'Take Such Nonsense Seriously'

In December, at Nige’s suggestion, I read Michael Wharton’s memoir The Missing Will (1984). It’s an amusing book, a reminder of the days when satire was thriving and journalists permitted themselves to be not drones but, at least on occasion, independent-minded eccentrics. Several times throughout his memoir, Wharton tells us his favorite book, one he read many times, was William Butler Yeats’ A Vision (1925), a choice that casts doubt on Wharton’s otherwise impeccably barbative reputation. When Yeats dabbles in the occult, he looks silly and writes tediously, as do all of us who possess at least a few atavistic genes that stimulate, in the privacy of our skulls, thoughts of an occult nature – astrology, tarot cards, poltergeists. Then the grown-up part of us takes over. In “Yeats As an Example” (Kenyon Review, Spring 1948), written nine years after the Irish poet’s death, W.H. Auden writes:

 “Let me begin with the element in his work which seems most foreign to us, his cosmology, his concern with the occult. . . . However diverse our fundamental beliefs may be, the reaction of most of us to all that occult is, I fancy, the same: How on earth, we wonder, could a man of Yeats’s gifts take such nonsense seriously?”

 

One of the qualities I most admire about Auden as a critic is his willingness to admit his limitations, weaknesses and prejudices:

 

“I have a further bewilderment, which may be due to my English upbringing, one of snobbery. How could Yeats, with his great aesthetic appreciation of aristocracy, ancestral houses, ceremonious tradition, take up something so essentially lower-middle class -- or should I say Southern Californian -- so ineluctably associated with suburban villas and clearly unattractive faces. A.E. Housman’s pessimistic stoicism seems to me nonsense too, but at least it is a kind of nonsense that can be believed by a gentleman -- but mediums, spells, the Mysterious Orient -- how embarrassing.”

 

I confess that’s part of my reaction to Yeats’ slumming in esoterica. But Auden is honest enough to look at it from the other side, take a balanced view, and not dismiss the Irishman as an idiot:

 

“In fact, of course, it is to Yeats’s credit, and an example to me, that he ignored such considerations, nor, granted that his Weltanschauung was false, can we claim credit for rejecting what we have no temptation to accept, nor deny that the poetry he wrote involving it is very good. What we should consider, then, is firstly, why Celtic mythology in his earlier phases, and occult symbolism in his later, should have attracted Yeats when they fail to attract us; secondly, what are the comparable kinds of beliefs to which we are drawn and why; thirdly, what is the relation between myth, belief, and poetry?”

 

It has never occurred to me to reject Yeats’ best work in poetry because he was credulous when it came to Madame Blavatsky. Likewise I continue to read and learn from Dante and George Herbert, though their faith and theological understanding is not mine. It’s different with politics. I can’t read the work of Nazis and Stalinists, except as historical documents, never as literature. I can’t read Ernst Jünger or Pablo Neruda for pleasure. As Auden writes in his great elegy, soon after Yeats’ death in 1939: “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.” Not so for political/moral aberrants. Auden in his essay is admirably direct and mature, and addresses today’s rampant incivility:

 

“We are unlikely to believe something because it would be fun to believe it; but we are very likely to do one of two things, either to say that everything is relative, that there is no absolute truth, or that those who do not hold what we believe to be absolute reject it out of malice.

 

“When two people to-day engage in an argument, each tends to spend half of his time and energy not in producing evidence to support his point of view but in looking for the hidden motives which are causing his opponent to hold his. If they lose their tempers, instead of saying, ‘You are a fool,’ they say, ‘You are a wicked man.’”

 

[Auden was born on this date, February 21, in 1907, and died in 1973 at age sixty-six.]