[Marxism] George Paizis, Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution -- Review

[Paul Flewers]

List members may find the review below of interest.

Michael Rosen celebrates the work of the French First World War poet, Marcel
Martinet 

Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution, by George Paizis, 214pp, Francis
Boutle, £12.50

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/poetry/0,,2250876,00.html 

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Francis Boutle Publishing can be found at < http://www.francisboutle.co.uk/
>. This company has published several good books, including:

David B Riazanov, Marx and Anglo-Russian Relations and Other Writings

Alfred Rosmer, Boris Souvarine, Emile Fabrol and Antoine Clavez, Trotsky and
the Origins of Trotskyism

Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution

David King, Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin

Francis Boutle will also be publishing my book The New Civilisation?:
Understanding Stalin's Soviet Union, 1929-1941, in a couple of months' time.

Paul F

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In 1919, France's foremost literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, was won by
Proust. One of the runners-up was Marcel Martinet with La Maison à l'Abri
("The House out of Harm's Reach"). It's a novel about the first world war
seen through the eyes of a group of tenants living in the same house, and
George Paizis' account of the book suggests shifts and conflicts reminiscent
of Chekhov or Sean O'Casey. Martinet was someone who not only opposed the
war in the build-up to 1914, but, unlike many of a similar outlook, went on
opposing it throughout. The book can't be pigeon-holed as an "anti-war
novel" though, because it gives voice to a whole range of attitudes that
develop and twist as loved ones are injured or killed. So, Paizis has
excavated someone whom very few English-speaking readers will have heard of
and he is keen to place Martinet both in his times and in the context of his
own political activity - which was considerable.

Martinet was born in Dijon in 1887, to parents with migrant origins (Italian
and Polish-Jewish). He was heading for a degree in France's top college when
he gave it up with a lifetime commitment to a refus de parvenir, a "refusal
to 'make it'", a turn-away from careerism. In the first years of the
Communist party, he was at its heart, writing pages in its daily paper on
what we would now call literary theory. But it wasn't long before he was on
the outside, finding himself in the company of other socialist and Marxist
critics of Stalinism -- though he seems to have been uncomfortable with
being too close to André Breton and the surrealists on this matter. What's
more, he wrote a play, La Nuit, which Paizis argues anticipates Brecht both
in its method and its intent. If we need labels, Paizis tucks away in a
footnote the suggestion that at heart, Martinet wasn't anyone's "party" man,
he was probably a "revolutionary syndicalist".

The central 100 or so pages of this book are taken up with a selection of
Martinet's poems, printed here in both French and newly translated by the
author. A first reading immediately suggests a politicised anger, very
similar to Sassoon at his most agitated, as with his famous "Fight to a
Finish" which closes: "I heard the Yellow-Pressmen grunt and squeal; / And
with my trusty bombers turned and went / To clear those Junkers out of
Parliament." It emerges from this book that in order to avoid the censors --
or worse -- Martinet published the poems in Switzerland, from where they
were distributed as samizdat. Like Wilfred Owen or Ernst Friedrich in his
book of photos War Against War, Martinet gives us the horrors of industrial
warfare, piling up bodies and documenting horrific injuries. But he also
wanted to express rage at the betrayal of the international socialist
leaders who, he thought, could have united to prevent this carnage, and
likewise at the clerics, "newspaper warriors" and learned professors who
sell the war. There's fierce sarcasm here too: "Beautiful Europe, light and
conscience of the world, / O charnel house."

Martinet didn't see action - he was deemed to be not fit enough -- so when
he imagines the other side, it's not as another soldier, as with Owen's
"Strange Meeting", but as a German poet who in parallel will be "weeping
over our dead and yours". Then, as if expanding Sassoon's idea of turning
the guns on his own leaders, Martinet pleads for some kind of revolutionary
revenge.

Across the poems, his style shifts, one moment focusing on the detail of a
woman asking her lover if they'll start up "where they'd left off" and the
next using a declamatory: "Ah! c'est un crime affreux." He moves between
free, blank and rhymed verse and adopts compressed expressions, as with "O
people, who cut each other's throat on the chessboard of their rulers". In
fact, this equality of victims is the key to the poem cycle, expressed at
its simplest and most powerful in these lines, written in July 1914: "Docker
from Le Havre, before you stands / A docker from Bremen, / Kill and kill,
kill him, kill each other, / Worker, set to work."

Our attitude to French literature in this country seems seriously skewed
towards the 19th-century novel, with such figures as the Musketeers, les
Misérables and Emma Bovary leading active lives well away from the page.
Twentieth-century French literature is a different matter, where the novels,
plays and poems seem caught up in a complicatedly French crossfire -- both
literal and literary. Anyone unacquainted with the story of the occupation
or the position of the French Communist party, settling down to a
comfortable read of Le Silence de la Mer by "Vercors" or a night-out to see
Sartre's Les Mains Sales, might well wonder why these works became important
in France. And in several ways, I found that this scholarly and fascinating
book reads as a preface to the life and work of Sartre. The themes that he
worked on in, say, Les Mains Sales and What is Literature? seem to be
prefigured by Martinet, so, if nothing else, it's helpful to be reminded
that Sartre didn't just invent his position out of nowhere.