Choice and Quest
One of the pleasures of coming to Auden in one’s twenties—as I did—is the strong sense of identification that one can develop with the poet in his early years. In one’s twenties one can read what Auden wrote at the same stage in his life, and earlier, and imagine how he felt—because that is how one feels oneself. Yet one sees that there is a later Auden, the Auden at the height of his powers round about the time of his departure for America, and soon thereafter; one then encounters the mature Auden, the Auden of settled views, the religious Auden; and finally the cantankerous and complaining Auden of late middle-age, the Auden who complained about modern manners and carped on about the boredom and vulgarity of a changed world. Here then is a whole life reflected in a body of poetry that changes in its preoccupation and emphasis, mirroring, too, a whole swathe of a turbulent century. It is not impossible to chart development in the life of other writers, but there are few, I feel, whose work reveals so clearly the intellectual history of an age without being tied so closely to the particular as to become dated and irrelevant once the world has moved on. There is, then, in Auden’s work a strong sense of biography, even if he generally eschews the sort of personal poetry that one finds, for instance, in the work of Robert Lowell. Lowell’s Notebooks became a favorite of mine in the late 1970s, but I always felt that in reading these poems I was listening to a poet addressing a circle of friends and contemporaries of whom I knew nothing and would never meet. Auden’s friends are present in his poems—often as dedicatees—but any conversation he has with them is not a private one. Auden uses the first-person pronoun sparingly and, even when he does, the I transcends the purely personal and sounds more like a we that naturally and courteously includes the reader. Even at his most intimate, in his gravely beautiful “Lullaby,” we know that the poet was there and that these, or something like these, must have been his thoughts, and yet he speaks for all of us who have been vouchsafed a personal vision of Eros.
It is sometimes said that writers give themselves away every third sentence, no matter how much they protest their detachment. Small wonder, then, that readers as well as critics should believe that their appreciation of a work might be aided by an understanding of its author. Some authors dislike this intensely; the historical novelist Patrick O’Brian once commented on what he described as the effrontery of a journalist who asked him his age. Auden felt that his private life was his own affair even if at times his poems are extremely revealing of the moral and psychological growth of their author. Auden was at pains to stress that his poems should be judged as creations in themselves and not as an outcrop of the poet’s personal life. If such a wish was unlikely to be honored in the first half of the last century, how much more unlikely would it be in an age of deconstruction and persistent intrusion.
The early Auden is rich and rewarding, as full as any young man can be of determination to find a way through life, as excited as any of us feel at the outset of adult life. Auden liked to obscure the context in which his poems were written by ignoring, or indeed confusing, chronology, but wherever the early poems are placed in a collection, they will stand out for the strength and vividness of their imagery. This is poetry that engages strongly with landscape—with roads and cliffs and lead mines; it is the poetry of a young man looking at his world and trying to see what lies beneath it. It also shows the beginning of the spiritual quest that was to feature in all his work: the young Auden is searching for the way that will lead him through life—he is looking for a purpose, for a role that will enable him to live honestly and to heal the rift both between man and nature and between the contradictory aspects of the poet’s personality.
The sense of quest in Auden’s life led him to engage in a series of adventures in which he became for a time the man of action that he realized he never was. The scholar poet is not the hero athlete—and usually knows it—but may try to be. I find Auden’s life absorbing because it is very unlike the life of those poets who appear to have done nothing but frequent academia. How can one write convincingly of life if one has seen only so small a slice of it? Hemingway asked that question and went off to preclude its application to him by hunting and deep-sea fishing, all fueled by copious quantities of whisky. Auden spoke in his earlier poems of the truly strong man but well understood that one did not become truly strong by doing the sort of things recommended by Hemingway. Rather, he traveled; first to Berlin, where he spent a great deal of time catching up on sexual opportunities harder to encounter in the more prudish climate of England. Berlin was all about sexual freedom, but it was also about politicization, and by the time he returned to England, his previously proclaimed views on the separation of poetry and politics had changed. Then there was the trip to Iceland he did with Louis MacNeice, the trip to Spain during the Civil War, and the journey to China to investigate the conflict with Japan. These were not the actions of a man who intended to live his life in a literary ivory tower; these were the actions of a man who was struggling with a central moral question that most of us face: to what extent should we seek private peace or follow public duty? The world is a vale of tears and always has been. We may withdraw from it and cultivate a private garden of civility and the arts—a temptation that is often strong; or we may face up to uncomfortable realities and work to bring about justice in society. Auden’s life and example illustrates the struggle between these two options; significantly, it offers comfort for us whichever way our choice may lead us.