W. H. Auden by W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden and the Jews Beth Ellen Roberts University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast

n his 1941 Christmas Day letter to his lover Chester Kallman, W. H. Auden announced: Because it is in you, a Jew, that I, a Gentile, inheriting an O-so-genteel anti-semitism, have found my happiness: As this morning I think of Bethlehem I think of you. (Farnan 65)

Auden’s rejection of his inherited anti-Semitism progressed over the years to an extraordinarily active philo-Semitism not limited to his relationship with Kallman, whom he met after his emigration to America in 1939. From the early 1940s on, Auden engaged intensely with Judaism on intellectual, emotional, and social levels, to the extent that during a conversation with Alan Ansen, he announced, “I’ve been increasingly interested in the Jews,” and after describing a book he had been reading about Hasidism, he mused, “I wonder what would happen if I converted to Judaism” (32).¹ In addition to studying Jewish religion and culture, Auden actively supported Jewish causes—he pulled a flier for the United Jewish Appeal out of his pocket during one of his conversations with Ansen (59)—and during his service as a member of the postwar bombing survey team in Germany he met with concentration camp survivors, asking a friend to wire him a hundred dollars for a woman who had been in Dachau (Carpenter 336). In response to questions about his famous opinion that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he frequently cited the failure of his work to “save a single Jew” (Carpenter 413). If his poetry saved no Jews, his work with various groups to raise money and provide placements for Jewish refugees likely did (Mendelson, LA A 38). In their book Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews, 1840–1939, William D. and Hillary L. Rubinstein describe four different categories of philo-Semitism. Auden’s attitude toward Jews in

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the 1930s corresponds to the Rubinsteins’ description of the “liberal” type, common among British socialists at the time. These “liberals” were prone to regard Jews as prototypical victims of oppression, an attitude that tended to more of an “anti-anti-semitism” than true philo-Semitism (123). Auden might have inherited his “O-so-genteel anti-semitism” from his middle-class family,² but by the 1930s he had rejected his bourgeois upbringing and embraced the political left, including its attitude toward the Jews. For the left, anti-Semitism was synonymous with fascism, and when Auden wrote T. S. Eliot in 1934, s which Eliot notoriously thanking him for a copy of After Strange Gods—in denigrated “free-thinking Jews”—his response contained not a word in defense of the Jews, only concern for the political repression represented by such an attitude: “Some of the general remarks, if you will forgive my saying so, rather shocked me, because if they are put into practice, and it seems quite likely [they will be], would produce a world in which neither I nor you I think would like to live” (qtd. in Mendelson, 150n). He went on to use Eliot’s phrase to indicate the fascism of the narrator in For the Time Being, g a character Anthony Hecht describes as “a shameless jingoistic spokesman for imperial policy and totalitarian power” (269), who announces that “the recent restrictions / Upon aliens and free-thinking Jews are beginning / To have a salutary effect upon public morale” (289). Auden had also used anti-Semitism as a general indicator of fascism in his 1933 play The Dance of Death, a criticism of the bourgeoisie that features the Dancer and Announcer encouraging an anti-Semitic mob. His most personal statement against Nazi persecution of the Jews came in 1935 when he married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, who was part Jewish, solely in order to provide her with a British passport. Throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s, Auden’s poetry and prose demonstrate a one-dimensional understanding of Jews as victims of persecution, as an oppressed race. In his biography of Auden, Humphrey Carpenter reproduces a song written for a 1934 play at the Downs School, where Auden was teaching, that illustrates his association of Jews with outcasts: New boy Oh, it’s hard to be a new boy To be no better than a Jew boy Strange terrifying faces Come and ask me my name Until in a corner I hide for shame Just a don’t-know-what-to-do-boy At a public school. (174)

In the 1940 poem “Diaspora,” the Jewish refugee is figured as a passive scapegoat: “fulfilled the role for which he was designed; / On heat with fear, he drew

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their terrors to him / And was a godsend to the lowest of mankind.” This figure’s persecution and exile are used more to illustrate the insufficiencies of the rest of the world than the worth of the Jews: “No worlds they drove him from were ever big enough; / How could it be the earth the Unconfined / Meant when It bade them set no limits on their love?” The 1939 poem “Refugee Blues” (“Say this city has ten million souls”) is devoted to the plight of Jewish refugees; in one stanza a German Jew recalls the anti-Semitism he encounters in his search for a home: “Came to a public meeting; / the speaker got up and said; / ‘If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread’: / He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.” Like “Diaspora,” this poem is more of a lesson to Christians about loving one’s neighbor than an apologia for Judaism. As a homosexual and an immigrant, Auden had more reason than political theory alone to sympathize with Jewish refugees. Janet R. Jacobson suggests several points of commonality between Jews and queers, of which the most significant to this discussion is that both are “geographically mobile” (79), a condition that characterized the European Jewish refugees Auden met in New York and that Auden not only experienced himself, but lauded as an ideal. Referring to himself as “something of a déraciné,” é he argued that geographic borders and national sovereignty incite wars, and that peace could be achieved through “the abolition of passport control and immigration laws,” though he concedes that most people are “much too lazy to shop around for a country to live in” (Griffin 22).³ Although the seriousness of these pronouncements might be somewhat suspect, Auden made similar statements elsewhere. In his essay, “Auden’s New Citizenship,” Robert Caserio quotes Auden as having praised America as a place where one could “live deliberately without roots” (93), suggesting that deracination is a condition to be desired. At minimum, he felt that such rootlessness had become inevitable. Reviewing several books by Franz Kafka in 1941, Auden proclaimed, “It was fit and proper that Kafka should have been a Jew, for the Jews have for a long time been placed in the position in which we are now all to be, of having no home” (Prose III 113). Arguing that Auden’s homosexuality underlies his “elevation of the refugee as the model, and not the antitype of citizenship,” Caserio suggests that Auden’s “new citizenship” as an American is best represented by “the displaced person, the real counterpart of the mythical Wandering Jew” (91). Caserio proposes the Jewish refugee only as a symbol of the déraciné, not as actual inspiration; but much like the speaker in “Refugee Blues,” Auden himself felt ostracized and unwanted. In Edward Mendelson’s words, Auden experienced an “inescapable sense of guilt about his homosexuality, his sense of it as criminal and isolating” (220), and Hecht suggests that Auden must have regarded his queerness “as a grave blemish in the eyes of society” (445). In their introduction to a collection of essays titled Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini point

