The Burning Cactus

by Stephen Spender

[Random House, $2.00]

IN his latest volume Stephen Spender turns from poetry and the essay to the short story. Five in number, these stories concern themselves with those neuroses and personal tragedies produced by the impacts of an unstable civilization on the highly strung and sensitive.

‘The Dead Island,’ first and longest of the collection, investigates the problems of a young dipsomaniac and of a woman on the verge of a third divorce. ‘The Cousins ’ represents a blood tie complicated by considerations of race and wealth. The title story is that of a young egoist twisted and racked into neurasthenia by the post-war hardships of his earliest years. A political fanatic on his deathbed and afterwards furnishes the theme of ‘Two Deaths,’ while a ‘pensionnat for the backward and nervous sons of rich people’ is the setting for ‘By the Lake,’ As short stories, they are not entirely successful — situations like these are hardly of that stuff which makes conventional or familiar literature. They are ‘special eases,’ and, as such, important.

The case history is a comparative newcomer to the material of fiction, although not a fortuitous one. Wherever the conditions and circumstances of life spawn unrest, insecurity, and maladjustment, there is ripe and fruitful substance for the artist. Of that unhappy segment of society most affected and bewildered by this state of affairs, Spender writes with a splendid articulateness: ‘Their life was a competition of roaring speeds rushing towards the farcical destruction which was their winning post, and excusing themselves by subtle advertisements appealing to tolerance and pity.’ These are, in reality, the living dead. Yet there remain always those few who assert their capacity to make distinctions without multiplying them, and to live in the truest sense. Of these: ‘She herself was the explorer. The dead are heaped together. But the living are alone. They are continually being forced to alter their lives.’ An analogy to Proust would not be out of order.

But although I have no quarrel with — indeed only the highest praise for — Spender’s choice of material or with the icy, intellectual perspective in which he sees it, it does seem to me unhappy that his embellishments should so often clutter and obscure his narrative. Only a faulty discrimination, for example, could offer as equivalently excellent images such disparate ones as that which depicts an embarrassed young man as feeling ‘immensely tall and out of place, like a tower, with bells clanging in his head,’ and another which states that ‘the notes of the organ blazed like twigs burning invisibly in the air,’ or, again, conceives of young women in a drawing-room as ‘darting bronzed minnows breasted with coloured pullovers ’! A talent as rare as Spender’s owes itself a more disciplined expression.

PAUL HOFFMAN