The cancellation of Edgell Rickword

Literary pioneer pilloried by both left and right for the ‘matter’ of his Englishness

Edgell Rickword: “architect of the conjunction between an internationalist socialist theory and a vigorous national historical practice”

Essex-born radical John Edgell Rickword may well be one of the most influential literary figures of the last century that you have never heard of, mainly because he has been cancelled from history by cultural elites of all political persuasions.

He was many things, trench poet, bohemian, communist, pioneering critic, satirist, modernist, publisher and historian, the very embodiment of the English radical literary tradition.

He also championed French symbolist poets like Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as English metaphysical poets such as the republican John Milton, John Donne and Jonathan Swift and, initially, US modernist poets such as TS Eliot and Ezra Pound.

He burst onto the English literary scene following World War One and was to play a major role during the inter-war years in shaping and contributing to radical literature and political thought as well as developing the cultural anti-fascist popular front.

He became an inspiration to a new generation of writers, historians and poets including future poet laureate John Betjeman, Stephen Spender and Roy Fuller as well as historians like Christopher Hill and EP Thompson, musicologists such as Ewan MacColl and Roy Palmer as well as critics such as F R Leavis.

Following the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany in 1933, many cultural figures were choosing sides and Rickword, along with many other intellectuals, decided to join the Communist Party to the surprise of many.

They foresaw the growing threat of fascism and the need to create the broadest possible anti-fascist alliance whilst, at the same time, challenging the establishment view of British imperialism itself.

Rickword, along with his collaborator the prolific writer Jack Lindsay, set about recovering a different narrative based on the rich democratic tradition created by English radicals down the centuries, a political and cultural legacy that ruling elites would rather working people didn’t know about.

In the words of historian E P Thompson, he was the “architect of the conjunction between an internationalist socialist theory and a vigorous national historical practice”.

For Rickword, although the ‘Good Old Cause’ in England had suffered many defeats, it was just another part of the struggle for democratic gains won over a thousand years of history.

As he wrote in 1939 in the introduction to the ground-breaking radical historical lexicon A Handbook of Freedom: “There is no short cut to an absolute freedom, but with the democratic rights we have won we can press forward the limits of our freedom in ways that will benefit all the people in their daily lives. Democracy ensures us the right to promote change, and those who sneer at its evident limitations as we have it today, are repudiating the wisdom gathered from the harsh but inspiring experience of the last twelve centuries”.

However, down the centuries the British public had to endure deeply chauvinistic and jingoistic narratives advanced by a largely comfortable intelligentsia and, consequently, any opposition to the flourishing British Empire was often belittled.

In 1899 the poet laureate of British imperialism Rudyard Kipling even exhorted the United States to grab control of the Philippines in his poem The White Man’s Burden.

Rickword’s earlier ground-breaking collection of critical essays which he edited and published in 1928, Scrutinies, included a scathing contribution from Robert Graves regarding Kipling and the Empire he championed.

This literary and moral crusade in defence of imperialism also manifested itself on the left. Even as late as 1920 Tom Quelch, a representative of the British Socialist Party (one of the largest organisations that went on to form the Communist Party of Great Britain) famously declared that British workers would see the party as treasonous if it openly adopted an anti-imperialist programme.

Rickword was also very clear on the need for national independence and democracy as essential guarantees of social freedom as he set out to challenge imperialist narratives.

“The English ruling-class has been foremost in destroying the independence of many free peoples. No single volume could adequately show the heroic resistance of Welsh, Scots and Irish to the encroachment of the English crown, of the many nations of Asia and Africa to that of the capitalists; but we have proved that English people are not guilty of all the bloodshed by their rulers. Workers and intellectuals alike have refused to endorse the policy of imperial oppressors and have denounced crimes committed in their name”, he wrote in On English Freedom.

He endeavoured to harness the wider growing political and cultural backlash against the sufferings caused by aggressive Western imperialism.

Yet, by joining the CP, Rickword had to effectively cut himself adrift from the literary world he had known as he was quoted in a brilliant biography by Charles Hobday A Poet at War: “many of my friends had become fascists”.

In 1936 Rickword edited Left Review and championed the Spanish republic against the nazi-backed fascist uprising led by General Franco. His poem “To the Wife of any Non-Interventionist Statesman” was described as the most successful political poem of the period, translated into many languages, and compared to Picasso’s anti-fascist classic painting Guernica.

Together with figures likes Tom Winteringham, Douglas Garman and Randall Swingler, Rickword set about developing a more flexible Marxist approach invoking figures such as Milton, Wollstonecraft, Swift, Shelley, Byron, Cobbett and Thomas Paine. But this broad approach would put them on a collision course with party hacks who already had a deep distrust of intellectuals that had flooded into the party.

Rickword immediately rejected the CP’s longstanding suspicion of English literature and championed it as part of an alliance with the working class against the barbarism of Nazism and British imperialism, calling on the people to ‘use our poems against the infectious influence of the warmakers’.

Rickword would inspire a generation to look to its own culture to reveal a forgotten revolutionary tradition that could teach them something about the future. Future historian EP Thompson, like many of his contemporaries, carried a copy of A Handbook of Freedom - latter published as Spokesmen for Liberty - throughout his war service.

A Handbook of Freedom, later published as Spokesmen for Liberty, is long out of print

The book led to an explosion of interest in English radical history which had hitherto been largely overlooked and it led to the creation of the influential CP historian’s Group in 1946.

Rickword had relentlessly championed the early pamphleteers, poets and democrats with their universal demands for freedom and workers’ rights born through reason and bitter experience.

Yet, as Thompson explained in his essay on Rickword published in 1994, it was exactly for this that Rickword was cancelled, humiliated and sacked as editor of the cultural journal Our Time by the CP in 1947. Thompson should know because he had taken part in what he retrospectively described as the ‘disgraceful’ meeting that denounced Rickword and his friend Swingler for various crimes and nationalist deviations.

It is significant that Rickword sat silently throughout this show trail and, when it was all over, he quietly left London to open an antiquarian book shop in Kent. Interestingly he never held this betrayal against his former comrades, a measure of the man.

With that meeting, as Thompson remarks, “a decade of aggressive cultural vitality on the Left came to an end”.

Thompson maintained that Rickword was singled out for the ‘matter’ of his ‘Englishness’: “It is exactly this emphasis upon national cultural experience which a contemporary generation of Marxist intellectuals in England (but not in Scotland or Wales) most distrust and deride in their forerunners”.

For Thompson, the party had been led by ideologues ‘whose mental strategies and vocabularies were designed to evade actualities’. He went on to argue that Rickword had paid the price for leading a fight against ‘those habits of idealism, falsetto utopianism, and the consequent evacuation of actuality’.

Similarly, Rickword was never forgiven by British establishment figures for exposing the decadence, corruption and brutality at the heart of an increasingly anachronistic and dying empire.

However, he had had the courage to build cultural movements that championed working people and an inclusive, democratic future as well as challenging imperialism, colonialism and racism. He has indeed left us a legacy which ultimately proved him right.

For Rickword, the personal cost was a price worth paying because Rimbaud’s radical contempt for ‘dead convention’ had never really left him and, as he once remarked, ‘a poet does not speak merely for himself’. We still have much to learn from the great man.