Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary 3031396464, 9783031396465

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Jack Lindsay Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary Anne Cranny-Francis

Jack Lindsay

Anne Cranny-Francis

Jack Lindsay Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary

Anne Cranny-Francis University of Technology Sydney Sydney, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-39645-8    ISBN 978-3-031-39646-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: MORRIS: WALLPAPER, 1875. /William Morris ‘Acanthus’ wallpaper, 1875 contributed by GRANGER - Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Helen, with thanks for your help and friendship

Preface

In a tribute to writer, theorist and critic, Jack Lindsay (1900–1990) on his eighty-fourth birthday the eminent historian, Christopher Hill (1984) described his work in this way: … I should like first to admit that I just don’t know how he does it, how he keeps on, never lowering his standards. Secondly, to pay tribute especially to the enormous energy and delight that he has poured into his books: they give pleasure to the reader because he so obviously enjoyed finding out about the human achievements he records, because the patterns which forced themselves upon him gave him intellectual satisfaction. Thirdly, to note the selflessness of his work. He doesn’t write to show off his very great erudition, nor to be clever, but to use the study of history and the analysis of art and literature for what after all is their main purpose—to help make the lives of men and women on earth fuller, richer and freer. (p. 268)

The last point is also a tribute to Lindsay as a person—a man of great learning whose purpose was not career advancement or self-­aggrandisement but to contribute to the betterment of human experience on earth. This aim led him to join the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s and much of his writing was a contribution to and dialogue with the Marxist principles espoused by its members. However, he was also a polymath, an independent intellectual whose views could not be contained by the ideology of any party, movement or academic discipline. Descended from families of visual artists, writers, and intellectuals he was eager to understand the relationships between culture, society and the individual: vii

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to understand how artworks, visual and literary, engaged the individual and how they might produce new understandings about the nature of society and of being. In their recent book British Marxism and Cultural Studies: Essays on a Living Tradition (2016) historians Philip Bounds and David Berry begin their account of the forebears of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies with a chapter by Bounds about Lindsay’s work. Bounds gives two main reasons for his choice of Lindsay as subject. The first is that Lindsay’s writing exemplifies much of the Marxist thought of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s: Although Lindsay was not the best known or most widely read communist critic of the age, his work gives peculiarly vivid expression to the CPGB’s most important cultural shibboleths in the period between the rise of Hitler and the onset of the Cold War. It thus embodies in capsule form the sort of intellectual culture in which Williams and other pioneers of Cultural Studies cut their teeth. (p. 22)

Bounds goes on to argue that Lindsay not only voiced some of the revered principles and beliefs about the nature of society, culture and human being held by the Communist Party of Great Britain; he also challenged many of them. In so doing, Lindsay played an important role in the intellectual debate that provided Raymond Williams and other early Cultural Studies practitioners with a context and a local tradition. Bounds continues: The other main reason for engaging with it is that it still stands up in its own right. Totalising, polymathic and suggestive—traversing continents and historical epochs with enviable ease—Lindsay’s theory of culture sometimes makes the work of Eliot, Leavis and other contemporaries seem drab and unambitious by comparison. (p. 22)

At a time when knowledge was becoming increasingly specialised and disciplinary borders were closely guarded, Lindsay’s research was interdisciplinary, and his thinking and writing were transdisciplinary. Lindsay’s expertise and interests included many disciplinary fields: anthropology, archaeology, art, classics (in which he held a First-Class Honours degree), history, literature, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion and science. He wrote mainly literary and cultural history and criticism, art history and criticism, modern fiction and poetry, autobiography

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and historical biography, and political analysis. He also translated classical and modern texts and was an editor and publisher, notably of the fine art Fanfrolico Press and of left-wing journals, including Poetry and the People (1938–40) and Arena (1949–51). He wrote and presented work for theatre and, during World War II, as propaganda for British troops, and one of his novels, All on the Never-Never (1961) was made into a film, Live Now – Pay Later (1962). His output included over 160 books and hundreds of essays, as well as a collection of poetry edited by James Borg in a 605-page volume, Collected Poems (1981). From the research that underpins this extraordinary output Lindsay fashioned his own theory of culture: an account of the formation of human culture and society from prehistory to the sixteenth century that is the context from which the modern world developed and with which it still in many ways engages. This theory is presented in his book, A Short History of Culture: From Prehistory to the Renascence, published first in 1939 and in a substantially revised form in 1962. Its core ideas are developed throughout Lindsay’s entire output, which gives his work coherence, breadth and intellectual animation. All of which leads Bounds to question why Lindsay’s work has been overlooked. Bounds suggests that Lindsay was a victim of his own productivity; that he wrote so much and in so many different fields that his contemporaries could not keep up with him. It was easier for them to ignore him, a response that led to his reputation as a talented outsider or eccentric. Bounds notes also: ‘It was only towards the end of his life that a handful of scholars began to recognise him for what he was: one of the most important members of the talented generation of literary intellectuals associated with the CPGB in the 1930s’ (p.  22). Lindsay continued to write and publish books into the mid-1980s when he was in his mid-­ eighties. The books published in his final decade cover a range of fields including art history and criticism, literary criticism, translation, poetry, as well as a critique of contemporary Marxist theory, The Crisis in Marxism (1981) that both distinguished him from the communist orthodoxy of his time and constituted a dialogue with that orthodoxy. In writing this study I also struggled with this massive literary output— across disciplines and domains of knowledge. To write on all of Lindsay’s work with any kind of depth and interest seemed impossible. I chose to focus on Lindsay’s major author studies, contextualised by other literary and related writing from the same period. In this way I was able to map

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the development of his thinking and also the ways in which he challenged the boundaries of the literary studies discipline, and of mainstream and left-wing intellectual thought of that time; sufficiently, according to both Bounds and Victor Paananen (2000), that his work predicted by some thirty years the work of Raymond Williams and the development of cultural studies with its interdisciplinary methodologies. It also enabled me to focus on Lindsay’s specific interest in how cultural production—here, literature—engages us as embodied individuals, through senses, emotions and intellect, reflexively demonstrating their interconnectedness. At the same time, he argues that these faculties are fundamentally social, not instinctual or idiosyncratic, so can only be understood within the context of an individual’s experience. This model of human being and knowing—replacing mind-body dualism with a notion of embodied being in which senses, emotion and intellect are interconnected and mutually formative—enabled Lindsay to focus on the individual’s engagement with their world, their society and with elements of their own being. For him this was also key to understanding how individuals could be positioned or lulled or coerced into thinking and behaving in ways contrary to their own values, beliefs and well-being. In turn, it was critical for understanding why capitalism was so successful as an ideology despite the damage it caused to many individuals, the society and the environment. Conversely, a writer might use a coordinated appeal to senses, emotions, and intellect to reveal its practice and present the reader with a new understanding of themselves and their world, as did William Blake and the Romantics; art could be a form of political activism. Furthermore, Lindsay’s refusal to be bound by knowledge domains meant he was able to roam across fields of knowledge, not remain contained by disciplinary borders and their ever-narrowing specialisms. He directly confronted this corralling of research into knowledge silos isolated from the social, cultural and environmental consequences of their work. In the 1930s he declared a communist future must be vegetarian as human beings had no right to slaughter fellow beings; in the 1960s he argued against his fellow communists that expanding industrialisation was central to the move to communism, citing the damage to the environment caused by industrial pollution. His innovation was in bringing this analysis of the human connectedness with the natural world and with other species into the political domain, a difficult strategy even in many current contexts. Mapping the development of Lindsay’s thought across the twentieth century raises many of the issues with which we are still dealing and

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demonstrates ways in which they may be productively reframed; primarily, by addressing them simultaneously from a range of different disciplinary perspectives; with an understanding of individuals as embodied beings, not will-driven machines; and by recognising the fundamental interconnectedness of human beings with each other, other species and the natural world. Lindsay’s work became indispensable to me as a PhD student in the late 1970s, studying the work of William Morris. My basic question was how I could see Morris’ work—all of it, his wallpapers and chintzes, tapestries and carpets, lyrical poetry, fantasy novels and translations, as well as his essays and speeches—as part of his political practice. Lindsay’s major study of Morris (1975) answered that question in a way no other study did, because he was able to analyse the artistic practice itself; showing how textual choices (e.g. use of imagery, colour, rhythm, genre, narrative) evoked sensory, emotional and intellectual responses in reader or viewer to create particular meanings and understandings of the world that could change an individual’s understanding of themselves, their society and the world in which they lived. In transforming individual being and knowing the artwork is a political practice, at times, more effective than a political polemic. Lindsay’s analysis brings together social and historical research on the context of a work’s production and reception, textual analysis that relates literary practice to knowledge production, and his understanding of human being and knowing and how that relates to reading practice in order to show how a literary work may reflect and/or challenge the society in which it was produced. This interdisciplinary methodology is complex and demanding but generates in Lindsay’s work the energy and delight identified by Hill. The aim of this study is to map the development of this methodology and show it in practice, while also noting some of the political scrapes into which it led Jack Lindsay. Sydney, NSW, Australia

Anne Cranny-Francis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank a number of people for their help and support in completing the research that led to this book, including Jack Lindsay’s daughter Helen who talked to me at length about her father’s life, ideas and experiences, and gave access to private manuscripts; also Philip Lindsay for a memorable discussion about his father in Cambridge and access to books and papers by Jack, including a manuscript copy of his unpublished intellectual autobiography, The Fullness of Life: Autobiography of an Idea. My thanks also to Lynette Trad and Margaret Liessi for access to their Family Histories of the Owens and Parkinson families, Jack’s maternal family. For their interest in and discussions of my research I’d also like to thank Henry Stead, Adrian Palka, Jill Hamilton, my cultural studies colleagues at the University of Technology Sydney and from other disciplines Belinda Middleweek and Juanita Sherwood. For reading drafts of chapters thanks to Patricia Gillard, Marele Day and Tony Thwaites; for their professional help as research assistants thanks to Cathy Hawkins, Emma Fraser and Amelia Gledhill; to librarians Stephen Gates and Jackson Mann for assisting with access to publications and papers by Jack Lindsay; and to editor, Paul Allatson for preparing the Index. Finally, to my neighbours Peter Armstrong and Susanne Slade thanks for the stories about Peter’s grandmother, Essie who had modelled for Jack’s father, Norman and their gift of a pencil sketch of Essie by Norman; for hospitality and support many thanks to long-time friends, Jill Brewster and Bobbie Gledhill; and as always for untiring support thanks to my sons, Hamish and Conal Francis-Martin. xiii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP1096475). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I Early Years, the 1920s; and William Blake  17 2 William Blake, Visionary 35 3 From Revolutionary to Visionary 53 Part II  The 1930s; and John Bunyan  71 4 John Bunyan, Dissenter 81 5 Return to Socialism; and Marx105 Part III  The 1940s; and Charles Dickens 125 6 Charles Dickens, Radical133 7 Art as Political Activism159

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Part IV  The 1950s; and George Meredith 179 8 George Meredith, (Psycho)Analyst191 9 Society, Being and Consciousness217 Part V  The 1960s–Mid-1970s; and William Morris 237 10 William Morris, Revolutionary247 11 The Artist and the Senses271 Part VI  The Late 1970s–1990; and William Blake (Revisited) 289 12 William Blake, Prophet297 13 Art, Politics and Ideology321 14 Conclusion345 Selected Bibliography357 Index379

About the Author

Anne Cranny-Francis  is a writer and critic with a thirty-year career as an academic, most recently as Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, where she currently holds an Adjunct Professorship. Her major research interests are human-technology engagement, sensory studies, multimedia literacies, gender studies, science fiction and fantasy, textual politics and the work of Jack Lindsay. Her publications include Technology and Touch: The Biopolitics of Emerging Technologies (2013), Multimedia: Texts and Context (2005), Gender Studies: Terms and Debates (2003), The Body in the Text (1995), Popular Culture (1994), Engendered Fictions: Analysing Gender in the Production and Reception of Texts (1992), Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (1990) and the co-edited Feminine, Masculine and Representation (1990) as well as over seventy journal articles, book chapters, and catalogue essays: https://uts.academia.edu/AnneCrannyFrancis. She was also a founding editor of the journal, Social Semiotics and has worked as a media, communication and web site consultant, literacy consultant, social researcher and creative consultant for children’s television.

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Abbreviations

ATT B:CW CM CP CPGB FH

Jack Lindsay, After the ’Thirties: the novel in Britain and its future William Blake, Complete Writings Jack Lindsay, The Crisis in Marxism Jack Lindsay, Collected Poems Communist Party of Great Britain Lynette Trad and Margaret Liessi, ‘Family Histories: Owens and Parkinson’ GA John Bunyan, Grace Abounding LRT Jack Lindsay, Life Rarely Tells M:CW George Meredith, Collected Works MCS Jack Lindsay, Marxism and Contemporary Science MM Norman Lindsay, My Mask MP Jack Lindsay, Meetings With Poets NAUK National Archives of the United Kingdom SP Jack Lindsay, Who Are the English?: Selected Poems 1935–81 SPAB The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings TFOL Jack Lindsay, ‘The Fullness of Life: Autobiography of an Idea’ TLS Times Literary Supplement

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

‘JACK Lindsay, “translator, polymath, biographer, poet man!” as Roy Fuller described him was as old as the century, steeped in its culture and politics. Generations of avant gardists, often unknowingly, trod in his footsteps.’

Robert Leeson’s obituary in The Guardian (10 March 1990) identifies some major areas of Jack Lindsay’s scholarship and writing, though not the one with which this book is concerned, literary studies. In his literary analysis, also, Lindsay demonstrates his engagement with the culture and politics of his time; his ability to move across and between different disciplines in order to identify culture as fundamental to human nature, being and productivity. For Lindsay culture was not dependent on the economy or a reflection of it, but the basis on which that economy and its politics developed. And underlying culture is the interconnectedness of human beings with their world—with other species, with the natural world, as well as with each other. In the 1930s this led to his adoption of vegetarianism on the basis that there could be no true humanity based on the predation and exploitation of other species with which we share our world. Later in The Fullness of Life (TFOL) Lindsay recalled aligning this with his rediscovered Marxism to argue: ‘A communist society which is not vegetarian seems to me a hopeless contradiction’ (pp. 93–94). Subsequently, his theorisation of individual (embodied) being as interconnected led him to abandon the mind-body dualism that characterised his early thinking

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_1

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for a notion of being as the dynamic interrelation of sensing, feeling and thinking faculties that are all also based in social experience. In this work Lindsay foreshadowed the turns to the body and to the senses of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century as well as the development of interdisciplinary fields such as Cultural Studies (Paananen 2000; Bounds 2016). Reading Lindsay’s work is a journey through twentieth-century cultural politics, enriched by learning how to read and see differently, as we witness the development of new ideas and the changes in understanding required to formulate them. As Leeson suggests, Lindsay was a pathfinder leading the way through the thickets of left political disputation and conservative ideology, both of which prioritised economic and technological development in their analysis of society. In so doing, they neglected the role and significance of individual being and consciousness which, for Lindsay, remained central to all political and cultural endeavour. This stance was not always popular and Lindsay himself recalled the term ‘humanist’ being hurled at him as an insult. However, he did not resile from this position and painstakingly used his own writing to argue his case. In his major literary studies Lindsay’s choice of subject and method of analysis reveal the stage of his thinking at different points on the journey. However, they also show Lindsay’s singular ability to understand how texts engage readers as embodied subjects. His literary analysis goes beyond grammatical rules or ideological positionings to show how texts employ appeals to the senses, emotions and intellect of readers to reveal new ways of understanding the world and, reflexively, themselves. At the same time, Lindsay addresses major issues in contemporary cultural politics that affect his own work and approach to the subject. For example, when he rejects the base-superstructure model used by mid-century Marxists (and most others) to locate the role of culture in society and insists instead that cultural production is just as essential and formative to society as the production of goods and services, this transforms his analysis of literature. Instead of simply a reflection of the economy of a society, literary production becomes a major social agent capable of transforming both individuals and the society that produced it. Which also makes the ability to analyse how it acts this way a crucial skill. Leeson’s obituary reviews Lindsay’s life as writer and activist and concludes by addressing an issue often raised in relation to Lindsay; why he is not better known. One repeated suggestion is that he was so prolific that no one—comrades, critics, or readers—could keep up with him, nor take

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the time required to understand how his work developed. Leeson responds: ‘Too productive? That is not the point. He was engaged in a life-long discussion with the world. “For me it is the quest that matters,” he said. “I always feel my work lies ahead.”’ This concern is addressed further below, but one other answer is that every engagement with his work is another part of the discussion, another stage in his quest to make the world better by finding ways for human beings to avoid the injustice, disharmony and alienation that characterises many contemporary societies and instead accept their connectedness with each other, other beings and the natural world, and within themselves. In summary, then, the aim of this study of Lindsay’s literary analysis is to map the development of Lindsay’s thinking from a kind of early twentieth-­ century aestheticism to his own version of late twentieth-­ century Marxism. The reason for tracing this process is that it shows how Lindsay’s thinking about culture, society and the nature of being changed over the course of the twentieth century—and incidentally how it was at times decades ahead of his contemporaries; mostly because of the interdisciplinarity of his thought and his unceasing engagement with culture that focussed his concern not on economics and politics, but on people. Which in turn maps the move across the century to recognise the critical role of context and interrelationships in every project or exercise or government policy; the rejection of a decontextualised and dehumanised rationalism based on quantitative ‘efficiency’ towards a context-dependent, consultative humanitarianism that acknowledges complexity and diversity as productive elements of individual being and society. Though it must be said that, over two decades into the twenty-first century, we are still struggling to escape that rationalistic thinking now identified with neoliberalism. Lindsay’s work offers some ways forward.

Forgotten Intellectual As the issue of Lindsay’s relative obscurity is raised repeatedly, it is worth considering briefly at this point. John McLaughlin’s article, ‘How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm’ (1998) offers a range of views on how intellectuals lose prominence. Though the subject of his analysis is sociologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, these same principles can be applied to Jack Lindsay.

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McLaughlin begins by contrasting ‘ideational or content-based’ perspectives that are ‘rooted in the traditional humanities as well as disciplinary-­based histories of science and social science’ with ‘reputational perspectives’. Ideational perspectives attribute the nature of an individual’s reputation to ‘the power or flaws of particular ideas’ (pp. 216–7). Of course, this immediately begs a host of questions for anyone who has studied virtually any humanities subject, explored the intellectual history of a discipline, or seen recent movies such as The Imitation Game (2014), The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) or Hidden Figures (2016) that explore the way that social prejudices enable ideas and their makers to be appropriated, misrepresented or excluded from public and institutional recognition. In response, reputational perspectives ‘highlight historical and cultural context, geography and national traditional traditions, institutional arrangements and connections, or charisma, character flaws, and discrimination’ (p.  217). From these factors MacLaughlin refines the parameters of his study to ‘(1) climate of times, (2) geography/national traditions, (3) institutional prestige, and (4) personal characteristics’ (p. 217), which can also be applied (here, briefly) to Jack Lindsay. (1) Climate of times refers to both the intellectual and political climates within which work is produced and published, and which typically change over the lifetime, and afterward, of the individual. McLaughlin maps the reception of Fromm’s work from popularity to rejection as ideas about the nature of human relationships changed under the impetus of political movements such as women’s liberation, in relation to which Fromm’s work came to seem outmoded and, for some, repressive. Lindsay encountered many climates during his lifetime of work. In the microclimate of the British Communist Party Lindsay encountered approval for his literary contributions—his cultural transformation of British literary history to acknowledge rebel voices, even amongst the canon, and his own innovative use of literary genres—the verse-declamations, historical novels, contemporary novels of everyday life—but also severe disapproval and threatened expulsion when he refused to accept the Party’s doctrinaire communism and proposed his own version of Marxism, particularly with his publication of Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949). The mainstream cultural politics he encountered during the Cold War years was predictably negative: readers of the Times Literary Supplement were warned about the danger of allowing his work to be studied, or even published; and the Security Services warned the BBC against continuing to employ him (to discuss the Classics). Indeed, Lindsay was sometimes

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unlucky enough to create a cyclonic disturbance in which both left and right denounced the same work (as happened with Marxism and Contemporary Science), while he sat quietly in his study, in the eye of an ideological storm. Lindsay remained a respected member of left intellectual culture but in his final decades (the 1970s and 1980s) the development of new fields of study such as Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies to which he did not directly contribute (but which, it can be argued, he enabled) and a new kind of academic Marxist orthodoxy, particularly related to the work of Louis Althusser, swept like an atmospheric High through contemporary cultural politics. Lindsay’s work was left eddying in its wake, though he came out fighting with The Crisis in Marxism (1981), which argues against the influence of Althusser and the focus on system and structure at the expense of the lives and agency of individuals in their everyday lives; Althusser, he argues, sees only intellectuals like himself as capable of understanding how state and ideological systems operate. For many, especially those to whom new critical movements spoke directly including feminists, anti-racists and gay activists, Lindsay’s writing was not directly citable and so faded from view. 1 (2) Geography/national traditions. For much of his life Lindsay was a colonial subject in post-imperial Britain. In his late teens and early twenties in Australia he developed a reputation as a skilled classicist and translator, poet of erotic verse, literary critic and publisher. This skill set placed him in the Lindsay clan of artists, led by his father Norman, but did not guarantee him recognition in Britain. In London he soon became a member of the left intelligentsia, though it is doubtful that he was ever wholly accepted. John T. Connor (2016) discusses Lindsay’s outsider status in his adopted home, citing the satirical portrait of him by Aldous Huxley: A cameo appearance in Aldous Huxley’s satire of 1920s literary London, Point Counter Point (1928), sets the trope. There we meet Lindsay as Willie Weaver, ‘a little man perpetually smiling […] bubbling with good humour and an inexhaustible verbiage.’ His height (four foot nine inches) stands in inverse proportion to a ‘verbiage,’ which in print grew to be substantial. (p. 345)

1  Though Lindsay was not directly associated with these movements and did not publish under their aegis, he had a long history of writing about issues of ‘race’ and had argued for its inclusion, with class, in Marxist analysis. This is exemplified in his study of the work of Indian writer, Mulk Raj Anand (1948) that is discussed in Chap. 7 of this study.

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Huxley’s physical diminution of Lindsay in this portrait seems to derive primarily from class and colonialist prejudice—the patrician Huxley metaphorically looks down his nose at the colonial Lindsay—rather than from any critique of his work. Connor notes, however, that elements of his description lingered, even among Lindsay’s comrades: Huxley’s portrait of Weaver ‘simmering on, like a tea kettle’ returns in later recollections, as when Eric Hobsbawm recalls how after the war Lindsay’s ‘encyclopaedic erudition and constantly simmering kettle of ideas let off steam’ during meetings of the Communist Party Historians’ Group, or when the poet Charles Hobday recalls Lindsay’s ‘learning, and his ability to turn out theories about anything’ during meetings of the Communist Party Writers’ Group. And for Hobday, as for Huxley, there is a slight difficulty in ‘taking him seriously’. (p. 345)

It is noteworthy that when he was first taken to task by the Communist Party for his transgressive version of Marxism in Marxism and Contemporary Science, only one person supported him, the young Edward Thompson. In Britain Lindsay always felt an outsider, because he was and this, too, affected his reputation and its longevity. (3) Institutional prestige was slow to build for Lindsay, the scholar and polymath who rejected the possibility of a higher degree, despite achieving First Class Honours in Classics, because he wanted to join his father in the bohemian art world of 1920s Sydney. McLaughlin notes a similar trajectory for Fromm compared with that of Derrida: Both Fromm’s fall and Derrida’s rise can usefully be explained in institutional terms, since Fromm’s lack of a full-time appointment to a prestigious professorship in America and Derrida’s ties to numerous elite universities through the efforts of supporters of his ideas clearly helps explain the trajectory of their reputations. (p. 219)

Without a full-time university position Lindsay’s work was open to attack and de-legitimation from those in positions of institutional power and influence such as literary critic and Cambridge Fellow, F.R.  Leavis of whom Lindsay wrote in The Fullness of Life: ‘Leavis attacked my book [on John Bunyan] as a work of purely sociological analysis’ (p. 114). Of course, Lindsay’s work is open to critique, but the grounds of Leavis’ analysis are more political than literary.

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In the literary journal, Scrutiny (1938) Leavis begins his review of two books about Bunyan—Lindsay’s John Bunyan: Maker of Myths (1937) and William York Tindall’s John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher (1934)—with the following: ‘Mr. Lindsay is Marxist and psycho-analytic’ (p.  461). Predictably, things go downhill from here, with the peculiarly academic insult delivered on the following page: ‘Mr. Tindall—and in this he has the advantage over Mr. Lindsay—is a scholar’ (p. 462). And indeed, Tindall was an academic who taught in the English Department at Columbia University from 1931 to 1971. Though Leavis takes issue also with much of Tindall’s analysis, it is legitimated by his institutional position. Of Lindsay’s analysis Leavis concludes: ‘Though Mr. Lindsay talks of ‘fuller life’ he proffers emptiness; like most Marxist writers who undertake to explain art and culture, he produces the effect of having emptied life of content and everything of meaning’ (p. 466). Tindall was inside the institution and the discipline and protected by them, if not from criticism at least from de-legitimation; Lindsay was not. At the same time, as noted in the Preface, Paananen (2000) and Bounds (2016) regard Lindsay as playing a major role in the establishment of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies and the foundational work of Raymond Williams, though this has rarely been acknowledged. Again, his distance from the institution makes the appropriation of his work and erasure of his role more possible, particularly in a pre-digital environment. (4) Personal characteristics. Under this heading McLaughlin includes the ‘charismatic presence’ that can enable the individual to attract attention and followers as well as ‘interpersonal incompetence, lack of tact or personal scandals’ (p.  219) that may lead to an individual’s work being ignored or dismissed. It also includes the socially generated categories discussed at point (2): ‘countless intellectuals are ignored because of their gender, race, class, or ethnicity, while other intellectuals are able to translate class or cultural advantages into intellectual recognition’ (p. 219). For Lindsay, as noted above, his colonial status as an Australian doubtless contributed to his snub by Huxley. McLaughlin adds that ‘different styles and images of individual thinkers’ (p. 220) may help build reputations. Derrida, he notes, was a great networker, whose ‘complex language and renegade image increased his stature in French intellectual life and American English departments’ (p. 220). By contrast, Fromm’s ‘popular writing style and cultural conservatism played a major role in both his early fame as well as his later decline’ (p. 220). Lindsay was a prolific communicator and collaborator and built his own intellectual communities including left

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intellectuals and artists and members of the Communist Party amongst many of whom his work has not been forgotten. However, those communities though influential did not have the power to legitimate or validate formally (through use in teaching and research; reviews and citations) the work of individual writers; in universities his name, if not his influence, has become barely visible. McLaughlin’s combination of different forms of reputational studies to provide a comprehensive method to study the rise and fall of intellectual influence is extremely useful and his argument about Erich Fromm is convincing. Interestingly his study reveals that both Fromm and Lindsay were attacked for their challenges to Marxist orthodoxy, though for very different reasons. McLaughlin’s method opens up many of the obstacles Lindsay faced to have his work acknowledged and validated by the academy, which remains the chief maker and breaker of intellectual reputations. However, the one factor this approach does not address is the enduring (invisible) influence of the work of the forgotten intellectual.

Vanishing Mediator It was recently suggested by Classics reception scholar Henry Stead that Jack Lindsay’s work might be seen as an example of a ‘vanishing mediator’, the concept used by John T. Connor (2014) to describe the transformative role played by the communist historical novel in mid-twentieth-century historical consciousness. The concept was devised by Fredric Jameson (1973) to explore Max Weber’s narrative of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, and derived from Marx’s description in Capital (1976) of the nature and role of money in capitalist societies: What appears to happen is, not that gold becomes money, in consequence of all other commodities expressing their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in gold, because it is money. The intermediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave no trace behind. (p. 187)

In his article Connor argues that the historical novel, a genre favoured by Lindsay, was ‘the major genre of mid-century socialism and a “vanishing mediator” for those habits of historical attention’ that would be articulated in works such as E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and in the development of the ‘world’ novel, exemplified by Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) (p. 344). Connor

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argues that it was with those works that ‘the Communist historical novel finally surrendered the scene, displaced by the forms it had helped bring into being’ (pp. 344–5). It had shifted the nature and focus of the historical consciousness articulated in the historical novel, opening it up to formerly suppressed or marginalised ways of conceptualising and articulating the history of a society. Connor uses a close reading of Lindsay’s novel, Thunder Underground: A Novel of Nero’s Rome (1965), along with references to other works, to map the cultural politics that Lindsay negotiated in producing his work. This included Lindsay’s clash with the Communist Party over his publication of Marxism and Contemporary Science as well as a range of influences on his thinking: ‘Lindsay’s pre-Marxist vitalism and from Marx’s early research into the “metabolism” between nature and man, from Blake’s prophetic books and the Goethean Naturphilosophie Lindsay learned from his friend, the physicist and philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte’ (p. 359). He also identifies the singular contribution made by Lindsay to the institution and discipline that found his work so difficult to accept: For all that the cultural Cold War coded realism as slavish mimeticism and modernism as the free play of liberal possibility, Lindsay offers in Thunder Underground and in supporting texts a mixed method, one that troubles these binary terms and that reads today as a minority report on the post-war institution of academic English studies. Read against Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), Richard Chase’s The American Novel and its Tradition (1957) or Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), Lindsay’s socialist humanist aesthetic marks a significant departure. (p. 359)

Connor goes on to describe how Lindsay reconceived the novel from ‘a symbolic meditation on the political emancipation of the privileged individual’ to ‘a form that has as its object the problem of community; specifically, it claims the semantic potential of primitive religion as the symbolic enactment, displaced truth and utopian expectation of the collective agency of the people’ (p. 360). Connor’s complex formulation collates the interdisciplinary thinking that underlies Lindsay’s work, and aligns it with a notion of culture as, not in Williams’ term ‘a whole way of life’, but more dynamically ‘a whole way of struggle’ (p. 360). He ends the article by noting that the British Left ‘described the asynchrony of revolutionary movements and the movements of the imagination. They wrote to educate desire and to conserve a vision’ (p. 363), adding that John Berger wrote

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to congratulate Lindsay for his work in exactly these terms. So, given Connor’s view that Lindsay’s historical novels exemplify the mid-­ twentieth-­ century transformation of historical consciousness and that Lindsay’s re-theorisation of the novel transformed the conception of the form, it might be asked whether Lindsay’s work also should be regarded as a ‘vanishing mediator’. As noted earlier, Paananen (2000) and Bounds (2016) both argue that Lindsay’s work should be recognised more widely for its contribution to literary and cultural studies, with Bounds concluding: The ideas which Lindsay outlined in his early work were widely shared by British communists in the thirties, forties and fifties. Implicitly, or explicitly, they dominated the left-wing subcultures in which the pioneers of Cultural Studies acquired their earliest beliefs. They were part of the received radical wisdom to which writers like Williams and Thompson responded in books such as Culture and Society and The Making of the English Working Class. The evolution of Cultural Studies in Britain cannot be fully understood until they are written back into the historical record. (p. 40)

For Bounds as well as Paananen and Connor, as well as the authors of the Lindsay studies cited below, Lindsay’s work and influence is still evident in many fields including classics, historical studies, literary studies, art history, poetics, cultural studies. In a sense, his success is that his work transformed the way critics think about culture and its role in the formation of individual being and society, to the point that his views now seem the accepted starting point for further theorisation. As in Marx’s analysis of money, the ‘intermediate steps have been lost’. For the humanities, particularly, Lindsay’s work can be seen as a ‘vanishing mediator’ that enabled the development of new ways of thinking within and beyond traditional disciplines, as well as the development of a range of interdisciplinary fields of study such as Cultural Studies. As Bounds notes, however, this is simply the starting point. To understand Lindsay’s influence, we need to understand his thinking and how it developed; how Lindsay was able to bring together different perspectives on the nature and meaning of culture—the ideas and writers that inspired him and the work he found problematic, and why that was so—and the social and political environment he negotiated and how that, too, was incorporated into his thinking and writing.

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As noted in the Preface, this study focuses on Lindsay literary studies because his analysis of cultural production (the arts) brings together the individual, the social, the aesthetic and the political. It enables him to theorise the individual not as the individualist bourgeois subject but as the embodied individual, negotiating their interrelationships with others and the world through the medium of the cultural production that is itself a complex negotiation of those same relationships.

Studies of Lindsay’s Work The study has been aided by the work of writers in many fields who have analysed Lindsay’s work and explored his contribution to literary, historical and cultural analysis. The first scholar of Lindsay’s work I encountered was Michael Wilding, then Reader in English Literature at the University of Sydney whose 1981 essay remains one of the most insightful analyses of Lindsay’s work, discussing Lindsay’s aesthetics and politics and how they were related, as well as the academic environment in which his literary studies were received. There have been several edited volumes addressing Lindsay’s work from the perspectives of multiple disciplines. Bernard Smith’s edited collection, Culture and History: Essays Presented to Jack Lindsay (1984), from which the acknowledgement by Christopher Hill quoted in the Preface is drawn, includes essays on Lindsay’s life, poetry, novels, historical and anthropological studies and art criticism along with comprehensive bibliographies of his work by John Arnold. Another collection of essays, Jack Lindsay: The Thirties and Forties, edited by Robert Mackie and published in 1984, includes studies of Lindsay’s life, writing, politics, and philosophy from scholars of literary studies, classics and history. These collections followed several publications from the early 1980s that celebrated Lindsay’s eightieth birthday. In 1980 James Corbett edited A Garland for Jack Lindsay, a collection of verse and short prose memoirs by Lindsay’s family, friends and colleagues including Cressida Lindsay, Doris Lessing, Randall Swingler and Allan Sillitoe. Then in 1981 the Australian literary journal, Overland published a special issue to mark Lindsay’s eightieth birthday, which included Michael Wilding’s foundational assessment of Lindsay’s literary criticism (pp.  41–3). James Borg published (unbound) his essay, ‘Jack Lindsay, A Rough Chart of the Great Unknown: A Bio-Bibliographical Summary by a Non-Marxist Friend’ (n.d.) that brings together major life events with a survey of Lindsay’s

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literary output. Paul Gillen followed Borg’s bibliographical study with a book in six parts of selections from Lindsay’s writing, Jack Lindsay: Faithful to the Earth (1993). Each part responds to an important period in Lindsay’s life and includes an introduction by Gillen followed by excerpts from Lindsay’s letters, poetry, novels, historical and cultural studies, and political philosophy. In 2000 Victor N. Paananen published an annotated bibliography of British Marxist Criticism that includes fifty pages on Lindsay’s work and includes in the Appendix a chapter (‘8 Symmetry, Asymmetry, Structure, Dominance’) from Lindsay’s The Crisis in Marxism (1981) that outlines some key elements of his thinking. In 2009 John Arnold published his study, The Fanfrolico Press: Satyrs, Fauns and Fine Books that describes Lindsay’s early ventures as publisher, translator and writer, and includes an annotated bibliography of books published by the Press. Following the celebratory edited collections of the 1980s, the most dedicated scholar and writer about Lindsay’s work is Paul Gillen who, apart from the edited collection cited above and an essay in the Mackie volume, has published many scholarly articles on Lindsay’s historical and political writing (1986, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2001, 2001a, 2001b, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2015). Others include Wilding (1982), Paananen (1988, 2000), Morpeth (1993, 2000), Brouwer (1994), Hawke (2000), Harker (2011, 2016), Cranny-Francis (2014, 2015, 2017), Lindsay (2015), Spittel (2015), Connor (2015, 2020), Bounds (2016), Taylor (2017), Bowd (2019). As well, Lindsay’s work is discussed as part of broader cultural, historical and political studies, including Colin Chambers’ The Story of Unity Theatre (1989), Andy Croft’s Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler (2003) and Edith Hall and Henry Stead’s A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 (2020). Apart from one notable exception, there is no single-author, book-­ length study of Lindsay’s work. The exception is an unpublished intellectual autobiography or auto-exegesis, The Fullness of Life: The Autobiography of an Idea (n.d.) written by Lindsay and sent to his literary agent, Murray Pollinger sometime in the 1970s. This manuscript has not been widely available until recently when, with the permission of his family, a scan of the manuscript and an edited transcript was placed on my research web site about Lindsay’s work (jacklindsayproject.com). In the manuscript Lindsay grapples with the ideas and issues that shaped his life and writing up to the end of the 1960s.

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Other useful reference materials about Lindsay include his autobiography, Life Rarely Tells (1982), which includes the three separate volumes of his autobiography, published 1958, 1960, 1962 in a single volume, with an Introduction by Michael Wilding; an unpublished history of his mother’s family by Lynette Trad and Margaret Liessi, Family Histories: Owens and Parkinson (2013); autobiographical accounts by his father Norman, My Mask (1970) and brothers Philip, I’d live the same life over: being the progress, or rather the circumgyration, of Philip Lindsay [1941] and Raymond, A Letter from Sydney (1988); letters and diaries made available by Jack Lindsay’s daughter Helen, now held in the University of Technology Sydney Library; and the Security Service files on Jack Lindsay held at the National Archives in Richmond, London.

Structure and Approach As my aim is to map not only what Lindsay thought but how he thought, the study is divided into six Parts, each one corresponding to approximately a decade of Lindsay’s life as a published author. Each part has the following components: i. Introduction: a contextual biographical introduction that locates major events of Lindsay’s life, including significant personal relationships, publishing ventures, literary output and political activity ii. Author-study: Lindsay’s analysis of the work of a major author— William Blake (1927, rev.1929), John Bunyan (1937), Charles Dickens (1950), George Meredith (1956), William Morris (1975), William Blake (1978) iii. Contemporaneous critical and cultural studies: other work by Lindsay from the same period that addresses the same (or related) issues as the author-study Each biographical Introduction sketches the personal context in which Lindsay produced the following author-study and is relatively short. The exception is the introduction to Part I which deals with Lindsay’s childhood, education and early political and literary activity up to 1930. Most of this period, up to 1926, was spent in Sydney and Brisbane, Australia. The author-study maps the development of Lindsay’s literary and political analysis at a specific period, with the major author as his example and case study. The six books in this study are his only full-length literary

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studies. They start and end with Blake, which makes the transformation of Lindsay’s thinking and writing from 1927 to 1978 very clear. As Lawrence Coupe (1984) noted in his essay in the Mackie collection: ‘One could regard the whole of Lindsay’s career as, in a sense, a dialogue with Blake’ (p. 51). His choice of authors was part of a project by the British Left to identify a genealogy of left-wing writing in Britain, to which Lindsay adds piquancy by choosing writers canonised in British literary culture and the academy. The contextual writings introduce other literary, philosophical and political studies by Lindsay from the same period that situate the author-­ study in relation to his current ideas about the meaning and role of culture and provide the context for his theories and ideas about a range of related issues, such as the nature of society and of being. This journey through Lindsay’s major literary studies not only takes us through the life and work of five canonical British writers and thinkers, but also traces the evolution of Lindsay’s critical thinking. Along the way we witness his rejection of orthodoxies of both right and left, driven always by his vision of a better world in which people rediscover their inner coherence or integrity (of body and mind; sensing, feeling and thinking) and their fundamental connectedness with each other and the natural world, exemplified for him in the earliest human societies. We also see him grappling with the individual, social and political problems created by an economy based on the decontextualised, abstract rationalism figured in Blake’s work as Urizen, and his attempts to find solutions in the works of writers who faced the same problems and graphically illustrated their effects on individual being and experience. In his studies of these writers we witness him using not only the methods of literary analysis, but also the analysis of mythology that was part of his training as a classicist, his ongoing studies of history and anthropology that led him to develop his own theory of culture, his engagement with Freud as he attempted to understand how individuals are shaped by their experience, and his reading of the works of Marx that informed his understanding of how capitalist society developed and functions and how it fundamentally affects individual being and experience.

‘a fully Marxist aesthetic’ Lindsay concludes his intellectual autobiography The Fullness of Life by tracing a continual line of development from his early philosophical study, Dionysos: Nietzsche contra Nietzsche (1928) to his mature writing, ‘as well

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as the movement, erratic but constant, into a fully Marxist aesthetic’ (p.  247). That sense of continuity is created by Lindsay’s focus on the nature of being, with what makes us human, and he explores this in the artworks we produce and the societies we form. And like the early works of Marx that he admired and the works of the authors about whom he wrote, he explored the interrelationships between human being, thinking and acting. Along the way he was influenced also by writers from the many fields and disciplines he studied but notably by two Italian philosophers born almost 350  years apart: Giordano Bruno, sixteenth-century renegade monk, theologian, philosopher, mathematician and philosopher whose notion of the interconnectedness of all things became fundamental to his thinking, and Antonio Gramsci, early twentieth-century Marxist philosopher and activist whose work Lindsay explores for its analysis of both the power of ideologies over people’s thinking, acting and being and the ways that individuals can and do resist them. This is the fulfilment of Lindsay’s journey; not a set of ideological principles, nor a stylistic analysis of artistic practice, but a critical analysis of the relationship between art (literature) and the individual as an embodied (sensing, feeling, thinking) being. In the process Lindsay identifies the ways in which the writer uses the capacity of art to stimulate sensory, emotional, and intellectual responses to create an awareness in readers of the interconnectedness of sensory, emotional and intellectual faculties of their own being, to expose social and political inequities and injustices and make them intelligible and sensible for readers whom it thereby provokes to explore appropriate responses and actions, art as political activism. It is, at the same time, a journey through the cultural politics of the twentieth century.

PART I

Early Years, the 1920s; and William Blake

Jack Lindsay was born on 20 October 1900 into families of artists and writers. His father was the artist, Norman Lindsay (1879–1969)—painter, engraver, lithographer, model-maker, cartoonist, novelist, and leading member of an artistic dynasty that included siblings, Percival Charles (1870–1952), Sir Lionel Arthur (1874–1961), Ruby (1885–1919) and Sir Ernest Daryl (1889–1976). They were five of the ten children born to Jane Elizabeth Williams (1848–1932) and her husband, Robert Charles William Alexander Lindsay (1843–1915), a doctor from Londonderry, Ireland, who had sailed to Australia as a ship’s surgeon in 1864, opened a practice in country Creswick, Victoria and in 1869  in Ballarat married Jane. Lindsay’s mother, Kathleen (Katie) Agatha Parkinson (1871–1948) was born in Allahabad, India, one of six children of an Irish (British) civil servant, Patrick Parkinson and wife, Cassandra Owens, who had herself been born in Allahabad. The Parkinson family emigrated to Tasmania around 1879 because of Patrick’s ill-health. When Patrick died in 1883, the family moved to Melbourne where oldest child, Mary, took on the role of head of the family. There Mary and her journalist brother Raymond were part of the literary and artistic scene and regularly held gatherings at their home. Mary also wrote articles for the Melbourne paper, The Argus and the UK based Daily Mail. Among the attendees at these gatherings were Mary’s future husband, Dr John (Jack) Elkington and penniless young artist, Norman Lindsay.

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The Owens-Parkinson Family Histories (FH) reproduces excerpts from a letter by Jack’s cousin Molly in which she recalls the family memory of the meeting between Norman and Katie: Norman Lindsay had left his home (in Creswick, Victoria). His father was a pompous doctor and his mother a religious, pious woman. So you can see how out of place Norman was … Norman got to know the Parkinsons and practically lived at their place. This is when he met Katie. He was so poor his shoes were tied with string. (FH, p. 39)

For his part Norman wrote in his autobiography, My Mask (1970) that Mary Elkington, Katie’s older sister was not impressed by him, ‘a scallywag art student’ (MM, p. 152) and argued the case of ‘a mature gentleman friend of the family who was clearly smitten by Katie, and would be a good matrimonial prospect’ (p. 153). When Katie fell pregnant, Norman described springing into action, arranging accommodation and furnishings as well as an elopement and expedited marriage ceremony so that they would appear a respectable couple before Katie’s pregnancy became visible (pp. 154–5). When they married, Norman was barely twenty-one years of age and Katie was twenty-nine. Neither had much life experience; Norman very young and Katie never having worked outside her home. In 1901 Norman took a position as a cartoonist with the prestigious Sydney-based magazine, the Bulletin. He went ahead to Sydney in May to set up a home for them in Northwood, a waterside suburb on the lower north shore of Sydney Harbour, while Katie and Jack remained with Mary until January 1902. The marriage continued for several years more, producing two more children, Raymond in August 1903 and Philip in April 1906. However, it did not provide the couple with the support and companionship either required: Katie did not understand Norman’s dedication to his art and his need to work for long hours in isolation, and Norman was unable to explain this adequately to her; she felt abandoned, and he felt trapped. When Norman left for England in 1909 on a work and study tour, it was clear to both that the marriage was over. Norman’s model, Rose Soady, would soon join him in Hampstead, London where he’d taken a studio apartment. Katie knew then that there was no future for her with Norman and moved herself and the boys to Brisbane, where Mary’s husband, John Elkington had taken up the post of Commissioner of Public Health for Queensland. Katie was to rely on Mary’s assistance to raise the

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three boys, supported by an allowance from Norman. For the children, their parents’ separation meant the loss of stability and social status as well as the physical presence and emotional support of their father, whom Jack saw briefly only once in the next ten years and with whom all communication was lost. In the first chapter of his intellectual autobiography, The Fullness of Life he writes of Norman: ‘He had turned from my mother and her three sons, had thrown us aside and rejected us’ (pp. 8–9).

Growing Up in Brisbane Growing up in Brisbane with a distracted and increasingly depressed mother made life difficult for Lindsay and his brothers, though he writes in his autobiography that Katie was never harsh or unkind: She was the sort of person who could never be really trained to think that people should do things they disliked, least of all her own sons. In her heart she never understood or liked the world, and couldn’t see why everyone shouldn’t be happy, perpetually setting out on a new holiday……In all my young years I cannot remember one slap or harsh word. (LRT, p. 26)

Mary was always there to offer support and the family was soon swelled by sister, Charlotte who left her husband in Melbourne and moved to Brisbane with her children, Molly and Nancy. This extended family was a sanctuary for Jack and his brothers and provided Katie with the social life that would have been otherwise difficult at that time for an abandoned wife with three small children. Throughout their time in Brisbane Katie was unable to settle or to find a life that satisfied her, and the family moved constantly between rental houses and boarding houses. Lindsay describes one of these boarding houses as emblematic of their lives: ‘Its air of extreme instability, its rickety condition, its happy-go-lucky ways, everything about it seemed to emblematise the breaking-down family, the lack of any shared aims…’ (p. 183). One of the major consequences of this peripatetic life for Jack was that, when they arrived in Brisbane, Katie did not send him to school for several years. He recalls days spent wandering through Brisbane’s lush and beautiful Botanic Gardens, reading a book. Eventually his precocious literacy drew the attention of his aunt and uncle. Historian Mary Stewart, writing about Mary in the Queensland History Journal in 2011 notes: ‘His aunt’s influence on Jack Lindsay was enormous. She started him on his

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education at five when she gave him a copy of Treasure Island and he taught himself to read’ (Stewart, p. 421). Jack Elkington insisted that his nephew be sent to a preparatory school with which he had a personal connection through the headmaster (LRT, p. 31). Jack finally began his formal education, moving quickly from the infants’ class where he was forced to begin and reaching the lower sixth in about a year. Lindsay later recalled the change this brought about in his life: I, an expert malingerer and truant in Sydney, never missed a day and was never late—a record that I kept up through my four years at the Grammar School. After the first incredulous shock, my mother said that she had always known I was like that, a student, like her brother Raymond. (p. 31)

With Mary’s encouragement Jack sat for the scholarship examination for Brisbane Boys’ Grammar, where he excelled academically. At the age of sixteen he sat for the University of Queensland Entrance Examination which also included a scholarship. Once again, he was successful, and it seemed that in scholarship Jack had found his vocation. Mary gave Jack a small room next to the kitchen at the Elkington home to store his growing library of books and he was able to read and study at their house, a refuge from the instability of his life with Katie. As the oldest child Jack took on a particular burden. He increasingly had to manage the family finances and try to control his mother’s drinking. At the same time Lindsay recognised in Katie’s behaviour not simple passivity or withdrawal but a flickering spirit of rebellion against convention, which included the helpful ministrations of her sister Mary: ‘She had come to Brisbane to be near her tower-of-strength sister; but a dim yet pervasive resistance made her refuse to do the things of which Mary approved. She needed the impressive shadow, but pulled in her own direction, away from Mary’s idea of a correct and respectable existence’ (p. 26). Lindsay would soon follow his mother down her rebellious path. Mary wanted for Jack a conventional career pathway as a scholar, which would have meant a degree from the University of Queensland, then a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge to study for a higher degree, followed by a position as an academic. Instead of allowing Mary to guide him, however, Lindsay saw her as a symbol of a world he rejected: ‘She was inflated, somewhat unfairly, into the supreme exemplar of hypocrisy and corrupt temptation—though at the same time I recognised that she had a genuine affection for me, and though, at another level than that of

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poetry’s stark judgment-light, I responded to this affection’ (TFOL, p. 3). This conflict came to a head when Mary arranged a meeting for Jack at her home with one of his former preparatory school classmates who had a junior position in a leading business firm. This young man attributed to Lindsay the same career drive and striving for wealth as himself and offered him advice in those terms, which served only to infuriate the anti-­ establishment young Lindsay. His response was to pledge an oath that he would never work simply for material gain.

Early Politics During his teenage years Lindsay experienced the social disruption caused by World War I and the divisive debates about conscription in Australia, the hysteria generated by the rise of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the continuing rise of unionism, the fight for workers’ rights and associated class struggle, as well as the start of the Aboriginal Rights Movement. Lindsay tells of being invited when a university student to be part of a ‘social action committee’ for Aboriginal Rights by one of the former editors of Queensland University Magazine, Thomas Thatcher, now secretary to the governor, Sir Hamilton Goold-Adams: ‘The society in question had been developed I think largely by himself for inquiry into abuses and for action to right them’ (LRT, p. 131). Lindsay was dubious about Thatcher’s scheme which, while advocating for full educational and social rights for Aboriginal people, also supported their placement in reserves, and he recalled fellow student, P.R. Stephensen’s characterisation of Thatcher as a ‘callow idealist’. Nevertheless, he writes that he and other students visited stations on which Aboriginal people were working and found out what they could about the missions as background research for a plan proposed by Thatcher for improving the living conditions of Indigenous people. A meeting was arranged with Labor premier, T.J. Ryan and Lindsay notes that he listened sympathetically to their arguments and promised to act on their proposals. Ryan then almost immediately resigned to enter Federal politics and Lindsay noted bitterly: ‘clearly he had known all along that he was going to resign and that his affable words would be worth no more than the breath that uttered them’ (p. 132). Ryan’s successor refused to be bound by agreements he had made and the whole enterprise failed. Stephensen’s cynicism was vindicated; he had warned Lindsay that only a socialist revolution could change the way that society operates. For Lindsay this was a betrayal; politics was conducted in the

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interests of those in charge, not the people whose lives were affected by it. He would not return to conventional politics. His other early political engagement came through his work as a tutor in Literature for the Workers’ Educational Association in Brisbane and his friendship with its director of tutorial classes, T.  C. Witherby. Lindsay found in Witherby’s Christian socialism a way of envisaging his own work as more than teenage rebelliousness: ‘What had been an intense personal rebellion was suddenly widened, taking on the whole scope of the earth’ (LRT, p.  125). Witherby was reported in the Brisbane newspaper, the Daily Standard (14 December 1920) as saying that the free discussion of ideas, which was the W.E.A. understanding of education, had been halted in Brisbane because of a double fear: ‘the fear that men had of criticism lest their cherished convictions should prove illusions, and the fear they had of the opinion of others’ (p.  2). The account continues: ‘A fear of certain members of the Labor movement of University criticism; a fear on the part of certain members of the University staff and Senate of the discussion of certain ideas; and fear on the part of certain journals and members of Parliament of the discussion of things they did not understand …’ (p. 2). Jack’s experience of teaching at the W.E.A. and his conversations with Witherby, unionist and W.E.A. colleague Jim Quinton, and Witherby’s friend, archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, led him to challenge the university’s claims to intellectual and cultural authority. Lindsay’s life in Brisbane exposed him to a range of viewpoints—from the most conservative form of Empire loyalism (supporting the British Empire) to revolutionary socialism. He saw people stricken by war service; businessmen profiting from the war; Bolsheviks and unionists attempting to bring a worker’s republic into being and wild riots prompted by anti-­ Russian propaganda (Evans 1988). He also saw the university cited not as a place of disinterested learning but as the intellectual home of the bourgeoisie (Freeberg 1920). He found a strong disputant at home in his aunt Mary, who represented the bourgeois values with which he struggled, and mentors like Witherby and Quinton, whose views he shared and who, like his aunt, did not dodge a fight. At the same time, he encountered scholars such as Professor John Lundie Michie, the inaugural Chair of Classics who took a major role in shaping the new university and taught him how to translate classical texts, and Vere Gordon Childe, the brilliant archaeologist whose breadth of learning, precision of argument and rejection of intellectual and political orthodoxy inspired the young Lindsay.

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During this time Lindsay had also continued his interest in writing and publishing, begun years before as an escape from his unstable family life and continued at the university in both his studies and his work for the Queensland University Magazine, later renamed Galmahra to honour Australian Indigenous culture. This early writing included essays on literary and philosophical topics and erotic poetry that upset the University authorities (causing one issue to be banned) and also brought him to the attention of his estranged father. Norman had been prompted to contact Jack by literary and art critic Bertram Stevens who told him of his son’s success as a young poet and scholar. Years later in The Fullness of Life Jack reiterated the profound impact on him of Norman’s first letter, describing it as ‘the summons’: ‘I was intoxicated by the voice: This is my Son in whom I am well pleased’ (TFOL, p.  10). His omission of the adjective ‘beloved’ that appears in all usual translations of the Biblical event to which he refers 1 is indicative of the hurt caused by Norman’s long silence; equally his deification of Norman suggests his need for his love and approval. Thus began a dialogue that would have a lasting influence on Jack’s life.

A Crucial Decision In his graduation year, Lindsay was faced with a crucial decision about his future. He had applied for a travelling scholarship that would take him overseas to study for a doctorate that would equip him for an academic career. However, another student, ex-serviceman and lexicographer Eric Partridge also applied for the scholarship. As this was Partridge’s final year of eligibility, Lindsay was advised to wait a year and re-apply when he would be certain to receive the award. He professed himself torn between waiting for the scholarship and embarking on a career in the arts, which meant moving to Sydney where he would be near his father. The scholarship was exactly what his aunt Mary wished for him; leading to a respectable and challenging career that would provide him with the stability he had not yet known in his personal life. Unfortunately, at the time that he

1  At Christ’s baptism a heavenly voice, assumed to be that of God the Father, is heard speaking these words, reported in St Matthew’s gospel as ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’ and with slight variation in the Gospels of St Luke and St Mark: ‘You are beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’.

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most needed her counsel, Mary was on a trip with her husband to Java and Singapore. Lindsay was devastated by her absence at this crucial time: Everything was falling away, becoming insubstantial. … Her absence had the effect of unravelling my world; by removing the knots she tied in my thoughts and feelings, it seemed to remove all interconnecting links. I felt continually closer to a crisis-moment in which I’d have to make a fundamental decision—not just one more spiritual jump, but a combined operation of action and thought. (LRT, p. 217)

Norman refused to help him resolve his dilemma and Jack noted: ‘I was hurt by Norman’s refusal to advise me for or against the Oxford project’ (LRT, p. 221). The desire to be near and work with his father and to be more directly engaged with the arts won. On her return Mary was furious at Jack’s decision and engaged him in prolonged argument until: ‘At last I told her that I absolutely rejected her world of careers, hypocricy [sic], money-making and nice marriages’ (LRT, p. 229). Constructing an academic career in these terms gave Lindsay the rationale he needed to reject it. His brother, Philip would later write with unbecoming glee in his autobiography, I’d live the same life over (1941): ‘Not until then did the brilliant phenomenon of the family reveal the cloven Lindsay hoof beneath his scholastic gown. In sudden rebellion, he hurled away his triumphs, kicked for ever out of hope his chances of a scholarship to Cambridge or Oxford, and entered the diablerie of art’ (p. 19). Lindsay turned his back on the academy and on Brisbane and set off for Sydney, Norman and a new life.

Sydney, 1921–26 Lindsay left Brisbane a declared Neoplatonist; a classicist with a desire to work in the hands-on world of art rather than the critically dispassionate world of academia; a disappointed political activist; and a budding poet with a particular interest in the sensory and the sensual. He continued to debate the nature and role of art with his aunt Mary Elkington by mail. In a response to her concerns about highly sensual or overtly sexual art (‘Letter to Mary’) he argues that such work is the opposite of ‘the animal’ as it shows a heightened awareness of the role of the senses in human being and knowing, whereas the animal is unknowing and so at the mercy of the senses. He argues that ‘All Knowledge is reached through the senses’, a position that will not change over the years unlike his following

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proposition, ‘The senses in themselves are automatic processes, blind lenses or antennae’ that will change completely. He follows by noting that ‘All development of Mind therefore must come by an intensification & subtilisation of sense perception’, this process being the basis of the human spirit. And the one who ‘creates sensation i.e. spirit … is the artist who subtilises vision, the musician who creates the capacity to react to sound, the poet who creates form (i.e. body) out of speech’. This is the role of the artist that Lindsay will champion throughout his life, though how and why this happens will also change utterly. In Sydney he finally had the opportunity to work with his father. In 1922 Norman persuaded the editors of the quarterly magazine, Art in Australia to publish studies of literary as well as visual arts. For a short time (in the issues of February and May 1922) Art in Australia included essays and poetry by Norman, Jack, Hugh McCrae and Kenneth Slessor, as well as interviews with writers. However, this move was not popular with subscribers and the magazine reverted to its focus on visual art in the August 1922 issue. In the meantime, Jack had been introduced to John Kirtley, who was interested in printing and had purchased his own press. After a series of meetings, a plan was devised for a literary journal that would propagate the philosophy and aesthetics of the circle centred on Norman and his manifesto: Vision was born.

Vision Conceived as a quarterly, Vision was published in 1923–24; four issues were published, and it then folded for lack of sales. Philosophically and aesthetically, the magazine was out of step with the times. In the early 1920s many non-Indigenous Australian artists were grappling with the inherited European tradition that prevented early settlers from seeing the country in its own terms. They were also engaging with Modernism, notably in recent events such as Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin’s exhibition Colour in Art (1919). Many were also attempting to understand Australian Indigenous art and its unique engagement with and portrayal of the land. Under Norman’s mentorship Vision was implacably opposed to Modernist work, which he believed to be based on the abstract thinking that had caused World War I. Instead, the ‘Foreword’ to the first edition (May 1923) proposed a return to the roots of European culture in classical Greek art: ‘the Faun, symbol of desire and poetry, who cries the songs of

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Olympos amid the woods of earth, is the saviour who must sound his pipes to call man to this high task’ (p. 3). In The Fullness of Life Lindsay explains their aim as an ‘Australian Renascence’ (p.  15), founded in a ‘supra-national notion of culture’, a notion of culture as a ‘single lineage of mind or spirit’ extending from ancient Greece, through the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and now realised in the work of the Lindsay circle (p. 16). They considered themselves patriotic in that they saw Australia as the venue for this modern flowering of European-derived art, rather than because they were fostering a specifically Australian art. Lindsay explains that they saw contemporary Europe, the site of the recent barbarism of World War I, as ‘culturally exhausted, going down into a swamp of primitivism, a desert of abstraction’ (p.  16). For both Norman and Jack, abstraction—whether in art, philosophy or economics—signified the loss of humanity. As Tony Moore wrote in his study of Australian bohemia: ‘The magazine explicitly rejected the Modernist movements of Europe, such as the Fauves, Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists, as decadent, and looked back to classical, renaissance and early romantic art for touch points’ (2012, p. 138). Indeed, the Foreword to the fourth issue identifies the contributors as ‘Legionaries of the new Roman effort to reconstruct earth’ (p.  3). With that issue the Legionaries retired.

Quiet Rebellion Though Lindsay would maintain this anti-Modernist stance for some time, the seeds of rebellion were sown when he came across copies of Edith Sitwell’s Façade (1922) and Bucolic Comedies (1923) in a bookshop, ‘turned them idly over, and was captured. …. Here, I was forced to realise, was sensibility tuned in the same key as my own, the key I sought’ (LRT, p. 364). He was forced to confront his own role in the condemnation ‘on the scantiest of grounds’ of the Sitwells’ work in Vision even as he acknowledges: ‘if I were to be true at all to my own senses and their poetic impulsion, I must learn to drink at the spring I had placarded as muddy and polluted’ (p. 364). For a while he resisted: ‘I tried to hold out and pretend I wasn’t as centrally affected as I was’ (p.  365). However, the imagery and rhythm of Edith Sitwell’s work captivated him and he was soon also reading the work of Sacheverell Sitwell in The Hundred and One Harlequins (1922).

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This was a disturbing experience for Lindsay, which he images as a change of tree from poplar to aspen, ‘as that suggested more the shivery-­ shake of the light-jangle’ and perhaps also Jack’s nervousness should Norman catch him with the contraband. Given the effect of the Sitwells’ poetry on him, Lindsay records that he told his father that ‘there were many elements after all in experimental verse that could be used for our purposes’ (p.  365). Norman’s response was that he would take Jack’s word for it, but Jack observes: ‘he wouldn’t if I had come to say the same of Van Gogh or Picasso’ (p. 365). This was something of a turning point: ‘a split had been born in our concepts that was later to have important effects for me’ (p. 365). Not the least of which was Jack’s reassessment of Modernism as a valid response to the same social and political morass that forced Norman’s renunciation of the conventional world and its artforms (Connor 2020).

Poetry Lindsay continued to write and publish poetry while in Sydney though he writes in his autobiography: ‘My verse, I realised with dismay, had heavily deteriorated since I became a full-time poet’ (LRT, p. 262). This situation persisted for some time with Lindsay noting, ‘I was getting nowhere at all. My verse had shrivelled’ (p. 283). He was, however, continuing to research and write literary criticism, if to no apparent purpose: ‘My denunciations of Baudelaire and my inquiry into the failure of English poetry after Keats filled some notebooks, but what was I to do with them?’ (p.  283). He soon realised that it may be lack of purpose that is his problem: ‘The more I clung to poetry as an all-sufficient purpose, the less purposeful I became’ (p.  283). In abandoning his social and political goals and principles it appears Lindsay had lost any sense of direction for his verse. Despite this negative self-assessment his work attracted positive responses. A review of the second issue of Vision in the Sunday Times (Sydney) of 19 August 1923 wrote of Lindsay’s verse play about Christopher Marlowe: ‘The work of Mr. Jack Lindsay is again remarkable. He has written a blank-verse fragment affecting to describe the death of Christopher Marlowe: the rich and luxuriant language, the sensuous reality of its imagery give it distinction. Passion underlies what he writes’ (p. 6). In a similar vein a Sydney Morning Herald review of Lindsay’s collection of verse, Fauns and Ladies (1923) published by John Kirtley, praised the book as a fine art object, noting of the poetry: ‘Mr. Jack Lindsay is the most

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promising of our younger school of poets. His verses are vigorous and colourful, and intensely vital, although in this collection their preoccupation with sex amounts almost to an obsession’ (p. 12). The combination of sensuousness, passion and blatant sexuality in Lindsay’s writing qualified him as a member of Sydney bohemia.

Sydney Life In Chapter 15 of the second volume of his autobiography, ironically titled ‘Masquerading Villon’, Lindsay describes his attempts to fit into Sydney’s bohemian scene, which was characterised by the objectification of women: For poetry and love, the individual girl evaporated into puffs of colour from outside the spectrum, into circulating contours, yielding an inexhaustible sweetness and asking only to be pivoted afresh on the centrique part, the life axis. After that she became an individual girl again. The two aspects fused and yet were quite distinct. (LRT, p. 398)

In retrospect Lindsay related this objectifying behaviour directly to ‘the narrow philosophy of my art’ (LRT, p. 397). He writes that he hid from himself, in a ‘banal bitterness’, the contradiction between his own desire to be loved and appreciated for himself and his inability to treat women accordingly (p.  398). The chapter concludes with his attendance at the Lord Mayor’s Artists Ball dressed as the raffish French poet, Villon, which ended with him drinking himself into a stupor when he saw the woman he was pursuing with another man. Villon was no more than a mask for Lindsay. In 1922, Lindsay had married Sydney poet, Janet Beaton. Beaton’s family gave her a stipend, which Lindsay later wryly admitted he had no qualms living on, despite his political and aesthetic rejection of the bourgeoisie (LRT, p. 286). He identifies his own hypocrisy with that of many young rebels of the time, which he characterises with a quote from French poet, novelist and activist, Louis Aragon: ‘“I shall never do a stroke of work, my hands are pure”’ (LRT, p.  287). The young couple lived on Janet’s stipend and Jack’s minor earnings from his poetry and reviews. Despite his marriage Lindsay wrote that he felt obliged to be open to experience, a sexual adventurer in spirit if not expertise, while at the same time finding with Janet the stability that had been missing so long from his life. He records in Life Rarely Tells that it was only much later, after his

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marriage to Janet was abandoned, that he realised ‘the wealth and strength of her character, and the liberation she could have brought me’ (p. 285). In place of this liberation Lindsay felt the demands of art: the disciplines of his work had to dominate his life and all other experience was to be ‘the living material of one’s art’ (TFOL, p.  17). This material included the pleasures found in natural surroundings, in drinking with friends, and ‘the embrace of the girl who gave herself without bargaining or equivocation. One had to submit to the pull and drive of life, take it wholly inside oneself, yet be unsubdued, the master of one’s fate’ (TFOL, p. 17). Lindsay was attempting to live as the artist of Norman Lindsay’s manifesto Creative Effort (1924), a will-driven creature for whom human experience is simply the material from which to build a transcendent and greater vision. This contradiction within his personal life reflects the intellectual and philosophical conflict Lindsay experienced during this time in Sydney. For Lindsay, the dissolute bohemian lifestyle was the key to artistic creativity, something to which he needed to subject himself no matter the consequences: Despite the qualms of my flesh, the code of submission to life continued to control much of my outlook. Woman as the active principle in life, Man as the active principle in art or thought: a sheer dichotomy that was momently overcome in the embrace of love and the birthpang of the image (psychologically coincident moments). (LRT, p. 411)

This simplistic dichotomy, his perceived need to participate in amorous adventures and his embrace of the disruptions they caused in his marriage ultimately led him to conclude: ‘Because of my preconceived ideas, I failed in art and life alike to realise and develop the rich possibilities before me’ (LRT, p. 412). The politics of Lindsay’s bohemian experience in Sydney was equally constrained. As part of Norman’s circle his political vision was subsumed into the artistic vision of their collection, Poetry in Australia (edited by Lindsay, Kenneth Slessor and Frank C. Johnson) and Vision: ‘in our positions the whole emphasis had been laid on the aesthetic movement; the social movement was irrelevant’ (TFOL, p. 19). In The Fullness of Life he would identify this position as fundamentally conservative: Since experience was reduced to a purely sensuous level, from the simplest enjoyments to the ecstasies of sexual union, the best thing that society could

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do was to stay as it was, carrying on its blind repetitions, and getting as little as possible in the way of the delighting artist. Any effort to actualise justice could only upset the balance and result in worse cruelties and oppressions. (TFOL, p. 19)

Jack had accepted Norman’s view that all forms of politics are ultimately repressive and that the only relief from the inevitable injustices of society was to live as an artist devoted to ‘creative effort’.

Fanfrolico During these years in Sydney Lindsay continued his work as writer, translator and publisher alongside John Kirtley. In 1925 they published Lindsay’s translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1925), a fine art book with illustrations by Norman Lindsay. This was the first book to bear the imprint of the Fanfrolico Press. In The Fullness of Life Lindsay explained the name of the Press: The Press was called the Fanfrolico (the Motteux-and-Urquhart version of Rabelais’ Fanfreluche); Norman had used the name for a fantasy-world in which he set a number of contes drolatiques, a sort of Abbey of Thelema. It seemed a suitable and mystifying name for us to use as our Australian battle-­ standard. (p. 38)

In his study of Fanfrolico Press John Arnold (2009) provides an annotated bibliography of its forty-six publications (though the first four were not official Fanfrolico publications), along with essays describing the history of the Press in Sydney and London. The pre-Fanfrolico books were all produced on John Kirtley’s Hand Press and were books of verse: two by Lindsay—Fauns and Ladies (1923) and Spanish Main & Tavern (1924), Kenneth Slessor’s Thief of the Moon (1924) and Philip Lindsay’s An Affair of Philip Lindsay’s (1925). Of Lindsay’s Lysistrata, Arnold writes: ‘At the time of publication, the Fanfrolico Lysistrata was arguably one of the finest books ever produced in Australia’ (p. 38). Norman Lindsay was pleased and impressed by the publication, writing to Kirtley: I should have written before to congratulate you over the splendid results with the Lysistrata. I never saw better printing. You have kept the quality of the line wonderfully in the small blocks. I expected it would have thickened

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considerably but the result is perfect. Also, the quality of the type, and the setting in the page is admirably judged… (Arnold 2009, p. 39)

Their painstaking work was justified; Lindsay also publishing his first major work as a classicist and translator. He would go on to publish eighteen books of classical translation with Fanfrolico, along with studies of ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian societies, historical novels and biographies of those times. Buoyed by the success of the Lysistrata Kirtley decided to move the press to the United Kingdom and invited Lindsay to go with him.

London In 1927 Fanfrolico Press opened its first office in London at 5 Bloomsbury Square. Kirtley had invited Norman Lindsay to be co-Director of the Press, but he declined, writing: I tried to make the boys see at the time that to try and carry the thing on my name would be fatal … If my name is put in the forefront of this venture, it must be maintained by my work, because that will be expected. What contributions I will doubtless make in the future to it will not be sufficient to maintain that expectation, and so, what you would gain at the outset by the use of my name will destroy all the eventual chance of success. Now, be a brave pair of lads and adventure fortune on your own efforts. (Arnold, 2009, p. 41)

In a follow-up response to Kirtley he advised: ‘You must build its future on type, not pictures’ (p. 41). Arnold reports that Norman gave Jack and Kirtley an important publishing contact in London (Wilfrid Partington, editor of The Bookman’s Journal) and provided Jack with his passage to London, a new suit and £100 (p. 49). In the following three years, the Press published thirty-nine books and six numbers of a literary periodical, London Aphrodite that argued the Lindsays’ anti-Modernist stance. The books included classical translations, poetry (old and new) and philosophy, many incorporating illustrations by Norman Lindsay. In his study of the Press John Arnold writes: ‘The name Jack Lindsay rightly dominates the story of the Fanfrolico Press. Without him it simply would not have existed. His capacity for work was exceptional, his ability as a translator outstanding, his talents as a poet considerable. In a sense he was the Fanfrolico Press’ (p.  154). Lindsay took a

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principal role in the design and printing of the books, including choice of font, materials, and layout, and he hand-set the text for many of them. He also provided the text for twenty of the books: eleven classical translations, three books of verse-play(s), two books of verse (The passionate neatherd (1926) and a second edition (1929)), one book of philosophical analysis (on Nietzsche), one prospectus (list of Fanfrolico Press books) and a book of literary criticism (on William Blake) in two editions, first edition (1927) and a larger revised edition (1929). In terms of productivity the Press had an impressive output, with Arnold recording that: ‘In terms of overall sales, Fanfrolico was probably second only to the Nonesuch Press in the 1920s’ (p. 142). Nevertheless, it did not survive long into the 1930s. The Press suffered several setbacks. The financial uncertainty of the late 1920s that ended with the Great Depression made the venture of selling fine art books precarious. Also, the Press had problems with U.S. Customs rejecting as pornographic books that featured illustrations by Norman, at one point causing the loss of a provisional major order of 400 books (Arnold 2009, p. 74). As well, the management changed repeatedly with Kirtley returning to Australia in mid-1927, replaced (or displaced) by P.R. (Inky) Stephensen, Jack’s University of Queensland colleague who had recently completed an Honours degree at Oxford University. Then in 1929, he too was replaced by another Queenslander, journalist and novelist Brian Penton, freeing Stephensen to establish his own venture, the Mandrake Press. Each change of management was accompanied by upheaval and personal tensions (notably between Stephensen and both Kirtley and Penton). And there were personal issues that affected the relationships between Jack and his co-workers, particularly Kirtley’s disapproval of Jack’s new relationship with poet Elza de Locre and the mutual dislike of Elza and Philip Lindsay, who came to work for the Press in its final year (1929–30). Critically, the Press never found a stable, wide readership that could sustain its specialist output.

William Blake Amid all these adventures and upheavals Lindsay wrote his first major author-study, William Blake: Creative Will and the Poetic Image (1927, revised 1929). The book begins with a ‘Note’, which faces the Contents page, and one illustration, unacknowledged but apparently by Norman Lindsay, facing the first page of Chapter 1. The illustration features the head and torso of a naked male figure about to be struck by a bolt of

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lightning, his head thrown back by the force and hair blowing in an unseen gale. The illustration is captioned with a quote from Blake’s poem, ‘Infant Sorrow’: ‘Into the dangerous world I leapt’. Though this might refer to Blake himself, one cannot help but feel that it refers equally to Lindsay, launching himself as a professional publisher and writer in a world far from all he has known. ‘Infant Sorrow’ is the companion poem published in Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794) to ‘Infant Joy’ published in Songs of Innocence (1789). The infant of the earlier poem lives joyfully, almost ecstatically, in the world, unaffected by its demands and strictures. By contrast, the infant of the second poem is born in a state of rebellion, shrieking its resistance to the world it enters. It rejects its father and struggles against its swaddling clothes, finding comfort sulkily with its mother. This infant, it seems, is all too aware of the classification and disciplining that awaits it. Again, this seems to refer equally to Lindsay and to Blake, both of whom resist the conservative beliefs and forces of their time. In this first author-study Lindsay introduces some of the major ideas that inform his thinking and that he locates in the writing of Blake. At the same time, his approach reflects the apolitical stance mandated by his father in Creative Effort, causing him to replace his earlier embrace of Blake as revolutionary with a metaphysical notion of him as visionary; recognising the evils of the world he lived in and identifying them but not making the Shelleyan Romantic mistake of directly engaging with them in his art. Not how Blake might have seen it, but necessary for Lindsay at this time.

CHAPTER 2

William Blake, Visionary

Jack Lindsay’s first major literary study, William Blake: Creative Will and the Poetic Image (1927) was published by Fanfrolico Press on the centenary of Blake’s death. For Lindsay in the 1920s Blake’s achievement lay with his power to engage readers through the senses, and consequently the emotions and intellect, in order to present them with a different perspective on their own society and its institutions, values and beliefs and so transform their understanding of themselves and their world. At the same time, Lindsay’s approach to the analysis of Blake’s work—the analytical terms and concepts that recur, the artistic strategies he addresses and those he ignores or rejects (notably, Blake’s visual art), the meanings he finds in Blake’s work—tell us a great deal about Lindsay himself. Effectively, this analysis marks the beginning of Lindsay’s journey to develop what he describes at the end of his intellectual autobiography as ‘a fully Marxist aesthetic’ (TFOL, p. 247). That is a long way off but, as he notes in The Fullness of Life, the seeds are in his study Dionysos: Nietzsche contra Nietzsche (1928) that he was writing at the same time (p.  246) and, I would argue, in this first, aesthetically focused study of Blake. The book begins in the belles-lettres style typical of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century literary analysis, which was just only beginning to feel the first disciplinary constraints of what came to be the academic study of English or Literary Studies. In this opening chapter Lindsay discusses Blake’s own theory of knowing and its relationship to

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the poetic image. He then moves to a study of some of Blake’s major literary works, concluding with Lindsay’s discussion of his own theory of the image and a summary of Blake’s achievement (that did not include his visual art). Threaded through the study are references to psychology and a focus on the mind of the artist (the subject of Norman Lindsay’s recently published manifesto, Creative Effort), which are linked to the first concept that emerges as a key term in Lindsay’s analysis, unity.

Unity For Lindsay unity took many forms in Blake’s work—the psychic unity of the artist; the unity of individual being; the unity of the artwork; and of the universe. Unity continues to be a major concept for Lindsay in whose writing it comes to mean the fundamental interconnection of human beings within themselves, with other humans and other species, and with the earth. In this early study his focus is on unity within the self, the text and the artist and in the first edition (though not the revised second edition) he begins by identifying his study as an attempt to get inside the mind of Blake: This is not a critical essay on Blake’s poetry, but an effort to define the condition of mind his work represents and to expose its psychological machinery from the inside by employing an idiom which is as close, poetically, as I can make it to the nature of the subject, and by accepting life as existing in terms of the values he creates. [italics in original]

By reproducing mentally, the means by which Blake’s work engages readers, Lindsay argues, he will be able to assess the unity of the vision that created the work and the work itself. The same year an essay by Lindsay appeared in an edition of Blake’s poetry edited and introduced by Eric Partridge, Poetical Sketches by William Blake, With an Essay on Blake’s Metric by Jack Lindsay (1927). This essay deals in detail with the rhythm of Blake’s verse, locating its debt to earlier poetry and praises Blake’s early innovation, though is less impressed by his later Prophetic Books. On the first page Lindsay notes: ‘A poem has a number of separate existences, all bound together in the ultimate unity which is the poem itself and which transcends each one of them’ (p. 1). The separate elements Lindsay identifies are an emotional image, an intellectual construction and an essential sound (p.  1); diverse elements that come together to form a unity. This conception of unity in diversity

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will remain central to Lindsay’s work, though the elements that constitute unity and how they are interrelated will change substantially over the next fifty years. This chapter addresses these recurrent concerns for Lindsay in his study of Blake’s work: the nature of being and knowing, with reference to the senses; the artwork, again with reference to the senses; the politics of art; and the unity of being, of the artwork and of artistic vision. Each provides a way of exploring Blake’s work, while at the same time mapping the development of Lindsay’s own thought and analysis.

Poetic Vision Lindsay begins his analysis by examining a letter (with poem included) that Blake sent to his patron Thomas Butts in 1802 in which he describes the development of an image: A frowning thistle implores my stay. What to others a trifle appears Fills me full of smiles or tears; For double the vision my eyes do see, And a double vision is always with me. With my inward eye, ’tis an Old Man grey, With my outward, a Thistle across my way. (B:CW, p. 817)

Critical for Lindsay is Blake’s explanation of his poetic method: the transformation of an everyday encounter with the natural world into an image, with its associated sensory, emotional and intellectual connotations. The recursive interplay between natural and cultural worlds created by this encounter and the image produced from it constitutes Blake’s ‘double vision’, whereby individuals begin to recognise the patterns in their own thinking that make sense of the world, thereby becoming self-­ aware beings. In the final stanza of his poem Blake adds a threefold and fourfold vision that Lindsay refers to as a ‘double double vision’: Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; ’Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah’s night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s Sleep. (B:CW, p. 818)

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These extra degrees of vision represent the ability to situate ourselves and our understanding of the world in relation to others and their experience; a greater self-awareness that extends beyond how we think and create meaning to others and enables us to both empathise with the experience of others and understand the interconnections between ourselves, others and our world. Lindsay explains this by reference to Blake’s aphorism, ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees’ (p. 10), noting that for Blake the difference is not in what but in how we see: ‘By this he states that the reality of the tree does not rely in the mere image it casts on the retina of wise man or fool equally, but in the act of looking’ (p. 10). The fool simply sees a tree, like other trees seen before, and passes on. For the wise man, Lindsay continues, the tree is embedded in a network of ideas, sensation, emotions, thoughts that are shaped by the poet into a transformative vision for the reader: … a swarm of energies have assailed the tree, like sailors in the rigging of a ship. They have snapped branches and leaves off here and there, they have rapidly added others and run wires of rhythm through the slumping structure, they have woven into its textures the silk of the mind, they have pulled the skies down over it and penetrated it with lustrous imaginations. (p. 11)

Perceptions, emotions, memories and ideas from the poet’s and reader’s experience turn the thistle from matter to meaning. Readers are no longer trapped by the exigencies of matter, but through the capacity this process gives them to understand their own thinking and being and how this positions them in relation to the material world and to other people, it gives them the creative capacity to remake their world. For Lindsay the significance of art is this power to generate self-­reflexive thinking that enables the individual to act on their world. As a result he describes life as based on an ‘aesthetic principle’ (p.6) not a moral imperative, seeing Blake as a ‘forerunner of Nietzsche’ and claiming that although Blake is ‘obsessed by the aesthetic rather than the moral analysis, Nietzsche primarily by the moral attack’ (p. 11), they eventually reach the same conclusion; Blake realising that ‘moral freedom must attend the vindication of the inspired image’ and Nietzsche ‘that freedom could only be proclaimed in a universe for which the aesthetic fact transcended all others’ (p.11). For Lindsay the argument resolves back to the aesthetic as the source of creativity and power for the individual. Key to understanding the practice

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of art that generates this creativity and power is a new (or renewed) non-­ dualistic conception of the body.

The Body and the Senses For Blake, Lindsay argues, there is no separation of body and soul: ‘He annihilates equally the attitudes of Neo-Platonism, Christianity, or Materialism, by merely saying: All the body is soul, though not all the soul is body’ (p. 20). Lindsay supports this claim by reference to Blake’s poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790–93): Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight. (B:CW, p. 149)

Replacing the dualistic notion of body and soul with that of a soul-body composite destroys the power of those who would demonise the body and use this construction of the body as evil to disempower and control others. For Lindsay this constitutes a revision by Blake of the role and value of the body: The body, therefore, instead of being depreciated, has a new and tremendous value set upon it. It is no longer a kind of anchor of dirt to which the bobbing soul is tethered. It is the soul itself as projected into three-­ dimensional space; and freedom can only be found by forging into the consciousness images that transcend, while including, all the properties of that condition of space. (pp. 20–21)

Aligned with this revaluation of the body is a new understanding of the senses, ‘making the senses not dark portals of automatic perception but so subtilized and washed with light that the body rubs with harsh ecstasy on the very surface of the drawn skies’ (p.  21)—or, in less ecstatic prose, when the senses are understood as not simply instinctive responses to external stimuli but acculturated modes of engaging with the world, then the sensory engagement with art incorporates an existing cultural domain that the individual is subsequently positioned by the artwork to recognise and examine.

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The Artwork Lindsay relates this to Blake’s description of the poetic image: ‘Firstly, the recoil of the senses is necessary to the mind’s energies. Secondly, the impressions of sense need to be fertilized by an eternally active mind or they fall once more out of the mind, unabsorbed into its unity’ (p. 13). Senses and intellect work together to create the artwork that reflexively reveals the inseparability of senses and intellect in human consciousness and being. This includes consciousness of the artistic process and of the effect it has on those who engage with the work—through the senses and the intellect acting together. When Blake describes his creation of the thistle-old man image, Lindsay argues, it is not a move to pantheism or mysticism or some kind of sentimental fancy, ‘but because it reveals something very subtle in the creative energies of the spirit, because it holds a precise analysis of the action of those energies, and because it brought into existence an utterly new sense of values and of the secret and shining chambers of the soul’ (p. 5). For this reason, Lindsay writes: ‘It marks an epoch’ (p. 5). For Lindsay Blake’s work marks the beginning of a new age, when the artist consciously draws on the sensory and emotional appeal of the natural world to take the reader to new understandings, whether that be a new appreciation of themselves, their environment, their relationships with others, or a more complex understanding of their society and how it functions. In each case it begins with a reader who is wholly bodily engaged with the work. For Lindsay, Blake had come out of a ‘dead world’ of cheap gin, Methodism, Gothic horror and sentimentalism, and ‘the dreadful heritage of Miltonic diction’ that had ‘stultified the aesthetic faculty’ (p. 12). He brought new vitality and a new way of understanding art as a sensory, emotional and intellectual practice that restored the unity (and integrity) of individual being and knowing; Blake’s fourfold vision.

Abstraction The opposite of Blake’s fourfold vision is the single vision he attributes to Newton. Lindsay notes that, with this damning notion that he labelled ‘Newton’s sleep’, Blake signified one of his greatest concerns about his own time: the scientific use of abstraction to describe and delimit the world. This scientific rationalism that Blake would depict in his etching of Newton—a young man seated at the bottom of the ocean, using a

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compass to construct an abstract image on a roll of parchment—reduces the world and all within it to a series of abstractions, isolated from the complexities and interconnectedness of everyday life. For Blake, Lindsay argues, the greatest achievement of science (represented by Newton) was also its greatest failing: it provided those without self-awareness or reflexivity with a tool that could be used to subjugate all of nature, including humankind. Lindsay notes that Blake rejected outright Sir Joshua Reynolds’s claim that ‘this disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind’. In his Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (1808) Blake wrote: ‘To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess’ (B:CW, p. 451). This power to create abstract categories, to generalise and classify, ‘Single vision’ is only the first step towards knowledge; it is non-reflexive and does not question its own practice or assumptions. As a result, it makes generalisations and constructs abstractions that accord with its own assumptions and motivations. When applied to people whose life experience is different, it leads to misunderstandings, misinterpretations and even to exploitation as any different experience or assumption may be constituted as aberrant or criminal. In the following century advocates would argue the same problem with the use of statistics to control people and whole populations; in our own time, the same complaints arise about ‘Big data’. In each case, critics argue, the problem is with the failure of proponents of statistics or data sets to examine and reveal the assumptions by which their data is identified, collected, and analysed, which includes the contextual factors that are used to make meaning of the data collected. For Blake, Lindsay argues, only by identifying the particularities of individuals, events, cultures can knowledge be constructed. In this way, the individual not only recognises their own assumptions as the basis of their thinking (twofold vision), but also relates this to how they understand and engage with other people (threefold vision), and finally to how they understand and engage with the world, seeing all as interconnected (fourfold vision). Hence Lindsay’s analysis of Blake’s aphorism of the tree and the act of looking identifies not only the radical contextuality of the act of looking, but also its power to create the being of what is seen: ‘It is not as a thing looked at, but as an element of an act of the mind, that its reality is determined’ (p.  10). Determining how that looking takes place (and therefore the reality of what is seen) is the work of twofold or double (and

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threefold and fourfold) vision. Without this contextualising vision, Blake argues (and Lindsay through Blake), the world is reduced to a set of unrepresentative, decontextualised abstractions. Lindsay had been engaged in a battle with abstraction for some time, joining his father’s campaign against Modernist art and its aesthetics of abstraction. For Norman abstract art was a rejection of the beauty of the human form and of being, a decadence into which Europe had slipped that produced the savagery of World War I. Lindsay was more equivocal, coming to understand abstract art as an attempt to generate the reflexivity of Blake’s twofold, if not fourfold, vision. At the same time, he was critical of the abstractions used by institutions (church, state, economic, political) and disciplines (sciences, natural and social) that denied the unity in diversity of human being, experience and culture. It is in the latter sense that he writes of Blake’s rejection of abstraction, as exemplified in figures such as Urizen, Newton and Spectre. Lindsay writes that Blake uses Los and Urizen in a similar way to Nietzsche’s use of Apollo and Dionysos, except that Urizen ‘stands not only for the negative or inert element to be overcome in the creative act, but also for the imposer of moral law, the soul’s tyrant’ (p. 27). The Urizen of Blake’s engraving, The Ancient of Days (c. 1827), depicted using his compasses to delimit human potential, is contrasted with his twin figure Los, the figure of poetic imagination. Lindsay writes: ‘[Los] follows in [Urizen’s] track, turning every destructive movement of his into one constructing. The body is a limitation of the spirit’s energies. It is therefore the artist’s work to coin new spiritual energies out of the senses’ (p. 26). The poetic imagination must reconnect the mind and body through the senses, rescuing the individual being from the tyranny of abstract reasoning, the assumptions and power of which are unchallenged. Lindsay identifies another figure with the same characteristics in Blake’s Spectre, whom he describes as ‘all that tends to harden, to parch, to lose contact with life and set up an intellectual or moral abstraction in place of the living image’ (p. 38). In Jerusalem, Lindsay notes, Spectre is described in this way (quoted, p. 44; Plate 10, ll.13–16): … It is the Reasoning Power, An Abstract Objecting power, that negatives everything. This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy Reasoning Power, And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation!

