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the novel or the drama, Anderson appeared to be arguing, deals with human situations and values. The task of the critic is to engage those values openly with his own commitments declared. But the critics commitments are not the same as the writers commitments in his work. Or rather, the relationship between what the writer believes and how those beliefs are worked through in his novel, is different from the clear statement of principles which a critic is free to develop in the course of making his judgments and discriminations. It is important to know what views Tolstoy held about society, but they are a very different thing from the way in which those attitudes are embodied, organised selectively and subjected to the test of experience within, say, Anna Karenina. I think that we were interested, both in the ways in which human values are embodied in the work, and in the relationship between the writers attitude to life and the attitude which his work reveals. But they are different questionsor, at any rate, the relationship between them is not a simple one: and I think a great disservice was done to the discussion by trying to harness them together with the irritating yoke, Commitment. Why did this happen? Largely, I suspect, because of the peculiarly intense pressure of the period in which the whole discussion arose. On the one hand, there was the literature of the timeparticularly the breakthrough in the drama with Osborne, Wesker and Delaney, and the poetic documentaries of Free Cinema. Such works dealt directly with problems and complexes of feeling which were close to us. They spoke with immediacy to our condition. They were cast in terms which we could clearly understand and sympathise with, by writers and directors whose commitments we shared. Chicken Soup and Roots were, after all, not merely plays by a playwright with strong socialist convictionsthey were plays about socialism: about the Communist Party, the East End, the disillusion with Hungary, the search for a new socialist and humanist language. They were doubly committed. They demanded to be judged in terms of the commitments which they set out, in the first place, to dramatise. But even here the limits of the term were reached almost at once. The critical coolness with which John Ardens Sergeant Musgraves Dance was received was almost entirely due to the fact that it did not fit the pre-arranged categories of commitment as they had been erected (see NLR 1, 7). On the other hand, there existed another, quite distinct area of concern: the relationship of culture to politics. Here the need was deeper: the feeling that, to express the humanism of our beliefs, we had to turn to the creative definitions which could only be found

COMMITMENT DILEMMA
The Writer And Commitment, by John Mander: Seeker & Warburg. 25s.
IT IS a brave man who will confront contemporary literature armed only with this unwieldly weapon, the word commitment. My reservations about entering the discussion in this way are not dispelled by John Manders interesting examination of the limitation of the term in his first chapter to The Writer And Commitment. He is aware that there are other questions involved in the relation of literature to society than showing the flag or joining the Party; that it is not merely commitment to a concept or a cause; that commitment is more relevant to the artists work than to his life. Manders purpose is to enquire into the possible meaning of the term in relation to certain English writers of the past thirty years. Since many of these writers have been committed in the obvious sensefrom Auden to Weskerthe examination seems perfectly legitimate. Yet the doubts continue to nag. The word commitment was taken over into English from Sartre, but no theory of literature was provoked to life by it. Was this so important? I think it was. For without such a theory, there was little to prevent the term being used as a simple, crude rallying cry. It is a pity that Mander does not offer a more detailed analysis of the genesis of the term in its English setting, particularly in the post-1956 period, for this might have helped to clarify some of the confusion. The source text was Lindsay Andersons Stand Up! Stand Up!, published originally in Sight And Sound and reprinted in the first issue of ULR. But here the confusion begins. Andersons piece was a clarion call to critics. It asked them to reject the notion of the neutrality of criticism, and to declare in more forthright terms the point of view from which judgments were being made. A view of the cinemaand of literaturewas implicit in the article. The cinema or

