The history of the British communist novel is ultimately the story of the political degeneration of the Communist Party of Great Britain. By Lawrence Parker. Reading: LC.
In 1939, Frank Griffinâs1Â novel October Day recorded the events of the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, where British fascist leader Oswald Mosley planned to march through the East End before being repelled by a counter-demonstration organized by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and others in the labor movement.Â
One of the characters in the book is an unemployed laborer called Slesser, unwilling to take a job with the local council because of his refusal to join a trade union. After an argument with his wife, he gets sucked into the vortex of the anti-Mosley demonstration, marching and fighting alongside CPGB members before becoming involved in incidents with fascists after the demonstration when being mistaken for a Jew. Griffinâs book is fast-paced, knockabout stuff and it doesnât go deeply into the modulations of working-class consciousness. But we are left with a strange denouement. By the end of the book, Slesser has reversed his previous outlook on life: ââIâve been a bloody fool! I ought to have joined the union years ago. Everybody ought to join a union. Donât you see?â he asked passionately. âWe must all stand together. All us working folks must be organised. Thatâs the only way weâll ever fight the bosses, thatâs the only way weâll ever get the rich off our backs.ââ2
So, after one day, the anti-union Slesser seems on his way to becoming a communist sympathizer. He has simply been processed by the experience of the demonstration and militant action, buoyed along by events that he initially had very little understanding of; enough that he fairly immediately sloughs off his previous world view. This is mechanistic in the extreme and a mystical, not rational, view of the formation of working-class consciousness. One has to ask whether a character with views such as Slesser would have even gone to Cable Street or, if he had, whether he would have been marching on the fascist side. But Griffin ultimately allows no mediatory role to his characterâs consciousness and his views are simply a matter of chance as to where he ended up on the day.
Some of the character dynamics of this novel illustrate the broader tragedy of the CPGB, formed 100 years ago: the manner in which it viewed the British proletariat as an agent of history, its potential increasingly diminished in the ideology of the party down the years.3 This was not solely due to Stalinism; some of it goes back to the conceptions of the early Comintern. One of the means of gauging this collapse in expectations is imaginative, through a selection of the novels that CPGB members wrote about the party and the proletariat. Given that this picture of the British working class was a âperfected,â fictional one, it is a useful means to assess how the party ideally (or not so âideallyâ as it turns out) thought about its constituents.4Â
Decline of a political culture
Although subsequently developed into a peculiar aesthetic by party writers, such a culture was rooted in the failure of the CPGB as a political project in the 1920s and 1930s. The full background is an article in itself, but we can offer some pointers to what happened. If one considers the National Left-Wing Movement (NLWM) and the Sunday Worker newspaper, projects initiated by the CPGB in the mid-1920s to win the rank and file of the British Labour Party to communist ideas, one is struck by the relatively sophisticated political culture that underpinned such initiatives. One could find the working-class readership of the Sunday Worker debating all manner of political and cultural matters in its pages; non-communist members of the NLWM arguing with CPGB members over their interpretation of Leninâs theory of Labourism; and, after the dissolution of the NLWM by the CPGB in 1929, arguing with the CPGB over the decision. Thus, the programme of the NLWM sought to differentiate the organization from more run-of-the-mill reformist Labour lefts by introducing advanced anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, and anti-monarchist demands, which, of course, relied on a certain conception of its audience as the advanced part of the proletarian class.5 But such a culture was not set in aspic, and because the CPGB was a product of the early Comintern it also denied the internal right to form factions. This had the effect, when it was in the wider labor movement, of an opportunistic tendency to close ranks with other non-communist sections. The differentiation, or âunity in diversityâ that it denied to itself internally could thus not be properly advanced externally, without radically undermining the partyâs internal regime in the long run.6Â
By the time the CPGB had started to develop the politics of the Third Period in late 1928 and 1929, the political programme of the NLWM was seen as something to be junked, a barrier to engaging with the working class. Rather, despite the radical verbiage one associates with this juncture in Comintern politics, solace was to be sought in developing âimmediateâ demands deemed more appealing to workers.7 Despite the shift in rhetoric, this perspective of a politically stunted and simplistic proletariat was carried over into the Popular Front. By January 1936 a leading party member could state: âWhat are the issues around which unity can be achieved? We are not thinking in terms of a cut-and-dried programme, but those immediate and sometimes changing issues affecting the daily lives of the workers, small shopkeepers and professional people: wages, salaries, hours, conditions, taxation, democratic rights, armament expenditure, the threat of war, etc.â8Â
This programmatic perspective bred a certain limited view of the proletarians it was meant to address. In other words, more simplistic and immediate programmes meant thinking of proletarians in a simplistic manner, including in the realm of art. Critics included Bertolt Brecht, who castigated these âso-called poetical formsâ, in his famous 1930s critique of Georg LukĂĄcs. Brecht derided the representation of âthe peopleâ âin a superstitious fashionâ thatâendow[s] the people with unchanging characteristics, hallowed traditions, art forms, habits and customsâ such that âa remarkable unity appears between tormentors and tormentedâŠâ9 But this was clearly also a political problem lodged in the development of the Comintern throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, one can discern a coded political critique in Brechtâs complaint: âThere will always be people of culture, connoisseurs of art, who will interject: âOrdinary people do not understand that.ââ10 Brecht drew on his own artistic experience to state âone need not be afraid to produce daring, unusual things for the proletariat so long as they deal with its real situationâ.11 âOrdinary people do not understand thatâ has become the stock refrain of most contemporary Stalinist and Trotskyist groups when political or aesthetic issues are being discussed that clash with their truncated politics. In so doing, they are tiny caricatures of the earlier decomposition of organizations such as the CPGB.Â
