The Search for a Secular Scripture

...when they did not, it was not...

...Yet at the time, few of the Auden-led literatior youthful Left-wing intellectuals in the United States-could imagine that the future would have such a perspective on the era...

...They were all at some point, to a greater or lesser extent, deluded into accepting Stalinism or a United Front with the Soviet Union as that movement...

...He succeeds admirably...

...Accordingly, they saw the totalitarian characteristics of the Bolshevik state if they saw them at all As little more than temporary aberrations, so desperate were they in their search for a secular religion, so naive in their hope for the emergence of a classless society that would nonetheless include bourgeois culture and idealism...

...Then, after quoting from Orwell's dour 1940 summation of the '30s, the author remarks: "Orwell's account itself is a part of the Myth, and one could compose a different summary that would alter the picture...

...In addition, his command of the primary sources is greater than his predecessors': He has read the Oxford and Cambridge undergraduate magazines, plus the anthologies of the '20s and '30s (including some we have unfortunately forgotten especially Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse...

...He is very good on the social criticism implicit in Christopher Isherwood's Mr...

...On the basis of this summary, one would exclaim 'What a Decade!' in a different tone of voice...

...To them the '30s were a wasteland, a "low, inglorious decade" as Auden put it in "September 1, 1939...

...This situation, they felt, could be remedied only by a movement that would supplant tottering capitalism and save the humane ideals of Western civilization from the destruction likely to occur if fascism took over, as it had in Manchuria and Abyssinia and as it was doing in Spain...

...he fails, for instance, to cite Monroe K. Spears' study of Auden and Katherine Bail Hoskins' Today the Struggle...

...The reader of Samuel Hynes' study will agree...

...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Author, "On a Darkling Plain" Samuel Hynes' aim is to relate literary to social, political and economic history, while simultaneously keeping a sharp focus on his declared subject?literature and the growth of literary forms among the young English writers of the 1930s...

...Poetry," Auden claimed, "is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice...

...Hynes concludes his analyses, appropriately, with a discussion of two works that in a way marked the close of the '30s: MacNeice's Autumn Journal (among the most neglected poems of the decade), and Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," (one of whose lines?Poetry makes nothing happen"may, alas, have set the tone for writers and readers of the less hopeful, more subjective decades that followed...

...He is familiar, too, with English reviews of books that appeared during the decade, and knows his subjects' early and later judgments of themselves and their writing...

...The book's first chapter discusses the reasons for the despair of these writers...

...Auden their leader, and the events they tried to deal with...

...and he neglects because they were not middle-class radicals novelists Ralph Bates and James Hanley...

...These flaws do not detract from the merits of the book, however: Hynes has produced a thorough analysis of the outstanding examples of British fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism of the era...

...The majority of them shared a fascinated admiration for Eliot's The Waste Land, as well as for the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sas-soon, and held with Auden that a new "parabolic" method of expression must be found to set forth society's ills and create a realistic basis for hope...

...Both summaries would be true or rather, both would be a part of reality...

...As he takes us through the period 1929-40, devoting a chapter to each year, the author carefully and insightfully examines both the work of those coming to consider W.H...

...Norris Changes Trains and Rex Warner's The Professor, and on Christopher Caud-well's Marxist criticism in Illusion and Reality...

...When the Auden generation followed this prescription, the results were exciting, even where wilfully obscure...

...The author properly focuses on Auden, Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, but he is astute on the little-remembered Upward and Beachcroft, and on some of George Orwell's now almost unknown books...

...The chief factors were their disillusionment with war the idea of pro patria mori And their realization that the poor had problems no political leader adequately confronted nationally, much less internationally...

...If anyone ever doubted it, Hynes makes it demonstrably clear that Auden led the way in technical innovations, in undogmatic hopefulness, and ultimately in the rejection of totalitarian doctrines...

...putting them together, we will come as close, perhaps, as we can come to the true literary history of the '30s...

...Combining lucid interpretation with precise scholarship, he makes us aware of both the Myth of the '30s and the realities on which it was based...

...it might simply contain the titles of novels and poems and plays, of books of travel and criticism and reportage poems by Auden and Spender and MacNeice and Emp-son, novels by Isherwood and Greene and Warner, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, Journey to a War, Some Versions of Pastoral, Illusion and Reality...

...His reflections on Auden's The Orators are enlightening (though he does not try to explain all of its obscurities), while his comments on Auden's "Spain" and "Summer Night" and Stephen Spender's "Vienna" are better than any previous discussions of the same poems...

...Moreover, Hynes is apparently uncomfortable with having a bibliography that mentions secondary sources whose points are often similar to his...

...Hynes accurately observes: "Looking back at the '30s, we can see in the history of the decade the shape of a tragic play the initiating errors, the complicating actions, the climax, and the fall toward disaster and death...

...The author is too harsh on C. Day Lewis and the contributors to New Signatures and New Country...