Jonathan Bowden on Jonathan Bowden

I just returned from the library, where I was inspecting vol. 3 of Jonathan Bowden’s very rare Collected Works, 6 vols. (London: Avant-Garde, 1995). I examined the first two volumes a couple of years ago. I will look at the remaining three as soon as time permits.

The Collected Works mark the transition, in my view, from the first to the second period in Bowden’s writing life. This was a transition of which Bowden was himself aware. Below are gathered a few snippets of ‘Bowden on Bowden’ from vol. 3. I hope this will be of all the more interest given how vanishingly rare and difficult to access texts from this period are, especially these Collected volumes.

 

1

This all-caps list is from the flyleaf (so to speak: the volume is a perfect-bound paperback).

OFFENSIVE * SCATALOGICAL * SAVAGE * INTELLECTUAL * OPINIONATED * VALUE-LADEN * INDISCRETE * RABID * AUTHORITARIAN * LIBERTARIAN * EXTREMIST * IMMODERATE * ILLIBERAL * POLITICALLY INCORRECT * STIMULATING * ROMANTIC * CYNICAL * NIHILISTIC * REGRESSIVE * STRONG * SINUOUS * UGLY * HORRORIFIC * RAPACIOUS * PORNOGRAPHIC * HIGHLY-CHARGED * SADISTIC * SATANIC * AVANT-GARDE * REACTIONARY * ANTIFEMINIST * HETEROSEXUALIST * RADICAL * REVOLUTIONARY * CONSERVATIVE * HETERODOX * POLITICALLY AMBIDEXTROUS * CLINICAL * MASTERFUL * CARING * DOMINANT * PRIAPIC * FULL OF TESTOSTERONE * ERECT * MASCULINE * OCCULTISTIC * FORENSIC * INTOLERANT * RELIGIOUS * DEEPLY SERIOUS * FULL OF FUN! * A SMORGASBORD OF DEATH, MURDER AND MAYHEM!

 

2

Here is the blurb from the back cover, signed ‘Jurgen Schwartz,’ one of Bowden’s pennames.

Too often, Jonathan Bowden is regarded as nothing more than a shadowy present in the intellectual firmament, an addendum or concomitant to the post-Nietzschean fragments of Redbeard, Henry Miller, Bonnard, Charles Bukowski, Blanchot, Montherlant, Lewis, Rand, Hopkins, Crowley, even Heidegger. Alternatively, he is regarded as the author of a large number of mystifying ‘novels’ or meta-fictions — neither straightforwardly fiction or nonfiction, autobiography or personal reminiscence, political tract or metaphysical monograph, ‘pornographic’ expulsion or aesthetic monstrance—but a combination of all these. Yet Jonathan Bowden is responsible for a body of work whose implications can no longer be ignored.

A few points.

Bowden has now called his writing ‘pornographic’ twice. While only Sade, to my knowledge, qualifies as pornographic on a conventional definition, an interest in the grubbier sorts of sexuality as well as a general view of violence and politics as basically psycho-sexual phenomena is evident also in Aryan (CW, vol. 3), Suck (CW, vol. 2), Onslaught (CW, vol. 2) and elsewhere. Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich are both referenced and thought through seriously in this earlier writing.

If we take this list as an avowal of influence, it is interesting to note that, alongside those we would expect from his more popular, later pronouncements (Bill Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis), we have the hardbitten libertines Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, the occultist Aleister Crowley and the pious free-marketeer Ayn Rand (though he does, come to think of it, mention his taste for Rand in late interviews with Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson). I suppose ‘Bonnard’ is Abel Bonnard: not a well-known figure in the English-speaking world. And ‘Blanchot’ is Maurice Blanchot, a friend of Emmanuel Levinas and Georges Bataille, a novelist and philosopher, and a leftist activist: a fairly common reference for (implicitly) leftist ‘critique’ of a certain sort. Perhaps his writing on death attracted Bowden.

