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PARTISAN REVIEW
never left me. After I left Oxford my education was extended by
learning German and French. However, I must admit that I am
so incompletely educated as to be self-educated, which is another name
for being uneducated. That is to say, I have neither developed the
potentiality to learn my subject to the full extent of my capacity,
nor have I ordered and disciplined in my own mind that which I do
know. I do not even know what I know, and I tend to assume that I
know nothing, to such an extent that
if
a publisher writes and
asks
me for the dates of my own biography, I feel embarrassed and at a
loss as though I were being sent an examination paper. Again, I
read continuously and almost without stopping. But if I were asked
to write down what books I have read during the past month, I
would be able to remember very few of their titles.
Pacifism, socialism and the politics which had seemed very real to
me before Oxford, now existed beyond the Oxford wall, like
dim
abstractions. Indeed, I passed through an anti-political phase under
the influence of Auden who said that poets should have no truck
with politics. "Politicians take sides and hold opinions. A poet should
hold no opinions about anything. Politicians pretend to
care
about
what happens to human beings. The poet should be utterly indifferent.
Everything to him is interesting in so far as it is potential material
for poetry, but he takes no sides and holds no views. Secretly the
poet prays for the death of his loved one in order that he may write a
poem about it. The subject of a poem, what a poem
says
is the peg
on which to hang the poetry, which has no subject and says nothing."
In a way Auden meant, and in another way didn't mean all
this. His seriousness is not of the kind that takes itself seriously. More–
over, when I repeat (I think fairly accurately) the .actual words which
people have used to me it should be remembered that I seemed to
encourage them to simplify their attitudes, even to dramatize them–
selves.
I certainly protested, though not strongly, that there was a great
deal of suffering in the world and that "one had to be a socialist."
Auden agreed. But to him
all
that was a matter of practical arrange–
ments amongst managing people, of which socialism was doubtless
the most sensible.
In 1928 I met a young German Jew from Hamburg who had
