W. H. Auden’s imaginary academy for poets, described in his essay “The Poet
and the City” from The Dyer’s Hand (1962), is of a clear practical bent, for
as well as poetry the curriculum requires its students to undertake
allotment-keeping and the care of a domestic animal. The habit of situating
the useful alongside the beautiful also animates his prose writing. Having
established himself in America – “so big, so friendly and so rich” – during
the 1940s, he could rely on reviewing and journalism and teaching, the
occupation of his winters, to earn him a living. At the same time these
commissions provided him with a framework in which to discuss his religious
and historical concerns as they emerged in his poetry, while creating the
opportunity to write important extended literary-critical pieces such as The
Enchafèd Flood and material collected in The Dyer's Hand. In return for
these labours, as it were, Auden wrote “Under Sirius”, “Bucolics”, “Memorial
for the City”, “Deftly, admiral, cast your fly”, “The Shield of Achilles”,
“Homage to Clio” and “Horae Canonicae”, poems which complete the major phase
of his work and would in the case of most other poets form grounds for a
high reputation in themselves.
Auden was fortunate in that his eminence and the inherent interest of
virtually everything he put on paper meant that people would read the work
of his left hand because in the first place he was its author, whatever the
ostensible subject under review. Fortunately his writing does not seem to
have been the platform for the display of “personality” in the way which is
now widespread, for while Auden’s literary personality is everywhere
apparent, it is always for something more than itself. It is hard nowadays
to name a single author who can demonstrate the same breadth of competence
or wield the same authority as Auden in his time, or who can make serious
matters look like the natural occupation of the intelligent general reader.
Auden was of course sui generis, but the world has changed, and the subjects
at the centre of his concerns, religion, history, philosophy, music and
(most of all) poetry, have undergone developments of their own. More than
that, in some probably unquantifiable way they no longer occupy the same
securely central place in contemporary discourse. Many of those who in
earlier generations would have felt some obligation to attend to such
matters no longer feel it, and in any case no longer have the confidence to
engage without the aid of a screen of simplification.
The lack of confidence extends to the expert, too: before it does anything
else, seriousness is likely to have to apologize for itself and don the
guise of Fun. Auden’s witty examination of the changing readership of
Mademoiselle (“Then and Now 1935–1950”) involves an element of tolerant
clowning: “I might, had I been born a lady and an American, have been one of
the original readers of Mademoiselle”, but he also has some sombre things to
say. He allows that his image of the readership is highly selective and
“highbrow”, while pointing out its (and his) political woolly-mindedness and
rather optimistically concluding that now “we” know what to do about the
fact that “no democracy can function properly if politics are left to
organizations and the individual is politically apathetic”. If the United
States is not in this sense politically apathetic this year, the same can
hardly be said of Britain.
And what would Auden have made of the intolerant atheism now abroad in the
guise of liberalism? Perhaps he would have pitied it, but he might well have
found it harder to claim public space in which to do so, especially if he
wanted to say this, from a review of T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture (1948) published in the New Yorker: “Nobody has ever
really believed in Freedom of Religion. Where religion is concerned, the
hardest virtue is tolerance, and to find out what a person’s religion is one
has only to discover what he becomes violent about”. The resonance of these
remarks for us is loud and clear, but Auden’s observations take a prophetic
turn in what follows:
In a revolutionary age like the present, the greatest threat to freedom is not
dogmas but the reluctance to define them precisely, for in times of danger,
if no one knows what is essential and what is unessential, the unessential
is vested with religious importance (to dislike ice cream becomes a proof of
heresy), so the liberal who is so frightened by the idea of dogma that he
blindly opposes any kind, instead of seeing that nothing is made an article
of faith that need not be so, is promoting the very state of tyranny and
witch-hunting that he desires to prevent.
Setting speculation aside, one fact demonstrated by this latest instalment of
Edward Mendelson’s great Complete Works project is that Auden no longer
reads as our contemporary. During the past decade, perhaps, a door has
closed between him and us. We can open it, but it’s still there. The
separation inevitably dates him in some way, but it also sharpens his
implied critique of what comes after him. How would he have regarded the
tendency to promote opinion over knowledge? It would not have been new to
him, but the seeming respectability of the contexts in which this sin is
indulged might have surprised him. And his own unselfconscious didacticism
would now cause considerable discomfort. Displayed to good effect throughout
his first prose book, The Enchafèd Flood (1950), or The Romantic Iconography
of the Sea (1949), and elsewhere here, Auden’s liking for lists and
taxonomies and subheadings suggests, as does his prose in general, that he
had a natural talent for teaching. He likes to provide a relief map of a
mass of information with the major features pointed out and distinctions
boldly drawn.
