SPENDER'S JOURNEY THROUGH THE TOMB OF LOST LIBERTY
Greenberg, Martin
Spender's Journey Through the Tomb of Lost Liberty Reviewed by MARTIN Gfff ENIEftG w~*UROPEAN witness* is a record of some montha spent by Spender in Cerri many en an official mission in 1945,...
...It still does...
...In this conversational .exchange we can sea rejected what were the root ideas of this century's radicalism...
...Spender's Journey Through the Tomb of Lost Liberty Reviewed by MARTIN Gfff ENIEftG w~*UROPEAN witness* is a record of some montha spent by Spender in Cerri many en an official mission in 1945, with a short period in France sandwiched in between...
...and yet-remembering past beliefs—with a certain amount of uneasiness, too...
...Randall and Rasasdell, Raringer and Potter, Luthin snd Monaghan — each of whom has mads aigniticant contributions—are not mentioned in the footnotes...
...Hendriek wrote about Jefferson Davis* cabinet...
...Spender's gloom (at times it reached the point of actual nausea, for the cui a <>( which be read French novels> sprang, front his sense of Germany as "one vast monument or tomb of lost liberty," and from a sense, too, in the presence of its ruined cities, of foreboding...
...5.00...
...It implies...
...Spender, however, although sufficiently . shamed, was too much an English man of letters to surrender his talent to Stalinism...
...When the world becomes difficult, it turns shrill and righteous...
...the Naxis "made social and political activity significant moral, or rather immoral, activity, and they renounced the irresponsible amoral automatism of the progressive industrial era...
...It is this note of sanctimony, long latent in Spender and now openly sounded, which lends this book itsSnsiifferable air of priggishness...
...Whereas once we should have been concerned with a class struggle in which all could find redemption, now we are concerned—at least in Germany's case—with a national history in which all are involved in damnation...
...The best things in this book are the incidental, symptomatic evidences of a generation's dismayed abandonment of long-standing and at one time almost universal attitudes, seen in the harsh light of Occupied Germany...
...By Stephen-Spender...
...Spender apparently took little joy of his trip to Germany...
...the able, scheming Blair, and the acidulous, devoted Welles —and shows how Lincoln handled each...
...the tiles of the historical magazines, or has done research in manuscripts or newspapers...
...However much it may delight the hearts of Lincoln Cultists tnd please the high-priests of patriotic mythology, the viewpoint of this volume is trite to the point of stateness...
...The major theme of Lincoln's War CaHn't is that the prairie politician in the White House, a master strategist of singulsr purity, molded s cabinet of diverse, conflicting prima-donnas Into a ¦ingle tes.n, and that with them be administered the war and saved Wis Union...
...By soms mystic hns.-us-po.-us, these critics concluded that an assault on the phony liberalism of the Civil War era waa a reflection on the warmongering, blood-lusty "liberals" of World War II...
...o On'K'S impression of Spender in this book is above all the impression of someone "decent...
...Whereas in an earlier time we should have told her that she had no country, Inst i or ted her in her "class interests" •*.W»pe«n Witness...
...ABOUT a year ago Professor J. O. Randall's two-volume Lincoln tli* L Preside at met a sudden and unexpected attack from Bernard De Voto and Louis Hacker...
...Hendriek's cur .rut book appears to have been designed aa a companion piece to this earlier work...
...Mot only did the bonk present a Lincoln who waa ever-so-slightly different from the patriotic myth, it also portrayed the "Radical Republicans"—oft yclept "Jacobins"—in an unfavorable light...
...in a sense, be turns his back on Germany...
...Spender believes, with Jung, whom he quotes, that the whole German people was "demoniacally possessed...
...Some yeara ago Mr...
...Occasionally — even frequently—the writing glitters, but evea t'len its gold is old gold and nothing new has bes»n added...
...To a woman who, standing in the doorway of her but, exclaimed, " 'Poor Germany,' " Spender, in the characteristic accents of reproach that Occupier employed to Occupied, rejoined, " 'Poor Holland, poor Belgium, poor Greece, poor Norway and poor Denmark.'" There is a world of meaning summed up in this little incident...
...an identification of this quite insignificant woman with her "country...
...For ever and beyond the obvious and palpable ruins of a country and a people, Germany signihed to the observer the ruins within himself of a whole asyteaa of attitudea and ideas...
...He calls it a travel ls>ok, but it is marked by too strong • quality of inwardness to be really that...
...It disproved, he says, the middle-class confidence in the "automatism of society...
...Unfortunately, neither the thesis nor the supporting story of this book is news — unless it's news that so hoary s yam ahould still be published...
...His gloom, however, has a bitter edge of disenchantment to it, and it ia in this that he significantly echoes the disenchantment of a generation reared under the influence of the ideas of orthodox Marxism...
...virtue...
