W. H. Auden: a Meetingthought of The New York Review. Auden hadalready told the editors he thought they printedtoo many unfavorable reviews. Bad books shouldnot be reviewed. They only provide an oppor-tunity for cleverness or the expounding of thecriticTs personal theories. There are too manycritics who find it unfortunate and regrettablethat there must be a poem before there can becriticism. A sympathetic reviewer will be muchmore critical because he is interested in the work.Bad books will die without being attacked; atworst, they will only be replaced by the next gen-eration of bad books. What should be attacked isfalse information and corruption of the language.Sanford offered that the review in the same per-iodical of the memoirs by PicassoTs ex-mistresswas unfair. Auden agreed that the reviewercould hardly have known enough to completelysupport what he said; he would have had to havebeen a familiar of the mistress or Picasso. Butthe book was suspect anyway; it looked as thoughshe had published it for the money. He addedthat the idea is widespread that there is an es-sential relation between an artistTs life and hiswork. He was only interested in the work. Therelation is either so clear as to be obvious or socomplex it would be hopeless to unravel; eitherway there is just nothing to say, and no point insaying it. Some poets, but not the majority, hadled interesting lives, Byron for instance; ByronTslife would make no less interesting reading hadhe never written a line. There are as many in-terpretations as readers of a poem; completed, apoem is a verbal object, he said; if a reading ofa poem is biographically incorrect, it may be stillvalid for the reader. He wrote, in The DyerTsHand, a group of essays, that the reverse is truefor the poet: his poem must be biographicallyvalid, true to himself, oin his own handwriting.?Jim asked him what he was working on now,and apologized for the standardness of the ques-tion. Auden said he was very superstitious aboutwork he hadnTt completed. He could easily talkit away before it got written. There was a con-siderable silence. I confessed that we really didnTthave any specific questions to ask him. I saidhe might consider this as sort of a social call.oWell, ask me some social questions.? I asked ifhe answered scholarly questions about his work,since I had noticed the author of a book on hispoetry had expressed indebtedness for some in-terviews. He said he answered questions aboutlocal references, metaphors and place names ageneral reader might not know, and about pointsof fact. I asked what was the proper business ofliterary scholars. He said that what critics coulddo for him was: (1) Introduce me to authors orworks of which I was unaware. (2) Convince methat I have undervalued an author or a work be-cause I had not read them carefully enough. (3)Show me relations between works of differentages and cultures which I could never have seenfor myself because I donTt know enough andnever shall. (4) Give a reading of a work whichincreases my understanding of it. (5) Throwlight upon the process of artistic making. (6)Throw light upon the relation of art to life, toscience, economics, ethics, religion, and so forth.While speaking, he counted these six points offon his fingers. He listed them probably verbatimfrom The DyerTs Hand, published in 1948, as wefound later.We sat still. Jim asked if he ever read on anyof the poetry circuits. He said he did, but notoften; it was slightly dangerous. He thought itbest for a writer to support himself in some em-ployment where it was not necessary to man-ipulate words. Of those jobs which did use lan-guage skill, translating, lecturing, and reviewing,translating was the least dangerous. He lecturedand reviewed when he needed money. He hopedit came out well; he did as good a job as possible,but he only did it when he needed money. Hesaid that now he was pretty well set up untilSpring, 1967.Noticing an anthology of Blake on the coffee-table, I asked him how he liked Blake. He saidthat he found the Prophetic Books unreadable,but that Blake had written some very nice things.Jim mentioned that Mr. Auden had said in anessay, oAmerican Poetry,? that Blake was notparticularly English. Auden explained thatBlakeTs language and ideas were sufficiently gen-eral that he could have occurred at almost any ©place and time. |Jim asked if he had any opinions on Lawrence |Durrell. oYes.T?T When we had absorbed that:oHis brother writes very well. He has writtensome nice books about animals.? Sanford smiled,and spread his arms on the back of his chair. |Then Sanford said that he admired oIn Mem- |ory of W. B. Yeats.? Auden replied that he had |said what he had wanted to say in that poem, |but that he was unsatisfied with the rhetoric. He "now thought that there was too much of an ele- |giac tone, and it tended to overshadow the con- "