Volume 24, Number 10 · June 9, 1977
Goodbye to Britain
By Karl Miller
The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s
by Samuel Hynes
Viking, 430 pp., $12.50
Marx predicted that when the class war reached its Armageddon, there would be defections to the proletariat from the enemy side. The ruling class would crumble, and 'a small part' of it would break away 'to make common cause with the revolutionary class, the class which holds the future in its hands.' That small part duly broke away, and could look and feel like the blessed remnant that religion had promised to save from the burning: it was now on the right side of the 'justice' which revolution—in the manner of a religion—had undertaken to dispense. Samuel Hynes has written a book about a small part of that small part. It is about the writing that was done in England, during the 1930s, by half a dozen men who could be considered, and who could sometimes consider themselves, defectors of the sort that Marx had in mind.
Review, 3283 words
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