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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Prophet to Artist

Prophet to Artist

A friend of mine tells me that George Orwell once called Auden a ‘gutless Kipling’. This was after Orwell had received a bullet through the throat in Spain, and was consequently feeling polemical. Auden had rhapsodised in a poem about the ‘necessary murder’, and the glib comment stuck in Orwell’s wounded gullet. Orwell’s riposte was no doubt thoroughly unfair; but it does underline the fact that not all Leftist writers of the Thirties looked on Auden as their prophet and spokesman. Yet to understand the social myths that lie behind Auden’s work one has to understand the thoughts and hopes of that irritable dedicated milieu.

One could put it in a series of conditional propositions. ‘If they had not come out of societies saturated by the values of the semi-affluent Middle Class, they would not have seen a Marxist Revolution as an interesting bohemian job’; ‘If modern Christianity had not in the main discredited itself as a social force, they might have retained a grasp on the doctrine of Original Sin and acted politically without excessive disillusionment’; ‘If Communism had not come first in the least developed countries, the semi-feudal decadent whip-cracking areas, the idea of Communism might have retained its charge for Western workers and intellectuals . . .’. What lies behind these propositions is the most thundering crisis of disillusionment that the world of intellect has ever known in the West. In America, in England, even in our own sleepy, selfish Pig Islands, there are millions of the most intelligent and idealistic men and women our cultures have yet produced, bottled up, burnt out, innocently self-betrayed, lacking a mainspring of action – not because the Leftist side lost the Spanish War, but because their experience, whether firsthand or second-hand, taught them terribly that men can be evil whatever armbands they are wearing, and that the longed-for Socialist State may be in some circumstances less just and more tyrannical and opportunist than the disgusting political menages we are already saddled with. The Cause died; and its rotting body encumbers the social life of every nation, on either side of the Iron and the Bamboo Curtains. To understand this is to understand page 15 the sleepless anguish that lies behind much of the work of Auden and his contemporaries. And we are worse men than they were when we shrug the matter off with a casual – ‘So what?’ – and turn back to our beer and books.

In the curious dualist world of the charade ‘Paid on Both Sides’ the Cause is shown as a system of feuding between two families. Even there Auden presents the pain of the Present being dismembered for the sake of a possible Future . . .

Though he believe it, no man is strong.
He thinks to be called the fortunate,
To bring home a wife, to live long . . .
His fields are used up where the moles visit,
The contours worn flat; if there show
Passage for water he will miss it:
Give up his breath, his woman, his team;
No life to touch, though later there will be
Big fruit, eagles above the stream . . .

It was the echo of a saga that haunted us when we read these lines a little before the Second World War. The sense of fate was always strong in Auden’s work.

Then, in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, comes a high-spirited attack on the English mediocracy. Auden undresses a number of his family skeletons for the world to see. What strikes one most, re-reading this poem, is the temporary reality in the Leftist milieu of a cosmopolitan culture. For the first time since Cromwell’s Commonwealth, England had become in idea part of Europe. Then, in ‘New Year Letter’, Auden most painfully abandons the Marxist mystique to annotate the triumph on all sides of the Machine State and the possibility of a private and even eccentric Christian assent to the muddle and injustice of the human condition. Then, in ‘For the Time Being’, he states a new coherent philosophy by which the Incarnation is seen as the hope hidden inside a civilisation no less and no more barbaric than that of the Romans. Then, in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, he analyses the necessary illusions of life and art with magnificent aplomb, using Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a springboard.

I do not choose to comment on ‘An Age of Anxiety’, since its theme is almost wholly the modern chaos and Auden’s undoubted verbal dexterities clog the pattern. But the other long poems are Baedekers of the pilgrim journey from a romantic Marxism to a heavy-hearted Christianity. En route Auden’s Everyman loses the larger part of his enthusiasm for social justice – perhaps because the ‘necessary murder’ has become the Crucifixion, and neither we nor Auden are able to be jocund about it. The journey may have been necessary. But its terminus in the minor neurotic nuances of American page 16 college life does not cheer or enliven anybody, Auden least of all, who began as a prophet of the Cause and ended as an artist writing about art. I do not believe that the World Council of Churches evens the score. The cemetery of social idealism is loaded with glittering and inscrutable whitened bones. And now the prophets of the Apocalypse are muttering on the rooftops.

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