Sons of the Revolution

THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS by Stephen Spender. 186 pages. Random House. $4.95.

The guns spell money's ultimate

reason In letters of lead on the Spring

hillside.

But the boy lying dead under the

olive trees

Was too young and too silly To have been notable to their

important eye.

He was a better target for a kiss.

--(the Spanish Civil War)

In poetry, as in politics, the predominant quality of the man who wrote these lines has not so much been talent or intellect as extraordinary compassion. A near Marxist as well as a poet during the years of the Spanish Civil War, Stephen Spender has worn reasonably well since he served as Auden's slightly junior fellow in the vanguard of English verse. Now an uncomplacent 60, he knows that nothing turns off a young radical quicker than old radicals who say "When I was a boy ..." Yet ironically, compassionately, he sees the New Left making many of the old youthful mistakes. And what is a father figure to do? In his latest work, Spender hopefully jumps in to say his piece about what he diplomatically calls "nostalgic ideas springing from new lips."

Haunted by the image of his own past superimposed on the present--Old Left traced over New Left, Spain over Viet Nam--Spender has lately toured the world as if it were a single troubled campus. During the student occupation in April 1968, he made the scene at Columbia. In fact he boosted himself through a window into President Kirk's office, though he declined the insurgents' invitation to smoke a presidential cigar (a "sign that I was not taking their side"). A month later, Spender was roaming Paris, listening to another Polonius of the Old Left, Jean-Paul Sartre, at a Sorbonne rally and being mistaken by French student-rebels for the professor-prophet of revolution, Herbert Marcuse. To the young, alas, all white heads look alike.

By July, Spender had arrived in Prague to make contact with Czech hippies who misspelled peace slogans on the sidewalk: MOR I AQCUINT MY DOG LESS I LIK MY MAN. The kindly Spender could not resist subverting their English to read: "The better I know my dog the more I love man."

One must be a bit subversive, as well as comic, ambiguous and heroic in order to play middleman in a world where everybody else appears as an extremist of one sort or another. Spender shows a certain fondness for "girls with hair like seaweed." He is as fascinated as a traveler from another planet by the rebel-rhetorical style, which he traces back to the beatniks: "It had the inspiration of some sustained fit of oaths from the mouth of a drunken Welshman." He even admires the way student-rebels combine "a passion for solitude with a love of being televised."

In a quick rundown, Spender typecasts French student-rebels as "romantic," West Germans as "theoretic" and Americans as "hysterical." Columbia's wildly improvising white students ("Let's take a hostage!") he accuses of being more neurotic than the blacks, who, he says, had limited but precise objectives. He chides students for being in love with revolution--"perpetual change, perpetual spontaneity"--for its own sake, as if it were a marvelous formula for releasing all the virtues, including love. On the other hand, Spender complains, given half a chance student-reb els go all brisk, like "frustrated bureaucrats." (As he observes: "The first thing they set up is a committee.")

As Spender sees it, an ideal student-rebel's contribution should be both non-mystical and nonpolitical: he should operate as a troubler of conscience and imagination. Today's rebels, who vacillate between instant saintliness and instant power, Spender--like most other observers--finds dangerously ill-informed. He is inclined to agree with Raymond Aron's judgment: "More sympathetic than the Communists, they are their intellectual inferiors." In matters of hunger, illiteracy and overpopulation, "they seem to take very little interest." "Students who attempt to revolutionise society by first destroying the university," Spender adds in a warning, "are like an army which begins a war by wrecking its own base."

Spender feels himself a not especially welcome guest in somebody else's world. Yet he refuses to become annoyed when the young tell him that their problems are "unprecedented"--thereby implying that his opinions are irrelevant. Conceding that they know all about the "now," he just wishes he could convince them that all "nows" finally become "then."

One's final picture of Spender may be the self-portrait that shows him at the Sorbonne, still full of good will but revolutionized almost to tears. "One longed," he says, "to hear a professor talk for half an hour about Racine."

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