A Question of Commitment

Australian literature in the twenty years after the war

Susan Lever

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780043550328
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000248074
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

In the years since the Second World War, Australia has seen a period of literary creativity which outshines any earlier period in the nation's literary history. This creativity has its beginnings in the arguments and alignments which emerged at the end of the War, and the changes in perceptions of art and society which occurred during the fifties and early sixties.

A Question of Commitment examines the attitudes of writers as diverse as James McAuley, Frank Hardy, Judith Wright, Patrick White and A. D. Hope, as they responded to a changing Australian society during the postwar years. Through their work and that of many others, it considers the debates about literary nationalism, the artistic politics of the Cold War, the threat of technology to art in the Atomic Age, and the nature of the writer's role in the new society. It documents the way in which the political commitments of some writers and the resistance to commitment of others were challenged by political and social changes of the late fifties.

Susan McKernan's lively exploration of Australia's writers in a time of innovation provides the reader with the context needed to understand the creative choices they made and, in so doing, introduces wider intellectual and cultural issues which remain relevant to this day.

1
Pursuing the National Tradition

An interest in nationalism of all kinds is likely to grow at a time of national threat. In Australia during the forties, the interest in a national literary tradition was not merely part of the patriotic sentiment of a people resisting invasion but it also offered a link between literature and politics. Critics such as Phillips, Palmer and Christesen linked the tradition of Lawson with a left-wing democratic socialist political view.

A renewed determination to establish a national culture was evident in many areas of Australian life after the war. Many historians, critics and writers were tired of the shadow of Britain and Europe and they saw a new threat to Australian independence in the growing cultural influence of the USA. In 1950 Phillips coined the phrase ‘the cultural cringe’ to describe the lingering unwillingness of many Australians to accept the achievements of their own culture in comparison with that of Britain. It is a phrase still in use but it belongs essentially to that period after the war when there was a strong reaction against the denigration of things Australian.¹

Arthur Phillips and Vance Palmer indicated the directions which postwar writers might take in pursuing a national literary tradition. As Phillips put it, the national tradition was concerned more with simple verities’ than ‘the sophistications of human nature’, with straightforward storytelling rather than with the ‘fripperies of aesthetic practice’. Sophisticated literary ideals were no more relevant after the war than they had been to Lawson when he warned critics to keep out of‘the tracks we travel.²

On this rising tide of nationalism a large number of novels were written in Australia in the period between 1945 and 1956. Though all of this fiction was in keeping with the national tradition’s call for realism, for concern with the social world, for praise of the Australian character, and in keeping with the tradition’s refusal to experiment technically, it may be placed into several distinct groups. The first group includes the novels of Vance Palmer and Katharine Susannah Prichard who formed a link between the writers of the turn of the century and those of the postwar period. Both novelists had established themselves in the years between the war and both wrote novels which reflected their political commitments—Prichard to communism and Palmer to left nationalism. In the postwar years each of these writers published trilogies—Palmer’s Golconda trilogy and Pricharďs Golden Miles trilogy—which seem to be their authors’ final attempts to write Australian novels of grand proportions.

In the forties, younger writers who shared Palmer’s kind of left nationalism began to emerge. Alan Marshall published a novel of factory life, How Beautiful Are Thy Feet, in 1949 and his well-known partly autobiographical I Can Jump Puddles in 1955. Kylie Tennant, too, accepted the bush tradition in her early novels but seemed less interested in politics with each novel after The Battlers (1941). Dymphna Cusack, on the other hand, developed a nationalist novel which retained the realism and social concerns of the tradition but directed its attention to contemporary problems. In the immediate postwar years, she wrote Come In Spinner (1951) with Florence James, then Say No to Death (1951) and Southern Steel (1953) and she went on to write novels which addressed racial prejudice and fascism. Marshall, Tennant and Cusack wrote novels which used the techniques of the national tradition to portray the lives of people in the Australian cities. Their novels had political sympathies with the left but did not form part of a political program.

In 1948 Ruth Park published her first novel about life in the slums of Sydney, The Harp in the South. Although this novel also adopted the clear narrative techniques of the national tradition and identified the true Australian as the Irish-Australian, it was distinguished from the work of Cusack because there were no obvious political or social goals behind it. The Harp in the South was one of several novels written in the early postwar years which exploited the nationalist tradition for its ‘exotic’ subjects and strong narratives. Other novels of this kind returned to the bush to find true Australians: Jon Cleary’s The Sundowners (1952), Darcy Niland’s The Shiralee (1955) and Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice (1956).

