The Reactionaries: Yeats, Lewis, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia

by John R. Harrison

This is an important book, but it is scarcely likely to win favor in the Literary Establishment. It rattles too many skeletons in the closet. The importance of the book does not lie in the incidental literary criticism it contains but in its undertaking a necessary job of systematic research into the “beliefs” present in the work of some of the major writers of our age. Why, then, do I anticipate this negative reaction of defensive maneuvers and clever alibis? Because four of the five writers (Wyndham Lewis is the least famous among them) examined by Mr. Harrison—and he finds the ideas about history and society of all five to be lamentably reactionary—belong to the exalted company of the “sacred untouchables,” as they have rightly been called, of the modern creative line. Read and praised everywhere, they have been speedily converted into classics of the college classroom, where they are almost invariably presented in a heroic light. Thus they have come to represent a vested interest not so readily affronted.

— Philip Rahv, An Open Secret (The New York Review of Books, JUNE 1, 1967 ISSUE)

243 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1967