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The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930's
The description for this book, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, will be forthcoming.
430 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1976
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About the author
Samuel Hynes
58 books12 followersA scholar and literary critic, Samuel Lynn Hynes Jr. attended the University of Minnesota before serving in the United States Marines as a torpedo bomber pilot during the Second World War. After completing his degree at the University of Minnesota, he earned his masters and doctorate degrees from Columbia University. Hynes taught at Swarthmore College from 1949 until 1968, Northwestern University from 1968 until 1976, and Princeton University from 1976 until his retirement as Woodrow Wilson professor of literature emeritus in 1990.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 18, 2021
As a literary history of the thirties, this book does its job well. It gives an in-depth tour of some of the most significant writings of the time from Auden, Spender, Isherwood, Orwell, Caudwell, Richards, Connolly, and many others. Hynes gives many interesting thoughts on the making of the ‘Myth of the Thirties’, which I greatly appreciated as someone with an historian’s perspective. That said, the book is somewhat misogynistic (evinced by Hynes's mocking formal address for ‘Mrs Woolf’ and his disinterest in women’s writing), and oddly homophobic for a book which mostly concerns gay authors. Hynes seems utterly unable to think of sexuality as anything more than a vaguely risible personal trait (or even defect); he does not seriously consider the importance of sexuality in the writings of Auden, Isherwood, and Spender. Still, overall an enjoyable and informative book once one has acknowledged its drawbacks.
April 26, 2019
For each year of the 1930s, Hynes has a chapter discussing the literature produced by the younger writers of the time and the influence of political events on their work. It was of course a horrendous and chaotic decade, opening with the effects of the 1929 Crash and culminating in the opening of World War II. The key writers start out as fresh Oxbridge graduates with a comfortable, public school upbringing and utterly devoid of political awareness, and Hynes recounts in thoughtful prose their various attempts to relate to and be relevant to the great events of their times, in their lives and in their art. It turns out to be a lively and provocative account, in which the writing of Sam Hynes himself proves more than adequate to the challenge of reviewing such a brilliant cohort of writers.
Quotes
In the kind of poetry that [Wilfred] Owen described, the traditional celebration of military heroism would obviously not be possible. Nevertheless, Owen’s poems (and Sassoon’s and Graves’) are about heroes and even about glory and honour... The new Myth of the War was not simply a rejection of former attitudes; rather it was a revision of them. Anyone who reads the war poets will sense at once the note of praise that comes through the violence, anger and grief; men may not perform great deeds any longer, but they can be tough, stoical and humorous under stress, they can be loyal to each other, they can feel pity, and they can perform their meaningless destructive duties faithfully and with skill. It is a myth without the flags and the martial music, but not without values. [p23]
For the young, particularly, the pressure of external events must have made 1931 and the years that followed different from the years before... Spender’s word is hounded, andhe is talking about the pressure of the public life upon the private, the sense of immediate history as an aggressor against the private man. ... For a young man (Spender was twenty-two in 1931) such a crisis, coming at a time when he was trying to define himself and his place in the world, must have been profoundly disorienting and disturbing. / When the young man is a poet, and the private act that he values is the writing of a poem, then a crisis in society becomes a literary problem. Is the role of a poet a defensible one in such a time? And if it is, what sort of poem should he write? Is the traditionally private content of lyric poetry, for example, appropriate to a time of public distress? In a situation that seems to demand action, can any poem be a sufficient act? There are all questions that imaginative writers faced throughout the ‘thirties and answered in various ways; they are the subjects of the best of ‘thirties literary criticism, too, and they enter, colour and sometimes distort many of the decade’s best and most characteristic poems. [p67]
England also appears again and again in both the prose and verse in New Country, in ways that suggest that these writers were as nationalistic in their way as the Georgian poets were. Their England is a curious mixture of contradictory elements, pastoral and derelict, lovable and sick, and their attitude toward their country is equally mixed, part love and part social criticism... There is a good deal here that is in the tradition of Georgian ‘week-end pastorals’: the towns are ugly, the country is beautiful and the spiritual force of England is linked to the natural world. But there is another, new set of conventions, which derive from Auden Country: images of industrial ruin and social sickness, of urban bleakness and poverty, and of the ordinary objects and actions of everyday life, and melodramatic images of guerrilla warfare against that dying society. [p112]
