Critical Survey

This edition of Critical Survey is dedicated to papers first given at the ‘Literature of the 1930s: Visions and Revisions’ conference and includes radical new perspectives on woman novelists.

This essay has a double purpose. The first is to set out the function of France, as the place of salvation, in Storm Jameson’s writing in and about the 1930s. The second is to suggest that her familiarity with French culture – specifically, French writing – provided key models for some of the most important formal innovations she embarked on in that time. Jameson’s was one of the voices most consistently raised against the low, dishonest decade. She devoted herself to conducting two interconnected salvage operations on the social wreck: in the one, recovering a sense of human values (for her, those of a socialism that foregrounds respect for individual needs and dignity), and in the other, looking for that honest and politically effective way of writing about them which was the elusive goal of all her contemporaries on the Left. The success of both was linked for her to the French connection. In the mid-1930s, her Mirror in Darkness trilogy, planned as a five- or six-volume series novel, ran into sand. In the last volume, the heroine, Hervey, who is and is not Jameson, seems to have come to a dead end. Ten years later, however, she is back, in the Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945), speaking with a new voice. That Journal is written from France, and it breathes out, at every turn of the page, Hervey’s sense of a personal debt to the country for having redeemed her vision and her writing.

On 7 April 1937 Virginia Woolf told Stephen Spender that when writing The Years (1937) she had been anxious to ‘Keep one toe on the ground by means of dates, facts’. The Pargiters began as ‘a novel of fact’ and in two interesting and previously unacknowledged ways, The Years ended up as one.

The immediate impression is of a figure outrageously Quixotic, albeit bereft of the elaborate structure of chivalric belief which sustained that earlier hero; of a figure of catholic fideistic absurdity which approaches the ‘endearing’. Later, post-war photos of Campbell show a figure bearing an uncanny resemblance to W.C. Fields though – it has to be said – without the charm. The Campbell of the anecdote – simultaneously, as we are told, author of the longest fascist poem in English (apart from Ezra Pound’s) – would moreover seem to have stepped out of one of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. Their author had, it will be remembered, moved, under the influence of his friend Belloc, from a position of amiable if ineffectual liberalism to increasingly pronounced anti-Semitism. Yet the play of paradox in the earlier Father Brown stories shows little of this: its function is in general to demonstrate the resolvability of paradox through the operations of grace and the intimations of the enquiring subject, a kind of functional accommodation of deism and liberal individualism.

Randall Swingler was a poet in a very English literary tradition. He was the last of the Georgian poets, writing lovingly about the English countryside long after the Modernist urbanisation of poetry. He believed that poetry was the voice of the people. And he was the inheritor and the bearer of a radical vision of England rooted in the English rural landscape and the common people. Standing in direct line of descent from Langland, Winstanley, Milton, Blake, Morris and Edward Thomas, he was a late poet of Old Dissent, combining a love of the English countryside with Christian fellowship and an English Puritan’s hatred of privilege and power, property and money. For Randall Swingler, poetry had a moral and a political urgency, a responsibility to testify against cant and hypocrisy, and to bear witness to a utopian vision of an open-shirted, classless Commonwealth which would one day liberate human living, loving and creativity.

In ‘Why Art Follows Politics’, published in The Daily Worker in 1936, Virginia Woolf remarked on a change in the conditions for creativity in the late 1930s. She wrote that the artist’s studio was now ‘far from being a cloistered spot where he can contemplate his model or his apple in peace’, for it was ‘besieged by voices, all disturbing, some for one reason, some for another.’ She characterised the developing political crisis in terms of auditory disturbance or interruption, including the noises of radio news; the voices of dictators addressing the public by megaphone in the streets, and public opinion, which, Woolf wrote, called for artists to prove their social and political usefulness. In extreme political systems, artists were forced to compromise and use their work for political purposes – to ‘celebrate fascism; celebrate communism’ – in order to be allowed to practise at all.

‘Berlin meant Boys.’ Christopher Isherwood’s retrospective summary of the appeal of Germany for some of the writers of the 1930s set the tone for the rather limited critical evaluation of a very interesting feature of 1930s writing that was to follow. Almost every critical study of Auden, Isherwood and Spender feels obliged to make at least cursory reference to the fact that Germany represented some kind of libidinous homosexual nirvana. Atelling example is Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties. There he writes: ‘Germany was now the place to be: for artistic progressivism, but also because there sunshine and cocaine and sex, especially homosex, were up until Hitler’s intervention in 1933 so freely available. Berlin was a mythic sodom, and a sodomites’ mythic nirvana. The British homosexuals excitedly went there to ‘live’.’ I would like to add to this narrow and biased view some important and less simplistic aspects. I will try to show that the lure of Germany also touches on issues of class, politics and nationality. I will try to present the related transgressions that result from this entanglement not so much as biographical achievements or failures, but explore how they feature in the literary production of the writers of the era.

