W.H. Auden: A Biography
Teachout, Terry
for example, that the demand for children depends specifically upon the ratios of fixed to variable costs for quantity and quality and the ratio of marginal variable costs to average variable...
...BS, BT...
...He wrote . . . some of the strongest, strangest, and most original poetry that anyone has written in this c e n t u r y , " J a r r e l l said of Auden's pre-1939 work...
...125 G~e...
...Paul...
...he sings us comic songs, supplies us with brilliant elegies on the deaths of great contemporaries...
...7, 39, 44, $9, 124...
...or $8.50 (elsewhere) for a one-year | subscr0ption, starting with the current issue, | Money back of not pleased...
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...8. 221 Fm'dma~, Mdttm, 31, 3Z Hamen...
...Chieago, 611610* 312/610-1647 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1982 37...
...It is hard to imagine, in politics, a happier or more useful life than to provide critical aid to the man who will lead the country...
...74 Hall...
...These he understands to be served by the man he helped to make President...
...83 Frankr Day*d...
...In Auden's case, however, the schism between preaching and practice was unusually blatant...
...Centre for Conflict Studies, University of New Brunswick Fredericton, N.B., E3B 5A3 Canada Telephone: (506) 453-4978 tion), Becker's argument itself is of little utility...
...Benl~m...
...14,4...
...215-217, Great ~ , TM, (Wall~), 33 223 Gr~nspan, Allan...
...4 Fortune, 49 Foundation for Economic Education H~rle...
...But your efforts, and your convictions, are recognized in Why Reagan Won, a narrative history of the conservative movement from 1964 to 1981...
...194 G,~non...
...174 Hind C.r The (White and ~hn...
...This is particularly true of the biographer whose subject is homosexual...
...S6, 57...
...Jeffrey...
...Oklahoma 74114 the slough of academic despond...
...Langguth's recent Saki...
...Indeed, he actually had the gall to complain on one memorable occasion that J.R...
...Hr F~dan~, 62, 171 I11, 126...
...18J, 19...
...In 1968, all four Republican frontrunners--Reagan, Nixon, Rockefeller, and Romney--asked White to help lead their campaigns for nomination...
...L58, 169...
...Without information, an individual who wishes to maximize has to do so by guessing at these missing numbers...
...The results, a near-definitive biographical pendant to many specifically literary studies of Auden which have appeared over the years, leave virtually nothing to be desired...
...84, IZ3...
...It is so important that when, in chapter ten, Becker finally acknowledges ill, at 'participants in marriage markets hardly know their own interests and capabilities, let alone the dependability, sexual compatibility and other traits of potential spouses, it is hard to avoid concluding that he has just presented a devastating critique of chapters one to nine...
...39, $1, 52...
...Clifton White is a genuine pioneer in the technologizalion of the Democratic art...
...Why Reagan Won is your story Were you surprised by Ronald Reagan's landslide victory...
...It is a clear and incisive overview of America in these closing decades of the most eventful century in all history...
...67 Game...
...although the only sensible and coherent approach is one of absolute honesty, few scholars are in a position to exercise it...
...67 O,lle...
...Auden, and they symbolize the profound change which Auden's new life worked on his art...
...and a poet who once dealt in genuine jewels now cheerfully peddled a brilliant grade of tinsel to his surprised and, finally, disappointed public...
...2Z5 Hauuna...
...47.61 Oarrgk, Rcberl...
...4 Foreign Policy R~aKh lmtitme, 62 Grenier John...
...Carpenter's book is not salacious--nor does it sink into Terry Teachout is jazz critic of the Kansas City Star...
...70 154-t55,16I, 164-17],, 174-181, Great Soctely...
...159, 172 (FEE), 30...
...Such candor is essential to any serious discussion of Auden's stature a~ a poet...
...Rtr M Gardner...
...It's 178, 18Z-18), 216 C, okkh~ra~lr Alfred...
...Z2, 32...
...Maybe you joined in the mid- to late-7Os...
...213 GaMx~r...
...and though Mr...
...Earlier he had told us that participants in marriage markets choose the mates that maximize their total utility...
...He downgraded the lyric side of his art, going so far as (in the 1945 Collected Poetry) to attach gratingly ironic titles to many of his loveliest early verses, as if he distrusted the emotions they embodied...
...The poet-critic Randall Jarrell followed Auden's career closely, and the change in Jarrell's feelings about his work constitutes a disquieting chronicle of the change in Auden's artistic personality...
...So it's anyone's guess what Auden would have thought of Humphrey Carpenter's new book W.H...
...Those approaches, needless to say, will continue to be made...
...l a ~ C. 113 Had[tin...