It is surprising, to anyone who has read the book through, that reviewers should have found political uniformity there, but they did. Bonamy Dobree ... concluded that ‘they are on the whole communists, but communists with an intense love for England’, and Leavis ... observed that ‘the Communism of the Group offers an interesting study’. A more interesting study would be to try to discover what notion of communism these critics shared that could be applied to such heterogeneous writers. The point is, it would seem, that in the early ‘thirties almost no one outside the Party had a very clear idea of what communism was. [p113]
In September 1933 Gollanzc published The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, an anonymous compilation of the crimes of National Socialism from its beginnings through its first months in power in the Spring of 1933...It was the first book in English to record in such sobre detail the actual behaviour of the Nazis and it must have been highly influential in creating the general English attitude towards German fascism. [p130]
“Beneath The Skin is a picture of a society defeated by an enemy whom the writers have not put into the picture because they do not know what he looks like although they thoroughly support him.” [Spender] This is very good and points to a problem that dogged the middle-class, left-wing intellectuals throughout the ‘thirties and was much debated: how can one resign from one’s own class and join another? Or, another form of the problem: how can one write from the point of view of a classless society that doesn’t yet exist? Spender assumed that Auden and Isherwood were on the side of the workers, but reviewers of the play were less confident of what its political point really was .... another review remarked: ‘The general trend of the play is revolutionary, but apart from one easily adapted scene, the fascist helmet fits almost as well as the communist cap.’ [p184]
New Signatures, New Country, New Verse – newness was obviously a period value. But what New stood for changed. The newness of New Signatures was an uncertain experimentalism, with some politics here and there; New Country was more explicit and assertive politically, but still far from uniform in the fiction and poetry. New Verse began with an independent flourish, and through it was caught in the tide of the times, remained uncommitted, though leftish. But New Writing set out to be explicitly political and left. Since Lehmann had a hand in three of these four ‘New’ publications, one must conclude that the variable was date: that what made New Writing what it was, more than anything else, was the movement of history. [p197,198]
By 1936 the New Signatures poets had come to be widely regarded as a group or a school, but in fact they were no such thing. They did not resemble each other in their work (except Day Lewis, who resembled all the rest at one time or another), and they did not have a common theory of literature. The best critical books of the generation – The destructive Element and Some versions of Pastoral – were heterodox, unsystematic and individualistic. [p205]
Roberts’ two prefaces had claimed for his poets and prose writers a revolutionary orthodoxy that was largely in his own mind... What these young writers had in common was something a good deal less militant – the modernist tradition, as articulated by Eliot and Richards. Their tradition was elitist, difficult and individualist. When the Marxist critic D. Mirsky wrote of Spender that he was ‘gripped by an obsession – the obsession of the “independence” of the artist, of the necessity for him to fight shy of all party allegiances for fear of forfeiting his inner freedom’, he must have thought that he was exposing a profound critical fault: and so he was in his own terms, ... But it might also be said that all he was really doing was accurately describing the idea of the artist that then prevailed among young English poets. Of course, Spender argued that position; but so did Auden, so did Empson, so did Mac Neice, so even did Day Lewis – it was a central part of their literary heritage. The swing in the early ‘thirties towards political commitment and away from ‘individualism’ had been a deviation from the main thrust of the modern movement, and by 1936 the results of that swing were apparent: political commitment had produced no art of any importance and no aesthetic that seemd satisfying to a generation raised on Eliot’s essays and the books of Richards: everything of importance in those years had been heterodox and individualistic. So, in the mid ‘thirties, a return to the main stream of modernism had begun. It would have been greater than it was, no doubt, had it not been [that] ... the Spanish Civil War had begun, and so the rest of the decade commitment once more seemed a moral act of such obvious and compelling rectitude that the ‘independence’ of the artists was again suspended in the anxieties of history. [p206]