In 1950, the CPGBâs Daily Worker featured a âdebateâ on poetry in which one reader responded with the fatal words: âFor the working class, things are and always have been fairly simple â for the class-conscious workers, extremely so.â12 This is simply a superstition, or even prejudice, on the lines laid out by Brecht. It absolutely jars with many autobiographies of working-class autodidact CPGB members who joined the party not only because of immediate issues such as poverty but often due to a thirst for knowledge and a discerning attitude towards the political and social forms taken by the proletarian movement as a whole. Raphael Samuel argues: âMany, it seems, came into the [CPGB] through reading, sometimes under the guidance of older workers, sometimes by themselves.â13 So, when communist politics were refracted through this fatalist superstition that non-communist workers could only be approached through so-called immediate issues, unmediated by the intellectual life of proletarians, the CPGB partly ran up against its own experiences, which led to a particularly schizophrenic ideological existence. Â
Problems of the British communist novel
Some in the CPGB had a strong inkling that this hadnât produced strong fictional writing. Writing in April 1962, Margot Heinemann,14 at that point one of the CPGBâs more successful novelists, analyzed how anti-working-class sentiment had found its way into the British communist novel:Â
The convention that most âordinaryâ people are completely without social and political ideas has two sources. Firstly, it is the convention of our rulers, who would like this to be true⊠Secondly, it is a common sectarian mistake on the part of those who have failed to persuade the workers to adopt the same ideas about reform or socialism as they hold themselves. In this sense communists are not immune from it. The workers in our novels often tend to be quite blank, politically, until they see the light and are changed.15Â
Heinemann goes on to make a funny parody of the kind of dialogue this leads to in the communist novel: ââI never realised till I met you, Jock, that our factoryâs just part of something bigger â much bigger. Youâve made me see we can all do something to change things.ââ She adds: âLetâs face it, if the lad didnât know that much before he was something of a sap.â11Â
While the description of what had happened to working-class characters in such literary work was acute, the explanation of how this had come about was noticeably abstract in the negative sense. This manner of characterization is implicit in the degeneration of the CPGBâs political culture through the 1920s and 1930s and its low expectations of the British proletariat. Heinemann uses a common trope of the CPGB leadership of the time about this being partly the fault of âsectarians,â.There were indeed small groups of âproto-Maoistâ activists in the party of the early 1960s: pro-Stalin and, paradoxically, holding some militant revolutionary ideas of one sort or another that this label was meant to describe. However, to blame such people for this view of the working class, when it was lodged in the whole dynamic of the CPGBâs ideological development, was simply a conservative thrust by Heinemann to protect her party and the leadership of which she was a part (as we shall see, this bled over into her art).Â
Non-communist proletarians were depicted in CPGB novels ânaturallyâ and ârealistically,â often as intrinsically non-political and simplistic; to be marched on and off the stage as the strike or demonstration demanded, with such mass action (rather than any use of political reason or understanding on the part of these proletarians) imbued with almost mythical qualities to resolve contradictions in working-class consciousness and push it towards a communist denouement. Many of the novels by CPGB members did include communist characters, sometimes interesting ones, but the issue was usually the emaciated picture of proletarian culture that such writers drew overall. This left communist characters in a kind of strange artistic limbo, sometimes floating like driftwood in a sea of working-class âslum-lifeâ, and led to the party itself complaining that such communist characters were âpreachyâ and the like.16 In fact, when such characters were composed in front of this unpromising and simplistic backdrop, it would have been very hard for them not to sound âpreachyâ and alien.Â
This immersion in what CPGB writers saw as the main features of working-class life was clearly an attempt to evade âsubjectivismâ: the imposition of any âideal typeâ of proletarian consciousness, i.e. a perfected revolutionary world view, onto non-communist working-class characters. Instead, such writers immersed themselves in the tendency of working-class life to reject such forms. This rejection led them to straight back into subjectivism in that their view of a primitive working-class consciousness was just as invented as the âideal typeâ they rejected. They thus mirrored what Adorno saw as the error of constructivist art: âThey treat as a pure natural force something which is only a human will concealed from itself.â17 For Adorno, the anti-subjectivism of constructivist art led back to another type of subjectivism, which meant that the subject, the creator of the art, overlooked her own presence in its production. CPGB writers concealed from themselves that an âobjectiveâ description of a simplified proletariat was in fact their partyâs own highly partial expression of the deterioration of its politics in the 1920s and 1930s. But the outcome of this subjectivism was seemingly perverse in that the subjects of this writing (the CPGBâs published and aspiring writers) found themselves cast off and adrift from their own creations, and, as alluded to by Heinemann above, stuck inside endless modulations on the more prosaic features of working-class culture and how their party could relate to it.Â
What follows is a compressed and partial analysis of some examples of CPGB novels that follow this course of undermining the potential of proletarian subjectivity. A clear pattern does emerge but I am aware of the danger of such patterns and to that end I have also looked at some British communist novels from the 1960s, when this pattern started to disintegrate and a partially progressive notion of working-class subjectivity (and, concurrently, a more critical view of the CPGB) began to emerge in the work of Margot Heinemann and Edward Upward.18 This late emergence underlined the tragedy inherent in the form that the CPGB novel had taken hitherto.
Harold Heslop, Last Cage DownÂ
Harold Heslopâs19 novel, Last Cage Down (1935), was a fictional work that explored class struggle in the Durham coalfield. It centers on the conflict between a headstrong and individualist lodge secretary, James Cameron, and a rank-and-file communist miner, Joe Frost, who turns out to be the more farsighted of the two. The book had an interesting reception by the CPGB in 1935, which deemed that it exhibited some of the sectarian politics of the Third Period as opposed to the Popular Front that the party was then embarking on.20 In the Popular Front, in practice, there was a shift from the excoriation of non-communist leaders in favor of more diplomatic relations with such forces. In fact, this was a formalist misreading of the work as a whole, where the steady and more calculating influence of the communist Frost was counterposed to the headstrong weakness of lodge secretary Cameron.21
