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British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928-1939

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British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928-1939 _________________________________________________________________________Swansea University E-Theses British Communism and the politics of literature, 1928-1939. Bounds, Philip How to cite: _________________________________________________________________________ Bounds, Philip (2003) British Communism and the politics of literature, 1928-1939.. thesis, Swansea University. http://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42543 Use policy: _________________________________________________________________________ This item is brought to you by Swansea University. Any person downloading material is agreeing to abide by the terms of the repository licence: copies of full text items may be used or reproduced in any format or medium, without prior permission for personal research or study, educational or non-commercial purposes only. The copyright for any work remains with the original author unless otherwise specified. The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder. Permission for multiple reproductions should be obtained from the original author. Authors are personally responsible for adhering to copyright and publisher restrictions when uploading content to the repository. Please link to the metadata record in the Swansea University repository, Cronfa (link given in the citation reference above.) http://www.swansea.ac.uk/library/researchsupport/ris-support/ BRITISH COMMUNISM AND THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE, 1928-1939 PHILIP BOUNDS SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF WALES IN FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF WALES SWANSEA 2003 ProQuest Number: 10805292 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10805292 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 ^ r s /7> LIBRARY SUMMARY This thesis examines the work of the most important literary critics and theorists who were either members of, or closely associated with, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period between 1928 and 1939. Its main concern is to provide a systematic and critical account of the communist understanding of the politics of literature. Its wider objective is to assess the ways in which the “Party theorists” were influenced by the CPGB’s relationship with the world communist movement. The basic argument is that the work of the Party theorists had its roots in (1) the political strategies imposed on the CPGB throughout this period by the Communist International, and (2) the body of cultural doctrine enunciated by Soviet intellectuals at the famous Writers’ Congress in Moscow in 1934.1 argue that the Party theorists responded creatively to these external influences, usually (though not always) by drawing on ideas from the British tradition of cultural criticism to develop Soviet doctrine in distinctive ways. Moreover, in spite of its debt to Soviet theory, much of the British work on literature and culture was noticeably unorthodox - sometimes consciously so, sometimes not. I argue that these ideas are consistent with the main principles of the so-called “revisionist” school of CPGB historiography which has emerged over the last 15 years. Chapter One surveys the period between 1928 and 1933 when the CPGB adhered to the Communist International’s “Class Against Class” strategy. It focuses on (1) the work of the Anglo-Australian critic P. R. Stephensen, (2) the ideas about cultural crisis developed by John Strachey and Montagu Slater, and (3) the communist response to the prevailing fashion for cultural conservatism. Chapter Two provides an overview of the ideas explored at the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934. Chapters Three, Four and Five examine the work of Alick West, Ralph Fox and Christopher Caudwell, the three men who are usually regarded as the founders of Marxist literary theory in Britain. Chapter Six explores the consequences for British cultural Marxism of the Communist International’s “Popular Front” strategy against fascism. Its particular focus is the attempt of British communists to combat the influence of fascism by tracing the history of the “English radical tradition”. CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Introduction 1 1 Communist Party History: The New Revisionism 2 2 Earlier Work on the Cultural History of the Communist Party 7 3 Soviet Theory, The British Cultural Tradition and the Origins of Marxist Criticism 10 Notes 14 Chapter One 19 The Critic as Left Sectarian: Responses to Class Against Class 1 P.R. Stephensen: A Marxist Fallen Among Nietzscheans 20 2 John Strachey and Montagu Slater: The Idea of Cultural Crisis 31 3 Left Leavisism? The Encounter with Cultural Conservatism 42 4 Conclusion 59 Notes 60 Chapter Two 67 