Looking Back on the 1930s without Being Anti-Communist:
Cornford, Orwell, Spender, Sommerfield
Nick Hubble (Brunel University)
The interwar literary and cultural politics of Britain were shaped crucially by the influence
of the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Communist Party. Without their
presence there would have been no ‘Auden generation’, no Popular Front and Britain might
not even have participated in the Second World War. However, the centrality of
Communism to the period’s significance raises a problem for the academic study of the
literary and cultural politics of the 1930s and the Popular Front. The advent of the Cold War
from the late 1940s onwards created an environment in which Communism and Communist
cultural politics were coded as mistaken at best and hostile at worst. As a consequence, the
study of the more neutral and abstract forms of high modernism flourished. When interest in
the literature of the 1930s began to rise in the 1970s and 1980s, it was often centralised
around figures who were seen as anti-Communist either because they had been critics, like
George Orwell, of the Party at the time or because they had, like Stephen Spender, publicly
recanted from their support from Communism.1 As the threat of Communism receded
towards the end of the 1980s, more comprehensive studies of the 1930s began to appear and,
following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these were supplemented by a number
of works that focused on directly Communist-influenced areas such as socialist realism and
proletarian literature, which had hitherto been marginalised in the study of the decade.2
However, these works have not led the way to a field of study in its own right for the simple
reason that it is extremely difficult to think positively of Communism from the perspective
of the twenty-first century. The history that has become public since the collapse of the
Soviet Block has served to reinforce its Cold War equation with conformist repression. In
the popular imagination, Communism has become indelibly associated with the brutal,
totalitarian and genocidal politics that characterised the Stalinist period of 1927–53. It was a
combination of delayed disgust at this period, legitimised by Khrushchev’s denunciation of
Stalin’s personality cult in February 1956, and dismay at the Soviet Union’s military
suppression of the Hungarian Uprising later that year, that led to the exodus of literary and
other intellectuals, who had been key participants in interwar cultural constellations, from
the Western Communist Parties and marked the beginning of the movement’s decline in
influence. While plenty of historical nuance can be added to this brief account, it seems
1
extremely unlikely that Communism will ever be recuperated as a positive political force.
Therefore, the problem remains for scholars who want to focus on the left-wing cultural
politics of the 1930s as a progressive force with ongoing political relevance that much of the
work they might want to study appears in retrospect either idealistically simplistic or
actively complicit with a discredited and repressive political movement; whereas the
material that appears outside those two categories reduces to positions that are easily
assimilated within the social frameworks of Capitalist Western liberal democracy. In
practice, I would argue that this has trapped the literary reception of the period in a crude
binary opposition between Communist and anti-Communist sensibilities, which, although
rarely voiced out in the open,3 still structure unconscious responses to the 1930s. However,
with the effective collapse of Global Communism since 1989 – and certainly the collapse of
Western Communism – we are no longer implicitly forced to choose sides on that binary.
Admitting the historical faults of Communism today actually allows us to view Communism
more objectively without the need to adopt an ideologically anti-Communist stance.
Therefore, in this article I would like to propose a different approach to the period which
seeks to move beyond the binary opposition between Communism and anti-Communism.
Instead, I will suggest that it is much more productive to look at what unites 1930s literary
figures such as Orwell and Spender who may be considered anti-Communist and those who
were firm Communists during the period and never later recanted. In this latter case, I will
take as my two examples the poet John Cornford and the novelist John Sommerfield, who
fought alongside each other in the Spanish Civil War, where the former died. Sommerfield
remained in the Communist Party until 1956 and although he subsequently came to view his
earlier work, such as the experimental novel, May Day (1936), as Communist romanticism,
he never criticised Communism in the way that Spender did. While there are other stories to
tell of the 1930s involving working-class, women, and black and Asian writers, I have
chosen these four, white, men from privileged backgrounds precisely because they represent
the dominant literary figure of the 1930s and, also, because their careers are so similar and
interchangeable. They wrote for small journals and periodicals, and joined left-wing political
parties; Cornford, Sommerfield and Spender (briefly) were in the Communist Party while
Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party. All four went to Spain, where Sommerfield
fought for the International Brigades, Orwell for the POUM, Cornford for both the POUM
and the International Brigades, and Spender worked as a radio broadcaster and a literary
delegate. In fact, as this article will seek to demonstrate, it is by treating these four not as
bourgeois individuals but as an intersubjective constellation that it is possible to break their
2
reception free from the limiting framework of the Communist/Anti-Communist binary. By
intersubjective constellation, I do not just mean the extent to which any individual’s
subjectivity is inevitably a product of interaction with other individuals’ subjectivities, but
that the subjective perspectives and identities of these four men – at least, as we know them
through literary and cultural history – were constructed in terms of the shared meanings and
values which animated the 1930s generation. In his Crisis and Criticism, the Communist
critic, Alick West identified the question facing the preceding modernist generation as
being: ‘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.’4 What defined the generation of Spender, Cornford, Orwell
and Sommerfield was that they knew the collective identity to which they wanted to belong
and therefore they knew who they were. It is the centrality of this collective identity to their
literary generation, which makes Spender’s subsequent post-war preference of the earlier
individualist modernist generation so problematic.
