| The author of some forty novels,
a number of plays, volumes of verse, historical, critical and
autobiographical works, an editor and translator, Jack Lindsay is clearly an
extraordinarily prolific writer--a fact which can easily obscure his very real
distinction in some of the areas into which he bas ventured. His co
editorship of Vision in Sydney in the early 1920's, for example, is still felt
to have introduced a significant period in Australian culture, while his study
of Kickens written in 1950 is highly regarded. But of all his work it is
probably the novel to which he has made his most significant
contribution. Since 1936 when, to use his own words in Fanfrolico and after, he "reached bedrock", Lindsay bas maintained a consistent Marxist viewpoint--and it is this viewpoint which if nothing else has guaranteed his novels a minor but certainly not negligible place in modern British literature. Feeling that "the historical novel is a form that bas a limitless future as a fighting weapon and as a cultural instrument" (New Masses, January 1937), Lindsay first attempted to formulate his Marxist convictions in fiction mainly set in the past: particularly in his trilogy in English novels--1949 (dealing with the Digger and Leveller movements), Lost Birthright (the Wilkesite agitations), and Men of Forth-Eight (written in 1939, the Chartist and revolutionary uprisings in Europe). Basically these works set out, with most success in the first volume, to vivify the historical traditions behind English Socialism and attempted to demonstrate that it stood, in Lindsay's words, for the "true completion of the national destiny." Although the war years saw the virtual disintegration of the left-wing writing movement of the 1930s, Lindsay himself carried on: delving into contemporary affairs in We Shall Return and Beyond Terror, novels in which the epithets formerly reserved for the evil capitalists or Franco's soldiers have been transferred rather crudely to the German troops. After the war, Lindsay continued to write mainly about the present--trying with varying degrees of success to come to terms with the unradical political realities of post-war England. In the series of novels known collectively as The British Way, and beginning with Betrayed Spring in 1953, it seemed at first as if his solution was simply to resort to more and more obvious authorial manipulation and heavy-banded didacticism. Fortunately, however, from Revolt of the Sons, this process was reversed, as Lindsay began to show an increasing tendency to ignore party solutions, to fail indeed to give anything but the most elementary political consciousness to his characters, so that in his latest (and what appears to be his last) contemporary novel, Choice of Times, his hero, Colin, ends on a note of desperation: "Everything must be different, I can't live this way any longer. But how can I change it, how?" To his credit as an artist, Lindsay doesn't give him any explicit answer. |