Christopher Caudwell

Christopher Caudwell
Caudwell c. 1936
Born
Christopher St John Sprigg

(1907-10-20)20 October 1907
Putney, London, England
Died12 February 1937(1937-02-12) (aged 29)
Jarama, Spain
Cause of death
Killed by Spanish nationalists
EducationSt Benedict's School, Ealing
OccupationsJournalist, author, machine gunner
Known forCommunist activism, poetry, literary criticism
Political party
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)

Christopher St John Sprigg (20 October 1907 – 12 February 1937), best known by his pseudonym Christopher Caudwell, was an English Marxist writer, literary critic, intellectual and activist.

Life

Christopher St John Sprigg was born into a Roman Catholic family, in Putney, London, on 20 October 1907. He was educated at the Benedictine Ealing Priory School, but left school at age 15 and worked first as a cub reporter for the Yorkshire Observer, where his father was literary editor, and then as editor of British Malaya.

Two years later he joined an aeronautical publishing company. He invented an infinitely variable gear and published his designs in Automobile Engineer. He was a prolific writer; by age 25 he had already published five aeronautics textbooks, seven detective novels, and books of poems and short stories. He was also following developments in 20th century physics; his writings on the subject were made available posthumously in The Crisis in Physics (1939).

Sprigg became interested in Marxism in 1934 and studied it with "extraordinary intensity". In summer of 1935, he wrote his first Marxist book, titled Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, which was accepted for publication by Macmillan. By this time, Sprigg was using the "Christopher Caudwell" pseudonym. Following completion of the book, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Death and legacy

According to socialist magazine Monthly Review, Christopher Caudwell was killed on 12 February 1937 "by fascists in the valley of Jarama during the Spanish Civil War. He died at a machine gun post, guarding the retreat of his comrades in the British Battalion of the International Brigade". He was 29.

In a 1942 essay, Hugh MacDiarmid labeled Caudwell and John Cornford (another young English writer killed in Spain) the "few inspiring exceptions" among "the leftist poets of the comfortable classes".

In 1949, The Bodley Head published a posthumously discovered Caudwell manuscript, Further Studies in a Dying Culture, and included a preface by Edgell Rickword. Caudwell's prior book, Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), had also been published by The Bodley Head, with a John Strachey introduction. In 1971, Monthly Review Press put out a volume combining the two Dying Culture books.

Lawrence & Wishart selected multiple Dying Culture essays, and chapters from The Crisis in Physics, and published the material in a book titled The Concept of Freedom (1965). In his Manchester Guardian book review, Raymond Williams stated that Caudwell's views on freedom and related topics were still relevant three decades later.

In an assessment of Caudwell's small body of political and cultural writings finished before his death, Marxist historian E. P. Thompson wrote: "It is not difficult to see Caudwell as a phenomenon – as an extraordinary shooting-star crossing England's empirical night – as a premonitory sign of a more sophisticated Marxism whose true annunciation was delayed until the Sixties". The Marxist academic John Bellamy Foster similarly credited Caudwell with "breathtaking intellectual achievements in a brief period of time".

Works

Criticism

  • Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (1937)
  • Studies in a Dying Culture (1938)
  • The Crisis in Physics (1939)
  • Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949)
  • Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature (1970)
  • Scenes and Actions (1986)
  • Culture As Politics: Selected Writings of Christopher Caudwell (Pluto Press, 2017)

Poetry

  • Poems (1939)
  • Collected Poems (1986)

Short stories

  • Scenes and Actions (1986)
  • "Death at 8:30"
  • "The Case of the Jesting Miser" (unpublished)
  • "The Case of the Misjudged Husband"

Novels

As Christopher St. John Sprigg:

  • The Kingdom of Heaven (1929)
  • Crime in Kensington/Pass the Body (1933)
  • Fatality in Fleet Street (1933)
  • The Perfect Alibi (1934)
  • Death of an Airman (1934)
  • The Corpse with the Sunburnt Face (1935)
  • Death of a Queen (1935)
  • This My Hand (1936)
  • The Six Queer Things (1937)

Other

  • The Airship: Its Design, History, Operation and Future (1931)
  • British Airways (1934)

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Sheehan, Helena. Christopher Caudwell. Archived from the original on 6 July 2008. Retrieved 30 October 2021. This web page is an extract from Sheehan's book Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Humanities Press International: 1985, 1993).
  2. 1 2 Walker, Michael. "Christopher Caudwell". A Compendium of Communist Biographies. Graham Stevenson. Archived from the original on 14 November 2017. Retrieved 11 March 2024.
  3. 1 2 Caudwell, Christopher (1946) [1937]. "Biographical Note by George Thomson". Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (PDF). London: Lawrence & Wishart. p. 3. OCLC 22427418.
  4. 1 2 3 "75 Years after the Death of Christopher Caudwell". Monthly Review. 12 February 2012.
  5. ↑ Glen, Duncan, ed. (1969). Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 90. ISBN 978-0224617116.
  6. ↑ Caudwell, Christopher (1977) [1965]. "Publisher's Note". The Concept of Freedom. London: Lawrence & Wishart. p. 7. ISBN 978-0853153931.
  7. ↑ Williams, Raymond (18 November 1965). "A young man's papers". Manchester Guardian.
  8. ↑ Thompson, E. P. (1977). "Caudwell". In Miliband, Ralph; Saville, John (eds.). The Socialist Register: A Survey of Movements & Ideas. Vol. 14. Merlin Press. pp. 228–276. OCLC 867227669.
  9. ↑ "Christopher St John Sprigg". Moonstone Press. Retrieved 11 March 2024.

Further reading