The Temple

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Customer Reviews

One of my favorite books - unique perspective on the Reich
I read Stephen Spender's The Temple many years ago, when it first came out. It is an absolutely unique work, in that he wrote part of it back in the early 30s when the storm clouds were forming over Germany -- and then finished and polished it in the 80s, once one could look back on the whole of the 30s and 40s with a more objective eye.

He is also just such a wonderful writer - beautiful prose, lovingly rendered. I am sure that anyone with a fine eye for elegant prose will love this book as I did!

2010-04-02 | "Ernest" (Denmark) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A Touching Memoir
While some people may find The Temple flawed, I was quite touched by its vividness and immediacy. Especially in the first part, it made me feel like I was there in 1929 Germany enjoying that summer with the tremendous intensity and uncertainty of youth that Spender so beautifully captures. Yes, there isn't much of a plot and the writing is uneven, but this is all about recording the experience, fictional though it may be, and The Temple succeeds spectacularly at doing that.

The second part takes place in the winter of 1932 when the Nazis are about to take power. Spender contrasts the freedom of the Weimar Republic with the oppression of the Third Reich by depicting 1929 in Summer light while the impending darkness of the Nazi's rise in late 1932 occurs in gloomy wet weather mostly in the dark. This not-too-original technique works for me even if it is obvious. Paul, the English narrator of the story observes the rise of the Nazis without fully accepting its reality, and the German characters are either in total denial or casting their lot with the Nazis, whom they can see are going to prevail. It's all too believable.

So for me, The Temple is a big thumbs up. It's intensity and immediacy more than make up for its flaws in style, pacing, and plot.

2007-01-29 (Milwaukee, WI, USA) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4

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Mediocre
Despite the "hot" cover and interesting historical period involved, this book is actually quite dull and poorly written. Spender is known as a poet and memoirist, not a novelist. There is no narrative pace, the characters are thinly drawn, and the plot is meandering. It is interesting as an artifact in the Auden-Isherwood-Spender literary history, for those who care, not as a novel in itself. Let the reader be warned.

2001-06-24 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Do not go to the gym - read this instead
This simply told but sincere and intelligent story captured me. So much has been written on the subject of Germany, before, during, and after World War II... I felt relieved but also invited by the apparent simplicity of the text. It betrays the underlying emotions and discoveries, which are poignant and real, and brings the experiences of a different time closer. I was reminded of the temporal, fragile nature of every human constellation, be it family or friends, so it makes sense that I found the book in my stair well... Finally, it was very refreshing to read a nonpolitical, nonmoralizing book on the experiences of a young gay man, focusing on the human traits of emotions, a sense of belonging, and friendship. Especially the description of the fascination with health and the body as a machine at that time should be pertinent for our culture at present.

1999-10-01 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 4

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Letters to Christopher: Stephen Spender's Letters to Christopher Isherwood, 1929-39

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Customer Reviews

Lovely
Lovely book of letters: best read in conjunction with "Christopher and His Kind" by Isherwood (to get the other side of the story).

1997-02-11 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Stephen Spender Journals 1939-1983

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New Collected Poems of Stephen Spender

Description

Stephen Spender, along with his friends W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and C. Day Lewis, rose to prominence in the 1930s, writing powerfully of the fear and paranoia of a continent heading towards war. By the time of his death in 1995 he had established a distinguished reputation as a poet, critic, editor and translator. This New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Brett, gathers seven decades of verse from Poems (1933) to Dolphins (1994) and the late uncollected work. Reordering the thematic principle of the 1985 Collected Poems, this edition returns to a book-by-book chronology and allows the reader to experience, for the first time, the full development and range of his career.

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Selected Poems of Stephen Spender

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Stephen Spender, the son of a journalist, was born in London in 1909. He was educated at University College, Oxford, where he met, among others, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, with whom he was to develop a poetics of engagement, writing powerfully of the confusion and alarm of 1930s Europe. He visited Spain during the Civil War, in 1937, where he assisted the Republican cause with propaganda activity. His post-war memoir World within World was recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to have come out of the 1930s and 1940s, distilling a distinctively personal, humanistic socialism. His poetry has been praised for its exploratory candour, its personal approach to the stresses of modernity, and its exact portraiture of social and political upheaval. Grey Gowrie's new selection offers a timely and incisive revaluation of Spender's substantial poetic corpus.

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World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (Modern Library)

Description

"In this book I am mainly concerned with a few themes: love; poetry; politics; the life of literature....I believe obstinately that, if I am able to write with truth about what has happened to me, this can help others....In this belief I have risked being indiscreet, and I have written occasionally of experiences which seem strange to me myself, and which I have not seen discussed else-where." So begins Stephen Spender's autobiography, widely acclaimed as the twentieth century's greatest memoir.

