A special relationship benis Donoghue Ove-liate Relations: A Study of
Anglo(4 °lean Sensibilities Stephen Spender The Hamilton £3.95, paper £1.75) ilet study of American life and literature has eN.,„Yet gone far beyond two common pertrrons. Both have been expressed by GerStein. One, from The Making of ricans (1925): "It has always seemed to rare privilege, this, of being an re,.erican, a real American, one whose tradi, has taken scarcely sixty years to create. Ze need only realise our parents, remember grandparents and know ourselves and our 4:°rY is complete." Two, from Lectures in liCeerica (1935), the point being that English indrature is based upon "daily daily living" ja„,Arnerican literature is not, witness Henry ces's use of the paragraph, demonstrating se4t he disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from hancliething was the American one. The way it Wasof often all never having any daily living an American one." In Love-Hate Rela,'p 's Stephen Spender quotes the first per'
tio
tett, 11, inaccurately I am afraid but accura enough to retain the main point. His eunt of American literature is in the spirit re the second Stein, and he agrees with thneeived opinion that American writers live tere deeply in their fictions than in their As he says, "more than the European A117-e1)t for a Shelleyan Romantic) the O ,rican writer exists in his fiction or poetry. jeet.`s Work, objective material becomes subthe ye, whereas in English poetry or fiction Sr, siThjective becomes objectified." Mr rlder's study of Anglo-American sensibililess.a Peace-making tour of the scenes, an
1•:.Y In the gentle art of making friends. lc is interesting to compare Love-Hate (ie913ations with The Destructive Element
which considered many of the same earters and some of the same issues. In the i4p Y book Henry James was the determining ,o13,,Iire. Mr Spender proposed "to establish my verY great writer as my chief value, and th 'then allow the others to fall into their places," we others being Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, and boYndham Lewis. The dominant feeling of the th'e„ arose from issues moral and political. In fro "ew book, the dominant feeling arises not Of rt4,_ Politics directly but from a general sense qiornee relations between America and Europe, evid Particularly America and England; the ence offered is just as likely to be the g411114,141itY of American bread, American speech, ika;blowing undergraduates, as Vietnam and
ergate. As for the American sense of
10 that that does not require many pages. than new book is more loosely organised tvitil The Destructive Element, it moves even out stress from one theme to another, and the when (very occasionally) it says much IDo„sanie thing as the earlier book, it says it 'elY, as though Mr Spender felt it necesrepeat his meaning for the benefit of a Oes, knowing undergraduate audience. In The a`rtictive Element he wrote of James: "If he itih,snob, he is a snob for this reason: that he tre."Posing on a decadent aristocracy the Relater tradition of the past." In Love-Hate 34.4°ns this sentence is expanded to four: ls uo often accuied of being a snob. The actievoh , is irrelevant if it means only that he rrian `ed a great deal of attention to the life and he of a small and privileged section of society. l'ilea„'W the faults of this society and was by no blinded by its virtues. Where the snobbery hit . 1Ply a limitation is that he could not separate hiea of civilised values from the circumstances
of the aristocracy, even when he realised – as he came to do — that the aristocracy failed to live up to the values.
In the second version, the third sentence is unnecessary and the fourth is wrong; James found no difficulty in separating his idea of civilised values from the circumstances of the aristocracy. I concede that there are advantages in Mr Spender's present style, though I admire the vigour and stringency of The Destructive Element. The later style allows him to ramble, to compare one piece of evidence with another, to mediate between rival attitudes, and to show that all these things can be done with unfailing goodwill. There is a time for everything, literary criticism, history, speculation, anecdotes. (Two nice specimens of the last. One: "In 1945 E. M. Forster had a photograph of General Patton pinned up on his wall. When I asked him why it was there, he said, 'It is a good thing to remind yourself of whom to hate'." Two: Mr Spender's Uncle Alfred, editor of The Westminster Gazette, held a competition to discover the most beautiful word in the English language. Walter de la Mare, invoked as adjudicator, produced the answer: swallow. The editor was delighted, until his assistant asked, "Does Mr de la Mare mean the noun or the verb?") I suppose a certain amplitude is appropriate to Mr Spender's wide screen and big cast. If the book had an index, it would be a long one because evidence is cited from far and near, Mr Spender has brief but lively passages on Emerson, Whitman, Margaret Fuller, Rilke, Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, Pound, Eliot, Frost, Edward Thomas, Bridges, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence, Forster, Auden, George Orwell, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams. The ton6 throughout is relaxed to the point of being casual. In the presence of such latitude, the reader stays content even when he comes upon things which would irritate him in a more strenuous book. It doesn't much matter, somehow, that Eliot's 'ragged' in "I should have been a c pair of ragged claws" omes out as 'human,' that Mark Gertler becomes Max, Christopher Caudwell becomes
'Caldwell. What we ask of Love-Hate Relations his that it be interesting, and it is. If Mr Spender writes a page or two about Mary McCarthy's Birds of America, the points are worth making; he exercises the reader's mind without pretending to blow it. The book does not present a massive argument; rather, it shows a poet's sensibility ranging through themes proposed by the juxtaposition of America and England. There is room for disagreement on particular issues. I think Mr Spender exaggerates the extent to which Eliot made himself an Englishman. Eliot's poems sound American to me, and I cannot hear them otherwise, no matter how hard I think of Stilton cheese and Faber and Faber. Again, I find it odd that Mr Spender, who writes several pages about Lawrence and England has little or nothing to say about Lawrence and America, the Lawrence of St Mawr, for instance. And I keep missing chapters I would have written if the bright idea of writing Love-Hate Relations had occured to me first rather than to Mr Spender. I want a chapter on Santayana, another on Henry Adams, and a third on William Carlos Williams; these, for a s .art.
