Post-Oxford World

STARTING POINT--C. Day Lewis--Harper ($2.50).

In the minds of most U. S. readers, England's Oxford Poets--W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Michael Roberts, Christopher Isherwood, Rex Warner -- are lumped together not only because they are contemporaries, but for: 1) their viewpoint (a sort of oblique communism), and 2) their literary method. Recently, however, the Oxford Poets have shown signs of setting up separate literary establishments; their differences are developing faster than their similarities. If this tendency continues at the present rate, it is not inconceivable that in another decade their similarities will be no closer than those of Harvard's famed Class of 1910, which included such writers as Heywood Broun, John Reed, Walter Lippmann, Stuart Chase.

One indication of this possibility is the career of C. Day Lewis. Oldest (33) of the Oxford Poets, once considered almost indistinguishable from Poet Auden, he now orients himself to Marx where Auden follows Freud, now writes few poems and many book reviews, turns out detective stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. Last spring he published his first novel, The Friendly Tree, a love story almost panting with lyric breathlessness.

Compared with his first novel, Starting Point shows a marked improvement--its theme is more mature, its prose less fluttery. Its four central characters are Oxford roommates: Theodore, a small, plump, precocious, post-Huxleyan cynic; effeminate, peace-loving Henry; John, a shy, radical, brilliant science student; and Anthony, popular, versatile, idealistic son of a rich, liberal M. P. The time is 1926.

First quake to shake this introverted world is the General Strike. Socialist John joins the strikers; idealist Anthony becomes a disillusioned member of a scab student battalion; effeminate Henry sighs for a role as mediator; cynical Theodore spits esthetically on both sides, cloisters himself in the library through it all.

Author Lewis shows his own confusion by the desperate means he takes to finish his characters. One shoots his mother and blows his brains out. One retires to a monastery. One sells his Socialist faith for a mess of chemical pottage. The last goes off to fight with the Loyalists in Spain.

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