Direction and misdirections
On Auden and Buber and crossroads
For some months, Auden’s The Age of Anxiety kept appearing at the corner of my eye, constantly quoted, or so it seemed to me, until I finally went and read it for myself.1 Published in 1947 and promptly deemed a failure, the book-length poem then won the Pulitzer Prize and Leonard Bernstein’s heart, inspiring his tone poem2 Symphony No. 2.
Stylistically, The Age of Anxiety lies halfway between Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) or possibly The Four Quartets (1936-1942) and Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning (1948), but unlike the latter was never meant to be staged. Describing what passes is the poorest way to treat the poem: four lonely characters, Emble, Quant, Malin, and Rosetta, meet in a bar in New York City, muse on the stages of life, wind up dancing in Rosetta’s apartment, stage a mock wedding between Rosetta and Emble, then straggle into their solitary existences again. I would call the characters four projected aspects of the poet himself, acting out archetype and absurdity, oddly united in their view of life. They are knight, fool, sage, and damsel, each one a foil to the rest.
What Auden’s poem and his own symphony both did, Bernstein said, was trace out “our difficult and problematical search for faith.”3 Such a theme is, of course, like oil to the water of the present zeitgeist, immiscible, but for the very same reason able to float above the world. That said, Bernstein’s description is not quite right, since Malin alone wrestles with angels at the close of the poem, fighting to a draw before limping back to the real world. It also does not account for why the poem is so compelling to the present. Despite having been written in 1947, the poem is bitingly prescient: it depicts a world unstructured by faith, bombed into meaninglessness by war, human cruelty, and advances in technology, where love is both a hoped-for, almost achievable longing and a fleshly farce, and reality militates against miracles.
Malin, the wise old man of the poem, mourns what society has become, a gladiatorial arena ruled by mobs, where every person must be a fanatic and every deed must be clearly liveried in either “Heretic green or orthodox blue, / Safe and certain.”4
Rosetta’s opinion of this “tawdry age” is no higher:
…Life after life lapses out of
Its essential self and sinks into
One press-applauded public untruth…
Only the poet who chooses solitude, she says, can escape
…this stupid world where
Gadgets are gods and we go on talking,
Many about much, but remain alone...5
Emble watches “Nieces of millionaires / Twitter on terraces”6 while others stoop to their day’s work, all of them fitting into the world somehow, he alone without a home, out of place, out of time, questing for something outside of time—unless, of course, they all see themselves just as he does.7
The poem’s most-quoted lines come near the end, in a meditation by Malin:
Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry—“Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.”
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.8
Say, rather, the noble despair of the young and sensitive. The section recalls to me Baldwin’s “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up,”9 for what is described here is the hard, sore, amused work of maturation. To grow up, to mature, to love and to steadily love better, none of which is inevitable, one must willingly release each stage of life and each worldview as it fails to deal with the world as it is, in order to take on a larger and more adequate view, and all this while doing the work that has been given to us to do. But in a time when people earn $18 for every 1,000 views on a YouTube video, it’s been profitable to stand in place and cry “Miserable wicked me! Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and click the notification bell,” or even to seek out new ways to be miserable, always filmed, of course. The older one gets, the more regrettable this is.
Dark and bitter though it is, the ending of Anxiety gestures toward the hopeful close of “September 1, 1939,” Auden’s famously repudiated poem, with its steel-cable tension between “points of light” and “negation and despair.”10 But Anxiety is more tired than its predecessor of a decade prior; the fighter is bruised and weary from his bouts, with more to come and no end in sight. The train Malin is riding upon rattles into a Manhattan morning, the poem ends, and we are no closer to an outcome in the match between human hope and despair.
Published in 1952, five years after Auden’s poem, Martin Buber’s Good and Evil describes the same decision point that Malin despairs of (ruined or changed; death or disillusionment) as a problem of direction against indecisiveness, which, while drier and less dramatic, makes the matter appear more manageable without diminishing the inherent difficulty of the choice.
Drawing on the Avesta, the Vedas, and the Old Testament, the second half of Buber’s book proposes that in human life, “good and evil are not, as they are usually thought to be, two structurally similar qualities situated at opposite poles, but two qualities of totally different structure.”11 Flooded and overwhelmed by possible actions, the human soul can “clutch at any object, past which the vortex happens to carry it, and cast its passion upon it,” and thereby “exchang[e] an undirected possibility for an undirected reality.”12 This is a recurring temptation. In this, the first stage of evil, “man does not choose, he merely acts,” not making a full and committed decision but sliding into the misdeed. However, once the soul recognizes and willingly “affirms” that which ought instead to be “negated,” solely “because it is his,” the previously chaotic, indecisive, almost hapless sliding into and out of evil stiffens into rigidity. It is here that radical evil becomes possible.13
The alternative to grasping at every passing fashion, mania, sexual partner, handbag, or fad is to attend to the mysterious impulse within the soul to become integrated and unified. This, like temptation, is a recurring possibility, such that one may choose evil, evil, evil, then good, and then evil again. In becoming integrated, the soul “becomes aware of direction, becomes aware of itself as sent in quest of it. It comes into the service of good or into service for good.”14 Unified, the soul has “only One direction,” only one decision, though it must be repeated over and over in its different disguises. The whirlwind of possibilities narrows down to a single one. One way to describe that direction is as “the direction towards the person purposed for me,” the person one is meant to become. Another is as “the direction toward God.”15 These are, Buber says, different aspects of the same thing.
