The English Literary Left
F. W. Dupee
IN
FRANCE
.AND
AMERICA left-wing literature has been largely a prose
literature. In England, however, the novelists (Hanley, Calder-Marshall,
Hampson) are negligible in comparison with the group of poets' gathered
around W. H. Auden. The one prose writer of importance is Christopher
Isherwood, who belongs to the Auden circle. Comparatively negligible too
are the critics and journalists associated with
Left
Review.
Edgell Rick–
word, Montagu Slater, Alick West-these writers comprise the official,
the Communist Party Left, with which the Auden circle is linked through
Stephen Spender and
C.
Day Lewis, its political wing. Its other wing,
literary in the traditional sense, opposed to the pamphlet-poem and the
politically inflated reputation, is made up of Geoffrey Grigson, who edits
the small bi-monthly
New Verse,
and Louis MacNeice, its chief contributor.
In the center of the Auden circle, looking both ways, is W. H. Auden
himself.
The English Renaissance
In the light of the American Left, there is a great deal that is ambiguous
about the Auden circle. Politically they fall short of the specifications for
a left-wing group, and in a literary sense they tend to exceed them. Orien–
tated though they are towards the Communist Party, yet there has been
little direct transposition of party politics into their writing; and as poets
they have much in common with the purely literary avant-garde movements
of the 20·s. No such ambivalence can be ascribed to the American Left.
In the United States the bohemian-esthetic tradition of the 20's was largely
played out when the Depression came, and little friction was encountered
by the Communist Party in its literary operations, for it was working in a
cultural vacuum. For this reason, and because the party was able to divert
writers back to a venerable literary populism which had survived through
the 20's as a thin, secondary current, the program for a "proletarian litera–
ture" succeeded in America-succeeded, that is, in influencing enough
writers to produce an organized movement. Among English writers, however,
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