But the book also partially looked back to the remnants of the critical proletarian culture that the CPGB had once fostered in the 1920s. The communist Joe Frost is talking to a group of miners and a critic of the CPGB speaks. Frost lets him continue but this is the third-person narratorâs view: âJoseph Belmont took the floor. Meet Joe in his thousands all over the working-class world, the little bibber at the fountain of philosophy, who annoys friend and foe, who is libelous of all things with which he does not agree. Young Mister Trotsky.â22 So, critical voices in the working-class world are equated with someone being portrayed in the world communist movement of the time as a traitor. This derogatory view feeds off Heslopâs politically paralyzed view of miners as a group: âThe miner in the mass doesnât worry about Marx, nor does he take extremely kindly to the men who talk about mysteries contained in books.â23 One wonders where this then would leave the communist project given that CPGB members spent large amounts of time unraveling the âmysteriesâ of esoteric books, and in what particular state of self-loathing such lines left Heslop himself. But the bigger mystery would then be how communists politics can be related to such workers.Â
In Heslopâs world, the production of a socialist idol24 such as Georgi Dimitrov, who had been acquitted from the 1933 Leipzig Trial after spurious Nazi accusations of his complicity in starting the Reichstag Fire, was enough to act as a point of revelation whereby communist and non-communist could be enjoined. Frost only had to say the name âDimitrovâ to a group of miners with whom he was discussing what could aid them in struggling against reformism for this to happen:Â
And they all became silent. It was a moment when the great heroism of one of the noblest creatures in the world stood amongst them, a moment filled with the sweet poignancy which is the workersâ share of the joy of the earth. In far-away Leipzig, amongst the howling wolves of the worldâs worst form of fascism⊠stood one, a worker, fearless of the headsmanâs blade poised above his upturned face⊠Could it be possible that so great a miracle of heroism existed? Dimitrov lit up their world and sent that great, hopeful shudder thrilling through their spines, and stimulated their love of their own class, their pride in their own class.25
Even in a novel that was able to illustrate some worthwhile notion of proletarian consciousness such fawning prose would be highly suspect. (Dimitrovâs acquittal was, in any case, something of a Comintern-inspired âbooby prizeâ when measured against the catastrophic destruction of the German workersâ movement.) The idea of miners with no communist ideas suddenly lit up by the mere mention of Dimitrovâs name is a mythical and ultimately absurd view of working-class people that sees them as mere dupes of an external mysticism.Â
John Sommerfield, May Day
John Sommerfieldâs26 May Day (1936) was much more experimental than the previous two works, charting 48 hours in the life of London, culminating in a vast demonstration, led by the CPGB and its slogans: âAll out on May Day! For a free Soviet Britain!â The work cuts in around 90 named characters, which leads to an impressive and suspenseful montage of the cityâs life. Like a British John Dos Passos, Sommerfieldâs modernist technique looks forward, but his view of proletarian consciousness looks backward, to the deformed view that the CPGB had developed since the late 1920s. This then is how Sommerfield describes female factory workers:Â
These silly girls with their synthetic Hollywood dreams, their pathetic silk stockings and lipsticks, their foolish strivings to escape from the cramped monotony of their lives, are the raw material of history. When their moment of deep discontent comes to them in a mass, taking form in the words of their class-leaders, then there are revolutions. What happens to the revolutions depends upon other factors â automatic lathes for instance.27Â
So here we have raw material to be prodded about, processed; whose discontent comes in a singular moment that can be harnessed by the party. Rational thought seemingly plays little or no part in such processes, except as a reaction to circumstances. Sommerfield repeats this emaciated view of the proletariat in his short chapter âThe Communist leaflets,â concluding on the topic: âThere should have been more.â Why? Because of the essentially apolitical and deluded nature of the London proletariat, hung up on âdograces and bicycles,â pondering âthe forms of horses and boxers and filmstarsâ, and pumped full of newspapers and speeches in parliament about democracy.28 By that token, the CPGBâs leaflets became merely another quantifiable thing prodding this inert mass into action. They just needed more of them.Â
When Sommerfield turns his attention to the qualitative shifts in the consciousness of London proletarians, we are not quite caught up in Heslopâs strange metaphysics, where proletarians are simply lit up by the example of socialist idols, but we are still in a world where the collapse into an agreement with the CPGB is all too straightforward, as shown by the following dialogue:Â
ââThatâs what I donât hold with about the communists,â said John. âTheyâre always on about Russia â not that Iâm against Russia; itâs fine there and good luck to âem⊠But what I want to âear about is how we can get things better ourselves instead of how good they are somewhere else.â
ââThatâs what this feller said though. He said thereâs only one way of getting decent conditions for ourselves, to do [the] same as they did in Russia â kick out the bloody bosses and it canât be done through voting either. âE said it was different here to Russia. Course it is, itâs much harder for us to win âcos our bosses are so strong. Only once weâve got power weâd be able to go ahead easily âcos everythingâs organized already and there âr so many factories and everythingâŠâ
ââThatâs true⊠Iâm on their side all right, always have been. I never took aâ interest in politics, I always thought the Labour Partyâs no bloody good for usâŠââ29
The objection that Britain wasnât Russia was one that many CPGB members would have heard, particularly from members of the Labour Party, who used this argument to undercut appeals for revolutionary violence. But in Sommerfieldâs dialogue, such an apparent objection is only a mere byway into an agreement with the CPGB. This simplified and schematic view of consciousness was the product of how the CPGB, and Sommerfield, saw the revolutionary process unfolding in Britain. Towards the end of May Day, a communist, James, muses upon the demonstration to come: âI know too that we are setting out on a road whose inevitable end will be a moment when we stand with guns in our hands and thinking the thoughts of death and revolution.â30 But then if strikes and demonstrations do indeed send proletarians out to this inevitable end, it becomes clear why Sommerfieldâs essentially irrational picture of working-class consciousness can stand, simply because, in this schema, rational thinking is redundant. Itâs okay to picture proletarians as being prey to the charms of dog racing and film stars because the struggle will ultimately decide all.
Arthur Calder-Marshall, Pie in the Sky
This relative decimation of working-class subjectivity reaches a derogatory low point in Arthur Calder-Marshallâs31 Pie in the Sky (1937), which, like May Day, attempts to paint a kaleidoscopic picture of British society using a variety of narrative techniques, with âstream of consciousnessâ being used alongside more traditional linear sections. In conversation, the communist Turlin says of the working-class masses: âItâs drink or sport with the men and films and men with the women. Who can blame the capitalist for exploiting the working class, while the working class is begging to be exploited?â Turlin further characterizes proletarians as sheep âtrotting into the slaughterhouse and holding up their necks for the knifeâ. This accounts for his partial feelings of helplessness as a communist, âas if weâll never pull it offâ.32Â
