Stephen Spender Pages From A Journal

Pages from a Journal
Author(s): Stephen Spender

Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1955), pp. 614-630
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27538493
Accessed: 19-05-2016 18:14 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The Sewanee Review
This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Thu, 19 May 2016 18:14:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
PAGES FROM A JOURNAL
By STEPHEN SPENDER
May 20thy 1955
I read in the newspapers a report of an article by Aneurin

Bevan commenting on the General Election. Bevan writes:
"There is another influence working against the Labour
attack: spiritual exhaustion, lethargy of the collective will. After
all, it must be kept in mind the British people have been kept on
their toes for more than 16 years; more than 5 of them in the
supreme effort of war." Bevan then goes on to complain about
the conservatives taking advantage of this lethargy. But of
course that is absurd. It would be there with or without the
Tories. The lethargy is lethargy precisely about some of those
ideas which are supposed to be most inspiring and positive. It is
the result of disillusion about advanced and progressive ideas,
in politics, art, perhaps even science.
"Spiritual exhaustion" is only a phrase describing the absence
of some quality which ought to be present. It seems likely that
this exhaustion is a post-war phenomenon rather than the result
of exhaustion from the war. It is the result of something pro
foundly negative which has been discovered to exist within those
very causes which were once regarded as positive, now that their
aims have been realized. Thus Social Welfare and Social Se
curity, although excellent in themselves, are only a scaffolding.
Bevan stands for aims which, when they have been achieved, may
be discovered by those who benefit from them to be purposeless.
In the same way, advanced movements in the arts have led to
abstraction which has led to a complete void. So today we are
left with a Reaction which is not so much Conservative, as a Re
action against everything: and a Restoration which is not a Resto
STEPHEN SPENDER 615
ration of standards, quality, etc, but simply of the idea of private

wealth and private expenditure as against public wealth and
public expenditure. Apathy is the result of people realizing?
dimly?that their lives are poised between the negativism of
"advanced" ideas and the negativism of Reaction against these
ideas.
June 10 th
Conversation with N. She observed that it is no use dreaming

one's way through life. Later, this made me think of the dis
tinction between dream and vision. The condition of dreaming}
in which many people spend their lives, is to live almost entirely
in a world of reverie and phantasy. You go through the day
imagining things that are not or that things might be other than
they are, constructing an unreality of your own, a kind of inner
pictorial monologue which may continue for hours and even days
on end, partly a kind of running commentary on the life around
you, partly quite disconnected from it. When confronted by
inescapable facts either they defeat you or?having survived
them?you sink back into a dream which has now turned to re
sentment. The state of mind?on which people often pride
themselves?called bitterness arises from such dreaming, which
is really the decadence of the power of the imagination.
Vision is the opposite of this. Vision is an ordering of the im
agination to construct a model world out of bricks which are from
the real world. It is a discipline whereby, whilst one knows very
well the real world, nevertheless one is able to abstract oneself
from it, and create a picture which one can measure against
reality. Vision is where creation is also criticism. Dream is
a kind of desultoriness. Today the arts are associated in many
people's minds with dreaming, whilst vision is regarded as a
technique of self-hallucination practised in bygone days by saints.
1* H* t* ^ 1* rf*
John Craxton and I went to a really appalling performance
616 PAGES FROM A JOURNAL
of Macbeth at the Old Vic, with Paul Rogers and Ann Todd.
Presumably because Ann Todd is a screen actress, they had at
tempted to turn Macbeth into a movie, with background music
often drowning the words, scenes melting into one another, and
no breaks in the action. Ann Todd looked like one of the more
sentimental, and therefore less inspired, fairytale inventions of
Walt Disney. She was right out of Snowwhite and the Seven
Dwarfs.
This is the greatest public success the Old Vic has had for many
years.
June 12 th
I flew to Vienna to attend the meeting of the PEN Club.

