***** For it must be remembered that a working man, so long as he remains a genuine working man, is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete, logically consistent sense. Very likely he votes Labour, or even Communist if he gets the chance, but his conception of Socialism is quite different from that of the book-trained Socialist higher up. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type, the type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by employers, the word is a sort of rallying-cry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future violence. But, so far as my experience goes, no genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency. But what he does not grasp is that Socialism cannot be narrowed down to mere economic justice and that a reform of that magnitude is bound to work immense changes in our civilization and his own way of life. His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring round the same things as at present -- family life, the pub, football, and local politics.
(George Orwell, _The Road to Wigan Pier_, <http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/o79r/chap0.html>). *****
To Orwell, working-class socialists are "decent" in so far as they are not (in his opinion) his intellectual equals; educated "middle-class socialists" in Orwell's imagery, in contrast, are all indecent -- mostly "Nancy Poets" in "pansy-left circles" who (in his opinion) profess to love the working class but actually despise them -- all the more hateful because Orwell fears that he, by virtue of his class and profession, may be one of them: "Lawrence tells me that because I have been to a public school I am a eunuch" (_The Road to Wigan Pier_, <http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/o79r/chap0.html>).
If Orwell had not been set on creating a mythical dichotomy between decent but unintellectual working men and intellectual but indecent "middle class socialists," and if he had not been prejudiced against women and gay men, he could have drawn a truer portrait of British socialism and working-class life, including the intellectual life of a working-class socialist who showed him around Wigan and of whom he mentions in "The Road to Wigan Pier Diary":
***** George Garrett and the USA
Author: Joseph Pridmore Date: January 2002
I was very greatly impressed by Garrett. Had I known before that it is he who writes under the pseudonym of Matt Low in the Adelphi and one or two other places, I would have taken steps to meet him earlier. He is a biggish hefty chap of about 36, Liverpool-Irish, brought up a Catholic but now a Communist. He says he has had about nine month's work in (I think) the last 6 years. He went to sea as a lad and was at sea about 10 years, then worked as a docker. During the war he was torpedoed on a ship that sank in 7 minutes, but they had expected to be torpedoed and had got their boats ready, and were all saved except the wireless conductor, who refused to leave his post until he had got an answer. He also worked in an illicit brewery in Chicago during prohibition, saw various hold-ups, saw Battling Siki immediately after he had been shot in a street brawl, etc. etc. All this however interests him much less than Communist politics. I urged him to write his autobiography, but, as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who, I gather, objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist.[1]
The words above are George Orwell's, who met with George Garrett on February the 25th 1936 while visiting Liverpool as part of his research for The Road to Wigan Pier. Garrett's name is all but unknown in literary circles today, but when his writing first appeared in the thirties it regularly received high praise from established literary figures such as Orwell. Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Lehmann and Tom Harisson were also "very greatly impressed" by the Merseyside left-wing writer and activist. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin with Orwell's account of their meeting, partly because its detailed description of Garrett is a useful place to start for those who have not heard of him before now, and also because it contains a number of details about Garrett's travels to America which are the subject of this paper.
There are a number of reasons why Garrett became a forgotten name in 1930s English literature. One is that the body of work he left behind is relatively small. As Orwell notes, Garrett could not escape the demands of finding work and supporting a large family (he had seven sons), and ultimately these factors kept him from producing any writing on a large scale. Just ten short stories, two pieces of reportage and a handful of articles were published in his lifetime, although since his death in 1966 some other unreleased works have been discovered. Garrett's popularity as a writer was also compromised by tensions arising following the end of World War Two and the beginning of the Cold War. Growing paranoia surrounding the perceived threat posed by Communist Russia led to a sharp decline in the success of western proletarian writers such as Garrett, who had voiced their support of left-wing politics during the thirties. This fall from grace affected many of Garrett's contemporaries too, and such 1930s working class authors as James Hanley, Jack Hilton, Jim Phelan and Jack Common are still neglected and under-researched figures in most current studies of British writing from between the wars.
However, the study of Garrett's work is rewarding for it reveals much about left-wing politics, labour history on Merseyside, the stylistics of resistance writing, and tactics for overcoming the implicit class domination that lies within conventional literary forms. Furthermore, and most significantly, Garrett's work also contains fascinating details concerning the interplay between British and American left-wing organisations during the 1920s and 30s. This was an immensely lively time for socialist movements on both sides of the Atlantic, and I'd like to look in particular at the various ways in which Garrett's life and writing were influenced by one of the most famous of all American labour movements: The Industrial Workers of the World. . . .
Notes
[1] George Orwell, 'The Road to Wigan Pier Diary', in Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, eds. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, London: Secker & Warburg, 1968, p 187. . . .
<http://polsong.gcal.ac.uk/articles/pridmore.html> *****
Why did Orwell erase George Garrett (and men and women like him) from _The Road to Wigan Pier_? Perhaps Orwell sensed what Garrett thought of him: "[A]s George Garrett, the working-class writer who showed Orwell around Wigan, was quick to spot, Orwell claimed a knowledge of working-class life that was greatly in excess of the truth" (John Lucas, "Jonathan Rose, _The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes_" [Book Review], _Textual Practice_ 16.2 [2002], p. 375, <http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/app/home/content.asp?wasp=6cc6l524gn0rwk9a5g8h&referrer=contribution&format=2&page=1&pagecount=64>).
Cf. ***** George Garrett: The Collected George Garrett Edited with an introduction and notes, by Michael Murphy. Price: £7.99 ISBN 0 0905 488 48 2
All but ignored by post-war critics, George Garrett's stories and reportage were praised by some of the most influential writers of the 1930's, including George Orwell, Sylvia Townsend Warner and John Lehmann. His ability to shift from realism to the symbolic has been likened to Conrad, making his work indispensable to anyone interested in the full range of British writing during the decade.
Born on Merseyside in 1896, Garret's stories vividly record the experiences of a merchant seaman during the First World War and his return to the working-class realities of 'a land fit for heroes.' Also included are Garrett's first-hand accounts of life on the breadline in twenties Liverpool, and of the 1922 Hunger March. Both display his powers as a satirist and social critic in the tradition of Defoe.
The Collected George Garrett also contains his critical ripostes to Conrad's 'The N-word of the Narcissus', and an extract from his essay on Shakespeare's The Tempest. The collection concludes with a previously unpublished autobiographical sketch set in the pre-1914 docklands of Liverpool.
Michael Murphy's poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Critical Survey, London Magazine, Miscelania, Poetry Ireland Review and Symbiosis. His first collection poems, After Attila, is published by Shoestring Press. He is currently writing a thesis on Modern Poetry and Exile at The Nottingham Trent University.
<http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/trenteditions/trenteditions.html#garrett> ***** -- Yoshie
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