Mr Spender's method is comparison. This book, this argument, this theme, set against that at one: his liveliest criticism arises from the Juxtaposition of two writers where each points to a crucial emphasis or a major bias in the other. Mr Spender is adept in such recognitions; Lawrence and Galsworthy, Eliot and Forster, Pound and Eliot against the Georgians, Frost and Edward Thomas, James and Baudelaire. He does not stay very long with any author or try to exhaust his significance. He is not given to the concentrated detail of analysis: he is not a 'practical critic,' though he can be a perceptive critic in practice when he chooses to be. But he is more often interested in the illustrative significance of an author, his bearing upon the definition of an age or a generation, than in the explication of his texts. I have no doubt that he is .skilled in close work, too, but he rarely goes in for it in his books. He treats writers as instances, and their poems as exemplary occasions, available for comparison one with another when the theme is the cultural si.. tuation at a given moment. The main emphasis of his criticism is therefore upon attitudes, values, social and moral conflicts. I am not sure what relation he maintains with a poem after it has served an illustrative turn. Perhaps, too, he is so interested in the exemplary value of the poem that he does riot sufficiently recognise in it the force that alters the sensibility of the age. He often points to a poem to show what the feeling of its moment was like, but not to show how that feeling was changed by the poem, or the direction of the change. Speaking of a poem, he is mainly concerned with the point' of intersection between the poem and the society he is content to think the poem defined; or with the relation betwen the poem
and another poem similar or different in important respects. But he does not stay long enough to make the expenence of engaging
with the poem as rich as it aught be. One of the merits of The Destructive Element was
that Mr Spender took enough time and space to establish James not only in relation to the other writers seen in his light but in relation to the whole range of Mr Spender's sensibility. Not the least of the relations exhibited there is the relation between James and one well qualified reader. Demonstrations of that kind need time, the reader has to enter into a liaison with his writer, taking genuine pos session of the entire work. He must have time to discriminate, to supply the necessary modifications which a bold critique calls for. Love-Hate Relations is a survey course rather than a seminar. Many writers, many themes; but they are all held together, however loosely, by Mr Spender's sensibility. He does not assert him self beyond the limits of courtesy. Instead he invokes "the idea of the true nation," calling after (after a hint from Ezra Pound) 'patria' and distinguishing it from any nation in practice somewhat as a fiction is distinguished from a fact. Yeats's Ireland was a 'patria,' so was Whitman's America, countries of the mind created by a poetic imagination out of its desire and need for such a thing. Later in the book, the sense of 'patria' merges into the more general sense of the potentialities of a nation, set against the recognition of failure in the particular case. Mr Spender does not distinguish very sharply between this general sense and the ordinary sense of moral and political decency which emanates from such a sensibility as his own; liberal, domocratic, freedom-loving, and only as wordly as it has to be. This does not give the book the vigour of The Destructive Element, where James and a Jamesian reader establish between them criteria more demanding than anything enforced in Love-Hate Relations. But the later style is commensurate with Mr Spender's political sentiments: kindly, openhanded, rueful in recognition of their limitations, easy-going while the going is still pos-L sible, and (occasionally) sharp, enough to make a shrewd point such as the followIng comment on the rhetoric of Tradition in Eliot, and Pound: "Pound and Eliot wrote as though; they had some special access to past civilisations denied even to the greatest living. English scholars. Pound imposed on his Idaho manner that of a Latin poet of the Silver Age, a Provencal troubadour, or a Chinese calligrapher at the court of some scholarpainter-prince, whilst Eliot more modestly adopted the style of an ancestral English!puritan ancestor of the seventeenth century about to leave for Virginia. They showed the tendency of Americans who, when they attain historic consciousness, feel so foreign in their own country and century that they start treating history as though it were geography, themselves as though they could step out of the present into the past of their choice." Denis Donoghue is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College, Dublin.
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