The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never came close to achieving political power, but its contribution to British society during the seventy-one years of its existence was by no means negligible. Some of its most important achievements occurred in the fields of culture and the arts. From the early 1920s onwards — though especially in the period between the mid-1930s and the late-1950s — the CPGB played host to an array of writers, artists, and musicians whose work has proved of lasting value.1 One of the Party’s particular strengths was in the area of literary and cultural theory. Although a number of writers had adumbrated a Marxist approach to culture in the years before the foundation of the CPGB in 1920, it was only under the influence of Party critics such as Christopher Caudwell, Alick West, and Ralph Fox that Marxism became an accepted tool of literary and cultural analysis in Britain. Moreover, it is now becoming clear that the CPGB’s cultural line exerted a seminal influence on some of twentieth-century Britain’s most important writers and thinkers. George Orwell, Jacob Bronowski, Raymond Williams, John Berger were among the cultural titans whose work was deeply affected by their early exposure to British communist ideology.

In spite of the efforts of a number of pioneering scholars, British communist criticism has yet to receive the academic attention it deserves. This is partly because of the cultural and political prejudices by which it is still surrounded. Because many British communists were influenced by ideas originating in the USSR, there is still a tendency to dismiss them as “Moscow dupes” whose only contribution to intellectual life was the mindless repetition of Soviet dogmas. If assumptions like these have discouraged many people from examining communist criticism in depth, they have also had a distorting effect on the small body of work that takes it seriously.2 Insofar as scholars have tried to defend the British communists against the charge of mindless pro-Sovietism, it has sometimes been at the cost of understating the extent of the Soviet influence. As stimulating as the work of pioneering scholars like Prakash, Paananen, and Behrend undoubtedly is, the impression it creates is that men such as West, Caudwell, and Fox owed no particular debt to Soviet theory and were usually more responsive to ideas drawn from the Western tradition. The result is a vision of communist intellectual history from which the specter of the USSR has been mysteriously erased.

One of the aims of this article is to suggest an alternative to the two existing positions. Its central assumption is that British communist critics were deeply influenced by Soviet ideas but never enslaved by them. Although the British communists derived their basic intellectual framework from Soviet theory, they often succeeded in extending Soviet ideas in highly innovative and unpredictable ways. Indeed, there were times when the British response to Soviet theory was downright unorthodox. Unwilling to follow the prevailing line too uncritically, British communists sometimes developed ideas that were both deeply inconsistent with Soviet aesthetic orthodoxy and implicitly critical of the CPGB’s political perspectives.3 This article seeks to illustrate these ideas by examining communist debates about literary aesthetics in the late 1930s. The first section focuses on the work of the Soviet intellectual Nikolai Bukharin, whose writings on literary aesthetics played a major role in legitimizing the Soviet government’s promotion of “Socialist Realism” in the arts. Sections two and three examine the specifically aesthetic element in the work of Alick West and Christopher Caudwell, Bukharin’s two most important British interlocutors. My intention is to show that West and Caudwell owed a considerable debt to Bukharin but never even came close to sacrificing their intellectual independence. In the end they should both be regarded as communist dissidents.

Nikolai Bukharin and the Defense of Socialist Realism

The emergence of Marxist literary and cultural criticism in Britain long predated the foundation of the CPGB in 1920. Marxist writers began addressing cultural themes as early as the 1880s and some of their insights — especially those of William Morris, Edward Aveling, and Eleanor Marx — retain their importance more than a hundred years later.4 Nevertheless, it was only in the second half of the 1930s that Marxist cultural theory in Britain acquired real intellectual weight. The single most galvanizing influence on the new cohort of CPGB thinkers was the aesthetic ideology explored at the famous Soviet Writers’ Congress in August 1934. In many respects the Congress was the culmination of the extraordinary cultural debates which had occurred in the USSR in the seventeen years since the October Revolution. As soon as Lenin and the Bolshevik Party took power in 1917, a bewildering variety of artistic groups, engaged intellectuals, and culturally minded politicians rushed to express their ideas about the role of the arts in the emerging socialist society. The debate was characterized by an unusual degree of fervor from the very beginning. On the one hand, spokesmen for a variety of modernist tendencies — notably Futurism, Constructivism, and the so-called montage cinema — insisted that only the most uncompromising avant-gardism was equal to the task of reflecting and shaping life in the post-capitalist era. By contrast, naturalist groups such as the AkhRR and RAPP claimed that revolutionaries would struggle to find a mass audience unless they employed techniques of a more traditionalist vintage. The influential Proletcult group around A.A. Bogdanov even went so far as to advocate the complete abandonment of all existing artistic traditions, insisting — much to Lenin’s chagrin — that an authentic socialist culture would have to be built from the ground up by working people.

The Soviet government’s attitude towards the competing artistic trends was at first a comparatively liberal one. No movements or individuals were suppressed in the early years of the revolution unless they were perceived as explicitly counter-revolutionary. However, the state’s efforts to extend its influence over the arts began to gather pace shortly after Lenin’s death. The first sign that Soviet politicians were swinging behind the traditionalist, realist, and anti-modernist camp came in 1925 when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) issued a resolution entitled On the Party’s Policy in the Field of Literature. At the heart of the resolution was the demand that politically conscious artists should “make use of all the technical achievements of the old masters to work out an appropriate form, intelligible to the masses.”5 It was now only a matter of time until the state sought to bring Soviet artists under complete control. State-run organizations to oversee the production of new work in each of the arts were eventually set up in 1932. Two years later, during the tumultuous debates at the Writers’ Congress in Moscow, Stalin’s hired intellectuals finally clarified the aesthetic ideology to which Soviet writers and artists were expected to adhere. The core of this ideology was the instruction that communist cultural workers should eschew modernist experimentation and observe the conventions of “Socialist Realism.”6 The most important speeches at the congress — those by A.A. Zhdanov, Maxim Gorky, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukhari, and A.I. Stetsky — were subsequently translated into a number of different languages and published in book form throughout the world. The English translation of the speeches can reasonably be regarded as the single biggest influence on British communist criticism in the 1930s.7 When critics such as West, Caudwell and Fox wrote about the arts, they developed their ideas within a conceptual framework established by their Soviet counterparts. As innovative and unorthodox as they could frequently be, they took it for granted that their main duty was to tease out the significance of Soviet criticism’s defining shibboleths.

