Critical Survey

The second special issue on the literature of the thirties follows on from an earlier edition of Critical Survey which brought together new critical writings on the period (volume 10, number 3, 1988). The first four essays selected are responses to regionalism and identity and the last two to the issues raised by the relationships of gender and generic fiction. Simon Featherstone analyses how two popular artistes, Gracie Fields (the ‘mill girl’) and Max Miller (‘the cheeky chappie’) achieved success in an entertainment industry that was changing rapidly in response to technological and cultural pressures. Their stardom depended on the dialogues between regional and national identities as part of a national cultural dynamic during a decade in which mass popular forms reconstituted the older regional and local traditions of dialogue and performance. Steven Matthews sees Auden’s injunction to ‘Consider this and in our time’ as a ‘clarion call to a particular, post-The Waste Land, form of modernity’. Focusing on Scottish and Irish writers (Louis MacNeice, Sorley Maclean, Grassic Gibbon et al.) Matthews argues that the temporality of some thirties’ writing aligns it closely with the emergent nationalisms familiar in recent postcolonial theory.

In May 1931 the comedians Gracie Fields and Max Miller appeared together at that odd English institution, the Royal Variety Performance. Both had already defined their public personae and audience appeal. Miller’s character was cocky, garrulous and, in non-royal contexts at least, obsessed with sex; Fields played a dizzy, warm-hearted Rochdale ingenue; Miller’s patter was shaped in the speech patterns of the South-East and his manner was alternately brash and seductive, whilst Fields communicated a version of the values and language of Lancashire mill-towns. Their careers were to follow different trajectories as well. Fields headed to Hollywood and early post-war retirement in Capri, whilst Miller, after his greatest stage successes in the later 1930s and 1940s, worked in the terminally declining variety theatres throughout the 1950s, dying in his native Brighton in 1963. But the contrasting performances that George V witnessed in the Spring of 1931 together provide a guide to a popular dynamic of 1930s social history, touching on the sensibilities and vulnerabilities of a mass audience, and the contexts and media of the production of British popular entertainment.

I take it that, when thinking through notions of literature and history in the Thirties, and of the Thirties text in history, it is essential to look at the ways in which the text has become established within historical narratives of the Thirties, as well as the relationship to history which the text seeks to establish for itself. For the two seem curiously interwoven in the subsequent formulations of the distinctiveness of the period, whereby claims made in the Thirties find their absolute echoes in later narratives of its ideas and patternings.

This article will explore the imaginative, philosophical and political relations between human labour and selfhood in a central fictional text of the 1930s: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair. James Leslie Mitchell, writing under the pseudonym of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published the three volumes that make up this trilogy between 1932 and 1934. The first, Sunset Song (1932) develops narrative and symbolic resources for the representation of the economic and cultural history of farming communities in North-East Scotland from 1911 to the end of the First World War (with a formally inventive prelude that reaches back to the Norman Conquest). This novel is centrally concerned with the developing consciousness of Chris Guthrie, a farmer’s daughter, and much of its free-indirect narrative style offers glimpses into her perceptions, fears, and desires as she moves from childhood to early adulthood. The second novel, Cloud Howe (1933), shows the pressure on community and on continuity as Chris moves with her second husband and her son to a small industrial town in the 1920s. It explores the efforts towards collectivity as well as the social and psychic costs of faith, as Chris and her family try to sustain relationships and histories in the conflictual and rapidly changing social relationships of Scotland in the 1920s. The final novel, Grey Granite (1933) follows the logic of the first two novels in moving to the city. Chris’s son Ewan acts out the logic of intense identification with the impersonal demands of the collective, a psychological and social adjustment that is signalled through the symbolic centrality of rocks and minerals to the novel, while Chris struggles to survive her financially precarious identity as an impoverished widow.

Between the Acts is one of Virginia Woolf’s most political novels. Once attacked for ‘its extraordinary vacancy and pointlessness’ and its lack of concern for ‘an external world’, it is now generally understood to be a deeply felt response to fascism, patriarchy and the coming of the Second World War. However, while the book’s feminist and pacifist themes are well explored, its central motif, a village pageant, is not well understood in terms of its historical context. Critics have tended to regard it in terms of tradition.

Mr Campion’s somewhat intemperate outburst erupts into the midst of Margery Allingham’s 1938 novel, The Fashion in Shrouds, causing serious damage to the detective’s veneer of gentility. Yet these words, disturbing as they are, are merely the tip of a complex gender iceberg – a paradoxical mass of attitudes and opinions that are all the more difficult to read for their being seven-eighths submerged beneath the familiar surface text of classical crime fiction. The underlying misogyny of the detective, Albert Campion, inevitably raises questions about his creator. What were Allingham’s opinions regarding the role of women in inter-war society? What was her ‘gender agenda’? As the above quotation suggests, the answers are far from clear. Is the reader expected to sympathise with Campion’s bizarre collection of gender assumptions – or is Allingham, to borrow a phrase from Alison Light, ‘making fun of heroes’? Allingham’s output during the 1930s varied enormously in tone and style, making it difficult to place both writer and detective within the parameters of gender and genre, but some insight into these evasive fictions can be gained through a comparison with her later work – specifically the wartime novel, Traitor’s Purse (1941). The outbreak of war in 1939 effects a change on both Allingham’s narrative and her gender agenda, manifested as a shift in perspective from the ‘problem’ of femininity to a crisis of masculinity, and this transition suggests that the disruption of war facilitated the articulation of a range of doubts and uncertainties that could not find expression in her fiction of the 1930s.

The 1930s can be seen as a key turning point in the development of the historical novel: it is during this decade that the historical novel becomes a genre particularly associated with women writers. Women had, of course, written historical novels before. The gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe and her successors have ‘historical’ settings, while Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot both wrote historical novels. Baroness Orczy had been producing her Scarlet Pimpernel books since 1905 and Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan had been a bestseller in 1906. As the 1920s wore on a steady flow of women’s historical fiction gathered pace. Georgette Heyer’s career as a bestselling historical romance writer began with The Black Moth in 1921. Naomi Mitchison published her first historical novel in 1923, while Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary Webb produced so-called ‘regional’ or ‘rural’ novels which are also set in the past.

You Made Me A Child MICHAEL MURPHY

Photographs of Shandong Peasant Children Sydney Olympian ANDREW SANT

Old Brave World Revisited: At Southwell PETER DE VILLE

The Pianist Lives By His Hands. His Hands Are Empty JOHN HAYNES

Soft Landings, Jenny Swann Languages, Gary Allen

Passionate Renewal, edited by Peter Lawson MATT SIMPSON

Spending Time with Walter, John Hartley Williams The Black-Out Book, Peter Carpenter MICHAEL MURPHY

The Chine, Mimi Khalvati JOHN HAYNES

Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, Dennis O’Driscoll ANDREW SANT

Notes on contributors