BOO KS
Spender's best book, in which he came closest to finding himself, and
which should have been the basis of his later organic development, was
The Destructive Element,
in which he "analyzed the deep consciousness
of destructive forces threatening our civilization, which was to be found
in the work of Henry James, James Joyce, T . S. Eliot." The most in–
teresting pages intellectually of
EU'ropean Witness
are those in which
Spender describes his emotional response to the nihilism of Goebbels'
Michael
and Ernst Juenger's
Feuer und Blut.
When he discussed this with
the student Aulach, Aulach told Spender that whtm he wrote out of
the aliveness of his real self, "you are filled with social despair, and you
have no religious or political beliefs whatever. Directly, out of a sense
of conscience, you try to introduce a constructive idea into your writing,
you faiL"
"All the same," Spender said to him dutifully and emptily, "one
must look for a constructive idea.
If
one has the sense Qf despair and
of evil, then one must look for the sense of hope and of good with
which to confront despair and eviL" But the looking was outside, was
movement toward an ideal goal.
It
was not self-determined, it did not
grow out of a real struggle with the demon inside, and it ends in this
book in just what Spender thought he hated
in
his liberal, dutiful
father. "Just as Midas turned everything he touched to gold, so my
father turned everything into rhetorical abstraction,
in
which there was
no concreteness, no accuracy." Nevertheless, Spender is franker and
more honest than most. We can hardly afford now not to make the
best of any attempt to "admit the elements out of which we make our
lives," and in a period when the formula of moral affirmation of the
self is in danger of seeming at once unrealizable and historically deter–
mined we can hardly afford not to make the best of any attempt to
see what it really means to have "opinions of one's own."
Robert Gorham Davis
MACABOOK SHOP
168 West Fourth Street
New York
City
14
WA 4-5043
MARQUIS DE SADE HIS LIFE & WORKS-BLOCH (Red. from 10.00)
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.75
EZRA POUND-SOCIAL CREDIT AN IMPACT (Paper)
.75
JEAN ANOUILH-ARDELE (Play) (Red. from 2.50)
1.50
IVY COMPTON-BURNETT-A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD
2.75
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD-BORROWED TIME
3.00
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2.25
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.75
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