Expressing the emotions (1995)

Book Review from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Against the Current by Christopher Hampton. (Katabasis Press, £5.95.)

There is more than one way to skin a cat. Polemicising against capitalism is good and necessary, but we need to express the felt emotions of an oppressed class as well. Marx learned more about the awful impact of industrial capitalism in France by reading Balzac's novels than from statistical formulae. Poetry, too, is a potent force in the struggle we are waging. As Christopher Hampton writes in his poem, What Words Can Do:

It's not a choice. Words either play

their part in making actions count

(imperative as the pressures mount)

or— caught between— give way,

give up, condone, conform, betray.

Hampton has a fine pedigree of finding the right words for the struggle. His Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England, 1381-1914, published in paperback by Penguin in 1984, was a remarkable anthology of fighting words. The Faber Book of Political Verse, edited by Tom Paulin in 1986, added much to the repertoire of our political battle songs: a veritable feast of great poets showing that the capitalists might own the printing presses, but it is from our class that the great literature of our time comes.

Hampton's new anthology of poetry is an invigorating addition to that repertoire. It reflects wide classical knowledge (he is currently working on a novel about Cicero’s radical conservatism in opposition to the true voice of freedom expressed by an ex-slave), and the poems from and about the ugly Eighties, the decade when Thatcherism called upon us to celebrate commerce. is unrestrainedly angry. His poem, The Leash, reminds us of Shelley's fire and will not easily be extinguished in the minds of its readers:

We walk these streets believing we are free.

    We take our roast-beef rolls with beer

and sun ourselves in Little Tilchficld Street

    as if there were no questions to be answered.

Love, its message half unheard in the rhythm

   of a ground-bass beating intermittently

among the chatter and the jostle, binds.

    And at such moments one could be forgiven

for supposing London’s teeming lunchtime air

     was freely ours—not bought or fought for,

not constricted, driven by the chartered laws

    of property, but unconditional and open,

there to move through, in and out, at will.

    Yet all the time, containing us, the abstracts

are at work that keep us all on leash.

With great pleasure we can report that Christopher Hampton will be a participant in the show of Socialist Words and Music currently being organised by our Camden branch. 

Steve Coleman

Political lines (2006)

Book Review from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Christopher Hampton: Border Crossings. Katabasis £7.95.

We don’t often review poetry in the Socialist Standard, but here is a volume which merits a brief notice at least.

One poem speaks of ‘something other than this money system’ and of the need to ‘make resources work for the social wealth’. Another, in an echo of Brecht’s work (‘Who built Thebes of the seven gates?’), refers to ‘those / without whose skills no cities can be built’ – ordinary people, rather than gods or rulers. The Anonymous Makers repeats this point: that it’s nameless people who have built and grown things, not those who live off their backs. The invasion of Iraq is satirised: ‘We’ve hearts and minds to win and markets to invest’. But all this is spoilt by a poem supporting Allende’s Chile: ‘this workers’ President, this hated workers’ state’ (hated by the rulers of the US, that is).

Best to remember this volume though for its attempt to supply ‘words that cross the frontiers / of hope and failure’.

Paul Bennett

Marxism and Literature (1991)

Book Reviews from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engels once commented that he learned more about history by reading the novels of Balzac than the historians ever told him. Literature is part of history; it reflects and contributes to its struggles, even if that is not the writer's intention. In The Ideology of the Text (Open University Press. £8.99) Christopher Hampton launches a timely assault upon those who seek to explain literature purely in terms of the words contained within texts, as if these can be extricated from historical motion and converted into “pure” literary form. Hampton exposes such theories as being:

in essence a refutation of the Marxist position, which takes its stand on the assumption that there are pre-existent material conditions which we can identify and relate to. and which determine the ways in which we act and think and feel.

The “mystificatory detachment" of the post-modernist critics is seen by Hampton as an excuse by which critics opt out of the necessity of explaining the texts of literature in terms of their ideological status—the sense in which they express the class consciousness either of the oppressor or the oppressed.