The overriding purpose of the congress was a prescriptive one. Zhdanov, Gorky, and the other keynote speakers all had a hand in stipulating what a work of Socialist Realism should look like. Zhdanov came closest to encapsulating the new form in a single sentence when he said that Socialist Realism “means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, not to depict it in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as “objective reality,” but to depict reality in its revolutionary development.”8 Soviet writers were given precise instructions as to how they should shape their work at the level of both form and content. They were told, in the first place, to turn their backs on modernist experimentation and to employ only traditional forms — linear narrative in the novel, rhyme and rhythm in poetry, Renaissance perspective in painting, and so on. They were also told that a meritorious work of Socialist Realism should strike a balance between illuminating the present and prefiguring the utopian promise of the communist future. On the one hand, guided by the materialist conception of history, revolutionary writers should sharpen their audience’s understanding of contemporary affairs by laying bare their “essence.” This could only be done by portraying society as synoptically as possible and by rigorously adhering to the principles of klassovost (the idea that the working class has the main responsibility for changing society), partiinost (the idea that the Communist Party must lead the working class in its revolutionary activity), and ideinost (the idea that Marxism alone provides an adequate means of interpreting human affairs). On the other hand, a work of Socialist Realism should also look beyond the limits of the present towards the glories of a fully realized communist society, bathing reality in a romantic hue and sketching “positive heroes” who foreshadowed the well-nigh superhuman citizens of the future. Speakers like Zhdanov and Gorky made it perfectly clear that the age of aesthetic autonomy was over. Artists could only produce meaningful work in the modern world if they submitted to the will of the Communist Party.

Although the main goal of the congress was to give Soviet writers a clear understanding of the sort of work they were expected to produce, the main speakers did not confine themselves to issuing instructions. They also floated ideas of a broad-ranging kind whose purpose was to provide Socialist Realism with a measure of intellectual justification. Some of these ideas were primarily historical, rooted in the claim that there was a tradition of “critical realism” in world culture to which the new Soviet art could legitimately be regarded as the successor. Others were of a more comparative nature, seeking to prove that art and culture were infinitely healthier in the Soviet Union than in the “decadent” capitalist world. (As is well known, modernism came in for particularly virulent criticism at the congress.)9 Of greater intellectual consequence was what could perhaps be called the aesthetic or philosophical element in Soviet criticism, exemplified by the work of Nikolai Bukharin.10 In a lengthy speech entitled “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR,” Bukharin outlined a series of ideas about the ultimate nature of art which proved — or at least purported to prove — that Socialist Realism possessed all the characteristics that make artistic greatness possible. Ostensibly concerned only with poetry, Bukharin in fact raised ideas that were relevant to the arts as a whole.11 As we shall see, his theory served as a starting point for British communism’s most talented cultural critics.

The first element in Bukharin’s aesthetic theory concerns the relationship between literature and doctrine. Aware that Socialist Realism was intended more than anything else to serve as an instrument of political education, Bukharin rejects the claim that works of art are inefficient at conveying ideas. Instead he argues that art is distinguished from other forms of discourse by its ability to fuse thought and feeling. His case rests on what he calls a “dialectical” theory of perception. Strictly speaking there are only two ways of engaging with the external world, or so Bukharin insists. One is through sense impressions and the other is through concepts. To engage with the world through sense impressions is to stick to the surface of things and to feel an emotional response to whatever one encounters, even if the extent of one’s emotions varies from the intense to the barely noticeable. To engage with the world through concepts is to transcend the surface of things and to understand reality in terms of linked generalizations. However, the distinction between the emotional and the conceptual poles of perception is by no means watertight. In practice the two ways of understanding reality tend to interpenetrate with each other, creating a situation in which “the stream of experience is integral and undivided.”12 Bukharin’s point about art is that it takes this dialectical fusion of thought and feeling to new heights. The artist does not trade in concepts but his work always expresses a particular view of the world. In effect she works by transforming sense impressions into symbols of thought. By condensing her experience of the world into a handful of images ˗ and by linking the images together in a rigorously ordered sequence — she imbues sense impressions with the capacity to generalize about reality and thereby to stand in for concepts:

The type of thinking here is not the same as in logical thought. Here generalization is achieved not by extinguishing the sensory, but by substituting one complex of sense symbols for a great multitude of other complexes. This “substitute” becomes a “symbol,” an “image,” a type, an emotionally colored unity, behind which and in the folds of whose garments thousands of other sensory elements are concealed.13

Bukharin’s faith in the capacity of art to reconcile thought and feeling was by no means new. Its roots in the work of Lessing and Hegel would have been clear to at least some of his listeners. Nevertheless, it had a central role to play in shoring up the idea of Socialist Realism. One of the complaints most frequently made about political art is that it vulgarizes aesthetic expression by focusing too closely on ideas. When Bukharin argued that ideas can sometimes be expressed through the medium of concrete particulars, he implicitly defended Soviet writers against the charge that they were polluting their art with propaganda. Having emphasized the sensory, emotional, and particularized nature of art’s engagement with thought, he then goes on to investigate the type of emotion to which art gives expression. Here his argument takes the form of an exasperated attack on what he calls a “highly ridiculous” trend in modern Western philosophy. Since the end of the eighteenth century — a period in which aesthetic considerations moved to the heart of Western thought — many philosophers laid special emphasis on the “disinterested” nature of the aesthetic gaze. In their different ways Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche had all argued that art’s evocation of reality somehow transcends self-interest and eschews all reference to “desire or will.”14 Unlike the scientist or the homme moyen sensuel, the artist surveys and recreates the world around her in a spirit of pure objectivity. Bukharin was having none of these Idealist verities: “All this is utter nonsense.”15 Instead he goes to the opposite extreme and emphasizes the strongly self-interested nature of the arts. Mindful of Socialist Realism’s efforts to whip up enthusiasm for the communist experiment, he argues that art’s main function is to bind its audience to a particular vision of society by stimulating their most powerful desires. Its emotional currency is not Kantian self-abnegation but “active militant force.”16 Like many other Marxist critics, Bukharin seeks support for his particular understanding of art by referring to the early history of Western culture. Noting that the works of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and the other great playwrights of democratic Athens were replete with politically charged emotions, he effectively claims that Socialist Realism takes up where the peerless culture of the ancient world left off. He also implies that art’s emotionalism can ultimately be traced to its plebeian roots. In ancient Greece there were frequent “poetic contests” in which “the poets were awarded crowns by the crowd.”17 It was precisely the need to win over the crowds which ensured that artists in the Western tradition had valued strong emotions more than anything else.

