1

One of the more interesting developments in American political and social thought in the last decade or so has been the emergence of communitarianism—in large part because, though no one knows exactly what communitarianism is, people do tend to think good thoughts about the notion of community. As Wendell Berry writes, "Community is a concept, like humanity or peace, that virtually no one has taken the trouble to quarrel with; even its worst enemies praise it." Perhaps some communitarians have chosen not to define their aims and goals too specifically because they know that the cold light of specificity tends to dispel the warm fuzzy aura that surrounds that word "community."

But some attempts at definition have been made. According to Christopher Lasch, who should know, communitarianism "proposes a general strategy of devolution or decentralization, designed to end the dominance of large organizations [this means multinational corporations as well as the U.S. government] and to remodel our institutions on a human scale." Communitarians, then, inveigh against the old habit of thinking of the polis largely in national terms, and advocate its replacement by more localized forms of attention.

A curious trait of communitarians is that few of them seem to have arrived at their position willingly. Rather, they have become communitarians only because more grandiose and universal systems (whether Marxism, old-fashioned liberalism, or state capitalism) have, in their view, failed us all. In this regard the paradigmatic communitarian, it seems to me, is St. Francis of Assissi. After he discovered the Biblical principles on which he and his followers would base their brotherhood—by picking three verses at random from the Gospels—he sought again and again to bring his message to other parts of the known world. But each time he prepared to voyage forth to make his message universal, some barrier (whether a Pope's edict or the collapse of his health or God's unmediated will) would prevent him from living Italy; thus he was forced, until quite late in his career, to cultivate the Franciscan spirit of community only in his native Umbria. Like most communitarians, then, Francis became one by default. No one, it seems, wants cultiver son jardin as long as changing the world remains a viable option.

This is especially the case for intellectuals, because, as Karl Mannheim pointed out many years ago in his Ideology and Utopia, intellectuals in Western societies form a distinct class "whose special task is to provide an interpretation of the world." An intellectual, then, by definition thinks globally rather than locally; so much so that to accept the validity of local concerns is to court excommunication from the church of the clerisy. This danger may best be seen, I think, in the example of Albert Camus. Think of some of his most notorious statements about the Algerian conflict in which his family was endangered: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." "Love is injustice, but justice is not enough." "If anyone … thinks heroically that one's brother must die rather than one's principles, I shall go no farther than to admire him from a distance. I am not of his stamp." If the virulence with which such statements were repudiated by the French intelligentsia seems shocking today, that is only because in the intervening thirty-five years we have lost confidence in the mental and moral detachment of the intellectual. Even if the detachment and objectivity of the intellectual is a fiction, it remains (if Mannheim is right, and I think he is) necessary to the very concepts of "intellectual" and "intelligentsia." To the adherents of that fiction, the celebration of local culture and local knowledge is anathema.

These reflections apply quite directly, I believe, to one of the more interesting, if largely unacknowledged, predecessors of the contemporary communitarian movement, the poet W. H. Auden. Though Auden settled on communitarian principles with great reluctance, after the defeat of his universalist hopes he articulated those principles with remarkable force and clarity in twenty-five years of beautiful, but to this day largely unappreciated, poetry. Moreover, I contend that Auden understood both the costs and benefits of choosing to cultivate local knowledge and local attachments better than almost any political thinker writing about such issues today. For that reason alone his work on this subject deserves our attention. But it also repays study because of certain conflicts into which Auden's particular brand of communitarianism drew him—conflicts that may have been inevitable.

2

What we need here is a vantage point from which to survey both the early and the later Auden, and that point is provided by "New Year Letter," the first long poem Auden wrote after he moved to America at the outset of the Second World War. One of the most notable and surprising features of this poem is its celebration of local culture. Auden's conception of what local culture is and what it does develops throughout the "New Year Letter," but finds condensed expression near the beginning, as Auden remembers a recent gathering of friends at the home of Elizabeth Mayer (to whom this "letter" is written). After describing the various objects and actions which with a "neutral eye" the sun observes on earth, he writes that this same sun

     Lit up America and on
     A cottage in Long Island shone
     Where BUXTEHUDE as we played
     One of his passacaglias made
     Our minds a civitas of sound
     Where nothing but assent was found,
     For art had set in order sense
     And feeling and intelligence,
     And from its ideal order grew
     Our local understanding too.

The phrase "ideal order" comes from T. S. Eliot's famous essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent": "The existing monuments [of European art] form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." But while Eliot's concerns are merely intertextual, describing only how these "monuments" are organized and deployed in relation to one another, Auden's interests are markedly different: the question for him is. How does art help us (if indeed it does) to set our lives in order? For Eliot the ideal order is to be contemplated and celebrated; for Auden it is to be used. And it finds its use in the formation of "local understanding," of small groups of people united, if only temporarily, to become citizens of their own tiny republic.