Surrealists continued to talk revolution and Marxist solidarity, as though they all agreed that an artistic movement needed some heavy political ballast to keep afloat in a time of crisis, and in their writing they kept on trying to solve the problem of how to be a surrealist and a communist, an individualist and a collectivist at the same time. But as far as I can discover nobody who started from the opposite camp took any trouble to try to reconcile their beliefs with those of the surrealists: the communist Party was firmly and decisively dismissive, and all the yearning was in the other direction. [p221]
By the end of 1936, the peak of the surrealist movement in England was past. ... Breton had said ... in 1936 that ‘the admirable thing about the fantastic is that it is no longer fantastic: there is only the real.’ One might alter that slightly, and say that as the ‘thirties moved on towards the end, there was only the surreal: when violence becomes a commonplace, it doesn’t need fantasy or the unconscious to express it... In a Europe in which even the agents of order were surreal and terrifying, Surrealism was unnecessary. [p227]
Writers of the ‘thirties generation turned to travel writing in the last few yers of the decade and produced a number of striking books: Waugh in Abyssinia and Greene’s Journey Without Maps in 1936, Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland and Lehmann’s Prometheus and the Bolsheviks in 1937, MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (a rather special kind of travel book to be sure) in 1938, Auden and Isherwood’s Journey in a War, Greene’s The Lawless Roads and Lehmann’s Down River in 1939. What is most striking about them is ... the degree to which the ‘thirties writers turned their travels into interior journeys and parables of their time, making landscape and incident – the factual materials of reportage – do the work of symbol and myth – the materials of fable. [p228]
When Auden wrote that Illusion and Reality [by Christopher Caudwell] had long been needed, he was simply saying what was clearly true – the left poetry had long needed a theoretical defence against the Agitprop mentality and now it had it. [p258]
Two aspects of this vision [The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell} are especially striking, when one considers that it occurs in a ‘documentary’ book written by a socialist.. First, the political implications are essentially conservative – just keep the working classes working and they will be happy, happier than we are; and second, the secure and cheerful life that they live is one from which middle-class intellectuals are excluded – we can never be them and they can never be us. The fictional tradition operating here is no longer the proletarian novel: this passage is in the Dickensian tradition of the sentimental poor. It defines human happiness in terms of domestic security and family bonds, says nothing about class solidarity or political or social action, and makes poverty a happy, innocent state. It is a very odd paragraph indeed for a socialist to write. [p276]
...it was passages like this one, when Orwell was writing about himself and his prejudices, and demonstrating those prejudices in operation, that he wrote most brilliantly and imaginatively – more brilliantly than he did in any of his ‘thirties novels. It was only when he turned to ideas, and to the political future, that his imagination failed him; like so many other writers of his generation, he could not imagine a socialist future or give it literary form. [p278]
One sees a similar change in the literary rendering of war. In the early ‘thirties, war was a folly to be opposed through pacifist action: the option of not fighting was still an open one and most liberals chose it. Then in the middle of the decade, as actual military action began in Abyssinia and then in Spain, war became a heroic resistance to fascism, in which the brave man would choose to join ‘the army of the other side’. But it was still a choice, and the war that literary heroes like Auden and Isherwood’s Alan went off to was still being fought somewhere else. But as the end of the ‘thirties approached, war came to seem neither an elected action nor a foreign one, but a catastrophe that could happen right here, in England and soon; it was the apocalypse that would destroy culture. This was the line taken by the government in defence of its policies of appeasement; but even those on the Left who urged resistance and the Popular Front agreed that if war came it would mean the end of western civilisation. The only thing that could be worse, they thought, was a fascist world. [p292]
It is a curious phenomenon of the late ‘thirties that liberalism, which had been buried so deep by the Left in earlier years, should seem to rise from its grave like Banquo, and demand new sympathy.... E.M.Foster...in 1938, in an essay titled ‘Credo’, published in September in the London Mercury.... it must have take some courage for a shy man to say in public, in 1938, ‘I hate the idea of causes, and if i had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ [p302]