...for example, that the demand for children depends specifically upon the ratios of fixed to variable costs for quantity and quality and the ratio of marginal variable costs to average variable costs of quality This makes perfect sense--except that I would be hard put to estimate the actual magnitude of any one of these variables...
...Send $7 9 5 for t~lendar, $1 O0 for postage t o HCE...
...Auden: A Biography with the closest attention and interest...
...5I-~JZ H+vek, Fv~t'~IcE...
...It is, in short, a tale well calculated to stir men's souls...
...Carpenter's task was considerably simplified by the fact that most of the principals of Auden's life are either dead or "out of the closet...
...7L 84, 95, t97 182-190, 192-196...
...Writers," Auden once commented, "are usually in the unfortunate predicament of having to speak the truth without having the authority to speak it...
...216 59, 61, 62...
...But I have tried to show how they often arose from the circumstances of his life, and I have also attempted to identify the themes and ideas that concerned him...
...Auden publicly professed to abhor biography while privately relishing it...
...Why Reagan Won is the comprehensive history, the essential source book, of the movement that swept Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980...
...I n a way, the most noteworthy aspect of this outstanding book is the candor.with which it confronts the issue of Auden's sexual inclinations...
...Auden: A Biography, though one suspects he would have been won over in the end by Mr...
...Lzwvence Henry, 52 H~l,tt...
...in addition, he has approached his duties with a gratifyingly cold eye, taking care to avoid the "camp" archness which mars, say, Charles Osborne's biography-memoir of Auden or (to cite a more extreme case) A.J...
...Here are the men who forged that .movement: the writers and journalists who bucked the prevailing fashions...
...j CENTENNIAL CALENDAR _9 . c:elebratinl~ dates, Irish places, Jovcv, jovceana set in Basker',:dle t?,pe, printed ,t,r~ fine laid paper Illustrated throughout Iq82...
...And, as Senator Paul Laxalt, Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign chairman, notes in his Introduction to Why Reagan Won, "no man had more to do with organizing the movement" that gave Reagan the Presidency than Clif White...
...He produced verse plays, lengthy poetic cycles, even a "Baroque eclogue...
...When Auden moved to the United States in 1939, this peculiar lightmindedness began to dominate his work...
...John, 70 Hart,San, Anthony...
...I have not usually engaged in a critical discussion of Auden's writings...
...Strangely enough, Becker himself provides the best example of all this in a discussion of marriage and divorce...
...Fred...
...T~, 68 Hayzka~, SA., 89...
...Getakt, 51 Hawkins, P'~IM, 120 Gdl...
...Date Card # - Signature as it appears on card Illinois residents add 6oi0 sales tax...
...2, 41 Haig, Ale~nder...
...The Language Quarter- I ly, dealing with all aspects of language...
...Fortunately, Mr...
...and, by 1955, J a r r e l l could say of The S h i e l d o f A c h i l l e s that " t h i s is what great and good poets do when they don't bother even to try and write great and good poems, now that they've learned that--it's Auden's leitmotif, these days--art is essentially frivolous...
...60 H+a, AlgeT, }$ Gray, Nelhe, 3 Helle...
...alto...
...In the fateful years between 1939 and 1945 the English Auden, a man at odds with his sexual identity and unable to sustain long-term relationships, was gradually transformed into the American Auden, a complacent Anglican communicant living with Chester Kallman and content to search out "cosiness...
...he charms us, he lulls us to sleep...
...even the specific sexual preferences of Auden and his longtime "chum" Chester Kallman are described in tersely Latinate detail...
...Thus, even if man does maximize his utility over stable preferences (a point that is itself open to contenHe or She Who reads The American Spectator Ought also to read a new international journal dealing with low-intensity conflict--the wars that are occurring everywhere--and ways in which governments, the media, and the public respond...
...41 H~llm*~ll...
...146 ttm~n...
...41 Galhr GeoqK...
...the politicians who sought glory and those who sought only to serve...
...WHY REAGAN WON _9 250 Ford, Gerald...
...Auden: you'll love VERBATIM...
...Pet...
...even during his peak years, just before the Second World War, it was his lyric side which produced the real masterpieces...
...William F. Buckley...
...He is, I suppose, not "great" in the way Eliot is great, even as Beethoven was a " g r e a t e r " composer than Poulenc...
...The impulse to greatness was there, but it was continually at war with a deep-seated flippancy...
...William F. Buckley, Jr., in his Foreword, calls this "an engrossing book" and credits White with helping make Ronald Reagan President...
...2506 South Cincitmat~, Tulsa...
...J ~ , 95 God 0~ F~'d, T~ (Kc~P~Irt), }$ HeLms, Jpu~, 7, 8, ~B, 147-14...
