Paul Who?

 In the original version of his "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," Auden included the famous lines: 

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well[.]

It's a perennially relevant stanza, as we debate these days whether this or that famous artist, film director, or musician is to be pardoned for their politics or personal behavior. 

Can anyone defend Roman Polanski, say? Just because he made extraordinary films? Do the works excuse the artist? 

Probably not, I say. But sometimes—perhaps—the works should be excused the artist. That is to say, even if we do not pardon Polanski; maybe we can pardon his extraordinary films for having been made by Polanski. 

Time may not have pardoned Polanski his deeds, merely because he filmed well. But it did pardon his films. 

Auden may have been closer to the truth, then, when he wrote: "there are many whose works/ Are in better taste than their lives[.]"

Auden was speaking, strangely, of Henry James. Whose life I never thought of as being in particularly bad taste anyway. But it applies very well to Polanski. 

But there is something else strange about Auden's lines: he deleted them from his poem about Yeats, in subsequent versions. 

This strikes me as unfortunate, since they were the only lines in the poem that were memorable or were actually saying anything. 

Auden must have realized that he had accidentally let slip something interesting, against his usual practice. 

He must have realized he had actually said something, and—in his embarrassment—hastened to tuck it away again. 

Leaving, in subsequent editions, a perfectly smooth surface of forgettable nothingness. 

Seriously, tell me if that poem about Yeats is actually saying anything at all without these lines. 

But no matter, because there is yet another problem with these lines. I was reading David Markson's This is Not a Novel today, and I find that he puts his finger on it succinctly: 

"Has time pardoned Paul Claudel?" he asks. 

Probably not. Is anyone still reading him? Did he in fact write so well as to join the immortals? 

And the more one thinks about it, the more one is tempted to the wonder whether Auden did not pick Paul Claudel for this line—of all people—purely in order to complete that rhyme with "well." 

Is this why Auden later deleted the line? Or was it because, in the gathering religiosity of his later years, his own views evolved to be more in sympathy with those of Claudel anyway? 

And so, he no longer thought these views even needed pardoning? 

Auden was perhaps embarrassed in later years by the kind of cocksure leftist that he was in his youth. 

But he should have been embarrassed by the kind of cocksure Anglican he became in age. 

As Hazlitt observed—in his "On Consistency of Opinion"—it is the most cocksure holder of one lopsided opinion who is sure to become the most cocksure holder of the opposite lopsided opinion later on. 

Hazlitt had in mind how Coleridge and Wordsworth and Southey evolved from proto-socialist utopians to rock-ribbed religious conservatives with age. 

But he could also have been writing about all the 1930s Cambridge Marxists who later took communion. 

Or all the 1940s Trotskyites who later became Neo-Conservatives. 

Or all the 1960s Trotskyites who later became Neo-Conservatives (viz. the later years of Christopher Hitchens). 

Or, today, all the Bush era leftists who hated Neo-Conservatives more than anything on Earth, and who have now become MAGA Republicans (viz the Greenwaldians and the Tulsi Gabbard type).

Time and again, the old truth is proved: 

The stupid kind of leftist in their twenties is sure to blossom into the insipid kind of rightist in their forties. It is a law of nature as fixed as any yet discovered. 

It is people who, as Hazlitt wrote, are only ever capable of holding one idea in their mind at a time, and must therefore—when confronted with the actual and inescapable complexity of reality—leap wildly from one to the other, never retaining both at once. 

The Greenwaldians and the Tulsi Gabbard types who realized—"The U.S. was wrong to invade Iraq!"—and who now therefore conclude that they should support Trump, because he will empower Putin to destroy the U.S. and all other Western democracies—being exhibit A. 

As Hazlitt put it—and he might as well have been writing of Greenwald and Gabbard when he wrote: 

I cannot say that, from my own experience, I have found that the persons most remarkable for sudden and violent changes of principle have been cast in the softest or most susceptible mould. All their notions have been exclusive, bigoted, and intolerant. Their want of consistency and moderation has been in exact proportion to their want of candour and comprehensiveness of mind. Instead of being the creatures of sympathy, open to conviction, unwilling to give offence by the smallest difference of sentiment, they have (for the most part) been made up of mere antipathies—a very repulsive sort of personages—at odds with themselves, and with everybody else. The slenderness of their pretensions to philosophical inquiry has been accompanied with the most presumptuous dogmatism. They have been persons of that narrowness of view and headstrong self-sufficiency of purpose, that they could see only one side of a question at a time, and whichever they pleased.