The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction 9781350079144, 9781350079175, 9781350079151

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The 1930s A Decade of Modern British Fiction

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Titles in The Decades Series The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, John McLeod and Philip Tew The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Emily Horton, Philip Tew, and Leigh Wilson The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson In preparation: The 1940s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew and Glyn White

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The 1930s A Decade of Modern British Fiction Edited by Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber, Elinor Taylor and contributors, 2021 Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber, Elinor Taylor and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hubble, Nick, 1965- editor. | Seaber, Luke, 1979- editor. | Taylor, Elinor (Postdoctoral teacher), editor. Title: The 1930s : a decade of modern British fiction / edited by Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor. Other titles: Nineteen thirties Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: The decades series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “With austerity biting hard and fascism on the march at home and abroad, the Britain of the 1930s grappled with many problems familiar to us today. Moving beyond the traditional focus on ‘the Auden generation’, this book surveys the literature of the period in all its diversity, from working class, women, queer and postcolonial writers to popular crime and thriller novels. In this way, the book explores the uneven processes of modernization and cultural democratization that characterized the decade. A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, the book covers such writers as Eric Ambler, Mulk Raj Anand, Katharine Burdekin, Agatha Christie, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Christopher Isherwood, Storm Jameson, Ethel Mannin, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christina Stead, Evelyn Waugh and many others”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020040936 (print) | LCCN 2020040937 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350079144 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350079151 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350079168 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction–20th century–History and criticism. | England–Civilization–20th century. Classification: LCC PR881 .A127 2018 (print) | LCC PR881 (ebook) | DDC 823/.91209—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040936 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040937. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-7914-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7915-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-7916-8 Series: The Decades Series Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Series Editors’ Preface List of Contributors Acknowledgements

Introduction: The 1930s in the Twenty-First Century Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor 1 2 3 4

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‘You’re Not in the Market at Shielding, Joe’: Beyond the Myth of the ‘Thirties’ Nick Hubble

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Spectres of English Fascism: History, Aesthetics and Cultural Critique Elinor Taylor

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Naomi Mitchison, Eugenics and the Community: The Class and Gender Politics of Intelligence Natasha Periyan

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British Culture and Identity in 1930s Anglophone Literature from Australia, Canada and India Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay

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Timely Interventions: Queer Writing of the 1930s Glyn Salton-Cox

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Private Faces in Public Places: Auto-Intertextuality, Authority and 1930s Fiction Luke Seaber

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‘How To Acquire Culture’ by The Man Who Sees: The Middlebrow, Liberal Humanism, and Morally Superior Lower-Middle-Class Citizenship in Woman’s Weekly, 1938–1939 Eleanor Reed

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‘It’s a Narsty Biziness’: Conservatism and Subversion in 1930s Detective Fiction and Thrillers Glyn White

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Timeline of Works Timeline of National Events Timeline of International Events Biographies of Writers Index

273 279 281 283 299

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Series Editors’ Preface Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson

The series began with a focus on Contemporary British fiction published from 1970 to the present, an expanding area of academic interest, becoming a major area of academic study in the last twenty-five years and attracting a seemingly ever-increasing global scholarship. However, that very speed of the growth of research in this field has perhaps precluded any really nuanced analysis of its key defining terms and has restricted consideration of its chronological development. This series addresses such issues in an informative and structured manner through a set of extended contributions combining wide-reaching survey work with in-depth research-led analysis. Naturally, many older British academics assume at least some personal knowledge in charting this field, drawing on their own life experience, but increasingly many such coordinates represent the distant past of pre-birth or childhood not only for students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, but also younger academics. Given that most people’s memories of their first five to ten years are vague and localized, an academic born in the early to mid-1980s will only have real first-hand knowledge of less than half these forty-plus years, while a member of the current generation of new undergraduates, born in the very late-1990s, will have no adult experience of the period at all. The apparently self-evident nature of this chronological, experiential reality disguises the rather complex challenges it poses to any assessment of the contemporary (or of the past in terms of precursory periods). Therefore, the aim of these volumes, which include timelines and biographical information on the writers covered, is to provide the contextual framework that is now necessary for the study of the British fiction of these four decades and beyond. Each of the volumes in this Decades Series emerged from a series of workshops hosted by the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) located in the now vanished School of Arts at Brunel University London, UK. These events assembled specially invited teams of leading internationally recognized scholars in the field, together with emergent younger figures, in order that they might together examine critically the periodization of initially contemporary British fiction (which overall chronology was later expanded by adding previous decades) vi

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by dividing it into its four constituent decades: the 1970s symposium was held on 12 March 2010; the 1980s on 7 July 2010; the 1990s on 3 December 2010; and the 2000s on 1 April 2011. Subsequent seminars expanding the series included the 1960s on 18 March 2015; the 1950s on 22 April 2015; the 1930s on 21 June 2017; and the 1940s on 6 June 2018. During workshops, draft papers were offered and discussions ensued, exchanging ideas and ensuring both continuity and also fruitful interaction (including productive dissonances) between what would become chapters of volumes that would hopefully exceed the sum of their parts. The division of the series by decade could be charged with being too obvious and therefore rather too contentious. In the latter camp, no doubt, would be Ferdinand Mount, who in a 2006 article for the London Review of Books concerned primarily with the 1950s, ‘The Doctrine of Unripe Time’, complained ‘When did decaditis first strike? When did people begin to think that slicing the past up into periods of ten years was a useful thing to do?’ However, he does admit still that such characterization has long been associated with aesthetic production and its relationship to a larger sense of the times. In The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967, Frank Kermode argued that divisions of time, like novels, are ways of making meaning. And clearly both can also shape our comprehension of an ideological and aesthetic period that seem to co-exist, but are perhaps not necessarily coterminous in their dominant inflections. The scholars involved in our BCCW symposia discussed the potential arbitrariness of all periodizations (which at times is reflected by contributors by extending the parameters of the decade under scrutiny), but nevertheless acknowledged the importance of such divisions, their experiential resonances and symbolic possibilities. They analysed the decades in question in terms of not only leading figures, the cultural zeitgeist and socio-historical perspectives, but also in the context of the changing configuration of Britishness within larger, shifting global processes. The volume participants also reconsidered the effects and meaning of headline events and cultural shifts such as the Great Depression, Proletarian Literature, the Popular Front, the Second World War, the emergence of the Welfare State, and the Cold War to name only a very few. Perhaps ironically to prove the point about the possibilities inherent in such an approach, in his LRB article Mount concedes that ‘For the historian  . . . if the 1950s are famous for anything, it is for being dull’, adding a comment on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’. Hence, even for Mount, a decade may still possess certain unifying qualities, those shaping and shaped by its overriding cultural mood. After the various symposia had taken place at Brunel, guided by the editors of the particular volumes, the individuals dispersed and wrote up their papers into

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full-length chapters (generally 10,000–12,000 words but in some cases longer), revised in the light of other papers, the workshop discussions and subsequent further research. These chapters form the core of the book series, which, therefore, may be seen as the result of a collaborative research project bringing together initially twenty-four academics from Britain, Europe and North America. Four further seminars and volumes have now added scholars to this ongoing project, which is continuing to expand. Each volume shares a common, although not necessarily identical, structure. Following a critical introduction shaped by research, the first chapter of each volume addresses the ‘Literary History of the Decade’ by offering an overview of the key writers, themes, issues and debates, including such factors as emergent literary practices, deaths, prizes, controversies, key developments, movements and bestsellers. The next two chapters are generally themed around topics that have been specially chosen for each decade, and which also relate to themes of the preceding and succeeding decades, enabling detailed readings of key texts to emerge in full historical and theoretical context. The tone and context having been set in this way, the remaining chapters fill out a complex but comprehensible picture of each decade. A ‘Colonial/Postcolonial/Ethnic Voices’ chapter addresses the ongoing experience and legacy of Britain’s Empire and the rise of a new globalization, which is arguably the most significant long-term influence on contemporary British writing. A chapter will focus on women’s writing and that particular gendered form of voice, perception and written response to both literary impulses and historical eventfulness. Various other chapters with a variety of focuses are added according to the dynamics and literary compulsions of each particular decade, which may feature international contexts or a specific sub-genre of the novel form, for instance. Each decade is different, but common threads are seen to emerge. In the future it is planned that the Decades Series will go back to 1920 and forward to 2020, in effect reconnecting Contemporary British Fictions with their modern precursors from the aftermath of the First World War, linking the last hundred years through a detailed and forensic examination of its literary fiction.

Works cited Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Mount, Ferdinand. ‘The Doctrine of Unripe Time.’ London Review of Books 28 (22) (16 November 2006): 28–30, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n22/ferdinand-mount/thedoctrine-of-unripe-time: n.p.

Contributors Sabujkoli (Sabu) Bandopadhyay works at the University of Regina, Canada. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta in 2016. The majority of her current research and writing focuses on the representations and the problems of representations of the subaltern in relation to working-class historiography (in the contexts of colonialism, modernity and globalization). On a grand scale, she is interested in studying how the literary sphere has responded to social and political movements in the various pockets of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the global north. Her work is influenced by the thoughts of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak amongst others. Nick Hubble is Professor of Modern and Contemporary English at Brunel University London, UK. They are the author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006/2010) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017); co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016), The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks (2018), Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice (2018) and four volumes of Bloomsbury’s ‘British Fiction: The Decades Series’: The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015) and The 1950s (2018); and also co-editor of special issues of the journals EnterText, Literary London and New Formations. Nick has published journal articles or book chapters on writers including Pat Barker, Ford Madox Ford, B.S. Johnson, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christopher Priest, John Sommerfield and Edward Upward. Natasha Periyan’s research examines modernist and interwar literature and women’s writing. She was a Research Associate at the University of Kent on the AHRC-funded project ‘Literary Culture, Meritocracy and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880–1920’ and has held teaching positions at Goldsmiths, Falmouth, Royal Holloway and the New College of the Humanities. She has published articles and book chapters on writers including Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson. Her book, The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Gender, Class ix

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(Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism Series, 2018), won the 2018 International Standing Conference for the History of Education First Book Award and her next project will examine the trope of the intelligent woman in interwar women’s writing. Eleanor Reed completed her PhD at the University of Roehampton in 2018. Throughout 2019, she was an AHRC TECHNE Creative Economy Engagement Fellow at Roehampton, researching twentieth-century domestic magazines in the Knitting & Crochet Guild’s collection. In 2020, she began a year-long post at Nottingham Trent University, as Project Officer for Catherine Clay’s ‘Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies’ project. Glyn Salton-Cox is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in History and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include Marxism, queer theory and its relation to social history, 1930s literature, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, French, and German intellectual history, the modern novel, Weimar Berlin, Soviet aesthetics, twentieth-century British comedy, and comparative urbanisms. His monograph, Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s (2018) examines queer writers of the 1930s who engaged with Communism, including Christopher Isherwood, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Katharine Burdekin. With Leo Mellor, he guest edited a special edition of Critical Quarterly on ‘The Long 1930s’ (October 2015). Among other venues, his work has also appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature, A History of 1930s British Literature (2019), Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, and Twentieth-Century Communism. He is currently working on book projects on the intellectual, literary, and cultural history of the lumpenproletariat as an alternative genealogy of the revolutionary subject, and on British comedy’s compensatory responses to decolonization. Luke Seaber is Tutor in Modern European Culture on the Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate for the Humanities at University College London. He is author of G.K. Chesterton’s Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony (2012) and Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (2017). He has published various articles and chapters on British literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Elinor Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster, London, UK, and the author of The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934–1940 (2018). She is a member of the executive committee of the Raymond

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Williams Society and a member of the editorial board of its journal, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism. Glyn White is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture at the University of Salford, in Greater Manchester, UK. He is co-author (with the late John Mundy) of Laughing Matters: Understanding Film, Television and Radio Comedy (2012), and contributed ‘ “You Don’t Have to be Crazy to Work, But it Helps”: Work in Film Comedies of the 1930s’ to Work in Cinema: Labour and the Human Condition (ed. Ewa Mazierska, 2013). He has also written extensively about page design and meaning in late twentieth-century fiction, including the monograph Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction (2005), and chapters and articles on Christine Brooke-Rose, Mark Z. Danielewski, Alasdair Gray and B.S. Johnson. He is currently co-editing and contributing to the Bloomsbury Decades volume on the 1940s.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank all our contributors for their expertise, patience and generosity when responding to our queries and guidance as this book has gradually taken shape. We have enjoyed excellent support throughout from the editorial team at Bloomsbury, especially David Avital, Mark Richardson, Clara Herberg, Lucy Brown and Ben Doyle, who have been instrumental in bringing this series and book to fruition. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Brunel University Research and Knowledge Transfer Committee for providing the funding that enabled the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing to host various events in the ‘British Fiction Decades Seminar Series’ during 2010, 2011, 2015, 2017 and 2018, which have led to the publication of the volumes in this book series. Without the support of administrative and catering staff at Brunel these events could not have taken place. We would also like to thank all the academics and postgraduate students who attended and contributed to the discussions at these events. We would also like to acknowledge gratefully the staff at Brunel University Library, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales and other research libraries who have provided support to the contributors to this volume. Special thanks to our contributors and in particular to Glyn Salton-Cox and Glyn White for the brief biographies they have written of writers discussed in their chapters. Natasha Periyan would like to acknowledge the Mitchison family and Georgia Glover of David Higham Associates for permission to quote from the letters of Naomi Mitchison.

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Introduction: The 1930s in the Twenty-First Century Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor

Until relatively recently, it was usual to consider the literature of the 1930s in Britain as the product of a particular political context involving a politicization of writers stemming first from the consequences of the global recession at the beginning of the decade and then, after 1935, from the rise of a defensive ‘Popular Front’ against fascism. While the critical perspective on the period has gone through various evolutions, as discussed in the section on reception below, the net effect has tended to remain that the politically committed writing of the time appeared to be the product of a specific set of historical circumstances, which were overcome in Britain by the defeat of fascism in the Second World War and the establishment of the postwar welfare state. If the ‘hungry years’ of the 1930s were never to be repeated, then its politicized writing, while historically important, remained something of an exception to the apparent main lines of development of British fiction. However, the rise of populism during the 2010s across the Western world and elsewhere has led to the widespread invocation of events and experiences of the 1930s as the comparators for contemporary political developments. Suddenly, the literature of the 1930s is back in academic fashion for perhaps the first time since the 1990s. Recently, there have been numerous monographs – including by editors of this book (Hubble 2017; Taylor 2018) – and edited collections published, which focus largely or entirely on the literary output of the 1930s. Indeed, one UK academic press alone has published two such collections in 2019 following a further collection concerning the 1920s and 1930s appearing the year before (see Ferrall and McNeill 2018; Kohlmann and Taunton 2019; Smith 2019). What does The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction add to this scholarship? As part of a series examining decades of British fiction by starting from the contemporary period and working backwards, this volume offers a different 1

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perspective to more historicist accounts. For example, a companion volume in this series reconceptualizes the literary 1950s in several ways including as ‘the decade in which the modernist and proletarian literatures of the first half of the century met the types of writing which would eventually become as important as them in the late twentieth and twenty-first century: science fiction and fantasy’ (Hubble 2019: 20). Likewise, The 1930s highlights a number of aspects of 1930s fiction that directly inform, or have otherwise remained influential on, cultural practice today. In particular, this volume illuminates a major cultural transformation, which was enabled by the democratization of literature arising from the establishment during the decade of professional cohorts of women and working-class writers. One aspect of this democratization was the continued expansion of genre fiction, which as discussed in a section below, is the other against which the decade’s selfmythologizing was often constructed. In fact, we might see genre writing – and the anxieties surrounding it – as at least as central to the decade, if not even more so, than the literary products of the ‘Auden generation’. More specifically, self-reflexive working-class writing during the decade intensified class consciousness so that an awareness of the limitations of the established ‘common proletarian way of life’ (Hobsbawm 1978: 281) dating from the late Victorian period, led to a moving beyond those old ways of life. This was a shift in consciousness that, in conjunction with a 1930s feminism that strove to move beyond the symbolic equality achieved by the suffrage movement towards full agency for women, drove widespread change in British society. As Nick Hubble discusses in the following chapter, the democratization and politicization of the 1930s, as expressed in its fiction, was not fulfilled but constrained by the 1945 political settlement. As we move beyond the remnants of the welfare state into the landscape of political and cultural uncertainty that characterizes Britain in the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is time to recover those aspects of 1930s literary culture – including queer and anti-racist movements alongside working-class and feminist politics  – which have been occluded by the dominant paradigms of literary history and the normative discourse of much British history.

Critical reception of the 1930s The critical history of the literature of the 1930s is the story of an ongoing reckoning with the decade’s own self-image. As Robin Skelton, in his introduction to his landmark 1964 anthology Poetry of the Thirties, notes, it is ‘rare for a decade to be so self-conscious’ (Skelton 1964: 13). The literature of the 1930s, especially

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its poetry, is marked by an acute tendency to self-periodize, indeed to selfobituarize (surely most memorably in Auden’s ‘September 1st, 1939’). A strange sense of time pervades 1930s literature so that it often appears to look back on its present moment from some future position. The decade, moreover, was selfcanonizing: even before it had really concluded, the ‘Auden Group’ had been anointed its major writers; they were, declared the poet and publisher John Lehmann in 1940, ‘the real core of the movement of the ’thirties, its central and most active motor’ (Lehmann, 1940: 47). Their work would provide an enduring image of the literary 1930s that was not seriously revised for decades. While, in the mid-century period, figures of the New Left engaged in intense confrontation with the literary and political legacies of the 1930s – the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 might be thought of as the end of the ‘long 1930s’ – a significant body of criticism on 1930s literature did not begin to amass until the 1970s.1 The major intervention, still much admired, is Samuel Hynes’s The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, published in 1976. Hynes’s study replicated the terms on which the literature of the decade understood and evaluated itself and, indeed, the titular reference to literature and politics announces the question with which all subsequent study has had to grapple, namely, the question of the relationship between those two institutions and discourses. Politics inflects all critical work on the decade, intentionally or otherwise. Many studies are (politically) invested in an image of a chastening decade of hopes dashed and acute, traumatic failure; an image readily available in the form of anti-communist recantations such as those offered by writers including Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler in The God that Failed (1948), edited by Richard Crossman. The cultural politics of the Cold War, endorsing a Greenbergian discourse of aesthetic autonomy in the name of anti-totalitarianism, clearly shape such works as Bernard Bergonzi’s Reading the Thirties (1978) and Richard Johnstone’s The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen-Thirties (1982). While moving beyond Hynes’ canonical grouping to include more prose writers, both texts similarly figure the relationship between literature and politics as a doomed one into which naïve, credulous writers of the 1930s unwittingly entered. Implicitly or explicitly, these corrupting commitments were unfavourably contrasted with those of George Orwell, who attained something like secular sainthood in the Cold War years as his independent socialist commitments were transformed into heroic invulnerability to ‘ideological’ thinking of all kinds; ‘ideology’, in this view, meaning little else than dogma, submission to authority, moral abdication, and so on. Critics from the Left wrote against these tendencies, however, as

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exemplified by Andy Croft’s comprehensive survey of leftist fiction, Red Letter Days (1990), a particularly ground-breaking study for its attention to genre fiction and women’s writing, while Frank Kermode’s History and Value (1988) offers a meditative, emotionally and politically complex reappraisal of the decade in contrast to the condemnations of Bergonzi et al. Valentine Cunningham’s prodigious British Writers of the Thirties, published in 1988, significantly expanded the field through excavating a vast network of shared tropes, references and affects that extended through poetry and prose, the canonical and the marginal, the metropolitan and the provincial, and did so with critical rather than condemnatory attention to political commitment. Cunningham’s work pointed the way towards the pluralization of the critical field of 1930s literature, even if its selections and omissions have been scrutinized over the years. From this point, the centrality of the Auden Group became less of a given, and prose fiction – previously very much neglected in favour of poetry – received increasing critical attention. The last 30 years have seen a significant proliferation in 1930s literary scholarship that has further revised the image the decade fashioned for itself. H. Gustav Klaus’s work (2018) has brought to light neglected fiction by workingclass and socialist writers such as James Barke, John Sommerfield and Mulk Raj Anand. More recently Christopher Hilliard (2006) has explored the complex relationships between working-class writers and publishers, participating in a more general scholarly engagement with the material and institutional underpinnings of literary production. Much important work has also been accomplished on women’s writing of the 1930s; a signal event was the republication of Katharine Burdekin’s dystopian novel Swastika Night (1937) by the Feminist Press with an introduction by Daphne Patai in 1985. This retrieval announced a new critical engagement with the relationships between gender and genre that remains productive to this day. Work by Rosemary M. Colt and Janice Rossen (1992), Judy Simons (1992, 1998), Janet Montefiore (1996) and Mary Joannou (1998) has brought into focus writers including Sylvia Townsend Warner, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann and Naomi Mitchison. The subsequent emergence of the ‘middlebrow’ as a critical paradigm through which to address the large body of work, often by and for women, that falls outside both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ systems of value owes much to their work, while women’s writing of the period is the subject of ongoing critical attention.2 Interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the relationship between different media cultures has also found much of interest in what David Trotter has termed the ‘First Media Age’ (2013). Lara Feigel (2010) and Keith Williams (1996), for instance, have considered the

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relationship between 1930s literature and the technologies of mass media and film. The Mass Observation Archive held at the University of Sussex has provided a rich source of new ways of thinking about the cultural life and formations of 1930s Britain as part of a larger scholarly turn towards the ‘everyday’ as a subject of analysis (Highmore 2002; Hubble 2006). The attention to the everyday as implicitly political, often allied with feminist approaches, enables a turn away from the more obviously public dramas of commitment that dominate much of the period’s best known writing. Queer theory has informed recent studies by Glyn Salton-Cox (2018) and Charlotte Charteris (2019) that illuminate the complex ways that aesthetics and politics in 1930s writing are entangled with sexual and gender difference. ‘Four nations’ approaches that operate against the longstanding tendency to homogenize British literature by calling attention to the distinct literatures of the UK’s constituent entities have also yielded new insights.3 Thus, the 1930s has proved an exceptionally fertile period for exploration by new approaches which, at their most ambitious, continue to make the fiction of the decade relevant to new readers. If current 1930s scholarship is defined by anything, it is an engagement with the dual problems of periodization and commitment. The critical challenges to the orthodoxies surrounding the time, place and meaning of ‘modernism’ that emerged at the turn of the millennium and were subsequently christened the ‘New Modernist Studies’ (Mao and Walkowitz 2008), have opened up space for the literature of the 1930s, much of it bearing little formal resemblance to the ‘high’ modernism of the previous decade, to be incorporated into an expanded category of modernist cultural production. Tyrus Miller (1999) and Jed Esty (2004) both establish new ways of thinking about the literary culture of the later interwar years via the concept of ‘late modernism’. The contributions to Intermodernism, a (2009) collection edited by Kristin Bluemel, demonstrate that thinking of the 1930s as a period of ‘betweenness’, and conceiving of its literature as related to but not simply ‘belonging’ to modernism, provides one way out of the possible quandary of New Modernist Studies, whereby ‘modernism’ might reach a point of definitional exhaustion by sheer proliferation, while also avoiding simply accepting 1930s’ writers own accounts of the singularity of their moment. From a slightly different angle, the possibility that ‘the 1930s’ as a cultural period might not be neatly coterminous with the 1930s as a decade has been the subject of a special issue of Critical Quarterly, edited by Leo Mellor and Glyn Salton-Cox (2015). In recent years, the question of commitment – of the relationship between politics and literature – has been a major source of new scholarship on the 1930s.

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With the abeyance of Cold War cultural politics, there has been a renewed willingness to think again about the nature of commitment and the achievements and failures of ‘committed’ literature. Two recent essay collections on 1930s writing, A History of 1930s British Literature (2019), edited by Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, and the Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s (2019), edited by James Smith, feature contributions reassessing commitment. They also reflect the richness and diversity that now characterizes the field. Writing in the latter volume, however, Kohlmann suggests that the question of commitment might be put in a rather different way. He notes the ways that critical interventions in the 1930s are often emotionally and intellectual charged by critics’ own investments; rather than attempting to break this impasse by attempting to remain ‘objective’, Kohlmann suggests we might instead reflect on our own commitments to the 1930s, ‘a historical moment whose hopes and anxieties are intimately connected to our own present’ (Kohlmann 2019: 230). This is not to argue for a presentism that is interested in the past only so long as we can see our own reflections in it; but it is to suggest that we might ask ourselves why we care so much about the 1930s and its literature. There is perhaps something uncanny about the 1930s suggested not just by the language of nightmare, altered mental states, the unconscious and fatalism that mark many of its most prominent texts, but also by the ways ‘the 1930s’ periodically resurface in contemporary political discourse as a figure of generalized, intractable crisis. It is worth asking ourselves once more about the nature of our commitment to the ‘devil’s decade’.

The 1930s, canonicity and genre fiction One of the sources of the enduring critical fascination with the 1930s are the complex, often politically charged dynamics that may be detected in the relationships between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fictions and in intellectuals’ ambivalent engagements with popular and ‘low’ culture. In a moment emblematic of the 1930s in its transmutation of autobiography into fiction and its obsession with the idea of the middle-class intellectual – voluntarily or otherwise; praiseworthily or otherwise – ‘sinking’ into the world of poverty (Seaber 2017: 62), George Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) describes how Gordon Comstock finds himself working in ‘one of those cheap and evil little libraries (“mushroom libraries”, they are called) which are springing up all over London and are deliberately aimed at the uneducated. [. . .] The books are published by special

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low-class firms and turned out by wretched hacks at four a year, as mechanically as sausages and with much less skill’ (225). Orwell gives four genres as typical of such hack-work: ‘And so when a customer demanded a book of this category or that, whether it was “Sex” or “Crime” or “Wild West” or “Romance” (always with the accent on the o), Gordon was ready with expert advice’ (228). On the one hand, we might read this as a simple and simplistic snobbery over genres (alongside the linguistic snobbery) of a type that Orwell would modify to a greater or lesser extent in later essays such as ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (1940) or ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’ (1944). This though would be somewhat misleading. The narrator has already spoken of how in such lending-libraries ‘there is not a single book that is ever mentioned in the reviews or that any civilised person has ever heard of ’ (225). This strongly suggests that Orwell’s seeming judgement based on genre has in fact far more to do with texts’ social presentation than with their contents. This is borne out if we look at the novels that he himself reviewed in the 1930s. Orwell’s first review was of Lewis Mumford’s biography Herman Melville, and was published in the New Adelphi in the spring of 1930. Between then and the end of the decade, he would go on to review a further 136 books. Those between 1937 and 1939 are overwhelmingly on the topic of Spain, but the first six years saw him reviewing an extremely wide range of types of text. Of the 101 books he reviewed between 1930 and 1936, six are ‘Crime’ and two ‘Romance’ (these figures should though be taken as a minimum, as we have only included works that by Orwell’s own description in his reviews fit into those categories). Orwell tends to be dismissive of these books, the best example being from the first time he reviews ‘Crime’ books, in the New English Weekly on 26 September 1935: ‘The two other books on the list are crime-stories. Criss-Cross is American and “tough”. [. . .] Keep it Quiet is English and gentlemanly. But as for the dust-wrapper of this book, all I can say is that I should have thought Faber’s were above that kind of thing’ (Orwell 2000: 397). Keep the Aspidistra Flying strongly suggests by elision, as it were, that the genres it is so snobbish about are not to be found ‘mentioned in the reviews’, yet its author himself, a reasonably typical hack in this as his ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ (1946) shows, is reviewing books of this type at the very time of writing the novel. It is of course no surprise that the genre of these most reviewed by him in this period, giving the lie to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is ‘crime-stories’, the only one of these popular genres that is in fact allowed a certain level of social and intellectual respectability. This respectability marks it out from the other implicitly denigrated genres that Gordon Comstock lends out. More widely, the situation of it in the 1930s can be seen not only in the fact that it is considered a suitable topic for so clearly

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serious a poem as W.H. Auden’s ‘Detective Story’, but also in how Auden prefaced this in its original publication in Letters from Iceland (1936), a text that flaunts its own status as highbrow by nominally mocking that very status (for example, ‘Το καλον. glubit. che. . . what this may mean/I do not know, but rather like the sound/ Of foreign languages like Ezra Pound’ (Auden 1996: 180). The poem is included in what is nominally a letter, ‘W.H.A. to E.M.A.’, which is to say to Erika Mann Auden, whom Auden had married in 1935 in order to provide her with a British passport. This biographical fact, however, need not have been known to the general reader for it to be clear that the supposed recipient of the letter was of a similar social and intellectual background to its author and so, by extension, was that reader him- or herself. The poem is introduced as being ‘about why people read detective stories’ (267), and ‘people’ here should absolutely be read as referring to people of the type of the author and his reader: this is very much ‘people like us’. This acceptance of ‘Crime’ as a genre not only ‘respectable’ but also culturally important in and to the 1930s is cemented by Auden with the publication of ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ in 1948. Elsewhere in this volume, and in many others, useful correctives are offered to the mythologization of Auden as the figure of the British 1930s, but that such a mythologization has taken place is of course undeniable, and that such a figure has written so important an essay on the genre can only work as a sort of vicious circle wherein one cannot seek to expand the 1930s canon to include this type of popular literature without invoking (whether explicitly or not matters relatively little) in readers’ minds the most ‘traditionally canonical’ of 1930s writers. As Victoria Stewart has brilliantly shown, however, interwar ‘crime’ writing is not reducible either to the ‘Queens of Crime’, however constituted, or a wider set of novels that meet the semi-clichéd criteria that an essay like Auden’s suggests; there is a vast corpus of factual and semi-factual crime writing pointing to a centrality and importance in interwar British culture that is genuine rather than being one of the final and most persistent myths of and about the ‘Auden Generation’ (see Stewart 2017).

The 1930s: A decade of modern British fiction This book includes a range of research-led approaches to, and ways of thinking about, different aspects of the fiction of the decade. In Chapter 1, ‘ “You’re Not in the Market at Shielding, Joe”: Beyond the Myth of the “Thirties” ’, Nick Hubble analyses the recent expansion of the literary decade into ‘the long 1930s’ stretching from 1926 to 1945 or even 1950 and argues that, rather than modernism, it is the

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democratization and politicization which characterized this period that is key to understanding twentieth- and twenty-first-century British fiction. The newly emergent cultural consciousness of the 1930s, which Orwell saw as evidence of Britain moving into a classless period, actually depended on an increased class consciousness overlaid with a self-reflexivity that revealed the limitations of the subject position of the writer, whether bourgeois or proletarian. Focusing on this kind of writing reveals an alternate literary history of the 1930s, which Hubble charts through a comparative close reading of two undeservingly neglected writers of the decade, Ethel Mannin and Harold Heslop. Both of these writers illustrate how the sardonic and irreverent attitudes of the 1920s underwent a social turn in the 1930s as it became obvious that nothing less than a wholesale structural transformation of Britain would permit fulfilling lives. Hubble goes on to compare Mannin’s Women and the Revolution (1938) with Naomi Mitchison’s The Moral Basis of Politics (1938) as evidence of a 1930s feminist argument for a transformative moral revolution. Finally, the chapter links the expression of intersectional class and gender politics with the national turn taken by writers such as Mitchison and Lewis Jones. Hubble concludes by suggesting that reading these writers opens up a very different version of the 1930s to that enshrined by the myth of the ‘Thirties’ and argues that now is the time to orientate our approach to the fiction of the 1930s in accord with our contemporary needs. In ‘Spectres of English Fascism: History, Aesthetics and Cultural Critique’, Elinor Taylor surveys visions of fascism in England in the 1930s novel, and considers their historical, cultural and aesthetic implications. Focusing on three novels in which a fascist movement is figured as arising within English culture and society, she explores the recurring anxiety that England harboured a latent fascism that might easily establish itself without much resistance. After surveying English perspectives on the nature of fascism and, in particular, the linkage between fascism and figurations of the English countryside as the signifier of an eternal truth in novels such as Burdekin’s Swastika Night, the chapter provides indepth case studies of the three novels: Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year (1936), Winifred Ashton’s The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939) and Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941). These texts reflect differently on fascism’s possible intimacy with English culture, rejecting the commonplace figuration of fascism as an alien invading force, and finding in the archive of history not sustaining myths of natural democracy but tyranny. Taylor concludes that while these novels produce more sophisticated analyses of fascism than were produced by other arenas of political and philosophical thought in Britain, the questions they provoke concerning the possibility of an English fascism remain unanswered.

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Natasha Periyan’s ‘Naomi Mitchison, Eugenics and the Community: The Class and Gender Politics of Intelligence’ discusses Mitchison’s membership of the Eugenics Society from 1925 until her resignation in 1933 in terms of both the wider debate at the time surrounding birth control and the inheritance of intelligence, and the influence of her own thinking on the topic on her literary work during the decade. Periyan shows Mitchison’s eventual rejection of eugenics to be part of her political move to the left from the beginning of the 1930s but what she retained was a commitment to intelligence, conceived as malleable rather than static, as a central component of her feminism and socialism, which became directed towards educational aims. Periyan concludes by considering how We Have Been Warned is structured around hereditary female intelligence in a revision of masculinized eugenicist thinking and therefore finds an idealistic release from violent, revolutionary forms of social change in education and birth control, which are positioned as creating a revolution in consciousness. In Chapter 4, ‘British Culture and Identity in 1930s Anglophone Literature from Australia, Canada and India’, Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay examines how the cultural and economic logics of colonialism weaved voices from the various pockets of Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas within the narrative of the British Empire. By focusing on some of the lesser known literary works (in Britain) of the 1930s, she re-examines the importance of Anglophone literature produced from these colonial outposts on the overall development of 1930s British literary culture and imagination. The chapter explores the Anglophone literary culture of South Asia, Canada and Australia by analysing authors including Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, Irene Baird, Christina Stead and Xavier Herbert. Bandopadhyay demonstrates that these writers played a crucial role in the formation of the Popular Front era internationalist solidarity that established a network of writers, editors, publishers, activists committed to fighting fascism and strengthening working-class political movements. Glyn Salton-Cox’s ‘Timely Interventions and Disruptive Temporalities: Queer Writing of the 1930s’ contends that not only do the queer 1930s reverberate in the present in historically concrete yet counterintuitive ways but they also challenge the normative assumptions underpinning conventional literary periodization. For example, his account of Valentine Ackland’s Country Conditions (1936) as a ‘queer progenitor’ to Orwell’s ‘famously homophobic’ Road to Wigan Pier (1936) suggests that ‘open gender dissidence and same-sex partnerships were not only no bar to forging links between bourgeois writers and workers, but sometimes actively an asset’; a claim that takes him on into a discussion of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (1935/39). The chapter goes

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on to examine other works of the long 1930s such as Burdekin’s The End of this Day’s Business, a ‘landmark text of queer utopianism’, which remained unpublished until the 1980s, and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, Or the British Agent (1928). The latter’s influence on John Lehmann’s memoir of the 1930s, In a Purely Pagan Sense (1976), leads into an exploration of other queer memoirs of the decade, such as J.R Ackerley’s My Father and Myself (1968), Stephen Spender’s World Within World (1951) and, returning to Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1976). Salton-Cox concludes that these texts disrupt straight linear progress by showing different moments in literary history to be related through complex relays of production, revision and publication. In Chapter 6, ‘Private Faces in Public Places: Auto-Intertextuality, Authority and 1930s Fiction’, Luke Seaber explores the role of auto-intertextuality in various authors’ works in the 1930s and how it gave them a level of authorial authority that they otherwise would not have had. By ‘auto-intertextuality’ is meant the relationship between various works by the same author: what is central to its use by the authors discussed here is the way in which it cuts across boundaries of text classification between fiction and non-fiction. For example, considering the twinned fiction and non-fiction works by Evelyn Waugh, he notes that to each novel  – Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938)  – corresponds a non-fiction book of travel writing – Remote People (1931), NinetyTwo Days (1934) and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). Reading these alongside each other as well as alongside Waugh’s journalism allows us to recreate his public persona as an ‘expert’ on certain areas that gave his fiction-writing authorial persona an authority and his novels a particular depth that cannot be found if they are considered purely as texts in isolation rather than as part of an intertextual process. Seaber analyses similar processes in the work of Orwell and considers how these relationships of public personae, fiction and non-fiction develop over time and can work retrospectively so that these authors now seem more authoritative than when first published. In Chapter 7, ‘ “How To Acquire Culture” by The Man Who Sees: The Middlebrow, Liberal Humanism, and Morally Superior Lower-Middle-Class Citizenship in Woman’s Weekly, 1938–1939’, Ellie Reed discusses middlebrow reading in relation to the popular domestic women’s magazine Woman’s Weekly between September 1938 and September 1939. She focuses on a monthly series, ‘How To Acquire Culture’, by masculine columnist ‘The Man Who Sees’, which introduced the Arts to socially aspirant readers; and relates it to other middlebrow literatures, such as the novels of E.M. Delafield. Printed in a mass-produced publication and exploiting technologies of mass reproduction (e.g. the wireless),

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‘How To Acquire Culture’ participated in the interwar democratization of the Arts by mass culture. Ironically, the series expresses concerns about the impact of mass culture on traditional communities, lifestyles and values echoing those expressed by F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson in Culture and Environment (1933), which suggests that the latter might be an influence. In conclusion, Reed discusses how The Man positioned Woman’s Weekly and its readers in relation to the coming prospect of war. Finally, in Chapter 8, ‘ “It’s a Narsty Biziness”: Conservatism and Subversion in 1930s Detective Fiction and Thrillers’, Glyn White examines how popular fiction of the 1930s was regarded by literary critics on right and left as either irredeemably bad or as an addictive vice that prevented the cultural or political ‘development’ of its readers. He focuses on the detective novel and the thriller as exemplars of conservative views but also of their possible subversion by examining both famous and forgotten figures working in these genres. While our memory of detective fiction in the 1930s is dominated by the queen of crime fiction, Agatha Christie, and her female rivals, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, several now largely forgotten male writers contended for the field. Therefore, White analyses the work of F. Jefferson Farjeon, whose series featuring Ben the Tramp was successful in fiction (seven sequels) after stage beginnings and was filmed by Hitchcock in Number Seventeen (1932), in relation to Christie. For example, Farjeon’s The Z Murders (1932) prefigures Christie’s The ABC Murders (1936) and his Mystery in White (1937) is not unlike Christie’s neverending play The Mousetrap (1952). He shows how the differences in durability between these authors lie in the differing articles of faith of the writers; their victims, culprits and perspectives on class. The thriller was fertile ground for the political right – H.C. McNeil’s character Bulldog Drummond sold 300,000 copies before 1939 – but left-wing writers also identified the thriller as a genre with possibilities. In particular, the works of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler demonstrate how the genre became a successful vehicle for anti-fascist sentiment. Through interrogating key examples of detective fiction and thrillers in their historical, political and generic contexts, White uncovers their complex interrelationships with the political context of the time. Overall, the collection of chapters contained in The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction aims to provide an alternative point of entry to perhaps the most mythologized literary decade within English Literature. Rather than focus historically contextualized readings through the lens of the political concerns of the time, the analyses in this book are geared towards the relevance of these texts for our own times.

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Notes 1 Notable early engagements between the ‘First New Left’ and the legacies of the 1930s are, for example, E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’, Universities & Left Review, Spring 1957; and Raymond Williams’s chapter on ‘Marxism and Culture’ in his Culture and Society (1958). 2 Faye Hammill and Nicola Humble have done especially important work on ‘middlebrow’ culture in Britain. The work of the transatlantic Middlebrow Research Network attests to the productiveness of this paradigm as a way of prising open received ideas about interwar culture: https://www.middlebrow-network.com/ About.aspx. 3 British Literature in Transition 1920–1940: Futility and Anarchy, edited by Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill (2018), includes a section of contributions on ‘The First Break-Up of Britain’, and the editors note in their introduction the trickiness of the term ‘Britain’ in this period (16–21).

Works cited Auden, W.H. Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse. The Complete Works of W.H. Auden, vol. 1. Edward Mendelson (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Bergonzi, Bernard. Reading the Thirties: Texts and Contexts. London: Macmillan, 1978. Bluemel, Kristin (ed.). Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Charteris, Charlotte. The Queer Cultures of 1930s Prose: Language, Identity and Performance in Interwar Britain. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Feigel, Lara (2010), Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930–45: Reading Between the Frames. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Ferrall, Charles and Dougal McNeill (eds.). British Literature in Transition: 1920–1940 Futility and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge 2002. Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratisation of Writing in Britain. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2006.

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Hobsbawm, Eric. ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ Marxism Today, September 1978: 279–286. Hubble, Nick. Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Hubble, Nick. ‘ “The Choices of Master Samwise”: Rethinking 1950s Fiction’. In The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble (eds.). London: Bloomsbury, 2019: 19–51. Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. London: Bodley Head, 1976. Joannou, Maroula (ed.). Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Johnstone, Richard. The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen-Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Kermode, Frank. History and Value: The Clarendon Lectures and the Northcliffe Lectures 1987. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Klaus, H. Gustav. The Literature of Labour. Brighton: EER , 2018 [2019]. Kohlmann, Benjamin. ‘Fashioning the 1930s’. In The Cambridge Companion to British Literature in the 1930s. James Smith (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 224–238. Kohlmann, Benjamin and Matthew Taunton (eds.). A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Leavis, F.R. and Thompson, Denys. Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto & Windus, 1933. Lehmann, John. New Writing in Europe. London: Pelican, 1940. Mao, Douglas and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA , 123 (3), 2008. Mellor, Leo and Glyn Salton-Cox (eds.). ‘The Long 1930s’. [Special issue] Critical Quarterly, 57 (3), 2015. Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Montefiore, Janet. Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History. London: Routledge, 1996. Orwell, George. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 4. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 1986–87 [1936]. Orwell, George. ‘Review of Captain Conan by Roger Vercel; Private Life of a Successful Man by W.F. Casey; Song o’ Sixpence by T. Thompson; Criss-Cross by Don Tracy; Keep it Quiet by Richard Hull’, The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000 [1935]: 395–397. Salton-Cox, Glyn. Queer Communism and The Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

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Seaber, Luke. Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Simons, Judy. ‘The Torment of Loving: The Inter-War Novels of Rosamond Lehmann’. In Writers of the Old School: British Novelists of the 1930s. Rosemary M. Colt and Janice Rossen (eds.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992: 138–151. Simons, Judy. ‘The Vanishing Hero: Men and Modernity in Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets’. Critical Survey 10 (3), 1998: 95–104. Smith, James (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Skelton, Robin (ed.). Poetry of the Thirties. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964. Stewart, Victoria. Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Taylor, Elinor. The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934–1940. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Thompson, E.P. ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’, Universities & Left Review, 1 (1), Spring 1957: 31–36. Trotter, David. Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2013. Williams, Keith. British Writers and the Media, 1930–45. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Williams, Raymond. ‘Marxism and Culture’. In Culture and Society. London: Hogarth Press, 1987 [1958].

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‘You’re Not in the Market at Shielding, Joe’: Beyond the Myth of the ‘Thirties’ Nick Hubble

The literary decade featured in this volume has recently expanded into ‘the long 1930s’ (Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015a, 2015b; Kohlmann and Taunton 2019b). This is a reaction to the dominant literary-critical reception of the decade established in the 1970s and 1980s (Hynes 1976; Bergonzi 1978; Cunningham 1988), which, by focusing on the specificities of the period, has functioned in effect to tie its unashamedly political writing to a particular set of not-to-be repeated circumstances which were superseded by the wartime defeat of fascism, the foundation of the welfare state, and the onset of postwar political consensus leading to prosperity from the mid-1950s onwards. This negative perception had already become well-established in the postwar decades: as discussed in the 1950s volume in this series, the overt political commitment of 1930s writing was unpopular and even embarrassing from the viewpoint of an apparently meritocratic society enjoying a decade of full employment (see Bentley et al 2019: 6–7; Hubble 2019: 19–20). While the return of mass unemployment and the rise of political conflict across the 1970s and 1980s made such commitment relevant again, it was within a tightly constrained critical and historical framework already in place. As Mellor and Salton-Cox note, the initial 1930s canon comprised of works of the male, public-school-educated ‘Auden Generation’ was not revised but added to while ‘leaving fairly intact the governing assumptions surrounding the period’s literary historiography  – in particular the classic bookending of the period [between the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War] according to a neat decade’ (2015b: 3). Thus, despite Lawrence & Wishart reprinting key works of proletarian literature, such as Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937/1978a) and We Live (1939/1978b), Harold Heslop’s Last Cage Down (1935/1984) and John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936/1984), Virago reprinting novels by women, such as Naomi Mitchison’s The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931/1983) and Storm 17

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Jameson’s Company Parade (1934/1982), and the publication of revisionist critical studies (Croft 1990; Caesar 1991; Montefiore 1996), the constricting parameters of the decade have remained in place until very recently. This reception history depends on the 1930s being seen simultaneously, on the one hand, as just as a literary decade like any other decade covered in this series, and, on the other hand, as exceptional because of its political and historical circumstances. As a consequence of what Mellor and Salton-Cox describe as this reification of the decade into ‘the thirties’ – a contained, knowable topic, suitable for an undergraduate module and the occasional edited collection of essays – it becomes harder to argue for its pivotal role in twentieth-century British cultural history: ‘the 1930s saw a thoroughgoing renegotiation of the relationship between literary texts, writers, forms, audiences, and publics that transformed literary production in Britain’ (Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015b: 1). These developments, including especially the unprecedented quantity of working-class writing published and the emergence of a generation of ‘professional women writers’ (see Ewins 2019), amount to what Christopher Hilliard describes as a broad process of cultural democratization that drove the immense social and political change that occurred across twentieth-century Britain. Hilliard’s central argument is that democratic cultural life is not best defined by ‘a widely shared corpus of texts and ideas [as] [f]ew actual societies would satisfy this test’ but rather by ‘a shared sense of entitlement to participate in cultural activities’ (Hilliard 2006: 5–6). From this perspective, the novelty, topicality and publicity surrounding ‘proletarian writing’ (147) in the depression years of the mid-1930s contested the common conception that writing was an elitist pursuit and paved the way to active mass participation in the ‘wide-ranging examination and revaluation of the everyday in literature and the arts’ that characterized postwar Britain (287). Explicitly acknowledging the centrality of 1930s concerns to cultural democratization would help undermine the normative assumptions that underpin much British history by highlighting the importance of ‘the longterm development of working-class, queer, anti-racist, and feminist political movements’ (Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015b: 3). Therefore, this chapter will take a different approach to many previous accounts of the decade by discussing 1930s contexts and concerns largely in relation to two lesser-known writers who personify aspects of this cultural democratization, Ethel Mannin and Harold Heslop, and by orientating these contexts and concerns towards the demands of an intersectional politics of the twenty-first century. Both Mellor and Salton-Cox and Kohlmann and Taunton criticize the expansion of modernism, which has intensified over the last twenty-five years of

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the New Modernist Studies, into certainly the dominant period descriptor for the 1910s to the 1950s and, by implication, for pretty much the whole of the twentieth century; with the latter pair hoping that their A History of 1930s British Literature (2019) ‘demonstrates that subsuming the 1930s under an increasingly expansive (and increasingly) meaningless “modernism” label fails to capture central aspects of the decade’s literary and cultural field’ (2019b: 8). However, while it is undeniable that a focus on modernist signifiers, such as stream of consciousness or experimental form, excludes or marginalizes certain types of 1930s writing, the term is not so easy to dispense with because of the way it stands – in the work of writers from Katherine Mansfield to Virginia Woolf – for the attempt to break free from the traditional hierarchies and patriarchal order of the nineteenth century. Thus attempts to reconfigure modernism, such as Kristin Bluemel’s concept of ‘Intermodernism’, do not indirectly perpetuate conventional canonical hierarchy but seek to break down the binary oppositions around which that hierarchy is structured. As she points out, one way to circumvent the underpinning logic of modernist studies ‘that whatever is not modernism will function as modernism’s other’ (Bluemel 2009: 2) is to focus on the many writers who were operating in the space between that opposition by, for example, simultaneously pursuing aesthetic and political aims. Rather than accepting the binary logic of modernist studies, an intermodern approach would therefore lead to ‘reshaping the ways we think about relations between elite and common, experimental and popular, urban and rural, masculine and feminine, abstract and realistic’ (2009: 3). It was with this aim that I sought to rethink the seemingly antithetical opposition between the categories of proletarian literature and modernism in The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017). Despite the playful socialist triumphalism of the title, the book examines case studies that show not just points of overlap but a shared project of intersubjective and intersectional – particularly in terms of class and gender – self-liberation; while writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and John Sommerfield wrote modernist novels to convey socialist politics, a text such as Woolf ’s introductory letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies’s edited collection of the autobiographical experiences of members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, Life as We have Known It (1931), ‘can itself be seen as a work of proletarian literature designed to hold open the possibility of readers developing a fuller consciousness’ (Hubble 2017: 167). I argue that the defining feature of these texts, whether ostensibly proletarian or modernist, is a ‘desire for a liberated future’ (Hubble 2017: 53). From this perspective, the expansion of modernism as a category of study simultaneously acknowledges and conceals the transformational impulse running through twentieth-century writing. The

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reason the radical popular and political components of this impulse remain obscured is because the democratization and politicization of self-reflexive and self-liberating writing that occurred from the end of the 1920s onwards is bracketed off within the hermetically sealed ‘thirties’ and considered as the exception to the norm. The argument of this chapter and volume is that rather than modernism, it is the democratization and politicization that characterized the 1930s, and subsequent decades, that is central to twentieth-century British fiction. Mellor and Salton-Cox’s argument that the long 1930s run, if not until the Oil Crisis of 1973, at least from ‘a penumbra about 1926 to in, or around, 1950’ (2019b: 7) coincides with the position outlined in David Edgerton’s revisionist history, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (2018): In the early 1950s there was little new rolling stock; there were barely more private cars and buses than in the late 1930s; the most modern public buildings from pubs to council buildings dated from the 1930s. In 1950 there were still about the same number of private telephones as there were business telephones. The number of TV owners was at 1930s levels, the newest cinemas were the great palaces of the 1930s. The schools, hospitals and employment exchanges of the 1950s were those of the 1930s. To cap it all the British diet was the 1930s diet set in aspic by a decade and a half of food control and rationing. Edgerton 2019: 282–283

However, not only was the British infrastructure of the early 1950s in fact built in the 1930s, but also the welfare provision of the time was a reworked version of the ‘elaborate system of welfare for the working class (that is, around 80 per cent of the population)’ created by the Conservative Party in the 1930s: ‘The United Kingdom went to war in September 1939 with a welfare state already in place’ (Edgerton 2019: 236–237). As Edgerton points out, the reality of this situation undermines the ‘whole historiography developed’ from the 1960s onwards, in works such as A.J.P. Taylor’s English History (1965) and Angus Calder’s The People’s War (1969), ‘claiming a wartime consensus around the need to create a welfare state, brought into being after 1945’ (Edgerton 2019: 236). This dominant trend in historiography, which Calder later partially repudiated in The Myth of the Blitz (1991), implicitly supported the construction of the literary myth of ‘the thirties’ by enabling the political literature of the decade, particularly documentary writing, to be portrayed as preparing the ground for the subsequent postwar consensus and welfare state. A different way to think about the 1930s and 1940s

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would be to see them jointly sharing political, policy and social differences from the preceding decades. Edgerton (2019) argues that the UK went from being ‘part of an Empire, not something which had an Empire’ to emerging in the late 1940s as ‘one of the new nations which arose from the dissolution of Empire’ (22, 26). The pound coming off the gold standard in 1931, as a result of the financial crisis triggered by the Great Depression, brought down interest rates and tariffs were introduced on most manufactured imports; conditions which supported the home market becoming important for British industry, leading to the expansion of Britain’s manufacturing capacity in time for the war when trade routes were largely cut off. Consequently, the free trade versus protection arguments of the Empire became superseded in the 1930s ‘as class became the central divide in politics, politics which was now national rather than imperial’ (Edgerton 2019: 33). For Edgerton, the defining feature of this emergent British state of the 1930s and 1940s was nationalism and the resultant ‘actual post-Second World War United Kingdom was in some ways better prefigured in the programme of the Tories and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) than that of the Liberals or the Labour Party’ (Edgerton 2019: xxxiv). However, if the long 1930s, running into the 1950s, was the period in which a British nationalism developed, there was a shift within this period in the way that this Britishness became represented or embodied in the working class. In Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (1998), Ross McKibbin situates this shift as occurring principally in England during the period of the Second World War: ‘In the 1930s the ruling definition of democracy was individualist and its proponents chiefly a modernized middle class; in the 1940s the ruling definition was socialdemocratic and its proponents chiefly the organized working class’ (533). McKibbin argues that working-class fortunes during the interwar period were mixed, with huge differences eventually developing between skilled workers in the South or the Midlands and the long-term unemployed in the North. Furthermore, there was a split in political allegiance: ‘Throughout the interwar years about half the working class voted Conservative, about half Labour’ (530). However, the War, with its restoration of the ‘old staple industries’, evened out disparities between North and South and ‘universalised a working-class political culture’ in support of the Labour Party (531). Considering the historical accounts of McKibbin and Edgerton side by side makes visible the ambiguity of the long 1930s and the nationalist British welfare state that emerged within it. On the one hand, the postwar welfare state was, as Edgerton argues, a continuation of the structures developed by the Tory governments of the 1930s. On the other hand, the wartime universalization of working-class political culture, as described by McKibbin, changed the signification

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of those welfare structures so that their popular meaning shifted from a 1930s fear of means-testing to a post-1945 pride in the idea of support from the cradle to the grave. This latter meaning held throughout the period of postwar prosperity and full employment, but once economic conditions changed following the 1973 oil crisis (Mellor and Salton-Cox’s implied end date for the longest ‘long 1930s’), the universalized working-class political culture fragmented and welfare state systems gradually resumed a more punitive dimension culminating in the despised Universal Credit scheme in operation since 2013. The point is not that Britain has returned to a modern-day equivalent of the 1930s means test, but that it has never moved beyond that system structurally, even if for many years that system signified what appeared to be a different set of values. The idea of Britishness being represented or embodied in the working class is also ambiguous. As William Empson noted in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), anticipating Roland Barthes’s (1957) concept of myth, the idea of the heroic ‘Worker’ was a myth, which could be used in different contexts to signify radically different meanings. Communist and Labour Party celebrations of the worker were no hindrance to the Conservative-dominated National Government also presenting images of the worker in posters as the ‘stringy but tough, vital but not over-strong, cockney type’ (Empson 1995: 20) that they presented themselves as the champion of. While the working-class vote did consolidate around Labour in 1945, the division of the interwar years returned from the 1970s onwards with large sections of the English (as opposed to the Scottish and Welsh) working class going on to vote for the Thatcher governments of the 1980s. As Raphael Samuel notes, Thatcherism was attractive to those whose sense of identity had been unsettled by progressive social change in Britain from the 1960s onwards because of the way it was able to articulate a reactionary version of history from below ‘which gave pride of place to those whom [Thatcher] called “ordinary people”’ (Samuel 1998: 346). A similar implied division between ‘ordinary people’ and ‘metropolitan elites’ went on to become one of a number of complex factors impacting the 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership, and has underlain attempts by Brexit-supporting politicians of both the political left and right to appeal to working-class voters. This convergence suggests that the constituent myths of the emergent British state of the 1930s and 1940s have merged with the passing of time. In the 1930s, Empson argued that there was little point people complaining that the ‘Worker group of sentiments is misleading’ whether deployed by the National Government or as proletarian propaganda by the Communist Party; ‘what they ought to do is produce a rival myth’ (1995: 20). He suggested that a more sophisticated ‘Proletarian Literature’ was possible than one that simply

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expressed a supposedly working-class viewpoint. Such a literature would function similarly to pastoral by ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (25). For example, ‘in the manner in which Shakespeare brings lords and ladies together with simple men who unexpectedly turn out to have more sense than their betters’ (Hubble 2017: 6). In other words, one alternative to a literature rooted in the supposedly authentic experience of the worker would be a literature focusing on intersubjective relations between classes and  – given the changes that occurred in the industrial workforce during the 1930s  – genders. As I have argued in The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, such a proletarian literature did exist during the long 1930s in novels such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–34), Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned (1935), Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man (1935), and John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936). The work of some of these writers, and others such as Jack Common and James Hanley, led George Orwell to state ‘I believe we are passing into a classless period, and what we call proletarian literature is one of the signs of change’ (Orwell 2000a: 297). Such writing overlaid class consciousness with a self-reflexivity that revealed the limitations of the subject position of the writer, whether bourgeois or proletarian. The net result was a move away from the rigidities of Victorian class and gender roles, including from the ‘common proletarian way of life’ that had existed since the 1880s (Hobsbawm 1978: 281), into what Orwell later called ‘the naked democracy of the swimming-pools’ (Orwell 2000b: 297). Orwell’s idea in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) that the germs of a new England were forming in the indeterminate social strata at the margins of longer established communities suggests that this fluidity offered a route from the cultural democratization of the 1930s to a liberated future beyond the seemingly intractable binary oppositions of the British State. The rest of this chapter reconceptualizes this alternative literary history of the 1930s by first focusing, as mentioned before, on two key writers of the period who remain undeservingly neglected, Ethel Mannin and Harold Heslop, before moving on to consider the challenge posed to the newly formed British State by the national turn of Welsh and Scottish writers.

I suppose we’re all for ourselves in this world? On 7 December 1935, Ethel Mannin wrote to Harold Heslop complaining about the depiction of sex in his novel of that year, Last Cage Down:

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The 1930s I thought the incident a mistake, myself, not on moral grounds, but on artistic ones. And dammit, all adult people know how [it’s] done; why go into the details? [. . .] I mean it’s gratuitous. Of course, ‘he went into her.’ [Heslop 1984: 190] What else would he do? If he had done something original it might be worth recording. qtd Croft 1993: 216

The criticism here has an edge to it. The implication is that Heslop could do something more interesting with his portrayal of gender relations alongside the more overt account of class relations in the novel. It is also significant that Mannin, a bestselling romantic novelist, is making this criticism on aesthetic grounds; she clearly doesn’t see the ex-miner, Heslop, as purely a writer of proletarian propaganda. These two writers, very near contemporaries, who both became established in the 1920s, provide us with a way of rethinking the literary relationship between the two interwar decades. In one of her many memoirs, Young in the Twenties (1971), Mannin (1900–1984) devotes a chapter to ‘The books we read’, from the moving sagas of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels to the intellectual excitement of Aldous Huxley’s early novels: ‘Did the same people read both Galsworthy and Huxley? I think so. I certainly did, and the people I knew seemed to’ (85). It was Huxley that she saw as being ‘quintessentially of the Twenties’ (93) by representing a modern ‘kind of sardonic humour’ (94) that hadn’t existed before and which was more significant than even the ‘mocking brilliance’ (95) of Evelyn Waugh, whose novels began to appear at the end of the decade. However, for her the two greatest literary excitements in the run-up to the 1930s, both taking place in 1928, were the banning of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Orioli in Florence, an edition of which she possessed for many years before selling in the 1960s when it was finally available as a paperback. Looking back from the 1970s, Mannin suggests she no longer considered Lady Chatterley’s Lover a good novel, but – perhaps reinterpreting her earlier championing of the novel in the light of later writings on Lawrence by F.R. Leavis  – insists how important it had been to defend it at the time for its commitment to life. In 1930 she described the novel in her best-selling autobiography, Confessions and Impressions, as ‘one of the truest and most beautiful and moving books the age has produced’ (116) and as the harbinger of a future in which ‘men and women will live and work and love and beget each other in the sun and wind and rain, cleanly and decently and simply as the animals do’ (117). Even by the end of the decade, when that future must have seemed further from reach, she still considered Lawrence as more

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important than most of the overt political writing of the decade, as noted in her second volume of autobiography, Privileged Spectator (1939): The effect, if any, of the so-called Left Book Club on the thinking of the younger generation has yet to be seen: my own view is that any effect must be superficial, because a Left Book Club book represents so many cut-and-dried and partyapproved ideas, handed out ready cooked like tinned food; the reader’s thinking is already done for him. Whereas Freud and Lawrence, postulating the Unconscious behind all human conduct, open up whole new worlds of realisation and thought-research. Mannin 1939a: 19

What differentiates Mannin’s reverence for Lawrence during the 1930s from Leavis’s later insistence on the importance of life in his work is that she is writing from the perspective of a woman; a woman who is very sophisticated in the modern sense and capable of articulating her own agency wittily when discussing her first trip to New York in Confessions: ‘it is such a mistake to take a conscience with one on an Atlantic crossing’ (1937: 74). Of her destination, she notes ‘In New York City there are no husbands; only married men’ (80). Therefore, as an autobiographer prepared to use the word ‘masturbation’ (25) and opine aloud that ‘a little more going to bed with the right person would be of great value to the majority of the women in this country’ (97), Mannin’s quotation of the entire ‘If the men wore scarlet trousers’ passage from Lady Chatterley signifies more than just aesthetic approval but a commitment to a transformed gender politics, which is more commonly associated with the 1960s, or even 1970s, than the hungry years of the 1930s. In contrast, Heslop’s work seems very much the product of the 1930s, as traditionally and narrowly conceived. A product of a mining family from the Durham coalfield, Heslop (1898–1983) started work in the mines at the age of 15. In 1924–25 he attended the Central Labour College in London and wrote a novel, which became a bestseller in the Soviet Union, Pod Vlastu Uglya (1925; subsequently published in the UK as Goaf in 1934). After 1928 he was blacklisted from the mines and returned to London where he wrote his second novel, but first to be published in English, The Gate of a Strange Field (1929). In November 1930, he was the sole British novelist to attend the Second Plenum of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov in the Soviet Union. His address to the delegates began with an apology: ‘It must be recognised that proletarian art in Great Britain is in a very backward condition – and is in fact hardly begun’ (qtd Croft 1984: vii). Discussing this speech in his introduction to

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the 1984 reissue of Heslop’s 1935 novel Last Cage Down, Andy Croft notes that ‘within a few years this had all changed’ (1984: vii) with the publication of the working-class writers that we now associate with the 1930s. However, although Heslop is regarded as an integral part of that movement during the decade, his troubled reception history reveals some of the contradictions in that model. As Croft explains, The Gate of a Strange Field was published during the Comintern’s ‘Third Period’ of ‘Class against Class’ at a time when the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), ‘a proletcult organisation who argued for a militant class-conscious literature rooted in Communist-led industrial struggle’ held sway: A fellow-traveller and ILP [Independent Labour Party] novelist like Heslop, writing about the industrial defeats of politically-confused individual tradeunion leaders, clearly did not meet the sectarian demands of RAPP literary criticism. . . . [In 1932] International Literature carried a long and damning study of Heslop’s fiction, accusing him of being ‘infected’ with ‘social-fascist bacteria’. In The Gate of a Strange Field . . . the article complained, Heslop only regarded ‘the workers’ movement from a purely aesthetic point of view . . . [depicting] the social only though the prisms of the personal  . . . under the influence of sentimental individualism’. Croft 1984: x

Croft goes on to argue that Last Cage Down, ‘bears all the marks of a penitent attempt to answer these criticisms’ (Croft 1984: xi). More recently, John Connor has described Last Cage Down as informed by ‘pure Third Period orthodoxy, the trade-union movement cast as an adjunct of bourgeois class rule and its leaders as “social fascists” undermining the interests of the workers’ so that ‘the charismatic labour leader [Jim] Cameron . . . betrays the men he leads while the quiet communist Joe Frost argues the correct course of action’ (Connor 2019: 325–326). The problem was, however, that by 1935, when Last Cage Down appeared, the sectarian ‘Class against Class’ position had been superseded by the inclusive Popular Front line. Both Croft and Connor cite the contemporary criticism of Charles Ashleigh, who reviewed the novel for both Left Review and the Daily Worker, that it was ‘perhaps a little too sectarian and formalist for these days’ with the character of Frost appearing ‘somewhat dated . . . rather more in the spirit of a few years earlier’ (qtd Connor 2019: 326; qtd Croft 1984: xii). Such readings illustrate some of the pitfalls of being a working-class writer during the politicized 1930s. But perhaps more damning for Heslop’s reputation has been the extravagant praise he also received during the decade from another

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Communist critic, Alick West. In Crisis and Criticism (1937), West identified the question facing modernist writers, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, in the interwar period: ‘When I do not know any longer who are the “we” to whom I belong, I do not know any longer who “I” am either’ (19). West considered Ulysses (the subject of his penultimate chapter) to be an important step in this direction because it related self to society. However, he went on to argue in his final chapter that a full answer to this modernist question can only be found by relating self to society in terms of the production process as Heslop does in The Gate of a Strange Field, which is thereby elevated above Ulysses in importance. This is probably too much freight for any novel to bear and it is certainly not a claim that has fared well against the test of time. When Crisis and Criticism was republished in 1975, the final chapter on Heslop was omitted and rather than The Gate of a Strange Field being bountifully available to teach as a regularly reprinted classic, copies are difficult to locate outside a handful of libraries. However, I am going to suggest here that all of these interpretations are misreadings of Heslop because of the way they situate his work in terms of the orthodoxies of communist and male class politics and downplay the complexities and intersectional dynamics of the novels. For example, The Gate of a Strange Field is a Bildungsroman in which we see Joe Tarrant’s progression from school to pit and on to full-time union representative but it is also an intense record of the changing relations between the sexes in the context of women’s emancipation enabled by better employment opportunities and the gaining of the vote. A large part of Joe’s coming-of-age story is concerned with his relationship to Molly, a ‘likely lass’ of his own age. On the evening before Molly’s departure to Huddersfield to become a parlour maid, they have sex on a haystack in the moonlight. Three months later, Molly is back in Shielding (South Shields) because she is pregnant. Therefore, on the same day that Joe discovers unionism by attending his first ever miners’ lodge meeting, and also goes to the pub for the first time, he learns from the lodge secretary, Tot Johnson, that he is going to be a father: Joe was not a deep thinker at all. He was a taciturn member of the Northern proletariat, who ate his food with very little decorum, and who grumbled savagely if he had to wait for it. He was not so concerned about his ultimate fate, and it certainly did not play any tricks with his imagination. There the fact lay. He was to be the father of a child. He had sowed his tares and the time for their reaping was close at hand. And was he not a putter? It was just that the thing had happened sooner than he had warranted. The child would come, and he would have to make the best of it. Heslop 1929: 78–79

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The sardonic tone of this passage is indicative of the approach Heslop takes towards the ‘Northern proletariat’ throughout the novel. On the one hand, he describes a material culture that is long established. Hence, Tot Johnson’s reflection on those who would say that people didn’t behave like Joe and Molly in their grandparents’ time: ‘The life of the proletariat cannot be split into Victorian and other periods, for it is ever the same’ (90). On the other hand, Tot is eventually shown for a sententious windbag and the whole dynamic of the novel is encapsulated by the struggle of the protagonists against the constricting limitations of the very proletarian material culture they are embedded in. Neither the Soviet critics nor West seem to have grasped this. West’s use of Heslop to claim that the proletarian attitude to life is inherently favourable to good literature because it is concerned with ‘the expression of the social world in terms of the activity of producing it, not consuming it’ (West 1937: 182), depends on him reading Heslop’s bitterly ironic criticisms of the miners as straightforward celebrations. For example, he cites this passage at length as evidence of Heslop’s reverence for miners’ long traditions: Bill Tempest, the greatest coal-hewer of all times, he who in his youth had worked at two collieries at once, had trod these streets and shouted in these bars.‘Tempest’s Way’ had long testified to that, for his name was for ever enshrined upon the plans of Hunton Colliery. It remains there, but over it is written the word: Goaf. And to this day the sons of this man, and the sons of his contemporaries, were still producing coal in the manner of their fathers. . . . Heslop 1929: 165; qtd West 1937: 187

Furthermore, West interprets Heslop’s sardonic commentary on how Joe and the other characters in the novel are trapped within tradition and the narrow constraints of their context as unnecessary contemplation, which distracts the reader from the priorities of the class struggle: Early in the book, it is said of Joe Tarrant and his dreams: ‘He was but the product of his day’ (p.38). What else should he be? The ‘but’ suggests that there is some higher freedom, which this poor mortal has not attained to. [. . .] These qualities of the style convey the impression that the final reality is not on earth, but on the height beyond the class struggle, from which it is contemplated. It is to this contemplation, rather than to the struggle itself, that the book, as propaganda directs our energy’. West 1937: 196–197

Surely, however, if Heslop is trying to direct our energy to anything it is to the need for self-reflection. Far from occupying a higher plane of reality – or

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unreality, as West sees it – such self-contemplation represents the only possibility for the protagonists of the struggle to escape the narrow mindsets and morals of their constricted existence and succeed in effecting real change; only through self-contemplation will they be able to pass through the gate into a new context. In any case, as Croft notes in Red Letter Days (1990), young working-class writers from the mining areas did not have a reservoir of socialist and proletarian writing to draw from: ‘there was no readily available, familiar, native, national working-class literary tradition to which they could see themselves belonging. All they had was D.H. Lawrence’ (67: emphasis in original). The model for Heslop and his peers was Lawrence’s intense subjective focus and concern with gender and sexuality. For example, the Nottinghamshire miner, Walter Brierley, describes the girlfriend of the main character in his novel Sandwichman (1937) by direct reference to Lawrence: ‘Nancy was like some of the women in his books [. . .] sexdriven out of all balance’ (Brierley 1990: 48–49). In The Gate of a Strange Field, Heslop displays a similar Lawrentian influence but is more explicitly concerned than Brierley with showing the problems arising from the inability of Joe and the miners in general to deal with women’s sexuality and agency. Marriage to Molly certainly makes Joe aware of women’s sexuality but this only serves to increase both his horror and his callous attitude to the opposite sex: ‘He became able to differentiate all the women he passed. There were three categories – respectable women, women, and prostitutes’ (Heslop 1929: 109). Molly and Joe find themselves living ‘a strange, loveless, over-sexed life, each pulling a different way, each so pitiful’ (139) before Joe manages to steer Molly towards running off with another man. Joe then goes on to scandalize the respectable morals of the coalfield by moving in with modern  – as signified by her page-boy haircut  – grammar-school-educated ILP socialist, Emily Ritter, who represents a very different model of female agency to Molly with her conscious decision ‘to smash through all the Northern conception of morals’ (169). Yet, Joe still feels stuck within the conventions of the coalfield even as he flouts them by living outside marriage with his girlfriend, hence the pleasure he takes in his trips to London on union business: In the parochial wilderness of the North men and women had small minds. In London it was different. There nobody knew anybody else, and so morals did not count. Morals were changing. To blazes with morals. Heslop 1929: 180

Which is how we come to find Joe, in London as an elected union representative, in bed with a sex worker as the General Strike collapses. Clearly, the novel is not

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The 1930s

uncritical of Joe in this respect and Heslop’s apparent celebration of London’s difference is as sardonic as his comments on proletarian culture. However, critics, such as David Bell (1995), who have seen the novel as a ‘negative apprenticeship’ (117) in which the protagonist makes all the wrong decisions resulting in personal and political failure from which we, the readers, are supposed to learn the message that we should make the opposite decisions (i.e. think like a Communist, don’t treat strikes as just local issues, don’t fornicate etc.), seem wide of the mark. In fact, the sex worker who Joe meets in London is his estranged wife, Molly, and the twist in the story is that she has made more progress in emancipating herself from her upbringing than either Joe or Emily. For the irony is, that even while indulging himself in London, Joe is still caught up in the limited ‘respectable’ moral outlook of the coalfields. This is made spectacularly clear when Molly interrupts his post-coital mansplaining of the politics of the General Strike: ‘ “You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe,” she said “You’re in bed . . . with me.” ’ (Heslop 1929: 229). The logic of the novel suggests that only an intersectional politics that moves beyond ‘respectability’ would liberate Joe and Molly and Emily. Or, to put it another way, Heslop does not fall into the trap of ‘sentimental individualism’ and an aesthetic focus on personal problems that he was criticized for by International Literature; rather, through fictional exploration of his own feelings and experiences he shows the necessity of moral revolution in order for collective industrial struggle to be successful. He is not trying, as the conventional reception of his work suggests, to slavishly follow the Party line and failing: he is, in fact, criticizing the Party line and exposing the limitations of the Labour movement more generally. In Heslop’s next novel, Journey Beyond (1930), he went a step further – at least for the opening chapters of the novel – by making the viewpoint protagonist a young woman, eighteen-year-old Martha Darke, who, following the unsuccessful miners’ strike of 1921, is sent away from Shielding to be a domestic servant in London because her family can no longer afford to keep her. She is keen to go to escape the limited options of the coalfield: ‘Martha felt a desire to go. To get away from Shielding into a newer, a less stultifying atmosphere, where the outlook was less barren’ (40–41). However, the novel’s viewpoint soon switches to the man she meets and marries, Russell Brent, an assistant in a bookshop. When Russell becomes unemployed – forcing the couple to move into a single room adjoining that of a sex worker, Patty Lennox – he becomes a vehicle for Heslop’s own late1920s experiences of going to the Labour Exchange in Walworth Road and working in various unskilled labouring positions. Russell gets a job in an

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engineering works and all is going well until he has an accident; a not uncommon experience in 1930s factory-set fiction. In this case, he trips and falls into a ‘Bullard’, a perpendicular lathe, which has been left in gear, and ends up in a coma in hospital. When he finally recovers it is to discover that he has been sacked for damaging equipment and is therefore ineligible for unemployment benefits, which has the consequence of forcing Martha to leave their child to his and Patty’s care while she goes out to work as an office cleaner. Melodramatic misfortune takes over as the child dies and Martha is imprisoned for stealing cash from one of the offices to pay for the funeral. All seems lost as Martha turns to sex work on her release and Russell to suicide. Their escape from these fates is due to a random encounter that leads to Russell getting a job at a factory where a group of striking workers have just been laid off. The message of the novel is therefore somewhat ambiguous, a sense that Heslop underscores with the ending: Martha spoke. ‘I suppose we’re all for ourselves in this world?’ she said. He smiled at her. ‘Everybody is—except you,’ he said. She snuggled against him. He kissed her, and Patty smiled upon them both. Heslop 1930: 252

The social turn Journey Beyond certainly takes its readers beyond the knowable organic community of the Durham coalfield and out into a brutal capitalist world but, at the same time, it is still clearly striving for some sort of intersectional solution beyond individualism that would incorporate the view of not just the category of respectable women but also those of women and sex workers; or, rather, a solution that also broke down those three categories (as identified by Joe Tarrant in The Gate of a Strange Field) so that they didn’t subdivide female experience. Heslop was aware that it was difficult for women to be independent in northern working-class communities, mining communities in particular, precisely because the clerical and typing jobs of London were not widely available there: Colliery offices have no apparent uses for typists. The reckoning of pay-sheets and the paying of wages still demand the labour of the male. Thus, a miner who begets a daughter is unlucky. Until the son of some other miner takes her to wife she is her father’s liability. It is in this way that middle-class houses are staffed

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The 1930s with the females of the miner who begets them. The girl dwells in the miner’s house until she goes to domestic service, or marries. Heslop 1930: 38

This was a problem that also featured in different ways in the fiction of other working-class writers of the period. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery (originally serialized in the Daily Herald from October 1923 to February 1924) is equally concerned with economic and sexual slavery although she is writing about the North West of England, where working-class women formed much of the labour force for the cotton mills. Her novel deals with the choices facing two out-of-work sisters, Hester and Rachael Martin. While the former in effect prostitutes herself within a loveless marriage, the latter becomes a socialist activist and is imprisoned for incitement. There is no satisfactory resolution possible for the novel other than to hope that one day ‘this slavery’ will pass (Holdsworth 2011: 250). Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929) is set at the time of the General Strike and, like Heslop’s The Gate of a Strange Field, switches locations between London and the Durham coalfields. Joan is independent through her job as a trade union official but she also benefits from her friendship with a wealthy socialite; a fictionalization of Wilkinson’s own friendship with Lady Rhondda, the owner and editor of the journal, Time and Tide. While Joan is able to give women important roles in the coalfield through her setting up of a Women’s Relief Distribution Committee to support the striking miners, thus implying the possibility of a more gender-equal future, the novel’s structure relies on a heterosexual romance for resolution. The best-known and bestselling (then and after) working-class novel of the 1930s, Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), emphatically rejects the ideology of working-class respectability and the idea that a woman should be passed from father to husband, when Sally Hardcastle chooses to become the kept woman of local bookmaker, Sam Grundy, and thereby support her unemployed parents and brother: ‘Y’d have me wed, wouldn’t y’? Then tell me where’s feller around here as can afford it? [. . .] can y’get our Harry a job? I can an’ Ah’m not respectable’ (Greenwood 1969: 246). Looking back on the 1930s, Mannin described works such as Love on the Dole as ‘sociological novels’ before noting that ‘Greenwood used to declare that I was his “fairy godmother”, because it was I who encouraged him to write the novel which made his name’ (1971: 142–143). Greenwood, as an aspiring writer, had sent his short stories to the well-known Mannin hoping for some sort of advice or notice. As Greenwood writes in his preface to the stories, which were eventually published as The Cleft Stick (1939): ‘Miss Ethel Mannin, a complete stranger to

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me at that time, was good enough to read the collection and to advise me to write a novel using some of the characters. I followed her advice, and Love on the Dole was the consequence’ (9). Working-class writers receiving help from more established writers was not unusual in the period, as Chris Hopkins points out: ‘Greenwood will surely have known of Mannin’s leftist but in many ways romantic and popular novels and shorter fiction of the 1930s (including perhaps Ragged Banners and Bruised Wings and Other Stories, both from 1931) and presumably identified her as someone likely to be sympathetic to his stories of working-class life’ (Hopkins 2018: 206). It is more likely however that Greenwood chose Mannin because her autobiography, including the details of her workingclass childhood, was a huge and controversial success during the time he was first writing the stories;1 but he may well have known Ragged Banners – the first novel she published after Confessions and Impressions – which also turns on a rejection of respectability. While Mannin later described Ragged Banners as belonging ‘in mood and manner to the Twenties’ (1971: 142), it might be interpreted as a transitional work, bridging some of the characteristic concerns of the two decades. The novel, a sequel to Crescendo (1929), revolves around the relationship between the three protagonists, the partly autobiographical Mary Thane, Stephen Lattimer, a fictionalized version of the writer Douglas Goldring – who was a former associate of Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis and a friend of Mannin’s – and Anthony Starridge, who is introduced to us as ‘half-genius, half-faun’ (1938: 11). While these relationships are not directly portrayed as sexual, there is a very strong undercurrent to the novel and the implication that Starridge is queer; a term that is used freely in the sense in which it is used today. Ultimately, this renders the novel’s sexual politics problematic because Starridge, in effect, kills himself by walking into the Arctic Circle with no food after murdering a young woman. However, even this ending is ambiguous because he dies in an ecstasy of endless light that suggests an escape from the timebound dimensions of the Earth: Now his mind was empty of everything; he had no thoughts; no emotions; no memory; no consciousness of anything save the light which flooded out of the everlasting sky and filled him; light that was the colour of the wind, unreality made real; reality in terms of unreality. Mannin 1938: 292–293

The sense is not so different from the ending of H.G. Wells’s ‘In the Country of the Blind’ (1904) in that it also projects the idea of someone who can see more clearly than his contemporaries, who has forcibly been held back by the stupidity

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of social conventions and then finally manages to escape in death. Some of the confusion evident in the novel is clearly down to Mannin, herself, whose sardonic detachment in discussing the sexual and gender ambiguity of ‘Bloomsbury at play’ (80) is not entirely successful in concealing her evident fascination with conversation lines such as ‘Oh, my dear, it was awfully chic  – all the smartest women there were men’ (60) and ‘Personally, I don’t see how any intelligent person can be anything but bi-sexual’ (84). But while she mocks the avant garde in this way, the disdain she displays for Starridge’s very straight petit-bourgeois parents is much more savage. Similarly, the novel is ambiguous concerning the ‘proletariat’, whose existence is acknowledged throughout, with Lattimer, on the one hand, assuring Starridge that if he had ever seen the North of England he would believe in the revolution, while, on the other hand, insisting on how much he hates the proletariat for their spinelessness. Instead, Lattimer supports ‘an aristocratic proletariat, a proletarian aristocracy; the simple unspoiled animal is aristocratic!’ (75–76). There is a real sense in Ragged Banners of a society and culture in a critical flux poised equally between the poles of reactionary fascism and queer communism.2 The overall message of the novel, captured in Mary’s stream of consciousness, is of the need for people to hang on in the hope of the change that is urgently required for a decaying society: Somebody one loved dies, but the world in which one carried on with one’s job, made love, went to parties, went on. One carried on [. . .] Fundamentally one was defeated, yet somehow undefeatable. . . . Life became a series of little deaths and resurrections; one died of ecstasy and one died of pain, and was resurrected to new delight or new pain, or merely to the same old dragging weariness; but whether gay courage or drab resignation was the colour on the banner, there was this necessity to keep it flying . . . that, she thought, with a little twist at her heart, was life’s ultimate symbol . . . ragged banners . . . rampant. . . .’. Mannin 1938: 305–306

Writing at the end of the decade, Mannin reflected that Ragged Banners showed the ‘stirrings of an awakening social consciousness  – too long asleep’ (1939a: 23) but that she still stood by the novel despite ‘all its overwriting and its asterisks, and a certain self-conscious sardonic quality’ for its ‘fire and spirit’ (1939a: 24). Although Mannin had always considered herself a socialist since her childhood, she had never really thought out her political philosophy before the 1930s. From henceforth, her fiction would be different. Goldring  – perhaps indirectly expressing his opinion on the fictional representation of himself in Ragged Banners – suggested that the best part of Confessions and Impressions was

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the description of Mannin’s working-class childhood and youth in Clapham and advised her to draw on this experience for her fiction. The result was Venetian Blinds (1933), which is dedicated to Goldring, and The Pure Flame (1936), both principally set in the working-class streets of South London. According to Charles Ferrall, Mannin is one of only ten women from working-class backgrounds (the list also includes Wilkinson and Kate Roberts, discussed further on in this chapter), as opposed to over 120 male equivalents, ‘who published at least one book during the 1930s’ (Ferrall 2018: 167). Mannin was far and away the most successful of these and so her absence from critical discussion of the 1930s, with only the notable exception of Andy Croft’s work (1990, 1993), is a major lacuna in the literature. Mannin’s own route out of respectable poverty had been through becoming a shorthand typist at fifteen and graduating to writing – first, advertising copy and, later, articles for magazines; exactly the career route for women that Heslop identifies in Journey Beyond as not existing in the Durham coalfield. Having the perspective of a successful post-First-World-War career woman marks her out both from earlier writers like Carnie Holdsworth and her male contemporaries such as Heslop and Greenwood; and aligns her with the 1930s generation of professional women writers, such as Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson and Naomi Mitchison, who ‘were able to inhabit the intellectual spheres of journalism and literary writing with new legitimacy’ (Ewins 2019: 58). Therefore, Mannin is able to imagine trajectories for working-class women that evade the twin poles of respectability and prostitution without collapsing into total melodrama. Venetian Blinds is in some respects a tale of upward social mobility but at the same time it reflects the everyday reality of the interwar years in which the children of working-class families moved into the white-collar careers, such as advertising, insurance, banking etc., that mushroomed with the expansion of mass modernity. Mannin’s protagonist, Stephen Pendrick, follows the same route as Mannin herself, through a six-month spell at commercial school learning shorthand, typing and book-keeping and on, after some mixed experiences, to work for an advertising company, in which he does eventually come to design campaigns. Over the same time span, he follows a parallel spatial trajectory from workingclass Ledstock Street, via lower-middle-class Rinscombe Road, and on to middleclass Acacia Avenue, where he eventually lives, not entirely happily, with his wife and a live-in domestic servant. Neither of them really want the servant, but his wife, as a former maid of Stephen’s employer, which is the capacity in which he first met her, feels it is necessary to demonstrate her own changed status; thus the outdated social hierarchies of the Victorian world are residually perpetuated

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within a context in which they make no sense. The novel does not celebrate Stephen’s elevation from working-class life but rather critiques the ideologies of status and respectability, as represented by the titular ‘venetian blinds’, that mean nobody is ever really happy or fulfilled apart from the blind-less, cacti-owning Leider family, who are Stephen’s friends during his childhood on Ledstock Street. Mannin, by now a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), eschews any direct socialist message but, by showing the Leiders – Marxists and adherents of William-Morris-inspired ideas of useful work and design  – driven out of the street by anti-German feeling at the outbreak of the First World War, implies that the shallowness of the interwar years as experienced by Stephen is a product of the failure to establish international socialism. Meanwhile, Stephen’s ‘fashionably boyish’, ‘full of “It” ’ sister, Elsie, follows his trajectory to the advertising company, where she works as the counter receptionist, entrancing a succession of male callers so that she is ‘never short of a dancing-partner or someone to pay for her dinner or take her to a theatre’: She seldom sent out with the same man more than twice; after the second time the providers of the good time were apt to want more than she was prepared to pay for her entertainment; a certain amount of flirtation was part of the game, but she had her own ideas as to the amount – with the result that she was often not asked a second time, and if she was she herself usually decided that there shouldn’t be a third. Mannin 1933: 340

Elsie might be independent in a manner unobtainable and even unimaginable for Heslop’s Martha Darke, but from Mannin’s point of view this comes at the price that ‘the good time mania which had hold of so many of her generation’ has repressed her sexual drive and left her ‘completely subordinate to the craving for pleasure’ (341). She cannot be really free if she is not a free sexual agent and therefore she does eventually make a misjudgement and get pregnant by a twice-already-married much older millionaire. However, the result is not a melodramatic or tragic downfall but that she has to become ‘Mrs Tendall number three’ (428) and we suspect that she will emerge stronger, wealthier, and more fully independent in the long run. Venetian Blinds functions as a social criticism of interwar society in which the politics are implicit, but by the time it was published Mannin had begun to extensively read and review novels by other working-class writers for the ILP publication, the New Leader (see Croft 1993: 213–214). As a result, her own writing became more directly political as can be seen in The Pure Flame (1936), in

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which Harry Winchell becomes an ILP activist. The novel occupies the same setting as Venetian Blinds with the addition of Orchard Street, which is characterized as a slum in comparison to the respectable working-class Ledstock Street. The Winchells live in Orchard Street, except for Rose who is the live-in maid of Elspeth Rodney, the protagonist of Mannin’s earlier novel, Cactus (1935). In Cactus, Elspeth’s experiences of being in love with one German before the First World War and with another, a POW, on a remote Scottish farm, during the War – both of whom die – led to her becoming a revolutionary socialist at the end of the novel. The plot of The Pure Flame turns on the cross-class romance between Elspeth’s niece, upper-middle-class Chloe, and working-class Harry, but it includes a number of industrial working-class scenes possibly inspired by Mannin’s reading. For example, Harry’s feckless brother-in-law, Stan, manages to get a job at the same factory, Elton’s, where Elspeth has managed to get Harry taken on, and promptly organizes an ‘accident’ to himself for the compensation, which is described in a long detailed sequence (1936: 219–227). While the novel cannot resolve the issues it raises, and evades harder choices by causing Harry to die of consumption, it does end with Chloe having become aware of the need for both class and gender politics to change so that it is no longer the case that ‘this little bourgeois went to Paris; this little proletarian stayed at home’ (257). Mannin’s ‘sociological novels’ depict British society in the same state of flux and crisis as her earlier novels, such as Ragged Banners, but they do not simply advocate desperately soldiering on; reflecting a recognition that socialist change is necessary to enable equality between women and men, which would then allow women to become fully independent. The strength of her novels is that they reflect this need for independence across a range of social positions from the hope of servants like Rose Winchell to be free of both mother and mistress (even though she loves both), to the desire of professional office workers, such as Elsie Pendrick, to be able to live as freely as their male colleagues do, and on to the desire of upper-middle-class women, such as Elspeth and Chloe Rodney, to love freely irrespective of nationality or social class. Only universal social change could meet all of these demands. Therefore, in Mannin’s novels, socialism and Labour movement politics are not represented as the preserve of male industrial workers but as the solution to women’s inequality. It is not that male socialist writers totally ignore women’s issues; in fact, gender relations are at the heart of working-class novels of the 1930s, such as Love on the Dole and Means-Test Man, while Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–34) and John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936) may be considered as explicitly intersectional (see Hubble 2017). However, there were particular difficulties in addressing such issues for

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writers, such as Heslop, writing about the exclusively male workplace environment of miners within the gendered constraints characteristic of Northern mining communities as he set them out in Journey Below. Therefore, it is interesting to contrast Mannin’s fiction with Heslop’s in this respect by returning to Last Cage Down, which, as we have seen, she found so lacking in originality in its depiction of sexual relations. Regarding Last Cage Down with the intersectional perspective here ascribed to Mannin, we can see that the novel is not, as Croft and Connor suggest, intended as a penitential corrective for the apparent failure of The Gate of a Strange Field to adhere to the Communist party line. Joe Frost might be ‘a proletcult literary type’ (Croft 1984: xi), but he is a satirical take on that type. While he reads Marx and listens to the radio, he is also obsessed with his waistline because it shows to the world ‘a horrible bourgeois manner of living’ and he ‘was no bourgeois, by heavens, no’ (Heslop 1984: 204). Therefore he has the local butcher weigh him once a week by hauling him up on his hook, which is anything but a calm, committed pose and probably intended as comic relief by Heslop. Jim Cameron, the old-fashioned miner protagonist of the novel does come to realize that he has been wrong about most things after he loses his position as secretary of the miner’s lodge and spends nine months in prison, during which time his mother is evicted from her village house. However, the novel’s epiphanic moment is not Cameron’s belated realization that Frost might actually know better than him how to conduct a strike, but when, after having ‘[gone] into her’ and – a line Mannin doesn’t quote  – her coming forward and ‘overwhelming him in wonderful savagery’ (190), he finds himself back downstairs in the kitchen helping his girlfriend, Betty, with the washing up: She nodded. ‘Good,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘Now, help me to clear away because I’ve got to be up at the Lion in time for six.’ Funny. He’d never done this for his mother in all his life. He had never thought about it. He had always taken it for granted that the clean crockery would be placed before him and the dirty crockery carted away from before him and cleansed. And here he was helping the girl to clear way the dishes. Well . . . he was damned . . .! Heslop 1984: 195

In this manner, the novel takes a step towards developing the implicit intersectional politics of The Gate of a Strange Field and demonstrates the consistency of Heslop’s position even while writing in a rapidly changing political context.