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Blake explicitly associates abstraction with Reason, the ability to isolate and objectify aspects of human being and life that may become a means to control others. With Spectre and his twin, Emanation, Blake shows how that control is made to seem moral, even holy. Lindsay describes Emanation as ‘all that tends to loosen, to weaken the bonds of individuality, to dissolve it in the common and glucose mass of life’ (p. 38). With this pair, Lindsay argues, Blake exemplifies the practice of religions that impose laws on people based on their own assumptions and prejudices and, when the devastating consequences of those laws for people’s lives and well-being are revealed, weep sentimentally over the apparently inevitable harm caused to some. Lindsay exemplifies the work of Emanation which he describes as ‘feminine snares for the soul’s deluding’ (p.  38) in the religious preaching about chastity that seeks ‘to hide or distort the sacramental lyricism of lust under the sentimental sway of fidelity or affection abstractly conceived, to distract man’s attention from the business of emotional experience, the adventure into self-knowledge which is an earth, by turning him towards an abstract conception of heaven’ (pp.  38–9). The adventure into self-­ knowledge would mean a rejection by the individual of the power of abstract principles to determine how they understand themselves and their relations with others and with the world, a rejection of Spectre. Lindsay notes Blake’s description of the devastating effect on both women and men of this perversion of desire into a means of control, replacing the search for genuine human connection and experience with the promise of a fantasy afterlife in heaven. In particular, he cites Visions of the Daughters of Albion as exemplifying this combination of Spectre and Emanation in people’s lives. The poem tells the story of Oothoon who is raped by Bromion while on the way to meet her love, Theotormon. Racked by jealousy, Theotormon (the God-tormented) rejects her and it is left to Oothoon to denounce the abstract moral laws of Urizen that blame her, the victim, for her rape: ‘O Urizen! Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of Heaven!/ Thy joys are tears, thy labour vain to form men to thine image’ (B:CW, p.  192). Lindsay describes this as a statement of Blake’s doctrine that ‘no one … can judge anybody but himself’ (p. 41), a repudiation of Oothoon’s persecution. In order that Blake’s view not be taken as a form of anarchism, a rejection of all principles or morality, Lindsay cites the concluding line to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93), ‘One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression’ (quoted, p.  41) that articulates the need for the

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particularities and interrelationships of any situation, including those involving oneself, to be taken into account in determining its justice and validity: ‘No one can judge of an action till he knows all the minutest causes of that action; and as he can only know them by entering into the first cause, the principium individuationis, he can never judge any action at all, not even his own’ (pp. 41–2). Through Blake Lindsay argues the need for meaning and truth to be acknowledged as the product of multiple interrelationships and associated causalities; not relativistic but precisely and comprehensively located within the network of events and relationships that generate each being or event. In summing up Blake’s writing on abstraction Lindsay argues: We have finally found the formula to express evil. … Evil is all that is abstract. For there must be a vein of abstractness in all torment. It must be that distorting vein which makes the image writhe awry, cut off from that direct and full contact with life which is self-knowledge and a completed rhythm. (p. 43)

The abstraction that subjects people to laws that are inappropriate to their being and experience is identified by Lindsay as one of Blake’s major concerns, because it both leads to unjust judgments made about others and militates against the individual’s achievement of self-knowledge. Yet, while Blake attempts to situate those laws socially, politically and economically, in this book Lindsay reverts always to the aesthetic.

Aesthetics Lindsay’s aesthetics focuses on how the individual enhances their understanding of themselves and their world through art. The genius of Blake for Lindsay was his contribution to this process, particularly in the context of the world he inherited. For Lindsay Blake was a trailblazer from a world dominated by the mechanical and the abstract: There are periods … when even the strongest seem maimed, cut off irredeemably from these depths of tumultuous and crystal desire, when the soul’s energies are so coated over with the dust of death that they come filtered through it rattling and mechanical. Such a period is the Miltonic, wrongly called the Augustan period.

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Blake came at the end of that period. He came on a dead world, one that was trying … to escape the dreadful heritage of Miltonic diction which had stultified the aesthetic faculty … (p. 12)

For Lindsay, Milton’s work was dominated by abstract expression (pp. 12–3); a century later it was Blake who re-established the relationship and connection between people and their world. Blake demonstrated the power of the concrete image to create self-awareness and an ability to understand and analyse the self, others and the world. In his essay ‘Shakespeare and Milton’ (1924) for the journal Vision Lindsay had described the latter as ‘an intellect that does not respond to life as a passionate adventure, but is obsessed by moral righteousness, with its inevitable abstractions that judge life’ (p. 34). And of the mind produced by reading Milton he wrote: ‘It will set up … an abstract construction that will be purely intellectual and mathematical, as ponderous and defunct as the Great Pyramid, and use words as literary counters, not as a means of lyric re-integrations of sense by formative mind’ (pp. 34–5). For Lindsay, Milton was the product of Newton, Urizen and Spectre and he argues that, as a result of Milton’s work, ‘the concrete image will disappear from mind, and a mechanism of expression, utterly artificial in its abstractness, will take the place of the projection of emotion in sensuous communication with Life. Sense and Mind will cease to interact as living elements’ (p. 35). He concludes with the verbal coup de grace: ‘Milton arrives, and Life dies’ (p. 35). For Lindsay, Blake came upon that dead world and revivified it. The paradox that Lindsay identifies in Blake’s work is his own struggle with abstraction. He quotes Blake’s own anguish from his letter to Butts: ‘My abstract folly hurries me often away while I am at work, carrying me over mountains and valleys, which are not real, into a land of abstractions where spectres of the dead wander … Who will deliver me from this spirit of abstraction?’ (p.  63). In Lindsay’s judgment the later Prophetic Books represent Blake’s descent into Milton’s hell: ‘He landed in a universe of maniacal abstractions’ (p. 62). At the same time he proposes the reasons for what he sees as Blake’s loss of hope and faith in humanity: It seems to him that the commercial and imperialistic lust of England has stamped out the governance of the poetic principle there, and the Giant Albion lies cold and rotting in the unending storm. Instead of the palaces of the soul’s delight dark satanic mills rise everywhere; instead of beauty breathing upon life its clear bloom … life is a mass of disintegrating and

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wormy substance. Jerusalem, which is his symbol for the mind’s vital contact with the earth-fact, lies ruined. (p. 63)

While acknowledging the social and political engagement of Blake’s work, Lindsay’s focus is on his artistic practice. Schooled by his artist father to avoid any kind of social or political analysis, he identifies Blake’s political motivation as a flaw that undermines his work: One of the causes of the lack of complete synthesis in Blake’s mythology seems to me to be an imperfect correlation of the humanistic emotions (or the desire to save man by humanizing him) and the aesthetic emotions (or the desire to create oneself; thereby creating all the lesser emotions and incidentally the instrument for the humanizing of man). (p. 25)

For Lindsay the ‘aesthetic emotions’ achieve the aim of humanising readers because they enable them to become self-aware and capable of critical analysis, making the ‘humanising emotions’ redundant. However, Lindsay’s approach denies the artist the political activism that was arguably one of the most powerful elements of Blake’s work. Indeed, the description, ‘dark Satanic mills’ has outlived Blake by several centuries and remains a fitting description of many industrial (and post-industrial) workplaces. In providing a vocabulary for the social and political evils he observed, Blake was doing more than describing his world; he was providing a vocabulary by which his self-aware and critical readers might do battle, symbolically as well as materially, with the injustices that surround them. Whether Lindsay was relying on Blake’s readers to make that step on their own, having been tutored in self-awareness and critical analysis by Blake’s verse, or if he had come to see all social and political activism as doomed to failure is not clear, although he was adamant that it had no role in art. In its place Lindsay argues for the notion of unity in being and experience, including aesthetic engagement, that will enable the individual to become self-aware, analytical and active.

Unity, Revisited From the start, Lindsay assumes an essential unity in the being of the artist that enables them to create work that is coherent and consistent, while also dynamic:

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Every image is a star, and obeys a law of gravitation by which it welds together the atomic material of its substance, emotional and aesthetic, around its central point of radiating fire, which is at once both an emotional and an aesthetic accretion and something transcending either: a unity that comes from the psyche of the individual creator, the sole home of unity. (pp. 3–4)

For Lindsay, this psychic unity is a repudiation of the mechanistic and atomistic notions of being that he, like Blake, regarded as fundamental to scientific thinking that worked by ‘dissecting a given body into its component chemicals and bony structure’ (p. 5). The fundamental fault in this process, he argues, is that being is reduced to ‘a compartmented and jointed area of intellect, instinct and emotion’ (p. 5) with these fundamental aspects of being regarded as separate faculties rather than as mutually constitutive. When this is recognised, as Lindsay argues it is in Blake’s work, the mind as an aspect of spirit is no longer ‘the pigeon-hole, but a sculptured and sculpturing flame’ (p. 5); not a predetermined and predetermining categorising function but creative, formative and integrative. Lindsay argues also that Blake’s work acknowledges that this unity is often experienced and expressed as a series of antinomies: ‘Being and Becoming, Life and Death, Force and Inertia, Joy and Torment, Individuality and God, Spirit and Matter’. He argues, however, that this does not discount the notion of unity as all these antinomies are ‘facets of the dynamic synthesis of unity’ (p. 14). Their unity is in their interrelationship and, as noted above in the discussion of abstraction, this applies not only to the psyche of the artist, the nature of the artwork, and the consciousness of all human beings, but also extends to human relationships with other beings and the natural world. The way that people access this unity is through the imagination.

Imagination Lindsay refers again to Blake’s discussion of image-making and the role taken by imagination: ‘The constructive imagination swoops on the material, sinks through it, sifts it, impregnates every element it desires with something of its fire, blasts the rest out, and then curves back to the closing heavens. It finds a thistle and it leaves an old man’ (p. 15). This notion of imagination as the synthesising and connecting power that constitutes the image by recognising its different elements and how to relate them to

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each other, and in the process demonstrates the fundamental connectedness of individuals and their world, remains implicit throughout the rest of Lindsay’s book until in the conclusion, he writes: ‘But, Blake how shall I sum up his gift to futurity, to himself? In a dead world, he knew that there was no reality except the act of imagination’ (p. 83). Lindsay returns throughout his analysis to Blake’s notion of imagination as the basis of knowing; that what we see is dependent on how we have come to understand ourselves and our world. This, Lindsay argues, is the basis of Blake’s rejection of mechanistic science, which he regards as a pigeon-holing exercise that distorts the world and all within it to fit into preconceived abstract categories. Lindsay notes that Blake extends this critique to social, political and religious institutions and practices that subject individuals and communities to judgments based on their own beliefs and assumptions. For Lindsay, Blake’s insistence on the power of imagination to unify sensory, emotional and intellectual responses into a coherent vision and basis for action constituted a break with both mechanical and magical thinking and promised a new, more rigorous and self-reflexive understanding of the nature of being.

The Creative Will In a chapter titled ‘The Creative Will’ Lindsay presents his major criticisms of Blake’s work, drawing on both his own theory of artistic practice (heavily influenced by his father, as the title of the chapter acknowledges) and elements of Freudian psychology that had begun to influence literary interpretation. He does not focus on Blake’s work so much as on the artist himself. Blake, he claims, did not read very much and when he found something affecting, he did not look for ways to include it in his own work but set himself in opposition to it: ‘he kept on abstractly and evasively matching himself against it’ (p. 65), including the Bible and the works of both Swedenborg and Ossian. Hence, for example, his repeated and inconsistent use of Christian imagery that Lindsay argued was misunderstood and misappropriated by many of his readers whom he labels ‘types he ought to repel’ (p. 71). For Lindsay Blake also wasted time on visual art: ‘In the most important formative years of his life, the whole of his twenties, he did nothing but practise engraving and play about in a print-shop’ (p. 66). In this book Lindsay shows no understanding of the interplay of visual and verbal text in Blake’s work, noting: ‘The word is his natural symbol’ (p. 66). Although

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he acknowledges that Blake was eventually able to produce expressive visual art, he argues that it does not have the power of his writing: ‘All the qualities of his verse are here, slowed down and at a greater distance still from the centres of constructive energy’ (p. 66). Blake’s theory of art, Lindsay argues, is more convincing than his practice. He quotes Blake’s statement that ‘Natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me’ (p.  67) as a confession of his failure to engage through the senses as his own theory demanded. This, Lindsay argues, is evident in his work that is drawn not from life but from other art, mostly that of Michelangelo (p.  68). It is realised also in his attacks on artists such as Titian and Rembrandt ‘that seemed to him smudged tone and colour’ (p. 69). For Lindsay this results in Blake’s own possession by the spectre, abstraction: ‘He confesses the dominance of the spectre instead of the warm and minute ecstasy of communion with the lovely vitality of life’ (p. 67). Finding it hard to believe that Blake did not appreciate the beauty and power of the works and artists he criticised, he concludes that this is the result of ‘envy, his anger at himself, his regret for the lost rhythm of will’ (p. 69)—Lindsay’s damning (psycho)analysis of Blake the artist.

Colour-Image In the same book Lindsay presented his own theory of the colour-image that works by melding the senses and provoking an immediate intellectual response that is then referred to the emotions. He contrasts this with the form-image that works to modify the senses through the interplay of emotion and intellect. Lindsay uses the contrast of colour and form to signify different artistic traditions and ways of thinking. Effectively, the form-­ image is associated with writers and painters whose work contains and explicates the interrelationship of sense, emotion and intellect; Lindsay cites Shakespeare as exemplifying this mode. Whereas the colour-image embodies the dynamic interrelationship of sense, emotion and intellect and invites the reader, viewer or listener to engage with and experience that state of being. Lindsay identified Blake as preparing the way for the latter, which he traces in the work of poets, John Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Francis Thompson and the music of Richard Wagner. The primary concern of Lindsay’s poetics at this time was to understand the constitution and role of the senses: ‘What comes finally out of it all? A greater sensitivity of the nerves, a more complex precision of each

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sense’ (p.  81). Despite having shown throughout the book how Blake relates sensory engagement to our capacity to understand and engage with the world, Lindsay avoids dealing with its social and political consequences. Instead, he argues for the intensification of sensory stimulation that he identifies in the work of Richard Wagner to ‘find our contact with life’ (p.  82); which is to say, to recognise the web of relationships and interconnections that constitute our being.

Conclusion Lindsay’s study concludes with a summary of Blake’s achievement that begins with his view (quoted above) that reality is the act of imagination. He adds: ‘In a morally inert world, he knew that everything that lives is holy’ (p.  83), a gnomic utterance that again gestures towards, though does not specify, the social and political consequences of this notion of imagination as the basis of our understanding of and engagement with the world. He follows this with an affirmation of Blake’s belief in the value and integrity of desire, rejecting the shame accorded to sexuality. The connection with another, Lindsay writes, constitutes ‘the act of imaginative substitution by which we find self-knowledge among the masks of life’ (p. 83). Lindsay reiterates his analysis of Blake’s theory of knowing along with his own anti-materialist interpretation, noting that the theory predicts the work of Kant: ‘Blake with fearless logic proclaimed that there was a transcendental factor in all experience, that without it we lived in an inert world because the intellect was only a pigeonholing faculty and could not produce a fresh idea or touch into being the mysterious unity of the aesthetic intuition’ (p. 83). This notion of ‘aesthetic intuition’ is Lindsay’s term for the bodily engagement with the world that is articulated and mobilised by the artwork and which he sees as superior to the ‘social creed’ of Shelley that Lindsay regards as ‘based on an utter lack of the psychological sense’ (p. 83). In the final paragraph and as his final accolade Lindsay writes of Blake: ‘He brought consciousness to the act of creation’ (p. 84). He concludes that this is why Blake’s work has always been misunderstood, because that consciousness and the self-awareness it creates confronts readers with too many unpleasant truths about themselves and their society. Despite his best efforts to be non-political Lindsay’s explication of Blake’s poetry and his description of image-making argues the power of the work to waken readers to the political and social injustices of their world and their own

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complicity with them. Couching his critique in terms that are poetic and philosophical rather than overtly political does not detract from the political significance of Blake’s (or Lindsay’s) writing but, if anything, establishes even more clearly its power to both present an analysis of contemporary society and locate the individual and their responsibility within that analysis. Lindsay concludes of Blake: ‘He will continue not to be understood.’ The projection of Blake’s image of Urizen, The Ancient of Days onto the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral (from 28 November to 1 December 2019, during the Blake exhibition at Tate Britain) was either a peculiarly Blakean act of defiance or suggests that Lindsay was quite correct.

CHAPTER 3

From Revolutionary to Visionary

As noted in Chap. 1, the companion chapter to the author-study locates the study by reference to other literary criticism by Lindsay of the same period in order to understand the approach he has taken: the issues that he addresses in relation to the author and their work; what this shows about Lindsay’s own interests and values at this point; and where this fits in Lindsay’s journey as a literary and social critic. In this case, the study addresses the earliest influences on Lindsay’s thinking, some of his early essays written for a university journal and the beginnings of his publishing career in Sydney. It begins with his early reading, where he was drawn to the work of Blake and the English Romantics and post-Romantics, including Swinburne whose work was the reference for one of his own earliest poems, his ‘Oath’ in which he predicts the Nonconformist path his life will follow.

Blake and the English Romantics In Life Rarely Tells Lindsay writes about the chaotic life that he and his brothers lived in Brisbane after his parents’ separation. His major source of stability and escape was poetry: In our family, truncated of its father, I was the eldest male. Now I half realized that fact, in a revulsion of anger and confused distaste. I knew that my mother was unhappy and didn’t know what to do with herself; but I shrank © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_3

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from the knowledge, which imposed on me a responsibility far beyond my powers and comprehension. My refuge was poetry. (p. 35)

As a young boy Lindsay found among his mother’s books a copy of The Golden Treasury (1890), a large collection of almost 300 poems edited by Francis Turner Palgrave and first published in 1861 when it started with the Elizabethans and ended with the (then) Contemporary poets, primarily the Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Byron (LRT, p. 34)). A later edition (most likely the one Lindsay read) included the poets of the nineteenth century, starting with Matthew Arnold and ending with William Butler Yeats and containing the work of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Around the same time he also bought a second-hand copy of Smith’s New Classical Dictionary, first published in 1860, a densely printed book of 950 pages that identifies people, places and myths from ancient Greece and Rome. For the young Lindsay, beset with concerns about his mother and younger brothers and missing his father, these two books opened a world of sensations, ideas, and feelings where he could feel both stimulated and at ease: ‘In our unstable condition, without school or friends, I was turning more and more to reading. A clear inner world, opposed to the outer world, was forming’ (LRT, p. 30). Lindsay notes also that these books suggested to him that ‘it was possible to write poetry as well as read it’ and he describes his early attempts to set mythical and Shakespearean texts into verse (LRT, p. 34). He writes at length about his commitment to poetry throughout his teenage years in Brisbane noting, in particular, the significance of Blake’s work: ‘I found that a poet might harmonize his attack on the existing world with an enjoyment of man and nature, his acceptance of all-that-lives with a demand for total change’ (p.  102). This essentially Romantic notion argues that sensory pleasure may be part of, not antithetical to, social analysis and critique: ‘Blake brought immediacy of emotion and rarefied symbol together in a new texture of fusion; and the first effect was to strengthen my antagonism to the world’ (p.  102). Inspired by Blake, Lindsay rejected an aesthetic of detached appreciation for an embodied and socially engaged experience. Poetry and politics were not separate or conflicting practices, but mutually formative: ‘Poetic activity was a ceaseless fight against empire, against war, against all the cruelties and fears known as law and order, against the satanic mills of exploitation, against the money forces that deadened men into things’ (p. 103). Furthermore, he noted, Blake’s poetry revealed that the struggle to create a better world

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enabled people to discover ‘a common objective, a common humanity’ and in the process to reintegrate their own being: ‘Out of an unending crucifixion, the whole man proceeded, the poet, the lover, the revolutionary’ (p. 103).

The Oath In both Life Rarely Tells and The Fullness of Life Lindsay also tells of the blank verse vow he wrote during his teenage years never to work simply for material gain: They have taken the beautiful woman and cropped off her young bright hair. They have broken the thews of Apollo with a dark and bitter snare. Their word is the fear in the darkness, they move with a smell of decay, and all that on earth is most lovely turns loathliest under their sway. And this is the world they have builded, the world where alone I roam with a statue only friended, with only a song for home. And this is the world I am bidden to accept and build more secure, or starve. But an oath I have taken, and come what may come, I’ll endure. (LRT, pp. 107–8)

The Oath starts with a reference to St Francis of Assisi who, at her behest, cut the hair of Chiara Offreduccio (later St Clare), the daughter of Favorino Scifi, Count of Sasso-Rosso to signify her rejection of the marriage that had been arranged for her. At the same time, it was a rejection of her father’s world of rank and privilege, which she exchanged for the life of a nun. For Lindsay, it was a rejection of the World War I profiteers whose victims he saw daily in the maimed young men returning from battle as well as of the status-driven middle-class life of his aunt and uncle, Mary and John Elkington. It might be seen as an adolescent act of rebellion except that in Lindsay’s case the Oath defined his life: he never did work directly for a business corporation or institution but earned his living by his writing. In The Fullness of Life (p. 8) Lindsay notes the reference in his Oath to Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (1866) that denounces the deadening impact of Christianity on the classical world. Swinburne attributed to Christianity the leaching away of all that is sensuous from life and the replacement of classical ideals of courage, beauty and vivacity with a religion focused on death.

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Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. (ll. 35–36)

This pallid Christian world is the obverse of what Lindsay would later term ‘the fullness of life’. Looking back at his early vow he wrote: I was confusedly acclaiming and yet attacking asceticism, identifying the cash-nexus with the denying and distorting forces and yet asserting my refusal to partake in the fleshpots that were dangled before me as a temptation. In a way this conflict has always remained with me in that the defiant demand for the fullness of life has been linked with the need to refuse most of what is considered enjoyment because of its complicity with corruption, with the fetishisms of a consumer-society, with dereliction in the cause of human wholeness. (TFOL, p. 8)

In his mid-teens Lindsay was not using terms such as ‘cash-nexus’ but he was aware that profit-driven economic practices led to both the inability of human beings to engage openly and joyfully with the world around them and a fetishised luxury and lasciviousness that was driven by the desire for power and control, not bodily engagement. As Lindsay notes, he would explore throughout his writing the nature of embodied engagement with the world: how it is related to social and economic factors, its relationship to feeling, and its fundamental role in being and knowing.

Poetry and Being In The Fullness of Life Lindsay wrote that he first realised the power of poetry to engage the individual fully at the age of about sixteen while reading Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: … I had a sudden overwhelming sense of poetry as a living body of experience, as an experience somehow greater in intensity and fullness than anything I had known or could imagine in everyday existence. The conclusion, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” burst on me with the conviction of ­ultimate truth, creating new dimensions all round me, revealing an infinity of meanings where I had never been aware of any meaning at all. (p. 2)

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In that moment, the older Lindsay recalled, ‘life was lifted to a new level’ (p. 2) His younger self had seen that in poetry ‘the harmonies and unions denied by the everyday world came true, were directly experienced, conjured up, given a force and enduring stability that set them up in a permanent antagonism to the broken and incomplete world from which they yet drew their energies’ (p. 3). Lindsay then realised his purpose in life: ‘the only life worth living was that in which I sought all the while for the poetic moment, the resolution in which this unity was achieved’ (p. 3). Over the next two years he would add to his influences Shelley and Blake, whose work provided ‘the formulations on which to rest my case against the world, the final vision of Prometheus Unbound, the accusations of Songs of Experience and the dialectics of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (p. 4). Lindsay outlined his early views in an article titled ‘Poetry’ published in the Queensland University Magazine in August 1919. In his opening paragraph he claims: ‘Poetry is not a matter of a few aesthetics, or any sect with its narrow vision of Beauty; it is as wide as humanity and as deep: it comes home to every man’s business and bosom’ and with an echo of Blake’s rejection of the general (and abstraction) and insistence on the individual (and particular) as the basis of being and knowledge, he adds: ‘it is the most universal because it is the most individual’ (p. 10). He goes on to argue that poets create their work from the interrelation of their sensory, emotional and intellectual engagements: All the sights and sounds he has known; his passions and his exaltations; colour and scents; and all the little crying rhythms of life; whispering desires and deep meditations; all he has ever thought and felt join together in his brain subliminally, and are at last evoked into consciousness with flaming vividness. (p. 10)

Accordingly, he argues, poetry is not an imitation of life as Aristotle claimed in his theory of art, but ‘Life itself’ (p. 11). Lindsay follows this assertion with a series of claims for poetry as all that is good and true in the world: ‘Every good deed is but the expression of poetry in action …’ (p. 11) And he concludes: Poetry is the summoning cry for humanity in the great battle of right against wrong, justice against injustice, and it is the true expression of democracy, for it reminds us that all men have souls, suffer in the depths, and rise to the heights; that the whole of mankind is heir to love and sorrow—a fact we are apt to forget nowadays. (p. 11)

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This formulation recalls Percy Bysshe Shelley’s claim in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821) that ‘Language, color, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry’ (p. 349). For Shelley the sensory and formal properties of poetry were among the means by which it achieved its social purpose. He famously went on to argue the power of imagination as a means of social and political analysis because it ‘makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ (p.  353) and so enables us to see the world without the blinkers imposed by conventional thought (precursor to the Russian Formalists’ notion of defamiliarisation). The means by which imagination is provoked in the individual is again through the interrelation of sensory, emotional and intellectual stimuli that create the embodied experience of poetry: ‘The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause’ (p. 354). This Romantic conception of the power of poetry and the means by which it acts is echoed in Lindsay’s first essay on the nature of poetry. As he noted in The Fullness of Life: ‘while remaining true to Keats and Shakespeare, [I] had been deeply stirred by Blake and Shelley’ (p. 4). Furthermore Lindsay’s friendship with T.C. Witherby of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and the members of the International Workers of the World (IWW) whom he met during this period further confirmed his belief in the social and political as well as aesthetic function of poetry: ‘Thus I had found that my revolt, however arrived-at as the result of communion with the voices of poetry, had its wider connotations; that I had comrades ready to act for the principles I professed as a lonely discipline; and that the poetic revolt was linked at a thousand points with the spheres of social and political thought and action’ (TFOL, p. 7). This is reinforced in Lindsay’s account of his early political activity at the University of Queensland when he supported the 1917 Russian Revolution: At the university I now called myself a Bolshevik. I wore a red tie 1 and rose in the debating society and defended the revolution. I had not yet even 1  The significance of Lindsay’s sartorial choice was that anti-Bolshevik feeling was so strong at this time that the Australian Government’s War Precautions Act was extended in September 1918 to make it illegal to fly a red flag in public. Lindsay’s red tie was a subtle flouting of this regulation. The red flag was also a symbol of the trade union movement and the regulation was seen by many workers as a suppression of unionism (see Evans, 1988).

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heard the term Marxism and had no idea that it was the philosophy of Lenin. I interpreted the Soviet revolution in formulations drawn from Shelley, William Morris, and Blake. (LRT, p. 133)

And yet, when Lindsay came to write his first major literary study, the linkages between poetry and social and political thought and action have (mostly) been severed. Lindsay explicitly rejected Shelley’s address to the social which, in the final chapter, he contrasts unfavourably with what he now characterises as Blake’s ontology: His doctrine of freedom was no thin anarchism of the intellect, no weak rebellion of discontent. It proceeded from a passionate and penetrating vision of life and a knowledge of the energies that shape and stabilize life. It was not a social creed like Shelley’s, based on an utter lack of the psychological sense; but a vindication of the creative contact with life. (p. 83)

Lindsay retained his belief in the power of imagination, which he sees championed in Blake’s work, in the formative role of the senses (interrelated with the emotions and intellect) in creating our understanding of ourselves, each other and the world around us, and in the power of art to intervene in that understanding by engaging the senses (and hence the emotions and intellect) and so empower the individual to transform themselves and their world. However, he now rejects the application of these faculties to the social and political realm, which begs the question—what caused this major change in his thought?

Norman Lindsay In 1919, after a ten-year silence, Norman Lindsay re-established communication with his son. For Lindsay this recognition was utterly transformative. Following a rapturous response from Jack (Gillen, 1993, p.  12). Norman wrote again, sending etchings and a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883). Lindsay was delighted with the etchings, but he struggled with Nietzsche: ‘Certain notes of the call were richly in key with my own deepest thoughts and emotions; others jarred harshly against those thoughts and emotions’ (TFOL, p.  10). Lindsay noted that the book ‘seemed to deny the positions that I had been reaching through Witherby and Quinton, my synthesis of Blake, Keats, Dostoevsky and the

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idea of revolution’ (LRT, p. 161). Although he found some of it horrific— ‘The attitude to war seemed the sheerest barbarism, vulgar as my aunt’s snobbery’ (LRT, p. 161)—he found other elements inspiring: for example, ‘a philosophy of history’ that he believed could help him to formalise his understanding of revolutionary poetry and ‘the conception of joy as the deepest creative dynamic’ (LRT, p. 161). Norman subsequently invited his son to visit him at his home, Springwood in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and sent him a proof copy of his manifesto, Creative Effort (1924), which was heavily influenced by Norman’s reading of Nietzsche.2 Jack read the manuscript many times before his visit to Springwood, finding it incompatible with his social and political views, as he explained to Bertram Stevens: I can’t accept this rejection of history. Perhaps it suits Norman and what he needs to get out of life. But even if it were true that the earth exists only as a mud-flat for the generation of a few geniuses, I still wouldn’t accept it because I don’t want to and it isn’t true for me. I still believe that I ought to be ready to give my life for freedom, for the people. I can’t accept some special ticket of exemption from Olympus. (LRT, p. 174)

This visit to Norman was destabilising for Lindsay. Based on his extensive reading, his university studies, his early writing and editing work for Queensland University Magazine and its successor Galmahra, his work for the W.E.A. and comradeship of Witherby, Quinton and others, and his immersion in the complex and contradictory politics of Brisbane, Lindsay had developed a socialist, anti-capitalist understanding of how society works and a Romantic belief in the power of art to engage people with the social injustices they see around them. Norman’s reappearance in his life shook him to the core. He recorded: ‘I was torn by the intense conflict of my various universes, those of Keats and Shelley, Blake and Plato, Dostoevsky and Beethoven, Nietzsche and N.L.’ (LRT, p. 185).

2  Norman Lindsay’s writing on art mirrors that of Willard Huntington Wright whose Creative Will: Studies in the Philosophy and the Syntax of Aesthetics (1916) is an application of Nietzschean ideas to the study of art. In 1915 Wright had published What Nietzsche Taught, a selection of excerpts from Nietzsche’s work, including Thus Spake Zarathustra, each introduced by Wright.

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Nietzsche In 1920 Lindsay attempted to incorporate Nietzsche’s work into his understanding of being and of art in the essay, ‘Nietzsche’ published in the Queensland University Magazine. He enlists Nietzsche in an attack on the ‘cold and bloodless aesthetic’ (p. 13) he associates with academic learning and judgment, contrasting this with the vitality of Nietzsche’s conception of being: ‘All those who repudiate effort, and seek in aestheticism, religion, or opium, an escape from Life, have already repudiated Nietzsche’ (p. 13). Despite his initial aversion from some of Nietzsche’s ideas Lindsay applauds his rejection of conventional ways of thinking and being, particularly the repression of sensory being by Christianity. Lindsay identifies Nietzsche’s key argument as ‘Man is something that must be surpassed’ and he argues: ‘His whole philosophy is summed up in that passionate reiterated cry. Man must go beyond pity and terror, and the sentimental reality of sympathy: he must advance beyond to the higher development of self’ (p. 14). However, Lindsay goes a step further, claiming that ‘it is through Art that man goes beyond Man’ and he adds ‘Nietzsche never realised this last point with sufficient clearness, but it is his value that he points the way to it’ (p. 14). Or at least that, for Lindsay (Norman and subsequently Jack), is the value of Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche’s image of the dancer who becomes the dance is for Lindsay a way of representing the formative relationships between sense, being and creativity: Dancing was for Nietzsche the symbol of intellect. “I could only believe in a god who knew how to dance.” The passionate gesture of the dancer, uniting rhythm and colour, with its beauty of balance and movement seemed to him the perfect symbol for activity of mind. Man who has this clay of creation in him has also the immortal fire that creates, the hardness of the hammer, the dance of the stars. (p. 14)

This has become for Lindsay now an individual, not social, endeavour: ‘The only moral law is Be Yourself’ (p.  14). The rest of his essay deals primarily with Nietzsche’s attack on the anti-sensuous, particularly Christianity’s demonisation of the body that Lindsay compares unfavourably with the Hellenic affirmation of the sensory and sexual. For Lindsay this separation of mind and body and repression of the senses undermines

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the creativity that is articulated in the image of the dancer who in the act of creation becomes the artwork. This is not incompatible with his earlier writing about art and the artist: however, what has been lost is the direct social and political engagement of art as represented in the work of Blake and Shelley. And this move is exacerbated by his reading of Creative Effort sent to him in manuscript by his father.

Creative Effort In the opening pages Norman establishes the basic principles of his Nietzsche-inspired manifesto, beginning with a dualistic (mind/body) notion of being that distinguishes between Existence, which is ‘the body, and all that serves to supply its needs, to keep its machinery active’ and Life, which is ‘all that goes beyond the body, the impulse that we vaguely call the mind, the soul, the intellectual process’ (p. 1). He specifies further that the body is ‘the poor relation of the mind, the servant, the vehicle. In serving its needs, one supplies movement; in serving its senses, one supplies material for the intellectual process’ (p. 1). There is no sense, as there is in Lindsay’s Romantic-inspired conceptualisation of being, that the body has any formative role in being. Norman identifies ‘Man’s destiny’ as ‘beyond the body’ (p. 1). Society and social organisation are described as serving the needs of the body, not the whole being: ‘From prime necessity, from bare struggle for existence, man has elaborated the Social System. All efforts that are commercial, political, scientific, seek one end—the service of the body. The sociological structure exists to feed and clothe the human mechanism’ (p.  1). For Norman, Life takes place in another domain altogether, that of Art: Search for all that common minds reject as useless to the struggle for Existence, and you will find all that serves Life. At its highest, where does one find man’s effort trend away from the struggle for existence? In Creative art. Therefore, in Creative art one must find the direction of Life. (p. 2)

Norman identifies creative effort or artistic creativity as an ‘aristocratic ideal’ noting that it ‘makes no claim to dominate other souls. Its effort is dominion only over self’ (p. 3). At the same time, he is at pains to assert that he does not denigrate those who work for Existence. The struggle for

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Existence is important, he argues, because without it there is no being: ‘for the vehicle that contains Life is drawn by this Cart-horse, Existence’ (p. 3). Nevertheless, he definitively separates Existence and Life, body and soul or mind: the domain of the body is that of the viscera, the blood-beat of raw Existence; the realm of art, where we find Life, is the domain of the mind. Norman’s attitude to the body determines his response to social and political activism: Those whose minds are stimulated only by the problem of maintaining and ordering the mechanism of the body strive for a political end, which they call vaguely “the good” of mankind. Let it be understood that one admits the importance of this problem, but that one draws aside from it. For it has only a small significance to Life. (p. 3)

Norman spends most of the opening chapter denouncing the work of those who fight for social change and for material and technological advance, all of whom he believes mistake Existence for Life: … this absurd jumble of politics, religion, commercialism; of racial animosity, class distinctions, and industrial hatreds; this desperate effort to fuse the primitive passions and communal necessity; this stress of furious activity overlaid by a thin layer of education and culture, and the sporadic effort of small movements to refine, to decorate, and to emotionalise its needs; this, such as it is, is the material out of which life is made. (pp. 5–6)

He concludes the chapter by noting that the one positive attribute of humankind is ‘the individual effort to create thought and beauty’: ‘This passion to create something finer than the creator himself is the one permanent and enduring element in man, and since creative effort is the rarest, most difficult achievement, it remains the stimulus to high development—and this development is Life’ (p. 16). As noted earlier, in his autobiography Lindsay recalled his initial resistance to Norman’s ahistoricism and his aristocratic notion of art. Years later, in The Fullness of Life Lindsay recalled reading the manuscript with ‘fascination, with a revulsion near terror and an ecstatic acceptance’ (p. 11). He describes Norman’s vision as ‘the world of Nietzsche given the cosmic dimensions of Plato’ and noted: ‘He saw the individuals with creative powers in thought or in the arts as the demiurges of the universe’

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(p. 11). It would soon become clear that if Lindsay was to work with his father, he would have to accept Norman’s views on art and life, though this meant abandoning some of his own beliefs: To enter this kind of universe I had only to stress the side of my thinking which had seen poetry as the force creating a concrete universe of joy and harmony, which the earth-systems denied and sought to destroy or pervert. To stress this side so strongly that the link of the poetic struggle with the revolutionary struggle to bring about a just, brotherly, harmonious, and happy earth began to loosen and fade out, to seem irrelevant or even a parody of the aesthetic transformations. (TFOL, pp. 11–12)

Lindsay accommodated himself—and William Blake—to Norman’s vision: By concentrating on the concept of art-activity as the supreme concretising activity of the human mind I was able to move over from Blake the down-­ to-­earth revolutionary to Blake the visionary, dispersing his spirit-shapes all over the universe and using aphorisms of his such as that which declares eternity will come to pass by a refinement of sensuous enjoyment. (TFOL, p. 11)

Poetics Lindsay spent much of the 1920s exploring poetics. In 1923 he published an essay in Vision titled ‘Two Dimensional Poetry’ that was highly critical of the work of one of his former muses, Percy Bysshe Shelley. He began by quoting from a letter from Keats to Shelley about his verse drama, The Cenci (1819) in which he urged his friend to ignore the modern preoccupation with ‘purpose’ and ‘be more of an artist’ (p. 38). For Lindsay, Shelley’s melodramatic tale (based on real events) was flawed by both the unrefined emotionalism of the verse—‘As soon as an emotion rises in him, he makes no effort to define it: he is only conscious of a blinding extravagance of vague, fainting rapture’ (p.  39)—and its social and political engagement: Real liberty can only be given man by defining his passions and dreams for him; Shelley agitates for Republicanism, a vegetarian diet and the abolition of marriage. However we may sympathise—at least in the last case—this has nothing to do with poetry which should concern itself with bringing man into being, not with maxims of conduct. (p. 40)

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By directing his readers to social and political issues, Lindsay argued, Shelley has brought them back to earth (in Norman’s terms, Existence) and forsaken the metaphysical task of poetry—to create within the reader an understanding of the nature of being. With this focus on art Lindsay continued to explore the nature and role of the senses in art, being and their interrelationship. Despite his own declared Neoplatonism and his allegiance to Norman’s vision, both of which argued a determining role for the intellect in the use and value of the senses, Lindsay was developing a different understanding of the relationship between senses and intellect and their constitution of being. In Life Rarely Tells he recalls the influence on his thinking of philosopher Samuel Alexander, ‘with his ideas of body-mind as an example of Emergence, of the arrival of a new synthesis out the elements of a complex organized in a certain pattern. The new quality in the synthesis results from the total organized pattern’ (LRT, p.  482); that is, not from the dominant mind. Lindsay defines the nature of mind according to Alexander’s Emergentism: ‘Mind is thus seen as the emergent quality come from the new complexity of the total physiologico-neural processes in the human body, which involves new possibilities of functioning’ (LRT, p. 482). Rather than separating the different functions of being into distinct areas, mind and body, with mind performing the higher-level function of interpreting and coordinating the bodily (sensory, emotional) engagement with the world, Lindsay now proposes a relational model in which mind and body are considered mutually formative and together create a more complex and dynamic understanding of being. Lindsay adds to this mix of influences the work of British classicist, Jane Ellen Harrison, particularly her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (2010 [1903]) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (2010 [1912]) that guided his reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and from which, he writes, ‘I had gained an indelible conviction of the earth roots of art—the way in which the significant patterns arose from a social concentration of energy, linked with productive work and the organic crises of birth and death, puberty and marriage the moments of initiation-renewal’ (LRT, p.  483). Again, not art as metaphysics but as derived from the fundamental interrelationship between human beings and their world. Under the patronage of his father, Lindsay notes, he ‘tried to over-ride this conviction, but it was there, biding its time for a full reassertion’ (p. 483). However, this was some time away.

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While Lindsay was writing his book on Blake, he was also working on a major study of Nietzsche’s work, Dionysos: Nietzsche contra Nietzsche (1928). It is useful to note here Neil Morpeth’s caution: ‘Readers should not expect the work of a Nietzschean scholar from the second half of the twentieth century—for Lindsay was never a Nietzschean scholar, either in the 1920s or later. Nor should we expect the genius of hindsight. Jack Lindsay was an ideological fan: a naive and ambivalent traveller who duelled and jested with ideas and ideals’ (Morpeth 2000, p. 141). Written in the lyrical mode of the opening to his book on Blake, it addresses the issues he had raised in his 1920 essay on Nietzsche, and more. In his concluding chapter he writes that all art changes us but to read Nietzsche—‘to pass through the wild spaces of Nietzsche’s mind’—is to be ‘born anew, violently. It is to change forever the centres of one’s creativity. And ultimately it is this that matters’ (p. 224). Lindsay shared with his father this preoccupation with creativity as central to being. He identifies himself in this chapter as Dionysian and proclaims a new form of Rabelaisian social organisation: This community will be bound together by its inexplicable laughter, its delicate, witty ecstasy. Our lyricism will have a lightness and richness not yet caught in the poised flesh of dancers, for we shall colour earth with dyes beyond the prism of the senses; and from this vital embrace with the goddess Nietzsche so chastely wooed we shall beget creatures of emotional fantasy undreamed of by the father of the centaurs. (p. 225)

Lindsay’s Nietzsche has begotten a community capable of creating art and life that is beyond the restrictions of everyday existence but held in check by what he calls ‘aesthetic discipline … a divine tact and taste in all things’ (p. 226). From this duality of (Dionysian) wildness and (Apollonian) control comes the courage to face the fragility of the world and our own selves with love (p. 226). For Lindsay there is an important link between Nietzsche and the Romantic poets through their shared belief in the role of the senses in creating knowledge about ourselves and about the world. As noted earlier, this was a response to post-Enlightenment mechanistic thinking that focused on data gathering and classification at the expense of context and complexity. Its most extreme example is the Cartesian modelling of human life or being as a form of clock mechanism or automaton. For the Romantics it signified the reduction of life to abstraction, as represented in

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Blake’s Urizen; for Nietzsche it meant the dominance of Apollonian thinking without the qualifying presence of the Dionysian. Lindsay identified in both the Romantic poets and Nietzsche an iconoclastic response to social, political and religious institutions. Their concern was to develop an understanding of self no longer constrained by the magical thinking of theocratic states or the class strata of bourgeois societies, whether through the reflective self-awareness of the Romantics or the will-­ driven self-organisation of Nietzsche’s vitalist philosophy. When Nietzsche wrote in the ‘Prologue’ to Zarathustra, ‘“This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!”’ (p. 14), he was voicing (through Zarathustra) the notion that modern humanity must find meaning not in the ‘Man’ defined by Christian religions or feudal social structures but a new humanity forging its own ways of being and knowing. Though working with Norman required Jack to renounce his early social and political activism and instead live and work in Sydney as a bohemian philosopher-artist, the Romantic poets, particularly Blake, and Nietzsche remained major influences on his thinking and writing. In his first major study Lindsay focuses on Blake’s poetics, returning repeatedly to his analysis of the thistle image for its description of the ‘four-fold vision’ he identified with the poet. Critically, that vision was not only a way of seeing the world that circumvented the abstract rationalism that Blake signified in Newton; it was also a way of understanding the self as a sensing, feeling, thinking being. This being might be understood as a member of Norman’s artistic elite or as Nietzsche’s dancer or even Shelley’s unacknowledged legislator of the world, though Lindsay decries Shelley’s political writing in this study. For Lindsay in the mid-1920s, it was also Blake the visionary, musing on the old man thistle, and doomed to be misunderstood because his revelations of the nature of his society are so disturbing that people wilfully misconstrue his work.

Conclusion From Blake’s proto-Romantic belief in the power of imagination to enable the individual to break free of conventional ways of seeing the world, the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that Blake cites in his poem, ‘London’, Lindsay took inspiration for his own critical re-imagining of the world and his early political activism. From Blake too came the effort to understand the nature of that imagination; not as fanciful escape but a more complete (sensory, emotional, intellectual) engagement with the world that Lindsay explores

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in his analysis of Blake’s four-fold vision. Lindsay presents Blake’s vision as a move from disengaged abstraction—the hyper-rationalist world of Blake’s Newton, single vision—to embodied connectedness—the relational world of four-fold vision that shows individual beings as constituted through the mutually formative relationships between senses, emotions and intellect, within their own being, between their own being and others, their society and their world. This encompassing vision expanded the study to exploration of not only the nature of being and the relationship between art and being, but also the relationships between art and society and art and the world, and how both impact on being. Yet Lindsay’s focus in this first study reverted to the poetic image. Given Lindsay’s personal history, the decision to minimise the social and political dimensions of Blake’s writing seems to be related primarily to his need to please his father, which meant severing the connection between art and the everyday world. For Norman Lindsay, art was conceived on and raised humanity to a higher, transcendental realm that was free of the social and political conflicts that raged in the world of the body, of mere Existence. Lindsay attempted to adopt his father’s view, including his dualistic (mind/body) conception of being, seeing it as an expression of Neoplatonism. Still, his explanation of Blake’s vision retains traces of the contradictory insights he could not relinquish: Shelley’s Romantic conception of imagination as a defamiliarisation of conventional thought and experience and hence the basis of social critique and political activism; the philosophy of Samuel Alexander that interrelated senses and intellect as formative of individual being and so challenged the conventional dualistic (mind/body) conception of being; Jane Ellen Harrison’s use of cultural anthropology to identify early art as an articulation of the fundamental interconnectedness of early human societies and their world and of the interrelationship, not simple antagonism, of Apollo and Dionysos—order and chaos, mind and body, intellect and senses. And fundamental to all these ideas is Lindsay’s conception of dynamic unity in diversity, of dualisms within unity that are the basis of all knowledge and self-knowledge; a radical interconnectedness of all life and being that had been lost to modern society—or perhaps, more correctly, the understanding of which had been lost. On the centenary of Blake’s death Lindsay embarked on his own journey to understand the nature of being and of art. One of the touchstones for this journey will be the sixteenth-century monk, Giordano Bruno whose last days Lindsay would soon narrate in the novel, Adam of a New

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World (1936) and whose theory of unity is discussed briefly in one of the books Lindsay lists as an early influence, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) (LRT, p.  84). And there are others, new influences and inspirations that replace the dominating effect of his father on Lindsay’s life and work. In many ways, Norman represented an older world—old ways of thinking and acting, old beliefs and values. Half a world away from his father’s influence Lindsay would join the intellectuals and artists battling the rise of fascism in Europe and searching for their own way to be part of this struggle.

PART II

The 1930s; and John Bunyan

Ten years after publishing his first major author-study and half an empire away from home, Jack Lindsay’s John Bunyan: Maker of Myths (1937) was published by Methuen, London. Lindsay had been living and working in England for just over ten years, during which he had experienced successes and failures, personal and professional, that impacted fundamentally on his writing. The decade opened with the closure of his fine art publishing venture, Fanfrolico Press.

Demise of Fanfrolico In December 1930, after lengthy negotiations, Fanfrolico Press was finally declared insolvent, and its assets sold to pay off debts. Norman Lindsay had refused a final request for financial assistance from Jack, which not only caused a long (seven-year) silence between the two, but also alienated his brother Philip who discovered that Jack had used the pregnancy of his partner as an emotional lever in his negotiations with his father. What began as a brave, egotistical, naïve, fantastic assault on the British literary establishment ended as the millionaires dived out of skyscrapers on Wall Street. In a ‘Retrospect’ that Lindsay wrote for the Press in 1931, he gives his own view of what the Press had achieved. He knowingly acknowledges the criticisms that it was ‘immature’ but declares that it was ‘less so than the scattered sensibility of its critics’ (Arnold 2009, p. 155); ‘crude’ but dismisses this as irrelevant to its aims; ‘egocentric’ but relates this to its

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rejection of ‘ethical and social falsities’ (p.  155); and ‘out-of-joint with out-of-joint modernity’, which Lindsay defends as ‘its effort to make a concrete simultaneity of culture, in opposition to an abstract representation of that simultaneity’ (p. 155). Lindsay was unrepentant; aware that the Press was out of step with the literary and artistic establishment but seeing this as the outcome of its mission to eschew values and beliefs that his group believed to be false and to maintain their opposition to abstraction, both aesthetically and philosophically. Instead, he claimed that its value lay with ‘the balance between its human and typographical characteristics’, both being concrete, embodied and engaging. This striving for consistency between artistic practice and fundamental values underpins Lindsay’s work and is why he rejected abstraction, regarding it as a devaluing of embodied being that led to the treatment of human beings as abstract entities to be disenfranchised, abused or destroyed at the whim of those in power. Though Lindsay’s politics was about to undergo a major change, this striving for consistency between practice and values and the rejection of abstraction that he shared with his father Norman continued to motivate his thinking and writing. At the same time, Lindsay’s personal life was difficult and sometimes tempestuous, which had consequences for his work during this period. Soon after arriving in London Lindsay began a relationship with poet and Café Royal habitué Elza de Locre, apparently abandoning any thought of his wife, Janet joining him in London.

Elza de Locre Elza’s history was complicated; even her name was a fabrication. She was born illegitimate as Elsie May Hall in 1897, and later used surnames of partners or the invention ‘de Locre’ that John Arnold (2019) traced to her years spent in Paris with husband, Robert Craig and their daughter, Ruby Chelta known as Robinetta. Elza met Lindsay in London in 1926. She was living alone, having left Craig and Robinetta in Paris and returned to London with the name, de Locre and a fictional French family history. The couple met through a mutual acquaintance and became lovers. After a holiday together on the Îsle de Bréhat, France with P.R. Stephensen and Winifred Lockyer that turned into a three-month sojourn for Lindsay and Elza, the two decided to live together. Even at this early stage of the relationship, however, Lindsay was weighed down by the grief and loss he sensed within her, writing in his autobiography that ‘she had something

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absolutely broken, a submissive fear that attracted outrage and made her the casual prey of any passer-by. Possessed by corruption, she was uncorrupt’ (LRT, p. 545). Even more telling, perhaps, is his recollection of his own response to hearing of her history of betrayals and compromises, including her time living by prostitution: I ran out of the house and wandered along the shore by the pines. But I couldn’t think. I felt only a horror. It was not so much that I made a moral judgment of Elza’s past; for herself I felt only an aching impotent pity. What I couldn’t decide was her nature, her character; and unless I decided that, I could not understand in the least what was my own relation to her. The horror I felt was a horror of the void, of the dark void I touched in her. A void in which all personality broke down and was lost in faceless anguish. She seemed to have no distinctive character at all: to be an image of pure beauty and the wound of ancient wrong. (LRT, p. 544)

Predictably, things did not go well. Elza touched something in Lindsay that was both compelling and destructive; it seems he did not see her as an individual, but as a kind of elemental force. John Arnold (2009) notes this as a popular response to Elza and quotes the description of her in Edith Young’s autobiography, Inside Out (1971): Her eyes were deep set above prominent cheek bones. Their inhumanity was that of a moon creature. This woman who attracted in turn I don’t know how many men, including my husband and Jack Lindsay … captured my imagination to such an extent that I made her the heroine of my novel, Lisa … She became in my novel a symbol of the legendary woman whom all men seek but whom none may possess. (pp. 58–9)

It is not clear from these accounts whether Elza cultivated this allure, or it was the result of a combination of beauty and introspection, though it is apparent that no one knew very much about her. After two years in London, the couple decided to move to the country where Elza could be closer to nature and Elza’s daughter, Robinetta could be with them. They rented a cottage in Alphamstone, Essex, some fifty-­five miles from Central London, with Lindsay spending three days a week in London at the Press, staying overnight in a rented room. Though this arrangement seemed to work well for some time, Lindsay created major problems by engaging in a short-lived affair with Betty May, an artist’s model, dancer, singer and member of London bohemia who was

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known as the ‘Tiger Woman’.1 Though the affair only lasted a matter of weeks, it broke whatever trust Elza had in him and, shortly afterwards, they decided to return to London, a move that cost Elza her custody of Robinetta. In London Elza alienated Lindsay’s family, friends and professional partners, including Kirtley, Stephensen and Jack’s brother Philip, all of whom expressed concern about her possessiveness and controlling behaviour. Some years later, Philip would write to Rose, Norman Lindsay’s second wife and business partner: ‘I can’t understand Bunny [Lindsay’s family nickname]—he just does whatever Elza tells him to do—& this mad—I mean genuinely mad—insane—lunatic—not just silly—fiendishly lunatic …’ (Arnold 2019, p. 18). John Arnold relates a story he was told by musician and critic, Julian Russell who was in London when the pair were living there together, ‘that Jack would come home and find Elza standing on a chair with a rope around her neck. She was not really intending to suicide, but wanted to make Jack feel bad about leaving her alone and thus increase her hold over him’ (2019, p. 17). Elza had her own successes during this period, publishing two collections of poetry: I See the Earth (1928) and Older than Earth (1930), which was the last publication by Fanfrolico Press. The last few operating years of the Press were mostly spent at a house in West Hampstead where Lindsay set up the hand-presses used to produce many of the later, less heavily illustrated Fanfrolico books. These years were difficult, with Lindsay working in every area of the business as writer, translator, publisher, designer, manager and sometimes as printer. After the closure of the Press, Jack and Elza moved to Forge Cottage at Onslow Green, near Dunmore in Essex. While there Elza began proceedings to regain custody of her daughter, a difficult and costly process that ended with Robert Craig being awarded custody. Elza refused to ‘share’ her daughter and so did not avail herself of the generous visitation rights offered by Craig. Afterwards Lindsay and Elza spent most of the years, 1930–34 in the Southwest counties of England. They lived in extreme poverty, often moving house in the middle of the night to avoid paying the rent and with only 1  May is said to have run with the infamous criminal Apache street gang in Paris (where she received her nickname, Tiger Woman) and also in France to have had a combative relationship with occultist, Aleister Crowley. She tells her own story in her autobiography: Betty May, Tiger Woman: My Story (1929). Lindsay is not mentioned by name in the book, though May describes the bohemian scene at the Café Royal in London where they met.

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Lindsay’s writing to sustain them during the difficult economic period following the Great Depression. Elza became increasingly unstable and violent, and Lindsay noted that for years he slept badly for fear that she would attack him during the night. During this time, he met Elza’s mother and learned that her (de Locre) French history was purely a romantic invention, covering up her abusive early life. By then, however, nothing could salvage their relationship. Later in The Fullness of Life he wrote of the fear that disabled him at this time: ‘When I took the course of accepting Elza’s distractions, I was in extreme fear, fear of the world and its cashnexus, fear of her and the effects on myself if I drove her to suicide’ (p. 100). However, he came to recognise that, in continuing the relationship, ‘I made her responsible for what happened. … I was evading my fear of the world by putting it on her’ (p.  100). The couple made several attempts to live apart, but Lindsay writes that on each occasion Elza fell ill and called on him for support. In the end they stayed together as (barely friendly) housemates until 1941, when Lindsay was called-up for military service, soon after which Elza voluntarily went into a psychiatric home where she died of cancer (p. 114). For Lindsay it was a period of intense introspection, during which he used psychoanalytic theory and Marxist ideas (though he had not yet made a systematic study of Marx’s work) to try to understand both his own personal history and major social and political events. One result of this was his conversion to vegetarianism, which he aligned with his evolving socialist politics; the other was a fundamental shift in his understanding of the role of art and the artist.

Vegetarianism Lindsay’s vegetarianism was initially a matter of necessity in the penniless wandering years, yet in typical style he was driven to understand and theorise its consequences for him. He describes a particular occasion when a local farmer had gifted a couple of rabbits to them as a neighbourly gesture. Confronted with the reality of having to skin and disembowel the animals before cooking, Lindsay found himself unable to proceed. He contemplates the economy of death on which a meat-eating society is based, particularly when social organisation has reached a point where meat protein is no longer essential to the diet: ‘One’s symbiosis with the earth is therefore in terms of unceasing violence and murder; and one

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knows, deep in one’s being, that one lives only by a system of blood-­ victims’ (TFOL, p. 89). Vegetarianism became for Lindsay a point of resistance to dominant conservative social forces, and he writes that the choice was both moral— the refusal to base one’s diet on ‘making endless victims out of other forms of animal life, my kin’ (TFOL, p. 89)—and philosophical as it ‘involved the question of a way of life in all its aspects, of one’s relation to nature and other forms of life’ (p. 90). Lindsay aligns this with the refusal to use other people and argues: ‘To achieve freedom and harmony both inside and outside oneself one must end the aggressive and parasitizing attitudes expressed by eating one’s fellow animals’ (p. 90). And he concludes: ‘A communist society which is not vegetarian seems to me a hopeless contradiction’ (p. 90). Lindsay remained a vegetarian for the rest of his life.

Art and Politics During this period, he also began to revise his understanding of the artwork, wresting it from the hands of the art-elite championed by his father: Art still had its active role, but was not the exclusive source of values. I was not yet clear as to the role of productive activity and the relation of art to its processes, but I was beginning to glimpse some sort of close link, a dynamic union between the two levels. (TFOL, p. 82)

This is a major break with Norman’s philosophy, which argued that only art could generate elevated thought and action and foreshadows Lindsay’s detailed investigation of artistic practice. He goes on to write of his developing critical methodology: The method meant an attempt to see how the central conflict worked out at all levels, political, legal, social, religious, cultural, personal—each owning a certain autonomy, especially with regard to its forms of expression. And to bring all these aspects together in a dynamic whole, which was both the hidden core of conflict and the spirit of the poet struggling to understand himself and his society. (TFOL, pp. 83–4)

This understanding of the artwork as located within and interacting with a range of institutional and discursive practices and including the specificities of its creator’s views and practice, runs counter to mainstream literary

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criticism at this time, which argued for the complete dislocation of the artwork from artist and context. To his method Lindsay would also soon bring his reading of the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Communist Party of Great Britain On moving back to London Lindsay discovered that many of his friends (including Edgell Rickword, Douglas Garman and Alec Brown) had become communists and many had joined the Communist Party. Lindsay would soon join them, although at first his constant travel between London and Elza’s cottages in the country prevented him from being able to attend regular meetings. Recently released MI5 files include a microfilm copy of Lindsay’s Party membership card, listing his address as Quarry Cottage, Ashour Farm, nr Tonbridge, Kent and dated 1936; his Party branch is given as St. John’s Wood (NAUK, KV 2/3252, 31/5/50). In The Fullness of Life Lindsay records: ‘In the May 1936 issue of Left Review I signalised my arrival on the Left by the publication of a long poem Not English? … in which I eagerly sought to set out my new uprushing vision of our revolutionary history’ (p. 106).

Publications 1931–37 At the same time, he continued his extraordinarily prolific writing career and between 1931, after Fanfrolico Press had folded, and 1937, when he published his next major author-study, he wrote twenty-three books, issued by some of the most reputable publishing houses in London including John Lane, Mathews and Marrot, Nicholson and Watson, Chapman and Hall, Lawrence and Wishart, Golden Cockerell, Jonathan Cape and Routledge and Sons. His future as a writer seemed secure. Most of the books Lindsay published in this period were historical novels, inspired by his brother Philip’s success with the genre and its popularity at the time. Many were based on Lindsay’s classical knowledge and set in ancient Greece, Rome or Roman-Egypt, including the fictional trilogy Rome for Sale (1934), Caesar Is Dead (1934) and Last Days with Cleopatra (1935) and the Egyptian story, Wanderings of Wenamen (1936). He also published a translation of The Golden Ass by Apuleius (1932) and historical studies, The Romans (1935) and Marc Antony: His World and His Contemporaries (1936). Lindsay also began to write contemporary novels, the first being Time-please! (1932), co-written with Elza de Locre under

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the pseudonym Ailsa Lindsay, and books for children including historical fictions, Runaway (1935) and Rebels of the Goldfields (1936). This was the beginning of Lindsay’s life as an independent writer; his publication and livelihood dependent on producing books that had a ready audience.

Verse-Declamations In the 1930s Lindsay also wrote two verse-declamations that were published by New Left Press: Who Are the English? (1936) and On Guard for Spain (1937). These works signal the major change that took place in his politics and writing. No longer financially dependent on Norman, Lindsay returned to the socialist ideals and communist aspirations of his student days that had been revitalised by the horror he and Kirtley felt on encountering the slum areas of London in 1926. That first impression should not be underestimated. Arnold writes: ‘their first impression—the dirt, the grime and the crowded tenements along the Thames estuary—remained with Kirtley for the rest of his life’ (2009, p. 51), and he quotes the annotation Kirtley wrote in a copy of Volume II of Lindsay’s autobiography, Fanfrolico and After (1962): ‘I shudder still when I recall it all’ (Arnold 2009, p. 280). Lindsay gives an equally vivid account in his autobiography, Life Rarely Tells (at the beginning of Part II, to which Kirtley was responding): The weather was dingy, the docks lacked the spaciously enchanting hurly-­ burly of Marseilles, the train from Tilbury swung us through ever worse slum backyards. Liverpool Street was a cavern cobwebbed with smoke and foul with the smell of decaying fish. Everything grew smaller and dirtier. We had never imagined that men could live in such a dwarfed and sootied world. A taxi drew us out of the station catacombs along narrow bedraggled streets. London. (LRT, p. 504)

Their response to their surroundings is a mix of depression and chagrin: We stared out at Fleet Street and the Strand, confirmed in our impression of a grey diminutive world, wholly lacking in dignity or charm, parochial and constricted. The impact of London so depressed us that we did not dare speak of it for days; above all we felt fooled and humiliated, To have come so far for this. (LRT, p. 504)

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After checking into their hotel, they ventured out for an evening walk, only to be shocked by the poverty they see around them: ‘I felt the persons of the many beggars as the visible sign of an inhumanity that hit me harder than I knew’ (LRT, p. 505). Poverty in the temperate climate, blue skies and lush verdure of Brisbane and Sydney had not prepared them for their confrontation with industrialised, imperial Britain and its entrenched class system. This experience reawakened in Lindsay the left-wing allegiances of his University and W.E.A. days. His work with P.R. Stephensen at Fanfrolico Press introduced him to the work of Marx and began his transformation into a Marxist critic. In the late 1930s Lindsay, along with other left-wing artists and intellectuals, began to protest the rise of far right-wing and fascist ideologies. For the Communist Party of Great Britain this was part of their Popular Front Policy, whereby they formed a united bloc with supporters of the Labour, Liberal and Independent Labour Parties, as well as dissident members of the Conservative Party, to oppose the Conservative government’s policy of Appeasement with Nazi Germany. Lindsay’s response was to trace and reinforce the dissident voices that he had learned about at university, at the W.E.A. from T.C. Witherby and Jim Quinton, from V.  Gordon Childe, and from his own reading. This research structures Who Are the English? (CP, pp. 272–287; SP, pp. 13–22), first published as Not English?, a chronicle of English peasant and working-­ class leaders and movements including John Ball, Jack Cade, Wicliff (Wycliffe), the Lollards, Anabaptists, Levellers, Chartists and Socialists that, he argues, have shaped the character of the English people even more powerfully than mainstream histories and leaders. For example, when a Women’s chorus sing the famous verse by John Ball, ‘When Adam delved, when Adam delved, and Eve span, / who was then the gentleman?’ a male voice responds, ‘You are not English, peasant,/ your ruling class has said it’ (CP, p. 276). With this challenge Lindsay begins his new narrative of the development of the English character based on the voices and actions not of the victors, the rulers, but of the dissenters, the workers, that leads to visions such as this: This morning is of men as well as light Its unity is born from the sweat of mingled toil, It springs from the earth of action, It is ours and England. We who made it, we are making another England, and the loyalty learned

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in mine and factory begets our truth, this compact linking us to past and future. (CP, p. 286)

Lindsay’s verse-declamation was performed around the country as a way of gathering supporters to the anti-fascist cause. At the same time Lindsay was also doing the research for a trilogy of books set in England—1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), Lost Birthright (1939) and Men of Forty Eight (1941)—that all describe popular resistance against oppression. He had also recently completed the research for two new books, a biographical study of Giordano Bruno, Adam of a New World (1936) and a study of religious emotion, The Anatomy of Spirit (1937). This research was also preparation for Lindsay’s second major author-­study, of seventeenth-century writer and Nonconformist preacher, John Bunyan.

CHAPTER 4

John Bunyan, Dissenter

Jack Lindsay’s study, John Bunyan: Maker of Myths (1937) is strikingly different from his first author-study. Gone is the belles lettres opening of William Blake: Creative Will and the Poetic Image (1927) with its story of the poet musing on the natural world and its transformation into art. Instead, the introduction is grounded and scholarly, with a touch of Tolkien: Near the hamlet of Harrowden a small cottage stood at the foot of a slight hill, between two streams. The spire of St John’s Church in Bedford could be seen from the top of a green hillock to the south. In this cottage, late in November 1628, John Bunyan was born. (JB, p. 1)

In the ‘Foreword’ Lindsay describes his book as a biography, though its focus is on Bunyan’s writing: ‘I have tried to analyse the myth-making faculty in Bunyan and to show how his allegories take their place in the world of symbolism and myth’ (p. 1). He identifies the innovative feature of his study as ‘the attempt to relate Bunyan’s work in particular, and the protestant movement in general, to the social forces from which they sprang’ (p. 1). Lindsay is no longer avoiding the social context of the artwork but sees it as key to understanding the significance of the author and his work. Lindsay’s literary analysis has moved from the aesthetic focus of his early Blake book to an emergent form of Marxist criticism.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_4

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Situating Bunyan: Class The book opens by locating Bunyan both geographically and by class. Bunyan’s family, Lindsay writes, once had considerable social status as part of the yeomanry, but they now have only the house in which he was born: ‘Doubtless they were one of the many yeoman families whom the great capitalist wave, given momentum by the seizure of Church lands, engulfed’ (p. 2). Lindsay provides some family history, including a description of the professional role taken by the wife of sixteenth-century innkeeper, Thomas Bunyan evidenced by the number of times that she, not her husband, was fined for over-charging. Lindsay notes that working women of this time frequently took equal responsibility in the family business: ‘And very strong-minded and vigorous they usually appear’ (p. 2). He compares this with the ‘closed-in, domestic slave’ notion of the feminine found in Victorian times, observing: ‘Man was considered as patriarchally superior to woman; but in actual daily life among the working-classes there was something of an effective equality between the sexes, or at least a chance of give-and-take’ (p. 2). Lindsay identifies as a key factor in Bunyan’s life his lack of a formal education, the result of his family’s poverty, noting that the ‘question of education was one about which he was especially touchy’ (p. 4). Bunyan was disadvantaged by his lack of formal education in several ways: his difficulty in dealing with the legal proceedings in which he became embroiled for many years as a dissenting preacher and also when it was used to ridicule and belittle him as both preacher and author. Lindsay suggests that he might be seen as a proletarian writer except that he wrote in pre-industrial times and concludes: ‘He is a writer of the transition, proletarian in that he writes from the viewpoint of the dispossessed, pre-industrialist in that he still clings to a medieval concept of reconciliation, petty-bourgeois in that he is tied down to an individualist ethic’ (p. 5). The language of politics had entered Lindsay’s literary analysis, confirming his abandonment of Norman’s anti-political philosophy. For Lindsay the contradictory combination of medieval communal and modern individualist ideas and beliefs within Bunyan’s work made him an important voice at a time of social, political and philosophical change. To this he adds a discussion of the role of religion in Bunyan’s society, with reference to its political function and use.

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Religion In seventeenth-century England, all citizens were required by law to attend church a minimum number of times each year and the Church of England was mandated as the official (state) religion. Lindsay explores Bunyan’s entry into religious life after his marriage, the zeal with which he pursued his work as preacher and then as writer, the long prison terms he suffered for Nonconformist (Protestant but not Church of England) preaching; and his most famous publications including Grace Abounding (1666), The Pilgrim’s Progress (1677), The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) and The Holy War (1682). Lindsay’s major interest in these works is how Bunyan uses the religious discourse of his time to articulate his own journey through the complex social and political landscape of the seventeenth century with its Civil Wars, religious battles (between Catholic and Protestant, and between different forms of Protestantism), and the continuing rise of capitalism. … what he did succeed in doing was to transcribe his states of mind in terms of the contemporary religious idiom, the only idiom in which he had a chance of formulating his problems. Because of the strength of his persistence, he brought himself into the heart of the ideological storm of his age … (p. 8)

Lindsay identifies religion in Bunyan’s time not as a separate spiritual domain that existed independently of civil society but as a social institution alongside others such as the parliament, the law, education, all of which have their internal contradictions and problems and all of which fundamentally shaped the lives of those who live within them. He was particularly interested in the hold that religion exerted over the whole person—sensory, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. As an example, he quotes a passage from The Journal (1911) by George Fox, Bunyan’s Quaker contemporary, in which he describes his childhood observations of immoral adult behaviour and determination not to behave the same way. Lindsay notes: ‘It reveals, in thinly veiled form, the emotion of shame and outrage at the sensuality of the parental world’ (p. 13): “In my very young years I had a gravity and staidness of mind and spirit not usual in children; insomuch that when I saw old men carry themselves

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lightly and wantonly towards each other, I had a dislike thereof raised in my heart, and said within myself, ‘If I ever come to be a man, surely I shall not do so, nor be so wanton’… people being strangers to the covenant of life with God, they eat and drink to make themselves wanton with the creatures, devouring them upon their own lusts and living in all filthiness, loving foul ways, and devouring the creation; and all this in the world, in the pollutions thereof, without God: therefore I was to shun all such.” (p. 14)

For Lindsay, this passage demonstrates how religion intimately affects the ways in which individuals experience the world, other people and their own being. For this reason, he argues, religion can be used to deflect attention from the social and political causes of injustice; to re-frame them in religious or moral terms and locate them not in social and political inequalities but in the behaviours of individuals: Thus does the religious emotion feed on the sense of irresponsibility in the adult, parental world. The lusts which are repudiated are conceived as the essential forces of cruelty and oppression. The dark injustices of the world are seen, not in relation to the social whole and its distorting contradictions, but as incidental expressions of lust. (p. 14)

The individual who experiences injustice is thereby directed to examine their own behaviour to determine how they brought this disaster upon themselves, while observers are positioned to view the sufferer as having created their own problems. This is the beginning of Lindsay’s exploration of the way that the social bond between people may be displaced by an individualist religious discourse that replaces the connectedness of that bond with subjugation to a deity: ‘The baffled sense of social unity flows into the imagination of a Perfect Father’ (p.  14). For Lindsay it replaces relationships of mutual concern and obligation with the kind of power relationship associated in Freudian theory with difficult father-son interactions. He explores these ideas through his analysis of Bunyan’s relationship with his own father.

Trauma After the deaths of his mother in June 1644 and his sister Margaret in July the same year, Bunyan’s father re-married (his third marriage) just one month later. Lindsay writes: ‘We must try to estimate the effect on Bunyan

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of the shock of loss followed so hastily by his father’s re-marriage’ (p. 7). Bunyan was then sixteen and the Civil War was raging. By the end of the year, he was in the Parliamentary Army ready to fight with the forces of Cromwell against the Royalists, whom his father supported. Bunyan does not describe his response to his father’s re-marriage, but Lindsay infers his emotional state from the descriptions of his turmoil later recorded in his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding: … we can deduce from that story the intensity of the recoil. So wildly, so irresistibly did the tempest of pang and loss burst on him—with so passionate a precision is he able to record its flux and return, the pattern of its involvement in agony and release—that we can deduce the relation of the religious sense of humiliation to the facts of his family life. He was shaken to the roots. Mother and sister were borne to rot in Elstow churchyard, and the father, forgetting them, found another bedmate. (p. 9)

The eloquence of this description seems deeply personal, perhaps to Lindsay as much as to Bunyan. Yet Grace Abounding confirms that Bunyan, too, was a troubled soul. Lindsay notes that Bunyan describes his childhood as one of rebellion; troubled for years by nightmares but also ringleader of the village lads in ‘all manner of vice and ungodliness’ (GA, p.  9). Bunyan described his experience as akin to the conflict of good and evil, or God and the Devil, explaining that he was so traumatised that he was prepared to be a devil if it meant no longer feeling so tormented. To Lindsay both are figures for the father, with whom he was in conflict and from whom he, at the same time, desired approval. Throughout the study Lindsay uses this Freudian, Oedipal reading of Bunyan’s relationship with his father to explain the intensity of emotion that Bunyan brought to the religious, social and political conflicts in his life and his writings about them. At the same time Lindsay reiterated that this psychological formation is fundamentally social, not individual: ‘For it cannot be too much emphasized, to correct the common psycho-analytical error, that the sanction of the father-image, though mirrored in family experience, derives at every point from the totality of social experience embodied in the cultural level of the group to which the father belongs’ (p. 13). For Lindsay Bunyan’s youthful rebellion was generated by his family’s social decline and its atavistic aspirations to status, historical resentment, and unachievable desires (for education, independence, recognition). Particularly difficult for

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Bunyan Lindsay argues, was the contradictory longing to belong to the rising middle class—or at least have its recognition and approval—and the historical resentment against that class for its role in the enclosures that stripped his family of their land and independence. Lindsay reads this through the lens of the Oedipus complex as ‘a violent wish to attack the authority-image and yet at the same time to find reconciliation with that image on a higher level’ (p.  10). And again he is careful to insist on a psycho-social rather than psycho-analytical reading: ‘since these personal conflicts did not and could not take place in a void, in a dimension of abstract human nature, Bunyan’s work becomes a definition of the historical processes of his age’ (p. 11). To this history Lindsay adds one further element—the development of Bunyan’s political understanding.

Politics Lindsay argues that Bunyan’s experience in the Parliamentary Army (1646–47) during the Civil War exposed him to political ideas and beliefs he would not otherwise have encountered. He quotes from an account by conservative Presbyterian, Richard Baxter of the iconoclasm and Nonconformity he encountered as a soldier: ‘When I came to the army among Cromwell’s soldiers I found a new face of things I never dreamt of. I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that which intimated their intention to subvert both Church and State’ (p. 23). Lindsay suggests that the Civil War provided the arena for new thinking: ‘Men asked questions they had never thought of asking before; they discovered the truth of relationships that had long lain masked’ (p. 23). Hence, Lindsay writes, ‘As early as 1641 Edmund Waller had told parliament how necessary was hierarchical religion for the suppression of the masses’ (p.  23). Lindsay quotes Waller’s reasoning: I look upon episcopacy [government of a Church by bishops] as a counterscarp, or outwork, which, if it be taken by this assault of the people, and, withal, this mystery once revealed, ‘That we must deny them nothing when they ask it thus in troops,’ we may, in the next place, have as hard a task to defend our property, as we have lately had to recover it from the Prerogative. If by multiplying hands and petitions, they prevail for an equality in things

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ecclesiastical, the next demand perhaps may be Lex Agraria,1 equality in things temporal. (pp. 23–4)

A religion that works through hierarchy provides the people with a model of governance that keeps them in a subservient role, ruled by those with greater power and influence with the added coercion that it is mandated by the divine. If the people discover they can challenge that model by force or by popular opinion, Waller predicts, then the ruling classes may lose political control and may have to defend their property, including the land that they seized through enclosures. In other words, the value of an episcopal church to the ruling classes is not moral or spiritual, but political; it validates their right to rule, seemingly with the authority of the divine. English Presbyterians were fundamentally opposed to episcopacy, yet many shared Baxter’s concern at the rebellious opinions expressed by Independents in the army: ‘The Presbyterians, representing the bourgeois proper, raged against the Independents even more than the royalists’ (p. 24). Lindsay notes also that a petition by Lancashire Presbyterians of 1645 opposing a religious Toleration Act used familiar tropes to argue against any form of independence and recognition for those they identified with the lower classes: ‘A Toleration would be the putting of a sword into a madman’s hands, a cup of poison into the hands of a child, a letting loose of madmen with firebrands in their hands …’ (quoted p. 24). For Lindsay, this demonstrated the close connections between political and religious movements and solidified class identities within the state. This connection had already been demonstrated in the battles within Protestantism over ritual: 1  Waller refers to the land reform law, or Lex Agraria, of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (133–121 BCE): ‘The land reform law, or lex agraria, of Tiberius … applied only to former public land, ager publicus, which had been usurped and concentrated in the hands of large landholders. Land concentration reduced the number of owners and hence the number of citizens and those eligible to serve in the army. In addition, such concentration was accompanied by a shift from cultivation to grazing, which reduced employment and increased the poverty of the peasants, producing a crisis. The motives of the reformers continue to be debated, but it would appear that concern for the poor and political stability were major factors.’ Encyclopaedia Brittanica online, viewed 18/4/20 at https://www.britannica.com/ topic/land-reform/History-of-land-reform#ref320303.

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The Protestants rightly saw in ritualism the ideological wedge of feudal modes of thought and action. Because men could not objectify these emotions with full freedom, they seized on to trivial aspects and magnified them into central issues and causes. Thus, the Puritans were ready to die in protest against the wearing of surplices by clergy. (p. 40)

Religion was a mode of political action, of class allegiance and of rebellion. Though Bunyan reports religious feelings and anxieties as a child, his spiritual upbringing had been quite conventional. Returning home after his term in the Army he would embark on a prolonged spiritual journey that was also intensely personal and political.

Marriage Two years after his return from the war Bunyan married a pious woman and began to attend church regularly. In Grace Abounding Bunyan explains that although he and his wife were very poor, they owned two books left to his wife by her father: Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety (1611). Dent was a Puritan cleric, while Bayly was a bishop of the Church of England. Bunyan records that the books had little direct effect on him (‘they did not reach my heart’ (GA, p. 9, para.16)) but did awaken a kind of spiritual curiosity. With the energy typical of Bunyan, he embraced the religious life of the local Church of England chapel: So that, because I knew no better, I fell in very eagerly with the religion of the times; to wit, to go to church twice a day, and that too with the foremost; and there should very devoutly, both say and sing as others did, yet retaining my wicked life; but withal, I was so overrun with a spirit of superstition, that I adored, and that with great devotion, even all things, both the high place, priest, clerk, vestment, service, and what else belonging to the church; counting all things holy that were therein contained, and especially the priest and clerk most happy, and without doubt, greatly blessed, because they were the servants, as I then thought, of God, and were principal in the holy temple, to do His work therein. (GA, p. 9, para.16)

Embedded in this account are the concerns that would subsequently lead Bunyan away from the state-sanctioned Church. The enthusiasm that saw him attending church twice daily argues a high level of engagement with the ritual of the Anglican Church and its ministers, though retaining what

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Bunyan described as a sinful inner life. That contradiction between the appearance of piety and inner venality led Bunyan to reject as superstition the theatricality and spiritual hierarchy of the Church of England. Lindsay’s analysis of Bunyan’s religious transformation, which was the basis of both Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, continues his exploration of religion as the means by which political and associated economic ideologies were propagated and took root in people’s everyday lives; not only in their thinking but also in their sensory and emotional being. For Lindsay, Protestantism represented a move away from a feudal society that was supported by a highly ritualised religion (Catholicism) to a bourgeois capitalist society that was based in rationalist, evidence-based thinking and practised by private or individual devotion (Protestantism): Abstractly considered, Protestantism is no more rational than Catholicism; but, considered in relation to historical process, the triumph of Protestantism was a triumph for rationalism. The Calvinist might be personally as intolerant as any Catholic; but he stood as the ideologist of forces which by carrying capitalism into free-trade were to act as powerful solvents of irrationality. (p. 40)

Lindsay allows that many Protestant clergy did not support capitalism, despite the co-emergence of Protestant and capitalist ideologies: ‘Protestants like Bishop Latimer, or Thomas Becon and Robert Crowley, courageously denounced root and branch every manifestation of capitalism; they uncompromisingly declared that there was no possible fate for the rackrenters, enclosers, speculators, and profiteers, except damnation’ (p. 43). The result, Lindsay argues, was that their ‘simple humanity … had to be crowded out; a different ideology, one which sanctified success, had to be created’ (p. 44). By the time Bunyan was attempting to find his way to God, Lindsay argues, Protestantism had forged a new identity as the religion of the virtuous hard worker and success was seen as not only a material but also a spiritual aspiration and achievement.

Soul-Searching In Harrowden Bunyan had not reached a point of peace and stability from which he could contemplate the notion of success; he continued his spiritual struggle. As he illustrates in Grace Abounding, Bunyan would explore an issue that was troubling him, reach a conclusion and seem to have

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resolved the problem, and then doubt himself, doubt that God could love a sinner such as he, so find himself back where he started, examining whether it was possible for him to earn God’s love. As an example, Lindsay relates Bunyan’s description in Grace Abounding of his renunciation of bellringing. Deciding that he should no longer participate as he enjoyed it too much, Bunyan goes to watch the bells being rung. However, he then decides one of the bells might fall on him, so he stands under a thick beam. Then it occurs to him that one of the bells might come loose and hit the beam and kill him. So, he goes to the steeple door to listen, but then fears the steeple will fall on him (GA, p. 13, paras 33–4). The guilt and anxiety at the basis of such a fantasy is indicative for Lindsay of the hold religion was able to exert over (the embodied being of) the believer. Lindsay explains Bunyan’s fears using Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex: ‘Underneath the direct castration fear of the father-vengeance, the fear of the murder-phallos, there is the revolt against authority which derives its sanction from the sale of flesh and blood, hiding from the truth of relationship behind the money-symbol’ (p.  55). He sees this conflict reflected in Bunyan’s rejection of the religion of his (Royalist) father, the Church of England. Bunyan’s reasons were not simply personal, however; Bunyan left the State Church because he regarded it as corrupt. The Church’s organisational structure and its pomp and splendour were financed by parishioners who, he argued, are thereby coerced to pay for their spiritual guidance. His revolt was against the Church’s compromised role as shepherd of the people. Again, Lindsay insists on a psycho-social reading of Bunyan’s experience: ‘We mistake neurosis entirely if we probe only for physical-personal imagery, without understanding that it is the skein of social relationships which in the final analysis conditions that imagery and its effects’ (p. 55). For Lindsay, Bunyan experiences this trauma as spiritual rather than emotional because of the prominence of religion in seventeenth-century England. It was therefore one of the key means by which Bunyan understands and expresses his being. Lindsay notes the skill with which Bunyan described his bodily experience, quoting from Grace Abounding: Then was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at sometimes I could, for whole days together, feel my very body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that

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should fall on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such a clogging and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if my breast bone would have split in sunder; then I thought of that concerning Judas, who, by his falling headlong, burst asunder, and all his bowels gushed out (Acts 1:18). (GA p. 40, para.164)

In contemplating the horror of committing the unforgivable sin of despairing of God’s love and gift of grace, Bunyan mobilises imagery that is sensuous and immediate, engaging readers physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually with his story. As Lindsay goes on to discuss, Bunyan’s great strength as a writer was his ability to map so intimately onto individual embodied being the consequences of trauma. The other great interest for Lindsay in Bunyan’s writing is that he articulated so clearly the political struggles of his time. In his work we witness not simply the dominance of one ideology, but the struggle of one committed, intelligent, but relatively uneducated and powerless man to work through the different positions and belief systems available and to arrive at a resolution. In Grace Abounding, Lindsay notes, Bunyan turns repeatedly to a Biblical story that acts as a touchstone for his internal debates: the story of Esau and Jacob and the lost birthright.

The Lost Birthright Esau is the elder twin of Jacob who, returning home from an unsuccessful hunt, tired and hungry, is tempted or tricked (depending on your reading) by his younger brother into relinquishing his birthright for a meal Jacob has prepared. The birthright entitled him to a larger share of the inheritance left by their father, Isaac. Later Jacob tricks their blind and dying father into bestowing upon him the greater blessing owed to the first son by dressing in such a way that Isaac believes he is Esau. This story is mentioned in fifteen paragraphs of Grace Abounding and is the only tale to which Bunyan returns repeatedly, beginning about half-way through the book. Lindsay’s analysis of the social meanings of Bunyan’s spiritual ruminations begins by exploring a section of the book, paragraphs 133–139, just before his first mention of Esau where Bunyan describes a terrible temptation:

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And that was, To sell and part with this most blessed Christ, to exchange Him for the things of this life, for anything. (133) … still the temptation would come, Sell Christ for this, or sell Christ for that; sell Him, sell Him. (135) Sometimes it would run in my thoughts, not so little as a hundred times together, Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him … (136) … as fast as the destroyer said, Sell Him; I will not, I will not, I will not, I will not; no, not for thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds. (137) … I was, at other times, most fiercely assaulted with this temptation, to sell and part with Christ; the wicked suggestion still running in my mind, Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him, sell Him, sell Him, as fast as a man could speak; against which also, in my mind, as at other times, I answered, No, no, not for thousands, thousands, thousands, at least twenty times together. (139)

Lindsay argues that the reason Bunyan’s temptation took the form of selling is ‘the mesh of capitalist values in which he is caught’ that form ‘the basis on which society is organized’ (p. 66). He continues: ‘What attacks Bunyan is the cruelty of the world which is destroying his sense of the human bond. It is the flaw in the conviction of unity that disquiets and obsesses him. For it is that flaw which is destroying his hope of happiness’ (p. 66). Bunyan’s own convictions, Lindsay argues, are based on a notion of unity, a oneness between people and between people and the earth, that this new capitalist world has destroyed. It has reduced people to abstractions so that it can sell them, literally and metaphorically, and it has destroyed the bond between people and nature, which it now treats as a resource to be exploited. Lindsay notes that the land is used by Bunyan as ‘the symbol of God’s enduring grace’ and yet ‘the land of the Bunyans has been sold; they are dispossessed, at the mercy of the world’ (p. 66). Furthermore, ‘it is the sellers of God who are the men that succeed. It is they who have sold the land; and the land, the mother-earth, is the secure refuge’ (p. 67). The rising bourgeois class and the decaying aristocracy buy and sell (or seize) land to secure their fortunes; the Church of England barters scripture for alms; working people are forced to sell their bodies to live. In contemplating this loss of birthright, Lindsay argues, Bunyan is searching for a way to describe the world around him and his problem in finding a place within it, and the closest he finds is the notion of selling; he is being pressured to sell out—his God, his principles, the bonds between people and between people and the land that hold society together.

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Lindsay notes also that the term ‘birthright’ was crucial to the rhetoric of many of the anti-royalist and revolutionary forces during the Civil Wars. The Lilburnian revolutionaries who had a major presence in the Parliamentary Army used the notion of a lost birthright to demand rights for the common people and one of Lilburne’s major books was titled England’s Birthright justified against all arbitrary usurpation, whether regal or parliamentary, or under what vizor soever (1645). This book demanded freedom for all, which went far beyond bourgeois democratic sentiments. It also identified specific relationships between religion and politics: ‘Lilburne pointed out that the Episcopalian or hierarchical Church was intimately bound up with the economic monopoly-forms that absolutism was developing, “the one helping the other to enslave the people”’ (p. 73). Works by sixteenth-century Puritan and social reformer, Robert Crowley had already begun to develop this criticism of capitalism and its practices. In The Way to Wealth (1550) Crowley criticised the government’s failure, under pressure from the wealthy, to limit the enclosures that turned vast tracts of public land into private property; and in An informacion and Peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore Commons of this Realme (1548) he attacked the tyranny of the landlords and capitalists of his time. The common land, the people’s birthright, had been seized, stolen, by the wealthy and greedy, whose official religion was the Church of England. This concatenation of political, economic, and religious practices, Lindsay argues, bred the Dissenting movements that Bunyan encountered in the Army. Again, Lindsay refers to the history of the Bunyan family who had suffered the debilitating effects of land enclosure, both financially and socially: The Bunyans had lost their part in God’s promise, the land; they were cut off from God’s inheritance, the human bond. Not that they would gain promise and inheritance back if they were to get hold of a piece of land again. For security did not come from merely holding the land; it came from holding the land in terms of the social bond. The bond had been broken. (p. 79)

In Lindsay’s analysis, Bunyan does not simply want to reacquire land—he is not Esau wanting back his birthright and his blessing; rather he is witness to the abolition of a set of established social relationships and their replacement by a mercenary economic system that denies people their

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humanity, reducing them to their labour-power, bodies to be bought and sold. For Lindsay, Bunyan bodily experienced the agony of that social and class transformation; his continuing struggle with the story of Esau reflecting his internal debate about how to deal with a situation over which he has no control. Should he too sell his birthright—the birthright of his people—and join the bourgeoisie? Lindsay argues that Bunyan came to a religious accommodation with capitalism by removing himself entirely from the political sphere. His repeated return to the Esau story represents his desire to sell his birthright and join the bourgeoisie: he is tempted, and he resists, repeatedly: ‘he was tearing out of himself all the tendrils of emotion that led back to political action’ (p. 84). Finally Bunyan feels himself free of the need to take part in the battle: ‘When at last he felt utterly broken, when the Esau-text no longer had the power to torment him, he was able to make the final step into the conviction of grace’ (p. 84). Just after his final meditation on the Esau story Bunyan describes how he came to an understanding of grace: … suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought withal, I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand … I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. (Heb.13.8)

Bunyan stopped struggling, acknowledged his faith and accepted God’s grace, which included an understanding that his righteousness comes from God. It is God who determines that he is righteous, not a struggle that he must endlessly wage within himself. Bunyan found peace. Lindsay notes that this radical acceptance is often related to the notion of election or predestination, as proposed by Calvin, whereby a selected few received God’s grace and were chosen to be saved. For Lindsay this Calvinist notion of grace is ‘partly a compensation for the lack of unity, partly an ideological disguise of the fact that in class-society many are called and few chosen. The masses go under; a few men are on top’ (p. 83). Worldly success became a moral good and worldly failure a moral weakness or evil, an indicator of poor character, while the evil perpetrated in order to achieve that worldly success was hidden or explained away as ‘necessary evil’. For Lindsay, the irony of Calvin’s work was that, although Calvin disliked capitalist financial practice, his notions of grace and

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election ‘provided the ideology which could be turned into a sanctification of capitalism’ (p. 85). Opinions differ about the extent to which Bunyan believed in the notion of election, but apparently, he no longer felt constrained to either join the bourgeoisie or formulate his own revolutionary response to earthly injustice. Lindsay writes that Bunyan’s influence would, from now on, be in the spiritual domain: ‘he was free now to make the best of a bad job on earth, spreading the evangel of unity in the only terms effective for his age, no longer tormented into paralysis by the contrast between that evangel and the “bad frame” of things’ (p. 85). Ironic, then, that he nevertheless found himself on the wrong side of the law with his preaching politicised not by him, but for him.

