Fictions of "going over": Henry Green and the new realism - pseudonym of author Henry Vincent Yorke

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by Carol A. Wipf-Miller

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class... assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as... at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (29-30)

In the 1930s, "going over" was a standard trope among left-leaning artists and intellectuals who used it to articulate their position in the social crisis precipitated by the collapse of British industry in the late 20s and the rise of fascism in Europe. Thus, in quoting Marx and Engels, I also quote C. Day Lewis,John Cornford, and other young writers of the 30s for whom the passage was both an epigraph and a frame of reference so familiar that leftist discourse often referred to it in shorthand, dropping the quotation marks to speak unself-consciously of going over.(1) This distillation and concentration of Marxist rhetoric in a single phrase bespeaks not only the efficiency with which Marx appeared to frame the crises of the 30s but also the way in which these crises gave the Marxist text a local inflection: "going over" becomes, in so many texts of this period, the formal expression of a 30s sensibility, a structure of feeling through which men and women of letters understood their crises as the crisis, the "decisive hour" of the class struggle in which an enlightened intelligentsia would leave its ivory tower to create solidarity with the politicized worker.

This essay is concerned with the aesthetic corollary of the political imperative to "go over," particularly as it affected the generation of writers born between 1900 and 1914.(2) In her essay "The Leaning Tower," Virginia Woolf points out that these writers still had their education in front of them when the Great War broke out, and as a consequence, had no knowledge of the (comparatively) "settled civilization" that informed the work of high modernism and purportedly allowed it to sustain a disinterested composure above the chaos of history (20). She claims that while her generation recalled a time when the classes were "settled" and therefore politically invisible, the next generation could not ignore the politics of class. This younger generation, according to Woolf, developed an acute social consciousness and a conviction that it was "wrong to stand upon the gold that a bourgeois father had made from his bourgeois profession" (23). In the idiom of the 30s, to act on this conviction was to "go over." And for writers born into middle-class privilege and expensively educated in the best public-school tradition, this required a reconfiguration of identity - a new form of consciousness which they projected in their aesthetic commitments; they attempted to escape their bourgeois subjectivities through a politicized art. Largely rejecting modernist emphasis on form, on individual consciousness and aestheticized emotions, they favored a "materialist" vision that would, in the words of W. H. Auden, make "the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear" (Poet's Tongue ix). Thus the political shift that earned the 30s the epithet "the Red Decade" had its concomitant aesthetic shift as the younger generation of writers "went over," so to speak, from modernism to a new realism, from an aesthetic ideal of formal autonomy to one that pursued an active and politicized engagement between life and art.

This view of the 30s is largely the orthodox view. My purpose here is not to overturn that orthodoxy but to expand its frontiers by using Henry Green's midlife autobiography Pack My Bag to demonstrate the range of (often contradictory) values and commitments that fell within the construct of the new realism.

Negotiating a passage between modernism and the ideals of the new realism, Henry Green (pseudonym for Henry Vincent Yorke) is by no means an idiosyncratic figure of the 30s. The son of a wealthy industrialist, Green was educated at Eton and Oxford. He left the university, however, at the end of his second year and went to work in his father's Birmingham factory. Driven there, he says, by a nagging doubt "whether there should be great inequalities between incomes" and "a sense of guilt whenever I spoke to someone who did manual work" (Pack My Bag 191), he made this experience of "going over" the basis of his second novel, Living. Published in 1929 and hailed by Christopher Isherwood as "the best proletarian novel ever written" (qtd. in Hitchcock 6), Living was seen as anticipating the new or socialist realism of the 30s - so much so that Harold Heslop, at the Second International Conference of Revolutionary and Proletarian Writers (1930), mistakenly classified Green with James Hanley and other writers of "proletarian stock" who were heralding "a new school of writers" (qtd. in Cunningham 322).