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out that, “While there are no simple equations between Jewish and queer identities, Jewishness and queerness yet utilize and are bound up with one another in particularly resonant ways” (1). In addition to his relationship with Kallman, Auden had at least one very personal reason to associate his sexuality with Judaism, one that made him physically equivalent to a Jewish man, and one that might be regarded by others as a “blemish”—namely, his circumcision. The operation, according to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, did not, for some unknown reason, occur until Auden was seven years old, and therefore left “a great psychological impression” (21). According to Carpenter, Auden at one point, in discussing the operation with Ansen, remarked that it was “really something” (21). Circumcision was rare in Europe except among Jews, so much so that the Nazis used this distinction as a means of identifying Jewish men. Indeed, Hitler’s persecution of both groups serves as one obvious example of a connection between the Jews and homosexuals. The Nazis conflated Judaism and homosexuality, as in this attack on Magnus Hirschfeld, a crusader for homosexual rights in Germany, and an acquaintance of Auden’s: “Among the many evil instincts that characterise the Jewish race, one that is especially pernicious has to do with sexual relationships. The Jews are forever trying to propagandise sexual relations between siblings, men and animals, and men and men” (Page 99). The Nazis, of course, were not alone in stigmatizing homosexual relationships. If Auden had been completely free to choose to settle down as a conventional Englishman, his assertions about the desirability of rootlessness would be more convincing; but he was forced to choose between denying his homosexuality to obtain a settled home life or accepting his sexual identity and sacrificing his ideal conception of home. In marrying Erika Mann in 1935, Auden conceded his inability to fill the role of the typical English husband. Later, when other women in similar situations needed passports, Auden urged other homosexuals to step in, asking, “What are buggers for?” (Carpenter 196). If what “buggers” are for involves marriage to Jewish women fleeing the Nazis, that is so only because as queers they were unable to marry for love, a disability Auden felt keenly.⁴⁴ Farnan reports that Auden was “fascinated with the concept of marriage” and asserts that he “would certainly have chosen the family life for himself had he been heterosexual” (168, 170). Although unable to marry legally, he considered his relationship with Kallman, several years after wedding Mann, as a marriage from its inception, to the point of announcing to friends that they were going on honeymoon and wearing a wedding ring (Carpenter 262). One friend of his reported that when they first met, Auden had told him that he was romantically unavailable because he was in love with “a Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” Although by that time Kallman had already apparently been unfaithful, and perhaps Auden as well, Auden declared that emotional faithfulness meant more to him than the physical variety (Farnan 70). A 1949

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letter from Auden to Kallman indicates that he still considered them married, even though both had other sexual partners: “A chaste fidelity to the Divine Miss K? Miss God, I know, says that, but I haven’t the strength, and I don’t think you, sweetie, have the authority to contradict me. If it is wrong, at least I don’t behave badly to him as I do to you” (Farnan 158). Although the failure of their “marriage” had more to do with Kallman’s predilection for picking up sailors at the docks (Carpenter 311) than with societal and legal taboos, Auden might well have imagined that no heterosexual wife would have gone out on the prowl in that way. In a wistful letter to Elizabeth Mayer in 1943, Auden lamented his inability to marry and settle down. Referring to the 1919 German movie Anders als die Andern (“Different from Others”), a compassionate look at homosexuals, Auden complained that “ Being ‘anders wie die Andern’ has its troubles. There are days when the knowledge that there will never be a place which I can call home, that there will never be a person with whom I shall be one flesh, seems more than I can bear” (Mendelson 227n). In his introduction to Red Ribbon on a White Horse, a memoir by Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska, Auden relates freedom from anxiety to the ability to achieve one’s desires: “A man is so free when (1) he knows what he desires and (2) what he desires is real and not fantastic. A desire is real when the possibility of satisfaction exists for the individual who entertains it and the existence of such a possibility depends, first, on his present historical and social situation [. . .]” (11). The person who desires what is unrealistic due to his unfavorable historical and social situation, “unless he dismisses his desire as fantastic, becomes unhappy because to question his lack of satisfaction is to question the value of his existence” (12). Attributing such fantastic desires to the poor Jewish immigrants Yezierska portrays in her books, he writes, “To have the desires of the poor and be transferred in a twinkling of an eye to a world which can only be real for those who have the desires of the rich is to be plunged into the severest anxiety” (15). Such is the case in The Age of Anxietyy when the Jewish Rosetta realizes that she cannot marry a gentile man and will therefore never have the home she has dreamed of. Rosetta, commonly acknowledged to have been based on Auden’s one female lover, Rhoda Jaffe, is one of four characters in The Age of Anxiety, the others being Emble, a young sailor; Malin, a medical officer in the Canadian Air Force; and Quant, a widower and clerk in a shipping office. The four characters meet in a New York City bar and experience a shared dream that unites them in a mystical journey through “The Seven Ages” and “The Seven Stages.” In the penultimate section of the poem, “The Masque,” the four characters, having awakened and left the bar, repair to Rosetta’s apartment, where Rosetta and Emble become aware of an increasing attraction for one another. Malin performs a mock wedding ritual, and the “bride” and “bridegroom” exchange vows of undying love. After Rosetta sees Malin and Quant out, she returns

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to find Emble passed out, and in her soliloquy, “Blind on the bride-bed, the bridegroom snored,” she reveals that she is Jewish, accepts that she can never marry someone like Emble or have “a home like theirs,” and accepts her part in the “ragged remnant,” finishing with a recitation in Hebrew of the Shema, the Jewish affirmation of faith. She tells the sleeping Emble that he will be “Satisfied soon, while I sit waiting / On my light luggage to leave if called / for some new exile” and offers a prediction disguised as advice: . . . . . . . . . . . . . Make your home With some glowing girl; forget with her what Happens also. If ever you see A fuss forming in the far distance, Lots of police, and a little group In terrible trouble, don’t try to help; They’d make you mock and you might be ashamed.