The other crucial element in Bukharin’s aesthetic theory is a consideration of the relationship between form and content. Once again he chooses to articulate his views through an attack on a non-Marxist school of thought, in this case that of Russian Formalism. Associated with the likes of Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, and Boris Eichenbaum, Russian Formalism had emerged in the years leading up to the October Revolution and enjoyed considerable prestige in revolutionary Moscow. (Bukharin paid special attention to the work of Victor Zhirmunsky, a now largely forgotten figure.) At the heart of its account of how literature works is an emphasis on the priority of form over content. Seeking to explain how literature “defamiliarizes” human experience — how it banishes sensory torpor and revitalizes our responses to the world — Shklovsky and his co-thinkers argue that literary works should ultimately be regarded as an autonomous “heap of devices.”18 By employing a style that differs radically from the language of everyday life, writers impede their readers’ capacity to engage with a work’s content by focusing their attention on such things as rhyme, rhythm or narrative structure. In so doing they force them to make a special effort to understand what a work is seeking to represent, freeing them from the jaded forms of perception that dominate everyday life. Although Bukharin takes ideas such as these seriously, he also finds them unpersuasive. His first and most predictable reason for doing so is that Russian Formalism takes no account of literature’s historical genesis: in ascribing so much importance to form and so little to content, Shklovsky, Zhirmunsky, and their ilk fail to identify the socio-economic circumstances in which individual works have their roots.19 More important from the perspective of Soviet cultural policy is the related claim that Formalism fundamentally inverts the relationship between form and content. In opposition to the idea that form somehow floats free from content and in so doing serves to defamiliarize it, Bukharin harks back to Hegelian and Marxist orthodoxy by claiming that authentic art is always characterized by the unity of form and content: “Every poetical work is an integral unity, in which sound, ideas, imagery, etc., are component parts synthetically united.”20 Two aspects of this unified relationship are especially important, or so Bukharin implies. The first is the capacity of content to determine form. In the final analysis, in spite of the endless complexities governing the relationship between the “what” and the “how” of art, the things that a work says always shape the way in which it says them. Moreover — and crucially — an authentic work of art always seeks to represent its content as transparently as possible. The idea that an artist should go out of her way to draw attention to her chosen forms is not an admissible aesthetic principle. Any work that interposes its form between its audience and its content — any work that fails to give its audience a clear and immediate sense of what it is about — is guilty of needless obscurantism.

Bukharin’s attack on writers like Shklovsky and Zhirmunsky was directly related to his defense of Soviet cultural policy, even though its significance may not have been immediately clear to all his listeners. In questioning Formalism’s emphasis on the autonomy of form, Bukharin is launching a sort of proxy raid on modernism — or what he chooses to call “formalism in art.”21 In the early-twentieth century it was very common for modernism to be accused of stylistic ostentatiousness. Discontinuous composition in literature, atonalism in music and the abandonment of linear perspective in painting were widely dismissed as symptoms of aesthetic nihilism, intended only to confuse audiences and obscure whatever it was an artist had to say. When Bukharin upbraids the Formalists for arguing that form ultimately has priority over content, his central objective is to reinforce the Soviet attack on modernism by demolishing a theory that appears to offer support to the most experimental trends in modern culture. By the same token his own arguments about the relationship between form and content are clearly intended to buttress the case for Socialist Realism. If authentic works of art always value clarity more than anything else — if the things they say and the way they say them are always “synthetically united” — it follows that revolutionary artists will have an instinctive preference for the traditional forms endorsed by the Soviet state. Bukharin adds extra weight to his attack on modernism by making some grim predictions about its future. Given the modernists’ obsession with stylistic innovation and their relative indifference to content, it is only a matter of time until they start creating works from which every last trace of meaning has been expunged. This exercise in aesthetic “self-emasculation” will perfectly reflect the individualism, solipsism, and irrationalism which disfigure bourgeois culture in the modern age. For him, modernism begins with a massive overestimation of the importance of form and ends with the “suicide of the given form of art.”22

Alick West on the Unity of Form and Content

Bukharin’s paper on the aesthetics of poetry was more sophisticated than any of the other contributions to the Soviet Writers’ Congress, but its central ideas were by no means purely academic. In seeking to define poetry in terms of such things as emotional force, accessibility, and the synthesis of thought and feeling, Bukharin set out to provide historical and philosophical justification for the work of the Socialist Realists. However, his support for state-sponsored art in the USSR was somewhat weakened by a conspicuous gap in his argument. Although he took it for granted that contemporary literature could only be worthwhile if it expressed a socialist perspective, he made no real attempt to explain why this should be the case. Bukharin gave his listeners good reasons for supposing that the arts could play an important role in changing the world. What he failed to do was justify the proposition that the politically conscious artist should be a Marxist as opposed to a liberal, a conservative or even a fascist. Undoubtedly sincere in his commitment to the idea of Socialist Realism, he elided the issue of why communists and communists alone could now be relied upon to carry forward the great realistic heritage of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, or Leo Tolstoy.

It is in this context that the work of Alick West acquires its significance.23 In his path-breaking book Crisis and Criticism (1937), West extends Bukharin’s ideas in such a way as to justify the claim that literary excellence can only result from a Marxist or Marxisant approach to contemporary affairs. At the core of the book is an ingenious reworking of Bukharin’s doctrine of the unity of form and content. Working backwards from form to content, West argues that the aesthetic integrity of a work of literature is wholly bound up with the depth of its author’s understanding of material production. Since literary form is ultimately rooted in production, it follows that a work can only realize its formal possibilities if it evokes the most progressive elements in contemporary economic life. In the modern world this means that the writer who aspires to greatness has no choice but to describe — and in some senses to support — the economic forces transforming capitalism into socialism.

Stated in brief, West’s theory seems impossibly vague and dogmatic. The skill with which it reworks Bukharin’s ideas only becomes apparent when it is examined in more detail. Its understanding of the relationship between form and content rests on a startling hypothesis about the origins of literary inspiration. According to West, the greatest artists in human history have acquired the urge to create through identifying with the majesty of the economic process. Deeply though perhaps unconsciously inspired by humanity’s efforts to impose its will on nature, writers experience a quickening of their inner lives and a corresponding invigoration of their responses to the external world. These experiences demand expression in formally sophisticated language:

The good writer does not take for granted. In some way, of which at present we know very little, he actively feels the productive energy of society and identifies himself with it...With this sense in his body of the productive energy that alone continues the existence of us and our world, the writer’s language is quickened. His whole writing expresses that participation in social energy through which he feels the life of the world.24

Having identified the economic roots of creativity, West goes on to portray the literary work as a sort of compacted verbal replica of economic activity. Crisis and Criticism moves far beyond the common or garden Marxist assumption that writers are influenced by and somehow “reflect” the prevailing mode of production. Its more precise argument is that a literary work achieves aesthetic significance not merely by reproducing but also transfiguring the most important subjective and objective elements in economic life. West’s efforts to pin down what he means begins with a discussion of literary form, which he sees — in line with the precepts of what was becoming known as “Cambridge English” — as the force most directly responsible for adding aesthetic luster to a work’s content. His essential point is that literary forms grow directly out of the experience of work. Insisting that the subjective aspects of work have been much the same throughout history, West argues that laboring men and women necessarily suffer from a species of emotional self-division. Eager at times to work hard in pursuit of common objectives, they also feel a continual temptation to shirk their responsibilities and live off the labor of others. This tension between “energy and stasis” corresponds to a broader tension between “inclusion and exclusion.” During the periods in which they contribute most enthusiastically to the labor process, men and women feel fully integrated into the society of which they form a part. By contrast, they are inclined to feel isolated from their fellows when the urge to withdraw from labor takes hold. The secret of literature’s capacity to vitalize our experience is that it takes these and other experiences and models its forms on them. Literature’s emotional structure is linked to the subjective experiences of the individual worker by a direct relationship of cause and effect. Deviating between emotional extremes — reproducing and compressing the sense of self-division that has always characterized the labor process — literature “show[s]” its content “in relation to succeeding or mingled feelings of activity or inertia, hope or fear, courage or despondency.”25 The result is what the Russian Formalists might have called a “defamiliarization” of our habits of perception. Under the influence of literary form we once again experience the world in its full majesty.

