Mervyn de Silva’s 7th death anniversary falls today

Literature, politics and criticism

Mervyn de Silva's reply to Regi Siriwardena
 

The Mervyn-Regi debate

Mervyn de Silva was Editor of the Ceylon Daily News and 42 years old when this polemic with Regi Siriwardena, his former teacher of English literature at Royal College (and Features Editor when he was a contributor to the literary page while still at university) erupted.

This article, originally entitled 'Pound, Poetry and Politics' and subtitled 'Mervyn de Silva in a reply to Reggie Siriwardena', appeared in the editorial page of the Ceylon Daily News of Friday 17th November 1972.

The debate was occasioned by Mervyn's essay entitled 'Ezra Pound - A Great Pioneer', in the CDN of Nov 7, 1972, continued on Nov 08th as 'A Daring Experimenter'. This was critiqued by Reggie in his piece 'Revaluing Contemporary Literature' in the CDN of Nov 15th. Mervyn's rejoinder which is reproduced here appeared a mere two days later!

The debate went into its final round with Reggie writing on 'Poetry and Politics', on Nov 20th and Mervyn's concluding remarks 'Poetry, Criticism and Politics' appearing on Nov 23, 1972. S Pathiravithana intervened briefly in the debate. It has been translated into Tamil by K.S Sivakumaran.

In his appreciation of Mervyn de Silva last year, Godfrey Gunatilleke re-evaluated the debate and its significance almost three and half decades on: '....Mervyn captures the dilemma of his generation in the two terms he uses in his debate with Regi - "cosmopolitan hothouse" for the artificial cultural mix of this intelligentsia and "universal" for what he describes as the "finest things they assimilated from another culture."...Both Regi and Mervyn were agreed on what I would call the literary critical fundamentals.

But it is Mervyn who comes out more convincingly on the issue of literature and ideology. And Mervyn's definition of the issues and the answers he gives go beyond the boundaries of literary criticism....' (Godfrey Gunatilleke, Universality, Culture & Language: An Appreciation of Mervyn de Silva, Daily News, June 22, 2005)

REJOINDER: Although I am a little surprised that my modest essay on a formal occasion has provoked so studied a rejoinder from Mr. Reggie Siriwardena, I am glad of the response. Even on matters where there is disagreement it is always a pleasure to read him and, if I may be excused an editorial aside, welcome him back to these columns.

Mr. Siriwardena has raised several interesting issues, some specific and some general. A natural inclination to pursue all these points has to be greatly curbed in recognition of certain considerations which I am sure most readers will appreciate.

Part of his article is really an invitation to access the relative merits of certain specified works and to judge the relative worth of the whole corpus of some named writers in terms of how meaningful they are to us, here and now.

To accept such an undertaking seriously is to initiate the type of lengthy discussion which is best conducted in a literary journal and not, alas, in this columns.

Besides, in the discharge of my editorial responsibilities (and attendant obligations to the vast majority of readers who may not be frightfully concerned with these questions) I shall be forced into the awkward position of suppressing both Mr. Siriwardena and myself.

This thought is fortified by the realization that the general issues raise even greater difficulties. These questions touch on fundamentals: on the writer and his beliefs, on literature, ideas, politics and life.

While I am as much excited by and concerned with these problems as he evidently is and baffled by them (as, possibly Mr. Siriwardena is not) I realize that a fully consistent and comprehensive view can be advanced only by a person who is given to total belief in a religious or metaphysical system or by one who subscribes to an all-inclusive ideology.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I have to exclude myself from such categories. This does not render me powerless or make me unprepared to examine such issues. On the contrary, the very fact that many of these questions remain imponderables to me enhances the excitement of the intellectual challenge.

But it will be generally appreciated that such an exploration will carry us quickly from literary criticism to philosophical disquisition, and even if we were both equally ready and equally competent to take that journey, this page is obviously not the proper vehicle.

Nevertheless. I shall endeavour to comment on the points raised by Mr. Siriwardena as briefly as I possibly can.

I am told I sounded an 'elegiac note' not only for a dead master but for 'a vanished cultural era'. Did I? Let us compare Mr. Siriwardena's evocation of that past with mine.

Mr. Siriwardena speaks of the 'groves of academe where we formed our literary values were also provinces of a genteel and insular culture'. Perfectly right. And this is how I put it. 'The days of Ludowyk and the Lionel Wendt when Pound's poetry was almost a cult in the salon of the avant-garde seem now another time, and perhaps another country too'. I went on to call it 'at best a commodious hot-house'.