Owing to a misunderstanding, there was no one to meet me at the
airport, from which there was also no bus into Vienna waiting to
meet the plane. It amazes one, arriving there, that a capital the
size of Vienna should have an airport one would associate with a
small Midwestern town. Finally, a bus did arrive, and I went
to my room at the Pension Atlanta. A large bare white room,
two beds, a washbasin, a table, and two or three chairs: the sort
of room in which, twenty-five years ago, I wrote poems.
Next to me, beyond a wall through which I could hear every
sound, were two other writers. The three of us shared a bath
room. Within twenty-four hours I had reverted so completely
to 1934 that when I was offered a hotel room I refused it.
I put down my things at the Pension Atlanta, changed, and at
once went to a party at the Palace of Schoenbrunn given by the
City of Vienna for the PEN Club members. In the tall long
rooms, under candelabras, and before tapestries and mirrors,
there was the usual crowd of writers and intellectuals, some very
shabby, some almost ostentatiously well-dressed.
As always, the delegate I most liked and sought out was
Ignazio Silone. Silone has an unhappy clown-like, rather pear
shaped face, with many vertical lines, a small Charlie Chaplin
STEPHEN SPENDER 617
moustache, a woebegone appearance at once solemn and comic.

Like Chaplin in his early films, when he tells a story he indulges
in frequent gestures?taking his hat (if he is in the street)
suddenly off his head and then putting it as abruptly on again,
shrugging his shoulders, answering a question with a movement
of both hands or by simply turning up his eyes.
More though than by any gesture, one is struck by something
unremittingly sad which is the ground bass of his moods, above
which comedy is superimposed. The action most characteristic of
Silone I can remember is when at the conclusion of a Paris meet
ing of the Executive Committee of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, he presented the committee with a little clockwork
figure of a monkey beating a drum and ringing a bell?a monkey
that wore a little three-cornered revolutionary red cap. He said
this should be our mascot when we had a Congress meeting in
Moscow. Silone loves to tell long, involved stories from which
he draws no moral.
The PEN Club deliberations were not at all exciting. The
theme of discussion was the Drama Today. Some good papers
were read, but they all consisted of accounts of the situation of
drama in various countries. No one got up and said that all
contemporary plays ought to be symbolical or social realist or
poetic or political: and that everything which was not what he
advocated was trash. We were supposed to have discussions, but
hearing a dozen reports, like Progress Reports, of the way the
theatre was going in more countries than anyone could have
wished to hear about, there was nothing to discuss.
In the background, a dreary political wrangle which had noth
ing to do with these literary matters did take place. Charles
Morgan, the President, in his opening address had made some
remarks about the inadvisability of letting people into free or
ganizations if they did not believe in freedom. One of the
Eastern delegates had countered by proposing to the Congress a
Ban-the-Atom-Bomb resolution. The President had ruled this
resolution, and discussion of it, out of order. This made Silone

