Marxism's lost hero

SEVENTY years ago on Monday, on February 12 1937, a young man was killed while defending a position on the front at Jarama during the Spanish civil war.

He had been in Spain for only six months before becoming one of over 500 heroes of the British Battalion who gave their lives in the cause of democracy and freedom.

His name was Christopher St John Sprigg, but he also wrote under the pen name Christopher Caudwell.

While to many, especially younger readers, these names may mean nothing, but Sprigg/Caudwell's achievements during the 29 years of his short life speak for themselves.

He was born into a Catholic family in October 1907 and was educated at a Benedictine school in west London, but left at 16 to become a cub reporter on the Yorkshire Observer, where his father was literary editor.

In 1925, he joined his brother, a publisher of books on aviation, in London and learned to fly.

He invented an infinitely variable gear, which attracted a good deal of attention from experts. He also published five textbooks on aviation, seven detective novels, as well as poems and short stories. All this before he was 25.

Towards the end of 1934, he came across some Marxist classics and the following summer spent time in Cornwall immersed in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and other leading Marxists.

During this time, he produced the first draft of his book Illusion and Reality, a study of the sources of poetry.

Returning to London, he settled in Poplar, which was then home mostly to dockers and their families.

There, he joined the Communist Party, not as an intellectual but as a working member, becoming branch secretary and carrying out all the usual duties of leafleting, bill-posting, selling the Daily Worker and speaking at street corners.

During these two years, he produced two volumes of essays and a book, the Crisis in Physics, which he left unfinished when he went to Spain.

He had planned to end the volume of essays entitled Studies in a Dying Culture with a quotation from Lenin, which can, in fact, be regarded as his own epitaph.

"Communism becomes an empty phase, a mere facade and the communist a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his consciousness the whole inheritance of human knowledge."

During and especially after World War II, interest in Caudwell the philosopher, novelist, aviation expert, poet, essayist, Marxist literary critic and, above all, communist hero, mounted.

In 1950-1, the Communist Party organised a symposium to discuss and evaluate his contribution to Marxism.

Marxist philosopher and executive committee member Maurice Cornforth criticised his work heavily, arguing that Illusion and Reality was an un-Marxist mishmash of Freudian psychology, orthodox anthropology and philosophical idealism.

Although Cornforth admitted that Caudwell's later work showed marks of genius, he argued that the young man had tried to master and reinterpret the whole of human knowledge in the light of Marxism in what had simply been too short a time.

But fellow executive committee member Professor George Thomson defended Caudwell strongly, calling Illusion and Reality one of the great books of the 20th century.

Since that conference, there have been other discussions of Caudwell's work, including a seminar at Goldsmiths College in London in 1989.

Caudwell developed rapidly and his work is, from a Marxist standpoint, uneven.

Cornforth's criticism of Illusion and Reality contains a lot of truth. But the later books, all of which were published after Caudwell's death, are brilliant by any standard and still relevant.

Studies in a Dying Culture give masterly analyses of such famous figures as Lawrence of Arabia, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and DH Lawrence. But the most astonishing of all Caudwell's books is the unfinished masterpiece The Crisis in Physics.

The eminent Communist biologist Professor JBS Haldane, wrote that it would be a quarry of ideas for philosophers for generations to come and that, if Caudwell had lived to complete it, it "might have been one of the most important books of our time."

Had Caudwell lived, he would undoubtedly have corrected his mistakes and gone on to produce even greater work. His death was a major loss to Marxism.

Caudwell's whole life was a demonstration of the unity of theory and practice. Art, poetry and science were all activities that not only expressed and reflected reality but they moved people to action. They could help to change the world.

Caudwell's appeal came not only from his real, heroic life. His writings are unique and exciting and a message to their readers to involve themselves in the struggle for the liberation of humanity.

Out of this World: An Examination of Modern Physics and Cosmology by Hyman Frankel is published by Cardiff Academic Press.