Humble Pie

WORLD WITHIN WORLD (312 pp.)--Stephen Spender -- Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau set the style with his gloom-drenched Confessions, it has been widely taken for granted that no autobiography is really honest unless it is unremittingly conscience-stricken. When a poet such as Britain's Stephen Spender prefaces the story of his life with the statement: "I have tried to be as truthful as I can," readers can be pretty sure that the author is going to whip himself naked through the streets at the tail of his art.

Poet Spender felt miserable almost from the day he was born. When he got to Oxford he made friends with an even gloomier youth who said to him cordially: "What's so nice about you is that you're so naive, Stephen ... I feel you're like me. We aren't clever, we aren't brilliant, we're just ourselves, and we know we're just little undergraduates." Another Oxford friend, Poet W. H. Auden, took a rather more hopeful view. "You are so infinitely capable of being humiliated," he told Spender. "Art is born of humiliation."

Thereafter, Stephen Spender's life was a series of highly successful humiliations. His early humble poems established him as one of the flowers of the new clump of British poets that blossomed in the '30s. T. S. Eliot became his kindly mentor and publisher; an independent income relieved him of the rigors of earning a living. Six months of the year he shared a house with Novelist Christopher Isherwood in seamy-gay Berlin; at home, he was wined & dined by Virginia Woolf, rubbed shoulders with William Butler Yeats, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell. Some poets might have been stimulated by all this, but Poet Spender kept finding bumblebees in his blossoms. "In the life of action," he noted sadly, "I do everything that my friends tell me to do, and have no opinions of my own." The social and literary life of London he found "exhausting."

How to Fill a Void. Friendships with other men proved to be unsatisfactory, so Spender "began to discover a need for women," began not only to "think about" women but even "to look for them." Eventually he decided that "marriage seemed the only solution" to "fill the emptiness of living alone," and found himself a wife. "I think it would be safe to say," he ventures gloomily, "that we 'adored' one another."

Political problems were another headache. "In Forward from Liberalism I argued that Liberals must reconcile Communist social justice with their liberal regard for social freedom, and . . . accept the methods . . . necessary ... to defeat Fascism." In blunter words, Spender became a Communist, and went off to Civil War Spain for the London Daily Worker.

But Marxism proved another "disappointing" path. "I had to work out these things for myself within myself," Spender decided. His autobiography ends nonetheless with this essential work suspended. "Now I am a middle-aged man , in the center of life and rotted by a modicum of success, surrounded on the one hand by material responsibilities and on the other by material achievements."

Escape from a Dungeon. World Within World is interesting as an eyewitness appraisal of the high place that has been granted to guilt by intellectuals of the last decades. But its main lesson is that nothing can be more misleading than a "truthful" book written by an author to whom confession and humiliation are the only verities worth stressing. No one would guess from World Within World that Spender has been capable of writing many admirable poems, or that he has won a small but probably permanent place in the literary history of his generation.

Here & there the gloom is pierced by a lively sense of humor that bursts out like a prisoner escaping from a dungeon; occasionally there is evidence of Spender's acute eyes & ears, e.g., his description of antiaircraft fire as "like immense sheets of lead falling slowly through the sky, rattling and uncreasing as they fell." Then the pea-soup fog of shame descends again, and Poet Spender plods sadly on, carrying his backbone like a broken reed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.