Index
Contents: This Issue
Search CHNN
CHNN Home
‘History in the Making’
Stephen Woodhams, History In The Making: Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Radical Intellectuals: 1936-1956, London: Merlin Press, 2001, 221 pp.
There is some interesting material in this book, based mainly on secondary sources but with some minimal some archival work. However, its scope does not match the ambition of its title. One thread that runs through the work is Raymond Williams and the debates about the relation of his early work to the formation of a New Left after 1956. However, this theme is not dealt with as clearly as it needs to be, since Williams drifts completely out of focus in too many places. The title also suggests a concern with the emergence of a ‘collective’ of historians — with E.P. Thompson and Williams acting as the catalysts for this new radical, intellectual milieu. However, this is another theme that is not consistently pursued in the pages that follow. Also I automatically associated the main title History In The Making with the collection of documents edited by Dona Torr, mentor of the Communist Party Historians’ Group. She is ignored, and those four books are not even mentioned. For any book purporting to be, at least in part, about Thompson, the lack of analysis of his relation with the avowed ‘co-author’ of his major book from this period, William Morris (1955) is a problem. But when we delve into it, this study is not really about Thompson at all.
Williams is a more central figure, and it here that the book’s most significant contribution may lie. The assumption is made of a considerable background knowledge of Williams and his times. However, some details remain unclear. Since Williams had ‘not applied’ (p. 82) for a Cambridge job, the means by which he secured one is left as a mystery. Though both were at Cambridge (at different times), Williams’s very brief sojourn in the Communist Party (CP) provides only a tenuous connection to Thompson, who unlike Williams was a dedicated activist in the Communist Party Writers’ Group and an official in his party district. Their being linked in the title seems teleological: they were in the New Left, so despite their having such diverse paths to that destination they constitute ‘a pair’.
Detracting from any focus is a real tendency to drift. Indeed almost the whole of chapter three, focusing on the Second World War, is a lengthy digression. It was obviously a shared (if separate) experience for Williams and Thompson, but — apart from that generational experience — how this is relevant for the purpose of the book is never made clear. Several parts of other chapters are similarly unfocussed: for example, George Orwell pops in here and there (pp44ff & 88ff), but why is unclear. Likewise, the section on Welsh and Cypriot activists in the chapter on the internal culture of the Communist Party, is an interesting summary, but again seems unrelated to the book’s central themes. For the rest, much of the material presented is not new and seems overly reliant on Raphael Samuel's 'Lost world of British communism' essays from New Left Review. The problem with this is that several former party members have said to me that they thought Samuel’s experiences were so at odds with theirs that they felt they had been in a different party. Samuel’s claims about ‘non-conformity’ as some sort of key to the inner life of the party is too easily relied on as a given. Although it may have some merits, there were a great many other party members with Jewish, Catholic, or even atheist backgrounds. Indeed, perhaps Samuel’s experiences and observations are partly formed by his Jewish background, but he is not used as a source for London’s Jewish members. The idea of party branch meetings being marked by ‘civility’ (p103) ignores the many members who were grilled in nightmarish ‘self-criticism’ sessions. These are vividly described by Bob Darke in The Communist Technique in Britain (1952). Similarly, the account presented in Joe Jacobs’s memoir Out of the Ghetto (1978) does not altogether fit the claim of ‘decorum’ (p104) as he details street riots, and the Battle of Cable Street.
The sections on the Left Book Club are very reliant on John Lewis’ 1970 book. Other studies which have appeared since, such as Ruth Dudley Edwards’ biography of Victor Gollancz (1987) might have been consulted. The discussion of the issue of why a sense of community faded away in the later 1940s is weakened by the failure to even mention the impact of television. Indeed the BBC — radio or TV — is not dealt with at all. Doris Lessing’s autobiography gives a vivid sense of how TV killed much social life — even if Lessing exaggerates her case it is too important an argument to ignore in this debate.
Certain factual errors should be noted. For example, Victor Kiernan went to Trinity in 1931, not in 1934 as suggested here (p37). I would also like a source for the claim that Eric Hobsbawm was in the CPGB Writers’ Group (p40). Of an article by Henry Collins, Woodhams finds it ‘suggestive’ of a ‘party intellectual’ (p89), but we know that Collins was in the Historians’ Group. More importantly, the typesetting and proof reading is amongst the most careless I have seen in a book. There is some sort of mistake every few pages. Some may be minor, but others are confusing or leave ambiguities. For an academic text the referencing is also inadequate — just a perfunctory reference provided for quotations. There are many instances where a source is really needed, but not even hinted at. Even the bibliography is weak: archival material is listed with all the secondary materials, and it is not always clear that some items are drawn from the archives. Despite some interesting material on Williams, it cannot really be said that this book lives up to its ambitions.
