My paper to the Working Class Studies Association Conference (3-6 September 2019) held at the University of Kent, Canterbury. This is different (especially after the first couple of paragraphs) from the Literary London version of the paper (which immediately precedes this on the blog). I will say more about this conference and more about the changes to the paper and how they affect the project in due course. There is still more to do on the idea of British Proletkult (mentioned at the end of this paper). Other side projects that have suggested themselves to me are (a) to organise a conference/collection on the relationship between proletarian (and working-class fiction) and modernism because in some countries, such as Sweden, modernism is proletarian and the key writers are working-class writers; (b) to rewrite Alick West’s Crisis and Criticism from the kind of perspective I’m trying to get at in this paper (esoteric – maybe I’ll have to self-publish – but a project I think would be interesting to write). Here, though is the paper given on the morning of Friday 6 September 2019:
“Nearer the gate of a strange field”:
Beyond Class and Gender in Interwar 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 he lived from 1924-5 while attending the Central Labour College and then from 1928 onwards when blacklisted from the mines) forms a direct or indirect element. In this paper, I focus on The Gate of a Strange Field (1929) and Last Cage Down (1935) as autobiografictional negotiations of complex class and gender politics, which, through navigating the intersections between respectability, sexuality and trade unionism led the way towards a transformed socialist politics, which pointed in more radical directions than the eventual 1945 welfare state, and still holds lessons for the twenty-first century.
‘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 ability to self-reflexively narrate the self became an alternative source of agency to power rooted in the Victorian 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, such as Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and D.H. Lawrence, marginalised by class and/or gender from Victorian power structures. Following Lawrence, working-class writers – especially those like Heslop who also came from mining communities – rejected autobiography as too complicit with 19th century discourses of progress and the hierarchical ordering of society.
In Crisis and Criticism, first published in 1937, Alick West identified the question facing modernist writers, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, 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). The work of these writers may be characterised as an autobiografictional move beyond the limits of the bourgeois self in search of intersubjective social relations. West considered Ulysses (the subject of his penultimate chapter) to be an important step in this direction because it related self to society. However, West goes on to argue in his final chapter that a full answer to the modernist question can only be found by relating self to society in terms of the production process as Heslop does in The Gate of a Strange Field (which is thereby elevated 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 test of time. When Crisis and Criticism was republished in 1975, the final chapter on Heslop was omitted and rather than The Gate of a Strange Field being bountifully available to teach as a regularly reprinted Penguin Classic, copies are pretty near impossible to locate and I had to read it in the British Library. However, nonetheless, I think that West was correct and the best way to vindicate his arguments is 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 (2017).
My aim in that book was not to create an alternative canon but to try and lay out a different approach to reading and a different way of thinking about literature that isn’t hierarchical. However, this is not to deny the unofficial existence of a proletarian or working-class canon which includes, for example, Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philantrophists (1914) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932-4). Despite Lawrence & Wishart’s 1984 republication of Last Cage Down with an introduction by Andy Croft, Heslop has never quite been accepted into that unofficial canon because of the way his novels don’t fit the changing political positions of the Communist Party over the 1920s and 1930s. As Croft explains, The Gate of a Strange Field was published during the Comintern’s ‘Third Period’ of ‘Class against Class’ at a time when the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), ‘a proletcult organisation who argued for a militant class-conscious literature rooted in Communist-led industrial struggle’ held sway:
A fellow-traveller and ILP novelist like Heslop, writing about the industrial defeats of politically-confused individual trade-union leaders, clearly did not meet the sectarian demands of RAPP literary criticism. . . . [In 1932] International Literature carried a long and damning study of Heslop’s fiction, accusing him of being ‘infected’ with ‘social-fascist bacteria’. In The Gate of a Strange Field … the article complained, Heslop only regarded ‘the workers’ movement from a purely aesthetic point of view … [depicting] the social only though the prisms of the personal … under the influence of sentimental individualism’. (Croft 1984: x)
Croft goes on to argue that Last Cage Down, ‘bears all the marks of a penitent attempt to answer these criticisms’ (Croft 1984: xi). More recently, John Connor has described the novel as informed by ‘pure Third Period orthodoxy, the trade-union movement cast as an adjunct of bourgeois class rule and its leaders as “social fascists” undermining the interests of the workers’ so that ‘the charismatic labour leader Jim Cameron … betrays the men he leads while the quiet communist Joe Frost argues the correct course of action’ (Connor 2019: 325-6). The problem was, however, that by 1935, when Last Cage Down appeared, the sectarian ‘Class against Class’ position had been superseded by the inclusive Popular Front line. Both Croft and Connor cite the contemporary criticism of Charles Ashleigh, who reviewed the novel for both Left Review and the Daily Worker, that it was ‘perhaps a little too sectarian and formalist for these days’ with the character of Frost appearing ‘somewhat dated … rather more in the spirit of a few years earlier’ (qtd Connor 2019: 326; qtd Croft 1984: xii).
