THE ENGLISH LITERARY LEFT
13
it has confused them one with another. In addition to the task of erecting
on English soil the technical machinery of modernist literature, it has had
the mission of enlightening benighted Britain on sex. A revolt against
"puritanism"-that is to say, against bourgeois family morality-has figured
in the majority of post-war literary movements. In England, however, the
belated reformers were faced, n<;>t only with a neurotic family life, but
with a prostrated society. Hence they could not be satisfied to derive from
the new psychology merely a literary program and a bohemian ethic. The
Freudian perspective was raised to a social gospel, sometimes competing
with the historical prespective of Marxism, but more often simply melting
into it.
So long as psychology was not confused with ·politics, but operated as
an alternative and a foil, it proved in many cases an effective instrument of
literary creation. The Healer who figures as a hero in Auden's early work
is not only a non-political but an anti-political conception; yet Auden's
most militant, brilliant and self-consistent poetry is built around it. But the
big extravaganzas of a later period,
The Dog Beneath the Skin
and
The
Ascent of
F6,
indiscriminately tap both psychology and politics, and are
essentially incoherent. ,Where Auden went, the others followed . The pro–
letariat became, for many a writer of the English Left, the social embodi–
ment of libido; in Charles Madge's "darksome working man" and Sylvia
Warner's "kiln-man" the gypsies of D. H. Lawrence had a new incarnation;
in the floods, the steamrollers and other dream symbols which were invoked
to represent it, the revolution acquired the character of emancipator for the
inhibited middle classes; and in
The W i/d Goose Chase,
Rex Warner's
interminable "fable," the ambition to "synthesize Marx and Freud" was
finally reduced to its essential absurdity. Yet the failure of so many of these
writings, like the failure of Auden's later plays, cannot be attributed to
ideological confusion alone, for this confusion is only symptomatic of a
meager, confused and synthetic experience,
In their early period Auden and some of his fellow poets had another
important mission; one which they have since dropped. The economic
crisis, coinciding with the long-standing crisis in English culture, called
forth in the first instance, not a socialist but a nationalist reaction from the
young poets ; and Auden was intensely conscious of himself as the prophet
of a resurgent Britain. His early verse is vibrant with the sense of an England
depressed, inert, helmless and looking for a sign. In this doggerel poem,
"Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own," he
ran through the symptoms of national decadence and complained that
"they quietly undersold us with their cheaper trade abroad." And at the
end of
The Orators
(1932) he invoked the leader who should restore
To England's story
The directed calm, the actual glory.
