Auden at 100: Who is he now?
Who am I now?”, W. H. Auden asked in a poem, written in April 1967, called “Prologue at Sixty”, an age he suddenly defined as the start of his real writing life. How sadly short the ensuing “main text” would be, Auden was probably starting to guess: the physical effects of years of heavy consumption of alcohol, cigarettes and uppers and downers, of sedentary habits, and of a disrupted domestic life, were making themselves felt. His answer to his own question then – “Who am I?” – was that he was “a New Yorker, who opens his Times at the obit page” and whose “dream images date him already”. Such intimations of mortality belie his insistence to friends that he was going to live to be eighty. He looked that age, though he was only sixty-six, when he died in a Vienna hotel in 1973. Auden would have been a hundred years old this month.
Who is Auden now, at 100? The older Auden did his best to set the terms of his future reception. But as well as a physical end, writers’ deaths mark their final surrender of control over the meaning of their work. It was the point where Auden could “accomplish” his “corpse at last” (he is punning here on the dual meanings of both “accomplish” and “corpse”), but also the point (as he puts it elsewhere) where the poet is “stripped of excuse and nimbus” and becomes “a Past, subject to Judgement”.
As early as the spring of 1931 – at which time Auden, at twenty-four, had published only one real book, Poems (1930), though “Paid on Both Sides” had appeared in the Criterion – Ezra Pound in Rapallo was sneering about the “Auden craze” in Britain. “Audenesque” was already an adjective by 1933. Subsequently Auden enjoyed the lifelong dignity of a controversial and highly variegated reputation. When, in June 1940, a Tory MP, outraged by Auden’s “refuge” from war service in the United States, demanded that the writer be stripped of British citizenship, it was the first time that a poet had been the subject of parliamentary interest since Sassoon’s non serviam “Declaration” was read out in the House of Commons in July 1917. The following year, in the journal Horizon, the sociologist Tom Harrisson surveyed two years of wartime book publication and came to the extraordinary conclusion that “to judge from most war books, Britain is fighting this war to protect the world against Auden and Picasso, the Jews and any form of collectivisation”. By 1947, Auden was referring to himself as “Public Cultural Enemy No 1” in his former country. And issues of national belonging and social responsibility remained central to judgements about Auden’s poetry for the rest of his career. For example, in 1960 Philip Larkin complained that Auden had “abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns”, and he denigrated the “individual and cosmopolitan path” the poet had followed since. (As if making the same point but in reverse, Auden once told Christopher Isherwood: “Though I believe it sinful to be queer, it has at least saved me from becoming a pillar of the Establishment, and it might not even have done that if I hadn’t bolted to America”.) But a living author can always fight back against critics and even admirers. Death means total powerlessness in the face of abuse or praise. For the English novelist Anthony Powell, Auden was something close to a traitor. Powell greeted the news of Auden’s demise by telling Kingsley Amis, “I’m delighted that shit has gone . . . scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend”. Yet for many younger readers, such as James Merrill, Auden had acquired almost divine status. In his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill refers to the memory of Auden, guest of honour at a party in Athens, with an epithet, “Father of forms”, which was often used of Zeus. Auden himself foretold how “the words of a dead man”, like a Dionysian sacrificial offering, “are modified in the guts of the living”. Robert Lowell wrote shortly after Auden’s death of seeing
a girl reading Auden’s last book.
She must be very modern,
she dissects him in the past tense.
Lowell concluded, with a rival’s relief, that Auden was “historical now as Munich”.
The prospect of becoming “historical” brought from the 1960s’ Auden a fusillade of late self-characterizations. He seems to have begun pondering the total arc of his career around 1963, the year in which the first full critical study of his work, Monroe K. Spears’s The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The disenchanted island, was published, with his input. This was the year in which Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath all died, and Auden’s partner Chester Kallman left New York for good. The “dead we miss are easier / to talk to” than the living, Auden wrote, as if with one foot already planted in the Elysian fields. “Thoughts of his own death” began to preoccupy him, “like the distant roll / of thunder at a picnic”. By the summer of the following year, he was writing what he cannily but morosely called “Posthumous” poetry, “not all of it printable” as he told a friend – poems, that is, which he could not or would not publish during his lifetime. Three of those proleptically “Posthumous” poems made their way into the Collected Poems of 1976.
A number of other such poems, however – mostly in the tanka and haiku forms with which he became fascinated in the 1960s – will eventually be included in Edward Mendelson’s ongoing edition of Auden’s Complete Works. One of these is “My Epitaph”, scribbled on the menu in a New York Chinese restaurant in 1965: “posthumous” both in its graveyard conceit and in its (then) unprintable nature:
A cocksucker? Yes.
A poet? I believe.
Good. And a Christian?
Some things could only be confessed publicly once one was dead. After all, in 1963 Time magazine had at a late stage cancelled a cover story on Auden after the periodical’s editors discovered that he was a homosexual. And Auden had been frantically annoyed in 1965, the year in which he wrote “My Epitaph”, when Fuck You, a Lower East-Side samizdat “magazine of the arts”, pirated the text of “The Platonic Blow”, a poem about fellatio which Auden had written in 1948 but, for obvious reasons, had never published.
