THE
LIFE OF
LITERATURE
chology, philosophy and science as well as literature in several lan–
guages.
The legend of Auden at Oxford is so confused in my mind with
the real Auden, that I can scarcely distinguish the two. I have
known Auden for twenty years and it is only in the last year, when
seeing him in America, that I could understand him in at all the
same way as I understand other people. There is, as a matter of fact,
something really puzzling about Auden, and I think
this
is his ability
to organize his attitudes on a great many subjects at a given time to
a far greater degree than most people, and to do so intelligently. Al–
though he is extremely intelligent, this is not just intelligent: it is
extraordinary. I can explain what I mean by contrasting the ordinary
with the extraordinary. Most people- even very intelligent people
have a quality of ordinariness about them: one feels that they are
uncertain: this is what makes them "ordinary." To be puzzled, not
to know one's way in life, not to know what use to make even of
one's knowledge, to be unsure about the meaning of life and what
one's purpose should be in this world: that is the ordinary human
condition, which is, indeed the situation within which most of the
world's literature, including the greatest, has been written. What is
extraordinary is to be clear-sighted about and in complete control
of all the elements of one's life, to fit them all into a single intel–
lectual purpose, to be able to relate the life around one and the
ideas of others to a pattern which one has invented for oneself,
without doubts or uncertainties. Auden has always had to a remark–
able degree this capacity to think of everything and everyone as a
cipher within a pattern which he has invented to explain life in his
own mind. He also has a remarkable gift for inventing the most in–
clusive imagery to explain how the different factors which he observes
round
him
fit into the general pattern which he sees so clearly. His
genius, of course, lies more in the inventing of the images than in
the creation of the pattern itself, which changes and which often
seems arbitrary and rather impatiently improvised.
Auden's talent is of course the opposite of the romantic. The
romantic thrives on doubts and uncertainties, on what Keats called
"negative capability," he makes a virtue out of being .a victim of
the immensity of the universe and the darkness in which he
is
lost,
and then exercises a kind of magical power in inventing huge images
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