Noonday & Night

Man is changed by his living; but not fast enough.

His concern to-day is for that which yesterday did not occur.

In the hour of the Blue Bird and the Bristol Bomber, his thoughts are appropriate to the years of the Penny Farthing;

He-tosses at night who at noonday found no truth.

Four years ago a young English writer, Wystan Hugh Auden, incorporated these lines in the chorus of a play. Auden's poems were at that time widely talked about and widely misunderstood--with some reason. They seemed brilliant, veiled, obscurely revolutionary. By October 1939, however, few Englishmen could still look blank over such lines as these. Their meaning was all too painfully clear.

The most significant ideas of War, as of everything else, may sometimes be found in the words and deeds of free writers. In Germany, in Russia, and to a great extent in Italy this sensitive register no longer exists, or if it does, remains hidden. In France and England no "war" books have yet appeared. But by last week many writers had tentatively or tartly expressed themselves.

At least three first-rate English writers were paying the U. S. the compliment of "exile"--which at least two great U. S. writers (Henry James and T. S. Eliot) had paid to England in the past. W. H. Auden (rhymes with applaudin'), whose search for noonday truth took him to Iceland in 1936 (Letters From Iceland), then to Spain during the Civil War, then to China (Journey to a War), last week had taken an apartment in Brooklyn and intended to stay. Bony-faced, eager, un-slicked, Auden told a reporter that he saw one hopeful prospect from the "muddle" in Europe; a general realization that violent revolution is as impotent as violent war. Said he: "In America nationalism doesn't mean anything; there are only human beings. That's how the future must be. . . ."

In Hollywood, Christopher Isherwood, Auden's old friend and collaborator, was at work last week on a scenario for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Richard Aldington, who came to his conclusions about war ten years ago (Death of a Hero), left the Riviera last February to settle in the U. S., summered in Peace Dale, R. I., and last week was in Manhattan.

But most English writers remained in England, where the vast armory of English literature was being mobilized along with the rest of the Empire. In the first week of the war the London Times recommended, for blackout nights, a reperusal of such "lenitive" 19th Century giants as Trollope and Dickens. Publishers adopted slogans like "Always carry your gas mask; always carry a book." The London Library resolved to stay open. Publisher Geoffrey Faber publicly suggested that writing a book was "the most valuable piece of national service which an author can render. . . ."

National service of this sort was indeed already being rendered by talents so widely diverse as Mystery Writer Dorothy Sayers, who wrote cheerio editorials for the newspapers, and Herbert Read, art critic and scholar, who prepared an anthology of prose and verse to be called (for its destination) The Knapsack--"just the sort of thing I wanted myself in the last war."

Most yeomanly English novelist since Galsworthy, Sir Hugh Walpole was finishing a long Elizabethan adventure story "to keep myself quiet." He was also doing semi-official propaganda work. Said he: "Because people realize the futility of war much more fully than in 1918, the result may be some new sort of realistic idealism."

William Gerhardi (pronounced Jer-hardi), suave novelist whose undergraduate impression of Winston Churchill is famous ("poor stuff for a grown-up man"), signed up in the Officers' Emergency Reserve. Born in St. Petersburg, he thought it "reasonable" of Russia to wish her own former Baltic provinces to remain Baltic, not German. As for himself, "my home is in darkness, my income in jeopardy, my hopes for a career non-existent." Evelyn Waugh, creator of the bright young thing, observed with suspicious blandness that "the war is an extension of our normal habits of life; fighting has been a universal human activity and will remain so"

Two men who had nothing to say, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but their silence was eloquent. As frontline officers between 1914 and 1918, their experiences with the universal human activity gave rise to the two straightest and grimmest accounts of World War I produced in England, respectively Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Goodbye to All That. Last week Sassoon was in seclusion; Graves had volunteered again.

To Stephen Spender, most lyrical of left-wing poets, the Soviet-German pact seemed to "make nonsense of most of the left-wing writing of the past ten years." He saw the war as "the most extraordinary confusion, in which each side is fighting to produce chaos in the other before it has lost control of itself. ... As I haven't been told to do anything, I can devote myself to writing, perhaps my posthumous works."

Into a war so gingerly regarded from the start by almost every mature writer of Britain, many writers were going while yet immature and unknown. Nobody could foresee who might survive it, nor what writing might come of it. Yet there were many to remember Wilfred Owen, the round-faced, silent young officer who was killed a week before the Armistice in 1918, and the few terrible poems published after his death:

Red lips are not so red

As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

In France almost all writers were patriots, and those who were not did little talking. Notable exception was Jean Giono (The Song of the World), pacifist and peasant legendmaker of the Basses-Alps, who in September 1938 organized the peasants of his province to revolt against mobilization. This time Giono wrote the gendarmerie of his village that he would not obey the mobilization order. He was clapped into jail (TIME, Oct. 23).

In the Commissariat of Information were such pillars of French letters as Paul Claude), the Roman Catholic poet and onetime Ambassador to the U. S., and Paul Valery, who presented the first wartime performance of the Comedie Fran-Qaise. Andre Maurois took a post in the censorship under Jean Giraudoux (TIME,

Sept. 18). Quite likely to be killed in the war was Andre Malraux (Man's Fate, Man's Hope), who officially broke with revolutionary parties, was turned down by the draft as substandard, immediately tried to enlist in the most suicidal branch of the service, the tank corps.

The war drove Jean Cocteau to the Ritz as a guest of Couturiere Gabrielle Chanel. Said he: "I consider that during a war of this gravity the duty of a writer who has no official post is to make himself until further orders into the form of a zero and to pass that ring over the finger of France. . . ."

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