The British Left in the 1930s

...Although he came to the conclusion that the "war was worth winning even if the revolution were lost" he also realized that "perhaps the P.O.U.M...

...The British intellectual of the 1930's was learning rapidly what Malraux had discovered a little earlier in China...

...Mary McCarthy, now a member of the Trade Union Congress hierarchy, in her Generation in Revolt (1953) recants her Communist past but has the honesty to say that "even with my experience of the dark side of Communism I realized (in 1951) that I could not sincerely regret having passed through the ranks of the Communist Party, despite the confusion it had made of my life...

...Perhaps he did not understand what revolution meant, had not thought enough about it, and had not realized the possibilities in the situation both in Spain and in Britain...

...And, as it then seemed, radical political action could mean the Communist Party as well as the Labor Party...

...What political maneuver could galvanize a standpat government...

...The need of the British left to work its way through what Spender called the political-moral problem therefore presented a monumental tasks: nothing less than a new political point of view...

...He also saw a revolution going on underneath the surface of civil war and found it good...

...Liberalism had nothing to say about destructive elements...

...And a good thing too, for it was a decade which questioned practically every value which a bourgeois civilization had managed to create...

...The awakening of the political sense, the awareness of political crisis may have led to fevered responses...

...Optimism for the here and now was irrelevant...

...Each nation in the West had its own variation of political and economic crisis...

...Politics as something done by the British governing classes was replaced by the fusion of politics and society...

...It is one thing to read about the Waste Land, another thing to live in it...

...Politics entered the core of life and was seen as a part of the question, "What is it we want really...

...TODAY SOME PEOPLE SEEM TO KNOW BETTER, for in the current absorption with Communism the danger of fascism in the thirties is all but forgotten...

...Orwell, however, enlarges his sin by seeing that anti-Communism alone was no answer to this problem, and in fact he has no answer...

...She is not a traitor who is discussing her past sins, nor has she any more neurotic impulses than, say, Lionel Trilling...

...One may also doubt the extent to which the British left was actually throwing overboard the fundamental postulates of liberalism and still recognize that there was felt a need to drive home the lesson that knowledge and good thoughts were not enough...

...When they moved from a consideration of the individual's crisis to the crisis in Britain, they were preparing Britain to fight back...

...In retrospect it might be felt that it would have been better for him to act through joining the Labor Party and serving as a leaven within that "soggy mass...

...There were funda mental needs...

...These were old questions but were now seen anew in the context of democratic incapacity and external threat...

...It was an unhappy time for the British left...

...In Britain the fascist threat augmented a crisis of already major proportions in the unemployment of the 1920s...

...And a frustrating experience, since it has the usual denouement...

...It was necessary to find a way out...

...That this attack on the official beliefs of liberalism contained some considerable amounts of superficiality and masochism is now clear...

...To deny this dilemma is to deny that fascism existed, a not impossible feat to be sure...

...The great advantage of repudiating one's past is that it provides a standpoint from which to scourge the past of others...

...Any choice was a dangerous choice—but then Orwell, McCarthy and a long list of others thought it was a dangerous age...

...It was a large order, as he himself makes clear, but it was also a desperate desire...

...An old story...

...But she was a member of the Lancashire working class in the twenties and thirties, and finding herself surrounded by a wall of indifference— economic, political and personal—she chose Communism as a way of breaking out...

...Others chose other means, and for Miss McCarthy herself the Labor Party, the Independent Labor Party and the Communists only varied in the vitality of their struggle against poverty—their will to strike back...

...indeed, one reason she should not have joined was that even in terms of her standard of action, it was less effective than the Labor Party...

...The British left had no such political movement in which to put its hopes...

...What could be done to end mass unemployment and the dole...

...It therefore acted as a magnet for the intellectuals and drew their energy into orderly politics...

...This was itself enough to distort the normal beat of British political life...

...For both books demonstrate that it was not the psychopaths, traitors, and the naive who ruined the age, but rather, that the problems of the age could be avoided only by psychopaths, traitors and the naive...

...But both Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and another book by a Britisher, Generation in Revolt, give us a chance to revalue the revaluation as far as they concern Britain...

...Orwell, like Miss McCarthy, met up with political power and did not like it, but that did not make the problems of politics less pressing...

...And above all: what could the individual do to change the society responsible for these disorders...

...It is a failure to see the problems of the thirties as they then existed which cripples the work of those who would re-write the history of those years...

...One was to complete the collapse of official liberalism which up to then had been the common doctrine in Britain...

...The liberal had apparently gotten himself into a mess...

...And her actions were of a piece with the age...

...Maybe there was no satisfactory answer, but that only heightened the dilemma, for inaction and an apolitical mood in an age of civil war was in fact an answer—defeat by abdication...

...Even in his most disillusioned moments he continued to dramatize the issue to the point where he thought that although in Spain the enemy was Franco, it was a war of civilizations that was being fought...

...whether the answers were right or wrong they were at least rational answers...