An Eloquent Tinker Bunyan’s history of preaching began when he joined a Free Church in Bedford that had a mix of Independent, Congregationalist and Baptist parishioners. Services were conducted in the parish church of St John by rector, John Gifford, who saw Bunyan’s potential and encouraged him. While continuing his work as a tinker, Bunyan was developing his ideas about grace which, Lindsay again notes, were ‘closely related to the social processes in which he and his class, the dispossessed peasantry on the edge of the petty-bourgeois, were involved’ (p. 112). For Bunyan, however, the focus was on theology and spirituality and in 1656 he published his first book, Some Gospel Truths Opened According to the Scriptures that was based on his public debate with the Quakers. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, official views against the Nonconformists hardened. Their rejection of the State Church was seen as seditious as were the views on the rights of the common man that were implicit in many of their teachings. In November 1660 Bunyan was first arrested under an old law2 that made it illegal to preach to a non-Church of England congregation that included more than five people outside the preacher’s own family. In January 1661, Bunyan was sentenced to three months in Bedford County Gaol, which turned into twelve years as Bunyan

2  This was the Conventicle Act of 1593 issued by Queen Elizabeth I, which required all citizens to join the Anglican Church on pain of death or exile. It was basically an anti-Puritan measure, aimed at preventing gatherings (conventicles) of anti-royalists.

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repeatedly refused to guarantee he would no longer preach.3 Bunyan was eventually freed in May 1672 under Charles II’s Royal Declaration of Indulgence that suspended penal laws against all Nonconformists.

Politics and Religion The social and historical context and literary and biographical analysis that Lindsay has presented so far leads up to his analysis of The Pilgrim’s Progress. For Lindsay, Bunyan’s preoccupation with religion was not surprising, given the intimate relationship between religion and politics: at a time when the king was the Head of the official State Church to which all citizens were required to belong and to demonstrate their membership with a prescribed number of attendances, using a specific prayer book (the Book of Common Prayer). However, Lindsay argues, while religion was used to suppress dissent, it also became a site and channel for the expression of Nonconformist views. Hence, he sees Bunyan’s abandonment of the Church of England as not only spiritual dissent but also a rejection of conservative politics, both feudal and bourgeois. And when Bunyan joins a dissenting Church, he sees Bunyan as actively searching for a community and belief system that is consistent and rewarding not only spiritually but also socially and politically. Lindsay argues that Bunyan faced an impossible choice, with neither bourgeoisie nor king prepared to champion the cause of universal democracy. Bunyan stands his ground and is jailed for preaching to large congregations, though his sermons are not overtly political, but spiritual. Nevertheless, the views he expresses, which are conventional Christian views, are often perceived as directly critical of capitalism. The greatest irony, for Lindsay, is that Bunyan was won over by the Calvinist interpretations of grace and election, which suggest that all are not equal before God (pp. 107–113). To Lindsay Bunyan needed this belief to explain his personal history with its family memory of social elevation; he was unable to accept that all had equal access to God’s grace—a point of disagreement between Bunyan and the Quakers. With this compromise, Lindsay argues, 3  While Bunyan was in prison, several repressive laws were passed: the Act of Uniformity, passed in 1662, made it compulsory for preachers to be ordained by an Anglican bishop and for the revised Book of Common Prayer to be used in church services, and the Act of Conventicles, passed in 1664, which made it illegal to hold religious meetings of five or more people outside the Church of England.

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Bunyan articulated a petit-bourgeois sensibility that recognised some people as more deserving of God’s grace than others; a belief that gave religious authority to the notion that success is inherently good, as are successful, wealthy people, and conversely, that failure is spiritually bad, as are those who fail. Nevertheless, he argues, Bunyan’s work retained Christian notions about being and doing good that are fundamentally subversive of capitalism. For Lindsay, Bunyan’s struggle in Grace Abounding was not only a journey from uncommitted Anglicanism to spiritual awareness and acceptance of God’s grace, but also a struggle to find a voice for democratic values and egalitarian principles at a time when such notions were proscribed: ‘Here we have the authentic class-voice of the dispossessed, who abide their time, who are ready to take suffering and contempt and outrage, knowing that out of this resolute acceptance there will be bred the powers of active resistance when the time arrives’ (pp.  147–48). What Lindsay most appreciated about Bunyan’s work is the simplicity and honesty of his prose. He writes of Grace Abounding that it is ‘the first personal testament in English in which the pattern of inner conflict is defined with scrupulous truth and unslackening grip’ whereas The Pilgrim’s Progress is ‘the first book of clean-cut and objectively defined imaginative story-­ telling’ (p. 176).

The Pilgrim’s Progress Lindsay’s analysis of The Pilgrim’s Progress focuses on the generic influences on the text. The major referent for Lindsay is ‘the unbroken tradition of the popular pulpit’ (p. 165), characterised by ‘its way of figuring intellectual and moral ideas in concrete personalized form, its use of homely metaphor and illustration’ (p. 166). For Lindsay, Bunyan’s great allegory ‘concentrated the ideas and images of a whole vast body of popular literature—the body which had for centuries alone been close to the living needs of men and woman, close to the mass-needs’ (p. 167). He concludes: ‘Bunyan thus takes up the medieval basis and transforms it to the requirements of the new epoch’ (p. 168). Although Bunyan lacked the literary resources of an educated writer, Lindsay notes, ‘his sources in popular culture are enormous’ (p. 168). This, he argues, was the source of Bunyan’s originality, that he used a genre well-known to his readers and used it to tell his own story of a spiritual journey:

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Whereas in Grace Abounding he had sought to recall and re-state the various pressures and patterns of thought and feeling through which he passed on his way to conversion, now he sought to use the religious imagery as a means of getting at the inner meaning of his struggle, its dramatic immediacy. (p. 168)

Lindsay identifies the ways in which Bunyan created that immediacy. The first is Bunyan’s use of local sites around Bedford to create the descriptions of places in the narrative: for example, Vanity Fair was a combination of the local Elstow Fair and the much larger Stowbridge Fair that Lindsay notes was a major commercial event with rows of stalls selling novelties and booths displaying the wares of different trades; the Slough of Despond was a ‘quaggy vale’ near Dunstable; the House of the Interpreter was the rectory of St John’s in Bedford; the Palace Beautiful was a mix of two great houses Elstow Place (‘the house of the Hillersdons— Renascence architecture contrasting with the Gothic of the near church’ (p.  171)) and Hillsdon Conquest (‘a complicated and ornate building, which would impress a village lad as immensely magnificient’(p. 171)); the Valley of the Shadow of Death was a ravine that appears unexpectedly in the flat land near Shillbrook Village; the Delectable Mountains were the Chilterns and many more, including a local version of the entry to hell: The hell-mouth, rumbling with fire and brimstone in the side of a hill, suggests the pits near the Icknield Way, once pit-dwellings. Here also were old workings, ancient earthwork circles, and the rumble of quarrymen at work in the great chalk-pits. As the lime was burnt on the spot, the smell is also explained. (p. 173)

Even those who don’t know Icknield Way have seen old mine-­workings; for Lindsay these local, everyday references bring the story to life for its readers. Lindsay notes also the love of natural beauty that is expressed in Bunyan’s work in simple direct descriptions of the countryside, which he exemplifies in passages such as this from Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘Here he would lie down, embrace the ground, and kiss the very flowers that grew in the valley. He would now be up every morning by break or day, tracing and walking to and fro in this valley’ (p. 173). Lindsay notes that the lack of pretention and formality of Bunyan’s style contrasts markedly with the English translation of the Bible that he characterises as

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‘majestic, hieratic, sterile’ (p. 174). As a result, he argues: ‘It never represented a living speech, and therefore it never entered into living speech. … the hieratic nature of the style, its sterile grandeur, prevented any real fusion with language’ (p. 174). By contrast, ‘all the passages which give personal quality to his writing are derived directly from the common speech of the day, and have nothing biblical about them’ (pp. 174–75). Lindsay concludes: ‘Where his style is great is in the power he has to use a concentrated form of popular idiom and rhythm’ (p. 175). Lindsay goes on to quote a long passage from Book II in which Christiana (Christian’s wife) and Mercy (a neighbour who accompanies her at the start of her journey) knock at the Wicket-gate through which lies the path to the Celestial City. Marking the same directness of style and emotional complexity Lindsay claims: We may say that Bunyan has here founded the English novel. We find brilliant improvisations of every kind among the Elizabethans, rich suggestions and diversities of tone. We find, in short, everything except what we find in this passage of Bunyan’s: a sensitive objectivity capable of all effects, from those of the simplest incident to those of extreme dramatic tension. (pp. 175–6)

Lindsay seems to reach this interpretation almost against his own inclination as, on the next page, he acknowledges that, although The Pilgrim’s Progress represents the origin of the bourgeois novel tradition, it is an allegory (p. 177). The key factor for Lindsay is the simplicity and directness of Bunyan’s style. Lindsay identifies in Bunyan’s style the requirements of the Royal Society, established in 1660 and in the process of defining the requirements of scientific writing, that prose should be ‘plain, unlaboured, simple’ (p. 176). Thus, he writes, the ‘needs of the passionate seeker and of the earnest scientist coincide’ as they ‘both derive from a triumphant class-­ movement determined to advance productivity and master nature’ (p. 176). Again, the complexity of Bunyan’s position is expressed in class terms: unlearned but articulate, ignorant but intelligent, materially poor but culturally rich, Bunyan and his work represented a cultural change as fundamental as that of Enlightenment science: ‘socially divided as they were, deeply separated in ideology, he and the scientist were making up a whole’ (p.  176). Both herald the triumph of reason, individualism and capitalism.

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Lindsay also subjects The Pilgrim’s Progress to a Freudian analysis that likens the allegory of the journey to birth trauma. While not totally convincing, it is indicative of Lindsay’s attempt to understand the ways in which the individual is shaped by embodied (sensory and social) experience. Lindsay argues that any attempt to understand individual psychology, including the most basic sensory experiences, cannot be done without locating them historically and socially, ‘without admitting the historical element and showing how the forms change with the social consciousness that encloses them’ (p. 179). For Lindsay this means analysing complex modern societies with reference to the loss of the communalism and sense of unity associated with early societies: The forms taken by the notion that the [unified] true-self is lost grow more complex also. The body is the ‘unreal’ self. The soul is the reality. The body is a substitute for the self lost at birth; therefore one can be redeemed in turn by somebody or something else that takes one’s place. (p. 179)

And he adds that, as exemplified by Bunyan, class conflict ‘deepens the personal conflict’ (p. 180); his family’s social decline but enduring aspirations creating an internal conflict that for Bunyan was conducted at a spiritual level, but which also mirrored the class struggles within seventeenth-century English society.

Mr Badman Bunyan reverses the journey in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, published shortly after The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1680. In this book Bunyan told the story of a soul’s journey to hell. Mr. Badman is dead; his journey told through the dialogue of two characters, Mr. Wiseman and Attentive. In a Preface to the tale Bunyan tells the reader that the events described are real: ‘all the things that here I discourse of, I mean as to matter of fact, have been acted upon the stage of this World, even many times before mine eyes’ (p.  4). He also claims that there are many people like Mr. Badman and that their effect on the world is toxic: ‘England shakes and totters already, by reason of the burden that Mr. Badman and his Friends have wickedly laid upon it: Yea, our Earth reels and staggereth to and fro like a Drunkard, the transgression thereof is heavy upon it’ (p.  5). For Bunyan his task was to reveal their wickedness and its consequences even though, he acknowledged, some will judge him vicious for maligning

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those who have died. Lindsay notes that Bunyan writes about Mr. Badman with the same sensory and emotional realism that he used to describe Christian’s struggles in The Pilgrim’s Progress, causing him to judge the book ‘the first realistic novel’ (p. 209): Bunyan’s tale is the first imaginative reconstruction of a character-type drawn directly from experience, a coherent definition of an individual within his social area—the progress of that individual being shown by a steady narrative and the psychological reactions of each stage in the progress being grasped with masterly insight. Here, in short, are all the elements of the classic bourgeois novel. (p. 209)

Lindsay notes that Bunyan is particularly critical of those who take advantage of the poor, which provides the moral impetus of the Badman story. However, despite long sections of sermonising, Bunyan did not allow the tale to become two-dimensional or his character to become a caricature: The work is of course openly a propaganda-lesson. Yet with what aesthetic self-control does Bunyan tell the tale. The peaceful deathbed of Badman, for instance. Once he is launched on the tale, Bunyan’s feeling for honest character-­drawing directs the whole construction. He gives Badman just the traits of good-humour that are needed to round out his character with full conviction. And he has many a side-light of incisive humour or satire. (pp. 209–10)

Lindsay argues that The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Life and Death of Mr Badman are the forerunners of the English bourgeois novel: A coherent story, a conscious relation of character to social background, a moving narrative structurally bound up with character-development. All these elements are present. Between the compass of The Pilgrim’s Progress and of The Life and Death of Mr. Badman the whole bourgeois novel is included. (p. 211)

The other elements that Lindsay recognised as central to these texts include emotional or psychological authenticity, accessible language written in a rhythm that is close to everyday speech, an ability to locate the reader within a believable environment, and the use of sensory imagery and language to engage readers bodily with his stories. For these reasons

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the eloquent tinker from Bedford is remembered not only as a great religious preacher and thinker, but also as a great writer: He founded the great bourgeois novel; he first created a prose for narrative purposes which was at once objective in content and highly sensitive in form. He projected in concrete symbols a vision of the revolutionary era through which he had lived, and its glorious significances. He gave us an autobiography which had no parallel except the Confessions of Augustine, and which far surpassed Augustine’s book in the way it fused, yet held separate, all the complex stages of a protracted inner conflict—though it lacked Augustine’s intellectual scope. (p. 248)

For Lindsay, Bunyan’s achievement and importance was not only literary and religious, however, it was also political.

The Holy War Lindsay concludes his analysis of Bunyan’s work with one of his final works, The Holy War that inverts the method of The Pilgrim’s Progress: In the latter work he had used the theme of the lonely and isolated salvationist to depict the bustling world in which he himself had come to grace. In The Holy War he used the image of a whole society to express the psychology of the individual of his day. (p. 212)

For Lindsay this strategy is an acknowledgement of the fundamental interrelationship between individual and society, neither of which can be understood without the other. The society of the book resides in the peaceful town of Mansoul that comes under attack by a group of Diabolonians, followers of the devil. They occupy Mansoul, subverting many of its citizens, until driven away by the army of Emmanuel, son of Shaddai, the creator of the Universe. The Diabolonians return, conspiring with malcontents, but are defeated and two of their number are crucified as an example of the treatment all will receive unless they desist: ‘Now this Christian act of the brave Lord Wilbewill did greatly abash Captain Past-­ hope, discourage the army of Diabolus, put fear into the Diabolonian runagates in Mansoul’ (quoted, p. 222) The allegory is generally read as representing the struggle to sanctity of the individual soul as well as the history of humanity from the Fall to the Last Judgment, while historically it is seen as the struggle between Charles II and the Nonconformists.

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Hence, as Lindsay notes, the punishments dealt out to the Diabolonians, horrifying to the modern sensibility, can be read as the censuring of the individual’s baser impulses (p. 223). Even so, he argues that the graphic descriptions of these punishments reveal that ‘the Puritan revolutionary remained intact in Bunyan’ (p. 222). For Lindsay the most interesting feature of The Holy War is that it expresses ‘the profound wish, everywhere evident, for revolutionary action’ (p.  221). He concludes by writing of this and Bunyan’s other major allegories: ‘His sustained effort to define the individual in terms of social organism was expression of the intuited fact that the individual can be fully explained or understood only in terms of the social whole. And that is a realisation that leads into Marxism’ (p. 225). For Lindsay, if not for Bunyan.

Conclusion Lindsay concludes that the success of Bunyan’s preaching and writing is a testament to his literary innovation and skill, made meaningful by his practical knowledge of his readership and their social and political environment. From the disaffections of his own family history to his time in the Parliamentary Army to his role as a preacher, Bunyan encountered and was one with the common people of his time, those who did the fighting and the work that others ordered, ordained or bought. Lindsay argues that this experience gave Bunyan a deep understanding of the discontent among the peasantry and petit bourgeoisie as the freedoms and democratic rights for which they fought were closed to them; arrogated to themselves by the wealthy and powerful. Bunyan, he writes, ‘gave voice to all the popular feelings of derelict despair, the general stupefaction and suspension, that followed the failure of Lilburne’ (p. 248) and then offered hope: ‘He, more than any other man, transmuted that cloudy frustration into an ideological weapon of hope which served the masses well in the difficult century and half awaiting them’ (p. 249). For Lindsay, Bunyan was the voice of the struggling masses who refused to capitulate to the demands of Church and State that they join the Anglican Church and accept their subservient place in the economy of bourgeois England. Their faith in their birthright to live free and equal remained the impetus for the political struggles that would erupt into mass movements in the industrial nineteenth century. Lindsay argues: ‘To understand the English masses even to-day, to realize the warm heart of English Radicalism—in so many ways linked up with dissent—one must go back to Bunyan’ (p. 251).

CHAPTER 5

Return to Socialism; and Marx

In a poem from the personally turbulent years, 1933–35 Jack Lindsay writes of his return to politics: In coils of foam with tossing heads the wave in landing fury spreads, the spray pelts round in cold drops, then the broad shallow inrush stops, crinkles, retreats, tumbles back rattling the shingle in its track, louder, louder. Small spouts break round the stone dragged in its wake, then it ends. With thump and screech the next wave gruffly floods the beach. (CP, p. 253)

His poem recalls Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), his melancholy memorial to a world of lost certainty: Listen! You hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. (ll. 9–14)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_5

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In place of the gentle, detached melancholia of Arnold’s memory of religious consolation is the feverish, embodied engagement of Lindsay’s return to politics. Arnold uses a simple rhyme scheme and polysyllabic words that slow the rhythm of the verse to create a meditative mood; a sense of capitulation and helplessness in the face of a brutal society that only love can relieve. Lindsay’s verse, by contrast, uses short lines, a very simple rhyme scheme and dynamic sensory diction to suggest disturbance, displacement and constant movement. There is no submission here but a determination to stand and resist as ‘ignorant armies clash by night’ (Arnold, l. 37). Lindsay’s study of John Bunyan embraces the political and the social in a way that would have horrified his father. It represented a rejection of Norman Lindsay’s aesthetics, which was avowedly anti-­ political and opposed to any form of social engagement.

Transformation In his historical fiction, 1649: A Novel of a Year, published the year after his Bunyan study in 1938, one of his characters (Roger Cotton) undergoes major changes in life and beliefs. The character who fully responded could not do so in a merely intellectual way; his whole life must be changed. With his changed sense of what constitutes true social or human unity he must find all his relationships in a state of flux and moving into new patterns, new perspectives. It seemed to me that in the last resort this moment of total change was the only thing worthwhile as a theme of art. (TFOL, p. 116)

In The Fullness of Life Lindsay explains how this understanding that an individual’s change in beliefs and values is realised in every aspect of their being (sensory, emotional, intellectual) also changed his view of art, replacing his father’s conception of art as a domain removed from the everyday with that of art as the medium of an embodied engagement with the world: The great moment was both one of Hell-harrowing (the individual experience of descent and ascent), and one of a Last Judgment (a total revision of values in which not only the individual but the whole of society and its positions were called in question, radically reconsidered, and brought together in a new unifying concept). (TFOL, p. 116)

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Lindsay argues that art has the power to perform this kind of Last Judgment: to confront people with the realities of the world in which they live so that they can make their own judgments and choices, and so give them access to new ways of knowing and being. In 1936 Lindsay decided that he needed to read the work of Marx and his associates and followers and so wrote away for some books: ‘[Marx and Engels’] The Communist Manifesto, [Marx’s] Capital (in the available form which I took to represent the complete thing), [Engels’] Anti-­ Dühring, [Lenin’s] Imperialism, State and Revolution: these works in particular had an immediate effect upon me. … The thought-processes were akin to those I had been painfully working with, but at once clarifying many points that had been still mystifying or obscure’ (TFOL, p. 106). He had been schooled in Marx’s work through dialogue with companions at the University of Queensland and while working as a tutor at the W.E.A. in Brisbane, then later by P.R.  Stephensen when he was co-director at the Fanfrolico Press. The ideas interested Lindsay, but he had never read the works closely. Now he was looking for a way to understand and organise his own experience, and particularly to formulate a method of analysis: ‘I also got some Russian textbooks on dialectical materialism; and soon there was to come the outpouring of Left Book Club choices and extras. I turned again to Hegel and Spinoza; I discovered Giordano Bruno and studied his work as thoroughly as I could’ (p. 106). Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century priest who began his religious life with eleven years in a monastery in Naples and ended it burned as a heretic in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, seems in strange company with modern Marxists. However, he would remain one of the major influences on Lindsay throughout his life. This reading was central to the transformation Lindsay was undergoing, which had begun in the first half of the thirties with ‘the inversion of my idealist existentialism into a concrete one’ (TFOL, p. 105). From Blake, Plato and Hegel he had learned about dialectics but ‘I had not built up a definite philosophy of history out of those terms’ (p. 105). With the assistance of major political thinkers and philosophers his quest now was ‘to move from my concrete existentialism into the full categories of Marxism’ (p. 110). Lindsay gives an account of this transformation of his thinking in a book that appeared the same year as his study of Bunyan, The Anatomy of Spirit: An Enquiry into the Origins of Religious Emotion (1937). Not, as the title might suggest, a theological study but a study of the role of religion in coercing people to accept a particular social and political structure.

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At the same time, it reveals the theories and ideas that have shaped his new politically engaged criticism.

The Anatomy of Spirit Lindsay announces in the ‘Note’ that precedes the Contents page: ‘The core of this book is an attempt to fuse the basic ideas of Marx and Freud’ (p. v). He warns readers that this is not a random mixing of the two with the hope of a synthesis. Instead: ‘Since the method of the work is dialectical materialist, I have had to sift Freud’s ideas throughout to get rid of the idealist assumptions that lurk in them; and the result is largely a Marxist criticism of Freud’ (p. v). Hence the warning he repeats throughout the Bunyan study that his use of Freudian ideas and terminology is psycho-­ social, not psycho-analytic. Lindsay avoids the individualist application of Freud’s ideas, instead using them to reveal the way that the social structure and associated practices position individuals to feel and behave. The Oedipal complex, he pointed out, is a result of patriarchy, not vice-versa. In Anatomy Lindsay begins to explore and elaborate issues and ideas that will become central to his philosophy and critical practice: his understanding of history and of society, of unity, dialectics and dialectical materialism; his revised understanding of abstraction; his analysis of the role of religion, the work of Freud, and the significance of nature. Some of the ideas are in an early stage of development and will change substantially over the years; others, such as the notion of unity and his understanding of religion and of nature, are constants that he will elaborate in different contexts and with greater subtlety.

History In The Fullness of Life Lindsay writes of his study of history: ‘I hoped that by dealing with the past periods of great social convulsion and change, which we had some hope of seeing with a fair amount of fullness and clarity, I could in turn clarify the vast entangled and seething situation all around us’ (p.  116). In particular, his interest was in ‘the vast issues of human and cultural change that a transition to socialism implied’ (p. 116). In Anatomy Lindsay accepts the (Marxist) notion of history as a move from classless groups to classed (feudal or bourgeois) societies and then to classless (socialist) societies.

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His analysis seems to be based not only on the Marxist theory he read but also on the cultural anthropology he had imbibed from scholars such as Vere Gordon Childe and Jane Ellen Harrison. At this stage, however, Lindsay’s thinking is still motivated by the ‘progress narrative’ of capitalism that presents each of these forms except the last as a logical advance from the previous one, based primarily on developments in technology: from a nomadic group or clan to a settled agricultural society to an industrialised society. Each situation is seen as an advance in complexity, facilitated by the technology required to handle increasing population density. The same technology enabled the subjugation of those with less or different technology and enabled imperialist invasion to be represented as bringing a higher order of ‘civilisation’ to its victims. The fact that Lindsay cites Australian Aboriginal nations as existing at a level of ‘primitivism’ without science or technology reflects his uncritical acceptance of this narrative at this time. First nations guardianship of the land and ability to live without destroying its resources along with their sophisticated oral and material cultures were invisible to invading Europeans, who could only recognise land management and social and cultural practices that were the same as their own (Pascoe, 2018). Early in the Anatomy Lindsay dismisses theorists of the mind who, he claims, cannot explain ‘why the “mind” of the Australian aboriginal remained at an irrational and undeveloped level, while the “mind” of the European proceeded into marvellous powers and discoveries’ (p. 3). Though he is arguing against this notion of mind as a thing-in-­ itself, his argument deploys the colonialist European perspective on Indigenous societies that has caused catastrophic damage to the land and all of those (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) living on it. He does not challenge this colonial standpoint but includes it in his own model of history as an example of clan-based, communal, classless society, but also as primitive and incapable of the abstract thought that produces concepts such as human, love, justice, freedom. He identifies abstract thinking with the societies that are based on tool-use for production (not subsistence), beginning with agriculture-based communities that trade with others and so come to recognise generalities across differences of culture and community. These societies develop class divisions based on kinds of labour and on access to wealth, knowledge and power. In industrialised societies—the next stage of civilisation—class divisions are exacerbated as communities are broken up by the demands and possibilities created by industry and the capitalist economy and ideologies that have enabled it.

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The ideologies include religion, which Lindsay sees as evolving with class-­ based societies and as supporting their class division, whether this be the feudal structure and ideology of the Catholic Church or the bourgeois structure of various forms of Protestantism. The final phase in Lindsay’s Marxist-inspired model is a classless society with a socialist belief in freedom and equality for all. In the 1930s he and many others influenced by Marxism saw the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet State as the beginnings of that final phase; they also thought capitalism was in its death throes. At this point Lindsay was still working his way through the factors that characterised these different phases of history and which for him made sense of the progress narrative that he had accepted from Enlightenment and Marxist historiographies. This viewpoint begins to change with his understanding of the relationship between human beings and their natural environment, where the sophistication of First Nations Australians becomes apparent.

Unity All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity (1584)

Lindsay used the concept of unity in his analysis of John Bunyan’s work to describe the loss that afflicts all class-divided societies, which religion is designed to remedy, conceal and often to facilitate. For Lindsay unity within a social group is a measure of success, and it derives from the ability of group members to think beyond the self and the immediate situation: ‘The growing awareness of cause and effect, of the interrelation of objects, becomes an awareness of social interplay, of the existence and activity of the individual within the group, and of nature in so far [as] it concerns the group-life’ (Anatomy, p.  9). Becoming self-aware in the context of the group means understanding one’s own actions and their consequences, as well as those of others. It means understanding how objects are used within the group and constitute the material culture of that group. And it involves an awareness of how nature and the group coexist peaceably. He also notes that this unity first occurs in the group that he otherwise characterises as primitive, the clan-based communities that preceded the development of settled agricultural societies. In those groups he claims the

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family acts as a structuring principle: ‘the effort to understand, to grasp unity, begins to work through an effort to understand the structure of the group, of the family relationship’ (p. 12). This same understanding governs the relationship between the clan and their natural environment: ‘… in the difficult effort to understand nature, the vague sense of group-unity is projected outwards on to the external world. Not only are natural processes analysed in terms of human processes, but also they are lumped together vaguely as a unity of threat or benevolence’ (pp. 12–13). The next phase involves agrarian societies that develop trading arrangements outside their own domain. In these societies, inequalities of wealth, power and influence and the development of stratified classes destroyed the unity within the community. However, Lindsay notes of ancient Egypt that, at the same time as this internal stratification had destroyed any internal sense of cohesion, a broader concept of unity evolved: From the moment that Egypt was sufficiently unified and brought into contact with the outside world to develop the idea of a human family, mankind never lost sight altogether of the goal of equality and co-operation. The sense of group-unity, of the clan-bond, had been broken, however it might reappear in local patriotisms … The sense of something bigger and more important than the group-bond persisted. (p. 30)

The notion of a common human unity, a shared humanity, within societies internally riven by class division is a contradiction that is essential to the dialectics Lindsay will go on to espouse. He writes that the class division caused by the mercantile economy ‘created vast sufferings’ (p. 31) but it also ‘was creating the sense of the essential kinship of all human beings, for it was giving all human beings the same needs and raising them to the same productive levels’ (p. 31). He describes the response to this paradox: ‘Yet by its exploitations it seemed to mock the emotion it created. The more that the intuition of human unity clarified, the more dreadful grew the sense of thwarting evil, of frustrating fate’ (p. 31). Lindsay constantly returns to the ways in which division and exploitation are experienced by the individual, and by society as a community of individuals. For Lindsay, the industrial phase is a result of the development of modern science and its ‘mastery over nature’ (p. 32), a formulation that signifies another loss for human society—the unity between human society and nature. Science provided new ways of understanding and thinking about the natural world but, in so doing, it severed vital connections between

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human communities and the land on which they lived: within the growing capitalist economies the natural world became a resource to be plundered. This loss of unity with nature was another trauma for a society already suffering internal, class division. However, the industrial phase also brought with it ‘a dream of co-operation’ (p. 32) that recalls the unity of the clan-­ based groups: ‘No matter how class-society might raise the level of living, men looked back to the lost bond with increasing sorrow’ (p. 35). Though religion might attempt to replace the unity of the classless society with a vision of original perfection—such as Christianity’s Garden of Eden—the next step, in the Marxist and Lindsay’s history, is not backwards but forwards, to the classless post-revolutionary Communist future. For Lindsay, however, it was crucial that his understanding of history should not be dogmatic but grounded in human experience. For Lindsay this meant the adoption of dialectical materialism, a methodology that he described in his opening ‘Note’ as ‘fully scientific’: ‘Marxist materialism seeks to grasp the living fact in its dialectical fullness—that is, to see the fact as a whole; as related to past, present, and future; as organic process’ (p. v).

Dialectics Lindsay’s notion of dialectics, like his sense of history, was influenced by his reading of the works of Hegel and Marx. In Anatomy he provides his own description of dialectics: ‘By dialectics we mean the science of wholes, the method of apprehending process in its fullness. The cosmos is one, is vitally interrelated in all its parts; and once we forget that fact we fall into error’ (p. 60). He starts from a core notion of unity and theorises dialectics as a way of exploring and understanding the world. We must seek concretely to realize that all life is ceaselessly in flux, in process of development. We cannot know the Whole, but whatever section we take we must treat it as if we were advancing towards the apprehension of the Whole. That is, we must never forget that it is dynamically interrelated with endless other phenomena, and we must watch out for all the significant points of relation. (p. 60)

Lindsay’s concept of unity, grounded in his reading of the work of Giordano Bruno, argues that all aspects of our world are interconnected; any part of the world, any person, object or practice, both contains that unity and must be analysed as part of that unity. Since nothing is ever

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isolated but is constantly reconstituted by the unity of all things within which it exists, its context, situation and meaning are ever changing: ‘We thus treat the object as a living thing, as a thing really in movement’ (p.  60). Lindsay bases his understanding of dialectical materialism on this notion: Since no object exists in isolation, we find that development occurs by reason of two objects or forces fusing. This process we call the fusion of opposites to produce a higher unity. And since no object exists in isolation, the higher-unity itself at once begins to disintegrate and to fuse afresh. And so on. (p. 61)

He notes that this continual movement may suggest that all knowledge is relative. He does not resile from that judgment, although he argues that it does not mean the knowledge generated is baseless: ‘it is as real as it is concrete, as real as it faithfully enables us to act upon nature and ourselves’ (p. 61). For Lindsay dialectical materialism is a way of both knowing the world and acting on it: By grasping the dialectical sense of fusing opposites and the interplay of forces we are able at last to rob relativity of its sting, of all subjective idealism (which ends in solipsism). We can make it a weapon in which knowledge and act fuse, so that in knowing the world we can change it. (p. 61)

He acknowledges that the ways we think has always changed the world, but argues that dialectical materialism adds a ‘directive consciousness … to the fusion of thought and act’ (p. 62). This explanation clarifies one of his opening arguments in The Anatomy of Spirit, that the idea is not a passive reflection of a material fact: ‘The idea is indeed as material as the fact itself’ (p. 5). Lindsay notes that although the idea reflects the organisation of the material conditions that produced it, once it has come into existence ‘it does more than reflect; it is itself a reality, a part of reality, but not a higher-reality’ (p. 6). As a methodology that explores the generation of such ideas, dialectical materialism is therefore a way to explore how far the mind itself can affect the material world and where it falls into what Lindsay calls ‘fantasy-thinking’ (p.  6). This includes magical and religious thought, both of which Lindsay regards as ways of accommodating people to unpalatable, inequitable and frightening realities.

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The wholistic nature of dialectical thinking also has consequences for the ways in which we produce knowledge, and hence for the nature of that knowledge. Lindsay’s work is fundamentally interdisciplinary and exemplifies his argument that ‘dialectics, while accepting the different sciences as valid in their areas of analysis, accepts no closed compartments of knowledge. It sees how all the sciences merge in reality, in human concretion’ (p. 62). Lindsay was writing this at a time of increasing specialisation in the disciplines of knowledge that has continued until the present day, when inter-, cross- and trans-disciplinarity are seen as necessary for the solution of problems that are too complex for any one discipline to solve: however, because of their specialised training, very few specialists now have the flexibility to be able to work in that way. Writing of the development of the natural sciences, he notes, ‘the sciences are not realized as parts of a unified effort to grasp process. They are cut off as much as possible from one another by logical distinctions drawn from their differing subject-matters’ (p. 164). And even though the cutting-off is never totally complete, Lindsay notes that it is ‘sufficiently developed to obscure the full inter-relation of all knowledge’ (p. 164). Hence Blake’s exhortation in the Letter to Thomas Butts (1802): ‘May God us keep/ From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!’ Newton may have been a brilliant scientist but for Blake he embodied the specialisation of knowledge that confined its practitioners to one specific area of expertise to the exclusion of other disciplines and knowledge. Not only does this compromise the value and effectiveness of that knowledge, it also makes the knowledge vulnerable to misuse, while its creator is effectively oblivious to its social and political implications. The interrelationship of different forms of knowledge to form a wholistic understanding of the world (as unity) will only come, Lindsay argues, in a class-less society. His own work demonstrates this traversal of boundaries, a key feature of his analysis being that he is not confined to the disciplinary silos that are imposed on contemporary scholars and researchers. This exploration of historiography and dialectics inevitably takes Lindsay to abstraction, a particular focus in his study of Blake.

Abstraction 1.  Lo, a shadow of horror is risen In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific,

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Self-clos’d, all-repelling: what Demon Hath form’d this abominable void, This soul-shudd’ring vacuum? Some said “It is Urizen.” But unknown, abstracted, Brooding, secret, the dark power hid. (B:CW, p. 222)

In the 1920s when Lindsay was writing his first study of the poetry of William Blake, this was his understanding of Abstraction, exemplified by Blake as the figure of Urizen, the embodiment of fetishised rationality who, with his golden compasses, confined the universe within a perfect circle of reason and law. Inspired by the work of William Blake and motivated by his work with his father, he had conceived abstraction as a fundamental evil, a way of categorising and classifying people and things that denied them their embodied being. Ten years later, Lindsay analyses the nature of abstraction differently. He situates the practice of abstraction within the history of human society, where it can be seen as productive of modern consciousness. Lindsay argues that the development of tool use requires the ability to objectify, to realise an abstract concept in material terms. He describes the making of the first tool for hunting in this way: ‘This act involved a tremendous effort of objectification; it was the prototype of rational thinking, of getting outside one’s personal limitations and seeing things objectively’ (p. 7). He notes that some animals also use objects as tools, but that the practice is not systematic; only humans actively understand the abstract principle behind the design and use of the tool: ‘man was able to make something stable of this use of objects … the growth of thinking power was inevitable as part of the effort to master nature by means of objects. The human grouping emerged, no longer a mere herd, but a society’ (p. 7). And he adds that this toolmaking was the genesis of speech: ‘The use of the tool led to “objective thinking”. That use and that thinking led to speech’ (p. 7), which enabled humans to stabilise rationality, increase technical control and strengthen the social bond. This, he argues, was the origin of human culture: ‘The dialectics of this interaction developed culture’ (p. 8). As he notes in relation to the concept of unity, however, being able to think in generalising (and hence abstract) terms has a double edge, since it also reflexively identifies inequalities and injustices within the individual’s own group. Lindsay associates abstraction with the growth of inequality: ‘The appearance of parasitic power necessitated the growth of idealist

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thought. That is, thought that denied its materialist basis, that had cut the cord connecting it with common life’ (p. 39). Subsequently, practices such as religion that, in his analysis, facilitate the division of society into classes rely heavily on the development of abstractions that conceal the fundamental loss of the unity and coherence of the group. So, Lindsay argues, Christian theologians transformed the loss of social unity into the notion of the Fall. At the same time, the power of abstract thought has enabled humanity to develop rationality: ‘This process was primarily one of activity, but it included a capacity to state the relations involved, to generalize. It was this capacity to generalize which produced the abstraction when the connexion between relationship and method was severed’ (pp. 97–8). Specifically, Lindsay adds, generalisation is ‘the valid deduction from activity’ while abstraction occurs when ‘the relationship is castrated from the dialectical whole and conceived as existing on a self-sufficient plane’ (p. 98). By this reasoning abstraction once again assumes its sinister edge since, when used without reference to the whole (individual, situation, interaction, society), it can act as a force of oppression and control. Lindsay has not changed his view that abstraction can be dangerous, but he now has a methodology that enables him to understand its genesis, use and value. As he argues, this gives him the power to confront it; to describe its practice, map its influence, and perhaps find a way to incorporate it into a process that is enabling and cohesive, not disempowering and divisive. One set of abstractions on which he focuses during the 1930s occurs in the domain of religion, as we saw in the study of John Bunyan. Lindsay’s concern was with the ideology of institutional religions (not Christianity itself), the theological abstractions of which Lindsay sees as revealing the human experience they are designed to conceal, including the injustice and inequality of class-based society.

Religion In his study of Bunyan Lindsay argued that Christianity served the social and political function of providing those without power or influence a way to reconcile themselves to earthly injustice through the vision of a Paradise to come. It was used by those in power to bolster their authority, which was thereby given a ‘divine’ legitimacy, as seen in the establishment of the Church of England and the laws enacted that required citizens to be members of that religion. Bunyan fell foul of these laws and spent many years

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in prison as a result. The Churches subsequently became self-generating institutions that acted with the same ruthlessness and corruption as feudal emperors and court advisors. For Lindsay, the lack of moral direction in the Christian churches is summed up in what he identifies as a ‘Christian thesis, “It is the use, not the source, of money that matters”’. He argues that this is the exact opposite of ‘any true social morality’ (Anatomy, p. 125), since it elides the likely source of wealth, which is the appropriation of the goods and services of others. Lindsay argues in the Anatomy that religion arose out of the human need for stability and security: Religion arose in the first place, and continuously keeps arising, out of economic insecurity, inadequacies of the productive mechanism, social discord. Its irrationalities were originally the most rational formulations, the best understandings, of the difficulties and contradictions of human existence, that could be made at the time. (pp. 113–4)

Hence, he argues that when the Roman State failed in Europe, Christianity ‘provided the idiom, the cultural basis, which was just what the troubled age required’ (p. 110). At this point, he argues, Christianity did a lot of good, providing a common set of ideas and values that united disparate groups: ‘It enabled the superstructure of Christian ideas to create something like a common culture over all Europe and thus defeated the disintegrative tendencies of serf-economy’ (p.  111). At the same time, he writes, ‘It was the Church as an exploiting business concern that held together the serf-economy of the Middle Ages’ (pp. 110–1). The Catholic Church had grown into a huge monopoly that needed to keep its power, even when conditions were less tenuous and there was less need for it as a stabilising force. When the bourgeois class started to assert its own economic power and the old serf-economy started to break down, the Church became a retrogressive force. The battle between bourgeoisie and Catholic Church was not conducted in economic terms, however, but through the medium of theology, as ‘the various theologies of the Protestant sects arose to supply the needs of the emerging bourgeois’ (p. 114). As Lindsay argued in his analysis of Bunyan’s work, many of the fundamental beliefs of Protestantism were also formative principles of capitalism: ‘Hence the way that all the Protestant sects developed doctrines that belauded in one form or another the characteristics of the successful capitalist’ (p. 115).

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While this structural analysis of the role of religion is clear to Lindsay, he proposes also that ‘the abstraction of social unity is to be found in religion and philosophy’ (Anatomy, p.  164). He notes that in the battle between religion and science, religion can claim to have a unifying principle that science lacks, because of the segregation of knowledge disciplines and their inability to work together with a wholistic understanding of the world. Religions have a ‘concept of divine order and creation, its centralizing deity’ and so they ‘can unite the sciences to one another and (more important) unite them to the human core, human purpose and values’ (pp. 164–5). Lindsay argues that this semblance of unity has played a crucial role in maintaining social coherence so that religions are likely to play this role for as long as class divisions exist. He writes also about the trauma of the solitary individual who experiences the absence of social unity, even without knowing the cause of the distress. The worst failure of religion, he asserts, is not its structural reflection of the society it served, nor its wealth or political scheming; it is its isolation of the individual: ‘By castrating the individual into his aloneness, his terrible relation to the living-god, it went as far as could be from any effective moral sanctions; for morality to be effective must be related to the social whole’ (p. 121). This (Protestant) focus on a personal relationship with an ineffable God reinforces the powerlessness of the individual. This was exemplified in Bunyan’s account in Grace Abounding of his many years of fear and trauma as he attempted to forge that relationship. By using the term, ‘castrating’ Lindsay indicates the intimate violence of this strategy, which ostensibly is used to assist the individual to find comfort with a Higher Spirit, but actually strips away the possibility of comfort with fellow human beings and leaves the individual vulnerable to those (whether from Church or State) who claim to represent that Spirit.

Freud Throughout the Anatomy Lindsay uses Freudian analysis to theorise his readings of the trauma that is generated by class division. Lindsay is critical of some elements of Freud’s theory, including his treatment of sex: ‘he tended to abstract it as a god-force controlling the individual’ (Anatomy, p.  89). This fetishisation of sexuality, he writes, prevented Freud from identifying the reasons behind neurosis (p.  89). On the other hand, he argues that Freud’s theory of the Unconscious has been crucial to our understanding of the individual’s psychical organisation (p.  94) and

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concludes: ‘Freud’s position as the discoverer of a new world of knowledge is as secure as that of Newton or Darwin’ (p.  95). Later in the Anatomy he writes about Marx and Freud: ‘Only the full materialist analysis of history, Marxism, and the full analysis of the physical sources of idea and emotion, Freudism, can complete the rout of religion; and those analyses must stultify themselves unless they lead to social application, action’ (p. 160). Freud’s work was a means of exploring individual behaviours and emotional responses which might be combined with a social perspective to create a ‘dialectically-materialist psychoanalysis’ (p.  95). For Lindsay, it was not enough to know how religion—or any other social or political ideology—operated structurally (economically, politically, socially); he also wanted to understand how it affected people in their everyday lives— in the way they understood their own being and how they related to others and to the world. In particular, he was interested in why they allowed it to affect them: what they gained from it; how it limited and oppressed them. This attempt to reconcile Marx and Freud was not uncommon in the 1930s among British Left intellectuals. In his review article, ‘Psycho-­ Analysis and Marxism’ (1937) J.D.  Bernal published a highly critical review of Reuben Osborn’s Freud and Marx: A Dialectical Study (1937). Osborn’s thesis, he writes, is that ‘Freud and Marx are to be reconciled in a dialectical way as two opposites, one representing the psychological and the other material understanding of humanity. Out of the fusion of these is to come a superior understanding.’ At the beginning of The Anatomy of Spirit Lindsay states that his approach is not a fusion of this kind (p.v). And later in the book, after a substantial analysis of Freud’s work, he writes: ‘It will be clear, I hope, that I do not consider Freudism and Marxism as two “lumps” of knowledge, each with varying claims and validities. Freud’s work, like all genuine science of the pre-marxist type, must be dialectically sifted and revalued’ (p. 96). Both Bernal and Lindsay criticise Freud’s assumption of what Bernal calls ‘an essentially unalterable human psychology’ and Lindsay adds to this his rejection of Freud’s fetishisation of sexuality as the motivation underlying all human behaviour. Bernal argues: Human nature is not constant; it can be and is being moulded by society. Freud is incorrect when he produces, from his study of the psychology of the bourgeois family a generalisation to fit the whole human race, reaching as far back as the hypothetical primal horde with its jealous and terrible

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father. To accept the Freudian analysis is to accept by implication a completely non-dialectical view of psychology which must destroy the whole basis of Marxist analysis.

Lindsay also warns that Freud’s analysis is based on his study of the casualties of bourgeois ideology and adds: ‘To complete Freud’s work we must show how the subjective forms can only be finally explained by reference to social relationships’ (Anatomy, p. 96). He attempts to do this throughout the Anatomy, mobilising aspects of Freud’s theory to explore specific ideas and events and their impact on individuals as social beings, not the individualised monads of Freudian psychology. Indeed, the ‘jealous and terrible father’ cited by Bernal is central to Lindsay’s exploration of the Father/Son relationship represented within the Holy Trinity of the Catholic Church (pp. 68–76), which he explores for its impact on believers and traces back to the patriarchs of the early clan groups. Though Lindsay’s use of Freudian concepts seems at times too literal, he clearly valued the contribution of Freudian theory to understanding how ideology works. His approach is not mechanistic or dogmatic but attempts to tease out the subtleties, complexities and contradictions of human thought and behaviour. As he writes during his study of religious emotion: If ideology was a simple and direct product of the social fact, with the connecting links all open and obvious to every one, then the part played by these consolations and anodynes would be exactly limited to the period that they were needed. But, unfortunately, things are not so easy as all that. The consolations that make it possible for the oppressed to survive in their darkest hours become in turn hindrances to progress when conditions grow lighter. Or the imageries of dim hope suddenly at moments of extreme stress stir the blood to a desperate violence, and a Jacquerie results. (p. 71)

Lindsay does not simply dismiss Freud as bourgeois but finds in his work a valuable correction to a mechanistic notion of being that effectively dissolves the individual into the group. He wrote of Freud: ‘in the actual clinical analysis, Freud showed himself to be magnificently dialectical’ (p. 90). As noted earlier and in his study of Bunyan, the problem he has with Freudianism is that it fetishises (individual) sexuality at the expense of the social:

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… he could not, because of his initial abstraction of the sex-force, gain the full advantage of his own method; he could not make the complete dialectical approach that would have united individual and social, and which would have seen the social relation without losing sight of the organic centrality of sex. (p. 90)

As a result, as Lindsay wrote in his opening ‘Note’, he does not synthesise the works of Marx and Freud but formulates a Marxist analysis of Freud. For him, this was a way of relating individual trauma and its social causes to the power and persistence of ideologies, political and religious. Reviewing this period in The Fullness of Life Lindsay writes that his historical novels were an exercise for him in exploring the interrelationship of embodied being with all other major forces affecting the life of the individual: … my sole alternative was to grasp process, human and natural, as completely as I could, with every faculty I possessed. And that meant to give their full rights to all particular existences while seeking the systems, laws, or principles that drew them together and related the individual and the universal movements. (TFOL, p. 81)

This included stepping back from the rejection of abstraction, which had been a feature of his relationship with Norman, and instead exploring and understanding how abstraction had been fundamental to the development of (European) society, its practice, limitations, and potentials. It also meant abandoning Norman’s notion of the artist-aristocrat and instead joining with others in a social movement to create a better world: The notion of a purposive structure in life, defined by the creative image, passed into that of a purposive structure in the individual and society, which was to be found in all men, however much some might be more active, more responsive to the changing systems of which they were all a part. (TFOL, p. 82)

However, Lindsay was not turning away from art. If anything, this transformation made his analysis more complex and subtle; not a series of judgments and pronouncements (which he saw in retrospect as the major flaw of his analysis of Nietzsche’s work in Dionysos) but an exploration of how art can communicate and explain the complexities of everyday life and provide an informed basis for social and political activism. This is evident in his re-conception of nature.

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Nature Lindsay’s writing on nature in John Bunyan and Anatomy, for example, is very different from its use in the earlier Blake book, where it supplied the material for the poetic imagination. Now he writes about a bond between human and nature that is essential for the realisation of fully developed human being; observed first in early societies but lost during the period of social and technological complexity that gave rise to bourgeois society. In The Fullness of Life Lindsay acknowledges that he had accepted a (Marxist) historiography that regarded ‘mastery of nature’ as the mark of social sophistication: I was taking over, as I was to do for some time, the idea of struggle against nature, of men’s goal as the mastery of nature. Certainly those phrases echo well enough the attitudes that have dominance in class-societies, where they are linked with the power-ethic that permeates the ruling-class or the sections aiming to become such a class. But such an idiom, reflecting violence, power-lust, war, sadism, rape, expresses what is wrong in the societies that use it. (TFOL, p. 122)

In technology-driven feudal and later capitalist societies nature was increasingly fetishised until it became a foe to be conquered and a resource to exploit. With his development of dialectics Lindsay writes: ‘Society is opposed to nature, but not mechanically, not as two separate quantities. The relation is dialectical; society and nature combine to make up a vital unity from which new qualities emerge’ (p.  57). To this he adds a wholistic perspective: ‘… society, born from nature and part of the cosmos, is bound ultimately by the same laws as nature—the laws of dialectical process’ (p. 59). And again: ‘Dialectically nature and society do make a unity; but a unity in which act and knowledge fuse’ (p. 107). This is his clearest statement of the interrelation of nature and society, as it involves both action and thought: the knowledge of land and human engagement and responsibility that is evident in the oral and material cultures in the earliest human societies. In his own life, Lindsay writes, this led him to choose ‘the way of direct and harmonious symbiosis with the earth, with nature as a whole’ (TFOL, p. 90). Nature was no longer simply a resource for Lindsay, materially or poetically.

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Transition The 1930s were a time of change for Lindsay, in every area of his life. He began them as a bankrupt publisher, with an abandoned marriage and a tempestuous and self-destructive personal relationship. Through the decade he achieved a massive writing output in a variety of genres, adding to his repertoire historical fiction, modern fiction, children’s fiction and history writing. At the same time, he underwent a political transformation that led him back to his earlier socialist beliefs and prompted him to develop a methodology for analysing society, the individual and the artworks by which their interrelationships might be articulated. He became politically active, writing verse-declamations such as Who Are the English? and his study of John Bunyan as part of the Popular Front strategy to battle the infiltration of fascist ideas into British society. Lindsay also joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and began what would be a life-­ long dialogue with their version of Marxism. The subject of Lindsay’s next major author-study, published in 1950, was Charles Dickens, a writer with an avowed political platform: Dickens self-identified as a Radical. For Lindsay the challenge was to show how Dickens’ popular and engaging fiction was also a serious and at times scathing critique of the dominant classes and beliefs of his own society. In so doing Lindsay took another step away from his earlier de-politicised analysis of art. Now he would explore literature that set out to be political, but also engaged an enormous audience, which raised suspicion amongst comrades and conservatives alike. Lindsay’s study of Dickens was an examination of how art could be a mode of political activism; how, rather than simply reproduce the values of the dominant class in society, it could hold those values up to scrutiny. His choice of a writer who shrouded his politics with the cloak of melodrama proves to be both provocative and enlightening.

PART III

The 1940s; and Charles Dickens

In the thirteen years between the publication of his study of Bunyan (1937) and his next major author-study, Charles Dickens: A Biographical and Critical Study (1950) Jack Lindsay was caught up in a number of life-­ changing events, including protests against the rise of fascism and military (though not fighting) service in World War II. He tried repeatedly to end his relationship with Elza de Locre, which remained fraught and damaging to both; and at Unity Theatre he met the woman with whom he would form a new relationship, Ann Davies. He also became a fully-­ fledged member of the Communist Party; began to attend meetings regularly; joined its History Group; and took part in the Popular Front work of the Party.

Elza Throughout the 1930s Jack Lindsay had continued his fraught relationship with Elza de Locre, regularly shifting homes, sometimes alone and sometimes as a couple. Jack had been attempting to end their relationship for some time but was constantly drawn back by her calls for assistance. In 1941 the situation was resolved externally: ‘The call-up paper had brutally and simply solved a relationship which had baffled me’ (TFOL, p. 142). He reports arriving at Trowbridge Barracks concerned for Elza’s welfare while she was left to live alone: however, he adds, she ‘soon went voluntarily into a psychiatric home, and died of cancer’ (p.  142). Lindsay acknowledges: ‘I was ashamed that I was one of the many men who in one part of themselves welcomed a call-up if it took them away from a situation grown personally intolerable’ (p. 142).

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Military Service Nearly forty-one years of age and too old for a combat unit, Lindsay was appointed to the Signals Corps of Military Intelligence that intercepted enemy communications. The job required skill in reading high-speed Morse Code, which Lindsay found impossibly stressful. On requesting a transfer, he was assigned as a clerical officer to the Orderly Room, first at Trowbridge in Wiltshire and then at Douglas on the Isle of Man, assisted by the fact that his commanding officer ‘had two passions: troutfishing and Cleopatra—and he had read my novel on that queen’ (p. 143). While at Trowbridge he attended the local Branch of the Communist Party1 where he ‘gave classes on Marxist dialectics and helped to organise the party-members in the battalion’ (p.  144). Lindsay reported that during the war the Army paid little attention to communists; they were mostly concerned about active trade unionists whom they feared might disrupt the war effort. At Trowbridge Lindsay began to work on poetry (Into Action: the Battle of Dieppe (1942), Second Front: Poems (1944)) and novels (We Shall Return (1942), Beyond Terror (1943), Hullo Stranger (1945)) set during the war and based on first-hand accounts and army war records. While on leave in London in 1943, he encountered fellow Australian and leftist Mary Wren who referred him to Captain MacOwan of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), situated in the War Office. MacOwan was looking for people to write theatre and film scripts with an anti-fascist theme for a documentary theatre he was attempting to establish. Though Lindsay warned Wren that he had no experience of scriptwriting, he found himself in an interview with MacOwan and, to his surprise, was subsequently transferred back to London to write propaganda scripts for the troops. Many of the writers employed to write these scripts turned out to be leftists and he recounts one officer warning a group of twelve writers in the War Office that they must be careful not to let their work fall into  Lindsay writes in The Fullness of Life that he joined the Communist Party as soon as he was called up in 1941. The microfilmed Party membership card in his Security Service files is dated 1936. Whether his membership was not ratified in 1936 because he was unable to attend meetings is not clear. 1

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communist hands, not realising that eleven of them were communists and the twelfth was Trotskyite (TFOL, p. 144). Paul Gillen describes the work of the Unit as ‘collective, experimental and politically radical, aiming to raise political consciousness by arguing the need to defeat fascism and to struggle for a better world once the war was over’ (1993, p.  74). Of Lindsay’s contribution he adds: ‘Usually in collaboration with others, Jack worked on dozens of playscripts, film treatments and “living newspapers”—dramatised documentaries influenced by Brecht and the American avant-garde’ (p. 74). Some of these forms had been used by Unity Theatre in their successful pre-war performances; others Lindsay learned by studying European, Russian and U.S. theatre. An entry on Lindsay’s Security Service file for 3.1.45, extracted from an entry of 2.11.44 refers to an article in the Sunday Times, 29 October 1944, titled ‘The Army Now Has Its Own Theatre Unit’ and quotes: ‘A new school of drama and dramatists, resembling in many ways the documentaries of the film world, is rapidly developing inside the British Army. Among the plays already written and acted are “Lend-Lease” by Ted WILLIS and Signalman Jack LINDSAY’ (NAUK, KV 2/3252). Lindsay’s work also attracted attention outside the Army, his play, Lend-Lease considered for film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock. Lindsay reports in The Fullness of Life: Hitchcock had come over from the U.S.A. and wanted to do a documentary film; he saw a production of our Lend-Lease and said at once that was just what he wanted. I discussed the matter with him and drew up a film-script; he didn’t want a single detail changed from the play-version. Then suddenly we heard that he wasn’t going to do the film. Later we were told that he was overruled from somewhere high-up: the public in America knew practically nothing about Lend-Lease and the authorities thought it would be most unwise to enlighten them. As Hitchcock wanted a film for distribution in both Britain and the States, he had therefore dropped the idea. (TFOL, p. 164)

The Security Service was apparently less impressed than Hitchcock, in the same file note confirming that Lindsay is ‘attached to the central Pool of Artists and is working for E.E.13 and A.W.2A on A.B.C.A. scripts, at which he is not at all efficient’.

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Post-War Years After he was de-mobbed Lindsay returned to his work as a writer and publisher. In the 1940s he published the journals, Our Time (monthly) and Seven (quarterly), both of which were part of the Communist Party attempt to build a post-war cultural movement based on their values. He was also a director of Fore Publications and editor of the book series, New Developments (1947–48) and Key Poets (1950). In The Fullness of Life Lindsay describes the development of his artistic and political theory during these years, including a 10,000-word paper titled A Marxist Theory of Culture that he circulated to members of the Communist Party. Notes for this paper were the subject of a letter to a colleague that was intercepted and microfilmed by the Security Services. He would develop this paper into the book, Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949). During this period Lindsay’s major literary interests were in the relationships between the artist and the artwork and the artwork and society, explored in his pamphlet, Perspective for Poetry (1944) and his study of the work of colleague and friend, Mulk Raj Anand. His motivations for these studies included the cultural redevelopment in Britain post-World War II and his rejection of both conservative claims for literature to be apolitical and the Soviet Communist Party policy that literature should be dogmatically political (primarily in the form of Socialist Realism).

Ann Davies Through his work in the 1930s with Unity Theatre (Chambers, 1989) Lindsay had met Ann Davies, who was widely regarded as a talented, intelligent, charismatic and committed young woman: Ann had been the star of Unity’s immensely popular Babes in the Wood, a prewar political pantomime satirising the Munich agreement. … She had literary as well as theatrical talents, later writing a book about contemporary British drama and translating Zola’s Earth. She also possessed an imposing reputation for political, theatrical and business management. (Gillen, 1993, p. 108)

Davies had worked in a variety of organisations, including the League of Nations, the British Drama League and the National Council of Social

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Services and in 1942 became the first female President of the Unity Theatre. In 1944 she worked with Lindsay at Fore Publications and Gillen notes that: ‘Soon Jack and Ann were telling everyone they had married. (They were not, but Janet refused him a divorce and he did not want to face the lengthy and expensive rigmarole one would have involved)’ (pp. 108–9). Davies adopted the Lindsay surname and Jack noted in The Fullness of Life that his play, Robin of England, written for Unity Theatre, was intended as ‘an epithalamion for Ann and myself’ (TFOL, p. 151). As Ann Lindsay, she wrote a book about her experience of community and educational performance titled The Theatre (1948), published by Bodley Head. Lindsay describes Ann as selfless and self-possessed—‘I do not recall one moment when she lost her balance or her temper, when she even raised her voice’ (TFOL, p. 160)—and totally dedicated to her work. She was, as he notes, a very different person from Elza. She and Jack shared not only an intense emotional bond, but also a deep political commitment to a communist future, as he wrote in the poem, ‘To Ann’ (CP, pp. 524–5): When lovers meet I meet you always I know in my heart the love then redeemed When lovers meet I meet you always in the breaking heart in the depths transformed. When lovers meet nothing is lost: the communist future once grasped in our hands When lovers meet all bitterness goes the memory still of that future is mine.

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Writing and Publishing, 1940–49 For the rest of the 1940s Lindsay was involved with work for Unity Theatre, the Society for Cultural Relations with Russia, the P.E.N. group, the League for Democracy in Greece, and attended meetings of the Writers Group, and less frequently the History Group, of the Communist Party. In 1944, for his contribution to British literature, Lindsay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He co-edited the Communist Party journal, Arena (1949–51), wrote for the short-lived political theatre company, Theatre 46, contributed essays to a range of journals including Left Review, Dialectics, Poetry and the People, Our Time, Adam International Review, Life and Letters, The Nineteenth Century and After and Arena, and puzzled over the doctrinaire turn in Zhdanov’s speeches about culture that argued for a form of didactic social realism (Socialist Realism) that directly opposed the freedom of the artist Lindsay espoused in Perspective for Poetry. He continued to research and write historical novels, though his approach was not that of an academically trained historian. Paul Gillen writes: Only a small proportion of his writing about the past can be classified straightforwardly as ‘History’. Nearly all of it is woven into fiction, cultural criticism, political polemic, mythography, ethnography and biography. He wrote history episodically, collectively, polyphonically and kaleidoscopically. Individual experience is subordinated to social experience, plot to pattern and process. (Gillen, 2020: online)

Lindsay’s interdisciplinary practice predicts the development of Cultural Studies some decades later. In the period 1938–50 he wrote twelve historical novels, one of which was for children, The Don Sights Devon: A Story of the Defeat of the Invincible Armada (1941). Most of these novels are set at times of social unrest and place ordinary people in the context of social and political events that threaten their lives and livelihoods. As Gillen notes, many are polyphonic, giving voice to many different characters and their diverse experiences and viewpoints. He also wrote a cultural study of Ancient Rome, set during the break-up of the Empire and a comprehensive Western cultural history titled A Short History of Culture (1939), later revised and re-issued as A Short History of Culture: From Prehistory to the Renascence (1962).

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In this decade Lindsay published two more classical translations; six books of verse, including two verse-declamations and the works based on wartime experience mentioned earlier; an overview of the arts in Britain, British Achievement in Art and Music (1945); the book of political and cultural theory that would cause him to be censured by the Communist Party, Marxism and Contemporary Science: or, the Fullness of Life (1949); and an account in diary form of the month he and Ann spent in the Soviet Union when invited to attend the Pushkin celebrations, A World Ahead: Journal of a Soviet Journey (1950). His other extended works from this period are the pamphlet, Perspective for Poetry; his extended essay on writer and communist, Mulk Raj Anand (1949), later published in expanded form as The Elephant and the Lotus (1965), and his major, encyclopaedic study of the life and work of Dickens, Charles Dickens: A Biographical and Critical Study (1950).

CHAPTER 6

Charles Dickens, Radical

In Charles Dickens: A Biographical and Critical Study (1950) Jack Lindsay writes about a self-declared Radical who was appalled by the effect of industrial capitalism on working people and on nineteenth-century British society, and who had an abiding hatred for all forms of Christianity except perhaps the Church of England which he found impossible to take seriously as a religion. Yet this is not how Dickens has always been understood or remembered. In The Fullness of Life Lindsay notes that, in the 1940s when he was writing his study, ‘Dickens was generally despised by intellectuals as “the low comedian of a one-dimensional universe”’ (p. 189). In the prefatory ‘Note’ to his book, he cites one of the few celebratory accounts of Dickens he found during his research, Edmund Wilson’s essay, ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’ from his book, The Wound and the Bow (1941). Wilson begins by declaring: Of all the great English writers, Charles Dickens has received in his own country the scantiest serious attention from either biographers, scholars, or critics. He has become for the English middle class so much one of the articles of their creed—a familiar joke, a favorite dish, a Christmas ritual— that it is difficult for British pundits to see in him the great artist and social critic that he was. Dickens had no university education, and the literary men from Oxford and Cambridge, who have lately been sifting fastidiously so much of the English heritage, have rather snubbingly let him alone. The

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Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoyevsky ignored Dostoyevsky’s master, Dickens. (p. 1)

Lindsay concurs, noting: ‘My main excuse for this book is a great love of Dickens and a failure to find any book about him which made a serious attempt to grapple with his creative processes’ (CD, p. 5). Lindsay paired Dickens with Blake as ‘the two writers who hold the key to the nature of our cultural crisis to-day—that is, the national key, the signposts to the resolutions needed by British culture in its last stages of nationhood’ (p. 5). For Lindsay and his left-wing colleagues, this meant the step into a classless society. Lindsay located art as a key site and practice in which this cultural change was taking place, and this is where his critical next step is taken: to argue the case for artistic practice as a political act capable of producing change. As Victor N. Paananen (2000) notes, this was not a popular stance at the time among British Marxists who envisaged base and superstructure in a relationship of reflection, not interrelatedness. As part of the superstructure along with other social institutions such as law, education, politics, the family and religion, art was seen as reflecting the means and relations of production (base); it did not enable or enhance them, though it might be seen as embedding them in the life of society and individual citizens. That applied particularly to work by writers such as Charles Dickens, who were popular with middle-class readers. In his study, however, Lindsay argues for a different model of society and of the role of art that was inspired in part by Engels’ belief in the interaction between base and superstructure (Paananen, p.  51). Instead of an essentially passive role reflecting the base, Lindsay proposed that art and the artist could have an activist role in the transformation of both base and superstructure, and so of society. Lindsay’s book is about art as political activism and the artist as activist: about the inseparability of art from the artist who produced it—the skills and abilities that enable them to create their work and the personal history that grounds their understanding of the world; about the political influences that enable the politically-engaged artist to think outside the mainstream and see their world differently and critically; and about how the artist uses the capabilities of the artwork to engage readers with their vision. All of which Lindsay exemplifies in his study of the life and work of Charles Dickens.

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The Artist Lindsay begins his study by reflecting on the relationship between the artist and the artwork as expressed by Dickens himself in his short story, ‘Somebody’s Luggage’ (1894) when an accomplished but impoverished pavement artist says of his audience: ‘You have seen my works many a time, though it’s fifty thousand to one if you have seen me. You say you don’t want to see me? You say your interest is in my works, and not in me? Don’t be so sure about that’ (p. 9). This is one of Dickens’ framed tales for which, as Ruth F.  Glancy explains: ‘Dickens would write the linking framework [for a journal issue] and send round a circular explaining the theme of the number and his requirements for stories’ (Glancy, p. 58). With this story Dickens was eliciting the kind of personally revealing, self-reflexive story that Lindsay believed was the basis of Dickens’ writing. As Lindsay argued also at the beginning of his study of Bunyan, art cannot be understood without some understanding of the artist, their experiences and actions constituting the basis of the view of human and social behaviour that is embedded in their writings. Accordingly, he begins with a description of Dickens’ childhood that includes everyday details that later find their way into his writing. They include the name of Dickens’ childhood nurse, Mary Weller, who gave her name to Sam Weller of The Pickwick Papers (Dickens also has Sam marry a woman called Mary); and the abandoned house near Chatham where Dickens played as a child, known locally as Tom’s All Alone after its owner, Thomas Clark who lived there by himself for twenty-five years, and which entered the pages of Bleak House as Tom-all-alone’s, an image of the most desolate of London slums, described by Lindsay as ‘the rotten forces of greed caught in a material effluvium of decay and darkness’ (CD, p. 24). He notes: ‘No important writer has drawn so continuously and directly on his personal experience as Dickens. There is scarcely any gap between the experience and the creative image’ (p.  24). For Lindsay, the key point about Dickens’ use of these childhood events was the emotional energy and meaning with which he infuses them in his writing: His observation was of a peculiar kind, emotionally selective, intensely aware of certain movements and interconnections in a given field of contacts, but blind to all others. What it had been in childhood it remained throughout life. Its action, or failure to act, is always linked with the key impulsions of

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his life, his quest for definite patterns and clues of union and separation. No one was ever farther from the naturalistic observer or cataloguer. (p. 26)

Dickens was never a disinterested or objective observer of life; he was always engaged, driven, or motivated by particular emotions and feelings that he strove to identify and analyse. A familiar example of this practice is his use of the story of his childhood employment at a shoe blacking factory in his serial novel, David Copperfield (1849–50). For about a year (1824–25) young Charles Dickens was abruptly removed from his comfortable, genteel, lower middle-class life and sent to work sticking labels on bottles of shoe blacking, alongside a group of working-class children in a warehouse on the Thames. The cause of his sudden change of life was that his impecunious father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. His mother accompanied his father into the prison, taking the younger children with her. Charles was boarded out, to live alone, at the age of eleven, spending ten hours each day working in the rat-infested warehouse. Although Dickens did not work at Warren’s factory for very long (less than a year), the conditions under which he came to the work, his apparent abandonment by his family, and his insertion into an unfamiliar and frightening working-class environment left deep psychic wounds. Dickens translates this experience into fiction when, at the age of ten, young David Copperfield is sent by his abusive stepfather to work at Murdstone and Grimsby’s wine and spirits warehouse in Blackfriars, pasting labels on bottles and preparing them for shipment. In the novel Dickens speaks through the voice of young Copperfield: I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby. (Chapter 11)

Lindsay argues that Dickens’ power is not just in his acute powers of observation (of himself and others), but that he subjected the situations and behaviours he witnessed to social and political analysis that he conveys through character. His story of the abandoned and neglected child is more

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than a personal tragedy; it challenges the nature and values of the society in which this can happen. Lindsay adds to this story Dickens’ relationships with his sister and mother, which he sees as adding to the trauma of the situation. This includes the young Dickens’ grief over the loss of his sister Fanny as his regular childhood companion when she was offered a place at the Royal College of Music; his sense that Fanny was now his mother’s favourite; and then his shock at discovering that it was his mother who arranged for him to work at Warren’s factory. Lindsay notes: ‘To Charles it meant the final betrayal. He never forgave his mother for accepting the offer, and round his sudden violent anger there gathered all the past elements of fear and distrust’ (p. 50). Conversely, his relationship with his father is affirmed when he discovers that John Dickens has complained to one of the factory-­ owners about the visibility of his son’s workspace: ‘John Dickens, it would seem, didn’t mind his son tying up pots, but he wouldn’t have people knowing about it’ (p. 59). Father and son collaborate in their shame about Charles’ loss of gentility. For Lindsay, this is more than mere snobbery, though it is that: however, it also indicates ‘deep psychic causes, which went beyond any conscious social attitudes, any simple issues of prestige’ (p. 61). For Lindsay it shows ‘something of the terrible fear of the lower middle class that they would fall back into the struggling miserable mass of the proletariat of those years’ (p. 61). David Copperfield gives voice to the reasons for this fear: No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these henceforth everyday associates with those of my happier childhood …; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom. The deep remembrance of the sense I had, of being utterly without hope now; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day by day what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, would pass away from me, little by little, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. (Chapter XI)

The source of this fear is Copperfield’s awareness that, no matter what his personal qualities are, relegation to the working class means that his potential will never be realised. Dickens’ personal anguish is channelled into his communication of the effect of class-based injustice on the individual.

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Lindsay argues that Dickens developed his political philosophy through experience, not political or family affiliation. During his personal interactions with major social institutions Dickens’ observational powers enabled him to see the inequities that they strove to hide behind platitudes and generalisations. One of his earliest institutional encounters was with religion.

Religion As a child at Chatham, he hated the sermons at the Baptist Chapel the family attended. Full of fire and brimstone, accusation and threat, they were completely at odds with his peaceful family life and happy school experience. Many of Dickens’ characters who profess religious affiliation are personifications of hypocrisy, greed, selfishness, and self-righteousness: the evil Murdstone of David Copperfield, Mrs Varden (‘most devout when most ill-tempered’) of Barnaby Rudge, the prolix and egotistical Reverend Boanerges Boiler of The Uncommercial Traveller, and the vengeful and hypocritical Mrs Clenman of Little Dorrit. Lindsay writes that rejection of Nonconformist religion (often more outwardly driven and punitive that the conformist Church of England) is a key component of Dickens’ politics: Since it exists strongly from the outset of his career, it represents a primary point of critical dissent from the lower middle-class world out of which he comes … which ultimately widens into a complete break between him and the values of the money world. To understand the integrity of his art and life we must grasp this fact. (p. 38)

He supports this judgment with quotes from an early pamphlet published by Dickens called Sunday under Three Heads (1836), which describes a dissenter congregation as ‘a stronghold of intolerant zeal and ignorant enthusiasm’ (quoted p.  38). He notes that Dickens considered Nonconformity, like Catholicism, to be ‘a regressive force’ and the Anglican Church as irrelevant and useless at best (p.  39). However, Lindsay notes, Dickens regarded Christ as ‘a morally perfect person’ and the Bible as teaching excellent life lessons (p. 40). His quarrel was with institutionalised religion, not spiritual belief.

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Lindsay notes that there was a tendency to read hypocritical religious characters as aberrant individuals rather than as representative of their Church. However, Dickens does not let religion off the hook so easily. If individuals can cloak their behaviour by reference to religion Dickens suggests, the religion somehow enables this usage. For example, in his last and unfinished book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) Dickens relates the response of the Anglican Dean of Cloisterham Cathedral to Canon Septimus Crisparkle’s decision to stand as guarantor for Neville Landless to keep him out of jail: ‘It does not become us, perhaps,’ pursued the Dean, ‘to be partisans. Not partisans. We clergy keep our hearts warm and our heads cool, and we hold a judicious middle course.’ ‘I hope you do not object, sir, to my having stated in public, emphatically, that he will reappear here, whenever any new suspicion may be awakened, or any new circumstance may come to light in this extraordinary matter?’ ‘Not at all,’ returned the Dean. ‘And yet, do you know, I don’t think,’ with a very nice and neat emphasis on those two words: ‘I don’t think I would state it emphatically. State it? Ye-e-es! But emphatically? No-o-o. I think not. In point of fact, Mr. Crisparkle, keeping our hearts warm and our heads cool, we clergy need do nothing emphatically.’ (Kindle Locations 2971–2977)

The Dean abandons moral authority and leadership, revealing himself and the Anglican Church as functionaries of the State, providing divine authority for its repressive and inequitable treatment of its citizens—emphatically. For Dickens Catholicism was a medieval anachronism that was foreign to the modern British state. Nonconformists were rigid, puritanical, loveless congregations in thrall to preachers who threatened them with damnation if they failed to follow the teachings of the Bible as devised by the preachers themselves. And the Anglican Church was the propaganda arm of the State, benign at best but at worst enabling and validating repressive State policies and practices. Religion was the first social institution with which Dickens tangled, and he never changed his mind about its pernicious influence, in whichever sectarian guise it appeared. However, Lindsay argues, it was not the only social institution he criticised.

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The Law After leaving school Dickens went to work as a clerk in a law firm, first Molloy and then Ellis and Blackmore. He learned Gurney’s shorthand 1 and when proficient set up office with his cousin, Tom Charlton as a freelance reporter for the Consistory Court of the Bishop of London, situated in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. Established in the eleventh century Consistory Courts were ecclesiastical courts that presided over matters related to church property, the behaviour of the clergy, matters related to births, marriage and probate, and matters related to morality. The bishop appointed a judge of the Court who acted as his official principal and was known as the Chancellor. By the start of the nineteenth century, the Court was no longer used to adjudicate moral issues though when Dickens started work there, it still presided over probate, matrimonial issues and all matters related to church property and clergy behaviour. Lindsay reports of Dickens’ observations: ‘He gained a very low opinion of the law indeed; and to the end of his days he considered it largely made up of unnecessary formalities and organized injustice’ (p. 72). In his novels Dickens’ most sustained attack on the legal system was Bleak House (1852–53), which includes the infamous internal combustion of rag-and-bone man, Krook. Known locally as the Chancellor, Krook’s collection of papers includes the key to the central legal mystery of the novel. Again, word play alone tells the reader Dickens’ opinion of the law as an institution, with Krook the Chancellor hoarding the solution to the problem until it becomes worthless. Lindsay concludes that Dickens’ opinion of the law was that, like religion, ‘it, too, was essentially a form of considered and organized oppression’ (p. 73). Dickens’ judgment was based not on studying the law, but on his observation of the effects of the legal system on people’s lives. In the Consistory Court he witnessed the archaic ceremony of the court and the way in which the complex legal apparatus disadvantaged anyone without 1  Thomas Vice, ‘Charles Dickens and Gurney’s shorthand: “that savage stenographic mystery”,’ Language & History (2018), Vol. 61, nos. 1–2, 77–93. Vice reports that Dickens’ father had learned Gurney’s shorthand on release from Marshalsea debtor’s prison and worked as a parliamentary reporter for The Mirror of Parliament, established and run by Dickens’ maternal uncle, John Henry Barrow (p.  79). Dickens bought his own copy of Gurney’s book, Brachygraphy, or an Easy and Compendious System of Short Hand (1825). Biographers disagree over whether Dickens taught himself the skill, as does David in David Copperfield, or his uncle, John Barrow taught him (p. 80).

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legal training or the wealth to hire expert legal assistance. He also witnessed the court being used by the wealthy to take advantage of poor and honest people. Lindsay reports that, shortly before his death in 1870, Dickens repeated his charge that the legal system was biased and unjust: ‘“I have that high opinion of the law of England generally, which one is likely to derive from the impression that it puts all the honest men under the diabolical hooves of all the scoundrels”’ (CD, pp. 72–3). This practice of judging an institution not by reference to its own internal standards and practices, but by its effects on the lives of those it touches, led him to another source of concern and criticism—the parliament.

The Parliament After several years at the Consistory Court, Dickens set out to become a parliamentary reporter and in 1832 started work for the newspaper, The True Sun. One of his assignments was a report on the Reform Bill. On 7 August that year, Dickens recorded the passage of the Bill through parliament for the record of parliamentary proceedings, The Mirror of Parliament established and run by his uncle, John Barrow. Subsequently he reported on three major bills: the Bill for the Preservation of Peace (in Ireland); the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery in the Colonies, and the legislation that turned the British East India Company into a trustee of the Crown. Lindsay reports: ‘He was suitably unimpressed. Or rather he was indelibly impressed with contempt for Parliament as an institution’ (p. 83). Despite receiving praise for his assistance in ensuring the Preservation of Peace Bill was reported accurately (pp. 84–5), Lindsay concludes: He was convinced that Parliament was a sham, a façade of free discussion and decision behind which various sections of the ruling and owning classes got on with the real business of quarrelling over the plundered country’s body. This conviction had been completed by his observations during the time of the Reform Bill and the first activities of the Reformed Parliament. (p. 85)

Lindsay goes on to note that, although Dickens never suggested an alternative form of governance to Parliament, he was convinced that it was ‘a contaminated system … which could never overcome the limitations enforced by its origin as an organ of class domination’ (p. 85). Nor was he reassured by the Reform Bill (which gave the franchise to more of the

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middle class) when he witnessed not greater freedom and equity, but the scrabbling of that class for its share of the wealth: ‘this very extension of franchise … convinced him of the corruptness of the Parliamentary method. After four years’ experience his suspicion and contempt were unshakable’ (p. 85). It was this experience, Lindsay argues, that prompted Dickens to produce a new kind of writing, ‘a mixture of satire and fantasy, which dealt with basic social or political issues’ (p. 85).

Early Writing Lindsay describes one of Dickens’ first literary sketches: ‘Drawing on his memories of eastern fable, he wrote a tale about Howsa Kummauns [House of Commons] and the odalisque Reefawm [Reform]’ (p. 85). He revised it many years later as The Thousand and One Humbugs: ‘It tells how the Sultan, Taxedtaurus (Fleeced Bull), has many loves whom he raises to the dignity of Howsa Kummauns or Peerless Chatterer; but the inhabitants of his harem prove faithless, idle, boastful, extravagant, chattering, useless’ (pp. 85–6). At the same time Lindsay notes that Dickens continued his work for The Mirror, for which he reported the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834): 2 ‘He recognized in it the grand result of the Reform Ministry and it completed his contempt of Parliament and of the State machine. He felt in its key idea (no outdoor relief) the perfect exposure of the inhumanity of all measures concerned with furthering the money ethic’ (p. 102). He was also a reporter on the Chronicle, and several of his short stories including The Bloomsbury Christening, Horatio Sparkins and The Boarding House—later to be collected with others as Sketches by Boz—were published in the Monthly Magazine. Of this early work Lindsay writes: ‘Already we cannot miss the joyous impact of his humour, his capacity to strike out vivid phrases in which character and 2  The 1832 Royal Commission that gave rise to the 1834 Amendments was based on Thomas Malthus’s theory of population increase and Jeremy Bentham’s doctrine that people would prefer handouts to work. One of the major recommendations was that ‘out-relief’ should cease and relief would only be given in the workhouses, which would be so unpleasant that only the desperate would enter them: ‘into such a house none will enter voluntarily; work, confinement, and discipline, will deter the indolent and vicious; and nothing but extreme necessity will induce any to accept the comfort which must be obtained by the surrender of their free agency, and the sacrifice of their accustomed habits and gratifications’. Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick, Poor Law Commissioners’ Report of 1834 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1834).

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action appear defined by creative verve and concentration on essentials: a definition of the internal motive force in terms of visual imagery’ (p. 101). However, he concludes: ‘What is lacking is any central impulsion, any deep pattern of significance’ (p.  101). That systematic critique, Lindsay argues, may have been prompted by what Dickens himself later identified as a key moment: the burning down of the Houses of Parliament. In October 1834 two cartloads of the wooden sticks used to tally votes in parliament were sent to the House of Lords basement furnaces to be destroyed and accidentally set the building on fire. Dickens later described the event in a speech for a conference on administrative reform (27 June 1855): The sticks were housed in Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for firewood by the miserable people who lived in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went out that they should be privately and confidentially burned. It came to pass that they were burned in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes … (Dickens, 2014: Kindle Locations 1478–1483)

Dickens’ explicit linking of the operation of parliament with the social obtuseness and lack of charity that led to this valuable commodity being destroyed without any thought of their value to the poor and needy represents for Lindsay the ‘deep pattern of significance’ that he found missing in the earliest stories: In that moral we touch a fundamental aspect of his thinking, and at the same time a fundamental aspect of his artistic method, which works by allegorizing such an event as this of the fire and its causes, until the particular event becomes an all-embracing symbol of the society begetting it. (p. 103)

A range of issues and institutions became the subject of Dickens’ allegory and analysis, including the prison system from which he repeatedly had to rescue his father; a parliamentary system that gave no voice to the working class and the continual repression of political reform; an economy that was based on greed and exploitation at home and abroad; the cruel treatment of the displaced and the poor; a class-based society characterised by

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exploitation and cruelty; and a legal system that existed to serve lawyers and the wealthy. However, Lindsay notes, Dickens was not a revolutionary.

Politics and Thomas Carlyle Lindsay writes that Dickens was fundamentally a reformer; he wanted change but rejected violence as the means to achieve it. He was publicly outspoken on reform issues, took place in public debates, and attended conferences and meetings to pressure for reform. He also informed his own understanding by visiting slum areas, prisons and workhouses, so he understood the consequences of bad government policy and law. Lindsay identifies him as a ‘lower middle-class Radical, strongly and consistently opposed to all forms of inherited rank and power, and regarding the State as a curse carried on as a feudal or absolutist survival to set barriers and tolls on free enterprise’ (p. 137). For Dickens, Lindsay argued, the only viable form of economic activity was small-scale and local, ‘where the radical illusion could seem justified’ (p. 137). However, this vision was inadequate for a state undergoing a change to industrial capitalism, fuelled by imperialist expansion and exploitation. Lindsay argues that Dickens lacked an understanding of capitalism as an economic system, which meant he was equally blind to the need of workers to organise in order to protect working-class interests: ‘Both big business and trade unions seemed to him excrescences, forces that threatened the world of small units, free enterprise, and good man-to-man relationship which he thought possible and desirable’ (p.  137). For Lindsay, the power and value of Dickens’ work lay with the way he mobilised his artistry to advance ‘(a) to a definition of the human condition in terms of his world (b) to a definition which grasped the totality of forces operative in his world’ (p. 137). Dickens did not have the theory required to systematise his understanding of people and power, he adds, but he had the ability to create their likeness and conditions of being in all their complexity and nuance and to convey this to readers, who are thereby empowered to see their world anew, and to transform it. The social critic whose work Lindsay identifies as contributing most to Dickens’ social, political and economic understanding was Thomas Carlyle. He argues that Dickens shared with Carlyle a contempt for those ‘who monopolized suffrage, land, machinery, Press, religion, communications, travel, paper money, and who had imposed the Poor Law’ (p. 202).

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However, more importantly, Lindsay notes, Carlyle gave Dickens an holistic vision or theory of how and why this abuse of power took place. Abuse, cruelty and exploitation were not simply a matter of certain individuals behaving badly; they were enabled and even fostered by a class system that positioned some as more powerful than others. That differentiation was not only disempowering and harmful for the lower classes; it was corrupting and brutalising for the upper classes. ‘For the first time he saw the social system in something like a coherent perspective and discovered that it wasn’t an accident that various things he disliked could all be grouped as expressions of class-power’ (p. 202). Although Dickens and Carlyle disagreed on many issues, Carlyle’s books Chartism (1839) and The French Revolution (1837) were invaluable in assisting Dickens to systematise his thinking about social inequality: ‘these were the two books to which he owed a new start. A start which at last had an intellectual structure, however much he still depended on his intuitive radical reactions’ (p. 203). Lindsay goes on to quote passages from Carlyle’s Chartism that had a major influence on Dickens’ thinking and writing. Two are related to a new concept devised by Carlyle, the cash nexus, the notion that the ‘human’ bond between employer and employee has been destroyed and replaced by the abstraction, cash: ‘Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things which cash will not pay …’ (quoted, p. 203). Marx and Engels later took up this term in their writings and it is now mostly associated with their work. Another concerns the interrelationship of classes, which links the wealth of the middle and upper classes to the poverty and destitution of the working classes, which in turn corrupts the upper classes: ‘Vain also is it to think that the misery of one class, of the great universal under class, can be isolated, and kept apart and peculiar, down in that class.’ Instead, Carlyle contends, ‘the misery of the lowest spreads upwards and upwards and poor drudges … do, by circuitous but sure methods, bring kings’ heads to the block!’ (quoted, p. 203). Two other quotes concern the necessity for rebellion as a means of achieving justice, ‘as the dumb man, seeing the knife at his father’s throat, suddenly acquired speech!’ (p. 203). The working classes might not want to rebel, but they are given no option: ‘Rebellion is the means, but it is not the motive cause. The motive cause, and the true secret of the matter, were always this: The necessity there was for rebelling …’ (p. 203). Lindsay notes that the latter part of the 1830s was a time of great unrest and change in Britain. The response to the cruelty of the workhouse system implemented after the passing of the Poor Law Amendment

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Act of 1834 (that Dickens had reported and found cruel, punitive and morally repugnant) was that in ‘some towns the people stormed and burned the workhouses, and clashes between troops and people occurred’ (p. 204). The Chartists agitated for support but, despite collecting over a million signatures on their petition for reform, the Parliament arrogantly refused to accept the document. ‘This was the background of the renewed effort Dickens was making to grasp at an extended artistic method and understanding of his world’ (p. 205).

