Meanwhile, back in Stuckeyville

Actually, Stuckeyville wasn't so bad. It had a bowling alley and warm quirky people with good teeth who helped you re-evaluate your priorities after the world kicked you in the face. But it has been an interesting, nay exhausting, week here in Stuckeyville's dentally-challenged twin city. 

Last Saturday we took a school trip to see The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe Theatre. It was definitely the biggest trip the English department has ever done - there were even several generations of ex-students as well as colleagues, ex-colleagues and a passel of our current undergraduates. Some had never been to London before, let alone the Globe.

This was a very odd staging of Taming. It's a difficult play anyway: a comedy (with lots of good gags and some technically-good-but-now-rather-uncomfortable ones) about how sarcastic/independent/disobedient women should be beaten into acquiescence by starvation, cruelty and the like. The usual way to get round the happy ending (Kate admits that she needs to do what she's told) rather than look like a bunch of misogynistic bigots is to play it like she's only kidding and she'll get her own back in some unspecified extra-textual future.

This production didn't really do that. It did something very odd indeed. It removed the Sly framing which makes the action a play-within-a-play, replacing it with an Ireland 1916 setting, complete with tuneless 'Irish' music and hammer-heavy didactic lyrics. The intention was to imagine that Shrew was being put on in Ireland on or around the time of the Rising to make us understand that just as the play is misogynistic, so was the Ireland that resulted from the Rising.

OK. But there are some historical and dramatic problems with this. Dramatically, it just didn't work: the only people who knew about this Irish framing were those who'd bought the programme like me – everybody else just liked the Irish music and thought it was nice to have an Irish cast. Historically: well, the Rising itself wasn't a misogynistic enterprise. There were radical feminists, socialists, communists, Catholic reactionaries and all sorts involved, and the Proclamation of the Republic, though expressed in the masculinist terms of the period and signed only by men, was pretty progressive, especially in comparison with the Constitution and state that eventually appeared:

The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past. 

Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.

British women didn't get the vote until 1928 of course. The problem with the Rising is that the British shot everyone they could find, including the progressive men. By the time Independence came round, previously minor and very reactionary types like Eamon de Valera had seized the reins (and handed them back to the Church): a Republic didn't exist until 1949 legally and one could easily argue that the ideals embodied in classical republicanism (let's leave Irish Republicanism to one side today) haven never been instituted. Ireland's women were betrayed, but not by the Rising.

Also: yes this is the centenary of the Rising, but I'm not sure why a British Shakespearean Theatre with a British and tourist audience felt the need to tell everyone that Ireland was a sexist hellhole. It's not as if the UK to date or colonial Ireland were ever paragons of liberation. I'm just not sure, in the end, what light the Rising throws upon Shrew, or what the Shrew throws upon Irish history. The acting was superb, the set design excellent, but it felt like such a half-baked idea, and I was actually quite glad that lots of people around me could enjoy the performance without sitting there fretting – as I did – about what it all meant. I believe this is what Caroline Magennis meant when she remarked 'this is why academics can't have nice things'. Still, at least lightning wasn't hitting the building next door this time, as it did when we saw Antony and Cleopatra.

The rest of the week descended into the banal hell of the post-teaching academic: endless piles of marking and moderation, putting together module packs for the external examiners, all interrupted at the most crucial moments by interminable meetings: negotiating committee, estates committee, board of governors and casework. Also – because I'm a complete idiot – I agreed to give a conference paper yesterday and was therefore trying to write that while juggling all the other things.

It was a lovely conference, on Communism and Commitment, basically talking about the emotional and quotidian lives of British communist members, activists, officers and apostates, and what happened at times of stress. Jane Bernal, daughter of Margot Heinemann and JD Bernal talked about her parents on a panel that looked at devoted activists who eventually left the Party, such as Douglas Hyde, who was converted from Methodism to Communism by his time as a preacher in North Wales and his experience in the South Wales valleys, particularly meeting Lewis Jones. After years as a journalist and energetic activist, reading the Catholic Weekly Review caused him to have Doubts, and he eventually became a deeply Catholic Cold Warrior: his confession I Believed was an enormous hit. I learned that the Daily Worker was basically like a Communist Tindr and that the Most Dangerous Man In Britain, Harry Pollitt, would give child visitors to CP HQ jars of his home-made fudge (hopefully called Moscow Gold).

