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A Weapon in the Struggle
Andy Croft (ed), A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, Pluto Press, London, 1998, ISBN 0 7453 1209 8, pp218.
The story of communism and culture in Britain was very much one of discord, crowned by far less achievement than their combination merited. Much of the record of frustration can be found in this collection of essays brought together by Andy Croft, a writer and, more surprisingly, by trade a teacher of poetry in Teeside schools. His introduction, like the book's title, poses a highly relevant question. Unlike any other British party, the CP 'always took its cultural work very seriously', and put immense effort into it. Yet it never reached a proper comprehension of what politics and culture had to do with one another, and was too apt to fall back on a formula congenial to Moscow. Culture was 'a weapon in the struggle', its acolytes were only in need of training and discipline, under party direction, to form a useful corps in the army of progress.
Croft very rightly rejects this crude, military-style conception. His own essay here (the eighth) contains a great deal of enlightening detail about how things kept going wrong. It is called 'The Boys Round the Corner: The Story of Fore Publications' — the latter representing the cream of the party's literary and intellectual strength, while the first five words disguise the party leadership, self-immured in its fortress in nearby King Street. Not all of its members were impervious to the magnetic spell of words. This may have been truest of the Scots. We have heard from Alison Macleod, who spent some years in the Daily Worker office, how keen an ear its editor J R Campbell had for correct and impressive language. Scots had been reading their Bibles until not long since, and their commoners had been cut off for fewer centuries than their brethren in England from times when people, even though deeply divided by class, were not yet conscious enough of this to be much divided by culture.
But in Britain generally by this time it was easier for 'workers by hand or brain', as the party liked to call them, to come together politically than poetically. Their language of belief could be — as formerly in religion — the same, but their languages of feeling were very far apart. One felt the other to be clumsily insensitive, the other felt that he was being offered too much over-subtlety with too little meaning. As for the leaders, their star was in the east, and their great teacher was necessarily Joseph Stalin, whose philosophy was one of getting things done rather than talking about them.
Literature was the most fertile field for cultural work, and also for disagreements about how it should be done. Its most important form had for long been the novel. Fore Publications was set up in the early l930s, as a rallying-point for radical writers indignant at the way Britain was being led or pushed. Their influence was making itself felt in all the progressive movements that were being set afloat in those years. Among them was Left Review, edited by Randall Swingler — the outstanding figure in what was to become a tug of war between men of the pen and party bureaucrats. Left Review closed in 1938, and Fore Publications, again with him as its chief guide, took its place. It began with pamphlet-length 'Key Books', which repeated the success of the Left Book Club by selling nearly half a million copies in their first year. Even poetry was showing that it could play a part as a bridge between the political left and the intelligentsia. King Street on the other hand was soon insisting on playing the part of censor, and after the War this became insistence on the current controversies surrounding Zhdanov and Lysenko being handled as Moscow required. New magazines — Our Time, Arena — could still mobilize a sparkling array of contributors, home-bred and foreign, not all of them party members. They failed, because of pressures from King Street as well as those of the Cold War launched by America and its satellites. They, like Fore Publications, were 'too political for literary London and too literary for the Communist Party' (p159).
A novelist of that era, James Barke, is introduced by H Gustav Klaus as a 'True Scot', though unlikely, Klaus concedes, to be known to many readers outside Scotland today, or to be thought of in his own land as an equal of Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, as he hoped to be. He was country-bred, from the Border, and always a staunch defender of nature and her rights, but his job came to be that of a clerk in a Glasgow engineering firm. He joined the party in 1932 or 1933, and stayed in it until his death in 1958. He began with half a dozen plays, and then wrote in quick succession five novels. A point of interest is his gradual drift towards a feeling that the happenings of the modern world have been too gigantic for any novel to throw its cloak over. Something like this may be the reason why so many novelists have turned inward, to sex-psychology, in search of pasture. Barke turned instead to an autobiography and a six-vo1ume fictionalized account of Robert Burns and Jean Armour. He had a growing family to cope with, always a handicap to artists with no income of their own.
Daughter of a Harrow schoolmaster, Sylvia Townsend Warner had a very different start in life. Fascism had a knack of rounding up into the same fold a multitude of apparently incongruous men and women. Maroula Joannou holds her up as a refutation of various false picturings of the l930s; as an example for instance of how many women, as well as men, were active in the cause of Spain, and in many other struggles of that turbulent decade. She was an effective public speaker, and a poet as well as novelist; she shared with many communist intellectuals of her time a 'seemingly limitless energy and indefatigable optimism' (p89).
Another woman writer, Hanna Behrend, discusses marxist literary criticism in the l930s, and argues that it was more meaningful on various fronts than its own critics have allowed. Ralph Fox's book The Novel and the People led the way, and attracted attention quickly. Christopher Caudwell, Alick West, the Australian Jack Lindsay, Edgell Rickword, are other names that figure here, besides the near-marxist Raymond Williams. The party was never short of literary talent, whatever else it may have lacked — sometimes perhaps common sense.
Mick Wallis's discussion of the pageant, the mass drama, as an aspect of the Popular Front's attempts to arouse public awareness, is so striking that one may wonder whether marxist historians might have done well to put more of their resources into it. Written history has on the whole failed to grip the less well educated (as well as many others, scientists too often). TV may now be doing more than the schoolroom. Hamish Henderson describes the Edinburgh People's Festival of 1951-54, for which he himself did so very much with his ceilidhs and his discoveries of gifted folk-singers. As he says, it did not begin as a challenge to the official Festival, but as an attempt to broaden and enrich it, by bringing it closer to ordinary people. This did not save it from carping foes. To another province belongs a lively account by Robert Radford of a group of graphic artists familiarly known as 'The Three Jameses' — Boswell, Fitton, and Holland; also of James Friell, a poor Glasgow boy who in 1936, at the age of 24, became the Daily Worker's cartoonist, under the nom de guerre of 'Gabriel'.
Three articles which might have been brought closer together relate to music, the art, if not accompanied by words, the least capable of any political significance. Chapter 4, by Richard Hanlon and Mike Waite, discusses party relations with music in the classical tradition, from the setting up in 1936 of the Workers' Music Association. It was joined by a bevy of distinguished composers, who might even join the party — Alan Bush was the most firmly committed to the left. His post-War work was performed more often in East Germany than in Britain, and he had to admit that left-wing music had not had any such impact as left-wing literature in the 1930s. But 'serious' music altogether was steadily losing ground. The same fate befell the left-wing efforts, discussed by Gerald Porter, to revive or adopt the folk-song, of which Alan Lomax, from America, was the most strenuous collector and classifier, and Ewan MacColl, along with A L Lloyd, the most enthusiastic believer in a new future.
There were even attempts to promote a morganatic marriage between communism and jazz. Kevin Morgan traces them from 1933 when the first local jazz club was set up. The grand idea being trumpeted was that jazz must be accepted as 'the music of the proletariat', 'a great people's art form'. But by the 1970s both the old working-class and the party were falling into decline, and bourgeois culture world-wide was, for reasons not unrelated, on a parallel track. 'Pop' poured in to fill the yawning gap. It was accompanied by the Hollywood cinema; between them the pair provided the opponents of progress with their trump cards.
Paul Hogarth adds an afterword, closing with the pregnant words: 'As long as politicians exist there will be the need for radical attitudes and radical artists.'
