Stalinism and literary culture

["Steve Painter and Rose McCann" <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stalinism and literary culture, particularly in Australia

By Bob Gould

A while back on Marxmail Dave Riley, a DSP old hand from Brisbane, posted an
interesting piece in which he criticised Trotsky's views on literature
because Trotsky didn't, in his view, make a serious or sympathetic study of
Stalinist socialist realism in literature. I reject Riley's view on these
literary questions, and I find it difficult to understand how he could have
arrived at them from any assessment of the experience of left-wing literary
culture in Australia, which is long and complex.

Firstly, Trotsky's general view, expressed in Literature and Revolution and
in the other collection of essays published by Pathfinder, generally stands
the test of time.

Secondly, the struggle in the 1930s and 1940s of the Marxist writers,
intellectuals and others against the Stalinist current in Western literature
and in favour of complexity, diversity and modernism, was a necessary one.

In my piece arguing with Keith Windschuttle
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Windschuttle.html, I list a large
number of the books written about these intellectual upheavals, especially
in the US, in the 1930s and 1940s, but I would rely particularly on the work
of Alan Wald, especially his book on James T. Farrell, and his very
important book The New York Intellectuals.

In general, I stand with James T. Farrell and the more left-wing of the New
York intellectuals against the Stalinist literary culture of the 1930s and
1940s, with which I am fairly familiar, because this Stalinist literary
culture was very influential in the left wing of the labour movement in
Australia, and a number of Australian writers became part of this Stalinist
literary culture, and they produced an indigenous Australian version of it.

Some of the Communist literary critics of the 1930s, such as Christopher
Caudwell and Ralph Fox, produced works of great value, but their work of
value is actually contradictory to the main thrust of Stalinist Social
Realism. Most of the literature of Stalinist Social Realism published in the
Stalin period in the USSR is bizarre rubbish, and most novels written in the
West under the influence of this Stalinist school, with its constant upbeat
emphasis on "positive heroes", are also pretty worthless.

The theorising of this school is culturally sterile. I've just dug out the
classic Western statement of Social Realism, published in Australia by
Current Books in 1952, Howard Fast's Literature and Reality. This book,
along with the cultural criticism of another American, V.J. Jerome,
circulated widely in Australia in Communist Party cultural circles, which
were important in Australian cultural life.

Three or four years later, Howard Fast was among those who broke with
Stalinism after the 20th Congress and Hungary, and his book about the
Communist Party and writers, The Naked God, is of some interest in getting
an insight into the internal dynamics of Socialist Realism.

Some novels produced by Communists in English-speaking countries were of
considerable literary and working-class interest and value. Stefan Heym's
Goldsborough, about a strike; and Alexander Saxton's The Great Midland, are
both novels that shrug aside the worst aspects of Stalinist Social Realism
to produce something that's useful, exciting and readable.

That can't be said for most of the literature of this genre. The engagement
of Australian writers with the Communist movement and Stalinism was
contradictory and complex. For a start, four left-wing women writers stood
out in the 1930s and 1940s, and Drusilla Modjeska wrote a useful book about
the four of them. They were Katherine Susannah Pritchard (who remained a
Stalinist until she died), Kylie Tennant, Jean Devanny and Eleanor Dark.

Dark was a kind of leftist fellow traveller of the CP, who wrote careful
novels of Australian life and history. Kylie Tennant was the most
interesting and useful. She was a critical left Social Democrat who fell
foul of the CP, but her two political novels, Ride On Stranger and Foveaux
and her autobiography, The Missing Heir, are an indispensable picture of the
left of the labour movement in the 1930s.

The fourth of these novelists was Jean Devanny, a very good writer, not
particularly Social Realist, who was a devoted CP militant who fell foul of
the apparatus, was expelled and later rejoined. She actually wrote two
versions of an autobiography about her encounter with the Communist Party,
which weren't published until after her death.

The Queensland former ISO academic, the redoubtable Carol Ferrier, has made
a veritable small industry out of studying the life of Devanny, in a useful
and creative way, researching and publishing Devanny's autobiography. Carole
Ferrier has written and published the major biography of Jean Devanny. All
Carole Ferrier's work on Devanny illuminates and underlines the real
conflicts that existed between creative writing and Stalinism.

The Stalinist literary culture in Australia was expressed in the foundation
of the magazine Overland and the Realist Writers Groups in a number of
cities and the long-lived activity of the "New Theatres" in the arena of
drama.

