Book Wrangler’s Postscript:
The
Intellectual Sources of Erle Cox’s Out
of the Silence
By
John Costello
The book you have just read is the most famous Australian science fiction novel of the twentieth century. In the twenties it was a best seller in Australia, Britain, and the United States; it was translated into French (La sphére d’or) and Russian (Eremenya based on the shortened French translation) and then translated into French again in full in the 1970s. It was even plagiarized, or, at least, ‘heavily mined’ by French author Rene Barjavel for La nuit des temps.
The
book you have just read is also the most defamed science fiction novel of the
twentieth century, from any country. The normally estimable David Langford of Ansible calls it ‘remarkable if
hideously racist.’ John Clute’s assertitively authoritative Encyclopedia of Science Fiction writes:
“The
novel exhibits some racist overtones. (John Clute in Clute; 271)” “What is
disturbing for the modern reader is the way the novel takes racialist thinking
seriously. Although it finally rejects the Nazi-like utopia it depicts, this
rejection has to be earned through layers of irony and complex narrative, in
all of which Earani’s ideas are given what today seem more than their due.
Indeed, she is depicted as morally cleaner than many of the 20th
century people she meets. (Richard Bleiler in Clute; 71)”
‘Layers
of irony and complex narrative’ combined with character and plot are a good
definition of the term ‘novel.’ And if one is examining a set of beliefs in
fictional form, and if those beliefs are generally held within your society, it
is certainly best to take those beliefs seriously.
But
Bleiler is, in one sense, correct. The
book does describe a ‘Nazi Utopia.’ The same ideas Cox attacks in the novel
were later used by the Nazis in their construction of a racist, genocidal,
totalitarian state.
Out of the Silence
was written almost a hundred years ago between 1913 and 1916 and not published
until 1919, in a world
whose mores and popular beliefs are as alien as anything that might come from
Mars, and as familiar as anything in yesterday’s Times (New York’s or
London’s.)
Out of the Silence
is highly polemical ― it uses the medium of SF to argue with a set ideas
popular at the time and warn against the world the acceptance of those ideas
might produce.
Out of the Silence
is, in fact, highly prescient. Twenty
years after it was begun those ideas were put into practice in Germany, and
despite the lessons learned at the time, those ideas are still accepted by a
significant portion of the intellectual elite and general public.
More
than ninety years after the book was written we have no surviving notes as to which sources Cox used, but the ideas
Cox challenges are those of the Eugenics Movement, and many of its thinkers
left paper trails.
Eugenics
comes from ‘well-born’ in Greek, and as envisioned by Sir Francis Galton, who
coined the term in 1883, it would have been a movement to encourage people of
exceptional ability to produce more children, and people with inherited defects
to produce fewer or no children. Galton envisioned it as more a religious than
a political movement. At the time it
was popularly thought that blindness, deafness, insanity, nervous disorders,
susceptibility to disease, alcoholism, pauperism, and a host of other maladies
and social calamities were inherited conditions transmitted through the ‘germ
plasm (what would later be defined as genes.)’
A data base describing the extent of the problem faced by the human race
was lacking; the British wing of the movement under Galton’s successor Pearson (of Pearson’s r fame) wanted to collect
data, the American wing wanted action, and would collect (or manufacture) data
as needed. The watchword was ‘efficiency.’ How much
money could be saved or directed to more fruitful pursuits if the ‘defectives’
of the world were all segregated during their reproductive periods and kept
from producing more defectives. Or, better, sterilized. The ‘lethal chamber’
was much discussed. All, of course, for the benefit of those poor individuals
to whom life was a ‘burden,’ promoted and foisted on the general public by what
Cox in his third novel The Missing Angel describes derisorily as ‘societies for
the moral improvement of everybody and everything.’
