Category Archives: Journalism

Paul Anderson, Tribune, 2 February 1990

 Lewis Mumford, the American writer on architecture, town planning and technology, who died last week at the age of 94, described himself as a “radical conservative”, but no one who has read any of his books would ever confuse his politics with those of the current British government.

He was an unorthodox man of the humanist libertarian left, a precursor of the sixties new left and, particularly, today’s greens in his consistent criticism of centralised power and capitalism’s inherent alienation and wastefulness. Technics and Civilisation, first published in 1934 and recently reissued by the anarchist Freedom Press, is a history of the machine age that argues for using modern technology to allow us to work less; Culture of Cities (1938) is a sociological study that includes a visceral radical critique of the effects of uncontrolled urban expansion.

In Art and Technics (1951) and The City in History (1961, still available in Penguin paperback), he developed these themes further, and, during the sixties, he was an outspoken critic of the American military-industrial complex and of the war in Vietnam. In Britain, his work has been much praised by planners and architects – the writer Colin Ward is probably the best known of his admirers – but his ideas have rarely been put into practice, especially in recent years.

As anyone who lives in or visits our blighted inner cities will know, the case for the planned, human-scale development advocated by Mumford throughout his life has never been more relevant.

Paul Anderson, review of Boots for the Footless by Brian Behan (Tricycle, Kilburn), Tribune, 26 January 1990

“Tricycle’s play ‘outrages’ audience,” screamed the lead headline in last Friday’s Kilburn Times. The story underneath was less spectacular. “Four members of the audience of Brian Behan’s new play, Boots for the Footless, have written to the leader of Brent Council, Dorman Long, and to the local MP, Ken Livingstone, to demand that the production’s funding be withdrawn,” it read. “Cannel Keeley, of Glastonbury Street, West Hampstead, described the performance as “two hours of psychological torture”.

“Every single stereotype about stupid, drunken, violent Irishmen and sexually contradictory, irrational Irishwomen was dragged out and celebrated . . “

Ms Keeley is, of course, entitled to her opinion, but it is difficult to feel anything but pity for anyone quite so humourless. Boots for the Footless is certainly bawdy, hilariously irreverent and satirical — particularly about Irish Catholicism and republicanism — but racist it is not.

It is a two-act farce, some might say autobiographical, the first part set in a Dublin bedroom in 1950. The central character is Padser, a chronically lazy skiver who is living in bed at his brother’s house, tolerated because he has £5,000 of inheritance money (under the mattress). Padser’s brother, Declan, is a drunk; his nephews, Martin and Lar, are workshy political agitators (Martin republican, Lar communist); the sister-in-law, Maura, is undisputed boss of the household.

To cut a long, complex and immensely funny story short, we reach the interval with only Maize and Declan left in the house. Padser has done a runner with his money to escape the clutches of Bridie, a country girl to whom he has been forced to promise marriage; Martin has been arrested for shooting a policeman; and Lar has decided that there’s more chance of making the revolution in England.

Act two takes us to the Festival of Britain building site in London the following year, where Padser has taken a job after gambling away his fortune. He gets his nephews jobs too (Martin has escaped from Mountjoy prison), and Lar soon becomes shop steward.

Lar attempts to organise the workers to prevent the King and Queen from visiting the site wthout union cards; Martin announces his plan to assassinate them.

Although the pace flags at the very end, this is a tremendously enjoyable anarchic comedy. It’s also superbly written: Behan has an unerring ear for vernacular Irish speech. If this is “psychological torture”; give me some more.

Paul Anderson, review of Letters to an Editor by Mark Fisher (ed) (Carcanet, £14.95), Tribune, 12 January 1990

Carcanet, the Manchester publishing house, has marked its 20th anniversary in a characteristically unusual way, by publishing a selection of letters to Michael Schmidt, its founder and editor. Schmidt’s responses to his correspondents — poets, critics, translators and novelists — are entirely absent. Nevertheless, the collection provides a compelling insight into the workings of an extraordinary publishing venture.

Carcanet began as an Oxford undergraduate magazine, moved into publishing pamphlets of poetry, and has grown to become one of Britain’s most respected serious literary publishers.

Today it has a list that includes contemporary English poets, translations of European writers, neglected modernist texts and a bi-monthly magazine, PN Rewiew. C B Cox rubs shoulders with Stuart Hood; Hans Magnus Enzensburger meets, inter alia, Roger Scruton, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

It is difficult to make sense of such eclectic seriousness — the temptation is simply to celebrate — but there is method in it. The correspondents that dominate this volume are two poets, C H  Sisson and Donald Davie, both, in their own ways, late twentieth-century claimants to the mantle of Ezra Pound. It is their uncompromising elitist high modernism that has been the spark for Carcanet’s book-publishing programme and magazine (the “PN” started out ‘ as “Poetry Nation”).

