This is the text of the paper I gave at the 2019 Literary London Conference (11-12 July) this year. It is mainly a condensation and refocusing of my previous post, ‘Working-Class Autobiography and Proletarian Autobiografiction: Harold Heslop’ (bibliographic details can be found here). Apart from the fact that it might be of interest to those who heard the paper, I’m putting it up because I’m trying to trace the evolution of this project as it progresses. For me, ideas often develop through writing something up and then leaving it a bit until I realise that actually I might think something different on reflection. I do now think something different, which I will try and work in to an updated version of the paper that I will be giving at the Working Class Studies Association Conference to be held at the University of Kent at the beginning of September. Returning to topic of categorising literature in terms of Communist Party lines (which is something I’ve said we can usefully dispense with in the 21st Century), I’m now thinking that the standard reading of Heslop as out of step does him an injustice. Rather than see him as responding to criticisms of The Gate of a Strange Field (1929) during the ‘class against class’ period by making Last Cage Down (1935) more proletarian and thereby condemning it to be received as ‘sectarian’ during the ‘popular front’ period, I’m now thinking maybe we should read him as a Proletkult writer in the sense discussed by McKenzie Wark in Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015). Because in Heslop, more than any other British proletarian writer, the key conflicts and actions are determined by the interaction between the labour point of view and nature. Read this way, Heslop’s work is important for thinking about the expansion of proletarian culture into a general account of the experience of the world. It offers a way of thinking about what Wark calls the ‘progressive selection’ of ideas and social values. As such, it is very relevant to twenty-first century concerns as I shall investigate in future posts.
Here, though, is the version of the paper yet to be updated in terms of Heslop’s British Proletkult status:
“In London it was different”:
Class, Gender, and Metropolitan Values in Harold Heslop’s Proletarian Autobiografiction.
Nick Hubble (Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk)
The Durham miner Harold Heslop was one of the key proletarian writers of the interwar period and Britain’s representative at the Second Plenum of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in 1930 in Kharkov in the Soviet Union. While his novels are principally set in the Durham coalfields, the contrast with London (where Heslop lived from 1924-5 while attending the Central Labour College and then from 1928 onwards when no longer able to find work as a miner) forms a central element of his novels The Gate of a Strange Field (1929) and The Journey Beyond (1930). On one level, this contrast is framed in terms of neighbourhood and community:
In the parochial wilderness of the North men and women had small minds. In London it was different. There nobody knew anybody else, and so morals did not count. Morals were changing. To blazes with morals. (GSF 180)
In practice, however, Heslop’s texts display fascination with a female sexuality, often figured through prostitution, that is located within the capital in contrast to the ‘respectable’ values of the coalfields. In this paper, I will read these texts as part of an autobiografictional negotiation by Heslop of not just the complex class and gender politics of the time but also of the apparently insurmountable divide between London and the regions.
‘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 through their creative practice and not only represent, but also discover, a different, fuller and more complex 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)
The appearance of autobiografiction over the fin-de-siècle can be seen as related to the changes in subjectivity referenced by Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration in her essay ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’ that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed’. A mixture of technological change, mass education and new thinking (Marx, Darwin, Freud) resulted in the old Victorian hierarchical order tipping over into a fluid modern society which could be navigated by self-invention: or rather, the ability to self-reflexively narrate the self became an alternative source of agency to power rooted in the systems of patriarchy, class and empire. What we think of as modernism – a self-reflexive technique that incorporates what is ‘unconscious’ to bourgeois consciousness – was originated by those marginalised by class and/or gender from those power structures, such as Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence, in particular, set the template for working-class writers – especially those like Heslop who also came from mining communities – to write autobiografiction rather than straightforward autobiography (which had hitherto been the dominant genre of working-class writing) which was too complicit with 19th century discourses of progress and the hierarchical ordering of society. However, self-reflexive autobiografiction plays out differently for working- and middle-class authors creating the divide between what we know as proletarian literature and modernism.
In Crisis and Criticism, first published in 1937, Alick West identified the question facing modernist writers in the interwar period: “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). What characterises high modernist texts such as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is the autobiografictional discovery of modern subjectivity through exploring intersubjective relations with the working class, albeit with the suggestion of a conscious-unconscious relationship (i.e., in crude terms, the modernist subject is made conscious of their unconscious through the interaction with the working-class other). On one level, proletarian literature showed an equally full working-class subjectivity which interacted with the bourgeois individual as other. Furthermore, however, proletarian literature automatically placed the working-class subject in a relationship with other working-class subjects that was not othered but collective; enabling the pronoun ‘we’. We can consider the key works of proletarian literature, alongside those of Woolf and Joyce and some others, as the collective expression of a changed subjectivity that was orientated towards a transformed future, which was dependent on an autobiografictional move beyond the limits of the self as defined by the culture of the period. West considered Ulysses to be an important step on this trajectory and therefore made it the subject of the penultimate chapter of Crisis and Criticism – but he still saw the novel as limited by Joyce’s tendency to focus on acts of consumption while more-or-less ignoring the social relations of the production process and the class conflicts surrounding it. As an example of a novel which does organise the social energy of productive activity, West names Heslop’s The Gate of a Strange Field, to which he devotes the final chapter of Crisis and Criticism and thereby in effect elevates above Ulysses in importance. This is perhaps rather too much freight for most novels to bear and it appears to be a claim that has not fared well against the tests of time. When Crisis and Criticism was republished in 1975, the final chapter on Heslop was omitted and rather than being bountifully available to teach as a regularly reprinted Penguin Classic, copies of The Gate of a Strange Field are pretty near impossible to locate and I had to read it in the BL. However, notwithstanding the current context, I think that West was broadly correct but that in order to vindicate his arguments it’s necessary to consider a range of proletarian literature written by men and women, such as I outline in my book, The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question.
