ABSTRACT
Her choice of the plural pronoun in ‘this is not more than we can deal with’, underlines the importance of the notion of solidarity in facing such tragedies. Perhaps her acceptance in the last stanza of the fact that the best world ‘has to be made’ by such great sacrifices, brought her some comfort. Nevertheless, in the interview, when she is asked about John and the ‘tragic losses of so many talented people’, there are long pauses in the normally rapid flow of her responses. She regains her stride by changing to a more ‘public’ style of speech and summarising the various ways in which the Brigades played an important role in Spain.113 Her reasons for doing so could be construed in different ways. She could be simply suppressing a painful memory, or she could be maintaining a denial of any personal doubts about the value of his sacrifice in retrospect. Given that the interview context itself was in this case rather formal and unsympathetic, she could perhaps have wished to avoid appearing vulnerable in any way. Two years after this interview, in an article on English poetry and the Spanish Civil War, she raised the subject herself:
When I read now about young British writers who were deluded by the myth of anti-fascism, or who took the easy road of action and commitment rather than the hard one of being a poet and objective, it is to [Sorley] Maclean’s passionate lament that I turn to recall the feelings and conflicts of that generation.
