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Comrade Heart:
A Life of Randall Swingler
Andy Croft, Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), £45, hardback, ISBN 0-7190-6334-5.
Andy Croft has done more than anyone else to shape our understanding of the CPGB's contribution to British literary culture. In the face of an academic orthodoxy which dismisses party writers as third-rate exponents of the Soviet doctrine of 'socialist realism', he has shown that their work grew directly out of indigenous literary traditions (which is not to say that the Soviet influence was unimportant) and that it drew promiscuously on existing styles and genres. He has also demolished the idea that the party's intervention in culture was organised along ruthlessly authoritarian lines. While never ignoring the clumsy efforts of machine politicians in King Street to impose their propagandist schemes on party 'creatives', especially in the fractious period after 1947 when Emile Burns chaired the National Cultural Committee, Croft has clearly demonstrated that communist writers were not only self-organising but that their approach to literary aesthetics was often highly unorthodox. This fine biography of Randall Swingler is Croft's first attempt to explore these ideas in the context of an individual communist life.
Randall Swingler (1909-1967) was one of the CPGB's most prominent poets, novelists and editors in the two decades or so between the start of the Popular Front period and his resignation from the party in 1956. Born into the Edwardian upper-middle class (his father was a provincial curate) he was educated at Winchester and Oxford and seemed at one point to be set for a career as a professional flautist. He played an important role in most of the Communist Party's cultural initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s, collaborating with Alan Bush on music for the various theatrical and musical organisations of the inter-war left, writing two novels and several books of poetry (Croft has edited an excellent selection from his poems)[1] and serving as an editor on Left Review, Poetry and the People and Arena. Swingler also provided a link between the Munich generation and the younger Marxists who founded the New Left in the 1950s, not least by sitting on the editorial committee of Edward Thompson's New Reasoner until 1959. Having donated most of his inherited wealth to the Communist Party and the Daily Worker, he spent his later years in a state of shambolic poverty in Essex. He collapsed and died in his beloved Soho while still two years short of his sixtieth birthday.
Croft's finest achievement is to show how Swingler's communism grew out of a tension in his outlook between asceticism and a love of beauty. As a young man, deeply influenced by his father's concern for the industrial workers in his Nottingham parish, Swingler was naturally drawn towards a radical interpretation of christianity – one which culminated in 1932 in the christian socialism of his play Crucifixus. Yet the obverse side of his father's generous social vision was a grim emphasis on the need for self-denial. Swingler and his siblings were raised to believe that sensual pleasure was the breeding ground of immorality, and an early poem about his 'Puritan Childhood' recalls how 'the long cold hands of the black father, Sin/Palpably pressed upon our cringing shoulders'. Perhaps the main dilemma of Swingler's adolescence and early manhood was how to square this taste for self-denial, which eventually drew him to the work of the christian platonists, with the induction into the 'Cult of Beauty' which he underwent while a pupil at Winchester. Worried that the love of nature which irradiated the work of the Georgian poets (his main influences at this time) was somehow intrinsically impious, Swingler eventually concluded that the church had badly compromised its political effectiveness when it turned its back on the life of the senses. A more egalitarian social order could only be established once 'Man's Divorce from the Body of God, Nature' had come to an end. Croft seems to believe that Swingler's conversion to marxism (a system of thought which does more than any other to locate humanity in the context of its relationship with the natural world) was a natural consequence of his desire to throw off the sensual constraints of the established church. It's a fascinating example of how membership of the Communist Party could result from something as quintessentially English as an anglican childhood and a love of Robert Bridges, Edward Thomas and Rutland Boughton.
Croft has turned up some very important documents while examining Swingler's private papers, not least the violently abusive (but also very funny) reply which George Orwell sent to Nancy Cunard when she asked him to contribute to her famous pamphlet Writers take Sides on the Spanish War (1937). It says something about Croft's rather elevated view of his subject that Orwell's prose lights a small bonfire on the page, whereas the frequent quotations from Swingler's work glow much less fiercely. The other big find in the Swingler papers was a document revealing the existence of the Ralph Fox (Writers') Group, an organisation which aimed to co-ordinate the activities of the CPGB's poets, novelists and critics in the various cultural groups which sprang up in the 1930s to reflect the outlook of the Popular Front.[2] Often convening at the flat in Primrose Hill which Swingler shared with his wife Geraldine, the Group was chaired by Julius Lipton and included the likes of Mulk Raj Anand, A L Morton, Edgell Rickword, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Alick West. It seems not to have engaged in public work and was presumably unknown to the vast majority of ordinary party members. Croft's discovery of the Group has important implications for our understanding of the CPGB's early cultural work. At present, partly because of Croft's own writings, our impression of the men and women who created a communist culture in Britain is practically Namierite — we see a tangle of disparate individuals who shared only their commitment to the party and a willingness to observe its current political line. Although the Fox Group seems not to have been very successful, its very existence reminds us that the desire to project a coherent literary position was present even in the 1930s – long before Emile Burns demanded complete obedience to the strictures of Zhdanovism.
The excellence of Comrade Heart is only slightly vitiated by a couple of minor flaws. The first is its failure properly to relate Swingler's work to Soviet debates about literature and culture. Although Croft was right to argue some years ago that the great merit of Swingler's generation of communist writers was that they 'helped to mitigate and delay the effects of Soviet literary politics on the British party',[3] it is equally clear that Soviet ideas established the intellectual framework within which they tried to operate. Croft's book goes just a bit too far in seeking to emphasise the Englishness of cultural marxism in the 1930s. It seems especially perverse that there is no reference to the cultural strategy advocated by Georgi Dimitrov in his speech to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, since Dimitrov's main point (that communists should seek to combat fascism by drawing attention to the history of popular radicalism in their respective countries) set the terms for much of Swingler's work in the ensuing years.
The other main problem with Comrade Heart is its overestimation of Swingler's literary talents. Croft believes that Swingler was no minor representative of the Auden generation but a 'truly great' poet whose work has been shamefully excluded from the English canon. He seeks to corroborate his case with some excellent literary criticism (his anatomisation of the 'Audenesque' on page 142 is especially memorable) but at no time does he persuade us that Swingler's verse is anything more than what it it is generally regarded as being — an interesting combination of apocalyptic sonorities and pastoral uplift which strives just a little too earnestly for enlightened effect. It seems unlikely that many of Comrade Heart's readers will be inspired to explore Swingler's writings for themselves. But those of us who follow in Croft's pioneering footsteps would scarcely wish to deny him his enthusiasms.