Before launching a chronological analysis in the second half of this article, I want to provide
an opening case study of this intersubjective constellation functioning in practice, which
centres on Orwell’s essay, ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940), and his assignment therein of
a key role to Cornford, who had already been dead for several years at this point. The essay
is a key text for the construction of Orwell as a Cold War warrior because it equates his
abandonment of pacifism and determination to fight with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact
in August 1939:
For several years the coming war was a nightmare to me, and at times I even made
speeches and wrote pamphlets against it. But the night before the Russo-German pact
was announced I dreamed that the war had started. It was one of those dreams which,
whatever Freudian inner meaning they may have, do sometimes reveal to you the
real state of your feelings. It taught me two things, first, that I should be simply
relieved when the long-dreaded war started, secondly, that I was patriotic at heart,
would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight
in it if possible.5
The first point to make here is that Orwell’s conversion from the implicit pacifism of his
pre-war novel Coming Up for Air (1939) to supporting wholeheartedly the pursuit of the war
was not the over-night one portrayed here. We know that ‘My Country Right or Left’ was
not actually published until the Autumn 1940 edition of Folios of New Writing and that
following the outbreak of the War, Orwell took several months completing Inside the Whale
(1940), a project that certainly started from an anti-war position and more-or-less advocates
3
quietism in its published form, despite being published in March 1940. It certainly does not
reflect the same sentiments as ‘My Country Right or Left’ even though written during the
period of the supposed conversion.
The persistence of the idea that the onset of the war caused a radical break in Orwell’s
thought is due to the positioning of ‘My Country Right or Left’ at the end of the first volume
of the 1968 Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, as an apparent coda to the pre-war
Orwell and cliffhanger introduction to the wartime patriot of The Lion and the Unicorn.
Given that the editors of the CEJL, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, state that the ‘rare
exceptions’ to their policy of arranging material by publication date are ‘generally made for
the sake of illustrating the development in Orwell’s thought’, it must be concluded that this
signification was deliberate.6 The extent of their selection and achronological organisation
of the material from the start of the war to the publication of The Lion and the Unicorn is
rather more considerable than they imply. Only one item published between the end of July
1939 and the beginning of 1940 is selected: the September 1939 ‘Democracy in the British
Army’ (anti-war in tone). The 1940 material which is selected is split in two, with the half
not explicitly referring to the war – principally the three component essays of Inside the
Whale – placed immediately before ‘My Country Right or Left’ at the end of CEJL I; and
the more warlike half – including reviews of Mein Kampf and Borkenau’s The Totalitarian
Enemy, as well as Orwell’s June 1940 letter to Time and Tide calling for the arming of the
people – inserted at the beginning of CEJL II more or less immediately preceding The Lion
and the Unicorn, which is the second item for 1941.7 This manipulation completely hides
the fact that whatever the extent of the change of heart he underwent at the Nazi-Soviet Pact,
there was no sudden change of tone in Orwell’s output over the first year of the war. In fact,
the two positions of being pacifist or pro-war were not the polar opposites they appear, but
the logical outcomes of the two possible Marxist positions of considering the Second World
War as either an Imperialist war or a war against Fascism.
The transition from ‘Inside the Whale’ to ‘My Country Right or Left’ can be traced through
Orwell’s two essays on Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Thirties. The second half of his April
1940 ‘Notes on the Way’ for Time and Tide starts with the same image as his 1935 review
of Tropic of Cancer: a bisected wasp.8 The wasp stands for modern man: ‘The thing that has
been cut away is his soul, and there was a period – twenty years, perhaps – during which he
did not notice it.’9 While first seeming to agree with Muggeridge’s description of the terrible
consequences of abandoning God in order to build an earthly paradise, Orwell nonetheless
goes on to add, ‘Seemingly there is no alternative except the thing that Mr Muggeridge …
4
and the others who think like [him], so earnestly warn us against: the much derided
“Kingdom of Earth”, the concept of a society in which men know that they are mortal and
are nevertheless willing to act as brothers.’10 Therefore, rather than agree with Muggeridge,
Orwell takes Marx’s equation – ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion
is the opium of the people’11 – and substitutes ‘England’ for religion: ‘People sacrifice
themselves for the sake of fragmentary communities – nation, race, creed, class – and only
become aware that they are not individuals in the very moment when they are facing bullets.
A very slight increase of consciousness and their sense of loyalty could be transferred to
humanity itself, which is not an abstraction.’12.
Orwell’s subsequent review of The Thirties in New English Weekly takes a different tack.