Later in the poem, at the beginning of its third and last part, Auden returns to the same message:

     And SCHUBERT sang and MOZART played
     And GLUCK and food and friendship made
     Our privileged community
     That real republic which must be
     The State all politicians claim,
     Even the worst, to be their aim.

I quote this passage too because otherwise it might not be clear how such an apparently high view of art's utility could be reconciled with that famous opinion Auden had pronounced for the first (but certainly not the last) time almost exactly a year before, in his famous elegy on Yeats: "Poetry makes nothing happen." Does Auden now mean to say that if poetry can't make anything happen music can? There were certainly times in his later career when he came close to saying just that, but in the context of the "New Year Letter" I think the point is that art, while it cannot of its own power enforce any alteration of consciousness or morality, can help those who would be joined together to find their desired unity. Artists can never become the legislators of the world, either acknowledged or unacknowledged—Auden often expressed scorn and repulsion for Shelley's famous claim—but they can become after a fashion public servants. Yet even this they can only do successfully if the public they serve is small enough for real commonality of purpose to be possible: art can promote "local understanding" in a miniature civitas, but cannot change the world. And this is true not because art is weak, but because, in Auden's view in 1940, all dreams of universal or even national unity, dreams which he himself had tried for a decade to share in, are fundamentally absurd. Art can serve only local understanding because local understanding is the only understanding there is.

3

One of the more interesting points to be made about Auden's conclusion here is that he had been confronted with just such an example of perfect local understanding—an example even more perfect, and certainly far more dramatic, than he found in Elizabeth Mayer's Long Island home—less than seven years before, and had been unable to accept it. He did not provide a full account of the experience until 1964, thirty years after it had occurred, and even then he did not openly admit that the experience was his own. The account needs to be quoted at some length:

One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man…. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because, thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one's neighbor as oneself. I was also certain, though the conversation continued to be perfectly ordinary, that my three colleagues were having the same experience. (In the case of one of them, I was later able to confirm this.) My personal feelings towards them were unchanged—they were still colleagues, not intimate friends—but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it.

I recalled with shame the many occasions on which I had been spiteful, snobbish, selfish, but the immediate joy was greater than the shame, for I knew that, so long as I was possessed by this spirit, it would be literally impossible for me deliberately to injure another human being. I also knew that the power would, of course, be withdrawn sooner or later and that, when it did, my greed and self-regard would return. The experience lasted at its full intensity for about two hours when we said goodnight to each other and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning, it was still present, though weaker, and it did not vanish completely for two days or so. The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do. And among the various factors which several years later brought me back to the Christian faith in which I had been brought up, the memory of this experience and asking myself what it could mean was one of the most crucial, though, at the time it occurred, I thought I had done with Christianity for good.

This story fits nicely with the celebration of "local understanding" elaborated in "New Year Letter": here indeed is a tiny Athens, even a miniature New Jerusalem. But when Auden wrote a poem about the experience, soon after it happened, his chief concern was to articulate his sense that the acceptance of such an excessively local culture was morally and politically indefensible.

The early stanzas of the poem, which Auden would eventually give the title "A Summer Night," show no sign of uneasiness:

      Equal with colleagues in a ring
      I sit on each calm evening
        Enchanted as the flowers
      The opening light draws out of hiding
      From leaves with all its dove-like pleading,
        Its logic and its powers:
 
      That later we, though parted then,
      May still recall these evenings when
        Fear gave his watch no look;
      The lion griefs loped from the shade
      And on our knees their muzzles laid,
        And Death put down his book.

But as the poem moves on its center of interest shifts: what about those who are not so fortunate as to be enclosed within such an Edenic "ring"? How does an acknowledgement of their existence affect the comfortable insiders? Or is life in such an enchanted circle dependent on a studied ignorance of those outside? Perhaps the insiders, "whom hunger cannot move,"

       do not care to know,
      Where Poland draws her eastern bow,
       What violence is done,
      Nor ask what doubtful act allows
      Our freedom in this English house,
       Our picnics in the sun.
 
      The creepered wall stands up to hide
      The gathering multitudes outside
       Whose glances hunger worsens;
      Concealing from their wretchedness
      Our metaphysical distress,
       Our kindness to ten persons.

This vision of love and community, then, may not be a free gift in which to rejoice, but a dangerous temptation to social quietism: it is at best a "doubtful act." What the Auden of 1964 celebrates as a blessed inability to harm others, the Auden of 1933 fears as an insidious tendency to be satisfied with one's "kindness to ten persons" while the "gathering multitudes" outside starve. The perfect local understanding which the Auden even of 1940 celebrates as an incalculable gift, the Auden of 1933 finds a scandal precisely because it is local and not universal.