Her identity as a Jew, she realizes, will never allow her to “marry well / Marooned on riches,” and God will never allow her the unthreatened English middle-class lifestyle, “the semi-detached / Brick villa in Laburnum Crescent, / The poky parlor, the pink bows on / The landing curtains.” She is “too rude a question,” and she admits to herself that though, “More boys like this one may embrace me yet / I shan’t find shelter.” Being “anders wie die Andern” means the same thing for Rosetta as it does for Auden: she knows that she will never really have a place to call home. If Rosetta is based on Rhoda Jaffe, then she is based also to some extent on Chester Kallman. When Auden shocked his friends by taking up with Jaffe, they assumed that he had found what he considered a socially-acceptable substitute for Kallman: “It was unbelievable; yet we decided that in some mad way she must have reminded him of Chester. At least she had been in Brooklyn College at the same time, and she was blonde and she was Jewish” (qtd. in Carpenter 343). Rosetta is also, as Mendelson points out, a portrait of Auden himself (254–56). Her inability to marry recalls Auden’s inability to marry Kallman, but the mock wedding ritual also, in some ways, resembles his sham wedding to Erika Mann; neither marriage is consummated, and neither creates a place to call home. Caserio nominates Rosetta as Auden’s “new muse,” a model for his new rootless citizenship (95); but her acquiescence to her future as a wanderer comes only after her tristee acceptance of her fate. For Rosetta as a Jew, just as for Auden as a homosexual, the dream of a real domesticity is a fantastic and unattainable one and therefore a cause of anxiety. It is only by relinquishing that fantasy that she is able to fully express her faith. After his move to America, Auden’s philo-Semitism depended to some extent on the attractions of cultural difference that paradoxically helped him

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to realize the value of his own individuality. Himself subject to stereotyping based on his sexual orientation, Auden, who once claimed never to have met a Jew before college (Ansen 86),⁵ had no real appreciation of Jews as individuals until he met Kallman. For Auden, the Kallman family held the attraction of an exotic otherness, one that represented a break from the bourgeois English uniformity that Auden had left behind for New York. Thekla Clark, in her memoir Wystan and Chester, r claims that while Chester was good looking and witty, “his Jewishness was, for Wystan, an extra bonus” (95), and Dorothy Farnan, a college friend of Chester’s, noted that Judaism was to Auden a “continual source of fascination, of mystery, and of desire,” apparent in his attempt “to absorb Chester: his middle class New York Jewish background—its jokes, its charm, its peculiar intolerances, its humorous sayings, even its food and its language” (qtd. in Carpenter 260). Though not religiously observant, Kallman’s family was culturally Jewish; his mother had been an actress in the Yiddish theater as a girl (Farnan 43), and he evidently spoke at least some Yiddish himself. According to several reports, Auden frequently attempted to tell jokes in Yiddish, usually with disastrous results (Clark 50, Mendelson, LA A 259). The Kallmans and other immigrants represented New York, and New York to Auden was America: shortly after his arrival in the city, he would respond to questions about his nationality by answering, “I am a New Yorker” (Carpenter 281). In New York both Jews and homosexuals had the opportunity to transcend their outsider roles, to be appreciated as individuals, not as members of despised groups. In his introduction to Red Ribbon on a White Horse, Auden indicates that America, unlike “more static societies,” allows individuals to base their senses of identity on merit, not class; “the more successful” the individual, he writes, “the nearer he comes to the ideal good of absolute certainty as to his value” (16). Edward Mendelson suggests that Kallman served as a model of this ideal: “In Kallman, Auden had seen a revelation of the personal uniqueness that such categories as race and nation conceal, and he came to think of Kallman’s exile as a Jew as a symbol of everyone’s uniqueness” (LA A 57). For Mendelson, Kallman’s Jewishness attracted Auden not because of its fascinating alterity, but as “a prophecy of their identity” (LA A 57). Both were exiles, and Kallman was clever like Auden, blond like him, and probably most importantly of all, queer like him. Kallman embodied a paradox that became dear to Auden: the idea that only through diversity could society achieve unity. If anybody believed in the motto E Pluribus Unum, it was Auden. In his 1940 long poem New Year Letter, r addressed to Elizabeth Mayer, the German wife of a Jewish psychiatrist who had escaped the Nazis, Auden writes explicitly: “Only the Many make the One” and “all real unity commences / In consciousness of differences.”⁶ The 1945 poem “Anthem” praises God for such plurality:

Journal of Modern Literature As one feeling fabric, all flushed and intact, Phenomena and numbers announcing in one Multitudinous oecumenical song Their grand giveness of gratitude and joy, Peaceable and plural, their positive truth An authoritative This, an unthreatened Now When, in love and in laughter, each lives itself, For, united by His Word, cognition and power, System and Order, are a single glory, And the pattern is complex, their places safe.

The United States, if not perfect, at least values diversity, while “static” countries like England stifle any coalescence of the Many, a conviction he expressed long before his move to America in a 1932 letter to poet John Pudney: “The problem is particularly bad in a city like London, which is so large, that the only group you can find, is living with your own kind, those mentally like you. This is disastrous. You end up by eating each other. The whole value of a group is that its constituents are as diverse as possible, with little consciously in common, Plurality in unity” (qtd. in Mendelson, EA A 23). America comes much closer to meeting the standard he sets out for a civilization, which is “the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained” (Prose III 359). Shortly after relocating to the land of the free, Auden defines freedom in terms of unity and plurality in his 1940 Smith College commencement address: “From the point of view of the whole, of internal relations, freedom is synonymous with unity, through harmonious agreement of the parts. From the point of view of each of the parts, of external relations, freedom means the right of that part to reach its entelechy unhindered, to realize its potential nature to the full” (Prose III 64). From Auden’s point of view, that meant the freedom as an American to realize one’s potential in a way that no Jew or homosexual could do elsewhere in the world, as was being demonstrated vividly in Nazi Germany. Shortly after his relocation to America, Auden returned to the religion he had long since abandoned, converting to Anglicanism in 1941. Carpenter ventures a guess that the conversion was precipitated by Auden’s relationship with Kallman during the short period of time before their “marriage” fell apart—that Auden returned to Christianity only after he felt that his sexual life could be sanctified to some extent (300n). Both the Christmas letter and the circumstances that lead to the statement of faith by Malin at the end of The Age of Anxietyy suggest that Auden felt that his relationships with Jews brought about his embrace of the church, just as Judaism itself serves as a necessary precursor to Christianity. Only after an integrative mystical experience, or vision of agape, do Rosetta and Malin find their respective faiths, with Malin’s soliloquy occurring subsequent to Rosetta’s. Their final speeches constitute a

