Arts and Letters

I suppose Austin Warren, who was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on the fourth of July in 1899 and died last August 20 in Providence, Rhode Island, was best known for his collaboration with René Wellek in a book titled Theory of Literature (1949), a highly civilized and judicious work that had wide audiences wherever literature is taught and discussed. It helped stem regressive forces in our culture between the war's end and the cultural delinquencies of the '6os, in an era when visuality in the forms of video was overtaking words, and mangling language. But among the creative elite of those who read as well as look, other works of Austin's will be cherished—his masterly study of Richard Crashaw (1939), and his collection of essays, Rage for Order (1948), on figures as diverse as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Taylor and W. B. Yeats, and the earlier moderns, Forster, Joyce, Kafka. Allen Tate called these books among the most distinguished of this century and I would add to them Austin's concise and brilliant life of the elder Henry James which he published in 1934, a beautiful example of brevity and objectivity.

Behind his mask of reticence, his eternal quest for a workable religion, Austin Warren led one of the most private lives among our writers without becoming an anchorite. He was, if one got a little closer to him, a man of great warmth and humane feeling, and in an age of careless utterance he cultivated style and directness which made him, as I have always said, one of our rare artists of the essay, certainly the most disinterested in the Arnoldian sense. He could throw off with wit and clarity such sentences as "Yeats needed religion less as a man than as a poet," or "Hopkins was an Englishman, of a proud and patriotic sort. This is not always remembered, partly because he became a priest of a church viewed by other Englishmen as Continental, or Italian, or international"; or "Kafka's imagined America is not a land of broad cornfields shining in the sun but chiefly a metropolitan affair, clearly stratified, weary and hopeless—a land of hotels and slums." There is a kind of New England briskness in this; but also one senses how the few words of his sentences are packed with thought. This is the prose of a man whose every phrase is luminous. Who else among our critics had the terseness and compactness to give us pictures of nine major figures, extract their greatness and idiosyncrasies, and all in a book of small format and 161 pages?

There was another side of Austin Warren's life that gave him his resilience and firmness beyond his syntactic exactitude. He derived much of his authority from his ecumenical grounding in many forms of religion: one might say he was a democrat among dogmas. He was reared a Methodist and a pietist; he called himself ethnically Anglo-Saxon Protestant; in his high school days he was a Fundamentalist, for adolescence and dogma can go hand in hand—and he remarked indeed that this meant he was a "Jesus freak." Of the Gospel hymns, he said they were "my treasury and delight." At Harvard he sat at the feet of Irving Babbitt and his forms of humanism. He became a communicant of the Episcopal Church and then, like T. S. Eliot, an Anglo-Catholic. There followed Kierkegaard, whom he had to reject because "he put the claims of religion in so rigorous a fashion as to make it virtually impossible to be 'saved.’" Austin tried at this time to reconcile Catholicism with Zen; and he went on to the Eastern Orthodox Church in its Greek form and its Russian forms. To have moved through all of these forms of worship may suggest a ceaseless anxiety, a casting about for illumination and relief.

A man who quested so strenuously for a God not surprisingly reached in middle age, by his own confession, "a severe psychic breakdown" which in the end acted as an emotional purgative, bringing "relief, release, and emancipation." He found this also in his association with a community of Anglican Benedictine monks and their prior, whom he described as a man of tenderness and holy wisdom.

From the verbalizations and incantations of the spirit, Austin Warren always found solace in the unverbal of religious music: his instinct, his intuitions, his mind, spoke to him thus in organ tones, in the midst of his religious preoccupations. In the end he was an ecumenist and proclaimed himself a searcher for "the genuine spiritual values of orthodox Protestantism." In his "rage for order" he decided that he could call himself a liberal conservative: I suppose I should underline that these terms had no relation to politics.

Once, when I visited him in Ann Arbor, where he taught for many years, he showed me, with mystical devotion, his private altar—an actual altar, not one of the mind: that is, a low table, spread with a white cloth or cerement and certain beautiful religious artifacts. It had a great simplicity and an intense privacy, as much symbol as ritual. I found it touching, and touching too the feeling of exultation and tenderness in his voice as he talked to me of the religious emotion. He wholly lacked the vanity of intellectuals; he sought neither to impress nor use his meditations as instruments of power—a common failing in our critics. In his old age he insisted on the importance of E. M. Forster's "only connect," and this gave him the title for his ultimate book, Connections. He defined "connecting" as "the pervasive concern with 'interness.’"

Few of our prose artists, few of our meditative scholars, have lived more modestly and more deeply. In others this might have led to the dullness of narcissism. In him it led to a search for "universal relations." Therein lay the particular radiance and beauty of Austin Warren's pilgrimage.