A Mind in Chains
Further Studies in a Dying Culture. By Christopher Caudwell. (Bodley Head. Ss. 6d.) CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL was twenty-nine when, in 1937, he was killed while fighting as a member of the International Brigade. He died prematurely, in a cause to which he was completely and passionately devoted, and it is t*ssible to invest his early death with an ideal significance—to think of him as a sort of Rupert Brooke of Marxism. Those who share his faith tend to do so. But the publication of this new collection of his essays makes one wonder whether his death was not premature in another sense. Like his earlier books, these papers reveal an intellect of consider- able vigour and penetration, Whose activity was abrupty ended on the Jarama River ; but they also pose the question: In what direction would that intellect be moving if it were still active today ?
Caudwell's Marxism was a product of the 'thirties. It was in 1934 that he first became closely concerned with Communist theory, and began to study working-class conditions in the East End of London. The theory seemed to him to explain, and to provide a remedy for, the social chaos of the years of slump: it also answered his other intellectual problems. "He had," writes Mr. Edgell Rickword in his introduction to these essays, "an insatiable in- tellectual curiosity, a consuming Faustian ambition to master all the sciences." Marx became his Mephistopheles. "Having grasped from Marx the clue to the contemporary labyrinth, Caudwell found that the other knowledge he had acquired now fell into due plan and proportion." Into the narrow categories of dialectical materialism he started to cram the broad subject-matter of physics, aesthetics, psychology and metaphysics.
The essays in this volume are five examples of his endeavour. They are ingenious, earnest, trenchant: for me, who in Caudwell's terms am pure bourgeois, they are vitiated by the way that the old Marxist dogmas rigorously dictate his conclusions. In his conduct of the argument one observes an original and sensitive mind at work, but one is always aware of the direction in which one is being led, and the end is a place to which one has been before. The first essay, "The Breath of Discontent," is a discursive examination of the place of religion in mankind's history, but in effect it is no more than a clever cadenza on Marx's theme- " Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressed creature . . . it is the opium of the people." And sure enough the relevant passage from Marx's "Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law" bobs up as an appendix to the essay. In his essay on Beauty, Caudwell circles away in curves of original speculation, but returns always to his main purpose, the presentation of aesthetics along the party line.
The final essay, on Reality, ends with this expression of Caud- well's credo: "To have become a dialectical materialist is to have been subject to exploitation, want, war, anxiety, insecurity ; to have had one's barest human needs denied or one's loved ones tormented or killed in the name of bourgeois liberty, and to have found that one's ` freewill ' alone can do nothing at all, because one is more bound and crippled in bourgeois economy than a prisoner in a dungeon, and to have found that in this condition the only thing that can secure alleviation is co-operation with one's fellow-men in the same dungeon, the world's exploited proletariat." Those sentences Mr. Rickword &scribes as "his own apologia and sufficient epitaph." To inc they suggest that the generous spirit which informs them would be rebelling today, had it survived, against the evidence which has accumulated since 1937 of Com- munism in practice: while the sense of intellectual originality which pervades this set of essays 'suggests that sooner or later Caudwell would have rejected, as philosophically inadequate, the categories within which his young mind was still operating when he died. A book is shortly to appear under the title, The God that Failed, in which a number of contributors—Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, et hoc genus omne—describe how they came to abandon Com- munism. I believe that, if he had lived, Caudwell would have been another contributor, another observer. of his idol's feet of clay.
- RONALD 4,EWIN.
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