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W.H.AUDEN POEMS 2 VOLS 1927-39, 1940-73
Edited by Edward Mendelson
ISBN 978-0-691-21929-5 & 978-0-691-21930-1
Princeton
Edward Mendelson is rightly praised for his excellent editing of
these two volumes. The endnotes come to some five hundred or more
pages. There is little any Auden scholar or enthusiast could lack.
All poets, even the so-called minor, should receive such diligence
because having all the work in one place ( or two to be pedantic) is
the best way to get to the heart of a poet, to see him or her in
context and to understand both development and unevenness.
Auden wrote a great deal, probably too much. His most famous poem,
now, is probably Funeral Blues; such is popular culture. It’s
a well-composed poem whose five-stanza version was written for
The Ascent of F6. The subsequent four-stanza iteration is the
established one. Auden was approached by a certain Miss Boyd
(nothing is known of her) for poems she might include in a
children’s anthology. Auden sent her this one, and Nonsense Song.
That doesn’t imply it’s a poem for children, but suggests he thought
it suitable. He was thirty when he wrote it. Its absolutism is
somewhat adolescent and would appeal to children. The death of a
loved one is an absolute loss, but loss is accepted more readily
by the mature mind. The poem is achieved but has a hint of
Auden’s characteristic display of virtuosity. He was known for
welcoming challenges to write in a particular form, with specified
lexis on a given topic.
Reading the entirety of his work, brings this into focus. Auden had
no compelling reason to write, in the sense that, say, Lawrence did
(Auden calls Lawrence “woozy”). He rightly recognised himself as
bourgeois: his sensibility was formed in upper-middle-class
circumstances, private school and Oxford. There was nothing he could
do about it. The fellow-travelling of the thirties was shallow and
produced no fundamentally authentic poetry. Embracing an ideology is
easy. Changing your sensibility a very different challenge. Not that
Auden was insincere: throughout his work there is a dislike of
tyranny and injustice and a consistent compassion; but he simply
didn’t share the sensibility of working people. Nor, of course, did
the Communist Party nor the originator of communism. Auden was
honest in acknowledging that he was a product of his circumstances
and needed to be true to what he was. Yet what he was deprived him
of a passionate motivation as a writer.
Lawrence was always kicking against the pricks. His sensibility was
genuinely working-class. He was always the Bert Lawrence of 8a
Victoria Street. As a child, his was deeply wounded by his parents’
low social status and the failure of their marriage (much is made of
his mother’s middle-class origins, but she married into the
working-class). Lawrence said he laboured at one task: to show that
sexual love wasn’t a
dirty secret; but what was also bubbling away in his work was a
visceral dislike of industrial capitalism. Auden had nothing of the
same kind. Nor did he have Jane Austen’s obsession with choice of
marital partners, or Tolstoy’s need to shake off his origins and
find a simpler, truer form of life, nor Wordsworth’s will to write
in the language of the common people. He was comfortable,
academically successful, accepted as a writer easily and early. He
had a talent for a certain kind of writing, but nothing urgent to
drive him to his desk. Not even the rise of fascism disturbed him as
it did Brecht. He opposed it, to his credit, unlike the demented
Pound, but nothing seems to have troubled him to the point that he
had to write about it. Rather, his work has, almost from beginning
to end, the sense of an exercise in poetry.
This is at its most obvious in pieces like Night Mail,
another very famous example which many schoolchildren were once
required to learn. Auden was employed by the General Post Office
Film Unit from September 1935 and the poem was a commission, or it
might even be argued, part of his contract. It’s clever and charming
and a good example of construction to put before children. Yet its
obviously written to order. Such work always has a duteous feel
which is distinct from the aura of inevitability which inheres in
what is written from an irresistible inner impulse.
Much of Auden’s early poetry is derivative of Hardy. He was frank
about this, advising
young poets to follow his example and imitate a good but not great
poet. Hardy wrote some two thousand poems. Irving Howe chose two
dozen as the core. Perhaps in selecting Hardy as his mentor, Auden
was heading in the same direction: huge output but a small body of
really fine pieces. Maybe too by selecting a writer born in 1840 and
therefore steeped in Victorian mentality, Auden incorporated a
retrospective tone in his writing. Apollinaire was born twenty-seven
years earlier, yet his work seems much more attuned to the potential
democratic sensibility of the twentieth century. Auden’s mother was
thirty-eight when he born, his father thirty-five. His upbringing
must have had a significantly Victorian feel. Auden’s poems often
feel at home in this atmosphere of professional, responsible, but
staid late nineteenth century middle-class conformism.
