Men and Women Writers of the 1930s

The Dangerous Flood of History

Janet Montefiore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134915002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Men and Women Writers of the 1930s is a searching critique of the issues of memory and gender during this dynamic decade. Montefiore asks two principle questions; what part does memory play in the political literature of and about 1930s Britain? And what were the roles of women, both as writers and as signifying objects in constructing that literature?
Montefiore's topical analysis of 1930s mass unemployment, fascist uprise and 'appeasement' is shockingly relevant in society today. Issues of class, anti-fascist historical novels, post war memoirs of 'Auden generation' writers and neglected women poets are discussed at length. Writers include:
* George Orwell
* Virginia Woolf
* W.H. Auden
* Storm Jameson
* Jean Rhys
* Rebecca West

Chapter 1
Remembering the 1930s

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin¹

POLITICS AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY

This book is about political memory and the literature of the 1930s: how it has been remembered, how personal and political memories work in the literature itself, and also how much important writing has not been remembered: especially, though not wholly, the work of women. In English literary culture, the poetry and fiction of the 1930s are accepted features of the twentiethcentury landscape. Established classics of the ‘thirties canon’ include Robin Skelton’s Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties (1964) and the often reprinted novels of Greene, Waugh, Isherwood and Orwell. The past decades have also witnessed the retrospections of Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward, the belated publication of texts by W.H.Auden and Stephen Spender, and the republication of many women writers, often reprinted by feminist publishing houses,² although women are still not commonly perceived as part of ‘thirties history’, a fact whose causes and implications I discuss below (pp. $–*). Literary autobiographies of the 1930s began to be published in 1939, continued well into the 1990s³ and look set to go on appearing as long as there are survivors. The first accounts of the literature of the 1930s appeared in 1940,⁴ to which successors are still being produced—including, of course, this book.

Yet literary history, especially of such an intensely if patchily remembered decade, cannot be tackled on its own. Any useful account of the 1930s must begin with politics. This is a surprisingly complicated matter because there exists no universally accepted version of English political history during these years. No one, of course, disputes the main facts: the Wall Street Crash which inaugurated the Great Slump in 1929, the return of the National Government in 1931, the advent of the Means Test in 1934, the policy of non-intervention in the Spanish War and the Munich Agreement in October 1938, the ascendancy of left-wing ideas amongst English writers, and the ‘Popular Front’ alliances between Communist and liberal intellectuals. The disagreements are about selection, emphasis and value: what these events meant, whether they were good or bad, even whether they were important. For example, the historians Margot Heinemann and Noreen Branson disagree sharply with A.J.P.Taylor⁵ about whether there even was a significant Depression in England. The extent of the disagreement about the thirties appears in the two folk-memories of the 1930s which continue to haunt British public discourse: on the one hand, the protest marches and the International Brigade which fascinate the Left and, on the other, the images of appeasement and/or Red treachery by which patriotic conservatives remember that decade. Related versions of these political memories been played out in the long series of literary histories of the 1930s (discussed on pp. #–$), which have appeared since the decade ended.

To approach these different, often contradictory versions of history, I find it useful to invoke the concept of collective memory, theorized by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945)—himself, incidentally, a liberal victim of Fascism. (An immensely distinguished professor at the Sorbonne, showered with professional honours, he died in Buchenwald after being arrested under the Vichy regime for protesting against the murder of his liberal Jewish inlaws.) ⁶ In On Collective Memory (1939), he argued cogently that memory is not, as is commonly thought, an individual phenomenon but a collective creation, whose patterns are defined by the interpretative frameworks of different social groups. Memory should thus be understood as, by definition, a social phenomenon. Individual remembrance is part of, and only made possible by, group memory:

It is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these [collective] frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection… Collective frameworks are…precisely the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society.

This argument dissolves the rigid conventional distinction between things inside the psyche (thoughts) and things outside (material realities), insisting that because thoughts, perceptions and memories are only made possible by language, which is a system of communication, they cannot be purely individual. Once a memory is verbalized, its meaning is shared with others: ‘There are no perceptions without recollections. But inversely, there are no recollections which can be said to be purely interior, that is purely preserved by individual memory.’⁷ And since the individuals who remember, and the social context which defines their way of remembering, exist in the ‘present moment’ in which their past is recalled, their (re)constructions of that past must be profoundly affected by the ideas and values current at that present moment.

