Looking Back on the 1930s without Being Anti-Communist:
Cornford, Orwell, Spender, Sommerfield
Nick Hubble (Brunel University)
The interwar literary and cultural politics of Britain were shaped crucially by the influence of the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Communist Party. Without their presence there would have been no ‘Auden generation’, no Popular Front and Britain might not even have participated in the Second World War. However, the centrality of Communism to the period’s significance raises a problem for the academic study of the literary and cultural politics of the 1930s and the Popular Front. The advent of the Cold War from the late 1940s onwards created an environment in which Communism and Communist cultural politics were coded as mistaken at best and hostile at worst. As a consequence, the study of the more neutral and abstract forms of high modernism flourished. When interest in the literature of the 1930s began to rise in the 1970s and 1980s, it was often centralised around figures who were seen as anti-Communist either because they had been critics, like George Orwell, of the Party at the time or because they had, like Stephen Spender, publicly recanted from their support from Communism.[1] As the threat of Communism receded towards the end of the 1980s, more comprehensive studies of the 1930s began to appear and, followingthe dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these were supplemented by a number of works that focused on directly Communist-influenced areas such as socialist realism and proletarian literature, which had hitherto been marginalised in the study of the decade.[2]
However, these works have not led the way to a field of study in its own right for the simple reason that it is extremely difficult to think positively of Communism from the perspective of the twenty-first century.The history that has become public since the collapse of the Soviet Block has served to reinforce its Cold War equation with conformist repression. In the popular imagination, Communism has become indelibly associated with the brutal, totalitarian and genocidal politics that characterised the Stalinist period of 1927–53. It was a combination of delayed disgust at this period, legitimised by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult in February 1956, and dismay at the Soviet Union’s military suppression of the Hungarian Uprising later that year, that led to the exodus of literary and other intellectuals, who had been key participants in interwar cultural constellations, from the Western Communist Parties and marked the beginning of the movement’s decline in influence. While plenty of historical nuance can be added to this brief account, it seems extremely unlikely that Communism will ever be recuperated as a positive political force.Therefore, the problem remains for scholars who want to focus on the left-wing cultural politics of the 1930s as a progressive force with ongoing political relevance that much of the work they might want to study appears in retrospect either idealistically simplistic or actively complicit with a discredited and repressive political movement; whereas the material that appears outside those two categories reduces to positions that are easily assimilated within the social frameworks of Capitalist Western liberal democracy. In practice, I would argue that this has trapped the literary reception of the period in a crude binary opposition between Communist and anti-Communist sensibilities, which, although rarely voiced out in the open,[3] still structure unconscious responses to the 1930s. However, with the effective collapse of Global Communism since 1989 – and certainly the collapse of Western Communism – we are no longer implicitly forced to choose sides on that binary. Admitting the historical faults of Communism today actually allows us to view Communism more objectively without the need to adopt an ideologically anti-Communist stance.
Therefore, in this article I would like to propose a different approach to the period which seeks to move beyond the binary opposition between Communism and anti-Communism. Instead, I will suggest that it is much more productive to look at what unites 1930s literary figures such as Orwell and Spender who may be considered anti-Communistand those who were firm Communists during the period and never later recanted. In this latter case, I will take as my two examples the poet John Cornford and the novelist John Sommerfield, who fought alongside each other in the Spanish Civil War, where the former died. Sommerfield remained in the Communist Party until 1956 and although he subsequently came to view his earlier work, such as the experimental novel, May Day (1936), as Communist romanticism, he never criticised Communism in the way that Spenderdid. While there are other stories to tell of the 1930s involving working-class, women, and black and Asian writers, I have chosen these four, white, men from privileged backgrounds precisely because they represent the dominant literary figure of the 1930s and, also, because their careers are so similar and interchangeable. They wrote for small journals and periodicals, and joined left-wing political parties; Cornford, Sommerfield and Spender (briefly) were in the Communist Party while Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party. All four went to Spain, where Sommerfield fought for the International Brigades, Orwell for the POUM, Cornford for both the POUM and the International Brigades, and Spender worked as a radio broadcaster and a literary delegate. In fact, as this article will seek to demonstrate, it is by treating these four not as bourgeois individuals but as an intersubjective constellation that it is possible to break their reception free from the limiting framework of the Communist/Anti-Communist binary. By intersubjective constellation, I do not just mean the extent to which any individual’s subjectivity is inevitably a product of interaction with other individuals’ subjectivities, but that the subjective perspectives and identities of these four men – at least, as we know them through literary and cultural history – were constructed in terms of the shared meanings and values which animated the 1930s generation. In his Crisis and Criticism, the Communist critic, Alick West identified the question facing the preceding modernist generation as being: ‘When I do not know any longer who are the “we” to whom I belong, I do not know any longer who “I” am either.’[4] What defined the generation of Spender, Cornford, Orwell and Sommerfield was that they knew the collective identity to which they wanted to belong and therefore they knew who they were. It is the centrality of this collective identity to their literary generation, which makes Spender’s subsequent post-war preference of the earlier individualist modernist generation so problematic.
