Enoch Powell's Island Story (Part 1)

eddie — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:02:29 +0000

We are reproducing in two parts a chapter on Enoch Powell from Jonathan Rutherford’s new book, Forever England. Using a mixture of political, historical and psychological analysis, Rutherford offers a rich account of the interaction of masculinity, empire and race in the development of Powell’s notorious but undoubtedly significant brand of politics. This part focuses in particular on Powell’s relationship to the British Empire and the development of his character through his austere and isolated childhood and education. Part 2, following shortly, draws upon this backdrop to develop an account of his political career.

In 1959, Enoch Powell wrote a review of Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, a chronicle of the author’s solo journeys across the ‘Empty Quarter’ of Arabia. Described by Sir John Glubb in the Sunday Times as ‘perhaps the last, and certainly one of the greatest, of the British travellers among the Arabs.’ Thesiger epitomised the ascetic Englishman in search of an authentic native culture and the limits of his own will power and endurance. As with Lawrence before him, Thesiger’s hostile world was the modernity of his own society; his journeying an escape from its domesticity. And like Lawrence, Thesiger fashioned the desert and the Bedu into a simulacrum of his own homoeroticism and narcissistic longing for self-becoming. Powell was captivated:

What is it about deserts that tugs at the hearts of men? Even those who have only touched the hem of the desert . . . know what it was that Thesiger repeatedly sought and found in the centre of the Arabian emptiness, and they would, or think they would, go back again to get it if that were possible… The secret lies perhaps in the desert not as a mere environment, but as something travelled over, which seems to remove the purpose from journeying and substitute in its place a kind of timeless contentment, almost as though the soul were soothed by this emblem of its own metaphorical journey across the desert of the world. The desert is the true setting of the words: navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse. [It is necessary to avigate but not necessary to live]

Powell’s fascination with Thesiger lay in his own boyhood obsession with the desert travellers Burton, Blunt and Doughty. What these men held in common, and what Powell spent a lifetime attempting to emulate, was their journeying without a worldly purpose; their confrontation with the desert as symbolic of what Lawrence called ‘death in life’. These men were the heirs of the seventeenth century pilgrims in search of a spiritual home, indifferent to the worldly and sensual. Fated, driven by the seduction of death and their need to subjugate their bodies, they pursued life to the centre of the desert, to
the point at which its nature threatened to extinguish their cultural identities. It is here, Powell imagined, that they found their ‘timeless contentment’.

Powell’s own life was an attempt to reproduce this external compulsion of the desert, to construct an unyielding personal intellectual and theological order which would structure and contain his instinctual and emotional life. He once informed a journalist, ‘I’m at home in an environment where rules are strict but external… Liberty of thought is consistent with willing submission, enthusiastic submission, to a formal ordered existence.’ In an interview in 1994, Terry Coleman asked him if he was a believing Christian.4 He replied; ‘I am an obedient member of the Church of England.’ Loyalty and identification with the rules and rites of the institution were paramount; he would believe what he was commanded to believe. Sensing disingenuousness, Coleman pushed him to elaborate; ‘what did he in conscience believe?’ Powell replied; ‘God knows what I believe: you only know what I’m saying.’ For Powell, the formal syntax of his religious and political language was a protective carapace around the inner world of his beliefs and feelings. His play on the words ‘God knows’ suggests that what is there is an absence.

In 1943, Powell had the opportunity to discover the ‘timeless contentment’ of the North African desert. As a Lieutenant-Colonel and an intelligence officer he undertook a two week journey from Algiers to Cairo, travelling by lorry in the company of Major Michael Strachan. The experience was no metaphorical narrative of spiritual asceticism. The sandy wastes offered none of their mythic negation, only a frustrating tendency to sabotage the banal but necessary chores of daily life. Strachan later wrote a humorous account of Lieutenant- Colonel Powell’s dangerous ineptitude as a driver and the shambles of his cooking.

The fire smouldered dejectedly until he teased it with a gill of petrol, and then it sprang up and singed his moustache; and when he assaulted the sausages the tin counter-attacked and cut his finger; the water refused to boil and while he was not looking tipped itself over into the fire. ‘Oh the malice – the cursed diabolical malice of inanimate objects!’ muttered the Professor ferociously between clenched teeth. ‘Here, let me help’, I said. ‘You keep away,’ he snarled. ‘If they want to be bloody-minded, I’ll show them, by God I will,’ booting the empty sausage tin into a cactus bush.

