The Guardian, 7 Luglio 2001
Url: http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,3605,517842,00.html

The left's ace of clubs

It sold books, held dances, supported causes and promoted socialism. Paul Laity on the radical venture that engaged the political passions of the British middle classes in the 1930s
In January 1936, the "red squire" and barrister Stafford Cripps met Victor Gollancz, the publisher, for lunch. They were joined by the bestselling Marxist writer John Strachey. What could be done, Cripps wanted to know, to revitalise and educate the British left? He was considering a new weekly paper, but Gollancz had another idea - a club along the lines of the successful Book Society, which would sell radical books very cheaply. The first advertisement for the Left Book Club appeared a month later. It was a call to arms. Political understanding, Gollancz wrote, was a matter of "terrible urgency at the present time, when the world is drifting into war, and fascism is triumphing in country after country". The club's aim would be to "help in the struggle for world peace and a better social and economic order, and against fascism". The response to the ad was staggering: 2,000 adherents were needed to make the club work - after a month, there were more than 6,000. By the end of the first year, membership had reached 40,000 and by 1939 it was up to 57,000; in total, 6m LBC volumes were put into circulation. Among the writers who contributed were Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Edgar Snow, Clement Attlee and Clifford Odets. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge wrote in 1940 that a collection of club volumes was "an armoury from which a weapon could be selected for argument on any conceivable subject" - from farming to Freud to air-raid shelters to Indian independence. Some of the books were extended news bulletins, others were closely argued treatises; almost all advocated a politics to the left of the Labour party. The club was the most astonishing political publishing venture seen in Britain, and there has never been such a powerful force in this country for the dissemination of far left ideas. The club published a few novels, and a small amount of poetry and drama, too. Most impressive, however, was its output of personal political reportage - from Wigan pier, the Welsh collieries, Shaanxi province, Barcelona and other zones of crisis in those remarkable years. Club members were committed to buying a designated title from Gollancz's list every month for a minimum of six months. The books were often specially commissioned for the LBC, but were also sold to the general public, at two or three times the club price of 2s 6d (12.5p). They were distributed via bookshops and some newsagents. The sales of each of the club's monthly selections far surpassed those of most other topical books. The print run of Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier, for example, was 42,000; that of his next book, Homage To Catalonia, published by Secker, was 1,500. The LBC quickly developed from a book club into a distinctive political movement as members formed local groups to discuss the monthly choices. By the outbreak of war there were 1,200 such groups, one in almost every town in the country - they held lectures and "socials", distributed pamphlets and acted as recruiting centres. The LBC was fast becoming, Gollancz said, "a genuine movement of the masses". Through the groups, it provided a focus for leftwing cultural activity of all kinds: in theatre, film, poetry, travel and music. "It could only have happened," Strachey said, "at the present moment." The club's first months coincided with nervousness at the prospect of another war, the triumph of the Popular Front in France and, crucially, the beginning of the civil war in Spain. In Britain, the Tory-dominated National Government was widely disliked, but there was no effective opposition: the Labour party was still reeling from betrayal and defeat in 1931; the Liberal party was in permanent decline. At the same time, a new, radical middle class was emerging - hooked on modernity, public-spirited and often employed by local government. The popularity of the Left Book Club depended on such a readership. With the Labour party appearing unadventurous and feeble, many socialists looked further to the left. A Marxist view of the world was never more plausible. World capitalism was in crisis - economies crashing, governments toppling, empires overextended - and the imagery of blight could be seen everywhere in Britain: dole queues, abandoned docks and shipyards, slums in decaying towns. Meanwhile, Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia, and Germany was obviously a ravenous empire sustainable only by a series of military advances. The only answer, it seemed to Gollancz and others, was for Labourites, Liberals and communists to forget their differences and form, as they had done in France, a Popular Front government to cope with the emergency. This new administration would immediately sign up to an anti-fascist alliance with France and the Soviet Union and stop the dictators in their tracks. The LBC was founded as a means to support