"JOURNEY TO A WAR"
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] Sm,—By mischance your issue of March 31st did not reach me until April 54th. Will you allow me, thus tardily, to reply to Mr. Stephen Spender's letter about my review of Mr. Isherwood's and Mr. Auden's book?
Mr. Spender misunderstands me when he speaks of my attacking those whom I believe to be down. It was precisely because I believed Mr. Auden to be so very much up that I allowed myself the pleasure of a few sharp expressions. More- over, I find no satisfaction in the general apathy to poetry ; what Mr. Spender takes for complacency was intended as irony. But I think that this apathy does in fact exist; and that as a result of it the English public is particularly gullible with regard to poetic reputations. In my opinion, Mr. Auden is a case in point. I find him a very dull and awkward writer. Mr. Spender disagrees. This is not the place to dispute the matter in detail. Since, however, Mr. Spender imputes per- sonal malice to me, I am entitled to ask : which of us is the more likely to be prejudiced—I, who have never met Mr. Auden nor, so far as I know, set eyes on hirp, or Mr. Spender, who is, I understand, his intimate friend?
I cannot- affect any patience with Mr. Spender's final argu- ment that it is evidence of poetic merit to be unfavourably reviewed ; nor, I think, would he care to pursue it when his agitation has subsided. I am replying to Mr. Spender mainly because his letter forms an example of the attitude towards Mr. Auden of a certain group of writers. As I said before, it is their fault, not his, that he is a public bore. He writes mediocre verse, as do a multitude of quite decent young men. No particular shame attaches to that. But a group of his friends seem to have conspired to make a booby of him. At a guess, I should say that the literature they have produced about him is, in bulk, about ten times his own work. That is shockingly bad for a man still young, alive and, I fear, productive. But what is far worse is that they assume any dissension to spring from ignoble motives of personal malice. That is intolerable.—
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