Muggeridge’s motivation is still summarised as ‘a simple disbelief in the power of human
beings to construct a perfect or a tolerable society here on earth’.13 Furthermore,
Muggeridge is interpreted as ‘saying … that the English are powerless … because there is
no longer anything that they believe in …’14 and yet Orwell still manages to detect
something unconfessed tempering all the defeatism:
It is the emotion of the middle-class man, brought up in military tradition, who
finds at the moment of crisis that he is a patriot after all […] As I was brought
up in this tradition myself I can recognise it under strange disguises, and also
sympathise with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a
comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing
intelligentsia.15
On the one hand, Orwell is poking fun at Muggeridge by suggesting that when it comes to
the point of facing military conquest, in-bred class loyalties are stronger than intellectual
detachment. Yet, also, he is arguing – as he had in Inside the Whale – that it is precisely the
belief in England, itself, which will sustain the English people and that it is the re-emergence
of middle-class patriotism that will paradoxically take the intellectual closer to the common
people than any attempt to disengage from the class system. Here, the rather artificial
posture of attacking a ‘left-wing intelligentsia’, which Orwell knew perfectly well no longer
existed in its pre-war sense, purely serves to put down a marker that the positions advocated
should not be reduced to Popular Front positions. In fact, he soon found himself awarding a
guarded praise to ‘left-wing intellectuals’ such as Spender and the Lehmanns, as his
thoughts on the new series of New Writing demonstrate: ‘New Writing … has managed to
rise from its own ashes and reappear in a slightly altered form, not less Left but less Left
5
Book Club, less strident and, on the whole, greatly improved.’16 The state of the war –
following the invasion of France, Belgium and Holland from 10 May 1940 onwards – forced
him into an identical political position with those he had formerly disparaged as ‘Nancy
poets’.17 The uncanniness of this intersubjective convergence would have been brought
home to him on the morning of 22 June 1940 when he ‘picked up’ a leaflet issued by the
Political Bureau of the CPGB containing a call to arm the people, which echoed his own
identical call published in Time and Tide that same day – and the Communists were not even
supposed to be supporting the war!18
Therefore, although Orwell insists in ‘My Country Right or Left’ that he would rather feel
the impulse to stand for the national anthem ‘than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are
so “enlightened” that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions’,19 it is not entirely
convincing and it is certainly not anti-Communist because he uses a Communist icon,
Cornford, to validate his argument in favour of patriotism. Unless your heart has jumped at
the sight of the Union Jack, as his and Cornford’s have, runs Orwell's argument, you won’t
be able to respond when the revolutionary moment comes:
Let anyone compare the poem John Cornford wrote not long before he was killed
(‘Before the Storming of Huesca’) with Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘There’s a breathless
hush in the Close tonight’. Put aside the technical differences, which are merely a
matter of period, and it will be seen that the emotional content of the two poems is
almost exactly the same. The young Communist who dies heroically in the
International Brigade was public school to the core. He has changed his allegiance
but not his emotions. What does that prove? Merely the possibility of building a
Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself
into another, the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which,
however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been
found.20
Orwell’s rhetoric here is no different in effect from that which he employed in the proPopular-Front Wigan Pier. The reference to the ‘boiled rabbits of the Left’, like the
reference to fruit-juice drinking ‘sandal-wearers’ in Wigan Pier,21 is simply misdirection so
that the middle-class targets of his rhetoric do not notice that his call for patriotism is also
implicitly a call for socialism. Using the example of Cornford also had the subversive
potential of tempting Communists to join up despite the anti-War line that had been
imposed, not without impassioned contestation,22 following the Nazi-Soviet pact. Of course,
many Communists, including Sommerfield, simply ignored the Party line and did join up as
quickly as possible in order to fight against Fascism and for a socialist future.
6
The suitability of Cornford as a role model stemmed in part from the fact that his death in
the offensive against Cordoba on either the 27th (his twenty-first birthday) or 28th of
December 1936, the year in which Orwell later suggested history stopped,23 came at a point
when the Spanish Civil War could still be viewed as a pure struggle between the Republican
Popular Front and the forces of Franco, before the Communists started trying to eliminate
revolutionary groupings such as the POUM. While Cornford had joined the Party at the
height of the ‘class against class’ policy, he became through the circumstances of his death,
a symbol of the Popular Front and was celebrated as such in the volume, John Cornford: A
Memoir (1938). Indeed, the text celebrates and continually affirms this transition through
passages such as the following describing how the Communists at Cambridge addressed the
issue of an orthodox Labour Club splitting from the Socialist Society in the summer of 1934:
Some of the Communist students, including John Cornford, were inclined to
think at first that since the split was effected by Labour party members it would
discredit them and show the correctness of the left-wing line, especially as the
new club was very weak in numbers. It was only after the fiercest discussion,
in committee and in private, that John and others became fully convinced that
their aim must be to heal the split, both in Cambridge and nationally, before it
crippled the whole anti-Fascist student movement. This was a turning-point for
the movement in Cambridge.24
However, while Orwell clearly approved of Cornford’s posthumous image in 1940, or at
least recognised its potency, this hadn’t been the case in 1937 judging by his response to an
earlier implicit commemoration of Cornford, Sommerfield’s Volunteer in Spain (1937).