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As Last Cage Down moves to a conclusion (involving, as in The Gate of a Strange Field and several other Heslop novels, a mining disaster), Frost is trying to organize a contingent of the miners to join an anti-fascist demonstration protesting at a Mosley-like figure visiting ‘Tymecastle’ (Newcastle). However, an explosion in the mine traps him underground and ultimately he is rescued by Cameron. The novel’s closing scene finds Frost convalescing in bed, receiving a visit from Cameron and another miner, Paddy O’Toole – suggesting a new unity among the different factions in the miners’ union – and the last words are given to Frost’s wife: ‘I’d like to see any of you dare to stop fighting. Just any of you dare, that’s all!’ (361). Both this ending, and the fact that Frost identifies the rise of a fascist threat as representing ‘a new phase of the struggle’ (300), suggest that Heslop is not advocating the ‘Third Period’ position that Croft and Connor ascribe to Last Cage Down. Rather than display a sectarian attitude to the Labour Party, Frost calls for a ‘united front’ (302), which would be an alliance of communist, socialists, trade unionists and all in the Labour movement. Discussion of the miners talking about cricket and ‘Bodyline bowling’ (302) suggests the novel was written during or soon after the notorious 1932–33 tour of the England Cricket team to Australia and so before the Communist adoption of the Popular Front policy of aligning not just with the left but with all liberal democratic forces against fascism.3 While Heslop is actually showing part of the trajectory that led from sectarianism to the Popular Front, the disjuncture between the position he describes and how it had evolved by the time of the novel’s publication probably accounts for the misreading in the contemporary reviews and subsequent reception of the novel. Yet there is also no question that Heslop’s sympathies lie with the idea of a united front; the whole logic of Last Cage Down is to show that Cameron and Frost belong on the same side. In this respect, Heslop might be seen as having more in common with the pro-revolutionary stance adopted by writers in the ILP, such as Mannin and George Orwell, than with stereotypical Popular Front novelists. Of course, there is absolutely no reason why historical political positions, however important a context, should provide the benchmarks for assessing 1930s literature in 2020. Such interpretations have tended to occlude the gender politics of many 1930s texts. Depictions, such as Heslop’s in Last Cage Down or Gibbon’s in Grey Granite (the third volume of A Scots Quair), which satirize militant proletarian masculinity are either misinterpreted as too sectarian or dismissed as stemming from inadequate knowledge of the struggle in the industrial working place.4 A more productive approach might follow the example of McKenzie Wark in Molecular Red (2015) and attempt to rethink proletarian literature as not so much the expression of a sectarian political movement but rather a quest to find

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‘in and against nature’ ‘a totality within which to cultivate the surplus of life’ (23). The reason why Heslop has appeared a politically confused writer to critics is because his work is not orientated towards the shifting political goals of the 1930s but towards an as-yet-unrealized proletarian worldview beyond class and gender. Far from being a product of the 1930s, as traditionally and narrowly conceived, Heslop’s fiction calls into question many of the assumptions that have contributed to the restrictive myths surrounding that decade. By considering his work alongside Mannin’s, it is possible to see how the sardonic, modern attitude adopted by individuals in the 1920s as a defence against a decaying society still hidebound by leftover Victorian traditions – whether in the Durham coalfield or the complex class stratifications of the south London suburbs – took a social turn in the 1930s as it became clear that nothing less than a wholesale structural transformation of Britain would permit fulfilling lives.

Women and the moral revolution But while women had as much to gain from a social revolution as men, according to Mannin they were already at the forefront of change that had gone too far for reactionary forces. The argument of her non-fiction book, Women and the Revolution (1938), is that fascism was principally defined by its desire to overturn those aspects of women’s emancipation that were already taken for granted. Therefore, she warns her readership: ‘Perhaps you who read this are a housewife with no ambition to make a career outside the home; perhaps you will say that the coming of Fascism would make no difference to you. But you would be wrong’ (202). As in her novels, which explicitly link the struggles of workingclass women – such as Mrs Pendrick or Mrs Winchell – within the constrictions of the respectable conventions of keeping ‘themselves decent [and keeping] themselves to themselves’ (Mannin 1936: 29), with the desire of middle-class women – such as Elspeth Rodney – for full autonomy in life and love, Mannin’s aim in Women and the Revolution is to establish female emancipation as not just a facet of modern life but a principal cause of modernity, which has come about not just through progress and reform, but through the radical agency and revolutionary activity of women: ‘There has been in our time a revolution for women – the revolt of Woman against the oppression of Men, which culminated in the full enfranchisement of women in 1928’ (Mannin 1939b: 30). However, in Germany, more advanced progress to equality than in Britain was being dismantled by the Nazi regime:

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All that progressive women have worked for for years has been lost. Women professors, doctors, civil servants, have been sacked. Women are no longer eligible for Government posts, and may not be appointed to municipal positions. That women should be displaced in medicine and teaching, two spheres in which women can do such valuable work, seems fantastic, but it is all in line with the Nazi policy of woman’s subservience to male domination. Mannin 1939b: 196–197

When twenty-first-century commentators claim that particularly reactionary aspects and/or the populism of contemporary American or British politics are like something from the 1930s, we should remember Mannin’s labelling of the Nazi assault on women’s rights as ‘fantastic’. Modern progressive democracy was already established before the 1930s and the counter-revolutionary attack on it during that decade was just as apparently achronological as the repressive trends that have characterized the Western world since 2016. The answer to such attacks, both now and then, is not taking a defensive stance but being assertive, as Mannin illustrates by pointing to the situation of women in 1930s Spain, who, under the influence of the Catholic Church, had been kept away from public life and within narrowly delineated passive roles. They didn’t have the social freedom of women in England; a fact presented by Mannin as completely outside the norm for modern life. However, by the summer of 1937 rapid progress had been made as ‘women’s emancipation march[ed] side by side with the revolutionary movement’ (1939b: 190). In particular, Mannin’s discussion of the struggle of Mujeres Libres (Free Women), a group backed by the Anarchist trade unions, ‘to emancipate women from the triple slavery of ignorance, traditional passivity and exploitation’ (qtd Mannin 1939b: 188) and find new ways for men and women to live and work together without excluding each other, while supporting women nurses, teachers, doctors, artists, chemists and skilled workers, is central to her wider argument in Women and the Revolution. However, at the time she was writing, October 1937, these advances were under threat: . . . since then the Mujeres Libres organisation has been suppressed – part of the work of the counter-revolution which suppressed the P.O.U.M. after the May rising. But nothing short of a Fascist regime can now suppress the feminist movement itself; the women have tasted freedom and will no more tamely retire behind their grills, to be dominated by husbands, fathers, priests, than the women of England retreated from their new found place in commerce, industry, professions, when the [First World] War was finished. Mannin 1939b: 190

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Mannin’s designation of the communist-led oppression of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista [Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification] as counterrevolutionary demonstrates the perspective she shared with her fellow ILP member, George Orwell, whose Homage to Catalonia (1938) recounts the events of the May 1937 fighting in Barcelona in which he participated. For both of these writers, the USSR’s role in suppressing the Spanish revolution was a decisive factor in their rejection of Soviet communism under Stalin. Mannin had already become disillusioned during the course of her second trip to the USSR in 1936, when she had travelled east to Samarkand (in present-day Uzbekistan) and seen the extent of Soviet colonialism: ‘Russia has no more business in Turkestan than the British have in India’ (Mannin 1939b: 144). Unlike Orwell, Mannin would also go on to oppose involvement in the Second World War on the grounds that it was an imperial conflict; she remained a fierce opponent of colonialism in general and of British actions in Kenya in particular, during the postwar decades. While those developments lay ahead in the future, Mannin was aware that she occupied a marginal and apparently contradictory political position for the late 1930s, as she acknowledges by beginning Women and the Revolution with a ‘Dedicatory Letter’ to the anarchist, Emma Goldman: There will be those who will no doubt find it paradoxical that a book which quotes from Marx and Lenin and advocates social revolution for the establishment of a Workers’ State along Marxist lines (though not as interpreted by the Stalinist bureaucracy) should be dedicated to you, an Anarchist, and as such opposed to any Centralized State. Mannin 1939b: np

Mannin goes on to specify that the difference between herself and Goldman is that rather than see Marxism as inevitably flawed, she still believes in ‘a real dictatorship of the proletariat which would not deteriorate into the dictatorship of a bureaucracy’. Mannin argues that such a free workers’ democracy would become indistinguishable from the ‘Libertarian Society of Anarchism’ advocated by Goldman. But this isn’t just a hypothetical discussion, the possibility of common ground between the two is rooted specifically in the collaboration between the POUM and the Anarchist-Syndicalist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo – Federación Anarquista Ibérica) in the Spanish Revolution of 1936; the same historical instance that inspired Orwell’s belief in revolutionary socialism (see Orwell 1966: 46–70 and passim). Therefore, we can see that Women and the Revolution was written as a political intervention within a particular political context when it appeared briefly possible to act outside the normal circumscriptions

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of tradition and historical weight. However, as Mannin was aware, this window of opportunity was rapidly blinking out of existence following the set-back of the May rising. Historically, that window of opportunity did disappear in Spain as first the balance of power in the Republic continued to shift to the communists and then Franco’s forces won the civil war. By the time, the Second World War was over, Mannin’s book appeared irrelevant as the global fascist threat was defeated by conventional, as opposed to revolutionary, forces. While this victory was enabled in a UK context by an unprecedented mobilization of the state, which included the conscription of women, this was not the same as women participating in the revolution. After the War, these women were supposed to return home. Indeed, the postwar welfare state which is often seen as the utopian outcome of the ‘People’s War’ was predicated, in the words of Jane Lewis, on William Beveridge’s ‘conviction that adult women would normally be economically dependent on their husbands’ (qtd Hennessy 2007: 123). While the 1950s were not as culturally conservative as they are sometimes portrayed, this regressive postwar turn in gender relations has underpinned a popular historiography which views the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s as a feminist ‘second wave’ following the ‘first wave’ of the early-twentieth-century suffragette movement; the implication being that not much changed between 1928 and 1968. Yet reading Mannin suggests that there was a feminist generation in the mid-to-late 1930s who were seeking to move beyond the symbolic equivalence of suffrage to the possession of full agency within society. In this respect, her arguments in Women and the Revolution carry a sense of urgency, which speaks out of its time – and the now-dated concerns of the respective ‘lines’ of the ILP, the Anarchists and the Communist Party – to us today in the midst of the political and cultural crises of 2020: Reforms of one kind and another can do much to make the lives of women freer and easier and happier, but woman’s real need is for moral revolution in the society in which she lives, and you cannot get moral revolution by reformist methods; to achieve that the whole of the existing form of society must be smashed and something new fashioned nearer to the heart’s desire. Mannin 1939b: 208

The deployment of the phrase ‘heart’s desire’ by a writer who was certainly regarded in some contexts as a women’s writer or a romantic novelist is significant here not only because it legitimates romance by acknowledging desire as a source of agency and a force for change; but also because it gives some indication of the extent of the change that might follow from a moral revolution. Mannin is implying change reaching far beyond the elimination of traditional gender roles

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and sexual double standards. After such a moral revolution, everything from common sense to how we collectively construct reality would be different; a point that is explained in more detail in another significant female-authored work of political theory published in 1938, Naomi Mitchison’s The Moral Basis of Politics. Mitchison, like Mannin and Heslop, established herself as a writer in the 1920s. In particular, she wrote historical novels set in classical antiquity but employing modern idiom. While the upper-class Mitchison came from a very different social background to Mannin, a similar trajectory can be traced through her work as she came to see that full freedom and agency for women required social and moral revolution. This evolution can be seen in The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), which had been written on and off since 1925 over a period during which Mitchison’s son, Geoff, died of meningitis and two of her other children were born, her marriage went through various phases of being an open marriage, her relationship with the classicist Theodore Wade-Gery broke down, she also experienced the General Strike and the global financial crash; and by the time the novel was published, Mitchison and her husband were members of the Labour Party (see Benton 1992: 58–64). During the course of the novel, Mitchison’s alter-ego Erif Der comes to understand the only way for her to live her life freely is through social change from traditional hierarchy to a new pattern of equality. As Spring Queen, Erif Der is inescapably caught within the patriarchal symbolism of the harvest-related fertility rituals of her people, which require her to submit passively to the Corn King, but she eventually escapes this structure and gains agency by joining in with the common people in the harvest rituals and associated (sexual) celebrations of a number of different cultures she travels through. In this way, Mitchison is able to allow her heroine to enjoy the freedom of a classless society in antiquity. These folk structures are linked to the revolution led by Kleomenes of Sparta and the novel’s epilogue, set some years after the main events, implies that Erif Der has inspired a revolutionary tradition that is passing down among the common people separately from the hierarchical structures of classical Greek learning and culture which supposedly underpin Western thought. The novel’s message is that one day, this revolutionary tradition will finally triumph allowing women to create a freer, easier society for all. The Corn King and the Spring Queen was well received, not just by Mitchison’s peers among the 1930s generation of ‘professional women writers’, such as Winifred Holtby who rated it the most important novel of 1931 above Woolf ’s The Waves, but generally across the literary reviews (see Benton 1992: 68–69). However, when Mitchison transposed the theme of women’s agency into a

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contemporary setting in We Have Been Warned (1935) not only did she find it impossible to get the novel in print without cuts imposed by the publisher but her combination of female stream of consciousness, fascist uprisings and socialist politics with free love, rape and abortion was ‘universally despised’ by critics (Bluemel 2015: 51). As Jill Benton notes, ‘in another historical moment, Naomi might easily have sustained bad reviews on a single experimental novel’ but this was the middle of the highly politicized 1930s and while conservative readers were alienated, left-wing male reviewers, such as Tom Wintringham in Left Review, were annoyed at what they saw as pollution of social morality with sexual immorality: ‘Naomi never recovered her literary reputation in England’ (Benton 1992: 106). In this context, The Moral Basis of Politics, may therefore be seen as Mitchison’s attempt to recalibrate the basis on which we construct common sense and consensus reality so that they wouldn’t be opposed to desires such as that of Mitchison’s alter-ego protagonist in We Have Been Warned, Dione Galton, for the same opportunities as Soviet women factory workers to have children while remaining single. Mitchison’s argument in The Moral Basis of Politics is that the mechanization and modernization of the 1930s had changed the material basis for human life while our thoughts and social habits remained conditioned by the competition for resources that had dominated most of human history before. Given that the productive capacity now existed to supply enough food and materials for all, it was time to change the moral basis of politics: ‘the present culture pattern is founded on economics of scarcity, and scarcity is now an abnormality except in times of war (when the culture standards of our immediate past always seem to become more valid)’ (Mitchison 1971: 15). On the basis of her 1932 trip to the Soviet Union – several years earlier than Mannin’s visits and before the onset of full-blown Stalinism – she estimated that 70 per cent of Soviet citizens were ‘free to choose the kind of work they want to do, the kind of pattern they want to make with their lives’ (69) and that the ultimate success of Soviet communism was dependent on it entrenching economic equality over the next twenty years as a precursor to a post-scarcity society bringing pleasure, play and plenty to everyone. While the Soviet Union never delivered on this early promise, it provided – at least at the beginning of the 1930s – an example of a system in which women had economic independence and bourgeois morality was being discarded. However, while the example of the Soviet Union had demonstrated to writers such as Mitchison and Mannin how society could be transformed to allow women to live freely, the deteriorating political conditions of the decade – the rise

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of Stalinism and fascism – were calling this possibility into question even as they were exploring it in their writing. The intention of both Mitchison and Mannin was to make readers in Britain aware of both the need for and the possibilities of moral revolution. But aside from gender and class there were other key dimensions to British literary politics in the 1930s, one of which – illustrated by the middecade demise of Mitchison’s literary reputation in England rather than in Scotland  – was the new significance of the cultural difference between the remaining nations that made up Britain following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Notably in We Have Been Warned, Mitchison relates her imagining of a wider social transformation of property relations and the position of women in society to the democratic potential of her native Scotland rather than the more class- and morality-bound England she depicts as undergoing a fascist takeover in the closing pages of the novel.

The national turn There is a passage in Last Cage Down in which Jim Cameron, shortly out of prison and unable to get his job in the mine back, returns to the remote cottage where his mother is now living following her eviction to find that the local vicar, Reverend James Teale, is there. It is a sudden reminder that the rural class relations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as found in the quintessentially English novels of Jane Austen, remained in place even during the proletarian 1930s. Heslop gives us a potted biography of Teale’s background and education, including his sporting prowess as evidenced by playing rugby for England against Wales: Teale was a peculiar product of the English system. It would be hard to find anywhere on earth the exact counterpart of the English parson. He typifies the strong satisfaction of the English bourgeoisie which so horrifies all other people. Teale was a man of wealth and could well afford to live as a country gentleman had he cared to do so. Heslop 1984: 200

Unsurprisingly, Cameron is not overjoyed to find that his personal misfortunes are providing entertainment for the bourgeoisie and makes his displeasure obvious. When Teale enquires if Cameron is questioning his right to visit his parishioners, Cameron responds ‘cheerfully’ that he is questioning Teale’s right to live, leading to the following exchange:

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‘You wouldn’t shoot us!’ cried Teale jovially. He had met these fellows before. There was one down in the village called Frost. ‘Not at first,’ said Cameron. ‘I’d try you all out with a bit of honest labour and then I’d see [. . . .] I’d put you into a hard place in Franton [Colliery] and then I’d see what you could do in the way of hewing a few coals. No minimum wage, either. . . .’ Heslop 1984: 202

Hard-edged joking aside, Cameron’s point is that the miners pay for Teale – ‘We hew the coals and give you the earnings’ (202) – and by implication for the entire English class system, including its elite sport. As Teale walks off telling himself that Cameron is mad, his stream of consciousness reveals that he is a shareholder in the mining company. This one-off passage – we only hear briefly of Teale again in the novel – is not just another example of the supposedly hardline-communist Heslop’s sardonic sense of humour, but a telling comment on the lack of shared values between the Durham coalfield and the surrounding English nation; and the exploitative relationship of the latter to the former. Journey Beyond begins with Martha leaving Shielding on the train for London to take up a position in domestic service. In the carriage with her is a young man on the way back from holiday, ‘tall and fair, a southerner’ (Heslop 1930: 9). When they arrive at King’s Cross, Heslop informs us that ‘like all good English people travelling in a train, neither had spoken all the way’ (42). The reason for this lack of social exchange is not some innate national reticence but the class divide rooted in the peculiarly exploitative nature of an English capitalism that outside the big cities remained embedded in eighteenthcentury rural hierarchies. Although going to those big cities enables Heslop’s characters to release themselves from the specific mental framework of the coalfield, it doesn’t solve the wider problems of class relations in England. Even if the resultant expanded worldview could be transferred back to the coalfield – as arguably happens in Last Cage Down through Cameron’s transformation from stereotypical Stakhanovite worker into sensitive new man  – it doesn’t help the Durham miners build a new society as they are still isolated within an exploitative English context; to achieve social change in an English context they would have to follow through on Cameron’s logic by either killing the bourgeoisie such as Teale or turning them into workers too. For this reason it is interesting to contrast Heslop’s English mining novels with those of his Welsh miner contemporary, Lewis Jones, who also attended the Central Labour College in the mid-1920s. Jones’s Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939), feature a male protagonist, Len Roberts, who is the opposite of the stereotypical heroic worker, being a physically

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weak, rather frail character introduced to the reader as ‘a queer lad for his age’ (Jones 1978a: 14). Subsequently, he marries the also frail, and indeed consumptive, Mary, who becomes his equal as a communist leader. It is Len’s father, Big Jim, who represents the heroic worker but he is no grim-jawed hero but rather an unfailing reservoir of good humour – what we might term a source of ‘comic optimism’ in distinction to the ‘tragic optimism’ represented by Mary and Len, who ends up dying fighting for the International Brigades in Spain. As Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill note in Writing the 1926 General Strike (2015), ‘male chauvinism is a frequent target of narrative scorn’ but this is principally directed at Jim: Jim remembered looking at her for some moments in amazement before bursting out. ‘What? Me light fire? Good God! What is coming over you, my gel. Don’t forget I am a man not a bloody dish-cloth. Huh! It has always been against my principles to do a ‘ooman’s work.’ qtd Ferrall and McNeill 2015: 116–117; Jones 1978b: 77

Jim’s bluster as he comes to terms with some of the more basic aspects of women’s autonomy provides a nice foil for the more serious transition undergone by Len, who not only has to take over responsibility for a share of the housework when Mary becomes elected to the County Council as a communist representative, but also has to ‘learn a new sexuality in recognition of Mary’s autonomy’ (Ferrall and McNeill 2015: 170). By the end of We Live, it is the village women who lead the demonstrations and battles with police, leading Big Jim to declare, ‘by damn, those girls is good boys’ (qtd Ferrall and McNeill 2015: 170; Jones 1978b: 274). The gender politics are therefore more pronounced than in Heslop’s novels – it should be noted that the final chapter was written after Jones’s death by his friend Mavis Llewellyn who saw the manuscript through to publication – but what really marks the distinction is that Jones is writing from a non-English perspective in a non-English context: Jones being Welsh and writing about the South Wales coalfield and the Rhondda valley in particular. In 1935, Jones attended the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, famous for the adoption of the Popular Front policy. Elinor Taylor (2018) reads Jones’s novels in the context of ‘the national, popular and historical emphases of Popular Front ideological struggle’ (178) as set out by Georgi Dimitrov, the General Secretary of the Comintern, at the Congress. She notes Jones’s comment in a letter to Douglas Garman, who worked with him on the manuscript on behalf of the publisher Lawrence & Wishart, that Cwmardy was ‘definitely a class book in the fullest sense of the word’ (qtd. Taylor 2018: 180;

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emphasis in original). In other words the books were connected to the life of the valley through Jones himself in his attempt, with the help of Garman and Llewellyn, to write a new kind of novel as an expression of the people rather than of bourgeois individualism. As Taylor argues, ‘The quality of affirmation [of the people] inheres in Jones’s shaping of his historical material to show that even at moments of internal conflict and defeat, the utopian possibilities immanent in the class community’s way of life are preserved’ (180–181). In this respect, Jones’s novels are clearly more successful than Heslop’s because they show the community as a living culture in a way that Heslop only gestures at. We only know that Cameron and Frost will carry on the struggle at the end of Last Cage Down because we are told; there is never any question in readers’ minds that the people of Cwmardy might be defeated. In the words of Lawrence & Wishart’s advert for Cwmardy in the Daily Worker, the novel seemed to herald the ‘creation of a new literature written of the people and by the people – for the people of Britain’ (qtd. Taylor 2018: 179). However, viewed from a different perspective it is less than surprising that Jones was more successful in generating a Popular Front representation of Britain than Heslop. The crucial difference was not Heslop’s supposed adherence to the outmoded ‘Third Period’ policy but that of writing in an English as opposed to a Welsh context. The sense of Britishness generated by Jones’s novels is not just a Popular Front deployment of nation but the product of the novels’ explicit Welshness differentiating them from the harsh class divisions of England, which Heslop is always forced to acknowledge in his work. For example, Cwmardy begins with Jim and his then young son Len on top of the mountain and Jim pointing out to Len the ground on which ‘a big battle was once fought between the Cymro and the English’ (Jones 1978a: 3). The novels also use snippets of Welsh language and specific Welsh traditions throughout, such as when striking miners organize an eisteddfod during the course of a sit-in down the mine. Therefore, the ‘we’ of Jones’s novels is not simply a working-class ‘we’ but also the ‘we’ of ‘Welshness’. Although Jones’s miners have to deal with a variety of antagonists including soldiers and colliery management, they are able to talk directly to the mine owner, Lord Cwmardy himself. In contrast, Heslop’s protagonists, such as Cameron, never get so close to the central power dynamic but find themselves ranged against a seemingly ubiquitous web of interests stretching from engineers, mine managers and clergymen to petty rivalries in the union itself and the sententious moral restrictiveness of the very communities they are living in. The idea of a people’s Britain in which Heslop’s miners might find themselves at ease free from the pervasive influence of the English class

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system  – as was perhaps the case in the immediate decades after the Second World War following the nationalization of the coal mines – was only possible to represent in the 1930s in areas that were not subject to English ideology. However, the reason these areas were not subject to that English ideology was not because they were somehow more British but because they were Welsh or Scottish and being written about by Welsh writers, like Jones, and Scottish writers, like Mitchison or Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Viewed from the perspective of the twenty-first century in which Wales and Scotland have devolved governments, the contours of the national turn of the 1930s have a very different shape to that of the new Britain imagined in Lawrence & Wishart’s advert for Cwmardy. This is not to suggest that the concerns of the present may be simply read back into an earlier historical period. Gibbon, who in any case was not an orthodox communist and who died in 1934 before the advent of the Popular Front, was notoriously scornful of the still predominantly romantic Scottish nationalism of his contemporaries, as he expressed in ‘Glasgow’ (1934): There is nothing in culture or art that is worth the life and elementary happiness of one of those thousands who rot in the Glasgow slums. There is nothing in science or religion. If it came (as it may come) to some fantastic choice between a free and independent Scotland, a centre of culture, a bright flame of artistic and scientific achievement, and providing elementary decencies of food and shelter to the submerged proletariat of Glasgow and Scotland, I at least would have no doubt as to which side of the battle I would range myself. For the cleansing of that horror, if cleanse it they could, I would welcome the English in suzerainty over Scotland till the end of time. Gibbon 1994: 122

Therefore, however tempting it might be to read Gibbon’s invocation of ‘the Land’ in A Scots Quair as a proleptic vision of post-Independence Scotland, it is necessary to realize that it was not written as a nationalist work. Similarly, while Jones writes of the people of a specific valley, he was consciously writing in the name of international socialism. However, circumstances alter and in the same way that a present-day Gibbon’s attitude to nationalism might change if his prioritization of ‘a surety of food and play’ for the people of Glasgow was shown to be more readily achievable in, for example, an independent social-democratic Scotland than an isolationist, Conservative UK, so Jones today might see the interests of both the people of the South Wales coalfield and international socialism better served by a European-orientated Welsh polity than a Britain orientated entirely to US capitalism.

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Furthermore, we can use the changed perspectives afforded to us by the present in order to rethink the relationships between texts and ideas in the past. For example, unlike the Scottish nationalism of the 1930s, Welsh nationalism was ‘programmatically internationalist and European’ (Silver 2015: 108). Kate Roberts, a member of Plaid Cymru from soon after its formation in 1925, wrote Traed Mewn Cyffion (Feet in Chains), her novel of the hard life of the families of North Wales quarry workers set at the turn of the century, in the early 1930s while living in Tonypandy in the Rhondda valley. As Katie Gramich points out, although set in the past, the novel ‘can be said to engage directly with the political crisis of the 1930s and in this regard can be compared with other politicallyengaged texts emerging from the South Wales valleys in the period’, such as Jones’s novels (2012: xiv). At one point in Feet in Chains, Roberts describes a conversation in which two women talk ‘about their lives, without understanding any of the causes of their situation’ (134). As Gramich argues, while the novel evokes the harshness of life there seem to be no solutions on the thin soil of Snowdonia; neither the chapel nor socialism provide an answer and the character, William, who embodies the narrative’s concern with social injustice is forced to travel south to the valleys. Something has to happen and yet it is not clear what might possibly change that environment. In comparison, when we first meet Big Jim and young Len at the beginning of Cwmardy on the top of the hill, Jim is staring wistfully into the distance remembering when he used ‘to walk the fields of the North before ever I come down here to work in the pits’ (Jones 1978a: 1). An intersectional literary politics of class and gender, bolstering Jones’s depiction of Len learning to live equally alongside Mary with Roberts’s women-centred focus, holds out the possibility of both realizing the utopian possibilities of the community in Cwmardy and explaining the causes of the situation of Roberts’s women in the North. In this respect, Jones’s and Roberts’s novels are complementary, suggesting the possibility of a shared political consciousness for a country that remains today still significantly divided between ‘North’ and ‘South’.

Conclusion When Mitchison wrote the foreword to Among You Taking Notes . . . (1985), an edited version of the diary she kept for Mass Observation throughout the Second World War, she expressed sadness at the lack of fulfilment of both the hope during the war ‘for a new kind of world’ and the desire ‘to get at least a measure

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of self-government and a recognition of nationhood’ for Scotland (Mitchison 2000: 12–13). She discusses these two aims as separate but the contrast she makes between her own and her husband’s practice suggests a relationship between the two: ‘I tried to begin the change [to a new pattern of living] with personal relations, but Dick, my husband, working with Beveridge and Cole on the political and economic foundations of the welfare state, got much further in the end’ (13). At the point when Mitchison was writing, midway through the Thatcherite 1980s, when the full-employment basis of the postwar consensus had been dismantled, and in the aftermath of the failure of the 1979 devolution referendum to gain a sufficient majority to establish a Scottish Parliament, all hopes seemed to have ended in despair. But forty years later, while the welfare state recedes into distant memory, Scotland has a thriving parliament and a markedly distinct social and political culture to England, even though it is still a subordinate part of the UK. The element of 1930s literary politics which still remains pertinent in this twenty-first century context is Mitchison’s belief in the possibility of making a new pattern of social life in Scotland rather than the attempt to forge a British common culture through the alignment of a myth of the worker – figured almost exclusively as a male industrial worker – with a preexisting welfare state in the vain hope that the terrible conditions of the hungry decade would never be repeated. Therefore reading Mitchison today opens up a very different version of the 1930s to the reified and tightly restricted myth of the ‘Thirties’ that dominated literary reception of the decade until recently, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In particular, it is now becoming clear how much the 1930s were framed from the perspective of a postwar common culture that was itself the product of the ‘national turn’ Edgerton describes, in which England, Wales and Scotland underwent a transformation from having been locations within a British Empire to becoming regions within a British nation. This framing didn’t so much exclude as occlude not just the fact, as examined in the previous section, that the difference between an apparently working-class-centred Britain and a hierarchical bourgeois-dominated England was really the difference between Wales or Scotland and England, but also the unprecedented cultural democratization of the 1930s. In postwar Britain it was possible to say for the first time in British history that, as in the title of Raymond Williams’s influential essay, ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (1958); but, as discussed in the opening section of this chapter in relation to points made by Mellor and Salton-Cox, knowledge of that cultural democratization of the 1930s shows us that that ordinary culture could be as much queer, anti-racist and feminist as it was working-class. To pick

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an area focused on in this chapter, studying fiction of the 1930s shows us that gender politics are not a recent development arising out of the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s but were a central concern in the 1930s; not just of women writers such as Mannin and Mitchison but also of uncompromisingly communist-orientated male proletarian writers such as Heslop and Jones. The recent development of the concept of ‘the long 1930s’ testifies to the need of contemporary scholars to wrest the decade from its entrenched myths in order to make sense of what has come to light with the expansion of texts studied from the period beyond the public-school-educated males of the ‘Auden Generation’. This expansion has been in part due to the expansion of modernism over the last quarter of a century into the all-encompassing New Modernist Studies. However, it is now possible perhaps to turn this expansion on its head and suggest that the emancipatory impulse to self-actualization in modernist writers such as Woolf is actually a subset of a much broader impulse, which would peak after the First World War, towards breaking away from the traditional hierarchies and patriarchal order left over from the nineteenth-century British Empire. As I’ve tried to show with the example of Mannin – a writer who has been largely ignored within the previous frameworks for addressing the literature of the 1930s  – there is a progression of ideas by which it became clear, first, that the impulse to individual freedom of the 1920s could not be realized without social transformation or revolution and, second, that social revolution could not be achieved without a moral revolution. This latter, as the work of Mannin and Mitchison makes clear, would not just be a sexual revolution in terms of enabling free love for women in particular but a more profound transformation of how life is understood moving beyond limiting factors such as hierarchical thinking, binary oppositions and economics based on competition and scarcity; in other words, a set of concerns that speak directly to the intersectional politics of the twenty-first century. The specific historical contexts of the 1930s, such as the character of Scottish nationalism or the precise shifts in party line of the Communist Party, remain important for our reading of texts from the decade but they should no longer be allowed to dictate our value judgements. It is useful to be able to relate the novels of Heslop and Jones to communist cultural politics but not especially helpful, as I have shown, to dismiss Last Cage Down as a late ‘third period’ text not just because it restricts our capacity to enjoy Heslop’s sardonic humour but also because it misreads the politics of the novel. There has been some excellent scholarship on Popular Front novels in recent years, as indicated by some of the ways in which the novels of Jones are now read, but it is also important that we don’t become so imprisoned by those categories of the decade itself that we don’t read writers such

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as Mannin who were committed to a different version of socialist politics. Rather, we should consider understanding Mannin, a working-class socialist woman writer, and her relationship with her wide readership of upper-working-class and lower-middle-class women as a key to understanding more about the nature of the widespread cultural democratization of the 1930s. The future of 1930s literary scholarship, I would suggest, lies in following this democratizing impulse towards the self-actualization of individuals and communities not just over an extended ‘long 1930s’ period, but up until the present day and on into the future cultural opportunities offered by the twenty-first century. Reading Mannin, Heslop, Mitchison and Jones today offers as good as a cultural insight as any into the results of the 2019 UK General Election for, respectively, the London suburbs, the North East of England, Scotland and the South Wales valleys. More to the point, they might offer some resources for hope for those in those areas who are in need of them. It’s time to orientate our approach to the fiction of the 1930s to our contemporary needs.

Notes 1 As an indication of its popularity, Confessions and Impressions passed through its fiftieth impression in April 1936 before publication by Penguin in a revised edition in January 1937. 2 For the latter, see Glyn Salton-Cox, Queer Communism and The Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s (2018). 3 ‘Bodyline’ was the controversial tactic, derived to counter the unparalleled success of the Australian batsman Don Bradman, of bowling fast and short at the batsman’s body in the hope that he would fend it off defensively and be caught out by suitably placed close fielders. There was a social class dynamic to the 1932–33 tour of Australia, which made it of particular interest to miners as the principle bodyline bowlers were the Nottinghamshire miners, Bill Voce and Harold Larwood, but they were bowling in this manner at the command of the upper-class, public-school educated, English captain Douglas Jardine, who was deeply unpopular in Australia. 4 For example, as recently as 2000, Ian A. Bell was explaining away the politics of A Scots Quair in terms of Gibbon’s ‘lack of engagement with urban working-class lives’ (185).

Works cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Hammersmith: Paladin, 1973 [1957].

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Bell, David. Ardent Propaganda: Miners’ Novels and Class Conflict 1929–1939, Umeå: Umeå Studies in the Humanities, 1995. Bell, Ian A. ‘ “Work as If you Live in the Early Days of a Better Nation”: Scottish Fiction and the Experience of Industry’. In British Industrial Fictions. H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (eds.). Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000: 181–192. Bentley, Nick, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble. ‘Introduction: The 1950s: A Decade of Change’. In The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble (eds.). London: Bloomsbury, 2019: 1–18. Benton, Jill (1992), Naomi Mitchison: A Biography. London: Pandora. Bergonzi, Bernard. Reading the Thirties: Texts and Contexts. London: Macmillan, 1978. Bluemel, Kristin (ed.). Intermodernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Bluemel, Kristin, ‘Exemplary Intermodernists: Stevie Smith, Inez Holden, Betty Miller, and Naomi Mitchison’. In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945. Maroula Joannou (ed.). Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015: 40–56. Brierley, Walter. Sandwichman. London: Merlin, 1990 [1937]. Caesar, Adrian. Dividing Lines: Poetry, Class and Ideology in the 1930s. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Connor, John. ‘Anglo-Soviet Relations in the Long 1930s’. In A History of 1930s British Literature. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 317–330. Croft, Andy. ‘Introduction’ to Harold Heslop, Last Cage Down. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984: vii–xiii. Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Croft, Andy. ‘Ethel Mannin: The Red Rose of Love and the Red Flower of Liberty.’ In Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889–1939. Angela Ingram (ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993: 205–225. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Edgerton, David. The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History. London: Penguin, 2019 [2018]. Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 [1935]. Ewins, Kristin. ‘Professional Women Writers’. In A History of 1930s British Literature. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 58–71. Ferrall, Charles. ‘Women’s Work? Domestic Labour and Proletarian Fiction’. In British Literature in Transition: 1920–1940 Futility and Anarchy. Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018: 166–181. Ferrall, Charles and Dougal McNeil. Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. A Scots Quair. London: Jarrolds, 1932–34.

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Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. ‘Glasgow’ [1934]. In Gibbon, The Speak of the Mearns. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1994: 118–127. Gramich, Katie. ‘Introduction’ to Kate Roberts, Feet in Chains, Cardigan: Parthian, 2012: vii–xvi. Greenwood, Walter. Love on the Dole. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 [1933]. Greenwood, Walter. The Cleft Stick. London: Selwyn & Blount, 1937. Hennessy, Peter. Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties. London: Penguin, 2007. Heslop, Harold. The Gate of a Strange Field. London: Brentano, 1929. Heslop, Harold. Journey Beyond. London: Harold Shaylor, 1930. Heslop, Harold. Last Cage Down. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984 [1935]. Heslop, Harold. Out of the Old Earth. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994. Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratisation of Writing in Britain. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2006. Hobsbawm, Eric. ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ Marxism Today, September 1978: 279–286. Holdsworth, Ethel Carnie. This Slavery. Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2011 [1925]. Hopkins, Chris. Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole: Novel, Play, Film. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Hubble, Nick. ‘ “The Choices of Master Samwise”: Rethinking 1950s Fiction’. In The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble (eds.). London: Bloomsbury, 2019: 19–51. Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 [1976]. Jones, Lewis. Cwmardy. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978a [1937]. Jones, Lewis. We Live. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978b [1939]. Kohlmann, Benjamin and Matthew Taunton (eds.). A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019a. Kohlmann, Benjamin and Matthew Taunton, ‘Introduction: The Long 1930s’. In A History of 1930s British Literature. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019b: 1–14. McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mannin, Ethel. Confessions and Impressions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1937 [1930]. Mannin, Ethel. Privileged Spectator. London: Hutchinson, 1939a. Mannin, Ethel. Ragged Banners. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938 [1930]. Mannin, Ethel. The Pure Flame. London: Jarrolds, 1936. Mannin, Ethel. Venetian Blinds. London: Jarrolds, 1933. Mannin, Ethel. Women and the Revolution. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939b [1938]. Mannin, Ethel. Young in the Twenties. London: Hutchinson, 1971.

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Mellor, Leo and Glyn Salton-Cox (eds.). ‘The Long 1930s’. [Special issue] Critical Quarterly, 57 (3), 2015a. Mellor, Leo and Glyn Salton-Cox. ‘Introduction’. [Leo Mellor and Glyn Salton-Cox (eds.), ‘The Long 1930s’. Special issue] Critical Quarterly, 57 (3), 2015b: 1–9. Mitchison, Naomi. Among You Taking Notes . . . Ed. Dorothy Sheridan. London: Phoenix Press, 2000 [1985]. Mitchison, Naomi. We Have Been Warned. Kilkerran: Kennedy & Boyd, 2012 [1935]. Mitchison, Naomi. The Corn King and the Spring Queen. London: Virago, 1983 [1931]. Mitchison, Naomi. The Moral Basis of Politics. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1971 [1938]. Montefiore, Janet. Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History. London: Routledge, 1996. Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966 [1938]. Orwell, George. ‘The Proletarian Writer’. In A Patriot After All 1940–1941, Collected Works XII . Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000a [1940]: 294–299. Orwell, George. The Lion and the Unicorn. In A Patriot After All 1940–1941, Collected Works XII . Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000b [1941]: 391–434. Roberts, Kate. Feet in Chains [Traed Mewn Cyffion]. Katie Grammich (trans.). Cardigan: Parthian, 2012 [1936]. Salton-Cox, Glyn. Queer Communism and The Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Samuel, Raphael. Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. London: Verso, 1998. Silver, Christopher, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Scottish Nationalism’, The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Scott Lyall (ed.). Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2015: 105–118. Sommerfield, John. May Day. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984 [1936]. Taylor, Elinor. The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934–1940. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Wark, McKenzie, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2015. West, Alick, Crisis and Criticism and Selected Literary Essays. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937. Wilkinson, Ellen. Clash. Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2004 [1929]. Williams, Raymond. ‘Culture is Ordinary’. In Convictions. Norman Mackenzie (ed.). London: MacGibbon and Gee, 1958: 74–92.

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Spectres of English Fascism: History, Aesthetics and Cultural Critique Elinor Taylor

This chapter examines visions of fascism in England in the late 1930s, and considers what these imaginings reveal about how fascism was understood in relation to culture, and particularly in relation to English culture. I focus primarily on novels in which a fascist movement is figured as arising within English culture and society, rather than those novels forming part of the tradition of ‘invasion literature’ in which England falls to an exogenous fascist threat, of which Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) is perhaps the best example from this period. That speculative fictions proliferated during the later 1930s has been much remarked (Croft 1990; Booker 2005); what is less commonly noted, however, is the recurring anxiety that English social and cultural traditions contained a latent fascism that could easily consolidate itself, and that, moreover, such a development might be met with little resistance. I explore several of these narratives and show how they operate against widespread assertions of the ‘natural’ resistance of English culture to fascism, and discourses of natural democracy that often recruited the English landscape as an emblem of an eternal English freedom, a guarantor of futurity as much as of continuity, as a new and apocalyptic war loomed. The chapter first outlines perspectives on the nature of fascism in the later 1930s. It then discusses Storm Jameson’s 1936 novel, In The Second Year, which narrates England falling to an incipient fascist movement, followed by an examination of Clemence Dane’s The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939), a supernatural fantasy in which an animate scarecrow becomes dictator of a nearfuture England. Finally, the chapter examines Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941), one of many novels that locates the seeds of fascism within English society itself – and, significantly, in the heartland of the English rural village. All these texts, as I will show, have much to say about fascism’s relationship with 59

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English social customs and traditions, but are also significantly self-reflexive in their explorations of the ways that fascism is entangled with questions of genre, representation, and perception; they offer sophisticated imaginative accounts of how fascism appeals to its initiates, how it transforms subjectivity, and how it eludes recognition as a distinctive politics by its very familiarity, its ability to camouflage itself in English culture such that it is legible as a natural development of it. Moreover, all three texts are concerned with what resources of resistance to fascism might be marshalled  – and all ask questions about the relationship between fascism and ‘culture’ in both its broader and narrower senses. Particular questions are addressed in these novels to the English countryside and its landscape as a resource of hope, permanence and renewal against a fascism perceived as sterilized, uncreative and without a future. Yet while all these are antifascist texts, they ask disquieting questions about English history and fascism, via recurring figures of the uncanny, landscape and desire, that sit uneasily with leftist cultural tendencies that reached back into the national past to retrieve images and memories of freedom that might sustain the present struggle.

Introduction: Fascism, futurity and English culture In the second half of the 1930s, it became increasingly apparent in Britain that everyday life would be imminently subject to a transformation whose nature was as yet unrevealed, as the inevitability of war asserted itself. This realization provoked a crisis in a sense of futurity: the war loomed, and with it the prospect of death on an unimaginable scale, alongside the possibility, engendered by the depletion of public confidence in Britain’s politicians, that England itself would be annihilated (Rae 2003: 246–247). The cognitive shock of these years registered in, among other forms, a proliferation of fantastic fictions, peddling visions of the future with near-Millenarian intensity (Croft 1990: 220–225). Visions of war, fascism, communism abounded, registering a displacement of historical reference points, a disorientation in time. As Andy Croft has documented, these fictions emerged from the full range of political positions, from the anti-communist paranoias of Dennis Wheatley to the socialist-feminist utopias of Naomi Mitchison (1990: 222). Fascism was the cardinal problem of everyday life, and yet not a lived experience; it remained distanced, threatening yet alien. Mass Observation’s 1939 Penguin Special, Britain, notes the ‘touch of unreality’ (Madge and Harrisson 1939: 113) that pervaded daily life, a troubling sense that the real and the imaginary, the conscious and the unconscious, had reversed their

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positions. Mass Observation furthermore noted that ‘Fascism thrives on fantasy’, on unarticulated hopes, fears and desires (Madge and Harrisson 1939: 113) whose expression – as the subsequent discussion of the novels will demonstrate – was frequently loaded with an uncanny charge. Already in 1933 Wilhelm Reich had published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which joined the categories of psychoanalytic inquiry to the materialist method of Marxism to account for a politics whose allure seemed rooted in some unconscious source. Observing Nazi rallies in German, Thomas Mann framed the spectacle in terms of the states of otherness produced by charismatic religious practice: ‘Politics in the grotesque style, with salvation-army attractions, mass fits, showground-stall bell ringing, hallelujahs, and dervish-like repetitions of monotonous slogans till everyone is frothing at the mouth’ (qtd. Brendon 2000: 96). The intimacy of fascism with the uncanny automata is, as we shall see, repeated through English fiction. Peter Lassman suggests that public opinion in Britain was generally puzzled by the rise of fascism in Europe, and the press ‘found it difficult to believe that it was being confronted by a genuinely new form of political activity’ (1992: 214). This may suggest that what was disturbing in fascism was its newness, indeed its modernity, which emerged from a matrix of contemporary social, technological and cultural factors that marked it as belonging ‘essentially to the era of democratic and popular politics’ (Hobsbawm 1995: 117), a contemporaneity often disavowed in responses that envisioned fascism as presaging a ‘return’ to some earlier, more barbaric state. In Storm Jameson’s No Victory for the Solider (1938), published under the pseudonym James Hill, the protagonist Knox is haunted by a sense that the war in Spain revealed the persistence of something that should have been left behind long ago: in a time so described in the old chronicles, at which we shudder, thinking of the house burning, the brains spilled on the stones, the women, mutilated, dying helplessly as they lived, and now to see it happen once again under your eyes. Hill 1938: 312

Such visions of fascism’s atavistic drive are common enough, but I want to suggest that they were the product of the disturbance produced by fascism’s simultaneous modernity and anachronism, its troubling of progressive historiography, and the categories of past, present and future. Fascism’s distinctive relation to these categories was never theorized in Britain, as it was by Ernst Bloch in The Heritage of Our Times (1935), but instead, I suggest, it may be detected as a literary effect in speculative fictions. The recurrence of something ‘known of old and long familiar’ (Freud 2010: 825) produces the uncanny charge

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in many of these novels. Responses to this disturbance could take several forms. One was a shift towards a cyclical view of history in which the political specificities of fascisms and their support bases were taken to be less significant than the function played by fascist movements as harbingers of the impending collapse of the European civilization, often drawing inspiration from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (published in English in 1926). The question of history’s patterning concerns several authors to whom I will return later, and while this cyclicality is suggested in the quotation from No Victory for the Solider above, notable too is the narrator’s feeling that this is an event that is being reexperienced. Another response to the disturbing power of fascism’s contemporaneity  – its production by the conditions of the conjuncture – took the form of a turn towards English history for resources for resistance but also, just as importantly, for an image that transcended the modernity of which fascism was part. The communist left, negotiating a shifting Comintern line on the nature of fascism, was instructed to recruit and deploy popular and radical histories as inspiration and stake in the struggle (Taylor 2018: 93–101), while mainstream political discourse emphasized democratic traditions in Britain (Olechnowicz 2010: 13– 17). The unwelcome lesson of the decade was to be the historical contingency of democracy, and democracy’s inadequacy as a unifying discourse; Eric Hobsbawm points out that while most of Western Europe had some form of parliamentary democracy by 1920, only a handful of states would function continuously in that way until 1945 (1995: 111). The collapse of democracies in quick succession unsettlingly demonstrated that, far from marking the consummation of a destined modernity, democracy failed to survive at least in part because it was so recently and provisionally established in many of these national contexts (Hobsbawm 1995: 110–115). And yet, through the decade, the myth of a natural and permanent English democracy circulated through culture and political discourse, offering permanence (against the disturbing and often disavowed contemporaneity of fascism), and stretching back into myths of medieval democracy, of ‘Merrie England’ and pastoral Arcadias. Such ‘mythic views of Britain as a uniquely peaceable kingdom’ (Lawrence 2003: 558) were sufficiently flexible to be appropriated both by both left and right and sufficiently abstracted from the present to elude the fragility and novelty of political democracy. The claim that resistance to fascism was somehow inscribed in Britain’s institutions and technologies of power, was made by, for instance, the Liberal Home Secretary John Simon, who claimed in a 1936 speech on Britain’s ‘natural’ resistance to authoritarianism that democracy was ‘our own form of government: gradually

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developed over centuries by the genius of the British people, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, the embodiment of our national character’ (Manchester Guardian 1936: 25). The organicist and corporatist metaphor is noteworthy in part for its proximity to the very fascist discourses it sought to deflect. The rural English landscape played an increasingly visible role in enshrining this ‘eternal’ England of natural democracy, resistant to tyranny and transcending modernity, in the interwar years. The period’s most prominent, effusive communicator of this pastoral vision was prime minister Stanley Baldwin, who in 1926 rhapsodized on, The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of the hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England. qtd. Baxendale and Pawling 1996: 195

Landscapes could function as an object on which to contemplate England’s future via the landscape’s recording of the national past, and thus to establish the ‘immortality’ that is central to the national and nationalist imaginary, in Benedict Anderson’s influential account (Anderson 2006: 9–10). Indeed, after the First World War, the landscape had been explicitly inscribed with the commemoration of the dead through the creation of national parks and monuments; ‘a way of remembering the dead through their links with a known, shared countryside’ (Goldie 2012: 271). For Anderson, of course, the imaginary constructed by these practices was a modern one that compensated for the uncertainty and anonymity of modernity by providing precisely the continuity into the past and the future that the transformed conditions of modernity had abolished: a sacralization of time that gave shape and meaning to the ‘empty, homogenous time’ of modernity (Anderson 2006: 26). Baldwin’s speech quoted above clearly suggests the imaginative function of the English countryside as emblematic of an ‘eternal’ England that would outlive modernity  – a modernity for which ‘Empire’ and ‘works’ are clearly metonymic. Such an investment could, of course, shade into the discourses of blood and soil that marked European fascism, and in the second half of the decade the British Union of Fascists turned against their earlier embrace of technologized modernity, which had been inspired by the modernism of Mussolini, and towards the racializing association of landscape and national identity. Hence, interwar

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British fascism displayed a particular concern with the preservation of the landscape (Stone 2013: 114–115). More widely, however, the landscape, and especially the ways of life wedded to it, could operate as metonyms for ‘English culture’ and also by elision for ‘culture’ in general: both ‘culture’ as it operated in the English modernist idiom as an organicist ideal opposed to ‘mass civilization’, and ‘culture’ in the wider sense that would come to predominate new paradigms of cultural analysis after the war. A brief glance at Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 dystopia Swastika Night may illustrate the point. Set seven hundred years in the future, the novel contemplates a future in which the Nazis won the war (clearly impending in the novel’s moment of writing) and effected a near-total cultural revolution, eradicating British culture as well as mythologizing and de-historicizing their own origins and rise to power, creating a monolithic, palingenetic myth system. And yet, an occult historical account has been preserved, transmitted patrilineally via a line of dissident knights. The English landscape is figured as an active collaborator in the preservation and transmission of this text, which stands metonymically both for historical truth and for ‘culture’, for the survival of the written word. The first knight in this lineage took up sheep farming on Romney Marsh, this pastoral practice operating as subterfuge for antifascist dissidence (Burdekin 1985: 104). In the novel’s present, the Englishman Alfred reads the Book in tunnels beneath Stonehenge, cultural text and landscape converging to provide a moment of sacred rite and a new hope for the future (Burdekin 1985: 181–182). Swastika Night is therefore imbued with an optimism about English culture’s survival under fascism as if that future were safeguarded and sheltered by the very landscape itself. Other memories teem in the landscape, too, however; and not always reassuring of a continuous tradition of natural democracy. In Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), the narrator encounters a subterranean authoritarian regime, ‘the State’, mysteriously persisting since the Roman invasion just beneath the surface of the English landscape. This permanent undertow of violence and totalitarianism represents an ever-present threat of seduction to young men like the novel’s narrator, in search of a father figure, and although, O’Neill’s narrator claims, in ‘normal circumstances’ the State could not be expected to take over England, ‘if a Fascist or Nazi section of her own citizens made common cause with the underearth invaders, because of the similarity of their doctrines, nobody could tell what might happen’ (O’Neill 1987: 245). In Howell Davies’s near-future Minimum Man (1938, written under the pseudonym ‘Andrew Marvell’), concentration camps spring up in the heartlands of what Patrick Wright calls ‘deep England’: at Salisbury, near Stonehenge, in the Fens and on the moors, even as the public delude themselves that fascism is a ‘dementia

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which infected foreigners’ (Wright 2009; Marvell 1953: 5–7). Landscape might function in some texts as the ideological anchor of an immortal, ‘free’ England, but other writers clearly registered its complicity with the geopolitics of the modern, militarized nation-state.

Storm Jameson, In the Second Year (1936) Burdekin’s Swastika Night places considerable faith in the power of the cultural text (the Book) to explode the mythic edifice of fascist power, as well as in the landscapes of England to protect the fragments of that culture. In that sense it bears out Andy Croft’s claim that ‘The history of political science fiction in the 1930s is the story of a reactionary genre, chauvinistic and anti-Semitic, fearful of the future and looking to the past, being transformed into a forward-looking genre, anti-fascist and optimistic in the long run’ (1990: 222). The rest of this chapter examines novels that while forming part of that history do not so neatly conform to the transformation proposed there. In the Second Year, published in 1936, by the socialist, antifascist and pacifist Storm Jameson, speculates on a fascist revolution in England a few years in the future. While it carefully echoes certain aspects of the rise of Nazism (Smith 2004, xi–xiii), it nonetheless engages with questions of the potential relationships between English culture and fascism. Jameson claimed that inspiration came after hearing a radio report on the Night of the Long Knives: ‘I thought I knew why [dictators purge the men who bring them to power], and I could imagine an English Fascism, the brutality half-masked and devious with streaks of Methodist virtue’ (Croft 1991: 231). As in other novels I will discuss, its temporality is ambiguous: the novel is set in a near future, but narrated in the past tense, from some unknown place and time. It opens out, therefore, onto questions of eye-witnessing and testimony, of how fascism and the things it destroys might be remembered and forgotten, thus making it an example of what Patricia Rae has identified as ‘proleptic elegy’, a mode that anticipates suffering and loss yet to come (Rae 2006). It worries about the potential accommodation between English culture and a native fascism, and it furthermore implicates the narrator’s culturally and historically conditioned way of seeing in the events that unfold in ways that, I will suggest, raise salient questions about the relationship between fascism, aesthetics and autonomy. The novel’s narrator, Andy, returns from Norway to find a revolution in progress. His brother-in-law, Richard Sacker, is head of the army, while Sacker’s childhood best friend Frank Hillier is prime minister, called to power by the

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political establishment as a strongman to quell postwar unrest. The increasing violence of the new regime and the power struggle between Hillier and Sacker, culminating in the latter’s summary execution, is observed by the liberal intellectual Andy, who reflects on the fate and impermanence of English culture, the patterning of history, and the allure of fascism. Returning to the sites of his childhood in an England radically but obscurely transformed, Andy repeatedly figures his confrontation with the descent into tyranny in terms of an uncanny sense of temporal displacement; he feels himself ‘a ghost living for a moment in the future. I saw faces, heard young excited voices, but their owners were living in another moment as children, and I, only I, knew what they were living towards’ (Jameson 2004: 71). The spectrality alluded to here grows over the course of the novel so that, in the end, he is only a vessel for other ghosts (215). This ghostliness marks in Andy his inability to make sense of the present, to conjoin his past memories with a contemporary fascist England, and this gulf is felt too by his sister Lotte’s reverie of a machinic history in which individuals are merely functions: Perhaps there are times, in the history of a country, when naked forces take charge, needing only the covering of flesh as the hand needs the white glove. They rise from the ground, from the fields left unploughed by the farmer, from the spoiled orchard, from streams poisoned with oils, from dry wells. [. . .] They find their hand and guide it, their brain and charge it with their electricity, their nerve and hold it stretched awaiting their time. The tongue moves but the words are given. Jameson 2004: 150

Here the fascists are merely automata carrying out an impersonal historical will, the wreckers of a land already gone to ruin; a ruination recalled by her husband’s surname in its echo of the wreckers of the Roman Empire. Through the pall of fatalism hanging over it, though, the novel does hold such mystifications in a critical light, as condensed in the violent fate of the historian Tower, who is firmly and complacently committed to an abstract theory of the rise and fall of civilizations in which there is no space for the individual human life and the suffering body in given and unrepeatable historical circumstances; an omission poignantly expressed by Andy: ‘I was overcome by the strangeness and intolerable grief of living in a Europe in decay. It had happened to Europe before but never to me’ (31). In this sense the novel strikes against fatalism, abstract theorizing, and the figuring of fascism in apocalyptic and mystical terms. The novel is also keen to expose fascism’s own mystifications of the past and its appropriation of the cultural heritage – that ‘rummaging’ through the national

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past of which the Comintern general secretary Georgi Dimitrov accused the fascists in his widely disseminated declaration of the cultural politics of the Popular Front (1935: 69). A particular contempt is directed at the famous but mediocre opera singer, Harriet English, who enthusiastically conspires with the ‘inexecrable’ cultural tastes of the fascists while investing in armaments for the inevitable new war (Jameson 2004: 54). During a concert, she performs a ‘childishly poor’ opera, expunged of its exotic foreign settings to render it palatable to an increasingly jingoistic public, while the audience sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and feel a ‘hopeful nostalgia’ (78–79). Meanwhile Sacker and Hillier concoct a version of the ever-pliable myth of Merrie England, a version not of natural democracy but of tyranny legitimated by social stability (26). This clearly echoes the historical myths purveyed by Oswald Mosley – against whose British Union of Fascists Jameson had protested at Olympia in 1934 (Birkett 2009: 132) – who declared that English fascists should temper the quest for ‘a morality of the Spartan pattern’ with the ‘the Elizabethan atmosphere of Merrie England. The days before the victory of Puritan repression coincided with the highest achievements of British virility and constructive adventure’ (Mosley 1934: 52). The novel is however anxious about the susceptibility of the public to these myths; while the people in London might laugh at the pompous militarist Hebden and his hundred and fifty uniforms (Jameson 2004: 8), the rural Yorkshire people of Andy’s childhood home do not, and, indeed, listening to the servant Annie, he thinks, ‘it only needed a few years of isolation of this part of England for them to begin burning witches again. Annie would have piled faggots with the cruel zest of a child to be helpful’ (6). There is no consolation in English rurality for him; quite the reverse: its residual modes of life are figured as steeped in the ‘unclaimed heritage’ of superstition and xenophobia Ernst Bloch recognized as readily exploitable resources for fascism (Bloch 1991). Andy’s self-perception at such moments is of himself as the sole remaining rational figure in a country descending – regressing – into unreason. Indeed, he frequently likens the rural people, as well as working-class characters, to animals and children, placing them beyond the pale of reason and culture: when he encounters George, a prisoner escaped from one of concentration camps now firmly embedded in the English landscape, Andy describes him as having eyes ‘like a child or an animal’, whose hopeless plan is either to retreat into the caves he played in as a child – a double regression – or else commit suicide (Jameson 2004: 112–113). These moments are symptomatic, I argue, of Andy’s tendency to see the world in aesthetic terms, as a work of art defined in a particular traditional way. Andy’s recurring concern in the novel is with the fate and imminent loss of

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English ‘culture’ in its elite sense, but that culture is materialized in books and institutions rather than people. He wonders whether to save books, those materials that form ‘a great part of the civilisation of six centuries’ that will otherwise be ‘engulfed, burned or scattered’; and envisages the stones of the National Gallery ‘being dragged away to rebuild Charing Cross station and the canvases burned to warm the sweating or freezing workmen’s tea. Some of them were worth little else, but others would be a heavy irrecoverable loss’ (31). Works of art stand outside of everyday life, for Andy, and the incursion of life into the space of art (and vice versa) is experienced with physical shock. This alienated aesthetic sensibility explains the violence of Andy’s response to Sacker expressed via a comparison with mass culture. Sacker, he thinks, had an extraordinary imagination, sometimes acute, but oftener on the level of a penny dreadful. The trouble is that by some ghastly betrayal the violent and vicious sub-life depicted in these writings has been translated into actual life, and it worked out with real victims and real murderers, and given Spenglerian labels. The hero-gangster of a certain kind of American novel and film steps off the page or the screen and plays his horrid part in what is called the regeneration of his country. A disgusting cinematograph psychology becomes actual, as in a nightmare. Jameson 2004: 29

Sacker violates the distinction between art and life; for Andy, this distinction dictates that the work of art should be held outside the degrading conditions of modernity, and hence here the revulsion arises from Sacker’s resemblance to specifically popular cultural figures. Such popular entertainment, for Andy, would seem to be a site for the containment of popular desires too ‘disgusting’ to be given form in ‘actual life’; its failure to act this way constitutes no less than a ‘betrayal’ of an implied bargain between cultural producers and intellectuals. There is of course an unavoidable echo here of interwar critiques of mass culture, and mass culture’s (often alleged) implication in fascism via its standardizing and homogenizing dynamic (Madge and Harrisson 1939: 183; cf Mulhern 2000: 22–48), as well as of the claim that fascism disturbed boundaries between fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, as in the ‘touch of unreality’ felt by Mass Observation (Madge and Harrisson 1939: 113). But it is symptomatic of Andy’s reading of the world in aesthetic frames that although he imagines himself as a recording camera-eye in the manner of Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated Berlin novels, there is little evidence of either curiosity or insight. He believes himself almost telepathically insightful  – ‘My only genuine talent is for the

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receiving of unuttered messages’ (Jameson 2004: 134) – but in fact his way of seeing is bound to modes of judgement rather than of understanding. He appreciates or recoils from immediate appearances he finds ‘repulsive’ (85). Even his memories are framed in aesthetic terms as images rather than lived experiences: returning to his childhood home in Yorkshire, he figures it as a painting: ‘This part of England touches my heart. It is beauty without softness, the lines firm and bounding, the colours full’ (166). Most revealing in this regard is Andy’s hope for the future expressed as a desire for immersion in the pure and disinterested object of beauty: one day, he hopes, ‘We shall turn over some lovely perfect thing in our hands, and feel thankful for it. We shall cover our eyes and stop our ears with its perfection’ (Jameson 2004: 136). This desire for desensitizing aesthetic immersion concurs with his appreciation for the abstract schema of mathematics, ‘the skeleton of music’ (25) and discloses his conception of the aesthetic as something beyond sensory experience, something that might in fact limit or deaden sensory experience – an ‘anaesthetic’ for the constant sensory stimulations of modernity, a view Susan Buck-Morss ascribes to Walter Benjamin (Buck-Morss 1992). Buck-Morss proposes that the goal of the aesthetic tradition since Kant is precisely this condition of sensory deadness; a disembodied aesthetics disavowing its original connection to the sensations of the body (Buck-Morss 1992). Andy’s revulsion towards Sacker, expressed in the quotation given earlier as ‘horrid’, ‘ghastly’ and ‘disgusting’, is rooted both in Sacker’s apparent and uncanny violation of aesthetic distance, of the distinction between art and life, and in his much remarked physicality: he is a ‘wild beast’ who can in the end only be exterminated (Jameson 2004: 53). Andy is a figure in flight from bodily experience; his spectrality, his lack of a substantial presence in the novel, is such that his physically is never registered beyond his partially paralysed left arm (181). He acknowledges, in fact, that ‘Nothing in my life is constant except my avoidance of it’ (78), and his way of framing and appraising the world through disinterested aesthetic judgement is a symptom of his refusal to live and act within it. Condemning present conditions as irredeemably ugly – ‘Let [the English people] be stupid. Let them be cheated and kept down. It is what they deserve’ (105) – he mentally removes himself so that experience is framed in the elegiac mode, as something that has already happened: ‘above this field a lark drew his thread of sound. It was so thin and frail it seemed to me very far away. Many years away. I heard it in my first youth and my boyhood and in my infancy’ (166). Andy is in a certain way a reader-surrogate; a warning to Jameson’s antifascist readers about what might come from a failure to act, to break out of a

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contemplative mode of seeing and judging borne of alienation from the body. He fears for the cultural artefacts that will be destroyed but cannot countenance the physical suffering of human bodies that will accompany that destruction. Jameson’s critical treatment of him echoes the critique she advances in her important 1937 essay ‘Documents’ of those writers (it is Orwell she has in mind) whose judgement is rooted in the senses: ‘The first thing the socialist writer has to realize is that there is no value in the emotions, the spiritual writhings, started in him by the sight, smell, and touch of poverty’ (1937: 11). Interestingly, however, a parallel or doubling of sorts can be detected between the aesthetic as represented by Andy and the political aesthetics practised by the dictator-in-waiting Frank Hillier. Andy’s recoil from Sacker described above already registers one dimension of fascism’s ‘aestheticization of politics’ (Benjamin 2007: 241), but Jameson’s exploration of this development goes some way further. If Sacker represents a figure of ‘degraded’ mass culture made flesh, Hillier represents the hollowed out ‘mass’ man of modernity, who reacts against a profound inner fear of invisibility by transforming himself into an aesthetic object, making himself fully self-contained and autonomous. He recalls a dream that clearly discloses this fear of anonymity and invisibility before the gaze of power: ‘I have a dream in which I am a serf of some sort, in another century’; ‘I seem to be working in an immense field, far out of sight of the lord’s house or castle, or whatever it is. He has never heard of me. I am unknown, lost, a speck crawling slowly along the furrows for ever, as long as I lived’ (Jameson 2004: 125), and his dramatic, indeed ecstatic, performances must be understood as responses to that anxiety, an anxiety evidently more modern than feudal. He is a figure that needs to be looked at alone, as an aesthetic object, ‘the figure that obstructed the light’ on the platform (105). Andy’s sister Lotte explains how for Hillier this an ecstatic experience that renders him an automaton: he is ‘capable of any deed [. . .] if he has been pushed, or has pushed himself, into being obsessed with it. If he can see himself doing such things. He will be like a man in a trance’ (119). His ability to see himself in such moments, to be free of the terror of either invisibility or subjection to the critical gaze of another, locates this fascist figure in the specular regime of modernity: he needs to be seen by the cameras as much by the massed audience so that, as Buck-Morss suggests, ‘the powerfully prosthetic sense organs of technology [become] the new “ego” of a transformed synaesthetic system’ (1992: 33). For Benjamin, the fascist spectacle provides the masses with a means to ‘express’ themselves (2007: 241), and the mass rally in which Hillier works on his audience as if they were artists’ materials provides them with a possibility of

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expression that is also a relief from the senses: the young solider Eckhart is ‘truly out of himself ’ (Jameson 2004: 104), and Lotte notes that Hillier ‘caught people into his own ecstasy’ (185). As Simonetta Valasca-Zamponi, writing about aesthetic politics in fascist Italy, argues, ‘although fascism relied on people’s feelings and sentiments (much as art came to appear as the refuge from instrumental-rational society), it still strove to neutralize the senses, to knock them out’ (1997: 12). While, for Freud, the uncanny effects of such trance-like states betray their origin in pre-modern rituals and belief, here they return in the specifically modern context of fascism as the fulfilment of the aesthetic tradition to which Andy is also committed. Hillier’s anonymity, the source of his desire for total autonomy manifested in authoritarian power, is not overcome but rather transfigured as the basis for his relationship with his audience. Contemplating his face, Lotte thinks, ‘It is like a blank sheet, she thought, waiting for the image. His eyes were without a centre, rather, the centre was inert and empty. At once, with sharp clarity, she realised that he was in a sense faceless. Any one of a multitude of images could take possession of that vacant surface, with the least trouble’ (Jameson 2004: 149). His facelessness is a screen for projection, for the investment of the audience, who see but do not look; as Nicholas Mirzoeff proposes, in fascist spectacle the right to look critically was negated by the leader’s need to be seen without vulnerability (2011: 231). Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon is unintelligible when viewed from the position of a disinterested, aesthetic observer, as demonstrated by Andy, who finds Hillier’s facileness merely ‘strange and unpleasant’(Jameson 2004: 185).Andy’s reaction echoes the uncomprehending reports of observers of fascist rallies (Stone 2013: 117), but also suggests the limits of his vision. Lotte’s more critical form of looking makes her the most insightful observer in the book, but also a tragic figure, foretelling her own death in the uncanny sensation that ‘she lived in this moment before, and thought these thoughts’, as if ‘her mind were living ahead of her body’ (Jameson 2004: 150). If In the Second Year, then, functions in a mainly monitory way to warn its readers of a contemplative and superficial mode of judgement that forestalls effective political action, it ends up, I think perhaps inadvertently, drawing attention to the ways that the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics’ was not a break with the Western aesthetic tradition but, as Benjamin and Buck-Morss suggest, a stage in its development. A successful challenge to fascism on the terrain of culture will demand a transformation in aesthetics. Jameson’s novel in this way anticipates her slightly later No Victory of the Soldier (1938), which very directly stakes the survival and renewal of European culture on the war in Spain, and the new, committed aesthetics glimpsed but not realized by the composer-protagonist

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Knox before his death. Arguably, however, such specifically aesthetic questions were not taken up, by Jameson or others on the left, in a concerted way, as the encroaching threats intensified and the imperative to collective defensive action edged out theoretical and transformational questions (see e.g. Rickword 1937). Jameson was active in this movement through the International Association for Writers in Defence of Culture and as president of English PEN through the war years. Her wartime writing would hold ‘culture’, not aesthetics, as its central preoccupation. Discussing Jameson’s 1942 novel Then We Shall Hear Singing: A Fantasy in C Major, Jennifer Birkett argues that: The issue is whether, and how, cultural memory can revive in a nation where it has been systematically obliterated. Culture in its most significant form, as the title of the novel indicates, is the culture of everyday life. The singing that returns in triumph at the end of the narrative, with the liberating army, is pitched in C Major, the basic, common scale. The creative relation an individual enjoys to public and private space, memorialised in the rituals and habitual practice of everyday life, is the experience that forms his identity. Birkett 2009: 239–240

This suggests an attempt to offer an alternative perspective to the fatalistic, alienated gaze of Andy in In the Second Year by emphasizing cultural practice over aesthetics; but this risks bracketing off the implication of fascism in the very culture – especially its account of the aesthetic – positioned to be at stake.

Clemence Dane, The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939) Jameson’s novel ends in Andy’s flight from England, and the prospect of unopposed fascism and cultural destruction. It is therefore a ‘proleptic elegy’, to use Patricia Rae’s term, for things not yet lost, and Andy is in a certain way a selfelegizing figure; his ghostliness giving the impression of one speaking from beyond their own life, about what he has already lost, but which the novel’s readers have not. Clemence Dane’s strange fantasy novel The Arrogant History of White Ben, published in 1939, shares with In the Second Year several significant themes: memory, the uses to which English cultural history might be put, and the allure and aesthetics of fascism. Clemence Dane was the pen name of Winifred Ashton (1888–1965), a prolific playwright and later screenwriter, as well as a novelist, and White Ben is particularly attuned to the theatricality of fascism and its performative appropriations of existing cultural materials such that it might conceal itself in everyday life.

