A Discovery of Auden
I saw Auden only once. It was in Edinburgh, a short time before his death, at a reading that he gave in the University Lecture Theatre in George Square. I was in my mid-twenties at the time, and I had just taken up my first academic post in Belfast. I was back in Edinburgh for a visit when I stumbled upon a notice announcing that W. H. Auden would read from his work at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a day. I got hold of a ticket and found a seat close to the front.
The poet came in, flanked by members of the committee of the Scottish Society for the Speaking of Verse. The party mounted the stage and introductions were made. Then Auden stood up, and it became evident that the fly-buttons of his trousers were undone. There was an audible gasp from the audience, but Auden seemed unaware of anything untoward or, if he was aware of it, did not care. He began to recite his work, entirely from memory, including “The Fall of Rome” and “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
“The Fall of Rome” is a portrait of decline. If Auden was at pains to stress the virtues of the civic sense and the city, he was also aware of how such things can fall apart. In this poem the images of such decline are particularly vivid:
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend …
Caesar’s double bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
Lines like that are memorable; indeed, they can get under one’s skin. When I see a picture of a glittering occasion, with fantastic evening gowns, I am sometimes tempted to think of the impermanence of empires; when I encounter a minor bureaucrat—a customs official, perhaps, annotating those largely useless forms that we have to fill in when we cross a border—I wonder whether he or she would not like to write in “I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK.” And as for the agents of the Fisc pursuing tax-defaulters through the sewers—that is pure Graham Greene, pure Harry Lime. When I read in the newspapers of the arrest of some financial criminal, I am tempted to imagine that the arrest took place in a sewer, a paysage moralisé if ever there was one.
There is a modern term for lines of poetry or song that stick in the mind in this way—a worm. Most of us experience these worms from time to time; we hear a snatch of melody and later we hum it repetitively. For me, it tends to be a line of poetry; the line returns again and again until it becomes part of the way I look at things. It may be a line of Auden, or it may be a line from some other poet. Michael Longley, the distinguished Northern Irish poet, once wrote a poem in which he referred to the landscapes of Ireland and of Scotland. There is a line from that poem that comes to me again and again: “I think of Tra-ra-Rossan, Inisheer / Of Harris drenched by horizontal rain.” I find that last line very beautiful; Harris is an island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I have a house on the edge of the Hebridean Sea, and it is close to such islands. When I see an island swept by rain, Michael Longley’s lines often come back to me, as if they were background music orchestrated for the very scene before me.
I do not mind this in the least—why should one mind? It is rather like having the poet by one’s side—ready to point something out, ready to put into words a feeling or impression that would otherwise be fleeting. And I think we need these familiar references. In the past, many people had them from religious liturgy or from exposure to biblical texts—or they picked them up from poetry they had been obliged to learn by rote as children. This is no longer the case, with the result that our stock of metaphor, the range of our vocabulary, contract and language becomes dry and technical—and less morally and imaginatively powerful.
As Auden read these poems, the unmistakable accent, English with an overlay of American, was compelling; the famous face, with its geological catastrophe of lines and crevasses, held the audience. The fact that he was a sartorial disaster, wearing a stained and ash-spattered suit and battered carpet slippers, in no sense detracted from the impact of his words. This was what the audience had come to see and to hear, and it was being delivered.
A short while later he died. I was then back in Belfast and had gone out on a Sunday morning to buy a newspaper. I turned the corner into the street in which I lived and read, on the front page, the headline, AUDEN DIES. The article revealed that Auden had been in a hotel in Vienna and had been found dead by Chester Kallman. Isherwood, it said, was too distraught to make any comment to reporters. I remember thinking: What did they expect? I have never understood why the press feels that it is appropriate to try to interview those in a state of grief.
I walked the rest of the way back home feeling that curious emptiness that can sometimes come after receiving the news of a death. This emptiness can sometimes seem all the greater when you did not know the person who has died, but you admired him or her. Perhaps it increases the poignancy; one has lost a friend one never really had the chance to have. In this case, I felt that a great humane voice had been silenced. I felt a strange sense of loss, as one feels when a personal hero dies. Public people, people we do not actually know but whose lives or work means something to us, become part of our lives. They are like friends, and their death moves us in the same way as does the death of a friend.
I read a great deal of poetry as a child. I had a rambling set of volumes called Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, my proudest possession, and this had pages of poetry among the articles on famous explorers and the Pyramids of Egypt that such books tended to contain. This started me on poetry, and by the time I was in my teens I had read screeds of Tennyson, Longfellow, and the like, with a smattering of the moderns, including Eliot (“A cold coming we had of it …”) and Lawrence (“A snake came to my water trough, on a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat …”). I had, too, a slender paperback of translations of Yevgeny Yevtushenko; I was so proud of the ownership of this book—Russian poetry! And I owned it where-as others in my class at school had no idea who Yevtushenko was!) For various reasons, Auden had not featured in this; he was obviously far too outré for Arthur Mee, and the moralists who edited school textbooks would perhaps have caviled at including a poet who was synonymous with left-wing ideals of the 1930s and the permissive sexual attitudes that went with all that. So by the time I was nineteen, my reading may have included Spender and MacNeice but had embraced little Auden apart from one or two poems of his that I encountered in anthologies. It was in one of the Guinness anthologies, I think, that I first came across “Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno.” That was, I think, the first poem that I read of his, and I am not sure if at that point I understood it fully. I had not been to Italy at that stage, and so I did not understand the full contrast, so strikingly portrayed by Auden, between the culture of northern Europe and that of the South of Italy, between northern Protestantism and the relaxed Catholicism of the Mediterranean.
