440
PARTISAN REVIEW
and eager brothers by
his
amorphous generalization,
his
foetalization
-tramps goodheartedly, selflessly, will-lessly over the conditions of
the universe, choosing, choosing, up to a final choice: a choice
rewarded by an external, causally unrelated, paradoxical "success."
Actuallv his normal state is its own reward, his' real reward. "Success"
i~
mereiy the morphological stamp of approval necessary to imprese
the undiscerning hearers of the parable; it is truly success only insofar
as it resembles the state it rewards. Thus the third son, in his most
developed and Audenish, his
truest
form, sits happily at home, al–
ready successful, and reads indifferently the love-letters of his more
primitive forbear, trudging unnecessarily over the tundra or gasping
on the peak.
There is only one real name for Auden's latest period:
Paul;
but it is hard to resist
Grace Abounding; The Teleological Suspen–
sion of Ethics,· Waiting for the Spark from Heaven to Fall.
Here
everything that is important happens in the Realm of Grace. The
fundamental structural picture underlying the poems is that of
waiting
humbly for Grace,·
man's ultimate accomplishment is
sitting still.
We
are damned not merely for what we do, but for doing anything at
all-and properly
~~mned,
for what
we
do is necessarily evil :
Do not,
till ye be done for
is our only possible slogan. In Stage II action and
the will are evil;
in
Stage III everything (except the Wholly Other,
God) is evil; Auden, like a backward Cato, leaves no speech without
its
Carthage has fa/ten- for
he, like Niebuhr, acce ts the Fall not
merely as a causal myth but as the observed
esse~
of a
t-ex
enence.
Bu t 1e speeches no nge snpporrany Universal Popular
Fr~t-;w&o
are we to help out God's world? (Better wait it out instead.) The
earlier
We must do something about Hitler
has become
We must
realize that we ARE Hitler.
There is no more choice-we are chosen;
the elections of the free voter, the man of good will and good works,
have been succeeded by the Election of the helpless and determined
sinner, the Man
of
Faith. The whole concepj:_of evolutionary develop-
ment has disappeared.
e Old Adam of the
linded
oy
~teousness
;:n·
sel -conceit pumped into him y
__.Se.cul
elli ence, the Wisdom of this World must
mutate
into
,tOO-New-A
of the
spirit.~
as nahiral mutations are o ten )the
effects of extra-terrestna ra iation, this supernatural mutation
is
an
effect or aspect of the unearthly radiation of Grace-that is, it
is
Grace as it feels to us who receive it. (After making up this rather
derisive simile I was astonished to find Auden, in something I hadn't
read before, using it seriously: Agape is "Eros mutated by Grace.")
