September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. Ian Sansom
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end.
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One might, I suppose, console oneself with the knowledge that even some of Auden’s books were not entirely successful: Academic Graffiti, City Without Walls.
But to dwell on the minor faults and failings of the great is hardly a comfort.
It is merely another sign of one’s own inadequacies.
The greater the equality of opportunity in a society becomes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail, particularly for those who have some talent but not enough to win them second or third place.
(Auden, ‘West’s Disease’)
But surely – surely? – literature is not a competition. Literature is not a sport. One cannot measure oneself by the usual standards of success.
The writer who allows himself to become infected by the competitive spirit proper to the production of material goods so that, instead of trying to write his book, he tries to write one which is better than somebody else’s book is in danger of trying to write the absolute masterpiece which will eliminate all competition once and for all and, since this task is totally unreal, his creative powers cannot relate to it, and the result is sterility.
(Auden, ‘Red Ribbon on a White Horse’)
Let’s not kid ourselves.
It is a competition.
It is a sport.
One does measure oneself by the usual standards of success.
When writing about any great writer – or indeed about anyone who has achieved great things – one can’t help but compare oneself.
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(Throughout his life, Philip Larkin often measured himself against Auden. Auden, for him, was the Truly Great Man: Philip Larkin loved Auden. When he bought a car in 1984, for example, an Audi, he said he liked the name ‘because it reminds me of Auden’. In a letter to a friend in 1959, extolling the virtues of Auden’s poem ‘Night Mail’, he wrote in horrible realisation, ‘HE’D BE ABOUT SEVEN YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME,’ but then quickly added, ‘I reckon he’d shot his bolt by the age of 33, actually.’ Again, when Larkin was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1965, he told an interviewer, ‘Take this Queen’s Medal. I’m 42, but he got it for “Look, Stranger!” when he was 30. Mind you, I feel he was played out as a poet after 1940.’ This scuttering between despair and disdain is typical of Larkin in general but it is also typical of his attitude towards Auden in particular. He prefaced a home-made booklet of poems in 1941 with the gulping confession ‘I think that almost any single line by Auden would be worth more than the whole lot put together.’ When, in 1972, Auden’s bibliographer Barry Bloomfield asked Larkin if he might be his next subject, Larkin expressed both delight and dismay: Bloomfield ‘has switched to me now Auden’s gone’, he told his friend Anthony Thwaite; ‘I am not much more than a five-finger exercise after Auden,’ he apologised to Bloomfield.)
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If Philip Larkin was no more than a five-finger exercise compared to Auden, then this – this! – is, what? At the very best, a one-note tribute?
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Polyphony
↓
Monophony
↓
Penny whistle and kazoo
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Parnassus after all is not a mountain,
Reserved for A.1. climbers such as you;
It’s got a park, it’s got a public fountain.
The most I ask is leave to share a pew
With Bradford or with Cottam, that will do.
(Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’)
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Park?
Fountain?
Pissoir.
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Perhaps one of the only things the rest of us share with the truly great writers is the sense of struggle, the sense of inadequacy.
Flaubert: ‘Sometimes when I find myself empty, when the expression refuses to come, when, after having scrawled long pages, I discover that I have not written one sentence, I fall on my couch and remain stupefied in an internal swamp of ennuis.’
Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘Birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, / Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.’
Katherine Mansfield: ‘For the last two weeks I have written scarcely anything. I have been idle; I have failed.’
We all know that feeling, that sense of despair and woe-is-me and all-I-taste-is-ashes, and all-I-touch-has-turned-to-dust.
Great writers, it seems, are not necessarily those who are most confident about their own capacities or skills. They are more often keenly aware that words are failing them, and that they are failing words. Like us, they find it difficult.
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Or rather, most of them find it difficult: Auden was convinced of his own skills and capacities from an early age and went on to fulfil and exceed his early promise.
(His tutor at Oxford, Nevill Coghill, recalled Auden announcing his intention to become a poet. Jolly good, said Coghill – or something donnish to that effect – that should help with understanding the old technical side of Eng. Lit., eh, old chap? ‘Oh no, you don’t understand,’ replied Auden – or again, words to that effect – ‘I mean a great poet.’)
He seems never to have been lacking in confidence. He seems always to have been convinced not merely of his brilliance but of his sovereignty.
‘Evidently they are waiting for Someone,’ he told his friend Stephen Spender.
He was that Someone.
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And me, who am I?
If nothing else, one of the things I have realised over the course of the past twenty-five years, in trying to write a book about W. H. Auden, is the obvious fact that I AM NOT W. H. AUDEN.
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Other people realise they’re not their heroes much earlier, but I was in the slow learners’ class in school and seem to be a slow learner still.
I think I probably believed that one day – through sheer willpower and determined slog, through dogged persistence and self-discipline – I might somehow overcome my weaknesses and become an artist of some significance.
It is only recently that I have come to accept my true role and status, which is, obviously, naturally, inevitably, as an utterly insignificant bit-part player in the world of literary affairs.
This is the real trouble with studying major writers: it reminds one of one’s minority status.
(Great Lies of Literature No. 1: reading great literature is good for the soul. The truth: reading the greats does not just uplift; it also casts down.)
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F. R. Leavis once described E. M. Forster, when compared with Henry James, as ‘only too unmistakably minor’ – though Forster accurately remarked of James that though he might have been a ‘perfect novelist’, it wasn’t a ‘very enthralling type of perfection’. It hardly needs stating that I’m not in James’s league, nor in Forster’s – but, alas, the real truth is that I’m not even in Leavis’s league, which is a league no one in their right mind would want to be in anyway, a league whose entry requirements include anger, bitterness and envy. (He was not a great fan of Auden, Leavis, particularly not his irony, which he described as ‘self-defensive,