On the face of it, “My Epitaph” suggests that whether one is a poet or not is a more significant fact than whether or not one is a cocksucker and a less significant matter than whether or not one is religious. But Auden’s poems, and his career as a whole, demand that we watch for gaps and to listen for lacunae. For example, the “missing” syllable in the second line here between “poet?” and “I believe” is a morally meaningful, self-doubting silence. Poetry is this poem’s bridge and pivot: it is only in poetry that Auden can articulate his human shortcomings, and religious clarity is therefore inseparable from poetic magic. This little poem makes a memorable claim for the centrality of poetry to the meaning of Auden’s life. But it is also a bid for posthumous interpretive power. “This, finally, is who I was”, Auden’s poem says. By 1965, then, the stock-taking had already begun. Now, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, if we ask who Auden is, we are not posing a new question, but are stationed further along the curve of examination which the poet himself inaugurated in his mid-fifties. And there is more to be said (and to be discovered) about him than those three things that his “Epitaph” puts in the foreground.
One difficulty about producing an accurate overview of Auden’s career is that his oeuvre is so sprawling and various. He had an anxious, Victorian prodigality, telling a friend, “unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day, I feel ill”. The problem is not with the poetry. The expanded edition of Katherine Bucknell’s collection of Auden’s juvenilia, published in 2003, has raised a large number of early poems to the surface, and now only a few later pieces remain to be collected: as well as the once-unpublishable poems such as “My Epitaph” and “The Platonic Blow”, there is the mesmerizing but unfinished dream vision beginning “In the year of my youth when yoyos came in” (written around 1931), a very few rejected drafts, and various occasional squibs, birthday poems or verse compliments. The general contours of Auden’s poetry are by now relatively clear, if dauntingly vast in scope; as are those of his work in the theatre, in opera and in films.
But much of Auden’s output of prose remains, for most readers, terra incognita. Aside from the inner drive to create something “every day”, Auden wrote copiously because he needed the money. After an early stint as a schoolteacher, he never held a steady, long-term job, not even in a university, and never taught so much as a semester of creative writing. The price of such independence for Auden, especially once the spendthrift Chester Kallman came on board, was a very close relationship with his typewriter: he once wrote about his study: “from the Olivetti portable, / the dictionaries (the very / best money can buy), the heaps of paper, it is evident / what must go on”. Yet very little of what Auden wrote can be discounted as hack-work. The prose as a whole is remarkable, full of fresh ideas and commanding yet eccentric speculations and intuitions. When it becomes readily accessible in its full extent, it will surely alter preconceptions about Auden. s.
A second factor inhibiting an overall assessment of Auden is his strong evolutionary urge as an artist. When his father wrote to him, in 1939, that he preferred Wystan’s old poems to the new, he wrote in reply: “The writer’s problem is that of everyone: how to go on growing the whole of his life, because to stop growing is to die”. And in 1946 he insisted to an audience in New York that a “major poet is always willing to risk failure, to look for a new rhetoric”. His subject on that occasion was Shakespeare, but Auden was also thinking about his own career. The will to change, to find “a new rhetoric”, was so strong in him that there is in fact something almost eerily provisional about his poetic self. Auden was, in effect, several different poets working under a single name. To make a general point about his work as a whole is almost inevitably to mischaracterize at least some of those “Audens”. The poet who brought the television set, the sick joke and the word “sexy” into poetry for the first time, Auden was the master of the diagnostic, Arnoldian, authoritatively vatic voice. But he was also the major dismantler of “His Majesty King Ego” and that poetic voice’s pretensions to power over its audience. This anti-authoritarian thrust, which included attacks on his own authority as a poet, is clear in his elegy for the “silly” Yeats, who in Auden’s poem lies semi-delirious, not surrounded like Cuchulain by the onrushing sea and the whirrings of his heroic sword, but instead – a rich, half-conscious bourgeois – confusingly impinged on by “nurses and rumours” as he dies in his bed. Auden was a public poet, capable of writing an ode which could link our private “fears” with the continental crisis of a civil war; but he was also the poet who opened up for male writers, in “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”, the domestic and homely sphere in poetry. In this sequence, written in the early 1960s, there is a poem for almost every room in his Austrian farmhouse: though here, as often with Auden, a silence is filled with meaning – there is no mention of Chester Kallman’s bedroom.
Added to Auden’s enormous output and his protean qualities as a poet is the fact that his interests range so widely. (His work is far more diverse intellectually than – for example – that of Ezra Pound; The Cantos present themselves as encyclopedic, but make virtually no reference to the most prestigious culture of the modern world – science.) Even after the publication of John Fuller’s indispensable W. H. Auden: A Commentary (1998), with its tracking of allusions to subjects as disparate as the Abdication crisis of 1936 and the Zulu Empire, there is still much basic information which is unknown about Auden’s life, his studies and writing. Fuller says drily at the start of his book, “there are limits to one man’s understanding of such a polymath as Auden”. What is more, Auden’s life, both in mental and physical terms, was an extraordinarily mobile one. It is often still not easy to determine where he was when, whom he met where, what he was reading, and so on. With two passports, at various points he had long-term homes in five countries: England, Germany, the USA, Italy and Austria. He made twenty-nine separate journeys that lasted more than two months; twenty-six of those lasted more than five months, blurring the meaning, especially in his later years, of home and abroad, domestic and foreign, here and there.