West is not simply concerned with the emotional aspects of the labor process when he describes the parallels between literature and work. His discussion of literary form also addresses the cognitive element in economic activity, while acknowledging that literature’s other stylistic debts to human labor are “subtle, intricate, and various.”26 Nevertheless, his single most celebrated statement about form is primarily concerned with the emotional impact of great works. Rejecting the idea that literature simply reproduces the experience of work without at the same time embellishing it, West argues that one of the great virtues of literary form is that it “gives the sensation of a more harmonized organism than the social organism actually is.”27 Whereas everyday work is always tainted by the sort of emotional self-division to which Crisis and Criticism draws attention, literature makes its mark by bringing a measure of unity to apparently disparate feelings. Evoking the gnawing tensions that do so much to impede economic efficiency — tensions between energy and stasis, inclusion and exclusion and so on — it works tirelessly to rob them of their sting by melding the sharply opposed emotions that define them into a sort of continuum. In the work of a great writer there is ultimately no such thing as a prolonged emotional conflict. The overriding objective of a Shakespeare or a Milton is take unreconciled feelings and make them seem continuous with each other. In so doing they hold out a deeply inspiring vision of emotional unity — so inspiring, in fact, that it often encourages people to return to their work with renewed enthusiasm. One way of defining literature is simply to say that it “organiz[es] social energy in a particular activity.”28

West’s remarks about the capacity of literature to reconcile opposites hint at the diversity of his theoretical influences. At one level reminiscent of Bukharin’s analysis of the relationship between thought and feeling in poetry, they also point towards his preoccupation with the work of I.A. Richards. In the theoretical writings which laid the foundations of the academic study of English Literature in the inter-war period, Richards famously argued that the defining characteristic of literature is its ability to promote the “resolution, inter-animation, and balancing of impulses.”29 By replacing the emphasis on “impulses” with an emphasis on emotions generated during work, West was clearly trying to recalibrate Richards’s argument so that it applied more to the sphere of social organization than to the sphere of individual psychology.30 His subtle efforts to balance Soviet and English influences also shaped his comments on the relationship between form and content. As a critic working in Richards’s shadow, West took it for granted that a persuasive theory of literature had to explain form’s capacity to confer aesthetic power on what a poem, novel or play seeks to represent. Yet what distinguished Crisis and Criticism from Richards’s work was the use it made of Bukharin’s emphasis on the continuity between form and content. If we accept that literary form mimics the states of mind that characterize productive activity, or so West argues, we have to assume that its aesthetic power can only be unleashed by works depicting the most progressive elements in the existing economic conjuncture. Any work that aspires to artistic greatness must somehow evoke two related aspects of its contemporary scene. The first are those developments in the means of production which point the way towards a new form of economic organization. The second is the process of class struggle which determines whether a new form of economic organization actually comes to pass. Moreover, literature can only be successful if it not merely evokes these things but actively approves of them: “Social movement only becomes an impulse to literature when the individual actively feels it, when... the individual in his own activity experiences the strain between the new productive forces and the old productive relations.”31 The writer who fails to identify with the forces of economic progress of necessity produces work of little value.

The political corollary of West’s observations about form and content could scarcely have been clearer. Taking it for granted that the most progressive elements in modern economic life expose the obsolescence of capitalism, West effectively argues that contemporary literature must lay bare the need for socialism or be condemned to irrelevance. But this is not to say that his theory is as crudely partisan as it at first appears. He makes no attempt to claim that great literature must directly reflect the prevailing economic realities — on the contrary, he recognizes that most works evoke “new productive forces and class-war” in purely symbolic form. Nor does he deny that certain writers can produce great works in the modern age without necessarily being socialists. As much as his theory is intended to undergird the doctrine of Socialist Realism, West happily echoes Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Lukács in arguing that some works can have progressive consequences in spite of their authors’ political beliefs. If the work of a self-confessed conservative vividly evokes the technological changes and class struggles that define the age, its ability to radicalize the minds of its readers can often be greater than that of more dogmatically left-wing writing: “Though literature is propaganda, its value... does not depend on its manifest program.”32 West then goes on to speculate about the precise means by which a work encourages its readers to identify with the progressive elements in modern life. In a suggestive but slightly vague passage on Milton’s Paradise Lost, he implies that great works are usually characterized by their balanced and even-handed depiction of social change. A writer like Milton starts out by evoking the progressive and reactionary elements in life without undue partisanship, leaving it until relatively late to guide the reader towards an identification with the forces of social transformation. There is a sense in which Milton was simultaneously “on both sides” when he first described the battles between Satan and God, finally siding with God (and the bourgeois realities he symbolized) only towards the end of the poem. The great artist’s strategy of even-handedness is closely related to his handling of emotion. While West agrees with Bukharin that literature seeks to revolutionize consciousness by stirring up strong feelings, he openly challenges his rejection of the Kantian doctrine of disinterestedness. Drawing a clever analogy between the experience of reading a work of literature and the experience of watching a tube train arrive at a station, he affirms that Bukharin was right to question orthodox Kantianism while at the same time insisting that the notion of disinterestedness is not “utter nonsense”:

if, instead of merely waiting for the train to come, as trains always do come, we look down the tunnel, feel the wind begin to blow out of it, then see the gleam from the approaching train, the sense of excitement may make us momentarily forget whether we are waiting for a Highgate or a Golders Green train. In that sense, we are disinterested. The train is not a given object, by which we travel to Highgate, which we consume. We look at it without reference to our desire to get to a particular station. But it is untrue to say that it exists for us only in an intellectual way, without desire or will. We see it with a sense of exhilaration that there should be any trains at all, with a feeling of the social energy that has created them. We do not want only to use trains, but to take part, in our field, in the activity that produces them. The element of truth in Hegel’s [and Kant’s] idea is that in an aesthetic experience we do not desire as mere consumers; but we do desire as producers, and this desire, though not necessarily the only one, is dominant.33

