Spender's Bitterness

...Let us call a partial roll of them: justice, decency, keeping one's word, individual responsibility, the right to differ and, inevitably, the preeminence of moral standards—in brief, those crystallizations of belief and behavior that have always been precious to men liberal of nature...

...Their relationship is too fugitive, too tenuous, the creative working out too thin...

...Engagement," as omnipresent Asphalt expounds the thought to us, "is, for a writer, identification of soul, heart, mind, with conditions he witnesses, together with his determination to recall the truth about them transformed within his art...

...Despite a satirical focus it never stoops to the trifling or the mean...

...As for Sarret and Marteau— there is more than a hint that Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are meant—their brilliance has dwindled to a semantic play with terms like "premature ex- or anti-Communists" and "anti-proletarian bourgeois proto- anti-Stalinists...

...Engaged in Writing is the latest voicing of Spender's bitterness...

...Once again there is an autobiographic stance...

...Csongor Botor the poet is a stricken man...

...The line of development is simple, its human nature always under control...

...On another level, that of the degeneration of leftists in general, "Engaged in Writing" is equally perspicuous...

...Immersed this long in an element which, as he himself has shown, is destructive, he too is something of an ideological casualty, novelistically speaking at any rate...

...A slim volume of two fictional pieces, only the title story, however, carries his burden of complaint...

...Now this kind of trust is predicated on concepts that may be old-fashioned but are nonetheless valid and desirable...

...Engaged in Writing" is...

...The fault, perhaps, is not altogether Spender's...

...It is also his Voltairean admonition that writers should till their own gardens, yes...

...The Fool and the Princess" follows as a case in point...

...then, Spender's call upon the individual to evaluate even the most promising of human efforts in terms not of the communal but of the separate soul...

...They are an unbearable pair to Asphalt...

...It marks his hail and farewell to the political bent of which he wrote so positively in Forward from Liberalism and so negatively later in World Within World and The Creative Element...

...go back to the writing which is their particular engagement in life...

...Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," N. Y. "Herald Tribune" THOSE WHO HAVE FOLLOWED Stephen Spender's work through the years cannot have failed to note how he trusts his heart...

...In protest against the crucifixion of ideals in which they and the others are participating— one should observe that the time is Easter week and that frequent religious references suggest more is meant than meets the secular ear— he resigns from LITUNO...

...his conscience will not let him rest because he has denounced his best friend at the behest of the Party...

...the conference taking place just after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, the period prematurely called the "Thaw," it makes manifest the hardening of intellectual arteries which Communist ideologists have suffered...

...When it involves them in repudiations repugnant to the soul, even in performing acts in direct contravention of the aims which the acts presumably were designed to achieve...

...Like any work of significance it proceeds on a number of levels...

...And yet this "Engaged in Writing" is not pretentious...

...Despite such citations, story and symbol are not, on the whole, satisfactorily integrated in Engaged in Writing...

...Still bedeviled by secret police, still repeating polemical formulas, Russian representatives like Pobedin, Korovin and Pomyalov can hardly be said to think—as Spender's alter ego Olim Asphalt puts it: " . . . all their ideas lie buried under murdered corpses...

...On one...

...Is not his recent praise of private rather than party motivation, to put the spotlight on that, symbolized in Harvey Granville's giving up of a Continental for an insular love...

...Indeed, if one may press still further into the matter, it really speaks out for the renascence of that independent witness which so many people have for years suppressed in themselves because they were led to believe true political participation demanded the suppression...

...Dunstan Curlew, the nuclear physicist—he dreams of improving the human race "by a cocktail mixture of hygiene, birth control and eugenics"—is so un-prescient of common reality that he can cry over the fictitious suffering of characters in a movie even as he disregards the authentic agonies of the victims of the dictatorship he admires...

...What happens when such men find that their commitment to the shaping of a better world runs counter to their instincts or training...

...This being so, it is not ungenerous, surely, to claim that thus far he has only given us a preliminary presentation of his urgent theme: the individual in a world which requires the social than as well...

...Though Saul Bellow's recent strictures make deep reading somewhat perilous, one cannot help feeling that this resigning is indicative not only of Spender's own desired signing off from congresses, Communist-inspired or otherwise, but also of what he believes any man of good will must do rather than be an ideological unit...

...A wry story of a young Englishman who, while employed in a DP camp in Germany, and to the great jeopardy of his marital relationship, falls in and out of love with what is to him a glamorous DP, it gives Spender a chance to show how he himself as a writer can carry on, involvement in contemporary event unscanted, conscience unparalyzed by any commitment to a group...

...In consonance with his "Concept of the Dialogue," Chairman Bonvolio has been reduced to making a virtue of meeting for the sake of meeting...

...What happens is that our liberal beings suffer an accretion of disillusionment with a force in direct ratio to the enthusiasm of their initial commitment...

...Fairly enough it presents its subject: an international conference of writer-culturists in Venice—the sort of people PEN and UNESCO, here called EUROPLUME and LITUNO respectively, might convene...