Jack Common

                                                            Talents in Touch

    The original process is something like this. As any body of men begin to live together in larger and more complex systems of relationships, some of them fail to fit in easily. They are to some extent cut off from the natural communism of their fellows. Some in their isolation become ego-conscious; they slave to perfect their talents so as to be top-dogs and thus escape the vagrancy which otherwise would be their fate. Some again endure that vagrancy but are compensated in their bad luck in being cut off from the normal activities by developing a sudden consciousness of what the whole business is about. The lame man who cannot hunt draws pictures of hunting; the weak-bodied and unfit for war spins his tales of heroes more glorious than his colleagues whom he dare not fight. But the simplest example of this in our time is sex. Odd word for it! Complicated societies like ours have to practically forbid their members from entering into full sexual life until they have gone a good way towards mastering the economic ropes. Many are able to acquiesce quietly in the postponement. But for some the denial brings a flare of heightened consciousness which, when it is spread about, is communicated to all, so that in our own streets you’ll see this curious blinkering and intense seeing occurring simultaneously, as some lass with a nice leg on her passes men preoccupied with business and men unnaturally alert for inflammation – the same men in alternating moods. That’s the low of it. Yet the barring out provides some marvellously fine insights, too. Sometimes the passion, which might easily have spent itself in dull coupling, is distilled into a sweetness which irradiates a whole personality. The little stark bit of chastity – that is the deep of the well, and people who haven’t it are somehow glossy and over-blown. Their attraction shocks like the electric eel at first touch, but who would want to touch again?

    Besides this general process, there is the particular one by which someone here and there gathers in himself a queer kind of consciousness of the notions playing on his fellows. The case of the artist and the philosopher is a hard one to unravel. We are over-dazzled at the splendour and the rarity of the achievement and generally content to murmur “genius” and pass on to something easier. It’s sure a wonder how a whole world of sensation is suddenly focussed in the reflector of one imagination and thrown far and near into many minds. Only one Beethoven and one Shakespeare and one Jesus - the marvel it is. Now in general, when a thing appears mystical and miraculous, it means that here we have something that has been left to nature. We never planned to have Shakespeares and Beethovens. Many of them would be an embarrassment to our narrow day of toil, and anyhow we don’t know how to grow them. Yet they answer some necessity.  Somewhere in the dark and nettled tensions of human life there comes about a thrust which our institutions cannot take. The force bursts through to produce something which looks alien and odd to the potato-ranks of our planning, or the carnations we grow for swank; it shoots up in a singular and impossible luxuriance. We never planted that one, and we know well that the way the ground is dunged and dug there’ll not be another like it for a long time. So give it a name and pass on – genius.

    All the same we are prepared to stand a fair amount of consciousness of a less intense sort, something that can be controlled and handled and made to yield only enough light to enable us to get on with the job in hand. During all periods of high civilisation this consciousness is fairly widely taught; it becomes a usual social asset; and there comes to be a body of people who can pretty easily write a book, paint a picture, cut holes in somebody’s belly, manage a factory, or argue a case in a law court – it’s very nearly a matter of indifference which shape their consciousness takes. Such a versatile and shallow cultivation it is. Perhaps one or two of them are really much better than that, men who might have had “genius” (the silly word) were it not that it was too easy for them to win some sort of knowledge. These great leaders just fallen short are surrounded by thousands of people for whom consciousness is a mere social privilege and convenience. They derive licence from the intellectually arrogant leader, as he from them. They surround him with a wall of light. So that his search for knowledge of the simple human stuff is a continual discovery of them. We did not dare ask for a “genius” – I mean ask with the full responsibility of getting someone who would upset all our comfortable world with his notions – and so we are limited in what we know to the short-range observation of these men of brief roots.

