Has the left lived differently? Writing the biography of socialists

This talk addresses some problems of writing biography, especially the biography of active socialists. It considers the following questions: is biography still a relevant form of historical writing? Does it belong properly to some historical dark age, now past? Or indeed, has it superseded previous, nineteenth-century forms of historical writing? What about the biography of the left, have historians proceeded differently, when writing the lives of socialists? Have they resorted to forms of overt apologetics, or indeed partisan criticism? Have there been more subtle processes of self-censorship, so that writers have actually failed to treat people as a whole, instead neglecting private emotions and dreams for the sake of some public record? Alternatively, have the attempts (which have been made) to restore a balanced picture, only constituted a new form of class and gender bias?

I should begin by explaining my interest in the topic. Over the past four years, I have been engaged on a number of projects, several of which have included a biographical element. They include one book, Classical Marxism, which was a collective biography of seven socialist journalists, activists or theorists from the 1890s; another collective biography Dissident Marxism, this time centred around fifteen activists from the 1930s and 1960s; as well as a short and so-far incomplete biography of the Russian Marxist, Leon Trotsky. This turn towards biography has marked a shift in my research interest - much of my other writing has been political theory, or non-biographical history. It is also true that I have concentrated on 'heroes', or potential heroes, rather than 'villains'. I am myself a socialist, and most of the people about whose lives I have written fit into the same tradition.
Having published the first of these books, one friend asked me whether I thought biography was still an appropriate form in which to write? I paraphrase, but my friend seemed to be saying that biography was really an old-fashioned mode of writing. The form itself implies a pattern of thinking about the past, in which small circles receive exaggerated attention, while larger numbers of people are ignored. As such it sets itself against the historical revolution of the 1960s, epitomised by the work of such historians as Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Raph Samuel and Victor Kiernan, writers who set themselves the task of exploring history 'from below'. Many different historians have commented on the limits of biography as a form. In his book, What is History?, the English historian of Soviet Russia E. H. Carr satirised the 'Bad King John' school of history, arguing that biography was only really appropriate to rural societies, while the conducts of modern states was decided by mass movements and public opinion. Biography ' does not fit the more complex society of our times,' Carr wrote, it had been superseded by sociology. The insights of the latter were of more interest and more use to historians.

R. G. Collingwood, a working archaeologist and an inter-war advocate of the idealist philosophy of history, employed yet more pointed language. 'The biographer's choice of materials', he wrote, 'though it may be (and ought to be) controlled by other considerations, is determined in the first instance by what I will call their gossip value.' Collingwood maintained that biography depends on pre-rational feelings. 'Sympathy and malice must have individual objects'. All such writing could be boiled down to one of two forms, 'amusement biography', to be found in 'circulating libraries', and 'magical biography', a literature 'of exhortation and moral-pointing, holding up good examples to be followed or bad ones to be eschewed.'
From the right, historians have defended what they see as the innate snobbery, parochialism and selfish pleasure of biography. All these characteristics can be redefined as virtues. One Tory historian A. L. Rowse defends biography, in the middle of a passage criticising the Marxist writer Christopher Hill:

J.E.C. Hill has written so many books that he has exerted a notable influence, not so much with the public at large as with the Left, particularly with his own Leftist disciples, squirreling away at what the ancestors of the Politically Correct thought. As if the thinking of people who don't know how to think has any value! Hobbes, Milton, Selden, Clarendon, Halifax, Locke, Yes; but not that of the People at large. A great many books, and much paper, have been wasted on this stuff ... For, to be fair, there is a place in history for the reactions, the demands, the grievances, the needs of the People. But the needs and demands, the opinions of government are much more indispensable and much more worth studying, if more difficult to grasp and understand. For government, of whatever colour, is concerned with the problems of the whole society; its point of view must be more general, the questions it faces more complex, solutions more difficult to find. That is its job. Any fool can criticise, but can he do the job?