How, then, did Auden get in less than seven years from the one position to the other? One might begin by describing his disillusionment with Marxism and his return to Christianity, a return which was not yet complete when "New Year Letter" was written but was nearly so. But we should be careful here. That Auden rejected Marxism and became a Christian is certainly true; but there is no necessary connection between Christianity and the embrace of local culture exemplified in "New Year Letter." In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Marxism and Christianity alike stand opposed to such localization of culture, which finds more sympathy in certain ancient Greek and Roman modes of political thought (Aristotle rather than Plato, Horace rather than Virgil). The cultivation of "local understanding," as is manifest in the passages quoted from both "New Year Letter" and "A Summer Night," requires as an essential, perhaps the essential, component the cultivation of friendship—and friendship, while an Aristotelian virtue, tends to be suspect both to Marxism (which opposes to it the ideal of "comradeship") and to Christianity (which opposes to it the ideal of "brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ"). Jeremy Taylor, the seventeenth-century Anglican divine, wrote: "When friendships were the noblest things in the world, charity was little." In other words, when the ancient Greeks and Romans emphasized the great virtue of friendship, they neglected to care for those who stood outside philia's charmed circle: the "gathering multitudes" outside the "creepered wall." Likewise Samuel Johnson: "All friendship is preferring the interest of a friend, to the neglect, or, perhaps, against the interest of others…. Now Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren; which is contrary to the virtue of friendship, as described by the ancient philosophers." One might easily argue that Marxism inherits this Christian universalism, while proposing alternative explanations for its practical failure and alternative means for its eventual realization. Thus it is by no means obvious that Auden's embrace of Christianity would naturally lead to an embrace of local culture and local understanding.

In fact, it seems to me that Auden's return to Christianity and his celebration of local culture form two rather distinct movements in his intellectual life that meet at only one point, a point which we will soon identify. First, it is vital to note that at no point in Auden's intellectual development does he deny that human beings are capable of creating universal evil. For instance, from "New Year Letter":

      And more and more we are aware,
      However miserable may be
      Our parish of immedicacy,
      How small it is, how, far beyond,
      Ubiquitous within the bond
      Of an impoverishing sky,
      Vast spiritual disorders lie.

Then follows a catalogue of those "disorders," from China to Spain to Ethiopia to Poland. But a grave spiritual and moral danger, Auden argues, arises from the recognition of such universal evil. "Who," he asks,

       will not feel blind anger draw
      His thoughts toward the Minotaur,
      To take an early boat for Crete
      And rolling, silly, at its feet
      Add his small tidbit to the rest?
      It lures us all; even the best,
      Les hommes de bonne volonté, feel
      Their politics perhaps unreal
      And all they have believed untrue,
      Are tempted to surrender to
      The grand apocalyptic dream
      In which the persecutors scream
      As on the evil Aryan lives
      Descends the night of the long knives,
      The bleeding tyrant dragged through all
      The ashes of his capitol.

One might with cause assume that Auden here is arguing for pacifism, claiming that the attempt to defeat Hitler will reduce the Allies to Hitler's moral level. But Auden, though he felt the appeal of pacifism, never embraced it, and soon after writing "New Year Letter" explicitly rejected it. Instead, Auden is warning the Allies that they are not immune to the forces that (as he wrote about Germany in "September 1, 1939") "have driven a culture mad"; the great if not inevitable danger of fighting the Nazis is that one may become contaminated by the very disorder one sets out to cure. Thus the little parable that, in the Notes which he originally appended to "New Year Letter," Auden attaches to the lines about throwing oneself at the feet of the Minotaur:

During the last war Frau M was in Tübingen. Walking home one cloudy night, she met two professors from the university, carrying rifles.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"There's an enemy aeroplane overhead. Can't you see its pilot-light?"

"But that's not an aeroplane. That's Jupiter."

Having thrown themselves at the feet of what Auden calls in The Sea and the Mirror "the Minotaur of Authority," these men have lost their ability to make elementary moral and even perceptual discriminations. And let us not fail to note that these are professors, a fact that indicates that Auden's warning is chiefly directed against the intellectuals, who are in the greatest danger of all because of their conviction that their detachment and objectivity place them beyond danger. This is a lesson, I believe, Auden learned in Spain, where he saw how the Republicans (surely hommes de bonne volonté), consumed with hatred for anything associated with the old regime, had closed and in many cases wrecked or burned the churches of Barcelona—and without eliciting recognition of their act, much less disapproval, from their supporters among the intelligentsia.

Perhaps Auden's insistence upon the nearly infinite human capacity for evil would not have been so objectionable to the intellectuals of his time, were it not for his equally vivid insistence that it does not follow that humans are capable of equally great goodness. A consistent theme in Auden's work of this period is that we lack the power to undo the evil that we have the power to do. It is this belief that leads Auden to what would become one of the most persistent features of his poetry until his death: his praise of humility. This is the point at which his conversion to Christianity and his acceptance of the validity of local culture converge.