Family Life and Emotional (In)stability While Dickens was working as a journalist and developing his writing career, he had also begun his own family. After a failed early romance (with Maria Beadnell), in 1834 he met Catherine (Kate) Hogarth, daughter of one of his colleagues at the Morning Chronicle, writer and music critic, George Hogarth. They married in 1836 and by all accounts their early years were happy, but Dickens came to find the demands of parenthood overwhelming, particularly financially. Kate became pregnant soon after their marriage and went on to bear ten children, which Dickens seemed to regard as her choice alone. Not long after their marriage Kate’s younger sister, Mary moved into the house to assist with the children and household management and Dickens became very attached to her. Lindsay writes of this affection on Dickens’ part as obsessive, a situation that was exacerbated when, in 1837, Mary suddenly died: ‘Mary died in Charles’s arms, at five o’clock. In his anguish he pulled a ring from one of her fingers and put it on his own little finger, where he kept it till his death’ (p. 131). Lindsay notes that Kate, who was pregnant at the time, had a miscarriage ‘but that was only a minor unpleasantness for him in the shattering shock he received’ (p. 131). Dickens could not work and had to defer instalments of his fiction; he also had nightmares about Mary: The obsession was genuine; but there is also no doubt that he used it to some extent as a revenge on Kate. He continually made clear to her that she had failed to give him the happiness Mary had given. (Note the offensive form of the notice in the Miscellany, which described Mary as his chief solace.) (p. 134)

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At the same time Lindsay suggests that this obsession with an untouchable other woman, while his wife was preoccupied producing their children, may have been a creative stimulus for Dickens and that if Mary had not been available, someone else would have taken the role. Lindsay presents a psychoanalytic reading of Dickens’ response that concludes ‘all this derived from his fear of being made to confront his sense of guilt’ over the emotional infidelity involved in his feelings for her (p. 135). Lindsay argues throughout his book that there was a deep emotional instability within Dickens prevented him from achieving a stable, contented personal life. Not long after Mary’s death, another one of Kate’s unmarried sisters, Georgina moved in to help with the children and, although the bond between her and Dickens was not so deep, again it was sufficient to disrupt his relationship with Kate. Lindsay writes that Georgina was also deeply emotionally attached to Dickens, whether or not he reciprocated. Later would come his affair with actress, Ellen Ternan that finally caused Charles and Kate to separate. This became a public scandal, particularly when, largely because of harassment by her husband, Kate moved out of their home to a house in Camden, taking with her only their youngest child. Sister-in-law, Georgina was left to raise all the other children. Lindsay suggests that this arrangement suited Georgina to some extent: ‘She at last had her way and had driven Kate out of the house; but she hadn’t managed to get Charles for herself’ (p. 339). He supports this claim by noting that she cut all loving references to Kate out of Dickens’ letters, prevented Dickens’ eldest daughter, Mary (Mamie) from visiting her mother and shielded Dickens in every way from public disapproval despite his unethical treatment of his wife. Dickens had published his own account of the separation in his magazine Household Words. In his article, ‘How the Dickens Scandal Went Viral’ (2013) Patrick Leary summarised its content: On May 25, he wrote a long, self-servingly disingenuous account of his marriage that began with the statement that he and his wife, Catherine, had lived unhappily together for many years, and that they were “in all respects of character and temperament, wonderfully unsuited to each other”. The remainder of this extraordinary letter threw the entire blame for the failure of the marriage upon his wife, whom he described as suffering at times from a “mental disorder” that had rendered her unfit both as wife and mother, and ended with a defense of the spotless character of a “young lady” [Ternan] who had been slandered by “two wicked persons”. (p. 307)

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This characterisation of the marriage is at odds with Dickens’ own early letters to and about Kate and its publication is, in any case, a shameful public act. Lindsay quotes daughter Katie: ‘“My father was like a madman when my mother left home,” said Katie. “This affair brought out all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home”’ (p. 338). The man who could never forget his own sense of childhood abandonment withdrew emotionally from his own children. Years before this final break with Kate, Lindsay noted, this ‘disequilibrium’ seemed to be necessary for his work: ‘In London he tended to become the mere journalist: alone he tended to dissolve in day-dream. Only when the social recoil and the day-dream came vitally together could he create’ (p.  270). However, this process became increasingly difficult and Lindsay argues that Dickens could only manage it by allowing himself to be ‘totally mastered by his theme’, one major consequence of which was that ‘the demonic element in his work was liable to get mixed up with his actual living’ (p. 270). For Lindsay this was a way of understanding the emotional intensity of Dickens’ work, and the personal consequences for him (and those around him) of having to live with that intensity in his everyday life. It seems that the one social institution that remained unintelligible to Dickens was the family.

Creating a Literary Form Lindsay notes that when Dickens began writing, he had read all the great eighteenth-century novelists ‘from Defoe to Scott’ and essayists ‘from Goldsmith to Washington Irving’ (p. 146) but when he looked for models from his own time, none were forthcoming. Instead, he found feeble imitations of Sir Walter Scott, ineffectual social novels, historical novels that incorporated elements from a range of sources such as picaresque, melodrama, and Gothic, the sea stories of Marryat and others, and a range of popular forms including ‘thriller and the melodrama, the burlesque and the farce, the puppet show and the broadsheet’ (p.  146) as well as the theatre, which Dickens had always enjoyed. Lindsay concludes: ‘It was, indeed, deep down in the popular levels that one had to look for creatively fertilizing forces’ (p. 146). Dickens’ success was in his ability to fashion from this mix a text that engaged his readers, constituted a coherent narrative and, at the same time, was a serious and articulate commentary on nineteenth-century

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British society. Lindsay has already noted Dickens’ observational skills, and he early commented on Dickens’ acute sensory awareness, including his keen sense of smell (p. 35) and ‘his strangely deep awareness of the subtle net of association in form and sound’ (p. 126); abilities that enable the skilful writer to create fictional worlds that are pulsing with life. In his serial novels Dickens will bring together his literary ability and his social analysis to create affecting, engaging and critical reflections on his own society. Lindsay notes, for example, that in his early novel, Oliver Twist (1839) Dickens brings together multiple literary forms, ‘a consolidation of melodrama and the eighteenth-century low life novel’ (p. 167). The novel is also an attack on social abuses: ‘directly on the workhouse system and indirectly on the vast cruelty and greed that begets the slums and the haunts of crime’ (p. 167). Lindsay notes the detailed, sensory descriptions of London slums that provide a fitting backdrop for Oliver’s experiences at the workhouse and while a member of Fagin’s gang, as well as for the tragic life and murder of Nancy and the brutality of Bill Sikes (pp. 167–8). While the emotional intensity of the novel derives in part from Dickens’ memories of his factory experience in London and its associated trauma, as well as his grief and associated feelings of guilt at the death of his sister-­ in-­law, Mary Hogarth (projected onto the death of Nancy). He reserves his final praise for ‘Dickens’s power to draw characters in a method of intense poetic simplification, which makes them simultaneously social emblems, emotional symbols, and visually precise individuals’ (p.  170). Lindsay acknowledges that Dickens’ characterisation has always attracted criticism but rejects this as the view of ‘thin-blooded intellectuals, philistine naturalists, and those for whom “psychology” means introspection’ who berated Dickens over what they referred to as his ‘exaggeration or caricature’ (p. 170). Implicit here is Lindsay’s view, expressed in his study of Bunyan, that psychology is only effective when combined with an understanding of the social positioning and experience of the individual. Lindsay argues that at the end of Dickens’ career we see his method ‘in all its subtle diversities’ (p. 170), including the intermingling of varied forms of characterisation, each with its own purpose in the narrative and its meanings. With Oliver Twist Lindsay notes also Dickens’ fondness for serialisation, which gave him an intimate relationship with his readers. Dickens was able to modify the story as he wrote by reference to the responses of friends and readers to his work: ‘Now he debated with Forster the fate of

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the Artful Dodger; and Talfourd stepped in to plead for a second chance for Charley Bates, which was granted’ (p. 172).

Social Criticism Lindsay argues also that there was a thread of social criticism in the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century, which he sees as ‘now flowing into Dickens’s work’ (p. 201). This social criticism was evident in works such as Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840), adding: ‘but this well-documented and strongly felt novel had little effect, and is now forgotten, because it simply exposed the brutal fact’ (p. 201). By contrast, Dickens ‘does not deal in such a documentary way with the fate of the children, but he draws on deep conflicts and tensions which enable him to make his picture of their fate appear of crucial importance’ (p. 201). Dickens explores all of the factors that have created the social abuses about which he writes, not a theoretical argument. At the same time, he gives an emotional intensity to his characters that engages readers with his complex analysis of their social situation. Just under two years after he finished Oliver Twist, Dickens began serial publication of Barnaby Rudge, his first historical novel, set in London during the Gordon Riots of 1780. In this novel he attempts to deal at length with civil unrest and its effect on society and individuals: ‘under the influence of Carlyle, he writes what is the first novel in which a mass movement is treated in its own right, as an integral part of the story, not as a mere background or foreground event through which the characters make their way’ (p. 212). The Gordon Riots were precipitated by the Papists Act of 1778, which was aimed at reducing discrimination against British Catholics. The resulting anti-Catholic protests led to violence against Catholic people and property and spread to attacks on institutions such as Newgate Prison and the Bank of England. The instigator of the riots was Lord George Gordon, founder and head of the Protestant Association, who claimed that the repeal of the discriminatory legislation would mean that Catholics could join the army where they would have access to weapons which they would then use to attack the British state in liaison with Rome. Gordon was considered politically naïve and inconsistent; an aristocrat who had a parliamentary seat bought for him. The Riots started as a 50,000 strong protest march on parliament led by Gordon and ended in hundreds of deaths. He was subsequently arrested for treason, but acquitted the following year on the grounds that he had no treasonable intent.

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Meanwhile, London had been ravaged by the worst riots ever experienced in its history. Lindsay writes that Dickens represents Gordon as a Fool in the literary sense, a person who is not bound by social propriety and so is able to speak the truth unbound by ideology, creed or even self-preservation: ‘Gordon is the Fool lifted onto the level of political action, the plaything of forces which he cannot understand or control, and yet contributing something of integrity to a mad situation’ (p. 212). His integrity lies in the fact that he believes in his cause, though he is unable to control the populist sentiment and the violence he unleashes. The evil is in those more politically astute than he, who have placed him in a role for which he does not have the capacity because they believe they can manipulate him to their own advantage. Lindsay adds: ‘This is for Charles the inner tragedy of history, that the Fool-Innocent, symbolic of the deepest and purest element in the mass-life, is deluded and twisted, is made the tool of the evil scheming forces’ (pp. 212–3).

Class Politics For Lindsay this scenario also reflects Dickens’ fear of mass movements (including unionism) for their potential to become a conduit for mass anger, hatred and violence. At the same time, however, he rejects Carlyle’s fantasy-nostalgia for a benevolent ruling class who simply need to understand the plight of the poor. Lindsay quotes from Chartism, the book that had so impressed Dickens, where Carlyle argues: How inexpressibly useful were true insight into it; a genuine understanding by the upper classes of society what it is that the under classes intrinsically mean; a clear interpretation of the thought which at heart torments these wild, inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures, in pain, unable to speak what’s in them. (p. 213)

Dickens’ experience in the law courts and the parliament had shown him that the upper classes knew very well what the working classes were pleading for; they simply had a vested interest in refusing to listen: … he considers that the upper classes understand only too well, and have always understood what the tormented Fool is trying to bring forth. They understand and take their counter-measures in time; they manage to twist

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the direction of the people’s energies and make it beget things it has not meant to beget. (p. 213)

Lindsay argues that Dickens lays the blame for the Riot and its attendant violence squarely at the door of the upper classes who know all too well that they will not be victims of that violence. Lindsay points out that Dickens couples Gordon with another Fool, the eponymous Barnaby Rudge. He is the simpleton son of Barnaby Sr, who was steward to the wealthy Haredale family but feigned his own death to cover up his murder of both Reuben Haredale and the gardener who was blamed for that crime. Barnaby spends his days in the countryside with his mother and his pet raven, Grip. A manual labourer he is a generous and happy soul. He and his mother are caught up in the main plotline when a mysterious stranger appears in the area, who turns out to be his father in disguise. In order to escape his demands for money Barnaby and his mother, Mary relocate several times, ending up in London just as the Riots start. Barnaby is caught up in the mob, which he does not understand, and is almost hanged as a traitor. He is rescued by another character, an amiable locksmith who is part of another plot strand that explores different working-class responses, including unionism, to the Riots. Barnaby’s story shows the effect of class on the life of the individual. Barnaby’s innocent joining with the rioters almost sees him hanged as a traitor. No upper-class hero arrives to rescue Barnaby (as Carlyle wanted to believe would happen) but a good-hearted working-class man convinces the court of his simplicity. The real-life Gordon, who initiated the violence that lasted a week and led to the deaths of between 300 and 700 people, was protected by his class privilege: he too is declared innocent of any traitorous intent.

Social Transformation and Literary Exaggeration On Dickens’ choice of the Gordon Riots as his setting Lindsay writes: ‘these riots came at a moment of obscure transition, when Wilkite radicalism was at its ebb and new proletarian forces were still unstable and inchoate’ (p. 217). He notes, too, that Dickens was still resistant to working-class mass movements, as we see in his descriptions in Barnaby Rudge of the union meetings presided over by the vain and ridiculous Simon Tappertit, the locksmith’s apprentice. This and many similar portraits were criticised as exaggerations and caricatures, particularly by those who championed

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the realist mainstream Victorian novel. For Lindsay, this was to miss the point or, at least, to misunderstand the strategy: What quickened “exaggeration” in Charles was the dream-transmutation of reality. And this activity, which lies at the root of his creative writing, is most easily detected in the stories, where the compression brings out the lines of force in the fantasy and prevents it from much pretence of being assimilated in normal event. (p. 242)

With a character such as Tappertit the connections between his personal vanity and desire for power, his jealousy and enmity towards his employer and his willingness to urge on the most destructive elements of the rioting mob are clear. Dickens does not make him representative of all members of the working class, but he does demonstrate through him the warping effect on individuals of class-based society, particularly on someone who is constitutionally disposed to be weak. He does the same through the characterisation of Lord George Gordon. Lindsay notes that Dickens’ mid-career novels, A Christmas Carol (1843), Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853) and Hard Times (1854) show the same rejection of mass political movements that is at the core of Barnaby Rudge. These novels are all driven by reader engagement with characters, which range from realist to bizarre in their composition. In each case, the character and story are the locus for an exploration of social injustice as well as the centre of a story of personal struggle that exemplifies that injustice from a particular perspective—as victim, perpetrator, innocent bystander, accomplice, puppet-master. The least successful of this set of mid-career novels is Hard Times and Lindsay suggests that is because his ‘petty-bourgeois fear of [social] organisation’ prevents Dickens from fully engaging with the characters and their story: ‘His full self is not implicated, though morally and intellectually he feels the utmost loathing of the Manchester School of economics 3 and emotionally he feels a deep sympathy for the workers’ (p. 310). The result of Dickens’ fear of mass movements, Lindsay argues, is that ‘no powerful symbols develop which can intuitively cement the material as in his other 3  The Manchester School, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, believed in laissez-faire economics, including free trade, free competition, and freedom of contract, arguing that this would lead to a more equitable society. Their major economic influences were classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

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novels. There is no centralizing dynamic image’ (p.  310). Instead, the novel is bedevilled by this deep ambivalence in Dickens. He supports the workers unionising because parliament will not help them in any way, but at the same time he fears mass organisation: ‘He advocates trade unionism and shrinks from its results’ (p.  311). For this reason his ‘ideal sort of worker’, Stephen Blackpool does not join the union, although he defends the strikers to his boss. There is no political resolution within the narrative, and, for Lindsay, the only familiar Dickens reference point is Sleary’s Circus, which appears at the beginning and the end of the book: The circus stands for the release, the fullness of life, which the workers are cheated out of. Painfully and weakly carrying on the festival liberations which were once integrated with labour and art, it yet stands for the day of the fullness of things, the dream of the happiness of freedom. (p. 311)

In the flat depressing Utilitarian universe of Gradgrind, the circus is the promise that another reality is possible.

Dickensian Baroque and Our Mutual Friend For Lindsay the novels of Dickens’ mature years demonstrate his genius, Little Dorrit (1855–57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861), Our Mutual Friend (1865) and the unfinished manuscript, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Lindsay notes that Dickens was the only English writer after Byron to have a major influence on European culture and although French critic, Hippolyte Taine missed some key elements of Dickens’ work, ‘he did see many of the social correlations, the emergence of Dickens from the English romantic movement, and something of his suffering passion’ (p. 321). Taine also recognised Dickens’ artistry, including ‘his strange visual associative power which operates in terms of a centralizing spiritual principle’ (p. 321). And Lindsay notes: ‘Rightly, he links this deep new associative energy with the scientific focus and tempo of the age, comparing Dickens’s lidless eye to the daguerreotype view’ (p. 321). Dickens’ technique was innovative, elusive and allusive, not easily contained, and excessive, because through that excess he was able to tell the whole story of his society. However, this was transgressive in the measured, reserved, middle-class society of nineteenth-century Britain—or, at least, in its representation.

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Lindsay notes that Dickens was acutely aware that his work was seen by many as melodramatic, overblown, populist—and that his own view of culturally-lauded English art was equally blunt. Lindsay reproduces a passage from a letter by Dickens to his friend, Forster: It’s no use disguising the fact that what we know to be wanting in the men is wanting in their works—character, fire, purpose, and the power of using the vehicle and the model as mere means to an end. There is a horrid respectability about most of the best of them—a little, finite, systematic routine in them, strangely expressive to me of the state of England itself. Mere form and conventionalities usurp in English art as in English government and social relations, the place of living force and truth. (p. 357)

In his final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend Lindsay traces the artistry of Dickens’ writing that enabled him to move beyond ‘the little, fine, systematic routine’ of his time and to define ‘the human condition in terms of his world’ in a way which ‘grasped the totality of forces operative in his world’ (p. 137). Lindsay explores the plots and sub-plots of this encyclopaedic novel, with its brilliant central image of the dust-heap. He notes that Dickens had used this image in the past to refer to Parliament and the social system as a whole (p. 381) and also that William Morris, in his lecture Communism [it was actually the lecture How I Became a Socialist (1894)], would later describe nineteenth-century English society as ‘a counting house on top of a cinder-heap, with Podsnap’s drawing-room in the offing’ (p. 381). Lindsay comments on key characters and plots in the novel, but also sub-­ plots such as the story of Bradley Headstone, the working-class man who worked hard to educate himself and achieve a position of respectability as a school master. Instead of seeing him as a model of achievement, as Oliver is presented in Oliver Twist, Dickens represents in him ‘the distortion of the human essence’: ‘By bettering himself he has destroyed himself; he has become a frenzied cog in a mechanistic universe of phoney knowledge and money-values’ (p. 383). In summary Lindsay writes: ‘Here the final mastery of his method shows itself, his power to use a fantasy-invention of character to depict class-types and to set the “human-beings” over against this background as against the essential forces at play on their struggling lives as they love, fear, and yet love’ (p. 382).

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Lindsay argues that Dickens has now come to the realisation that the working man must act for himself, quoting from a paper by Dickens of 1867: ‘Whatever is done for the comfort and advancement of the working man must be so far done by himself as that it is maintained by himself’ (p. 385). In this final speech, Lindsay argues, Dickens expresses his faith in the working classes and total lack of faith in the governing classes.

Conclusion In summing up Dickens’ achievement Lindsay starts with the scope of his work: He begins in a pre-industrialist world, partly borrowed from childhood fantasy and partly borrowed from eighteenth-century novelists like Smollett. He moves step by step into the hell of the actual world, always consolidating his position by the building-up of significant symbols that grasp the basic plight of men. (p. 412)

Dickens identified the characteristics of these different forms of social organisation and how they positioned individual citizens from different classes, along with the trauma that attended the transition from one form to another, which Lindsay identifies as ‘the discovery of dissociation and the alienation of man from his fellows and his own essence, the stages of struggle against the dissociative forces, and the intuition (uttered in symbolic forms) of the resolving unity’ (p. 412). For this reason, he adds: ‘He and Blake are still the prophets of our epoch’ (p. 412). Dickens articulated his understanding of social organisation, change and its effects on individuals through his novels, the sentimentality of which Lindsay identified as ‘an expression of the overwrought emotions of men at this difficult moment of loss and thwarted development’ (p. 413). He sees its social and artistic value as the access it gave Dickens to a mass audience with whom he could share his analysis of the reasons for this shared trauma—the inequalities endemic to the social institutions that structure his society. Lindsay maintains that Dickens never abandoned his critical vision: ‘All the themes that stirred his creative faculty had at their core a deep-going antagonism to the major trends of respectable society’ (p.  414). And though he was a lone fighter, likely because of his petit-­ bourgeois origins, Lindsay argues that this ‘derived in the long run from his need to fight for a concept of unity that led far ahead and had no hope

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of actualisation in his world’ (p. 414). The central dynamic of his work, to which Lindsay returns, is its ability to engage readers at a point of distress that was always simultaneously personal and social: ‘He speaks for the soul of the struggle, and therefore for a future in which the existing contradictions will be humanly resolved. For this fully human resolution he is an uncompromising fighter, a consistent partisan’ (p. 414). Lindsay concludes by debating whether Dickens’ writing is revolutionary. Despite Dickens’ rejection of mass action Lindsay concludes that: ‘there remains as the central dynamic of his work a critical vision which we can only call revolutionary, since it draws its creative virtues from a fundamental rejection of existing values’ (p. 415). He notes that George Bernard Shaw had the same view, finding that, while Thackeray roundly criticised the ruling class, he remained bourgeois ‘for he had a basic agreement on social doctrine with the persons he reviled’ whereas ‘Dickens had a basic disagreement’ (p. 415). Lindsay concludes his study of Dickens as novelist by arguing his value to contemporary writers: I do not mean that we should start trying to write novels like Dickens’s or ape his tricks of style. I mean that we should realize his fundamental method of fusing dream-process and realism in terms of essential human conflict, and find our own ways of relating this method to contemporary issues. Dickens is still ahead of us. (p. 420)

CHAPTER 7

Art as Political Activism

Jack Lindsay’s study of Charles Dickens was written at the end of a decade of reflection on how literature could be a form of political activism. Lindsay developed not only an understanding of the relationship between art and society that enabled art to take a critical stance, but also an understanding of how specific textual strategies and choices worked to generate that critique while keeping readers engaged with his writing. Charles Dickens may have been known to many as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ (Carney 2011) but the affect in his prose was strategic and targeted; he elicited emotional responses in readers to engage them with systemic social issues and problems. In 1944 Lindsay published an extended essay, Perspective for Poetry that further explored this viewpoint.

Perspective for Poetry Perspective for Poetry is effectively a manifesto in which Lindsay proclaims his own view of the relationship between artist and society; artist and artwork; artwork and society. The artist must be immersed in society, but not the servant of any ideologue of left or right; above all, the artist must be free. At the same time, the being of the artist is both individually and socially formed; possessed of personal abilities (by nature or education) that exist in dynamic relation with embodied social experience with which they interact to create a particular view or understanding of the world. The artwork engendered through the engagement of artist and social © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_7

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world is also a dynamic part of that world, either supporting mainstream beliefs and values or opposing them, and so contributes to the debate about what constitutes a viable and ethical society. The artist may not only engage with our embodied experience of the world, but also reproduce that engagement within the artwork. As a result, the reader or viewer experience is not only intellectual, but also sensory and emotional, thereby engendering a fully embodied engagement with the work, and hence the world.

Aesthetics of Unity Lindsay recognises in the work of recent poets (T.S.  Eliot, W.B.  Yeats, W.H.  Auden, Stephen Spender and Edith Sitwell), artistic movements (Symbolism and Surrealism) and art critics (Herbert Read) attempts to make new meanings about their world, based on their reworking of conventions and devices from earlier artworks: ‘a continuous re-integration of elements from tradition that could be creatively used for new purposes’ (p. 5). This is part of the re-conception and re-presentation of the whole of life, which includes the interrelationship between individuals and their world: ‘The unity of the individual and history, of personal and social, is aesthetically realised in new and exciting ways’ (p.  5). For Lindsay this means the transformation of aesthetics from a narrowly focused poetics into an encompassing vision that focuses not on individuality or uniqueness, but on new understandings of interrelationship: ‘New centres of relationship, new planes of unifying vision, are invading the poetic consciousness’ (p.  5). He exemplifies this new vision in his own verse-­ declamations with their multiple voices, though he notes ‘these works expressed rather an agitational desire for unity than the creative achievement of it’ (p. 6). The poet who achieved this unity, he argues, was William Butler Yeats. The power of Yeats for Lindsay is that he brought together sensory imagery and a politics of unity between people and between people and the earth: ‘he fabricated a fantastic variation of symbolist philosophy, and a political creed based on pre-capitalism (peasant and aristocrat united in abundance, in earth-contact, with the graciousness of ceremony overflowing from the heart of abundance)’ (p. 7). The foundation of his vision was ‘the revolutionary movement of the Irish people’ (p. 7), which grounded his work in contemporary society and gave his verse its ‘tense and clarified diction and rhythm’ (p. 7). Lindsay argues that poets who attempted to

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imitate Yeats fail because their work lacks his integration of the political and poetic. Instead, they create ‘a false tension between the Yeatsian form and a content of a different kind’ (p.  7). Form and content cannot be divided; Yeats’s poetics is also his politics, down to the level of diction and rhythm. He concludes of Yeats’s verse: … it has set a standard which is seldom far from mind and touches even the alembicators of imagery. It points to an achievement, a synthesis, which has not yet been won in English verse. In a sense, we are only now realising Yeats. Only the consciously and adultly political of our poets will carry on his work effectively. (p. 7)

This synthesis or unity—between poet and society, artwork and society, poetics and politics—is fundamental to Lindsay’s aesthetic and he locates it as fundamental to human cultural development.

Early Culture In the dance of early cultures Lindsay locates fundamental patterns of movement that represent the dynamic relationship between individuals and the group and between the group and the natural world. An earlier form of this argument appears in The Anatomy of Spirit (1937), discussed in Chap. 5 while the influence on Lindsay of the writing on dance by both Nietzsche and Jane Ellen Harrison was discussed in Chap. 3. Here Lindsay writes of early dance: ‘The imagery is mainly genetic; the stimulus is economic, based in the productive life of the group’ (p.  8). By genetic, Lindsay refers to innate or inherent properties of human being that remain substantially the same over the centuries, and which he contrasts to learned social behaviours and experiences. Lindsay equates the dynamic of the creative work to the tension within the individual between biological (or genetic or innate) and social experience: ‘We know the universe in two ways in the organic changes of our body and in our activity as social beings, productive agents’ (p. 10). For Lindsay the fundamental practice of artwork is to relate the two: ‘It is precisely where there is a powerful conflict and fusion between the two that we get creative activity’ (p. 10). For Lindsay this dynamic unity defines the difference between good and bad art. ‘Good art’, he writes, preserves the tension of organic and social, and he relates this to artistic practice: ‘A tension which is resolved in rhythm, in the image or form which reveals the reality of conflict within

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the society and the individual’ (p. 10). The viewer or reader of good art feels the social conflict within their own embodied being, and their bodily response leads them to explore and challenge the nature of the social conflict—its history, causes, mechanisms. Bad art, on the other hand, simply lectures. It recounts people’s ideas about themselves and their world but provides no impetus to look beyond the immediate experience described: ‘It therefore fails to produce a true pattern of life in movement’ (p. 10).

Social Role of Art Lindsay argues that this is also why some art endures; it appeals to embodied experiences that are shared across cultures and historical periods, even when references to specific events or people or practices are not available. And it is also why people look to the arts at times of unrest and change, when ‘life-patterns are richly stirred and find revaluation’ (p. 11). At such times, Lindsay notes: ‘People in general tend to look more to the arts for the utterance of the new fullness, for the revelation of crisis and the way-­ out’ (p. 11). The ability of the artwork to realign the organic or genetic with the social, through a process of bodily (sensory, emotional, intellectual) engagement, enables the individual to reach a new ‘fullness’ or self-­ awareness. Lindsay adds: ‘The poet is the prophet of the new fullness emerging out of the new productive union. The relationship involves politics but is not political in the narrow sense’ (p.  11). And he confirms explicitly that his aim is to ‘shake any too-doctrinaire approach to the question of the artist’s loyalties’ (p. 11). For Lindsay it was inevitable that both the artist and their work articulated a social vision: … however obscure, devious and involuted the social relationship of the artist is, it is nevertheless basic; and it is not discredited because it has been so often expounded in trivial ways. Within the aesthetic fact is a social dynamic, without which there would be no aesthetic fact; but the aesthetic and social aspects must not be confounded and incorrectly identified. (p. 11)

He acknowledges that artists who live in bourgeois cultures will inevitably express some bourgeois values in their work, but he argues that this does not prevent their work from being socially critical; it may even enable that critique because of the way it engages readers with a world they think they know.

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Reader Engagement Lindsay cites Blake’s invention of a mythology that reflects other mythologies (including Christianity) and historical events (such as the French Revolution, American War of Independence) in order to unveil the problematic vision at the heart of post-enlightenment European (and particularly English) industrial society—the dehumanising, abstract, disengaged intelligence of Urizen. He also discusses the attempts by the Symbolists and Surrealists to create imagery and a related imaginary that, like Blake’s mythology, enables readers to see and experience their world differently; Rimbaud’s ‘creative confusion of the senses’ as leading directly, in his Commune experiences, to ‘direct revolutionary act’ (p. 11). For Lindsay, however, the Surrealists were less successful, because they equate the free association of images in dreams with the crafting of imagery in the artwork: ‘The dream is an unconscious release of symbols, not a work of art with a dynamic construction’ (p. 13). In support he quotes Christopher Caudwell’s judgment of this surrealist technique in his book, Illusion and Reality (1937): This leads to surréaliste technique with its undirected feeling and personal affective organisation, where freedom, in true bourgeois style, is the unconsciousness of necessity, i.e. ignorance of the affective organisation which determines the flow of imagery and is conscious in good poetry. Hence the cerebral and visual character of surréaliste art. (p. 211)

Therefore, Lindsay argues, their work ‘does the exact opposite of what the surrealist wanted. It automatically utters repression’ (p. 13). The surrealists believed that the exposure of dream symbols would release repressions leading to the formation of a new kind of consciousness, a theory that Lindsay believes is based on a misreading of Freud. Amongst the left, he notes, the political analogue is the belief that contradictions within the capitalist state will lead to its spontaneous collapse and replacement by communism. And just as the surrealists believed all dream-method art was good art as it was dismantling repression, so the political spontaneists believed that ‘a “correct” political line automatically breeds good art’ (p. 15), an attitude Lindsay believes has done considerable damage to the left. He adds, ‘any writer really concerned with his medium was abused as formalist’ (p.  15), an accusation that had been directed at him. He acknowledges that, in their use of the dream method to explore the

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mechanisms of bourgeois repression, the surrealists did understand the need for ‘a fuller sense of process’ (p. 14). However, in their destruction of all earlier forms (and their alignment of those forms with conformity and repression), they isolate the artist from the social which, for Lindsay, is equally problematic.

The Poet as Political By reference to the work of Read and the New Apocalyptics 1 Lindsay rejects the notion that the artist must be seen as apolitical or socially disengaged and instead proposes some basic principles. Firstly, the poet must be free (p.  18), which does not mean in some naïve sense apolitical. Lindsay argues that the poet must be even more engaged than others, since they need to situate the conflicts, issues and experiences they experience for their readers: ‘the poet is both above the conflict and yet vitally entangled in it. He sees both sides, but he also sees something more, the structure and movement of history’ (p.  19). For example, in Macbeth Shakespeare does not have to like or approve of his main character, but rather through him portray the forces operating within his society, both the moral laws that condemn an oppressor and the fact that the oppressor has been produced by that society: ‘he defines objectively the pattern, and is to that extent detached from it as well as absorbed inside it’ (p. 19). For Lindsay, the quality that made Shakespeare a great writer is not simply his immersion in the society of his time, but also his ability also to stand apart from it, see it (as would an outsider) and explain its operation in his writing: ‘The poet’s freedom is his right, his need, to be true to the fullness of life, not to one side of it, but to the complete meaning and movement’ (p. 19). ‘Freedom’, Lindsay writes, ‘is ultimately freedom to act’ (p. 20). Lindsay’s subsequent principle is that the poet cannot act without a ‘true understanding of self and the world’, without a full immersion in and understanding of the elements (cultural, political, historical, economic) 1  The New Apocalyptics was a group of poets in the United Kingdom mostly active between 1939 and 1945 who took their name from the anthology The New Apocalypse (1940), which was edited by J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece. Two more anthologies followed: The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and Sickle (1944). Their work was a reaction against the political realism of much of the Thirties poetry and included work inspired by surrealism, myth and expressionism. Contributors included Dylan Thomas, George Sutherland Fraser, Norman Alexander MacCaig, Robert Melville, Vernon Watkins, Thomas McLaughlin Scott, Terence Hanbury White and Alex Comfort.

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involved in social life. Macbeth is a great play because Shakespeare depicted the complex forces motivating Macbeth and the conflicts they created within his character. This raises for Lindsay the nature of knowledge as he argues that without an understanding of cause and effect and the principles that underlie that relationship, the individual has no rational basis on which to act, think or be: ‘One cannot act successfully, freely, in a way that brings a full satisfaction to the psyche, unless one is correctly relating ways and means. Ignorance is slavery, for it means that one is dominated by dark forces’ (p. 20). Those dark forces were the anathema of enlightenment thinking that replaced the secrecy and ineffability of magical thinking with a process of theorisation, experimentation and analysis that was open to all. Lindsay notes, however, that this also means we must recognise that ‘knowledge, the precondition of freedom, is socially derived’ (p. 20). For the poet, Lindsay writes, this meant developing an understanding of the formal properties of their work; how they both engaged the embodied reader and illuminated the social world, its values, beliefs and practices. Lindsay writes of form that it ‘comes from the innermost heart of his humanity, where organic self and social whole are most fully merged’ (p.  20), as he argued earlier in tracing the origins of art in the earliest human societies. He acknowledges, also, that artists are drawn into conformity with the state, even as their impulse is to resist it. However, attempting to stand outside it, as he saw in the work of the Surrealists and Herbert Read, was no answer: … if you are outside the struggle, you are not above it in the creative sense. You are merely outside it, which is a very different thing. You cannot have any real sense of the transforming factor, the dynamic. Either you retire into a fantasy-world or you get depressed. You turn pacifist. (p. 21)

For Lindsay, pacifism was essentially a conservative form of political (in) action and he attributes to Orwell the notion that ‘the young writers have turned to pacifism, and anarchism, out of a desire for solace in the impossible’ (p. 21). He argues that this turn to the impossible or the fanciful comes about when people lose their sense of the historical development of a better world, which must move through different phases in order to come to fruition. Like Orwell he identifies this with the anarchists: ‘these leftists coincide in view and method with the extreme right; the anarcho-­ pacifists and the reactionaries both praise “personalism” and find symbol

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superior to reality’ (pp.  21–2). Lindsay rejects this ‘personalist’ stance, arguing that freedom ‘cannot be abstracted into some divine isolation’ (p. 22), arguing instead that ‘our growth, our freedom and individuality, [result] from a ceaseless conflict and harmonisation of personal and social elements’ (p. 22). Lindsay is also concerned that the individual artist who feels the need to isolate themselves either from politics or from others and society will undermine their own sense of self, and so their ability to work, quoting from Edgell Rickword’s analysis of Wyndham Lewis: It is often in the artist himself that the enemy of creation is most deeply entrenched—in distrust of his own emotions, in fear of, resulting in contempt for, aspects of his emotional life … One genuinely creative work would dispel these miasmas of doubt and self-distrust that resist the efforts of ratiocination. (pp. 22–3)

For Lindsay, the inability of artists to trust their own emotions and judgment is caused by their misunderstanding of society and how it acts on the individual, when they see the relationship of the individual to society as one of repression. He argues instead that if artists engage fully with society, utilising their individual skills and embodied experience to produce creative work, this will resolve their internal conflicts and self-doubt, allowing them to not only create comprehensive representations of their society, but also realise fully their own potential as artists.

Poetics Is Political Lindsay notes that the symbolists and surrealists attempted to develop symbols and mythologies that either have no roots in a shared social understanding (being drawn directly from the poet’s idiosyncratic experience) or which draw on systems of symbols that claim universality (like Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’). Instead, he argues that poets need to immerse themselves completely in their own society and allow their poetic abilities to shape their response. And he wryly notes that writers need a thorough knowledge of their own society for their work to express the dynamic relationship between personal and political, individual and social, that articulates the nature of a particular time and place:

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The cry for Myth, then, means only that art has lost its true comprehensiveness. But we shall regain comprehensiveness, not by self-conscious efforts to make the individual psyche do the work of whole epochs of history, but by responding most deeply to our own epoch. And that means achieving the new dialectical consciousness. And that means achieving social responsibility—a unity of theory and act. And that’s not so easy as café-conversations about Myth. (p. 26)

He argues this further by discussing the poet’s relationship with audience. When the poet thinks of his audience as ‘We’, Lindsay asks, of whom are they thinking? For Shakespeare it included the court, the middle classes and the workers; an all-encompassing We. Milton’s We, on the other hand, excluded the court, the workers and pro-revolutionary members of the middle class. Basically, he wrote for the successful members of the middle class and aspiring members of the lower middle class; an exclusive and exclusionary We. In his own time, Lindsay argues, those who eschew the social and political and argue the case for art-for-art’s-sake have lost touch with the roots of their society, with the context in which it operates, and the means by which it operates, including its effect on their own being. They fetishise the art-object as others fetishise the consumer-object. The self-aware contemporary poet, on the other hand, engages fully with society and is conscious of its effects on individual being and experience: ‘He is dialectically aware of his internal conflict, and its resolutions, the historical conflict and its resolutions, and the way in which these two processes ultimately make up a single process’ (p. 27). The work itself is a dynamic fusion of form and content, though Lindsay specifies further that the content is ‘never simple …is always rent by a conflict’ and that ‘this conflict of opposites within the content creates the Form. The Form is the resolution of inner conflict’, which includes ‘inner and outer, personal and social, self and audience, and so on’ (p.  28). Lindsay reiterates his dialectics in arguing that form and content do not simply mirror each other, nor do they work together harmoniously to create the artwork; they are interrelated, with the contradictions and conflicts within the content generating the form that relates the work to the audience. Accordingly, the Form is not a receptacle or a showcase but is an act: ‘These opposites become poetry, become aesthetically realised (as distinct from intellectually realised, etc.), only through the Act which is the Form’

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(p. 28). Lindsay notes that this perspective means neither form nor content is idealized or fetishised, whether as the idiosyncratic imagery of the surrealists or the propagandist representations of Socialist Realism. And he adds his own vision: For the achievement of [classless] society, by restoring wholeness to men, restores to them the participation in art … Our task is therefore dual. To bridge the gap and make art a part of common life; to resume the whole tradition of our art at a new level. (p. 28)

The poet becomes an activist; the work becomes an act. The year after he published this booklet he stood in the street in London with his friend, fellow communist and writer, Mulk Raj Anand trying to absorb the news of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan: ‘We felt that what had happened was not just the handing-over of a gigantic power of destruction to military maniacs, but that something had been split inside man himself. … the atomic bomb as not merely a matter of increased destruction; it meant cataclysm on a quite new level. Mulk and I felt this without being able to find the words for it’ (TFOL, p. 153). For Lindsay, Anand, and others the dropping of those bombs signified a fundamental change in the nature of society and of human experience that made their struggles for a new (Socialist) world even more compelling. Their battles would be in the cultural domain where they aimed to provide readers with new ways of understanding their society and themselves; to demonstrate that change is not only possible but inevitable; and to empower them to act on their own behalf to create a new and better world. To these ends, Lindsay mobilised the ideas in Perspective for Poetry in his own writing in multiple genres, which included the literary analysis of his friend’s work in Mulk Raj Anand: A Critical Essay (1948). 2

Mulk Raj Anand Born in Peshawar, India in 1905 Mulk Raj Anand would become known as the Indian Charles Dickens. He was the son of a craftsman who worked in copper, silver, and bronze, and who left his home in Amritsar to join the 2  Later published in revised and expanded form as The Elephant and the Lotus: A Study of the Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, 2nd ed. revised (Bombay: Kutub Popular, 1965), and in the collection of Lindsay’s essays, Decay and Renewal (1976), pp. 139–66, from which references here are taken.

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British army. As the family travelled with the army, the young Anand was exposed to both British and Indian ways of thinking and being: Through his father he gained the traditional pieties of craft and brotherhood and was taught by him to read and write. Through his mother he was nourished on the songs, tales, myths and epics of the village community. And the fact that he grew up in a family making the transition from village life to accommodation with English ways … enabled him to develop from his own personal experience a full sense of the tensions at play throughout Indian society. (1976, p. 140)

From his earliest years Anand negotiated multiple class and national cultures, each with their own systems of beliefs and values and with different degrees of power and authority within the society. Anand himself is not identified with an institutionally powerful group, though this is his own country, a situation that will become increasingly evident to him as a young man growing up under the strictures of the Rowlatt Act. Passed by the British government in 1919, this Act extended the measures enacted during World War I under the Defence of India Act 1915 which gave the police powers to arrest anyone without having to show cause. In the case of suspected terrorism people could also be detained for up to two years and subjected to an in-camera trial without a jury. The Act also severely limited the power of the press to report on incidents of abuse. Far from quelling nationalist feeling that was growing in the country, this strategy by the British contributed to its growth. The Act was repealed three years later in 1922, when Anand was seventeen years old but by then he had experienced its consequences for his own people. Lindsay quotes Anand: “And I turned in on myself,” he said to me, describing those years, “feeding upon my own life-blood in the obscure lanes and alleys of towns and villages; and reaching out beyond myself, I found that there were others as well, others struggling to realize the life that was in them and the life that was India.” (p. 141)

In Anand’s own words, Lindsay confirms not only the conflict-ridden political environment in which Anand grew up, but also its impact on his whole being—body and soul: ‘The external pressures were driven inward and transformed into spiritual tensions—the basis of a continually renewed discipline of organic development’ (p.  141). Yet, as Lindsay also notes,

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Anand did not simply reject all European knowledge, habits or people; he welcomed what was good and valuable though always ‘valuing all his discoveries in terms of Indian needs and possibilities’ (p. 141). This is a portrait of the artist as described by Lindsay in Perspective for Poetry, fully aware of their complex social and political environment and of how they are situated personally within it by virtue of their cultural and class backgrounds. And that includes not only political consequences, but also the physical and emotional consequences of living under a regime that disavows one’s own right to be and is prepared to use violence to enforce their oppressive rule. He again quotes Anand: And there could be no worse hell than that of India under the Rowlatt Act passed in 1919. In it I fought for my life, along with my companions, fought for the right to be myself, through long illness brought on by the savage Government floggings during the days of martial law in Amritsar. (p. 141)

Lindsay describes how Anand embodies this experience in a short story about a young man who is trying to read a book by Gorky, whose work was proscribed in India by the British government: ‘he keeps on trying to be alone and then, just as he is getting down to the book, a mere knock on the door shatters him’ (p. 142). Accessible to and dreaded by all readers, this moment is not only understood intellectually but also experienced viscerally. In Perspective Lindsay argued that the most accomplished writer is fully aware of how their literary strategies prompt readers to embody (sense, feel, understand) the world they inhabit. Lindsay argues that this is demonstrated in Anand’s first novel, Untouchable (1935): ‘He wanted a large clarifying grasp of the historical pattern, but in terms of individual lives, so that the movement from point to point would never be schematic but would embrace the full human factors of resistance and conflict, union and re-integration’ (p. 142). Anand achieves this with the character of Bakha, a member of the Dalit or Untouchable caste who perform the most unpleasant kinds of physical labour such as cleaning toilets. Bakha is an outsider in his own society, reviled as unclean. His father tells him of a time when Bakha was young and very ill, desperately in need of medicine, but no one would allow him to enter the pharmacy lest he should defile it. His father had to stand outside begging people to take the prescription inside for him so that he could save his son’s life. Yet Bakha has a transformative experience. When cleaning latrines for the British army, he finds

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that the privates treat him very differently; as a fellow human being: ‘The result is a shock which makes him reconsider what he has previously accepted as a natural and fixed order of things’ (p. 143). Anand goes on to describe other events in Bakha’s life, some reinforcing the outsider status of the caste into which he was born, others that suggest that the whole caste system must and can be changed. Lindsay notes that this narrative never becomes trite or simplistic, and nor does the character of Bakha who is by turns hurt, saddened, and inspired by the ideas he encounters. Lindsay notes that ‘the skill with which Anand interweaves his themes and shows the gradual, confused mergence in the lad’s mind of a critical faculty, a scared but persisting sense of new human values’ (p. 144). And without any sense of sentimentality Lindsay notes that what unifies the narrative is ‘the deep, simple note of love’: ‘The whole picture is irradiated by a sympathetic warmth, and the kaleidoscopic movement of colour, sight, touch, sound, invoking the Indian scene, is linked throughout with the movement of Bakha’s mind. One false note might have killed the whole thing, but there is no false note’ (p. 144). In linking the sensory richness and dynamism of the social environment with the evolution of Bakha’s thinking, energised by love, Lindsay might as well be describing the practice of Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House—indeed, almost any of the works of Charles Dickens. For Lindsay Dickens and Anand share a concern with how society operates and how its institutional practices (such as caste and class formations) shape the perceptions and understandings as well as health and well-being of its members. They also share a belief in the possibility of social transformation, especially when members are exposed to new thinking and experience that changes their sense of being and understanding, when old certainties and imperatives are shown to be variable and changeable. Both writers often depict this through the experience of one major character, and their journey to new understanding is always complex and harrowing, as befits life-altering events, whether this be the discovery that caste and class are not universal imperatives, that the people can revolt against their oppressors, or that ideologies generate fears and desires that are used to manipulate their subjects or followers. And they both deploy a full range of sensory, emotional and intellectual strategies in their work to engage readers with their narratives so that they participate fully in the main character’s transformation and may reflect that back onto their own personal and social experience.

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Art as Activism When Anand focussed an early short story around an incident involving prohibited literature (a novel by Gorky), he makes the point that Lindsay would make many times, in defiance of criticisms from both the right and the left, that art is a form of political activism. However, Lindsay’s views of art and of the role of culture were increasingly problematic for the Communist Party at this time. In his study of Lindsay’s contribution to British Marxist thought Joel Brouwer (1994) notes that Lindsay was not the only Marxist of this period who believed in the transformative power of art, quoting Christopher Caudwell’s view in Studies in a Dying Culture (1938): ‘The value of art to society is that by it an emotional adaptation is possible. Man’s instincts are pressed in art against the altered mould of reality, and by a specific organisation of the emotions thus generated, there is a new attitude, an adaptation’ (p. 267). Brouwer notes that the difference between the two is that, while Caudwell focuses on the role of art in the transformation of the individual, Lindsay sees art as having the potential to transform society: Lindsay goes beyond Caudwell by demonstrating that the influence of art on the development of individuals is the first step in a dialectical relationship between art and productive activity that is transformative of society. Art and artistic activity are not only essential elements of human experience, but also of social progress. (pp. 267–8)

Lindsay derived this view of art from the work of Blake and the English Romantics, and subsequently his reading of Marx. Like Blake and the Romantics, he rejected the mechanistic mode of rationalism that accompanied early forms of industrialisation, as later would Marx; Brouwer quotes from Minna Doskow’s study of Blake (1982): “Blake and Marx propose a humanistic alternative to the mechanistic world view which placed man as a single perceiving subject within a world of dead and mechanically operating objects, cut off from his world and his fellow man in this way, and seen as an object himself by his fellow man so that his relationships to his world and other men become objectified and reduced to mechanistic operations. They propose a human definition of man and his world, for both believe that the world has no meaning isolated from man, and it is only man’s work upon the world which gives it shape, substance, and meaning.” (p. 225)

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Lindsay believed that human beings experienced and understood the world through the ways they interacted with each other and with the natural world. With Blake he identifies this loss of connection with the rationalistic and ghettoised thinking that typifies the industrial application of science. The way to a Socialist future for Lindsay lies with the return to ways of thinking that recognise the interrelationship of human beings with each other, other beings and the natural world. Work is a key means and expression of that renewed sense of relationship, and art is a form of work: a way of acting on the world that, in Doskow’s words, ‘gives it shape, substance, and meaning’. Lindsay did not see art as part of the superstructure that passively reflected the economic base where the work took place, the view that many Marxists of the 1940s had come to accept. The corollary of that view is that art does not actively participate in politics; it mirrors the politics of the situation it represents. When Lindsay presented his contradictory view in a discussion paper at the Communist Party conference in 1945, he received almost universal condemnation. 3 He recorded in The Crisis in Marxism (1981): ‘I may mention that with one exception everyone at the conference condemned my views. The exception was Edward Thompson’ (p. 126). Nevertheless, Lindsay was not cowed and expanded his controversial paper into the book Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949).

Marxism and Contemporary Science Victor Paananen writes that although Communist Party members admired Lindsay’s intellectual range, nevertheless, ‘as was the case in the Communist Writers Group, he was frequently in trouble because of his seemingly unorthodox Marxism’ (p.  55). Marxism and Contemporary Science, Paananen notes, was denounced as revisionist by ‘the same Maurice Cornforth who denounced Christopher Caudwell as not Marxist’ and Lindsay was in danger of being expelled from the Party. That did not happen but Arena, the Communist Party literary journal that he co-edited with Randall Swingler from 1949–51 and that promoted this activist but not dogmatic role for art, was discontinued. 3  The Security Services intercepted and microfilmed a letter from Lindsay to a CPGB comrade in which he sets out in point form the arguments in the discussion paper that was the basis of Marxism and Contemporary Science: NAUK, KV 2/3252.

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Lindsay was not unaware or unconcerned about the discord that was prompted in part by his view of art. In a paper about Lindsay’s relationship with the British Communist Party Paul Gillen (online, 2020) quotes a note by Lindsay in which he agonises over his 1945 essay and the book that followed: Much suffering. How far was I right in my heretical views? how far merely intellectually conceited and stubborn? … I desperately didn’t want to break with the movement, at the same time couldn’t bend beyond a point and deny what I felt essential in my positions. This same problem of course dogged and still dogs me from that time on.

In The Fullness of Life he describes the events following the book’s publication. Maurice Cornforth was one of his ‘strongest attackers’ and eventually he was called before the Cultural Committee to explain himself: ‘It was one of the worst moments of my life’ (p. 182). He recalls: ‘I listened with the utmost concentration to the various explanations of how badly I had strayed from the Marxist Truth; I desperately wanted to hear an argument against me with which I could agree’ (pp. 182–3). But with total candour he concludes: ‘almost all that was said seemed to me to be stupid or irrelevant’ (p.  183). This included a specious argument linking him with General Montgomery as an ‘exponent of imperialism’ (p.  183). Lindsay offered to reconsider his position and later presented a defence that focused on his apparent misinterpretation of the concept of unity; however, he did not resile from the fundamental principles of his argument about art—nor does he ever abandon his conception of unity. In Chap. 6, ‘Towards an Art Criticism’ Lindsay develops his views on art with respect to the work of modern theorists, beginning with Clive Bell and Benedetto Croce. Although he regards Bell’s work as formalistic and hopelessly self-referential, and Croce’s as absorbed by individual intuition and hopelessly self-referential, Lindsay nevertheless identifies in both a recognition of properties of art for which he also argues: in Croce’s work the notion that meaning is made by comparing our immediate experience with our previous knowledge, which opens up the possibility of transformation; in Bell’s work the notion that ‘The Form is the work of art’ (p. 140). He reinforces the latter with a quote from Lascelles Abercrombie: Form is not a final imposition on the matter of art, finishing it off and compelling it into a given mould; the inevitable establishment of its form is

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inherent throughout the whole process of a work of art’s existence. And at the completion of its existence the final resultant and inclusive impressions will be an impress of unity. … It is by Form that this matter, whatever it be, is accepted as unity. (p. 140)

Though Abercrombie and Lindsay were not natural allies, they both believed that criticism should focus on ‘art as a process rather than dealing with Form as an end-product’ (p. 140). The alternative is the fetishisation of Form that Lindsay identified in the work of Clive Bell, leading to a ‘purely subjective and affective response’ being seen as the criterion of the artwork. For Lindsay, this leads nowhere and says nothing. Lindsay considers the notion of ‘Value’ in the work of G.E.  Moore, Clive Bell and R.W. Church, noting the simplification of meaning evident in Moore’s notion that one can explain to someone what constitutes yellowness by showing them a yellow object. He argues that this ignores not only different saturations and intensities of the colour, but also the meanings that culturally accrue to it. He cites Church’s description—‘any aesthetic situation will consist of felt materials and forms with their immanent and referential expressions found satisfactory in themselves’ (p.  141)— affirming that this is valid ‘if by “immanent” is meant the Form, the organic symbol projected in the work, and by “referential” the complicated relation of the Form to history, to personality, to the whole human process’ (p.  141). Lindsay adds that, although these two aspects of the work are separated while performing the analysis, in the creation of the work and subsequent engagement with it, they are ‘dialectically fused’ (p. 141). Again, Lindsay argues against the fetishisation of either form or content, in particular citing Tolstoy’s concentration on content and Jung’s focus on form (as symbol). The work must always be integrative, bringing together form and content, and as specific to a particular time and place. Rubens, he notes, ‘integrates sense, thought, feeling in the particular Form of his paintings because of the needs of his period’ (p. 143). Picasso’s work does the same for his time, but they are not interchangeable; a modern-­day Rubens would be anachronistic and meaningless, ‘detached from the real creative issues of our day’ (p. 143). The form of Picasso’s work tells the story of the twentieth century as it does because ‘Form is Content’ (p. 143). Lindsay discusses some terms derived from the work of Scottish philosopher, physicist, science historian and economist, L.L. Whyte that

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might be used to analyse the process of the artwork, including Pattern/Form (projection of structure), Rhythm (the movement of the process) and Dominance (the integrative function). However, he does not prescribe an approach to be used for all works; his point is that the process can be analysed in a variety of ways. Hence, he also notes that terms such as Realism, Escapism, Fantasy and Formalism can be used descriptively or polemically to explore the work, though the descriptive usage tends to focus on the work as product, not as process, and the polemical is usually restrictive and unhelpful. To use the terms effectively the critic must maintain the fundamentally dialectical relationship of form and content, with its basis in the creative response of the individual artist to their social environment. Lindsay concludes: ‘what is needed at the moment is a generalised scheme, a methodology, to which the many important investigations already made into various aspects of creative activity can be related’ (p. 145). This would remain the aim of his own critical writing, and of much literary and art theory, for the next half-century.

Conclusion In his own theoretical works, his art and literary criticism, and his publishing and editing work Lindsay explored the components of such a methodology and worked to develop it. For the editorial for the first edition of the ill-fated journal, Arena (1949) Lindsay wrote: The work in which Arena is interested is the sorting-out of these confused and often vital trends of resistance—the clarification of the valuably formative from the false and the merely fashionable (a feeble conformity trying to exploit what was for the moment a genuine adventure). This work includes a give-and-take between Marxism in its critical aspects and the free play of the creative elements in our culture; it aims at separating-out and strengthening all that genuinely reveals the artist’s prophetic function, his capacity to reach ahead into various aspects of the integration that his world lacks but needs for its advance. And that means also showing how this function worked out in the past. Christopher Caudwell posed with fine precision the issue at stake. The critical problem is to realise what “is the lie at the heart of contemporary culture, the lie which is killing it, and deeper still is found the truth which is the complement of the lie, the truth which will transform and revitalise culture”. (TFOL, p. 178)

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Lindsay notes that he wrote the Editorial which was accepted by his coeditors John Davenport and Randall Swingler. It immediately attracted the ire of the Daily Worker and then of the Communist Party, and Lindsay notes: ‘These positions had led me continually into the role of oddman-­ out’ (p. 178). When he came to write his Dickens study Lindsay paid no heed to those contemporary literary critics who saw no value in Dickens’ major novels and scorned him as a popular or sentimental writer. Instead, he explored Dickens’ personal and social background for the events and relationships that shaped him as an individual. He noted the skill Dickens showed for writing and his innovative use of popular cultural forms to engage his readers. He also explored Dickens’ political activism, noting that he was not a revolutionary but a committed and genuine reformer who explored the issues about which he agitated (such as Poor Law Reform, legal reform and prison reform) and actively participated in meetings and related events with the aim of pressuring the government to change its policies. Furthermore, Dickens incorporated the problems and abuses he encountered in his reform work into his novels as a way of reaching the public and convincing them to argue for change. And as Lindsay writes of Rubens above, he ‘integrates sense, thought, feeling in the particular Form of his [works] because of the needs of his period’. Not every novel found the perfect balance of elements and sometimes Dickens’ sentimentality is more saccharin than instructive, yet in the main, as Lindsay’s analysis demonstrates, he expertly used the materials of his craft (characterisation, narrative, image, diction, rhythm) to convey a story and an acute social and political analysis of his own society. Lindsay’s political stance was not the same as that of Dickens, yet he recognised that, within his own terms, Dickens’ work was consistent with the views that he publicly espoused and for which he worked throughout his life. And Lindsay located also aspects of his personal life that motivated and mobilised certain of his beliefs and values that were manifest in the characters and events of his novels. In other words, in his own methodology Lindsay strove to create the same integration of personal and social that he saw in the work of the novelist, and to demonstrate by detailed analysis how the form of Dickens’ work in all its complexity and polyphony was its content. Lindsay’s next major literary study was George Meredith: His Life and Work (1956). Meredith’s work spanned the second half of the nineteenth century, when industrial capitalism was firmly established, and Britain had become an empire. Lindsay’s interest is in what is commonly referred to as

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Meredith’s ‘psychology’, though this was not the Freudian construct that would now be assumed. Following on the explorations in the first half of the nineteenth century of the relationship between the mind and the senses and inspired by Darwin’s work on evolution came a new interest in the ways that individual development and individual being are determined or guided by human engagement with their environment, natural and social. For Lindsay Meredith’s genius as a writer lay in his exploration of the nature of human being under capitalism.

PART IV

The 1950s; and George Meredith

Jack Lindsay began the 1950s in trouble with the Communist Party (GB) for his version of dialectics and his views on art, which he persisted in explaining in works such as Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949). As a result of this the Party contacted Left Book shops and advised them not to carry Lindsay’s latest work because of its dangerous right-wing tendencies. At the same time his Marxist analyses of culture and history so offended the editorial and review staff at the Times Literary Supplement that they warned bookshops not to carry his books and argued that universities should be advised not to use his work in their teaching because of its dangerous left-wing tendencies (e.g. TLS, 12/12/1952, p. 816). Sales suffered and fewer and fewer publishers had the courage to publish left-­ wing literature because of the ideological war in which the country was embroiled. Lindsay had written a very successful programme for the B.B.C. and been promised further work, but the offer was subsequently withdrawn in an awkwardly worded letter of apology; he never knew why. Financially his situation was perilous, and then Ann became ill.

Ann Davies In 1949, a year before Lindsay’s Dickens book was published, he and Ann had attended the Paris Peace Congress and then gone on to the Soviet Union where they spent six weeks as guests at the 150th anniversary celebrations of Pushkin’s birth. There they met other distinguished guests including Pablo Neruda, Nikolay Tikhonov and Paul Robeson. Lindsay

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published a diary of their visit, A World Ahead (1950). On this trip Ann sometimes felt weak but was not otherwise unwell. When they returned to the United Kingdom Ann and Jack were forced out of London by financial problems. They first moved to Quarry Cottage near Penshurst in Kent and then into a forester’s cottage in Ashour Wood, about two miles east. In 1951 Ann accompanied Jack on several other trips to Europe and the USSR.  In Poland they met playwright, Bertolt Brecht and in Paris poets, Louis Aragon and Tristan Tzara, the latter featuring in Lindsay’s book, Meeting with Poets (1968). When they returned, Ann underwent surgery for breast cancer. Afterwards, with Ann’s father as guarantor and the assistance of their friends, Geraldine and Randall Swingler, they were able to move into an old tollhouse called Bangslappers, in Castle Hedingham, Essex. The Swinglers lived in nearby Pebmarsh, fifteen minutes-­drive away. There they joined the thriving colony of impoverished artists, writers and intellectuals that Andy Croft reports was laughingly called by Randall and Geraldine Swingler ‘The People’s Republic of Essex’ (Croft 2003, p. 209). He also records that a regular at a local pub was overheard complaining, ‘It’s getting that you can’t order a fucking pint for all these bleeding weirdos’ (p. 209). The move to Castle Hedingham was prompted by the need to find comfortable surroundings for Ann during her recuperation, close to the Swinglers who often cared for her when Lindsay was away. During her recuperation she edited Lindsay’s cultural history, Byzantium into Europe (1952) that had been commissioned by Bodley Head Press. In 1952, as members of the British-Rumanian Friendship Society, she and Jack were invited to visit Bucharest on what, with hindsight, was clearly a propaganda tour for the Romanian leadership. It would be their last trip together. The following year Ann was forced to undergo further surgery for cancer. While she recuperated, she finished her translation of Zola’s La Terre, which was published posthumously as Earth (translated Ann Lindsay, 1954). The surgery was unable to halt the cancer and Ann died on 9 January 1954. Her death was a terrible blow to Lindsay and to Randall Swingler, with whom she had worked since 1938. Without her, Croft notes, Swingler and Lindsay totally lost interest in Fore Publications (p. 221). To commemorate Ann’s death the Communist Party of Great Britain issued the booklet, Nothing Is Lost: Ann Lindsay 1914–1954, in which Tony Adams described her, in words that echo Lindsay’s own, as ‘perfectly poised, beautiful, with one of the most musical voices I have ever heard … her composure was

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such that I never saw her angry’. In Life Rarely Tells Lindsay quotes from a letter of consolation and tribute he received from Edith Sitwell: I loved Ann very much. I think she was nearer to being a saint than almost anyone I have ever known, saintly without censoriousness, good without weakness, sweet without weakness. …I think I never saw any face with such a light of goodness on it, and of peace. (p. 806)

The Struggle of the 1950s Concerned by Lindsay’s depression after Ann’s death his Communist Party comrades and friends, the Woosters proposed that he accompany them to Italy to get away from the inevitable associations of home with Ann. To fund the trip, the Woosters had also undertaken to deliver an atomic imaging device to the Physics Department at Genoa University. From there they travelled south to Rome; then Naples and Pompeii, and then on to Palermo, Agrigento and Erice, a village built on Mt Eryx in Sicily. Typically, Lindsay turned the trip into an opportunity for research and writing: The Writing on the Wall (1960) was based on graffiti he saw at Pompeii, which he used like the pages of his ‘talking newspapers’ to create a polyvocal cultural history of the final days of the city. Later that year Lindsay was invited to Moscow to lecture at a celebration of the work of English novelist, Henry Fielding. He stayed on to attend the Second Writers Congress of the Communist Party. Lindsay was struggling with not only personal loss but also continuing pressure from the Communist Party in Britain to toe the Party line on the nature of dialectics, the role of art and of the artist in society, and what constituted value in the artwork. The Writers’ Congress was, therefore, an opportunity for Lindsay to assess his own position in the context of the official Communist Party views on writing and creativity. One of Lindsay’s most surprising discoveries was that no one he met knew of the concept of alienation, which he considered central to Marxist theory. Equally disturbing was the apparent failure in the Soviet Union to continue to develop Marxism, or even to acknowledge that it needed to be developed. Nevertheless, he was pleased to find that many Soviet speakers recognised the same point, with Alexey Surkov, head of the Soviet Union of Writers (1953–59) claiming that ‘Back-scratching and lack of principle led to Stalin prizes for poor works’ (TFOL, p. 207). More importantly for Lindsay Surkov argued that: ‘The theory of “no conflict” had sadly

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weakened literature wherever it seeped in—the theory that socialist society had no fundamental conflicts, that at most it witnessed a harmless debate between the good and the better, not a clash of good and evil’ (p. 207). Lindsay also noted the attack on ‘objectivity’, which was equated with a god-like omniscience by authors that excused them from articulating values, but later acknowledged his own failure to understand the political reason for this: At the time I did not notice that this formula was being used to deter writers from coming too close to the Stalinist realities; the so-called objectivists were in fact often too passionately partisan of the humanist values that were feared by those still trying to hold up veils, however tattered, round the worst sides of past and present. (p. 208)

Nevertheless, Lindsay and many others both inside and outside the Soviet Union realised that something was wrong. There was a lack of honesty and transparency that was signified by the behaviour of state-approved literary critics and reviewers. Konstantin Simonov gave voice to many of Lindsay’s concerns when he noted the post-war malaise in Soviet writing. A writer might produce a good book but once nominated as an accepted Writer go on to produce only inferior works or nothing at all. Simonov blamed the state critics: ‘who uniformly attacked anything new and alive, and who steadily praised the moribund long after it stank in everyone else’s nostrils. They had fostered the no-conflict theory’ (p. 208), which meant that problems and contradictions within the Soviet State could not be acknowledged or addressed. The result, according to Simonov, was: ‘They encouraged the conventional and the dull. They were generally so cowardly and scared that they long hesitated to write anything about a new book or play, and waited till someone plunged into print or they got wind of an important person’s attitude, and then they all howled in chorus’ (pp. 209–09). At the same time, Lindsay discovered that good criticism could be found in the Soviet Union: ‘A writer told me, “There are many good critics, but often they’re in the institutes and so on, or they’re practicing writers who don’t normally carry on criticism”’ (TFOL, p. 209). Lindsay also attended a play at the Satire Theatre in Moscow that criticised exactly that kind of ideologically driven bureaucratic intervention in everyday and cultural life. He saw in the Soviet Union the same battle against ideologically driven criticism and repression that he was fighting in Britain. What’s

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more, these Soviet critics and writers with whom he identified were fighting the battle on the same front. Firstly, that contradiction and conflict happened within Marxism, not only between Marxism and other ideologies, and this was part of its growth; stifling that conflict was destroying its ability to grow. Secondly, that artists needed to be free to explore these contradictions and so contribute to the development of Marxism, rather than being corralled into State or Party sanctioned modes of expression that prevented free debate and exploration. Thirdly, that artistic expression was a function of the artist’s manipulation of materials which, again should not be determined by the State or the Party but must be left to the artist in order for the work to express the true nature of the contemporary real, rather than a sterile, ideologically cleansed version of it. This confirmation of his own views and battles was cautiously reassuring but there were other serious battles to come.

1956: annus horribilis With Nikita Khrushchev’s speech delivered to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (24–25 February) the Orwellian nightmare that had stultified writing, and everything and everyone else, in the Soviet Union was revealed in its full horror. Three years after Stalin’s death from a stroke Khrushchev openly stated what had been rumoured and discussed ever since his death: that Stalin had ordered the torture and murder of over a million Soviet citizens, and that another million died in the Gulags during what he called ‘The Great Purge’, the eradication of citizens said to be ‘enemies of the state’. Khrushchev also criticised many of Stalin’s policies for the needless deaths they caused; some for their genocidal impacts on whole communities, cultures and countries. He did not cite statistics, except in one instance,1 though he was talking about millions of people. His four-hour long speech detailed Stalin’s attacks on individuals and groups within Russian society, Russian ethnic groups, and communities within other countries that were included in the Soviet Union, such as the Ukraine and Poland. In a review of the speech fifty years later, John Rettie (2006) reported that the effect on delegates was 1  Khrushchev did cite numbers in relation to the 17th Congress: 98 of the 139 citizens elected to the Central Committee were subsequently arrested and shot—a statistic that would have been particularly alarming for his audience. He also named among Stalin’s victims many people who would have been well known to members of the Congress.

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devastating, with some suffering heart attacks in the meeting room and others later committing suicide. The effect on Communist Party members outside the Soviet Union was equally profound. In The Fullness of Life Lindsay wrote that his struggle against Zhdanov’s prescriptions for literature and his arguments about dialectics and art with the British Communist Party and the ‘trial’ to which they subjected him had prepared him intellectually for these revelations, however ‘What I was not prepared for was the revelation of insensate and quite lawless cruelties, the vast scale of the repression, under Stalin’ (p. 210). There was some reassurance in knowing that his suspicions were confirmed, he writes, ‘yet, despite all that, the moral shock was central’ (p. 210). Lindsay surely speaks for many when he writes: ‘One’s attitude to life, to history, to oneself, could never be the same again. One had been an accomplice in a great evil’ (p. 210). At the same time, he could see no alternative allegiance. The fact that the Western capitalist countries were right about many things that took place in the Soviet Union did not negate the problems and injustices associated with their societies. For Lindsay, ‘there would have been no solution in going over to the side of the attackers’ (p. 210). Lindsay’s approach was to identify the circumstances and events that had created this disaster: ‘the isolation of Russia, its total lack of any democratic tradition, the devastation of the pre-1917 working-class by war, civil-war, famine’ (p. 211) and the replacement of the democratic Lenin with the dictatorial bureaucratic Stalin under whom ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat had become the dictatorship of the party’ (p.  211). For Lindsay, leaving the Party was not a solution: ‘The problem was, not to feel hurt and humiliated, but to understand what had happened in all its fullness, to play one’s part in facilitating the progress to a new level of thought and organisation in which the Stalinist distortion was transcended, prevented from any possibility of recurrence’ (pp. 211–12).

Post-1956 In 1959, along with Ewen MacColl, Lindsay was invited to attend the 3rd Writers Congress in Moscow. He was impressed by Khrushchev’s sympathetic support for Boris Pasternak, whose book, Doctor Zhivago had been cited as traitorous by many in the Soviet Union. In his talk to the Congress Lindsay also supported Pasternak, favourably contrasting Dr Zhivago with ideologically driven work that represents social conflict simplistically and

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creates caricatures instead of characters. He also spoke about the need to see conflict as fundamentally internal and creative: ‘every character, realized in depth, had his own inner conflict, without which he was a dummy’ (TFOL, p. 214), an indictment of any regime that made its people behave like this or its writers write like this. Back in England he embarked on several projects, producing the final draft of Volume III of his autobiography and, under commission to Tony Adams at Studio Books, revising his Short History of Culture and writing a study of the painter, Jacques-Louis David. Each of these books is concerned with the dynamic of history—in his autobiography with his own ongoing struggle about what constitutes art and social life; as depicted by David in his paintings; and in the Short History by a comprehensive study of cultural works that articulate the relationships between human beings with each other, the natural world and their society. Lindsay was back at work, and he was about to enter fully into a new personal relationship.

Meta Waterdrinker An Essex County Constabulary report of November 1956 sent to MI52 records that Meta Waterdrinker, ‘a Dutch Alien’ had been employed from 1954–56 at Lindsay’s home, Bangslappers in Castle Hedingham as a ‘Home Help’. It goes on to note that in May 1956 Meta moved to London, where she married Charles Ashleigh, a resident of Brighton, though she continued to visit Bangslappers regularly. The report continued that, although Jack had a car, he apparently could not drive, and it was common to see Meta chauffeuring him around the district. This report is among the Security Service Files released since 2010. Meta was a fellow communist, a former World War II Dutch Resistance worker, and a ceramic artist. Meta’s marriage to Ashleigh was a marriage of convenience, enabling her to stay in the United Kingdom. From 1958 Jack and Meta were known as a married couple, though they were not able to marry at that time (Jack was still married to Janet Beaton), and Meta moved into Bangslappers. In March 1959 she gave birth to the couple’s first child, Philip; Helen was born two years later in March 1961. With two children to support Lindsay had never had such an important reason to have a regular income, but he was to find that difficult because of the political environment. 2

 The National Archives of the UK (NAUK): Ref. KV 2/3256, 1956 Feb 11–1958 Jan 14.

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Cold War Politics The Security Service Files released in the last decade record the ways in which Lindsay’s political allegiance affected his work, as it did the work of many others including Randall Swingler. The United Kingdom did not have a House Un-British Activities Committee, but the establishment nevertheless exerted their power and influence—not in the candid manner of the United States with their H.U.A.C. but in a very English way of polite letters with between-the-lines directions. The Files from this period finally solved the mystery of the withdrawal of Lindsay’s offer of work by the B.B.C. in 1949, over a decade earlier. A letter on the file stamped SECRET in red at top and bottom performs this kind of quiet government suppression (NAUK, KV 2/3252):                         3rd May, 1949 Our Ref: PF 218,584/Bla/GSW Dear Miss Wadsley,      I notice in a recent report on JACK LINDSAY, the author, of 14, Wellington Road, N.W.8, that he is said from time to time to prepare scripts for broadcasts for the B.B.C., and that his adaptation of a Greek play was broadcast in the Third programme on March 15th this year. In August 1948 he is reported to have broadcast himself a talk on “Post-War Trends in British Literature” and his notes on this subject are said later to have been used in the B.B.C.’s Russian Service.      LINDSAY has been known to use in a Communist connection since 1936 and for some years has been active in the Party’s literary activities. He is at present one of the lecturers attached to the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party and is connected with the Writers’ Group of the Society for Cultural Relations with the U.S.S.R.                         Yours sincerely,                             [initials]                         C.S. Weldsmith

Miss N. Wadsley, B.B.C ___________________ CSW/HLS

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Jack’s daughter, Helen recalled her father describing the withdrawal of work by the B.B.C. as upsetting for several reasons. Firstly, because he was so short of money at the time and a series of talks had been proposed, which would have been very welcome financially. And secondly, because he was given no reason for the decision and the person who conveyed it to him (presumably Miss Wadsley) had been so discomfited by the whole situation. The political sensitivities of the period were such that other work by Lindsay that acknowledged its Marxist historiography aroused fierce antagonism. In ‘Jack Lindsay’s Historical Writings’ (online) Paul Gillen writes about the T.L.S. review of Lindsay’s Byzantium into Europe (1952), a study of Byzantine influence on the development of Europe. Gillen writes that Lindsay’s strategy in his book was to compare the reticence on the role of Byzantium in favour of the dominance of Roman culture to the (then) contemporary suppression of communist Eastern Europe. Not a popular (or, perhaps, wise) move during the Cold War. The last thing scholars of Byzantium wanted was for their studies to be aligned with the Communist bloc. Gillen reports one response: An anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement opened with a tirade against Marxist dogmatism and Soviet propaganda. The review cited Lindsay’s acknowledgments of Soviet contacts as evidence that he took orders from Moscow, and without mentioning that he did not hold an academic position, wondered ‘whether, in fairness to his pupils, any individual who adheres to the Communist doctrine can be allowed responsibility for the teaching of history’. (Anon [Moss], p. 816)

This review (by historian, Henry St. Lawrence Beaufort Moss) illustrates how the political atmosphere of the Cold War affected people in all spheres of their activity, even so esoteric a subject as the role of Byzantium in Europe between the fourth and thirteenth centuries A.D.

Publications: 1950s Despite the freeze Lindsay continued to publish work related to his political affiliations, starting with three books of verse: a verse-declamation about the battle for democracy in post-World War II Greece, Cry of Greece (1950), a book of linocuts by Noel Counihan with verse by Lindsay dedicated to the World Peace Movement, Peace Is Our Answer (1951), and a

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Fore Publications book in their Key Poets series, Three Letters to Nikolai Tikhonov (1950), addressed to the politician and former President of the Soviet Writers’ Union. He also published two accounts of travel in the Eastern bloc, A World Ahead: Journal of a Soviet Journey (1950) and Rumanian Summer: A View of the Rumanian People’s Republic (1953), a book of translations of Russian poetry: 1917–55 (1957) and a translation of the work of nineteenth-century Polish writer, academic and political activist, Adam Micklewicz (1957). During this decade Lindsay published one other translation, The Loves of Asklepiades (1959), a book of love poetry by Asclepiades of Samos, ancient Greek epigrammatist and lyric poet and the first book of his autobiography, Life Rarely Tells: An Autobiographical Account Ending in the Year 1921 and Situated Mostly in Brisbane, Queensland (1958). It was the first of three books that would later be published in one volume as Life Rarely Tells: An Autobiographical Account in Three Volumes (1982). Most of Lindsay’s publications in the 1950s, however, are about British history, society and culture. He published three more historical novels set in England: the frothy confection, The Passionate Pastoral: An 18th Century Escapade (1951), The Great Oak: A Story of 1549 (1957), the tale of rebellion against land enclosures in Norfolk led by yeoman, Robert Kett, and 1764: The Hurlyburly of Daily Life Exemplified in One Year of the Eighteenth Century (1959), written in the style of the living newspaper like the earlier novel, 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938). He also started his series of contemporary ‘British Way’ novels with Betrayed Spring (1953), Rising Tide (1954), Moment of Choice (1955) and A Local Habitation (1957). Britain was also the focus of historical and archaeological studies: The Romans Were Here: The Roman Period in Britain and Its Place in Our History (1956), Arthur and His Times: Britain in the Dark Ages (1958) and Discovery of Britain: A Guide to Archaeology (1958) that focused on the Upper Colne Valley near his home in Essex. In 1956 Lindsay published a study of the contemporary British novel, After the ’Thirties: The Novel in Britain and Its Future and the next in his series of major literary studies, George Meredith: His Life and Work. After starting the 1950s with a book on one of the most popular writers in English, Charles Dickens, Lindsay went on to write about the obverse, a writer who received academic praise but was popular with neither readers nor reviewers in his own time. Known to some of Lindsay’s prospective readers for his portrait of the execrable Sir Willoughby Patterne of The Egoist (1879), the flaying honesty of his narrative poem, Modern Love

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(1862) and as a writer of nature poetry including the evocative ‘The Lark Ascending’ (1881), the lyricism of which inspired Vaughan Williams’ composition of the same name, a study of Meredith was nevertheless not likely to attract a large audience. His novels, which are the major concern of Lindsay’s book, are convoluted, complex and difficult, featuring numerous plots and characters, multiple forms of authorial commentary, and a metaphorical and often satirical style that distances rather than engages readers. Yet Meredith was lauded for his ‘psychology’, his exploration of the nature of human consciousness and how it is formed in relation to the values, beliefs and social practices it encounters. For Lindsay, negotiating the political and institutional hysteria of the Cold War, Meredith’s work offered a way of exploring how individuals then and in his own time come to embody ideologies, even when this works against their own best interest. With Meredith, he continues the exploration of consciousness that formed the core of his study of John Bunyan, and he combines this with the social criticism of Dickens.

CHAPTER 8

George Meredith, (Psycho)Analyst

George Meredith: His Life and Work (1956) starts with a ‘Foreword’ in which Lindsay writes that he asked people what they knew of Meredith. The younger ones knew nothing of the writer and had read none of the novels, though they knew some of his poetry. The older ones, like himself, knew and admired The Egoist (1879) but otherwise remembered him only as ‘a believer in Progress and a psychologist who could analyse the most complex states of self-division’ (GM, p. 8). Lindsay notes that Meredith’s vaunted belief in Progress explains both the neglect of his work and ‘the nonsense written about him’ (p. 7). He rejects the claim that Meredith blindly accepted a capitalist narrative of continual progress: ‘For he both grasped the essential nature of the conflict now issuing in the threat to life itself and held a deep optimism which believed that despite all hells men— the masses—would master the threat and achieve a happy harmonious life on earth’ (p.  7). Which leads Lindsay to conclude: ‘Meredith has been ignored because of his profound relevance to the situation of our world’ (p. 7). Like Blake, he held up a mirror into which no-one wanted to look. As Lindsay notes, Meredith’s work is primarily known for its psychological insight, though this is not any form of self-focused Freudian analysis. Rather it refers to his understanding of the formative effect that ideologies and belief systems have on how individuals think, act, and experience the world and their own being. This is at the heart of all of

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Meredith’s work and is the focus of Lindsay’s analysis. As with his studies of Bunyan and Dickens, he begins by locating Meredith by class and education.

Beginnings George Meredith spent his childhood in Portsmouth imbibing the naval port city’s social and financial aspiration, its mix of seafarer hospitality and fiscal cupidity, as well as a degree of cosmopolitanism that is common to cities that frequently entertain outsiders. Lindsay writes that this was the source of both its danger—press-gangs often roamed the streets, kidnapping citizens for naval service—and its romance, the chance of a foreign posting accompanied by social elevation and economic advantage. Meredith’s aunt Louisa took the latter route, marrying W.H. Read, a former navy purser who was appointed to consular service in Portugal. The Reads produced three sons and a daughter, Luiza whose husband ascended through the ranks of the diplomatic service and eventually became a Marquis. Louisa’s marriage was a triumph for the class-conscious Meredith family, particularly George’s grandfather Melchizedek known to the family as ‘the Great Mel’. A tailor by trade, Mel was a bon vivant who won his way into hearts, homes and clubs of the local gentry not only by his personal charm, charisma and excellent workmanship, but also reportedly by excusing them from paying many of their accounts. Mel died relatively young (aged fifty-one) leaving his business in debt and forcing his son Augustus, George’s father, to abandon his medical training for the tailoring business in which he had no interest. Augustus shared his father’s belief in his own essential gentility and the need to be recognised as the rightful member of a class superior to that into which he was born. So despite carrying Mel’s debts, Augustus did not send George to the local school, Frost’s Academy, but to St Paul’s day-­ school at Southsea, where he learned Latin and history. As a result, the local lads called him Gentleman Georgy (p. 20), a provocation he seems to have handled with his father’s characteristic mildness. Lindsay observes: ‘if Frost’s boys called him Gentleman Georgy, he probably didn’t escape being called Son of Snip by some of the gentry at St Paul’s’ (p.  21). Nevertheless, the young Meredith was learning the manner and speech of the ruling classes, Lindsay notes, quoting from a documented comment by eleven-year-old George to a childhood friend: ‘I was at Stokes Bay races last week and I saw your father’s horse come in second, but I think he is a

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grand horse. By George! He’s got some blood in him’ (p. 21). George was being groomed to embody the class to which his father and grandfather aspired to belong.

Education In 1838 Augustus’ business failed and he travelled to London to work as a journeyman tailor. For three years young George lived in the country with relatives and during the academic year attended an undistinguished boarding-school where he later claimed to have learned nothing, but much admired the head-boy who subdued the bullies. On turning fourteen he inherited some money from his mother and aunt and enrolled in a Moravian Brothers School at Neuwied on the Rhine. Marianne Doerfel (1986) notes that the Moravian schools were very popular with British professional and business families. The Brothers were known as sincere, hard-working Christians who practised what they preached and did not evangelise their pupils (Doerfel, p. 79). Lindsay quotes from an essay by a former pupil identifying the value of the Moravian education: … in the way that the Brothers lived exemplary lives before the pupils with child-like simplicity of spirit and heart; they seemed incapable of understanding a lie and brought out the best in the children who were left full of freedom of imagination; they deprecated all cramming methods and tried to develop their pupils’ own faculties. (GM, p. 26)

Lindsay writes: ‘George felt at home. There was no doctrine of hell preached by the Brothers; all emphasis was laid on the Brotherhood of Man’ (p. 27). He also records Meredith’s own memory of going through a six-week spell of religiosity during which he annoyed a lot of people ‘by asking everyone if they were saved’, adding that Meredith later commented: ‘Never since have I swallowed the Christian fable’ (p. 27). Lindsay notes that at Neuwied Meredith was exposed to German literature, art and philosophy including Romantic writers such as Goethe, Hegel, Richter and Heine (p.  27), and identifies Goethe as the major influence on Meredith’s writing: … his effort to realise a high seriousness and sense of responsibility in art, his understanding that all true poetry was poetry of circumstance, his elimination of the wilful and pettily personal. His effort to achieve the integration

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of self within the historical process in which it played an active and socially-­ conscious part. (p .28)

To this he adds the influence of Goethe’s belief in the organic relationship between human beings and nature, as well as his view of science as united with art in a ‘fundamental principle of becoming, change, progress’ (p.  28). This is the Romanticism of social responsibility and fellowship, which places Goethe in a trajectory from Bruno and Spinoza to Hegel and Marx, whom Lindsay identifies as moving away from otherworldly idealist belief systems such as religion to a grounded engagement with the world, with ‘human society and its living relationship to nature’ (p. 28). Meredith left the Moravian school with a set of values that was the opposite of the commercial environment in which he was raised and that governed the social life of the port city and his own family: ‘Portsmouth had deified the class-values of the Victorian middle-class … Neuwied set out a totally opposed system of values, in which the world’s criteria of money and power had no meaning and all that mattered was the individual’s intrinsic qualities, his readiness to work for the brotherhood of man’ (p. 29). Lindsay notes that this constituted the internal (moral and ethical) conflict that Meredith would work to understand and resolve throughout the rest of his life.

Early Work Having completed his school education Meredith was articled to solicitor, Richard Charnock whom Lindsay describes as: something of a buck and a bohemian, untidy and even slovenly, a great pipe-­ smoker and talker, keen on fishing and joking, a fantasist with claims to polyglot learning, who was one of the first on the books of the British Museum Reading Room in 1838, a member of the Arundel Club (with Dickens, Horne, and Lord John Manners …), a rationalist and a cynic, who preferred Anacreon to Aeschylus and Hood to Tennyson. (p. 30)

Charnock might not have been the right master for a budding lawyer, but he was ideal for an aspiring author. He encouraged Meredith in both his walking (often thirty to forty miles in a day) and his writing, both activities coming together in poems such as ‘London by Lamplight’ and ‘The

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Sleeping City’, published in his first book, Poems (1851). Lindsay identifies in these works Meredith’s departure from the notion of nature as a refuge from society. For Meredith, he argues, ‘it is also a human space, in which the union of man and nature begets energies for the shaping of society’ (p. 32). Lindsay detects in his work the influence of post-Romantic British poets such as Robert Browning, R.H. Horne and the group that he calls the New Poets (also known as the Spasmodics) including Philip James Bailey, Ebenezer Jones, Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell and Gerald Massey (p. 31). Like them, Meredith sees the critical depiction of everyday experience as a means to explore and explain social problems. In Meredith’s description of the sleeping city, for example, Lindsay identifies the basis of social change in the behaviours of different classes towards the destitute. The poor dispensed charity though having little themselves; the rich were so driven to acquire wealth that they dispensed nothing: ‘While Poverty dispenses alms/To outcasts, bread, and healing balms;/While old Mammon knows himself/The greatest beggar for his pelf’ (ll. 97–100). Lindsay argues also that Meredith used the sensuous imagery of the post-Romantics to challenge the division between humanity and the natural world. He analyses the poem ‘Love in the Valley’ (1965, p. 609), which begins with a description of the narrator’s beloved sleeping under a tree: ‘Couched with her arms behind her golden head,/Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly’ (ll. 2–3). For Lindsay the poem represents nature as not simply a backdrop to the lovers’ meeting but integral to it. The lovers are one with nature, like the woman asleep in the tree’s shade: ‘The girl and the various life of nature are merged so that each enhances the other. … the result is a dynamic and delighted fusion of girl and earth that owns a new rich fullness’ (p. 50). This fusion of human and earth or nature is identified by Lindsay as a ‘new note’ (p. 50). He finds this unity with nature throughout Meredith’s early poems, including ‘South-West Wind in the Woodland’ that concludes: For every elemental power Is kindred to our hearts, and once Acknowledged, wedded, once embraced, Once taken to the unfettered sense, Once claspt into the naked life, The union is eternal. (p. 51)

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Lindsay extends this unity of human beings and nature to all the spheres of human activity: ‘discovering that man’s relation to nature is part of his social being, so that into it enters the forms of conflict in which he is enmeshed’, including conditions of labour, the roles of science and of art, as well as struggles for political equality (p. 51). Though the contemporary reviews of the book were lukewarm at best, Lindsay discerns in this work the germ of the artist and social critic whose writing will offer a new way of thinking about human being and consciousness: The young poet who could attain the lyric energy of Love in the Valley and the vision of man’s alienation from his own essence in The Sleeping City was already a great innovator, whose innovations were based on a passionate insight into the real nature of struggle in his world. (pp. 51–2)

Marriage and Modern Love At Charnock’s suggestion a group of young poets had started by publishing their work in a privately circulated periodical, The Monthly Observer (1849). Among their number were Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock and his widowed sister, Mary Ellen Nicholls. She was considered very beautiful and intellectually accomplished, a ‘mixture of feminine grace and cavalier decision, sharp malice and blue-stockinged seriousness’ (p. 35). Lindsay concludes that Mary ‘appealed both to his strong romantic emotions and also to his anti-romantic feminism’ (p. 35). Meredith was smitten and resolved to marry her despite their differences. He had just turned twenty-one and inherited some money that enabled him to marry and to leave his legal internship to develop his career as a writer; Mary was a widow of twenty-eight with a young daughter. Meredith was a firm atheist, while Mary was a liberal Protestant who dabbled in spiritualism. Though she refused him six times, they eventually married in August 1849 at St George’s Church, Hanover Square. The marriage was not a success, largely it seems because Meredith was not prepared to take regular work to support his family, which included Mary, her daughter Edith and soon their son, Arthur. When his small inheritance ran out and with only his meagre earnings as a writer to support them, the family became dependent on friends and relatives for accommodation and living expenses. Mary’s father, the former Romantic

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but increasingly reactionary Peacock made his disapproval of his penniless son-in-law clear to all. Then, like Ruskin before him, Meredith found himself the third party in a love affair between his wife and an artist who was painting him, when he posed for Henry Wallis’ The Death of Chatterton (1856). The following year Mary left Meredith for Wallis and the couple began living together in North Wales. In April 1858 she bore Wallis a son, though the child was registered as Felix Meredith as he and Mary were still legally married. She and Wallis left for Capri soon afterwards with Edith and Felix, ‘leaving George to cope with debts, loneliness, and young Arthur’ (p. 82). By the following year Mary’s relationship with Wallis had failed and she returned to Twickenham, anxious to see Arthur and to explore the possibility of a reunion with Meredith. However, he had given her an ultimatum when she left, that he would not see her again if she did so, and he never did. Although Mary was seriously ill and begged Meredith to visit her, he refused. His only concession was to allow Arthur to visit his mother in her final months. Meredith writes: ‘In October 1861, aged 41, she died, and no tombstone was raised over her body’ (p. 83). Meredith may not have been a conventional Victorian middle-class pater familias, but he was also neither generous nor forgiving. Lindsay describes Meredith’s sonnet sequence, Modern Love (1862) as a thinly fictionalised account of Meredith’s marriage to Mary that charts the desperate unhappiness of an estranged married couple, forced by social convention and its economic imperatives to stay together. The first sonnet sets the scene:         I By this he knew she wept with waking eyes: That, at his hand’s light quiver by her head, The strange low sobs that shook their common bed Were called into her with a sharp surprise, And strangely mute, like little gasping snakes, Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes Her giant heart of Memory and Tears Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat Sleep’s heavy measure, they from head to feet Were moveless, looking through their dead black years, By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.

