THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200820003-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 4, 2004
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: June 1, 1969
• Content Type: BOOK

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'? THE YEAR OF ME YOUNG REBELS. By SteOteii:;?
Spender. Random Rouse. 186 pp. $4.95.
l':By Alfred Kazin e.
'Nothing in years has so disturbed and enlivened old
liberals, radicals, rebels, as the current "youth unrest."
Ancient protesters and solid anti-Communists of my
generation, who had a right to expect quiet and re-
? &peeled professorships after having been disappointed .!
in every social ideal except making money, now- find
themselves in constant battle with students, colleagues,
:?wives, children, over rum. ritgrst is that unanticipated
? ,t phalanx for radicalizing America, the student radicals,
i ;?
, now a race apart, who say rude things to teachers n . ? ?
..vate as well as to .administrators in public, show no re-'. ?
. spect for learning, tradition, propriety, property, who
perversely attack the 'Pentagon" by. occupying the 1.
Dean's
1- Dean's office, scream "Racist!" at anyone who doesn't
. believe in open enrollment from Negro high schools,
' ? and apply moral pressure in ways that. turn every dis..
. agreement into a test of social morality.,
? The worst of it is, the young ? the professionally
young, ,the militantly radical young, the unrestingly
h.:young ? make old rebels feel guilty. Obviously ours is
?still an idealistic nation, for why else should the young's ?
ideals of total social justice and racial togetherness .
!' have such ?a shaming effect on the middle-aged? A 13os-
? .
ton business man, Harvard, '44, said the other day to a'
. member of the class of '69: "Why are you More moral,
than your mothers and fathers? Are. your parents so:..
crass? Am I so devoid of sympathy for the poor?" The
young devil replied: "We have more time. 'You are
? ^ so immersed in your own lives. We can do things, and '
I hope fifteen years from now, when the others aro mak-
? ing new demands, we will still have the flexibility to
:;,consider them."
,???- The "young" make the others feel guilty because they ,
.; are still the party of hope and so of action, not the party ?
,of failures and excuses. "They" make "us" feel guilty
? because at least they believe that the age of super-tech-
1: ? nology justifies and makes possible some lighteninn, of
traditional oppression: which has alwaya.been Utopia.
I:: The young shame those too concerned with owning,',
L. saving, securing, bossing?with trying to mend or to
?
4..e? . stave off one 'of the thousand ,crises that the "secure"..:;;;
I.'. arc heir to. Whereas the young 11)41,4 on crisis, sleep on
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i3y Gz1brie! Gersh
? THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS. By Stephen
Spender. Random House. S4.95; paperback, SI.95.
American student activists would regard Stephen
Spender as a reactionary. For there is no reactionary
like the one who hes hved through the agonies of. the
10:1s and who has taken the present student revolts as
a sudden, =expected revival of his own youthful
' dreams. Yet for all this and his association with the
? Congress of Cultural Freedom, Spender has written a
bock that illuzennates the 'meaning of the student
? rabz.,:dens that. hnve convulsed so many universities.
. l-is book consists of our impressionistic descriptions
of student views and activities in New York, Paris,
Praene and Berlin, concluding with three chapters in
? winch he attempts to make sense of it all. Un-
fon.u:lately, interspeesed among these chapters are
(
, such ierelevancies as a memento on his bafflement at
,\,
the Enounter-Cffair, to illustrate the 'cynicism of
governments." .
?
At Columbia University. Spender Nees asked whether
the student revolt of last spring reminded him?of the
Spanish Civil War in which he had been deeply involv-
ed, and he tells us that it did in certain ways2He men-.\-
-tions s:nall parallels uik the passionate telephoning,
ann the flow of messeges and messengers. But in a.: ..
more important way Spender seams to be reminded of
Spain when he assumes that ? now as then ? revolu-
tionary idealism is an expression of youth and will ?
yield to disillusionment with the passage of time.,
Scencier believes that whatever the course followed
by the administration at Columbia' during the con- ?,.
vulsion, the result \eoeld have been the same. For so-ee
dal and psychological reasons many students want
:neermegthlwee:.: and continuing through the
eemmer menthe, :,:-:cwcasu will publish book re- ? '
'e /.' tO eupn:ernent boo:: coverage in special
erntnetal 'nestles
c ck Iknene on June 8, June 22,
^ 13 end, Aug. 17 and in Family Magazine each
`Ww.ineenay. Full-scale publication of 2ook Week
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? such confrontation, ckifining themselves through
tagonism to the university. Here, as in other universi-:
? , ties, he found students eschewing long-range politicel? q
,ostrategy like that of student movements of the 120s,
f:10 zing and personalizing the issues and, above all,:
1.)elieving, in spontaneity. Riots, sit-ins, the occupation or
? .:?4:,V-ibillidines ? all have taken the place of organization,:,
. a:fid program and often seem to relieve the sense of
" frustration exacerbated by the difficulties of explaining':
why it is felt.
