13

Mixed Feelings

This was the third of four Northcliffe lectures given at University College London in 1988. The lectures look back to the literature and society of the Thirties, the period when I was first taking an interest in such matters. Among other things, this talk argues that posterity has been wrong to ignore the work of Edward Upward, who now, in his tenth decade, remains a writer of exceptional originality. Indeed the literature of that age is too easily neglected or derided; for example, the work of Chrisopher Caudwell is much more interesting than you would guess from the dismissive attitudes of more recent Marxists. The relative neglect of some of the writers of the period may be in part attributable to the eminence of W. H. Auden, who figures more largely in the next chapter.

 

The crisis that engaged the minds and spirits of the bourgeois writers of the Thirties appeared to them to be unique; and in one respect at least it was so, for I do not think that any English writers before them – or since – have felt as they did about inequality and the absence of respect and affection between classes. There was an evident need for something more than fellow-feeling, more than progressive reform. It was not merely that they began to attend to the plight of the poor. They applied themselves to a need much more overwhelming – the inevitability of vast historical change, of revolution and war, of which poverty and class hatred were the social signs. Conscience was reinforced by intellect, and the desire to love one’s fellow humans by fear.

Because of all this the Thirties offer us what we are not sure how to handle: a literature of conscience that is also a literature of fear, and sometimes of a certain pleasure in the fear, even of a wish to be clever about the fear and the pleasure.

These years have seen a boom in sorrow;

The presses of idleness issued more despair And it was honoured;

Gross Hunger took on more hands every month,

Erecting here and everywhere his vast Unnecessary workshops;

Europe grew anxious about her health,

Combines tottered, credits froze,

And business shivered in a banker’s winter …¹

The years of slump see a boom in sorrow, despair is inflated as when too much money is printed, Hunger becomes an industrialist, a mass employer, when the normal mass employers are closing their factories and yards. These are conceited inversions – perhaps we might think them just a little too smart. But in the world of 1936 they were (and are) very telling. And this was one of the voices we listened to; it was Auden who found and formed the right period style. There were others who warned us of our spiritual desolation. Eliot was calling us ‘decent godless people’ whose only monument would be ‘the asphalt road/ And a thousand lost golf balls’.² Ezra Pound blamed the bankers, ‘news control and perverted publicity’, and tried to sell his economic panacea.³ John Strachey proved to the large Left Book Club readership that Communism was both desirable and inevitable. But a poet might believe that to be so, yet express, along with the excitement and alarm attending such a belief, a sense that the compound aura of feeling around it included also nostalgia and regret. It was hard to imagine the poetry of the future, and the poetry of the present had to deal with the particular sorrows and threats of the present, which required the sacrifice of much of the past to the necessities of history and conscience.

To understand what it felt like to be in this position we must first see that these writers were not simply experiencing one of those intermittent stirrings of conscience which had afflicted the intelligent bourgeoisie in the past, much as it does today. There really is a qualitative difference between these types of conscientious attention to social evils. Throughout the nineteenth century the attention of the well-to-do was at random intervals drawn to the existence of intolerable social conditions, and the harsh measures used to mitigate their consequences. When the crime rate increased greatly after the French Revolution those in power blamed the libertinism of that revolution, and took repressive countermeasures. But liberals blamed instead the policies of the government itself. ‘Our progress towards the minimum of endurable privation’, wrote William Maginn in 1830, ‘has been as rapid as the most inveterate enemy of England could desire’. Prison turned occasional thieves into professional criminals; bankruptcy was common; and the principal remedy for these ills was emigration, either voluntary or compulsory, with consequent depletion of the labour force. The responsibility for social ills was firmly placed on the poor themselves.⁴ The Morning Chronicle could startle its readers into a momentary awareness that the cities were really ‘horrible muckheaps’, as William Morris called them; Dickens could urge his readers to understand that rich and poor were of one body, that the diseases of the slums were not obliged to spare the middle classes. Thackeray expressed his dismay at learning how people had to live in slums not five minutes away from his own Garrick Club. Mayhew’s Life and Labour of the London Poor (1861-2) placed a lot of evidence, some of it horrible, some of it curious, before the public; and The Economist condemned his work as ‘an encouragement to communism’.⁵ But horror soon gave way to renewed indifference, and the problems were again left to the heroic charitable organizations, until the next wave of interest. These periodic alarms about the condition of England continued well into the twentieth century, and they still go on. The uproar caused by the television play Cathy Come Home was typical: Tony Garnett told me that a year after its showing, when the urgent calls for action had subsided, the number of people in Cathy’s position had greatly increased. No doubt it is now much larger.