But then Calder-Marshall is faced with a familiar problem as a communist novelist: how can the party relate to this type of beleaguered consciousness? As with Heslopâs Last Cage Down, we are thrown back into the arms of mysticism, but rather than workers being lit up with the example of socialist idols, in Pie in the Sky, it is the communist who is lit up by the almost unearthly power of workers drawn together in a mass. Turlin speaks to a march about housing conditions:Â
It was no longer Turlin on the platform, not the pale man doubting his power. It was no person, but a voice and a fling of arms. He drew from the crowd his power to speak. His words came not from his brain but theirs; his body merely an instrument, a huge mouth. And as if it was their brain and not his, the thoughts were at first rough comparisons. There seemed to be no connection of logic, nothing linking one sentence to the next. But as he proceeded, the pattern began to become plain: like a man struggling to shape his thoughts and shaping them. It began to become plain, the need to fight for the class, because only in mass is the counterweapon to wealth and influence and armed force.33Â
Calder-Marshall takes a partial truth, the power of the mass, and turns it into an absolute. But the power of Carlinâs speech does not begin with logic or rationality; the speaker finds his way into it, compelled by the almost supernatural power of the âcrowd brainâ before him. When the early Comintern was more concerned with emphasizing âunity in diversityâ (rather than the type of abstract unity presented by Calder-Marshall), it understood the problems of this type of rhetoric, speeches taking shape on the hoof, as being prey to opportunism and spontaneity.34 By 1937 this type of political culture had been smothered in the CPGB and this imagined somnambulism on the part of communists was seemingly acceptable. Also, one must stress that this submerging of characters into a proletarian crowd only compounds the issue of working-class characterization, given that this unearthly power leads to the notion of an undifferentiated mass, excluding any notion of qualitative difference or âunity in diversityâ. Communist proletarians were obviously different from non-communist proletarians. But that did not exclude qualitative relations between the two, unlike the strange notion of communists talking through the collective brain of the proletariat.  Â
Novels of the Popular Front
Our first four examples of British communist novels have been culled from in and around the period of the Popular Front. On the surface, one would have thought this supposedly ânon-sectarianâ segment of the history of the world communist movement would have led to a richer and more empathetic view of the British working class. This seems to be the assumption of Elinor Taylorâs recent work on the Popular Front novel. She argues, in line with the âwisdomâ that the CPGB itself emoted on the subject: âThe formal adoption of the Popular Front strategy marked a decisive and dramatic shift from the Cominternâs earlier, ultra-sectarian âclass against classâ line, which had demonized non-communist elements as âsocial fascistsâ and forbade communists from seeking alliances.â35Â This positive appreciation of the Popular Front leads Taylor into enthusiastic appreciations of some of the novels that communists produced in this period.Â
Regarding May Day, Taylor comes to the opposite conclusion to myself: âIn spite of LukĂĄcsâs rejection of montage as fragmentary and incoherent formalism, Sommerfieldâs montage articulates a model of the relations between the parts and the whole that is essentially congruent with LukĂĄcsâs version of totality.â36 In such a view of totality, the parts, the human characters, can play a role in the construction of the âwholeâ historical process. LukĂĄcs thought narrative modes such as montage only offered an essentially fragmented picture of human consciousness, buoyed along by the historical process instead of helping create it. Taylor is right in one sense that the practice of montage does not preclude artists producing a richer picture of reality, and it is true that Sommerfield produces a âtotalityâ of sorts. But May Dayâs totality is underpinned by a model of working-class consciousness that is apolitical and irrational, where essentially bovine workers collapse into the arms of the communists under the pressure of the âinevitableâ exigencies of the immediate struggle. It would have been a miracle if this had produced the expressive totality pictured by LukĂĄcs in works such as The Historical Novel (1936), with richly illustrated and epoch-making characters infusing the historical process with their own sense of rationality and mission. Instead, the proletarian characters in May Day are merely âpartâ of a dead schema that precludes their rationality from the outset.Â
But that should be no surprise. The Popular Front was not premised on any dramatic change in the incremental manner in which the CPGB viewed the process of working-class consciousness. As we have seen in the introduction to this article, this emaciated and apolitical view was also present in the politics of the Third Period and also arguably went back to the circumstances of the CPGBâs foundation and its ban on factions. Organizations that could not allow internal âunity in diversityâ were unlikely to be able to extend it externally in the wider labor movement. Hence, the Popular Front, with its emphasis on diplomatic unity between communist and non-communist, and the denial of the means for organizations such as the CPGB to act critically alongside bloc partners, only made explicit tendencies inherent in the Comintern from the outset.37 And it was this tendency to homogeneity that lay at the root of the homogenized picture of the working class that then developed; of a mass that had seemingly no political memory and was precluded from logical thought. Proletarians using their reason and with a political memory that simply couldnât be collapsed into that of the CPGB would, of course, have the premise of heterogeneity; a real âunity in diversityâ.Â
So, there was no way for these novels to develop any kind of fruitful relationship to âthe realâ, given that their production was so obviously premised on a subjectivized view of the proletariat.38 Such practice had nothing to do, in the cases of Sommerfield or Calder-Marshall in particular, with the use of modernist literary modes such as montage or stream of consciousness. Rather, the lamed and incremental notion of proletarian consciousness, which was the product of the CPGBâs ideology, led such works into the arena of subjectivism. The outcome of this was to foreground the literary experimentation found in May Day and Pie in the Sky and reduce it to a similar synthetic level, choking off any aspiration the authors may have had to represent âthe realâ. In the examples from Heslop and Griffin, their subjectivism, in the relative absence of such experimentation, was merely the herald, in Heslopâs case most obviously, of a rather hysterical propagandism.
Jack Lindsay, Betrayed Spring
Jack Lindsay39 was one of the CPGBâs relatively more heterodox writers and had crossed swords with the party bureaucracy over his idiosyncratic views in the immediate post-war period.40 It is disappointing then to read a novel such as Betrayed Spring (1953), which displays a familiar distorted conception of proletarian consciousness. This novel was part of Lindsayâs âBritish wayâ series, essentially a fictional rationalization of the CPGBâs reformist and nationalist British Road to Socialism programme that had been launched in 1951 (although its politics had developed earlier, during the CPGBâs initial support for the post-war Labour administration).
