You’re still with me?
(‘What you need is some beta-readers,’ one of my students told me, some years ago. ‘Beta-readers?’ ‘To test the book.’ ‘As in, like, readers?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, beta-readers.’ They were kind enough to read the book, this student – an earlier version of this book. ‘You lost me round about the Holocaust,’ they said. ‘That’s where I gave up.’)
Good.
As for ‘what occurred at Linz’ (European Capital of Culture 2009) – what occurred at Linz?
Well, Anton Bruckner was the organist at the cathedral in Linz, and Ludwig Wittgenstein went to school there, but what Auden is obviously referring to is Linz’s dubious honour of being Adolf Hitler’s home town. (He was born, actually, in nearby Braunau am Inn, on 20 April 1889, but he lived in Linz betwen 1898 and 1907 – and loved it. As Führer, he planned for Linz to become one of his five great ‘Führer Cities’, along with Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Nuremberg, and to be home to a Führermuseum, and a Nibelungen Bridge across the Danube, and a luxury Hitler Hotel.)
So, mostly what occurred at Linz was Hitler’s childhood and schooling. Both Wittgenstein and Hitler attended the Linz Realschule, though they were both together there only from 1903 to 1904, according to Wittgenstein’s biographers, and there is no need to attend to the various claims in Kimberley Cornish’s book The Jew of Linz (1998), including his extraordinary suggestion that it was Wittgenstein who made Hitler anti-Semitic.
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The other thing that occurred at Linz is something to do with a ‘huge imago’.
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Ah. Now.
I’ll be honest, when I read this sort of thing in Auden, or elsewhere, I feel a slight twinge of my inner Philistine, my inner Kingsley Amis, who has Jim Dixon, the hapless lecturer in his novel Lucky Jim, become enraged and overwhelmed with a desire to torture a colleague ‘until he disclosed why, without being French himself, he’d given his sons French names’.
Imago, I want to say: what the hell’s an imago when it’s at home? (And how do you even say it? Im-ar-go? Im-may-go? Im-ah-go? I’m going with im-may-go.)
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According to the accounts of accurate scholars, Auden seems likely to have come across the term ‘imago’ in Jung, in the B. M. Hinkle translation of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido:
Imago: Here I purposely give preference to the term ‘Imago’ rather than to the expression ‘Complex,’ in order […] to invest this psychological condition, which I include under ‘Imago,’ with living independence in the psychical hierarchy […] ‘Imago’ has a significance similar on the one hand to the psychologically conceived creation in Spitteler’s novel […] and upon the other hand to the ancient religious conception of ‘imagines and lares.’
(Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, B. M. Hinkle trans., 1916)
In plain English: the ‘imago’ seems to be the subjective image of someone which has been formed in another’s mind and which influences that other’s behaviour.
Fine. OK.
So why didn’t you just f***ing say so in the first place?
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(You can take the boy out of Essex, it seems, but you cannot take the Essex out of the boy. I went up, as they say, from Essex to Cambridge in 1986, a long time ago now – yet I never seem to learn. All of the usual clichés applied back then: I was the first person in my family to attend university; I came from a comprehensive school; I felt I didn’t fit in; I became ill and overwrought, and had to take time off to recover; I fell in love; I went travelling, to find myself, and found I wasn’t there; worse, I completely lost my sense of humour. It was, I suppose, looking back on it, like most things in life, completely unoriginal and stereotypical: three years of confused and straining emotions, and intense, overdramatised intellectual activity, accompanied by endless instant coffee and Leonard Cohen. Now, more than thirty years later, looking back at my student life, it all seems utterly ludicrous, like something from one of those melancholy foreign films I used to go and see with my friend Nick at the Cambridge Arts Cinema – more Betty Blue than Andrei Tarkovsky. It seems unreal. And thinking about it, it even seemed unreal at the time – a kind of fantasy. I remember arriving at the college and walking through the big carved wooden gates with my rucksack and my carrier bags and being amazed at the sight of all the trunks lined up outside the porter’s lodge. I had no idea people actually owned trunks. I’d never seen an actual trunk before, a trunk in the flesh, as it were. You didn’t get trunks where I was from: we had hold-alls. I thought trunks were just props in Sunday-night BBC costume dramas, like elephant-foot umbrella stands, and tiger-skin rugs. Trunks were from another, imaginary world. Going to university felt like going to New York: it felt as though I wasn’t there, and yet as if I’d been there all my life. I’d gone to a place that existed in my head. I was taught by some brilliant people – great, famous scholars and writers, most of them now long dead – and what they taught me above all was the importance of the careful choice of words. That’s what I understand it means to be a serious writer, that it’s not enough merely to say what you think or whatever’s on your mind. Yet even now that’s exactly what I seem to do, and so my writing remains as wayward and impressionistic as it ever was, associative, undisciplined, ill-judged and ill-considered, and I have slowly come to realise that I do not possess the necessary skills to become a great writer, a serious writer, a writer, frankly, who does not tell other writers to f*** off.)
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Auden was always susceptible to big explanatory ideas and psychological theories like this – Jung, Freud, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. For me, suffice it to say, this tendency is perhaps the least appealing aspect of his work, though the true scholars and critics seem to love it. I suppose this exposes my shallowness and superficiality.
Oh well.
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What I do find interesting here, though, in a stanza that offers a number of possible answers to the question of who’s to blame and who’s responsible, is the way in which it wanders, ‘From Luther until now’, swerving wide, taking in history, current affairs, psychology and a dose of folk wisdom.
I like the swerve.
One might argue that the whole poem is a kind of swerve, or a series of swerves. At the end of the first stanza, a moment ago, we were on 52nd Street. Now the attention has shifted to Europe, and we’re about to head to ancient Athens, and there’s lots more to come.
Yes: this is what I love about Auden, the fact that his poetry is dynamic rather than static, that it looks at things from high dimensions and low dimensions and in multi-dimensions, that it is interested in interactions as much as it describes actions, that it … wanders.
(In the prefatory note to Holzwege (1950) – a collection of essays translated into English as Off the Beaten Track and in French as Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part (‘Paths that lead nowhere’) – Heidegger explained his title:
In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are called Holzwege. Each goes its separate way, though within the same forest. It often appears as if one is identical to another. But it only appears so. Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what it means to be on a Holzweg.
(Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes)
This book is doing its best to follow Auden on his Holzweg.)
Anyway, the poem has clearly moved here into a different mode. This is Auden’s Sunday-high-tea-at-the-vicarage manner, that cup-and-saucer-tinkling, slightly vague sermonising manner. Everywhere throughout his work you get these little pronunciamentos, these sermonettes – which does mean he sometimes ends up sounding rather like Jesus addressing the multitude.
Or like a teacher.