Managing Literary History

...Meredith's is one rationale in defense of destruction...

...Freud recommended ruthlessness: "Our opponents are pachyderms, you must reckon with their thick hides...

...His personal life is, naturally, of concern to himself and, he hopes, to his personal friends, but he does not think it is or ought to be of any concern to the public...

...BOOKS A PSYCHOANALYTICAL AFFAIR JEFFREY MEtieRS The Freud-Ju#g Letters WILLIAM McGUIRE, ed...

...He was not an expansive letter-writer"two words on a card," says Epstein...

...This seems a reasonable request...

...The question is cogent, and has caused considerable agonizing among Auden's associates and the executors of his estate_9 Some friends and publishers acted reflexively on Auden's directive for his letters_9 "If he says they should be burnt, I shall burn them," British poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, a friend of Auden's since Oxford days, told The Times of London_9 At Random House, vice-president and editor Jason Epstein said the Auden correspondence will be kept "for practical reasons," since it deals with contractual and other technical matters...

...They forbid biographies, demand that their letters be destroyed, order their papers censored and/or locked up...

...If history is at all prelude, it cannot be otherwise...

...Because of his homosexuality, Auden's motives in seeking the destruction of his correspondence invite the most titillating of speculations, and there must be those who feel, along with Richard Crossman of The Times of London, that Auden grew "ashamed of his early manhood" and wished it and possibly other facets of his life buried forever...

...In those early days of psychoanalysis, when Freud and Iung saw deeply into things even when they did not see clearly, they tried out their embryonic ideas on each other before they put them into print, and exchanged insights about their current cases...

...The Times' Auden file, accordingly, is open to researchers, although Leonard is not promising much...

...After their first meeting in Vienna in March 1907, Iung assumed a filial relationship, confessed "the tremendous impression you made on me" and hoped "my work for the cause will show you the depths of my gratitude and veneration...

...This is the same Auden, recall, who in reviewing J. R. Ackerley's book, My Father and Mysel], would complain at some length because Ackerley, in detailing his homosexual life, "is never quite explicit about what he really preferred to do in bed...

...W. H.--as being for "the foolish and the idle," preoccupations that even if successful would not illuminate understanding of the Sonnets themselves...

...and for $110, a page and two-thirds autograph letter containing autobiographical data and comment about the inclusion of poems in an anthology...

...Or good sense will at last prevail...

...But, of course, life does not provide for such neat divisions--neither for bank robbers nor for artists...

...For reasons that time will develop, one or another of these eventualities will materialize with respect to Auden, whatever the dictates of his last will and testament...

...Auden was must expect his private life to be a matter of interest to many...

...I have not yet decided what I shall eventually do with the W. H. Auden correspondence," author and old Auden friend James Stern wrote me from his home in Wiltshire last February...

...Inevitably it became the 11 October 1974:38 object of colorful interpretations, quickening the decision of Eliot's widow, Valerie, to name an authorized biographer in hopes of putting an end to what she considers gossip and scandalous rumor...

...Some with lofty estimate of their work may resent this research as an intrusion of the ephemeral on the eternal, the individual on the universal...

...There is a certain pretentiousness in all of this, or is it hypocrisy...

...But Hemingway letters turn up regularly at literary auctions and in the shops of dealers in autographs and manuscripts...

...If there are letters that are embarrassing or insulting to someone, I would think of it...

...Whatever, I know a respected poet who is resentful yet of Lawrence Thompson's biography of Robert Frost, feeling that Frost's priI JOHN DEEnY is managing editor o~ Commonweal...

...As poets, novelists, essayists, they can spend careers plumbing the lives and emotions of people nearest and dearest to them or, more's the case, the world at large, then from beyond the grave seek to impose restraints on the plumbing of their own lives and emotions...

...and will always, above all, be recognized as so great a poet, that it is absolutely certain that his biography will be written: probably many times...

...It is the letter-burners and destroyers of other papers--like the little old lady in Massachusetts who did away with a box of Byron letters before she died a year and more ago-who go down as vandals and villains...

...What and how much has been destroyed no one knows for sure...

...The action turned out to be as futile was as it was ill-advised...

...To Auden "I made no comment," Spender told The Times...

...Apart from that, however, there is a certain naivet6 in "Auden's expectations, and letter writers to the Times Literary Supplement of London were quick to seize on it in the extended correspondence that followed publication there of Auden's posthumous request that "any friends who have letters from me . . . burn them when they've done with them, and on no account . . . show them to anybody else...

...In similar context would Auden chill a friend who one day in a bookstore would pick up a life of Byron and offer it to him as an item in which he might be interested...