Although
the movement was world-wide (See Adams) it had its greatest impact in
anglophone countries. In its original, British, setting, lack of funding
rendered the movement virtually innocuous; the 1861 Offenses Against the Person
Act made sterilizing or otherwise mutilating someone else a crime, and until
the 1920s the movement lacked funds to try and influence Parliament, and by the
time it managed to get its proposals introduced the Nazis were already passing
far stricter laws and managed to discredit the British Eugenicists in the eyes
of the political class.
In
the US eugenics evolved into a politically powerful and popularly accepted
pseudo-science with funding from the widow of railway magnate E. H. Harriman
and the Carnegie foundation and managed to get laws passed in more than 30
‘progressive’ States, which led to the involuntary sterilization of more than
sixty thousand people from around 1911 to the mid-seventies, more than half of
them in California.
It
is impossible to trace in this article the origins of the mindset which led
from New England Puritanism through the various Great Awakenings to what Edwin
Black has described as The War Against
The Weak (Black 2003), but take Charles Darwin, a dash of Muscular
Christianity, fear of ‘racial degeneration,’ and anti-immigrant paranoia, and
Gregor Mendel’s discovery of dominant and recessive traits (with the
implication that apparently ‘superior’ people could – by stealth! – carry the
genes of the ‘unfit’ or ‘lower tenth’ or ‘the Abyss,’ without obvious stigmata)
and the stage was set for interference in the reproductive lives of hundreds of
thousands, and mass murder.
The
eugenics movement was part and parcel of the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth
century Progressive Movement, as much as birth-control, anti-trust, child labor
laws, etc., a fact many historians find convenient to ignore.
Woodrow
Wilson stands second
only to FDR in the liberal pantheon as civic demigod, yet readers of most of
the biographies of the 28th President will be surprised to learn
that, as President of Princeton University, he worked assiduously to keep the
University all-white, excluding black applicants. As the Democratic Governor of
New Jersey he asked Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen to draft a
eugenics law for the state which he proceeded to sign. He was a close friend of
Thomas F. Dixon, whose novel, The
Klansman, filmed as Birth of a
Nation, played at the White House to Wilson’s
own review: “It’s all so true.”
The
acceptance of institutionalized racism by the liberal reformers, seen as a
means to ensure social peace within the US, is often admitted but
downplayed. The role of Woodrow Wilson
generally receives a white wash, and McAdoo and other cabinet members take the
blame for the introduction of Jim Crow into the Civil Service in Washington,
DC.
Among
the more prominent promoters of eugenics were Margaret Sanger, Luther Burbank,
George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell (who abandoned it after it became
clear that, had such laws been around a century before, he himself would never
have been born), and Virginia Woodhull Martin, publisher of Marx’s Communist Manifesto in the US and the
first woman to run for President of the United States, who in 1891 wrote in The Rapid Multiplication Of The Unfit:
“A
great many seem to think that interference with the marriages of the unfit will
only give greater opportunity to races, lower on the scale of development who
are multiplying so fast, to overcome and conquer the more advanced races. We have an example of this in the rapid
multiplication of the negroes in America, who at some not far distant day, will
outnumber and overrun the whites if the rapid increase be not checked. If
America is owned and governed by negroes, will that the survival of the
fittest? The outlook is as ominous in
Europe…
“The
best minds of today have accepted the fact that if superior people are desired,
they must be bred; and if imbeciles, criminals, paupers, and otherwise unfit,
are undesirable citizens, they must not be bred.
“The
first principle of the breeders art is to weed out the inferior animals to
avoid conditions which give a tendency to reversion and then to bring together
superior animals under the most favorable conditions. We can produce numerous
modifications of structure by careful selection of different animals, and there
is no reason why, if society were differently organized, we should not be able
to modify and improve the human species to the same extent. In order to do this
we must make a religion of the procreative principle. Our girls and boys must
be taught how sacred is the life-giving principle. The most wonderful of all
forces at work throughout nature.” (Martin, cited page 45 of Perry)
Martin’s
words are reflected in Earani’s arguments with Bryan, as is the following
hyper-euphemized rant extracted from the work of one of the movement’s most
prolific ideologues:
“…To
the multiplying rejected of the white and yellow civilizations there will have
been added a vast proportion of the black and brown races, and collectively
these masses will propound the general question, "What will you do with
us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the new republic
emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into
existence by the passes this sphinx will guard.