In addition, Auden’s homosexuality helped to enforce the social mobility and unpredictability which he thought essential to his freedom as a writer. Thus, in the United States, Auden was able to move back and forth between vastly disparate worlds, from the ultra-stolid milieu of the British Embassy in Washington, to the golden craziness of the international operatic and ballet elites, to the seedy fertility of the East Village underground scene, rubbing shoulders with Christians, poets and cocksuckers alike. Auden’s social reach in the 1960s could take in Dag Hammarskjöld and Hannah Arendt at one end, and – crossing by way of people such as Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara – murky figures like the convicted Canadian thief named Coney Burns at the other. Burns had come across an Auden poem in an anthology in the prison library and wrote to the poet. Their friendly exchange of letters about literary and ethical matters continued even after Burns had escaped (temporarily) from prison and was on the lam.
Social ambiguity has been compounded by an only slow-fading reticence about Auden’s love-life. This means that it has only recently become possible to discuss directly in print, or even to name, Michael Yates (1919–2001), who was a schoolboy of thirteen when the twenty-six-year-old Auden fell in love with him in the summer of 1933, and whom scholars have had to refer to by such periphrases as “the person who is the subject of the poem ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love’”. Nothing substantial about Auden’s and Yates’s relationship, or on its bearing for Auden’s poems has yet appeared.
“Lay your sleeping head, my love”, written in January 1937, is one of the century’s most famous lyrics. Many of its key phrases come directly from W. B. Yeats: the “living creature” from “The Poet Pleads with the Elemental Powers”; “the entirely beautiful” from “A Prayer for My Daughter”; and the “stroke of midnight” from “Broken Dreams”. The poem’s final cadence comes from Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Son”. The latter poem ends with thoughts about “A woman and a man” protecting Yeats’s sleeping son “till the danger past, / With human love”; Auden’s poem, also about a sleeping boy, ends: “Nights of insult let you pass / Watched by every human love”. “A Prayer for My Son” also provides the note of anxiety about the beloved’s future. Auden writes more delicately, but still in strikingly threatened terms, about the loss of “Certainty, fidelity”, about “fashionable madmen” and those “Nights of insult”. (No doubt the sense of havoc and uncertainty in Europe in the mid-1930s – with, in H. A. L. Fisher’s words, “one emergency following upon another, as wave follows upon wave” – accounts for the note of trepidation in Auden’s poem.) The poem addressed by an adult to a sleeping child is a traditional scenario, of course, and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is another example to which Auden’s lyric seems to allude. But Yeats’s rhetoric in Auden’s poem seems to crowd out more distant references. Poets often make cryptic play with the names of their lovers – Yeats did it, for example, in “Fallen Majesty”, where he imagines himself the sole surviving witness to the glory of what was Maud Gonne: “this hand alone . . . records what’s gon[n]e”. Here Auden matches, with identical last words, Yeats’s poem about “my Michael”, Michael Yeats (who died in Ireland recently), with a poem about his own homophonically identical Michael Yates. The identity of the sleeper in Auden’s poem had to remain veiled; but the love that dared not speak its beloved’s name in 1937 could at least whisper it through the language of parallelism and allusion.
As well as using Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Son” to cipher Michael Yates’s name into his own poem, Auden invokes it to explore the similarities and differences of his own case to that of a father and son. When “Lay your sleeping head, my love” was written, Auden was nearly thirty, Yates sixteen. Auden’s feelings for his lover surely included a sense of protectiveness which we conventionally but limitingly associate with the feeling of parents for their children. And, indeed, in the only public statement that Yates ever made about his relationship with Auden, evidently embarrassed, he chose the parent-child analogy, while acknowledging its obvious lack of a perfect fit:
There was this considerable affection, you know, which I had for him too in a way. I suppose you could use the word “son”, but that wasn’t quite his feeling.
This is the point of Auden’s inserted “every” in the final line of his poem: “Watched by every human love”, including, that is, not just the love of parents for their children but the socially unsanctioned love of a man for a boy half his age. Many of the important and more “subversive” meanings of Auden’s lyric come from its juxtaposed relation to Yeats’s poem. But because Michael Yates’s relation to Auden was only recently made public, no one has previously linked “A Prayer for My Son” and “Lay your sleeping head, my love”.
