Finally, in times when class struggle nears hour, process of dissolution on within ruling class... assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins revolutionary class, class that holds future in its hands. Just as... at an earlier period, a section of nobility to bourgeoisie, so now a portion of bourgeoisie goes to proletariat, and in particular, a portion of bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to level of comprehending theoretically historical movement as a whole. - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (29-30) In 1930s, going over was a standard trope among left-leaning artists and intellectuals who used it to articulate their position in social crisis precipitated by collapse of British industry in late 20s and rise of fascism in Europe. Thus, in quoting Marx and Engels, I also quote C. Day Lewis,John Cornford, and other young writers of 30s for whom passage was both an epigraph and a frame of reference so familiar that leftist discourse often referred to it in shorthand, dropping quotation marks to speak unself-consciously of over.(1) This distillation and concentration of Marxist rhetoric in a single phrase bespeaks not only efficiency with which Marx appeared to frame crises of 30s but also way in which these crises gave Marxist text a local inflection: going over becomes, in so many texts of this period, formal expression of a 30s sensibility, a structure of feeling through which men and women of letters understood their crises as crisis, decisive hour of class struggle in which an enlightened intelligentsia would leave its ivory tower to create solidarity with politicized worker. This essay is concerned with aesthetic corollary of political imperative to go over, particularly as it affected generation of writers born between 1900 and 1914.(2) In her essay The Leaning Tower, Virginia Woolf points out that these writers still had their education in front of them when Great War broke out, and as a consequence, had no knowledge of (comparatively) civilization that informed work of high modernism and purportedly allowed it to sustain a disinterested composure above chaos of history (20). She claims that while her generation recalled a time when classes were settled and therefore politically invisible, next generation could not ignore politics of class. This younger generation, according to Woolf, developed an acute social consciousness and a conviction that it was wrong to stand upon gold that a bourgeois father had made from his bourgeois profession (23). In idiom of 30s, to act on this conviction was to go over. And for writers born into middle-class privilege and expensively educated in best public-school tradition, this required a reconfiguration of identity - a new form of consciousness which they projected in their aesthetic commitments; they attempted to escape their bourgeois subjectivities through a politicized art. Largely rejecting modernist emphasis on form, on individual consciousness and aestheticized emotions, they favored a materialist vision that would, in words of W. H. Auden, make the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear (Poet's Tongue ix). Thus political shift that earned 30s epithet the Red Decade had its concomitant aesthetic shift as younger generation of writers went over, so to speak, from modernism to a new realism, from an aesthetic ideal of formal autonomy to one that pursued an active and politicized engagement between life and art. This view of 30s is largely orthodox view. My purpose here is not to overturn that orthodoxy but to expand its frontiers by using Henry Green's midlife autobiography Pack My Bag to demonstrate range of (often contradictory) values and commitments that fell within construct of new realism. …