[In the following review, Perkins comments favorably on The Temple and argues that its message regarding the repression of cultural and sexual freedom is relevant to contemporary America.]

Some books are an honor to review, and Stephen Spender's The Temple is one of them. Poet, critic, journalist, playwright—there are few writing hats that Spender has not worn, and he has worn them all with dauntless grace and style.

The Temple was written, in part, by the youthful Spender at a time when he was discovering life—and sex—along with two other famous buddies of his, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, in the final halcyon days of the Weimer Republic. I say "in part" by the youthful Spender, because the novel took an interesting course over the years before finally finding the light of publication. "Dear Mrs. Grundy"-laden England had driven the three to Germany to unfetter their youth. "In the early twenties," Spender wryly comments in his introduction, "Prohibition resulted in young Americans like Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald leaving America and going to France or Spain. For them, drink; for us [the English], sex." Spender's publisher liked the novel, but was afraid it might be too libelous and pornographic (Ah, there will always be an England!), and the manuscript was never published. In a fit of poverty, something which happens all too often to even the best of poets, Spender sold his papers in 1962 to, of all places, the University of Texas, where the novel was rediscovered by John Fuller, who brought it back to the attention of Spender. Spender then requested a copy of his own manuscript, liked it, and, with some minor tinkering afforded by the wisdom of hindsight, it has finally arrived in Spender's spectacular canon.

The novel is thinly disguised autobiography, and, is even more fascinating for that; it is, in Spender's words, "a complex of memory, fiction, and hindsight." Spender's famous colleagues turn up, not much disguised, as Simon Wilmot (Auden) and William Bradshaw (Isherwood). Auden/Wilmot is beautifully and lovingly caricatured. "Terribly untidy in appearance," Wilmot made "pronouncements with almost absurd emphasis on certain words as though they were Holy Writ." Criticizing the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilmot says, "Siggy's No Use. His war poems Simply Won't Do." And, reiterating one of the themes of the novel, "Germany's the Only Place for Sex. England's No Good."

Beyond these wonderful insights into one of the most well-known triumvirates in English letters, there is a portrait of the world in the eye of the storm between two world wars. It is a novel of awakening—awakening to sex, yes (terribly sophisticated and very catholic regarding just who one might have sex with)—but also an awakening to the presence of evil in the world and to the possibilities and difficulties of love and friendship.

At times, the undercurrent of the growth of Nazism is eerily and frighteningly similar to the growth of conservatism that has taken place in this country over the past few years. As one of the major characters, Joachim, remarks to Paul/Spender, "It is what you are in your own being that counts. The terrible thing is that there are so many people today who are Nazis in their hearts even without belonging to the Party." The sun-drenched sexual freedom of 1929 Germany was followed by the worst oppression in modern history. The sexual expression, both homo- and heterosexual, which is at the heart of this novel, parallels America's recent past, and stares into face of an increasingly homophobic and repressive future not unlike the Germany which goose-stepped into the 1930s. The anti-Semitic comments which appear increasingly in our culture (witness the response to Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ), left unchecked and unchallenged will only proliferate, and the lessons are doomed to be repeated over and over until they are learned. The lesson of history, The Temple dares to tell us, is one that has not yet been absorbed. The consequences are dire.