Such views as Rowse holds should not be dismissed as those of an eccentric. The last thirty years has indeed seen a shift towards narrative history, and away from social history, towards biography and linguistic history, and away from studies of power or class. In some cases, this transfer of interests can be traced through the career of individual writers. Patrick Joyce was once a student of workplace relationships in Manchester factories. His most recent book, Democratic Subjects, claims to tell the entire story of nineteenth century society through what is actually a perfectly conventional biography of two Liberal politicians, Edwin Waugh and John Bright. With its emphasis on parliamentary as against popular dynamism, Joyce's recent book marks itself as part of the fashion of our times.
The critique of biography as a form may start with the suggestion of anachronism, but behind this point lies another criticism, of elitism. It is assumed that the only proper subjects for biography are the 'Great Men', those who left an unquestioned mark upon their age. Yet I think there is no necessary reason why biography should play such a role. The phrase 'a life' becomes easily 'a life and times'. Simply because it is true that man is a social animal, so it follows that the achievements or frustrations of any one life will only make sense if they are connected to the circles in which they moved, and the lives of the people with whom they attempted to engage - the audience, not just the artist. There are several examples of well-known biographies, which have attempted to play that explanatory or 'total' role. Ian Kershaw's recent life of Hitler uses Max Weber's notion of charismatic authority to explain how Hitler exercised control position over the great mass of German people. Even in the field of biography, the Andrew Robertses, Patrick Joyces and David Starkeys do not have it all their own way.
I think that the biography of socialists is potentially less vulnerable to the charge of elitism. For socialists - or the ones that have interested me - have not generally been the rulers of states, but the opponents of unjust power. One of the people about whom I have written, the Communist historian Dona Torr found meaning to explain her own life in Blake's poem, 'William Bond', 'Seek love in the pity of other's woe / In the gentle relief of another's care / In the darkness of night and the winter's snow / In the naked and outcast, seek love there.' Another figure, the nineteenth century Leeds socialist Tom Maguire offered this account of his friends: 'Some thought we might advantageously limit the scope of our ideal to the five continents, while directing our operations more immediately to our locality. Others were strongly of the opinion that our ideal was too narrow, and they proposed as the object of the society the internationalisation of the known and un-discovered world with a view to the eventual inter-solarization of the planets.' Maguire's point may have been made in scepticism, but the idealism behind it is unquestionable. The values of rank-and-file socialists have been always against elitism.
The more telling criticism of socialist biography has been that in concentrating on the self-appointed representatives of the oppressed, left-wing historians and biographers have neglected to tell the story of other dispossessed people, including those who have relished in the status quo, working-class Conservatives, racists, sexists, nationalists, poor Christians, xenophobes, fascists - these sorts of people have been neglected by the left. Instead, we have chosen some frequently exotic and marginal people to act as our representatives of the past. This criticism was made of Edward Thompson's great book, The Making of the English Working Class, that despite its author's intentions it collapsed the categories of the activist and the people, and was thus guilty of its form of elitism. Even against Thompson, the charge is harsh. Meanwhile, many other left-wing biographers and historians are most evidently exempt, Raph Samuel for his life of the East End blackshirt, Arthur Harding, George Rudé, the historian not just of 1789, but of Wilkes' crowd as well.
Along with the charge of elitism, we have also heard the suggestion of emotionalism, Carr's 'sympathy and malice'. The opposite must be objectivity, which is said to be a prime task of the historian, to construct a value-free narrative from which all hints of their own opinion have been excised. Is such a way of writing possible? One Anglo-German writer Peter Pulzer doubts that it is:

Most historical writing - at any rate writing on modern history is also autobiography. Often this works indirectly. The writing may be entirely impersonal and dryly objective, with no connection to the author's life story. The details may be derived from archives, newspapers or interiors, and therefore not part of the author's own experience. But what about the choice of subject itself? The agenda? The questions to be addressed and the conclusions to be formulated? Are they chosen at random? Or do they come from inside the scholar, because something that once happened to him goes on growing inside, because the world as he has experienced it has features that cry out for explanation?