4

One of the first significant appearances of this leitmotif is in Auden's great sonnet sequence of 1938, "In Time of War," which grew out of his and Christopher Isherwood's visit to China. In the last sonnet of the sequence, for instance, Auden describes the hopes for human perfection in a perfectly innocent past of what Eliot would call "unified sensibility" and in a perfectly ordered future—these being the dreams, as he would later write in the "Vespers" section of the "Horae Canonicae," of the Arcadian and the Utopian respectively. But here he calmly rejects both visions of perfection as being incompatible with the fundamental human condition:

    But we are articled to error; we
    Were never nude and calm like a great door
 
    And never will be perfect like the fountains.

A full understanding of this inevitable fallenness requires not only humility but a recognition of the historical value of humility: in the verse "Commentary" to the sequence Auden writes of the importance of giving "Our gratitude to the Invisible College of the Humble, / Who through the ages have accomplished everything essential." Auden's conviction on this point finds its most perfect poetic expression about a year after the completion of "New Year Letter," in the penultimate (later, upon revision, to be the last) stanza of "At the Grave of Henry James":

     All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
     Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
      Because there are many whose works
     Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end
     To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
      For the treason of all clerks.

Auden's humble recognition of the profundity of human evildoing and the limited capacity for doing good has two major consequences for his thought: first, that the Christian belief in original sin and the concomitant need for salvation from God is, in all essentials, right; second, that one must do what one can, not what one wishes one could do, to make things better. In the famous phrase from "Tintern Abbey," Auden determines to cultivate and to praise "that best portion of a good man's life: / His little, nameless, un-remembered acts / Of kindness and of love"; and from Sydney Smith he learns (a phrase he would often repeat in prose and verse) to "take short views." This emphasis on limited aims, this desired reconciliation with inevitable incompetence, appears often in Auden's later poetry—to take but one example, in "Memorial for the City" (1949), in which a versified history of the failed Constantinian experiment of melding the City of Man with the City of God is followed by the voice of "our Weakness," a voice never acknowledged by the hubristic Constantinians whose best efforts culminated in the encompassing tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin.

Auden's replacement for these great dreams, his determination to cultivate his garden, may be chastised as a philosophy for the cosy, merely domestic ethics. But Auden is quite explicit in his belief that on these grounds and on these grounds only can meaningful culture—and moreover, the kind of culture which both safeguards us from as a culture being "driven mad" in the way the Germans were, and minimizes the danger of becoming like the Nazis in fighting them—be achieved. It is, of course, precisely this view that has caused so many critics to scorn the "new" Auden and long for the earlier, politically-committed Auden. Randall Jarrell, for instance, in a famous attack upon Auden in a 1945 issue of the Partisan Review, sneers at "that overweening humility which is the badge of all his saints" and condemns Auden for "moral imbecility" in seeking the salvation of his own soul while heedless of the world being destroyed around him. Jarrell feels that Auden should have somehow put his intellectual powers to work in the war against Hitler rather than criticizing, as Auden did in a 1944 review of a new edition of Grimm's Märchen, "the Society for Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Coöperative Camp for Prudent Progressives and all other bores and scoundrels." To which Jarrell: "In the year 1944 these prudent, progressive, scientific, coöperative 'bores and scoundrels' were the enemies with whom Auden found it necessary to struggle. Were these your enemies, reader? They were not mine."

Auden did not respond to Jarrell's attack; he never responded to attacks. But someone should; therefore, the prosecution having made its case, I will now take the part of the counsel for the defense (on the model of Auden's own "The Public vs. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats").

5

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, it is customary at this point for the defense attorney to praise the eloquence of the prosecutor. That I cannot do, for it seems to me that despite the customary brilliance of his wit he has spoken neither well nor to the point. He has accused my client of a virtually treasonable disregard of his social and political duty as a writer, and this accusation, with all its unreliable inferences and misleading implications, it is my duty, and my pleasure, to refute. I think you will soon see, ladies and gentlemen, just how insubstantial these apparently weighty charges really are.

Where to begin? The distinguished prosecutor has made so many errors that I struggle to decide which to dispose of first. Perhaps we had best begin by clearing up a potential misunderstanding about the accusation itself. Members of the jury might be forgiven for assuming that the distinguished prosecutor meant at times to chastise my client for having failed to enlist as a soldier—whether of his native Great Britain or of our United States—and to fight in the most literal sense against Hitler's armies. But this cannot be what Mr. Jarrell intended: if such had been his charge, he would have complained that Mr. Auden was writing at all, rather than complaining about the specific content of his writing. (And Mr. Jarrell could not make a general attack on writing in wartime without, like King David, standing condemned by his own judgment.)

