September 1, 1939. Ian Sansom
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lot can happen to someone in twenty-five years – though it hasn’t really happened to me. I have overcome no addictions. I have suffered no serious mental or physical breakdowns. There were no major achievements, no terrible lows: I am, in all regards, average to the point of being dull. There is, alas, no backstory to this story. This is not one of those books.
It is not a book about grief.
It is not a book about loss.
It is not a book about some great self-realisation.
I did not go – I have not been – on any kind of a journey with W. H. Auden.
I do not believe that Auden provides readers with the key to understanding life, the universe and everything. Reading Auden has not made me happier, healthier, or a better or more interesting person.
Perhaps the only strange or remarkable thing to have happened to me over the past twenty-five years is that I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden.
The only possible conclusion, I suppose, after all this time, is either that I haven’t been trying hard enough, or that I’m simply not up to the job.
Or, possibly, both.
*
Completed finally in my early fifties, in vain and solitary celebration, this – whatever this is – turns out to be proof against itself.
For decades I had imagined writing a big book about Auden’s life and work, a truly great book, a magnum opus.
I have managed instead to write a short book about just one of his poems. At the very moment of its completion, the work turns out to be evidence of failure. Opus minus.
In the end, one feels only depletion, disgust and disappointment, the sense that one has once again turned manna into gall, the everlasting taste of bitterness.
*
(I am reading the collected poems of Bertolt Brecht, in translation. I come across this, ‘Motto’:
This, then, is all. It’s not enough, I know.
At least I’m still alive, as you may see.
I’m like the man who took a brick to show
How beautiful his house used once to be.
This book is my brick: it is proof of how beautiful the house might have been.)
*
Auden wrote all of his prose, he claimed, because he needed the money.
I have written all of my prose because I am not a poet.
And I needed the money.
Underneath the abject willow,
Lover, sulk no more;
Act from thought should quickly follow:
What is thinking for?
Your unique and moping station
Proves you cold;
Stand up and fold
Your map of desolation.
(Auden, ‘Underneath the abject willow’)
Twenty-five years, though – can you imagine? – twenty-five years of failing to write a book.
*
It’s perhaps not entirely uncommon.
There are, of course, individuals who write great books at great speed, and with great success, and to great acclaim – Auden’s first book with Faber was published when he was just twenty-three and he went on to produce a book about every three years for the rest of his life. The truth is, it takes most of us years to get a book published, and even then those books end in massive failure: neglected, overlooked and forgotten.
(My own books, it should probably be admitted, have all ended in massive failure: neglected, overlooked and forgotten. It’s nature’s way. There’s a critic, Franco Moretti, notorious in literary studies, who has pioneered the study of literature as a kind of data set, and he has an essay, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, which is all about clues in detective literature, and which is an excellent essay, though I’m less interested in his thoughts about clues in detective literature than I am in his redolent title phrase – which he stole from Hegel, actually – because it acknowledges what is rarely acknowledged, which is the hard, painful truth that to study literature, never mind to participate in it, is to become a witness to the sheer horrors of literary history, as savage and violent as all history. ‘The majority of books disappear forever –’ writes Moretti, ‘and “majority” actually misses the point: if we set today’s canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published novels. And the other 99.5 percent?’ I am one of the 99.5 per cent: I am one of the living dead, the Great Unread. This book too will undoubtedly end up in the slaughterhouse, as it should and as it must.)
*
This book I began long before I had written or even contemplated writing any of my other books. It was the first – and it may be the last. It may be time to admit defeat, to admit to my own obvious lack of whatever it was that Auden had, which was just about everything. In Auden, one might say – if it didn’t sound so dramatic, if it didn’t sound like I was trying to talk things up by talking myself down – in Auden was my beginning and in Auden is my end.
*
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.
*
(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