By now, though, we are straining beyond the limits of biography. It is surely evident that this is only one form among many open to the historian. While the concentration on an individual life is indeed likely to impose a certain method on the book, much still depends on the choices of the author. What pure matter do we have to counter-pose against the waste of biography? Carr's science of sociology seems now a more divided field, less self-assured, and less inherently radical than it may previously have appeared. While nineteenth century Russian students may have struck for the right to study sociology, several of their counterparts in Britain in the 1970s protested for the right to ignore it. Many different sorts of history can be written, none is perfect, the advantages of any depends on the task to which it is set. What, then, are the specific insights or weaknesses of the biography of the left?
We may recall Collingwood's critique of 'magical biography', and of the idea that lives should be read for the purpose of moral instruction. This point is helpful when discussing socialist lives. For as Lawrence Black has shown in his recently-published work on the cultures of post-war Labourism, all manner of socialists - right-wing Croslandites just as much as left-wing Bevanites - believed that they were engaged in the best moral cause of improving mankind's lot. Indeed Black goes further, suggesting that the activism of Labour identifiers shaded easily into a contempt for the apathetic majority. It was not just the times that were against, the people themselves had turned fickle. Without any of the excuses of political vanguardism, Black finds that most socialists exhibited a moral elitism, and cut themselves off from their audience. Influential thinkers such as Crossman, Crosland and Castle believed that affluence posed a threat to the left, expressed in the spread of television, fridges and washing machines. Ernest Bevin regretted the 'poverty of desire' manifested by most workers. Ian Mikardo argued in print that gambling was A Mug's Game. Labour Woman defended the 'Keep Britain Tidy' campaign. E. P. Thompson advocated a ban on smoking. J. B. Priestly blamed California for the dominance of the car culture. Nye Bevan's speech to the 1959 Labour Conference denounced the 'so-called affluent society' and the 'delirium' of TV.
Such moralism had echoes further to its left in the idea of the 'good Communist', a self-less and hard-working comrade, as dutiful and modest as 'a good Christian' in earlier times. This ideal was expressed primarily through regular activism, but also in reading. Any good Communist knew the correct party line on national development (socialism in one country), democracy (bourgeois in the West, transitional in the East), human philosophy (mechanical materialism), history (Stalin's stages theory of progress), culture (Zhdanov), biology (Lysenko), art (socialist realism) and so on. The labour historian Sidney Pollard complained in 1962 of reading one such biography, a life of a prominent Sheffield Communist. George Fletcher had played a heroic role in the history of the Yorkshire working-class. Blacklisted from engineering plants, he became a full-time organizer for the CP, travelled widely, and ended his days the red owner of a bakery in the North of the city, which more than thirty years later still paid the best wages for the work in the region. A former Communist himself, Pollard applauded the story, before asking:

Did George Fletcher never have doubts himself, one wonders? … Here was no party hack, no 'professional', not even a wage earner: was there ever a dilemma in his mind? … Was he happy about purges in Russia, the sectarian position of the CPGB, the absence of democracy in the Third International, which he once attended as a delegate? … Are good Communists really never assailed by doubts? And if they are, do their biographers really perform a service to the Party by hiding them?