However, Heslop might also be considered particularly unsuitable for representing the superiority of proletarian literature over modernism because the trajectory of his fiction appears to lead to an almost stereotypically crude version of the worker as all-powerful male hero, such as Jim Cameron, the miner protagonist of Last Cage Down (1935):
The whole being of a man must be in tune with the silver rock before him and the frowning strata about him. He must know when to kirve, when to knick, when to smash down the ‘caunch’. He must make this dead coal speak, speak with many tongues of coal, weep as a woman weeps when she mourns. If he is skilful he will make the coal leap voluntarily from its fastness with a shriek of joy […]. (Heslop 1984: 3)
The only other time Jim Cameron feels like a proper man is when he is with Betty, the barmaid from the Red Lion: ‘She was a likeable lass, one with whom a man could become a man because she was essentially a woman possessed of the rich virtues and treasures of a woman’ (Heslop 1984: 55). This apparently unreconstructed sexual politics seems to be linked to what some critics, such as John Connor, have described as Last Cage Down’s ‘class against class’ position which the Daily Worker found ‘a little too sectarian and formalist’ for the now popular-front times of 1935. Yet, a different reading – one not determined by the lines taken by the Communist Party over 80 years ago – might think about Heslop’s fiction as concerned with liberating his subjects and himself from the remnants of a restrictive nineteenth-century subaltern consciousness. In his autobiography, Heslop relates that restricted consciousness to ‘proletarian dreaming’:
The year 1919 was a year of intense proletarian dreaming … Despite the overwhelming victory of Lloyd George and his coalition, the proletarian world of men did not cease to dream. The most outrageous fantasy was the Sankey Commission. … How we gloated over the possibility of the mines becoming nationalised. How we dreamed. How we stretched out our hands towards the towering pit head gearing to take it, and all it signified, into our own dear keeping. Poor, soft, deluded people that we were. (Heslop 1994: 146)
Joe Tarrant, the protagonist of The Gate of a Strange Field falls prey to such ‘proletarian dreaming’ and ends up a comfortable union representative. In London as an elected representative of the national committee running the General Strike, he spends his time in bed with a prostitute as the Strike falls apart. Unsurprisingly, critics, such as David Bell, have seen the novel as a ‘negative apprenticeship’ in which the protagonist makes all the wrong decisions resulting in personal and political failure and we the reader are supposed to learn the message that we should make the opposite decisions (i.e. think like a Communist, don’t treat strikes as just local issues, don’t fall into proletarian dreamings of Sunday outings etc.). Yet this is not really how the book reads. In fact, the prostitute who Joes meets in London is his wife, Molly. They had (with shades of Lawrence) ‘lived a strange, loveless, over-sexed life, each pulling a different way, each so pitiful’ (Heslop 1929: 139) before separating. Joe scandalises the morals of the coalfield by moving in with modern, as signified by her page-boy haircut, Emily Ritter, who represents a very different model of female agency to Molly: ‘Emily Ritter had completely lost her head. She had to smash through all the Northern conception of morals. It could not be said that she went into the matter blind as a mole, for she knew exactly what she was doing.’ (Heslop 1929: 169). Yet, Joe still feels stuck within the conventions of the coalfield even as he flouts them by living outside marriage with his girlfriend, hence his pleasure in his trips to London on mining union business (returning to the quote I had at the beginning):
In the parochial wilderness of the North men and women had small minds. In London it was different. There nobody knew anybody else, and so morals did not count. Morals were changing. To blazes with morals. (Heslop 1929: 180)
When Joe ends up in bed with Molly, Heslop is not implying criticism of him for neglecting his proper union business. Indeed, Molly has to remind him that he is still too stuck in the mental outlook of the coalfield: ‘You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe,’ she said ‘You’re in bed . . . with me.’ (Heslop 1929: 229). The logic of the novel suggests that a liberalised, transformed and expanded socio-cultural context, as represented by the London scenes of the novel, would liberate not only Joe but Molly and Emily as well. If the novel can’t quite manage to formally resolve all of these possible outcomes it is not for want of Heslop exploring a range of outcomes and subjectivities autobiografictionally.
