The primary task of this book is to explore this model of Christian humane learning as a force for social renewal. We have already seen why the model—especially in the more confrontational form advocated by Maritain, Adler, and Hutchins—was resisted by secularists and pluralists like Sidney Hook and John Dewey. But it is equally important to note that this approach was not the only Christian one on the scene at the outset of the war. One important alternative was the “Christian realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr.
To be sure, there is much overlap between Niebuhr’s ideas and those of the protagonists of this book. In Christianity and Power Politics, the book he published in 1940 to mark his support for the war effort, and total rejection of the pacifism he had previously embraced, Niebuhr rejected the humanism of the Renaissance in terms very similar to those employed by Maritain and Weil: “The Renaissance . . . saw human history as a realm of infinite possibilities, but forgot that it is a realm of evil as well as good potentialities. In both its rationalism and its mysticism the Renaissance thought that it had found methods of extricating the universal man from the particular man, embedded in the flux of nature.”1 It thought wrongly.
This could be a quotation from Maritain. But in 1936 Niebuhr had reviewed Maritain’s Freedom in the Modern World in the Saturday Review and had been unimpressed by what he believed to be its nostalgia for an earlier social order that could never be restored. “A type of guild socialism seems to [Maritain] to conform best to the Christian ideal”—but the guild system is a relic of the Middle Ages. Therefore Maritain “is as unrealistic as the rationalistic liberals, whose approach he rejects, in explaining how that kind of a social order is to be created.” Maritain wants to articulate a humane political philosophy that is prior and superior to economic concerns, but this, says Niebuhr, is precisely what one cannot achieve in the modern world: “He pleads for a priority of politics over economics but does not face the problem that a technical age has made economic power the most basic power, from which political power is derived.” Maritain, Niebuhr thinks, “fails to recognize the dynamic and quasi-autonomous character of the various materials with which a modern statesman must deal.” (His assumption of the perspective of the “modern statesman” is characteristic of Niebuhr and one of the chief ways he differs from Maritain and the other central figures of this book.) “One gains the impression that a Catholicism which once dominated a comparatively static agrarian society will have greater difficulty than it realizes in insinuating its ideals into the dynamic force of a technical age.”2
This is the voice of what Niebuhr called Christian Realism. In contrast to a renewal of broadly based humane learning, Niebuhr offers a version of Realpolitik undergirded by a constant awareness of original sin and (consequently, he would say) unafraid to plunge into the give-and-take of “power politics” with the hope of getting something useful done.
In 1992, on the centennial of Niebuhr’s birth, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote of how bracing it had been to hear Niebuhr preach on this subject in the first years of the Second World War: “Traditionally, the idea of the frailty of man led to the demand for obedience to ordained authority. But Niebuhr rejected that ancient conservative argument. Ordained authority, he showed, is all the more subject to the temptations of self-interest, self-deception and self-righteousness. Power must be balanced by power.”3Power must be balanced by power, and therefore any trust placed in the renewal of humane education to reshape the world can be little more than evasive nostalgia, a model of social action that simply fails to meet the need for a deeply Christian engagement with the “principalities and powers” of this world. A “technical age”—Niebuhr uses the phrase repeatedly—must be confronted on its own terms, not avoided by a shift sideways into an essentially private realm of personal formation. He draws a bright straight line between a Pauline and Augustinian theological anthropology and public policy.
Niebuhr was often a strong critic of some elements of the American political regime, but his critique came from within its walls. Some years ago, the sociologist Michael Lindsay wrote a book about Christian participation in politics called Faith in the Halls of Power. The title is susceptible to two very different construals. It could announce the story of how people of faith act when in the halls of power; it could also suggest the description of what happens when people have faith in what happens in the halls of power. Both possibilities fit Niebuhr. He never expected politics to achieve some utopian order—his pervasively skeptical anthropology forbade that—but he thought that Christians could intervene directly in the political order in powerful and valuable ways. He was, I think, less hopeful about attempts to alter society through intellectual transformation, though he used his own powerful intellect to produce critiques of modern society as incisive as any of his time. It can sometimes seem that Niebuhr’s most theologically serious work merely laid the foundation for more direct modes of political intervention—precisely the modes that the protagonists of our story here shunned in favor of longer views and less direct interventions. Niebuhr’s thinking owed little to the essentially humanistic tradition of which our protagonists are, in their admittedly varying ways, heirs and celebrants.