Between these periodic awakenings many middle-class people appeared to resume their old view of poverty as inevitable or selfinflicted. The poor (the proletariat, as they began about this time to be called) were an anonymous unwashed mass, to be feared, despised, and disciplined. The severity with which they were treated by those forced into contact with them went far beyond what was needed to punish or even merely exploit them, as for example in heavy fines for lateness at work, and the prohibition of singing in factories.⁶

Most people rarely came into contact with the poor except in their capacity as servants. Engels, who had told the world about the lives of workers in Manchester, was impressed by the arrangements which made it unnecessary for the well-to-do ever to see the conditions under which those workers lived; the roads which carried them from their suburbs to their businesses were driven through the working-class districts in such a way that they did not need to pass through the mean streets. And he observed that ‘the middle classes have more in common with every other nation in the world than with the proletariat which lives on their own doorsteps’.⁷ Not the least remarkable aspect of this situation was the docility of the working class. Engels saw that Chartism was simply too deferential in its manners, too gentle, to achieve its objectives. But he believed that the next slump in the cycle would inevitably produce a qualitative change, a change which entailed revolution; deference would stop, the attention of the middle class would no longer be switched on and off at convenient intervals; the bourgeoisie would be involved in a world-historical process, and not merely taking a look at the problem when it chose to do so.

He was wrong, of course, and his mistake was repeated in the Thirties, when capitalism was once again in its death throes, and history had again brought about that qualitative change which precedes revolution. But deference was again triumphing over tendencies to militancy. The conditions of the poor were perhaps not very different. The city was still the great image of social division, often not much changed from the previous century when Walter Bagehot, in a famous conceit that would nowadays qualify him as a Postmodernist, compared it to a newspaper: ‘everything is there, and everything is disconnected’; ⁸ wealth and poverty, virtue and scandal, all in the same place. In the nineteenth century there was a popular song called ‘I can’t find Brummagem’ and in the twentieth the middle-class poet Louis MacNeice, exiled there for a time, called it ‘a sprawling inkblot’, lived on its genteel south side, and escaped by car whenever he could, leaving behind his ‘unresponsive’ and ‘undernourished’ students; as they made the prison-like lecture-rooms resound to the verses of Homer recited in Midland accents they seemed as different from the ‘clean-cut working man’ of his fantasy as they were from Oxford undergraduates. ⁹ And ‘up in the industrial district on the north side of Birmingham the air was a muddy pond and the voices of those who expected nothing a chorus of frogs for ever resenting and accepting the status quo of stagnation’.¹⁰

The calm or resignation of the proletariat in these pre-revolutionary times continued to puzzle middle-class left-wingers, and their puzzlement is a measure of the frightful task they set themselves when they proposed to breach the class frontier. I think again of Edmund Wilson’s novel, in which the narrator begins to explain Marxism to his working-class mistress but soon gives up, seeing that she can’t believe it has anything to do with her and the way of life she knows and he doesn’t. I myself lived through most of the Thirties in a small town in the Isle of Man which had very high seasonal unemployment. Poor children were easily identified because they wore clogs, issued free by the municipality to the children of the unemployed. These children were despised but also feared by those of us, not all that much richer, who wore boots or shoes, were brought up not to be rough like the clog-wearers, and threatened with their fate if naughty. There was some grumbling about the bosses when times were particularly hard, and even, at a moment of extreme poverty, a successful general strike. But for the most part the interests of working-class people didn’t extend far beyond their own kind and their own problems. There was a good deal of gaiety and gossip, since within these limits everybody knew everybody else, or if not, knew her cousin. There was no great envy or dislike of the gentry, indeed there was a measure of respect (one was always being told to behave like a gentleman). Animosity was reserved largely for those who were a rung lower, the wearers of clogs. I don’t remember any talk of revolution and the word ‘bourgeoisie’ wasn’t used; nor, for that matter, was ‘proletariat’.

All this tended to reduce the possibility of concerted proletarian action; it was just the sort of thing the infatuated bourgeois intellectual couldn’t know about. There was another consideration tending to reduce that possibility, no doubt less surprising to us than to people in the Thirties, few of whom will have known about it anyway (which illustrates the difference between living in a period and knowing about it later). It is this: people who had work were better off than ever before; real wages rose throughout the decade, and the gap between those in work and the unemployed steadily widened. It was no easier then than now to feel the misfortunes of others; and as one motored down the new asphalt roads to the ball-strewn golf course the unfortunate, like Engel’s slum-dwellers, were nowhere to be seen, and were remembered, if at all, only for their feckless refusal to prosper. Yet there was a myriad of them, out of sight, not only of the poor but of the crippled. More than two-and-a-half million men were drawing pensions for disabilities sustained in the still quite recent war. These were carefully apportioned: 16s. for a whole right arm, 14s. for an arm missing below the elbow, and so on. These men tended to show up only on Armistice Day. And if you had £5 a week, poverty and privation were remote considerations. If you were a ‘rentier poet’ with £500 a year you thought about them only because of a deliberate and educated act of conscience. And once committed to this course you might feel compassion, beyond necessity no doubt, for almost the whole population; manual workers earned about £3 a week, and 88 per cent of the population had less than £250 a year.¹¹ It is true that a family like my own managed fairly well on £3, and people lived with enviable style on £5. But the bourgeois poets could hardly be expected to know that.

