1/7/2023 0 Comments Slapdash printsSome quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of idolatry. Like many heavy readers he loved detective stories, but he took them seriously, prefixing to his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ a heavy Pauline epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. He read intensively, and mainly with his own intellectual needs in mind. Another important work was Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s strange book Out of Revolution, which Mendelson identifies as a formative influence on The Age of Anxiety. Zahl und Gesicht, a work by the exiled Austrian philosopher Rudolf Kassner, was among the books he described as having ‘so essentially conditioned vision of life that he cannot imagine who he was before he read them’. In his early New York years he was much taken with the Christian existentialism then flourishing, and especially by Kierkegaard (who provided a valued philosophical schema with his aesthetic-ethical-religious triad). At one point he too could have produced a reading list of essential books but as time went by he seemed to care less than he had in his wilder, more assertive days about convincing or converting others. * He was all for making it new, but not in quite the same way as Ezra Pound. Ker, and regarded George Saintsbury’s Historical Manual of English Prosody (1910, useful to poets and other interested parties, but now, I daresay, rarely consulted) as his authority on that subject. For example, he admired, as if he were a modern expert, the professorial medievalist W.P. Some of those writers were fashionable, some not he seemed indifferent to such considerations, and for the most part addressed himself as thinker or as artist to whatever topic attracted his attention in either capacity. He looked into other writers for thoughts that might help him shape his own meditations, his repeated attempts to express his own peculiar versions of the truth about God, history, the natural world, love. He reviewed books of almost all sorts and found further occasions for writing prose – lectures, pensées, forewords, afterwords, theological essays, opera programmes and sleeve notes – and by no means all these pieces could fairly be dismissed as what Milton called writings of the left hand. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion and Leavis’s Scrutiny to Vogue and the New Yorker from the Daily Herald to many and various obscure little magazines. Luckily he had another powerful reason for writing prose: ‘unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. Auden more than once explained that his business was poetry and that he wrote prose to earn his keep while pursuing that ill-paid vocation.
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