Auden was just getting to know Niebuhr and his wife Ursula when Christianity and Power Politics appeared. It was Ursula to whom he was closer—they were both English and missed their native land in similar ways—and in letters to her maintained a rather consistently bantering, not to say mocking, tone toward her husband. He described Reinhold as resembling a “benevolent eagle,” and in a letter written in December 1941 said,
I hope that that Christian Dynamo Reinhold will give you two or three days rest at Christmas, or rather that you will very firmly put him to bed and keep him there. How I laughed over your story about not getting anything DONE. I’m sure if Lutherans had confessors, his would say “Now, my son, as a penance for being an ecclesiastical Orson Welles, you shall sit in an arm-chair for 48 hours with NO RADIO and twiddle your thumbs.”4
And when he reviewed Christianity and Power Politics for the Nation in January 1941, he allowed some of this tone to creep into his response. Acknowledging that the book is “lucid, just, and . . . theologically unexceptionable,” he went on to say, “and yet it leaves me a little uneasy.” The problem, for Auden, is that Niebuhr’s eagerness to participate in the political arena, even under the banner of a belief in original sin, might allow him to lose sight of some of his own foundational beliefs. Auden illustrates his discomfort through a parable:
A brother once came to one of the desert fathers saying, “My mind is intent on God.” The old man replied, “It is no matter that thy mind should be with God; but if thou didst see thyself less than any of his creatures, that were something.” I am sure Dr Niebuhr knows this: I am not, sure, though, that he is sufficiently ashamed. The danger of being a professional exposer of the bogus is that, encountering it so often, one may come in time to cease to believe in the reality it counterfeits.
This is on the face of it a very peculiar response to a book on Christianity and politics. But I think Auden is suggesting, in as gentle a way as he can manage, that a vast chasm separates an Augustinian theological anthropology employed as a tool of social analysis and critique from an Augustinian theological anthropology that generates what would surely be a profoundly discomfiting self-knowledge. “The question is: does he believe that the contemplative life is the highest and most exhausting of vocations, that the church is saved by the saints, or doesn’t he?”5
It is noteworthy that Auden does not defend the intellectual life—by implication a branch of the contemplative—by claiming that it is “a realm of infinite possibilities,” as, in Niebuhr’s account, did the Renaissance humanists; rather, he claims that it is the sphere that demands the most of its adherents, and the sphere in which the church itself is saved. What would it profit the church to engage effectively in “power politics” but lose its own soul through neglecting the witness, and the proper formation, of its saints? What would it profit a man, a theologian and a pastor, to articulate a convincing Augustinian critique of the whole social order while forgetting that he too is, as the Book of Common Prayer says, a “miserable offender”?
This is a question, as C. S. Lewis put it in an article he published in 1942, of distinguishing between first and second things. “You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first. From which it would follow that the question, What things are first? is of concern not only to philosophers but to everyone.” Lewis argues that throughout the twentieth century “our own civilization . . . has been putting itself first. To preserve civilization has been the great aim; the collapse of civilization, the great bugbear.” And if “preserving civilization” really is the first order, then Niebuhr’s Christian Realism is surely the political philosophy to follow. But, Lewis asks, “how if civilization has been imperilled precisely by the fact that we have all made civilization our summum bonum? Perhaps it can’t be preserved in that way. Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it.”6
To the question of what that “something else” might be, Lewis does not, in that essay, give an answer. But we may find a hint in “The Weight of Glory,” the sermon he preached at Oxford’s University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in June 1941. There he said, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”7 To embrace this account of the human person, which is of course a traditional Christian one, is to decenter the world of politics—not to ignore it, but to shift it toward the periphery, to see it as among the second rather than the first things. To think from within this account is to accept the necessity of giving, before anything else, a proper account of personhood, and to understand oneself as bound as fully as anyone else by the account that one gives.
If Auden has rightly understood that Niebuhr neglected this account, and consequently failed to grasp his own place in the cosmos, then we might pose as the proper counterbalance to Niebuhr the self-understanding of Simone Weil. In the “spiritual autobiography” she wrote in 1942 for her informal personal confessor, Father Perrin, she describes a moment seven years earlier when she, “in a wretched condition physically,” visited a Portuguese fishing village “which, alas, was very wretched too.” She happened to arrive on the day of the festival of the village’s patron saint.
