George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (review)

The "War on Terror" which has been the defining historical experience of the first few years of our young century, has created some fairly strange bedfellows in the political, intellectual, and artistic responses to it. Impossible as it is to have a war on a concept, the targets have necessarily been people—people who look different, people who believe differently, and people who come from different places. In the United States, the jingoism and propaganda have radicalized the extremes and drowned out the voices of the middle that want to express things in a more complicated and complex fashion. Concepts like patriotism, nationalism, and imperialism are simplistically defined, claimed by, or leveled at an extreme, and used to discredit those with an opposing view. Conventional wisdom has always assumed that in time of war, communities put aside differences and rally together in the face of the "enemy." If this is a cultural and political over-simplification, then it is certainly an artistic and aesthetic one, as well, as the stock in trade of artists and writers is to examine the nuances, contradictions, and paradoxes of experience—both in war and in peace.

Literary responses to cultural and political turmoil have never been simple, and it is only in hindsight that reactions have seemed unified and coherent. The middle decades of the twentieth century were some of the most tumultuous in history, but the literature of the 1930s and 1940s has for the most part been neglected or read through the very narrow lens of "the Auden Generation" or the literature of a failed socialist vision. Kristin Bluemel's new work takes a fresh look at the politics and art of the 1930s and 1940s in Britain and not only recovers the work of writers who have been neglected but gives readers a radically new vision of one of the most famous radicals of the last century. Bluemel's work recovers Orwell from the almost superhuman, saint and martyr, role he has been placed in and examines his life and work within the context of a group of writers who were also committed to advancing social justice in Britain. Stevie Smith, Mulk Raj Anand, and Inez Holden were loyal to Britain in the face of German fascism and aggression, and because they were loyal to Britain, they were dedicated to exposing the injustices of the class system, imperialism, and racism. Because these writers engaged these topics from radically different—or eccentric—positions and in unique styles, literary scholars have had a hard time placing them. This prompts Bluemel to define the writers and their work as "intermodern," a category that aptly captures the compelling and often-ignored space between modernism and modernity.

While it may seem that literary scholarship is hardly in need of yet another "ism" or category, intermodernism, as Bluemel defines it, is not so much a category but a useful and much needed way of looking at kinds of writing that go beyond—and even partake of—the separate categories of modernist, war, post-war, or postmodernist literature. Indeed, she claims the terms "radical" and "eccentric" for the writers she looks at precisely because their work falls outside the received literary categories or movements of the era. Their work, she argues,

is importantly eccentric and radical not because they are consistently socialist or Communist (they are not), but because they consistently resist inhibiting, often oppressive assumptions about art and ideology—about standard relations between literary form and sex, gender, race, class, and empire—that dominate English culture at every point of the political spectrum.

(7–8)

Bluemel's approach makes for an interesting and unlikely mix. Stevie Smith, the most well known of the group after Orwell, is often described as eccentric, with her fascinating combination of humor and despair (and in her public readings where she sometimes wore a little-girl pinafore). Smith's complex love of suburbia (in particular her own suburb, Palmers Green) is radical...