Auden’s Way

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• by
• David Mason

 

 

For Christmas lunch, 1937, Virginia and Leonard Woolf hosted John Maynard Keynes and his wife, Lydia. Imagine the talk, which no doubt ranged widely, including gossip about younger writers like W. H. Auden, the recipient that autumn of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry from George VI himself. A lot of people were saying it: Auden was the man to watch. At only thirty, he was already regarded as England’s leading poet, head of a squadron of younger writers, including Louis MacNeice, C. Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender. According to Nicholas Jenkins’ important new book, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England,^[1] Keynes was “offended by Auden’s standards of personal hygiene,” telling the Woolfs that the poet was “very dirty but a genius.”
 
We rarely associate Auden’s poetry with the slovenly and remember his tidy stanzas too often as something cold and oblique, iceberg verse. His early work has been published as The English Auden (1977), appearing to emphasize the national (even nationalist) poet, a thoroughly domesticated animal. As Jenkins argues in over 500 densely written pages, there is a lot of truth in this image. Auden deliberately identified himself as English, even as he diagnosed the ills of his society and wished he could cure them. Yet there was always a dog beneath the skin, unpredictable and animal and free, or at least seeking freedom. There was always the psychic spy or double agent. That Christmas of 1937 was the last Auden would spend in his native country for 35 years. Like D. H. Lawrence, a writer he admired, he had chosen self-exile.
 
Jenkins has performed a remarkable feat in this new book, making me rethink the early Auden and reread the poems with fresh insight. He frames his narrative with two photographs. The second of them shows the poet sprawled on a lawn with a cigarette and a cup of tea or coffee. Jenkins finds a “timeless” feeling in the photo: “a poet, stretched out on the ground, makes eye contact with their readers.” (I still wince at our contemporary gymnastics with pronouns, but there it is.) This photo, found in the book’s Epilogue, depicts a prodigiously accomplished poet in his late twenties, his face a bit guarded, his body ready to spring into the future. In the Prologue we find a photo of Auden at Gresham’s, his secondary school, which he later equated with a fascist state. He is eighteen, playing Caliban in a production of The Tempest in July 1925. Auden had performed female roles in earlier productions at the school. He understood his sexuality early, and in fact had had sex at age thirteen with a chaplain at his previous school, but it’s significant that he chose to play Caliban rather than Miranda in his final school production. He was trying on parts from England’s greatest national bard, Shakespeare, and Jenkins sees the role as a way of claiming his identity—utterly English, linguistically precocious, and at the same time hurt, monstrous and isolated. “Now, in 1925, Caliban incarnates Auden’s disruptiveness, dispossession, lyrical knowledge, pained memory, and uncertain hope. He is the Dionysian force in this artist so often and so misleadingly understood as an Apollo.”
 
Jenkins, who teaches at Stanford, must know as much about Auden as anyone alive, with the possible exception of Edward Mendelson. He brings to this book a scholar’s sustained gaze and the pressure of interrogation. He knows that the best criticism is narrative and does not lose his way in a bog of academic jargon. His book, he insists, is not a biography. Call it biographical criticism, then, with a big dose of social history, a story “about one poet’s engagement with what it meant to be English in the period between two world wars.” He adds that it is also “a story about the entire cultural formation of Englishness coming to an end, a culture that Auden, among others, tried for a while to shore up among its landscapes, ghosts, and ruins. No reimagining of Auden’s work could take place without a parallel reimagining of the cultural world in which it was embedded.” If Auden accurately identified (and identified with) Englishness, he did so at a time of crisis that would eventually result in his choosing to leave.
 
Jenkins sometimes struggles to contain the sheer volume of what he knows. Details get tediously repeated, and the prose, while lucid, often lacks ebullience and élan. This is my gentle caveat: if you love Auden, you ought to read this book, but you will have to make an effort. Jenkins provides a helpful chronology, and his eight chapters adhere to it within a three-part structure. “Marsh” has only one chapter, “The Historical Child: Music, War, and Sex, 1907–1922.” “Moor” contains four chapters taking up aspects of pastoralism and modernism, including the development of Auden’s first book of poems. “Garden” moves from that remarkable first collection to an equally remarkable second book, called Look, Stranger! in England (a title Auden hated) and On This Island in the US. I’ve left out The Orators, which Jenkins discusses in helpful detail, because it’s not, primarily, a book of lyric poetry, and Auden later disavowed it, despite its moments of uncanny brilliance.
 
