Looking Backward

By Paul Gray

THE THIRTIES AND AFTER

by Stephen Spender

Random House; 236 pages; $10

Poet Stephen Spender, 69, first emerged as a member of the Auden circle, the preternaturally clever group of young writers who came down from Oxford and inherited The Waste Land. The legacy was intimidating. Not only did Eliot's masterpiece seem to leave scorched earth for subsequent poetry, but the apocalyptic dry rot it portrayed cried out for desperate measures beyond the range of literature. Spender and his contemporaries, including Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cyril

Connolly and Christopher Isherwood, watched the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe with equal horror and fascination. "This was one of those intervals of history," Spender writes, "in which events make the individual feel that he counts."

This collection of essays, journal and diary entries vividly recaptures the heady atmosphere of the '30s, as well as the long hangover that followed. Unlike memoirs of the period that have been recollected in tranquillity, Spender's book unfolds like a collection of vintage newsreels. With many members of his generation, the young poet rushed into ideology. He heralded "the birth of a new world" through Marxism, championed the cause of Republican Spain and did his best to see no evil hi the side he supported. If loyalist troops were sometimes brutal, Spender had an answer: "It seems to me that atrocities are a measure of the ignorance and suffering imposed on the isolated people who commit them, and thus they are only a by-product of the monstrous Spanish system which is now being abolished."

Spender does not reprint such youthful blunders in a spirit of self-justification. He says, for example, that he is "thoroughly ashamed" of the essay in which he announced his joining of the Communist Party. He also notes that the party dropped him as soon as the essay was published, because he admitted having once doubted the total legitimacy of the Moscow trials. There is a comic poignancy to this imbroglio that pervades nearly all of Spender's political writing. His well-meaning, intellectual support of proper causes always left him at cross-purposes with improper people. He occasionally blinked at excesses, but he was never able to blind himself for long.

Although he is often harsh on him self, Spender seems to have been less consistently wrong than fairminded. He was generous in praise of Yeats, Eliot and Pound, whose work had political leanings alien to his own: "The reactionaries never thought that they should put their art at the service of the ideology of the authoritarian fascistic leaders, in the way that many leftists thought that they should put theirs at the service of Marxism and of the political bureaux which laid down the Communist Party lines."

He was equally kind to his friends and acquaintances. Their foibles inspired him to write warm sketches rather than diatribes. He recalls the young Auden who used his knowledge of Freud to unsettle his Oxford classmates with instant analyses. He describes an older Cyril Connolly literally breaking into tears because of boring dinner-table conversation. The death of Dylan Thomas prompted Spender to praise the Welsh poet for "entering into the realness of the scene and singing from core and center of its being." As an afterthought, Spender added: "I realized that I myself saw things clearly but from the outside, at a distance, through the instrument of what I am -- saw them small and clear and looking-glass and upsidedown, as on an old-fashioned camera's ground-glass screen." This book of miniatures and portraits is the accomplished work of that craftsman.

-- Paul Gray

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