Literature of Political Commitment

The Literature of Political Commitment

that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s was a critical response to the two ideologies that dominated the twentieth century: communism and fascism.

 

This account of The Literature of Political Commitment is divided into the following sections:

1. Literature in the Age of Political Commitment: The Context.
2. Writers and Politics: Programme and Practice.
3. Writing as the Triumph of the Revolution: Socialist Realism.
4. The Politicisation of Modernism: Between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit.
5. The Imperative of Commitment: The Literature of Radical Humanism.
6. ‘The God that failed’: Disillusion/Dystopia.
7. The Attractions of Fascism: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution.
8. The Leap of Faith: The Literature of Catholic Revival and Existentialism.
9. The Literature of Political Commitment: An Annotated Bibliography.

 

 

 

1. Literature in the Age of Political Commitment:

The Context

 

‘It was in 1915 the old world ended’, announced D.H. Lawrence in his novel, Kangaroo (1923). From that date, democratic-liberal Europe no longer possessed for many any right to rule, its cultural and moral legitimacy nullified by the ‘human ignominy’ and the ‘unspeakable baseness’ of a war that had been driven by nationalist rhetoric and rampant xenophobia. Lawrence was not alone in viewing the so-called Great War as a critical juncture in European history. Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia) also saw the war as a point of no-return for his generation: ‘in 1914, in the background of one’s life and one’s mind’, he later noted in his autobiography, ‘there were light and hope; by 1918 one had unconsciously accepted a perpetual public menace and darkness, and had admitted into the privacy of one’s mind or soul an iron fatalistic acquiescence in insecurity and barbarism’. Throughout Europe, many reached for metaphors of rupture, decline and termination in order to make sense of contemporary history. The ambit of cultural pessimism was a broad one: it ranged from the youthful radicalism of the Auden generation in England, who infused into their critique of the status quo a vital component of generational conflict, through the middle-ground of the sceptical humanism of Thomas Mann and Romain Rolland, to the more ominous anti-democratic stance taken by the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega Y Gasset, and by the German neo-nationalist writer, Ernst Jünger. In spite of their ideological differences, all agreed that a fundamental and irreversible change had taken place in the political culture of Europe, that stability had given way to uncertainty, diplomacy to naked power, and the needs of the individual to the priorities of anonymous mass society.[1]

 

Nowhere did this pessimism reach a more succinct formulation than in a volume whose very title summed up the secular eschatology of this period: Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922, Spengler’s epic work offered an overview of three thousand years of European culture, from its beginnings in the ‘great creations of the newly-awakened dream-heavy soul’ of a mythical past, to the present age marked by crisis and confusion. Spengler saw the successive moments of this history in terms of an organic development, in which nations and societies were fated to pass through the inevitable stages of birth, maturity and death. European civilisation was now nearing its end, its creative energies dissipated, its will to survive against the dawning civilisations of the East broken through increasingly bloody internecine wars and through a political defeatism that Spengler graphically linked to the ‘self-annihilation of democracy through money’. Teleological and deterministic, fatalistic and self-fulfilling, Spengler’s historicising narrative offered neither hope nor optimism, but a craven sort of self-surrender to the forces of inexorable historical decline.[2]

 

And yet, Spengler’s readership did not find his prognosis either too drastic or too pessimistic. Compelled to live in a post-war period plagued by rampant inflation, civil unrest and mass unemployment, in (as the noted Catholic novelist, François Mauriac explained) ‘a kind of terror’ that seemed unfathomable as it seemed unending, many found Spengler’s angular fatalism a convincing philosophy. Much of the fiction of the 1920s and 1930s dealt with social and political dislocation. This included the epic novel sequences by Roger Martin du Gard (The World of the Thibaults, 8 vols, 1922-1940), Jules Romains (Men of Goodwill, 27 vols, 1932-1946), John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga, three volumes, 1906-1921), and Hermann Broch’s, The Sleepwalkers (3 vols, 1931-1932). These were novels of contemporary history (a genre known in German as Zeitroman), which used the experiences of representative individuals or families to explore the tensions and crises besetting a post-war Europe destabilised by class conflict, the proletarianisation of the middle classes and female emancipation. Although the social focus of these novels varied, ranging from Galsworthy’s upper bourgeoisie to Broch’s proletarian agitators, they all shared a barely containable pessimism regarding the fate of individual values and individual consciousness in the age of the masses. As Jules Romain observed in his preface to the first volume of the Men of Goodwill (The Sixth of October, 1932), ‘myriads of human activities are scattered in all directions by the indifferent forces of self-interest, of passion, even of crime and madness; and they proceed to destroy themselves in their clashes or lose themselves in the void – or so it seems’. Living in such an environment, the novelist must necessarily grapple with the ‘ultimate incoherence’ that surrounds him, not seeking false patterns of meaning or attempting to impose a manufactured aesthetic unity upon the world (as the Modernists had tried to do), but remaining alive to the ‘whole pathos of dispersion, of disappearance, in which life abounds’.[3]

 

For many, the confusions and dislocations of this period could be traced back to one single event: the First World War, whose traumatic effects were felt well after 1918 both diplomatically, in ongoing tensions between the former antagonists, and economically, as Germany struggled to pay the reparations imposed upon it by the victorious Allies. The war also became a powerful symbol of national unity and purpose. Assisted by the patriotic agencies of their respective governments, British and French service men were able to return to places of war-time tragedy, sites of despair such as Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele, which were now transformed into quasi-sacred monuments. Germany cultivated its own collective memory of the war, commemorating past victories and defeats through monuments and symbols, organisations and anniversaries such as ‘The Day of Langemarck’, observed on 10 November each year under the most solemn of circumstances. Celebrating that battle in a speech almost a decade later, the German war novelist, Rudolf Binding, argued that those who had died in that battle had given their lives for ideals upon which future Germans would forge a new sense of national identity, one that would be drawn out of the ‘continuously creative, continuously rejuvenating, continuously living power of myth’. As the nationalist novelist, Franz Schauwecker noted, in a memorable formulation of this logic of compensation: ‘we had to lose the war, in order to win the nation’.[4]

 

The war also formed the focus of a growing body of pacifist literature, which sought to strip the notion of military struggle of its heroic aura. This process of demystification had, in fact, started during the war itself, when novelists such as Henri Barbusse (Under Fire, 1917) in France, and poets such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg in England, Giuseppe Ungaretti in Italy and Georg Trakl and Georg Heym in Germany and Austria, had expressed a growing disillusionment with the conduct of the war and its aims. The general pacifist tendency of this work, which was often inflected through a lyrical subjectivism which stressed the pity and suffering of that conflagration rather than its political or economic causes, was strengthened by a body of writing that appeared in the late 1920s, and which took advantage of a greater distance from the war to offer a more complex perspective. Except for R.C. Sherriff’s play, Journey’s End (1928), the key texts were novels: Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1923), Arnold Zweig’s The Case for Sergeant Grischa (1927), Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). They criticised the war and the notion of war from varying perspectives: Sassoon’s position was the closest to that of the conscientious objector; his novel (a first-hand account of his own traumatic military experiences) represented a highly personal critique of the ‘political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men [had been] sacrificed’; Graves also employed the memoir form, but supplemented Sassoon’s moral self-scrutiny with a more ironic and even jocular perspective, and focussed upon the material conditions of army life: the physical discomforts and the danger, and the mechanics of survival in a world where ‘common sense’ and insanity seemed reversible values. The novels that offered the greatest insight into the common man’s experience of war were two novels whose popularity was to remain unsurpassed: Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Both attempted to give a picture of the insecurities, physical vicissitudes and sheer violence of military engagement from the point of view of the ordinary conscript. Hašek’s novel provides, through the irreverent antics of its picaresque hero, a rare comic insight into war and the absurd workings of the Austro-Hungarian military machine, whose complicated code of ethics and stultifying bureaucracy the wily Švejk manipulates to his own self-serving ends. Remarque’s novel likewise employs the perspective of the ordinary man, but here the focus is upon the sheer destructiveness of war: its terrifying power not only to maim, cripple and disfigure those involved but also to psychologically destroy the survivors. The latter are, in one sense, the real victims of the war experience, this lost generation, who return to civilian life ‘weary, broken, burnt out, rootless and without hope’.[5]

 

For the Western nations, the First World War culminated either in ignominious defeat or pyrrhic victory. But for Russia it ended with an event that was to transform that nation from a semi-feudal relic into one of the major world powers: the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1916. Its impact on Russian society was enormous: within a decade, first under its revolutionary leaders Lenin and Trotsky, and then, from 1924, under the more centralising influence of Stalin, the private sector was dismantled and the means of production nationalized; the agricultural sector streamlined and rationalised (and its ‘inefficient’ and ‘selfish’ kolkhoznik class liquidated); all cultural and educational institutions brought under a single state apparatus, controlled by a single party system, and supported by a new secret police service (the Politburo); and the satellite nations of the erstwhile Russia united under the control of the newly founded Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the U.S.S.R.). The ideological and the political effect of the Russian Revolution was felt throughout Europe. Germany had a Communist Party, founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, by 1919; France and Britain by 1920, and Italy, under the leadership of Antonio Gramsci, by 1921. Tied to the parent organisation in Moscow through the agency of a Communist International (Comintern), these parties sought to duplicate the success of the Bolshevik party in their own countries, hoping, ultimately, to further the interests of a World Revolution, whose advent would (it was hoped) not only free the proletariat from their economic serfdom, but in the process liberate all minorities from systems of oppression.

 

The utopian dimension of the Communist vision inspired intellectuals and writers throughout Europe, many of whom, following the tragedy of the First World War, felt betrayed by the institutions, values and politicians of the liberal-democratic West. Reasons for joining the cause were diverse. The poet Stephen Spender was attracted to ‘the mysterious aspect of Communism: the idea that the proletariat had some virtue whereby, when they had made the revolution, all the evils of the bourgeois class would be removed by a classless society’; whilst Arthur Koestler (future author of the famous Darkness at Noon, 1940) found that Communism alone had been able to purge him of that ‘load of guilt’ about the poor and the oppressed that as a member of the well-fed middle classes he would have otherwise ‘carried around with him for the rest of his life’. Many of these acolytes discovered that Communism demanded much, indeed, everything, from the individual; but far from being a deterrent, this demand for total surrender to the cause proved an attraction. As Richard Crossman, journalist and British Labour politician, was later to note: ‘the emotional appeal of Communism lay precisely in the sacrifices […] which it demanded of the convert. You can call the response masochistic, or describe it as a sincere desire to serve mankind. But, whatever name you use, the idea of an active comradeship of struggle – involving personal sacrifice and abolishing differences of class and race – has had a compulsive power in every western democracy’.[6] Communism provided a way out of the intellectual confusions and uncertainties of the Modernist period. Where writers such as Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf had pointed to the fragmentation and rupture of modern experience, but had proffered no solutions to this anomie, Marxism was able to offer the individual certain fundamental and quite unquestionable truths, explaining the crisis of modernity in terms of the quite specific realities of imperialism, capitalist exploitation and class struggle, whilst holding out the promise of a solution to this crisis through revolutionary change. For a generation worried and confused by the intellectual legacy of Modernism, Communism came as a great relief. Koestler again: ‘to say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows (regardless to what faith he has been converted). The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jig-saw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question; doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past’.[7]

 

Many writers became Communist because they abhorred the past; but an equal number joined because they feared a future that was increasingly coming under the sway of the second major political force of the twentieth century: Fascism. It too arose in reaction to the radical disillusionment with the liberal-democratic tradition that was widespread after the First World War; but in the place of Communism’s vision of a classless society, it celebrated the nation, state and race, and hoped to secure the victory of its cause not through social revolution but through coup d’etat and military conquest. Fascism emerged in Italy, where under Mussolini it seized power in 1922; in Germany, where it agitated as a political movement under its leader, Adolf Hitler, before it finally came to power in 1933; and in Hungary, Rumania and then in Spain, where through the activities of Franco’s Falangist party, it initiated the bloodiest civil war in modern European history. The intellectual origins of Fascism were diverse, but one contemporary source lay in the writings of the political philosopher, George Sorel. Sorel never described himself as a fascist, but in his promotion of extra-parliamentary agitation, in his advocacy of the mobilisation of the masses through myth and charismatic leadership, and in his celebration of the ‘psychology of the deeper life’ that is activated by political violence, he bequeathed in his seminal work, Reflections on Violence (1908), a constellation of anti-democratic ideas that would find further elaboration in the writings of José Primo de Rivera in Spain, Alfred Rosenberg in Germany, and Charles Maurras in France. As with Communism, Fascism had its adherents amongst intellectuals and writers, many of whom were erstwhile Modernists. They included Marinetti and Pirandello in Italy; Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence in England; and Gottfried Benn in Germany. These believed that Fascism offered a way back to the elemental energies and tribal solidarity of a distant past, to that ‘heritage of exaltation and intoxications’ that had been lost with the advent of modernity. Fascism alone (it was felt) could provide a force capable of destroying the false and superficial values of mass democracy, and of creating a new aristocratic ethos founded on ‘the old, bristling, savage spirit’ of our ancestors. The French cultural critic, Julien Benda, argued that such writers were guilty of a ‘spiritual betrayal’ (a trahison des clercs), because they had surrendered themselves to irrationalist and nihilistic philosophies whose goal was ‘the intellectual organisation of political hatreds’.[8]

 

That the two powerful ideologies of Fascism and Communism, so similar in their totalitarian ambitions and messianic fervour, but so different in their social goals, would clash could have been predicted, although the initial site of this conflict, Spain, could not have been. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) permitted Europe its first sight of the Fascist militarist war machine in action. For ranged against the elected Republican government (which had come to power with a broadly-based Popular Front mandate in 1936) were not just Franco and his generals, determined to return Spain to its monarchist Catholic past, but élite divisions from Fascist Italy and from Nazi Germany, whose presence confirmed the broader European significance of the war. The plight of the Republic drew support from throughout Europe and the world, attracting individuals determined to fight for democratic government and humane values, believing themselves part of an ‘international crusade’ of right against wrong, the oppressed against the oppressor, of light against darkness.[9]

 