I was on a panel talking about writers and the CP: the others were Glyn Salter-Cox whose paper was a tender, funny and revelatory examination of novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland's open, proud blend of Communist lesbianism at a time when the party was very conservative socially, and Matthew Taunton from UEA who used the recently available letters between Doris Lessing and her novels to explore the dialogic nature of her political beliefs and her literary work. My paper was on Lewis Jones, the communist hero and novels: I argued that far from being the propagandist his allies, publishers and enemies believed, he wrote Cwmardy and We Live as attacks on authoritarianism whether in the state or the party. It's all in there: even the hero's death in the Spanish Civil War is a form of suicide occasioned by his coldly ambitious wife, rather than the sacrifice of a true comrade. I think I got away with it: one Japanese scholar said he'd come specifically for my paper which was a bit scary, and another said that I'd 'set the tone for the conference'. At the time I took that as a compliment but now I'm wondering whether the subtext was 'you bastard' or if it was meant to be the equivalent of what actors say to friends in terrible productions ('well, you've done it again').

What I loved about this conference was that it wasn't just academics: a lot of people there were independent researchers, old comrades, trades' unionists and enthusiasts for Britain's radical past. While there were some recriminations about where it went wrong and how we should understand it (David Aaronovitch and Alexei Sayle got some stick for their accounts of growing up Communist) the wide spread of people and perspective meant that there was an awful lot to learn. Oh, and I met a Japanese PhD student who has translated CLR James's work, inventing an awful lot of Japanese cricket terms along the way. How do you translate 'googly' and 'chinaman'?

If you don't know the People's History Museum, it's a wonderful, welcoming place with an awful lot of material that British kids don't get told about in school. The first time I went there it was so interesting that I lost track of time and got locked in…

The Thursday Afternoon Vole

Maybe I'll institute a regime of single daily posts rather than a stream of random Reckons. What do you think? 

Here's a moody, wintery little shot I took on my phone the other day. 

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." (James Joyce, 'The Dead').

I've been quiet today because a) I stayed in bed longer than I should have and b) I've been doing astonishingly boring tasks. Administration Hell is very different from Marking Hell. Marking Hell is at least exciting. There's a fresh torture coming along any second: a bigoted comment, a stolen paragraph, a missed apostrophe or a misplaced preposition, all finely tuned to press my particular buttons. But Marking Hell also has its pleasures: there are – despite my sardonic whinging – informed, passionate and fluent students who turn in elegantly stylish essays. 

Administration Hell lacks both the stimulation of the Diabolical Essay and the snatched moments of relief afforded by a good piece of work. For instance, today I was updating the electronic module guide for a single-semester module (remind me to tell you one day about our four – or is it five? – timetables. We have two electronic systems, because an integrated one would abolish Administration Hell. There's Evision, which holds Module Guides, student details, submission details and the like. Then there's WOLF, which holds Module Guides, student details, submission details and the like. Did you see what they did there? They don't talk to each other very well either. And Evision carries stern warnings like PRESS SAVE BEFORE EXITING OR ALL YOUR HARD WORK WILL BE SACRIFICED TO THE ADMINISTRATION GODS AND THEY ARE VENGEFUL, MOCKING DEITIES WHO SCORN YOUR PUNY SACRIFICE except that on many pages there isn't a Save button. Instead, there's a Store And Exit button. But I don't want to Exit and I don't trust this programme's grasp of synonyms and therefore don't believe that Save and Store are the same thing at all and besides I haven't finished working out what the difference between Assessment Criteria and Assessment Requirements are yet and oh gods what if this is all some kind of horrible test and if I get it right they make me an Associate Dean in one of the Lower Circles of Administration Hell?

But it's OK because we're all going to be moving to Moodle and percentage marking schemes whether we like it or not and once in the sunny uplands everyone will get first class degrees (seriously, that's the justification for changing schemes). 

