An Analysis Of The British Periodical `the Left Review`

Art and politics [are] only different aspects of the same humane and revolutionary struggle. Both Randall Swingler s article What is the Artist s Job? and Jacques Roumain s poem Madrid appear to energetically embody this view. Both texts are politically concerned with the purpose of art, and the role of the artist in society. This essay will focus on the April 1938 issue of Left Review which, written in the shadow of the world war that loomed ahead , demonstrates the political efforts of the journal to help create a culture of the people which may be realised as the most effective democratic bulwark against any reactionary dictatorship . In other words, culture produced by and for the people may act to ally fascist encroachment. This, it may be argued was the ideological pivot around which both the cultural and political aims of the journal were always seen to revolve and these texts, likewise, orbit this argument. Therefore since literature has real life consequences it should engage with the reality and struggle of contemporary life, which the quest for Socialism may batten itself upon. Swingler s polemic article pits Realist art against the enemy of productive culture, Surrealism. The charge levelled at Surrealism is similar to that throw at Modernism they are both bourgeois in essence, serving only to alienate the proletariat. They do not constitute a culture of the people, and therefore cannot hope to have any social or political value. Therefore Realist art, for Swingler, is the only legitimate political art form. He essentially pines for Socialist Realism in Britain, or artistic work [that] reflect[s] and promote[s] the ideals of a socialist society. Roumain s Madrid may be just that, revealing itself to be a condemnation of the Spanish Civil War and its apocalyptic effects upon the political and cultural landscape of Spain which leaves a putrefying core that annihilates any hope for future cultural growth. Violence infiltrates the deepest recesses of the poem, smashing the landscape cracking the sierra, and leaving a shard in the sky. This is symptom of modernity and war indeed like a smashed mirror, the fragmentation of the whole confuses that which was once familiarity and meaning is disorientated. The translation of it perhaps may need a recalibration, a different way of looking. For Roumain, the dawn of Socialism may be just that. Whilst such decay may have given rise to Realist literature in Spain, Britain had no such fertility for Socialist Realism and this is what Swingler s partisan article fails to see, indeed perhaps Swingler is the one who is afraid of looking too far.

What is the Artist s Job? , written by Swingler as he resided as editor of Left Review in April 1938, is a frustration with the function of art in the modern world, and raises the aesthetic criteria art must possess to be of Socialist, or revolutionary value. In pitting the humility and honesty of Realist art against their aggressive opponents, the Surrealists Swingler addresses the value of the practice of art in contemporary society. Present in his argument is the notion that painting has access to a part of the human consciousness denied to many other cultural art forms its visual power [ ] is one which no other social activity can perform . Yet whilst it does have indispensable value , Swingler situates this value in an artist s aptitude for depicting the realities of life, without which [art] had better cease. Swingler s essential criticism of Surrealism is that it is bourgeois in essence. It is not created by, or even for the people. It concerns the individual, in that it constitutes a subjective - not a collective - experience, since the meaning of Surrealist art is always located in the knowledge of the observer. Incidentally, Swingler seems to echo Aldous Huxley s critique of popular art [as] the modern tragedy in that it is made for the people but not [ ] by them. Yet whilst Huxley negatively visualises popular culture as a product to be passively consumed, Swingler s issue is that Surrealist art does require critical engagement and is esoteric in nature. It may only be available to those implicit bourgeois persons who are privy to the [ pseudo ] intellectual knowledge through which it was produced. It is contended that Surrealists embody a complete despair and sterility as regards the practice of art and are betrayed by their [ ] pretentious flourish of pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-psychological, pseudo-literary, pseudo-phraseology which has nothing to do with painting. Further, Roland Penrose is referred to as their chief apologist in contrast to the Realists whose art needs no defence . Yet it is important that Swingler introduces various institutions of knowledge, exaggeratedly undermined by their hyphenation with pseudo. For Swingler their intrusion into art only serves to remove meaning from general accessibility, isolating the proletariat and harming the defence of Socialism. Moreover as the general observer is made to rake up from the present associations in his mind something there which corresponds to what is in the picture any revolutionary fervour is dampened. One may be reminded of T. S. Eliot s constant deferral of meaning through intertextuality in The Waste Land, and indeed Swingler s critique of Surrealism seems to mirror the cynical attitude held by many Left Review editors towards Modernis that they both languish in a state of creative importance unengaged with the reality of material life. Yet Swingler s language is so disparaging that the article is turned almost into a vociferous polemic, and he is in danger of languishing in a different sort of superior importance.

