no ground organization. It is their splendid tradition that is inherited by the younger pilots who follow them …’ (LLF!, p. 208). It is probably this appreciation of testing the limits of machine and man that accounts for his friendship with Clem Beckett, his partner on the machine gun at which they both died. Beckett was a national hero of motorbike racing, someone who had been cheered by crowds across European circuits, whose appearances were well paid but who had also organised the exploited speedway riders into a union.2 The close relationship between the intellectual and the daredevil racer may seem improbable but both had chosen – one at the height of his fame, the other on the verge of recognition – to risk their lives to fight fascism; they shared a strong attraction to speed, they wanted to know how things worked and they admired courage.
Caudwell’s orientation towards practical matters is of central importance to his theoretical work. He was concerned more with the concrete explanations of how things functioned, than with their philosophical implications. Aeronautics is an obvious aspect of this, as is the article he published in Automobile Engineer in 1929 – ‘Automatic Gears: The Function of the Moving Fulcrum in Determining Design’. But he was also intensely occupied with psychology, with anthropology and sociology, and with the economic organisation of society – with how things worked on a larger scale. His involvement with crime writing began when he said that anyone could write a crime novel overnight and was given the challenge of writing one in a fortnight – which he did, and went on to write six more. Crime fiction is a part of his concern with practice; for him it was not simply a matter of ingenious clues and making the pieces fit together, but how the psychology of individuals functioned in a social context. He was very successful as a crime writer and most of his books were published by an American crime fiction club. The books gave him a platform for incidental social comment. In the earliest, Crime in Kensington (1933), he positions his characters to make a comment on the narrowness of a justice system that ignores the context of the crime. The killer, an older woman who has killed two people who have been blackmailing her daughter, decides not to kill a woman who could expose the daughter, on the condition she does not reveal the information. The victim, about to be released, reflects on her captor: ‘she was not fundamentally a killer, but a harassed mother with the atavistic fixity of purpose of a less squeamish age.’3 Fatality in Fleet Street, also from 1933, deals with the murder of a bully, a war-mongering press baron.
This My Hand (1936) he regarded as a ‘serious’ novel and signed it Caudwell (his mother’s maiden name) rather than Sprigg because he joked he couldn’t risk losing his credibility as a crime writer. The novel received praise as a brilliant psychological case study; unfortunately, it reads rather like a case study. The characters are usually presented in an external analytic perspective without much dialogue that would individualise them, and the writing lacks the light, stylish tone that gives personality to his crime fiction. However, throughout there is a strong sense of class injustice and the conclusion makes a moving argument against capital punishment through the responses of the condemned hero, the prison staff and the governor.
Caudwell’s crime fiction undercut conventional views of colonialism, empire, class and gender. Unusually for the time, he also displays a proto-feminism in all his fiction. Women in his crime novels are given demanding roles and never are merely objects of masculine interest; they are shown to be the equals of, and sometimes superior to, the men they have to deal with. Thus in Death of an Airman (1934), the heroic figure, a female drug-runner, is a skilled pilot, intelligent and courageous. In The Corpse with the Sunburnt Face (1935), Caudwell mocks the misjudgements made by the vicar of the Berkshire village of Little Whippering, which are based on the racist and sexist assumptions common in his parish. In his first flying instruction book – though his nominal co-author, Capt. H. D. Davis AFC, wrote a classically sexist introduction: ‘… a really good or reliable woman pilot is extremely rare. Most of those who passed their tests seem thereafter to alternate between a sort of blindness, unconscious recklessness and a tendency to lose their heads’4 – Caudwell does not draw gender distinctions in regard to flying and, as his Death of an Airman shows, he believes women can be as competent pilots as men.
CAUDWELL AND MARXISM
Despite his curtailed formal education, Caudwell was certainly an intellectual, and the fact of his self-education had some advantages. He was less exposed to the indoctrination suffered by people who go through the educational system, whose learning takes place in a context of received ideology, of shared assumptions about the world. He was freed to form his ideas and make his intellectual connections without pressure to conform. This is not to deny that there would have been things to be gained from more formal education, nor to claim that he remained completely unaffected by the dominant ideology; but because he was outside the confines of institutional learning, he would have escaped much encouragement to conform his thinking to the received patterns of the day. Caudwell’s ability to look at the world in a different way proved a great strength; and, coupled with his interest in how things actually work, it enabled extraordinarily creative thinking.
Caudwell’s coming to Marxism was an important step in his creative vision. In 1934, during a period of social deprivation and unemployment, of rising fascism and military expansion, Marxism’s view that capitalism will destroy itself must have made obvious sense. But Marxism probably also attracted Caudwell because of his desire to understand how things worked. He realised that capitalism, as an economic system, had inherent design faults: it failed not because of individual greed or because its objective was to create personal wealth, but because its fundamental principles produced the opposite of what they were intended to produce. Unemployment, misery and war were not supposed to be features of capitalism. Marxism gave him the key to this complex of contradictions. It provided a unified vision of the social system and also, of obvious importance to Caudwell the poet, a guide to understanding the place of poetry in society. In the introduction to Illusion and Reality (IR), he wrote, ‘There is only one sound sociology which lays bare the general active relation of the ideological products of society with each other and with concrete living – historical materialism. Historical materialism is therefore the basis of this study.’5 His intended subject was the historical development of English poetry and his intended method was historical materialism, that is, Marxist examination of historical development in relation to the economic structure of society.
But simply to say that Caudwell was a Marxist, when the term covers such a diversity of intellectual behaviour, is insufficient. Many people’s acquaintance with Marxism comes from university courses that treat Marxism abstractly as a philosophy but neglect what Marx himself considered its essential element: practice. One of Marx’s best-known statements is his eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ Caudwell accepted this as a call to action, as did many others, but, unusually, he also adopted it as a principle of analysis. He looked at social processes in terms of their relation to change – the nature of mankind was to deal with the world in an active way, to change things. Caudwell’s experience in aeronautics and his productivity as a writer meant that making and doing had a fundamental place in his thinking, and his focus on poetry in Illusion and Reality emphasised its relationship to material life. ‘Poetry is what happens when it is read,’ he said, a distillation of his active view. He saw that concreteness and social practice were fundamental to the development of Marx’s thinking: ‘the understanding of concrete living came to appear to Marx as primary to the understanding of the products of concrete living’ (IR, p. 15). That is, if you wanted to understand what people made and did, if you wanted to understand their poetry, Caudwell, following Marx, said you had to understand how they lived. Of course, people’s thinking was individual – but only to a degree; in shared social conditions that shaped thought the focus shifted from individuals to class.
For Marx, class was a central point in this understanding:
In the social production of their means of existence men enter into definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will, productive relationships which correspond to a definite stage of
