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. During these years, a generation of English public-
schoolboys, who had been expecte