I want the poem to be completely American in language.
(Auden on The Age of Anxiety, in The Table Talk of W. H. Auden)
*
So, the speaker of the poem is sitting in a dive, and a dive, according to the OED, is ‘An illegal drinking-den, or other disreputable place of resort, often situated in a cellar, basement, or other half-concealed place, into which frequenters may “dive” without observation.’
A dive is not, therefore, just a place to be seen or to look, but a place to disappear.
Auden is using a half-concealed place as a site of contemplation.
*
‘Dive’, by the way, is an Americanism. It’s worth pointing out. It is not insignificant.
*
In a poem for his old friend Louis MacNeice, Auden wrote of his own desire to become a ‘minor Atlantic Goethe’.
Which is exactly what he became.
*
He took the oath of allegiance and became an American citizen on 20 May 1946. His Collected Poetry had been published in America by Random House a year previously and had gone into its fourth impression, having already sold over 14,000 copies. (That’s a lot of copies for a book of poems. It’s a lot of copies for a book of anything. I would love a book of mine to sell 14,000 copies – even a third of 14,000 copies would do, a quarter. A tenth. I’ll be honest, I’d take a tenth.) On this evidence, the critic Edmund Wilson pronounced that Auden had achieved ‘almost the circulation of an American family poet’. Auden had, in other words, made it in America.
*
Though for America, one should probably read New York.
Who am I now?
An American? No, a New Yorker,
who opens his Times at the obit page.
(Auden, ‘Prologue at Sixty’)
He had arrived in New York with Christopher Isherwood on 26 January 1939. The two men had already visited America in the summer of 1938, on their way back from China, but this time they were there to stay.
On arrival in New York, they found rooms in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue, and by spring 1939 they had moved into an apartment together on East 81st Street. Auden began reviewing for magazines and started to undertake speaking and lecturing engagements. He was getting his feet under the table.
*
Their departure from England caused considerable controversy. During 1940, the pages of Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon were given over to a long-long-running debate about the rights and wrongs of the two young men’s decision to remain in America, and in June 1940 Sir Jocelyn Lucas MP asked in the House of Commons ‘whether British citizens of military age, such as Mr. W. H. Auden and Mr. Christopher Isherwood […] will be summoned back for registration and calling up, in view of the fact that they are seeking refuge abroad’. The whole fuss was satirised by Evelyn Waugh in his novel Put Out More Flags (1942), in which Auden and Isherwood are caricatured as Parsnip and Pimpernell: ‘The name of the poet Parsnip, casually mentioned, re-opened the great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy which was torturing Poppet Green and her friends.’
Poor little Poppet.
*
(It’s easy to mock, but I too have taken Auden’s move to America personally, as a kind of rebuke, just as I’ve done with friends who’ve moved to America over the years. I mean, it always makes one wonder, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t I? Couldn’t I? What might have been, could have been? As I get older, it gets worse, the challenge seems all the greater. ‘What have I done for you, / England, my England?’ asks W. E. Henley in his much-maligned poem ‘Pro Rege Nostro’. Not a lot, is the honest answer: paid my taxes, kept out of trouble, apologised unnecessarily as and when required, and suffered in silence as the country becomes slowly but surely despoiled and divided up among tax-shy corporations and the south-east super-rich. Why not go to America, Auden seems to be asking, if you’re just going to sit around complaining and doing nothing?)
*
(I will confess: years ago, in an attempt to write this book, to reinvent myself, I went to New York, to follow in Auden’s footsteps, with nothing more to sustain me than a pacamac, a bar of Kendal mint cake and a pair of good stout shoes. I lasted about two weeks.)
*
There were many who felt that Auden’s remaining in America during the war was both a personal let-down and a matter of serious consequence. Poets, naturally, expressed their disappointment in verse: Christopher Lee, in a poem titled ‘Trahison des Clercs’, wrote wistfully about ‘the poets we took for leaders’, ‘these swift migrating birds’; and Alan Ross took up the plaintive chant in his poem ‘A Lament for the “Thirties” Poets’, bemoaning ‘They who for us were’, and drily observing ‘Their world and their words subsiding like flat champagne’.
Some people had good reason to take umbrage at Auden’s behaviour: John Lehmann, for example, in the second volume of his autobiography, I Am My Brother (1960), describes a visit from Auden in 1945 on his way to Germany to work with the US Strategic Bombing Survey, during which Auden boasted to Lehmann about America’s contribution to the war: ‘There was no word from Uncle Sam Auden about what we had endured, the various skills, the faith, the unremitting industrial and military effort without which the fortress of Western civilization could never have held.’
And there were others who simply never forgave Auden for leaving. I think I have already mentioned the novelist Anthony Powell: ‘I’m delighted that shit has gone … It should have happened years ago … Scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a … like a …’
Like a … like a … like a … Like a what exactly, Anthony? Spit it out, man. Like a …? What is Auden?
I’ll tell you what he is: he is neither/nor.
