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Title: Miners Speak
Author: Henry Poulaille
Date: July 1, 1933
Language: en
Topics: book review, miners strike
Source: Retrieved on 24th September 2020 from https://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/poulaille/1933/miners-speak.htm
Notes: Originally published in Prolétariat, no. 1. Translated by Mitchell Abidor.

Henry Poulaille

Miners Speak

In this anthology of proletarian literature that we will be attempting

every month, it seemed to us that front stage should be occupied by the

most difficult, the most dangerous, the least perfectly known of

professions, despite books and films that strive to be as honest as

possible. Of the works dedicated to the mines Zola’s Germinal and G.W.

Pabst’s film Kameradschaft are probably the most remarkable among those

given us by literature and cinema. But it must be said that as much as

they differ from Malot’s stories and the trickery of the bourgeois

cinema, these works bespeak more an effort to understand that subject

than they are authentic expressions of it. A verbal or a visual

symphony, these works describe the subject from without. To be sure,

Zola and Pabst attempted to put themselves in the place of the

characters to whom they gave life, and certain tableaux are shockingly

true. Without a doubt it is only right to place the sober and beautiful

novel by Pierre Hubermont, Treize Hommes dans le Mine, right behind

these novels. It is also appropriate to mention the poems in the cht’i

northern patois of Jules Mousseron, both perfect in themselves, and one

can see in these still literary transpositions an accent Zola did not

render, or else drowned beneath his lyricism.

The same accent can be heard in the Belge Jean-Louis Vandermaesen, as

well as in the American poem and the Negro chain gang song we quote. It

is clearer in the Belgians Louis Gérin and Constant Malva, and the

Scotsman Joe Corrie. In the latter it’s a kind of cry, in the young

Gérin – he’s nineteen years old – his first novel Une femme dans le mine

is a book that’s already two years old! In Gérin it’s a touching,

stifled resentment, and it’s impossible to read these pages without

feeling a pang of heartbreak, for these men are sentenced to hard labor

in a subterranean hell. It is in taking these things into account that

their imperfections as writers and the bitterness in the tone of their

tales, poems and plays must be judged. There is perhaps something

unexpected about this. From the bowels of the earth rises the voice of

the workers. It is perhaps Corrie alone who has given a full idea of

what is possible. Gérin is full of vigor and he will no doubt be spoken

of again. Malva’s oeuvre is being graduallu constructed and in it it is

the very voice of the mine we hear: Constant Malva speaks a gallery

digger without artifice, without literary effects. He is in the heart of

the mine, a thousand meters and then some above salonnard and populist

literature. And perhaps these Corries, Malvas, Gérins, and Stephen

Peters are outside literature if we persist in wanting literature to

remain in the furrows dug by the scribbling flunkeys who, like

parasites, lived off its name. But as expressions of class, as testimony

of a crushing task, outside or within literature, these voices cannot

not be heard.

This is no more the realm of play, but that of life itself, of the

difficult life, the dangerous life of the miner that these new amateurs

expose and explain.