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Naomi Mitchison’s fiction from the nineteen thirties is marked by a sense of moral and spiritual crisis. This sense of crisis intensifies from her anthropological blockbuster The Corn King and the Spring Queen in 1931, to The Blood of the Martyrs in 1939. Although her early fiction belongs to the decade which followed the First World War and had been profoundly influenced by D.H. Lawrence, Naomi Mitchison was among the first to identify and express those topics now characterised as ‘thirties’ concerns. Art it was felt ought to be committed and socially relevant, and literature could only be justified if it was a mode of action in the real world offering ‘models’ or, in Auden’s phrase, ‘parables’ which clarified human issues and expressed moral intentions. For someone of Mitchison’s beliefs, such issues included the struggle for some definition of orthodoxy within left-wing movements, the uncertainty as to whether Russia provided a model, the belief in a socialist millenium, the all-pervading fear of war, and the need to identify with working-class aspirations and solidarity.

The need for a clear response to an extreme situation dominates The Blood of the Martyrs which was written in the shadow of fascism and anti-semitism in Germany and Austria, and completed as war and possibly German invasion seemed unavoidable. In its depiction of the first century Christian Church in persecution and martyrdom, The Blood of the Martyrs is both a parable for the times and Naomi Mitchison’s personal moral and political testament.

Such a work does not sit easily with a purely literary interpretation of ‘classic’ status. In the nineteen twenties as now, Naomi Mitchison did not write for a restricted literary audience but for the wider reading public which had been engaged in her own Edwardian childhood by authors such as H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. The Blood of the Martyrs was not conceived primarily as an enduring aesthetic artefact but as a ‘testament to reality’. It is a declaration of faith in the capacity of human love to transcend evil and oppression. It reaches beyond an aesthetic response and, by appealing to a shared psychological and emotional background, attempts to change attitudes and actions in the real world.

The question of religion, therefore, goes beyond the subject matter of this book to become a central metaphor in its own right. Political commitment and religious passion are closely allied for Mitchison, since both offer a psychological coherence for the individual self—a communal identity such as the anthropologists had identified in primitive societies. Equally of course such religio-political community can be diverted from moral ends to the service of unreason and evil: psychological identification with the group must be balanced by a commitment to reason and goodness.

In The Blood of the Martyrs Mitchison works from the religious end of the equation, arguing for a humanistic, social and political interpretation of New Testament Christianity. The Kingdom of Heaven is ‘Being fully ourselves towards one another: that is, letting what is of God become free of what men do to other men out of pride and greed.’ Sin is to be in the grip of the powers of this world and to behave accordingly. All in this condition are slaves, from the Emperor of Rome down, although paradoxically it is the actual slaves who have the greatest chance of release since they have least to lose. At the core of this creed are the deeds and sayings of Jesus of Nazareth — not a Resurrected Lord in the mould of the mystery cults, but (like Kleomenes in The Corn King) a man turned legend.

One who lived for us who’ve lost hope and found it again and been reborn. Who promised that he would feed the hungry and give their turn to the humble and meek. Who will see there is equal justice at last, not one scale weighted. Not Romans and natives, Beric. Not masters and servants. Not ladies and whores.

With consistent panache, Mitchison redefines the key concepts of Pauline theology. Grace is to be in a state of right relationship with one’s fellows; love and forgiveness are the bonds of human community as opposed to the might and coercion of Rome; to act with moral purpose is to serve Providence rather than Lady Luck and the superstitions of arbitrary chance which pervade the Graeco- Roman world; prayer is a concentration of the common will, emotion and intention. The sacraments are an intense symbolic sharing of the community experience from entry and catharsis (baptism), through mutual service (foot- washing) and love (the agape meal), to the final shared death which is Mitchison’s replacement for the communion or eucharist.

The communal experience of the Church is a moral one of simple kindness, friendliness and practical support but it is also something more: the individuals concerned feel themselves to be part of a greater whole. This is expressed as being part of ‘The Will’, or as being moved by ‘the Spirit’ (‘some unknown and unmeasured power’), but in neither case is the will or spirit conceived of as being exterior to the sum of human persons that composes the community. These religious terms are taken from the Christian context in order to describe a quality or dimension of experience which all human beings can discover and share when they come together harmoniously.

The Christians, including Beric, are eventually martyred for this quality of experience rather than for an idea or creed. Their willingness to endure physical pain and death is a vindication of their awareness of a life which is more than material and more than individual.

The possession of such a group loyalty or ‘mythology’ is, from Mitchison’s standpoint, a necessary part of the balanced personality. Its absence leaves a vacuum which is in danger of being filled by a false cult of the irrational or the worship of power. Rome has lost her gods and the common will to serve the state, and the vacuum is filled by Nero, who with a mixture of megalomania and adroit manipulation, exploits the ‘natural wish of the people for gods and the gifts of the gods, the natural wish for a leader.’

‘I feel like a god,’ said Nero, ‘sometimes. Coming into the Arena, slowly, grandly, at the head of the great procession serpent-stretching behind me, lifted on the voices, the closing, rising cheers, the love, lifted above the sand that is so soon to take the blood … I am the Will of Rome and the people know it, the ordinary people who love me. For whom I make the great blood sacrifice.’

This is opium for the mass unconscious and the contemporary comparison with Nazi Germany is omnipresent, but it is a thematic rather than historical link. In fact Mitchison’s argument is that goodness must also involve an element of unreason ‘so as to make a hold on the unreason in the human soul’, otherwise the powers of the dark unconscious will take control.

It is important to grasp that Mitchison’s method in The Blood of the Martyrs is not didactic. Everything for which she argues is grounded in an evocation of collective human experience expressed in fluid economical prose which embraces both narrative simplicity and poetic intensity.

She took off the veil and laid it by, and then all of them came close round the table with the bread and the fish and the little meat rolls which Sapphira had cooked, and they held one another’s hands. Argas, too, had kissed Persis, feeling curiously glad and assuaged at seeing her again. Every time they met together was something snatched by them from the powers of darkness, something solid that could never be taken from them again.

It is arguable that in its essential simplicity The Blood of the Martyrs fails to represent the complexity of reality. Certainly no character in the novel possesses the range of internal contradictions of Erika Der in The Corn King and the Spring Queen, or Phoebe in Naomi Mitchison’s other thirties novel We Have Been Warned (1934). This, however, is a deliberate authorial choice. In The Blood of the Martyrs Naomi Mitchison disciplined and restrained the autobiographical tendencies of her fiction to match the urgency of the immediate crisis as she perceived it in 1938. In consequence, paradoxically, she produced a passionately self-revealing novel.

Anyone seeking to understand this profilic Scottish author and activist could profitably begin with The Blood of the Martyrs. Mitchison’s complex relationship with the evangelical protestantism of her Haldane family background is at its clearest in this novel. Here the marriage of religious feeling and political action, common to all Naomi Mitchison’s endeavour, is at its most intense and its most historically immediate.

Equally significant however is the revelation in The Blood of the Martyrs of Naomi Mitchison’s literary method. The novel shows most directly the way in which she harnesses the popular format of the historical Romance and its close emotional identification with the reader, to moral and literary seriousness. It is liberating for Scottish fiction in particular, that critics have in recent years come to follow the general reader in acknowledging the validity and importance of the Romance genre. In this respect, The Blood of the Martyrs enhances our concept of what literature is, and our sense of Scottishness.

Donald Smith