No, the essential charge the prosecutor levels against my client is the charge of frivolity: the allegation is that Mr. Auden fiddles while Europe burns. The cause of this frivolity, or rather its justification, according to the prosecutor, is Mr. Auden's belief in the Christian doctrine (traditionally, if not accurately, identified with Calvinism) of human depravity: because Mr. Auden believes that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, he has ceased to make moral discriminations, and this is inexcusably frivolous—especially in the midst of this war, when moral distinctions between the monstrous Hitler and his opponents are vital.

Were this an accurate representation of my client's views, he would indeed be guilty of, in Mr. Jarrell's memorable phrase, "moral imbecility." But it is a wildly and irresponsibly inaccurate account. Mr. Auden has time and again, in public and in private, expressed his opposition to Hitler and Hitler's cause. However, unlike Mr. Jarrell, he does not believe that in so doing he has exhausted his moral responsibilities, because, again unlike Mr. Jarrell, he does not assume that we have all honor and virtue thrust upon us merely through being attacked by an evil force. Mr. Auden never, even for an instant, questions whether the force that has attacked the Allies and Western civilization itself is evil; rather, he asks us to be watchful lest (possessed by a "grand apocalyptic dream" of revenge) we become infected with that same evil ourselves. What the doctrine of human depravity does for Mr. Auden is simply and constantly to remind him that no one can assume himself or herself to be invulnerable to the forces that led, first to the Nazis' supremacy in Germany itself, and later to the Nazis' determination to conquer all Europe. Mr. Jarrell, on the other hand, seems never to doubt his moral standing, and appears unaware that the war offers to him, or to any loyal citizen of the Allied nations, any moral temptations whatsoever. This is especially odd when one considers Mr. Jarrell's poems about the life of a common dogface soldier, which indicate his comprehension of the evil that can be done at least by the leaders of an army, even when that army fights in a just cause.

Moreover, the prosecutor has not just misrepresented Mr. Auden's understanding of evil and its manifestations in the current war; he has also simply missed the essential point of the writings by my client that most offend him. The key issue for Mr. Auden is not what the ordinary citizen can and should do in the war, but rather what responsibilities the artist, in particular the poet, must carry out. It is clear that Mr. Jarrell believes that the poet should in some way turn his or her talents to the fight against Hitler; but he does not, or cannot, explain just how this could be done. If he believes that Mr. Auden should be active in translation or propaganda, he should say so. Does he believe that Mr. Auden should write poems about the war? Well, Mr. Auden cannot, like Mr. Jarrell himself, write poems about the experience of being a soldier; what sort of poems, then, should he write? Whatever our prosecutor's answer might be, it appears that he has not thought seriously about Mr. Auden's striking claim that there is nothing a poet, qua poet, can do to fight against Hitler. "Poetry makes nothing happen," he has famously said; moreover,

art is a product of history, not a cause. Unlike some other products, technical inventions for example, it does not re-enter history as an effective agent, so that the question whether art should or should not be propaganda is unreal. The case for the prosecution [of Yeats, my client's distinguished predecessor in the dock] rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth … is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would remain materially unchanged.

If Mr. Auden is wrong in this belief, then he is honestly wrong; and even the most cursory review of the history of Europe will suffice to show that the burden of proof rests on those who disagree. It is understandable that Mr. Jarrell would want to believe that art has the power to change the world, and thus that the writer qua writer can be a significant weapon against the evil incarnated in Hitler; but it is less understandable that he would exercise such virulence and scorn against a fellow poet who happens to disagree with that assessment of art's power.

Why does Mr. Auden write at all, then, given his skepticism about the power of art? Because while poets are not and can never be the unacknowledged legislators of the world—that job, Mr. Auden says, has been applied for by the Gestapo—they can serve their own community by calling certain important but easily neglected facts to remembrance, and by warning against some equally easily neglected dangers. Poets cannot fight against Hitler, but they can fight against the people and the tendencies in their own society which corrupt that society from within and on the foundational levels of family and locality. Moreover, it is not inconceivable that some of these corrupting forces are precisely those—"the Society for Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Coöperative Camp for Prudent Progressives"—whom Mr. Jarrell explicitly claims not to oppose. It is evident, then, that while there is opposition between Mr. Jarrell and Mr. Auden it does not take the form that Mr. Jarrell claims it does: it is not Jarrell's concern for the world versus Auden's concern for his own personal salvation; rather, it is disagreement over which enemies may profitably be fought, which superindividual concerns the poet may effectively engage in.

Two conclusions, then, emerge from my exposition of the real ideas of the real Mr. Auden, as opposed to the prosecutor's imaginary versions. First, that if my client has sinned, it is only against Mr. Jarrell's high view of art, and not against English or American society, or against the Allied war effort. And second, a man who goes out of his way, and against the current cultural grain, to warn us of the moral dangers that we face as we fight against Hitler, is guilty of anything but "moral imbecility," anything but frivolity. Mr. Auden's is a voice we need to hear, and not, as Mr. Jarrell would counsel, to suppress.