Poem XII of the early poems was written on 20th April
1930, when the world was in a bad way in the wake of the Wall St
Crash. It mentions G.G.Newman, the clergyman Auden has his first
sexual experience with while at St Edmund’s School. He left at
thirteen so this was paedophilia. Auden himself was almost certainly
a paedophile: on his appointment to a private school teaching post
he wrote to a friend it was “a paradise for buggers”. Sexual abuse
was taken for granted in English private schools, an inevitable
right of passage.
Lawrence, Blake and |Homer Lane, once healers in our
English land:
he writes in the same piece. Lawrence was recently dead (2nd
March). It’s interesting Auden sees these three as “healers”.
Elsewhere he described Lawrence as “dangerous”. There is nothing of
Blake’s visionary feel in Auden, nor of Lawrence’s faith in blood
intelligence. Lane, who believed children flourish if given autonomy
and who influenced A.S. Neill, founded the Little Commonwealth
School, Dorset which he was forced to leave after allegations of
sexual abuse from two sixteen-year-old girls. Auden is an
essentially cerebral writer, almost a philosopher in verse. Yet here
he champions men who distrust the intellect to some degree, or at
least claim to. Perhaps he embraces them because he senses they
possess an elemental capacity he lacks. The choice of Lane was
unfortunate. He was never prosecuted and the allegations may have
been malicious, but doubt remains.
In Prothalamion Auden writes:
The last line isn’t ironic. Perhaps it’s intended as a joke, but if
so it betrays insensitivity. Auden appears to see sexual abuse as
part of the natural order, sufficiently for him to include this line
in a poem celebrating a forthcoming marriage. Isn’t it very odd that
anyone would want a reference to sexual abuse in poetry wishing them
well in marriage?
In part II of The Orators there is:
from the death-will of the Jews
The first version was published in 1932. Hitler was not yet
Chancellor but was well on his way and his anti-Semitism had been
clearly declared in 1919. Did Auden genuinely believe in a Jewish
death-will or is this tongue-in-cheek? Is he poking oblique fun at
Nazi doctrine? It’s difficult to arrive at a definitive
interpretation, but to favour the latter is the generous response.
Yet the ambiguity is present. Auden complained of his early work,
Paid On Both Sides for example, that it was just too obscure.
The obscurity thins out in the later work but never truly
evaporates, probably because of his academic training and an
enduring sense that he was writing for professors and critics.
Part IV of The Orators gives us Auden’s view of the British
working-class:
Fitters and moulders,
He follows this with an equally derisive view of the upper-class:
cautious, hypocritical, lifeless, manipulative. This section is
asking how to escape from the mess the world was in and the above
passage is in essence a dismissal of the glib idea that the workers
can offer a solution. Yet it goes a little further. The voice isn’t
necessarily Auden’s. He’s engaging in a bit of ventriloquy. Yet if
there is an underlying request for sympathy for working people,
there is also here a ready caricature. The writing lacks sufficient
irony to indicate satire. Perhaps this view of the majority came
easily to Auden because he was raised in it. Not many people in
private schools or Oxbridge in the early decades of the twentieth
century thought of the working-class as other than hopeless dunces
who deserved their difficulties.
A Happy New Year
is an eight-page poem written in February 1932. It has two parts,
the first in eight-line stanzas rhyming AABBCDDC and the second in
five-line verses rhyming AABBC and is full of contemporary
references: Harry Lauder, Philip Snowden, Mosley, John Reith, hire
purchase, Keynes. Auden had a real talent for this, and it comes
across as charming and always slightly amused and amusing. It’s a
way of anchoring his poems, and its use may have contributed to his
best work. The obscurity he regretted is in some measure due to the
abstract, philosophical cast of much of his poetry. In the pieces
where he weaves recognisable references he’s tilting towards William
Carlos Williams’s “no idea but in things.” The poem is a slant
survey of Britain, or perhaps the world, as fascism was on the rise
and no obvious answer to the pervading problems was discernible.
It’s subtle and low-key, but interestingly Auden can’t resist a
reference to public school sexual abuse: You beastly rotters,
you’ve made me come. Those beastly rotters went on to run
the country.
There’s a curious tension in Auden’s work between the modern (not
the modernist) and the retrospective. The first of a series of five
poems written in 1933, for example, begins:
Sleep on beside me though I wake for you
The inversion of imperative and the negative adverb in the second
line is noticeably archaic. Is there anything about these lines
which couldn’t have come from the early nineteenth century? It may
be Auden felt trapped: contemporary reality was obviously flawed,
there was little sense of a better future on the way (in 1933 it
looked rather as though the future was refusing to be born), leaving
only nostalgia as an escape.
