BOOK REVIEWS

Accordingly, the final version of the Whitman essay is reminiscent of

The Scarlet Letter essay. It begins by repeating the response to his own
question at the end of the Melville: What have we seen since the sinking
of the Great White Soul in 1851? Post-mortem effects, presumably.
The soul sinks, but the body survives to CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF! along
mechanically with the insistence with which Whitman repeats his familiar themes. The essays style is also reminiscent of the Hawthorne essay, as well as the added beginning and ending of the Melville, with the
telltale paragraphs of single, short sentences, or less:
DEMOCRACY. EN MASSE. ONE IDENTITY.

The universe, in short, adds up to ONE.

ONE.
1.
Which is Walt.

Lawrence may assert Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to
me. Whitman, the one man breaking a way ahead, but he seems to have
turned against Walt, too.
The Cambridge editors are to be commended for a Herculean labor,
for which all those who work on Lawrence owe a huge debt of gratitude.
They bring together in a single volume with valuable explanatory notes
and textual apparatus a wealth of relevant material for scholars to pore
over, perhaps to compare more fully these variant texts, and pose the
question of whether a final version is superior to an earlier one.
Lawrentians also may speculate about what these revisions indicate of
the sea-change that took place as Lawrence was reconstructing himself
as something beyond an exclusively English writer.
EARL G. INGERSOLL
SUNY College at Brockport

Reluctant Modernists
Peter Edgerly Firchow. Reluctant Modernists: Aldous Huxley and Some
Contemporaries. Muenster: LIT Verlag, 2002. xxv + 315 pp. $39.95.
THIS RETROSPECTIVE, featuring fifteen essays spanning
nearly forty years of exemplary scholarship on modernism by one of the
foremost Aldous Huxley specialists, is a welcome and important contribution to the assessment of modernism at this time when the awareness
of a past has been superseded in literary studies by the prevalence of
theory and its futuristic/ideological implications. In addition, the publication is also a Festschrift honoring Peter Firchows outstanding quali-

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ties as a researcher, educator, and friend. While the essays by