The writing of this paper was prompted by the recent publication by Harvill Press of The Last Voyage and Other Stories, an anthology which brings together Hanley’s earliest published shorter fiction from the 1930s. Two of these two stories – ‘The German Prisoner’ and ‘A Passion Before Death’ – were privately printed owing to the prevailing prohibitions on representations of sexuality. Hanley was originally an ‘ordinary seaman’ who subsequently built a reputation as a writer on his stories and novels of the sea-going working class. However, such an identity masks a diversity evident in his work from its inception and which developed over some fifty years, beginning with the publication of his first novel, Drift (1930) a narrative of unemployment and Catholic anguish in contemporary Liverpool. The five stories in The Last Voyage, of which three are directly concerned with maritime life, are a reflection of Hanley’s range, yet they all bear the traces of his preoccupations and tendency – compulsion even – to focus on the extremes of contemporary working-class experience.

William Empson famously suggested in his book Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) that ‘good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral’.1 This comment, and the discussion which follows it, has a good deal of characteristic Empsonian provocation and idiosyncrasy, and has rarely been pursued with seriousness by 1930s critics. Thus Valentine Cunningham says that this ‘cheeky dodge’ of Empson’s is at least half-serious, but is more inclined to emphasise the playful half of the intention

Left Review appeared for forty-four monthly issues between 1934 and 1938, produced by a group of volunteer poets, novelists and critics. However exciting it may have been as literary criticism, it can also be seen as a model of cultural democracy. The general notion of how culture and politics come together often does not extend beyond the recruitment of prominent cultural figures to endorse political positions. Left Review’s editors had a more fundamental concern and were constructing a relationship between politics and culture that was active; through their activity as writers, of both imaginative writing and critical commentary, they were contributing to social change – they were not just interpreting the world but helping to change it. That meant a serious rethinking of the nature of literature and also of the nature of political processes.

Imagine a newly-built car park near the Roman fort of Borcovicium on Hadrian’s Wall, and an imaginary meeting on 29 September 1938, the day of the Munich agreement. Through one of the entrances strolls a gangly, unshaven young man of thirty-one with a dirty shirt and an excited look. He is on annual leave from the Borough Treasurer’s office in Blackburn and has walked 120 miles to the Wall from Settle in Ribblesdale. This is Alfred Wainwright, twenty years before the Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells (1955-66) made him famous. His first book is about this walk to the Wall in 1938.

When Rosamond Lehmann died in 1990, her obituary notices were obsessive in unearthing links between her fiction and her personal life. In particular, obituary writers seemed fixated on the men in Lehmann’s life, on her passionate affairs and their equally intense traumatic collapse. As Hermione Lee pointed out in The Times, ‘No man would get obituaries like’ these.1 Women writers always run the risk of being judged and classified according to gendered criteria, especially when, as in Lehmann’s case, their work conforms to the literary models that have traditionally provided the staple diet of middlebrow ‘women’s fiction’. It is, however, more helpful to see Lehmann’s novels of the 1930s not so much as an autobiographical journey or a transparent reflection of her erotic career but as a register of the emotional climate of her times. The self-conscious and subversive deployment of the romance format in a work such as The Weather in the Streets (1936) serves to interrogate the relationship between sexualities and textualities, by exploring the artistic and social divisions characteristic of the period, where the failure of grand narratives exposes the linked crises of gender and aesthetics that absorbed many writers of that generation. Addressing this very issue, Lehmann regretted the ‘androgynous disguises, the masculine masks’ adopted by modern women in order to cope with a world in collapse, a ‘general post-war fissuring and crackup of all social and moral structures’.

Intertextuality is basic to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s narratives: she is a formidably learned, effortlessly allusive writer. From her slyly absurd references to Wordsworth in the lush tropical setting of Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927) through her retelling of Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche to produce an allegory of class oppression in her first historical novel, The True Heart (1929), to the densely woven intertextuality of Summer Will Show (1936), she uses allusion both to ground her apparently implausible narratives within literary history and to question and parody the politics, ‘history’, and narratology of her predecessors. It is appropriate that in this novel, where the lesbian romance in Paris is precisely coterminous with the 1848 revolution, many of the allusions are to nineteenth-century French literary history. Warner’s ‘unwriting’ of Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale has received a great deal of attention since it was first noted by Terry Castle in her 1990 theorisation of the lesbian triangular plot. Later writers, in contrast, have emphasised the allusion’s Marxist significance. Quite another fictional genealogy seems more to the point, however, when we consider Warner’s characterisation of Minna Lemuel, the revolutionary Jewish story-teller: the representation, usually by women writers, of the powerful, sexually active, sometimes evil and sometimes doomed femme artiste, as in Madame de Stael’s Corinne, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, George Sand’s Consuelo, and Colette’s La Seconde. It is now abundantly clear that the intertextuality of Summer Will Show demonstrates that the novel is narratologically, politically, and sexually revolutionary.

The production of models, narratives or ‘visions’ of the 1930s, as with any other periodising, involves processes of selection and rejection, inclusion and exclusion. It is a matter of no small interest that one of the most significant areas of exclusion from such paradigms has been the Empire. This article points to, but hardly constitutes a rectification of, that situation. Rather than any attempt at ‘the big picture’, in its allotted space it offers more in the way of a thumbnail sketch, but one which aims at something like a symptomatic relevance in its juxtaposition of two areas of textual production to give a sense of the ideological and political struggles taking place via the various envisionings and revisionings of imperialism in this period.

Notes on contributors