With understanding and compassion, Spenticr re-. ;
counts the determination of the students of Prague to? -
win the very liberty and affluence the ideologues of the:,:
West reject. It upsets him that the \Western New Left'
disgraced itself by criticizing the Czech experiment el
/ 'der pubcck which believes that freedom can be bnlit
into a Communist system that shakes off the legacy of.
? Stalinism. To others, however, the plight of the Czech
student underlined the narrowness of the New Left's
preoccupations, for the Czech students faced enemies
. in the form of Stalinist prisons and Red censorship,.;
while the RuddseDutschkes and Cohn-Bendits behaved.'
like modern counterparts of Bikuninist romantics for
.whom even Marx and Lenin had contempt.
So sympathetic is Spender's treatment of the ntu-e
dent revolt that some may regard'-the final conclusion .1
naive. "Efe believes that perpetual revolutionists can.:
' co-exist with serious academics, making a pact of non- "
interference. He argues that if the revolutionists con-
centrated on important social issues like over-
'population and city planning instead of ill-defined
revolutionary aims or trivial issues like university
? . ? discipline, such co-existence might be useful. ?
Wilether one agrees with this formula for student '
peace, the book should be savored for the pleasure of its fringe benefits: an account of Allen Ginsberg is.j ?
? the hippies, a brief but succinct portrait of prewar Ox-
ford and, more important, o.n examination of obscene ?
journalism, an offshoot of the student revolution. All
? this adds up to a stimulating .appraisal of the student
revolt by a middle-aged intellectual, whose
? humaneness and breadth of vision are equal to the
.complexity of the subject.
Gabriel Gush tenches at Long Island University
.,2065108/230: GIALIFEesavirnisoweagoGEMDIN-1
':gieNctlion and The Saturday Review.
-
The New York Times Bo
Approved For Release 2005/08/122 ivSykliA8
The Year
significance of liberated sex, ob-
scenity and the underground press
as a kind of cultural politics.
0
Of the Young
Spender understands that ,the stu-
o
Mr. Newfield, author of "A Pro-
!
I . phetic Minority," is a political
ok Review P
, -74
8-01350R00020081'000311`4"
59,-4.0 '
seems to remind Spender of the
! anarchists he saw fighting in Spairi50 a t
30 years ago.
Rebels columnist for The Village Voice.
I dent occupations of Columbia
!' the Sorbonne were, since there is
no "revolutionary situation" in the ,
West, "a revolution rehearsal, like !
a war game." He can see this so
clearly because he knows some things manipulations of a "formal democ-
the students, with whom he so gra" L.. racy." but for the elemental free-.
pathizes, do not yet know. He knows" doms the students at Columbia and
they are probably doomed to failure. the Sorbonne took for granted ?
And he knows they will soon grow free speech, free assembly, no cen-
old sorship.
"The Year of the Young Rebels" Spender approves of most that is
is divided into seven chapters. The really new and distinctive about this
first . four are first person, journal- internationalist generation of rebels:
istic impressions of Spender's pil- their passion for community, authen-
grimages to Columbia, Paris, Prague ticity and participation; their rejec-
and West Berlin, at the time of the tion of all existing models, parties
.student insurrections last year. The and dogmas of the Old Left, especial-
By Stephen Spender.
200 pp. New York:
Random House. $4.95.
By JACK NEWFIELD
For some mysterious reason, per-
haps psychological, perhaps literary,
two women ? Susan Sontag and
Mary McCarthy ? have written the
two most honest and moving books
have read about North Vietnam.
'Similarly, the most evocative and
,perceptive prose I have read about
ithe new student radicalism, oddly
!enough, has come from cultural and
The Czech students, however, are
' ?
the ones who won the author% heart
without cavil or reservation, siase
they are the most heroic, most
tolerant and the most rooted in real-
ity. Their movement was not a re-
hearsal or a game, but a now tragic
matter of life and death. They were
not fighting the materialism of a con-.
sumer culture, or the impersonal
!
