380
STEPHEN SPENDER
politics, John Cornford wrote to his mother: "I have found it a great
relief to stop pretending to be an artist" and
in
the same letter he told
her that he had bought
"Kapital
and a good deal of commentary,
which I hope to find time to tackle this term. Also
The Communist
Manifesto."
In renouncing being an artist he is also turning back on
the world of his mother, Frances Cornford, the poet. Julian Bell ex–
perienced an immense sense of relief when he decided to turn away
from literature and go to Spain.
If
Auden and Isherwood had written
a play on the theme of Bell and Cornford one can well imagine that
their deaths on the battlefield would have been seen as the finale
of a dialogue with their art-loving mothers.
Feelings and motives involved here are extremely complex. Un–
certainty about their vocations, rebellion against their mothers and
against the values of the literary world of Cambridge, Oxford and
London, a suppressed anti-intellectualism and an expression of the
tendency of the young in that decade to interpret all current issues as
a conflict between principles of "life" and "death," the "real" and the
"unreal," all enter in. The reader of Stansky and Abrahams cannot
help noting that in a decade when people were always being reproached
for "escapism" the immersion into the life of action and political choice
filled Bell and Cornford with an elation remarkably like that of escape
--escape from having to be poets. Escape is wrong only if it means
an
escape from high standards to lower or more relaxed ones. In their
renunciation of those standards of their parents which were, perhaps,
too esthetic, Cornford and Bell shared a tendency to escape into ac–
cepting means which were perilously close to Fascist ones. Thus Corn–
ford writes:
The disgraceful part of the German business is not that the
Nazis kill and torture their enemies; it is that Socialists and
Communists let themselves be made prisoners instead of first
killing as many Nazis as they can.
Julian Bell states still more strongly the objection to the liberals.
His reaction is all the more striking because it is so much a renuncia–
tion of that pacifism which was one of his deepest ties with his parents:
Most of
~y
friends are
ut~erly
squeamish about means; they
feel that It would be terrIble to use force or fraud against
anyone. . . . Even most Communists seem to me to have
only a hysterical and quite unrealistic notion about violent
methods . . . I can't imagine anyone of the
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