The point is that consciousness of the need and the possibility of action was to a very considerable extent an affair of the middle-class conscience. And it is surely to the credit of the intellectual left, now somewhat despised for naïveté, that they were so moved, that they came to believe that they must do something about the whole system that in their view made poverty and war equally inevitable. When they joined the Communist Party, or fellow-travelled, they were not climbing on to a bandwagon; even in the days of its greatest pre-war success, the great days of the Left Book Club, before the German-Soviet Pact, the Party had only a few thousand members. Ordinary people only began to worry about world politics in 1938, with the frantic trench-digging in Hyde Park, and the barrage balloons, so weird then, soon to be so familiar. Moreover the events of 1939, including the introduction of conscription, made political argument an irrelevance, especially for nineteen-year-olds like myself. Even those who had said they would not fight in a capitalist-imperialist war quietly went along. The rhetoric of the coming proletarian revolution was no longer much heard.

As I’ve suggested, it had always been in some degree ignorant. The proletariat wasn’t the beautiful, doomed, unlucky, but potentially irresistible body fantasized by the bourgeois Communist sympathizer, transferring his sense of what it meant to be outcast, alienated, maudit, to the worker. The proletariat was a strange tribe, and it might be lovable. In fact intellectuals invented Mass Observation to find how the workers lived and behaved, much as if they were a ‘primitive’ tribe and the Observers anthropologists willing to learn a new language in return for knowledge of an alien culture. They observed such events as the Silver Jubilee celebrations of George V and the coronation of George VI, and they observed perfectly ordinary, arbitrarily chosen days like 12 May 1937. They wanted to know what people did in dance halls, bathrooms, and pubs. They developed the fashionable genre of reportage, and they unwittingly established techniques of market research that are still too much with us. Their motives were excellent; they wished to learn about and possibly love the unknown, the Other.

The poets looked at the proletariat less methodically, more speculatively than the Mass Observers. Tending to repeat one another, they were, for example, astonished at the degree to which the poor seemed to depend for comfort on the cinema – not Russian films or John Grierson’s, but Hollywood’s.

Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door;
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford …

 

Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed –
Sleepwalking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.¹²

How did Cecil Day-Lewis know this? He didn’t; he assumed it must be so. And where did George Barker find the word ‘marvellous’ used as he uses it in these lines?

I encountered the crowd returning from amusements,
The Bournemouth Pavilion, or the marvellous gardens,
The Palace of Solace, the Empyrean Cinema …¹³

Here ‘marvellous’ means, roughly, ‘not marvellous’, or ‘what ordinary people ignorantly think marvellous’, and Barker of course got it from Auden (‘long marvellous letters’, etc.). It may also have been Auden who first put it about that cinemas were a pathetic kind of solace for the poor: ‘bowers of bliss/Where thousands are holding hands’, ‘Gaumont theatres/Where fancy plays on hunger to produce / The noble robber, ideal of boys.’¹⁴ It didn’t matter if you used the cinema yourself as a means of escape, as MacNeice and his wife did, four or five times a week, in Birmingham, going

 

solely for entertainment and never for value, holding hands like a shopgirl with her boy-friend. The organist would come up through the floor, a purple spotlight on his brilliantined head, and play us the ‘Londonderry Air’ and bow and go back to the tomb. Then the stars would return and the huge Cupid’s bows of their mouths would swallow up everybody’s troubles – there were no more offices or factories or shops, no more bosses or foremen, no more unemployment and no more employment, no more danger of disease or babies, nothing but bliss in a celluloid world where the roses are always red and the Danube is always blue.¹⁵

 

You can tell from the tone that it was all the other people in the cinema who were experiencing this bogus solace and not the MacNeices, who were there with them, but not of them, almost nightly, being entertained, not seeking value where only the others could be deluded into thinking they might find it.

Such, it was supposed, were the compensations of terribly restricted lives. Here another poet describes how those poor lives are lived:

The greengrocer’s cart, the haggling to save a halfpenny,
On the boiled orange or the Argus-eyes potato;
The fecund red-elbowed women with their baskets,
And their humourless menfolk.

These will never hold aces or travel farther
Than a tram will take them. And their summum bonum
The threepenny double which comes up by a head,
Unlimited bitter.¹⁶

Those lines come from a long poem, desperate, indignant, compassionate; but it certainly makes the poor keep their distance. The Horatian stanza is itself a mark of detachment, even of retreat. Then there is the learned little joke about the potatoes, the patronizing summum bonum, the women so very unlike our own (‘fecund red-elbowed’) and their men, so very unlike us (‘humourless’). The workers’ Cockaigne is defined by a bet won with a derisory stake, and a gutter flowing with beer. The poem is saying to the poor what Upward’s hero said to his girl: ‘How ugly you are!’ But it is also trying to add, ‘This is what we must learn to love’. Those fashionable definite articles (the cart, the haggling, the orange, the potato, the women, the threepenny double), also from Auden (neatly labelled by David Trotter, who calls them articles of ‘unfulfilled specificity’¹⁷), mean ex uno disce omnes: from these types you will understand the collective whole. I don’t know about boiled oranges, which sound exotic, but the proximity of this one to the obviously substandard potato suggests that it represents the exoticism of a poverty we do not, at this stage anyway, share.