...I hope you roasted, flayed and impaled the fellow with such a genial ferocity that he got a lasting taste Commonweal: 41...

...Meredith hedges...

...ship...

...The relation between his life and his works is at one and the same time too self-evident to require comment . . . too complicated ever to unravel...

...Rulers, statesmen and generals might make valid biographical subject material, but the ease of the artist is quite different, Auden maintained...

...However, if I do not destroy it," he added, "I think it is highly unCommonweal: J9 likely that I should wish it to be scrutinized by scholars and biographers in my lifetime...

...At least two of Auden's executors destroyed letters...

...Edith Wharton's correspondence and her diaries were sealed away for thirty years...

...How many letters did he burn, and what was their nature...

...In the files of the New York Times is a letter from Auden asking to review a book of poems by Chester KaUman, an innocuous request on the surface, but one that provides insight into Auden and, by extension, into the proclivity of poets to run around, in the words of Times Book Review editor John Leonard, "promoting or pummeling each other in public with a breathtaking disregard for the niceties of critical discourse...

...Then there are those adamantly opposed to destroying anything of Auden's...

...The Auden file at the Times Book Review will remain intact, by the way...

...In sum, it is likely that nothing drastic :is going to result from Auden's request that his correspondence be destroyed...

...Auden, too, hoped to block a biography...

...Freud and Jung were inspired by a total devotion to their ideas that recalls the passionate commitment of the Crusaders and the Russian revolutionaries, and they shared many triumphant moments: the First International Psychoanalytic Congress at Salzburg in 1908, the founding of the Jahrbuch and the lectures at Clark University in 1909 (they sailed to America together and analyzed each other's dreams as they strolled around the deck...

...You don't preserve the privacy of life by such a request," Meredith declared...

...In all these literary forms, Auden's correspondence will figure...

...He is a difficult poet to quote from because his poems are so tightly knit that any passage depends for its full effect upon its place in the whole," Auden wrote in seeking to "rectify" 11 October 1974:40 literary "neglect" of Kallman...

...The thought of biographers and, concomitantly, the idly curious poking into the corners of their lives raises the hackles of many artists...

...John's College, Cambridge, took the point further: _9 . . Auden was a figure of such central importance to the intellectual and artistic history of our times...

...He looked and was bored...

...Spender affirmed this intention in a letter to me dated June 16, 1974...

...or rather, that the best biography will inevitably contain a great deal of more or less intelligent conjecture_9 Is this what they want for him...

...Secondly, this is a serious honor as well as a serious responsibility, and I figure it is a small price to pay...

...A person who destroyed three Auden letters scratched the admission in a quick return telephone call...

...Identical requests were also published in the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review o/ Books but, curiously, evoked not a single published response...

...and the more fiery Jung once replied: "of course the slimy bastard was lying...

...Though we very deeply regret that we are disregarding the request of an author for whom we felt the deepest respect and affection, we feel that these letters are an important part of our archives and that it would be wrong of us to destroy them," Charles Monleith of Faber and Faber, Auden's British publisher, wrote to the Times Literary Supplement...

...I place pride of ownership above value...

...Most writers have an understandable sense of privacy...

...I did it, first, because I do want to be a conscientious executor...

...Personal reputations seldom suffer irreparably by posthumous revelations, and literary reputations ---if substantial to begin with--not at all...

...It is as though some dirty deed had been done, the memory of which must now be suppressed...

...They had sentimental interest to me," Meredith remarked, "but they were not of any considerable literary significance...

...People have destroyed letters in the past and it only ends up with bad books coming of it...

...Some letters of his are really of interest...

...William Shawn of The New Yorker did not take a telephone call or answer a letter inquiring about plans for the Auden correspondence file at that magazine...

...In his book about his brother, Leicester Hemingway conscientiously refrained from reproducing Ernest's letters...

...Maria Edgeworth and Henry James confiscated letter files, James burning an archive of forty years...

...and the following month he warned Jung, who was nineteen years younger than himself, not to "deviate too far from me when you are really so close to me . . . . My inclination is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation...

...a man so interesting in himself...

...Kafka wanted his papers dr spondence, book manuscripts, everything...

...It is an easy theory, but whatever relevance it has must be divorced from embarrassment about sexuality...

...Many of those who exchanged correspondence with Auden are not talking for the record--particularly, it seems, if they might have done some destroying...

...This point of view would not be alien to some of those cited...

...He values the postcard at between $100 and $125, but adds quickly he is not selling...

...A letter is a gift and one cannot posthumously control one's gifts to others...

...But his letters to Felice Bauer landed in a fat tome on library shelves last year and we have, thankfully, The Trial, The Castle, and various short stories, all saved and published posthumously...

