1946 Despite the false promise of the Munich Agreement, many British people sensed towards the end of 1938 that war with Germany was on its way. So when in the New Year of 1939 W.H. Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood sailed for New York on board the steamer Champlain, it looked to many as though they were fleeing their threatened homeland for a (then) neutral country where they’d be safe.
Evelyn Waugh’s reaction that Auden fled to the US ‘at the first squeak of an air-raid warning’ was typical of the poet’s enemies.1 Even friends like Stephen Spender reproached him for giving up the ‘struggle’.2 Spender, part-Jewish and therefore with more to fear from a successful German invasion, would stay behind and fight the Blitz as a fireman.
Auden thought England was provincial, that its political and aesthetic culture had declined along with its industry. America was no promised land for him, but at least New York, where he planned to settle, was cosmopolitan, in touch with the rest of the world. ‘An artist ought either to live where he has live roots or where he has no roots at all’, he told Louis MacNeice in 1940.3
Of course he was welcomed by the New York literary community. Before long he was giving lectures and writing for the New Yorker. In the autumn of 1939 he had moved to Brooklyn, begun to attend services at the local Episcopal church, and taken up with a Brooklyn boy, Chester Kallman.4
By the end of the war it was clear that Auden’s work had changed direction. He himself had repudiated much of his earlier work – particularly the communist invocations of history like ‘Spain 1937’ – and had re-established his Christian faith. But back in England all signs of an increasing conservatism were put down to his formal change of citizenship. Now the line of attack wasn’t his cowardice and treachery. What preoccupied a younger generation of English critics was the depletion of energy and loss of focus in the poet’s work following his emigration.
So John Wain claimed that the characteristically trenchant ‘Auden line’ had been smashed by his ‘renunciation of English nationalism’, while Philip Larkin lamented the loss of Auden’s ‘dominant and ubiquitous unease’ when he absconded to America. ‘At one stroke’, Larkin proclaimed, ‘he lost his key subject and emotion – Europe and the fear of war – and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.’5
1 Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden, London: Minerva, 1996, p. 180.
2 Stan Smith, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 6.
3 Cited in Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 180.
4 Brad Lockwood, ‘Remembering W. H. Auden’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 29 September 2009.
5 Cited in Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.