Strachan’s light-hearted descriptions of ‘cold and flabby’ sausages and ‘tea-leaves… on top of a grey, tepid liquid’ mocked the serious-minded pretensions of Powell. But they also suggest an explanation for his later political career as an English nationalist. Powell was a man who was only ever to touch the hem of the desert. In his introduction to Arabian Sands, Thesiger wrote; ‘I went to Southern Arabia only just in time. Others will go there . . . but they will move about in cars and will keep in touch with the outside world by wireless. They will . . . never know the spirit of the land nor the greatness of the Arabs.’ History and the ‘winds of change’ were to rob Powell of empire and thwart his own imperial mission. If Powell imagined his heroes had discovered serenity in the centre of the desert, his own earthly quest uncovered nothing but a feeling of emptiness. More than any other figure of post-war Britain, he gave vent to this feeling of profound and irreconcilable loss; of Empire, of identity, of belonging. It was a loss he sought to resolve in his poetry, his religion and his political life. In the end, it was his mythologising of English nationalism which would form his imaginary, ascetic desert journey; his pursuit of ‘death in life’ – ‘to have a nation to die for and to be glad to die for it-all the days of one’s life.‘6

The Hallucination of Empire

Before the outbreak of war, Powell had spent eighteen months as the Professor of Greek at Sydney University. On 4 September, 1939, the day after war was declared, he resigned and returned to England. He enlisted as a private in his father’s old regiment, the Royal Warwickshires, but his period in the ranks was short lived. A Brigadier on an inspection asked him how he liked the work. Powell replied with a Greek proverb and found himself dispatched to an officer training programme at Aldershot, the first of a series of courses before being posted to North Africa in 1941. In Cairo he was assigned to the Intelligence and Plans Division as Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee, Middle East. The crucial factor in the desert war was U.S industrial-military power. Not only did Powell develop a contempt for the Americans’ lack of finesse in military strategy, he felt a growing distrust of their geopolitical ambitions. ‘By the end of 1942 it was clear to me… that for the survival of the British Empire what was overwhelmingly important was that the Far East – India and the Far East – Burma and the Far East – would be recovered by Britain before they were occupied by the United States.‘7 Powell’s desert journey was his first move in securing a transfer to the war in the Far East. In August, 1943, he left Cairo for India, as Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee India and South East Asia. He harboured an ambition to be a part of the fighting and on his journey he approached Orde Wingate, with an unsuccessful request to join his Chindit campaign in Burma.

In The Times of 12 February, 1968, Powell recalled his two years in India. ‘I fell head over heals in love with it. If I’d gone there 100 years earlier, I’d have left my bones there.’ He taught himself Urdu, cycling from New Delhi to outlying villages to practise the language. ‘It was one of the glories of the British Empire in India that they regarded it as desirable for officers up to the highest rank to identify themselves with the life and language of the country.’ But his identification with India was a highly circumscribed affair. Powell avoided the Indian intelligentsia. It was the peasants and their archaic cultures of caste and religion which attracted him. His loyalty lay with the fading glory of the Raj, its rigid codes of etiquette and the Pukkah Sahibs whose selfenhancing mystique of power ruled over the multitudes. The pomp and circumstance of the colonial hierarchy and the disciplined existence of army life provided Powell with his ideal world. When he told his biographer Andrew Roth that the army was the happiest time of his life, it was more specifically the army in India. His conservatism and need for social conformity left him incapable of recognising the nationalist aspirations of the Indian people. The concept of self-determination, both personal and political had no place in Powell’s mind’s eye, nor in the parody of Late Victorian India he identified with. On a journey through Bihar, he was struck by a ‘blinding revelation’: ‘I was the only Englishman within, thirty, forty, maybe fifty or sixty miles, and that this was apart of the natural order of things.‘8 Powell had imbued the myths of indirect rule. It was an attitude – arrogant, myopic, even unbalanced – that he brought to his administrative work.

By 1944, with the war effectively won in Europe, the British turned their attention to the political future of India. Powell was promoted to Brigadier and appointed Secretary to the Reorganisation Committee responsible for deciding the future of the Indian army. He was a dominant figure on the committee and travelled extensively, garnering opinion and facts for its Final Report. He was also responsible for writing one of the key chapters – recommending twenty-five years before the Indian Army was ready for independence. The logic of Powell’s argument was impeccable. The Indian army needed five thousand officers with the right educational qualifications. Only three per cent of Indian men with these qualifications held commissions in the army. A committee had just reported that this number could only be increased by two per cent a year. Therefore, Powell deducted, it would take twenty-five years before the Indian army had its full officer corps. Until then it must rely on British officers to command it. His argument was meticulous, but it owed more to the academic analysis of a Greek text than the real politic of British imperial rule; and he failed to recognise Indian antipathy towards the British as responsible for the low level of recruitment to the army. Powell’s failure to account for contemporary political realities discredited other sections of the
Report and his recommendations were quickly dismissed as off the mark. He did not appear to have been embarrassed by this setback. India had prompted his Pauline conversion to imperialism and his idealisation of the Raj left him floating in a dream world. He was now about to manufacture himself as a man of destiny. ‘I was determined to do something’, he told Roth, ‘to stop the disintegration of the Empire which seemed imminent.‘9 He would enter politics:

