930
PARTISAN REVIEW
The extreme bitterness of resentment which Oxford can produce
was illustrated for me in the middle of the Spanish War, when at a
public meeting I heard a young man who was the son of a philo–
sophy don get up and read out to the audience in a sneering voice
a letter which, as he explained was from an Oxford don, and typical
in its "watery" attitude. The letter seemed to me noble in sentiment
and in action. It said that the writer had carefully weighed the rights
and wrongs of the Spanish War, and as a teacher of ethics, he had
decided that the cause of the Spanish Republic was as just as any
cause that anyone had been asked to support in the present century.
Accordingly, he sent the largest sum of money which he could dis–
pose of for the cause of the Republicans. No one except myself in the
audience could possibly have understood the significance of the speak–
er reading these sentiments with an expression of disgust. Afterwards
I went to see him, and he said to me immediately: "Do you realize
whom that letter was from? My father! Isn't it typical!" This incident
filled me with a kind of horror for the ruthless little son whom the
virtuous don had produced, a horror which, indeed, I still feel. But
the intensity of his feeling was really his reaction to the intellectualism
of Oxford. And it is hardly too much to say that many of the
young University men who went to fight in Spain shared this feeling.
They were supporting a cause but they were also trying to be
real.
If
I had been clever and wise (I was neither) I would have
been able to do as W. H. Auden did at Oxford: separated in my
own mind the values of Oxford from what I could obtain there which
would be useful to me. Auden would explain that he regarded Ox–
ford as a convenient hotel where he stayed and was able to read books
and entertain his friends. But I had neither Auden's intellectual
power and sense of objectivity, nor his vigorous independence of
spirit. I was afraid of being crushed, and my temperamental aver–
sion from any kind of discipline was increased by dread of this par–
ticular Oxford discipline. I was afraid of studying in the English
school, just because I was interested in English. The correctness of
the critical and creative writing produced from the English schools
at Oxford and Cambridge might well be superior to anything I
could achieve, but at a certain point it seemed to clo'>e the sensibility
of the student so that he could not develop beyond intellectual at–
titudes which he had been taught, and I would rather fail altogether
