AGE BEFORE BEAUTY:

...Kallman, in another war, did a stint in a military office of censorship...

...But here again the mirror bites the image: the rejection seems to be of a fount (or is it font) of his character: It is known that Auden as a child found his imaginative landscape most stimulated by configurations like this one found pressed into a volume called Lead & Zinc, which was among his oldest books: The thematic concitation which made him prominent was an exorcism of the implications of such contrap-tions, and the structural virtuosity which made him pre-eminent surely was prefigured in such precincts: Ein-stein, reports Bucky Fuller, discovered Relativity studying the patents of clocks...

...Something of the extraordinary spontaneity of the young man was sacrificed, which was a big-- ger price than most of us can pay, in order that he might attain the isolation out of which he wrote his later work...

...John of the Cross, two examples of highly erotic, if mightily repressive, poets...

...Spender's scrapbook, if nothing of this kind, is the definitive gossip, and will be a relative must for the cosy few who can take the "Disenchanted Island" with a few grains of schmaltz...

...Auden's technical view of poetry, his isolation and incorporation of its elements into vessels whose design bordered on the exponential, tended to diminish the rub of the elemental inconsistencies of his subject matter (Western Civilization), and to delegate his implication in its dichotomy to vague, benevolent processes of artistic or erotic absolution...

...One is that he was more unrecognizably different when old from when young, than are most people...

...As one who knew him well enough, and whether or not it might have pleased him, I must say that there is not enough poetry, not enough Caesar in this salad to justify the expenditure of dollars or drachmas-unless you be among those Audenoids who must have the complete set...

...Auden was perfectly right about how Yeats would meet judgment, and so eventually succeeded him-naturally assuming, it follows, that his own head-stone would be similarly subject to the random ravages of change...

...If have it you must, then have it you shall, but remember: he shan't be able to sign it...

...In his poem YOU, which he was quite partial to, Auden addresses the flesh: Oh, I know how you came by A sinner's cranium, How between two glaciers The master-chronometer Of an innocent primate Altered its tempi: That explains nothing...

...Why am I certain, Whatever your faults are, The fault is mine, Why is loneliness not A chemical discomfort, Nor Being a smell...

...Auden was never much of a one for demiurgical clergy such as Hopkins or St...

...Macmillan, $14.95 Thank You, Fog W. H. AUDEN Random House, $6 ULTIMATE appraisal of the worth of W. H. Auden will be a process as complex as deciphering the chemistry of his time...

...Anne Fremantle, in Spender's book, recalls: He seemed happy at Helens-burgh, and I remember wondering why, it seemed to me a dour place...

...The ethical entropy of this basically mechanical gestalt-operation produced in his being a sort of discorporate angst, which demanded corporeal solu-tions-for Auden made no bones about flesh and surrender when somehow he let his Last Poems slip through an ode to anaesthetic complacency (better to have made a final appearance in Vari-orum-or in drag), a subliminal ad-vocacy of Circe and Soma...

...With Auden's death, the suit for as-sessment becomes more contentious, for it involves a matter of succession: we need to know the Master's dimensions before we can discover who might yet occupy his chair...

...Image becomes the Likeness he so ecumenically divined...

...AGE BEFORE BEAUTY MICHAEL NEWMAN posthumous criticism-and the present partisan public tribute further delays the prospect of a detached modern ap-praisal...

...It seems that somewhere along the way Auden, like Eliot, changed thematic (ethical) polarities, while continuing a line of structural (aesthetic) priority, which caused the poems, like the proverbial cracked Japanese Teacup (with its lane to the land of the dead), to develop a glacial cleavage between matter and manner, a bereftness he continues to lament in the concluding stanza of YOU: Who tinkered, and why...

...Was Auden in his virtuosity the nemesis or unwitting accomplice of mechanism...

...I think one has a chance with every child to teach them to concentrate.' I then com-mented that Bertrand Russell had told me he found the techniques of prayer enormously useful, and used them, though he did not be-lieve in God...

...Indeed, looking through the tribute-book's generous al-lotment of previously unpublished pho-tos, of Wystan's strikingly Nordic mother and equestrian father, of him-self, as a baby with his brothers, in an Army uniform, on the beach with Isherwood and Spender-always (ex-cepting, of course as a baby) with that slightly decadent cigarette-one begins somehow to laugh off his paradoxes and, beyond all protestation, his crea-tured Image becomes the Likeness he so ecumenically divined...

...I would have thought the uninten-tional comedy of the title, Thank You, Fog-with its unfortunate connotation of a Prisoner's Chorus in Dachau, and its equally regrettable susceptibility to low permutation (one Catholic news-paper, permuting high, actually review-ed it as Thank You, God)-might have convinced Auden's sacristan to burn these slim leavings instead of any-thing he might have said in his letters, which, however whatever, could never conspire to plagiarize his laurels as do these lame last words, this crown of conceit which so disfigures the portent of Augustus...

...but these come off a good deal sexier than the supposedly Dionysiac Auden, who chambered Epos with Clio but laundered Eros in Narcissus...

...Reading through them, they do suggest a few conclusions...

...And I like teaching small boys best.' I asked why and he replied that they could be taught to concentrate, and that one of the few things the human animal can learn to do is to learn to concentrate . . . Forty years later I reverted to the subject of teach-ing children, and Wystan added: 'Yes...

...I've known Latin nostrils to which certain subtle grandeurs of Au-denoid inflection were far more im-mediately registered than might have been the case with an English or American palate jaded by the base mechanics of secular bread-mnn'mg...