The two words he uses to capture his kind of writing, and the kind of act writing was for him, are ‘expulsion’ and ‘monstrance.’ Literally, the latter term means a vessel designed for displaying its contents (usually consecrated hosts) or a proof or demonstration (usually, in law, a writ restoring property to its owner); but etymologically it has to do with showing (from Latin ‘monstrare,’ to show). Here Bowden seems to mean that writing, for him, is a throwing up or exudation, a getting to the surface of things bubbling within. This is in line with how Ian Nol reports Bowden elsewhere described his writing-process: that he wrote Mad (CW, vol. 3) ‘straight out’ and never edited it [see Note below].

 

3

Finally — I compared Mad as it appears in vol. 3 of the Works with its first edition (London: Egotist, 1989). It seems much the same, except for quite considerable changes in punctuation and paragraphing. Also, Mad, Aryan and Sade all have editorial noted by ‘Jurgen Schwartz,’ i.e. Jonathan Bowden. Many of these are just points of information. However, here follow a couple that shed interesting light on how Bowden understood the change in the thinking of his first period to that of his second. Both are from Mad.

First, from p. 179. Bowden is discussing conservatism and writes that ‘Conservatism believes that man is superior to woman, black inferior to white and empire preferable to co-existence’ (cf. 1989 ed., p. 99). In this 1995 version, ‘Schwartz’ adds (after ‘black inferior to white’):

as was attested to by the author later — in the company of a large number of intellectuals like Arthur Jensen and the leading behavioural psychologist H. J. Eysenck

Second, from p. 180. Bowden is psychoanalysing fascism: ‘They have a great fear of dirt. A morbid sensitivity towards disease, particularly if it is sexual in origin. They exhibit a mortal terror of the body,’ etc. (cf. 1989 ed., p. 100). In the 1995 version, ‘Schwartz’ adds (after ‘Something which brings us to fascism’):

Although it is important to recognise here, as an interpolation, that the author’s views changed considerably over time — and rather like Maurice Barrès who he resembles—works such as Mad are Stirnite [sic] or fundamentalist individualist works (rather like Barrès’ Moi or Me); whereas later works would put this anti-social authoritarian individualism in a socially ‘fascistic’ context

So, in short, as the author himself understands it, the early work is ‘fundamentalist individualist’ and still under Stirner’s sway. This ‘authoritarian individualism’ is not eliminated but is integrated into a broader outlook, ‘a socially “fascistic” context.’ I think this is important. The main influences in the early writing are Nietzsche, of course, but also Stirner and especially Sade. Sade is the only man (except the Ripper) to whom Bowden devoted a whole book; and he did that twice (Sade and Colonel Sodom). This early thinking does not disappear; but it is reworked in a new context: Bowden’s increasing involvement in right-wing politics. These and some others of ‘Schwartz’s’ editorial notes seem to be there in large part to emphasize Bowden’s change of attitude towards right-wingism.

Note (28 April 2025)

Bowden’s description of his writing-process comes from a letter to his publisher Chip Smith, who reproduced the following excerpt in his obituary of Bowden.

On some of the stylistic points which you raise — first, you have to remember that I wrote this text straight out when I was eighteen years of age. I am now almost forty seven, so it is inevitable that a few of the points you mention are actually solecisms, mistakes, counsels of despair, a desire to shock, épater les bourgeois, et cetera. There is also a serious point here: something of the work’s prosody, its proem-like quality or deliberative insistence has to do with the directly self-creative nature of the text. It is a thoroughly Stirnerite work in every sense — in other words, it lives and breathes in its own textual environment, one that obeys its own laws, ducts, discontinuities and prior inconstancies … et cetera. To summarise the obvious, it is also something of an attack — possibly upon the reader in the manner of certain modernist works from earlier in the twentieth century, although hopefully, stylistic solipsism apart, in a less illisible way.