...Impatient, they turned elsewhere—and made their terrible mistakes...

...It was the way in which the elite of Britain educated, if not the masses, then themselves...

...But behind this incantation lay a more profound sense of the times...

...Quite simply, a melancholy appreciation of social dissolution was no longer possible...

...America at least had the New Deal which in fits and starts gave a kaleidoscopic illusion of action...

...Politics, more specifically the politics of the Left, became a way of seeing all things, a general point of view...

...THE POLITICAL PROBLEMS WHICH THE BRITISH LEFT faced were practical and rational problems of means and ends...

...Hitler too had fused politics and society, and the left met his challenge with its own formula of a totality in which the essential element was—ironically--a tenacious liberal belief in freedom and a trust in the future...

...Orwell at least had no doubts, and he thought the Spanish Civil War was the possible turning of the tide against fascism...

...The tragedy lay in his discovery that both the revolution and the resistance were killed by "the temporary alliance that fascism, in certain forms, forces upon the bourgeois and the worker...

...Despite their revolutionary pose it was as the representative embodiment of the radical-liberal soul of Britain that the intellectuals worked in the 1930s...

...perhaps he should have stayed at home...

...But he believed he had to make a practical choice and thus he concluded that "it did not follow that the (Spanish Loyalist) Government was not worth fighting for...

...Orwell, like so many who went to Spain, concluded that the political situation was depressing...

...To say that Miss McCarthy should not have joined the Communist Party is all very well...

...There was an espe cial need for such an examination in Britain where a humanitarian reac tion to political problems had long been good form and where it was becoming obvious that the stock responses of good will and progressive enlightenment not only failed as an explanation of human behavior but also as a way of political life...

...Ideology meant less than food...

...THE REVOLT OF THE LEFT PosED some complicated problems of morals and politics, and it was the function of the age to identify these problems and to solve them...

...Thus the crisis of the 1930s went further than questions of political tactics and penetrated deep into the political problems which Orwell faced in Spain and Miss McCarthy in Lancashire...

...In his introduction to the recently republished edition of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia Mr...

...But as it happened there were both Fascists and Communists in Spain, and this made politics complicated and hazardous...

...Britain, along with other nations, had to deal with problems of economics which led directly to problems of political freedom, action and belief...

...If the latter was not incompatible with Communism, the former was, and it took much less time than is generally assumed for most of the British left to realize the fact...

...But forced by her family to return and cornered by desperation in a hated land, she expressed her despair in political attack...

...Still, man's conscience had not yet been abolished and Orwell in the specific circumstances of the Spanish Civil War felt impelled to participate despite its political confusions...

...For what end and how...

...But before we repudiate the past that made so many of us, including those who are most committed to fashions of the moment, it is well to remember that in a period of collapse and terror it was no bad thing to try to act, however mistakenly or inadequately, as the conscience of an age...

...If both he and Miss McCarthy went into their experience full of hope for good—it may be doubted whether they would otherwise have exposed themselves, he to bullets, she to family estrangement—they both came out with some considerable sophistication as to what the issues were...

...the division of political forces was absolute...

...that could be saved for the future...

...But much of the moralistic hindsight of the fifties misses the point that for people like Miss McCarthy the problem was how to take radical political action in Lancashire...

...The Auden-Spender group perhaps came as close as any among the writers of the thirties to dealing with these questions when they considered the civilization of their time and power within that civilization...

...Nor is there a need to call in psychology to explain the problem...

...Stephen Spender put it this way: man must immerse himself in the destructive element before he can come out on the other side...

...A new political mood was created...

...Trilling describes Orwell as the original anti-Communist and tells us that the British liberal was a dolt for not listening to him...

...The belief in belief became a mania: to mock at the ruins was no longer enough...

...It was how to force the Tory Government out of power, or at least to force it to improve the daily living conditions of the workless workers...

...Growing up as a millhand with no further education than that of the other workers, she had to decide what to do to improve her position and that of the other workers...

...there was for example, a preternatural and obsessive concern with the masses and mass action...

...In making explicit these questions, in stirring up what Louis MacNeice called the right discontent, Britain's intellectuals served her better than they knew, for it was the fact that these questions had been asked that made possible sophistication concerning the nature of the crisis before the fire bombs fell...

...This indeed is the theme of his book The Destructive Element: not merely the immersion in the destructive element but getting through it to the other side where belief is possible...

...the angry rejection by both Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice of T. S. Eliot are evidence of the change in thought, if any evidence is needed...

...But it was a soggy mass and it is understandable that for people who felt the need was to fight here and now the Labor Party should have had a very limited attraction...

...That is also the virtue of Homage to Catalonia, for Orwell too was concerned with the problem of how to save his skin and the skin of others by changing the condition of civilization...

...What indeed could the liberal belief in rationality do against the ugliness and irrationality which was spreading over Europe...

...A mistake, of course...

...The political and economic crisis in Lancashire was simple: a hungry working class, a hostile government, a politically impotent Labor Party...