The Spanish Civil War was also a writer’s war, and here the lines were equally clearly and equally vehemently drawn. Confronting those, such as Roy Campbell (Flowering Rifle, 1939) and E.E. Dwinger (Spanish Silhouettes, 1937), who supported Franco, came an array of writers, whose responses to the war produced some of the central literary texts of the inter-war period. They included André Malraux (Days of Hope, 1938), Georges Bernanos (A Diary of My Times, 1938), W.H. Auden (‘Spain’, 1937), Arthur Koestler (Spanish Testament, 1938), and George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, 1938). The battle cry was sent up by Auden in ‘Spain’, a poem that saw in the Spanish conflagration a pivotal moment within world history: ‘Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greece, / The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;/ Yesterday the prayer to the sunset/ And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle’. Militancy as an ethical imperative was particularly sounded by Communist poets such as Christopher Caudwell (Poems, 1939) and John Cornford, (Poems from Spain, 1936), both of whom gave their lives in the war. But it was also taken up by others such as Herbert Read (The End of a War, 1933) and Stephen Spender (Poems, 1933), who wrote poetry in honour of the soldiers of the Republic, celebrating ‘the will of those who dared to move/ From the furrow, their life’s groove’, their deeds ennobled both by the cause for which they fought and by their stoical acceptance of death. The political necessity of self-sacrifice (both on and off the field of battle), the tensions between voluntarism and obedience, and between humanitarian sympathy and the need for military proficiency, were themes explored in one of the great novels of the war: André Malraux’s, Days of Hope. The novel tests out the idealism and tentative optimism of which the poets spoke against a background of military and political struggle, in which atrocity and summary execution are daily realities. Within this context, order and self-discipline, technical proficiency and party unity assume the status of near ethical priorities. As Manuel, the Communist labourer, learns: in war it is necessary to choose ‘between victory and compassion’, between the sacrifice of the short-term values of individual humanism, and the long-term objective, which is the defeat of Fascism. Within this bitter and confusing landscape, every fighter must organize ‘for common action an aggregate of feelings that are often incompatible. In this case they include poverty – humiliation – Apocalyptic vision – and hope’.[10]

 

To many, the Spanish Civil War represented an unambiguous struggle between two divergent and quite irreconcilable political and ethical positions; but to others, such as Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, the issues were more complex. Both authors pointed to complications in the neat right wing-left wing divide, noting important cross-overs in strategy and goals, and a shared convergence on intolerance and resistance to criticism or self-scrutiny. These form the focus of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. His first-hand account of the war captured not only the tactile experience of battle, that ‘long nightmare of the fighting, the noise, the lack of food and sleep, the mingled strain and boredom’, which was broken only by the sudden horror of random death and mutilation, but also the peculiar internecine and masochistic nature of the Republican offensive, which was marked by ineptitude, inexperience and continuing animosity between the Republicans, the Communists and the Anarchists. It is this internal war, conducted between supposed allies within the anti-Fascist camp, that most concerns Orwell. Within this conflict between the various wings of the Republican cause, the modus operandi of totalitarian politics became dramatically apparent: the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of ‘higher goals’; the debasement of language through propaganda, the continual imposition of a ‘me-good; you-bad’ Manichean view of the world, and the emotional and psychological ambit of intellectual repression and intolerance. It is within this ‘horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred [and] censored newspapers’ that the war claimed its greatest victim. As Orwell was later to explain in ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (1942): the Spanish people had lost in its bid for democratic self-determination, but the Western world had lost something equally vital: ‘the very concept of objective truth’, whose annihilation in Spain would in the years ahead continue to poison politics in Europe and elsewhere.[11]

 

 

2. Writers and Politics:

Programme and Practice

 

Behind the commitment of Auden, Orwell and Malraux to the Spanish cause lay a new vision of the vocation of the writer. Even those not directly involved in the fighting had come to realize that they had become, whether they wished it or not, a part of history. Stephen Spender put it simply: ‘just as the pacifist is political in refusing to participate in war, so the writer who refuses to recognize the political nature of our age must to some extent be refusing to deal with an experience in which he himself is involved’. Spain had provided the litmus test for the committed writer, but it was Russia that had been the catalyst. Under the impact of the Revolution of 1916, an entire generation of writers had come to subject their vocation to a sustained and theoretically rigorous process of scrutiny. The most polemical writer of the Revolution was the former Futurist, Vladimir Mayakovsky. His many manifestoes, speeches and impromptu observations disclaiming the value of traditional culture and extolling the poetry and art of the new Russia were not simply extensions of the ‘épater le bourgeois’ philosophy of the Avant-Garde; they represented attempts to make contact with the popular voice of the revolution, and to break down the formal divisions between the arts. Mayakovsky showed the way forward himself, in his play, The Mystery Bouffe, 1918, and in the satirical poem, 150 Million, 1920. These were texts offered to the public as ‘agitational pieces, an agitation on behalf of the industrial and trading establishments, i.e. advertisements’; in short, contributions towards the ‘de-aestheticising of the productive arts’. Mayakovsky’s work represented the most radical moment in the literature of the new Russia, whose cultural goals were embodied both in the LEF (Left Front) organisation and in the agitational movement known as Proletkult (Movement for Proletarian Culture), which took art directly into the streets and public places of cities and villages, in an effort to mobilise the population in the direction of the Revolution.[12]

 

In spite of the exuberant individualism displayed Mayakovsky and by other early revolutionary writers such as Sergey Esenin (Goluben, 1918), the arts in the new Russia were directly tied to the wishes of the Communist Party and its leadership. As the Leninist guard of the first wave gave way to a new regime of consolidation and control, so experimentation and Futurist playfulness were replaced by a style and a policy that would become synonymous with Stalinist Russia: Socialist Realism, The term was not coined until 1932 and did not gain currency until 1934, when, at the First All-Union Congress of Writers, the Communist Party directed Soviet writers to produce a literature which would be Realist in form but Socialist in content, and would focus upon the positive achievements of the State, depicting ‘reality in its revolutionary development’. Politicised Avant-Gardism and Socialist Realism provided the two poles around which committed literature in the post-war period revolved. In Germany, ‘proletarian-revolutionary’ authors such as Willi Bredel (Machine Factory N & K, 1930) and Ernst Ottwalt (Law and Order, 1929), affiliated with the Communist journal Die Linkskurve (The Left Direction), favoured the RAPP inspired Reportageroman genre (the novel of documentary or ‘factional’ verism) rather than Socialist Realism. But the most productive committed writers of this generation gravitated either to a form of anarchist utopianism, represented in the immediate post-war period by Kurt Hiller, Walter Hasenclever and Ernst Toller, or to the more broadly-based humanism of the so-called ‘fellow travellers’ (Mitläufer), who espoused a radical socialism but remained independent of the official Communist Party line. Some of the most noted fellow travellers were Hermann Broch, Kurt Tucholsky and Heinrich Mann. All had been deeply affected by the war, and all had found an outlet for their nascent radicalism in avant-garde journals such as Die Aktion (Action), Das Ziel (The Goal), and Die Erhebung (The Uprising). Heinrich Mann was, perhaps, the best known of the group. He had begun as a fin de siècle aesthete in pre-war Germany, celebrating hedonism and the joys of heightened sensibility in novels such as Cockaigne (1900) and Diana (1903). But from 1910 onwards, Mann came to revise his early aestheticism, adopting a more civic and politically self-conscious stance in essays such as ‘Spirit and Action’ (1910) and ‘Zola’ (1915). Here he argued that writers should not stand apart from the issues of the day but should become ‘agitators’, ‘aligning themselves with the people in their struggle against oppression’. Mann himself tried to do precisely this, writing novels of social conscience such as The Important Matter (1930) and The Hill of Lies (1932), where he depicted the plight of the poor and under-privileged. His example was followed by many from within the left-wing intelligentsia, from Alfred Döblin and Arnold Zweig to Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzsky, the editors of the journal Die Weltbühne (The Worldstage). In their consistent tirades against militarism, Fascism and right-wing exploitation of the judicial system and the army, these writers provided a much-needed forum for political protest in the ‘morally darkest years’ of Germany’s history.[13]

 

In Britain, proletarian literature moved within its own, more modest ambit. The main names here were James Hanley (Men in Darkness, 1931), John Sommerfield (May Day, 1936) and Hugh MacDiarmid (First Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems, 1931). Their work, which was associated with The Left Review (1934-1938) and John Lehmann’s New Writing (1936-1939), gave expression to a vernacular style of socialism that was no less committed than its German counterpart, but was without the latter’s ideological pretensions. As the contemporary Communist writer, Edgell Rickword, noted this was a ‘literature that expressed and reflected the actual struggle of the down-trodden’ and ‘could convey by Realistic treatment, reportage, their actual conditions of work and communicate their humanity and the plight of their position in a flourishing society’. As these writers accepted the political duties of the present, they rejected the aesthetic practices of the Modernists, whose Avant-Garde provocations and experimentations they regarded as both elitist and irrelevant in a world of economic deprivation and mass politics. T.S. Eliot, in particular, was a favourite target. The critic Michael Roberts spoke for many in the famous preface to his New Signatures anthology (1932) in which Auden, Spender and Day-Lewis first made their collective appearance, where he described the verse of this group as a ‘reaction against esoteric poetry in which it is necessary for the reader to catch each recondite allusion’. In the place of what was felt to be the wilful obscurantism of Eliot and others, the poets of the Auden generation sought to produce a ‘popular, elegant and contemporary art’, which would reach the widest readership and bring home to it the necessity of political activism.[14]

 

Auden, Spender and Day-Lewis, and others such as Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, saw in Communism a ‘faith which had the authority, the logic, the cut-and-driedness of the Roman church’, an ethos, self-confident and forward-looking, which could replace that sense of moral direction that had been lost with the decline of liberal humanism. As MacNeice, the author of Blind Fireworks (1929) and Poems (1935), noted, this generation of poets was ‘emotionally partisan’, and fully prepared to engage with problems beyond their own private worlds. These were sentiments shared by Day-Lewis (Collected Poems, 1938), who sought to produce ‘revolutionary poems’, in the conviction that ‘we discover reality by acting upon it, not by thinking about it’. A poetry of radical politics, however, could not simply be willed into existence, as the work of the leading representative of this generation, W.H. Auden, testifies. From his very first volume, Poems (1930), Auden gave evidence of a highly idiosyncratic voice, angular, obscure and oppositional, superbly tuned to a poetic idiom shot-through with metaphors of intrigue, sabotage, conspiracy and transgression (see, for example, ‘Missing’ and ‘The Secret Agent’). Auden’s poetry did not acquire a clearer political trajectory until later, when the poet took to task an entire generation for its lack of moral integrity and political honesty, castigating, as in ‘A Communist to Others’ (1932), a social class to which he himself, in fact, belonged. And yet the poem also makes it clear that those who belong to the ruling caste are guilty more of mindless acquiescence in the status quo than explicit oppression, and act out of myopic self-interest, hoping ‘to corner as reward/ All that the rich can here afford/ Love and music and bed and board/ While the world flounders’. Auden’s political commitment was neither permanent nor unambiguous; not only the homosexual complications of his own personal life, but also his involvement in the Spanish Civil War forced him to rethink the easy ethical judgements made in his political verse. After leaving Europe for America in 1939, he took stock, in one of his most anthologised poems, ‘September 1, 1939’, both of his own past and that of his generation. Here in nine stanzas of conversational verse, he passes judgement on the ‘low dishonest decade’ of the 1930s, which had allowed personal morality to be sacrificed to political pragmatism, and the individual to the state. In the face of such collective bad faith, Auden exhorts the reader to accept one fundamental truism, reducing his earlier personal philosophy to the starkest of propositions: ‘we must love another or die’.[15]

 

Elsewhere in Europe, the literature of political commitment emerged with a greater or lesser tenacity. In spite of the theoretical initiatives made by the leader of the Italian Socialist Party, Antonio Gramsci (largely formulated during his years of imprisonment under Mussolini), there was no significant example of political literature in Italy prior to the publication of Ignazio Silone’s novels, Fontamara (1933) and Bread and Wine (1936). The literatures of Portugal and Greece also register a similar absence, although the latter country did have the remarkable early poetry of Yannis Ritsos (Tractor, 1934, and the celebrated Epitaphios, 1936). Ireland likewise produced its most popular political playwright during this period: Sean O’Casey, whose Dublin trilogy, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock (1923 and 1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), focus upon the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the ensuing civil war. In France, many writers had, due to their experience of war, arrived at a compromise between pacifism and a form of socialist humanism. This was the ethos expounded by the Clarté movement, founded in 1919 by Henri Barbusse (author of the pacifist war novel, Under Fire, 1916), which saw itself as a ‘league of intellectual solidarity for the triumph of the international cause’. Although the Clarté movement lasted only two years, foundering in 1921 upon internal disputes between the pacifist internationalists and a new more politically self-conscious wing dedicated to the class struggle, it helped to prepare the way for the markedly more successful International Writers Congress for the Defence of Culture, founded in 1935. The organisation brought under a single rubric some of the most noted names of French literature: Louis Aragon and André Breton from the Surrealist movement; the noted modernist novelist, André Gide; and André Malraux, who combined adventurism, epicureanism and an early version of Existentialism with a no less sincere disavowal of the imperialist polices pursued by Western nations in Indo-China. Unlike their British and the Germans counterparts, they conspicuously diverge in literary terms; but what allows us to bring them together is their desperate faith in Communism, which they held with an at times uncritical intensity. Gide, for example, would later retract his earlier enthusiasm for the Russian model in his polemical Return from the USSR, 1937); but in 1932 his commitment to Soviet Communism bordered upon a religious faith. As he explained in a journal entry of that year: ‘in the abominable distress of the world today, the plan of the new Russia appears to me now as salvation. There is nothing that does not convince me of it’.[16]

 

Political literature not only had its programme and its exponents; it also had its theory. Working along parallel lines with these committed writers was a group of literary theorists who were able to place the initiatives of the former on a more clearly adumbrated theoretical base, establishing in the process the framework for a specifically Marxist approach to literary criticism. Such an aesthetic did not, it is true, emerge ab ovo. Half a century earlier, Marx and Engels had both written about literature, stressing its unique ability (which they felt was particularly evident in the great Realist novels of the nineteenth century) to penetrate the real motives, values and ‘illusions that govern bourgeois society’. They were followed by Lenin who, in his essay, ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’ (1905), argued that the distinction between the aesthetic and the political was illusory: there is no such thing as purely disinterested writing; all literature embodies (implicitly or explicitly) an attitude towards class, property and politics. What the progressive writer must do (Lenin insists) is recognise this fact, abandon the myth of ‘bourgeois-intellectual-individualism’ and infuse into his writing ‘the life stream of the living proletarian cause’. Lenin’s essay was a call to arms, an exhortation to committed writers to produce a type of literature that would extol the cause of the Communist Party (Partiinost). But although Lenin argued for the necessity of an unswerving commitment to the party line he offered no indication of how literature (conceived of as a specific form of artistic activity) could meet these demands. That lacuna was filled by a work that was to become one of the seminal texts of Marxist literary criticism: Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1924). Trotsky attempted here to answer questions that Marx, Engels and Lenin had left in the margins of their work: should politics be explicit in a text? (Engels had answered in the negative, Lenin in the affirmative); should revolutionary politics have a revolutionary form? Must writers follow the party line? Is all ‘bourgeois’ literature necessarily politically reactionary? Can genuine Socialist art be created before the advent of universal socialism? Trotsky framed his questions within a broad analysis of contemporary Russian literature, which ranged from the mystical work of Alexander Blok through to Avant-Garde groups such as the Futurists and the Constructionists. And behind his analysis lay, not only a sharp perception of the relationship between cultural policy and political strategy, but also a broad, almost utopian vision of what culture can help achieve: not only the classless society of the Socialist state, but a new man, a ‘higher social biologic type’ who, freed from material want and political exploitation, will mutate into the future, capable of raising ‘his instincts to the heights of consciousness’.[17]