The new poets, MacNeice says [in Modern Poetry], ... are ‘emotionally partisan’ – they take sides on modern issues, they affirm values, they are capable of tragic and heroic themes and because of their partisanship they are willing to adapt forms to changing circumstances, and even to simplify reality in order to deal with it. All these are reasonable things to say about the young poets of the ‘thirties, but only MacNeice said them all, and his book is the best account of his poetical generation to be written during the decade. [p331]
‘Time that with this strange excuse / Pardoned Kipling and his views, / And will pardon Paul Claudel, / Pardons him for writing well. / The ‘him’ in the last line is Yeats; here are three reactionary poets, pardoned by Time. But why? The answer is Auden’s answer to the critical question of the ‘thirties: what relation can there be between art and life, or art and history, in a time of political crisis? And it is all in that last line: ‘Pardon him for writing well.’ That does not mean, I take it, that art is a value in itself, but rather that to write well in such a time is to preserve the human imagination, and thus to defend a human value against the forces of inhumanity. It seems a confession of political powerlessness, and certainly it rejects the idea of poetry as a mode of action even more explicitly than “In Time of War’ did. It proposes instead poetry as a mode of survival, and this too is a political proposition of a kind. For as Orwell observed, bad politics debases language and misused language coarsens political thought. So that in a way Yeats and Kipling and Claudel were on the right side in spite of themselves. ... Auden’s poem makes nothing happen – what could be made to happen in that season of tragic endings? – but it does what is possible in art: it transforms calamity into celebration by an act of imagination, and so affirms the survival of art in a bad time. And if art survives, man survives too.’ [p353]
Goodbye to Berlin is not a didactic book, but nevertheless it does contain a lesson in history. It tells us that poverty kills feelings, and isolates one man from another like freezing weather; that love and hate are political terms, and that hate feeds on human separateness; that violence is the energy of frozen hearts; that passivity and detachment are cold virtues. [p359]
‘The duty of the artist,’ Spender writes in his opening paragraph [The New Realism], ‘is to remain true to standards which he can discover only within himself.’ In his art he will seek to analyze modern life, and if he is a true artist, that analysis will be revolutionary, because it will reveal the sickness of society. But the artist himself may be a reactionary (Spender takes admiring note of Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence). ‘What is important is the analysis and not the means of achieving the change, which is not the primary concern of art.’ [p362] ... ‘It would follow from such an approach that we judged writers by the amount of life felt in their works, rather than by their political actions and opinions. In practical affairs this would mean that instead of appearing on political platforms and writing about aspects of life of which they know nothing, writers would write about the kind of life they know best, learning as much about it as possible and saying what they believe to be true of it, without airing too much their opinions... A great deal is said about saving culture, but the really important thing is to have a culture to save.’ [p364]
Autumn Journal is, most simply, what its title says it is: a personal record of the period from August through December 1938. Those were the months when Chamberlain found ‘peace in our time’ at Munich, while London prepared to be bombed and the Loyalists at Barcelona fought their last defence, and these events all enter the poem. But even in times of crisis the private life goes on, and MacNeice’s achievement in his poem was to interweave the constituent parts of his life, and to show how these parts acted upon each other... It is a poignant last example of that insistent ‘thirties theme, the interpenetration of public and private worlds. [p368]
...clearly if the time allowed, he [MacNeice] would have been content to go on as he was, a charming Irish classicist with upper-class tastes and a gift for making melancholy poems. [p370]
Autumn Journal is the best personal expression of the end-of-the-thirties mood. Only one other book that I know gives that mood with equal intensity – George Orwell’s last pre-war novel, Coming Up For Air. [p373]
...we will have a set of assumptions about the ‘thirties and the younger writers of that decade that remain the commonplace of literary history. That set will include the following propositions:
The ‘thirties may be treated critically as a single historical period with a fixed and definable character;
It was a period marked by intellectual error, false hopes, delusion and dishonesty;
The fact that it ended in war may therefore be considered a deserved destiny, a just punishment for moral failure;
Its writers were all of necessity politically motivated;
Their efforts to make literature a mode of action failed, and their writing shared in that failure.