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meditation on the differences between Judaism and Christianity that echo an essay Auden wrote on the topic several years earlier. Auden devoted one edition of his “Lecture Notes” column in The Commonweal, l published under the pseudonym “Didymus,” to a comparison of the two religions, beginning with a marital analogy: “The difference between a genuine Judaism and a genuine Christianity is like the difference between a young girl who has been promised a husband in a dream, and a married woman who believes that she loves and is loved” (Prose III 170). “The young girl,” he continues, “knows that the decisively important thing has not yet happened to her, that her present life is therefore a period of anticipation, important not in itself but in its relation to the future [. . .] To the married woman, on the other hand, the decisively important thing has already happened, and because of this everything in the present is significant” (171). For Jews, in Auden’s view, the coming of the messiah is yet to occur, and therefore, “Faith for Judaism lies in the power to endure the suffering of waiting” (171). He puns on “waiting” in Rosetta’s soliloquy when she declares that “Time is our trade, to be tense our gift / Whose woe is our weight; for we are His Chosen” (404). To be “tense” is both to live in past, present, and future at once, as in a verb tense, and to remain anxious, a condition she believes a Christian in name only like Emble incapable of sustaining. Emble represents the man who, according to “Didymus,” says, “Of course I am a Christian. There are the gospels to prove that Jesus existed, and the existence of the Church to prove that his claim to be Christ was true. I go to church every Sunday. What it all means, I can safely leave to the theologians” (171–72). As a gentile, he need not strain to have faith in order to avoid persecution, as Rosetta says to him, “You’re too late to believe. Your lie is showing. / Your creed is creased. But have Christian luck.” Auden extends the marriage analogy to this type of Christian: This is as if a married woman were to say: “Look at my large centrally-heated apartment, and here is my marriage license which my lawyer tells me is valid. I can’t say I remember ever having met my husband personally, but what of that? The important thing is that I can put Mrs before my name.” A Christian, that is, can lose his faith or never have won it without ever realizing it. He can be a pagan, and still grow red in the face over all the communists and free-thinkers in our school system. (172)

Jewish faith would be too difficult for Emble, Rosetta implies, warning that he “couldn’t accept / Our anxious hope with no household god or / Harpist’s Haven for hearty climbers” (403); but for Auden, Christian faith, which he defines as “the power to endure the paradox that Jesus, the individual historical man, was and is, as He claimed, Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father” (Prose III 171), is hardly easy.

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To endure paradox is to embrace unreason, and this is what Malin understands in “The Epilogue,” the final portion of the poem, when he explains to himself: For the new locus is never Hidden inside the old one Where Reason could rout it out, Nor guarded by dragons in distant Mountains where Imagination Could explore it; the place of birth Is too obvious and near to notice, Some dull dogpatch a stone’s throw Outside the walls, reserved For the eyes of faith to find.

The “new locus” supercedes the old one of Judaism, and the difficulty in apprehending the paradox of the incarnation leads to recalcitrance on the part of Christians who are: Wanting our own way, unwilling to say Yes To the Self-So which is the same at all times, That Always-Opposite which is the whole subject Of our not-knowing, yet from no necessity Condescended to exist and to suffer death And, scorned on a scaffold, ensconced in His life The human household. [. . .]

For Malin, whom Mendelson considers to be “Auden’s straightforward selfportrait” (LA 255), the “anxious hope” of the gentiles results from a positive refusal to accept the paradox and thus put an end to the wait, and “our minds insist on / Their own disorder as their own punishment” (408). In the last lines of verse, Malin tells us that God condescends to communicate in “Our creaturely cry, concluding His children / In their mad unbelief to have mercy on them all / As they wait unawares for His World to come” (408–9). One of the obsolete meanings of the verb “conclude,” according to the O. E. D., is “to oblige,” so that to conclude His children to have mercy on them could mean that God honors an agreement to be merciful despite their disbelief. Malin’s final speech becomes possible only after the mystical union of the four characters and the symbolic wedding. Up to that point, all four characters speak gibberish, unable to communicate with each other or the reader; after that point, Rosetta and Malin both speak coherently and cogently. Both reenter the real world determined to reconnect with others, Rosetta will rejoin her people, and Malin condemns “worship which for the most part / Is so much galimatias to get out of / Knowing our neighbor,” suggesting that he will embrace the

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paradox and consequently become more engaged with those around him. If Rosetta’s engagement is more circumscribed, that limitation is consistent with Auden’s view of Judaism as a religion comparable to Christianity, but restricted to a specific people. In For the Time Being, g which he completed two years before he began The Age of Anxiety, Simeon voices this belief, as he announces: [. . .] that we may no longer, with the Barbarians, deny the Unity, asserting that there are as many gods as there are creatures, nor, with the philosophers deny the Multiplicity, asserting that God is One who has no need of friends and is indifferent to a World of Time and Quantity and Horror which He did not create, nor with Israel, may we limit the coherence of the One and the Many to a special case, asserting that God is only concerned with and of concern to that People out of all that He created He has chosen for His own. (300)

The view that Judaism is a “special case” is not uncommon among Christian philo-Semites, many of whom believe that the “New Covenant” between God and the gentiles expanded on instead of superseding the covenant with the Jews. Some viewed themselves as “a kind of modern parallel” to the people of the Torah, and many Christians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expressed gratitude and a sense of indebtedness to the Jews, without whom their own faith would not be possible (Rubenstein 126–32). Simeon resents the former limitation of God’s relationship to His people to a special case; but in The Age of Anxiety, Auden regards Christianity’s existence as an extension of Judaism, not as a replacement. As a representative of Christianity, Malin’s understanding is made possible by the existence of Jews like Rosetta; a stand-in for Auden, his revelation derives from the existence of a specific Jew, much like Auden’s acquaintance with Rhoda Jaffe and Chester Kallman. Auden’s 1945–46 affair with Jaffe is particularly important to the notion of Rosetta as a catalyst to revelation, a realization not only of a liberating religious faith, but of a sexual liberation as well. Hecht, noting that Auden proposed marriage to two Jewish women, Jaffe and Hannah Arendt, pronounces him “a vigorous philo-Semite” (287). If that phrase evokes some rather unfortunate imagery, it is not at all unlike the imagery that Jaffe attempted to implant in Auden’s head just prior to and during his writing of The Age of Anxiety. Farnan’s description of Jaffe’s campaign to convince Auden of his vigor is as follows: “She spent a great deal of energy trying to convince not only Wystan but also Chester that Wystan was really not homosexual, and she attempted to point out by profuse examples, all explained in the terms of Sigmund Freud, that she had made the difference in his life” (120). Jaffe apparently tried to convince herself and others of the same unlikely outcome, telling Kallman’s father that Auden was “a real man in bed” (Farnan 120). Apparently she succeeded in convincing Auden himself, at least temporarily, and Mendelson credits the affair with having revolutionized Auden’s understanding of his homosexuality,

