MOM
Waiting for the End, Boys
By JOHN DAVENPORT
HisToRy has an irritating habit of refusing to fall into neat divisions and sub- divisions of time for the benefit of the idle- minded. Thus the nineteenth century, a late starter, lingered on until 1917 before giving up the ghost. Decades are equally recalcitrant, but there are two recent exceptions: the 'twenties and the thirties. The twenty years between the peace of 1919 and the war of 1939 fall into two almost suspiciously neat halves. The jazzy hysteria of the 'twenties collapsed with a crash in the depression, and the 'thirties was a period of uncertainty ending in a fearful and justified apprehension.
In England, where our responses to external affairs are traditionally sluggish, it was not until 1933, one would say, that 'intellectuals' first began to be aware of what lay ahead, when the first famous refugees began trickling out of Ger- many—Brecht and Kurt Weill, Schoenberg, Georg Kaiser and many more. One met them in Zurich, in Paris, in Brussels; a little later, in England. I spent the years 1936-38 in the United States, where the majority of them were, and where most of them remained—musicians, archi- tects, poets, novelists and painters—to the lasting benefit of American civilisation.
The volume under review* deals with the lives of Julian Bell and John Cornford, both of whom were killed in the Spanish Civil War; the first, in 1937, as an ambulance driver, the second, in 1936, as an active soldier in the International Brigade. Julian Bell was born in 1908, the same year as myself, and we were contemporaries at Cambridge. John Cornford was seven years younger (he was killed on his twenty-first birth- day). I met him on only two or three occasions, during the time he spent in London between leaving Stowe and going up to Trinity—at David Archer's bookshop in Parton Street, it is scarcely necessary to say. He was an astonishingly intelli- gent, mature, integrated and uncompromising youth, carrying no excess baggage, intellectual or emotional.
When I finally evaporated from the Cam- bridge scene, of which Julian Bell was so very much a part, it was true to say, I think, that politics played a deplorably small part in our pretty self-indulgent lives. This was in 1931. By the end of 1933 the case had altered. Aesthetics and vintage clarets had yielded to high tea and an earnest austerity verging on asceticism. Politics had supplanted poetry. And high time, too : the next major war was scarcely a lustrum away. (Strangely enough, the three twenty-year- old poets who were first published in 1934— Dylan Thomas, George Barker and David Gas- coyne—showed no interest in politics whatsoever. They were entirely introspective. None of them was a 'university' poet.) The authors of this joint biography have made its title by fusing the characteristic titles of two works of the 1930s, On the Frontier, the Auden-Isherwood play, and • JOURNEY TO THE FRONTIER: JULIAN BELL AND JOHN CORNFORD AND THE 1930s. By Peter StailOY and William Abrahams. (Constable, 50s.) - Edward Upward's Journey to the Border. The frontier was the Spanish Civil War, where these two utterly dissimilar young men lost their lives for essentially different reasons—Julian Bell be- cause he felt that life had become confused and purposeless and wanted to make a clean break with the past, John Cornford because of his profound political convictions. One was, so to speak, uncommitted; the other was completely committed.
Mr Stansky and Mr Abrahams appear to have consulted every written source and most of the available personal ones. Their double biography and their general account of the 'thirties is remarkably accurate. They sometimes surprise one, as when they refer to certain of Clive Bell's proclivities as 'huntin, shootin and fishin,' or tell us that when the Cornfords gave a dinner party, 'even during the Depression, there were certain things taken for granted: a maid to serve it, fine linen, china, silver. . . .* Also, they be- lieve in the notion of an 'intellectual aristocracy,' following the line taken by Lord Annan in his biography of Leslie Stephen. To me, this theory has always seemed wilful to the point of absurdity, although it is now largely taken for granted. But in any case, the authors have done an admirable piece of research work, and fitted their two subjects together without any Pro- crustean butchery.
