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ledge from power, but we are also opposed to their union." Yet under
present conditions one feels that whatever union power and intellect
will achieve is likely to be, as Robert Merton observed, nasty, brutish
and short. The major locale for critical intelligence will continue to be
outside the house of power-while mental technicians and experts will
sit within. There is no place for the "antennae of the race" in the
Federal Communications Commission.
Lewis Coser
AUDEN'S ESSAYS
THE DYER 'S HAND.
By
W.H. Auden. Random House. $8.50.
In this book Mr. Auden has collected a number of his essays
written over the past several years and excluded others, among them
some of his best known pieces. It might, therefore, seem that he has
made his selection capriciously or with respect to esoteric principles.
But the opposite is true, for Auden has not only chosen the essays for
this volume with care but has reshaped them, linked them together
and emphasized their common themes so that they amount to a kind
of literary autobiography. The result is an extraordinary book. Still, it
is bound to strike even very sensitive readers and especially those who
have known these essays in other contexts as somewhat personal and
eccentric.
That it is eccentric there can be no doubt, for the eccentricity of
its author-of any genuine author, of any genuine observation, for
that matter- is one of the themes to which it continually returns,
from the very first sentence: "The interests of a writer and the interests
of his readers are never the same, and if on occasion they happen to
coincide, this is a lucky accident." The implication, of course, is not
that there is no center, simply that none of us occupies it. Thus much
of what Auden says in
The Dyer's Hand
falls outside those realms of
convenient discourse in which author and reader casually presuppose
a ready-made universe in common. The only world which Auden wants
to presuppose is that of his own imagination and intelligence, con–
centrated on his recollections and feelings: a world which can truly be
made to exist only insofar as he can find the language to create it
and which, in order for it to exist at all, he has to create again and again.
"There are," he says, "four aspects of our present
Weltanschauung