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Like sculptured effigies they might be seen Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between; Each wishing for the sword that severs all.

Lindsay identifies Meredith’s narrative of alienation, mistrust, betrayal and death as exposing the ideology at the heart of bourgeois marriage. The Marriage Laws of nineteenth-century society stripped the wife of all her possessions on marriage, reducing her to financial dependency. Bourgeois marriage embedded within the intimate sphere of life the ideology of financial power and control basic to capitalism; accumulating wealth in the hands of one who then had control over all those dependent on him. Of course, couples might (and did) resist this construction of their relationship, but they were still subject socially to the permissions and prohibitions associated with it. This included the public performance of domestic harmony and female submission. Lindsay praises the directness of Meredith’s analysis: his refusal to romanticise bourgeois marriage and his revelation of the social pressure to perform domestic bliss. He focuses solely on the husband’s situation, and specifically on his refusal to play the conventional role of breadwinner. Lindsay cites at length the husband’s complaints: ‘She treated him as something that is tame’ (sonnet V); women want someone who will ‘Mince/the facts of life’ in order to be successful, ‘Her much-adored delightful Fairy Prince!’ (Sonnet X); women do not praise great poets and sages but instead reward ‘the little lapdog breed’ (sonnet XXXI). Lindsay argues that this identifies the wife with the middle class and the husband as the anti-bourgeois hero, struggling against the middle-class respectability that supports and enables capitalism—and he tellingly identifies the actors not as the husband and wife of the poem but as Mary and George Meredith: The meaning is plain. Mary wanted a snug warmth of love, a sly refuge, with the world barred out by an acceptance of its terms. But to George those terms were foully false; the murder of the loyalty which alone made life worth living. They denied his dream of brotherhood, his need to struggle for the changing of the world. (p. 87)

The reader learns nothing of the wife’s perspective, nor is attention given to the fact that if a Victorian wife left her husband, she forfeited all

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property; he even effectively ‘owned’ her children and could refuse her access to them, as did Meredith (and Dickens). Meredith’s examination of Victorian marriage reveals the gross inequality at its heart and the grief it may cause the married couple. It also details its coercive power on both parties to be and act as conventional subjects of that ideology: the man to adopt his responsibilities as breadwinner, the woman as homemaker. The power it gives the man is financial, the woman emotional, though its exercise in either case can be disastrous for the relationship between the two. Lindsay argues that Meredith’s revelation of how bourgeois ideology has shaped the meaning and practice of Victorian marriage makes the poem ‘more than a subtle psychological document’ (p. 87). It exposes the intersection of class and gender ideologies in marriage that situate the woman as voiceless, powerless, and dependent and the man as controlling, vengeful and paranoid, while both are trapped within its expectations as homemaker and breadwinner. And it does this not with a scholarly treatise or political monologue but by using the sensory, emotional and intellectual capacities of the sonnet form, structured by an overarching narrative, to describe not only this failed marriage but also how it has generated the damaged consciousness of the male partner. For Lindsay this is the next step in his exploration of the role of art; how it reveals the power of ideology to infiltrate the individual’s being and consciousness and to cause or coerce them to be, act and think in ways that may contradict their own values and beliefs. The first novel in which Meredith focuses on the formation of character by a system of beliefs and values is The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), another work with autobiographical references.

Ideology and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel Feverel is the story of a man (Sir Austin Feverel) left to raise a child (Richard) when his wife leaves him for an artist, the poet Denzil Somers to whom Meredith rather meanly assigned the penname, Diaper Sandoe. In this book, Lindsay argues, Meredith not only demonstrates the mechanisms by which people are formed within the ideologies of class and gender that characterise capitalist society but also identifies in human beings a rebellious spirit that works against and beyond their upbringing. Lindsay sees this expressed in Feverel in the contrast between the portrayal of Sir Austin and his cohort, the biting satire which exposes the vanity and emptiness of this group and their class, and the sympathetic portrayal of his

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son, Richard and his friends who are described with ‘more particularised contours and human warmth’ (p. 89): The demarcation is not precise, but the two trends are obvious. In them we see something of George’s torn and disturbed condition as he writes, and also the strain he feels at the effort to move from definitions determined by a poetic transfiguration of the world into a realistic control of everyday material—while preserving a lyric faith in love and brotherhood, and a clear poetical critique. (p. 89)

Lindsay quotes the contemporary reviewer from The Times (Lucas, 1859) who attempted to resolve this apparent formal contradiction within Meredith’s text by arguing the author is ‘a humorist, shaping his own world with people “more entirely symbols and shadows of his thought than ordinary denizens of the world about him”’ (p. 94). Lindsay argues that what confuses both friendly and unfriendly reviewers alike is the book’s ‘grasp of the contradictions in existing society’ (p. 94). That is, the book represents both the ideologue (Sir Austin), determined to raise his son strictly in accordance with a rigid set of principles that are devoid of human love and warmth, and the rebel (Richard) who is driven to explore those qualities and relationships that the ideology demands he suppress. Citing the Athenaeum reviewer, G.E.  Jewsbury (1859) Lindsay writes: ‘The critics, and the public, retire bewildered because they dare not follow Meredith into his exploration of the bourgeois illusion, its “cruelty and blindness and blundering”’ (p. 94).

Egoism and The Egoist Meredith creates in Sir Austin Feverel a portrait of the egoism that Lindsay identifies as ‘the supreme expression of the dominant class-values of his world’ and it is because of this that ‘he remains always a political writer in the deepest significance of that phrase’ (p.  89). Lindsay insists that this point must be understood ‘so that the reader may grasp the social, political, and psychological implications of the term Egoism whenever it is hereafter used’ (p.  89). Egoism is not simply an individual psychological characteristic: Egoism is for Meredith the process of inner division, of self-alienation, that is the spiritual reflection of class-cleavages; and everyone who fights against

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Egoism is fighting both for personal integration and for world-brotherhood. Egoism reveals the inner discord and split which find cultural expression in a whole complex of abstractions, in the denial of Earth and the separation of body and mind. (pp. 89–90)

In describing the egoism of Sir Austin Feverel and its destructive effect on the life of his son, Lindsay sees Meredith as mapping the effect of class ideology on the formation and lives of individuals. Lindsay notes that the ‘conflict of father and Son is for the same reason shown as an expression of the division of Mind and Heart, which Meredith sees always as an outcome of social division’ (p. 90). The final image of Richard in mourning for his dead wife and left to raise his baby son alone, because of misguided actions by Sir Austin, ends a book full of love and loss, vanity and foolishness. The book did not have a conventional ‘realist’ happy ending, but a more realistic scene of emotional devastation. As a result, Lindsay writes, ‘The book roused instant and strong denunciation by the middle-class reading public’ (p. 94) who complained about its inclusion in the stock of Mudie’s circulating library. This led to its withdrawal from the library, Lindsay concluding that the embargo ‘thus killed a book’ (p. 96). Given that Meredith drew on some of his own behaviours when raising his son Arthur to describe Sir Richard’s behaviour, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel can be seen as both critical and self-reflexive, the beginning of a lifelong analysis of the egoism that Meredith identified as the self (and psychic organisation) created by capitalism. The most famous example is his study of Sir Willoughby Patterne of The Egoist (1879), a portrait of vanity, vacuity, privilege and a pathological lack of empathy that, in its reference to the willow-pattern crockery of every successful middle-class household, not only prepares the reader for a tale of benighted lovers (the willow-pattern story), but also evokes the middle-class conformity and spectacle that the book analyses. Lindsay begins his analysis of the novel by defining egoism as ‘as no mere accidental or incidental aberration of personality, but as the essence of bourgeois life, bringing to a head the whole long process of spiritual and economic alienation’ (p.  238). He adds of the character of Sir Willoughby: ‘his Egoist was no sport-figure, no exaggerated monster, but the normal type of bourgeois man—appearing abnormal only because of the exposing light’. Meredith makes this point in the novel when one of his characters comments on Sir Willoughby: ‘Really a superb young

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English gentleman,’ Mrs Mountsteward says, summing up public opinion’ (p. 238). Lindsay goes on to identify Meredith’s portrayal of Sir Willoughby as a Victorian embodiment of the self that is described by existentialism—self-­ referential, isolated, hopeless: ‘the maddened dialectic of the self and its divisions abstracted from concrete resolution in act, in history, in social movement’ (p. 240). However, where the existentialist remains trapped within the ‘vicious-circle of the self closed in on itself’ Lindsay argues that ‘Meredith analyses this condition of mind in order to reject it as the last disintegrative stage of capitalist egoism’ (p. 240). For Meredith, Lindsay argues, egoism was not an individual but a social psychopathy. Lindsay notes that Meredith also explores the consequences of egoism for Sir Willoughby’s own sense of self. For example, when he is rejected by Clara Middleton, his jealousy erupts ‘to produce division of himself from himself, a concentration of his thoughts upon another object, still himself, but in another breast, which had to be looked at and into for the discovery of him’ (p. 240). The tragedy of the egoist is not only in the effect of his thought and actions on other people but also in the evacuation of any integrity in the core of his being. Sir Willoughby’s self-obsession means that the only self he can see is the self he finds outside himself, reflected in a mirror or in the uncritical regard of another person. The vital interconnections between his sensing, feeling, and thinking selves have been disrupted by the demands of a political economy that requires him to be able to act without feeling (about other people or the world) and without sensing the results of his actions (on other people and the world). In this book of multiple egoisms, Lindsay writes, only Clara Middleton is awakened to ‘something of the horror of it and begins[s] to struggle’ (p. 239): The one person who stands up against Patterne is Clara. She begins her revolt from something of his own level, merely shocked at finding that he means to make her will a reflection of his own. But her growing critical understanding of his outlook and method deepens her revolt and begins to affect others. (p. 241)

The importance of Clara is that she shows that someone raised within this environment can resist, particularly when her experience contradicts her expectations. When Clara realises that the sentimental construction of marriage conceals a very different reality—that her role would simply be

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to reflect to Sir Willoughby his idealised image of himself and that he will never see her at all—she rejects his proposal. She is so shocked by this realisation that she begins to question the basis of all interpersonal relationships in her society and the (class and gender) roles available to her. And, as Lindsay notes, her questioning prompts others to reconsider their own choices and the way they have been positioned by society to be and to behave. Clara becomes one of Meredith’s ‘positive heroes’ along with the man she will marry, Vernon Whitford, Sir Willoughby’s cousin and a foil to him in every way. Together they show that social (and individual) transformation is possible even for those raised to be egoists.

Sentimentalism and Sandra Belloni Lindsay aligns this egoism with its emotional performance as sentimentalism. In his appended Notes he defines sentimentalism by reference to Thomas Love Peacock’s definition of sentiment as ‘canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling’ (p. 392). Meredith’s target is the affectation of refinement that masks the brutal, vacuous, ruthless nature and behaviour of the egoist. Lindsay brings this together with the cash nexus that Carlyle identified as characteristic of capitalism: ‘He saw Capitalism as substituting the cash-nexus for human relationship and striving to turn people into things. … He saw its forms of cant and humbug as the signature, the necessary veil of the reduction of men to things’ (GM, p. 73). The capitalist cannot acknowledge their reduction of the worker to an object, a thing, as it offends religious and moral beliefs. In order to veil this psychic and spiritual brutality the capitalist affects a refinement of emotion and sensibility that would or should be impossible in the person who would deny the humanity of another. The result is a display of sentimentalism that conceals the fundamental emotional disengagement of the egoist who is the embodiment of contemporary capitalism. Lindsay argues that Meredith exposes this sentimentalism in his novel, Sandra Belloni (1864 (as Emilia in England); 1887) when Emilia, a local farm-girl with a beautiful voice, is taken under the patronage of the three daughters of wealthy merchant, Samuel Pole. For the Pole sisters the public support and display of Emilia is an opportunity to flaunt their self-­ image as sensitive beings who do not care about vulgar matters such as social standing, while at the same time using Emilia to attract suitors and win them a place in fashionable society. A typically complicated plot sees Emilia betrayed and abandoned by the son of the Pole family; then

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rebuilding her life as a singer; and finally stepping in to assist financially the family that wronged her. Emilia emerges as another version of the positive hero that Meredith sees as the revolutionary alternative to the capitalist subject, whereas in the Pole family we see the sentimentalists in action, using a talented but poor and vulnerable young woman as a pawn in a game of affective one-upmanship. Lindsay traces Meredith’s skill at analysing individual behaviour to his constant interrelationship of the psychological and political: ‘his resolve to make every detail subserve a central concept, political and psychological, so that the conclusions of the novel in particular bring out into the open what he has been keeping under cover as his organising system’ (p. 184). In Sandra Belloni those conclusions include Emilia’s fiscal rescue of the Pole family, which stands in marked contrast to their exploitation of her. The organising system of the novel is Meredith’s deconstruction of capitalist ideologies of class and gender and their effect on those who live under their dictates: in particular, the egoist who embraces or aspires to its display of power and control and the sentimentalist who, while living by and benefitting from the same regime, masks this power-play with a performance of ‘fine feeling’.

Gentility and Evan Harrington Another public expression of class politics and identity at this time was gentility. The notion of gentility was a major issue for the new industrial middle class, since it was one of the means by which they were excluded from upper-class circles of power and influence. Lindsay traces this back to medieval times with the couplet: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span/ who was then the gentleman?’ He adds: ‘There we get the stark rebellion against privilege-by-birth; but already in the seventeenth century come moralisations that seek to extend the notion of Gentleman, e.g. when Decker calls Christ a Gentleman’ (p.  106). Lindsay cites, by contrast, Dinah Craik’s 1 John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) as a story of social elevation from orphan to gentleman through honest hard work. He also notes that Ruskin discusses the term in Volume V of Modern Painters ‘calling sensitiveness, sympathy, self-command gentlemanly, while rating 1  Lindsay refers to Dinah Craik as Miss Mullock, actually Mulock. After her marriage her books were published under various versions of her married name, as Dinah Maria Craik, Dinah Mulock Craik, Mrs Craik.

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callousness, meanness, suspicion, indifference to the interests of others as vulgarity’ (p.  106). However, he notes, Ruskin was not a champion of democracy: ‘He denied that Gentlemanliness had anything to do with birth or blood, but sternly attributed vulgarity to those of “inferior stations” who aped ways and clothes “unsuited” to them.’ In other words, writes Lindsay, ‘he defended the right of the middle class to share in feudal privilege, but wanted to keep out the workers’ (p. 106). The issue was of particular interest to Meredith because of its major role in his own life: his upbringing and education that proclaimed him a gentleman, despite his relative poverty; the catastrophe for his father of his grandfather, Melchizedek Meredith’s aspiration to gentility; and the fact that, when he formed an attachment to a young woman after his wife’s death, his class position and poverty denied him any hope of marriage. Meredith’s analysis of gentility and its relationship to class and wealth was conducted through a scathing critique of his own family’s class pretensions in Evan Harrington, or, He would be a gentleman (1861). The book begins with news of the death of Melchisedec Harrington, an obvious reference to his own grandfather. Meredith writes that the death of a tailor was not usually a source of much interest, however: In the case of Mr. Melchisedec it was otherwise. This had been a grand man, despite his calling, and in the teeth of opprobrious epithets against his craft. … Mr. Melchisedec, whom people in private called the great Mel, had been at once the sad dog of Lymport, and the pride of the town. He was a tailor, and he kept horses; he was a tailor, and he had gallant adventures; he was a tailor, and he shook hands with his customers. Finally, he was a tradesman, and he never was known to have sent in a bill. Such a personage comes but once in a generation, and, when he goes, men miss the man as well as their money.

With this opening paragraph Meredith summarises the class aspirations of his own family, and their price. Meredith’s father was greatly distressed by the book, which he read as an indictment of himself and the family, though Lindsay argues it is more a reflection by Meredith on his own folly. For Lindsay the comic masterpiece of the book is the countess de Saldar, based on Meredith’s aunt Louisa and her daughter Luiza: Absolutely unscrupulous, an abysmal liar ready to use her physical charms for social ends and almost admirable in her buoyant determination, she embodies supremely the maniacal snobbery of the Victorian bourgeoisie,

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the subordination of all human realities to class-aims. … The landed aristocrats, the Jocelyns and their friends, dwindle before her gigantic pettiness into trivial or coarse parasites; and she looms up as the emblem of the class-­ force from which they draw their minor meanings. (p. 107)

Through her character Meredith exposes the lie of gentility when the opposition of the aristocratic Jocelyns to a commoner becoming a member of their family crumbles before the countess’s revelation of Evan’s wealth: ‘in her exposure of the class-principles she champions, she becomes the involuntary avenging-angel of democracy’ (p. 107). Meredith drives this point home directly to readers when the narrator comments in Chapter XXX: Accept in the Countess the heroine who is combating class-prejudices, and surely she is pre-eminently noteworthy. True, she fights only for her family, and is virtually the champion of the opposing institution misplaced. That does not matter: the Fates may have done it purposely: by conquering she establishes a principle. (Quoted p. 107)

The countess attacked the class barrier, one aristocratic family at a time. Lindsay notes in this alliance, too, the way in which the impoverished upper class and the aspirational middle class combine to preserve class-­ based society. He wittily depicts this at the end of the book when the Countess flees disgrace at home for Rome and conversion to Catholicism, which ‘Meredith considers the worst reactionary forces in the world’ (p. 108). Lindsay adds: ‘The bourgeoisie, cornered, make an alliance with the feudal enemy to preserve a class-world’ (p. 108). The Countess’s class rebellion does not extend to the working classes. For Lindsay, the other character of major interest is Rose Jocelyn, the young woman with whom Evan falls in love: ‘Rose (Janet) is a sort of dream-sketch of what was to be later the full portrait of the New Woman, who, retaining all her femininity, fights uncompromisingly for equality, comradeship, human dignity’ (p. 109). And he adds that: ‘she refuses to lose her sense of worth as a social being when she does fall in love’ (p. 109). However he also notes that Meredith would later acknowledge the flaw in this portrait of Rose, that a young woman raised as she had been could not afford to be so open and honest: ‘he had given Rose a simple frankness and honesty which was incompatible with her class-position’ (p.  109).

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This observation confirms Lindsay’s reading of the politics of Meredith’s work as conveyed through his characters and their social location: When I call Meredith a political novelist, I do not mean that he habitually deals with the externals of politics, parliamentary elections and the like. I mean that the central focus of each of his works implies a considered judgment, based in political economy, of the fundamental forces determining the general movement of society. The personal struggles of his characters are always seen within this general movement. (p. 111)

With the egoist and the sentimentalist Meredith showed how the ideology of capitalism impacted on the formation of individual being and behaviour; with gentility he showed how that ideology policed the formation and maintenance of the class structure created by capitalism. Lindsay notes that the happy ending of Evan Harrington, with the union of Evan and Rose, contradicts its critique of middle-class society. Perhaps Meredith succumbed to his own fantasy of class mobility, or perhaps he wanted to rebuild trust with the audience he lost with the tragic ending of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Lindsay notes that Meredith had purposely written for a broader audience with this book, including an anti-­ aristocracy stance that he hoped would win over the American market, but did not (p. 105). Once again, however, Meredith’s work failed to win the readership to which he aspired and it may be that the echoes of the Westminster Review followed him: that the class he satirised also comprised his readership. Meredith’s politics were his strength and his undoing.

Politics and Beauchamp’s Career Lindsay writes that Meredith identified himself as a Radical, which originally meant the left wing of the Whig Party. After the collapse of Chartism in 1848, Lindsay argues, the Radicals were left to carry forward the activist element in the mass movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, he writes, ‘the London Radical Clubs were probably the most powerful of organised political groupings in Britain’ (p. 114). He summarises Meredith’s stance, based on analysis of his writing: ‘Radicalism meant for him the stand for as many of the revolutionary ideas of 1848 as the situation made practicable, the continuing criticism of the existing State in terms of those ideas, and the struggle towards a future in which freedom and brotherhood could be wholly realised’ (p. 115).

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Lindsay notes that Meredith wrote only one book that focused on institutional politics, Beauchamp’s Career (1875) that was written after Meredith worked as an election campaigner for his friend, Frederick Augustus Maxse, Admiral and Radical. Lindsay writes that Meredith used this exposure to the world of parliamentary politics as the basis for a novel that explores what happens to a young idealist exposed to the world of realpolitik. Lindsay quotes Meredith’s own account of the novel, written after it was rejected for publication by The Cornhill but accepted (in shorter version) as a serial by the Fortnightly: It is philosophical—political, with no powerful stream of adventure: an attempt to show the forces around a young man of the present day, in England, who would move them, and finds them unutterably solid, though it is seen in the end that he does not altogether fail, has not lived quite in vain. Of course, this is done in the concrete. A certain drama of self-­conquest is gone through, for the hero is not perfect. (p. 204)

Meredith concludes: ‘I think his [Beauchamps’] History a picture of the time—taking its mental action, and material ease and indifference, to be a necessary element of the picture’ (p. 204). Thus Meredith describes his own method that related individual being and behaviour to pervasive ideologies and their consequences in order to describe a society at a particular time. Lindsay maps Meredith’s exploration of a range of different political allegiances through the story of Beauchamp who, after serving with distinction in the navy, aspires to a political career in England as a Radical. Beauchamps’ Carlylean notions of government by a benevolent aristocracy (his own class) had been destroyed by his experience in the Crimean War (p. 205). As a result, Lindsay asserts, Beauchamp ‘has a vision of … a brotherly England of peaceful construction’ (p. 206) that Lindsay identifies as socialist. His friend Cecilia Halkett acts as the conservative voice who questions his ideas and assumptions. He almost wins her over until her fear that he is unstable—prompted as much by the reappearance of his former lover, Renée, daughter of the Comte de Croisnel, as by his politics—reasserts itself and she accepts the proposal of Blackburn Tuckham, the Tory candidate. The romantic sub-plot is another snapshot of contemporary politics. The greatest influence on Beauchamp is the Radical, Dr Shrapnel: ‘Shrapnel calls himself a fire-worshipper, a sun-lover, and demands a new

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materialist concept of the unity of the life-process’ (p.  210). Lindsay quotes at length from a speech by Shrapnel in which he denounces ‘that palpable Satan whose name is Capital!’ (p. 210). In the speech, Lindsay adds, Shrapnel denounces ‘philosophers and leaders [who] have sought to kill truth by their quest for idealist absolutes’ (p. 210). Instead, Shrapnel declares ‘The people are the Power to come. Oppressed, unprotected, abandoned; left to the ebb and flow of the tides of the market, now taken on to work, now cast off to starve … slaves of Capital—the whited name for the old accursed Mammon’ (p. 211). When Tory candidate Seymour Austin criticises Shrapnel’s ‘wild preaching’ and describes the Radicals as ‘theory-tailors not politicians’ (p.  212). Lindsay locates a fundamental problem revealed by Meredith: ‘it is the need of men like Shrapnel or Beauchamp to advance from the theory of fellowship to the full union of theory and practice’ (p. 212). Through Beauchamp’s encounters with Tories, Whigs and his Radical mentor Shrapnel, Meredith constitutes a debate between different political standpoints, but for Lindsay there was a serious problem: ‘he never got fully clear the nature and function of the class-State, though at times his definition is clear enough … Hence he wobbles from a powerful statement of the class-struggle as the sole key to progress into reconciliation-­formulas that can only work out as betraying progress’ (p.  218). For Lindsay Meredith suffered the same flaw as Shrapnel and Beauchamp. The romantic sub-plot has Nevil marry Dr. Shrapnel’s ward, Jenny whom he comes to love even though she does not have the same attraction for him as Renée. Again, a political allegory; Nevil may be attracted by the idea of a benevolent aristocracy but comes to appreciate the value of community and equality. They marry in Church, though this conflicts with Beauchamp’s stated beliefs, a compromise that Lindsay identifies as weakness as it represents an alliance with the oppressive force of religion (p.  220). Lindsay notes that Beauchamp later dies saving the child of a worker from drowning and suggests that this child is where the future lies. He concludes of Beauchamp and the standpoint he represents: Beauchampism is the reverse of Byronism; but it still carries on the Romantic split in so far as it can conceive only of individual action, individual heroism and self-sacrifice, and fails to grasp ‘the secret of cohesion.’ Beauchamp’s death expresses both his failure and the overcoming of his failure. In it there is the tragedy of wasted powers, broken aspirations; but there is also the

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scorn of tragedy and the unfaltering faith in the future which salves and transforms the personal grief, which defeats death. (p. 220)

Characteristically, Meredith represents his politics through the nature and actions of his characters. Lindsay quotes Meredith’s satirical response to his friend Maxse’s suggestion that he should ‘take to political writing’. Meredith responds by outlining an Opera libretto featuring a preposterous love story with a political twist, to which his friend responded: ‘Good God! How can you spout buffoonery in times like these!’ (p. 191) Lindsay observes: ‘When Maxse tells him to write politically, he reacts with ribaldry; for Maxse’s inability to see that all his writing is political is a revelation of the flaw in Maxse’s own political thinking’ (p. 191). For Lindsay the politics of Meredith’s writing is in its mapping of the alienation that he believed was foundational to capitalism—body from mind, human from human (class), man from woman (gender), human from nature (industrial capitalism)—and its portrayal through the being and experience of his characters: ‘This magnificent novel is the one great novel on an explicitly political theme in its century, the one novel which throughout sees the struggle for personal integrity as a struggle against capitalism and its values at all levels’ (p. 221).

Religion Lindsay notes throughout his study Meredith’s belief that religion was a way of promoting capitalism and controlling the working classes. In one of his earliest novels Rhoda Fleming (1865), he shows how a combination of class-based defensiveness and religious orthodoxy motivate farmer Fleming to abandon his pregnant daughter Dahlia who has been seduced by a wealthy banker’s son, Edward Blancove. Lindsay observes that religion has produced in Fleming ‘an ingrained hardness, an inability to comprehend or forgive any transgressions of the accepted code, especially by a woman’ (p. 153). Later he quotes Meredith’s musings on religion: ‘The Parsonry are irritating me fearfully, but a non-celibate clergy are a terrific power. They are interwound with the whole of the Middle class like poisonous ivy’ (p. 190). In Beauchamp’s Career he has Nevil identify the role of the parson in the maintenance of capitalism: ‘The Protestant parson is the policeman set to watch over the respectability of the middle-class’ (p. 211). This includes the proponents and representatives of both industrial capitalism and Christianity which ‘goes rotten among the bourgeoisie’ (p. 211).

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The ‘New Woman’ and Diana of the Crossways Another pervasive concern in Meredith’s work and Lindsay’s analysis is the interrelation of class and gender politics. Modern Love showed the consequences for both men and women of living under a gendered regime with inflexible roles and demands that were related not to the needs and desires of individuals, but to the continuation of a class system based on property and power. For women, there is the tyranny of dependency, for men the tyranny of tyranny. In his novels Meredith relates the struggle of female characters to achieve independence and self-respect when faced with a society that denies them humanity, treating them as property. When they prevail—like Emilia Belloni of Sandra Belloni and its sequel Vittoria (1867), and Clara Middleton of The Egoist—they become the most attractive of Meredith’s positive heroes. Meredith’s most popular female character, however, was Diana Warwick of Diana of the Crossways (1885), which was praised as a characterisation of the ‘New Woman’. Diana is based on the life of Lady Caroline Norton, accused of adultery by her husband, who brought all the force of British law against her so that she lost her rights, her home and her children. She subsequently campaigned for legal and political reform and in 1870 the Married Women’s Property Act was passed, which allowed married women to inherit property and to take legal action as individuals; they thereby acquired a legal identity separate from that of their husband for the first time in Britain. Diana shows through its heroine the material, mental and emotional consequences for women of living in a society that discriminates institutionally against women. Lindsay has reservations about Diana, finding her final decision to marry a wealthy politician a betrayal of her spirit and creativity: ‘she has fallen away from the real struggle and become “dependent” in a subtle yet crushing fashion’ (p. 266). Lindsay contrasts her with Sandra Belloni whose story he finds more convincing and compelling, and he also makes another important distinction between the two. Sandra is driven by causes outside herself—Music and Freedom, the latter realised in her support for the United Italy movement. By contrast, Lindsay writes: ‘Diana is devoted to nothing—except herself, her integrity in an abstract way’ (p.  266). Without a reference point in the outside world Diana turns inward and veers towards

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‘sentimentalism and falsity’ (p. 266). When Diana accepts her ‘shackles’ as the consequence of her own misguided actions and notes that her future will mean ‘mixing among the highest and brightest’ (quoted p.  267), Lindsay reads her as having capitulated to the desire to live among the ruling classes: What spoils Diana is not the weaknesses and self-deceits of Diana, which make her a real woman of the contemporary world, but the final abandonment of any struggle against the society that has twisted her; she merely succumbs to a conventional marriage, and hopes that “marriage might be the archway to the road of good service”. (p. 268)

Lindsay notes that the critics were enamoured of Diana, finding in her portrait a ‘a Real Woman’. Their response confirms his judgment of the book as fundamentally inconsistent. Meredith’s aim, he argues, was to start with a romantic story; then show its reality in the breakdown of the marriage and its consequences; and to end with an anti-romantic critique of the gender relations in his society. He describes this method as common to many of Meredith’s books but in Diana notes that the author was ‘too tired and anguished to complete the process’ (p. 268). Meredith’s second wife, Marie Vulliamy, with whom he had two more children had been very ill and died the year that Diana of the Crossways was published.

Nature and Earth and Man The other major theme in Meredith’s work and Lindsay’s analysis is the fundamental interrelationship or connectedness of human beings and nature. In Meredith’s own time and for many of Lindsay’s readers in the 1950s this was not regarded as political, certainly not in the same way as class or gender politics. It was noted earlier that Lindsay saw Meredith’s post-Romanticism as in part a rejection of the contemplative, aestheticised notion of nature as a site for withdrawal from the world associated with Romantics such as William Wordsworth. To a man who spent so much of his life walking in the world, both country and city, this disconnection of ‘nature’ from human being and experience was false and misleading. Instead, Lindsay identifies in Meredith’s work the assumption that human being is a part of nature and that humans are fundamentally connected to the natural world. For Meredith, this closeness to nature was not a form of consolation or meditation, but a fully embodied engagement with the

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world and its people that was sometimes expressed too sensuously and honestly for readers and reviewers alike. Lindsay also finds in Meredith’s work a conception of labour as the intersection of human being and nature, writing of his poem ‘Earth and Man’: Earth and Man is a full-length set-piece in which he attempts to state explicitly his philosophy of man in Nature, the opposition-and-unity of nature and man, the way in which the labour-process is the key to the dialectics of this relation, and the need to achieve a deeper consciousness of the dialectics so that men may build world-brotherhood and overcome self-­alienation. (p. 258)

Lindsay acknowledges the influence on Meredith of Darwin’s theory and though noting that he never mentions him (he did, once only, in Chapter V of The House on the Beach when referring to a time of primeval competitiveness as ‘the days we see through Mr Darwin’s glasses’ (GM:CW, Kindle loc.151973)), Lindsay comments: We can only surmise that already by the time he read Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, he was so prepared in his revolt, based in his own inner working-­ out of the inner conflict of the Romantic poets and in his admiration of the Enlightenment, that he accepted Darwin’s thesis without question, finding in it the scientific confirmation of his own moral and poetic convictions. (p. 259)

He adds that Meredith’s own analysis saved him from falling into the Social Darwinism of Spencer and Huxley. For Lindsay, this insight from Meredith assumes a major importance as another factor in the struggle against industrial capitalism, for which the natural world has no value other than as a resource; capitalism thingifies nature. For Meredith this was the premise of British Imperialism, the need to expand access to resources, which embroiled Britain in colonialist enterprises that he could not support. Lindsay did not believe that Meredith ever had a clear grasp of politics at the structural level, however, he applauds his contribution to a range of debates and issues, including the need to work together across class boundaries to achieve freedom and equality; working-class political representation and activism; female suffrage; his support for a range of revolutionary movements across Europe; and his belief in the need for radical,

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not partial, change of his society (pp. 331–42). For Lindsay, however, his greatest strength was his revelation of the impact of ideology on individual being. Meredith’s political activism was his writing.

Conclusion Lindsay finishes with a lengthy reflection on Meredith’s writing practice, influenced by his lifetime of work as an editor and reviewer for publishers, Chapman and Hall and his mentoring of writers such as George Gissing, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy (pp. 159–62). Through this work Meredith engaged in debates about the nature of realism and its relation to naturalism and idealism. Earlier in the book Lindsay had summarised Meredith’s view of this debate: He feels it is no use writing unless the novelist grasps the deep truths of individual behaviour and social movement, and forces his reader to grasp them as well. Realism is essential; but it must be philosophic realism defining types as well as particularised individuals and always making the story definitive of the general movement of society. (p. 140)

The work for which Meredith had no time was the solipsism of the realist writer who creates in exquisite sensory and emotional detail a particular circumstance from the life of a particular character but goes no further with the analysis, a tendency he acknowledged in his own work: ‘Much of my strength lies in painting morbid emotion and exceptional positions; but my conscience will not let me so waste my time’ (p. 141). Instead, he argues, he strives to create grounded and contextualised characters and events: ‘My love is for epical subjects—not for cobwebs in a putrid corner; though I know the fascination of unravelling them’ (p. 141). Lindsay concludes that the power of Meredith’s writing lies in his ability to relate individual behaviour to social context, not a spiralling obsession with individual pathology: By Analysis Meredith does not mean introspection or naturalistic detail. He means the realistic power to relate action to the consciousness of its social implications, which involves showing how people really act, not how they think they act—or rather showing the relation, when necessary, between the split thought and action. (p. 348)

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He acknowledges the difficulty and complexity of Meredith’s style but relates this to his aim to find a new kind of realism that articulates the realities of social life, rather than glossing over, concealing, or escaping from them: ‘a new realism able to grasp simultaneously the inner and outer world, the individual and society, and to show the struggles going on between the united opposites’ (p. 348). Of his celebrated psychological analysis Lindsay writes: ‘he does not abstract aspects of life as psychological, moral, artistic entities. He sees the various aspects as aspects of a total process which, in his world, always involves the pressures of capitalist self-alienation and the struggle to change the world so as to extend freedom and brotherhood’ (p.  365). Indeed, for Lindsay Meredith’s work is a precursor for a valid, non-­ dogmatic Socialist Realism that would reveal the complexities and contradictions within individuals and social life: ‘For Socialist Realism is expression concretely based in actuality, in immediate struggle, in the existing positions of people, and yet always fusing its realism with a vision of the transformative process, of the future within the present’ (p. 365). Not what Socialist Realism had become under Stalin. Lindsay reiterates also Meredith’s recognition of the unities that have been sundered in the alienated society of nineteenth-century industrial capitalist Britain: From the outset of Poems 1851 and Shagpat he realised … that if he was to struggle against the divided-man of the cash-nexus (who, in striving to make men into things, dehumanises and splits himself) he must struggle against the philosophic and religious abstractions which cut men into body and spirit, and reality into this-world and another-world. (p. 362)

The dichotomies that Meredith analyses include not only body and spirit and Heaven and Earth, but also individual and society, human and nature, mind and body, man and woman. For Lindsay Meredith’s recognition that each of these apparent binaries is a unity that needs to be reconstituted in order to create a more equitable, sustainable society is fundamental to the value of his work: Hence the vast advance he made on the romantic rebels who could not reach the concept of the unity of process without losing their grasp on the struggle against existing divisions, or who, at their best, clung to the hope of a revolutionary change but could not sustain a realistic approach to the issues. (p. 363)

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Lindsay concludes of Meredith: ‘He was a Radical Revolutionary—that is, he emotionally carried on the revolutionary hopes of 1848, while at the same time keeping close to such political organisations of the people as were at all effective and representative, those of the radicals’ (p. 374). For Lindsay, Meredith’s writing represents the maturation of the English novel, relating individual experience to social and political reality—as ‘Flaubert and Zola did for French … Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov did for Russian … Ibsen did for Scandinavian’ (p.  374). And finally: ‘Meredith, if he has many faults, has one supreme virtue: from first to last he sees the forward-movement or regression of people, their development in resistance or submission to the alienating processes of capitalism, as a political issue. That is, he sees it steadily and sees it whole’ (p. 375). As does Lindsay himself.

CHAPTER 9

Society, Being and Consciousness

It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx 1975, p. 425)

For Jack Lindsay Marx’s theory of consciousness is the essence of the insightful psychology for which George Meredith became known: not portraits of individual psychopathy but of the sociopathy that was the basis of consciousness and being for those living under nineteenth-century bourgeois capitalism. And to Meredith’s credit, Lindsay argued, he also showed that resistance was possible; that some people refused to be compliant bourgeois subjects, but instead negotiated a different (non-­ alienated) being and a non-bourgeois consciousness. They became the outsiders who, in Meredith’s books, were the ‘positive heroes’.

Marxism and Contemporary Science Throughout the early 1950s Marxism and Contemporary Science remained a major reference point for Lindsay, not only for the problems it caused him in the Communist Party but also because it was an attempt to define the major principles and ideas that underpinned his own cultural theory. This includes the notion of unity that had also guided his reading of Meredith’s work where it reveals the alienation characteristic of capitalist society: as the disrupted unity of the man and woman in bourgeois © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_9

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marriage, the lost unity of people and nature, of the worker and their work, and of the individual within themselves.

Unity In the opening chapter of Marxism and Contemporary Science Lindsay identifies unity as connectedness or interrelationship, not unanimity or homogeneity. Of society, he writes: ‘it must be a unity; otherwise it would be a disintegrating collection of warring units and would dissolve overnight’ (p. 12). And in a passage that recalls Bakhtin’s description of discourse 1 he argues that at any one moment capitalist society is made up of ‘a vast number of intertwining social relations and functions, which constitute its living unity of movement’ (p. 12), a more dynamic understanding of society than the economic determinist models of both left- and right-wing commentators in the 1950s. Lindsay acknowledges that two main ways of thinking and being can be identified as constituting this society: in Marx’s terms, ‘owning class and proletariat’. Society, he argues, is constituted by a multiplicity of ways of thinking and being; it is the unity within which multiple ways of thinking and being intersect, creating points of identification for those living within it. If we forget this complexity and the struggles that take place within it, he warns, we create a distorted image of that society; one that recognises only oneself as valid and true. For Lindsay Meredith showed this singular vision through his egoists, who see no other reality than their own; their own self-image reflected in the eyes of others. Lindsay notes that L.L. Whyte makes the same point in his book, The Next Development in Man (1944) when he writes that: ‘No interpretation of European man in traditional European terms can bring the truth to light, any more than the color-blind can know their deficiency’ (p. 25). For Lindsay, even though Marx’s analysis of capitalist society predicts increasing cooperation between classes for the purposes of production and distribution and the continuing concentration of power in the owner class, this does not mean a simple opposition of worker and owner, proletarian 1  In ‘Discourse in the Novel’ Bakhtin writes: ‘The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue.’ M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 276.

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and capitalist. ‘In fact’, he argues, ‘the mechanical interpretation of Marxism, which sets one class against another leads to a logical impasse’ (p. 14). Lindsay uses a chemical example to explain this idea: hydrogen gas and oxygen gas can be combined to make water, but if one is omitted you have no water: If transformation occurs through the dialectical unity of opposites (as when two gases merge to make water), then the moment of transformation would have to be the merging of two opposed classes to beget a new society; and the idea of one class triumphing over another would then signify chaos. (p. 14)

This was unlikely to have been a popular view at the height of the Cold War with ideologues of either the left or the right. Nevertheless, Lindsay insisted that Marx’s thesis does not entail the simple overthrow of one class (the bourgeoisie) by another (the proletariat). With reference to Marx, Lindsay notes that the class-structure created by individualistic forms of control and power simultaneously creates the class conflict that will lead to transformation, and indeed that the transformative element will be the proletariat, but again he insists: ‘The mechanical separation of the classes is a denial of any possible dialectical concept of transformation’ (p. 15). Lindsay consistently refused to use a simple dualism to understand world politics, the nature of society, the nature of being and of consciousness, or the role of the artist. For Lindsay the artist’s responsibility is to recognise this complexity or diversity within unity and not slip into simplistic ways of describing society or people. By this time Lindsay had learned about the institutional rewarding of Soviet writers whose work simply represented Party ideology and he was all too aware of the same situation in the United Kingdom where oppositional political views resulted in writers having their work suppressed and labelled ‘ideological’ while those who supported mainstream opinions were regarded as neutral or politics-free. 2 Lindsay argues that the great writer rises beyond the oppositions that define their society. As noted earlier, he argues of Shakespeare that he ‘expresses the whole people, the whole of his historical epoch; and his criticism of Money … cannot 2  Lindsay explicitly makes this point in his response to the review of Byzantium into Europe: ‘Marxism and Historical Teaching’ in Letters to the Editor, The Times Literary Supplement, Friday December 26, 1952, p. 853.

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be understood from the angle of any separate section of the people of his day’ (p. 17). Shakespeare’s critique of money derives from ‘what the poet feels to be human wholeness; it reaches back and forward in history; it is made in terms of the harmonies of human life and not in terms of any economic interests’ (p. 17). For Lindsay, Shakespeare identifies the role and power of money as key issues for the unity that is his society. He does not argue the case for rich or poor but explores the way that possession of or desire for money fundamentally affects both the experience and selfhood of citizens and how it characterises the society to which they belong. This notion of society as a unity within which there are many different sets of values and beliefs was read by some members of the CPGB membership as idealist, revisionist and even imperialist. For Lindsay, however, it avoided the simplistic mechanical (economic determinist) interpretation that cast society and its members into two warring factions that would either destroy each other or simply recreate another form of despotism. Furthermore, it avoided a simplistic form of identity politics that ignored the complexity of individual human beings. Lindsay was concerned that individual members of society should not be treated simply as representatives of an homogenous group, seeing this too as a characteristic of capitalism: ‘Capitalism seeks to convert the “personal individual” into the “class individual”’ (p. 22). He argues that not even capitalism is strong enough to exclude divergent ideas and values from the individual and society. If it were, society would cease to exist and individuals would be ‘economic robots, who in fact are unthinkable except in a nightmare’ (p. 22). Lindsay summarises Marx’s view of the dialectics of capitalist society: ‘under capitalism there is a ceaseless struggle between personality and class, between human nature and the economic system’ (p. 22). George Meredith’s achievement was to have revealed through his characters and their behaviours and actions the individual dynamics of that struggle; how individuals are acted upon and react to a range of different social forces and so create their individual consciousness.

Nature One of the other elements Lindsay identifies as influencing the formation of individual consciousness is the human relationship with nature. … we must take as our basic starting-point the unity of man’s spiritual processes with the processes of nature. Men do not know the world because

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they have a given faculty of judgment, which has enabled them to judge correctly, to compare evidence, and so on. Men know the world because they are part of it. (p. 57)

As Lindsay discussed in his earlier book The Anatomy of Spirit, the natural world plays a key role in human social and cultural development. The interconnection with the natural world evident in practices such as toolmaking, hunting and gathering is seen by Lindsay as the means by which knowledge is formulated, disseminated and shared. He rejects the idea that human beings possess an innate reasoning power that enables them to make a priori judgments about their world; rather, he argues, reasoning power develops through this interconnection with the natural and social world. Again, Lindsay rejects the kind of abstract reasoning that he (like Blake) saw at the basis of knowledge disciplines that isolated their methodologies from the society in which they operate and hence from the consequences of their use for individual people, society and the natural world.

Knowledge In MCS Lindsay continues his discussion of the nature of knowledge, relating it to individual being and consciousness: ‘The faculty of judgment and all the rest of the human psychic equipment have evolved through a differentiation within the human organism. The point of reference is always the human whole, from which alone the separate faculties derive meaning and power’ (p. 57). For Lindsay these ‘separate faculties’ are the senses, emotions and intellect, which he identifies as interconnected, not separate mind and body functions. If any of these is affected, all are affected; none can be conceived as purely instinctual responses. The faculties may be differentiated for the purposes of analysis but, in practice, act in concert within the individual being. It is their interconnection that gives them the meaning and power we ascribe to them. It was equally important for Lindsay that knowledge and the individual who produced it could change, and that idea is fundamental to his dynamic, interconnected model of being and of consciousness. If knowledge is an active process, it must do more than reflect the world. It apprehends the world; and since the apprehension is part of man’s whole active relation to society and nature, it changes the world. It does not reflect the self, it expresses the self, and by expression it changes the self. (p. 58)

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For Lindsay this enabled the individual to be an actor, capable of transforming the world they live in, rather than a passive embodiment of the mainstream values of their society; an ‘economic robot’. To explain this process of meaning-making he draws on Gestalt theory: Gestalt … relates the full neural and organic pattern to the spiritual pattern, and calls them isomorphic. Molecular events cease to be thought of as independent events, the irreducible basis; the true basis appears as local events determined by large field-events. (pp. 66–7)

This notion of meaning as a negotiation between the immediate or local event and the whole also challenges the subjectivist notion of a wholly individual response to any event. Each individual experiences the world uniquely but that uniqueness is predicated on sharing most of their responses and judgments with those around them, whose culture(s) they share. Their individual being and their idiosyncratic experiences and abilities and values, generated by all their previous encounters with others, nature and the world create their own unique version of that encounter. Lindsay cited Gestalt analyst, Kurt Koffka’s explanation of how human beings make sense of external stimuli: … we see, not stimuli—a phrase often used, but on account of, because of, stimuli. … Things look as they do because of the field organisation to which the proximal stimulus distribution gives rise. The answer is final and can only be so because it contains the whole problem of organisation itself. (p. 67)

Lindsay presents an analogy with the patterning process that Gestalt theorists use to understand how we make sense of stimuli: we do not process every stimulus we encounter from scratch, repeatedly reinventing the process of meaning-making. Instead, we place the possible forms created by that stimulus within a field of forms and identify the most similar, and then proceed to locate the specificities of a particular event or encounter. Recalling Lindsay’s earlier description of society, the individual response is one aspect of the whole, which reveals the process of meaning-making as that response is placed within ‘a vast number of intertwining social relations and functions, which constitute its living unity of movement’ (p. 12).

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Society Lindsay found Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts a rich resource for exploring the relationship between the individual and society, however he noted that Marx was deflected from this social and cultural analysis by the urgent need to respond to the terrible living conditions of many workers. He quotes a letter by Engels acknowledging the same point: Marx and I are both to blame upon one point. We both placed, and had to place, the chief weight upon the derivation of the political, legal, and other ideological notions, with their resulting actions, from economic facts. Consequently, we neglected the elements of their form (i.e. the actual manner in which they developed) … Because we have denied that the different ideological spheres have an independent historical development, we were supposed to have denied that they had any historical efficacy. (p. 50)

That included their role in the everyday lives of the people living in capitalist society. Instead, they were seen as totally subject to the economy, giving rise to the base/superstructure model of society in which all other aspects of social existence, all ideologies and the institutions and practices by which they operate, were seen as entirely dependent on and determined by the economic base. When Lindsay proposed a different understanding of society in which the economy was seen as basic to, but not totally defining of, the society or its people, he was held by some to be betraying the communist view of society. However, Lindsay’s alternative model explains, in a way that the economic determinist model cannot, how someone born and raised in a capitalist society can become a critic of that society and its economy. Lindsay does not disavow the notion or importance of an economic base, just its fetishisation. For Lindsay the base and superstructure model proposed by Marx and Engels must be dialectical, not reflective: ‘In point of dialectical fact the cultural elements of a society are not derived from the economic system any more than the economic system is derived from them. They arise together with that system as part of the total human process’ (p. 51). He goes on to note that Engels warns in many letters that ‘Marxists must beware of vulgarisations which seek to reduce the human life-process to economic necessity’ (p.  51). And after quoting from one such letter Lindsay didactically asserts: ‘What is the key-point that Engels is making? That spiritual or cultural activity is real, is in no way a passive reflection or

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epiphenomenon; and that there is a real relation between the cultural levels and the (economically) productive levels’ (p. 51). Accordingly, the cultural, far from being a passive reflection of the economic base, has the potential to transform it.

Being and Society In another literary study published in 1956, After the ’Thirties: The Novel in Britain and Its Future (ATT) Lindsay continued the exploration of the formation of human being and society that he had begun in The Anatomy of Spirit and his encyclopaedic study, A Short History of Culture (1939). Once again combining his interests in anthropology and archaeology (particularly the work of V. Gordon Childe and from his classics training the work of Jane Harrison) with his reading of Marx’s work, Lindsay argues that the defining feature of human beings is their ‘active relation to nature’ (ATT, p. 138), their ability to transform natural resources into tools that freed them from the limitations and exigencies imposed by nature: ‘they began to grow human in so far as they devised productive activity’ (p. 138). Lindsay cites Childe’s description of the development of the bow not only as an example of an effective tool, but also for the new power it gave humans to concentrate and release energy: the energy in the archer’s muscles is stored in the wood or horn of the bow and released in concentrated form to propel an arrow (p. 138). Crucial for Lindsay was the way this invention represented the ability to think through a series of complicated interactions, causes and effects and to create a new object. The production of the bow involves ‘a creative power of synthesis, of embodying the grasped laws of cause and effect in an objective form’ (p. 139). In creating the bow, he argues (via Childe), humans gathered information from diverse experiences and found within it general principles that they could apply to their specific task—‘they moved from the concrete to the abstract, then from the abstract back to the concrete’ (p. 139)—and then made the generalisation or abstraction concrete in the form of the bow and arrow: ‘Human creativeness had intervened to change life, to widen its possibilities and to increase the chances of survival for the species’ (p. 139). In this process Lindsay identified a combination of scientific (abstract) and artistic (concrete) activity, an ‘image-projection’ (p. 140), which enables the bow to be conceived and produced. This combination is for him also the basis of all art.

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Art The other significant characteristic of this process for Lindsay is that it involves ‘co-operative methods of work’ (p. 140). He argues that innovation occurred because human beings learned to work together, to combine insights and ideas to produce a solution to a complex problem. He also claims that the origin of speech lay with the need to communicate within the group the complex ideas, chains of cause and effect and techniques of making that were involved in the creation of new objects and activities. This, he argues, was the basis of human society. It involved being able ‘to look to the future, to plan’ (p. 140), as well as being able to work together in order to solve problems such as the need for food. Lindsay argues that this defines the nature of human being: ‘The active and purposive relation to nature is the human core’ (p. 141). And this is where art played a role: ‘Art in early pre-class societies is linked directly with the productive life of the group; it expresses the needs and hopes of men united in production and helps them to intensify their co-operative powers’ (p.  141). For Lindsay this meant that art has a formative, not just a reflective, role; it articulates group needs and hopes, drawing people together. It also enacts the bodily dispositions and individual and group communication that are involved in the purposive activities of the group. It heightens awareness and understanding of those activities and so contributes to social cohesion and group dynamics; this was exemplified in ritual dance. Lindsay identifies in dance the rhythmical control of movement that characterises human activity and being. It bodily enacts the purposive behaviours that enable the group to maintain social coherence, engaging them through the rhythm of the breath: ‘Body and mind are thus keyed together in new adventurous and interfused ways’ (p.  143). The dance becomes an exploration of the embodied being required to achieve a specific purpose, such as a hunt. It lifts the dancer (and observer) into the realm of ‘pure potentiality’ where ‘desire and act are one’ (p. 144); where the bodily disposition required to engage successfully in a particular activity is achieved and communicated. In this process, Lindsay argued, human beings imaginatively engage aspects of everyday life and rehearse the modes of being, thinking and acting that enable them to achieve their needs and desires. For Lindsay this is the role of culture in the formation of being and consciousness, whether it be the ritual art of early societies or contemporary literature, visual art, theatre and dance.

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Accordingly, Lindsay argued, art must always be in touch with everyday life if it is to engage audiences and have relevance to the life of the society. Failing this, art is ‘devitalised, falling into erratic formalisms or hardening into schematic dullness’ (p. 145) Rhythm, in movement, sound, pictorial and plastic arts, prose and poetry, is one of the means by which the artwork connects with the world; with everyday life and embodied being. Furthermore, it is a means by which life is structurally organised: In rhythm is uttered the element of union, participation, the mass-element. Rhythm is the form in which we see and feel and hear and know many persons acting as one person, and at the same time it is immediately impacting on our pulse, our central nervous organisation, our body as a whole. (p. 146)

For Lindsay, art is defined by its bodily engagement with the individual (through the senses, emotions and intellect) and so is more than a simple reflection of reality. It involves all the forms of analysis and innovation that Lindsay associates with human productive activity, and accordingly art ‘is a form of knowledge that involves a transformation of reality’ (p. 146).

Imagination For Lindsay imagination works within the artwork to recall the past, project the future and deploy both to engage with and transform the present. Lindsay argues that the future projected by art is (or should be) not a utopian dream but a potential reality that is contained within the work: ‘The future that art embodies is the real present seen with the full focus of its own concrete potentialities’ (p. 147). He exemplifies this in the working-­ out of a novel: a particular future will not emerge in a story because a character explains that it will follow, but only if the seeds of that future are already evident in the action up to that point. And he reflects on how this is enacted in early dance that is not only based on an actual hunt but also an ideal version of a hunt. He concludes of the work of imagination in the artwork: It sets up a maximum of tension between the actual and the possible, between individual experience and the developments felt to be within the grasp of the united group. By lifting the actual to the level of the possible, and the possible to the level of the actual, it stirs men with hope and with

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determination to actualize all that they have felt as possible, not only in the art-image, but also in daily life. (pp. 147–8)

Lindsay bases this model on the art produced in the earliest human societies, when individuals and communities were conscious of and fully engaged with the natural world and when their productive activity was integral to their being. In the complex world of capitalism, Lindsay notes, these relationships have broken down.

Art Under Capitalism The artwork no longer deals directly with the labour that defines and unites the community; now it deals with the network of relationships that delineates and divides the society, based on the struggle between workers and capitalists over ownership and control of the means of production. Lindsay writes that the focus of the artwork has moved away from the shared details of the labour process to the complex social context within which work takes place and the vexed questions of who performs the work, for whom and why. Those questions are often explored through representations of the people involved and their relationships, Lindsay noting that in class-based societies ‘the relationships tend to be abstracted from the productive spheres and to be treated as things in themselves’ (p. 151). The role of art in a class-based society, then, is to challenge that abstraction and the disjunctions between the individual and society, social relationships, and productive activity, to understand and reveal the ‘social whole and its deepest conflicts—a struggle that runs counter to the abstracting or dividing tendency’ (p. 151). Through characters and their relationships, a writer such as George Meredith is able to reveal to readers the social life created by capitalism: the inequality between classes and sexes and the corruption, degradation and inhumanity to which that gives rise, as well the courage with which some are able to resist it. For Lindsay, in order to be meaningful, artworks must retain their engagement with the real and on several occasions in After the ’Thirties he rejects the utopian thinking that is simply a form of nostalgia or wish-­ fulfilment fantasy. For example, when discussing the concrete future or potentiality that is embedded in the work of art he noted: ‘A utopian creed with no vital basis in the immediate struggles of the age could never satisfy the writer who must look always to concrete reality—even if utopian ideas lurked importantly in one compartment of his mind’ (p. 153). By keeping

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its focus on the concrete reality of its world and its society the artwork maintains the dialectic between the world we have and the potential for a better world that generates the energy for a move from one to the other (analogous to the move from actual hunt to ideal hunt in the ancient dance): ‘And this means in class-society also a tension between the existing divisions and the desire for a world in which those divisions have been ended’ (p.  153). That move is not possible if the other world is an impossible dream. Lindsay notes that writers of the capitalist period including Shakespeare and Balzac inevitably engaged with the dominant (middle-class) politics of their time. They acknowledge features of bourgeois society that they find positive—such as new freedoms for those in less powerful roles—but this does not blind them to the structural inequalities in their society (p. 154). Lindsay labelled both writers partisans of life: Under this term we include both the ways in which they were involved in the conflict of creeds and ideas in their society, in the whole complicated political situation—and also the ways in which their work in its fullness embodied elements of understanding and aspiration that could not find outlet in any of the historically-limited creeds and ideologies of their world. (p. 156)

Again, Lindsay argues against the notion that individuals are necessarily delimited by their society. For example, an artwork can reveal to audiences that their social world and its relationships may be viewed differently and that they have the power to think and act and be differently. It has the potential to transform consciousness. Lindsay’s Marxist allegiance is evident in his view that the only force that can finally bring about unity, eradicating the division and alienation characteristic of capitalism, is ‘the organized proletariat’ (p. 161). And he adds: ‘What limits the writer today is the lack of this sense of solidarity; for without it he cannot embody in his work the concrete future’ (p. 162). In order to recognise this transformative practice, Lindsay suggests, the writer must embrace Marxism: It is the coherent and stable expression of the new unity of thought and action which is urgently needed; it boldly enters into the universe of ceaseless transformations in order to master it; it is no fixed system but a system

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rapidly developing and extending its range, its subtlety of method, with every fresh conquest of reality. (p. 163)

For Lindsay the actions of the organised working class have already shown that capitalism is not an inevitability and that ‘the world can be changed at its root … that it is in fact being changed by working-class action and that the change operates along lines that end for all time the contradictions of class-society’ (p. 165). Lindsay argues that the writer will come to recognise the link between art and labour, beginning by seeing ‘productive activity, not as a mechanical making of things, but as a shaping process by which men control nature and develop themselves’ (pp. 165–6). This recognition creates a kinship in production between workers and writers: ‘The artist, in so far as he was a good artist, has always been a partisan of life. Now to be a partisan of life means to be a partisan of the proletariat’ (p. 167).

The Artist Under Capitalism … writing at the crucial period of imperialist decay, the period of nuclear fission and the new consciousness of relationships required by the struggle for human unity, we need to deepen our sense of what goes to make a man and at the same time to see the human life-process with a new fullness, a new sense of its interconnections. (p. 173)

Writing of his own time Lindsay argued the need for artists to engage with the proletariat, promising they will experience the exhilaration of struggle for a new unified society, a renewal of faith in humankind, conviction of purpose, a growing audience and the knowledge that their work has contributed to the development of a ‘new and happy world’ (p. 169). As he specifies what is involved in this new artistic practice, he reveals its connection to his theory of art. Firstly, the work must be grounded in its own time, which is characterised in Britain by anxiety about the end of the empire and fear about loss of resources; the global anxiety about nuclear weapons and the resulting xenophobia and witch-hunts; and the sense that a new understanding of social relationships is required for the society to survive and thrive. This is the world of 1956 that Lindsay’s contemporary readers faced. At the same time, artists need to explore the nature of humanity in the context of the transformations underway and the new connections (person to person,

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human to nature, individual to society) that might be made. As Lindsay noted of bourgeois writers from Shakespeare to Dickens, Meredith and Balzac, their art no longer focuses on labour and other ritual practices that define their society, but on the network of social practices that enables capitalist labour practices to take place and forms the alienated being and consciousness of those who live within that society. The aim of this work is to enable a transformation of the society and hence of those living within it. The work must also have a future vision or aspiration that inspires it and for Lindsay this was socialism. He writes in After the ’Thirties that there are many opponents of this view, including fellow writers who feel that being asked to write from a socialist perspective ‘is going to mean the abrogation of [their] critical faculty’; requiring them to ‘give up reality for wishful-thinking’ (p. 170). Lindsay defends his position against its critics: for example, press and radio who ‘present the artistic issue as one between the free sensibility of capitalism and the imposed demands of socialism’ without any acknowledgement of the coercive and sometimes punitive actions of capitalist authorities and institutions (p.  171). Capitalist artworks present capitalism and its institutions as natural and inevitable, confirming their own fundamental values and assumptions; accordingly, capitalist institutions (such as the media and literary establishment) view capitalist artworks as ‘free’ or ‘neutral’. On the other hand, socialist artworks present capitalism and its institutions as contrived and historically specific, exposing them to investigation and reassessment; in response capitalist institutions label socialist artworks as ‘politically constrained’ or ‘ideological’. While his fellow-writers might not have followed him directly into socialism, this explanation of the coercive forces operating on their thinking and creativity challenged them to reconsider their assumptions about their society and their work, including the literary strategies and conventions by which their works are constructed.

Literary Innovation Lindsay’s analysis of contemporary writing led him to explore not only the story it tells but also how it tells it. This was a time of formal innovation and yet he senses an underlying lethargy and discontent or melancholy in the work. Lindsay addresses this by reference to some of the major

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conventions of the novel, including characterisation, the nature of the hero, narrative and language. In his study of the hero Lindsay reiterated a trajectory he noted in his study of Meredith, from the positive heroes of folktale who achieve great deeds (Prometheus and Herakles) to the negative heroes torn by conflict or vengeance or self-doubt or madness (Oedipus, Quixote, Hamlet, Lear). Lindsay finds this same negativity in most of the Romantic heroes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but identifies the emergence of positive heroes in the work of Victorian writers such as Meredith, in his characters Richard Feverel, Emilia Belloni and Nevil Beauchamp. These heroes represent for Lindsay a change in political and social awareness, a recognition within the novel that a different form of society is possible and attainable. This reading is predicated on Lindsay’s understanding of the politics of the artwork, which includes its portrayal and analysis of its own society. This may take place through a naturalistic portrayal of characters and their social interactions, or the exaggerated portrayal and caricature used by Dickens, 3 but in both cases the underlying ideas, values and attitudes represent the state of the society. The negative hero may be part of an incisive analysis of the problems of the society but offers no way forward, the better future that Lindsay argues must be part of the writer’s analysis. The positive hero emerges from the writer’s vision that change is both necessary and possible. This is the basis of the struggle that Lindsay identified as key to the artwork: ‘The problem is not to show some hypothetical better world, in which people and system are the result of wishful thinking and the ironing out of real conflicts. The problem is to show the existing world with nothing extenuated or blurred—but from the angle of struggle’ (p. 183). Struggle is what brings the future to the artwork and rescues it from the stasis that Lindsay identified in some of the great Modernist and Surrealist art of his time. Lindsay did not deny the power and value of work by writers such as Joyce and the Surrealists, noting ‘that they expressed and revealed the 3  Lindsay writes that characters may be very eccentric and yet be typical of humanity. He writes of Don Quixote: ‘he embodies the deepest conflicts and contradictions in his world, but seems odd and even quite unlike his fellow-citizens because what is diluted or suppressed in them has forced itself violently into the open in his life’ (p. 187). Hence, his argument that the type ‘is not the statistically average, not the superficial elements of sameness spread by bourgeois levelling, but that in people which truly reveals their humanity’ (p. 186).

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terrible disintegrative and isolating pressures of capitalism’ (p. 188). They often did this, he argued, by fragmenting their own art-form, focusing on a particular literary strategy: ‘One writer is all dialogue; another specializes in sensory impressions or stream of consciousness’ (p. 187). However, the result of this specialisation is that they lose their grounding in the real and the work becomes self-referential, focusing on the strategy that best conveys the hopelessness of the time. As a result, the reader who engages with their work is ‘still passively accepting the [disintegrative and isolating] pressures’ (p. 188) of capitalist society. Only by accepting these revelations and then finding a new explanation for the horrors they portray (refusing to be caught up in this self-referentiality) can the reader reach a new understanding of society. Lindsay notes in particular the impact of this loss of social and historical context on contemporary narrative, which in many texts had been replaced by stream of consciousness: ‘a jumble of thoughts, feelings, sense-­ impressions run together in a sort of a reverie’ (p. 191). For Lindsay this runs counter to the discipline of art: ‘Instead of revealing the life of the spirit, such methods dissolved character in the stream, dissolved event and action, dissolved situation and the interrelations which make up the real movement of life’ (p. 192). In opposition to this strategy he argues that it is only through interactions that characters reveal the complexity of their being: ‘their deepest sense, their many-sidedness’ (p. 192). He ends his argument with Meredith’s rejection of writing that is self-obsessed and self-referential: ‘My love is for epical subjects—not for cobwebs in a putrid corner; though I know the fascination of unravelling them’ (p. 192). Not psychic narcissism, which Lindsay regarded as an individual expression of social alienation, but social responsibility and a vision for the future that encompasses all. Similar concerns underpin Lindsay’s analyses of rhythm, imagery, texture and language in contemporary fiction. In the latter case he is principally concerned with the way in which modern writers such as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway purport to represent the speech of ordinary people. He argued that this is not what Wordsworth meant in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads when he said he wanted to return to common speech: ‘He wanted to restore the “natural bonds” which were being torn apart by the capitalist “cash-nexus”’ (p. 202). Modern writers, Lindsay argued, copy superficial characteristics of the speech of working-­ class people, but have no understanding of the social relationships that make their words rich and meaningful. He regarded their ‘phoney popular

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idiom’ (p. 204) as disrespectful and contemptuous: ‘The mechanical element, which in fact reduces people to things and gives the writer the sense of being the (capitalist) God above them, begets a sort of exhilaration, a feeling of power’ (p. 206). Furthermore, it depicts working-class people as helpless and hopeless. In 1888, Lindsay notes, Engels objected to Margaret Harkness about the passivity of her depiction of working-class characters in her novel, A City Girl (1887): ‘the working class figures as a passive mass, incapable of helping itself, not even desiring to make the effort to help itself’ (p. 206). Lindsay identifies the same treatment of working-class characters in contemporary writing, particularly in fiction that addresses the relationship between workers and machines, which they frequently depict as having ‘destroyed the worker’s personal initiative, converting him into a mere appendage of the machine’ (p.  207). Lindsay argued that, in fact, the workers led the struggle against subordination to the machine, and that it continues every day in small protests as well as in major demonstrations. By contrast, many contemporary books, plays and films such as Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) focus on workers because they are unable to envisage how they (and their class) can resist this mechanisation. As a result, he argued, these writers serve the interests of capitalism as they ignore and (hence) suppress the history of worker activism and its achievements. Lindsay describes this characterisation as ‘mass-produced man (man as the capitalists would like him, man as he is reflected in their cultural mass-media and in such as activities as football-pools, newspaper-­ astrology, etc.)’ rather ‘the man who asserts himself against the alienating pressures, economic and moral’ (p. 208). Lindsay rejects fiction that has capitulated to capitalism and become passive and compliant for work that has a vision of a more just and equitable society, illustrating the former with a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1964). Woolf describes Mrs. Ramsay listening to reassuring everyday sounds until her perception shifts, and she hears them as signalling the destruction of the island and the ephemeral nature of everyday life: ‘this sound which had been obscured and concealed under other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror’ (p. 210). For Lindsay this vision of destruction and emptiness is a desolate counterpoint to the sensory richness of the descriptive prose that preceded it and he concluded: ‘Under the shimmer trembles corruption, which she wishes to dazzle away’ (p. 210). And he noted a similar occasion in another novel by Woolf: ‘“When one gave up seeing

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the beauty that clothed things,” says a middle-class woman in her The Voyage Out, “this was the skeleton beneath”’ (p. 210). Lindsay’s concern was that these novels offer no alternative vision of the present or future and simply wallow in the horror of the everyday—from the comfort and security of middle-class life.

Conclusion Not everyone agreed with this analysis of Modernism, of course, but Lindsay’s analysis of contemporary writing in After the ’Thirties identified the elements that he believed were essential for the creation of artworks that would benefit individuals and society: mindfulness of the interrelationship between humanity and nature, awareness of the complex social relations of everyday life, aspiration for a better future, the ability to work with others to achieve that future, an understanding of the ways in which the conventions of the artwork communicate the state of the present and the possibility of change, and a transformative recognition that change is possible, both for the individual and the society. Underpinning this understanding of the role and practice of art for Lindsay was his rejection in Marxism and Contemporary Science of the base/superstructure model of society that fetishised the role of the economic base. Deconstructing this determinist model enabled Lindsay to explain how and why multiple ideologies and belief systems can exist in a society, even if one might be dominant at any one time. With these two books Lindsay also developed further his understanding of the formation of individual being and consciousness; identifying the interconnections between the individual and the natural world, society, other people and diverse aspects of their own being that form the basis of consciousness. This enabled Lindsay to explain the diversity within and between individuals as well as to show how the rebels within society come to be. His next author-study, published almost twenty years later, was about a quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) rebel, William Morris. In the poem that appears at the front of his major study, William Morris: His Life and Work (1975) Lindsay described his earliest encounter with Morris’ work as a child in Queensland: ‘I wandered down dry gulley-courses/ Criss-­ crossing in the thin gumtree-shadows/Or drowned beneath the dreamtime moons … His earthly paradise I entered’ (ll. 8–10, 12). He reflects on the resolution of their differences in a shared vision of and belief in a world of fellowship. For Lindsay, this is based on their continuing

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explorations of social and individual being, ‘Deeply grow/the understructure of our faiths’ (ll. 21–22), and their vision of non-alienated consciousness, ‘the human core’ (l. 25), along with the historical perspective that argues that the future can only be envisioned through knowledge of the past that has produced it: ‘A dual task: to explore that past,/Yet reach the hilltop whence at last/We view the future’s clear expanses’ (ll. 31–3).

PART V

The 1960s–Mid-1970s; and William Morris

The 1960s began with Jack mourning the deaths of his brothers, Philip (1906–58) and Raymond (1903–60). Philip had followed Jack to London, where he worked for a time at Fanfrolico Press. After its demise he earned a living as a writer, mostly of historical fiction publishing over forty books including a study of the much-maligned king, Richard III (1934) whose stewardship he respected. He also wrote a biography of Australian cricketer, Sir Don Bradman for the Phoenix House series, Cricketing Lives (1951). Middle brother Raymond worked as a journalist and teacher but most aspired to be an artist. He specialised in historical paintings, one of which was purchased by opera singer, Dame Nellie Melba who advised him to go to England to further his career. However, Ray stayed in Sydney to be available for the boys’ mother, Katie who was unwell and spent many years in institutional care. After her death in 1948 Jack and Philip offered to pay Ray’s fare and expenses to England but he chose to stay in Australia. He died of cancer in 1960. Of the immediate family only Jack and Norman remained.

Family Life During this same period Jack and Meta became parents, Philip born in 1959 and Helen in 1961. Jack’s life was transformed. With two children to care for, he turned to his writing with renewed vigour in order to provide for them. His diaries suggest that Lindsay was an anxious parent, keenly aware of his age and intensely aware of the problems of the world

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in which he was leaving them. In their Family Histories Trad and Liessi report this observation made some years later by Lindsay’s niece, Molly about his protectiveness: Molly was to be amused in later years at Jack’s concerns for the safety and well-being of his children, in view of his own reckless earlier days and rejection of family concerns for him as controlling: ‘I correspond with Jack occasionally and couldn’t help but be amused in one of his letters when he said how concerned he was for Helen and Philip as they had gone to live in London. He hadn’t heard from them for a while. I couldn’t help thinking how he didn’t care a jot whether he was causing concern for his family at that age.’ (p. 55)

The family was still living at Castle Hedingham, where Australian family members visited them over the following years: It was there that Molly visited him in 1963 and again in the 1970s; as did Lynette in 1968 and again with Molly, Joe and Jamila in 1975. Nancy also saw him when she visited Europe in 1956. Lynette has clear memories of his quaint old cottage—one abiding vision is of rooms lined with bookshelves filled with books, very many of which displayed Jack’s name as author or translator. (FH, p. 54)

Jack’s Australian family noted that physically Jack was a Parkinson, not a Lindsay: ‘Another immediate impression was how alike in facial appearance Jack and Nancy were—clearly they had both inherited their features from their mothers’ side—the Parkinsons.’ With his stocky build and broad facial features Jack did not at all resemble his wiry, bird-like father. Jack and Meta lived a relatively quiet life with the children throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Meta was able to find the clay nearby for her ceramics. Jack pointed out that a nearby laneway off Queen Street was called Pottery Lane because the surrounding land had always been a source of clay. Indeed, the village had boasted a Pottery in the second half of the nineteenth century, which had been named for the location. Meta also kept sheep and spun her own wool for knitting. Meanwhile Jack focused on writing, including a study of the work of J.M.W. Turner, which he reported had pleased his father: ‘In a letter to Molly in 1967 Jack referred to his father: “I am on good terms with Norman again—he liked my life of Turner very much”’ (FH, p. 54). The Parkinson family were aware of the

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difficult relationship between Jack and his father, which they attributed in the Family Histories to their political differences: … this is described as being stormy at times—that may have been due to Jack’s increasingly left-wing political views (he became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1930s), as Norman’s political stance is thought to have been more right-wing. Jack wrote for the Left Review; many of his works were published in the USSR under the name Richard Preston. (p. 54)

They go on to quote Jack’s judgment of his father’s politics from the same letter to his niece, Molly: A strange lost character he is; but it’s far too late now to contravert the many elements of nonsense in his outlook, some of it pernicious in its effects. An example of what isolation and egoism can do; for there were many elements in his earlier work that could have led in a very different direction. (p. 54)

The dissident potential Jack identifies in Norman’s work may be related to his early criticism of puritanism and hypocrisy that resulted in confronting works such as The Crucified Venus, a pencil drawing first exhibited in 1913 that shows clerics nailing the goddess of Love to a cross. Unfortunately, just two years after this reconciliation, Norman died.

Death of Norman Lindsay Jack’s relationship with Norman had not been easy since the demise of Fanfrolico Press. Norman visited Britain in the 1930s and tried to arrange a meeting, but Jack avoided the encounter mostly, he acknowledged, because he felt a failure before his very successful father. The story of father-son relationships threads through all of Lindsay’s writing, fiction and non-fiction. In his analysis of John Bunyan, for example, it is sometimes difficult to work out whether he is writing about Bunyan and his father or himself and Norman. Despite their lack of contact Jack recorded in a diary from 1969 (now held at UTS Library) about the intensity of his response to learning that his father had died: He is dead. Wire from Chaplin. PO woman brought it round. Meta wants to comfort me but I feel nothing. Later when at tea time she is grumpy and unpleasant to the children I find myself near tears. Depressed all evening—

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do little work. But only as I am going to bed I feel something about NL— not just a sense of loss. As if a precipice under my feet. No longer any safety, no longer any need to work. As if I have always worked to prove myself to him. Ridiculous at near 70 to feel this sort of relation. Also I am sorry for him: with such powers. Work that could have been so much greater. A lost child. And am I any better?

All of Jack’s work, it seems, has been at least partially an attempt to win his father’s recognition and approval: without that absent presence in his life Jack’s sense of abandonment is complete and his work has lost its meaning. Of course, Jack’s decades-long commitments to Socialism and the Communist Party argue that this is not the full story; that this response reflects his grief over losing Norman, particularly with so many issues unresolved. In the same diary Jack muses on the incompatibility of his parents, recalling that in the early years of their marriage Norman had made furniture, paintings and decorated pots for Katie that she did not appreciate: He must have felt a lot then. It seems such useless pathos that it all broke down—Katie’s lack of intellectual force, or his overweening vanity? Probably both were at work—ending in that dull and stupid life of his with Rose, the perpetual jealous spy and frightened hoarder. He was so weak, he needed to be cooped in. How much of that have I inherited, but I have at least ended in recognizing my weakness, while he has ended by lying about everything.

Again, the major impression is of a radical mismatch between his parents, which Jack found profoundly sad. Jack mourns his father’s retreat into solitude, which prevented the development of his work despite his formidable artistic ability. This view of Norman is not unusual, but for Jack it is part of an emotional disengagement that wounded him but that he suspects he has replicated. Several years later, when his autobiography was about to be published in its complete form as Life Rarely Tells (1982), Jack wrote a trio of short family poems, the first two dedicated to his brothers Raymond and Philip, the third to his father Norman (CP, pp. 584–5). The image of Norman that emerges is one of detachment, isolation, and coldness, yet it ends with another plea by Jack for the recognition that Norman had always been unwilling or unable to give. As a bitter tribute then take these pages that strip me bare

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in death’s bleakening ray. Turn for a moment I say Turn from your obdurate place in that clarity of stone, that terrible folly of light, turn for a moment this way your abstracted face.

There was no final happy resolution to this complicated relationship though what is always evident in Jack’s responses to Norman, even the most condemnatory, is his desire for Norman’s approval and love. Now, however, he had his own children to care for and his concern came to rest on the world they would inherit.

Cold War Politics In the final chapter, ‘The 1960s’ of The Fullness of Life Jack describes the issues that preoccupied him during the Cold War period with its ever-­ present threat of nuclear war: ‘I returned to the study of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts and to the critiques of science from Galileo to nuclear fission and the driving of a shaft into the world of the particles’ (TFOL, p. 221). And he adds: ‘More and more I felt that the realisation of what was implied by Marx’s analysis of alienation had not even begun’ (p. 221). Alienation— already identified by Lindsay (with reference to Marx) as human from human, human from nature, human from society, and mind from body— was now attributed to the society which produced the nuclear bomb and the long-term threat of nuclear annihilation. This caused Lindsay to challenge the concept of Progress that was used to support any kind of scientific or technological innovation, regardless of its effect on people or the environment (p.  283). This mindset dominated during the Industrial Revolution and created the living and working conditions that prompted Marx’s philosophical, social and economic analyses of capitalism. Against the pollution of the cities and degradation of the environment Lindsay argued for ‘a stable and harmonious equipoise with nature—a goal that could only be reached when everyone on earth has all that is necessary for an existence free of malforming deprivations’ (p.  283). Lindsay’s allegiance to communism came from the need for human society to regain the balance with the natural world that he identified with the earliest human communities. However, he saw communism being

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undermined constantly by the seduction of capitalism: ‘The aim of communism is to free man from alienation, not to clog him with a wealth of consumer-­goods, which in fact have the effect of increasing alienation’ (p. 283). Lindsay notes particularly the failure of the U.S.S.R. to find a way to respond to the glamour of capitalism, so that what he calls the ‘socialist morality’ is lost and accumulation of goods becomes the measure of social success. Along with this, he argues, comes the fetishisation of technology. Lindsay aligns acceptance of the bourgeois notion of progress with ‘the acceptance of technology as a sort of abstracted force with its own laws, to which human needs must be submitted, not the other way round’ (p. 226). He warns that there are many signs that this argument is not theoretical or academic, as is sometimes claimed, such as ‘the whole issue of environment-­ destruction and pollution which has come up in the last few years’ (p. 226) and he goes on to elaborate: We have reached the point where practically all large-scale extensions of technology are disastrous, whether bringing about supersonic aeroplanes, vast dam-projects which upset the whole ecology of regions or irritate the earth’s surface into fractures and quakes, huge oil-tankers that foul the seas, nuclear-fission projects that beget incalculable hazards with their waste-­ materials, insecticides, detergents and other chemicals that more or less permanently poison the soil, in fact all big chemical production or usage, vehicles and engines that send out toxic fumes, and so on. We cannot expect a decisive reorientation in scientific theory or a reversal of tendencies that would undermine profits to be brought about in a class-society … (p. 226)

For Lindsay this reversal should take place in a socialist society, but the capitalist ideology of progress has so permeated communist states that they are unable to think about science any differently to their capitalist colleagues. He responded in the only way he knew how—in writing.

Writing Lindsay’s extraordinary literary productivity was recognised by the U.S.S.R. in 1967 by the award of the Znak Pocheta (Badge of Honour) for his services to literature. In 1973, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt) by his alma mater, the University of Queensland, Australia.

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In the 1960s Jack published thirty-three books, including the second and third volumes of his autobiography; five contemporary novels set in Britain that were all part of his ‘British Way’ series; seven books of translation—from Russian, ancient Greek and Latin; two books of historical fiction, set in ancient Rome and Pompeii; eleven books of cultural history that included studies of ancient Rome and Greece, Roman Egypt, and Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Roman Britain as well as a complete revision of his earlier book, A Short History of Culture from Prehistory to the Renascence (1962); three literary studies including his book of interviews, Meeting with Poets (1968) that included Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, and surrealists Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, a published lecture on William Morris, and a revised and extended version of his essay on Indian novelist, Mulk Raj Anand; and three books of art criticism, including a survey study of French painting from David to Delacroix titled Death of the Hero (1960) as well as major studies of the life and art of J.M.W. Turner (1966) and Paul Cezanne (1969). In his British Way novels Lindsay addressed many of the problems raised above through stories of everyday life in contemporary Britain. For example, All-on-the-Never-Never (1961) focused on the dilemma of buying goods on credit and then falling behind on payments through the story of a woman who tries to use prostitution as a way of paying off her debts: ‘Thus prostitution was used as a symbol for the consumer society where all things become commodities’ (TFOL, p. 229). Lindsay adds that he later came across a newspaper report that ‘most of the amateur prostitutes in provincial towns consisted of women trying to raise cash for hire-­ purchase payments’ (TFOL, pp. 229–30). This book was later made into the film, Live Now – Pay Later (Lewis, 1962) starring Ian Hendry, June Ritchie and John Gregsonn. Lindsay is credited as screenwriter but notes that he did not write the screenplay. This was left to screenwriter, Jack Trevor Story who changed the viewpoint from that of consumer to salesman, undermining Lindsay’s political narrative. Another novel, The Way the Ball Bounces (1962) was inspired by the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to explore how people put out of their minds the traumas that most affect their lives, in this case of being a conscript in the Korean War. The protagonist is only able to retrieve his sense of self and power to act when he is enabled to relive and deal with the experience. In each case the novel deals with the impact on the individual of forces that disempower and silence them, alienating them from others, their society and themselves.

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During this period Lindsay also had several works performed at the Mermaid Theatre in London: ‘In 1968 Bernard Miles at the Mermaid Theatre put on my versions of four Euripides plays, making a Trojan War cycle, as well as a version of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise’ (LRT, p.  808). One of the main reasons for this productivity was his need to support his family financially, yet he observes that ‘there have been some million copies of my novels printed in the U.S.S.R. in translation’ (p. 231). Although Lindsay does not address the issue of payment, there was a problem in that any royalties earned could not be sent outside the U.S.S.R.1 This may explain why Lindsay kept up a steady schedule of research and writing into the 1970s (and his seventies), during which he produced another sixteen books. Books from this period included a book of verse, Faces and Places (1974), a fine art edition by Paul James Davies under the imprint of Basilike, illustrated with etchings by his father, Norman and containing poems by Jack dedicated to literary figures (William Blake, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas), comrades and friends (including V.G. Childe who had taken his own life in 1957), and his family, Meta, Helen and Philip. It is in many ways another form of autobiography, as is suggested by his contemplative, wistful and playful poem from the late 1960s, ‘Song of a Refugee from the Twenties’ (CP, p. 582), which concludes: Then a few years ago, an old man in a London street, I roused myself from an abstract thought and nobody to meet, and all around me I saw the girls with wildwood hair and the lads with ridiculous beards: all our dead friends were there:

1  Helen Lindsay (personal communication): ‘Jack did earn quite a lot of money from Soviets but it was not transferable so couldn’t leave the country. He, like many other authors including famously J.B. Priestley, had a bank account supposedly stuffed with roubles. When we went for a 6 week summer holiday in 1969 it was all paid for out [of] that bank account. I can remember being with mum in a department store in Moscow buying a watch and camera. We also bought a huge quantity of cheese by mistake (language) and I have an early memory of sitting in a central Moscow park on a sunny bench eating large round slabs of said cheese, which seemed really funny at the time. I was 8.’

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suddenly all-sides multiplied. The small daft bunch was a host and myself in my resurrected youth a dumb irrelevant ghost.

In the first half of the 1970s Lindsay published four books of cultural history: two set in Graeco-Roman Egypt about the origins of modern science in alchemy (1970) and astrology (1971), one about the world of the Normans (1974), and the other, Blast-Power and Ballistics (1974), a study of the development of scientific thinking from ancient times to the modern day. Also from this time: a book of stories set in the ancient world (1974) and historical biographies of Cleopatra (1971) and Helen of Troy (1974) as well as a study of nineteenth-century French realist painter Gustave Courbet (1973). These books again show the breadth of Lindsay’s research and his continuing interest in the development of both science and art. They were followed by his major study of William Morris (1975). In his published lecture William Morris, Writer (1961) Lindsay concluded: … if we look closely at Morris’ verse and prose we can find the clue to the unity of the man and his fecund irruption into so many fields—his remarkable leap from the extreme of lonely and derelict romantic sensibility to the position of revolutionary prophet calling for the consistent and constant union of the creative act with common life and the productive processes, at all levels. From one aspect there never was a more impetuously frank man than Morris; he lives restlessly in the open and follows his convictions out without concern for the consequences to himself or anyone else. From another aspect he appears a hidden figure, moved by a passion of which the multiple effects are plain but the central impulse obscured. I suggest that along the lines I have sketched we can bring the man and the artist into a single focus, and see the way in which his personal dilemma was transformed into a dynamic of acceptance and revolt, of deepening insight into the nature of his world and into the ways in which the terrible wounds of alienation can be healed. (pp. 29–30)

Similarly, if readers look closely at the ideas and beliefs, the critical thought, and the vision of William Morris: His Life and Work (1975), they may find Jack Lindsay.

CHAPTER 10

William Morris, Revolutionary

You saw him producing everywhere organisation and beauty, seeming almost in the one instant helpless and triumphant; and people loved him as children are loved.—W.B. Yeats

Jack Lindsay quotes Yeats’s affectionate description of the ageing William Morris towards the end of his study, William Morris: His Life and Work (p. 309) and one cannot help but feel that this is also how Lindsay saw him. It is a measure of the honesty and integrity of Morris that he was loved by so many people. For them he was not the class traitor denounced by conservative nineteenth-century politicians and social commentators, nor the jobbing upholsterer patronised by his long-suffered friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; he was simply a man who worked unceasingly to make the world more equitable, peaceful, free and beautiful. In his ‘Foreword’ Lindsay describes his book as bringing together the family-biographies of Morris by J.W. Mackail (1899) and Philip Henderson (1967) with the landmark historical study by E.P. Thompson (1955). To these Lindsay brings his understanding of the aesthetics and politics of the artwork. Lindsay traces how Morris transformed himself from an inward-­ looking, idealistic young man who had spent his childhood reading adventure stories that he acted out in Epping Forest in his own small suit of armour and then went off to Oxford to study theology in preparation for a respectable life as a clergyman, into a writer, artist, designer, conservationist and socialist activist. This change was not a sudden conversion but © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_10

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developed slowly over decades, starting with his love of medieval fantasy and the natural world and his loathing of the industrial ugliness he saw blighting British towns and countryside. For Lindsay, Morris came to politics through art and in the process, he not only developed a revolutionary political stance; he also revolutionised art. In the 1970s Lindsay’s cultural analysis was now less confronting to comrades and conservatives alike. The Marxist and psychoanalytic criticisms that Lindsay and others had pioneered in the 1930s were now established (if not always academically accepted) forms of literary analysis. However, academic theory and criticism—whether the pervasive New Criticism or the newer Structuralist analysis—remained focused on the text; on how the author creates the text as a coherent whole through narrative, characterisation, imagery, rhythm; the poetics dependent on the form or genre of the text. The major external referents were other texts, to locate the text in the history of the discipline and determine whether and how it is innovative. Reference to the society of the text only occurred in the most general and abstract terms, while reader response criticism such as that of Wolfgang Iser (1974) and Umberto Eco (1979) was new and still primarily focussed on textual practice. In writing on Morris Lindsay had taken on a major challenge—to write about an artist whose work crossed multiple disciplines and developed as a clear and avowed response to the society around him. Lindsay’s continuing interest in the interrelationships between the artwork, society and the (sensing, feeling, thinking) individual leads to a study that, once again, predicts the cultural studies of some ten to twenty years later. He begins, as he did for Bunyan, Dickens and Meredith, by locating Morris socially and identifying some of the early influences on his development.