this unity campaign. To help him select the club volumes, Gollancz recruited Strachey and Harold Laski. It was an awesome trio: three of Beaverbrook's "four horsemen of the socialist apocalypse" (the other was Kingsley Martin). Brought up in a privileged, Liberal household (Lytton was his second cousin; his father edited the Spectator), Strachey became a Labour MP in 1929 but then moved violently to the left. He took up with communism, "from chagrin", he used to explain, "at not getting into the Eton cricket XI". Strachey was a great persuader; The Coming Struggle for Power, published in 1932, made communism seem practical and logically necessary. Laski's books were even more widely read than Strachey's. A professor at the LSE, he was also the most popular Labour party figure outside parliament. He came from a Liberal family, but found a home on the left of the Labour party. Intellectually unsatisfied, he found that Marxism gave him "inner peace". Gollancz was himself a committed, impulsive socialist. As a young man, he had "thrilled" to the Russian revolution and rebelled against his authoritarian Jewish upbringing. He set up his firm in 1928 and by the mid-30s was already a publishing phenomenon, thanks partly to the sleuthing of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey. Gollancz had demonic energy, combined with a self-assurance which slipped easily into arrogance ("I am incapable of error"). He oversaw everything to do with the LBC ("the club is myself!") and was, Strachey said, a "generous, emotional, greedy, intelligent, gorgeous and sometimes absurd man". He admired the language of the CP and, despite retaining Labour party membership, was identified as a fellow traveller. "I was as close to the communists," he later said of his politics in the 30s, "as one hair is to another." Gollancz was too much of a crowd-pleaser to confine the club's output to Marxist polemics, however well written. He cast about for political "narratives of adventure" to put some pace into the list. As a result, the first few monthly choices offered variety as well as quality. They included a book on the French Popular Front; a study of the future of genetics; two novels - André Malraux's Days Of Contempt, about a political prisoner in Nazi Germany, and Hillel Bernstein's Choose A Bright Morning, a satire on the "follies of fascism" - and Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths, a "sensationalist" account of life inside Parkhurst prison. Yet Gollancz also had a compulsion to educate, and when Gaetano Salvemini's Under The Axe Of Fascism raised protests from members for being too much like hard work, he gave them a ticking off: the club was "'not just for light entertainment". One member, at least, was contrite: Forced to make the choice ourselves Our rude forefathers loaded shelves With Tennyson and Walter Scott And Meredith and Lord knows what! But we don't have to hum and ha, Nous avons changé tout celà - Our books are chosen for us - Thanks to Strachey, Laski and Gollancz! One aspect of the selection process was never made explicit - the unwillingness on the part of Gollancz, Strachey and Laski to criticize the Soviet Union and its leadership, or to publish anything that would seriously annoy the communist party. For instance, a great deal of anguish surrounded the publication of the second part of The Road To Wigan Pier which, with its stinking workers and its assault on Marxist intellectuals, was tough for the CP to swallow. (Gollancz overruled party objections but wrote a special foreword which tried to set Orwell straight.) Communists were the driving force behind the club. In March 1937, Gollancz and Strachey agreed that all club groups should ideally have "one or two good party members". In effect, the club became a key part of the CP's recruitment drive. The Labour party leadership was embarrassed about the success of the club and was also suspicious of the Popular Front campaign, which had been initiated by the CP. It therefore distanced itself from the LBC and even tried to set up its own book club and expelled a couple of local constituency activists because of their membership of the real thing. The Stalinist show trials coincided with the first years of the club, but Gollancz shared the CP's sensitivity to any criticism of Stalin and remained blithely pro-Soviet. On a trip to the Soviet Union, Gollancz told the Moscow Daily News of the "real, genuine classlessness" he had seen on his visit, "a sort of springtime feeling... that pre- history is over and history is just beginning". And in November 1937, when asked by Cavalcade magazine to nominate his man of the year, he chose Stalin, who was, he felt, "safely guiding Russia on the road to a society in which there will be no exploitation". On discovering that HN Brailsford's LBC volume Why Capitalism Means War took the Soviet Union to task for lack of personal freedoms, Gollancz pressed him to revise the manuscript. Lion Feuchtwanger's Moscow 1937, a "topical" offer in July of that year, eulogised Stalin, in socialist realist style, as "big, broad and commanding... He walks up and down whilst he is speaking, then suddenly approaches you, pointing a finger of his