themselves speak eloquently of the integrity of the honoree, an introduction to the volume by fellow Huxley scholar and colleague Jerome
Meckier, as well as a touching and gracefully exuberant memoir by
Janet Rossen, a former graduate student, now colleague and author herself, round out, together with a list of publications and a bibliography,
this homage in celebration of Peter Firchows scholarly achievement on
the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday.
The genesis of a scholars focused, tenacious labors and discoveries reveals itself in the first essay, originally published in 1965. Besides two
seminal books on Aldous Huxley, Firchow has also published a large
number of articles and essays on him and related issues of modernism
over the years, some in proceedings, symposia publications, and journals
that are no longer readily available, particularly when published in different parts of the world. This is one of the reasons for offering this collection of previously published essays under the title Reluctant
Modernists, focusing primarily on Aldous Huxley and his distinguished
contemporaries Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, A. E. Housman, Ezra
Pound, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Margaret Drabble, and others. For this collection Firchow has added postscripts of varying lengths to the individual essays, either updating or at
least offering second thoughts on the particular essays subject.
In his May 1925 Vanity Fair essay, What, Exactly, is Modern?
Huxley placed himself by the mid-twenties among the most modern of
writers. But, as Firchow argues, having phrased the question in this
way, Huxley also hints at reservations to come in the subsequent attempt to provide a satisfactorily precise answer. Indeed, as it turns out, a
signif icant characteristic of modern is associated with sexual promiscuity, a clearly negative attribute that is wrong, without benefit of clergy,
without counterpart in antiquity, and is barbaric. How, Huxley then
seems to ask, can something barbaric be called modern in an age in
which the evolutionary principle and the belief in cultural betterment
are premises of human and societal progress? Huxley deems Dostoevsky
and Proust modernists, but denies Ronald Firbank and Joyce that distinction. The former did not deserve the epithet because of his cynicism,
the latter because of his blasphemous reactions to his medieval Catholic education. Huxley considers Schoenbergs music modern, but Stravinskys not. (Later Huxley revised his opinion with regard to Joyce and
Stravinsky). Concerning the plastic arts, Huxley saw nothing new in
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non-realistic art which had already been practiced for millennia by our
primitive ancestors in their caves. What, then, is really new in the development of literature and the arts? It is the same question Pound and
Eliot were also asking.
Taking the cue for his inquiry from these celebrated modernists,
Firchow wants the criterion of what is really new defined by this question: to what extent the pre-existing order has been altered, that is, how
much of our conception of the past has been radically changed by what is
truly innovative in the present? The answer will reveal itself in how
willingly the modernists accepted the radically new or whether they
had reservations that hinted at reluctance.
Anything radically new always encounters reservations. It was relatively recent that the profession that teaches literature experienced
such a change imposed by certain philosophical and sociological theoriesa radical change that many wished would not become established.
But once deconstruction had made inroads into doctoral studies, the tide
had irretrievably turned, the battle was lost. Such a radical change, as in
any transition, involves a period of confrontation. It was so with the
emergence of deconstruction, and it was obviously so with the emergence of modernism. Firchows studies make this abundantly clear in
the proper historical context which means that life, living, and human
achievements altogether were considered by the modernists still as a
synergistic whole whose proper functioning rested on the premise that
human cultural progress builds logically on the firm foundation of past
achievements, not on haphazard ideological predilection contrary to
continuity and stability.
With the exception of Breton and Aragon, all writers dealt with in this
collection are reluctant modernists according to Firchow. They are
deeply concerned with the ways in which the present is connected with
the past, or if it isnt, as for example in The Waste Land, with the ways in
which it may be reconnected. This holds true for Joyce, Proust, Mann,
Pound, Eliot, and Aldous Huxley, who are all engaged in wanting to
make the classics new in various ways. Other prominent modernists reveal their reluctance by being a teacher of Latin (Housman), a translator and adaptor of classics (H. D.), a student of classics who wrote an
introduction and added notes to a translation of the Aeneid (Forster),
writers wanting to heal the break with the past brought on by the First
World War ( Lawrence, Orwell, Waugh), and a restorer during the 1960s

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still trying to link the past with the present, because the modern ways
were sexually and aesthetically out of step (Drabble).
Peter Firchow knows that his understanding of modernism represents during these times a minority view, and it is for this reason that he
is all the more eager to put it forwarddeservedly sosince his research is immaculate, his evidence well documented, and his achievement and contribution to modernism studies without blemish.
HANS H. RUDNICK
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Rejoinder
To John Gordons Review: Bernard McKenna, James Joyces Ulysses: A
Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. ELT, 46.3 (2003), 33541.
JOHN GORDON, in his review of James Joyces Ulysses: A Refer ence Guide mis-states what my book does and does not do. He represents
disagreements in interpretation as errors of fact, inaccurately characterizes the books components, and uses hyperbolic language and mockery to buttress his misrepresentations.
Specif ically, Gordon writes that [r]emarkably, the book contains no
verbatim quotations from Joyces works (338). The book does, in fact,
contain verbatim quotations from Joyces works. It quotes directly from
Ulysses, of course, but also from Stephen Hero and Dubliners. My book
also specif ically references all of Joyces other works. Gordon uses his
unfounded accusation as a basis for his judgement that the book reflects
a kind of giddy insouciance (338). If there is any carelessness or any
lack of concern for professional standards, it is not in the books use of
primary source material but rather in the accusation that the book uses
no primary source material. Gordon either did not carefully read the
book and, consequently, missed the quotations, or he read the book with
diligence and chose to misrepresent what the book does or, in this case,
what it does not do. In either case, Gordons blatantly inaccurate characterization points to a seriously flawed review and a seriously flawed set
of professional and critical standards in the reviewer.
Gordons review goes on to make about twenty or so equally inaccurate points about the book. Sadly, space does not allow for a refutation of
all of his accusations. Therefore, I will counter some of his most blatant
misrepresentations. On page 339 of his review, Gordon writes that Nelsons statue, atop his pillar, does not have one arm raised. My book contends that Nelson in fact does have an arm raised in the statue, and

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