WORLD WITHIN WORLD, The Autobiography of Stephen Spender. — Hamish
Hamilton, London.
SPENDER, Auden, Day Lewis, the great poetic rebels of the adolescence of the 1930s, now have securely arrived at a respectable position in literature and society.
Auden has the rock of a Church to grasp. Day Lewis has an Oxford Chair. Spender has safely emerged through the whirlpool of Left-wing politics. All have a secure reputation as poets.
What goes on at the back of their minds still—what emotional conflicts have they harnessed and do they still go on harnessing to capture their poetic vision? Here is a partial answer.
If we grant that Stephen Spender is a poet for posterity, then this autobiography is a valuable part of literary history. Even if the tides of posterity's literary fashions are going to leave him in a backwater, it is still a moving revelation of a sensitive mind surrounded by a troubled world.
It is not written as a straight-forward autobiography. It follows a more or less chronological order, but that, he says, is only to give it "a framework of objective events through which I could knock the holes of my subjective experiences." The subjective experiences group themselves round "a few themes: love; poetry; politics; the life of literature; travel; and the development of certain attitudes towards moral problems."
Different aspects of what is after all a many-sided revelation will impress different readers. It may perhaps be his flirting with Communism and his renunciation, an aspect covered in his recent essay in the symposium called "The God That Failed"; it may be the portraits of "his contemporaries, notably Auden and Isherwood; but probably most of all it will be the self-portrait of a poet.
*
'THE clear, burning single-mindedness of a man with a poetic mission has seldom been so sanely expressed. It is the only justification for his more-than-usual slothfulness, rebelliousness and maladjustments in his school and University days: his exam, marks of half a per cent., his determination at Oxford to read nothing his tutor recommended, his aesthetic poses which withdrew him from the bulk of his fellows.
He was sustained by a knowledge that his "incommunicable visions were struggling through a night beyond which they would find the day." Throughout his life he has been prepared to toil and toil to help them struggle. He is impatient with other art forms.
He tried painting, but detail maddened him. Even in writing prose, he says, he is impatient with the detail of balancing a sentence, choosing the exact word. In poetry, he is prepared to write and rewrite, leaving a sketch for several years and then taking it up and working on it again.
In the lonely hours of the school dormitory, young Stephen Spender used to dream of the books he would one day write.
What I would say was perfectly clear to me. It was this: Everyone is occupied in blindly pursuing his own ends, and yet beneath his aims, and beneath his attempts to escape from solitude by conforming with the herd-like behaviour of those around him, he wants something quite different from his aims, and quite different from the standards of human institutions, and this thing which he wants is what we all want; simply to admit that he is an isolated existence, and that his class and nation, even the personality and character which he presents to his fellow-beings, are all a mask, and beneath this mask there is only the desire to love and be loved just because he is ignorant, and miserable, and surrounded by unknowns of time and space and other people.
*
IN his search through problems of love and friendship he offers us his relation with Jimmy, the young man he hires to be his secretary, an unfulfilled love affair in Austria, one unhappy marriage and one that seems to develop better.
But in the unhappy 1930s few artists could escape the impending doom of the world by pondering on the isolations of existence. Spender's writing took on a political complexion, though he says now his attitude was too divided.
We anti-Fascist writers of what has been called the Pink Decade were not, in any obvious sense, a lost generation. But we were divided between our literary vocation and an urge to save the world from Fascism. We were the Divided Generation of Hamlets who found the world out of joint and failed to set it right . . .
The action we took may not have been of the right kind. It was, for the most part, the half-and-half action of people divided between their artistic and their public conscience, and unable to fuse the two. I now think that what I should have done was either throw myself entirely into political action or, refusing to waste my energies on half-politics, made within my solitary creative work an agonised, violent, bitter statement of the anti-Fascist passion.
He had grown up in what he calls an atmosphere of progress curiously mingled with apprehension. As he grew older the mingling of apprehension must have grown stronger and the Liberal belief in progress surrounding him (his father was Harold Spender, biographer of Lloyd George, and his uncle was J. A. Spender, the great Liberal journalist) must have grown weaker.
*
SPENDER wrote "Forward From Liberalism" and was briefly a nominal member of the Communist Party. He reported aspects of the Spanish War for the "Daily Worker" and defied the Foreign Office's visa ban and attended the Writers' Congress in Madrid in 1937. His attendance there, was a gesture of idealism and faith. Yet when he comes to write of it now, as he says in his introduction, "the narrative diverges into satire."
He was too much of an individualist to accept Communism wholeheartedly. Essentially, he was anti-Fascist, but he is now not content to regard that as a merely political attitude. His probing pen now searches out hidden reasons of personality that shaped his conduct.
The intelligentsia, he says, had their own reasons for understanding Hitler. These were the elements of pure destructiveness, of attraction to evil for its own sake, and of a search for a spiritual damnation, which had been present in some European literature for a century and which Nazi politics fulfilled in fact. In Hitlerism the nightmares of Dostoevsky's "The Possessed," of Nietzsche and of Wagner were made real. The cultured Europeans recognised in this political movement some of their most hidden fantasies
At the very worst there were moments when I felt that there was a conspiratorial relationship between the evil passions of the Fascists - which I so profoundly understood-and my own anti-Fascist virulence On a more superficial level, the existence of this vast immoral spiritual demonism in the world which was Fascism, dwarfed my own moral problems However bad I was, Fascism was worse, by being anti-Fascist I created a rightness for myself besides which personal guilt seemed unimportant.
"World Within World" is hardly a portrait of a generation, except in the special sense that Spender is a sensitive and articulate representative of a large body of his contemporaries. But those who go to biographies for their anecdotes of the great may find Auden surrounded by papers in his dark-curtained Oxford room, laying down the law about poets and poetry; Christopher Isherwood half-starving in Berlin but spending a mark a day on sticky toffees just to forward his revolt against hygiene; Ernest Hemingway arguing about writing and fighting.
The pictures of life in between wars Germany, Civil War Spain, wartime British fire-fighting and elsewhere are painted with a careful pen, and there are glimpses of authors like Virginia Woolf. Yeats, Eliot, Ezra Pound and Edwin Muir.
-L. V. KEPERT.
Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Saturday 21 July 1951, page 8
