14

Eros, Builder of Cities

The title of this, the fourth of the Northcliffe lectures, comes from the closing lines of Auden’s great elegy for Freud:

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

Reporting MacNeice, I spoke of Stephen Spender’s vulcanite desk and Wyndham Lewis portrait as a story denied by Isaiah Berlin, and I dutifully noted his remark. But Spender himself later told me the story was perfectly true. One shouldn’t put too much trust in the conflicting reminiscences of survivors. I daresay my remarks about Goronwy Rees, another survivor of my acquaintance, may sound too acerbic for the occasion, but this occasion merely remembered others that had shaped my attitude.

The chapter ends with a defence of ‘the English Auden’, the poet as he was in his youth, the poet whom he came to dislike or distrust. I included in the lecture a guess that having made such brilliant use of Anthony Collett’s book The Changing Face of England when the cheap edition of 1923 came his way, he turned to it again years later in his poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’. Now I know that he was looking for another copy of Collett in 1947, and he presumably found one, for it affected that splendid poem. This information may be found in Edward Mendelson’s The Later Auden (1999). Mendelson and I have an ancient quarrel about the early Auden, perhaps particularly about ‘Spain’, which I take some notice of in this chapter. This inveterate difference of opinion does nothing to reduce my admiration for Mendelson as scholar and executor of the Auden estate; he has managed the poet’s Nachleben with extraordinary generosity and skill.

The poet’s debts to Collett’s book are also recorded by the second of the major living Auden authorities, namely John Fuller, in his W. H. Auden: A Commentary (1998). Auden, as Janet Adam Smith once noticed, had a habit of hoarding phrases for future use, and he was greatly taken with Collett’s book, which is full of such treasures. Except in this connection it seems to be forgotten – another injustice, for it has exceptional power and distinction. No doubt its geology has dated, but that is appropriate enough, as if Collett’s book were miming what it describes, the perpetual mutability of the English scene. What should have preserved it was the power and felicity of its prose. But I suspect that Collett’s politics, miles to the right of the modern Conservative Party, would be the most important obstacle to a revival.

 

One of the chief difficulties of writers compelled by conscience or desire to cross the frontier of class was simply habit, an attachment to their own way of life. An Upward might teach himself to hate that way of life, but even he could not altogether forfeit the inheritance of bourgeois manners and education; and others, though convinced that it must be sacrificed, could not bring themselves to despise it, or to abandon it in what they took to be its last days. The inheritance included certain attitudes very much at variance with the straight-faced and solemn courtship rituals with which they approached the proletariat. They were clever and cliquish, weaned on private jokes and teases which could take a nightmarish turn, as in ‘Paid on Both Sides’ (1930) and The Orators (1933) (both strongly affected by Upward’s earlier manner). And they naturally teased one another; and might be expected to comment on what sometimes seemed false or strained in the poses struck in public by friends.

In his posthumous autobiography The Strings are False (1965) Louis MacNeice, who was perfectly capable of teasing himself, teased his friends for talking too much about ‘barricades’ and the like – he might have added ‘struggle’ and ‘history’ or even ‘love’. There was Stephen Spender, moving forward from liberalism to Communism in a chic apartment with a vulcanite desk and a Wyndham Lewis painting over the fireplace.¹ There was – to focus for a moment on an interesting minor figure in MacNeice’s circle – an impassioned Welshman, haranguing a group of writers as if from the pulpit, but not with the object of instructing them in the old ways of virtue; for his message was that in future they must take their orders from the proletariat, lay down their personalities, and become the trumpets of the people, the working class in whom lay all hope of victory in the struggle. The meeting over, the exhausted speaker demanded, and was given, oysters at Prunier’s, where oysters were very expensive.

This speaker was Goronwy Rees, not a writer of importance but a figure of some interest to students of bourgeois life and love, and also Oxford, in the Thirties. I say a word about him here because I want at the end of this chapter to distinguish rather sharply between the genuine article and the reproduction, closely associated though they were in the Thirties, as no doubt at other times. MacNeice, who knew him well and liked to take him to rugby internationals at Twickenham, says he would have made ‘a wonderful travelling salesman’,² but he became a Fellow of All Souls instead. Oxford had attached to him that almost irremovable label ‘brilliant’, and he was famous for charm. By the time I came to know and for a time to work with him the admired black curls were white, but a fair share of folly and misfortune had not quite extinguished the brilliance or the other qualities for which he became well known. I see that there is at present an argument in progress as to whether Rees was ever signed up by the KGB; later it might have been a question rather of the CIA. But it would be a pity if it came to be thought that his association with spies was the only interesting thing about him.

