DE LAS CENIZAS A LA VANGUARDIA BIBLIOTECARIA (1934-2020) (1934-2020)

That the literary output produced by postwar working-class realist authors was, by and large, the literary manifestation of postwar consensus politics is also evident in the degree to which those identities largely excluded from the postwar political imagination were similarly excluded from the imagination of much of the period’s working-class fiction. Indeed, as discussed above, the monological dominance of the male autodiegetic narrator in these novels meant that women were largely marginalised, figuring ‘in so far as they impeded or

facilitated his rise’ (Sinfield 1997: 234) or relegated to the terrain upon which conflicts between men manifested.

Comparable tendencies can be observed with regards Britain’s burgeoning migrant

communities who, as discussed above, also found themselves generally excluded from the

196 integration of working-class organisations into welfare capitalism and the national

community. Thus, in the postwar novels discussed in this chapter, people of colour are depicted either somewhat problematically or as largely non-existent. In Sommerfield’s novel, for instance, black presence is conspicuous in its absence—especially given the prevalence of passages set against the backdrop of London youth culture and jazz clubs—with their

mention restricted to a single off-hand comment about ‘strolling coloured students’ on a quiet Sunday (Sommerfield 1960: 44), implying little more than non-threatening peripheral

coexistence. However, given the novel’s previously-discussed Marxist undercurrents with regards to working-class navigation of the postwar housing crisis as well as the text’s publication shortly after the racially-motivated violence of 1958 (themselves propelled in significant part by racist narratives around housing), a continuity from Sommerfield’s two decades of CPGB membership becomes detectable. That is, the narrative’s marginalisation of black characters permits a reading of the novel as embodying the CPGB’s

economic-reductionist approach to anti-racism not by confronting race and racial discourses but avoiding them in a simplistic attempt to discuss the “real” economic base at the root of all social problems.

Novels such as A Kind of Loving and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, meanwhile, suffer from related problems, though manifesting somewhat differently. Barstow constructs a complex characterisation of Vic as holding some prejudiced ideas alongside a “common sense” “live-and-let-live” tolerance arguing that among the ‘coloured bods’ in his town

‘there’ll be right’uns and wrong’uns among them like there is with anybody else’ though qualifying his statement saying he ‘wouldn’t like to be a bird walking home late at night by myself up Colville Road. There’s so many of them living up there the locals call it the Road to Mandalay. God! I’m glad I’m English’ (Barstow 2010: 92). Later, however, Vic reaffirms

197 his anti-racism, satirising Mrs Rothwell’s desire to ‘pack that lot off home’ as ‘it’s getting as a respectable Englishwoman daren’t put her nose outside her own door’ (280), contradicting his previous statement about the supposed danger to women on Colville Road. Meanwhile, Sillitoe similarly attempts to address issues of race through the character of Sam, a black soldier in the British Army who stays with Arthur’s Aunt Ada after befriending her son Johnny while serving together in Africa. Subject to what famed psychiatrist and postcolonial Marxist, Frantz Fanon, described as the ‘thousand details, anecdotes, stories’ with which white society ‘battered down’ black people with discourses around their supposed intellectual deficiency and savagery (2008: 84), Sam is bombarded with questions, “jokes” and

assumptions, such as thinking ‘telegrams are sent by tom-tom’ (Sillitoe 2008: 191) and being asked whether he can read and write (192). Yet he is also defended by Aunt Ada, who, responding to Bert, ‘turned on him fiercely. [...] “you’d better be nice to ‘im, or Johnny’ll gi’

yer a good thump when ‘e comes ‘ome from Africa.”’ (193). As Haywood points out, during Sam’s brief presence in the narrative, ‘the festive camaraderie of the occasion extends to him also, and seems to offer him a tentative place within this older working-class culture’ (1997:

104). However, the place offered to Sam is ‘tentative’ precisely because it is fundamentally imperiled by the assumption underpinning the family’s relationship to him: ‘He’s a guest’

(Sillitoe 2008: 193), explains Ada and, in framing his presence this way, Sillitoe implicitly attaches temporal conditions to the aforementioned camaraderie while simultaneously severing Sam from the possibility of more profound bonds of solidarity. This is exacerbated by Sillitoe’s portrayal of Sam as the “perfect guest”, grateful and unimposing, an obvious attempt at undermining stereotypes of black savagery or predatory sexuality but which ultimately result in Sam having hardly any personality at all. So while ‘Sam beamed with happiness at the universal sympathy around him’ (196), he is also removed from the social questions and struggles of race and class in Britain, leaving Sillitoe capable of addressing

198 racism only on the relatively superficial level of individual phobia rather than as part of the social relations which he is able to portray with regards to Arthur’s antagonistic subject position. Indeed, Sam’s ‘guest’ status is inadvertently complicit with anti-migrant

