Hail to Thee, Blithe Spart?
Chrtstopher Booker
Red Shelley Paul Foot (Sidgwick and Jackson, in association with Michael Dempsey Publications, pp. 293, £12.95, paperback 0.95).
Paul Foot's Red Shelley reminded me of a brilliant revue sketch staged in London some years ago by the Second City Company of Chicago. Two American professors were discussing the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. The first was a Marxist. To him the old tale was obviously a revolutionary tract. Jack and his widowed mother are typical peasants, living in semi-feudal impoverishment. Like the poor everywhere, according to Marx's doctrine, they become poorer and poorer, until they are at last forced to sell their sole remaining asset, the cow. Inevitably they are swindled by the so-called 'free market', and receive nothing but a symbolically worthless handful of beans. But froth these beans spring up the mighty beanstalk of the Worker's Movement, at the top of which Jack comes face to face with the giant Capitalism. He slays the giant, the beanstalk (like the state) withers away, and Jack and his mother live happily ever after in their post-revolutionary utopia.
It all sounded quite plausible until the second professor began to chip in. He was a Freudian. To him 'Jack and the Beanstalk' was nothing more than the 'simple, rather touching tale of a young boy's sexual awakening'. The selling of the milk-giving cow merely represented the end of the original infantile phase of Jack's life, Now in return he possessed beans, 'seminal essences', which sprang up into the great phallic beanstalk. At the top, of course, he discovered Father. In true Oedipal fashion, he slew Daddy, and returned home to live happily with Mum ever after.
Few people on seeing that sketch would have concluded that either interpretation gave the exclusive truth about Jack and the Beanstalk. But Paul Foot, I suspect from his reading of Shelley, would have had no doubts at all. He would be with the Marxist professor all the way.
Foot's view of Shelley has the virtue of unadorned simplicity. For a century and a half, he argues, critics, dons and bouregeois poetry-lovers have engaged in what amounts almost to a conspiracy to 'castrate' Shelley, presenting him as little more than an ineffectual babbler about skylarks. In order to sustain their view, they have ruthlessly ignored or even suppressed all Shelley's 'political' writings, from Queen Mab to The Revolt of Islam. In fact these are the heart of Shelley, and reveal him as the greatest revolutionary poet in history. Chapter One sets the historical background. The French Revolution, 'hailed by liberals and working people everywhere as the dawn of a new era', was dead and gone. England was slumped in reaction, under 'its worst government ever'. That government was engaged in 'two monstrous wars'. The first was against Napoleon, 'the second was against the mass of the British people'.
As this strip-cartoon view of the period 1810-1822 unfolded, I could not help recall ing that while some of us at Shrewsbury School 30 years ago were learning about the Luddites, Peterloo and Lord Eldon, young P. Foot remained faithful to Homer and Vergil on the Classical Side. He should not suppose that until E.P. Thompson's 'indis pensable,' The Making of the English Work ing Class, nobody knew about these things. I cannot recollect any history of the period I read from ten upwards which did not include at least a few lines from The Mask of Anarchy CI met murder in the way, he had a mask like Castiereagh'), plus obligatory references to people being sentenced to death for sheep-stealing.
Against this black backdrop of tyranny and oppression, Foot begins his piece by piece construction of the portrait of Shelley he wants us to see. Firstly, Shelley was a Republican. Fair enough. Shelley was un doubtedly very hostile to kings and all figures of authority — as our Freudian professor would call them 'father-figures'.
But it is noticeable that Mr Foot passes very briskly over the possible personal roots of this in Shelley's tortured relationship with his own father, Sir Timothy, so well explored in Richard Holmes's masterly biography of Shelley published a few years ago (to which, when it suits his case, Mr Foot otherwise pays deserved tribute).
Next Shelley was an Atheist. Again there is plenty of evidence to support that view, although a more three-dimensional assess ment of Shelley might make allowance for the complexities of his position, making rather more effort, for instance, to take account of Shelley's neo-Platonic streak, and his constant and by no means always dismissive use of such un-Marxist ideas as 'Eternity' or even 'God'.