 

The classical tradition of Marxist literary criticism provided the parameters within which subsequent theoreticians in this field would write. These included Christopher Caudwell (Illusion and Reality, 1937), Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935), Ernst Bloch (Heritage of Our Times, 1935), George Lukács (Essays on Realism, 1948, but written in the 1930s) and J-P Sartre (What is Literature? 1948). Although the point of contact between these theorists is oblique, collectively they produced a type of literary analysis that placed for the first time the process of writing to the priorities of political and ideological engagement. In his works, Caudwell sought to explicate what he termed ‘the destructive illness’ that was besetting ‘bourgeois culture’ in the twentieth century. He meant by this not only the objective circumstances of its decline (which he believed to be evident in the increase of imperialist expansion, poverty and militarism), but the ideological and artistic attempts to dissimulate that crisis, the ‘illusions’ and the myths of political liberty that many still adhered to in democratic nations. Lukács was equally critical of what he termed late-capitalist society, and likewise worked with a model of terminal decline; but behind his analysis lay a deep desire to restore totality in the face of the fragmentation and dissolution that, as he had argued in his Theory of the Novel (1920, written 1914-1915), characterised the decline of bourgeois society. Lukács rejected the idea that literature should be simply propaganda, arguing in a series of important essays published between 1930 and 1933 in The Left Direction, that only a complete, epic account of the present, one capable of integrating individual political fate into the collective movement of history, as the Realist novelists of the nineteenth century had done (albeit, in an apolitical fashion) could produce ‘the great proletarian work of art’. For that reason, Lukács found the Modernists’ preoccupation with subjectivity and psychology unacceptable, and their pessimistic attitude to the possibility of social change and to history unnecessarily fatalistic. As he wrote in the German émigré journal based in Moscow, Das Wort (The Word), the Modernists and, in particular, the German Expressionists, had by tying their representation of the world to the experience of individual consciousness, produced a picture of society that remained ‘opaque, fragmentary, chaotic and uncomprehended’. At a historical juncture, where clarity of analysis and coherent political purpose were necessary, for example in the struggle against Fascism, the Modernist perspective was not only erroneous; it also served ‘to discourage rather than promote the process of revolutionary clarification amongst its followers’, travestying in the process ‘the great social mission of literature’.[18]

 

In spite of his open espousal of revolutionary art, Lukács was essentially both conservative and uncompromisingly elitist in his cultural inclinations. Walter Benjamin arrived at a similar commitment to Marxism, but from a position that was more alive to the politically dynamic textures and energies of Modernist culture. Benjamin was particularly attracted to the dramaturgy of Bertolt Brecht, whose epic theatre seemed to him to embody the ‘destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value [‘aura’] of the cultural heritage’, without which the formal apparatus of bourgeois culture could not be undone. The writer and artist, Benjamin argued in his most influential work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, must seize the technical means of aesthetic production, distance the consumer of culture from the origins of the artistic experience in ritual, and replace that experience by the process of political education. Only through such means could the masses be brought ‘face to face with themselves’ and helped to an understanding of their essential role as agents of revolutionary change. It was, above all, through Benjamin’s insights, less systematically theorised than Lukács’ and less empirically grounded than those of Adorno, that Marxism regained contact with the revolutionary energies of the European Avant-Garde. [19]

 

 

3. Writing as the Triumph of the Revolution:

Socialist Realism:

 

The transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union after 1917 meant not only the opening of a new epoch in world history; it also brought with it a new vision of what literature was and might become. During the revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky (Backbone Flute, 1916, Mystery Bouffe, 1918) and other early revolutionary writers in Russia, such as Sergey Esenin (Goluben, 1918) and Boris Pasternak (My Sister, Life, 1917), had fully embraced the radical energies of the European avant-garde in their work. But as the Leninist faction of the first wave of the revolution gave way to a regime of consolidation and control, so experimentation and Futurist playfulness were replaced by a style and a policy that would become synonymous with Stalinist Russia: socialist realism, a new aesthetic promulgated by Stalin in his decree ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations’ in 1932, where he called on the new writers of the Soviet Union to become ‘engineers of the soul’. Stalin’s words were followed by a similar directive from Andrei Zhdanov, the Chairman of the First All-Union Congress of Writers in 1934, who exhorted Soviet writers to produce a literature that would be realist in form but socialist in content, and would focus upon the positive achievements of the state, depicting ‘reality in its revolutionary development’. The statute of the Union went into more prescriptive detail, stating that socialist realism was:

 

the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands that the artist should produce a truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, that the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality should be linked with the task of ideological transformation and the education of workers in the spirit of socialism.

During the congress, four guidelines were laid down as a framework for this new literature. These stated that the work must be:

Proletarian: art relevant to the workers and understandable to them.

Typical: depicting scenes of everyday life of the people.

Realistic: in the representational sense.

Partisan: supportive of the aims of the State and the Party.

Literature with working-class heroes had existed long before this date in Russia and elsewhere. The early works of Maxim Gorky, his play Lower Depths (1902) and his novel Mother (1906), are classic precursors of socialist realism (although Lower Depths is set in a Lumpenproletariat rather than industrial working-class milieu, and involves no overt politics other than a vague rebellious stance towards authority). In Denmark, Martin Andersen Nexø anticipated socialist realism with his epic novel Pelle, the Conqueror, published in four volumes between 1906 and 1910. The novel is a Bildungsroman (a novel of personal development), which takes its protagonist, Pelle, from a backward farming community to the factories of Copenhagen, where he learns to become a skilled political organiser of his fellow workers. A subsequent novel Ditte, Daughter of Man, features a working-class woman as its heroine, who may lack the political perspicacity of Pelle but, nonetheless, embodies the humanism that is, the novel contends, at the centre of the socialist worldview.

 

The work of Gorky and Nexø occupies a transitional place between the literature of social protest of the Naturalist school and the more ideologically motivated socialist realism of later Soviet writers such as Dimitry Furmanov (Chapayev, 1923), Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (And Quiet Flows the Don, published in four volumes between 1925 and 1940), Fyodor Gladkov (Cement, 1925), Isaac Babel, (Red Cavalry, 1926), Alexander Fadeyev (The Rout, 1927), Nikolai Ostrovsky (How the Steel was tempered, 1932) and Yuri Krymov (Tanker ‘Derbent’, 1938). The settings of these novels are either those of recent history (such as Red Cavalry and The Rout, which deals with the partisan struggle against the Japanese in Russia’s Far East during the Russian Revolution), or the industrial present (How the Steel was tempered and Cement). They centre on characters whose optimism triumphs over material and social deprivation, and who move through diverse experiences, in a spirit of political triumphalism and rather forced optimism, from ignorance to political consciousness, from passivity to activism, to a point where they come to comprehend the forward movement of history in the shape of the Communist cause. In the process, they must counter the constant threat of internal and external enemies, such as the Trotskyites and White Russians, aristocrats and expropriated bourgeoisie who have remained in the service of international capital. A key moment in the development of the hero is when he becomes a member of the industrial proletariat, for it is only here, in the factories and work places of the city, that class consciousness can be fully formed, when confronted with the inequities of capitalism and class politics. The heroes of these novels are largely male. Women are sometimes depicted in active roles, as in the figure of Dasha in Gladkov’s Cement, but her activism is seen there largely as a disruptive force. Whether male or female, the hero functions largely as a synecdoche of the revolutionary proletariat (although he is also a man of the people, with affinities to the folk, to their culture and values): he moves forward into the future, just as the class to which he belongs will progress through world history. His ultimate duty, as Pavel makes clear to his wife in How the Steel was tempered, is to the Party and only then to his family.[20] He overcomes confusion and hardship to emerge politically enlightened, finally joining, in a curious mixture of sentimentality and party-political pragmatism, ‘the active ranks’ of the future.[21]

 

Zhdanov’s injunction at the 1934 congress that ‘the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism’ was clearly meant to define the ideological ambit of socialist realism. If, however, we look more closely at the politics of the novels themselves, it becomes clear that it is, above all, the motivating and structuring ideology of communism that is promoted rather than its content, as in, for example, any explicit avowal of Marxism. Communism is identified not simply with a social-economic agenda but with moral probity. Certainly, most novels include and even end with a triumphant assertion of socialist principles, but such denouements are typically brought about by principles that are as much connected with personal ethics and the goodness of character (which is variably defined) as with political ideology. Within the narratives themselves, achieving the latter represents in absolute terms (and only tangentially in party-political terms) the victory of ‘right’ over ‘wrong’. Indeed, most socialist realist novels initially set up the problem to be solved, the evil to be removed, in terms of ‘bad’ personal and social behaviour: alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, material self-indulgence, corruption, untrustworthiness and laziness and inefficiency in the work place. These are all forms of dissolution that Communism seeks to abolish by providing the individual with both structure and discipline and a greater sense of purpose in working for the social whole, as exemplified in Tanker ‘Derwent’ by Krymov, whose solution to the crisis that is afflicting the ship (a synecdoche for Soviet society) is to embrace ever increasing amounts of hard work in the spirit of the ‘Stakhanovite’ movement (whose adherents committed themselves to exceeding production targets in the work place).

 

Socialist realism emerged out of the triumph of the Communist Party in Russia and the creation of a Soviet State, whose principles it celebrated in literary form. Elsewhere in Europe, these political conditions were lacking, and Communism itself was not a form of state governance but the programme of a small and often factionally divided political party. Nevertheless, the achievements of the Russian revolution, and the classless society that it promised to bring about, provided inspiration for writers in other countries. In Germany, the Union of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors was formed in 1928 with its own journal, the Linkskurve (Left Turing) to promote literature by and about the working class. Its members included the ex-Expressionist Johannes R. Becher (Levisite, or; The Only Just War, 1925), Anna Seghers (The Revolt of the Fishermen of St. Barbara, 1928), Willi Bredel (Machine Factory N & K, 1930) and Ernst Ottwalt (For They Know What They Are Doing, 1931). These works lack the epic monumentality of their Russian counterparts: they tell of class-struggle, but they cannot point to the historical victory of socialism. The only work that speaks of the future does so in apocalyptic terms: Becher’s Levisite (for which he was prosecuted by the government for sedition), projecting its vision of class warfare into a bloody and violent future. These novels depict struggles between disadvantaged and oppressed workers and their capitalist oppressors, typically within an industrial context (although in Segher’s The Revolt of the Fishermen of St. Barbara it is local fishermen resisting an international fishing cartel: the emotive power of her story lies in the failure of their revolt). In these novels, capitalism figures as a largely anonymous force, as a system that exerts its dominance distant from the place of manufacture or production. In Bredel’s Machine Factory N & K, which depicts a strike over wages in a light industrial factory (an environment known at first hand to the working-class Bredel), the enemy is not only the capitalist state but also the enemy within: the trade unions and their political representatives in the Social Democratic Party. These novels drew upon journalistic techniques of documentary reporting, often included statistics and other forms of hard information as in Ottwalt’s For They Know What They Are Doing, and were thus known as ‘Reportageromanen’ (‘factional’ novels or novels of reporting).

 

The politics of the ‘Reportageroman’ were crudely dualistic: capitalism, self-interest and personal greed stood at one end of the equation; socialism, collective needs and selfless ideals stood at the other; and the protagonists of these novels functioned largely as representatives of such values. Their narratives were linear and predictable, and there was an absence of psychological sophistication in character construction. As the noted Marxist critic of the day, George Lukács, observed in his essay ‘Reporting or Creating? Critical Observations on a Novel by Ottwalt’ (1932), the ‘Reportageroman’ remained on the surface of life, reproducing the details of events mechanically without integrating those details into a greater perspective. In such novels, events are viewed in an ‘objective’ way (as in a newspaper report, hence the derivation of the term ‘reportage’), but as in a newspaper report the deeper causes and consequences of actions are not brought to light. Great realist writers such as Tolstoy, Lukács concluded, also dealt with matters of justice and injustice, but they engaged with such issues in a ‘more comprehensive, multi-faceted, more concrete, more dialectical fashion’, which allowed them to depict justice as part of a greater social process.[22]

 

Socialist realism as a general style was adopted by writers elsewhere in Europe, in the form of ‘working class’ or ‘proletarian’ fiction. The latter, however, possessed neither the epic monumentality of its Russian counterpart (and its sense of optimism and faith in the future) nor the technical rigour of the Germans writers and their concern for sociological exactitude. In Britain, novelists wrote about the hardships experienced by working people, suffering at the hands of the state or from the machinations of their capitalist bosses. These writers tended to produce novels of human interest, which approached political matters through the life experiences of their characters, not only experiences in the work force but also their romantic involvements, marriage and family relationships. Amongst these were Jim Phelan (Ten-a-Penny People, 1938), James Hanley (Last Voyage, 1931) and, with the sharpest promotion of organised politics, John Sommerfield (May Day, 1936). Few of these novels found resonance with the public. The sole exception was Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933). Set in Hanky Park, an industrial slum in Salford, north England, it depicts the consequences of permanent unemployment upon the lives of the working-class. The human content of the novel, its realistic detailing of personal misery and deprivation, brought great popularity. Love on the Dole is indeed a novel of great social compassion; but that is precisely its problem: in its attempt to show the human impact of iniquitous economic conditions, it aims at evoking pity rather than political understanding. The novel champions the underdog but it never escapes from a spirit of resignation and even fatalism regarding the predicament of its characters. The sole educated character in the novel, Larry, despite his theoretical acumen, can only look on at the development of events (which includes a protest march and police brutality) in ‘hopeless impotence of the utter futility of it all’.[23] In Germany, a debated raged in the late 1920s and early 1930s about whether non-working-class authors could (and the implication was should) be able to write about the day-to-day existence of working people. The debate is relevant to the work of the English writer, the Eton-educated Henry Green. His novel Living (1929) is set amongst factory workers in Birmingham, whose values and even local argot Green attempts to reproduce. Green chose for a brief period to join the ranks of metal workers in a Birmingham factory to gain first-hand experience of industrial life. As with Greenwood’s novel, the result is a work that, by concentrating on misery and frustration, imparts a sense of resignation to the narrative and to the development of its characters, who cannot see beyond the grim reality to which they seem inextricably bound. That there might be a political solution to their fate, or that their fate might in the future be capable of change, either within the democratic system or beyond it, the novel does not countenance.