Kenneth Allott’s poem goes on to tell us that the poet lies in bed thinking of these things, hearing the water knocking in the pipes, or perhaps it is his own heart; while outside the ‘necessary’ light awakens ‘the seasons and cities’. The light is necessary as Auden’s lovers are necessary, part of the going on of a world from which the poet contemplates his detachment. ‘The moon is usual … . The planets rush towards Lyra in the lion’s charge … And tomorrow comes. It’s a world. It’s a way.’¹⁸ The usual is given cosmic scope, yet we don’t belong to it. Mere rags of it as we are, we cannot fail to join the universe; yet to make a point of our having to do so also sets us apart, just as we are apart from the red-elbowed women and the humourless men whom we must also somehow join. To know the ordinary other one is forced to be extraordinary, which makes it difficult to join the ordinary. The poetry emerges as at once cool and distraught, and so much in the fashion and dialect of the time that to see its value requires a patient effort of historical understanding. Given that, we may read it not exactly as it was but with a supplement of later sympathy which shows it to be struggling for a cathexis unwillingly willed. It is an attempt to do as Auden’s sages taught – to renounce ‘what our vanity has chosen’, to pursue ‘understanding with patience like a sex’.

The sheer difficulty of pursuing understanding like a sex was coldly described by George Orwell as both moral and technical.

 

Books about ordinary people behaving in an ordinary manner are extremely rare [he said], because they can only be written by someone who is capable of standing both inside and outside the ordinary man, as Joyce for instance stands inside and outside Bloom; but this involves admitting to yourself that you are an ordinary person for nine-tenths of the time, which is exactly what no intellectual ever wants to do.¹⁹

 

But, even if being a writer is to be truly extraordinary only one-tenth of the time, you are a writer when you are writing, and so extraordinary, even when writing about the ordinary, the necessary, the usual; and Joyce would serve equally well as evidence in support of this truism. Orwell himself was compelled to behave in an extraordinary way, to be a writer of pastoral, by the excitements of those early days in Barcelona, intimations of proletarian triumph which for a moment induced even in Auden a sense of solidarity with the workers. Orwell’s essay ‘Looking back on the Spanish War’ ends with a poem about an Italian militiaman, ‘his battered face/Purer than any woman’s’, and about a handshake that is as much between classes as between men:

The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns …²⁰

So to Orwell himself it seemed that the writer must search for and love an ordinary wisdom different from his own (the Italian soldier ‘was born knowing what I had learned/Out of books and slowly’); and there is no inaccuracy here in using the word ‘love’ and no difficulty in understanding what it was that Orwell loved – a person who stood for a class:

a fierce, pathetic, innocent face … which I only saw for a minute or two … He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forcedlabour camps.

 

He is one soldier but all that as well:

… the thing I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.

Orwell didn’t often write like that; but that he did so on this occasion shows the special quality of the intellectual’s attitude to the worker, however difficult it was to articulate. It isn’t the slight ache of conscience over breakfast; it isn’t anything Morris or Ruskin or Shaw would have felt. It is also very different from that ‘aesthetic’ form of socialism to which Wilde gave his blessing, a socialism that did not seek the handclasp of subtle with strong, but hoped by a redistribution of income and property to avoid such contacts altogether. ‘The chief advantage of Socialism is undoubtedly the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hard on nearly everybody.’ Hideous poverty, hideous ugliness, hideous starvation, says Wilde, tempt one to try to ameliorate things, which always makes them worse. Despite its facetious tone, Wilde’s essay encapsulates some of the stronger motives of English parlour socialism. The sentiments of the Thirties writers were different because they wanted, or tried to want, that handclasp with the unknown and innocent oppressed.

 

It is part of the story that the wish to love was accompanied by its opposite, an uneasy desire to withdraw, a repugnance like that of Upward’s hero. Stephen Spender explained that in the end he finally had no real choice but to prefer his own aesthetic individualism to the ‘historically correct position’.

To believe that my individual freedom could gain strength from my seeking to identify myself with ‘progressive’ forces was different from believing that my life must become an instrument of means decided upon by political leaders. I came to see that within the struggle for a juster world there is a further struggle between the individual who cares for long-term values and those who are willing to use any and every means to gain their political ends – even good ends. Within even a good social cause, there is a duty to fight for the pre-eminence of individual conscience … the individual must not be swallowed up by the concept of social man.²¹

 

Spender is thinking of the disillusioning tactics of the Party in those years, but the word that keeps on recurring is ‘individual’, and the sacrifice that is refused is the sacrifice of individuality, of the subtle hand; once the position is clearly understood, the writer, unless he is as totally committed as Caudwell or Upward, simply backs away from proletarianization; the sacrifice is too appalling, he feels he would have nothing left to work with or indeed to love with.

So most of the middle-class writers did fall away from active leftist politics as the decade drew towards its end. But the record of their affair with the workers is an honourable one, and we shouldn’t allow stock responses about pink or pansy poets to usurp our judgement. They had mixed feelings, but, as Auden remarked, poetry ‘might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings’,²² which could very well consist of a consciousness of extraordinary novelty and deep anxieties about loving the unknown.

