Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Introduction 11
Oscar Wilde, dramatist and man of letters, stated in an interview that he believed
he was ‘something of an Anarchist’, but previously said, ‘In the past I was a poet and
a tyrant. Now I am an anarchist and artist.’ 29 John Cowper Powys, a marvellously
original novelist, is the only one of my subjects to be discussed in two full chapters.
In the first I will show that his very important life-philosophy is best understood as
a form of individualist anarchism, while in the second I trace the way in which he
came to adopt also a social anarchism and – while confused on theoretical matters
concerning government, authority and law – from the late 1930s was consistent in
describing himself as anarchist, and that at a time when he was writing two outstanding
novels, one of which, Porius, is his masterpiece. No such terminological difficulties
apply to the three remaining writers. Both Herbert Read (poet, literary and art critic,
and educational theorist) and Alex Comfort (another doctor and medical scientist,
but concurrently a poet and novelist) were, and Colin Ward (who had worked in
architect’s offices before becoming a writer on housing, planning and the environment)
happily still is, forthright and influential proponents of anarchism.
My concern is to show that these eleven writers constitute a submerged but
creative and increasingly relevant current of social and political theory and practice,
an alternative, left-libertarian tradition. How much of a tradition it was in the sense of
a shared continuity of thought is more debatable. But Carpenter was acknowledged
by Read as a major influence and Wilde and Huxley read him with approbation. Read
became the admiring publisher and friend of the younger Comfort, who was, like
Huxley and Orwell, very much an independent thinker and unobligated to others.
Ward names Morris, Orwell and Comfort as significant influences. Thompson and
Pallis are distinctive in being decisively shaped by Marxism, but Thompson was as
indebted also to Blake and Morris. Morris’s impact is pervasive, with Wilde an early
admirer, but with Read, as an advocate of industrialism and the machine, having an
uneasy, though increasingly close, relationship to his outlook. Wilde and Powys
shared a common debt to Taoism and Chuang Tzu (as well as to Walter Pater) and
Powys in turn was much influenced by Wilde. Morris and Carpenter were on excellent
terms, Morris staying at Millthorpe, and Carpenter expressing ‘great admiration
and friendship’ for the other man. 30 Comfort was to regard Orwell as a friend. Lastly,
Read was to write movingly of Orwell: ‘I suppose I have felt nearer to him than to
any other English writer of our time…who was, in general, nearer in ideals & even
in eccentricities?’ 31
29 Percival W.H. Almy, ‘New Views of Mr Oscar Wilde’, The Theatre, XXIII (March 1894), in E.H.
Mikhail (ed.), Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2
vols., 1979), I, p. 232; Oscar Wilde, ‘Référendum artistique et social’, L’Ermitage, July 1893, cited
by Paul Gibbard, ‘Anarchism in English and French Literature, 1885–1914: Zola, the Symbolists,
Conrad and Chesterton’ (Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 2001), p. 168.
30 Cited by H.W. Lee and E. Archbold, Social-Democracy in Britain: Fifty Years of the Socialist
Movement (London: Social-Democratic Federation, 1935), p. 71.
31 Read Archive, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC: letter from Read to George Woodcock, 3
August 1966.