Читать книгу Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry - Christopher Caudwell - Страница 5

THIS is one of the great books of our time. It is not easy reading. It is a book to be studied and annotated and returned to again and again. The reader will then find that, however often he takes it up, it will always give him fresh food for thought.

The author, Christopher St. John Sprigg, was born in Putney on October 20, 1907. He was educated at the Benedictine school at Ealing. He left school at sixteen and a half and worked for three years as a reporter on the Yorkshire Observer. Then he returned to London and joined a firm of aeronautical publishers, first as editor and later as a director. He invented an infinitely variable gear, the designs for which were published in the Automobile Engineer. They attracted a good deal of attention from experts. He published five textbooks on aeronautics, seven detective novels, and some poems and short stories. All this before he was twenty-five.

In May, 1935, under the name of Christopher Caudwell, he published his first serious novel, This My Hand. It shows that he had made a close study of psychology, but he had not yet succeeded in relating his knowledge to life.

At the end of 1934 he had come across some of the Marxist classics, and the following summer he spent in Cornwall immersed in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Shortly after his return to London he finished the first draft of Illusion and Reality. Then, in December, he took lodgings in Poplar and later joined the Poplar Branch of the Communist Party. Many of his Poplar comrades were dockers, almost aggressively proletarian, and a little suspicious at first of the quiet, well-spoken young man who wrote books for a living; but before long he was accepted as one of themselves, doing his share of whatever had to be done

A few months after joining the Party he went over to Paris to get a first-hand experience of the Popular Front and he came back with renewed energy and enthusiasm. Besides continuing to write novels for a living, he re-wrote Illusion and Reality, completed the essays published subsequently as Studies in a Dying Culture, and began The Crisis in Physics. He worked to the clock. After spending the day at his typewriter, he would leave the house at five and gp out to the Branch to speak at an open-air meeting, or sell the Daily Worker at the corner of Crisp Street Market

Meanwhile, the Spanish Civil War had broken out. The Poplar Branch threw itself into the campaign, with Caudwell as one of the leading spirits. By November they had raised enough money to buy an ambulance, and Caudwell was chosen to drive it across France. After handing it over to the Spanish Government, he joined the International Brigade, and was killed in action on the Jarama on February 12, 1937.

In a letter from Spain he wrote: “I’m beginning to feel an old soldier, and already act as machine-gun instructor to our section. I’m political delegate to the group, joint editor of the wall newspaper, and have another political job, so you see I have my spare time fairly well filled.” He goes on to ask for news from Poplar, no matter how small. “Out here”, he continues, “where our Labour Party group meets in the Communist Political Commissar’s room in the offices of the local Anarchist Trade Unions, it’s difficult to imagine the frame of mind of the Labour Party leadership at home.”

His death was reported by a fellow Brigader, one of his best friends, who has since been killed in the Second World War. “On the first day, John’s section was holding a position on a hill crest. They got it rather badly from all ways: first artillery, then aeroplanes, then three enemy machine guns. The Moors then attacked the hill in large numbers. As there were only a few of our fellows left, including John, who had been doing great work with his machine gun, the Company Commander gave the order to retire. I got in touch later with one of his section who was wounded while retiring, and he told me the last he saw of John was covering the retreat with the Moors less than thirty yards away. I enquired of all our chaps for him for the next seven days, while I was on that front, but no one had seen him again. It was obvious he never managed to get off the hill.”

Except for the novels and textbooks on aviation, all Caudwell’s books are posthumous. Illusion and Reality was in the press when he left for Spain; Studies in a Dying Culture appeared in 1938, Poems and The Crisis in Physics in 1939.

In a review of The Crisis in Physics, Professor J. B. S. Haldane wrote: “Caudwell has something to say about science, and something very important indeed, though he only half-said it, I believe that the book will be a quarry of ideas of philosophers for generatiofis to come.” The same may be said of Illusion and Reality. It marks an entirely new departure in literary criticism It is the first comprehensive attempt to work out a Marxist theory of art, and, while some parts of the argument will doubtless be modified by further research, it is as a whole a permanent contribution to the subject, destined to become a classic.

Caudwell was a man of genius, but he might have been that and still not achieved what he did in his short life. A naturally gifted thinker, he became a man of action. It was not an accident that his most productive period as a writer coincided with his political activity in Poplar And his death was a tragedy in the true sense of the word, because in it his life was consummated. He lived and died a Communist.

G. T.