18
PARTISAN REVIEW
that Auden's mood reflects, obscurely, the bankrupfcy of the English Left
and its ideals-that obvious bankruptcy which nobody dares declare?
Auden is the creative leader of his group---that is· acknowledged. But
in other respects he is their ca...ptive. He lacks a critical intelligence; and one
cannot always be sure whether the hub is turning the spokes or the spokes
the hub. At present we may guess that Auden is the captive of his friends'
reformist gentility, their politically fostered blindness, the rationalized
prudence of their democratic front against fascism-as though fascism
were a respecter of prudence, of democracy!
The
Left Review
critic, although he stops short of a prescription, is
nevertheless right in his diagnosis of Auden's present state of mind. The
poet who began as the impersonal voice of a generation, whose greatest
merit was the power to generalize his experience, seems, like Eliot before
him, in his later work to have been thrust deeper and deeper into his own
ego. In order to retrace the stages by which Auden arrived where he is today,
we may follow the evolution of his favorite conception: the figure of the
Healer. In his ambiguities and his successive incarnations, this transfigured
scientist, who talks the clipped jargon of the clinic and views the world
as a psychiatric ward, embodies the poet's shifting attitudes towards the
fact of social change.
The idea of the Healer seems to have been suggested to Auden by
two actual psychiatrists: Homer Lane and Georg Walth.er Groddeck, with
whose teachings he came in contact in Berlin in 1929. "Teachings" rather
than "theories" because, in addition to sharing a similar conviction as to
the functional nature of disease and crime, both men strove to unite belief
and practice in their own lives, and both endeavored to cure by example.
Homer Lane, who experimented in progressive penology, was fiercely anti–
authoritarian. And Groddeck, a practicing psychiatrist, underwent at one
point in his career a dramatic conversion from hypnotic methods of therapy,
which brought into play the will of the physician, to a technique of sug–
gestion and reeducation. From the ideas and experiences of these men,
Auden appears to have derived his repugnance to the will and all forms
of coercive change, and, conversely, his doctrine of Love-"What can
be
loved (he has said) can be cured. "
In any case, the Healer is a kind of psychiatric saint or redeemer; but
in order to emphasize his benign aspects Auden has given him a terroristic
alter ego;
and the Healer is always undergoing transformations from one
one self to the other.
His earliest appearance seems to have been in certain of the
Poems
(1930) . He is here invoked as the Enemy, and if he foreshadows the
·new order he also signifies the unqualified extinction of the old. "Death,
death of the grain, our death, Death of the old gang." In later poems we
shall see him transformed into Eros Paidogogus, the embodiment of love