Spender was one of his generation's most celebrated poets, a writer living at the intersection of literature and politics in Europe between the two world wars. His portraits of his friends--Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden,
W. B. Yeats, and Christopher Isherwood--render a romantic world of literary genius. Spender uses a poet's language to create an honest and tender exploration of amity and the many possibilities of love. First published in 1951, World Within World simultaneously shocked and bedazzled the literary establishment for its frank discussion of Eros in the modern world.

Out of print for several years, this Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the critic John Bayley and an Afterword Spender wrote in 1994 describing his reaction to the charges that David Leavitt plagiarized this autobiography in a novel.

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Customer Reviews

Historically fascinating, wonderfully insightful, beautifully written
I do not think that memoirs get any more personal, or more beautifully expressive, than Spender's. It is prose penned by a poet...wonderfully descriptive, and (almost alarmingly) frank. Within the first few pages, I became utterly convinced that Spender would have been ill-suited for anything other than a life of poetry.

I originally acquired the book after reading an excerpt in an old 1940s issue of Partisan Review, and I was fairly seduced by Spender's vivid depictions of the hedonistic tendencies exhibited by young Germans he visited just prior to the disintegration of the Weimar Republic.

Spender's insights into human nature, however, all so poetically rendered, were what I most marvelled at. The book also is packed with historical, political, and social commentary regarding the period in which he lived: Spender was an intimate of Auden, he aided Republican Spain during the Civil War, he was a Communist and a bi-sexual, and he served in a fire brigade during the bombing of London. Despite my own personal stances against his early political and sexual proclivities (both of which he apparently renounced in later years), I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Aside from a few eccentricities regarding punctuation, I seriously doubt that autobiography has been written quite as well as this by anyone.

2007-08-18 (Lilburn, GA United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A poignant memoir, although ultimately sad.
I like Stephen Spender. That is, of course, I like his poetry that I've read as well as his introduction to my favorite novel:Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano. I like this book too. But, first of all, there's altogether too much name-dropping, which becomes rather tedious at times. Some of the anecdotes are quite rum, like the ones involving Lady Ottoline Morrel. But all this Bloomsbury-Virginia Woolf business gets on one's nerves (well, mine anyway) after a while. I don't think Spender's homosexual relationship is the most important thing in the book; though it was doubtless courageous of Spender to include it as well as indispensable to getting this book back in print! The most important thing in the book is the difference in the pre- versus post- Spanish Civil War mindset among sensitive, well-bred intelllectuals among whom Spender was a figure. Before the war, Spender says, it seemed that individuals (particularly idealists) could make a difference. After the war, all that had not been killed fighting Franco (and there were many) were disillusioned and glum, especially Spender. Finally, this book has a sad tone that runs from Spender's school days to his middle age. He was a cultured, gifted writer who had not, by his middle ages, produced a "great work." And, despite the Queen's Gold Medal and Knighthood in later years, his melancholy grew worse. He speaks of himself at the end of the book as "rotted by a modicum of success" and admits that "My mistake was to think that my own nature would make everything easy."-The strange thing is that he didn't shake this attitude off. He was only halfway through his life. I was going to make put forth some hypotheses as to why, but, really, it's anybody's guess. Isn't it?

2001-03-18 (Greenville, SC USA) | Helpful Votes: 14 | Rating: 4

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Excellent Memoir
Memoirs have become ubiquitous recently, a favored literary form. World Within World is one of the best. Stephen Spender, one of England's leading twentieth century poets and literary figures wrote this book less than half way into his long life, covering his youth and early middle age through World War Two. While this book became notorious a few years back as the source of a lawsuit for plagiarism brought by Spender against David Leavitt over his book While England Sleeps, the book has merit far beyond the controversy. The incident which forms the basis of the dispute, Spender's rescue efforts on behalf of a former lover during the Spanish Civil War, is merely one of the interesting and illuminating episodes and set pieces of this book. Spender, growing up in the wake of World War One, in a well-connected family, encountered some of the leading literary figures of the Twentieth Century. He was a contemporary and friend of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Cyril Connolly, whom he incisively sketches and analyzes, both in terms of personality and work. He was taken under the wings of such giants as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, who form the basis of two fascinating portraits. Most memorable perhaps is his description of a meeting with William Butler Yeats at Lady Ottoline Morrill's salon that started out quite disastrously but was rescued by Lady Ottoline's desperate telephone call to Woolf. Not only does he describe the literary scene in England, but also the atmosphere of Weimar Germany, Civil War Republican Spain and World War Two England. Indeed we get a glimpse of the Berlin boarding house immortalized by Isherwood and later in Cabaret. As memorable as he is in describing others, Spender is balanced, acute and unsparing in his self-analysis. Aware of the characteristics of his work that distinguishes it from that of others, he gives insight into his creative methods and process, rescuing poetry from misty philosophizing and dogmatic pronouncements. There is little self-aggrandizement or puffery and very little malice if any in this book. Its style is clear and its content admirable. It is well worth reading.

2001-02-13 (Flushing, NY United States) | Helpful Votes: 13 | Rating: 5

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