BOOKS
629
"an immensely tall, shambling boy of nineteen, with a great scarlet
poppy-face, and eyes the violent colour of bluebells. " "Savage" (Ste–
phen Spender) appears a good deal in the Finney biography as a
sympathetic but not uncritical friend of Isherwood's. This new book of
his consists of extracts from private journals and book reviews and
other journalism, which he has revised and abridged, and stitched
together with a retrospective commentary. We are by now familiar with
Spender's view of the Red Thirties and his part in them. One good
point he makes is that his set's absorption in "causes" at that time has
always been common among European writers generally, though rare
among British writers; and he sees his friends as successors to poets like
Osbert Sitwell, Sassoon, Graves, and Owen, who, he observes, were all
Socialists in 1918. He emphasizes that his group continued to admire
the great "modernists," such as Eliot, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence or the later
Yea ts , though disagreeing with them politically; and it is relevant here
to
note his high estimate of Wyndham Lewis as a poet. And there are
other things of historical value in the book. For example, his review of
D.H. Lawrence's posthumous prose collection
Phoenix
is an implicit
refutation of the Leavis view that Lawrence was despised or ignored by
the young writers of the 1930s. And it is clear that in many ways he was
a shrewd critic, even in his "Left" days . He despised the crude Stalinist
propaganda of writers like Aragon. And, as also appears in the Finney
book, he made acute criticisms of the Auden / Isherwood plays at the
time, showing that his group was not just a mutual admiration society.
The section on the thirties is perhaps the most interesting. Thereafter
we are escorted on a tour of the forties, the war years, Spender's service
as a fireman, the time when he was a "drinker of
Horizon's
fluid line,"
and postwar Germany; then on to the fifties, the years of
The God that
Failed
and
Encounter
and the row over its CIA involvement.
In
the
sixties he is very much the elder statesman of literature, rather unen–
thusiastic about student revolt but genuinely seeking
to
understand it,
willing to discuss his own early work with great frankness, offering
respectful recollections of his friend Eliot and incisive memorial
accounts of Cyril Connolly, MacNeice, and Auden. With their deaths,
he says sadly, he feels himself to have entered the area of the posthu–
mous . But happily it is clear that his mind is still lively and his sense of
humour still keen .
Spender, like Isherwood, is primarily a restless autobiographer.
He was not gifted by nature with Isherwood's terse and vivid style, and
we soon tire of the trends and movements and ups and downs of literary
politics which this book constantly presses on us. But despite all the
awkwardness, an innate honesty and decency come through which