unhappy. He took the line that we were playing into the hands
of the Communists by refusing to discuss what they called their
initiative for Peace.
However, as all this had been ruled out of order, it became
a discussion which went on in meetings of the Committees, about
which ordinary members, like myself, only read in the news
papers. The real point of the PEN Club meeting, which made
up for everything one might criticize, was, of course, seeing
Vienna at a moment when every street in the centre of the city
seemed to be undergoing a major operation in connection with
the reopening of the Opera next October.
In Vienna I was struck by what is less obvious in England?
though certainly noticeable, even there?the tremendous boom
taking place in Western Europe. I was accustomed to the Vienna
of 1934, with unemployment and political agitation. But here
was a Vienna of nearly full employment, restorations of old
buildings, and new buildings going up everywhere, and a good
deal of fairly obvious wealth.
Some of the things completely restored to Vienna are the
wonderful museums and collections of paintings, the concerts, and
the masses with choir and orchestra sung in a dozen churches and
chapels every Sunday morning.
One concert I went to was of Irmgaard Seefried and Fischer
Diskau singing an arrangement for alternate male and female
voice of Hugh Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch. Concerts in
Vienna have such an air of convivial intimacy that one is able to
get a far more immediate impression of the personality and
qualities of the artist than anywhere in the world. Fischer
Diskau, aged 26 or 27, looks rather like a Russian teddy bear with
hair sticking up, a round face, and round eyes with which he
seems to be looking at what he sings. He has an astonishing
visual line in melody, and while hearing one has the impression
of seeing what he is singing, not just as the scene the words refer
STEPHEN SPENDER 619
to but as the line of the music. Someone to whom I remarked on
this told me that Chaliapin made just this impression.
Fischer-Diskau has another quality I associate with genius. He
realizes the utmost complexity of detail in a song with the most
effortless simplicity.
I saw another aspect of Vienna when L. and I called on the old
Princess S? at her palace. This grey, baroque palace is com
pletely desolate, falling into ruin, set amidst its garden of un
kempt grasses and roses running to wilderness. Princess S? is
a elderly, stalwart, grey-haired and outdoor-complexioned lady,
strong-as-a-horse-seeming. L. told me the Princess had lost six
sons in the war, that she is now penniless, her husband dying in
his room in the palace. L. said they were so poor that when she
went there she felt afraid to eat anything, even a potato. Yet the
Princess S? goes on attempting to have parties, which no one
attends, and to use the palace as a centre for soir?esy receptions,
and lectures. L. told me she was so determined that Count C.
should give a dissertation there on some psychological subject,
that she pursued him for weeks on end. Finally Count C took
to his bed when she called one day, pleading illness. She walked
into his bedroom and demanded that he get up and give a lecture
to a gathering which, she said, was assembled and waiting for
him at the palace.
While L. visited the Prince on his sick bed, the Princess took
me into a small kitchen which seemed to have been built into a
corner of a room, where she was preparing a scrappy meal. She
talked about poetry, explaining that she wanted to write a small
book in four languages. As she did so, I realized that she was of
a family that would once probably have patronized Rilke. She
mentioned the six sons she had lost in the war, in a matter-of-fact
way. A surviving son, I suppose the youngest, a boy of 17, came
in, bringing with him a friend, who was a cellist.
The Princess explained to me that on the following day there
was to be a social wedding in Vienna, of the son of the Archduke,
and she had to be there. She asked me to meet her at the hair
dresser's and talk to her whilst she was having her hair curled in
preparation for the reception.
On the following morning, I did so. While girls were help
lessly trying to dry and curl her hair, she read to me from a
manuscript scrawled over in large forward-leaning handwriting,
partly in English, partly in German. It was balf-story half-essay,
a series of reflections and recollections, arising from some family
brooch of turquoises set in Hungarian style, which she had given
to a friend. Thoughts of the brooch led to recollections of her
childhood, her garden, her sons, and so on. I could not at all
judge the merits of the story, but what impressed me was the
strength of happiness won out of affliction which the Princess
gave as she read it.
At the hairdresser's the Princess told me she was shortly going
to set up as a jeweller. With her she had brought one of her
pieces of jewelry. It was a rose twig with leaves and buds on it
which had been dipped into a solution that covered it in a thin
layer of gilt. To me it seemed to demonstrate how ugly a world
must be where every object was transformed by the Midas touch.
June 28th {London)

We went to the ball given by Lord and Lady Glenconner for
their daughter Emma's Coming Out. There were many of the
aristocratic young, the girls incredibly frail and soft, the young
men mostly a bit vacuuous and goofy looking. It gave me the
feeling not so much of a youth I have lost, as of a life that I
missed out on altogether when I was young, As someone pointed
out to me the other day, during the 1930's it was almost un
thinkable for any of us to have been drawn to this kind of re
ception. Yet I realize now how much we missed. How elegant
our affairs could have been instead of rather sordid and consci
entiously wretched.
Last night one certainly had the feeling that there was a kind
STEPHEN SPENDER 621
of Restoration going on in England?perhaps throughout the