Sommerfield, who fought alongside Cornford with other British members of the No. 4
Section, Commune de Paris Battalion, 11th International Brigade, was also reported dead in
the same action and obituaries appeared in The Times and the Daily Worker, to be proved
false when he arrived back in London in January 1937. He wasted no time in writing his
book, dedicated to Cornford, which came out in July by when Sommerfield was directing
field operations for Mass Observation in Bolton.25 Orwell’s review of Volunteer in Spain,
for Time and Tide, was dismissive:
Seeing that the International Brigade is in some sense fighting for all of us − a thin
line of suffering and often ill-armed human beings standing between barbarism and
at least comparative decency − it may seem ungracious to say that this book is a
piece of sentimental tripe; but so it is.26
7
Given their persecution of him and the POUM generally, it is difficult not to regard this
review as politically motivated by Orwell’s understandable antipathy towards the
Communists. The book is certainly not ‘tripe’ and other critics were more complimentary.
Cyril Connolly, for instance, describes Sommerfield in the New Statesman as ‘an excellent
writer’ whose ‘book is short, modest, and readable, and gives an admirable account of the
sensations of fighting, a true picture of what war feels like, of fear, the death of friends, the
noise of different kinds of projectiles, the dangers, and also the discomfort’.27 However,
Connolly does object (and this is also probably what Orwell regards as sentimental) to what
T. C. Worsley, reviewing Volunteer in Spain for Life and Letters, described as the tendency
of people in Volunteer in Spain to ‘behave not as if they were themselves in the Spanish
war, but as if they were characters from Hemingway’s forthcoming (?) novel on the Spanish
War’.28 However, it should be noted that Sommerfield does actually acknowledge
Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms explicitly, noting that ‘Hemingway is quite right about a
number of things, especially the things that happen to you in a war, especially the unpleasant
ones’.29 This acknowledgment occurs directly before the passage objectionable to Worsley:
I began to feel fine, so did John. I must say it seemed against nature: it would
have been more reasonable to have felt awful: the others did. When we told them
how fine we felt they hated us.
The lorry came, and there were buckets of hot coffee with brandy in it, plenty
of it, and some biscuits.
“This is a fine war,” said John.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s a fine war.” 30
What nobody seems to discuss is that this is a portrait of Cornford and that by adopting this
Hemingwayesque style, Sommerfield is able to avoids the pitfalls of over-romanticising his
friend, of whom he notes at the end: ‘I did not see him dead; I can only remember him alive
and laughing, strong, resolute, and reliable’.31 Moreover, if anything, the adoption of the
style of A Farewell to Arms betokens an attitude to fighting that is critical as much as
sentimental.
Worsley goes on to criticise Sommerfield for writing of the red flag, ‘It had all the glamour
and excitement that governments can use to make men forsake their homes and die on
foreign soil for foreign governments, but it was ours and the glamour was real...’32 Worsley
notes that this was exactly what people thought in 1914 too and yet, here surely,
Sommerfield’s position coincides with the one that Orwell was to adopt in ‘My Country
Right or Left’, in arguing that the transference of patriotism to socialism makes it real. In
8
fact, if anything, Sommerfield is rather less romantic and rhetorical about this transmutation
of loyalty than Orwell, projecting a simpler vision of the need to fight for a better future.
However, what starts to emerge from looking at these correspondences is the sense that
Orwell and Sommerfield are occupying very closely related positions that turn on similar
aims and assumptions.
Indeed, I find it impossible to disregard the suspicion that Orwell’s dismissal of Volunteer in
Spain is partly to disguise the extent to which he borrows from it for the construction of
Homage to Catalonia, which he would have just begun to write at the time. His review of
Volunteer in Spain was actually the last paragraph of a much longer and more approving
report on Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit, which makes his non-discussion of
Cornford in relation to Sommerfield’s book significant because Cornford also features in
The Spanish Cockpit. Borkenau reports how on 11th August 1936 he drove from Barcelona
to see the Aragon Front in a car that also contained ‘Mr John Cornford, a young British
Communist’.33 Three days later they arrived back in Barcelona ‘with the exception of Mr J.
