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Some writers did battle with their impulses and the intellectual fashions of those years. George Orwell wrote with a minimum on condescension about "the proles" in his early novels and "1984." H.G. Wells seemed to advocate mass extermination of his inferiors in his non-fiction, but in his fiction his imaginative sympathies were usually with the failures and "losers" of the world. James Joyce's masterpiece was "Ulysses", a tribute of sorts to the common man (although written in a Modernist style that made it impossible for the common man to read it.) But on the whole the snobbery of most of the intellectuals of the day was unforgivable.
This book is an excellent companion to Modris Eksteins' "Rites of Spring" his cultural history of World War I. Both books argue that Modernism was in part responsible for the horrors of the 20th century, with its ruthless elitism and emotional coldness. Shaw, Pound and Forster dreamed of ridding the world of "superfluous" people; did this make it possible for Hitler and Stalin to actually attempt it? The necessary ideas were in the air. And they still are. Carey notes that, as the masses began to catch up in sophistication, post-modernism and literary theory was invented to create a new elite artistic language for its aristocrtatic initiates to revel in. The Modernist loathing for the mass media of newspapers was replaced by hatred of television and America, the middle-class nation par excellance. (And I would add, they really hate the Internet.) If you want to know why so many celebrities seem so sour and cynical about everything but themselves, read this book.
This is an excellent read for anyone struggling through "Ulysses," "To the Lighthouse," or even "The Wasteland." Carey's thorough research and well-argued points shed much-needed light on the dark side of our past century's most celebrated authors: why they wrote in such an unreachable voice, why they crafted their themes to be so alien to most people, why they lived where they did, and (most importantly) how much worthier they took themselves as human beings. I did groan a bit during the final chapter, which was about Wyndham Lewis and Hitler. Dropping the "H-bomb" can make anything seem evil and was therefore too easy a potshot for Carey to take at the intellectuals. Also, the two back-to-back case studies on H. G. Wells were somewhat redundant; Carey would have done better to write two case studies on two separate writers. Still, this book gives the reader an exciting, enlightening, and shocking view at the world of the intellectuals between 1880 and 1939 (and, in the Postscript, a look at similar currents in today's postmodern world), and I highly recommend it to any fan of modern literature who is not afraid to explore the ugly side of the great writers.
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