beautiful hand." Gollancz was in no doubt that the trials were legitimate and necessary, even restrained. There was, Strachey wrote, "no conceivable alternative" after the accused had told their stories "but to shoot them". The god had yet to fail and the disasters of the Soviet Union were still obscured by the glare of optimism. The USSR was the target of fascist threats and was alone in helping republican Spain - even those on the left who would have blanched at Strachey's endorsement of the firing squads were unwilling to condemn it. All sorts of people (Lady Astor, HG Wells, GB Shaw, Malcolm Muggeridge) had visited the Soviet Union and reported tremendous improvements in agriculture, schools and hospitals - the Soviet Union seemed to have escaped economic crisis, thanks to the five-year plan. Sidney and Beatrice Webb's now notorious dispatch, The Soviet Union: A New Civilisation? - "the most preposterous book ever written about Russia", according to AJP Taylor - argued that the Soviet system was in some ways the highest form of democracy so far evolved (it was reprinted by the LBC without the question mark in the title). But most club subscribers weren't communists and embraced the Popular Front as a means to end inter-party bickering in a time of emergency. The club's rallies and meetings provided evidence that the Popular Front transcended party politics. Talks were given by - for example - Aneurin Bevan, David Lloyd George, JB Priestley, Paul Robeson, AJP Taylor, Quentin Bell, Rose Macaulay, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Cecil Day Lewis. The majority of club members may have read Strachey's The Theory And Practice Of Socialism but had little interest in the manoeuvrings of the CP. Their activism was more about passion and urgency (and perhaps a bit of class guilt) than the formalities of dialectical materialism. The LBC surfed the wave of sentiment and activism which moved across progressive Britain following Franco's rebellion. Once the fascist powers and the Soviet Union had become involved, the complex situation in Spain was easily transformed into a simple struggle of good v evil: a people's army was fighting for democracy and a classless society. Holding meetings about Spain was, Gollancz urged, "the first big chance for us to prove that we are, each one of us, missionaries for civilisation". All of Europe was a "suburb of Madrid", Strachey said at the first club rally: "We do not want to wait until London is suffering the same fate." The club's official reports of events in Spain were naturally gung-ho: "With unexampled heroism, Madrid's defenders have hurled back the onslaught of Franco's murderers." Very few LBC members knew the unsavoury nature of what was actually going on - Gollancz refused to publish Homage To Catalonia, because of its uncomfortable revelations that Spanish communists, under their Russian-trained commissars, were busy fighting their anarchist allies as well as Franco's troops. Meetings were held everywhere, often in combination with Labour constituency parties and Spanish aid committees. Some groups constructed motorbike ambulances; others adopted Basque children. There were "knit-ins" to make clothes for the International Brigades and money raised to send a club food ship to Spain. The books had an impact, too. The December 1936 choice, Spain In Revolt by Harry Gannes and Theodore Repard, taught members the background to the conflict and became, one commentator says, "a kind of 30s Lillibulero, which swept young men into the International Brigade". The Left Book Club's meetings had, one American observer noted, "the atmosphere of a true religious revival". (Malcolm Muggeridge said, more savagely, that Gollancz was greeted by his members with the acclamation due to a führer.) Some groups thrived where leftwing politics had barely existed before. ("Lefts of Richmond and Kew," one letter to the Gollancz offices said, "had thought themselves isolated until the Book Club came along and introduced them to one another".) Another enthusiastic recruiter who lived in an unnamed "reactionary town" managed to convert "two enamelled and trousered lovelies" in a saloon bar, "two sinister colonels in a railway carriage" and a doctor's "large and, I had always thought, smug" family. With its communist cachet, even its button badge and slogans ("a penny a day keeps reaction away"), the club had a sort of radical chic. One journalist imagined Gollancz seated at his desk with a map of the country in front of him. Every time the telephone rang, he stuck in a flag - a new group in London, one in Southampton. (The club also spread overseas: Paris, Zurich, the Gold Coast, South Africa - Australia alone had 4,500 members and 98 branches.) Most, but by no means all, of the British groups were in the south. Their size varied from a few subscribers in villages and small towns to 500 in the big cities. Smaller groups tended to meet in a member's house, over coffee and biscuits, enjoying, Julian Symons has written, "the warm sense of shared feelings and common attitudes that keeps all minority movements together". "A spot of coffee drinking about halfway through the evening," Gwyn Thomas from Bristol