Rewriting the Thirties

Modernism and After

Keith Williams, Steven Matthews, Keith Williams, Steven Matthews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317886396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Rewriting the Thirties questions the myth of the 'anti-modernist' decade. Conversely, the editors argue it is a symptomatic, transitional phase between modern and post-modern writing and politics, at a time of cultural and technological change.The text reconsiders some of the leading writers of the period in the light of recent theoretical developments, through essays on the ambivalent assimilation of Modernist influences, among proletarian and canonical novelists including James Barke and George Orwell, and among poets including Auden, MacNeice, Swingler and Bunting, and in the work of feminist writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. In this substantial remapping, the complexity and scope of literary-critical debate at the time is discussed in relation to theatrical innovation, audience attitudes to the mass medium of modernity - cinema - the poetics of suburbia, consumerism and national ideology, as well as the discursive strategies of British and American documentarism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

KEITH WILLIAMS AND STEVEN MATTHEWS

 

 

 

 

 

Our reason for putting this anthology together is that we thought it long overdue to challenge the persistent aftermyth of the thirties as a homogeneous anti-modernist decade. Outdated cultural maps of the time sustain a damagingly restricted canon centred on a narrow genealogy of polarised relations between aesthetics and politics, or between difficulty and accessibility, textuality and content. According to this tradition, let us say, Auden fathers out of Socialist Realism a prodigal generation whose lasting literary value resides in subsequently recognising the disastrous inadvisability of their own attempts to mix writing and ‘commitment’, and in disowning their immature output. Against this distortive narrative, this book seeks to configure an alternative history – that, at least in terms of the avant-garde aspect of their culture, the thirties were more accurately a troubled but symptomatic transitional phase between modernist and postmodernist writing, art and politics, a complex mutation that defined itself within, and in some ways against, the wider background of the popular writing and mass culture of the time. Following on from this, it is vital to locate any reassessment of this kind within a suitably broad and contested cultural context.

Ezra Pound famously declared that ‘We do not all inhabit the same time.’ Such a sense of mutiplicity blows apart the homogeneous chronology which has dogged our sense of the period: the idea that cultural history is a mosaic is especially applicable to the culture of the thirties. There were many overlapping, competing and contradictory theoretical tendencies and practical alignments in the decade. So-called High Modernists, such as Pound himself, were still writing both ‘impersonal’ high art and egregious political propaganda. Joyce, in drafting Finnegans Wake, and Woolf, in writing The Waves and The Years, were moving into extended explorations of the possibilities of formal experiment, which for Woolf became, paradoxically, increasingly indivisible from ever-closer engagement with sexual politics, whatever the arguably more open-ended nature of the Joycean project.

As for the popular literary audience, they were still largely dieted on texts in the pre-modernist modes of Ian Hay and Edgar Wallace. A growing ‘middle-brow’ (to use the period term) sector of the population, on the other hand, were busily making best-selling authors of novelists such as J.B. Priestley and poets such as John Betjeman. But despite such mediating figures, the mass-civihsation/minority-culture split, diagnosed as the chief condition of cultural ill-health by the Leavises, was all too apparent. As demonstrated by Jeffrey Richards’ chapter, this was particularly the case in relations between literature with a big ‘L’ and popular cinema, though it was being gradually (albeit ambivalently) modified by poets, prose-writers and dramatists increasingly fascinated and enthused by the artistic potential and popular impact of modern media forms. On the other hand, paradoxically, the attitudes of feature film audiences (rigorously policed as the industry was by the British Board of Film Censors) were, in terms of their sensibility, morality and expectations about narrative form, still largely located in the nineteenth century. Similarly, there were few signs of modernism arriving at all in mainstream British theatre.

Writers as different in themselves as Auden, Orwell and Winifred Holtby, whose careers are virtually synonymous with the thirties, were under the ‘anxiety’ of modernist influence – as much a case of repressing some aspects of it as admitting others. This made them often ambivalent towards the presumed cultural entailments and political responsibilities of innovative form. Conversely, the role of Joyce, Woolf and Eliot as menton and – in Woolf and Eliot’s case at Hogarth and Faber – literary midwives to the younger writers of the thirties should not be underestimated. In turn, as Stan Smith’s and Steven Matthews’ essays argue, the work of High Modernists was being modified by its rewriting in, and by their reading of, the texts of the next, upcoming generation. This is not only true of Eliot and Auden, but also of the serial encounters between Yeats, Pound and Bunting. All of these parameters and trends throw into question the neat paradigms of ending which have been imposed on the decade. Such periodising, as Peter McDonald shows, is essentially myth-making and drastically inadequate for the task of illuminating the actual matrix of creative relations between MacNeice, Auden, Spender and their High Modernist precursors.