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The novel’s plot concerns an animated scarecrow, White Ben Campion, who comes to power following a protracted war stretching into the 1950s, the epicentre of which quickly moved away from England, leaving a country depleted and yet ‘drably livable’ (Dane 1939: 1). As the war concludes in an uneasy, unfavourable ‘Cessation’, characters representing different social groups and vested interests see in White Ben a means to advance their own fortunes, notably the press magnate Bothering who aims to increase the worth of his armaments investments by manoeuvring White Ben into power, bypassing traditional political institutions and whipping up public demand for rearmament. The novel largely concerns these characters’ ultimately failed attempts to use and control him for these ends. This novel is at one level a fairly obvious allegory of the consequences of appeasing fascists, and particularly of the German political classes’ disastrous belief that Hitler could be contained and disciplined by drawing him into the sphere of legitimate political activity. It also echoes Jameson’s vision of the conditions precipitating a future fascism, as well as George Orwell’s warning in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) that an unfavourable ‘draw’ could galvanize fascist advance in Britain (Orwell 2000: 88). There are, however, several other strands to the novel, particular in its later stages, that rather exceed this simple allegorical purpose. The novel opens with a question of commemoration and forgetting. It begins in some future time beyond the novel’s strange events, when those events have become familiarized and passed into national memory by inscription into the landscape: the hilltop on which White Ben the scarecrow first came to life now features a monument, that ‘with its pageant of steps and the white shaft rising higher than Nelson’s column, seems part of the eternal chalk’ (Dane 1939: 1). The inscription of history into landscape is here figured as an act of remembering in order to forget, to displace historical memory onto ‘eternal’ landscape, which suggests a critical view of the recruitment of landscape to allay historical trauma after the First World War (Goldie 2012: 272). The commemoration acknowledges the scarecrow-dictator’s origins in rural English life  – a child follows a local superstition by placing a mandrake root in the scarecrow’s chest, which apparently causes him to come to life – and attempts to seal the troubling events involving him back into that world, so that, the novel’s narrator discloses at its conclusion, Pseudo Bens crop up occasionally [. . .]; but Ben himself, whether worshipped or reviled, becomes with every passing anniversary a more shadowy memory. Time-travellers report that the savants of a thousand years hence have proved beyond all further doubt or disputation that White Ben Campion was no more

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These moments from the beginning and end of the text indicate its concern with how fascism can be rationalized, naturalized, excused, and euphemized, for this enclosure indicates the repression of the ways that the very modern forces of industry and militarism in the novel drive White Ben’s rise to tyranny. One of the novel’s epigraphs is from Marx’s 1867 preface to the first volume of Capital: ‘Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters’. Where earlier societies deployed superstition against imagined threat, in modernity a willed blindness to horror exerts a similarly powerful hold. Indeed, if the vital spark of the scarecrow’s transformation comes from rural superstition, the form he takes is an assemblage of signifiers of modern, technologized authority: he is composed of the clothes of a dead doctor and a dead clergyman; he is, as Jenny Hartley points out, ‘a composite of the different institutions of patriarchy’ (2004: 97). These garments bestow the experiences of their dead owners, so that he cannot escape the memory of pain: ‘Hunger, heartache, the smart of tears  – his garments recognized all three and communicated their knowledge’ (Dane 1939: 28). Cloaked in the garments of dead men, and hence legible to the novel’s characters in terms of established codes of authority, White Ben himself is inspirited by the dead in another way. In the rural churchyard, under a yew tree  – ancient symbol of connection with the dead  – he finds himself overwhelmed by the voices of suffering from the past: ‘ “Oppression! Oppression!” said the mist. Its voice was thick and multiple, the voice of a river in flood. It spoke in his attuned brain only in thoughts and cryings and unintelligible echoes; but his brain made modern words out of the medley, for him to remember and use’ (87). There follows a six-page section in which fragments of these voices emerge through the ‘mist’: memories of the Roman, Saxon and Norman invasions, the Civil War, religious persecution, enclosure, industrialization, and the wars of empire, punctuated with the refrain ‘Oppression! Oppression!’ and the assertion that who holds power is irrelevant. It concludes by voicing postwar discontent: Please God, don’t let peace come!  . . . Unemployed  . . . Unemployed  . . . Unemployed  . . . Unemployed  . . . There’s a good time coming  . . . The means

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test  . . . Unemployment  . . . Nazis  . . . Reds  . . . What’s the world coming to?  . . . Munich . . . Keep off the grass! . . . Oppression . . . Unemployment . . . Oppression! Dane 1939: 92

There might be a parody of the 1930s literary quest for a ‘collective’ speech here, as well perhaps of leftist historical texts that aimed to situate present antifascist and anti-war struggles in a long national continuum of popular resistance (as in, for instance, Rickword and Lindsay 1941). The collective voicing so prized in 1930s leftist writing is here a convocation of the dead, a witches’ sabbath; there is no collective strength or articulation of a desired future arising from this ‘mist’, this collective ghost, only grievance feeding tyranny: it torments White Ben so that he will never ‘outwalk that whisper’ (Dane 1939: 93). He is ‘oppressed’ by the ‘stink of discarded thought’; feeling himself ‘impregnated with the woes and passions of a thousand obscure years’ (86). Fascism feeds off old suffering, as White Ben feeds off the glance of others: it is something inanimate brought to life by the desire of either the oblivious – the young girl whose game brings him to life – or the wounded and resentful, the crowds that animate him with their attention, for ‘He wished, but could not will it unless someone watched and applauded’ (28). The implication is that remembered or imagined oppression in the national past is a resource for exploitation by the naïve, hollow figure, for whom the human tragedy is memory itself, the fact that ‘a done thing is not ended’ (46). The inrush of this vast history of suffering (in which ‘the people’ are always the victims, never the perpetrators, as the logic of populism runs), produces a desire to liberate himself and ‘the people’ from sensation: ‘No-one should feel. One must do things’ (107). As in In the Second Year, fascism’s connection to the automaton, the sense-dead anaesthetized subject that is, for Buck-Morss, the desideratum of modern aesthetics, comes to the fore. A supernatural creature sprung from a history of injustice, he promises defence from those feelings and memories by sweeping the despondent populace up in his campaign against ‘the crows’. In a certain, surreal way this merely reiterates the self-presentation of fascism as redeemer of historical mortification. But where Storm Jameson envisioned an insurgent fascism in an England very like that of 1936, Dane relies on a supernatural device to bridge a larger gap between the real and the possible in such a way that the surrealism of the novel’s premise opens up the dangerous banality of the ways in which White Ben is interpreted and incorporated into political acceptability by forms of analogic thinking. His eccentric appearance is incuriously accepted because political instability and semi-starvation have

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acquainted the country with political eccentrics, messianists (78) and ‘warmushrooms’ (193), while his verbal obsession with ‘crows’ is taken metaphorically; his first acolyte, the well-to-do Lady Pont, immediately decides that he means ‘the exploiters, the destructive, the hangers-on, the war-mongers, the middlemen, don’t you? All the birds of prey’ (76). He offers a vision of renewed pastoral lavishness to a beleaguered postwar England, telling the people that the land is poor, is preyed upon, ‘by crows. Scare them and burn them off the fields, out of the trees, rid the earth and the very air of them, and then see how rich and happy England should be’ (141). (Notably his vision of pastoral renewal contrasts with the names of characters who turn this literal-minded scarecrow-vision into a violent and xenophobic populism: Speedwell, Peddle – names tying them to a cheap and mechanized modernity.) The language clearly echoes Oswald Mosley’s polyvalent attacks on ‘parasitism’: as Mosley wrote in 1938, ‘The system of British Union provides no place for the parasite’ (Mosley 1938: 38); ‘he who lives on the land without service to the nation will pass with other parasites’ (39). The novel’s communist butler Trelawney writes in a letter that ‘crow’ has been extended to refer to anyone of ‘alien’ blood, or of no occupation, or who lives on the earnings of others, and a genuine horror attends the description of the treatment of ‘crows’ in the ‘concentration cage’ in Richmond Park as the full dehumanizing effect of the revolution in language becomes apparent (Dane 1939: 362). This too can be excused by precedent; the press baron Bothering recognizes that celebrated persecutions might be recalled against possible public outcry: freedom of thought might be an ‘English tradition’, but men and women have been hanged for the ‘wearing of the green’, and so wearing the black might ‘easily be proved an analogous crime  – the distinguishing mark of  – of an undesirable’ (328–329). For every vague tradition that might be deployed against fascism, there is another that might be recruited in its favour. Speaking to an interviewer in the novel’s present, Peddle, Bothering’s chauffeur who becomes White Ben’s secretary, recalls, ‘Ever heard a dumb man speak? Well, there was a touch of that tune in the voice, besides his never letting you know whether he was laughing at you or not’ (268), again figuring the fascist leader as medium without consciousness. This inessentiality enables other characters to continually interpret him according to their own interests. The ex-journalist Illico, later White Ben’s lieutenant, thinks the term ‘Rookeries’ is a simply an effective rhetorical figure for vested interests (105). Bothering sees him as an iteration of a recurring type, the English radical or eccentric, ‘the type we always need to launch an idea, to make a stir’ (241–242). The actress Angela Swete sees in White Ben a performer, something like the ‘visual legend of [Henry] Irving’,

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‘nobly theatrical’, a ‘spectacle that excited her beyond measure’, since as a ‘soft, conquerable girl’ she ‘leaned to the monsters’ (128). The imperialist Lady Pont understands him as a latter-day figure in the tradition of Lord George Gordon and ‘Chinese Gordon’. When he takes over Westminster Abbey, seeing his likeness in the effigies of the dead, the wardens simply accept this turn events as another chapter in the abbey’s long history (363). Among the public, his hatred of black clothing is accommodated by a reversion to the white suits of colonial fashion (173). Where Jameson’s novel sees fascist appropriations as crude and transparently incoherent, here the potential for English tradition to enclose and accommodate, rather than to resist, is acknowledged. It is not White Ben disguising himself in familiar garments to deceive; the deception is on the part of observers who – like Perseus – prefer to pretend there are no monsters, only reiterations of familiar types. As events outpace their control, the group who brought him to power are forced to retreat to the press baron’s house (formerly the National Gallery) and ponder the ‘problem of how one makes the tail wag the dog’ (Dane 1939: 359). ‘Do not mock him!’, the narrator warns, and indeed characters do not laugh: he is ‘a lunatic who had dived into the deeps of unreason to bring up hope’ (250). The disturbing, surreal aspect of fascism’s public presentation, which invited laughter and yet which somehow did not actually evoke it, an effect famously registered in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), is figured through the characters’ reductions of White Ben to frames of reference they can easily comprehend, thus expelling his threatening (but also evidently comic) novelty. The narrative shifts forwards in time to show how those who enabled the tyranny subsequently justify it and exculpate themselves. The novel therefore anticipates postwar concerns with the problems of testimony, complicity and acquiescence. Peddle claims on first seeing him, he was transfixed as if by a ghost or a giant, but ‘I didn’t want to laugh at him, no!’, though he ‘ought to have done’ (56). Angela Swete centres herself in retrospective representations of the novel’s events: ‘when the playwrights began to deal with his story she selected the most romantic version and put it on with herself in the only woman’s part’ (122). The attention at these moments shifts to meaning-making and historical absolution. The ‘Arrogant History’ of the title is what is concocted by self-serving and complicit cynics determined to both centre themselves as historical agents and exculpate their actions (122–123). That said, this is also a novel that fears the role of the ‘mass’ in bringing fascism to power, even as it condemns such characters as these for their venality. If the characters manoeuvring White Ben to power represent financial interests in

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armaments, chemical industries and mass media, his support base appears largely rural; a character voices the fear that the countryside will become a lawless space of bandits and gangs, a site of civil war (219); others fear a confluence of mobile, workless subjects liable to rebellious assembly (246), who join White Ben’s march on London out of sheer boredom. The fear of the crowd, and thus of a figure who might harness the crowd’s energies, is also a gendered fear – though the novel’s tone in this regard is ambiguous: In those days women were the inflammable element in any crowd. The women had lost their patriotism when they lost their men and their homes: and when the first war-prosperity ended in penury they became dangerous. Then the raging women had fallen back upon ‘gleaning’, as the phrase ran. They had handpicked England, from its country rubbish-heaps to the bombed quarters of its cities. Many died, yet the homeless female crowd was constantly augmented by its broken men-folk, and modern historians agree that it was unquestionably the stoicism, the good-temper and the handy-man ways of these disused, dis-wanted men which saved the prosperous from open spoliation. The Englishmen had seen that game in other countries, and controlled their women. Dane 1939: 246–247

Quite how we are to read this attribution to ‘modern historians’ is difficult to decide; an ironic comment on the patriarchal historiography that justifies the repression of women on the basis of the perceived danger of an unaffiliated ‘crowd’ of women? Perhaps, indeed, these women are a revolutionary element whose threat to the ‘prosperous’ is contained by the incipient fascist movement. In any case, it is the ‘mass’ appeal of fascism that provides it with the mandate of seriousness (as against George Orwell’s claim that the goose-step could not catch on in England ‘because the people on the street would laugh’: 2000: 81), but the novel also anticipates the problems ‘modern historians’ would encounter in accounting for it. Like Jameson, Dane recognizes the distinctiveness and centrality of the fascist leader’s performance of power in the mass rally; as Jenny Hartley writes, ‘The novel dramatizes and deconstructs dictatorship as charisma and performance, the totalitarian state as brutal theatre’ (2004: 97). Watching White Ben speak at Trafalgar Square on television (the anticipation of the widespread availability of television is Dane’s one concession to technological development in her imagined future), Lady Pont thinks: It did not embarrass him to stand watched by ten thousand eyes. He needed to be watched. It was as if the silence and the watching produced in him some physical change. He was no thinker [. . .] He had to put himself into a state of

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daze, into a warm and tingling coma. The words had to bubble up in him of themselves, or be evoked only by the silence and the hypnotic gaze of the crowd. Then he, the actor, would seize upon those alien words with conscious enjoyment. Dane 1939: 343

Jameson’s Hillier is a ‘hollow’ figure temporarily giving flickering presence when on stage, but Dane’s White Ben is a more extreme and literal figure of hollowness: a straw man, feeding on the energies of the audience, who stand ‘voluptuous and submissive as any creature being milked’ (343). Once the audience have constructed a fantasy around him, all glimpses of what he really is come as a sickening, uncanny shock: Illico later recalls a moment of horror as his face ‘seemed to be just a turnip head’, a ‘turnip-ghost’; for a moment, ‘[Illico’s] fist itched to smack out and hit the head off the pole’ (346). As Mirzoeff writes, the rally is the occasion for the leader to be seen without being looked at (2011: 231). Illico’s reaction here is the horror of a critical form of looking forbidden by the spectacle. But the novel also, and in many ways more interestingly, suggests that understanding fascism, even describing it accurately, is undermined by the way that it contaminates and changes its observers, and likewise affects language. Dane once again identifies a crucial political practice of fascism, particularly in Nazi Germany, and also anticipates the linguistic problems that would arise in a post-fascist future (for a recent survey of these issues in the German context, see Komska 2019). A narrative voice located at the level of the crowd suggests the performance is spectacular and yet deliberately bewildering to the senses: ‘blessedly confusing the judgement, confusing even the sense of sight, but not the hearing. Listen! Listen!’ (Dane 1939: 250). But even to external observers, fixing the event in language proves impossible; the stenographers recording White Ben’s speech in Trafalgar Square complain later that ‘it was unusually difficult to reduce their notes to sense because he conveyed so much by the inflexions of his voice, by gestures and by looks’ (347), while ‘Some, thus carried, forgot to make notes, and amended afterwards in an imaginative fury. Others, hostile or perplexed, deliberately misinterpreted’ (348). The novel recognizes how fascism undermines the bases of objectivity and colonizes all possibility of representation; as Bertolt Brecht noted of Hitler, the fascist orator ‘involves his audience in himself ’ and ‘makes every criticism impossible, denies them every perspective on reality from their own point of view’ (qtd. Griffin 2004: 104). White Ben’s few fragmentary slogans, originally intended literally, operate in a special context, a charged field of fears and desire so that normal rules of meaning

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do not apply. This is rather literally figured in the climax of White Ben’s Trafalgar Square rally, as a crush in the crowd causes such pressure on Nelson’s Column that it collapses, leading to a riot and a period that the ‘conscientious chronicler’ finds hard to ‘reconstruct’ (Dane 1939: 360–361). This is perhaps where the novel is most astute and prescient, in its suggestion that fascism might leave a hole in the historical record because language is distorted and evacuated by it. That possibility impinges, it seems, on novelistic form in its encounter with fascism; the element of fantasy and the ambiguities it introduces might be a crucial strategy for exploring the verbal and psychological otherness engendered by fascism without merely conniving in its mysticism. White Ben finally vanishes when he returns to the field from which he came, and the young girl who brought him to life removes his mandrake heart to use in a different game. England, the novel implies, remains under effective dictatorship for decades after his disappearance. If Jameson’s is a novel about what might be lost under fascism, Dane’s is one about how fascism might in a certain way be ‘lost’ to history, retrospectively camouflaged, naturalized and repressed. While in Burdekin and Jameson’s novels, somebody always sees through the shoddily constructed façade – the cynical observer, Andy, or the heroic knight destined to restore ‘culture’ through the salvation of the Book  – there is hope of neither eventuality here.

Rex Warner, The Aerodrome (1941) Rex Warner’s 1941 The Aerodrome, written when the shape of the changes anxiously anticipated in Jameson’s and Dane’s novels had begun to come into focus, scrutinizes the subject seduced by fascism and the prospect of individual recovery or escape from that enchantment. Where the other novels distance and mystify fascism’s appeal so that it works towards the production of uncanny effects as experienced by observers, this novel takes precisely the uncanny appeal of fascism as its central concern. Warner, a classicist and poet, author of two earlier allegorical novels The Wild Goose Chase (1937) and The Professor (1938), and (uncredited) co-author with C. Day-Lewis of the 1936 antifascist pamphlet We’re Not Going to Do Nothing, takes an ultimately optimistic approach that thinks through fascism, and towards a way out of it, in comic, romantic and pastoral terms. The novel is subtitled ‘A Love Story’, and while it is tempting to read in it the influence of Kafka, translated into English for the first time in the early 1930s, it is as useful to see the novel as patterned something like an

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extremely compressed Tom Jones, and thus a Bildungsroman that places its ultimate faith in the essential orderliness of English life. The distinctly English quality of the novel contrasts with Warner’s earlier novels, which operate by an allegorical abstraction that generalizes, and holds up for critical scrutiny, the institutions of Western European society. In The Wild Goose Chase three brothers journey through three unnamed countries, each organized on a different political principle, making the novel a journey across the frontiers of political possibility and tendencies of development Warner saw in interwar Europe. In The Professor, the liberal institutions rooted in the European Enlightenment are placed on trial and ultimately condemned for their inertia in the face of fascism; the novel rages – after Guernica, after the Anschluss – at the prioritization of the defence of ‘culture’ over the lives of the victims of fascism. Echoing the critique of unqualified pacifism in the pamphlet We’re Not Going to Do Nothing, the liberal professor who finds himself unwillingly made head of state is told by a revolutionary student: While you were talking I saw in front of my eyes the thousands of dead and shattered bodies of those who have been killed from the air in the towns and villages in a neighbouring country. Those men and women and children knew nothing of the Polis, had never read Homer, but had heard of democracy and were pitilessly and brutally bombed. And we, and every democracy in Europe, connived at the slaughter. Warner 1938: 21

While The Aerodrome shares the allegorical, abstracted quality of these novels, it is much more recognizably an English novel, marked by an ambivalent fascination with the English rural village and the dark potentialities it might nurture, even if Warner’s arch ‘Author’s Note’ declares that ‘both for the Air Force and for the village of my own country I have the utmost affection and respect’. Where Jameson’s In the Second Year envisages fascism emerging in a land gone to ruin, ‘from the fields left unploughed by the farmer, from the spoiled orchard, from streams poisoned with oil, from dry wells’ (2004: 150), Warner locates it in the aerodromes that had sprung up in the English countryside since the First World War. The novel repeats the association of fascism with hollowness and the effacement of knowable identity found in Jameson and Dane’s novels, but it is here transferred to the neophyte, the subject of fascist seduction. The novel’s protagonist, Roy, begins the novel in a state of crisis, in a moment of simultaneous pastoral euphoria and profound depletion of security: face down, drunk, in the

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mud on his 21st birthday, having just discovered that the story of his origins he has been told by his guardian, the Village Rector, is false. Roy reflects on his deep attachment to the soil and the shock of his dispossession. The knowable world of the Village, in which characters are identical with their social roles – the Rector, the Squire, the Rector’s sister – gives way to moral ambiguity and dissimulation. This crisis of continuity and authority rapidly intensifies as a result of the deaths of his father-figures, the Rector and the Squire: They had been symbols for me of security and peace; but I had learnt that they could represent neither of these qualities. What I thought to be solid, rounded, and entire, now seemed to melt into frightful shapes of mist, to dissolve into intricacies wherein I was lost as though I had never been. Warner 2007: 124

On the one hand, this image of a world passing from solidity into mist clearly echoes the figuration of the emergence of modernity in The Communist Manifesto, suggesting the essentially modern character of the experiences the novel allegorizes. On the other hand, ‘security and peace’ were the watchwords of interwar diplomacy, and the chasm that opens here between the concepts and the figures supposed to embody them would seem to allegorize the specific conditions of fascism’s rise. Indeed, the collapse of Roy’s personal system of authority and his quest to reconstruct it through identification with authoritarianism echoes the analysis of the attraction exerted by fascism proposed by the Frankfurt School thinker Erich Fromm, for whom fascism was a symptom of an inability to grasp ‘positive’ freedom in the wake of the breakdown of traditional authority and an embrace of total submission to authoritarianism (2001: 178–190). Roy’s quest to heal the gap opened by the breakdown of authority takes the form of a schematic series of attachments and identifications. The first of these is with his girlfriend Bess; she promises a future of certainty against the contingency history, a ‘new and certain world’, ‘for ever and ever’ (Warner 2007: 108). Such a future is barred by the ties of history, however, and specifically by sexuality; the revelation of Bess’s infidelity, which provokes another crisis in Roy, is overdetermined by the revelation of a complex history of sexual betrayal in the Village’s families (151–163), leaving Roy vulnerable to the allure of the mysterious Aerodrome that has appeared on the periphery of the Village. This appeal diverts the normative course of the development of the Bildungsroman protagonist away from maturation, negotiation and reintegration towards willed subjugation to totalizing authority, the lure of ‘certainty’ offered by the sinister Air Vice Marshall. Roy at one level discovers history itself, condensed to the scale of family

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scandal, and a fundamental ambiguity in the relationship between appearances and essences. In this sense, the novel indicates the conditions in which allegory might be expected to give way to the particularities and contingencies of realism. Fascism, however, diverts that development, offering an order of meaning without such complications. The appeal of ‘empty’ figures such as Jameson’s Hillier and Dane’s White Ben operate similarly by their absence of content: the hollowness means no gap between appearance and essence can be apprehended, supplying the ‘unreal’ quality identified by observers of fascism. Warner’s Aerodrome seduces humiliated young men with technological fetishism and the promise of the subjugation of contingency by the will through the liberation of the individual from the past. This ideology eschews ‘the bondage of the future’, that must be rejected if ‘you are to be what you wish, conscious and deliberate shapers of your own destiny and those of others’ (180). Apparently expressing exactly this anxiety, Oswald Mosley wrote in 1938, ‘To Freud we reply that if indeed man has no determination of his own will beyond the idle chances of childhood then every escape from heredity and environment, not only of genius, but of every determined spirit in history, is but a figment of historic imagination’ (1938: 52). If Jameson’s Hillier represents the dictator as self-creator, free from the critical gaze and inured to sensory vulnerability, this hypostasis of ‘the will’ suggests another inflection of the same theme. There are no mass rallies in this book; Warner registers the cultic dimension of fascist social organization through the ‘services’ performed in the Aerodrome’s former chapel, now decked out as a cinema and social club (2007: 175). As in Jameson and Dane’s novels, fascism works on language ritualistically and repetitively, reshaping its meanings: ‘Reflect, please, that “Parenthood”, “ownership”, “locality” are the words of those who stick in the mud of the past to form the fresh deposit of the future. And so is “marriage”. Those words are without wings’ (178). Indeed, the Air Vice Marshall continues, parents are ‘conduits through which you have all in varying degrees been infected with the stupidity, the ugliness, and the servility of historical tradition’ (178). The conjunction of history with land here is significant; to be subject to history, to the determination of the past and the future, is to be tied to the land, serf-like, and ‘without wings’. The novel, more strongly than the others discussed in this chapter, recognizes that, as Roger Griffin argues, fascism did offer a transformation in culture, and people became fascist because at the level of the individual it ‘decoded’ existing social arrangements, and then ‘recoded their desires and identities in terms of its own world-view’, while also supplying the means of the expression for that new outlook (2004: 112). Such an analysis was inadmissible from a Marxist perspective that considered fascism to be

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essentially a parody of radical social transformation, a degraded version of revolution; Jameson  – writing from the left, though not a Marxist  – figures fascism in much this way in the culturally and aesthetically degraded movement portrayed in In the Second Year. In a comparable way to Dane, Warner countenances the possibility that fascism performs a thoroughgoing (though not, in this novel, irreversible) ‘recoding’ in the field of language. The catechistic speech of the Air Vice Marshall as it exhorts the exercise of the will in the cultic space of the ‘recoded’ chapel furthermore echoes Daniel Woodley’s analysis of the ways that fascism separates conscious thought from will, producing an antirationalism that ‘begins with the assumption that the will is more fundamental than conscious thought in human life and nature in general’ (2009: 31). Dane’s White Ben is galvanized by the agonizing memory of collective suffering; Jameson’s Hillier and Sacker are driven by homosocial antagonism rooted in childhood loyalty and betrayal; and Warner likewise sees in fascism an attempt to overcome, in fact to subdue, the past. Fascism in the novel entails a willed present, an exercise in the subjugation of history, as well as the subjugation of women and the natural world. Like In the Second Year, The Aerodrome locates the seeds of fascism in male rivalry and psychosexual wounding (Warner 2007: 299); the Aerodrome is the outgrowth of the Air Vice Marshall’s rivalry with the Rector (yet since it is implied that the Vice Marshall answers to some higher, unseen authority, his personal Aerodrome might be only one node in a wider system). What is offered to the Aerodrome’s initiates is a flight out of history and contingency. Eventually, Roy recognizes that heritage is not a fetter but a record of responses to those inescapable conditions, and to the fact of death: The fumbling conventions that had centred around church, manor, and public house had been the efforts of generations of the dead to establish some basis of security in the middle of a mystery which to many of them had been delightful as well as startling. We in the Air Force had escaped from but not solved the mystery. Warner 2007: 261

He realizes they became servants of a single will, an instrument that could ‘shape like clay, cut through like butter the vague, amorphous, drunken, unwieldy, and unsatisfactory life that was outside our organisation’ (261), which produced a ‘barren edifice of perfection’ (266); ‘a denial of life’ in its complexity ‘rather than an affirmation of its nobility and its grandeur’ (283) in the time-stopped world of the Aerodrome. What motivates Roy’s abandonment of the Aerodrome, and his rapprochement with history, time and nature, is his relationship with the Air

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Vice Marshall’s wife, Eustacia, who becomes pregnant, prompting Roy to wonder ‘what was the point of our tremendous programme’ (259). In turn, he feels a renewed pity for Bess. But this of course figures women as the necessary counterweight to an excessively masculine will that seeks to free itself from the ‘earth’ through technology, discipline and violence. Women are the signifiers of ‘nature’ coded as feminine, earth-bound and messily fertile in ways that interrupt the fascist project by ‘breaking the bonds of sterility’ (266) imposed on them. The novel’s solution to the seductive desire to control women’s bodies is then a fetishization of those bodies as guarantors of time and natural cyclicality. While Dane’s novel reflects the movement of several upper-class suffragettes into the British fascist movement (Hartley 2004: 99), no women are seduced by Warner’s Aerodrome, and his novel’s antifascism is underwritten by its conservative gender politics. Roy’s return – both spatial and social – to the Village is also figured as a return to a long known yet repressed landscape; as his feelings for Bess return, he thinks ‘It was as though there had been something in me like snow and ice which were now melting and gradually revealing a landscape whose outlines I had not seen for some time and barely remembered’ (245). The novel ends too in a reaffirmation of ‘beauty’, in an apostrophe for a world that is ‘clean’ and ‘most intricate, fiercer than tigers, wonderful and infinitely forgiving’ (302). The concluding note is of the survival of the aesthetic, and more specifically the sublime in the English landscape. In counselling the acceptance of messiness, of mixed morals and motivations, the novel also participates in the attack on political puritanism levelled by We’re Not Going to Do Nothing, which asks, ‘Must we do nothing just because all action is besmirched with dregs of self-interest? Can no improvement be made with the limited means at our disposal?’ (Day Lewis 1936: 26). It is also in a certain way, a return to the conditions of the possibility of realism, after the hiatus of the ‘sterile’ utopia of the Aerodrome, as Bess and Roy recognize that the history of the Aerodrome cannot be repressed, but is an episode in their personal histories and that of the their community, a force shaping the present and the future (Warner 2007: 302). And yet the novel is unforthcoming about what Roy is actually supposed to have learned by this experience. The novel’s rather uninquiring ending, in this regard, is unsettling, and puts a great deal of faith in the workings of history (the plot mechanics that guarantee Roy ‘returns’, to sexuality, landscape and the aesthetic) to undermine the Aerodrome via its fundamental contradictions and the constrictions of the life it offers. For Marina MacKay the novel registers essentially conservative fears about the totalitarian potentialities of the state (rather than of fascism particularly) that intensified following the

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passage of emergency powers legislation after the Munich Crisis, fears, indeed, that a creeping fascism was already abroad in English life (MacKay 2015). In this sense, the novel’s conclusion affirms the status quo in England against the temptations to which Roy temporarily succumbs, temptations it nonetheless suggests are a permanent and undefeated feature of its imagined England.

Conclusion The novels on which this chapter has focused all present revealing visions of fascism in England. Set at some distance – temporal or allegorical – from the moments of their writing, they nonetheless reflect late interwar anticipations of coming struggles for power and, especially in Jameson’s and Dane’s texts, memories of social unrest that followed the end of the First World War (see McKibbin 2000: 53–54). In their often complex, unsettling imaginings of fascism’s aesthetics and psychological appeal, they echo the theoretical work of European thinkers like Benjamin, Fromm and Bloch, and suggest that in the novel we find somewhat more sophisticated analyses of fascism’s ‘revolt against reason’ than were produced by other arenas of political and philosophical thought in Britain, in which fascism was either taken as either the outgrowth of ‘irrational’ European philosophical tradition (Akehurst 2010: 16–25) or a phenomenon ‘which could in the end be understood and brought to participate in the ordinary machinations of great power politics’ (Stone 2010: 188). These novels recognize that for all the strangeness and atavism of fascism’s public presentation, it is an essentially modern phenomenon, a phenomenon of a hollowed out, alienated world, and yet all the same a political phenomenon, the work of men, not of mysterious forces of history. Their primary function as novels, however, is to warn against the realization of their visions rather than to point the way to some alternative transformation in the relationship between culture and politics. It is Jameson’s novel that goes furthest in probing the potential complicity between liberal cultural politics and fascism, but it does not glimpse the ‘politicization of aesthetics’ prescribed by Walter Benjamin as the revolution necessary for survival; indeed, the furthest reaches of the questions it raises arguably never came into focus in Britain at all. Dane’s fantasy raises the unsettling question not just of how a fascist movement might come to power, but also of how it might comfortably be inscribed and explained away in the chronicle of national history. Warner’s pastoral return, in a novel written when war was now a reality not merely a premonition, in a certain way echoes the

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wartime uses of the English landscape as emblem of enduring and inclusive community, as exemplified perhaps by Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), while ambivalently acknowledging the indelibility of the Aerodrome in personal and national history. Taken together, they constitute unsettling monuments in the literary landscape of the ‘devil’s decade’, and the questions they provoke remain unanswered.

Works cited Akehurst, Thomas L. The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy: Britishness and the Spectre of Europe. London: Continuum, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006 [1983]. Baxendale, John, and Chris Pawling. Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Benjamin, Illuminations. Hannah Arendt (ed.) and Harry Zohn (trans.). New York: Schocken Books, 2007 [1968]: 217–251. Birkett, Jennifer. Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bloch, Ernst. Heritage of Our Times. London: Polity, 1991 [1962]. Booker, M. Keith. ‘English Dystopian Satire in Context’. In A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000. Brian W. Shaffer (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 2005: 32–44. Buck-Morss, Susan. ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’. October, 62 (Autumn), 1992: 3–41. Burdekin, Katharine. Swastika Night. New York: The Feminist Press, 1985 [1937]. Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Dane, Clemence [pseud. Winifred Ashton]. The Arrogant History of White Ben. London: Heinemann, 1939. Day Lewis, C. We’re Not Going to Do Nothing. London: Left Review, 1936. Dimitrov, Georgi. The Working Class Against Fascism. London: Martin Lawrence, 1935. Freud, Sigmund. ‘From “The Uncanny”’. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (eds.). New York: WW Norton, 2010: 824–841. Fromm, Erich. The Fear of Freedom. London: Routledge Classics, 2001 [1942]. Goldie, David. ‘War Memorials’. In The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature. Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012: 269–276. Griffin, Roger. ‘Notes towards the Definition of Fascist Culture: The Prospects for Synergy between Marxist and Liberal Heuristics’. In Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, Volume III: Fascism and Culture. Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman (eds.). London Routledge, 2004: 99–119.

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Hartley, Jenny. ‘Clothes and Uniform in the Theatre of Fascism: Clemence Dane and Virginia Woolf ’. In Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Textual Representations. Angela K. Smith (ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004: 96–110. Hill, James [pseud. Storm Jameson]. No Victory for the Soldier. London: Collins, 1938. Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Abacus, 1995. Jameson, Storm. ‘Documents’. Fact, 4, July 1937: 9–18. Jameson, Storm. In the Second Year. Stan Smith (ed.) Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2004 [1936]. Komska, Yuliya. ‘In Search of an Anti-Fascist Language’. Boston Review, 17 May 2019. Available at: http://bostonreview.net/politics/yuliya-komska-search-anti-fascistlanguage. Lassman, Peter. ‘Responses to Fascism in Britain, 1930–45’. In Sociology Responds to Fascism. Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Käsler (eds.). London: Routledge, 1992: 207–232. Lawrence, Jon. ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain’. The Journal of Modern History, 75 (September), 2003: 557–589. MacKay, Marina. ‘Anti-State Fantasy and the Fiction of the 1940s’. Literature & History, 24 (2 Spring), 2015: 27–40. Manchester Guardian. ‘Speech to National Liberal Demonstration’, 27 September 1936: 25. McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1998]. Madge, Charles, and Tom Harrisson. Britain by Mass Observation. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939. Marvell, Andrew [pseud. Howell Davies]. Minimum Man. London: Science Fiction Book Club, 1953 [1938]. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2011. Mosley, Oswald. A Greater Britain. London: British Union of Fascists, 1934 [1932]. Mosley, Oswald. Tomorrow We Live. London: British Union Policy, 1938. Mulhern, Francis. Culture/Metaculture. London: Routledge, 2000. Olechnowicz, Andrzej. ‘Introduction: Historians and the Study of Anti-Fascism in Britain’. In Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Interwar Period. Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds.). London: Palgrave, 2010: 1–27. O’Neill, Joseph. Land Under England. London: Penguin Science Fiction Classics, 1987 [1935]. Orwell, George. The Lion and the Unicorn. In George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2, My Country Right or Left. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.). Boston: Nonpareil Books, 2000.

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Rae, Patricia. ‘Double Sorrow : Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain’, Twentieth Century Literature, 49 (2), Summer 2003: 246–275. Rickword, Edgell. ‘In Defence of Culture’, Left Review, III (7), 1937: 383. Rickword, Edgell, and Jack Lindsay (eds.). Spokesmen for Liberty, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941 [1939]. Smith, Stan. ‘Introduction’ to Storm Jameson, In the Second Year. Stan Smith (ed.). Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2004 [1936]: vii–xxix. Stone, Dan. ‘Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a Contribution to Defeating It’. In Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Interwar Period. Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds.). London: Palgrave, 2010: 183–201. Stone, Dan. The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas. London: Palgrave, 2013. Taylor, Elinor. The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934–1940. Boston: Brill, 2018. Valasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacles: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Warner, Rex. The Professor. London: The Bodley Head, 1938. Warner, Rex. The Aerodrome. London: Vintage, 2007 [1941]. Woodley, Daniel. Fascism and Political Theory. London: Routledge, 2009. Wright, Patrick. On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 [1985].

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Naomi Mitchison, Eugenics and the Community: The Class and Gender Politics of Intelligence Natasha Periyan

Dear Mrs Hodsen Your queries: A. My own children. The eldest, Geoff, died at 9, of meningitis [. . .] the school he was at thought him brilliant; he was much under his average form age. The second, Denis [. . .] is now recovered, but is probably not up to his right school place; he is however six months to a year under his average form age, so is probably intelligent. The third, Murdoch, is possibly brilliant, but has had his heart strained [. . .] It is odd that they are all dark eyed, though my husband had a blue eyed brother and father, and I am, I think, a homozygous blue. B. My first cousins. [. . .] The children of William and Edith Nelson (the publishers: she seems to me quite remarkably dull, but one shouldn’t judge one’s aunts!) are: Patrick (killed in 1915, at about 21 – he had done quite fairly well at Oxford). Elsie (a curious, ironic person, very intelligent [. . .]). Graeme (an engineer, I should say quite first rate but without any imagination). Archibald (intelligent and charming, but probably not first rate). [. . .] Do you want to know the complete Haldane pedigree, including the more distant cousins? [. . .] Some of my further cousins seem to me quite half witted, but not I suppose in any technical sense [. . .] there are a number of cousins mostly in New Zealand [. . .] some really dull? [. . .] My husband’s family nice, dull [. . .] on his mother’s side the only distinguished person was her father, who

*

This chapter was completed as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Literary Culture, Meritocracy and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880–1920’ at King’s College London and the University of Kent. I am grateful to Dr Sara Lyons and Dr Mike Collins, the project leads, who read and commented on a draft of this work. I am also grateful to the Wellcome Library, London and the staff of the McMaster University Library for access to archives referenced in this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge the Mitchison family and Georgia Glover of David Higham Associates for permission to quote from the letters of Naomi Mitchison.

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The 1930s came from god knows where in Ireland and became governor of Auckland. I think he is brilliant (he got a double first at Oxford, and has a pretty good reputation at the Bar). My mother’s family is also an old Scottish one, and in the last generation it has petered curiously out and there are several epileptics. [. . .] I made up my mind early not to marry anyone belonging to a Scottish family which was in any way related to my own. Naomi Mitchison to the Eugenics Society, 12 August 1929; Mitchison: Wellcome I should like to resign from the Eugenics Education Society. [. . .] I find myself more and more out of sympathy with the general trend of opinion. I cannot help feeling that, to most of the members and council of the society, eugenics merely means conservation of those virtues which have made people into successful members of society as it is. [. . .] I can’t therefore feel it consistent with my position as one who wants to see the present state of society completely altered, and new sets of social and individual values substituted for the old ones, to continue as a member of your Society. I also feel very doubtful about such measures as the sterilisation of the unfit. They put a terrible power into the hands of a government and bureaucracy which may yet prove tyrannous. Naomi Mitchison to the Eugenics Society, 29 May 1933; Mitchison: Wellcome

Naomi Mitchison’s two letters demonstrate both the commitment and tensions in her involvement with the Eugenics Society. The first evidences a strong adherence to the concept of intelligence and the measurement of human minds while the second suggests a struggle with the class politics of the movement and the nefarious political ends to which eugenic measures could be put. Mitchison’s resignation from the Society came shortly after Hitler rose to power and just a couple of months before the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, the first Nazi eugenic measure, which was passed in July 1933.1 Mitchison had joined the Eugenics Education Society (which became the Eugenics Society in 1926) in July 1925, when she submitted an official ‘Application For Fellowship’ whereby she was required to state that she was ‘in general agreement with the aims’ of the Society (Mitchison: Wellcome). The archive suggests that an interest in Birth Control largely occasioned her membership – she wrote to the Society noting that she was aware of women in Kensington and Camberwell who were interested in starting ‘some sort of a Birth Control group’ (Mitchison: Wellcome).2 Mitchison’s involvement with – and eventual resignation from  – the Eugenics Society resonates with what Mary Joannou identifies as Mitchison’s perennial concern with community and group solidarity (Joannou

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1998: 293). In the early and mid-1930s, Mitchison’s interest in eugenicist ideas is evident in her exploration of intelligence as central to the realization of a democratically cohesive community. The contours of her eugenic thought, her left-wing and feminist politics are all shaped by a commitment to the concept of intelligence. In the early to mid-1930s, Mitchison examines how two of the indices of interwar social reform, education and birth control are influenced by – or indeed influence – intelligence as part of a wider exploration of nonviolent forms of social change. Mitchison’s 1929 letter was written in a year when the question of mental capacity had a profound personal and political salience. It was written as a response to a request from the Society on 9 August that Mitchison send information about her family, including details about her children and cousins. The material would be used ‘for our simple teaching, we are using pedigrees of well-known families of which yours is one’ (Mitchison: Wellcome). These were typically displays of family trees used to demonstrate the inheritance of skills and attributes. The Society was particularly concerned about the accuracy of the material they received: ‘If there are dull or defective people in any stock, we must bring it out, otherwise there will be no scientific conclusions possible’ (Mitchison: Wellcome). Mitchison’s letter is strikingly unguarded, blending the perspectives of the proud mother, the gossipy relation and the scientific disciple of intelligence testing. Mitchison was of particular interest to the organization because of her distinguished pedigree as a member of the Haldane family. In the same year as the Eugenics Society’s request, The Haldanes of Gleneagles, edited by General Sir J. Aylmer L. Haldane, was published. The study was prompted by an interest in how this family’s long ancestry of distinguished men could elucidate the theory of hereditary talent. Its introduction noted that ‘[f]or more than seven hundred years it [the Haldane family] has continued without break in its direct male line’ and suggested the study’s utility for ‘the modern sciences of heredity and eugenics [which] call for family histories as their raw material and complain that they are not forthcoming in sufficient numbers’ (J.A.L. Haldane 1929: a2). The Eugenics Society took an interest in the volume, reviewing it in their organ, the Eugenics Review. Ironically, Mitchison’s father, J.S. Haldane, was critical of the hard hereditarian approach of eugenics, contributing an essay to the collection on ‘The Heredity of the Gleneagles Family’ which emphasized not genetic inheritance, but ‘[m]odes of behaviour transmitted in upbringing and by example’ (J.S. Haldane 1929: 269). Mitchison’s brother and one-time scientific collaborator, the communist biologist J.B.S. Haldane, similarly examined the relative weight of environment

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and heredity in his research. Like Mitchison, Haldane was a member of the Eugenics Society, joining the Eugenics Education Society while at Oxford. Diane Paul argues that Haldane was a ‘critic of eugenics if this is understood as referring to the eugenics movement of [. . .] [his] own day’, his goal was ‘the reformulation, not the defeat, of eugenic ideology’ (Paul 1984: 572). As a reform eugenicist, Haldane advocated the equalization of environmental factors, the elimination of social classes and the enactment of a ‘socially responsible eugenics’ programme within a society that could ‘differentiate between the effects of heredity and environment’ (Paul 1984: 574). Haldane signed the 1939 Geneticists’ Manifesto, which contended that ‘there can be no valid basis for estimating and comparing the intrinsic worth of different individuals without economic and social conditions which provide approximately equal opportunities for all members of society’ (Gruenberg 1939: 371–372). Within this reformed society, the geneticists proposed a visionary future achieved through ‘voluntary [. . .] control over the processes of parentage’ which would revolutionize the intellectual levels of the population so that ‘everyone might look upon “genius”, combined of course with stability, as his birthright’ (Gruenberg 1939: 372, 373). Although Meloni identifies Haldane as a ‘hard hereditarian’ (Meloni 2016: 88), his 1930s publications point to his cynicism towards the main line of eugenic thought as he increasingly explored the role of environment in determining intelligence.3 The Inequality of Man (1932) expressed both Haldane’s commitment to intellectual difference and social reform: ‘to-day the recognition of innate inequality should lead not to less, but to greater, equality of opportunity’ (J.B.S. Haldane 1938: 35). Haldane cites studies that suggest that ‘environment counts for something, but [. . .] its field is limited’ (J.B.S. Haldane 1938: 27). He dissociates himself, however, from eugenicist ideas commenting that ‘popular expositors of eugenics make the fundamental mistake of suggesting that differences not due to environment are due to heredity’ as he notes also the significance of biological segregation (J.B.S. Haldane 1938: 27). Haldane’s Human Biology and Politics (1934) argues against the popular eugenicist view that the ‘innately stupid breed faster than the innately clever, and the mean innate ability of the population is falling’ with a focus on environmental differences between social groups (J.B.S. Haldane 1934: 15). Heredity and Politics (1938) is centrally concerned with eugenic arguments surrounding the ‘differential birth-rate’ and emphasizes that the results of intelligence tests ‘do not depend entirely upon nature, but to a considerable extent on nurture. [. . .] Clearly, environmental differences may have a large effect on the mental performance as measured by the intelligence

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quotient.’ (J.B.S. Haldane 1943: 115). Haldane’s conflicted relationship to eugenic ideals provided a framework through which his idea of a utopian society could be forged that offered the promise of the best possible version of man within the fairest possible of worlds.4 Mitchison’s 1929 letter demonstrates a keen sensitivity to her early scientific training and the research interests of her father and brother. She notes her plan to marry a man that she was not related to in order, presumably, to broaden her genetic stock. Mitchison’s comments regarding the ‘odd’ dark colouring of her children’s eyes, given her own ‘homozygous’ blue-eyed genetic heritage and her husband’s blue-eyed ancestry suggestively recalls the early scientific paper Mitchison published with J.B.S. Haldane. In ‘Reduplication in Mice’, Mitchison et al. were the first to demonstrate a Mendelian genetic linkage in mammals with a focus on eye colour (J.B.S Haldane, A.D. Sprunt, and N.M. Haldane 1915). The 1929 letter also demonstrates a propensity to rank minds ‘first rate [. . .] probably not first rate’. Mitchison attempts to measure the minds of her children using a quasi-scientific methodology as she quantifies the degree to which her children’s minds deviate from the mean within their classes. The qualifiers deployed (‘possibly’, ‘probably’) register not a cynicism surrounding the categories of brilliance and intelligence themselves, but rather a scientific reluctance to make overemphatic claims given the evidence available. The letter also demonstrates an awareness of the received language of intelligence testing: Mitchison declares her cousins as ‘half-witted’ but qualifies this as ‘not [. . .] in any technical sense’. Repeated use is made of adjectives particularly associated with the measurement of minds: the Galtonian adjective ‘brilliant’ and the epithet ‘dull’, which Mitchison seems to use in a relatively loose sense to blend notions of the tedious and the intellectually deficient, and is perhaps prompted by the Society’s own concern with the ‘dull or defective’ in their initial request. Mitchison employs the term ‘dull’ at a time when mental ‘deficiency’ had been found to be more prevalent. In January 1929 the Wood Committee delivered its report with its prevailing ‘ambience [. . .] a vigorous and even crusading desire to root out the “defective” ’ (Jones 1982: 725). The Report broadened the categorization of mental deficiency and concluded that in addition to the 33,000 children who had already been diagnosed as mentally defective, there were another 72,000 undiagnosed children, based on a survey of group intelligence tests. Where previously children of IQs of below 70 were deemed to be ‘ineducable’ or referred for special schools, the Committee found that only children with an IQ of below 50 should be referred and children

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with IQs of between 50 and 80 should be grouped together to become conventionally termed the ‘dull or backward’. This new category of the ‘retarded’ should, the report found, be educated within the ordinary elementary school as this seemingly rapacious disease of mental deficiency that was seizing the nation would be accommodated within mainstream education (Sutherland 1984: 65–66). The conclusions of the Wood Committee were reflected upon in The Realist, a journal of ‘Scientific Humanism’ that included Mitchison on its editorial board, alongside Archibald Church, the journal’s General Editor; in July 1931, as Labour MP for Wandsworth, he proposed a Private Members’ Bill which called for voluntary sterilization. The Bill was defeated by 167 votes to 89, with 31 Labour MPs voting for and 130 against (Redvaldsen 2017: 777). In the October 1929 edition of The Realist, Dr E. O. Lewis, a Medical Investigator to the Joint Committee of the Board of Control and the Board of Education and a former researcher on mental deficiency at Cambridge, suggested that the mentally unfit were those who failed to ‘achieve a certain standard of social adaptation’ and found that as society became more complex, mental deficiency proliferated: ‘a high incidence of mental deficiency is a concomitant of a high degree of civilisation’ (Lewis 1929: 30). He expressed alarm at the report’s findings and its implications for modern society: The statement that a higher proportion of children born to-day than formerly are mentally defective is possibly one of the most startling and significant that any scientist could make. It implies that the balance of forces that has preserved the biological stability of the race has become upset. Lewis 1929: 29

The differential fertility rate between the social classes, combined with the ‘humanitarian attitude [. . .] towards the physically and mentally subnormal’ has, Lewis found, resulted in ‘a serious deterioration of the human material in the nations of the western world’ (31). Lewis found a response to the proliferation of this ‘dysgenic population’ in two key measures: ‘the universal education of the masses and our scientific knowledge of the laws of heredity’ (31, 35). For Lewis, the forces of progressive knowledge offered a means of mitigating mental deficiency. His arguments point to a context whereby education was held as a counterbalance to mental deficiency as progressive social policy unites with reactionary biopolitics. The findings of the Wood Committee were symptomatic of, and a catalyst for, wider interwar concerns surrounding a perceived decline in the national stock,

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a cultural phenomenon analysed by Richard Overy. The Eugenics Society was an important stimulus of this cultural concern and advanced positive eugenic measures that encouraged the breeding of quality stock, while negative eugenic measures discouraged ‘the fertility of all persons below the average’, categories which, as Mitchison’s 1933 letter registers, were frequently arranged along class lines (Overy 2010: 108). Mitchison’s resignation letter associates the Eugenics Society ‘conservation of those virtues which have made people into successful members of society as it is’ rather than ‘new sets of social and individual values’ in order to alter society (Mitchison: Wellcome). Mitchison’s political commitment to the Left intensified after the 1929 slump (Calder 1997: 101). Although her 1933 letter aligns the Eugenics Society with conservatism, the interwar Eugenics Society did appeal to political parties on the Left. David Redvaldsen suggests the shared underpinnings between eugenics and socialism, with both orientated around creating a better society with an emphasis on collective good and an appeal to middle-class intellectuals (Redvaldsen 2017: 764). Different strands of left-wing thought shared different relationships to the Eugenics movement. The Fabian Society, through which the Mitchisons first encountered socialism after meeting the Coles, found a place for eugenics within their programme for reform, with the Webbs both ‘socialists and eugenists’ (Redvaldsen 2017: 766). The increasing focus of the Eugenics Society on enforced sterilization rendered relations between the Eugenics Society and the Labour Party hostile, despite attempts on behalf of the Eugenics Society to suggest that the movement shared an affinity with both socialism and capitalism in the early 1930s (Redvaldsen 2017: 776, 777). Greta Jones notes the ‘highly conservative role’ that the Eugenics Society played in the interwar period, one ‘rather unsympathetic to the working class’ as it characterized poverty as a natural consequence of low intelligence (Jones 1982: 718). This antipathy to the working class found its way into the Eugenic Society’s policies for social reform, as they advanced a system of family allowances that would favour the professional classes in order to encourage middle-class fertility (Jones 1982: 719). The increasing left-wing interwar critique of hard hereditarianism and the class prejudice that often accompanied eugenics rendered relations between the Left and the Eugenics Society distant (Redvaldsen 2017: 773). Naomi Mitchison joined Labour in 1931, the year that Dick ran for Parliament as a Labour MP. Dick Mitchison was eventually elected to the House of Commons in 1945 and Naomi Mitchison ran for MP as a candidate for the Scottish Universities in 1935. During this period, the Labour Party was forging its

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meritocratic brand of social mobility. Adrian Wooldridge identifies that ‘[f]or much of its history the Labour Party has been much more interested in upward mobility than in equality of outcome’ (Wooldridge 1994: 182, 409–410). Labour’s concern with ‘upward mobility’ was shaped around a policy of educational reform that was supported by the new technology of the intelligence test. Psychologists of the 1920s and 1930s felt that psychometric tests offered a ‘machine capable of eliminating bias and allocating limited resources on the basis of justice’ (Wooldridge 1994: 410); the intelligence test was held to reward academic attainment as opposed to family connections. Until the early 1940s, this community of psychologists formed a broad consensus; they believed that innate intellectual differences were largely caused by biological inheritance and that these differences were measurable with objective tests which could be used as a tool for educational organization. From the 1950s onwards, sociologists and Marxist educational historians critiqued the supposed objectivity of intelligence tests and suggested that the theory of innate inequality of abilities which underpinned them was an expression of an unequal class system (Wooldridge 1994: 294–318; Kavanagh 2017). During the interwar period, two reports by the Hadow Committee determined the direction of travel of educational reform: the Committee’s 1926 report on The Education of the Adolescent which advocated a tripartite system of secondary education and the Committee’s 1924 report on Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity, which found a place for intelligence testing as a supplement to other methods of determining educational capacity (Board of Education 1924, 1926). This emphasis on a selective educational system informed the educational policy of the Labour Party during the interwar period. It created a social and political climate that privileged the ‘intelligent’ child and cultivated a cultural mythology around the scholarship ladder. Mitchison’s feminism and socialism was marked by a commitment to intelligence that found expression in the educational policy and meritocratic ideals of the Labour Party and the propagandistic work of the Eugenics Society. Mitchison’s relationship to the eugenic movement was mediated by her desire to forge a community in which intelligence and human fertility could reform society as she sought to influence both through engagement with birth control and education. Her interest in eugenicist notions of intelligence and inheritance placed her in a critical relationship to the gender and class politics of the movement and she was in dialogue with the meritocratic current of Labour thought on educational reform as she attempted to mitigate the hierarchical implications intelligence held in education.

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Comments on Birth Control and The Corn King and the Spring Queen: Knowledge, social class and fertility Mitchison’s early 1930s texts, Comments on Birth Control (1930) and The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) are centrally concerned with questions of fertility, education and community. The former text draws on contemporaneous anthropology in an exploration of social class and fertility that celebrates cohesive primitive communities that Mitchison argues had psychic control over their own fertility. In the latter text, knowledge and enlightenment is positioned as a barrier to a communal life that had been shaped by fertility rituals. Comments on Birth Control explores the emotional and practical effects of contraception and suggests Mitchison’s critical relationship to the Eugenics Society. It references a group of ‘controversialists’ focusing ‘especially’ on the ‘Neo-Malthusians’ (Mitchison 1930: 7). The Malthusian League was established in Britain from 1877–1927 with the motto ‘Non Quantitas Sed Qualitas’ and it sought to restrict parenthood to prevent the breeding of those who it claimed were ‘plainly incapable of producing or rearing physically, intellectually, and morally satisfactory children’ (Overy 2010: 95). Mitchison expresses distrust for all who ‘make propaganda for birth control. [. . .] they are missionaries [. . .] But missionaries are people to beware of ’ (Mitchison 1930: 7). Caution surrounding the potential instrumentalization of human fertility for political ends is suggested by Mitchison’s distrust of the ‘spectacular weapon of statistics’ (7) and her evasion of them in her own pamphlet: ‘I cannot find out what the statistics say, and anyhow I am rather frightened of statistics, those ungrateful creatures who are so apt to turn and bite the hand that feeds them’ (8–9). Instead, she relies on perception to make her point: ‘I believe from my own observation that among the professional classes a slightly larger family is becoming more usual’ (9). In tension with eugenicist ideals that encouraged breeding among the wealthy, the pamphlet is addressed to the ‘professional classes’. Towards its opening Mitchison notes her intention in strongly class coded terms as she suggests that she will ‘express some of the difficulties [. . .] raised in ordinary conversations, most of all perhaps in their tea-time or after-dinner talks (before the men come in and, according to our conventions, the conversation becomes lopsided) between reasonably intelligent women’ (6). Mitchison finds that in some areas of London and elsewhere birth control clinics are enabling the improvement of social conditions as ‘the constant nag and drag of the big slum family is

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stopped’ (9) but she does not sanction eugenicist arguments for the encouragement of breeding amongst ‘desirable’ social groups: ‘one does not feel that it would be emotionally or socially appropriate for the Neo-Malthusians themselves and their few and usually intelligent children, to be in larger family groups’ (7). Mitchison’s interest in the effects of birth control extends to ‘fairly well-off people’ (10) in a departure from the positive eugenic policies of the Eugenics Society. Mitchison also references the associations made by eugenicists between ability and social class as she posits a circumspect association between class and intelligence: I should be the last to say that, even among women, this peculiar sort of sensitiveness and intelligence is only found in the upper and middle classes (though I admit that as things are it is harder for a poor woman to keep her intelligence than it is for a poor man) nor – still emphatically – would I say that the individuals of these luckier classes are all sufficiently intelligent to take even a mild interest in the problems of their own bodies. Mitchison 1930: 10

Mitchison privileges environment in shaping mental ability: poverty is associated with a loss of intelligence, but nor are the ‘luckier classes [. . .] all [. . .] intelligent’. While refusing to subscribe to a class-based model of intelligence, the pamphlet demonstrates a commitment to intelligence as a political category through which Mitchison can make her appeal, as her audience is repeatedly defined in terms of their intellectual capacity: ‘the individuals, the conscious intelligent individuals’ (8), ‘the ordinary intelligent person’ (22), ‘Intelligent and truly feminist women’ (25). Mitchison draws on anthropological and philosophical ideas as she explores the problem of birth control. Finding contraception a ‘compromise’, the pamphlet hopes for a utopian solution to controlling pregnancy and references Malinowski’s study, The Sexual Life of Savages, which considered a community of ‘Primitive islanders’ who developed ‘psycho-physical control’ (26) of their own fertility: ‘they can at their own will be fertile or not fertile’ (26). This phenomenon is analysed through the lens of Gerald Heard’s work, a writer Mitchison references in You May Well Ask (1979) as helping to ‘build the moral climate of the Thirties’, as she outlines his ‘general thesis’ as ‘the historical growth of the individual out of the soulless mass of very early mankind’ and the search for a ‘more advanced moral sense’ that can ‘transcend individualism into something automatically other-regarding (that is loving) because each of us is we [. . .] we have to go back to a more primitive social feeling and make it come real in modern terms’

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(Mitchison 1986: 112). Comments on Birth Control specifically references Heard’s The Ascent of Humanity, where he terms this common consciousness ‘superconsciousness’ asking: ‘from individuality ought there not be developed, in the course of evolution, a superconsciousness, a common self-consciousness?’ (Heard 1929: 260).5 Heard’s concept provides a lens through which Mitchison negotiates the problem of a socially divided community. The pamphlet argues that while for most people ‘the community has broken up into more or less conscious individuals, out of communion’ (27), Malinowski’s islanders are ‘not separated out into individuals. [. . .] they are all [. . .] in communion with one another’ (26), group ‘values are their values.’ (27). Mitchison draws on Heard’s categories as she looks forward to a ‘super-conscious community [. . .] in the dark future’ (28). This ‘magic’ (27) community will be achieved through ‘some unforeseeable revolution in consciousness’ (27) and individuals will be formed into ‘a community of a new kind, becoming again conscious of one another and of their own central will and good and unity’ (27) rather than divided by ‘love and hate, greed and fear and jealousy’ (28). In Comments on Birth Control the economic dimensions of the problem of birth control, and a wider critique of capitalist society, are subsumed into a mystical frame of reference, and the solution Mitchison finds to the problem of social division is grounded on the planes of transcendental, supra-rational experience. Such a response to social division anticipates Mitchison’s interest in ‘conversion’ (Mitchison 1938: 107) as a preferred vehicle for social change in The Moral Basis of Politics (1938), a phenomenon Mitchison explores in The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) where the spread of Christianity is posited as a non-violent social and spiritual revolution that can overcome barriers of social class. In Comments on Birth Control, the utopian solution Mitchison prophesies remains hypothetical  – available only in ‘primitive’ communities. Her literary work around this time suggestively refracts the problems of fertility and community explored in this pamphlet. The Corn King and the Spring Queen examines a community where social life is mediated by fertility rites and considers the effects of the disruption of a community’s links to organic life through knowledge. The novel depicts Marob, a civilization in which communal life is shaped by ancient fertility rituals led by the Corn King (Tarrik) and the Spring Queen (the witch, Erif Der). This communal life is disrupted when Tarrik encounters Stoic philosophy through Sphaeros who sets him free into a world of intellectual adventure that poses a challenge to his ‘barbarian world of colour and smell and solidity’ which ‘broke up deliciously about him into a new freedom’

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as his ‘intelligent mind’ is ‘let loose [. . .] on a whole new series of problems’ (Mitchison 2001: 79). Tarrik decides to accompany Sphaeros to visit Sparta and discover new ways of ruling. This process of gaining knowledge is analysed as a threat to established communal life: It is natural for men to live in communities and painful to them when these communities break up [. . .] Yet as men’s minds grow, they have to question. And as they question and become different one from another and want to be still more different and to lead each his own separate life, so the community breaks up. Mitchison 2001: 415

The erosion of community life is associated with the Corn King and the Spring Queen’s encounter with ‘Greek modes of thought, and especially those of Sphaeros the Stoic’ (416). This introduction to philosophy leads to the disintegration of the Marob community that had been based on nature and magic as ‘these two began to question, and, before they understood [. . .] they were out of their community and had to [. . .] face a world of apparent chaos and pain and [. . .] moral choices which [. . .] they could not deal with’ (416). The control of human fertility that Mitchison idealizes in the ‘super-conscious community’ that she explores in the ‘primitive’ societies in Comments on Birth Control and hypothesizes as being possible in a socially reformed, utopian future is critiqued in The Corn King and the Spring Queen as polarized to the condition of enlightenment. This state of knowledge is examined as a challenge to the magical society governed by fertility rites. Elizabeth Maslen notes the novel’s veiled approach to contemporary issues, suggesting it ‘very clearly reveals a danger within her own society of losing touch with roots [. . .] what happens in her story also warns against the aridity of self-interest which is rationalised in the capitalist ethic’ (Maslen 1999: 142). As Calder suggests, however, the novel is also concerned with the challenge rationalist philosophy poses to an elemental mode of life (Calder 1997: 97). In Comments on Birth Control and The Corn King and the Spring Queen, intelligence, education and fertility are conceived as opposing forces. Mitchison’s 1932 textbook, An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents, examines the difficulty of reconciling an organic communal life centrally concerned with mankind’s generative nature with rational enlightenment. It responds to this problem by devising a syllabus of knowledge that accommodates the instrumentalization of human fertility in plans for social reform and cultivates an educated future citizen shaped by both socialist principles and scientific knowledge.

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An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents: Eugenics and the community In October 1932, Winifred Holtby reviewed An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents in Time and Tide, commenting that the collection evidenced a ‘democratic, candid [. . .] attitude’ (Holtby 1932: 1052). The volume’s central concern with the relationship between democracy and knowledge is shaped by its political moment: the left-wing publisher, Victor Gollancz invited Mitchison to edit the volume ‘in the middle of the 1931 general election’ which led to the eventual formation of the National Government (Mitchison 1986: 169). Mitchison found that the volume fitted in ‘splendidly with my political preoccupations. [. . .] we were very hopeful. The book was clearly needed at that time’ (Mitchison 1986: 170). Mitchison’s analysis of the collection’s emergence from impulses of hope and reform captures the progressive tenor of the volume, with its contributors identified by reviewers as harking from a new generation of writers and thinkers. Its scientific approach to knowledge both aimed to create intelligent citizens, and examined how intelligence could provide a means for shaping a community informed by eugenic reforms. Within the collection itself, intelligence is contextualized in psychological and biological terms, which reflect the modern understanding of the idea of ‘intelligence’ (Danziger 1997: 66–84). In ‘Physiology’, Dr Evelyn Hewer and Professor Winifred Cullis, a member of the board of Time and Tide and Professor of Physiology at the London School of Medicine for Women, frame intelligence as a concept associated with nineteenth-century evolution. They explore the structure and purpose of the brain to note man’s intellectual distinction from beast and refer to the hierarchy of human minds: ‘The greater our power of interpreting [. . .] incoming messages, and understanding them, the more intelligent we are’ (Mitchison 1936: 84). ‘Psychology’ by the psychiatrist Eric Strauss is dismissive of psychometric testing as he comments that the branch of psychology concerned with ‘classification and orderly study of mental “faculties” [. . .] has only succeeded in producing innumerable dry-as-dust text-books’ (142). While chapters in the book frame intelligence in scientific terms, Mitchison’s introduction associates intelligence with political and civic engagement. The volume claims to provide the knowledge necessary to ‘live intelligently in a society and be a good citizen, either of your country or of the world’ asserting that ‘you have to understand how power and knowledge and order are organised,

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and how the organisation can be altered’ (11). Such an aim is stated in the context of dissatisfaction with the current political climate. The text suggests that ‘very few of us’ are ‘capable of governing the country’ resulting in ‘muddles and misunderstandings. An Outline for Boys and Girls is an attempt to clear up these muddles, to make the people who will be running things in another twenty years aware of all the different kinds of knowledge and values.’ (5). In order to cultivate these intelligent citizens, Mitchison composes a curriculum informed by a sense of how the self is defined by communal forces. The book follows a ‘definite scheme [. . .] working outward, from Me or You [. . .] to the Universe. From Now [. . .] to all time, past and future.’ (5). It approaches this method through three different sections, starting with chapters on ‘Science’, which aim to give an understanding of ‘the kind of animal you are, and [. . .] the kind of place that you live in’ (389). The second part covers ‘Civilisation’ and looks at communal life in order to ‘show you how it is possible to be the best kind of individual, the best kind of “I”, and at the same time to fit in with a group – to be what is called social’. (11). The final part considers ‘Values’ through the framework of an exploration of the arts because ‘they are [. . .] what makes life feel valuable, what makes civilisation worth living in or for’ (753). The arts themselves are perceived as a particularly significant vehicle for fostering communal life; they ‘bridge[s] the gap between people, and stops them being separate and lonely [. . .] Perhaps this might be the real value of art [. . .] it makes us feel we are joining together’ (754–756). The volume’s emphasis on a scientific – rather than religious – approach to knowledge received controversy on publication. While the reviewer in The Highway noted that the collection ‘makes no concession to the sinful old pedagogic methods which put a moral order in front of the material order’ (Unsigned 1932: 22), in the conservative press, its lack of emphasis on religious morality prompted outrage. Most notably, the Bishop of Durham penned an open letter to the Church Times which noted that the book could do ‘immense and irreparable harm’ amongst the ‘intelligent and curious’ (Lunn 1932: 483). He condemned the collection because it ‘simply excluded’ ‘religion and morality’ and instead ‘purports to express the conclusions of science [. . .] with an omniscient dogmatism incongruous [. . .] with the cautious habit of genuine science, but immensely effective with inexperienced and half-educated people’ (Lunn 1932: 483, 483, 482). The role of eugenics in improving society and mankind is a recurrent feature of contributors’ essays. The tone of these contributions varies, with some demonstrating ‘dogmatism’ and others admitting ‘the cautious habit of genuine science’.

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The biochemist N.W. Pirie exercised some degree of scientific caution yet remained optimistic about the potential efficacy of a eugenics programme in his chapter on ‘Applied Biology’. He suggested that ‘[c]learly man might be improved’ (Mitchison 1936: 214) through carefully engineered breeding, noting that ‘many people have great faith’ (214) in eugenics but stating relative ignorance surrounding heredity in man to be ‘very hopeful about it yet’ (214). Nonetheless, Pirie finds that ‘it should be possible to start eugenic experiments in a generation or two’ (214). The zoologist Dr John R. Baker included a subsection on eugenics in his chapter on ‘Biology’ to argue that ‘the most successful people have the fewest children in most civilised countries to-day, and the least successful the most. [. . .] It would certainly be better if the most successful people had most children, because success in life is partly due to inherited qualities’ (205). Baker reflects Haldane’s reformist eugenicist stance: ‘If we wanted to improve our race, we should give everyone an equal chance in life as far as possible. We should then encourage the most successful to have a lot of children.’ (205). He foretells of biological catastrophe, as he reflects the findings of the Wood Committee in the suggestion that ‘feeble-minded people’ are ‘increasing rapidly in numbers in Great Britain. Before long they will form quite a large proportion of our population, unless we decide not to allow them to have children.’ (205). The essay alludes to the failure of the sterilization bill in its polemical closure that co-opts Mitchison’s volume into a call for eugenic laws for enforced sterilization in order to save democracy: ‘Members of Parliament, who decide these things, think it best to let them go on multiplying. When they were young, Members of Parliament did not have an Outline for Boys and Girls.’ (205). The Workers’ Educational Association tutor and science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon also adopted an alarmist tone as he explored how to improve the human race, in a chapter focused on ‘Problems and Solutions’. He hopes for a society embedded in both positive and negative eugenic measures, contending It is very important to stop the breeding of bad stocks as soon as possible, but some day we may do more than that. We may encourage the best stocks to breed [. . .] to make a race of splendid men and women with beautiful bodies and lively, daring minds. Mitchison 1936: 732

Stapledon foretells this brave new world to be ‘dangerous’ (733) with the potential to breed qualities unevenly or for misappropriation of biological controls by governments. If it is handled wisely, however, Stapledon hopes to produce

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‘intelligent [. . .] sensitive [. . .] free, responsible citizens of the world, understanding and approving of the whole pattern of world-life.’ (733). Although the book dismayed religious authorities, the mainstream press found much to praise in the scientific approach to knowledge. The Fortnightly Review declared the volume ‘one of the three or four most important books of the century’ suggesting that ‘the crowning virtue of the Outline is that it sounds throughout the note “Science for Life”’ (Thomson 1932: 525). It hoped that the collection could contribute to social and cultural renewal declaring that through ‘thinking scientifically [. . .] and when all boys and girls carry it in their knapsack [. . .] the Kingdom of Man will begin again to come in our midst and the joy of life will be less shadowed.’(525). The New Statesman and Nation found ‘Science’ ‘so obviously excellent’ calling it ‘the most important contribution made to education in this century’ with particular praise given to Pirie’s chapter on ‘Applied Biology’ with its cautious advocacy of eugenics (Fremantle 1932: xiv). Stapledon’s contribution attracted a mixed response. The New Statesman suggested that he was amongst several contributors who are ‘inclined to take the “we whose souls are lighted, with wisdom from on high” attitude’, commenting on the ‘idealism’ of his essay and its quality as ‘propaganda [. . .] the authors of Part II are trying to safeguard their own immortality – are endeavouring to sow the seed of their beliefs before it is too late’ (Fremantle 1932: xiv). Conversely, the TLS called his chapter a ‘winning and sincere attempt to sketch a modern ethic’ calling him ‘a writer from whom one may expect good things to come.’ (Murray 1932: 722). The fact that the eugenic views of the volume’s contributors did not attract specific comment, and were rather accepted as part of the progressive outlook of the volume as a whole, suggests not only the pervasive nature of eugenic ideas in the 1930s, but also its apparently accepted – if controversial – part as a programme of social reform. Mitchison’s contribution to the collection does not specifically mention eugenics, but nor does she edit the references out – despite her claims of being ‘a brute with the blue pencil’ (Mitchison 1936: 4) in the editorial process. Notably, You May Well Ask acknowledges that John Pilley, who contributed the volume’s first essay on ‘What Science Can Do (And What It Cannot)’ and with whom Mitchison was having an affair, ‘helped me a lot with the actual science editing’ (Mitchison 1986: 170). The diligent editorial cross references supplied in parentheses after references to eugenics in the work of Pirie, Baker and Stapledon suggest an attempt to encourage the reader to trace the attitude to eugenics across the collection. The introduction notes the inclusion of these cross references to allow the reader to ‘look things up easily’ (Mitchison 1936: 5). Pilley himself, however, urged a more holistic view of the measure of man beyond a

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focus on mental ability as he notes the propensity of scientists to ‘become so interested in the resemblances between things [. . .] that they lose sight of the things themselves’ (29). Pilley implicitly focuses this comment on the myopic view of humanity provided by eugenics: ‘in calling anybody clever we usually bear in mind that this is never more than an incomplete description of what we feel about them’ (29). Mitchison’s Introduction to Part II of the book also notes the difficulties of applying scientific knowledge to society (390) and urges readers to notice ‘how many different points of view the writers have had’ (390) in Part I. However, the writers who mention eugenics do broadly advocate its principles, with varying degrees of caution and evangelism. Mitchison’s May 1933 resignation from the Eugenics Society demonstrates a more robust rebuttal of the eugenicist ideas that the Outline seems to tolerate as it evolves a communal pedagogy that is concerned with developing a syllabus of knowledge that will shape the relationship between the self and society. The Outline registers the desire to substitute new ‘social and individual values’ for old and is ultimately ambivalent about the extent to which eugenics could be part of these new social values (Mitchison: Wellcome). We Have Been Warned (1935), which Mitchison began in early 1932 and finished on the day of the Reichstag fire in April 1933, before multiple redraftings, is reflective of Mitchison’s detachment from the Eugenics Society yet remains preoccupied by questions of birth control, inheritance and intelligence in social change. The novel revises a masculinized tradition of eugenics to explore a feminist inheritance of intelligence. While the novel expresses resistance to revolutionary forms of social change, contraception facilitates new cross-class social relationships and the efficacy of education in creating a levelling of intelligence is considered.

We Have Been Warned: Community, inheritance and female intelligence Mitchison’s heavily autobiographical novel We Have Been Warned explores the social and political conscience of Dione Galton as she accompanies her husband, Tom, on his 1931 election campaign and visits the USSR as part of a Fabian delegation – both experiences Mitchison underwent in the 1930s. You May Well Ask details the difficulty Mitchison had publishing the novel with Jonathan Cape. She then approached Gollancz who turned the novel down for fear of his reputation with the Left, and eventually published with Constable after some editorial wranglings. Questions of literary decency determined much of the

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controversy surrounding the novel; not only did it depict an abortion based on Mitchison’s own experience in the USSR, but references to contraception in the novel’s sex scenes formed a particular point of provocation: Mitchison notes that ‘anything about contraceptives’ particularly shocked the reader for Jonathan Cape, Edward Garnett (Mitchison 1986: 173). Cape himself also wanted references to contraceptives removed. ‘Clearly’ Mitchison later noted, ‘this was one of the main areas of contention’ (Mitchison 1986: 175). The novel’s honest approach to sex and relationships informed critical response. Q.D. Leavis suggested that Mitchison ‘smears everything she handles with a nauseating brand of sentimentality, so that revolutionary feeling is for her bound up with an incessant kissing and pawing between and among the sexes’ (Leavis 1935: 128). Gollancz looked upon this combination of sex and politics more favourably. Despite rejecting the novel, he called it ‘the first piece of genuinely social art’ finding it to be ‘immensely valuable as such  – the sexual parts no less than the political and economic’ (Mitchison 1986: 176, 176–177). Mitchison’s reluctance to remove the references to birth control are significant for her ‘social’ message where contraception facilitates cross-class sexual encounters that lead to the forging of new emotional and social bonds for Dione and her husband Tom, with Donald and Oksana respectively. Mitchison’s text is also centrally concerned with familial bonds as it engages with eugenic discourse to consider notions of hereditary intelligence. Intelligence is a key element to Dione’s characterization: she identifies herself as one of ‘the young, gay, intelligent people’ (Mitchison 2012: 62) and Cyril Connolly noted Mitchison’s ‘gift of rendering the speech, thought, and feeling of an intelligent woman’ (Connolly 1935: 594). The name ‘Dione Galton’ signals an indebtedness to Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869), a founding text of eugenic thought that delineates Galton’s central claim that genius is inherited. Galton’s focus is on an androcentric enquiry into talent. His introduction notes his concern with ‘eminent men of modern days’ arguing that it would have not been ‘consistent with decorum [. . .] to introduce the names of female relatives that stand in the same category’ (Galton 1869: 3). He suggests that ‘[m]y case is so overwhelmingly strong, that I am perfectly able to prove my point without having recourse to this class of evidence. Nevertheless, the reader should bear in mind that it exists’ (3). H.N. Brailsford commented that the novel was concerned with ‘the tranquil procession of the generations, the confident planning for an assured future, in which children shall inherit what fathers build’ (Brailsford 1935: 7). However, Mitchison’s text offers a matrilineal analysis of inheritance that is in dialogue with the masculinized model presented by Galton. This feminist reworking of a

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masculinized eugenicist model is significant in the context of the focus given to the male line of her family in The Haldanes of Gleneagles. Mitchison was, nonetheless, listed in the volume as the daughter of J.S. Haldane. Her education and war experience are noted, alongside her literary achievements as ‘the author of The Conquered, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and other historical novels; awarded the Palms of the French Academy (1924)’ (J.A.L. Haldane 1929: 237). The text also notes her ‘issue’, listing her five children. J.S. Haldane’s essay in the volume is in dialogue with the masculinized focus of the collection. He affirms the ‘female line of descent’ in determining ‘special individual characteristics transmitted from birth’ and suggests the Janus-like nature of ‘hereditary behaviour’ which ‘unites in itself both past experience and outlook for the future’ (J.S. Haldane 1929: 272). Haldane’s examination of inheritance as elucidating both past traditions and future projections elucidates We Have Been Warned’s proleptic closure. Notions of inheritance offer a lens through which to understand the interpolation of fantastical elements into this social realist narrative. Such elements have attracted much critical attention as awkward disjunctions with the main narrative of the novel.6 However, existing interpretations do not account for Mitchison’s attempts to embed within We Have Been Warned a subnarrative of feminist, matriarchal inheritance. This is signalled by Dione’s alignment with explicitly Galtonian discourses via her married family name and the novel’s framing opening which examines Jean Maclean – Dione’s ancestor on her mother’s side (her mother’s maiden name is noted as MacLean in the text’s preliminary material (Mitchison 2012: xxiii). The novel’s sub-narrative overlays Dione’s attempts to reconcile her awakening socialist conscience and privileged family background with a mystical familial inheritance that signals female disruption and rebellion. The opening of the novel depicts Dione exploring her family heritage as she reads a ‘volume of criminal trials’ (4) that contain a report of the trial of Jean Maclean, ‘called Green Jean, for witchcraft’ (4). Benefitting from a ‘moderately enlightened jury’, Jean was acquitted ‘not because she was innocent, but because she was the Lady of Auchanarnish’ (4). Jean was then attacked and thrown out on to the hillside with her baby before both were found dead. MacLean now haunts Auchanarnish, ‘in her green dress, carrying her baby and mourning [. . .] a witch would rather be burnt and her ashes scattered on the fields. The un-ritual death by cold could not lay Green Jean.’ (4). The probable source for this book is Robert Pitcairn’s series of publications Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland (1833). The third volume of this collection

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covers the beginning of the seventeenth century until 1624. Details noted in We Have Been Warned accord with Pitcairn’s volume. Dione notes that the volume she is reading contains testimonies of witches: ‘Now she had come to the evidence; she liked reading what the witches themselves said’ (Mitchison 2012: 5), just as the first part of the third volume of Pitcairn’s work contains an appendix that details three confessions of ‘Issobel Gowdie’, which identifies the ‘Maiden to the Coven’ as ‘green Jean Martein’ (Pitcairn 1833: 606). Isobel Gowdie’s confession was an important context for understanding witchcraft in the nineteenth century. Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) used Pitcairn’s volume as his source and notes the ‘extremely minute’ detail of Gowdie’s confession and its ‘singular’ nature (Scott 1830: 286, 291). As a child Dione and her sister Phoebe saw Jean Maclean in the nursery corridor and aligned themselves with their occult heritage in a bookplate to the volume, which noted ‘her name, Isobel Dione Fraser, and her sister’s name, Elizabeth Phoebe Fraser. Isobel and Elizabeth were their witch names.’ (Mitchison 2012: 3). Although her family claimed that ‘of course Jean Maclean had not been a witch; there were no such things as witches,’ (4) Dione rejects this family narrative: ‘now this other woman, her descendant, Isobel Dione Galton, rereading the trial in her old schoolroom after fifteen years, was doubting and criticising the family tradition’ (4). The novel’s commitment to inheritance is signalled by the narrator’s use of both Dione’s Galtonian surname and her witch name to identify her occult family origins. Re-educating herself on her family tradition in ‘her old schoolroom’, Dione explores the mystical alternative to the rationalist family tradition of Jean MacLean’s status as a witch. An identification between Dione and her ancestor is further signalled through the text’s formal effects. Mitchison’s attempts at literary experimentation were received negatively by Cyril Connolly in the New Statesman and Nation who found that the book ‘comes off worst in the literary passages, such as the beginning, which combines the technique of The Waves with the background of To The Lighthouse in obvious and uneasy assimilation’ (Connolly 1935: 594). The text’s opening paragraph deliberately blurs the lines between Dione’s experience as a reader and the time and place depicted in the book she reads on Green Jean’s trial: Her mind focused sometimes on to the page and sometimes beyond it. It shifted her in time and space. It shifted her more in time than in space. For in the book the time was middle seventeenth century and the place was Inverary, but out of the book the time was September 1931, but the place was Aucharnarnish [. . .].

