Literary Realignment

Mid-Century Romance tells the forgotten history of a genre that has been much denigrated by literary scholars but which remained a vibrant popular form throughout the twentieth century—that of the historical novel, especially its socialist version. The Popular Front and the rise of socialist realism from 1934 onward (when Left Review was established by the British Section of the Writers’ International) mark a significant episode in this history, but so do the soul-searching efforts of British Communist Party members in the wake of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the dissolution of the Old Left in the 1950s. By tracking the genre's revival in Britain between the late 1920s and 1960s, John T. Connor situates a wide range of historical novels from both the Left and the Right in the broader context of post-1945 geopolitical and cultural realignment that eventually solidified into the Cold War dichotomy of Soviet socialist realism against liberal democratic modernism led by the United States. According to Connor, the turn toward nationalism and folk culture, commonly associated with late modernism, can be traced back to the end of the First World War. As such, neither the extant narrative of imperial decline, nor that of the Soviet Union's policy change can fully explain the resurgence of the historical novel. A larger canvas is needed to map the traffic of the genre among world republics of letters of the Left and Right.The titular “romance,” set in contradistinction to the realist novel that emerged as the predominant form of modern fiction since the eighteenth century, encompasses here a variety of “premodern and popular” forms from “medieval metrical romance and Renaissance gothic literature” to “ballads, folklore, collective memory and mentalities” (23–24). For Connor, the revival of the historical novel is in line with the early nineteenth-century, post-Enlightenment Romantic turn toward folk culture, the imagination, and the premodern past. It is no surprise, Connor suggests, that both the Left and Right turned to Sir Walter Scott's historical novels as models presenting alternative visions of the nation. Scott's combination of “antiquarian and conjectural history” offered twentieth-century writers an aesthetic that helped confront the historical trauma not only of the recent Great War, but of modern civilization itself (37). On the one hand, the need for re-enchantment in confrontation with a present typified by loss, chaos, and decline has led politically conservative modernist writers such as Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf to write historical novels and fantasies—respectively, Madeline: One of Love's Jansenites (1919) and Orlando (1928)—at least two decades before what Jed Esty identifies in A Shrinking Island as late modernism's “Anglocentric turn.” On the other hand, communist writers from Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács to Harold Heslop and Jack Lindsay saw in Scott's “national-popular” aesthetic a possibility to reinvent the “popular epic,” a literature that will inspire social transformation for an alternative and better future (29). In focusing on the historical novel as a site for the struggle between “Right-religious and secular-Left investment in rituals of belonging that may be typified as ‘romantic,’” Mid-Century Romance locates a “national turn” in twentieth-century British literature not (or not simply) as a response to imperial decline, but as a return to England's own socialist tradition (27).This socialist tradition forms the book's second—and to my mind, much more compelling—trajectory. In writing about not only historical novels but also the Left historiography that emerged after World War II, Connor traces a forgotten Left “historical culture” that brought together forgotten working-class writers such as A. L. Lloyd and Hyman Fagan with more well-known social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and E. P. Thompson, whose academic works share with the novelists an interest in “voices from below” (102). The book's final chapter on Lindsay and its epilogue on Raymond Williams illustrate particularly well the extent to which creative praxis intertwined with new theoretical extrapolations of Marxist tenets since the 1950s. In Connor's account, Lindsay's unique brand of socialist humanism offers a serious answer to the so-called crisis of Marxism across Europe following Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism and the USSR's invasion of Hungary in 1956: Literature, Lindsay argues, must turn its attention “to ‘productive activity as the core of the life-process of man,’ thereby casting into sharp relief the ‘crushing destructive effect’ of alienation on people's ability to live at full capacity or fully express what Karl Marx had called their ‘species being’” (186).In this respect, Mid-Century Romance shares with the recent works of critics such as Glyn Salton-Cox, Benjamin Kohlman, Nick Hubble, and Mathew Taunton a similar focus on the relationship between mid-century (especially 1930s) British literature and the culture of international communism centered in Moscow. What makes Connor's contribution particularly important here is his meticulous and informative account of the interplay between a number of factors: Popular Frontism as top-down politicocultural policy from the Communist International (or Comintern), Lukács's works on the historical novel in 1930s Moscow, their reception respectively in the Soviet Union and Britain, and how all such discourses found expressions in the wide range of communist historical novels by both professional and working-class British writers. As Michael Denning argues about the Popular Front culture in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s, the transactions between centralized cultural policies and local literary contexts were