Anyway, I've just nobly ceded my The Sorrows of Young Werther lectures to my Romanticist colleague for a first-year module. I'm really looking forward to teaching it: it's central to the Romantic notion of individualism and the individual's relation to knowledge and reality. When it first came out, rumours spread that it caused multiple suicides. I've already been ticked off on Twitter for being flippant about this, but obviously I'm rather more thoughtful and sensitive in class than my online persona might indicate. I'll be teaching the legend and reception of the novel, but won't be cracking any more jokes about assignments, student retention etc. But I can't help looking forward to giving the students a novel about a self-dramatising, self-regarding young man…

In other news: good books in the post. David Williams' A World of His Own: The Double Life of George Borrow (just too late to add to my Borrow/Edwards paper, but I was already up to the word limit), and two books on the decline of British Communism: Geoff Andrews' Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964-1991 (by which he rather presumptuously means the CPGB) and Francis Beckett's Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. I went to a conference in 2004 called Reds! The Story of the CPGB. It was fascinating. All the major players from the Party's previous decades were there, acrimoniously blaming each other for minor doctrinal deviations which had destroyed the coming Revolution. It didn't seem to have occurred to them that spending 60 years following every twist and turn of the CPSU's policy and never seriously trying to build a mass movement based on the UK population's needs just might have been a strategic error. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

Literary Advice From The Proletarian Vanguard

It may surprise you to learn that the Communist Party, even in its most Stalinist period, took literature far more seriously than any of the mainstream groups. Perhaps Matthew Arnold was right: the aristocracy are more interested in hunting than reading. The Party went through agonies trying to decide whether pre-Revolutionary literature was corrupted by the society which generated it, or whether anything was salvageable (Marx wouldn't have been a book-banner: his work is shot through with literary references). Serious attempts were made to specify the qualities and characteristics of Proletarian, Socialist and Communist Literature, something of which I've made a study myself.

Here in the UK, the 1930s Party leadership, aware that many authors were at least sympathetic, tried to ride both horses: they encouraged the members to read Party-approved work and through their publishing house Lawrence and Wishart, disseminated 'Proletkult' fiction and non-fiction by workers which seemed to follow the party line (my PhD is partly about how Lewis Jones's Cwmardy is actually subversive, while appearing to be an orthodox Communist novel), at the same time proclaiming the genius of the rather more unruly (and bourgeois) fellow-travellers like Isherwood, Auden and many, many others whose beliefs and activities only occasionally coincided with that of the rather unlettered Party. The Party was actually rather conservative, as this excellent book describes (especially the chapter by Mike Waite): it led national campaigns against American comic books and pop music, claiming that industrial art is always inferior to 'authentic' folk culture. Hence all that finger-in-the-ear stuff in the 1950s.

I recently bought this delightful pamphlet, Books Against Barbarism from Left on the Shelf, one of my favourite bookshops, after seeing it on Cath Feely's Academia.edu page.. Some of the chapters could well be appreciated by my students, while others are redolent of a more innocent age.

'The first essential is to make up your mind to read what Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin have themselves written… but then, also, draw up a list of subsidiary reading on the same theme, by other authors, bourgeois as well as Marxist'. Garman was a very interesting character - Party intellectual and literary editor. He shepherded Jones into print, though it's never been entirely clear how much meddling he did. I've heard that Nottingham University has some letters between them in the Garman archives, so I need to get over there for a look. 

I'm not sure Lenin's tastes or opinions should guide anyone's reading habits. Krupskaya then reveals that Lenin was actually a big fan of the Russian classics, especially Pushkin, and a range of deeply tedious Soviet Realist propagandists. 

Having spent the day reading emails about the university library's turn from holding books to disposing of them (they've clearly been watching Fahrenheit 451) and watching local authorities close libraries all over the place, this paragraph seems rather sweetly naive. 

Finally, a Tom Gauld cartoon for all my friends who write short stories, and for those of us inspired to have another go at Ulysses after the BBC's wonderful dramatisation:

(And if you're really bored, I've posted the first 130 photos of my 7" single collection here. Only many thousands to go…).

Art meets the Iron Curtain

I came across this cartoon today. Not sure the punch line does much except to me a bit snobbish about LS Lowry and British art in general, but it's historically accurate.

The Soviet Union had a 'workerist' attitude towards art and culture. The products of bourgeois pre-revolutionary cultures were admired and preserved - architecture, ballet, music, paintings, literature, but contemporary work was judged according to whether it fitted the state's concept of progressive values. So all workers had to be heroic, all employers damnable, all social problems soluble through revolution. What literature would be once the Revolution had liberated everybody was hard to say - boring, I suspect. Certainly the 'proletarian literature' authorised by the Soviet state was bloody awful, though some of the visual art was stunning. Architecture swung between jaw-droppingly science-fiction amazing and soul-crushingly terrible.

