Auden's Omnium-Gatherum

...Professionally invaluable to writers and ministers, the commonplace book also served for some as a surfeit of footnotes and bibliography does today in the more arid reaches of publish-or-perish scholarship...

...Though there is some similarity between Auden's leisurely, Oxford-bred commonplace entries and Benjamin's mania, the two ways of sifting gold from books are finally as different as life and death...

...Often the entries were garnished with reflective or "Hear...

...The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide.' " In time, Benjamin's critical writing consisted almost wholly of citations wrenched out of context and rearranged to give each other an entirely fresh shock of significance...

...Commenting on a sentence of Charles Williams' about Good Friday, Auden wonders what he might have been doing at the time of the Crucifixion...

...In A Tale of a Tub, Swift sneered: "What though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full...

...Benjamin gave to this seemingly bizarre critical goal a far from merely eccentric justification...

...In fact, like so many bright publishing ideas today, this is a nonbook, a way of marking time and filling up space until the next legitimate piece of writing gets done...

...Auden has throughout his career been constitutionally incapable of dullness, magically immune to the meretricious, the banal, and the pedestrian, and this accounts for the many real pleasures to be found in his book made up so largely of the words of others...

...Instead of preserving the past in the present, quotation out of context had the savage power of confronting the present with what it sought to destroy...

...This devilishly personal, eccentric, shocking, whimsical, endlessly diverse and diverting collection is as superior to other nonbooks as his fascinating five-volume anthology of English verse, published 20 years ago, is light-years removed from most "college readers...

...In the age of Bartlett, Oxford and Penguin dictionaries of quotations, in a time when books are so much more readily and cheaply available than they once were, the commonplace book has, along with the art of letter-writing, gone out of fashion...

...As Miss Arendt writes, "Nothing was more characteristic of him in the '30s than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him...

...Thus it is a surprising delight to be offered, in W. H. Auden's A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (Viking, 438 pp., $10.00), a rich and multifarious bouquet of quotations from a lifetime of tireless and unfaddish reading, covering not only poetry and intentionally literary prose, but also treatises on lead-mining (a specialty of Auden's native Yorkshire), the geology of England, Roman roads, the Renaissance, madness, and marriage...

...In fact, it is even odd that any serious intellectual aware of Benjamin's work, as Auden must be, could want to publish the conventional kind of commonplace book after Benjamin's work became available...

...In contrast, how sane, how English, placid and Christian Auden's notebooks seem...

...One can see this as a kind of madness, given method not only by the extraordinary scope of his bookish zeal, but by Hitler, who forced him to leave half his library behind in Germany when he fled to Paris, and in the year of Benjamin's death separated him from his life-giving library altogether...

...Unsurprisingly, given Auden's deeply enduring Christian concerns, there is an extraordinary variety of passages from writers who have been, each in his singular, cautious, or insistent way, intoxicated with definitions of God: Charles Williams, Simone Weil, C. S. Lewis, Novalis, Kierkegaard, Goethe, anonvmous early-Christian monks battling the slothful affliction of accidie, G. K. Chesterton, and Dag Hammerskiold...

...saying that the local gas company had 'stopped supplying gas to Jews...

...Writers & Writing AUDEN'S OMNIUMGATHERUM BY PEARL K. BELL In the 18th and 19th centuries, educated persons, and those with pretensions to learning, kept so-called commonplace books in which they preserved aphorisms, couplets, and the particularly apt sentence or paragraph encountered in their reading...

...I wish there were much more of Auden's own comments and annotation, for they are unfailingly insightful and ironic, particularly about himself...

...Yet there is an aspect to the uses of quotation that is strangely missing from this book, one that is peculiar to our century and altogether different from the indefatigable note-taking of genteel Victorian readers...

...Why can't the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock?' " And since no external scheme will bind Auden if he chooses to ignore it, some of the entries are only succinct commentary, and no quotation...

...Hear...

...But since Wystan Hugh Auden is one of the most powerfully original poets of this century and a luminous critic as well, he should not be confused with the kind of writer usually conned into lending his name to a nonbook in order to give it an illusion of substance...

...quotations, or "thought fragments," as Benjamin called them, could acquire an immense, hitherto unsuspected impact and concentration...

...and Phrase Books, Foreign ("compared with the compilers of phrase books for tourists traveling abroad, the so-called surrealist poets are amateurs...

...And the most potent way, he felt, was through citation: "Quotations in my work are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions...

...comments of the reader's own devising...

...Although the book is arranged alphabetically by subject, the contents range quite literally from the sublime to the ridiculous...

...When a writer of Auden's stature shares his notebook with the world, it will be no fishy bundle of homiletic chips off the block of world culture...

...Walter Benjamin, the Jew in Hitler's Germany, grasped at quotations as a kind of lifeline, a way to keep hold of what he held valuable while the world around him was reducing all writing and thinking and life to chaotic rubble...

...Over the years, his faultless originality of judgment and interest have guided the course of his reading, and he has preserved not only what he admires, but also what he finds campy, genuinely funny, horrible, and bemusing...

...long lists of euphemisms for the male and female genitals...

...And how curious and somehow disappointing—remembering Auden's great familiarity with Germany in the '30s, his compassion for Hitler's victims far earlier than it arose in most Englishmen—that nowhere is Walter Benjamin's name to be found in a book of quotations collected by the poet who wrote, in his elegy to Freud, that he . . . told The unhappy Present to recite the past Like a poetry lesson till sooner Or later it faltered at the line where Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged...

...1 see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend...

...To give this omnium-gatherum a more purposive unity than it actually possesses, Auden presents it as "a map of my planet...

...Living in a time that had experienced a lethal break with tradition and authority, Benjamin concluded, as Miss Arendt remarks, "that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past...

...This quality was apotheosized in the tragic German critic Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide at the Franco-Spanish border in 1940...

...In this collection, which by then was anything but whimsical, it is easy to find next to an obscure love poem from the eighteenth century the latest newspaper item...

...Hannah Arendt has described him as "a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations...

...Frowning with prim distaste, I say, 'It's disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things...

...Among the ridiculous are such mistresses of low camp as Florence Aadland, the mother of Errol Flvnn's ultimate girl friend, writing of Errol's inexplicable failure to use a deodorant...

...Always a serious and perceptive student of anything to do with words, Auden has read a great range and depth of psychiatric work, and he includes many passages by Bruno Bettelheim because, as Auden remarks, "for anybody interested in language, the linguistic behavior of autistic children is of the greatest interest and significance...

...Looking up, we see . . .three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd...

...a sort of autobiography," because "biographies of writers, whether written by others or themselves, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste...

...This disclaimer doesn't quite wash, however, since Auden cooperated with extraordinarily revealing generosity a few months ago on a long biographical interview printed in Life...