WRITERS AND POLITICS
363
John Cornford was seven years younger than Julian Bell, who
was almost contemporaneous with Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice
and myself. In our speeded-up century, perhaps even those few years
marked still another "new generation." For our earlier Oxford and
Cambridge one secretly sided with the personalist generation old enough
to be our parents. We had, written on our hearts, the motto from
The Orators:
Private faces in public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces in private places.
But John Cornford's generation of anti-Fascist undergraduate
agitators at Cambridge, and of the Oxford October Club, did not
cherish our sense of the supreme importance of maintaining the dis–
tinction between public and private worlds. This difference of genera–
tions comes between Julian Bell and John Cornford.
For Bell, to have to choose between personal loyalties and the
public cause was always agonizing. By upbringing antipolitical, his
choice would always have been for personal values, if he had not
come to think of anti-Fascism as a burning loyalty beyond mere poli–
tics. But even so he remained conscious of having to make choices in
which one set of loyalties had nearly always to be sacrificed to an–
other. He came to think that the private ones of poetry and of love
for his family had to submit to the public ones of anti-Fascism. Yet
when he went to Spain, in joining an ambulance unit rather than
the International Brigade, he sacrificed his interest in war and strategy
to
his parents' pacifism.
For Cornford, however, there was no question that personal
values had to be sacrificed to the public cause. All that mattered was
to defeat Fascism. For him, and for his already "new generation," all
choices had to be decided by the Marxist interpretation of history.
Subjective motives did not count.
In the jargon of the new activist generation (only five years younger
than ours) all our generation's scruples about personal relations and
subjective feelings could be consigned to the dustbin of liberal inhibi–
tions. Cornford's conviction of the superiority of the Marxist objective
reason over personal consideration is indeed the dominating theme
of most of his poetry. Leaving the girl who is mother to his child, the
objective reason becomes the image of the surgeon's knife cutting
away the soft rot of compassion:
