The literature of the 1930s has a quite specific reception history bound up with the period’s status as ‘the hungry decade’, marked by the ideological clash between Fascism and Communism which led to the all-out brutality of the Second World War. The culture and society that arose after 1945 in Britain were markedly different to how they had been before. On the one hand, collective ideals and realist forms of representation were dominant over the individualist and modernist/experimental values of the interwar period. On the other hand, the fictions of political commitment which were so central to the 1930s were anathema to 1950s literary opinion. When the celebration of the ‘Auden generation’ – those young upper/middle-class men, such as Auden, Orwell and Spender, who had ‘gone over’ to the side of the working class – began in the 1970s, there was very little immediate interest in working-class writers themselves. Notoriously, Samuel Hynes simply declared in The Auden Generation (1972) that ‘virtually no writing of literary importance came out of the working class during the decade’ (qtd Hubble 2017: 23). It wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that wider-ranging accounts of the literature of the 1930s began to appear, with Andy Croft’s Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (1990) a milestone text in the recovery of the work of both working-class writers in particular and the wider communist and socialist literary circles of the time in general. Over recent years, my The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017), henceforth PAMQ, is just one of a number of texts that situates both working-class writing (reconfigured by me as part of a broader category of ‘proletarian literature’) and an expanded ‘long 1930s’ as central (rather than exceptions to) the main lineages of British literatures across the twentieth century.
In To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (2006), the cultural historian, Christopher Hilliard, argues that it was the support of established publishers and left-wing intellectuals that made the 1930s not only especially important to the long-standing tradition of British working-class writing but also for the democratisation of culture in Britain. While the more traditional approach to this democratisation has been to see it as a process of dissemination in which reforms to the education system and technological developments in printing (e.g. penguin paperbacks) and broadcasting brought the work of cultivated intellectuals, such as Virginia Woolf, to the masses, Hilliard argues that a democratic cultural life can’t be defined by a widely shared corpus of texts and ideas; in this sense there is not one common ‘Culture’ but common cultures of production:
My focus, in contrast, is on people who were at once members of the less ‘cultivated’ populace and intellectuals or producers of cultural goods. I locate the democratization of culture in their acts of production, rather than in the nature of what they produced. (5)
It is the fact that worker-writers, amateur writers and wartime popular writing are widespread phenomena, which Hilliard traces out in detail in his book, which indicates the real democratisation of Britain and its constituent nations. However, my point is not to privilege working-class writers over their upper-class counterparts, or to oppose the literary canon with an alternative democratic and working-class canon. Rather, the need is to undermine such binary oppositions altogether and construct a new system of cultural and literary value predicated not on restricted access to the cultural means of production but on those democratically-shared common cultures of production. Valuable products of such a new system would still include canonical writers such as Woolf and James Joyce but they would be valued alongside writers such as Harold Heslop, whose novels are principally set in the Durham coalfields. I mention Heslop because I am intending to study his work (amongst others) in some detail over the course of this project (with further blogposts, conference papers, book chapters and articles forthcoming). This is because (i) a copy of the typescript of his autobiography (a shortened version of which was published in 1994 as Out of the Old Earth) is included in the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies (another copy is included in the Harold Heslop Papers held at Durham University Archives); (ii) he was one of the key working-class novelists of the interwar years and Britain’s representative at the Second Plenum of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in 1930 in the Soviet Union; (iii) his work is compared favourably with Joyce’s Ulysses in Alick West’s Crisis and Criticism (1937); (iv) his novels such as The Gate of a Strange Field (1929), Journey Beyond (1930) and Last Cage Down (1935) are clearly ‘autobiografictions’.
‘Autobiografiction’ is an Edwardian term that has been recently revived by Max Saunders. It describes a category of writing which is more than just autobiographical fiction in that it allows writers to transform themselves performatively and not only represent, but also discover, a different understanding of selfhood:
Autobiografiction can include material that writers may prefer not to own in their own person; but rather than suggesting that their fiction gives them away, either consciously or unconsciously, they are claiming that the fictional permits a fuller autobiography. This is partly a matter of its being able to include the shameful as well as the honourable, and thus assemble a more complete, more human, picture. (Saunders 2010: 205)
Saunders’s discussion of Woolf’s Orlando (1928) – and its complex interplay between ‘mock biography’ of Vita Sackville-West, autobiographical expression of Woolf through her biography of another, and the different ‘selves’ readers read into the text – indicates some of the ways in which autobiografiction represents not the unity of the self but its multiplicity and intersubjective nature (i.e. the way in which any person’s subjectivity is dependent on the relationship with other subjectivities). Orlando (or, for that matter, the equally autobiografictional Ulysses) can be read as attempts to answer what I call the ‘modernist question’, as posed by West in Crisis and Criticism: “When I do not know any longer who are the “we” to whom I belong, I do not know any longer who ‘I’ am either” (19). West’s point was that for modernist writers to fully answer this question they would have to take into account the class relations of industrial capitalism; to which we might also add gender and colonial relations. I argue in PAMQ that Naomi Mitchison was one writer who succeeded in doing this. The autobiografiction of We Have Been Warned (1935) allows her to express herself in a way that was not otherwise possible at that time for a woman (albeit at the cost of her literary reputation) and to produce a complex identification with socialism, feminism and Scotland (in opposition to an England which turns fascist) which points forward to a radically-transformed future rather than back to the liberal norms of bourgeois society. Writing the novel enabled Mitchison to free herself from the constraints of her (upper-class) background and move beyond a progressive politics of the dissemination of social and cultural goods towards an understanding of the sheer scale of change a democratisation of the means of cultural production would entail.