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making his sexuality an act of volition, not an inescapable burden (267). Once queerness is understood as a lifestyle choice and not as an inherent quality, its difference from race becomes obvious and reassuring. Rhoda, Chester, and Rosetta, as Jews, cannot escape their identities, as Rosetta makes clear in her soliloquy and as had been made abundantly clear by the Nazis. Rhoda serves as a Rosetta stone, a means of translating Auden’s identity, allowing him to decipher his queerness in relation to his religion, and his revelation is courtesy of her existence in the same way that Christianity owes its being to the Jews. It was not long after the publication of The Age of Anxietyy that Auden realized that his perceived liberation from his sexuality was an illusion. The military had rejected him when he tried to enlist in 1942; he had been criticized by the British press early in the war for moving to the States and not serving, but an American army doctor found him unfit to serve due to his homosexuality (Carpenter 324). By 1948, according to Farnan, not only had he abandoned his attempt at a heterosexual lifestyle, but in the wake of the involuntary outing of and subsequent dishonorable discharge from the military of one of his friends, Auden “seemed to retreat into a circle more self-protective and clannish that ever” (153). He later regretted his effort to escape his homosexual identity, telling a friend: “I tried to have an affair with a woman, but it was a great mistake. It was a sin” (Carpenter 349). In his 1951 libretto for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, co-written with Kallman, Tom Rakewell is persuaded to marry the bearded woman Baba the Turk. Auden explained in a radio broadcast that the beard that signals her “genius” as a sideshow performer is “something which makes her what she is and at the same time cuts her off from other people.” The problem, he continued, “is that she tries to fit into an ordinary family life, to be an ordinary person, and of course the whole thing breaks down.” (qtd. in A 272). Only by accepting his difference and his isolation could Mendelson, LA Auden succeed as extraordinary. Both Mendelson and Carpenter report that after Auden’s return from Germany in 1945, he limited his company to a select group of people. Significantly, the two biographers each report a different identifying trait for that group. Mendelson reports that Auden “immersed himself in the intense, argumentative life of Jewish exiles” and that he claimed that Jews were “the only people he could talk to in America” (259). Carpenter, on the other hand, claims that Auden had “become quite militant about homosexuality” and spent his time largely with homosexuals with whom he shared “an inevitable affinity” (342). Carpenter’s position is supported by Auden’s 1947 contentions that “America is really a very queer country” and that “The American male really wants two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper, and he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he’s drunk” (Ansen 80–81). Both men, in fact, are correct; Auden’s homosexual friends were so overwhelmingly Jewish that when a non-Jewish gay man was introduced into their circle, Kallman bestowed on him the camp name “The Shiksa” (Farnan 194).

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Auden’s return to a closed circle of friends accords with his longstanding attraction to secret societies, an attraction that likely accounts for some of his fascination with Judaism. Esoteric organizations offer the seductive promises of turning outsiders into insiders and the acquisition of power through arcane knowledge, and what group could be more select than the one chosen by God? Auden’s attempts to learn Yiddish and other aspects of Jewish culture are consistent with a desire to obtain the specialized knowledge necessary to penetrate the barriers of a closed society. Norman Page attributes Auden’s interest in secret societies to the intersection of the exclusive British upper-middle-class, segregated through education, with the clandestine communications and practice necessitated by “sexual difference” (49). Homosexuality remained illegal in Britain and, although Auden was never closeted, most of his friends were; according to Carpenter, the resulting “ ‘secret society’ aspect of homosexuality certainly appealed to him” (105). After Paul Bowles met Auden and Isherwood in Berlin, he described them as “two members of a secret society constantly making reference to esoteric data not available to outsiders” (qtd. in Page 48). In New York, Auden’s coterie is described by Farnan as “a more or less closed homosexual enclave” and as “an inner-circle occult group, having a secretsociety aspect that always appealed to the adolescent still alive in Auden’s psyche” (153). The segregation and criminalization of any group leads to the development of private methods of communication and to traditions passed only to members of that group; Auden would have found the same type of atmosphere among the Jews he encountered, whose culture developed in the ghettos and shtetls of Europe. Numerous closed societies have been created out of marginalized groups, but most do not attract outsiders looking to join in that marginalized status. The most likely reason for wanting to associate oneself with a such a group would be a belief in the superiority of its members, and in the 1940s Auden clearly held a favorable, if essentialist, opinion of Jews as an elite class. This was a view not unique to him. According to William D. and Hillary L. Rubenstein, “A surprisingly significant factor in modern philosemitism was the perception of Jews as an ‘elite’, a people possessing rare and valuable qualities, setting them above the general run of humanity” (171). Among the characteristics commonly attributed to Jews, according to the Rubensteins, were patriotism, physical and mental superiority, and racial/cultural stamina (171). Thorstein Veblen lauded “that massive endowment of spirtual and intellectual capacities of which [Jews] have given evidence throughout their troubled history,” and a newspaper editorial praised the Jewish people on the grounds that, “the Jews, whatever they undertake, carry out further and with greater earnestness and success than any other equal body of people on earth—they have ever since the beginning of their nationality” (qtd. in Rubenstein 183, 180). The latter point, that of the “earnestness,” or “seriousness,” of the Jews, is one that Auden returns to repeatedly, both in his poetry and prose.

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In The Age of Anxiety, seriousness is one of the characteristics that Malin attributes to Rosetta, even before she reveals to the reader that she is Jewish. In his mock benediction to her mock nuptials, a ludic exercise if ever there was one, Malin advises Rosetta to lighten up: O clear Princess, Learn from your hero his love of play, Cherish his childishness, choose in him Your task and toy, your betrayer also Who gives gladly but forgets as soon What and why, for the world he is true to Is his own creation; to act like father, And beget like God a gayer echo, An unserious self, is the sole thought Of this bragging boy. . . . . . . . . . . . . (399)

Emble represents the type of the heroic figure of the Greek poets, as delineated by Auden in his introduction to Charles Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals, published the same year as The Age of Anxietyy (1947). In this essay, he distinguishes between Greek and Jewish heroes, defining the Greek poetic hero as one “endowed by fate with areté,” and if he is brought low by hubris, then “what is this hubriss really but the will of the hero to become the fortunate man he already is?” (Prosee 309). As a proper Greek hero, Emble’s aretéé is excellence in the form of his own form, “a grace of person,” according to the narrator at the beginning of the poem, which leads to “a succession of sexual triumphs” (346). As he sits at the bar in his Navy uniform, he is “fully conscious of the attraction [. . .] to both sexes.” Earnestness is unnecessary for him as he experiences simultaneously “the doubt of ever being able to achieve the kinds of success which have to be earned, and the certainty of being able to have at this moment a kind which does not” (346). The Jewish hero, on the other hand, has no natural endowment of grace, according to Auden: “What makes him exceptional is that he, outwardly an average man, is called by God to an exceptional task and obeys” (Prosee 309). Obedience and attention to the task distinguish the Jew from God’s “gayer echo.” “Gayer” here probably refers both to Emble’s “unseriousness” and his attractiveness for both sexes. At a time that Auden was attempting to live as a heterosexual, he may have been striving to attain a greater seriousness than the camp behavior of his homosexual cohort. Considering that Chester Kallman was a master (or perhaps mistress) of camp silliness and spent most of his life sponging off of friends and relatives, Auden must have been aware that Judaism and earnestness were not inevitably or inextricably linked, but he repeated the assertion frequently. Jewish literature, according to Auden, exhibits such seriousness: “It looks at nature and history with one aim—to perceive the hand of God. Everything

