442
PARTISAN ·REVIEW
fervid rudeness of the attack: Auden is attempting to get rid of a
sloughed-off self by hacking it up and dropping the pieces into a
bathtub full· of lye. Why on earth should Auden choose to represent
Herod
a.s
the typical Liberal? It would have been far more natural
and far more plausible to pick Pontius Pilate (at that time the only
regular subscriber to
The Nation
in all Palestine) ; but Auden could
not risk the sympathy for Pilate which, increasingly injected into the
gospels as they developed- as anti-Semitic propaganda, incidentally–
has been inherited by all of us. We are so
used
to rejecting Herod as
a particularly bogey-ish Churchill that Auden can count on our going
right on rejecting him when he is presented as Sir Stafford Cripps.
II.
But under all the changing surface forms of Auden's develop–
ment-often almost grotesquely at variance with one another-there
is a constellation of a few persistent organizing forces, the examina–
tion of which is a key to the understanding of the changes themselves;
particularly
if
we realize that in development the opposite of an at–
titud · of en
im
iatel alhed tort than any irlt'erme tate
rasition~~nd
that Auden's rationalizatwnsof-his changes, however–
Irrational they may seem, should rarely be considered of any
causal
importance.
A complex of ideas, emotions and unconscious attitudes about
anxiety, guilt and isolation- fused or not yet separated in a sort of
sexual-authoritarian matrix- is the permanent causal core of Auden's
ideology; it is structural and basic in his nature-compared to
it
most
other things are skin or hair, the mere bloom of rouge. In Auden's
work the elements of
anxiety, guilt, isolation, sexuality
and
authority
make up a true Gestalt, a connected and meaningful whole; but the
necessities of analysis force the analyst to sketch them one by one, as
they appear in the successive stages of Auden's development.
In Stage I
guilt
is ubiquitous, since (a) from his Freudian point
· of view all levels are reduced to lower, genetically prior levels–
"really" are "nothing but" these discreditaple animal, savage or in–
fantile levels; since (b) from his dialectical-evolutionary, formally
if vaguely Hegelian point of view, any success or good is temporary,
already beginning to assume its permanent, discredited and guilty
status of failure or evil; since (c ) if we look either through Freud's or
Marx's eyes, our "reasons" for doing anything never by any chance
coincide with the "real," less creditable reasons, so that our whole