‘Gastarbeiter’ discourse (Sivanandan 2008: 75) and runs counter to the identities which would be constructed by the future protagonists of Britain’s anti-racist and black liberation movements, exemplified in slogans such as ‘Here to stay, here to fight’ and ‘Come what may, we’re here to stay’ (Ramamurthy 2013). In the end, what is evident in both Barstow’s and Sillitoe’s novels, is that while there exist attempts to directly confront racism, these attempts remain on the level of interpersonal prejudice rather than the articulated structures of class and race, while the voices of non-white characters are minimised; indeed, Barstow’s

‘coloured bods’ do not speak at all, existing only as objects of discussion in the background, while Sam says little more, but instead is frequently spoken for by the novel’s white

characters.

Such a tendency towards the removal of agency and subjectivity from non-white characters was counteracted by the emergence of what can be considered a ‘proletarian literary

formation’ around the milieu of postwar Caribbean writers whose radical oeuvres often focused explicitly on black or migrant working-class experiences, even if often categorised in ethnic rather than class terms. However, though the 1950s, as ‘the great decade of the West Indian novel’ (Hughes 1979: 90), is correctly understood through the analytical frameworks of race and postcolonialism, productive readings can be made through analysing the milieu’s characteristics as a proletarian literary formation paralleling—but nonetheless distinct from—

that of the Angry Young Men. This is not only due to the working- or lower-middle class origins of some of its authors—such as the ‘scholarship boy’, George Lamming, or Sam Selvon, who left school at fifteen and worked as a wireless operator during World War

199 Two—nor merely the depiction in their novels of working-class experiences and anti-colonial struggle. Rather, as well as these, postwar Caribbean writing can be considered a proletarian literary formation for the fact that it formed what Denning might describe as a distinct literary institution growing out of a specific social formation of class recomposition arising from the need for migrant labour to rebuild Britain following the war and, to draw on Jameson, reaffirmed the existence of a marginalised and oppositional culture of postwar Caribbean migrants while restoring them ‘to their proper place in the dialogical system of the social classes’ (2002: 71).

The postwar Caribbean proletarian literary formation was buoyed by support from Henry Swanzy whose influence can be thought of as broadly analogous to that of John Lehmann at New Writing discussed in the previous chapter. During his editorship of the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices, Swanzy not only provided a platform for burgeoning Caribbean writers but also supported them financially: in 1949, Swanzy said the BBC was

‘subsidising West Indian writing to the tune of £1,500 a year in programme fees alone’

(1949: 28), a claim supported by George Lamming, explaining how

in one way or another, all the West Indian novelists have benefited from his work and his generosity of feeling. [...] If you looked a little thin in the face [...] he would make some arrangement for you to earn. Since he would not promise to ‘use’ anything you had written, he would arrange for you to earn by employing you to read. (2005: 67)

Swanzy’s contribution, however, went beyond the purely financial, sustaining the Caribbean proletarian literary formation in London through ‘informal evenings of literary discussion at his home. West Indian writers from across the region could, for the first time, meet and enter

200 regular discussions with each other’ (Nanton 2000: 69). Swanzy’s contribution was such that in 1960 Lamming argued that ‘No comprehensive account of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade could be written without considering his whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian novel’ (2005: 67).

Keeping in mind Denning’s refocusing of discussion away from “haggling” over the

‘backgrounds and affiliations of specific writers’ and towards the kinds of writing, genres, forms and formulas which proletarian literary formations produced, one effect of Caribbean Voices on postwar British Caribbean literature was the result of radio’s focus ‘on the diversity of Caribbean vernaculars [which] drew attention to narrative form and poetic voice as much as content’ (Griffith 2001: 19-20). Influencing writers’ approaches to form and voice, radio also highlighted an oft-neglected tendency within disagreements between the London BBC office and literary agents in the Caribbean with Griffith observing the ‘ironic situation’

whereby BBC personnel promoted West Indian accents on Caribbean Voices while significant sections of the Caribbean literati preferred (Standard) English accents (15).

Griffith quotes Jamaican poet John Figueroa’s opinion that ‘when one looks more carefully, and observes who are strongly praised as readers, one cannot help noticing they are either English or have very “Oxford English” voices’ (15). It is important to note, then, that Caribbean writers arriving in London, were also escaping a latent conservatism within their region’s middle-class literary milieus.

Moreover, as novelists often depicting the articulated experiences of racialised working-class migrants from the Commonwealth, their texts therefore sit at the intersection of issues of class, race, citizenship and colonialism while similarly navigating forms of political representation attempting to contain/exclude this complex marginalised subject position