Before launching a chronological analysis in the second half of this article, I want to provide an opening case study of this intersubjective constellation functioning in practice, which centres on Orwell’s essay, ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940), and his assignment therein of a key role to Cornford, who had already been dead for several years at this point. The essay is a key text for the construction of Orwell as a Cold War warrior because it equates his abandonment of pacifism and determination to fight with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939:
For several years the coming war was a nightmare to me, and at times I even made speeches and wrote pamphlets against it. But the night before the Russo-German pact was announced I dreamed that the war had started. It was one of those dreams which, whatever Freudian inner meaning they may have, do sometimes reveal to you the real state of your feelings. It taught me two things, first, that I should be simply relieved when the long-dreaded war started, secondly, that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible.[5]
The first point to make here is that Orwell’s conversion from the implicit pacifism of his pre-war novel Coming Up for Air (1939) to supporting wholeheartedlythe pursuit of the war was not the over-night one portrayed here. We know that ‘My Country Right or Left’ was not actually published until the Autumn 1940 edition of Folios of New Writing and that following the outbreak of the War, Orwell took several months completingInside the Whale(1940), a project that certainly started from an anti-war position and more-or-less advocates quietism in its published form, despite being published in March 1940. It certainly does not reflect the same sentiments as ‘My Country Right or Left’ even though written during the period of the supposed conversion.
The persistence of the idea that the onset of the war caused a radical break in Orwell’s thought is due to the positioning of ‘My Country Right or Left’ at the end of the first volume of the 1968 Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, as an apparent coda to the pre-war Orwell and cliffhanger introduction to the wartime patriot of The Lion and the Unicorn. Given that the editors of the CEJL, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, state that the ‘rare exceptions’ to their policy of arranging material by publication date are ‘generally made for the sake of illustrating the development in Orwell’s thought’, it must be concluded that this signification was deliberate.[6] The extent of their selection and achronological organisation of the material from the start of the war to the publication of The Lion and the Unicorn is rather more considerable than they imply. Only one item published between the end of July 1939 and the beginning of 1940 is selected: the September 1939 ‘Democracy in the British Army’ (anti-war in tone). The 1940 material which is selected is split in two, with the half not explicitly referring to the war – principally the three component essays of Inside the Whale – placed immediately before ‘My Country Right or Left’ at the end of CEJL I; and the more warlike half – including reviews of Mein Kampf and Borkenau’sThe Totalitarian Enemy, as well as Orwell’s June 1940 letter to Time and Tide calling for the arming of the people – inserted at the beginning of CEJL II more or less immediately preceding The Lion and the Unicorn, which is the second item for 1941.[7] This manipulation completely hides the fact that whatever the extent of the change of heart he underwent at the Nazi-Soviet Pact, there was no sudden change of tone in Orwell’s output over the first year of the war. In fact, the two positions of being pacifist or pro-war were not the polar opposites they appear, but the logical outcomes of the two possible Marxist positions of considering the Second World War as either an Imperialist war or a war against Fascism.
