Stanza 2.
Accurate scholarship.
Oh dear.
*
There was nothing remotely accurate about Auden’s own scholarship. It wasn’t accurate scholarship at all: it was wide reading. There is a difference. I should know.
Writers, on the whole, are just not scholars. (Cynthia Ozick, in her essay ‘Toward a New Yiddish’: ‘To be a writer is to be an autodidact, with all the limitations, gaps, and gaucheries typical of the autodidact, who belabors clichés as though they were sacral revelation.’)
This is a book, it goes without saying – a phrase no scholar would ever use (‘Why say it goes without saying if it goes without saying?’) – built on nothing but limitations, gaps and gaucheries.
*
(For me, writing has been not so much about finding out who I am and what I can do – who cares? – but rather discovering who I’m not and what I can’t do, a kind of hazard prevention, and it became clear to me many years ago that one of the things I was not was a scholar, and that one of the things I could not do was traditional scholarship. I was simply never able to talk the talk. I am at best an example of what the Fowler brothers, H. W. and F. G. – of dictionary and usage fame – would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. What has encouraged and determined these proclivities is my indiscriminate appetite, which seems only to grow by eating. ‘That inescapable animal walks with me, / Has followed me since the black womb held, / Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, / A caricature, a swollen shadow,’ writes Delmore Schwartz in his poem ‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me’. ‘[…] The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.’ I have been feeding wildly on books my entire life, like Gaffer Hexam, who in Our Mutual Friend gets his ‘meat and drink’ from the bodies he finds in the Thames. You will doubtless recall that scene in chapter 3 of Dickens’s novel, when Gaffer shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn the handbills of the missing persons that he has pasted all over his wall. ‘He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his scholarly intelligence.’ Welcome to my ’umble abode.)
*
In this regard at least, I think I slightly – very, very slightly – resemble Auden, who was perhaps more magpie than mudlark, picking things up from anywhere and everywhere. Isherwood, in his early autobiographical novel, Lions and Shadows (1938), describes Auden seeking out ‘oddments of scientific, medical and psycho-analytical jargon: his magpie brain was a hoard of curious and suggestive phrases from Jung, Rivers, Kretschmer and Freud.’ Elizabeth Bishop, writing in tribute to Auden after his death, in the Harvard Advocate, reflected that ‘[he] gave us the feeling that here was someone who knew – about psychology, geology, birds, love, the evils of capitalism’.
Auden knew a lot.
He was also a bit of a bluffer.
A serious scholar has great merits. But a serious scholar who is also a good man knows not only his subject but the proper place of his subject in the whole of his life.
(Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good)
There have been hundreds of articles and books published about Auden’s work during the time I have been trying to write this book, the kind of articles and books I should have been writing but just can’t, or won’t, or simply couldn’t, books written in a style and a mode which I can vaguely approximate yet never quite achieve. Serious books. Accurate scholarship. There have also been complete editions of Auden’s poetry, the plays, and the libretti, and the prose, published by Princeton University Press: again, volume after volume after wearying volume. Peter Edgerly Firchow, in W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry (2002) – which is exactly the kind of book this could have been and should have been – remarks that all these additional new resources and insights make it easier to think and write about Auden and his work.
Easier?
He was no good in discussion, not because any amount of argument could shake his faith, but because the mere fact of hearing another voice disconcerted him painfully, confusing his thoughts at once – these thoughts that for so many years, in a mental solitude more barren than a waterless desert, no living voice had ever combatted, commented, or approved.
(Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent)
In the Berg Collection in New York Public Library – a great repository of Auden archives – there’s a letter that Auden wrote to Stephen Spender on 12 July 1963, chastising him for having apparently misread one of his poems, ‘A Change of Air’: ‘You’re a naughty girl,’ writes Auden, ‘and in her reply your Mother, sweet old lady we all know her to be, has had to give you a little spank-spank.’
No one wants a little spank-spank.
Actually, I suppose some people do.