It was the evening and there was a full moon over the sea. The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant unless it were the song of the boatmen on the Volga. There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.8
* * *
“The Weight of Glory” was the second wartime sermon Lewis preached at Oxford’s University Church; the first had come a mere six weeks into the war. At that moment fraught with tension, he raised quite bluntly before the assembled students and dons the question of whether they should be attending the university at all. (This was also when he stated that he believed the Allied cause to be “very righteous.”) Canon T. R. Milford, then the vicar of the church, discussed the topic with Lewis beforehand and got a copy of the address, with which he was so impressed that he had it mimeographed and handed out to everyone who came. The title on the handout was “None Other Gods: Culture in War-Time,” though Lewis would later publish it under the title “Learning in War-Time.” For this was Lewis’s general question: What possible use could academic studies be in time of war?
His answer, in brief, is that such studies have the same use, and the same uselessness, in time of war as in time of peace, because “the war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.” He points out that the question of how people can possibly think of academic questions when the outcome of the war is at stake takes precisely the same form as the question raised everlastingly by some Christians: “How can you be so frivolous and selfish as to think about anything but the salvation of human souls?”9
Lewis’s reply to the latter question is that whether or not it would be a good idea to think only explicitly “religious” thoughts, nobody does. “Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before, one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.” And for Lewis, “in a new spirit” is the key concept: he takes his watchword in this sermon from the biblical injunction “Whether ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The question, then, is whether academic work can be done to the glory of God, and Lewis’s answer is that of course it can. “If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.”10
There is some naïveté, or perhaps conscious exaggeration for the purposes of exhortation, in Lewis’s assumption that his students understand themselves to be living “the learned life.” Even for the most studious, learning is only part of undergraduate experience. But it could also be that Lewis was thinking of himself. When the previous war had come about, and he had fought in it, he was not a Christian and had no sense of religious obligation. Now he had to consider whether this new war brought him any new responsibilities—especially since it was to him a horror that he wanted only to sleep through or, failing that, ignore. He was, I believe, sufficiently self-aware to know that he was preaching a message that he himself would like to hear; but he preached it anyway, because its message was his genuine conviction.
For Lewis, then, trying to think in Christian terms, the life of learning is like any other life: something that can be done “to the glory of God” but not of any particular distinction—not different in this respect from any other calling. As George Herbert had written three hundred years earlier, “Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, / Makes that and th’ action fine.” And Lewis had cause to develop his thoughts further in an essay he wrote for the journal Theology just a few weeks later, “Christianity and Culture.” He wrote it in response to one George Every, who in an earlier contribution to the same journal had argued that good literary taste is a Christian virtue in need of cultivation. Lewis’s essay initiated a controversy that went on in the pages of Theology for several issues, and later in the disputation Lewis accepted Every’s claim that Lewis had misunderstood him; but the chief provocation of Lewis’s side of the controversy was his belief that Every did indeed contend that good aesthetic taste was a Christian virtue and was very wrong so to contend.
Lewis says that his first response to Every’s essay was to be “almost thankful for . . . bad hymns. It was good that we should have to lay down our precious refinement at the very doorstep of the church.” But on further reflection he decided this that would be simply an error in the opposite direction of Every’s and that a more moderate conclusion was needed. That conclusion, as he described it at a later stage of the debate, “was that culture, though not in itself meritorious, was innocent and pleasant, might be a vocation for some, was helpful in bringing certain souls to Christ, and could be pursued to the glory of God.” Some of these beliefs, especially his conviction of the value of activities that are merely, as some might say, “innocent and pleasant,” find their way into much of his later writing; and generally he reinforces, throughout the dispute, the position he articulated in “Learning in War-Time” that cultural pursuits are permissible but not intrinsically good. There may be circumstances in which the cultivation of aesthetic excellence is misplaced, and in which its absence is not only justifiable but commendable: a given man may be uncultured “because he has given to good works the time and energy which others use to acquire elegant habits or good language.” In almost the last words of Lewis’s last contribution to the disputation, he writes, “I am stating, not solving, a problem.”11
The “problem” comes into play because, as it turns out, there is no necessary and inevitable role for any element of human culture in relation to the “first things” of the Christian life. The first answer to the question of whether a given activity is for spiritual good or ill must always be that it depends. Thus when, a year after concluding this disputation in Theology, Lewis begins writing a series of fictional letters from a demon named Screwtape to his underling Wormwood, he has Screwtape say this: “I must warn you not to hope too much from a war.”
Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? . . . Let us therefore think rather how to use, than how to enjoy, this European war. For it has certain tendencies inherent in it which are, in themselves, by no means in our favour. We may hope for a good deal of cruelty and unchastity. But, if we are not careful, we shall see thousands turning in this tribulation to the Enemy, while tens of thousands who do not go so far as that will nevertheless have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes which they believe to be higher than the self.12
And of course Lewis means for his Christian readers to use the words of Screwtape as a kind of mirror in which they see their own priorities reversed.
But this means that Lewis here uses culture—more particularly, the literary genre of satire—to make what he believes to be vital theological and moral points. That is, he is striving to turn cultural instruments to good effect, so that one can say that in this case at least the pursuit of culture is commendable and helpful. In the disputation in Theology, Lewis had commented that literary reading had been for him an important vehicle for drawing closer to Christian faith, and believed that the same could be true for others, though some were of course led away from Christianity by their literary reading. (“It depends.”) One of the questions he raised near the end of his last contribution to the debate in Theology was whether he had not just the opportunity but also the duty to use his literary gifts in that way, as a means of cultural critique and the illumination of tendencies. Having agreed with one of his interlocutors that one thing a good critic might do is tease out the hidden implications of a work of art, he asks, “Is it the function of the ‘trained critic’ to discover the latent beliefs and standards in a book, or to pass judgment on them when discovered, or both?”
I think that Lewis came to believe that this combination of inquiry and judgment was essential to his own public role, and that in pursuing that joint impulse he was bringing together his vocation as scholar and critic with his avocational pursuit of writing fiction. And this can be seen in the literary genres he chiefly employed in his writing during the war. He became expert in using storytelling as a form of cultural critique, and always with the war as a backdrop—incidental, in one sense, and yet essential. The experience of being in a country under siege turns up repeatedly in Lewis’s work throughout the 1940s, from The Screwtape Letters at war’s outset to The Great Divorce at its conclusion, and even after. In 1940, when he was hosting at his home in Oxford children who had been evacuated from London, he decided to write a children’s story, but set it aside. When he returned to it a decade later, the setting he had originally envisioned remained the same: “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.”13
In his storytelling and his polemical writings alike, Lewis understood himself to be bringing something distinctive to bear on the challenges of his world: an intimate knowledge of, and love for, the distant past. His academic training as a medievalist is not, in his mind, an irrelevance, still less an impediment, but a qualification for social commentary. As he says in “Learning in War-Time,” “[W]e need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.” Moreover, since the twentieth century’s powerful communications technologies have a tendency to reinforce those temporary fashions more powerfully than any culture could have imagined in the past, those who know other ways become especially vital: “the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”14
On these grounds he freely commended the wisdom of the past, and filled his wartime stories with demons, transfigured and glorified souls, planetary Intelligences, unfallen beings radiant with wisdom and love . . . . One suspects, given his belief in the value of old books to correct “the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone,” he would have told such tales even if he had not believed in the spiritual warfare that he continually portrays in them. But he did believe that such warfare was constant, and that an earthly war, even a worldwide one, was a small thing in comparison with the great cosmic conflict between a righteous and loving God and all those who aligned themselves against righteousness and love.
* * *
In July 1942, Auden wrote to his friend James Stern, “In 1912, it was a real vision to discover that God loves a Pernod and a good fuck, but in 1942 every maiden aunt knows this and it’s time to discover something else He loves.”15 That sentence neatly encapsulates the intellectual and spiritual journey that Auden had openly embarked on soon after he came to America in January 1939.
In one sense, the journey had begun some years earlier. Looking back late in life on the steps that had led him to embrace Christianity, Auden recalled two events from the 1930s: his unexpected and inexplicably intense distress at seeing the destruction of churches in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War; and his meeting with Charles Williams, the Oxford University Press editor and eccentric Christian writer, which gave to Auden the strong conviction that while he was with Williams he was “in the presence of personal sanctity.”16 But he was situated within English intellectual culture in a way that prevented him from absorbing whatever lessons were to be learned from those experiences, and it was only once he got to America that he began in a serious way to reconsider the foundations of his life.
