September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. Ian Sansom
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kept out of trouble, apologised unnecessarily as and when required, and suffered in silence as the country becomes slowly but surely despoiled and divided up among tax-shy corporations and the south-east super-rich. Why not go to America, Auden seems to be asking, if you’re just going to sit around complaining and doing nothing?)
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(I will confess: years ago, in an attempt to write this book, to reinvent myself, I went to New York, to follow in Auden’s footsteps, with nothing more to sustain me than a pacamac, a bar of Kendal mint cake and a pair of good stout shoes. I lasted about two weeks.)
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There were many who felt that Auden’s remaining in America during the war was both a personal let-down and a matter of serious consequence. Poets, naturally, expressed their disappointment in verse: Christopher Lee, in a poem titled ‘Trahison des Clercs’, wrote wistfully about ‘the poets we took for leaders’, ‘these swift migrating birds’; and Alan Ross took up the plaintive chant in his poem ‘A Lament for the “Thirties” Poets’, bemoaning ‘They who for us were’, and drily observing ‘Their world and their words subsiding like flat champagne’.
Some people had good reason to take umbrage at Auden’s behaviour: John Lehmann, for example, in the second volume of his autobiography, I Am My Brother (1960), describes a visit from Auden in 1945 on his way to Germany to work with the US Strategic Bombing Survey, during which Auden boasted to Lehmann about America’s contribution to the war: ‘There was no word from Uncle Sam Auden about what we had endured, the various skills, the faith, the unremitting industrial and military effort without which the fortress of Western civilization could never have held.’
And there were others who simply never forgave Auden for leaving. I think I have already mentioned the novelist Anthony Powell: ‘I’m delighted that shit has gone … It should have happened years ago … Scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a … like a …’
Like a … like a … like a … Like a what exactly, Anthony? Spit it out, man. Like a …? What is Auden?
I’ll tell you what he is: he is neither/nor.
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After his trip to America in 1909, Freud remarked to Ernest Jones, ‘America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake.’ Auden’s move to America has often been viewed in similar terms, both by his contemporaries and by the literary historians and anthologists whose attempts to accommodate the move have obscured his place in literary history. In 1950, T. S. Eliot expressed his delight that Auden’s ‘influence, on both sides of the Atlantic, has only increased year by year; he can now justly be called “a famous poet”’. In fact, Auden’s transatlantic fame and influence had only been achieved at the cost of his being disowned by both sides, by both England and America.
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In his introduction to the 1970 anthology British Poetry Since 1945 – standard issue when I was at school – Edward Lucie-Smith announced that he had decided not to include work by Auden because his ‘long residence in America seemed to make him an American rather than a British writer’, a decision ratified by George Watson in his 1991 critical survey British Literature since 1945 – standard issue when I started teaching – from which Auden is excluded, along with Isherwood and Robert Graves, for being an ‘expatriate’.
(It is interesting to compare the disapprobation that attaches to the word ‘expatriate’ with the valorisation of the word ‘exile’ in the formation of a writer’s reputation.)
Unfortunately for Auden, the official keepers of American poetry have long been happy enough without him. For the mighty Norton anthologies, for example, Auden’s residence in America was simply not enough: he does not figure in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, but he is included in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and is safely ensconced in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ‘a wide and deep sampling of the best poetry written in the English language, from early medieval times to the present day’.
A comparison with T. S. Eliot, who became a British subject in 1927, is perhaps instructive, not least because Eliot himself sanctioned such a comparison in his essay ‘American Literature and the American Language’ (1953), in which he defined his position in the national literatures in direct relation to Auden: ‘I do not know whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me in providing me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself, for I can say: “whichever Auden is, I suppose I must be the other.”’
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