THE ENGLISH LITERARY LEFT
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in its "reeducative" aspects. But for the present he is love the avenger, with
a hawk's vision of the undifferentiated loveless and neurasthenic mass: he
is Anteros who punishes with death those who from greed or fear, egotism
or false shame, pervert the norms of sexuality and deny the affection of
Jlthers. Yet suddenly in the very last poem in the volume the Enemy becomes
a friend: "Sir. no man's enemy, forgiving all." And he is called on to
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy .
..
The Enemy thus stands forth in his counter-role as the psychiatric saint.
The next appearance of the Healer is in
The Orator
(1932). Here,
as the Airman, he has acquired a profession in keeping with his hawk's eye
vision. And we are now taken into his confidence and introduced to his
journals: not he, but the old order, is now the Enemy. The Airman is a
young man who, operating with a few friends from a country house called
"The Hollies," is plotting to overthrow "society." His plan of attack, while
it simulates a political insurrection, consists essentially
in
undermining the
old order through disrupting its habitual thought associations. These are
accordingly analysed, plotted and diagrammed in the Airman's journal, as
the defenses of some well-fortified country might be studied by an army
that proposed to invade it. At the very last, ·however, when the great attack
is in its seventh day, the Airman has a sudden change of heart, paralleling
the abrupt transformation of the Enemy at the end of the earlier volume.
"Do not imagine," he says to himself, "that you, no more than any other
conqueror, can escape the mark of grossness." And he repudiates coercion
and violence for humility and understanding.
Yet in 1933, just a year after the appearance of
The Orators,
Auden
writes the play,
The Dance of Death,
and in the central figure of the Dancer
revives his former hero-only to slay him summarily with the apparition of
Karl Marx. Caricatured and discredited, the specter of the psychological
redeemer appears to be laid for good. But in reality he is not. In
The Ascent
of
F6
(1936) the old problem of coercion is resuscitated, in a new form,
and the Healer has yet another incarnation, this time sympathetic, in the
character of the Abbott. But, devoid alike of scientific professions and a
terroristic
alter ego,
the Abbott simply realizes all the devout and ritualistic
tendencies inherent in the Healer type from the beginning. In later lyrics
the type becomes merged with the Dioscuri- which are merely a literary
symbol for astronomical benevolence-or more often with the poet himself,
who now preaches love and forbearance in his own voice.
Psychology or politics? Inner reform or social revolution? Such are
the issues implied in those writings of Auden's that center around the figure
of the Healer. And the survival of this unreal dilemma is a curious re-
