THE ENGLISH LITERARY LEFT
War. But as Spender himself has said, writing of Owen: "The difficulty
is
that poetry inspired by pity is dependent on that repeated stimulus for its
inspiration." But this is impossible: the alternative is some ponderable link
with reality: love, communism, immersion in the external world. He begins
accordingly to celebrate sexual health and comradeship, the new social order,
the world of machines and workers. And finally, in
Vienna
(1934) he
contrasts the "stalking inner worlds" of a corrupted individuality with the
revolutionary heroism of the Vienna workers. "These," he decides, "are
our ancestors." He had accepted,
as a poet,
the revolutionary imperative.
Vienna
was written as the result of a trip to Austria. Like the visits
which Auden and Isherwood had paid to Berlin a few years earlier, Spen–
der's stay in Vienna provided a fund of experience enormously important
to his creative work and his political development.
After 1934 his work was largely done in prose. He was seeking some
basis on which he could cooperate with, or even join, the Communist Party.
At first his approach to Stalinism was a literary one; it revolved around the
question of "proletarian literature"; and Spender feared, rightly enough,
that to accept the Stalinist program meant to surrender his rights and his
integrity to party control and to "RAPPism." He failed, however, to exam–
ine "proletarian literature" as a theory, or to connect the theory and the
excesses of RAPPism with the bureaucratic emergencies which had occa–
sioned them. By 1936, however, he had already found a broader base for his
essentially personal communism; a base which permitted him to draw closer
to the Communist Party. In that year he published
Forward from Liberalism.
This characteristically candid and well-intentioned book stated with much
eloquence the case against capitalism and for socialism; but it developed a
blind spot as to ways and means. He had come to socialism, he admitted,
as a liberal, and because it was a stage through which the liberal mind must
pass en route towards the ultimate fulfillment of its ideals of freedom. The
unconscious class egotism of this view-as though the proletariat's function
were to realize for certain righteous bourgeois types the lofty plans which
their own class had somehow bungled-was strictly in the tradition of
English social dilettantism.
It
was possible only in a country where the
bourgeoisie, having lived unchallenged for generations, could regard their
world as the field in which historical questions were all finally decided.
Thus the Fabianism of Shaw and Squire, of Brooke and Lady Warwick,
made its reappearance in a young poet of the 30's, assuming new forms in
keeping with the new epoch. The social democracy on which the older
Fabians had leaned was now discredited; the new Fabians discovered the
Comintern. And at the same time, of course, the Comintern began to seek out
the Fabians. English reformism thus acquired what it had badly needed:
the tradition of a successful revolution; and Stalinism possessed itself of
a respectable facade for its adventures in class collaboration. For Stephen