Early Life and Influences The Morris family was originally Welsh (ap Morris), moving to England when William’s grandfather married into a Worcester family. His father later moved to London and had a very successful career as a broker, living first above his office where daughters, Emma and Henrietta were born, and then moving to Elm House at Walthamstow where, in 1834, William was born. In 1840, the family moved to Woodford Hall, a large Georgian house on the outskirts of Epping Forest where, as a boy, Morris spent many hours playacting as the hero of his own adventure story or Arthurian fantasy. Lindsay quotes Morris’ fond memory of the Forest, recounted not

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long before his death, as having ‘certainly the biggest hornbeam wood in these islands, and I suppose in the world’ (p. 3). Some years earlier in his ‘Introduction’ to Selected Poems by William Morris (1948) Lindsay had suggested a connection between the forest and Morris’ imagination: ‘those dark shadowy copses of pollarded hornbeam, set with brighter holly, gave to the boy’s mind a background of adventurous mystery which he never lost’ (p. 7). Lindsay notes that Morris’ boyhood imagination was nurtured by the Forest, the gardens each of the children kept, his fishing expeditions with his brothers, and the medieval character that was retained even in small country Halls such as Woodford: ‘The Morrises brewed their own beer, made their own butter, baked their own bread’ (p. 4). Lindsay concludes: We see that when Morris later came to love the medieval world he was in part looking back to his own childhood, with the survivals of old customs and the re-creations of the past in the fantasies of games; at the same time, while imagining himself a knight in armour amid flowers and forests, he was also beginning to take an interest in what of the past he could find intact in old buildings. And his inner life, with its eager reconstructions of a knightly and adventurous world, was already overflowing in the ceaseless telling of stories. (p. 5)

Lindsay adds that these stories were prompted by Morris’ prodigiously early reading, citing May Morris’ family memory that by the age of nine Morris had read all of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels (1771–1832) and Frederick Marryat’s Peter Simple (1834) and Mr Midshipman Easy (1836) and, although he was not taught to write until he was ten, in two months he was quite proficient (p. 2). Lindsay identifies Morris’ closest childhood friend as his sister, Emma and in this relationship, he identifies a pattern that is repeated in many Victorian families: an intense attachment between siblings, as Lindsay described in his Dickens book between young Charles and his sister, Fanny. For Lindsay, this is indicative of the alienation that characterises capitalist society, and he writes of both examples: ‘The peculiar intensity in both cases can only result from the forms of alienation developing in Victorian bourgeois society, with its exaltation of the family-unit as a bower of domestic bliss, an island of refuge, and with its violent intensification of conflict and competition outside the family’ (p.  38). When Emma married a clergyman, Lindsay finds in William’s poems and letters

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to her a foreshadowing of the love triangle which later bedevils his marriage to Jane. For Lindsay this also perhaps explains his decision to study theology and join the Church of England, despite his distaste for his parents’ religion (pp. 29–33).

Oxford In January 1853 Morris arrived at Exeter College, Oxford to read theology, church history and archaeology (p. 46). With his neighbour, Edward Jones (later Burne-Jones) Morris joined a group based at Pembroke College who met often to read and argue about literature, art and society. Many of its members became Morris’ lifelong friends and workmates: Burne-Jones, Charles Faulkner, Cormell Price, Richard Watson Dixon and William Fulford. They read the Romantic poets and argued about Tennyson (Morris defended him); debated Thomas Carlyle’s view of medieval society and his critique of their own time in Past and Present (1843); and were inspired by John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–60) and The Stones of Venice (1851–53), Lindsay noting: ‘The chapter on the Nature of Gothic soon became their evangel’ (p. 47). Though they discussed the ideas of Christian Socialists such as F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, Lindsay argues that this was mostly an intellectual exercise for them. They also discussed the ‘bodily affections’, which was then a popular topic of research, though Lindsay quotes Burne-Jones’ recollection that Morris and Faulkner were largely unmoved by it: ‘Our subjects of private communication and thought this term have been those branches of psychology treating of the affections—a subject which we have elaborated very satisfactorily, in spite of constant interruptions on the part of un-­ sentimentalists such as Morris and Faulkner’ (p. 47). The work that Lindsay identifies as most significant for Morris at this point was Ruskin’s essay on ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, published in his Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854, pp. 151–185). Even before they had seen any Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Morris and Burne-Jones were excited by Ruskin’s description of Pre-Raphaelitism’s basic principle of ‘truth to nature’ that he relates to the fact that: … there was not one [great artist] who confessedly did not paint his own present world, plainly and truly. Homer sang of what he saw; Phidias carved what he saw; Raphael painted the men of his own time in their own caps and mantles; and every man who has arisen to eminence in modern times has

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done so altogether by his working in their way, and doing the things he saw. (PR, p. 176)

Morris and Burne-Jones now believed that works of their own age could equal those of the past. At this time too, Lindsay notes, Burne-Jones first introduced Morris to Celtic and Norse tales with Benjamin Thorpe’s Northern Mythology (1852). The seeds of Morris’ move away from the ideals of classical beauty of the Mediterranean had been planted. In the Long Vacations of 1854 and 1855 Morris, Burne-Jones and members of their Oxford group travelled through Belgium and Northern France, visiting churches and museums and admiring the French countryside from trains and buses. The second trip concluded with visits to the cathedral cities of Évreux and Louviers, where Morris noted: ‘I have never, either before or since, been so struck with the difference between the early and late Gothic, and by the greater nobleness of the former’ (p.  66). Already, Lindsay suggests, Morris was starting to notice the differences between forms of art and assign value to them. Morris and Burne-Jones had found their vocations. When they reached the harbour at Le Havre for the journey home, they decided that they would wait no longer to begin ‘a life of art’ (p. 66); Morris would train to be an architect and Burne-­ Jones a painter.

Early Writing Lindsay described Morris’ early attempts at verse, sent to his sister Emma after her marriage, as psychologically interesting but weak (p.  29). At Oxford, Lindsay argues, Morris begins to write with more literary knowledge and understanding gained in large part from his self-education among a group of friends. He analyses the first three stanzas of ‘The Willow and the Red Cliff’, one of the first poems Morris shared with his friends, noting that the ‘idiom and method is close to that of [his juvenile poem] “The Three Flowers” and that there are influences both from old balladry and the Spasmodics’ (p. 55). In Morris’ final year at Oxford he contributed poetry, prose romances and essays to ten of the twelve monthly issues of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856) published by his group, with Morris reluctantly working as the editor of the first issue. A week later he paid William Fulford £100 to take over this role. Lindsay notes that, although the magazine also addressed social and political issues, ‘[m]uch of the work was earnest and well-intentioned, but

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cloudy’ (p. 72) quoting from Cormell Price’s essay, ‘Lancashire and Mary Barton’: ‘We have before us a herculean task to sweep the world clear of work-houses, open sewers, strikes, money-grubbings, over-production, and an ugly infinity of political and religious phantasms; the existence of such things implies an unsettled transitory period—to what remains within ourselves’ (p. 72). Lindsay locates many influences on the essay, including Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic, J.S. Mill on the division of society into ‘payers of wages and receivers of them’ (p. 72) and Froude’s History of England (1850–70) but can find no systematic analysis of the contemporary situation, other than proclaiming it the inferior successor and opposite to feudalism. Lindsay infers that, at this point, Morris and his group accepted this simple opposition of medieval and modern values (p. 73). Morris now performed his first formal act of rebellion, turning away from the religious life his family had approved and instead determining to enter the professional world: ‘by early December [1855] the matter was settled. He had at last set himself to a definite purpose in life: to become an architect who would follow, however humbly, in the footsteps of the Gothic builders he admired’ (p. 71). Morris’ mother was distressed by this choice, seeing in it a loss of social status, but although Morris was forced to negotiate his choice slowly with her and his sisters, he did not back down. Fortunately for him, Lindsay notes, on turning twenty-one he came into an inheritance that made him financially independent and so able to follow his own path. At the end of 1855 Morris passed his Final Schools Exam and was admitted to a bachelor’s degree; in January 1856 he was articled to architect, G.E. Street whose offices were then in Oxford. Morris’ life as an artist had begun. Lindsay notes that 1856 also marked the start of his personal and professional relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti who remained a major influence on Morris until at least 1870. Lindsay writes that Rossetti’s influence was both good and bad: bad in that he deflected Morris from any engagement with the political issues of his time; good in that he encouraged Morris to ‘concentrate his forces on the aesthetic level before he could dare to confront the existing world with steady accusing eyes and a broadly based conviction in the transformative powers of art and work’ (p. 78).

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Guenevere Morris’ first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems was published in 1858 to mixed reviews, though Lindsay notes that Swinburne, Thomas Woolner, Ruskin and Robert Browning all discuss the book positively in their letters. For Lindsay, the strength of the verse is in its combination of sensory intensity and a deeply engaged, not detached and isolated, Romanticism: The core was highly original. What matters for Morris is the degree of intensity to which he enters into the life of his medieval characters. He creates a new form which is at once the climax of the romantic idiom and the transformation into its opposite. The romantic vision … is merged with a sharp emotional realism. (p. 98)

Lindsay goes on to give a metrical reading of the opening lines of the title poem that shows Morris’ artistic control of rhythm and metre: But, knowing now that they would have her speak, She threw her wet hair backward from her brow, Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek, As though she had had there a shameful blow, And feeling it shameful to feel ought but shame All through her heart, yet felt her cheek burned so …

He observes that reading line four with any common metrical system makes the words painfully clumsy: ‘Read them with a proper wondering weakening of stresses, and they become richly evocative, making us feel the immediate sense of shame, the fever, of Guenevere herself’ (p. 99). Lindsay notes also that Morris’ Guenevere speaks for herself. She takes responsibility for her infidelity but does not regret her actions: ‘she mingles an agonised sense of sin with a defiant delight in her deeds, an impulse to confess with an inability to resist the impulse to make the confession a further seductive flaunting of her beauty’ (p. 100). Her independence and

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strength confront Victorian beliefs about femininity and the role of women in society. He adds that ‘in both her fear and her flaunting there is an all-­ enveloping naïve conviction of the glory of life that has irresistibly spoken through her’ (p. 100). Lindsay identifies in Morris’ early work the seeds of his later understanding of the development of society; that valued elements of the past may be combined with those of the present to create a future that is based on human values, not the vagaries of the market or the demands of technology. As Lindsay notes, Morris was not thinking politically in the 1850s, yet his early work with his rejection of moral cliché in the case of Guenevere, his subtle destabilising of familiar rhythm patterns, and his substitution of an active sensing embodied consciousness for the psychological portraiture of Victorian realism show these ideas in formation. They would be refined by Morris not through theory and discussion, but as a result of his work as an artist and craftsman.

Architect and Artist Morris worked for architect, G.E.  Street for only one year but he took away some invaluable lessons. Lindsay writes that Street ‘held the architect to be not just a builder; but also a blacksmith, painter, fabric worker, and designer of stained glass. He thus helped to inspire both Morris and Webb as well as the whole arts-and-crafts movement’ (p.  76). Subsequently, both Morris and Webb took up embroidery, which Morris practised throughout most of his life. This breaking down of the boundaries between arts and crafts, professions and trades, will be fundamental to Morris’ work. During this year Morris had also begun to study painting with Rossetti who was teaching at a Working Men’s College in Central London. Morris was not hopeful about his abilities; however, he was unable to resist Rossetti’s charisma and so attended classes outside of working hours. Lindsay quotes a letter from Morris in which he describes his life as comprising ‘love and work, these two things only’ and continues: ‘I can’t enter into politico-social subjects with any interest, for on the whole I see things are in a muddle, and I have no power or vocation to set them right in ever so little a degree. My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another’ (pp. 81–2). Though he is concerned about failure, Morris adds: ‘I am glad that I am compelled to try anyhow; I was slipping off into a kind of small (very small) Palace of Art’ (p. 82).

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Morris was soon to expand his Palace of Art in a number of ways, beginning with his resignation from Street’s architectural practice and his decision to devote himself entirely to art. Morris’ mother was distressed by this choice: ‘An architect in her eyes might be a sad come-down from a clergyman, but an artist was a reprobate’ (p.  86). He and Burne-Jones took rooms in Red Lion Square in Bloomsbury to begin their lives as artists. When they could not find any furniture to their liking, Morris decided to design some pieces for them. Lindsay quotes Burne-Jones’ description: ‘Topsy has had some furniture (chairs and table) made after his own design; they are as beautiful as mediaeval work, and when we have painted designs of knights and ladies upon them they will be perfect marvels’ (p.  84). And so, Lindsay notes, Morris began his career in the decorative arts.

Marriage Morris’ own medieval dream was embodied by Jane Burden, the young working-class woman whom he first saw in a theatre audience in Oxford. He was too shy to approach her, however, luckily (or perhaps not) for Morris, Rossetti was in Oxford working on commissions for architect, Benjamin Woodward at the new Oxford Museum and the Oxford Union Debating Society. Rossetti had no fear of speaking to young women and invited her to sit for his main Oxford Union mural, Sir Lancelot’s Vision of the Holy Grail. The murals for the walls of the Debating Society were designed and painted by Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris, enabling the latter to meet Jane in a professional context. Lindsay notes that Morris’ choice of the Tristan-Iseult-Palomides story (Palomides loved Iseult; she loved Tristan) has been seen as an expression of Morris’ grief at the loss of his sister and confidante, Emma; he argues that it also predicts the Morris-Janey-Rossetti triangle. From all accounts Morris idealised Jane’s beauty but did not know how to relate to her as a person. She is reported to have been burdened by her much-admired beauty, with one observer noting: ‘Her mind was not formed upon the same tragic lines as her face; she was very simple and could have enjoyed simple pleasures with simple people, but such delights were not for her. She looked like the Delphic Sibyl and had to behave as such’ (p.  102). Neither Morris nor Jane, in Lindsay’s reading, could find a way to connect simply and directly to the other, yet Morris was entranced by her beauty and Jane could not give up the opportunity for middle-class respectability

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and security that Morris offered. It was a marriage dreaded by his friends and boycotted by his family, primarily for snobbish reasons, and in this case destined to make both unhappy. Lindsay gives Morris the last word on his own marriage, quoting the words of Old Hammond in Morris’ utopian romance, News from Nowhere (1890): Calf love, mistaken for a heroism that shall be life-long, yet waning early into disappointment … the unhappiness that comes of man and woman confusing the relations between natural passion, and sentiment, and the friendship which, when things go well, softens the awakening from passing illusions. (p. 107)

Lindsay concludes: ‘It is hard not to believe that he was thinking of his own position at this moment and regretting that that there had been so little to soften the awakening’ (p. 107). The test for Morris will be in how he manages the eventual breakdown of their relationship.

Dream In the meantime, however, he elaborated his medieval dream by building a house for Jane and himself, the Red House, at Bexley Heath, some fifteen miles from the Firm’s headquarters at Queen Square, and seven miles east of Greenwich Park. Morris was determined that it should not be in the style of conventional domestic architecture which he described as ‘pedantic imitations of classical architecture of the most revolting ugliness, and ridiculous travesties of Gothic buildings, not quite so ugly, but meaner and sillier’ (p.  108). Lindsay notes that the Red House: ‘was meant to adapt late Gothic methods and forms to the needs of the day. Hence the use of plain red brick, the solid and clear structure, the lack of any pretentious or unfunctional decorations’ (p. 108). Yet, he adds, the ‘total effect was strange and barbaric to Victorian sensibility’ (p. 110), perhaps because of the very disparity between the medieval past it evokes, and the modern materials used. Morris had not yet found a way to integrate past and present and make it intelligible to others. Morris’ major inspiration still came from the past and his next two major works were based on ancient myths and legends. His long poem in seventeen books, The Life and Death of Jason (1867) retold the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, while his anthology poem in twelve books, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) had a frame narrative in which a group of

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Norsemen fleeing pestilence in their homeland come across a community who still worship the ancient Greek gods. The two groups meet monthly to swap stories, comprising twenty-four verse tales, half of them drawn from classical sources and the other half from Norse and medieval sources. Both books were enormously popular in Morris’ own time and from the late 1860s he was mostly known as ‘the author of The Earthly Paradise’. On the great success of Jason Lindsay quotes the conclusion of Henry James’ long celebratory review: ‘To the jaded intellects of the present moment, distracted with the strife of creeds and the conflict of theories, it opens a glimpse into a world where they will be called upon neither to choose, to criticise, nor to believe, but simply to feel, to look, and to listen’ (p.  146). The Earthly Paradise was equally successful with the Victorian public and Lindsay notes that it was praised in The Saturday Review as having ‘adapted for conveying to our wives and daughters a refined, although not diluted version of those wonderful creations of Greek fancy which the rougher sex alone is permitted to imbibe at first hand’ (p. 148). He also quotes Walter Pater’s description of the world of the narrative, in contrast to the tales retold, as ‘still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or “earthly paradise”. It is a finer idea, extracted from what in relations to any actual world is already an ideal’ (pp. 148–9). And he notes that the St James’s Magazine lauds it as ‘one possible means of escape’ (p. 149). In all these reviews the prominent element is the escapism of the works, providing readers with a respite from the difficult realities and responsibilities of their own time. Not all reviewers were satisfied with this escapist fantasy, however, and Lindsay quotes Alfred Austin’s acerbic review of Morris’ work for its failure to address contemporary problems: ‘They are crooked; who shall set them straight? For his part, he will not even try.’ Austin wrote that Morris ‘evaded the very conditions in which alone the production of great poetry is possible’ and so became ‘the wisely unresisting victim of a rude irreversible current; the serene master of a mean and melancholy time’ (p. 159). Austin’s caustic rewording of Morris’ self-reflexive description of himself as poet in the ‘Apology’ at the beginning of The Earthly Paradise as ‘the idle singer of an empty day’ (p. 159) contains an implicit rebuke at Morris’ well-fed passivity. Lindsay writes of the book that it ‘was a tapestry in a real sense, embodying the kinds of interrelations of forms and textures that Morris learned at loom and designing-table’ (p. 150). Those forms and textures, he argues, were based not on conventional Victorian notions of art but on Morris’

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childhood memories, which ‘provided the vital impulse of the paradisiac quest’ (p. 150). The artistic technique of the poem is one with its content; it is neither a critical reflection on Morris’ own society nor a conventional Victorian portrayal but the fantasy of a fictional past. Nevertheless, Lindsay sees in the poem’s ghostly evocation of the Victorian world and the sensory appeal of Morris’ poetry the promise of his later active engagement with industrial capitalism: ‘Its sensuous essence only needed to gain further release of a new comprehensive hope, an effective belief that men and society could be truly changed, and the revolutionary potentialities would find their outlet’ (p. 150). However, he was not there yet.

Reality In 1861 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. (referred to as ‘the Firm’) was established. Lindsay writes that the Firm’s aesthetic was based in the multidisciplinary training that Morris had received as an apprentice to G.E.  Street, noting that its medievalist aesthetic had to negotiate two major contemporary trends: ‘the abstract patterns of the Owen school, favoured by the puritanic or evangelical clergy as lacking all idolatrous suggestions; and there was the elaboration of over-worked painting, which dulled and darkened the [stained] glass’ (p. 128). He cites Morris’ later essay, ‘Hints on Pattern Designing’ (1881) as encapsulating the principles developed in the Firm’s work, noting in particular its rejection of pure abstraction: ‘You may be sure that any decoration is futile, and has fallen into at least the first stage of degradation, when it does not remind you of something beyond itself, of something of which it is but a visible symbol’ (p. 128). Lindsay finds in this principle a rejection of abstraction as ‘the void that emerges out of the disintegration of human sensibility’ (p. 129), while for Morris, he argues, ‘the test of originality [is] an ever deeper penetration into the essence of the familiar, of the forms out of which mankind has distilled its sense of beauty and enjoyment’ (p. 129). Despite the Firm’s artistic success, Morris’ medieval fantasy began to unravel. The business made huge demands on his time and attention, though he obviously enjoyed learning the arts and crafts associated with the goods they sold. However, he was a bad manager and a terrible salesman and was soon to discover that he could not conduct the business from Bexley Heath. At the same time, the inherited shares on which he depended for backup income were now worthless; he was dependent on his own

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work to survive. In 1866 he moved the family to Queen Square, London and sold the Red House, which he never again visited. He was also facing difficulties at home. Lindsay conjectures that his focus on the Firm and his own work must have made him seem to Jane ‘withdrawn and dominating’ while ‘Rossetti, with his insidious and undemanding adoration, was the diametric opposite of Morris’ (p.  139). By 1868, Lindsay adds, it was clear to all that Rossetti and Jane were more than friends, quoting from an account by William Bell Scott of a dinner he hosted for the group: ‘As to Gabriel he forgets everyone else. When he went down, although it was my part to take Jeanie [Janey], G. got her arm in his in a moment, then abandoned her as hurriedly for the nearest other lady, Morris looking at him all the time.’ That last detail helps us to enter into the misery and uncertainty that Morris was feeling throughout this period. (p. 152)

For Lindsay the difficulties of this period contributed to Morris’ turn away from the comfort of classical stories to the austere Northern Sagas with their ethic of courage and endurance (p. 155). Morris had begun to study Icelandic with Cambridge scholar, Eiríkur Magnusson. Their study sessions took the form of translations of the sagas, as Magnusson explained: ‘Morris decided from the beginning to leave alone the irksome task of taking regular grammatical exercises. He said, “You be my grammar as we go along”, and began at once translating’ (p. 151). Learning by doing was characteristic of Morris, in writing as much as in craftwork. Morris published translations of many Norse and Icelandic sagas, beginning with those of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue and Rafn the Skald and including the great Volsunga Saga. Lindsay notes, however, that the public who had so loved his previous work were not enthusiastic: ‘his dropping of the smooth style of The Earthly Paradise was not welcomed’ (p.  166). In Lindsay’s view Morris’ motivation for this work was more personal than professional, as it provided him with a model of bravery and endurance that he needed to see him through his personal and professional difficulties. Lindsay quotes from a later speech, ‘The Early Literature of the North—Iceland’ (1887) in which Morris describes the attributes of the society that produced the sagas: Self-restraint was a virtue sure to be thought much of among a people whose religion was practically courage: in all the stories of the North failure is never

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reckoned a disgrace, but it is reckoned a disgrace not to bear it with equanimity, and to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve is not well thought of. (p. 156)

For Lindsay the sagas provided Morris with a way of thinking about his problems and acting on them that was gracious and honourable, a step away from the escapism of Jason and The Earthly Paradise.

Love Morris’ solution to his marriage complications was not that of a Victorian patriarch. In June 1871 he took a joint lease with Rossetti on a country-­ house, Kelmscott Manor near Lechlade on the banks of the Thames, thirty miles from Oxford. The following month he set off with Magnusson and Faulkner on a two-month visit to Iceland, leaving Jane and Rossetti together. Lindsay discusses several poems written by Morris after his return from Iceland in which he attempts to come to terms with both Janey’s abandonment and Gabriel’s betrayal of him. One is a dramatic monologue by a woman in Jane’s situation describing her treatment of her rejected lover. Lindsay notes its similarities with The Defence of Guenevere including the narrator’s refusal to demonise the woman caught between the man who loves her and the man she loves, while also keenly depicting Morris’ sense of abandonment. According to May Morris her father never revealed his deepest feelings ‘even to his closest friends—secretum meum mihi [my secret]. It was a subject on which he never spoke save in Love Is Enough’ (p.188). Love is Enough, or the Freeing of Pharamond (1872) is the framed narrative of King Pharamond’s quest for love, presented as a masque before an audience that includes both a royal and a peasant couple. After a dream of his ideal woman King Pharamond abandons his kingdom and sets out to find her. After many difficulties he finds the woman, Azalais; yet is eventually driven to return and check that his people are thriving. Pharamond finds that a former rival has stepped into his place and that people no longer recognise him as their ruler. The masque ends when Pharamond hears Azalais calling for him and resolves to return home, leaving his rival to reign in his place. This is followed by a speech by Love (personified) that reminds the audience of the many mansions of the House of Love, including the loyalty shown by Pharamond’s foster-father, Oliver who accompanied him through his journeys and died in his service and Pharamond’s

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love for his people, demonstrated when he chooses not to challenge his rival but to leave the kingdom and its people in peace. The poem concludes with peasant Joan’s words, thanking Love for his tales of love, which she situates not in the fanciful world of King Pharamond but in everyday experience. Lindsay quotes a contemporary review of the work by G.A. Simcox in the Academy: ‘In his new work Mr. Morris demands more of the reader; instead of abandoning himself to a passive fascination, he has to be penetrated with a profound and earnest passion: we have to live in the poem, not dream of it’ (p.  195). Simcox notes the contrast with The Earthly Paradise where ‘we drifted along a swift current of adventure under a sky heavy with sweet dreams, through which the dew of death fell without dimming the sunshine’ (p. 195). Lindsay comments on Love’s final speech where he notes that Pharamond’s obsessional desire became for him ‘a poisoned fire’ which did not die but compelled change: ‘through a dreadful world all changed must move’ (p.  196). For Lindsay, the poem signalled a recognition by Morris of the need for change. There is no happy ending in the masque, simply a recognition that idealised love (like Morris’ for Jane) is a fantasy. Lindsay saw it as marking the end of Morris’ passivity.

Change To Lindsay it seemed Morris had reached his own Ragna rok: ‘Things are getting so bad that there must surely come some final confrontation, clash, and new start’ (p. 203). His first move was to create a distance between himself and Rossetti. For several years Morris had been unhappy that Rossetti was living full-time at their shared country-residence, Kelmscott House. Not only did it deprive Morris of a peaceful escape from London, but he also disapproved of Rossetti’s behaviour: ‘he has all sorts of ways so unsympathetic with the sweet simple old place, that I feel his presence there as a kind of slur on it’ (quoted, p. 195). In 1874 he proposed to Rossetti that, since he was permanently in residence, he should take over the lease, knowing he was unlikely to do so. When Rossetti moved out, Morris arranged to share the lease with publisher, F.S. Ellis. Morris was now able to spend time at Kelmscott House without encountering Rossetti. Morris’ next concern was to reorganise the management of the Firm, so that he was freed from everyday economic concerns to pursue the work that interested him (p. 203). As the Firm had been carrying partners who

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contributed nothing but shared in the profits, Morris proposed that Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company be dissolved and a new company involving those actively involved in the work be formed. After a great deal of negotiation and paying out several partners (Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and George Watts), he formed Morris and Company. In the future he would instigate a financial arrangement whereby long-term employees were given a share of the profits. The Firm’s manager, Thomas Wardle, wrote of Morris’ attempt to share the profit: ‘The plan was clearly no solution of the question which was occupying Morris, but he adopted so much of it as to give some half dozen of us a direct share interest in the business’ (p.  264). Wardle added that none of his workers ‘would willingly have joined any other workshop’ (p.  264). The Firm was back on track as Morris & Co. Lindsay traces Morris’ new engagement with life to the qualities of character he had discovered first in his work first with Burne-Jones and others at Oxford and then in the Icelandic sagas. Morris could now address the conflicts he faced in his personal life, his business dealings at the Firm, and the dilemma created its success: that, despite his idealism, the work produced at the Firm was only affordable by the wealthy, which Lindsay identified as ‘a dire conflict between the Rossettian dream and the Ruskinian vision’ (p. 217). Lindsay concludes: ‘Thrown back on himself, he had to fight for a new centre of being: one in which the vision dominated and steadily eliminated the dream’ (p. 217). Lindsay’s comment is a direct reference to the conclusion of Morris’ utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) when the utopian traveller, returned to dirty, polluted late nineteenth-century London, ponders on the value of his visit to green and peaceful post-capitalist Britain: ‘Yes, surely! And if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream’ (p. 182). A dream is a wish-fulfilment fantasy, located in the individual, based on ideals, a mode of escape from the realities of life, in Morris’ case, imperial, industrialist, capitalist Britain. Vision, on the other hand, is shared, created in communion with others and by engagement with the world; its aim is to change the world. Having addressed his personal and work problems, Morris’ next move was into social and political activism.

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Activism Morris began to engage with contemporary politics, writing to the Daily News to protest British involvement in the Franco-Prussian War (p. 213) and joining the Liberal-Radical protests against the policy and jingoistic propaganda of Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (p. 213). Lindsay notes, however, that Morris shared Dickens’ distrust of Parliament as a middle-­ class institution that, ‘by its very nature organised to baffle and deflect the popular will’ (p. 216). For Morris it was simply the only viable option to anarchism, as he remarked in a letter to Charles Faulkner: ‘I do not feel very sanguine about it all, but it is the only thing that offers at present, and I do not wish to be anarchical: I must do the best I can with it’ (p. 216). Lindsay describes Morris’ move into political engagement as one ‘who has long been asleep in a Ruskinian dream and who is now jolted awake to the reality of the callous world’ (p. 213). For Morris art and activism were now inextricably related. Some ventures focused on art, such as his foundational involvement with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) that was also known as ‘Anti-Scrape’ as it opposed the practice of scraping the weathering off stone buildings to leave a smooth surface. Morris’ conservation work led him to elaborate his ideas about the arts and their destruction in the nineteenth century, which he expressed not only in letters to the newspapers but also in public lectures delivered in a range of contexts for SPAB and other organisations. Lindsay describes Morris’ first lecture, ‘The Lesser Arts’, delivered before the Trades’ Guild of Learning, London (4 December 1877): He sets out the thesis that since the Renaissance the arts have been ruined by luxury and display, by a barren classicism; a true basis can be found by a return to the traditional yeoman’s house and the humble village church. He wants a functional simplicity, with which goes cleanliness and decency. Nature and history are the teachers; as things are, the world is made hideous and inhuman and unhealthy by the ruling commercial interests; and there is no hope of redemption in an élite art. (pp. 221–22)

Of these early lectures Lindsay argues that Morris ‘still tends to a middle-­ class paternalist outlook … He appeals to his class to treat the workers equitably, even if this act of justice will mean loss to them’ (p. 244). Morris

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had not yet recognised that the problems of capitalism were systemic though Lindsay traces the beginnings of this awareness: … in The Beauty of Life, he had repeated that if civilisation could not give a share in the happiness and dignity of life to all the people then “it is simply an organised injustice, a mere instrument for oppression, so much the worse than that which has gone before it, as its pretensions are higher, its slavery subtler, its mastery harder to overthrow, because supported by such a dense mass of commonplace well-being and comfort.” (p. 248)

Morris had an implicit understanding of the social and economic imperatives and ideology that were causing the degradation of the environment, the cheapening of goods and the inaccessibility and increasing irrelevance of what was identified as art. He nevertheless sensed his understanding was inadequate and resolved to learn about politics by doing, in the typical Morris way.

Politics Morris threw himself into the fray in 1876 joining the Eastern Question Association that opposed Britain’s involvement in the war between Russia and Turkey. Morris believed that Britain’s role was prompted by commercial interests and that those who would most suffer would be young working-­class men, enticed to join the army by jingoistic government propaganda. He attempted to work with the Liberals but was disappointed by their conservatism and so joined the Labour Emancipation League, which Lindsay described as ‘the first Socialist organisation in London with any effective influence’ (p.  244). In 1884, Lindsay records, he joined the Democratic Federation, where H.M.  Hyndman noted Morris’ total engagement with the issues being discussed, ‘every hair on his head and in his rough shaggy beard appearing to enter into the subject as a living part of itself’ (p. 256). By this time, Lindsay notes, Morris had schooled himself in political and economic theory, starting with John Stuart Mill’s Chapters on Socialism published in the Fortnightly Review (February, [March] and April 1879), which described different approaches to socialism by Robert Owen, Louis Blanc and Charles Fourier (p.  231). Lindsay quotes Morris’ comment from this time: ‘I had never so much as opened Adam Smith, or heard of Ricardo, or of Karl Marx’ (p. 231). However, by 1883, he was reading

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Marx’s Capital in French translation and would later read it in English. Lindsay adds that, through his political activities, Morris had met and worked alongside many working-class people, which offered its own political education. In June 1884, Lindsay reports, the Democratic Federation issued a manifesto with Morris as one of the signatories. Morris described his involvement in a letter to Thomas Horsfall that Lindsay reads as demonstrating his political self-education. Morris acknowledges that the rich do not necessarily operate from malice: ‘Nevertheless their position (as a class) forces them to “strive” (unconsciously most often I know) to keep the working men in ignorance of their rights and power’ (p. 259). He also argues that social change will not come from the united action of people with good will, but ‘that the basis of all change must be, as it has always been, the antagonism of classes’ and that ‘the upper and middle classes as a body will by the very nature of their existence, and like a plant grows, resist the abolition of classes’ (pp. 259–60). On the inevitable demise of capitalism, he adds: ‘Commercialism, competition, has sown the wind recklessly, and must reap the whirlwind: it has created the proletariat for its own interest, and its creation will and must destroy it’ (p. 260). Of his own class he writes: I have never under-rated the power of the middle-classes, whom, in spite of their individual good nature and banality, I look upon as a most terrible and implacable force: so terrible that I think it not unlikely that their resistance to inevitable change may, if the beginnings of change are too long delayed, ruin all civilisation for a time. (p. 260)

And Lindsay quotes Morris’ own caveat that, to avoid a slide into anarchy, ‘it becomes a pressing duty for those who … have any hopes for the future, to lay before the world those hopes founded on constructive revolution’ (p. 260). From this time, Lindsay notes, Morris was involved actively with socialist politics, travelling the country to deliver political speeches, and attending regular meetings at which political theory and practice were debated. Lindsay traces Morris’ involvements with the Democratic Federation (DF), established in 1881 by businessman, H.M. Hyndman to promote Marxist views. In 1884 the DF was renamed the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), openly declaring its socialist platform and agenda in opposition to the parliamentary Liberals who had failed to represent

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working-class interests. Hyndman’s dictatorial manner and financial control of the SDF led to internal dissension and at the end of 1884, Morris joined others in splitting away from the newly formed SDF to form the Socialist League (SL), which had a revolutionary socialist platform. Morris remained a member of the League until 1890 when, alarmed by the domination of anarchists, he left and formed the Hammersmith Socialist Society. For Lindsay Morris’ political instincts were not always optimal. He notes Paul Lafargue’s view that Morris and his comrades should not have left the SDF, effectively ousting themselves: ‘Paul Lafargue … noted his mistaken tactics; on 5 February 1885 he wrote to Engels from Paris: “Everyone here is very surprised that after having the majority our friends have resigned instead of throwing out the minority”’ (p.  283). In the League’s failure to support the London Dock Strike (1889) because it regarded strikes as palliative and not change-making, Lindsay identifies its political naivety (p. 340). On the other hand, Lindsay writes that The Manifesto of the Socialist League (1885), written by Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax, was ground-­ breaking in its theorisation of social change. He quotes from the ‘Notes on the Manifesto’, with which the second edition of the Manifesto concludes: The enemy will say, ‘This is retrogression not progress’; to which we answer, All progress, every distinctive stage of progress, involves a backward as well as a forward movement; the new development returns to a point which represents the older principle elevated to a higher plane; the old principle reappears transformed, purified, made stronger, and ready to advance on the fuller life it has gained through its seeming death. As an illustration (imperfect as all illustrations must be) take the case of advance on a straight line and on a spiral, the progress of all life must be not on the straight line, but on the spiral. (p. 293)

Lindsay concludes: Here for the first time in Marxist writing is the clear statement of movement by spiral and not by the simple straight line. … Not till Dialectic of Nature was published in 1925 was there a definite statement, though again brief and schematic, of the spiral of development by Engels in print. (p. 294)

The value of this conceptualisation, Lindsay argues, was that it enabled Morris to resolve the conflict between barbarism, which demonstrated the

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qualities of courage and endurance that he admired, and the civilisation that he desired. Morris was no longer faced with an either/or choice, but a process by which admired qualities from one state might be combined with those of another to create a new state based on the best aspects of both. Lindsay writes: ‘The door was now open to his later romances and indeed to the whole distinctive contribution he made to Marxist thought’ (p. 294).

Vision Lindsay identifies several of Morris’s later works as major contributions to literature and politics, including the verse narrative, The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), the utopian romance, News from Nowhere (1890) and the prose romances beginning with A Tale of the House of the Wolfings (1889) that preoccupied Morris in his final years. Lindsay wrote of Morris that he understood the relationship between political economy and people in a way few did: He was indeed one of the few Marxists who understood, as Marx did, that in political economy we deal not only with forces outside men’s control— the exploiting side of production, in which alienation and reification are concentrated—but also with the very life process of men, in which what is produced and reproduced is not merely commodities, but is men themselves and nature. (p. 310)

In recognising the formative relationship between human beings and the conditions in which they live and work, Morris found a way in which he, as an artist, might intervene in that process. Morris’ most successful intervention was his utopian romance, News from Nowhere, written as a response to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). In 1889 Morris reviewed Bellamy’s novel in his newspaper Commonweal, alarmed by the popularity of the work that was regarded by some as socialist but did not challenge the rampant consumption that drove his society. It describes a society in which machines have been developed to perform most labour and satisfy most desires: ‘a machine-life is the best which Mr Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides; it is not to be wondered at then that his only idea of making labour tolerable is to decrease the amount of it by means of fresh and ever fresh developments of machinery’ (pp.  194–95). Lindsay notes: ‘Bellamy’s utopia

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had increased his aversion from such attempts to imagine the future; he felt that the composer of worthwhile utopias must concentrate on the more purely human aspects’ (p. 349). Lindsay argues: ‘If Marx was right, a genuinely new society can be born only when commodity-production ends, and with it division of labour, money, market-systems, and alienation in all its many shapes and forms— above all alienation from labour’ (p. 349). Morris, he notes, is one of the few who have tried to imagine what kind of society this would produce: ‘In the world where commodity production has ended, we have neither maximum production nor zero-growth; we have instead a society where people, freed from fear, are able to realise how little they need in order to achieve fulfilment and happiness’ (pp. 349–50). Lindsay notes that these are problems the world is facing in his own time, the mid-1970s, with its unlimited demands for energy, and he adds: The greatness of Morris, as of Marx, lies in the fact that he realised the urgency of such issues, not as the result of practical problems associated with energy-resources, but wholly from his understanding of the human essence, of the wrong being done to men and women by a fragmenting and alienating society, of the possibilities that opened up as soon as the wounds of division were healed. (p. 350)

Lindsay goes on to explain: ‘Morris … realised that uncontrolled productive activity begot pollutions and destructions of the environment in an ever-increasing virulence. The society which ‘restored’ and destroyed its cultural inheritance, he discovered, was a society which poisoned the very earth itself’ (p. 350). In News from Nowhere Morris places his visitor in a post-capitalist society that Lindsay describes as having ‘reached a position of equilibrium with nature’ (p. 350). He notes, however, that this meant that Morris had to define ‘just what are the forms of growth and movement inside this new condition of stability and harmony’ (p. 350). It would be a society without the conflict and competition that characterises bourgeois capitalist society: however, the challenge is to describe the positive society and the creativity that will emerge out of ‘the negation of the negation’ (p. 350) Lindsay argues that Morris restricts his analysis to ‘the simplest relations men and women have with one another and with work’ because ‘if he truly captures the spirit of the new harmony, the happy balance of man and nature, the rest can be left unstated’ (p.  351). To a large extent this

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strategy worked, though Lindsay notes that Morris’ description of how the revolution happened relies on the Marxist model of intensifying internal contradictions leading to systemic breakdown; that is, revolution. For Lindsay this meant that even Morris, who had described the middle class as ‘a most terrible and implacable force’, underestimated the power of capitalism to incorporate and nullify those contradictions. In his final years Morris began writing prose romances. They were very different from the Gothic-inspired stories of his student days, and focused on how people might live together as a community in harmony with the earth. From The Wood Beyond the World to his final romance, The Sundering Flood, published posthumously in 1897, Lindsay argues, Morris used the quest romance form, with its magical elements, to explore individual and social life: … the romances show his obstinately continuing effort to plumb the deep recurring patterns of human experience and to relate them in turn to the structure of history in which they have played a dynamic role of transformation. They reveal yet one more attempt on his part to grasp fully what the spiral concept of development implied. (p. 370)

As Lindsay noted when introducing Morris’ later works, he was one of the few in his time who realised that capitalism produced not only commodities but also ‘men themselves and nature’ (p. 310).

Conclusion Lindsay concludes by specifying what made Morris ‘a new kind of artist, a new kind of thinker’ (p. 378): ‘For Morris the adventure of freedom is also always a realisation of beauty and a communion with the earth; and so the liberation of the human essence is aesthetic as well as social’ (p. 378). For both Morris and Marx, Lindsay argues, the alienation engendered by the capitalist mode of production alienates the individual not only from the product of their labour but also from their own body, ‘from sensuous activity and self-realisation’ (p.  378). Marx could only theorise this but Morris could address it directly through his art, by ‘link[ing] art-activity organically with social and political aims’ (p. 378). Lindsay traces Morris’ move from detached dreamer to social revolutionary, from dream to vision. Morris’ art may look backward to the medieval world, ‘but in its working-out it involved both an attack on the

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industrial world and a struggle to transform that world into something quite different, which belonged to the future’ (p. 378). This is the basis of Morris’ transformative vision—a spiral ‘with the present realised in terms of a spiral movement that included both past and future’ (pp.  378–9). Hence Morris’ move from his (Ruskinian) call for ‘joy-in-work’ (to overcome alienation of labour) to ‘the full political and social struggle which alone could have as its aim the achievement of brotherhood and the ending of commodity-production’ (p. 379). Lindsay locates Morris as merging the ‘moral and aesthetic revolt’ of British thinkers such as Smith, Coleridge, Carlyle and Ruskin with the European philosophic tradition that stretches from Bruno and Spinoza to Goethe and Hegel and then to Marx (p. 381). And he concludes: ‘Morris, then, for all his weaknesses, must be seen as the first Marxist who grasped in its fullness the nature of revolutionary change—indeed, apart from Lenin, almost the only one who never lost or diluted his sense of the vital unity of the political, economic, aesthetic and moral factors. (p. 381)

CHAPTER 11

The Artist and the Senses

For William Morris, Jack Lindsay argued, bourgeois notions of art and work are based on the separation within the individual of mind from body: Here the positions of Morris merge with those of Marx, which see the division of labour and commodity-production at every point bringing about an alienation of the individual from his own body, from sensuous activity and self-realisation. But whereas these ideas remain theoretical with Marx, with Morris as an artist there is the unceasing effort to actualise them in the struggle to link art-activity organically with political and social aims. (WM, p. 378)

For Morris as for Marx, the labour that confined workers to a highly specialised task repeated endlessly with no control or input into the final product led to the schism of mind and body. Lindsay adds that Morris, like Ruskin before him, believed that all people should be creatively engaged with their work: ‘Ruskin gave him his first coherent ideas of a comprehensive kind: the belief that art and work had once been harmoniously united, and that they still ought to be, despite the general movement towards degradation and mechanisation’ (WM, p.  379). Accordingly their work would bear the imprint of their particularity or individuality (as did the stones of the Gothic cathedrals studied by Ruskin and Morris) and enable them to realise themselves as individuals through the interrelationship of all aspects of their embodied being (sensory, emotional and intellectual). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_11

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By studying in Morris an artist who was engaged in multiple fields— visual arts, crafts, design, writing—Lindsay leads the reader to the sensory engagement that is fundamental to all the arts. Furthermore, Lindsay locates in Morris an integrated notion of being that afforded the senses— interrelated with feeling and thinking—a key role in the formation of thought and consciousness. For Lindsay this provided a more nuanced way of understanding how art performs as a political practice; not by sloganising or painting utopian images of a bright future or dystopian accounts of the evil present, but by alerting readers and viewers to the deformation of their being under capitalism. He identified an early manifestation of this awareness in the work of the little-known, early nineteenth-­ century poets whose work was marked by sensory excess, the Spasmodics.1 In the essay, ‘Ebenezer Jones, 1820–1860—An English Symbolist’ (1978), published shortly after his study of Morris, he describes and analyses the work of one of their leading exponents. At the same time, Lindsay was aware that his focus on the senses led to him being perceived as individualistic, a characteristic associated with bourgeois capitalism. This was because the senses were regarded by many as idiosyncratic, different for each person. For Lindsay, however, this was a misunderstanding: he argued that the senses are socially formed, like every other aspect of being. Nevertheless, everyone is different as their particular experience forms their senses, as well as their ways of thinking and feeling, to be distinct while also sharing much with their contemporaries. For Lindsay it is this ability to mobilise individual abilities and perspectives, that are also social, to present new ways of understanding oneself and one’s society that gives the artist the power to make meaningful work. It also makes the artwork relevant to the audience who share aspects of the artist’s experience and relate it to their own being and experience. Lindsay argues this viewpoint in his essay, ‘The Role of the Individual in Art’ (1976). Although this essay was published two years prior to the essay on Ebenezer Jones, this chapter begins with the study of Spasmodic verse as it focusses on the role of the senses in art as a social as well as 1  There has been a more recent surge of interest in the Spasmodics. Most present arguments predicted by Lindsay’s study, often expanding on a particular issue or idea: see Rudy (2003), Boos (2004), Harrison (2004), Hughes (2004), Laporte (2004), Laporte and Rudy (2004), Mason (2004), Rudy (2004), Tucker (2004), Blair (2006), Morton (2008).

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individual practice and experience. This argument is fundamental to his description of the role of the individual—artist and audience—in the production of the artwork and its meaning.

Spasmodic Poetry Lindsay describes the decades in which the work of the Spasmodics first appeared, the 1830s and 1840s, as marked by deep unrest and change: ‘They began with rick-burnings and the Bristol riots, then saw the rise and culmination of the Radical and Chartist movements, the Poor Law riots and the risings at Devises, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newport and elsewhere, the great mass meetings of the Chartists that reached their climax and breakdown in 1848’ (p. 151). He adds that this period saw the ‘decisive construction of English capitalism’ when old forms of popular resistance were crushed and would not return until the 1880s when the Trade Union movement began to achieve traction (p. 151). Lindsay notes that Dickens was writing at this time, as were Tennyson and Browning whose early works he aligns with the Spasmodic movement; while ‘Hopkins and Meredith alone can be said to have carried on to some extent from Spasmodic bases’ (p. 152). Spasmodic verse is identified by its focus on the disruption to the lives of millions of people caused by technological changes, associated industrial, social and political practices and formations, and the loss of former traditions, work practices and security: ‘Their poetry, in both its virtues and its vices, is conscious of a fierce disruptive pressure, which they can only partially understand and control’ (p. 152). Lindsay notes that these poets, who included Philip James Bailey, Alexander Smith, ‘Orion’ Horne, John Stanyan Bigg, W.H. Smith, Sydney Dobell, D.B. Starkey, J.E. Reade, A.J. Symington and Ebenezer Jones, lacked a philosophy that would have enabled them to understand these changes in their entirety but that ‘taken all together, they reveal richly the nature of the crisis they confront and the new possibilities opening up in culture, in human relationships’ and he argues that ‘at their core is the quest for the new kind of union that will overcome the evil effects of the dehumanising forces at work throughout society’ (p. 152). Ebenezer Jones interested Lindsay because, during this difficult social period, he not only aspired to be a poet, but also studied and wrote an account of the political forces he believed were creating such unrest.

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Ebenezer Jones Lindsay introduces Jones with a brevity that matches his lifespan: ‘He was born on 20 January 1820 in Canonbury Square, Islington, and he died after a cramped and miserable life on 14 September 1860’ (p. 152). Jones was raised in a strict Calvinist family where contact with the outside world was seen as inevitably corrupting and, according to his brother Sumner Jones (1879), reading was restricted: Shakespeare and Milton ‘were left in rigourous quarantine’ while of Byron ‘we had a mysterious notion, gathered from hearing our elders now and then speak of him shudderingly’ and of Shelley ‘we had never heard’ (p. 152). Despite this strict upbringing, with the death of their father and their loss of financial security, the Jones brothers ‘began to fight the dark Calvinist controls, aided by reading Carlyle’s French Revolution and Shelley’s poems’ (p. 153). Lindsay writes that Jones was deeply moved by popular political movements and became ‘an Owenite sort of socialist’ (p. 154). He records Sumner Jones’ recollections of his brother’s political aspirations and that his poem, ‘A Coming Cry’ was ‘thrillingly recited from the platform by [politician and Unitarian minister] W.J.  Fox’ (p. 154). Lindsay adds: ‘This poem, which contrasts the great constructive powers in men with the degraded ends to which they are put, and with the denial of human dignity by unemployment, has a darkly menacing line at the end of each stanza: “We’ll go on building workhouses, million, million, men”’ (p. 154). Lindsay analyses Jones’ political tract, The Land Monopoly, the Suffering and Demoralisation Caused by It; and the Justice and Expedience of Its Abolition (1849), concluding: As a political thinker he is then only an advanced radical attacking the landed interest; but his moral and social analysis is primarily concerned with the essentially dehumanising nature of the capitalist wage-relation, anticipates attitudes of Ruskin and Morris, and is in the key of what his contemporary Marx was thinking about the alienations of class-society. (p. 156)

Jones’ interest for Lindsay is less his institutional politics than his underlying analysis of the effect on human being and consciousness of the living and working conditions, including social and political institutions, that render individuals powerless and voiceless. In his poetry, Lindsay argues, Jones conveys the trauma produced in individuals by this social pathology.

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Sensation and Event Jones’s first book of poetry, Studies of Sensation and Event (1843), was not a success with either reviewers or the public, though Lindsay notes that it would gain the attention of poets such as Swinburne, Browning and Rossetti—in most cases, too late to support him either morally or financially. As the title indicates, Jones’s verse focuses on the interrelationship of sense and experience that Lindsay identified as traumatic for members of a society undergoing rapid transformation. This may be realised as a state of extreme distraction that is illustrated for Lindsay in Jones’ poem, ‘A Crisis’. Ostensibly, a description of a young man’s love for a young woman and his musings on the stages through which his feelings pass— from admiration to lustful desire to self-loathing to devotion—the poem is notable for its portrayal of a consciousness in process; attempting to make sense of a reality it finds hard to comprehend and control. In attempting to analyse the disturbing feelings he has for a young woman; the male narrator repeatedly deflects attention to the natural environment in which he observes her. The poem opens with a detailed description of a meadow—the dense forest surrounding it with its hidden spaces, the old timbers of the fence surrounding it, its wildness protected by its role as a former battle-site, the church bells sounding over it, the flowers (yellow, ruby, milk-white) blooming in it, the breezes blowing through its grasses—and finally the figure of a young woman, described in sensuous and sexual detail. This pattern of observation, desire, deflection, and self-reflection is repeated throughout the poem as he attempts to understand his relationship with her, moving from the natural world to her physical being and the feelings aroused in him including violent jealousy at the thought of her with another man, followed by agonised self-­ analysis. He finally writes to her of his feelings and is concerned that she will, in turn, find them disturbing, even demeaning or offensive—as conventional morality suggests she should. This is the morality that leads him to describe her physical presence as ‘murderous beauty’ (p. 138). In the end, it seems, she accepts him with a loving, accepting look that no artform can reproduce or surpass, but if speaking it would destroy the poet he would take that risk:

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            … he would fling Art to the winds, thought, life, and heaven, forget,— And though the uttering the words should shatter Him to annihilation, he would speak, And shatter himself into eternal flame. (p. 140)

For Lindsay the story of the poem is less important than the way it is told. The particularity of the sensory engagement, strong and irregular emotion, moral and social challenge map the floundering of a consciousness negotiating a new world: It is not a question of naturalistic accretion, but of sharpened awareness that sees the world of forms stirring and infused with new energies in all its ‘minute particulars’: a new relation of the parts and the whole. The movement of the seemingly detached eye is one with the movement of a strong almost-­ tranced emotion, bringing about a unity of observer and observed, of isolated object and the totality of scene and episode: a sort of comprehensive dream-state merged with a near-sight realism. Such an approach to the image is based on a distrust of past generalisations, a need to reconstruct the world afresh from the smallest possible units or facets inside a unifying vision. (p. 159)

This re-ordering of the senses and unity of senses, emotion and feeling gives a voice, rough as it sometimes is, to those denied representation in this new social order. In other works, Jones addresses the forces that are creating this new world. In ‘Ways of Regard’, Lindsay argues, Jones vividly describes the rapacity of the bourgeoisie: Sharks’ jaws are glittering through the eternal ocean Now, even as ever; through the topmost seas That mightily billow, through the secrecy Of its abysses, where the waters bide Omnipotently shuddering—scattering fear, Onward they go; their illuminating teeth Perpetually parting … (pp. 167–68)

Lindsay characterises the verse as: ‘An image of ravening divisive forces that looks back to Keats but is developed with fuller insights’ (p. 168). He

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argues that, while many remain torn by the conflicting forces confronting them and others acquiesce becoming ‘quite inhuman in their acceptance’ (p. 168), others are moved to rebellion: Commanding time, And extinguishing space, and past the furthest reach Of the five senses reaching,—he beheld Within this earth, where night was dark, a cavern, Peopled with slaves contemplating revolt. (p. 169)

For Lindsay Jones describes here ‘the reality of the revolt gathering at the heart of an alienating and exploiting society’ (p. 169). He also cites Jones’s identification of the way in which bourgeois ideology and those who embody it perceive and characterise the working classes:         They blind your minds With writhing toil, and say you have no sight; They break you from the majesty of man, Into gaunt monsters, crooked miseries, And call you brute-light,—trample down your hearts, And say you have none,—banish from your souls The light of knowledge, and proclaim you soulless … (p. 169)

The poem ends with a vision of revolutionary change based on class war that Lindsay found unconvincing, yet he infers: ‘he must in fact mean that the men of an unalienated and free earth will live such a different life from that of the present with its inner and outer divisions that they will seem a different species’ (p. 171). Studies of Sensation and Event was savaged by reviewers in the terms typical of responses to the Spasmodics, yet Lindsay specifies three major areas of interest in the work: (a)  The strong sensuous pictorial effect, which clearly had much effect on Rossetti and played its part in bringing about the key-ideas of Pre-­ Raphaelitism, (b) the strange or bizarre situation, image, event, which dominates in each poem … (c) the dialectical interrelation of ideas and emotions, which has affinities with Blake’s method and leads on to a doctrine of symbolic correspondences linking Jones with the French symbolistes, with Baudelaire and Rimbaud. (p. 159)

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For Lindsay the use of heightened sensory stimuli that led to the label ‘Spasmodics’ was not a lapse in taste, but indicative of the impact on embodied being of the divisive ideology and the work and institutional practices of capitalism. Rather than attempting to describe that experience, the Spasmodics reproduced it, not simply as a story but as a psychic state. Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud described the poet as one who ‘makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic, and rational derangement of the senses’ to access the truths lying behind the everyday real (Rimbaud 1966, p. 307). For Lindsay this also described the work of the group who came to be known, initially as a reviewer’s term of abuse, as the Spasmodics (see Aytoun 1854; [Aytoun as] T. Percy Jones 1854). He notes that Morris used the same strategy in his early poetry and prose, though there is no evidence that he knew their work (p. 173). Lindsay concludes of Jones: ‘His work is thus, as Rossetti recognised, singularly hard to define, and yet, once known, it haunts us with a sense of its deep potentialities, with its insights into the alienated condition of men and with glimpses of a liberating union, a truly human harmony’ (p. 173).

The Individual in Art Lindsay spent much of his life writing about extraordinary individuals, yet he was aligned with a political movement that was opposed to (bourgeois) individualism. Lindsay notes that Georgi Plekhanov’s essay, ‘On the Role of the Individual in History’ (1898), to which the title of his own essay refers, argued that history and the social, political and economic forces that constitute it, not biology, create the grounds on which a particular individual may come to prominence and he précises Engels’ explanation (1894) of the same point: ‘If Napoleon hadn’t been there, some other military leader would have come up to carry out much the same general function … though the details of what happened, and many of the incidental consequences, would have been different’ (p. 371). Lindsay accepts the thesis that ‘the major forces in history will always find somebody to embody and advance them’ (p. 371) and adds: ‘we may say the same is true of art’ (p. 371). Lindsay contends that the talented individual not only represents key trends in the ‘socio-political and intellectual development’ of their time but also was often consciously engaged with those trends, sometimes in opposition to them. Others were representative of those trends,

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communicating them uncritically, but they did so with such clarity that they exposed social, political and economic realities usually kept hidden, as he noted of Jane Austen (TFOL, p. 116). This typically involves the artist’s manipulation of sensory engagement and their interrelation of the sensory, emotional and intellectual in the work to create a new way for the audience to understand and analyse their world. For Lindsay, this is a crucial cultural practice in a society characterised by alienation.

The Artist Lindsay defines the individuality of the artist as emerging out of their ‘aesthetic and personal’ response to their total situation ‘which will include, directly or in various degrees of refraction, elements from all the most significant aspects of the situation, the entangled movement of which he is willynilly a part’ (p. 373). He rejects the notion of the artist standing apart from society: the great artist, he argues, is at the very heart of the struggle, ‘at the heart of the movement, the conflict’ (p. 373), and in their work can be found ‘the social essence of the situation’ (p.  373). For Lindsay the artwork itself is the realisation of the unity of the artist and their world: ‘The conflict and the union of the individual with his world both appear in the dynamic resolution of the work of art’ (p. 373). Lindsay contrasts this with what he regards as the failure of abstract art and its makers. The fact that abstraction involves the taking apart of the image and the treatment of aspects of the totality as ‘things-in-themselves’ (p. 373) is problematic for Lindsay as it represents the artist’s failure or refusal to see or strive to find ‘the integrated form’ (p. 374): ‘At core it means the abandonment of all efforts to create totalities, integrations of man and the world’ (p. 373). From this viewpoint abstract art is both an accurate representation and an agent of the alienating forces that fragment human beings and separate them from each other and the natural world. The abstraction may focus on the subject-matter of the artwork, as Expressionism focuses on the viewer’s emotional response, but without exploring the genesis and meaning of the relationship. Or it may focus on the art practice as in action-painting (gestural abstraction), driven apparently by the instinctual response of the artist to the canvas and isolated from social and political engagement. Accordingly, he argues, abstract artists are not so much individual as individualist, refusing to engage with the struggles taking place in their society:

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Any form of integration is seen as an imposition from without; for the artist has detached himself from that struggle, from all concepts of significant union as well as from the craft basis which was one aspect of the social reality of past art, and he feels such things as an external intruder threatening his virginly spontaneous individuality. (p. 374)

The value of this art, Lindsay argues, resides in the supposed spontaneity of the artist, which will be sold to the highest bidder. Lindsay concludes that art produced on this basis is ‘the final reflection of bourgeois egoism’ (p.  375), despite its own self-image as rebelling against authority from both the art-world and society. For Lindsay, ‘it reposes on a rejection of the ordering and organizing forces that create humanity’ (p. 374) and in so doing collaborates with the ‘thingifying’, alienating practices of capitalism: ‘Individuality becomes the unique property of the individual, a given thing … the social aspect is ignored or veiled’ (p. 375). Far from being a rebel, the individualist artist is the lackey of capitalism. With the loss of the artist’s relationship with both society and the history of the craft, Lindsay argues, (individualist) art can have no meaning. Its vision of society is nihilist: ‘So we find the idea of a society, not as a living process, a complex of positive and negative, integrative and disintegrative forces, but as a repressive totality, which is doing its best to blot out or tie up the individuality of the artist’ (p. 375). The individualist artist colludes with this repressive vision of society and the notion of the artist as a rebel, which validates the artist as individualist genius and the bourgeois concept of individuality as ‘something that forms itself by throwing off all influences and pressures, by merely being its mysterious self’ (p. 375). The artist is co-opted by bourgeois ideology as an exemplar of the individualist self that is born, not made. In bourgeois ideology, Lindsay notes, ‘the self is not something that has to be formed by a difficult and entangled effort’ (p. 375; italics added). Lindsay traces the history of this conception of the artist, relating it to the artist’s desire for social status (to become ‘a gentleman’), the growth of patronage, and the development of academies ‘generally under royal patronage, in place of the old guild systems of apprenticeship’ (p. 379). The result, he argues, was a notion of creativity that elides training and collaboration in favour of the individual genius who asserts mastery by rebellion against the history of the artform or society or both. The notion that an artist can produce work of value with a purely idiosyncratic vision is, for Lindsay, akin to the anarchist assumption that destruction inevitably

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leads to a new and different society: ‘the mere act of destruction does not itself solve “the enormously complex problems of inheritances from the previous stage”’ (p. 380). Those inheritances need to be understood and their value to the present moment assessed. In the same way, Lindsay argues, quantitative science may be retained ‘while displacing [it] from the centre of our systems’; the cash-nexus can be analysed so that it can be ‘steadily weakened and finally eliminated’ (p. 380). This cannot be done by the rebel who rejects all connection and collaboration; it requires a totalising, unifying vision.

Technology as Distraction Lindsay cautioned the same contextual critical approach in relation to the arts and media. The book, for example, has been long associated with bourgeois culture and he notes that ‘it is valid enough to discuss the ways in which it has reinforced the egoist and alienating trends of bourgeois society’ (pp. 380–81). However, he argues, to identify it as bourgeois and therefore as capable of articulating only bourgeois ideas and values is to fall into the same reductive thinking as bourgeois ideology, which regards the notion of society as a repressive totality. Lindsay reads Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of media as typifying this simplistic thinking with its argument that media technologies such as radio and television have replaced the lone, isolated (bourgeois) reader with a global village. He argues that McLuhan, like Benjamin some years earlier, was seduced by technology and quotes Stanley Mitchell’s criticism of Benjamin: Because Benjamin was the child of the first phase of a new technological era, when techniques like photo-montage had a direct political effect, he sometimes tended to isolate technique as politically effective in itself, and to ignore that the politicalisation of technology involves the relations, as well as the means of production. (p. 382)

Lindsay argues that, in focusing directly on the engagement between the individual and technology without acknowledging any mediation by the ‘content’, both Benjamin and McLuhan constitute the audience as an undifferentiated mass: ‘the individual is swallowed up in the collective, of which he is an exact refraction’ (p. 382). Equally, turning the focus from ‘content’ to ‘form’ (in their case, the technology) does not address the

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major issue for the artwork, which is how the form of the work communicates and resolves the complexity of the forces and inheritances with which the work deals and their relationships with the artist’s society: ‘the conflict in the content with its roots in the life-process’ (p. 383). For Lindsay the content of the work cannot be subsumed as an effect of the technology but is crucial to the work’s meaning and is where it most clearly engages with the society in which it is produced. So, while the media theory of Benjamin and McLuhan may be attempting to relate art and life more directly, in the end, he argues, ‘its effect is to dissociate them completely by making the relationship non-human, mechanical’ (p. 383).

Critical Methodology In the place of theory that prioritises the technology of the artwork Lindsay argues for a critical methodology that will enable the artwork to be understood and analysed in relation to both the social world and art history, and empower the artist ‘who is tackling the problem of creating an art which can stand against the art of the past without imitating it, and which can grasp the living moment in all its immediacy, violent or lyrical, without being enclosed in it, unable to achieve a fuller perspective’ (p. 383). He adds that, through its identification of patterns of thought and ideas emerging in the present, this art will foreshadow the future, citing the Brechtian maxim recorded by Walter Benjamin: ‘Don’t start from the good old things, but from the bad new ones’ (p. 384). Among the bad new things Lindsay includes the Modernist writing and art that dominated the first half of the twentieth century: ‘the Joycean flow of consciousness, Proustian vicious-circles of analysis, Kafkan allegorical abstractions, concentrations on the atomic bombardment of the senses, endless monologues of the morally-dead isolated in a rubbish-tin, the putting together of torn-up bits of other books in any old order’ (pp. 384–85) all of which Lindsay identifies as ‘the reduction of human beings and their life-moments to the same level as all the other objects surrounding them, the reduction of the complex moral and social involvements of people to a moment of choice in which no act of choice is possible’ (p. 385). Lindsay acknowledges that behind all these strategies was an attempt to ‘grasp the existential moment in its fullness’ (p. 385); yet, for him, this is not enough. Lindsay suggests the critical use of Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit, ‘“a nunc stans, in which time stands still, where past and future converge not

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harmoniously, but explosively, in the present moment” (Stanley Mitchell)’ (p. 385). Applied to art, this concept demands an analysis of the past and the identification in the present of the patterns of thought and behaviour, the sense of being, that constitute the future: the elements Lindsay has identified as the critical perspective necessary for the artist who wishes to move beyond the assumptions of the dominant culture. For Lindsay artworks based on the jeztzeit model would have both an overarching totalising vision as well as an intense sense of the everyday, ‘the lived-­moment, of the life-process grasped in the immediate fullness of the here-­and-­now’ (p.  386) without its Modernist metaphysics. Lindsay views both Modernism and Socialist Realism through this lens, urging the former to discard its metaphysical ‘moment of epiphany’ and the latter to throw off the utopianism that predicts the future according to a specific ideological projection. Instead, Lindsay argues for the construction of both the individual and society as dynamic, in a state of constant struggle, in which lies their freedom and their ability to shape the future.

Alienation, Art and the Senses Lindsay acknowledges in the work of the major Modernist writers, Marcel Proust and James Joyce the struggle to capture and convey the world of everyday experience. Yet, he argues, their interest is not in the relation between the individual and the (social, political, economic) totality but between the ego and its ‘accumulated capital of impression, thoughts, emotions’ (p. 401). For him, their analysis is trapped by the individualist ideology that has caused the alienation in the first place and which lauds them as artists of genius: ‘This inner fund each writer treats as his own mysterious property, his godgiven essence, not as something which owes its very being always to interaction, interrelation, participation, fusion with others inside the dynamic whole’ (p. 401). One consequence of this model of the self is that the individual is rendered effectively passive, their personal (sensory, emotional and intellectual) capital locked within each individual, rather than formed, maintained and developed through interaction, interrelation, participation and union with others within a dynamic, changing and contested social environment. Lindsay finds no contradiction in the notion of the individual as fundamentally social, as there is for an individualist ideology that constitutes the individual in opposition to the social. With a dynamic, interconnected model of the self, Lindsay argued that ‘interaction, interrelation,

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participation, fusion with others’ are the ways in which the individuality of the self is continuously honed and refined, not diminished. Hence of the individual artist he writes: ‘it is the fullness of sensuous experience in the artist himself that provides the living quality of particular existence in his images or characters, in his whole method of expression’ (p. 406). This conception of the artist is based on both the individual artist’s response to the art-discipline and its inherited meanings that become part of the specific artwork, and the fundamentally social nature of the senses: ‘The senses as well as the mind of men are socially formed’ (p. 406). And, lest this be seen as challenging the uniqueness of the individual and their experience of the world, Lindsay noted: ‘If a person without a mind is a mere chaos, without senses he is a ghost’ (p. 407); insubstantial, incapable of interaction, unable to communicate, unable to engage with others or their world. The importance of sensory engagement, Lindsay argued, lies with its fundamental interrelationship with the mind to constitute the individual self, and the role of art is to reconstitute that relationship: In creative activity the dialectical unity of mind and sense is continually raised to a new level. A new concentration of the life-force is achieved, in which an enhanced intensity of living is merged with a fuller understanding of relationships. In this sense the signature of true individuality in an artwork lies in its organic nature: the way in which its intellectual and moral definition is fused with a sensuously apprehended world of people and nature. (p. 407)

By showing in the artwork the interrelationship of senses and intellect, body and mind, Lindsay argued, the artist works to heal the alienation generated by capitalism that disparages the contribution of the sensory to human being: ‘At the heart of alienation lies the withering and impoverishment of the sensuous being, together with an inability to grasp and understand the social whole of which the individual is a part’ (p.  408). Lindsay cites Marx’s argument in ‘Private Property and Communism’ (1844) that capitalism degrades the senses so that they are ‘cut off from the alienated person, turned into external things, then reunited with him in a degraded form, as something animal, separated from his human nature and opposed to it, instead of representing its richest forms of expression and fulfillment’ (p.  408). Freeing the senses from this servitude and

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denigration is, therefore, a way of reclaiming humanity. Lindsay quotes Marx: ‘The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’ (p. 410). Lindsay goes on to argue that, because they are engaged fully in the practice of relating the senses to human being and experience, artists provide a model of fully realised humanity to which all should aspire (pp. 410–11). Which brings him back to William Morris.

Morris, Art and the Senses For Lindsay Morris redefined the nature of art for his fellow Victorians: ‘The thing that I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour’ (Morris quoted, p. 411). Written at a time when very few people experienced pleasure through their labour, this was a provocative statement aimed at the economic basis of capitalism and its alienating consequences for the individual. Lindsay again quotes Morris: ‘If a man has to do work which he despises, which does not satisfy his natural and rightful desire for pleasure, the greater part of his life must pass unhappily and without self-respect’ (p.  412). Accordingly Morris concludes: ‘the chief duty of the civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all’ (p. 412). Lindsay notes that Morris came to his philosophy through his own work and that ‘by living out this belief in action to the bitter end he had given his Marxism a rich content that rediscovered the points which Marx had laid down in 1844’ (p. 413). He adds that, despite the fact that Morris did not have the strong philosophical background and capability of Marx, ‘he was the first Marxist to put in print the concept of history as involving a spiral movement in which old forms returned, changed and given a new force through the intervening period, their positive aspects now freed from limiting elements’ (p. 413). Lindsay notes also that Morris’ historical knowledge included societies based not on private accumulation of wealth but ‘brotherhood and the vital relation of art and work’ (p.  413). For Lindsay Morris’ argument transformed art from the fetishised product of individualist genius to a productive activity in which all members of society can and should be engaged. And since it involved the integration of all aspects of being (mind and body; sensing, feeling, thinking), it achieved the major aim of art, which is the full expression of individual humanity.

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Genealogy of Art Lindsay refers to his study of the role of art in the earliest human societies, noting that it was part of everyday experience not a differentiated or fetishised practice. Only in the manifesto issued by Mexican Socialist Realist artist, David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1922 does he find an echo of Morris’ ideal, which he relates to the revival of Indigenous art in the face of imperialist exploitation: Not only noble labour but even the smallest manifestation of material and spiritual vitality of our race spring from our native midst. Its admirable, exceptional and peculiar ability to create beauty is the highest and greatest spiritual expression, which constitutes our most valid heritage. It is great because it surges from the people; it is collective and our aesthetic aim is to socialise artistic expression. (p. 417)

Lindsay traces a trajectory from Siqueiros back to the admiration of Ruskin and Morris for early Gothic cathedrals for their manifestation of the skills, spirit and worldview of the community that created them. And he notes: In medieval art, as in the art of Siqueiros’ Mexico, the opposition or conflict of truth and beauty, of intellectual or moral purpose and sensuous enjoyment, has been overcome. The opposition or conflict of individual and collective has been overcome. The individual can experience the utmost pleasure of which he is capable in creating and enjoying the forms, and yet know at the same time that he is serving his own deepest moral need and is achieving union with his fellows. (p. 419)

Lindsay concludes the essay with a meditation on aesthetics, explaining Keats’ notion, ‘Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty’ as ‘the idea of an art which combined intellectual and social truth with sensuous fullness’ (p.  419). For Lindsay, if the senses and intellect are irrevocably intertwined, there is no possibility of an immoral or anti-social beauty. This argument confronts the alienated being of capitalist society, which constitutes the sensory as an appetite that is independent of other aspects of human being. For Lindsay, the struggle now is to overcome that division, to heal the schism within being so that truth and beauty are united: From Marx’s viewpoint any true socialist society must be one in which there is a ceaseless and conscious struggle to eliminate the division and fragmenta-

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tion of labour, the division of town and country—something to be achieved by other ways than creating huge cities and wrecking the countryside—and the division of hand and mind. And this struggle, Marx and Morris each saw in his own way, implicated the liberation of the human senses in a fully creative manner. (p. 415)

Three years after his book on Morris Lindsay published his last major author-study, William Blake: His Life and Work (1978). Lindsay’s first study of Blake was written under the influence, and largely under the thumb, of his father Norman who detested any talk of politics or social activism. Lindsay toed the family line and focused his analysis on Blake’s poetics, without reference either to his politics or to the visual art in which his poetry was often embedded. Now, fifty years later, Lindsay’s critical perspective has been transformed by decades of political activism, reading and writing, though he has retained the major interest in art practice that he shared with Norman. He combines all these resources to write his second study of the poet and artist who was perhaps more outspoken than any other on the role of the sensory and its inseparability from thought and understanding and who brought this understanding to his analysis of society and the alienation and subjugation of the individuals that comprise it. In his last author-study Lindsay brings us not only Blake the poet, but also Blake the prophet who exposed the corruption at the heart of class society and ripped the pious mask from the colluding clergy, and also Blake the inspiration whose dazzling images and stirring poetry continue to motivate people to work for a more just and equal society.

PART VI

The Late 1970s–1990; and William Blake (Revisited)

Until 1984 Jack Lindsay lived in the village of Castle Hedingham, Essex shadowed by MI5 officers, whom Meta once offered a cup of tea as they sat in their dark suits in a dark car parked conspicuously on a country road in rural Essex. It was there that his children, Philip and Helen grew up, where Meta worked as a potter and weaver and Jack as a writer. Helen Lindsay recalled being amazed when she started school to discover that other children’s parents had to leave the house to work as hers were always at home, a much less common occurrence in those days. In the early 1980s, now in his early 80s, Jack still met regularly with family, friends and scholars interested in his work. The Family Histories notes of this time: The other letters of the 1980s frequently mentioned his children Phil and Helen—he was clearly besotted with them and always anxious as to their wellbeing. Helen studied at Chelsea Art School, and then travelled to Australia. Phil commenced a physics course at Essex University, though ditched that and later studied computers. (pp. 55–6)

Lindsay’s anxiety about his children was often noted; he felt this acutely as a relatively aged parent of children just entering their twenties. As noted earlier, some of Lindsay’s most intimate autobiographical writing is in his poetry and in the section titled ‘The Final Arc: Poems 1957–1979’ of the Collected Poems there are works addressed to Meta, Philip and Helen, as well as to his brothers Ray and Philip and father, Norman. To Meta Jack dedicated the poem, ‘Remembering Robert Kett’ that evokes the spirit of the yeoman farmer of Wymondham, Norfolk

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(about fifty miles north of Castle Hedingham) who led a rebellion against land enclosures, and whose story he told in The Great Oak: A Story of 1549 (1957). The poem is about the land and political activism and the love for both that he shared with Meta (CP, p. 601): Life is enough and gold the Earth remains, Beyond our deaths, in all her spendthrift grains. Death is Life’s heart-of-hearts. The pulse that drives Breaks as it stores: one death is various lives. Rich with its roots entwined among the dead The red rose salves the wood from which it’s bred. O Love, the little Sun stoops at our will And out of songs the Earth awakens still; Yet here my living heart, in Silence, hears My buried heart that holds four hundred years.

For Philip there are two poems, one of which reflects on nuclear physics and his concerns reflected in the anti-nuclear movement of that time about the consequences of nuclear research. The poem nevertheless speaks of courage and the attempt to reach a new unity (CP, p. 599): How take the world to pieces, then put it alive together again? The problem’s crashed upon us all since Humpty Dumpty had his fall crackt from the bumptious abstract wall— since consciousness of human fate made us feel direly separate yet merged with something far more great, our lives a fragmentary part, yet pulses of a single heart.

For Helen also there are two poems, one accompanying his book on Helen of Troy that reflects his awareness of the gendered world that his daughter will have to negotiate in becoming herself (CP, p. 589): Rejoice and find yourself, I beg you then, not as Helen but in Helen Helen as the earth of choice Helen as the embosoming tree

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as well as Helen who steps gaily into the hells of chaffering men to blaze her paradisiac trail. Seek the whole truth and through the maze of dangerous and delightful days follow the thread that yet can save and guide through the deceitful cave where minotaurs, confronted, fail, into bare light, which sets us free.

Politics and Honours The Family Histories account of this period notes Jack’s continuing engagement with politics and records his account of having received honours from his long-relinquished homeland, though not in his adopted country: Jack frequently referred to political issues; and in letters in 1983 and 1984 mentioned that he had been honoured in Australia with an Order of Australia and Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He was somewhat bemused by this given his long absence from the country of his birth, commenting on the absence of any such acknowledgment in the UK—‘I have stayed too far left for the Establishment here to notice me.’ (p. 56)

The Family Histories also describes the publication in 1984 of a book of essays about Lindsay’s work, Culture and History: Essays Presented to Jack Lindsay edited by art historian Bernard Smith and including contributions from scholars in many fields including art, literature, anthropology, history and theatre. The authors of the Family Histories quote from a review of the work in Brisbane Courier Mail of 1 December 1984: The review says in part: ‘Art critic, anthropologist, novelist, historian and poet, few Queenslanders have achieved the stature in any one field of intellectual endeavour that Jack Lindsay has in so many. He is also a superb biographer…’ And further on: ‘…Jack Lindsay is today regarded as one of the masters of Marxist letters…He is also a leading 20th century intellectual whose close associates have included, at one time or another, Aldous Huxley, Liam O’Flaherty and Robert Graves, as well as Freud, Dubois, Jean Paul

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Sartre, Edith Sitwell, Krishna Menon, Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, and many more.’ (p. 110)

The same year, at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, Robert Mackie convened the symposium, Jack Lindsay: The Thirties and Forties that included papers on Lindsay’s historical novels, literary writing and publishing, poetry, and political philosophy. In his ‘Foreword’ to the published edition of the papers Geoffrey Bolton, historian and foundation member of the Institute wrote: It was not just that he is the only left-wing member of the remarkable Lindsay family, nor that he has been the formidably prolific author of over 150 books: translations, novels, biography, politics and philosophy. Beyond any question he is a classicist of great distinction and a stimulating thinker whose intellectual odyssey has touched on many major themes in 20th century ideological debate. Unabashedly a Marxist for many years, he never allowed his beliefs to sap his critical independence. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Awarded the Znak Pocheta by the Soviet Union and the Order of Australia by his own people (at the hands of a conservative government, too) he has received a belated measure of public recognition; but it has still remained for the academic community to pay him the compliment of an adequate amount of serious attention. (pp. 1–2)

Bolton acknowledges the intellectual independence that is key to both the abundance of Lindsay’s work and its relative obscurity. Lindsay was prolific not only because he needed to write to earn a living, but also because he worked outside the academy, without a guaranteed audience of academics and students for whom he would have had to tailor his work in specialist terms reflecting the disciplinary boundaries of the time. Lindsay recalled Leavis as having rejected his critical study of John Bunyan as ‘sociological’ not literary. Yet it is the breadth of his studies that gives his critical writing such life and interest and often meant his thinking led that of the academy by decades. During a meeting with Philip Lindsay in 2011 he and I discussed whether Jack would have won greater acclaim if he had waited a year at the end of his Honours degree in Classics at the University of Queensland in 1921 and taken the travelling scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge to complete his doctoral training as a classicist. Of course, the answer could only be: he might have, but he wouldn’t be Jack. His intellectual independence offended both the right and left of politics as well as

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members of the academy, but it gave Lindsay the freedom to push boundaries and, more pertinently, to show how those boundaries were often set by factors equally, though differently, political to those patrolled by the disciplinary beadles, who enforced the current version of the canon, literary and critical. Again, the Family Histories muses on the centrality of politics to Lindsay’s being, as it was for other members of the Parkinson family: How interesting that Jack’s political views, developed in England, were so like those of [Jack’s maternal cousins] Nancy, Molly and Alex—whose politicisation took place in Australia. One is tempted to attribute this to more than just coincidence—the extent to which nature and shared early nurture account for this, if at all, is a matter for conjecture—though the period of the depression and World War II in the 1930s and 1940s must also have been a strong influence on them all in the development of a sense of social justice and the seeking of philosophical and political means of redress for inequalities and injustices. (p. 56)

This was another way in which Lindsay was closer to his mother’s family than his father’s. The politics associated here with Jack and his maternal cousins is not the Cold War ideology of left or right but the struggle for social justice including reparation for historical maltreatment and abuse.

Cambridge In 1984 Jack and Meta moved to Cambridge to be closer to medical facilities. During that year Jack wrote: Meta has felt the house and grounds have been getting too much for her, and will get even more so. So she wants to move to Cambridge. If we got a reasonable place, I would enjoy that in many ways. But the process of moving—my books etc etc—dismays me. (Personal communication)

Despite the burden of relocating Jack’s roughly eight thousand books, in October 1984 the couple moved to Clarendon Street, Cambridge, just over a block from the Victorian park, Christ’s Pieces and two blocks from Parker’s Piece, a large open parkland. The following year Jack wrote that he continued to like Cambridge, but that age was catching up with him: ‘85th year! My nervous energy has much evaporated, though so far I’ve no definite physical complaint beyond that. Can’t imagine tackling another

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book—unless a small one’ (personal communication). That final qualification could only have been written by the extraordinarily prolific Jack Lindsay. The Clarendon Street house also proved to be too large for them to manage and they moved again to a terrace house in Maids Causeway, Cambridge which Jack wrote ‘is just what suits us’. It was only five minutes’ walk away from the Clarendon Street house and two minutes from Midsummer Common, an ancient area of common land close to the heart of the city, flanked on one side by the river Cam and home to many local events and festivals. This would be the final home for both Jack and, nearly twenty years later, Meta who loved its small but beautiful garden and the birds that visited there. Jack had a study in the new house and for some time continued working on a book about the English painter, George Romney, though this book would remain unfinished.

Farewell On 8 March 1990, aged eighty-nine, Jack died. As noted in Chap. 1, Robert Leeson began his Obituary in the Guardian (10 March 1990): ‘Jack Lindsay, “translator, polymath, biographer, poet man!” as Roy Fuller described him was as old as the century, steeped in its culture and politics. Generations of avant gardists, often unknowingly, trod in his footsteps’ (p. 21). Not only avantgarde artists, but also academics. To Fuller’s list of Lindsay’s fields of creativity and influence might be added cultural historian, novelist, art critic and literary critic. Lindsay’s work spanned a century in its creation and thousands of years in its scholarship, and it was fearless, unconstrained by any outside party or Party, conservative or communist. Like William Morris he did as much in his lifetime as several people. Yet, as Leeson notes, he was unerringly generous with his time and encouragement: ‘He always had time to listen to others and help them, while his creative output was staggering.’ Leeson concludes by addressing one of the complaints often made about Lindsay’s output: ‘Too productive? That is not the point. He was engaged in a life-long discussion with the world. “For me it is the quest that matters,” he said. “I always feel my work lies ahead.”’

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Final Publications After the publication of his major study of William Morris in 1975, Lindsay published thirteen more books. A number of these were all or partly based on previously published material. Decay and Renewal (1976) is a collection of published essays that also features two new papers, one of which (‘The Role of the Individual in Art’) was discussed in the previous chapter. The Blood Vote, a story of the ideological clamour around World War I in Australia and the government’s (failed) attempts to introduce conscription, written in 1937 and put aside by Lindsay as unlikely to find a publisher in the troubled years before the start of World War II, was published in 1981. Also that year, under the stewardship of James Borg, a comprehensive collection of Lindsay’s poetry, Collected Poems, illustrated with line drawings by Helen Lindsay, was published by Chiron Press, Illinois. Its 605 pages of verse constitutes a personal and intellectual autobiography that encompasses almost all of Jack’s life. Then in 1982 the three volumes of Lindsay’s autobiography were published under the collective title, Life Rarely Tells: An Autobiography in Three Volumes, with an Introduction by Michael Wilding and Bibliography by Jack Arnold. Of the other books three are cultural histories—of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century worlds of the troubadours, the early modern London of Daniel Defoe (1688–1730), and the breakup of the Roman Empire (350–600). Another is a translation of two works by Russian poet Alexander Blok, The Twelve and The Scythians, the former described by Lindsay as ‘the folklore of the revolutionary street’. There are three further artist studies—of Hogarth (1977), Gainsborough (1981) and Lindsay’s second major study of Turner (1985), which was effectively his final book, though his essay, William Morris: Dreamer of Dreams, revised and edited by David Gerrard, was published posthumously in 1991 by The Nine Elms Press, London. The other two publications of this period are literary studies, the posthumously published essay, William Morris: Dreamer of Dreams (1991) and The Crisis in Marxism (1981), Lindsay’s study of twentieth-century Marxist literary theorists, including Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci. Victor Paananen (2000) describes the theme of the book as ‘the distortion and sidetracking that Marxism has suffered through a failure to understand the events of 1917’, noting that ‘this concern is focused on developments that failed to maintain the unity of theory and practice that is

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fundamental to Marxism’ (p. 98). Lindsay’s conclusion, Paananen notes, is ‘an appeal for a recognition of the productive and transformative character of cultural activity, a modified understanding of the concepts of base and superstructure, and a return to dialectics’ (p. 99). The Crisis in Marxism followed the publication three years earlier of his final major author-study, William Blake: His Life and Work (1978). Instead of the apolitical poetics of William Blake: Creative Will and the Poetic Image (1927) Lindsay gives the reader a Marxist analysis that is informed by his own understanding of dialectics and of life as irrevocably interconnected, a unity made of diverse elements that we all constantly negotiate to realise ourselves as human beings.

CHAPTER 12

William Blake, Prophet

Jack Lindsay’s first study of William Blake (1927) was determinedly apolitical, with Blake analysed as a philosopher-poet and art conceived as a realm apart from and superior to the everyday world, which mirrored the views of his artist-father, Norman Lindsay. As well, his early study showed little understanding of and no interest in Blake’s visual art, focusing solely on the verbal or literary component of Blake’s composite texts. His last major literary study, William Blake: His Life and Work (1978), was dramatically different and demonstrates how Lindsay’s own thought has changed over the intervening five decades. The apolitical stance of the earlier book has been replaced by a Romantic-inspired, embodied and located Marxist analysis that brings together the knowledges and methodologies that Lindsay developed throughout his earlier studies. Blake has not changed; Lindsay has. Written during the political activism of the 1970s this second study of Blake highlights key elements of Lindsay’s thinking about the nature of being and consciousness, and about the role of ideology that had become a major focus for theorists such as Louis Althusser. Lindsay rejected the determinism of Althusser’s theory, along with his privileging of the intellectual. His study of the lower middle-class engraver who battled isolation and poverty to produce artworks that deconstruct the practice of ideology is both a homage to Blake and a way of demonstrating an alternative form of social and political analysis. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_12

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Early Life and Training Unlike his first study that begins poetically with the mature Blake strolling a country lane, Lindsay begins by identifying Blake’s family as lower middle class, his father James a hosier and haberdasher who worked and raised his family in Soho, London. The most unusual aspect of Blake’s early years was that he saw visions: a fearsome God who frightened the four-year-old William by staring at him through a window; a tree full of angels when he was nine or ten; a city of gold, silver and precious stones sometime later, suggesting to Lindsay that he was ‘already familiar with the Book of Revelations’ (p. 3). Later in the book Lindsay suggests that, when Blake composed The Four Zoas (1796–1807), he developed a form of eidetic projection that he explains by reference to the work of psychologist, E.R Jaensch: ‘when the influence of the imagination is at its maximum, they are ideas that, like after-images are projected outward and literally seen’ (p. 229). Peter Ackroyd, in his study, Blake (1995), suggests that Blake always had this facility and that this also explains his childhood visions. Lindsay notes that Blake’s early artistic skill was recognised by his family and that he attended a preparatory art-school from the age of ten. However, the cost of continuing his training as an artist was prohibitive and Blake was apprenticed as an engraver, a profession that would support him while maintaining a connection to the art world (p. 4). This training led to the development of Blake’s strong graphic style and his attachment to the classical Greek and Roman art and Gothic art that featured in his training, Lindsay noting: ‘Here was a union and conflict of opposites that took a long time to work out’ (p. 6). However, this vocational education meant that Blake did not participate in the visual arts training at the new Royal Academy of the Arts, presided over by Sir Joshua Reynolds whose views he would later contest in his Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (c. 1808) (B:CW, pp. 445–79). He was not a member of the fashionable artistic community of his time and, lamentably for Lindsay, he never appreciated the work of Reynolds’ student, J.M.W. Turner. Outside the academy, Lindsay writes, Blake developed his own art after business hours in the print shop that supported him and wife, Catherine. There he devised the process for making the illuminated books for which he later became famous, but which were commonly dismissed in his own time as eccentric or mad. Based on Alexander Gilchrist’s (1863) recount Lindsay explains how Blake composed his multimodal, verbal and visual text:

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Blake’s procedures were a kind of relief-etching. The system was well known and had been set out in the first chapter of Valuable Secrets concerning Arts and Trades, 1758, with six more editions by 1810. What Blake seems to have added was an ink unaffected by acid which he used to write on the copper. With his fervid mind he attached symbolic meanings to the method. (pp. 31–2)

That is, his compositions were not simply poetry with accompanying iterative illustrations; the meaning of the work is produced through the interrelation of the visual and verbal elements. The other artistic influence mentioned by Lindsay is the Swiss painter, Henry Fuseli who lived most of his life in Britain. Lindsay notes that Fuseli and Blake agreed on many issues, such as the pre-eminence of Michelangelo, but even more important was their shared love of the fantastic and of passionate expression in thought and art (p. 38). Lindsay traces to Fuseli’s influence ‘proportions in his figures that had little basis in real forms, repetition of attitudes and patterns, linear rhythms and undefined space, swirling movements’ (p.  38) though, Lindsay adds, he sometimes took these tactics to excess, as even Fuseli noted. Just as Blake’s artistic skills and abilities were constrained by the limited resources available for his training so was his intellectual development, Lindsay noting that his early influences were theologian-philosophers whose work he encountered through his exploration of Nonconformist Christianity.

