Auden as a Guide to the Living of One’s Life
He Helps Us to Have Spiritual Purpose, and to Love
In “As I Walked Out One Evening” Auden gives us two memorable lines about the transience of our lives: “In headaches and in worry / Vaguely life leaks away.” For most of us that is probably true—at least for part of the time. Our life is short and seems all the shorter the closer one comes to its end. We would like to do great things; we would like to lead a life that is full of meaning and purpose, but there are few of us who achieve that—rather, we struggle to catch up with lives the course of which is determined by chance, by the vagaries of fate. As a result, we may live our days suspecting that we are not getting from life all that we might. The famous question Is this all there is? sums up that dissatisfied, possibly puzzled feeling rather succinctly.
Of course there are several ways of filling this empty core at the heart of our existence. One of these is religious belief, and Auden was one who chose this as his preferred solution to emptiness. He embraced Christian belief—or reembraced it—when it dawned on him that liberal humanism had failed to prevent the moral disaster of fascism and the horrors it brought. He was nudged in that direction in a famous incident in which he witnessed, at a cinema in New York, the German audience cheering on the killing of Poles. In “New Year Letter” he considered the notion of the Kierkegaardian leap into faith: the act of commitment that enables us to assert a position that reason alone might not be able to justify. Thereafter he knew what belief he would profess, even if the rational dissection of the tenets of that belief might produce doubt or incredulity. Many people take that view, electing to believe in something that may wither under close scrutiny but that nonetheless represents an engaged response to evil and emptiness. And why should they not do this? The rationalist will argue that we should face up to the reality of our position, even if that reality offers us no comfort. A fond belief in something that we cannot prove, the rationalist would argue, amounts to nothing more than self-delusion; far better to be adult, to face up to the facts of our existence and use humanistic values to justify and inform the struggle for a better world.
It is certainly possible to see the logic of such a position. Courage in facing up to the fact that we have no life other than this one, that there is no divine intervention in human affairs, and that we can expect no help might well be expected to shock us into moral improvement. And yet, in practice, such a view has not done that. When Auden decided that science and psychology, along with the liberal humanistic values they proclaimed, were powerless in the face of real evil, he chose to commit himself to a system of belief that gave grounds for the pursuit of the good, and to a set of rituals that embodied that notion of the good; by identifying, then, with a power for good, we give our own weak spirit a strengthening boost. That may amount to whistling in the dark, but if its effect is to give a sense of moral purpose and thus enable us to lead lives that have moral shape, then one might be justified in asking what is wrong with that.
I can understand the discomfort of the rationalist over this. I can see, too, the argument that ultimately it is better to be truthful to ourselves and others about everything, but I wonder whether the destruction of Western spirituality has ultimately enriched us more than it has impoverished us. I believe that the materialism that has become the prevailing value of many post-Christian Western societies has not brought us any greater happiness—indeed its reductionist effect appears to have brought widespread alienation. The material appetites can never be satisfied; we shall never be made happier or more fulfilled simply by possessing the latest electronic gadgets or being able to afford bigger and better material things. That simply will not happen; in fact, the outcome of a materialist philosophy will be quite the opposite. Auden would agree with that, and if today we seek to understand his spiritual quest, as well as the other quests that played an important part of his life, we might be encouraged to embark on similar quests ourselves. The results may be distinctive for each of us; not everybody is going to end up, as Auden did, in the Anglican Church or indeed in any church. The spiritual life can be cultivated in all sorts of ways: through music, through poetry, through the cherishing of others or, more broadly, the appreciation and understanding of nature. It helps, though, to have the support of others in our striving, and so it may be more effective to participate in the institutional effort that organized religion involves—but this is not necessary. Nor, I think, is it necessary to believe in a personal god of the sort that we find in Christian doctrine. Religions are full of myths and things that defy belief; these things can clutter and obscure, can put off those who might otherwise find solace or purpose in religious practice. We do not have to believe them, though; we can see them for what they are—expressions of value—and live with them because they have been thought necessary in the past, as signposts to something that would otherwise be too difficult to explain, or because some find them helpful in the cultivating of a spiritual life. We can act, then, as if they were true, although we know they are not, embracing the purpose and dignity they give to our lives, the example they set. That is not dishonest, nor is it cowardly; it is easier to proclaim meaninglessness than it is to assert meaning or to see the meaning in symbolic myths; it is easier to be cynical and dismissive than it is to assert the primacy of the good. We should not see Auden’s adoption of a Christian position as a retreat into the comfort of a sheltering creed—it was a highly intellectualized process; it was for him the only solution, the only thing that could impose on life the sense of order and meaning he sought. This was the reaction of a critical, acute mind, not a clutching at a straw of comfort.
