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are alive, and precisely because we are alive, we have constantly to
arbitrate between the demands of the spirit and the conditions of our
lives, and one of those conditions is, as Auden reminds us over and
over, that because we are neither pure flesh nor pure spirit we are
not very good arbitrators either.
This tentative quality in Auden's argument reflects itself in a
peculiarly modest, sometimes diffident, and often playful prose which
now and then crystallizes into aphorism. Occasionally it gives the
im–
pression of its author as a large man who has gone behind a small
tree to change his clothes. One never quite gets a full view of him. His
playfulness goes deep and at times one is forced to wonder to what
extent Auden's concern with the world of pure play may not reveal
a
regressive temptation which he finds it hard to overcome and which
he may not really wish to overcome; that his tentative preference for
the aesthetic over the ethical reveals a deeper preference for Belmont
over Venice, for the world of childhood over that in which he currently
finds himself.
But
if
this is Auden's weakness, it is offset by a corresponding
strength which insists on paying its debts regularly to the practical,
demanding and more or less unbearable world which we all share. The
virtue of
The Dyer's Hand
is to have rescued those unhappy words
isolation
and
alienation
from self-pity and to have found in them, or
in
one's attempt to deal with them, positive virtues. Of course, Auden
seems to be saying, the world out there doesn't really exist for you and
me, but our obligation to each other is to make a world that does ex–
ist, for as Nietzsche said in the epigraph to this book, "We have art
that we may not perish from the truth."
Jason Epstein
THE AMERICAN SUR-REALITY
THE PAPER
ECONOMY.
By Oovid T. Bozelon. Rondom House. $6.95.
In the 1948 campaign, Harry Truman conducted the last
political rites of the Great Depression; the Thirties came to an end.
The morning after his victory, the promised Fair Deal was not at hand.
Instead, the Cold War and Communism were at the center of everything,
the labor movement had lost much of its elan, and not a few intellectuals