*
After his trip to America in 1909, Freud remarked to Ernest Jones, ‘America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake.’ Auden’s move to America has often been viewed in similar terms, both by his contemporaries and by the literary historians and anthologists whose attempts to accommodate the move have obscured his place in literary history. In 1950, T. S. Eliot expressed his delight that Auden’s ‘influence, on both sides of the Atlantic, has only increased year by year; he can now justly be called “a famous poet”’. In fact, Auden’s transatlantic fame and influence had only been achieved at the cost of his being disowned by both sides, by both England and America.
*
In his introduction to the 1970 anthology British Poetry Since 1945 – standard issue when I was at school – Edward Lucie-Smith announced that he had decided not to include work by Auden because his ‘long residence in America seemed to make him an American rather than a British writer’, a decision ratified by George Watson in his 1991 critical survey British Literature since 1945 – standard issue when I started teaching – from which Auden is excluded, along with Isherwood and Robert Graves, for being an ‘expatriate’.
(It is interesting to compare the disapprobation that attaches to the word ‘expatriate’ with the valorisation of the word ‘exile’ in the formation of a writer’s reputation.)
Unfortunately for Auden, the official keepers of American poetry have long been happy enough without him. For the mighty Norton anthologies, for example, Auden’s residence in America was simply not enough: he does not figure in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, but he is included in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and is safely ensconced in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ‘a wide and deep sampling of the best poetry written in the English language, from early medieval times to the present day’.
A comparison with T. S. Eliot, who became a British subject in 1927, is perhaps instructive, not least because Eliot himself sanctioned such a comparison in his essay ‘American Literature and the American Language’ (1953), in which he defined his position in the national literatures in direct relation to Auden: ‘I do not know whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me in providing me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself, for I can say: “whichever Auden is, I suppose I must be the other.”’
There is in fact no equivalence of the kind suggested here by Eliot: while Auden is usually considered neither/nor, Eliot is often assumed to be both/and: Norton, for example, hedge their bets and include Eliot in both their English and American anthologies.
In many ways, Auden is the odd man out.
*
(When and how exactly, one wonders, does a writer become an American writer? Was Nabokov, for example, ever really an American writer? He certainly liked to think of himself as one – ‘I am as American as April in Arizona,’ he told an interviewer in 1966. And again: ‘I feel intellectually at home in America.’ And again: ‘I am an American, I feel American.’ And again: ‘America is the only country where I feel mentally and emotionally at home.’ Arriving in America in 1940, aged forty-one, with his wife Véra and their young son Dmitri, Nabokov lived in the USA for over twenty years, teaching at Wellesley and Cornell, and writing many of his greatest novels in and about and around America, not least Lolita (1955), which was scribbled on his beloved index cards in his equally beloved Oldsmobile while touring the country on his long summer butterfly-hunting expeditions. Among other things, Lolita – whether you like it or not – is a celebration and denunciation of what Humbert Humbert calls that ‘lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country’. But could Nabokov – or Auden – ever really be regarded as an American writer in the same sense that, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis, or John Updike, or Lydia Davis and Toni Morrison, are American writers? Updike probably had it about right: Nabokov, he declared back in the 1960s, is ‘the best writer of the English language presently holding American citizenship’. And Auden was the best poet.)
*
(Auden’s odd example has been useful to me, I should say, in my own modest way: he has helped me understand my own peculiar position. I happen to have lived on the island of Ireland for most of my adult life, but I’m clearly not an Irish writer, nor ever will be. I was born in England and live here in the north, in Northern Ireland, which is a double disqualification for Irishry, yet which also puts me at a far distance from the English and from English concerns. Like a lot of other people, I’m not a both/and: I’m a neither/nor.)
(Once, years ago, I was invited and then disinvited to a literary festival, when it was discovered that though I live on the island of Ireland, I am not in fact an aboriginally Irish writer: the festival organisers made it sound rather as though I had set out to deceive.)
*
Anyway, so, he’s in a dive – and it’s not an English dive.
(In William Empson’s poem ‘High Dive’ (1955), a dive produces ‘A cry, a greenish hollow undulation / Echoes slapping across the enclosed bathing-pool.’ Empson’s note to his poem is instructive. There are two ways down from a diving board, he writes: ‘solid and airy, one of which the man must take’. In Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘The springboard’ – dated June 1942 – a figure prepares to dive, ‘spreadeagled above the town’: ‘He will dive like a bomber past the broken steeple, / One man wiping out his own original sin / And, like ten million others, dying for the people.’ These are very different types of dive. Off the top of my head – and according to my notes, and without the assistance of Google, which is no good for this sort of thing anyway – they are the only other dives I can think of in English or Irish poetry. I’m sure there are many others. You’ll let me know.)
*
Auden’s dive is a place, not an action – though the more obvious English meaning of ‘dive’ puts a nice bit of tension, a little spring, into the line, from sitting to diving. (What might it mean to sit in a dive – to squat and to pause on the springboard?)
*
Imagining Auden’s dive, one thinks perhaps of a Hopperesque sort of a place, a place of isolation, melancholy and alienation. So where is this dive?
It’s in America, as we know.
But where exactly?