If at all then, I express the same critical attitude to some characteristic habits and values of that vanished area more strongly than does Mr. Siriwardena.

Any misinterpretations of my attitude therefore is as unfair as it would be to overemphasize Mr. Siriwardena's condemnation of Lawrence's glorification of male power to the point of calling him the ideological avant-courier of local Women's Lib.

Mr. Siriwardena seeks to support his criticism on the basis of another statement of mine which expresses regret over the wilful rejection by English educated Ceylonese today of 'even the finest things they have assimilated from another culture'. And something of that culture I added is also universal.

This observation comes in a sweeping statement that also refers to 'the anti-western backlash of nationalism' and the embarrassment and guilt today of the cultivated English-educated of the generation I had already referred to.

In short, it was a general warning against what I believe to be a lamentable swing of the emotional-psychological pendulum from an unreasoning surrender to a 'superior' culture to an equally unreasoning repudiation of the 'alien'. I thought such a cautionary note necessary and used a convenient occasion to do so.

Mr. Siriwardana however chooses to read these remarks, not as a generalization, but as a direct judgment on Pound. He takes me up on my use of the word 'universal' and questions how far these writers (that is, writers like Pound) are 'representative of what was most significant in the experience of the West....' To begin with, nowhere did I make the last claim.

Far from doing so, I explicitly declared my own gradual loss of critical respect and admiration for Pound since the initial excitement of discovering poets like Pound and Eliot. Not once but several times I have said this in my article.

One has to be more selective in one's enjoyment of Pound's poetry, less generous in judgment. Having said that, I noted the immense obscurities and essential dilettantism in much of Pound's work and described the Pound cult as 'part of the snobbery of the times'. What is more, I comment adversely on the comparative poverty of 'felt life' in Pound and Eliot as against Yeats and Frost.

From so observant a critic as Mr. Siriwardena, this error, which is quite elementary, puzzles me. The confusion arises from a failure to distinguish between my appreciation of Pound's historical importance and my evaluation of his intrinsic literary worth. Such a distinction is unambiguously made in the following excerpt, a few words of which I underline for fresh emphasis:

'Nevertheless, we owe Ezra Pound a different kind of debt and if there is a 'boom' it will be in recognition of that. I mean Pound's historical role, of course'.

Though we may deny them greatness, there are writers who are historically important because of the enormous influence which they exert on other writers, on the way they write and on the whole poetic tradition at a given time.

While this ought to be clear to any student of literature who has an overview of the tradition, the best authorities on this are the practitioners themselves, Hence, I not only quoted Eliot on Pound's 'central importance' but also Auden (surely a representative modern voice?) because Eliot's special relationship with 'il miglior fabbro' can be grounds for partiality. An article by Roy Fuller, a lesser figure but a poet nonetheless, gives me special satisfaction therefore.

In his own tribute to Pound (New Statesman, Nov. 10th) Mr. Fuller writes: "His death should not only send us back to the best of his verse but also to a consideration of how far the poetry of the century has lapsed from what he hoped from it and helped so much to give it".

The dispute over my use of the word 'universal' is easily settled. All literature is a statement on life. I judge an individual work on how deeply it moves me, on how well the writer has used his skills to do so and how much It enriches my own experience and my understanding of the human situation.

I am interested in a writer's political views and ideas qua ideas and I am interested in how these influence his creative work but those ideas and views are not the basis of my literary critical judgment. But more of that later.

Whatever the character of the writer's society and whatever his own politics, his imaginative work has a substratum of common basic emotions - love, hate, joy, grief, pity, remorse etc - which makes the inspired utterance of one man meaningful to his fellows in other times and places, Nihil humanum alienum puto.

The humanist's article of faith embraces a human heritage. In making a continuing contribution to culture all literature is part of that. It is in this sense and no other that I used the term 'universal' and my phrasing leaves no doubt about that: 'and something of that culture is also universal'. Pound's own claims for the universality of his poetic vision was certainly not supported by me.

Having answered the points which have a direct bearing on my article, I should perhaps end this essay here. But Mr. Siriwardena's most provocative remarks are his general observations and I find myself torn between the temptation to examine these and the realization that a daily newspaper is not the appropriate forum for the discussion of these large issues in depth.