6

What we have done so far, then: first, to trace the history of Auden's conviction that significant culture is and must necessarily be local rather than universal; and second, to defend this conviction against certain misunderstandings, especially those which conceive it to involve a quietistic or even fatalistic withdrawal from all forms of superindividual concern. But what also emerges from reflection on this period of Auden's career is his equally important conviction that this local culture must be deliberately and personally chosen. Now, normally those who emphasize the inevitable chosenness of culture (for example, T. S. Eliot) tend also to emphasize its universality, while many communitarian devotees of local culture (for example, Wendell Berry) tend to avoid the question of choice. It is Auden's combination of these two positions that makes him particularly important today.

Let's look at Auden in contrast to the two representative figures I just mentioned. Eliot writes, in a famous passage from "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that tradition "cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour." Presumably, in light of other things he was writing at the time, Eliot means us to understand that this need to obtain tradition only through heroic effort and deliberate choice is the peculiar curse of the modern age; certainly it would not have afflicted John Donne, who (or so Eliot thought at the time) "could feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose," living as he did in an age of unified sensibility. It is incidentally important to understand Eliot's later career, his claim to classicism, traditionalism, and so on, to see these positions as choices rather than inherited givens. As Robert Langbaum wrote in The Poetry of Experience some thirty years ago: "Are not, after all, even our new classicisms and new Christian dogmatisms really romanticisms in an age which simply cannot supply the world-views such doctrines depend on, so that they become, for all their claims to objectivity, merely another opinion, the objectification of someone's personal view?" I am not sure that Eliot fully understood the implications of this point, but Auden did. The dialectic of choice and necessity is, as many critics have pointed out, an obsession of Auden throughout his career, but it is summed up with exemplary clarity in the prayer that concludes "In Sickness and in Health," written just a few months after "New Year Letter": "O hold us to the voluntary way."

But in any case, what most clearly distinguishes Auden from Eliot is the fact that Eliot's chosen tradition is universal and objective: the "ideal order" of all great works of art, the forerunner of Northrop Frye's archetypically organized "imaginative universe." It by definition cannot be confined to a place; it repudiates the insular and parochial—opprobrious terms which in its dialect are synonymous with the local. But as we have already seen, for Auden it is precisely the locality and particularity of the gathering at Elizabeth Mayer's home that enables those people to come together as a genuine, if tiny, civitas.

Auden may equally well be contrasted with Berry, who relentlessly and eloquently has argued for the beauty of the local and its necessity as a foundation for significant culture. But Berry's consistent emphasis is on the need to conserve and protect existing communities, or to restore those that have fallen into neglect and disrepair; he always assumes a history of relations which, if they are not currently active, can be reestablished. In essays such as "The Work of Local Culture" and "Writer and Region"—many others could be cited here—Berry posits memory as a necessary component of healthy community. In Berry's scheme, it appears, Auden's first move toward community would have to be a return to England; yet England is the one place where, Auden believed, he could not find genuine community, in part because there was no place in England which he could think of as home, but also and more importantly because the English intelligentsia rejected and scorned the convictions he had come to find essential. (In 1940 Auden told Golo Mann, "The English intellectuals who now cry out to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to; they have nothing to offer and their protests echo in empty space.") Berry cannot, or does not, explain how Auden might find significant local community in America, in New York City of all unlikely places. It is the creation of new community that Auden is concerned with—as he often tried to explain, in letters from this period, to his puzzled English friends—not the restoration of the old; and thus the question of choice, which Berry neglects but which is formulated so eloquently by Langbaum in the passage quoted above, is paramount for him.

From the preceding paragraph it becomes evident that, while I have identified Berry and Auden alike as proponents of local culture, "local" does not mean the same thing to both. There are common points; local culture as both men use the term is restricted in scope, humble in its aspirations, dedicated to preservation and conservation; moreover, it emphasizes and celebrates the social and communal formation of all personal identities. But for Berry—again see "Writer and Region," also "Poetry and Place"—healthy local culture must necessarily be rooted in a particular physical environment, a place. Auden does not seem to think so. For more than twenty-five years he lived in New York City, but for only half the year; the other half being spent first on the tiny Italian island of Ischia, later in his beloved home in the village of Kirchstetten in Austria. Auden thought often and wrote beautifully about these localities, but clearly felt the need, as Berry perhaps does not, to maintain his community solely in his own mind and work. The nature of his profession—it is vital to remember that Berry is a farmer as well as a poet, and would necessarily have a very different understanding of community and local culture if he only wrote poetry—and of his apparently rootless way of life forced Auden to confront a difficult fact: if he were to experience the blessings of communal, local culture at all, he would have to find a means to cultivate such experience that would seem quite alien to more traditional local cultures.

