Christopher Hilliard

MODERNISM AND THE COMMON WRITER

This article re-examines the resistance to literary modernism in interwar Britain from the angle of popular literary theory and practice. Drawing on the papers of some of the notable working-class writers of this period, it disputes Jonathan Roses claim that a rejection of modernist ‘obscurantism’ was a response distinctive to working-class autodidacts. Moreover, many middle-class readers responded to modernism in the same terms that Rose takes to be peculiar to a working-class intelligentsia. Negative reactions to modernism are better explained as a response conditioned by a literary discourse in which plebeian autodidacts as well as middle-class readers participated. The article approaches this discourse via the aspiring authors who joined writing clubs in the interwar period. Because these people were at once fairly typical readers and writers, their ideas and practices disclose more about popular understandings of literature than debates in the national press or literary reviews do. Their ideas about what constituted good writing and their hostility to modernism were underpinned by a popular conception of literature that derived from English romanticism.

Producers by Hand and by Brain: Working‐Class Writers and Left‐Wing Publishers in 1930s Britain*

George Garrett did not have a room of his own. A seaman and dockworker barred by his past political activities from what little work was available in 1930s Liverpool, Garrett lived in a tenement with his wife and five children. “The whole bunch of us are crowded in together. There is no separation. All that these tenements are . . . is one room sub-divided, like a hen-coop. It is impossible to have privacy or peace.”1 Garrett explicitly used Virginia Woolf’s phrase as he explained the difficulties of the working-class author to a sympathetic middle-class intellectual: “In your own circle, when you sit down to write, it is understood immediately that you are WORKING. . . . You will probably have a room of your own to write in, not a crowded place where each member of the family is treading on the other’s heels.”2 Despite the deprivation and claustrophobia of tenement life, Garrett kept on writing short fiction and a book on the experience of unemployment. He envisaged this book as a response to The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell’s travelogue of the areas suffering most from structural unemployment (and exploration of Orwell’s own attitudes toward class and socialism). Garrett had been Orwell’s guide around Liverpool as Orwell did his fieldwork, but he found the published book “one long sneer. . . . I wish I had been given the job of debunking it.”3 Garrett hoped that his own book would “shock . . . some of the knowalls and strutting

Licensed Native Interpreter

Many of the cross-cultural intermediaries who figure in the New Zealand historiography operated in ‘middle ground’ situations. However, in New Zealand as elsewhere in the Pacific, intermediaries also had roles to play in settings where the authority of the colonial state was more or less assured. Working from government records and the 1920 diary of the Pakeha interpreter Ben Keys, this article examines the sorts of cross-cultural expertise involved in negotiating sales and leases of Maori land and probes the relationship between such instrumental uses of knowledge of Maori culture and the ethnographic interests that this work nurtured. For some settlers, Keys included, amateur ethnographic inquiry constituted the active intellectual work of being a New Zealander. By examining the work of an intermediary and amateur ethnographer in an age of automobiles and cinemas, I seek to demonstrate — in a modest, textured way — how the colonization of New Zealand was an ongoing, twentieth-century process in the sphere of economics and law as well as culture and identity.

Words That Disturb the State: Hate Speech and the Lessons of Fascism in Britain, 1930s–1960s*

Freedom of expression is often described as a British value even though the state has historically imposed many restrictions on speech and writing. In an important sedition trial in 1947, the judge all but told the jury to acquit, alluding to Thomas Paine and declaring: “it is in the highest degree essential, and I cannot overemphasise the importance of it to you, that nothing should be done in this Court to destroy or weaken the liberty of the Press.” A few years earlier, the same judge, sitting on a committee reviewing defamation law, breezily dismissed newspaper editors’ complaints about speculative libel suits by making an analogy with the law of nuisance: just as factory owners had to pay for pollution even when they were not negligent, press barons had to accept libel suits as an occupational hazard. The simplest explanation of this apparent contradiction is that the rhetoric of “the liberty of the press” was simply insincere or opportunistic. This is to miss a range of judgments about the ways different types of provocative writing worked on individuals and on public opinion. And it is to project an expansive, post-1960s conception of freedom of expression back onto a time when there were narrower, more instrumental reasons for keeping speech free.

