09.08.2012

Artistic engagement

Lawrence Parker reviews: Philip Bounds British communism and the politics of literature 1928-1939 Merlin, 2012, pp322, £18.95

It has been quite a long time since a book has given me such unalloyed pleasure as this one. This study of the CPGB and literature by Philip Bounds, a member of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, is a superb piece of research. It is also excellent that the theoretical implications of writers such as Christopher Caudwell, Alick West and Ralph Fox are fully explored, as opposed to merely having a label plonked on them (although the literature on the so-called ‘English Marxism’ of the 1930s is steadily growing).

The key to this book’s success, I think, is its dialectical presentation. The influence of Soviet cultural theory of the 1930s is sketched not through an abstract, reductive encounter between two fixed poles (which usually has a strong element of anti-CPGB moralising), but working out, through a precise analysis of a particular writer’s intellectual labour, where that influence was most marked and where such work started to escape the bounds of that influence and move beyond it.

Alick West produced a work of literary theory in 1937 entitled Crisis and criticism. Bounds characterises this book as “extending the insights of Soviet theory in innovative directions, but rarely seeking to challenge them” (p115). However, other parts of West’s oeuvre pushed him into a critical confrontation with the ‘official communist’ movement’s popular front strategy of the period. West was unhappy (as recorded in his beautiful 1969 memoir, One man in his time) with the practical subordination of communist politics to the tasks of defending ‘bourgeois democracy’, which led him to take a tougher ideological stance against the likes of ‘progressive’ Christians, the Auden circle and other leftwing writers (in the pages of journals such as Left Review), when the major tone of CPGB politics was to blur obvious demarcations in the cause of ‘unity’.

Similarly, in relation to the party’s adoption of the British road to socialism (1951), “there were many British communists who feared that an intermediate programme of left-Keynesian reforms … represented the height of the CPGB’s ambitions” (p127). West interpreted this in predominantly cultural terms, arguing that ‘official communists’ were merely interested in culture as an instrument to achieve something else, rather than seeing it as an end in itself - what West called the “heightening of human life” (p128) under communism. Bounds asserts, however, that West was a “cautious dissident” and the parallels with the career of Georg Lukács are obvious, albeit on a less dramatic scale.

Part of the issue with some of this theory, and of the reasons why it is of limited practical use, is its conservative anthropological thrust. Some of this was embodied at the Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, where the likes of Maxim Gorky, in an attempt to harness the expression of the policy of socialist realism to the dubious ideological needs of Soviet ‘planning’, argued that the primary function of myth among primitive societies “was to express a plebeian yearning for the domination of nature” (pp71-72). The likes of West and Christopher Caudwell extended and embroidered this argument. West used various pieces of anthropological data to suggest that language and poetry had their origins in the economic activity of primitive societies; while Caudwell, in Illusion and reality (1937), argued that poetry, “far from reflecting the private moods of the isolated individual …, was originally a collective form which functioned as a stimulus to hunting or agriculture” (p168 - although Caudwell grouped this with a highly unorthodox emphasis on the instinctual elements in poetry).

The problem with these highly impressionistic, speculative accounts is, to paraphrase Raymond Williams, they were not specific enough to even be wrong. But this masks a deeper critique that they functioned primarily as a source of historical consolation to the improbabilities of Soviet orthodoxy in the 1930s, which itself was an attempt to grapple with the deep-seated chaos and irrationality of the Soviet Union. This function has carried through to the current day, where all manner of impressionistic anthropological theories are fielded as a buffer to contemporary life; and quaint theories of ‘what it means to be human’ are seemingly employed as metaphysical blunderbusses against a crushing sense of disappointment with modern life.

Crass and simplistic as the theory of socialist realism was, the rather obvious point that arises from this book is that it galvanised the work of literary theorists in the CPGB; it did not end a debate, but started one that, ultimately, became problematic for the party.

This leads me on to the final point that I wish to make in this short review: there should not be a problem with a Marxist political organisation having a clear preference for certain types of cultural practice, with a roughly corresponding theory (given that the nature of such theory may be to question that ordering of priority); the problem tends to arise when the implementation of that view moves in a bureaucratic and sectarian fashion. Further, the example of the CPGB’s latter years would appear to show that when an organisation declines such a preference, then its ability to galvanise artists and theorists disintegrates in a commensurate fashion.

In 1950-51, CPGB intellectuals were engaged in the ‘Caudwell discussion’ (openly published in the pages of The Modern Quarterly), where philosopher Maurice Cornforth declaimed that Caudwell’s work had an ‘idealist’ bent. Bounds correctly locates this controversy in a struggle then underway between CPGB cultural activists and ‘Zhdanovist’ “machine politicians” on the party’s national cultural committee (p129). He argues that “Cornforth was perceived as the voice of party authority whose demolition of Caudwell was effectively a warning to party ‘creatives’ that they should follow the NCC line” (ibid). Bounds is right to point out the undermining effect of such pantomimes on the cultural work of the CPGB in the post-war period (p128). However, the problem with Cornforth (and allies such as Emile Burns and Sam Aaronovitch) was not his preference for this or that ‘orthodoxy’, but the sectarian and bureaucratic manner in which those views where orchestrated. Actually, Cornforth’s frothing critique was met with further debate, as more than 20 of Caudwell’s admirers (including Alick West) jumped into the pages of The Modern Quarterly to defend their man.

Compare this to the rather sad state of affairs after the CPGB had issued ‘Questions of Ideology and Culture’, a statement from its executive committee in 1967. It said: “... the Communist Party, during the fight for and under socialism, does not see its task as being to direct what should be written, painted or composed - either in terms of subject or of style; it does not see its role as laying down laws governing literary and artistic creation.” As critics duly noted, this was the CPGB paying penance for the era of Zhdanovism and a clumsy attempt to recreate the era of popular frontism. But what was unique about this era, as alluded to above, was that CPGB writers were being given the space to engage with ‘bourgeois’ art alongside a specific aesthetic outlook and direction in the form of socialist realism. While I am a protagonist of neither, it is a point of fact that this did provoke an engagement from CPGB artists and writers.

‘Questions of Ideology and Culture’ provoked the opposite state of affairs. In 1972, Betty Reid drew up a report on the CPGB’s specialist groups (which included those working in the artistic sphere) for the political committee. Of the statement she admitted: “Many of the most active people are totally in disagreement with it”. Judging from the rest of the report, ‘Questions of Ideology and Culture’ (a collection of essentially empty platitudes), after an initial burst of criticism in the pages of Marxism Today, had merely led to a widespread disengagement on the part of artists and writers.