AUDEN'S
IDEOLOGY
449
with the Reason which is over all things, gods and men alike. His
relation to Authority is notably ambivalent-naturally so, since the
relation is primarily that of Reform. A certain childishness (not too
rare in young English intellectuals, who are sheltered and cherished in
comparison with our own wild boys) becomes apparent in his at–
titudes- .J remember a reviewer's talking of the "typical boyish
charm" of the Auden poem of this period. Auden is managing to stay
on surprisingly good terms with Authority by assuming the role of
enfant terrible
of the r.eformers-a very goodhearted and very childish
• one, the
enfant terrible
of the old father's long soft summer dreams.
He becomes fond of saying that his favorite writers, those he would
like most to
be.,
are Lear, Carroll, and the author of
Peter Rabbit–
who themselves (a<; Auden wistfully realizes ) reformed or rejected
society in their ways, though not in any ways that kept them out of
the nicest nurseries. (Of course much of the appeal of
his
statement,
to Auden, la in its shock valu ; but he could have dismayed
his
"readers quite as heartily by telling them that his favorite writers were
Tarski and Frege. His admiration was genuine and even predictable.)
In Stage II Auden nourishes a residual, partially perverse affec–
tion for any maladjustment to authority, for any complex or neurosis
his development may have left lying around in him: after all, Author–
ity itself, in the process of reform, has to get 'adjusted to poor
ill–
adjusted me. He feels an uneasy but thorough dislike for that
"goddess of bossy underlings, Normality," and all the nursery schools
and feeding-formulas that follow in her train; he betrays an astonish–
ing repugnance to such concomitants of Progress as antisepsis and
central heating, prays
Preserve me from the Shape of Things to
Be,
and invents as
his
educational slogan: "Let each child have that's in
our care/ As much neurosis as the child can bear." All
this
corresponds
to the petulance with which Alice, an eminently reasonable child,
greeted any divergence of Wonderland from one's own household's
routine-which
is
Reason.
In Stage III Auden repudiates with fear and repulsion any at–
tempt to revolt against Authority, to reform Authority, to question
Authority, or to remain separate from Authority in any way. Such
an attempt
is
an insane depravity that is the root of all sin. He knows
that (as Kierkegaard puts it in
his
wonderful, if unintentional, eight–
word summary of Calvinism)
the only thing which interests God is
obedience.
This is lucky: it is
all
He gets. But Auden is no Calvin–
no logician, either-and tactfully overlooks any direct hand of the
Creator in the creature's guilt. The only responsibility that Auden, as