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The shapes of the hills were almost exactly the same, and the shapes of the sealochs, and behind the wall-paper, which was about thirty years old, the stone outer walls of the Auchanarnish schoolroom were the same as they had been then. It was only the woman in the book and the woman who was reading it who were different. Mitchison 2012: 3

The multiple repetitions establish a cyclical link between present day Auchanarnish and seventeenth century Inverary. Mimi Winick notes the ‘literal transport’ in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, whereby the novel effects a ‘movement from realism to realist fantasy’ (Winick 2015: 576). A similar strategy is evident in this passage as Mitchison employs textual effects that overlay past and present experience to create a sense of intersubjective experience. Nick Hubble argues that Mitchison ‘employs fantasy and magic [. . .] to generate imaginary spaces in her texts where both identity and difference and consciousness and unconsciousness become intermingled in an intersubjective mix’ (Hubble 2017: 16). In the opening of We Have Been Warned, this ‘intersubjective mix’ signals a notion of selfhood shaped by heredity. Such literary devices stand in opposition to the text’s claim that Jean and Dione are ‘different’. The merging of time and space creates an identification between the two women that becomes significant at the novel’s closure, and subtly transposes an anti-realist impulse onto the narrative’s seemingly dominant realistic mode in a way that prefigures the clumsier apparition of Green Jean in the schoolroom at the closure of the book. Parallels between Jean Maclean and Dione’s fertility are also established on the level of plot and story. Jean is identified with female fecundity and motherhood. The association of the occult with female fertility reflects Margaret Alice Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which argues that early modern witches were part of an ancient fertility cult. Murray noted that witches’ roles encompassed the promotion and prevention of birth: ‘they claimed to be able to cause and to prevent pregnancy [. . .] to have power over the generative organs [. . .] it is possible to say [. . .] the better the midwife the better the witch’ (Murray 1921: 170). Murray particularly identifies the ploughing ceremony detailed in Isobel Gowdie’s confession as a ritual designed to ‘induce fertility for the benefit of the witches’ (171). Murray notes a usurpation of the witch’s role: while ‘[o]riginally for the promotion of fertility’ the cult ‘became gradually degraded into a method for blasting fertility’ and the witches ‘who had been once the means of bringing prosperity to the people and the land by driving out all

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evil influences [. . .] were looked upon as being themselves [. . .] evil [. . .] and were held in horror’ (24). The closure of We Have Been Warned, where Green Jean warns Dione of the ‘counter-revolution’, suggests Mitchison’s attempt to enact a feminist reclaiming of the witch’s original function. The politicization of female fertility in the witch trials is a context that resonates with Mitchison’s examination of birth control in the 1930s and the pervasive eugenic biology of the decade, which freighted women’s reproduction with national significance. At the opening of the novel, Dione considers having another baby whom she would name in recognition of her family heritage: ‘If she had another girl she would call her Jean. [. . .] She knew she mustn’t have any more children. Unless the revolution came in time, before she was too old.’ (Mitchison 2012: 3). Green Jean explicitly associates Dione’s family with occult forms of organization in her appearance at the end of the novel ‘You and your coven are in danger, Isobel Dione’ (529). In the latter stages of We Have Been Warned Dione becomes pregnant and, reluctant to have a baby in the face of what she considers to be the impending social unrest of revolution, she plans to travel to Paris to procure an abortion. She is partly convinced to keep the child through a conversation she has with Teddy, a biologist colleague of Tom Galton’s at Oxford: ‘We feel we aren’t justified in bringing any more people into such a world as it is. And we feel that the more children we have the more we’re bound to cling to safety.’ ‘My dear Dione, I don’t see you and Tom turning into . . . little Conservatives – sorry to use biological adjectives! – if you had a hundred infants! Go on, have it, what’s one more or less? If you had to think in numbers the way a biologist does you wouldn’t fuss so. [. . .] Now, can’t you find a nice girl who’d be willing to bear me half a dozen healthy children and stay intelligent herself? I’d give her every facility. Or shall I have to wait for Morag? [. . .] don’t you go doing this!’ She shook her head: ‘No, Teddy, I must be reasonable.’ ‘Don’t be reasonable,’ he said, ‘be intelligent!’ Mitchison 2012: 496–497

Teddy’s speech reflects the profound mid-1930s concern with population levels and the quality of the national stock: two articles in The Times in September 1936 on ‘The Dwindling Family’ seized the popular imagination and early in 1936 the Eugenics Society established a Population Investigation Committee to explore why fertility levels were falling (Overy 2010: 131–132). Tom’s parting injunction ‘be intelligent!’ along with the identification of Morag, Dione’s daughter, as ‘intelligent’ situates Dione in a line of intelligent women. The

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concatenation of ideas surrounding intelligence and population control, along with Teddy’s encouragement of Dione’s breeding, reflects positive eugenicist arguments. Q.D. Leavis implied that the text also had a negative eugenicist message, interpreting the novel’s advocacy of birth control in class-coded terms as she argued that Mitchison associates a lack of access to contraception with a failure of intelligence: ‘to Mrs. Mitchison she [the working-class woman] only means reflections of the “How horrible to [. . .] live in such poky little rooms. . .Silly of her not to have found out about contraception” type.’(Leavis 1935: 129). The novel’s engagement with positive eugenic ideals does not necessarily render it also an advocacy of negative eugenic ideals; indeed one character living on the Means Test in Dione’s husband’s working-class Birmingham constituency is identified as ‘a jolly, intelligent girl, with a young baby’ (397). Dione’s hereditary intelligence stretches back to Green Jean in ways that suggestively engages with the understanding of witches as clever, unconventional women. The links between witchcraft and intelligence are overtly made elsewhere in Mitchison’s work. In The Corn King and the Spring Queen, the status of the novel’s witch, Erif Der, as ‘clever’ is repeatedly explored (Mitchison 2001: 90, 243). Mitchison’s association of female witches with intelligence is also evident in her adaptation of a traditional Scottish fairytale ‘Nix Nought Nothing’ which was performed to raise funds for the North Kensington Clinic, of which Mitchison was on the Committee. You May Well Ask recalled the play’s ‘lighting effects showing the fish and bird flocks beautifully’ (Mitchison 1986: 35). Mitchison gives the story a feminist reworking with an emphasis on the intelligence of female witches. The story’s main female character, Mary, is changed from the daughter of a giant to the daughter of a wizard. Although originally identified by her father as having ‘no power’ Mary helps Nix Nought Nothing achieve the tasks he has been set by her father through magic: ‘You took my daughter,/Who stole my magic’ (Mitchison 1940: 264; 275). The finale of the play is on Nix Nought Nothing’s wedding day to a foreign princess who, the stage directions note,‘should if possible be beautiful [. . .] but need not be intelligent’ (283). After working for Nix Nought Nothing’s family, Mary, aided by her magic powers, reveals herself to him. In the story’s closure, rather than Mary being identified as ‘kind’ as in the original, the king suggests instead that ‘She seems a most intelligent lady’ (289). The instrumentalization of this play for a women’s clinic fundraiser echoes the links between intelligence and contraception established in the implied readers of Comments on Birth Control and suggests that Mitchison’s emphasis on women’s intelligence was not merely a reflection of a eugenicist social and political climate, but overlapped with a broader feminist reproductive agenda.

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Through consideration of the broader context of Mitchison’s work, Jean Maclean’s powers of prophecy at the end of We Have Been Warned, whereby she grants Dione an insight into visions of a ‘counter-revolution’ (Mitchison 2012: 546), are suggestively recontextualized as a form of female intelligence. The novel’s apocalyptic vision is tempered by its final moments, which suggest rebirth and renewal: ‘You have been warned,’ Green Jean said [. . .] and faded – faded – and the sun had set. And Agnes Green came hastily into the schoolroom: ‘Dione, what were you doing? We lost you!’ [. . .] Dione caught hold of her: ‘I saw,’ she said; ‘I saw the counter-revolution happening. And you were all being shot!’ [. . .] And then Tom came in, too, and saw her clinging on to Agnes Green, and cried out: ‘Sweetheart, what is it?’ and caught her under the shoulders, his arm by Agnes Green’s arm. ‘We have been warned,’ Dione said, and it was as though a steel spring had suddenly loosened and vibrated inside her. The baby was coming alive and moving in her for the first time. Mitchison 2012: 553

The awakening child, which the novel’s opening page suggests will be called ‘Jean’, implies the persistence of Dione’s inheritance of intelligence and tempers the novel’s dystopian conclusion. Angela Kershaw suggests that the novel’s ‘nonrealist narrative form’ is a symptom of ‘political despair’ as Mitchison dramatizes ‘a radical contradiction within her own political thought’ through the novel’s dystopian closure and its utopian Soviet episode which ‘coexist, making it impossible to decide whether the text is for or against revolution’ (Kershaw 2006). For contemporary reviewers, the text did not hold such ambiguity. In the Left Review, Tom Wintringham found that the book ‘suddenly comes alive’ in its final sections noting that ‘the cause’ of this ‘is a real and deeply-rooted fear, in Mrs. Mitchison and in very many others, that the only result of revolutionary struggle in this country will be “white terror” ’ (Wintringham 1935: 382). The Moral Basis of Politics elucidates Mitchison’s resistance to revolutionary social change, identifying that men of the calibre of Lenin and Trotsky ‘are extremely unlikely to be thrown up at the right time’ (Mitchison 1938: 105). These men have the ability to ‘gauge the moment’ when ‘the time is ripe’ for revolution but ‘[n]or is it certain that the time will ever ripen’ (Mitchison 1938: 105). The association Mitchison makes between revolution and counter-revolution in We Have Been Warned is also elucidated as she suggests that the violence of

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revolution ‘creates hate, fear and irrationality in others and, in turn, a counterforce. It is an obvious historical fact that counter-revolutions are always much more unpleasant and violent than revolutions’ (Mitchison 1938: 102–103). While ambivalent about the role of revolution in creating social change, the closure does imply an alternative. The novel’s final moments place Green Jean in an implicit relationship with the novel’s communist schoolteacher, Agnes Green. The narrative voice repeatedly refers to Agnes by her full name, which has the effect of encouraging an association between the pair. This association, along with the ‘schoolroom’ setting, implies education as a more moderate method of social change in the face of the novel’s resistance to revolutionary action.

Education, intelligence and meritocratic communities The novel’s closure is haunted by a commitment to education as facilitating social change. This closure reprises the novel’s debate between the role of education and revolution in effecting social change that is more overtly explored earlier in the novel. In conversation with her brother – the communist sympathizer Alex – Dione suggests that social change is ‘a matter of education’ (Mitchison 2012: 136) only for Alex to rail against this: ‘“Education be damned,” said Alex [. . .] “But if it isn’t education,” said Dione, “then it must be – revolution” “Exactly.”’ (137). Education as a method of social change is also one that has disillusioned Agnes Green: ‘What about education?’ ‘No time, Dione. Besides, you can educate a few highbrow children, but you don’t touch the elementary schools. I spend my working time shoving at the structure of education, hoping to budge it an inch. [. . .] A good many of us are doing that; we’re bound, as a profession, to see things as they are to some extent. But oh, my dear, it’s so tiring [. . .] it would be so easy just to do plain State teaching!’ [. . .] Dione realised what it must be like for her to be making this effort the whole time, to be in a constant state of strain. Mitchison 2012: 424–425

The passage contains a self-reflexive commentary on Mitchison’s own educational activity – her edited textbook An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents (1932) and the plays for schools she broadcast for the BBC, as being for ‘a few highbrow children’ rather than the children in elementary schools. Through Dione, Mitchison’s educational activity is critiqued as not effecting any institutional change, and her earlier comments surrounding elementary school

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education (‘a child in an elementary school is usually just disciplined into a few facts – it isn’t drawn out as our children are’; 2012 400) are recontextualized as myopic. Agnes Green remains cynical about her ability to change working-class education, conceived here as being based in the elementary school, stateeducation system. Q.D. Leavis critiqued the depiction of Soviet education in the U.S.S.R. scenes of We Have Been Warned as utopian and suggested that Mitchison – like other ‘lady novelists’ – evaded an autodidact tradition of working-class education and eroded the role of the family in working-class associational and cultural life: ‘if, in obedience to the ideology of a political party, they deny that such a [workingclass] culture has ever existed, they are helping to deprive the English workers of the cultural heritage which their ancestors heroically earned.’ (Leavis 1935: 129). There are limitations with Leavis’s reading: she does not acknowledge Dione’s cynicism towards Soviet education as indoctrination (Mitchison 2012: 295), and the character of Donald Maclean in the novel is indeed associated with an autodidact tradition; originally intended for the Ministry, he now ‘seems to be reading any amount’ (132) despite not formally continuing his education. However, working-class characters in the novel repeatedly experience meritocratic modes of social advancement through the scholarship ladder: from Agnes Green, the daughter of a publican; to Idris Pritchard (‘the clever boy of the family [. . .] I won scholarships. So they sent me to college’; 407); and the Finney children: related to local farmers in Auchanarnish, Chrissie Finney is identified as ‘intelligent [. . .] She and her brother will probably both go to a University.’ (525). In We Have Been Warned, the focus on the educational opportunities available for the ‘intelligent’ reflects the Hadow Report’s advocacy of a tripartite secondary system of education. The novel suggestively examines the motivations behind Mitchison’s own educational activities with implications for questions of intelligence: Have I got to be torn, one half of me wanting brotherhood, demanding it as the only sensible thing, and the other half realising the plain fact of intellectual inequality? That means education, of course, and equality in the future. But now? Mitchison 2012: 62

Dione’s sense that ‘education’ is a remedy for ‘intellectual inequality’ demonstrates a conception of education as a means of levelling intelligence that echoes Lewis’s article in The Realist. The perception of intelligence as affected by education is also reflected in Mitchison’s 1935 campaign as a Labour Candidate for the Scottish Universities. Her campaign leaflet specifically addressed teachers: ‘I

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stand for the equal rights of men and women teachers at schools and in the Universities, and for raising the school age, at the same time raising all school standards, material and mental, to the level of the very best.’ (McMaster Box 163). Such a position renders Mitchison in dialogue with her brother, J.B.S. Haldane who discussed intellectual inequality and its relationship to educational opportunities in The Inequality of Man (1932), published around the time Mitchison started writing We Have Been Warned. The Inequality of Man notes that the ‘more widespread’ educational opportunities in the United States demonstrates that ‘[u]niversal education leads, not to equality, but to inequality based on real differences of talent’ (J.B.S. Haldane 1938: 28). Haldane alludes to Charles Spearman’s concept of ‘general factor’ intelligence (or ‘g’), which Spearman associated with the ‘mental energy’ required for the performance of mental tests (Gregory 2004: 473). Haldane is cynical about the influence education can have on ‘g’: ‘There is [. . .] no evidence at all that classical or any other education increases “g”, and a good deal that it does not.’ (J.B.S. Haldane 1938: 31). He suggests that ‘g’ as a measure of intellectual capacity seems ‘fairly strongly inherited, and education can do little more than just give it a chance to show up’ (J.B.S. Haldane 1938: 31). In The Moral Basis of Politics (1938), Mitchison’s perception of the relationship between education and intelligence becomes more standardized against the claims made by psychometric testers. Mitchison suggests that IQ tests measure not educational attainment but intellectual capacity and posits a less causal link between education and intellectual attainment: Everyone has certain capabilities and certain sensitivities. These are not the same for everyone, but different. They are not caused by economic circumstances or by education, although, for instance, they may be suppressed by adverse economic circumstances or liberated by education. Mitchison 1938: 74

The suggestion that education is an emancipator of intelligence configures intellectual capacity as enslaved by educational inequality, but in the suggestion of the ‘different’ ‘capabilities’ of individuals Mitchison resists the idealism of We Have Been Warned, which accords education power as a stimulant of intellectual levelling. Mitchison’s post-war pamphlet, Re-Educating Scotland (1944), an educational report edited by Mitchison through her work with the Education Committee of the Scottish Convention, reflects the political current of educational reform that reached fruition in the tripartite educational system of the Butler Education Act.7

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The pamphlet attempts to mitigate the relationship between intellectual inequality and social inequality that the meritocratic order initiates. The scholarship ladder is identified as damaging Scotland’s educational system as this ‘narrowly academic tradition’ favours the ‘book-intelligent minority’ and neglects ‘the needs of the great majority of our children, who have not the academic ability to profit from a University education’ (Mitchison, Britton and Kilgour 1944: 7; 15, 7). Instead ‘We want young citizens [. . .] with abilities along all lines, not merely the academic ones’ (47). Despite de-centring academic attainment, intelligence remains a significant organizational tool for the proposed educational schema: ‘we must classify pupils in mental rather than actual age-groups’ (17). Re-Educating Scotland claims that ‘We have tried to think in terms of ordinary children, not very bright’ (46) and rejects the multilateralism backed by left-wing teaching groups based on the concern that ‘the least intelligent pupils would tend to be neglected’ (18). The pamphlet suggests, however, that the ultimate quality of an education system lies in its ability to provide for high-achievers: ‘clearly we must cater for the really bright, or our schools will still be second-rate’ (18). Like the influential Spens Report (1938), the pamphlet is committed to a tripartite system of education but maintains parity of esteem between all branches of education: ‘all forms of education are honourable, whether academic or technical, whether for the bright or the backward’ (6). In its maintenance of the ‘honour’ of academic and non-academic education, the pamphlet attempts to evade the hierarchical implications of meritocratic selective education, although in reality the intelligence tests that are advanced in Re-Educating Scotland as an organizational tool created the very hierarchical system that the pamphlet seeks to avoid. Where Re-educating Scotland wrestles with how public policy-making could mitigate the meritocratic terms of a burgeoning post-war democracy, the narrative closure of We Have Been Warned is haunted by education’s potential to create social change by peaceful means. The persistence of education’s reforming potential, despite the reservations of the novel’s characters, suggests the idealism of the text’s approach to social change, where education offers an alternative to the ‘kissing and pawing’ identified by Leavis (Leavis 1935: 128).

Conclusion In the mid-1930s, Mitchison envisaged intelligence as key to the cultivation of a democratically coherent community. Her left-wing politics, feminism and interest in eugenics all found expression in her commitment to the concept of

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intelligence. At the start of the decade, Mitchison diametrically opposed intelligence and rational thought to fertility in The Corn King and the Spring Queen and Comments on Birth Control, which both examined how knowledge split mankind from societies organized around fertility. An Outline for Boys and Girls and their Parents cultivated intelligence in twofold terms: both within an educational schema framed for citizens of a democracy, and in the tolerance the volume afforded for eugenically inspired plans of social reform. We Have Been Warned is structured around hereditary female intelligence in a revision of masculinized eugenicist thinking. The novel examines education as facilitating social and intellectual levelling in a conception of intelligence that is in dialogue with the intelligence testers: Mitchison frames mental ability as a malleable  – rather than static  – measurement. The novel finds an idealistic release from violent, revolutionary forms of social change in education and birth control, which are positioned as creating a revolution in consciousness. Mainline eugenicist thought thus provided both a stimulus and a foil for Mitchison’s thinking in the mid-1930s: it spurred her commitment to intelligence and spurned her progressive feminist and class politics.

Notes 1 The German government passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) on 14 July 1933. It mandated the forced sterilization of certain individuals with physical and mental disabilities or mental illness, as well as members of the Roma community and Afro-Germans. 2 In 1925, the President of the Eugenics Education Society and the Eugenics Society between 1911 and 1928, Major Leonard Darwin (one of Charles Darwin’s sons), felt that the Society needed to publish a clearer position on birth control, suggesting that an endorsement of contraception would drive members away, but would also bring in new members. In 1926 – shortly after Mitchison joined the Eugenics Education Society – the Society agreed to endorse birth control as a eugenic agent, but emphasized that birth control campaigns should be directed to the poor and regarded use of birth control by the rich as ‘immoral and unpatriotic’ (Soloway 1995: 184–185). 3 It is likely that Mitchison had read her brother’s 1930s works. Her autobiography notes that she and her brother sent each other their books during the decade (Mitchison 1986: 77). 4 For more on the utopian, visionary potential of J.B.S. Haldane’s scientific thinking, see Mark B. Adams, ‘Last Judgment: The Visionary Biology of J.B.S. Haldane’ (2000).

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5 Heard’s concept of ‘super-consciousness’ offers a mystical iteration of the Tylorian and Frazerian tradition of ‘psychic unity’. I am grateful to Dr Mike Collins for this observation. 6 Isobel Murray argues the text’s opening represents a ‘lack of authorial control’ and laments the time spent on Dione’s ‘personal Scottish mythology’ via the introduction of Jean Maclean, who Murray suggests is evident ‘chiefly to account for her reappearance [. . .] later’ (Murray 2012: xii, xiii, xiii–xiv). Elizabeth Maslen similarly laments the recurrence of Jean Maclean as an intrusion on the realist narrative suggesting that this ‘signal[s] the many centuries of unchanging hostility to those, like Dione, who explore the boundaries of what society will tolerate’ but finding ‘Dione’s world [. . .] cannot accommodate the slippage between actuality and intrusions from imaginary, fabular layers of consciousness’ (Maslen 1999: 143). 7 Mitchison’s wartime diaries record that she was given responsibility for editing the pamphlet (Sheridan 2000: 260).

Works cited Adams, Mark B. ‘Last Judgment: The Visionary Biology of J.B.S. Haldane’. Journal of the History of Biology, 33, 2000: 457–491. Board of Education. Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1924. Board of Education. The Education of the Adolescent. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1926. Brailsford, H.N. ‘The Exploring Mind’. The Observer. 28 April 1935: 7. Calder, Jenni. The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison. London: Virago Press, 1997. Connolly, Cyril. ‘New Novels’. New Statesman and Nation. 27 April 1935: 593–594. Danziger, Kurt. Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language. London: Sage, 1997. Fremantle, Anne. ‘The New Child’s Guide to Knowledge’. New Statesman and Nation. 15 (October), 1932: xiv. Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius. London: Macmillan, 1869. Gregory, Richard Langton (ed.). Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Gruenberg, H. ‘Men and Mice at Edinburgh: Reports from the Genetics Conference’ [The Geneticists’ Manifesto]. The Journal of Heredity. 30 (9), 1939: 371–374. Haldane, General Sir J. Aylmer L. The Haldanes of Gleneagles. London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1929. Haldane, J.B.S. Heredity and Politics. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1943 [1938]. Haldane, J.B.S. Human Biology and Politics. London: The British Science Guild, 1934.

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Haldane, J.B.S. The Inequality of Man and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938 [1932]. Haldane, J.B.S., A.D. Sprunt, and N.M. Haldane. ‘Reduplication in Mice’. Journal of Genetics. 5 (2), December 1915: 133–135. Haldane, J.S. ‘The Heredity of the Gleneagles Family’. In The Haldanes of Gleneagles. General Sir J. Aylmer L. Haldane (ed.). London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1929: 269–272 Heard, Gerald. The Ascent of Humanity. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. Holtby, Winifred. ‘Mrs. Mitchison’s Academy’. Time and Tide. 1 October 1932: 1052. Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Joannou, Mary. ‘Naomi Mitchison at One Hundred’. Women: A Cultural Review. 9 (3), 1998: 292–304. Jones, Greta. ‘Eugenics and Social Policy Between the Wars’. The Historical Journal. 25 (3), 1982: 717–728. Kavanagh, Matthew. ‘British Communism, Periodicals and Comprehensive Education: 1920–56’, Twentieth Century Communism. 12, 2017: 88–120. Kershaw, Angela. ‘French and British Female Intellectuals and the Soviet Union. The Journey to the USSR, 1929–1942’, E-rea 4.2 (2006). https://journals.openedition.org/ erea/250 [Accessed 15 February 2019]. Leavis, Q.D. ‘Lady Novelists and the Lower Orders’. Scrutiny. September 1935: 112–132. Lewis, Dr E. O. ‘Mental Deficiency’. The Realist. II . (1), October 1929: 24–35 Lunn, Arnold. ‘The Scandal of the Outline’. The English Review. November 1932: 471–484. Maslen, Elizabeth. ‘Naomi Mitchison’s Historical Fiction’. In Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History. Mary Joannou (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999: 138–150. Meloni, Maurizio. Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Mitchison, Naomi. Comments on Birth Control. London: Faber & Faber, 1930. Mitchison, Naomi. ‘Nix Nought Nothing’. A Book of Short Plays XV-XX Centuries. London: Oxford University Press & The English Association, 1940: 256–291. Mitchison, Naomi (ed). An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents. London: Victor Gollancz: 1936 [1932]. Mitchison, Naomi. The Corn King and the Spring Queen. London: Canongate, 2001 [1931]. Mitchison, Naomi. The Moral Basis of Politics. London: Constable, 1938. Mitchison, Naomi. We Have Been Warned. Kilkerran: Kennedy & Boyd, 2012 [1935]. Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir of 1920 – 1940. London: Flamingo, 1986 [1979]. Mitchison, Naomi, Robert Britton and George Kilgour (eds.). Re-educating Scotland. Glasgow: Scoop Books, 1944.

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Murray, D.L. ‘An Outline for Youth’. Times Literary Supplement. 13 October 1932: 722. Murray, Isobel. ‘Introduction’, to Naomi Mitchison. We Have Been Warned. Kilkerran: Kennedy & Boyd, 2012 [1935]: v–xix. Murray, Margaret Alice. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921. Overy, Richard. The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization. London: Penguin, 2010 [2009]. Paul, Diane. ‘Eugenics and the Left’. Journal of the History of Ideas. 45 (4), 1984: 567–590. Pitcairn, Robert. Criminal Trials in Scotland Volume Third. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1833. Redvaldsen, David. ‘Eugenics, Socialists and the Labour Movement in Britain, 1865– 1940’. Historical Research. 90 (250), November 2017: 764–787. Scott, Sir Walter. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Addressed to J.G. Lockhart, Esq. London: John Murray, 1830. Sheridan, Dorothy (ed.). Among You Taking Notes: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939–1945. London: Phoenix Press, 2000 [1985]. Soloway, Richard A. Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain. Chapel Hill and London: 1995 [1990]. Sutherland, Gillian. Ability, Merit and Measurement: Mental Testing and English Education 1880–1940. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Thomson, Sir J. Arthur. ‘The Children’s Bread’. Fortnightly Review. (October), 1932: 523–525. Unsigned. ‘New and Recent Books’. The Highway. (October) 1932: 22–23. Winick, Mimi. ‘Modernist Feminist Witchcraft: Margaret Murray’s Fantastic Scholarship and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Realist Fantasy’. Modernism/Modernity. 22 (3), September 2015: 565–592. Wintringham, Tom. ‘We Have Been Scared’. Left Review. June 1935: 381–383. Wooldridge, Adrian. Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c.1860–c.1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Archives ‘Naomi Mitchison’. Vera Brittain Archive McMaster, Box 163. ‘Naomi Mitchison’ (dec’d). SAEUG/C/361/391. Wellcome Library. Wellcome Collection [online]https://search.wellcomelibrary.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1689911 [Accessed 14 October 2019].

4

British Culture and Identity in 1930s Anglophone Literature from Australia, Canada and India Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay

Introduction While the colonized spaces, cultures and people were studied, researched and (mis)represented in both non-fiction and fiction produced from the centres of European imperialism (including the centre of the British Empire), this encounter was not necessarily unilateral. Inhabitants of the colonized lands also formed their own opinions and perceptions about the colonizing peoples and races when they came in contact with these Western cultures. However, little academic attention has been assigned to study how the colonized populations defined their colonizers. In the case of the British Empire, the representation of Britishness/ Englishness in Anglophone literature from colonized spaces and peoples has received limited recognition. In the preface to Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 the editors, Robert Colls and Phillip Dodd, contemplate that ‘there is no account of what ‘the Empire’ or part of it, thought of the English’ (2014: n.p.), which contributes to certain ‘omissions’ in their collection. In available criticisms of English literature and culture such silences and omissions are often witnessed and sometimes justified. The current essay is an attempt to track those marginalized voices that spoke from the colonized lands of the British Empire and offered varied representations of Britishness/Englishness in their fictions of the 1930s. It is crucial to engage with both the content and context of productions of these imaginative and fictional representations as they demonstrate how the British Empire and its associated Britishness/Englishness are literary-cultural mosaics that have been perceived from the margins through the writings of colonized people, settlers, socialist writers, royalists and pro-imperialists, alongside the voices from within the United Kingdom. 123

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The 1930s experienced a series of global phenomena (including the Great Depression, rise of fascism in Europe and anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa) that transformed the financial, political and cultural life of the British Empire. Anglophone literature of the period represents these changing material conditions in the life of the Empire and provides us with an idea about the significance of the Empire on an international scale during the 1930s. When studied within a comparative framework, in which literary representations of the culture and concept of the British Empire produced from the white settlements are contrasted against the fictional depictions of the Empire in literary texts emerging from the racialized colonial contexts, the British Empire emerges as a complex abstraction that is internally conflicted. ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’, a conceptualcultural counterpart of the imperial economy, appears to be in a constant flux and is defined and negotiated through both temporal and spatial coordinates. A historicist reading of the major trends and texts that emerged from the peripheries of the British Empire in the 1930s provide important insight into the cultural image of the Empire as well as its associated ‘Englishness’. These representations further illustrate the long-term implications of the Empire in the lives of the postcolonial ‘Anglophone’ nations in a global world.

Major historical events that impacted the cultural and political identity of the Empire The cartography of the British Empire was permanently altered through the Statute of Westminster, implemented on December 11th, 1931, which articulated the legal relationship between Britain and its ‘white’ settler dominions of South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada (including Newfoundland), and the Irish Free State. As a result, these dominions emerged as new nations with their own sovereign parliaments, which could enjoy full legal freedom. The Statute did not ensure a completely independent status for the former dominions, but it was a step towards the formation of new national consciousness that was no longer an integral part of the Empire. The Statute initiated some of the resolutions that were passed by Imperial Conferences held in the years 1926 and 1930. The Statute of Westminster also declared that the participating dominions no longer remained colonies of the United Kingdom: ‘the expression “Colony” shall not, in any Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed after the commencement of this Act, include a Dominion or any Province or State forming part of a Dominion’ (Department of Justice, Government of Canada). And just like that,

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without any mass resistance or revolution, the dominion colonies became nations, settler nations to be specific. The indigenous and native peoples of Australia, Canada, South Africa or New Zealand did not necessarily regain any autonomy in political, economic, legal or cultural realms through this legislation of 1931. As a result, the decades following the 1930s witnessed racial and ethnicity-based discriminations, apartheids and indigenous peoples’ resistances in these provinces. It could be argued that the Statute of Westminster planted the seeds of an ongoing system of cultural and economic imperialism of the indigenous peoples. Following the Statute, the former self-governing dominions, each of which, until 1931, held an ambiguous status of ‘part nation, part colony, part imperial colleague’ (‘Commonwealth’), embarked on a process of independence. This process of the ‘growing up’ of the aforesaid geopolitical landscapes established the concept of the British Commonwealth and contributed to the eventual dissolution of the Empire. Literature emerging from these Anglophone settlements began the process of re-envisioning the ‘mother’ country and gradually became critically conscious fields of expression of the complex relationship between the centre of colonial authority and its subordinated peripheries. The settlements of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa continued to nurture and emphasize the racial and cultural supremacy of ‘whiteness’ which is reflected in their social policies and cultural products. The indigenous populations of these landscapes continued to experience a second-class status within the newly nationalized spaces and faced discrimination in most social, political and economic sectors. Anglophone literature produced from these corners was predominantly produced by authors who were affiliated with positions of racial-cultural supremacy. As a result, during the 1930s the majority of the Anglophone literature of Australia, Canada, News Zealand or South Africa did not represent the sentiments of the subjugated colonized populations; instead these literary texts tell the story of how the settlers envisioned the Empire and its associated ‘Englishness’. However, it would be misleading to theorize that literary fiction from the settler colonies offered monolithic and unquestionable loyalty towards the ‘civilizing mission’ of the Empire. For example, Australian author Xavier Herbert highlighted the violence and brutality that the indigenous populations were subjected to in his novel Capricornia (1938). While Anglophilia was a dominant and overt theme in many of the popular and classical works of the time, there were also literary voices that questioned the purpose of the Empire. The Statute of Westminster was responsible for a restructuring of power relations for the select ‘white colonies’ only. The Empire continued to share a

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uniquely oppressive relationship with its South Asian colony, the British Raj, where organized resistance movements gained significant momentum and threatened colonial rule during the 1930s. The decade began with the famous ‘Dandi march’, a protest against the ludicrous taxation on salt, a common and crucial consumer product in the subcontinent. On March 12th, 1930, Mohandas Gandhi began a non-violent people’s movement with the purpose of emancipating the subcontinental population from this oppression of imperial capitalism. The 24-day long march ended on April 6th, 1930 when Gandhi broke the laws and produced his own salt. Although the ‘Dandi march’ or ‘Salt march’ did not gain any success in changing the salt taxation policies of the British government in the subcontinent, the march and its message of ‘satyagraha’ or self-reliance sparked a spontaneous mass resistance of the subcontinental people, which would eventually culminate into a political movement against imperial rule in the 1940s. Founded on the tradition of ‘padayatra’, the ‘salt march’ became a dramatic symbol of non-violent protest that provided agency to a formerly depoliticized population. The march demonstrated the possibility to mobilize a significant portion of the population and proved that the law and order of the British government could be defied. The unprecedented symbolic power and authority associated with the imperial government was challenged, which triggered the subsequent resistance activities in the subcontinent that would eventually bring an end to the two-hundred-year-old colonial structure within two decades. The repression of the participants in the ‘satyagraha’ or self-reliance movement that was triggered by the ‘salt march’ brought the cruelties of the Empire into the purview of both subcontinental and British intellectuals and activists, as ‘[t]he naked violence against unarmed protesters discredited the Empire even among its staunch supporters in England’ (Kurtz 2009: n.p.). The salt march provided the foundation for the 1930–31 civil disobedience movement, which successfully engaged civilians from a wide range of cultural, social and economic backgrounds and paved the way towards the independence of the South Asian colony. Another important step towards a redefinition of the Empire’s relationship with the subcontinental colony was drafted through the legislation known as Government of India Act 1935. While the Statute of Westminster of 1931 appears to be an appeasement policy, whose roots can be located at the 1926 imperial conference, the 1935 Government of India Act, which provided home rule and almost a Dominion status to the subcontinental colony, signals a change in the power-relation between the centre and the periphery. These events not only resulted in a cartographic change in the Empire’s identity, they also transformed the cultural identity of the Empire and its associated Englishness.

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When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the newly formed Commonwealth nations declared their war participation independently of the United Kingdom, though India was forced to participate as an official colony, despite the 1935 Government of India Act, which was meant to provide the region with the functional status of a dominion of the Empire. Reciprocating to these cartographic reformations and political turbulence, 1930s Anglophone literature addresses how this change in its relationship with the centre of the Empire transformed the authority and legitimacy of ‘English’ in various parts of the world.

How literature represents the relationship between the Empire and its colonies and settlements While the colonialized populations of Asia, Africa, North America and Oceania experienced permanent social-economic and cultural transformations through their encounters with the practices and policies of the British Empire, these provenances also engaged in reciprocal acts of defining and conceptualizing the ‘mother country’ and its culture, people, society and lives. The introduction and proliferation of English language and culture in the lives of the colonized societies transformed the texture of cultural interaction between the subjugated and the empowered, who shared a vertical power relationship. Until then, the aesthetics of colonialism dictated a unidirectional trajectory, whereby the colonized people, their cultures and societies were defined by the logic of imperialism: often as inferior and uncivilized. As Edward Said has noted in Culture and Imperialism (1994), the representations of the colonized world in the literature of the colonizer are always intertwined with the process of colonialism itself. A process of decolonization is initiated when the colonized people assess their relationship with the foreign colonizing culture and assign the latter a literary-cultural identity based on experiential evidence. Benedict Anderson’s (1983) analysis of the role of vernacular language and print culture in the formation of national identities is useful in explaining how the identity of the British Empire was affected by the implementation of English language and Anglophone culture in the colonized pockets that ultimately ‘spoke back’ to the Empire. Access to English language was crucial for the colonized to understand the structure and ideology of the Empire. During the nineteenth century, the English ‘model’ of education, i.e. an education that was delivered in English language and represented the ideological beliefs of the Empire, was implemented in a number

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of colonies, which left lasting effects on the indigenous communities of the settler colonies of Canada and Australia and created a new ‘class’ of men, who were English in taste but brown in skin, in the British Raj. The influence of the curriculum in legitimizing imperialism and crafting a legacy of British imperial culture has remained under-studied, though works such as J.A. Mangan’s The Imperial Curriculum (1993) have drawn scholarly attention to the undeniable role of the school curriculum in the colonies of Africa, Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Ireland, Malaya (and Singapore) and New Zealand in maintaining imperial authority. While the imperialists and colonizers granted themselves the sacred responsibility of writing the history and establishing a cultural identity of their colonized others, the educational institutions that were meant to serve the imperial mission would eventually be responsible for the implantation of new concepts of the Empire, imperialism and the colonizer’s identity; thereby facilitating the grounds for the postcolonial analysis of imperialism and Britishness, and enabling the establishment of a global Anglophone culture. Once the colonized populations were empowered with the newly found ability of ‘knowing’ and ‘learning’ the world of ‘Englishness’, representatives of these populations engaged in presenting their own experience of dehumanization, which sharply contradicted the morality of the ‘civilizing mission’ that was supported by the average British subject. As a result of this reverse process, which originated from the colonies and settlements, England and British/English culture became carved in colonial literature, representing their unique regional experience and engagement with Englishness. These depictions of England and the British Empire, which were ‘shaped by historically localized varieties of British colonialism and continuing process of anti-colonialism and decolonization’ (Blake, Gandhi and Thomas 2001: 2) became an integral part of the identity and culture of the British Empire. In the case of racialized colonies like India, the English education system and its curriculum transformed the world of literature for the regional populations so that they could imagine their local fiction in a foreign language; on the other hand, in the case of the settler colonies, the English educational institutions were eventually responsible for mass-scale cultural genocide of indigenous populations of Australia and Canada. But in both cases the English education systems introduced in the colonies and settlements initiated a process of slow evolution of the concept of Britishness or Englishness as well. When characters with racialized identities, settings with alien signified natural and social worlds, and contents questioning the ethics of British imperialism began to appear within the body of English or Anglophone literature, the scope of English

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literature experienced a revolution that would eventually create the twenty-firstcentury canon of global Anglophone literature, which is internally conflicted and capable of representing the British Empire and its legacy from drastically diverse points of view, including those of pro-imperialists, anti-colonialists, and human and environmental rights activists. In the 1930s, Anglophone literature from the peripheries of the British Empire was capable of expressing its own versions of Britishness in a complex literary medium like the novel. These literary texts and authors from the colonial peripheries contributed to a conception of England that was heterogenous, fluid, and omnipresent. The act of speaking back was supported by groups, who questioned the ethics and appeal of imperialism, from within England itself. During the interwar period, the cultures of cosmopolitanism, anti-colonialism, pacifism and socialist internationalism were influential in initiating collaborations and ideological exchange between the ‘Englishness’ of the ‘mother country’ and its colonies, as well as amongst the colonies themselves. Borrowing from Kris Manjapra’s conceptualization of ‘transcolonial ecumene’, Katerina Clark shows how a systemic movement for decolonization and pacificism gained significant momentum during the inter-war era: ‘a worldwide community of people committed to a single cause and engaged in discussions, lobbying, and writing aimed at working toward a common program, at generating a common discourse. . .especially in the 1930s, played a major role’ (2017: 63). Networks of writers, publishers, editors, translators, readers, and journalists made up a significant portion of this worldwide literary community and provided a platform for the critics of the Empire to raise awareness about the dehumanizing effects of colonialism and its British enforcer.

Trends and titles from the peripheries The following sections of the chapter present examples from the Australian, Canadian and Indian literary cultures of the 1930s to demonstrate how the settlements and colonies developed their impressions of the British Empire in the domain of Anglophone literature. By juxtaposing authors and texts from a widely varied spectrum of political, regional, racial and social positions, including anti-colonials, fascists, indigenous rights supporters, royalists and proimperialists, this section demonstrates that a uniform and unanimous definition and perception of the Empire was absent during the interwar period. A comparative study of the Anglophone authors and texts from the peripheries of

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the Empire unveils how a cultural identity of the British Empire and its associated Englishness/Britishness were constructed as both a monstrous beast and an enigma of human civilization in the narratives of the colonized and settler populations.

Australia and Englishness: A complex conjugation of nationalism, nativism and imperial identity Unlike Canada, South Africa or the Irish Free State, which embraced the possibility of emerging as new national identities through the Statute of Westminster, Australia showed a keen interest in keeping its ties with the Empire intact and did not fully embrace its legislative independence until 1942 (Feingold 2007: 64). While Australia was conceptualized as ‘rough’ and ‘bush’ by the rest of the Empire, an image of the ‘Englishness’ of Britain was constructed in Australia that was more ‘British than Britain itself ’ (64). Thus, the colony that was initially settled by those who were deemed undesirable and purged from the UK, the centre of the Empire itself, needed and desired the legitimacy and security of the Empire. As Australia’s social and political policies administered a slow progression towards the foundation of a national identity, its cultural institutions promoted the image of a ‘young, clean, white nation’ whose national life was ‘a provincial counterpart to life in England’ (McLaren 1989: 103). Caught between the fading image of the ‘bushman’ of the former years and emerging impression of the ‘pioneer’ figure of a new nation and nationalism, most of the mainstream works of Australian fiction in the 1930s were instrumental in equating ‘Englishness’ with civilization, while depicting the non-English ‘Aborigines’ as members of a lawless and wild society. A system of law and order, that was borrowed from Great Britain, and reinforced by violence in the name of taming the outback, controlled the historical-material realities of the signified worlds of Australian fictions. In the 1930s, Robert and Angus became the principal publisher for Australian fiction (Holbrook 2014: 216). It was also the decade when the genre of the Australian novel rose to prominence. In 1932, Nettie Palmer, a key literary critic of the time, wrote, ‘The novel, which used to be the least represented genre in Australia, appears this year with luxuriance we have lately come to expect’ (quoted from Nile 1987: 7). Not only did the genre experience a significant growth in the pure number of novels produced, but the 1930s also witnessed

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formal experiments with a wide array of social contexts in the works of Frank Dalby Davison, Miles Franklin, Brian Penton, Xavier Herbert and Christina Stead. The most notable novels of the decade include Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Kylie Tennant’s Tiburon (1935), which was the winner of the S.H. Prior Memorial Prize that year, Herbert’s Capricornia, which was awarded the Sesquicentenary Award for Australian Literature in 1938, and Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher (1933), and Return to Coolami (1936), which both won the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal. Following the precedent set by the earliest settler authors of the convict colony, the 1930s also continued to highlight the importance of the landscape in the cultivation of a national-cultural identity which is most evident in Mike Franklin’s novel All That Swagger (1936). These literary titles were instrumental in carving out a new identity for Australia while simultaneously contributing towards the global image of ‘British/Britishness’ and/or ‘English/Englishness.’ The two major trends of Australian literary culture of the decade can be categorized as nationalist aspiration and colonial legacy. A complex perception of the faraway island nation of Great Britain effectively remained a guardian figure of the dominion of Australia throughout the 1930s. Commenting on the reading culture of the period, Carolyn Holbrook observes that ‘Australian readers were far more likely to be reading romance and thriller novels imported from Britain and the USA than novels written, set and published locally. Australia had become a vital market for British publishers and, during the interwar years, imports from Britain grew to “diluvian proportions” ’ (2014: 216). This indicates that the average Australian reader’s imagination was trained by the depictions of British culture and geography. Just like the readers, Australian authors were also fascinated by British literary traditions and most sought career opportunities in the UK. Despite being primarily exposed to and groomed by a literary culture that was thoroughly British in taste, a slow and steady increase in the production of socially conscious literature rooted in Australian geography and society occurred over the decade. These literary works helped frame the new nation. Throughout the 1930s, controversial literary and cultural critic P.R. Stephensen argued for the creation of an Australian identity that is emancipated from British domination, and he emphasizes the importance of ‘place’ or ‘geography’ rather than bloodline as the basis of this new national identity, which literature was to invent and represent. Stephensen himself shared a complex relationship with the Empire and played an important role in Australia’s literary and political development. He was born in Maryborough, Queensland and won the Rhodes scholarship in 1924,

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which allowed him to pursue his studies in The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he was a registered member of the university’s branch of the Communist Party; he participated in the General Strike of 1926 and Workers’ Theatre Movement in London. Between his graduation in 1927 and his return to Australia in 1932, Stephensen worked for a number of publishing houses in London and became a strong supporter of D.H. Lawrence’s anti-censorship crusade. Upon his return to Australia, Stephensen co-established the Endeavour Press in Sydney but after a disagreement with the board members he resigned in 1933 and eventually established P.R. Stephensen & Co. Though his publishing firm was short-lived (1934–35), it managed to publish the works of significant authors such as Henry Handel Richardson and Eleanor Dark; his press was also due to publish Herbert’s Capricornia but it folded first, delaying publication of Herbert’s masterpiece until 1938. From the latter half of the 1930s, Stephensen increasingly became more disillusioned with his previous commitment to leftist politics, and ultimately cofounded the fascist movement, Australia First, in 1941. Any discussion of Australian literature of the 1930s will remain incomplete without engagement with Stephensen’s 1935 work The Foundations of Culture in Australia where he wrote: . . . we are no longer a colony pure and simple, nor yet are we a nation fullyfledged. We are something betwixt and between a colony and a nation, something vaguely called a ‘Dominion’, or a ‘Commonwealth’ with ‘Dominion status’. We are loosely tied to other Dominions in the British Empire by law, strongly tied by sentiment and an idea of mutual protection. In as much as we are politically autonomous, we have entered into virtual alliances (political, military, commercial, and sentimental) with other Dominions and Colonies in the Empire, including Canada, the Irish Free State, South Africa, New Zealand, Great Britain and Jamaica. Where it will all lead to we do not know; but the virtual alliance gives us a sense of security in international affairs for the time being. The political and legal ties that bind us to other ‘Dominions’ are loose enough, but the sentimental and financial tie is strong, particularly with the ‘Dominion’ called Great Britain. And the cultural tie is strong. Stephensen 1935: 341

Elsewhere in the same essay Stephensen urges for a ‘two-way traffic’ of cultural exchange between Great Britain and Australia to ensure that Australian culture leaves an impact on the perception of the cultural identity of the imperial centre and its Englishness. The sentimental and financial ties mentioned in Stephensen’s essay summarize the state of the relationship between Australia and Great Britain in the 1930s to be that of a nation in formation with

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ontological and epistemological reliance on the centre. This relationship was important for the globalization of the ‘Anglophone’ and in advertising the cultural superiority of the ‘Englishness’ that emerged from the dominion of Great Britain. Stephensen’s life and career has been fuelled by contradictions. The Foundations of Culture in Australia strongly supported a nativist approach to Australian history and culture, which was also ‘anti-British, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic  . . . and was criticized for its overt Fascism’ (Munro 1990: n.p.). On the other hand, Stephensen was one of the earliest advocates of aboriginal rights within the contexts of the settler colonies. The juxtaposition of Anglophobia, nativism and aboriginal advocacy in Stephensen’s life and work had significant influence in Australian literary cultures of the time. Contemporary novelists also documented how the indigenous peoples of the country had their human rights violated by both the British Empire as well as the Australian nation. This advocacy of, and awareness about, indigenous rights remains unprecedented in global Anglophone literature of the interwar period. On the other hand, Australian novels of the time also presented critical insight into the exploitative class structure of the former penal colony. Authors such as Xavier Herbert and Christina Stead deconstructed the dominant ideas of ‘Englishness’ by framing the questions of racial and social justice in the making of the Empire and imperial capitalism. Herbert was one of the most prominent Australian intellectuals and has been described as an ‘ “outback legend”, indigenous rights activist and patriotic reformer’ of the 1930s (Conor and McGrath 2017: n.p.). Herbert’s Capricornia, for which the author received the Commonwealth sesquicentenary literary competition and the Australian Literary Society’s gold medal, was written during a period in London but did not capture the interest of any British publisher. Herbert returned to Australia in 1932 and eventually Capricornia was published by the Publicist Publishing Co. in 1938. Publicist was directly involved in the white nationalist movement in Australia at the time. Ellen Smith has documented the culture and ideology surrounding the publishing company: The Publicist newspaper was the main arena for a group of extreme nationalists who circled around the wealthy financier William Miles and the writer P.R. Stephensen during the late 1930s and early 1940s. . . it criticized democracy and it demanded national racial purity; it was fiercely anti-Semitic and it expressed unreserved admiration for Adolf Hitler and the Axis powers. By1937 the paper was pro-Japan and by 1938 it was explicitly pro-Hitler. Smith 2014: 101–102

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Therefore, the publishing history of Capricornia, a novel that frames indigenous rights and racial justice as the central issue for understanding the concept of Australia and its cultural identity, highlights a connection between the question of the citizenship and human rights of indigenous community members and the anti-British sentiments of the Australian fascist movement. In one of the earliest reviews published in the Publicist in 1938, Mike Franklin compares Capricornia with Uncle Tom’s Cabin to illustrate the importance of the novel in shaping a national consciousness concerning the mistreatment of the indigenous people of the land during the attempts to settle it. Capricornia locates Australian identity in a specific relationship shared between the inhabitants and the landscape; the bond between the two is legitimized through birth. Beginning with the recollection of the violent massacres of the indigenous people during the settlement of northern Australia by the British, the novel ultimately narrates the story of a white settler father named Mark Shillingworth and his mixed-race son, Naw-Nim (noname) or Norman, who is born of an indigenous mother. This ‘half-caste’, ‘yeller feller’ or ‘Eroaustralian’ Norman or Naw-Nim is presented as the prototype of Australian identity and culture, indicative of ‘a national genealogy born of soil and transmitted by blood’ (Smith 111). Abandoned by his father at birth, Norman is brought up by his uncle (Mark’s brother) Oscar Shillingworth and he grows up without the knowledge of his true parentage. He spends part of his childhood in Melbourne and only later returns to the cattle station in Capricornia where he finally meets his biological father Mark and learns about his indigenous heritage. In a quest to discover and explore his indigenous identity, Norman embarks on a journey that brings him in contact with another ‘half-caste’, Tocky, the daughter of Constance Differ, who was forced into prostitution and died of consumption. Previously Oscar Shillingworth had refused to oversee the wellbeing of Constance despite the pleas of her father (and Tocky’s grandfather) Peter Differ. Norman and Tocky soon form a relationship while wandering the wilderness, though their union is shortened after Norman is accused of a murder which, in reality, was an act of self-defence by Tocky. At this point, Norman’s father, Mark Shillingworth also undergoes trial for the murder of a Chinese shopkeeper, Choo See Kee, a crime that was conducted nearly two decades earlier. Both Norman and Mark are acquitted from the charges and a reconciliation of their relationship is initiated through the process. Ultimately, the novel ends on a grim note with Norman discovering the dead body of Tocky and their child inside a water tank. It is evident that Tocky had taken shelter in the tank while running from the authorities. Through the process of reconciliation, Mark Shillingworth eventually inherits a legitimate Australian identity from his son Norman Shillingworth; this process

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constitutes a narrative that weaves together indigenous heritage and an image of Australia’s national identity. Framing the British and British colonialism as its other, Herbert established a national imaginary for Australia that is founded on the principles of cultural hybridity and relationship to the land. It is noteworthy that all mothers and indigenous women are eliminated in the process of establishing this claim to the land by the settlers. According to Ellen Smith, ‘it is perhaps the figure of the Aboriginal woman who bears the brunt of this attempt to hold together the fantasy of white Australian ethnicity and belonging, and a commitment to Aboriginal justice’ (2014: 114). The apparently contradictory ideological positions of indigenous rights and extreme nationalism are merged through the identification of an ‘other’, the mother country and its Englishness. Herbert is joined by one of the most prominent Australian modernists, Stead, in addressing the problematic nature of British imperial economy and culture. In a 1937 letter to her brother in Sydney, Stead expressed her opinion about the centre of the Empire: ‘I detest and despise the London Englishmen who runs the Empire; they are the smuggest, bootlickingest, most class-saturated, most conceited and ignorant people I ever met. This only goes for the middle and Eton classes, too, the clerks and counter-jumpers and the white-collar brigade of London’ (Letters, 1, 73–74, quoted in Ann Blake et al 2001: 107). Stead revolutionized the perception of Australia and its relationship with the ‘Englishness’ of the Empire by representing the plight of the white working-class of the settler colony in relation to the Empire’s vision and promise. If Herbert had attempted to capture the perception of the Empire and its imperial mission from the experience of colonial violence in Australia, Stead focused on the urban cityscapes to represent the reality of working-class Australian life, shaped by and for the needs of the Empire. Stead’s literary works of the 1930s were written during her stays in Paris, London and the USA. Her first novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney was written during her stay in Paris and was conditionally accepted by the London based publisher Peter Davies in 1931, following which the novel was ultimately published in 1934 (Pierce 2011: 249). Set in the 1920s, Seven Poor Men of Sydney is a novel of ideas that shows how ‘Communism, Christianity, evolutionary theory, the nature of humanity, the nature of knowing and of action’ affected the social perception of the self and society within a British imperial framework (Goodwin 1986: 98). It depicts Sydney’s working-class lives and introduces a wide range of leftist political positions each of which had a vision of class emancipation. She subsequently published Beauties and Furies (1936) and House of All Nations (1938). Stead’s most critically acclaimed work The Man Who Loved

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Children was published in 1940. Her reputation as a crucial critical voice against British imperialism and its rigid class system was firmly established with the publication of Cotter’s England (1966), which is sometimes described as a counterpart of her first published novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney. Though drastically different in their politics, literary and intellectual figures such as Stead, Herbert and Stephensen, consciously addressed the issue of Australian identity and its relationship to the British Empire and ‘Englishness.’ Rupturing the dominant traditions, each of these authors critically examined how the imperial economy had exploited the land and its people. Beyond simple representation or recollection of the historical and contemporary events, these 1930s writers proposed new ways of conceiving both Australian and British cultures and identities by addressing concerns about the human rights of indigenous peoples and working-class populations. Australian literature of the 1930s presents a complex image of the British Empire and Englishness as steeped in racial and class-based violence while simultaneously recognized for the sophisticated cultural identity that was a product of its economic-political position as a global leader at the time.

Anglophile Canada and Canadian literary imagination of Englishness and the British Empire Settled by the Anglo-Celtic majority, the Dominion of Canada and its subsequent successor, the Canadian nation state, retained a loyalist relationship with the Empire. Except for the French-Canadian areas and territories retained by the Indigenous peoples, the British Empire remained a powerful presence in Canadian social life. Most Canadian authors of the 1930s did not directly write about the British Empire but its associated ‘Englishness’ was presented as the ontological and epistemological coordinates for the emerging sense of self and identity of the Canadian nation state. Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series provides a good demonstration of the cultural position of ‘Englishness’ in Canadian society in the interwar period. Roche’s popular series consists of sixteen novels. The first work of the series, Jalna, was published in 1927 and the last one, Morning at Jalna, was published in 1960. The temporal settings of the fictional world span over a hundred-year period, beginning in 1854 and ending in 1954. The timeline of the publication of the books do not coincide with the timeline of the content of the series. For example, the setting of the first book, Jalna, follows the storyline developed in six

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succeeding novels. This inconsistency between the chronologies of publication and plotline can cause the modern reader some confusion, though it did not threaten de la Roche’s popularity and financial success. The series is often referred to as the Whiteoak Chronicles and has been translated into various European languages. The popularity of the series can be grasped by its sale information: over eleven million copies of the series had been sold during the author’s lifetime. Published in 1944, The Building of Jalna provides the foundation of the setting – how the property called ‘Jalna’ is established by a young couple, Captain Philip Whiteoak and his wife Adeline, who move to Canada from British India in 1853. The couple settle in eastern Canada on the shores of Lake Ontario and aspire to replicate a lifestyle suited for genteel, Victorian Englishness. By the time of this book’s publication, the contemporary readers had already known about the Whiteoak family and their home, Jalna, through the first eight books of the series. The plotline of the last published work in the series, Morning at Jalna (published in 1960), is set in the aftermath of the incidents covered in The Building of Jalna. Morning at Jalna develops its plotline with the American Civil war in its backdrop. Centenary in Jalna, published in 1958 and set in 1953, provides the final closure to the series. Four of the sixteen books in the series, Finch’s Fortune (1931), The Master of Jalna (1933), Young Renny (1935), and Whiteoak Harvest (1936), were published in the 1930s. These books were preceded by Jalna (1927) and Whiteoaks of Jalna (1929), which had firmly established a fanbase for de la Roche. Out of these four novels published in the 1930s, only The Master of Jalna and Whiteoak Harvest are set within the temporal frame of the decade. These two novels are examples of the popular perception of ‘Englishness’ in Canada that matched their contemporary readers’ imaginations. It is necessary to analyse the readership of de la Roche’s work to gain a realistic idea concerning the significance of the ‘Englishness’ presented in the Whiteoak Chronicles. In other words, without knowing the social, cultural, religious, political and economic groups that enjoyed her Jalna series and supported the financial wellbeing of the author, it is impossible to decipher the social role of the series and its ‘Englishness’ in its temporal context. George Hendrick describes de la Roche’s fanbase as ‘one that much-admired ornate style. Her readers were obviously entertained by the novel’s appeal to snobbery, its erotic scenes and its titillating incidents’ (1984: 61). This description conforms to the middlebrow readership that the series is usually affiliated with. In ‘The Immediate Present in Canadian Literature’, E.K. Brown divides the Canadian reading audience of the early 1930s into three groups. The first of this category is designated as a ‘precious group of Canadians of cosmopolitan culture’

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who lived in larger urban enclaves; ‘[m]any of them have never read Jalna’ (Brown 1933: 430–431). The second group, ‘the truculent advocates of Canadian literature’, whose ‘members are incorporated in many local and national societies’, can be identified as the support base for the series. The third group, classified as the ‘general reading public in Canada’ is identified as ‘indifferent’ towards Canadian literature, and by extension the fictional world of the Whiteoaks (Brown 1933: 431). The popularity of the Jalna series and its author’s commercial success was guaranteed by the second group of emerging Canadian literature enthusiasts as well as their international counterparts. The creator of the Whiteoak world, Mazo de la Roche, subscribed to royalist sentiments and thus it is little surprise that throughout the Jalna series, the characters, the family’s lifestyle and traditions all aspire to uphold a sense of ‘Englishness’ that was archaic and inspired awe. This admiration and presumed superiority of Victorian ‘Englishness’ stroked the imagination of those Canadian readers whose sense of identity could not be severed from the imperial mission of the British Empire. Thus, the Whiteoaks of Jalna became a source of comfort and security for the ‘advocates of Canadian culture’ as the series presents a Canada modelled after Victorian moralities and Canadians born and raised with the etiquettes of the ‘high culture’ of the Empire. In ‘Howard Robinson and the “British Method”: A Case Study of Britishness in Canada during the 1930s and 1940s’ (2009), Don Nerbas demonstrates that such perceptions are historically consistent and were commonplace in Canada at the time. The success and popularity of the novels published in the 1930s indicate that a large portion of the literate Canadian audience subscribed to a racist and imperialist perception of the British Empire, which influenced a national ideology that placed ‘English’ and ‘Britishness’ as superior to all other populations and cultures. De la Roche’s fan mails (currently held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) state how Jalna’s Whiteoaks were feeding and shaping the (English) Canadian (as well as American) identity and a sense of pride associated with its peculiar brand of Englishness. This brand of Englishness was also supported by the bestsellers of the time as many of these literary works presented an image of the British Empire that was unstoppable and allconsuming; civility and the power of Englishness and England were conceived as a binary to all other regional cultures that were part of the British Empire. In other words, the bestselling works in Canada established the assumption that British culture was the epicentre of all civilization and, as a result, affiliation and attachment with anything English or British was encouraged to legitimize a civilized identity. Consequently, races and cultures that resisted assimilation and

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affiliation with the epicentre were deemed uncivilized, barbaric, primitive or, in some cases, pure and innocent; suggesting an infantile identity. Gordon Sinclair’s Footloose in India (1933) and Cannibal Quest (1935) are two bestsellers of the decade which demonstrate how the British Empire influenced and dominated Canadian literary imagination and popular culture. As annotated by its subtitle, Adventures of a News Chaser from Khyber’s Grim Gash of Death to the Tiger Jungles of Bengal and the Burmese Battleground of the Black Cobra, Sinclair’s Footloose in India is set in Bengal and Burma (now Myanmar), on the eastern frontier of British India. It represents the subcontinent as a primitive and exotic site with the clichés of jungles and adventures of the ‘white man’. Thus, the imperialist episteme is reinforced in this Canadian fiction and circulated within the North American settlement. To further validate the significance and impact of Footloose in India, it is important to note that the book was released in Canada by Oxford University Press and became an instant bestseller. Oxford University Press, as an institutional authority, supported and was supported by the Empire’s cultural-ideological mission; it provided the stamp of legitimacy and credibility to works such as Sinclair’s adventures, which are founded on unpalatable racism. Sinclair’s world upholds binary worldviews such as civilized vs. uncivilized, modern vs. primitive, and developed landscape vs. jungles. If the aforementioned popular works had been instrumental in training their readers to imagine and embrace the roots of twentieth-century Canadian identity in its British heritage, Canadian author Irene Baird’s John (1937), which was another bestseller of the decade, presented a more nuanced and sophisticated representation of the relationship between Canada and Britain. More importantly John sketched the Canadian landscape for the British readers as well and in some way captured how this landscape influenced the lives of the British characters. In other words, John presented the north American colony as a place of refuge, rejuvenation and reflection for those of British identity and thus constructed an idea of British and/or Englishness in relation to the Canadian landscape. Almost no academic research has substantially focused on John and its influence in interwar Anglophone culture. The novel was first published by J.P. Lippincott in Canada but went on to be published in the USA, Australia, England and Sweden. The novel received enthusiastic reviews in most countries; the Ottawa Journal defined John as ‘a finely perceptive novel. . .Quiet and controlled, it is written with an awareness of hidden currents of feeling that would do justice to the most seasoned novelist’ while The Saturday Review of Literature called it ‘flawless’ and suggested that ‘Restraint is the key-note of its excellence.’ Similar sentiments were shared by the Sunday Sun of Sydney which proclaimed that

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John was the ‘herald of a successful literary career’ and Baird was praised for her outstanding descriptive powers (Hill 2014: xiv). The novel tells the story of sixty-two-year-old John Dorey, who arrived on the shores of British Columbia from northern England earlier in his life. The novel juxtaposes his contemporary life with his past through reflections and flashbacks. While living on his ten-acre farm in northern British Columbia, John forms a strong attachment with the land which becomes a dominant feature of his identity. His life is also influenced by disputes with a neighbour, which escalate into violence, and with a land developer, who is interested in acquiring John’s farm and turning it into a vacation resort. The slow tempo of the narrative is facilitated through a series of philosophical inquiries and psychological reflections. The readers learn about John’s love interest, whom he had left back in England. Few active events happen in the plot of the narrative, though crucial questions about land rights, ‘British’ identity, values and morals, as well as the role of land and religion in the formation of Anglo-Canadian identity, are explored. Ultimately, the novel ends in the discovery of the death of John by the son of his love interest in England. John’s connection with both England and Canada and his choice of embracing Canada as his forever home, despite attempts by his stepbrothers to bring him back to England, establishes Canada as the chosen environment and geography for cultivating a British personality. The novel frames England as history and heritage, and Canada as home and future. It legitimizes the claim of the settler on the foreign shores by vividly depicting the attachment between John and the land. This attachment of a British born settler stands in sharp contrast with the indigenous cultural perceptions of epistemic relationship with the land. John doesn’t inherit this attachment but simply claims it and thus becomes a symbolic representation of the settler discourse of the Canadian nation. John is unique in its contribution to the literary and cultural conception of Britain and its associated culture because of the way it deviates from the other popular strategies of the time. The Canadian audience of the 1930s were consumers of the idea of ‘Englishness’ as a superior human condition of existence and British imperialism as a legitimate, civilizing mission. Works like the Jalna series were instrumental in the dramatic restoration of the image of Victorian English culture and its reproduction on the Canadian soil. On the other hand, Gordon Sinclair’s bestsellers associated civilization and humanity with ‘Britishness/Englishness’ and whiteness, by contrasting them with an overtly racist representation of colonized people and the landscapes of the Indian subcontinent. John does not resort to either of those attempts. Instead it

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establishes a land claim for the settler originating from Britain who finally finds a home in Canada. This novel situates the Canadian landscape as a quintessential part of British culture and thus creates a narrative of legitimacy for the process of British settler colonialism. With rich descriptions and sentimental storytelling the novel convinces its readers to conceive of the British settler as a benevolent, nature-loving, well-groomed man of great taste and abilities, whose presence on the Canadian soil brings civilization and culture to the landscape.

South Asian experience of British colonialism and its literary imagination of Englishness In the context of the South Asian colony – the crown jewel of the British Empire – transnational collaborations were significant for an internal transformation of the canon of Indian literature, which in turn was crucial for the development of Anglophone literature as a site of multi-ethnic and diverse voices and interests. The 1930s witnessed the systematic development of an audience that was politically curious and willing to volunteer their time in reading about colonial lives and realities expressed through the language of English and represented in the novel form. On the other hand, international networks and collaborations were willing to support South Asian authors in publishing their manuscripts in England. As a result, 1930s Anglophone literature was able to expand the world of the English novel and transform it into a site of cultural representation of the world of the British Empire that was not limited to the British Isles. It is imperative to remember that the interwar period did not pioneer the trend of Anglophone literature written by and about the colonized people; as Caryl Phillips has argued in Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997), non-British writers have a longstanding influence in the development of modern English literature, which can be traced back to the early nineteenth century. The significance of the 1930s lies in the change in British readers’ relationship with texts about the colonial experiences. Similarly, the interwar era witnessed a transformation in the elite South Asian populations’ perception of, and relationship with, the Empire and its repressive and intellectual state apparatuses. By the 1930s, the purpose and function of South Asian Anglophone fiction had changed from the previous century. Nineteenth-century English literature, especially novels, produced from South Asia were still in their infancy and were influenced heavily by the generic and thematic boundaries established by their correlatives from the colonial centre. In ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of

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Imperialism’ (1985), Gayatri Spivak argues that, throughout the nineteenth century, English literature produced by writers, who were born and raised within the British Isles, performed as cultural ambassadors of the civilizing mission of the Empire. The colonial writers of the late imperial period were also performing a role – questioning the empire’s civilizing mission and by extension its legitimacy. Colonial Anglophone literature of the 1930s created colonial conditions in their fictional worlds and as a result brought those realities within the realm of social consciousness of the English-speaking audience of the world. Though the first Indian novel in English, Rajmohan’s Wife, was serialized in 1864, it did not appear in a printed book form until 1935, indicating a transformation in the subcontinental reading culture as well as the reception of Indian English literature. Anglophone novels by South Asian authors were not only published and read in India in the late colonial period, but with the success of authors such as Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayanan, these novels achieved international attention. This is not to claim that the Indian English novel was a product of the 1930s; on the contrary, both the novel form and English literature had been evolving in India since English education was implemented following Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute to Indian Education’ (1835). While the English Education Act of 1835, which followed Macaulay’s proposition, defunded and destroyed the indigenous forms of education in the subcontinent and systematically erased the literary cultures of Sanskrit and Persian, it created a training system in English that also developed an audience for English literature in the subcontinent. Macaulay articulated that, ‘It is not possible for the [British], with [their] limited means to attempt to educate the body of the people. [They] must . . . form a class who may be interpreters between [the British ruling class] and the millions whom [they] govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and intellect’ (quoted from Edwardes, 1967). The education policy of the British Raj, following Macaulay’s proposition, ensured that a thin layer of British-born bureaucrats could rule over a region with its vast geography and complex history. For example, in 1931, out of the 168,000 British people posted in the raj, only 4,000 were employed in the civil government. The hybrid class that was born out of Macaulay’s proposition became the cog and screw of the Empire’s operation in the subcontinent. This hybrid class consisted of a handful of native elites serving in higher positions within the Empire’s bureaucracy and an army of native clerks. Members from these occupational and social backgrounds, especially those with relatively higher positions within the British bureaucracy, emerged as a possible audience for Indian-English writing as they were trained in an English-medium school system and already

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familiar with the canon of English literature emerging from the UK; experiencing their real-historical world of the subcontinent as literary representation was within their horizon of expectations. The first three decades of the twentieth century witnessed a steady growth in the literary public sphere of India, which was propelled by the radical advancement of print capitalism. Though the literacy rate (in the indigenous languages as well as English) was still significantly low at the time, and only a privileged few had the opportunity of associating with literary activities, the highly politicized body of Indian literature was successful in narrating the ways in which colonialism and nationalist struggle complicated the structure of a class society. Englishness, its associated power, lifestyle and culture has been documented in the subcontinental literature of the time in both regional vernacular literature as well as English literature. During the interwar period, a literary public sphere, mostly consisting of male members from the middle and upper castes and classes, had emerged in the subcontinent. The social and economic status of these members equipped them with the necessary time and training to engage with political and social debates of the day. Francesca Orsini’s The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940 (2009) and Samarpita Mitra’s The Literary Public Sphere in Bengal: Aesthetics, Culture and Politics, 1905–1939 (2009) demonstrate that the 1930s Indian literary culture originating from the northern urban hubs were critically conscious of the ‘national’ question of the day and was invested in creating an aesthetic identity for both the nascent nation state and its ‘other’, the colonial master. The representation of Englishness and its executioner, the Englishman, from the subcontinental point of view was essential in producing an aesthetic logic that highlighted the dehumanizing process of colonialism and indicated that the only solution to end the indignity of the local population was independence from the British rule. The pedagogic goal of creating literary representations of Englishness in the regional vernacular was clearly to educate the local people (mostly middle-class intellectuals and politicians) about the perils of British colonialism as a systemic issue rather than an individual or personal one; furthermore, these literary representations had the potential to provide imaginative solutions for the native population to develop a systemic resistance against this foreign rule. In contrast, the task of creating an aesthetic representation of Englishness from the point of view of the colonized people of the subcontinent in the language of English was aimed (at least partially) at educating the middle-class tax payers of England to engage with the hidden face of Englishness that resorted to cruel means and violated the human rights of native populations in order to ensure the smooth

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functioning and economic profit of the British Empire. As Edward Said’s much acclaimed studies have traced how European colonialism carved out an aesthetic identity for its colonized other as the ‘uncivilized’, ‘effeminate’ and ‘weak-link’ of humanity, the 1930s writers, who were Indian by birth but trained in the elite British educational institutions, were also aware of the narrative about the benevolence of the colonizer who is dedicated to bringing law and order to the land of superstitious barbarians, i.e. the subcontinental population. As their lived experience deviated from the master’s narrative, these writers had the legitimacy and training to offer counter-narratives and define British/English culture and identity as diverse and heterogeneous concepts. These counter-narratives present the faces of ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’ that conflicts and complements the imperial narrative of the ‘white man’s burden’. An alternative narrative of Englishness, as experienced and exhibited in the subcontinent, became possible when the All India Progressive Writers Association (IPWA) was formed by Indian expatriates in London under the leadership of Mulk Raj and Sajjid Zaheer in 1935. The inspiration of this literary and cultural organization was derived from the Paris-based antifascist group called the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture. The IPWAaffiliated authors and critics were determined to use literature as an educational instrument for social awareness and developed an intersectional analysis of the power relations along the axes of colonialism/race, gender and class. Members of the IPWA aspired to produce representations of subcontinental life that were framed within the systems of colonialism, feudalism, castism and patriarchy. One of the star members of IPWA was the Hindi novelist Premchand whose 1935 novel Godaan, or The Gift of a Cow as it is translated in English, contrasts the English/British ruling class against the subalterns, local landlords and the native elites. Though none of the primary characters in the novel are British/English, it is the law and order of the Empire and the power of the bureaucratic system that represents Englishness from the point of view of the subcontinental masses, which consists of both agrarian and industrial labourers. Englishness, as a culture and site of power, is equated with an incomprehensible and labyrinthine legal and bureaucratic system, which is complicit in exploiting and extorting from the subaltern while benefitting from the systems of colonial and traditional hierarchies. Complementing the regional vernacular literary works, Indian English novels also emerged as imaginative sites where British Empire and British/Englishness were re-envisioned and contested. Mulk Raj Anand was a pioneering figure in directing the literary sphere to represent and imagine how the subcontinental colony experienced the Empire. After a challenging beginning to his literary

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career, Anand published four novels, Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) and The Village (1939) along with a number of short stories including ‘The Lost Child’ (1934), all of which were in written in English and published by London-based publishing avenues during the 1930s. Subsequent novels like Across the Black Waters (1940), The Sword and the Sickle (1942), The Big Heart (1945), Seven Summers (1931), and The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) continued the trajectory of Anand’s collaboration with London-based intellectual circles and added to the evolving field of English literature by establishing Indian-English literature as a valid subcategory. Anand’s social, political and racial identities and affiliations position him as a transitional subject who can simultaneously navigate the distant worlds of the colonized and the colonizer. Benjamin Baer has pointed out that Anand’s first published novel Untouchable (1935) ‘marks the desire to carry the periphery to the metropolis so as to inscribe and make visible the unknown, excremental abjection of the colonial margin in the aesthetic heart of the center’ (Baer 2009: 577). Untouchable was capable of attracting the interest of the British audience immediately as it confirmed some of the most dehumanizing aspects of the caste-divided Indian society by narrating an average day in the life of a latrine cleaner from the dalit caste – an ‘untouchable’ community. The protagonist Bakha, who clads himself with a discarded British army uniform comes to the realization that ‘[t]he Tommies had treated him as a human being and he had learnt to think of himself as superior to his fellow-outcastes’ (Anand 2014: 9), which ruptures the liberal humanist narrative as Bakha’s superiority is validated through the recognition of his ‘humanness’ by the British/English who are representatives of power and authority (Baer 2009: 578). Though much of the novel is focused on incidents and interactions amongst subcontinental members in which Bakha is repeatedly dehumanized and humiliated because of his caste identity, he also directly interacts with a British man named Colonel Hutchinson, the chief of the local chapter of Salvation Army. While Hutchison comes to Bakha’s rescue after he is kicked out of the house by his father, Hutchison’s wife insults Bakha without any pretention to hide her anger and hatred towards his kind. Bakha’s point of view demonstrates that Britishness was experienced as an authoritative and autonomic entity that could potentially aide the process of subaltern emancipation by overruling the traditional hierarchies and injustices. However, the nature of colonial relationship cannot overlook racial hierarchies and dissolve all difference into universal human equality; that is why Bakha is unable to establish any meaningful relationship with Hutchison and has to settle for an abject rejection of his human identity by Hutchison’s wife.

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Anand’s second-published, but first-written novel. Coolie (1936) offers a wider variety of British characters and English characteristics while representing the colonial society from the point of view of another child worker (from an elevated caste background). The British characters belong to the widest variety of classes, from the highest government officials in Shimla to factory foreman and labour activists in the textile industries. The narrator as well as the protagonist are aware of the differences amongst the class identity and political affiliation of the British characters and eager to demonstrate that international working-class solidarity can overpower both colonial and traditional systems of hierarchy. Coolie also shows that coordinates of the racial and class-based identity of the colonial child labourer challenge the logic of imperialism as well as nationalism. Thus, it ruptures the binary of self and other between the colonized and the colonizer and instead conceives of a duality in which the British characters simultaneously align with (class interests) and disrupt (race interests) the struggles of the working-class masses of the colonies. Alongside Anand were two major literary figures from the subcontinent  – Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan – who started publishing novels in English in the 1930s. R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935) and The Bachelor of Arts (1937), both set in the imaginary town of Malgudi, elaborate on the education system, its influence and significance in British India. The infrastructure, curricula and system of education becomes representative of the Britishness/Englishness that connect the protagonists of Malgudi to the mechanics of the British Empire. On the other hand, in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), English education and social infrastructure interacts and conflicts with traditional practices – a process that promises to change both the colonized and the colonizer in the subsequent decades. The novels of Anand, Narayan and Rao provided the racialized peripheries with the authority to represent the centre. These novels guide their transnational readers to imagine an abstraction of the British/ English culture and identity that is impacted by the connections between the South Asian populations and the British subjects and cultures, as mediated through social institutions and economic structures.

A comparative overview The context of production of the aforementioned narratives by settlers and racialized writers of the colonies demonstrate that UK-based networks of writers and publishers dominated the cultivation of both mainstream and the

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alternative fictional conceptions of the British Empire and the cultural identity of its subjects. Literature from the colonies and settlements that disrupted the grand narrative of British Empire and British/English identity was supported from the heartland of the Empire, especially London. Most Australian authors of the decade aspired to be recognized and supported by the London-based publishing houses and they often sought their legitimacy from the centre rather than the periphery. Both Herbert and Stead travelled to London, the centre of the British Empire, from Australia during the interwar period to further their literary careers. Though Herbert returned to Australia and published all his works from within the country, Stead remained a writer in exile throughout. Comparable to subcontinental writer Mulk Raj Anand, Stead extended the horizon of expectation and imagination of the purview of the Empire for the metropolitan audience of the 1930s. The transnational and transcultural networks such as that of Mulk Raj Anand and his patron Ralph Fox, and supporter E.M. Forster, and R.K. Narayan and his patron Graham Greene, are noteworthy as they demonstrate how the production of colonial English novels upheld an image of an ethically conscious British identity that promoted democratic rights and criticized imperialism. When studied together, the novels of Herbert Xavier, Christina Stead, Mazo de la Roche, Irene Baird, Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan present a widely varied and conflicting perception of the British Empire and Britishness/ Englishness. Baird’s John, and Herbert’s Capricornia offer conflicting points of view regarding the legitimacy vs. illegitimacy of land claims of the Empire and its subjects in the foreign shores of Canada and Australia. On the other hand Anand’s Coolie and Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney both represent the workers in the peripheries of the Empire and highlight their complex, exploitative relationship with imperialism; Anand’s novel adds the dimension of race to the class question and urges the readers to render the invisible relationship between unwaged and under-waged labour and the British working-class movements. Narayan’s novels primarily focus on the educational institutions of British India and show how the places of knowledge construction and circulation became a point of contact between the colonized and colonizing cultures and impacted both in the process. Finally, de la Roche successfully imposed a Victorian culture within the twentieth-century Canadian landscape. Read alongside each other, as a cluster, with the knowledge and understanding of the differences in the perceptions of Britishness and the British Empire, these literary works demonstrate that British culture and identity cannot be grasped as a simple dualism that constructs a homogenous concept of Britishness and measures all

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cultures against its innate worldview. Instead, the aforementioned fictional narratives from Australia, Canada and India prove that Britishness is an internally conflicted category that needs to be explored through the eyes of its ‘others.’

