17.05.2000

Whose legacy?

David Margolies (editor) Writing the revolution: Cultural criticism from 'Left Review' Pluto Press 1998, pp208, £12.99

The period of popular frontism was one of extraordinary contradictions for the CPGB. On the one hand we have the subordination of the Party to the developing right centrism of Comintern. On the other we see CPGB leader Harry Pollitt becoming a national political figure, the extension of the Party's base inside the trade union movement and a burgeoning ability to interact with the world of the arts.

Launched in 1934 by the Writers' International group, Left Review is an excellent example of this last development, with contributors of the calibre of C Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, WH Auden, and Hugh MacDiarmid. However, despite the undoubted achievement of Left Review, in the last analysis it proved unable to surpass the above contradictions into a fully rounded revolutionary aesthetic.

To understand this we have to comprehend 'official communist' ideology at this particular juncture, dominated as it was by the Soviet Union and the CPSU. By the mid-1930s it was 'socialist realism' that was prescripted for the Soviet artist. This was the perfect ideological accompaniment to the development of 'socialism' under Stalin. The first five-year plan was a leap into the voluntaristic dark as the bureaucracy side-stepped the democratic input of the working class in the cause of ideological whim. The Soviet economy thus began a long descent into an uncontrollable crisis. This inability to 'plan' society in any recognised sense of the word was transferred into the ideological spheres. Artistic creation in the sense that it transcends and heightens the materials of our social life was trampled on in the cause of making the artist a propagandist 'engineer of the human soul'. The Marxist approach to art as a specific, sensuous mediation of reality was thus destroyed. Or, as Herbert Marcuse put it, the bureaucracy wanted art that was "not art, and it gets what it asks for" (H Marcuse Soviet Marxism: A critical analysis Harmondsworth 1971, p110).

How then was Left Review able to partially break out of this depressing circumstance and engage the artistic community? The key is of course popular frontism. Despite it being thoroughly in line with the diplomatic needs of the Soviet Union, the various national communist parties were instructed to engage with political and social realities in the cause of forming broad democratic alliances. Rigid adherence to communist ideology and propaganda (as in the Third Period) was frowned upon. This opened up a space for the CPGB's cultural workers to re-engage with art as art. Although in the long term the consequences of popular frontism were disastrous for the Party's future militancy, its ideological dynamic did partially contradict that of the USSR. Here we had a regime that could not possibly understand the contours of Soviet life due to the manner in which it 'planned' society, but on the other hand the parties of Comintern were being given some of the materials (although undoubtedly opportunist ones) to do just that.

If anyone doubts this they should have a glance at Ralph Fox's The novel and the people (originally published in 1937). What made Fox so effective was his ability to reconstruct the views of Marx and Engels on literature. In particular on a discussion of socialist realism he quoted Engels to devastating effect: "The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art" (cited in R Fox The novel and the people London 1944, p108). Stephen Spender developed this point in one of the featured selections from Left Review when considering the poetry of Rex Warner, writing of how a work becomes sterile and abstract when the author feels constrained to draw social and political morals from his observation (pp178-180).

Fox gives these observations a more theoretical bent: "Art is one of the means by which man grapples with and assimilates reality. On the forge of his own inner consciousness the writer takes the white-hot metal of reality and hammers it out, refashions it to his own purpose, beats it out madly by the violences of thought ..." (ibid pp37-38).

Thus it is that Spender and Fox both preserve the much contested concept of realism by making it broad and sovereign (to paraphrase Brecht), in that they take account of literature's ability to communicate itself as a specific form. Despite a tendency to lapse into subjectivism at certain points, the whole tenor of their conclusions is the absolute antithesis of 'socialist realism' as practised in the USSR. Formalism, in the parlance of the wretched practitioners of the Soviet aesthetic, was a crime against the people. Political functionalism was the guarantor of art's success under Stalin. A whole strain of CPGB theorists partially retained the ability of art to both historicise and protest against reality by preserving and transforming this 'reality' in the work of art.

Such a theoretical shift was not of course left uncontested in the pages of Left Review. Firstly the contributors had to come to terms with the unpleasant remains of the 'Third Period' and its aesthetic adjunct of so-called 'proletarian culture'. In the section concerning the 'Writers International controversy' of 1934-35 (pp23-44) Alec Brown made a strident contribution: "Literary English from Caxton to us is an artificial jargon of the English ruling class; written English begins with us ... we are revolutionary working class writers; we have got to make use of the living language of our class ... allusive writing is clique writing: we are not a clique" (p28).