     Now complex people should associate with very simple folk. And the association is not real unless the complex man feels vividly his essential human inferiority to the good unconverted stuff of the simple man. At present he cannot get into that position at all: he is a “gentleman”, thus forever out of touch, or he is crippled in his powers by uncongenial work and lack of  social recognition. So consciousness must feed on consciousness until it soon burns out. And, therefore, the art, philosophy and leadership of our day is brittle, flashy stuff, over-intellectual or too consciously under-intellectual. It reports on what is already reported in a tiny trickle of marginal commentary. Suppose you leave out of your music everything but pure rhythm; or if you leave out of sculpture everything but pure form, the shape itself; suppose you leave out of writing everything but the bare word-sound – these are the whittlings that go on now. Why, the dear old bourgeois novel turns up every week freshly maltreated; and the nature-poetry of that too-practical epoch comes along regular as rain, twisted in syntax and with some functional scenery in, but still saying nothing about man and man that has not already been put in prose. These repetitions and dissections show all too clearly that there is no right relation between the conscious and unconscious parts of society. They are divided, hostile and alien. The sap cannot flow between them. Therefore, leviathan remains unlighted while the illuminants twinkle for themselves like glow-worms on a Big Five bankside.

    Our artists at least are sensible of the deprivation this is. They are weary of willing to paint, or of copying the tradition. They want to experience some deep compulsive mandate which will overwhelm their irritating awareness of what they are doing. So they turn to the unconscious. That instinct is sound – if they did but know the way.  Yet the works of surrealism, confessed or not, never climb out of a confused experimentalism. Probably what is wrong is that they to express a personal unconscious – “my unconsciousness” one of them said the other day with a quaint and unpardonable possessiveness. They desire the trance of art, and know at any rate what is missing in nearly all contemporary work, but in that trance they’ll be themselves still; they’ll serve their own unconscious, nobody else’s. They put their shirt on nightmare as a dark horse, but they take care to hang on to the cuff-links. That is the disease of our day all right, the same that makes the pacifist hang on to his dividends while refusing the crude and final stroke of war.

    It was different in Shakespeare’s time. Notice how his unconscious is so remarkably like everyone else’s that every born fool with a B. Litt. to his name thinks he has a special affinity to Shakespeare and can shed new light on the plays. Even if you regard the characters there as projections of the author, then all you can say is that he must have ardently wanted his world to be just goodly human. His folk are not geniuses, not astoundingly intricate or rare; there is nothing they do or say (content, that is, not the perfection of their speech) which is not done or said in any back-street. Hence, though literary men are fascinated by the amazing technical dexterity of his writing, ordinary simple folk still feel perfectly well at home in his world. He probably never was at home in theirs, but he wanted to be – that’s it. Here you have a man natively of exceptional talent, who might have graced the Court or the government, living almost like a vagrant, or like a man disinherited and teased by contact with all he might have had, extremely sensitive to all the relationships yet failing in marriage, and again in extra-marital and extra-sexual love. The makings of a fine man, you might have said, had you known him in the flesh, only nothing came to a proper focus for him except in the imaginative crystal of his writing, and there perfectly. It is the standard situation of men of fine consciousness.

    You can be certain that his perfection, his wonderful haleness, was to some extent the gift of his fortunate time. There were ready around him certain sympathies which he could naturally rely on, but which now need a lot of looking for. What a business that search can be you may see something of in the career of D.H. Lawrence. Natively Lawrence had an imaginative insight of the same order, though not the same magnitude as Shakespeare’s. Yes, but how often is it free? At first, perhaps, he had a certain naïve confidence of addressing the world, but it isn’t long before an irritated uncertainty of whether any listen or not begins to intrude into everything he does. His natural audience, his natural inspiration, should have been the Nottingham miners. He is certain – why, is interesting – that they would never read his books. The people who will, bourgeois women and the university youth, are no good to him. He exists in a sort of culture vacuum, like a fly on a bubble riding down the stream. Out of his lonely lack of community, he is always much over-valuing the importance of his personal relations with friends, and then in reaction theoretically damning them. His own personality he over-values. He is the only child not allowed to go out and play. The result is that the ordinary reticences and self-discipline which membership of any community naturally brings do not exist for him. He’ll record the littlest moods of exasperation or vanity; even the sort of squib one might let off at the drinking- table must go down seriously as a poem or something. And every now and then his stories will dwindle into dramatisations of himself and his friends, a kind of amazing diary. His personality is fully-licensed. He and we get so sick of it – for, of course, a writer’s personality is the last thing that anyone should write about – that it’s a relief to everybody when his fine sympathy with the non-human world gets the uppermost. He’s top of the world so long as there’s no people in it.

