554
STEPHEN SPENDER
allowed to sleep, or being submitted to tortures perfected by the techniques of
an age of progress. Solzhenitsyn writes:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time
guessing what would happen
In
twenty, thirty, or forty years had been
told that in forty years mterrogation by torture would be practiced in
Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings ;
that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would
be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod
heated over a primus stove would be thrust up theIr anal canal (the
"secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath
the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances,
prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by
thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays
wo~ld
have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off
to msane asylums.
*
*
*
In England during the twenties and thirties it became fashionable to
write about History. By this was meant the historic process conditioning
people's lives so that their values, sensibilities etc., were only symptoms of the
time in which they lived:
Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities,
Eliot wrote. And Auden
History to the defeated
May say Alas, but cannot help or pardon.
(Towards the end of his life, Auden scrawled across Cyril Connolly's copy
of
Spain,
in which this passage occurs: "This is a lie!")
But supposing that History is not an abstraction capable of being per–
sonified by poets who attribute to it something of the sickness of their lives:
supposing it is the price paid in the sweat and blood and tears of people who
are victims of the rulers who have power? In this case the reality is not the
personified abstract History in the works of modern poets but-where the
shoe pinches.
It
is-to use George Orwell's 1984 metaphor-the face that is
perpetually smashed in by the jackboot. To live history is to be that smashed-in
face. During the Industrial Revolution in England History was the workers in
