He had rather mixed feelings about what he called his 'deplorable cultus.' In 1968 he wrote to his son Michael about
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"the behaviour of modern youth, part of which is inspired by admirable motives such as anti-regimentation, and anti-drabness, a sort of lurking romantic longing for 'cavaliers', and is not necessarily allied to the drugs or the cults of faineance and filth."
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All the same, he could still comment to Auden about fan-clubs,
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"Real lunatics don't join them, I think. But still such things fill me with alarm and despondency."
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In an interview, being diplomatic, he would nonetheless observe that
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"Art moves [American youth] and they don't know what they've been moved by and they get quite drunk on it. Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I'm not."
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Late in life he would be even more forceful, commenting about "intelligent and well-equipped readers" at least not being
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"a soil in which the fungus-growth of cults is likely to arise. The horrors of the American scene I will pass over, though they have given me great distress and labour (they arise in an entirely different mental climate and soil, polluted and impoverished...)"
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