    Lawrence was too good to acquiesce in that banishment. His artist’s need of deep contact with primarily innocent people drove him to a wild and extravagant exploration of the external proletariat and the coolie-fragments of past civilisations. But he’d have done better to have stayed at home. The original statement of the problem was a cleaner one. Why was he not in full acceptance of the Notts. miners? That was the thing. All the differences of race and colour among the proletariat abroad merely obscured the way for him. Sad. It is such a simple need to have, that of a constant good communion between the bright nervelet that the intellectual is and the dark unaware life of the commonality. It would happen easily but that in the odd contrivances by which we keep up a part-civilisation any polarity may be strangled.

    We have been talking of exceptional cases, of course. The lesser men of consciousness never feel their present deprivation with anything like the same force. Nor do they need to be in such exquisite fine touch with folk as do these adventurers in the rare imaginative realm. Still, they too, every time they look up from the thinning trickle of their work, meet the great blank wall of mass- humanity. That seems inimical to them. The poor old mass-monster, how he mocks their tea-cup civilisation and their cult of the person! Well, give it up then. It has become purely self-regarding anyway, the clever studying the clever. We know to weariness all that that kind think, say and do. The world has been their Lido long enough; the sun must be sick of this nakedness. And they must be. They are. Yet there is always in front of us this tremendous mass-humanity, still unlocked. Think of the potentiality there. Why, damn it, we made Athens and Rome, Paris and London, while calling on but one man in a hundred to live a full manhood – what shall we do now, when the whole species pauses before the possibility of ascension. All but a tiny fraction of the people now breathing have been living under a belittling and inhibiting notion of themselves as unfit for anything but toil. It had a long life that notion, for generally it was justified by our inability to fight necessity without it. It went unquestioned, therefore, except for rare grumbles or Messianic flashes of inspiration. But now people actually cling to it – a sign that it is going. The eagerness with which all sorts of men disown an interest in anything highbrow, as though they were under suspicion; the general habit in nearly all circles that you’re just an ordinary bloke that likes sport and jazz and doesn’t bother his head about politics – this is how the deep pressure of some intimations of immortality first are felt. The proletariat clings to the gutter, and desperately shoos away destiny with an Edgar Wallace or a Littlewood’s coupon. The middle-classes have to join in, of course, with a sort of Toc H good fellowship. Meanwhile the realists of the high bourgeoisie arm themselves against the day when the man-in-the-street goes highbrow and asks for his heritage.

    We’re going to see some fun, we are. And we can’t practice seeing too soon. Why, if our intellectuals were capable of half the humility and self-suppressing wonder before the spectacle of plain humanity with the sun rising on it that they have shown for the pretties of Nature, we should have made our fag-lighter work and found out where we are by now. It is harder to admire man than nature. That’s seditious, for a start; it costs you the total loss of your misterhood, and seriously threatens your prospects of owning wage-slaves and becoming civilised. Oddly enough, though, most of the poets are getting prepared to pay that penalty. You and I will have to follow them – all in good time.

    You see, the present arrangements are so damn ridiculous. The proper study of mankind is man, but the moment any of us shows a bit of useful social awareness or insight, we at once make a gentleman of him, thus segregating him from his subject- matter and compelling him to work by memory all the rest of his life. Strictly speaking there is no allowance made among us for the intellectual in his own right. He is accidental. One who makes his money in a queer way, but does, thank God, remain a gentleman. It means in practice that he’s expected to do no more than picture the ruling class to itself. And now the ruling class doesn’t want pictures of itself, so he might as well be bundled out of the country as a Jew or something equally unsporting. It’s hard lines on the intellectuals. For they are made to seem snobs by the mere organisation the country has, and there’s nothing more absurd to himself and others than a writer-painter-scientist shoved into snobbery. To be denied living contact with nearly all your fellow-citizens and kept viciously circling in the coteries of a class, while at the same time trying to do good work – by God, let no man envy the present-day intellectual. No wonder the stuff they raise is brittle and short-stemmed, little hard dottles of poetry, incredibly skeletonised pictures, philosophy vapour-thin despite the many layers of its tissues. They lack renewal, these talents out of touch. They want manuring with some of the good rough stuff of inarticulate man.