Carcanet came into being at the end of the sixties, a low dishonest decade of know-nothing populism and declining standards in the eyes of Schmidt and most of his correspondents. “I can’t see that it was that conspicuously awful,” is about the best it gets here.

The task, or so it seemed, was to counter the intellectual hegemony of the Marxist Left, reassert the conservative modernist aesthetic of Pound, T S Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, and fight the appalling cultural collapse that lay behind such diverse phenomena as the New English Bible and rock and roll.

This is the voice of a literary intelligentsia disgusted by social democracy and the fake scientism of literary academia, which, unlike its similarly disgusted continental West European conterparts in the same period, turned right.

If Carcanet and PNR had remained true to these origins, there would be little more to say than that reaction often finds sophisticated literary practitioners. But the tensions in the high modernist project (helped by Schmidt’s sentimental attachment to the idea that the serious publisher has a duty to make available the works of the unjustly ignored) have proved fertile. The Eliotesque laments in PNR on the crisis of Anglicanism (always more literary-aesthetic than theological) are now less frequent than unambiguously humanist polemics against the depravations of Thatcherism.

Why? Most obviously, seriousness about English modernism necessarily means engagement with other modernisms and the abandonment of the narrow concerns of British conservative culture. Faced with Berlin Dada, it is impossible to claim that taking modernism seriously is essentially a matter of complaining about the destruction of the C of E’s poetic heritage under the pernicious influence of leftist vicars.

More important, the departure from conservative Leavisite norms took place in the context of a sea-change in literary culture in Britain. If in 1969 the enemy was the populist barbarians listening to the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, by the late seventies there was a new threat, at the heart of the academy: structuralist criticism and its progeny, denying the very possibility of the author and, thereby, all the critical values of humanist modernism.

Against this new enemy, Schmidt found, almost accidentally, some unusual allies — secular humanist leftists at odds with the old Carcanet project but far more antipathetic to the new and orthodoxy, despite their one-time endorsement of such horrors as communism and sixties populism. The list grew more diverse and PNR more interesting. By the mid-eighties, Schmidt’s reconciliation with his one-time political enemies seemed complete. Recent issues of PNR have been the closest thing we have in Britain to a secular European literary review.

The question that faces Schmidt now is an old one: “What next?” It would be a pity, to say the least, if he decided, out of fear of losing control or because of worries about integration into an academic “establishment”, to draw back from the broad cultural agenda that Carcanet and PNR now address, and to concentrate on “poetry and its milieu” again. But that, I’m told, is what he plans to do. Perhaps somebody should drop him a line.

Paul Anderson, review  of Playing With Trains by Stephen Poliakoff (RSC), Tribune, 8 December 1989

Stephen Poliakoff has a theory about why Britain is in such an economic mess: we’re good at inventing but bad at exploiting the commercial potential of our inventions.

This is a lament that has recurred in British politics since the end of the last century — since the beginning of Britain’s decline as an imperial power, in fact — but to see Playing With Trains you would think that Poliakoff was the first to think of it. The play’s didactic enthusiasm is at first refreshing but after a while becomes irritatingly unsubtle and repetitive.

The plot on which Poliakoff hangs his big idea is a simple one. Bill Galpin (Michael Pennington) is a single-minded engineer/inventor with two children (Lesley Sharp and Simon Russell Beale). We join them in 1967 as they prepare to move house after Bill has made a small fortune for inventing an automatic record player. From then on, it’s rise and fall. Bill first becomes still richer through his inventions, then makes a mark as an outspoken campaigner for industrial and political backing for innovators, then finally is ruined by an unwise libel action.

Bill is no one-dimensional hero, and the domestic angle of his story — progressive estrangement from his offspring as he becomes more and more obsessive provides welcome dramatic relief from his confrontations with bureaucrats and his pubic speeches.
But in the end none of this amounts to much.

Poliakoff dealt with the theme of obsessive genius overlooking domestic commitment far better in his previous play for the RSC, Breaking the Silence (which also had the bonus of an exotic Russian revolutionary setting). And Britain’s economic disaster simply doesn’t have quite as much to do with frustated innovators as Poliakoff believes.