“…It
has become apparent that whole masses of human populations are, as a whole,
inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be
given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted,
that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing
fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong.
To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is
to be swamped in their fecundity…
“…the
ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to
favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity
— beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds… And the method that
nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, the method that must
in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death…The new ethics
will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night
refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct
between living fully beautifully, and efficiently will be to die…
“I
anticipate, that a certain portion of the population….exists only on
sufferance, out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that they do not
propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they will hesitate
to kill when that sufferance is abused…
“If
the new republic will not be squeamish either in facing or inflicting death...
They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while…they will have
the faith to kill…Most of the human types, that by civilized standards are
undesirable, are quite willing to die out through such suppressions if the
world will only encourage them a little….At any rate, it will be a terminating
evil….Consider what it will mean to have perhaps half the population of the
world, in every generation, restrained from or tempted to evade reproduction!
This thing, this euthanasia of the weak…is possible.”
Who
is this verbally flatulent Pol Pot wannabe who has arrogated to himself and his
cronies the right to decide who will live and who will die, who will reproduce
and who will be born? Can anyone have read this and not have concluded that to reach the shining future of the ‘new
republic’ mass murder was perfectly acceptable?
What role did this author play in the establishment of the Nazi state?
If you are an SF reader, you are certainly familiar with his works. Brian
Stableford (Clute 1993; 1135) heaps praise on him as “the founding father and
presiding genius of UK scientific romance,” which, yes, H. G. Wells was. He was
also a fervent racist and eugenicist (See Black), and the citation comes from
the final chapter to his 1901 book Anticipations.
Other
elements of Earani’s world may have been drawn from Wells’s A New Utopia, which can easily be found
on-line at Project Gutenberg. The ‘kinetic men’ described by Wells, his New
Republic’s Praetorian Guard or ‘Samurai’ class, is a good description of Andax
and Earani: “…Absolutely inflexible. They saw one goal ahead, and went
straight to it”
who will let nothing stand between them and the betterment of the human
condition. What does it matter if “We might have to depopulate one‑half
of the world” so long as the ‘radiant future’ comes into being? The same
utopian attitude inspired Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao…the entire sad
litany of the bloody and wasted twentieth century where one paranoid psychopath
after another promised to provide a perfected world, so long as he was allowed
to kill, and kill, and kill. It is still around today.
In
the thirties, as the Nazi eugenic atrocities made headlines in the US and
Britain, the Eugenics Movement retrenched. The various eugenics journals that
survived replaced the word with Genetics, but you can still tell their
histories as you walk back through the years in libraries counting the bound
volumes. Eventually, the foundations funding Cold Spring Harbor’s activities
asked the prominent Archaeologist Alfred Kidder to conduct an outside audit of
the Eugenics Laboratory’s developed data base of inherited human characteristics,
and he concluded what ‘data’ they had was, because of changing definitions and
impossibly vague categories, utter garbage.
Again,
I can only urge you to read Black’s War
Against The Weak. What is remarkable is that so few voices rose up against this
idea. Most high school and college biology text-books in the US parroted it; it
was the conventional wisdom among the well-to-do and elites; SF in the twenties
and thirties is filled with societies that licence and control reproduction. Donald H. Keller is one of the few in SF to
argue against it. C. K. Chesterton was perhaps the most prominent member of the
literary establishment to find it objectionable – he pointed out that no
society which tried to be a democracy could engage in eugenics, since the
‘lower tenth,’ H. G. Wells’s ‘Abyss,’ would also be voting, and would certainly
not vote for its own extinction.
