THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
words or syllables of words, with a mocking portentousness, an extra–
vagant impersonality. He could say something quite usual such as
"It's very
cold,"
with an emphasis on the word "cold" which set me
shivering and laughing.
He read his own poems in a voice which curiously mingled
clinical lack of expression with his singling out of words and syllables.
It was impossible to understand a whole poem read
in
this
way, yet
certain lines stand out in the memory, for example:
The heel upon the finishing blade of grass.
I was too over-awed by him to feel confidence in our relation–
ship. I always had a clear idea that. there were others whom he
cared for more than for me, some for their intelligence, some for
their charm. With most of my friends at this time, my relationships
existed in a kind of No Man's Land where I happened to be, outside
all
their other relationships. Despite
all
this, I had the pleasure of
knowing that Auden took me seriously as a writer, and in a way
which I could not explain to myself, even respected my personality.
One day I showed
him
a story which I had written when I was
seventeen in Switzerland (it afterwards appeared in
By the Lake).
When I next came to see
him,
he suddenly said: "This is pure poetry."
"What?" I asked. "Listen," and he recited:
His whole life had probably been a pilgrimage to this moment.
Or rather, if not his whole life, one portion of it, divided into sections:
little closed-in beads of lust running on a chain of days and weeks
through years. Till now, that which had been furtive, cried to be let
out, would burst its way through.
"Who wrote that? You did." Read out in Auden's voice, the
words had seemed strangely unfamiliar, and yet he had extracted
that which was most important in them: the image, followed all
the way through of the chain of beads which were also spermatozoa.
Now when I saw my own creation transformed through the medium
of his mind, I felt the ecstasy and relief which a writer feels on very
rare occasions when he sees his words in print: the letters are a dance,
a forest of dark trees, a row of sentinels on the glossy page : and with
a warm flush of the blood against his face he knows there was a
moment when he was justified.
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