The implications of this highly evocative passage are worth considering. In seeking to modify Bukharin’s argument about the role of emotion in literature, West is doing a lot more than simply registering a minor theoretical disagreement. He is also hinting at something curiously ambivalent in his attitude towards communist politics. As we have seen, Bukharin believes that art’s function is to bind people to a particular social order or political project through the expression of powerful emotions. The role of the Socialist Realist is to inspire people into embracing revolutionary politics by stimulating their most urgent desires. West’s inspired comparison between a tube train and a work of literature suggests that his attitude to the issue of emotion is a lot less emphatic. Summarizing his understanding of how great art evokes the progressive or emergent elements in society, he seems to imply that the highest function of art is to induce a mood of cautious enthusiasm rather than fervor. The traveler who gazes out at the train for Golders Green (here symbolizing the progressive thrust of technology and class struggle) is neither desperate to clamber aboard nor overcome by feeling. Instead his attitude is one of quiet and dignified appreciation. Although he is deeply moved by the train’s grandeur and everything it implies about human capacities, he retains enough distance from the spectacle to ensure that his emotions do not get the better of him: “In that sense, [he is] disinterested.”34 The implications of all this for contemporary politics are surely clear enough. Respectful of Bukharin’s anti-Kantianism but unpersuaded by his relish for “active militant force,” West gestures towards the idea that a virtuous communist is one for whom high-minded engagement always takes precedence over the perfervid certainties of the mob. The trustworthy revolutionary is never so enthused by the spectacle of change that he cannot distance himself from his feelings if circumstances make it necessary. A measure of ambivalence is always a good thing, or so West seems to imply.

West was writing in a period when left-wingers held their beliefs with ferocious passion — a period defined by the rise of fascism, the persistence of economic chaos on a global scale and the threat of war. What can have stimulated one of Britain’s most gifted communists to enter an (admittedly indirect) plea for emotional moderation at the very moment when many of his comrades were at their most fervent? West hinted at the answer to that question in his great autobiography One Man in His Time (1969), published more than thirty years after the appearance of Crisis and Criticism. What the book proved was that West had always been slightly detached in his attitude towards the CPGB, not least because he believed that the Party had not always lived up to its cultural ambitions.35 Born into a sober middleclass family in the last decade of the nineteenth century, West portrayed himself in One Man in His Time as someone who converted to communism because of his hatred of individualism. Deeply alienated by the “separating silence” that characterized bourgeois culture in England, he joined the CPGB because he believed that a socialist society would be one in which a communitarian ethos might once again flourish. The thing that most distressed him about the Party was that its loyalty to the idea of community was at best half-hearted. Taxing British communists with a tendency to prioritize short-term reforms over the struggle for a new society, West believed that the CPGB had lost touch with its communitarian roots and in so doing had lost sight of what socialism was ultimately all about. At the time he wrote Crisis and Criticism he was especially worried about the political and cultural implications of the CPGB’s Popular Front policy.36 His particular concern was that the goal of constructing anti-fascist alliances with left-wing reformists, liberals and even moderate conservatives effectively committed the Party to the continuation of capitalism, notwithstanding the fact that market institutions perpetuated the individualism he had come to loathe:

“We communists,” the [Communist] Manifesto said, “scorn to conceal our aims.” We conceal ours for the sake of unity, and all we achieve is a false unity with Gollancz and the Left Book Club; and by that compromise we take away from our own aim its power to inspire real unity.37

West did not raise his doubts about the Popular Front policy in public, though many of his shorter writings in the 1930s were highly critical of the political and cultural movements with which the CPGB was seeking to establish an alliance.38 Nevertheless, it is easy to see how his anxieties about the policy might have fed through into his analysis of literature in Crisis and Criticism. Unable to give the new line his wholehearted support — concerned that it would weaken the Party’s commitment to communitarian politics — West portrayed the virtuous revolutionary as someone whose immersion in the political struggle was always tempered by a measure of distance. Indeed, there is even a case for saying that hostility to the Popular Front shaped the overarching arguments of Crisis and Criticism. As we have seen, West’s main innovation in the book was to advance the proposition that great art necessarily endorses the progressive elements in contemporary life. Although his goal was undoubtedly to plug a theoretical gap in the Soviet orthodoxy, he may also have been issuing a tacit warning to those of his comrades who believed that the politics of anti-capitalism could be set aside for strategic reasons. In the final analysis, or so West seemed to be arguing, politics and literature have one thing in common: They can only flourish by hastening the overthrow of the existing order. Compromises with the status quo will not do.

Christopher Caudwell on Poetry and the Instincts

The international communist movement was famous for expecting its members to meet extremely rigorous standards of self-education. Perhaps the most erudite autodidact among recruits to the CPGB was the literary theorist Christopher Caudwell, whose gift for forging interdisciplinary connections was prodigious even by Marxist standards.39 Despite leaving his public school at the age of fifteen because his family could no longer afford to pay the fees, Caudwell had mastered the essentials of a dozen different subjects by the time he wrote his books of Marxist criticism in his late twenties. There is a sense, however, in which the sheer extent of his learning has had a distorting effect on our understanding of his work. Most Caudwell scholars have chosen to trace his debt to the scores of Western thinkers whose ideas he synthesized so creatively. Although much of this work has been extremely important and suggestive, it has tended to obscure one of the most important things about Caudwell’s intellectual career — the fact that his writings on literature represented a sustained and often deeply unorthodox response to Soviet cultural theory. This is particularly true of his theory of poetry, expounded in great detail in Illusion and Reality (1937).40 Caudwell’s ideas about poetry cannot be fully understood without reference to Bukharin’s emphasis on the role of “active militant force” in art. No other communist critic pursued the anti-Kantian line quite so dramatically. Whereas Alick West had tried to qualify Bukharin’s disdain for the idea of aesthetic disinterestedness, Caudwell took it to extremes. At the core of his work is the claim that human beings possess a cluster of anarchic desires or “instincts” which have to be tamed before life in society can begin. The function of poetry is to project these desires onto the material world, in so doing helping to sublimate them. Without poetry there can be no such thing as civilization.