Nevertheless, Surrealism is revealed to be antithetical to the Socialist ideal that art must become the production and property of all. The notion of culture not in the service of the people is unacceptable for Swingler.. In other words, art that is not intelligible or directly correlative to material life has no social value, and therefore should be extinct. Realist art is the art of the proletariat, for crucially it can be allied with Socialism in a way Surrealism cannot. Importantly, for Swingler artists are not free from social implication, from the responsibility of fulfilling any social function instead the artist s job is:

[To] define the natural process in visual terms, and so to convince the spectator that he subsequently sees more acutely, and in consequence feels and acts more accurately in relation to his own environment.

In this profession, it is evident that Swingler`s distain for abstract art is an eagerness, and impatience for the manifestation of Socialist Realism in Britain, that the artist s job should be the engineer of the human soul . Yet this is not explicit. Perhaps in an effort to avoid the criticism previously levelled at Left Review of being simplistic sentimental Russophilia [ ] where the sharpness of the anti-capitalist polemic is in striking contrast to the naivety of the pro-Soviet propaganda. Yet he slips and reveals his Communist partially, adding his wish that the function of art in Britain will [soon] be as established and obvious as it is in now the USSR and Spain. Left Review s sympathy with the USSR was no secret, yet in Swingler s mention of Spain there is an allusion to Spain as representing the pinnacle of successful Socialist art, therefore from here we may understand Roumain s poem Madrid , translated from the Spanish by Nancy Cunard.

Madrid depicts a trauma to the natural and cultural landscape which, through distorting the pillars of familiarity, engenders a melancholic disorientation. Like a mirage induced by the heat of war, the dimensions of the landscape in the first stanza becomes confused and distorted the linear horizon is at odds with its descri ption as ringed and like an opaque metal tempest, suggests the landscape to be totally engulfed by a storm of iron. Indeed the word sinister hangs over the crack in the sierra and literally over the whole poem, since the comma that precedes the word induces a pause, and as the word hangs in the air its shadow is cast on all that follows. This menace is embodied by the storm that suffocates the sky, where there is not a single shard of azure. Here the word shard , not only illustrates the vast permeation of violence, but alludes to a singular piece of glass, a shattering of the whole. This landscape then has suffered a trauma. Indeed, simultaneously language and the natural world have suffered, since they are both infiltrated and corrupted by violence. Language much like a post-war world, ceases to make rational sense tanks [are] giant beetles the silence is bombarded by the cataract of crashing explosives and a smile is likened to a pomegranate crushed under [a] heel. Trauma has stamped its mark, leaving a confused conflation behind. There exists an uncertainty in the tone of the speaker there is, yes, there is not only suggesting the faze of violence in the air, but a lack of confidence in the most basic of human empiricism, sight. Indeed, the melancholic image of tattered trees stand up again, wailing like violins unstrung creates an allusion to flags ripped apart by gunfire, even the alliteration of t` mimics the sharp and repetitive sound of spray of bullets. Further, the unstringing of violins is not only emblematic of the discordance that permeates the whole poem but suggest an end to music, to impossibility and futility censorship of culture. Nothing organic or creative will be able to germinate in this decaying landscape, which is carious and the carrion of the earth has shell-pits like a worm in a broken ulcer. This putrid world is full of decay and disease, nothing may gestate here but death. In light of this, the dissimulation of the seemingly provincial little desperate square and a city marched upon by the advance of tanks and the obstinate invasion of giant beetles is seemingly more poignant it is as if the detrital animals have come to feast upon the remains of Spain, in its tarnished and decaying state. This is underlined by the fact that this rot appears during the snow , a climate which usually hinders decay, yet here it is so ingrained and putrid it may fester comfortably. Yet simultaneously, the image of snow brings with it the idea of seasonal change, indeed this is a season of apocalyptic locusts and death s at its harvest. Both of these words allude to cyclical patterns, almost as if this violence may have been predicted. Yet more importantly, these allusions are used to implement the idea that sky [has no] smile left and no more the birds or sweet bird-song on the hilltops , that Spain is no longer the rural season beyond belief of honey in the orchard . This passage exists almost as an oasis in contrast to the violence and decay that fills the rest of the poem. It visualises the space Spain held in the imagination of writers of representing a culture separated from modernity, and still in contact with a kind of organic folk culture, so precious in the face of punishing autocracy of modernity and authoritarianism alike. Even the tone of this passage is folk-like in style, long oh long ago already she fell Lina Odena and through which the poem s Socialist stance enters. The longing for the time in the olive-grove down there, in the South is evident. Indeed, the trajectory of the poem from here moves towards something like Socialist Realism. Roumain pines for dawn [to] tear itself clean out of the tatters of night and to birth a world wherein the brow of man shall be freed of [ ] despair. The relationship between this and the anonymous blood of the peasant and worker layers the dawn with an explicit class dimension. This dawn, is Socialism.