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else seems unseemly frivolity” (Prosee 171). Kafka’s diaries provided him with one example of that type of literature; the diaries, he told Ansen, are “so depressing—that terrible Jewish earnestness” (95). Because Christianity is like “the married woman” for whom “the decisively important thing has already happened,” Christians are not in the same position of anxious waiting for the messiah to appear as are the Jews, which frees Christians to take pleasure in the world around them and in living their lives: “If, within Christendom, art has been able to concern itself with “secular” subjects, i.e., the same subjects as those of pagan art, it is not because, like paganism, it takes these subjects seriously, but because it is not so anxious at heart that it cannot enjoy frivolity” (Prose 171).⁷⁷ One of the reasons for his attribution of seriousness to Judaism might have been his awareness that Jews believe that they must take an active role in the coming of the messiah through the process of tikkun olam, or “repair of the world,” necessitated by the catastrophic “breaking of the vessels” in which the divine light was spilled and became imprisoned in matter, resulting in a world “at variance with its originally intended order” (Scholem 138). In her soliloquy, he has Rosetta compare the state of her people in the aftermath of the Shoah to the broken vessels: “When bruised or broiled our bodies are chucked/ Like cracked crocks onto kitchen middens” (404). The breaking of the vessels leaves the world in disorder, and only by gathering the divine sparks through the process of tikkun by the Jews will they achieve redemption (Scholem 142). Because of this requirement, orthodox Judaism does, in theory, reject creative literature and other “frivolous” pursuits as a distraction from the work of perfecting the world;⁸ but Auden was well aware that that this rejection remained largely theoretical, as evidenced by his own praise of Jewish humor and his attempts to tell jokes in Yiddish. Hecht comments that “One need only observe that very few Christian apologists rely so heavily and so admiringly on Jewish thought” as Auden (292), and Auden’s knowledge of Jewish lore extends well beyond that of even many Jewish writers. In The Age of Anxiety, for example, Rosetta makes reference to at least two midrashim (exegetical stories) in her soliloquy.⁹ In the first instance, she says to the sleeping Emble, in explanation of her inability to convert the mock wedding to a real marriage: “I’d hate to think / How gentile you feel when you join in / The rowdy cries at Rimmon’s party” (403). “Rimmon,” which means “pomegranate” in Hebrew, has numerous mystical associations, including a text by the author of the Zohar, r Moses de Leon (the Sefer ha-Rimmon), another medieval kabbalist, Moses Cordovero (the Pardes Rimand one by monim); but Auden seems to be using “Rimmon” in its association with the 613 mitzvott (commandments) and, by extension, the Torah and the people of Israel. According to one midrash, the pomegranate contains 613 seeds, the same as the number of commandments in the Torah. At the end of her speech, Rosetta also alludes to a midrash that says that the souls of all Jews throughout

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time, past, present, and future, gathered at Mt. Sinai with Moses to receive the Torah: “Moses will scold if / We’re not all there for the next meeting / At some brackish well or broken arch” (405). The setting for The Age of Anxietyy is the night of All Souls, which, according to one of Auden’s favorite theologists at the time, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “established the solidarity of all souls from the beginning of the world to the end of time” (qtd. in Mendelson 260). The midrash to which Rosetta refers is therefore particularly apt. Auden’s interest in kabbalah, the esoteric tradition of the Jews, is another facet of the “secret society” aspect of Judaism that he found immensely attractive. Even after his conversion to Christianity, and even though he denied any belief in spiritualism, he retained an intense interest in arcane knowledge and even the practice of magic (Carpenter 298). Among the more exotic supernatural processes and capabilities in which he believed were feline telepathy, graphology, chiromancy, metoposcopy (the interpretation of one’s forehead lines), and phrenology (Carpenter 298; Griffin 89). According to Farnan, the onset of Auden’s fi xation on mysticism began with his study of Yeats and the Order of the Golden Dawn, and his interest extended as far as the actual practice of magical rituals, including apparently once placing a curse on Farnan herself (71–72). According to one of her sources, Auden completed a ritual to “achieve dominion of will” over Kallman by cutting a photograph of Chester’s naked body into pieces and gluing the scraps onto a piece of paper (158). Whether or not he actually took these practices seriously was a matter of discussion, but apparently a number of friends believed that he did indeed subscribe to the efficacy of such magic (Farnan 158). There is no question that Auden read extensively in kabbalah, and The Age of Anxietyy includes several kabbalistic references in addition to the breaking of the vessels. He indicated to Ansen that the symbolism of “The Seven Stages” section of the poem has a kabbalistic origin, explaining, “It’s all done in the Zohar” (Mendelson 251). In his explanation to Ansen, he associates the stages with different parts of the body: It begins in the belly, the center of the body, goes on to the general region around the heart, then to the hands (symmetrically, [the four characters] two by two), then to the nose and throat (the capital), then north to the eyes where Rosetta goes in and the others describe it from outside, then to the forehead complex (the museum), the ears (gardens) through which one receives spiritual direction, the hair (woods), and finally they look down the back, the desert—there’s nothing farther.