world. Perhaps this is because many of the young feel far more
need to establish their social identity than to criticize society. That
Matthew, at the age of 10, should spend days designing his Coat
of Arms, seems to show that he is living in the spirit of his age.
If he goes on like this, in ten years time he will be at some ball
like the Glenconners', one of the young men with a girl in a
cream-fruit-colored dress, her cheek pressed to his as they dance.
Yet of course there are young people who do not at all par
ticipate in the Restoration. For instance, I had luncheon today
with a young writer sent me by Frances Cornford. For his
National Service, this young man has chosen to work in hospitals
and mental institutions. As well as writing, in a bare, clear, very
truthful style, marred only by weak grammar and spelling, he
tries to be an artist and is quite a good draughtsman. His drawing
and writings of illness and insanity are most original. His whole
conversation is about madness and operations. We ate in a
Chinese Restaurant, and talking to him was like having a meal
during a rough Channel crossing. I kept on wondering whether
I would have to run out of the room and be sick, as I listened to
his descriptions of patients in the last stages of senility, of some
one cut open from the base of the neck to the pit of the stomach.
Occasionally he produced a drawing to render more realistic what
he was saying. He was amusing about the cockneys he works
with, also about Sisters and nurses in hospitals. He regards all
Sisters as pathological cases. Usually he is allowed to go to any
operation where he expresses a wish to make a drawing. But the
other day he was banned from the operating theatre on the
grounds that a Sister was being operated on for hernia.
July 3rd
Ever since I heard X?and Y?agree, the other day, that
they would count Auden as brilliantly intelligent but not "in
tellectual," I have been thinking off and on about this. What
they meant, of course, was that although exceptionally brilliant,

intelligent, and well read, Auden often does not employ the
methodical processes of intellectual argument. An example cited
was his writing that Tennyson was the stupidest poet in the
English language (in his Preface to his Tennyson Selected
Poems). It is a provoking remark and one sees what he means,
but it is not subject to proof. If he had argued this intellectually,
he would have had to compare the stupidity of Tennyson with
that of one or two other poets.
Having just read Auden's talk On Writing Poetry Today,
published in The Listener, it strikes me that no writer has stated
better the situation of being a poet in this time. In this essay,
Auden quotes a poem of D. H. Lawrence expressing the idea that
today whether you call yourself conformist or non-conformist
you may, just the same, be a worm. Lawrence also, although
extremely intelligent, was not an intellectual. Perhaps, though,
the writers best equipped to attack and criticize modern life have
to be more wasps or destroyers than intellectual whales. The
intellectual gets caught up in the methods of research and ex
position which are symptoms of the over-intellectualization to be
criticized. Lawrence, Auden, and Kierkegaard have it in common
that they treat their time as a gigantic encyclopedic body of in
formation and behavior against which they write ferocious com
ments in the margins. To be an intellectual is to be already partly
institutionalized.
Perhaps the weakness of Auden as compared with Lawrence is
that, after all, he is too impressed by the intellectuals, and does
make a show of trying to be one.
July 6th and 7th

Have spent the last two days in Hamburg. This city, which
I had last seen in June 1954, has been almost completely re
stored to the state in which it was in 1929, when I first went
there. In the 1920's the great passion of the Germans was to
STEPHEN SPENDER 623
build something new. This may have been because the first war
produced the combination of poverty and spiritual ruin against
a background of townscape doubtless shabby, but not destroyed.
The second world war produced terrible physical destruction,
followed within a few years by staggering material recovery
before many Germans had time to reflect on what had happened
to them spiritually. The Occupation, by taking over all re
sponsibility, provided people with a moral alibi.
The Germans of today, instead of wishing?as they did
after the first world war?to create new forms with which to
surround themselves, are simply anxious to use their prosperity
to fill in the gaps left by the war. They rebuild their bombed
cities to look exactly as they did before, not in their beauty but
in their ugliness, in much the same spirit perhaps as one goes to
the dentist and requires artificial teeth which are a replica of one's
lost real teeth. Filling in the gaps is the German passion today.
Here again one comes back to the theme of the Restoration in
which some observers say we are living. Hamburg certainly
gives the impression of Germany reconstructing proliferous bour
geois amenities. Every shop window attempts to put on show
Elegance of that special German kind which is so different from
any other kind of elegance elsewhere. Even the parcels in which
your purchases are wrapped have neat little tapes glued on, with
which to carry them.
Going into a toyshop called Kinderparadies, I noticed that the
paradise of German children is almost entirely mechanical. Prac
tically all the toys were of the constructional mechanical or aero
nautic kind. The only other beautifully made things I could
discover were some neat and pretty models?good enough for an
architectural display?of churches, farms, manors, etc.
The bookshops are packed with books on science and engineer
ing.
I went to the Europa College of the University. This is a
nice place, with buildings round a quadrangle, nice rooms for the
students, a fountain in the quad and so on. The students came