The son of a Welsh preacher, he tells us he had not wanted to go to Oxford, seeing it as the opposite of what he took to be the just order of things; but he soon changed his mind, and congratulated himself on avoiding the corruptions of Cambridge, a university he held responsible not only for the treason of his friends Burgess and MacLean (and doubtless Blunt, about whom Rees remained silent), but for the homosexuality then rampant at Oxford, which he attributed at least in part to the unwise importation from Cambridge of the teachings of G. E. Moore and E. M. Forster. In those days, one gathers, Oxford was a male society, recruited largely from the public schools, and it seems that homosexuality was flaunted as a class marker. The young Welshman found it all very strange, and wondered how it had come about that two universities, one preaching and the other practising corruption, should provide the nation with its rulers as well as with its spies. Nevertheless he quickly joined this decadent society.

However, as the Twenties turned into the Thirties, there was a change of moral climate. For the kind of life Oxford had offered one had now to go to Berlin. Politics, to which nobody had hitherto paid much attention, now became important. In 1931 Rees, already a socialist, became a Prize Fellow of All Souls, with £300 a year, a bed and board. ‘It only slightly marred my enjoyment of it’, he writes, ‘that an unemployed family in South Wales lived on 30/- a week.’ Shortly afterwards he was asked to dinner by Felix Frankfurter, and so met ‘the most brilliant undergraduate of his day at Cambridge’, Guy Burgess.³

Rees justly commends the ruling class of the time for its easy acceptance of a brilliant outsider, even if Welsh, Wesleyan, and heterosexual. And he gives as good an explanation as anybody of how the aestheticism of the Twenties was transformed into the gay Communism of the Thirties. The change was a change of interest rather than of class feeling. And, however easy his acceptance, it is hard to think of Rees as being fully incorporated. Capable of wildness, he was quiet compared with Burgess. He wrote prose of dignified precision, totally lacking in the virtuoso excess of Auden or of his friend Henry Green, famous for his extremely idle and luxurious way of life as an undergraduate. He was loyal to the set he had joined and kept Burgess’s secret for sixteen years, revealing it only when Burgess had decamped, but doing so, with ridiculous indiscretion, through that trumpet of the proletariat, the Sunday People.

For this performance he got into terrible trouble, and it will doubtless be for his minor role in the Burgess and Blunt affairs, though possibly also for other vagaries, indiscretions, and brilliances, that he will be remembered. But he is also interesting as a charming métèque, a talented mimic, a curiosity; very attractive, serious much of the time, unafraid of the louche but also of ‘big houses where things are done properly’. That phrase comes from Elizabeth Bowen’s novel of 1938, The Death of the Heart, which is widely and correctly believed to contain a portrait of Rees as a young man. The society represented in the novel has more elegance than conscience: ‘The most we can hope for,’ says one character, ‘is to go on getting away with it till the others get it away from us.’ ‘These days,’ says another, ‘there’s something dreadful about talk; people’s convictions keep bobbing to the surface, making them flush.’ Should one try to earn the respect of the workers (feudalism) or simply pay them for what they do (cash nexus)? In this milieu Eddy seems in a way innocent, like the girl Portia (also a portrait of a well-known and still living writer), who, though a relation, is regarded as of a lower class than the family. However, we are instructed that in such a milieu innocents are forced to be disingenuous: ‘the system of our affections is too corrupt for them; so they blunder and cheat and betray.’ When Portia runs away it is the perfect servant, Matchett, feudal fossil and ethical norm – her name conventionally reduced to deny her both gender and baptism – who goes after the girl. Matchett’s values are not corrupt because she is not involved in that system of affections. Eddy, who partly is, cannot be found at the critical moment, and is therefore, though rather oddly, described by the family as ‘a scab’; meanwhile they get on with their dinner.

Eddy is an illustration of Orwell’s argument that there can’t be lower-class intellectuals because as soon as they become intellectuals they are forced to live in a world very different from their own; and sometimes, we might add, in a system of affections which induces them to blunder and cheat and betray. This was simply an acute form of the problem everybody had when habit or self-interest attached them firmly to a way of life which conscience insisted they should give up; acute because, having but recently arrived at that way of life, one finds it necessary, like some of the other inhabitants, to denounce it in order to be comfortable in it. This could expose one to teasing, as MacNeice, who would never have teased his more important friend Blunt, teased Rees. His revivalist performance at the writers’ political gathering was a calculated regression to a nonconformist origin; MacNeice, whose origin was prelatical, couldn’t possibly have made such a speech with a straight face. But the lapse was partly redeemed by the amusing request for oysters.