But I certainly do not.
(I think part of the reason why I have been trying and failing to write a book about Auden for twenty-five years is that I’m scared: I fear the reprisals. Writing as a novelist, you’re just making things up. But here, now, I’m making claims, truth claims, claims that are subject to refutation, and I know that a lot of what I’m saying is going to be proved downright wrong. There will be no second edition of the book, but to correct any mistakes, do please write, c/o my publisher. It’s Ian – not C. J. – Sansom. S for Sierra, A for Alfa, N for November, S for Sierra, O for Oscar, M for Mike.)
*
Of the many books about Auden published during the past twenty-five years, there are perhaps two really important works, two works of not just accurate but astonishing scholarship – John Fuller’s W. H. Auden: A Commentary (1998) and Edward Mendelson’s Later Auden (1999) – works so accurate, so painfully accurate, as to have rendered all other commentary, including this, pretty much superfluous. The only honest way to deal with this brutal fact, it seems to me, is to give the books their full whack.
*
The dust jacket of Mendelson’s book shows a sepia-coloured full-length photograph of Auden, circa 1947, his legs set firmly apart, broad-shouldered, hands in pockets – a boxer’s or a writer’s stance – looking sideways, away from the camera. His tie is too short – schoolboyish, or professorial. He looks purposeful, but slightly mad.
Fuller’s fine dust jacket also shows a sepia-coloured photograph, probably also 1940s, but this is a head-and-shoulders shot, showing Auden up close, frowning, looking directly at the camera. He wears an open-necked shirt; you can see his throat; you can almost count the hairs on his head. And there is a menace and depth about the eyes.
From the dust jackets alone you can tell that they are serious books – different sorts of books, but serious books.
*
(John Fuller, I should say, was my PhD supervisor, many years ago. And he was a very decent chap. I met him perhaps half a dozen times during the three years I was studying. I always had the slight impression that he found me rather lacking in seriousness. Which, in fairness, I was, and am – but back then I was worse. I hadn’t yet earned my frivolity.)
*
Fuller’s W. H. Auden: A Commentary is a terrifying, stomach-churning sort of a book, in much the same way as, say, Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce is terrifying, or Christopher Ricks’s edition of Tennyson is terrifying, or the Ralph W. Franklin three-volume edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson is terrifying. How, one wonders, did they do that – and why?
*
Fuller works his way steadily through Auden’s oeuvre, volume by volume, poem by poem, from the privately printed 1928 Poems to the posthumously published Thank You, Fog, with five separate chapters on uncollected poems, 1925–30, 1930–36, 1937–39, 1940–48, 1949–73, another on ‘Poems first published in the Collected Poetry (1945)’, and two indexes. More than 600 pages.
If you really want to learn about Auden, this is where to start, although ‘This book’, cautions Fuller in his foreword, ‘is not for reading in the normal way.’ I’m not entirely sure what counts as reading in the normal way. Carelessly, or carefully? I have a horrible feeling – I’ve always had the feeling – that I’ve been doing it wrong.
*
Mendelson’s book is another 600-pager, give or take, and is equally amazing, though it is scholarship of an entirely different kind.
Here is Fuller writing about the second part of Auden’s early sequence ‘The Megalopsych’:
This part, in a tone of hectic disgust, elaborates Aristotle’s definition of the magnanimous man in the Nichomachean Ethics, 4.iii.15, as someone who is not a coward, and it confesses, in a style somewhat like an English translation of Catullus (‘puella defututa’ is from Carmen xli), that the homosexual’s confidence is assisted by alcohol and cruising – ‘the tirade is about a joy-boy’ as he puts it to Isherwood.
Just one – rich, thick, stunning sentence – which manages to cover matters of tone, allusion, style and content in the time it would take me to make some sly remark or equivocation.