These are all arguable propositions but none is entirely true; they are constituents of a myth by which a complex, confused, often contradictory time has been simplified in order that it might be comprehended. There is no way of reducing the period (or any historical period for that matter) to order except by such simplifications, and of course all history is myth-making in this sense. But some myths come closer to reality than others, incorporate more of the disorderly facts into their orders; and all historical myths must be re-examined from time to time, and a new effort made to stretch them further, to assimilate more, to approach more nearly the complexity of truth. [p393]
Quotes
In the kind of poetry that [Wilfred] Owen described, the traditional celebration of military heroism would obviously not be possible. Nevertheless, Owen’s poems (and Sassoon’s and Graves’) are about heroes and even about glory and honour... The new Myth of the War was not simply a rejection of former attitudes; rather it was a revision of them. Anyone who reads the war poets will sense at once the note of praise that comes through the violence, anger and grief; men may not perform great deeds any longer, but they can be tough, stoical and humorous under stress, they can be loyal to each other, they can feel pity, and they can perform their meaningless destructive duties faithfully and with skill. It is a myth without the flags and the martial music, but not without values. [p23]
For the young, particularly, the pressure of external events must have made 1931 and the years that followed different from the years before... Spender’s word is hounded, andhe is talking about the pressure of the public life upon the private, the sense of immediate history as an aggressor against the private man. ... For a young man (Spender was twenty-two in 1931) such a crisis, coming at a time when he was trying to define himself and his place in the world, must have been profoundly disorienting and disturbing. / When the young man is a poet, and the private act that he values is the writing of a poem, then a crisis in society becomes a literary problem. Is the role of a poet a defensible one in such a time? And if it is, what sort of poem should he write? Is the traditionally private content of lyric poetry, for example, appropriate to a time of public distress? In a situation that seems to demand action, can any poem be a sufficient act? There are all questions that imaginative writers faced throughout the ‘thirties and answered in various ways; they are the subjects of the best of ‘thirties literary criticism, too, and they enter, colour and sometimes distort many of the decade’s best and most characteristic poems. [p67]
England also appears again and again in both the prose and verse in New Country, in ways that suggest that these writers were as nationalistic in their way as the Georgian poets were. Their England is a curious mixture of contradictory elements, pastoral and derelict, lovable and sick, and their attitude toward their country is equally mixed, part love and part social criticism... There is a good deal here that is in the tradition of Georgian ‘week-end pastorals’: the towns are ugly, the country is beautiful and the spiritual force of England is linked to the natural world. But there is another, new set of conventions, which derive from Auden Country: images of industrial ruin and social sickness, of urban bleakness and poverty, and of the ordinary objects and actions of everyday life, and melodramatic images of guerrilla warfare against that dying society. [p112]
It is surprising, to anyone who has read the book through, that reviewers should have found political uniformity there, but they did. Bonamy Dobree ... concluded that ‘they are on the whole communists, but communists with an intense love for England’, and Leavis ... observed that ‘the Communism of the Group offers an interesting study’. A more interesting study would be to try to discover what notion of communism these critics shared that could be applied to such heterogeneous writers. The point is, it would seem, that in the early ‘thirties almost no one outside the Party had a very clear idea of what communism was. [p113]
In September 1933 Gollanzc published The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, an anonymous compilation of the crimes of National Socialism from its beginnings through its first months in power in the Spring of 1933...It was the first book in English to record in such sobre detail the actual behaviour of the Nazis and it must have been highly influential in creating the general English attitude towards German fascism. [p130]
“Beneath The Skin is a picture of a society defeated by an enemy whom the writers have not put into the picture because they do not know what he looks like although they thoroughly support him.” [Spender] This is very good and points to a problem that dogged the middle-class, left-wing intellectuals throughout the ‘thirties and was much debated: how can one resign from one’s own class and join another? Or, another form of the problem: how can one write from the point of view of a classless society that doesn’t yet exist? Spender assumed that Auden and Isherwood were on the side of the workers, but reviewers of the play were less confident of what its political point really was .... another review remarked: ‘The general trend of the play is revolutionary, but apart from one easily adapted scene, the fascist helmet fits almost as well as the communist cap.’ [p184]
