Keeping the Faith

Yvonne Kapp, Time Will Tell, Verso, London and New York, 2003, 296 pp., £15. ISBN 1-85984 -510.

At the end of 1989 the world watched the sudden collapse of the USSR. In the same year, one of the USSR's staunchest British supporters, Yvonne Kapp, completed her autobiography, Time Will Tell. She was eighty-six, and had already been in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) for over half a century. Today, autobiography is an increasingly valued genre. But this was not always so. Until recently serious people, especially if they were political, were often rather contemptuous of self-writing. Certainly, Kapp is wary of the temptations of autobiographical self-indulgence, and suspicious of its satisfactions: 'The gratifications of chattering about one's childhood, to indulge long cherished resentments, paranoia, self-pity, self-love and pure swank, must account for the lasting appeal of psychoanalysis'. Accordingly, she begins her memoir with lighthearted self-disparagement: 'My reminiscences lack gravity . . . partly out of sheer laziness . . . [they] rely upon my fallible, fitful and selective memory, fully aware of the pitfalls that presents'. What follows, after a few vivid reminiscences about a conventional Edwardian childhood, are compelling tales of Kapp's personal engagement with many of the most dramatic moments of twentieth-century politics in Britain. The zest with which she recounts these recalls Raphael Samuel's evocative description of older working-class Party men from his childhood: 'completely untroubled by doubt, but brave, selfless and with a redeeming London wit'.¹ Kapp was neither working-class nor male; rather, she was raised as a 'lady', moving from an elite girls' school in Harley Street to a Swiss finishing school. All her life she was elegant, erudite and refined while, like Samuel's elderly comrades, remaining a 'good Communist' for over sixty years.

Kapp's career as a dissident began not in leftwing politics but in the 1920s world of Bloomsbury sexual bohemianism. But in the 1930s she began working with Basque and Jewish refugees (while also publishing four successful novels under the pen name Yvonne Cloud), going on to become a lone woman at the centre of British trade-union politics in the 1940s, then embarking upon field work in the East End of post-war London, and later still editing and translating Bertolt Brecht and other Communist writers. In her sixties she began a decade of research for her scholarly, much acclaimed thousand-page biography of Eleanor Marx, published in her seventies.² Along the way, she raised and supported a daughter, for the most part as a single mother, while engaging in complex love affairs with women and men, before becoming—as her friend and former lover Quentin Bell records—'magnificently active' in the British CP from 1936 onwards. It seems extraordinary that in the ten years she lived after completing her memoir, she could not find a publisher for it. But in the 1980s and 90s there was little public interest in those whose lives had been dedicated to leftwing politics. The publisher that commissioned her book, Virago Press, turned it down in 1990; and even the Communist Party publisher Lawrence and Wishart rejected it. Having become affiliated to Marxism Today, they were perhaps unsympathetic to the memories of staunch old-timers, a number of whom were by then hoping in vain to publish accounts of their political journeys.³

Born into an affluent German-Jewish family in London in 1903, Kapp had tuberculosis as a child, spending much time alone in bed, away from school, often away from her family, always reading, even writing, from the age of seven—kicking off with a tiny collection of comic verses. A frail but apparently rebellious child, she was always in conflict with her domineering mother, a woman, we are told, with 'all the makings of a colonial governor', but with only two children and a few servants to bully: 'her despotic sway . . . needed larger fields of operation'. By adolescence, the daughter would feel a 'suffocating sense of injustice' confronting...