 

The advent of the Soviet state, the proselytising energy of its literature and its cultural politics, made an enormous impact on Modernist writers throughout Europe. The cultural pundits of the Communist party explicitly challenged the relevance of the literature produced by ‘bourgeois’ writers, decrying avant-garde experimentation as a self-indulgent distraction from the realities of social injustice and class conflict. With the rise of fascism throughout Europe, an increasing number of writers agreed, and sought to find ways of accommodating political issues in their work. This was the case with the Surrealists in France. In 1926, they were confronted by a junior member of their group, Pierre Naville, who argued in his tract, The Revolution and the Intellectuals: What can the Surrealists do? that the Surrealist attempt to overturn the social order through anarchic individualism had been a failure: its outrageous antics and public demonstrations, its provocative use of nonsense texts and its irreverent stance towards the institutions of bourgeois society had simply been assimilated by a public increasingly inured to its excesses and extravaganzas. Surrealism did indeed transfigure the world, but only in the mind. An effective challenge to the status quo could only be made through class struggle, and through an open adherence to the Communist Party. Naville’s strictures effectively split the Surrealist movement in two. The ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ of 1930 included an open acceptance of the class struggle and of ‘allegiance to the principle of historical materialism’, in a programme that yoked politics in an unconvincing way to the familiar discourses of dream cultivation, automatic writing and eroticism.

 

After 1927, Aragon and Breton, the two presiding spirits of the movement, went their separate ways: Breton wrote the diary-novel, Nadja (1928), whose gentle eroticism and narrative surrender to ‘the demon of analogy’ represented a continuation of his earlier Surrealist aesthetics, whilst Aragon gravitated towards the Communist Party, working as co-editor with the novelist, Paul Nizan (Trojan Horse, 1938), on the journal Commune, published by the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, At the same time, Aragon produced his novel tetralogy, The Real World (The Bells of Basle,1934, Residential Quarter, 1936, Travellers on The Imperial, 1942 and Aurelian, 1944). In a later autobiographical essay, Aragon spoke of an inner journey that allowed him to leave ‘the world of shadows to enter the real world’, the latter being understood as a broad engagement with and sympathy for the concerns and aspirations of common humanity.[24] A similar journey is undertaken in these novels by the characters Catherine (in The Bells of Basle) and Armand (in Residential Quarter), who disengage themselves from their privileged pasts to join (or attempt to join) the ranks of the proletariat. The role of women throughout these novels is a positive one, as the depiction of Clara Zetkin, the German Marxist feminist, in The Bells of Basle shows. But even here, where Aragon is seeking to broaden the humanist base of his socialist vision, the tendency to idealised abstraction, generated by the need for characters to be representative of a class or social type, produces figures of little depth or complexity. Aragon will not find a living voice, and specifically a living female voice for that humanism until the poems of The Eyes of Elsa (1942), where he finally arrives at a creative point between the free play of the mind and political conscience.

 

 

4. The Politicisation of Modernism:

Between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit.

 

That tension between avant-garde experimentation and political ideology was recognised by many committed writers in this period who were aware of the problems involved in translating radical aesthetics into progressive politics. Following 1918, these tensions helped cause a fragmentation of in the Expressionist movement, whose erstwhile members moved off in heterogenous directions. Some, such as Hans Johst, sought to find a surrogate destiny for his utopian goals by joining the nationalist cause, celebrating what he regarded as its youthful idealism in the proto-Nazi play Schlageter (1933); others, such as the poet, J.R. Becher, impatient with the contradictions within politicised Avant-Gardism, reached out to a fully unambiguous party-political Marxism in his poetry (To All!, 1919, Machine Rhythms, 1926); whilst others still, such as the dramatists Walter Hasenclever (Humanity, 1918, and Beyond, 1920), and Ernst Toller (The Luddites, 1922) translated the utopianism evident in their early work into revolutionary fantasies of struggle and resistance.

 

The most important voice in this process of political adaptation, the figure who acted as a fulcrum for the increasingly committed writers of this generation in Germany and elsewhere, was the playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht. He had begun life with the play Baal (written 1918; first performed 1923), in which he had celebrated the raw vitality and animalist hedonism of his amoral hero, who consumes others and himself in an unbridled process of sensual exploitation. Some of these errant energies found their way into Brecht’s first political plays: Drums in the Night (1922) and In the Jungle of the Cities (1923), both of which deal with topical themes but from a perspective that construes political behaviour as a confused mixture of self-seeking careerism, ignorance and (as Brecht later admitted) a ‘pure delight in fighting’. These plays capture the cynicism and earthy pragmatism of German society in the early years of the Weimar Republic, qualities that Brecht further intensified in his bawdy Threepenny Opera (1928). The greater perspective was not to come until the late 1920s, with a series of so-called didactic plays (Lehrstücke): The Measures Taken (1930), The Exception and the Rule (1930), and Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1932). Here, under the influence of a newly-found Marxism (and the more immediate presence of the innovating dramaturgist, Erwin Piscator), Brecht dramatised the necessity of transforming liberal humanism into a more self-reflective and more politically viable ethos, one capable of judging the predicament and values of individuals in terms of the higher goals of the world revolution. Underscoring these plays lay a new vision of a political stage, the ‘epic theatre’. Brecht outlined the model for this new dramaturgy in his Little Organum for the Theatre (1948), but its defining features had already been sketched in notes to his musical drama Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). Here he condemned the ‘dramatic form of the theatre’ (called elsewhere ‘Aristotelian’ but clearly that of the Realist-Naturalist stage of the late nineteenth century), because it stupefies the critical faculties of the audience, and encourages it, through empathy, suspense and other techniques, to identify with and uncritically accept the actions represented on stage. Such a theatre presupposes (Brecht argued) an unchanging model of human nature, existing beyond history and impervious to political change. Epic theatre, for its part, seeks to challenge the reactionary and purely reactive nature of traditional drama by distancing the audience from the action through ‘alienation devices’ (Verfremdung or V-Effekten). It forces the spectator to view the dramatic events as purely fictional allegories, open to analysis and discussion, in a process of critical confrontation, which imparts a ‘quite definite practical attitude, directed towards changing the world’.[25]

 

Brecht’s epic theatre was the result of a political optimism hard won in the teeth of a natural pessimism regarding the existence of ideals and values in a world that had become, as he wryly noted in his famous poem ‘The tale of poor B.B.’, from his Manual of Piety (1927), ‘mistrustful, and idle, and self-satisfied’. But there were other writers of this generation who could not, or would not follow Brecht down the road of political activism, but preferred to meet this world head on, eschewing future visions, and ethical or political imperatives. The culture that they produced was called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Functionalism). Politically aware, but uncommitted, the exponents of New Functionalism celebrated the machine, speed, technology, and all the other epiphenomena of urban existence, with its sharp and brittle mass culture. In literature, a new Realism or pragmatism installed itself in the ‘functional poetry’ (Gebrauchslyrik) penned by Walter Mehring (Arche Noah SOS, 1931), and Erich Kästner (Honest to Truth, 1928, and A Man gives Information, 1930); in the novels of social crisis produced by Hans Fallada (Little Man what now? 1932); and in the wry satirical studies of provincial mores of the plays of Ödön von Horváth (Italian Nights, 1930, and Tales from the Vienna Woods, 1931). This was a literature that dealt with characters caught between the extremes of political activism and quizzical passivity, ultimately unable, like the hero of Kästner’s popular novel Fabian: The Story of a Moralist (1932), to free themselves from the ‘hopeless, pitiless labyrinth’ of German history on the eve of Hitler’s Third Reich.[26]

 

The spirit of the New Functionalism manifested itself in a trio of remarkable novels published at this time, all of which gave voice to the same post-Expressionist, post Avant-Garde mood of quietism and political disillusionment: Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé (1935), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (three volumes, 1930-1943). Musil’s novel (left unfinished at his death in 1942) is the most epic and the most philosophical of these. Through the story of the free-wheeling Ulrich, who moves in a half-hearted fashion between different professional and personal spheres in a semi-picaresque voyage of self-discovery, Musil subjects the coherence of categories such as causality, historical progress and personal identity to sustained sceptical comment. As Ulrich discovers through his many experiences, neither the ‘interior space’ of the self, nor the larger space of contemporary history seem to possess an inherent logic or direction. In the age of modernity, one can only be ‘negatively free, constantly aware of the inadequate grounds for one’s own existence’, and compelled to choose irony and intellectual distance as modes of survival. Canetti’s novel likewise focuses upon an individual’s attempts to come to terms with the chaos and confusion of mass society. The story centres on the elitist bibliophile, Peter Kien, who uses his library as a mental and cultural barricade against the ‘angular, painful, biting multifariousness’ of the society that surrounds him. Canetti’s hero ends up, paradoxically, internalising some of the worst aspects of this society: its anonymity, its lack of respect for others and destructive irrationalism. Kien is brought close to madness, before surrendering himself, in an act of desperation and protest, to a funeral pyre made from his own books, an act which objectivises the apocalyptic pessimism that runs throughout Canetti’s novel. A similar prescience of impending catastrophe pervades Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. His novel moves within the same world of violence, criminality and brutal materialism explored by Canetti; but this time the values of mass society are viewed not through a superior narrative perspective but through the limited point of view of the ex-criminal and denizen of the Berlin demi-monde, Franz Biberkopf. A victim of life, persecuted by erstwhile friends and present foes, Biberkopf’s unsure grasp on the world (the product of an urban consciousness that is both fragmented and anomic) is reconstructed by Döblin through a stylistic register that moves between the Joycean interior monologue, Expressionistic subjectivism and the neo-naturalistic ‘faction’ techniques of the Reportageroman. Döblin’s hero spends the entire novel trapped within a world that he never really understands, struggling ‘against something fortuitous, something unaccountable, something that looks like fate’. At the end of his story, Döblin leaves Biberkopf (as he leaves the reader) caught between a vague optimism in collective action and a vision of a future, ‘red of night and red of day’, leading ‘deathward’.[27]

 

Post-Expressionist developments in German literature may well have culminated in a political impasse, but in Spain Communism and the Avant-Garde were seen not as antinomies, but as complementary positions on the spectrum of political radicalism. Surrealism flowered amongst a group of poets who rank amongst the outstanding voices of twentieth century Spanish poetry: Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, and Federico García Lorca. Their work came into existence in the period between 1928 and 1933, exactly at that point when writers throughout Europe were discovering Communism. It was a happy coincidence, for the extravagant dislocation of grammar and syntax that was a product of the Surrealist recovery of the logic of the dream world is given momentum in the work of these poets by a pointed and at times passionate statement of political protest. As Alberti noted, this was a poetry written in periods of anger and outrage, when ‘electricity runs through my skeleton and blood tastes to me of cataclysm’. This note of protest is heard throughout the work of the Spanish Surrealists, from Cernuda’s Forbidden Pleasures (1931) and Where Forgetfulness Dwells (1933), and Alberti’s Concerning the Angels (1929), and, with a greater topical focus, From one Moment to the Next: Poetry and History (1937), through to the writing of García Lorca. In his poetry, Songs (1927), Gipsy Ballads (1928), and A Poet in New York (1930), and in his plays, particularly Blood Wedding (1933,), the subconscious emerges through imagery of aggression and fear, to be organised by sentiments that are invariably political. This is the case in the ironically entitled ‘Romance of the Spanish Civil Guard’ (1927). The poem tells of the extermination of a gipsy camp by a contingent of local police. Lorca uses the traditional ballad form, but combine religious iconography with Surrealist symbolism to recreate a landscape of dark violence, where ‘tender and naked the imagination burns out’. The anguished nature of Lorca’s sensitive surrealism reached its most heightened form in A Poet in New York, where the sufferings of the marginalised blacks and poor are depicted in imagery which is both grotesque and disturbing. Lorca’s poetry in this volume possesses a disturbingly elemental quality, frequently rising, as in his description of the sufferings of the negroes of Haarlem, to the level of ritualistic insistence: ‘Blood has no doors in your upturned night/. There is no flush of blood. Blood raging under the skins/, living in the thorn of the dagger and in the heart of landscapes, / under the pincers and genistas of the celestial moon of cancer.’ Lorca’s A Poet in New York remained unpublished during his lifetime. In the second month of the Spanish Civil War, in August 1936, the poet was forced to pay both for his political convictions and for the provocative nature of his literary genius, murdered by the supporters of Franco at the height of his achievement and reputation.