The legacy of the periphery Any revisionist project, where a historical period and its literary products and movements are studied in the light of contemporary political and social discourses, ultimately asks ‘How has the literature of this decade been remembered?’ (Montefiore 2003: 2). It is not merely a retrospect of the writers and their works but is also an inquiry into the social and historical contexts of production of the texts that illuminate why our collective memory of the decade has been shaped by overrepresentation of certain narratives while amnesia and ignorance bury the other narratives. This current revisionist project attempts to ask and answer: What role did the literary texts, primarily novels, from the margins of the British Empire play in the formation of a political discourse on Anglophone literature of the 1930s? Alongside the narratives produced from the centre of the Empire, the literary works emerging from the peripheries of the imperial power structure performed a few important functions. First of all, the novels emerging from Canada, Australia or India in the 1930s provided their contemporary audience with new visions of Britishness, which either aligned with traditional and established ideas about British culture and identity or challenged those ideas. As a result, the novel-reading audience of the 1930s had the opportunity to attain a sense of the varieties and variations of Britishness from the point of view of the British colonies. This is significant because novels like Capricornia or Coolie or Two Leaves and a Bud or Seven Poor Men of Sydney point out how the British Empire, which has been marketed as a civilizing and humanitarian mission, was directly responsible for the gross violation of human rights, causing human suffering and refusing justice to people constrained within coordinates of identity that did not position them on the top of race, class, or gender paradigms. On the other hand, novels such as the Jalna series provided their audience with an opportunity to find a secure British identity in a Victorian setting; in other words, British/ English identity is equated with a conservative Victorian morality and culture in the series whose popularity proves that the general reading audience enjoyed this equivalence. It would appear that Canada was presented to the novel-reading audience of the 1930s as a new spatial dimension where a Victorian British

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culture could be cultivated and would flourish. On a similar note, the novel John, also offers Canada as the natural habitus for a British/English identity to prosper in the twentieth century. All these fictional accounts influenced the perception of the identity and culture of Britishness/Englishness in the 1930s. Considering the intellectual climate of the interwar period, it can be safely assumed that these novels had an important function in addressing the role of the British Empire and British/English identity. Besides expanding the horizon of the Anglophone literary audience of the 1930s, these novels also demonstrated how the imperial economy violated the rights of the poor working-class people across the globe and thus had the potential for evoking empathy for and amongst people who were separated by geography but connected through colonialism. As such, the importance of the periphery cannot be restricted only as an avenue to legitimize the minority voices, but instead, the concerns of these voices often echoed the concerns of the downtrodden from within the United Kingdom itself. Works like Seven Poor Men of Sydney or Coolie, which were set in Australia and India respectively, explore how the working classes of the Empire perished in every corner of the world. When studied within a comparative framework, 1930s Anglophone novels from various parts of the British Empire connect and contrast the glory of the British Empire with its practices of class exploitation, rabid racism, and imposition and legitimization of British/English authority over the lands that have been inhabited by indigenous populations. The colonized people of colour, who were erstwhile represented as either the noble savage or the exotic barbarians were envisioned and represented as members with complex social, economic and psychological dimensions, who became a relatable subject even with their localized fervours. In the context of the 1930s, when working-class literature gained some momentum, these novels from the colonized corners were reminders that the problem of exploitation and injustice was not merely a national issue for the British public but was indeed a global issue affecting every part of the Empire. The Empire-wide circulation and successful reception of the novels discussed earlier in this chapter also indicate the possibility that these narratives were crucial for a global Anglophone culture that was not only centred around homegrown versions of the Empire and its identity but also included narratives about working-class and racialized people of the colonies, which created a heterogenous Anglophone literary culture that would both empower and criticize everything that Britain has come to stand for. Finally, the 1930s novels from the settlements and colonies made a significant contribution in providing the foundation for a

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postcolonial future where cultural identity of the Britishness/Englishness as well as the British Empire would be constructed based on the multiple and divergent points of view that include voices from the peripheries. Class and Race would become the most important lenses to analyse how Britishness and the British Empire were experienced by the widest body of people across the globe in critical scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century.

Conclusion: Why should we focus on the voices from the peripheries? The validity of the depictions of England/Britain and Englishness/Britishness by its colonized people have been largely ignored in dominant scholarship. A primarily home-grown and pro-imperialist image of ‘Englishness’ and British identity and culture retains a commanding presence in the postsecondary English curriculum across the globe. Despite contemporary efforts to decolonize the academy, the novels that highlight a different face of Britishness/Englishness remain disproportionately underrepresented in the curricula in postsecondary English departments around the world. As a result, an incomplete and homogenous image of the nature of British society and English identity, which embodies ‘a process by which the empire can define itself against those it colonizes, excludes and marginalizes’, is continuously promoted and reproduced (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1998: 96). The process is problematic because it dignifies and legitimizes acts of violence and injustice against a large section of the world’s population and also prevents the human race as whole from accepting these mistakes and attempting to rectify them through future actions. Not all voices from the centre of the Empire were pro-imperialist either; socialist writers and activists alongside anti-colonial and pacifist writers were instrumental in challenging the legitimacy of the imperial mission through their literary and political activism. The co-existence of the anti-colonial networks and narratives of Herbert Xavier, Christina Stead, Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan and their counterparts in the heart of London alongside the proimperial writers like Irene Baird or Mazo de la Roche contribute to a complex understanding of the 1930s British Empire and its associated Britishness as a diverse, heterogenous entity that is simultaneously responsible for providing opportunities and promises to a group of people while punishing many others through both direct violence and the indirect interference of legal systems, bureaucratic structures and educational institutions.

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It is important to document and analyse the representations of Englishness from the margins of the Empire as these narratives aide us in organizing the ‘facts’ in the light of a correct philosophy of history; and since a writer is always positioned within a philosophy of history, it is the responsibility of the critics and scholars to evaluate the particular brand of a philosophy of history that has been presented in a text. The purpose of recognizing and studying the writers and their works from the settlements and colonies is not merely to validate the previously subdued voices and versions but also to ascertain a total and dialectical perception of the history of the British Empire and its associated culture of Englishness. The dominant narrative of benevolence is ruptured by these alternative and complementary narratives, which help us locate the role and responsibility of the ‘Englishness’ of the British Empire in world history. It is not only in the contents of the novels that we can locate the fragmented and conflicting identities of the Empire and its subjecthood. The context of production of these texts offers a concept of British identity that is connected by the laws of imperial economy but fragmented in terms of political opinions, geographical locations and perceptions of racial-national identity.

Works cited Anand, Mulk Raj. Untouchable. London: Penguin Classics, 2014 [1935]. Anand, Mulk Raj. Coolie. Harmonsworth: Penguin Classics, 1994 [1936]. Anand, Mulk Raj. Two Leaves and a Bud. New York: Liberty Press, 1954 [1937]. Anand, Mulk Raj. The Trilogy: The Village, Across the Black Waters, The Sword and the Sickle. New Delhi: Vision Books, 2016. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd rev. edn. London: Verso, 2016 [1983]. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 1998. Baer, Ben Conisbee. ‘Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers’ Association’. Modernism/modernity, 16 (3), 2009, 575–595. Project MUSE , doi:10.1353/mod.0.0104 Baird, Irene John. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1937. Blake, Ann, Leela Gandhi and Sue Thomas (eds.). England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Brown, E.K. ‘The Immediate Present in Canadian Literature.’ The Sewanee Review, 41 (4), 1933, 430–442. Clark, Katerina. ‘Indian Leftist Writers of the 1930s Maneuver among India, London, and Moscow : The Case of Mulk Raj Anand and His Patron Ralph Fox.’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 18 (1), 2017, 63–87.

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Colls, Robert and Phillip Dodd (eds.). Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. ‘Commonwealth.’ The Canadian Encyclopedia. www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/ en/article/commonwealth [Accessed 12 December, 2018]. Conor, Liz and Ann McGrath. ‘Xavier Herbert: Forgotten or Repressed?’ Cultural Studies Review, 23 (2), 2017. epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/ view/5818/6218 [Accessed April 10 2019]. Dark, Eleanor. Prelude to Christopher. Sydney : Halstead Classics, 1999 [1933]. Dark, Eleanor. Return to Coolami. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981 [1936]. De la Roche, Mazo. Whiteoaks of Jalna. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1957 [1929]. De la Roche, Mazo. Finch’s Fortune. Toronto: Dundurn, 2007 [1931]. De la Roche, Mazo. The Master of Jalna. Toronto: Dundurn, 2007 [1933]. De la Roche, Mazo. Young Renny. Toronto: Dundurn, 2009 [1935]. De la Roche, Mazo. Whiteoak Harvest. Boston: Little, Brown, 1936. De la Roche, Mazo. Whiteoak Heritage. Toronto: Dundurn, 2009 [1940]. De la Roche, Mazo. Wakefield’s Course. Toronto: Dundurn 2010 [1941]. De la Roche, Mazo. The Building of Jalna. Toronto: Dundurn, 2009 [1944]. De la Roche, Mazo. Return to Jalna. Toronto: Dundurn, 2010 [1946]. De la Roche, Mazo. Mary Wakefield. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949. De la Roche, Mazo. Renny’s Daughter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. De la Roche, Mazo. The Whiteoak Brothers. Toronto: Dundurn, 2010 [1953]. De la Roche, Mazo. Variable Winds at Jalna. Toronto: Dundurn, 2010 [1954]. De la Roche, Mazo. Centenary at Jalna. Toronto: Dundurn, 2011 [1958]. De la Roche, Mazo. Morning at Jalna. Toronto: Dundurn, 2011 [1960]. Edwardes, Michael. British India, 1772–1947: A Survey of the Nature and Effects of Alien Rule. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1967. Feingold, Ruth. ‘From Empire to Nation: The Shifting Sands of Australian National Identity.’ In A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900, Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer (eds.). Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2007, 61–72. Franklin, Mike. All That Swagger. Sydney : Angus & Robertson, 1986 [1936]. Franklin, Mike. ‘Capricornia: Reviews of the Commonwealth Prize Novel.’ Publicist, (May), 1938: 11–16. Goodwin, K.L. A History of Australian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1986. Hendrick, George. Mazo de la Roche. Farmington Hills, MI : Cengage Gale, 1984. Herbert, Xavier. Capricornia. Award Fiction, 1976 [1938]. Hill, Colin. ‘Introduction’ to Waste Heritage, by Irene Baird. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Holbrook, Carolyn. ‘The role of nationalism in Australian war literature of the 1930s.’ First World War Studies, 5 (2), 2014: 213–231. Kurtz, Lester. ‘The Indian Independence Struggle (1930–1931).’ June 2009. International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/indianindependence-struggle-1930–1931 [Accessed 12 March 2019].

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Mangan, J.A. (ed.). The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience. London: Routledge, 1993. McLaren, J. Australian Literature: An Historical Introduction. New York: Guilford Publication, 1989. Mitra, Samarpita. The Literary Public Sphere in Bengal: Aesthetics, Culture and Politics, 1905–1939. Syracuse University, PhD dissertation, 2009. Montefiore, Janet. Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History. London: Routledge, 2003. Munro, Craig. ‘Stephensen, Percy Reginald (1901–1965).’ Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb. anu.edu.au/biography/stephensen-percy-reginald-8645/text15115, (published first in hardcopy 1990) [Accessed 21 January 2019]. Narayan, R.K. Malgudi Landscapes. S. Krishnan (ed.). New Delhi: Penguin India, 2000. Nerbas, Don. ‘Howard Robinson and the “British Method”: A Case Study of Britishness in Canada during the 1930s and 1940s’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 20 (1), 2009: 139–160. Nile, Richard. The Rise of the Australian Novel. 1987. University of New South Wales. PhD Dissertation. Orsini, Francesca. The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Phillips, Caryl. (ed.). Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Pierce, Peter (ed.). The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. Cambridge Cambridge: University Press, 2011. E-book. Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. New York: New Directions, 1963 [1938]. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Sinclair, Gordon. Footloose in India. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1966 [1933]. Sinclair, Gordon. Cannibal Quest. Toronto: Doubleday, Doran & Gundy Limited, 1935. Smith, Ellen. ‘White Aborigines: Xavier Herbert, P. R. Stephensen and the Publicist.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16 (1), 2014: 97–116. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.’ [‘Race’, Writing and Difference, special issue] Critical Inquiry, 12 (1), 1985: 243–261. ‘Statute of Westminster, 1931 - Enactment No. 17.’ Department of Justice, Government of Canada. www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/constitution/lawreg-loireg/p1t171.html [Accessed 22 March 2019]. Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney. Sydney: Angus & Robinson, 1990 [1934]. Stephensen, Percy R. The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect. Sydney : Allen & Unwin, 1986. Tennant, Kylie. Tiburon. Australia: Michael Walmer, 2013 [1935].

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Timely Interventions: Queer Writing of the 1930s Glyn Salton-Cox

In 1933 E.M. Forster gave Christopher Isherwood the manuscript of his queer novel, Maurice, to read. Forster then anxiously asked the younger queer writer whether he felt the novel had dated, to which Isherwood famously replied ‘why shouldn’t it date?’ (Isherwood 2001: 126; emphasis in original). Forster’s novel was largely composed in 1912 under the influence of a visit to queer pioneer Edward Carpenter and his partner George Merrill; Forster then revised Maurice in 1931–32, and the novel was only published after his death in 1971 under Isherwood’s stewardship of the manuscript. Perhaps more than any other strain of literary history, the genealogies of queer fiction abound in these complex relays of conception, composition, and publication. Dorothy Strachey’s autobiographical novel, Olivia, for instance, which draws on Strachey’s adolescence in the late nineteenth-century, was written in 1933, and published in 1949; Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian Bildungsroman The Well of Loneliness was prosecuted for obscenity in 1928, and legally published in 1956; memoir-novels by famous figures such as Stephen Spender, or the lesser-known dystopias of Katharine Burdekin all had to wait until the 1970s and 1980s to come to press, to say nothing of the original uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, which finally emerged in 2005. This essay argues that the 1930s presents a particularly salient point from which to explore this problematic of literary periodization. The obvious reason for this is the regime of censorship at work during the period, most famously seen in the Well trial (which coincided with the banning of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Love the same year), and the continuing criminalization of male homosexual acts until 1967. While acknowledging the undoubtedly major significance of these developments, we might find another model for understanding these fractured temporalities. In her influential study Time Binds: Queer 155

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Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), Elizabeth Freeman develops a suggestive concept she calls ‘chrononormativity’, the governing assumption of both traditional modes of cultural history and official state-sanctioned teleologies. Against such ‘dominant arrangement[s] of time and history’, Freeman insists instead on ‘nonsequential forms of time [that] can also fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye’ (Freeman 2010: xi; see also Lothian 2018, inter alia). Queer lives and cultural objects, Freeman argues, are particularly likely to dwell in such nonnormative temporalities for they often necessarily are positioned ‘aslant to dominant forms’ (Freeman 2010: xv). What makes Freeman’s argument so important for the 1930s is the ways in which various new forms of sociality, cultural production, and political activism so insistently and defiantly positioned themselves aslant the hegemonic structures of the period. Alongside the prominence of a famous group of queer writers, the so-called ‘Auden gang’, the most important of these currents was the internationalist literature of protest and exhortation that came about in response to the widespread poverty of the day, the persistence of British Imperialism and the rise of fascism. In other words, the 1930s were not only pink, but also red. Here I diverge from Freeman in that I see Communism as a more antinormative force than she allows. Developing a concept I have elsewhere called ‘the long 1930s’ in a specifically queer modality, this essay explores the ways in which a series of surprising relays operate in mid-century literary history and beyond (Mellor and Salton-Cox 2015: 1–9). The 1930s function here as a nodal point, not so much an historical middle as a series of reference points for the development of twentieth-century literary and cultural history. Accordingly, this article is organized around a number of prose genres of particular importance to the 1930s but which are also hallmarks of twentieth-century writing more broadly: documentary, dystopia, the spy story, and memoir. In the section on documentary with which this essay begins, I explore the possible influence of a little-known work of queer Communist political journalism: Valentine Ackland’s Country Conditions (1936) on George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), before going on to examine sections from Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Next, I examine the antifascist dystopias of Katharine Burdekin and their resonance in Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967). I then turn to Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories (1928), and their influence on Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, which, in turn, are key precursors to John Lehmann’s sexually explicit queer memoir of the 1930s, In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976). The closing section of the essay explores queer memoirs of the late 1960s and 1970s, including Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind (1976), J.R.

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Ackerley’s My Father and Myself (1968), and T.C. Worsley’s fictionalized documentary-memoir Fellow Travellers (1971), also examining Stephen Spender’s bizarre, unpublished rebuttal of an unauthorized biography by Hugh David (1992). The queer 1930s that I argue for here is thus simultaneously a succession of interventions in major lines of literary history, and a series of temporally destabilizing resistances to the dictates of such normative history.

Documentary and class-crossing contacts Left-wing documentary writing rose to prominence in the mid to late 1930s as a response to the pressing need for a record of the period’s deprivation, political turmoil, and also partly as a reaction to the high modernism of the 1920s, with its stress on formal experimentation over direct political partisanship; it is, however, important to stress that these texts do not rely on what we might call mere veridicality (see Denning 2010: 120). Rather in the manner that Émile Zola’s famous metaphor of the microscope must be taken with more than a grain of salt when compared with his novels themselves, here we might compare programmatic statements of the documentary imperative such as Storm Jameson’s famous manifesto-essay in the short-lived journal Fact with the variegated narrative practices of documentary prose. Jameson’s piece, ‘Documents’, argued that the socialist literature of the future must contain ‘No stream of consciousness [. . .] No commentary [. . .] No aesthetic, moral, or philosophical inquiry – that is, none which is not implicit’ (Jameson 1937: 16; also cited in Maslen 2014: 175). Indeed, while Fact announced that it wouldn’t be reviewing novels at all unless they rose to the level of documentary accuracy of actual reportage, it still found room for a review of John Lehmann’s queer autobiographical novel Evil Was Abroad (1938) – a novel based on personal experience and written in clear prose, to be sure, but hardly documentary as such. Indeed, documentary prose of the period broadly considered ranged from Jack Lindsay’s use of Cromwell’s diaries in his novel of the English Revolution, 1649 (1938); pieces of straight reportage such as the writing of George Orwell; what I have elsewhere called Isherwood’s ‘factographic’ fiction in The Berlin Stories (1935/9) and his documentary diaries in Journey to a War (1939), accompanied by poems by W.H. Auden (Salton-Cox 2015). We should also include, perhaps as the culmination of the documentary impulse during the period, the project of Mass Observation, the initiative from the period that recorded contemporary attitudes from the position of a series of ‘participant observers’ (see Hubble 2006). Documentary

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was, then, a widely variegated prose genre during the period, both in the hands of queer cultural producers and other writers more broadly. However, one question loomed large over the genre, however broadly considered – the problem of the relationship of the bourgeois writer to the typically proletarian object of documentary interest. Perhaps the most famous documentarian of the period was George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier (1937) investigated conditions in industrial towns in the north of England and meditated on the difficulties of cross-class communication. Here I would like to explore a surprising queer progenitor to Orwell’s text, from an underrated writer of the period  – if the famously homophobic Orwell has become the most celebrated practitioner of documentary prose of the period, Valentine Ackland is almost certainly the most underappreciated today. Always labouring in the shadow of her more famous partner Sylvia Townsend Warner, today her work is almost entirely forgotten. But in the 1930s her writing was widely admired on the Communist left, particularly in its indictments of rural poverty. Alongside Townsend Warner, Ackland became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1935, and quickly rose to a relatively prominent position in the Party: her diaries of the period, for instance, record meetings with figures such as Tom Wintringham, and she also personally knew the General Secretary of the CPGB, Harry Pollitt (Ackland 1935a). Most prominent among her literary output of the period was a series of articles she wrote for the major leftist publication, Left Review, entitled ‘Country Dealings’ (Ackland 1935b: 198–201; Ackland 1935c: 311–314; Ackland 1935d: 506–508); she also contributed poetry and reviews to the magazine, her contributions totalling nine over four years. In these sharp pieces of committed journalism, Ackland investigated the conditions of rural labourers and their families, in particular their dilapidated dwellings, harsh working conditions, and lack of political representation. The CPGB were sufficiently impressed that the Party’s publishing house, Lawrence and Wishart, commissioned Ackland to produce an extended book form of the articles, entitled Country Conditions (1936), which she produced ‘with the thought of doing something that might be for the Party’, as her partner reported in an unpublished letter from the period (Townsend Warner 1935). The volume is studded with first-hand testimony from various labourers and their wives and includes amongst its several appendices a section comprised of workers’ testimonies. The distinctive texture of the volume emerges from the way in which Ackland interweaves these testimonies with data from the Ministry of Agriculture and other sources, and with an overarching historical narrative

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tracing the history of the area back to the time of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Ackland’s historical argument is that the condition of the country labourer and his family have not changed in that hundred-year period – except for the worse, in that political organization has become increasingly more difficult. Ackland argues that this is because: The old independence has been stifled (but not completely choked) by the progress of the industrial revolution, splitting the ranks of the working class, focusing attention on the more immediately important industrial workers; by the imperialistic stage of capitalism; by the combined effort of these two causes – constant and unrelieved depression on the land  – and lastly by the present bureaucratic system of distribution of responsibility. Ackland 1936: 11

Despite these woeful developments, Ackland is clear to state that the villagers she meets are not devoid of political consciousness – particularly in the chapter on politics, which details rural workers’ and their wives’ clear support for the Labour candidate, but also in a series of observations made by rural labourers. For instance, one labourer befriended by Ackland exclaims of a group of dilapidated cottages that ‘what those houses need is a red jacket!’ (31). In her excellent critical biography of Townsend Warner and Ackland, Wendy Mulford glosses this remark as referring to the cottages being burnt down, which is certainly a radical valence present in the remark, but we might also see this as a moment of fairly explicitly Communist political commitment (Mulford 1988: 77). Well received in the leftist press at the time, Country Conditions is an extraordinary piece of committed reportage of a type only just beginning to be produced in Britain, and indeed Europe more broadly (for British reception of Ackland, see Mulford 1988: 78). It bears comparison, for instance, to the work of the Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, whom, among others, the Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács had praised in 1935 for creating ‘a new type [. . .] for our literature: the type of the revolutionary reporter’ (Lukács 1955: 9–10). Like the more celebrated Kisch, Ackland’s project of objective reportage proceeded symbiotically with her growing commitment to Marxism, as the chapters of the volume showcase, moving from housing conditions, labour, the role of women in the rural economy, and finally to a section on politics and a series of appendices detailing agricultural conditions in different European nations. Unlike Kisch, however, whose work tended to involve an incessant authorial self-inscription (see, inter alia, Kisch 1937) Ackland’s voice in the volume is more self-effacing, even as her commitment becomes increasingly clear throughout the book. While

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coming from an upper-middle-class background, Ackland was very short of funds when she came to Dorset, and did live amongst the villagers, and in the section on housing she comments: I speak with some knowledge in this matter; for some time I lived in a farm cottage, paying a rent of 5s. a week. The roof leaked and the walls were damp. Water ran down the bedroom wall, and clothes and bedclothes were always damp. Negotiations between me, as tenant, the farmer as my landlord and the estate agent as his landlord, led me to the discovery that either I could leave the house or stay in it. Nothing would be done. Ackland 1936: 51–52

There is a quiet understatement here in the phrase ‘some knowledge’, while the conditions of her cottage are noted as representative of village housing in general, which is the subject of much of the volume. Indeed, the fact that she was living long-term in the same village she describes throughout the volume is only mentioned in passing at a few points, with the exception of the final chapter in which she describes her role in campaigning for the Labour candidate in the 1935 General Election. Ackland’s position in the village was quite extraordinary – living openly with her partner, and dressing in male attire, she cut a striking figure in rural Dorset. But this did not affect her ability to gain the confidence of the villagers, except positively as it helped her win their trust as she looked ‘so unlike the people who oppress them’ (Ackland 1935e). It is, in fact, clear from the volume as well as Ackland’s diaries and letters from the period that she became good friends with a number of local agricultural labourers, including a hedger named Fred Dory, whose testimony is at the heart of the section on labour. Ackland was also very close to town workers such as Julius and Queenie Lipton, who came down to visit her and Townsend Warner, the two women also visiting the Liptons in the East End of London. Country Conditions bears close comparison to a perhaps rather unlikely bedfellow – George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Like Country Conditions, the first part of Orwell’s text consists of an indictment of the dire state of working-class housing and on labour conditions; again, like Ackland, Orwell blends personal observations, workers’ testimony, and lists of facts and figures in a mode that would become characteristic of leftist journalism of the period. It is very difficult to prove with any certainty any strain of direct, conscious influence, but it is hard to see how Ackland’s path-breaking studies in country conditions were unknown to Orwell, and the textual similarities are very close. Moreover, as Philip Bounds has convincingly argued, and is clear from his own references in

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the text, Orwell read widely in Communist literature of the period; he mentions Left Review by name in The Road to Wigan Pier, needless to say in a derogatory register (Bounds 2009; Orwell 2001: 171). Could it be, then, that a certain anxiety of influence is at work between these two volumes of committed reportage? It is outside the scope of this present essay to pursue this question in greater depth, but it is worth noting one particular example of how this might be at work. In what seems like a direct riposte to Ackland’s final appendix on Soviet agricultural policy, Orwell argues against “that nexus of thought, ‘Socialism-progressmachinery-Russia-tractors-hygeine-machinery-progress’ ” (Orwell 2001: 199). Drawing heavily on the recently published Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation (1935), Ackland’s appendix sets up precisely this matrix, which has led to some disparaging comments on her naivety (see Wright 1996: 136– 149), but however misplaced her confidence in the implementation of Soviet agricultural policy, her recommendations for the modernization of English agriculture along Soviet lines in English country villages remains salient. For it’s surely very hard to argue that the electrification of labourers’ homes, better medical care, the foundation of rural leisure and educational facilities, and upto-date farming equipment would not have improved the lives of the rural poor a great deal, nor to see how Orwell’s disdain for such schemes is a fundamental problem for his socialist credentials. I would also like to stress how Country Conditions – and Ackland’s activism more broadly – give the lie to Orwell’s conclusions in the infamous final section of the text. As is well known, Orwell inveighs against socially unconventional socialists, including ‘dreary tribe[s] of high-minded women’ (2001: 183) and ‘cocksure Marx quoting types’ (181). Although Orwell famously recommends that increasingly submerged white-collar workers should realize that their objective economic situation is directly aligned with that of the more traditionally conceived proletariat, he is also at pains to point out that the breaking down of cultural class barriers is much harder than many middle-class socialists would presume. Orwell’s answer to this is to purge the ‘cranks’ from the movement in order to appeal to the ‘plenty of decent people’ (176) who are alienated by feminists, vegetarians, fruit-juice drinkers and so on. While not a self-identifying feminist, nor a vegetarian – she preferred rabbits and pheasants she shot herself, accompanied by a glass of beer or gin – Ackland would surely count among the legion of socially unconventional types Orwell would see purged from the socialist movement. But, as I have noted above, she was able to connect very closely with agricultural and town workers, gaining their trust and friendship in a way that Orwell, by his own admission, was never completely able to do (see,

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inter alia, Orwell 2001: 166–167). This is an essential point to note about queer documentary writing of the period  – open gender dissidence and same-sex partnerships were not only no bar to forging links between bourgeois writers and workers, but sometimes actively an asset. In a different way to Ackland and Townsend Warner’s rural activism, this capacity to forge links can also be seen in queer male writing from the period, which was involved in class-crossing sexual partnerships that were often politically inflected and international in character. Another celebrated documentarian of the period, Christopher Isherwood, famously moved to Germany in search of working-class male partners, as did W.H. Auden (see Page 1998), while their publisher John Lehmann journeyed to a similarly politically charged Vienna. Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (1935/9) is perhaps the best-known contemporary document of these class-crossing international intimacies, which are also explored in Lehmann’s autobiographical novel Evil Was Abroad (1938). While Isherwood was perhaps the most celebrated queer practitioner of documentary prose in the 1930s, his work during the period was never ‘objective’ according to the normative dictates of the genre as it is sometimes commonly conceived; rather, his Berlin Stories built upon his personal experiences in Weimar Berlin teetering on the edge of the Nazi accession from a specifically queer, antifascist, Marxist perspective. Perhaps the most salient aspect to note about these works is that they have traditionally not been seen as “out” texts  – nowhere does Isherwood directly reference his own homosexuality – but on a closer reading they reveal a great deal about homosexuality in the period, and how it can be part of a complex web of documentary impulses (broadly considered), networks of cross-class desire, and engaged political commentary. In the series of interlinked vignettes that make up the central part of the second part of The Berlin Stories, Isherwood describes the narrator’s relationship with a young working-class man, Otto, who is based on Isherwood’s own boyfriend during the period. The narrator – named Christopher himself – meets Otto who is caught in a tumultuous relationship with a neurotic and explicitly homosexual Englishman, Peter. Their relationship is never described in explicitly sexual terms, yet we learn that ‘whenever Otto turned his head to stare at a girl, Peter’s eyes mechanically followed his glance with instinctive jealousy’ (Isherwood 1999: 349–350). Upon meeting Christopher, ‘Otto grins, two large dimples appear in his peach-bloom cheeks’, and soon ‘he makes up to me assiduously, laughing at my jokes, never missing an opportunity of giving me a crafty, understanding wink’ (335). Otto’s and Peter’s relationship finally comes to an end following the bisexual Otto’s affair with a young female

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teacher, and the close of the story features a note from Otto to Christopher, promising to come and see him in Berlin. The next story in the volume, ‘The Nowaks’, sees Christopher living with Otto and his family in a slum tenement. Tellingly, it is Christopher who makes the first move, coming to the tenement on his own initiative. It is, moreover, made clear that the narrator knew the Nowaks before this time, as the narrator notes that Otto’s mother, Frau Nowak, greets ‘Herr Christoph’ enthusiastically. Otto then appears: Otto, as usual, had begun acting at once. His face was slowly illuminated by a sunrise of extreme joy. He sprang forward, throwing one arm around my neck, wringing my hand: ‘Christoph, you old soul, where have you been hiding all this time?’ Isherwood 1999: 365

Otto’s hearty greeting here again underlines an ongoing relationship, and while his mother reproaches him ‘he’s got no time to waste running after a do-nothing like you’, Otto responds by, as in the previous story, grinning and winking at Christopher (365). Very quickly it is decided that Christopher will live with the Nowaks ‘as a lodger’, but, as Otto insists, ‘you can do just what you like [. . .] you and I can sleep in the back room’ (367). Otto is obviously an amateur hustler, whose exploits are tolerated by his family, his mother reprimanding him in halfirritated, indulgent terms: ‘You wicked boy,’ she was up in arms again in an instant, ‘have you no more shame than to speak of such things in front of Herr Christoph! Why, if he knew where that twenty marks came from – and plenty more besides – he’d disdain to stay in the same house with you another minute; and quite right too!’ Isherwood 1999: 369–370

But, of course, Frau Nowak is well aware of Otto’s and Christopher’s sleeping arrangements. Later on, Otto shows Christopher a series of pictures of girlfriends and letters from male admirers, including a Dutchman who has got ‘the biggest car I ever saw in my life. I was with him in the spring’ (380). When Christopher leaves the Nowaks for other lodgings, Otto asks to be taken with him ‘as his servant’, to which the narrator slyly replies, ‘I’m afraid you’re a luxury I can’t afford’ (394). It will have become clear that these stories are quite explicitly about crossclass homosexual relationships, often monetized, but bearing a great deal of affection. The point I want to underline here is the way in which Isherwood’s

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entry to working-class interiors is predicated upon a sexual relationship with Otto; this story is a closely autobiographical account of his real-life relationship with a young man named Bubi, with whose family he also lived for a time, with no animosity from the family apart from an elder brother (see Parker 2004: 199– 202). In other words, Isherwood’s documentary gaze is occasioned, and not hampered by his love for working-class German boys. As John Lehmann was later to put it, ‘some glass wall that normally exists between the reporter or historian and his subject had to be broken down’ in his case through ‘sensual adventures with Austrian youth’ (Lehmann 1985: 75). Isherwood’s own politically committed and sexually charged investigation of working-class lives, his breaking down of ‘glass walls’, was insistently predicated on his queer identity and sexual practice. It is particularly important to underline this aspect of homosexual documentaries of the 1930s as they are usually dismissed as modes of exploitative ‘slumming’, not only by conservative literary critics such as Valentine Cunningham (1988: 240–265), but also by Isherwood himself in later life, who wrote in 1956 that he was ‘repelled’ by the ‘heartlessness’ of the first half of The Berlin Stories. However, in the very same interview, the older Isherwood recoiled against the fact that ‘the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an overcrowded market’; he then relates the story of ‘a boy who told a psychiatrist quite seriously that he was “homosexual – for economic reasons”!’ (Isherwood 1966: 86–87; see also Shuttleworth 2000: 151). I will return to the bi-erasure of this anecdote later in this essay; but also very telling here is Isherwood’s recognition of the transactional nature of much cross-class queer sex in his phrase ‘as always’, which indicates that he thinks that the main problem is the working conditions and pay of young Berliner sex workers rather than transactional sex per se, and in this his remarks are very much in line with today’s most radical currents of sex worker advocacy, activism, and scholarship.

Female civilization and its discontents To move, then, from the documentary impulse to the speculative: unsurprisingly given the threat of fascism and coming war, dystopia is another signature genre of 1930s writing. Examples include Aldous Huxley’s cautionary tale of biopolitical pleasures, Brave New World (1932), oneiric fables such as Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase (1937), Patrick Hamilton’s Impromptu in Moribundia (1939), or

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Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939), and more realist novels such as Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year (1936), to which may be added dramas such as Winifred Holtby’s Take Back Your Freedom (1939), and Isherwood and Auden’s The Dog Beneath The Skin (1935). Here I would like to focus on the underexplored queer feminist novelist Katharine Burdekin (1896–1963). Burdekin was a prolific writer, active from the 1920s until the 1950s; she is today best remembered for her 1937 dystopia Swastika Night, which was reissued by the Left Book Club in 1941, and again in 1993 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York (Burdekin 1989a). Set 700 years in the future, Swastika Night presents a horrific vision of Nazi victory, a world in which women have become reproductive chattel kept in cages, the Jews completely wiped out, and (almost all) Germans and all subjects of the defeated nations alike kept in complete ignorance of history. As Daphne Patai and Andy Croft have observed, Swastika Night is an important antecedent of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Patai 1983: 85–95; Croft 1984: 210); other commentators have pointed out that Burdekin also anticipates feminist dystopias such as Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of female slavery, The Handmaid’s Tale (Cirrone 2001: 4). While acknowledging the importance of Burdekin’s novel for literary history, I have argued elsewhere that Swastika Night deploys a vigilant homophobia and cultural nationalism as the cornerstone of its antifascist critique, as queer Germans are opposed to its stoutly heterosexual English hero (Salton-Cox 2018: 113–139). However, here I would like to focus on another of Burdekin’s dystopias, the lesser-known but perhaps more intriguing The End of This Day’s Business, which was composed in the mid1930s, but only published in 1989. As Patai has observed, The End of This Day’s Business can simultaneously be read as a utopian and a dystopian novel, offering a less bleak vision than that of Swastika Night, which might be described as its direct opposite (Patai 1989: 176). Set over four thousand years in the future, Burdekin’s novel depicts a rationally ordered world society in which war has been abolished, medicine and technology have advanced; individual nation states have not been erased, but rather exist in unstrained international cooperation. This is not, however, an equal society, for following thousands of years of oppression, women have turned the tables and subjugated men. The men are treated much more humanely than women in Swastika Night – they are free to do as they please within certain boundaries, and generally appear contented in their lives of drinking, fist-fighting, sports, manual labour, and casual, objectifying sexual encounters with the ruling class of women. Men are also allowed pride in their physical strength, their ‘strong muscles’, which are opposed to their equally ‘weak brains’ (Burdekin 1989b: 4). Men are

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kept in complete ignorance, brought up to believe in their innate inferiority to women, who occupy all the professions and political office, and alone are allowed to learn history and Latin, their ‘secret language’ into which a selection of the most important texts of the past have been translated, the originals having been completely wiped out (94). Despite the novel’s depiction of a calmly ordered society, it features at its centre two figures who have become discontented. The reader is first introduced to ‘Big Neil’, who suffers a bout of depression and self-hate despite his physical strength and manly good looks. Tellingly and extremely atypically, he refuses the sexual invitation of an attractive woman because ‘it seems as if I, me, Neil, were so much live meat’ (15; emphasis in original). Despite this ironic flash of insight, the intellectually challenged Neil is unable to understand the source of his depression, firmly believing in his own inferiority. The bulk of the narrative is then taken up with his tutelage in history given by a woman, Grania, whom he had believed was his aunt, but who turns out to be his mother. Grania is a visionary artist and butch lesbian who believes that men ought to be restored to a position of equality. She narrates the history of Europe to Neil, a future projection from Burdekin writing in the mid 1930s, which one critic, writing on Swastika Night, has called a ‘future as past’ (Stock 2016: 429–436). In stark contrast to Swastika Night, Burdekin’s vision of the future here involves the swift defeat of fascism, which is followed by a period of Communist internationalism and gender equality. However, in what she calls the ‘second militarist reaction’, men revolt against gender equality and attempt to restore patriarchal power after a few of generations of this utopia (Burdekin 1989b: 91). Women then carefully and systematically assumed control of the planet; this derives in large part from their more careful reading of Freud than the men, the knowledge that ‘any human being can be kept in moral slavery by early inculcation of sex-shame’ (90). Further drawing on Freud, women realized that ‘the relationship between the Mother, the son and the father will determine the life and character of the son’ and accordingly ‘eliminated the father’ by systematically refusing to tell sons who their fathers were; this was possible as under Communism sexual freedom had meant that compulsory monogamy had been eliminated and fathers could not, therefore, claim parentage. While Grania’s discourse draws explicitly on Freud, Burdekin also appears to be drawing on Engels. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels’s analysis of pre-patriarchal society holds that: Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in the house; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to the

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impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty, means that the women – the mothers – are held in high esteem [. . .] the position of women is not only free, but honourable. Engels 2010: 78–79

The women then begin a calculated recapitulation of this pre-patriarchal society, a ‘cold, logical and slow process, passed from Mother to daughter, and spreading over some two hundred and fifty years’ (Burdekin 1989b: 91). Finally, in a classic revolutionary move, women printers then refused to take on men, and the other skilled trades and professions followed; while this was against the Communist spirit of absolute equality still prevalent ideologically, men were unable to counter these moves, for given the meritocracy of Communist society, the naturally more logical women already dominated all professions, trades, and government (92). Finally, then, a well-ordered totalitarian society emerged, which ruled for four thousand years entirely without war (Neil isn’t even aware what war is [61]), almost entirely free of disease given huge advancements in biology and medicine, and with a stationary world population and the male gender firmly locked into the role of a new labouring proletariat. If, for Engels, ‘the first class oppression coincided with that of the female sex by the male’, the novel’s final class oppression reverses these terms quite exactly (Engels 2010: 96). Grania is in revolt against this new form of class society. She notes that during this period there have been almost no advancements in pure science, which ‘interests comparatively few women’ (98), and she confesses an admiration for the ‘Old Men’ she reads about in the Women’s Libraries, ‘not only the exceptional ones, but for the whole toiling mass’ (104). Curiously, she also finds the rule of women ‘dull’ and believes a society of true equality between the sexes (her term) to be happy, ‘and nearer to the full feeling of God’ (107). Accordingly, she gathers up a small group of men and sets up a secret society in which she begins to teach history. This is a capital offence, and Grania is found out and sentenced to death by her former sexual partner, Anna, a German woman now General Secretary of Europe. However, in a queer rewrite of a classic trope of mid-century leftist fiction, in which a flash of defiance from the condemned man holds the potential of a utopian world to come, Grania believes that she has convinced Anna of her cause, and that her dreams of equality will finally be realized sometime in the future. I’m going to shortly return to the relationship between Grania and Anna, but first I’d like to observe one strikingly prescient aspect of Burdekin’s novel: the rise of technocracy. The major figure in the intellectual history of technocracy is,

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of course, James Burnham; in The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham observed the rise of the rule of the manager in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Roosevelt’s New Deal, arguing that it was control rather than ownership of the means of production that would characterize a new global elite comprised of bureaucrats, managers, and technocrats rather than industrialists and property owners qua property. The influence of Burnham on Orwell has often been noted, but what is striking is how Burdekin makes a similar prediction along gendered lines; more than merely anticipating Orwell’s later novel, she anticipates his source. Her vision of a female-managed world system also anticipates aspects of second-wave bourgeois feminism, according to which female access to the professional managerial class is not only desirable in terms of gender equality, but also an appropriate state of affairs because such a society would be better run. In stark contrast to bourgeois feminism, Grania however observes that this society is ‘dull’ – and also, even more provocatively, ‘a coward’s world’ (Burdekin 1989b: 143). What, then, are we to make of such an assertion? On the face of it this would appear to be an anti-feminist position, as Anna upbraids Grania (on a certain reading, in fact, the whole novel might be indicted along these lines), but what must be taken into account here is the role of Grania’s queer female masculinity as opposed to the conventional aspects of the gender roles in Burdekin’s speculative matriarchy. Women, Grania notes, not only encourage men to be proud of their physical prowess, but also ‘deliberately keep themselves unmuscular in order to be as different to you as possible’ (99). What is lost in this new technocratic matriarchy is the possibility of cross-identification – as Grania also point out, her own massively muscular form is seen as a ‘disaster’ (97). While the text might perhaps appear to offer a simple inversion, in which men are to be pitied, more importantly, the complete disdain for and expulsion of any masculine traits is deeply damaging to the possibilities for benign gender variation. In other words, the butch is thrown out with the bathwater of violent phallic masculinity. Not only is female masculinity despised, but lesbian desire is also repudiated in the world of the novel; in stark distinction to Swastika Night, there is almost no homoerotic desire between the ruling class of women in The End of This Day’s Business. Indeed, Grania and Anna are the only queer women in the novel. They are depicted as a classic butch/femme couple: in contrast to Grania’s large, muscular form, Anna is ‘slim and delicately made both in feature and limb. Her skin was smooth and hardly lined at all, pale, but very faintly flushed over the cheekbones’ (137). When Grania arrives in Germany for her trial and execution,

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she has a series of impassioned arguments with her former lover, who now is determined to put her to death for breaking the oath that women must not reveal anything of human history to men; these arguments are punctuated by moments of tenderness, culminating in a final embrace before Grania stands trial. While the two women are depicted in clearly loving terms, in a curious moment Grania rather uninspiringly describes their love as a by-product of the subjugation of men: But now I’ll tell you why you love me, because you can’t love anybody else. You, people like you, arranged this world where there can’t be any but physical love between women and men. And you live in it, but you can’t be happy in it. You haven’t had my difficulties, Anna. You’re beautiful and attractive and men draw towards you like iron to a magnet, but you’ve never been able to love any of them [. . .] You have as much natural force to love as anyone that’s ever been in the world, to love as hard, and love as long, and you’ve had to give it all to me for lack of a better receiver. Burdekin 1989b: 144

Grania frames Anna’s love for her as a transmuted version of what Freud called ‘contingent homosexuality’, which is defined by the absence of viable heterosexual partners; here the contingency does not emerge because there are no men available for sex, but because they are not available for love. In turn, however, Grania exclaims that she rejects this love, for ‘it’s no use to me, except for the furtherance of my purpose and my desire’ (144). This bold statement is an early iteration of a common trope of gay and lesbian fiction, in which neither mere sexual attraction nor a spilling over of homosocial bonding is sufficient for a satisfying queer love – Grania refuses Anna’s contingent homosexual attachment, all the while insisting that it satisfied her own desire, and more tellingly perhaps, her ‘purpose’. Throughout these final scenes Grania is ‘making revolutionary propaganda’, trying to persuade Anna to open up the matriarchy to the possibility of male inclusion. On Grania’s penultimate night before her execution, Anna fails to turn up at Grania’s room, and her former partner upbraids her on her final night, ‘by your cowardice you wasted last night when I would have been nothing but your friend and your love, and tonight I shall be your enemy and your tyrant’ (150). Grania however relents in this, and holds Anna to her breast, before kissing her and carrying her out of the room. Her ‘purpose’ is, then, simultaneously the acknowledgment of queer love and the attainment of a more equal society, which Burdekin’s counterintuitive dystopian fiction sees as coconstitutive. As such, The End of This Day’s Business should not be seen as an

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oddity in the history of feminist dystopia, but rather as a landmark text of queer utopianism. Burdekin’s novel has surprising resonances with Valerie Solanas’s 1967 polemic, the SCUM Manifesto. A landmark work of lesbian-feminist satire, Solanas’s manifesto, like Burdekin’s women of the future, insistently reverses the heterosexist terms of orthodox Freudian discourse, arguing not that women suffer from penis envy, but rather that men are caught in the grips of ‘pussy envy’ (Solanas 2004: 38, inter alia). Solanas’s text proclaims a violent revolution of women in order to overcome the animalistic passivity of men, who are unable to complete any form of thorough-going social revolution because they are caught up in a series of ‘basic animal activities – eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama’ (45). In the face of such abject physicality of men, Solanas argues, ‘there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex’ (35). Of course, the major way in which Burdekin anticipates Solanas is not in any notable similarities in their recommendations for a queer utopia, but rather in the location of basic animality in the male, and cerebral possibilities in the female; for Burdekin this might come about through years of female dictatorship and Freudian cross-conditioning, but for Solanas it is a basic precondition of sexual difference itself. And yet, Burdekin’s text also features a dominant note of biological determinism, in an obverse fashion to Solanas. While Solanas argues that men are, chromosomically speaking, ‘walking abortions’ who should be entirely eliminated and only female children produced by technical eugenic means in the future (35), in The End of This Day’s Business, women decide to continue bearing children in order to maintain the matriarchy that naturally keeps men in thrall to their female betters. In these ways, both writers maintain a certain degree of biological superiority of women, through their present indispensable role in biological reproduction. A further resonance between Solanas and Burdekin emerges when we consider Burdekin’s 1935 novel, Proud Man. Burdekin’s speculative presentist fiction envisages a post-human – or, as they call themselves, fully human – being who visits her present-day England and is horrified by the morass of sexual desire and gender strife they encounter. The ‘person’, as the post-gendered being is known, refers to present day men and women as ‘sub-humans’ (Burdekin 1983) – a term which Solanas uses of the male gender (Solanas 2004: 62), but which she might equally have applied to her scathing evaluation of the majority of women caught up in the male nexus of control, ‘Daddy’s girls’. Again, a striking similarity emerges in that both Solanas and Burdekin insist upon the present

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condition of most women who are in thrall to and complicit with the current heteropatriarchal system. The point here is not to excoriate either Burdekin nor Solanas for their gender essentialism, but rather to note both writers’ powerful indictments of gendered roles at an interval of forty years. Solanas’s manifesto remains an important text of radical feminism – and so, for all their similarly problematic moments, should Burdekin’s novels.

Some more queer bonding As Erin Carlston (2013) and others have pointed out, queer men, particularly cultural producers, are insistently associated with espionage in the popular imagination. There are two main reasons for this imbrication: first, a conception of the exigencies of the closet as providing psychological resources for the secrecy of spying; and second, the links between the famous ‘Cambridge Spies’ and the Auden group, as one of the spies, Guy Burgess, was an acquaintance of Auden and Isherwood, which led to a round of wild speculation about these two left-leaning writers upon the revelation of his defection in 1956. I do not intend to rehearse either of these arguments here, for they are unimportant for queer literary history or that of spy fiction  – the first being a homophobic cliché, the second a coincidence. Nor do I wish to focus on the more salient question of the role of the spy in Auden’s early poetry – partly as this is an essay on fiction, but also because astute analyses of this feature have already been produced (see Bozarth 2001). Instead, this section will examine the influence of Somerset Maugham’s seminal series of spy stories, Ashenden, Or the British Agent (1928) on Ian Fleming’s Bond books and their later film adaptations, and both on John Lehmann’s queer memoir of the 1930s, In The Purely Pagan Sense (1976). Before turning to the role Ashenden plays in the literary history of the spy thriller, it is necessary to stress that the stories are emphatically queer fictions, especially because, as has often been observed, Maugham’s published works contain no explicit proclamations of his homosexuality. But, rather like Auden’s and Isherwood’s early work, the Ashenden stories reference homosexuality in an easily decipherable code, curiously overlooked in critical accounts of the stories, which tend to merely observe that Ashenden resembled Maugham, that Maugham used the name of a schoolboy crush for his main character, and to reiterate the cliché of spying being an ideal occupation for closeted homosexuals (See Archer 1993, and Myers 2004). Drawing heavily on Maugham’s experiences in the secret services in World War I, the series of interlinked stories feature an upper-class British spy, Ashenden,

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a ‘neat creature’, comic novelist and dramatist with refined tastes in art, literature, and food and drink (Maugham 1961: 12). Ashenden is sent to Switzerland, Italy, and Russia, where he meets a series of compromised characters: traitors who betray both lovers and their countries, assassins, and warped nationalists. As a somewhat jaded student of human nature, Ashenden has a keen eye for others’ absurdities, including an American travelling companion who dies trying to retrieve his laundry, an impeccably dignified ambassador who bares all about a love affair to a horrified Ashenden, an operative who decides a mission on the toss of a coin, and a Russian revolutionary who insists on eating scrambled eggs every morning during a trip to Paris. The last of these larger-than-life figures, Anastasia Alexandrovna, is Ashenden’s only explicit love interest, their brief relationship ending absurdly because of his inability to countenance her culinary obsession. But one grotesque looms large above all other characters, the Hairless Mexican, who bears a distinct resemblance to Arthur Norris from Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935), and his original, Gerald Hamilton, with whom Maugham was later to become indirectly acquainted (see Bachardy and Isherwood 2014: 100): The Hairless Mexican was a tall man, and though thinnish gave you the impression of being very powerful; he was smartly dressed in a blue serge suit, with a silk handkerchief neatly tucked in the breast pocket of his coat, and he wore a gold bracelet on his wrist. His features were good, but a little larger than life-size, and his eyes were brown and lustrous. He was quite hairless. His yellow skin had the smoothness of a woman’s and he had no eyebrows nor eyelashes; he wore a pale brown wig, rather long, and the locks were arranged in artistic disorder. This and the unwrinkled sallow face, combined with his dandified dress, gave him an appearance that was at first glance a trifle horrifying. He was repulsive and ridiculous, but you could not take your eyes from him. There was a sinister fascination in his strangeness. Maugham 1961: 56

Ashenden’s exoticizing gaze here frames the Hairless Mexican as ‘horrifying’ and ‘ridiculous’, and yet is inexorably drawn towards him  – as is the interlocking narrative of the series of stories itself, for the Hairless Mexican forms the central thread of the collection, reappearing more than any other character with the exception of Ashenden’s boss, R. During a long train journey he takes with Ashenden, the Hairless Mexican endlessly boasts of his affairs with women, tales which Ashenden initially treats with suspicion, but which he comes to credit when the pair spend a late night at a Naples dive, and his gallant companion

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whisks away a woman in dance. Ashenden ‘watched him moodily,’ an apparently irritated attitude that however quickly gives way to a heavily eroticized gaze, implying a certain degree of jealousy: He was a monstrous, terrible figure with that blond wig and his hairless face, but he moved with a matchless grace; his feet were small and seemed to hold the ground like the pads of a cat or a tiger; his rhythm was wonderful and you could not but see that the bedizened creature he danced with was intoxicated by his gestures. There was music in his toes and in the long arms that held her so firmly, and there was music in those long legs that seemed to move strangely from the hips. Sinister and grotesque though he was, there was in him now a feline elegance, even something of beauty, and you felt a secret, shameful fascination. To Ashenden he suggested one of those sculptures of the pre-Aztec hewers of stone, in which there is barbarism and vitality, something terrible and cruel, and yet withal a brooding and significant loveliness. Maugham 1961: 96

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this passage is the slippage that occurs between Ashenden’s perspective and the reader’s and back again, ‘you could not but see [. . .] you felt a shameful, secret fascination’, which returns to Ashenden’s exoticizing arousal at this feline figure’s ‘brooding and significant loveliness’. Further underlining his queerness, during the section of the narrative dealing with his abortive affair with Anastasia Alexandrova, the reader is told that Ashenden ‘had felt his heart go pit-a-pat because of one charming person after another’ (272, emphasis added). Once again, during an exchange with R., discussing an Indian nationalist, ‘Ashenden thought there was about the man something rather romantic and attractive, but he knew that R. did not want any nonsense of that sort from him’ (110). He was, however, mistaken, for a few moments later his chief remarks of another of their targets, ‘She seemed to have a sneaking fondness for naval officers. I couldn’t exactly blame her for that; they are attractive’, and, his eyes ‘twinkling’, tells Ashenden of one of his agents, ‘That’s none of your business. But I don’t mind telling you that he was a good-looking boy’ (115). What, then, does the stories’ insistent coding of queerness mean for Ashenden’s influence on later spy writers? As has often been observed, the moral ambiguity of the tales clearly anticipates John Le Carré’s later bathetic novels of compromised lives, with Le Carré describing Maugham as ‘the greatest craftsman of our century’ and explicitly acknowledging his debt (Bloom 1991: 141). However, perhaps the most striking example is found in the influence of Maugham’s tales

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on Fleming’s Bond novels and on their film adaptations. The two men became acquainted in 1950 following Fleming’s marriage to one of Maugham’s friends. Fleming was ‘in awe’ of the older writer, to whom he sent his first Bond novel, Casino Royale (Morgan 1980: 545). Maugham wrote back to Fleming, praising the novel as ‘thrilling’, but refusing to let his comments be quoted as a blurb – a practice that Maugham had avoided throughout his career (Morgan 1980: 550); the two men’s friendship continuing in the coming years as they stayed at each other’s luxury homes and commented on each other’s works. The Bond books are full of subtle, largely epicurean winks to the reader acquainted with the Ashenden stories, such as both spies’ fondness for dry Martinis, and their love of what Ashenden snobbishly calls ‘simple things’ such as ‘caviar and cold grouse’ (Maugham 1961: 48), Bond remarking in similar vein that ‘the problem is [. . .] not how to get enough caviar, but how to get enough toast with it’ (Fleming 1961: 58); in an echo of Ashenden’s love that was never to be, Bond even has a slight obsession with scrambled eggs, which he eats at all hours. Bond is also sandwiched between Ashenden and another glamorous queer spy, Jack Marlowe (note the name taken from the famous sixteenth century queer playwright and spy, Christopher Marlowe), the well-endowed protagonist of John Lehmann’s In the Purely Pagan Sense. Lehmann’s memoir-novel revisits the Vienna of Lehmann’s earlier novel Evil Was Abroad in the mode of a pulpy gay thriller. Lehmann’s novel is a relentlessly sexually explicit account of Marlowe’s life from boyhood into the 1930s and 1940s, and while the reader is informed that Marlowe is engaged in secret work for the British government which occasions travel throughout Europe, the real story is that of sexual adventure, luxury accommodation and dining. In a characteristic scene that could have been lifted straight from Bond with the substitution of a female for a male name, Lehmann wows a young conquest with sophisticated food: ‘dinner in the decidedly posh restaurant of the hotel we stayed in, with steak Diane being cooked on the trolley in front of us by the maître d’hôtel himself, reduced Willi for a few minutes to a wondering silence’ (Lehmann 1985: 196). As Michael Denning has written of Bond, the major effect of the text is that of tourism, sexual and otherwise (Denning 1987: 102–113); but here Lehmann’s Marlowe outdoes Fleming’s fantasy alter-ego in that sex completely takes over the spying – and is far more explicit, undoubtedly largely because the novel was written after the lifting of the Chatterley ban in 1963, and the decriminalization of homosexual acts between men in 1967. As Marlowe recounts of one of his many conquests he meets at an orgy, ‘after fondling my cock which was growing hard, he flung himself down on the bed and invited me to fuck him’ (Lehmann 1985: 68). A far

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cry from Ashenden’s ‘shameful fascination’ for the Hairless Mexican, and yet a scene occasioned in part by a line of literary history inaugurated by Maugham’s diffident anti-hero. These three spies’ epicureanism is also especially significant for later developments in queer cultural history. Writing in the early 1990s, Michael Warner identified a ‘close connection between consumer culture and the most visible spaces of gay culture: bars, discos, advertising, fashion, brand-name identification, mass-cultural camp, “promiscuity” ’ (Warner 1993: xxxi). While the character of Ashenden is somewhat removed from this new phenomenon in gay male life, Bond and Marlowe most certainly are not. Both characters are deeply involved with many features of Warner’s list  – citing brand names, visiting nightclubs, fashionable to a fault, and deeply “promiscuous” (Warner’s scare quotes are, of course, well taken), these two figures clearly participate in related emergent subjectivities defined by a complex relation to late capitalism: the glamorous, globe-trotting spy, and the gay man as defined by mass-cultural camp. At this point I would like to make clear that I have no intention of reducing queer life to these aspects of Warner’s list, which is itself very specific; as the previous sections of this essay have argued, politically engaged writing has also been central to queer writing of the 1930s and beyond. Moreover, I would also argue that, for all its snobbish tone, Lehmann’s novel holds its own political importance as an early example of mainstream gay erotica.

Speaking frankly Lehmann’s romp through Europe was far from the only queer memoir to be published during the period. One such memoir that has received relatively little recent critical attention is J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself (1968), a curious text that integrates Ackerley’s own queer life with that of his bisexual father’s. Before becoming rich as a businessman, Ackerley’s father had enrolled as a Guardsman, and also acted as a secretary for a number of wealthy men; one figure in particular was obviously smitten with the handsome young man. While their shared queerness is generally left unspoken, in a particularly moving scene Ackerley’s father explains that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in masturbation, adding that: [. . .] in the matter of sex there was nothing he had not done, no experience he had not tasted, no scrape he had not got into and out of, so that if we should ever

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be in want of help or advice we need never be ashamed to come to him and could always count on his understanding and sympathy. Ackerley 1969: 82

What makes this scene and Ackerley’s memoir as a whole at once so singular and yet so typical is precisely this sense of inter-generational queer love, which is usually reduced to the question of age gaps in gay relationships, or to the increasingly prominent paradigm of the queer chosen family as non-procreative. Ackerley’s memoir exposes the biphobia of many iterations of these paradigms, particularly in some versions of the former’s reduction of the younger partner’s ‘phase’, and the latter’s expulsion of biological reproduction from queer life. Moreover, Ackerley’s recognition of his father’s bisexuality is also particularly salient given that at the time he was writing, the early gay liberation movement was increasingly disavowing it. As we have already seen, Isherwood cackled over the story in which a young man claimed he was homosexual for economic reasons; this rejection also takes place in the tactical form of Carl Wittman’s 1969 insistence that bisexuality was simultaneously a utopian form that had to be deferred until after the completion of the sexual revolution, and yet also, somewhat incoherently, a ‘cop out’ (Wittman 1969: 3). Another memoir of the 1930s to acknowledge bisexuality is Stephen Spender’s World Within World (1951). But here we should be cautious before necessarily applauding Spender’s autobiography. This is not, as one biography of Spender claimed, essentially a matter of the closet, for Spender’s omission of the word boy before his term ‘friend’ hardly cloaks the nature of his relationships with men; nor am I referring to Spender’s undeniable complicity with the CIA, but rather to his heterosexism and denial of gender variation. Spender writes: ‘The relationship of a man with the “otherness” of a woman is a relationship of opposite poles’, and going on to cite Goethe, he defines ‘male force, energizing, intelligent, constructive’ upon the ‘receptive body’ of a woman. Having praised this passive role of femininity, he goes on to admit that, ‘I never lost my desire for camaraderie also, my desire to share my creative and intellectual adventures with a man, whose search was the same as mine’ (Spender 1994: 185). It should go without saying that there could be no better illustration of conventional misogynistic perceptions of gender roles than these remarks. Tellingly, Spender was also famously touchy about his sexual legacy, as it were, which can be seen in an unpublished document he lodged in university libraries around the world. Following the publication of a scurrilous unauthorized biography by Hugh David, Stephen Spender: A Portrait with Background (1992),

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Spender wrote a point-by-point rebuttal of the text in the third person, which rightly noted that Spender’s 1951 autobiography could hardly be described as evasive for its time (Spender 1993: 4). The document also, however, contained a series of bizarre points of clarification, such as the important fact that the Woolfs served wine not cocoa with dinner (25); that his cousin was an Old Etonian and thus apparently not a social climber (11); the assertion that the private school he attended was ‘almost classless’ (11); and the correction of David’s knowledge of expensive areas of southern France (38). More interesting than these outbreaks of rampant snobbery, however, is Spender’s repeated insistence that ‘Spender was never a cruiser’ (18; 26; 28). Naturally, the revelation of the details of a queer sexual life without consent can be very hurtful; but nevertheless there is something significant here in Spender’s repeated insistence that he was never ‘promiscuous’, particularly as he compares his own love life with that of Lehmann’s. Spender condemns Lehmann in no uncertain terms: ‘It was precisely John Lehmann’s lack of respect for other human beings, whether casual acquaintances or boys, which made one thankful to maintain only a literary contact with him’ and condemns In the Purely Pagan Sense as a ‘distasteful book’ depicting ‘heartless encounters’ (288). Spender’s insistence that he was never a cruiser, then, must be seen as a rejection of an important literary and social history of gay male intimacies, which necessarily disregards the world-making possibilities arising from fleeting sexual encounters. While Ackerley’s memoir is today sadly largely forgotten, and Spender’s increasingly less read, Isherwood’s 1976 Christopher and His Kind remains canonical. Isherwood’s autobiography details his life in the 1930s through, as the text puts it in its opening lines, ‘as frank and factual as possible’ a narrative (Isherwood 2001: 1) – a statement directly reversing the opening of his earlier work of autobiography, Lions and Shadows (1938): ‘this book is not, in the ordinary journalistic sense of the word, an autobiography; it contains no “revelations”; it is never “indiscreet”; it is not even entirely “true” ’ (Isherwood 2000: 8). Taking up where Lions and Shadows had left off, Christopher and His Kind revisits the Berlin of The Berlin Stories in a register of gay disclosure; but it is important to note that, as we have seen, Isherwood underplays the clearly queer aspects of his work of the 1930s, as do other figures such as John Lehmann. In other words, the point here is not only not to over-estimate the ‘frankness’ of 1970s memoir as compared to queer texts of the 1930s, but rather to understand these two moments in literary history as operating in complex relays of production, revision, and publication, and also as drawing heavily on earlier forms, in particular documentary.

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Central to these two, interlinked genres is the question of veridicality. While documentary necessarily implies, and more often than not explicitly proclaims, a series of truth claims about the objects of representation, the coming-out memoir relatedly stakes its claim as representing the truth of the subject’s life as gay writer. This holds true for biographical novels such as Stephen Spender’s The Temple, which relates in lightly fictionalized form Spender’s early queer experiences in Hamburg  – and also for In the Purely Pagan Sense. In a way, then, queer writers of the 1930s schooled in documentary prose were ideally positioned to produce paradigmatic coming-out narratives of the 1970s. The irony is that these later texts necessarily involved downplaying the queerness of earlier published works in a process known in dialectical thought as sublation – the simultaneous preservation and erasure of a thesis meeting its antithesis. This process is particularly salient in an underexplored documentary novel by T.C. Worsley, Fellow Travellers; the material for which was gathered in the 1930s, but only published in novel form in 1971. Worsley’s preface to the novel is a crucial document of the impulse towards reportage characteristic of 1930s writing: I had chosen as my characters people who were too close to me just then, too real to be transferred into fiction. But that didn’t strike me at the time. There was a theory going round in the Thirties that novels should be made up from careful and accurate documentation, that the first task of the novelist was to collect his documentary material and proceed from there. Worsley 1984: 10

Fellow Travellers arranges this material in a series of ‘files’ on different characters, including the young novelist, Martin Murray (clearly a cipher for Spender), Harry Watson (Hyndman), Lady Nellie (The Duchess of Atholl), and Pugh (Esmond Romilly). While the use of these files appears somewhat cold  – and perhaps uncomfortably close to the police surveillance suffered by many queer writers of the period – they are accompanied by a series of authorial interviews that are deeply sympathetic to if gently satirical of the main figures in the text. The effect of this curious method of organization is to insistently underline the documentary nature of the text in a deeply self-conscious fashion, at once characteristic of and yet in another way quite possibly unique in queer writing of the period. Few texts in British writing of the 1930s or 1970s better illustrate Michael Denning’s claim that ‘these “documentaries” are less a form of social realism than formal experiments’ (Denning 2010: 120). Denning is writing about the US novelist John Dos Passos, whose USA Trilogy made innovative use of

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newsreels alongside modernist prose; but in a different way Worsley’s ‘files’, accompanied by mock interviews, should be understood as part of the formal innovativeness of documentary prose of the 1930s, and its resonance beyond the period in the form of queer memoir. In all their differing ways the queer prose genres I have discussed in this essay have contributed to major lines in mid-century cultural history and beyond. But to return to Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity with which this essay began, I hope also to have shown the ways in which this process is not simply linear, but rather composed of a series of dialectical movements and complex relays between presentist concerns and longer histories. Whether we consider Ackerley looking back to his father’s sexual past of the 1910s, related to him in the 1930s and written up in the 1960s; Burdekin looking four thousand years into the future in anticipation of the radical feminism of the 70s; Ashenden’s resonance for the Bond books of the mid-century and back again to the future with Lehmann’s 1976 memoir of the 1930s; or Ackland moving back and forth between the early nineteenth century and a Soviet futurity, the disruptive timeliness of the queer 1930s is an unavoidable aspect of British literary history.

Works cited Ackerley, J.R. My Father and Myself. New York: Coward-McCann, 1969 [1968]. Ackland, Valentine. Country Conditions. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1936. Ackland, Valentine. Diary Entry 25 February 1935, The Sylvia Townsend Warner Papers, The Dorset County Museum, T(11)12, 1935a. Ackland, Valentine. ‘Country Dealings’. Left Review, 1 (6), March 1935b: 198–201. Ackland, Valentine. ‘Country Dealings II ’. Left Review, 1 (8), May 1935c: 311–114. Ackland, Valentine. ‘Country Dealings III ’. Left Review, 1 (12), September 1935d: 11–14. Ackland, Valentine. Undated letter (c.1935) to Julius Lipton, The Sylvia Townsend Warner Papers, S(LL)32, 1935e. Archer, Stanley. W. Somerset Maugham: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Bachardy, Don and Isherwood, Christopher. The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Bloom, Clive, Spy Thrillers from Buchan to Le Carré. New York: Springer, 1991. Bounds, Phillip. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Bozarth, Richard R. Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

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Burdekin, Katharine. Proud Man. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1983 [1935]. Burdekin, Katharine. Swastika Night. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1989a [1937]. Burdekin, Katharine. The End of This Day’s Business. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1989b. Cirrone, Dorian. ‘Millennial Mothers: Reproduction, Race, and Ethnicity in Feminist Dystopia Fiction’. Femspec 3 (1), (December 2001): 4–11. Croft, Andy. ‘Worlds without End Foisted upon the Future: Some Antecedents of Nineteen Eighty-Four’. In Inside the Myth: Orwell, Views from the Left. Christopher Norris (ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984: 183–216. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. David, Hugh. Stephen Spender a Portrait with Background. London: Heinemann, 1992. Denning, Michael. Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 2010 [1997]. Engels, Friedrich. On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Penguin, 2010 [1884]. Fleming, Ian. Gilt Edged Bonds. New York: Macmillan, 1961. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2010. Hubble, Nick. Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and His Kind. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 [1976]. Isherwood, Christopher. Exhumations. London: Methuen, 1966. Isherwood, Christopher. Lions and Shadows. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1938]. Isherwood, Christopher. The Berlin Novels. London: Vintage, 1999 [1939]. Jameson, Storm. ‘Documents’. Fact 2, May 1937: 9–18. Kisch, Egon Erwin. Australian Landfall. John Fisher and Irene and Kevin Fitzgerald (trans.). London: Secker and Warburg, 1937. Lehmann, John. In The Purely Pagan Sense. Viborg, Denmark: Gay Modern Classics, 1985 [1976]. Lothian, Alexis. Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Lukács, Georg, Der Meister der Reportage’. Kisch Kalender. F.C. Weiskopf (ed.). Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955 [1935]: 9–10; translation mine. Maslen, Elizabeth. Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography. Evanston, IL : Northwestern University Press, 2014.

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Maugham, Somerset. Ashenden, Or the British Agent. London: Heinemann, 1961 [1928]. Mellor, Leo, and Salton-Cox, Glyn. ‘Introduction’ [Leo Mellor and Glyn Salton-Cox (eds.), special edition]. Critical Quarterly, 57 (3), October 2015: 1–9. Morgan, Ted. Maugham: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. Mulford, Wendy. This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters, and Politics. London: Pandora, 1988. Myers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. In Orwell’s England. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Penguin, 2001 [1937]: 51–216. Page, Norman. Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Parker, Peter. Isherwood: A Life. Basingstoke: Picador, 2004. Patai, Daphne. “Orwell’s Despair, Burdekin’s Hope: Gender and Power in Dystopia,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 7 (2), 1983: 85–95 Patai, Daphne. ‘Afterword’ to Katharine Burdekin, The End of This Day’s Business. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1989. Salton-Cox, Glyn. ‘Boy Meets Camera: Christopher Isherwood, Sergei Tretiakov, and the Queer Potential of the First Five-Year Plan’. Modern Language Quarterly, 76 (4 Winter), 2015: 465–449. Salton-Cox, Glyn. Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Shuttleworth, Antony. ‘In a Populous City: Isherwood in the Thirties’. In The Isherwood Century: Essays on the Life and Works of Christopher Isherwood. James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (eds.). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000: 150–161. Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. London and New York: Verso, 2004 [1967]. Spender, Stephen. “Errors of Fact and Misreadings of Texts in Stephen Spender: A Portrait With Background by Hugh David.” Unpublished Manuscript, 1993. The British Library, ADD 71250 Spender, Stephen. World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994 [1951] Stock, Adam. ‘The Future-As-Past in Dystopian Fiction’, Poetics Today, 73 (3), September 2016: 429–436. Townsend Warner, Sylvia. Letter to Julius Lipton 3 May 1935, The Sylvia Townsend Warner Papers, The Dorset County Museum, Q(LBR)27. Warner, Michael. ‘Introduction’ to Warner, ed. Fear of a Queer Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Wittman, Carl. A Gay Manifesto. San Francisco: The Red Butterfly, 1969. Worsley, T.C. Fellow Travellers. London: Gay Modern Classics, 1984 [1971]: 10. Wright, Patrick. The Village That Died for England. London: Vintage, 1996.

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Private Faces in Public Places: Auto-Intertextuality, Authority and 1930s Fiction Luke Seaber

To talk of ‘fiction’ is impossible without there being, explicitly or implicitly, works that are not fiction from which we are distinguishing it. This in itself may appear trivially true, as may the banal affirmation that authors may on occasion write both types of work, and that these works may mix. George Orwell reuses some of the experiences that he lived whilst gaining material for the non-fiction Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) to write the scenes in the fiction A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) in which Dorothy sleeps in Trafalgar Square; Evelyn Waugh writes fiction in Black Mischief (1932) set in the non-existent Azania drawing on experiences in the existent Abyssinia published as nonfiction in Remote People (1931). This phenomenon will here be called ‘autointertextuality’: the relationship between various works by the same author, cutting across boundaries of text classification between fiction and non-fiction. This chapter will argue that auto-intertextuality is of far greater importance than its superficially obvious nature as the basic condition of the works of any author who has published more than one lone piece may suggest, and I shall argue that this is due to its relationship with the changes in the writer’s persona that it causes. We have, though, to be careful to distinguish the nature of the authorial persona being discussed here. What we are not examining is the persona as created by the individual text (the Orwell of A Clergyman’s Daughter, say), which we may describe as a private persona offered to the reader by the text and constructed by the author: ideally and theoretically, the authorial persona understood by a reader of A Clergyman’s Daughter, the ‘Orwell’ thereby constructed, is a figure as much under the author’s control as that of Dorothy Hare  – or as little, depending upon one’s theoretical inclinations. Such an approach, I would argue, is only tenable if we posit a reader who reads only that one novel. Once there appears a name somewhere in the paratext assigning a text 183

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to an author, the authorial persona escapes the control of its creator and becomes public. This textual public persona, as we may call it, becomes part of the wider, extratextual, public persona: unlike the monotextual authorial persona, the public persona understood is necessarily unique to each reader theoretically as well as actually, depending on which other works have been read. We may call this persona the pantextual public persona, where the ‘pantext’ is all the works by a single author that the reader has read.1 The pantext is not, though, by any means necessarily identical with the totality of works written by an author: as we shall see, the theoretical ideal pantext is not as important as the actual series of pantexts available to different readers at different times. This puts this chapter partially into dialogue with Michel Foucault’s 1969 piece, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’; the attempt here is not, though, to answer to the question ‘What is an author’, but rather to examine another question that Foucault asks: is everything an author writes or says, everything they leave behind, part of their oeuvre (1994: 794)?2 He goes on to say that a theory of the ‘oeuvre’ does not exist (794);3 this chapter will not seek to provide one, but will attempt to offer some case studies towards thinking about how the ‘oeuvre’ (a term similar to, but not necessarily identical with, ‘pantext’ as used here) has functioned in certain synchronic and diachronic circumstances. A particularly fertile area for studying the twists and turns of relationships between fiction and non-fiction in the 1930s is that which has to do with questions of authority. In Keywords, Raymond Williams has ‘Expert’ immediately following ‘Experience’. Williams’s first of ‘the two main senses’ of ‘experience’ – that on which he spends less time  – is ‘knowledge gathered from past events’ (1983: 126): the connection of ‘expert’ with ‘the closely related experience’ (129) clearly relates primarily to this meaning. From experience grows expertise, and from expertise grows authority. After all, ‘authority’, etymologically and historically, is what an ‘author’ has, and the OED ’s note on the forms written with is very germane here: they ‘reflect the frequent association of the word, in French as well as English and other European languages, with classical Latin authenticus, its etymon Hellenistic Greek αὐθεντικός [. . .], and related words, the author of a document being viewed as the guarantor of its authenticity’.4 The pantextual construction of authority is a vital part of various 1930s writers’ work, and auto-intertextuality is often key to it. In order to explore this question, this chapter will focus on neither the content of 1930s fiction nor its context; rather, it will attempt to trace how readers in the 1930s (and beyond) may have considered various authors who wrote fiction in that decade. To carry out this task, will in fact involve, perhaps counterintuitively, paying at least as much, or

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even greater, attention to non-fiction texts: my intention here is not to analyse fiction texts qua texts so much as it is to examine them qua historical events, and by focusing on authors’ non-fiction texts we shall be able to see better the spaces into which fiction fits and has fitted in individual 1930s authors’ careers and various eras’ changing understanding of those careers. In other words, this chapter will not focus so much on certain authors’ fiction texts in the 1930s themselves as much as on how certain fiction texts in the 1930s fit into their authors’ overall oeuvre both synchronically and diachronically: how, as it were, authors and publishers have imposed upon readers frameworks into which fiction can be fitted. The precise area of our case studies here relates not to authority in general, but more specifically to authority as it applies to knowledge of certain non-British cultures and places. Our first case study of 1930s auto-intertextuality and its relationship with authority and the creation of a public persona is provided by George Orwell and his relationship with Burma.5 His connection to the area is well known, and not just amongst specialists and academics. Copies, pirated or otherwise, of Burmese Days are hawked to tourists in Myanmar; Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Tea Shop was a well received and widely reviewed popular success in 2004; ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ are essays that have been reproduced in many school anthologies; reference to him sometimes can seem obligatory in newspaper travel pieces looking at Myanmar (see Keck 2005: 27). What is of interest and importance in the current study is not the content of Orwell’s works discussing Burma or British India (for the sake of convenience, the two countries will here be used somewhat interchangeably, as Orwell’s expertise regarding the former was very clearly regarded as including the latter), but rather some of the ways in which awareness of this connection may have grown up. In other words, the auto-intertextual interest here regards how readers’ awareness of the existence of works dealing with the British Empire in South Asia created and creates an image of Orwell the authoritative expert whose statements can be trusted when we draw upon them for creating anticolonialist discourses. The first time the British public was introduced to the connection between Orwell and Burma was on 24 June 1935 (Davison 2000a: 388), when Victor Gollancz published Burmese Days: this is clearly a text suggesting first-hand knowledge of the setting of the novel. This is obviously and banally true: Orwell’s third book has Burma in the title, deals with Burma, and creates a connection in its readers’ minds between its author and Burma. Things, however, are a little more complicated than this. This regards Orwell’s British public, not his worldwide

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public, however relatively exiguous that might then have been. A French translation of Down and Out in Paris and London had been published on 2 May 1935, a month and a half before Burmese Days went on sale in Britain (Davison 2000c: 299). For the publication of La Vache enragée, as the title of Down and Out in Paris and London was translated, the author contributed an introduction (dated 15 October 1934), in which he offers a few biographical details so that his French readers can understand how and why he found himself living in Paris. These begin: ‘Je suis né en 1903. En 1922, je partis pour la Birmanie, où j’entrai dans la Police Impériale des Indes. C’était un métier qui me convenait assez peu que possible’ (Orwell 2000d: 536).6 A month and half is not a long time, and the ability to read French was required, but information was certainly circulating by late June 1934 regarding Orwell’s time in Burma. It was not just circulating in French, however. In June or July of 1933, Harper & Brothers had published an American edition of Down and Out in Paris and London. The dust jacket contains this about the author, almost certainly based on material supplied by Orwell: ‘He served with the Indian Imperial Police for five years but resigned in 1928 chiefly because he disliked putting people in prison for doing the same things which he should have done in their circumstances’ (quoted in Davison 2000d: 318).7 We have therefore to historicize the question of what readers of Burmese Days would have known about the author’s own relationship to Burma into the question of which readers. This is even more strongly the case with regards to American readers who would have seen the Down and Out in Paris and London dust jacket, as they would have had the opportunity to read Burmese Days before the British public: due to fears of libel, Gollancz did not publish it in the UK, in a heavily modified edition, until 24 June 1935, making it Orwell’s third book published there, but it had been published in the USA by Harper & Brothers on 25 October 1934 (Davison 2000b: 356). In other words, ‘everyone’ now knows of Orwell’s time in Burma, but when Burmese Days was first published in the UK, only those readers who had by chance read paratexts from other countries would have had this contextual knowledge.8 Again, however, even this is only part of the historicized story of the creation of ‘George Orwell’ as an authority on Burma. At least one copy of the American book was circulating before the British Gollancz publication: on 2 February 1935, Orwell wrote to his publisher, Victor Gollancz, who wanted to see the text of the novel, that the manuscript had been destroyed, but that if his agent, Leonard Moore, was unable to supply a copy, then ‘I will send you the one that is in our lending library’ (Orwell 2000c: 372). Peter Davison notes that the American edition was not on sale in the UK, and that therefore Orwell had

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presumably donated a copy to a local library (2000c, n. 1), but it is more likely, given the possessive adjective, that Orwell was referring to the lending library run by Booklovers’ Corner, where he was working in this period – an attempt at self-publicization! At least in Hampstead, then, there may already have been some readers who knew of Orwell’s service in the Indian Imperial Police. Those who knew him personally would very likely already have known of this too, of course, and accepted him as an authority on matters relating Burma and British India more generally. Hitherto, this study has proceeded somewhat disingenuously. It has taken Burmese Days as the moment in which Orwell the old Burma hand made himself known to the British public, but there is of course another, more obvious, contender: ‘A Hanging’, published in The Adelphi in August 1931, long before any of these questions of paratexts and publication dates comes into play. The opening sentence of this – ‘It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains’ – and the first-person narrator would all link Burma with Orwell – were it not for the fact that it was not published by ‘George Orwell’, but by ‘Eric A. Blair’ (Orwell 2000a: 207).9 Not until its publication in the New Savoy in 1946 would it become a work by George Orwell as far as all those readers who did not know that they were one and the same were concerned (2000a: 207). Nor was this Blair’s first published work on Burma, although his previous piece was unlikely to have been read by many of The Adelphi’s readers. Paratextually, its author was given undoubted weight as an authority on Burma, being described in an introductory note as one who had lived for some time in Burma and thus something of an expert (Orwell 2000b: 172).10 This was ‘Comment on exploite un people: L’Empire britannique en Birmanie’, published in Le Progrès civique on 4 May 1929 under the name E.-A. Blair (2000b: 178). In other words, if we think of Burmese Days synchronically, in the moment of its first British publication, we should not be thinking of a book by a ‘George Orwell’ known in any way as an expert or authority on Burma through his own lived experience except amongst his own family circle and (some of) his social circle. To speak then of ‘Orwell’s readers’ in the 1930s is misleading. There were differing groups of readers with differing amounts of knowledge about the author: there were, correspondingly and necessarily, different ‘Orwells’ whom these different groups read. These can be summarized as follows: Orwell the unknown author, whom one only knows from textual information – the most common version; Orwell the known author, whom one knows from (rather rare and obscure) paratextual information; Orwell the (personally) known individual, whom one knows from extratextual material – presumably the rarest version.