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in literature and art, and beyond that, the belief that, through our culture, we are constantly remaking and reasserting the values and aspirations which are smothered in contemporary society. Here, I think, something distinctive was being added. But, although some of these meanings and ways of looking are beginning to emerge (in the first section of The Long Revolution, for example), I cannot think that the word commitment was anything but a hindrance to that examination. I say this at some length because Mr. Mander, very rightly, refers throughout this book to the part which the New Left played in this discussion, and because I think we should accept some of the responsibility for helping to short-circuit and re-route the discussion in rather unhelpful ways. My hope, then, was that Mr. Mander would attempt in his book to redress the balance: that, by reading the word commitment back, retrospectively, to authors who seem central to us but who cannot be contained within this straightjacket, he might have helped to put the argument back on the tracks. And what delights would have awaited him. Lawrence, whose Women In Love deals more creatively with the theme of human alienation than most Marxist treatises, with his primitivism, his turning away from intelligence and mind at key places in his work, his disparagement of democracy, his latent authoritarianism and his bullying. Does the man destroy the work? Did the society destroy the man? Were the beliefs wrong, tragic, but the work whole, open, suggestive, offering life? Is there a definition which embraces all the facetsman and work, drama and belief, teller and prophet? And what about the Royalist Balzac whom Marx thought to be the greatest novelist of his age? And the Greek tragedians, with their civilisation based on slavery, whom the sly Lenin preferred? And the technical mastery of that overtly fascist work, Leni Riefenstals film, Triumph Of The Will? Commitment might then have disappeared, a mere pip-squeak of a term, strutting upon the stage of giants: but what riches remain. I am asking for the book Mr. Mander did not write which is the irritating trick with reviewers. But I am saying something more. I think by not working through the difficulties of the word commitment at sufficient depth, and by limiting his examination to writers already committed (in an age itself committed, as Irving Howe says in Politics And The Novel, to the total imperialism of competing ideologies), Mr. Mander has translated the wanton crudities of our earlier discussion into mere errors and abuses which can be tidied away. He should have been so much harsher. Auden And Orwell He is at his best in his Chapter on Auden. He shows how much of Audens early poetry lacked a grasp of the things they were supposed to value, how, in the words of Mr. Alvarez, Eliot transformed the sensibility of his age, Auden caught the tone of his. This can be seen, not only in the external way in which Audens values are reported in the verse, but in the artificiality of the rhythms in which they are expertly encased, in the slack, modish lists of images, in the doubtful ambiguityhalf-revolutionary, half-fag with which they are offered for inspection, and the adolescent tough-mindedness of the tone. Then there is the question of the massive revisions which Auden has since carried through, the small revolutionary

lists and sentiments which have been capitalised into Freudian and Christian Abstractions. This is not new, but it is well supplemented here. What Mander adds is the judgment that, as this phase passed, as Auden gave up the earlier attempts at public speaking in verse (Poems) and adopted a more personal, lesscommitted tone, addressed to a closer intimate circle, his poetry took on a kind of strength and certainty (Look, Stranger!) In other words, as he ceased to speak with the flat tongue of the times, and began to explore, personally, the ambiguity of feeling embedded in his own positionthe middle class revolutionary in an increasingly conformist agehe began to make more sense in poetryand the style of the later volume reflects this. The commitments were real only when they were personal: and we go to the poems now, not to give our Marxism a poetic flavour, but to respond to these concerns as the poet worked them out. About Orwell, however, my reservations are immense. I am conscious here that the stream is moving against me. Orwells limitations are only too clearhe was a documentary not a creative writer. One must account for the extreme and unjustified pessimism of the fevered, hectic later books, the nastiness of tone in some parts of The Road To Wigan Pier, the tendentiousness of language, nowhere so clear as when he is arguing against the language of propaganda in Politics And Language. One cannot resist E. P. Thompsons point (Out Of Apathy) that Orwell played a central part in that whole pattern of defeat which became a major cultural pattern in the Fifties. Manders judgment is that Orwell was interested in the working class, but that his sympathies were not socialist: that, in describing working class life, he accepted class divisions as totally enclosing separations, as final. There is a compelling point here. On the other hand, when Mander insists that Orwell revealed himself as anti-socialist when he wrote: the tendency of mechanical progress is to frustrate the human need for effort and creations, I am forced to dissent. The comment accepts a far too mechanistic definition (machine=progress=socialism) for me. Orwell seems to me, in that sentence, to stand well within the most distinctive and humanist socialist tradition. It is an extremely odd judgment which, moreover, reveals more about Manders commitments than about Orwells. And this is seen most clearly in his handling of Homage To Catalonia. This is the book which socialist critics find it most difficult to accept, and which they handle most inadequately. The Spanish experience was surely crucial to the turn in Orwells life. But I think that truth must be faced that it is not the book which, in Manders words, moves from ecstasy to disenchantment: it was the Spanish Civil War which did. How is it that the Spanish Communists were too Right-wing for him? Mander asks. I should have thought that the tragedy of our times lies in the answer to that question, and I cannot think of a better place from which to consider a reply than Homage To Catalonia itself. Spain is the point of pain in any socialist mind because it embodied a double betrayal: the betrayal of Spain by the democratic socialist movements of the West, and the betrayal of socialism by itself. Perhaps the lesson is too complex and troublesome for us to learn. Perhaps we cannot bear the naked way in which Orwell reveals the pattern to us. We cannot deny that it provoked in him an unjustified despair. But it cannot be wished out of existence. Orwell dared to judge history from the parish of his

