PARTISAN REVIEW
Next day we went on a picnic. Auden told me now that he had
qmte changed his mind about my work. I should not write poetry
but prose narrative.
He walked very fast on flat feet with striding angular move–
ments of
his
arms and legs and jerkings up of
his
head. Once he had
been told by a doctor that he must walk as little as possible, so he
immediately began going for thirty mile walks. He had a theory at
this time that the body is controlled by the mind, and he could explain
a headache, a cold or a sore throat in what are now called "psycho–
somatic" terms.
We came to the open country, crossed fields, .ate from our
luncheon baskets and lay down on the grass. Auden talked about the
poet. "In a revolution, the poet lies on his belly on the top of a roof
and shoots across the lines at his best friend who is on a rooftop of
the other side." "Of course, at heart, secretly, the poet's sympathies
are always with the Enemy," he added darkly, "because he so hates
the idea of there being sides and propaganda that he inevitably must
hate most the side of which he hears and sees most, namely his
own. . . . When he is in love, the poet always prays that his loved
one will die. He thinks more of the poem that he will write than of
the beloved. . . . The tragic, at its best, is always funny: "Enter
LEAR with CoRDELIA dead in his arms. LEAR: Howl, howl, howl,
howl!" Or that scene in
War and Peace
where Pierre rushes into
the burning building to save a baby and the baby tunrs and bites
him." Later on he told me that I must stop being "the Mad Shelley
stuff. The poet is far more like Mr. Everyman than like Shelley
and Keats. He cuts
his
hair short, wears spats a bowler hat and a
city suit, and goes to the job in the Bank in the suburban train."
And so on . . . . I realize now that such lectures by one young
man to another, with their mixture of sense and nonsense, f-un and
portentousness, malice and generosity, compose a secret language
between a circle with a leader, the Witches' Brew from which a
literary movement is made.
It happened that day to be a very fine afternoon of high summer
when the trees in their massive foliage under the immense and still
light were like very old walls and tumuli. The shadows between the
branches were so motionless that they seemed crevices between stones.
And across endless, green and yellow fields like glass, these walls of
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