This horrible leftist 'reasoning' was fairly well debunked in subsequent issues. After pointing out that some working class dialects are highly allusive, Hugh MacDiarmid effectively exposed Brown's sectarian narrowness by pointing to Lenin's insistence on using Marxism's entire theoretical edifice and his refusal to give Russian workers 'Marx without tears'. MacDiarmid was completely correct when he refuted Brown's rigid equation of life and literature and the ultimate consequence of writers talking down to their working class audience (p43).

In a similar vein C Day Lewis protested against any leftwing sentimentality towards poetry from a "revolutionary standpoint": "The first qualification of a poem is that it should be a good poem - technically good, I mean. A badly designed, badly constructed house is not excused by the fact that it was built by a class-conscious architect and workmen. Equally a poem may have been written by a reactionary bourgeois and yet be a very good poem and of value to the revolutionary; The Waste Land is such a one" (pp53-54). In reality MacDiarmid and Day Lewis were not just taking apart the 'agit-proppers' in Britain: they were (seemingly) unconsciously rejecting the whole ethical basis of Soviet aesthetics.

Thus far we have concentrated on the positive aspects of Left Review. Undoubtedly the negative 'official communist' element existed too. The piece by a certain Anthony Blunt on 'The realism quarrel' (pp76-79) made some fairly standard criticisms of surrealism and cubism by claiming that such abstract art had no roots in the proletariat and so could not contribute to the building of socialism (p77). Blunt does go on to summarise the contradictory tensions of Left Review by considering how subconscious techniques could be absorbed into realist practice (p79). Bert Lloyd strikes a much more orthodox note by dismissing these "frivolous games of automatism and newspaper-clipping-creation, of goosy ghost-hunting and a hazardous preoccupation with chance" (p149).

These trends towards 'simplicity' and an inability to understand the function of the unconscious and abstraction in the artistic laboratory were occasionally reinforced by reductive attempts to constrain art politically. In the introduction, Margolies draws attention to a piece on 'Soviet poetry' by Bert Marshall from November 1937 which dismisses Pasternak largely on the grounds of his recommendation by Bukharin - recently 'found guilty' and shot during the Moscow trials. Margolies is surely right to suggest that "such imposition of judgement is a dangerous short-circuiting of the whole critical process" (p16). The ministrations of the Stalinist aesthetic were submerged, but never drowned, in the pages of the Left Review.

David Margolies' selection from Left Review is undoubtedly slanted towards its more creative moments, sharing in the contemporary trend towards rehabilitating this moment of the CPGB's cultural intervention. This is a worthwhile enterprise, but it is necessary to be critical of some of the editor's conceptions. Margolies considers the legacy of Left Review, stating that it "made an enduring contribution to the development of Marxist literary criticism" (p19), and noting its foundational role in the works of Caudwell, West, and Fox, amongst others. Margolies also transposes this influence onto the non-reductionist historiography of the CP Historians Group (Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, et al).

In fact the reception of this output has been somewhat more controversial. Leading British Marxist literary theorists such as Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams have always been rather scathing of this 'English Marxist literary criticism'. Similarly this so-called "enduring contribution" proved to be the site of much conflict in the CPGB itself. Left Review ceased production in 1938, with Margolies speculating that a lack of enthusiasm amongst the CPGB leadership may have been a contributory factor (pp21-22). This may be inferred from the launch of the Modern Quarterly in 1938 just around the time that Left Review was on the brink of folding. Although the new journal had a remit to cover the arts, both the content and the editorial board had a much more scientific bent, with the editorial statement of purpose which "made art the shadow of science" (p13).

This shift should be seen as a response to the theorisation of art as a relatively autonomous site for social intervention. As has been shown above, this was dangerous to the ideological dogmas of the USSR and, of course, the CPGB was highly prone to its influence.

This rearguard action against some of the conceptions of Left Review turned into a full frontal assault in 1950-51, appropriately enough in the pages of the Modern Quarterly. In particular, Christopher Caudwell's work was criticised by the scientist JD Bernal for constructing the same formulations as those of "contemporary bourgeois philosophy" (cited in R Williams Culture and Society 1780-1950 Harmondsworth 1966, p269). This in the context of Zhadnov's repressive clampdown on 'formalism' in the Soviet Union.

True, the insights of Left Review were defended and expanded by writers such as Alick West and George Thomson (Caudwell and Fox had both died fighting for the Spanish republic), but when we talk of a 'lasting legacy' we need to pose the question: for whom?