![]() ![]() The whole tone, anyway, apocalyptic or skittish or heavy-avuncular, is Auden’s the other characters speak for him as steadily as Quant. The general effect is that of a parody of Auden by somebody very pretentious and uncertain, but so gifted that it can only be Auden himself. ![]() The occasional prose seems more thoughtful, really, and more natural than the verse, though the verse is sporadically “brilliant” and there are good lines and passages. The numerous subjects are dim and confused, the styles are nerveless and self-indulgent, anything comes up anywhere and nothing happens to it. As in some recent novels but for no reason that appears sufficient, it is All Souls’, and everything goes, all the tangle of current intellectual equipment. They think, then they talk in the cab they sing a dirge Emble and Rosetta make vague love, Emble passes out Quant sings, Malin thinks, on their way home. The four vaguest characters in modern literature (Quant, a shipping clerk and widower Malin, a medical intelligence officer in the RCAF Emble, a young mid-Western naval officer Rosetta, a department-store buyer) sit around one evening during the recent war, first in a Third Avenue bar, then in Rosetta’s apartment, and mull things over: the modern soul, the seven ages of man’s life, the seven stages of some dream-quest, the possibilities of happiness, the alienations of men, the ennuis of America. As a large and ambitious production by one of the best living poets, The Age of Anxiety is disappointing. ![]()
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