noted, was effective for "breaking down shyness". Urban groups met in a cafe, bookshop or meeting hall. Unexpectedly, all sorts of vocational and other specialised groups began to appear: bus drivers, London Indian residents, railwaymen, Clarion Cycle Club members, clerical workers, musicians, busmen, civil servants, hospital workers, postmen, architects, teachers (by far the biggest vocational group), City workers, engineers, marionette theatre enthusiasts, sixth-formers, bank employees, doctors, lawyers, commercial travellers, journalists, London cab drivers and accountants (who discussed topics such as "Britain without capitalists"). Among the more prestigious were the scientists' groups, formed in London, Cambridge and Bristol: their members included JD Bernal and JBS Haldane. More than 40 groups opened special club premises. The Camden Town branch boasted "two tables, a typewriter, a gramophone and a couple of banjos", while the centre in Paddington enjoyed easy chairs, committee rooms and a buffet. The less fortunate residents of Wolverhampton had a gloomy loft in a barn, approached by a ladder, in which members gamely played table tennis. "Brightly coloured Soviet posters" - sunlit tractors and smiling workers - could be obtained free of charge. With or without premises, a bewildering variety of activities were organised by the groups. A Cambridge convenor promised that "on every Saturday night, some kind of social, film show or singsong will be taking place. A radiogram has been installed and light refreshments will be available at most times." In Stepney, the members ran a football club, a gramophone recital circle, a swimming team, PT (physical training) classes and various educational courses, as well as launching its own inquiry into conditions in the east end. The club's journal, Left News, said that "even games, songs and recreation can, and indeed should, reflect and awaken a leftwing attitude to things... walks, tennis, golf and swimming are quite different when your companions are 'comrades of the left'." Commitment knew no bounds: one member attended a fancy-dress dance with orange cardboard attached to his front and back, and wearing a skull-cap with "Join the LBC" written on it. The novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, former lover of Dylan Thomas and future wife of CP Snow, featured the club in The Monument (1937). Mrs Sellars a Labour activist and local LBC organiser, takes part in a march for Spain ("the proud and lovely ranks of the Spanish flags... the streaming purple, magenta and gold"). She is waiting with her children, dressed as Basques, when she hears a "soaring gust of laughter from the watching crowds as the Left Book Club contingent came up. That's a good idea," she thinks to herself, "all those orange books prancing about on legs looking like something out of Alice in Wonderland." G eorge Orwell, on the other hand, who grew to despise the club for its CP connections, was scathing when he featured a provincial LBC lecture in Coming Up For Air (1939). The audience of "West Bletchley revolutionaries" includes Miss Minns, anxious to improve her mind, a woman knitting a jumper, two others, sitting "like lumps of pudding", and a younger woman, "one of the teachers at the Council School", who is "drinking it all in". Then there are "two old blokes from the local Labour party" who have been "pitchforked" into foreign pol itics; and a group of young communists, "twitching to get involved". The club also ran weekend and summer schools. A series of weekend events near Hastings was announced in Left News: "The company is left and congenial, the situation delightful, our host is an excellent fellow and a real socialist, the cooking superb and the terms moderate." Annual summer schools were held at Digswell Park country house. Talks given by "Sage" Bernal or Tom Harrisson (on "Mass Observation") were alternated with "sunbathing in a minimum of clothing in a field of new- mown hay". A 16mm film shot at the school during that week survives. It's a quaint comedy about the conversion of an upright Tory woman who accidentally finds herself at Digswell Park. She begins to enjoy herself in such congenial surroundings, reads a book on the position of women in the Soviet Union and dreams of honest labour in the fields working a simple plough. There's plenty of tennis, country dancing and nodding vigorously at lectures - linen jackets and tea dresses, and Gollancz in a straw boater. There were also "distressed areas summer schools", run by a club enthusiast. One was based in Pontypridd. The idea was that those attending should board with unemployed families, but if that was too bleak a prospect "alternative accommodation" could be found. Potential signers-up were reassured that the town had "first-rate tennis, bowls and an excellent miniature golf course"; they should pack overalls if they wanted to go down a pit. Although the LBC was predominantly middle class, there was a social mix in a few of the groups. Working-class communists (most of them in South Wales, South Yorkshire and Glasgow) were often members. When James Hanley, conducting research for his book Grey Children (1937), visited a miner's house