Yet Swingler s yearning for the production of such literature in Britain is one that Karl Radek argues would be untenable whilst fecund artistic soil enabled Socialist Realism to manifest itself readily in the Soviet Union, no such environment existed in Britain. Indeed, in the Soviet un ion writers live in the most favourable conditions for their literary production and were joined under ideological hegemony, in Britain this was not the case. Indeed as editor, Swingler would have played a role in selecting Madrid for this issue, perhaps through a lack of British Socialist Realism readily available to him. The hope for Social Realism was seemed far fetched, not least because many of Left Review s contributors were half heartedly Communist in their beliefs. Indeed George Orwell in The Road To Wigan Pier [1937] wrote that that not only was the sincerity of many of its Communist contributors suspect . Swingler reveals a certain naivety in his article, and his class vision blinds him. Indeed, when Swingler asserts that modern artists [are] deficient [as] they appear to be frightened of looking too far , he locates the issue in the artist themselves, rather than in their environment. He suggests the modern world is brimming with order and reality, which need only be conveyed and translated realistically and intelligibly. Perhaps the Surrealists are translating the disorder and chaos of the modern world more realistically than those who practice Realism. What Swingler fails to see however is that perhaps Surrealism constitutes a recalibration in depiction, one that is more in line with a disoriented and violent world.

Both texts reveal themselves to be in line with the idea that art should be in the service of the people. This was one of Left Review s basic tenants, and therefore the inclusion of these texts in a latter issue is even more pertinent. Against the backdrop of European turbulence, the artist had an obligation to metamorphose and become political. The Ivory Tower attitude was now obsolete, and these texts reflect this. Swingler, as editor of this issue can be seen to be advertising what he saw as art - or literature s - imperative: to be realist. However, what Madrid illustrates is in the debris of modernity s destruction, the world had become so disorientated and fragmented that perhaps if one looks deeply, a different kind of reality might arise. In Madrid this is figured as the dawn of Socialism, yet in Britain no such fecundity existed. In this perhaps we see the Surrealist s point, Britain s reality was not be Socialist and never was.

Word Count: 2,500

Bibliography:

Cunard Nancy, `Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War`, Left Review, , (1937),

Huxley, Aldous `Art and the Obvious`, in Music at Night and other Essays, ed. by David Margolies(London: Penguin, 1950 [1931]), p. 24-5

Margolies, David `Writing the Revolution`, in Cultural Criticism from Left Review, ed. by David Margolies(London: Pluto Press, 1998).

Marks , Peter `Illusion and Reality: the Spectre of Socialist Realism in Thirties Literature`, in Rewriting the Thirities: Modernism and After, ed. by Keith Williams and Steven Matthews(Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Inc, 1997), p. 23-36

Paul, Ronald `"A Culture of the People": Politics and Working-Class Literature in Left Review,1934-38`, Left History, 8.1, (2002), 61-76.

Roumain, Jacques `Madrid`, Left Review, 3.15, (April 1938), 909-10.

Swingler , Randall `What is the Artist`s Job?`, Left Review, 3.15, (April 1938), 930-32.

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