The transition from ‘Inside the Whale’ to ‘My Country Right or Left’ can be traced through Orwell’s two essays on Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Thirties. The second half of his April 1940 ‘Notes on the Way’ for Time and Tide starts with the same image as his 1935 review of Tropic of Cancer: a bisected wasp.[8] The wasp stands for modern man: ‘The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period – twenty years, perhaps – during which he did not notice it.’[9]While first seeming to agree with Muggeridge’s description of the terrible consequences of abandoning God in order to build an earthly paradise, Orwell nonetheless goes on to add, ‘Seemingly there is no alternative except the thing that Mr Muggeridge … and the others who think like [him], so earnestly warn us against: the much derided “Kingdom of Earth”, the concept of a society in which men know that they are mortal and are nevertheless willing to act as brothers.’[10]Therefore, rather than agree with Muggeridge, Orwell takes Marx’s equation – ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people’[11] – and substitutes ‘England’ for religion: ‘People sacrifice themselves for the sake of fragmentary communities – nation, race, creed, class – and only become aware that they are not individuals in the very moment when they are facing bullets. A very slight increase of consciousness and their sense of loyalty could be transferred to humanity itself, which is not an abstraction.’[12].
Orwell’s subsequent review of The Thirties in New English Weekly takes a different tack. Muggeridge’s motivation is still summarised as ‘a simple disbelief in the power of human beings to construct a perfect or a tolerable society here on earth’.[13] Furthermore, Muggeridge is interpreted as ‘saying … that the English are powerless … because there is no longer anything that they believe in …’[14] and yet Orwell still manages to detect something unconfessed tempering all the defeatism:
It is the emotion of the middle-class man, brought up in military tradition, who finds at the moment of crisis that he is a patriot after all […] As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognise it under strange disguises, and also sympathise with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia.[15]
On the one hand, Orwell is poking fun at Muggeridge by suggesting that when it comes to the point of facing military conquest, in-bred class loyalties are stronger than intellectual detachment. Yet, also, he is arguing – as he had in Inside the Whale – that it is precisely the belief in England, itself, which will sustain the English people and that it is the re-emergence of middle-class patriotism that will paradoxically take the intellectual closer to the common people than any attempt to disengage from the class system. Here, the rather artificial posture of attacking a ‘left-wing intelligentsia’, which Orwell knew perfectly well no longer existed in its pre-war sense, purely serves to put down a marker that the positions advocated should not be reduced to Popular Front positions. In fact, he soon found himself awarding a guarded praise to ‘left-wing intellectuals’ such as Spender and the Lehmanns, as his thoughts on the new series of New Writing demonstrate: ‘New Writing … has managed to rise from its own ashes and reappear in a slightly altered form, not less Left but less Left Book Club, less strident and, on the whole, greatly improved.’[16] The state of the war – following the invasion of France, Belgium and Holland from 10 May 1940 onwards – forced him into an identical political position with those he had formerly disparaged as ‘Nancy poets’.[17] The uncanniness of this intersubjective convergence would have been brought home to him on the morning of 22 June 1940 when he ‘picked up’ a leaflet issued by the Political Bureau of the CPGB containing a call to arm the people, which echoed his own identical call published in Time and Tide that same day – and the Communists were not even supposed to be supporting the war![18]
Therefore, although Orwell insists in ‘My Country Right or Left’ that he would ratherfeel the impulse to stand for the national anthem ‘than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so “enlightened” that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions’,[19] it is not entirely convincing and it is certainly not anti-Communist because he uses a Communist icon, Cornford, to validate his argument in favour of patriotism. Unless your heart has jumped at the sight of the Union Jack, as his and Cornford’s have, runs Orwell's argument, you won’t be able to respond when the revolutionary moment comes:
Let anyone compare the poem John Cornford wrote not long before he was killed (‘Before the Storming of Huesca’) with Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight’. Put aside the technical differences, which are merely a matter of period, and it will be seen that the emotional content of the two poems is almost exactly the same. The young Communist who dies heroically in the International Brigade was public school to the core. He has changed his allegiance but not his emotions. What does that prove? Merely the possibility of building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself into another, the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.[20]
Orwell’s rhetoric here is no different in effect from that which he employed in the pro-Popular-Front Wigan Pier. The reference to the ‘boiled rabbits of the Left’, like the reference to fruit-juice drinking ‘sandal-wearers’ in Wigan Pier,[21]is simply misdirection so that the middle-class targets of his rhetoric do not notice that his call for patriotism is also implicitly a call for socialism. Using the example of Cornford also had the subversive potential of tempting Communists to join up despite the anti-War line that had been imposed, not without impassioned contestation,[22]following the Nazi-Soviet pact. Of course, many Communists, including Sommerfield, simply ignored the Party line and did join up as quickly as possible in order to fight against Fascism and for a socialist future.