Democracy, therefore, would have to go, or at last be subordinated to
‘Eukary’s Law,’ fanatics who know they are right, who will “not let one life or
a thousand stand in the way of the future of the race…”
Erle
Cox was the son of Ross Cox, who emigrated from Dublin to Australia in the
1850s and eventually became a bureaucrat in the Australian State of Victoria’s
Department of Education; the son and nephew of writers he himself wrote stories
which clearly appear to be SF. Erle Cox received an education which, by
today’s standards, would be the equivalent of a college liberal arts degree.
Diana H. Wyndham, in her doctoral dissertation, describes the intellectual
atmosphere of late 19th century Australia as a country obsessed with
racial matters and a perceived ‘disastrous’ decline in the white birth rate,
and paranoid about invasion by the teeming hordes of Asia (primarily the
Japanese.)
We
cannot be certain that Erle Cox read any of the abovementioned possible
sources, but if Cox himself never read Martin, Luther Burbank, or Wells (and
one finds it odd that someone whose father wrote SF and who would later write
SF himself would not read everything by Wells that might come his way) the
basic ideas would have been simply ‘in the air.’
Cox began Out
of the Silence in 1913, the same year that Australian Labor politician and
later WWI Prime Minister Billy Hughes (evidently fruitlessly) introduced a
eugenically inspired “Marriages Certificate Bill” in the Australian Parliament
(Wyndham; 11); Wyndham notes that the first known reference to eugenics in an
Australian newspaper dates to around the turn of the year 1904/05 (Wyndham; 56)
and describes a eugenics fervor in 1912; of greater relevance to Cox’s book
would be Charles Henry Pearson (1830-1894) Minister of Education in the
Australian State of Victoria, where Ross Cox worked for the Department of
Education, author of National Life and
Character: a Forecast (1894), who “warned about the dangers ‘for the higher
races everywhere if the black and yellow belt encroaches upon the
Earth.(Wyndham; 41, citing Pearson; 96)’”
The
intellectual stage was set; the writing commenced. But why do Clute and Bleiler
and the others assume that the ideas of Odi and Eukary were being ‘propounded’
by the author? It is this writer’s contention that Clute, Langford, Bleiler,
and others, have totally misread Cox’s Out
of the Silence. Part of the reason for this may be the cuts in the 1947
edition which eliminated so much of the characterization; part is probably a
lack of knowledge of the western world’s late 19th century popular
culture. It may be because Earani seems to reject the formal strictures of
Victorian sexual morality (although, in fact, she has it totally internalized!)
It may be because the ‘principal character,’ Alan Dundas, accepts Earani’s
arguments and prepares to help her carry out her designs. If the last this
results from a too simplistic reading of the text. The principal character is not Alan Dundas,
who Hamlet-like, refuses to come to necessary decisions, who decides to ‘let
events shape themselves,” follows Earani’s lead blindly, and lets himself be
carried along by events; the principal character, the moral center of the
story, who puts himself and everyone he loves at risk, and sets in motion the
events that will resolve the issue, is Richard Barry.
Erle
Cox’s background is in some ways similar to that of another early SF writer
Clute has accused of racism, Edgar Rice Burroughs. The two men were born within
two years of each other, Cox in 1873 and Burroughs in 1875; both had upper
middle class backgrounds and were well educated (Cox at Castlemaine Grammar
School and the Melbourne Church of England Grammar School; Burroughs at Andover
and Michigan Military Academy); both married in the early years of the century
and, after a series of business ventures, settled on writing for a living, and
did very well at it. Both men died in
1950. There are differences as well:
Tompkins mentions no military background for Cox, while Burroughs managed to
get into the 7th Cavalry after Wounded Knee, when it became a ‘hard
luck’ regiment. Of the two men, Cox was the far better writer in terms of
characterization and prose style, Burroughs the more prolific for his fiction.
