4 of 5
As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, though faith and grace, a unique "existential" relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, every man, in common with everything else in the universe, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin.
And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done
As Mendelson points out in Later Auden (1999), the best book anyone has yet written about the poet, it was in 1948 that Auden "began to write poems about the inarticulate human body"—the part of us that does not and cannot talk, or think, or have faith in God, but which Christ died to redeem, along with the rest of creation which, as St. Paul says, groans in anticipation of its deliverance. Cardinal Newman distinguished between "notional" and "real" assent, and while Auden gave notional assent to the physical Resurrection of Jesus, and to the credal claim that "we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come," he always struggled to make that assent real. But he understood these affirmations to be absolutely central to orthodox Christianity and necessary to a true embrace of the goodness of Creation.
It is interesting and also slightly comical to see how relentlessly Auden inserts these distinctions into his essays and reviews. His ingenuity in this enterprise is truly remarkable. But this is simply an indication of how vital he thought the distinctions are, and how disastrous the "existentialist" neglect of nature and the human body. Auden was a natural and irrepressible pedagogue, and while he had given up teaching in schools, periodical writing provided ever-new outlets for that side of his character. An introduction to a collection of George MacDonald's writings allows him to develop a theory of Dream Literature; a review of a Dostoevsky travel journal (commissioned and then left unpublished by The New Yorker, probably because they thought it was too cranky) turns into a lecture on the virtues of the bourgeoisie too often scorned by intellectuals. Writing on Isaiah Berlin's famous division of intellectuals into hedgehogs and foxes, Auden insists, borrowing from Lewis Carroll, that they can also be divided into Alices and Mabels. And I was surprised to see how many of the pieces collected here feature Auden explaining Americans to the British or the British to Americans, tasks he always pursued with great energy and sublime confidence.
It was during the years represented in this collection that Auden began to think about putting together a major critical statement, something like his own version of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. It was not Auden's way to put this in the form of a treatise or consecutive argument, but rather as a collection of pensées, meditations, reflections. Most of what ultimately went into that book, which Auden would title The Dyer's Hand, may be found in one form or another in this new volume. Some of his major lectures—those on Shakespeare that he gave at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan in 1946, those he gave a decade later when he was named Professor of Poetry at his alma mater Oxford—made their way into the book revised but recognizable. But many of the parts of The Dyer's Hand are compiled from bits and pieces of the writings collected here: the Alice/Mabel dichotomy is neatly extracted from the discussion and repurposed, along with dozens of self-contained chunks from other essays. Many of these deal in one way or another with the relationship between Christianity and art, which, Auden told Stephen Spender, "is what the whole book is really about, the theme which dictated my selection of pieces and their order." And it's interesting, in light of this half-hidden purpose, to reflect on how much of the book takes the form of notes and aphorisms. It had been Pascal's plan to form his pensées into a book with a single strong line of argument, though he did not live to do so; Auden by contrast seems to have waived, or repudiated, such an ambition, contenting himself with more scattered provocations.
share this page
RSS Feed