A clear expression of similarly mixed feelings is Edward Upward’s The Spiral Ascent, a trilogy of novels long meditated and completed only in 1977. It has won less attention than it deserves, perhaps because it came so late, perhaps because it was easy to deplore Upward’s departure from the manner of his admired early story ‘The Railway Accident’, which, as Isherwood records in Lions and Shadows, was one of the Mortmere fantasies devised by Upward and Isherwood in their time at Cambridge. There is also a change of manner from Upward’s early novel Journey to the Border (1938). Samuel Hynes, in one of his rare mistaken judgements, says that ‘the tension between his imagination and his political ideology shrivelled his natural gifts, and left him an arid, unimaginative and unreadable realist’.²³ In fact Upward did feel he had to achieve a new socialist simplicity of style, but he believed he could do so without ceasing to be an artist; for ‘an artist cannot give his best to a political cause if in his art he is a politician first and an artist second’. Of course it was difficult to hold this position, and indeed holding it is a principal subject of his book. He could not altogether abandon the style of fantasy which came naturally to him as a writer; but, although it is true that the first volume of the trilogy represents a willed socialist realism, Upward can justifiably claim that in the rest of the work he was moving to something richer – not the old Balzac bottles with new wine in them, but what he calls ‘new forms’. He admits that he found this progress easier after he became disillusioned with politics – ‘the Party, I was able to see, was becoming un-Marxist’ – and when he left the Party in 1948 he was in a position to abandon the strict canons of socialist realism, or to transform that kind of realism in very remarkable ways.²⁴

Upward’s hero is a middle-class, public-school poet, sure of his vocation but full of what Caudwell would have described as an anarchistic hatred of his own class, of the ‘poshocrats’ as he always calls them. The early scenes report with remarkable directness some naïve conversations between this poet, who is a straight version of Upward himself, and his friend, who is Isherwood. “‘I’ve realized lately that I’m against the plus-foured plutocracy, and for the cockneys and lower orders,”’ says the Isherwood character. “‘I’m for them too,” Alan said. “But I haven’t your courage. I am afraid they will despise me. How did you do it?” “By behaving naturally. They are rather proud of their gentlemanly friend.”’ These lower orders are contrasted with the guests at the big holiday hotel, blazered young men and confidently striding girls. ‘In their dress, their voices, their every minutest gesture and facial movement, they represented for Alan what he loathed more than anything else in the world: they were the loyal young supporters of that power … which despised the living poets and the truth.’ Not long after this, however, Alan goes to bed with one of the confidently striding girls; she is about to be married but clearly enjoys her bourgeois irresponsibility. The theorists were always saying that all socialist realism need do to discredit the bourgeoisie is to show it as it actually is.

As one reads these early pages it is difficult to avoid the thought that this very deliberate attempt to invent a Communist style of writing merely proves that the new style is bound to be mistaken for bad writing by the unreconstructed bourgeoisie. However, Upward, even in this first volume, confounds this judgement by doing some good bourgeois writing, too. Certainly the effect is original, and it seems to me that the value of the whole is enhanced by the intrusion of this highly accented unproletarian rhetoric into flat grey stretches of candid socialist realism. In the representation of natural objects for instance, Upward cannot prevent himself from writing well in an older style: ‘Then the miniature waves detaching themselves from the spent breaker and scarcely having the power of individual motion: these flopped on the sand with pause and dip like the rolling of a metal ellipse, or like the movement of the genitals of a naked male runner.’ For all its ideological assertiveness, its continual worrying about how to mix solitary art and comradely Party business, Upward’s book is always written, always organized, and always true to the sort of self-consciousness that is supposed to be the privilege of the privileged. In that degree it is pastoral, but it does not acquiesce in the fate of the poor. And if it was true, as Upward believed in 1937, that only a Marxist or near-Marxist attitude could produce good writing,²⁵ it was equally true, and just as well understood by him, that only good writers could produce good writing, and that, because of their traditional habits of mind and of work, good writers would have their difficulties with Communism, and find it hard to avoid pastoral attitudes to the workers.

Here Alan and his friends are watching some workers at a dance: “‘What is it that makes them so fine?” … “It can’t be just sex.” “No. Perhaps it’s beauty, eh?” “Then it’s because they’re living.” “Yes, that’s partly it. But there’s more to it than that … I’ve got it … It’s because they’re doomed.” “Boy, I believe you’re right.” “It’s because in ten to fifteen years’ time all these girls will be prematurely middle-aged and ugly. And they’re dancing now in defiance of the inevitable rot which will come upon them.” “Yes, that’s it.”’ Later this insight is developed: it isn’t only the young women who are doomed; the men are just as fine and they’re doomed, too. “‘What makes people vile is being comfortably off. That’s why most of the hotel visitors are so poisonous. They are the wicked, the devils. Only the doomed are good, and we must be on their side always.”’ His friend agrees. “‘Our duty is to live among the doomed, and in our poetry we must record and celebrate what they are.”’ And then Alan names the price to be paid for choosing the noble and rejecting the vile: “‘We ourselves, in our own way, are doomed too … We shall always be misfits, not properly belonging to any social class. We shall never settle down anywhere. We must walk the earth. We must descend into hell.”’