Which is another way of saying that Berry's emphasis on memory does eventually come to be essential even to Auden's peculiar form of local culture: Auden does not have the luxury of beginning with a substantial history, but he soon develops one. From about 1940 on Auden very consciously builds a community of friends and colleagues that he sustains and memorializes through his poetry. No other major poet dedicates so many poems to his friends; the reader of Auden's correspondence, especially letters from the last twenty years of his life, finds that he spent an extraordinary amount of time typing up drafts of his poems for friends, and asking them if he could dedicate those poems to them. And often the themes of these poems involve Auden's reflections on the very issues of this essay: under what conditions communities can thrive, what dangers (internal or external) threaten those communities, and, especially, the importance of being continually thankful for the blessings of friendship and "local understanding." Thus a chief purpose of Auden's later poetry becomes the making of a permanent record of the nature and history of his friendships, that is to say, his community. Poetry—for Auden and, he hopes, for his friends—resumes an ancient (and by Auden much-lamented) function, as a mnemonic device. What must be remembered through poetry, however, is not the number of days in April, but rather the character of one's friendships and the virtues of one's community. Like the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci. Auden builds a memory palace, but this one does not remain a Prosperian "insubstantial pageant": it is inscribed on solid paper and bound between hard covers.

7

Earlier I mentioned, briefly, "Memorial for the City" as a poem in which Auden repudiates the Constantinian project. But the very title suggests that Auden retains as part of his conceptual framework the notion of a political entity larger than the tiny civitas made up of his friends and colleagues. Every local culture, Auden frequently implies, though it is a polis unto itself, also participates in that larger entity more usually called the polis. It does not often participate well and meaningfully, largely because it remains unconscious of its responsibilities to the greater City, but in the ideal commonwealth the smallest and largest politics will understand their relation: as he writes near the end of "New Year Letter," "The largest publicum's a res, / And the least res a publicum."

One practical consequence of this view is that each local community must recognize the validity of other such communities and accept that each has a place in the fabric of the whole, Berkeley and Orange County alike. In "Vespers," the fifth of Auden's "Horae Canonicae" (that great and potently condensed sequence of poems that he worked on for about seven years, from the late forties to the mid-fifties), Auden described a brief but significant crossing of paths. At dusk in "our city," the poem's speaker, an Arcadian devoted to contemplation of a charming and idealized past, meets his future-directed Utopian "anti-type"; however,

Neither speaks. What experience could we possibly share?

Glancing at a lampshade in a store window, I observe it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy: He observes it is too expensive for a peasant to buy.

Passing a slum child with rickets, I look the other way: He looks the other way if he passes a chubby one.

The playful tone of the poem should not obscure the underlying seriousness of its theme: "You can see, then, why, between my Eden and his New Jerusalem, no treaty is negotiable." But this collision of opposites is not the poem's conclusion. It may be, muses the speaker as they move on in their different directions, that this twilit meeting, far from being an accident, is "a rendezvous between two accomplices," each of whom reminds the other "of that half of their secret which he would most like to forget." For "a fraction of a second" each remembers "our victim," a victim both human and innocent, whose blood enables the "secular wall" of the city "safely [to] stand." This victim—Auden says "call him Abel, Remus, what you will, it is one Sin Offering," but these are clearly shadowy types of Christ—in his innocence recalls the unspoiled perfection of Eden, the restoration of which is now the city's hope and goal; but this restoration is only made possible by the shedding of that very innocent's blood, for as St. Paul says, "without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin"; and this is a fact only the Utopian, willing to make sacrifices for an imagined future, is able to face. Thus these two enemies are in fact equally necessary members of their city, "our dear old bag of a democracy."

The challenge that Auden presents in this poem, then, is to maintain simultaneous allegiances to one's local culture and to the greater polity—assuming that that polity is a democracy, because only in democracy (thinks Auden) can such exceedingly varied and even contradictory local communities be formed and sustained. But it is extraordinarily difficult, even in times such as ours in which there is (supposedly) no higher virtue than toleration, to acknowledge and even celebrate the role one's political opponents play in the constitution of the society. And sad to say, as Auden got older the vision of this great twilit meeting receded and was replaced by withdrawal into the most local of all cultures, the garden cultivated only in the mind.

8

I have already said that Auden's lack of attachment to a place causes him to think of the formation of community in terms of thankfulness, remembrance, and inscription: to write poems to and for his friends is to remember and give thanks for their friendship, to build a community on the page that cannot, thanks to the international character of Auden's life and his connections, be built in a single location. But however necessary this form of community-building was for Auden, he pursued it with such vigor and determination that it gradually assumed a kind of perverse life of its own, so that the local culture that he conceived in his mind and memory became preferable to any more material kind. This tendency he was perfectly aware of, though it is not easy to tell if he regretted it. For instance, in "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" (written mostly from 1962–64), Auden writes that one of the greatest blessings of his Austrian home, a dwelling-place "I dared not hope or fight for," is that there "I needn't, ever, be at home to / those I am not at home with," which is pretty understandable; but he adds these curious lines in the third poem of the sequence, "The Cave of Making," to his recently deceased friend Louis MacNeice:

          I wish you hadn't
    caught that cold, but the dead we miss are easier to talk to: with those no longer
    tensed by problems one cannot feel shy and, anyway,
     when playing cards or drinking
    or pulling faces are out of the question, what else is there
     to do but talk to the voices
    of conscience they have become? From now on, as a visitor
     who needn't be met at the station,
    your influence is welcome at any hour in my ubity
    ...