For themselves, writers such as Auden, Orwell and Holtby were on the one hand anxious to adapt pragmatically the legacy and, indeed, currency of modernism, and on the other to resist its perceived obscurantism and indifference to social and economic facts. They adopted a whole variety of self-consciously ad hoc theoretical formulations and provisional solutions in their practice, which cannot simply be subsumed by any single aesthetic or political category because they stemmed from such a plethora of hybridised elements. Freud, Marx, Catholicism, Homer Lane, D.H. Lawrence, I.A. Richards, the Leavises, the Surrealists, Socialist Realism, Documentarism and Epic Theatre, to name but a few of these elements, all jostle in uncoordinated chorus for the attention of thirties writers. The sometimes unstable positions that resulted from volatile mixtures undoubtedly anticipate more fully postmodern thinking about the relations between culture and politics. For example, Lynette Hunter’s essay shows how Orwell’s precocious hunches that ideology is ‘naturalised’ by processes of historical dismembering and obliteration, as well as about the torturous negotiations between private self and public space, foreshadow post-structuralist debates in this area.

This thirties polyphony of ideas, issues and discourses was also being played out – in underlying rhythm, if not to exactly the same score – in the theory and practice of many proletarian writers, as Valentine Cunningham and Peter Marks demonstrate in their case studies of Joycean novelist James Barke and the heterogeneous editorial ‘line’ of Left Review on what would constitute a properly proletarian kind of writing. No less symptomatic of the leading contemporary debate about the nature of ‘realism’ and the real, as Keith Williams shows, are the self-conscious aesthetics of documentary form. Whatever the myth-making says to the contrary, thirties writers did not necessarily proceed in a vernacular naturalistic vein, anymore than in a prescriptive Sovietised one. Indeed Andy Croft argues that Randall Swingler, in many ways close to the nominal centres of committed cultural activity in the period, was representative precisely because he confronted the perplexing nature of modernity neither as a modernist nor a hard-line Socialist Realist, adapting instead the home-grown, more populist poetics of Georgian accessibility and place to the contemporary scene. However, there is little doubt that through the work of both bourgeois and working-class writers, definitions of the political underwent significant metamorphoses in practice. Besides the public ‘macropolitics’ of the decade – the clashes between Fascism and Communism, dictatorship and social democracy – a whole new agenda of ‘micropolitical’ concerns was being opened up, consciously or unconsciously, and addressed by writers. Take, for example, the explicit and implicit social values of style, and what they reveal about the material conditions and cultural ideology of the writer, as demonstrated by Simon Dentith’s account of the poetry of suburbia, or Steve Nicholson’s discussion of the shifts in the performance-audience relationship sought by the innovators of radical theatre. Not least, the politics of gender, unfairly regarded as neglected in thirties writing, were in fact continously objectified and scrutinised in the later work of Virginia Woolf and of her acolyte/antagonist, Winifred Holtby and others, as Marion Shaw contests. In this way, the writing of the thirties emerges as both less and more political than hitherto assumed, in more complex and inflected senses.

The revised map of the period this collection plots is a topography riven by cultural fault-lines and by intellectual cross-currents of sometimes politically edgy, even indeterminate direction, though always dragged by the unpredictably tidal influence of large-scale historical events. Moreover, to regard the British writing of the thirties as a resurgence of cultural ‘Little Englandism’ also ignores the wider geography of cosmopolitan modernist influences, continuous from the American and Irish, but also the European, spheres. Eliot and Auden’s trajectories, for example, are parallel but inverted in this respect. Eliot naturalised both his statehood and critical assumptions in a cultural vision which, contradictorily, laid claim to both universal tradition and essential Englishness. Auden, in turn, began the thirties by deconstructing these assumptions and then took the opposite route at the end of the decade, by assuming American citizenship. Similarly, it is an error to marginalise or demonise the influence of Joyce in the period, because unlikely Joyceans, like the proletarian Glasgow Communist James Barke, brought into focus many of the key critical and political debates in their writing. By such unprogrammatic means, the cultural and linguistic hierarchy between the heteroglot ‘margins’ and mandarin, unitary ‘centre’ (to use Bakhtin’s terms) was contested. The actuality of perpetual displacement of lives in travel and exile, of political alignments, and of forms of reading and writing patently defies the kind of canonical selectivity all too often imposed upon the thirties, and resists any master-theory about its nature and aftermath. The map is of course a favourite and most highly-charged metaphor in thirties writing. Since the last major collection of essays on the period appeared well over a decade ago, it is high time that it was culturally reconfigured: Rewriting the Thirties will provide an indispensable pathfinding chart for subsequent undertakings in this long overdue process.

