One useful way of thinking about Auden’s massive oeuvre – or at least, one useful way I have of thinking about Auden’s massive oeuvre – is to imagine it as a kind of depository fed by his extraordinary brush-equipped pick-up belt of a brain, which managed to load and deliver material for recycling over a sustained period of more than forty years. As one might expect of a major processing plant – Auden Inc., established 1930, HQ NYC, with branch offices throughout Europe – most of the output during that period is of an excellent quality. But some of it is merely satisfactory. And some of it is rubbish. (Randall Jarrell described the late Auden manner as the work of someone who had ‘turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo’.)
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This is a stanza that concerns itself with various kinds of rubbish: trash, excess, unmet needs and bad ideas.
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(I have been reading Walter Benjamin – thirty, forty, fifty years after everyone else, having been thoroughly put off when I was a student. I remember once I mentioned his name in a seminar and was corrected in my pronunciation by our polyglot tutor: it was just one of those things, absolutely nothing, but one of those significant nothings. I’d like to say that Benjamin’s example is a model for this work, but his is a model I cannot possibly hope to follow; this book not so much an Arcades Project as an Auden minimart or corner shop. But I do know that no book on a serious subject is complete without a quote from my old friend Valthar Binhyameen:
‘Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.’ This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practised it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.
(Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings)
Auden is not a ragpicker, but he does talk trash.)
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According to William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, garbage archaeologists with the University of Arizona’s Garbage Project, ‘garbage’ refers ‘technically to “wet” discards – food remains, yard waste, and offal’ – ‘trash’ refers, strictly speaking, to the ‘dry’ stuff – ‘newspapers, boxes, cans, and so on’ – while ‘refuse’ covers both, and ‘rubbish’ refers ‘to all refuse plus construction and demolition debris’.
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Why is it ‘windy’ militant trash? Auden might be talking about Party pamphlets, I suppose, stuff that blows away in the wind, but also about speeches and statements that are themselves full of wind – rhetorical puff. Or perhaps it’s ideas that cause wind – matter that is hard to swallow, to digest and to stomach. Whatever it is, there is no doubt that Auden is partly addressing himself here: he could be windy and waffly at the best of times. (For Wystan at his windiest, see ‘A Communist to Others’, which is another of those poems that he revised and altered, before eventually excising it from his canon altogether, scribbling ‘O God what rubbish’ in the margins of one copy. He wasn’t alone, of course: lots of poets in the 1930s were writing poetry which they later came to regard as rubbish, particularly those in Auden’s crowd, who spent the decade slumming it and then regretting it. In their attempts to identify with the workers’ cause, they were driven towards what they felt was self-treachery. As Spender put it in The God That Failed – a book of confessions by ex-communists – ‘I was driven on by a sense of social and personal guilt which made me feel firstly that I must take sides, secondly that I could purge myself of an abnormal individuality by co-operating with the workers’ movement.’ Spender might have learnt from Lenin: purges never work.)
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Following his self-important windy years, Auden became insistent, going to the opposite extreme in his ideas about the social utility of art:
Art is impotent. The utmost an artist can hope to do for his contemporary readers is, as Dr Johnson said, to enable them a little better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it.
(Auden, Secondary Worlds)
Art is not life and cannot be
A midwife to society,
For art is a fait accompli.
(Auden, New Year Letter)
By all means let a poet, if he wants to, write engagé poems, protesting against this or that political evil or social injustice. But let him remember this. The only person who will benefit from them is himself; they will enhance his literary reputation among those who feel as he does. The evil or injustice, however, will remain exactly what it would have been if he had kept his mouth shut.
(Auden, A Certain World)
When disowning his work, Auden invariably referred to it as ‘trash’: the word registers his self-disgust. But I think it also registers something else, something rather slippery and disturbing.
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Freud had some notorious ideas about faeces and defecation and their role in the development of character, ideas most clearly expressed in his short paper ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ (1908), and in ‘Dreams in Folklore’ (1911), in which he sets out his belief that ‘all the interest which the child has had in faeces is transferred in the adult on to another material which he learns in life to set above almost everything else – gold’. The connection between the child’s esteem of faeces and the adult obsession with some other precious material perhaps tells us something about writers’ tendencies towards both self-disgust and self-esteem: Montaigne described his essays, for example, as ‘the excrements of an ageing mind’; Kafka in his diaries remarks that ‘writers speak a stench’; and Freud himself, writing to Wilhelm Fliess in 1899 about The Interpretation of Dreams, claimed that ‘no other work of mine has been so completely my own, my own dung heap’. Here, look at this amazing, disgusting thing!