There is very short poem by Auden in which I take great comfort. “The More Loving One,” written in 1957, can be read at one level as a poignant, but not particularly complicated, reflection on unrequited love. It is considerably more than that, though: it is an acceptance that in the face of meaninglessness or indifference it is still possible to be engaged in the world—it is still possible to love. These are the first two stanzas of this curious little poem:
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
At first blush there seems to be nothing complicated about these lines. The argument can be summed up as follows: the stars have no interest in us—there are some things for which our human concerns are a matter of complete indifference; our life is nothing to them. In our earthly lives, though, indifference is not too bad—there are plenty of things that can do us a great deal more harm than can indifference. But what if we are faced with the opposite of indifference—a strong passion that we cannot reciprocate? It is better then, Auden suggests, to be the giver of love rather than its object.
But can he really mean that? Can it really be true that the person who burns with passion for one who does not return it is better placed than the nonreciprocating object of his or her love? I would have thought that the misery of such a situation is very clear. The person who loves another who cannot or will not love him or her back is surely to be pitied, and most of us would probably not wish to be that person. So what Auden suggests here flies in the face of our common experience of the pain of unrequited love, unless he is suggesting that it is particularly uncomfortable to be the subject of love that one does not want. He probably does mean that, because Auden was himself the more loving one in his long relationship with Chester Kallman, and perhaps that is what he accepted, and indeed wanted. Why? Because to love another who is unworthy of one’s love or who will not respond to it is a mature act of moral commitment of precisely the sort that Auden valued and that he himself practiced in his relationship with Kallman. Kallman was unfaithful to him, and indeed there was a moment when Auden may have came close to killing him—a shocking revelation that he was later to allude to in a verse letter to Kallman. We cannot be completely certain of the facts, but according to one account Auden had his hands poised above the throat of his sleeping lover and could easily have proceeded to throttle him but did not.
There is another way in which we can read the lines “If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me.” This reading has nothing to do with psychological comfort but is concerned with, rather, the need that we have to love others in spite of what they feel about us. It would be best if we could all love one another to the same degree, but that will not be possible. Some, therefore, will not love us, but that does not mean that we should fail to love them. To say let the more loving one be me is to express the hope that we shall rise above the indifference of others, and perhaps even above their animosity, and love them more than they love us. Surely that is true—and surely even if this reading takes those words out of context, the message is a profoundly moving and inspiring one.