...Now, with his discovery of the moral theme in politics, his guiltfeelings are assuaged, for what better vehicle is there than literature (this book is the evidence) to instruct us in good and evil ? But something of the old feeling nevertheless persists...
...to the endurance of the immature bad conscience of the thirties thst Speeder is impelled to admire in this book as hs has done elsewhere so unpleasant a figure as Louis Aragon...
...the irascible, treacherous Stanton of surpassing efficiency...
...Nor is there svidenre thst the author haa consult...
...that literature could exert an influence to change society," la tha thirties, Bolshevism, anticipating Spender somewhat in his present point of view, transformed this consciousness of the isolation and political ineffectuality of literature into a moral" question, instilling writers with a sense of guilt and shaming them into the Communist fold...
...Professor Randall's moderate and fair-minded appraisal of Abraham Lincoln struck these writers as especially dangerous...
...Complete reliance upas memoirs, out-dated biographies, and we"" worn collections could hardly be expected to produce a fresh interpretstion...
...It became stupid," he says, "to think...
...When confronted with the noisy, unprincipled literary violence of an Aragon, Spender apparently feels himself a guilty and irresolute aesthete again...
...the pompous, ambitious Chaae, who committed the major crime of using tha Treasury patronage to advance his political aspirations...
...ThESE banalities offend one not because they are banal—one could forgive a traveling poet some well-intentioned lapses into this kind of dull earnestness —but because Spender in such rentarka is in reality saving his soul...
...Nothing New Has Been Added Reviewed1 by WILLIAM f. HESSELTIME LINCOLN'S WAR CABINET...
...In affect, they plead for a resanctification of Lincoln and a return to the conventional reverence for the Great Emancipator...
...His triumphant championship of the necessity of moral choice in history meana to Spender the conquest of his feelings of social guilt...
...New York: Regnal k Hitchcock...
...He takes a more grandious view of what the fate of Germany has disproved...
...The obsolescence of the volume may have resulted from the author'a apparant failure to read any recent writers on the Lincoln theme...
...Spender's attention is directed much more towards the state of ssiad engendered ia him l>y the experience of Germany than it ia towards Germany itself, and this perhaps accounts for the lack of any vivid feeling in the book for the life ia whose midst it waa written...
...needed careful, scholarly investigation...
...For what does such an answer imply...
...as opposed to the national interests of her ruling class, taught her h~ - membership in the international community of the proletariat, now we teach her her exclusion from any international community, hold her "responsible" and "guilty" with her country, call her "German," not "proletarian...
...Il has not, toe, any of that traveler's elation which seises one—even amid the ruins of Germany—when one is confronted by the aathentic, living strangeness of a country that is not one's own...
...1946 482 pages...
...For the most part, the "statesmen" turned out to be diplomats—an area in which the Confederates, who were inept in all fields except the military, showed the least statesmanship...
...Despite a multitude of conversations reported, despite a wealth •f minutiae noted, and despite some sensitive general remarks on the German landscape in the early part of the book (he speaks of its "mental quality," of its being "full of intentions, moods," not "haunted with a sense of individuals like England or France"), Spender keeps his eyes gloomily fixed on the ground...
...One of the results of the "amoral automatism" he decries had been the minimization of the social role of literature...
...In Germany these ideas seemed'as strange, in recollection, as the remnants of the " 'New Germany' of advanced architecture"—"the purposeful, novel, well-planned Germany" that had "seemed to promise so much ia the nineteen-twentiea"—that Spender found bizarrely mixed with the ruins of the rest of the country...
...Nevertheless, with Spender as with many others, the weakening of the authority of Marxism has had only the unfortunate result of calling forth a spate of "morality...
...under the tills .Statesmen of the Lott Csn...
...ton J. Hendriek...
...Atlantic: Litllt Brown...
...The story of "Lincoln's relations with his cabinet has lens...
...The respective roles of the cabinet members have long ago been assessed in these same terms...
...Spender is highly ronsxioua of this, to be sure, but where he is moat conscious he is most inept...
...It must be owing...
...By Bur...
...To demonstrate the thesis, the author has taken up each member »f the cabinet in turn—the charming, storytelling Seward of great influence and bad judgment...
...An answer to this prayer ia furnished by Burton J Hendriek, three-time winner of Pulitzer prizes in history snd biography...
...it irritates one when it applies its simplemmded measure to complex issues...
...But English decency is notoriously a provincial (or insular...
...When one gave the answer that Spender gave (for conversations of this kind invariably took place In every part of Occupied Germany, and one did give such an answer), one sai I il with a great deal of vengefulness...
...One tedious piety follows the next, all of them vacuous: "Peace must be more important than national interests...
...The character of Lincoln hero revealed is stereotyped and conventional...
Vol. 30 • March 1947 • No. 12