...The lyric strain gradually dried up, and Auden's poetry ultimately degenerated into a bizarre kind of religious-intellectual light verse...
...G,pso...
...147 Harm~d,~l...
...he lifts us to a moment of inspiration...
...Avcntll...
...Yet greatness always seemed something of an impersonation with 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1982 Auden...
...De~m, 31 H...
...It is a reliable measure of Auden's stature that we read ~/'.H...
...19, 63...
...It may seem the act of a deeply fissured p e r s o n a l i t y - - a "double man," to use Auden's own phrase--to write a gravely beautiful villanelle like "Time will say nothing but I told you so" and then, five years later, saddle it with the jeering title "But I Can't...
...It is an incisive, first-hand account of the conservative movement, which Reagan has led since the first nationwide TV speech he gave in behalf of Barry Goldwater's candidacy in 1964...
...Wdham ] . 17, 6...
...68 Ham~o...
...Allow 6 weeks_9 " | i~ \ Y ' r ;D" "t2 A "t'q" k .4 pOST OFFICE ~ox 66~',4 AI I ~ \ J ,J-%.J,)Z $. J L~.Y L ~SSEX...
...His vision, moreover, made these skills, inevitably advancing upon us, available to friends of the old ways, by which I mean the old insights of the Founding Fathers...
...Now he modifies this Where information is expensive, "rational persons marry even when certain of eventually finding better prospects with additional search, for the cost of additional search exceeds the expected benefits from better prospects...
...Hrrbcrg...
...the hard-core cadre that Clif White forged in the early 1960s and which has influenced, and even dominated, every Republican Presidential nominating process since 1964, Senator Paul Laxalt and F. Clifton White "Why Reagan Won will certainly stand as one of the great political books of our time...
...A veritable Who's Who of participants in the 16-year effort that preceded Ronald Reagan's "surprise victory" | A rounded profile of Ronald Reagan the candidate, the President, and the man., A contqmporary history of the conservative movement | A compendium of the issues...
...Dur~.~od, G...
...It is not a book of literary criticism," he says...
...A~hr )S Hathaway, Stank...
...AUDEN: A BIOGRAPHY Humphrey Carpenter/Houghton Mifflin/$15.95 Terry Teachout L i k e so many of his fellow homosexuals, W.H...
...A~[L 35.46 One of ten index pages from Why Reagan Won F. Clifton White and William J. Gill, the pair that recorded Suite3505: The Story o f the Draft Goldwater Movement--"the definitive story of the Goldwater Campaign"--pick up where they left off in their new book, Why Reagan Won: The Conservative Movement 1964-1981...
...While protesting that "[b]iographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste," dismissing the run of literary biographers as "gossip-writers" and voyeurs calling themselves scholars," and promulgating a Maughamlike posthumous bull calling for all true friends to burn his letters, Auden simultaneously (and consistently) managed to write favorable reviews of numerous biographies...
...Now greatness tends to be a much overrated vLrtue--any number of gifted artists have permanently derailed their careers chasing after it--and one would be inclined to dismiss the open question of Auden's "greatness" as irrelevant were it not for the fact that, from Oxford days on, Auden advertised himself as a great poet...
...but anyone insensitive to the unique+ role the Poulencs and Audens play in the hierarchy of art is insensitive to the meaning of art itself...
...and, unlike Leon Edel's too relentlessly interpretative life of Henry James, it allows us to draw our own conclusions from the flawlessly presented evidence within, clearing the way for still more new approaches to Auden...
...S~'nt~l...
...The actors maximize their expected rather .than their actual utility, a difference that is, as we have seen, important...
...Great {~pression...
...J0, 32...
...Four issues $12.50...
...CT 06426 U S A A Biography is not to deal with the vexing question of " t h e Auden problem"--he is basically on the side of those who view Auden's later work as the logical consequence of his artistic development rather than as a catastrophic decline--his book inevitably sheds new light on an old controversy...
...W.H...
...234 Fo~ I FatheL T~' (WhJIcnL 49 Hall...
...Carpenter's careful scholarship, solidly crafted prose, and generally sympathetic tone...
...0 33, 38...
...H~ckc-r Fa~'wlld+ 1~3+ 241 2C$, 223-224+ 226 HmL~E ]c,h~ V., *)}n CaxxletE Charles...
...While explicit, Mr...
...By ignoring the problem of imperfect information throughout most of A Treatise on ,the Family, Becker has done himself, his readers, and the institution of marriage a great disservice...
...40 F~ghczrc, W~dv...
...47 Gavin, Wdham l , 48~9 H=nkr Va~r 194 G~'o~l~lo~ Gr11w~lly ~nlet 1"r H~ad Univemty, 57 Suatell,C and In+ernalton~l Studies...