And here is Mendelson, on ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’:
When all collective action seemed doomed to futility or injustice, Auden argued to himself that the only just acts open to him were private ones of teaching and praise. In his elegy for Yeats he portrayed these acts as the work of an exceptional individual who braved the realm of death and transformed the irrational powers; they were acts achieved through the mysterious power of a poet’s gift, and were unconstraining acts that might teach a justice they would never impose.
Summary, speculation, argument and explication all at once.
While Mendelson announces from on high, Fuller works from the bottom up. Discussing the early, puzzling poem ‘Who stands, the crux left of the watershed’, for example, Fuller patiently provides a context (‘Written in Harborne at his parental home’), a neat summary (‘this poem is descriptive of Auden’s sacred landscape’), a useful guide to grammar and syntax (‘Auden begins the poem with a compound relative’), a brief outline of influences and sources (‘If Hardy presides over the visionary distance of this poem, it is Eliot who has contributed to its diction’), and a polite acknowledgement of alternative commentaries and interpretations (‘Reminders that Auden had driven for the TUC during the General Strike of the previous year may be salutary’). To manage this once, one might say, is mere criticism; to pull it off again and again, hundreds of times, is truly painstaking – it is accurate scholarship.
*
And painstaking indeed: Fuller’s is a work of anatomy, while Mendelson’s is more like a very long session on the psychiatrist’s couch.
(Which makes this what? Some sort of sideshow perhaps? A comic interlude?)
*
Mendelson seems to believe that poems are made from big ideas, while Fuller works on the assumption that poetry is made up of many little parts (often from other poems). There is truth in both, but the different truths have their consequences. If a poem is made up of ideas, then it may be paraphrased. If a poem is made of parts, as the human body is made of parts, then it might more usefully be dissected and described.
So, Fuller dissects. (His first detailed forensic tests on Auden were carried out while the poet was still alive: his A Reader’s Guide to W. H. Auden, published in 1970, was written, Fuller reveals in the preface to the updated Commentary, in a mere eighteen months, a piece of work as judicious as it was concise; his careful fingering of the allusions to anal intercourse in Auden’s ‘Letter to a Wound’, for example – ‘“offal” is waste, “snig” an eel, “the hardware shop at the front” the erecting genitals’ – can only now decently be published. The Commentary is a series of sharp, fresh cuts into the Auden corpus.)
*
(Fuller is also a poet, by the way – and the son of a poet, incidentally, Roy Fuller, who, like Auden, became Oxford Professor of Poetry – and there is no doubt, with the notable exception of Mendelson, that the best books and articles about Auden have all been written by fellow poets, who are at one and the same time the most and least qualified to judge him. In his book The Hidden Law, published in 1993, the American poet Anthony Hecht presented a picture of Auden as a poet profoundly troubled by questions of morality and religion; a poet a lot like Anthony Hecht. An American poet of an older generation, Randall Jarrell, wrote about Auden’s work as a sad process of steady decline: a decline mirrored, one might argue, in the work of Jarrell himself. Fuller, in turn, presents Auden as a poet of great erudition and technical mastery: no surprise to find Fuller’s own poetry displaying the same extraordinary qualities.)
*
In 1972, the year before his death, Auden appointed Mendelson as his literary executor, Mendelson being then a mere twenty-five-year-old member of the English department at Yale. It may have looked foolhardy at the time, but Auden was being very shrewd: ‘Wystan says that he has just met a young man’, recalled Chester Kallman, ‘who knows more about him than he knows himself.’ Now, after a lifetime spent editing Auden’s poetry and prose and trawling through letters and drafts and diaries in New York and London and Oxford and all over America, this is clearly more true than ever, and Mendelson’s uniquely intimate knowledge takes many forms.