Similarly, a working-class writer such as Heslop was able to free himself from the constraints of his background through his autobiografiction and thus understand the extent to which social relations would change outside the sphere of working-class respectability generated by the industrial capitalist process. In Bread, Freedom & Knowledge (discussed in my previous post), David Vincent noted that nineteenth-century working-class autobiographers do not discuss their private and family life. As Nicola Wilson points out in Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2015), ‘This was partly to do with the inherited tradition of autobiography as a public and moral genre’ (33). Certain things are just not assumed to be of public interest. Even though autobiography and biography changed in the opening decades of the twentieth-century to include more private life, there was still the problem that it is difficult to disclose information about yourself without giving it away about others also. By fictionalising his experience, Heslop was able to generate a space in which to reveal the personal and sexual aspects of working-class life that had been hidden in working-class autobiography (I will discuss this in relation to his novel The Gate of a Strange Field in a subsequent post). Part of the impetus for this fictionalisation was the change in the public status of women (which was itself a reflection of a longer process of change in women’s rights, educational and employment opportunities) following their acquisition of the right to vote in 1918 and the subsequent equalisation of the franchise in 1928. Men’s proletarian literature of the 1930s – by writers such as Heslop, Walter Brierley, Walter Greenwood, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Barke amongst others – is a prime example of the use of autobiographical narrative to understand and adapt to social change. Although this change took many forms and was happening on many fronts, I would argue that the emancipation of women was probably the most significant element of it; a social shift so profound that it required the replacement of working-class autobiography with proletarian autobiografiction as the primary means of representing working-class experience in the 1930s.
I am using the term ‘proletarian autobiografiction’ rather than ‘working-class autobiografiction’ because, as argued in PAMQ, I see the designation ‘proletarian’ as circumventing the problems attendant in defining who is working class: ‘Proletarian literature was able to represent this classlessness precisely because it did not focus directly on the authentic experience of the worker but on the intersubjective connections between the worker and people of other classes’ (7). What characterises this proletarian literature of the 1930s – which is often autobiografiction – is an imagining of intersubjective social relations prefiguring a post-capitalist future. Such a literature is not restricted to male-authored accounts of male industrial workers but may include the work of writers such as Mitchison and even Woolf (see, for example, her ‘Introductory Letter’ to Life as We Have Known It (1931) and the discussion in PAMQ, 165-74). In The Communist Horizon (2012), Jodi Dean suggests that the term ‘proletariat’ is not useful if tied to an empirical social class (e.g. industrial workers) but ‘proletarianization’ is still a valid term of description for the ‘process of exploitation, dispossession, and immiseration’ (18) that is characteristic of capitalist accumulation. She argues that a twenty-first century equivalent of the historical communist party would need to be conceptualised continually as a complex, adaptive system whose ‘end is proletarian revolution, that is, the destruction of the capitalist system of exploitation and expropriation, of proletarianization, and the creation of a mode of production and distribution where the free development of each is compatible with the free development of all’ (20). This closing idea of the necessary interdependence of the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ (which comes directly from Marx) is central to the future-orientated imagined intersubjective social-relations that characterise proletarian autobiografiction. If, following the arguments of Vincent in Bread, Knowledge & Freedom, we see nineteenth-century working-class autobiography as generating a working-class consciousness, then we can think of proletarian writers as not just the victims of ‘proletarianization’ but also as the vanguard of a new kind of intersubjective subjectivity compatible with a transformed future society. Such proletarian subjects (potentially of any gender or class or ethnicity) are constructed as much by writing (and reading) as by class struggle. Therefore, proletarian autobiografiction may be seen as a means of understanding and adapting to social change, which at the same time generates new cultural forms and social values (analysis of examples to follow in future posts).
Further Reading:
Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.
Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon, London: Verso, 2018 [2012].
Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratisation of Writing in Britain, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, & the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
West, Alick. Crisis and Criticism, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937.
Wilson, Nicola. Home in British Working-Class Fiction, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
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