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...Chff0ecl...
...Behavior is determined not by utility maximizing, but by judgment and subjective probability...
...the frivolous side of the double man finally prevailed...
...The stereotype had at last come true...
...12Z Htm~o~,r .Twn~rh, 47 G~ld~alr I ~ , 1)-19...
...Wilson was, of course, writing in praise of Auden...
...168, GcG~*n...
...Odds are vou weren't...
...Carpenter's purpose in writing W.H...
...Send | $7.50 (U.S...
...We may read it once as a tribute to Humphrey Carpenter's skill--but we will reread it because Auden, even the late Auden, matters...
...The key word here is, of course, f r i v o l o u s , and it immediately brings to mind the famous passage from Don Fernando in which Somerset Maugham reflects on the distinctive traits of the homosexual: "With his keen insight and quick sensibility he can pierce the depths, but in his innate frivolity he fetches up from them not a priceless jewel but a tinsel ornament...
...add $1.50 per order for shipping and handling) to: [ ] Check, money order L3 viSA [ ] MasterCard FTq-[~ Exp...
...204 Gamson...
...148, IS6...
...Their relevance to my behavior must be limited...
...80 H a l l ~ , II.gh~d, Z45 F r ~ TM...
...Senator Paul taxalt...
...Henry, ],Z, 41 GodardMana~ Yale (W ~kltwt...
...J+m~ HenKk...
...36 Ftt'em~n...
...L He+m, H. John Ill, 194 52 Hclben...
...Because you were part of that victory sweep--perhaps since it first began in 1964...
...DanieI...
...152 Hz...
...C a r p e n t e r ' s book vividly charts Auden's artistically fatal quest for the reassuring certainties of domesticity...
...Why Reagan Won: The Conservative Movement 1964-1981 F. Clifton White and William J. Gill Introduction by Paul Laxalt Foreword by William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Z07 GBIwlIz...
...4) H~nq~n, Frm...
...Ackerley's My Father and Myself while admirable in its way, really should have been hotted up with some properly graphic sexual revelations--and then proceeded to speculate on what they might have been...
...He amuses us, converses with us, "does his best to give us good advice...
...20-21...
...Without any form of markets or price information, maximizing is not what determines behavior...
...C.'r162162 112 Graham...
...Mdls...
...Lcomnd...
...25, H~Ir Ray...
...He spent the last years of his life striving toward an increasingly austere and unsentimental diction, ceaselessly revising or suppressing his earlier poems to suit his newly religious view of the world...
...16In Ganh, Davgt, 146 |ha...
...Why Reagan Won, co-authored by William Gill, is Mr...
...It provides intimate, and revealing, anecdotes about the principal Republican candidates for President during this period.: Yet Why Reagan Won is more than a taleof Ronald Reagan's career in politics...
...the scholars who created a network of conservative think tanks in a hostile academy...
...White's personal account of his long and close friendship with President Reagan...
...for, despite his failings as an artist, Auden will always remain a poet to whom readers are drawn again and again...
...Vm' S~[r 68 ~1 ~1 156...
...Will, )5 76, 82, 8L 84...
...84 Hav-.bunj, Oao v...
...It is the moving story of Ronald Reagan's political career and the conservative movement he so ably represents...
...Why Reagan Won provides an overview of the personalities, the individuals and the organizations that finally, in 1980, were among the least + surprised voters in America--the conservatives...
...lone...
...but poem and title lie on opposite sides of a crucial line of demarcation in the life of W.H...
...but there is in his praise an oddly ambivalent note, one which suggests that he meant by stealth to broach an uncomfortable question:.Can so " e d i b l e " a poet, whatever his virtues, be great...
...Hatch, Or:in, 194...
...83, IlL 209 Fraohhn...
...By 1940, however, Jarrell had come to feel that Auden had "gone in the right direction, and a great deal too far...
...Aided by his voracious intelligence and technical virtuosity, Auden mastered the forms and manners of greatness early on, so much so that the majority of his contemporaries were willing to take him at his self-declared value even when--as was so often the case in the early thirties--the content of his formally impeccable verse was impenetrably obscure...
...10.g...
...The author has left no biographical stone unturned...
...Send . . . . copies of Why Reagan Won at $14.95 ca...
...Edmund Wilson hinted at the fundamental nature of this controversy when, in a 1956 essay on Auden's American years, he desci'ibed the poet as "one of the most edible, one of the most satisfactory of contemporary writers," giving the following explanation: One saw with surprise that Auden--so far from being a r a r i t y t h a t could only be a p p r e c i a t e d by a few--was t h e oldfashioned kind of poet, like Browning or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . . . who is at his best when printed and read in bulk...
Vol. 15 • February 1982 • No. 2
