[R. S. Gwynn]

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/0...Q5_ltMrv-mrskE

[Martin Rocek]

Thanks for this, Sam. Very interesting and thought provoking.

Martin

[R. S. Gwynn]

Cerf was a publisher with some integrity, and I can sympathize with his position. However, I am glad that he reversed himself.

There would be no such reversal in such a matter today, however, and Auden would be in a minority.

The Bollingen matter raised the same questions again in 1948.

[Michael F]

Yes, thanks, Sam. Mendelson has done such wonderful work on Auden over the years.

Aren’t we seeing a similar drama play out today, though about a different matter, with Michael Jackson and Woody Allen? But the art, the art remains.

[R. S. Gwynn]

A substantial part of Pound's poetry is about fascism, so it's impossible to separate the politics from The Pisan Cantos. Still, Cerf was reacting to early poems by Pound, written at times when economics and politics were not yet obsessions.

Woody Allen's Manhattan is a film that touches on (sort of) pedophilia; the age of consent in New York is 17, the age of Mariel Hemingway in the film. Given the accusations, this makes the film difficult to watch, embarrassing. I don't have a problem with his other films, but it's hard to watch him performing with Mia Farrow now.

As far as I know, none of Jackson's music is about his "boys," but personal distaste for his private actions may hinder one from enjoying it.

So many artists of all kinds have had personal failings that spoil their works for many. There are those who refuse to listen to Wagner, for example, or Furtwängler. This, again, amounts to "personal distaste," and its very hard to argue with it.

I have read so much about the havoc that Lowell and Berryman caused to loved ones that I have trouble reading them anymore.

[Michael F]

Assuredly, it’s fruitless to argue over personal taste. And I think you’re right that, to the extent that an artist’s work concerns his or her personal craziness or depravity, it’s probably tougher to like or to defend.

I guess I can compartmentalize, because I know my life would be poorer without Wagner, or Woody Allen, or (occasionally) some MJ, who did, I think, have genius. Or Lowell. Or Dostoyevsky. Or Rilke. Or Hemingway. Or Picasso. Or Woolf. Or Beethoven. Or… there’s plenty of human shortcomings to go around. What might a biographer say about you, or me? (Which is not to put everyone’s shortcomings on the same level -- by no means.)

As an aside, I’m unconvinced by the closing lines of Auden's “Postcript”:

God may reduce you / on Judgment Day
to tears of shame, / reciting by heart
the poems you would / have written, had
your life been good.

That seems to me a pat answer to something unknowable. Had Auden's life been ‘good’, who knows if he might not have eschewed poetry altogether, and devoted himself to ‘better’ pursuits? Perhaps like Dorothy Day, whom he considered the only saint he had met?

Or perhaps he considered Day's life 'poetry'.

M