BOO K S
477
THE EDUCATION OF STEPHEN SPENDER
WORLD WITHIN WORLD, the Autobiogrllphy of Stephen Spender.
HlIrcourt Brllce lind Compllny. $3.50.
In 1929 Stephen Spender left Oxford and went to Germany
to become a writer. "My own work," a quoted journal entry of that
year declares, "is to write poetry and novels. I have no character or
will power outside my work. In the life of action, I do everything that
my friends tell me to do, and have no opinions of my own. This is
shameful, I know, but it is so."
Twenty years later the situation is the same. "A middle-aged man,
in the center of life and rotted by a modicum of success," Spender
returns at the end of his autobiography to the truth he had already
known
in
lonely childhood, a truth he thinks everyone should acknowl–
edge: "that his class and nation, even the personality and character
which he presents to his fellow beings are all a mask, and beneath this
mask there is only the desire to love and be loved, just because he is
ignorant and miserable, and surrounded by unknowns of time and
space and other people . . . that under all causes and all appearances
there was an extreme simplicity, like that of a lost child or a sick
person."
In between it was the same, too. When Spender returned from
Spain, reacting against his attempt at Communist self-righteousness, he
wrote poems expressing the sense "of being isolated within my personal
existence: but I tried to state the condition of the isolated self as the
universal condition of all existence."
And yet during the late 'thirties and 'forties Spender made a career
not of writing poetry but of having opinions. He became internationally
famous as a poet-spokesman for opinions not his own and which did
not express his deepest feelings. How could this be? In
World Within
World
Spender tries to
be
very frank. He says quite truly that most
people refuse to admit the elements of existence out of which they
make their lives. But he is not clear what he is being frank about,
despite all that he says of homosexuality and liking to see his name in
the paper. At the same time that he reveals the unreality-to-self of most
of his political pronouncements, he continues, even in this autobio–
graphy, to produce new political cliches which are increasingly abstract,
sententious and contradictory.
The contradictions in
World Within World
parallel those in
Forward from Liberalism
of 1936. Obviously if one has no opinions of
one's own, one can reflect more fully, responsively and in a certain
sense sincerely the contradictions of the period. In
Forward from
