PARTISAN REVIEW
he did not take anything seriously: for
him
living consisted of a col–
lection of objects: objects of behavior, material objects, persons, and
the interest of these lay in a mental pattern which he could make
out of them. He could not take the objects themselves seriously, and
in
a sense he could not take the pattern seriously either. Perhaps
seriousness only lay in the spirit which could make the pattern.
It
is
this lack of seriousness which has most disconcerted some of Auden's
admirers, particularly his American ones. They want art to be serious
all through, like they might want a golden calf to be made of solid
gold.
Auden's style of dressing eccentrically, eating enormously, run–
ning the lives (particularly the sexual lives) of
his
fellow undergradu–
ates, was also carried to the point of absurdity. Sometimes one had
the impression that he was running a clinic for distributing informa–
tion on the facts of life, by special interview, whilst he was as Oxford.
He had a clownish, albino appearance which gave an impression of
lashlessness and hairlessness, thick
lips,
a mole on one cheek, a habit
of jerking his head up authoritatively, a rather flabby physique. He
used to say in
his
clinical voice that he would make a good actor
because he had a face of putty, and that the rest of
his
physique
was
"designed for vice." He smoked enormously.
Most of the stories about him illustrate
his
enormous self-confi–
dence, his clowning, and his affectation of a certain caddishness whilst
he was at the University, which later gave way to a studied determina–
tion to "love everybody." A story is told by his Oxford tutor, Nevill
Coghill, that one day he came late for a tutorial to find that Auden
had already arrived. Auden was seated at
his
desk reading Coghill's
letters, with a frown of serious myopic concentration. When Coghill
had come in, Auden looked up and said: "Good, you're here. What
have you done with the second page of
this
letter?," holding up the
first page in his hand. On another occasion Auden went to tea with
the family of a don who lived on Boars Hill near Oxford. In the
middle of tea, he got up hastily and poured the contents of his cup
out of the window. His hostess looked at
him
inquiringly and said:
"Is my tea all right, Mr. Auden?" Auden replied in his most clinically
analytic voice: "Tepid urine," and resumed his place at tea.
Auden had an extraordinary intonation. He spoke underlining,
selecting, and holding out, as it were on metaphorical pincers, certain
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