In Journey Beyond, he took a step further – at least for the opening chapters of the novel by making the autobiografictional protagonist, ‘Martha Drake’, which allows him to directly criticise the patriarchal values of the coalfield:
On the floor were a couple of lead soldiers and a sort of spring cannon that shot matchsticks into the air. That was it! No love. To destroy! It is the only task that man can perform successfully. To kill. To maim. To wound. How man loves such tasks! Brutality rising beyond the heights of fiendishness. . . . With a breaking heart she had gone back home. (Heslop 1930: 11)
Reading between the lines, one can see how Heslop’s experiences of London – living there first while studying on a miners’ scholarship at the Central Labour College from 1924-5 and then permanently from 1928 onwards – changed his attitude to his northern birthplace. The differences are figured through women in particular: ‘A woman of the North has not obtained the outlook of her sisters of the South. She knows neither the clicking of a typewriter nor the eternal cigarette.’ (Heslop 1930: 38). Martha’s experiences in London during the depression – having to work as a char, stealing money from an office, getting caught and being sent to prison for a month, and losing a child – turn her to the brink of prostitution and her southern husband, Russell, whose experiences of the labour exchange and various short-term jobs are drawn directly from Heslop’s own, to the brink of jumping off the embankment into the Thames. Their survival, due to Russell getting a factory job after strikers have been laid off, leads them to a version of the modernist question concerning the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ as they ponder whether individualism is really the answer: ‘I suppose we’re all for ourselves in this world?’ (Heslop 1930: 252). This clearly isn’t the political position that Heslop is advocating but it indicates the width of his thinking about possible subjectivities before returning to the problem of how to build a collective class consciousness that doesn’t simply replicate the constraints that Joe, Molly and Emily kick against in The Gate of a Strange Field.
Looking again at Last Cage Down from this perspective, it is possible to see that the establishment of Jim at the beginning of the novel as the stereotypical worker-hero of prodigious activity is something of a set-up because the plot of the novel involves him losing everything, including his position as secretary of the miner’s lodge, and going to prison for nine months, during which time his mother is evicted from her cottage. He realises he is wrong about many things and consequently he changes his behaviour in many respects including in relation to Betty. In this manner, Heslop’s metropolitan consciousness is introduced back in to the Durham coalfield:
She nodded. ‘Good,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘Now, help me to clear away because I’ve got to be up at the Lion in time for six.’
Funny. He’d never done this for his mother in all his life. He had never thought about it. He had always taken it for granted that the clean crockery would be placed before him and the dirty crockery carted away from before him and cleansed. And here he was helping the girl to clear way the dishes. Well . . . he was damned . . . ! (Heslop 1984: 195)
The eventual conclusion of the novel (involving as in The Gate of a Strange Field and other Heslop novels a mining disaster), in effect, calls for a ‘United Front’ of socialists, communists and trade unionists (as opposed to the broader ‘Popular Front’ of all anti-fascist forces which included liberals and conservatives). Heslop therefore remains opposed to the ‘proletarian dreaming’ implicit to labourism (and as a consequence his books were not compatible with the values of the postwar British state) and committed to an altered form of class consciousness embracing liberated and equal gender relations that he has mapped out through the autobiografictional practice of his writing.
To conclude, the capacity of a working-class writer such as Heslop (aided of course by his socialist education and values) to free himself from the structure of feeling of his background and understand the extent to which social (i.e. class and gender) relations would change outside the sphere of working-class respectability suggests how proletarian autobiografiction might be seen as a means of understanding and adapting to social change, which at the same time generates new cultural forms and social values. Heslop’s novels and proletarian literature in general suggest that the emancipation of women was a key catalyst for the shift from working-class autobiography to proletarian autobiografiction. In terms of Heslop’s texts, this works out in practice through the way a female sexuality that is located within the capital is not just contrasted with but also used to critique the ‘respectable’ values of the coalfields. Reading his novels, it is possible to see how taking an autobiografictional approach to his experiences allowed him to discuss (and analyse) parts of his own life – his response to metropolitan values of gender and sexual fluidity – that would have been difficult to include in an autobiography at the time. However, the autobiography he did finally write in the early 1970s helps us see how those complex autobiografictional negotiations of intertwined class and gender politics reconciled regional and metropolitan values and pointed the way towards the transformed culture of postwar Britain that would emerge in the 1960s, with its social and sexual (or emotional) revolutions. Rethinking literary history and the importance of interwar proletarian fictions like Heslop’s, which are not just regional texts but very much about the intersection and transformation of cultural values across Britain, is also a way of rethinking contemporary British history and the apparent binary divide between ordinary people and metropolitan liberals. Morals have gone to blazes in the London of Heslop’s novels because his characters have been taken outside the respectable constraints of their local neighbourhoods but if they can survive the transition, they become the agents of change.
