‘what the dawn will bring to light’ half a century later, ‘was conscripted into politicsby Hitler’: young writers espoused
communism as the only way to fight fascism, innocently accepting ‘the Marxist
interpretationofhistory’andbelievingthat‘Communismwouldlead to the freedom
of oppressed people, to a world of social justice, and to a depoliticised egalitarian
anarchist utopia’.^5 Auden’s poem fused individual and collective commitments by
depicting the volunteers converging on the Spanish peninsula in some vast natural
migration in which ‘All presented their lives’. John Lehmann, Spender’s co-editor in
1939 of the anthologyPoems for Spain,^6 recalled in his 1955 memoirThe Whispering
Gallerythat Spain merged literary and political preoccupations, presenting ‘an
opportunity that appeared at the same time as an imperative. I wanted, I felt it
absolutely necessary, to makeNew Writingmirror this latest crucial phase of ‘‘a new
life breathing through the old’’, and become the place where whatever imaginative
writing came out of the Spanish experience should naturally be published.’^7
Lehmann, too, envisaged commitment to the Spanish cause in a metaphor of
pseudo-scientific determinism: ‘everything, all our fears, our confused hopes and
beliefs, our half-formulated theories and imaginings, veered and converged towards
its testing and its opportunity, like steel filings that slide towards a magnet suddenly
put near them.’^8 He later concluded, however, that the war ‘dragged us all deeper
into the morass of ideological conflict, putting to the sharpest test the idealism that
the advance of fascism in Central Europe had awakened in us’.^9
The idea of a test recalls Christopher Isherwood’s conviction inLions and
Shadows(1938) that his and Auden’s generation, which missed the Great War, had
to confront its own personal test of manhood, ‘a complex of terrors and longings
connected with the idea ‘‘War’’ ’: ‘ ‘‘War’’, in this purely neurotic sense, meant The
Test. The Test of your courage, of your maturity, of your sexual prowess: ‘‘Are you
really a Man?’’ Subconsciously, I believe, I longed to be subjected to this test; but I
also dreaded failure.’^10
Rupert John Cornford, the scion of a distinguished Cambridge academic family,
so named in honour of his parents’ friend Rupert Brooke, that earlier poetic casualty
of war, joined the Communist Party in 1935. He was killed on the Cordoba front
in December 1936. In his major poem of the war, ‘Full Moon at Tierz: Before the
Storming of Huesca’, Cornford spoke explicitly of Spain as the place where ‘our
testing has begun’, a testing which involved not just external action but also what
the poem called the ‘private battle with my nerves’.^11 His poem ‘As Our Might
(^5) Stephen Spender, ‘Diary’,London Review of Books, 9 Apr. 1992, 25.
(^6) Stephen Spender and John Lehmann (eds.),Poems for Spain(London: Hogarth Press, 1939);
hereafter abbreviated in the text asPS.
(^7) John Lehmann,The Whispering Gallery(London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 279.
(^8) Ibid. 273. (^9) Ibid. 332.
(^10) Christopher Isherwood,Lions and Shadows(London: Methuen, 1979; 1st pub. 1938), 46.
(^11) John Cornford, ‘Full Moon at Tierz: Before the Storming of Huesca’, inUnderstand the Weapon,
Understand the Wound: Selected Writings of John Cornford, ed. Jonathan Galassi (Manchester: Carcanet,
1976), 39.