05.09.1996

Profound commitment

Christopher Caudwell was killed in action in Spain early in 1937. He was 29 years old. Educated at a Benedictine school in Ealing, he left at 16 and worked for three years as a reporter on the Yorkshire Observer. Then he returned to London and joined a firm of aeronautical publishers, first as editor and later as director.

He invented an infinitely variable speed gear for cars and published five textbooks on aeronautics, seven detective novels and some poems and short stories - all before he was 25. In 1933 the publishing firm went bankrupt, causing Caudwell to question seriously for the first time the nature of capitalism. By the end of 1934 he had become immersed in the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. In less than two years before his departure for Spain Caudwell heroically attempted to construct a Marxist aesthetics in a series of essays published after his death as Studies in a dying culture (1938), Further studies in a dying culture (1949), Romance and realism (1970), Illusion and reality (1937) and The crisis in physics (1939).

He wrote many poems (Collected poems, 1986), but opportunities declined due to the demands of his theoretical work and activity on behalf of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1935 he joined the Poplar branch of the Party. After spending the day at his typewriter, he would leave the house at five and go out to the branch and speak at an open air meeting or sell the Daily Worker at the corner of Crisp Street market. He became branch secretary in March 1936. By November 1936 the Poplar branch had raised enough money to buy an ambulance and Caudwell was chosen to drive it across France. After handing it over to the Spanish government, he joined the International Brigade and was killed in action on the Jarama on February 12 1937.

In a letter from Spain he wrote: “I’m beginning to feel an old soldier, and already act as machine-gun instructor to our section. I’m political delegate to the group and joint editor of the wall newspaper.” Meanwhile his brother was trying to get Christopher recalled to England. He showed a proof copy of Illusion and reality to senior Communist Party members in London.

Because Caudwell had avoided intellectual circles, this was the first they knew of his efforts. They ordered his recall, but it was too late.

Despite being neglected in his own lifetime, Caudwell’s work became the site of furious debate during the 1950s, as intellectuals and theorists attempted to come to terms with this whirlwind of activity and place it within a properly Marxist framework. Opinion was and still is polarised. GS Fraser wrote:

“To read him is to become aware of a certain meanness in many contemporary critics, an unwillingness of the young critic to commit himself, not necessarily at all to Marxism or communism, but to some large, noble and generous enthusiasm for what human life at its best could be” (The modern writer and his world London 1964, p382).

Against this Raymond Williams said of Caudwell:

“... his influence is curious. His theories and outlines have been widely learned, although in fact he has little to say, of actual literature, that is even interesting. It is not only that it is difficult to have confidence ... but that for the most part his discussion is not even specific enough to be wrong” (Culture and society London 1990, p277).

Terry Eagleton concurs, calling Caudwell a “vulgar Marxist” who thought of “social being (content) as inherently formless, and of forms as inherently restrictive”, thus leading him to mistakenly “raiding literary works for their ideological content and relating this directly to the class struggle or the economy” (Marxism and literary criticism London 1992, pp23-24).

Let some tough fibre in my being win
Even though it pulls the flesh awry; ruckles it
Like a botched shoe.
When all is done, it’s not the airs and graces
Time’s acid spares, but a defiant coarseness
In the grain

(From The request, C Caudwell)

The distinguished scientist and Marxist, JD Bernal, criticised Caudwell savagely, saying his scientific essays appealed mainly to literary intellectuals, for whom scientific rigor is impossible. The formulations in his books “are those of contemporary bourgeois scientific philosophy ... and not those of Marxism” (Modern Quarterly Vol 6 no4, autumn 1951, p346). Most importantly he questioned Caudwell’s imperfect powers of synthesis, calling them mechanistic and lacking in historical sense.

Looking back through the welter of criticism, it is hard not to feel that Caudwell has been too often used as a political football and not as a subject for critical theory. Certainly there is a disturbing ‘little England’ edge to Williams’ and Eagleton’s denunciations. Williams sees Caudwell as an anachronism, an interloper who does not fit with his own preordained view of English culture, with himself and the new left sitting comfortably at its apex.

Commenting on JD Bernal’s thoughts on Caudwell, Williams says: “This is a quarrel which one who is not a Marxist will not attempt to resolve” (Culture and society London 1990, p277), thus displaying a revealing convenient lack of engagement at a critical moment. Similarly Eagleton in a note on Caudwell in Marxism and literary criticism ducks his earlier insinuations by claiming it was the “unpropitious conditions” that caused Caudwell’s vulgar Marxism. This is a subjective put-down that is presumably meant to imply that the historical circumstances were more propitious at Oxford University in 1976.

There are undoubted theoretical problems in Caudwell’s work with over-determination and mechanistic tendencies. It is clear that he had not totally resolved the contradictions in his life between a religious upbringing, a bourgeois business life and a conversion to communism. But that is precisely the point to grasp for a deeper understanding of his work. Caudwell is perched between the romantic tradition and realism, with all the crisis of faith and abandonment of shibboleths that 1930s Britain contained.

It is the struggle to reconcile and elaborate these historically particular problems for a communist perspective that makes his work worth more to us than many academic Marxist histories with their pain-free view of the class struggle. The immanence of his dialectic and sense of emerging presence allowed him to engage with the most dynamic but necessarily declining bourgeois art and philosophy (Freud, DH Lawrence, Wells, Shaw; liberty, pacifism and violence). Few indeed are able to discern and commit themselves so profoundly to the problems, complexities and solutions of their age.

Phil Rudge