Cornford, who had enlisted in Leciñana’.34 Therefore, Orwell was reviewing two books,
which jointly recorded the trajectory of Cornford over the duration of his stay in Spain. At
the outbreak of the revolution, Cornford had first gone to Barcelona and then on to fight on
the Aragon Front with the POUM. After falling sick, he had returned to Barcelona and then
back to England, where he recruited volunteers, including Sommerfield, before setting out to
fight and die with the International Brigades in the defence of Madrid. This trajectory is, of
course, recapitulated by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. He goes to Barcelona and
continually bemoans not being there for the beginning of the revolution. He then fights with
the POUM at the Aragon Front until being shot, before returning to Barcelona and
attempting to join the International Brigades in order to help defend Madrid. It is not unfair
to suggest that his book could be retitled Being John Cornford. Furthermore, the unreal
quality Orwell assigns to his opening account of revolutionary Barcelona in December 1936,
describing it as ‘a period that has already receded into enormous distance’ is similarly
described in Volunteer in Spain as ‘dream-like, utterly fantastic’.35 The phenomenon, Orwell
records, of everyone including the middle classes wearing blue overalls (a feature he later
deployed in Nineteen Eighty-Four) is also identified by Sommerfield:
There was an odd atmosphere of excitement and slightly hysterical gaiety in the town
at night. The streets were crowded with militiamen in overalls and rope-soled shoes,
wearing funny little cadets’ hats, mostly with Anarchist or Communist badges stuck
in them. Overalls were becoming a national dress. Obvious middle-class gentlemen
9
strolled about in beautifully tailored boiler-suits. For the first time in history, John
pointed out, the middle-class was beginning to take fashions in dress from the
workers.36
This is not to belittle Orwell’s achievement in Homage to Catalonia, which, as I have
argued elsewhere, is a brilliantly-conceived project to satirise Popular Front politics while
simultaneously participating in them,37 but to demonstrate that he uses both Volunteer in
Spain, which is a good book in its own right, and the example of Cornford, as templates for
his own book. When he employed Cornford as a model in ‘My Country Right or Left’, he
was repeating a tactic he had already employed to devastating effect. The wider point to be
taken from this is that beneath the factional political posturing, there was not too much to
divide the literary aesthetics and politics of Cornford, Sommerfield and Orwell. Certainly,
from the perspective of the twenty-first century, I don't see any bar to us adopting a critical
stance that allows us to see the virtues of all three as part of a unified network, or
intersubjective constellation, that shared the aims and objectives of defeating Fascism and
opening up a transformed future society.
Rather than relate Spender to this constellation by comparing his own positions in the 1930s
to those of the other three, I want to focus on the positions he took up after the Second
World War. Connolly described Spender in this period as simultaneously ‘an inspired
simpleton, a great big silly goose, a holy Russian idiot’ and ‘shrewd, ambitious, aggressive
and ruthless’.38 This unsettling combination is apparent in his fictionalisation as ‘Mark
Pringle’ in Sommerfield’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Imprinted:
He was as tall and gangling and accident-prone looking as ever, his curly hair now
getting silvery, his still-handsome face scarred from years of self-torture. He lectured
about things like freedom in art, he edited a Paris-based, Unesco-subsidised
magazine, wrote articles about other people’s books about other people’s work. And
still produced some critical work of his own, that had nothing to do with the heavily
introverted writing of his youth, about the horrors of public school life and the
glorious dawn of a classless society. ‘We were all revolutionaries then,’ he was
saying.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but in different ways, and for different reasons.’39
The narrator’s analysis is correct here but the point is that in the 1930s, these different ways
and different reasons converged within the collective outlook of a generation. It was only
afterwards, as that generation fragmented and the historical context changed that the
differences became unbearable.
10
For example, Spender’s involvement in the collective book project The God that Failed
(1950), in which former Communists spilled the beans on the deficiencies of the Party must
have been particularly galling to someone like Sommerfield who remained a member.
However, on analysis, Spender’s contribution is rather more equivocal than it appears on the
surface. He begins by suggesting parenthetically that up to that point, overtly antiCommunist propaganda had ironically worked to Stalin’s advantage. Therefore, he rejects
the overt Communist/anti-Communist binary and, focusing on the Spanish Civil War as the
key point of the 1930s, instead laments the Communist failure to enter into the Popular
Front ‘with the same good faith as the Socialists and Liberals’ and thus instigate a European
wave of radical democracy akin to the Liberal revolutions of 1848. In this respect, his
position remains consistent with the one he advanced in his 1937 book, Forward from
Liberalism, at the height of his political commitment. The argument of that book was that
the political freedoms and idea of individual liberty that had developed over the previous
century could only be maintained if the masses were given ‘not merely political but also
economic freedom, so that they may produce their own individualism and their own
culture’.40 Spender’s critique of Communism is therefore valid from the perspective of the
1930s constellation he belonged to. As Orwell also recognised, rather than being a vehicle
for transforming the future, Communism became one of the limiting factors which prevented
the goals of the 1930s from being fulfilled. Having thus established that he is writing a leftist
critique of Communism, Spender proceeds to indict every aspect of Communism from
science to literary criticism for its instrumentalism; an inability to see the trees for the wood.
While this argument is more rhetorical than fully backed up – e.g. Upward is not necessarily
the most representative Communist from whom to generalise – it does, nevertheless,
summarise fairly accurately the grounds on which Communism was to lose its appeal to
Western intellectuals and more widely. In fact, it is difficult to see how someone like
Spender who had participated in the 1930s constellation could look on Communism any
differently in the early 1950s unless they were still supporters of Communism and the Soviet
Union. Within a few years, many of those remaining supporters, such as Sommerfield, came
to take a similar view. Furthermore, as discussed at the beginning of this article, it is now
difficult to see from a twenty-first century perspective how anyone can look back on what
happened in the 1930s without adopting at least some sort of critical attitude to
Communism.