    That will happen all right, never fear. Each year sees almost all of us forced nearer to the negative consanguinity of mass. We don’t like it; we don’t even want to believe that it is so. We all hunch cold shoulders against it. But wait. Already there are people who are beginning to exploit this new helplessness, and to rule us as though we were something sub-human. It is amazing to watch how in a few short years the ordinary impotence of the working-class against its bosses has extended to whole sections of the bourgeoisie. They still enjoy a relatively high standard of living, but their influence on the government of the country rapidly wanes. We come to the day of the unscrupulous and unsanctioned ruler. And our defence against him is to proclaim the community we are in. Once we know we are in it and feel it vividly, we’d be invincible. But we are not sure yet; we can only recognise it as a shadow on us, which can be sketchily declared in popular fronts and alliances against something. Things often begin sketchily, but wait till we proclaim our unity for something positive, for the triumphant declaration of the good-neighbourliness of all. Then under-dogdom will see its day come up. For the first time the whole man will walk upright in the sun, and his story will not then be concerned with the dismal account of whole populations mutilated of their manhood in the cause of some brief and uncertain part-splendour which so far has been all his tale.

    That’s all for the present, hoping it finds you as it leaves me. I had intended to conclude with a table of dogmas. For, as this book cannot aim at proving anything, proof being possible only when all parties are using the same dialectic and are agreed about their main hypothesis, it seemed only fair to put down flat what I think are trumps, so to speak. But if I did that, folks might think I had an original set all to myself. Actually the kind of intimations I’ve been dealing in are common property among many, many people who have greater authority than I to speak of them. When they are codified it must be by collective counsel, a general squaring-up of common experiences. To do it any other way would be to commit an act of isolation, perhaps, from the others. One has to be careful of that, even in small matters.

    No conclusions, then. You can work them out for yourself, and it’s odds on you’ll get as least as good an answer as I should. The things I’ve been talking about hit you as hard as they do me, mate, and that’s a fact. I leave it to you, then – all the best.        

Originally published as the last chapter of Jack Common's "Freedom of the Streets"; Martin Secker and Warburg, 1938. Republished by People's Publications, 1988.] 

On the Cinema

    The great advantage which the cinema has over the other arts is that it is so realistic. Unjaded and not over refined palates always ask realism from an art, and it is true that all arts while they are vicarious do offer just that quality.

    It is the audience who makes the art, however. What an audience! Whoever wants to look the twentieth century in the face cannot do better than stand behind the screen in a big cinema…

    The audience of the music hall are bright, consciously convivial, aware of their neighbours, and taking their enjoyment in company. The music-hall spreads an invisible festive board. But in the cinema it is a ghostly bed which awaits you. There the audience is as disunited and dim as the guests of an opium den. All those parted lips and staring eyes express no convivial enjoyment, they are lulled out of life, journeying along the moonlit paths of dreamland.


[Abbreviated from "Behind the Screen", (The Sweeper Up),   in The Adelphi vol. VIII, December 1933. As reprinted in Revolt Against an 'Age of Plenty', op.cit.]

 Desire on the Street 

    But what we have to see, if we're to see anything at all, is that life itself, the common life of the streets and cinemas, is miserably circumscribed. The bourgeois keeps himself to himself and prospers exceedingly. That was the theory. Its result is that outside this office at the present moment, there is a wide street full of people keeping themselves to themselves, drifting by the shops in ones and twos and threes, indifferent to each other, little knotted creatures like small fists closed about their selves and denying their common humanity.

    So many people marry, desperately, as a way of getting in touch with one fellow creature at any rate. Then they bungle that by their desperate insistent fumbling. Women should beware of the man who wants marriage. He will ask of them what they should not give. It's very bad to make the individual response of sex do duty for a social relation. That's why our women go about now so hard-faced, made up to look halfway between the screen vamp and the dressmaker's dummy. We put them in a purdah of cosmetics. For as we have no way of saluting them, except by flashing the sexual semaphore, they go endlessly about our streets numbed by a thousand impacts of sexual desire. They are prostitutes to the ineffectual gaze.