New Signatures, New Country, New Verse – newness was obviously a period value. But what New stood for changed. The newness of New Signatures was an uncertain experimentalism, with some politics here and there; New Country was more explicit and assertive politically, but still far from uniform in the fiction and poetry. New Verse began with an independent flourish, and through it was caught in the tide of the times, remained uncommitted, though leftish. But New Writing set out to be explicitly political and left. Since Lehmann had a hand in three of these four ‘New’ publications, one must conclude that the variable was date: that what made New Writing what it was, more than anything else, was the movement of history. [p197,198]
By 1936 the New Signatures poets had come to be widely regarded as a group or a school, but in fact they were no such thing. They did not resemble each other in their work (except Day Lewis, who resembled all the rest at one time or another), and they did not have a common theory of literature. The best critical books of the generation – The destructive Element and Some versions of Pastoral – were heterodox, unsystematic and individualistic. [p205]
Roberts’ two prefaces had claimed for his poets and prose writers a revolutionary orthodoxy that was largely in his own mind... What these young writers had in common was something a good deal less militant – the modernist tradition, as articulated by Eliot and Richards. Their tradition was elitist, difficult and individualist. When the Marxist critic D. Mirsky wrote of Spender that he was ‘gripped by an obsession – the obsession of the “independence” of the artist, of the necessity for him to fight shy of all party allegiances for fear of forfeiting his inner freedom’, he must have thought that he was exposing a profound critical fault: and so he was in his own terms, ... But it might also be said that all he was really doing was accurately describing the idea of the artist that then prevailed among young English poets. Of course, Spender argued that position; but so did Auden, so did Empson, so did Mac Neice, so even did Day Lewis – it was a central part of their literary heritage. The swing in the early ‘thirties towards political commitment and away from ‘individualism’ had been a deviation from the main thrust of the modern movement, and by 1936 the results of that swing were apparent: political commitment had produced no art of any importance and no aesthetic that seemd satisfying to a generation raised on Eliot’s essays and the books of Richards: everything of importance in those years had been heterodox and individualistic. So, in the mid ‘thirties, a return to the main stream of modernism had begun. It would have been greater than it was, no doubt, had it not been [that] ... the Spanish Civil War had begun, and so the rest of the decade commitment once more seemed a moral act of such obvious and compelling rectitude that the ‘independence’ of the artists was again suspended in the anxieties of history. [p206]
Surrealists continued to talk revolution and Marxist solidarity, as though they all agreed that an artistic movement needed some heavy political ballast to keep afloat in a time of crisis, and in their writing they kept on trying to solve the problem of how to be a surrealist and a communist, an individualist and a collectivist at the same time. But as far as I can discover nobody who started from the opposite camp took any trouble to try to reconcile their beliefs with those of the surrealists: the communist Party was firmly and decisively dismissive, and all the yearning was in the other direction. [p221]
By the end of 1936, the peak of the surrealist movement in England was past. ... Breton had said ... in 1936 that ‘the admirable thing about the fantastic is that it is no longer fantastic: there is only the real.’ One might alter that slightly, and say that as the ‘thirties moved on towards the end, there was only the surreal: when violence becomes a commonplace, it doesn’t need fantasy or the unconscious to express it... In a Europe in which even the agents of order were surreal and terrifying, Surrealism was unnecessary. [p227]
Writers of the ‘thirties generation turned to travel writing in the last few yers of the decade and produced a number of striking books: Waugh in Abyssinia and Greene’s Journey Without Maps in 1936, Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland and Lehmann’s Prometheus and the Bolsheviks in 1937, MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (a rather special kind of travel book to be sure) in 1938, Auden and Isherwood’s Journey in a War, Greene’s The Lawless Roads and Lehmann’s Down River in 1939. What is most striking about them is ... the degree to which the ‘thirties writers turned their travels into interior journeys and parables of their time, making landscape and incident – the factual materials of reportage – do the work of symbol and myth – the materials of fable. [p228]
When Auden wrote that Illusion and Reality [by Christopher Caudwell] had long been needed, he was simply saying what was clearly true – the left poetry had long needed a theoretical defence against the Agitprop mentality and now it had it. [p258]