 

 

5. The Imperative of Commitment:

The Literature of Radical Humanism

 

The literature of political engagement raised fundamental issues relating to the political and ethical responsibilities of the writer, questions such as: what is the nature of political commitment? Is it the result of rational choice, or are there other factors involved, such as social guilt? To what extent should private ethical criteria be suspended for the sake of long term political goals? Is a belief in individualism possible in an age in which the collective good is the overriding desideratum? To what extent can politics satisfy spiritual needs? And how can we explain the willingness of civilised people to embrace nihilistic ideologies such as fascism? These questions had been posed implicitly, at least, by writers of social conscience in the nineteenth century, but left largely answered. The literature of political engagement written in the 1920s and 1930s moved these questions from the margins into its centre. Even a work such as Brecht’s Lehrstück, The Measures Taken, written in defence of the notion of party discipline, ultimately resolved itself into a set of ethical issues, offering in the place of compassion for the individual a new ethos of political activism to which everything, even assassination, is permitted in the service of revolutionary agitation, that ‘inflexible will to change the world’.[28]

 

Brecht’s elevation of the principle of party expediency into a law of political pragmatism was intended to provide a general set of criteria against which the morality of action might be judged: it was a principle that constituted (however paradoxical this may seem) a Marxist version of the Kantian categorical imperative. But for other writers of the period, the conflict between ethical norms and revolutionary strategy, between conscience and duty, self-determination and subservience to the party-line, could not be resolved so easily. Into this category, fell three writers of particular note: Ignazio Silone, André Malraux and Thomas Mann. All explored the intellectual parameters of political commitment, hedging their acceptance of the necessity for political struggle with caveats concerning the ethical implications for individuals and societies alike of such struggles, and all converged on a radical humanism, which was sympathetic to, but ultimately critical of, the inhibiting and debilitating strictures of party politics. Silone wrote three novels, Fontamara (1933), Bread and Wine (1937) and The Seed Beneath the Snow (1940) that dealt with social tensions in Southern Italy and with confrontations between peasants and the landowning class, which Silone describes against the backdrop of the rise of Fascism. In spite of Silone’s early adherence to Communism, these novels reveal a scepticism regarding the relevance of party activities and policies in the peasant’s struggles against Fascism. The central figure of Bread and Wine, the fugitive Pietro Spina finds that his increasing contact with the peasantry, and the elemental nature of their existence, forces him to abandon his doctrinaire Marxism in favour a more pragmatic Christian socialism, capable of uniting (as in the symbolic imagery of the title) religious faith and bodily need. Fontamara lacks any single hero; its focus is upon a collectivity and upon the attempts of the latter to resist ‘the living dead’: the black-shirts of Mussolini, who do the dirty work for the landowners in their forcible expropriation of peasant lands. The struggle of the village people is inhibited by illiteracy and by a traditional acceptance of adversity. But even here, where class consciousness cannot hope to flourish, the basis of opposition slowly emerges, on the back of continual suffering and through a growing feeling, however incoherently held, of the necessity of establishing natural justice. The final pages adumbrate a crucial turn towards political self-consciousness amongst the peasants, which is all the more convincing for having its origins in (as Silone was later to note concerning his own development) their willingness to extend ‘the ethical impulse from the restricted individual and family sphere to the whole domain of human activity’, in full recognition of the ‘need for effective brotherhood’.[29]

 

The tension between radical politics and ethical idealism is also explored by André Malraux in his novels; but now the focus is not upon peasant communities, caught within political ideologies that they dimly understand and only imperfectly resist, but upon self-confident and articulate intellectuals, who embrace revolutionary activity in order to give a higher purpose to their lives. This urgency of this personal need for political engagement is explored by Malraux in The Conquerors (1928), Man’s Estate (1933), Days of Contempt (1935) and Days of Hope (1937). The novels set up quite specific historical contexts to lay bare those mechanisms (emotional and intellectual) by which people come to sacrifice themselves to the cause of radical politics. Malraux drew upon the experiences that he had gathered in Indo-China in the mid-1920s, where he acted as editor of the anti-imperialist journal, Indo-China Enchained, and in Spain, where he commanded a pro-Republican air force during the 1936-1939 civil war. All of his novels deal with revolutionary situations, and with characters who embody the full range of ideological positions open to the agitator during periods of radical change: in The Conquerors, Garine and Borodine represent militant individualism and Comintern pragmatism; in Days of Hope, Lopez and Manuel incline towards anarchism and a strict doctrinaire Communism, whilst the semi-autobiographical Magnin is a revolutionary Socialist and a technician with ideals; and in Man’s Estate, a medley of characters appear, ranging from the terrorist Chen and Vologuin, the party functionary, through to the insurrectionist leader, Kyo Gisors and his wife, May, whose fraught relationship with her husband lends a component of sexual and even feminist politics absent from the author’s other novels.

 

The focus of Man’s Estate is upon Shanghai revolt of 1927, where the local Chinese population rose against their imperialist European overseers. Malraux gives substance to the major issues with great historical verisimilitude, outlining in detail the uneasy detente between the newly-formed Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalists (the Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai Shek, who form a strategic alliance only for the latter to liquidate the former in the final stages of the struggle. He also details the cynical but ultimately ineffectual policies pursued by Moscow, and the exploitative and intransigent nature of the foreign occupying powers. Such detail convinced his contemporaries that the author had experienced the upheavals at first hand, a perception that helped the novel to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt, and secure the reputation of the author as the foremost representative of the literary left in France. But Malraux’s main interest lay (as the he argued in reply to Trotsky’s critical review of The Conquerors) in examining ‘the relationship between individual and collective action and not […] collective action alone’. The same is true of Man’s Estate. Its real focus is not the Chinese masses and their struggle but the individual protagonists who, like the decadent aristocrat, Baron de Clappique, see in the revolutionary experience a ‘new frightful sense of liberty’, an occasion for personal self-realization. The terrorist Chen exemplifies their predicament. He is a man of the people, part of the anonymous, oppressed masses; yet he too is haunted by an existential need for personal legitimacy, seeking through his actions to enter that ‘timeless world’ of ‘exaltation’ that comes with complete commitment to a cause, and involves, in his case, and act of assassination. Chen is an extreme example of the voluntarism that is implicit in the behaviour and motives of the other characters in Malraux’s novel: Kyo, who views self-sacrifice as a necessary step in investing human affairs with a moral idealism; Gisors, who believes that the foundation of the self can be reached only through suffering; and even Ferral (the cynical capitalist and misogynist) who argues that ‘man is the sum-total of his actions, of the things he has done’. In the final analysis, it is these values that the novel returns to time and time again, expanding the activity of political commitment into a metaphor for that ‘mystic faith’, which (Malraux argues) can alone ‘couple fool and universe together’.[30]

 

In his writing after 1939, Malraux sought to put himself beyond the emotional pull of ‘collective passions’ to which he had at one time been prey, and renounced his early internationalism in favour of a commitment to an ‘organic culture’ rooted in the French nation. It is only an apparent paradox that Malraux was to end where Thomas Mann had begun: in a celebration of the traditional culture of Europe and in a rejection of the materialist civilisation of America. For what had led Mann in the 1920s to abandon his earlier conservative position, which he had memorably formulated in the lengthy politico-cultural tract, The Reflections of a nonpolitical Man (1918), was precisely the same perception of cultural and political crisis that Malraux was responding to under different circumstances in the devastation of post-war Europe. In Mann’s case, the transition had been affected by one episode in particular: the assassination of the Jewish foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, in 1922 by a group of nationalist radicals. Rathenau was a friend of Mann, and one of the most gifted Republican statesmen of the period. Abandoning his former role as a Vernunftrepublikaner (a supporter of democratic politics not through conviction but through rational recognition of their necessity), Mann now became convinced that writers were inextricably a part of the public realm. As he argued in a famous essay written just after Hitler’s election successes in 1930, the artist’s traditional ‘immersion in the eternal-human predicament’ had become an ‘intellectual impossibility’ for those forced to witness the new barbarism of Fascist mobilisation, in the midst of what was clearly widespread preparation for a second, and possibly even bloodier world war.[31]

 

Mann had already anticipated his political awakening in the novella, Mario and the Magician (1929). The story tells of a German family on holiday in Italy, who stumble one evening into the performance of a hypnotist. Mann uses the experience of the family, and that of the local community, who are likewise drawn to the ‘magician’, as the basis for a parable on the dangers of the seduction of fascism. Mann focuses upon those elements that permitted Fascism to exert itself upon electorates in Italy and Germany: the mystique of the charismatic leader, its exploitation of the need of the majority to be led and guided and its cynical stage management of collective euphoria. Even the narrator (a respectable pater familias from the German Bürgertum) comes under the magician’s spell; but not before he registers the key insight of the novella: that simply rejecting a political threat such as Fascism cannot provide the basis for adequate opposition; if the individual is to resist such ideologies, he or she must grasp a clearly felt alternative position, because ‘between not willing a certain thing and not willing at all […] there may lie a too small a space for the idea of freedom to squeeze into’.[32]

 

The focus of Mario and the Magician is upon individual psychology, upon those aspects of the mind that are susceptible to charismatic personalities and vitalistic politics. In his last major novel, Doctor Faustus (1947), Mann moved from a personal to a national perspective, and to an examination of the broader irrationalist ideologies that had allowed so many Germans to embrace political nihilism. He was joined here by other émigré writers fleeing from Hitler, who likewise sought to explicate the intellectual and moral origins of the evil embraced by their homeland. They included writers such as Klaus Mann (Mephisto, 1936), Heinrich Mann (Henry the Fourth of France, two volumes, 1935 and 1938) and Anna Seghers (The Seventh Cross, 1939). They all wrote important novels, but few possess the thematic complexity, the detailed cultural historicising and humanist scope of Mann’s Doctor Faustus. In his novel, Mann attempts to reconstruct, through a fictional biography of the composer, Adrian Leverkühn, nothing less than the intellectual history of his country, focussing upon those elements in its cultural past that have brought it into the camp of Hitler’s National Socialism. In his brief life, Leverkühn rehearses in symbolic form the key moments of the German ideology: the penchant for the irrational that emerged during the medieval period that was dominated by ‘fantastic and mystical folk-movements’; the spiritual fanaticism of Luther; the quest for the absolute that characterises the late music of Beethoven; that desire to renew Western music by returning to the ‘elemental, the primitive, the primeval’, which Mann identified with the music of Wagner; the misplaced patriotic idealism of the Wandervögel; and, finally, that sustained intellectual reaction against the Enlightenment known as the Conservative Revolution, whose exponents sought to replace the liberal institutions of the West with a more typically Germanic Peoples Community, united by racial ties and shared Nordic values. Leverkühn’s personality and music reflect in diverse ways these aspects of the Germanic ideology, as does the central deed of the novel: his pact with the devil, made to enable the faltering composer to achieve a break-through to a new musical idiom. But what composer and nation achieve (Mann suggests towards the end of his epic novel) is not transcendence nor the heroic transfiguration of modernity, nor even a lasting contribution to the future, but unimaginable horror. It is a burden of guilt that all must share, even the well-meaning narrator and Leverkühn’s confidant, Zeitblom. As the extermination camps are opened to reveal the charred remains of those murdered by the Nazi regime, the gentle scholar must join the ranks of his countrymen, and witness the consequences of a politics conducted without compassion or minimal humanism, ‘standing wild-eyed in face of the void’, in a belated recognition of the horror inflicted upon the nation by Hitler and Nazism.[33]

 

 

6. ‘The God that failed’:

Disillusion/Dystopia

 

Writers joined the Communist Party (or allied themselves with its policies) because they saw in Communism the only way of keeping alive humane values in a world threatened by ruthless capitalism and rampant Fascism. But once they had become members, they soon discovered that at the heart of its ethos lay an insidious and nihilistic logic, which sought to destroy the present for the sake of the future and the rights of the individual for the sake of a spurious vision of a classless society. Communism, in Arthur Koestler’s words, encouraged its followers to accept ‘the necessary lie, the necessary slander; the necessary intimidation of the masses to preserve them from short-sighted errors; the necessary liquidation of opposition groups and hostile classes; the necessary sacrifice of a whole generation in the interest of the next’. Disillusionment with the Communist cause became widespread during the Spanish Civil War, where Orwell, Spender and Koestler were able to witness at first hand the manipulative tactics of the Party and its uncompromising use of force majeur through which it imposed its hegemony on the broadly based Popular Front alliance. The credibility of the Soviet model took a further blow during the Moscow show trials of 1936-1938. Here, in what was clearly a systematic miscarriage of justice, Stalin sought to rid himself of the old wing of the Party, those who had helped carry through the October Revolution of 1916, people like Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Both the way the trial was conducted, its use of fabricated confessions and intimidation, and the many blatant impingements upon the basic rights of the accused, who were tortured, brain-washed and deprived of legal representation, shocked the Western world, and left many (as the English radical, George Woodcock, would later note) ‘disillusioned […] with the orthodox Communism that [had] beguiled our predecessors’.[34]

 

A similar revision of allegiances was registered in the literature of the period, most memorably in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Written in German in 1939 and published the following year in English, Koestler’s novel became the key anti-Communist documents of this generation. Set in the era of the show trials, Darkness at Noon tells of the experiences of the old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who has been arrested and held in custody on suspicion of crimes against the state. During his incarceration, he takes the opportunity, in the periods between his interrogations, to analyse himself and his original reasons for joining the Communist Party. The latter had offered, in the face of the bankruptcy of nineteenth century liberal ethics, both moral credibility and the promise of a classless society. By helping to achieve that goal, Rubashov had sought an identity beyond personal volition, beyond those values that emerge from the little world of the self: ‘for us [the true believers in Communism] the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the law of historical credit: it was our law’. To achieve the ultimate goal all is permissible: ‘history has taught us that often lies serve better than the truth’, ‘virtue does not matter to history’. In the final analysis, it is not individuals but the party which embodies the will of history: the ‘I’ is a ‘grammatical fiction’, a provisional entity when set beside the greater reality of class and Party. Against the consequential logic of this secularised credo, Rubashov during his many moments of introspection painstakingly reconstructs the premises of a new faith in human nature and a new argument in defence of individualism, which he seeks to justify both to himself and to his two inquisitors, the sympathetic Ivanov, and the new man, the peasant functionary, Gletkin. Rubashov meets his end before resolving his political and ethical impasse, caught between an ideology that he has helped create, and a premonition of a new ethical faith that is still beyond his reach. His life expires on a note of almost mystical quiescence, as he greets the single pistol shot from his executioner with a ‘shrug of eternity’. It was left to Koestler himself to give shape to the more positive ethos towards which his hero falteringly moves, sketching out in The God that failed the modest assumptions of a new humanism. It includes the conviction ‘that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity is not a petty-bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilisation in orbit’.[35]

 

With such sentiments Koestler ended his association with Communism. In subsequent novels, such as Arrival and Departure (1943), and in a volume of essays, The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), Koestler lambasted Communism for the deviousness of its logic and its moral duplicity. These works gave voice to a widespread disillusionment with the new Soviet state that had set in as early as the 1920s. This was the period, in the years following Stalin’s assumption of power in 1922, that saw the optimism and idealism exhibited by young writers such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin and Eugene Zamytin turn into sober vigilance, cynicism, and, finally, despair. By the time of the show trials in 1935, many writers in Russia had already distanced themselves from Communism, hoping to keep alive humanist values within the most inhospitable of landscapes. Concrete opportunities for protest were limited, but two works did emerge to speak for a generation now thoroughly alienated from the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism: Mayakovsky’s play The Bedbug, written in 1929, shortly before his suicide the following year, and Zamytin’s bleak vision of totalitarianism, the novel We (1924). The Bedbug is a satire upon the principle of collectivisation which has succeeded in reducing those who do not fit into Socialist society (represented in the play by the gross ex-Communist, Prisypkin) to the level of ‘parasites’ and ‘insects’, capable only of zoological classification. Satire is similarly evident in Zamytin’s We, but here it is framed within an extended political allegory. Set in an indefinite future, the novel focuses upon the centrally planned United State, whose citizens (identified simply as he or she numbers) have surrendered the right to self-determination in return for social order and the guarantee of material happiness. In this dystopian vision, the most restrictive and dehumanising regulations and practices are presented by the narrator as unambiguously progressive measures; even individual death, an increasing occurrence as the tentative spirit of protest begins to emerge in some quarters, can be dismissed as mathematically irrelevant: ‘practically considered, it is an infinitesimal of the third order. Only the ancients were prone to arithmetically illiterate pity; to us it is ridiculous’. It is a system that has replaced participation through directive, ideals through brutal pragmatism, the individual through the state, which takes upon itself the right to liquidate all who stand in the way, those ‘enemies of happiness’, who do not or will not accept the irrevocable march of history.[36]

