The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940

Elinor Taylor, The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018) 224 pages.

In an interview published recently in Historical Materialism, Elinor Taylor identifies the research gap that her new book seeks to fill in exploring the relationship between politics and literature during the 1930s in a similarly comprehensive way as Michael Denning’s survey in the U.S. – The Cultural Front (1997):

There isn’t a study of the British Popular Front that encompasses the breadth that Michael Denning’s study of the American Popular Front.” The Cultural Front, does. There are important studies of particular developments, like Colin Chambers’ The Story of Unity Theatre (Lawrence & Wishart, 1989) and Mick Wallis’s work on the Popular Front pageants. But I would say that it’s certainly possible to speak of a ‘cultural front’ of politically engaged art and writing in Britain, though I think it was less diverse and less developed than the American case. The USA had a longer history of cultural organisation via institutions like the John Reed Clubs, established in 1929, and the New Masses journal, established in 1926, while in Britain the institutions of the Popular Front, such as the journal Left Review and the Left Book Club, had no real precedents. The cultural infrastructure that sustained the ‘cultural front’ in Britain was always quite fragile and subject to financial and ideological pressures.¹

Introducing her own study, Taylor states more precisely that her main focus is to use the Popular Front as the starting point to trace the literary expressions of particular works of fiction that were informed by the cultural debates of the time. In this way, Taylor seeks to rehabilitate these radical novels that were written by Communists, not least in terms of their formal experimentation and political sophistication:

This book seeks to contribute to the increasingly pluralist field by reading back beyond what E. P. Thompson called the ‘cultural default’ of the British intellectuals to reconstruct the relationships between the politics of Communism, anti-fascism and novelistic form, and in so doing to recover resistance to the closure Auden announced on the outbreak of war: a consignment of cultural radicalism of the thirties to a dead end, a ‘clever hope’ and nothing more (4).

Without doubt, this is a meticulously researched, extremely well written and illuminating new study that does indeed cover important aspects of novels that have been previously neglected or ignored. Despite the title of the book, Taylor is however not particularly concerned with assessing the actual political success or failure of the Popular Front strategy of the Communist Party in Britain or elsewhere. She is much more interested in looking at the impact this dramatic shift in the policies of the Third International (Comintern) had on a small but representative selection of works written at the time in order to tease out the tensions between Popular Front politics and literary production.

In reality, the sudden political volte face on the part of the Comintern from a previous ‘class against class’ sectarianism to an all-embracing ‘people’s front’ reflected a profound ideological confusion within the Communist movement. The earlier tactic had led to the catastrophic defeat of the revolution in Germany, where the Communist Party pursued a policy of rejecting any alliance with the ‘social fascist’ Social Democrats, thus allowing Hitler to come to power on the back of a fundamentally divided workers’ movement. This political débâcle sent shock waves through the Communist International leading to a desperate call in 1935 for all-inclusive ‘popular’ coalitions between Communists, Social Democrats, Liberals, Conservatives and anyone else on the basis of defending bourgeois parliamentary democracy. In Britain, the Popular Front never really got off the ground since the Labour Party leadership would have nothing to do with the Communist Party. Instead there was a series of national coalition governments with different constellations of Conservative, Labour and Liberal ministers. In Spain, however, as George Orwell documented at first hand in his book, Homage to Catalonia (1938), this policy of class conciliation had similarly disastrous consequences. The Spanish Communist Party were told by Moscow to put the revolutionary struggle for workers’ power on hold and devote itself instead to appeasing its liberal government allies by persecuting radical Socialists, Anarchists and Trotskyists almost as vigorously as it fought the fascists of Franco. Stepping warily around such defining moments of Stalinist betrayal in the 1930s, Taylor nevertheless calls tentatively for a more positive estimation of this Popular Front tactic as still providing the basis for radical cultural and political struggle today. Thus, citing Eric Hobsbawm, she concludes:

Even 50 years on from the original Popular Front movement, another intellectual formed in that atmosphere, Eric Hobsbawm, could claim that ‘the people’s front remains the socialist strategy that most frightens the enemy’. The validity of that claim will not be considered here; nonetheless, this book has sought to restore to view the possibilities and challenges that such a strategy sought, for a brief time, presented at the interface between culture and politics (200).

In contrast to throwaway political comments like the above, the strength of Taylor’s study lies in her clear, detailed and very persuasive close readings of the novels themselves. Here she also challenges previously perfunctory dismissals of them as being either vulgar socialist realism or drab literary sociology. It is therefore something of a revelation to see these texts placed in a new aesthetic context of the literary critical debate in the 1930s, not only between realism and modernism, but also a creative reconfiguration of the historical novel and the concept of a radical ‘people’s history’. This discussion also underpins Taylor’s choice of literary texts that dramatize these encounters in different fictionalized ways. Thus, we find modernism represented in John Sommerfield’s collective ‘camera-eye’ novel, May Day (1936) and in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s experimental, anti-fascist satire, Pie in the Sky (1937). The radical historical genre is illustrated by Jack Lindsay’s much neglected trilogy – 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), Lost Birthright (1939) and Men of Forty-Eight (1948) – while the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘national culture’ form the subtext of James Barke’s Scottish novels, Major Operation (1936) and The Land of the Leal (1939). Finally, Lewis Jones’s two proletarian novels about Welsh miners – Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939) – help to trace a line of critical reconnection between class, communism and the community of ordinary people.

In this selective context, it needs to be said however, that while Taylor’s choice of literary texts most certainly allows for a fruitful exploration of the issues raised in her study, the question is still begged about the absence of a sustained engagement with the work of any female writer from the same period. That Taylor herself is aware of this lapse can be seen in the critical acknowledgement she adds at the end of her study:

In seeking to restore to view some of the components of this still fragmented and incomplete history, there are, inevitably, many omissions. The most obvious of these is the lack of discussion of the contributions of women writers […] Productive work could certainly be done too on questions of the relationships between gender and political subjectivity in leftist fiction more generally (197).

Taylor does not explain why she nevertheless chose not to address this oversight. Although she does briefly mention the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner, it would have added to the whole critical balance of her book to have included such a writer in a much more comprehensive chapter discussion of gender politics and the novel. Not least since Townsend Warner was herself a Communist writer who participated actively in the literary debates of the 1930s and who wrote a whole number of historical novels, including what she herself described as a Marxist portrayal of women’s lives in a medieval nunnery, The Corner that Held Them (1948). She also produced an epic novel of the 1848 revolution in France, Summer Will Show (1936),which depicts what one might characterize as a lesbian continuum in the radical political and personal development of the two main characters, Sophia and Minna. Moreover, even when it comes to the male dominated novels that Taylor has actually chosen to analyze, a case could still be made for more gender-oriented readings. For example, in Sommerfield’s May Day, one could argue that it is the female factory workers, with the communist agitator Ivy Cutford at their head that represent the most dynamically radical force in the whole novel.

These critical shortcomings should not, however, in any fundamental way eclipse the overall qualities of Taylor’s study which make it such an original contribution to the cultural debate about the 1930s. Given her wide-ranging expertise, one would also have liked to see a more politically probing evaluation of what can still be learned from this decade of acute class struggle that seems in many ways so much like our own. It is of course possible that Taylor’s work might have been restricted by the fact that it is originally a doctoral thesis where a more limited focus is often required. If that is the case, one can only look forward to her writing further studies that address the questions she herself has indicated as important areas of future research.

Ronald Paul
University of Gothenburg
Sweden
ronald.paul@sprak.gu.se

Footnotes

1The Popular Front Novel: An Interview with Elinor Taylor”. www.historicalmaterialism.org. 19 December 2017.