Cultural Cohesion Read Online Free Page B

peace. A tall white god landing from an open boat, a laconic war-bitten captain, the Truly Strong Man is a passive homosexual’s dream of equitable domination. He is the authentic figure of good in early Auden just as his half-brother, the Dictator, is the authentic figure of evil, the man swifter than Syrian horses who can throw the bully of Corinth and is seeking brilliant Athens and us.
    In the Strong Man’s embrace Auden achieves release from terror and a respite from his own admitted ugliness—his post-coital death at the hands of his Hellenic aggressor would appear to have a close visual affinity with the Dying Warrior.
    Acquire that flick of wrist and after strain
    Relax in your darling’s arms like a stone.
    In this Owenesque half-rhymed couplet the schoolboy vocabulary of mutual masturbation snuggles up with dainty boldness to the image of the narrator coiled in the tall leader’s massive embrace. We could be excused for assuming that Auden spent half of his most productive decade fainting dead away: he returns to the image of orgasm over and over, as the lolling bridegroom droops like a dying flower or lapses into a classic fatigue.
    .    .    .
    Auden’s butch hero flying fast aeroplanes or roping his weaker companions up F6 bears an ineluctable resemblance to the Aryan demigod breaking records in his BF 109 or pounding skyward at 45 degrees into the white hell of Pitz Palu. As with heterosexuals, so with homosexuals, sexual fantasizing is the mind’s dreariest function. The scholars, when they finally do get started on this tack, would do well to refrain from waxing ecstatic when nosing truffles of ambiguity. Auden started supplying a sardonic critique of his physical ideal almost from the moment of its creation. All generalized desire leads to banality. Auden staved off bathos by transcendence on the one hand and by foolery on the other. It needs always to be understood that the British schoolboys of his generation saw too much homosexuality ever to think of its mere mechanism as a mystery. Auden planted an abundance of gags for the lads.
    Out of the reeds like a fowl jumped the undressed German,
    And Stephen signalled from the sand dunes like a wooden madman. . . .
    Those were the days. Penned during his early time as a schoolmaster, frolicsome lovesick odes to the rugger team are similarly self-aware. Their presence in Poems edifyingly reminds us that Auden’s exaltation of the third sex (soon to have its internationalism recognized by being sneeringly branded “the homintern”) as a political paradigm was innocent only politically—sexually it was self-analytical to an extent that made Auden’s achievement of chaste lyricism a double triumph.
    In Look, Stranger! , the wonder book of Auden’s poetry, the lyricism was carried to its height. On the one hand, there was the perfection of his abstract sweetness— dolcezza so neutralized that it could be sung as plighting music for lovers everywhere.
    Moreover, eyes in which I learn
    That I am glad to look, return
    Â Â Â My glance every day;
    And when the birth and rising sun
    Waken me, I still speak with one
    Â Â Â Who has not gone away.
    On the other hand, there was a deepening admission of vulnerability, of a fateful strangeness which no amount of bravado could usher into its inheritance.
    Whispering neighbours, left and right,
    Pluck us from the real delight;
    And the active hands must freeze
    Lonely on the separate knees.
    All lust, Auden now complains, is at once informed on and suppressed: the new political forces will offer outlaws no place. Throughout Look, Stranger! the heterosexuals are characteristically pictured as the tireless sentries guarding those lonely roads on which lovers walk to make a tryst, unpitying soldiers
    Whose sleepless presences endear
    Our peace to us with a perpetual threat.
    It’s the threat which makes the homosexual’s peace more