A Poet Among the Young

...He is trying to tell the students something valuable, whether they are bound for the barricades or the library...

...He calls Columbia's rebellion a "happening" and adds, "Strategy is something to which the students have scarcely paid attention...

...but about elemental human freedom, an end to censorship, the right to study and live a little too...

...it is accessibility of teachers to students that matters, not student power over teachers...

...Stephen Spender, in The God That Failed The last thing one would have expected from this brief encounter, this soft brush of thoughtful poet against angry student, is a good book...

...THE CZECH AND THE GERMAN STUDENTS in Spender's narrative hold our interest more strongly than the Americans and the French because they are still in the process of working their way out from under severe political repression...

...the explosion of talk, the erratic political strategy...

...IN A SERIES of rather loose-end essays which follow the sharply-etched reports on the student revolts, Spender arrives at some suggestions for change in the universities and, implicitly, the larger society...

...Nixon can testify to that...

...Yet The Year of the Young Rebels is just that, a good book...

...I felt very unsure of myself with Chalmers [an orthodox Communist friendof the thirties in Berlin] as I confessed to my dislike of violence, my attachment to freedom of self-expression, my wish nevertheless for revolutionary changes which would produce a socially just international societywithout destroying the liberty of the individual...

...Still, poets and plumbers both have to recognize that the moving phrase "imagination IS revolution" will not resolve such issues as the failure of the French workers and students to come together or the desire of the middle class to preserve its own French version of "lawanorder...

...Over thirty, in fact exactly twice so and whitehaired, he found himself once mistaken for Herbert Marcuse...

...He welcomes the widest measure of student protest, provided it does not take the ugly turn of total contempt for disinterested knowledge and the free play of ideas, provided as well that it addresses itself to sustained attack on "war and armaments, racial inequality, the deterioration of the cities, the pollution of the atmosphere, the population explosion...

...Wanting to see the French students' revolution succeed, Spender watched it drown in a sea of words...

...In his travels from New York, to Paris, to Prague, to West Berlin, Spender, first of all, keeps his head...

...He took his pipe out ofhis mouth and said with friendly terseness: "Gandhi...

...Yet in some respects they are God's gift to the strategy of the other side...

...A has la telecommunication...

...Spain also taught him how swiftly a democratic left can be undermined by its "friends" on the left who proclaim toughness as truth, socialism as heroism-pluscatechism...

...They, the engage and the enrages, were seeking to restructure the university and radicalize the society (Columbia, the Sorbonne), to enlarge the breathing space of human freedom inside the Communistcontrolled academy (Prague), to express their alienation from an uncaring establishment preoccupied with prosperity in the Flat Society (West Berlin...

...He wandered about on the edge of the student storms, spoke to old faculty friends, mostly listened to the students, and tried to make sense of the demonstrations, the capture of buildings, the exhilarating slogans (Vive la communication...

...At all times, you must keep one copy...

...Here again, in a vivid chapter on "the Sorbonne Revolution" Spender is able to participate, as poet and humanist, in the students' feeling for spontaneity and the free play of the spirit in the face of the counterforces: ossified bureaucracies, dead-weight unions, bourgeois attitudes, consumer society...

...I find it appropriate that Spender, whose best poems are in praise of "those who in their lives fought for life," should in the end urge the student rebels to join mood to action, spirit to organization: Become an international pressure group, he says...

...Spender wants traditional scholarship and the new activism to exist side by side at the university...

...I think he underestimates how close the students came, even on the basis of "the spontaneity of direct democracy," to unseating the government, but he is surely right to point out to Cohn-Bendit and his friends that organization is not necessarily stifling, that even revolutions must have it...

...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...In the case of West Germany the students have discovered that it is not enough to celebrate the contrast of free West Germany and unfree East Germany behind the Wall...

...He sees the poetic impulse, all right, in "up against the wall, mother fucker," but he knows clenched fists are no substitute for the political impulse...

...A Poet Among the Young THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS, by Stephen Spender...

...In the Czech case, a year after the brutal Soviet invasion, we are talking not about consumer values or restructuring faculty senates TO CONTRIBUTORS When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...

...In the end, when spring passed into summer and the students went home, he, too, went home and wrote up his reflections...

...The famous English poet was not asked to read his poems, nor discuss Auden, nor recount his brief attachment to, and subsequent deep disillusionment with, Stalinism in the thirties, nor compare "his" Spain with "their" Vietnam...

...New York: Random House...

...It is that they "have to anticipate this world and prepare themselves in every way for it...

...Mr...

...He, on the other hand, represented no cause other than "freedom of selfexpression" and carried no ideological luggage other than the wish for a "socially just society" consistent with "the liberty of the individual...

...If there is, as usual in Spender, vagueness and confusion when it comes to action and program, no matter...

...IN FRANCE, if the students had far more to be angry about than in America—the rigid centralization, the raw-concrete quality of the new universities, the dismal examination system— their anger ended in a comparable sputteringout after nights of high drama, marathon discussions, and full-scale battle with the police...

...But, then, even Marcuse no longer pleases the hottest visionaries among them...

...poetic sensibility is wedded to sensible politics...

...WHAT was Stephen Spender to the students and what were they to him in 1968, "the year of the young rebels...

...Sentimental bourgeois liberalism, the new wave of student leaders would reply...

...How did they suppose they could turn the country round by turning a university upside down...

...They are generally reasonable and sensible except for a proposal to have students sit in as observers at the United Nations "to see what the problems are through the lives of those who are trying to deal with them," a proposalthat could only heighten the sense of student frustration...

...Spain taught Spender never to underestimate the generous idealism of the young when pitted against the forces of injustice...

...He was questioned about the subvention of Encounter by the CIA and he told the students he had resigned as soon as the facts were verified...

...Remembering what the Communists, as well as Franco, did to the Spanish Republic in the thirties, Spender is not a man to be swept BOOKS away by the student radicals' praise for Che Guevera or Chairman Mao in the sixties...

...He remains open to the spirited aims and revolutionary elan of the Columbia radicals but takes a stem view, quite rightly, of their muddled strategy...

...He thinks it absurd for students to be preoccupied with controlling the appointment of professors...

...which will condition all other problems...

...He understands the depth of the student grievances, whether in the context of the unfreedom of a Czechoslovakia or the slack freedom of a California, and at the same time he is concerned that the student rebellion will spend itself in a spasm of fury on campus instead of being worked out from the campus base into the larger political community...

...Spender describes the way in which surface prosperity and the "deafening silence" of intellectual life in West Germany are terribly oppressive...