Twenty Years After
FOR some years now the poets of the Thirties have been under a cloud. Indeed, the case against them was put from the very beginning. Their style appeared forced, their attempts at political significance vitiated by a bourgeois background which left them with a feeling characteristically described as 'guilt' towards the working classes. What a ridiculous life pattern it was! They joined the Party and were disillusioned; they went to Spain and got a thrill out of Barcelona; they revolted against Munich and were unable to produce any creative reaction to 1940. And once it became clear that it was not the Headmaster but Big Brother who was the enemy, they faded, and their creative power faded with them. It had all been based on an unreal opposition, on confusions between the machinery of power and the exercise of tyranny, between the science of progress and the tech- nology of the servile state. Hating and loving the middle classes from which they came, they welcomed the idea of the crack-up:
Engine-drivers with their oil-cans, factory girls in overalls Blowing sky-high monster stores, destroying intellectuals,
while, on the other hand, they were afraid of the disappear- ance of the world of prep schools, Oxford colleges and tennis parties in which they had been brought up. And the ideals they invented to replace the old order have today the same air of unreality as the posters we once used to see of Mr. One World and his wife and family looking into the future with proud, confident smiles, while the rays of what was meant to be the sun, but looked more like a searchlight, im- pinged on their faces. In 1933 Cecil Day. Lewis was hymning the world to come in these execrable hues:
Oh there's a mine of metal Enough to make me rich And build right over chaos A cantilever bridge.
Unfortunately, in 1933 there were even more fervid addicts of the Managerial revolution than English left-wing poets. Moreover, their full participation in the pleasant emotion of mass solidarity was hampered by the fear that they, the intellectuals, might not be admitted to this brave new world. The rough children, who refused to smile at Stephen Spender when he was a boy, were still there, and what if the emanci- pated proletariat too would not play with them? The same lack of self-assurance marked their attitude towards other things—notably sex—and, though help was on the way from Vienna, the problems implicit in being intellectuals could only partially be solved by a study of Marx or Freud. wharves and choked canals,' the northern twilight, the metaphors drawn from the confusion of modern warfare, the view of life 'as the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman,' of life that begins with a mother fixation and ends with getting into a 'gang' (half prep school, half Communist cell)—all this imagery and the feeling it conveys was due to Mr. Auden. Moreover, he was that rare thing—a genuine anarchist sharing none of the regrets and nostalgias which impeded his fellows. There is nothing hopeful about his world. Alone among his contemporaries he makes no attempt to create Utopias. In his Poems he confines himself to describing the wrecking of the old order. Not for him the cantilever bridge to pie in the sky. All his machinery is rusty, all his human beings approaching death, and he managed to embody this terribly destructive view of life in imagery of such power and virulence that it caught like smallpox. Fully accepting the consequences of his pessimism, he inculcates the classic stoic remedy: 'new styles of architecture, a change of heart.' Mr. Auden is said (perhaps apocryphally) to have once remarked that he lived in New York because it was the only toviin he disliked sufficiently to get from it the kind of inspira- tion he needed, and, whether true or not, this story certainly symbolises his role in English poetry. The anarchist is the voice of justice adapted to an individualistic society, and his appeal is to the individual conscience. There is no place for him in the Welfare State; it is not sufficiently unjust. Its vices, if ,vice there be, are other, and it is perhaps significant that Mr. Auden, who played the voice of conscience and doom to British laissez-faire throughout the Thirties, should have transferred himself across the Atlantic to the only Western society where death is an indecent word. It is almost impossible to estimate how much this pre-war decade owes to this poet. His verbal skill, his gift for the surprising word, his novel imagery, his jazzed rhythms—all this adds up to a cosmology. It is impossible not to realise that you are reading a poem by him. His stamp is on it, and the reader must enter a universe peculiar to the poet. That is a pre-condition of greatness in poetry, and the possession of this quality differentiates Mr. Auden from anyone who began to write at the same time. Sometimes it seems that he and he alone was the poetry of the Thirties.