Among other crucial episodes in Auden’s life, almost nothing has yet been published about his meetings with anarchists in Spain in 1937, or his visit to Nazi Berlin in January 1939. Such events matter, not because the life somehow authenticates the poetry, but because knowledge of them often clarifies some of the deeper structures of his poems. Thus, Auden’s poem Spain is, as critics have frequently remarked, at war with itself, pulling in two directions at once. But why? Because the international Left was at war with itself about how to respond to Franco’s uprising in Spain. Auden’s poem dramatizes that being in two minds: the communist centralizing drive towards a single poetic message, a “mando único” of “to-day”, conflicts with an anarchistic, centrifugal, image-based enactment of poetic libertad “to-morrow”. Auden’s, and the Left’s, experiences of Spain are formalized as two contending modes of organizing the poem. But without knowledge of his actual meetings both with orthodox Party members and with dissident anarchists on the Aragon Front, this far-reaching but stylized account of the “struggle” on the Republican side is hard to explain.
Another difficulty we face is that “Auden” now means so many different things to different people. In The Changing Light at Sandover, again, James Merrill captures Auden’s characteristic shape-shifting by having him surface in the afterlife sporting a “NEW PROLE BODY”. And in terms of literary influence all sorts of writers have found something in him to follow. For example, the young Derek Walcott was introduced to Auden’s work on the little island of St Lucia by the poet and educator James Rodway, who owned a collection of Faber books of poetry. “I remember, during that period, reading Auden with a tremendous amount of elation, a lot of excitement, and discovery”, Walcott has recollected. “I think Auden actually dared a lot more than either Pound or Eliot. I think his intellect was far more adventurous, far braver, far stronger, and far more reckless than either of them – plus, of course, there was also that tremendous intelligence behind the poetry.” Echoes of Auden are everywhere in Walcott’s own early poems. And when Walcott compiled and published his first book of poetry, 25 Poems, in 1949, he indicated how much those Faber volumes meant to him. His biographer explains that he “used a Faber volume of Auden as the typographical model . . . . He wanted a typeface that looked like one of the Faber volumes”.
Auden’s impact on poetry extended outside the English language. Auden became, in the 1940s and after, the poet of a deliberately willed uprootedness; he turned himself into the first great poet of that most symptomatic of all social groups in the modern world: those who will not or cannot go home. Correspondingly, his works have slipped back and forth across cultural and linguistic borders. The young Yehuda Amichai served in the all-volunteer “Palestinian Brigade” in the British Army during the Second World War, and was stationed in Egypt. There he somehow picked up a Faber anthology of modern poetry, and was deeply affected by what he saw as the wryness and unpoetical flatness of Auden’s work. It encouraged him to explore the use of a Hebrew deprived of traditional rhetorical flourishes and melitzah (melody or sweetness). Although he had grown up speaking German and wrote his poems in Hebrew, Amichai told an interviewer around 1980 that “he was most influenced not by the German poets, as one would expect, but by English poet W. H. Auden”.
But to think of Auden’s influence in merely literary terms is to place an unnatural limit on the ways in which his works have travelled through culture. Like Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath, Auden is a poet with “reach” – a figure of international stature within the realm of literature, but at the same time read by people who do not normally read much, or any, poetry. Even during his lifetime he was “scattered among a hundred cities”, where readers often made sense of their lives, and on occasion their likely deaths, through his words.
A young mathematician named David Haden Guest, serving in the International Brigades in Spain, wrote to his old tutor in England in July 1938, and cited the most famous phrase from Auden’s poem about the civil war to justify his own involvement in it:
I have myself a lively and intense desire to explore whole fields of theoretical work, mathematical, physical, logical, and far beyond these when the conditions for this will become again possible. But, of course, this is not possible now. “Today the struggle”.
There were only a few more “todays” for Haden Guest: he was killed by a sniper at the Battle of the Ebro later that month. Faced with his work’s implication in stories such as this, it is no wonder that Auden was desperate to believe, probably against all his deeper instincts, that “poetry makes nothing happen”.
Ian McEwan was thus spot on when he made Robbie Turner, one of the central figures in Atonement, keep on his bookshelves a talismanic copy of Auden’s Poems (1930) and an autographed copy of The Dance of Death (1933). During the disaster of Dunkirk, the text which Robbie carries into “the storm of approaching German armour” is a London Mercury clipping of Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, folded together with a letter from his lover in the top pocket of his uniform, near his heart. Auden’s poem becomes the explanatory voice of the fictional character’s experience. While Robbie watches the detonations lighting up the sky, he remembers lines from the poem (he has them literally by heart): “In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark”.
More positively, Auden once claimed that the “nicest poetic compliment” he ever received came in 1957 when his friend the Catholic activist Dorothy Day was arrested and held at what was then called the “House of Detention for Women” at the corner of 6th Avenue and West 10th Street in Manhattan. She told him that as the women prisoners were marched down for their weekly shower, a prostitute recited the last line of Auden’s poem “First Things First” (which had recently appeared in the New Yorker): “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water”. “When I heard this”, Auden commented, not wholly ironically, “I knew I hadn’t written in vain!” Such moments testify to the ways in which a readership actually uses (rather than just reads) a writer’s work.