Can Auden be read by young people? I have often wondered which of his poems I should recommend to younger readers and have not always been able to come up with suggestions that will get them started on him. This did not stop my introducing my elder daughter to his work at the age of four, in what, in retrospect, seems an absurd example of the pushy parent hothousing a child. I read her “As I Walked Out” and taught her to recite the first few verses. She appeared to enjoy this, and we still have a film of her sitting on a sofa, wearing a curious red hat, reciting, “As I walked out one evening, walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement, Were fields of golden wheat.”
Of course it is not with four-year-olds that a proselyte of Auden’s work might be concerned; the more appropriate young audience is that aged between, say, sixteen and twenty-something. This group certainly responded to “Funeral Blues” when it was recited by a grieving lover in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and the muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circling overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policeman wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Auden in general speaks to the more mature mind, but the raw sorrow and sense of loss that this poem conveys spoke to a young audience that had probably never heard of him. And the same might be said of “September 1, 1939,” another poem that touched the public imagination so vividly. That poem was photocopied and faxed around New York in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade towers. I suspect that many of the recipients similarly had never encountered Auden but were profoundly touched by the gentle resignation of many of the lines of that poem. Auden, when encountered for the first time, can touch the heart, can bowl one over, as these opening lines from that poem can certainly do:
On Fifty-second Street, Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low, dishonest decade …
The dive in question does its best, but its denizens are who they are:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day;
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Auden has a knack of seeing exactly who we are, and with that self-knowledge comes a very particular benison. I wish that somebody had put a volume of Auden into my hands at the age of fourteen or fifteen. I wish that somebody had been able to explain him to me, to accompany me through a line-by-line exegesis of poems such as “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.” What a comfort that would have been; what a release from the very oppression that he talks about in those lines. Most of us, of course, wish for that sort of thing. We think back to our youth and wish that we had had somebody who could have taught us not to worry, could have laid our anxieties to rest, could have relieved us of unnecessary unhappiness.
As it was, my real discovery of Auden came during that time in Belfast, in 1973 and 1974. I remember browsing in the university library and wandering past the poetry shelves. A blue-covered hardback book attracted my attention: Collected Shorter Poems, by W. H. Auden, published by Faber and Faber. I borrowed that book and started to read it that afternoon. I was immediately in thrall, in particular to the Freud poem, and I read my way through if not all, then the majority of the poems in that collection before returning it to the library. I had no idea, of course, that I was making the greatest literary discovery of my life. Thereafter there would be no writer who made as profound and lasting an impression on me; no writer whose work I would carry about with me in my suitcase when traveling, as a priest may carry his missal, or a diarist his diary.
We do not always remember the precise circumstances in which we first make an important intellectual encounter. I have many favorite writers, but only in very few cases do I remember how I first came to them. I remember my discovery of Somerset Maugham, whom I first read in my late twenties when I was spending a month at a research institute in Hastingson-Hudson, in New York. I had resisted Maugham for some reason, in the way in which we sometimes put off reading a particular book or author, not for any good reason but simply, and perversely, because we have decided that we do not read that book or that author. That summer, though, I read Of Human Bondage sitting in the porch of the house I was staying in, so far from the London of Maugham’s story. I also recall the circumstances of one or two other literary discoveries, of recommendations made by friends, but not in the same detail as I remember this first reading of Auden.
Where we are when we read something can make a difference to how we respond to it. Auden’s earlier work is written in response to political and social crisis. In a later chapter I shall return to this theme, but for now I raise it to make the point that reading Auden in troubled circumstances gives his work a particular resonance. When I first started to read Auden I was in Northern Ireland, and it was in the time of the Troubles that began in 1968 and continued until the first years of the twenty-first century. The word troubles is a somewhat poetic Irish expression; in reality Ulster was seized by what can only be described as a low-grade civil war. British troops patrolled the streets; the police moved about in armored cars; the sound of exploding bombs was a regular occurrence. At night the city was largely deserted, a northern Beirut, divided into mutually hostile zones. In such an air of crisis, Auden’s thirties poetry seemed utterly apt, with its sense of things about to go wrong, of unreason about to be unleashed.
It was not just Auden that I read at the time. That year in Belfast was for me a period of discovery of Irish writing—of Brian Moore, the novelist, whose Lonely Passion of Miss Judith Hearne and The Doctor’s Wife capture so beautifully the atmosphere of middle-class Belfast. I also came across Michael Longley, one of the finest poets of his generation and also the most accomplished interpreter of that special Belfast poetic sensibility. Political crisis lends an edge to poetry—both to its writing and to its reading. Auden was a good companion, then, to the sense of danger that hung over Northern Ireland at that time. He had experienced something infinitely more sinister in his encounter with European fascism, but what he wrote about still seemed to be relevant to times where fear and distrust hung in the air about one. Auden helped; he was exactly that rational voice to which he alludes in his poem to Freud. He said that poetry had nothing to teach us, but he was wrong about that; just as he was self-confessedly wrong in his assessment in “Funeral Blues” that love has no ending.