Christos Hadjiyiannis, Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900–1920

Abstract

In 1915, T. E. Hulme found himself stationed near Kemmel and St. Eloi with the Honorary Artillery Company. He had enthusiastically signed up for military service, but in a letter home he wrote of how he now found himself living ‘a kind of nightmare’. Half-drowned in Belgian mud and psychologically wracked by shellfire, he discovered that this sort of soldiering ‘felt just like being in your grave’ (148–9). One might expect such a harrowing experience to prompt Hulme to doubt his conservative politics, the same politics of nationalism and imperialism that forged the conflict engulfing him. Far from it. Using a ‘logique du coeur’ derived from Blaise Pascal, Hulme rationalized his hardship as a form of self-sacrifice to his conservative ideology for which he claimed an objective ethical validity (154). Christos Hadjiyiannis, in Conservative Modernists, sets out to show the deep, intricate, and ultimately inconsistent roots of that conservatism as it was shared and promulgated by an array of writers at the outset of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot, Ford Maddox Ford, J. M Kennedy, Edward Storer, and Hulme.