I thought of how Burke had said 160 years earlier that the keys of India were not in Calcutta, not in Delhi, they were in that box – the Despatch Box at the House of Commons. I decided at that time that I must go there.10

Powell arrived back in England on 27 February, 1946. He was 33 years old. He had already achieved the distinction of becoming a professor at the age of 25 and the youngest Brigadier in the British army. With these credentials he was quickly recruited into the Conservative Party, where ‘Rab’ Butler was endeavouring to organise its intellectual renaissance. After an interview with David Clark, the Director of the Conservative Research Department, Powell began work in the Conservative Parliamentary Secretariat, alongside two other newcomers, Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling. He was made joint head of the Home Affairs Department and Secretary of the Party’s India Committee. In 1947, he was chosen as a by-election candidate for the safe Labour seat of Normanton in Yorkshire. His speech to the adoption meeting was an apocalyptic rallying cry for Empire: ‘If there is a way for the Empire to survive . . . it can only be because through Britain is liberty and independence preserved. If that is not true, then we will perish in proving it otherwise.’ Seven months later, in August, India was partitioned. The central figment of his dream world was shattered. His reserved, disassociated comment; ‘One’s whole world had been altered’ – offers little insight into his feelings, but the trauma compelled him to spend the night walking the streets. To Powell, the two hundred year long link with India was the empire; every other possession had been acquired for the sake of maintaining that link. India had gone, but he could not come to terms with its implications for the rest of the empire. He simply resolved to work harder for its preservation and unity.

Indian independence was the beginning of the end. Its immediate effect was a redefinition of the old concept of British citizenship as being based on being ‘a subject of the King’. In 1948, the Labour government introduced the British Nationality Bill which would make a distinction between British subjects who were citizens of the United Kingdom and those who were Commonwealth citizens. The Bill ensured that the great majority of British subjects in the colonies and dominions would continue to have the legal right to settle in Britain. Their allegiance however, would no longer be to the British monarch.

Powell and a number of other Tory imperialists tried to persuade the Conservative Party to vote against the Bill. He later explained his position in the Birmingham Post (6.11.52): ‘the Crown is the great link which binds the Empire together in a common loyalty. But the British Nationality Act of 1948 took away allegiance to the Crown as the basis for British citizenship . . . citizens of the . . . Indian Union were expressly given all the rights and privileges of British subjects, though repudiating the King as their sovereign.’ Powell failed to persuade the Party to vote against the Bill and, contrary to his own regressive opinions, the official party document, Imperial Policy, published in 1949, accepted the implications of Indian independence for the Commonwealth. The document became one of the intellectual cornerstones of One Nation Toryism and laid the ground for Harold Macmillan’s 1960, ‘winds of change’ speech. Already the demarcation lines within the Conservative Party around the issue of race and nation were being drawn. Nevertheless, despite its permissiveness, The British Nationality Act represented the first step in the post-war racialising of immigration policy. As if to symbolise the oment, the SS Windrush arrived in May with 417 Jamaicans in search of work and a new life. It was they, rather than the hundreds and thousands of Irish and European immigrants, who signified the coming post-colonial struggle over the meanings of English ethnicity.

On 17 December, Powell was adopted as the candidate for Wolverhampton South-West. A reporter from the Wolverhampton Express and Star, interviewing the new candidate, described Powell’s ‘blinding revelation’ of the ‘tremendous force for good the Empire was.’ On 23 February, he won the seat in the General Election, campaigning as an old fashioned imperialist. India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon were already independent nations, but he was determined to stem the retreat. His maiden speech in the House of Commons, two months after India had declared itself a republic, was emphatic in his refusal to contemplate the end of empire. Powell advocated the recruitment of a new colonial army which would replace the Indian army and defend ‘His Majesty’s Dominions as a whole throughout the world.’ Indian independence had simply reinforced his dogged disregard for the emerging post-imperial world. The moment of reckoning arrived at the 1952 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. A number of heads of newly independent states objected to the Queen’s formal title. It had an outdated and imperial ring to it: ‘By the Grace of God of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Sea, Queen, Defender of the Faith.’ The Royal Titles Act of 1953 introduced a title which would account for the new Commonwealth sovereignties: ‘By the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.’ The semantics of the new title – the ‘other Realms and Territories’ – fractured the symbolic union of empire, and with it Britain’s imperial preeminence. Powell rigorously opposed the Bill in a Parliamentary speech.