Two aspects of this vision [The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell} are especially striking, when one considers that it occurs in a ‘documentary’ book written by a socialist.. First, the political implications are essentially conservative – just keep the working classes working and they will be happy, happier than we are; and second, the secure and cheerful life that they live is one from which middle-class intellectuals are excluded – we can never be them and they can never be us. The fictional tradition operating here is no longer the proletarian novel: this passage is in the Dickensian tradition of the sentimental poor. It defines human happiness in terms of domestic security and family bonds, says nothing about class solidarity or political or social action, and makes poverty a happy, innocent state. It is a very odd paragraph indeed for a socialist to write. [p276]
...it was passages like this one, when Orwell was writing about himself and his prejudices, and demonstrating those prejudices in operation, that he wrote most brilliantly and imaginatively – more brilliantly than he did in any of his ‘thirties novels. It was only when he turned to ideas, and to the political future, that his imagination failed him; like so many other writers of his generation, he could not imagine a socialist future or give it literary form. [p278]
One sees a similar change in the literary rendering of war. In the early ‘thirties, war was a folly to be opposed through pacifist action: the option of not fighting was still an open one and most liberals chose it. Then in the middle of the decade, as actual military action began in Abyssinia and then in Spain, war became a heroic resistance to fascism, in which the brave man would choose to join ‘the army of the other side’. But it was still a choice, and the war that literary heroes like Auden and Isherwood’s Alan went off to was still being fought somewhere else. But as the end of the ‘thirties approached, war came to seem neither an elected action nor a foreign one, but a catastrophe that could happen right here, in England and soon; it was the apocalypse that would destroy culture. This was the line taken by the government in defence of its policies of appeasement; but even those on the Left who urged resistance and the Popular Front agreed that if war came it would mean the end of western civilisation. The only thing that could be worse, they thought, was a fascist world. [p292]
It is a curious phenomenon of the late ‘thirties that liberalism, which had been buried so deep by the Left in earlier years, should seem to rise from its grave like Banquo, and demand new sympathy.... E.M.Foster...in 1938, in an essay titled ‘Credo’, published in September in the London Mercury.... it must have take some courage for a shy man to say in public, in 1938, ‘I hate the idea of causes, and if i had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ [p302]
The new poets, MacNeice says [in Modern Poetry], ... are ‘emotionally partisan’ – they take sides on modern issues, they affirm values, they are capable of tragic and heroic themes and because of their partisanship they are willing to adapt forms to changing circumstances, and even to simplify reality in order to deal with it. All these are reasonable things to say about the young poets of the ‘thirties, but only MacNeice said them all, and his book is the best account of his poetical generation to be written during the decade. [p331]
‘Time that with this strange excuse / Pardoned Kipling and his views, / And will pardon Paul Claudel, / Pardons him for writing well. / The ‘him’ in the last line is Yeats; here are three reactionary poets, pardoned by Time. But why? The answer is Auden’s answer to the critical question of the ‘thirties: what relation can there be between art and life, or art and history, in a time of political crisis? And it is all in that last line: ‘Pardon him for writing well.’ That does not mean, I take it, that art is a value in itself, but rather that to write well in such a time is to preserve the human imagination, and thus to defend a human value against the forces of inhumanity. It seems a confession of political powerlessness, and certainly it rejects the idea of poetry as a mode of action even more explicitly than “In Time of War’ did. It proposes instead poetry as a mode of survival, and this too is a political proposition of a kind. For as Orwell observed, bad politics debases language and misused language coarsens political thought. So that in a way Yeats and Kipling and Claudel were on the right side in spite of themselves. ... Auden’s poem makes nothing happen – what could be made to happen in that season of tragic endings? – but it does what is possible in art: it transforms calamity into celebration by an act of imagination, and so affirms the survival of art in a bad time. And if art survives, man survives too.’ [p353]
Goodbye to Berlin is not a didactic book, but nevertheless it does contain a lesson in history. It tells us that poverty kills feelings, and isolates one man from another like freezing weather; that love and hate are political terms, and that hate feeds on human separateness; that violence is the energy of frozen hearts; that passivity and detachment are cold virtues. [p359]
