486
PARTISAN REVIEW
But I
do not know as much as Auden himself does about the difficulty
of adapting his style, a habit of many years' growth, to his new belief :
Can I learn to suffer
Without saying something ironic or funny
On suffering?
Prospero (who stands for Shakespeare who stands for Auden) asks this
question in the course of the seven pages of verse in which he explains to
Ariel that he is giving up verse in favor of the pursuit of sanctity.
It
is
a Christian version of the Plight of the Artist, on which Auden has had
more to say than anyone else except Thomas Mann.
If
I were going
to investigate Auden's present Christianity, I should study what he says
now about the artist, the field of experience nearest home. Mr. Hoggart
has pointed out several good places to do that, notably Caliban's terribly
difficult speech
in
The Sea and the Mirror.
Mr. Hoggart does not think that the longer pieces, the plays,
New
Year Letter, The Sea and the Mirror, The Age of Anxiety,
and
For
the Time Being,
are quite successful as wholes, though he points out
beautiful passages in each. I think he is right, but I wish he had
speculated about the reason. Auden is not alone in wishing to proceed
from the short lyric to some more capacious form, and being somewhat
thwarted in the attempt. It would be interesting to compare his
experience in this respect with Eliot's or Wallace Stevens'.
Mr. Hoggart thinks that the songs, and in general many short
poems, are Auden's most unqualified successes. I agree with him again,
and wish again that he had tried to investigate the magic of the songs,
one or two of the early
Odes,
and
Paid on Both Sides,
a work which
Mr. Hoggart (following Auden, who has not wished to reprint it) un–
justly neglects. To my taste it
is
the most original, and the best, longer
work. The scene, a country ruined by industry now rotting in its turn;
the mythology, oddly suggestive of the Sagas, prep-school athletics,
Sophocles, spy-stories; and the langUage, which is mannered but wonder–
fully musical, aly.compose.
It
is the only longer work which is not
devised: the id(a itself is that long and complex, an authentic night–
mare.
My chief quarrel with the impression of Auden that Mr. Hoggart
gives is that he has not stressed sufficiently that talent for music, the
music of language, which produces something beautiful whenever
Auden is not too bothered by intellectual problems. The ultimate ques–
tion about Mr. Hoggart's book is whether his general reader exists-
