A new batch of deplorables

Quite a crop linked from Arts and Letters Daily just this morning.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline:

Alongside Marcel Proust, Céline is considered one of the greatest French novelists and stylists of the twentieth century, notably for his 1932 masterpiece, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night). He is also recognized as a vile anti-Semite, xenophobe, misogynist, misanthropist, and early pro-Nazi who nourished the general defeatist spirit before and during the war and who, through his writings and articles, infused into French society a deeply insidious anti-Semitism.

Ezra Pound:

Perhaps no other poet in the 20th century presents more forcefully than does Ezra Pound the need to separate the life from the work — and the impossibility of doing so. Pound’s visionary role in leading poetry in English into the modern, after the etiolations of the late 19th century, seems incontestable. So do his generosity and loyalty as a critic and friend (to Eliot, Joyce and others), his tirelessness as a teacher, his unorthodox brilliance as a translator from multiple languages and above all, his supreme ambition for poetry, expressed in his long poem the “Cantos,” and in its animating conviction that poetry not only could but should guide the practical motions of society itself.

On the other hand, Pound was a sort of Antaeus. As long as his feet were on the ground that fed him with images and experiences, he was a giant. In the air, as a seer, a social theorist and a philosopher, he was notoriously vulnerable. He worshiped strong leaders; he indulged in a virulent anti-Semitism; and only slyly, belatedly, offhandedly did he take responsibility for mistaken actions and for detestable opinions that he expressed in writing. His life resists posterity’s best efforts to make it resemble a morality play. His arrogance, his ambition and his hopes for his country led him to record more than 100 radio broadcasts critical of the American government while he was in Mussolini’s Italy between 1941 and 1943.

Also, yesterday they linked to Peter Hitchens’ First Things article on the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which we are reminded that D. H. Lawrence had his characters express some pretty unfriendly attitudes toward Jews and lesbians.  Hitchens raises the wonderfully ironic possibility that future editions of the notorious book will probably be subjected to the new censorship.

So, what are we up to now?  Deplorables gave us the Enlightenment.  Given Frege and Heidegger, one could argue that both strands of modern philosophy, analytic and continental, trace to deplorables.  Then it turns out they gave us the theory of evolution.  Now literature too seems to owe reaction quite a debt.  When these guys are done digging, it may turn out that modernity owes more to those it labels villains than those it credits as heroes.

UPDATE:

I’ve just noticed that the other article linked yesterday on Arts and Letters Daily was also about deplorables in the arts.  It’s getting hard to keep up.  Here’s one bit.  George Orwell called Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden “fashionable pansies”, clearly showing insufficient reverence for what Jesuits refer to as the “differently oriented”.