1
A DIALOGUE WITH W. H. AUDEN
79
A: Laura Riding has a poem that bears on this question.
It
begins
with the line: "Without dressmakers to connect the goodwill of the
body." I suggest that you read it. Her contention seems to be that
the Flesh like all instruments is neutral, and evil arises from the
mind. She claims that clothes quench the body, "turn the gloom
inward" and that, being psychophysical in nature, man must make
some balance between outer and inner life. She thinks that civiliza–
tion with its garments, social tabus, tr.affic zones, etc. is busy work–
ing out this balance. "The union of matter with mind/ by the
method. of raiment/ destroys not our nakedness/ nor muffles the
bell of thought." -"Inner is the glow of knowledge and outer is
the gloom of appearance." Never forget that the three crises of living
occur with little or no clothes: birth, love and death. The beginning,
the center and the end make the individual more honest. Eyewit–
nesses of battle remark on how efficiently the impact of the great new
bombs strip the body.
If
we cannot understand what we are in
other ways, at least these disasters drive the lesson home. And with
equal directness war and love release the essential "glow," "the
shaded breast," the bare limbs.
I: Socrates states- if I remember correctly- that he found it pos–
sible to fall in love with the person of a stranger, to love
as sight
with no knowledge of the character of the beloved.
A: Do you think that surprising? ... Standards in regard to beauty
vary extremely not only in different cultures but at various times
within the same culture. I think a person must accept the confirma–
tion of others as to whether he is handsome or ugly.
If
good-looking,
he should regard this as a worldly gift like birth, money or brains:
the result of luck, a fact not creditable to himself. The temporality
of beauty-this distinguishes it from other gifts. It wears less well
then a talent for engineering or a musical ear or wit.
I: F.atality seems to attend great good looks.
A: Yes-not only intuition but experience confirms that. One can
find a number of reasons: envy, the commonness of physical desire.
Laura Riding's poem demonstrates pretty well, I think, the curious
psycho-physical nature of man. Dress as a symbol of this ambivalence
is
at least as old as the Bible where the fig-leaf aprons become the
image of sexual enmity. Since sexual love has a double nature of