For his whole-heartedness was exceptional. In other poets the conflicts indicated above, the perpetual struggle to assume attitudes which they felt they should adopt, but could not, were bound to affect their style adversely. Mr. Day Lewis is a case in point: his Collected Poems 1954' reveal him as a Georgian poet, who can produce very pleasant verses, with the traditional English themes of love and landscape well to the fore. Word Over All is a very much better book of verse than The Magnetic Mountain, for in it the poet expresses his natural self: Yet words there must be, wept on the cratcred present, To gleam beyond it :
Never was cup so mortal but poets with mild Everlastings have crowned it.
Are these lines about the war more like Mr. Auden or Lawrence Binyon? To ask the question is to realise how unnaturally Mr. Day Lewis once racked his talent. Mr. Spender too, even in his early poetry, is a personal, romantic poet. In the preface to his Collected Poems' he admits im- plicitly the failure of those of them 'which, when they were written, provided a particular label for some of the poetry of the Thirties.' In his best poems, like 'I think continually of those who were truly greaV (practically all of them are in the first volume of Poems), Mr. Spender presents a meditative, introspective type of poetry, owing something, no doubt, to Rilke and komething to symbolism. What it lacks principally is strength; often sensitivity is carried to masochism, and the want of a firm point of view is reflected in the rather wavering style. Take a stanza of a fairly typical love poem : Your body is stars whose million glitter here : I am lost among the branches of this sky Here near my breast, here in my nostrils, here Where our vast arms like streams of fire lie.
What is damaging about a stanza like this is the want of sensuous effect upon the reader. Mr. Spender's poetry is like a faulty electric light; sometimes it gives a fair illumination, sometimes the wires glow faintly red and sometimes nothing happens at all. The interesting thing is that, when it does come off, it has as little to do with the 'Thirties' movement as have the best poems of Mr. Day Lewis.
'Louis MacNeice was in rather a different position. He could make Mr. Auden's attitude his own, not because he was an anarchist, but because he was an Irishman. The closeness of his observation, the sharpness of his satire and the cruel common-sense of his race make him a raucous and formidable observer of the years the locust ate : It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky, All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
This admirable sentiment and its expression owe more to Ireland than to Bloomsbury. However, as a poet Mr. MacNeice may more legitimately be called 'of the Thirties' -than most. Those shameful years of history gave him some- thing to attack, a campaign to carry on, to which his verse could be related. The difference between the two sequences of poems Autumn Journal (1938) and A utunin Sequel' (1953) is startling and revealing. The earlier poem is full of strong, plain, angry satire, and many of its passages (such as that in section 13 on classical education) give the savage satisfaction of seeing someone chuck a brick through a plate-glass window one has long wanted to smash. The book just published is a sad let-down. Its maddening puns and tricks of style seem to be the result of having nothing to say, and the terza-rima is lifeless—perhaps it could not come off in English over such a distance. What we are left with is a civilisec: mind going through an embarrassing series of antics, and, though the poem is described as 'rhetorical,' this precaution cannot prevent us from feeling disappointed with a monstrously precious piece of writing. A Georgian, a Neo-Romantic and an Irishman, all influ- enced by the strongest talent of their time, but owing their best poems to their own personal vein—is that all the poets of the Thirties have in common? Almost, but not quite. The cause of Mr. Auden's influence is fairly clear : he had found a way of expressing the profound shock that English liberals felt at unemployment and the rise of Fascism. It is important to do them justice here. We may laugh as much as we like at the left-wing intellectuals of the Thirties, at the hesitant efforts of young middle-class Englishmen to rid themselves of their guilt complexes, to fight against Fascism or plan a Utopia. But never for one moment should it be forgotten that they were right. Right to be shocked by unemployment, right to see the monsters creeping into English life and no Beowulf in Baldwin, right to detest the Spanish clericals, right to join the Party and right to leave it. It was their political intelli- gence that was at fault and not their moral instincts.
No doubt, their effort towards social responsibility had a bad effect on them as poets. Their temporary adoption of much of Mr. Auden's style without really sharing his point of view deflected their talent and produced an effect of metallic hollowness in their verse. Twisted by his powerful influence, pulled apart by their age and their own conflicts. it is no wonder that most of their work appears aborted. But it was respectable to make that effort in a decade when so many things were sold down the river, and we, who find much of their verse lifeless and who were just old enough to perceive and resent the sudden nervelessness which came upon English poetry with the war years, must try to remember it.
' Autumn Sequel. By Louis MacNeice. (Faber, 12s. 6d.)
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