Auden’s language can seem as if it has worked its way like a gas into every cranny of modern culture. His libretti, with Kallman, for Britten, Stravinsky, Henze aside, there are innumerable “classical” settings of Auden’s poetry all the way from Benjamin Britten’s and Lennox Berkeley’s early works in the 1930s, and Elizabeth Lutyens’s and Leonard Bernstein’s in the 1940s onwards to the present. Although Auden came to be associated with the “high” world of opera, he drew on popular song lyrics, such as those of Cole Porter, in his own poetry. Now his writing has cycled back into the world of pop. For instance, Michael Bracewell, calling on Auden’s “sexual difference, residence in pre-War Europe and a fascination with the glamour of science and technology”, has even identified him as the “grandfather of the robot dandys” of early 1980s synthpop such as Gary Numan, Kraftwerk and The Human League. More recently, the former fashion diva Carla Bruni released an album, No Promises, which features an Auden-scripted song “Lady Weeping at the Crossroads”; and the singer Lois has a number called “A Summer Long”, which includes the lines: “‘Nights of insult let you pass / Watched by every human love’ / That’s the page that I tore out / And pasted to the wall above”. (The quoted lines are “torn” from “Lay your sleeping head, my love”.) These stray examples suggest how pervasively Auden’s work is now a part of the cultural weather of our time.
Two recent events added peculiar impetus and width to the “scattering” of Auden. When the Princess of Wales was killed in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997, many British people gave themselves over to unprecedented expressions of communal grief. Great mounds of cut flowers appeared all over London, especially outside Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace; and according to one report, there were cards from “every corner of the globe”, including, “inevitably, lines from W. H. Auden, immortalized in Four Weddings and a Funeral” (the 1994 film in which the John Hannah character recited Auden’s “Funeral Blues” – “Stop all the clocks”, etc. – over his lover’s coffin). In the following days, that poem seemed to be everywhere.
Discussing arrangements for the funeral, a leader in The Times recalled a great poem written for a state funeral, Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington”, but concluded that a different tone was wanted now: “Not Tennyson’s pomp and circumstance but Auden’s sad lines . . . strike the right note”. Since then, the poem has been recited at tens of thousands of private funeral services across Britain. In this case, too, Auden would surely have felt that he had not “written in vain”.
The public response to Auden’s “Funeral Blues” was remarkable. But the mass recourse to his “September 1, 1939” four years later was even more striking. Though Auden more than once disowned it as “trash” or a “damned lie” or “infected with an incurable dishonesty”, this intensely dramatic poem had already enjoyed a long public life. It is one of those very rare poems, like Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, which re-enters history to become itself an event.
Auden published the poem in a periodical in 1939 and in his book Another Time in 1940. Almost immediately it was circulating in the Anglo-American cultural bloodstream. The April 6, 1940 issue of a Communist newsletter called Report to Our Colleagues, probably written by J. Robert Oppenheimer (later to become the “father” of the Atomic Bomb), attacked Roosevelt, argued against American participation in the European war, and had a quotation from Auden’s poem as its epigraph. A year later, the popular British novelist Robert Westerby published Hunger Allows No Choice, a title culled from the eighth stanza of “September 1, 1939”. Indeed, the poem has been a fruitful source of titles for many other authors: for W. Michael Reisman’s Folded Lies (1979), an exploration of corruption and bribery, as well as Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart (1985); for Madelon Powers’s Faces Along the Bar (1998), a cheery history of saloons, as well as Allen Weinstein’s The Haunted Wood (1999), a fevered history of Soviet espionage, and, inevitably, Robert G. L. Waite’s The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1977). Some phrases from the poem have done double service: David Patterson has published The Affirming Flame: Religion, language, literature (1988), and Maurice S. Friedman The Affirming Flame: A poetics of meaning (1999). From Lyndon Johnson to Dan Quayle, presidents and presidential candidates, or their speechwriters, have similarily ransacked the poem for nuggets of rhetoric. (With the uses of his earlier poem in mind, Auden condemned, in “Ode to a Terminus”, 1968, “all / self-proclaimed poets who, to wow an / audience, utter some resonant lie”.)
On or around September 11, 2001, however, “September 1, 1939” began a quite new chapter in its existence. As people sought to come to terms with the events of that day, the usually marginal genre of poetry became very popular; and this watershed poem of Auden’s in particular felt uncannily fresh, as if somehow it had been written after, and about, the event which it preceded by more than sixty years. What might be called the first poem of the Second World War was taken up on what seems like the threshhold of another period of global conflict. The more formal manifestations of the poem’s revival might have been predictable: it was read at impromptu memorials by Adrienne Rich and Paul Muldoon and others. But the poem was suddenly meaningful not just to literary readers, to politically engaged citizens of the Right and Left, or to newscasters and pundits, but also to “ordinary” people. It worked temporarily as Dr Johnson said Gray’s “Elegy” did, as a poem which “abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo”.
On September 18, 2001, Eric McHenry posted an article about Auden’s poem on Slate’s “Culturebox” section. McHenry’s piece was titled by the Slate editors “Auden on Bin Laden”. It began:
Last Wednesday I e-mailed W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” to members of my family. Two days later a friend e-mailed it to me, having received it from another friend who was circulating it. On Saturday my mother told me that Scott Simon had read portions of it on NPR. And Monday my wife, a prep school teacher, saw it lying on the faculty photocopy machine.
