You seem to miss my point that From Hell comes from the period of crisis in which Moore was reacting to the final collapse of Communism, and what must have seemed to him the witches' sabbath of "capitalist" rejoicing and ideological self-reinforcement. I well remember the fury and bitterness of the extreme left at the time. One article, which somehow found its way on one of London's free magazines for commuters - you know, the kind that they distribute at the exits of main tube stations and so on - consoled its fury with a fantasy that in a few years the United States, too, would collapse, with leading states such as California not wanting to "support" the feebler states in the middle. That was the mood of the left at the time: baffled, murderous fury.
What I said was something along those lines: Moore completely misrepresents the early Marxists, including Morris and his circle, by presenting them as beautiful, noble dreamers of universal goodness. He lies - I do not think I used any weaker expression: Moore lies - about the reality both of Morris' circle, which was motivated by personal unhappiness and sexual inadequacy, and of Karl Marx himself, who is presented as their inspiration. Marx was no otherworldly dreamer: he was a political writer who spent much of his life building up a following, the savage conqueror and ruler of the First International, from which he banished Bakunin. In his private life, he was a family man of more than Victorian oppressiveness and selfishness, who branded the lives of his unfortunate daughters with fire. In other words, Moore is presenting the whole Marxist left, which was forming in London in the period that concerns him, in the same mendacious light as Matthew Arnold did Shelley: "A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain". But Shelley, far from being that, was a more committed Satanist than Byron himself - Byron never rose to the heights of artistry and Satan-worship of Prometheus Unbound - and a man of atrocious, vicious sexual selfishness, who left at least one woman, probably more, dead in his wake, and whose penchant for "noble" public gestures, that so impressed Arnold, went with a total inability to recognize the needs of those around him. And Marx and Morris, in the same way, were not beautiful dreamers of ineffectual paradises - Morris was, but he was a lot more than that - but highly practical and highly questionable people. Moore idealizes them. Why? Not, as with Arnold, because he simply could not bear to accept the reality of what Shelley was about; but rather because he wants to make the point that beautiful dreams of ideal humanity have no place in the ugly world of Gull, Netley and "the four whores of the apocalypse." In other words, he is justifying the failure of Marxism by its being, not - as most of us would say - too ugly, but too beautiful, for real life. I do not think I need to say any more.
no subject
What I said was something along those lines: Moore completely misrepresents the early Marxists, including Morris and his circle, by presenting them as beautiful, noble dreamers of universal goodness. He lies - I do not think I used any weaker expression: Moore lies - about the reality both of Morris' circle, which was motivated by personal unhappiness and sexual inadequacy, and of Karl Marx himself, who is presented as their inspiration. Marx was no otherworldly dreamer: he was a political writer who spent much of his life building up a following, the savage conqueror and ruler of the First International, from which he banished Bakunin. In his private life, he was a family man of more than Victorian oppressiveness and selfishness, who branded the lives of his unfortunate daughters with fire. In other words, Moore is presenting the whole Marxist left, which was forming in London in the period that concerns him, in the same mendacious light as Matthew Arnold did Shelley: "A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain". But Shelley, far from being that, was a more committed Satanist than Byron himself - Byron never rose to the heights of artistry and Satan-worship of Prometheus Unbound - and a man of atrocious, vicious sexual selfishness, who left at least one woman, probably more, dead in his wake, and whose penchant for "noble" public gestures, that so impressed Arnold, went with a total inability to recognize the needs of those around him. And Marx and Morris, in the same way, were not beautiful dreamers of ineffectual paradises - Morris was, but he was a lot more than that - but highly practical and highly questionable people. Moore idealizes them. Why? Not, as with Arnold, because he simply could not bear to accept the reality of what Shelley was about; but rather because he wants to make the point that beautiful dreams of ideal humanity have no place in the ugly world of Gull, Netley and "the four whores of the apocalypse." In other words, he is justifying the failure of Marxism by its being, not - as most of us would say - too ugly, but too beautiful, for real life. I do not think I need to say any more.