In the UK, plenty of bad writers were published because they were workers or pro-Communist, but many worker-authors of high skill were discovered: amongst them Lewis Jones, whose novels Cwmardy and We Live were presented as orthodox Communist propaganda. Actually, my PhD argues that they're actually a very subtle and intelligent critique of Stalinist Communism as well as of capitalism. They're stuffed with odd sex-and-death stuff too - not the kind of thing tolerated by the Culture Commissars.

Anyway, I digress. The cartoon is interesting because it refers to the Cultural Cold War, in which the CIA founded and funded lots of cultural bodies and magazines, such as Encounter, a very popular English-language current affairs/arts magazine. They used front groups and charities to put on touring art shows and concerts, all designed to show socialists inside and out of the Soviet Union that Western artists were free to do whatever weird stuff they wanted - Jackson Pollock was one unwitting tool of this policy. The Soviets had bagged realism, the CIA seemed to think, and so abstract expressionism must necessarily be the property of capitalism. Needless to say, lots of the artists promoted by the CIA weren't very good: just useful.

If you'd like to read more about this weird element of the Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders' Who Paid The Piper? is an excellent and readable introduction, as is Hugh Wilford's The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. As they both used musical metaphors, I'll just point out that both the American and Soviet security services thought the Beatles were subversives.

Amidst the maelstrom

OK, the budget is as depressing as we imagined - massive cuts to public services and attacks on the old, the young and the poor to fund tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Ed Miliband managed a good line - inviting those members of the Cabinet lined up in front of him to raise their hands if they were getting a tax cut. Personally, although my pay has gone down by 10% in real terms over the past two years (thanks to inflation), I'll be paying more tax after this budget, while George Osborne - who is an inherited multimillionaire - will be paying less. Every little helps, eh George?

But away from the misery, I've had a rather good day. An excellent seminar on Paradise Lost and the intellectual context of the Civil War and Commonwealth preceded a visiting speaker's paper on 1930s Communism and the BBC. According to Ben Harker, the BBC employed plenty of leftists and communists, but worked very hard to exclude leftwing ideas and voices from the airwaves. The Communist Party of Great Britain was too slavishly Stalinist to come up with a considered cultural strategy except during the flowering of the Popular Front, and couldn't do much about the BBC's monopoly in any case, whereas their sister parties in Germany, Holland, the USA and elsewhere were able to set up their own radio stations. The Party saw new media as an opportunity, but the BBC as a reactionary weapon wielded by the ruling élite - with good reason.

The most interesting element was Harker's discussion of individual socialists' grasp of form being ideological. People like Archie Harding felt that the established use of a radio as a lecture was backward looking and overly dependent on the conventions of other media. So he used mobile recording studios and the like to go out and record ordinary people talking about their lives. He held studio debates and experimented with form to generate radio-only conventions - much to the horror of his superiors.

Sadly, the Party and the BBC shared some cultural fears. Echoing the Frankfurt School's suspicion of popular culture, they both insisted on the primacy of 'high' culture: the CP later led the battle against American comics and pop music, preferring 'serious' books, classical music and folk, which the presented as 'authentic', despite very little of it actually originating in the fields and factories.

All this and much more in 45 short minutes. Anyway, back to the marking…

My hero

It's a while since I nattered on about Welsh literature, my primary passion.

I just received from Academi two packets of postcard portraits of Welsh writers in English. All the usual suspects: RS Thomas, Dannie Abse, the profoundly under-rated David Jones (I have one of his prints in the office), Alun Lewis, Richard Llewellyn that disgraceful fascist hack and many more (mostly male, but not exclusively).

I expected to see one of Lewis Jones (1897-1939). He wrote two wonderful novels (Cwmardy and We Live) and a few short stories. He also managed to be a miners' leader, a Communist Party councillor (though he was repeatedly suspended from the Party and my PhD claims that he was a syndicalist with reforming tendencies), he went to prison for 'sedition', he organised the Welsh branch of the National Unemployed Workers Movement (perhaps it's time to restart it) and led their hunger marches, he recruited for the Spanish Civil War (he tried to volunteer but was refused) and he deliberately insulted Stalin, in person, in Moscow, at the height of the liquidations. In the midst of all this, he apparently had a love life that made Lloyd George look shy and retiring, and had a massive… work ethic. He died of a heart attack after speaking to 200,000 people at 30 mass meetings in one day in aid of Spain.

None of us are likely to match that commitment or energy.

Here's the picture I found of him, greeting Arthur Griffiths, another great Welsh socialist who played his part in Irish freedom too, joining the Irish Citizen Army.

