Nick Moss reviews two new books from Smokestack Books: The Selected Poems of Clive Branson, edited by Richard Knott, and The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater, edited by Ben Harker

It makes sense to review these volumes together as there are overlapping themes. Both are poets who were staunch communists. Both wrote in the face of the rise of fascism, the necessity of resistance and the outbreak of war.

While stylistically there are some overlaps, the two are very different poets. The publication of these books by Smokestack gives us the opportunity to assess and compare their works, but also, in light of these, to consider three linked questions – what might constitute a properly communist poetry; whether such a poetry might be conceivable today; and what might be salvageable from the failures of the communist project in the past to retrieve as  a point of distinction from the betrayals of social democracy and the collapse of “official communism.”

How might any of this be made to make sense as anything other than an exercise in nostalgia? In a time when the possibility of the overthrow of capitalism seems so proscribed by both capitalism’s capacity for self-renewal and by the defeat of any lived alternatives, what can we take from a poetry of Spain in the Civil War, of the Blitz, of the poverty of the 1930s, that might help us chart a way out of the twin impasses of political pessimism and an aesthetic conservatism that manifests either as a dead-end contextless recycling of  stale pseudo-Prynnian  tropes or inoffensive pastoral verse?

To turn to Branson first, we should admit that both a strength and weakness of his writing is its seeming spontaneity, the almost improvisational quality to it, as if it represents an unedited attempt to make sense of life while he is in the midst of events.

Branson was born in India , joined the Communist Party in 1932, took a leading role in driving the British Union of Fascists out of Battersea, and fought with the International Brigade in Spain. He was conscripted in 1941 and killed in action in Burma in 1944. His life then, brief as it was, encompassed a commitment to struggle against fascism both via street fighting and via military means and he did not shirk from any of this.

One of the most striking aspects of his poetry therefore is the fact that his rage against the injustices he encounters is always at the forefront of his work. This is from “Forward” (p.33):

Because it’s time for a revolution

To end the beating up of man by man,

To do away with the police nark, stool pigeon, assassin

Judge, gaol.

And, again, from the poem “London” (p.53):

This shadow’s magnitude is entirely yours.

But not the depth of night, the sense of darkness.

The will to feel belongs to us and ours:

No, not to armed police, businessmen and bankers.

And, in “London”, this clear sense of possibility, the “will to feel”, is articulated against both a clear description of the oppressive machinery of the capitalist state, and the terror it maintains:

In peoples’ eyes look fear,no sleep, and despair.

Children must feed on hunger, read the pavement

While mother labours to quicken dad’s massacre

In this mad-house of profit, interest and rent.

We can see these as blunt, effective representations of a distinctly communist aesthetic. Roberto Schwartz has described Bertolt Brecht’s works as seeking to “demonstrate that actions of everyday life also have a representational aspect: the roles played there could be different, too, for social processes were mutable.” (New Left Review second series 57).

There is no need to make grandiose comparisons with Brecht to see that Branson is attempting something similar here, a refusal of illusion and a belief in revolutionary possibility. What is also distinct, and I think is clear in both Branson’s work, and, as we shall see, in Slater’s, is an acceptance of the need for (not glorification of) revolutionary violence.  As Branson sets out, in “The General Didn’t Know” (p.93):

We are the people those bombs hit again-

and again-there’s always printers ink

for tomorrow’s press-and again-

there’s always plenty of drink

for the General Staff - again

until we realise WE are the men, the women,

the children killed in the press

by the generals for the rich

who have no feelings, cannot feel our pain.

The solution Branson looks towards is to fight a war against war, to turn the war against fascism ultimately into a revolutionary war. (“Peace the bloodier crime”, as he puts it in “December 1936, Spain.”) There is a distinctly Orwellian mood to his writing in this regard, in his reverence for England, and for a patriotic socialism.

Orwell said, in The Lion and the Unicorn, that “It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free…The England that is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its own destiny.” 

Branson calls upon the legacy of Chartism, peasant revolts “fighting that those who worked should own the land/not Baron, Priest or King. They failed/Though never for want of knowing the power they held” (May First p.95) so that:

We take this oath

no matter the consequence to ourselves-life or death-

we pledge our whole strength to raise once again

the banner of liberty, the banner of Englishmen.