There is also (and this too suits the schoolmaster’s role) at times something
eerie and even slightly mad in the tenor of the reprinted lectures which
make up The Enchafèd Flood. It is as though the process of model-building
itself, with its binarisms and special cases, is the real object of Auden’s
interest. He engages in a form of secondary world-making analogous to
collecting complete sets of tea-cards or, as in his own case, the scrutiny
of books on mining and engineering. Something in Auden that was precocious
in childhood comes to seem childlike in adulthood. The desire for reason and
order is equalled by a belief that these properties in themselves are
resonant with magic of divine provenance. (Is this a gendered condition?
Many women seem baffled or irritated by men’s attachment to information or
facts for their own sake.)
Even at his most serious, Auden can give off an air of make-believe, as when
he declares: “The sea, then, is the symbol of primitive potential power as
contrasted with the desert of actualised triviality, of living barbarism
versus lifeless decadence”. It feels as though there is an element of parody
in this formulation, but parody of what? Perhaps of the necessary banality
of homework exercises or classroom note-taking, where large notions must be
got down plainly and the sense of their real proportions can be displaced by
a subversive absurdity. At the same time, the habit of summary is so
ingrained as to make this kind of thing wholly unexceptional, which in turn
helps to sustain the reader’s faint disquiet.
Alongside this, Auden has a genius for quotation – especially useful here,
since it makes up perhaps half the entire text of The Enchafèd Flood – of a
kind which makes familiar material look strange. The words from Captains
Ahab (on the human) and Nemo (on the liberty of underwater life) make a
return visit to Melville and Verne an immediate priority, and the quotation
from Melville’s poem “The Berg” redeems it from muscle-bound
clumsiness to reveal a memorable horror:
Impingers rue thee and go down
Sounding thy precipice below,
Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls
Along thy dead indifference of walls.
Nothing, the reader notes, could be further from Auden’s poetic practice than
this. Where Melville reaches awkwardly out through layers of rhetoric to
grasp the actual, Auden operates a series of filters, so that the actual
always sounds like him. This is emphatically the case when he concludes a
discussion of the futile phantasmal nature of the public, as distinct from
people, by explaining: “Coleridge was imaginatively correct in allowing all
the companions of the Ancient Mariner to die . . . they are an irresponsible
crowd and since, as such, they can take no part in the Mariner’s personal
repentance, they must die to be got out of the way”. The schoolboy
ruthlessness of that closing phrase draws attention to itself, not because
Auden has forgotten that he is discussing a work of literature, but in order
to ask how seriously the reader is prepared to take the work in question
(given Auden’s remark that many readers feel the death of the crew is
“unjust”), i.e. whether sentimentality, which is utterly foreign to Auden,
will displace seriousness. In a period when more than ever readers are
apparently inclined to use the ability to “identify” with fictional
characters as more or less the only basis of literary judgement, such a
disinterested approach as Auden’s seems unlikely to claim many votes, but
time and again Auden’s responses to his reading are simply more interesting
and more committed than those of his successors. He makes literature sound
less like property and more like a challenge.
Although Auden wrote a great deal about poetry, he reviewed comparatively few
contemporary poets during the period covered by this volume. He deals with
Pound’s translations and David Jones’s “Anathemata”, and he discusses Eliot
on no less than four occasions, doing so as an equal, agreeing or
disagreeing as he chooses and in one memorable formulation agreeing to
differ over the scansion of “The Family Reunion”: “prosody is to poets what
laying a fire is to married couples, a matter on which nobody is right but
oneself”. One of the other tasks he undertook was to select and edit the
annual publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets (his editorship ran
from 1947–59) and provide a brief introduction to the chosen poet. In the
period covered in this volume, his choices – Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin,
Edgar Bogardus, Daniel Hoffman and John Ashbery – have, with the exception
of Bogardus (1928–58) proved durable. Yet despite the professionalism which
inclined him to complete assignments well ahead of deadlines, Auden does not
seem to have found the work congenial, partly because the publisher’s
schedule required him to consider the manuscripts at the wrong time of year,
in the summer, when he wanted to give his attention to his own writing. The
notes on this matter tell a very funny story. Eugene Davidson, series editor
at Yale University Press, felt by 1949 that Auden was giving less than his
best, especially since the Press filtered the submissions down to a
shortlist which was then sent to Auden. Davidson wanted to replace him with
Louise Bogan, who made it clear that she would only take over if her friend
Auden chose to resign. In a subsequent meeting and exchange of letters,
Auden simply outmanoeuvred Davidson’s attempts to bring matters to a head,
eventually writing from Italy about the submissions: “none of them will
quite do. I have assumed that you want me to set the standard high and not
accept anything in which I don’t wholeheartedly believe”. In a subsequent
letter he recorded “the most fantastic difficulties” in returning the
parcels of manuscripts from the local post office. Checkmate.