There is often a certain quasi-religious fervour in Upward, but rarely to the degree that in this passage he attributes to himself as a young man: first to be like the disciples and walk the earth, homeless and without possessions; then to be like Christ and harrow hell. It seems to be weirdly excessive, absolutely dated, yet because rather than in spite of that, it sounds right. It would be as well to add that there is present also a hint of self-irony, a suggestion of reserve. And we can’t grasp the full sense of these opening pages until their material reappears, splendidly transformed, at the close of the trilogy, 760 pages later.

What follows it more immediately is Alan’s going to bed with his girl poshocrat, and then contemplating suicide. He understands that a commitment to Communism could save him, but fears the effect of such a move on his writing. His poetry had failed hitherto because it wasn’t, for want of such commitment, rooted in life and reality. To have any hope of writing well he must join the Party. But he must not do so simply in order to be able to write poetry. And in any case Party work might prevent his writing. Finally he joins because there is no tolerable alternative.

When Alan meets the workers at the local branch he is struck by the drabness of the habitat and the beauty of the inhabitants: ‘From their eyes, bleared or bright or set in undernourished faces marked with skin disease, there looked out the life of the future.’ They were finer than the well-dressed men and women from the hotel, more beautiful than the well-kept girl he had fallen in love with in the last days of his bourgeois life. He must work with these people, distribute pamphlets, turn up at meetings; he must also write, but there could be no compromise with bohemianism or liberal anarchism. Shunning bourgeois romance, he takes up with Elsie, who is plain and has not ‘the look of a lady’; when he marries her he is quite expressly ‘marrying the party’. She is thus a perfect emblem of the sexualized politics I’ve been trying to explain.

There is no salvation outside the Party, but we are not allowed to forget that its routine apocalyptic certainties, ritual condemnations, and repetitive propaganda can be tedious. Nevertheless the faith, as expounded in Alan’s ‘dusty stable loft’, will prevail, and it is a great thing to be living at this hour of crisis, ‘qualitatively different from former periodic crises’. The hour which should have struck in 1917 – when the clock was stopped by the interventions of democratic socialism, by a Labour Party which was merely an instrument of capitalism - that hour is now at hand.

Writing after the event, Upward must have been conscious of historical ironies. The Labour Party ceased to be the servile instrument of capital when Moscow, in the interest of the Popular Front, suddenly said it wasn’t. The confident assertion that ‘Communism was the only force in the world which was uncompromisingly on the side of the doomed and against them who wanted to keep them doomed’ must surely have acquired an ironical ring after the Stalinist purges became common knowledge. But at this stage Alan is keeping faith with a pure Communism that can cohabit with poetry. He is aware of a tension between them, but that tension is exactly what must be resolved by faith and works.

The beauty of Upward’s slowly developing design is that such conflicts are registered and reconciled, as perhaps they only could be reconciled, in a work of art. It may be that in this respect it stands alone. Some of Upward’s younger contemporaries thought their duty to be the writing of articles and pamphlets or poems about those who excelled all others at the making of driving-belts, thereby violating their sense of what poetry really was. Upward finds a way of putting in all the pedestrian detail and giving it a relation to the whole work (a criterion of value despised, I’m afraid, by modern Marxists). Alan finishes his long poem after many years of work, and his poem is Upward’s novel, with all its longueurs and embarrassments. Here is a hero who is disgusted by Party rhetoric, by the stereotyped gesture, even by the infidelity of its leaders to Marxist Leninism; yet when he is expelled from the Party he falls ill with the sickness of the excommunicated.

Upward calls his trilogy ‘a dialectical triad’ – the political and the poetic as dialectical opposites, with a synthesis at the end, following the ‘spiral ascent’. The final volume represents the synthesis. Alan is no longer described in the third person; the narrator is now ‘I’. He has withdrawn into bourgeois security, but in finishing the book he simultaneously finishes his poem, so that they share a beautiful coda, the effect of which is to synthesize poetry and Communism.

To express admiration for such refined structures and transformations is to use measures devised for the sort of writing which advocates of the proletarian novel reject. However, they are the measures appropriate to such skill and originality. Anybody who wants quick assurances that these are the proper terms of praise might look at a recent short story of Upward’s, called ‘At the Ferry Inn’, which appeared in 1985.²⁶ It recounts a single incident and is seemingly a quite flat and over-detailed piece of slightly disguised autobiography. On inspection, however, it is not that at all. A poet called Walter Selwyn, quite obviously Auden, pays a visit to his old friend Arnold Olney, that is Upward, on the Isle of Wight, where Upward happens to live. They have been estranged for forty years (perhaps since Auden’s departure to the United States in 1939). The ferry will bring Selwyn over for a day before he returns to New York. The arrival of the ferry is described with much detail. Among its passengers Olney observes a young man, ‘tall, broad-hipped, sloping-shouldered’, his hair thick and yellow, his cheeks plump and smooth-skinned. It is as if only a week or two has passed since their last meeting.