Revolutionary Traditionalism: Soviet Cultural Theory in the 1930s 1 The Prescriptive Element 68 2 The Aesthetic Element 73 3 The Historical Element 76 4 The Comparative Element 79 5 The British Response 84 6 Conclusion 86 Notes 87 Chapter Three 90 Alick West: Loyalty, Dissidence and the Politics of Community 1 Becoming a Communist: A Reading of One Man in his Time 92 2 Crisis and Criticism 100 3 Opposing the Popular Front? West’s Other Writings from the 1930s 125 4 The Cautious Dissident: West in the Post-War Years 135 5 Conclusion 141 Notes 141 Chapter Four 150 Ralph Fox: Positive Heroism in the Socialist Novel 1 From Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe: “The Novel as Epic” 151 2 A Brief History of the Heroic Individual 156 3 Problems of Revolutionary Fiction 163 4 Other Writings 172 5 Conclusion 174 Notes 174 Chapter Five 179 Autodidacticism and Orthodoxy: Notes on Christopher Caudwell Notes 185 Chapter Six 187 “The Past is Ours”: The English Radical Tradition and the Popular Front 1 The Anatomy of English Radicalism 187 2 The Secret History of English Radicalism 192 3 The Question of Orthodoxy 234 Notes 239 Conclusion 248 Notes 253 Bibliography 256 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My biggest academic debt is to my two supervisors, Dr Alan Finlayson and Professor George Boyce, who have both been very generous with their help. Dr Finlayson worked with me from the beginning and deserves special thanks for the subtlety of his comments on my early drafts. I am also grateful to Professor Kevin Williams for reading a portion of the thesis and to Mike Allen, Daisy Hasan, Dr Andrew Hoskins, Mala Jagmohan and Dr Ieuan Williams for sharing their insights into the nature of doctoral research. Deborah Rideout and Mostyn Jones gave me some valuable advice about word processing. The librarians at the University of Wales Swansea and the Marx Memorial Library in London were extremely helpful. I would not have been able to undertake research without the extraordinary generosity of my parents, Neville and Megan Bounds, whose support has always gone well beyond the call of duty. No one else I know combines intellectual acuity and tolerance of human frailty in quite the same way. I am also deeply indebted to Dominique Fargeot, whose encouragement was characteristically selfless - I thank her for everything. The friendship and support of Aftab Hamid, Heather Jordan, William and Rhianydd Morgan, Ian Morgan, Edward Parr and Aston Thomas have meant a great deal to me. Margaret Bounds has always been extremely supportive and generous. I greatly regret that Peter Bounds, another exceptionally generous relative, died before the thesis was completed. INTRODUCTION Marxist ideas had a significant influence on at least three groups of literary critics and theorists in the Britain of the 1930s. The most famous was the so-called “Auden Circle”, several of whose members (Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and W.H. Auden himself) produced a large body of critical writing in the period between their conversion to Marxism in the middle of the decade and their shift away from it at the beginning of the Second World War.1 Similarly well- known to an academic audience is the handful of maverick scholars, notably William Empson and L.C. Knights, who drew briefly on Marxist and Marxisant sources in their efforts to extend the insights of “Cambridge English” in a radical direction.2 Yet the most impressive engagement with Marxist ideas was undertaken by the numerous writers who were either members of, or closely associated with, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and whose work (now largely forgotten) had its roots in the ideas about literature and culture which emerged in the Soviet Union during the Stalin period. The aim of this thesis is to provide an overview of the critical and theoretical contributions of the latter group, though it will occasionally be necessary to refer to the other two groups for purposes of comparison and in order to identify influences.3 The scholarly neglect to which the work of the communist writers has been exposed is astonishing. Nearly every historian of criticism accepts that Marxism was a dominant force in the literary culture of the 1930s, but few are willing to examine its impact in any detail. The relevant volume of Rene Wellek’sHistory of Modem Criticism , easily the most important work of reference on the subject, devotes just two of its 400 pages to the work of only one of the Party theorists.4 The reasons for this neglect are probably bound up with the cultural politics of the Cold War.5 At a time in the 1950s and 1960s when one might have expected literaiy historians to provide a balanced assessment of the communist writers of the previous generation, the majority of British intellectuals were deeply hostile to the Soviet bloc and regarded Marxism as a barrier to genuine thought.
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