The poem also began to emerge in the discursive hinterland of the Web, the newsgroups. In one typical instance, after another person had posted some of Auden’s lines to express her feelings about what happened on September 11, “Ilene B”, a correspondent to a newsgroup for people without children, commented on September 13:
I’m reminded of the beginning of the Gulf War. I was working nights at an AIDS hospice, and had just joined the Army Medical Reserves. I was hanging around the hospice kitchen, taking a break from CNN. Someone had handwritten, framed and posted the Auden poem, “September 1, 1939”. I just kept reading the line, “We must love each other or die”. It was very poignant.
On September 17, 2001, “G*rd*n”, posting to alt.society.anarchy, wrote:
I went into the city today to see what the 21st century looks like. There were cops, firemen, construction types, generator trailers, dust and ashes everywhere – not very pretty. I learned that “the unmentionable odour of death” is not always a metaphor.
“September 1, 1939” seemed, as one post on another site put it, “Better words than I can summon . . . to describe the sense of dread most people feel right now”. And the poem has since become redefined, at least for now, as a “peace text”. At a march in Adelaide, South Australia, in February 2003, to protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq, a placard read: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return. / W. H. AUDEN”.
Auden as prophet; Auden as thinker; Auden as activist; Auden as comforter – all these figures were alive in people’s minds in recent years. The words of “September 1, 1939” have been appropriated by speechwriters; xeroxed and distributed by political dissidents; hung up in an AIDS hospice kitchen; intoned on the radio; photo
copied in prep schools; displayed at the close of a TV news show; posted on a thousand websites. All these scenes and moments evoke the ways and contexts in which poems gain and lose meaning, get re-read, re-thought and re-deployed. They are instances of the infinitely diverse and circumstantial routes by which a piece of writing moves through a culture.
But what if you want, not to pore over the sum of different readings of Auden, but instead to get back to the source, to Auden’s poetry in its own historical moment? How easy is that? Auden’s own late, neurotic obsession with revising his poetry is well-known. Edward Mendelson has steadfastly maintained that the elder Auden knew what he was doing when he reworked earlier poems. But most readers think the opposite: that precisely because Auden was such a metamorphic poet, he found it almost impossible to work himself back into the inspirational mood or to re-experience the historical pressures bearing on a poem’s composition. The general verdict has been that almost everything of the young poet’s which the old poet touched with his blue biro turned to ash. But in returning to the “original” versions of poems such as “Spain” or “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, perhaps we of the majority persuasion have congratulated ourselves on our own good judgement too soon. Auden seems to lose every skirmish over earlier and later versions of the same poem. But to an unacknowledged degree, he has consistently been winning the larger interpretive war. As Auden turns 100, it is thus striking to see how lastingly successful the later Auden, and a few literary friends, have been in establishing the basic outlines of his career and work.
There is thus the metaphorical issue of his “eyesight”. Later in life Auden came to define himself as a non-visual writer and to make much symbolic play on his personal short-sightedness. Readers have responded by playing down the “visual” qualities of his writing – even though we know him to have been an enthusiastic photographer through the 1930s. The idea of Auden’s un
visual imagination begins with the first and most potent of all the Auden mythographers, Christopher Isherwood. In Lions and Shadows (1938), the first description offered of the very young “Weston” is that his “normal expression was the misleadingly ferocious frown common to people with very short sight”; and many years later when Isherwood re-encounters Weston he finds “his small pale yellow eyes . . . screwed painfully together in the same short-sighted scowl”.
Until Lions and Shadows appeared, Auden’s poetry had been characterized by the critics as marked by clarity, “hardness”, stark imagery, striking details. The reviews of Look, Stranger! (1936) refer repeatedly to Auden’s visual power. Dilys Powell saluted his poetry’s “ability to surprise and excite by its images and metaphors”, praising one poem as “a piece of precise description”. F. R. Leavis, in the course of an extremely hostile review, acknowledged “those striking and so characteristic phrases and images”. And Janet Adam Smith highlighted the way in which Auden’s “hoard” of “phrases, gestures, actions” are always enough to provide “him with the effective word and image”.
As far as I have been able to establish, Auden made only two references to his being short-sighted in all the time between March 1922, when he took up poetry at the age of fifteen, and March 1941. It seems as if the myth about the literary significance of Auden’s short sight was created by Isherwood (eager, of course, to monopolize the “camera aesthetic” for his own writing) in Lions and Shadows, and then taken up by Auden and others. In March 1938, Geoffrey Grigson, one of Auden’s great supporters, reviewed Isherwood’s book enthusiastically, calling it “a reference and key book of the Auden Age and the Auden Circle”. Less than a year later, when Grigson picked a public quarrel with Auden over the latter’s advocacy of the paintings of William Coldstream, he used ammunition that Isherwood had put in his hands. Aside from rubbishing Coldstream, Grigson attacked “short-sighted” Auden for daring to have such an opinion about art when “he has many of the most sensitive and visually expert persons in England against him in this business”.