Despite Lindsayâs previous heresies, he does seem to have seen the series as a conscious party enterprise and the front piece lists a number of CPGB names who had advised him. Although Lindsay didnât tread any new ground in relation to this discussion, Betrayed Spring is pertinent because he spelled out, in an exceptionally clear fictional form, how the CPGB envisaged the development of working-class consciousness. The novel centers on a young working-class woman from London, Phyl, who has been through the experience of the mass squatting movement, attends a demonstration of striking hotel workers in central London:
âShe wasnât sure what the cause was in its full working-out, what the big words implied when the march was ended and the strike was won; but she felt the meaning of it all inside her, in the deep determination and happiness that gripped her, the pride of being there in the defiant march..â41Â
So, rationality is placed as the antithesis of the emotional impact of the march, given that Phyl doesnât apparently understand all of the implications of the cause she is supporting. Again, we have this alienated power of the mass on the move to spark proletarian political virgins into life. This is no accident on the part of Lindsay, and he underlines Phylâs response as she listens to the speeches at the end of the march: âAnd once more she felt herself part of this great thing which she only partly understood but which had entered irretrievably into her life.â42 Lindsay also extends this impact to the crowd around Phyl: â… the sunlight was sparkling over the myriad faces, while the voice flowed on, like the truth of struggle suddenly becoming articulate in all the dumb mouths of the world. The world within the world, the ghosts of the future taking body as the familiar comrades of everyday light.â11Â
Now, âthe truth of struggle suddenly becoming articulate in all the dumb mouths of the worldâ is pretty prose indeed but its alliance with such a partial and intensely ideological view of the âdumbâ working-class being impregnated with external signs, merely foregrounds the retreat of Lindsayâs articulate prose into the realm of a mere literary effect; a reconciliation with an alien ideology.Â
Towards the 1960s
With the 1960s looming, there were a number of interlinked factors that made the continued production of decimated working-class subjects in communist novels problematic and old-fashioned. As the CPGBâs Heinemann had noted in the previously quoted article, there were, by the time she wrote the piece in 1962, a group of non-communist writers such as John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Colin MacInnes and others who had begun to popularise stories of proletarian life (although this type of novel wasnât a post-war invention). One canât quite imagine the muscular and engaged working-class characters of authors such as Sillitoe being jolted into life by strikes and demonstrations and swooning into the arms of communists.43 By comparison, proletarian characters in communist novels merely seem pinched and wooden.Â
By the early 1960s, the CPGBâs whole Soviet-inspired aesthetic of âsocialist realismâ was in retreat and had indeed been under attack by CPGB sympathizers such as John Berger in the partyâs Artistsâ Group since the death of Stalin in 1953.44 Many of the artistic âcategoriesâ associated with Stalinâs cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov were in the process of being emptied out and questioned, and such processes were given added urgency by the events of 1956 when, after Khrushchevâs denunciation of Stalin and the invasion of Hungary, more communists would question the CPGBâs subservience to concepts of Soviet provenance. This meant that the partyâs whole aesthetic, as far as it had one, was up for interrogation.Â
But the events of 1956, when the CPGB was wracked by internal crisis as party members faced up to the fact of their organizationâs subjection to an anti-working-class dictatorship, also offered a dilemma to communist novelists. If the CPGB was henceforth going to be portrayed in fiction it would be fairly untenable that some notion of this crisis would not appear in such ârealistâ productions. This pressure can be seen in Herbert Smithâs otherwise unmemorable A Field of Folk (1957). This was fiction largely on the old communist pattern: shop-floor drama in a west London engineering factory providing the basis for the British Road to Socialism. But world political events had now intruded and couldnât entirely be left behind, even as they were being over-run by events in the factory. A communist character, Tom Barrett, listens to the criticisms of a non-communist, Blackman:Â
Itâs no good you [Barrett] hammering away at wages and housing and pretending that the political doesnât exist. You still seem to think our kids havenât any shoes; your slogans are way back in the âthirties. You just refuse to admit that our standard of livingâs advanced â and you donât like mentioning the fact that more of us are worried about whatâs happening inside Russia than we are about where the next meal is coming from. The problemâs political, not economic. Weâre getting a fairer deal from capitalism â but what sort of deal is socialism giving the Russians? 45
Smith seems to be implying from Blackmanâs dialogue that there is now a political problem in an obsessive concentration on shop-floor âbread-and-butterâ issues. Non-communist proletarians are quite capable of making political judgments about the Soviet Union and the CPGB had to confront that fact in the aftermath of 1956. In some ways, this reads like a meta-critique that encapsulates the problem of the British communist novel (although surely unconscious). Notice how the acknowledgment of the CPGBâs crisis has been acutely diagnosed by a rational and thinking proletarian: the party crisis necessitates the latter, as there wouldnât have been such a crisis in 1956 if the CPGB had been faced by an unthinking working-class, ruled by shop-floor spontaneity.Â
Margot Heinemann, The Adventurers
Margot Heinemannâs The Adventurers (1960) is meant to be the definitive turning point against the old type of British communist novel. In one rather bold account: âThe Adventurers marks the end, in Britain at least, of the confident chase after socialist realism in fiction.â46 It may have been the end of a âconfident chaseâ but it wasnât quite the end of the chase. One of the key facets of âsocialist realismâ was the production of cultural works that had some political utility for the communist movement. A careful reading of The Adventurers shows an author inclined towards critical and rational working-class characters dealing with at least some aspects of the CPGBâs problematic history (as partly illustrated by her âWorkers and Writersâ article from 1962 quoted above), while also being caught in a movement that was defensive of the party. It also has to be said that the book reproduced some awful CPGB tropes that havenât aged particularly well.Â
For a CPGB recovering from the traumas from 1956, a novel that dealt with some of that crisis, while retaining the partyâs honor and with a more nuanced sense of working-class characterization, was useful and generally well-received by non-communist reviewers. Not that the CPGBâs leadership, which had come to expect simplistic party novels of the type analyzed above, was completely happy with The Adventurers.47Â Nevertheless, the book had a certain utility familiar to âsocialist realismâ. It also pays to remember that Heinemann had no particular record as an oppositionist inside the CPGB in the immediate post-war years and was a trusted member of the party bureaucracy. In the inner-party controversy around the works of Christopher Caudwell of 1950-51, Heinemann was among those on the orthodox wing denouncing the âidealismâ of books such as Illusion and Reality.48Â
The tropes that Heinemann uses in places are familiar CPGB ones where other trends in the labor movement were simply denigrated. The following example from The Adventurers explores attitudes to the Second World War and the issue of conscription into the mines: âOf course Jack Marvin says why worry, itâs a capitalistsâ war anyway. But Marvin is a bit of a spouter and not a very good workman at that, the boys donât go all that much on Jack.â49 The implication here is that Marvin is a Trotskyist and, naturally, he wouldnât be a good worker or have any support among the workers because that was a classic CPGB trope about Trotskyists.50 On similar lines, the character Tommy attends the annual Trades Union Congress: âComing out of the hall the brilliant sunlight hurt your eyes. Tommy pushed through the swarm of literature sellers thronging the approaches â beaky, dark young men with Trotskyist weeklies, ladies with white bobbed hair and pacifist monthlies, men with open shirts and cycle-clips shouting the Daily WorkerâŠâ51 In retrospect, this is fairly crude stuff. The âbeaky, darkâ young Trotskyist men (a trope that recalls an older habit from the Soviet purges of equating opponents with deformed animal life), up against the dynamic, thrusting sellers of the Daily Worker (the CPGBâs paper), with their easy âopen shirtsâ and âcycle-clipsâ, ready no doubt to pedal quickly down the British Road to Socialism. So, The Adventurers does have an amateurish undertone of familiar political smears.Â