Anti-Means Test (for welfare) postcard

Forward to the Workers' Syndicalist State

The Tories have been muttering about instituting Easyjet-style local service provision (mm, what a vote-winner) and the Labour Party have had to find a localised model of service provision to avoid looking like centralist Soviets (not that I mind centralisation much - especially as I find myself living in an evil Tory/Lib Dem council).

The model they've gone for is one of workers' control: users and staff of anything from hospitals to leisure centres running places without too much control from the centre.

I'm all for it. Yes, things will end up being plotted by hyperactive busybodies, but the theory is sound, because the theory is Syndicalism, a splinter of communism which appealed to the Welsh miners and others in the 1930s (and got several of them in trouble with the CPGB Central Committee. Under syndicalism, the workforce of any particular industry, via their democratic union, controlled the means of production. Industries would be run co-operatively and would trade resources with other syndicalist industries. The profit motive and capitalist class would wither away. The theory suggests that government wouldn't be necessary because all workers would operate with the good of society in mind, and thus all would behave well. Personally, I think that a government of some sort would be required to adjudicate, distribute and set priorities (and conduct diplomacy, defence and public services), but it would be minimal compared with the Soviet and capitalist models.

Syndicalism rocks - and its time has come. Though I've probably just ruined its chances by identifying its origins in such as disreputable lefty idea.

Manichaean…

As told by Alex Ross in The New Yorker this month, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was believed to be a Communist by the secret services - leading to spies trying to analyze his music for subversive material.

How very reductive. Like most artistic people of the time, Bernstein was of the left (it was, after all, the period of McCarthy and then Nixon) but the idea that musical notes are politically charged is exactly what the Soviets thought in the very depths of their most Philistine period, the Proletkult (late 1920s-1930s). It's just such a facile argument and shows how plain dumb our superiors were, whichever side they were on. Also, artists just aren't that bright. They have their peculiar skills and are usually happy to side with whoever will let them exercise their talents. Rarely has a composer had the intellectual ability to discuss the dialectic, let alone encode it into his or her music (which doesn't stop people endlessly analyzing Shostakovich's music for anti-Stalinist attitudes).

Bernstein was on Hoover's 'Security Index', a list of 12,000 Americans he thought were so dangerous that they should be arrested in the event of a Soviet invasion. Because fat conductors are always the shock troops of the occupation. I'd love to get a copy of it.

On a more enlightened level, I'd recommend Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book on the US secret service's attempts to control the worlds of literature, art and music.

Here's alleged Communist Bernstein conducting alleged anti-Communist Shostakovich's allegedly anti-Communist 5th symphony. Oooh, feel the confusing subversion. After that, the Latvian State Choir singing the Mass that the FBI thought was Communist (like all Catholic masses written by Jewish composers are secretly communist).

A literary question

What book has changed your life? What one book should people read? What one book shouldn't anyone read. I tried these questions on my first-year students and discovered that nobody likes 19th-century novels any more.

My answers:

Changed my life: Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

Book everyone should read: more tricky - so many good ones, so many for particular reasons. The Communist Manifesto? The Wind in the Willows? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Don't touch with a bargepole: The Lord of the Rings. Atlas Shrugged. The Book of Mormon. Left Behind. Any of Dickens' 'funny' novels. The Narnia novels. Loads more…

In case you aren't convinced

… that Jessica (Decca) Mitford was the best of the lot: she started a Running-Away fund from an early age, and used it to go to Spain with Esmond Romilly, Churchill's nephew. She had Leadbelly to stay, as well as many of the Black Panthers. She tried to give her share of an inherited island to the Communist Party (largely, I suspect, to annoy her sisters). J K Rowling named her daughter after Jessica - a great role model.

Those wonderful Mitford gels

Right now I'm reading Mary Lovell's The Mitford Girls and not enjoying it much. I've an interest in the Mitfords - Jessica (Decca) is a hero of mine, and the rest of the brood are an object lesson in the iniquities of the aristocracy. Unfortunately, Lovell's book is essentially a long paean of praise to poor misunderstood Diana (unrepentant Fascist, friend of Goebbels, wife of Mosley etc), an elegy for Unity (personal friend of Hitler etc. etc.) and an attempt to paint Decca as a liar and fantasist because she was a Communist (who lived most of her life in rough Oakland, California, fighting for the poor and black population). Lovell, it seems, divides the world between those who hunt (good) and those who don't (rotters).