In each of these novels the national character which had been identified and promoted by left nationalists for political motives became a romantic or exotic figure. There was no political program behind Cleary’s itinerant Irish-Australian shearer or Niland’s Irish-Australian fighting swagman or Shute’s returned soldier; they were simply hard-drinking, hard-fighting larrikins with generous hearts. In 1957 John O’Grady turned the cult of the national character into a comedy by creating an Italian immigrant, Nino Culotta, who studied the national character, language and customs in They’re a Weird Mob.

Apart from novels which made open reference to the national tradition, either by a bush setting or by a deliberate adapting of the bush style to city subjects, there were novels which continued the traditions of the realist narrative and the concern for external event but applied them to new aspects of Australian life. For example, Brian James’ The Advancement of Spencer Button (1950) offered a comic account of promotion in the New South Wales teaching service, Tom Ronan’s Moleskin Midas (1956) satirised the respectability of squatters like Kidman, and Dal Stivens’ Jimmy Brockett (1951) experimented a little with the autobiography of a gangster.

Many of these realist novels remain rewarding to read and we should beware of dismissing them as dull simply because they do not conform to more recent notions of novelistic technique. Often they were journalistic’ in the sense that writers like Tennant and Cusack wrote about aspects of Australian life which they researched and then cast into stories. Most of these novels were more concerned with plot than with character and there was little psychological insight or complexity of social discussion. The novelists did not see themselves as technical innovators and the main value of their novels lies in the attention they gave to aspects of Australian life and history, and the cheerful extroversion with which they treated these subjects.

However, more ambitious programs for the national tradition emerged from the political commitments of the forties and fifties. As these political commitments dominated Australian literature for some time it is important that the more consciously political applications of the national tradition be considered in detail.

During the war years, the Communist Party of Australia had attracted some Australians’ interest in the possibility of a new society after the war, one which put into practice those ideals associated, correctly or not, with the egalitarianism of the 1890s. Though in Britain, Europe and the USA the Communist Party reached a peak of influence in the thirties, in Australia membership of the Party peaked in 1945. It seems that where in other parts of the English-speaking world the experience of the Spanish Civil War and Stalin’s alliance with Hitler had disillusioned many communists, in Australia the Party offered a program for the future which attracted nationalists anxious to throw off the influence of Britain and the USA.

The Communist Party also had a program for writers which was part of its political program and this fitted very well with current notions of a national literary tradition. In the years since the breakdown of Stalinism among Western communist parties, Marxist critics have developed sophisticated and complex theories of literature. These theories combine an understanding of literature as a dynamic part of society with an awareness of the subtlety of literary communication. Since the seventies Marxist literary theory has challenged the division between political writing and writing with ‘universal’ interests above politics.

However, in the forties and fifties communists who adhered to their Party’s doctrines were offered the theory called socialist realism as official party guidance for art. At the time, the work of Marxist critics such as George Lukács or Bertolt Brecht, who continue to be respected as literary theorists, was either unavailable to Australians or was banned by official Party decree. In pursuing a simple form of socialist realism Australian communists were not alone or particularly backward by comparison with communists in Europe or America. Socialist realism was the theory adopted by communists throughout the world, in particular in the Soviet Union, which was regarded as the source of communist truth by most communists until 1956.

The Marxist literary theory available to Australian writers in the forties and fifties provided a simple statement of the relationship between art and reality. It was based on readings of the accepted English Marxist critics—Christopher Caudwelľs Illusion and Reality and Studies in a Dying Culture or Ralph Fox’s The Novel and the People—supplemented by material which came from Soviet sources through the Party publications and more accessible works such as Literature and Reality by the American novelist Howard Fast. This version of socialist realism had its roots in a ‘reflection’ or ‘mimetic’ theory of art—in which the role of art was to mirror reality. But Marxism meant that reality was seen from the perspective of a Marxist political understanding. Writers with a Marxist commitment were obliged to examine the economic forces at work in society, and the reality which they reflected emphasised the relationships between those economic forces. This kind of realism sought not merely the external, obvious features of social interaction but a truth which exposed the bases of this interaction. Socialist realist art is not simply a ‘mirror of life’ but a mirror which selects and emphasises the conflicts in economic and political power within society in order to teach the true nature of these conflicts.

The obvious criticism which such a theory invites from non-Marxists is that socialist realism distorts the mirror of life for propaganda purposes and that socialist realist artists surrender their independence to a preconceived political theory. Many of the critical pronouncements reaching Australian writers did offer crude notions of the writer’s task. They knew, for example, the explanation which Zhdanov (now infamous for his part in Stalin’s purges) offered in 1934 for Stalin’s description of writers as the ‘engineers of human souls’:

It means, in the first place, to know life, in order to depict it truthfully in works of art, to depict it not scholastically, not lifelessly, not simply as ‘objective reality’, but to depict actuality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic description must be combined with the task of the ideological transformation and education of the working people in the spirit of socialism. This method of literature and of literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.³

The theory in the hands of such spokesmen was principally didactic and writers were part of a team putting into practice the political ideas formulated at another Party level. In the Marxism of the period, literature was not part of the base of political, social and economic activity where revolution occurred but part of the superstructure which could only reproduce and communicate these activities. Literature was apart from the revolutionary developments of the political, social and economic world, and its main role was to educate revolutionaries about these developments. This positioning of literature meant that writers were not significant in the formulating of political theory nor even in developing literary theory. Their art could be revolutionary only in the sense of assisting revolution at a political level.