That unity we are now formally and deliberately giving up, and we are substituting what is, in effect, a fortuitous aggregation of a number of separate entities… By recognising the division of the realm into separate realms, are we not opening the way for the other unity – the last unity of all – that of the person of the Monarch to go the way of the rest?

Unity, what he defined as a ‘corporate identity’ in which ‘all the parts recognise that in certain circumstances they would sacrifice themselves in the interests of the whole’, was the bedrock of his political beliefs. His venom was reserved for the Commonwealth leaders who had proved themselves incapable of such self-sacrifice. They were ‘the underlying evil’: ‘We are doing this for the sake of those to whom the very names ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ are repugnant.’ The linguistic entity of the British empire was dead, and the Suez crisis of 1956 would destroy the last vestiges of its moral and political legitimacy. The colonial peoples he had been willing to sacrifice his life for had rejected him. His shock at their ‘ingratitude’ was the decisive moment of his political career. That obscure and archaic play on semantics precipitated his turn to England as a new source of corporate identity. His bereavement, and the invasive, persecutory quality he ascribed to those who had disillusioned him, would later fuel his virulent, nationalist assault on her imaginary enemies. But by 1953, Powell was a man expelled to the hem of the desert, its meaning no more than badly made tea and burnt sausages.

The following year, Powell recanted his faith. On 12 July he presented a paper to the Conservative Political Centre Summer School entitled; ‘The Empire of England.’ In his meticulous style, Powell detailed the historical inevitability of the end of Empire. Seeley’s ideal of imperial federation and the social-imperialism of Joseph Chamberlain, which had once inspired him, had been illusions: ‘the unstable compromise of Imperial government by the Parliament of
Great Britain could not in the long run endure.‘12 Parliament could not maintain its jurisdiction over peoples who owed their allegiances to
other sovereignties. He concluded:

the disintegration of that sovereignty which was known until some years ago as the British Empire is for the most part neither accidental nor due to the errors of policy or perversities of intention, but is the inevitable consequence of the political institutions of the United Kingdom and the character of its former and present dependencies.‘13

The paper marks Powell’s political and intellectual position on the end of Empire. Empire he states, ‘was a self-delusion’. He had already adopted a similar terminology in his article for the Birmingham Post (6.11.52): ‘To most of the world outside it seems that the British Empire, if it does not already belong to the past, has a short lease of life. Only here in England, like a nation of Rip van Winkles, do we live in a dream world of undisturbed complacency’

Twelve years later, in April 1964, Powell turned once more to what he called the ‘national hallucination’ of empire. In a series of influential articles in The Times, he set out a Conservative, political agenda which was to anticipate the Thatcher revolution. In his second, ‘Patriotism Based on Reality Not on Dreams’, he condemned the Commonwealth as a ‘gigantic farce’, and appealed for a clean break with Britain’s imperial past.

The change in Britain’s relative power and position in the world since 1939 has imposed a colossal revision of ideas on Britain . . . which draws most strength and inspiration from that position and power. In the course of this revision, self-deception has been employed on the grand
scale and has served a purpose. Now the wounds have almost healed and the skin formed again beneath the plaster and the bandages, and they
come off.

It is hard not to conclude that Powell was speaking about his own damaged psyche. The following year he declared that his own wounds were irreparable.

One can never resolve in the span of a human lifetime that kind of a revolution [the end of empire] without the marks being left of a struggle. I confess to you that for all that I write, for all that I think, for all that I try to demonstrate to myself and others I shall go to the grave with a conviction at the back of my mind that Her Majesty’s ships still sweep the oceans of the world in case there should be any hostile warships which it might be necessary to sink. That hallucination will be there when the mind stops.14

In 1968, in a book review, Powell referred to this hallucination as an ‘English sickness’. ‘One feels like a doctor sitting in the middle of an epidemic with the sovereign vaccine on his shelves, and the population will not take it.‘15 He concluded: ‘so the psychoanalysis through which lies the cure for Britain’s sickness has to be twofold: first we must identify and overcome the mythology of the late Victorian empire; then we must penetrate to deeper levels and eradicate the fixation with India from our subconscious.’ The review was published five months after Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech had catapulted him into public consciousness, and into the print columns of political commentary. Drawing upon his recent visit to the United States and his perceptions of its racial conflict, Powell predicted that the mass immigration of New Commonwealth citizens to Britain would result in a racial war: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the river Tiber foaming with much blood”.‘16 A period of fifteen years had passed between the collapse of his idealisation of empire and this apocalyptic vision. His championing of racial incommensurability unleashed an ethnic populism – Powellism- which launched a frontal assault on the class paternalism of post-war Toryism and helping to pave the way for Thatcherism. To understand this transition and the virulence of the politics in which it culminated, we can follow his own advice. But it is not only the patient who needs to be examined. The
doctor is also in need of attention.