Both
men in their writing were dealing with broadly popular social movements of the
period, some of them now so obscure most readers have no idea just what ideas
or movements the writers were attacking. A modern reader turning the pages of
Burroughs’s Beyond the Farthest Star
can see the references to Nazi anti-Semitism, or in the Venus and Moon novels
Russian Bolshevism, but most of the utopian schemes Burroughs derided are
forgotten by all but historians, and after the Second World War those most
guilty of the Eugenics Movement mirrored the actions of the SS in going to
ground, often with far more success.
In
his introduction to Soviet Science
Fiction Isaac Asimov defines three stages of the genre’s growth, the third
being “If this goes on…” named after the Heinlein story, the dystopian warning
tale. Had Heinlein actually been able to bring himself to write “The Sound of
His Wings,” the story wherein Nehemiah Scudder converts the US into a theocracy,
would Clute accuse Heinlein of religious fanaticism?
Cox’s
book is a warning (as much as 1984 or
Brave New World,) an attack on the
eugenics movement in particular and the utopian impulse in general. In 1913, a
generation before it gained power in Germany, based on the arguments of its
speakers and promoters, Erle Cox predicted it would lead to mass murder,
genocide, and the Nazi utopia noted in Clute. Should he be condemned for his
prescience?
Since
the author has been dead for half a century and cannot now be asked what he
meant, we must turn to the text itself: does the author preach racism? Does the
author argue for a race war and a
eugenic dictatorship?
The
story is told by an omniscient third person, an authorial voice who makes
various comments on small town Australian society, the proclivities of married
women, politics, and on the actions of the characters. All ‘racist’ comments
are those of characters: Earani and to a lesser extent by Dundas. Barry accepts
the supplanting of Australia’s native population by Europeans as the result of
‘natural selection’ (which was how it was generally argued at the time; see
Wyndham) but with little enthusiasm.
It
is a cardinal error to assume the arguments of any one fictional character
reveal an author’s own views. In a polemical work, the sum of the work, the
competing ideas of the characters and their actions and the outcome of those
actions, is perhaps the best indicator of authorial intent.
For
the sake of story telling Cox assumed the Eugenic Utopia would produce its
desired result, a very advanced society of super beings without fault or
blemish, cleansed of genetic flaws, improved upon generation by generation,
creators of superb music and high art. The adjective ‘glorious’ is repeated 20
times in relation to Earani, who herself notes that she is as advanced over
Dundas and Bryan as they are over monkeys; her society is capable of enormous
self control and heroism, its music and arts have reached degrees of perfection
we can only hope to aspire to. It had achieved everything that utopian
progressives could hope for.
Unlike
the progressives, Cox asked himself another question. Would it be worth it?
This
writer contends that Erle Cox’s answer is a clear ‘No.’
Dundas
listens to Earani’s arguments and agrees totally; he is fully in love with her
from the first moment he has seen her and whatever she said he would have
agreed with, no matter how outrageous.
His final conversion to her cause comes in a moment reminiscent of the
temptation of Christ by Satan as he is offered dominion over the earth. It is
unnecessary, as what he wants is Earani.
Although
almost seduced by Maxi’s marvelous medical instrument and Earani’s knowledge,
Doctor Bryan listens politely, fascinated by the story of her civilization,
disturbed, and worried about her powers, and Andax’s. He honestly cannot come
up with arguments against her; too many of Earani’s civilization’s defining
moments are just the logical extension of ideas floating around in his own
intellectual milieu, but he insists her intended actions are morally wrong. It
is one thing to live in a society which benefits from a past generation’s
misdeeds; it is quite something else to use those past misdeeds as
justification for murders of your own. He is torn between having given his word
to his friend and the inevitable results of continued silence and
inaction. In the end it is Earani’s
attack on the
itinerant farm worker that makes her words real and convinces him to act,
although he knows he is risking his life in revealing her existence to the
Prime Minister, and he knows with certainty that, should Earani discover his
‘treachery,’ he will be killed. He has, after all, been warned, but he chooses
to ‘interfere in the future’ anyway.
