stan smith
Lessens’,^12 writtenwhile he was still at Cambridge, was posthumously transformed
by Lehmann into a poem about the Spanish ‘Test’ when he published its first three
sections, along with Margot Heinemann’s elegies, inNew Writing IV.Thepoem
is centrally, if somewhat abstractly, concernedwith confronting the test of action,
while acknowledging the fear that ‘haunts us all’, that ‘Flesh still is weak’. ‘The
living thought must put on flesh and blood’, it asserts, discovering in action ‘New
ways of love, new ways of feeling’ which give ‘nerve and bone and muscle to the
word’. Action alone ‘creates new ways of living,|Shatters the old ideas of loving’.
The intellectual can no longer retreat into introspection, but must ‘regain the name
of action’ by willed engagement with the external, political world. If ‘Black over
Europe falls the night,|The darkness of our long retreat’, he has an existential
responsibility for the future: ‘what the dawn will bring to light,|Victory or fresh
defeat,|Depends on us until the nightmare’s over.’ This responsibility is all the
more overwhelming because of one’s recognized weakness and vulnerability. Flesh
is weak, bone brittle, the poem argues, but ‘Our sinews must be hard as metal’.
Strength can be found only in a collective engagement which acknowledges no
frontiers of class or nation: ‘Our home, our job, is everywhere,’ and ‘freedom must
be won, not bought’. A growing part of ‘the Test’, however, was the internal struggle
to maintain faith in the cause of Spain even though it was increasingly corroded by
brutality andrealpolitikin one’s own ranks, a struggle which required deepening
complicity in what Auden inSpainnotoriously designated ‘conscious acceptance
of guilt in the necessary murder’.^13
For, as Lehmann observed:
Long before the Nazi–Soviet pact, the last stages of that war had seen the turning of the tide:
volunteers and political workers home from Spain told stories of Communist ruthlessness,
cynicism and intolerance towards minorities and minority opinion, or any opinion that did
not square with the Party line, that we found itdifficult to credit at first, but less and less
easy to excuse as they accumulated.^14
Victor Gollancz, the fellow-travelling publisher of the Left Book Club, turned down
George Orwell’sHomage to Catalonia(1938) because of its inadmissible revelations
about the Communist suppression of POUM and Anarchist workers in Barcelona
in May 1937. Orwell’s revelations, those of a ‘disillusioned revolutionary’, Lehmann
later commented, ‘broke the last resistance of many who had been desperately
holding out against the shock of truth’; but ‘it was better late than never to
realize that we had been walking beside someone whose features we had never
clearly discovered until then; to see after all that we had to choose between D. H.
Lawrence’s change of heart and a revolution engineered by forces that did not,
would never speak the language we recognized as our own’.^15
(^12) Cornford, ‘As Our Might Lessens’, ibid. 32–5. (^13) Auden,Spain, 11.
(^14) Lehmann,Whispering Gallery, 332. (^15) Ibid. 333.