Heinemann, however, picked up the direction that Herbert Smith had partly traveled. Dialogue between communists and non-communists did contain an element of conflict that wasnât easily collapsed into the communist position, despite the authorâs obvious predisposition to rationalize the line of the CPGB in places. A good example is given in a conversation between Dan (a non-communist Welsh minerâs son, who goes on to âKeir Hardieâ college in Cambridge, and then to a career in journalism) and Richard and Kate (communist Cambridge students). The conversation develops through a discussion of France in 1944 and the reasons why it didnât have a revolution. Dan largely accepts Richardâs argument that all the French communists could do was âhand over the guns and join the regular armies to finish off Hitlerâ.52 The conversation then develops through Richardâs line that the US now dominates Europe which Dan disagrees with. The discussion then moves through another point of consensus on the need for the working class to have patience in its struggles before Richard argues that workers are satisfied with so bloody little. To which Dan replies: âTheyâve got some things here the Russians havenât got though⊠Those Soviet women that married British lads, for instance, and the Russians wouldnât let them come out here…â11 Richard initially dismisses this argument as a press stunt before stating: âIâm a communist because of what I do know about Britain and France and Spain â not what I donât know about Russia. If thereâd never been a Soviet Union Iâd still be a communist.â It is Kate who finishes with the killer line: âThatâs what you think⊠You mightnât have had the chance.â[Ibid p99.[/note]
In this passage, the working-class character Dan uses his reason to argue against elements of the communist line. The argument passes through points of consensus and conflict. Danâs suspicion of the CPGB and the Soviet Union is unabated and this feeds into his later development as a journalist, where he eventually collapses into the prevalent Cold War anti-communism of his trade. Nevertheless, it does strike the reader that this conversation is displaced, being more concerned with the CPGBâs crisis after 1956 than with its supposed setting in the 1940s. After the unflattering revelations that appeared in 1956 about the Soviet Union, the CPGB had an official position of stressing that it was an independent British organization, while still being broadly supportive of the Soviet Union and much of its historical record. This is actually reproduced by Richard and Kate: Richard says he is a communist in spite of the Soviet Union, while Kate reminds him that he might owe a lot more to the Soviet Union than he thinks. It was clever of Heinemann to work this in through a point of disagreement, but the end result is a subtle rationalization of the CPGBâs existence and history, developed through unresolved ideological conflicts.Â
The book ends in 1956; the communist Richard, who has moved to Wales to become a teacher in adult education, has been hard hit by the events in the world communist movement and has begun to have a crisis of conscience. The visit of the non-communist miner Tommy portrays a proletarian character using his logic and what he has learned about the working-class movement to effectively give a âpep talkâ to Richard about his position. Tommy offers a rationalization of the role of the communists in the class struggle: âYou say youâve been wrong, youâve made mistakes, your party made mistakes, the Russians done some bad things, some stupid things â duw, weâve all known that a long time. If you and Griff Jones and Dai James [another local communist], ay, and your Russian pals hadnât been trying so bloody hard to do something, get us somewhere, now, you mightnât have made so many mistakes.â11
Heinemann has acutely observed the problematic of working-class characters in the British communist novels as it had developed prior to 1956. The Adventurers attempted to deal with that flaw. Its proletarian figures are far from politically blank and the crisis in the CPGB is pictured in a way that does have a bearing on what happened to the party and its members in 1956. However, this is a very formal resolution of the problem: these characters are developed among situations and arguments where their undoubted intellectual coherence is used to offer a pathway towards rationalization of the CPGB and its associated mythology. The Adventurers overthrows one of the forms of âsocialist realismâ â proletarians as dull, insensitive lumps, waiting to be jolted into life by external circumstances â in the cause of reinstating its more fundamental cause: political utility to the party.Â
Edward Upward, In the thirties; The rotten elements
A much more satisfying attempt to overcome the limitations of the British communist novel came in the form of Edward Upwardâs In the Thirties (1962) and The Rotten Elements (1969), the first two volumes of âThe spiral ascentâ trilogy.53 Perhaps to some, Upward would have been an unlikely source of such rehabilitation, given his privileged middle-class background, attendance at Corpus Christi College Cambridge, and his association with Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden. Such an impression might be compounded by the nature of âThe spiral ascentâ where a fictionalized Upward (Alan Sebrill) relinquishes the âpoetic lifeâ and joins the CPGB (as did Upward in the early 1930s) and then struggles to relate his poetry to the life of a party militant. But Upward and his wife Hilda (fictionalized in the books as Elsie Sebrill) had left the CPGB in 1948 after a factional struggle in which both had claimed that the party was ârevisionistâ and âreformistâ due to its support for the British Labour government elected in 1945 and its apparent disregard for Leninâs teachings on the state.54 So, Upward had no external limitations on any critique of the CPGB (although the party and its comrades are generally treated sympathetically in the pages of In the Thirties). This, and a constantly questioning prose, opened up space for a treatment of the CPGBâs working-class cadres that accords much more with what we actually know of them from autobiographies and other sources, treating them as a kind of intellectualized âvanguardâ of their class.Â
This is made clear by Upward when Alan Sebrill makes his first contact with the party, eventually helping a working-class comrade, Wally, with some election leafleting. Wally remembers his last job as a commissionaire at a cinema: âWhile I was there I first met a young chap from Cambridge â Symington his name was â who got me interested in philosophy.â55 Wally says heâs read some of Feuerbach and Dietzgen with Symingtonâs help: âIâve tried Hegel too, but couldnât get far, not even with help. Now Iâm reading Adoratsky on dialectical materialism. Pretty good.â56 Wally agrees with Alanâs high opinion of Plekhanovâs Fundamental Problems of Marxism: âThatâs a grand book⊠though they say now it has its faults. But that, with Leninâs Materialism and empirio-criticism â well, you couldnât find a better introduction anywhere to dialectical materialism.â11 This particular character isnât whitewashed by Upward. In another scene, a meeting dealing with the disciplining of a comrade who has started to criticize the Soviet Union, Wally is shown as someone also capable of spouting the worst kind of CPGB dogma. After stating that heâs heard the comrade, Bainton, speaking elsewhere, Wally proclaims: âIt was Trotskyite filth. The sort of lies about the Soviet Union that even the capitalist press might find too smelly to serve up. No party member whoâd heard it could have had any doubts that Bainton⊠had gone right over to the other side. But perhaps thatâs nothing to be surprised at, considering Baintonâs petit-bourgeois origin.â28
