THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
What was there in it about the climate?" Of course, I could not
explain my mistake. I was embroiled in the kind of conversational
impag;e which becomes classic when I try to carry on a conversation
with any of the Huxley family, but I could not extricate myself then.
Auden looked down his nose and himself changed the conversation,
asking me what poets I liked. He was extremely definite about whom
he liked, and after hearing my reply would say "Yes," "No good,"
"Can't hold a pen," "Up the wrong pole." He ended by saying that
the literary scene was hopeless, and it was evident that poetry was
waiting for Someone.
As
I was leaving him I took from a shelf a book called
The
Making of Americans,
by Gertrude Stein. "Is this any good?" I asked.
"Tripe," Auden .answered, "I'll sell it to you for fifteen shillings," and
he seemed quite to expect me, on that recommendation, to buy it.
Once, in these early days, I felt so utterly stupid when I was
with Auden that I asked him straight out whether he thought I was
any good. He looked at me strangely, and said: "Of course, you're
some good." "Why?" "Because you are enormously humiliated." He
paused a moment and then said in his rather self-consciously icy
tones: "All literature springs from humiliation." Later on the same
day, he said: "You mustn't write anything but poetry. We need you
for poetry."
When Auden talked he often used the word "Symptomatic."
The philosophy of Whitehead, the neurosis of some friend, the Oxford
gasworks, might all equally be "symptomatic." A poem to be good
in our time must
also
be "symptomatic," it must show "contemporary
sensibility." Another word he often used w.as "clinical." The poet's
attitude must be absolutely detached, like that of a surgeon or a
scientist. I think that Cocteau's image in
Orphee
of Death as the
surgeon with white coat and rubber gloves was his secret fantasy
of the poet. Then the poet must be "the ordinary man,"
if
possible
dressed "like a bank clerk." But no one dressed less or looked less like
a bank clerk than Auden himself.
Auden had enormous vitality, and this means that he was in–
fectiously amusing in a rather buffoonish way. He was not witty in
the Gallic way. His humor lay in the expansiveness of his personality,
his uninhibited freedom from the fears and prejudices which weigh
on many people, and a capacity to parody himself. In the last analysis
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