BRITISH WRITERS AND THE MEDIA, 1930-45
British Writers and the Media, 1930-45 Keith Williams Lecturer in the Department of Enxlish University of Dundee
First published in Great Britain 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-63896-5 ISBN 978-1-349-24578-9 (ebook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-24578-9 First published in the United States of America 1996 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. tooto Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Keith, 1958- British writers and the media, 1930-45 / Keith Williams. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. \. English literature-20th century-history and criticism. 2. Mass media and literature-great Britain-History-20th century. 3. Politics and literature-great Britain-History-2Oth century. 4. Authors, English-20th century-political and social views. 5. Great Britain-Politics and govemment-1936-52. 6. Great Britain-Politics and govemment-1910-1936. 7. World War, 1939-45-Geat Britain. 8. Right and left (Political science) I. Title. PR478.M37W55 1995 820.9'00912--dc20 96-4326 CIP Keith Williams 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. to 9 8 7 6 05 04 03 02 01 54321 00 99 98 97 96
This book is dedicated to the patience and support of my wife and children and to my parents' watching and listening.
Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Obituaries of History and the Thirties Sublime ix xi 1 1 A Twisted Skein: The Media Background 20 2 Refractions: The Media as Subject Matter 48 3 Responses: The Mass Media as Formal Influences 114 4 Involvements: Writing for the Mass Media 151 Conclusions 232 Notes 241 Index 274 vii
Preface: Mobilising the Medium In this study of the intertextuality between writing and the media, 'mobilising' is intended in two senses: both the dynamic modernisation of the practice of Leftist writing in the 1930s under the impact of the new mass media, and how that impact featured in the politicisation of writers. Both meanings stem from that decade's accelerated awareness of inhabiting a technological mass-society and -culture, with increasingly complex communications and sophisticated modes of representation. Thirties Leftists were particularly influenced by developments in the early Soviet Union and in Weimar Germany, where the power and forms of the media were eagerly embraced as a modernising influence by avant-gardism with its exhortation toward involvement with modes of production and audiences outside the traditional literary domain. I therefore intend to show how British writers reacted to the mass media, not just negatively - as instruments of mystification, endowing monopoly capitalism and the state with immense new ideological power - but constructively - as a means of political consciousness-raising, as well as a fundamental challenge to the contemporaneity of their own art. In this respect, this study also engages with the cultural fault-lines of the time and its complex negotiations between 'high' and 'low' cultural discourses and genres. Consequently, the study goes beyond consideration of how the overbearing presence of the forms, assumptions and imagery of the capitalist media were critically refracted in Leftist texts (their mere jeremiad and satire) to examine the formal implications of writers' attempts to subvert and compete with them. It investigates the way newly-privileged technologies of representation, such as radio, photography and cinema, were self-consciously emulated and critiqued by Leftists, but it also explores the practical involvements with the media this often entailed for writers. The final chapter, extending the thirties media experience into the peculiar conditions of the Second World War and immediate postwar Britain, examines the qualified fruition and aftermath of the social-democratic cultural and political consensus that emerged from the period. Thirties cultural history offers a paradigmatically fractious, but also mutually enriching and potentially liberating, encounter between ix
x Preface modem art and the media, which still has powerful implications for today's cultural politics. In order to show this, I intend, for example, to place well-known writers back into this neglected context. For example, Graham Greene's formative literary years were in this period and no writer has been more involved with film 'as critic, scenarist, co-producer, performer, adaptor and adaptee'.l Similarly, the epitome of twentieth-century angst about the media - Nineteen Eighty-four's 'Ministry of Truth' - was George Orwell's ironic twist to a phrase from a 1935 study of broadcasting? While including the background to writers's reactions to the power of the press, I do, however, concentrate on broadcasting and film when examining the media's formal impacts and writers' practical involvements. This is partly because they are specifically modem and technological, but also the sheer volume of Leftist reportage and documentary produced under the influence of the period's journalism merits a separate study.3 But first I want to introduce my subject by working 'back from the future' to frame it within a Postmodem historical retrospective. For all their characterisation as the decade of naive political commitment, the 1930s were in fact a determining moment in the prehistory of today's debates about Postmodernism and, indeed, can even be seen as initiating some of its key terms (not least in its overtures to popular cultural forms). When we examine Leftist writers' growing scepticism about the possibility of unmediated historical 'truth' this becomes particularly clear. Their encounter with the mass media as constructors of a rhetorically charged and ideologically saturated 'hyperreality', which converts all events into discourse, while appearing to guarantee the literal presence of the facts, was crucial. K.B.W.
Acknowledgements Special thanks are due to Professor Stan Smith at Dundee, Professor Jeffrey Richards at Lancaster, Drs Steve Matthews and Michael Brennan at Leeds, Charmian Hearne and John M. Smith at Macmillan, and to all at the British Film Institute and National Sound Archive. xi