Jack’s Clarinet: ‘It doesn’t do to awaken longings that can’t be fulfilled.’ 17

John (Jack) Enoch Powell was born on 16 June, 1912 in a semidetached house in Flaxley Lane, Stechford, near Birmingham. His father, Albert Powell, was the son of a general merchant from Staffordshire. In 1909, at the age of 35, he had married Ellen Breese, fourteen years his junior and the daughter of a Liverpool policeman. Both were primary school teachers and products of the Victorian artisan class. Albert Powell had earlier divested himself of the moral strictures of its fundamentalist Methodism, by converting to Anglicanism. Powell described his father as having an ‘agreeable temperament’, ‘a
warm presence . . . and another boy around the place.‘18 In contrast, his mother was a Tory and a puritan, with a Victorian drive for education and self-improvement. Despite her atheism, she held to the basic principles of her class culture, imparting its moral sobriety and its rigid codes of conduct to her only son, for whom she possessed a driving ambition. After his birth, she gave up her job and devoted herself to his care and his education. ‘My childhood is very much my mother… She was also my first teacher… from the very beginning, right up to the sixth at grammar school, she took a part in my learning, encouraging me and helping me and very much working with me.‘19

Powell’s mother was the dominating presence in the household. Her financial economies and emotional austerity ruled the household with a parsimonious rigour. ‘My mother used to quote St Paul: eat what is set before you asking no questions.‘20 As a schoolgirl she had taught herself Greek and she set out to cultivate the same assiduous attention to detail in her son. She began with the alphabet when he was two and had taught him to read in a year. ‘My earliest recollections are of my mother putting up the alphabet round the kitchen wall so that I could learn it – and my saying the most elementary lessons to her standing on a chair in the kitchen, while she worked at the stove or the sink.’ By the time he was four he was reading Harmsworth’s encyclopaedia. His precocity earned him the nickname of ‘The Professor’. Patrick Cosgrave, one of Powell’s biographers, recounts the story of a local girl who used to visit the eight-year-old, Jack Powell. He would invite her to choose a book and return it the following week. ‘This I did, and to prove that I had read it he would ask me a lot of questions about it. I was four years older, and it was terrible if I couldn’t answer the question correctly.‘22 According to Cosgrave, the eight-year-old Powell organised a debating society amongst local children and in one session argued that Bacon, and not Shakespeare, had written Henry V and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His mother’s tuition not only determined his leisure activities. It ensured that he became, in his words, a’ “prizescholarship
winning, knowledge-eating” being.‘23

Powell won a scholarship to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, where he was remembered as a loner. An old classmate recalls, ‘he was really unlike . . . any other schoolboy one had known. He was austere. One seldom, if ever, had seen him standing against a wall with his hands in his pockets, just talking. He didn’t play games… He was either at his books or he was walking purposively from A to B with a goal in mind, with either his books or his clarinet under his arm.’ At 17, he won a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge. Here he established a personal regime of unremitting austerity. He locked himself away in his room and worked from 5.30 am to 9.30 pm, venturing out for lectures, meals and visits to the library. His only pleasure was a
daily evening walk to the train station – ‘I simply picked a place to walk to, and back from. The station seemed a good destination.’ Powell’s social autism ensured him the majority of the classics prizes and no friends. The local head of the ‘Old Edwardians’ paid him a social call: ‘as I remember it there was no fire, there were no pictures, Powell was sitting in his overcoat with a rug across his knees and . . . he was surrounded by eighteenth century folios… I said: “Hello Powell, would you like to come to tea?” and he said “No.” I’d never met this response before… I walked over to his mantelpiece and leant on it and took out a cigarette and he said “Would you mind not smoking!” And so I left.‘24 Powell’s own version of his reclusiveness is less acerbic. ‘I didn’t know [there was anything else to do . . . the social life of a college was a social life completely unfamiliar to me – even the sheer mechanics of it, of how to tie a bow tie, were unknown to me.‘25