This is not, however, to exonerate Spender completely from the accusations of bad faith that
implicitly underpin Sommerfield’s negative depiction of him in The Imprinted. Spender’s
11
crime was not his abandonment of Communism but his abandonment of the intersubjective
collectivity of the 1930s in favour of a reassertion of bourgeois individualism. In other
words, he himself abandoned the move forward from Liberalism as much as the
Communists and was in fact at the forefront of the return to Liberalism which has come to
characterise post-war Britain. This abandonment is visible in the transition from Forward to
Liberalism to his autobiography World Within World (1951), which was written
concurrently with the chapter for The God that Failed. In Forward to Liberalism, Spender
argues that ‘the foundation of the classless society of the future is to be found in the lowest
class’ which is not hindered by interests bound up with the past: ‘The great asset of the
lowest social classes is the history of the future.’41 He goes on to state that when he meets a
worker it is ‘as a fellow member of a future classless society, even though it is useless to
pretend that there is no gulf between us at present’.42 This is a feeling which he subsequently
denied ever having in World Within World, in which he repeatedly implies that he was not
prepared to give up his individuality in favour of a classless society and thus negates the
earlier book.43 Given that Forward to Liberalism was written at a period in which Spender
had joined the Communist Party and was in a relationship with the working-class Tony
Hyndman, who is appallingly represented in World Within World and by most of Spender’s
biographers, it seems likely that this account is truthful and the later version a false denial,
which together with the downplaying of his relationship with Hyndman and others, serves to
present himself to the post-war world as an essentially heterosexual, bourgeois individual. It
is this duplicity, rather than his renunciation of Communism, that made him a figure of
derision and contempt for former contemporaries such as Sommerfield, who had no
reservations in making themselves into ‘function[s] of the proletariat’.44 Furthermore, by
separating himself in this way from the collective values that his generation had espoused in
the 1930s, Spender was destroying his own identity and therefore rendering himself into a
rootless, shifting figure who could look nothing but insubstantial from the perspective of his
erstwhile comrades.
In The Imprinted, the narrator (Sommerfield) and Pringle (Spender) are only in the same
room because they are both taking advantage of the fact that ‘the thirties were about to
become fashionable again’ by making a radio programme to commemorate the life and
death of the Communist poet and volunteer in the defence of Republican Spain, ‘John
Rackstraw’, a thinly disguised version of Cornford.45 The real life counterpart of this
incident was a BBC radio documentary made in 1966 to commemorate another of
Sommerfield’s friends, Malcolm Lowry. However, Sommerfield clearly chooses to link this
12
with the interest stirred up by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams’s book of the same year,
Journey to the Frontier, which was a joint biography and critical study of Cornford and
Julian Bell. This was one of those ‘other people’s books about other people’s work’ that
Spender wrote about in the article, ‘Notes on Revolutionaries and Reactionaries’ (1967). In
fact, to be precise, Spender writes about Peter Stansky and William Abrahams’s Journey to
the Frontier (1966) in the first half of the essay and John Harrison’s The Reactionaries
(1966) in the second. Here Spender writes about Cornford as a personification of
instrumental Marxist ‘scientific objectivity’ and by situating him along the English literary
divide between aesthetic and social concerns (i.e. between Eliot, Woolf and Lawrence, on
the one hand, and Wells, Shaw, Bennett, and Galsworthy, on the other) is able to use the
example of his abandonment of poetry to live the life of action (a move which he also
accuses Orwell of making) as evidence supporting his Cold-War construction of High
Modernism: ‘The reactionaries [Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence] wrote out of their tragic
sense of modern life. The Cornfords and Bells lived and died the tragedy’.46
Spender’s aim here may be interpreted as following up the personal separation of himself
from the 1930s intersubjective constellation that he achieved in World Within World with an
intellectual separation for which purpose he tries to prove that there were really two
completely different generations of 1930s writers as illustrated by the two subjects of
Journey to the Frontier. Therefore, he argues that the seven years by which Cornford was
younger than Bell, who was a near contemporary of Auden and himself, constitutes a
‘generation gap’.47 Cornford, we learn, consigned all of Spender’s ‘seven-years-previousgeneration’s scruples about personal relations and subjective feelings [...] to the dustbin of
liberal inhibitions’.48 In other words, Cornford embraced the intersubjective relationships
with workers that Spender found ultimately abhorrent. However, Spender’s attempted
demonstration that Cornford’s generation accepted ‘means which were perilously close to
those of their Fascist enemies’ depends on quietly forgetting the ‘generation gap’ by
associating Cornford with Bell once more and then quoting Bell in support of the
argument!49 In short, the distinction between the two generations doesn’t hold and,
therefore, Spender’s attempt to say that his generation, now safely depoliticised by removal
of any association with Cornford, were really supporters of the High Modernists all along is
quite as hollow as it appears:
We (and here by ‘we’ I mean the thirties writers) not only look back on Yeats, Eliot,
Pound and Lawrence with reverence, but we also revered them at the time. It is
13
important to understand that we thought of them as a greater generation of artists
more dedicated and more gifted than ourselves. They made us reflect that we were a
generation less single-minded in our art, but which had perhaps found a new subject
− the social situation. We did not think this could lead to a better work than theirs;
we saw that young poets could not go on writing esoteric poetry about the end of
civilisation. In their end-games were our game-beginnings.50
However, despite his longing for bourgeois respectability and an association with high
modernism, Spender still cannot help himself from giving away that he was a fully
participating member of the 1930s constellation by pointing out that Stansky and Abrahams
are wrong in thinking that the abstractions in Cornford’s poetry take him away from reality:
‘From the Marxist standpoint, what is wrong with such a diagnosis is the idea that
“abstractions” (if they are “correct”) inevitably lead away from reality instead of penetrating
deeper into it’.51 Try as he might, Spender could not get away from his own past.