Vortex, chaos, whirlwind, infinite possibility—or decisive service, given out of and with the whole soul. Malin’s tart meditation is on precisely that moment of choice, that crux, and the repeated failure of human beings to choose good. It is very hard, after all, to give up an infinity of possibilities. But that moment, that ever-returning, recurrent moment, Buber tells us, is the point at which the individual human being can and does intervene in the world-conflict. By choosing the truth over the lie, or by choosing the lie over the truth, one becomes true, or one becomes false, in that moment, either strengthening or desecrating being “at the point of one’s own existence.”16 One becomes a firefly flash of light for that moment, or else one diminishes in reality. The war is won, or lost, in one’s person, at that time.
Always the soul’s motion toward integrity, toward integration, toward becoming-that-which-I-was-created-to-be, however early it is on that path, however small the motion, is a victory. Always the soul’s false glorification of itself as its own creator, Yima’s (Jamshid’s) fatal error, which involves the rejection of self-knowledge in favor of self-will, is a defeat. What Buber suggests is that these battles are fought in and with and upon one’s whole being, moment by moment, and simultaneously on the battlefield of the universe, and that only in victory does any human being, in a meaningful way, come into existence.17
And then you have to do it all over again.
Contractually obligatory note(s)18
Break, Blow, Burn & Make comes out next Tuesday, June 11. It contains what I know about writing, reading, art, and faith. Karen Russell (Orange World), who is gracious beyond belief, has called the book a masterpiece. Makoto Fujimura (Art + Faith) describes it as “an invitation to hope, to persevere, to recalibrate through despair, to pray and ultimately to love.” For those interested, if you can afford to preorder the book through a physical bookstore, that helps the bookstore and increases the likelihood of copies making it onto shelves19; if you cannot, you can usually suggest a purchase of a recently-published title to your library, and they may either buy it or place an inter-library loan on your behalf.
Jewel Box is, for whatever reason (see ft. 19), is almost half off at Amazon right now.
And now I can’t find those quotations anywhere, and am wondering if I dreamed the whole thing.
Technical term in music for “smeary partial dissonances in ambiguous meter that fail to have a clear downbeat or resolve to the tonic; consequently, terrible for dancing.”
Said to be from his Preface to the score of the symphony. Also quoted by the Leonard Bernstein Office’s page on Symphony No. 2, which includes Auden’s unfavorable opinion of the ballet that resulted.
W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (NY: Random House, 1947) 39.
Ibid 43-4.
Yes, yes, this a terrible abuse of the original lines. And yes, this already happened with Eliot’s Burnt Norton.
For the most part they don’t, but the sentiment is a generous one.
Auden 134.
“In Search of a Majority.” Address at Kalamazoo College, 1960. In The Price of the Ticket (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021) 241.
I can understand and could even agree with his later deletion of the penultimate stanza, but for the sake of the last stanza would protest his rejection of the whole thing.
Martin Buber, Good and Evil (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1953) 64. Very short but dense.
Ibid. 126-7. For example: “Defund the police.”
Ibid. 140. It bears restating: to affirm with one’s will what one’s self-knowledge recognizes as wrong is the beginning of decisive evil.
Ibid. 127.
Ibid. 140-1.
Ibid 112-13. “Reality” or “creation” or “the universe” could be substituted here for “being” for the sake of comprehension.
Which sounds outrageous only until you remember Diogenes’ lantern.
You might think I’m kidding, but this is in every book contract. Section H. par. i and ii in this case.
Brick-and-mortar stores are one of the few places in which obscure books like mine can be found by readers by accident, or where I can find books I had no prior awareness of. These stores are also expensive to staff, to stock, and to run. This is why writers and publishers talk incessantly about buying from physical bookstores.
Far, far more detail than anyone asked for: As I understand it, publishers traditionally discount copies by 55% for wholesalers (the standard trade discount). In most cases, when a book is sold, 15% of its list price goes to a wholesaler like Ingram, while 40% of list goes to the bookstore that gets its stock from Ingram (adding up to 55%). The bookstore’s 40% is used to pay rent, wages, utilities, and so on. Any discounts offered by the bookstore are subtracted from the bookstore’s 40%, the exception to this being remainders, where the book is sold at cost with a black mark on the bottom edge and the author receives no royalties. (See Clive James’ classic 1983(?) poem “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.”)
Bookshop.org only donates 10% of list to bookstores, in contrast to the 40% a bookstore receives through a standard sale. (I think they keep the other 30%.) On the other side of things, author royalties are lower on books that customers buy directly from the publisher.
I’d guess that Amazon, a combination distributor and retailer, can afford to discount its books so heavily because it receives the full 55% trade discount, while not paying for the costs of a physical bookstore and enjoying economies of scale in terms of warehousing, so any sale at half price or higher is likely still profitable.