stan smith
on a muscular physicality is symptomatic of an age in which the clash of mas-
culinitieswas central to the political discourse. (Heinemann’s elegies, praised
for being ‘particularly poignant for their clear mental focus’, obviously unsettled
the reviewer’s gender stereotypes.) But, he concluded, ‘there is little time for
the maturing of poetry in minds which are violent and unsettled, and little
hope...of imagination reaching out to embrace the human reality which unites
the combatants’.
Sinking the Ego
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Those private battles with the nerves were not simply struggles to overcome the fear
of personal death; they also involved convincing oneself to continue believing in
and justifying the cause itself. Communist poets steeled themselves by submitting
their allegedly fallible subjectivity to the iron discipline of a party line which,
though endlessly mutating, claimed to offer the only accurate interpretation of the
‘objective’ movement of history. Louis MacNeice’s autobiography,The Strings Are
False, confessed that, in the 1930s, ‘The strongest appeal of the Communist party was
that it demanded sacrifice; you had to sink your ego.’^19 Spender’s autobiography,
World within World, was candid about the ‘subjective’ motivations for submitting
to a rigid ideology:
Communism seemed to offer a way out of my dilemma. It suggested to me that after all I
was not myself. I was simply a product of my bourgeois circumstances. By ‘going over to
the proletariat’ and entering a different set of circumstances I could become another kind
of social projection. I would be ‘on the side of history’ and not ‘rejected’ by it.^20
Montagu Slater, the Communist editor ofLeft Review, summed up the orthodox
position in his poetic puppet play ‘Old Spain’, performed by the Binyon Puppets
at the Mercury Theatre, London, in July 1938, with music by Benjamin Britten.
Three kneeling women in black call from ‘an invaded country’ to a young man
asleep, urging him to ‘Think of Spain as the limit of|Your private love’.^21 Fearing
that he can bring only loss and failure to their aid, he speaks respectfully of a
friend whom ‘We called...sectarian|Inhuman and abstract,|Too human and
not|English enough yet’, who, nevertheless, was ‘ready|With one more body’ to
see ‘all history|Fulfilled in his gesture’ of commitment. Another whose ‘English
life|Turned sour in his mouth’ likewise opted to give his life for Spain, confirming
the second woman’s assertion that ‘A revolutionary|Has a duty to die.’ That these
are puppets speaking does not seem to be an intended irony.
(^19) Louis MacNeice,The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography(London: Faber, 1965), 146.
(^20) Stephen Spender,World within World(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), 311.
(^21) Montagu Slater, ‘Old Spain’, inPeter Grimes and Other Poems(London: Bodley Head, 1946),
71–5.