The question arises as to how to relate such postwar recasting of the 1930s to what we know
of the decade itself. Sommerfield’s The Imprinted achieves this excavation of the past from
its subsequent misrepresentation by satirising the self-contortions of ‘ex-revolutionaries and
disillusioned Communists’ precisely through the sub-plot round the Rackstraw radio
documentary. However, at another level, the temporal scheme of Sommerfield’s novel in
which ‘Then, Now and Later on’ co-exist simultaneously or, rather, ‘imprinted’ upon each
other, offers a model for rethinking the aftereffects of Cornford’s death not as a linear
progression but rather as a cluster of superimposed meanings all still reverberating in the
present. Thus the book opens with the memory of a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, in
which the narrator smashes a shop window much to Rackstraw’s disgust, which segues into
the narrator walking past the same window decades later. Images from the 1930s are
blended in with images from the Second World War and the post-war present bound up in
the narrator’s old notebooks and diaries,52 among which is a photograph of
Rackstraw/Cornford taken during the Spanish Civil War:
A long rifle (World War I Springfield) was slung on his shoulder; he had a couple of
cartridge belts draped round him, a bayonet and a water bottle. All this […] made
him look like a guerilla fighter in some old silent film about the Russian revolution.
But the effect was spoiled because he was laughing at the time. Which was why I
preferred the picture to other and better ones of him. John was a poet, a scholar and a
revolutionary − he would have put those categories in a different order − and also he
was marvellous company, an enjoyer who could make other people enjoy too.53
14
This, of course, is the same myth-resistant image he provides throughout Volunteer in Spain
− the aim is to bring dialectics to a standstill, free the subject from the weight of history, and
allow the future to unfold through its own momentum.
Sommerfield has escaped from the Communist/anti-Communist binary and looks back on
the 1930s without being historicist. For example, he tells the story of a post-war encounter
with Jean Reynolds, a fictionalisation of Jean Ross, who was the original of Isherwood’s
Sally Bowles: ‘I realised that A Woman of the Thirties [i.e. Goodbye to Berlin] had been a
misfortune for her; she had been fixed by the book, turned into a fictional character whose
story had ended in 1939’.54 The Imprinted may be read as an attempt to avoid this fate and
ends with the narrator finally escaping from the past, as he burns his notebooks and decides
to have no more to do with another 1930s veteran involved with the Rackstraw
documentary, Edward Eaton (loosely-based on Arthur Calder-Marshall): ‘I’d fooled myself
about Edward and I being friends simply because we’d known each other for so long’.55 But,
as he goes on to say, ‘As far as what’s going to happen later still, it’s unknowable and I
wouldn’t want to know it anyhow. There’s always a later on as long as you’re alive.56 Like
Cornford, whom he rightly identifies as primarily a poet, Sommerfield’s narrator has
become part of the future. The importance of Sommerfield, as a writer who moved beyond
Communism without becoming anti-Communist or being represented as anti-Communist, is
that he demonstrates a way in which the cultural politics of the 1930s can be understood
beyond that binary as still relevant to a contemporary readership. He understood this himself
as reflected in his accompanying note to the 1984 republication of May Day. This might
have been used for a blistering attack on Thatcherism but instead Sommerfield chose to
emphasise how the 50 years since the original publication had seen an improvement in the
‘material circumstances and social climate’ that ‘would have seemed unbelievable to the
people depicted in May Day’: ‘Only the truly rich and powerful can still carry on more or
less as if nothing had really changed at all except for electronic improvements in the means
of selling goods and bending minds.’57 His point is that it is not the political structures of the
past that matter, whether they be nationalised industries, anti-Fascist organisations or the
concept of Communism itself, but the political impulse and will which generated them. This
mode of reading may equally be applied to Cornford, Orwell, Spender and all the other
participants in the cultural politics of the 1930s, whose work, like Sommerfield’s, may be
read ‘in relation to our own times’ without the need to unravel exhaustively the legacy of
Communism or apologise or other features of the past ‘because it was a genuine idealism.
15
There was a lot of it about then. And there still is now, not in the same forms as before, but
still alive and hopeful.’58
Examples include the 1976 exhibition ‘Young Writers of the Thirties’ at the National Portrait Gallery and
Samuel Hynes’s influential The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton UP, 1972). Auden, of course, was never a Communist but the manner of his departure from
Britain in 1939 and the subsequent post-war trajectory of his career made him an apparent fit for the antiCommunist paradigm.
2
For a comprehensive study that included Communist and proletarian writers of the 1930s, without necessarily
valuing them, see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford; Oxford UP, 1988). Examples
of works that took seriously Communist and working-class writers include Andy Croft, Red Letter Days:
British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990) and Pamela Fox, Class Fictions: Shame and
Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994).