often oblique, involving not so much directives from party officials as chance encounters of one writer with a reprinted article here or a translated novel there (Denning).Many of the British communist historical novels Connor discusses turn to premodern peasant revolts (between the 1300s and 1600s) for subject matter, recalling Britain's own folk tradition of radical socialism that long predated international communism and the Popular Front. Connor makes a strong case for the historical novel's significance in preserving Britain's tradition of peasant radicalism, yet the mid-twentieth century was by no means the first time this tradition was invoked or reworked. The Socialist Revival in late Victorian Britain, for example, saw a similar turn toward the utopian images of postrevolutionary, anticapitalist rural communities as captured in works such as William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), Robert Blatchard's Merrie England (1893), and J. C. Kenworthy's anarchist commune experiments, inspired by Peter Kropotkin and Lev Tolstoy (Bevir). Given the prominence of “Merry England” as a literary-political imaginary not only of the nation but of the Left, it would be great to see a more schematic analysis of how this tradition within the British Left intersected with Dimitrov's injunctions to wrest the national-popular past from fascist appropriation at the Comintern Seventh World Congress in 1935.Of course, Mid-Century Romance offers a much wider overview than one of British Left writing and its connections to Soviet cultural policy. Instead, it illustrates the interplay between the “modernist cosmopolitan and the national proletarian aesthetic” through the preoccupations of individual writers with the idea of the “national-popular,” whether or not their views aligned with the Comintern. Connor joins scholars such as Katerina Clark, Joe Cleary, Jed Esty, Peter Kalliney, and Monica Popescu in their attempts to reconfigure modern literary studies as a discipline shaped by Cold War dichotomies. Such a critical method involves, on the one hand, de-centering modernism as the epitome of aesthetic achievement over other popular or nonexperimental forms or genres. On the other hand, it calls for a re-evaluation of interwar and Cold War Soviet literature. If we view literary history not from the vantage of one literary world-system—the Anglo-American capitalist one led by New York, London, and Paris—but from the perspective of multiple competing literary world-systems, then the very idea of canonicity becomes suspect. As Connor astutely points out, writers like Lindsay and Sylvia Townsend Warner might have been marginalized in their home country, but they were feted and widely circulated in the Soviet Bloc. Scholars like Clark, Steven Lee, and Amelia Glaser have shown that what Maxim Gorky, Karl Radek, and Andrei Zhdanov proposed at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 was nothing less than a revolution of literature: socialist realism was not merely dogmatic, soulless propaganda, but rather a promise of a radical literature that would organically reconcile political reality with political desire, historical necessity with visions of social transformation, merging the present and the future (Clark; Lee and one wishes at times that, rather than offering brief overviews of many different approaches to the historical novel, the book could home in on what is obviously its focal point: the British Left in its interplay with global forces such as international communism and international modernism, the Popular Front against the Far Right national imagination, and the emergence of the New Left. It would have helped readers to see more clearly, for example, how Woolf and Lindsay, the respective protagonists of the study's bookend chapters, may be read alongside each other, especially when, despite their political differences, both maintain a deep fascination with Englishness and English history. Connor's vast canvas offers a crucial and timely intervention in the study of global modernist studies and mid-century world literature, challenging the Cold War binaries that continue to dominate critical discourse today. Nonetheless, I find the book at its most cogent and thought-provoking when the British communist historical novel is read in its own terms.Mid-Century Romance is an essential read for any scholar interested in interwar and Cold War global literature, especially those interested in retrieving a left-wing literature beyond the Auden generation or Karl Radek's rather draconian instructions for socialist writers. With his ambitious geographical and historical scope, his meticulous archival research, and his deep commitment to honoring the contributions of working-class writers, Connor retrieves an important episode in literary history, viewed from the other side of the Cold War divide, where a vibrant and diverse literary culture of the Left persisted throughout the twentieth century as a viable alternative to international modernism. Most crucially, Mid-Century Romance shows how the socialist dream of a literature that allows the people to recognize their own historical becoming is, pace Lukács's conclusion in 1961, not “too optimistic” (89). On the contrary, Connor's study shows how the energies of the communist historical novel were channeled into other forms that emerged elsewhere, such as magic realism and New Left social historiography. Tracing the formal and cross-disciplinary permutations of Left literary practices is important not only for a more multifaceted account of mid-century culture, but for the Left in general. As Connor rightly concludes in the book's epilogue, to revisit courageous, albeit failed, attempts at social transformation in the past is precisely not to succumb to left-wing melancholia; rather, it is to recognize—and continue—the tradition of dissent and resistance.