Stephen Spender
OXFORD AND GERMANY*
When I went to Oxford, I had added to my pacifism a
socialism which was based largely on rebelliousness against my own
family and dislike of the attitudes of my English middle class con–
temporaries. My own attitude, like that of nearly everyone at Oxford,
became false from the first day I arrived at the university, false and
self-conscious, like an imitation of a part I had once known, acted
without conviction in front of an audience whose hostility was also
only acted. My dislike of the public school boys at the University
became affectation and a desire to assert my own form of class snob–
bery over theirs. I wore a red tie and I was secretly delighted when
they tore it off my neck and cut it up into little fragments which
they hung up on the frames of the Gauguin and Van Gogh repro–
ductions on my walls.
On another occasion, my fellow freshmen decided that the
time was come when they should break up my rooms. I was sitting
in an armchair reading Blake, when about a dozen of them trooped
in, equipped, I think with a bucket, and other traditional tools, so
I went on reading (very conscious, of course, that I was reading
Blake). They did not know what to do either, so they stood around
me in an awkward half-circle. Then one of them said: "What's the
big idea, Spender?" I had no idea what to say, so I read aloud
a few lines of Blake. This achieved a certain result, for they simply
changed their minds and left the room. This whole scene was totally
lacking in conviction. I was playing the role of the mad socialist poet,
and they were playing the role of the toughs who break up such
*
This is a further excerpt from Mr. Spender's autobiographical work in pro–
gress. Other chapters appeared in the November and December, 1948 issues, and
in the iS$ues of January and February, 1949.
