14 October 2007

‘Lovers and Political Movements’, A Review of Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story

Deborah Jordan

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Jeff Sparrow, Communism: A Love Story (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007).

Jeff Sparrow’s Communism: A Love Story is an engaging intervention into historical and literary global debates about love and activism, and is a new development in Australian biography. Written with an enviable talent for dramatic narrative, Sparrow will find a new generation of readers for the life story of this rebel and his commitment to an international/transnational/global movement: communism. Guido Carlo Luigi Baracchi (1887-1975) has been waiting in the wings, especially since the late 1960s with the advent of New Left criticism, and we now have him centre stage, his life and loves, political thinking and praxis. Communism: A Love Story raises questions about the relationships between lovers and political movements; shared intellectual passions and radical sexual politics; about being centre stage and off in the margins; and the function of the Soviet Union and its transformation of communism into ideologies in the service of power. Sparrow portrays Baracchi as a leading Marxist theorist of the Australian left in the period after the Great War, and this large claim makes this new biography particularly significant.

Born in 1887 in Melbourne to a renowned astronomer and meteorologist father, Baracchi was one of the generation that grew up in the radical tide of Australia’s white democracy. As adolescents they saw the new century and Australia’s federation; some of them took up the challenge of Bernard O’Dowd, the prophet and militant poet, to partake of the dawning of the new age. In student circles, literary circles, free religious circles, and Marxist grouplets a number of young men and women including Lesbia Harford and Esmond Keogh, Percy Earsman, Percy Laidler, Christian Jollie Smith and Katharine Prichard challenged, explored and resisted the previous generation’s Victorianism, its religious rituals and its Puritanism. What matter that Baracchi stepped out of the schoolboy networks of the elite private grammar school in which he was educated, did not sit for his exams at the University of Melbourne or was arrested and served a prison sentence, when Australia could be ‘an augury of a new democracy’ or the ‘Delos of a coming sun-God’s race’.[1] Baracchi’s education, like Esmonde Higgins’ and Vance Palmer’s, continued in London through close contact with Fabian and guild socialist ideas, and the London School of Economics. The heady days before the implosion of the Great War are explored by Sparrow to frame Baracchi’s intellectual development. When does Baracchi have his moment of intellectual revelation about the vision of Marxism? Tens of thousands of Australians have done so, Sparrow finds. In Baracchi’s case, it was partly through his relationship with women.

Baracchi was both an extraordinary lover, and a cosmopolitan theorist. The book opens with his arrest on the Yarra Bank for campaigning against First World War recruiting. Baracchi was extremely active in the anti conscription campaign and his opposition to the war was based on a class analysis The disruption, the disjunction of the Great War in this generation’s lives, was a forcing time for their political positioning and this is explored in depth in the chapter ‘You don’t want to be disloyal do you?’ As a founding member of the Communist Party in in 1920, Baracchi co-edited the Proletarian. In 1922 he left for Europe with Neura, his second wife, edited an English version of the Communist Party paper in ‘Weimar’ (Chapter Six), and by 1924 was a member of the party of . Back in Melbourne, after advocating the dissolution of the Communist Party there, he was expelled. After a visit to Asia with Neura, Baracchi went on to lecture through the auspices of the Victorian Labor College and co-edit the Communist and the Communist Review. Sparrow unfolds the course of Baracchi’s life as he again works for the communist press in the 1930s with Betty Roland in ‘Russia’ (Chapter Eight), attempts to return to the fold of the Communist Party and does so in , but is finally out of the Party again over its support for World War Two. The rich texture of the social history of the period provides the frame through concrete example, iconic images and thick description.