...Auden allowed exceptions for artistic analysis, study of influences, changes of style...

...Meredith labeled Auden's wish "quixotic," and said that if he had know Auden was going to include it literally in the executor's instructions, he would have protested...

...I disapprove of people destroying the letters of great writers," declared Leonard...

...It is permissible, Auden would say, "provided that the biographer and his readers realize that such an account throws no light whatsoever upon the artist's work...

...Hugh Brogan of St...

...But biography...

...vate life has now been unloosed to intrude upon the reading and appreciation of his poetry...

...Certainly this theory is consistent with some neo-classicist notions about poetry being a kind of divinity...

...This is not what Auden intended, but it is what his literary reputation deserves...

...a new edition of the extant correspondence of Henry James will restore passages deleted by the James family from Percy Lubbock's 1920 edition...

...An artist who enters that complaint about another seems hardly the person to be establishing narrow ground rules of privacy for himself...

...On the contrary, literary history is enriched and the artists emerge as fuller persons...

...Nor does it stay the hands of those at Random House and the New York Review from their prospective fiery rituals...

...If the writers are sufficiently interesting in themselves and, more especially, if their works are historically and literarily meritorious, their lives will out...

...Or is it always that artistic fictions must be protected from biographical facts...

...Thus one Auden associate, who insisted on anonymity, would excuse his act of destruction on the grounds that "there was nothing lost to literature in letters that said merely, 'I will be there next Tuesday,' or 'I cannot give the lecture at...

...naming a prestigious Ivy League university...

...many may be anxious to spare feelings and, by inhibhing the use of their letters and related papers, to safeguard reputations, if only their own...

...I don't know how I could ask other people to destroy their correspondence if I didn't do it myself," Meredith remarked by phone from Pittsburgh, where he was spending the year as a visiting professor at CarnegieMellon University...

...Such prices may soon rank with the 29-cent gallon of gasoline and the 25-cent loaf of bread...

...The Times discreetly refused Auden's offer, and reportedly the New York Review and the New Republic did so also--- but not Harper's...

...Or they will give way to the pressures of legitimate scholar...

...But on the whole I am for preservation...

...Apparently, considerable resoluteness for preservation, if not for early revelation, has been drawn from Stephen Spender--"probably the longest-standing" of Auden's "best friends," in the words of The Times--who let it be known that he did not intend to destroy his Auden correspondence, even though Auden himself had conveyed this wish to him before he died...

...And they developed a wonderful camaraderie that was stimulated by the collective stupidity of their adversaries, who attended conferences but only understood the dinner...

...Ernest Hemingway let it be known that he did not favor the publication of his letters...

...Auden felt so strongly on the point that he would dismiss speculations on the mysterious figures of Shakespeare's Sonnets--the Friend, the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet, Mr...

...But, he continued, "I will destroy it when the legal department tells me . . . . If he wanted it to be destroyed, it should be destroyed...

...If his friends destroy his letters, or any other evidence, ~hey will simply be ensuring that a good biography cannot be written...

...Its March, 1972, issue featured a lavish Auden critique of Kallman's The Sense o[ Occasion...

...Princeton, $17.50 The 360 superbly edited letters of Freud and his most brilliant disciple and chosen heir, Jung, chronicle one of the great moments in the history of modern thought and build up to a truly tragic climax that was inevitable from the very beginning of their friendship...

...more commonly, they may prefer to be remembered for their formal writings rather than the lives they led...

...Meanwhile, look for prices to shoot up on Auden letters reaching the commercial market...

...This is poet William Meredith of Uncasville, Conn...

...Now, executors of the estate of W. H. Auden have passed on his request that all correspondence of his, by whomever held and whatever the content, be destroyed...

...Their frequent and mutually stimulating letters, punctuated by an exchange of photographs and increasingly intimate forms of address, soon led to affection, confidence and friendship...

...The New York Times' obituary stated that Auden's "acceptance of his state had given him an easier time on a restless earth," an observation no one disputes...

...Spender did not preclude the possibility of sharing his Auden correspondence with bona fide scholars and biographers...

...We intend, in the reasonably near future, to commission a history of the firm and to the writer of it they will be essential...

...One spoke candidly about his action...

...Biographies will be written independent of Auden's wishes, and these will take place alongside reminiscences and memoirs--to which, incidentally, Auden never objected...

...If in some instances the cry of foul is raised, it is usually stilled by its own unreasonableness...

...Unfortunately, Meredith's post-factum doubt does not cancel out the advice that was contained in the executors' letters to TLS, the Times Book Review and the New York Review...

...Thackeray, George Meredith, Kafka, Orwell, Eliot and Robert Bridges all sought to bar biographies of themselves...