There are the little titbits of information, for example, which he scatters and sprinkles over his prose like a dusting of icing sugar, like hundreds-and-thousands: Auden’s writing to his publishers to find out exactly when Yeats died, to ensure the accuracy of his line in ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, about ‘his last afternoon as himself’; Auden’s enthusiasm for the theories of management guru Peter F. Drucker; his considering converting to Judaism; his contacting the British embassy in Washington at the outbreak of the Second World War to report that he was ‘willing to do anything when and if the Government ask me’; and his brave response to T. S. Eliot, on receiving a copy of After Strange Gods, published in 1933, with its vile claim that ‘reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’, a response which is surely enough to make anyone shout hooray for W. H. Auden. (It reads, ‘Some of the general remarks, if you will forgive my saying so, rather shocked me, because if they are put into practice, and it seems to me quite likely, would produce a world in which neither I nor you I think would like to live.’)
And then there are the much larger patterns beneath this sweet top-dusting, the rich primary material that Mendelson kneads and teases and shapes into his various narrative threads and theories. There is the clever way in which he twists together poetry and biography, for example, and makes connections: how, on arriving in the USA, according to Mendelson, Auden abandoned the oratorical voice, adopted ‘a lonely existentialist Protestantism’ and began experimenting with different forms. Then in 1948, when he and Chester Kallman began holidaying on Ischia, how his poetry ‘almost immediately found a new conversational tone of voice’, and ‘his beliefs turned in the direction of a shared, corporate Catholicism’. How, in 1958, he moved to his summer house in Kirchstetten, where he ‘celebrated his privacy’ and his poems ‘explored the bleakly modern religion he found expressed in the letters written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’. How in 1972, after his move to Oxford, ‘His poems now increasingly addressed the dead instead of the living, and his religion took the form of timeless rituals in a dead language.’
Mendelson really knows how to tell a story.
*
(I have tried on numerous occasions to interest film and TV production companies in producing some kind of Auden biopic. It’s an incredible story, the Auden Story – not just the work, the life. The closest I ever came, after months, years, was when I managed to set up a meeting with some magnates of moviedom and in the meeting they asked, ‘And who do you have on board as the writer?’ ‘Me?’ I said. Blank looks all round. I never heard from them again. The last thing I recall is the sound of their heels clicking away into the distance.)
*
The enormous strengths of the two books, then, and their many differences, are obvious. (Fuller is characteristically English, smuggling in the occasional light-hearted, donnish quip and tease, while Mendelson has chutzpah: he portrays an heroic Auden, a poet in the grip of constant mental tightenings and slackenings, a poet constantly clenching and unclenching his philosophical muscles, and the resulting poetry as a series of rippling, flexing renunciations and reversals and self-criticisms and rereadings. If Fuller is at times cautious, Mendelson is more often prepared to take a punt: he poses; he queries; he asserts; and in imitation of Auden he attempts to write his own memorable speech: ‘This transformation of abandonment into love now became the central plot of Auden’s poems’; ‘“New Year Letter” is Auden’s Faust.’ After quoting Auden’s haiku ‘He has never seen God, / but, once or twice, he believes / he has heard Him’, the final sentence of Later Auden swells to hurrah and grandiloquence: ‘With these words, he gave thanks for the last gift of vision, and his work was done.’ Fuller, in contrast, winds up his book with a discussion of the poem ‘Minnelied’ and, comparing it with another, ends in diminuendo: ‘The reader may be interested to compare these poems.’ Indeed.)
*
Basically, everything Fuller and Mendelson can do and have done, I cannot. If this book has an apologetic tone, then there is – as I hope you can now appreciate – a very good reason. Two very good reasons.
Writing about Auden after Fuller and Mendelson is like playing tennis after Federer and Nadal. (I would like to think that I might be an Andy Murray, but I am definitely not at the level of an Andy Murray. A Tim Henman, then? Alas, no, I’m not even a Tim Henman. An umpire, perhaps? An unseeded pro? Semi-pro? Amateur? Ball boy? A professional queuer in the Wimbledon queue?)
*
Anyway, if you want to know the meaning of Auden’s ‘Accurate scholarship’, you can find the answers in Mendelson and Fuller. (It’s to do with German reparations and various psychoanalytic subjects.)