Paul Anderson, review of New Times by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds) (Lawrence and Wishart, £9.95), Tribune, 1 December 1989

The basic thrust of Marxism Today‘s “New Times” thesis – you’ve read the magazine articles and seen the manifesto, now read bits of both in a book – is simple. The organisation of production in the developed west has changed. The era of “Fordism”, of production lines in giant factories turning out standardised products, is over. The revolution in information technology means that small-batch production and small factories, with more flexible specialised labour forces, are increasingly the norm.

In line with, and partly as a result of, these changes in production, other things have changed too. The composition of the working class has changed dramatically: it is now split into an affluent core of securely employed, skilled, full-time workers (disproportionately male and white), and a poor periphery (disproportionate female and black), where part-time and casual work and unemployment are the options.

With the decline in the traditional manual working class and the growth in importance of consumption in everyday life, people see themselves less and less as members of social classes, defining themselves increasingly as individual consumers and citizens, or as members of gender, sexual-preference and ethnic groups. Everything from philosophy to television reflects all this. Homogeneity is out. Diversity is in. The left must adapt by jettisoning most of the baggage acquired during the Fordist era – centralisd nationalisation in economic policy, Leninist “democratic centralism”, class politics, admiration for “actually existing socialism” in the eastern bloc, and hostility to individualism and consumption.

The first thing to be said about all this is that, for all the claims to novelty, there isn’t much that’s very original about it. Borrowings from the Frankfurt school, the French post-modernists, liberal pluralist political theory and anarchism sit uneasily together.

And the heart of the argument – all the stuff about changes in the nature of production meaning the end of the Fordist era of the “mass worker” – is a sanitised version of mid-seventies Italian and French neo-Marxist theories of capitalist restructuring.

According to these thinkers, working-class insurgency was forcing capitalists to discover new ways of ensuring their control of production, by splitting up the workforce through decentralisation, replacing key workers with robots, moving production to Third World countries and so on. Our thoroughly post-modern communists remove the engine of class struggle from this rather interesting old jalopy, give the bodywork a quick respray job, and try to pass off the result as a spanking new model.

But this is by the way. What about the validity or otherwise of the “New Times” thesis? It certainly cannot be dismissed out of hand. The developed west has witnessed dramatic changes in the organisation of production in the past decade, and the era of the Fordist assembly line does seem to be coming to an end – at least in North America, Japan and western Europe. Traditional class identities are weaker than hitherto. Nationalisation and Leninism are dead-ends for the left. Many of the essays in this volume are succinct and serious contributions to our understanding of the world in which we live.

Nevertheless, there are weaknesses in the analysis too. First, it exaggerates the extent of “Post-Fordism” in production. In particular, even if the developed west is seeing the end of the Fordist factory, the rest of the world is not. None of the contributors to New Times, with the exception of Mike Rustin (who contributes a critique of the thesis) has anything to say about the new international division of labour.

Worse still, as Paul Hirst points out, the “New Times” thesis is essentially a crudely economic determinist one which exaggerates the impact in the wider world of changes in production.

Both these lines of criticism point to the conclusion that the changes of the past decade are rather less “epochal” than the “New Times” types would have us believe. Which in turn points to the real problem of the “New Times” thesis: its political function. Its central political argument is that Leninism, centralised nationalisation, class politics and admiration for eastern bloc “socialism” are dead-ends because the Fordist era is over.

That is implicitly to argue that all of them were fine and dandy while Fordism ruled the roost. To me, that seems simply to be a way that the dwindling band of Communist Party members can disown everything the party once stood for without ever subjecting its past to criticism. I suppose that’s emotionally easier than admitting they were wrong all along, but the intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking.

Paul Anderson, review of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson (National, Cottesloe), Tribune, 3 November 1989

In his native United States, the black playwright August Wilson is big. From Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the first of his works to be staged here, it’s not hard to see why. Wilson’s ear for the poetry of everyday language is extraordinary, his didactic purpose tempered by the unusual ability to create believable characters whose views are entirely at odds with his own.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is of a genre that British audiences will find familiar enough, a musical drama that uses the experience of black American entertainment stars — in this case, Ma Rainey, “the Mother of the Blues”, and her band, who are recording in a Chicago studio in 1929 — as a means of exploring the whole system of racism in the United States. What sets it apart is its subtlety. Wilson refuses to see his black characters simply as put-upon heroes; all are complex, fully formed characters.

The play begins with the seedy, white recordingstudio owner (Tom Chadbon) and Ma’s white manager (William Hoyland) preparing for the session. The band arrives, without Ma, and makes ready to rehearse In fact, precious little rehearsing happens. The four band-members bicker and joke, and from the start it’s clear that there is tension between Levee (Hugh Quarshie), the flash, young cornet-player who wants a band of his own playing sophisticated dance music for whites, and the others, particularly Toledo (Clarke Peters), the pianist, who’s something of an intellectual and an advocate of black self-reliance.