from all over the world. A warm, hopeful, touching atmosphere
of promise and good will. I was asked questions. An Indian
student, who rather monopolized the afternoon, wanted to per
suade me that he was right not to like Thomas Mann.
There is quite a lot of talk among German students I met about
their sense of belonging to a "new generation," though?as in
England?the qualities of this generation seem more difficult to
define than, for the young, they were in the '20's, '30's, or '40's.
Being "new" seemed largely to consist of the sense of a gap be
tween themselves and the old, and perhaps also of a grievance
that there was no Neuaufbau. One young man insisted to me
that his generation was not in the least represented by a writer like
Wolfgang Borchert. (Borchert, who was from Hamburg, was
an expressionist writer of nihilism and despair, very much in the
1920's manner. He died in 1945.) Quite evidently his world
of chaos had been built over by the Restoration, and the main
passion of the Germany of the moment is not to have chaos of
any kind.
Everything is rebuilt, and yet there is absolutely no new archi
tecture. It was a surprise to me to find that there are no great
German achievements in the cinema, which produced so much
after 1920. An anthology of poetry of the 1950's which I bought
seems to show that the most advanced kind of poetry being
written resembles the poetry of social conscience written in Paris
or London twenty years ago. However, an Expressionist An
thology has recently had a success, and the Expressionist painters
are now recognized as a great modern school.
In Germany, Hitlerism seems simply a ghost, a phase recol
lected beyond a background of ruins. After all, Hitler did not
go on long enough! Even Italian Fascism lasted ten years longer,
and it is amazing to reflect that Hitler only ruled from 1933 to
1945. A movement has to last at least twenty years to seem more
STEPHEN SPENDER 625
than a phase, however impressive its achievements and catas

trophic the results.
5y* *j* 2}* ?ji 5jC J|C
While I was in Hamburg, I noted down the outline of a short

story about an Austrian refugee cook called oddly Madame Gro
bois, whom we once had. This story was a sympathetic study of
a victim of our times, a very rare person and an eccentric, who
happened also to be an exquisite cook. Inevitably the story?
though this was not the point of it?might be taken to show that
one should be patient and sympathetic with refugees. My wife
and I visited Madame Grobois on her death bed, and reading my
sketch one would think we loved and pitied her partly on account
of her situation. I had scarcely finished writing this outline when
the telephone rang. X., a German refugee whom I had not seen
since 1941, was at the other end of the line. He is an extremely
clever, extremely unattractive, morbidly self-pitying character.
During the war he once complained to me that our boasts of
having freedom in England were vain and empty. His reason for
saying this was that when he had attempted to seduce a lady in a
train not only did she resist his attempts, but she turned out to be
a policewoman, and she arrested him. When I heard X?'s voice,
my heart sank, and I busied myself making excuses not to see
him. I asked him to send me information about himself, and
said that I would do my best to "help." But I had decided not
to help. All I lacked was the honesty to say so: I felt that he
understood this perfectly well.
July 17 th
Aida at Co vent Garden. A routine performance, which only
had one advantage: that of being sung in Italian. The scenery
and the costumes were in the vulgar Grand Opera manner which
always reminds me of the art nouveau style of certain stations of
the Paris M?tro. Every building done in this style looks like the
entrance to an Underground world. The dresses were glaringly
ugly, and Amneris, sung by Ebe Stignani, looked like a cook.

There was no attempt on the part of any of the singers to act.
I have mentioned the M?tro, and indeed, perhaps there is
some connection between operas done with international casts,
and Travel Agencies?a kind of musical American Express or
Cook's must make the arrangements whereby vast numbers of
singers are flown across seas and mountains and assembled, like
trucks, on the platform of an Opera House stage, in Paris, New
York, London, or Berlin.
July 18 th
Went to Stratford, to see Macbeth. Beyond High Wycombe,
the train runs through hundreds of miles of countryside that
seems all packed grass and hedges, quite unspoiled: through
Warwick, near Tewkesbury, all those places that seem nearer to
the Elizabethan than any other part of England. Stratford itself
is a bit disappointing, except for the stretch of the river near the
Memorial Theatre. The swans, the theatre itself, and the laid
out gardens with far too much stone about them, present an aspect
of England which seems all too characteristic of official tasteful
ness.
The performance was interesting. It opened with the stage as

