Farewell to Fantasy

FOR THE TIME BEING--W. H. Auden--Random House ($2).

In 1938 Chinese soldiers blinked when a tall, ungainly, towheaded young Briton with bright hazel eyes and an Oxford voice introduced himself with a visiting card phonetically inscribed "Au Dung" and wandered through battle areas discussing the poetry of Robert Bridges with his companion. Novelist Christopher Isherwood ("Y Hsiao Wu"). In 1936 Icelanders watched the same outlander read the works of Lord Byron while jogging through their bleak countryside on a pony. In 1937 he worked as a censor in the Spanish Loyalist Government. In 1940 this unusual apparition settled improbably in Brooklyn.*

King's Medalist. By any U.S. standard, Poet Wystan (rhymes with piston) Hugh Auden is an odd fish. To such plain U.S. readers as may be exposed to it, most of his poetry seems still odder. Nevertheless, at 37, Auden is generally rated the most influential poet of his generation. For the Time Being, his twelfth book, is likely to be the year's most discussed book of poetry.

Born in York, England, where his father is a doctor, young Auden at first doted on photography, engineering, motorcycles and whales. But he soon turned to poetry, by the early 1930s was the leader of Britain's famed, leftist "Auden Circle." Like most original poets, Auden experimented constantly with the styles and techniques of his predecessors--Donne, Blake, Byron, Housman, Yeats, Rilke. He wrote sharply satirical leftish poems (The Orators, The Dance of Death), co-authored verse dramas with Isherwood (The Ascent of F6, The Dog Beneath the Skin), edited anthologies (The Oxford Book of Light Verse), turned out some of the most sparkling verse of his time, wrote highly personal witty reports on his travels in Iceland and China (Letters from Iceland, Journey to a War).

He also found time to write such peculiar radio dramas as The Emotional and Psychological Reaction of the Women Who Killed the Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs. In 1937 young Auden received the King's Medal for the year's best poetry.

Since he moved to the U.S., Auden's poems (Another Time, The Double Man) have been chiefly concerned with metaphysics and religion. For the Time Being is simultaneously an intense declaration of the poet's new-found religious faith and a rejection of the more self-centered aspects of his brilliant past. A slim (132 pages) volume, it consists of two dramas in verse and prose: a commentary on Shakespeare's Tempest, and a Christmas oratorio.

"A Way of Silence." Principal mouthpiece for the new Auden is Shakespeare's Prospero, the magician in The Tempest, who in his old age throws his books of magic into the sea, breaks his wand, dismisses his wonder-working servant Ariel, abandons his magic island for the mild humdrum of everyday life. In Auden's version, Prospero's farewell to Ariel represents the mature intellectual's adieu to the glorious but unreal life of personal fantasy:

Can I learn to suffer Without saying something ironic or funny

On suffering? I never suspected the way of truth

Was a way of silence . . .

But despite his new humility, Poet Auden does not lay sole blame for the blunders of contemporary thought on the artist and creative thinker. For the plain people clamor at the artist's door, promising him devotion and rich rewards if he will only distract them from the harshness of life by painting it in magic colors and assuring them that their idle dreams and nostalgia are true and good. They cry: "Carry me back, Master, to the cathedral town where the canons run through the water meadows with butterfly nets and the old women keep sweetshops in the cobbled side-streets, or back to the upland milltown . . . with its grope-movie and its poolroom lit by gas, carry me back to the days before my wife put on weight, back to the years when beer was cheap and the rivers really froze in the winter."

The honest poet has no choice, however, but to show the illusion-loving man-in-the-street that today the beauty he dreams of has become a Wellsian, moonlit scene of desolation--a "lava plateau . . . fissured with chasms" and dotted with extinct volcanoes. Instead of a credible faith, this frozen land offers nothing but a thousand contradictory ways of life, centered around the false face of "the huge stuffed bird of happiness" and the "black stone on which the bones are cracked." Only "among the ruins and the bones" can man hear "the real Word which is our only raison d'etre."

The Nature of the Word is the theme of the Christmas oratorio that follows. Before the Nativity, men of the Roman Empire shrank from a future that seemed then as dismal as it does to some today:

The violent howling of winter and war has become

Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are afraid

Of Pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare

Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.

This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.

Into this desolation falls the Star, and around it assemble the characters of the Nativity's great drama. The old Auden mixture of flippancy and fervor appears at its strongest in these passages.

JOSEPH

My shoes were shined, my pants were cleaned and pressed,

And I was hurrying to meet

My own true Love ...

CHORUS

Joseph, you have heard

What Mary says occurred;

Yes, it may be so.

Is it likely? No.

But in belief in Christ, Poet Auden finds the substitute for the egotistical fantasy of Prospero and the contemporary artist, and for the wish-dreams of the man-in-the-street. For the time being:

Let us acknowledge our defeats but without despair,

For all societies and epochs are transient details,

Transmitting an everlasting opportunity

That the Kingdom of Heaven may come, not in our Present

And not in our Future, but in the Fullness of Time.

Let us pray.

Bryn Mawr and Third Avenue. Since 1941 Poet Auden has taught English literature at Swarthmore College, and, for the past few months, at Bryn Mawr. In 1936 he married Thomas Mann's eldest daughter, Erika, an exiled anti-Nazi playwright deprived of her nationality by Hitler. A vigorous anti-Nazi, he expects to apply for his final U.S. citizenship papers. Doubleday Doran will soon publish his Selected Poems of Tennyson, and next January his own Collected Poems 1928-1942 will appear. He is now working on "an eclogue in a Third Avenue bar", tentatively titled The Age of Anxiety.

*Other British expatriates now in the U.S. include: Novelists Aldous Huxley, Richard Aiding-ton and Somerset Maugham; Philosopher Gerald Heard.

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