The starting point of Caudwell’s theory is a striking account of humanity’s biological inheritance. Drawing on ideas from psychoanalysis, behavioral psychology, and anthropology, Caudwell argues that human beings enter the world as “genotypes” — that is, wholly unsocialized individuals who possess a “more or less common set of instincts.”41 These instincts have been shaped by the immemorial processes of human evolution but they do not endow the individual with much sense of how to survive in a particular material environment. The genotype’s urgent desires for food, shelter, physical gratification and so on are not matched by any innate understanding of how they can be acquired. Indeed, if the newly born child were left to fester in a state of nature it “might grow up into something like a dumb brute.”42 Society’s basic function can thus be regarded as what Caudwell calls an “adaptive” one. Its role is to take the genotype’s raw desires and make them compatible with the material environment into which it is born. Although the child initially makes grossly unrealistic demands on the world, it is transformed by the process of socialization into someone whose desires more precisely match the limits of its environment, whose knowledge of external reality is extensive and who is able to defer gratification long enough to acquire the things it needs. Unlike Freud and some of the other psychoanalytic thinkers who influenced him, Caudwell does not portray this process of instinctual adaptation in especially pessimistic terms. There was a part of Freud’s mind which always assumed that the suppression of natural desires permanently compromises human happiness. By contrast, Caudwell argues that the modification of the instincts produces men and women whose capacities for self-realization greatly outstrip those of the genotype: “The consciousness made possible by the development of society is not by its nature coercive; on the contrary this consciousness, expressed in science and art, is the means whereby man attains freedom.”43

Society has many ways of aligning the instincts with the demands of the material environment. Caudwell’s rather startling argument is that poetry is one of the most important of them. Concerned primarily with feelings or what Caudwell insists on calling “affects,” poetry transforms the inner world of men and women as surely as science transforms external reality:

The other world [of poetry], of organized emotion attached to experience... makes available for the individual a whole new universe of inner feeling and desire. It exposes the endless potentiality of the instincts and the “heart” by revealing the various ways in which they may adapt themselves to experiences. It plays on the inner world of emotion as on a stringed instrument. It changes the emotional content of his consciousness so that he can react more subtly and deeply to the world.44

The means by which poetry achieves these ends do not vary much from one period to another. The poet’s basic strategy is to conjure a vision of what objective reality would be like if it corresponded to our instincts. There is nothing “symbolic” about the world we encounter in poems — on the contrary, aesthetic reality differs in the most fundamental ways from the real world existing independently of our senses. A successful poem is “irrational” to its core, seeking to remake the environment in the image of our deepest desires. Temporarily rejecting the idea that the mind cannot exercise direct control over matter, poets use their instincts to sketch a picture of “the world as they long for it to be.”45 It is precisely this exercise in constructive fantasy which enables poetry to play a role in socializing the individual. By projecting her instincts onto the world around him — by breaking down the barriers between her desires and her environment — the poet encourages men and women to temper their instincts so that objective reality can be explored. Nowhere else in the history of British Marxist criticism does Bukharin’s emphasis on “active militant force” receive quite so dramatic a twist. Caudwell is not simply saying that poetry uses strong emotions to bind its audience to a particular social vision. His point is that poetry’s “condensed affects” play a central role in making social organization possible.

Why is the attempt to remake the environment in the image of the instincts so important a part of poetry? The pages in which Caudwell tries to answer that question are among his most ingenious.46 Drawing obliquely on an argument first advanced by I.A. Richards, Caudwell insists that poetry brings the instincts to the forefront of the mind through its use of rhythmic language.47 The most important aspect of poetic rhythm is that it loosely parallels the “natural periodicities” of the body. The beat of the heart, the in-and-out pattern of respiration, and the distribution of stresses in a verse of poetry are all characterized by a sort of hypnotic regularity. This means that poetry tends to give rise to what Caudwell calls “emotional introversion.” When poets use rhythmic language, they begin to look inwards towards the biological realities that unite them with the rest of humanity. Transported in an instant to an emotional landscape that predates their socialization — temporarily liberated from civilization’s most strenuous emotional taboos — they find their minds being flooded by all the instincts they must otherwise seek to suppress. They also find themselves in the grip of a powerful sense of community consciousness. Because the instincts are more or less the same in all men and women at all stages of history, it is virtually impossible for the individual to be reminded of them for any length of time without feeling a deep sense of kinship with her fellow humans. This explains why poetry is not simply concerned with a purely introspective exploration of the instincts. During the process of composition, the poet is so overwhelmed by feelings of collective power — so convinced that men and women can achieve anything when they choose to work in unison — that she invariably projects her instincts onto everything in the real world that she wishes to represent. The result is the enchanted alternative realities which enable poetry to discharge its adaptive function.

Although Caudwell ascribes the highest importance to the element of illusion in poetry, he is at pains to deny that it induces a mood of credulity in its audience. Throughout history the consumption of poetry has always been characterized by what Coleridge famously called the “willing suspension of disbelief.”48 In his account, everyone from the primitive tribesman to the modern literary scholar knows perfectly well that the poet’s vision of reality has been distorted beyond recognition by his emotions. Indeed, poetry’s capacity to socialize the individual is entirely dependent on its illusory status being recognized. If people made the mistake of confusing poetry’s enchanted landscapes with reality, they would simply overlook the tension between their emotions and their environment. It is only by drawing attention to its illusory status that poetry encourages people to adopt a new attitude to reality. By making it clear that her vision of the world is rooted in the instincts — by confessing that there is nothing in the slightest bit realistic about her rendering of the physical environment — the poet equips her audience with an inspiring fantasy whose ultimate effect is to engender an “appetitive attitude.”49 The most important way in which poetry lays bare its illusory status is by emphasizing its expressive elements and downplaying its referential dimension. Like all other forms of language, poetry refers to something in the external world while simultaneously registering an emotional response to it — or, to use Caudwell’s slightly grandiloquent vocabulary, it invokes the “Common Perceptual World” and the “Common Affective World” at one and the same time.50 What distinguishes poetry from other forms of language is that its emotional dimension impinges on our awareness far more powerfully than the things to which it refers. To read or hear a poem is to be immersed in a world of strong emotions, only dimly perceiving the aspects of external reality to which the emotions are attached: “Thus the world of external reality recedes, and the world of instinct, the affective emotional linkage behind the words, rises to the view and becomes the world of reality.”51

Caudwell’s point is simple enough. By elevating its expressive dimension over its referential dimension, poetry advertises its status as an illusion by underscoring the fact that its vision of reality is ultimately rooted in emotion. But how exactly does poetry create the thick emotional textures that define it? Here Caudwell falls back on a theory of poetic form clearly indebted to what David Lodge has called “modern symbolist poetics.”52 There are two ways in which a word can engender an emotional response, or so Caudwell argues. Either it can refer to an emotionally significant aspect of reality or else its “affective associations” can somehow be embodied in its sound.53 Poetry works primarily with words of the latter type, reinforcing the emotional charge lying dormant on their surfaces by combining them with words that vibrate at a similar emotional frequency:

In a simple word like “spring” there are hundreds of them [i.e. emotional associations]; of greenness, of youth, of fountains, of jumping; every word drags behind it a vast bag and baggage of emotional associations... It is these associations that provided the latent content of affect which is the poem. Not the ideas of “greenness,” “youth,” but the affective cord linking the ideas of “greenness” and “youth” to the word “spring,” constitutes the raw material of poetry.54