.literary figures, rather than from final three chapters are more spccu- ly the Soviet Union: their efforts
political or educational ones. I have , lative and analytical. They explore: to strike alliances with the young
in mind Norman Mailer's "The Ar_ the common threads of student'move- workers; their lack of selfishness,
mies of the Night," essays by Richard ments, West and East, and they' and their perseverance despite the
Poirier and Martin Duberman pub- thoughtfully rebut some of the older' absence of revolutionary situations.
,lished in the Atlantic magazine, and critics of the students, particularly But he has one crucial, and I think
this gentle, wise book by the poet ?George Kennan and Zbigniev Brze- . justified, criticism to make. He warns-
and critic, Stephen Spender. zinski. the young rebels repeatedly not to
The reason, I suspect, is that ' destroy the university, not to see it
The chapter on Columbia is lucid
Spender and the other writers can
and fair-minded, without pretending as a simple and vulnerable micro-
see the personalities, confrontations to expertise or a false solidarity with cosm of the larger society. He writes:
,
and dreams of the young Left in?
the activists. Spender is especially. "Students who attempt to revolu-
:
larger than just its surface political astute in his observations about the: tionize society by first destroying
black students, concluding: the university are like an army which
. dimension. Spender, for example,
understands the cultural root of stu- "Their behavior was mature; (per-., , begins a war by wrecking its own
dent alienation, that they are trying haps because they accepted the ad-S base. . . . Thus the militant students
to change values and consciousness. vice of older people) and less neu- _should accent the university as their
rather than lay down a program and rotic than that of the improvising base. ? . . without the university
seize state power. He understands white students. . . . The white stu-, there would be no students. The
they are trying. to make revolution- dents, as I have said, had a problem' Position of the students, even as
aries, rather than make a revolt*. . of identity which they resolved first agitators, depends on there being a
,tion, that they are trying to create' by being students, secondly, more university. . . . To say, 'I won't
a "parallel world," in opposition to emphatically by being rebellious stu- have a university until society has
consumer cultures in which things dents. The black students, opposite a revolution,' is as though Karl?Marx
7 manipulate individuals, here as in other respects, had a: were to say, 'I won't go to the read-
Spender also brilliantly sees the problem of losing their identity, ing room of the British Museum un-
, .
f % ' through segregation. Their identity, til it has a revolution.'"
, ? symbolic, stylistic, psychic and
' I mythic layers of their politics. He. is, of course, immensely real, in some: Stephen Spender has, of course,
calls one chapter "The Columbia
ways the most real thing in America. ? led a remarkable personal and pub-
- .
Happenings," grasping the important ? . . So if the neurosis of the white lic career. He belonged briefly to
..
role spontaneous anarchic energy
students is the fear that they have the British Communist party during
'
plays in the movement. He perceives
no identity, the passionate search to the 1930's. (His essay in the collec-
i
how much of the movement is based find one, that of the blacks is the , tion "The God That Failed" convinced
fear that
on gesture, myth and style, as well y
as the movement's close and subtle:
beyond this the fear of actual ex-
" ?
relationship with the ideas of sexual tinction.
' liberation, popular and underground In his chapter on the Sorbonne,
, culture and the theater of the ab- Spender emphasizes the special
0 ? surd. He knows the real political romantic and surrealist quality of
significance of the epigrams and the French students. He quotes the
; poetry chalked on the walls of the slogan "Imagination is Revolution,"
g Sorbonne.H remindsthat the as an explanation of why the stu-
theirs,ill lose me personally, more than anything
else written on the subject, of the
futility of Communist dogma, .of the
Illegitimacy of the Communist notion
of the end justifying the means.)
Later he was duped by the C.I.A.,
while he was co-editor of Encounter.
He has survived these two potentially
embittering experiences still a gentle
radical still a fine ?et with a mod-
phrase, "Up against phlovdkiedper -FigfAraelopiffhWaSt tolie jOadisfis ri4.1cri
official l'arrne'gvigellaW a-too man
is literary, and comes trom the poet Politrear Pante:
miinistri." He frequently quotes with living in a bad time. ti
IgRoi Zones. He comments on the
approval Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who
nal I