...In much of his later poetry Auden in the persona of the spirit repeatedly upbraids the flesh, that over-familiar/ dense companion which bound him from Ariel's smoother song-and so the later work became an ex-cathedra monologue of soul at self, while the latter man became the vector of these antagonisms...

...But, as he insisted, Auden was not a camera-though he did pose for quite a few snapshots...

...There is, however, in retrospect, a conspicuous suppression of Yeats' in-fluence, of the emergent Orphic Eros of The Second Coming, apparent throughout the editing of Auden...

...When Spender's more W. H. Auden STEPHEN SPENDER, ed...

...His spontaneity of expression was further subjected to a Cartesian parti-tion of life into autonomous spheres of work, prayer and carnival-each presumably perfected by separate rules, and consummated via non-valent ritu-als...

...He was never much at military protocol-though his New York best friend did work in industrial public-relations, and his friend Mr...

...but the proliferation, toward the end of Au-den's career, of authorized not-quite biographies, (starting with his own A Certain World), coupled with the posthumous proscriptions impressed up-on his correspondence, seem, in current light, to be doing to prospective biog-raphers what a lawyer might call lead-ing the witness: in the deliberate stage-management of his aftertaste, has Auden as edited violated the oath by which he assumed Yeats' office when Eliot died...

...When Yeats died, Auden confronted this problem squarely: Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to un-familiar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience...

...Brought to mind here is Kazantzakis' rendition of Christ in the grip of his Last Temptation, one which, as His four scribes bear witness, He survived...

...Perhaps it was with Auden as with the sciences, that values were tech-nical, and technique relative...

...It is as if the poet found identity in the Thirties in an Orphic-inspired rebellion against the inequities of an inherited Promethean ethic, but, once within the safety of the Cathedral, sought to strengthen his stewardship therein by pronouncing inoperative any poetic policy suspect of that formal incon-gruence and theologic heterodox which accompanies the decline of letters and the advance of the irrational...

...Also be advised that these are Last Poems like certain gas stations are Last Chance gas stations: as Spender recently announced, only half of Auden's work has been publish-ed...

...Yeats, moreover, for all his foppy maudish-ness, wrote the sexier sonnet...

...I think it entirely possible that in the end, when, not the intensity of bis feelings and not the gift to trans-form them into praise, but the sheer physical strength of the heart to bear them and live with them, gradually faded away, he might have considered the price too high...

...The festschrift, For W. H. Auden, released by Random House in a limited edition of 500 on his 65th birthday, was, in effect, a hand-picked jury for critical aspect comes to bear, it comes in abeyance: in the same way, based on knowing him, one can feel fairly sure he would have been pleased with these tributes...

...All but the most articulate (mostly women) fairly swoon before the prospect of addressing directly the paradoxes which made this poet so compelling, and this man so more and more alone...

...And one wonders how the erstwhile Audun comes across in Iceland-per-haps Auden's true apostles and only critics await translation, or maturity...

...I think what is important is to teach them the techniques of prayer...

...Is it possible also that Auden's meth-odology and expediencies had more to do with those of Robert McNamara than either could possibly have imag-ined...

...reading through its gallery of reflec-tions of Auden by his personal con-temporaries, I was struck with how the vacuum of the poet's persona pervades the wake of his passing from their midst...

...Poetry, as Auden wrote, again in his elegy for Yeatssurvives In the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper- why then, we must not resist the con-jecture, this tampering of executors...

...Auden kept his distance from Vietnam, and privately gave the impli-cation of his American citizenship in that affair as grounds for his Nobel rejections...

...That is, the technique of paying attention and of forgetting oneself...

...his paradoxical devotions, apostasies of nationality and reversals of belief, emphasize the inconsistencies of his anxious age, and the geopolitical relativity of its values...

...That has nothing to do with technique,' Wystan remarked...

...Beneath the cautious deference of these lines can be detected a certain irresolution, that snicker of anxiety we have, after Eliot, always associated with Auden, and have come to per-ceive in the forkings of Frost-that sense of something other than innocent organism manipulating the connota-tions of its organ...

...The gospels of all four of these scribes seem intemperate, even horny when compared with the erstwhile four brilliant editions of the utterances of Jesus, who was, before anything else, the Second Coming of Orpheus, and who, after all, must become the arche-type of His antithesis...

...Hannah Arendt comes closest to the quick of this question, in an essay which appeared earlier in the New Yorker: It seems, of course, very un-likely that young Auden, when he decided that he was going to be a great poet, knew the price he would have to pay...

...Sitting and planning notwithstanding, Auden has in fact exerted a significant influence upon both Dylans, and the impact of his exemplary stanzas in universal translation is yet to be esti-mated...

...Just as one balks in the case of Spender's book at taking too much to task the work of its several literary amateurs, one must resist, in the case of these Last Poems, the temptation to get too judgmental or specific about what manner of spiritual matter is here evinced in what we must hope has been offered as some sort of musi-cal joke...

...If culture be condemned to machin-ery, then ethics will be business-so perhaps we should rejoice, not cavil, at the refusal of Auden's rhetoric to ac-commodate the advances of mechanism...

...He told me: 'I enjoy teach-ing...

...He always loved discussing his poems as though they were carburetors, sending jets of fact and fiction through conduits of faculty and fancy...

...Stephen Spender, the book's editor, spoke recently to the effect that Auden at the end of his life was not a power-ful influence on the young, that a man of 21 would not sit down and plan to write poems in the style of Auden...

...There are disquieting parallels dis-cernible between the rationale which ordered Auden's letters burnt, and that of Executive Privilege-none, unfortu-nately, within the license of a reviewer of minor books, however poetic...