Influences From the works of German philosopher, mystic and theologian, Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) Lindsay traces Blake’s notion of ‘Eternal Man’, the being not yet self-divided and alienated by social and political ideologies, and not sexually differentiated but including both feminine and masculine attributes (Lindsay uses the term, bisexual). Lindsay also cites Boehme’s symbolic (not literal) reading of the Old Testament as having provided Blake with a model for his own construction of mythologies and stories. In the work of the Swiss theologian and philosopher known as Paracelsus Lindsay identifies the notion of unity created from the dynamic interrelationship (not synthesis) of opposites that would fundamentally influence Blake’s work, along with his conception of imagination as the ability that enables human beings to create their world and themselves, paraphrasing

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the argument of Paracelsus His Archidoxies: ‘the imagination is the sun of man; it irradiates the earth, which is man. The whole heaven is nothing but imagination, and as man imagines himself to be, “such he is, and he is also that which he imagines”’ (p.  15). This notion of imagination as a creative power that enables humans to understand themselves in relation to their world would inspire Blake’s work and become the basis of his opposition to Enlightenment rationalism. From Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor, Lindsay argues, Blake took ‘an understanding of the symbolic significance of the ancient religious Mysteries, which supplied him with a mythical structure for his ideas and emotions as Boehme and Paracelsus could not’ (p. 35). Lindsay identifies this structure as the fall, death, resurrection, rebirth cycle characteristic of many ancient religions and mythologies as well as of Christianity, noting that Blake used it to dramatise the crises he saw afflicting his society and, at the same time, provide hope for a renewed future (p. 35). For Lindsay this also explains Blake’s renewed interest in ancient Greek mythology and its Eleusinian mysteries, which are based on a similar pattern. Added to this mix of philosophical and artistic influences was the work of Swedish theologian, mystic and philosopher known as Swedenborg. Lindsay notes that many of Swedenborg’s ideas interested Blake: the notion that ‘there is no other Idea of God than that of a Man’ to which Blake annotated ‘Man can have no idea of anything greater than Man’ (p.  36); Swedenborg’s insistence on the unity of love and wisdom that Blake extrapolated as ‘Thought without affection makes a distinction between Love & Wisdom, as it does between body & Spirit’ (p. 36). In his work, Lindsay argues, Blake would insist on the indivisibility of thought and emotion, body and spirit, and love and wisdom: ‘he is denying the old dualities, which split and fragment life, dividing man into body and soul or cutting heaven and hell away from immediate earthly experience’ (p. 39). And although Swedenborg did not propose a link between his contraries or link them with his notion of progression, they would become the basis of the ‘dialectic of contraries’ (p. 36) that would underpin Blake’s visions. For Lindsay, however, Blake’s dialectics had both negative and positive features. On the negative side, he identified a belief in an homogenising wholeness rather than unity (in diversity) of the organism. For Lindsay, this represented a failure to understand the interrelated fate of all beings. He relates this to Blake’s early exposure to the industrial revolution, before the formation of workers’ organisations and unions, and to his solitary

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work as an engraver (p. 90) that again meant he had no sense of collective action. Taking the place of the energy generated by the group or the collective Blake ‘must assert the self-creative energy of spirit’ (p.  39), the popular image of the Romantic artist though one which denies the sense of interconnection—within the self, with others, with the natural world— that is fundamental to much Romantic writing. On the positive side, Lindsay argues that there is one way in which Blake’s notion of dialectics surpasses that of Hegel, ‘in his stress on sensuous experience and the unity of body and mind’, which Lindsay likens to the writings of Marx (pp.  39–40). He adds that Blake’s subsequent criticism of Swedenborg was based on his isolation of the domains or levels of being (natural, spiritual, celestial), the interrelationship of which Blake saw as the source of creative transformation. For Blake, Lindsay argues, this isolation of levels represents the separation of body and mind, a fundamental misrepresentation of the (indivisible) nature of being, a falsification Blake identifies in the Enlightenment science that created the industrial revolution. Though Lindsay introduced Blake’s dialectics in his early study, he did not discuss the sources of his ideas, the most prominent of which is the work of Swedenborg.

Science and Reason Lindsay returns repeatedly throughout the study to Blake’s criticisms of science and the post-Enlightenment rationalism on which it is based. In his first two illuminated books—All Religions Are One (1788) and There Is No Natural Religion (1788)—Lindsay notes that Blake identifies Poetic Genius as enabling the transformative insights denied to the mechanical logic or Reason of quantitative science: Science, when purely quantitative, is a closed and static system, which he calls the Ratio or Reasoning Power. By it man can ‘only compare & judge of what he has already perceiv’d.’ But the poetic faculty can break through the Ratio and grasp the life-process at a new qualitative level. (p. 41)

In this way Reason becomes a self-generating and self-limiting mechanism that can only deal with the ‘reality’ it has delimited. The poetic faculty, Blake argues, is not constrained by this logic but is able to encompass life in all its complexity.

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Furthermore, Lindsay argues, Blake rejects Reason because it has become ‘the apologetics for the existing system of society’ (p. 42), used to justify aggressive and exploitative behaviours: The combination of ideas that Blake most detested can be seen clearly asserted by the philosopher Hobbes, for whom the new sciences were inseparable from a philosophic and political system that justified the exercise of power and aggression in natural law and self-preservation. Science and philosophy combined to provide the rationale for the class-state and the rule of the market. (p. 42)

Among the apologists for this non-contextual rationalistic worldview Lindsay includes the astronomer Johannes Kepler, philosopher John Locke and economist Adam Smith, for all of whom the quantitative description of the world (and universe) was the source of truth and, in Smith’s terms, with God as the maker and conductor of the vast machine we know as the universe. Lindsay notes that ‘the world of division and exploitation’ was thereby ‘proved to be natural and divinely ordained’ whereas ‘all the specifically human qualities, all the elements that enter into our experiences (apart from those mathematically graspable as quantities) were regarded as subjective, ghostly, not truly real’ (p. 42): ‘Reality was the mathematical world, the power-world, the cash-nexus and the laws of the market. This is the system that Blake groups under the heading of Reason or Abstract Demonstration, and attacks from every angle’ (p. 42). Lindsay argues that for Blake this use of Reason denied not only all the cultural, symbolic dimensions of human experience, but also the fundamental nature of being and consciousness, which include all the factors and experiences that Reason declared ‘unreal’. In Lindsay’s mature work, this critique of decontextualised rationalism recurs and although he identifies it also in his early study of Blake’s work, it is now given greater emphasis and explanation. As he reiterates, abstraction itself is not the problem but its use devoid of context, which effectively changes it from, in Blakean terms, fourfold to single vision which strips it of the scope and comprehensiveness that makes it useful to human being and society.

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Nature and Natural Man, Deconstructed Lindsay identifies one of the strategies used by Blake to reveal and challenge the power of science as his contrary use of the concepts, Nature and Natural Man: Nature becomes the term for the given world in all its limitations, a world ruled by money and the forces of alienation which transform men into things, a world ruled by endless inner and outer divisions. The Natural Man for Blake is the man who accepts without question this world of division in which the rule of money and the forces of the market are an aspect of a science which ignores all qualitative differences and reproduces phenomena to a purely quantitative level. (p. 40)

This is the ‘Nature’ of Natural Science, an abstraction from the myriad of phenomena that constitute human beings and the world in which they live, but without any sense of the interrelationships and connections that give those phenomena their meaning. Blake believed that the objectifying language of quantitative, mechanistic science had entered his contemporaries’ thinking, acting and being: ‘the mind-forg’d manacles’ of his poem, ‘London’. Hence Blake’s ‘Natural Man’ is not the individual freed of ideological constraints, but the individual who has accepted and internalised those constraints. Lindsay cautions that Blake’s target is the ‘Nature’ of ‘Natural Science’ that was used as a justification for capitalism, not the natural world of the ‘romantic counter-attack’ (p. 42). The Romantics would use the sensory engagement with nature as a way of healing the body-mind division of Enlightenment philosophy and science. Blake was their vanguard, alerting them to the mechanisms (philosophical, political, ideological) by which the split had occurred and its damaging consequences for both the individual and society. Lindsay identifies the works in which Blake presents his sustained critique of fetishised reason and its use by bourgeois ideology as the ‘Urizenic myths’, which include The First Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795) and The Song of Los (1795).

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Urizen, the Rule-Maker Blake’s most famous representation of this rationalistic mindset is Urizen. Lindsay argues that in The First Book of Urizen (B: CW, pp. 222–37) Blake sets out an alternative Genesis story, ‘a counter-myth of creation that will really explain how and why men have become divided spiritually and socially’ (p. 94). Blake describes the genesis of industrial capitalist society as the invention by Urizen of ‘an abstract method for dealing with reality: a method that takes one aspect in isolation and treats it as a thing-in-itself’ (p. 94). As this way of dealing with reality effectively closes individuals off from all connection with others and the world, it leads to what Lindsay terms ‘an inturned self-sufficient individualism’ (p.  94), the opposite of Blake’s (and Lindsay’s) interconnected model of being: ‘The result is the reduction of men to things and the construction of systems destructive of free expression, love, individuality’ (p. 94). As Lindsay notes, Blake identifies this with ‘purely quantitative science’ which he sees as reducing the cosmos to abstractions generated by its own methodology. It subsequently identifies these abstractions as reality, rejecting all else (other factors, ways of knowing) as unreal, ephemeral, fantasy. Opposing this practice of abstraction Blake introduces the poet-artist Los whose work challenges the divisiveness of abstract thinking by integrating body, mind and spirit. His continual struggle with Urizen leads to his self-division, creating his (female) emanation, Enitharmon who embodies the sense of loss caused by the split. From the union of Los and Enitharmon comes Orc, the spirit of revolution in response to whom Urizen develops his science of quantitative measurement. When this fails to repress the popular demand for freedom and equality, Urizen creates ‘the net of Religion’ (p. 95). For Lindsay this signifies Blake’s belief that quantitative science alone cannot dominate human beings; this requires a set of beliefs that destroys their internal unity and sense of self, making them vulnerable to manipulation. For Blake, Lindsay argues, orthodox religion is the perfect instrument of oppression. Lindsay also traces references in the poem to eighteenth-century evolutionary biology—‘The idea of organic evolution is indeed reflected in the whole structure of Urizen’ (p. 95), which implies that Blake is not opposed to all science. Rather his concern is that the scientific method, deployed mechanically not contextually, destroys the sense of unity and interconnectedness in human life. Even so, Lindsay notes, this can be seen as part of a necessary dialectic: ‘At the end of Jerusalem all the creative forms that

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Blake loves are united with the systems he detests in a new unity’ (p. 96). He quotes from Chapter IV of Jerusalem the names of those involved in constructing this new unity: ‘Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakespeare & Chaucer’ (B:CW, p.  745). When the new Jerusalem is achieved, Urizen is transformed, along with the science he represents: ‘Urizen becomes what he originally was: the first born Son of Light, a naked bright-beaming youth, throned on mountains of silver (love), amid the sweet fields of bliss “where liberty was justice & eternal science was mercy”, where everything has its rightful place’ (p.  96). Science is now engaged with everyday life, not dismissive of it.

Los, the Poet In The Book of Los (B: CW, pp. 255–60) Blake describes Urizen’s adversary, Los ‘who represents all the forces of transformative energy in men that resist the fettering limits imposed by Urizen (State, religion, all divisive ideologies)’ (p. 98). This work traces the genesis of Los and Lindsay again identifies references to science, particularly Newton’s dilemma over whether the world is constituted of discrete particles or a continuum, which Blake considered a weakness in his natural philosophy. Los is trapped in solid rock (‘A vast Solid, without fluctuation’ (l. 58)), then falling endlessly, all flux (‘Still he fell thro’ the Void, still a Void/ Found for falling, day and night without end’ (ll. 81–2)) until finally his mind learns to organise the contrary elements of his existence into a new being (‘Incessant the falling Mind labour’d,/ Organizing itself’ (ll. 98–9)). There is no contradiction for Blake in Los as both discrete and continuum, solid rock and falling in a void, just as he sees all individual lives as both specific and merged in a continuum or network of interrelations with other people and with the natural world that gives meaning to human being. Through the contest between Los and Urizen, Lindsay argues, Blake further reveals the practice of rationalist science; how it operates through the ideologies used to repress people’s belief in themselves and their rights: ‘The problem of breaking the illusion and creating (realising) what reality is in its fullness is still to be solved’ (p. 98). Lindsay describes Blake’s companion poem, The Song of Los (B:CW, pp. 245–48) as taking up ‘the story of the fettering of men by religious abstractions, their destruction by anti-sensuous anti-sexual creeds’ (p. 99). He singles out a passage in which ‘Blake attacks all the ruling principles of the Bourgeois world’ (p. 99):

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Shall not the King call for Famine from the heath, Nor the Priest for Pestilence from the fen, To restrain, to dismay, to thin The inhabitants of mountain and plain, In the day of full-feeding prosperity And the night of delicious songs? Shall not the Counsellor throw his curb Of Poverty on the laborious, To fix the price of labour, To invent allegoric riches?

The King and the Priest create famine and pestilence as a way of controlling the population, while the politician assists by fixing wages so low that workers are kept in grinding poverty to enable the rich to increase their wealth. Lindsay sees this passage as a precursor to Marx’s description of the difference between abstract and concrete labour, between ‘the great [creative] powers evoked in production and the alienating effects’ (p. 100). In this later analysis Urizen and Los become more than a Blakean version of Apollo and Dionysos, as they were in the early study. While retaining the energy of those earlier constructions, Lindsay now identifies in their characterisations a far more complex analysis that addresses the specific nature of his own society and the ideologies that shape its institutions as well as the lives and being of those that live within it.

Dialectical v. Binary As noted above, Lindsay identifies in these mature works by Blake a focus on how ideologies operate, often intersecting, to subjugate and control those who live under their influence. In earlier works such as There Is No Natural Religion (c.1788), Tiriel (1789), Songs of Innocence (1789), The Book of Thel (1789), The French Revolution (1791), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790–93) and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Lindsay identifies both textual experimentation and a focus on specific political events or instances of social or political injustice. Though again, Lindsay notes, Blake’s concern is the consciousness that underpins and enables them, such as the binary thinking illustrated by this verse from Plate 3 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

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Without Contraries there is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (B:CW, p. 149)

Lindsay describes this verse as Blake’s ‘dialectic of the union of opposites’ (p.  60); in which the opposing terms are united in a transformational move forward, rather than a binary in which one term defeats and subsumes the other. Furthermore, he notes, Blake identifies religion as mobilising binary thinking to designate those who do not challenge them (the passive) as Good and those who do challenge them (the active) as Evil. In Plate 4 of Visions, ‘The voice of the Devil’, Lindsay notes, Blake identifies the ‘error’, or political tactic, of religion as the construction of body and soul as a duality, with Energy, the generative force of the body, as evil (p. 60). Blake insists on the indivisibility (or unity) of body and soul, locating life as the Energy generated by embodied being and Reason (decontextualised rationalism) as delimiting the possibilities of being. 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight. (B:CW, p. 149)

For Lindsay, Blake consistently uses terms in a way that ‘transvalue[s]’ (p. 60) or contradicts and reverses, familiar assumptions and moral positions. As, for example, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion when the main character Oothoon insists on her purity despite her rape by the predatory Bromion. Oothoon’s action (and Blake’s representation of her action) transvalues the contemporary patriarchal construction of her as ‘tainted’ that is reinforced by the religious ideology than entraps her beloved, Theotormon.

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Revolution and Repression In what Lindsay identifies as the second phase of his work Blake ‘applies his method directly to the revolutionary situation and seeks to grasp the fundamental patterns of history’ (p.  100). So, in America: A Prophecy (1793) and Europe: A Prophecy (1794) Blake includes both historical agents (George III, Paine, Warren, Washington etc.) and symbolic figures (Urizen, Orc, Urthona, Enitharmon) who represent the forces that caused or were unleashed by the revolutions Blake describes. Lindsay writes of America: The Prophecy begins with the defiance of Washington. Then comes a verbal conflict defining what is at stake, followed by a battle between Orc, the figure devised to represent the spirit of defiant freedom, who is supported by the guardian Angels of the thirteen colonies, and Britain’s spirit, Albion’s Angel. … As Orc drives the pestilence back into Britain, a tyrant-god Urizen intervenes to freeze and arrest the whole action. The poem ends with a promise that Orc’s fires in time will melt Urizen’s frost; the revolutionary struggle will revive. (p. 77)

The symbolic figures reveal that the actions of the historical figures are not idiosyncratic but are the result of the systems of thought and belief that enable them. Hence replacing one king with another will not solve the problem of inequality and injustice in either America or England; the whole system of government and representation needs to be changed. Lindsay notes that in America Urizen ‘appears in action for the first time’ (p 78) as a repressive force stalling revolutionary change, reflecting the actions of the rulers of France, Spain and Italy struggling to hold back revolution in their own domains. And he adds: ‘The political repression is at the same time an alienation of man from his body, from sensuous fulfilment’ (p.  78). At the heart of this repression is the decontextualised abstract reasoning, figured as Urizen, that divides human beings from others, society and the natural world, as well as within their own being. The connection drawn by Blake between the political and social environment and individual being and consciousness is illustrated for Lindsay by Blake’s revisions to his poem, ‘London’ that appeared in another publication from this period, Songs of Experience (1789–94). I wander thro’ each charter’d street Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

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And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

In the first two lines Blake replaced the original adjective ‘dirty’ with ‘charter’d’. Though dirty might be read symbolically as well as literally or physically, Lindsay notes that Blake’s revision makes it clear that he is referring to not just the physical pollution of the city and its river, but its occupation by ‘the chartered companies, the big money-powers, which he sees as owning the city and its people’. And he adds: ‘The social content is deepened’ (p. 68). Even more striking is the revision that led to Blake’s most famous and enduring concept, the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (l.8). Lindsay notes that the original line used the phrase ‘german-forged links’ to express Blake’s concern about the power of the (Hanoverian) monarchy over the English State. However, Lindsay writes, Blake ‘drops the plain accusation of the state and speaks instead of the inner enslavement that power brings about’ (p. 68). The power of ideology rests not only with the institutional forces it mobilises, but also with its infiltration of the being and consciousness of those living within its influence. Controlled by internalised repression people no longer feel that they can or should rebel. Again, in this later study, Lindsay’s focus has changed from the individual to the forces formative of individual being, particularly the political and social ideologies and institutions that deny individuals power and autonomy and instead enlist them in the repression of their own being.

Prophetic Books and Alienation Lindsay identifies this concern about the power of ideology with the final phase of Blake’s work, the prophetic books that explore ‘the Urizenic world of false consciousness, of alienation’ (p.  100). Mostly, Lindsay argues, Blake hated industrial capitalism and its quantitative, decontextualised, rationalistic science ‘that saw the universe as a vast machine and the machine itself as a reflection of that universe in the productive sphere. He hated it for cruelly torturing and malforming the men, women, and children caught in its toils. One aspect involved the other’ (pp.  100–1).

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Lindsay notes that Blake’s symbolic use of the wheel and the mill suggest he knew little of contemporary technologies, though the wheel ‘symbolised the whole imprisoning system, found in the clock-wheel of dead time and the revolving heavens of Newton’ (p. 101). As early as 1797, Lindsay observes, Blake identified the alienating, soulless labour that was demanded by industrial capitalism (p. 128). Lindsay quotes from ‘Night the Seventh [b]’ of Vala, or the Four Zoas (1794–1805) (B:CW, pp. 263–382) Blake’s description of workers forced from their traditional crafts to work in factories: ‘Then left the sons of Urizen the plow & harrow, the loom,/ The hammer & the chisel & the rule & compasses’ (ll. 170–1). Their former work is scorned for its ‘simple workmanship’ (l. 175) and replaced by the production of weapons of war: ‘all the arts of life they chang’d into the arts of death’ (l. 174), an early manifestation of the military-industrial complex. With a vision that foretells the exploited worker of the film, Metropolis (Lang, 1927) Blake describes industrial work practice (B:CW, p. 337): And in their stead intricate wheels invented, Wheel without wheel, To perplex youth in their outgoings & bind to labours Of day & night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious workmanship, Kept ignorant of the use that they might spend the days of wisdom In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread, In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All, And call it demonstration, blind to all the simple rules of life.

Not only are the workers condemned to the drudgery of minor repetitive tasks, but they have no control over the product of their labour and, more critically, they no longer recognise that they should have.

Ideology and the Patriarchal Feminine In Lindsay’s analysis one of the most complex and informative discussions addresses Blake’s deconstruction of the patriarchal female, which he cites as a model of ideological practice more generally. Lindsay illustrates the power of ideology through his discussion of the patriarchal feminine, which he fears affects Blake as well. While acknowledging the power of Oothoon’s anti-patriarchal stance in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Lindsay struggles with Blake’s characterisation of the feminine,

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particularly in the character of Enitharmon. He writes of the ‘night of Enitharmon’s joy’ described in Plate 5 of Europe: ‘It gives an account of her woman’s world with its religion of vengeance, violence, repression, chastity. This world is in fact the Christianity of the last 1800 years, which is called a female dream’ (p.  83). From here on, Lindsay claims, Blake ‘holds fast to his condemnation of the female’, adding that she symbolises ‘the fallen life of the passively receptive senses’ (p. 83). This is the ‘female’ as created and defined by patriarchal ideology who has no active sensory being. In that formulation she is seen as limiting and controlling men’s sexual desire: ‘In a divided world the emanation torments the male’ (p. 85). The effect on the male, he writes is that he ‘tends to wither into a being who seeks abstract and tyrannic power. He is then a dark spectre or in his spectre’s control’ (p. 85). In other words, in patriarchal ideology patriarchal male brutality is blamed on women, or, more specifically, on the female subjectivity created by patriarchy. The man is saved only ‘if his wife knows her place, comforts and supports him, and becomes his “concentring vision”’ (p. 85), again a version of the patriarchal female, who then will be blamed for any transgressively active sensory (or other) behaviour. This iterative process shows how an ideology creates social roles and identities that delimit the being and experience of individual subjects and create the victims of violence and injustice as responsible for their own assault: women as responsible for male violence; workers as responsible for the greed and abuse of employers. Lindsay’s earlier study did not reach this kind of deconstructive analysis.

Revolution and Transformation Lindsay also finds in Blake’s work an alternative vision. In place of the brutalised and limited life governed by abstract reason that he sees as the catalyst for revolution in America and Europe, Blake proposes the inner unity of being that is produced not by the repression of some elements and dominance of others, but by the dialectical formation of new kinds of being from the co-development of contrary elements. Hence the bisexual ‘Man’ or human of Eternity (a state of ceaseless interconnection and transformation like Lindsay’s own notion of unity) is not the male who has subsumed the female but a new being with the qualities of both. As noted earlier, Blake’s dialectics does not rely on the suppression of one term in favour of another or the transformation of the subordinate term into a version of the dominant but is a transformative creation of something new.

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At the same time, Lindsay notes, Blake redefines the nature of Truth so that it ‘ceased to be an abstract or static thing; it involved an active movement of comprehension, which united the thinker dynamically with the world he explored’ (p. 86). With the reintegration of body and mind and individual and environment (social and natural) Blake constituted truth not as a set of (church and state) rules and regulations nor a scientific method that isolates phenomena from the environment in which they function but as generated through the individual’s embodied engagement with the world: ‘Action and thought were then only different aspects of the same moment of realisation’ (p. 86).

Imagination In discussing Blake’s visual art and his inability to appreciate the work of Turner, Lindsay challenges Blake’s understanding of imagination: ‘he could not conceive of the imagination as a transformative element in close relation to people, to events, to life-as-lived, lifting Nature to a new level of integration (as in Turner) and grappling realistically and directly with the full material of experience’ (p.  151). Instead Lindsay cites Blake’s adherence to ‘Renaissance categories as redefined in the eighteenth century’ (p. 150). Arguably, this may be related more to Blake’s vocational training than to his conception of imagination. This interpretation is enabled by Lindsay’s exploration of Blake’s training, dismissed in the first study but explored in detail in his later study. Later in his study Lindsay notes that Blake wrote specifically about imagination in his annotations to Bishop George Berkeley’s Siris (1746) (B:CW, pp. 773–75). To Berkeley’s claim that ‘God knoweth all things, as pure mind or intellect, but nothing by sense, nor in nor through a sensory. Therefore, to suppose a sensory of any kind, whether space or any other, in God would be very wrong, and lead us into false conceptions of his nature’, Blake responded: ‘Imagination or the Human Eternal Body in Every Man’. And to Berkeley’s claims that God has no body Blake counters: ‘Imagination or the Divine Body in every Man’. After further commentary Blake concludes: ‘This is my Opinion, but Forms must be apprehended by Sense or the Eye of Imagination. Man is all Imagination. God is Man & exists in us & we in him.’ These views reflect the influence of Paracelsus, identified by Lindsay as a major early influence on Blake. Lindsay acknowledges Blake’s understanding of the role of imagination in

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understanding ourselves and the world though he argues that Blake idealises imagination as ‘the life-process itself’. Responding to Blake’s annotation that ‘the Natural Body is an obstruction of the soul or Spiritual Body’ Lindsay writes that Blake thereby defines the body as ‘the source of both division and alienation, and of energy and unifying consciousness’ (p. 232). For Lindsay the problem is that Blake does not realise that the senses, fundamental to imagination, are ‘social products as well as products of organic nature’ (p. 232). As a result, ‘he can relate the two sides of his proposition only in terms of his symbolic imagery’ (p. 232), not in terms of direct bodily (including sensory) experience of the world. Nevertheless, for Blake, Lindsay argues, imagination plays a defining role in art, enabling it to be more than an imitation of the real but as playing a transformative role in society: True art he [Blake] says arises only in the struggle to liberate man from the destroyer; nature and imitation represent the acceptance of things as they are. The imaginative act is always a comprehension of the whole living situation and a transformation of it. (p. 233)

In this later study imagination is not only the means of reconnecting body and mind (via the poetic image) and enabling people to see their world differently; it is also based in an analysis and re-conceptualisation of the world in which they live. Not fancy; but an embodied engagement with the world that transforms both it and them.

Literary Analysis Throughout the study Lindsay traces the literary forms used by Blake— from his earliest tract-like writing, to the mythical works that he based on the writing of poets such as Thomas Chatterton and James MacPherson (particularly his Ossian cycle), the Methodist hymns and Books of Experience that were the model for his lyrical works, and his later prophetic books that reflected the contemporary interest in works of prophecy by writers such as Richard Brothers and Joanna Southwood. In each case, Lindsay writes, Blake was searching for the form that would best work for the ideas he wished to convey, which were in themselves complex and multifaceted: ‘In his symbolic universe Blake attempts a synthesis of all the elements of conflict, change, balance and unbalance in his age:

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elements social, political, economic, psychological, scientific, aesthetic, moral’ (p. 118). For Lindsay, the reach and complexity of Blake’s work is represented by his last two major works.

Milton Milton was the result of Blake’s search for a literary form that could express the profound changes happening in his society: an epic poem in two books, with symbolic and actual characters including Blake himself, that explored the role of art and the artist during a phase of epochal transformation: ‘First, the two books balance one another, dealing with the making of the poet, then the making of the poem. Inspiration stirs the imagination and becomes the poem; the poem in the last resort is not to be distinguished from the poet’ (p. 181). Blake chose as his model Milton’s epic poem in blank verse, Paradise Lost (1677), written as the country was attempting to overcome political and social divisions, the result of three successive Civil Wars, the execution of a monarch (Charles I), the formation of the Commonwealth and a period of Parliamentary rule (when the committed republican, Milton served the new republic for several years as a diplomat), the Protectorate ruled by Oliver Cromwell, and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. Lindsay writes: ‘Blake explores Milton’s expression, which represents the highest level of consciousness generated by the Cromwellian revolution as his own prophecies represent the highest level generated by the French Revolution, Blake is thus himself Milton, but Milton operating at a more advanced stage of history, poetry, prophecy’ (p. 175). To establish this trajectory from Milton to his own work, Lindsay argues, Blake needed to intervene in the orthodox readings of Milton’s great poem as the triumph of a Urizenic God, the lawmaker. Blake had already written of Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and “of the devil’s party without knowing it”’ (Plates 5–6), a judgment Lindsay identifies with the Milton who fought against censorship, the monarchy and the power of the church, and for divorce. Therefore, Lindsay writes, Blake attributes to his character, Milton a moment of self-recognition: ‘Milton … understands that Satan’s errors are his own. He leaves heaven to return to earth. His new prophetic insights enable him to correct old religious errors, and he struggles with Urizen’ (p. 180).

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Yet, Lindsay notes, with its parallel historical and symbolic narratives this complicated poem struggles to explain how to bring about the transformation of a divided world. Blake claims that visionary poets and artists (and liberated and libidinous lovers) have a vital role in creating a harmonious society but cannot specify ‘just how imaginative activity and happiness in love come together to create the spontaneity of mass-revolt symbolised in Orc [the spirit of Revolution]’ (p. 183). Nor can he explain how that revolt can be prevented from descending into a new tyranny, as happened under Cromwell after the Civil Wars and in France after the 1789 Revolution. Lindsay adds that if Milton must accept ‘bardic responsibility’ (as critic David Erdman phrased it) for the failure of the revolution led by Cromwell and for subsequent social and political corruption and division, then logically Blake has the same responsibility for ‘Robespierre and Napoleon, for Pitt and Nelson’ (p. 184). Above all, Lindsay suggests, the lesson of the work is that ‘we must not change one tyranny for another’ (p, 184).

Jerusalem Blake followed Milton with his final major work, Jerusalem (1804–20), which Lindsay describes as ‘his most complete picture of the universe in terms at once symbolic and historical, psychological and social, philosophic and aesthetic’ (p. 233). The poem addresses the state of England from Trafalgar (1805) to Waterloo (1815) and is written in a form Lindsay describes as declamatory: ‘its system of rhythmic expressiveness suited to theme and emotion. It is both narrative and dramatic, with Biblical and Miltonic echoes, but turning to direct speech’ (p. 234). Jerusalem is an epic poem about the whole of life, from the grandest historical events to the intimate functioning of individual being. The rhythm in the poem, Lindsay notes, helps the reader navigate the narrative in a Wagnerian way (p. 234); it also creates a sense of immediacy that draws the reader into the world of the text. Lindsay notes that Blake was aware of the power of music to inspire and unite people, condemning the use of patriotic music to induce support for imperial war (p. 192) but singing the lyrics of all his own works. The unity of poetry, music and art, Lindsay argues, ‘represents the primal organisation of the human faculties which he believed will be reborn in the revolutionary future’ (p.  235). Blake’s aim is to (re)create the unity of being that abstract reason, deployed by industrial capitalism, has destroyed. At the social level this means ‘how

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a fallen or divided people … regain their wholeness, their free and undistorted awareness of the life-process’ (p.  235). Referring back to the ‘Preface’ to Milton (particularly the verses beginning, ‘And did those feet in ancient time’) Lindsay notes that the locus of Blake’s vision is not Palestine: ‘Blake is saying that … our problem is here, amid the dark satanic mills and the green pleasant land, to build Jerusalem. The reunion of Albion and Jerusalem means the creation of a free and fraternal Britain or world’ (p. 235). To achieve unity, he adds, Blake believes we must first understand how we got to the current stage of disunity and division. This is what he sets out to explain in Jerusalem. Lindsay argues that Jerusalem reiterates Blake’s analysis of social division that is reflected in the being and relationships of individuals, though Lindsay notes that the issue of peace and war is more evident than in earlier works. Though he has some misgivings about the poem—‘Too much of the work consists of lists and blank statements more suited to a mythological textbook than an imaginative poem’ (p. 238)—Lindsay concludes: For all its weaknesses Jerusalem is a not unfitting conclusion of Blake’s prophetic vision. He expressed an ardent faith in revolutionary action in the Lambeth books, a huge vision of the condition of divided man in the Four Zoas, a revaluation of the English revolution and of the issues of contemporary culture in Milton, and then a critique of war as the final world-wide form of power-perversion and money-rule. (p. 239)

And even though Lindsay sees the poem at times as veering erratically between Blake’s personal dilemmas and his social analysis, in the end he achieves a creative balance: ‘We confront not only an unparalleled poetic universe of forms, images, symbols, but also a penetration into the processes of history which holds an ever-deepening meaning for all of us’ (p. 240). Yet again, the difference between Lindsay’s early study and this later work is his insistence that the poet must engage with their society and the forces that have made it, not simply retreat into a dream-world or idealist fantasy.

Final Years Lindsay writes that in his final years Blake became the focus of a group of young artists who called themselves ‘The Ancients’ though he doubts whether the group understood Blake’s work (p. 249). They did, however,

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offer him recognition and admiration that must have been welcome after the savage reviews of his work by Robert Hunt in 1808 who complained about the indecency of Blake’s depictions of reunions in heaven in his illustrations for The Grave by Robert Blair (p. 200) and the following year described Blake’s self-curated exhibition as ‘a few wretched pictures’, the Catalogue as ‘a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain’ and Blake himself as ‘an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement’ (p. 200). Though Lindsay, too, is critical of the Catalogue, which he sees as totally misrepresenting Blake’s views possibly to attract an audience, he noted that Blake never recovered from this savage criticism (p. 216). The Ancients were not Blake’s only supporters, however. Lindsay quotes statements from a range of people who admired Blake and acknowledged his eminence: the visitor to Blake’s home in Fountain Court who commented ‘Poor dear man, to think how ill he was used, yet he took it all so quietly’ (p. 242) and his friend Samuel Palmer’s account of taking him to a Royal Academy show in 1824: ‘Blake in his plain black suit and rather broad-brimmed, but not quakerish hat, standing so quietly among all the dressed-up, rustling, swelling people, and myself thinking, “How little you know who is among you”’ (p. 246). Most of his work in the last years was visual art and included his Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826), in which Blake reworked the familiar Biblical version to ‘depict the breakdown of the state of innocence, the tests and trials of the exposed individual in the world of experience, and his final rebirth of a new level of deepened understanding and secure relation to the cosmos’ (p. 258). He was also at work on the 100 illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, despite his absolute opposition to its worldview, ‘seeing it as an acceptance of tyrannical purposes, of the rule of power, law and punishment’ (p. 263). Lindsay notes that nervous anxiety still plagued Blake, along with ‘his now rooted fear of political action’ (p. 264). Blake’s failure to take the public stage troubled Lindsay throughout the study. It is not clear why he was so insistent that Blake should have been more direct with his criticism. He may have been concerned that Blake’s use of mythical figures such as Urizen, Orc and others alienated readers or simply left them bemused about the meaning of the work. Yet, generations of readers have been inspired by Orc’s rebellion, Oothoon’s rejection of patriarchal attitudes and by Blake’s understanding of the coercive power of industrial capitalism expressed in his phrase ‘mind-forg’d

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manacles’. Lindsay returned so often in the book to Blake’s fear of being charged with sedition (which eventually did happen, as it did for his reviewer, Robert Hunt) that it may be that Lindsay’s study of William Morris, published just a few years earlier, had an influence on his view of Blake’s role, as prophet rather than revolutionary. Morris was more overtly political than Blake: however, Blake’s world was very different. There was no organised working-class movement, and the power of the king was direct and despotic. Blake’s fears were well-founded and yet he created work that continues to inspire social critics and political activists to this day (Higgs 2019, 2021; Schama 2020). In 1827 Blake died, Lindsay citing as cause the stomach and gall bladder problems he had suffered for many years. Catherine was at his bedside along with a female neighbour and friend who commented: ‘I have been in at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel’ (p.  268). Blake reportedly died singing. He was buried according to his wishes in the Dissenters’ cemetery at Bunhill Fields beside other members of his family. Lindsay’s book ends by recounting Catherine’s death some four years later and the squabbles over her property, which ended with Frederick Tatham taking all the materials related to Blake’s work. Lindsay adds: ‘His unforgivable crime, however, was his destruction of a great many of Blake’s manuscripts. Anne Gilchrist speaks of his holocaust of the manuscripts’ (pp. 273–4). Lindsay concludes: ‘What we have lost we can never know’ (p. 274). Many reviews and scholarly accounts of Blake’s work appeared soon after his death but for Lindsay the most serious and impressive was the anonymous essay, ‘The inventions of William Blake, painter and poet’ published in the March 1830 issue of The London University Magazine. He quotes this essay at some length, and we may take it as his final tribute to the poet and artist who understood and battled against the effect on the being and everyday lives of his fellow Britons of mechanistic science and industrial technology, deployed within a capitalist economy with colonial and imperial ambitions: We may say, Blake in his single person united all the grand combination of art and mind, poetry, music, and painting; and we may carry the simile still further, and say, that as England is the least fettered by the minds of other nations, so Blake poured forth his effusions in his own grand style, copying no one … but breathing spirit and life into his works; and though shaping forms from the world of his creative and sportive imagination, yet he still

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remembered he was a moral as well as intellectual citizen of England, bound both to love and instruct her … … we should endeavour … to unlock the prison-door in which we are placed, and gain an insight into his powerful mind than rail and scoff at him as a dreamer and madman. (p. 271)

For Lindsay, Blake’s avoidance of direct political action might have disqualified him from the role of revolutionary, but it did not detract from the prophetic wisdom of his analysis of industrial capitalism, nor the deep humanity that enabled him to analyse and represent its repressive effect on those whose lives were ruled by its decontextualised, abstract reasoning. The essay argues, as does Lindsay’s book, that our best response to negative claims about Blake would be to try to release ourselves from our own ideological prison (our own ‘mind-forg’d manacles’), in the process learning the power and subtlety of Blake’s analysis. Which may also have been Lindsay’s reflection on the difference between his earlier, youthfully enthusiastic, poetics-based study and this later, socially, politically and aesthetically engaged, Marxist analysis.

CHAPTER 13

Art, Politics and Ideology

Three years after his second study of William Blake Jack Lindsay published an assessment of the state of Marxist cultural theory, The Crisis in Marxism (1981). Lindsay was concerned by the failures of Marxism to acknowledge its own ‘outworn formulations’ (p. 2) and to ‘keep abreast of history in all its complexity and richness’ (p. 2), particularly at a time when the Cold War was still raging, nuclear war seemed an imminent possibility and capitalism had shown no sign of weakening its grip on the Western world. The fact that Lindsay conducts his analysis of Marxism through the work of literary and cultural, rather than political, theorists attests to the centrality of cultural theory and analysis to all of his work. In a sense this is Lindsay, channelling Blake, arguing for a transformation of thinking about being and knowing that will enable Marxism to escape its own subversion by capitalism. For this study it is a statement of Lindsay’s mature position as a writer, critic and political activist. He begins the study by reiterating the basic principles underpinning his own work and then moves to an assessment of the work of those critics whose work he finds most influential in contemporary Western Marxist thought. This ranges from the foundational work of Hungarian literary critic and philosopher, Georg Lukács to that of Louis Althusser, Algerian-born French philosopher whose work focussed on the power and role of ideology. Lindsay agreed that the power of ideology to control people’s thinking and acting—the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ of Blake’s poem, ‘London’—was a major concern for Marxism but was © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_13

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not convinced by theorists and movements that focussed on systems and structures, rather than people—and so failed to recognise both how ideology functions and how people work to resist it. He concludes by reiterating his views of science and dialectics as forms of knowledge production; of alienation as a major outcome of the dominance of decontextualised knowledge and associated social and economic practices; and of art as exemplifying the production of unified, embodied being and knowing.

Foundations Lindsay begins from first principles, reminding readers that the closest Marx and Engels got to what is now called Marxism was historical materialism, ‘a philosophy and science of history which grasped the essential forces and structures at work in human development, indeed in all process’ (p.  3). The nature of those ‘essential forces and structures’ was revealed by dialectical materialism, re-focussing Hegelian dialectics on the material and social conditions of society, rather than on an intellectual or spiritual causality. For Lindsay it was essential that this method of analysis should take account of non-quantifiable factors that constitute the everyday life of a community or society. When these (sensory, emotional, intellectual, cultural) factors are repressed, whether by capitalist or communist ideologues, the result is alienation of the individual from vital aspects of their own being, from others and from the natural world. Marxist theorists had predicted that the internal conflicts of capitalism would result in social breakdown and a transformation into socialism, but this had not happened. In fact, Lindsay notes, it had proved impossible for a political party based on those principles to gain popular acceptance in most Western countries (p. 3). Lindsay locates his own Marxism as based on the transformational relationship between human beings and nature that is realised in tool making (p. 11). He argues that not only are humanity and nature interrelated and mutually defining (as Marx writes in Capital), but so also are material (technological, industrial) and symbolic (linguistic, graphic, acoustic, kinaesthetic) modes of production. He contrasts this with the notion of production as a thing in itself—a product for sale, isolated from its makers and all other aspects of its production. This removal of the product from the context of its production alienates human beings from essential aspects of their being, their transformational relationship to nature and the intellectual activity (science) involved in the process.

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For Lindsay, the base-superstructure model used by Marxist theorists during much of the twentieth-century repeats that error: ‘To attempt to limit the situation to an economic Base on which a social, political, cultural Superstructure is erected, is to oversimplify the situation hopelessly’ (p. 12). Engels, he notes, made the same point in a letter to Joseph Bloch in 1890: ‘If … somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase’ (p. 13). As did Stalin when he subordinated all forms of cultural representation to (his understanding of) the socialist base, a position represented by the Zhdanov doctrine (p. 14). This repression extended to science: ‘On a priori grounds Stalinism felt itself capable of telling empirical scientists what they ought to discover; there was no room for dissent’ (p.  15). Lindsay concludes: ‘Stalin’s use of dialectical formulas was arbitrary, twisted any way that suited his political policy’ (p. 15). Lindsay acknowledges that economically productive work plays a central role in human life, but he reiterates that it is not ‘a sort of machine that controls the other parts’ (p. 17). He exemplifies this in the work of J.M.W Turner that he sees as responding to the changing economic and social environment of his own time, not by simply reflecting those changes but through a critical exploration of their effect on individual perception and being. In place of the term ‘mode of production’ that is commonly used to refer to industrial or agrarian production Lindsay proposes the more expansive term, Productive Activity to include the cultural. After all, he argues, historically there are no clear dividing lines between these activities: ‘The mode of production in its earliest phases involved tools and forms of communication, science in embryonic forms, and speech in the cooperation of labour; and play, carrying over rhythmic elements from work and nature, developed into ritual, song, art’ (p. 18), which we call culture or art.

Culture For Lindsay culture, like the production of goods, involves the transformation of nature and is another way that human beings learn about themselves: ‘The nature that we confront involves both these past transformations and the immediate acts of objectification that we are seeking to carry out; part of the nature that we are seeking to transform is our own biological inheritance’ (p.  20). However, with reference to the work of Raymond

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Williams, he also observes that culture cannot be reduced to either biological imperatives or social and historical circumstances; it is a complex interrelationship of all factors—material, social, cultural, economic, political. Consequently, he dismisses all attempts to reduce art to either social relations or a set of cognitive activities, noting that Romano Luperini’s cognitive analysis ignores the sensuous and emotional components fundamental to art (p. 21). Cognitive analysis (not improved, he notes wryly, by calling it ‘decomposition’) is another way in which the artwork is reduced to simply a reflection of the economic base or mode of production. As in Lucien Goldmann’s genetic structuralism, which uses the terms ‘homology’ and ‘isomorphism’ to trace structural parallels between elements of an artwork and the economic base. From this perspective cultural production can have no effect on the economic base; it simply reproduces it.

Being as Interrelationship For Lindsay labour, which he describes as the human transformation of nature, is central to human being and incorporates human being into nature, citing Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts: ‘Through labour man can make nature “his inorganic body, both as a direct means of life and as the matter, the object, and the instrument of his life-activity”’ (p. 23). Historically, Lindsay argues, this human-nature interrelationship is evident in the being of the serf or slave who, despite their lack of freedom and equality, nevertheless had a clear relationship with the products of their labour (their transformation of nature) and could realise their being (sense of self) in that relationship. Under capitalism, however, that vital relationship is broken. Workers are separated from the product of their labour and Lindsay writes: ‘Their own creative energies are alienated and enclosed in the objects they produce’ (p. 24). As a result human beings are alienated from both nature and the creative power of their own being, which exacerbates the problem for Marxist activists attempting to engage people in a struggle against those same forces.

Alienation Lindsay notes that alienation has always existed to some degree, even in the earliest societies in which human beings were both part of nature and actively transforming nature. In the moment of transformation, he writes,

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a sense of something greater, ‘an External Soul or Otherself’, is used to express the loss of unity this process creates. The division is healed by ‘emotionally reunit[ing] themselves with nature through myth, ritual, art … Nature is reunited with society; society becomes a form of nature’ (p. 24). In class societies, Lindsay argues, religion takes this role, ‘expressing both the pang of alienation from nature and the inner division of society, and at the same time justifying the situation, making it again natural, a necessary part of the universe it reflects’ (p. 24). For Lindsay, capitalism extends all previous forms of alienation: ‘People were alienated from themselves (their creative powers), their fellows who were in the same situation, and from nature, to which they were opposed as producers’ (p. 25). The only positive result of this situation being that ‘old ideological systems which imposed a false unity of a divided society had fallen away, and the full reality could be realised and stated’ (p. 25). For Lindsay this led to the struggle for a new and better society ‘in which unity was truly concrete’ (p. 25): the unity of human with nature; of individual with society; within individual being. Lindsay was concerned, however, that this Marxist notion of internal contradiction leading to a new phase of society should not be constructed as natural and inevitable; nor that the relationship with nature should be constructed as one of human mastery and control—both of which he identifies as bourgeois in origin (p.  26). Equally, he argues against the simplistic Praxis claim, ‘Man is society, freedom, history, and the future’ (p. 26), which he sees as ignoring ‘the limits and modifications imposed on people at each moment of history’ (p. 26) that may limit or prevent them from even imagining, much less acting for, social transformation. His own work has focussed on empowering individuals to re-imagine themselves and their own society so that they can transform themselves and their world in enabling and productive ways, and the medium of that transformation has been primarily cultural. In the rest of this book Lindsay explores the work of the major twentieth-­ century left cultural theorists—Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser—with whose work he engages, sometimes as supporter and other times as adversary. In each case Lindsay is concerned with the perspective each brings to the study of society; how they theorise the relationship between different aspects of society and, crucially, how these theorists envisage the role of individuals—embodied human subjects—in bringing about social change.

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Lukács From Lukács’ early Marxist work, History and Class Consciousness (1923) Lindsay identifies several concepts that have influenced the development of left cultural theory. Following Marx, Lukács used the term ‘reification’ for the reduction of human beings to things that he saw as central to capitalist ideology and practice, while the workers’ subsequent feeling of loss of connection—from their own production, each other, their complete self or being—was termed ‘alienation’. Lindsay recognises the power of Lukács’ analysis using those terms but is concerned that he constitutes capitalist ideology as so pervasive that there is no other way to think or feel or be. If this is so, the only way that change can happen is through a cataclysmic breakdown of the system: ‘The workings of history do the whole thing; history becomes a teleological process with fated ends’ (p. 33). Not an outcome that Lindsay supported. For Lindsay, the flaw in Lukács’ work is that it does not link productive activity either with its own social and cultural world or to that of other historical periods it evokes (p. 33). As a result, the analysis has no sense of a complex society in a state of ‘continuity in change’, which is ‘variously refracted in the consciousness of individuals’ (p. 33). Lindsay also finds problematic Lukács’ idealist understanding of the relationship between subject and object which construes ‘subject’ as intrinsically superior, and the subject-object binary as a figure for the alienated consciousness of the capitalist subject. Because of this dominant role, Lindsay argues, Lukács represents the individual subject as able to think their way out of their alienated and reified condition, by ‘an act of cognition’, without the need for revolutionary action. It also construes the object and objectivity as negative rather than as essential to ‘the creative and productive process itself, by means of which human beings grapple with objective reality, realise it, and transform it’ (p. 35). Lindsay notes that Lukács later acknowledged this problem as based in a bourgeois strategy, ‘to convert an essentially social alienation into an eternal “condition humaine”’ (quoted p. 37). For Lindsay this capitulation to idealism means that, in Lukács’ work, objectification loses the transformative and creative value it has in Marx’s conception of productivity and being. Lindsay also expresses concern that Lukács’ awareness of the impact of capitalism on individual being, ‘with its increasing fragmentation and alienation … with ever sharper limitation of perspective and lack of interest in the wholeness of experience’ (p. 42) led him to propose a version of

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Socialist Realism that he believed would restore ‘totality of vision and richness of comprehension’ (p. 43). If applied crudely, Lindsay warns, as an ideology rather than a dialectical process of transformation, it would arrest cultural development and prevent the organic development of Marxist ideas and revolutionary practice. In his later work, Lindsay notes, Lukács expanded two other concepts from History and Class Consciousness, giving them a more dialectical inflection. Totality refers to a set of interrelated elements or activities in which the meaning of each is derived from its relationship with all of the others. In History and Class Consciousness he described how each class understands the myriad encounters and interactions of everyday social life— their reality—by reference to a totality that is constituted in terms of the experiences, values and beliefs of their class, though he adds: ‘This concrete totality is by no means an unmediated datum for thought’ (HCC, p. 8). Lindsay notes that Lukács exemplifies this understanding of mediation in his analysis of the bourgeois novel to demonstrate how members of different classes come to see their own view of the world as natural, logical and objective because of their own (class-based) experience, beliefs and assumptions: ‘He expanded his notion of mediations so as to show how the various levels or moments of social activity were dialectically linked, interacting, according to their natures’ (p.  41). Lindsay concludes that Lukács’ totality is ‘dynamic, inseparable from process, a genuine dialectical fusion of individual and history’ (p. 46). For Lindsay, this is Lukács’ major legacy, enabling his readers to move beyond the stasis and powerlessness of their positioning by capitalist discourse—and by some Marxist theory.

Bloch Lindsay finds the complement to Lukács’ determinist tendencies in the work of Ernst Bloch. Bloch rejected all narrow mechanist concepts of ideology that ‘related expressions, emotions and attitudes directly to a socio-­ economic base and considered them then to be completely explained away’ (p. 49). Instead he saw human nature as characterised by a wealth of creative thought and feeling that arises in present circumstances and ‘drives into the future, creating goals, aspirations, hopes and dissatisfactions with things as they are, in terms of a fuller human reality, a richer harmony and liberation of our energies’ (pp.  49–50). Bloch identifies these thoughts and feelings not only in concepts and practices approved by Marxism, but also in those regarded as petty and frivolous or as

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reactionary and false, such as religion. And Lindsay argues (along with Bloch) that the aspirations for happiness, peace and harmony expressed in religion are fundamental human longings that Marxist critics should not denounce or repress but engage with and use in pursuit of their goal of a classless human society. In his major work, The Principle of Hope (1938–47), Lindsay notes, Bloch defines Hope as that aspect of human being that persists even at times of greatest suffering and anxiety. Hope mobilises the individual’s engagement with the world in terms of both Astonishment (the finding of something not known) and Darkness (the recognition of the known), the two in dialectical union with each other. For Lindsay Bloch captures the wonder of transformation as people reach a new understanding of themselves and their world: ‘In the moment of Astonishment something new is born, a new unity of the self and the world in however unstable a form’ (p. 52). Bloch did not regard this as a replacement for social revolution but as one of its most powerful driving forces: ‘The function of Marxism, as he sees it, is to strengthen and develop all the elements of Hope until they are effectively united with our conscious processes, our ways of organising society and production’(p. 59). For Lindsay the crisis in Marxist politics and theory is that it has lost faith in the people for whom it is advocating and has fallen into the mechanistic thinking of the bourgeois ideology it rejects. It has no positive sense of the future but simply a grinding negativism that has failed to engage the majority of workers. By contrast, Bloch finds a source of transformation in the persistent human ability to engage with the world in a spirit of exploration and wonder, to be Astonished, rather than just to confirm acculturated assumptions. The utopian element in Bloch’s work, Lindsay argues, derives from his understanding of Marxism as ‘a philosophy of living process, of becoming, [that] cannot be satisfied with analyses of the past or with analyses of the present that by their nature are abstractions or schematisations derived from (inevitably incomplete) examinations of the past (even the recent past)’ (p. 59). He rejects the criticisms that Bloch’s utopianism is nostalgic, trivial or individualistic, arguing that Marxists need to be receptive to new ideas, particularly a more complex understanding of (individual) human being: ‘We need to realise that indeed that the human being is incomplete, is continually both torn and impelled forward by unsatisfied needs and unrealised potentialities. Herein lies a deep and constant human element which cannot be separated from all the various activities by which people develop’ (p. 59). One of these activities is art.

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Bloch argued for the ontological identity of aesthetic and material production: both are means by which individuals engage with the world around them, reach new understandings and develop a new creative engagement that ultimately transforms their understanding of themselves and their world: The substance and texture of individual life are indeed to be found expressed in their fullness and complexity in the various forms of art. Here then is an important point where we can bring together Bloch’s concept of Hope and our analysis of art expressions, linking it dialectically with our analysis of society but not submerging it in that analysis. (p. 61)

In his own work, Lindsay notes, Bloch tends to rely on generalised descriptions of drives, such as hunger, rather than specific instances of sensory, emotional or conceptual engagement. As a result, he argues, Bloch fails to connect the bodily (sensory, emotional, intellectual) capacities and associated drives that he describes with the socio-economic situation; nor is he able to link cultural and psychological forces and engagements to the class-struggle. Nevertheless, Lindsay argues, Bloch recognises these connections as critical to the Marxist struggle: The function of Marxism, as he sees it, is to strengthen and develop all the elements of Hope until they are effectively united with our conscious processes, our ways of organising society and production. Then and then only our consciousness will achieve a dialectical union of past, present, and future, and we shall be able at last truly to mate with the earth while building an harmonious society in which creative energy is given a maximum of chances to liberate itself. (p. 59)

Adorno Lindsay has a more ambivalent attitude to the next major theorist he discusses—Theodor Adorno, who famously differed radically from Bloch on the nature and value of utopian thinking. Adorno’s work has none of Bloch’s whimsy nor, Lindsay would argue, his trust in the value of people’s everyday wishes and desires. Appalled by the rise of fascism Bloch formulated Critical Theory which ‘seeks at every moment to put the reader on guard against a use of logic that sees things in fixed categories and introduces a metaphysical rigidity into its judgements, turning the living elements of Becoming into separate things’ (p.  64). This logic has

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been enabled by what Adorno called Identity Thinking, the categorial logic that identifies everything (and everyone) as an example of an abstraction. Lindsay traces this notion to the work of Hegel, ‘who used it to define the way that understanding, which includes the conventional modes of scientific thought, unfolds things in their abstract undifferentiated identity’ (p. 65). Things are thereby fixed in or as a particular identity, losing any sense of complexity, differentiation, unfolding or becoming. This also means that the institution or individual who creates the abstraction has enormous power, since they create the thing as that fixed identity and in the process determine how it is understood and valued by the world. The task of Critical Theory is to alert the reader to this practice, enabling them to deconstruct this process of meaning-making: ‘the traps and gaps in identity-thinking, all the ruses of reason’ (p. 65). Lindsay notes that, as part of its method, Critical Theory refuses to define its own concepts so that they do not become ‘identity-instruments’, nor does it set out its method from first principles. Adorno uses practices such as irony and word play to induce the reader to challenge the conventional meaning of a word, concept or formulation: ‘What is aimed at is the effect of a particular discrepancy between words and reality, which hints at what reality is’ (p. 66). Hence Adorno’s use of essays, short sections of prose, aphorisms, and his view that the short form is useful as it ‘thinks in breaks because reality is brittle and finds its unity through the breaks, not by smoothing things over’ (p. 67, from ‘The Essay as Form’, not ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’). For Adorno, Lindsay argues, shorter literary forms are not compromised by having to create a sense of unity where there is none but instead demonstrate the partial or provisional nature of our understanding of the world. To exemplify Adorno’s view Lindsay cites his essay, ‘Society’ which argues that our knowledge is ‘inevitably incomplete, partial, inadequate, and full of contradictions’ (p. 67) and that, if we analyse the terms and concepts by which we attempt to make sense of the world, we will uncover the ‘concrete reality of social life’ of our own time (p. 68). For Adorno, Lindsay notes, Marxist dialectics has failed. It has become rigidified through its political and institutional use and become a form of identity thinking. In its place he posits negative dialectics, a form of non-­ identity thinking that sets out to expose the premises that govern identity thinking. Lindsay’s concern is that Adorno offers no positive way forward beyond the critique of identity thinking, the mechanism of which he identifies with commodity-exchange under capitalism (p.  71). Adorno’s

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aversion to a class-based (i.e. identity-based) political programme means that he has no concept of mass-based revolutionary change: ‘There are no interstices or antagonistic groupings that could beget or stimulate a critical consciousness, an outlook independent of the reifying forces that reduce everyone to a common denominator. The victims accept the appearances of society as they have no awareness of the way they are manipulated’ (p.  72). The passivity of this position, so different from Bloch’s utopian vision, troubles Lindsay: ‘On this basis Adorno, and Horkheimer with him, develop their picture of a society without any inner forces of revolt, any elements making for renewal. Cultural production in such a world becomes the culture industry, linked at all points to the flattening and falsifying forces of exchange and identity-thinking’ (p. 73). For Lindsay, the flaw in this view of cultural production is that the artwork is not related fully to its historical moment: ‘So we arrive at the historical moment by analysing the nature of the form, its structure, contradictions, and resolutions. We do not work from the social moment, the historical situation, to the art-product’ (p. 73). As a result, he argues, Adorno’s view of the artwork is linked only to the system of production and circulation and not to ‘the historical moment in all its complexity of struggle, defeat, resolution, possibility’ (p. 74). So, for example, he notes that Adorno’s analysis of music does not comprehensively examine the social context in which the music is developed, performed and consumed but focuses on ‘economic abstractions’: ‘The idea of music as a form of production is valuable, but the way in which music is related abstractly only to the forces of production robs the idea of its vital possibilities’ (p. 74). When Adorno refers to conditions of production, Lindsay notes, ‘he does not mean the class-positions or roles of everyone involved in the productive process, but the particular tastes and attitudes, social and personal, which in general determine the reception and consumption of the products’ (p. 75). For Lindsay, this not only impoverishes our understanding of the artwork, but also explains why Adorno does not relate art to political action: ‘His position that art is at once an autonomous form and a social fact, with no real links apart from the forces and relations of production in his very restricted sense of those terms, explain[s] why there is no movement into political action’ (p. 75). Lindsay sees Adorno’s theory as weakened by his horror of the present: ‘since any idea of reconciliation with a world of total reification can only lead to disaster, to extreme dehumanisation’ (p. 76). Yet, Lindsay argues, Beethoven had to engage with the flawed world of his own time in order

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to create the work that Adorno so admired. Lindsay concludes: ‘Here the weakness of his notion of form, with its severe limitations as to what constitutes content, takes over. … any musician using accepted tonalities or structures is simply a conformist, accepting and aiding the ruling powers with their fetishistic identity-thinking’ (p. 76). Therefore Adorno approved Schoenberg’s atonal early work as expressing the revolt of the unconscious against repression, while Stravinsky’s more conventional form is equated with acceptance of repression. Lindsay adds that Adorno’s concept of Form was meant to explore the ways in which the artwork revealed the structure, conflicts and contradictions within society, but it was limited by his constitution of the nature of society; as a result, he was unable to acknowledge any sort of form-content unity in the present. In a modern capitalist society art seems doomed to reflect passively the alienation of contemporary being. This conception of art reflects the notion of manipulated and controlled consciousness that Adorno and Horkheimer detect in contemporary society. Spread through education and mass media it eliminates all contrary ideas and renders the individual passive, anaesthetised. For Lindsay this analysis reeks of elitism: ‘they feel only contempt for the masses’ (p. 78). Not that he rejects all of the analysis that they, along with their colleague, Herbert Marcuse present of society. Marcuse is even more concerned about the power of technology, noting in One-Dimensional Man that one form of totalitarianism is ‘a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests’ (p. 79). Nevertheless, Lindsay concludes that he too ‘oversimplifies and is unable to see the elements that are positive and capable of transforming the situation’ (p. 79). This includes the potential within individuals and the disdained masses to recognise the contradictions within society, challenge the commonplace assumptions that keep them passive and powerless and create their own rupture of the social order. Marcuse, Lindsay notes, is less dogmatic than Adorno and Horkheimer in his attitudes to art and individual consciousness: for example, he praises Brecht’s dramas for the estrangement effect that enables audience members to see their own society differently. Marcuse acknowledged the consciousness-changing power of art, writing of Brecht and other avant-garde writers: ‘these are not merely new modes of perception reorienting and intensifying the old ones; they rather dissolve the very structure of perception, in order to make room [–] for what?’ (p. 79). Even without an answer, Marcuse at least suggests that change is possible.

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Lindsay rejects the abandonment of class politics by Adorno, Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School because it left the ground to the dehumanising forces that they called ‘reifying, fetishistic, mechanistic’ (p. 80). He acknowledges the importance of Adorno’s writing on dialectics, particularly the reminder that dialectics must not become rigid and dogmatic. He also praises Adorno’s theory of Form in the artwork, even if he finds his application of the concept without a comprehensive social and political analysis of the context of the work weakens its value. And he notes that Adorno’s attention to the role of culture in society broadened the remit of Marxism in important ways. However, his greatest concern is that, unlike Bloch, Adorno and many of his colleagues failed to recognise the ‘counter-forces, different potentialities’ (p.  80) located in individuals in their everyday lives, that might bring about social transformation.

Structuralism This pessimistic, negative stance is also encoded, for Lindsay, in the linguistically based analysis that leads to the work of Louis Althusser, whose popularity was at its peak when Lindsay was writing his study. Structuralist linguistics, he writes, is ‘a self-sufficient synchronic system unrelated to the tensions, conflicts, and transformations of meaning that make up life’ (p. 82). The way in which this model was justified, Lindsay notes, was by claiming homology between the language system and the real world. However, this becomes a self-referential, self-justifying circle when the world is conceptualised in terms of the language system. As a result, while acknowledging the importance of the work of linguists such as Roland Barthes in showing that meaning is not inherent in objects but a consequence of their context, structuralism ‘tends all the while to reduce social life to a sign system and to ignore social structures and history. Signs are seen as determining physical behaviour and its controlling ideas, turning it into social practice’ (p.  83). He goes on to describe Barthes’ work, Mythologies (1972) as an attempt to ‘show that the structure of a discourse is a coded ideological language and the ruling class produce and disseminate their ideology as a code that the masses passively accept and use’ (p. 83). This model, he argues, offers no grounds on which the individual can move beyond the ideas and practices of the ruling class, relegating people to the passivity identified by Adorno and Horkheimer. Lindsay quotes Colin Sumner’s (1979) judgment:

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Structuralism has taken the blood and fight out of history. Indeed structuralism could be said to have taken the history out of history, and left it with the rotting skeletons of form which act as signposts or monuments to an elusive, ever-present reality. … its basic concepts and consequent techniques logically exclude any concrete analysis of the social nature, movement and function of ideologies. (p. 84)

Sumner’s dramatic description captures Lindsay’s concern that structuralism itself has done the work of the ruling classes; deflecting people’s attention from the social, political, historical and economic realities (within which signs make meaning) onto a play with language that traps them within the terms of that ruling class ideology. Lindsay contends that when writers such as Barthes, Derrida and Foucault attempt to account for the complexity of meaning, including the contradictions within a text that might expose the ideology on which it is based, they either deflect attention onto the unending deferral of meaning that is a feature of deconstruction, or focus on a psychoanalytical reading that empties the argument of the social. He refers again briefly to the work of structuralist philosopher and sociologist, Lucien Goldmann who related individual consciousness to the tensions and contradictions experienced by that individual within their social environment (pp. 85–6). Although Lindsay finds this approach more productive, he is still concerned that it identifies culture with one dominant class and that it isolates the work’s historical period as productive of individual consciousness, without sufficient regard to the lingering effect of earlier values, beliefs and practices. As a result, he argues, Goldmann is unable to identify the dialectical interplay between the levels—social, political, economic, cultural—of his analysis. Hence, he arrives at the work of Althusser.

Althusser Lindsay introduces the work of Althusser through that of his teacher, Gaston Bachelard: ‘Bachelard set out the idea of the epistemological break that must come in the process of acquiring knowledge if a radical advance is to be made’ (p. 86). Lindsay’s issue with this position is that the break is purely conceptual, with perception and experience regarded as distractions: ‘So science develops solely through a critique of previous ideological thought; it works on existing concepts, not on facts or objects. Its guarantees and criteria are wholly internal’ (p. 87). Again Lindsay identifies the

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isolation of the individual, the theory and the text from the social, economic, political and cultural contexts in which they were formed. Interestingly, he notes, when structuralists (including Bachelard and Althusser) look for the source of conflict in a text, they use a psychoanalytic method: ‘a Symptomatic Reading to bring out what is latent, silent, absent, in a text, and to construct its problematic’ (p.  87). Althusser’s focus, he argues, is not on individuals or on communities or classes, but on structures and theory. Lindsay notes that Althusser uses the same approach when he analyses Marx’s writing. Hence Althusser identifies the change in Marx’s writing in 1845 (to the focus on the economy) not as a response to the social and political context within which Marx was writing but as a rejection of Feuerbachian humanism and its replacement by Historical Materialism, ‘which saw humanism as a mere ideology, and which introduced new concepts: forces and relations of production, superstructures, ideologies, determination by the economy, relative autonomy in other levels or spheres of the social formation, and so on’ (p.  89). Lindsay notes that Althusser does not explain how or why this change occurred: it seems ‘a sort of mystical illumination’ that ‘is not seen as dynamically and comprehensively linked with reality, with the historical moment in its fulness’ (p. 89). The transformation is purely conceptual: ‘The unit of analysis is not people, but the relations of production’ (p.  88). Althusser, Lindsay observes, rejects theories based on any concept of human nature, praxis, or alienation: ‘any theory which sees alienation, for instance, as a problem, is thinking solely or primarily in terms of human beings, and so is a humanism: a term of the deadliest abuse’ (p. 92). Accordingly, history is not the experience of people but rather ‘the structure … gives history its significations’ (p. 92), or as Sumner notes: ‘ideas or concepts make history while people only act out the role that is set for them by the concepts … human practice is erased in favour of the abstract categories which use people as agents’ (p. 93). Lindsay’s account returns repeatedly to his belief that there is active, resistant role for those living under capitalism that is missing in much of the work of the Frankfurt School and in that of Althusser. Althusser’s epistemology, Lindsay notes, is based entirely on the elaboration of theory, not on the relationship of theory and practice: ‘He reduces the whole process by which Marxist theory is produced to a theoretical activity autonomous of the political practice of the working class, autonomous of the class struggle and political conditions’ (p. 98). For Althusser, Lindsay

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argues, the role of Marxist theory is to interrogate the means by which knowledge is produced and the raw material of its analysis is previous ways of knowing: ‘It uses an apparatus of theoretical concepts and functions in the sphere of ideas to produce knowledge’ (p. 95). For Lindsay this practice leads to a series of homologies that reflect each other and somehow reflect reality, leading Althusser ‘into the very mechanist-idealism he is supposed to be refuting and supplanting’ (p.  96). When in Lenin and Philosophy (1971) Althusser attempts to revise his epistemology, Lindsay notes once again that knowledge remains the product of thought alone, quoting the view of Norman Geras [not André Glucksmann1] that Althusser’s work reduces ‘the relations between Marxist theory and the working class [to] a unilateral and purely pedagogic one: the intellectuals “give” the class the knowledge it needs’ (pp. 98–9). For Lindsay Althusser’s theory not only ignores the reality of everyday life for working people, rendering them silent and invisible; it also patronises them. In the end, he concludes, Althusser’s rejection of the unity of theory and practice that is fundamental to Marx’s writing led to theory that was non-dialectical, non-­ transformative and idealist. The other major aspect of Althusser’s work that Lindsay addresses is his study of ideology. Althusser’s attempt to explain the power of the economic system to undermine all resistance ended, for Lindsay, in a capitulation to the power of capitalism: In his pedantic way Althusser declares that ideology ‘constitutes concrete individuals as subjects’ and that concrete individuals are ‘subjected to the Subject’. People live in ‘the trap of a mirror-reflection’, centred on themselves as ‘subjects’. The ideology itself is centred on the absolute power of the subject (the illusions of the individual as free agent). … Althusser thus sets out the mechanistic thesis that ideologies simply originate in the mode of production and are given effect by the state. Class conflict is inexplicable. (p. 100)

In a footnote to this passage Lindsay likens Althusser’s notion that ruling class ideology pervades society to the Frankfurt School’s concept of universal reification. This is where Lindsay, like his colleague, historian 1  Norman Geras, ‘Althusser’s Marxism: An Assessment’ in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Verso, 1978), pp.  232–72, misidentified by Lindsay as the following paper, André Glucksmann, ‘A Ventriloquist Structuralism’, pp. 273–314.

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E.P. Thompson (1978), departs decisively from Althusser’s work. And although Lindsay notes that Althusser later returned to a notion of class-­ struggle that meant working-class and anti-capitalist beliefs were no longer lumped together with capitalist ISAs, he is unwilling to support his work: ‘His passionate anti-humanism, his reluctance to allow human beings any significant activity except as units controlled by a structuralist mechanism, deprive him of any sense of the practical determinants of social forms’ (p.  101). Lindsay compares Althusser unfavourably with Marx who recognised the dialectical unity of human creativity and the demands of the sociality determined by a mode of production: Althusser saw only freedom or chains, and principally chains. Lindsay considers Althusser’s work a challenge to late twentieth-­century Marxists to provide alternative, more comprehensive answers to the issues raised by his structuralist methodology: why people comply with their own subjugation; the status of knowledge at a time when the objectivity of science has been disputed; and the nature of the dialectic that underpins Marxist thought and action. Lindsay concludes his book by discussing the work of Antonio Gramsci for its insights into how human beings are induced to see the world from a perspective that disadvantages themselves. Before that, however, he looks again at two ways of creating knowledge about the world—science and dialectics.

Science Lindsay was not anti-science, but he saw it as the product of its own time with a methodology that was as problematic as it was productive. He quotes Engels’ observation that the taxonomic method of science has enabled great advances in our understanding of the natural world but that the practice of decontextualising natural objects and processes ‘has also left us as a legacy, the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things’ (p. 107). Engels adds that, when this method is transferred from natural science to philosophy, ‘it produced the specific narrow-­mindedness of the last centuries, the metaphysical mode of thought’ (p. 107). Lindsay sees this same practice as leading to ever greater specialisation of the fields of scientific knowledge so that scientists are removed further and further from that ‘vast interconnection’ that constitutes our world. For Lindsay it was crucial that Marxism should avoid this kind of non-dialectical, de-­ contextualised and fetishistic practice, even if for some Marxist

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philosophers (such as Galvano della Volpe and Lucio Colletti) identifying Marxism as a science seemed a way to avoid being dismissed as mere politics. Lindsay does not reject scientific method but argues that it needs to be practised in a way that acknowledges the (social, cultural, political, economic) context within which the objects and processes being studied are embedded. This dialectical analysis enables the researcher to build a richer understanding of the object or process by locating it in relation to other fields of knowledge and other experiences of being, which impacts on the conclusions drawn from observation. At the same time, it acknowledges that ‘the particular direction taken by the science, and the methods it uses, are strongly affected—even conditioned—by the social and economic situation’ (p. 113). So, for example, an examination of Galileo’s work does not disprove his results or reduce them to ‘subjective and illusory reflections of class positions’ (p. 113). Rather it shows that, while they do perform some forms of observation and analysis with great success, they also ignore ‘other areas, other problems, other possibilities’ (p.  113) that Galileo’s own socialisation makes invisible to him. Lindsay has a positive vision for science as part of an understanding of being that includes all inhabitants of our world. For this to take place, he argues, several changes need to occur. Rather than fetishise theory, we need to embrace the relationship between theory and practice as this ‘enables us to move consciously into transformative action’ (p.  114). It also means that we acknowledge the relationship between science and capitalism: ‘the association of science with the bourgeoisie from Galileo onwards … had the effect of steadily and powerfully buttressing the capitalist world-view, and intensifying and interiorising its grip on people’ (p.  114). One consequence of which was the (ideological, conceptual) separation of human beings from the natural world: ‘Man became the conqueror and master of nature, of phenomena considered to be alien and outside him, something merely provided for his use’ (p.  114). Lindsay notes that the Frankfurt School addressed this alienation of humanity from nature in their critique of the Enlightenment, particularly the development of mechanistic science which they believed led to an obsession with power, as in Marcuse’s condemnation of the bourgeois use of science and technology in One-Dimensional Man (1964): ‘The scientific method led to the ever-more-effective domination of nature and thus came to provide the pure concepts as well as the instrumentalities for the ever-­ more-­ effective domination of man through the domination of nature’

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(p. 114). Although Lindsay was not so negative about the Enlightenment, listing positive aspects such as ‘the drawing of people together in common tasks in an unprecedented way through technology; the liberation of aspirations and hopes of harmony despite the dominant power-ethic; the final cohering of resistances in the hope for socialism; new elements of potentiality, new elements of Hope in the Blochian sense’ (p. 114), he was also concerned by the reductive, mechanistic methodology of enlightenment science, exemplifying this by the development and destructive use of nuclear fission (as nuclear weapons). Nevertheless, he argues that it is possible to develop a different kind of science that engages dialectically with the world as a social, political, economic and cultural totality (p. 115).

Dialectics For Lindsay, as we have seen, dialectics is a method of analysing and understanding the world based not on a reductive logic that isolates the object of study from its historical and social context, as does scientific method, but rather includes all contextual factors: ‘the dialectic is not a given method or logic that can be imposed on any material at will. The analytic grasp of the material’s structure and interconnections is necessary in varying degrees before any dialectical revaluation or presentation is possible’ (p. 107). Dialectics acknowledges movement, instability, complexity and change as fundamental to any system and to all elements within it, all of which are interconnected. It is fundamental to Lindsay’s analysis of culture which he construes not as a superstructure that reflects the economic base, but as ‘something on which the substructure entirely depends, just as it depends in turn on the substructure: the two make up a dialectical unity’ (p. 124). For Lindsay the analysis of culture involved the analysis of that dialectical relationship and of the unity they constitute, which is also an analysis of the society of that artwork and of how the individuals in that society know and experience their world: ‘… man can no more get on with his productive task without an ideology, without a release and satisfaction on cultural levels, than he can develop airy structures of the mind without the sustaining productive levels. For humanity, culture is just as essential as production’ (p. 124). He traces the development of his own view of culture in his essays, ‘The Aesthetic Fact’ (1939) and Perspective for Poetry (1944); his document, ‘Marxist Theory of Culture’ tabled at a conference organised by the cultural committee of CPGB in 1945; and his book, Marxism and

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Contemporary Science (1949). These writings have been discussed in previous chapters, along with the negative responses to the last two from his comrades in the Communist Party. In retrospect, Lindsay does not resile from any of the major points he made. The issues to which he returns and which are particularly relevant to the argument of The Crisis in Marxism include the dialectical relationship between culture and the economy, particularly the notion of culture as a productive activity; how individuals negotiate the conflicts and contradictions between the society represented to them by the dominant ideology and their own embodied, class-based experience in their formation of consciousness; and the role of the artwork in exposing those contradictions and in providing a model for the dialectical analysis of society. And the major problem he addresses is: how has bourgeois capitalist ideology convinced so many members of society, including those it represses, to accept its version of reality as valid and irresistible? Why haven’t the workers of the Western world thrown off their chains?

Gramsci Antonio Gramsci, Lindsay argues, was the first Marxist to acknowledge ‘the role of consciousness in bringing about and shaping revolutionary change’ (p. 140). Gramsci recognised that human activity is both shaped and determined by social structures and actively creates ‘new forms that challenge and overturn those structures’ (p. 140). For Lindsay, this is the answer to the pessimism of Lukács, Adorno and Althusser and he notes: ‘To carry on the division between elitist or superior theory and passive or directionless mass-consciousness was to deny the creative popular energies without which a sustained cultural revolution, leading directly into full democratic socialism, could not come about’ (p.  142). To this end, Lindsay noted, Gramsci urged his Marxist colleagues to pay attention to all forms of discontent or resistance: ‘populism, social banditry, form of mysticism or millenarianism in the countryside, utopian socialism, urban insurrection and cultural revolt’ as people who are just beginning to become aware of the nature of their society ‘were more likely to find rebellious forms or idioms that were “impure”, fragmentary and contradictory’ (p. 139). For Lindsay this changed the nature of Marxist activism: ‘The direct economic and political struggle must be conducted in union with a

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struggle to change ideas, emotions, sensuous responses—indeed every aspect of life—in the new direction’ (p. 143). Notably, Lindsay’s formulation includes the senses by which individuals engage with each other and the world and which are involved in all productive labour, including cultural activity. As ever, Lindsay notes that cultural activities have areas of creativity that are related to the history of the form they employ: The poet, for example, is working in a specific field, all its own, with its material (intellectual activity, emotional responses, sensuous experiences) gathered into the poem in a specific kind of unity. The discipline inherent in the Form sets certain limits, but also liberates potentialities which are quite unlike anything operative in the mode of production or the other cultural spheres. (p. 146)

This notion can be extended to other forms of labour and other disciplines. From this perspective, the individual’s manipulation of a (social, economic, political or cultural) form with its own embedded history and meanings has the potential to create new ideas and understandings of the world. Lindsay goes on to suggest this possibility for science: ‘Again we meet among the elements the levels of tradition, inherited lores, present activity, the link with the transformations of nature going on in the economic productive sphere—this time through technology and applied science’ (p.  148). And he concludes: ‘Productive activity in all its forms reproduces, transforms, re-creates systems of movement, change, organic patterns: not mechanically in flat reflections, but in new extensions or concentrations that reveal the hidden potentialities of the systems, their possible development into higher forms of themselves’ (p.  148). Lindsay notes that Marcuse breaks with the Frankfurt School over this point, quoting from his book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1977): ‘The inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions’ (p. 149). Art can set you free.

Alienation, Revisited Lindsay returns to the notion of alienation, locating it specifically with the separation of the individual from the products of their labour: ‘The core of alienation in capitalist society lies in commodity-production,

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commodity fetishism’ (p. 153).2 Lindsay notes the centrality of this term to the work of Lukacs and of the Frankfurt School: ‘The products of labour become the property of the employer; and the person selling his or her labour cannot find in work a means of self-expression’ (p.  153). Alienated from nature, from the product of their labour, from other people and from their own being, how are they to formulate a resistance to the system that has them in thrall? Gramsci argued that the dominance of capitalist society by the middle class is achieved not by brute force, but through the medium of a hegemonic culture or ideology that is sufficiently flexible to allow small modifications and reforms in social, political and economic practice. This hegemonic culture and its fundamental values and beliefs are identified as the ‘common sense’ of the society, which most members of society accept as natural and valid. The tactic of allowing incremental reforms works actively against the development of class consciousness and weakens the case for political transformation of the state (p. 157). In response, Lindsay argues, ‘we need the building-up of the historical bloc through the movement to a socialist consciousness, a socialist kind of activity (as far as is possible in a class society), through ever-widening struggle’ (p. 157). And he adds: ‘Such a struggle involves the rejection of the simple view of the state as a mere instrument of domination, an instrument of class-­ oppression’ (p. 157). For him this model is simplistic and fails to demonstrate a role for those who wish to change the society. Lindsay adds that the struggle for change must employ the ‘democratic creativity of the masses’, the revisioning and reinvention of their lives by the opponents of the bourgeois state that enables them to develop their own alternative (socialist) hegemony (p. 157). Those fighting for a socialist society must understand how the ideology of the bourgeois state operates; how it naturalises bourgeois beliefs and values so that opposition seems impossible. And they must recognise, like Gramsci and Bloch, the manifestations of resistance from those who are tangled in its chains and  Lindsay again refers to anthropological studies that depict early cultures (he uses an Australian example of a living culture with ancient history) as ‘primitive’ forerunners to more complex systems, ‘arriving finally at the class-state’ (p.  150). This characterisation of Australian and other First Nations cultures is an artefact of the progress narrative that Lindsay otherwise rejects. It shows a failure to understand in practice the connections between people and land that he constitutes theoretically as the unified state to which classed societies aspire to return. 2

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incorporate them into the formation of a new (socialist) historic bloc: ‘The stress is on the way in which the socialist struggle for hegemony already begins to transform the state before the winning of socialism, and ensures that the movement of the new society will be along democratic antibureaucratic lines in the direction of communism’ (pp. 158–9).

Art To the end of his writing life Lindsay was preoccupied with the practice and power of art to enable people to attain the (social and political) awareness and self-awareness that would enable them to be part of this movement to a more just and equitable society. His last nine books, published after the second study of Blake, included cultural histories of Defoe’s London and the final years of the Roman Empire, a translation of Alexander Blok’s poems, The Twelve and The Scythians inspired by the October Revolution in Russia, and studies of artists, Thomas Gainsborough and J.M.W. Turner. In The Crisis in Marxism Lindsay explains the reason for this preoccupation: the contribution of art to political change through its sensory, emotional and intellectual engagement of audiences with their world: the natural world of which they are a part, the society in which they live, and their own being. Accordingly, for him, it was critical that Marxism should not undermine this process by identifying all forms of cultural engagement as simply reflections of the economic base as does the base-­ superstructure model of the early to mid-twentieth century. As well, Marxism needs to inspire people, not simply constitute their everyday wishes and desires as trivial or pointless. In Gramsci, Lindsay found a theorist who both respected people in their everyday lives and understood the ways in which they were coerced to work in a system that alienated and divided them, and who might therefore guide people to use their unfulfilled needs and desires to begin the transformation of the (bourgeois capitalist) state from within. Which is also, for Lindsay, the most important role of art.

CHAPTER 14

Conclusion

In the final chapter of his book, Meetings with Poets (1968) Jack Lindsay argues that there is no contradiction in the aim of poetry to be a revolutionary activity that celebrates and glorifies life while simultaneously working to change life at the root—because life is not static and fragmented, ‘a sum total of separable elements or oddments’ (p. 234). Rather, he explains: Life is a process, a violent unity of conflicting opposites, and the poet’s loyalty is to the formative process itself, which involves the future as much as the past and the present. For the future is always present as the unseizable directive factor precipitating the next stage—whether one is thinking of the whole world or of one’s own body-spirit. (MP, p. 234)

Lindsay’s life was dedicated to that unity, finding and celebrating the beauty in life while at the same time working to change his society fundamentally. Between the two the dynamic could be so intense, for the individual and for the society, that it was physically, emotionally and intellectually debilitating. Lindsay wanted to change the economic basis of twentieth-century Western society, the industrial capitalism that he saw as ravaging the earth and its people. He celebrated the way that people found the beauty in each other and the world around them and in the process formulated their own critique of the oppressive forces that threatened them and their world. Furthermore, as he notes, the future is embedded

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_14

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in this dynamic, giving added urgency to the need for people to engage actively with it; to be part of making the future.

Unity Lindsay’s literary writings describe this struggle through the authors he chooses to study and the way he conducts those studies. In each case his chosen author is a social critic, from John Bunyan whose Vanity Fair remains a figure of decadence and excess to William Morris whose utopian society exposes the social and environmental degradation of industrial capitalist Britain. Lindsay explores not only the criticisms they offer but also how they present them: In this sense all true poetry is prophetic, since it grasps past-present-future in a single image of dynamic movement, where direction is determined by the totality of the process. That is why poetry, if it be true poetry, expresses in its own vital unity the wholeness of the individual, even in a situation where that individual and his society are rent by the most terrible of alienating pressures. (MP, p. 234)

So, too, in his author studies, in which he identifies in the complex unity of their novels and poetry the alienating pressures afflicting individuals and their society. As Lindsay noted in The Anatomy of Spirit, his inspiration for this concept was the work of Giordano Bruno, whose book Cause, Principle and Unity Lindsay translated. The notion of unity is fundamental to Lindsay’s understanding of the interconnections between all things: the relationship of the individual to others within the group, between the individual and the group to the natural world, and within the individual to all aspects of being. It is the opposite of the decontextualisation of that quantitative, categorial thinking that eliminates the particular and the local to locate the simplest, singular aspect by which any person or thing or process might be identified; instead, it calls for the radical contextualisation of any incident or behaviour or response, locating it within a constellation of influences, forces, permissions, prohibitions. This is also what art does very well. Where science pares things back to their basic components and deals with them in isolation, art explores the interconnections of each of those components to each other, to the world, to individual beings. For Lindsay (as for Blake) this does not require a

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choice between science and art but rather shows that both can and should work together. As he writes in the different versions of his cultural anthropology, only the earliest and oldest human cultures live that unity. Their science was not a series of processes producing products, but a way of interacting with nature and each other to create a world in which all could live and thrive. Their art communicates their ways of being and knowing, encoded in dance, visual art and stories that embody this knowledge in their individual (sensory, emotional, intellectual) being, their body-spirit. They, therefore, do not experience the intensity of alienation that afflicts the members of class-based societies.

Alienation For Lindsay alienation was a result of the loss of connectedness at every level of human being: within the self, between the self and others, self and society, self and the natural world. It is generated by a social system based on competition, that sets people in conflict with one another and the natural world. As Lindsay notes, Blake saw ‘nature’ as the invention of this acquisitive capitalism, setting it apart from individual human being so that it could be owned and used by the wealthy few. Many of the Romantics as well as late Romantics such as Meredith and Morris reasserted the unity of nature and the self in the face of the rapid industrialisation of British country and cities. Although, as Morris himself noted of his early work, this could lead to nostalgia for an irretrievable past (the poet as ‘idle singer of an empty day’), it was also a way to argue for a different kind of being and different way of knowing the world. It showed that the alienated world of capitalism was not natural and inevitable but produced by a particular economic structure, which also meant that it could be changed despite the forces that worked to keep it in place.

