CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

thing I do regret – that Tavendale couldn’t (and of course he couldn’t) experience deep
‘love’ for the working class […] understanding of historical necessity alone does it
rarely. 9
In a late paper Jack Mitchell, who taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin, strengthened his
earlier criticism of Trease and Ewan’s view of history expressed in ‘The Struggle for the Working-
Class Novel in Scotland 1900-1939’, and wrote of Trease’s claim ‘to be History’: ‘Here these two are
no longer communists but figures of almost Nietzschean fantasy.’ 10
The references to history are the most pervasive in the international communist language identified
earlier. Gibbon did not live to see where his characterisation might be leading. However, in Days of
Hope (1937) André Malraux wrote: ‘Hernandez was beginning to learn how history is made’ when
his character, a Republican captain, was waiting in a group of three to be shot by the fascists in the
Spanish Civil War. 11 Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), had no fewer than thirty-five references
to history, including: ‘History will rehabilitate you, thought Rubashov, without particular
conviction. What does history know of nail-biting?’ 12
References also occur in essays. At several points in the chapter of The Captive Mind, ‘Gamma, the
Slave of History’, Milosz refers to the ‘logic of History’:
Even before the [Second World] war the members of the Union of Patriots had agreed
to renounce independence for their country in the name of the logic of History. 13
He concludes his chapter, however:
But sometimes [Gamma] is haunted by the thought that the devil to whom men sell
their souls owes his might to men themselves, and that the determinism of History is a
creation of human brains. 14
Perhaps Silone gives the fullest outline of the view of history represented in part in Grey Granite in
his essay ‘The Lesson of Budapest’ (1956), when he disagrees with Sartre:
In his view, a writer who is really alive cannot be for anything but progress; on the other
hand, progress, in the modern era, is identified with the working class, which, in turn,
‘is identified’ with the Communist Party; the Communist Party, as everyone knows, ‘is
identified’ with Soviet Russia and with the People’s Republics, who of course are to be
‘identified’ with History. 15
In Hermanos! (1969), a novel with an ironic title, William Herrick, who had been a member of the
Lincoln Brigade in Spain, revisits the 1930s and quotes from a speech by Jake Starr, a history
graduate, to volunteers in Saint-Denis: ‘You’re not going to write history, you’re going to make it.’ 16
The novel has several other references to history.
There were earlier references in literature. In Boris Pilnyak’s ‘The Tale of the Unextinguished
Moon’ (1926) Number One (Stalin) is given to say to the fictional Commander Gavrilov, for whom
he has prescribed an unnecessary operation which leads to his death: ‘It is not for us to talk about
the grindstone of the Revolution, Gavrilov. The wheel of history, unfortunately, I suppose, is turned
mainly by blood and death – particularly the wheel of revolution.’ 17
At the end of Victor Serge’s documentary story ‘The Saint Barnabas Impasse’ placed and dated
‘Moscow-Leningrad, September 1932’ a soldier with serious facial injuries who is looking for a
room, comments: ‘All right, all right. We’re history’s manure. Let us be so knowingly.’ 18
Grey Granite contains several references to communists as ‘liars’. What did Gibbon mean by
‘the nonsensical lying of the Communists’ in the words of Bob’s interior monologue at the time
of a meeting of the Duncairn League? (p81) The clue exists in the opening words of Storman’s
address to the meeting of the South Wales Anarcho-Communist Group in Stained Radiance:
‘Comrades, the Government is on its last legs.’
This was a good opening, but, saying it, he knew that he lied. A year ago he
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