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It’s certainly one of the more remarkable and endearing aspects of Auden’s work that he was prepared to consider his own great dung heap. In his foreword to his Collected Shorter Poems (1966), he notes that ‘some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring’. (If only Eliot had said the same about some of the infamous lines in ‘Gerontion’ and ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’.) It makes him sound honest to admit to being dishonest, but it also signifies strength, and self-discipline – not so much self-abnegation as self-assertion. It’s reminiscent perhaps of Eliot’s description of the poet’s role as being to purify the language of the tribe, or of W. V. O. Quine’s description of the philosopher’s role – in Word and Object (1960) – as ‘exposing and resolving paradoxes, smoothing kinks, lopping off vestigial growths, clearing ontological slums’. (I’ll tell you what: you wouldn’t want to have got on the wrong side of W. V. O. Quine.)
Genius often has this ferocious aspect: to proceed to the furthermost extremities of one’s art or one’s activities seems to require it.
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(I have known a few people in my life who I regard as actual geniuses, and there is no doubt that there is something ruthless about them all, something in them that’s prepared to discard and abandon whatever needs to be discarded and abandoned – people, things, ideas – and to allow others to suffer the consequences. It’s a quality I rather admire. Two of them are novelists, incidentally, the geniuses. Auden thought all novelists were sadists – and he may be right. William Trevor has a couple of sad, put-upon characters, Keith and Dawne, in a short story, ‘A Trinity’, from his collection Family Sins (1990), who are described as being ‘familiar with defeat’, and it could be argued that the purpose of all great literature is to familiarise characters with defeat. That’s what authors do: think Ahab, Madame Bovary, Heathcliff, Othello, Macbeth. Trevor’s characters are particularly interesting because of the way in which they slowly drift towards crisis and then into decline: they tell each other pointless lies; they misunderstand each other; their hopes fail; their marriages collapse; they suffer petty humiliations and embarrassments; their conversations stumble. William Trevor is prepared not just to sacrifice his characters, but to rubbish them, and to have them rubbish each other.)
Only a minor talent can be a perfect gentleman; a major talent is always more than a bit of a cad. Hence the importance of minor writers – as teachers of good manners.
(Auden, ‘Writing’)
And just to go back to Freud and faeces for a moment: in describing his work as trash, isn’t Auden implicitly making a claim that it matters? A poem might be memorable and durable, it might be pointless and forgettable, but if it’s trash, doesn’t that rather imply that it had value at some time? (Derek Mahon has a poem, ‘Roman Script’, in which he translates a phrase from Pasolini, ‘Nei rifiuti del mondo nasce un nuovo mondo’: ‘in the refuse of the world a new world is born’.)
Trash isn’t valueless: its value is simply exhausted, depleted, soiled, disputed or hidden.
One of the most striking features of rubbish is that we all instantly recognise it when we see it, hear it, read it, smell it or, horror of horrors, touch it. The pleonasmic vehemence of the typical response, ‘That is complete and utter rubbish’, would appear to confirm the all-or-nothing quality of rubbish. Just as dogs are undoubtedly dogs, so rubbish is undoubtedly rubbish. There are no questions of degree. An animal is either a dog or it is not a dog, and something is either rubbish or it is not rubbish. Yet in the one case there is (apparently) complete unanimity concerning which animals are dogs and which are not, whilst in the other case there is often complete disagreement as to what is rubbish and what is not.
(Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value)
A poem is not a dog. (Nor, for that matter, is dessert. The Stravinskys went to dinner once with Auden and Kallman in New York. In the bathroom, Vera Stravinsky found a bowl of brown fluid, which she emptied into the sink – only to discover that she had flushed away Chester’s pudding. The boundary between what’s waste and what’s not can sometimes be difficult to discern.)
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You might say that after the 1930s and 1940s, Auden treated all his old poems like dogs – or like sheep and goats. Saved or damned, yes or no, good or bad. Which may or may not be a bad thing to do; it may even be the right thing to do. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, in his book La Défaite de la pensée (1987), argues that our culture has ended up in its sorry state precisely because we have been unwilling to distinguish between art and non-art, between rubbish and non-rubbish. We have become victims, he argues, of ‘la non-pensée’ – non-thinking. At least Auden was thinking.
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On the other hand, maybe he was able to view his work as trash because for him it was all just too easy. His facility was so great – his ability to turn his hand to anything, or his face from anything – it’s disturbing. Randall Jarrell, in his essay ‘Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry’, which really remains the essay on Auden, just twenty-three pages long, published in the autumn issue of the Southern Review (1941), in case you want to look it up, an essay which took Jarrell six years to write – if I was as good as Randall Jarrell, if I was as diligent, working at his pace, this book would have taken not twenty-five but sixty years to write – declares that ‘Auden was like someone who keeps showing how well he can hold his liquor until he becomes a drunkard […] he is like a man who will drink canned heat, rubbing alcohol, anything.’
Virtuosity can be dangerous. It can make you careless.
It can make you say things you don’t mean.
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(One reason this book has taken me so long to write is that I have tried only to say things that I mean and to mean the things that I say. This has proved much more difficult than I thought.)