He concludes “Let every Englishman fight for this cause/Communism is English! Freedom is ours!”.

Some will take issue with this form of revolutionary patriotism, but whatever else we might want to argue, it is  distinctly republican and thereby distinct also from the retreat to shallow patriotism of, for instance, Keir Starmer (from human rights lawyer to endorser of detention of refugees) or the cautious reformism of the various iterations of Britain’s Road to Socialism.

With its vital call to “head the assault/against the world’s tyrants who rule through our fault” and to “Fight with no rest till Fascism ends in rout” (“Soldier Just Take a Look” p.74) Branson’s writing also suggests that something was lost in the post-war years that was not simply about the debates about socialism in one country or permanent revolution, but an entire way of conceiving social transformation – its extent and how it might be brought about. That the tradition of Cable Street and Spain and the tradition of Labour Party entryism and campus paper sales are worlds apart, and that there is not a red thread from then to now but a discontinuity.

Orwell set it out as “In all societies the common people must live to some extent against the existing order”. It is this “living against” and what it requires that we have forgotten but which runs throughout Branson’s work.

But there is something strange in there too. It is probably best described as a kind of pagan materialism, and it emerges from Branson’s own wrestling with the horrors of  a world wracked by poverty, fascism and war – the same existentialist dilemma that resulted in the Sartrean turn in French post- war thought, faced with both the reality of finitude that war so brutally and casually  made clear, and the willingness of so many to compromise with fascism.

It is a love of nature which is vigorous, almost Lawrentian. It is the exact opposite of the Francoist injunction “Long Live Death.” It is there in Branson’s fascination in “Aeroplane” (p.25) with the “Power to touch the stars.” It is there in his acceptance of the possibility of death in Zero Hour (p.30) , in a reversal of Nietzsche that insists “No! Not like the sun do the dead repeat/The farce of their eternal repetition”. In “Forward” Branson condemns:

The writer who says he has no time to care

for the daffodil or cowslip

who thereby:

shames/The very revolution he proclaims/He is no better than the millionaire/Who clears the ground of trees/shrubs/weeds.”(p.33)

In Today My Eyes (p.70) , Branson states that “The dead deserve no eyes who from their birth/ Neglect to learn the beauty of the earth.” What stands out most in all of this is the unflinching, death-haunted, sensibility, and a coldness in his imagery that shows how the spectre of the triumph of fascism had so disrupted his natural optimism.

Like a new cut on a young girl’s shoulder

the sun left a crimson scar.

Through barbed wire

We can feel the day’s passing

and evening

warns us of night, the complete end.

(Sunset, p.84)

Branson writes as lover and soldier – at a time when he, like many others had made a decision to risk their lives against a force committed to maintaining inequality through genocide and permanent war. His proximity to the grave made him all to aware of how much he loved life and what he was therefore willing to lose:

Gone are the times of romance ! Over wide

Acres of night death ploughs the ruts of doom

Changing the destiny of tomb and womb.

(Soldier Just Take A Look, p. 74)

The cultural war against capitalist ideology

Montagu Slater is the better-known writer, insofar as he is remembered as the librettist of Benjamin Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes (the libretto and a deleted “Mad Song” are contained herein). Slater worked with Britten, John Grierson and WH Auden at the GPO film unit, and helped develop the realist documentary tradition, with its commitment to show things “as they are.”

Slater saw his involvement in the arts as part of a cultural war against capitalist ideology and the development of a revolutionary culture to help bring about a new and emancipated society. He was one of the founders of the Left Review, and worked across a range of art forms – poetry, theatre, film, pageantry and puppetry.

Ben Harker’s introduction provides an excellent overview of this. Slater’s view of culture encompassed folk poetry, Piers Ploughman, William Blake, music hall, popular theatre, and penny dreadfuls. His commitment to bringing about a genuinely popular revolutionary culture mirrors Branson’s faith in the revolutionary elements of English history. All of this we should note, preceded and doubtless impacted on Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawn, E.P. Thompson and the history-from-below that they developed within the CP tradition.