 

Zamytin’s We had, however, a much broader target: its critical animus was directed not at specific governments but at certain principles and forms of political organisation which, irrespective of their ideological content, had converged in their use of technology to control both the social and personal spheres. In this respect, Zamytin was aligning himself with the dystopian tradition in literature, which had emerged in England in the late nineteenth century, finding its most persuasive exponent in H.G. Wells. Like Zamytin, Wells had also, in novels such as The Time Machine (1895), and War of the Worlds (1898), had harboured a fundamental mistrust of the mechanistic-scientific ethos, which recognizes only quantitative not qualitative change, and sets no moral limits to the expansion of the former. The result of the victory of the technocratic mind-set was not the best but the worst of all possible worlds: dystopia not utopia. As the Czech dystopian science fiction writer, Karel Čapek, made clear in his novels, The Absolute at Large (1922), and the trilogy, Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life (1933-1934), and in his plays, such as R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920), one of the most disturbing aspects of the march of the technological spirit was that the majority (depreciatively designated throughout the 1920s and 1930s as ‘the masses’) was eager, as developments in Germany and Russia were demonstrating, to embrace these changes, irrespective of their consequences. Political subjugation seemed now to be a matter of an inner surrender of values rather than of external compulsion, with electorates throughout Europe showing themselves more interested in order, consensus and the satisfaction of immediate material needs than in personal liberty, free speech or democracy. This concern formed the central theme of Huxley’s novel, Brave New World (1932). Set in ‘the year of stability’, 632 After Ford, the novel depicts a world in which individuals have been reduced to automata, and personal values to functional reflexes installed by an omniscient and omnipotent World Controller. Brave New World offers a graphic depiction of the key components of the dystopian nightmare: the centralised control of the individual, and the absorption of the latter into a community ethos; the deadening of consciousness through emotive symbolism; and the omnipresence of technology as the means through which both hierarchy and the acceptance of hierarchy are assured. Huxley added to this picture the notion of genetic engineering, parodying the eugenicist preoccupations of Fascist governments, and a highly contemporary understanding of the role of state administered narcotics in stilling potential points of friction between the individual and system through ‘chemically induced happiness’. What disrupts the oppressive coherence of this society is not politics but the love of one individual for another, and a residual anarchism of spirit which allows the single aberrant unit of this world, the enigmatic John ‘Savage’, not only to demand ‘danger’, ‘freedom’ and ‘goodness’, but to claim the right to resolve the impasse of his own life through suicide.[37]

 

The dystopian novel moved in the realm of endless possibilities, its hypothetical nature deliberately left open so that its grim vision would be relevant to the future, as it was to the present. But that such novels had a more immediate relevance to the political cataclysms of early to mid-twentieth century Europe George Orwell made clear in his work. He had been one of the first to lose his illusions regarding Communism, disclosing in his Homage to Catalonia the ruthless means by which the Soviet government had attempted to control the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War; whilst in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) (a hybrid text of journalism and autobiography), he had firmly rejected the ‘materialistic Utopia’ promised by the Communists, for it could only come into existence by dint of a machine logic and a ruthless functionalism ‘that would make fully human life impossible’. During the following decade, Orwell deepened these insights into a systematic critique of Communism, which he now saw largely as a variant of the totalitarianism practiced by the Fascist states. The result was a series of searching essays such as ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940), ‘Politics v. Literature’ (1946), and novels such as Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). The former novel is unashamedly didactic, a piece of political satire in the Swiftian mode, a fairy story in which human vices are brought out through animal personae. The novel is also a precise roman à clef: the fate of the farm after the overthrow of the ‘bourgeois’ human owner mirrors in miniature the historical development of the Soviet Union, from the heady days of the Revolution inspired by Lenin and Trotsky (here Old Major and Snowball) to its consolidation as a state power under Stalin (here Napoleon). Not only the grim events of that regime: the establishment of a police state, the liquidation of opponents and erstwhile supporters, but also the perverse system of logic and argumentation used by the regime (‘All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others’) form the focus of Orwell’s parable, as does the paradoxical circularity of the story, which sees the animals at the end of the story returned to the servitude from which they had originally liberated themselves.[38]

 

The psychological mechanisms that allow such duplicity to function are further explored in the novel, 1984, but here they are anchored in human suffering and in the pain of failed protest. The moral of the novel is that knowledge is power, and total knowledge is total power. The coercion that the hero of the novel, Winston Smith, must undergo is not primarily centred upon the body (although the torture scenes in the novel are amongst the most vivid in the dystopian genre), but upon the mind. Here, in the London of 1984, consciousness has become a site of struggle between the anonymous (but omni-videant) gaze of Big Brother, on the one hand, and rare individuals such as Smith, on the other. The latter survives only by practising ‘doublethink’, a mental set which allows Orwell’s hero both ‘to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies […] to use logic against logic [and] to repudiate morality while laying claim to it’. ‘Double think’ encompasses everything: history, political identities and even the details of geography all are rewritten to serve the needs of the regime. Truth is a matter of political expediency. In 1984, we have reached the furthest point from the political idealism and ethical goals that motivated an entire generation in the inter-war period; what Orwell’s pessimistic vision leaves us with is an image of a state dedicated, not to the fullest development of the individual freed from class and economic restrictions, but purely to its self-preservation and continuing hegemony over a population caught in the eternal moment of the manipulated present, without a sense of the past, or hope for the future.[39]

 

 

7. The Attractions of Fascism:

The Literature of the Conservative Revolution

 

The literature of political commitment came not only from the Left. In every European nation, there existed writers who viewed the crisis of liberal humanism and the emergence of mass industrial society with the same distrust and concern as left-wing writers, but sought a solution to this crisis not in class warfare or the creation of a Socialist society but in the promotion of national consciousness and racial identity. These viewed Communism not as a solution to, but as a continuation of, the mechanistic, materialist and utilitarian philosophies of nineteenth century liberalism. Such views were held by Oswald Spengler and José Ortega Y Gasset, two of the foremost conservative philosophers of the early years of the twentieth century. They saw the modern period as the ‘progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable’ masses, whose presence had come to dominate in all political and cultural spheres. Spengler’s Decline of the West found a powerful resonance amongst those who were emotionally and intellectually alienated from the social and political forces of modernity. For here Spengler prophesied the advent of a new Caesarism, a radical conservative force that would break ‘the dictatorship of money and its political weapon democracy’, and return society to a more elemental reality, creating in the process an authoritarian political state, which would govern on the basis of a ‘stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life’.[40]

 

Spengler and Ortega Y Gasset were part of a widespread movement that attracted many writers in Europe. They included Pierre Drieu le Rochelle and Robert Brasillach in France; Ernst Jünger and Stefan George in Germany, Knut Hamsun in Norway; and Gabriele D’Annunzio in Italy, and included figures who had made an important contribution to the Modernist movement in literature, such as Gottfried Benn in Germany, and D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis in England. As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s, these figures came increasingly under the sway of radical conservatism and even, eventually, of Fascism, which many hoped would undo the social and cultural consequences of mass society, the commercialisation of modern life and the growing influence of America, which they held responsible for (in the words of Gottfried Benn) the ‘obliteration of the aristocratic principle of form [and] suppression of the inclination to cultivation and style’.[41]

 

The solutions that these reactionary modernists offered to the impingements of mass society were diverse. The Swedish writer, Verner von Heidenstam (The Tree of the Folkungs, 1905-1907), the Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun (Growth of the Soil, 1917) and the German novelist, Hans Grimm (A People without Living Space, 1926) took their cue from the Heimatkunst (rural art) movement of the late nineteenth century. They looked to the land and its customs, and to the mores of peasant life, in which they hoped to find the stability, order and consensus so conspicuously missing in a modern urban culture dominated by material self-interest. The literature of Grimm, Hamsun and the other exponents of rural life found a particular resonance amongst the conservative middle-classes in the interwar period, who viewed the rampant inflation and continually changing governments that characterised that period as an ‘unfathomable chaos’, as a ‘mystery’, as Hermann Stehr (another best-selling author of peasant fiction noted), ‘that we are forced to endure without ever understanding its causes’. It found less favour, however, amongst the radical youth of those nations. These did not share the nostalgia and rural fixations of the Heimatkunst group, but identified themselves with a new breed of political activist, whose nationalism was energetic, radical and populist. In Germany, their spokesman was Ernst Jünger, a veteran of the First World War. In his major works, The Storm of Steel (1920), War as an Inner Experience (1922) and Fire and Blood (1925), Jünger evoked military combat as a highly personal, almost existential experience: in a world without values, it alone could provide a test of the worth of man and nation. Throughout his writings, Jünger sang the praises of the storm troopers, those frontline soldiers who had managed to survive the horror and impersonality of artillery warfare by developing a feeling of comradeship, selfless idealism and a sense of national purpose. Such qualities, (Jünger argued) were precisely the values that could provide the base for a new type of political governance, whose values would be ‘national, social, militant and authoritarian’.[42]

 

The exponents of the conservative revolution had a quite definite agenda: they wished to see the complex social and personal relations of an urban culture returned to a simpler model, intellect and rational theorising replaced by intuition, individualism by collective identity, and the evils of a liberal, pluralistic and alien modern state swept away in favour of a community, hierarchically organized and based on obedience and consensus. Their writing was a response to a series of social, political and economic factors: the rapid pace of industrialisation and urbanisation that the country had undergone in the late nineteenth century; the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty; the absence of firm democratic institutions and liberal values; and the vulnerability of Germany in central Europe. France and Italy, on the whole, did share these problems, and consequently produced a conservative literature that was both less ideologically based and more individualistic. Italian Fascism, in particular, proved capable of exploiting talents as diverse as those of the Italian fin de siècle Nietzschean poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the idiosyncratic Futurist, Filippo Marinetti, who happily lent his Avant-Garde energies to the service of the ‘aesthetic and social dynamism’ of an emerging Fascist Italy.[43]

 

In France, the éminence grise of the neo-nationalist movement was Maurice Barrès. Years earlier, he had sought in his The Cult of the Self trilogy: Beneath the Gaze of the Barbarians (1888), A free Man (1889) and The Garden of Berenice (1891), and in later works such as The Uprooted (1897) and Call to the Soldier (1900), to inject a Nietzschean individualism and self-assertiveness into a new patriotic ethos founded on racial solidarity and nationalism. Barrès’ influence on subsequent writers, such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach, was immense. Like him, they felt that France had become a decadent nation, devoid of heroic and martial values, and corrupt with hedonism and petty materialism. That is the image that emerges from Drieu la Rochelle’s The Farce at Charleroi (1934) and his novel Gilles (1939), and from Brasillach’s novel, The Seven Colours (1939). Both writers deplored the defeatism, mediocrity and self-seeking nature of ‘modern man, urban man’, and set against the image of France ‘trapped in its negligence and its empty pride’, a more authentic world redeemed through ‘exuberance, exultation, culmination’, where the individual feels himself part of a greater totality. For these young exponents of the conservative revolution, Fascism alone was able to provide a source of values capable of wrenching the individual into the higher realm of national purpose and historical destiny.

 

A different type of militancy comes to the fore in the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine. His fiction registers the shadow world of the Fascist mentality: those darker energies of misanthropy and nihilism that festered beneath the rhetoric of individual enthusiasm and collective action cultivated by youthful writers such as Ernst Jünger and Drieu la Rochelle. The political implications of Celine’s dark vision did not appear until the mid- 1930s, when he published Bagatelles for a Massacre (1937) and School for Cadavers (1938), where he gave expression to his vehement anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. But the premises of his world-view were already apparent in his first and most famous novel: Journey to the End of the Night (1932). The work is an elaborate picaresque tale, which gives voice through the views and experiences of its central character, Ferdinand Bardamu, to a bleak, nihilistic vision of contemporary life. The novel contains little explicit politics; but in its insistence upon the inherent worthlessness of modern urban existence, in its valorisation of irrationalism and violence, and its feeling for an apocalyptic resolution to the impasse of modernity, it betrays parallels with many of the key texts of the conservative revolution, whose authors likewise believed that the present was moving inexorably toward a future of ‘war and disease, those two infinities of nightmare’.[44]

 

Many intellectuals were attracted to Fascism less by its policies than by the style with which it promoted itself, drawn to the aggressive self-confidence and energetic machismo exhibited by its leaders, to its talent for organising the body through uniform and ritual, and impressed by its ability to mobilise the masses through manipulation and civic ceremony. Fascism was construed as part of a new discovery of the irrational and the primitive; it was the political medium through which man (and sometimes woman) could be put back in touch with instinctual drives and energies that had too long been repressed by a civilisation based on narrow rationality and mechanistic principles. Accordingly, Fascism brought within its ambit a number of modernist writers who sought, in the wake of Nietzsche, Freud and Jung, to explore those deeper realms of the psychic self that lie beyond linguistic and social convention. Two such explorers of the irrational were Gottfried Benn and D.H. Lawrence. In the 1920s, both began to extol the value of primitivist and vitalistic ideas, arguing for their relevance to the social and political spheres: Lawrence in theoretical works such as Psychoanalysis and The Unconscious, Fantasia of the Unconscious (both 1922) and in the novel, Kangaroo (1923), and Benn in essayistic prose-poems such as ‘Primal Vision’ (1926). Typical of the tenor of their work were the sentiments expressed by Lawrence in the foreword to Fantasia. Here we learn that our ‘mistaken democracy’ has produced a ‘mechanistic’ civilisation, which no longer has room for the deeper wisdom conveyed through ‘ritual, gesture and myth-story’: ‘it has all gone grey and opaque’. We must, Lawrence argues, ‘rip the old veil of vision across’ and allow the ‘renewed chaos’ of those continually self-creating, unbridled life forces, with which our ancestors were in touch, to inform our lives. Lawrence developed his analysis further in Kangaroo, where he expressed (through the autobiographical figure of Somers) his ‘dread, almost horror, of democratic society, the mob’. The latter is the product of a shoddy superficial culture that has long lost any feeling for the ‘great living darkness’ which lies beneath the veneer of civilisation. In order to regain contact with this deeper force, Somers goes to the Australian Bush, as Lawrence will go to Mexico, where he wrote The Plumed Serpent (1926), becoming in the process a convert to a new religion, whose faith lies in that ‘instinctive passional self’ that is only accessible to those who return to the ‘old dark gods’ and to an ethos that is both pre-Christian and pre-Humanist.[45]