May I then compromise by posing a few questions prompted by Mr. Siriwardena's stimulating article in the hope this will be a spur to the serious reader's own reflections on problems which I for one, believe defy facile formulations?

With his characteristic perspicacity, Mr. Siriwardena notes a significant difference in the Anglo-American writer's milieu and that of his European counterpart between the wars - islands of relative stability in a period of great social turbulence in Europe. Despite his well-placed allusion to the Great Depression, American analysts of America's moral history will contest this distinction.

They will argue that the profound crisis of American capitalism caused agonies as painful for the sensitive American as revolutionary turmoil did for the European intellectual and artist and that the wounds on the American writer's sensibility were no less deep. No matter. What of the underlying assumption?

Is social stability a poor climate for writer's growth and is tension and turmoil more congenial? Cannot social conditions of comparative calm produce great literature? The generalization which implies a causal connection between socio-political upheaval and artistic achievement will be ridiculed by all traditionalists as a vulgar modern (western) view.

While I do not wish to leave Mr. Siriwardena to the notoriously un-tender mercies of the traditionalists, I must pass on to the more interesting question of the writer's politics. The Anglo-American writer, he says, was not given 'to the kind of involvement' (political) which engaged the European writer's life and loyalties.

Again a historically accurate unexceptionable observation. He does not however stop there. Although Mr. Siriwardena's objection seems to be this lack of political involvement we find in fact that his real objection is the involvement (for him) in the wrong type of politics.

And so, to Pound's pro -Mussolini broadcasts, Yeats' pro-Fascist songs, Eliot's anti-Semitism and Fascist sympathies and Wyndham Lewis' praise for Hitler. Cannot a convinced Fascist write a good poem? Does one have to subscribe to certain types of political views to be a good or great writer? What sort of views then? Progressive? Socialist? Marxist? And are these categories so well defined and universally acknowledged? If not, who will be the arbiter? Critics like Mr. Siriwardena guided by 'the best Marxist thinkers on literature', Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lukacs? Good heavens, even this is far from settled.

At the more mention of Trotsky's name, a million Marxists from Peking to Prague will swear by the Book that he is a dirty deviationist (It used to be 'Wall Street Agent', though the word 'Fascist' was also heard in that connection). Anyway, those theological squabbles are best left to the True Believers, lapsed Church-goers and unrepentant renegades.

For non-Marxist students of literature it is a simple warning of the dangers which lurk unnoticed when the critic, perhaps in some fitful exhibition of social conscience, tries to introduce, with a surreptitious deftness or with an air of pontifical authority, ideological labels into the currency of literary criticism.

And even if you do accept these labels at face value, all kinds of other problems crop up although the 'best Marxist thinkers on literature' may be your mentors. Commenting on the praise showered by Marx and Engels on Balzac (a stout anti-socialist and Royalist) a recent study on George Lukacs notes that one of his literary heroes was Sir Walter Scott, that terrible Tory!

It is easy to push a man to a corner especially when you are attacking a person who has to defend a positive position he has declared. To do so in this instance would be unjust since Mr. Siriwardena's natural sensitivity saves him from tumbling into the pit to which his own logic (the logic really of his desire, it seems to me, to assert a political commitment) drives him.

His sensitivity acts as a warning bell just as his argument nears the edge of coarse dogmatism. He suddenly stops short, 'I am not trying to make a simple equation between a writer's political views and the merits of his work....' Next he argues for a revaluation of writers in the light fresh social experience.

A sound plea, but as soon as he mentions 1971 and completes his thought, we find him protesting. 'I am not appealing to a simple and ephemeral criterion of topicality etc'. Again, the well-tutored mind sounds the alarm as an over-obtrusive 'political' conscience tries to brush aside the good critic.

Certainly literary-critical judgments cannot claim the immutability of religious-moral absolutes. Our attitudes do and must change in the face of new experiences and realities. This is true not merely of social but personnel experience.

We must guard ourselves however against the perils of rationalising our own private predilections and passing enthusiasms and constructing a new hierarchy of literary values on that basis. To do so is to create fashions like the Pound cult.

'In literary and art criticism', wrote Mao, 'there are two criteria, the political and the artistic. We must carry on a struggle on two fronts'. In trying to unite the two Mr. Siriwardena, I can see, is also struggling, but not necessarily in the Maoist sense.