In assessing recent trends in literary studies in universities, David Carter finds a move towards ‘post theory’: not anti theory but an added focus on context, function and audience.[2] Communism: A Love Story can be located within the advent of creative non-fiction, and interest in narrative and life writing. With exemplary skill, Sparrow’s text shifts scenes, draws on a huge range of historical sources – from intimate letters and interviews to plays and government archives and, through all that, as the novelist Amanda Lohrey suggests on the cover, has all the passion and drama of a novel. There are moments of close focus on a particular dramatic incident in Baracchi’s life followed up by questions and exposition. The general reader is given handles in the form of well known iconic figures from world history. Emily Davison, the British suffragette who was killed by the royal horse, for instance, becomes an exemplar for suggesting the passion and commitment of some of the New Women who appear in the text.

This kind of reading, this kind of recuperation, has some similarities to the challenge which feminist historians and literary critics have been working with for some time, with a clear focus on subject, agency and action, working with the wounded. Biographies of some significant left intellectual women have appeared – Jean Devanny, Marie Pitt, Lesbia Harford and, soon, Edna Ryan and Aileen Palmer. The examination of their work and lives is both detailed and critiqued. The biography of Charmian Clift by Nadia Wheatley reached a high point in presenting a fascinating and illuminating story with dramatic plot underpinning the structure of the study. Fewer Australian male activists on the left have had their life stories told – the New Left of the late 1960s sliced up the old men for their theoretical failures and left them dissected for their colleagues. Stuart Macintyre’s history The Reds: the Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality exposed many of the pet vanities in the search for ideological purity. With the demise of the Soviet Union, has Western ‘progressivism’ – that linked the social demands of Western countries, and especially those of the labour movement, with support for the Soviet Union and the Communist parties, – collapsed as Alain Touraine[3] argues?

It was rare for the historical biographer in to write with the need to create an audience, with the need to capture the passion and sacrifice of their subject, but Sparrow has done this. With skilled exposition and exegesis, he considerably extends our understanding not only of Baracchi himself and the issues facing communists, but of many of the key women in the early days of the Communist Party, both in and overseas. Take the case of Lesbia Harford, poet and committed activist, and her relationship with Baracchi, all told with skill and verve which makes us want to ponder further on these remarkable men and women. Sparrow draws the threads together from a careful reading of Lesbia’s poems, working out the exact timing of their writing to cross-correlate so as to contextualize them in a biographical frame which certainly elucidates their meaning. The shipboard affair with Katharine Prichard, the significant Australian novelist, is apparently based in original research and new material. His reading of the sexual politics of these lovers and equals, these activists and intellectuals, is full bodied and nuanced, encompassing emotion and desire. And yet, it is partly the story told from the male gaze. Sparrow is rather conventional in many of his authorial intrusions, given the revolutionary sexually liberated future for which they hoped. Wasn’t Lesbia, for instance, a sexual radical (as her poetry indicates she aspired to be); hence it is hardly fair to cast her in the stereotyped roles of femininity. Why would she feel ‘betrayed’ when Baracchi, her current lover, marries another? Surely she would hardly see the new wife as her ‘rival’? Presumably she shared Baracchi’s critique of marriage and understood its links with property, capitalism and the family, for they had all read Galsworthy and Marx, presumably Engels. And while they may not always have managed to sustain these kinds of open relationships and lifestyles, surely Baracchi and his lovers are best seen in these terms, not as flawed conventional men and women.

There are dangers and strengths in Sparrow’s immersion in past sources. When the focus is on the key actor, as in biography as a genre, all others fall by the wayside. Take for instance the case of Vance and Nettie Palmer, who appear in the text as friends and colleagues and on whom there is an extended literature suggesting their adherence to different cosmopolitan socialist ideas, yet who are too often castigated as repressed nationalists. Why on earth would Vance Palmer like the wonderful transnational and free thinking Baracchi, asks Sparrow, reverting to and perpetuating the bushy myth of Palmer’s philosophical positioning. Yet, Sparrow does often reach through the closures in cultural nationalisms by his close use of primary sources, never too far from the truth as represented by the subjects themselves. Baracchi surely went out of his way to cultivate the Palmers because of their shared experience both locally and globally, their common long term engagement with socialist theory and practice even as it took them in different directions. Socialism is ‘one of the few things I’ve been hot about’, Nettie told Vance in 1909 in their early exploratory letters of friendship.[4]