It is here that Lawrence joins in spirit with the pundits of the conservative revolution in Europe: not in his explicit politics (for like Somers, Lawrence disdainfully stayed away from party ideologies of any kind), but in his model of human nature, which is both elitist and regressive. Where Lawrence’s irrationalist ethos might have led him is demonstrated by the case of Gottfried Benn. He too had extolled those ‘chthonian powers’ which lie deeper than wisdom, because they belonged to that primitive unconscious that Benn attempted to give voice to in his poetry. In the realm of politics, such quests led Benn to embrace the most virulent and most nihilistic of the reactionary philosophies of his age: Hitler’s National Socialism. As the Weimar Republic hastened to its end in 1933 (under increasing political infighting and economic disaster), the poet saw in the victory of Nazism the beginning of a new era in German history. As he argued in essays such as ‘The New State and the Intellectuals’ (1934), gone were the weak and vacillating policies of liberal democracy. They had been replaced by a radically new style of politics, whose mission lay in the creation of a more elemental state of civic being, where public life would be informed by the rejuvenating power of myth and ritual. For all who had longed for a conservative revolution, the time had come: ‘to surrender the self to the community, to the state, to one’s race, to the immanent, in this turn from the economic to the mythic collective’, in a process that would finally free individual and nation alike from the confusions and confines of modernity.[46]

 

 

8. The Leap of Faith:

The Literature of Catholic Revival and Existentialism

 

Writing in the same year in which Orwell published his 1984, the ex-Communist critic, George Woodcock, argued that the committed writer ‘to display the truth, even a limited aspect of the truth’ had necessarily to embrace a ‘criterion against which falsehood must be judged and condemned’. For ‘by expressing an independent standard of values he attacks the principle of authority; by portraying the truth according to his own vision he attacks the factual manifestations of authority’. But in an age of moral relativism and political Realpolitik where should the writer look for values to set against the systematic falsifications of governments and rulers? The answers had been tentatively provided well before 1945 by writers who had retained faith in religion and, more specifically, with Catholic orthodoxy. France, in particular, had cultivated this tradition, producing successive generations of writers from Paul Claudel (The Five Great Odes, 1910) and Charles Péguy (Eve, 1913), through to Georges Bernanos (Beneath the Sun of Satan, 1926, and Diary of a Country Priest, 1936) and François Mauriac (That Which was Lost, 1930, The Knot of Vipers, 1932, The Frontenac Mystery, 1933, The Unknown Sea, 1939), who had made it their mission to find spiritual values and ethical integrity in a world from which they seemed conspicuously absent. Mauriac was the most noted Catholic writer of this generation. At the centre of his work lies the driving conviction that ‘even the genuinely good cannot, unaided, learn to love. To penetrate beyond the absurdities, the vices and, above all, the stupidities of human creatures, one must possess the secret of a love which the world has now forgotten’. Mauriac brings his characters to find that secret in different ways; Alain discovers his religious vocation in That Which was Lost, in the face of the moral dissolution of his family; the pater familias in The Nest of Vipers learns to transcend his hatred for his avaricious children, reaching a state of forgiveness and charity just before his death; the roué, Pierre, in The Unknown Sea discovers faith amidst death and financial corruption in Paris. All bear testimony, as Mauriac noted in a discussion of the work of Graham Greene, to ‘the hidden presence of God in an atheistic world’.[47]

 

In Bernanos’ fiction the struggle is not to attain but to retain faith, and to convey it to others in the direst moments of their need. In Beneath the Sun of Satan, Abbé Donissan must attempt to save the soul of the murderess, Mouchette, whose exploitation and abuse by successive lovers has reduced her to a mocking and callous indifference towards herself and others. Donissan must conduct a struggle against both the provincial and duplicitous world which he serves as a priest, and against an inner recognition of the power of evil in human nature, anthropomorphised as Satan, that ‘incomparably subtle and stubborn creature’, whose existence, paradoxically, seems a precondition for the attainment of grace. In Diary of a Country Priest, Bernanos explores the modest terrain on which spiritual realization must on a daily basis be preserved. The moral idealism that motivated many amongst Bernanos’ generation to embrace revolutionary politics for the sake of a utopian future has no place here in the diary of a humble provincial priest. ‘To accept and partake in the shame of another’s sin’, as the latter defines his task, requires both personal modesty and a concern for the many small rituals, acts of service and kindness that constitute pastoral care. But it is in this modest terrain that sanctity can form a part of human reality, becoming accessible to whose for whom doubt is a precondition of moral sympathy, and who can, like Bernanos’ priest, open their ‘eyes to death in all the simplicity of surrender, yet with no secret wish to soften or disarm it’.[48]

 

Religion inspired other European writers during this period. In Norway, Sigrid Undset, The Wild Orchid (1931) and The Burning Bush (1932); in Sweden, Pår Lagerkvist, The Dwarf (1944) and Barabbas (1950); and in Greece, Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek (1946) and Christ Recrucified (1948), engaged with the difficulties of spiritual witness in an era of rampant and apparently inexorable scepticism. In England, two writers arrived at a literature of religious faith from entirely different directions: Graham Greene and T.S. Eliot. Although Greene had begun as a writer of the Left, he soon developed into one of the major Catholic novelists of his generation with Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948). All explore the difficulty of witnessing, of retaining or achieving religious faith against prevailing attitudes, often to the detriment of personal self-interest. Certainly, in Brighton Rock, the possibility of salvation is only ambiguously nurtured in the main character, Pinkie, a small-bit hoodlum who has cheated and murdered his way through life, driven by social resentment. And yet even here a strange inverted religious sense is present (‘Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust’). What Pinkie only distantly gleans is held with greater determination by his girlfriend, Rose. In spite of the shoddy and violent nature of her companion, she wins through to the realisation that hope and forgiveness remain open to all, in spite of the sins committed in the past. In Brighton Rock, the issue of salvation is a purely personal one, connected to the spiritual survival of the individual in an environment of urban anomie. But in The Power and the Glory, set in the politically unstable Mexico of the late 1930s, the parameters are broader. The novel is structured around a clash between two irreconcilable forces: a revolutionary government intent on modernising peasant Mexico at any costs (represented in the novel by the young lieutenant), and a pastoral Catholicism, morally committed to the same peasantry and concerned for their salvation in a state that has outlawed the Church in its fight against superstition and ignorance. The struggle is an unequal one, but it is precisely the hopelessness of the Church’s position that calls forth the most unlikely hero in Greene’s work: an unnamed drunken whisky priest. With a loose grip on conventional morality and unsure in his ministering of rite and ceremony, he is elevated above his shortcomings by his capacity for self-sacrifice, and by a determination to serve and continue serving his flock, knowing that he will pay for this solicitation with his life. It is in the priest’s practical actions that (as Greene argued elsewhere) the bedrock of real idealism is laid, not in the grandiose projects of utopian politicians who are prepared to destroy the present for the sake of the future, but amongst those, humble in spirit, who may (like Greene’s unlikely hero on the eve of his execution) regard themselves with ‘grotesque unimportance’, but nevertheless maintain a militancy of outlook, mindful of their duty to the spiritual needs of the present.[49]

 

T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, a series of four connecting poems written between 1935 and 1943, represented the culmination of a gathering religious component in Eliot’s work, which began with the poems ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1930) and the Ariel sequence (1927-1931), receiving a dramatic deepening in the play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935). In these works, the iconoclastic Modernist idiom that Eliot had exploited in The Wasteland (1922) is abandoned in favour of a new vision of the ethical importance of human action and ideals, the intellectual roots of which lay in Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. In The Four Quartets, much of Eliot’s religious thinking is distilled into what borders upon a mystical reading of the mutability of self. In them, experience of place and time is now fashioned into an ornately-wrought formal pattern based on circularity and repetition, in a developing structure that seeks to achieve that ‘inner freedom from the practical desire,/ The release from action and suffering, release from the inner/ And outer compulsion’.[50] And yet even here, in what seems to be a realm of pure transcendence, the traces of a consciousness inflected against certain formations within contemporary history are discernible. They do not (it is true) possess the political moment that is evident in the work of Graham Greene, whose advocacy of the claims of religious sanctity made, for example, in The Power and the Glory, was intended to be read as a critique of the totalitarian ethos. Eliot’s concern lies not with politics per se, but with those homogenising and levelling processes that emanate from a world moving ‘in appetency, on its metalled ways’, uncaring for spiritual values and insensitive to subtle modulations of feeling and intellect. All who wish to survive the encroachments of modernity must confront the ‘mental emptiness’ that surrounds them, and which is evident (above all, for the poet) in the debasement of language, that ‘shabby equipment always deteriorating/ In the general mess of imprecision of feeling’. Against these limitations, Eliot struggles, formulating a counter ethos that will be alive to the transcendent nature of poetic experience, forever aware that it is only through communal discourse that the fleeting insight into a word thus transfigured can be caught. It is only here that poetry and religious sentiment can join; in those moments of heightened subjectivity made possible through a purified language, ‘where every word is at home’, and where ‘the fire and the rose are one’. [51]

 

Writing during the Second World War, George Bernanos committed himself to defending ‘that interior life against which conspires our inhuman civilisation with its delirious activity’. His words reflect an ethical militancy that underscored his own religious worldview; but they also anticipated the next and, perhaps, final stage in that ethos of personal and political commitment that stamped its mark upon the literature of the inter-war period: Existentialism. Its exponents were the French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who sought a source of ethical authenticity beyond both the conventional wisdom of the liberal-humanist tradition and the totalitarian ideologies of Communism or Fascism. Camus put his position succinctly in an interview given in 1953: ‘I am arguing in favour of a true realism against a mythology that is both illogical and deadly, and against romantic nihilism whether it be bourgeois or allegedly revolutionary’. Camus anchored his philosophy in the notion of the Absurd, a category that drew upon the Nietzschean concept of the eternal return. In his extended essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), he invoked the travails of Sisyphus, a legendary figure, who resolutely accepts his part in a never-ending task that he carries out with resolution and pride, in spite of the hopelessness of his situation. Even without faith in absolute values, modern man (argues Camus) can be like Sisyphus, prepared to greet even the most pointless and cruel of acts, ‘convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human’, and seeing simply in the struggle for meaning a sufficient reason for existence.[52]

 

In literature, the existentialist initiative had already manifested itself in Sartre’s Nausea (1938), in Camus’ own The Outsider (1942), in Raymond Queneau’s The Bark Tree (1933) and even earlier in Rilke’s study of urban alienation, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). In Sartre’s Nausea, Antoine Roquentin undergoes a crisis of identity brought about by his realisation that names (indeed all conceptual categories) are simply empty abstractions used to dissimulate the essential vacuity of the world, employed to hide the fact that ‘everything is gratuitous’. Sartre added a sharper historical focus to this perspective in his trilogy, The Roads to Freedom (The Age of Reason, 1945, The Reprieve, 1945, and Iron in the Soul, 1949), but it was Nausea, with its introspective intensity and analytical impersonality, which gave the most persuasive inflection to his Existentialism. Camus employed a similar focus in the The Outsider, but dispensed with the elaborate philosophical import of Sartre’s novel. The uncomplicated hedonism of the novel’s hero, Meursault, sketches a form of personal authenticity that cannot be approached in terms of conventional notions of motivation, duty and guilt. He awaits his execution, for the crime of murder, not only with a newly-won understanding of the ‘benign indifference of the universe’ but also with a heightened conviction of the inextinguishable value of life.[53]

 

As both Sartre and Camus had consistently argued, the ultimate reference point of Existentialism was not individual consciousness but the world. Accordingly, in their later work, both moved towards a greater sense of the applicability of their respective philosophies to real situations: Sartre in his plays The Flies (1943), The Victors (1946) and Crime Passionnel (1948), and Camus in his novel, The Plague (1947) and in his plays, notably Caligula (1944) and The Just (1950). All explore what Sartre termed ‘being-in-the-world’, where the individual recognizes the necessity, indeed, inevitability, of commitment to others as a precondition of personal liberty. The question that these texts pose is: to what extent can we serve others without embracing the utopian wish fulfilment which lay at the heart of the political ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s? Camus offers a tentative answer in The Plague. Here, in the midst of an outbreak of bubonic plague (which is possibly to be interpreted as a symbol of the German occupation of France in the Second World War) a group of characters finds itself trapped in a small town in Northern Africa.   In the face of the imperious advance of the plague, many of them strike postures either of passive acquiescence or of futile heroism, all caught between despondency, indifference and heroic self-sacrifice, and between idealism and practical solicitation.   Rieux, the doctor and narrator of the story alone chooses the middle path of ‘common decency’. In his words, but above all, in his deeds, he embodies a modest humanism, the sources of which lie not in an abstract code of morals but in a concrete sense of duty that is supported by a pragmatic understanding of immediate and local exigency.[54]

 

The limitations of political heroism are also explored in Sartre’s Crime Passionnel.   Its hero, Hugo, comes at the end of a long line of political activists in modern European literature stretching from the rebel personae of the Romantics through to the three comrades in Brecht’s The Measures Taken and Chen in Malraux’s Man’s Estate. Hugo is infused with the logic of dialectical materialism, which justifies what it sees as short-term injustices (here the assassination of the lapsed party boss, Hoederer) in terms of supposedly greater long term strategic objectives. Sartre explores in his play the applicability of that logic, showing through Hugo’s jealousy of Hoederer how political judgements are influenced by those mechanisms of the self that are irredeemably apolitical. As Hugo himself comes to realize, the links between a consciously held ideology and an unconsciously motivated action are complex and fraught: he has liquidated his victim, not because he felt himself the impersonal tool of world history but because he needed to prove his manhood, both to his peers and to his wife, whose sexual seduction by Hoederer provides the real catalyst for his action. Hugo cannot undo his deed; but by distancing himself in the final act of the play from those who style themselves the masters of history, ‘the toughs, the conquerors, the leaders’, and by willingly giving himself over to the Party’s executioners, he seeks, in a final gesture, both to redeem the inauthentic act that he has committed and the integrity of the man that he has killed.[55]

 

 

 

The Literature of Political Commitment

An Annotated Bibliography

 

That politicised literature is not the exclusive property of twentieth-century authors is demonstrated by Irving Howe in his seminal Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon press, 1955) and by Renee Winegarten, Writers and Revolution: The Fatal Lure of Action (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), who discuss a tradition that extends as far back as Romanticism (Blake and Stendhal come in for particular attention), and even further. Seen, however, as a conscious strategy, underpinned by a coherent political philosophy, the literature of political engagement did not become a recognisable literary genre until the 1920s and 1930s. Studies of the writing of this period chart the many personal confusions and disappointments experienced by this generation, as its initial uncritical enthusiasm for the ideology and realities of revolutionary Communism gradually gave way to reservation and finally apostasy. The major titles include George Woodcock, Writers and Politics (London: Porcupine Press, 1948), John Mander, The Writer and Commitment (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), Jürgen Rühle, Literature and Revolution: A Critical Study of the Writer and Communism in the Twentieth Century (Pall Mall Press: London, 1969), Alan Swingewood, The Novel and Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1975), George A. Panichas (ed), The Politics of Twentieth Century Novelists (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1971), Charles I. Glicksberg, The Literature of Commitment (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976), and the six volumes in The Writers and Politics series, edited by John Flower (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977–1978).