In The Journalists’ Song, however, written for The Dog
Beneath the Skin in 1935, Auden displays a healthy cynicism
which places him firmly in the present and kicking against its
pricks:
The General Public has no notion
This is a long way from Hardy. It sites Auden amongst the disabused
of the twentieth century who, by definition are discontents and
disturbers (in contradistinction to Larkin who, like Eliot, was
defeated). Auden is accomplished at this kind of tone and it might
be that it produced some of his best work; but he seems to have been
aware that he could get away with it only if it wasn’t
characteristic.
Poem XVIII of On This Island, written in 1932, is in this
vein:
The expert designing the long-range gun
In the same piece he takes aim at journalists, judges, bankers, even
poets. When he’s in this mood, Auden is pushing against the limits
of his bourgeois sensibility, he’s recognising things can’t go on as
they are and is mocking them in order to suggest change.
In the appendix to the first volume is one of what Auden called his
“dark ballads”. Sue tells the story of a fashionable young
woman. It’s typical Auden: sylistically fluent, rhymed with ease,
witty but also somewhat untypically subversive, if gently, though
the ending is tragedy lightened by wryness. Poems of this kind, in
their immediacy and charm, are more memorable than those in which he
tries to rise to a high philosophical level. Perhaps it was the
combination of a test of his poetic ingenuity and a cynic’s view of
modernity which brought out the best in him.
The later work shows Auden loosening up somewhat. Epistle to a
Godson, published in 1972, the year before his death, contains
Shorts 1 and II, a few pages of aphorisms:
Yes, a Society so obsessed with rabid consumption
He’s right. Others made the point before him, of course, Guy Debord
for example; but the language of the old order won’t pass muster for
the effort of ushering in the new. It’s worth noting too that here,
in his late sixties, Auden is dismissing consumer capitalism. The
thirties are well behind him, but freed from political affiliation
he is now genuinely radical; that is, his sensibility has embraced a
rejection of the characteristic form of his society.
On the same page, however, he writes:
Somebody shouted, I read: We are ALL of us
marvelously gifted;
This is humourless and snobbish. Auden puts himself among the gifted
and excludes the majority, but he misunderstands the meaning of the
slogan: we are all gifted with language, for example, we are
creative by biological inheritance. The shout is not intended to say
we are all Shakespeare or Bach, but that even the most ordinary
human gifts are marvellous. That Auden fails to grasp this is
perhaps indicative of the status anxiety of his upbringing.
No, Surrealists, no! No, even the wildest of poems
This has the feel of Auden’s high-Anglican forbears, the sermon
setting the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. It’s slightly
redolent of a Daily Mail editorial or a Tory back-bench rant.
Auden is dismissing Apollinaire. Zone is a seminal
proto-surrealist poem. Is it wild? Isn’t it rather what its author
intended when he coined the term surrealism: not an escape from
reality, but an enhancement of it. A super-reality if you like. It’s
disappointing that six decades after the appearance of one of the
best and most defining poems of the twentieth century, Auden could
slip into such quasi-philistine rejection. What does he mean by
“staid common sense”? Isn’t this typical buttoned-up, English
emotional repression and fear of imagination? Surrealism, both
visual and literary, has made a liberating contribution. Of course,
not all of it is great, but neither is all Greek drama.
City Without Walls
(1969) includes a few pages of marginalia, very akin to the earlier
shorts.
Patriots? Little boys,
It’s ironic that these neat, pertinent forms are very close to the
aphorisms produced by some surrealists. They might almost have
appeared on Parisian walls in 1968. They aren’t remote either from
the imagism Auden disdained as being able to get no further than a
single comparison: A is like B etc. The incisive radicalism of
pieces like this would never have made Auden the reputation he
enjoys. To gain that, he had to play the game. Long, elaborate poems
displaying a range of poetic skills and often with a decent helping
of obscurity were what the establishment would respond to.
Nevertheless, in a dozen words Auden succeeds in puncturing the
bubble of the phoney patriotism which isn’t love of your land and
the people you share it with, but a form of demented egotism which
makes an absolute of temporary arrangements. Auden had an interest
in geology, which makes impermanence obvious. In twenty million
years there will be one continent and the Isles of Great Britain
will have been shoved into Greenland. A huge span of time in human
terms, of course, but in the life of the universe, very brief. Yet
it’s only when we see our life against this backdrop
that we truly get a proper perspective. Auden had this
capacity. It made him curl his lip at strutting power-seekers and
vulgar money-grubbers:
A dead man
Small tyrants, threatened by big,
People sincerely believe all kinds of self-serving twaddle.
If equal affection cannot be,
ends the second stanza of The More Loving One. Like
Funeral Blues (or part of it) and the famous remark about poetry
changing nothing, it’s much quoted. The rest of the poem isn’t about
romantic or erotic love, but the indifference of the universe and
the cruelty of human life:
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
The poem is a call to be courageous enough to be vulnerable. Not the
kind of thing the masters and mistresses of mankind are much
interested in.