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We may remark that as time has gone on, these three Orwells have very much transformed into three other Orwells, with the opposite distribution. To read Orwell now and have only textual information about the author is rare: editions of his work that give no details of the author other than the name (or pseudonym) may exist, but are rare; some readers may still know about him solely through paratexts to his published works, although of course such paratexts are massively more detailed and ubiquitous than their equivalents were in the 1930s; the largest group, though, is now surely those whose knowledge of such a major cultural figure as Orwell is created extratextually. David Lodge explored this (in less detail, for reasons the significance of which will be explored below) in 1977 in The Modes of Modern Writing, concluding that: It is very unlikely, at this late date, that we shall ever be able to establish definitely whether Orwell attended a hanging or not, and more or less impossible that we should ever be able to check the particular circumstances of ‘A Hanging’ against historical fact. It may be completely factual, it may be partly based on experience, or partly based on the reported experience of others, or partly fictional, or wholly fictional – though the last possibility seems to me the least likely. The point I wish to make is that it doesn’t really matter. As a text, ‘A Hanging’ is self-sufficient, self-authenticating – autotelic, to use the jargon word. The internal relationships of its component parts are more important than their external references. Lodge 1977: 11–12

This is all perfectly true, as far as it goes: we cannot know the level of fictionality in ‘A Hanging’ purely from the text – paratextual and extratextual information is required – and this does not necessarily matter. That is to say, I agree with Lodge that it does not matter if what we are interested in is a reading of ‘A Hanging’ in isolation. The level of authority of any single text it is perfectly legitimate to judge irrelevant except insofar as that authority is constructed in and by the text, but the moment that we have more than one text by the same author claiming authority in a given field to examine, then matters become more complicated. It may not matter whether ‘A Hanging’ is true, but its level of authority may change the way we view Burmese Days: is this a novel written by one with first-hand knowledge of Burma or not? It may for that matter also change how we view The Road to Wigan Pier, the author-narrator of which gives his biography, including his time in Burma, when he witnessed scenes that made it into Burmese Days, and the fact that he once witnessed a hanging.11 Equally, the non-fiction12 of Down and Out in Paris and London is retrospectively given further authority by the public awareness of Orwell and Burma as it increased through the 1930s:

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such things as the ethnographic preciseness of the description of the East End crowd  – ‘Limehouse was sprinkled with Orientals  – Chinamen, Chittagonian lascars, Dravidians selling silk scarves, even a few Sikhs, come goodness knows how’ (Orwell 1986–87a: 136) – or the author-narrator’s unexplained ability to speak ‘bad Urdu’ and know the intricacies of distinctions of formality in secondperson pronouns in that language (170) would have been far more comprehensible when Orwell’s first book was re-read in light of his later work than they would at first reading. This can even be extended to explain certain choices of images: to use as a simile for the tramps gathered for a free meal at a church near King’s Cross ‘like kites round a dead buffalo’ (184) can be read as a slightly precious exoticism if we know nothing of the author; knowing more about his background, it becomes further evidence for the identification of author and narrator, further evidence for his genuineness insofar as it is not a literary search for a striking simile but rather, in its Anglo-Indian banality, merely the sort of image that someone of what a post-1933 reader would know of his background would be likely to arrive at instinctively. We might also extend this to matters not immediately and explicitly relating to Burma, but where much of the force still comes from an appeal to authority based upon that period in Orwell’s life and readers’ awareness thereof. ‘Inside the Whale’ has the famous criticism of the line in Auden’s ‘Spain’ ‘The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’ that says: It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men – I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means – the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. Orwell 2000e: 103

How much faith do we repose in the implied experto crede if we do not know of, and accept, Orwell’s Burmese experiences as a police officer? Any individual text may work autotelically, but the network of significance that creates an author’s authority cannot be so limited, and expands to include evidence both paratextual and extratextual. Thus, the potential network of authority for British readers of Burmese Days in the 1930s includes other material than that which I have mentioned so far. This is a reciprocal network: Burmese Days is given authority by its author’s position as one who is an expert through lived experience but it also gives authority to other utterances on Burma and British India. For example, in a

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review of various books for the New English Weekly on 23 July 1936 Orwell looks at the Penguin edition of Almayer’s Folly, noting ‘There is nothing memorable in it except a certain feeling which one might not detect unless one had lived in the East’ (Orwell 2000h: 491)  – the tone is the only real textual evidence of authority here, but the paratext giving the author as ‘George Orwell’ and the extratextual knowledge available to readers of the review when it appeared that George Orwell was one who knew whereof he spoke in such matters are not incidental to the review but central to it. The text alone at most hints at the authority of expert experience; the paratext and the extratextual knowledge to which it leads confirm and create it. There are various examples of this from the period after the publication of Burmese Days and Orwell’s going to fight in Spain at the end of 1936. For example, there is the observation buried in a set of New English Weekly reviews, this time dealing with A Passage to India: ‘ “A Passage to India” is not the perfect novel about India, but it is the best we have ever had and the best we are likely to get, for it is only by some improbable chance that anyone capable of writing a decent novel can be got to stay in India long enough to absorb the atmosphere’ (Orwell 2000f: 500). Here the only information that saves this from being a stereotypical and stereotyping generalization is necessarily extratextual: Burma is not India per se, but the reviewer speaks as one who knows, with justification, though, that is no way textual. Interestingly, in this period we also see Orwell writing with a textual tone that suggests his authority, even when the paratext that could lead to an extratextual justification for that tone is lacking. His first review for The Listener, of Mark Channing’s Indian Mosaic, begins ‘For an average Englishman in India the basic fact, more important even than loneliness or the heat of the sun, is the strangeness of the scenery. [. . .] Mr Channing knows this’ (Orwell 2000g: 488). Again, it is the extratextual that provides the authority for this, but when this was first published (on 15 July 1936) the piece was unsigned: the text suggested an extratextual justification, but lacked the paratext whereby one could reach it. The figure of George Orwell the expert authority on Burma and British India more widely, then, is not and cannot be one created solely textually. This reputation would be consolidated with his work for the BBC – but again, this is a reciprocal process that works both backwards and forwards in time: his 1930s work justifies his 1940s status, but his 1940s status also strengthens his 1930s reputation when those earlier works are re-read. It is interesting to consider in this light the important exchange of memoranda between Eric Blair, Rushbrook Williams, the Eastern Service Director, R.A. Rendell, Assistant Controller,

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Overseas Service, and J.B. Clark, the Controller, stemming from Blair’s memo of 15 October 1942. In this, he discusses whether or not he should ‘broadcast the weekly news review in English over my own name, i.e. George Orwell’ and how his doing so would be dependent on his being able to refuse to do commentaries if they contained material, the association of the ‘Orwell’ name with which would hurt the propaganda value of his ‘ “agin” the government’ reputation, so to speak (Orwell 2000i: 100). The value of ‘tak[ing] advantage of “Orwell’s” name’ (100) was agreed: we see here how the complex shifts in levels not just of fame – the degree to which a public figure is known – but also of what is known about them work both backwards and forwards in time, with consequences that can easily operate outside the relatively rarefied sphere of questions of literary authority. This chronological issue of how re-readings may differ from first readings as more information becomes available is a key one. It was said earlier that David Lodge in 1977 in The Modes of Modern Writing had explored the question of what the first readers of ‘A Hanging’ may have known of the author, Eric A. Blair rather than the as yet non-existent George Orwell, in less detail than this study is doing. This is not a criticism of Lodge; rather, it brings us to a central point of the argument that this chapter is proposing. Lodge was basing himself on the first volume of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus and first published in 1968. This contains Orwell’s work between 1920 and 1940 and excluding front and back matter is of 529 pages. I, as might be expected of anyone now working on Orwell, am basing myself on the revised edition of The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison; specifically, Volume X, covering the years 1911 to 1936, and Volume XI, 1937 to 1939, for a total of 1,019 pages. This intrusion of the (autobiographical and self-referential) details of the writing of a piece of academic criticism may go against current usage, but it is central to the questions being discussed here. In the approach taken here, it is necessary to know exactly what knowledge is available to readers, and how, at any given synchronic point; this applies as much to the most expert of academics specializing on Orwell in 1977 or 2018 as it does to the most casual and uninterested of readers picking up Burmese Days for the first time in 2018 or 1935. This matters because Lodge would not have had available to him Blair’s very early work in French, for instance, or Orwell’s review of Indian Mosaic. Such availability would not necessarily have changed Lodge’s overall conclusion to his reading, of course, but the question of how such availability and the details of publication and paratextual attribution are central to the problem of what we

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might call synchronic versus diachronic readings. Reading Orwell diachronically now, after Davison’s marvellous editorial labour, we can trace changes in his level of authority – textual, paratextual, extratextual – in a way not possible for Lodge in his 1977 diachronic reading. These diachronic readings are also therefore synchronic readings, however: I explore ‘Orwell’ as he changes through time, just as Lodge did, but that exploration is based upon a different total text – what we are calling here the pantext – to that which Lodge was using. We read Orwell – or any author  – based upon an understanding of him or her in the moment of reading, but this understanding grows out of a knowledge based not so much on texts as paratexts: the moment we move away from analysing a single text, we move towards a critical world where paratext is key: the paratext that tells us, quite simply, what texts belong to an author. In other words, ‘A Hanging’, first published in 1931, does not become a text of Orwell’s until 1946; more significantly, Orwell’s review of Almayer’s Folly, which appeared under his pseudonym in 1936, only became part of Orwell’s pantext in 1968 with its publication in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, except for those readers who read it at first publication and made it part of their Orwell pantexts from that moment; Orwell’s review of Indian Mosaic, however, or Blair’s ‘Comment on exploite un people: L’Empire britannique en Birmanie’ only became part of the pantext in 1998, when the Complete Works of George Orwell massively expanded it. The anticolonial Orwell whom people read upon the first British publication of Burmese Days in 1935 was not the same anti-colonial Orwell whom people read when to that work was added the background contained in The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937; neither was the same as the Orwell upon whom critics worked between 1968 and 1998, or the one upon whom we work now. This is true of Orwell/Blair, where we see a complex interplay of the two names and the growth of a more or less stable public persona out of a fragmented and partially anonymous mass of texts through the 1930s; it is also true of writers whose personae can be viewed as far more stable. The story of the process whereby E.-A. Blair became Eric A. Blair became ‘George Orwell’ became George Orwell is the story of the former type of auto-intertextuality in 1930s Britain; the latter, on the other hand, has as perhaps its most interesting exemplar an author often thought of as belonging to the preceding decade but much of whose most important fiction and non-fiction was published in the 1930s, Evelyn Waugh. Waugh’s public persona in the 1930s was a far more fully-formed thing; this is partially due to his having begun his career earlier, but of more interest in terms of auto-intertextuality is the fact that throughout the decade he published a series of books that can be considered fiction and non-fiction versions of the

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same raw material. To each novel  – Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938) – corresponds a non-fiction book of travel writing – Remote People (1931), Ninety-Two Days (1934) and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). Before we begin examining the interplay between the books in these pairs with each other, with Waugh’s journalism and with his public persona, we should pause to examine synchronically – in light of what has been said above about how changes in paratexts can change analysis – the differences between Waugh and Orwell in terms of publication. This will also go to explain why of these three pairs our focus will be overwhelmingly on the first one. Since 1998, all of Orwell’s writing – private, public, published, unpublished – has been available in the Davison-edited Complete Works in twenty volumes; ‘all’, of course, can only ever be an ideal goal rather than an actual achievement, and things lost or unknown slowly continue to come to light.13 The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project, on the other hand, saw the publication of the first three of the projected forty-three volumes in September 2017; two more have since been published, one of which is the first (1922–1934) of the projected four volumes collecting his essays articles and reviews.14 In other words, whereas one can now, insofar as such a thing is possible, recreate year by year which readers might have read which of Orwell’s non-fiction works, and thus trace how this can be read against his novels in relative ease, to do so for Waugh is still impossible, and will remain so until the publishing project is complete. It may be objected that it is an exaggeration to claim that to perform the sort of criticism for Waugh that I have above performed for Orwell is ‘impossible’: after all, the absence of a convenient collected complete works merely means that one has to find the works oneself rather than relying on the work of editors and publishers. Such an objection, though, would be to minimize unduly the importance of the material conditions of the production of knowledge. To ignore such details of publication and the material constraints under which the academic writer works is to move away from recognizing them too as a historicized actual reader and suggest a completist Model Reader as theoretical and inexistent as all such things must be. If we are to examine how the interplay as perceived by readers of text, paratext and authorial persona works in a feedback loop going towards creating that authorial persona, then to conceal the historical, contingent, circumstances of our reading would be to falsify that reading in the moment of its creation. Given the fact that this chapter attempts to trace shifting pantexts and to be open in its recognition of the fact that changes in pantexts are changes in the material conditions of the production of knowledge and interpretation of an author and their works, it behoves us to acknowledge and be open about the

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existence of the circumstances conditioning this work itself. That only the first volume, covering up until 1934, of Waugh’s essays, articles and reviews has been published at the time of writing means that to perform for Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) and Scoop (1938) the same sort of analysis as for the other two pairs (published between 1931 and 1934) would be falsifying. To create a pantext for Waugh that includes his occasional writing after 1934 as theoretically complete as that which exists for Orwell would involve a quite different type of labour to that which obtains for the years up to then. It would be misleadingly acontextual to write in similar detail of all three pairs: the first pair has an extremely full pantext regarding its context and the third next to none; the second, coming as the two books comprising it do in the year beyond which Volume 26 of the Complete Works does not go, has a very full pantext regarding what comes before it, during it and immediately after, but no further.15 For this reason, we shall limit ourselves in our analysis here to examining the first pair. By the beginning of the 1930s Waugh was already a public figure at a level that Orwell would only reach, insofar as he did before the 1940s, with the publication of The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 by the Left Book Club and the discussion it provoked. Indeed, given Waugh’s social connections and the reputation brought him by the publication of Decline and Fall in 1928, we may state that he started the decade a far more promoted figure than Orwell ever became during it. It would of course be naïve to mistake the boosting claims of publicists of one sort or another as guaranteeing genuine public knowledge; nonetheless, it is undeniable that 1930s readers were not only far more likely to recognize his name than they were Orwell’s, but also to recognize it from contexts lauding him as – for example – one of the ‘Leading Writers of Today’, as an article from the Daily Mail (and the fact that this was in a popular paper is not insignificant) from October 1929 on marriage calls him in its sub-heading (Waugh 2018f: 194). This is just one instance of such phrases from the later 1920s and early 1930s: it is uncontroversial to say that Waugh at the end of the 1920s was already ‘establishing himself as a professional writer [and] astutely aware that the public bought books by authors who were “talked about”’ (Gallagher 2018b: 120) before he began the following decade with the January 1930 publication of Vile Bodies, which ‘made him a celebrity whom editors competed to publish’ (123). Waugh himself was quite aware of this: a 1929 piece in his humorous ‘Careers for Our Sons’ series for the magazine Passing Show offers, in a parodic but accurate key, a version of his own career thitherto leading to the conclusion that ‘reviews matter very little in the case of a novel. The important thing is to make people talk about it. You can do this by forcing your way into the newspapers in some other way. Attempt to swim

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the Channel; get unjustly arrested in a public park; disappear’ (Waugh 2018b: 161).16 There is a sly unstated segue from having people talk about it to having people talk about you: it is the writer’s fame that makes the work known, not, as might be expected, vice versa. The pair of fiction/non-fiction works by Waugh that opens his series of 1930s books is Remote People (1931) and Black Mischief (1932). The order of publication should be noted: his candour about the primary importance of personal publicity notwithstanding, Waugh’s fame was nominally as a novelist (‘Evelyn Waugh, Whose Novels Have Brought Him Fame at Twenty-Six’ runs the byline to his Daily Express piece on his conversion to Catholicism [Waugh 2018c: 360, italics mine]), but for the three novels under consideration here the reading public’s first encounter with their subject matter (or part thereof in the case of A Handful of Dust, which constitutes half of the most complex of these pairs in terms of what, when and how the public were introduced to the material involved) comes through the travel-writing rather than the fiction. This shift, though, was something that readers would not have found particularly surprising. As early as February 1929, the Sunday Dispatch (note again the popular, mass-market and mass-media site of where the information is disclosed to the public) had revealed his plan to write one of the ‘only three good travel books ever written’, ‘starting shortly from Monte Carlo in extreme luxury in the Stella Polaris, preparatory to real squalor in a Turkish cargo boat’ (Smith 2018: 162).17 The book that came out of this plan – which never came to fruition other than the cruise on the Stella Polaris, which was in fact, suitably enough given the focus here, something organized in order to gain publicity for the boat – was Labels: A Mediterranean Journey (1930); this was preceded by various pieces beginning with ‘In Defence of Pleasure Cruising’ published in the London edition of Harper’s Bazaar in May 1930. Were this not enough to promote the already highly public figure of Waugh as a travel writer as well as a novelist, he began his 4 October regular ‘The Books You Read’ piece in the Graphic (yet again we see just how often he was communicating these messages aimed not only at publicizing his works but also – above all, perhaps, given such comments of his as we have seen – creating and publicizing his own public persona) with the words ‘The book that interests me this week is a new travel book issued by Duckworth’s under the title of Labels. My interest in it comes less from any outstanding merits it may possess, than from the fact that I wrote it myself ’ (Waugh 2018i: 354). In short, we may say that the reading public was already suitably primed for primacy being given to Waugh’s travel-writing rather than to his novels in the 1930s by the time Remote People appeared in 1931.

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Interestingly, we encounter at this point a similar question to that which we explored regarding Orwell and the shifting of attribution from Blair to Orwell. Waugh was, between October 1930 and March 1931, special correspondent for both The Times and the Daily Express and features writer for the Graphic sent to cover the coronation of Ras Tafari Makonnen as Emperor Haile Selassie I of Abyssinia;18 his simultaneous presence as an Abyssinia expert in these three titles might be expected to mean that the work he published a little later dealing with the same country, or later still with a fictional country based at least in part thereon, would be greeted as coming from a recognized authority. Whereas Orwell/Blair was not already a recognized figure when he began publishing material relating to Burma, and his writings thereon were scattered in periodicals with relatively limited circulation figures, the already-famous Waugh was writing for the ‘paper of record’ and two of the most widely read titles in the popular press. This is not the obvious case it might now appear, however. Waugh’s pieces in The Times had the byline ‘(from our special correspondent)’ and those in the Daily Express ‘“Daily Express” Special Correspondent’. His pieces for the Graphic, on the other hand, were credited to him, as well as his presence there having been announced to readers on 15 November (Waugh had left on 10 October) that ‘Mr. Evelyn Waugh, our regular [book] reviewer, is absent in Abyssinia whence he will describe the Emperor’s coronation for “The Graphic”’ (quoted in Gallagher 2018a: 375). In other words, the great majority of Waugh’s Abyssinia journalism (thirteen pieces for The Times plus five for the Daily Express) was anonymous, with only the three pieces for the Graphic appearing under his name. It is important to note too that this excludes from the contemporary pantext the pieces that would most give him authority as an expert on Abyssinia in his role as an accredited special correspondent for both the paper of record and one of the most popular newspapers of the day. This also excludes his most sustained claim to expert status before the publication of Remote People, the long piece appearing in The Times on 22 December 1930 giving an overview of the Abyssinian political and social situation. This begins by stating that ‘There is perhaps no country in the world where it is so difficult to obtain accurate political information as in Ethiopia’ (Waugh 2018e: 427), the fact that this statement, in the most authoritative of newspapers, is followed by a great deal of what is presented as accurate political information on the country can only suggest the writer’s globally rare expertise on the subject. Waugh may have been constructing an expert persona for himself, but it was one aimed, in this sense, at those paying him rather than those reading him. The three pieces for the Graphic are worth looking at with a little more attention than Waugh’s other journalistic writing from his trip to Haile Selassie’s

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coronation, and not just because they are signed. Whereas the anonymous pieces for The Times and Daily Express (with the exception of the long final piece for the former on politics discussed above) are short pieces limiting themselves to a flat and nominally factual description of important events (although as we shall see regarding the description of the gebbur the question of facticity is not as straightforward as it presents itself as being), the three Graphic pieces are humorous and discursive and focus as much on Waugh himself and things, however inconsequential, that catch his eye as they do on the weightier matters he is ostensibly there to report on. Some close examination of the same events as they appear first in his journalism and then in his travel writing is valuable here. Let us look at an episode in the first, ‘A Journey to Abyssinia’. This follows him from London to Djibouti, and ends at the point – chatty and light and proper to a writer of travel literature rather than to a foreign correspondent – where he and a travelling companion whom he has picked up on the way ‘changed our soaking clothes, for neither of us had thought of bringing umbrella or raincoat  – and began our enquiries about trains to Addis. Our adventure had begun’ (Waugh 2018a: 419). The very punctuation  – that dash before the final clause of the article’s penultimate sentence, suggesting, as it may be, breathless rush or a sense of anti-climax – reinforces that this is, so to speak, a writer engaging with the reader rather than a journalist informing them. In fact, the dash serves another purpose too. If we examine the same scene in Remote People, we find that what was in its first appearance presented in such a way as to suggest a very rapid sequence of events was in fact something much longer: ‘after luncheon, the rain having stopped, we drove for a tour of the town’, a tour that includes experiencing a minor earthquake before returning to the hotel to discover ‘the vice-consul there with the good news that he had obtained a carriage for us in the first special train that evening’ (Waugh 1985: 16–17). Furthermore, the sequence of events as described in the later book does not fully match what the article suggests happened. Waugh and his companion, in the more extended and complicated version of events as given in the book, are finally allowed to disembark at Djibouti; the purser of the ship on which they have been travelling has already wired to the station regarding trains, but the exact situation is uncertain. The British viceconsul informs Waugh that all the trains leaving over the coming days are in fact reserved for various dignitaries heading to the coronation, but that he will see what he can do. The two men have at this point already sent their luggage on ahead with a porter to the Hôtel des Arcades; they then go there themselves and arrived soaked, bathing and changing before setting out on their tour of the town in a one-horse cab. When Waugh returns to the hotel, he discovers that the

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vice-consul, against all expectation, has managed to obtain places for them on that evening’s train (15–17). The presence of this far more complex narrative of events gives us an insight into Waugh’s own approach to his public, pantextual, persona and its construction. There is no attempt to make the versions match; his authority lies in his having been there, not in his reliability over time. The complex web of persona-building to create authority that we see in Orwell and his writings on Burma here is clearly absent; Waugh’s texts live in the moment, so to speak, in a way that Orwell’s do not. Perhaps the most fascinating example of this is the gebbur episode, which suggests that Waugh’s nonchalance about asserting authority through reliability and consistency rather than through simple assertion of presence is more than mere carelessness but rather something that sheds light on to whom he was addressing his books. In the third chapter of the first part of Remote People, Waugh gives a description of one of the important ceremonial celebrations taking place connected with the coronation: [T]he party which excited the keenest interest was the gebbur given by the emperor to his tribesmen. These banquets are a regular feature of Ethiopian life [. . .]. Until a few years ago attendance at a gebbur was part of the entertainment offered to every visitor in Abyssinia. Copious first-hand accounts can be found in almost every book about the country, describing the packed, squatting ranks of the diners; the slaves carrying the warm quarters of newly slaughtered uncooked beef; the dispatch with which each guest carves for himself; the upward slice of the dagger with which he severs each mouthful from the dripping lump[. . .]. These are the traditional features of the gebbur and, no doubt, of this occasion also. It was thus that the journalists described their impressions in glowing paraphrases of Rhey and Kingsford. When the time came, however, we found that particular precautions had been taken to exclude all Europeans from the spectacle. Waugh 1985: 47

The admission, with its deft comic timing, that the assembled journalists’ account of the gebbur were in fact fiction, however cribbed from previous travellers’ tales and thus at least putatively aiming at being accurate descriptions of something that they are not able to witness, fits very well into this chapter. Readers have already been prepared for the joke by Waugh’s digression, a few pages earlier, on the mechanism of the press, comparing his ‘own experiences with those of the different correspondents’ (39). He notes how he saw journalists write descriptions,

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more or less successfully, of events before they happened (39) and how pure invention was used for descriptions of such things as the décor of the emperor’s banqueting hall (41). He ‘had the fortune to be working for a paper which values the accuracy of its news before everything else; even so I was betrayed into a few mistakes’, these being minor details, such things as proper names and titles (39– 40). The first point to note here is that he speaks of working for a paper: the suggestion is very much The Times, serious, accurate and respectable, rather than the popular Daily Express. There is, at the very least, a certain disingenuousness here. Overall, though, the function of the digression on the press, besides whatever intrinsic interest it might have for readers, serves to highlight Waugh’s honesty and accuracy: one does not draw attention to the general inaccuracy of reporting on events unless one is implicitly suggesting that one is the exception to the rule. There is, then, another level at which what Waugh says about the gebbur can be read in Remote People: not only is there the joke about journalist fantasy, but there is also the sly buried dig at other journalists in comparison to Waugh. He, unlike them, can be relied upon, but what he is reliably observing here and reporting back on is his fellow observers . . . There is yet another level, however, and it is here we see the degree to which talking of Waugh’s ‘audience’ differs from talking of Orwell’s. Waugh reported on the gebbur (although not naming it as such) for both The Times and the Daily Express, both pieces appearing on the 3rd of November 1930. The latter piece, as is usual, is shorter, dealing with various events and sights connected with the coronation; the relevant section, dramatically headlined ‘Raw Beef Feast’ reads in its entirety as follows: A feast for 20,000 Abyssinians, at which the chief delicacy was raw beef, was the outstanding ceremony of the festivities on Monday, says the B.U.P. The guests were fed in relays of 5,000 each, and some disorderly scenes occurred outside the enclosure in which the banquet, given by the emperor, was served, when a scramble for places occurred. Guards, using small whips freely, restored order among the surging multitude, and the feast proceeded with decorum. To European eyes the feast presented a bizarre sight. The chief course was the raw beef, which is known as ‘broundo’, and is highly prized by Abyssinians. In accordance with the best manners of the country the guests held large pieces of this ‘broundo’ in their left hands, and, taking a bite, cut upwards to sever the mouthful with sharp knives. It needs a practised hand to do this without damage to the nose. Waugh 2018g: 407

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The piece for The Times gives very much the same information, although with much more incidental detail regarding the meal  – the ‘damp, grey Abyssinian bread’, the ‘small squares of cooked mutton and bread covered with a peculiarly pungent red pepper sauce’, the ‘liberal supply of the local beer’ (Waugh 2018d: 405) – that served as an overture to the main feast of raw meat. The one great difference is that in the Express piece the information on the feast is credited to the B.U.P., the British United Press, a news agency: it is difficult to explain the presence of this in one piece but not the other. The Times piece has no such defence, however partial: it is presented solely as its anonymous author’s work. As such, when read in conjunction with Waugh’s statements in Remote People (or the corroborating evidence in his diaries, which would not be published until 197619), it is immediately clear that ‘the journalists’ who describe the gebbur ‘in glowing paraphrases of Rhey and Kingsford’ include amongst their number, one Evelyn Waugh. Notwithstanding the presentation of this episode in Remote People, then, Waugh is clearly not in fact one who, unlike other journalists, can be relied upon. Of course, matters are not quite as simple as this. It is, obviously enough, only clear to readers of Remote People that its author is – at the very least – being economical with the truth if they know what is to be found in his anonymous newspaper reportage from Addis Ababa regarding the gebbur. It is in this that we reach the central point of how Waugh’s audience in the 1930s differs from that of Orwell. Whereas Orwell creates a public persona that gains its authority from auto-intertextuality as readers experience it, Waugh here is simultaneously creating two personae with different types of authority depending on which of two sets of readers is reading. To the majority of readers of Remote People, who knew at most that he did report on the coronation for the British press (and implicitly for The Times, the most respected and respectable of them), Waugh’s authority, the authority that underpins the satire of Black Mischief, comes from the clear-sighted honesty he displays here in observing the less honest antics of his fellow journalists. To those who knew him personally, however, to that limited social set that should not be thought of as part of his overall audience but rather as a discrete entity reading his satire very often as romans à clef, Waugh’s authority lies in his being bifrons: he has the cynicism, the disdain and the wit to present one face to the mass of his public whilst secretly revealing to the elite composed of his friends how all journalism is false and how he aristocratically treats it with the self-interested lack of respect that it deserves. We have seen how analysis of non-fiction by the two authors under examination here gives us insight into how the non-fiction part of an author’s

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pantext as it changes over time creates varying levels of authority both for itself and for fiction dealing with related topics. These questions of authority and identity as they move across and between texts and text types are of course not limited to the 1930s – another fascinating case study would be the relationship between two texts from the preceding decade that were important influences on Orwell, W. Somerset Maugham’s reportage On a Chinese Screen (1922) and The Painted Veil (1926) – but they do have a particular importance and relevance then. In one of the decade’s greatest collections of fads and fashions, Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (itself appearing as part of a book where the line between fiction, non-fiction and various other text types is blurred, his and Louis MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland [1937]), we find ‘I’m going to be very up to date indeed./It is a collage that you’re going to read’ (Auden 1996: 182). The composite nature of synchronic 1930s pantexts is ‘very up to date indeed’. Furthermore, this question of pantexts leads us to a wider theoretical question. Currently, periodization is a hotly debated topic; even more so, perhaps, is that of the whole question of whom we describe as ‘Modernist’ and the validity and value of that label.20 This is of particular reference to ‘the 1930s’, a label that is both easily defined decade and more nebulous cultural period (Auden’s Poems of 1928 may unambiguously not belong to the decade but to say that the volume does not belong to the period known as the 1930s is far less obvious21). Within these scholarly debates over classification and categorization of authors, however, the authors themselves may seem to be more stable entities, the interpretation of whose works may vary, but who are fundamentally relatively unchanging compared to the classes to which we ascribe them. I would argue that we can and should try to question that stability too, and explore how the whole collection of texts, contexts, ideologies and facts for which the name ‘George Orwell’ or ‘Evelyn Waugh’ is shorthand is itself something that changes and shifts; this is especially valuable in Orwell’s case, where so much is bound up with the question of his expertise and authority, an authority, though, that readers construct from a collection of texts and paratexts that has never been as diachronically stable as the synchronic use of it made might suggest. Foucault once wrote that discovering Shakespeare was not born in the house that we now visit is a modification that would not change how the author’s name functions, although it would if it were demonstrated that Shakespeare had not written the sonnets attributed to him (1994: 797).22 This, I would argue, may be true for Shakespeare, whose author’s authority neither gains nor loses from whether or not he was born in a certain house in Henley Street, given that building’s absence from the pantext;23 it is not true, mutatis mutandis, when we read novels like Burmese Days – how much does

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the author know of Burma?  – or Black Mischief  – how much does the author know of East Africa? In the case of these two 1930s authors, non-fiction creates them as authors and as authorities, and in doing so creates the context in which their fiction, as a historical object, occurs.

Notes 1 My overall theoretical debt should be clear here to Umberto Eco’s work on model and actual readers, especially Lector in fabula (1979). 2 ‘[E]st-ce que tout ce qu’il [the author] a écrit ou dit, tout ce qu’il a laissé derrière lui fait partie de son œuvre?’ 3 ‘La théorie de l’œuvre n’existe pas’. 4 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/13329#eid33067160 (accessed 8 March 2019). 5 ‘Burma’ will be used throughout rather than ‘Myanmar’, unless reference to the contemporary state is intended. 6 ‘I was born in 1903. In 1922, I left for Burma, where I joined the Indian Imperial Police. This was a role for which I was as unsuited as it is possible to be.’ My translation. 7 This dustjacket is unique amongst texts or paratexts written or, at the very least, approved, by Orwell in his lifetime in the information about him that it gives (see Seaber 2017: 72–3). 8 I am of course limiting myself here to discussion of those readers not personally acquainted with the author. 9 It will be noted that the conventions of citation muddy the waters still further, attributing to ‘Orwell, George’ texts that were not published under that name . . . 10 ‘M. E. A. Blair, qui a longtemps habité la Birmanie’. 11 ‘One of my native sub-inspectors was bullying a suspect (I described this scene in Burmese Days).’ (Orwell 1986–87b: 136); ‘I watched a man hanged once’ (136–137). 12 The degree to which Down and Out in Paris and London is non-fictional autobiography and/or reportage or a fictionalized version of the same is problematic; it is here discussed as non-fiction given its self-presentation as such, which should not be taken as implying an acceptance of that self-presentation. 13 For example, the important series of letters from him to Eleanor Jaques. See Taylor (2017). 14 For details, see https://www2.le.ac.uk/projects/evelyn-waugh/about/volumes (accessed 13 February 2019). 15 There is of course another wider argument to be made here about how the political, economic and institutional situation of academia and academics creates pantexts in different ways at different times in different places whilst usually more or less tacitly encouraging the concealment of those circumstances of creation.

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16 There is also a nice private joke here: amongst Waugh’s acquaintances, the one most likely to be ‘unjustly’ arrested in a park was almost certainly Tom Driberg, who in his role as perhaps the first great and truly influential society columnist was key in keeping Waugh’s name in the public eye in these years. 17 It is interesting to note that Waugh returned the favour to the author of this piece, Lady Eleanor Smith, a member of the same social set, with a laudatory review of her novel Red Wagon in 1930 (Waugh 2018h: 352). 18 ‘Abyssinia’ will be used throughout for simplicity’ sake rather than ‘Ethiopia’, unless reference to the contemporary state is intended. 19 ‘Wrote description barbarous gebbur. Went out to see what I could barbarous gebbur. 3.30 no signs barbarity’ (Waugh 2009: 349). 20 For an excellent if polemic overview, see Collier 2016: 232–238. 21 It might perhaps be useful to distinguish between the ’30s and the ’Thirties, or to use some other orthographic sleight of hand in an attempt to solve this problem. 22 ‘[S]i je découvre que Shakespeare n’est pas né dans la maison qu’on visite aujourd’hui, voilà une modification qui, évidemment, ne va pas altérer le fonctionnement du nom d’auteur; mais si on démontrait que Shakespeare n’a pas écrit les Sonnets qui passent pour les siens, voilà un changement d’un autre type: il ne laisse pas indifférent le fonctionnement du nom d’auteur.’ 23 It should of course be noted that I write as one whose Shakespeare pantext is limited by my expertise lying elsewhere . . .

Works cited Auden, W.H. Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse. The Complete Works of W.H. Auden, vol. 1. Edward Mendelson (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Collier, Patrick. Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890-1930s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Davison, Peter. ‘Publication of Burmese Days in England’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000a: 388. Davison, Peter. ‘Publication of Burmese Days in the United States’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000b: 356–357. Davison, Peter. ‘Publication of Down and Out in Paris and London’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000c: 299–300. Davison, Peter. ‘Publication of Down and Out in Paris and London in the United States’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed,). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000d: 318–319.

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Eco, Umberto. Lector in fabula: La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi. Milan: Bompiani, 1998 (1979). Foucault, Michel. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’. Dits et écrits 1954-1988, vol. 1. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (eds.). Paris: Gallimard, 1994: 789–821. Gallagher, Donat. ‘Abyssinia Coronation Reports, Ethiopia and Arabia Essays, London Journalism: 25 October 1930-28 November 1932’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018a: 371–378. Gallagher, Donat. ‘Becoming Professional Literary Lion, Converted to Rome: February 1927-October 1930’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018b: 115–127. Keck, Stephen L. ‘Text and Context: Another Look at Burmese Days’. SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, 3 (1), 2005: 27–40. Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 1. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 1986–87a [1933]. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 5. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 1986–87b [1937]. Orwell, George. ‘A Hanging’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000a: 207–210. Orwell, George. ‘Comment on exploite un people: L’Empire britannique en Birmanie’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000b [1929]: 172–178. Orwell, George. Eric A. Blair to Victor Gollancz, 02 February 1935. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000c: 372. Orwell, George. ‘French Text of Orwell’s Introduction to La Vache Enragée (Down and Out in Paris and London)’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000d [1935]: 536–537. Orwell, George. ‘Inside the Whale’. A Patriot after All: 1940-1941. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 12. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000e [1940]: 86–115. Orwell, George. ‘Review of Black Spring by Henry Miller; A Passage to India by E.M. Forster; Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington; The Jungle by Upton Sinclair; A Hind Let Loose by C.E. Montague; A Safety Match by Ian Hay. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000f [1936]: 499–501.

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Orwell, George. ‘Review of Indian Mosaic by Mark Channing’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000g [1936]: 488. Orwell, George. ‘Review of The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly; Almayer’s Folly by Joseph Conrad; The Wallet of Kai Lung by Ernest Bramah; Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett; Mr. Fortune, Please by H.C. Bailey; The Rocklitz by George R. Preedy’. A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10. Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000h [1936]: 490–492. Orwell, George. ‘To Eastern Service Director’. Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 19421943. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 14. by Peter Davison (ed.). London: Secker & Warburg, 2000i: 100–102. Seaber, Luke. Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Smith, Lady Eleanor. ‘Determined – to Impress’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 [1929]: 162. Taylor, D.J. ‘Dead Letters’, Times Literary Supplement, 04 July 2017: 19. Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1943 [1938]. Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951 [1934]. Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. London: Penguin, 1965 [1932]. Waugh, Evelyn. Remote People. London: Penguin, 1985 [1931]. Waugh, Evelyn. Waugh in Abyssinia. London: Penguin, 1986 [1936]. Waugh, Evelyn. Ninety-Two Days: Travels in Guiana and Brazil. London: Serif, 2007 [1934]. Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Michael Davie (ed.). London: Phoenix, 2009 [1976]. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘A Journey to Abyssinia’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018a [1930]: 416–420. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘Careers for Our Sons: Literature’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 19221934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018b [1929]: 160–162. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018c [1930]: 366–370. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘Coronation Banquet in Abyssinia, 30,000 Guests’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018d [1930]: 404–406. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘Ethiopia To-Day: Romance and Reality behind the Scenes at Addis Ababa’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018e [1930]: 427–432, 427.

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Waugh, Evelyn. ‘Let the Marriage Ceremony Mean Something’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018f [1929]: 194–196. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘Raw Beef Feast, Grandfather Clock on Tomb of an Emperor, Former Ruler of Abyssinia, Coronation Scramble’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018g [1930]: 406–407. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘The Books You Read [27/09/30]’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 19221934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018h [1930]: 349–353. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘The Books You Read [04/10/30]’. Essays, Articles, and Reviews 19221934. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 26. Donat Gallagher (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018i [1930]: 354–358. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (rev edn). Flamingo: London, 1983.

7

‘How To Acquire Culture’ by The Man Who Sees: The Middlebrow, Liberal Humanism, and Morally Superior Lower-Middle-Class Citizenship in Woman’s Weekly, 1938–1939 Eleanor Reed

‘Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly!’ Featured as a sex toy in a song by Victoria Wood (2000), domestic magazine Woman’s Weekly can claim to be one of the most popularly recognizable titles in the British market. It is also one of the longest running. Launched in 1911 by Alfred Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press, it celebrated its centenary in 2011, and continues to be published today. Drawing on a sample of magazines issued between September 1938 and September 1939, this chapter examines Woman’s Weekly during the year leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. The date range of twelve months was chosen to produce a sample of material broad enough to be representative of the magazine at this point in its history. Of primary concern is social class: throughout this year, I will argue, the magazine targeted a lower-middle-class readership of socially ambitious women, probably from working-class backgrounds, who were presumed anxious to establish themselves as middle class by maintaining middle-class standards in their homes, lifestyles, and tastes. During the year leading up to the Second World War’s outbreak, Woman’s Weekly readers’ status and ambitions emerge primarily in features discussing housework and, especially, the Arts. Working on the understanding that Britain’s interwar middle classes were stratified, acutely status conscious, and intensely competitive, I will argue that the magazine’s lowermiddle-class niche in the market is demarcated by cost, material quality, and a distinctive absence of social pretention, a quality that, underpinning the discourses of housework and aesthetics that this chapter explores, is integral to its target readers’ class identity as it is formulated by the magazine. Of principal interest is ‘How To Acquire Culture’  – a monthly series, launched in January 1939 by 207

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masculine columnist ‘The Man Who Sees’, which sought to help the magazine’s socially ambitious readers to engage meaningfully with the Arts. Mediating between readers and so-called high aesthetic culture at a moment when the latter was becoming available to wider audiences than ever before, this fascinating series belongs to the middlebrow. In discussing ‘How To Acquire Culture’ as a middlebrow text, I focus on the middlebrow’s social function as it is understood by Beth Driscoll in her 2014 book, The New Literary Middlebrow; exploring how the series encourages Woman’s Weekly readers to use their engagements with artworks to improve their sense of citizenship alongside their class status, I highlight close similarities between its values and the liberal humanist values articulated by F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson in their 1933 educational treatise Culture and Environment. These values, I argue, inform a critique of mass culture. Looking forward, they also form the basis of Woman’s Weekly readers’ service to Britain during the Second World War, anxieties relating to which, I suggest, prompted The Man Who Sees’ appearance in the magazine in the first place. Underlying these arguments are preoccupations with the modus operandi and form of popular domestic women’s magazines produced during the late interwar period. Alongside Woman’s Weekly, I survey Good Housekeeping, a more upmarket domestic glossy aimed at a more affluent readership. Distinctions between how the titles address their readers, and the assumptions underpinning these modes of address, place them in different substrata of the middle class. I also survey working-class titles My Weekly and Peg’s Paper. All four magazines are pictorial as well as verbal texts, constituting what Stuart Sillars describes as a ‘mixed discourse’ in which meaning is produced by interactions between words and images of equal status (1995: 75–90). Images, Meyer Schapiro argues, can influence how words are interpreted by drawing them into networks of cultural association (1973: 9–10): my arguments explore how drawings and photographs in ‘How To Acquire Culture’ reflect and respond to contemporary anxieties, brokering relations between The Man Who Sees and Woman’s Weekly readers, and function as conduits for the values they produce. By approaching the texts I survey as mixed discourse, I support Catherine Clay’s recent contention that ‘[t]hinking through the meanings composed through the juxtapositions of images and text [. . .] yields a much richer and more nuanced vision of the periodical as a specific and dynamic print cultural object’ (2017: 6). Scrutinizing a range of magazine features, I highlight the permeability of texts that, although printed in different issues and separated from one another in the same issue by blank spaces and borders, engage with similar concerns and anxieties, irrespective of theme. Ambivalences and ambiguities surface between features that contradict

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one another  – as I will argue, this formal multiplicity can make it difficult to ascertain a magazine’s standpoint on a given issue (there is always a ‘but’). Moreover, what magazines do not say can be as telling as what they do. This chapter’s publication is timely, for scholarly interest in women’s magazines is growing. This is perhaps because they may be reaching the end of their life in their current form  – arguably, smart phones and tablets are presenting them with their biggest competition for readers’ attention since television ownership became widespread during the early 1960s.1 Clay detects ‘new energy in the field’ of women’s periodical studies, citing edited collections by Andrews and McNamara (2014) and Richie et al. (2016) as evidence (Clay 2017: 4); the 2017 collection of which Clay herself is an editor constitutes further proof of current scholarly enthusiasm for the genre. Woman’s Periodicals and Print Culture 19181939 is an interdisciplinary work, aiming to prompt ‘dialogue’ between scholars working on different subsets of women’s periodicals, within different disciplines (Clay 2017: 4). This chapter furthers these aims by prompting interdisciplinary dialogue between periodical and literary scholarship. As essays in Woman’s Periodicals and Print Culture 1918-1939 show, interwar women’s magazines engaged closely with contemporary literary culture, shaping their readers’ tastes through book reviews and critical essays, providing ‘unconventional’ or ‘radical’ modernist women authors with a platform, and using romance to work through real-life concerns. This chapter extends these arguments by exploring how The Man Who Sees creates a distinctively lower-middle-class reading culture for Woman’s Weekly readers. Furthermore, I approach the magazine itself as a literary text, subjecting its mixed verbal and visual discourses to close and survey readings, and contextualizing its preoccupations using contemporary fiction. In doing so, I respond to concerns voiced by Patrick Collier in 2015 that literature is ‘underrepresented’ in periodical studies, and that periodical studies have so far done little to expand the field of literary studies (104–108). A primary aim of this chapter is to show how, by treating magazines as works of literature, we might challenge existing notions of what constitutes the latter, as well as broaden understandings of the reading culture of a given period. This chapter’s inclusion in an edited collection addressing literature published during the 1930s draws popular domestic magazines into the latter’s scope by implication. To aid navigation, this chapter is divided into the following sections. An overview of the middle classes in interwar Britain provides a sense of the social culture within which Woman’s Weekly’s target readers were seeking to achieve upward mobility, which is crucial to understanding their aspirations and the means by which they hoped to realize them. The following section will establish

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Woman’s Weekly’s target readership as lower middle class relative to readers targeted by working-class and middle-middle-class magazines; next, I introduce The Man Who Sees and his middlebrow cultural syllabus. Finally, I explore both in the context of anxieties specific to the late-1930s present they inhabit.

The interwar middle classes The middle classes within which Woman’s Weekly’s late-interwar readers sought to establish themselves were stratified, status conscious and intensely competitive. These characteristics can be attributed in part to the First World War, which had thrown Britain’s class system into considerable disarray. Struggling to pay high post-war taxes and mourning male heirs who had died in battle, the interwar aristocracy had been conceding social, political and economic primacy to the upper middle classes, who were seeking to annex upper-class culture as proof of their own ascendancy (Humble 2001: 60–61, 70–71). At the same time however, notions of what being middle class meant were undergoing radical change. To begin with, the composition of the middle classes was altering, as they expanded to absorb impoverished members of the upper classes, and white-collar workers from working-class backgrounds who, thanks to the non-manual salaried occupations they had gained in part through free secondary education, considered themselves middle class (Humble 2001: 60–61; Jackson 1991: 44–45). Council school teachers, technicians, shop or sales managers, commercial travellers and clerks, these individuals and their families comprised the lower middle classes (Jackson 1991: 44–45); defying notions that status is based on inherited privilege by designating themselves middle-class through occupation and income, they were viewed as a threat by the upper middle classes who, even as they annexed upper-class culture, feared that lower-middle-class culture would subsume their own (Humble 2001: 70–71). In turn, the lower middle classes were preoccupied with distinguishing themselves from the working classes, whose (albeit waged) incomes were similar in size to their own (McKibbin 2000: 45). In seeking to become more middle class, they aimed to widen cultural gaps between themselves and their working-class inferiors. At the same time, as though to exacerbate upper-middle-class anxieties, the criteria designating middle-class status were undergoing radical redefinition. Professional distinctions were dissolving through occupational diversification, and lifestyles were being altered by technological and social change; as mass cultural forms such as the cinema, the wireless, and cheap, off-the-peg clothing

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democratized accent and costume, and as free secondary education made knowledge more widely available, it became increasingly difficult to determine individuals’ status using traditional criteria (Light 1991: 91, 97–98, 216; Orwell 2001: 53–54). Confronted by the ambitious, upwardly mobile lower middle classes, confused and unnerved by class indeterminacy, the established middle classes developed acute status anxiety, and battled hard to preserve rank. The result was diversification and stratification. Using difference to confirm their own status whilst ruling out their peers (Light 1991: 12; Samuel 1983: 30), the status-conscious, competitive interwar middle classes produced what Evelyn Waugh later described as an entirely relational hierarchy on which individuals fought to position themselves using criteria chosen to confirm their own superiority: ‘everyone (everyone, that is to say, who comes to the front door) thinks he is a gentleman [. . .] everyone draws the line of demarcation immediately below his own heels’ (1973: 74; Waugh’s italics). This ‘profoundly restless and heterodox grouping’ (Light 1991: 98) constitutes the middle classes to which Woman’s Weekly’s 1938 and 1939 target readership aspired to belong. By setting standards and supplying instructions for meeting them, the magazine provided these readers with the wherewithal to consolidate their status within a social group whose parameters were undergoing rapid and radical redefinition.

A lower-middle-class magazine Woman’s Weekly’s current producers believe that, at its launch in 1911, the magazine targeted women who were leaving domestic service to marry and run homes of their own (Gale, personal communication, 7 March 2017 [Sandy Gale was publishing director of Woman’s Weekly between 2010 and 2017]). Between September 1938 and September 1939, the publication still ranked towards the lower end of the market, although, targeting unmarried clerical workers alongside housewives, its working reader demographic appears to be no longer working class. Packed with features addressing cookery, housework, dressmaking, childcare and motherhood, and handicrafts including knitting, crochet and embroidery, the publication’s interests are primarily domestic; costing just 3½d per issue, it is slightly more expensive than cheap 2d weeklies such as Peg’s Paper, a magazine targeting female factory workers with sensational fiction, astrology and film gossip, and My Weekly, a more down-market version of Woman’s Weekly offering fewer adverts, less domestic advice and more fiction. But whilst Woman’s Weekly readers occupy an economic status slightly higher than that of Peg’s Paper

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and My Weekly readers, they rank lower in terms of income than those targeted by Good Housekeeping, a 1s domestic monthly printed on smoother, glossier paper, and featuring colour illustrations. Adverts for cars, travel companies and costumiers tempt readers of Good Housekeeping with affluent middle-class lifestyles commensurate with their magazine’s glossy appearance  – the virtual absence of equivalent adverts from Woman’s Weekly reinforces its readers’ economic inferiority to the latter. Appealing to readers from not quite the lowest income bracket, but who manifestly cannot afford a monthly domestic glossy or the products advertised on its shiny and colourful pages, Woman’s Weekly can be classified as lower middle class in economic terms between September 1938 and September 1939. But whilst cover price and advertisements are useful indicators of Woman’s Weekly readers’ economic status in relation to other magazine readerships, they are not sufficient in themselves to designate them lower middle class. Flipping through the sample of magazines chosen for this chapter, one further status distinction presents itself: absence of pretension. This is strongly apparent in Woman’s Weekly’s attitude towards housework, which emerges as distinctively lower middle class in comparison to the treatment of housework by middlemiddle-class Good Housekeeping, and it is to this comparison that I will now turn. During the interwar years, a significant shift took place in middle-class housewives’ relationship with domestic work. Triggered by the First World War, this shift made an important contribution to the destabilization of middle-class identities following the conflict. During the war, many domestic servants found jobs in manufacturing; afterwards, many, having enjoyed higher wages, better working conditions and more personal freedom than they had experienced during peacetime, were reluctant to return to what were often poorly-paid, exploitative jobs in service, with the result that middle-class housewives found it increasingly difficult to employ paid domestic help (Gunn and Bell 2003: 69). Their woes are documented in fiction of the period, notably novels by E.M. Delafield, whose housewife protagonists are repeatedly portrayed appeasing obstreperous cooks and maids, and struggling to replace them when they inevitably give notice. Indeed, the Servant Problem, as it became known, is partially responsible for an interwar ‘boom’ in domestic magazines targeting middle-class readers (Jackson 1991: 116): dispensing advice about cookery and housework, they swooped to the aid of housewives left high and dry without paid domestic help. At the same time, labour-saving appliances such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, electric irons and electric or gas ovens were becoming more affordable. By the end of the 1920s, middle-class housewives

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were increasingly switching their reliance for help with domestic chores from servants to labour savers (84). As a consequence, their ability to buy appliances was taking over from their ability to afford maids as a distinction of middle-class status. Launched in 1922, targeting a relatively affluent middle-class readership with adverts for the latest housework gadgets, Good Housekeeping numbers among the magazines launched with newly servantless housewives in mind. During the mid-interwar period, the magazine debated the Servant Problem, and sought to tackle the issue by, for instance, encouraging its readers to become more attractive employers: appliances, one feature argued, would attract young, modern-minded working-class women into domestic service (‘The Gordian Knot of Domestic Service’, GH Feb 1930: 150). Recognizing that servant-keeping was an important distinction of middle-class status, the magazine addressed its readers as mistresses, assuming thereby that they employed maids, cooks and gardeners, or that they were doing their own housework only in their servants’ temporary absence (‘Making the Most of your Kitchen Garden’, GH Feb 1930: 126; ‘A Micro-Telephone for Room-to-Room Communication’, GH Jan 1930: 56). Whether or not readers were actually in a position to employ servants, this assumption was critical to the magazine’s formulation of them as middle class. By the late 1930s however, Good Housekeeping’s position on servant keeping was becoming more ambiguous. Indicating a shift in its readers’ perception of what being middle class entailed, between September 1938 and September 1939 the magazine continued to address them as employers whilst openly acknowledging that some, at least, were doing their own housework. Cookery feature ‘Cook’s Night Out’ maintains the tone of mid-interwar service articles by supplying readers with instructions for preparing supper ‘when cook is out’ – the implication being that cook’s absence is only temporary (Palmer, GH May 1939: 66). Other features are, however, less certain that their readers have the means and opportunity to employ domestic help. ‘Parties for Summer Weddings’ states that ‘the bride and her mother’ will cater for ‘a large number of guests’ with the help of a ‘staff ’, but supplies readers, seemingly at their request, with instructions for making cake decorations that ‘would not tax the ability of the veriest amateur’ (Palmer, GH Jun 1939: 58–59). In the eyes of Good Housekeeping and its target readership, doing one’s own chores seemed to be losing its social stigma at the end of the interwar period. A similar sense of ambiguity surrounds Good Housekeeping readers’ ability to afford domestic technology between September 1938 and September 1939. Some adverts and reviews imply that they can,2 but others admit otherwise. One

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feature even contradicts itself: a laundry article promoting washing machines, ironing machines and drying cabinets makes no mention of servants, suggesting that they are being superseded by technology, but, in supplying instructions for hand laundering, it also acknowledges that not all readers can afford labour savers (The Director, ‘Save Labour when you Launder: Part III: Methods and Tools’, GH Mar 1939: 60–61, 129). During the year before the outbreak of the Second World War, readers of Good Housekeeping, although seemingly coming to terms with the absence of domestic servants, may not yet be able to afford the appliances that are replacing them as distinctions of status. Any assumption in the magazine that they can may, like its interwar assumption that they employ servants, be lifestyle fantasy, a means of flattering readers by implying that they occupy a section of the middle classes higher than that to which they belong in real life. Again, this assumption is crucial to its formulation of their class identity. That Good Housekeeping discusses servants and appliances even at the level of fantasy ranks its target readership above that of Woman’s Weekly during the year under review. One Woman’s Weekly housework hint implies that its reader may employ a maid, but this is an anomaly (1 Jul 1939: 20): the overwhelming majority of this magazine’s housework discourses address their readers as hands-on homeworkers. As though confirming that they are financially less well off than readers of Good Housekeeping, between September 1938 and September 1939 the publication does not review, and hardly ever advertises, expensive domestic appliances. An advert for electric cookers, and another for electrical appliances including an iron, a breakfast cooker, and a refrigerator are, like the hint about employing a maid, anomalous;3 for the most part, readers are presumed to do their housework using cheap cleaning products. That they do, however, aspire to being seen to use more expensive forms of domestic help, is suggested by adverts for inexpensive hand creams, which promise that these products will disguise the physical effects of rough domestic labour. Taglines on the latter reminding readers that the appearance of their hands will reveal whether or not they have help with their housework resonate with Good Housekeeping readers’ evident anxieties surrounding class status and domestic chores;4 but the absence of assumptions that Woman’s Weekly readers employ servants or labour savers from the magazine’s domestic advice features, which address housewives as though they are doing their own chores and do not refer to maids or appliances, suggests that its target audience is less concerned about being presumed able to afford domestic help than the readership of the middle-middle-class magazine. Comparison between housework discourses in Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Weekly suggest that, between September 1938 and September 1939, the

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readers targeted by the latter can be classified as lower middle class in part by their relative openness about doing their own chores without help from servants or appliances. This lack of pretension is an important social characteristic distinguishing them and the middle-middle-class readers of Good Housekeeping; in the following section of this chapter, I will argue that this distinctively lowermiddle-class absence of pretence also surfaces in their approach to consuming aesthetic culture. First, however, I will introduce The Man Who Sees, the columnist responsible for Woman’s Weekly readers’ cultural education.

The Man Who Sees The Man Who Sees entered Woman’s Weekly during 1936, and was a source of considerable authority in the magazine. Named for his superior observational abilities, he offered masculine insight into a range of issues deemed of interest to readers. Unusually, his column always featured a pictorial representation of its writer, which alone suggests that his relationship with Woman’s Weekly readers was intended to be more personal than that cultivated by, for instance, fashion and gossip columnist The London Girl, or cook and domestic advisor Cecile, neither of whom is ever pictured in the magazine during the year under review. Agony aunt Mrs Marryat, whose responses to readers’ personal queries are themselves an excellent barometer of the magazine’s values at a given moment, is the only other columnist to appear visually between September 1938 and September 1939. But whereas the pen and ink drawings depicting Mrs Marryat are limited in number and scope and reused multiple times, The Man Who Sees boasts an extensive repertoire of portraits, each one worked extravagantly in wash and ink, which show him in a variety of poses and sometimes even present him in a situation specific to his column’s theme. Typically dressed in a threepiece suit, seldom pictured without his pipe, his still-plentiful slicked-back hair greying at the temples and his smile frank and good-humoured beneath a reassuringly paternal moustache, he is fashioned in the image of a trusted family doctor or solicitor, and as such, oozes middle-aged, established middle-class masculine respectability. His values, these portraits suggest, are unimpeachable, and his advice, sound. The Man’s familiar, sometimes even mildly flirtatious modes of addressing Woman’s Weekly readers (‘you darlings’) frame his interactions with them as friendly, and, as though to emphasize their relations’ intimacy, he even appears to interact with some in person, by engaging them in imaginary dialogue and referring to letters he claims to have received.5 Frequently

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peppered with Biblical references, his views are to be taken seriously. His weekly ‘Talks’ are the closest Woman’s Weekly gets to an explicit ideological manifesto, and as such, are crucial to interrogations of its late-interwar values.6 The Man Who Sees flexes his authority chiefly by seeking to govern Woman’s Weekly readers’ personal conduct. Presented by taglines as the writings of a philosopher, his weekly ‘Talks’ address issues including dating, marital trust and contentment (‘Lessons For Sweethearts’, WW 5 Nov 1938: 922–923; ‘Two Major Domestic Crimes’, WW 17 Dec 1938: 1274–1275; ‘The Long Long Trail’, WW 11 Mar 1939: 450–451): appealing variously to young unmarried women, housewives, women in paid employment, mothers of small children and elderly women, they reflect the diversity (in terms of age and occupation) of Woman’s Weekly’s target demographic, and function as a moral lifestyle guide to all readers. Advice from a mature male authority figure seems to have a been a selling point for lowerclass domestic magazines besides Woman’s Weekly during 1938 and 1939, for by that year both Peg’s Paper and My Weekly also feature visibly middle-class masculine conduct columnists. Peg’s Man Pal is a well-established figure, having been giving Peg’s Paper readers the benefit of his views since the 1920s; My Weekly’s The Looker On is, however, much newer, making his debut in January 1939. Like The Man Who Sees, both men embody middle-class respectability and dependability, Peg’s Man Pal resembling one’s older and wiser uncle in high, round collar and necktie, and The Looker On, with his three-piece suit, slickedback greying hair and pipe, invoking the same brand of trustworthiness as The Man Who Sees. Portrayed in wash and ink, The Looker On is, in fact, a dead ringer for his Woman’s Weekly counterpart, and it seems likely that he is a direct imitation of the latter. Invoking insight, even his pseudonym is virtually identical; such apparent plagiarism testifies to both the popularity of The Man Who Sees, and the unscrupulousness of My Weekly’s editors. Addressing issues of personal conduct, Peg’s Man Pal and The Looker On play similar roles in their respective publications to The Man Who Sees. With hindsight, the timing of The Man Who Sees’ appearance in Woman’s Weekly, and of The Looker On in My Weekly, can perhaps be attributed to the political climate of the mid-to-late 1930s. The decade, which had begun with the Great Depression, saw the “maturation” of dictatorships in Italy and Russia, and the emergence of a third in Germany; Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and civil war in Spain contributed to an atmosphere of uncertainty and unrest in Europe (Large 1990: 13, 15–17). In September 1938, the beginning of the year under review, Britain was one year away from declaring war on Hitler’s Germany, and throughout that year preparations for a possible conflict proceeded quickly and

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visibly, with air raid shelters appearing in public places, gas masks being issued to civilians and the introduction of compulsory conscription under the Military Training Act (Mackay 2002: 30–37). To magazine readers concerned by the prospect of another war in Europe, these were disquieting times. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Woman’s Weekly, My Weekly and Peg’s Paper had tended not to engage directly with current affairs, perhaps to remain politically neutral, perhaps through lack of interest – whatever their motive, however, this lack of obvious ‘news’ presents the magazines as spaces of retreat, within which the paternal demeanour of The Man Who Sees, The Looker On and Peg’s Man Pal may have been comforting. Doing so, they prepare to perform their own war service in the magazines. Respectable, trustworthy and authoritative, between September 1938 and September 1939 these masculine columnists established themselves as paternal figures to which female readers could turn for counsel and reassurance during the potentially difficult and dangerous days ahead.

‘How To Acquire Culture’ The prospect of conflict notwithstanding, the Woman’s Weekly’s target readers are visibly anxious to achieve promotion to the established middle classes during the year before the start of the Second World War. I have argued already that the magazine’s housework discourses place them in a different middle-class circle to the one seemingly occupied by readers of Good Housekeeping; in what follows, I will suggest that their cultural aspirations, key to their sense of themselves as middle class as opposed to working class, confirm this difference. Woman’s Weekly readers’ middle-class cultural aspirations surface in ‘How To Acquire Culture’ by The Man Who Sees, a series that, taking advantage of opportunities for engaging with the Arts presented by mass culture, introduces them to socially aspirational cultural works. It is on this series that I will focus for the remainder of this chapter. Appearing in the first Woman’s Weekly issue of each month between January and September 1939, ‘How To Acquire Culture’ consists of nine ‘Culture Talks’ discussing painting, poetry, music, sculpture and architecture. Introducing readers from Woman’s Weekly’s relatively low-income target demographic to the Arts, the series appears at a moment when technologies of mass production were giving mass audiences access to so-called high artworks that had formerly been consumed only in situ by those with the time and money to do so;7 testifying to these innovations, photographs of artworks illustrate each Talk, and The Man

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Who Sees assumes that readers can listen to wireless concerts (‘How To Listen To Music’, WW 4 Mar 1939: 409, 435–436). Given that the Arts were becoming accessible to more socially diverse audiences than ever before, the timing of ‘How To Acquire Culture’ is significant, suggesting that Woman’s Weekly readers belonged to a demographic who, until recently, lacked opportunities to consume the Arts. Now that they had these opportunities, the series’ appearance implies, they aspired to develop the knowledge and confidence to experience ‘Culture’ meaningfully. The increasing accessibility of Art made an important contribution to the interwar democratization of leisure-class culture, and it seems extremely likely that Woman’s Weekly’s 1938–39 readership was anxious to ‘become cultured’ in order to become more middle-class. That the Arts were used as social currency by the status-obsessed, competitive interwar middle classes is suggested by fiction produced at the time. Lucia, protagonist of Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson, uses taste in music to claim superiority to her peers in the aptly named fictional village of Riseholme, treating her dinner guests to self-aggrandizing Beethoven piano recitals, and persuading a celebrated soprano to perform extracts from Wagner’s Ring Cycle at her garden party (Benson 1986: 9, 121–122). E.M. Delafield’s middle-class diarist the Provincial Lady feels anxious at the prospect of being judged for her taste in art and literature, worrying about her ability to understand and – more importantly – to discuss an exhibition of Italian art, and Orlando by Virginia Woolf (Delafield 1993: 47, 5). These middle-class housewives’ concern with appearing cultured seems to be shared by readers of Good Housekeeping, which, reviewing the latest novels and gramophone records, targets those eager to keep abreast of the latest developments in literature and classical music; as Claire Battershill notes, book reviews in interwar women’s magazines targeting middle-class readers helped the latter develop reading tastes that they would showcase through the purchase and display of appropriate titles (2017: 14–25). Whilst not providing lengthy reviews, ‘How To Acquire Culture’ engages closely with the act of reading as it relates to interpreting cultural works in a manner demonstrative of its readers’ class status. Through being taught by The Man Who Sees to appreciate paintings by Van Gogh and a symphony by Beethoven, Woman’s Weekly readers presumably hope to develop standards of aesthetic engagement commensurate with established middle-class status. Teaching Woman’s Weekly readers to appreciate Art, ‘How To Acquire Culture’ belongs to the middlebrow, a culture associated strongly with the lower middle classes during the interwar years. A key function of the middlebrow is cultural mediation, the making of so-called high culture accessible to audiences eager to

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establish their status using taste, and the middlebrow’s appearance as a concept during the late 1920s is linked by Nicola Humble to the rise of the ‘more affluent, newly leisured [suburban middle class]’ (2001: 10) to which Woman’s Weekly readers belong, or aspire to join. The notion that standards of taste are set by members of the established leisure classes, who consume cultural works that display their pecuniary wealth and leisure, is explored by sociologist Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Classes (1899). Leisure-class standards and values are observed, Veblen argues, by members of each social stratum below the leisure classes, who ‘accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum’ and seek to achieve this ideal in their own lives. Pointing out that the lower classes’ reputability depends on their ability to successfully reproduce leisure-class standards, he gestures towards the social pressure felt by members of the aspirant classes to conform (Veblen 2007: 52). Acknowledging this pressure, middlebrow works supply aspiring-to-be-leisureclass audiences with material and intellectual resources that aim to help them replicate leisure-class standards of taste in their own consumption of culture (Tracy 2010: 40). As what follows will argue, the aim of ‘How To Acquire Culture’ is, apparently, to familiarize Woman’s Weekly’s socially ambitious readers with leisure-class aesthetic tastes, representative of the status towards which they manifestly aspire. Several other critics have examined middlebrow cultural pedagogy as a function of interwar periodicals. These include Sheila Webb, who explores how American publication Life ‘strove to educate the reader in modern standards of taste’ during the 1930s (Webb 2013: 116), and Trysh Travis, who numbers American Reader’s Digest among the ‘middlebrow institutions [offering] to mediate literary culture for modern audiences in need of guidance’ during the 1920s (Travis 2002: 340); Michelle Smith notes that ‘anxieties over the correct use of one’s leisure time and the tasteful display of goods that attested to one’s level of material wealth’ are among concerns addressed by middlebrow fiction published in Canadian magazines between the 1920s and 1950s (Smith 2012: 8). Louise Kane holds ‘cheap [mass-produced] periodicals’ partially responsible for the development of the middlebrow in Britain, arguing that, along with Forster’s 1870 Education Act and the establishment of board schools and public libraries, they helped to transform the country’s ‘reading public’ from the small, educated elite targeted by most nineteenth-century authors to a broad demographic that included factory workers, domestic servants, and clerks (Kane 2015: 26). Catering for the aspirations of the newly literate classes, the middlebrow, Kane contends, is ‘a pedagogical form of literature [. . .] that appeals to a wide, predominantly

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lower-middle- to working-class readership, who [. . .] desire to engage in easily comprehensible but cultured reading’ (25). Appearing in a cheap 3½d weekly that targets housewives who cannot afford domestic help and is concerned with activating their upward class mobility, ‘How To Acquire Culture’ appeals to precisely this demographic. Before examining how a distinctively lower-middle-class absence of pretence surfaces in The Man Who Sees’ approach to shaping Woman’s Weekly readers’ cultural engagements, I want to highlight an important difference between ‘How To Acquire Culture’ and two other examples of the interwar middlebrow, which helps to distinguish Woman’s Weekly’s target readers as lower middle class in their consumption of culture. Woman’s Weekly readers’ implied notion of what constitutes ‘high’ art differs from that towards which some other middlebrow readerships are supposed to aspire. Eager to be deemed au fait with Woolf ’s Orlando and to discuss literature with the ‘distinguished’ author of Modernistsounding novel Symphony in Three Sexes, the Provincial Lady has distinctly highbrow cultural pretensions (Delafield 1993: 5, 9); it is difficult however to fit the works on The Man Who Sees’ cultural syllabus into the same category. Postimpressionist paintings by Van Gogh may have seemed outré to turn-of-thetwentieth-century audiences, but by the late 1930s they have become relatively mainstream. A painting by Millet, a symphony by Beethoven, and poetry by Herbert Trench and Alice Meynell, whilst they are presented by The Man Who Sees as elevated and elevating, do not classify as highbrow in the same way as novels by Woolf, whose more complex form makes them less easily accessible. The point here is not that ‘How To Acquire Culture’ complicates what is meant by high art within middlebrow culture, but that, inasmuch as they are made accessible by the middlebrow, artworks are designated high not by qualities intrinsic to themselves, but by their relation to the individuals who aspire to consume them. Lise Jaillant writes that the middlebrow ‘in its original [i.e. midinterwar] sense, described someone with high intellectual or aesthetic aspirations, but who lacked the cultural capacity to understand high art’ (2016: 5); since the amount and type of cultural capital vary between individuals, definitions of what constitutes high art must also vary from person to person. What is considered high by the Provincial Lady, herself a published writer who moves in literary circles, may differ from what is considered high by a Woman’s Weekly reader who, assumed not to have engaged meaningfully with poetry before, appears to have been exposed to considerably less aesthetic culture. The Provincial Lady’s apparent cultural capital indicates that she has long inhabited a social class with access to the arts; the apparent cultural capital of Woman’s Weekly’s target readers

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implies that they are assumed to inhabit its threshold. This comparison is complicated slightly by the taste of comfortably off, leisured housewife Lucia, who, a devotee of mainstream classical composers Bach, Scarlatti and Beethoven, evidently prefers tonally accessible music to more formally challenging contemporary works; ‘reject[ing] as valueless all artistic efforts later than the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ her taste in painting is, if anything, more conservative than that of The Man Who Sees’ target audience (Benson 1986: 8). The difference between Woman’s Weekly readers and Lucia is, however, that Lucia chooses not to engage with artworks she deems valueless, her ability to choose implying a cultural knowledge broad enough to be selective. Taught to appreciate artworks selected on their behalf by The Man Who Sees, the readers targeted by ‘How To Acquire Culture’ currently lack the means to make this choice. Like those of the Provincial Lady, Lucia’s cultural preferences signify that she has long been a member of the established middle classes. The cultural preferences of the readers formulated by Woman’s Weekly, barely formed as yet, signify that they have not. The absence of social pretence that distinguishes lower-middle-class Woman’s Weekly’s housework discourses from those in middle-middle-class Good Housekeeping emerges in The Man Who Sees’ pedagogical approach. Humble suggests that feminine middlebrow novels published during the interwar period appeal to their readers partly because, by depicting upper-middle-class life, they transmit knowledge of upper-middle-class conduct and values. This delivery of information is, however, covert: novels address readers as though they know already what they are being taught, flattering them with the assumption that they already belong to the upper middle classes whilst equipping them with the cultural knowledge they require in order to become upper middle class (Humble 2001: 88–89). Conveying knowledge of upper-middle-class culture without appearing to do so, these middlebrow novels acknowledge readers obsessed with status, who are anxious to appear upper middle class yet conscious that to ask for guidance would be to admit that they do not belong to upper-middle-class circles (Ross 1973: 17). Fiction reviews in Good Housekeeping are prime examples of this covert cultural pedagogy. Recommending novels that ‘deserve’ readers’ ‘attention’ alongside evidently correct opinions of the works, and phrases with which to articulate them – ‘maturity, solidity, sureness of approach and felicity of phrasing’ – they address a readership whose tastes appear well developed, but who in fact require telling what to read, what to make of it, and how to discuss it with their peers (Seymour, ‘Books for the Discriminating’, GH Dec 1938: 164). The middle-middle-class magazine’s record reviews furnish their readers with similarly correct knowledge and opinions, reminding them, for instance, that

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Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 is nicknamed his ‘Linz’ Symphony, and declaring the record in question ‘a scintillating performance which causes regrets that it appears in concert programmes too rarely’ (Liversidge, ‘Records to Hear’, GH May 1939: 184) – an assessment one can imagine being parroted in conversation by readers anxious to impress with their ear for a good performance and extensive knowledge of classical concert programming. Recalling Humble’s middlebrow readers, readers of Good Housekeeping book and record reviews seek cultural knowledge, but seem reluctant to admit to its current lack since this could demote them in the eyes of their peers. Their eagerness to be addressed as seasoned consumers of classical music recalls their eagerness to be addressed as employers of domestic help, human or mechanized: the maintenance of socially flattering pretence underpins relations between Good Housekeeping and its middle-middle-class target readership at the end of the interwar period. Unlike the feminine middlebrow novels examined by Humble and Good Housekeeping book and record reviews however, ‘How To Acquire Culture’ openly assumes a readership of novices. As the series’ title itself suggests, ‘Culture’ is something that Woman’s Weekly readers currently lack, and require guidance in order to obtain; ‘Before You Learn How To Choose Your Music, You Must Learn How To Listen To It!’ declares the subheading to a music appreciation Talk, making clear to its culturally aspirant readers their present inability to form their own musical tastes (‘How To Listen To Music’, WW 4 Mar 1939: 409). Working on the assumption that Woman’s Weekly readers embark on his learning programme without any sort of taste at all, The Man begins at the very beginning, exploring in his series’ introductory Talk what, he believes, being cultured actually means (‘The Garden Of The Mind’, WW 31 Dec 1938: 1354–1355). Throughout, his teacherly mode of address makes explicit the learning process: he makes clear his programme’s learning targets by highlighting current gaps in readers’ knowledge, setting them learning tasks and questioning their fictional counterparts, praising them for answering correctly. Some of the pictures you won’t understand [. . .] because they’re speaking in a language you haven’t yet learned. ‘Visiting A Picture Gallery’, WW 7 Jan 1939: 10 a picture has a word to give you; it has an impression to make on you; and now you are sitting in front of it to receive that word and impression. [. . .] Sit, silence the mind, and wait. [. . .] Yes, certainly you may look at it from a different angle. ‘Visiting A Picture Gallery’, WW 7 Jan 1939: 10 ‘And now, Miss Robinson, what have you to say about the [. . .] passage?’

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‘It’s so full of pictures’, says Miss Robinson. ‘Almost every line puts a picture, an image, in the mind [. . .] that’s why I like it!’ This is an excellent point. ‘The Test of Good Writing’, WW 6 May 1939: 911

Whereas Good Housekeeping book and record reviewers address their readers as equals, The Man Who Sees addresses Woman’s Weekly readers, somewhat patronizingly, as inferiors. By thus highlighting their present lack of knowledge, he places ‘How To Acquire Culture’ in a different category of the middlebrow to that occupied by the feminine middlebrow novels surveyed by Humble, and Good Housekeeping reviews. As with Good Housekeeping, this approach to readers’ cultural education resonates with the magazine’s attitude towards housework: just as Woman’s Weekly readers do not pretend to be able to employ domestic help, they do not pretend to a higher level of aesthetic cultivation than that which they currently occupy. Again, the magazine’s relations with its lower-middle-class readers are distinguished from those of a middle-middle-class magazine and its readership by an absence of social pretence. In seeming to recognize Woman’s Weekly readers’ eagerness to become more middle-class by learning to appreciate the Arts, ‘How To Acquire Culture’ seemingly acknowledges their lower-middle-class anxiousness to distinguish themselves from the working classes. Whilst The Man Who Sees’ cultural syllabus and pedagogical approach rank Woman’s Weekly readers below readers of Good Housekeeping, that they aspire to become cultured at all classifies them above readers of working-class Peg’s Paper and My Weekly, neither of which attempted to engage its readership with the Arts between September 1938 and September 1939. Neither magazine published an equivalent cultural programme; rather than novels or classical music, each reviewed the latest popular films, a far less aspirational art form in this context. Peg’s Paper was especially keen on popular cinema, supplying extensive coverage of Hollywood gossip alongside its film reviews. Woman’s Weekly also printed film reviews, and supplied answers to queries about film stars, indicating that at least part of its readership was interested in this less exalted cultural matter – nevertheless, the presence in the magazine of a series dedicated to cultural betterment indicates a readership with higher cultural aspirations than the readers targeted by My Weekly and Peg’s Paper, who manifestly do not wish to appear middle class in their consumption of aesthetic culture. In learning to appreciate the Arts, Woman’s Weekly’s lower-middle-class readers gain cultural distance from working-class readers of My Weekly and Peg’s Paper, another important factor in their middle-class identity.

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This appearance of cultural superiority is, however, complicated by the presence in Woman’s Weekly of popular romance fiction. Throughout the interwar period, popular romance had been a staple of Woman’s Weekly, My Weekly and Peg’s Paper; according to standards set by contemporary critic Q.D. Leavis, the genre designates all three readerships lower class. Leavis designates reading a distinction of class status in her 1932 anthropological survey Fiction and the Reading Public, which classifies individuals according to their taste in reading material: members of the ‘poorer reading public’ read a ‘poorer class of reading matter’ procured, she writes, from newsagents in economically deprived areas, which sell popular magazines and cheap novels (Leavis 1932: 14). In making her point, Leavis includes a list of novelists whose work she deems of a poorer class. E.M. Dell is on her list, and so is Ruby M. Ayres: both publish fiction in Woman’s Weekly during 1938 and 1939, and Ayres also publishes in My Weekly. Other authors whose romances appear in Woman’s Weekly and My Weekly during the interwar years include Phyllis Denham and Jane England, whilst Norah Smaridge and Coralie Stanton are among those who publish stories in both Woman’s Weekly and Peg’s Paper. By Leavis’s estimation, it seems that Woman’s Weekly publishes a poorer class of reading matter for a poorer class of reader, and that the magazine shares this ‘poor’ status with two working-class titles. If we accept Leavis’s system of classification, Woman’s Weekly readers are being encouraged to distinguish themselves from working-class magazine readers not by their current reading status, which they share, but by the status towards which they aspire. The presence of ‘How To Acquire Culture’ in the magazine suggests that Woman’s Weekly readers regard themselves, or aspire to regard themselves, as middle class; the absence of similar features from Peg’s Paper and My Weekly indicates that readers targeted by these publications do not. Offering readers of Woman’s Weekly the wherewithal to engage meaningfully with higher forms of aesthetic culture, The Man Who Sees acknowledges their distinctively lower-middle-class anxiousness to distance themselves culturally from readers of working-class magazines, whose aesthetic tastes are seemingly limited to popular movies and romance fiction. The Man Who Sees gestures towards the elevated, elevating status of the artworks he discusses by writing ‘Culture’ with an impressive-looking capital C in the text as well as the headings of each Culture Talk; his definition of being cultured suggests, however, that ‘How To Acquire Culture’ aims to help Woman’s Weekly readers distinguish themselves from, rather than join, the wealthier, more leisured middle classes whose Culture they appear to be gaining through its programme of instruction. Being cultured, according to The Man, involves privileging the moral quality over the material quantity of one’s engagements

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with artworks. A wealthy woman, he explains, may consume more Culture than her less well-off counterpart – but whereas the former’s cultural engagement is superficial, a meaningless‘rag bag’ of experiences collected without discrimination or purpose, the latter selects Culture discerningly, as a means of initiating moral self-improvement. ‘A woman may travel and see [picture galleries] in Paris, and Rome, and Vienna’ but she may assimilate nothing. She may come home with a rag bag mind full of odds and ends, which she can reel off like a catalogue; but she may have built little or nothing of all she has seen into her soul to enrich and beautify it. [. . .] Culture doesn’t depend on what is spread before you, but upon what you can digest. ‘Garden’ WW : 1354

Thus The Man Who Sees shifts ‘being cultured’ from a material signifier of pecuniary wealth and leisure to a more democratic state of mind, as available to ‘ordinary people’ with their wireless concerts and magazines as it is to the elite, ‘widely-travelled’ individuals who can consume artworks in situ (‘Garden’ WW : 1354). Given the relatively low economic status of Woman’s Weekly’s target readers, this shift is presumably strategic in part; nevertheless, their preference for moral quality over material quantity in their consumption of culture enables them to assert moral superiority to the wealthier and more leisured established middle classes. Their assumption of moral superiority to their economic superiors recalls Waugh’s relational middle-class hierarchy: using cultural aspirations to rank themselves higher than the working classes, Woman’s Weekly’s lower-middle-class target readers use morally qualitative cultural engagements to elevate themselves above the established middle classes. The following section examines Woman’s Weekly readers’ middlebrow consumption of Culture for moral betterment in the light of two contemporary anxieties: progress afforded by mass culture, and its impact on Britain’s landscape and communities, and the impending war.

