March 24th, 1952
Dear Comrade Levy,
Thanks for your note and the accompanying MS. I have gone over it a number of times and find it most interesting. You have set yourself a difficult task–of reaching out to an indeterminate audience, a task I must confess, beyond me. When I write my class wells up in me, I love and hate with all the vigour of my being. Such an approach frightens a good many people, they shrink from it–and me! In me–and I recognise it very clearly–the spirit of negation runs swift and strong. It is more than probable that the book you have written will get to the ear of people who would regard my poetry, its totality, with something very akin to loathing. And among such people some will be found who can be won to the side of progress, for the advancement of true science, and for the deepening of man’s spiritual values.
I am not going to attempt to go very deeply into your chapter, I cannot without examining the whole work. And I am not going to ’kick very hard,’ for at the present I have not found a great deal to kick at. Within the limits set by yourselves you have done a very useful thing: you have brought to the attention of your readers the plain fact that literature does “heighten man’s consciousness of himself and his environment,” that this is brought about through relating the particular to the general. Poetry attempts to explain the world even as science, the greater the Poet, as the greater the Scientist, the plainer the sense of reality is conveyed. Neither science nor art can flourish in a glass house, and this part of your job has persuasively been put forward. But not only has the artist the job of explaining the world, they have the job of consciously using their medium to bring about the required result–even though the result may not be all they looked for. I think your chapter would have been improved if this aspect of the struggle of the poet had been a little developed. You may have gone into this in other chapters, that is why I hesitate about examining this chapter in detail.
For example, I am puzzled at your allusion to the Elizabethan age. I am afraid I cannot follow you where you infer–you say you have explained your reasons in an early chapter–that that age was indifferent to the artist, offered him no comfort, but was, in fact, hostile to him. I won’t go into it, I cannot until I have studied your reasons, but I have always maintained that great art flourished in those periods when peoples moved forward, when the spirit of the age lit up the soul of man, driving him eagerly forward both as searcher and diviner.
I think there is one weakness that should be touched on. I may be quite wrong, but you seem to link imagination and emotion together then separate them from the mind. This strikes me as putting forward a theory of duality.
My own opinion is quite simple. Poets who allow their emotions to overwhelm them possess inferior brains, rationality is as much at home in the brain of a great poet as in the brain of a scientist, witness Homer, Shakespeare. Such brains are not ’split affairs’ with the thinking cells on one side and the emotional cells on the other. A scientist can lose his sense of reality even as a poet, witness a certain aspect of Einstein’s theories with which a Marxist cannot agree, that time and space are finite. A great interpreter of art such as Gigli has confessed that upon one occasion the role he was playing so overwhelmed him he was unable to go on. A great artist, as a great scientist, must possess and develop to the utmost the analytical aspect of human thought. Unless they come into the world with the free gift for this kind of check, and deliberately develop it, they are inevitably lesser than those who have such a developed gift.
There is one point which I feel I must touch on. You give the impression that feudalism collapsed of its own weight, that the age of Elizabeth was dominated by great merchants–was it? If that was the case why was the age of Cromwell necessary? For the great merchants were the leaders of their class, the bourgeoisie. I would rather say that great landlords dominated the age of Elizabeth. Feudal-minded landlords raised up, in the main, for services performed for Elizabeth’s father and grandfather. The confiscation of Church lands by Henry VIII bolstered the position of this new class of landlords, making it impossible to restore Catholicism under the brief reign of Mary.
The merchants were growing steadily in wealth, their influence had expanded enormously, but this is far from saying they dominated the age. Domination means political supremacy–that had to be won on the battlefield. 1640-48 was a necessity.
But here again I won’t press too hard, for you may have gone into it in your chapter “The Matrix of Society.” A short letter pertaining to this question of the Elizabethan age appeared in the DW a while back. It was written by Idris Cox and was critical of Christopher Hill–in fact I am convinced the letter itself was ’toned down’ by the Editorial Department of the DW.
A great deal of confusion exists on this subject, but is it not reasonable to suppose that if the great merchants dominated the times they would be the ones surrounding Elizabeth, her Chiefs of State, etc.? But we find nothing of the sort, aristocrats surrounded the Court. It is as Marx said: the new develops inside the womb of the old–birth is usually a somewhat harsh affair.
I shall look forward with keen interest to the publication of your book. May it do a lot of good.
A personal note: I am not bitter or depressed over the attempt of people in the Party to smother me and my work. I will outlive them. I know with whom I am dealing, and I have talent enough to possess a little humour. A note of discouragement once in a while is quite human. I have never been afraid of the final outcome, I will win.
Yours fraternally,
A. H. EVANS.