Many Australian left-wing wirters, playwrights, actors, musicians and
historians were involved in this general leftist political culture, heavily
influenced by Stalinism. There was constant conflict in these circles,
particularly over the concept of Stalinist Social Realism. A large number of
important Australian writers emerged in these circles: Frank Hardy, Eric
Lambert, Dorothy Hewett, the four female writers I've already mentioned,
John Morrison, Judah Waten, Oriel Gray, Bernard Smith (Australia's foremost
art critic) and a great many others.

Many of these people became enormously influential in Australian cultural
life. Only a few of them, in their maturity, could be grouped within the
framework of "Social Realism", mainly Judah Waten, John Morrison and Dorothy
Hewett and Frank Hardy in their earlier phases. All these people were pretty
good writers, and even their Social Realist writings generally transcended
the bounds set by the "positive hero" notion. Their actual key characters,
including their key communist characters, tended to be human beings, warts
and all.

I was a very young, callow, neophyte of some of these writers, most of whom
are now dead, as a member of the Sydney Realist Writers' Group in the
mid-1950s.

I never got to be much of a creative writer at that point in life because
political agitation took over and consumed my life and most of what I've
written subsequently has been agitational and ideological journalism rather
than creative writing, although at a late age I may try my hand at the novel
we've all got in the back of our heads.

Most of these writers privately laughed in despair at the Stalinist model of
Social Realism. The history of their creative conflicts with each other and
with the political movement of Stalinism as it evolved is of enormous
intrinsic interest.

The three most successful Communist novelists were Eric Lambert, Frank Hardy
and Dorothy Hewett. There was a certain rivalry between Lambert and Hardy,
because they both had early literary successes. Lambert wrote the classic
Australian novel of the Second World War, The Twenty Thousand Theives, a
Rabellasian book about army life, which was a runaway best-seller because of
the way it captured the life of soldiers in the Australian army, and many of
them bought the book.

It had something in common with the later book Catch 22, by Joseph Heller.
It was hardly Stalinist Social Realism because it was so irreverent and the
people in it weren't exactly "positive heroes". Privately the Stalinist
leaders hated it. In 1956 Lambert happened to be in London at the time of
the Hungarian uprising. He rushed to Hungary, witnessed the uprising and
sent back moving and angry reports on the events to Tribune, the CPA paper.

They were angrily rejected by Tribune, so Lambert then sent them to the
bourgeois tabloid, The Telegraph, which published them. Lambert was drummed
out of the Stalinist movement very summarily, with Frank Hardy leading the
charge among the writers.

Lambert stayed in Britain, wrote some more novels, and died young in the
1960s. His life has been movingly described by his longtime friend Zoe O'
Leary, in a short biography, A Desolate Market.

Frank Hardy was the mega-success of all Australian Communist writers. His
first book, Power Without Glory, was a long, rambling, slightly disjointed
book written by committee, so to speak, with the primary political aim of
exposing the Grouper Catholic Action movement in the ALP, and Hardy
contributed his talents in the form of a great grab-bag of sporting,
political and other gossip and anecdote.

Despite its literary defects, this sprawling book captured the atmosphere of
working class life over a whole period and came at a time when the issues
under discussion were reaching a climax in the labour movement.

Power Without Glory became the all-time best-seller for an Australian
political novel, and still finds a wide readership. Hardy then wrote a
really bad travelogue about the Soviet Union in 1952, called A Journey Into
the Future, which people who want to get a taste of high-Stalinist literary
culture should study carefully.

Hardy then had a certain amount of writer's block, but later started writing
books of yarns about Australian life and he showed an enormous talent for
this kind of semi-journalist writing, and his yarning became very popular,
and he became a television personality with his yarns as the cultural
barriers of the Cold War disintegrated in the 1960s. Not very Social
Realist, really.

In the mid-1960s he went to the Soviet Union again, and his outlook began to
change. He returned to Australia at about the time of the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia, took a strong stand against the invasion, and wrote a very
moving and useful piece of journalism, The Heirs of Stalin, based on his
experiences in the USSR.

His transition to an opponent of Stalinism caused enormous conflict in the
CPA because those who were still pro-Stalinist resented his point of view
but he had enormous authority among the working class activists around the
party, so his shift became the psychological breaking point for many
Australian Communists, for which the pro-Stalinists never forgave him.

He took up the cause of Aboriginal rights and wrote a major piece of
journalism, The Unlucky Australians about the Gurindji land rights struggle.

Finally, in 1975 he wrote the extraordinary novel of life and political
experience in the Communist movement (But the Dead Are Many). His literary
device in this novel, "the fugue" is a bit awkward, but the novel, despite
this is the classic literary exploration of Communism and Stalinism in the
workers movement in the English-speaking world.

