A Revolutionary Life

120 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW subject with the repetitive skill of an accomplished lecturer. But puzzles remain. Elsewhere Hynes has praised Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, to my mind one of the most brilliant anti-fascist documentaries the decade has produced. Why is it not discussed here where the documentary is canonized as a form? No women in the canon? A great deal of interesting fiction is revived. But where are those anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal novels of Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children and The House ofAll Nations? Where is Jean Rhys, who has surely captured the '30's sense of alienation, dispossession and loss of status as well as the men? Why is 77ie Waves absent, when its dead hero, Percival, embodies better than anything else in the period the Auden generation's romantic Parsifal-tike yearning for heroic chaste male youth? Where is The Years, that extraordinary dialogue between the loudspeaker and the human voice, which documents 'history' from the 1880's through the 1930's and envisions the artist as charwoman to the world? What about Margaret Llewelyn Davies' Life as We Have Known It which records the struggles of working women's lives in their own words? Auden was a good poet; his ear and his eye made no errors. But he wasn't the new Shelley or Blake. His heart and mind were always making mistakes. He is in the end the poet of Christianity and its consolations, not the poet of humanity and freedom. He sought in politics and religion salvation, forgiveness, authority. He wanted to be saved, to escape responsibility, to be sent on a secret mission. These attitudes make great spies, not great poets. Auden is in a sense washed in the blood of the lamb in this canonization. But greater claims are made, that he wielded the "strict and adult pen" he urged on Isherwood in his birthday poem. More often the pen was childish, boyish is perhaps a kinder word, and permissive. The austerity of Auden's poet's eye and ear needed an equally austere mind and heart. The decade deserves a better historian and Auden's poetry a stricter and more adult analysis. This is a dry liberal book about a decade of radicalism, wet with the blood, sweat and tears of those who cared and still await a caring memorial. Jane Marcus A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. New York : Pantheon Books, 1977, 829 pp., $17.95. William Morris was the first creative artist of major stature in the world to take his stand, consciously and without a shadow of compromise, with the revolutionary working class: to participate in the day-to-day work of building the Socialist movement: to put his brain and his genius at its disposal in the struggle. -E.P. Thompson. E.P. Thompson's biographical and critical study establishes William Morris as a revolutionary for our time as well as placing him in the forefront of the history of British socialism. A revision of his 1955 study of Morris, Thompson's book is a major reevaluation of this monumental figure from three interrelated perspectives: the origins and processes of his political development, the role he played as both theorist and activist during the beginnings of revolutionary socialism in Britain, and the increasing relevance he holds for contemporary Marxists. As a detailed account of the political rebirth of the English working classes in the 1880s, the book can be seen as a continuation of the author's The Making of the English Working Class. 121 REVIEWS Understanding Morris's life and significance should be a simple matter, since the man himself was so open and straightforward. But from the moment that Morris announced his conversion to socialism in 1883, at the age of fifty, the opportunities to see him whole have been few. Responsibility for obscuring his life and work can be divided equally among nineteenth-century sectarian socialists, liberals, conservatives, and Marxists past and present. It is not surprising then that from the day of Morris's conversion he should have been reviled in the bourgeois press. To them he had lost his...