Spender and After

Back in the late Thirties, when I was editing the radical but non-Marxist Common Sense, I asked Stephen Spender whether he would contribute a monthly London Letter focusing on two questions: 1) What kind of a political/economic order for Europe did Englishmen envision in the event of a British victory? and 2) Would England survive with a superior living standard if she ceased to be the center of an exploitative Empire? The poet—whose poems I had been the first to anthologize in America—had briefly been a Communist Party member and supported the Communist-backed Loyalist cause in Spain, but that fact in no way led me to doubt that I would receive from him honest reporting, sensitive evaluations, and a respect for democratic, humanist values similar to our own. Then as now, Spender could be described as a politically naive “liberal,” but no one could question his integrity and good will, or his readiness to admit his own shortcomings. What he had to say in those columns in answer to my two questions seems in retrospect to have been extraordinarily prophetic—and more interesting than the mea culpas and the literary name-dropping which clutter up too much of this badly organized book.

Not that The Thirties and After is without its rewards. Nothing that Spender writes is ever without a characteristic tone of humility and concern for the survival of the best in our common culture. The portraits of Auden, Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis are scrupulous refutations of the facile leftist notion, prevalent at the time, that these writers were “fascist” ideologues. Auden and Eliot, whom Spender knew best, really come to life in these essays, though Spender still stands too much in awe of Auden to see how deplorably the latter’s poems deteriorated once he had left his homeland. He mentions Auden’s suppression of the poems influenced by Freud and Marx without saying in so many words that those were the inimitable ones.

SR

About the Author

Selden Rodman

Back in the late Thirties, when I was editing the radical but non-Marxist Common Sense, I asked Stephen Spender whether he would contribute a monthly London Letter focusing on two questions: 1) What kind of a political/economic order for Europe did Englishmen envision in the event of a British victory? and 2) Would England survive with a superior living standard if she ceased to be the center of an exploitative Empire? The poet—whose poems I had been the first to anthologize in America—had briefly been a Communist Party member and supported the Communist-backed Loyalist cause in Spain, but that fact in no way led me to doubt that I would receive from him honest reporting, sensitive evaluations, and a respect for democratic, humanist values similar to our own. Then as now, Spender could be described as a politically naive “liberal,” but no one could question his integrity and good will, or his readiness to admit his own shortcomings. What he had to say in those columns in answer to my two questions seems in retrospect to have been extraordinarily prophetic—and more interesting than the mea culpas and the literary name-dropping which clutter up too much of this badly organized book.

Not that The Thirties and After is without its rewards. Nothing that Spender writes is ever without a characteristic tone of humility and concern for the survival of the best in our common culture. The portraits of Auden, Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis are scrupulous refutations of the facile leftist notion, prevalent at the time, that these writers were “fascist” ideologues. Auden and Eliot, whom Spender knew best, really come to life in these essays, though Spender still stands too much in awe of Auden to see how deplorably the latter’s poems deteriorated once he had left his homeland. He mentions Auden’s suppression of the poems influenced by Freud and Marx without saying in so many words that those were the inimitable ones.