In An Island Cemetery from Homage to Clio (1960) Auden
says:
Wherever our personalities go
We do, and did in 1960. They are a product of the activity in our
neurons, when our brains die, our personalities are finished. Auden,
of course, returned to religion, which is fine for personal comfort,
but objectively of little use. It was essentially another facet of
his inability (one we all share) to divest himself of the influences
of his upbringing.
There’s a poem from About The House (1965) -Auden wasn’t
inspired at titles-which is nicely cynical about the poet on tour.
He called it his “lecture tour effusion” and “light verse”. It
begins with a reference to “pelagian travelers”. It isn’t meant as a
compliment and suggests, therefore, Auden didn’t experience much
sense of autonomy. His fellow passengers are Lost on their lewd
conceited way. He recognises the dubious motivation of
travel. The cliché is that is broadens the mind, difficult for
anyone to believe who has seen hordes crowding on cheap flights for
a fortnight in a place where they’ll venture no further than the
pool and the bar and can’t speak the language. Tourism, the world’s
biggest industry, has become so small-minded it’s contributing
significantly to the ruination of the biosphere. Auden may not be
aware of the environmental lunacy of air travel for jollies, but
he’s very uneasy about his status as a public poet being moved
around like a suitcase and expected to perform like a trained
dolphin. Why didn’t he refuse? Presumably because the money was
handy. Yet he is fully cognisant of the meretricious nature of the
business:
Since Merit but a dunghill is,
The collection appeared in the same year as Ginsberg’s famous Albert
Hall reading. Michael Rosen has commented that the American saw
himself as a shaman who hoped his ecstatic performances could shake
his fellow-countrymen free of their adherence to money, power,
violence, racism. It’s doubtful Ginsberg ever had any such far-gone
ambition. He was writing out of his mental disturbance and against
the US’s lousy culture, but he was also enjoying himself and
relishing the fame and adulation. It’s interesting that at the time
readings were being seen as radical, Auden was mocking the sorry
business of the literary star on display. He would rather have been
where he belonged: among his books.
The disillusion of the opening line is much required. A pity it
isn’t as well-known and quoted as the snippets which have entered
the mass mind. The cynicism at work here, the simple seeing through
the tattered excuses of an inexcusable economic and social system,
have been driven to the periphery over the past five decades. Auden
isn’t read by the majority, nor are poems like this likely to be
taught in schools. Everything has to be up-beat. Criticism is
tantamount to terrorism. The suggestion is seriously advanced that
those who take aim at our culture should be investigated.
At the same time,
universities are removing literature which might trouble students
from their syllabuses. This is just the mindlessness Auden is
slashing at in this poem. It’s reminiscent of Einstein’s remark that
you become a physicist and end up as a photographer’s model.
All the same, he ends on a conformist note:
God bless the U.S.A., so large
This sits with the Elegy for J.F.K which comes a few pages
later and ends:
When a just man dies,
Kennedy ordered the bombings of Vietnam in 1963, a third of which
used napalm. Like every other American president since 1945, he’s
essentially a war criminal. Why does Auden see him as “just”? Isn’t
it because, in spite of his sometimes brilliant talent and his wide
reading, he fell for the propaganda? Right-wing America saw Kennedy
as a communist. Because he was a liberal, we are supposed to ignore
his moral wretchedness. The U.S. invaded Vietnam. It always uses
violence to get its own way, while lecturing others on peace and the
rule of law. Kennedy wasn’t “just” he was a purveyor of American
power. It’s measure of the corruption of our language that a poet
can be so confused.
Larkin imagined two readers, one who had read only Auden’s work up
to the age of forty, and the other only that after. In his view, the
latter would have little to get his or her teeth into. He identifies
the move to the U.S. as the faultline. This is too neat and it
ignores the derivative nature of much of Auden’s early work. The
conclusion which enforces itself from these two volumes, is that
Auden was a talented poet who never found a passionate reason to
write. He’s technically very good, sometimes too cerebral or obscure
but has moments of memorable brilliance. Literature is a social
phenomenon and societies promote and retain the work which serves
them. Auden found his way into literature and his rise to its top
table fairly easily because he came from the right stable. A public
school, Oxbridge chap can usually be counted on to revert to type,
even if he does dally with subversion. He can’t be blamed for that.
There is nothing to blame him for. He did what he could with the
talent nature had given him. His work is humanistic and usually on
the side of peace, tolerance, reason and compassion; but it belongs
to its time. As we face the possibility of making our home
uninhabitable we need poets who can write for sanity. Young ones
need to be conversant with what’s gone before. These volumes save
them the effort of searching for the collections and the scattered
pieces. Once again,
well-deserved congratulations to Edward Mendelson.
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