MacNeice wasn’t always amused, but he was always conscious of the irony of professing commitment to a cause of which the success would be measured by the degree to which it destroyed the way of life he enjoyed. He was willing to call himself a snob; he liked pleasant places to live, wine, poetry, upper-class women, Greek and Latin classics, in-jokes, and Twickenham better than boiled oranges and Argus-eyed potatoes, and he was reluctant to give them up though sure that they must be given up. Poetry may be sometimes flippant, sometimes sad; but it should always be a civilized admission of this necessity. Minor poet though we may think him, MacNeice – like other poets called minor – did something new, wrote a new poetry of departure, entirely different in tone from the freakish nostalgia of Auden’s ‘good-bye to the house with its wallpaper red/Good-bye to the sheets on the warm double bed …’⁴ Writing Autumn Journal in the aftermath of the fall of Barcelona and the German occupation of Prague, MacNeice feels that more than a sort of comfortable candour is called for, but he is determined not to risk dishonesty. It is because he has the technical resource to be honest that Autumn Journal survives as a sensitive record of the failures and successes of a class response to what now seemed a terminal threat. Even in its rehearsal of stock themes I’ve already mentioned it shows an intelligent blend of sympathy and self-interest.

August is nearly over, the people Back from holiday are tanned

With blistered thumbs and a wallet of snaps and a little Joie de vivre which is contraband;

Whose stamina is enough to face the annual Wait for the annual spree,

Whose memories are stamped with specks of sunshine Like faded fleurs de lys.

Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers, The workman gathers his tools

For the eight-hour day but, after, the solace Of films or football pools

Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eye of doubt,

The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking In the empty glass of stout.

Everything in this passage about duties and pleasures suggests a sympathetic wish that everybody could be as fortunate as the poet, so that one becomes almost too aware of a note of self-congratulation: our sprees are more frequent, our work less mechanical, our consolations more genuine than films and football pools; what we do when we cuddle is not called cuddling, and our conversation is not just gossip, though we can have that, too. Also we can compare the foam of the Guinness (in your glass, not ours, of course) to brown lace. We deplore these contrasts as the result of

an entirely lost and daft
System that gives a few at fancy prices
Their fancy lives
While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet
Must wash the grease of ages off the knives.

But in spite of this knowledge,

habit makes me
Think victory for one implies another’s defeat,
That freedom means the power to order, and that in order
To preserve the values dear to the elite
The elite must remain a few. It is so hard to imagine
A world where the many would have their chance without
A fall in the intellectual standard of living
And nothing left that the highbrow cared about.

‘Which fears’, he continues resolutely, ‘must be suppressed.’ But the effect of the poem derives from the relaxed way in which it declines to suppress them, though without making too much fuss about the refusal. Neither his personal troubles, delicately alluded to in the poem, nor his purely intellectual complicity with the unwanted revolution, can really prevent this civilized poet from being himself as he waits, somewhat incredulously, for the gun butt to rap on the door.⁵ The mind will not follow the heart: ‘My sympathies are on the Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts … With my heart and my guts I lament the passing of class.’⁶ One could think but not feel the unthinkable.

And that is something we should be able to understand, as we struggle to imagine nuclear winter and carry on as pleasantly as possible with our lives. The war images were different in the Thirties, more thrillingly apocalyptic (Auden’s crumbling flood, Empson’s forest fire ripening the cones), but they were inevitably based on the recent world conflict, with some imaginative trimmings. At the time of the Spanish Civil War there were great numbers of men around who had fought in France or elsewhere less than twenty years before, and even some who were young enough to fight in the war that was coming: it was expected to be like the Somme, plus aerial bombardment with gas, electric rays, civilian panic.⁷ But even after Guernica it smacked for most people of fiction, and the left-wing poets sometimes felt that they were almost alone in their awareness of the historical situation, so that the demands on them were felt as much greater than those to which poets are accustomed, and of a different sort. ‘It is quite easy to prove that we are in the first peculiar crisis of civilization,’ wrote Geoffrey Grigson, ‘and if poets say that rather often now in a good many different ways, is there a fact for us which is more important?’⁸ And looking back at those times from a distance of many years, Stephen Spender stressed the isolation of the poets who thought so:

 

if a small but vociferous and talented minority of what were called ‘the intellectuals’ (this was the decade in which this term began to be widely used and abused) were almost hypnotically aware of the Nazi nightmare, the vast majority of people – and the government and members of the ruling class – seemed determined to ignore or deny it. One had the sense of belonging to a small group who could see terrible things which no one else saw.⁹

 

To have that sense was of course to be cut off from the proletariat all over again. The keener one’s awareness of imminent war and proletarian revolution, the greater one’s difference from the mass of people. It is MacNeice’s serious but unimpassioned, rather nostalgic understanding of this that gives Autumn Journal some of its value. Others felt they must do something more positive than he – write articles and pamphlets, go to Spain. In the end most came to see that their actions were of small importance, that Spender’s ‘Who live beneath the shadow of a war,/What can I do that matters?’ was the wrong question – a natural, even admirable mistake, rather like the mistake of the Party itself in sending young writers to be killed in Spain. Auden, Day-Lewis, and MacNeice, each in his own way, came to understand this. And, as I said in the previous chapter, Spender, much better informed politically than the others, was forced to conclude that political action in the real world – political action on the only possible side – would be a worse affront to his conscience than abstention. Loyalty to Moscow meant telling lies. It was a simple but decisive consideration.