3
For exceptions where the binary does surface see the anti-Orwell essays in Christopher Norris, ed., Orwell:
Views from the Left (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984) and the anti-Communist position taken by
Christopher Hitchens in Orwell’s Victory (London: Allen Lane, 2002).
4
Alick West, Crisis and Criticism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 19.
5
George Orwell, ‘My Country Right or Left’, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, I, edited by Sonia
Orwell and Ian Angus, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 590-1.
6
S. Orwell and Angus, ‘A Note on the Editing’, CEJL I, p.xxi.
7
This aspect of Orwell reception has been mitigated by the publication of the Complete Works edition edited
by Peter Davision, which is scrupulously chronological throughout. To gauge the extent of the manipulation by
the CEJL compare CEJL I, pp. 401-540, and CEJL II, pp. 3-55, with CW XI, pp. 380-423, and CW XII, pp. 5391. The differences can also be seen clearly from the respective ‘Contents’ pages of the volumes; those of the
CW volumes include the dates of publication.
8
Orwell, review of Tropic of Cancer, CW X, p. 404; Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, 6 April 1940,
CW XII, p. 124.
9
Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, p. 124.
10
Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, p. 125.
11
Cited in Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, p. 126.
12
Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, pp. 125-6.
13
Orwell, review of The Thirties, New English Weekly, 25 April 1940, CW XII, pp. 149-50.
14
Orwell, review of The Thirties, p. 151.
15
Orwell, review of The Thirties, pp. 151-2.
16
Orwell, unsigned review of Folios of New Writng, The Listener, 16 May 1940, CW XII, p. 161.
17
Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 31.
18
Orwell, letter to the Editor, Time and Tide, 22 June 1940 and ‘War-time Diary’, 22 June 1940, CW XII, pp.
192-3, 195; see also John Attfield and Stephen Williams, eds. 1939: The Communist Party and the War
(London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), p. 31.
19
Orwell, ‘My Country Right or Left’, p. 592.
20
Orwell, ‘My Country Right or Left’, p. 592.
21
Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 161.
22
For the decision of the Communist Party of Great Britain to oppose the Second World War as an Imperialist
war see Attfield and Williams, 1939.
23
Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, CW XIII, p. 503.
24
Pat Sloan, ed., John Cornford: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), p. 110.
25
See Nick Hubble, ‘John Sommerfield and Mass Observation’, The Space Between: Literature and Culture,
1914-1945, 8 (1), 2012, pp. 131-51.
26
Cited in Cunningham, ed., Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), p. 19.
27
Cited in Cunningham, ed., Spanish Front, p. 19.
28
Cited in Cunningham, ed., Spanish Front, p. 21.
29
John Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937), p. 75.
30
Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain, p. 77; cited by Worsley in Cunningham, ed., Spanish Front, p. 20.
31
Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain, p. 159.
32
Cited in Cunningham, ed., Spanish Front, p. 21.
33
Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 93.
1
16
34
Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit, p. 108.
Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 8; Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain, p.
27.
36
Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain, p. 32.
37
See Hubble. ‘Orwell and the English Working Class: Lessons in Autobiografiction for the Twenty-First
Century’ in Richard Lance Keeble, ed., Orwell Today (Bury St Edmunds: Abramis, 2012), pp. 30-45.
38
Cited in Jason Harding, ‘Signing the Vivid Air’, The London Magazine, Oct-Nov 2012, p. 3.
39
Sommerfield, The Imprinted: Recollections of Then, Now and Later On (London: London Magazine
Editions, 1977), p. 39.
40
Stephen Spender, Forward From Liberalism (London: Gollancz, 1937) p. 71.
41
Spender, Forward From Liberalism, p. 191.
42
Spender, Forward From Liberalism, p. 193.
43
For example, see Spender, World Within World (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 135-8.
44
This is the phrase Spender uses: Spender, World Within World, p.135.
45
Sommerfield, The Imprinted, p.13.
46
Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People 1933-75 (Hammersmith: Fontana, 1978), p. 208.
47
Spender, The Thirties and After, p. 190.
48
Spender, The Thirties and After, p. 191.
49
Spender, The Thirties and After, p. 207.
50
Spender, The Thirties and After, p. 203.
51
Spender, The Thirties and After, p. 194.
52
Sommerfield’s own notebooks and papers are held by Special Collections, University of Birmingham
Library; See Andrew Whitehead, ‘John Sommerfield’s Box’, The Literary London Journal, 11 (1), Spring
2014, http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/spring2014/whitehead.pdf
53
Sommerfield, The Imprinted, pp. 18-9.
54
Sommerfield, The Imprinted, p. 94.
55
Sommerfield, The Imprinted, p. 173.
56
Sommerfield, The Imprinted, p. 176.
57
Sommerfield, ‘Author’s Note for 1984 Edition’, May Day (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), pp. xix,
xviii.
58
Sommerfield, ‘Author’s Note for 1984 Edition’, p. xix.
35
17