Powell’s childhood revolved around books and words and the acquisition of knowledge. Years later he wrote: ‘For all my life has been about words: manuscript words, printed words, spoken words. Thinking, loving, fighting, striving have always revolved around words – not mere words, but words, because apart from words men are but as brutes.‘26 Biographical accounts of his childhood (Lewis 1979, Roth 1970, Cosgrave 1986, Pedraza 1986) make no reference to play – emotion and desire appear entirely absent from his early years. Powell’s own distinction between words and brutishness suggests that he used language and learning to set himself apart from feelings and bodily impulses. His love of the clarinet offers the only glimpse of a life
other than one of strenuous scholasticism. At fifteen, he wanted to be a composer or conductor and to sit a scholarship for the Royal Academy of Music. The clarinet was an instrument of the disciplined and formal structures of classical music, but for Powell it also featured in band music, suggestive of more anarchic, emotional rhythms. His parents (but perhaps chiefly his mother) argued that book learning was more important and dissuaded him from pursuing a career in music. ‘Cambridge it had to be, and I put my clarinet away for the last time: I’ve never looked at a sheet of music since.’ Fifty years later, asked why he rarely listened to music, he answered: ‘I don’t like things which interfere with one’s heart strings. It doesn’t do to awaken longings that can’t be fulfilled.‘27 There was to be no more illicit fantasies of band music. Powell’s nascent exuberance was firmly suppressed beneath the intensive, singular activity of reading, fuelling an overweening ambition to become a classical scholar.

Powell’s disavowal of pleasure was in the name of ambition – ‘This was how one got on and up.’ But it left the problem of how to manage his emotional life. At Cambridge, he adopted the poet and classics scholar A.E Housman as his role model – another outsider, ill at ease amongst the ruling classes. ‘Here was someone who for whole decades had survived the heart-chilling loneliness of Cambridge. Could I not manage to resist it with the same stony manfulness?‘28 Powell followed the poet’s advice;

Courage, lad, ‘tis not for long:
Stand, quit you like stone, be strong.‘29

It was Housman’s ‘moral fervour’, and his ability to teach; ‘Patiently, resolutely, with the power and precision of a steel machine,’ which inspired Powell. ‘Not the least part of my good fortune was to encounter early . . . the enduring inspiration of A.E. Housman’s courage in the “mental fight”.‘31 Powell had already been introduced, at the age of fifteen, to the ‘mental fight’, through the work of Thomas Carlyle. Housman confirmed Carlyle’s ideal of manliness – earnest, high-minded, chaste and driven by ambition and a sense of duty.

there was the detonation of Sartor Resartus: I still hear, when I recall the first reading of those intoxicating pages, the gentle hissing of the incandescent gas mantle above the table where homework was done, and the tone of my father’s voice saying that I would find Carlyle as great an experience as he had done at the same age.

Carlyle’s promotion of self-denial reflected his own contradictory feelings about being a writer – an activity his father considered unmanly and domesticated. His solution was to redefine the status of intellectual work: strenuous mental effort replaced physical labour as the sign of a man’s innate quality. In contrast, abandoning this struggle for a life of ease and pleasure was to fall into the feminising realm of idleness. Powell’s puritanical work ethic and self-denial emulated Carlyle’s heroic and manly intellectual. His intellectualism confirmed his masculinity; it was retentive and industrious rather than imaginative and creative, involving painstaking analysis and criticism of ancient Greek texts. In later years, to read and listen to Powell is to be aware
of his meticulous attention to detail, his carefully chosen sentences and exacting syntax, the precision of his diction and the preeminence he gives to logic. His discourse acts like a procrustean defence against desire and emotional need, controlling language into a flattened intonation imbued with an exaggerated display of rationality. As Housman’s poem concludes:

And I stepped out in flesh and bone
Manful like the man of stone.

Powell learnt to sculpt his language into a hard protective shell.

His reading of Carlyle had introduced him to German culture and a passion for Nietzsche. His infatuation with the transcendental world of German Romanticism prefigured his later love of India. It provides an illustration of the relationship between his inner world of feelings and the outer realm of language.

The year in which I opened a German grammar for the first time was 1927… I knew that something had happened in my life and would go on
happening. It is trite to say that it was the language of which I had dreamt. But it conveys exactly what I experienced at the time. It was to me as if this language had waited all this time to be discovered just by me and to be absorbed by me. I dived into it like a familiar body of water
and I could swim right away.

This linguistic experience was accompanied by ‘all possible romantic and exciting feelings’. It was the discovery of a dual world; ‘of fantasy and romantic magic and a world of mental strength and philosophical courage.’