CHAPTER TWO

The Age of Anxiety and Influence; or, Tradition and the Thirties Talents

VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM

Two large focuses or frames of analysis confront us in any approach now to thirties writing. The first is literary-historical, and involves a sort of traditional knee-jerk division between modernism and the thirties. This is the crude bit of historicising which defines the Thirties as an Age of Utter Reason, a period only of Political Art, of Documentary deviationism, a time of sad Realist cravings, of rampant anti-Formalism, anti-Textualism, and so a sort of unfortunate historical blip or bypass on which writing got snagged and slowed down in the good long march of the twentieth century from modernism at the beginning to postmodernism at the end. This view sees the thirties as a very unfortunate, even inexplicable, parenthesis, and one which we can now, especially since the fall of Eastern European Communism and all that, simply overlook as a species of shortsightedness, a deviant moment in a larger textualising progress, involving crude ideological preferences which history has not sustained and literary-critical category errors we can only wonder at our immediate literary and critical fathers for indulging themselves in. This is a reading of literary history greatly ministered to by seeing the thirties as thoroughly Leftist and so extremely, even absolutely, hostile to the modernism that flourished before it and continued despite it. And, of course, vice versa.

A symptom of this making of stark historical contrasts is the reissuing by Lawrence & Wishart of their 1935 volume Problems of Soviet Literature with the rebarbatively new title Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (1977).

The second large analytical frame which now inevitably has thirties writing in its grip has to do with value and values. There is a common reading of much thirties literature which concedes it a certain, even momentous, cultural and historical value, but denies it anything like the highest literary merit. On this view the greats of our time are Eliot, Pound, Woolf, even – still – in our feminist age, D.H. Lawrence; whereas the thirties boys are scarcely up to snuff. Even if W.H. Auden, say, just about makes it into the pantheon of the great and good, Spender and Day Lewis (not to mention the raggletaggle army of poets who wrote for Spain or the gang of proletarian novelists of the period, or the women authors brought back into the light by Virago Books, Rosamond Lehmann and such), certainly do not get into the Premier Division. We certainly would not choose their sort to save our First Fifteen. This kind of demarcation is based, of course, on a very usual set of judgements about literary value, prejudgements or prejudices no less, heavily reliant on the very traditional assumption that overt political propaganda, in fact instrumentality of any kind, let alone sentimental disposition of materials, and simplicity of address to readers, will axiomatically mark a poet or poem down. According to these views, temporal or worldly interests and commitments automatically make a work of less importance than more formalist, or more language-centred, or (save the mark) more ‘eternal-verity’-centred writings – even if the ‘eternal-verities’ in question are, in the end, just as ideologically skewed as the propagandistic dispositions which are being disallowed.

What is at issue here, of course, sooner or later, is canonicity. Canonmaking, questions of what constitutes canons, how canons get formed, were utterly central to the critical debates of the thirties, and they are main questions in the critical debate about the merits now of thirties writing. Not surprisingly then, certain positions in current canon debates seem to have particular force in the light they can cast on thirties materials. There is the case Michael Bérubé makes, for example, for the black American poet Melvin Toison, involving a critique of how literary-historical modelling is done. Bérubé asks how an American version of modernism gets to be constructed so as to exclude Toison, and along with him most Leftist US work of the thirties:

Richard Chase’s canonical ‘modernism’ allows him to conflate aesthetic experimentalism and social protest under one sign, that of an ‘insurgent movement’ which ‘defended “modernism” ’ – which is to say that Chase’s account leaves no room for avant-garde social protest that attacked (or was at best ambivalent about) modernism, no room for Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, New Masses, or, for that matter, writers of the Harlem Renaissance. More generally, Chas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Age of Anxiety and Influence; or, Tradition and the Thirties Talents
• 3. Illusion and Reality: the Spectre of Socialist Realism in Thirties literature
• 4. ‘Alien Experiences’: Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain in the Thirties
• 5. Remembering Bryden’s Bill: Modernism from Eliot to Auden
• 6. Believing in the Thirties
• 7. ‘A Marvellous Drama out of Life’: Yeats, Pound, Bunting and Villon at Rapallo
• 8. Thirties Poetry and the Landscape of Suburbia
• 9. Politics and Beauty: the Poetry of Randall Swingler
• 10. ‘Irritating Tricks’: Aesthetic Experimentation and Political Theatre
• 11. Post/Modern Documentary: Orwell, Agee and the New Reportage
• 12. Modernism and the People: the View from the Cinema Stalls
• 13. Blood and Marmalade: Negotiations between the State and the Domestic in George Orwell’s Early Novels
• Index