“The guilt and grime of a great career,” he comments now, and Of his long marvelous letters but kept none. Or potter around the garden answered some Lawrence sort of hero whose ambition and energy are in effect condemned by comparison with the self-effacement and indolence of one he loves, who His anxiety is fundamental and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself-consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.” The attitude goes far back in Auden, though not to his earliest work it can be seen developing in an ambivalent sonnet from Look, Stranger, now called “Who’s Who,” about a T. There can be no doubt that he wrote the entire poem, and:Īuden’s present subject, actually, and his failure with it as semi-dramatic, were predicted by Randall Jarrell several years ago when he wrote in Partisan Review: “What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience-and he decides that the hero ‘is, in fact, one who is not anxious.’ But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. The whole tone, anyway, apocalyptic or skittish or heavy-avuncular, is Auden’s the other characters speak for him as steadily as Quant. The general effect is that of a parody of Auden by somebody very pretentious and uncertain, but so gifted that it can only be Auden himself. The occasional prose seems more thoughtful, really, and more natural than the verse, though the verse is sporadically “brilliant” and there are good lines and passages. The numerous subjects are dim and confused, the styles are nerveless and self-indulgent, anything comes up anywhere and nothing happens to it. As in some recent novels but for no reason that appears sufficient, it is All Souls’, and everything goes, all the tangle of current intellectual equipment. They think, then they talk in the cab they sing a dirge Emble and Rosetta make vague love, Emble passes out Quant sings, Malin thinks, on their way home. The four vaguest characters in modern literature (Quant, a shipping clerk and widower Malin, a medical intelligence officer in the RCAF Emble, a young mid-Western naval officer Rosetta, a department-store buyer) sit around one evening during the recent war, first in a Third Avenue bar, then in Rosetta’s apartment, and mull things over: the modern soul, the seven ages of man’s life, the seven stages of some dream-quest, the possibilities of happiness, the alienations of men, the ennuis of America. As a large and ambitious production by one of the best living poets, The Age of Anxiety is disappointing.
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