Other values existed meanwhile in satire. 'The Marxists-Leninists Song', appeared in The Rhyming Reasoner, 'I am the very model of a modern Marxist-Leninist / I'm anti-war and anti-God and very anti-feminist / My policies and theories have the air of unreality / Because I am the victim of a cult of personality / But still as propagandist, agitator and polemicist / I am the very model of a modern Marxist-Leninist.'
Collingwood identified two categories of magical biography, the uplifting life, and its opposite, the negative example. We are most likely to encounter the latter now in vigorous polemics written by the historical right. For while most socialists would today consider Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot to have been murderous tyrants who set about decimating the trade unions and socialist parties of their own country - many rightists still feel that this argument is too simple. The left still has apologising to do. Martin Amis' book Koba the Dread is a case in point. Its argument is that the Bolsheviks were all murderers from the beginning, their party was every bit as bad as Hitler's, and that anyone who ever displayed the slightest sympathy for any strand of Bolshevism was in fact a self-deceiving fan of dictatorship. 'Trotsky was a murdering bastard', Amis writes, 'and a fucking liar'. Lenin received no kinder treatment.
The most interesting aspect of Amis' book, however, is the presence of the author's father - Kingsley Amis, the novelist. Kingsley is the invisible, central character, who appears at the beginning and the end of Koba the Dread. In the first pages, Martin quotes from his father's student correspondence, when Kingsley was briefly a Communist. The last pages are a 'Letter to My father's Ghost', ending with the words, 'Your middle child hails you and embraces you.' Indeed several accounts of this book have ignored Amis' ill-informed historical point-scoring, and treated the book instead as a domestic memoir, continuation of his earlier book, The Information. Perhaps we can deduce from this a simple rule: although both 'negative' and 'positive' magical biographies exist, it is much easier to write the latter. Few people have the patience to construct a four-hundred page history of a character whom they loathe. This indeed is a criticism of the form, that the choice of medium encourages the biographer into positions of interest or sympathy (at least they must find their subject important), and these positions cannot be easily overthrown.
As well as the positive and the negative moral story, we may identify a third strand of magical biographical, which seems to be especially popular among the contemporary left in Britain, the polite and apologetic (but still uplifting) story. John O'Farrell's Things can only get better famously suggested that 1980s left had lost touch with majority instincts. We adopted a myth-making and nostalgic view of life, in which middle-class guilt was the dominant tone. His book opens with an imaginary account of the childhood that he should rather have had. 'Maidenhead. The slag heaps and the dirt. The rattle of the giant wheel at the pit head ... They didn't count the Labour votes in Maidenhead, they weighed them.' Blairites enjoyed the message of O'Farrell's book - that socialists needed to get a grip on reality - while more left-wing readers were happy to find their foibles recorded anywhere in print. Meanwhile, Mark Steel's book Reasons to be Cheerful possessed a similarly ironic tone. Steel may have been far more of a campaign activist than O'Farrell. Yet his biography again records the trials of an unsuccessful activist in the same period.
Elsewhere, we find a similar tone adopted in the middle of more conventional accounts. Eric Hobsbawm's recent memoir tells us that he was always less of a day-to-day activist than his Communist contemporaries at Cambridge, or than the members of the CP historians' group, 'The Party was, of course, my primary passion. But even for a 100-per cent communist there was simply too much to do in Cambridge to remain entirely confined to agitation, propaganda and organization, which in any case were not my forte. (In the end I reluctantly realized that the only really desirable career, that of the "professional revolutionary" ... was not for me).'
In the times and places when socialist values have threatened to become hegemonic, the trend has been for activist to emphasise the important part played by their generation, writing with a tone of confidence, even arrogance, but without irony. Sixty years ago, the American writer Edmund Wilson set out to explain the evolution of the socialist movement, from Karl Marx through to the first years of the Russian Revolution and beyond. The theme of his book, To the Finland Station, was that the whole process of the revolution could be understand within 'the writing and acting of history'. The first socialist historians were concerned to impose on human history a pattern, like the mathematical harmony of classical art. It followed that history was a story of mighty and impersonal forces, which people could neither challenge nor shape. Karl Marx, the pioneer, internalised some of this theory, but in other ways opposed or at times extended it. According to Wilson's Finland Station, 'With Marx and Engels we come to men of equal genius who are trying to make the historical imagination intervene in human affairs as a direct constructive force.' In the book's narrative, this notion of humans making history then takes over the socialist movement, so that the decisions of Lenin and Trotsky and the revolutionaries of 1917 are explained as the choices of men who had 'identified history with themselves'. Surely, Wilson has a point. In Trotsky, Lenin and also Lukács, there is a strong sense that Bolshevism saw itself as the self-actualisation of history itself.
One Australian historian Terry Irving, who has engaged in biographical studies from across the twentieth century, argues that there have been at least two different kinds of socialist life. 'Movement intellectuals' committed themselves to the struggle without reservation. 'Dissenting intellectuals' preferred to pick and choose between campaigns. Irving has something more in mind than the usual distinction between socialists or Communist on one side, and fellow travellers on another:

Movement intellectuals express the collective identity of a movement, they speak directly and intimately to their audience by working for movement institutions ... and they grow into their role, enjoying the opportunity to combine conceptualisation with realisation, theory with practice. Movement intellectuals often express a romantic rejection of modernity, valuing for example community over the individual, altruism over selfishness, and feeling over the intellect. Dissenting intellectuals on the other hand draw more heavily on the values of radical liberalism. They believe in a general public interest and in culture as a universal human quality that can be perfected. Because they are involved in this uplifting project they have a more distant relationship with their audience, the general public, but they are nonetheless reacting against the massifying and privatising characteristics of modernity's general public. They seek out their audience through the media and education, particularly, in our period, the popular press and adult education.