This was not an easy task, especially since the move to America disrupted him in almost every way. That he had no fixed abode was nothing new—he had been peripatetic his entire adult life—but traveling about in a new and vast country was disorienting. Then he fell in love. As he wrote to his brother John, “Mr Right has come into my life. He is a Roumanian-Latvian-American Jew called Chester Kallman, eighteen, extremely intelligent and I think, about to become a good poet. His father who knows all and approves is a communist dentist who would be rich if he didn’t have to pay two sets of alimony. This time, my dear, I really believe it’s marriage.”17 But the relationship grew complicated very quickly, and Auden was forced to recognize that Kallman did not think of them as being married and fully intended to have sex with other men when so inclined (and he was often so inclined). Even as he sought to reckon with this ever-changing and unprecedentedly intense relationship, Auden was trying to figure out what he believed and why he believed it. He had never lived in a manner so closely approximating his intellectual preferences, but sorting through all that reading was immensely demanding. In December 1939, he gave a lecture at Harvard, and one of the attendees was the eminent English literary critic I. A. Richards, who reported to T. S. Eliot,
Auden gave a Lecture here—very crowded audience, 300 seated, 20–30 standing throughout—and began by saying how proud he was to speak to the 1st University in the country in which he hoped to become, in a few years, a citizen . . . . He is an utterly changed man . . . thin, white, shrunk and tortured by something.18
Perhaps “tortured by something” is an exaggeration, but Auden was certainly struggling to find his way—and very consciously so. One of Auden’s first New York friends was a much older woman, Elizabeth Mayer, a German refugee whose father had been a Lutheran pastor. She began a correspondence with Auden’s father, who wrote to her, with telling insight, “You know what a sense of Mission there has always been present in Wystan’s plan of life from the time when he decided to leave England for America.”19 The Mission was, above all, to find his true vocation. And that proved an elusive Grail, not least because Auden’s personal quest could not be disentangled from the events then tearing Europe apart.
He tried to disentangle it. “New Year Letter,” the long poem he wrote in the first four months of 1940, is above all a defense of the new way of life he had chosen since coming to America: an aesthetic life, a life of reading and listening to music, as he sought to re-educate himself and to be open to new forms of art previously unknown to him (it was through Chester Kallman that he came to love opera). “New Year Letter” is perhaps not Auden’s most learned poem, but it is his most ostentatiously learned one, with all the artists and thinkers whose works he had been reassessing featured prominently throughout the poem in small capitals:
BLAKE shouted insults, ROUSSEAU wept,
Ironic KIERKEGAARD stared long
And muttered “All are in the wrong,”
While BAUDELAIRE went mad protesting
That progress is not interesting . . . .20
The poem is dotted from end to end with these typographic signals of a new emphasis: the local and the aesthetic now take precedence over the universal (it was a commitment to universal justice that had sent Auden to Spain in 1937) and the political—or what is usually taken to be the political. For Elizabeth Mayer’s informal salon on Long Island—from which the poem emerges and which it continually commends—constitutes a counterpolitics. The world’s sun, that true universal with its “neutral eye,”
Lit up America and on
A cottage in Long Island shone
Where BUXTEHUDE as we played
One of his passacaglias made
Our minds a civitas of sound
Where nothing but assent was found,
For art had set in order sense
And feeling and intelligence,
And from its ideal order grew
Our local understanding too.21
If the larger civitas is broken—“Defenceless under the night / Our world in stupor lies,” he had written in “September 1, 1939”—this smaller one remains whole and beautiful. And those who both create and receive its wholeness are not that abstraction from the earlier poem, “the Just,” but simply Elizabeth’s friends, those who have been fortunate enough to come for a time within her orbit and under the protection of her house.
In the last pages of the poem, Auden muses that the external chaos from which they are temporarily protected has multiple causes, some of which are philosophical. “The flood of tyranny and force / Arises at a double source”: “Plato’s lie of intellect” that allows philosopher-kings to arise and believe that they are born to rule over “the herd,” or “Rousseau’s falsehood of the flesh” that creates a universal pride and confidence in the sane strength of “the Irrational.”22 But then he turns to what seems to be an even greater and more intransigent force, visible with particular clarity even in an America not yet at war:
More even than in Europe, here
The choice of patterns is made clear
Which the machine imposes, what
Is possible and what is not,
To what conditions we must bow
In building the Just City now.23
Twenty years earlier, Eliot had famously written, thinking of art, that Tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”24 Auden is translating that idea into the terms of politics. We must understand
That the machine has now destroyed
The local customs we enjoyed,
Replaced the bonds of blood and nation
By personal confederation.