These were not the first poets to lose faith in a pure revolutionary cause – to become rather desolately aware of the discrepancy between ideals of social justice and the world of political power. Comparisons would, I think, suggest that this group came rather well out of the experience. Such failures are more valuable than some successes. Whether or not Auden was right to believe in the end that poetry can make nothing happen, it must be true that there can be poetry about the sort of thing that poetry cannot make happen, and about that failure. Here it might be useful to compare The Borderers and Spender’s Trial of a Judge, neither work satisfactory to its author yet central to his development. Wordsworth withheld his play from publication for almost half a century; Spender has in recent years given his extensive revision. Of the original version he seems to accept MacNeice’s opinion, that he had intended to express the weakness of liberalism and the necessity of Communism, but that this intention was ‘sabotaged by Spender’s unconscious integrity; the Liberal judge, his example of what-not-to-be, walked away with one’s sympathy’.¹⁰ The play shows that the Judge is wrong when he says with quiet conviction, ‘My truth will win’, and that his enemy Hummeldorf is equally wrong when he states that ‘Abstract justice is nonsense’. Although the Judge dies in a ‘vacuum of misery’ he redeems Hummeldorf; in some sense his truth has won, despite the power of the state to erase or deform the record of its victory. The play has obvious faults, but it is not a fault that it fails to make the political point mentioned by MacNeice. At the crisis there is nothing the Judge can do except suffer, yet the idea of Justice survives him, whether or not it is to be identified with the hopes of the Communist prisoners.

In the same year, 1938, Rex Warner published his novel The Professor, a book that deserves to live, not as another tragedy of liberalism or another indictment of Fascism, but as a study of abstract justice. The hindsight of the narrator can assure us that the Professor, summoned to power as his country is about to capitulate to Fascism, is quite unfitted for politics, believing as he does ‘not only in the existence but in the efficacy of a power more human, liberal, and kindly than an organization of metal’. Some future civilization, the narrator allows, may judge the Professor not to have been entirely without value. However, in his own day he is totally defeated by the tricks of the Fascists, the follies of non-Communist labour leaders, and the treachery of a beloved mistress. Possibly his most important encounter is with a philosophical cobbler, who wants nothing to do with economic improvement, the amelioration of poverty, or the cure of disease, holding that infinite human wretchedness is the true ground of love. This rather remarkable passage seems to offer a more abstract version of that love of the poor for their doomed wretchedness so notable in Upward.

In Warner’s novel, classrooms, parks, and streets are merely sets before which long serious debates are staged; though sometimes they are invested with a dreamlike terror which reminds one of his earlier book The Wild Goose Chase (1937), as well as of Kafka and Upward. These settings seem exactly suited to the impossible logic of the discussions: book-burning, torture, and rape seem to happen in a dream, but when such dreams invade the waking world the existence of justice is signalled only by its absence, and that of love by its present impossibility. This stately, wretchedly noble book, I’m glad to say, is not wholly forgotten. It could not have been written at any other moment, but it still touches the conscience; it expresses very well our interest in justice and our sense of its inaccessibility; and its severity is a reproach to our habit of dismissing books merely because we think their surface ideologies dated.

We do this the more readily when the books in question are so obviously caught up in a slightly embarrassing historical moment, especially when that moment was one of a crisis supremely important in detail and implication to writers conscientiously seeking a direct engagement we know by hindsight to have been unavailable – in the present case, with the immediate issues of poverty, war, and revolution. We know what happened, and cannot re-experience the excitements and terrors of the time, or be assailed in conscience by that set of facts; such reconstructions are impossible even to the most laborious of historians. Instead of smothering ourselves with futile historical fact we rely on convenient mythical formulations to make that past accessible. The myth of the Thirties as a ‘low dishonest decade’¹¹ began to circulate before the decade was over, and, as I said earlier, the influential voice of Orwell helped to give it permanence: its most celebrated writers were a pink clique, a pansy left, enfeebled by a gutless inability to surrender their class privileges. They may have wished to violate frontiers, transgress, defamiliarize the idea of class; but they were too ill-educated and too self-indulgent to do so.

