Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad EL-Din

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival started on 20 March with, according to the official programme, 173 events. This great event coincides with W H Auden's centenary. We studied Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeile at the English Section of Fouad Al-Awal (now Cairo) University. Those were fervent years, filled with enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge. English literature and especially poetry provided us with much stimulation in our quest for a sense of self, collective as well as individual. And we lapped it up with an intellectual hunger that reflected not only our age but our turn of mind. The three poets, with other famous poets and novelists, like Hemingway, Aragon, Malreau and Orwell volunteered in the International Brigade that was fighting against dictatorship in the Spanish Civil War which broke out in mid July 1936.

That war, which lasted for three terrible years, was recognised as an enactment and symbol of the struggle between Fascism and Democracy, dictatorship and freedom, right and left. It was, in a way, leading Europe into World War II, during which this dichotomy was played out on a larger and more devastating scale. Out of that bloody conflict came many notable works of poetry and fiction. I remember our lecturer's oral rendering of W H Auden's poem, Spain :

Tomorrow for the young, the poets

exploding like bombs,

The walks by the lake, the weeks

of perfect communion.

Tomorrow the bicycle rules

Through the suburbs on summer evenings.

But today the struggle,

Today the deliberate increase in the

chances of death.

The conscious acceptance of guilt

in the necessary murder,

Today the expanding of powers

on the flat ephemeral pamphlet

and the boring meeting,

The stars are dead.

The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day,

and the time is short, and

History to the defeated

May say alas but cannot help nor pardon.

There is no doubt that Western literature was, in the words of Malcolm Bradbury, "reanimated by the Civil War. It would go on being remembered for years, mainly as the locale of lost socialist dreams, the taking of sides, the ending of innocence. In the words of Louis MacNeile in his autobiography The Strings are False, "The young men for whom the Spanish War had been a crusade in white armour, a quest of the trail open only to the pure in heart, felt as if their world had burst, there was nothing left but a handful of limp rubber rags, it was no good trying any more."

But to go back to Auden. On the occasion of his centenary, the Culture Supplement of the Sunday Times republished "his vivaciously funny views on creative writing". And vivacious they most certainly were:

"It is surely astonishing how many young people of both sexes," he writes, "when asked what they want to be in life, reply 'a writer', and by writing they mean -- dreadful word -- 'creative writing'."

What is surprising, according to Auden, is that a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession "should think of writing as a solution". When this great number of untalented people express a wish to write, he reasons, the public must think of literature as a profession that does not need a special talent, or that writing is the only occupation today in which one is free to do as one likes.

Auden then goes on to explain the writing of poetry, and the audience of the poet, which consists of "myopic school teachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow poets". This means, Auden goes on, "that, in fact, he writes for his fellow poets."