Reviews of the Week
A Poet's Life
World Within World. By Stephen Spender. (Hamish Hamilton. z Ss.) LOOKING back on the poetry he wrote in the early 1930s, Mr. Stephen Spender says: " I was an autobiographer restlessly searching for forms in which to express the stages of my development." In his latest book he becomes an autobiographer in prose, and tells the story of his life in more or less conventional narrative form. This means, in effect, that Mr. Spender put his art as an auto- biographer into his poems ; this book is his truth. Considered as literature, it is not altogether well contrived—proportions and the unities are wanting—but it is a most interesting and important book. It has seemed to me also a profoundly moving one, though it may be that I belong to a generation—ten years younger than Mr. Spender—which is likely to be more intimately stirred than others. In our adolescence his verse (more than that of Mr. Eliot and Mr. Auden) was our voice, and his private being the analogue of our own. And now his " World Within World " seems to me the real world, and what others, may think of as something purely innerlich in him strikes me as an intense awareness of external fact.
Mr. Spender is well known for the left-wing views he held in the 1930s. With many bourgeois intellectuals such views were rooted in the sense of guilt they felt when they compared their own comfort to the sorrows of the unemployed, and they were often so obsessed by this guilt that they failed to recognise the Marxist plots to which they lent their aid in the name of anti- Fascist unity. Mr. Spender was bamboozled for a month or two, but not for long. He went to Spain and saw, behind the glamour and the heroism of the Republican cause, that power was in the hands of back-room gunmen, liars, cheats. And while others of the Left were blind or self-deceiving, Mr. Spender's eyes were open, and he returned from Spain to occupy a lonely vantage-point: out of tune with the illiberal movements of the day, and yet unfavour- ably equipped to be a Liberal, because he had been brought up all too deliberately to be one. Mr. Spender was born in 1909, the son of an unsuccessful Liberal politician, Harold Spender, and the nephew of the celebrated J. A. Spender ; he was connected on the other side of his family with both German and Jewish ancestors. He grew up, he recalls," in an atmosphere of belief in progress curiously mingled with apprehen- sion." History taught that terrible things had happened in the past, but man was gradually winning the conquest over nature and a cruel past. On the other hand his family believed that, after 1914, life was no longer what it had been. In the home there was austere comfort: enough money to keep up middle-class appear-
ances, little for enjoyment. When he was twelve, his mother died. His father lived on a daze of rhetoric, as if his life were " a play written by a hectic journalist."
When Mr. Spender was seventeen his father died ; and his grandmother, rich but exceedingly frugal, became his guardian.
He went to the day-school in Hampstead attached to University College, London. When he went up to Oxford, he was disappointed in his fellow undergraduates. He found they " cared only for games, drinking and girls," and were intolerant of " everyone not like themselves." He reacted by becoming self-consciously their opposite. Then he met Mr. Auden, a sort of literary Al Capone,
living in darkened rooms in Christ Church, snapping out orders,
laying down the law about poetry and philosophy and politics, surrounding himself with a " gang "--Christopher Isherwood, Cecil Day Lewis, Robert Medley, and one or two others ; after six weeks of acquaintance Mr.-Spender was flattered to find himself included. Mr. Auden was not yet twenty-one, but, Mr. Spender recalls, he was so impressively "confident and conscious a master of his situation." At nineteen, Mr. Spender was far far less mature, less clear, less sure • he was glad to let Mr. Auden dominate him. After Oxford, Mr. Spender went to live in Berlin. He spent much of his time with Mr. Isherwood. Mr. Isherwood's home, he found, was tbe world of Mr. Isherwood's stories. But, Mr. Spender adds, " far from being the self-effacing spectator he depicts in his novels," Christopher Isherwood was " really the centre of his characters, and neither could they exist without him nor he without them."
Having watched the Nazis' rise to power, Mr. Spender became preoccupied with politics. At home, the English seemed indifferent
to the crisis. He moved rather helplessly in literary circles, filled with a sense of urgency he thought others did not share. Yet he gained much as a writer from the friendship of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Nicolson, Miss Rosamond Lehmann, Mr. William Plomer, Mrs. Virginia Woolf and Lady Ottoline Morrell, about all of whom he writes with appreciative understanding. Early in the Spanish war, the London Communists sent Mr. Spender to find out what had hap- pened to a lost ship they were anxious about (of course, a Russian one). Mr. Spender stayed in Spain as a correspondent. He tried to get a young English friend, who had joined the International Brigade under his influence and then regretted it, freed. This intro- duced him to the more repellent aspects of the Communist con- spiracy. He was sickened again by the Writers' Congress he attended in Madrid in 1937. In the midst of the suffering, " the circus of intellectuals, treateNike princes or ministers . . . riding in Rolls- Royces, banqueted, feted, sung and danced to, photographed and drawn, had something grotesque about it." After the events of 1939 Mr. Spender collaborated with Mr.
Connolly in starting Horizon. and then joined the N.F.S. He saw little serious action as a fireman, but he learned much from contacts with working-class colleagues. Relations outside his own class had hitherto been difficult—and even within it they had their special problems. He has married twice. He writes of these and related private matters with delicacy as well as candour, and it may be that such passages of his narrative will command the greatest respect from his readers. I suspect that everyone who reads the book will think kindlier of the author afterwards. I know that my own
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