Cultural Cohesion Read Online Free Page A

specks of grit.
    Save him from hostile capture
    From sudden tiger’s leap at corner;
    Protect his house,
    His anxious house where days are counted
    From thunderbolt protect,
    From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
    Converting number from vague to certain,
    Bring joy, bring day of his returning.
    Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.
    Towards the glamour of the opposing teams—the chaps—Auden’s feelings were ambiguous. So were his feelings towards his own homosexuality. Like many homosexuals he seems to have experienced homosexual congress as the only clean kind, and thus had no reason to hesitate in identifying homosexuality with a new political order. Nevertheless guilt remained. In the 1930s it was a cultural residue (later on, when Auden returned to Christianity, it became a religious precept), but was no less powerful for that. Just as, in another poem, the “ruined boys” have been damaged by something more physical than the inculcation of upper-class values which left-wing readers delightedly assumed, so in this last stanza of “The Wanderer” the spreading ruin is something closer to home than the collapse of Europe. There was fear in Auden’s pride about his condition. Fear of the police and fear that the much-trumpeted corruption might be a fact. He thought that heterosexual people could enjoy security but that only homosexuals could enjoy danger; that the intensity of the homosexual’s beleaguered experience was the harbinger of a new unity; but that, nevertheless, the homosexual was unlucky. In the last line of this most beautiful of young poems, he doesn’t really expect luck to be granted or his kind of day to dawn. It’s yet another mark of Auden’s superiority that whereas his contemporaries could be didactic about what they had merely thought or read, Auden could be tentative about what he felt in his bones. (It was marvellous, and continues to be marvellous, that the Scrutiny critics never detected in Auden his unwearying preoccupation with the morality of his art, nor realized that a talent of such magnitude—the magnitude of genius—matures in a way that criticism can hope to understand but not prescribe.)
    It will be useful, when the time comes, to hear a homosexual critic’s conjectures about the precise nature of Auden’s sexual tastes. It seems to me, who am no expert, that Auden’s analysis of Housman’s guilt feelings (he said Housman was so convinced a Hellenist that he felt ashamed of being passive rather than active) was an indirect admission that Auden was passive himself. Even in the earliest poems he seems not to be taking the lead. All too often he is the forsaken one, the one who loves too much and is always asking his beloved to share an impossibly elevated conception of their union.
    You whom I gladly walk with, touch,
    Or wait for as one certain of good,
    We know it, we know that love
    Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,
    More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,
    The heel on the finishing blade of grass,
    The self-confidence of the falling root,
    Needs death, death of the grain, our death,
    Death of the old gang . . .
    But as Auden half-guessed that it might turn out, the old gang wouldn’t go away: oppression would always be a reality and homosexual lovers would continue to live in fear and fragments. Out of this insecurity as a soldier in a lost army, it seems to me, emerged Auden’s unsettling obsession with the leader principle—a version of führerprinzip which was in fact no more Hitlerite than Stalinist, but was simply Auden’s dream of a puissant redeemer.
    Absence of fear in Gerhart Meyer
    From the sea, the truly strong man.
    The Truly Strong Man, the Airman, the Tall Unwounded Leader of Doomed Companions—he occurs and recurs throughout Auden’s younger work, forever changing form but always retaining the magic power to convert fear into