The Fredösphere

After a long interruption while my reading list grew out of control, I have returned to the fascinating February House, the account of the artists who spent a year living at 7 Middagh St. in Brooklyn:  W. H. Auden, Paul and Jane Bowles, Britten and Pears, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, and George Davis, the last recently fired as fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar.

What a freak show.  I can't recommend this book too highly.  It's very quotable, so today I'll give you two, with perhaps more to come.  The first is a bit of philosophizing by W.H. Auden:

In a review of Theodore Roethke's new collection of poetry, Open House, Auden wrote in March [of 1940] that "a work of art, like a life, can fail in two different ways:  either, in terror of admitting that there is any chaos, it takes refuge in some arbitrary conscious order it has acquired read-made from others or thought up itself on the spur of the moment ... or, lacking the courage and the faith to believe that it is possible and a duty to bring the chaos to order, it contents itself with a purely passive idolization of the flux."  It was necessary to create "both in Life and Art," he wrote, a "necessary order out of an arbitrary chaos" -- not any order, but an order "already latent in the chaos, so that successful creation is a process of discovery ... and the more consciously one direct this process the more one becomes both conscious of and true to one's fate."

I suppose the second could be categorized the same way:

Louise Bogan recalled telling Auden that month about a man who broke into tears in a taxi, confessing to his traveling companion that he had a vestigial tail.  "I shouldn't have minded a vestigial tail," Bogan said playfully to her friend.  "No," Auden had replied, "one can always stand what other people have."