478
PARTISAN REVIEW
Liberalism,
"a Communist because I am a liberal," Spender criticized
Russian practices from a liberal point of view in terms of what is
preferable, but justified them from a Communist point of view in
terms of what is necessary. "What is the final aim of party discipline?
It is to teach the lessons of necessity." He criticized religious humanism
for making men refuse to admit what is necessary when it does not fit
into their idealist scheme.
But in his visit to the Spanish civil war, at a time when all the in–
tellectuals were discussing Gide's
Retour de ['U.R.S.S.,
Spender dis–
covered that Communist dogmatism and ruthlessness in action had
caused the death or imprisonment of some of his friends, of people
trying to be both liberals and communists at once. He had to go
forward from communism as he had gone forward from liberalism. In
World Within World
the emphasis is on movement for its own sake,
movement as giving a sense of life. The politics grows more and more
abstract and simple. "Human beings are bound together by the energy
of movements in the direction of shared ideals. The ideal is a fictitious
vanishing point.... Strictly speaking, one never
is,
one is only moving."
Though Spender says at one point that "the 1930's saw the last
of the idea that the individual, accepting his responsibilities, could alter
the history of the time," Spender prefers at most points the ideas of
the 'forties about individual morality to the ideas of the 'thirties about
historical necessity. But Spender still has little sense of the self as char–
acter with a necessary inner pattern of acceptances and rejections.
Everything is in motion. The self is not
there;
it must be repeatedly
chosen, and the choice of self (who choosei it?) seems as arbitrary as
the choice of opinions. There is no requiredness and nothing is really
ruled out.
Despite the abstract formulations, Spender has a self, nevertheless,
and though it is not expressed in his public rhetoric, it is much more
socially involved than his talk of isolation and of masks and the simple
need for love would suggest. This self is essentially nihilistic, most fully
at home imaginatively in the decadent Germany of the early 'thirties,
here described with such vivid nostalgia. Though Hamburg was a kind
of destined hell of satisfied wishes, Spender says that, "nevertheless,
during the year or so when I was living a life dangerous to myself and
impossible to justify to others. I was writing my best early poems."
He says of a later period that indignation over the crimes of the
Nazis freed him from emptiness, gave him a sense of self, of life. "At
the very worst there
wer~
moments when I felt that there was a con–
spiratorial relationship between the eviI passions of the Fascists–
which I so profoundly understood-and my own anti-Fascist virulence."