This raises up a delicate dialectic between the good and bad intellectual potentialities of this working-class character, which Upward puts like this: âWally spoke with an intensity which Alan at first regarded as out of character but which on second thoughts he recognised as arising from the very essence of the man, from the central principle without which Wallyâs other and gentler characteristics could not have continued to exist.â11Â
A similar process occurs in The Rotten Elements, where a CPGB factory worker, Bert Alldiss, speaks at borough meeting at which Elsie Sebrill has told the gathering why she doesnât agree with the partyâs support for the post-war Labour government and why it shouldnât support the reformist governmentâs production drive. Alldiss suggests that the situation has changed from war-time (when the CPGB also supported a production drive), because the British government no longer wants an alliance with the Soviet Union and wonders âwhat the old style Marxists would have thought of this idea of socialism through exports.â57 Alldiss does qualify his opposition: âUnless we step up production the whole nation will be in the soup, workers as well as bosses. I canât see how Elsie can get round that.â11 Upward records Alan Sebrillâs inner reaction to the intervention: âAs [Bert] sat down, an admiration for him was strengthened in Alan, and a conviction that his good sense and honesty would never allow him to accept trickery from any party leader, if only he could be brought to recognise that it was trickery. But the recognition might take time, since he was less strong on theory than on practice, and since the leadershipâs line â just because it was opportunist â appeared plausible enough in Britainâs immediate economic situation.â58 Upward is fully alive to the potential of working-class communists to rationalize their own political positions and that of the party, even if that potential isnât always realized.Â
In âThe Spiral Ascentâ, Upwardâs work also had definite experimental qualities, in particular, slowing down the narrative to a snailâs pace, taking objects out of normal âcirculationâ and fixing them with a probing objective eye that means they take on stranger forms that their literal description. Such an approach is a challenge to works such as LukĂĄcsâs âNarrate or Describe?â (1936), which stresses the humanizing advantage of narration over the dead weight of âobjective description.â Upward attacks that stance from an alternative angle, pointing tentatively to how such objects are debased in more prosaic human circulation. For example, this is how an increasingly paranoid Sebrill reacts to his assessment that a party comrade, Les Gatten, is a police spy: âFeeling was abruptly brought to life in Alan. Like someone who coming into a kitchen sees a joint of cooked meat on a white dish in the middle of a table and sees also on the same dish and in contact with the meat something which is not meat, greenish-grey, part liquid, part solid, and which he instantly knows to be dogâs vomit, though it does not make him begin to retch until his mind has willy-nilly formed an idea of what the solid (fishy, spool-shaped, shaggily stringy) might have been before the dogâs stomach rejected it â Alan did not feel nausea until after he had comprehended fully what Gatten was.â59
However, unlike the examples in this article by Sommerfield and Calder-Marshall, the experimentation in Upward is not simply foregrounded and revealed as a formal subjectivism alongside obviously subjective accounts of working-class consciousness that can only advance by increments. Rather, the precise, observational qualities employed by these two works feed off the rationality and critical nature of the booksâ characters, which is a much more plausible intellectual account of how people became communists and fought as communists; the experimentation on show is thus a diverse facet of the booksâ total effect.Â
Aftermath
Upward was long out of the CPGB by the time these works had appeared, and it was too late for the party itself to resolve any of its literary problems. Lawrence and Wishart, the CPGB publisher, stopped producing novels by party members in the early 1960s. (By the 1980s, it was reissuing older party novels by figures such as Heslop and Sommerfield from the 1930s and such works had a certain cult appeal on the left.) The aesthetic issues of the partyâs final decades need a lot more work in terms of investigation. The CPGB produced a statement in 1967 entitled âQuestions of ideology and cultureâ that saw the organization adopt a laissez-faire attitude to the arts and declined any kind of role in leading and directing artists.60 Broadly, the CPGBâs left opposed this shift in favor of older conceptions of vanguardism in the arts, but neither wing was in any real position to do anything given that the corrosion of the CPGBâs aesthetic was infused with the collapse of its political culture. The party did enjoy something of an âIndian summerâ in the late 1960s and 1970s due to its relative strength in the trade union movement. But this movement was politically weak. In the words of John McIlroy: âThe picture suggested [from CPGB reports] was not a national community of political branches, but rather a shallower, personalized network of trade union militants â individuals or handfuls â largely concerned with industrial issues, sometimes with limited attachment to the CP and âdeep-seated caution in showing the face of the partyâ.â61 These groupings were not enough to save the CPGB from decline or winking out of existence in 1991 and neither were they the cause of any radical re-casting of the British communist novel. Such shadowy networks were pictured in action in Herbert Smithâs A Morning to Remember (1962), set in a London power station. But the novel makes the CPGB effectively invisible in the workplace, in line with developing communist tactics to influence, not dominate, the trade unions. On one level, this did solve the issue of developing working-class subjectivity in that the relation to the communists was pushed into the background, while proletarian characters were still trapped in the âimmediacyâ of the shop floor, waiting for a spark (in this case, a workplace emergency) to bring them to life.Â
The collapse of the CPGBâs political culture in the 1920s and 1930s and its associated mandate to mold the most advanced part of the British working class thus cast a very long artistic shadow. To have a Marxist organization that was even capable of sustaining a literary culture, however debased, now seems an almost impossible dream 100 years after the partyâs foundation. But, despite the undoubted achievement in bringing proletarian voices into the literary world, the British communist novel can only ultimately be treated as an index of its political and cultural disintegration.
- Frank Griffin (1911-84) had previously written I joined the army (1937) as âPrivate XYZâ, an exposĂ© of the brutal nature of British army life. He joined the CPGB in the late 1930s and later wrote thrillers.
- F Griffin October Day Nottingham 2011 p225.
- My general view of the CPGB is that it was an organization that was, by around 1929-30, ruined by its general subservience to the ruling faction in the Soviet Union.
- In the 1950s and 1960s, the CPGBâs publishers, Lawrence and Wishart, released a series of novels by working-class writers in the party. By the 1980s, it had also started to reissue novels written by CPGB writers of the 1930s, such as Harold Heslop and Simon Blumenfeld. Lawrence and Wishartâs production of such novels was famously satirized by Doris Lessing. D Lessing The Golden Notebook London 1993 pp305-321.
- L Parker Communists and Labour â The National Left-Wing Movement 1925-1929 London 2018, surveys these processes in more detail.
- See M Macnair Revolutionary strategy: Marxism and the challenge of unity London 2008 pp110-111.
- L Parker op cit pp90-91 and p93.
- W Rust âThe Labour Partyâs futureâ Labour Monthly January 1936.
- B Brecht âAgainst Georg LukĂĄcsâ in Aesthetics and politics London 1979 p80.
- Ibid p84.
- Ibid.
- Cited in A Croft âThe boys round the corner: the story of Fore Publicationsâ in A Croft (editor) A Weapon in the Struggle: Essays on the Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain London 1998 p143. There were other responses of a similar nature to an article by party poet Randall Swingler.
- R Samuel The lost world of British communism London 2006 pp198-199.
- Margot Heinemann (1913-92) eventually became a drama scholar. She joined the CPGB in 1934 and worked for the Labour Research Department, as well as undertaking editorial duties on various CPGB journals. The Adventurers had come out, to some acclaim even beyond the party, in 1960.
- M Heinemann âWorkers and writers: some modern novels about the working classâ Marxism Today April 1962.