 

Radical politics during this period came, however, not only from the Left but from the Right; and just as the adherents of fascism offered their own solutions to the crisis of democracy in the West, so too did writers and philosophers sympathetic to that particular ideology. Aligning major Modernist figures such as D.H. Lawrence, Luigi Pirandello and Gottfried Benn with the policies of Hitler and Mussolini will always be controversial, but John Harrison in his The Reactionaries (London: Gollanncz, 1967), Alastair Hamilton, in The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919–1945 (London: Blond, 1971), the contributors to The Attractions of Fascism: Social Psychology and Aesthetics of the ‘Triumph of the Right’, edited by John Milfull (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1990) and, within the German context, Martin Travers, Critics of Modernity: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1933 (Oxford, Bern, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), seek to understand the compulsive nature of the Fascist experience on its own terms.

 

Many writers fought in the First World War and later in the Spanish Civil War, and generated a body of writing that has remained of interest to subsequent generations. The First World War in Fiction, edited by Holger Klein (London: Macmillan, 1976), includes essays on the major war novels of the period, whilst Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War: Comparative Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), offers an in-depth discussion of British and French writing on the war, in an attempt to identify those ‘similarities of approach that transcend national boundaries’ (Field, p. 3). The literature of the Spanish Civil War has been well covered, most notably by Frederick Benson, Writers in Arms: The Literary Impact of the Spanish Civil War (London: University of London Press, 1968), Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Cause: The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War (London: W.H. Allen, 1968), and in the essays collected in Rewriting the Good Fight: Critical Essays on the Literature of the Spanish Civil War, edited by Frieda S. Brown (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1989) and The Spanish Civil War in Literature, edited by Janet Pérez and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1990).

 

The most clearly defined doctrine of committed literature in the inter-war period was Socialist Realism. Formulated in 1934 by the Russian Communist, Andrey Zhdanov, it became an orthodoxy for a generation of writers in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, who felt compelled (or were compelled) to produce a type of literature that eschewed all Modernist techniques to extol the achievements of the workers’ state. The goals and programme of Socialist Realism have been well documented by C. Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (London: Macmillan, 1973), Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories, 1917-1934 (New York: Octagon Books, 1977, first published 1963), George Bisztray, Marxist Models of Literary Realism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1978) and Michael Scriven, European Socialist Realism (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). The effect of the doctrine upon the Russian literature of the period is described by Marc Slonim in his Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1977 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Gleb Struve in Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953 (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1971) and Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

 

Not all Marxists were Socialist Realists. The Hungarian literary critic, Georg Lukács, for example, took his criteria not from contemporary Soviet writing but from the great Realist novelists of the nineteenth century. Lukács’ extended debate with Bertolt Brecht, conducted in the 1930s, largely in the pages of the emigré journal, Das Wort (The Word), constituted one of the most sustained and theoretically sophisticated dialectics between Marxist literary theorists during this period. Documentation of this dispute, which also involved Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, is provided, together with commentary, by Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson and Francis Mulhern in Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980). The broader theoretical ambit of the debate is analysed by Frederic Jameson in his Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). The tradition of Marxist literary criticism is documented in Marxists on Literature: An Anthology edited by David Craig (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) and in Socialist Realism Revisited, edited by the Interdisciplinary Committee on Communist and East European Affairs (McMaster University, 1994).

 

The religious revivalism evident in the work of Bernanos, Greene and T.S. Eliot forms the focus of works such as Georg M.A. Gaston’s The Pursuit of Salvation: A Critical Guide to the Novels of Graham Greene (New York: Whitston Publishing Company, 1984) and (on Eliot alone) Frank Burch Brown’s Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). The bigger picture is provided by Eugene Webb in his The Dark Dove: The Sacred and the Secular in Modern Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975) and by the contributors to the anthology Religion and Modern Literature: Essays in Theory and Criticism, edited by G.B. Tennyson and Edward E. Ericson (Michigan: Eerdmans, 1975), essays that seek to address (in the words of Nathan A. Scott Jr,) the ‘problem of understanding the stratagems that become inevitable for the artist when history commits him to the practice of his vocation in a vacuum of belief’ (Religion and Modern Literature, p. 125). These studies, and others, such as Nathan A. Scott’s Rehearsals of Discomposure: Alienation and Reconciliation in Modern Literature: Franz Kafka, Ignazio Silone, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot (London: Lehmann, 1952), are largely written from a Christian perspective, but retain, nevertheless, a concern for the intellectual integrity of the authors and texts under discussion. The state of scholarship in this area is reviewed in Religion in Contemporary Fiction: Criticism from 1945 to the Present, compiled by George N. Boyd and Louis A. Boyd (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1973).

 

There are many studies of individual Existentialist authors, such as Terry Keefe’s Simone de Beauvoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), Robert Zaretsky’s A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), Jonathan Webber’s, The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Routledge, 2009), but there are relatively few studies that offer a comparative reading of their literature. Hazel E. Barnes does this in her The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic Existentialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), as does Sarah N. Lawall, Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968) and, with a feel for the broader tradition of Existentialist thought, Edith Kern, Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beckett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Lawrence, Kangaroo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), pp. 240-241; and Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years, 1919-1939 (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 9.

[2] Spengler, Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932), vol, 1, Table. 1, and vol. 2, Contents, p. 2.

[3] Mauriac, The Inner Presence: Recollections of My Spiritual Life, trans. Herma Briffault (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 116; and Romains, The Sixth of October, trans. Warre B. Wells (London: Lovat Dickson, 1933), p. 12.

[4] Binding, ‘Deutsche Jugend vor den Toten des Krieges’ in Grundschriften der deutschen Jugendbewegung, ed. Werner Kindt (Düsseldorf: Diederichs, 1963), p. 431; and Schauwecker, Der Aufbruch der Nation (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1930), p. 403.

[5] Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 218; Graves, Goodbye to All That (Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1960), p. 215; and Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A.W. Wheen (London: Putnam, 1929), pp. 317-318.

[6] Spender, World Within World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 305; and Koestler in The God that Failed: Six Studies in Communism, ed. Richard Crossman (London: Harper and Row, 1950), p. 28; and Crossmann, The God that Failed, p. 11.

[7] Koestler, The God that Failed, p. 32.

[8] Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme and J. Roth (New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 48; Benn, ‘Primal Vision’ [1927], in Primal Vision: Selected Writings, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Bodley Head, 1961), p. 36; Lawrence, ‘A Letter from Germany’ [1924], in Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 177; and Benda, The Great Betrayal, trans. Richard Aldington (London: Routledge, 1928), p. 21.

[9] John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1955), p. 275.

[10] Auden, ‘Spain’, and Spender, ‘At Castellon’ [1938], in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. Valentine Cunningham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 97 and p. 135; and Malraux, Days of Hope , trans. Stuart Gilbert and Alastair Macdonald (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 354 and 355.

[11] Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 141 and 142 and 235.

[12] Spender, World Within Worlds, p. 249; and Mayakovsky, Mayakovsky, trans. Herbert Marshall (London: Denis Dobson, 1965), p. 90.

[13] Mann, ‘Geist und Tat’, in Politische Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 13; and Ossietzky, Rechenschaft: Publizistik aus den Jahren 1913-1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1972), p. 188.

[14] Rickword in interview with John Lucas, in The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy, ed. John Lucas (Harvester Press; Sussex, 1978), p. 5; and Roberts, New Signatures (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), pp. 11-12.

[15] Day Lewis, The Buried Day (London; Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 211 and 212; MacNeice, Modern Poetry [1938] (Oxford, Oxford UP, 1968), p. 25; and Auden, in Poetry of the Thirties, ed. Robin Skelton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 56, 280 and 283.

[16] Gide, Journal, 2 vols (Paris: Pleiade, 1948), vol. 1, p. 1126.

[17] Engels, letter to Minna Kautsky, 26 November 1885, in Marx, Engels, Lenin: Über Kultur, Ästhetik, Literatur, ed. Hans Koch (Leipzig: Reclam, 1973), p. 433; Lenin, Collected Works, 44 vols (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), vol. 10, p. 46; and Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 256 and 255.

[18] Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture, (MR Books; New York, 1971), p. xx; Lukács, ‘Aus der Not ein Tugend’ [1932], in Lukács, Schriften zur Literatursoziologie, ed. Peter Ludz (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961), p. 145; and Lukács in Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, translation editor Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1977), pp. 39, 52 and 57.

[19] Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London; Fontana, 1973), pp. 223 and 253.

[20] Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel was tempered [Russian edition] (Leningrad, 1980), p. 158.

[21] Andrey Zhdanov i.a., Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports amd Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society, 1935), p. 21; and Ostrovsky, The Making of a Hero, trans. Alec Brown (London: Secker and Warburg, 1937), p. 440.

[22] George Lukács, “Reportage oder Gestaltung? Kritische Bemerkungen anläßlich eines Romans von Ottwalt”. In George Lukács, Schriften zur Literatursoziologie (Neuwied, 1961), pp. 122-142 (p. 136).

[23] Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 187.

[24] Aragon, J’Abats mon jeu (Paris, 1959), p. 92.

[25] Brecht, ‘Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stücke’ [1954], in Frühe Stücke (Frankfurt am Main; Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 11; and Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett (Methuen; London, 1964), p. 57.

[26] Brecht, Manual of Piety, trans. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 247 [my translation]; and Kästner, Fabian: Die Geschichte eines Moralisten [1931] (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1975), p. 124.

[27] Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaizer, 3 vols (London: Panther, 1968 ), vol. 1, pp. 68 and 69; Canetti, Auto de Fé, trans. C.V. Wedgwood (London; Pan Books, 1978), p. 366; and Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, trans. Eugene Jolas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 7 and 478.

[28] Brecht, Measures Taken, trans. Carl R. Mueller (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 33.

[29] Silone, Fontamara, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Dent, 1985), p. 48; and Silone in The God that failed, p. 119.

[30] Malraux, ‘Reply to Trotsky [1931], in Malraux, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (New York: Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 21; and Malraux, Man’s Estate, trans. Alastair Macdonald (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 240, 11-12, 215, 219, and 316.

[31] Malraux, ‘Afterword’ [1947] to The Conquerors, trans. Stephen Becker (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), pp. 189 and 183; and Mann, ‘Deutsche Ansprache’, in Essays, ed. Hermann Kurzke, 3 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1977), vol. 2, p. 110.

[32] Mann, Mario and the Magician, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 150.

[33] Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 39, 64 and 462.

[34] Koestler, in The God that Failed, p. 69; and Woodcock, Writers and Politics [1948] (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), p. 6.

[35] Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 82, 83, 172 and 211; and The God that Failed, p. 76.

[36] Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey and ed. Patricia Blake (New York: World Publishing, 1960), pp. 300 and 303; and Zamytin, We, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), pp. 95 and 130.

[37] Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Perennial Library, 1969), p. 2; Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper Row, 1958), p. 3; and Huxley, Brave New World, p. 163.

[38] Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Pennguin, 1962), pp. 188 and 167; and Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), p. 99.

[39] Orwell, 1984 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 31.

[40] Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses [1930] (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), p. 13; and Spengler, The Decline of the West, pp. 506 and 507.

[41] Benn, ‘Lebensweg eines Intellektualisten’ [1934], in Gesammelte Werke, 4 vols. ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1961), vol. 4, p. 56.

[42] Stehr ‘Das neue Evangelium’, in Stundenglas: Schriften, Reden, Tagebücher, (Leipzig: List, 1936), p. 165; and Jünger, preface to Feuer und Blut (Berlin: Mittler, 1925).

[43] Marinetti, ‘Beyond Communism’ [1920], in Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), p. 148.

[44] Drieu la Rochelle, The Comedy of Charleroi, trans. Douglas Gallagher (Cambridge: Rivers Press, 1973), pp. 17, 14 and 44; and Celine, Voyage au but de la nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 407.

[45] Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 11, 12, 13 and 16; and Kangaroo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), pp. 287, 289 and 294.

[46] Gottfried Benn, Werke, vol. 2, p. 117, and vol. 1, p. 440.

[47] Woodcock, Writer and Politics, p. 18; Mauriac, The Knot of Vipers, trans. Gerard Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p.185; and Mauriac, ‘Graham Greene’, from Men I Hold Great (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), pp. 124-128.

[48] Bernanos, Sous le soleil de Satan (Paris: Plon, 1926), pp. 286-287; and Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 139 and 251.

[49] Greene, Brighton Rock (London: William Heineman, 1970), p.284; and The Power and the Glory (London; William Heineman, 1971), p. 253.

[50] Eliot, The Four Quartets (London; Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 16.

[51] Eliot, The Four Quartets, pp. 18, 28, 31, 58 and 59.

[52] Bernanos, La Liberté, pour quoi faire? [1942] (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), pp. 287-288; and Camus, ‘The Artist and his Time’, in The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1955), p. 148.

[53] Sartre, Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 188; and Camus, The Outsider, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 120.

[54] Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: The Modern Library, 1948), p. 150.

[55] Sartre, Crime Passionnel, trans. Kitty Black (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 118.

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