Clues
to Cox’s own views are given throughout the text; as Dundas advances into the
sphere he finds “beauty beyond conception…horrors…grim and revolting beyond
the distorted images of a nightmare…A vast human slaughter-house.” – words that
mirror Earani’s soul, and continuing with the name of the odious character who
carries out genocide with his death ray. Earani’s description of Andax – the
ultimate product of Eukary’s dictatorship of the intelligentsia – as utterly
soulless sets up a counterpoint with the continual religious references and
biblical allusions that fill the book:
“…in
Christendom.” “Man proposes. [God disposes.]” “Only Eve’s legacy – work.” “God
made him for a man – let him pass.”
“Amen to that,” “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” “the elect.” “this world’s goods” “a miracle
as great as that of the loaves and the fishes” “Son of Anak.”
Earani
is fated to try to revive her own civilization. She says several times, “it is
written,” as though the future were inevitable.
Since the ‘unfit’ are destined to perish anyway, why stand in the way of
the future? Her use of the aphorism “Sufficient unto the day” is a misuse, as
the meaning is clearly “Don’t make matters worse than they are,” or in the
language of Doctor Bryan’s Hippocratic Oath, “First do no harm.”
One
New Testament reference that would have been familiar to any reader of Cox’s
generation is not cited, and, given Alan Dundas’s work as a wine grower must
surely come to mind; indeed it forms the novel’s unspoken theme:
“As
you sow, so shall you reap.”
Perhaps
the finest complement to Cox’s work was paid by French SF fan and writer Pierre
Versins, himself a Dachau survivor and victim of the real Nazi ‘utopia,’ when
he produced a full translation of the book the 1970s.
In
the end the works of Odi, Maxi, and Eukary, the vile and the glorious, are
reduced to naught, destroyed by one imperfect woman’s moment of love and rage,
to the relief of Bryce and Bryan, whose words at the end in regard to the still
sleeping, still threatening Andax, sum up Cox’s judgment of Earani’s perfected,
‘glorious’ world:
“Thank
God, he will wait an eternity now.”
Citations
Adams, Mark B., The Wellborn science; Eugenics in Germany,
France,
Brazil,
and Russia.
1990 Oxford
University
Press, London.
Black,
Edwin, War Against The Weak: Eugenics and
America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows
Press, New York.
Burbank,
Luther, The training of the human plant,
1909, Century, New York.
Chesterton,
G. K., Eugenics and Other Evils: an
argument against the scientifically organized state, 1922, reprinted 2000
by Inkling books.
Clute,
John, and Peter Nichols, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1993.
St. Martin’s
Press, New York.
Gabay,
Alfred J, interviewed by Rachel Kohn on Radio National’s The Spirit of Things on “The Faith of Alfred Deakin,” 13/5/01,
on line at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s296026.htm.
Thanks to Professor Bunyip for the link.
Martin,
Virginia
Woodhull, The Rapid Multiplication of the
Unfit (London,
1891), cited by Perry.
Page,
Curtis Hidden, Japanese Poetry, an
historical essay with two hundred and thirty translations, 1923, R. West,
Philadelphia.
Perry,
Mathew W, Ed. The Pivot of Civilization
in Historical Perspective, Inkling Books. On-line in PDF format at
http://www.inklingbooks.com/inklinguniversity/pdf_files/5_feminism.pdf.
Tompkins, Allan J,
“Erle Cox and Out of the Silence,” Somerset
Gazette, 1971. Article reproduced with the permission of the author on
http://www.FossickerBooks/erlecox.html.
Wells, H. G., Anticipations, 1901 London.
Wyndham,
Diana H., 1996 “Striving for National
Fitness; Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s, a thesis submitted in
fulfillment of the requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
Department of History, University of Sydney.” Available on-line in PDF format;
all citations from on-line edition. Hardcover edition published as Eugenics in Australia: Striving for National
Fitness, 2003 The Galton Institute, London.
Internet
Sources:
http://www.InklingBooks.com/inklinguniversity
http://www.FossickerBooks.com