September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. Ian Sansom
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had a ‘monstrous’ quality. Other contributors to New Verse were similarly impressed by Auden’s peculiar strength and power: Edwin Muir described Auden’s imagination as ‘grotesque’; Frederic Prokosch described his talents as ‘immense’; Dylan Thomas described him as ‘wide and deep’; Bernard Spencer claimed that he ‘succeeds in brutalizing his thought and language’.
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Auden was clearly regarded – as great writers often are by their contemporaries – as somehow superhuman, or rather subhuman, inhuman, freakish. (Stephen Spender, in his Journals, recalls being accused of making Auden ‘sound a bit inhuman’: ‘This did ring a bell,’ he writes, ‘because I remember when we were both young thinking of him as sui generis, not at all like other people and of an inhuman cleverness. I did not think of him as having ordinary human feelings.’)
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(I tend to fall into this trap today, with writers I know and admire: they are just not, I think, like me. They are different; they are special; they are odd. Which is both true, as it happens, and entirely false.)
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With its emphasis on Auden’s ‘monstrous’ qualities, his physicality, his animality, his otherness, the New Verse double issue inaugurated a significant theme in subsequent figurations of Auden. In numerous books, reviews, essays and poems, Auden is figured as a kind of predatory Übermensch, possessing great physical prowess and preternatural powers. The English poet Roy Fuller, for example, described him as a ‘legendary monster’, an ‘immense father-figure’,‘ransacking the past of his art’. The poet Patrick Kavanagh claimed that ‘a great poet is a monster who eats up everything. Shakespeare left nothing for those who came after him and it looks as if Auden is doing the same.’ Such language can’t help but admire as much as be appalled.
Auden is a hero.
Auden is a monster.
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His intelligence was superlative and frightening. (He was ‘the greatest mind of the twentieth century’, according to the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. ‘At one or another time there must be five or six supremely intelligent people on earth,’ writes Howard Moss in his book Minor Monuments. ‘Auden was one of them.’)
His appearance was outlandish. (‘I was struck by the massive head and body and these large, strong, pudgy hands, […] the fine eyes did not look at oneself or at any individual but directly at concepts,’ wrote the critic G. S. Fraser.)
And his troubled career was strangely exemplary. (Seamus Heaney’s decision to leave Northern Ireland and move to Wicklow in 1972, for example, was read by some critics as a symbolic gesture similar to Auden’s move to America in 1939.)
He was a creature to be feared as well as admired, an obstacle to be negotiated as well as an inspiration.
‘He set standards so lofty that I developed writer’s block,’ recalls the poet Harold Norse in his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (1989).
Even now he remains a barrier. This book, for example: both blocked and enabled by Auden, a classic example of reading in abeyance, a testament to his posthumous power, and a confession and demonstration of my own lowly subaltern status and secondariness.
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(My interest in Auden, like anyone’s interest in any poet, any writer or artist, any great figure who has achieved and excelled in a field in which one wishes oneself to achieve and excel, represents an expression of awe, and disappointment, and self-disgust – and goodness knows what other peculiar and murky impulse is lurking down among the dreck at the bottom of one’s psyche. My interest in Auden represents perhaps a desire, if not actually to be Auden, then at least to be identified with Auden. My grandfather used to sing a song, ‘Let me shake the hand that shook the hand of Sullivan’, referring to John L. Sullivan, the one-time world heavyweight champion. How much literary criticism, one wonders, is in fact a vain attempt to shake the hand of Sullivan? U & I is the title of the novelist Nicholson Baker’s book about his – non-existent – relationship with John Updike, for example. An alternative title for this effort might be A & I. But this implies an addition. Better: I − A?)
The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you.
(Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman)
‘Biographers are invariably drawn to the writing of a biography out of some deep personal motive,’ according to Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James. Freud’s famous criticism of biographers was that they are ‘fixated on their heroes in a quite special way’, and that they devote their energies to ‘a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models – at reviving in him, perhaps, the child’s idea of his father’.
I don’t think I am reviving in Auden an idea of the father. But it’s possible that I might be reviving in him an idea of the uncle. The kind of uncle I never had.
(Auden was, by all accounts, an excellent uncle. He sponsored war orphans to go to college. He supported the work of Dorothy Day’s homeless shelter for the Catholic Worker Movement. He did not stint in doing good.)
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He was many things to many people. As every critic notes, Auden’s book The Double Man (1941) begins with an epigraph from Montaigne, ‘We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’
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But he wasn’t really double, any more than anyone is double: anyone, everyone is multiple.
So, to go back to that question, who the hell was W. H. Auden?
He was a poet, a dramatist, a librettist, a teacher, an amateur psychologist, a journalist, a reviewer, an anthologist, a critic, a Yorkshireman, an Englishman, an American.
That’ll do, for starters.
So why is he sitting at the start of the poem?
And how is he sitting?
Is he on a chair? A stool? A bench?
Is he perched on a stoop or a stairwell?
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(And – my wife asks, appalled, having read the first draft of this book, twenty-five years after I embarked upon it – are you really going to spend all that time worrying over every single word in the poem?)
Many poets have some idiosyncrasy or tic of style which can madden the reader if he finds their work basically unsympathetic, but which, if he likes it, becomes endearing like the foibles of an old friend.
(Auden, ‘Walter de la Mare’)
Of course I’m not going to worry over every single word in the poem. That would be ludicrous – unfeasible, and unhealthy.
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(Really unhealthy. Fatal. In a lecture on ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, collected in his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov remarks that ‘In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth […] and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit […] are the highest forms of consciousness.’ Twenty-five years of falling to my death, gazing around, wondering at trifles.)
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Let me reassure you: we may have started out on the scenic route, but I promise there are going to be short-cuts. There’s just a lot of heavy lifting to get through at the start. Think of all this as backstory. Think of these early chapters as foundation stones, as building blocks, as … bricks.