- This was the reception given to communist characters by the Daily Worker to Frank Griffinâs 1939 novel about the Battle of Cable Street, October Day. See A Croft âIntroductionâ in F Griffin October Day Nottingham 2011 p9.
- T Adorno Aesthetics Cambridge 2018 p74.
- Edward Upward (1903-2009) joined the CPGB in 1934, leaving the party in 1948. His long literary career included an association with Christopher Isherwood and, while as Cambridge undergraduates, they created the surreal literary world of Mortmere. After suffering an acute case of creative block during his association with the CPGB, in later years Upward produced a steady stream of dream-enchanted short stories.
- Harold Heslop (1898-1983) was born in County Durham, England, and became active in left-wing politics after the First World War. He was active in and around the CPGB from the late 1920s. Four of his novels were published in the Soviet Union.
- See A Croft âIntroductionâ in H Heslop Last cage down London 1984 pxii.
- This was a premonition of future CPGB trade union leaders, who would often present themselves as wise and steady sages to the rest of the movement.
- H Heslop Last cage down London 1984 p81.
- Ibid p42.
- The Marxist art critic John Berger said of the âsocialistâ idol: âThe idol is so superficially desirable, spectacular, witty, happy, that he or she merely supplies a context for fantasy and therefore, instead of inspiring, lulls. The idol is based on the appearance of perfection, but never on the striving towards it.â J Berger âThe necessity for uncertaintyâ The Marxist Quarterly July 1956. Bergerâs comments are most apposite for considering Heslopâs use of Dimitrov.
- Ibid pp61-62.
- John Sommerfield (1908-91) joined the CPGB in the 1930s and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He left the party in 1956.
- J Sommerfield May Day London 1984 p30.
- Ibid p173.
- Ibid p123.
- Ibid p212.
- Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908-1992) joined the CPGB in the 1930s. He wrote fiction and non-fiction on a wide range of subjects throughout his literary career.
- A Calder-Marshall Pie in the sky London 1937 p107.
- Ibid p67.
- This can be seen in Karl Radekâs 1921 critique of the CPGB relying on the spontaneity of its members (after he had questioned CPGB delegates at the Cominternâs third congress of the same year): âTo my question, what do you tell the masses, what is your attitude to nationalisation? What is your attitude to the present concrete claims of the workers? one of the comrades replied: âWhen I ascend the rostrum at a meeting I know as little about what I am going to say as the man in the moon; but being a communist, I find my way along while I speak.ââ Needless to say, Radek was not impressed by such spontaneity. Cited in M Woodhouse âMarxism and Stalinism in Britain 1920-1926â in B Pearce and M Woodhouse A history of communism in Britain London 1995 p72. By 1937, Calder-Marshall had turned this negative into a positive.
- E Taylor The Popular Front novel in Britain, 1934-1940 Leiden 2018 p7.
- Ibid p63.
- This section follows the argument of Macnair op cit pp110-111.
- I use this phrase ârelationship to âthe realââ because ârealismâ in the singular is a problematical concept given that one would expect all pieces of art to have some ârealâ grains in them that are interpretations of things outside the author. Stating that a piece of art is ârealistâ is recording that an artist has managed to absorb something outside them, which is not saying much. This meant that ârealismâ merely became overburdened with political assumptions in the old world communist movement.
- Jack Lindsay (1900-90) was a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction throughout his adult life, joining the CPGB in the 1940s after being demobbed from the British army.
- In a 1945 document, âMarxist theory of cultureâ, Lindsay defined âculture as a form of production as against the notion that it was part of a superstructure with determining economic basesâ. These notions were attacked by party functionaries at the time. See J Lindsay Life rarely tells Ringwood, Vic. 1982 p801.
- J Lindsay Betrayed Spring London 1953 p92.
- Ibid p96.
- Although Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [1958] does vote communist, seemingly for idiosyncratic reasons; and the CPGB is also a shadowy presence in other novels such as A Start in Life [1970].
- Some of this debate is dealt with in L Parker âBerger and Stalinismâ Weekly Worker 2 February 2017.
- H Smith A field of folk London 1957 p35.
- A Croft âThe end of socialist realism: Margot Heinemannâs The adventurersâ in D Margolies and M Joannou Heart of the heartless world: essays in cultural resistance in memory of Margot Heinemann London 1995 p205.
- Arnold Kettle, a literary critic in the CPGB, who read the manuscript for Lawrence and Wishart, was concerned about notes of disillusionment in the novelâs ending and didnât feel that the partyâs critics were answered robustly enough; while some senior party figures were disappointed that one of the characters, Tommy, didnât join the party at the end of the book. See ibid p211 and p215. Itâs fairly clear that if Heinemann had actioned the latter, the tension between her criticism and party loyalty would have simply collapsed in favor of the party.
- She argued: âThe central thesis of Illusion and Reality is wrong, un-Marxist, and leads us away from a proper understanding of poetry into an idealist muddle.â M Heinemann âCaudwell discussionâ The Modern Quarterly Summer 1951. For more on the âCaudwell controversyâ see L Parker âArts and minds: reconsidering the Caudwell controversyâ in Socialist History 47 2015.
- M Heinemann The adventurers London 1962 p23.
- Of course, while the Trotskyists in Britain were tiny, they did in places get some working-class support during the Second World War because they were willing to fight against the official embargo against strike action that was patriotically supported by the CPGB. Lindsay produces a slightly less jaundiced view of the CPGBâs opponents in Betrayed Spring by introducing Thorne, âwho had been both an ILPer and a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, that splinter group of dogmatics, and who had left each party in disgust at what he called their opportunistic tactics. Now he constituted a party of one-man, pessimistically opposed to every other party, left or right; but Matt [another character in the book] liked him for his dogged consistency in denunciationâ. Lindsay Betrayed Spring op cit p45.
- Heinemann The adventurers p276
- Ibid p98.
- The final volume of the trilogy was the rather overblown No Home but the Struggle (1977), which covers Sebrillâs (Upwardâs) early life alongside later activism in CND after leaving the CPGB. The final pages see Upward effecting a somewhat forced reconciliation between poetry and politics.
- this rebellion is the subject of The Rotten Elements: which is what rebellious party members such as the Upwards were called by CPGB loyalists
- E Upward In the thirties London 1978 pp65-66.
- Ibid p66.
- E Upward The rotten elements London 1979 p84.
- Ibid p85.
- Ibid pp119-120.
- âQuestions of ideology and culture: statement from the executive committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain⊠for discussionâ Marxism Today May 1967.
- J McIlroy âNotes on the Communist Party and industrial politicsâ in J McIlroy, N Fishman, A Campbell British trade unions and industrial politics: the high tide of trade unionism, 1964-79 Aldershot 1999 p222.