Culture and citizenship In her recent (2014) publication exploring middlebrow literary culture, Beth Driscoll argues that the middlebrow is distinguished by strong personal and social moral imperatives (40–42). Middlebrow reading, she argues, involves engaging with texts that set a worthy moral example: ‘stories of personal growth and moral redemption’ that foster in their readers an awareness of, and the desire

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to involve themselves with, ‘social issues’ (40–41). Driscoll makes her argument in relation to twenty-first century middlebrow texts, but it resonates strongly with The Man Who Sees’ insistence that Woman’s Weekly’s late-1930s readers engage with Culture’s moral qualities. Driscoll’s exploration of the middlebrow’s ethical dimension also recalls the critical ethos of liberal humanist F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis’s husband, whose criticism holds ‘that there is a particularly close connection between the novel and morality’ (Bilan 1979: 115). Leavis elaborates on this connection in The Great Tradition (1962), arguing that ‘major novelists’ are ‘significant in terms of the human awareness they promote’ (10): a contention that ‘focus[es] our attention on [. . .] the interrelations of art and life, of aesthetics and ethics’ (Groes and Matthews 2010: 2). The Man Who Sees’ focus on Culture’s moral qualities aligns his programme for cultural betterment with Leavis. His assertions that, for instance, the purpose of poetry is to disseminate certain fundamental ‘truths’ amongst readers, and that for Van Gogh, painting is a means of ‘preaching’ a Christian message to his fellow citizens, situate ‘How To Acquire Culture in this liberal humanist aspect of the middlebrow (‘What Is Poetry?’ WW 4 Feb 1939: 224; ‘The Sunflowers and the Cypresses’, WW 1 Jul 1939: 12–13). Driscoll argues that an ‘ideal of citizenship’ is key to the middlebrow’s ethical dimension, writing that ‘[t]he new literary middlebrow promotes reading as a tool for readers to develop ideas about their membership of larger communities’ (2014: 42). Leavis also connects reading with becoming a better citizen in Culture and Environment: a work directed primarily at schoolteachers, whom he holds responsible for children’s social as well as their academic development. Co-written with teacher Denys Thompson and published in 1933, six years before ‘How To Acquire Culture’ appeared in Woman’s Weekly, Culture and Environment aims to demonstrate how children’s literary education could make them resistant to the negative effects of mass culture, which seems to be destroying what Leavis and Thompson regard as Britain’s traditional communities. In their introduction to the work, they lament the loss of ‘organic communities’ – whose citizens lived in close accordance with one another, ‘the natural environment and the rhythm of the year’ – to machine-driven mass culture, which is disrupting traditional ways of life (1–3). For Leavis and Thompson, the solution is literary education. By discovering the ‘cultural and social backgrounds’ within which certain texts were produced, children will be made aware of the communities that are being lost, and by learning to read critically, they will learn to critique and resist the discourses with which mass culture is surrounding them (6). Whilst it is impossible to halt the progress of industrialization, they argue, future communities may be built on organic principles (96–97). Citizenship in Culture and Environment involves an

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awareness of mass culture’s destructive impact on communities and individuals, and their capacity to resist its influence, developed through reading  – in thus preserving so-called organic values, citizens will ‘rebuild’ their communities. To the extent that Leavis and Thompson figure reading as a means of developing children’s sense of community, and their desire to improve their communities by personally resisting the mass cultural discourses that are purportedly destroying them, the pedagogical text Culture and Environment belongs within the middlebrow’s ethical parameters as defined by Driscoll. The Man Who Sees exhibits a sense of citizenship very similar to that articulated by Leavis and Thompson, expressing concern about the impact of mass culture and presenting ‘critical reading’ as a means of palliating it. He, too, figures the onset of modernity as the destruction of traditional ways of life by mechanization. In a non-Culture Talk, he laments that winding country lanes are being replaced by roads wide and straight enough to accommodate speeding motor cars; that regional dialects are being erased by the influence of wireless announcers; his contention that ‘the crowding out of Small Shops’ run by shopkeepers who knew their customers by name and ‘who gave you the impression that they weren’t keeping shop chiefly for the sake of making money [. . .] but for the sake of doing kindly and friendly things for you’ invokes the destruction of ‘organic communities’ bound by close human ties by mass-market consumerism (‘Augusta Puzzles Her Brain’, WW 14 Jan 1939: 44–45). Like those educated according to Culture and Environment, Woman’s Weekly readers receive a sense of the communities that are disappearing under the onslaught of mass, mechanized culture by engaging with the ‘cultural and social’ backgrounds of the artworks under discussion. Illustrating The Man’s Culture Talks, photographs of thatched cottages and rural villages, from which modern technologies such as motorcars and telephone wires are conspicuously absent, frame Culture as a touchstone connecting readers with pre-industrial Britain. Culture, these images suggest, forms a bond between those who engage with it, and traditional communities, their values, and ways of life. More explicitly, The Man Who Sees provokes nostalgia for traditional values and lifestyles in a Culture Talk about civic architecture, the moral significance of which he highlights by stating that, ‘the atmosphere of our minds and the shape of our characters are influenced by the places in which we live’ (‘Why A House Is Beautiful’, WW 3 Jun 1939: 1143). Invoking close-knit communities centred on ‘small’ manor houses or farms, their simple structure and materials evoking the simple lifestyle and values of their original occupants, Cotswold cottages, he writes, exert a positive moral influence over those who contemplate them (1134–1135); by contrast, he finds ‘ugly’

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modern architecture symptomatic of moral degeneracy, and urges readers to lobby their local councils for improvements (1143). Whilst The Man does not specify the forms that this degeneracy might take, it seems plausible from its context that it is linked to the onset of the mass, mechanized culture that appears to be causing traditional communities, their ways of life and their values, to fragment. In cultivating their preference for pre-industrial architecture, Woman’s Weekly readers will retain a sense of these values. Lamenting the apparent destruction of rural communities by progress, ‘How To Acquire Culture’ and Culture and Environment belong to centuries-old debates surrounding the impact of industrialization on Britain’s geographical and social landscapes. The apparent breakdown of organic rural communities can be attributed partly to fears about an urban shift that began during the eighteenth and increased during the nineteen century, as the basis of Britain’s economy moved from agriculture to manufacturing (Bunce 1994: 9); this shift continued during the interwar years as young men, drawn by prospects of entertainment and salaried employment, left the land in search of jobs in towns and cities (Moore-Colyer 1999: 107–108). Besides these changes to the makeup of rural communities, the appearance of the countryside was undergoing rapid, radical alteration. Cheaper cars, increasingly available to middle-class families, and road surface improvements were opening up the countryside to day trippers, who brought noise pollution and traffic jams (Law 2012: 491–492); advertising billboards, petrol stations, telephone boxes and cafes sprang up in their wake (Moore-Colyer and Scott 2005: 504). Like the wireless voices accused by The Man Who Sees of eliminating regional dialects, these icons of modernity, transported into the countryside by technologies of mass production, represent a seemingly destructive standardization of the rural landscape. Alongside The Man’s verbal criticism of road building and motorists, the visual absence of cars, billboards, cafes and telephone boxes from photographic representations of rural Britain in ‘How To Acquire Culture’ constitutes an implicit protest against the impact of ‘progress’ on the British countryside. Likewise, The Man Who Sees’ assessment of modern civic architecture participates in broader interwar debates about the impact of modern housing development. By the middle of the 1930s, approximately 60,000 acres of English and Welsh countryside were being built on per year. Ribbon developments comprised the bulk of this building, and whilst they enabled city workers to ‘realise their dream’ of rural housing with fast transport links to their workplaces, they drew criticism from bodies who felt that their layout precluded any sense of community (Sheail 1979: 502); expanding suburbia in the form of mainly massproduced semi-detached and terraced houses strung along arterial roads leading

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into towns and cities, they separated neighbours living ‘on opposite sides of the highway’ (Nicholl and Golland 2004: 25). Just over a decade before ‘How To Acquire Culture’ appeared in Woman’s Weekly, architect Clough Williams-Ellis associated modern housing with morally degenerate communities, deriding the present ‘spate of [. . .] mean and perky little houses that surely none but mean and perky little souls should inhabit with satisfaction’ (1929: 15). Occupying a still largely undeveloped area of Britain, the Cotswold cottages admired by The Man Who Sees represent an antidote to ribbon development housing, the architectural manifestation of a social culture increasingly shaped by mass production. That The Man Who Sees offers his critique of mass culture in a mass-produced magazine seems perhaps ironic. I have argued already that ‘How To Acquire Culture’ responds to – indeed, is made possible by – the democratization of the Arts by technologies of mass reproduction; I have also shown that one of these technologies, the wireless, is accused by The Man of destroying organic communities. Boasting a bought circulation of around half a million by the end of the 1930s, Woman’s Weekly itself is the site of a mass-produced community, whose members are spread around Britain and, if nods to an assumed readership in Britain’s colonies are anything to go by, much further afield. Moreover, the majority of the magazine’s 1938–1939 target demographic probably lived, or aspired to live, in modern suburban homes: ribbon development housing was very popular amongst the interwar lower middle classes, who enjoyed having modern conveniences, space to park a car, and access to both the countryside and their urban places of work (Law 2010: 79). In effect, ‘How To Acquire Culture’ seems to be undermining the very culture in which it is embedded. The Man himself seems aware of a potential conflict between the values he is impressing on his readers and their lifestyle, distancing his reader from his assertion that ‘ugly’ architecture reflects ugly morality by respectfully (if condescendingly) assuring her that, ‘I don’t mean to say that you, madam, if you happen to live in an ugly house deserve that it should cover you. It may have been the only one you could get’ (‘Why A House Is Beautiful’, WW 3 Jun 1939: 1134). Rather than irony, it is thus perhaps better to interpret ‘How To Acquire Culture’ as an attempt to embed organic social values within the structures of modern social culture. Through their cultural education, Woman’s Weekly readers are encouraged to develop critical awareness of their lifestyles and communities, and to effect change in both by restructuring them on preindustrial principles. Taking advantage of mass reproductive technologies and disseminated by the mass-produced magazine, the series constitutes an effort to improve mass culture from within.

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Middlebrow, liberal humanist ‘How To Acquire Culture’ raises Woman’s Weekly readers’ social conscience, and provokes a desire to improve their material and moral social environment. Whilst progress cannot be halted, future communities can improve on the present through structuring themselves on organic values. Woman’s Weekly readers’ morally superior cultural engagements put them at the heart of a better society.

War To Woman’s Weekly’s 1938–1939 readership, a perhaps more pressing concern than the impact of mass culture was the possibility of war. I have argued already that The Man Who Sees may have been a comforting, reassuring figure to readers anxious about the prospect of conflict; in this chapter’s final section, I will explore two, more direct, points of engagement between the masculine columnist and the imminent war. In the first, he makes a reference to current affairs rare in Woman’s Weekly; in the second, he prepares Woman’s Weekly readers to perform an important aspect of their own war service. As before, he views organic social principles as a source of consolation and renewal. That The Man Who Sees makes one of the only direct references to the European political situation in Woman’s Weekly between September 1938 and September 1939 is a mark of his authority in the magazine. Acknowledging a readership concerned about events in Continental Europe, he uses his Talk introducing Beethoven to posit organic communal interactions engendered by music as an antidote to conflict. When Beethoven composed his ninth symphony, he explains, the ‘world [. . .] was going through an agony. [. . .] Wars and revolutions were everywhere’ (‘A Great Musician’s Masterpieces’, WW 1 Apr 1939: 630–631, 672). His observation links the artwork to the national and international social and political cultures in which it was produced; his implication that Europe’s social and political climate during the opening decades of the nineteenth century (Beethoven completed his ninth symphony during 1824, shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and before the Second French Revolution) parallels that of Europe during the late 1930s is reassuring, for it suggests that the continent has ‘been here before’ and survived. Europe’s state of unrest surfaces in the symphony’s score itself, in the ‘strife [. . .] anguish [. . .] restlessness [. . .] terror [. . .] uncertainty [. . .] despair’ of its glowering first movement and frantic scherzo; the solution to this musical and social turmoil is revealed in the final movement’s ‘Ode to Joy’ which, scored for choir and quartet of vocal soloists as well as orchestra, realizes formally the ‘organic’

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community its lyrics describe. ‘There is no rest to be found, no solution to the world riddle [. . .] except in Togetherness, in human kindness, in loving Service and Sympathy with our fellows’ concludes The Man (672). It seems perhaps remarkable that, given the source of much of Europe’s unrest during the late 1930s, The Man Who Sees offers Woman’s Weekly readers hope in the form of a symphony written by a German composer. There is a clear parallel between his solution for Europe’s broken communities and the British communities fractured by mass culture: just as he charges suburban culture with reversing the negative moral impact of ‘ugly’ ribbon development housing, he makes German culture responsible for reversing National Socialism. Change, he reiterates, should come from within, from the establishment of pre-industrial values within communities stressed and fragmented by the exigencies of the present. As in his Talk praising Cotswold cottages, a cultural form provides the inspiration and model for positive change. With hindsight, by using Woman’s Weekly readers’ interactions with Culture to develop their sense of social morality, The Man Who Sees turns out to have been preparing them for war service. This is most apparent in his vision of an urban utopia, in which readers’ desire for personal and social moral improvement emerges as a desire to become their communities’ moral guardians, by reproducing the organic values embodied by artworks on public display. The artwork prompting this vision is the Venus Victoriosa, a Classical Roman sculpture of a woman. In what comes across as a further attempt to improve mass culture’s moral framework, The Man equates the democratization of Art with the democratization of ‘Beautiful’ civic values by suggesting that sculptures, which the Ancient Romans displayed in their streets rather than in galleries or museums, should shape and reflect the values of a society founded on the love of Beauty and one’s neighbour (‘Now Let Us Talk About Sculpture!’ WW 5 Aug 1939: 272). Not explicitly defined, his notion of Beauty seems to be ideal moral values as they materialize in these statues’ form: the moral message is intrinsic to the artwork, he suggests, recalling Leavis. The values transmitted by the Venus are similar to those transmitted by the Cotswold cottages that represented The Man’s notion of organic community in an earlier Culture Talk. Surely these are the things which make the figure beautiful: simplicity, proportion, balance [. . .] they must make anything beautiful which possesses them – you and me, your life and my life [. . .] that is what the statue says. ‘Now Let Us Talk About Sculpture!’ WW 5 Aug 1939: 272–273

The Man gestures towards the Venus’ role in building a civic utopia by explaining that the ‘ideal’ bodies of the sculptures displayed in Ancient Roman cities stood

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for their societies’ belief in an Ideal Society, whose citizens’ physical Beauty would produce and reflect Beautiful personal and civic morality; his focus on female sculptures places the responsibility for producing and reflecting Beautiful civic morality onto women. This vision of society, he implies, should inspire the moral environment of a future utopian Britain. One day, when we have learned to love one another, [. . .] artists [. . .] will build and adorn beautiful streets for us to walk in and beautiful places for us to live in. And when we have learned to obey the laws of simplicity and proportion and balance in our way of living, then, because of the beautiful life that will be within us, we shall grow beautiful bodies and women will walk as goddesses on the earth. ‘Now Let Us Talk About Sculpture!’ WW 5 Aug 1939: 273

Culture models and transmits ideal morality to women, who become its social embodiment. In acquiring culture, Woman’s Weekly readers become moral guardians of the ideal society they help to create. Just under a month after ‘Now Let Us Talk About Sculpture!’ appeared in the magazine, Britain declared war on Germany. Throughout the following six years, the magazine exhorted its readers to do their bit for Britain’s war effort, by enlisting in the women’s services, volunteering, coping with food and clothing rations, and knitting comforts for troops. At a time when relationships and marriages were being put under considerable strain by lengthy separations, it also urged them to maintain their peacetime moral conduct, by remaining faithful to husbands and boyfriends serving overseas and, especially after glamorous American GIs arrived in Britain, remaining sexually continent; their patriotic conduct would, Woman’s Weekly assured them, help safeguard fighting men’s morale, making a British victory more likely, and, with a view to eventual peace, ensure that the values underpinning ordinary life would not be damaged by the social circumstances of war. Ultimately, by acting as placeholders for peacetime femininity, Woman’s Weekly readers would ensure that normality would resume at the end of a long and difficult conflict. By urging them to view themselves as the moral guardians of their society during the final month of peace, The Man Who Sees effectively prepares them for their role in the coming conflict.

Conclusion Woman’s Weekly is a site of ideological formation and validation. At time when meanings and experiences of being middle class in Britain were undergoing

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renegotiation, the magazine helped a socially aspirant readership realize their middle-class ambitions. The magazine’s housework discourses and culture appreciation series suggest, however, that these did not constitute straightforward entry into the established middle classes. Evidently aware that its readers, although they viewed, or aspired to view, themselves as middle class, could not access the material trappings of better-off middle-class lifestyles, the magazine offered them moral superiority as the criterion for claiming social precedence over the established middle classes: defining and policing parameters of rank, Woman’s Weekly is thus complicit in producing a stratified, status-conscious interwar middle class. Rather than encouraging its readers to achieve parity with the established middle classes, who can (or like to appear able to) afford human or mechanized domestic help, and who have been consuming the Arts for longer periods of time, it encouraged its readers to rise above them. This encouragement is given explicitly in ‘How To Acquire Culture’ by The Man Who Sees, in which Woman’s Weekly readers’ awareness of the apparent social ills connected to mass culture, developed through their morally qualitative engagements with a carefully curated selection of artworks, gives them moral superiority over more leisured women. In the context of The Man’s Culture Talks, the lack of pretension shown by Woman’s Weekly’s housework discourses emerges as a sign of moral integrity  – the notion of pre-industrial ‘simplicity’ embodied by the Venus status and Cotswold cottages resonates strongly with the unpretentious domestic lifestyle promoted by the magazine’s housework discourses, making a virtue of housework performed without help from servants or appliances. Encouraged to embody the values they learn through their qualitative consumption of culture, the magazine’s readers are charged with building a utopian society that will resist mass culture’s negative impacts, and withstand a war. Guardians of society’s morals, they are agents of lower-middle-class cultural empowerment.

Notes 1 2013 was the first year that over 50 per cent of British adults used the internet rather than newspapers or magazines to access the news (Sweney 2013). Janice Winship observes that, by the 1960s, television soap operas and situation comedies were rivalling magazine fiction; she suggests that ‘the power and influence’ of television were such that magazine editors could probably have done little to prevent this drop (Winship 1987: 43–44, 148). 2 E.g. adverts for Hoover vacuum cleaners, a Vactric electric floor polisher, a Hotpoint washing machine, and Main Gas Cookers (GH Mar, Jul, Aug 1939); ‘A Home

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Canning Outfit’ reviews a canning machine and pressure cooker (82); ‘Buy a Refrigerator’ addresses readers who can afford refrigerators (GH May 1939: 74–75). Electrical Development Association advert (WW 15 Oct 1938: 769); Electrical Development Association advert (WW 3 Dec 1938: 1189). ‘Frequently women let housework and washing-up spoil the appearance by making their hands hard, red and ugly. There is no need for this today’ (Advert, ‘Snowfire Jelly’, WW 3 Dec 1938, 1191); ‘Millions of women have to do housework or rough work, but there’s no need for their hands to show it’ (Advert, ‘Vaseline Petroleum Jelly’, WW 3 Dec 1938, 1201). The Man discusses writing with ‘readers’ Miss Brown, Miss Jones and Miss Robinson (‘The Test of Good Writing’, WW 6 May 1939: 910–911, 944); he summarizes rather than quotes directly from readers’ letters he claims to have received (‘Peace On Earth’, WW 3 Dec 1938: 1156). Frustratingly, for all his efforts to establish close personal relations with Woman’s Weekly readers, The Man Who Sees remains an enigma. ‘The Man Who Sees is the Nom de plume which covers the identity of a Well-Known Writer’ claims the tagline of each weekly column, endowing him with the authority of authorship, and tantalizing readers with the thrilling possibility of celebrity (‘Visiting A Picture Gallery’, WW 7 Jan 1939: 10): in fact, ‘his’ articles may have been produced by a number of writers, not necessarily male, perhaps not especially well known, whose identities have sadly been lost with Woman’s Weekly’s interwar editorial records. Journalist and broadcaster Clare Jenkins, now a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, wrote his features for a short period during the 1960s, when the woman who usually wrote it was ill (Famed for its Knitting; BBC Radio Four, 2011); his column appeared weekly in the magazine until the 1990s, after which time its writer, the Reverend Roger Royle, continued to publish similar content under his own name on Mary Marryat’s problems page (Royle 2000: 1). The Man Who Sees’ longevity suggests that the magazine’s producers viewed him, like the agony aunt (who also retained her interwar pseudonym until the 1990s), as an important point of personal contact between their publication and its readers. His intriguing ‘Nom de plume’ enabled that point of contact to be maintained for around sixty years, through (presumably) multiple changes of writer. As Walter Benjamin observes in 1936, the ‘technological reproduction [. . .] enables the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record. The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium [. . .] is enjoyed in a private room’ (Benjamin 2008: 22–23). Light highlights the democratizing effect of new reproductive technologies by pointing out that, during the 1920s and 1930s, radio and the cinema ‘disengaged’ cultural forms ‘from their point of origin and community, offering them to [. . .] new groups’ (Light 1991: 216).

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Works cited Battershill, Claire. ‘ “Tricks of Aspect and the Varied Gifts of Daylight”: Representations of Books and Reading in Interwar Women’s Periodicals’. In Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017: 14–27. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’. Edmund Jephcott (trans.). In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (eds.). Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008 [1936]: 19–55 Benson, E.F. Queen Lucia. London: Black Swan Books, 1986 [1920]. Bilan, R.P. The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Bunce, Michael. The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape. London: Routledge, 1994. Clay, Catherine. ‘General Introduction’ to Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017: 1–10. Collier, Patrick. “What Is Modern Periodical Studies?” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 6 (2), 2015: 92–111. Delafield, E.M. Diary of a Provincial Lady. London: Virago Press, 1993 [1930]: 3–121. Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the TwentyFirst Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Famed for its Knitting [radio broadcast]. Produced by Clare Jenkins. BBC Radio 4, February 2011. Gale, Sandy. ‘RE: Thesis quote request’ [email]. Message to Eleanor Reed. 7 March 2017. Groes, Sebastian and Sean Matthews. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Gunn, Simon and Rachel Bell. Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl. London: Phoenix, 2003. Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jackson, Alan. The Middle Classes 1900-1950. Melksham: Redwood Press, 1991. Jaillant, Lise. Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Kane, Louise. ‘ “Chippy Bits Periodicals” and the Middlebrow: Holbrook Jackson, T. P.’s Weekly (1902-1916) and To-day (1917-1923)’. The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 6 (1), 2015: 22–43.

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Large, David Clay. Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Law, Michael John. ‘Speed and Blood on the Bypass: The New Automobiles of Inter-war London’. Urban History, 39 (3), 2012: 490–509. Law, Michael John. ‘ “Stopping to Dream”: The Beautification and Vandalism of London’s Interwar Arterial Roads’. The London Journal, 35 (1), 2010: 58–84. Leavis, Frank R. The Great Tradition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962. Leavis, Frank R. and Denys Thompson. Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto & Windus, 1933. Leavis, Queenie D. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991. Mackay, Robert. Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Moore-Colyer, R.J. ‘From Great Wen to Toad Hall: Aspects of the Urban-Rural Divide in Inter-War Britain’. Rural History, 10 (1), 1999: 105–124. Moore-Colyer, R.J. and Alister Scott. ‘What Kind of Landscape Do We Want? Past, Present and Future Perspectives’. Landscape Research, 30 (4), 2005: 501–523. Nicholl, Chris and Andrew Golland. ‘Innovation and Emerging Trends in Housing Development’. In Housing Development: Theory, Process and Practice. Ron Blake and Andrew Golland (eds.). London: Routledge, 2004. Orwell, George. ‘England Your England’. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 2001 [1941]. Ross, Alan S.C. ‘U and non-U – An Essay in Sociological Linguistics’. In Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy. Alan S.C. Ross and Nancy Mitford (eds.). London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973 [1956]: 11–36. Royle, Roger. Between Friends. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2000. Samuel, Raphael. ‘The Middle Class Between the Wars’. New Socialist, (January/ February), 1983: 30–36. Schapiro, Meyer. Words and Pictures: On the Literal and Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Sheail, John. ‘The Restriction of Ribbon Development Act: The Character and Perception of Land-Use Control in Inter-war Britain’. Regional Studies, (13), 1979: 501–512. Sillars, Stuart. Visualisation in Popular Fiction, 1860-1960: Graphic Narratives, Fictional Images. London: Routledge, 1995. Smith, Michelle. ‘Mainstream Magazines, Middlebrow Fiction, and Leslie Gordon Barnard’s “The Winter Road” ’. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, 37 (1), 2012: 7–30.

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Sweney, Mark. ‘More than half of Britons access the news online’. The Guardian, 8 August 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/08/half-britonsaccess-news-online (accessed 22 June 2018). Tracy, Daniel. ‘Investing in “Modernism”: Smart Magazines, Parody, and Middlebrow Professional Judgement’. The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 1 (1), 2010: 38–63. Travis, Trysh. ‘Print and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture’. Perspectives on American Book History. Schott E. Caspar, Joanne D. Chaison, Jeffrey D. Groves (eds.). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002: 339–366. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Mineola: Dover Publications Incorporated, 2007 [1899]. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘An Open Letter’. In Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy. Alan S. C. Ross and Nancy Mitford (eds.). London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973 [1956]: 65–82. Webb, Sheila. ‘Art Commentary for the Middlebrow: Promoting Modernism & Modern Art through Popular Culture – How Life Magazine Brought “The New” into Middle-Class Homes’. American Journalism, 27 (3), 2013: 115–150. Williams-Ellis, Clough. England and the Octopus. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1929. Winship, Janice. Inside Women’s Magazines. London: Pandora, 1987. Wood, Victoria. ‘The Ballad of Freda and Barry’ [song]. Victoria Wood, BBC Worldwide, 2000.

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‘It’s a Narsty Biziness’: Conservatism and Subversion in 1930s Detective Fiction and Thrillers Glyn White

This chapter focuses on popular fiction and particularly the crime genre, encompassing both the detective story and the thriller. Critical surveys looking back across the decades find these subgenres difficult to distinguish over time but writers of the 1930s are very much aware of which subgenre they are writing in and its relative status. In 1942 Nicholas Blake asserted that ‘It is an established fact that the detective novel proper is read almost exclusively by the upper and professional classes. The so-called “lower middle” and “working classes” tend to read “bloods”, thrillers.’ And, he points out, ‘the modern thriller is generally much below the detective story in sophistication and style’ (Blake 1942: xxii) Given the perceived hierarchy of readership and regard, defining the difference between these subgenres became important to some authors. In 1936, Dorothy L. Sayers identified ‘the most important principle of the modern detective story’ which she calls the ‘Fair-Play Rule’ (vii) as what marks detective fiction out. Sayers sees this defining characteristic as implicit in the foundational tales of the genre by Edgar Allan Poe, and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, but lost in the welter of Victorian sensation fiction, until Conan Doyle’s Holmes, and almost lost again in the overdone reaction to sensation fiction when detective short stories reduced the form to ‘over-intellectualized’ puzzles in which ‘human interest was lost in the mechanical ingenuities of the plot’ (Sayers 1936: xii). What Sayers is doing here, not at all objectively, is charting the most respectable line through the vicissitudes of sordid popularity. She very much wants detective fiction to keep the respectable mainstream literary novel in sight and is wary about it being equated with other forms of ‘popular’ literature. Popular fiction in the 1930s was generally regarded by literary critics on both right and left as either irredeemably bad or as a damaging addictive vice. Q.D. 239

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Leavis argues in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) that  – alongside radio, cinema and newspapers – popular literature ‘does not merely fail to help him [the reader], it prevents him from normal development’ (Leavis 1932: 224–225). To practitioner Christopher Caudwell in 1937 popular fiction was the new ‘opium of the people’ (1973: 123). Writing in 1980, as academic criticism finally began to change its tune with regard to popular fiction, Stephen Knight states the bald fact that ‘Literary criticism has shied away from commercial success as a ground for treating a book seriously.’ (Knight 1980: 2). Forty years previously, even detective fiction’s champions run it down because they share their critics assumption that literary fiction is necessarily superior to genre fiction. In the first book-length survey of detective fiction, Howard Haycraft points out ‘that one out of every four new works of fiction published in the English language belongs to this category’ but adds that it is ‘a frankly non-serious, entertainment form of literature’ (1942: vi, ix–x). Haycraft’s study appears at a peculiar moment as an American author celebrates a genre dominated by British writers, which is banned from import into Germany (xix), in the midst of what he refers to as ‘the Hitler War’ (191). The serious input comes from practitioner Nicholas Blake, quoted above, who is mostly at pains to understand why detective fiction is so valued by its upper-middle-class readership that Q.D. Leavis can describe it as a ‘highbrow cult’ (quoted in Watson 1971: 95). Many later critics (Watson 1971; Knight 1980; Porter 1981; Mandel 1984) suggest that the answer is that both the detective novel and the thriller are generally expressive of conservative views, or as Julian Symons summarizes: The values put forward by the detective story from the time of Holmes to the beginning of World War II and by the thriller and spy story up to the advent of Eric Ambler, are those of a class in society that felt that it had everything to lose by social change. Symons 1972: 17

Colin Watson suggests the genre offers its addicts an escape ‘inward  – into a sort of museum of nostalgia,’ (1971: 171) or perhaps into what John Scaggs identifies as a ‘positively Edwardian world’ which excludes ‘all the devastation of the Great War and the social and economic upheaval of 1920s and 1930s depression’ (2005: 48). Contemporary apologists for the detective genre frame its appeal quite differently. W.H. Auden and Blake respectively point to ‘the illusion of being dissociated from the murderer’ (1980: 24) and the appeal of the ‘fantasyrepresentation of guilt’ (1942: xxiv). Edmund Wilson, less positively, suggests

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that, in a world ‘ridden by an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster’, the detective story provides a specious exercise in pointing the finger away from it readers through ‘an infallible power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt’ (1951: 236–237). The elaborate play of locating guilt crucially involves the reader because: ‘Once the criminal is discovered, everyone else is freed from the burden of possible guilt’ (Aydelotte 1976: 73) – but perhaps not satisfyingly so. Auden admits that ‘I forget the story as soon as I have finished it and have no need to read it again.’ (1980: 15). In other words, the guilt has not gone away and the craving returns. Accordingly, Erik Routley titled his book on the genre The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story (1972). Gill Plain argues that a key form of guilt that this genre negotiates relates to the Great War: ‘Contrary to appearances, then, detective fiction is an arena that displays the body made safe’ (2001: 33) and ‘the wartime absence of explanation is superseded by detective fiction’s excess of possible solutions. Thus the fragmented, inexplicable and even unattributable corpses of the war are replaced by the whole, over-explained, completely known bodies of detection.’ (34). The conflict’s massive loss of life is defused, a corpse at a time. Read from this context the apparent inexhaustibility of the genre makes more sense, but the compulsive reading it gets from addicts and particularly readers who did not experience the war still requires explanation. Dennis Porter summarizes the contradiction of a genre that is ‘more endoriented than almost any other type of narrative. [Yet] the great majority of detective novels are instantly forgettable and discarded as soon as they are finished’ (1981: 235). He concludes that the form’s ‘framework of certainties [. . .] leaves us bored in the end’ (258) because ‘the pleasure is not in the end but in the process, not in the final reassertion of order but in the halting and suspenseful approach to it.’ (236) It is here, in the process of reading (which imitates the process of detection) that the ideas of fair play between author and reader are live. It does not make the detective story writerly in the Barthesian sense; nor is it an actual collaboration because ‘despite their participation, the reader does not create or produce meaning, but merely affirms the “meaning” or solution set down by the author’ (Scaggs 2005: 38). But once we shift the focus away from their endings the stories ‘reveal the hidden tensions beneath the surface of genteel English society, exhibiting its insularity, its greed, the instability of identity, its obsession with the hierarchies of class and gender’ (Horsley 2005: 19). More recent studies, (such as Light 1991; Diemert 1996; and Horsley 2005) thus question sweeping judgements about the conservatism of the

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genre and suggest that when the work of individual authors in these genres is studied closely cracks in the façade of crime fiction can be seen. What we find in practice in the 1930s is not a homogenous group of authors writing similar books but a heterogenous group of writers trying for success within the most popular genre of the decade and vying to determine its next steps, its new directions and its boundaries. The genre of detective fiction that Sayers is critically commentating on from within is clearly live, potentially open to innovation and change, rather than set in the aspic of nostalgia for its own period. The reason for this ferment is precisely the success and popularity of the genre. It appears to be what readers want and therefore is what publishers want. Unless a writer commits themselves to literary fiction, and the poor or unlikely financial rewards associated with that, detective fiction will be a logical starting point for achieving commercial success  – even if they are temperamentally unsuited to it and do not share its perceived values. In this chapter, I will argue that overviews of the genre made with the benefits of hindsight do not give a proper sense of the decade as lived by writers and their readers and that highbrow snobbery about popular literature, left-wing hostility to its conservative ethos and postwar nostalgia for a ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction have combined to obscure some of the most read texts of the 1930s. Through glancing at a range of examples in their generic contexts we can begin to unravel their complex interrelationships and better understand how this decade’s genre fiction evolved. The selections focus on a range of famous and forgotten figures working in these genres shaped by the parameters of the decade rather than those of a broader ‘Golden Age’.1

Agatha Christie: Marple, Poirot and ‘playing the game’ The detective novel was already in full flower by the start of the 1930s. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing new tales of his iconic Victorian detective Sherlock Holmes until 1927 (though Holmes ended his active career during the Great War). Holmes had first appeared in novels, A Study in Scarlet in 1887 and The Sign of the Four in 1890, but it was his short story adventures in The Strand magazine (1891–92) that made him famous. The short story was still a viable form for detective fiction into the 1930s though increasingly losing ground to the longer novel form that started to take hold with E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case in 1913. Bentley’s tale, conceived as a parody of the infallible detective seen in Doyle’s imitators, is really about a journalist who gives up on his assignment

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and allows various persons implicated in the death of American financier to remain above the law for personal reasons. While Holmes was certainly not above imposing his own morality rather than the letter of the law (two early examples are ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ and ‘The Blue Carbuncle’) the freedom of the amateur investigator not bound by duty becomes a key factor in the detective novel. It is also important – not least for dialogue purposes – that the detective character can interact with suspects on their social level, and the standard social level of the settings for the detective fiction genre as it develops is generally upper middle class. The publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Agatha Christie’s first novel and the debut of her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, occurred at an auspicious point in the aftermath of the Great War. Christie’s Styles gives us the (now-clichéd) denouement in which the detective assembles the suspects and explains to them who the guilty party is. In this way, ‘Christie perfected a structure, best called the clue-puzzle, which invited and empowered the careful reader to solve the problem along with the detective’ (Knight 1980: 107). In 1926 Christie further stamped her authority on the genre with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which pushes some of the genre’s conventions to their limit when the in-text narrator (not Hastings, Poirot’s usual companion) is ultimately shown to be the murderer. I use ‘conventions’ advisedly because the famous rules of the form – The Detection Club Oath (1928), S.S. Van Dine’s ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ (1928) and Father Ronald Knox’s ‘Detective Story Decalogue’ (1929) – all come later (see Scaggs 2005: 36–37) and it is probable that Christie’s ground-breaking work prompted their creation. Prohibitions against twins, doubles and Chinamen are all basically ways of restating the single real tenet: that the author should play fair with the reader. Christie published twenty or so novels in the 1930s, but was keen not to repeat herself. Between the five Poirot novels of the 1920s, she had tried out a number of alternative lead characters. The year 1930 brought Murder at the Vicarage and the introduction of Miss Marple (also the focus of a short story collection The Thirteen Problems [1932] using stories originally published in newspapers). A female detective and an elderly, unmarried one – a ‘superfluous woman’ to use a phrase current in the period (see Ingman 1998: 9)  – is a significant innovation, with a key challenge for the author in maintaining the requisite level of realism while keeping the detective character central to the plot. The novel is narrated by the Reverend Leonard Clement (in whose house the murder takes place) and he observes and describes his neighbour, Miss Marple, supplementing and surpassing the investigations of a brusque Inspector and

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bluff Chief Constable through her greater knowledge of St Mary Mead. The murder victim is the local magistrate and churchwarden who has enemies aplenty so that even the vicar comments on the first page that ‘anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world at large a service’ (Christie 2016a: 1). Shortly afterwards Lawrence Redding, the artist who is having an affair with Mrs Protheroe, expresses a similar wish with the words ‘if this were only a book [. . .]’ (32). The self-reflexivity here is a notable feature of the genre though it can usually be subsumed under realism. Later the vicar will spot Redding as a reader of G.K. Chesterton and as playing ‘that favourite character of fiction, the amateur detective’ (153, 152). Miss Marple herself admits to reading ‘a lot of American detective stories [. . .] hoping to find them helpful’ (257) and observes from their rules ‘I think one coincidence is allowable’ (261). This statement also plays out self-reflexively. The vicar, uncharacteristically impassioned in his sermon, appears to have driven his embezzling curate to try to take his own life, but on finding the man stricken and trying to call the doctor, he telephones Miss Marple instead. She can therefore turn up, express her guilt for not coming forward sooner and reveal the name of the murderer. The game of balancing realism against genre continues as the fictional detective tells the narrator: ‘I know that in books it is always the most unlikely person. But I never find that rule applies in real life.’ (279). This concludes a plot that begins by incriminating the most likely culprit (Redding), then disqualifying them, and finally reinstating them as the culprit as their various tricks of false confessions, false notes, and changes to clocks to obscure their guilt are one by one discounted so that Marple is proved right and the likeliest suspect is found guilty. The key clue observed by Marple is so domestic and feminine that even Poirot would be hard put to convincingly note that Mrs Protheroe appearing without a handbag was ‘Really a most unusual thing for a woman to do’ (284). Christie would come back to Marple in 1942 and eventually come to prefer her as a protagonist but, rather like the public reaction to Conan Doyle’s attempts to dispose of Sherlock Holmes, Christie found her readership did not want to see Poirot set aside and, in the decade after 1932, and she used him in 14 novels. Lord Edgeware Dies (1933) is one of these Poirot mysteries, set in London with Hastings ‘writing up’ a once famous crime of the 1920s. Its urban setting among aristocracy, actresses and film stars contains three murders and paints a portrait of decadence with a high frequency of conservative judgements. The eyes of the victim, Lord Edgeware, have ‘a queer secretive look about them’ (Christie 2016b: 36) according to Hastings and in his handsome young butler Hastings finds ‘something vaguely effeminate that I disliked’ (35). While Hastings

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is described as ‘easily the stupidest of modern Watsons’ by Haycraft (1942: 132) in this text Poirot supports and extends Hastings’s prejudices saying of Edgeware: ‘he is very near the border line of madness, Hastings. I should imagine he practices many curious vices, and that beneath his frigid exterior he hides deeprooted instincts of cruelty.’(Christie 2016b: 41). While admiring American cabaret performer Miss Carlotta Adams’s stage talent Poirot notes that she is ‘a Jewess’ and that there is an ‘avenue of danger’ in her character: ‘love of money’ (8). This 1930s stereotyping is confirmed when we find she has been paid by the murderer but then killed in a way that makes it look like she is a suicidal addict. Poirot goes to great lengths to retrieve Miss Adams’s last letter to her devoted sister, which has been doctored by the killer, eventually realizing how the most likely suspect (as in Murder at the Vicarage) has committed the crime. Actress Jane Wilkinson, Lady Edgeware, wants a divorce in order to marry a duke. We are told early on that she has ‘no morals whatsoever’ and ‘she’d kill someone quite cheerfully’ (17) and she succeeds in murdering Edgeware through the assistance of Carlotta Adams who pretends to be Jane at the party that gives her an unbreakable alibi for the time of the murder. Ultimately, Carlotta is held up as a flawed but good woman against the ruthlessly egotistical Jane Wilkinson who is allowed the last word in a letter to Poirot that proves her toxically self-centred worldview. The ABC Murders (1936) pushes the envelope of the Poirot novels by dealing with a serial killer and changing, slightly, their narrative method. Haycraft laments that Christie employs ‘one of the tritest of the Conanical devices almost ad nauseam, in the person of Captain Hastings’ (1942: 132) and this convention was beginning to have the effect of making Poirot seem old-fashioned. After all, if Christie could twist it so radically in 1926, why is she still using it a decade later? Hastings announces in a foreword that he will depart from his ‘usual practice of relating only those incidents and scenes at which I myself was present. Certain chapters, therefore, were written in the third person.’ The sections that do not come from Hastings’s journal deal with Mr Alexander Bonaparte Cust, stocking salesman, seemingly the killer but actually the killer’s baffled dupe gradually bringing himself under suspicion. While the murders accumulate and things seem to be spiralling out of control, what we actually get is three murder investigation vignettes with interested parties who attempt to help Poirot. The leader of these self-appointed assistants turns out to be the murderer. The victims are a female tobacconist in Andover, a promiscuous waitress in Bexhill and a titled collector in Churston. Here Hastings’s simplicity is significant in keeping Poirot on track, so that he notes where there was most to gain, the lack of

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psychological consistency in the choice of victims and the creation of a ‘stupid, vacillating and suggestible’ fall guy or ‘pseudo murderer’ (Christie 2013: 254). Having bluffed and outwitted the murderer, Poirot berates him: ‘You are full of insular superiority, but I myself consider your crime not an English crime at all – not above-board – not sporting –’ (263). This forms an interesting contrast to a passage in Lord Edgeware Dies in which Poirot has concealed a letter (against the rules of the genre). Hastings protests ‘It’s not – not playing the game’ and Poirot’s response ridicules the whole premise of the critique: ‘It is not said any more. I have discovered that. It is dead. Young people laugh when they hear it.’ (Christie 2016b: 173). There is a clear ambivalence here about the fairness of the game in a genre of fiction that ostensibly prides itself on having rules. For Christie, the author is in charge and always decides what is or is not fair. We will discuss the one-off non-Poirot bestseller with which Christie closed the decade, her most radical experiment in rule-breaking, in our concluding section on detective fiction after turning to others working in the genre.

The jobbing writer F. Jefferson Farjeon’s career in crime fiction sprang out of the stage success of thriller No.17 (1925), which he novelized in 1926. Seven sequel novels featuring the central character ex-merchant seaman Ben the Tramp followed and Hitchcock made the film Number Seventeen in 1932. These works are essentially crime comedies with the hapless Ben played for laughs. He is marked by his phoneticallyrendered Cockney (as in the title to this chapter) as irredeemably working class, but is the only character who is who he says he is. Farjeon, as a jobbing writer, needed to move with the times and diversify and by the 1930s had moved closer to clue-puzzle detective fiction. His works in this field share an uneasy mix of gothic atmosphere and comic dialogue, and a preference for upper-class amateur heroes and damsels in distress over the mechanics of detection. In The Z Murders (1932) the upper-class protagonist Richard Temperley is in a Euston hotel lounge where a man is silently killed and a red enamel ‘Z’ is found. Temperley also finds the handbag of once-glimpsed Sylvia Wynne and instantly wants to protect her from police investigation. Though she refuses to explain her odd reaction to the murder and insists she has an urgent appointment in the west country, Temperley dodges the police and follows. While dogged in pursuing Sylvia, Temperley is no detective and wishes ‘for the brain of a Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes!’ (Farjeon 2015a: 98). Near Bristol there is another murder and

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another ‘Z’ found. Next Sylvia leads Temperley to Boston, Lincolnshire, in the cab of comic but reliable Ted Diggs. Meanwhile a crooked Bristolian cab driver, Albert Bowes, is hired by the chief villain, ‘Z’ an uncanny and menacing figure with two flapping sleeves that conceal a hook and a silenced pistol and the reader spends some chapters accompanying their parallel journey to Boston where Bowes is killed and Z’s helper, the countryman, kidnaps Sylvia for the last leg of their journey to Whitchurch, Shropshire. The geographically marked Z has been pre-announced to Sylvia and the real target, her grandfather. The crooked grandfather panics and flees, dies of exposure and thus gives up the jewels Z coveted from their falling out ‘twenty years ago’ when Z was maimed, including having a ‘z’ carved in his forehead. The bizarrely sinister and implausible villain is thus distinctly not a victim of the Great War but an embittered crook. This and the obligingness of the police who save Temperley, despite his constant refusal to tell them what he knows, place the story at odds with generic standards of plausibility. The disposability of the victims is also telling. They are a struggling shopkeeper who snores, a Gypsy woman who can only tentatively be named by an embroidered handkerchief since ‘gipsies aren’t always too particular about property’ (208), a dishonest cab-driver and the three criminals. Implicitly, these are characters readers should not overly worry about, apparently, their deaths tidying up society and Sylvia’s family tree. Christie’s The ABC Murders clearly took elements from The Z Murders but the difference is that Christie makes the serial killer’s victims people with others who care about them, and makes the monstrous killer a fake. In essence she tames Farjeon’s excesses and bring her version within the clue-puzzle model. Farjeon is closer to Christie’s territory with his country-house mystery Thirteen Guests (1936). At Bragley Court Inspector Kendall has to contend with the separate deaths of Mr Chater, Mrs Chater and a body found in a quarry. Kendall has numerous uncooperative guests to wrangle but works out in his notes – rather boringly – that Chater was a blackmailer who poisoned himself when exposed, that Mrs Chater fled and died in a bicycle accident and that the man in the quarry is Chater’s brother-in-law, bigamously married to an actress guest, who was killed by Chater. Yet Kendall does not learn everything. The daughter of the house seeking to relieve the suffering of her dying grandmother acquired the Chinese cook’s suicide draft and placed it in her water only to think better of it and overturn the tray. In the meantime, Chater had re-filled his flask from the jug. Her guests contrive to redistribute the evidence to conceal this from the police, exculpating the upper classes and allowing them to carry on undisturbed. This sort of clue-puzzle is a zero-sum game.

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Farjeon’s Mystery in White (1937) features a mixed bag of Christmas travellers who leave a snowbound train led by Mr Maltby, a parapsychologist, and arrive at a strangely deserted manor. They are joined by a man called Smith who insists he was not on the train. Smith’s working-class background is kept visible by his phonetic speech and everything readers need to know about him is encapsulated in: ‘Smith was not a pleasant-looking object.’ (Farjeon 2014: 68). While the uppermiddle-class characters keep scrupulous tabs on what they use in the house, Smith does not and, after nearly strangling the group’s bore, he flees into the snow. The setting resembles Christie’s exceptionally long-running play The Mousetrap, first performed in 1952, but here, as in Farjeon’s other works, the characters the narrative invests in are curiously insulated from harm as the crimes usually occur ‘off-screen’ and do not directly involve any of the guests. Smith, having killed a man on the train, meets a woman on the road and stabs her in the face before being thrown off a cliff by the police and blamed for all the recent murders. This includes Smith taking responsibility for the murder of Harvey Strange who was actually killed by Nurse Martha Wick, the woman Smith stabs. Twenty years previously, Harvey and Martha conspired to rob Harvey’s shell-shocked brother, William, of his inheritance by murdering their father/employer John Strange and using an old will. When William turns up in the present with his daughter, Nora, the serious consequences of war are invoked by his disabling shell shock. When Nora is asked what fixed ideas her father labours under, she replies ‘one is that there is going to be another war.’ Maltby replies ‘That fixed idea is not born only of shell shock.’ (200). The case is solved (and an inheritance found) by Maltby psychically channelling John Strange, who requires no further action but that Martha’s brother, a servant who knew of the murder, is given a serious browbeating by his betters. Offbeat and incredibly classbound, Mystery in White gleefully breaks detective fiction rules feeling licensed by its subtitle, A Christmas Crime Story, to be (only) seasonal fun. This was the first of Farjeon’s novels to be republished in the twenty-first century and its larky tone and sinister setting recapture the combination he successfully made in No.17. But the combination falls flat in other examples of his work. Farjeon’s Seven Dead (1939) sets up a bizarre mystery when seven corpses are found in Haven House in an apparent mass suicide but, rather than stick with Inspector Kendall’s investigation, the narrative choses to follow yachtsmanjournalist Hazeldean’s unofficial excursion to Boulogne to find the child in the picture at the crime scene (Farjeon 2017: 52–133). Hazeldean uncovers sinister goings on at Madame Paula’s pension (and eventually a dead undercover gendarme) but rescues grown-up Dora Fenner. However, her false uncle, having

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covered his tracks in Britain, kills Madame Paula’s pilot partner in a faked air crash and escapes Boulogne by stealing Hazeldean’s boat. A few weeks later, Kendall has thrown in his lot with Hazeldean and Dora and they sail to the island at the map reference clue left by the leader of the seven ‘suicides’. This is where they were abandoned by the villain Cauldwell who stole Fenner’s identity. The trio are there to witness Cauldwell’s arrival, mental breakdown and suicide with the revolver they have (riskily) laid under the carved motto left by the revenge-bound stranded seven which says in Latin: ‘Let Justice be done though the heavens should fall’ (215). Once again the crime solves itself though in this case it really doesn’t quite add up. It might appear that Cauldwell’s social cross section of victims are only gassed in tidiness as they have lost their humanity already in their years trapped on the island. They undoubtedly perish because they prize revenge over anything else, but what has sustained them (and what allowed Cauldwell to steal the boat they built together) is cricket, a game representative of Englishness and fair play. Their cricket ball sails through Fenner’s window to announce their arrival and sits in the top of a vase at their death scene. Whether this visitation of revenants represent the casualties of the Depression or the unacknowledged victims of the Great War, betrayed by its coming sequel, is not resolved. Farjeon’s narratives have a superficial slickness to them but occasionally their more gothic elements reveal much more about the guilt underlying the genre’s conservatism than they can contain. What is certain is that the supposed comic ending when Kendall asks Hazeldean and Dora when they will announce their engagement and they tell him they have already married rings false.

The firebrand Trying to break into the ranks of established detective novelists was not easy for writers starting their careers in the 1930s. Christopher St John Sprigg wrote six detective fictions early in the decade coming from a career in journalism and going on to cultural commentary and an early death in Spain under the name of Christopher Caudwell. As we have seen earlier, his later verdict on popular fiction in general was negative but his early efforts at detective fiction are lively and playful and undeserving of the ‘simplistic’ tag attached by James Gindin (1992: 157). Fatality on Fleet Street (1933) projects its narrative five years into the future as the fascistic newspaper magnate Lord Carpenter (resembling contemporary

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figures Lords Northcliffe and Beaverbrook) is murdered after he attempts to manipulate public opinion to force the Prime Minister to declare war against Russia. The character of the detecting journalist as seen in E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case is personified by Charles Venables who, being determined to prevent the hot-headed brother of the fashion journalist he loves being convicted, obstructs the police investigation more than he aids it, coming into conflict with Detective Inspector Manciple who is reflected in the newspaper’s editorial conference table ‘with the meretricious glitter peculiar to Empire hardwoods’ (Sprigg 2013: 33). Cynicism varnishes the tale so that the half-Russian agent, whom Venables discovers by going undercover, cannot tell the difference between Kipling and Sapper, and Venables’s Chinese colleague – a violation of rule five of Knox’s decalogue – can put off his editor with nonsense predicated on orientalism: ‘Such is the value of the fictitious reputation for inscrutability, built up for the Chinese by six generations of imaginative sinologues.’ (Sprigg 2013: 141). After Manciple states: ‘The really intelligent murderer [. . .] belongs only to detective novels which I rarely read’ (170), the culprit turns out to be the least likely suspect, Hubbard the archivist, afflicted with epilepsy (still poorly understood in the 1930s) and megalomania. War is thus averted because of the actions of a lone madman (arguably answering Lord Carpenter’s insanity) rather than the system. Sprigg’s Death of an Airman (1934) draws on his extensive knowledge of flying and non-fiction publications on the subject. Bishop Edwin Marriott, learning to fly in order to serve his vast Australian Diocese more effectively, witnesses a flight instructor die in a suspicious crash and assists Inspector Bray. Embarrassingly for these investigators the victim may have been murdered by an international drugs cartel importing from Paris using a transport business owned by the Home Secretary’s nephew. The solution requires the Bishop to identify supposed trainee flyer Tommy Vane and aviatrix Lady Laura Vanguard as the secretly married criminals. In the climax the Bishop is knocked unconscious by Vane and stowed in the plane that Lady Laura uses to escape. He hears her confession and she hands him the controls before jumping to her death, while earthbound Vane deliberately runs into a spinning propeller. The novel ends with the Bishop and Sally Sackbut, aerodrome manager, committing to marry followed by: ‘Which explains why the Flying Bishop of Cootamundra (as he is known), and his wife, have a horror of detective novels’: ‘ “It reads alright in a book,” the Bishop will explain, “but it’s dreadful if you encounter it in real life.” ’ (Sprigg 2015: 287) These brief examples show Sprigg more than capable of writing in the genre but unable to take it entirely seriously, needing new outlets for his talents.

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The rival queen Like Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers was not afraid to innovate in the genre and collaborated with Robert Eustace on The Documents in the Case (1930) an epistolary science-based novel of detection. She also collaborated with other members of The Detection Club on four occasions in the decade. In her introduction to a collection of short detective stories she edited in 1936 Sayers traces the genre’s high and lows and argues for its development into ‘a novel of characters and manners’ (xiii). This is where she thought to take the detective novel using the detective character who had served her well through the 1920s, Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey is reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster with his own unflappable valet, Bunter, but in The Nine Tailors (1934) Wimsey’s education, knowledge of French and experience in detection are plausible assets that make him welcome in the police investigation (‘decent sort of bloke, his lordship’; Sayers 1993: 126). The way the locals all appear to know the correct way to address him, however, and his expertise in campanology both seem highly implausible. The murder mystery itself is rather a red herring. The mysterious corpse found in the grave of the lady of the manor when her husband’s burial is being prepared turns out to be a crooked ex-butler to the family coming back to retrieve hidden loot. He was imprisoned in the church tower while Wimsey joined Rector Theodore Venables and his bellringers for a record attempt at change ringing. The killer is therefore the bells, The Nine Tailors of the title, or the ten upstanding ringers. Apart from this gothic tinge The Nine Tailors feels like a conventional novel in the depth of its background and setting (the Cambridgeshire Fens) climaxing in a natural disaster that allows the Rector to be shown at his best and to resolve all outstanding issues, including the man guilty of imprisoning the victim in the tower dying in the flood. Sayers tends to split readers, with her works found too detailed and too deferent, or ‘pompous and boring’ (Symons 1972: 109). John Cawelti admits ‘the mystery in The Nine Tailors is an incredible tissue of improbability, coincidence and turgid sensationalism’ (1976: 121) and Wilson judges it ‘one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field’ (1951: 258). As Nancy Hoffman notes ‘Male critics are fond of knocking her work’ (1976: 100). There is some feminist impulse in Gaudy Night (1935), which famously set aside the murder generally regarded as necessary to the full-length form, but Wimsey’s developing relationship with Harriet Vane across the 1930s novels does not dislodge convention (marriage) and privilege. Cawelti ultimately responds more positively though doing down another (female) writer in the process: in ‘the evocation of a set of characters and

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a social atmosphere she is in my opinion a far richer and more complex artist than Christie’ (1976: 120). Nevertheless, by the end of the 1930s Sayers was essentially done with the genre, unable to drag it her way, and became busy with the translation work she would regard as her legacy.

The eccentric Anthony Berkeley Cox, writing as Anthony Berkeley, also had his own detective hero established during the 1920s, Roger Sheringham, but had largely exhausted his possibilities by The Poisoned Chocolates Case in 1929. A new approach called for a new pseudonym and an inversion of the clue-puzzle formula. As Frances Iles he wrote Malice Aforethought (1931) in which Dr Edmund Bickleigh plots the demise of his socially superior wife, Julia. The narration begins with a tennis party during which she utterly humiliates him, while he fails to seduce another woman he has deluded himself is interested in him and meets Madeleine Cranmere the new lady of the manor. Later, Ivy Ridgeway a former conquest he has lost interest in, tries to get him to express his love for her by pretending to be pregnant. Both Ivy and Julia know, well before Bickleigh will admit it to himself, that he is falling for Madeleine. Julia – to his surprise – can catalogue his earlier ‘sordid intrigues’ (Iles 1999: 104) but puts her foot down about Madeleine with the verdict that: ‘I should call her utterly untrustworthy, egotistical to the point of mania, and the most dangerous kind of liar there is – the liar who can deceive not only other people, but herself as well.’ (117). Unfortunately, Julia can’t see that she has married Madeleine’s male counterpart who is already engaging in a sexual relationship with Madeleine. When Julia refuses to divorce Bickleigh he is able to rationalize her murder to the point he barely thinks of it in such terms. Once he has caused her death, however, he finds Madeleine is committed to a younger lover. The village gossips of Wyvern’s Cross (far more acidly portrayed than those of Christie’s St Mary Mead) get on to the successful crime and Chatford, the solicitor who has married Ivy, decides to pursue the matter with the police. Informed by Ivy, Bickleigh decides to murder both Chatford and Madeleine, even as he is quizzed about Julia’s death. Overconfidence almost undoes him but the case against him for the attempted murder of Chatford fails. Freed, he is immediately charged with administering typhus to his rival for Madeleine’s affections and is found guilty despite being innocent of this crime. The defective drains of the manor house that Bickleigh complained about have, in effect, done for him. The irony and the queasy identification with the murderer

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(Berkeley/Bickleigh) make this inversion of the detective genre stand apart from contemporary works. Identifying the perverse pathos in Julia sticking to her husband, despite what she knows about him, Iles’s next book, Before the Fact (1932), focuses entirely on a wife/victim and her gradually dawning sense of what a monster her charming husband is. This was the basis for the Hitchcock film Suspicion (1941) in which the ending is defused, but the novel’s darker outcome of Lina Aysgarth’s narrative is prescribed from the start. Yet her complicity, her maddening refusal of a possible escape and her clinging to her aristocratic psychopath husband rather than suffering the humiliation of admitting how much she has been deceived, is made plausible (see for example 2011: 252). These novels are remarkably cynical. They bring the hypocrisy of upper-class 1930s values home to the reader in, for example, the way Julia despises the fact that Bickleigh needs to work even though it is this that allows him to keep her or the way Johnnie Aysgarth’s aristocratic disinclination and inability to work honestly to support his preferred profligate lifestyle lead him into theft, fraud and murder. Both novels portray relationships built on illusions, or perhaps delusions, about respectability, marriage, friendship, justice and romance; illusions must be maintained in spite of the facts. This iconoclasm sits beside a distinctly antimodernist certainty that is of a piece with the author’s published polemics and apparent efforts to save the reign of Edward VIII (see Turnbull 1996). A third Iles novel, As for the Woman (1939) about a toxic love triangle inspired by high profile criminal cases of the period, did not find critical favour and the author, having no financial need, chose to write no more novels. Iles’s blackly comic takes on character, motive, and victimhood are spins on the genre that it took time to process but they undoubtedly had their influence on his contemporaries.

The pseudonymous poet Nicholas Blake, whom we have met before, was a genre fiction pseudonym for poet C. Day Lewis seeking to support himself through writing. He created the detective character Nigel Strangeways for A Question of Proof in 1935 and novels featuring Strangeways appeared annually through the remainder of the 1930s. They do not, however, settle into a formula, becoming a means of processing the personal and the political (see Gindin 1992) through the range of formats offered by popular detective fiction.

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A Question of Proof is set in a public school where a pupil and later the headmaster are murdered. Teacher Michael Evans, who is conducting an affair with the headmaster’s wife, becomes a suspect and calls in his friend Nigel Strangeways, who appears with a third of the book already gone. In Thou Shell of Death (1936) Strangeways is asked by his uncle, Assistant Commissioner of Police, to guard Fergus O’Brien, Great War flying ace and ‘Public Idol No.1’ (Blake 2012b: 17). He fails in this task but solves this death and a subsequent poisoning, and pursues the culprit by car and plane until the latter falls to his death. Strangeways can then begin a relationship with explorer Georgia Cavendish, former lover of O’Brien and sister of the man responsible for his death. There’s Trouble Brewing (1937) begins with the killing of a dog in a brewing vat, a subsequent murder by the same method and two others followed by an attempt to blow up the brewery that is thwarted by the villain’s son. The Beast Must Die (1938) starts with the sort of arresting phrase typical of Frances Iles: ‘I am going to kill a man.’ (Blake 2012d: 3). Frank Cairns, a successful detective novel writer under the name of Felix Lane, takes the reader into his confidence about his intention to find and kill the hitand-run driver responsible for the death of his son in the absence of any progress from official police investigations. This time Strangeways does not show up until roughly halfway through the novel, investigating the death of George Rattery, the hit-and-run driver identified in the preceding sections ‘The Diary of Felix Lane’ and ‘Set Piece on a River’. What Strangeways and the reader need to do is to identify that Cairns’s protestations of innocence are calculated lies authored by his other persona as fiction writer Lane. The plot thus references Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as well as Iles. In the epilogue, presented to us through clippings and notes in Strangeways’s files we learn that Cairns, allowed to escape by the detective, has drowned himself at sea and Strangeways faces suspicion from his usual official collaborator, Inspector Blount, in this ‘most unhappy case’ (Blake 2012d: 294). With The Smiler with the Knife (1939) the series veers off into thriller territory with Strangeways’s wife Georgia, now ‘the most famous woman traveller of her day’ (Blake 2012e: 11), going undercover within a fascist organization, The English Banner, and having to go on the run across Manchester and into Gloucestershire. After this excitement, Malice in Wonderland (1940) reflects the so-called ‘Phoney War’ of 1939–40 as Mass-Observer Paul Perry visits the holiday camp of the title and finds himself suspected of being the prankster who calls themselves ‘the mad hatter’ whom Strangeways is called in to identify rather than catching a murderer. In this supposedly classless environment Perry is able to prove himself to pert Sally Thistlethwaite while Strangeways draws on the amateur criminological observations of her Oxford outfitter father.

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Blake’s novels are not so conservative in their relationship to politics and class as much detective fiction of the period. Their settings, the school, the brewery town, the holiday camp, are often microcosms of Britain and the villains and murderers reflect what is wrong with the country. In Proof, Evans is disgusted by the visiting parents at the private school where he works: ‘The spectacle of all this painted, feathered, complacent, chattering flock made him feel sick inside. It was to maintain this portentous scum that millions sweated or starved beneath the surface.’ (Blake 2012a: 21). The murderer is a religious maniac whom Strangeways allows to kill himself rather than escape justice as insane. In Shell the killer is the worst type of colonial exploiter and the corollary victim is a Great War brass hat who knowingly sent men to their deaths. The villain of Brewing is a sadistic capitalist and the socialist doctor observes: ‘It is an interesting comment on our social system that a fellow like Bennet, whose life was a series of more or less legalized crimes has to kill three people before we put him where he can do no more mischief.’ (Blake 2012c: 287–288). The hit-and-run killer of Beast is a snobbish and adulterous businessman whose murder is understood if not justified. In Smiler the villain is a millionaire aristocratic psychopath served by a variety of grotesques who believe in ‘the principle of aristocracy, the rule and government of the superior person [. . .] the hereditary line of true aristocrats [. . .and] the privilege and responsibility of a superior caste’ (Blake 2012e: 112). Finally, the saboteurs of Wonderland turn out to be the couple responsible for running the camp, taking bribes from a rival concern since they cannot control their high-living habits gained in the 1920s. Strangeways, a tea addict and upper-class British through and through, is a cerebral hero self-consciously inhabiting his role: ‘Nicholas had a weakness for consummating a case in the most spectacular way possible. It was a kind of extravagant repayment to himself for all the wearisome business that preceded’ (Proof, Blake 2012a: 243). For Blake the wearisome business of writing diligently researched detective novels rewards him with an arena for engaging with contemporary cultural ills rather than wallowing in nostalgia for a lost past.

And then there was one This subsection will make some concluding remarks about detective fiction and Christie’s role in it after discussing the bestselling work of her career, published in 1939, where the pattern of innovation and boundary testing of her 1930s work – often inspired by the works of her contemporaries – culminates.

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And Then There Were None, to give it its final title and that of all American editions, was originally titled Ten Little Niggers in Britain and – revealingly – it remained so for UK editions into the 1980s, though 1964 and 1986 editions went with Ten Little Indians. The novel narrates in third person the journey of ten individuals to an island off the Devon coast where a wealthy American built and abandoned a well-appointed house. All the travellers have their own reasons to stay with the current residents, the Owens, without knowing them well. Such vague plans are perfectly acceptable to the upper middle classes who have no jobs and live on their unearned income. Those of lower classes are hired as servants, detectives or bodyguards. A recording by the absent host/employer Mr U.N. Owen accuses them all of being murderers. The unreality is selfreflexively recognized. Hit-and-run driver Marston says ‘Whole thing’s like a detective story. Positively thrilling’ (Christie 2003: 84) before he takes the poisoned drink that will make him the first victim. Eventually realizing there is no hidden killer on the island, the survivors know the culprit is among them. Narratorially, we are given the thoughts of those undergoing this stressful situation, which differentiates their varied psychologies. For example, Miss Emily Brent, a Christian spinster lacking in charity, recalls one of Miss Marple’s fellow ladies of the parish of St Mary Mead. But while widow Mrs Price Ridley complains ‘ever since the war there has been a loosening of moral fibre’ (Vicarage, 2016a: 120), Miss Brent states ‘the present generation are shamelessly lax’ (2003: 18) and is unrepentant about casting out a pregnant servant who then committed suicide. Passages of close focalization through characters’ thoughts constrict the reader’s vision. The sketching of psychological depth for almost all these characters humanizes them and makes the text even more powerful as their consciousnesses are eliminated. With a third of the novel and only five characters left on the island the narrator gives us five separate unattributed internal monologues (227–229). The evidence in the monologues allows the reader to identify three: one belonging to Vera Claythorne, a former nanny whose charge drowned in unfortunate circumstances and perhaps the most sympathetic of the characters, one belonging to the callous colonial mercenary Lombard and one clearly belonging to the murderer. This narrows the field for the reader since the killer must be either Dr Armstrong, Blore the detective or Mr Justice Wargrave. This at least is scrupulously fair but, shortly afterwards, when the narrator tell us that ‘Dr. Armstrong lifted the lifeless hand and felt for the pulse’ the ‘lifeless’ is misleading description (237). The judge is alive and Armstrong is helping him conceal it. Much earlier, as each character comes into narratorial focus in order to reveal why they have come to the island,

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most of the judge’s section (47–49) is a shrewd display from him that makes links with Armstrong that he will exploit later, but there is a sharply angled trick in the short paragraph, which tells us he ‘reflected on the subject of Constance Culmington. Undependable like all women’ (48). The narrator allows the reader to think she is unreliable for issuing the false invitation rather than an unreliable person whom the judge has used to create his inclusion in the party. There are other clues and insights that point in the right direction but these are often countered by alternative views with no detective to sift them. For example, Lombard guesses the killer but allows himself to be dissuaded by Vera, and neither of them guesses two of the other three have an arrangement (181–183). The coming together of Lombard and Vera, which the reader might expect, never happens but in the judge’s terms Vera is dependable. Her hysteria will rise to the point at which she shoots Lombard and hangs herself, both acts observed by the judge. As all ten characters die the body count exceeds Farjeon’s Seven Dead of the same year. A chapter covering a few small details and the bafflement of the police follows, before a final chapter gives us the content of a message in a bottle sent by the culprit before they killed themselves in line with their ostensible death and left the mystery for the police to solve. Priestman draws out the parallel between the invisible host (U.N. Owen) and the novel’s creator (1990: 157). Alarmingly, the confessing culprit admits ‘I enjoy reading every kind of detective story and thriller’ (2003: 302) echoing Miss Marple’s reading policy expressed in Murder at the Vicarage (see above). The confession further claims: It was my ambition to invent a murder mystery that no one could solve. But no artist, I now realize, can be satisfied with art alone. There is a natural craving for recognition which cannot be gainsaid. I have, let me confess it in all humility, a pitiful human wish that someone should know how clever I have been . . . Christie 2003: 315

The effect of this is peculiar. The murderer congratulating themselves is very like the author praising their own sleight of hand and the tantalizing – if not quite playing fair  – clues to the murderer’s identity. This is perhaps why Haycraft suggests that Christie pays ‘closer attention to the probabilities and the canons of fair play’ while placing her only near the top of her field (1942: 133). Where aficionados are uneasy, Ernest Mandel points out that ‘to practice deception while “playing fair” is the very quintessence of the ideology of the British upper class’ (Mandel 1984: 16), yet Christie is not demonstrating upper-class ideology for her

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readers, she is playing an intimate psychological game with them. Knight noted that Christie’s golden age novels ‘both raised and dissipated the fears of their audience’ (1980: 133). Plain suggests there is greater emphasis on raising than dissipating: ‘reading before the ending [. . .] we might detect the extent to which she pleasurably and mischievously permits free play to the repressed desires and anxieties of her society’ (2001: 54). In this context it is easy to agree with Horsley that ‘Christie’s work cannot unreservedly be judged as conservative’ (2005: 49). In the case of And Then There Were None, Christie depicts sadism and cruelty by inventing the situation and then extends the experience by deception and rulebending, and removes the safety device of the detective. This extremity is the difference between Christie and the competitors she outsold. While the majority of her output might lack the emotional range, gothic shudders and mercurial invention of her competitors’ work, her novels consistently deliver mysteries that are hard to solve, do not stray from their genre, and do not use third-person narration to labour their points in ways that mark them as dated. The traditional format of her Poirot mysteries and the flat but authoritative figure of the detective, despite the fact that most laugh at him on first sight, are key elements. The differences in durability between her and other writers’ reputations lies in the differing articles of faith, their victims, culprits and perspectives on class. Priestman points out Christie’s lack of visible style and minimally stated snobbery (1990: 160). Porter says her style ‘combines a taste for understatement with a leisurely formality’ (1981: 135). Watson suggests that Christie ‘evolved a style of narration that hinted, just delicately enough not to offend British sensitivity to “sarcasm”, at self-parody’ (1971: 174). For Knight this is: quasi-humility, characteristic of English bourgeois self-protection. The false mockery [. . .] is seen as part of the honesty of the self-denigrator and passes for an ability to see oneself in real terms. A wry comic version of self-criticism can be a strong force to obscure the reality of one’s position, to defend by stasis a hard-won position of advantage. Knight 1980: 118

Nicholas and Margaret Birns make a case for Christie as a modernist, praising her ‘formal subtleties, her fractured yet resonant selves, and her often-brilliant modernism’ (Birns and Birns 1990: 134) (as does Light 1991: 65–75). Like the suspects who appear suspicious at one moment in her novels and innocent the next Christie’s true nature is strategically obscured. Although detective fiction continues to be a powerful and popular genre in publishing after the 1930s, the cutting edge would shift focus from the amateur

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sleuth dominant in this decade to the iconic American Private Eye of the 1940s. The classical form itself could not maintain its dominance but Christie, by continuing to write without appearing to notice generic shifts, became an institution as iconic in relation to the clue-puzzle detective novel as Conan Doyle is to the detective short story. Writing in 1990 Anna-Marie Taylor highlighted Christie’s status as ‘the world’s best-selling, English-language novelist’ (134) but noted the author increasingly clinging on to her ‘Old Toryism’ in her later work (149). As we have seen, the Christie of the 1930s was somewhat different, and freer to be so, hidden among a slew of other suspects drawing attention to themselves in the dominant popular genre of decade. Meanwhile the thriller, for so long detective fiction’s poor relation, would stake a claim to its inheritance in the late 1930s.

The thriller In his memoir, Here Lies, Eric Ambler records how he claimed to write ‘detective stories, mostly’ when reporting to join the army in 1940 because: ‘I had found that with persons who did not read much detective stories were more respectable than thrillers.’ (2017: 218). Why? We have seen how popularity was counted against all genre fiction but, while detective fiction offered its readers an intellectual puzzle, the thriller was closely associated with the even more popular (and therefore suspect) medium of cinema. Hitchcock’s film adaptation of John Buchan’s 1915 novel in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) made several improvements to its source, but its choice suggests that the literary thriller had not significantly moved on in twenty years. In fact, it had diversified. There are whole strands of the thriller genre closely associated with film genres that there is not room to deal with here such as the gangster thriller, stemming from the American publication Little Caesar (1929) by W.R. Burnett but rapidly adapted into the first of the archetypal early-sound Hollywood gangster films Little Caesar in 1930. Supported by news reports, this strand runs through British popular literature of the decade from one-man book factory Edgar Wallace’s Chicago-set On the Spot (1931) to James Hadley Chase’s infamous bestseller No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) and into the 1940s. Similarly, the Biggles stories by W.E. Johns which began in 1932 offer another example of a popular thriller subgenre picking up on Hollywood interest, in this case Great War flying exploits exemplified by Wings (1927) and The Dawn Patrol (1930). Appearing in collections of short stories and episodic novels Biggles

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books sold so well that eighteen were published in the decade. Biggles Learns to Fly (1935), one of four titles that year, has the hero signing up young and developing his ‘uncanny instinct [. . .] for detecting the presence of Huns’ (Johns 1992: 178). Upbeat and stoical, Biggles ‘had regarded war as “fun”. But he now perceived that he had been mistaken’ (39). Nevertheless, when he loses colleagues the response is usually to hunt and shoot down the culprit, and not dwell on trauma or loss, reproducing the idea that war was a character-forming arena for heroism current in the genre of the thriller since the late 1910s. This response to the Great War was embodied in H.C. McNeile’s character Bull-dog Drummond, created roughly contemporaneously with Poirot in 1919. Drummond, a demobilized officer with a private income, advertised himself as ‘finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. [. . .] Excitement essential’ (Sapper 1967: 16). When Sapper (McNeile) died in 1937 Drummond’s career was continued by Gerard Fairlie. By 1939 Drummond had sold 300,000 copies and been the subject of 17 films (compared to three 1930s Poirot films). Sapper’s hero helped the thriller gain its reputation for lowbrow, right-leaning views. If the 1930s is often remembered as ‘the golden age of detective fiction’ rather than the golden age of thrillers, despite some key and ground-breaking works in this subgenre, the difference in their critical statuses might simply be explained by the relative crudity with which their conservative views were conveyed to their readers. Drummond’s successes imply that a few armed British military men are equal to any emergency and the incipient fascism of the series shows where ‘Emphasis is laid on the fact that none of Drummond’s companions ever questions the rightness of his decisions or fails to carry out his orders’ (Watson 1971: 70). Michael Denning suggests that ‘Drummond is a bundle of chauvinisms, hating Jews, Germans, and most other foreigners; he is a bully, a vigilante, and a thug, but the narrator covers his activities by telling us again and again that he is “a sportsman and a gentleman” ’ (Denning 1987: 55). This sporting ethic can be traced – in fiction – back to Buchan: ‘It was an ethic that took the school cricket pitch, the celebrated paying fields of Eton, as a figure of social life, thus combining an institutional loyalty, and reverence for the hierarchical structure with a sense that social and political conflict was a game, to be played in a spirit of fairness, amateurism, and manliness’ (Denning 1987: 33). Earlier we have seen Christie’s ambivalence about the notion of fair-play and Farjeon’s identification of cricket as a simple-minded obsession marking a death-bound group. Blake’s Nigel Strangeways upholds cricket as a measure of British values and, in A Question of Proof, dismisses a suspect simply because ‘No man who could bat like that could commit a mean and cowardly murder’ (2012a:

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130). In his The Smiler with the Knife the focus of several chapters shifts to Peter Braithwaite, star cricketer and another undercover agent within the English Banner, who infiltrates a secret bomb factory where he is caught and tortured before blowing the factory up in a last heroic act (2012e: 172–189). Blake approves of the sporting ethic but not what he perceives it is associated with in Sapper, describing Drummond as an ‘unspeakable public-school bully’ (Blake 1942: xxiii). Genre fiction becomes a forum in which to debate the meaning of British ‘fair-play’ and sportsmanship while avoiding divisive political labels. Denning argues, from the first Drummond novel, that: ‘These thrillers are an attempt to privilege a national consciousness over any class consciousness, and the threat comes from those who place class over nation’ (1987: 49). He further suggests that since Drummond’s nemesis assembles American and German millionaires and Bolshevik trades unionists to bring Britain to its knees ‘Sapper is as anti-capitalist as he is anti-worker’ (48). However, there is real paranoia in the immediate wake of the Russian revolution and, in the conclusion, Drummond targets the intellectuals and ‘extremist members of Parliament’ (Sapper 1967: 254) leading the ‘working-man’ ‘to hell’ and states: ‘Evolution is our only chance – not revolution’ (258–259). In fact, during the 1920s, while Drummond evolved to be a little more in tune with the authorities, there was little ‘evolution’ in British society. The governmental response to the General Strike of 1926 and the Depression following 1929 showed it. By the mid-1930s another conflict was clearly looming in which the ordinary citizen would once again suffer for the failures of government. How to change course? If the thriller was a genre that reached working-class and lower-middle-class readerships then, some left-wing writers concluded, it was a genre through which anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and anti-war agendas could be pursued just as well as right-wing agendas. A key intervention is Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale (1936) which sprang out of Greene’s conviction that it was ‘no longer a Buchan world’ (1981: 54). According to Brian Diemert: ‘Greene saw the thriller form as tendering more than an outlet for melodramatic creative impulses or a shortcut to financial success. What it offered was a means of putting ideas, specifically political ideas, across to readers who would not be reached by more conventional political discourse’ (1996: 13). In A Gun for Sale Raven kills a Czech minister (and his secretary) for money on orders conveyed by Davis but is paid in marked notes from a wages robbery. As the police pursue him he seeks his revenge, getting entangled with Anne, a showgirl, whose fiancé, Mather, is the detective in charge of the robbery case. Raven, puny, hare-lipped, and orphanage-educated after his father’s execution

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and his mother’s suicide, learns from Anne what the consequences of his actions are. She helps him target Davis in the town of Nottwich because she does not want the coming war, knowing that Mather will enlist. We cannot share Anne’s enthusiasm for the stolid detective, ‘so one dimensional’ (Diemert 1996: 130), he is unable to see beyond the case in hand. It is Raven who interests the reader because, unlike Buchan’s Richard Hannay who is sought because he has been framed for a murder he did not commit, Raven is guilty and nearly without scruples. Those he has are clearly a weakness. A Gun for Sale’s tormented antihero was in many ways ahead of his time. It was adapted in Hollywood as This Gun for Hire (1942), a film as important in establishing film noir iconography as the more famous adaptations of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Greene uses the thriller format to show Britain gearing for war, its journalists focusing exclusively on the international situation and ignoring responsibility close to home. The novel draws on contemporary non-fiction exposés of the arms trade, such as The Bloody Traffic (1933), Merchants of Death (1934) and Who’s Who in Arms (1935), in its portrait of Sir Marcus, Davis’s employer and head of Midland Steel, who has sources close to government that let him know he will be able to export nickel for arms manufacture even when arms exports are banned (Greene 1987: 115–116). As Raven reaches Nottwich, Sir Marcus asks the chief constable Major Calkin to insist his men adopt a shoot-to-kill policy, and threatens Calkin’s dream of gaining promotion to Colonel and returning to punishing the ‘conchies’ at a military tribunal, reducing him to ‘a small plump, bullying henpecked profiteer’ (114). Perhaps most telling of the peripheral portraits is that of Buddy Fergusson, a medical student, a lion among men in the gas-attack training rag, bullying those he despises because he knows they will do much better than him after university. With his sexual and intellectual failings gnawing at his consciousness Buddy is totally undone when confronted by the physically meagre but genuinely dangerous Raven: ‘it was a dreadful thought that he had been keeping fit for this: to stand shivering and silent in a pair of holed pants, while the mean undernourished city rat, whose arm he could have snapped with a single twist, put on his clothes, his white coat and last of all his gas-mask’ (148). It reads like a repudiation of the Bull-dog Drummond mentality in the genre he made his home. A Gun for Sale was the first of Greene’s novels to be subtitled ‘an entertainment’, (though the term was retrospectively added to the title of his 1931 thriller Stamboul Train). The Confidential Agent (1939), about the representative of an unnamed rebel government trying to acquire British coal contracts, was also an entertainment, as was the first American edition of Brighton Rock (1938), though

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not in its British or subsequent publications (see Diemert 1996: 5–14). Roger Sharrock claims ‘Greene’s great technical achievement has been the elevation of the form of the thriller into a medium for serious fiction.’ (1984: 12). Greene’s straddling the fields of serious and genre literature is certainly behind his rise to greater success in the 1940s. Yet, apart from the threat of war and engaging antihero, A Gun for Sale is not so different from the London-set investigation of It’s a Battlefield (1932) or the conflict between unthinking good and principled evil in Brighton Rock focusing on a racetrack gang once run by one of Raven’s victims. In all Greene’s novels guilt cannot be discovered, because it pervades everything and cannot be dispelled by pinning the blame on an individual as in the classical detective story. This is the truth that the 1940s private detective thriller later discovered and reiterated: ‘guilt cannot be localized in a corrupt society’ (Diemert 1996: 97). Ambler’s late 1930s novels are generally regarded as a turning point for the thriller and, unlike Greene, Ambler subverts the genre from fully within it. Casting around for a way into a career in writing Ambler realized that: ‘The detective story had been worked over and over, but no one had looked at the thriller. It was still a dirty word’ (Denning 1987: 65). He wanted to make the thriller more relevant, and this involved a conscious rejection of elements familiar from the bestselling thrillers of the period. In particular, Ambler rejected to villains leading ‘world conspiracies no more substantial than toy balloons’ and heroes whose key characteristic was ‘abysmal stupidity combined with superhuman resourcefulness and unbreakable knuckle bones’ (Ambler 2017: 165). He also reversed the politics of the genre when he ‘decided to [. . .] make heroes of the left wing and popular front figures’ (Denning 1987: 65). Ambler’s protagonists are professional working men; engineers, journalists, language teachers, authors. They are ordinary men, not supermen with hordes of unquestioning followers to call upon. Ambler’s greater realism is informed by Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1927), published about a decade after the author’s experiences while employed by the British Secret Service in Switzerland and Russia. Through a series of loosely connected bathetic anecdotes, Ashenden provided ‘the first exposure of what espionage really meant – not romantic melodrama, but long periods of boredom, fear, human weakness, callousness and deceit’ (McCormick 1979: 167). Ambler’s first novel, The Dark Frontier (1936) is an oddity in which the writer attempts to have his cake and eat it; to both mock the thriller and reinvent it at the same time. Professor Barstow, a mild-mannered atomic physicist, learns from a representative of Cator & Bliss ‘one of the largest armaments manufacturing organisations in the world’ (2012: 14) that the Balkan nation of Ixania, previously

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best known for its pig-bristle production, is to get an atomic bomb unless he assists the company’s agent in sabotaging the development. Rendered unconscious in a crash after having read a spy novel, Barstow ‘becomes’ the superspy Carruthers (the hero’s name in Erskine Childers’s 1913 The Riddle of the Sands): ‘Free from the fears, and the vanities, the blunderings and shortcomings of ordinary men, he was of that illustrious company which numbers, Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, Arsène Lupin, Bulldog Drummond and Sexton Blake among its members’ (30). Halfway through the novel, however, an American journalist usurps the narration of the climactic encounters and the country’s successful socialist revolution. When the country’s ousted leader bemoans her country’s fate Carruthers’s responds: Ixania is unproductive because you make it so. Your businessmen suck the country’s life blood so that there is none to feed the body. Your soil is for the most part uncultivated because the wealth that should fertilise it maintains an army that is as un-necessary as it would be inadequate as a means of defence. Ambler 2012: 225

Ambler would go on to frame his analysis of the diseases of Europe in more realistic settings and actual countries where his ordinary heroes, remaining themselves, become embroiled in situations beyond their control. Ambler’s first ‘straight’ thriller, Background to Danger (1937), begins with a prologue in the City of London showing Joseph Balterghen, Chairman of PanEurasian Petroleum, at a board meeting where it is decided to influence the Bulgarian government by whatever means he thinks necessary to revive some concessions for the firm. Kenton, a journalist short of money, is bribed by a nervous man on a train to take some papers through Austrian customs and deliver them to him at a hotel address. By the time Kenton arrives the man is dead, and he is stuck with the incriminating papers. He stows them at a café with typical Amblerian economy: ‘The third [envelope] he marked with his own name and handed it over, accompanied by five marks and a circumstantial story, to the man behind the counter for safekeeping’ (2001a: 63). Captured and threatened by Balterghen’s agent, and threatened by his Drummond-like British thug, Captain Mailler, Kenton reacts strongly: ‘For the first time in his adult life someone was trying to coerce him with threats into making a decision, and his mind was reacting with cold, angry, obstinate refusal’ (84). Kenton’s pig-headed resistance, beyond any physical capacity to do so, is rewarded when he is rescued by Zaleshoff, a Soviet agent who has been following him from the hotel. Thereafter Kenton is largely caught up in Zaleshoff ’s plans to recapture the documents, but the most extraordinary sequence comes when Kenton is alone trying to flee Linz

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wearing a bloodstained coat. He is helped by an observant British traveller in worsted, Mr Hodgkin, who provides clues to the destination of the villains and then, as they separate on a scenic overlook, lectures Kenton on what a bad fugitive he is, only deigning to help him because he is British and he wants to thwart the Europeans whose brutal political reality he has seen first hand. Making his way down to the border Kenton sees ‘better than the view from Mr Hodgkin’s promontory’ (171) suggesting the reader is not being invited to share this insularity. Yet it is also true to say as Denning does: ‘That we are no longer in England, no longer subject to fair play, non-violence, and rational justice, is something that all of Ambler’s characters must learn’ (1987: 73). Cause for Alarm (1938) has Nicky Marlow, an engaged engineer, taking a job in Italy after two months of unemployment, and finding himself inveigled into industrial and then political espionage by General Vagas, a Yugoslavian who turns out to work for the Germans. Zaleshoff appears again, recruits Marlow as a double agent and, when things go wrong, gets him out of the country to Belgrade to deliver the final piece of disinformation to Vagas and help damage the Berlin-Rome Axis. Gavin Lambert points out that ‘the second half of the novel is Buchanesque’ (1975: 110) but a Buchan protagonist would not utterly depend on a Soviet agent as Marlow does: ‘without Zaleshoff ’s capacity for endurance and improvisation, he would never survive. He has nothing to fall back on except his middle class belief in muddling through, ludicrously inadequate in a crisis’ (1975: 111). Marlow’s refrain ‘you could not help liking Zaleshoff ’ (Ambler 2001a: 216, 223, 278) suggests resemblances, in Zaleshoff ’s theatricality and adaptability, to a Carruthers-like skill-set. Yet Marlow conspicuously fails to learn from him and on returning to England takes a job with Cator & Bliss (2002a: 280). The dropping of Zaleshoff from this point in Ambler’s output is often tied by commentators – concerned by Ambler’s popular front sympathies (Cawelti and Rosenborg 1987; Wolfe 1993) – to the 1938 NaziSoviet pact but it is also part of Ambler’s development of the genre that his protagonist will not be Carruthers, or – after this point – assisted by anyone with a claim to that ‘illustrious company’. Epitaph for a Spy (1938) takes place largely at a French coastal resort hotel where first-person narrator Joseph Vadassy, a stateless Hungarian, is arrested for taking pictures of the naval defences at Toulon. Flabbergasted, Vadassy eventually realizes, under the prompting of detective Beghin, that he has accidentally picked up a camera identical to his own in the hotel. Beghin suggests he clear himself of the charge of espionage by discovering the owner of the other camera. As in a typical detective novel, Vadassy has plenty of red herrings and unreliable

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witnesses to deal with, but he finds that ‘Reality is always so obstructive’ (Ambler 2009: 65). Describing himself as ‘pathetically ineffectual’ (152) Vadassy inadvertently discovers a left-wing exile being sought by Nazi agents among the guests but not the Italian agent responsible for his plight. He is still in the dark when he is dragged by Beghin into the chase denouement in the warehouse district of Toulon and any elaborate explanation of motive is cut off by Beghin’s epitaph for the spy: ‘He needed the money’ (218). Ambler’s masterwork The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios in the US, 1939) focuses on Latimer, an ex-academic turned detective novelist, prompted during an encounter with Colonel Haki of the Turkish secret police to seek the true background to the eponymous Dimitrios, the crook, pimp, murderer and fixer whose body he is taken to see. Excursions to Smyrna, Sofia and Geneva follow and Latimer finds he himself is being tracked by Mr Peters, a former ally of Dimitrios in a heroin-smuggling racket. Peters draws him to Paris and Latimer becomes a key part of his plan to blackmail the still-living Dimitrios, now a Director of the Eurasian Credit Trust. In trying to understand evil, Latimer loses faith in the concept: ‘Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent.’ (2001b: 252). Latimer’s hesitancy and morals make a difference to the outcome, but he very much wants to go back to fiction by the end, acknowledging it as an escape from messy and immoral reality: ‘He would be writing a detective fiction story with a beginning, a middle and an end; a corpse, a piece of detection and a scaffold. He would be demonstrating that murder would out, that justice triumphed in the end.’ (283) As the novel closes Latimer is warned by his journalist correspondent in Sofia that there will be war in the spring but all he can think of is getting started on his next book. Ambler’s last novel before war service led him into filmmaking, Journey into Fear (1940), caps the series with a spare narrative about an engineer, Graham – ‘a quiet, likable sort of chap’ (2002b: 5), with key knowledge of (neutral) Turkey’s naval capacity sent home by boat via Italy by Colonel Haki following an assassination attempt. Graham is distracted by dancer Josette and her cynical partner Jose’s reported moral opinions: ‘He says that it was people who were safe and well-fed who invented good and evil so they would not have to worry about the people who were hungry and unsafe.’ (109). Out of his depth, Graham can spot neither his enemies nor his allies and ends up stoically facing death: ‘Forty years was not a bad lifetime to have lived. There were many young men in Europe who would regard the attainment of such an age as an enviable achievement.’ (259). His salvation lies in his seemingly irrelevant relationship with the French traveller Mr Mathis, a socialist who deliberately embarrasses his snobbish wife

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with radical statements and uses the idea of revolution comically. Mathis is enough of an ally to change the odds, but the heroism has to come from within Graham. This is the nub of the thriller form and as Mr Thistlethwaite argues in Blake’s Malice in Wonderland: ‘We are all heroes at heart [. . .] But to few of us is given, in this modern world, the opportunity of translating our dream into reality’ (2012f: 166). Other late 1930s manifestations of the thriller come at this imagined opportunity from a different angle. Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (1939), while it eschews the middle-class protagonist of Ambler’s 1930s fiction, is equally about coming to awareness of the contemporary situation. The anonymous narrator is one of the landed gentry, more interested in agriculture than business, who has unintentionally achieved a certain amount of fame as a big game hunter. In jeopardy, he agonizes over his class position, claiming England is ‘the least class conscious of nations in the Marxian sense’ (Household 2014: 34) but noting ‘when I speak English to an Englishman I am at once spotted as a member of [Class] X’ (35). He explains: ‘I say Class X because there is no definition of it. To talk of an upper or ruling class is nonsense. The upper class, if the term has any meaning at all, means landed gentry [including himself] who probably do belong to Class X but form only a small proportion of it. The ruling class are, I presume, politicians and servants of the state – terms which are self-contradictory’ (34). The narrator does not rise above snobbery (60, 64) but his explicit awareness of and anxiety about class show he does not share the certainties of Hannay or Drummond. In fact, the narrator’s lack of self-knowledge is a theme of the book: ‘With this pencil and this exercise book I hope to find some clarity.’ (8). Writing in three bursts the protagonist initially tries to convince himself that he was lining up his rifle sights on the dictator of a country adjacent to Poland simply to prove that he could do so. Captured and tortured, his enemies decide it is better to stage his death by dropping him off a cliff rather than executing him, but he lands on soft ground and manages to conceal himself in woods. Back in England, finding himself still pursued and forced to kill a man in self-defence, he puts his affairs in order and disappears because ‘I could not risk embarrassing the officials of my country’ (57). The protagonist goes to ground in Dorset quite literally, digging out and occupying a rabbit warren in an ancient trackway. As narrator he acknowledges ‘my reasons were insistent but frequently obscure’ (61). Located by his enemies after an excursion to acquire books to occupy his mind, he almost outlasts them but is pinned down to be starved out unless he signs a document incriminating himself and his government. The suspiciously un-English Major Quive-Smith who traps him calls him ‘an anarchial [sic] aristocrat’ (136) and

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expects him to sign eventually but he reckons without other effects of his methods. They force the protagonist to face the fact that he loved the dead woman, that the site he chose to hide in is one he showed her before she went back to her country and was killed by the forces under the dictator he took aim at, and that he made a genuine assassination attempt when ‘mad with grief and hatred’ (142). Thus the protagonist passes to ‘a spiritual offensive’ (144) and strikes back. Ralph Harper suggests Rogue Male is an almost excessively Oedipal tale (Harper 1969: 17) and goes on to argue that ‘The thriller is not by any means oriented outward toward the shape of the world, but inward to the heart of the subject.’ (80–81) Yet while it seems that Rogue Male is an exploration of the narrator’s psyche it is also – like other examples of the genre – freighted with consideration of the character of his country in a time of crisis. At multiple levels Rogue Male is about facing up to moral obligations and doing something about what is wrong and at least partially about casting aside class considerations to do so. As such, and in a very different way, it shares a message with Ambler’s novels of the period that, although it may not be easy, we must move beyond our disgust with politics and politicians and finally, despite ourselves, commit to a war against fascism. Ultimately 1930s thrillers show us that ‘the ethic of sportsmanship and the game is at best an anachronism and at worst a mystification’ (Denning 1987: 62). The thriller is a much better vehicle for overturning this view than detective fiction could ever be because of its focus on removing the certainties of the protagonist’s life. By comparison, detective fiction was formally encumbered by outdated domestic and conservative values that would be significantly diminished in the next decade as a common sense of purpose took hold and its vitality, cruelty and innovations would be obscured by nostalgic – or hostile – retrospection.