Olney (Upward) has had a dream about his friend in which he met him at the ferry, remembering at the same time Auden’s sonnet ‘just as his dream foretold’ – which, though he doesn’t say so, contains the lines ‘at each meeting, he was forced to learn,/The same misunderstanding would arise … ’ ‘How well Auden’s sonnet gets the inconsequent feeling of dream’, thinks Olney. In the dream the poet’s face is ‘saggingly old’. Also in the dream Olney accepts a suitcase from a stranger, and places it on the steps of a bank.

The friends drink at the Ferry Inn, with a group of hostile blueblazered poshocrats at the bar. Perhaps they overheard Olney telling his friend about the bomb in the dream, and the interpretation offered by Selwyn, which is that the bomb stands for the dreamer’s guilt for so many years of political activism. ‘You were loyal for longer than the rest of us’, says the poet, ‘to the “clever hopes”, as Auden afterwards called them, that we all fell for in the nineteen thirties, but your book has brilliantly rejected them at last.’ He has been reading the final volume of The Spiral Ascent (which actually came out four years after Auden’s death). The author of that book protests that he was ‘deconverted’ not from Communism but from Stalinism. But the poet insists on congratulating him for having understood that he must put his trust not in politicians but in artists. ‘Art’, he says, quoting Baudelaire in an Anglo-American French accent, ‘is the best testimony human beings can give of their dignity.’ By now they sense the growing disapproval of the blazered poshocrats; but the author nevertheless affirms his confidence in Leninist Marxism as a force in a world of deepening capitalist crisis; the coming revolution must prevent nuclear war. The poet now says that a proletarian revolution was never a clever hope, adding that poets didn’t save a single Jew from the gas chambers. Whereupon he departs to the lavatory, leaving his host to reflect on the hostility of the yachtsmen, but also to remember that, had he not known the poet, he ‘would never have known how marvellous human life at its best could be’. After a long wait he goes in search of his friend, fearing that he might have fallen ill or been beaten up. But he has gone, and Olney can only glimpse him on the disappearing ferry, his face ‘even more saggingly and horrifyingly old’ than it had been in the dream. Was the poet offended? No; he had waved cheerfully, the estrangement was over, though they could never meet again.

It is a complex tale, dream within dream; here is a dreamlike double Auden, quoting himself as if he were another poet, the old poet quoting the young one, of whom he no longer approves; here is Upward’s paranoid vision of middle-class manners. The inn of the outer dream is the womb towards which, on such occasions, there is a retreat. The poet’s face is old in the dream, young in the dreamed reality. There is a synthesis of old aspirations and old conflicts, the clever hopes raised above cleverness, the Thirties as the low dishonest decade of the defector, the very poet who had, in that time, shown how marvellous human life could be. Reportage and fantasy are reconciled. Baudelaire was right; but so, too, was Marx; and so too was Kafka in his union of world and dream.

Upward is sometimes called naïve, or even ignorant, but to join that chorus is to accept the myth which, as I’ve said, is partly the creation of Orwell, though it also owes much to political opponents like Wyndham Lewis. From Lewis we get an antithetical view of Thirties politics, as well as of human dignity. He doesn’t want to love the proletariat – the peons, the Massenmenschen – and he does not love those who wish to love them; they earn his contempt and disgust as bad artists. If Lewis wasn’t interested in peons he wasn’t interested, either, in bourgeois individuals. His characters tend to be types, humours, even marionettes.

The Thirties pamphleteering of Lewis, ‘that lonely old volcano of the right’ as Auden almost affectionately called him,²⁷ is pretty well forgotten, but Hitler (1931), Left Wings over Europe (1936), and Count Your Dead (1937) were of some importance in their day. Lewis’s latest biographer calls Hitler ‘scantily researched and hastily written’ – he hadn’t even read Mein Kampf – but it was less a plug for Hitler than an expression of his hatred of Weimar, homosexuality, and the English writers who liked both.²⁸ Its contempt for the masses is so virulent that the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, by ingenious dialectical manoeuvres, can argue that its ‘oppositional stance’ puts the book finally on the side of the revolution.²⁹ Nobody except biographers and historians would want to read it now, and even Lewis’s belated recantations, The Jews, are they Human? and The Hitler Cult (both 1939) have no interest; but The Revenge for Love is sometimes called the finest political novel of its time.

Lewis’s novel appeared in 1937, at a time when left-wing writers were most deeply involved in the Republican cause, and it was read as an anti-Communist manifesto. So in a way it was; but Communism is for Lewis but one fraud in a world of frauds. To be a Communist is to be either a hired hand or a victim. What makes Lewis’s position idiosyncratic is that he sees the sordor of the world of Communism as analogous to that of bogus art. Day-Lewis’s confession that he felt small when he saw a Communist is repeatedly and derisively cited as evidence that a fake will always feel small when confronted with the real thing, however ugly. Lewis’s Communist agent, Percy Hardcaster, is not a political idealist but a technician: ‘There is a technique of the general strike, of agitation, of the coup d’état. Those are technical problems. Once you begin acting instead of merely talking, you become a technician.’ Hardcaster accepts as part of his business both the beatings he suffers and the amateurish stupidity of his middle-class associates, just as the real artist, Lewis, accepts the rough treatment he gets from frauds and philistines, and the amateurish pseudo-artists that surround him. Communism and the business of forging paintings have exactly the same moral status.