It's an incomparably useful book for anyone who wants to understand the
political, social, human and cultural atmosphere in the Stalinist movement
in the mid-20th century, and it stands the test of time.

The paradox is, that Hardy, who started out as the classic party writer and
who savaged his old colleague Lambert in 1956, ultimately came on the basis
of his won experiences to similar views to Lambert, and one hopes they've
made friends again somewhere in the Marxist Valhalla.

Hardy had many sins, he was a gambler, womaniser, not very good with money,
and he was an occasional plagiarist, all of which is spelled out in some
detail in a rather useful if somewhat bitter biography of him by the late
Pauline Marshall, but nevertheless the boundaries of his work from Power
Without Glory and the Load of Wood, to The Heirs of Stalin, The Unlucky
Australians and But the Dead are Many, outline the experience of Communism
and Stalinism in Australia in the 20th century.

In the mid-1950s, the Realist Writers Groups and other left writers founded
a magazine called Overland ("temper democratic, bias Australian"). After the
CPA crisis among intellectuals in 1956, when the historian Ian Turner and
Steven Murray Smith among other intellectuals left the CPA, Murray Smith who
was the editor of Overland managed to spirit it away from the hands of the
CPA, which caused outrage in CP circles.

Under Murray Smith's editorship it evolved into a solidly left of centre
journal of literature, history and politics and it still exists to this day
and plays a useful role culturally and politically for a quarterly magazine.

Ian Turner went on to write a number of useful books of Australian labour
and cultural history. Dorothy Hewett, the author of the classic Australian
Social Realist novel, Bobbin Up, went on to become a major playwright and
poet, breaking with Stalinism in the late 1960s. The first volume of her
autobiography (one hopes the second is in publishable form, because she died
recently) is another classic description of the encounter between creative
writers and Stalinism.

In  a recent issue of Overland, possibly conscious of her own impending
death, she wrote a most moving tribute to the generation of Communist
intellectuals, of which she was one of the younger members.

All I've just written seems to me to indicate the complexity and
contradictions involved in too rosy a view of Stalinist Social Realism, as
Dave Riley seems to have, or a too mundane view that Stalinism is now a
remote historical question, as Louis Proyect seems to think.

THE SOCIALIST POLITICAL NOVEL: The novels that interest me because of how
they illuminate the history of the socialist project

I'd nominate firstly, all the writers I've mentioned in this piece. In
addition to that I've always liked the novels of the anarcho-syndicalist, B.
Traven. The whole oeuvre of Victor Serge is of indispensable historical
importance to capture the atmosphere of the Russian Revolution in its
periods of both upsurge and Stalinist counter-revolution. The Case of
Comrade Tulayev is the classic novel of the purges, and could be turned into
an extraordinary film by someone like Ken Loach if the necessary funds could
be found.

Loach's classic film, Land and Freedom, based loosely on Orwell's Homage to
Catalonia, has done a great deal to demystify the Spanish Revolution.

There are also a number of serious novels of Communist, socialist and
Trotskyist experience. Clancy Sigal's Going Away, Harvey Swados's Standing
Fast, Doris Lessing's Central African novels and her incomparable feminist
book, The Golden Notebook, which has a powerful political aspect.
Unfortunately, the Trotskyist movement hasn't yet produced any classic
novels of its experience, other than Standing Fast.

However, there are two pieces of rather brilliant satire, one the Canadian
Earl Birnie's book Down the Long Table (with its classic split scene in the
room behind Halloran's grocery in Vancouver) and Tariq Ali's caustic but
extremely entertaining novel, Redemption.

Maybe Richard Fiddler, Jose Perez, and Barry Sheppard might get together and
write a novel about the US SWP. I'm told on the grapevine that Bryan Palmer
is writing a biography of James P. Cannon, and the sooner he finishes it,
and it's published the better, and Palmer is the right person to do a
sympathetic and useful biography of Cannon. There's a lot more useful work
to be done on our history and experiences, and of necessity some of it
should be done by way of the novel.

As an integral part of my bookselling activities I keep a list of about 550
books of Australian labour movement, world labour movement and Marxist
interest in print, so to speak. These are mostly books that I've initially
bought as remainders and are now out of print everywhere else. This
catalogue is too large to post on Marxmail but anyone interested can contact
me by snailmail at Gould's Book Arcade, 32 King Street, Newtown 2042,
Sydney, Australia, and I'll send them that catalogue free.


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