...The dealer may not be typical of those who handle manuscripts and letters, but obviously he is aware that Auden's request makes a rare item rarer--and more valuable...

...After all," Spender wrote, "one casts one's bread upon the waters...

...One Auden executor has allowed that he was "having second thoughts" about Auden's request, under the influence of the Spender position, as expressed in The Times, and the argument that the correspondence of a figure such as Auden does not belong to the individual but to literary history...

...In any instance, a fully adjusted, openly reconciled homosexual is not exactly the type person to set about wiping away an allegedly "shameful" sexual past by means of a legal document...

...I would ask the advice of the trustees before releasing Auden's letters," he declared, "or at any rate I would inform them of what I was doing...

...Thus what otherwise might be lost or discarded might now be carefully preserved...

...Presumptuousness may loom large in suppressions such as these, but the intentions are generally honorable--Auden's among them, no doubt...

...There were not very many, and they were not very important or very interesting to anyone...

...A Mamaroneck, N.Y., dealer has a three-sentence, 1940 postcard written by Auden from 1 Mountjoy Terrace in Brooklyn Heights, to an official of the Book and Magazine Guild in New York City...

...about two lines" to a letter, according to Spender...

...Auden's motives for asking the destruction of his correspondence had to be otherwise, and the strongest likelihood is bound up with privacy and Eliot-like feelings about the primacy of an artist's work over the minutiae of his life...

...In any case, confronted by terms of the will filed at New York County Surrogate's Court, Meredith went through his Auden letters, sorted out two for deferred decision (one dealing with his executorship), and consigned the rest to his fireplace...

...The only question is how long it will take for time to break down prevailing reticenees...

...A major reason why T. S. Eliot placed obstacles in the way of a biographym apart from shyness and some strong convictions about what is important in the life of the creative person~was to keep unprivileged eyes off the tragic problems of his first wife Vivienne and their disastrous marriage...

...Nor, alas, does it bring back what has already been destroyed...

...The best thing to do is to keep them and not publish ~them in any way...

...A genuine artist believes he has been put on earth to fulfill a certain function determined by the talent with which he has been entrusted," Auden once', wrote...

...Other Auden associates were more tentative...

...Kallman, however, is still less known as a poet than as Auden's Friend for over thirty years and, now, as the benefici.'try of his will...

...The role of a public man involves penalties as well as privileges," reminded William Chapman of Hertford College, Oxford, "and one of the penalties is that a man as famous as Mr...

...As early as his fourth letter to Jung in December 1906, Freud justified his carefully considered resistance to opinions that differed from his own...

...The paradox is that in seeking to limit the look of history into themselves, writers---or anyone else for that matter ---succeed less in defining the areas they deem of legitimate interest to posterity than they do in creating suspicions, valid or otherwise, that they have something to conceal: some deep embarrassment, some flaw of character, some dishonor, some humiliation...

...I opened the file in the past to a scholar," Leonard commented over the telephone...

...What Auden meant, Spender speculated, was that "in cases where a modern 'candid' biographer would want to print things private and perhaps harmful to his reputation, he would wish his friends to withhold such material...

...American Book Prices Current for 1970-71 records a collection of four autograph letters and an autograph postcard selling for $130...

...The supreme irony of Auden's request therefore might be to so inflate the dollar value of his correspondence that special care will be taken about everything to which he set his pen...

...Everything in them is in his works in one place or another...

...His is a sentiment echoed by editor Robert B. Silvers of the New York Review_9 "After we go over the correspondenee and see if there is anything in it that we have to take account of, then we will get rid of it," Silvers commented...

...There are actually three executors: Meredith and Monroe K. Spears of Houston, named in 1964, and Auden bibliologist Edward Mendelson of New Haven, designated literary executor in legal papers posthumously completed...

...Barriers of privacy will crumble before caricatures born of secrecy and rumors, as in Thackeray's case...

...In fact I think that Wystan--if he was really serious in making his request, which I rather doubt--was wrong...

...another is what seems to be the terse, business-like character of so much of Auden's correspondence...

...Orwelrs wife Sonia and Eliot's wife Valerie have both been obliged to set aside the preferences of their husbands and name official biographers...

...His position is that artists should be allowed to adopt a particular persona for their art, and when this turns out to be radically different from that of private life, the private persona must be protected...

...Meredith is undoubtedly right when he figures that the request will be honored more in the breach than the observance...

...But, of course, brevity and formality are not always indicators of literary or biographical non-relevance...

...I want something of Auden's," he declared...

...The fact is that Auden came to live comfortably with his homosexuality, speaking openly of it, particularly as the conventions of the new morality gained ground...

...no one is mortally hurt...