So Percy gets some ironical respect because he is a professional; the real villains are the middle-class intellectuals. In fact they are the only real Communists because Communism is a fraud and only frauds would profess to believe in it; Percy at least isn’t a fraud, nor are the worker-Communists, who are in it for what they can get. The workman, when he becomes a Communist,

 

regards it as just another job – a jolly sight better paid than any he can get out of the bosses. And when he makes himself into a Communist he brings with him all his working-class cynicism, all his underdog cowardice and disbelief in everything and everybody … That is why Marx insisted on the necessity of his hatred being exploited.

 

When a middle-class intellectual argues that his purpose is to free the workers from such moral bondage, he is given an unsavoury account of proletarian manners and told derisively, ‘It is with that that you have got to make your Communism rhyme.’ The person who wants to free the workers is, significantly, a painter of abstracts. ‘Don’t you ever see anything – except abstractions? Like your pictures! But you are dealing with men and women of flesh and blood. A mob of treacherous idiots! That’s what you’re doing – who snigger up their sleeves at you for the sucker you are … ’³⁰

Here, then, is the opposition, in the form of a book about Spain which consigns the Republican cause to the hands of mercenaries, dupes, and frauds, and is especially hard on worker-loving pink artists of the sort I’ve been praising. But Lewis’s contempt for them, and for the workers, is really only a special case of his disgust with the human world in general. His novel has two central emblems: a grotesque dwarf and a malignantly howling baby. They stand for what forces Lewis into his role as Enemy – the repulsiveness of human generation, of a race malformed, bitter, and loathsome. Much the same spirit informs his hatred of homosexuality (which he rather oddly supposed to be a consequence of the unfairness to men of bourgeois marriage laws³¹) – like Communism it was a fraudulent cult, but he saw these cults as having the malignant, distorted energy of the dwarf and the baby. Admirers of Lewis tend, I think, to smoothe him out, to ignore the deeper sources of his disgust, as I think Julian Symons does in his introduction to the 1962 edition of The Revenge for Love. He treats the book as a justified attack on ‘parlour Communists’ and on ‘the liberal myth about Communist behaviour’, a myth we can all now see through because we know ‘about the honeycomb of deceit and treachery that marked every Communist Party in the Stalinist era’. Symons reports with irony Lewis’s expressed hope that ‘his book would some day be read as a novel, with its politics forgotten’; in his view it earns its status as one of the three great political novels of the century (the others being The Middle of the Journey (1947) and Darkness at Noon (1940)) precisely because of the energy with which it exposed the liberal myth.³² These are all remarkable books, I admit, but their value cannot be dependent on the myth that they are good because they expose a myth. It is not enough to have seen through something, and Lewis knew that, was aware that opinions quite different from his own could be incorporated in works of art. Upward’s achievement, for instance, seems to me quite untouched by Lewis’s polemic. And both his novel and Lewis’s have what is more important than a critique of political attitudes in a past age: they surprise us by their own complexity, and by the force with which they violate commonplace perceptions, whether out of hatred for the self-seeking, deformed, brutal, and rank-scented mass of humanity, or out of love for the doomed and a desire to redeem them.

There are other myths as unacceptable as the one Symons is glad to have seen demolished. There is the myth of the uncorrupted classless artist facing alone the plebeian mob, its slippery tribunes and its deluded soft collaborators, the phoney artists and the sentimental intellectuals. And whether or no we accept Lewis in this Coriolanus pose – some do and some do not – it seems that his indictment of the intellectual left has to a large extent prevailed. There is a willingness to believe that the work of these writers was founded on ignorance (Orwell’s repeated charge) or on bad faith and stupidity (Lewis’s repeated charge). And there is an implication that to reject the politics of the bourgeois left of the Thirties implies the necessity to reject its art. Which accounts for our over-willingness to accept harsh judgements, sometimes made by the writers themselves, of a literature that might still, if we could escape from this myth, strike us as bold and troubling.

I don’t hope to show that these writers were never deluded, never silly; nor that their courtship of the proletariat did not lead them into difficulties and out of their depths. But we should not allow our opinion of their politics to serve as a judgement on their art. Indeed one only has to say so out loud for the point to be over-obvious. If I were referring to the great moderns of the previous generation – to Yeats, Pound, Eliot – the remark would be thought a truism; yet that elementary wisdom doesn’t at present come into play when we are talking about the Thirties. Perhaps the difficulty is that we are still in some ways close to the writers of the Thirties, some of them still alive, so that it is in that measure harder to think about them without confusing history and value, without allowing our disillusion with their politics to colour our reading of their work – something we manage quite easily to avoid when thinking of more distant times.

And yet that doesn’t seem a happy or adequate answer; the Thirties were the decade of the Fascism we allow for as well as of the socialism that embarrasses our judgements. I am clearly not yet done with this subject, and will return to it in the next chapter, when I shall have time to say something about the most important and controversial of all these writers, W. H. Auden.