Halbwachs defined his ‘collective frameworks’ of memory as the family, the Catholic Church, and social classes—not, significantly, nations, although he wrote at a time of intense nationalism. But though he was not a literary theorist, his verbal ‘collective’ model certainly works for written memoirs, since autobiographies are written by members of social groups (Bloomsbury littérateurs, politicians, the working class, journalists, etc.), the characteristic rhetoric and symbolism of whose memories are, as Halbwachs argues, shaped by their perception of the present. Halbwachs’ notion, far from defining all memory as part of an ideological consensus, thus helps to situate the memories of people belonging to marginalized or excluded groups. This does not, however, mean that particular memories are the product of a group consensus about history, still less that the group characteristically speaks through the individual: ‘“It is individuals as group members who remember”; it follows that there are as many collective memories as there are groups and institutions in a society.’⁸ It is rather that the defining collective ‘frame of reference’ drawn on by the individual to make his or her past intelligible derives from a dialogue, actual or implied, within the group. Nor can any individual be defined only by the membership of a social group, for each of us belongs to several—as in E.P.Thompson’s witty parable of the woman worker whose social identity is constructed by several roles and defined by none.⁹ It is nevertheless the dialogue with a significant group which defines personal memories, as with the reminiscences which Virginia Woolf delivered between 1920 and 1936 to the Bloomsbury ‘Memoir Club’.¹⁰ A more complex instance of a shared ‘interpretative framework’ would be Isherwood’s memoir Christopher and his Kind (1977), whose implied audience includes both Isherwood’s then-surviving contemporaries and a wider gay readership empowered by the politics of gay liberation with which the older Isherwood identifies himself.

Both the literature of the 1930s and most subsequent writings about that ‘moment’ are visibly shaped by the dialectical framework which Halbwachs identified as working between the interpretative ‘framework’ of a present moment and a recalled past. The process can clearly be seen in Rebecca West’s great retrospective memorial to liberal Eastern Europe, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942), which meditates on how the past determines the present, interpreting the monuments of that past by means of present-day imagery Describing the mummified corpse of a defeated medieval emperor, she conveys the pathetic sight of his dead hands adorned with exquisitely made rings through a contemporary analogy:

He is piteous as a knot of men standing on a street-corner in Jarrow or a Welsh mining town. Like them he means failure, the disappointment of hopes, the waste of powers. He means death also, but that is not so important. Who would resent death if it came when all hopes had been realized and all powers turned to use?

The allusion to Jarrow and South Wales, then proverbial for poverty and unemployment, makes the Tsar’s historical tragedy intelligible by interpreting him through a classic image of ‘present-day’ 1930s England.¹¹ But the ‘collective framework’ of knowledge and memory which makes Rebecca West’s analogy possible is itself political. As often in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a book well to the left of her post-war writings, the thought is shaped by a liberalism which accepts the image of unemployed men as a sign of the economic and social shortcomings of capitalism—not, as a reactionary might see it, of the men’s own laziness or plain bad luck.

The converse of this process of understanding the past by drawing analogies with the present is of course the interpretation of new events in terms of the known past. This process is far more common; it is, indeed, the way in which people make sense of politics. And, as Claud Cockburn pointed out, a proneness to historical analogy may only subject people to ‘those events and dates which have reached out a long, paralysing hand to grip and twist future history’.¹² A key exchange about war in E.R.Gedye’s history of post-war Austria Fallen Bastions (1939) bears out Cockburn’s point. Gedye, the Daily Telegraph’s Vienna correspondent from 1932 to 1938, wrote as an eyewitness, occasionally invoking the memory of the Great War as analogy or reference point to convey the enormity of what he saw. Thus, describing the ruin of workers’ flats in the 1934 right-wing coup that destroyed Vienna’s Socialist government, he compared them with the Western Front: ‘The building was as shell-shattered and bullet-scarred as anything I had seen in Arras or Albert in 1916’. The image is both personal and collective, at once authenticating Gedye’s own witness and invoking a generalized allusion to the brutal, pointless destruction which, as Paul Fussell has shown, the Western Front rapidly came to represent in modern memory. Later on, however, when a British diplomat obliquely invokes a similar allusion to the useless destruction of the Great War, Gedye rejects the anti-war consensus implicit in the man’s language. He relates indignantly how a member of the 1938 Runciman delegation deplored the Czechs’ eagerness to fight:

‘a notion which, thank God, we have grown out of in England’…
‘Then England would never under any circumstances defend herself against aggression again?’
‘England,’ I was told, ‘would, thank God, never allow herself to be led into the beastliness of war again under any circumstances.’

Each speaker in this exchange gives a different meaning to the words ‘war’ and ‘never again’. The official’s phrases ‘the beastliness of war’ and ‘never…again’ clearly allude to the Great War, assuming a consensual memory of that useless waste of life as a justification for England’s present policy of appeasement. Gedye, the liberal journalist, does not consent to this memory as valid or legitimate. His ‘never…again’ points to a hypothetical future: ‘would England defend herself?’¹³

LOOKING BACK IN IRONY

No other ten years can have produced so much autobiography as the ten years between 1930 and 1939.