The main thrust of Communism: A Love Story is a sensitive and engaging rendition of Baracchi’s relationship with communism both inside and outside the Communist Party in key locations. The account of the growth and changes in the Communist Party and communism in its various tendencies is humanized, refracted through the lens of the warm and generous personality of Baracchi and the key women in his life. What we know about fellow travellers, popular fronts and Trotskyites comes alive as they are embodied in key individuals in their kitchens, workplaces and bedrooms. As we become aware of the strength of Baracchi’s commitment; some of his story resonates with those present day environmentalists who step out of the corridors of their careers to live on platforms high in trees to save them from logging long after the media have gone.

One of the main themes in the book is Sparrow’s comparison and contrast of Baracchi’s two grand passions: for various women and, as Sparrow implies, his more important love of a political and intellectual belief structure, communism. Communism was and is, of course, notoriously weak on the equal participation of women, before (and after) initial revolutionary phases, and is flawed in its focus on the paid, as distinct from the unpaid worker. Perhaps this opposition between love of women and love of political action is merely a way to hasten the story and integrate the two supposedly disparate aspects of Baracchi’s life, yet it is conceptually slight and needs more interrogation. Recent interest by sociologists on forms of identity and action associated with social movements extending the work of the Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni on nascent and institutional stages has much of interest to add here. Similarly, Sparrow’s claims about communism and its key place in Australian radical traditions offering the only alternative to capitalism, may merely be paraphrasing Baracchi to strengthen the interpretation, but allows Sparrow to write out the revolution going on in Australia in the interwar period for the rights of women, and the persisting influence of the new social movements from the late 1960s. He begins to meet an urgent need ‘to make political action meaningful once more’ but stalls when reverting to conventional divides between the identity of men and women.

‘What is to be done with your relish for versing?’ Nettie Palmer, who was Australia’s finest nonacademic critic in the interwar period in , once queried Baracchi. ‘I like to see everything you write in this way,’ she continued, ‘yet it’s incomplete without its background. I can sort of see them all in a big book – rambling, whimsical verse accompanied by its exploratory and explanatory prose. To be published – I fear – posthumously.’[5] Baracchi’s response, when he reminisced with Nettie’s daughter, was how ‘she had seen, however, by no means everything.’[6] With our heightened interest in Baracchi after reading his story, we might have been able to demand, in the 1970s, to see more of Baracchi’s theoretical writings and versifying – in a companion volume to Communism: A Love Story, and we might have got it. Now, given the state of Australian left publishing, at best we can trust Sparrow will post a bibliography of Baracchi’s writings on the web. Communism: A Love Story is a remarkable achievement in illuminating the past passions for real socialism, especially given the past is so often aligned with Tradition.

Dr Deborah Jordan is working with Carole Ferrier and Maryanne Dever at the University of Queensland on the correspondence between Vance and Nettie Palmer. She has published widely on the Palmers especially in Nettie Palmer: Search for an Aesthetic.


[1] Bernard O’Dowd, ‘Australia’ in W. Murdoch, (intro.) The Poems of Bernard O’Dowd, (Melbourne: Lothian, 1941), p. 35.
[2] Ramona Koval (Presenter), ‘The Death of Australian Literature: The Bookshow’, ABC Radio National, 15/06/2007.
[3] Alain Touraine, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference, trans. David Macey, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 288.
[4] Nettie Higgins to Vance Palmer, March 1909, Ms 1174/1/152, National Library of .
[5] Nettie Palmer to Guido Baracchi, n.d. Guido Baracchi Papers, Ms 5241, Box 1, National Library of .
[6] Guido Baracchi to Helen Palmer, 10.1.1965 Helen Palmer Papers Ms 6083, Box 1, National Library of

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