We find again, in Slater, that pagan materialism which rendered much of Branson’s poetry a strange delight. In An Elegy (p.33) Slater writes:

Our little lives, our chapels and our hymns,

mining and fishing-apostolic round -

a tidal river governed with its whims

neap tides renew but spring tides leap the bounds.

Sometimes this can take a surprising turn. “In the Beginning: A Broken Narrative” is shattered, impressionistic, one moment reflecting on the 1926 General Strike and the tactics used to atomise a workforce, the next leaping to something that could be straight out of Apollinaire:

Skies, violet in the early stage

Purple by increment

Inaugurate the stratosphere

Black as bedazzlement

Sun-bathing our defiancies

Toughening skin to breed

Dimitrov physiognomies

Like greyhounds are for speed.

The shift in tone delivers up that shift to a mood that is exactly defiant, stratospheric, despite the strategizing of the factory boss, so that the poem, and, as Slater perceives it, the cultural intervention per se, becomes “a word like a rivet/Red hot, to be dropped in.”

What is also of interest in relation to Slater’s work, most obviously in Peter Grimes, is a commitment to working through an understanding of psychoanalytic theories. Thus, his materialism expands to incorporate this and is enriched by it.

He contends in Character Equals Situation (p.50) that “The plain man’s plain prosaic lie…is shame.”  In Your Touch Hast Still (p.71) there is a brief illumination of how this might be worked through to a possibly liberatory effect: “Mythology breaks down, a gap/Lets in the undecided hope.” The two materialisms, the psychoanalytic and the nature-grounded, combine to their most beautiful effect in Now Praise (p.53):

Fatigue may cloud

The spinal fluid

But thought will speed

The dancing blood

Which traces veins

so delicate

That you would say

The body thought.

Bare to the sun

Worship and study

This gold, this gold

Human body.

A commitment to communist militancy

What then, can we take from these collections? What can we learn from the works of 2 communist poets, the later of who died in 1956 , before Khrushchev’s speech, before Cuba, before the collapse of Stalinism?

Let us say that most obviously we can take inspiration from their determined commitment to the use of poetry not simply to reflect or to inspire, but to expose, to put into practice that “anti-illusionism” which Brecht most obviously sought to exemplify. We hear much now about “culture wars”, but should it not be the case that culture ought to be fought as a war – between the old order of rent, exploitation, racism, misogyny and homophobia, and the new order we want to bring about? Should we not commit to the relentless critique of what is? What’s the alternative – a commitment to a form of art that offers catharsis through tragic form, but thereby does nothing to move anything an inch further forward? A beautiful resignation? Neither Branson or Slater are “great” poets, but their work inspires, excites, rages and denounces and refuses to be passive.

In his essay “Marxism and Poetry”, Ernst Bloch writes of poetry as “imagination without lie.” He states that a “revolutionary poetry” does not demand the sacrifice of imagination, but the acceptance of a poetry where “the bleakness, solitude and disorientation of late capitalism are pressing concerns.”

He notes though, that poetry is not history. That historiographers express what happened, and poets what might well happen. This I think is the second point to take from reading Branson and Slater, and relates to that pagan/ Freudian materialism, and how we might conceive a communist poetry today. Bloch says that “meaningful poetry makes the world become aware of an accelerated flow of action.”

In other words, it is not passive, or pastoral. It conceives of a world which is dynamic and plastic. Bloch says that “Truth is ultimately the demonstration of tendency and latency of what has not yet developed and needs its agent.” Poetry, if both unillusioned and optimistic, might be one of those possible agents. Reading Slater and Branson at their best shows us a way to attempt that task.

As for the lessons we might more directly learn – what really separated the communism of Branson and Slater from the lefts of today? A commitment to ideological struggle, to not flinching from, and taking the initiative in, culture wars; a commitment to a revolutionary humanism and class struggle, and to militant anti-fascism as a recognition that fascism was committed to militant inequality and had to be fought relentlessly as such; and a refusal of (to quote Orwell again) “flabby pacifism.” Even though Branson and Slater carry with them some of the baggage of the degeneration of the CPGB, their writings still give an indication of what the commitment to communist militancy might truly mean.