‘what the dawn will bring to light’ As the war progressed, the contradictions between illusion and reality became
moreobvious, but they had been inscribed in the discourse of Spain from the start,
and lived out in innumerable private battles with the nerves. Auden himself fell
silent after returning from Spain in 1937, explaining later, ‘Nobody I know who
went to Spain during the Civil War who was not a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist came
back with his illusions intact.’^16 By the time his revised ‘Spain 1937’ appeared in
Another Time(1940), the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939 had permanently redefined
the ideological maps of the 1930s. Malcolm Muggeridge’s instant obituary for that
decade, in 1940, struck the new note of world-weary cynicism:
the International Brigade fought valiantly, attracting to itself the adventurous, the idealistic,
and sometimes the despairing, from all parts ofthe world. These at any rate had managed, to
their own satisfaction, to make explicit a conflict they felt was implicit in the circumstances
of their lives. Fortunate, perhaps, those who died; not living on to doubt again, and wonder
if blood shed in Spain had truly served the cause they had at heart.^17
‘Such doubts came, if at all, later,’ Muggeridge observed, for ‘While the Spanish
Civil War was in progress, it seemed certain that in Spain Good and Evil were at
last joined in bloody combat.’ The anonymousTLSreviewer ofPoems for Spainin
1939 had already registered the nature of the dilemma:
The tragic conflict in Spain cannot beevaded by the modern poet. Whether or not it
compels him to direct expression, it must haunt his mind with painful questions and torture
his imagination. For here, as in a theatre but with the appalling realism of indiscriminate
slaughter, the discord at the heart of our civilization is nakedly displayed.^18
But, in his opinion, what ‘makes the conflict so peculiarly tragic’ is that, ‘believing
that in supporting the Spanish republic they are defending the very life-principle
of civilization’, they do so ‘with weapons that inevitably deny the very values they
wish to affirm’.
Characteristic of such writing, he wrote, was ‘a stark impassioned utterance’
in which the poet steeled himself for the struggle. John Cornford’s poems, for
example, ‘seem, as Mr Spender remarks, to be written by the will rather than
from the sensibility, to be indeed the calculated acts of a fighter determined in
vindicating his creed to be ‘‘invincible as the strong sun,|Hard as the metal of
my gun’’ ’. Herbert Read displays ‘the same muscular concentration, enriched by
a subtler and maturer sensibility’. The collection was epitomized by ‘this quality
of clenched brevity’—the adjective eliding the Communist clenched fist salute
and the clenched teeth of John Buchan’s public school heroes. This emphasis
(^16) Auden, ‘Authority in America’,Griffin, 4 Mar. 1955, 9.
(^17) Malcolm Muggeridge,The Thirties: 1930–1940 in Great Britain(London: Hamish Hamilton,
1940), 248–9.
(^18) [Hugh l’Anson Fausset], ‘Left Wing Poets and Spain’,Times Literary Supplement,4Mar.
1939, 131.