Confession Without Substance

ilateral military intervention wherever the United States finds it necessary. The difference between such world-saving and the sort we are presently engaged in, says Mr. Campaigne, is that the United States would act out of its own interests, at times and places of its own choosing. The essential spark of such a foreign policy is determination, born of clear understanding of American strength and Soviet weakness.

C. Day Lewis, who is usually mentioned with Auden and Spender as constituting a modern “school” of British poetry, moved briefly into and out of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the nineteen thirties. His autobiographical study, The Buried Day (Harper, $3.95), is a pleasant, somewhat casual contribution to the literature of what made Communists in a period in which nobody apparently bothered either to teach or to study the nature of man as a political animal. As a revelation of innocence The Buried Day might be said to constitute a comforting assurance that Cecil Day Lewis’ precise pattern of political behavior will hardly be repeated in the near future. But if young English intellectuals no longer join the Communist Party these days, they still exhibit the same pristine innocence of the consequences of political behavior whenever they unite rhetorically to advocate unilateral scrapping of “the bomb” or to damn those McCarthyite Americans. Of this continuing inability to understand that rhetoric can be the most fatal of traps when it takes off from faulty analysis Mr. Day Lewis has nothing to say, which means that his book is not so comforting after all.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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ilateral military intervention wherever the United States finds it necessary. The difference between such world-saving and the sort we are presently engaged in, says Mr. Campaigne, is that the United States would act out of its own interests, at times and places of its own choosing. The essential spark of such a foreign policy is determination, born of clear understanding of American strength and Soviet weakness.

C. Day Lewis, who is usually mentioned with Auden and Spender as constituting a modern “school” of British poetry, moved briefly into and out of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the nineteen thirties. His autobiographical study, The Buried Day (Harper, $3.95), is a pleasant, somewhat casual contribution to the literature of what made Communists in a period in which nobody apparently bothered either to teach or to study the nature of man as a political animal. As a revelation of innocence The Buried Day might be said to constitute a comforting assurance that Cecil Day Lewis’ precise pattern of political behavior will hardly be repeated in the near future. But if young English intellectuals no longer join the Communist Party these days, they still exhibit the same pristine innocence of the consequences of political behavior whenever they unite rhetorically to advocate unilateral scrapping of “the bomb” or to damn those McCarthyite Americans. Of this continuing inability to understand that rhetoric can be the most fatal of traps when it takes off from faulty analysis Mr. Day Lewis has nothing to say, which means that his book is not so comforting after all.