September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem

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(I tend to fall into this trap today, with writers I know and admire: they are just not, I think, like me. They are different; they are special; they are odd. Which is both true, as it happens, and entirely false.)

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With its emphasis on Auden’s ‘monstrous’ qualities, his physicality, his animality, his otherness, the New Verse double issue inaugurated a significant theme in subsequent figurations of Auden. In numerous books, reviews, essays and poems, Auden is figured as a kind of predatory Übermensch, possessing great physical prowess and preternatural powers. The English poet Roy Fuller, for example, described him as a ‘legendary monster’, an ‘immense father-figure’,‘ransacking the past of his art’. The poet Patrick Kavanagh claimed that ‘a great poet is a monster who eats up everything. Shakespeare left nothing for those who came after him and it looks as if Auden is doing the same.’ Such language can’t help but admire as much as be appalled.

Auden is a hero.

Auden is a monster.

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His intelligence was superlative and frightening. (He was ‘the greatest mind of the twentieth century’, according to the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. ‘At one or another time there must be five or six supremely intelligent people on earth,’ writes Howard Moss in his book Minor Monuments. ‘Auden was one of them.’)

His appearance was outlandish. (‘I was struck by the massive head and body and these large, strong, pudgy hands, […] the fine eyes did not look at oneself or at any individual but directly at concepts,’ wrote the critic G. S. Fraser.)

And his troubled career was strangely exemplary. (Seamus Heaney’s decision to leave Northern Ireland and move to Wicklow in 1972, for example, was read by some critics as a symbolic gesture similar to Auden’s move to America in 1939.)

He was a creature to be feared as well as admired, an obstacle to be negotiated as well as an inspiration.

‘He set standards so lofty that I developed writer’s block,’ recalls the poet Harold Norse in his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (1989).

Even now he remains a barrier. This book, for example: both blocked and enabled by Auden, a classic example of reading in abeyance, a testament to his posthumous power, and a confession and demonstration of my own lowly subaltern status and secondariness.

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(My interest in Auden, like anyone’s interest in any poet, any writer or artist, any great figure who has achieved and excelled in a field in which one wishes oneself to achieve and excel, represents an expression of awe, and disappointment, and self-disgust – and goodness knows what other peculiar and murky impulse is lurking down among the dreck at the bottom of one’s psyche. My interest in Auden represents perhaps a desire, if not actually to be Auden, then at least to be identified with Auden. My grandfather used to sing a song, ‘Let me shake the hand that shook the hand of Sullivan’, referring to John L. Sullivan, the one-time world heavyweight champion. How much literary criticism, one wonders, is in fact a vain attempt to shake the hand of Sullivan? U & I is the title of the novelist Nicholson Baker’s book about his – non-existent – relationship with John Updike, for example. An alternative title for this effort might be A & I. But this implies an addition. Better: I − A?)

The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you.

(Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman)

‘Biographers are invariably drawn to the writing of a biography out of some deep personal motive,’ according to Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James. Freud’s famous criticism of biographers was that they are ‘fixated on their heroes in a quite special way’, and that they devote their energies to ‘a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models – at reviving in him, perhaps, the child’s idea of his father’.

I don’t think I am reviving in Auden an idea of the father. But it’s possible that I might be reviving in him an idea of the uncle. The kind of uncle I never had.

(Auden was, by all accounts, an excellent uncle. He sponsored war orphans to go to college. He supported the work of Dorothy Day’s homeless shelter for the Catholic Worker Movement. He did not stint in doing good.)

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He was many things to many people. As every critic notes, Auden’s book The Double Man (1941) begins with an epigraph from Montaigne, ‘We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’

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But he wasn’t really double, any more than anyone is double: anyone, everyone is multiple.

So, to go back to that question, who the hell was W. H. Auden?

He was a poet, a dramatist, a librettist, a teacher, an amateur psychologist, a journalist, a reviewer, an anthologist, a critic, a Yorkshireman, an Englishman, an American.

That’ll do, for starters.

Not Standing (#litres_trial_promo)

So why is he sitting at the start of the poem?

And how is he sitting?

Is he on a chair? A stool? A bench?

Is he perched on a stoop or a stairwell?

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(And – my wife asks, appalled, having read the first draft of this book, twenty-five years after I embarked upon it – are you really going to spend all that time worrying over every single word in the poem?)

Many poets have some idiosyncrasy or tic of style which can madden the reader if he finds their work basically unsympathetic, but which, if he likes it, becomes endearing like the foibles of an old friend.

(Auden, ‘Walter de la Mare’)

Of course I’m not going to worry over every single word in the poem. That would be ludicrous – unfeasible, and unhealthy.

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(Really unhealthy. Fatal. In a lecture on ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, collected in his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov remarks that ‘In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth […] and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit […] are the highest forms of consciousness.’ Twenty-five years of falling to my death, gazing around, wondering at trifles.)

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Let me reassure you: we may have started out on the scenic route, but I promise there are going to be short-cuts. There’s just a lot of heavy lifting to get through at the start. Think of all this as backstory. Think of these early chapters as foundation stones, as building blocks, as … bricks.

(In Joe Brainard’s cult classic I Remember he writes, ‘I remember a back-drop of a brick wall I painted for a play. I painted each red brick in by hand. Afterwards it occurred to me that I could have just painted the whole thing red and put in the white lines.’ I’m not going to be painting each red brick by hand: after a while, I’ll be sketching in white lines.)

Civilization is a precarious balance between what Professor Whitehead has called barbaric vagueness and trivial order.

(Auden, ‘The Greeks and Us’)

(I have been reading – I have been teaching – Erich Auerbach’s essay ‘Odysseus’ Scar’, the first chapter of his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, published in 1946. It is surely one of the last great, readable works of literary criticism, in which Auerbach distinguishes between Hellenistic and Hebraic modes of storytelling:

It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’

It’s like that old Lenny Bruce routine – Jewish or goyish? In Bruce’s estimation, Count Basie is Jewish, Ray Charles is Jewish – but Eddie Cantor, Eddie Cantor is goyish. The joke being that Eddie Cantor was Jewish, but he was nothing more than a smooth, crowd-pleasing entertainer. ‘If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.’ Auden was a High Church Anglican, but he’s definitely Jewish, in the same way Count Basie and Ray Charles are Jewish: his best poems are Hebraic rather than Hellenistic. They are fraught with background.)

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I imagine Auden sitting in a straight-backed chair, both feet flat on the floor, upright, sitting slightly forward, intent – like a sphinx, benevolent, ferocious, strong.

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