In a way that is not untypical of the masochistic streak in his persona, Auden began to think creatively about the implications of his “deficiency” of short-sightedness only after it had been highlighted for him, thrust in his face if you like, by Isherwood and Grigson. From the early 1940s on, it was something that he started to emphasize. At a banquet at Yale in 1941, Auden criticized “our distrust of language and mathematics, those two great instruments by which we relate the particular to the universal, fact to pattern, our fear of making children learn by heart, our indulgence of the visual sense, as exemplified by Life Magazine”. A week or so later he was telling Stephen Spender that “I unfortunately lack your great gifts of sensual perception but they are not in my nature and I shall never have them”. Spender subsequently described his first meeting with Auden in World Within World (the meeting occurred in 1928; the book was written in the late 1940s) in something like Isherwood’s terms: “Auden, after having cast a myopic, clinically appraising glance in my direction, did not address a word to me”. Recounting his first visit to Auden’s rooms in Christ Church, Spender again focused on the eyes: “He had almost albino hair and weakly pigmented eyes set closely together, so that they gave the impression of watchfully squinting”. Spender prided himself, not unjustly, on the sensory immediacy of his poetry. And consciously or not, this description of his friend makes Auden deficient in the area in which he himself was strongest. In this way, his own poetry’s character was differentiated and protected from the encroachments of Auden’s altogether more potent literary persona.
From these promptings, critics have come almost programmatically to play down the often remarkable “visual” aspect of Auden’s early writing. In this they have taken the hint too readily from Isherwood, and from the middle and late Auden, a figure always active, occasionally forgetful and exceptionally adroit at stage-managing critical understandings of his early career. These sly hints and signals by Auden, joined with the images of myopia drawn by Isherwood and Spender, soon became a misleading critical platitude. In the year following Auden’s death, for instance, the critic Geoffrey Thurley spoke (not unapprovingly) of “Auden’s deficiency in local actualization”, commenting that “I seem to remember a famous critic dismissing Auden with the remark that he ‘couldn't pass an optician’s test’; yet in fact Auden’s notorious short-sightedness made a positive contribution to his art”. In his biography of Auden, Humphrey Carpenter writes completely wrongly of the teenage poet that he
had not written many poems like this before he realised he had no real aptitude for noticing the details of nature. He put this down largely to defective sight . . . . In fact, none of his senses seemed to be highly developed; everything had to be scanned by his intellect before he could really become aware of it . . . . He eventually made his lack of sense-perception into a virtue.
Short sight thus became part of the distorting iconography which still defines Auden as a poet indifferent to the outer world, deaf and blind to sensory life, unfeeling, unimaginative – in short, that unappealing freak, an intellectual poet. This is a travesty of his poetry.
One task for readers of Auden’s poetry, then, is to detach his work from the fables and half-truths, many of them originating with Auden, which currently enshroud it. That Auden felt wholly unaffected by the First World War; that he took no interest in politics before he went to Berlin, and had no idea what the 1926 General Strike, in which he briefly drove a car for the TUC, was about; that he read Freud while at school; that he was a supremely self-confident individual; that he never had dreams; and that he identified strongly with his mother, and not with his father; all these shibboleths can be traced back to the writings of the later Auden and such carefully indiscreet friends and allies as Spender and Isherwood, both of whom had a stake in creating a particular myth of him. None of them is actually true.
In the same way, we have more generally to re-address the question of his early politics. Doubtless in the 1930s Auden believed himself to be a well-meaning “bourgeois” and a “selfish pink old Liberal”, leaning further left than right. But whatever Auden does not speak of, we cannot pass over in silence. Again and again, Auden’s poetry in the 1930s swings towards writing about England or Britain as a blessed enclave momentarily exempt from the terrifying pressures of history, both literally and figuratively an island. And within England, Auden’s imagination often sought out further nests or retreats, places protected, for example, by the “creepered wall” of “this English house” which shuts out threatening “multitudes”; immured in “gardens where we feel secure” and, “gentle, do not care to know, / Where Poland draws her eastern bow”.
Up to the year 1936, the young Auden generated poems of intense feeling by putting a small, tightly-knit group of friends in such sheltered spaces. Here Auden and others hoped that a new, more modest, modern and humane national character – uncontaminated by the nation’s escapades during the delirium induced by capitalism, militarism, industrialism and imperialism – might emerge. If there was less of a certain kind of left-leaning politics in Auden’s poetry in the early 1930s, that does not mean that there was no politics at all. A good clue to the political solutions he envisaged is given by the frequency of the words “England” or “English” in these poems: as when he writes about “our English land” (in “Get there if you can . . .”), or the “English earth” (in The Orators, an “English study”), “the English heart” (in “In the year of my youth . . .”), or “the English cell” (in Part Two of “A Happy New Year”).