He Reminds Us of Community, and of How Our Life May Be Given Meaning through Everyday Things
This is one of the greatest gifts that Auden has for us. Auden has been described as a Horatian poet—a poet in the tradition of Horace, the Roman port of the Augustan age whose work, particularly his Odes, expresses his love and gratitude for the life of the untroubled farmer, happy with his lot in life, savoring the pleasures of the tables, enjoying the company and conversation of friends, and bringing his poetic sensibility to bear on the everyday matters of our domestic life. Alan Jacobs has traced Auden’s journey to this Horatian position in his eminently readable account of the poet’s career, What Became of Wystan? In particular, Jacobs points out the striking similarities between Horace’s eulogizing of his Sabine farm in the Satires and Auden’s lines in “Thansgiving for a Habitat.” Horace says:
This is what I had prayed for: a small piece of land
With a garden, a fresh flowing spring of water at hand
Near the house …
It’s perfect. I ask for nothing else, except to implore,
O Son of Maia, that you make these blessings my own
For the rest of my life …
And almost two thousand years later, Auden says of his cottage in Austria,
… I, a transplant
from overseas, at last am dominant
Over three acres and a blooming
conurbation of country lives …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What I dared not hope or fight for
is in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft
where I needn’t, ever, be at home to
those I am not at home with …
A poet in the Horatian tradition need not necessarily be insensitive to the major issues of the day but is nonetheless likely to be concerned with the personal moral life—with the effort that we all must make to live with our private conscience. This will result in a focus on our own lives as people engaging with others, making choices, responding to art, being a citizen, and so on. This focus may lead to gratitude of the sort that Horace voiced—and that Auden expresses too. Auden reminds us to be grateful, and that is something that we increasingly need to be reminded of in a culture of expectation and entitlement. Consumerist culture has encouraged us to complain—we have become very good at that—but it does not encourage us to say thank you. As a result, expressions of gratitude may even strike us today as surprising—something worthy of remark. But why not say thank you? Perhaps we do not express gratitude because we do not think that we have anything to be grateful for. In which case, Auden certainly helps, because his poems after 1940 tend to be poems of celebration, written with great charity and with love for the ordinary pleasures of life. That message is immensely powerful, and even if it is Horatian in tone, it is more potent in its moral effect that any quantity of impassioned more political verse spelling out the features of injustice and suffering. The fact that one concentrates on the cultivation and appreciation of the personal life does not mean that one will be any the less dismayed than those who adopt a more publicly engaged position; you have to cherish something before you can truly defend it.
His particular insight was that we need to be at home; all his concerns with division within ourselves, with the tragic flaws in our nature, with the thwarting of love—all these point to the need that he felt we had within us to locate ourselves in a place we could live in with love, with people with whom we could share. This insight was evident in the early Auden but became stronger and more clearly expressed with the passage of time. It is there, explicitly stated, in that line in “Streams” in which he talks about the need that people have for their holy places; it suffuses the later poems in which he celebrates domesticity, the living space, our habitat. His nightmare was an absence of the sense of belonging—the life of the anonymous city in which we are all strangers, largely indifferent to one another. Auden lived in a large city, New York, but combated the loneliness of such a life by creating community through friendships and intellectual exchange. That is what we, too, must do; indeed that is what we shall be increasingly obliged to do in a world in which globalization sweeps away the power of the local to protect our sense of who we are and where we come from.
Preserving the human scale of our lives in the face of the onslaught of globalization and its bland culture cannot be achieved by legislative fiat. The declared cultural policy of states may be to protect or enhance local culture—France does that, as does Canada, to an extent—but such measures sometimes seem to be no more than the putting of a finger in a dike of a near-universal popular culture. It is very difficult to protect ourselves from fast-food chains or standardized coffee bars; it is equally difficult to keep fragile or threatened cultures alive in the face of blandishments of powerful offerings from far away. Many people today lead cultural lives that are rendered shallow because the things that have been authentic to their particular place are overshadowed by things made or done for them elsewhere, a long way from where they are, and having no ties to their past. That may be largely inevitable, given technological change, but it involves the loss of possibilities of feeling and belonging and fosters a consequent impoverishment of spirit. We can restore the power of the local by resisting the claims of those forces that would take away from us our control of our local lives. It is not particularly easy, but victories can be achieved against impersonal agencies, against empires even, by people asserting the value of what is local to them and taking back the power to control it. The Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe was ultimately weakened by just that, and the process of resisting distant power will repeat itself elsewhere unless people become too dehumanized to resist. But what they have to have to inspire them in such efforts is a culture that is real and valuable to them. By helping us to understand our choices, by illuminating our life and encouraging us to feel grateful for it, Auden assists the cause of freedom.
On his memorial in Westminster Abbey are inscribed the words In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise. I remember when I first read that these lines had been chosen for that memorial, I was not sure I understood why. Now I understand.
I have learned so much from this poet. I have been transported by his words. My life has been enriched by his language. I have stopped and thought, and thought, over so many of his lines. He can be with us in every part of our lives, showing us how rich life can be, and how precious. For that, I am more grateful to him than I can ever say.