The narrative occupies 413 pages, and might perhaps have been shortened with advantage, since a great deal of the material is familiar. Also, as can be seen from the chapter headings, the picture of the 'thirties it presents is largely localised and limited to Cambridge, with side glimpses of London and Oxford. The derogatory epithet 'pink' describes this division of the later 'thirties better than 'red,' because the brand of Communism in vogue in the particular world that is dealt with here was emotional, even senti- mental. The working class was far more conscious of what was really happening than were most middle-class 'intellectuals,' although the latter in- cluded such convinced Marxists as Christopher Caudwell, Ralph Fox and John Cornford him- self. For a large majority it was rather a fashion- able hobby-horse. Esmond Romilly and John Sommerfield were exceptions, like the poets Edgell Rickword and Douglas Garman, who were con- siderably older men, as was Jack Lindsay. It is significant that a truly talented poet like Rickword ceased to write verse at this time. He could not switch his talent to his new themes, whereas in- finitely less gifted writers like X, Y and Z used the new themes as vehicles for ineffably feeble verse. William Empson's The Gathering Storm, written in China, was unique. It was his last collection of poetry. This is not to imply that these other young men were insincere, precisely, but that their notions were vague and wobbly. Few of them were true Communists, because they refused to submit themselves to any dis- cipline. A single taste of it was enough to send them scampering off to their typewriters to recant or to scribble more pink 'poetry.' The term 'fellow traveller' was splendidly apt. One of them—not a poet, but a delightfully witty proie writer—described himself to me with pleasing candour as 'a fellow traveller with a platform ticket'; but such honesty was rare. I was astonished by the difference in France; and even more so in America, where the intellectuals at that time were infinitely tougher. It was like being pitched from a private school into a stockyard. No wonder George Orwell seemed the most incorruptible man in England. To me he still does so seem, although the astonishing prescience of Animal Farm was not revealed until the mid-'forties.
To return to Julian Bell, one feels that the authors exaggerate his potentiality. He was an immensely agreeable young man, congenial and intelligent—less an 'intellectual' than what was then called an 'aesthete.' He was capable of flashes of impatient anger, but, generally speak- ing, was humbly and endearing. There was nothing even faintly epicene about him. He is described by someone somewhere in these pages as 'a Greek god,' as though, because he was a Cam- bridge poet, he was a sort of Rupert Brooke. In fact, he was rather more like that jolly old fellow astride the giant tortoise in the Boboli Gardens. His carefully composed verses were —or so it seemed to some of us—rather back- ward-looking and conventional. He had a fine eye for nature and was a skilled ornithologist, but to one enthralled by such contemporaries as Auden, Eberhart and Empson, by the newly rediscovered Hopkins (1929), by Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Cummings and Wallace Stevens, he was strangely old-fashioned. Then we quarrelled over his attack on Wittgenstein, whom I greatly admired; it seemed tasteless and altogether in- adequate, although the couplets ran smoothly enough. One is not, at that age, a model of tolerance, and some of his friends seemed over- impressed by his Bloomsbury familial connec- tions. The son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, the admired nephew of Virginia Woolf, had an aura. He was an ornament of King's, an intrinsic part of the liberal furniture of Cambridge.
What I quite failed to realise was that he him- self found the aura a burden. He felt that respon- sibilities were being thrust upon him that he was ill-equipped to shoulder. He was essentially, in the best possible sense of the word, a hedonist. He had a succession of women friends, none of whom proved to be the real right thing for him. When he was teaching in China—his first attempt to get away—the same pattern was followed. His early letters home to his friends are full of joyous excitement, but the last ones, following an emotional disaster, are full of a self-contempt amounting to despair. His decision to drive an ambulance with the Loyalist Forces in the Spanish Civil War was not primarily due to any left-wing beliefs, but to make a still more definite break with his social background and with the insuperable problems, as they appeared, of his private life: to find 'reality.' He was killed on July 18, 1937, at Villanueva de la Canada, in the battle of Brunete. Richard Rees describes him in death as looking 'very pale and clean, almost marble-like. Very calm and peaceful, al- most as if he had fallen asleep when very cold.'
John Cornford had been killed on Decem- ber 27, 1936, or the next day, at Lopera, on the Cordoba Front. As has been said, the pattern of his life was very different from Julian's, although his father was a Fellow of Trinity, a 'liked Greek scholar, and elected to the Laurence Plofessorship of Ancient Philosophy in 1931. His mother, Frances Cornford, the poetess, was a.Darwin, and John therefore a great-grandson of Charles Darwin. 'He belonged by birth to the 'intellectual aristocracy,' but he was by nat.pre a rebel against all conventional orthodoxies. Cambridge 'liberalism' was not enough for him. His intellectual precocity was startling. He, too, wrote verse, though he would probably have scorned to describe himself as a poet. Anything but a pink fellow traveller, he found Marxism the answer to his problems, and his beliefs drew him inevitably to that grave in Spain. He com- bined a cool intellect with a passionate nature, and was a mature man at the age of twenty-one. To be on a battlefield is to invite death, but in thinking of these two brilliant beings, so different in their approach to life, it is impossible not to be reminded of 'the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears.' Requiescant in pace.
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