Ideology Those forces included ideologies of class and gender and religious institutions that undermined the unity of individuals. For many of his authors, Lindsay argues, Christianity is shown as playing a major role in the maintenance of bourgeois capitalist society. Blake exposed the hypocrisy of churchgoers who ignore the needs of the poor and instead preach to them of heavenly rewards for their servitude; and in his portrait of the God-­ tormented Theotormon, he shows the warping effect on individual being

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of a belief system that demonises the body. Dickens viewed the Church of England as an ideological arm of British middle-class society, as did Meredith and Morris who early rejected any religious belief. As a preacher and non-conformist minister John Bunyan was the only committed Christian in the group and Lindsay argues that his beliefs led him finally into an accommodation with middle-class values. At the same time Lindsay acknowledged that many of the spiritual beliefs of Christianity are critical of the behaviours associated with capitalism and provided followers with a way to re-vision their society, even when the religious institutions did not. Lindsay’s interest in religion was generated by its power to affect people bodily, in a way that discussions of politics and economics do not. Religion affects people’s senses and emotions, not just their thinking and so has the power to manipulate their whole being. Bunyan revealed this graphically in his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding which Lindsay addresses at some length in his author-study. Bunyan recalls the way his senses were distorted, and emotions heightened to hysteria by his concern that he had committed or even contemplated an action that contravened the tenets of his religion. For Lindsay this is one aspect of the power of religious ideology: its ability to destroy an individual’s unity within and make them vulnerable to manipulation. As Lindsay continued to develop his social analysis, the power of ideology to induce individuals to act in particular ways became increasingly central to his study, particularly when this meant that individuals acted against their own best interest or deepest beliefs and feelings. Many of his socialist and communist colleagues resorted to a determinist explanation that represented those living under capitalism as permeated by its ideology and essentially incapable of resistance. For Lindsay the most extreme version of this approach came with Louis Althusser and its most negative characteristic was that, like capitalism, it constituted all workers as incapable of independent thought and analysis; all, that is, except the intellectuals who would lead them in rebellion. In response, Lindsay proposed the work of Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch. Like Gramsci Lindsay saw capitalist ideology as dominant rather than totally pervasive, with an ability to constantly transform itself to meet its opposition (hence its co-option of religion), but also that it was constantly under challenge by individuals and groups who rejected economic and social practices that were unjust and inequitable. With Bloch Lindsay celebrated the hope for a better future that was embedded in the micro-challenges of everyday life that

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typically derived from the clash between the expectations created by capitalism (hard work will give you wealth and status) and reality (but only if you know the right people).

Base-Superstructure Model, Rejected Lindsay also rejected the base-superstructure model of society that was used by many social analysts in the twentieth century, including most of his socialist and communist colleagues. Though Lindsay agreed that the nature of a society’s economy (base) is a major factor in the formation of a society’s institutions and social practices, he rejected the idea that all other social and cultural practices were determined by or built on it (superstructure). Like Gramsci and Bloch, he held that earlier social and cultural formations continue to exert an influence on the individual and society, as does the individual’s own experience, other belief systems, etc. The individual constantly renegotiates their own being in response to multiple social, cultural, political, economic, and spiritual influences and experiences. They also articulate their being in personal and work practices that may contradict practices aligned with the economy. One of these practices is art. Lindsay saw art as having a major role in challenging, not simply reproducing, the values of its society. Not that all art is activist; he was just as critical of Soviet art that simply reproduced the ideology of the Communist Party as he was of art produced under capitalism that simply replicated its fragmentation and alienation. However, he totally rejected the notion that art is simply decorative, seeing it rather as a practice that engages the individual as an embodied (sensory, emotional, intellectual) being and so may restore the wholeness lost to the alienating practices of capitalism. He also conceived art as based on and as revealing the dynamic interconnections of all aspects of life, a practice that was the obverse of the disciplinary thinking that accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism.

Knowledge Production and Disciplinarity For Lindsay, knowledge production had become increasingly specialised and disconnected from the world it served. Enlightenment science swept the world along with Western imperialist forces that declared Indigenous knowledges to be superstition. As a university student Lindsay had rejected the disciplinarity of knowledge which he saw as stripping the life from the subject of inquiry. In response he left academia to join the world of art

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believing it involved an embodied engagement with the world. In the end this, too, proved inadequate as the sensuous and emotional appeal of the art he experienced was not matched by its social and political vision. When confronted with the poverty and inequity of post-World War I London, Lindsay became ever more aware of the need for a critical understanding of how the society had come to be as it was and why its people were forced to live as they did. It seemed that no single discipline or practice was sufficient to answer those questions.

Interdisciplinarity Lindsay’s far-ranging interdisciplinary research included his own (university) discipline of classics, literary and visual arts, cultural anthropology, history, political theory, psychology, science, philosophy, religion, archaeology. Rather than focus on any one of these fields he attempted to bring many or all together in the one project, to develop not a streamlined and simplified description of a particular artwork, writer, social practice, or historical period, but rather to proliferate the connections and associations which create its dynamic and multiple being and meanings. It is this interdisciplinary practice that enabled him to understand Turner’s painting, Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway as not simply a pictorial representation of a new technology but an astonishing slash across the face of the English countryside bringing with it profound and rapid changes to the life and well-being of the land, the society and its people and powered by a technology over which most people had no control. That reading could only be made by a writer who understood not only Turner’s artistic practice and how it affected his audience, but also the economic, social, political and cultural context of the work: ‘Men have taken over the speed of the hare: what are they going to do with it? Advance or hinder the movement of true humanity?’ (Lindsay 1985, p. 151). Sometimes Lindsay’s interdisciplinarity led to the dismissal of his literary criticism as sociology (perhaps to the discomfort of sociologists) and his history as politics. This is a familiar response to work which challenges disciplinary boundaries: that it is introducing into its analysis extraneous factors from other disciplines or areas of life. This criticism reflexively reveals the boundaries of the objecting discipline, examination of which might lead to new understandings of the subject of study, and in some cases to changes to the discipline itself. Lindsay’s lack or refusal of

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disciplinary inhibition meant that he followed his own reasoning based on wide-ranging research and experience, having encountered the criticism of the university as a bourgeois institution as a young tutor at the W.E.A., read Nietzsche’s rejection of the suppression of the body in Western thinking as a student, worked in the bohemian world of 1920s Sydney with its mix of conservative (sexist) and resistant (anti-bourgeois) values, joined people from all classes in membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, studied the life and work of a sixteenth-century iconoclastic monk, philosopher and scientist, Giordano Bruno who was as much of an outsider as Lindsay himself, worked as a publisher and editor as well as a writer, discovered the work of Karl Marx, particularly his early writings on society and being, staged performances for theatre, worked (briefly) in radio, attended Communist Party events in the Soviet Union where he encountered a range of colleagues from either side of the Iron Curtain and continued to hold both sides to account for their failures to live up to the promises of their belief systems, and found his final inspiration in the work of anti-fascist campaigner and Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci who maintained his belief that individuals can and do resist the power of hegemonic ideologies such as capitalism. As Lindsay wrote: ‘People are not economic robots.’ Lindsay’s refusal to delimit his research and writing according to contemporary disciplinary boundaries led him to develop his own conceptualisation of human society and culture that was not subject to the demands of scientific or pseudo-scientific rationalism. His research and critical methodology were interdisciplinary, and he constantly searched for a transformative, transdisciplinary practice.

Transdisciplinarity Lindsay explained the basis of this practice as a dialectics that is not synthetic but retained the individuality or specificity of different contributions, bringing them together in a new and more comprehensive dynamic that transformed the meaning and practice of all constitutive elements. His analysis of Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed is indicative of this aim. It does not subordinate the analysis of art practice to economics, nor the reverse: it aligns the sensory and emotional appeal of the work with the individual and social consequences of this new technology including the expression of ‘Time as a crucial aspect of a violently changing world’ (p. 150). In this sense Lindsay’s work, like that of physicist David Bohm

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whose work he quotes in The Crisis in Marxism (p.  113), is also transdisciplinary. Writing about Bohm’s ‘Transformative Scholarship and Intellectual Exile’ Peter le Breton notes: ‘By contrast with interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to inquiry, whereby topics are viewed through the lenses of two or more disciplines, transdisciplinary research is integrative, rather than additive, in the sense that it is a prism in the mind of the researcher that crosses or ignores disciplinary boundaries’ (2018, p. 421). In other words, it is more than a set of contributions from different disciplines but involves a change in perspective in order to accommodate disciplinary diversity within a methodology acceptable to all disciplines, which is the basis also of Lindsay’s dialectics. As le Breton writes of Bohm, ‘his insights are transformative because they point to a new level of knowledge and a new epistemology that is centred on the nature and role of thought’ (p. 421). Like Lindsay, Bohm was what le Breton describes as a generalist, an ‘integral scholar’: ‘Bohm challenges the validity of dualisms, such as science and nonscience, in his theory of wholeness—which is an epistemic theory of unified knowledge and an ontological theory of unified reality’ (p. 419). Not surprising, then, to find that Lindsay enlisted the iconoclastic Bohm in his own argument for unity. And that, like Bohm, Lindsay’s work championed a transdisciplinary methodology that requires a fundamental transformation in the ways we think about the world, ourselves and each other. Le Breton concludes his paper by noting that Bohm was deeply distressed by the current state of the world: He saw the underlying cause of civilisation on the brink of disaster as a pervasive lack of harmony between body, intellect, emotion, and spirit. Human beings are out of balance and disjointed; restoring balance and unity, Bohm believed, requires a radical reexamination of the thinking process. However, the difficulty is that seeing thought as a system that creates problems contradicts the prevailing and unquestioned paradigm that thought solves problems. (p. 428)

For Lindsay, that fetishisation of thought derives ultimately from the disunity within the self that also concerned Bohm. The transdisciplinary perspective they shared was not only a way to address complex problems in a world that technocratic thinking failed to comprehend; it also required the reintegration and unity of embodied (sensory, emotional, intellectual)

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353

being, and of human beings with each other and with their world that Lindsay identified in the oldest human societies. Lindsay, like Bohm, was ultimately optimistic that this reintegration and transformation could be achieved. Le Breton records that, when asked about whether human beings would survive, Bohm responded: ‘Yes. Barely’ (p. 417). In Meetings with Poets Lindsay is more positive: … bad as things are, I feel that they are continually trembling on the edge of a genuine upheaval, of the sort of which my poets become the triumphant mouthpiece. In the darkest night of society and the spirit, if one believes in poetry, one also believes in the possibility and inevitability of renewal, in the revolt of the young, in the miraculous gift of sight for the nation of the blind, in the return of the consuming hunger for wholeness. (pp. 234–35)

Interconnectedness Lindsay’s optimism came from a combination of sources but chief among them were the writings of a sixteenth-century monk and a twentieth-­ century Marxist. From Giordano Bruno came the notion that human beings are fundamentally interconnected within their own being, with each other and with their world and that all are part of a unity of being within which that connectedness operates and creates meaning. And with Antonio Gramsci he believed that people are more than the ideologies that shape them but creative beings who will find their own ways to revolt against the inequities and injustices they experience and witness in their society and their world. It goes without saying, but should perhaps be said, that Lindsay’s work predicted much contemporary interdisciplinary research particularly in fields such as cultural studies and environmental studies. He remained vitally interested in science but opposed to its fetishisation: the development of technology without regard for its social, cultural, economic and political consequences. And he was concerned that the growing specialisation of knowledge, with ever narrower disciplinary borders, facilitated this fetishisation, this loss of connectedness. What his individual studies and the breadth of his research and writing exemplify is the interconnectedness that he identified as essential for the development of a just and equitable society and a peaceful world. Lindsay found this interconnectedness in art.

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Art In The Fullness of Life he reflects back on his early work, concluding: When I exalted the creative image I was in effect declaring that this was the only unalienated object in our society—a claim with a fair amount of truth; for such an image, to the extent that it tears off the false face of alienated man and sets up an ideal of free energy (realised to the extent of the concreteness and fullness of the image, and thus robbed of utopianism), is indeed such an object—not the product of alienated man, but the prophecy of such a product, its prelude, and closely akin to it. It reflects or expresses the productive activity of labour with as great a distance as is historically possible between it and the intrusive alienation. (TFOL, p. 242)

For Lindsay, art is a fully embodied practice that enabled individuals to engage imaginatively with their world; to recognise and analyse the values and beliefs fundamental to class-based societies. It is not a practice that removes individuals from the social, political and economic realities of everyday life for a wish-fulfilment fantasy or a moment of solipsistic contemplation; rather it is a dynamic engagement with those realities which gave its audiences new ways to understand and act upon their world. Lindsay’s aim and achievement might be best expressed in the words of the poem ‘To Mulk Raj Anand’ that appears in the opening pages of his translation of Giordano Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity (1962): The world is there and then is here the fire without is deep within and near is far and far is near and the stars in my hand spin and in the stars I am spinning: love has cast out fear— Bruno is that moment when we find the hidden heart of things in the colliding lives of men as in the aspiring lark that sings small in the light’s tall tree with gyring wings:

14 CONCLUSION 

when the large joy we recklessly spend finds securely its home and finds at last the casual destined friend the shaping hands inside the mind present past and future one in struggle with no end           J.L.

355

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources Books Written by Jack Lindsay: Fauns and Ladies. Sydney: The Hand Press of J.T. Kirtley, 1923. The pleasante conceited narrative of Pan urge’s fantastically brocaded codpiece. Its damnation and a tricke plaied on a multitude of letcherous twats. Sydney: Panurgean Society, 1924. Spanish Main and Tavern. Sydney: Fanfrolico, 1924 [unpublished]. The Passionate Neatherd: a lyric sequence. Sydney: Fanfrolico Press, 1926. First list of fine books published in limited editions by the Fanfrolico Press. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1926. Marina Faliero. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927. William Blake: creative will and the poetic image. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927; rev. ed. 1929. Helen Comes of Age. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927. A Homage to Sappho. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1928. Dionysos: Nietzsche contra Nietzsche. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1928. Hereward. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1929. A Retrospect of the Fanfrolico Press. London: Simpkin Marshall, 1931. Cressida’s First Lover. London: John Lane, 1931. Time-please! London: Joiner & Steele, 1932. [Writing as Ailsa Lindsay] Rome for Sale. London: Mathews and Marrot, 1934. Caesar is Dead. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1934.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5

357

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Romans. ‘How & Why Series, no. 17’. London: A. & C. Black, 1935. Storm at Sea. London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1935. Last Days with Cleopatra. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1935. Runaway. Oxford: University Press, 1935. Despoiling Venus. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1935. Shadow and Flame. London: Chapman & Hall, 1936. [Writing as Robert Preston] Wanderings of Wenamen. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1936. Come Home at Last. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1936. Marc Antony: his world and his contemporaries. London: Routledge & Sons, 1936. Rebels of the Goldfields. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936. Who are the English? London: Left Review, 1936. Adam of a New World. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1936. End of Cornwall. London: Jonathan Cape, 1937. [Writing as Robert Preston] The Anatomy of Spirit: an inquiry into the origins of religious emotion. London: Methuen, 1937. Sue Verney. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1937. John Bunyan: maker of myths. London: Methuen, 1937. On Guard for Spain. London: Left Book Club Theatre Guild, 1937. Five thousand years of poetry: a declamation in prose and verse. London: Left Book Club Theatre Guild., 1938. To arms!: a story of ancient Gaul. Oxford: University Press, 1938. 1649: a novel of a year. London: Methuen, 1938. England, my England. London: Fore Publications, 1939. Lost Birthright. London: Methuen, 1939. A Short History of Culture. London: Gollancz, 1939. We need Russia. London: Left Book Club Theatre Guild, 1939. Brief Light: a novel of Catallus. London: Methuen, 1939. Giuliano the Magnificent. London: Andrew Dakers, 1940. Light in Italy. London: Gollancz, 1941. Hannibal Takes a Hand. London: Andrew Dakers, 1941. The Dons sight Devon: a story of the defeat of the invincible Armada. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. The Stormy Violence. London: Andrew Dakers, 1941. Into Action: the battle of Dieppe. A poem. London: Andrew Dakers, 1942. We Shall Return: a novel of Dunkirk and the French campaign. London: Andrew Dakers, 1942. Beyond Terror: a novel of the battle of Crete. London: Andrew Dakers, 1943. Second Front: poems. London: Andrew Dakers, 1944. Perspective for Poetry. London: Fore Publications, 1944. The Barriers are Down: a tale of the collapse of a civilisation. London: Gollancz, 1945. ‘Jolly swagman’: the Australians at home. London: Army Bureau of Current Affairs Pamphlet, 1945.

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359

Hullo Stranger. London: Andrew Dakers, 1945. British Achievement in Art and Music. London: Pilot Press, 1945. Time to Live. London: Andrew Dakers, 1946. The Subtle Knot. London: Andrew Dakers, 1948. Men of Forty-eight. London: Methuen, 1948. Mulk Raj Anand: a critical essay. Bombay: Hind Kitabs Ltd., 1948. Song of a Falling World: culture during the break-up of the Roman Empire, A. D. 350-600. London: Andrew Dakers, 1949. Marxism and Contemporary Science; or, the fullness of life. London, Dobson, 1949. Clue of Darkness. London: Andrew Dakers, 1949. Charles Dickens: a biographical and critical study. London: Andrew Dakers. Fires in Smithfield: a novel of Mary Tudor’s days. London: Bodley Head, 1950. A World Ahead: journal of a Soviet journey. London: Fore Publications, 1950. Peace is our Answer. London: Collets Holdings, 1950. Three Letters to Nikolai Tikhonov. London: Fore Publications, 1950. Cry of Greece. London: Arena for the League of Democracy in Greece, 1950. The Passionate Pastoral: an 18th century escapade. London: Bodley Head, 1951. Byzantium into Europe: the story of Byzantium as the first Europe (326-1204 AD.) and its further contribution till 1453 A.D. London: Bodley Head, 1952. Betrayed Spring. London: Bodley Head, 1953. Rumanian Summer: a view of the Rumanian People’s Republic. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1953. Rising Tide. London: Bodley Head, 1953. Civil War in England. London: Muller, 1954. The Moment of Choice. London: Bodley Head, 1955. George Meredith: his life and work. London: Bodley Head, 1956. The Romans Were Here: The Roman period in Britain and its place in our history. London: Muller, 1956. After the ’Thirties: the novel in Britain and its future. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956. A Local Habitation. London: Bodley Head 1957. The Great Oak: a story of 1549. London: Bodley Head 1957. Three Elegies. Sudbury, Suffolk: Myriad Press, 1957. Arthur and his Times: Britain in the Dark Ages. London: Muller, 1958. Discovery of Britain: a guide to archaeology. London: Merlin Press, 1958. Life Rarely Tells: an autobiographical account ending in the year 1921 and situated mostly in Brisbane, Queensland. London: Bodley Head, 1958. 1764: the hurlyburly of daily life exemplified in one year of the eighteenth century. London: Muller, 1959. Revolt of the Sons. London: Muller, 1960. The Writing on the Wall: an account of Pompeii in its last days. London: Muller, 1960.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Roaring Twenties: literary life in Sydney, New South Wales in the years 1921–26. London: Bodley Head, 1960. Death of the Hero: French painting from David to Delacroix. London: Studio, 1960. All on the Never-never. London: Muller, 1961. William Morris: writer. A lecture given to the William Morris Society on the 14th November 1958 at Caxton Hall, London. London: William Morris Society, 1961. Fanfrolico and After. London: Bodley Head, 1961. A Short History of Culture: from prehistory to the Renascence. London: Studio, 1962. The Way the Ball Bounces. London: Muller, 1962. Our Celtic Heritage. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. Masks and Faces. London: Muller, 1963. Daily Life in Roman Egypt. London: Muller, 1963. Choice of Times. London: Muller, 1964. Nine Days’ Hero: Wat Tyler. London: D. Dobson, 1964. The Clashing Rocks: a study of early Greek religion and culture and the origins of drama. London, Chapman & Hall, 1965. Our Anglo-Saxon Heritage. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965. Thunder Underground: a story of Nero’s Rome. London, Muller, 1965. Leisure and Pleasure in Roman Egypt. London: Muller, 1965. J. M. W. Turner. His life and work: a critical biography. London, Cory Adams & Mackay, 1966. Our Roman Heritage. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967. Meetings with poets: memories of Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Tristan Tzara. London: Muller, 1968. The Ancient World: manners and morals. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. Men and Gods on the Roman Nile. London: Muller, 1968. Cezanne: his life and art. London: Evelyn, Adams & Mackay, 1969. The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt. London: Muller, 1970. Origins of Astrology. London: Muller, 1971. Cleopatra. London: Constable, 1971. Gustave Courbet: his life and art. Bath, Somerset: Adams & Dart, 1973. Helen of Troy: woman and goddess. London, Constable; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman Littlefield, 1974. Blast-power and Ballistics: concepts of force and energy in the ancient world. London: Muller, 1974. Faces and Places. Toronto: Basilike, 1974. Death of a Spartan King and two other stories of the Ancient World. London: Inca Books, 1974. The Normans and their World. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974. William Morris: his life and work. London: Constable, 1975.

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361

Decay and Renewal: critical essays on twentieth-century writing. Sydney: Wild & Woolley; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976. The Troubadours and their World of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. London: Muller, 1976. Hogarth: his art and his world. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1977. The Monster City: Defoe’s London, 1688–1730. London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1978. William Blake: his life and work. London: Constable, 1978. Thomas Gainsborough: his life and art. London: Granada, 1981. Collected Poems. Lake Forest, IL: The Cheiron Press, 1981. The Crisis in Marxism. London: Moonraker Press, 1981. The Blood Vote. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1981. Life Rarely Tells: An autobiography in three volumes. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1982. Turner: The Man and his Art. New York: F. Watts, 1985.

Translations by Jack Lindsay: Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Sydney: Fanfrolico Press, 1925. Propertius, S. Propertius in Love. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927. Petronius, G. The Complete Works. London: Fanfrolico Press., 1927 Herondas. The Miniambs. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1929. Catullus. The Complete Poems. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1929. Aristophanes. Women in parliament. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1929. Homer. Homer’s Hymns to Aphrodite. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1929. Theocritus. The Complete Poems. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1929. Ausonius, D. Patchwork quilt: poems. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1930. Apuleius. The Golden Ass. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1932. Longus. Daphnis & Chloe. London: Daimon Press, 1948. Catullus. The Complete Poems. London: Sylvan Press, 1948. Nezval, V. Song of Peace. London: Fore Publications, 1951. Micklewicz, A. Poems. London: Sylvan Press, 1957. Asklepiades. The Loves of Askelpiades. Sudbury, Suffolk: Myriad Press, 1959. Bruno, G. Cause, principle and unity. Castle Hedingham, Essex: Daimon Press, 1962. Anthias, T. The elegy of Haido. London: Anthias Publications, 1966. Bille-de Mot, E. The age of Akhenaten. London: Evelyn, Adams & Mackay, 1966. Anthias, T. Greece I keep my vigil for you. London: Anthias Publications, 1968. Blok, A. The Twelve and the Scythians. Trans. London: The Journeyman Press, 1982.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books Edited by Jack Lindsay Poetry in Australia. Co-edited with K. Slessor and F.C. Johnson. Sydney: Vision Press, 1923. Inspiration: an anthology of utterances by creative minds defining the creative act and its lyrical basis in life. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1928. The Parlement of Pratlers, a series of Elizabethan dialogues and monologues illustrating daily life and the conduct of a gentleman on the grand tour, extracted from ‘Ortho-epia Gallica’ a book on the correct pronunciation of the French Language written by John Eliot and published in the year of 1593. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1928. Loving Mad Tom: bedlamite verses of the 16th and 17th centuries. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927. The metamorphosis of Ajax: a new discourse on a stale subject by Sir John Harington. with an anatomie of the metamorphosed Ajax, reprinted from the original editions. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927. With P. Warlock [Phillip Heseltine]. Delighted earth: a selection from Herrick’s Hesperides. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927. As Peter Meadows. Fleas in amber: verses and one fable in prose on the philosophy of vermin. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1930. A defence of women for their inconstancy and their paintings made by Jack Donne. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1930. The letters of Philip Stanhope, 2nd Earl of Chesterfield. London: Fanfrolico Press, 1930. l am a Roman: translations from the Latin. London, Mathews & Marrot, 1934. Medieval Latin poets. London: Mathews & Marrot, 1934. A handbook of freedom: a record of English democracy through twelve centuries. London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1939. With E. Rickword. New lyrical ballads. London: Editions Poetry, 1945. With M.  Carpenter and H. Arundel. Anvil: life and arts. A miscellany. London: Meridian Books, 1947. Poems by Robert Herrick. London: Grey Walls Press, 1948. Selected poems of William Morris. London: Grey Walls Press, 1948. Paintings and drawings by Leslie Hurry. London: Grey Walls Press, 1950. Stancu, Z. Barefoot. Trans. P.M. London, Fore Publications, 1951. William Blake: 200 years. Sudbury, Suffolk: Myriad Press, 1957. Russian poetry: 1917–1955. London: Bodley Head, 1957. Modern Russian poetry. Trans. Lindsay, J. London: Vista Books, 1960. Ribaldry of Greece: an anthology. Trans. Jack Lindsay. London: Elek, 1961. Ribaldry of Rome: an anthology. Trans. Jack Lindsay. London: Elek, 1961.

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363

The sunset ship: the poems of J.  M. W.  Turner. Lowestoft, England: Scorpion Press, 1966. Priestley, Joseph. Autobiography: memoirs written by himself [and] An account of further discoveries in air. Somerset, Bath: Adams & Dart, 1970.

Book Series Edited by Jack Lindsay New Development. London: The Bodley Head, 1947–48. Key Poets. Co-editor with R. Swingler. London: Fore Publications, 1950.

Journals Edited by Jack Lindsay Queensland University Magazine. Brisbane: University of Queensland, 1919. Vision: A Literary Quarterly. With Frank C. Johnson and Kenneth Slessor. Sydney, 1923–24. The London Aphrodite. Co-editor. London, 1928–29. Reprinted London: Fanfrolico Press, 1929. Poetry and the People. Co-editor. London, 1938–40. Arena. Co-editor with Randall Swingler. London, 1949–51.

Selected Articles, Letters and Manuscripts by Jack Lindsay ‘Ebenezer Jones, 1820–1860 – an English Symbolist’. In Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L.  Morton, ed. Maurice Cornforth, 151–75. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978. ‘Introduction.’ In Selected Poems by William Morris, ed. Jack Lindsay, 7–21. London: The Grey Walls Press, 1948. ‘Letters to the Editor: Marxism and Historical Teaching’. Times Literary Supplement, December 26, 1952, 853. ‘Nietzsche’. Queensland University Magazine (October 1920): 13–15. ‘Not English’. Left Review, 3 Oct. 1937: 511–17. ‘Poetry’. Queensland University Magazine (August 1919): 10–11. ‘Shakespeare and Milton’. Vision: A Literary Quarterly, Vol.4 (February 1924): 32–39. ‘The Academic Mind’. Galmahra (May 1921): 25–7. ‘The Elephant and the Lotus: The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand.’ In Jack Lindsay, Decay and renewal: critical essays on twentieth-century writing, 136–66. Sydney: Wild & Woolley; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976.

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‘The Metric of William Blake.’ In Poetical Sketches by William Blake, With an Essay on Blake’s Metric by Jack Lindsay, ed. Eric Partridge, 1–24. London: Scholartis Press, 1927. ‘The Role of the Individual in Art’. In Jack Lindsay, Decay and renewal, 370–421. ‘Two Dimensional Poetry’. Vision: A Literary Quarterly, Vol. 3 (November 1923): 38–41. The Fullness of Life: Autobiography of an Idea. [c. 1970] Accessed April 21, 2023. https://jacklindsayproject.com/the-­fullness-­of-­life/.

Secondary Sources ‘A Marxist View of Byzantium: Jack Lindsay, Byzantium into Europe’. Times Literary Supplement, December 12, 1952, 816. ‘Mr. Witherby on “Fear”’. Daily Standard, December 14, 1920, 2. ‘The inventions of William Blake, painter and poet’. London University Magazine, vol. II, (March 1830): 318–23. ‘Vision: Second Quarterly Number’. Sunday Times (Sydney), August 19, 1923, p. 6. Ackerman, Robert. ‘The Fortunes of Cambridge: Myth and ritual in Anglo-­ American criticism’. Information (International Social Science Council), Vol.15, No.6 (1976): 919–28. Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995. Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Essay as Form’. In Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 3–23. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1991a. ———. Aesthetic Theory, ed. & trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. ———. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991b. ———. Negative Dialectics. London: Bloomsbury, 1981. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, intro. Fredric Jameson. N.Y.: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Ananad, Mulk Raj. Untouchable, intro. Ramachandra Guha & afterword E.M. Forster. London: Penguin, 2014. The Book of Common Prayer [1662]. Digireads.com Publishing, 12 July 2020. Kindle. Arnold, John. ‘A Checklist of Jack Lindsay’s Books.’ In Culture and History, ed. Bernard Smith, 394–406. Arnold, John. ‘Jack Lindsay: a bibliography to 1926 and a checklist of his books.’ In Culture and History, ed. Bernard Smith, 374–393. ———. The Fanfrolico Press: Satyrs, Fauns & Fine Books. Pinner, Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 2009.

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Australian University Verse: An Undergraduate Anthology 1920–22, intro. John Le Gay Brereton. Melbourne: Universities of Australia Press [1922]. Aytoun, W.E. ‘Alexander Smith’s Poems’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 75 Issue 461 (March 1854a): 345–351. ———. [as T.  Percy Jones] ‘Firmillian: A Tragedy’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 75, Iss. 463, (May 1854b): 533–551. Bain, Alexander. The Senses and the Intellect, 3rd. ed. N.Y.: D.  Appleton & Co., 1868. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C.  Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1972. Bayly, Lewis. The practice of piety : directing a Christian how to walk, that he may please God. Morgan, PA : Soli Deo Gloria, 1994. https://archive.org/details/ practiceofpietyd0000bayl Accessed 19 May 2023. Beaton, Janet. Poems. Sydney: The Viking Press, 1944. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Oxford: OUP, 2007. Bernal, J.D. ‘Psycho-Analysis and Marxism’, The Labour Monthly, Vol.19 (July 1937), pp.435–7. Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed April 21, 2023: https:// www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1930s/psycho.htm. Blair, Kirstie. ‘Swinburne’s Spasms: Poems and Ballads and the “Spasmodic School”’. Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2006): 180–96. Blake, William. Blake: Complete Writings, With Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London: OUP, 1972. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Volume 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995. Blunt, Anthony. ‘Blake’s “Ancient of Days”: The Symbolism of the Compasses.’ Journal of the Warburg Institute. Vol. 2, No. 1 (July 1938): 53–63. Bohm, D.J. ‘Gary Zukav: The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An overview of the new physics’. Times Literary Supplement (February 15, 1980): 165. Boos, Florence S. ‘“Spasm” and Class: W.  E. Aytoun, George Gilfillan, Sydney Dobell, and Alexander Smith’. Victorian Poetry, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter 2004): 553–583. Borg, James M. Jack Lindsay: A Rough Chart of the ‘Great Unknown’: a Bio-­ Bibliographical Summary by a Non-Marxist friend. Lake Forest, IL: The Cheiron Press, [n.d.]. Bounds, Philip and David Berry eds. British Marxism and Cultural Studies: Essays on a Living Tradition. London: Routledge, 2016. Bounds, Philip. ‘Science, art and dissent: Jack Lindsay and the communist theory of culture.’ In British Marxism and Cultural Studies, ed. Philip Bounds and David Berry, 21–43. Bowd , G. P. ‘“This day in Paris/this day everywhere”: Jack Lindsay and France’. Socialist History, vol. 55 (2019): 69–95.

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Morris, William. The Sundering Flood. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1898. ———. The Well at the World’s End. Two Volumes. NY: Ballantine, 1970b. ———. The Wood beyond the World. NY: Ballantine, 1974. Morton, Heather. ‘The “Spasmodic” Hoaxes of W.E. Aytoun and A.C. Swinburne’. Studies in English Literature, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Autumn 2008): 849–60. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Cliftosn P. Fadiman. N.Y.: Dover, 1995 [1872]; Kindle. ———. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Thomas Common. [1883] Kindle. ———. Twilight of the Idols, Or How One Philosophizes With a Hammer. Trans. Thomas Common, ed. Bill Chapko. [1888] Kindle. Orwell, George. England Your England. Kindle [1941]. Paananen, Victor N. ‘Jack Lindsay.’ In Biographical Dictionary of Modem British Radicals, Volume 3, ed. Joseph O.  Baylen and Norbert Gossman, 524–7. Sussex: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1988. ———. British Marxist Criticism. NY: Garland Publishing Inc., 2000. Palgrave, Francis Turner ed. The Golden Treasury of the best Songs and Lyrical Pieces In the English Language. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890. Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. NY: Vintage Arrow, 2011. Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture, new edition. Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2018. Plekhanov, Georgi. ‘On the Role of the Individual in History’ (1898). Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed April 21, 2023, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html. Price, Cormell. ‘Lancashire and Mary Barton’, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Vol.7, (July 1856): 441–51. Accessed April 21, 2023, http://www. rossettiarchive.org/img/ap4.o93.1.451.jpg. Resnais, Alain. Hiroshima Mon Amour. France: Pathé, 1959. Rettie, John. ‘The secret speech that changed world history’, The Guardian, February 26 2006 12:51 AEDT. Accessed August 8, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/26/russia.theobserver. Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Rossetti, D.G. ‘Ebenezer Jones’. Notes & Queries, Vol. 41 (1870):154. Rossetti Archive. Accessed April 21, 2023. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/28p­1870.raw.html. Rudy, Jason R. ‘On Cultural Neoformalism, Spasmodic Poetry, and the Victorian Ballad’. Victorian Poetry, Volume 41, Number 4 (Winter 2003): 590–6 ———. ‘Rhythmic Intimacy, Spasmodic Epistemology’. Victorian Poetry, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter 2004): 451–72. Ruskin, John. ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’. In Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 151–85. London: The Waverley Book Company, 1854.

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———. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 2013. ———. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. London: Merlin Press, 1977. Thorpe, Benjamin. Northern Mythology, Comprising the Principal Popular Traditions and Superstitions of Scandinavia, North Germany, and the Netherlands [London: Edward Lumley, 1852]. Accessed April 21, 2023, https://archive.org/details/northernmytholog03thoruoft. Trad, Lynette and Margaret Liessi. Family Histories: Owens and Parkinson, 2013. (unpublished). Trollope, Frances. The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy. In Collected Works of Frances Trollope. Delphi Classics, 2016. Kindle. Tucker, Herbert F. ‘Glandular Onanism and Beyond: The Victorian Spasmodic Epic’. Victorian Poetry, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter 2004): 429–50. Tyldum, Morten, director. The Imitation Game. The Weinstein Company, 2014. I hr., 55min. Vice, Thomas. ‘Charles Dickens and Gurney’s shorthand: “that savage stenographic mystery”’. Language & History, Vol. 61, nos. 1–2 (2018): 77–93. Whyte, Lancelot Law. The Next Development in Mankind. With a new Introduction by Gary David and Brian Rothery, 970–92. London: Routledge, 2017. Wilde, Oscar. ‘The Decay of Lying’. In Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London & Glasgow, Collins, 1973. Wilding, Michael. ‘Introduction’. In Jack Lindsay, Life Rarely Tells: An autobiography in three volumes, pp. vii–xvi. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1982. ———. ‘Jack Lindsay’. Overland: a Literary Quarterly, No. 83 (1981): 40–3. Wilson, Edmund. ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’. In The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, 1–104. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. ———. To the Lighthouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1964. Wright, Willard Huntington. Creative Will: Studies in the Philosophy and the Syntax of Aesthetics, 1916. Kindle. ———. What Nietzsche Taught, 1915. Kindle. Writers Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Nothing is Lost: Ann Lindsay 1914–1954. London: Edgell Rickword for the Writers Group of the Communist Party, [1954]. Young, Edith. Inside Out. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. Zola, Émile. Earth, trans. Ann Lindsay. London & NY: Elek Press, 1954.

Index1

A Abercrombie, Lascelles, 174 Aboriginal Australians, 21, 25, 109, 110, 342n2 Aboriginal Rights Movement, 21 Abstraction, 26, 40–45, 108, 114, 115, 121, 279, 302–304 art, 227 artwork, 279 cash nexus, 145 devaluation, 72 disengagement, 68 evil, 44, 115, 116 generalisation, 57, 116, 224 identity thinking, 330 inequality, 115 interconnectedness, 47 life, 66 modern consciousness, 115

modernism, 42 moral, 42 opposition to, 72 power, 330 pure, 258 reason, 43 rejection of, 72, 121, 258 scientific, 40 spectre, 49 struggle, 45 unity, 118 Academic discipline, 4, 7, 9, 58, 114, 248, 349, 350 Ackroyd, Peter, 298 Blake, 298 Act of Conventicles, 96n3 Act of Uniformity, 96n3 Adams, Tony, 180, 185 Adorno, Theodor, 295, 325, 329–333, 340

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Cranny-Francis, Jack Lindsay, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5

379

380 

INDEX

Aesthetic, aesthetics art, 44–46 and Blake, Wiliam, 44–46 discipline, 66 emotion, 46 intuition, 50 life, 38 Marxist, 14 nature/natural world, 212 political function, 58 unity, 160–161 Agency individual, 5, 9 Alexander, Samuel, 65 Alienation, 3, 156, 181, 196, 198, 200, 232, 242, 245, 279, 287, 303, 309–310, 322, 324–326, 341–343, 347, 349, 354 artwork, 284 being, 332 body, 313 capitalist, 210, 215, 217, 228, 249, 269 economic, 201 exploitation, 267 humanism, 335 individual, 271, 283, 322 intensity, 347 of labour, 268, 270 Marxist, 241 nature, 338 political, 308 self, 213 social, 326 spiritual, 201 Alighieri, Dante, 49, 317 Divine Comedy, 317 Althusser, Louis, 5, 295, 297, 321, 325, 333–337, 340, 348 Lenin and Philosophy, 336 Anabaptists, 79 Anand, Mulk Raj, 5n1, 128, 131, 168–172, 243, 354

Untouchable, 170 Anarchism, 43, 59, 165, 263 Ancients, The, 316, 317 Anglican Church, see Church of England Anglicanism, 97 Anti-fascism, 80, 126, 351 Apollo, 42, 67, 68, 306 Apuleius, 77 Aragon, Louis, 28, 180, 243 Archaeology, 224, 250, 350 Arena, 130, 176 Aristophanes, 30 Army Bureau of Current Affairs, 126 Arnold, John, 11, 12, 30–32, 54, 71–74, 78, 105, 106, 295 Fanfrolico Press: Satyrs, Fauns and Fine Books, The, 12 Art, 61, 172–174, 225–229, 272, 289, 291, 295, 341, 343, 354–355 as activism, 134, 159–178, 263–264 bourgeois, 279–281 under capitalism, 227–229 critical methodology, 283 embodied practice, 354 genealogy of, 286–287 historical moment, 331 and ideology, 321–343 and individual, 278–279 and life, 62 literary innovation, 230–234 means of production, 134 and politics, 76–77, 173, 331 pre-class societies, 225 revolutionary, 248 and senses, 271–287 social role of art, 162 and technology, 281–282 Art in Australia, 25 Asclepiades of Samos, 188 Ashleigh, Charles, 185 Auden, W.H., 160

 INDEX 

Augustine, 102 Austin, Alfred, 257 Australian Academy of Humanities, 291 B Bachelard, Gaston, 334, 335 Bailey, Philip James, 195, 273 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 218n1 Ball, John, 79 Balzac, Honoré, 228, 230 Barrow, John Henry, 140n1 Barthes, Roland, 333, 334 Mythologies, 333 Base-superstructure, 2, 134, 173, 223, 234, 296, 323, 339, 343, 349 Baudelaire, Charles, 27, 277 Bax, Ernest Belfort, 266 Manifesto of the Socialist League, The, 266 Baxter, Richard, 86 Bayly, Lewis, 88 Practice of Piety, The, 88 BBC, 179, 186, 187 Beadnell, Maria, 146 Beaton, Janet, 28 Becon, Thomas, 89 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 60, 331 Being, 46, 49, 56, 107, 219, 225, 227, 232, 297, 303, 321, 326, 347, 353 abstraction, 44 alienation, 230, 286, 322, 326, 332, 342 and art, 61, 66, 68, 167, 196 artist, 46 beauty, 42 Cartesian, 66 Christian, 97 and consciousness, 40, 221, 234, 274, 309

381

creativity, 61 and culture, 1, 169 divided, 308 embodied, 15, 62, 91, 115, 121, 162, 226, 271, 278, 307, 322 empathy, 171 existence, 63 genetic properties, 161 and hope, 328 human, 15, 24, 67, 122, 224, 302, 306, 338, 347 individual, 2, 10, 14, 36, 40, 42, 48, 57, 84, 119, 178, 191, 199, 207, 208, 214, 222, 235, 308, 315, 323, 326, 328, 346, 347, 349 integrated, 272, 285, 305 interconnectedness, 50, 304, 353 and labour, 324 levels of, 301 material world, 38 mechanistic, 47, 120 nature, 14, 37, 47, 212, 343 network, 44 objectification, 43 and poetry, 56–59, 64 and senses, 65, 67, 68, 89, 106, 283, 284, 311 sensory, 15, 24, 37, 39, 40, 48, 50, 54, 57, 58, 61, 65, 83, 89, 100, 101, 106, 149, 160, 162, 171, 199, 214, 232, 233, 253, 258, 271, 272, 276, 278, 279, 283, 284, 286, 287, 303, 311–313, 322, 329, 343, 347, 349, 351, 352 social, 62, 196, 206, 218, 235, 351 social division, 316 sociopathy, 217 and trauma, 90 unity, 50, 55, 299, 311, 315, 348 Bell, Clive, 174, 175

382 

INDEX

Bellamy, Edward, 267 Looking Backward, 267 Benjamin, Walter, 281, 282 Bentham, Jeremy, 142n2 Berger, John, 9 Berkeley, George, 312 Siris, 312 Bernal, J.D., 119, 120 Bible, 48, 98, 138, 139 Bigg, John Stanyan, 273 Blair, Kirstie, 272n1 Blair, Robert, 317 Grave, The, 317 Blake, William, 9, 13, 14, 32–33, 35–51, 53–55, 57–60, 62, 64, 66–68, 81, 107, 114, 122, 134, 156, 163, 172, 173, 191, 221, 244, 277, 287, 289, 297–319, 321, 343, 346, 347 abstraction, 114–116 aesthetics, 44–46 alienation, 309–310 All Religions Are One, 301 America: A Prophecy, 308 Ancient of Days, The, 42 Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, 41, 298 artwork, 40 body and senses, 39 Book of Los, The, 303 Book of Thel, The, 306 childhood, 298 colour-image, 49–50 creative will, 48–49 death, 318 dialectics vs. binary thinking, 306–307 early life, 298–299 Emanation, 43 Enitharmon, 304, 308, 311 Eternal Man, 299 Europe: A Prophecy, 308

final years, 316–319 First Book of Urizen, The, 303, 304 Four Zoas, The, 298, 310 French Revolution, The, 306 Illustrations of the Book of Job, 317 imagination, 47–48, 312–313 influences, 299–301 Jerusalem, 42, 304, 305, 315–316 literary form, 313–315 Los, 42, 304–306 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 39, 43, 57, 306, 314 nature/natural man, 303 Oothoon, 310 Orc, 304, 308, 315 patriarchal feminine, 310–311 poetic vision, 37–39 Prometheus Unbound, 57 revolution and repression, 308–309 revolution and transformation, 311–312 science and reason, 301–302 Song of Los, The, 303, 305 Songs of Experience, 33, 57, 308 Songs of Innocence, 306 Spectre, 42, 43, 45 There is No Natural Religion, 301, 306 Tiriel, 306 unity, 36–37, 46–47, 315–316 Urizen, 14, 42, 43, 45, 51, 67, 115, 163, 304–306, 308, 310, 314, 317 Urthona, 308 as visionary, 35–51 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 43, 306, 307, 310 Blanc, Louis, 264 Bloch, Ernst, 295, 325, 327–329, 331, 333, 342, 348, 349 Principle of Hope, The, 328 Bloch, Joseph, 323

 INDEX 

Blok, Alexander, 295, 343 Scythians, The, 295, 343 Twelve, The, 295, 343 Body, 2, 39, 42, 56, 62, 201, 215, 271, 284, 285, 303, 324, 345, 347, 352 alienation, 269, 308, 313 being, 169 demonisation, 61, 348 integrity, 14 interconnectedness, 304 politics, 63 social conflict, 68 suppression, 351 unity, 301 Boehme, Jakob, 299, 300 Bohm, David, 351–353 Bolshevism, 21 Book of Common Prayer, The, 96, 96n3 Boos, Florence S., 272n1 Borg, James, 11, 295 Bounds, Philip, 2, 7, 10, 12 Bourgeois novel, 99, 101, 102, 327 Bowd, G.P., 12 Bradman, Sir Don, 237 Brecht, Bertolt, 127, 180, 282, 332 Bright, John, 153n3 British Drama League, 128 British Empire, 22 British-Rumanian Friendship Society, 180 Brothers, Richard, 313 Brouwer, Joel, 12, 172 Brown, Alec, 77 Brown, Ford Madox, 262 Browning, Robert, 195, 253, 273, 275 Bruno, Giordano, 15, 68, 80, 107, 110, 112, 194, 346, 351, 353, 354 Bulletin, The, 18

383

Bunyan, John, 6, 7, 13, 71, 80–103, 106–108, 110, 116–118, 120, 123, 125, 135, 149, 189, 192, 239, 248, 292, 346, 348 arrest, 95 and class, 82 Grace Abounding, 83, 85, 88–91, 97, 98, 118, 348 Holy War, The, 83, 102–103 Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The, 83, 100–102 lost birthright, 91–95 marriage, 88–89 nature/natural world, 98 Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 83, 89, 96–102 politics, 86–88 and religion, 83–84 Some Gospel Truths Opened According to the Scriptures, 95 soul searching, 89–91 and trauma, 84–86 Bunyan, Thomas, 82 Burden, Jane, 255, 256 Burne-Jones, Edward, 250, 251 Butts, Thomas, 37, 45, 114 Byron, Lord, 54, 154, 274 C Cade, Jack, 79 Calvinism, 89, 94, 96, 274 Capitalism, 8, 14, 89, 99, 110, 198, 199, 201, 216–218, 220, 227–230, 232, 233, 258, 264, 268, 272, 286, 303, 324, 325, 332, 342, 348, 349 accumulation, 198 alienation, 210, 228, 249, 280, 284 art, 349 bourgeois, 217, 272, 347 cash nexus, 203

384 

INDEX

Capitalism (cont.) and Christianity, 348 commodification, 269, 341 commodity exchange, 330 conflict, 322 critique of, 93, 241 demise of, 265 English, 273 human being, 178 ideology, 207, 351 individual, 326 industrial, 133, 144, 177, 210, 213, 304, 309, 315, 317, 319, 345 institutional, 278 interconnectedness, 218 labour, 285 nature, 347 power, 269, 336 pre-capitalism, 160 progress narrative, 109, 191 and Protestantism, 117 and religion, 94–96, 210 resistance, 335 rise of, 83 and science, 338 seduction of, 242 social life, 227 society, 223, 268 subversion of, 97 western world, 321 Carlyle, Thomas, 144–146, 150–152, 203, 250, 270, 274 cash nexus, 145 Chartism, 145, 151 French Revolution, The, 145, 274 Carney, Beth, 159 Catholic Church, 110, 117, 120 Catholicism, 83, 89, 138, 139, 206 Caudwell, Christopher, 163, 172, 173, 176 Illusion and Reality, 163 Studies in a Dying Culture, 172

Cezanne, Paul, 243 Chambers, Colin, 12, 128 Story of Unity Theatre, The, 12 Charles I, 314 Charles II, 96, 102, 314 Chartists, 79, 146, 207, 273 Chase, Richard, 9 American Novel and its Tradition, The, 9 Chatterton, Thomas, 313 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 305 Chekhov, Anton, 216 Childe, Vere Gordon, 22, 79, 109, 224, 244 Christianity, 39, 55, 61, 67, 112, 116, 117, 133, 163, 300, 311, 347, 348 bourgeois, 210 Christian socialism, 22, 250 Church of England, 83, 88–90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 96n3, 116, 133, 138, 250, 348 Church, R.W., 175 Civil War, 85, 86 Class conflict, 87, 100, 109, 219, 265, 336 Classics, 10, 11, 224, 350 Cleopatra, 245 Cobden, Richard, 153n3 Cold War, 4, 9, 186–187, 189, 219, 241, 293, 321 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 54, 69 Biographia Literaria, 69 Colletti, Lucio, 338 Comfort, Alex, 164n1 Communist Party of Great Britain, 4, 6, 8, 9, 77, 79, 123, 125, 126, 126n1, 128, 130, 131, 172–174, 173n3, 177, 179–181, 184, 186, 217, 220, 239, 240, 339, 340, 349, 351 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 181, 183 Connor, John T., 5, 6, 8–10, 12, 27

 INDEX 

Consciousness, 39, 50, 57, 163, 196, 213, 214, 219, 220, 229, 232, 282, 297, 309, 314, 326, 329, 332 alienation, 230 being, 221, 225, 234, 274, 302, 308, 309 binary thinking, 306 change, 326 class, 342 critical, 331 dialectical, 167 embodiment, 254 formation of, 340 historical, 8–10 human, 40, 47, 189 individual, 2, 199, 220, 334 Marxist, 217 modern, 115 non-alienated, 235 poetic, 160, 275 political, 127 revolutionary, 340 senses, 272, 276 social, 100 social existence, 217 transformation, 228 unity, 313 Consistory Courts, 140 Conventicle Act, 95n2 Corbett, James, 11 Garland for Jack Lindsay, A, 11 Cornforth, Maurice, 174 Counihan, Noel, 187 Coupe, Lawrence, 14 Courbet, Gustave, 245 Craig, Robert, 74 Craik, Dinah, 204 John Halifax, Gentleman, 204 Cranny-Francis, Anne, 12 Crimean War, 208 Critical Theory, 329, 330 Croce, Benedetto, 174

385

Croft, Andy, 12 Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler, 12 Cromwell, Oliver, 85, 86, 314, 315 Crowley, Aleister, 74n1 Crowley, Robert, 89, 93 informacion and Peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore Commons of this Realme, An, 93 Way to Wealth, The, 93 Cultural anthropology, 68, 109, 347, 350 Cultural Studies, 2, 5, 7, 10, 130, 353 Culture, 1, 3, 14, 109, 169, 273, 323–324, 333, 339 Australian Renascence, 26 being, 10, 225 bourgeois, 281 British, 134, 188 cultural history, 130, 180, 181, 243, 245 cultural production, 2, 11, 324, 331, 340 dominant, 283, 334 early culture, 161 European, 117, 154 hegemonic, 342 industry, 331 Marxist, 179 material culture, 110, 122 origins of, 115 popular culture, 97 role of, 172 Roman, 187 Socialist Realist, 130 system, 223 D Dadaists, 26 Daily Worker, 177 Dance, 61, 161, 225, 226, 228, 347 and Nietzsche, 61

386 

INDEX

Darwin, Charles, 178, 213 Davenport, John, 177 David, Jacques-Louis, 185, 243 Davies, Ann (aka Lindsay, Ann), 125, 128, 179–181 Nothing is Lost: Ann Lindsay 1914–1954, 180 The Theatre, 129 Davies, Paul James, 244 De Locre, Elza, 32, 72–75, 77, 125 I See the Earth, 74 Older than Earth, 74 De Maistre, Roy, 25 Defence of India Act, 169 Defoe, Daniel, 148, 295, 343 Delacroix, Eugène, 243 Democratic Federation, 264, 265 Dent, Arthur, 88 Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, The, 88 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 7, 334 Dialectics, 57, 107, 112–114, 167, 179, 181, 220, 296, 301, 311, 333, 339–340, 351, 352 and art, 184 in Blake, William, 300, 301 consciousness, 213 culture, 115 dialectical materialism, 108, 113 Hegelian, 112, 301 knowledge, 322 Marxist, 126, 330 method, 339 negative, 330 and science, 337 society and nature, 122 unity, 111, 112, 213 Dickens, Charles, 13, 123, 125, 131, 159, 168, 171, 177, 179, 188, 189, 192, 194, 199, 230, 231, 248, 249, 263, 273, 348 artist, 135–138

Barnaby Rudge, 138, 150, 152, 153 Bleak House, 135, 140, 153, 171 Christmas Carol, A, 153 class politics, 151–152 critical vision, 157 David Copperfield, 136–138, 140n1, 153, 171 early writings, 142–144 family life, 146–148 Great Expectations, 154, 171 Hard Times, 153 and law, 140–141 literary form, 148–150 Little Dorrit, 138, 154 Martin Chuzzlewit, 153 Mystery of Edwin Drood, The, 139, 154 Oliver Twist, 149, 150, 155 Our Mutual Friend, 154–156, 171 and parliament, 141–142 Pickwick Papers, The, 135 reformer, 177 and religion, 138–139 as revolutionary, 157 sentimentality, 177 Sketches by Boz, 142 social criticism, 150–151 social transformation, 152–154 Sunday under Three Heads, 138 Tale of Two Cities, A, 154 Thousand and One Humbugs, The, 142 Uncommercial Traveller, The, 138 Dionysos, 42, 67, 68, 306 Disraeli, Benjamin, 263 Dixon, Richard Watson, 250 Dobell, Sydney, 195, 273 Doerfel, Marianne, 193 Don Quixote, 231n3 Doskow, Minna, 172 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 59, 60, 134, 216

 INDEX 

E Eastern Question Association, 264 Eco, Umberto, 248 Eliot, T.S., 160, 232 Elkington, John (Jack), 17, 18, 20, 55 Elkington, Mary, 18, 22, 24, 55 Ellis, F.S., 261 Éluard, Paul, 243 Embodiment, 1, 2, 15, 56, 159, 160, 271, 297, 307, 325, 349 art, 354 being, 72, 90, 115, 121, 162, 225, 226, 278, 322, 352 consciousness, 254 engagement, 54, 106, 212, 313, 350 existential, 202 experience, 100, 162, 166 individual, 11, 91, 312, 340 interconnectedness, 68 poetry, 58 reader, 165 social experience, 85 specialisation, 114 writing, 228 Emergentism, 65 Emotion, 15, 37, 47, 48, 57, 160, 166, 226, 279, 322, 324, 329, 341, 352 adaptation, 172 artwork, 350 authenticity, 101 being, 89, 106, 271, 347 capital, 283 devastation, 201 and Dickens, Charles, 135 embodiment, 349 engagement, 65, 67, 162, 171, 343 image, 36 interconnectedness, 58 nature, 40 oppression, 170

387

reader response, 159 realism, 101, 253 and religion, 83 senses, 351 sentimentalism, 203–204 trauma, 90 Engels, Friedrich, 77, 107, 134, 145, 223, 233, 266, 278, 322, 323, 337 Anti-Dühring, 107 Communist Manifesto, The, 107 Environment, 10, 11, 40, 136, 169, 171, 241, 275, 283, 308, 312 commercial, 194 destruction of, 241, 242, 264, 268 engagement, 178 natural, 110, 111 political, 103 social, 170, 176, 334 Environmental Studies, 353 Erdman, David, 315 Escapism, 176 Euripides, 244 Evans, Raymond, 22, 58n1 Expressionism, 279 F Family Histories Owens-Parkinson, 13, 18, 238, 239, 289, 291, 293 Fanfrolico Press, 30–32, 35, 71, 72, 74, 77, 79, 107, 237, 239 Fantasy, 176 Fascism, 79, 123, 125, 329 Faulkner, Charles, 250, 260, 263 Fauves, 26 Fetishisation, 332, 333, 353 art-object, 167 consumer-object, 167 disunity of self, 352 of nature, 122 of sexuality, 120 theory, 338

388 

INDEX

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 335 Fielding, Henry, 181 First World War, 21, 26, 42, 295 Fore Publications, 128, 129, 180, 188 Form, 174, 341 artwork, 332 content, 175, 177 organic, 175 projection of structure, 176 Formalism, 176 Fortnightly Review, 264 Foucault, Michel, 334 Fourier, Charles, 264 Fox, George, 83 Journal, The, 83 France, 72, 74n1, 251, 308, 315 Franco-Prussian War, 263 Frankfurt School, 295, 333, 335, 336, 338, 341, 342 Fraser, George Sutherland, 164n1 Freeberg, Norman, 22 French Revolution, 315 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 48, 90, 108, 118–121, 163, 291 Marxist critique, 108 Fromm, Erich, 3–8 Froude, James Anthony, 252 History of England, 252 Fulford, William, 250 Fuller, Roy, 294 Fuseli, Henry, 299 Futurists, 26 G Gainsborough, Thomas, 295, 343 Galilei, Galileo, 241, 338 Galmahra, 23, 60 García Márquez, Gabriel, 8 Garman, Douglas, 77 George III, 308 Geras, Norman, 336, 336n1

Gestalt theory, 222 Gilchrist, Alexander, 298 Gilchrist, Anne, 318 Gillen, Paul, 12, 59, 127–130, 174, 187 Jack Lindsay: Faithful to the Earth, 12 Gissing, George, 214 Glancy, Ruth F., 135 Goethe, Johann, 9, 193, 194, 270 Goldmann, Lucien, 324, 334 Goldsmith, Oliver, 148 Goold-Adams, Sir Hamilton, 21 Gordon Riots, 150, 152 Gordon, Lord George, 150, 153 Gorky, Maxim, 170, 172 Gothic novel, 150 Gracchus, Gaius, 87n1 Gramsci, Antonio, 15, 295, 337, 340–343, 348, 349, 351, 353 Gregsonn, John, 243 Gurney, Thomas Brachygraphy, or an easy and compendious system of short hand, 140n1 H Hall, Edith, 12 People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939, A, 12 Hammersmith Socialist Society, 266 Hardy, Thomas, 214 Harker, Ben, 12 Harkness, Margaret, 233 City Girl, A, 233 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 65, 68, 109, 161, 224, 272n1 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 65 Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 65

 INDEX 

Hawke, John, 12 Hegel, Georg W.F., 107, 112, 193, 194, 270, 330 Hegelian dialectics, 301, 322 Heine, Heinrich, 193 Helen of Troy, 245 Hemingway, Ernest, 232 Henderson, Philip, 247 Hendry, Ian, 243 Hendry, J.F., 164n1 Hidden Figures, 4 Higgs, John, 318 Hill, Christopher, 11 Hiroshima Mon Amour, 243 Historical materialism, 322, 335 Historical novel, 8, 9, 77, 130, 148, 150 History, 9, 11, 14, 60, 77, 102, 108–110, 112, 115, 123, 130, 151, 164, 167, 185, 220, 248, 269, 278, 291, 322, 325, 326, 333, 335, 341, 350 art history, 10 artist, 280 British, 188 capitalism, 233 cultural history, 130, 243, 245 dialectic, 202 form, 175, 341 historical studies, 10 and individual, 327 Marxist, 179, 285, 321 materialist, 119 and nature, 263 patterns of, 308 philosophy of, 60, 107 processes of, 316 and senses, 285 social conflict, 162 structuralism, 334 unity, 160 Hitchcock, Alfred, 127

389

Hobday, Charles, 6 Hogarth, Catherine (Kate), 146 Hogarth, George, 146 Hogarth, Mary, 146 Hogarth, William, 295 Horkheimer, Max, 331–333 Horne, R.H., 194, 195, 273 Horsfall, Thomas, 265 Household Words, 147 Hughes, Linda, 272n1 Hunt, Robert, 318 Huxley, Aldous, 5–7, 213, 233, 291 Brave New World, 233 Point Counter Point, 5 Hyndman, H.M., 264, 265 I Ibsen, Henrik, 216 Iceland, 260 Icelandic sagas, 259, 262 Identity thinking, 330 Ideology, 89, 91, 95, 116, 151, 199, 219, 264, 293, 297, 303, 309, 311, 321, 336, 339, 349 bourgeois, 120, 198, 200, 277, 280, 281, 328, 342 capitalist, 207, 242, 278, 326 class, 201 code, 333 conservative, 2 dominant, 340 feudal, 110 and Freud, 120 hegemonic, 342 humanist, 335 individual, 214 individualist, 199, 283 mechanistic, 327 political, 119 power, 309, 310, 348 religion, 307, 348

390 

INDEX

Ideology (cont.) ruling class, 334, 336 and science, 99 Socialist Realism, 327 subjection, 336 textual, 334 Imagination, 9, 48–50, 59, 73, 193, 249, 298, 299, 312 in Blake, William, 312, 314 creative, 318 engagement, 226 image-making, 47 interconnectedness, 313 knowledge, 48 poetic, 42, 122 political analysis, 58 power of, 67 religion, 84 Romantic, 68 senses, 313 unity, 47 Imitation Game, The, 4 Imperialism, 45, 144, 174, 177, 229 India, 17, 168–170 Intellect, 15, 37, 40, 48, 57, 97, 160, 286, 341, 347, 352 abstraction, 42, 45 being, 106, 271 capital, 283 causality, 322 construction, 36 embodiment, 349 emotion, 49 engagement, 67, 162, 171 independence, 292 individual, 284 process, 62 and religion, 83 stimuli, 58 Intellectual, the, 3–8, 173, 292, 297

Interconnectedness, interconnection, 3, 14, 15, 40, 68, 84, 185, 212, 347, 353 art, 68, 353 culture, 1 everyday life, 41 human life, 304 imagination, 48 life, 68 unity, 218, 353 Interdisciplinarity, 2, 7, 9, 10, 114, 130, 350–353 International Workers of the World, 58 Ireland, 17 Irving, Washington, 148 Iser, Wolfgang, 248 Italy, 181, 211, 308 J James, Henry, 257 Jameson, Fredric, 8 Jetztzeit, 282 Jewsbury, G.E., 200 Johnson, Frank C., 29 Jones, Ebenezer, 195, 273–278 Land Monopoly, the Suffering and Demoralisation caused by it; and the Justice and Expedience of its Abolition, The, 274 Studies of Sensation and Event, 275 Jones, Sumner, 274 Jones, T. Percy, 278 Joyce, James, 231, 282, 283 Jung, Carl, 166, 175 K Kafka, Franz, 282 Kant, Immanuel, 50 Keats, John, 27, 49, 54, 56, 58–60, 64, 276, 286

 INDEX 

Kepler, Johannes, 302 Kett, Robert, 188 Khrushchev, Nikita, 183, 183n1, 184 Kingsley, Charles, 250 Kirtley, John, 25, 27, 30–32, 74, 78 Knowing, 24, 35, 37, 40, 48, 50, 56, 67, 107, 321, 336, 347 embodiment, 322 ways of, 304 Knowledge, 41, 44, 54, 57, 77, 221, 226, 235, 285, 337, 347, 353 access to, 109 acquisition, 334 active process, 221 contradictory, 330 dialectics, 114 European, 170 experience, 174 Freudian, 119 individual, 221 interconnectedness, 114, 221, 338 nature of, 165 production, 336, 349 relative, 113 scientific, 337 segregation, 118 self, 43, 44, 50 senses, 66 society, 166 unity, 68, 122 Koffka, Kurt, 222 Korean War, 243 L Labour Emancipation League, 264 Lafargue, Paul, 266 Lang, Fritz, 310 Laporte, Charles, 272n1 Latimer, Bishop Hugh, 89 Le Breton, Peter, 352 League for Democracy in Greece, 130

391

League of Nations, 128 Leary, Patrick, 147 Leavis, F.R., 6, 7, 9, 292 Great Tradition, The, 9 Leeson, Robert, 1–3, 294 Lenin, Vladimir, 107 Imperialism, State and Revolution, 107 Lessing, Doris, 11, 244 Nathan the Wise, 244 Levellers, 79 Lewis, Wyndham, 166 Liessi, Margaret, 13 Lilburne, John, 93, 103 England’s Birthright justified against all arbitrary usurpation, whether regal or parliamentary, or under what vizor soever, 93 Lindsay, Ailsa, see De Locre, Elza Lindsay, Ann, see Davies, Ann Lindsay, Cressida, 11 Lindsay, Helen, 12, 13, 185, 237, 238, 244, 244n1, 289, 295 Lindsay, Jack 1649: A Novel of a Year, 80, 106 1764: The Hurlyburly of Daily Life Exemplified in One Year of the Eighteenth Century, 188 1900s–1920s, 17–31 1930s, 71–77 1930s publications, 77–78 1930s verse declamations, 78–80 1940s, 125–129 1940s military service, 126–127 1940s publications, 130–131 1950s, 179–187 1950s publications, 187–189 1960s and early 1970s, 237–242 1960s publications, 242–245 1970s publications, 245 1970s–1980s, 289–294 1980s publications, 295–296

392 

INDEX

Lindsay, Jack (cont.) Adam of a New World, 68–69, 80 After the ’Thirties: The Novel in Britain and its Future, 188, 224, 227, 230, 234 All-on-the-Never-Never, 243 Anatomy of Spirit, The, 80, 107–110, 112, 113, 117–119, 122, 161, 221, 224 Arthur and his times: Britain in the Dark Ages, 188 in Australia, 5, 13, 19–31, 242, 289, 291 Betrayed Spring, 188 Beyond Terror, 126 Blast-Power and Ballistics, 245 Blood Vote, The, 295 British achievement in art and music, 131 Byzantium into Europe, 180, 187, 219n2 Caesar is dead, 77 Charles Dickens: A Biographical and Critical Study, 125, 131, 133 Cold War politics, 186–187 Collected Poems, 295 Crisis in Marxism, The, 5, 12, 173, 295, 296, 321, 340, 343, 352 critical neglect of, 3–8 Cry of Greece, 187 death, 294 Death of the Hero, 243 Decay and Renewal, 168n2, 295 Dionysos: Nietzsche contra Nietzsche, 14, 35, 66 Discovery of Britain: A Guide to Archaeology, 188 Don Sights Devon: A Story of the defeat of the Invincible Armada, The, 130 early life, 19–21, 54–55 early politics, 21–23

early writings, 55–59 Elephant and the Lotus: A Study of the novels of Mulk Raj Anand, The, 131, 168n2 Faces and Places, 244 family life, 185, 237–239 Fanfrolico and After, 78 Fauns and Ladies, 27, 30 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 130 Fullness of Life, The, 1, 6, 12, 14, 19, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30, 35, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 64, 75–77, 106–108, 121, 122, 125, 126n1, 127–129, 133, 168, 174, 176, 181, 182, 184, 185, 241, 243, 279, 354 George Meredith: His Life and Work, 177, 188, 191–216 Golden Ass, The (translation), 77 Great Oak: A Story of 1549, The, 188, 290 Hullo Stranger, 126 Into Action: The Battle of Dieppe, 126 John Bunyan: Maker of Myths, 7, 71, 81–103, 122 Last Days with Cleopatra, 77 Lend-Lease, 127 Life Rarely Tells, 19–22, 24, 26–29, 53–55, 59, 60, 65, 69, 73, 78, 79, 181, 240, 244, 295 Life Rarely Tells: An Autobiographical Account Ending in the Year 1921 and Situated Mostly in Brisbane, Queensland, 188 Live Now – Pay Later (film), 243 Local Habitation, A, 188 Lost Birthright, 80 Loves of Asklepiades, The, 188 Lysistrata (translation), 30, 31

 INDEX 

Marc Antony: His World and His Contemporaries, 77 Marxism and Contemporary Science, 4, 6, 9, 128, 131, 173–176, 173n3, 179, 217, 218, 221, 234, 339–340 Meetings with Poets, 180, 243, 345, 353 Men of Forty Eight, 80 Moment of Choice, 188 move to London, 31–32 nature, 122 Oath, The (poem), 55–56 On Guard for Spain, 78 Order of Australia, 291, 292 The passionate neatherd, 32 Passionate Pastoral: An 18th Century Escapade, The, 188 Peace is our Answer, 187 Perspective for Poetry, 128, 130, 131, 159, 168, 170, 339 Rebels of the Goldfields, 78 relationship with Norman Lindsay, 24, 59–60, 62–64, 71, 239–241 Rising Tide, 188 Robin of England, 129 Romans, The, 77 Romans Were Here, The: The Roman Period in Britain and Its Place in Our History, 188 Rome for Sale, 77 Rumanian summer: A View of the Rumanian People’s Republic, 188 Runaway, 78 Second Front: Poems, 126 Shakespeare and Milton (essay), 45 Short History of Culture, A, 130, 185, 224, 243 Song of a Refugee from the Twenties (poem), 244

393

Spanish Main & Tavern, 30 study of history, 108–110 Three letters to Nikolai Tikhonov, 188 Thunder Underground: A Novel of Nero’s Rome, 9 Time-please!, 77 unity, 346–347 vegetarianism, 1, 75 Way the Ball Bounces, The, 243 We Shall Return, 126 Who are the English?, 78, 79, 123 William Blake: Creative Will and the Poetic Image, 32, 35–51, 81, 296 William Blake: His Life and Work, 287, 296–319 William Morris: Dreamer of Dreams, 295 William Morris: His Life and Work, 234, 245, 247–270 World Ahead, A: Journal of a Soviet Journey, 131, 180, 188 Writing on the Wall, The, 181 Lindsay, Norman, 5, 13, 17–19, 23–27, 29–32, 36, 42, 59–65, 60n2, 67–69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 106, 121, 237–241, 244, 287, 289, 297 Creative Effort, 29, 33, 36, 60, 62–64 death, 239–241 My Mask, 13, 18 Lindsay, Percival Charles, 17 Lindsay, Philip, 13, 18, 24, 32, 74, 237, 240, 289 I’d live the same life over, 13, 24 Lindsay, Philip (son), 237, 238, 244, 289, 292 Lindsay, Raymond, 13, 18, 237, 240, 289 Letter from Sydney, A, 13

394 

INDEX

Lindsay, Robert Charles William Alexander, 17 Lindsay, Rose, 74 Lindsay, Ruby, 17 Lindsay, Sir Ernest Daryl, 17 Lindsay, Sir Lionel Arthur, 17 Literary history, 4 Literary innovation, 230–234 Literary studies, 10, 35 Locke, John, 302, 305 Lockyer, Winifred, 72 Lollards, 79 Lukács, Georg, 295, 321, 325–327, 340, 342 History and Class Consciousness, 327 M MacCaig, Norman Alexander, 164n1 MacColl, Ewen, 184 Mackail, J.W., 247 Mackie, Robert, 11 Jack Lindsay: The Thirties and Forties, 11 MacOwan, Captain, 126 MacPherson, James, 313 Magnusson, Eiríkur, 259, 260 Malthus, Thomas, 142n2 Manchester School, 153, 153n3 Man Who Knew Infinity, The, 4 Marcuse, Herbert, 332, 338, 341 Aesthetic Dimension, The, 341 One-Dimensional Man, 332, 338 Marlowe, Christopher, 27 Marryat, Frederick, 249 Mr Midshipman Easy, 249 Peter Simple, 249 Marx, Karl, 8–10, 14, 15, 75, 77, 79, 107, 108, 112, 119, 121, 145, 172, 194, 217–220, 223, 224, 241, 264, 265, 267–271, 274,

284–287, 301, 306, 322, 324, 326, 335–337, 351 Capital, 8, 107, 265, 322 Communist Manifesto, The, 107 early writings, 351 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 223, 241, 285, 324, 335, 351 Preface, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A, 351 Private Property and Communism, 284 Marxism, 1, 3, 4, 6, 59, 103, 107, 110, 119, 123, 173, 181, 217–220, 228, 285, 321, 322, 327–329, 333, 337 contradiction, 183 and culture, 176 hope, 328 means of production, 227, 281 Mason, Emma, 272n1 Massey, Gerald, 195 Maurice, F.D., 250 May, Betty, 73 Tiger Woman: My Story, 74n1 McCrae, Hugh, 25 McLaughlin, John, 3 McLuhan, Marshall, 281, 282 Melba, Dame Nellie, 237 Melville, Robert, 164n1 Meredith, George, 13, 177–179, 189, 191–218, 220, 227, 230–232, 248, 273, 347, 348 Beauchamp’s Career, 207–210 bourgeois marriage, 196–199 childhood, 192–193 Diana of the Crossways, 211–212 early work, 194–196 Earth and Man, 212–214 education, 193–194 Egoist, The, 188, 191, 200–203, 211 Emilia in England, 203

 INDEX 

Evan Harrington, or, He would be a gentleman, 205 gender, 211–212 gentility, 204–207 ideology, 199–200 institutional politics, 207–210 Modern Love, 196–199, 211 nature, 212–214 New Woman, the, 211–212 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, 199–201, 207 Poems, 195 religion, 210 Rhoda Fleming, 210 Sandra Belloni, 203–204, 211 sentimentalism, 203–204 Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment, The, 215 unity, 217 Vittoria, 211 Mermaid Theatre, London, 244 Methodism, 40 Methodist, 313 Metropolis (film), 310 Michelangelo, 49, 299 Michie, John Lundie, 22 Micklewicz, Adam, 188 MI5, 13, 77, 185, 289 Mill, John Stuart, 252, 264 Chapters on Socialism, 264 Milton, John, 40, 45, 167, 274, 305, 314–316 Paradise Lost, 314 Mind-body dualism, 1, 14, 39, 42, 61–63, 65, 68, 210, 215, 221, 241, 271, 300, 307, 312, 313 Mirror of Parliament, The, 140n1, 141 Modernism, 25–27, 42, 231, 234, 282, 283 opposition to, 31 Montgomery, General, 174 Moore, G.E., 175

395

Moore, Tony, 26 Morpeth, Neil, 12, 66 Morris, William, 13, 54, 59, 155, 234, 237, 243, 245, 247–272, 274, 278, 285–287, 294, 295, 318, 346–348 activism, 263–264 architect and artist, 254–255 Beauty of Life, The, 264 change, 261–262 Defence of Guenevere and other Poems, The, 253 dream, 256–258 early life, 248–250 early writing, 251–252 Earthly Paradise, The, 256–259, 261 Firm, the, 256, 258, 259, 261, 262 Life and Death of Jason, The, 256 love, 260–261 Love is Enough, or the Freeing of Pharamond, 260 Manifesto of the Socialist League, The, 266 marriage, 255–256 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, 258, 262 News from Nowhere, 256, 262, 267, 268 Oxford, 250–251 Palace of Art, 254, 255 Pilgrims of Hope, The, 267 politics, 264–267 reality, 258–260 Selected Poems by William Morris, 249 senses, 285 social revolutionary, 269 Sundering Flood, The, 269 Tale of the House of the Wolfings, A, 267 vision, 267–269 Wood Beyond the World, The, 269

396 

INDEX

Morton, Heather, 272n1 Moss, Henry St. Lawrence Beaufort, 187 Music, 49, 146, 315, 318, 331 N National Council of Social Services, 128–129 Nature/natural world, 1, 14, 37, 40, 111, 122, 185, 195, 212, 221, 227, 234, 248, 279, 322, 346 alienation from, 347 Art, 81 balance, 241 in Blake, William, 303 in Bunyan, John, 92, 98 and capitalism, 213 human, 347 human relationship with, 220 interconnectedness, 173, 305 in Meredith, George, 195, 212–214 in Morris, William, 263, 268, 269 and the Romantics, 212, 301, 303 science, 337 separation from man, 338 Neo-Platonism, 39 Neruda, Pablo, 179 New Apocalyptics, 164, 164n1 New Criticism, 248 New Poets, see Spasmodics Newton, Isaac, 37, 40, 42, 45, 68, 114, 119, 305, 310 Nicholls, Mary Ellen, 196 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 32, 38, 42, 59–63, 60n2, 65–67, 121, 161, 351 Birth of Tragedy, The, 65 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 59, 67 Nihilism, 280 Nonconformists, 95, 102, 139, 299

Norse sagas, 259 Norton, Lady Caroline, 211 Nuclear fission, 229, 241, 339 O Orwell, George, 165 Osborn, Reuben, 119 Ossian, James Macpherson, 48 Owen, Robert, 264 Owens, Cassandra, 17 Owens-Parkinson Family Histories, see Family Histories Owens-Parkinson Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 251 P Paananen, Victor N., 2, 7, 10, 12, 134, 173, 295, 296 Pacifism, 165 Paine, Thomas, 308 Palmer, Samuel, 317 Papists Act, 150 Paracelsus, 299, 300, 312 Paris Peace Congress, 179 Parkinson, Kathleen (Katie) Agatha, 17 Parkinson, Mary, 17 Parkinson, Patrick, 17 Parkinson, Raymond, 17 Partington, Wilfrid, 31 Partridge, Eric, 23 Pasternak, Boris, 184 Doctor Zhivago, 184 Peacock, Edward Gryffydh, 196 Peacock, Thomas Love, 196 P.E.N., 130 Penton, Brian, 32 Picasso, Pablo, 27, 175 Plato, 60, 63, 107

 INDEX 

Plekhanov, Georgi, 278 Poet as political, 164–166 Poetics, 10, 64–67, 166–168, 319 apolitical, 296 in Blake, William, 67, 287 encompassing vision, 160 and form, 248 political, 161, 166–168 politics, 161 revolutionary, 345 Romanticism, 64–67 senses, 49 Poland, 180, 183 Political theory, 128, 265, 350 Pollinger, Murray, 12 Poor Law Amendment Act, 145–146 Poor Law riots, 273 Popular Front Policy, 79 Post-Romantics, 53, 195 Pre-Raphaelitism, 250, 277 Presbyterians, 87 Preston, Richard, see Lindsay, Jack Price, Cormell, 250, 252 Priestley, J.B., 244n1 Proletariat, 137, 184, 218, 219, 228, 229, 265 Protestantism, 8, 83, 87, 89, 110 and capitalism, 117 Proust, Marcel, 282, 283 Psychology, 36, 48, 100, 102, 119, 120, 178, 189, 217, 250, 350 individual, 149 non-dialectical, 120 Q Quakers, 95, 96 Queensland University Magazine, 21, 23, 57, 60, 61 Quinton, Jim, 22, 59, 60, 79

397

R Rabelais, François, 30, 66 Rationalism, 3, 14, 40, 67, 89, 115, 172, 300–302, 305, 307 scientific, 351 Read, Herbert, 160, 164, 165 Reade, J.E., 273 Reader engagement, 163–164 Realism, 176, 214 Reason, 43, 302, 307 abstract demonstration, 302 limitation, 301 logic, 301 science, 301–302 Reification, 267, 326, 331, 336 Religion, 63, 82, 86, 89, 90, 93, 96, 108, 118, 133, 134, 138, 139, 144, 210, 250, 305, 307, 311, 325, 328, 348, 350 abstraction, 116 anxiety, 90 and Bunyan, John, 83–84 and capitalism, 210 and class, 116 coercion, 107 death, 55 dissent, 96 escape, 61 hierarchy, 87 idealism, 194 ideology, 110 individual, 84 injustice, 84 institutionalised, 138 isolation of the individual, 118 oppression, 140, 209 orthodox, 304 politics, 88, 93, 96–97 power, 83 primitive, 9 role of, 108, 118 rout of, 119

398 

INDEX

Religion (cont.) and science, 118 stability, 117 structural, 119 unity, 110, 112 Rembrandt, 49 Rettie, John, 183 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 41, 298 Ricardo, David, 153n3, 264 Richter, Jean Paul, 193 Rickword, Edgell, 77, 166 Rimbaud, Arthur, 163, 277, 278 Ritchie, June, 243 Robeson, Paul, 179 Roman Empire, 295, 343 Romania, 180 Romanticism, 33, 54, 58, 62, 64–68, 193, 196, 209, 213, 231, 250, 297, 301 Romantics, 53–55, 66, 67, 172, 212, 301, 303, 347 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 49, 54, 247, 252, 254, 255, 259–262, 275, 277, 278 Sir Lancelot’s Vision of the Holy Grail, 255 Royal Academy of the Arts, 298 Rubens, Peter Paul, 175 Rudy, Jason R., 272n1 Ruskin, John, 197, 204, 205, 250, 252, 253, 270, 271, 274, 286 Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 250 Modern Painters, 204, 250 Nature of Gothic, The, 252 Stones of Venice, The, 250 Russell, Julian, 74 Russia, 184, 264, 343 Russian Formalists, 58 Russian Revolution, 21, 58, 110 Ryan, T.J., 21

S Schama, Simon, 318 Schoenberg, Arnold, 332 Science, 4, 41, 118, 119, 196, 241, 242, 245, 281, 301, 303–305, 322, 323, 337–339, 341, 346, 347, 350, 353 applied, 341 and art, 194, 347 and dialectics, 112, 337 Enlightenment, 99, 301, 349 ideology, 334 industrial, 173 knowledge, 322 logic, 301 mechanistic, 48, 318 and nature, 111 power, 303 quantitative, 304 rationalism, 305, 309 reason, 301–302 Scott, Sir Walter, 148, 249, 259 Scott, Thomas McLaughlin, 164n1 Scott, William Bell, 259 Second World War, 125, 295 Senses, 2, 24, 35, 42, 59, 221, 226, 272, 277, 282, 286, 287, 311, 348 alienation, 283–285 art, 271–287 artwork, 37 colour-image, 49–50 consciousness, 272 constitution of, 49 derangement, 278 engagement, 39, 67, 284, 341 imagination, 49, 313 intellect, 68 intellectual process, 62 interconnectedness, 68, 284 knowledge, 66 mind, 178

 INDEX 

poetic image, 40 repression of, 61 revolutionary, 163 role of in art, 65 social nature of, 284 unity, 276 Shakespeare, William, 49, 58, 164, 165, 167, 219, 220, 228, 230, 274, 305 Macbeth, 164, 165 Shaw, George Bernard, 157 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 50, 54, 57–60, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 274 Cenci, The, 64 Sillitoe, Allan, 11 Simcox, G.A., 261 Simonov, Konstantin, 182 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 286 Sitwell, Edith, 26, 160, 243, 244 Bucolic Comedies, 26 Façade, 26 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 26 Hundred and One Harlequins, The, 26 Slessor, Kenneth, 25, 29, 30 Smith, Adam, 153n3, 264, 302 Smith, Alexander, 195, 273 Smith, Bernard, 11, 291 Culture and History: Essays presented to Jack Lindsay, 11, 291 Smith, W.H., 273 Smith, William, 54 New Classical Dictionary, 54 Soady, Rose, 18 Social Darwinism, 213 Social Democratic Federation, 265, 266 Socialism, 8, 22, 79, 108, 168, 173, 230, 240, 264, 322, 339, 343 democratic, 340 utopian, 340 Socialist League, 266

399

Socialist Realism, 128, 130, 168, 215, 283, 286, 327 Social science, 4 Social transformation, 171, 325, 333 Society for Cultural Relations with Russia, 130 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 263 Southwood, Joanna, 313 Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.), 110, 131, 179, 181–184, 186, 242, 244, 292, 351 Soviet Writers’ Union, 188 Spasmodics, 195, 251, 272–278, 272n1 Spencer, Herbert, 213 Spender, Stephen, 160 Spinoza, Baruch, 107, 194, 270 Spittel, Christina, 12 Stalin, Joseph, 181, 183, 183n1, 184, 215, 323 Great Purge, The, 183 Starkey, D.B., 273 Stead, Henry, 8, 12 People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939, A, 12 Stein, Gertrude, 232 Stephensen, P.R., 21, 32, 72, 74, 79, 107 Stevens, Bertram, 23 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 214 Stewart, Mary, 19 Story, Jack Trevor, 243 Street, G.E., 254 Structuralism, 248, 333–337 Sumner, Colin, 333 Surkov, Alexey, 181 Surrealism, 160, 164n1 Surrealists, 26, 163–166, 168, 231, 243

400 

INDEX

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 48, 300, 301 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 53, 55, 253, 275 Swingler, Geraldine, 180 Swingler, Randall, 11, 177, 180, 186 Symbolism, 160 Symbolists, 163, 166, 277, 278 Symington, A.J., 273 T Taine, Hippolyte, 154 Taylor, Elinor, 12 Taylor, Thomas, 300 Technology as distraction, 281–282 Tennyson, Alfred, 250 Ternan, Ellen, 147 Thackeray, William Makepiece, 157 Thatcher, Thomas, 21 Theatre 46, 130 Thomas, Dylan, 164n1, 243, 244 Thompson, Edward (E.P.), 6, 8, 10, 173, 247, 337 Making of the English Working Class, The, 8, 10 Thompson, Francis, 49 Thorpe, Benjamin, 251 Northern Mythology, 251 Tiberius, 87n1 Tikhonov, Nikolay, 179 Times Literary Supplement, 4, 179, 187 Tindall, William York, 7 Titian, 49 Tolstoy, Leo, 175, 216 Trad, Lynette, 13 Transdisciplinarity, 114, 351–353 Treece, Henry, 164n1 Trollope, Frances, 150 Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, The, 150

Tucker, Herbert, 272n1 Turkey, 264 Turner, Francis, 54 Turner, J.M.W., 238, 243, 295, 298, 312, 323, 343, 350, 351 Tzara, Tristan, 180, 243 U Ukraine, 183 United States, 186 Unity, 36, 40, 50, 69, 95, 108, 110–112, 195, 196, 215, 217–220, 228, 229, 245, 270, 290, 325, 330, 346–347, 352 actualisation, 156 aesthetics, 160 antinomies, 47 art, 174, 175, 279, 315 artist, 46 artwork, 40 being, 37, 46 in Blake, William, 36–37, 315–316 body and soul, 307 in Bunyan, John, 92, 110 and classes, 111 dialectical, 112, 219, 284, 337, 339 diversity, 42, 300 dynamic, 68, 161 embodiment, 352 emotion, 276 form, 332 fusion of opposites, 113 generalisation, 115 group, 111 human, 106, 111 individual, 347, 348 inner, 311 interconnectedness, 299, 353 internal, 304 lack of, 94 love, 300

 INDEX 

materialism, 209 movement, 222 nature and man, 213 nature and self, 347 origins of, 110 poetry, 57, 341 politics, 160 psychic, 47 resolving, 156 and science, 304 self, 328 senses, 100, 276 social, 118 society, 218, 220, 345 society and nature, 122 synthesis, 161 theory and act, 167 theory and practice, 336 violence, 345 wholeness, 352 world, 114 Unity Theatre, 125, 127–130 Utopian thinking, 227 V Van Gogh, Vincent, 27 Vegetarianism, 1, 64, 75, 76 Vice, Thomas, 140n1 Villon, François, 28 Vision, 14, 25, 29, 36–39, 57, 63, 65, 68, 218, 231–233, 310, 316, 348 abstraction, 41 artistic, 37, 134 beauty, 57 in Blake, William, 68, 311 Christianity, 116 classless society, 168 coherence, 48 concentring, 311 critical, 156, 157 in Dickens, Charles, 144

401

double, 37 fellowship, 234 fourfold, 38, 40–42, 67, 302 future, 230 holistic, 145 nihilism, 280 poetics, 160 political, 350 post-Enlightenment, 163 religion, 112 revolutionary, 160, 269 Romantic, 253 science, 338 single, 40 social, 162 threefold, 41 totalising, 283 totality, 327 transformation, 215 transformative, 38 twofold, 41 unity, 276 utopian, 331 Vision (journal), 25–26, 45, 64 Visionary, 33, 67 artist, 315 William Blake, 35–51, 64 Volpe, Galvano della, 338 W Wagner, Richard, 49 Wakelin, Roland, 25 Wallis, Henry, 197 Wardle, Thomas, 262 Warren, Joseph, 308 Washington, George, 308 Waterdrinker, Meta, 185, 237–239, 244, 289, 290, 293, 294 Watkins, Vernon, 164n1 Watt, Ian, 9 Rise of the Novel, The, 9

402 

INDEX

Watts, George, 262 Weber, Max, 8 White, Terence Hanbury, 164n1 Whyte, Lancelot Law, 9, 175, 218 Next Development in Man, The, 218 Wilding, Michael, 11–13, 295 Williams, Jane Elizabeth, 17 Williams, Raymond, 7, 10, 323–324 Culture and Society, 10 Wilson, Edmund, 133 Wound and the Bow, The, 133 Witherby, T.C., 22, 58–60, 79 Women’s Studies, 5 Woodward, Benjamin, 255 Woolf, Virginia, 233 To the Lighthouse, 233 Voyage Out, The, 234 Woolner, Thomas, 253

Wordsworth, William, 232 Lyrical Ballads, 232 Workers’ Educational Association, 22, 58, 60, 79, 107, 351 Wren, Mary, 126 Wright, Willard Huntington, 60n2 Y Yeats, W.B., 54, 160, 161, 247, 292 Young, Edith, 73 Inside Out, 73 Z Zhdanov, Andrei, 130, 184, 323 Zola, Émile, 128, 180, 216