stan smith
the externalized ‘you’ of the last stanza, the self realized as an other to those others.
Wintringham’s‘British Medical Unit—Granien’ begins at a level of generality, its
vocatives addressed to an apparently impersonal other which turns out to be a
projection of the self. It moves, in its final stanza, to a first-person plural in which
individual identity both finds and loses itself in a shared commitment defined,
initially, only in contradistinction to its antagonist: ‘Our enemies can praise death
and adore death;|For us endurance, the sun’ (PS, 41). Identifying with the waning
light of the surgeon’s electric torch, the enfeebled self then in a sudden reversal
finds renewal in a shared allegiance: ‘We are allied with|This light.’ His ‘Barcelona
Nerves’ likewise begins among objects and events in a ‘Dynamo-driven city waiting
bombers’ (PS, 29–30), to which the collective ‘we’ comes late. In a world beset
on all sides by a repetitious death, life is a matter of ‘breaking|By own hardness,
and a held hand, out|From fury, frustration, fear’, the depersonalized synecdoche
of comradeship (unqualified by the possessive adjective ‘our’) gesturing towards
that grammatical collectivity which emerges in the last words of the poem: ‘We
make what can wreck others into our gaining,|Into our choice.’ Collectivized, as
in Auden’sSpain, ‘choice’ resurrects the submerged ego as a historical agent.
Cornford’s ‘Full Moon at Tierz’ reveals a more complicated, less doctrinaire
reality.^25 The image of the full moon rising on friend and foe alike (‘the same night
falls over Germany’, and ‘England is silent under the same moon’) recalls both
Edward Thomas’s Great War poem ‘The sun used to shine’ and Auden’s ‘Out on the
lawn’, in both of which the moon shines down on Europe, indifferent to the partisan
allegiances that divide the continent. The ‘testing’ announced by the barren hills of
Aragon is not only of courage in the fight with an external fascism. It refers also
to an internal moral struggle with one’s bourgeois self, to maintain loyalty to the
party amidst misgivings about its policies and practice. The dilemma is expressed
at length in a long, rambling letter that Cornford wrote to Margot Heinemann in
which, speaking of his sense of solidarity with ‘German comrades’, he nevertheless
noted that several of them had left the party ‘because they genuinely believe the
C.I. [Communist International] has deserted the revolution’. He, however, was
‘beginning to find out how much the Party and the International have become flesh
and blood of me. Even when I can put forward no rational argument, I feel that to
cut adrift from the Party is the beginning of political suicide.’^26
If he really did have no doubts, of course, cutting adrift would not have crossed his
mind. The struggle to discipline the self into the iron resolve of the unquestioning
cadre is clearest in the paradoxical union of solidarity and solitude at the heart of
the poem: ‘Now with my Party, I stand quite alone.’ This is the subject steeling itself
to a commitment that remains abstract and hortatory, a wish and a prayer, rather
than a reality:
(^25) Cornford, ‘Full Moon at Tierz’, 38–40.
(^26) Cornford, quoted inUnderstand the Weapon, Understand the Wound, 180.