The literary underground of 1920s London

At some point in the 1920s or 1930s, one of the owners of London’s Progressive Bookshop painted a notice on a piece of cardboard. It read: ‘THIS IS THE ONLY DIRTY BOOK WE HAVE’. Presumably the sign was propped up against a volume spoiled by the dirt and soot that plagued the shop. The warning concluded: ‘PLEASE DONT WASTE TIME ASKING FOR OTHERS’. What did that sign mean? Perhaps, by protesting too much, it was a coded invitation to do business. Or perhaps it was to rebuff strangers who had walked in off the street in search of a title that was not available legally: procuring a dangerous book was a service to be undertaken only for trusted clients. The Progressive Bookshop was one of two British bookshops that distributed D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the unexpurgated text of which would not be available legally until 1960. Contacts as far away as Cape Town learned this and wrote to request copies. The sign hints at the complicated workings of the book trade and literary networks in a period when the category of ‘dirty books’ included Lawrence’s novel and Ulysses, and when producing, distributing or acquiring them depended on being enough of an insider in bohemian circles. The Progressive Bookshop was located at 68 Red Lion Street, a busy and grimy street of eighteenth-century houses and shops wedged between the modern clamour of the trams on Theobalds Road at one end and the buses of High Holborn at the other. It was founded in 1918 by Harold Edwards, who sold it for £25 after three years to Charles Lahr, who ran it throughout the inter-war decades. Lahr had previously kept a bookshop in Hammersmith

‘Rough Architects’: New Zealand Literature and Its Institutions from Phoenix to Landfall

In their preface to the first anthology of New Zealand poetry in 1906, W. F. Alexander and A. E. Currie struck an apologetic note. The first and second generations of European New Zealanders had ‘comparatively little time for things not practical – the columns must be set up before we turn to moulding the entablature’. Currie and Alexander were not the first to suggest that a New Zealand literature was an element of nation building – and one that had to wait until the basics had been taken care of. In his poem ‘A Colonist in His Garden’, the former politician William Pember Reeves had dramatised an either-or choice between ‘culture’ and pioneering. Though the young colony might be bereft of art in the conventional sense, ‘Who serve an art more great / Than we, rough architects of State …?’ Both as a policy maker and as a theorist of state intervention in settler societies, Reeves was acutely conscious that the market and civil society could not be counted on to drive progress in a small colony. The failure of commercial publishers and periodicals to provide a basis for the development of New Zealand literature was one strand in the ‘cultural nationalist’ critique of the status quo in the 1930s and 1940s, and the prospect of government support for local writers was hotly debated. By the end of this period, a state literary fund was in place and local firms were publishing substantial amounts of new fiction and poetry. Even more significant for the literary history of this period were the institutions fashioned by writers, above all the run of literary magazines beginning with Phoenix in 1932 and culminating in 1947 with Landfall . This history of the institutions of New Zealand literature closely tracks the rise to prominence of the younger writers, most of them male, associated with Phoenix or the Caxton Press or both, and their displacement of what passed for a literary establishment, which was both resistant to modernism and receptive to writing by women. For many years, a narrative of the rise of literary nationalism was told more or less triumphantly, though some of those involved rejected the ‘nationalist’ tag; from the 1980s, critics and anthologists worked to question some of the exclusions entailed by this narrative and its attendant poetics. The nationalist narrative needs to be revised in another way as well.

‘Mind’s Middle Distances’: Men of Letters in Interwar New Zealand

The poet Lauris Edmond described New Zealand as a country where ‘we cultivate mind’s middle distances’ (Edmond, 1991: p. 54). Local and visiting cultural critics in the first half of the twentieth century would have agreed with her. Does that mean ‘middlebrow’ is a useful interpretative category in a New Zealand context? David Carter has found in ‘middlebrow’ a way of reading Australian literature that makes sense of texts and styles that other approaches to modern Australian cultural history seldom convincingly incorporate (Carter, 2004). Yet the term does not quite fit the brand of middleness that prevailed in New Zealand literary culture. Moreover, the word ‘middlebrow’ had little currency in interwar New Zealand. In itself this does not mean that New Zealand could not have had a middlebrow literature sans la lettre. However, as a cultural historian, I am less interested in ‘middlebrow’ as a critical tool than as an historical phenomenon, a field of values that talk about ‘brows’ created in the 1920s and 1930s.