Such readings simultaneously illustrate some of the pitfalls of being a working-class writer during the politicised 1930s, account for Heslop’s reception history, and suggest why Alick West came to be embarrassed about his earlier advocacy of Heslop over Joyce as the pinnacle of modern writing. Nevertheless, they are misreadings of Heslop; not only because he is a complex and, at times, satirical writer but also because such readings focus on perceived male class politics and miss the intersectional dynamics of the novels.
For example, The Gate of a Strange Field is a Bildungsroman in which we see Joe Tarrant’s progression from school to pit and on to full-time 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 fornicate etc.). Yet this is not really how the book reads. In fact, the prostitute who Joe meets in London is his estranged wife, Molly. Previously, Heslop has described in Lawrentian tones how, following an enforced marriage due to pregnancy, they had ‘lived a strange, loveless, over-sexed life, each pulling a different way, each so pitiful’ (Heslop 1929: 139) before separating. Joe then goes on to scandalise the respectable morals of the coalfield by moving in with modern, as signified by her page-boy haircut, ILP socialist, 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 the pleasure he takes in his trips to London on union business:
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)
But the irony is, even while indulging himself in London, Joe is still caught up in the limited ‘respectable’ moral outlook of the coalfields. This is made spectacularly clear when Molly interrupts his post-coital mansplaining of the politics of the General Strike: ‘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 only an intersectional politics that moves beyond ‘respectability’ would liberate Joe and Molly and Emily. Or, to put it another way, Heslop does not fall into the trap of ‘sentimental individualism’ and an aesthetic focus on personal problems that he was criticised for by International Literature; rather, through fictional exploration of his own feelings and experiences he shows the necessity of moral revolution in order for collective industrial struggle to be successful. He is not trying to slavishly follow the Party line and failing; he is criticising the Party line.
Turning to Last Cage Down from a similar intersectional perspective, we can see that the novel is not intended as a penitential corrective to The Gate of a Strange Field. Yes, Joe Frost is ‘a proletcult literary type’ as Croft suggests, but he is a satirical take on that type; he might understand Marx and listen to the radio but he is also obsessed with his waistline and has the local butcher weigh him once a week by hauling him up on his hook (205), which is hardly a militant, heroic pose. Yes, Jim Cameron, the protagonist, does come to realise he was wrong after losing 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. But the novel’s epiphanic moment is not his acceptance that Joe Frost might actually be right about how to conduct a strike, but when he finds himself helping his girlfriend with the washing up:
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)
As the novel moves to a conclusion (involving, as in The Gate of a Strange Field and other Heslop novels, a mining disaster), Joe Frost is trying to organise an anti-Fascist rally to protest at a Mosley-like figure visiting ‘Tynecastle’ (Newcastle) and dreaming of a Communist revolution following on from it. But then there is an explosion in the mine trapping him and eventually he is rescued by Cameron. The novel’s closing scene finds Frost convalescing in bed, receiving a visit from Cameron and another miner, Paddy O’Toole – suggesting the multi-ethnic composition of the proletariat as discussed in Wednesday’s keynote lecture [at the WCSA conference] by Satnam Virdee – and the last words in the novel are given to Joe’s wife: ‘I’d like to see any of you dare to stop fighting. Just any of you dare, that’s all!’ (361).
Therefore, in the conventional reading of 1930s politics according to communist positions, Last Cage Down might be seen as calling for a ‘United Front’ of socialists, communists and trade unionists rather than the proletcult position that Croft and Connor associate the novel with. Alternatively, Heslop’s fiction might be considered as sharing more in common with the revolutionary politics of ILP writers such as Ethel Mannin and George Orwell. However, I think we need to move away from a criticism that seeks to fit British writers, and working-class writers in particular (and even more so miner writers), to political positions and then finds them failing. Why do we assume that the default ‘proletarian’ position is one of unyielding militant, masculinity – is it purely because the struggle is presented as man versus material nature in the mines? Better to follow the example of McKenzie Wark in Molecular Red (2015) and rethink proletcult from outside the parameters of the Bolshevik Party line and view the struggle -as called for by Mrs Frost – as ‘in its origin and ends not fundamentally against the ruling class’ but rather the quest to find ‘in and against nature’ ‘a totality within which to cultivate the surplus of life’ (11, 23). The reason why Heslop has appeared a politically confused writer to critics is because his work is not orientated towards the shifting political goals of the 1930s but towards an as-yet-unrealised utopian-because-proletarian worldview beyond class and gender.
Works Cited:
Bell, David. Ardent Propaganda: Miners’ Novels and Class Conflict 1929-1939. Uppsala: Umeå University, 1995.
Connor, John. ‘Anglo-Soviet Relations in the Long 1930s’ in Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, eds, A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 317-330.
Croft, Andy. ‘Introduction’ to Harold Heslop, Last Cage Down, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984: vii-xiii.
Heslop, Harold. The Gate of a Strange Field, London: Brentano, 1929.
Heslop, Harold. Last Cage Down, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984 [1935].
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.
Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2015.
West, Alick. Crisis and Criticism, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937.
