The Secret Auden

I heartily recommend this piece in the New York Review of Books on W. H. Auden.

W.H. Auden had a secret life that his closest friends knew little or nothing about. Everything about it was generous and honorable. He kept it secret because he would have been ashamed to have been praised for it.

It is a portrait of a man embracing humility and avoiding the conceits that all too often accompany achievement and notoriety.

I like that the author, Edward Mendelson, spotlights Auden's preternatural wisdom regarding the quicksand of moral certainty:

Aden took intellectual pleasure in sorting people into types and anti-types. Much of his work dramatizes a distinction between gentle-minded Arcadians, who dream of an innocent past where everyone could do as they wanted without harming anyone else, and stern-minded Utopians, who fantasize, and sometimes try to build, an ideal future in which all will act as they should. He identified himself as an Arcadian, but he never imagined that Utopians, no matter how much he disliked being around them, were solely to blame for public and private injustice, and he always reminded himself that Arcadians were not as innocent as they thought.

Could not be more appropriate for our time. Read the whole thing.