These parts of the body in kabbalah, symbolize the ten sefirot, t or emanations from the Ein-Soff (“Infinite”) that were contained originally in the divine vessels that broke following the process of tzimtzum that preceded the creation of the

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world.¹⁰ Scholem explains tzimtzum (“contraction”) as follows: “it is impossible to imagine an area which is not God, since this would constitute a limitation of His infinity. [. . .] Consequently, an act of creation is possible only through “the entry of God into Himself,” [. . .] whereby He contracts Himself and so makes it possible for something which is not Ein-Soff to exist” (129). Auden alludes to this process in For the Time Being when Simeon announces: “Before the Positive could manifest Itself specifically, it was necessary that nothing should be left that negation could remove [. . .] the mirror in which the Soul expected to admire herself [. . .] should be utterly withdrawn” (298). The image in which man is created and in which he expected to admire himself is God’s, and God’s withdrawal, though necessary for creation, is now, according to Simeon, rescinded. Simeon’s enumeration of the conditions which led to the creation of his people, the Jews, is followed by his recitation of the changes generated by the Incarnation that set the stage for Christianity to supplant Judaism. “Because of His visitation,” announces Simeon, “we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him” (301). Auden’s use of kabbalistic concepts in The Age of Anxietyy and For the Time Beingg reflects the evolution of his thinking on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity: Rosetta leads the other characters across the symbolic landscape to complete a necessary journey, while Simeon rejoices that God’s withdrawal has come to an end and that Judaism has been replaced. Auden appears, by the time he wrote The Age of Anxietyy in 1947, to have gotten over the resentment of the “special case” aspect of Judaism he had expressed in For the Time Being. g Auden’s change of attitude regarding the debt of Christianity to the Jews parallels the refashioning of his philo-Semitism from mere sympathy for the world’s scapegoats to an appreciation of Jewish thought and culture. In For the Time Being, g Simeon complains about Jewish exclusiveness as a claim “that God is only concerned with and of concern to that People whom out of all that He created He has chosen for His own” (300). Hecht identifies Simeon as “the one personage in the entire oratorio with whom Auden most willingly identifies himself ” (278), and Simeon’s gripe echoes a charge made more stridently in prose by Auden in the same year (1941): “Their defect lay in clinging to the primitive belief in Jehovah as their tribal property; in excluding the Gentile from religious equality, they were inferior to the Greek philosophers who welcomed all rational men” (Prose 132–33). Although the Jews had avoided the heresy of “philosophical dualism” that divided men “horizontally,” he argued that they had instead “divided society vertically, themselves from the rest of the world” (Prose 133). By 1944, Auden was addressing this problem in a fairly neutral manner, attributing this line of thought to otherr Christians, in an attempt to analyze the roots of anti-Semitism:

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Journal of Modern Literature The Christian who reads what I have quoted from Mr Frank will say, “Those are Christian values too,” but then he reads, “It certainly does not mean that they alonee can express universal values in a particular way of life—but only that they have theirr way of expressing the universal, a way which is Jewish,” and at that he will say, “But that’s just what it doess mean. The Christian way of life is not a way, nor my way, but thee way. All the others are false.” And in that disagreement lies, I think, the essence of our differences. [Auden’s emphasis] (Prosee 225–26)

Where in For the Time Beingg Auden ascribes the exclusion of all Gentiles to the Jews, here he distinguishes between Gentiles who are “pagan” or “inertial Christians” and those who actively choose to have faith, whom God “has raised up to be a child of Abraham; that is, he is a pagan who has to make a complete break with his natural way of thinking [. . .] to adopt a faith which until the coming of Christ was held only by Jews” (226). Here, as in The Age of Anxiety, Christianity becomes equivalent to, or perhaps even a special case of, Judaism. Auden’s new appreciation of the religious aspects of Judaism, however, was not unproblematic. In 1934, he had rebuked Eliot for expressing a repugnance for “free-thinking Jews.” By 1947, however, Auden himself was ready to criticize the same type of “free-thinking,” or liberal, Jews. Almost immediately after saying to Alan Ansen, “I wonder what would happen if I converted to Judaism,” Auden continues: “I wonder why there are so few converts to Judaism. I don’t know about Hebrew schools, but if they are anything like the Sunday school I went to, they must be pretty awful. There’s nothing religious about them, perfectly pagan. I expect if you went to a really Orthodox school it would be all right, but the Reformed are impossible” (32). For leftist philo-Semitism, such as he embraced in the 1930s, the question of religion was irrelevant; for Christian philo-Semites, the question is one of superlative importance. Auden’s comments about Reform Jews sound not unlike those of other devout Christian advocates of Judaism. A Reverend Charles Voysey, who was praised in the Jewish Chroniclee for his love of the Jewish people declared himself “horror-struck” by the Reform movement and in 1911 published “A Warning to Jews,” expressing his dismay that Reform Judaism “amounts practically to a call to Jews to adopt the same views and sentiments as are held by Unitarians” (qtd. in Rubinstein 140). On what the Rubinstein’s call “the vexed question of conversionism,” Voysey’s brand of Christian philo-Semitism comes down on the anti side; he argues that Jews must practice Judaism (Rubinstein 140). Although Carpenter asserts that soon after his own conversion, Auden wished to convince Kallman to convert as well (300), he apparently abandoned that quest at some point, which would be consistent with the transition from leftist to religious philo-Semitism. Auden’s position on conversionism in his review of Frank’s book sounds much

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like his position on Zionism: a resigned acceptance that Jewish needs supersede his own wishes on the subject. He asserts that a Jew who loses his faith, that is, one whoe tires of waiting for the Messiah and accepts that Jesus has already filled that role, necessarily becomes a Christian and relinquishes his “peculiar role of guardingg the truth” [Auden’s emphasis]. Not until all gentiles truly accept Christianity, he concedes, will the Jews feel comfortable giving up that role: There is an old Christian tradition that the last event of history before the Second Coming will be the conversion of the Jews; that is, as long as paganism, under whatever disguises, exists on earth, the Jew cannot believe the Christian claim to be the fulfi lment [[sicc] of the Law and the Prophets, but must regard himself as their God-chosen guardian and remain the scapegoat, because the bad conscience, of the Gentile world. (226)

This claim accords with that of an Anglican priest named Father Ignatius, who declared that, “The Jews must continue to remain apart from other nations because they are the divinely chosen nation of revelation to the world” (qtd. in Rubinstein 140). Classical Reform Judaism, with its emphasis on assimilation, would represent an abandonment of this peculiar role and is, therefore, unacceptable to the Christian philo-Semite. Problematic though it may have been, Auden never doubted his love for the Jewish people, and during and after World War II he devoted a significant amount of time and prose to attempting to puzzle out the causes of anti-Semitism. His proposed origins of the problem ranged from a fear of deracination (“What the contemporary anti-Semite sees in the Jew is an image of his own destiny”), to “ennui” (“Essentially the Nazis were bored”), to an inferiority complex due to the perception of Jewish seriousness (“Christians feel about Jews the way Englishmen do about the Scotch”) (Prosee 113; Griffin 8, 23). In his “Lecture Notes” of 1942, though, he identifies the role of the Jew as a goad to the “inertial Christian” as the major factor that engenders Christian anti-Semitism: “Modern anti-Semitism [. . .] is one symptom of a Christendom which has taken offense at faith, but finding that nothing means social breakdown, is determined to replace it by a pagan political religion. The Jew is persecuted because he cannot deceive himself. His witness is this—either faith or nothing” (Prose 172). For a Christian who finds true faith, “the power to endure the paradox” of the Incarnation, Judaism and the people to whom it was given will serve as a confirmation of that faith, not a threat. Of all of the various causes Auden posited for anti-Semitism, only this one allows for a possible solution to the problem: the conversion of non-believing Gentiles. In other words, the world had a Christian problem, not a “Jewish problem,” and for Auden, philo-Semitism is part of the solution.