German was ‘sharp, hard, strict, but with words that were romance in themselves, words in which poetry and music vibrated together.’ It was a language of firm boundaries, which both expressed and contained his unfulfilled longings. Such identifications became the idiom of his life. In adulthood, the external compulsion of institutions, regulated and disciplined his body and sexuality. His loyalty to concepts like ‘The Crown’ and ‘Empire’, and his fundamentalist religion, displaced his sensuality into an abstracted higher cause. He pursued bourgeois propriety to the point of parody because it emphasised convention and code over spontaneity and feeling. Powell feared his longings were potentially boundless and needed the security of clearly defined limits. Nevertheless he literally lost himself in his immersion into German culture and his ‘head over heals’ love affair with India. Melanie Klein has argued that these kinds of unrealistic idealisations, spring from ‘the instinctual desires which aim at unlimited gratification’.35 Powell’s description of empire as an hallucination was psychologically correct; in its denial of reality it symbolised the illusion of gratification.

Powell’s love for music, for German culture and for empire were attempts to resolve the split between his self-denying world of language and his emotional life; to bring words to repressed, unconscious feelings. This relationship between language and feeling is the key to understanding Powell’s metaphor of the desert as symbolic of a lost unity of ‘timeless contentment’. It can also explain why, in pursuit of this unity, he was drawn to the ‘corporate identity’ of empire; it explains too, the intense struggle, the sensibility of fanaticism, which he brought to its defence. Freud has defined an identification as ‘the earliest
expression of an emotional tie with another person.‘36 The shape and the feel of later political and cultural identifications have their genesis in this emotional tie to the mother. Like hallucination, idealisation is a defence against the fear of her absence; and Powell’s idealised India, like his fantasy of the desert, was a sublime symbol of the continuity of his mother’s presence. Independence destroyed its possibility, and symbolised his abandonment, in a place which he had no language to describe. Because language comes to replace attachment with the mother and to represent the child’s own instinctual life, an unresolved attachment means there is a failure of linguistic representation. Loss and separation can be felt, enacted and dreamt, but it cannot be spoken about or thought because it exists anterior to language. This crisis of self does, however, find its way into representation through metaphor, in particular it seeks expression through the adoption of political and cultural identifications. Powell’s identifications with Germany and later with India were metaphorical attempts to transfer unconscious predicaments into a familiar language and assimilate them into the ordered structure of his intellectualised world. But when these identifications failed him, when his idealised world was shattered, he was confronted with that wordless original loss: a loss of meaning.

In 1934, Powell was elected a fellow at Trinity and began work on his lexicon of Herodotus. His first academic essays were printed in German journals and he began travelling to Europe, to visit libraries. Hitler had become Chancellor in January 1933 and there were already documented reports of pogroms, arrests and German bellicosity. But his passion for German culture did not extend to any recognition or consideration of this political climate. On 30 June, 1934 Hitler launched his attack on the Brownshirts in the Night of the Long Knives.

I cannot escape the impression that the decisive date was for me the first of July 1934, which was when the news of the Rhoehm massacre reached England. I still remember clearly how I sat for hours in a state of shock, shock which you experience when, around you, you see the debris of a
beautiful building in which you have lived for a long time… So it had all been illusion, all fantasy, all a self-created myth. Music, philosophy, poetry, science and the language itself – everything was demolished, broken to bits on the cliffs of a monstrous reality. The spiritual home-land had not been a spiritual homeland after all… Overnight my spiritual homeland had disappeared and I was left only with my geographical homeland.’

Like his clarinet before and empire after, Powell’s renunciation was total: ’1934 was also the year in which I recognised it would come to war… The enemy was to be Germany and at stake was the freedom of England. From then on Germany, although still an abstraction, was for me the enemy… All the aspects which had seemed to me so wonderful and lovable took on a new appearance . . . a new pattern which let one recognise the threatening danger and illuminate it.’ What was loved became hated. ‘Germany’ (and this pattern was later to be repeated with the Commonwealth leaders) became the source of persecutory feelings which threatened to destroy him. His spiritual homeland was reduced to meaningless lines of cartography; he was living on
the hem of life, devoid of a centre. Fated by this meaninglessness he sought his recompense in war. ‘I was, if you like, fatalistic. There was
nothing I could do to change the course of events, nor their outcome.‘39 It was a war Powell did not expect to survive. It offered him the solace of death.

