BOOKS
CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE
THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS. By Stephen Spender. Random
Hous•• $4.95.
One evening in Paris in May, 1968, after a day spent at the
Sorbonne, Stephen Spender confessed that he was tempted to ask each
of his revolutionary interlocutors, "Young man, what do you really
want?"
The question may never have been articulated, it at least
never appears in
The Year of the Young R ebels
-
but it is implicit
throughout, implicit in the image of this white-haired figure of great
dignity, radicalized and disillusioned in the intellectuals' most sig–
nificant political commitment of our century, confronting the new wave
of revolutionary effervescence and attempting to understand the human
processes it represents. It seems to me very important that there should
have been an itinerant observer of the international student revolt of
1968, and that it should have been a man of the sensitivity, sympathy
and style of Stephen Spender.
The Year of the Young Rebels
is not
the comparative history of the 1968 scenes that we need - it contains
too many important lacunae, and even failures of understanding, especial–
ly
in
its first, reportorial half - but it is an important and moving
attempt at seeing and comprehending.
Spender sees acutely; his book is full of sharp recorded moments:
the Gaullists in their automobiles klaxoning up the Champs Elysees
after the General's speech on May 30: "the triumphant bacchanal of the
Social World of Conspicuous Consumption, shameless, crowing, and
more vulgar than any crowd I have seen on Broadway or in Chicago";
Sartre at the Sorbonne: "a warm heart and a cold brain" producing
"answers of sliced logic"; the overwhelming present of Prague, where
"the future offers nothing but the continuance of Now." There is a
sense of quiet, undramatized, but committed
temoignage
to the place
and time where history has reached a moment of convulsion. Spender
is particularly good at rendering the existential meaning of freedom
and the demand for freedom: "It would be a good thing if [freedom]
were discussed more as something positively consumed like air or food,
something the lack of which leaves a terrible void in life, and less as the
intellectuals' luxury or the philosophers' theory." This in relation to
Prague, where the students shouting "We want light!" were asking for
electric light in their dormitories
so
that they could read books.
It is the Czech students who elicit Spender's greatest sympathy,
