452
PARTISAN REVIEW
from a recurrent dream of being swallowed by a bear; and Auden of
course lives in such a dream.
In Stage III Auden no longer feels so much anxiety about
sexuality, after he has filed it away under Religion: even its guilt is
drowned in the guilt of that universal depravity which has rolled its
black flood over every human action. And Eros, considered as the
not-yet-mutated Agape into which Agape is continually relapsing, has
gained a new respectability:
it
is Grandmother, who was not every–
thing she might have been, but who left us all the money for the
Asylum. Sexualit is now no more than a relatively minor aspect of
our religiOilslife. Auden explains, m a summar
Q _
er egaar ,
that for the mClividu once
ed
to-e
nstianit -whether or n
he believes-there are onl three ossibilities: marria
~
ceu'bac or
espmr. ow a three of these possibilities are religious states,
;~la
tions w ich involve both man and God: sexuality is swallowed up
in salvation-or, at worst, in damnation. I'm not sure which of these
possibilities Auden thinks of as his own state; probably he, as usual,
considers all three. "aspects of one Reality," and thus can credit him–
self with one-third of each. (This is an absurd but not impossible joke:
Auden's favorite method of mediating between absolute irreconcilables
is to declare them "merely aspects" of one reality, a "reality" that
turns out to be as self-contradictory, paradoxical and unsearchable
as the ways of God.)
In Stage III Auden is completely alone, but the knowledge of his
isolation is not a burden but a blessing: he knows that we have always
been alone, will always be alone, except in our paradoxical, absurd
union with the Wholly Other, God; and he knows that he is for–
tunate not to be blinded by illusions of any impossible union with the
creatures rather than with their Creator. Our isolation is the complete
aloneness of the man who stands for every minute of his life, in fear
and trembling and abject dread, before his God. One could describe
this isolation with authoritative immediacy by paraphrasing the many
pages of Kierkegaard and Kafka from which Auden derives both the
spirit and the letter of his treatment. Few of the ideas of Auden's last
stage have the slightest novelty to a reader acquainted with Luther,
Calvin and Barth; even the expression of the ideas has no novelty to
the reader familiar with Kierkegaard and Kafka. But this is a God–
send for everybody concerned, since the theological ideas which
Auden does not adopt but invents are all too often on the level of
those brown paper parcels, brought secretly to the War Department
in times of national emergency, which turn out to be full of plans to