Caudwell’s theory of poetic form does more than anything else to throw his unorthodoxy into relief. Although his ideas about poetry and the instincts can certainly be seen as an extension of Bukharin’s endorsement of strong feeling in art, there is no way of making his theory of form and content seem consistent with the received Soviet wisdom. Whereas Bukharin argues that the first duty of form is to communicate a work’s content as clearly as possible, Caudwell insists that the language of a good poem invariably works to obscure its content. As I have tried to show elsewhere, Caudwell’s unorthodoxy can perhaps be seen as an expression of his autodidacticism.55 Like many autodidacts, Caudwell had a great love of intellectual drama. Much of his work suggests that his first requirement when assessing an idea was that it should be exciting rather than merely persuasive. Since Bukharin’s impassioned account of the role of strong feeling in art was nothing if not dramatic, it is hardly surprising that Caudwell should have been attracted to it. Nor is it surprising that he tried to augment its drama by arguing that the strong feelings expressed in poetry were ultimately those of the instincts. There is also a sense in which Caudwell’s work typifies the autodidactic mind by displaying a marked tendency towards intellectual obsessiveness. Having formulated the idea of poetry as a species of instinctual expression, he ascribed so much importance to it that it effectively dominated all other aspects of his literary aesthetics. For example, Caudwell’s thesis that poetry’s evocation of the instincts tends to obscure its references to external reality is not entirely persuasive. What makes it interesting is the sense that Caudwell is determined to keep his central insight about poetry at the front of his readers’ minds at all time, even if this involves distorting the true nature of the relationship between form and content. At the same time, it is worth situating Caudwell’s aesthetic unorthodoxy against the backdrop of the world communist movement’s political history. In putting so much emphasis on the role of the instincts — and by portraying the instincts as both historically fixed and incompatible with civilized life — Caudwell broke with the Panglossian social constructionism of his communist contemporaries, most of whom cleaved to the simple-minded Enlightenment assumption that human nature would be purged of its impurities once socialism had been established. (His alleged pessimism about human nature was one of the main reasons why “orthodox” communists denounced him so ferociously during the famous “Caudwell Discussion” in the early 1950s.)56 What I want to suggest is that Caudwell’s emphasis on the instincts was perhaps intended as a tacit warning to his more credulous colleagues. Valuing freedom above all else and secretly despising the barbarism of Stalin’s Russia,57 Caudwell indirectly criticized the Stalinist counter-revolution by reminding his readers that there was something permanently dark at the heart of the human condition. In spite of his optimism about the possibilities of socialism, he knew very well that the battle for human liberation would not be over simply because the means of production had been socialized. The good society could only be achieved if men and women engaged in a continuous struggle to tame the evil in their own hearts. Illusion and Reality took its lead from Soviet theory but it was scarcely the work of a bland conformist. One of its main targets was the dictator in the Kremlin.

Bookish to the Root

The relationship between Soviet literary intellectuals and their British counterparts throws one of the international communist movement’s most fascinating paradoxes into vivid relief. By the time of the Writers’ Congress in 1934, the USSR had long since become what its Trotskyist critics called a “degenerated workers’ state.” Power had been concentrated in the hands of a vast and essentially terroristic bureaucracy, socialist legality had broken down and the last vestiges of political opposition were in the process of being destroyed. Nevertheless, the suppression of basic democratic rights had not entirely adulterated the quality of Soviet intellectual life. Although Soviet intellectuals were always in danger of disappearing into the Gulag — and although their ideological horizons were necessarily rather narrow — their culture was often a lively, productive and surprisingly disputatious one. This was partly a consequence of the extraordinary head of intellectual energy which Marxism had built up in the decades before the October Revolution. The fact that the Marxist wing of the international socialist movement had always been “bookish to the root” — the phrase is George Steiner’s — meant that its cerebral impulses were able to sustain themselves even during the long Stalinist night.58 The Writers’ Congress illustrates this as well as anything. By no means all the ideas explored at the Congress can be dismissed as crude reflexes of the Stalinist mind. For every Zhdanov or Radek peddling a toxic mixture of vapid slogans and veiled threats, there was a Bukharin or a Gorky making a serious and pioneering effort to forge a genuine Marxist aesthetic. There is even a sense in which Soviet literary culture in the Stalin period allowed for a modicum of open debate. This is well symbolized by the presence in Moscow of the great Georg Lukács, whose path-breaking theory of realism paid careful tribute to the Soviet orthodoxy while breaking with it in a number of decisive ways. The British literary communists may have lacked Lukács’s genius but they shared his independence of mind. Happy to take Soviet cultural theory as their starting point, West, Caudwell and their peers never shrank from testing its limits and subverting its central principles. The result is a body of work which repays study even today. Out of the Stalinist nightmare came ideas that have lasted.