To judge our means and plan our ends; . . .25
Another way to put this point is to say that nationalism and romantic individualism are equal and opposite errors: nationalism believes that the consoling and nurturing force of tradition can indeed be inherited—if you happen to be born in the right place—while romantic individualism believes that each of us can be wholly self-sufficient, self-made. Each of these errors is consolidated by “the machine”: that is, enforced by a technological regime that makes “personal confederation” the only option for meaningful community. It is true that “Aloneness is man’s real condition,” but that merely sets each of us off as an adventurer, a “landless knight,” a “Gawain-Quixote,” in quest of such community— which, again, must be consciously made, in local company, and neither inherited (which the machine had made impossible) nor done without (which the machine falsely tells you you can do, with its infinitely resourceful help).
So the ideas of Plato and Rousseau must be resisted, as well as the power (both concrete and ideological) of the machine. All very good. And yet hanging over the whole edifice is the question that Auden had faced at the theater in Yorkville: is this vision strong enough to oppose the forces tearing the world apart? In “the world we know / Of war and wastefulness and woe,” it seems that “Ashamed civilians come to grief / In brotherhoods without belief.”26 Can brotherhoods be sustained without belief? Auden fears not; and so concludes his with a long and beautiful and yet also tentative prayer, “O Unicorn among the cedars.” It is a prayer of petition rather than praise, and what it asks is for this Unicorn, this Dove, this Ichthus, this Wind, to
Instruct us in the civil art
Of making from the muddled heart
A desert and a city where
The thoughts that have to labour there
May find locality and peace,
And pent-up feelings their release,
Send strength sufficient for our day,
And point our knowledge on its way,
O da quod jubes, Domine.27
The last phrase is adapted from Augustine’s Confessions, probably by way of Charles Williams’s Descent of the Dove: “O give what you command, Lord.” Which is to say: Whatever you ask of us you must give us the strength to do.
“New Year Letter” is clearly an attempt to master internal disorder—given that external disorder was beyond Auden’s control. An especially telling account of his state of mind, in the dark last days of 1939, just before he began the poem, may be found in his review of an anthology edited by Walter de la Mare whose full title is Behold, This Dreamer! Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination, Divination, the Artist, and Kindred Subjects. After but a few words concerning de la Mare’s anthology, Auden, as was his habit, rose high into the intellectual sky to take a hawk’s-eye view of the subject.
We are confronted today by the spectacle, not of a utilitarian rationalism that dismisses all that cannot be expressed in prose and statistics as silly childish stuff, but rather by an ecstatic and morbid abdication of the free-willing and individual before the collective and daemonic. We have become obscene night worshippers who, having discovered that we cannot live exactly as we will, deny the possibility of willing anything and are content masochistically to be lived, a denial that betrays not only us but our daemon itself.28
In sum, he writes, “We are witnessing the dissolution of a historical epoch which may be called for convenience Protestant, one during which the day life and the night life were segregated from each other.” The life of the daytime is represented by “the humanist tradition of the Renaissance”; the life of the night by “the Calvinist tradition of the Reformation making the contemplative man, whether as artist or as religious, the passive instrument of daemonic powers.” It is impossible here not to think of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s “lingerous longerous book of the dark,” which had appeared just a few months earlier and with which Auden would reckon in a 1941 essay. There, Auden imagines Joyce as “a man conscious of possessing great energy, who believes that order neither exists nor is possible.” But it is hard to say what such a man would “think worth doing with his energy. If order cannot be created, then no action can be worthwhile.” What is left, Auden says, is simply to “record the flux.”
One’s taste for Joyce’s work . . . will depend, therefore, on whether or not one accepts the flux as the Thing-in-itself. If one does, then Joyce must seem the supreme Master; but if, like myself, one does not, then, apart from the haunting beauty of accidental phrases with an accidental dream-like appeal, he ceases to interest as soon as he ceases to shock.29
All this is of course massively unfair to Joyce, whose ambitions are far greater and more complex (and far less “passive”) than Auden recognizes, but unfair in understandable ways. For Joyce offers no clear path toward recognizing the psychological, social, and political dangers arising from the “dissolution” of the boundaries between the Day and the Night. One might say that, for Auden, Joyce’s composition of two epics—one of the Day (Ulysses) and another of the Night (Finnegans Wake)—is a methodological failure to account for the bleeding of the “daemonic” forces of the Night into our daily lives.
At this period in Auden’s development, he is caught between two vocabularies for describing these disorders, the Freudian and the Christian. This marks a pivotal moment in Auden’s personal development, and it raises issues that are vital for any serious understanding of all five of the figures with whom we are here concerned. It is then, I think, necessary, to allow this account of Auden’s thinking to lead us into a more general meditation on demons.