‘The duty of the artist,’ Spender writes in his opening paragraph [The New Realism], ‘is to remain true to standards which he can discover only within himself.’ In his art he will seek to analyze modern life, and if he is a true artist, that analysis will be revolutionary, because it will reveal the sickness of society. But the artist himself may be a reactionary (Spender takes admiring note of Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence). ‘What is important is the analysis and not the means of achieving the change, which is not the primary concern of art.’ [p362] ... ‘It would follow from such an approach that we judged writers by the amount of life felt in their works, rather than by their political actions and opinions. In practical affairs this would mean that instead of appearing on political platforms and writing about aspects of life of which they know nothing, writers would write about the kind of life they know best, learning as much about it as possible and saying what they believe to be true of it, without airing too much their opinions... A great deal is said about saving culture, but the really important thing is to have a culture to save.’ [p364]
Autumn Journal is, most simply, what its title says it is: a personal record of the period from August through December 1938. Those were the months when Chamberlain found ‘peace in our time’ at Munich, while London prepared to be bombed and the Loyalists at Barcelona fought their last defence, and these events all enter the poem. But even in times of crisis the private life goes on, and MacNeice’s achievement in his poem was to interweave the constituent parts of his life, and to show how these parts acted upon each other... It is a poignant last example of that insistent ‘thirties theme, the interpenetration of public and private worlds. [p368]
...clearly if the time allowed, he [MacNeice] would have been content to go on as he was, a charming Irish classicist with upper-class tastes and a gift for making melancholy poems. [p370]
Autumn Journal is the best personal expression of the end-of-the-thirties mood. Only one other book that I know gives that mood with equal intensity – George Orwell’s last pre-war novel, Coming Up For Air. [p373]
...we will have a set of assumptions about the ‘thirties and the younger writers of that decade that remain the commonplace of literary history. That set will include the following propositions:
The ‘thirties may be treated critically as a single historical period with a fixed and definable character;
It was a period marked by intellectual error, false hopes, delusion and dishonesty;
The fact that it ended in war may therefore be considered a deserved destiny, a just punishment for moral failure;
Its writers were all of necessity politically motivated;
Their efforts to make literature a mode of action failed, and their writing shared in that failure.
These are all arguable propositions but none is entirely true; they are constituents of a myth by which a complex, confused, often contradictory time has been simplified in order that it might be comprehended. There is no way of reducing the period (or any historical period for that matter) to order except by such simplifications, and of course all history is myth-making in this sense. But some myths come closer to reality than others, incorporate more of the disorderly facts into their orders; and all historical myths must be re-examined from time to time, and a new effort made to stretch them further, to assimilate more, to approach more nearly the complexity of truth. [p393]
May 2, 2023
Still very impressive study of a coterie of briefly leftwing upper-middle class English writers during a nightmare decade; its judgements on why their "commitment" never quite worked and ultimately proved ephemeral have mostly aged very well.
March 30, 2017
There's much talk now comparing the current nationalist political scene to Europe in the 30's but that talk doesn't center on the literary response to these dictatorial right wing events. Reading Samuel Hynes' study - which is valuable on its own at anytime - is an even more valuable exercise today. The General Election results of 1931 swept in a long lasting conservative majority, the book burnings and anti-"decadent" art programs have their parallels with the US and elsewhere in 2017. Against this oppression, Auden and his fellow writers asked and tried to answer difficult questions of how to produce literature that is true, genuine and clear without devolving into broadsides. I can't say I have a sweeping grasp of all current writers to generalize but the lack of a cadre of like minded artists struggling to react to these events with a thoughtful active and literary response seems to be a fault of the times.
January 4, 2012
A well written literary history of a decade that saw writers fight politically and sometimes in war zones as well as the end which was a mourning of the loss of so much idealism with the rise of Hitler. It added about 5 more books to my collection, it also enhanced my all ready deep admiration for Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Day-Lewis, MacNiece and others of that generation.
April 25, 2009
Fascinating stuff on poetry and politics and the history of a strange and powerful time period.
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