234  BOOK REVIEWS CHRISTOPHER HILLIARD. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Brit- ain. Harvard Historical Studies, 150. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 390. $29.95 (cloth). In his discussion of intellectuals in the so-called Prison Notebooks, composed in the 1930s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci insisted that “all men [and women] are intellectuals,” though he added that “not all men [and women] have in society the function of intellectuals.” His slogan, if a sentence necessarily designed to elude the prison censors can be categorized as a slogan, was “homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens”(Selections from the Prison Notebooks [London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971], 9). The rigid opposition that some self-consciously modernistic intellectuals instituted between themselves and the masses at this time is collapsed completely. Gramsci argued that even the most mechanical physical labor involved creative intellectual activity, and that there is in consequence no such thing as purely physical labor. Furthermore, he emphasized, each man pursues intellectual activities outside his professional duties: “he is a ‘philosopher,’ an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a con- ception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 9). Men and women are intellectuals, according to Gramsci, in the quite ordinary pursuits that they take up in order consciously or uncon- sciously to compensate for their alienated function in the capitalist mode of production. Gramsci’s efforts to democratize prevailing conceptions of philosophical thinking coin- cides almost exactly with the “democratization of writing” that Christopher Hilliard identifies in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. In Hilliard’s fascinating social-historical account of the decades conventionally associated with the advent of modernism, all men and women are effectively creative writers, either potentially or in actuality. The argument in the Prison Notebooks is of course the product of a specific intellectual formation (one shaped by Be- nedetto Croce as much as Lenin) and of a particular political situation (the attempt to build the Italian Communist Party in the emergent epoch of fascism). But it nonetheless signals, albeit telegraphically, the fact that, during these decades, the process of democratization unfolded in a slightly broader context, both historical and geographical, than Hilliard’s tightly focused book about the production and consumption of demotic literature in Britain can offer. The most salient aspects of this process, though there is no space to discuss them in detail, are no doubt the rise of mass media like the cinema and radio and the mobilization of the labor movement. To Exercise Our Talents is, however, a scrupulous and convincing attempt to excavate the traces of a sometimes spectacular and sometimes subterranean explosion of popular creative writing particularly during the interwar period. It is interested in the literature produced by both the “unprinted proletariat” (as one contemporary editor put it), and those sections of the lower-middle and middle classes that had not benefited from a higher education (130). It accesses these lost and forgotten testaments to the unpretentious intellectual as- pirations of plebeian authors through an impressive archival investigation of a vast number of periodicals, writing clubs, and publishing companies. Hilliard’s book is evocative and at times even moving in its historical reconstruction of the social dynamics that operated for example in the amateur writers’ circles, which created what he calls “a ‘depoliticized’ but implicitly conservative kind of middle-class sociability, and one in which both men and women could congregate” (7). Seven, a “Magazine of Popular Writing” that, according to Hilliard, “had a better claim to the designation ‘people’s writing’ than any other periodical or organization of its time” (163), can for the purposes of this review stand as representative of the almost invisible This content downloaded from 144.82.107.73 on Thu, 9 Jan 2014 10:26:05 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions