Memory, History, and Homesteading: George Woodcock, Herbert Read, and Intellectual Networks 1

ABSTRACT:Drawing on the fragmentary chain of letters between George Woodcock and Herbert Read, this article uses these materials as a point of departure to consider the development of Woodcock's cultural politics. Focusing on the memories he explored in his autobiographical writing, his histories of anarchism and Canada, and his project to live off the land, it examines the ways in which Woodcock looked to anarchism's past in order to theorise afresh its future.Keywords: Woodcock, Herbert Read, Kropotkin, Marie Louise Berneri, history, memory, CanadaThere is something wholly fitting about the recent turn to the analysis of transnational networks in anarchist historiography.2 The rhizomatic metaphor beloved by political theorists when discussing anarchism's ability to grow unperceived beneath the soil and then burst forth in unexpected ways, finds an echo in the inky tendrils that spread radical ideas around the globe.3 These textual fragments offer the historian of ideas a rich and varied diet, pointing to the ways in which anarchism grew in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries into a distinctive political culture through the parchment, paper, and print that united activists divided by national boundaries. Yet as welcome and important as these efforts are in highlighting the vibrancy of a perennially overlooked politics, there are risks involved with this new interest in anarchist networks. The principal hazard is the potential to fetishise the network as a means of analysis; as if pointing to the spread of newspapers, periodicals, and personal correspondence is sufficient in demonstrating the role of anarchist ideas in shaping history's multifarious anti-capitalist and anti-state struggles. In other words, the burden of historical explanation remains. It is imperative to demonstrate not just that ideas travelled, but to also understand the ways in which they were received, revised, and reimagined in diverse intellectual and cultural contexts. That, in effect, ideas discussed under a flickering bulb in a London meeting room, and scribbled that night in a letter destined for Philadelphia, were not simply interned in a crowded desk drawer before ending their final journey under the attentive eyes of an archivist armed with cardboard folders and a complicated cataloguing system.The chain of correspondence between George Woodcock and Herbert Read - beginning in 1941 and ending in 1966, two years before Read's death - offers an example of the insights that examining such intellectual networks can furnish, but also the potential shortcomings. As is common with fragmentary textual sources, their incompleteness poses obvious analytical issues. Yet, even though the surviving letters are primarily from Read to Woodcock, drawing on Woodcock's voluminous published work helps flesh out this one-sided conversation. Similarly, such a creative reading also partly addresses the contextual shortfall that is a potential problem with patchy source material. Treating these letters as a jumping off point to consider the broader development of Woodcock's cultural politics is therefore revealing, and grants an insight into the efforts of two prominent intellectuals to rethink anarchist politics in the light of the changing fortunes of the movement. These letters show Woodcock interrogating his memories as his move to Canada encouraged critical reflection on the politics he had promoted in Britain, and his labours, in his most famous role as an historian of anarchist ideas, to invest this revised politics with historical pedigree. They also reveal another theme that united Woodcock and Read: the pursuit of a life in touch with nature that also achieved an integration of manual and intellectual work. While their respective projects floundered, their discussions point to the centrality of contact with nature to their shared cultural politics, but also the tensions generated by this ambition, and their pursuit of lives as public intellectuals. …

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