'Confined to Famous Defunct Chefs'

Never underestimate the satisfactions of contrariness. It starts as an impulse in adolescence, of course, when the will to disagree and provoke comes naturally. It’s enormously entertaining to the provokers, irritatingly tiresome to the rest of us. We outgrow it or at least it becomes latent, like shingles. But our species is weak and we secretly cherish our former recalcitrance, the power it gave us. If we have matured, we exercise contrariness with tact, reserving it for the truly deserving.

 Among the reasons my respect for W.H. Auden has steadily grown across a lifetime is his humanness, meaning his contradictory nature and his occasional indulgence in blatant contrariness. Like Dr. Johnson he was an Ur-human, like us only more so. Anthony Hecht observes this in “Paralipomena to The Hidden Law,” included in his final prose collection, Melodies Unheard (2003). “Paralipomena” is Greek for “things omitted.”  The essay is a supplement to Hecht’s The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden” (1993). He devotes two pages to the “remarkable resemblance” of Johnson and Auden. Both were inclined to choose, in the words of Johnson biographer W. Jackson Bate, “the wrong side of a debate, because most ingenious, that is to say, most new things, could be said upon it.” Boswell frequently baited his friend into arguing out of contrariness, to provoke a heated response from another. Auden often behaved similarly.

 

The Dyer’s Hand (1962) is one of the most enjoyable prose collections ever written by a poet. In the “Reading” section of his prologue, Auden includes a sort of survey he titles “Eden,”  a list of qualities he would like to find in paradise. Few are predictable and many, I suspect, were chosen in the spirit of contrariness. Under “Form of government,” Auden writes: “Absolute monarchy, elected for life by lot,” which certainly sounds preferable to what we have today. Under “Public Statues” he specifies “Confined to famous defunct chefs.”

 

A similar quasi-anarchistic spirit animates Vladimir Nabokov preferences in his 1964 interview with Playboy:

 

“Since my youth — I was 19 when I left Russia — my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions.”