Without a sense of purpose or belonging, Powell turned to poetry to give voice to his ‘painful emotions’. It was an activity he would pursue intermittently for the next sixteen years – a form of internal dialogue with himself. In his Foreword to his Collected Poems, he recalled how his personal pain demanded an outlet, ‘In Tennyson’s and Housman’s Cambridge I was not ashamed to break off my work on Greek Lexicography to “cry out” in the vein they had made available.‘40 His first book of poetry, published in 1937, has a succession of images of ‘youth doomed to die’, threnodies which also express his own death
wish:

As clear as light, sharp as a knife,
A truth springs in my breast:
There are but two things, death and life,
And death of these is best (p50)

Of the two final poems addressed to his mother, the first begins like Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’

When I am gone, remember me
Not often. But when in the east
Grey light is growing, and the mind
With fears and hope is clouded least,
Then, in the hour I love best,
And where I still reflected find
All that I ever sought to be,
I will return to you as one
New risen from the grave, as clear
As now you seem, and as dear
As when I slept beneath your breast
Before I saw the sun (p51)

The second concludes with the unconscious wish behind his idealisation of Germany and later of empire and nation.

Mother, with longing ever new
And joy too great for telling
I turn again to rest in you
My earliest dwelling (p52)

This search for meaning of life in an undifferentiated union with his mother was an impossibility. But, like Rupert Brooke before him, he rediscovered meaningfulness in war. In contrast to the wistful, sometimes tortured, melancholy of his other poems, he celebrates the beginning of war with an exuberant, sexual imagery. War is a bride that he embraces.

Their faces all, both man and boy,
With a lover’s flush are fired:
They haste with swinging steps of joy
To meet their long-desired;

And every eye is glistening
With hope no more denied;
For now the marriage-morn will bring
The bridegroom to the bride (p65)

She is also the harbinger of death:

O thou that takest
The hearts thou makest,
And them thou breakest,
Behold I die (p66)

But Powell, of course, did not die. To his everlasting shame he survived the war and sought to repay his debt in service to the nation.

Notes

1 Quote from frontispiece to Wilfred Thesiger (1984), Arabian Sands,
Penguin.
2 Enoch Powell (1959), ‘Escape to the Void’ in National and English Review,
December issue, p. 199-200.
3 Andrew Roth, (1970), Enoch Powell Tory Tribune, Macdonald, p.7.
4 Terry Coleman, The Guardian, Aug. 27th, 1994.
5 Michael Strachan (1952) ‘Educating the Professor’, Blackwood’s Magazine,
February issue.
6 Berkeley, p.128.
7 Patrick Cosgrave (1989), The Lives of Enoch Powell, The Bodley Head,
p.81.
8 Cosgrave, p.87.
9 Roth,p.41.
10 Berkeley, p.51.
11 Ibid., p.52.
134
ENOCH POWELL’S ISLAND STORY
12 Enoch Powell (date not known), ‘The Empire of England’ in Tradition and
Change Nine Oxford Lectures, Conservative Research Department, p.49.
13 Ibid., p.53.
14 Quote taken from Cosgrave, p.59.
15 Enoch Powell (1968), ‘Imperial Sickness’, the Spectator, 13 September.
Review of Colin Cross, The Fall of the British Empire, 1914-1968, Hodder
and Stoughton.
16 The full text of the April 20th, Birmingham speech is in Berkeley, p.129-
137.
17 Howard Pedraza (1986), Winston Churchill and Enoch Powell, London,
p.81.
18 Roth, p.12.
19 Cosgrave, p.31.
20 Ibid., p.37.
21 Roth,p.ll.
22 Cosgrave, p.37.
23 Roth, p.12.
24 Cosgrave, p.43.
25 Roth, p.18.
26 Enoch Powell (1986), in Alvilde Lees-Milne and Derry Moore, eds. The
Englishman’s Room, Viking, p.118-121.
27 Pedraza, p.81.
28 Enoch Powell (date not known), ‘A Personal Recollection of A.E.
Housman’, Housman Society Journal, Vol. 1, p.27.
29 From poem LI of ‘A Shropshire Lad’, by A.E. Housman.
30 Enoch Powell (1990), ‘A.E. Housman’ in Housman Society Journal, Vol.16,
p.48.
31 Ibid.,p.49.
32 Enoch Powell (1962) ‘Thin but Thorough’ in The Times, 27 September.
33 Roth,p.l7.
34 Roy Lewis (1979), Enoch Powell Principle in Politics, Cassell, p.15.
35 Melanie Klein (1946), ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’ in Juliet
Mitchell, ed. The Selected Melanie Klein, p. 182.
36 Sigmund Freud (1921), ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ in
PFL, Vol.12, p.137.
37 Roth, p.24.
38 Ibid.
39 Cosgrave, p.53.
40 Enoch Powell (1990), ‘Foreword’ to Collected Poems, Bellew Publishing,
p.vii.

Enoch Powell | ukwatch.net

Enoch Powell's Island Story (Part 1)