He looks at a number of important writers (Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Arnold, Morris) and attempts to treat the crucial question of how to decide their ideological colour. Shakespeare, for example, is seen as so much a part of the established English cultural institutions that quite absurd readings of his plays have emerged; Hampton cites G. Wilson Knight's use of Cranmer’s speech at the end of Henry VIII as justification for his support of the Falklands War. A remarkably good historical contextualisation of Shakespeare's writings is offered, a reading of which alone justifies the purchase or loan of this book.

Again, the treatment of the poetry of William Blake is fought for against those who would confine such texts to the history of harmless Christian prophecies. Blake, it is argued, made the historically crucial and ideologically distinctive choice to reject the pessimism of so many other poets—many of whom justified their right to call themselves poets by their unceasing miserableness. In the case of Blake, writes Hampton.

Though his world did its best, callously and indifferently. to break him, it failed. He was not a pessimist. He saw the world as it was, but he was not content to accept it as it was; for he saw it as it could be.

Substantiation of this assertion is abundantly provided. More than most, a writer who saw the world as it could become was the revolutionary socialist, William Morris. Hampton concludes that:

Today, the kinds of questions Morris asked about the destructive conditions of his time have not lost their urgency. However changed the particular circumstances that govern our lives in the late twentieth century, we still live under the domination of a capitalist economy which functions by feeding off the common wealth of the people and by imposing restrictive and stunting conditions upon them.

It is a cause for celebration that a writer of Hampton’s ability is throwing his weight behind the cause of clear Marxian analysis, and that, in the spirit of Marx, his book serves not merely to explain literature but to use it as a springboard to political action.

Revolutionary writings

Too many people who think of themselves as “Writers” and “Authors" place themselves in the precious literary arena where they feel they must be insulated from the filth of political ideas. As Hampton says, this luxury is not available to writers: those who are not with us are for them. John Graham has edited an excellent anthology of writings by those who were not afraid to contaminate their pens with the stains of class struggle. Yours For The Revolution (University of Nebraska Press) is about The Appeal to Reason, a newspaper which was published in Kansas between 1895 and 1922. Graham offers an interesting historical introduction to the newspaper, although he over-emphasises the journal’s socialist claims. In effect, it was a mish-mash of mainly reformist alongside some highly revolutionary writings. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was first serialised in The Appeal To Reason and Debs was a frequent contributor. Compared to the more solidly Marxian writings of De Leon, the pieces by Debs are rather tame, although the equal of anyone in terms of fiery rhetoric. The anthology contains some truly moving pieces; from Helen Keller, Mother Jones, Jack London as well as the individualistic editor, J. A. Wayland.

There is one letter which particularly moved the present writer: from a worker who was poor and ill and resolved to end his life and send what remained of his money to the journal that he had spent years trying to sell to workers. In “His Last Letter’ (as the piece was entitled) the anonymous writer urges readers. "I pray and beg of you to be of good cheer and courage. Do not fear to own the cause or blush to speak the name. If you can’t talk (nearly all persons can if they will try) you can do a world of good by distributing literature. Don’t let'em rest until such barbarous customs are completely abolished . . . Our principles cannot be refuted, for Right is on our side and we are bound to succeed . . .” Of course, the movement which he died supporting did not succeed, and only on the basis of revolutionary consciousness could success come. Those interested in the all-too-frequently neglected history of the American working-class movement should read this anthology.

Far from succeeding, in many ways there have been years of awful failure following the days of the Wobblies and The Appeal to Reason. In the USA the trade union movement has fallen prey to the organised bandits who have used it for their own corrupt purposes. Dan La Botz’s Rank and File Rebellion (Verso) tells the story, which has been ignored by the British media, of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and their efforts to wrest control of their union from bureaucratic leaders of the Jimmy Hoffa variety. The book makes compelling reading. If you did not think that there were militantly-minded wage slaves in the USA, then this book will open your eyes. The modern Teamsters’ movement understands the importance of democracy to working-class organisation and that is a vital lesson (not to understand only in theory, but in practical activity). They could do worse than to turn to Yours For The Revolution to learn that, as well as democracy, the workers need to be organised to a purpose: the abolition of the wages system.

Steve Coleman