446
PARTISAN REVIEW
The hero of Stage I, the revolutionary cult-leader-inadequate–
ly understood by his followers, entirely misunderstood by the rest of
the world-is almost wholly isolated. The hero of
The Orators
re–
sorts to political action of a fantastic sort, which necessarily fails;
and he ends by "understanding" that a complete submission to
Authority is the only method of reforming Authority and saving
him–
self: "God just loves us all,
but means to be obeyed
[my italics]." It is
no accident that he winds up a couple of miles of cold
air
away from
the nearest human being, about to commit suicide in an airplane; and
it is no wonder that the creator of
The Orators,
finally understanding
the uselessness of his own political action in "that black year of
which all the world heard"- 1940 in this case--ends up
floating over
70,000 fathoms
in complete submission to that Authority Who means
to be obeyed, the God of Kierkegaard and Barth. Laplace's Calculator
might have predicted most of Auden's development from the last
two pages of
The Orators.
(Kierkegaard's phrase about 70,000
fathoms attracts Auden so much that he adopts
it
as a disquieting
slogan for our union with God-the only possible union, incidentally.)
In an approving summary of the existential point of view, Auden
states that "the basic human problem is man's anxiety in time." In
Stage II Auden's anxiety finds .expression in guilty activity rather than
passive guilt-it is the period of
his
most active (and consequently
least consciously guilty) anxiety. Our decision is always
the
decision,
the great dividing watershed from which events fall to Evil or to
Good; the crises of existence come as regularly and hyperbolically as
elections. This political, liberal anxiety is rarely even temporarily
soothed-since everything went, everything
alway~
goes against the
Popular Front; the accompanying moral anxiety cannot be soothed,
even temporarily--since the means to the Best end is never even Good,
since acting with the best will in the world is still acting, since even
the purest contemplation is always on the verge of signing its
eternal, predestined pact with that "Hitlerian monster," the Will.
In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt-a
guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is
we
who are responsible,
either by commission or- more generally-by omission, for every–
thing from killing-off the Tasmanians to burning the books at
Alexandria.
(You didn't do it?
Then you should have stopped them
from doing it.
You never heard of it?
Ignorant as well as evil, eh?
You
weren't born?
You're guilty, I tell
you-guilty.)
Guilt is used to beat
us into an easy but active submission, that of the voter, the signer of
petitions, he who dies for freedom in the future the vote and the