Orwell was a transgressor, a violator of the frontiers of class, including its rhetorical frontier, the one that divided the mandarin from the demotic. One can imagine what he might have said about Rees in Prunier’s, and one knows what he said about Auden. Orwell had made many painful enquiries; he knew what it was to be poor, and what it meant to fight and be wounded. These writers who talked a lot but did no first-hand research were not really artists, not really men, not really alive. He thought of them as a transient historical phenomenon. The great writers of the preceding generation hadn’t been at public schools or English universities; they had not been Communists; most of them had not even been English. But now the English had swarmed out of their educational reserves and temporarily taken over. The times forbade them to go in for what would have suited them best, ‘art for art’s sake’. ‘Between 1935 and 1939 the Communist Party had an almost irresistible attraction for any writer under forty.’ So these young writers joined the Party, or came close to doing so, in much the same way as the previous generation had tended to join the church. They were quite right in their belief that ‘laissez-faire capitalism was finished’ but quite wrong to think they must therefore throw in their lot with Stalin. Not to perceive that the Russian Communism then available was nothing more than an instrument of Soviet foreign policy testified to a degree of stupidity possible only to an intellectual or an ignorant working-man. They felt the need of a cause, something to take the place of patriotism, honour, and the like; but they were too ignorant to find a true one. They had no notion of what life was like in countries less fortunate than their own, in police states; for ‘cultured’ middle-class life in England had ‘reached a depth of softness at which a public-school education – five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery - can actually be looked back on as an eventful period’. Here he is hitting out at Cyril Connolly and his opinion that Eton was an experience after which the rest of life must be something of an anti-climax.

The stick Orwell used to beat these softies in Inside the Whale (1940) was, unexpectedly, Henry Miller. Miller wrote strong demotic prose, was, on his own account, heterosexually virile to an unusual degree, and didn’t give a damn about the fate of the world. This endeared him to Orwell, who did care about the fate of the world but attached great importance to being demotic and uncommitted. Marxism, he said, could easily prove that ‘Bourgeois liberty of thought’ is an illusion; yet without that illusive liberty ‘the creative powers wither away’. Hence the folly of the pink writers in choosing a faith which required its surrender. But it has been part of my argument that these writers were well aware of the difficulty; Upward gives lengthy testimony to the agonies it caused, and the others all came to see that their honest choice was precisely the bourgeois illusion, if illusion it was. Orwell’s attack really comes down to saying that they were ignorant, cowardly, and self-regarding, and it is true that they were less tough and less knowing than he was; but they had their own peculiar understanding of their problems and the cost of their solution. They were not quite the half-hearted, the gullible, the gutless Thirties poets of the myth.¹²

 

The greatest of these poets, Auden, made his own solid contribution to the myth. Arriving in New York on the day Barcelona fell, and failing to go back home when the European war began, he seemed to have declared for bourgeois liberty, however illusive; but that was only the beginning. I agree with Barbara Everett that his move to the United States – hardly the result of a solemn decision – resulted from what he himself diagnosed as a perpetual ‘desire for separation’, and that it was, at worst, a ‘graceless’ act.¹³ I vaguely remember thinking at the time that he and Isherwood were quite right to make themselves safe, whether or no that was their intention, and I still think this a sensible view of the matter. Anyway, Auden’s more substantial contribution to the myth of his own early failure was his wilful and, as I believe, imperceptive renunciation of his own work, his implied denunciation of himself as liar, fraud, or dupe.

Despite some quite strongly expressed views to the contrary, Auden remains at the centre of our thinking about the Thirties, and it will not seem inappropriate if I conclude this chapter by discussing him at slightly greater length than I have so far. I will begin by mentioning one of the more celebrated instances of his meddlings and recantations, the ‘Prologue’ to Look, Stranger! (a title I may be alone in preferring to Auden’s own choice, On This Island, for it sets him at a distance from this island, affords those panoramic views of what he did not know and meant to find out). I have for fifty years thought the ‘Prologue’ a great poem and I don’t suppose anything could induce me to change my view at this stage, though I admit that believing it to be so may have affected my notion of what one sort of great poem should be like. But Auden himself was very unhappy with it, messed it about, and later dropped it altogether from his canon.

Edward Mendelson, who probably knows more about Auden than anybody else does, and certainly a lot more than I do, has always championed the poet’s decisions in such cases, and he does so here, calling the ‘Prologue’, along with some other poems, ‘deeply selfcontradictory or inauthentic’. He points to May 1932, the month in which the poem was written, as the moment of a major change in Auden’s manner; a switch ‘from clinical distance to didactic exhortation’. His admiration of the final lines of the poem is muted; here they are:

In bar, in netted chicken-farm, in lighthouse,
Standing on these impoverished constricting acres,
The ladies and gentlemen apart, too much alone,

 

Consider the years of the measured world begun,
The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water.
Yet, O, at this very moment of our hopeless sigh

 

When inland they are thinking their thoughts but are watching these
islands.
As children in Chester look to Moel Fammau to decide
On picnics by the clearness or withdrawal of her treeless crown,

 