...Perhaps just the opposite is true...

...If attacking liberalism satisfied some part of the desire to immerse oneself in the destructive element, the second demand which the times made on the Britisher was more devastating...

...but before any moral judgments can be passed with regard to this mistake, it must at least be seen in the context of its own time...

...What it meant, to one person at least, is shown in a book which has slipped in and out of the bookstalls without much notice...

...One can complain that his Professor is more woolly-headed than even a professor need be, and still grasp the point...

...The emotional as well as the economic impact of mass unemployment in a Lancashire mill town created a Waste Land—the real thing and not a literary reference picked up from reading Eliot...

...It is the virtue of Miss McCarthy's book that she shows the urgency of the need to act in a radical way...

...Both made what was for them a moral choice...

...Warner's answer was that woolly-headed good will was no longer sufficient...

...To someone living in Lancashire in the thirties the issue was not Russia vs...

...Yet these outmoded attitudes domi nated not only the Conservative political organs but also the Labor Party...

...It was an age obsessed with the idea of The Way Out, for which it no doubt deserves censure for escapism...

...This not very profound but matter-of-fact conclusion was reached by one who had to exist in the reality of the time and in real political situations— in contrast with the liberal of 1955 who makes no choice more serious than what to grow in his suburban garden but is angry with those who once did make a choice...

...In this violation of Orwell's thought Mr...

...piety was insufficient, and there was a need to meet death head on...

...One such dilemma was the need for Orwell to support a Republican government in Spain which he saw as anti-revolutionary...

...The British Labor Party had long since given off nothing but sounds of collapse, and the Trade Union Congress had had its vitality sucked out of it by the failure of the 1926 general strike...

...Britain...

...Miss McCarthy's first solution was emigration to America where she found the good living which could not be had in Britain...

...How could the fascist threat be thrown back...

...Trilling delicately avoids the revolutionary thrust of Orwell's argument and forgets what it was like to be a liberal or a radical—in Britain as well as America—in the thirties...

...What did you do—asked Orwell—when the Communists with whom you were conducting a common struggle against Fascism turned against you...

...He celebrates Orwell as a decent sort of fellow who stood out among the riffraff of the time simply because he was decent...

...Rex Warner asks this question in The Professor in which a representative of the old liberal culture faces traitors and political passion in a Kafka-like world and fails to control or even understand the situation...

...In Orwell's case, once again a Britisher found that right political action meant coping with a specific political situation and not merely affirming an abstract moral good...

...and the Anarchist slogan: the war and the revolution are inseparable,' was less visionary than it sounds...

...But much of it also corresponded to political reality, a fact that is made painfully obvious when one observes in Thomas Jones' Diary with Letters the collapse of Stanley Baldwin's good will into indecision, doubt, and flight from reality...

...When they attacked the liberal creed, they were stripping it of its flabbiness and preparing it to fight back...

...It was essential now to ask, what, in the crisis of the 1930s was the role of the accepted political shibboleths of British public life...

...It became a way of examining not the individual's predicament alone but also the predica ment of the individual as a public man, of the individual in society...

...Now these specific problems are no longer with us, and since the thirties are not likely to return again the responses of the time are in the public domain as history...

...Not only was he, in the person of Orwell, being shot through the neck but he had naively walked right into the trap prepared for him many years ago by the Stalinists...

...That Trilling and others can discuss the era in a way that avoids consciousness of these problems tells us more about our own age than the thirties...

...But what makes her Generation in Revolt more than usually interesting is her recall of the life of Lancashire and the political problem it symbolized for the British left...

...Today we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and the 1930s as innocent and naive...

...Such failures are in essence a refusal to understand that in the 1930s the radical and liberal faced concrete political and economic problems which forced them into an awareness that politics demanded deeds...

...a choice not only of sides—that was easy—but a decision to act and to meet the dilemmas that problems of politics involved...

...If the note now was alternating fits of heroism and/or suicide with utopian visions as found, say, in the poetry of C. Day Lewis, it was nevertheless a fact that living in the thirties involved for the Englishman a public as well as a private aspect...

...It was not irresponsibility but the dole which sent Miss McCarthy into the Communist Party...

...Here, in this statement, there was something for the British Leftist to think about...

...Perhaps the British Leftist was failing his cause not because he was too revolutionary but because he was not revolutionary enough...

...It is her description of the will to fight back rather than of the means she chose that makes her book useful, for it reminds us that there was something to fight against...

...Lionel Trilling that in Britain, just as in America, the 1930s was an age in which men with the minds of children wreaked havoc with the moral instincts of man...

...It was not irresponsibility but the need to fight back that sent Orwell to Spain...

...But once it is realized that in the circumstances facing the British left there was perhaps no satisfactory answer to the question of how to take political action and that nonetheless a political decision had to be made, the problems of the left in the thirties become less susceptible to cliches and more to human feeling...

...The questions asked in Britain by the poets, writers and university dons turned political hacks were those which the rest of Britain was asking itself...