Who Was He?
Many of us can point, I believe, to a particular artist—whether he or she be an author, a painter, or a musician—and say: This person’s work means a very great deal to me. Sometimes, indeed, we might go further and say: This person has changed my life. Alain de Botton has written a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, a title that I suspect was devised with at least some tongue in cheek but that speaks, nonetheless, to a very real possibility of personal transformation. The title of this book is in a way lighthearted homage to de Botton’s remarkable book. But something that is lighthearted can be very serious in its intention. I believe that reading the work of W. H. Auden may make a difference to one’s life. Of course we can be changed by reading or listening to something that moves us deeply, that makes us see ourselves or the world in a different light. It may be a poem that has this effect, or it may be the contemplation of a great painting; it may even be the great Proustain novel itself. In any event the work of art we are confronted with unlocks within us the recognition of something that had escaped us before. We are changed because we now understand something that we did not understand before.
For me, the person who has had this effect is Auden. Who was he? One of his poems begins: “A shilling life will give you all the facts.” Well, here are the facts, in even less detail than one might expect from a shilling life. Auden was the son of an English doctor. The family tradition was that the name was of Icelandic origin, although this has been the subject of dispute. When you look at a photograph of the poet as a young boy, though, he looks the part—large-boned, with a shock of light-colored hair, and that almost translucent skin that one sees in many Scandinavians. He was born into a comfortable home in which scientific inquisitiveness was always present. He grew to like rocks and old machinery, and the words that went with such things. The atmosphere in the home was one of tolerance—at least on his father’s side. His mother was less accepting of her son’s ways, complaining of his untidiness and, in one splendid attack on his “intemperate ways,” his habit of eating any food he came across. She herself was described by some who knew her as an unattractive and domineering personality in contrast to the milder and more accepting nature of Dr. Auden. There may be no book on the mothers of poets, or artists in general, but it might one day be written and would be, I think, an enlightening read.
As was common in those days—and still is, to an extent, in his particular class of English society—he was sent off to boarding school. Gresham’s School is in a small town called Holt, in Norfolk, a remote part of rural England. Unlike many boarding schools of the day, the regime in this school was reasonably liberal and did not involve the cruelties in which the English educational system of the time excelled. These could be profoundly distorting: how many lives were ruined by a harsh regime of relentless conformity, enforced by physical punishment; how many young men were sent out into the world emotionally crippled by a system designed to produce a stiff upper lip and an acceptance of hierarchy. The English were unwittingly cruel to their children, which is something the Italians, to think of one example, have never been. Auden did not have to contend with the traditional boarding school ethos—Gresham’s was no Eton—even if he felt that the Gresham’s honor-culture had the curious effect of creating what he considered an atmosphere of distrust. It was a good atmosphere, perhaps, for the production of spies, and indeed Auden was a near contemporary at Gresham’s of Donald Maclean, one of the so-called Cambridge spies (along with Blunt, Burgess, and Philby). Another contemporary was the composer Benjamin Britten, with whom Auden was later to collaborate. Both of those names—Maclean and Britten—can be seen today on the boards in the hall at Gresham’s that list those who won prizes. Auden’s name was added much later, recording the fact of his appointment as professor of poetry at Oxford.
It was while he was at school that he began to write. He had gone for a walk in the countryside with a boy called Robert Medley, an independent spirit for whom Auden felt undeclared love. They had become involved in a discussion about religion when Medley suddenly said to Auden: “Tell me, do you write poetry?” We can picture the scene: two boys walking in a Norfolk field, when one asks the other whether he writes poetry, and the other suddenly realizes that this is what he wants to do. This may reasonably be seen as one of the great, crucial moments in the arts, akin, perhaps, to the moment when it was suggested to Shakespeare—as it might well have been—that he might care to write a play about a prince of Denmark; or when Picasso’s attention was drawn to the bombing of a small Spanish village called Guernica; or when Leonardo da Vinci asked his model to smile—enigmatically, if you wish, but please smile. Fortunately, Auden acted upon the suggestion, and shortly afterward he had a poem accepted for Public School Verse, his first publication and the beginning of an output that was to produce numerous volumes over the years.
He went on to university, to Oxford, to Christ Church, where he was the clever undergraduate, the center of a circle of like-minded bright young men impatient with their elders—as bright young men have to be—and eager to become part of the new intellectual climate that was emerging in post–First World War Europe. It was a time of intellectual and artistic ferment, and in the eyes of his contemporaries at Oxford, Auden was very much in the vanguard of all this. He was also extremely promiscuous, picking up other young men with undisguised enthusiasm, even succeeding, as one of his biographers reports, in making conquests on the short train journey between Oxford and London. But if the world seemed bright and full of possibilities, there was a snake in the garden, and this would soon make its presence known in an unambiguous fashion.
Auden was not involved in politics at Oxford—his interest in the subject was really kindled only after he left the university and went to Berlin. But many of his contemporaries were becoming deeply involved in political debate: the future they envisaged was one in which justice and freedom would be secured by the enlightened reform of society on rational principles, while material needs would be catered for by scientific progress. It was a fairly conventional left-wing vision, and it had all the confidence that such views of the world usually have. For some, such as the British intellectuals who famously traveled to Moscow, the Soviet Union became the embodiment of their hopes (“We have seen the future—and it works,” enthused the fashionable social theorists Sidney and Beatrice Webb of their carefully stage-managed visit to Russia); for others the battle was a more domestic one, to be fought through unions and internal reform. For all of them, though, the greatest threat was fascism, which was threatening the very basis of European civilization. It was against this backdrop of political threat that Auden spent the years immediately following his graduation from Oxford.