Some possible dream, long coiled in the ammonite’s slumber,
In uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and kindness
Its military silence, its surgeon’s idea of pain;

 

And out of the Future into actual History,
As when Merlin, tamer of horses, and his lords to whom
Stonehenge was still a thought, the Pillars past

 

And into the undared ocean swung north their prow,
Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn,
For the virgin roadsteads of our hearts an unwavering keel.¹⁴

‘Splendid as the rhetoric is,’ says Mendelson, ‘– and the retention of the verb drives until the end is splendid indeed – it leaves some doubts …’ For instance, ‘Merlin, tamer of horses’ is inappropriate, since, if Merlin follows Dante’s Ulysses beyond the Pillars of Hercules, his fate should be that of Ulysses, not millennium but disaster. Mendelson catalogues faults and loosenesses elsewhere in the poem, and Auden’s thefts from Anthony Collett’s book The Changing Face of England (1926, cheap edition May 1932, the very month of the poem) are, it is implied, further evidence of opportunism and inauthenticity.¹⁵

It is likely enough that Auden himself would have accepted these criticisms, but they seem misplaced all the same. The poem isn’t truly didactic, for it doesn’t teach – it prophesies, with a reminiscence of John of Gaunt. In the Newton passage condemned by Mendelson, Love (that now vast impersonal force, the Eros that builds cities and reforms societies) is addressed like this:

Here too on our little reef display your power,
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp,
The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;

 

And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching
The apple falling towards England, became aware
Between himself and her of an eternal tie.

This is surely a very just conceit. England is little, a reef, a fortress, a mole; it is seen, like everything else in the poem, from a height, a distance; on one side Europe threatens, on the other the sea (enriched by the epithet ‘exile-crowded’, which makes it a nowhere full of anxious transients, in contrast to our home, our known and loved bit of territory, the garden in which, if anywhere, we walk in peace). It is to this small spot, a rock sticking out of the ocean, that gravity impelled the apple of Newton, thus demonstrating that the power which maintains the constellations is a perfect figure for the way we perceive, in our tiny habitat, the operation of another cosmic force, here called Love, which also moves the sun and the other stars.

As for the debt to Collett, it was noticed long ago in a review of Look, Stranger! by Janet Adam Smith, who attributed it, admiringly, to Auden’s sensible habit of hoarding phrases.¹⁶ Collett’s book is already a hoard of phrases, and, given the sort of book it is, a poet of Auden’s cast, with a passion for panoramic views and long historical perspectives, would have been mad not to use it. Its very title – The Changing Face of England – is exact for the period; but to see how apt the book was we need to observe that the changes Collett talks about are large-scale – geological, ethological, philological, and this is what enabled Auden to project his sense of catastrophic political change on to the scale of those vast but slower upheavals that change our coast, our rivers, and our language. It is a magnificent book, now of course out of date; changes Collett describes as occurring have now occurred, and his patriotic musings on race would certainly be called racist. But he has real grandeur and real point. What, to mention the most famous borrowing, could better illustrate the relation of England to the continent as one of unity in separation than the remark Auden brilliantly stole for the great chorus in The Dog beneath the Skin?¹⁷ There Collett’s observation that the North Sea ‘is still so shallow that if St Paul’s was planted anywhere between the Dutch and English coasts the golden cross would shine above the water’ is repeated with no more modification than Shakespeare would make to suitable bits of Plutarch. And Collett, in this modern version of the Mutability Cantos, dwells on the instability of what may seem fixed boundaries, the land liquefied by the sea, the sea as it were solidified by the land, the apparently eternal boundaries always in flux. A poet who likes to look on this island like the hawk or the helmeted airman could hardly do better than use Collett as a chart, showing the immemorial cliffs that are yet so new in geological time that solidity cannot be expected of them – ‘Like the moulting crab they need time before their surface hardens’ – and then closing in on the curled ammonites as the poet had done on the cigarette-end smouldering in a garden border. Auden, remembered the ammonites, was grateful to learn about the Sugarloaf standing sentinel over Abergavenny and the children in Chester scanning the summit of Moel Fammau to judge the weather prospects. Years later he must have thought of Collett when he wrote ‘In Praise of Limestone’; and perhaps when he used the Welsh word ‘nant’ to mean a brook or burn. Collett’s book offered him language that was already on the way to being poetry, a view and a love of England close to his own, the cosmic force intensely felt in one’s own garden yet known as universal; and a certainty that change is the law of the world.