And that’s where Jenkins ends, in 1937. He alludes to Auden’s journeys to Iceland, Spain and China before his arrival in the US in January 1939, but all that global and political experience, so remarkable for a poet of any stripe, remains outside the bounds of this study. By limiting his scope, Jenkins achieves a feeling of psychic and sociological penetration. I coped with the letdown at missing later scenes of action because he was helping me understand the ingenuity of the early work.
 
I knew the outlines of this story from other biographies (Charles Osborne, Humphrey Carpenter, Edward Mendelson, Richard Davenport-Hines), but Jenkins’ retelling feels like a revelation, and I don’t always recall whether I’m learning a detail for the first time. For example, I knew that Auden’s father, George, a doctor, served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in WWI, but I had not fully taken on board that he was at Gallipoli in 1915, where he could easily have been killed. A year later he was “invalided out of frontline medical duties,” and by 1917 he was in Egypt, where he took a mistress, causing a great row with his wife when he came home on leave. Essentially, Auden, the youngest of three sons, did not see his father for five years, a fact he always felt had influenced his sexuality, though this seems doubtful now. The family, living in a Birmingham suburb, were an “Edwardian three-servant household,” with all the decorum that description implies, yet they were aware of revolutionary trends in psychology—Dr. Auden knew W. H. R. Rivers—and understood the perils of repression. Some of that repression came from Auden’s mother, Constance, whose Christian values were more than a little buttoned-up. I knew of her talent for music, her singing opera duets with her youngest son but am not sure I realized how capable a pianist Auden became. Perhaps thinking of his grief when she died in 1941, I was less aware of the crisis in the family when his homosexuality became evident, how much anger he felt toward her, how many fights they had. I was also not aware that Auden experienced incest (I’m not sure how to put it because Jenkins treads cautiously here) with his brother, John. This is more than gossip. It is part of Caliban’s story, part of the subterranean energies that compelled him all his life and might have made him seek a complicated consolation by returning to the church.
 
Somehow it fits the narrative that he left Oxford with a Third Class degree, nearly useless in the job market. The question of whether he could really succumb to anyone’s system dogged him all his life, so he made visionary systems of his own. He was electrified by Eliot’s Waste Land as a student in 1926 and knew Eliot was the man to meet, but his flirtation with modernism did not last long. Jenkins even points out that the influence may have flowed the other way, from Auden to the later Eliot. Auden also loved the Medieval poetry he heard in lectures from J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and his tutor, Nevill Coghill. His Englishness was germinal, lexical and devoted to specific localities. At age 21, perhaps trying to please his parents, Auden became engaged to a Birmingham nurse named Sheilah Richardson. He then spent the better part of a year in the Babylon of Berlin, where his sexuality and love of German culture were confirmed, breaking his engagement the moment he returned to England. The tension between English and Continental modes never left him, yet he had to go through a phase of intense nationalism before he could leave it behind.
 
Auden had elected to become a poet at age 15, urged to it by his school friend Robert Medley. He brought his family’s musical and scientific culture with him, the love of excursions and the outdoors they had enjoyed in his childhood, but even his pastoral juvenilia are haunted by his father’s war. With hindsight, Jenkins can see how powerful images of war were to most modern English poets (he notes that Ted Hughes’s father, too, fought at Gallipoli). Auden’s early influences were formal, but often, like Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen, ironic. Early poems find him not quite at home in the landscape. His pastoralism was conservative but involved a “repressed subject.” Dismissive comments by friends like Christopher Isherwood about his first verses were misguided. Auden certainly understood what he was doing. He was adept at traditional forms and could easily have made himself a cozy Georgian poet, but he did not. His landscapes are scarred and haunted, and his view of them changes perspective. He was strange. He was a prodigy.
 
At age twenty he composed what Jenkins calls “his first great poem,” the one beginning

 

Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to the wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living.

 

It is immediately familiar and alien. We have to position ourselves, as if the traditional blank verse had run headlong into the buzz saw of modernist fragmentation. Perspective changes. In the second stanza we have a form of address: “Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock, / Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed: / This land, cut off, will not communicate.” By that third line we have a familiar Auden trope, the allegorized or psychologized landscape. But Auden splices images together like a film editor (Jenkins is good on his movie viewing). We have fragments of creatures more than whole beings: “Near you, taller than grass, / Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.” We have animal synecdoche.
 
