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PARTISAN REVIEW
development, justified for different reasons in every stage, we cannot
fail to see that these "reasons" are reinforcing rationalizations of the
related attitudes which, not even rationally considered-much less
understood-have been for Auden a core impervious to any change.
They form a core that Auden has scarcely attempted to change.
He is fond of the statement
Freedom is the re·cognition of necessity,
but he has never recognized what it means in his own case: that
if
he understands certain of his own attitudes as
causally
instead of
logically necessary-insofar as they are attitudes produced by and
special to his own training and culture-he can free himself from
them. But this Auden, like most people, is particularly unwilling to
understand. He is willing to devote all his energies and talents to
finding the most novel, ingenious or absurd rationalizations of the
cluster of irrational attitudes he has inherited from a former self; the
cluster, the self, he does not question, but instead projects upon the
universe as part of the essential structure of that universe.
If
the at–
titudes are contradictory or logically absurd there, he saves them by
taking Kierkegaard's position that everything really important is
above logical necessity, is necessarily absurd. In the end he submits
to the universe without a question; but it turns out that the universe
is his own shadow on the wall beside his bed.
Let me make this plain with a quotation. On the first page of the
New York Times Book Review
of November 12, 1944, there ap–
peared a review of the new edition of
Grimm's Tales-a
heartfelt and
moral review which concluded with this sentence: "So let everyone
read these stories till they know them backward and tell them to their
children with embellishments-they are not sacred texts-and then,
in a few years, the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of
Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of WorthwHile
Leisure, the Cooperative Camp for Prudent Progressives and all
other bores and scoundrels can go jump
in
the lake."
Such a sentence shows that its writer has saved his own soul,
but has lost the whole world- has forgotten even the nature of that
world: for this was written not in 1913, but within the months that
held the mass-executions in the German .camps, the fire-raids, Warsaw
and Dresden and Manila; within the months that were preparing the
bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki; within the last twelve months
of the Second World War.
The logical absurdity of the advice does not matter, though it
could hardly be more apparent : people
have
been telling the tales to
their children for many hundreds of years now (does Auden suppose