Eventually, Ma (Carol Woods-Coleman) arrives, and after further delays, the recording session takes place. In the meantime, the tension between Levee and the others mounts inexorably. Toledo’s taunts that he’s just a collaborator with the white man are rebuffed by Levee, who reveals that, as a boy, he was knifed by a gang of whites who were attempting to rape his mother, and that his father was lynched while trying to avenge her.

But any sympathy this generates among his fellows quickly disappears. Levee brags, offends religious sensibilities, loses his temper and rages after another band-member with a knife, plays his cornet too flamboyantly and, worst of all, refuses to accept Ma’s authority. He is fired from the band after the sessions.

He doesn’t care, but then the white studio-owner tells him that he is reneging on his promise of a band. Levee is devastated and, when Toledo treads on his shoe, he loses his temper , again and kills him.

The moral of this story – that blacks are exploited by whites and often, wrongly, turn their anger against their fellow blacks – is clear enough, but Wilson’s script never descends to crude agitprop. With some excellent acting (Hugh Quarshire’s Levee, Clarke Peters’ Toledo and Carol Woods-Coleman’s Ma in particular), some competent music (provided by the actors on stage) and an impressive set, Howard Davies’s production is one of the most refreshing pieces currently on the London stage.

Paul Anderson, Tribune, 3 November 1989

Ewan MacColl, who died last week at the age of 74, was at the centre of two of the most significant developments in the arts in post-war Britain: the rise of a populist political theatre and the “folk revival”.

From the vantage point of the late eighties, both phenomena seem past their peak. Indeed, folk music today is for the most part back underground, its place in the affections of young people long ago taken by commercial pop, most (at least until the current world music craze) of it rooted in black America.

Populist political theatre is rather more visible, but it has been severely curtailed by the financial rigours and political exhaustion of ten years of Thatcherism.

Still, both have been crucial in moulding the cultural landscape of our times, and neither would have been anything like as important had it not been for the contribution of Ewan MacColl.

Born James Miller in Auchterander in 1915, MacColl joined the Young Communist League at the age of 14. In thirties’ Manchester, as a member of a street-corner agitprop group, he was discovered by a young stage designer who was working at the local Gaiety Theatre with the exiled German playwright Ernst Toller. The young designer was Joan Littlewood, and the meeting was the start of a long and fruitful creative relationship that was to culminate in the creation of Theatre Workshop in 1946 which, after years of touring, settled in the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1953.

It is no exaggeration to say that Theatre Workshop revolutionised British theatre, introducing an exuberant style of ensemble playing, often involving song and dance, that was in its own way as deeply subversive of stuffy theatrical convention as Look Back in Anger or anything else put on by the Royal Court in the fifties. Its spirit lives on, not just in the populist radicalism that still informs the Theatre Royal and many other companies, but even in the mainstream. MacColl’s contribution included the authorship of Theatre Workshop’s biggest pre-Stratford hit, Uranium 235, an anti-bomb drama performed at the Edinburgh People’s Festival (a precursor of the Fringe) in 1951.

The fifties saw MacColl increasingly making his mark as a folk musician, performing and recording the “lost” music of ordinary British people as well as songs by his own hand.
MacColl’s discoveries came particularly from the urbanindustrial working class and from Scotland and Ireland: not for him the celebration of a mythical English rural idyll, His own compositions were songs of struggle — as often bleak and harsh as they were tender, and often intensely political. More than anyone else, MacColl was responsible for making folk the soundtrack of the Aldermaston generation.

The folk revival burned itself out by the late sixties, unable to compete with the pop music that the folkies hated so much. Increasingly, MacColl and his wife, Peggy Seeger, herself an accomplished musician, ploughed a lonely furrow, their work appreciated by an enthusiastic following (particularly on the left, for whose causes MacColl was such a great benefit performer to the very last) but never gaining the mass audience it undoubtedly deserved.

All that may be changing again now, as boredom with recycling of rhythm and blues prompts young musicians to look at other popular music styles and traditions. Most obviously, MacColl’s work has been a major influence on the best band to have come out of Ireland in recent years, The Pogues, who had a hit a couple of years back with MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”; but there are plenty of others in his debt.

His death is a great loss for everyone on the left, and it is difficult to believe that we’ll see his like again.

Paul Anderson, review of Negotiating the Rapids: Socialist Politics for the Nineties by the Socialist Society (£2.95), Tribune, 27 October 1989

And now, after all the military metaphors – the “forward march”, the “war of position”, the “fight back” – something that really fits eighties Britain.

