CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

publicity, without caring a fig for liking or aught else. So he’d deal with Mrs Trease, if it
came to that... And Ewan nodded to that, to Trease, to himself, commonsense, no other
way to hack out the road ahead. Neither friends nor scruples nor honour nor hope for
the folk who took the workers’ road; just life that sent tiredness leaping from the brain;
that sent death and wealth and ease and comfort shivering away with a dirty smell, a
residuum of slag that time scraped out through the bars of the whooming furnace of
History (p183)
The nineteenth-century Italian marxist scholar, Antonio Labriola, had written: ‘History is like an
inferno.’ 6 Marion Nelson commented: ‘…Ewan the communist, is something less than human. A bit
of a prig, self-righteous, romantic too – seeing himself so readily in the great march of History.’ 7
But neither Jessie Kocmanová nor Marion Nelson realised that Gibbon was writing within the
context of some of the international communist language of the period: he did not invent it all
himself. Grey Granite cannot be fully understood within its own confines. The three areas Ewan
muses over here: the prime interests of the Communist Party; the rejection of friends (and
comrades and partners), and the subjection to History, have all formed parts of the novels in
different situations of other slightly later writers who were communists at one time (though they
were subsequently expelled from or left the party) like Ignazio Silone, Charles Plisnier and Arthur
Koestler. The references are too similar to be coincidental. What was Gibbon’s stance as an author?
His authorial stance becomes clear if we consider Silone’s A Handful of Blackberries which was
published in Italian in 1952 (in English in 1953); the period is 1944. 8 Silone, who was less than a
year older than Gibbon, had been a foundation member of the Communist Party of Italy, and was
expelled ten years later for refusing to support the expulsion of three comrades. In A Handful of
Blackberries Silone’s main character, Rocco, who had also been a foundation member, finally
leaves the party since he has become aware of the victims of stalinism and also of some victims of
the group of partisans of which he had assumed command a few weeks before the Liberation. ‘Be
careful, Stella, don’t have any illusions. Individuals don’t count’, says Martino to Stella, Rocco’s
lover, when she fears for Rocco’s safety after he has left the Party (p227). ‘It isn’t friendship that
makes the wheels of the revolution go round,’ remarks Oscar, a party official, to Rocco when he
interrogates him about his friendship with Martino who has been expelled for ideological deviation
in exile (p102). ‘Haven’t you learned yet that for the Party there is no such thing as private life?’
demands Ruggero, another official, when Stella refuses to let him open an envelope without
Rocco’s permission (p184). ‘The Party is History on the march,’ says Stella to Rocco. ‘You know that
better than I do. It was you that taught it to me. Outside the Party there is nothing. Unfortunately,
history is made of suffering.’ (p119)
It is remarkable that the same kind of language is being used in two different contexts. In A
Handful of Blackberries Rocco finally leaves the party; at the end of Grey Granite Ewan leaves
Aberdeen at the head of a contingent of the 1934 Hunger March to London where he is to be kept
‘as a new organiser right in the thick’ at the unlikely age of nineteen and after a party membership
of less than a year. In A Handful of Blackberries Silone finally closes the debate on the party which
he had begun in Bread and Wine in 1936; in Grey Granite Gibbon keeps it open amid the explicit
criticism of some of his other characters and his implicit criticism of ‘the jargons and shields of
[Ewan’s] creed…’ (p202).
In Ewan’s words, the earliest of the three areas to appear in Grey Granite is ‘history making, the
working class to be captured and led…’. (p45) Later, he refers to the workers as ‘History’s
instruments’. (p83) When the workers return to Govans and Gloag Jim Trease exclaims: ‘For it’s
me and you are the working-class, not the poor Bulgars gone back to Gowans. […] A hell of a thing
to be History, Ewan!’ (p147) Finally Ewan notes that history has become: ‘our master not the
servant we supposed…’ (p169).
James Barke was the earliest critic of this area of Grey Granite. Two weeks after publication (on 12
November 1934) he wrote, combining praise and adverse remarks:
Just finished Grey Granite last night. Extraordinary performance despite some damned
unnecessary slipshod stuff. Why the hell wont you take time? And despite some
deliberate baloney (?) on the C.P. your line is admirable. And I suppose you’ve got your
answer to the inevitable doubts re dedication [to Hugh MacDiarmid]. […] Only, one
45