1. For a fascinating collection of essays on the CPGB’s contribution to British culture, see A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, ed. Andy Croft (London: Pluto Press, 1998).
2. For overviews of British communist criticism, see, David Margolies, “Left Review and Left Literary Theory,” Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties, eds. David Margolies, Margot Heinemann, John Clarke, and Carole Snee (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979); Hanna Behrend, “An Intellectual Irrelevance? Marxist Literary Criticism in the 1930s,” A Weapon in the Struggle Croft; Anand Prakash, Marxism and Literary Theory (Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1994); Victor Paananen, British Marxist Criticism (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000). I am not suggesting that these and other writers entirely overlook the impact of Soviet ideas on British criticism, but they do tend to underplay it.
3. For an attempt to apply these arguments to the entire history of British Marxist criticism in the 1930s, see Philip Bounds, British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928-1939 (London: Merlin Press, 2012). See also Philip Bounds, Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009).
4. See William Morris, Selected Writings and Designs, ed. Asa Briggs (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1968); Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, Shelley’s Socialism (London: Journeyman Press, 1979).
5. Quoted in Dave Laing, The Marxist Theory of Art: An Introductory Survey (Brighton: Harvester, 1978) 34.
6. The emergence of Socialist Realism is often seen as a sign that Russian aesthetic traditionalism won a more or less total victory against its modernist rival. However, some recent writers have argued that traditionalism’s victory was never quite as decisive as it seemed. Although Soviet artists were certainly expected to employ traditional forms, there is a case for saying that Socialist Realism’s messianic faith in the capacity of art to transform everyday life owed more to modernism than to anything else. This argument has been advanced with particular cogency by Boris Groys in The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). It also needs to be remembered that Soviet modernists were never entirely vanquished in the crucial area of cinema. Sergei Eisenstein and other exponents of the montage cinema continued to produce films well into the 1930s.
7. See Maxim Gorky, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin, Andrey Zhdanov, and others, Problems of Soviet Literature (London: Martin Lawrence, 1935). This book was republished by Lawrence and Wishart in 1977 under the title Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism. In this chapter I refer to the later edition.
8. A.A. Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature — The Richest in Ideas. The Most Advanced Literature” Maxim Gorky, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin, Andrey Zhdanov and others, Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) 21.
9. Karl Radek was especially critical of modernism, famously describing Joyce’s Ulysses as “A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope.” See Radek, “World Literature,” Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) 153.
10. For a detailed examination of the historical, comparative and aesthetic elements of Soviet criticism, see Bounds, British Communism and the Politics of Literature.
11. Since Bukharin clearly believes that his ideas about poetry also apply to the other arts, I have usually referred to art rather than simply to poetry in my exposition of his work.
12. Nikolai Bukharin, “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR,” Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) 191.
13. Bukharin, “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR” 192.
14. The phrase “desire or will” is Hegel’s, quoted in “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR” 197.
15. “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR” 197.
16. “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR” 197.
17. “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR” 197.
18. The best introduction to Russian Formalism by one of its own representatives is Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, eds. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
19. Bukharin’s handling of this theme was clearly influenced by the earlier anti-formalist writings of Leon Trotsky. It goes without saying that Bukharin made no attempt to acknowledge his debt to Trotsky. See Leon Trotsky, “The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism,” Literature and Revolution (London: RedWords, 1992).
20. “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR” 208. Bukharin refers not only to the unity but also to the “contrariety” of form and content, but his real emphasis is on the former.
21. “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR” 204.
22. “Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR” 206. Bukharin is anxious to make it clear that his opposition to “formalism in theory” and “formalism in literary criticism” does not entail opposition to the study of literary form. Indeed, he emphasizes the point that revolutionary writers will have to undertake a careful study of literary techniques if their work is to flourish.
23. For overviews of West’s critical writings, see Bounds, British Communism and the Politics of Literature; Prakash, Marxism and Literary Theory. See also the important annotated bibliography of West’s work in Paananen, British Marxist Criticism.
24. Alick West, Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975) 86-87.
25. West, Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays 87.
26. Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays 87-88. In his comments on literature’s relationship to the cognitive aspects of production, West argues that humanity’s efforts to uncover the structures of the natural world are characterized by two main intellectual procedures. On one hand, human beings can only identify patterns of cause and effect if they purge their minds of subjective distortions and relate to nature as objectively and dispassionately as possible. On the other hand, they can only make use of what they discover if they speculate about how the external world can be reordered in conformity with their own wishes. West’s argument is that literary form often mirrors this oscillation between objective and subjective perspectives, mixing strictly neutral descriptions of external reality with descriptions in which the real and the imaginative combine.
27. Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays 89.
28. Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays 85.
29. I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924) 112. Quoted in René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1780-1950, Vol. 5 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986) 222. Richards’s term for the capacity of literature to reconcile opposed impulses was “coenaesthesis.”
30. One writer has gone so far as to argue that “Crisis and Criticism is clearly a reply to [Richards’s] Principles of Literary Criticism.” See Christopher Pawling, Christopher Caudwell: Towards a Dialectical Theory of Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) 28.
31. Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays 95.
32. Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays 99.
33. Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays 92.
34. Crisis and Criticism and Literary Essays 92. West seems to be harking back here to the ideas of Friedrich Schiller, who famously claimed that art’s synthesis of thought and feeling encourages people to immerse themselves in the world around them while maintaining an empowering distance from it. See Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (New York: Dover Publications, 2004 [1795]).
35. For an account of One Man in His Time and its relevance to an understanding of West’s critical writings, see Bounds, British Communism and the Politics of Literature.
36. The Popular Front policy had of course been adopted by the CPGB at the behest of the Communist International. West clearly believed that the political deficiencies he ascribed to the CPGB could also be ascribed to the international communist movement as a whole.
37. Alick West, One Man in His Time: An Autobiography (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969) 173.
38. See the following works by Alick West: “A Reply to Eric Gill,” Left Review 1:10 (July 1935): 410-411; “Communism and Christianity,” Left Review 2:4 (January 1936): 174-176; “Surréalisme in Literature,” Left Review 2:10 (July 1936): vi-viii; “Ben Jonson was No Sentimentalist,” Left Review 3:8, (September 1937): 468-475; “Wild Goose Chase,” Left Review 3:10 (November 1937): 630-631. These articles contain attacks on radical Christians, surrealists, left-wing Leavisites and members of the Auden group.
39. Caudwell is the only British communist critic of the 1930s whose work has given rise to a substantial secondary literature. The most important works are the following full-length monographs: Robert Sullivan, Christopher Caudwell (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Christopher Pawling, Christopher Caudwell: Towards a Dialectical Theory of Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Perhaps the most useful of the many shorter studies is Francis Mulhern, “The Marxist Aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell,” New Left Review, 85 (May/June 1974): 37-58.
40. There is no room in this article to examine the fascinating theory of the novel which Caudwell sketched out in Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature, ed. Samuel Hynes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). There is an especially illuminating discussion of Caudwell’s writings on the novel in Pawling, Christopher Caudwell: Towards a Dialectical Theory of Literature.
41. Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977 [1937]) 140.
42. Caudwell, Illusion and Reality 153.
43. Illusion and Reality 26.
44. Illusion and Reality 174.
45. The phrase quoted here is that of the great Caudwellian scholar George Thomson, who applied Caudwell’s ideas about poetry to the history of ancient Greek literature. See George Thomson, Marxism and Poetry (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1945) 13.
46. Illusion and Reality 139-142.
47. For a discussion of the parallels between Richards’s and Caudwell’s ideas about rhythm, see Pawling, Christopher Caudwell: Towards a Dialectical Theory of Literature 101f.
48. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J.M. Dent, 1991) 169.
49. The phrase “appetitive attitude” is Francis Mulhern’s. See “The Marxist Aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell,” New Left Review I.85 (May-June 1974) 47.
50. For Caudwell’s analysis of the relationship between poetry and other forms of language, see Illusion and Reality 159f.
51. Illusion and Reality 222.
52. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1972).
53. Caudwell is not arguing that there is something intrinsically emotive about the sound of words. Certain words acquire their emotional charge as a result of “the thousands of different circumstances in which [they are] used.” See Caudwell, Illusion and Reality 236.
54. Illusion and Reality 236.
55. See Bounds, British Communism and the Politics of Literature.
56. The Caudwell Discussion was conducted in The Modern Quarterly and began in 1950. The single most vituperative contribution was Maurice Cornforth, “Caudwell and Marxism,” The Modern Quarterly 6:1 (Winter 1950-51): 16-33. Caudwell was defended by admirers such as Alick West and George Thomson.
57. The claim I am making here is a speculative one, but it is worth noting that, unlike most of his communist contemporaries, Caudwell never went in for extolling Stalin’s virtues in print. His preoccupation with the nature of human freedom was most in evidence in Studies in a Dying Culture (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938) and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1949).
58. George Steiner, “Text and Context,” On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) 5.