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PARTJSAN REVIEW
Fascism in England, the economic causes of the war.
The war,
generally,
is not taboo, but it is neglected: something much less important than the
Sergeant Major's voice.
And, living this monastic life under the Sergeant Major's shadow,
one is startled by the scraps of culture that arrive, as unexpected as
sunshine, with their news of the war and of ideas. The examination one
makes of them is more than normally close and exact; and everything is
seen through the distorting, simplifying lenses of this world where the
act of independent thought is itself an effort, and almost dangerous.
Reading
PARTISAN
REVIEW, making these notes about literature and the
war and myself, I think "What would the Sergeant Major say?" And
I know the answer.
Of Crisis and Dismay
"Now in this hour of crisis and dismay"
wrote Auden to Isherwood
"What better than your strict and adult pen
Can warn us from the colours and the consolations"
Excellent and appropriate words: but written in 1937, five or three years
too soon. The hour of crisis and dismay is on us all: where are the
writers who told us about it in advance? It is too clear from Auden's
literary history, and from Isherwood's, that they have not been warned
from the colours and the consolations, or not from all of them. The
best view of Auden's later poetry that I have read is a very brilliant and
sympathetic article by Randall Jarrell in
The Southern Review.
It says,
I thir..k, almost all there is to be said about Auden after 1937: a depress–
ing story. A great deal, certainly, remains, and among it the best
poetry of our time. "Our Auden never writes anything else worth reading",
Geoffrey Grigson said to me, looking with serious owlishness through his
horn rims, "We have something that will always be valuable." And so
we have. But reading Auden's work now, all the elaborate dead notes
in
New Year Letter,
even such little things as the review of Miss Bogan
in
PARTISAN
REVIEW: "But the escape from the Self without the sur·
render of the Self is, of course, an illusion", one thinks: Ah, those
capital letters, what desperation they convey. How much we were mistaken
who saw in Auden a poetic rationalist, when what we have is only another
"sport" of genius.
Something that will always be valuable,
yes: but we
hoped for so much more.
*
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•
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A talent for literature takes many shapes: but always a shape cut
to the social pattern of the time. What is the "development" of Auden,
MacNeice, Day Lewis, but an attempt of the petty-bourgeois to free
himself from his environment? Does this seem too mean a view? Auden:
in 1931 he wrote "A Communist to Others"; in 1937 the same poem
was published without a title and with the ending cut; in 1943 he is in
America, and his poetic voice sounds odder and odder. Day Lewis,
MacNeice: ,the names are equal to Book Society, BBC. These :poets have