Virginia Woolf¹⁴

‘Eyewitness history’ of the kind Gedye wrote has traditionally held an honoured place in thirties literary texts. Classics such as Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin each deploy a brilliant rhetoric of authenticity, which hindsight reveals to be the product of deliberate and skilful construction. Orwell’s revisions to The Road to Wigan Pier were clarified by the publication of his ‘Wigan Pier diary’; Christopher Sykes revealed how Robert Byron, who spoke no Arabic or Farsi, spent six months in England polishing the dialogues with native speakers in The Road to Oxiana; while Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and his Kind reveals in detail how his earlier books caricatured his friends and censored his own experiences.¹⁵ Less noticeably but very influentially, a rhetoric of testimony has dominated the literary histories of the thirties, partly because the first of these, Francis Scarfe’s Auden and After (1941) and Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed (1950) were written as memoirs by survivors of the thirties, and partly because later historians tended to rely on memoirs of the thirties, sometimes quoting them as straightforwardly transparent texts.¹⁶

This rhetoric of memory began very early, with two highly influential accounts of the writers of the thirties: Virginia Woolf’s The Leaning Tower’ and Orwell’s ‘Inside the Whale’. Both essays appeared in 1940 when Britain and its Empire were still fighting alone against the Fascist Axis powers. The ‘Popular Front’ alliances between Socialists and Communists in the European and liberal democracies had failed miserably; Communism had been discredited by the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. On the literary scene, Auden and Isherwood, the two leading left-wing English writers, had departed for America the previous year and apparently lost interest in the political causes they had been identified with. In 1940 it must have been impossible to read optimistic revolutionary poems like Spender’s ‘The Funeral’—‘This is festivity, it is the time of statistics’¹⁷—without irony. It is therefore not surprising that, although Virginia Woolf and George Orwell had little time for one another, they attacked the literature of the thirties, which they defined as the poetry of the ‘Auden Group’ plus a few prose writers,¹⁸ in remarkably similar terms. Firmly identifying texts with authors, they attack ‘Auden, Spender & Co.’ (Orwell, p. 512) for being well-off ex-public schoolboys who were flawed by dishonesty because they submitted to Communist control (Orwell) or only pretended to want to give up their own privilege (Woolf). Both writers rather disingenuously represent themselves as outsiders excluded from the privileged lives of those they criticize —a rhetorical move which has been given more sceptical treatment when adopted by Virginia Woolf, daughter of Leslie Stephen, than when used by Eric Blair, King’s Scholar of Eton College.¹⁹ This verbal self-distancing is underlined by the way that they represent the writer’s relation to society by key metaphors enshrined in their titles. With a pleasing elegant symmetry, these ‘title metaphors’ both invoke that sex to which the writer does not belong, just as in Lacan’s witty fable of heterosexual difference (‘“Look,” says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!”; “Idiot!” replies his sister, “can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen?”’).²⁰ Virginia Woolf uses the phallic metaphor of the ‘Leaning Tower’—an image drawn, appropriately enough, from Auden’s poem Spain 1937²¹—to represent the young men’s ‘eleven years of expensive education’ (Woolf, p. 170); while Orwell’s image for the impotent passivity of the writer in the leviathan State is the whale that swallowed Jonah, a metaphor which he interprets as ‘simply a womb big enough for an adult’ (Orwell, p. 521).

Of the two essays, ‘The Leaning Tower’ wears the better, principally because of Woolf’s astute perception of the autobiographical slant in bourgeois thirties writing, which she identifies as its central feature. As in A Room of One’s Own, she argues that literary achievement depends on material prosperity and a good education, symbolized by the ‘tower’ of privilege. Because this has begun to lean sideways, the writings of ‘Day Lewis, Auden, Spender, Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and so on’ sitting inside it are self-conscious and skewed. In other words, the left-wing writing of the thirties displays the consciousness of an insecure class. This explains ‘the violence of their attack upon bourgeois society and also its half-heartedness. They are profiting by a society which they abuse’ (p. 170). Hence ‘the pedagogic, the didactic, the loudspeaker strain that dominates their poetry’ (p. 175). Unlike Orwell, however, Woolf doesn’t mention the word ‘Communist’. Her objection to these writers’ left-wing politics is that their commitment is hopelessly self-contradictory, being only the symptom of a lived dilemma. The only virtue she concedes them is the creative honesty of their self-absorption: ‘They have been incapable of giving us great plays, great novels, great poems…[but] they have had a power which, if literature continues, may prove to be a great value in the future. They have been great egotists’. Because these writers had had the courage to tell ‘the unpleasant truths about themselves’ posterity might well owe much to ‘the creative and honest egoism of the leaning-tower group’ (pp. 177–8).

Samuel Hynes has criticized Virginia Woolf for the conventionality of her attack on the young poets: ‘She had wanted beauty and fine language, and they gave her politics and experiment’.²² True, ‘The Leaning Tower’ contains a surprisingly traditionalist account of English literature, is evasive about the writer’s own class privilege, and expresses an open dislike of the angry, rebellious tone of thirties poetry, much as A Room of One’s Own had rejected anger as ‘fatal’ to good writing.²³ But its shrewdest point about the ‘Auden Generation’ writers is that they were only really interested in themselves and their own predicament; and Hynes does not refute this argument, which is in fact not far from his own. For all of those commentaries on the writers of the thirties, including The Auden Generation, which interprets their work as responding t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Remembering the 1930s
• Chapter 2: The pram in the hall
• Chapter 3: Vamps and victims
• Chapter 4: ‘Undeservedly forgotten’
• Chapter 5: Parables of the past
• Chapter 6: Collective and individual memory
• Notes
• Select bibliography