Yes, we’re canoeing. It’s unclear whether this is some local government-funded youth-club scam or the real thing, self-managed by autonomous creative subjects, but the Socialist. Society is out for adventure in the mountains, paddling dynamically through the white water of our political predicament.

It certainly makes a change from the rooms filled with smoke and fat trade union fixers, and the pacifist in me cannot help but applaud the scrupulous avoidance of the left’s traditional rhetoric.

The metaphor is telling none the less: canoeing down mountain streams is virtuoso stuff, and for most people something to be admired from the riverbank, even if the canoeist insists that it’s easy really and everyone ought to join in. If the canoeist shows all the signs of being about to capsize or founder on rocks, of course, it’s much worse than that.

Which is not to say that most of us could not do with a breath of invigorating libertaian fresh air, and there’s plenty here: denunciations of “the exhausted traditions of the Second, Third and Fourth Internetionals”; assertions that socialism is “a process of collective self-emancipation, deferring to no established authority”; insistence that any future socialism ‘ must be green.

But the canoeist’s approach to the hostile stream is unreliable. The dangers of deep right-wing social democratic currents are systematically overestimated: those of Leninist boulders are ignored unless than can be labelled “Stalinist”. The possibility that “new-look” Labourism might have just a few features that make it significantly better than Wilson-Callaghanism (its policies on the environment, transport, health and decentralisation of power, for example) is not seriously considered. Nor is the possibility that it might just be worth continuing to keep up the libertarian left pressure on the Labour leadership from within the Labour Party.

Meanwhile the near-total failure of vanguardist politics in Britain – not just Arthur Scargill’s handling of the miners’ stirke, Militant in Liverpool and Ted Knight’s Lambeth debacle, but also the way that the Trotskyist sects’ hyper-activism and megalomania have turned off thousands from any sort of socialism – is simply overlooked.

I get the feeling that, if the Socialist Society were to succeed in its long-term aim of creating a green left party, it would be immediately swamped by the 57 varieties. Then again, given that a green left party could thrive only under proportional representation, and PR is at best unlikely in the foreseeable future, perhaps that’s the sort of problem that need not exercise us overmuch.

So, although there is much sense in Negotiating the Rapids (and I’ve not mentioned some excellent critical passages on identity politics, environmentalism and Ireland), it finishes the course badly holed. The Socialist Society might be going in the right direction, but it still has a lot to sort out before its practice and its rhetoric of left renewal are fully integrated.

Paul Anderson, review of A Vain Conceit by D J Taylor (Bloomsbury, £4.99), Tribune, 13 October 1989

D J Taylor believes that British fiction is in a bad way. The big names — Margaret Drabble, Kingsley Amis, John. Fowles, Iris Murdoch — write books that ‘ fail to connect with the realities of our society. Their reputations are sustained by a literary establishment of obsequious, lazy, middlebrow, xenophobic, philistine publishers, reviewers and reviews editors. Meanwhile, iconoclastic, politically committed writers are ignored.

There’s some truth in this thesis. Many of the big names of British fiction do produce tedious, cliched, polite, petty-bourgeois drivel. Most Fleet Street reviewers are insufferably servile. Coteries abound.

The problem is that there are enough exceptions to the rules for Taylor’s argument to appear foolish. Many of Taylor’s favoured authors — Martin Amis, Kazuro Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Graham Swift — might be considered dangerously subversive by their stuffy elders, but they are hardly outsiders. All get serious money out of writing.

Nevertheless, in the course of his polemic, Taylor scores several direct hits. His withering critiques of Drabble and Amis senior are both amusing and apposite, and his account of the business of reviewing is, for the most part, depressingly accurate (though the nepotism is inexplicably underplayed). Taylor is suitably irreverent about the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on both critics and novelists, and he does a wonderful demolition job on the populist anti-intellectual snobbery so widespread in Britain.

On the other hand, Taylor can’t resist the unsubstantiated assertion. In particular, he makes much of “the futility of thinking that you can satisfactorily represent in fiction the complexities of life in modern Britain”; “writers have lost the ability to describe and define the society of which they are a part”; “any attempt at the panorama effect is bound to fetch up as a queerly narrow perspective”. Really? And, if so, why?

Taylor also has little to say about the implications of the takeover of British publishing by conglomerates, and hardly mentions the growing tendency of publishers to concentrate advertising budgets solely on would-be best-sellers. Yet these changes in the publishing industry are crucially important reasons for the stagnation and exclusiveness that Taylor so deplores. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has missed a golden opportunity to blow the gaff.