If Auden could not always be enthusiastic about the material, he could be
assiduous in his role as gatekeeper. As a result no collections appeared in
1954, nor in 1955. He intervened to prevent a repetition for 1956, knowing
that Ashbery had intended to submit a collection, but finding it had been
missed off the shortlist. Chester Kallman had helped to overcome Auden’s own
doubts about the work, and Auden’s eventual assertion of authority is deft,
made inseparable from his seriousness, with status left to speak for itself:
“I have reservations about such of [Ashbery’s] poems as I have seen, but
they are certainly better than any of the manuscripts which have reached me.
I don’t know how or by whom the preliminary sieving is done at the Press,
but I cannot help wondering whether I am receiving the best”.
The rest is literary history, with Ashbery now the pre-eminent exponent of one
form of postmodernist poetry, as famed in his sphere as Auden but with
little of Auden’s general public presence. Ashbery has remarked that he was
uncertain that Auden actually understood his poems. That may well be so.
Auden’s introduction has less to say about Ashbery than about poetry in
general – though this is also true of his handling of the other volumes.
There is a faint sense of the housemaster passing over the lapses of a
gifted pupil, and there is also a complete failure to come to terms with
“Guadalajara”, before Auden returns to a familiar theme:
If in the eighteenth century, with its interest in the general and universal,
the danger for poets was a neglect of the singular, the danger for a poet
working with the subjective life is the reverse; i. e. realizing that, if he
is to be true to nature in this world, he must accept strange juxtapositions
of imagery, singular associations of ideas, he is tempted to manufacture
calculated oddities as if the subjectively sacred were necessarily and on
all occasions odd . . . It is not surprising, then, that many modern poems,
among them Mr Ashbery’s entertaining sestina “The Painter”, are concerned
with the nature of the creative process and with posing the question, “Is it
now possible to write poetry?”.
Some might ask a different question: whether it is any longer necessary to do
so, given poetry’s ever-diminishing claims on the attention of readers, but
while Ashbery’s work could quite clearly function without an audience, such
an idea would have been heresy for Auden, for whom art had civic
obligations, however indifferent the citizens might be. What he might have
gone on to discuss here is the idea of period change in art, which he raises
while reviewing Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays in 1953.
To have had a chance of becoming a real explorer in the arts, it would seem
that one had to be born between 1870 and 1890; the eighties were
particularly favourable, producing, among others, Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce
and Eliot. Those of us who were born later have to put up with the less
heroic, but, I hope, useful role of colonizers.
Auden does occasionally suggest an unexpected view (despite “Gerontion”) of
Eliot as a wild-eyed cutlass-wielding explorer. After the colonists, then
what? Decadence? Going native? Auden adds that “the writing of poetry
presupposes that communication is possible; no one would write if he were
convinced to the contrary”. “Communication” includes a great many
possibilities, however. It is possible to communicate a disengagement from
the traditional aim of making sense in favour of examining the nature and
construction of the material of which sense can no longer be made, and to
carry some kind of readership or audience with you as you do so. But W. H.
Auden, perhaps fortunately, was not in a position to agree wholeheartedly to
such a proposal.
Edward Mendelson, editor
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF W. H. AUDEN
Prose Volume Three, 1949–1955
816pp. Princeton University Press. £29.95 (US $49.50).
978 0 691 13329 3
Sean O’Brien’s sixth collection of poems,The Drowned Book, 2007,
received the Forward and the T. S. Eliot prizes. He is Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Newcastle.