Notes 1 Some readers may disagree with my choices within the criteria given. Margery Allingham, for example, is often considered as one of the 1930s ‘Queens of Crime’ but her success in the decade was slow burning and pendant to Sayers’s work. Her best novel (influenced by Iles) is The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) and is covered in this series’ 1950s volume. Similarly, Ngaio Marsh’s reputation rests on work after the 1930s. John Dickson Carr, however, clearly wrote his best work across the 1930s but my feeling is that his focus on locked room mysteries harks back to an earlier era of the genre.

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Works cited Ambler, Eric. The Dark Frontier. New York: Vintage, 2012 [1936]. Ambler, Eric. Background to Danger. New York: Vintage, 2001a [1937]. Ambler, Eric. Cause for Alarm. New York: Vintage, 2002a [1938]. Ambler, Eric. Epitaph for a Spy. London: Penguin, 2009 [1938]. Ambler, Eric. A Coffin for Dimitrios. New York: Vintage, 2001b [1939]. Ambler, Eric. Journey into Fear. New York: Vintage, 2002b [1940]. Ambler, Eric. Here Lies. London: Ipso, 2017 [1985]. Auden, W.H. ‘The Guilty Vicarage’. In Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Robin Winks (ed.). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice & Hall, 1980 [1948]: 15–25. Aydelotte, William O. ‘The Detective Story as a Historical Source’. In Dimensions of Detective Fiction. Larry N. Landrum, Pat Browne and Ray Browne (eds.). Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1976: 68–82. Birns, Nicholas and Birns, Margaret Boe. ‘Agatha Christie: Modern and Modernist’. In The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (eds.). Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1990: 120–134. Blake, Nicholas. A Question of Proof. London: Vintage, 2012a [1935]. Blake, Nicholas. Thou Shell of Death. London: Vintage, 2012b [1936]. Blake, Nicholas. There’s Trouble Brewing. London: Vintage, 2012c [1937]. Blake, Nicholas. The Beast Must Die. London: Vintage, 2012d [1938]. Blake, Nicholas. The Smiler with the Knife. London: Vintage, 2012e [1939]. Blake, Nicholas. Malice in Wonderland. London: Vintage, 2012f [1940]. Blake, Nicholas. ‘Introduction’ to Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. London: Peter Davies, 1942: xv–xxvii. Caudwell, Christopher. Illusion and Reality. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973 [1937]. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976. Cawelti, John G. & Rosenberg, Bruce A. The Spy Story. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. Christie, Agatha. Murder at the Vicarage. London: HarperCollins, 2016a [1930]. Christie, Agatha. Lord Edgeware Dies. London: HarperCollins, 2016b [1933]. Christie, Agatha. The ABC Murders. London: HarperCollins, 2013 [1936]. Christie, Agatha. And Then There Were None. London: HarperCollins, 2003 [1939]. Denning, Michael. Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Diemert, Brian. Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s. Montreal: McGill University Press, 1996. Farjeon, F. Jefferson. No.17. London: HarperCollins, 2016 [1926]. Farjeon, F. Jefferson. The Z Murders. London: British Library, 2015a [1932]. Farjeon, F. Jefferson. Thirteen Guests. London: British Library, 2015b [1936].

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Farjeon, F. Jefferson. Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story. London: British Library, 2014 [1937]. Farjeon, F. Jefferson. Seven Dead. London: British Library, 2017 [1939]. Gindin, James. British Fiction in the 1930s: The Dispiriting Decade. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992. Greene, Graham. A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment. London: Penguin, 1987 [1936]. Greene, Graham. Ways of Escape. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Harper, Ralph. The World of the Thriller. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1969. Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. London: Peter Davies, 1942. Hoffman, Nancy Y. ‘Mistresses of Malfeasance’. In Dimensions of Detective Fiction. Larry N. Landrum, Pat Browne and Ray Browne (eds.). Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1976: 97–101. Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Household, Geoffrey. Rogue Male. London: Orion, 2014 [1939]. Iles, Frances. Malice Aforethought. London: Orion, 1999 [1931]. Iles, Frances. Before the Fact. London: Arcturus, 2011 [1932]. Ingman, Heather. Women’s Fiction between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Johns, Captain W.E. Biggles Learns to Fly. London: Red Fox, 1992 [1935]. Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1980. Knox. Ronald A. ‘A Detective Story Decalogue’. In Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Robin Winks (ed.). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice & Hall, 1980 [1929]: 200–202. Lambert, Gavin. The Dangerous Edge. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975. Leavis, Q.D. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. London, Routledge, 1991. Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. London: Pluto, 1984. McCormick, Donald. Who’s Who in Spy Fiction. London: Sphere, 1979. Plain, Gill. Twentieth Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Priestman, Martin. Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990. Routley, Erik. The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story: A Personal Monograph. London: Gollancz, 1972. Sapper, Bull-dog Drummond: His Four Rounds with Carl Peterson. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967 [1919, 1920, 1924, 1926]. Sayers, Dorothy L. The Nine Tailors, Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993 [1934].

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Sayers, Dorothy L. ‘Introduction’, Tales of Detection. London: Dent, 1936. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Sharrock, Roger. Saints, Sinners and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1984. Sprigg, Christopher St John. Fatality in Fleet Street. Cambridge: Oleander, 2013 [1933]. Sprigg, Christopher St John. Death of an Airman. London: British Library, 2015 [1934]. Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From Detective Story to Crime Novel: A History. London: Faber & Faber, 1972. Taylor, Anna-Marie. ‘Home is Where the Hearth Is: The Englishness of Agatha Christie’s Marple Novels’. In Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction. Ian A. Bell and Graham Daldry (eds.). Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990: 134–151. Turnbull, Malcolm J. Elusion Aforethought: The Life and Writing of Anthony Berkeley Cox. Bowling Green State University Press, 1996. Watson, Colin. Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971. Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. London: W.H. Allen, 1951. Wolfe, Peter. Alarms and Epitaphs: The Art of Eric Ambler. Bowling Green: Popular, 1993.

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Timeline of Works 1930 Margery Allingham, Mystery Mile W.H. Auden, Poems Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday Harald Heslop, Journey Beyond Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God Ethel Mannin, Confessions and Impressions Ethel Mannin, Ragged Banners Frederic Manning, Her Privates We Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison John Sommerfield, They Die Young Evelyn Waugh, Labels Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies Charles Williams, Many Dimensions Charles Williams, War in Heaven

1931 Margery Allingham, Look to the Lady Margery Allingham, Police at the Funeral Robert Graves, I, Claudius Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men Dorothy Richardson, Dawn’s Left Hand Dorothy L. Sayers, The Five Red Herrings Sylvia Townsend Warner, Opus 7 Evelyn Waugh, Remote People Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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1932 W.H. Auden, The Orators Elizabeth Bowen, To the North G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song Graham Greene, Stamboul Train Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz Anthony Powell, Venusberg Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcass Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief Charles Williams, The Greater Trumps

1933 Margery Allingham, Sweet Danger W.H. Auden, The Dance of Death John Dickson Carr, Hag’s Nook T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Cloud Howe Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole James Hilton, Lost Horizon Malcolm Lowry, Ultramarine Ethel Mannin, Venetian Blinds George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London Anthony Powell, From a View to a Death John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come Antonia White, Frost in May Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy

1934 Dot Allan, Hunger March Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods

Timeline of Works Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Grey Granite Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School James Hilton, Goodbye, Mr Chips F. Tennyson Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow Rose Macaulay, Going Abroad George Orwell, Burmese Days Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors P.G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days

1935 Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Dog beneath the Skin James Barke, Major Operation Walter Brierley, Means Test Man John Dickson Carr, The Hollow Man G.K. Chesterton, The Scandal of Father Brown Graham Greene, England Made Me Patrick Hamilton, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky James Hanley, The Furys Harold Heslop, Last Cage Down Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains Ethel Mannin, Cactus Naomi Mitchison, We Have Been Warned George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter Herbert Read, The Innocent Eye Herbert Read, The Green Child Dorothy Richardson, Clear Horizon Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

1936 Margery Allingham, Flowers for the Judge Eric Ambler, The Dark Frontier W.H. Auden, Look, Stranger! W.H. Auden, The Ascent of F6 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table Agatha Christie, The A.B.C. Murders

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Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1935 Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale Graham Greene, Journey without Maps Winifred Holtby, South Riding Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza Storm Jameson, In the Second Year T.E. Lawrence, The Mint Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets Ethel Mannin, The Pure Flame George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying Anthony Powell, Agents and Patients Kate Roberts, Traed mewn cyffion [Feet in Chains] Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper John Sommerfield, May Day Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia T.H. White, England Have My Bones

1937 Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning Eric Ambler, Uncommon Danger W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland Nicholas Blake, Malice in Wonderland Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night Christopher Cauldwell, Illusion and Reality Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile A.J. Cronin, The Citadel Lewis Jones, Cwmardy Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings (eds.), May the Twelfth George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit Charles Williams, Descent into Hell Rex Warner, The Wild Goose Chase Virginia Woolf, The Years

1938 Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds

Timeline of Works Eric Ambler, Cause for Alarm Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy Nicholas Blake, The Beast Must Die Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart John Dickson Carr, The Crooked Hinge Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book Graham Greene, Brighton Rock Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows Lewis Jones, We Live C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet Jack Lindsay, 1649 Ethel Mannin, Women and the Revolution Naomi Mitchison, The Moral Basis of Politics George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia Dorothy Richardson, Dimple Hill Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier Sylvia Townsend Warner, After the Death of Don Juan Evelyn Waugh, Scoop T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

1939 Eric Ambler, The Mask of Demetrios W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War Agatha Christie, Ten Little Niggers Clemence Dane, The Arrogant History of White Ben T.S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society Henry Green, Party Going Graham Greene, The Confidential Agent Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads Rayner Heppenstall, The Blaze of Noon Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin Lewis Jones, We Live James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley Ethel Mannin, Privileged Spectator Naomi Mitchison, The Blood of the Martyrs

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George Orwell, Coming Up for Air Anthony Powell, What’s Become of Waring? Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight Flora Thompson, Lark Rise T.H. White, The Witch in the Wood

Timeline of National Events 1930 Seventh Lambeth Conference of the Church of England The R101 Airship crashed in France during its maiden overseas voyage on 5 October, killing 48 of the 54 people on board and leading to the abandonment of Government plans to use airships for long-distance travel

1931 Minority Labour government resigns; first National Government formed under Ramsay McDonald as Prime Minister Britain leaves the Gold standard Statute of Westminster gives Dominions constitutional autonomy The Means Test for unemployment benefit is introduced

1932 British Union of Fascists founded Kinder Scout mass trespass

1933 Unemployment reaches its interwar peak of 22 per cent nationally; as high as 70 per cent in industrial areas Oxford Union supports motion refusing to fight for ‘King and Country’ The England cricket team depart for a winter tour of Australia and what would become known as the ‘Bodyline’ test series

1934 Scottish National Party founded Gresford Colliery Disaster, North Wales

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1935 Penguin paperbacks launched Left Book Club started Stanley Baldwin becomes prime minister Clement Attlee becomes leader of the Labour Party Introduction of pedestrian crossings and 30mph speed limits on roads in built-up areas

1936 Death of George V and Edward VIII abdication crisis Battle of Cable Street Jarrow march BBC Television Service launches Welsh nationalist arson attack on RAF bombing school at Penyberth, Llŷn Peninsula First Butlin’s holiday camp opens at Skegness

1937 Mass Observation founded George VI crowned New Irish Constitution Neville Chamberlain becomes prime minister 4,000 child refugees from Spain arrive at Southampton Matrimonial Causes Act extends grounds for divorce

1938 First refugee children from Nazi-controlled Europe arrive on the Kindertransport Picture Post magazine launched Neville Chamberlain declares ‘Peace in Our Time’ on return from signing Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler Gas masks issued to civilians Foundation of Women’s Voluntary Service

1939 Britain declares war on Germany on 3 September The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act Introduction of conscription.

Timeline of International Events 1930 Occupation of the Rhineland by Allied troops ends Mahatma Gandhi initiates campaign of civil disobedience against British rule in India

1931 Japan invades Manchuria

1932 Adolf Hitler obtains German citizenship Iraq achieves independence from Britain World Disarmament Conference begins in Geneva First motorway built, from Bonn to Cologne

1933 Reichstag fire Trade unions and all parties except the Nazi party proscribed in Germany Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany Enabling Act gives Hitler dictatorial powers Concordat between the Vatican and German government Germany withdraws from the League of Nations Newly elected US president Franklin D. Roosevelt initiates the New Deal Prohibition repealed in the USA

1934 Hitler purges supporters in the Night of the Long Knives Soviet Writers’ Congress

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1935 Italy invades Abyssinia Nuremberg Laws enacted Comintern adopts Popular Front strategy against fascism

1936 Election of Popular Front governments in France and Spain Spanish Civil War begins following a military coup led by Francisco Franco Berlin Olympics First Moscow Trials Remilitarization of the Rhineland by Germany Germany and Japan sign Anti-Comintern Pact

1937 Second Sino-Japanese war begins Bombing of Guernica Italy withdraws from League of Nations Irish Constitution ratified First full-length Disney cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

1938 German annexation of Austria (Anschluss) The November Pogrom (Kristallnacht) Munich Agreement cedes the Sudetanland to Germany Biro invents ball-point pen

1939 German army invades Czechoslovakia German army invades Poland Second World War declared Molotov-Ribbentrop (‘Hitler-Stalin’) Pact Italy and Germany sign Pact of Steel Spanish Civil War ends in Francoist victory Discovery of nuclear fission First jet aircraft flown in Germany Sikorsky builds first helicopter

Biographies of Writers Valentine Ackland (1906–1969) was born Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland in London, the second daughter of a dentist, who taught her to shoot and box. Following a convent school education, she married Richard Turpin in 1925 and was received into the Catholic church. Within a year the marriage was annulled on the grounds she was a virgin, although in fact she had been pregnant from an affair and had a miscarriage. She cut her hair short, began wearing men’s clothes, changed her name to Valentine Ackland and began publishing poetry. In 1930, she began a relationship with the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner that was to last until her death. The two lived together in rural Dorset and jointly published a collection of poems, Whether a Dove or a Seagull (1934). By 1935, both were in the Communist Party and Ackland wrote a series of articles, ‘Country Dealings’, for Left Review describing the conditions of rural labourers and drawing on both historical knowledge of the area and her own experiences of living there. These articles were subsequently expanded into a book, Country Conditions, published the following year by Lawrence and Wishart. In 1937, Ackland and Warner attended the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in Valencia in Republican Spain. In the1930s, Ackland began an affair with the American writer and poet Elizabeth Wade White, which developed into a serious relationship, complicating her primary relationship with Warner. Ackland wrote a memoir of this period, For Sylvia: An Honest Account, which was published in 1985. The letters of the three women to each other from this period have been collected in Peter Haring Judd, The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White (2018). Ackland died from cancer on 9 November 1969. A selection of her poems, Journey from Winter, was published by Carcanet Press in 2008. Eric Ambler (1909–1998) was born to moderately successful music hall artistes in Charlton, South East London and grew up during the Great War. He won a scholarship to study engineering at Northampton Engineering College but, under-challenged by the course, took a trainee job with a large electrical manufacturer. His aptitude with words led him into their marketing department and then into copywriting at a London Advertising Agency while he nursed an ambition as a playwright. His first novel, The Dark Frontier (1936), began as a spoof of the thriller genre but allowed him to see how he might master it. Ambler’s variations on the thriller in the late 1930s met with significant success on both sides of the Atlantic, the acknowledged masterpiece being The Mask of Dimitrios (1939). After completing his third novel he moved to Paris where he met Louise Crombie, an American fashion correspondent. They married in Croydon in 1939 after war was declared. Ambler was commissioned in the Royal Artillery but moved into the

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Army Film Unit where he worked with Thorold Dickinson, Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov. During wartime four of Ambler’s novels were made into films without his input; these were Journey into Fear (1943), Background to Danger (1943), Hotel Reserve (1944)  – adapted from Epitaph for a Spy (1938) – and Mask of Dimitrios (1944). He was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and involved in liaising with American opposite numbers including John Huston whose attempts to scout locations for a documentary about the advance through Italy led them into significant danger. In peacetime Ambler became a screenwriter with over 15 feature screenplays produced during his career including Rough Shoot (1953) from a Geoffrey Household novel, The Cruel Sea (1953), an adaptation of Nicholas Montserrat’s novel, and A Night to Remember (1958) about the sinking of the then almost-forgotten Titanic. Ambler returned to writing novels in 1951 with Judgement on Deltchev set in an unnamed Communist country but based on knowledge of Bulgaria. There were five collaborations with Charles Rodda in the 1950s published under the name Eliot Reed, but only another eleven Ambler novels in the remainder of his literary career. The Light of Day (1962) was the basis for the film Topkapi (1964) and The Levanter won The Golden Dagger Award in 1972. In 1958 Ambler divorced his first wife and married his second, Joan Harrison, Hitchcock producer and screenwriter. They lived in Switzerland from 1969–1985 before returning to Britain. Ambler published a memoir, Here Lies, in 1985 after his last novel The Care of Time in 1981. Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar in 1905. After studying at Khalsa College in Amritsar, he moved in 1925 to London to pursue a doctorate in the philosophy of Locke, Hume, Berkeley and Russell at University College London. After a brief return to India in 1929, he continued to move amongst the intelligentsia in London, becoming friends with Woolf and others, and contributing to the Criterion. E.M. Forster, whom he got to know in this period, proved a staunch advocate of Anand’s work, and it was through his efforts that his first and best-known novel, Untouchable, was published in 1935. Alongside a steady literary production through the 1930s, undertaken both for financial reasons and to increase his reputation, Anand became an important promotor of Indian art, architecture and sculpture, publishing The Hindu View of Art in 1933; he would go on to be one of the founders of the Modern Architects’ and Artists’ Research Group in 1945 after his return to India, and edit MARG , their magazine, from 1945 to 1981. He spent much of the Second World War working for the BBC, often collaborating with his friend George Orwell. In 1945 he returned to India, his home for the rest of his long life. Whilst still living in England he had published various other works, most importantly the novels Coolie (1936) and Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) and a trilogy exploring the life of the peasant Lalu in the early twentieth century, The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1939) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942). The middle volume is of particular note due to its portrayal of the experience of Indian soldiers in France during the Great War. In India, Anand was very active politically but also continued to publish both novels such as Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) and a series of autobiographical works beginning with Seven Summers in 1951. He died in Pune in 2004.

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Nicholas Blake was a pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972). Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, Ireland, son of a Church of Ireland minister. His mother died in 1906, leaving him to be mainly raised by his father. Studying at Oxford, Day-Lewis published his first volume of poetry in 1925, associated with W.H. Auden and was co-editor of Oxford Poetry (1927). In 1927 he married Constance Mary King, with whom he had two children, and subsequently taught in private schools until 1935 when he published his first detective fiction as Nicholas Blake. Blake’s annual novels (1935–41) meant that from this point Day-Lewis could focus on writing. This was the period of Day-Lewis’s membership of the Communist Party (1935–38) and his editing of The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution (1937). During World War Two Day-Lewis worked in the Ministry of Information, as a senior editor for Chatto & Windus and served in the Home Guard. After the war, Blake returned with Minute for Murder (1947) set in the Ministry of Information, and produced twenty novels, all but four featuring the detective character Nigel Strangeways. Initially based on aspects of W.H. Auden, Strangeways evolved into a vehicle to help the writer work through various issues including writer’s block in Head of a Traveller (1949) and his relationship with communism in The Sad Variety (1964). Day-Lewis was involved in a long-running affair with novelist Rosamund Lehmann during the 1940s, but when his marriage was dissolved in 1951, he married Jill Balcon, with whom he subsequently had two children. Day-Lewis was Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1951–56, and became Poet Laureate 1968–1972 until his death from pancreatic cancer. Katharine Burdekin was born in Derbyshire in 1896, into a prominent local family; Joseph Wright of Derby was an ancestor. After the First World War the family relocated to Cornwall, where Burdekin’s sister Rowena Cade founded the Minack Theatre. In 1915, Katharine Cade married Olympic rower Beaufort Burdekin, with whom she would have two daughters, and moved to Australia, where she began to write. She published her first novel Anna Colquhoun in 1922. That year, her marriage ended and she returned to Cornwall, where she met a woman with whom she maintained a lifelong relationship. Her fourth novel, The Rebel Passion, published under the name Kay Burdekin in 1929, in which a twelfth-century monk recounts his visions of the future, was the first of many allegorical and utopian novels published through her life. Burdekin adopted the modes of science fiction and fantasy for antifascist, pacifist and feminist ends, often exploring the social construction of gender and its deconstruction or reconfiguration in alternative societies of the past or future. In Proud Man, published in 1934 under the name Murray Constantine, an androgynous “Genuine Person” is thrown back to 1930s England from a utopian future in which the gender binary has disappeared. Her next and best known novel, Swastika Night (1937), also published under the name Murray Constantine, envisages a future in which Nazi Germany has triumphed over Europe and reduced women entirely to their reproductive function. The novel is also notable for its far-sighted, even uncanny, grasp of the logic of Nazi exterminism, the horror of which was yet to be acknowledged by many in Britain. Swastika Night was selected as a Left Book Club choice

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in 1940, the first novel to be selected for the Club – though it was prefaced with a cautious ‘Publisher’s Note’ implying that the novel was defeatist in its speculation. Swastika Night would be the last novel Burdekin published in her lifetime, though she continued to write novels until 1956. Burdekin died in 1963. Since the 1980s, Burdekin’s work has been rediscovered by scholars of queer, feminist and fantasy writing; in the mid-1980s, the scholar Daphne Patai identified Burdekin as the author behind the ‘Murray Constantine’ pseudonym, and Proud Man, Swastika Night and the previously unpublished The End of This Day’s Business have since appeared in new editions, introduced by Patai, published by the Feminist Press. Agatha Christie, née Miller, was born in Devon in 1890, the youngest of three children. Though her brother and sister were sent away to school, Agatha’s formal education was minimal. During the Great War she worked with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and then in a dispensary. On Christmas Eve 1914 she married Archibald Christie, a young officer in the Royal Flying Corp, home on his first leave. She submitted her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to the Bodley Head, who eventually published it in America in 1920 (and Britain the following year). It features a Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot (by 1938, she told a friend, she felt he had become ‘insufferable’). The couple’s daughter Rosalind was born in 1919. In 1926 Christie lost her mother and discovered her husband to be having an affair – the couple divorced in 1928. She married archaeology professor Max Mallowan in 1930, which also saw publication of Murder at the Vicarage, her tenth novel, and the first to feature Miss Jane Marple as detective. In the 1940s Christie developed into a successful playwright with The Mousetrap, first performed in the London West End in 1952, still running there into the twenty-first century. Christie continued to write in her later years and by the time of her death in 1976 had published nearly 70 detective novels, and became (and still is) the bestselling author in English. Film and television adaptations of her works continue to be made while contemporary academic interest in her work thrives. Anthony Berkeley Cox was born in Watford in 1893 first son of a doctor father and aristocratic mother. He studied at Oxford, graduating in 1914, then enlisted in the Great War, becoming a Lieutenant, but was gassed, invalided out and suffered reduced health thereafter. Cox married Margaret Fearnley Farrar in 1917 and they divorced in 1931. A second marriage in 1932 (also childless) broke down shortly after the Second World War. In the 1920s, as A.B. Cox, he became a comic sketch writer for Punch and other periodicals, eventually becoming a novelist (as Anthony Berkeley) and writing a series of detective novels, mostly featuring the eccentric Roger Sheringham, the best of which is The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929). Of the non-Sheringham Berkeley novels, Trial and Error (1937) with the terminally diagnosed Mr Todhunter seeking the person he can kill to most benefit humanity is the most interesting. While guarding his personal circumstances from journalistic enquiry under pseudonyms, Cox founded the Detection Club which included the major contributors to the detective genre of the time and contributed to several joint publications. The range of his output is surveyed in Malcolm

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J. Turnbull’s Elusion Aforethought (1996). The most influential of Cox’s work, however, are those published under the pseudonym Frances Iles (taken from a distant relative) with innovative new perspectives on the genre Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932). Later, As for the Woman (1939), the first part of a proposed but uncompleted trilogy partly inspired by the Rattenbury case, was poorly received and Cox wrote no more novels. After the war he kept an interest in the detective genre as a specialist reviewer and produced monthly columns for the Sunday Times (1953–56) and the Manchester Guardian (1956–1970). He died in 1971. Clemence Dane was the pseudonym of Winifred Ashton, born in London in 1888. She studied art in London and German and had a brief career as an actress under the name Diana Cortis before the First World War. After the war she worked as teacher, and wrote her first novel, A Regiment of Women, published in 1917, which concerned a scandal in a girls’ school. She held a position on the selection panel of the Book Society and was a prolific book reviewer for Good Housekeeping. She was a prominent advocate of feminist causes; a collection of her articles on women’s issues was published as The Woman’s Side in 1926, and she was a vice-president of Lady Rhondda’s feminist Six Points Group. She was also a member of the Detection Group of mystery writers  – fellow-members included Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Hugh Walpole – and co-wrote three crime novels with Helen Simpson, the first of which, Enter Sir John (1928), was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Murder! in 1930. She was well known and recognized in her lifetime as a playwright and screenwriter. Her play, A Bill of Divorcement, was a sensation of the 1921 London theatre season and was adapted for film three times (in 1922, 1932 and 1940). The play engaged with contemporary debates concerning insanity as grounds for divorce through the dilemma of a middle-aged woman who divorces her ‘incurable’ husband only for him to recover. Many of her novels feature theatrical characters, settings and subplots; in her near-future dystopian satire on Appeasement, The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939), the scarecrow-dictator of the novel transfixes the wealthy theatrical set with his actorly charisma. Dane wrote more than 30 plays and some 15 novels, but focused on screenwriting in later years, and won an Academy Award for best original story in 1946 for Vacation from Marriage, which starred Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat. She died in 1965. E.M. Delafield was born Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture in Sussex in 1890. Her mother, Mrs Henry de la Pasture, was also a novelist, and her father was a count of French descent. She entered a convent in Belgium at the age of 21 but decided against a life in a religious order. During the First World War she worked as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment. Following her marriage in 1919 to engineer Arthur Paul Dashwood, she spent three years in Malaya before returning to England, to Kentisbeare in Devon where she raised two children and her husband worked as a land agent. Her family life in Devon would provide the inspiration for her most popular work, the Provincial Lady series, and she lived in Kentisbeare for the rest of her life. Her first novel, Zella Sees Herself, was published in 1917. She published two novels a year under the pseudonym ‘E.M. Delafield’ (the surname derived from her maiden name), until her death. She is best known for her

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bestselling and much-loved Diary of a Provincial Lady books, in which a harassed uppermiddle-class housewife, mother and aspiring author recounts her attempts to live up to social expectations in a running battle with interminable dinner parties, pretentious friends, rain-soaked picnics, uninvited relatives, mischievous children, a grumbling husband and his overbearing, aristocratic boss. The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930) was first serialized in the progressive feminist journal Time and Tide, of which Delafield was also a director. The journal is notable as the most significant periodical for women’s writing in the 1930s; among its many contributors were Storm Jameson, Vera Brittain, Ellen Wilkinson, Naomi Mitchison, Rebecca West and Winifred Holtby. The Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels The Provincial Lady Goes Further (1932), The Provincial Lady in America (1934), and The Provincial Lady in Wartime (1940) are enduring satires on well-to-do English life between the wars, and their influence may be detected in later comic novels by women, such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones series. Delafield published some thirty novels as well as several plays, numerous short stories and a travel book about Russia. She died in 1943. J. Jefferson Farjeon was born in Hampstead in 1883. His father, Benjamin, born into an orthodox Jewish family in Whitechapel had grown up into a secular man of the world as a gold miner and journalist in Australia and New Zealand and had become a prolific late Victorian novelist and playwright. His mother, Maggie Jefferson, was the daughter of an American actor, Joseph Jefferson. Joseph Jefferson Farjeon married Frances Antoinette Wood in 1910 and they had a daughter, Joan, in 1913. Farjeon was rejected for military service in the Great War and tried to make ends meet as a journalist and actor, but eventually followed in his father’s footsteps as prolific novelist and playwright. His first novel was The Master Criminal in 1924. His play No. 17 was a success in 1926, novelized in 1929 and filmed by Hitchcock in 1932. The comic central character, Ben the Tramp, lived on in sequels into the 1950s. Another character, Detective X. Crook, a reformed criminal, romped through dozens of short stories in the late 1920s. Farjeon averaged three novels a year throughout the 1930s, mostly murder mysteries and thrillers but extended his range to historical novels, children’s books and speculative fiction post-1945, including Death of a World in 1948. He died in 1955. Graham Greene was born Henry Graham Greene in 1904 to an upper middle-class family in Berkhamstead, Herts, at the boarding school where his father was headmaster and which he would later attend unhappily. He went on to study history at Oxford, briefly joined the Communist Party in 1922 and converted to Catholicism in 1926 under the influence of Vivien Dayrell-Browning who would become his wife in the following year. Greene worked at first for a regional newspaper in Nottingham before becoming a sub-editor at The Times. After the success of his first novel The Man Within in 1929 he became a full-time novelist but the next two novels (which he later repudiated) did not make money. A thriller, Stamboul Train, published in 1932 was a success and selling the film rights allowed him to continue despite less financially successful ‘serious’ novels It’s a Battlefield (1934) and England Made Me (1935). Greene tried travel writing, making a trip through Liberia that became Journey

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without Maps (1935), and visited Mexico in 1938 to investigate anti-Catholicism producing the account The Lawless Roads (1939) and the novel The Power and the Glory (1940). It was, however, the dynamic tension between genre in what he labelled ‘entertainments’ such as A Gun for Sale (1936) and The Confidential Agent (1939) and the grappling with human morality as in Brighton Rock (1938) that would ultimately define his work. During the Second World War Greene was posted by MI6 to Sierra Leone and used his time there as the basis for The Heart of the Matter (1946). He left his family in 1947 after an affair but there was no divorce. His later career followed the established pattern of visiting exotic and/or dangerous locales and writing about them as fiction. The Quiet American (1955) set in French IndoChina but foreseeing what would become the Vietnam conflict is perhaps the most insightful example. Greene based himself in France from 1966, comfortably one of the century’s most highly-regarded English novelists, and received the Order of Merit in 1986. He died of leukaemia in 1991. Harold Heslop was born into a mining family from the Durham coalfield on 1 October 1898. He attended a grammar school briefly but started work in the mines as a young teenager, joining the Durham Miners Association at 16 and going on to take elected positions; he was also active in the Independent Labour Party. Aside from a brief period of military training at the end of the First World War, he worked during these years at the Harton Colliery, South Shields. Following a successful application for a Durham Miners Association scholarship, he attended the Central Labour College in London for two years from 1924, where he was a contemporary of Lewis Jones amongst others. During this time he wrote a novel which was brought to the attention of Ivan Maisky, the Secretary to the Soviet Legation to London, who arranged for it to be published in translation in the Soviet Union as Pod Vlastu Uglya (1926; subsequently published in the UK as Goaf in 1934). It sold over half a million copies. In October 1926, Harry moved back to South Shields in time to witness the end of the miners’ strike. He returned to mining, taught classes on Marxism and Economics, and was active in the Communist-aligned Minority Movement. After 1928 he was blacklisted from the mines and returned to London. He worked in a bacon factory, then as a labourer at Waygood Otis Lifts until an accident took him four weeks to recover from and cost him the job and, finally, for a brief while swept the floor in an engineering factory; these experiences were all fictionalized in his third novel, Journey Beyond (1930). Subsequently he was unemployed for several years and began writing fiction again, as well as reviewing for the Worker, the weekly paper of the Minority Movement, which was edited by Bob Ellis. The Gate of a Strange Field (1929), which follows the experiences of Joe Tarrant from starting work as a miner, aged 14, through to the aftermath of the General Strike was well-reviewed. In November 1930, Heslop accompanied Ellis to attend the Second Plenum of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov in the Soviet Union. A psychological thriller, The Crime of Peter Ropner, was published in 1934, before Heslop returned to the mining background of his first two novels with Last Cage Down (1935). Heslop began work for Arcos, the Russian trading mission in London, and he went on to organize tours to the

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Soviet Union for Intourist during the mid-1930s. He started to have trouble getting work published but another mining novel, begun in 1936, The Earth Beneath, did eventually appear in print in 1946. Heslop, who was by now active in the Labour Party, continued to write but with no further success until his death in 1983. His autobiography, Out of the Old Earth, edited by Andy Croft and Graeme Rigby, was posthumously published in 1994. Geoffrey Household was born Edward West in 1900 in Bristol, the son of a barrister and civil servant. He studied English Literature at Magdalen College Oxford and gained a first through which he was able to gain a high-paying job in the Bank of Romania in Bucharest (1922–26). He then worked in Spain for the United Fruit Company and began to make connections in the USA, working on scripting children’s radio shows for CBS. He married Elisaveta Kopeloff in 1930 and divorced in 1939. During this period he travelled internationally selling printer’s ink and wrote his first novel, The Terror of Villadonga (1936) also known as The Spanish Cave. The contemporary thriller Rogue Male (1939) would be his most successful book and was adapted in 1941 as the film Manhunt. By this point, however, Household was back in Romania working for the Secret Service, and also worked in Greece and the Middle East. He married Ilona Zoldos-Gutman in 1942 and they had a son and two daughters. In Britain after the war he lived in the style of a country gentleman and wrote. There was an autobiography in 1958, Against the Wind and a sequel to Rogue Male, Rogue Justice (1982) partly in response to renewed popularity following from a 1976 BBC television adaptation. Household died in 1988. Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904 in Cheshire in his family home, Wybersley Hall; his privileged upbringing continued at Repton and Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he collaborated with his schoolfriend Edward Upward on a series of grotesqueries set in the imaginary village of Mortmere; these long circulated in manuscript amongst his friends, including his prep school friend and later on-off lover, W.H. Auden, with whom in the 1930s he would write a series of plays, The Dog beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936) and On the Frontier (1938). Having been sent down from Cambridge in 1925 due to writing limericks and jokes in an exam paper, he worked for a while as a private tutor and secretary before moving to Berlin in 1929; this period saw the publication of his first novel, All the Conspirators, in 1928. Weimar Berlin was a time and place in which Isherwood could be open about his homosexuality, taking various lovers; in 1932 he began a longstanding relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer, with whom he left Germany in 1933 after the Nazis’ rise to power. In 1932 he had published his second novel, The Memorial; much more successful were his novel, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and collection of connected short stories Goodbye to Berlin (1939) describing the Berlin of those years. Published together as The Berlin Stories in the USA in 1945 and giving rise to the successful play I Am a Camera (1951) and musical and film Cabaret (1966; 1972), they remain his best-known work. In 1938 Isherwood and Auden travelled to China to report on the SinoJapanese War; the result would be the co-authored Journey to a War (1939). In January 1939 the two men emigrated to the United States, much to many of their contemporaries’ consternation. Isherwood moved to Hollywood, where he became a disciple of Swami

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Prabhavananda and a committed follower of Ramakrishna Vedanta. He became a wellknown Los Angeles figure along with his partner, the painter Don Bachardy (1934–), his partner from 1953 until Isherwood’s death from prostate cancer in 1986. In his American years, Isherwood did much work writing for studios, and continued to publish novels such as Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), Down There on a Visit (1962) and A Single Man (1964), often considered his masterpiece. His 1972 autobiography, Christopher and His Kind was explicit about his homosexuality in a way that an earlier book about his life, Lions and Shadows (1938), had not been; the great majority of his fiction, however, was veiled autobiography to some extent. Storm Jameson was born Margaret Storm Jameson into a successful shipbuilding family in Whitby, Yorkshire, in 1891. She studied at the University of Leeds, and received a master’s degree from King’s College London, in 1914 with a dissertation on modern drama. She wrote prolifically and published some 45 novels as well as volumes of essays, criticism and history, and highly regarded autobiographies including Journey from the North (two volumes, 1969–70). Involved in campaigns for women’s suffrage during her student years, she continued to be politically engaged throughout her life. She was a founder member of the Peace Pledge Union, and from 1939 the president of the British Branch of International PEN, an organization devoted to the promotion of cooperation among writers worldwide and the defence of writers against political persecution. She was a contributor to Left Review, the short-lived but highly influential 1930s journal aligned with the British Section of the Writers International whose contributors also included Winifred Holtby, Naomi Mitchison and Sylvia Townsend Warner, as well as to the progressive and feminist journal Time and Tide. Her fiction often concerns the lives of women implicated in the social conflicts of their time; while typically written in a realist mode, Jameson also experimented with the modernist strategy of depicting a life in a single day in A Day Off (1933), and with dystopian and futuristic modes in In the Second Year (1936) and Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942). Her best-known works include Women Against Men (1933), Company Parade (1934), Love in Winter (1935), and None Turn Back (1936). She died in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, in 1986. Lewis Jones was born in 1897 in Clydach Vale in the Rhondda, the illegitimate child of a domestic servant, and started work in 1909 in the Cambrian Colliery of D.A. Thomas (later to become Lord Rhondda, whose daughter would be the owner and editor of Time and Tide). Married at 20 (although he was to be notoriously unconventional in life and love), Jones became the youngest ever Chair of the Cambrian Lodge before the end of the First World War. From 1923 to 1925, he attended the Central Labour College in London on a scholarship, during which time he joined the Communist Party. During the 1926 lock-out he went on a speaking tour of the Nottinghamshire coalfield which saw him prosecuted for seditious speech and imprisoned for three months. He lost his job in 1929 for refusing to work with blackleg labour and eventually became a Welsh organizer for the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) leading hunger marches to London. His first short stories appeared in the Daily Worker in 1932. In 1935, Jones was a

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delegate to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in the Soviet Union. His first novel, Cwmardy (1937), set in the local coalfield over the opening decades of the century was published by the recently formed Lawrence and Wishart. After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Jones volunteered for the International Brigades but was considered too useful a propagandist to be allowed to go. He died in January 1939 after addressing over 30 street meetings in a day. We Live, the sequel to Cwmardy, appeared posthumously later that year. Mavis Llewellyn, a local schoolteacher and Communist activist, wrote the last one and a half chapters to Jones’s plan and saw the proofs through to publication with Douglas Garman, who was working for the publisher. John Lehmann was born into a literary and artistic family in 1907 and educated at Eton and Cambridge. He began his career as writer and editor while still at university, and published his first collection of poems, A Garden Revisited, through the Hogarth Press in 1931. Lehmann’s poems appeared in both New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933), edited by Michael Roberts, which gathered together for the first time many of the young writers whose work would define the ‘literary 1930s’ in cultural memory, including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, Rex Warner and William Empson. In 1936, Lehmann established New Writing, a journal in book format, and it was here that he would conduct his most influential work as editor and champion of emerging writing. The periodical provided a venue in which many high-profile figures, such as Auden and Isherwood, could develop and experiment, but it also devoted space – through Lehmann’s considerable skills in recognizing talent and fostering creative relationships  – to international contributions from writers such as Boris Pasternak, Ignazio Silone, Rafael Alberti, Mulk Raj Anand, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre. Leftleaning but without a rigorously imposed ‘line’, the journal was one of the few seriously internationalist literary periodicals of its day. New Writing became Penguin New Writing from 1939 to 1950, and achieved a readership of 100,000 at its peak, featuring contributions from prominent post-war literary figures such as Dylan Thomas, V.S. Pritchett, Laurie Lee and John Wain; while the periodical’s internationalist outlook gave way somewhat to Anglo-American dominance, Lehmann’s earlier ideals clearly guided certain decisions, such as his support for Chinese writers including Zhang Tianyi. Lehmann was managing director of Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s Hogarth Press from 1938–46 (an experience recounted in his memoir Thrown to the Woolfs, 1978), and in 1956 established his own company, John Lehmann Limited, with his sister, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. Following the collapse of Penguin New Writing, Lehmann revived The London Magazine and ran it as editor from 1954 to 1961. He wrote biographies of Edith Sitwell, Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke, and published three volumes of autobiography, The Whispering Gallery (1955), I Am My Brother (1960) and The Ample Proposition (1966). Lehmann died in London in 1987. Ethel Mannin (1900–1984) the daughter of a Post Office letter-sorter from Clapham, who started work as a short-hand typist at the age of 15, went on to write around about a hundred books including novels, travel books, political works and volumes of

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autobiography. Working at an advertising agency during the First World War, she was given the chance to try copywriting and, following success, moved on from that to writing for and editing magazines. Married with a child by the time she was 20, she wrote romantic novelettes at a guinea per thousand words before progressing to her own novels. Sounding Brass (1926), a satire of the advertising world, was the early novel she was proudest of but all her work was financially successful. By the end of the 1920s, by which time she had left her husband and was living on her own with her daughter, she was a celebrity, known for her independence and sexual frankness as represented in Crescendo (1929), which sold over 95,000 copies, and its sequel, Ragged Banners (1931). In between, she wrote an immensely successful autobiography, Confessions and Impressions (1930), which passed through 50 impressions before being selected as an early Penguin paperback in January 1937. Subsequent volumes of autobiography and memoirs include Privileged Spectator (1939) and Young in the Twenties (1971). Her fiction changed in the 1930s, becoming more ‘sociological’, to use her own term, as novels such as Venetian Blinds (1933), Cactus (1935) and The Pure Flame (1936) drew on combinations of her workingclass upbringing and her socialist politics. Women and the Revolution (1938) is perhaps her most remarkable achievement, arguing that modernity is largely the product of the radical agency and revolutionary activity of women, which is being directly targeted by the male-supremacist forces of Fascism. Mannin joined the Independent Labour Party in 1933 and married fellow activist Reg Reynolds in 1935; both were close to George Orwell during the late 1930s and shared his views on the Communist Party’s betrayal of the Spanish Revolution but, unlike Orwell, they were to hold a pacifist position during the Second World War. She was to remain politically engaged throughout the postwar decades and was a fierce critic of colonialism and, in particular, the repressive British policies in Kenya. Mannin continued to publish frequently into the 1970s, and much of her prewar fiction remained in print until that time. Naomi Mitchison, who was born in 1897 and died in 1999, was the author of over seventy books published across eight decades and a central figure in British, especially Scottish, literary circles of the twentieth century. Initially raised and schooled with boys, she was educated at home by governesses from the age of 12 but the fact that the family lived in Oxford and were connected to the intellectual elite meant that she still gained an unusually good education for her gender at that time. In particular, a love for the classics informed a range of early historical novels from her first, The Conquered (1923), set in Roman Gaul, through The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), set in and around ancient Greece, and up to The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) set in Nero’s Rome. We Have Been Warned (1935), a dystopian account of the failure of the leftist politics of the decade to address the reality of class and gender oppression in Britain, climaxed with a violent fascist counter-revolution. From 1939, Mitchison lived at Carradale, a Scottish country estate, where she kept a wartime diary for Mass-Observation (published in 1985 as Among You Taking Notes . . .). Notable post-war works include a Scottish historical novel, The Bull Calves (1947), Travel Light (1952) and Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962). The

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sister of the eminent geneticist, J.B.S. Haldane, Mitchison was the dedicatee of James Watson’s account of his role in the discovery of the structure of DNA, The Double Helix (1968). Her later novels include two genetics-informed complex investigations of the pursuit of new ways of living in a world threatened by environmental disaster, Solution Three (1975) and Not By Bread Alone (1983). R.K. Narayan, which was the name under which Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanswami published, was born in Madras (now Chennai) in 1906. He was raised chiefly by his maternal grandmother, growing up speaking both English and Tamil at home. Upon graduating from the University of Mysore in 1930 he first tried to become a teacher like his father but found the work far from congenial and soon left it to become a professional writer. There was no tradition of Indian novelists writing in English, and the manuscript of his first novel was rejected by various publishers until by chance it happened to be shown to Graham Greene by a friend of Narayan’s, Kittu Purna, who was studying at Oxford. Greene enthusiastically recommended it to Hamish Hamilton, who published it in 1935 under the title of Swami and Friends. The book, like the vast majority of Narayan’s work, is set in the fictional South India town of Malgudi. It was followed by several short stories and fourteen further novels, amongst which The Bachelor of Arts (1937), The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) and A Tiger for Malgudi (1983). In 1956, Narayan, his reputation steadily growing, began to travel outside India, and met Greene for the first time in person. In 1980 he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament, for contributions to literature. He died in 2001. George Orwell was the pen name, adopted for the publication of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950). Born in Motihari, India, to what he would later describe as a ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ family, he grew up beside the Thames in Oxfordshire, a world he would describe in his novel Coming Up for Air (1939). After studying at Eton, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, where members of his mother’s French family lived; his experiences there would give rise to his first novel, Burmese Days (1934 USA; 1935 UK). Disillusioned with his experiences working for the British Empire, he decided to become a writer, living precariously in Paris for a period before returning to England; his time in Paris, combined with various later investigative forays from the early 1930s into the world of British tramps was written up in his first book. Besides those already mentioned, he also published two other novels in the 1930s: A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). He also published a further two important books of non-fiction: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), detailing his investigations into the socio-economic conditions of the North of England and Homage to Catalonia (1938) on his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War, in which he was severely injured. He worked chiefly for the BBC during the Second World War, a period that also saw the production of several of his most important essays. After the war, he published his two most popular and influential works, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He suffered from serious lung disease for much of his life,

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dying from it early in 1950. Since his death, his reputation has grown; he is now one of the most canonically recognizable figures of twentieth-century culture. Dorothy L[eigh] Sayers was born in 1893 in Oxford to an upper-middle-class family. Her father, a vicar, was the headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School and her mother was from a family of landed gentry. In 1912 Dorothy gained a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied modern languages and medieval literature, graduating in 1915. She published volumes of poetry in 1916 and 1918 and started work as a teacher. Early in the roaring twenties she turned to a London advertising agency for employment and stayed there until 1931. Her first detective novel, Whose Body? (1923) featured Lord Peter Wimsey, and the aristocratic detective who would be the focus of most of her work in this field. In 1926 she married war veteran Scottish journalist Oswald Atherton Fleming, known as ‘Mac’, a divorcee with two daughters. In 1924 Sayers had given birth to an illegitimate son and he was informally raised by an aunt and known as her nephew until legally adopted by Sayers and her husband in 1935. During the 1930s, Sayers’s increasingly unconventional detective novels saw Wimsey save Harriet Vane accused of murder in Strong Poison (1930), court her unsuccessfully in Have His Carcase (1932), before being finally accepted in the murderless Gaudy Night (1935). Sayers edited collections of detective short stories and knew the field and many of her contemporaries in it, contributing chapters to four collaborations between members of the Detection Club in the 1930s. A scholar of the genre, Sayers was live to its weaknesses and its classical appeal, yet her novelistic style, thematic interests, social attitudes and occasional deviations from the business of detection have made her work divisive among critics. After 1940, however, she almost entirely gave up the detective genre and focused on academic work, publishing the first third of her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell (1949), and producing a number of books expressing orthodox Anglican doctrine. She was widowed in 1950 and died suddenly in 1957, her third volume of Dante incomplete. Christopher St. John Sprigg (1907–1937) was born in Putney, South West London. His Roman Catholic father was literary editor at the Daily Express but lost his job in 1922, and relocated to Bradford, taking his family with him and Christopher out of school at the age of 15. The younger Sprigg worked for the Yorkshire Observer, and followed his older brother’s professional interest in aeronautics to the extent he wrote several books on topics ranging from the airship to British Airways and learned to fly. During this time Sprigg was also a novelist, publishing a half dozen detective novels including Crime in Kensington (1933), The Perfect Alibi (1934), The Corpse with the Sunburnt Face (1935), Death of a Queen (1935) and The Six Queer Things (1937). But in 1934 he became an engaged Marxist and began rethinking his interests in religion, science, poetry and the publishing industry through this ideological lens under the pen name Christopher Caudwell. He also wrote This My Hand (1936), a serious novel about crime under this name. Sprigg drove a vehicle to Spain in late 1936 and joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. He was trained to use a machine-gun and died at the Battle of

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the Jarama River while covering a retreat. His body was never found but the posthumously published intellectual works of Christopher Caudwell, including Illusion and Reality (1937) and Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), have become his memorial. Christina Stead was born in Sydney, Australia in 1902. Having trained for and rejected a career in teaching, she emigrated to London in 1928, determined to establish herself as a writer. She found work with the American financier and Marxist William J. Blake (formerly Blech) who became her partner and supported her work; they married in 1952. Her first novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney appeared in 1934, and concerned the lives of poor workers. Two further novels, The Beauties and Furies (1936) and House of All Nations (1938), the latter concerned with the cosmopolitan milieu of the Paris banking world, followed to some acclaim. In 1937 she and Blake moved to New York, where they moved among radical literary circles, and she wrote her best-known work, The Man Who Loved Children, a portrait of a family suffering under the overbearing idealism of a father, which was published in 1940. Little remarked at the time, it has found critical acclaim in more recent decades. Stead was a committed Marxist (though not a card-carrying communist), and political pressures led her and her husband to leave the USA in 1946 as anticommunist fervour began to take hold. They maintained an itinerant and impoverished existence in Europe before settling in London in 1952. Her post-war novels such as Cotter’s England (1966), The Puzzleheaded Girl (1967), Miss Herbert (1976) and The Little Hotel (1973) received little critical notice, although after her death her novels, especially The Man Who Loved Children, have acquired a significant reputation, not least among fellow novelists; Jonathan Franzen and Angela Carter are among her admirers. After the death of her husband in 1968 she returned to Australia, where she died in 1983. Rex Warner, born Reginald Ernest Warner in 1905, was for much of his life most recognized as a classicist, teaching at Bowdoin College from 1962 to 1963 and the University of Connecticut from 1964 to 1974, and publishing important translations of St Augustine, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Euripides, amongst others, as well as of the Modern Greek poet George Seferis. He also published a series of works of fiction – e.g. Young Caesar (1958), Imperial Caesar (1960 winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction), Pericles the Athenian (1963) – and non-fiction on the Classical world from the mid-1950s onwards. His reputation as a novelist, however, rests on three important novels from the late 1930s and early 1940s written after he came down from Oxford, where he had been a member of the same social circles as W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day-Lewis, and spent time in various teaching positions in England and Egypt: The Wild Goose Chase (1937), a curious dystopian fantasy and Kafkaesque allegory; The Professor (1938), a more realist book exploring traditional liberalism’s predicament in an increasingly totalitarian world; and The Aerodrome (1941), his most acclaimed novel, another dystopian work. Warner died in 1986. Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903 to a literary family; his father Arthur was the managing director of Chapman & Hall and his brother Alec (1898–1981) was the author of The

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Loom of Youth (1917), a succès de scandale due to its discussion of homosexuality in public schools. Evelyn was educated at Lancing College and Hertford College, Oxford, where he became part of various influential social circles and left without a degree. Whilst working as schoolmaster and trying to settle on a career he worked on his first novel, the black comedy Decline and Fall (1928). This was a great success, and the money earned therefrom allowed him to marry the Hon. Evelyn Gardner, one of the Bright Young Things whom he would satirize in his second novel, Vile Bodies (1930), which darkens notably as it progresses, partially due to its being written as his marriage broke down and ended in divorce. In 1930, Waugh also converted to Catholicism, which would become increasingly important in his life. The 1930s saw Waugh travelling and working as a journalist, particularly in Abyssinia and British Guiana, out of which came both novels – Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1938)  – and travel books. He remarried in 1937. In the Second World War he served in the Royal Marines, in various theatres of operation but with little glory. In 1944 he took unpaid leave during which he wrote Brideshead Revisited; this would be published in 1945 to great acclaim. He continued writing after the war, including a novel fictionalizing an episode of mental illness that he had due to bromide poisoning, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), and an important trilogy of novels coming out of his experiences in the Second World War: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961); these were published as a single, revised, work in 1965 as The Sword of Honour Trilogy. He died in 1966, having for most of the post-war period been an exaggeratedly reactionary figure: how much of this was a self-caricaturing public persona is still debated.

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Index Abyssinia 183, 196–200, 196 n.18, 297 Italian invasion of 216, 282 Ackerley, J.R. 175–176, 179 My Father and Myself (1968) 11, 157, 175–176, 177 Ackland, Valentine 158–162, 179, 283 Country Conditions (1936) 10, 156, 158–161 Ambler, Eric 12, 240, 259, 263–267, 268, 283–284 Anand, Mulk Raj 4, 10, 142, 144–147, 150, 284, 292 Angus, Ian 191 Ashleigh, Charles 26 Ashton, Winifred see Dane, Clemence Asia, South 10, 126, 141–142, 185 ‘Auden generation’, ‘Auden group’ 2–4, 8, 17, 53, 156, 171 Auden, W.H. 8, 157, 162, 171, 240–241, 285, 290, 292, 296 ‘Detective Story’ (1936) 8 ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1937) 201 Letters from Iceland (1937) 8, 201 Poems (1928) 201 ‘September 1st, 1939’ (1939) 3 ‘Spain’ (1937) 189 The Dog beneath the Skin (1936) 165, 290 ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ (1948) 8, 240–241 Austen, Jane 46 Australia 10, 39, 39 n.3, 124–145, 128–136, 139, 147–149, 250, 279, 285, 288, 296 Baird, Irene 10, 139–140, 147 Barke, James 4 Barthes, Roland 22, 241 BBC 115, 190, 280, 284, 290, 294 Ben the Tramp see Farjeon, J. Jefferson Benton, Jill 45 Bell, David 30

Bergonzi, Bernard 4 Reading the Thirties (1978) 3 Beveridge, William 43, 52 bisexuality 163–164, 175–176 Blair, Eric etc. see Orwell, George Bluemel, Kristin 5, 19 Intermodernism (2009) 5 ‘bodyline’ 39, 39 n.3, 279 Brexit 22 Brierley, Walter 29 Means Test Man (1935) 23 Sandwichman (1937) 29 British Empire viii, 10, 21, 52, 53, 63, 123–151, 185, 294 British Union of Fascists (BUF) 21, 63–64, 67, 279 Bulldog Drummond, Bull-dog Drummond 12, 260–261, 264, 267 Burdekin, Katharine 80, 155, 156, 165, 179, 285–286 Proud Man (1934) 170–171, 285, 286 Swastika Night (1937) 4, 9, 59, 64–65, 165, 166, 168, 285, 286 The End of This Day’s Business (1989) 11, 165–170, 286 Burma 139, 185 n.5, 185–190, 186 n.6, 196, 198, 201–202, 294 Burnham, James 167–168 Calder, Angus 20 The Myth of the Blitz 20 The People’s War 20 Canada 10, 124–125, 128, 130, 132, 136–141, 147, 148–149 Carnie Holdsworth, Ethel 35 This Slavery (1924–25) 32 Central Labour College 25, 47, 289, 291 Clark, J.B. 191 Charteris, Charlotte 5

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300 Christie, Agatha 12, 242–246, 247, 248, 251–252, 254, 255–259, 260, 286, 287 The ABC Murders (1936) 12, 245, 247 The Mousetrap (1952) 12, 248, 286 chrononormativity 156, 179 ‘class against class’ 26 Cold War vii, 3, 6 Cole, G.D.H. 52, 97 Comintern 26, 48, 62, 67, 282 Seventh World Congress (1935) 48 commitment 1, 3–6, 17, 71, 97, 132, 158–161, 164, 296 Common, Jack 23 communism 22, 26–27, 30, 34, 39, 42–43, 45, 47, 48, 50, 53, 60, 62, 76, 82, 94, 115, 135, 156, 158, 159, 161, 166–167, 284, 285, 289, 291, 296 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 22, 38, 39, 43, 53, 132, 158, 283, 285, 288, 291, 293 Connor, John 26, 38, 39 Conservative Party 20, 21, 22, 50, 112 Croft, Andy 26, 35, 38, 39, 60, 65, 165, 290 Red Letter Days (1990) 4, 29 Crossman, Richard The God that Failed (1948) 3 Cunningham, Valentine 164 British Writers of the Thirties (1988) 4 Daily Express 195, 196–197, 199–200, 295 Daily Mail 194 Daily Worker 26, 49, 291 Dane, Clemence 81, 83–85, 86, 287 The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939) 59, 72–80, 83–85, 86, 287 Davies, Margaret Llewelyn Life as We Have Known It 19 Davison, Peter 186, 192, 193 Delafield, E.M. 11, 212, 218, 287–288 Denning, Michael 174, 178, 260, 261, 265 detective fiction 7–8, 12, 239–259, 242 n.1, 259, 260, 263, 265–266, 266, 268, 285–288, 295 Dimitrov, Georgi 48, 67 documentary 20, 156–164, 177–179 Driberg, Tom 195 n.16 dystopia 4, 64, 114, 155, 156, 164–171, 287, 291, 293, 296

Index Eco, Umberto 184 n.1 Lector in fabula (1979) 184 n.1 Edgerton, David 20–21, 52 The Rise and Fall of the British Nation 20 Empson, William 22, 292 Some Versions of Pastoral 22 Engels, Friedrich 166–167 England 9, 21, 23, 32, 34, 39, 41, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 54, 59–87, 126, 128–129, 130, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 150, 158, 170, 265, 267, 279, 284, 285, 287, 294, 296 Esty, Jed 5 Ethiopia see Abyssinia Eugenics Society 10, 91–120 EU referendum (2016) 22 Fact (journal) 157 Farjeon, F. Jefferson 12, 246–249, 257, 260 Mystery in White (1937) 12, 248 The Z Murders (1932) 12, 246–247 fascism 1, 9, 10, 17, 34, 39, 40, 46, 59–87, 124, 133, 156, 164, 166, 260, 268, 282, 293 Feigel, Lara 4 Ferrall, Charles 35 Writing the 1926 General Strike (2015) 48 Feminist Press 4, 165, 286 film 5, 68, 171, 174, 211, 223, 244, 246, 252, 259, 260, 262, 266, 284, 286, 287, 288, 290 ‘First Media Age’ 4 ‘First New Left’ 3 n.1 First World War viii, 36, 37, 41, 53, 63, 73, 81, 86, 210, 212, 285, 287, 289, 291, 293 Fleming, Ian 156, 171, 174 Forster, E. M. 147, 155, 284 A Passage to India (1924) 190 Foucault, Michel 184, 201 ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ (1969) 184 ‘four nations’ 5 Freeman, Elizabeth 156, 179 Time Binds (2010) 155–156 Freud, Sigmund 25, 61, 71, 83, 166, 169, 170

Index Galsworthy, John 24 Garman, Douglas 48–49, 292 gender 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 19, 23, 24, 25, 29, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 46, 48, 51, 53, 78, 85, 98, 144, 148, 162, 166–171, 176, 241, 285, 293 General Strike (1926) 29–30, 32, 44, 132, 261, 289 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 19, 39 n.4, 50 A Scots Quair (1932–34) 23, 37, 39, 39 n.4, 50 Grey Granite (1934) 39 Goldman, Emma 42 Goldring, Douglas 33, 34–35 Gollancz, Victor 103, 107–108, 186 Great Depression 7, 18, 21, 124, 216, 240, 249, 261 Greene, Graham 12, 147, 261–263, 288–289, 294 Greenwood, Walter 32–33, 35 Love on the Dole 23, 32, 37 The Cleft Stick 32 Haile Selassie I (Ras Tafari Makonnen) 196 Hall, Radclyffe The Well of Loneliness 24, 155 Hammill, Faye 4 n.2 Hanley, James 23 Herbert, Xavier 10, 125, 131, 132, 133–136, 147, 150 Heslop, Harold 9, 18, 23–32, 35–36, 38–40, 44, 46–49, 53–54, 289–290 Goaf (1934) 25, 289 Journey Beyond (1930) 30–31, 35, 47, 289 Last Cage Down (1935) 17, 23–24, 26, 38–39, 46–47, 49, 53, 289 The Gate to a Strange Field (1929) 25–30, 31–32, 38–39, 289 Hilliard, Christopher 4, 18 Hitchcock, Alfred 253, 259, 284, 287, 288 Number Seventeen (1932) 12, 246 Holtby, Winifred 35, 44, 103, 165, 288, 291 homosexuality 155, 162–164, 169, 171, 174, 176, 290–291, 297 Hopkins, Chris 33 ‘How To Acquire Culture’ 11–12, 207–233

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Hubble, Nick 111 Humble, Nicola 4 n.2, 219, 221–223 Huxley, Aldous 24, 164 Hynes, Samuel The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (1976) 3 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 26, 29, 36, 289, 293 intermodernism 19 International Literature 26, 30 Irish Free State 46, 124, 130, 132 Isherwood, Christopher 68, 155, 162, 171, 176, 177, 290–291, 292 Berlin Stories (1945) 10, 156, 157, 162–164, 172, 177, 290 Christopher and His Kind (1976) 11, 156, 177, 291 Goodbye to Berlin (1939) see Berlin Stories (1945) Lions and Shadows (1938) 177, 291 Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) see Berlin Stories (1945) The Dog beneath the Skin (1936) 165, 290 Jameson, Storm 4, 35, 73, 75, 77–80, 81–84, 86, 157, 288, 291 Company Parade (1934) 18, 291 In the Second Year (1936) 9, 59, 65–72, 75, 81, 84, 165, 291 No Victory for the Soldier (1938) 61–62 Jaques, Eleanor 193 n.13 Joannou, Mary 4, 92 Johnstone, Richard The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen-Thirties (1982) 3 Jones, Lewis 9, 47–51, 53, 54, 289, 291–292 Cwmardy 17, 47–51, 292 We Live 17, 47–48, 292 Joyce, James 27 Ulysses (1922) 27 Kermode, Frank History and Value (1988) 4 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967) vii

302 Kisch, Egon Erwin 159 Klaus, H. Gustav 4 Koestler, Arthur 3 Kohlmann, Benjamin 6, 18 The Cambridge History of 1930s Literature (2019) 6 Larkin, Emma Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Tea Shop (2004) 185 Labour Party 21–22, 30, 37, 39, 44, 96, 97–98, 116, 159, 160, 279, 280, 290 Lawrence & Wishart 17, 48–50, 158, 283, 292 Lawrence, D.H. 24–25, 29, 132 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 23, 24–25, 155, 174 Leavis, F.R. 24–25, 226–227, 231 Culture and Environment (1933) 12, 208, 226–227 The Great Tradition (1967) 226 Leavis, Q.D. 108, 113, 116, 118, 224, 226, 240 Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) 224, 240 Left Book Club 25, 165, 194, 279, 285 Left Review 26, 45, 114, 158, 161, 283, 291 Lehmann, John 3, 162, 164, 174, 177, 179, 292 Evil Was Abroad (1938) 157, 162, 174 In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976) 11, 156, 171, 174–175, 177, 178 Lehmann, Rosamond 4, 285 Lewis, Jane 43 Le Progrès civique 187 Llewellyn, Mavis 48–49, 292 Lodge, David 188, 191–192 The Modes of Modern Writing 188, 191 ‘long 1930s’ 3, 8, 11, 17, 20–22, 23, 53, 54, 156 Lukács, Georg 159 McKibbin, Ross 21 Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 21 MacNeice, Louis Letters from Iceland (1937) 201

Index McNeil, H.C. 12, 260 McNeill, Dougal Writing the 1926 General Strike (2015) 48 Mann Auden, Erika 8 Mannin, Ethel 9, 18, 23, 23–25, 32–38, 39, 40, 40–44, 45–46, 53–54, 292–293 Bruised Wings and Other Stories (1931) 33 Cactus (1935) 37 Confessions and Impressions (1930) 25, 33, 34–35 Crescendo (1929) 33 Privileged Spectator (1939) 25 Ragged Banners (1931) 33–34, 37 The Pure Flame (1936) 35, 36–37 Venetian Blinds (1933) 35, 37 Women and the Revolution (1938) 9, 40–44 Young in the Twenties (1971) 24 Mansfield, Katherine 19 mass media 5, 78 Mass Observation 51, 60–61, 68, 157, 280, 293 Mass Observation Archive 5 Maugham, W. Somerset 171–175, 201 Ashenden, Or the British Agent (1928) 11, 156, 171–175, 263 On a Chinese Screen (1922) 201 The Painted Veil (1926) 201 Mellor, Leo 5, 17–20, 22, 52 ‘middlebrow’ 4, 4 n.2, 11–12, 137, 207–234 Middlebrow Research Network 4 n.2 Miller, Tyrus 5 Mitchison, Dick 52, 97 Mitchison, Naomi 4, 10, 44–46, 50, 51–54, 60, 91–120, 288, 291, 293–294 Among You Taking Notes . . . (1985) 51–52, 293 The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) 17, 44, 99, 101–102, 113, 119, 293 The Moral Basis of Politics (1938) 9, 44, 45–46, 101, 114, 117 We Have Been Warned (1935) 10, 23, 45–46, 107–118, 119, 293

Index modernism 2, 5, 8, 18–20, 27, 53, 64, 135, 157, 179, 201, 209, 220, 258, 291 modernism, late 5 Montefiore, Janet 4 Myanmar see Burma Narayan, R.K. 10, 142, 146, 147, 150, 294 National Government 22, 103, 279 Nazism, Nazis 40–41, 61, 64, 65, 75, 79, 92, 162, 165, 168, 265, 266, 280, 281, 285, 290 New Leader 36 ‘New Left’ 3 New Modernist Studies 5, 18–19, 53 non-fiction 11, 40, 123, 183–203, 250, 262, 294, 296 Orwell, George 3, 6–7, 10, 11, 23, 39, 42, 70, 73, 78, 156, 157–158, 160–162, 165, 168, 183, 185–194, 186 n.7, 196, 198–201, 284, 293, 294–295 A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) 183, 294 ‘A Hanging’ (1931) 185, 187–188, 191–192 ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (1940) 7 Burmese Days (1934) 185–192, 201–202, 294 Coming Up for Air (1939) 294 ‘Comment on exploite un peuple: L’Empire britannique en Birmanie’ (1929) 187, 192 ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ (1946) 7 Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) 183, 186, 188–189, 189 n.12, 294 Homage to Catalonia (1938) 42, 294 ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940) 189 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) 6–7, 294 La Vache enragée (1935) 186 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) 165, 294 ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’ (1944) 7 ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936) 185 The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968) 191–192

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The Complete Works of George Orwell 191–192 The Lion and the Unicorn 23, 73 The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) 10, 156, 158, 160–162, 188, 192, 194, 294 Orwell, Sonia 191 Passing Show 194 Patai, Daphne 4, 165, 286 Plaid Cymru 51 Popular Front vii, 1, 10, 26, 39, 48–50, 53, 67, 263, 265, 282 proletarian literature vii, 2, 17, 19, 22–23, 39–40 queer theory 5 Rao, Raja 10, 142, 146 Ras Tafari Makonnen (Haile Selassie I) 196 Rendell, R.A. 190 Roberts, Kate 35, 51 Traed Mewn Cyffion (1935; trans Feet in Chains) 51 Rossen, Janice 4 Salton-Cox, Glyn 5, 11, 17–20, 22, 34 n.2, 52 Samuel, Raphael 22 Sayers, Dorothy L. 12, 239, 242, 242 n.1, 251–252, 287, 295 Scotland 46, 50, 52, 54, 117–118 Second World War vii, 1, 17, 21, 42, 43, 50, 51, 127, 207, 214, 217, 282, 284, 286, 289, 293, 295, 297 Shakespeare, William 23, 201, 201 n.23 Simons, Judy 4 Skelton, Robin 2 Poetry of the Thirties (1964) 2 Smith, Lady Eleanor 195 n.17 Smith, James Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s (2019) 6 Solanas, Valerie 170–171 SCUM Manifesto (1967) 156, 170–171 Sommerfield, John 4, 19 May Day 17, 23, 37

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Soviet Union 25, 28, 42, 45, 114, 116, 161, 168, 179, 265, 281, 289–290, 292 Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956) 3 Spender, Stephen 3, 155, 157, 176–177, 178, 292, 296 World within World (1951) 11, 176–177 Stead, Christina 10, 131, 133, 135–136, 147, 150, 296 Stewart, Victoria 8 Sunday Dispatch 195 Taunton, Matthew 18 The Cambridge History of 1930s Literature (2019) 6 Taylor, A.J.P. English History 20 Taylor, Elinor 9, 48–49 ‘The Man Who Sees’ 11–12, 207–233 The Times 112, 196–197, 199–200, 288 Third Period 26, 39, 49, 53 Thompson, Denys 226–227 Culture and Environment (1933) 12, 208, 226–227 Thompson, E.P. ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’ (1957) 3 n.1 thriller 12, 131, 171, 174, 239, 240, 246, 254, 257, 259–268, 283, 288, 289, 290 Townsend Warner, Sylvia 4, 111, 158–160, 162, 283, 291 Trotter, David 4 Victor Gollancz 185–186 Wark, McKenzie 39–40 Molecular Red (2015) 39–40 Warner, Michael 175 Warner, Rex 80–86, 164, 292, 296 The Aerodome (1941) 9, 59, 80–86

Waugh, Evelyn 11, 24, 183, 192–203, 211, 225, 296–297 A Handful of Dust (1934) 11, 193, 195 Black Mischief (1932) 11, 183, 193, 195, 200, 202, 297 Labels: A Mediterranean Journey (1930) 195 Ninety-Two Days (1934) 11, 193 Remote People (1931) 11, 183, 193, 195–200 Scoop (1938) 11, 193, 194, 297 The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh 193–194 Vile Bodies (1930) 297 Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) 11, 193, 194 Weimar Germany 162, 290 welfare state vii, 1, 2, 17, 20–22, 43, 52 Wells, H.G. ‘In the Country of the Blind’ 33 West, Alick 27–29 Crisis and Criticism (1937) 27 Wilkinson, Ellen 32, 35, 288 Clash (1929) 32 Williams, Keith 4 Williams, Raymond 52, 184 Culture and Society (1958) 3 n.1 Keywords (1976) 184 Williams, Rushbrook 190 Wintringham, Tom 45, 114, 158 Woman’s Weekly 11–12, 207–233 Woolf, Virginia 19, 27, 44, 53, 177, 218, 220, 284, 292 Introductory letter to Life as We Have Known It 19 working-class writers 2, 4, 18, 26, 29, 32, 33, 36–37, 54, 149 Worsley, T.C. 178–179 Fellow Travellers (1971) 157, 178–179

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