Auden’s first book, Poems (1930; revised edition 1933), begins with his “charade,” Paid on Both Sides, a closet drama, but hardly a closeted one, about violence between two feuding families. Jenkins relates it to the gangster film, as well as the Anglo-Saxon poetry that gives it some of its primal verbal texture. It is both the “portrait of a divided society” and “of a divided mind within a divided society.” Jenkins reminds us of John Fuller’s discovery that “the dream sequence at the center of Paid on Both Sides is taken directly” from a psychological text, W. H. R. Rivers’ Conflict and Dream. Auden’s figure of the Man-Woman who “delivers an accusatory poem on behalf of the repressed power of love” may come, Jenkins thinks, from “Proust’s discussions of ‘les hommes-femmes’ in Sodome et Gomorrhe.” I always wondered if Auden had read Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Bloom is the womanly man. Either way, it’s an important addition to a work in which societal conflict is indistinguishable from inner turmoil. Auden follows the charade with poems like “Doom is darker and deeper than any sea-dingle” with its “new men making another love.” Lyric after lyric comes at us bearing powerful eccentricity: “It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens”; “This lunar beauty”; “Consider this and in our time / As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman”; “Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all.” This was not a simple-minded Englishness.
 
Auden was resourceful when it came to earning a living. After his time in Germany, he tried tutoring for a while, always freelancing on the side, then taught at the Larchfield Academy near Glasgow, then the Downs School, a Quaker institution in Herefordshire. There he fell in love with 13-year-old Michael Yates, a talented painter. It’s not clear exactly when their relationship became sexual, but remembering Auden’s own deflowering at 13, the timing seems important. In our time he would be thoroughly cancelled for this, which always makes me wonder if we aren’t too eager to judge. I don’t mean to carry it too far, just to remember that he actually loved the boy, and they were lifelong friends. Auden had had significant lovers by the time they met, but he would have been Yates’s first. Jenkins does not tell us how Yates himself felt about the affair, or offer any details about Yates’s subsequent war experience, which must have been rough—he was captured at the Battle of Crete and held in a German prisoner of war camp. He might also have mentioned that Yates had a substantial career in theatre as a set designer. They were fellow artists.
 
Among the poems written at the Downs School, one of the most famous begins “Out on the lawn I lie in bed . . .” Again, the startling way he places us—almost displaces us—in a landscape. This is the poem in which he feels “Equal with colleagues in a ring”—Jenkins thinks students like Yates would have been there too. At some point in that transformational night “The lion griefs loped from the shade / and on our knees their muzzles laid, / And Death put down his book.” It’s Auden’s vision of agape, an experience that would later underlie his return to the church. But this poem, the second of thirty-one poems in On This Island, also escapes the confines of England and sees where Europe and the rest of the world are headed:

 

Soon through the dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent,
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river-dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.

 

If the psychologized landscapes of his first book seemed to diagnose the illness of his country, the poems of On This Island (published in 1936 in England, 1937 in America) become more prophetic about the future.
 
Poets often attempt to make an impact with sheer bulk, larding their books with more poems than are necessary, and it’s worth repeating that On This Island contains only thirty-one poems, including a “Prologue” and an “Epilogue,” most of them untitled. Few poets have ever done a better job than Auden of thoughtfully organizing their collections. The opening “Prologue,” written some years before most other poems in the book, seems to underline what it means to be English, to live on this particular island:

 

Here too on our little reef display your power,
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp,
The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;
 
And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching
The apple falling towards England, became aware
Between himself and her of an eternal tie.

 

He could almost be a Bard of Brexit, raising the cross of St. George against all the evils beyond the waves. Yet even here a change is coming:

 

Some possible dream, long coiled in the ammonite’s slumber
Is uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and kindness
Its military silence, its surgeon’s idea of pain. . . .

 

I have a first American edition of this slender, astonishing book, and Jenkins has inspired me to take more time with poems I always admired yet read too quickly. Look at a short lyric like “Our hunting fathers,” third poem in the sequence, which seems to move in a single bound from hunter-gatherers to contemporary alienation:

 

Our hunting fathers told the story
Of the sadness of the creatures,
Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features;
Saw in the lion’s intolerant look,
Behind the quarry’s dying glare,
Love raging for the personal glory
That reason’s gift would add,
The liberal appetite and power,
The rightness of a god.
 