That is why Merlin (a Trojan, therefore a proto-Briton) turns north from the Pillars, not south like Dante’s Ulysses (a Greek) and finds not destruction but England, when England was not yet even a thought. The ancient possible dream will arrive in the same way to transform the impoverished constricting acres. Auden quite enjoys telling us it won’t be comfortable, that it’s no use raising a shout, that our talk and kindness will have to be laid away because they existed only for ‘ten persons’. It was for this kind of talk – ‘its military silence, its surgeon’s idea of pain’ – that some admired him and some, like Orwell, thought him too ready to speak of what he didn’t understand. But now, I think, we can see that it has its own accuracy. This is how it feels to contemplate a future, long prefigured by history, and now imminent, over which you have no control and from which you can expect no comfort save that of conscience and compliance. It will be a catastrophe, but of the sort Auden would later have called a eucatastrophe.

So that last sentence of the poem isn’t to be dismissed as mere rhetoric, however splendid. It celebrates, with the aid of its extended simile and the mythic charge it carries, an improbable, even a painful victory for goodness, for history as impersonal and alarming but ultimately benign – a victory as epoch-making as the one Auden celebrated almost thirty years later in the poem ‘Hammerfest’, when he spoke eucatastrophically of

… that preglacial Actium when the huge
Archaic shrubs went down before the scented flowers,
And earth was won for color …¹⁸

But that palaeobotanical victory happened, and the voyages of the Trojan Merlin and the possible dream didn’t, so that, when Auden decided that ‘nothing is lovely, /Not even poetry, which is not the case’,¹⁹ he concluded that such poems as the ‘Prologue’ were mendacious as well as useless. Certainly the ‘Prologue’ did not reduce the crowd of exiles, hasten the millennium, or even, in all probability, win recruits for the Party. Its usefulness, if it has any, is as a prophecy of love and its attendant terror.

Something of the sort may be said also of Spain, 1937. We all remember Orwell’s sneer at ‘the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’ – it could only have been written by a person to whom murder is at most a word – but fewer recall that he also described the poem as ‘one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war’. Stephen Spender, who thinks it a rare attempt on Auden’s part to write a poem with the formal structure of the dialectic, feels that it expresses ‘an attitude which for a few weeks or months he felt intellectually forced to adopt, but which he never truly felt’.²⁰ Mendelson accepts the poet’s own judgement, which is that, like ‘September 1, 1939’, it is ‘infected with incurable dishonesty’ – a dishonesty which, according to Mendelson, lies in its ‘implicit claim to have joined the realm of the private will to that of the public good, when in fact the union had been made through the force of rhetoric alone’. This distrust of ‘rhetoric’ – after all the only instrument available for the purpose – the critic has inherited from the poet, and he gives the word a very restricted sense, associating it, I suppose, with propaganda. However, he allows that neither Spain nor ‘September 1, 1939’ is simply ‘public and didactic’, calling them ‘equivocal’,²¹ as indeed they are. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that Auden could have so badly misunderstood his own poems unless it was from a simple desire to escape the memory of what it had been like to write them. Anyway, I believe that both Spender and Mendelson, despite their closeness to the poet and his work, are wrong about Spain.

In 1937 the Spanish Civil War seemed to have simplified the great historical issues by offering a plain though painful choice; as Spender expressed it, an individual could believe that his own action or failure to act ‘could lead to the winning or losing of [that war], could even decide whether or not the Second World War was going to take place’.²² The government seemed not to care much, even when British ships were bombed, and it might have seemed that the masses went on with their ‘dreams of freedom’²³ and did not bother about the other dream uncurling from the ammonite, the tidal wave that would soon breach ‘the dykes of our content’²⁴ – the satisfactions of the middle class, or of the poor content with the pools, the odd cuddle, the bitter beer, and the annual baring of flesh ‘beside the undiscriminating sea’.²⁵ If Auden came to think it wrong or hopeless to write poems intended to move some parts of that large public, it is not difficult to understand why he went on to join the party of his detractors and deplore his own past.

But Spain is not a marching song or a recruiting poster; it is an attempt to express what it feels like to confront a great historical crisis. At bottom such crises have elements in common, and in this respect Auden’s poem resembles Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ – indeed in my view it is our best political poem except for Marvell’s. Both deal with the great work of time and its ruin with individual will and its relation to historical forces. Both have wit and magniloquence, and both are, in Mendelson’s word, ‘equivocal’. As the execution of Charles (which divides Marvell’s poem in half) divides one age from another – however much one might regret the past and hesitate before the unknown future – so Spain divides history and concentrates attention on today and its ‘struggle’. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps, the future …’ The skewed detail, its oddity and force, may strike us as too much of their period, but the strong build of the poem supports them, as Marvell’s supports his puns and conceits.

Auden came to hate the last stanza most of all:

The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon—²⁶

and yet it seems to me exactly right. Heaven and earth leave us to our moment; choice is necessary, failure irredeemable. When he said this was ‘unforgiveable’, Auden had changed his mind about history and redemption; but that cannot hurt the poem, which ends with a remark as clear-sighted and as urgent as that which ends Marvell’s poem: ‘The same arts that did gain/A power, must it maintain’; ‘History to the defeated/May say Alas but cannot help or pardon’. The ideas are ancient, the politics modern; and so too with the individual poetic response.

