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Popular Front Politics and the British Novel, 1934- 1940

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Popular Front Politics and the British Novel, 1934- 1940 Popular Front Politics and the British Novel, 1934- 1940 Elinor Mair Taylor Doctor of Philosophy University of Salford School of Arts, Media and Social Sciences (English) 2014 Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Overview ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Central Figures ............................................................................................................................... 2 The Popular Front .......................................................................................................................... 7 Cultural Crisis .............................................................................................................................. 13 The Popular Front Novel .............................................................................................................. 19 Literature Review ......................................................................................................................... 24 Chapter Outline ............................................................................................................................ 33 Part One: Realism and Modernism Chapter One: Anti-Fascist Aesthetics in International Context ....................................................... 37 1.1 Realism & Formalism in International Literature ................................................................. 38 1.2 The Soviet Writers’ Congress ................................................................................................ 43 1.3 Realism & Anti-Fascism in Europe ....................................................................................... 45 1.4 British Developments ............................................................................................................. 50 1.5 Popular Form .......................................................................................................................... 60 1.6 Ralph Fox and the Realist Novel ............................................................................................ 63 Chapter Two: John Sommerfield, May Day (1936) ......................................................................... 68 2.1 John Sommerfield: Literature and Activism .......................................................................... 69 2.2 Politics of Articulation ........................................................................................................... 73 2.3 Memory & Montage ............................................................................................................... 76 2.4 Myth & Tradition ................................................................................................................... 83 Chapter Three: Arthur Calder-Marshall, Pie in the Sky (1937)........................................................ 92 3.1 Bathos and Narrative Convention .......................................................................................... 98 3.2 Articulation and Division ..................................................................................................... 102 3.3 Politics and Repression ........................................................................................................ 105 3.4 Refitting the Novel ............................................................................................................... 108 Part Two: On English History Chapter Four: History and the Historical Novel ............................................................................ 112 4.1 British Communists and English History ............................................................................. 114 4.2 The Historical Novel of the Popular Front ........................................................................... 122 4.3 Jack Lindsay’s English Trilogy ............................................................................................ 123 4.3.1 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938)..................................................................................... 130 4.3.2 Lost Birthright (1939) ................................................................................................... 141 4.3.3 Men of Forty-Eight (1948) ............................................................................................ 152 Part Three: Class, Nation, People Chapter Five: James Barke and the National Turn ......................................................................... 168 5.1 The National Turn (I): British Questions ............................................................................. 168 5.2 The National Turn (II): Critical Voices ................................................................................ 171 5.3 ‘There is no Scottish National Question’ ............................................................................. 175 5.4 James Barke, Major Operation (1936)................................................................................. 176 5.5 James Barke, The Land of the Leal (1939) ........................................................................... 190 Chapter Six: Lewis Jones’s Fiction ................................................................................................ 206 6.1 Vision & Alienation ............................................................................................................. 211 6.2 Tonypandy ............................................................................................................................ 214 6.3 Forms & Modes .................................................................................................................... 217 6.4 Spain & Home ...................................................................................................................... 220 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................... 225 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................... 231 Archives and Collections Consulted .............................................................................................. 262 Acknowledgements Thanks in the first instance to Ben Harker for supervising the thesis, and to Kristin Ewins for her help and support. Thanks to both, especially, for continuing to support the work after they had left Salford for new positions. Thanks also to Stan Smith for his encouragement, and the staff at the Working Class Movement Library, Salford, and the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, for making the archive work for this thesis possible. The University of Salford’s award of a Graduate Teaching Studentship in 2011-13 enabled the majority of this work to be completed. I am also grateful to Awena Taylor, David and Ellie Taylor, Joe Darlington, Lee Walker, Rob Clark, David Meller and Georgina Little, who have all helped in many ways. My dad, Richard Taylor (1947-2006), would no doubt have been pleased. Popular Front Politics and the British Novel, 1934-1940 Abstract This study considers how examining the Popular Front movement against fascism in Britain sheds new light on thirties leftist fiction. It brings into view a range of critically neglected texts, focusing on the work of John Sommerfield, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Jack Lindsay, Lewis Jones and James Barke. The thesis shows how their fiction relates to and participates in a mobilisation of cultural forces against fascism both at home and abroad. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part One, ‘Realism and Modernism’ begins by examining how British writers negotiated the respective claims of the developing Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism, the mobilisation of European intellectuals against fascism and the heritage of literary modernism (chapter one). These currents of thought are then explored through readings of John Sommerfield’s May Day (chapter two) and Arthur Calder-Marshall’s Pie in the Sky (chapter three). Part Two, ‘On English History’, discusses leftist writings of the history of England under the rubric of anti-fascism; at its heart is a reading of Jack Lindsay’s trilogy of English historical novels (chapter four). Part Three, ‘Class, Nation, People’, first examines the ‘national’ turn in Communist politics as it was negotiated in the work of the Scottish novelist James Barke (chapter five), before turning to the fiction of the Welsh proletarian novelist Lewis Jones (chapter six). In both We Live and The Land of the Leal, the Spanish Civil War plays a key role in mediating the relationship between working-class historical experience and the demands of internationalist anti-fascism. The chief contributions are firstly a recovery and critical reconsideration of a range of marginalised works, and secondly a demonstration of how these novels can be read in terms of a radicalised and populist realist aesthetic, consonant with and interpretable in terms of the work of Georg Lukács in the 1930s. Introduction Overview The Popular Front means a struggle for a genuine popular culture, a manifold relationship to every aspect of the life of one’s own people as it has developed in its own individual way in the course of history. Georg Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’, 19381 This study examines British fiction produced
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