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Notes 1. In the context of the conversation, this appears to be more of a whimsical rhetorical question than a serious consideration of conversion. The statement is preceded by a comment about Jewish mystics, and the next thing he says is: “Most people of the type turn to Mohammadenism—no, not Hinduism, that’s something different” (32). 2. On a visit to his family in England with Kallman, Auden apparently was upset by anti-Semitic remarks made by his father (Carpenter 357). It is difficult to know whether Dr. Auden actually insulted Kallman and Jews in general since his son routinely accused the numerous people who disliked Chester of anti-Semitism, including, somewhat astoundingly, Thomas Mann’s family (Carpenter 264n, 321). 3. It is on these grounds that Auden rejects Zionism, writing in his review of Waldo Frank’s The Jew in Our Day, that he believes “that to regard national statehood as anything more than a technical convenience of social organization—and few do not—is idolatry” (Prosee 224–25). One’s position on Zionism is for many Jews a litmus test, and for a gentile to reject the need for a Zionist state is for many a failure of that test—never mind that a number of Orthodox Jews object to the formation of a Jewish state before the advent of the messiah. Auden’s rejection of Zionism, however, is philosophical, not political, and he recognizes that he has no legitimate standing to criticize desperate refugees: “so long as one enjoys the full advantages of statehood one cannot congratulate those who do not on being spared its temptations” (225). He concludes his discussion of the matter by affi rming that although he is theoretically anti-Zionist, such a position would, on a practical level, be anti-Semitic: “though I believe that Mr Frank is right in rejecting Zionism, I wish it could have been a Polish Jew who rejected it. For the Gentile, the immediate duty of saving as many lives as possible by whatever possible means must take precedence over any other considerations [. . .]” (225). In the absence of alternatives, a permanent homeland may be necessary; but given the choice himself, Auden opts for a peripatetic lifestyle. 4. Many of Auden’s closeted homosexual contemporaries had married, and like many of them, he himself had been engaged at one point after he graduated from Oxford, although he did not go through with the marriage. According to Dorothy Farnan, he once told friends that he had panicked while on a rare date with a girl; “I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I asked her to marry me,” he reported (34). 5. Nicholas Jenkins reports that Auden once told James Stern that his fascination with Judaism was engendered by his regret over an incident at school when he had been rude to a Jewish boy and that his inclusion of Jewish ideas in his poetry was in part a gesture of atonement (46). As an explanation of the origin of his philo-Semitism, this seems unlikely, but the precipitating incident might be true. 6. Auden does believe that diversity can go too far. In his 1941 essay “Criticism in a Mass Society,” he writes: “We are all consciously or unconsciously seeking some form of catholic unity to correct the moral, artistic, and political chaos that has resulted from an overdevelopment of protestant diversity (using these terms in their widest sense). Our differences, and they are vital, are as to the essential nature of that unity and the form which it should take. The cohesion of a society is secured by a mixture of three factors, community of actions, community of faith and beliefs, and coercion by those who posses the means of exercising it. In a differentiated society like our own, the fi rst factor has in large measure disappeared” (Prose III 94), and in another 1941 essay in The Nation titled “A Note on Order,” he blames over-diversification for the turn to fascism: “Modern society is a differentiated society in disorder, the result of our ignoring the relations between its different elements. As long as we continue to do so, disorder will seem due to the social differentiation itself instead of to our false conception of it. The only remedy, therefore, will seem the fascist remedy, that is, a return to primitive uniformity and multiple objective requiredness—a theirs-not-to-reason-why obedience to unrelated military orders. But this is simply to substitute for the disorder of triviality the disorder of vagueness, and since our technological and economic development obliges us to remain differentiated, this is a vain attempt that produces a worse disorder than ever” (102).

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7. In fact frivolity, often in the form of camp, was Auden’s idea of the proper existential approach to religion, where any attempt at a human understanding of God is inevitably unsuccessful and therefore inevitably humorous. According to Mendelson, in “Auden’s theological camp, the joke simultaneously affirmed the absolute seriousness of the subject and the limited, artificial, therefore ultimately frivolous approach to it, which was, he thought, the most that any individual could achieve” (283). 8. Cynthia Ozick notes that the concept off yetzer ha-raa (Hebrew term for an evil impulse or inclination) is “related also to the creative capacity; the desire to compete with the Creator in ordering being and reality,” she declares forthrightly, “Literature is an idol” (196). 9. Auden’s father-in-law, Thomas Mann, was a great student of midrashic literature, and Auden might have learned these stories through Mann or through his own studies. Mann even gets a mention in a book called Midrash for Beginnerss by Edwin C. Goldberg (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1996: 37). 10. Keterr (“crown”), Chokhmah (“wisdom”), Binah (“intelligence”), Chesedd (“love”), Din (“judgment”); Tiferett (“beauty”), Nezach (“endurance”), Hodd (“majesty”), Yesod Olam (“the foundation of the world”), and Malkhutt (“kingdom”).

Works Cited Ansen, Alan. The Table Talk of W.H. Auden. New York: Seacliff Press, 1989. Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. . The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Vol. II: Prose: 1939–1948. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. . Introduction. Red Ribbon on a White Horsee by Anzia Yesierska. New York: Persea Books, 1950: 11–19. Boyarin, Daniel, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini. “Strange Bedfellows: An Introduction.” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question. Boyarin, Daniel, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, Eds.New York: Columbia University Press, 2003: 1–18. Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Miffl in Co., 1981. Caserio, Robert L. “Auden’s New Citizenship.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review. 1997 Fall; 17 (2): 90–103. Clark, Thekla. Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Farnan, Dorothy J. Auden in Love. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Griffin, Howard. Conversations with Auden. Ed. Donald Allen. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981. Hecht, Anthony. The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Jakobsen, Janet R. “Queers are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics.” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question. Boyarin, Daniel, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, Eds.New York: Columbia University Press, 2003: 64–89. Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Ozick, Cynthia. Art & Ardor. r New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.

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Page, Norman. Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Rubinstein, William D. and Hilary L. Rubinstein. Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews, 1840–1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: Meridian, 1978.