The Politics of the Earlier Arden

The Politics of the Earlier Arden MICHAEL COHEN The usual perception of John Arden's career as a dramatist is that it has undergone a radical change, commonly descJ;ibed in such terms as "from liberal to Marxist" or "from detachment to anger," a trajectory which is in marked contrast to the paths of his feUow playwrights of the 1950s. But in recent years there has been an increasing tendency in left-wing British theatrical circles, and even sometimes on the part of Arden himself, to minimize the differences between the earlier and later works. (n 1977, Arden described Serjeant Musgrave's Dance as the story of "an old soldier who, sickened of the oppressive role of the Army in the colonies, deserts, and attempts to strike a blow against his masters: by his inability to understand the political implications of the labour movement (the striking pitmen), he fails , and is executed.'" This is a very simplified description of one of the most ambiguous and widely debated plays ofits period. The exclusively political analysis is at odds with the predominantly moral and pacifist tone ofArden's 1960 preface to the published text! Catherine Ilzin writes ofthe earlier work that "the problems were framed by a socialist rather than a liberal perspective" and by a "dialectical approach." She quotes from the pacifist preface, but concludes that Musgrave is "about the results of an imperialist war waged by a capitalist society," and that clear connections were made between "capitalist economics and war...3 Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1964) is seen as a direct moral analogy of the Congo crisis of 1960- 1961 , whereas at the time Arden wrote rather more circumspectly: "all I have done is to suggest here and there a basic similarity of moral, rather than political, economic or racial problems.'" Despite this claim, Ilzin argues that the "political terms ofreference ofArden's early plays ... were so explicit that it is hard to understand how the plays could have been taken as anything other than profoundly political." She finds "almost hilarious" the comments ofcritics of the 1960s who perceived Arden as a writer who was uncommitted about his The Politics of the Earlier Arden 199 characters or took "no sides." Arden's own attitude to Armstrong at that point- "I find the whole sequence of events in the play so alarming and hateful (while at the same time so typical ofpolitical activity at any period)5 that 1 have ... taken for granted a similar feeling among the audience" - is seen as showing that he assumed, perhaps naively, that "his audience shared his socialist world-view.,,6 Though socialism can no doubt be defined in a variety of ways, an antipathy to "political activity at any period" surely relates to a non-socialist outlook, one from which Arden has moved a considerable distance. Similarly, Albert Hunt's claim is unsatisfactory - that Arden's political position has always been "completely clear," that of "a revolutionary, who instinctively and intellectually rejects authority" and who "in all his work ... examines social institutions and social relationships from a revolutionary point of view'" especially as regards the equation between a revolutionary outlook and the simple rejection of authority. We are dealing, after all, with a writer who came from a family with a British colonial service tradition, who had once voted Conservative, who may initially have supported the Eden government on Suez, who once described himself as having moved "through poetic imagination to the middle ground,"· and who, as late as 1966, confessed to being a "floating voter" who at that stage was not voting at allHowever , the case here is not that the more conventional labels for the politics of the earlier Arden - "liberal" or "detached" (or even "paralysed liberal," as one critic put it)1O - are in fact correct. A better starting-point in locating the politics of Arden and "The Ardens" (a phrase which has become increasingly unsatisfactory, but which remains syntactically helpful) can be found in Margaretta d'Arcy's summary of her career in Tell Them Everything (1981). Speaking of the period 1958-1969, she writes that she and Arden joined the Committee of One Hundred and came under the influence...