Fine. I’ll happily leave the scholarship to the experts.
But here’s something I can perhaps talk about with a degree of insight and certainly with enthusiasm: the unearthing of the whole offence. Because who unearths offences?
Detectives.
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Apart from Auden, the only thing I have read consistently over the past twenty-five years is detective fiction, or crime fiction, or whatever you want to call it: hard-boiled, French noir, domestic suspense, you name it, I’ve read it. Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Ellery Queen, Margery Allingham, Rex Stout, Patricia Highsmith, Derek Raymond, Barbara Vine, Simenon, Frédéric Dard, Fred Vargas, Camilleri, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid … The big names, and the little names, or the names that once were big: Dorothy B. Hughes, Gerald Kersh, Harry Kemelman. ‘Just reeling off their names is ever so comfy,’ writes Auden (about lakes, actually, ‘Moraine, pot, oxbow, glint, sink, crater, piedmont, dimple’, but the point stands).
He was a fan himself, of course, Auden. He loved detective stories. They were for him ‘an addiction like tobacco or alcohol’ – and he was seriously addicted to tobacco and alcohol. ‘I’ve often thought of doing a versified detective story,’ he once remarked, though in a sense he was always writing versified detective stories.
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
(Auden, ‘At last the secret is out’)
The appeal of the early poetry has much to do with this mysterioso Agatha Christie tone, and his deployment of detective-fiction tropes and images.
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(Also, I rather wonder – although no one else seems to have done so, so I may be barking up the wrong literary historical tree here – if Auden’s love of detective fiction explains what one might think of as the curiously commercial edge to his work, certainly compared with some of his contemporaries. I’m thinking in particular of his peculiar grasp of structure. According to Mickey Spillane, ‘Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it’s a letdown, they won’t buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.’ A lot of poetry is in the middle: Auden sells at the beginning, and at the end. There’s also that weird combination in his work of mental toughness and piercing insights, and also a deep, sweet sentimentality. As a writer, Auden’s a bit like Ernest Bramah’s creation Max Carrados, the blind detective: cultured, ruthless but also rather calm, who shoots by aiming at the sound of a beating heart, and who can detect a false moustache from its ‘five-yard aura of spirit gum’.)
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In fact, it’s hard not to imagine Auden as a sort of detective. Not a police detective, of course, that would be ridiculous – DI Auden? – but one of those professional amateurs beloved of crime writers, the consulting detective, the private eye. He’s got the brilliance, he’s got the wit and he’s got the trademark eccentricities. He’s Sam Spade, Columbo, Philip Marlowe and Sherlock Holmes all rolled into one: the weary eye, the cigarette forever smouldering in the ashtray, the tobacco in the toe-end of his Persian slipper. It’s obvious, isn’t it: if Auden didn’t exist, you’d have to make him up.
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Auden was first represented in fiction as a detective by Cecil Day Lewis, writing as Nicholas Blake, in the novel A Question of Proof (1935), in which he features as the appropriately named Nigel Strangeways – ‘every inch W. H. Auden’, according to Day Lewis’s son Sean – a character described in the novel as a ‘nordic type’ who ‘can’t sleep unless he has an enormous weight on his bed’. (In her short story ‘How W. H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend’s House’, Lydia Davis describes, entirely accurately, how Auden liked to sleep with a great weight on his bed and so used to pull down curtains and paintings to smother himself.) There are more than a dozen books in the Nigel Strangeways series, all of them excellent, but Auden also crops up in crime fiction elsewhere. There’s the satirical detective novel The Death of the King’s Canary, for example – which is terrible – written by Dylan Thomas and John Davenport in 1940, but not published until the 1970s, in which Auden becomes Wyndham Nils Snowden, ‘the leader of the younger poets’. And he’s also the éminence grise of the Amanda Cross novel Poetic Justice (1970), a campus thriller in which Kate Fansler, who is an amateur sleuth and an English professor – the best kind of English professor – is constantly quoting Auden, and who finally solves her mystery after attending one of his poetry readings.
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(‘The Fictional Auden’ might make an interesting PhD, beginning with Stephen Spender’s novel The Temple, partly written in 1929 – in which Auden figures both as a character called Simon Wilmot and as the character ‘W’ in a novel by another character in the book, William Bradshaw, who is based on Christopher Isherwood, who also featured a fictional Auden, as ‘Weston’, in his own actual novel, Lions and Shadows (1938) – and all the way through to Polly Clark’s Larchfield (2017), which is based on Auden’s time teaching at the Larchfield Academy in Scotland. ‘The Fictional Auden’ would include separate chapters on ‘Auden on Film’ and ‘Auden on Stage’, plus a big appendix, ‘Auden in Alan Bennett’, which one might eventually turn into a quirky little book, like The Lady in the Van.)
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Picturing my own fictional Auden, I see him rather like Horace Rumpole, as played by Leo McKern, who huffed and puffed his way through the long-running Thames Television series of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey when I was young, quaffing Château Thames Embankment at Pommeroy’s, consorting with Fig Newton and dining with the Erskine-Browns, before coming home on the Tube to She Who Must Be Obeyed. Or perhaps he’s a bit like Orson Welles (who might also have played Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe, Montenegrin by birth, weighing a seventh of a ton, and living in a brownstone on West 35th Street in New York, with his own Swiss chef, Fritz Brenner, and breeding orchids in his conservatory). Or even like Myrna Loy, as Nora Charles, in The Thin Man, based on Hammett’s novel, which begins with Nick Charles waiting for Nora, ‘leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street’.
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(I used to think – who didn’t? – that the best person to play Auden in a biopic would be Stephen Fry, but now I’m not so sure, now I think maybe Joaquin Phoenix, who was so good at playing Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, with that bloat-prone, slightly lopsided look of pain, but also with a sort of courtly magnificence, the hooded eyes, and the suggestion of both deep earnest thought and the lifelong indulgence of fleshly appetites. Actually, if he’d lived any longer, I rather fear Auden might have ended up like Johnny Cash, a sad, lost, lonely figure, appearing on The Muppet Show and Columbo, until the arrival of a Rick Rubin figure to revive his flagging fortunes. Or like Welles, dragging himself around the talk shows, and flogging Paul Masson wines.)
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He has a whole essay about detective fiction, of course, Auden – he has essays about everything. Everything. (Volume II alone of the collected prose in The Complete Works, which covers the period 1939–1948, is enough to make any aspiring writer wilt: essays on Yeats and Henry James, on Mozart, on Shakespeare, the Brothers Grimm, ‘The Mythical Sex’.) ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1948:
The most curious fact about the detective story is that it makes its greatest appeal precisely to those classes of people who are most immune to other forms of daydream literature. The typical detective story addict is a doctor or clergyman or scientist or artist. […] I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin […] The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law. The driving force behind this daydream is the feeling of guilt, the cause of which is unknown to the dreamer. The phantasy of escape is the same, whether one explains the guilt in Christian, Freudian, or any other terms. One’s way of trying to face the reality, on the other hand, will, of course, depend very much on one’s creed.
For me, the real thrill in reading crime fiction is the pleasure in witnessing an active human consciousness trying to figure things out, attempting to solve what it means to be alive, or not alive: it is the pleasure of watching someone unearthing the whole offence.
Which is what exactly?