In their insistence on the descriptive or representative role of literature and in their emphasis on literature as part of a superstructure determined by the base of political struggle, these versions of Marxist literary theory were artistically conservative and deterministic. Socialist realism attached radical politics to non-innovative art; it linked a belief in the ability of the working people to change the conditions of their lives with a refusal of the writer’s ability to change the conditions of art. Literature was the tool of the revolution rather than an expression of it and communist artists were obliged to accept the formulations of their political theorist comrades rather than explore new possibilities through literature.

On the other hand, Marxist sources also warned against the writing of propaganda. Frederick Engels’ letters to Minna Kautsky in 1885 and to Margaret Harkness in 1888 argued that a socialist novel need not offer social solutions nor even display the writer’s own political views: ‘The more the author’s views are concealed the better for the work of art. The realism I allude to may creep out in spite of the author’s views.’⁴

Despite the arguments about Marxist literary theory which can be traced through the writing of Engels, Lukács, Brecht and others, there is little evidence that Australian communist writers were very interested in literary theory. Most Australian discussions of socialist realism at the time centred on the links between the national literary tradition and the Marxist literary tradition. The writings of Lawson and Furphy were taken as instinctive, prerevolutionary attempts at socialist realism. Australian writers felt that a national tradition lay waiting for them to renew in a revolutionary and communist way.

In 1944 groups of Australian communist writers began to meet to discuss their work and the nature of the writer’s role. Members of these groups included Frank Hardy, Eric Lambert, David Martin, Jean Devanney, Walter Kaufmann, Ralph de Boissiere, Laurence Collinson, Mona Brand, John Morrison, Bill Wannan, Ian Turner and later John Manifold, Judah Waten and Dorothy Hewett. The Melbourne Realist Writers Group began publishing a journal, The Realist Writer, in 1952 and produced nine numbers before incorporating it into Overland in the spring of 1954. The first issue of The Realist Writer proclaimed that: ‘The old order is dying and the old literature, the old criticism, the old journalism with it. We aim to assist in the birth of a new order and its new literature.’ The Realist Writers philosophy was set out in an unsigned article entitled The Writer and the People’. The author (probably the original editor, Bill Wannan) named Graham Greene, T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ezra Pound as writers who reflected the breakdown of capitalism by defeatist or elitist writing. He explained the place of socialist realism in Australia in terms of a history of workers’ struggles. The songs of Eureka and the ballads demonstrated the creative spirit of ordinary people ‘standing together against the exploitation of tyrants’. Realism, simply defined as word pictures of life as it was lived’, had always been the method of the people’s art, but under capitalism it had been corrupted into modernism whose only purpose was the display of indecision, futility, boredom’.⁵

‘The Writer and the People’ called for writing which understood the processes of history and saw that the future was with the people. Modernism was associated with reaction and despair; socialist realism alone could show the way forward. The article was not so much an explanation of the methods and ideals of socialist realism as an emotional call for the defence of the people against the forces of reaction. Its rhetoric is typical of that found in Australian Communist Party publications in the fifties.

But the article also promoted socialist realism as a demand that the writer observe and write about the real conditions of life rather than sound the possibilities of technique or proclaim the mysteries of the self. Furthermore, the socialist realist writer was committed to the portrayal of ordinary people’ in active response to the limiting conditions of their lives. Many contemporary popular novels, for example Ruth Park’s novels of city misery, could not belong to a socialist realist canon since they depicted a degraded and passive minority suffering poverty; the socialist realist theory called for a realistic grasp of the whole society, with the working class as protagonists rather than victims.

‘The Writer and the People’ also indicated the nationalist thread in Australian socialist realism of the fifties: it claimed the songs and stories...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Pursuing the National Tradition
• 2 Cultural Freedom and Quadrant
• 3 James McAuley’s Quest
• 4 Uncommitted Modern Man: A.D. Hope
• 5 Douglas Stewart and the Bulletin
• 6 The Writer and the Crisis: Judith Wright and David Campbell
• 7 A New Kind of Novel: the Work of Patrick White
• 8 Drama, Old and New
• 9 Australian Civilisation?
• Endnotes
• Index