Who nurtured in that fine tradition
Predicted the result,
Guessed love by nature suited to
The intricate ways of guilt?
That human ligaments could so
His southern gestures modify,
And make it his mature ambition
To think no thought but ours,
To hunger, work illegally,
And be anonymous?

 

The last two lines signal a whole new range and depth of Auden’s sympathies.
 
Lines of warning and grief abound in the book, from “O what is that sound which so thrills the ear” to his sestina, “Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys.” In the latter poem, the six end-words Auden chooses tell it all: valleys, mountains, water, islands, cities, sorrow. If the first collection contained poems that were often syntactically disjointed, the second more often achieves a sweeping fluency and eloquence. Auden was becoming a great love poet:

 

All that was thought
As like as not, is not;
When nothing was enough
But love, but love
And the rough future
Of an intransigent nature
And the betraying smile,
Betraying, but a smile:
That that is not, is not;
Forget, Forget.

 

Some of the poems are utterly topical and of their moment, referencing Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill and the Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe, and in the “Epilogue” taking note of Gorki, Freud, Groddeck, Kafka and Lawrence. They must have seemed as “with it” as any poems written in their time, yet they are also steeped in the English lyric tradition. Some of the love poems clearly address a particular person, such as Michael Yates, but in terms that feel nearly universal and timeless. I always assumed that the sonnet beginning “A shilling life will give you all the facts” had T. E. Lawrence in mind, a man who had abandoned public fame to seek anonymity as T. E. Shaw, but Jenkins informs me that the subject was “Auden’s on-again, off-again, upper-crust lover . . . , Derek Wedgwood.” Auden scholars have now spent decades tracking down the most obscure references in his work, but we should remind ourselves that he was never a confessional poet. He nearly always abstracted from the specific to the general, and his lyricism gave his abstractions the ring of permanence.
 
Even in his politics Auden seems to have preferred the general over the specific. He used terms like communism and socialism and even, oddly, national socialism, without ever meaning to tie his loyalties to a Stalin or a Hitler. He was an ethical poet. Jenkins puts Auden’s mature sense of politics and poetry as follows:

 

In the introduction to The Poet’s Tongue, the anthology that Auden compiled with John Garrett and that was published in June 1935 . . . , he declared that poetry is a morally alert but nondidactic medium: “Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do,” he insisted, “but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.”

 

It’s as good a statement as you are likely to find about why most political poetry fails, too cocksure, too close to propaganda and advertising, too insistent on being right at the expense of being accurate and true.
 
Lest we think that Auden roared onto the scene with nothing but successes, Jenkins spends a good deal of time discussing failures and abandoned poems, like the epic that begins “In the year of my youth when yoyos came in.” The poem tries out an alliterative line similar to the one he would adopt for later work like The Age of Anxiety, but you can see why he set it aside—the story runs out of gas. His work for the GPO Film Unit appeared in two completed documentaries, Coal Face and Night Mail. He tried working on another film, an exploration of the slave trade, but it, too, was eventually abandoned. He dabbled in free verse and prose poetry, collaborated on plays with modest success. His prose “Sermon by an Armament Manufacturer” (which might owe something to Shaw’s Major Barbara) is an outtake from a play, possibly containing the seeds of speeches he would later write in “For the Time Being” and “The Sea and the Mirror”—the appalling self-justifications of his Herod, the elaborate locutions of his Caliban. He was restlessly experimenting.
 
As Europe moved inexorably toward another war, Auden was also becoming involved in the lives of exiles and immigrants. He married Erika Mann, who had been denounced by the Nazis with other artists like Bertolt Brecht, to secure a British passport for her. He assisted his friend Ernst Toller, who would later commit suicide in Manhattan. He took friendship seriously. Even though he and Erika were both gay and their marriage was one of convenience, they remained close. In this, as in so many other gestures he made over the course of his life, Auden seems generous and entirely honorable.
 
My epigraph quotes from the “Epilogue” to On This Island, which, according to Jenkins, “points out of Auden’s book and toward his poetic future. It does not summarize or conclude what has come before. Instead, as ‘The Hollow Men’ looked beyond Eliot’s completed work in Poems: 1909–1925. . . , ‘Epilogue’ here looks beyond the volume that it is collected in, and it does so with trepidation.”
 
More than trepidation, I would say. With grim resolution and hope for his gift. He was going away, but he had also found “a way.”

 

[1] THE ISLAND: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, by Nicholas Jenkins. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. $35.00.

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