Auden’s voice coalesced in the early 1930s, a period which witnessed what one commentator describes as a moment in which the “anglicization of Continental styles and values was being openly contested by a militant cultural nationalism”. In this context, some readers saw Auden not as an anglicized version of Bertolt Brecht or Ernst Toller but as – deep down – a dangerously right-wing writer. This view was not limited to those committed socialists who bemoaned Auden’s bourgeois eccentricity and artistic individualism. The liberal Isaiah Berlin, for example, wrote to a friend in 1935 that “it is as though Auden, fundamentally a patriotic poet, writes most eloquently when vaguely fascist, & conscientiously has to transfer this to the enemy because people he respects are all left-wing”. Berlin’s statement seems extreme, but it is true to say that the young Auden in his verse was “fundamentally a patriotic poet” in the early 1930s, albeit one who did not lapse into a crude or explicit chauvinism.
In Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), Peter Bürger located the rise of the avant-garde in Europe, with its mandate to re-integrate the arts and society, in the late 1910s, with the advent of Dadaism and the art of montage. His field of reference is insistently, and perhaps parochially, Germanic. In an Anglo-American context, the moment came later and from the right, in the 1930s, when writers such as Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Auden sought to close the gap between art and everyday life. With that attempt came hopes that poets would regain some of the prophetic authority they had lost since the Enlightenment. In a country traumatized by her war losses, by class strife, economic malaise, and cultural pessimism, Auden imagined that his poetry would play a regenerative role; he aspired, without turning poetry into “agit-prop”, to make it instrumental, diagnostic and curative again.
And Auden’s poetry did play that role, for some people, if only imaginatively. We have already seen how Anthony Haden Guest used Auden’s poetry to justify his own involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Another instance of Auden’s charismatic relation to his audience is that of Charles Madge (later to become an important British sociologist), who had been suffering from a debilitating spinal disease which forced him to lie flat on his back for long periods. He describes in his poem “Letter to the Intelligentsia” (1933) the symbolically uplifting effect of this new poetry:
But there waited for me in the summer
morning,
Auden, fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew
And all the world’s stationary things
In silence moved to take up new positions.
Madge casts himself as a cerebral Lazarus, raised from the dead by the curing power of Auden’s work.
Like the later T. S. Eliot, Auden in the early years of his career attempted to write the poetry of revived and redefined Englishness, of life in small, rural and often same-sex collectives in the southern half of the country, where he hoped a revitalization of the national spirit might take place. (One such site was The Downs School, at the foot of Elgars’s Malverns, where Auden met Michael Yates.) This was the world of poems such as “Out on the lawn I lie in bed” and “Look, stranger, on this island now”, the time when Auden referred to himself as a “Little Englander” and began to conceive of his own mind as a map of the national psyche, believing that the symbols he instinctively gravitated towards in his poems were “national emblems”.
Auden, then, was a “patriotic poet”, a celebrant of a closed, predominantly male, English Gemeinschaft, and one who believed that contact with England was an essential precondition of his inspiration. Wyndham Lewis, one of the younger Auden’s favourite authors, wrote in 1927:
To be “young” is to be in impulsive “revolt”: so a youth-movement must be a “radical” movement, it is felt. But the most characteristic, and the most admirable, “youth-movements” in Europe to-day are not at all “radical”, but quite the reverse . . . Europe has had the lessons of War and Revolution burnt into it.
This was, to a marked degree, true of Auden and the writers gathered round him. But far from being a socialist or left-leaning liberal as is usually assumed, Auden, as a few of his readers noticed, was something much more like an idealistic, lyric nationalist. In the early 1930s Auden privately went so far as to acknowledge a “tendency to National Socialism” in an English context, and he longed for what he called in one poem “an eternal tie” with his nation, with the “island”.
Modernity’s three great ideological inventions have been communism, fascism and nationalism. Fascism collapsed in 1945. Communism crumbled across most of the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But in a multiplicity of different forms, nationalism, the oldest of the three, has proved the most durable. In the words of one scholar, it is the “single red line” that “traverses the history of the modern world from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the Berlin Wall”. As such, the phenomenon of “nation-ness”, reaching as deeply into our lives as a sexual or religious identity, cannot be judged by moral criteria alone: the nation-state and the collective solidarity promoted by nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s are historical facts. And so it is with Auden’s lyric nationalism. By reorienting discussion of his politics away from the left-right axis on to the ground of nationalism and its opposites, it becomes clear that, early and late, one of the fundamental features of Auden’s poetry is its engagement with, first, national belonging, and then with the consequences of disaffiliation from national ties. It was because Auden began his career as a poetic nationalist that he could later reach for a “new rhetoric” and evolve into the most important cosmopolitan poet of the century.
Schlegel called the historian “a prophet looking backwards”. If we want to know who Auden will be in his second century, the best thing we can do is return to his cultural origins, to the world in which, a hundred years ago, he began. It was a world of virulent nationalisms, of strong collective bonds to class and country, and one in which the precondition of gaining a reputation as a “great” poet was to be recognized as a “national voice”. The next hundred years of Auden’s work should start, then, not with a candid appraisal of his virtues or vices, as Auden himself attempted in “My Epitaph”, nor of his “ideas”, but with a fresh account, free from the thrall of the older man’s self-conceptions and impositions, of why Auden’s poetry took the forms and themes it did – then on that island.