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own backyard. Sometimes there is no higher ground to take. I think Mander overestimates Orwells Trotskyism, and underestimates the betrayal of POUM: but I thinkwhich is more central to the argumentthat he is too hasty in applying his own commitments as a birch to Orwells back, too closed to the way in which Orwell tried to work through his own commitments, by way of pain and disillusion, in the book. Something of the same problem exists in Manders treatment of both Angus Wilson and Thom Gunn. His complaint about Wilson is that his stories are trapped between conflicting commitments, to Marx and Freud: that he offers a problem in social terms, but seeks a psychological resolution. This division seems to me unhelpful and, in the best of Wilsons work, untrue. Wilson has the caricaturists gift of placing his characters so firmly within their social economy (he is so alive to the nuances of class within the rather narrow range from which he draws his material), that he is perfectly justified in attempting to develop his insight into the psychological impasses of English middle class life. What he knows well is limited, but he knows it from the inside out. I think the difference between an early story like Saturnalia and The Wrong Set lies primarily in the dramatic development in the first, contrasted with the rather simpler, undeveloped juxtaposition of sets in the second. He is simply more familiar with the Thirties landscape than with the Welfare State, and his best work has been done where the references back to preWar are clearest. This is much more a question of insight and familiarity than it is of commitment. In any case, a consideration of the clash and exposition of values in Angus Wilson cannot be done without reference to his more developed work, particularly Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which still seems to me one of the most serious novels about the end of liberalism since Forsterand in the same tradition. And although Mander is very illuminating about Thom Gunns poetry, I cannot help feeling that he escapes too rapidly from the subject-matter and texture of Gunns verse, with its teddy-boys, its motorcycles, its leather-jackets and flick-knives, to existentialist questions about the Life Force and the Absolute which the poetry hardly seems to justify. The section on more recent writers, including Osborne, Wesker, Delaney and Braine, is less fully developed, but suggestive and illuminating. At the end, however, Mander returns to the qualified defence of what he calls the instinctive assumption of Socialist criticsthat what matters is the quality and nature of the artists commitments. But he is still begging the question. Why is it that we can say with certainty that King Lear is a greater work than any biography of Shakespeares life, any record of his commitments, which the Bacon Society might still throw up? What is it that literature adds, in itself, which cannot be wholly explained by reference to the values of the artist beyond the work itself? And surely, here, we need the theory of literature which no critic has attempted to provide. Either we believe that literature merely refers to and confirms the values which we share with the writer, in the terms in which we already understand them, or we are obliged to examine again how and why the process which Mander, somewhat disparagingly, calls aesthetic, alters the values, or forces us to see them in a quite new way. I think the difference between us is that, for Mr. Mander, prose literature is essentially a reflection of the world, referring and documenting values beyond the work itself; whereas for me, the prose

work is an imitation of the world, an attempt to dramatise the values we already know, and by dramatisation, to make us know them in ways which it is impossible to know by other means. I believe that, in this way, we are constantly being offered, in literature, and more generally, in our culture, ways of seeing, definitions and meanings, which are not available to us in any other way: that it is only by submitting ourselves to this process of the dramatisation of values that we can properly understand the relationship between the beliefs men hold and the way they come to be embodied in the work of art. What I am saying is that form and content are indivisible, and that the great danger of the word commitment is that it invites us to make a treacherous dichotomy between them.

Stuart Hall

HYNDMAN AND THE S.D.F .

H. M. Hyndman and British Socialism, by Chushichi Tsuzuki: O.U.P. 35s.
THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION has long been the problem-child of labour historians, especially marxist ones or those anxious to place it rather than merely to chronicle its erratic development. It cannot simply be approved. It cannot be simply condemned. It certainly cannot be dismissed. The least subtle student of its affairs is forced into unaccustomed complexities, contradictions and nuances. What precisely is its contribution to the evolution of the modern British labour movement? It cannot be dismissed for it was, after all, the first modern socialist organisation of national importance in Britain; a pioneering achievement not diminished by Dr. Tsuzukis demonstration that its marxism was shaky and slow to develop, nor by the claims to priority of forgotten local men and groups. For the point about the SDF is not only that it was first in the field, but that it lasted. Through splits, crises, wild fluctuations of membership and activity there shines the inextinguishable light of continuity, and what is more, of national political presence. It was the main British representative of Marxism from the early 1880s until 1920, when it contributed to the infant Communist Party the largest bloc of its original members and leaders. Marx disliked it; Engels opposed it; William Morris left it, together with most of its brilliant members. It survived. The dissidents who broke away from time to time disappeared in a few years like the Socialist League of the 1880s, remained wholly unimportant conventicles like the SPGB (1906) or became at best bodies of regional influence like the Socialist Labour Party on Clydeside (1903). Even its founder and paternalist chief, H. M. Hyndman, was jettisoned when he attempted to impose his imperialism on it during the first world war. (The Hyndmanites, a body of no further importance, withered away until finally ending the formal history of the SDF in the first months of World War II). Time and again former dissidents return to it, like Aveling or Tom Mann, or rebels against the reformism of other groups joined it or merged with it, for want of any other lasting marxist organisation of national scope. Time and again its sheer staying-power allowed it to recover from the consequences of its gigantic political errors, compounded of a mixture of sectarianism and opportunism. What is more, time and

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