a kind of frame round a picture with the three Weird Sisters at
the centre. There followed some rather uninspired pageantry.
The Sergeant's speech was effectively done, but there was little
excitement. One had the feeling of people trooping back and
forth across the stage, and in different directions. It was not till
later in the play that Olivier made any great impression on me as
Macbeth, and one was perhaps always a little too conscious of the
special effect he seemed to be seeking. This was to act Macbeth
as the visionary, someone who above all sees?perhaps a voyeur?
a kind of sick poet. He was haggard throughout,and gave no
impression of a Macbeth who had ever been in rude health. He
STEPHEN SPENDER 627
was hunched up, and lunged forward 5 with his staring eyes his
Macbeth had a slight suggestion about it of Richard III.
It was not until the line "Macbeth shall murder sleep" that the
performance seemed to me really to come alive. After this, one
recognized the extraordinary merits of Olivier's performance.
He made one feel the impact of every word, without losing speed
and direction in doing so. He also had moments of hectic, vio
lent activity of the kind which makes him one of the great athletes
of the English theatre. He is the only English actor who gives
the impression of controlled acting with his whole body. Mag
nificent as Gielgud is, he too often gives the impression of acting
in spite of his body, spiritually rising above it. And as for Donald
Wolfit?the other considerable Shakespearean-hero actor, he has
a body that seems of some powerful yet strange quality, like an
electric eel.
Vivien Leigh's Lady Macbeth has been criticized, but it seemed
to me that it had the virtue of relating well to that of Macbeth.
To a great extent, she interpreted Lady Macbeth as foil. And
this is what she?imagistically?is. When she reads Macbeth's
letter after the meeting with the Weird Sisters, she is foil to his
mind. When she holds out her hands covered with blood, they
balance his hands, which are also covered with blood. She
is his fantastically beautiful foil, balancing his wildness with her
hysterical calm, in the scene of Banquo's banqueting or non
banqueting (as one likes to look at it) ghost. The sleep-walking
scene she did in a clear sustained way, like the single line of a solo
instrument in an adagio. The Doctor and the waiting woman
muttered against her pure tone and beautiful profile.
July 22nd
This evening went to the performance of Much Ado About
Nothing with Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud. This is the
third time within three or four years that I have seen this same
performance, which has become a classic of contemporary Shake
spearean productions. I first saw it at Stratford, three years ago,

then at the Phoenix Theatre, and now tonight. Gielgud, the
producer, turns the play into something which leaves the im
pression of a dance in which he and Peggy are the central danc
ing couple. His whole conception of the play finds its centre in
Beatrice's "I was born under a dancing star." Peggy and he
give their interchanges a darting lightness which is the equiv
alent, in the action, of wit.
All the same, seeing Much Ado for the third time, I found
myself irritated by the absurdities of the plot, and the fooleries
and malapropisms of Dogberry become tiresome. There is a
kind of slum area of stupidity in this play which it is difficult for
the illumination of the dance to conquer.
Gielgud has developed a way of creasing his eyes as though
they are blinking in too great a light. This gives his face a mask
like look at times.
Walking home through the London streets, and seeing people
in pubs, I was struck again by a thought which often obsesses me:
that our world ought to be redeemed by art. It has become crass
to think this, and yet the thought is one against which I seem to
break myself.
Most people, while they wish for all sorts of improved facil
ities?motors, radios, television, etc?do not wish to live in a
town in which at the turn of a corner they encounter something
beautiful?a statue, or a fountain. Yet to anyone who cares
about beauty, ugliness is the most depressing thing in the world,
and no amount of utilities can redeem cities from its effects.
Also?although they may not understand this?perhaps the
lives of people are far more depressed by ugly surroundings
than they realize.
To feel like this, is to make a prison of the town in which one
lives, to think of contemporary living as beating against prison
bars, to long to live in times and places which are irretrievably of
the past. Yet when one considers how many people today do
STEPHEN SPENDER 629
want to live in some other time, and do live nostalgically in some