So Spain does deal with what is the case, even if the poet came to see it as a reflection of an uneasy or shaming interlude in his intellectual life. There is the past, wittily sketched as a history of instruments – the counting-frame, the cathedral, the dynamo – and a future less clearly definable; there is Life, an evolutionary force that once operated independently, as when it established ‘the robin’s plucky canton’, but whose action now depends on human decision. Life is now boldly identified with Spain, which at this critical moment offers itself to human choice. Henceforth the forces of life, like Marvell’s ‘ancient rights’, will ‘hold or break / As men are strong or weak’. They tell you to choose, not what to choose. The whole of history, evolutionary as well as cultural, culminates at this moment, and in Spain – a figure for crisis and necessary choice, a reef or mole between past and future. We have always projected our individual crises on to history, so Spain is caught up in a typology, and it is the nature of typologies to transcend history; because we all at times have to make more or less desperate choices, the urgency of that Spanish moment does not disappear with the moment itself. It becomes part of our mythical habit. It is this validity of type, as well as its magniloquence and wit, that preserves Auden’s poem.

My brief doesn’t require me to argue that Auden was never glib or false; as he said later, he was always a British Pharisee,²⁷ not as other men were, and lacking the sense other men might have that they needed at least to seem consistent in their opinions, or to give plausible reasons for changing them. Auden, I think, never really bothered to do that, and there is good reason not to accept his Thirties poetry at his own valuation. It was written under conditions of considerable intellectual discomfort, at a time when, in Spender’s phrase, there was a real compulsion ‘to make some choice outside the entanglements of our private life’.²⁸ The effort to do that enabled Auden to discover an appropriate magniloquence, something that was to recur very rarely in his work over the following thirty years, because he falsely equated it with falsity.

Auden once said of Kipling that poem after poem of his deals with encirclement, danger, and fear, ‘vague menacing shapes which can be kept away by incessant action but can never be finally overcome’.²⁹ There is something of Auden himself in this description. He feared encirclement – Spain and Thirties politics, each in its way, were something of the kind; they invaded the mind from all points of the compass; and, lacking Kipling’s ability to build bulwarks, Auden simply – or not so simply – withdrew. There was poetry in the being afraid of encirclement and in the departure from the ring as well; in the attempt to be on the side of Eros, builder of cities, as well as in the abandonment of Eros in favour of Agape.

 

I began this chapter with some words on a minor figure, Goronwy Rees, who was part of the network of acquaintance that included both the poets and the spies who trafficked more or less lovingly between upper-class life and the politics of proletarian revolution; and I have ended it by discussing a major poet who belonged to the same connection. I did so because I hoped the differences between the two might be instructive. The terms of abuse and the terms of the myth can hardly fit both cases. When Auden talks about ‘the struggle’ he is engaged in one, and writing a poetry which, with all its virtuosity, is a poetry of struggle. This is not done by bullying other writers into accepting the virtue, beauty, and power of the proletariat. If we can’t tell the difference between these responses it may be that we no longer understand the peculiar stimuli which produced them, both the honourable and the not so honourable. They were apocalyptic, or at least sham apocalyptic, and, as I remarked earlier, our apocalyptic sympathies are probably exhausted now that apocalypse, which used to be a moment, has become an epoch, not a threat of Armageddon so much as a permanent migraine. The modern Irish poets know something about struggle, and the entanglements of private and public life, but we are dulled. On the left, it seems to me, thinking grows more and more rarefied and academic, less and less intimate, or desirous of intimacy, with the life of the people, with the threat of encirclement, with crisis as a condition more than merely notional. It takes an Upward, a lonely old warrior never not to be committed, never not aware of the need for action, to speak now of CND as then, long ago, he spoke of the Party, as a shield against the last destructive assaults of a dying capitalism.

I don’t of course mean that one has to join some group or party in order to apprehend what is valuable in Thirties bourgeois literature, and to allow for the distortions caused by historical myths of convenience. The effort required is critical and historical; if we make it we may come to honour what is too often calumniated without much examination – a literature that is often splendid in the moment of its enforced engagement with the almost unthinkable Other – across the frontier, almost cut off, encircled, but capable of fineness even in its moment of withdrawal.

What I have been trying to tell is, in its way, a love-story, almost a story of forbidden love. If asked to define that huge word I will not repeat my reference to the Eros of Freud, or to Caudwell’s amorous economics, but simply repeat a definition of love Auden himself once gave: ‘intensity of attention’.³⁰ He might well have been thinking of the uneasy passion with which he looked at ‘the defeated and disfigured’,³¹ or at Spain, or at his friends’ encircled lives.