MacNeice's ghost might well be pleased at being named a "voice of conscience," but perhaps a little uneasy at being considered a more welcome friend now that Auden doesn't have to go to the trouble of meeting his train, and presumably feeding him and finding him a bed. It is true that the dead, as friends, are remarkably little trouble, but even to hint that this makes them better friends is to betray an unhealthy pleasure in keeping the garden of one's daily routine well-tended and undisturbed.

Such a tendency provokes a disturbing question: is something like this fate inevitable for forms of local culture that are not, as Berry would have them be, rooted in a particular place? Is the project of building local culture in poems of recognition and gratitude an impossible one? "The houses of our City," Auden writes in another poem from "Habitat," "Grub First, Then Ethics,"

        are real enough but they lie
       haphazardly scattered over the earth,
        and her vagabond forum
       is any space where two of us happen to meet
        who can spot a citizen
       without papers.

But is this good enough? Can a polis worthy of the name be sustained by occasional meetings of cognoscenti and equally occasional poems from one cognoscente to others? It seems that Auden feared just that, since the poem goes on,

             So, too, can her foes. Where the
       power lies remains to be seen,
      the force, though, is clearly with them: perhaps only
       by falling can She become
      Her own vision, but we have sworn under four eyes
       to keep Her up …

This is a curious passage, because it suggests that Auden's attitude toward the local culture he had striven to build closely resembles his attitude toward the poetic art to which he had dedicated his working life. To Louis MacNeice's ghost he writes,

            … Speech can at best, a shadow echoing
       the silent light, bear witness
      to the truth it is not …,

but this is an old idea with him. From "New Year Letter":

      Yet truth, like love and sleep, resents
      Approaches that are too intense.
      And often when the searcher stood
      Before the Oracle, it would
      Ignore his grown-up earnestness
      But not the child of his distress,
      For through the Janus of a joke
      The candid psychopompos spoke.

This idea finds its fullest development in The Sea and the Mirror, where Caliban, "beating about for some large loose image to define" the experience, recorded in The Tempest, of the disillusion of magic and the acceptance of bounds, finally settles on this: "the greatest grandest opera rendered by a very provincial touring company indeed." Paradoxically, it is the very poverty and ineptitude of the production that makes it valuable to its actors, for even though "there was not a single aspect of our whole performance, not even the huge stuffed bird of happiness, for which a kind word could, however patronisingly, be said," nevertheless it is "at this very moment [that] we do at last see ourselves as we are." At the moment when all pretense to aesthetic achievement helplessly falls away, and the actors are confronted with the authentic selves which they had used their performances to escape, they come to see God precisely in their distance from Him:

… we are blessed with that Wholly Other Life from which we are separated by an essential emphatic gulf of which our contrived fissures of mirror and proscenium arch—we understand them at last—are feebly figurative signs … it is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in the perfected Work that is not ours.

It is just when the would-be proximity of mimetic art to truth fails that the distance of analogy, with its "feebly figurative signs," manages somehow to succeed.

In "Thanksgiving for a Habitat," Auden seems to be saying something quite similar about the City of which he is a voluntary and self-selected citizen: "perhaps only / by falling can She become / Her own vision." A chief purpose, then, of all humanly built cultures is to produce recognition of the gaping chasm that separates all earthly cities from the City of God, all earthly communities from the Communion of the Saints. The failures of such cultures, then, are not only to be expected but to be welcomed—but only if the effort to perfect them (or at least "keep them up") has been genuine. As Simone Weil never tired of saying, you can confront your weakness only if you have reached the actual limit of your abilities; failures due to laziness have no educational value.

9

Is this a perverse and fatalistic conclusion? Or, to the contrary, an unrealistically hopeful one? For the reader who can share Auden's belief in an eternal City of God, his message is chastening but ultimately reassuring: "All will be judged," he says to Henry James, but in the (later excised) last stanza of that poem he also finds comfort in those words from the Prayer Book about "Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author / And giver of all good things." For the reader who cannot share that faith, Auden may seem to rest too comfortably in his own inevitable failure to sustain any ideal order, however restricted in its scope and aims. Members of either party, however, should, it seems to me, give thanks to Auden—as I have said, he was always one for giving thanks—for having shown us just how complex and difficult a project the formation of community is, and just how many and how serious are the virtues required to keep it alive and well.