    Obviously when you see a girl coming down the street, moving so delicately and rich with her own dim magnetism, you cannot walk past her like a cow by a hawthorn or a drayman by a bunch of violets. There should be a flare of recognition, a warm and steady response - it should not be sex only, especially not aware sex. But there's nothing else handy. We bare our desire - not meaning that, but as substitute - and she shields herself from the falsity. The cold glance of desire meets the cold defence, concupiscence meets cosmetic and the recognition of a precious relationship is slain. Some years of that experience and you can go about the town ungreeting, casehardened, dried-up through running on your batteries.

 [Abbreviated from "Apology For Playing Hell", (The Sweeper Up), The Adelphi vol. IX February 1935. As reprinted in Revolt Against an 'Age of Plenty', op. cit.]

The Great Proletarian Mystery

     “Proletariat” began as an unpleasant word which reminded one half of society of its social sins, and the other of its social servitude. It has now become like one of those bothersome theological phrases: it means different things in every mouth that uses it, and wherever two citizens meet to baffle one another this word jigs in and out of the argument carrying confusion into every contention. It is a boss word, sure enough, being itself masterless. Yet, after all, socialism bred it and we ought to insist on a little loyalty to the old stable. Nowadays when every fascist equips himself for a class-war foray with a bundle of borrowings from socialist literature, we ought to stick to our hosses.

     The word derived from a necessity in Marx’s logic. According to that worthy, a society which had its dynamic in the unrestricted lust for possession must sooner or later produce a class of persons who were completely dispossessed. This logical category of the dispossessed, he called the proletariat. The term was at once appropriated to the working-class, who were sufficiently near complete dispossession, God knows. Now, it might be used even more accurately of the unemployed. Wherever it is used, however, it must mean that class which is excluded from all the major benefits of the social system under which it lives. In socialist theory it is this class, the excluded, the dispossessed, which is the lever of change, the carrier of destiny, the doom of present things. Naturally, we are all of us most unwilling to believe it.

     The difficulty is about equal whether you try to persuade a dispossessed man to overcome his feeling of inferiority and choose himself for one of destiny’s agents, or whether you try to overcome the middle-class man’s snobbery and get him to throw in his lot with a class that has never achieved anything except toil. They have not faith, neither of them. Here is this paradox: progress, all the fine things civilisation has been promising itself and hasn’t got yet, must come from the weak, the ignorant, the powerless. Can you believe it? It is enough to make a man go fascist to think about it. Only, of course, you then get impaled on an equally different paradox: that you can make a revolution without turning the wheel, that you can keep the profits while abandoning the business. Let us stick to our own paradox.

     Most of the misunderstanding about the role of the proletariat is due to the class-war obsession. Because the class-war is a fundamental fact of capitalism, socialists are apt to let their ideology be dominated by it. They are afraid, naturally, that unless they continually demonstrate the reality of class-injustice they will be unable to awaken the people to the necessity for the abolition of classes. Too often the effect is to produce cynicism. When men are shown universal injustice they lose their old faith but do not necessarily get a new one. They agree that there is everywhere the tyranny of classes, but they do not see classlessness. Instead they hear of a possible great working class victory. It seems to them pretty much the same old story, a new class but the same injustice. And if they are middle-class they think they might as well stand by their class even if they no longer believe in it. The ranks of fascism are full of dead men, of men who have no belief and are therefore in times of urgency at the mercy of any traditional voice which orders their lives for them. For others, the demonstration of the rottenness of present society leaves only an uncertain knowledge that somehow or other new orders of society do appear. You never know, perhaps credit reform might do it, perhaps science. That is not enough.

[Abbreviated from “The Great Proletarian Mystery”,  in The Adelphi, vol.VIII, January 1934. As reprinted in Revolt Against an ‘Age of Plenty’, op. cit.]  