Next Shelley was a Feminist. Certainly he went along with the general Godwin Wollstonecraft line on women's rights. It is true that Mr Foot cannot really be said to have faced up convincingly to Shelley's appalling record in his relations with most of the actual flesh-and-blood women in his own life, notably of course his poor, abandoned wife Harriet, who committed suicide. But then, as a revolutionary, Mr Foot is perhaps inevitably less concerned with personal matters than with ideas.
We are now beginning to see what our author is up to. He is trying to show, point by point, how Shelley's position accords precisely with that of Dave and Deirdre Spart in 1981. He cannot prove that Shelley was actually a Socialist, because the word did not come into use until the 1830's. But the poet was against bankers, plutocrats and the exploitation of man by man, so the suitably vogueish word Mr Foot uses here tet describe Shelley's position is that he was a 'Leveller'.
Now comes the toughest but most crucial piece of the jigsaw. To make his Identikit Picture complete Mr Foot has to show that Shelley was actually a committed Revolutionary, and the trouble here is that, for all his rebelliousness, his hatred of authority figures, the wild and whirling imagery filling his head, Shelley was in fact a bit of a softie. He certainly liked to imagine a world in which all authority-figures had been overthrown, and in which men and women could live together in peace and brotherhood — but he found it remarkably difficult actually to face up four-square to the little bit of unpleasantness that is sometimes necessary before utopias are ushered in. The nearest Shelley ever got to producing a 'programme for revolutionary action' was in the sketch he produced in 1819 for a pamphlet to be called 'A Philosophical View of Reform'. He began boldly enough by calling for the abolition of the House of Lords and the monarchy. He even suggested that the rich should be made to pay off the National Debt, and that the franchise should be extended to women, so long as they were property owners. But he then began to speculate what would happen if parliament refused to grant all these wonderful reforms in a constitutional manner.
Even Paul Foot recognises that this is scarcely the uncompromising espousal of hanging the directors a multi-national conglomerates from lamp-posts that he is looking for—so we then come to a second key chapter 'The Contradiction Resolved'. In 'his greatest poem', Prometheus Unbound, Shelley comes down finally on the side of revolutionary violence. This is admittedly somewhat obscurely dressed up, in the conversation between Panthea, Asia and the mysterious Demogorgon. But so long as we grasp that Demogorgon comes from the Greek demos meaning 'people' (Mr Foot's classical learning coming in useful at last) and take a fairly imaginative view of the symbolic role Demogorgon thenceforth plays in the poem, we can just about see what it is the author is trying to persuade us of. The only trouble is that Richard Holmes has already provided a rather more thoughtful discussion of what Demogorgon stands for in his biography (including the possible derivation from demos) and it is hard after that to see Prometheus as quite the explicit MarxistLeninist call to flinging Molotov cocktails round the streets of Brixton our present author would have us believe.
Nevertheless it is enough for Mr Foot, and from now on, once he has established that Shelley was a fully-paid up revolutionary, it is downhill all the way. Anyone who has ever written about Shelley without placing his revolutionary views to the fore, from F.R. Leavis to the 'celebrated lady of letters' Miss Isobel Quigly, can be shown as having been party to the great conspiracy to hold back the truth about Shelley from 'ordinary working people'. Here and there, it is true, 'socialists and freedom fighters' like that 'great South African feminist' Olive Schreiner have seen the point.But it is not until now that the whole truth has come out at last: that Shelley was a member of the Socialist Workers' Party before his time ('that is why socialists, radicals and feminists of every hue should read Shelley today—read him, team him by heart and teach him to their children'). Shelley `was—and is—first and foremost an agitator' in 'every corner of his poetry', not excluding 'the Odes to the West Wind and to the Skylark'. Flail to thee, blithe Spud I must admit that I found this book deeply depressing, and not just because of the way Paul Foot has so remorselessly tried to squeeze Shelley into this pitifully twodimensional sub-Marxist caricature. One of the things which is undeniable about Shelle,y is that for all his Romantic sense of cosmic rebellion and his deeply tragic life, he was almost child-like in his charm and amiability, which is why he so hated violence. Even Paul Foot pays tribute to his 'good humour, openness and tolerance' — whereas his own book, so full of rancour and indignation, is quite without humour or human warmth of any kind. I just had the obscure feeling at the end that Mr Foot likes the idea of killing people. Shelley did not.
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