in South Wales, he "noticed one or two volumes of the Left Book Club at the head of his bed. He said he was a member of that, but that he shared his membership with six others as he couldn't afford it himself." The LBC Writers and Readers Group's most active members included Sylvia Townsend Warner, Randall Swingler and AL Morton. The Poets' Group, meanwhile, attracted Auden, Day Lewis and MacNeice. There was also a professional actors' group, with members including Michael Redgrave, Gerald Savory and Sybil Thorndike. More important for the average club member was the LBC Theatre Guild, which encouraged local groups to stage productions in rooms and small halls and also to act as flying squads, performing plays and sketches at rallies and meetings. The guild's organiser, John Allen, said that the cooperation required to put on a play was "a splendid lesson in practical socialism". The Spanish cause continued to inspire the Left Book Club even when, in 1938, the Aragon front began to collapse and it became clear that the nationalists were winning. Spain was only gradually replaced as the focus of the Popular Front campaign by the need to attack appeasement as the worst way to prevent war. Gollancz knew that the LBC had made little impression on the government and was increasingly frustrated by his inability to transform the club from a thriving minority organisation into a mass movement. As a result, he began to favour the distribution of propaganda leaflets on a massive scale. During the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, he called with such urgency on the group convenors to distribute his leaflet opposing any sell-out to Hitler that half a million were on the streets the day the printers delivered them. Gollancz continued to demand a peace alliance with the Soviet Union as the best means to avert war. The Nazi-Soviet pact, signed on August 23 1939, put an end to that. It was a moral and intellectual earthquake in the life of all communists and fellow-travellers. Their prodigious investment in the Soviet Union as an ally and a socialist ideal had been destroyed. Days after the pact was signed, war broke out. Gollancz supported it as an anti-fascist war, and could claim consistency in doing so - the club's warnings against Hitler were finally being listened to. At first, the CP in Britain took the same position; then it changed tack and came out against an "imperialist war". Strachey toed the line and the club hierarchy was split. Gollancz grew incensed when he found out that the CP was turning a number of LBC groups into Stop-the-War committees. The valiant days of the Left Book Club were over. Membership in wartime fell to 15,000; after the war, it fell again to 7,000. The club continued to publish monthly choices (taking a non-communist line), but Gollancz had lost much of his initial enthusiasm and it was finally wrapped up in 1948. But although the Left Book Club had failed to bring in a Popular Front government and failed to prevent war, Gollancz's efforts had not gone to waste. It was "the unorthodox political education of the Left Book Club," Aneurin Bevan said, which "prepared the way" for the Labour victory of 1945. Richard Crossman was similarly convinced that the club helped bring about the "psychological landslide to the left" which ensured a defeat for Churchill. LBC monthly book choices helped to make full employment, proper housing, socialised medicine and civilised town planning axioms of general expectation, not only for an increasingly politicised working class, but for residents in middle-class and suburban constituencies which had seemed beyond the reach of Labour in 1935. Most of the electorate was determined that the harshness of Britain in the 30s would never be experienced again. Gollancz was proud, too, that Clement Attlee's new administration included eight club authors, among them Wing- Commander Strachey, "Austerity" Cripps and the prime minister himself. Yet it was difficult to rescue the Left Book Club's reputation. The political atmosphere that had brought Labour into power soon altered; the unusual influence exerted on the left by intellectuals and the progressive middle classes began to wane. Foreign politics changed, too, and with the onset of the cold war, the club was more than ever dismissed as a communist racket. (When Arthur Miller's future wife, Inge Morath, arrived in Hollywood in 1951, she was roughed up by immigration officers because she had an LBC book in her suitcase.) Former sympathisers were the most vituperative of all. The LBC, Philip Toynbee said, was regarded with "scorn and hatred" in later years: it "came to represent for many people much that they wanted to forget in their lives; for other, younger people it was a symbol of all that they thought worst about the 30s". Strachey's view of the LBC's influence was more generous and more durable. "It is curious," he said long after the club had folded, "to find in unlikely places, high and low, east and west, among law-makers and law-breakers, minds which were sparked by the Left Book Club." © Paul Laity, 2001. Edited extract from his introduction to the Left Book Club Anthology, published by Gollancz on July 12 at £20.