In 1928 he went to Berlin, where he stayed until the spring of the following year. This was a very important experience for him in terms of political education and personal discovery—the equivalent, perhaps, of a dramatic gap year today. Christopher Isherwood, his close friend, recorded that period very strikingly in his Goodbye to Berlin, a book that was so successfully and atmospherically translated to stage and film. Later he went to Spain, another focal point of the battle between European left and right, intending to drive an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War. (Auden was not a good driver at all, and the fact that he did not actually drive an ambulance was probably a good thing for those whom he might have conveyed.) One of his great poems, subsequently disowned, was “Spain,” in which he explores—meretriciously, he later said—the significance of Spain to his generation. There was a visit to China with Isherwood to record the implications of the Japanese invasion, and a journey to Iceland with the Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice. Several volumes of poetry were published—to considerable critical acclaim. As a poet, Auden was feted. His was a new and exciting voice that seemed to capture the hopes—and anxieties—of the time.
In January 1939 Auden and Isherwood went to the United States, leaving behind an England on the brink of war. Their departure at such a critical time was the subject of adverse comment, with some regarding it as an act of retreat, of personal cowardice. In Auden’s case, it was probably not cowardice: those who knew him are firm in their rejection of that charge. When war broke out, Auden did contact the British Embassy and offered to return, to be told that only skilled people were needed. Yet for some reason that remains unclear, he did not respond to the subsequent urgings of friends who encouraged him to help with the British war effort. In his defense, it must be said that he did not go to America specifically to escape Hitler, nor did he preach appeasement. His decision to emigrate was based on a combination of factors, including the desire to be part of a society that was still in the process of creating itself. He also wanted to earn his living by writing—something that he felt would be more achievable in the United States. And that proved to be the case: Auden always worked hard for his living and was proud of the fact that he made poetry pay.
His reputation in the United States grew steadily. He lectured widely and wrote numerous essays and criticisms. In the decades following the war, his position as one of the foremost poets writing in the English language became assured.
He returned to Christianity, to an idiosyncratic form of Anglo-Catholicism, having been influenced by his extensive theological reading and by his own need to find a way forward in life. He wrote libretti for operas, notably The Rake’s Progress, over which he and his long-term partner, Chester Kallman, collaborated with Igor Stravinsky. He spent summers in Italy and then in Austria, where he bought a house an hour from Vienna. In the United States his home was in St. Mark’s Place, in Greenwich Village, and he lived there, in conditions of famous mess, until he decided to return to Oxford, where he was given a cottage on the grounds of his old college. His last years there were spent in an Oxford that had changed significantly since his own undergraduate days. He was a lonely figure, sometimes sitting alone in a coffee house, untalked to by students who were too shy to do so or who were simply unaware of who this shambling, unkempt figure was. He was seen in Blackwell’s, the famous Oxford bookstore, reading books off the shelf and then replacing them, his clothing covered in cigarette ash and assorted stains.
He was a very messy man—he always was, and there are numerous stories of the conditions of domestic disarray in which he lived. Some years ago I visited Williamsburg, Virginia, where I was due to deliver a talk at the College of William and Mary. My hosts were members of the English faculty, and one of them was married to a writer who told me an extraordinary story about Auden. We were in the car, traveling from the airport at which I had arrived, when, knowing of my admiration for Auden, he mentioned that as a teenager in New York he had met the poet. I asked him to tell the story.
He had written poetry, as some teenagers do, but, unlike most teenagers, he had decided to go to the top in seeking an opinion of his work. He wrote to Auden, enclosing some of his work, and Auden wrote back. That, in itself, was a fine thing: many such letters go off into an uncertain future and are never answered. This may be regrettable, but it is at least understandable: some public figures may be overwhelmed by correspondence and find it impossible to reply to all the letters they receive. They should not be judged too harshly for that, perhaps, but those who do reply should certainly be given moral credit.
Auden’s reply was encouraging, and the young man was emboldened to send further samples of his work. This led in due course to an invitation to call at Auden’s apartment to discuss the work. There was nothing untoward in this invitation, and the meeting consisted of a serious discussion of the poetry that the young man had been writing. But lunch was served amid great domestic squalor, and this gave rise to the story of the Audenesque chocolate pudding encountered by Vera Stravinsky. Mrs. Stravinsky, visiting Auden and Kallman for dinner, went into the bathroom and discovered on top of the cistern a bowl containing an awful brown mess. This she flushed down the toilet, thinking that she was improving the flat’s hygiene but only to discover that she had disposed of the chocolate pudding placed there to cool.
The young poet’s story tells us about Auden’s quiet, but very touching, kindness. Auden helped people. Sometimes this took extraordinary forms: he was kind, for example, to a Canadian burglar who wrote to him from prison. He wrote back, encouraging the burglar in his interest in poetry. (Canada no doubt has its share of burglars, but for some reason there seems something surprising in the concept of a Canadian burglar—something vaguely oxymoronic).
He died in a hotel room in Vienna and was buried in Kirchstetten, the village where he lived and where he was much appreciated and honored. At his funeral, the village band played him to his grave. The funeral of any great artist may be particularly poignant because it is the end of all the beauty he created; that it should come to this—a cluster of friends and relatives, around the resting place, with flowers and the dying notes of a brass band.
Those are the simple, stripped-down facts. They conceal so much: an immensely complex body of work in which there are layers of meaning and reference that could take a lifetime to understand; a noble and generous heart; a courteous and urbane citizen of a troubled century; a man who somehow seems to speak personally to his reader. They conceal a person who might be the best of guides to the inescapable task of being human; who might, if we allow him, really change our lives.