                                         Masses  

       In these days of the decadence of the great Liberal creed, when all parties are apt to call in the state to organise the chaos of competitive individualism, we cannot but marvel at the magnificent act of faith which said: leave individuals to sell freely with each other and the world will be alright … One can see how mad that must have sounded to the nobility and churchmen and kings whose profession it was to put the individual in his place. What a thing to trust to! The individual conscience, better than all the popes and colleges of cardinals; the individual initiative, more skilful than the trained corps of the aristocracy. Those brewers and merchants and petty tradesman had a flair for human quality, if you like. Compare their magnificent faith with the frigid planning and authority-mongering of their successors – it is the difference between eager youth and pottering age.

     They were the voices of the people; they believed in the people. Not enough, perhaps, but enough to get some splendid things done. But now, the people have gone, disappeared out of cultural consciousness. Instead we have the masses. The word “masses” is as terrifying to modern masters as the word “people” was to the old catholic priesthood and nobility of reformation times. They are both words which to snobbish ears seem to oppose number to quality. To the protestant tradesman, however, the word “people” opposed the unborn quality of individuals to the dead quality of caste. It was a gamble in human potentials. It came off.

     Now, we are a mass-civilisation which will not recognise its own character. All our institutions are cracked and strained by the washing of this great tide of multitudes, whom no one can give a voice to. They are there, the mass must be served, but none have joy in their service. You must give the public what it wants, or else sell what you want to the few persons constituted like yourself. You cannot work for men anymore: it must be either for mass or for the intelligentsia. That is a hell of a problem for us. What is it for the ordinary man?

     He doesn’t understand the intelligentsia, who are busy with their own problems, and the “What the public wants” school don’t understand him. They give what he is prepared to pay for; and that, they say, is what he wants. Well, he wants a bit of fun and he’ll buy anything that promises to give it to him. That doesn’t mean he gets what he wants. He only gets what’s going. Fair-ground folk are apt to jeer at the fools they take in (one born every minute kind of thing), but if you’ve ever been to a fair, you quickly realise that the boys go there intending to be taken in – it’s part of the fun. Nobody really believes that the two-headed baby actually has two heads, only they appreciate anyone taking the trouble to fake it for them. Similarly it is very unsafe to suppose that people who buy the Daily Express or the Daily Mail (if anybody does buy the Daily Mail these days) believe in all the twaddle they see there. The ordinary man regards his newspaper as very much in the margin of his life.

     And his newspaper, the mammoth-sale mass-journal, like his film, is a very bad guess at what he is like. It is compiled by cynics who think they are serving slaves, and who feel Barnum’s own sting in their humiliation at the servitude.  They give expression to what they think is the slave-character of the masses. But the ordinary man of this civilisation is potentially free and powerful; there is nothing for which he can be enslaved. And he is enslaved, for nothing. Millions of him are kept in idleness because slavery is unprofitable, and freedom is fearful to contemplate. The slavery is unnecessary, and therefore it has to be maintained by lying. And because all those enslaved to the idea of masters hate and dread the idea of the ordinary men (whom they call “masses”) being freed, the whole of popular culture is a concocted slander by which would-be superior people defend their groundless superiority.

     But actually the ordinary man is fine. Not the average man. He is a cerebral abstraction, like that average child which educationalists abuse themselves by playing with. Nor the “little man”, nor the “man-in-the-street.” All these are the conscious belittlements of those who cannot endure the richness of mere life, and must construct smoked glasses by a mental formula to dim it down lest their own ego be quenched by it. The common male of the species is fine. So, of course, is any bird or any tree. We take the poet’s word for it in the case of “natural” creatures; when it comes to men we listen to economists, or scientists, or journalistic hacks. Yet, precisely what is needed is another act of faith in the ordinary man. Give him the mastery of the machine-world which no masters of men can control, and things will be alright. You can bet on that.                                                                                                                                                                                 

[Originally published as “Slander is no Whispering Zephyr”, (The Sweeper Up) in The Adelphi, vol.VIII, June 1934. Reprinted as “Masses” in Revolt Against an ‘Age of Plenty’, op. cit.]