past they imagine so powerfully that it surrounds them with a
day-dream lasting for years, probably there are a great many
people who hate the present simply for its ugliness.
These thoughts arise from the performance of John and Peggy.
They are at the centre of a slum which they turn into a dance.
They are the golden waltzing pair who transform everything to
air and lightness. One goes out of the brilliant theatre into the
darkness, and one is immensely grateful to them.
July 24th
Gave a luncheon party at home for Hugh Gaitskell and his
wife, Sundrin Datta, the great Bengali writer, and his wife, and
Kay Cicellis, the Greek novelist.
I asked Hugh Gaitskell about our switchback economy in
England in which one quarter we are being told we are doing
extraordinarily well and, the next, given the impression that the
country is on the verge of bankruptcy and complete catastrophe.
He said he thought the ups and downs of the switchback were
exaggerated, but that it was impossible for us not to have ups and
downs unless there was a time in which all classes of society were
equally conscious of the whole situation and equally prepared to
act responsibly and in the same way. He did not think that our
bad periods were quite as bad as it was necessary?for the sake of
overcoming them?to make them out to be. On the whole, he
seemed optimistic.
His enemies?particularly in his own party?try to make out
that Gaitskell is a cold bureaucrat, uninterested in anything
except official figures and his own ambitions. I have always
found him much more interested in things outside politics than
most politicians, much more open-minded, amusing and warm.
The quality which he has to an astonishing degree is coolness?
imperturbability, and that is exactly what the Bevanites lack. He
combines this with clear-headedness and mastery of the knowl

edge required for his job.
Went to King Lear dont at the Palace Theatre by the Shake

speare Memorial Theatre Company. This was the performance
that has been savagely criticized in the entire press, particularly on
account of the settings and costumes by the Japanese artist, Isamu
Noguchi. The dresses?to me?seemed objectionable; the set
tings far less, if at all so. The effect of the dresses was to clothe
the characters as though they were chessmen in a scene from Alice
in Wonderland.
Another vice of this production was its treating the minor roles
as though they were token roles surrounding the "real" roles of
the lead. This is a tendency of actor-managers: much worse ex
amples of treating the play as though it was an occasion for the
performance of the main actor were Orson Welles's Othello,
and?still worse?Alec Guiness's Hamlet.
Claire Bloom represents another vice of recent Shakespearean
productions, which is that of sticking in a film actor or actress for
reasons which seem only what are called "Box Office." On the
stage, Claire Bloom rarely rises above being a kind of model or
beautiful puppet?always looking exactly the same?speaking in
her hard-as-nails voice the part of Juliet or whoever else she
happens to represent. She was absolutely incapable of the spon
taneous pure-line voice of Cordelia. The only occasion on which
she looked nearer than a hundred miles from the role of Cordelia
was when she was lying limply dead in Lear's arms. There is
something about the back of her neck faintly Cordelia-like when
she is prostrate.
There were magnificent moments in Lear. I doubt whether I
have ever seen Gielgud himself more splendid and wonderful.
He now enters effortlessly into what is most difficult in this part: I
mean, simply to be Lear throughout, quite apart from doing all
the things Lear has to do. To be Lear, not only in action, but
also in repose.

Stephen Spender Pages From A Journal

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Stephen Spender Pages From A Journal

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Pages from a Journal

Author(s): Stephen Spender

May 20thy 1955

I read in the newspapers a report of an article by Aneurin

ration of standards, quality, etc, but simply of the idea of private

Conversation with N. She observed that it is no use dreaming

John Craxton and I went to a really appalling performance

I flew to Vienna to attend the meeting of the PEN Club.

moustache, a woebegone appearance at once solemn and comic.

resolution, and discussion of it, out of order. This made Silone

June 28th {London)

of Restoration going on in England?perhaps throughout the

they meant, of course, was that although exceptionally brilliant,

July 6th and 7th

students, a fountain in the quad and so on. The students came

than a phase, however impressive its achievements and catas

While I was in Hamburg, I noted down the outline of a short

ugly, and Amneris, sung by Ebe Stignani, looked like a cook.

The performance was interesting. It opened with the stage as

spearean productions. I first saw it at Stratford, three years ago,

want to live in some other time, and do live nostalgically in some

combines this with clear-headedness and mastery of the knowl

Went to King Lear dont at the Palace Theatre by the Shake

You might also like