In the middle of the 1930s, a young English schoolmaster, Wystan Hugh Auden, began writing a torrent of tremendous poems. Some are rollicking ballads, others tender love sonnets, others philosophic observations about the ominous movement of world history. But they tended to be rhymed and metered and they did something most people had thought impossible. They took the “unpoetic” things about the 20th century—from fascism to airplanes to oncology—and bundled them into something about which lovers of the basically bucolic English tradition that runs from Shakespeare to Keats and Tennyson could say, “That’s poetry!”
This recovery of poetry was so exhilarating. It was so optimism-imparting. Among 20th-century poets only Auden’s contemporary and onetime coauthor Louis MacNeice could match it. Until then Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot had dealt with modernity, but only to mock and repudiate it. Auden, by contrast, was at home in the 20th century. He read Freud, drove a car (sometimes drunk), and watched TV (albeit rarely). Eventually he would sing of the partition of India and the Apollo moon landing. Now he was pouring new commonplaces into the English language: the “Thousand Points of Light” that George H.W. Bush wished his presidency to radiate in the 1980s were (mis-) remembered from Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939.” His verse manages to be unpredictable and memorable, whether it is giddy and surreal, in the fairy tale ballad “As I Walked Out One Evening”:
The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
or direct and chilling, as in this sonnet from “In Time of War”:
Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a planFor living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon. …
There have been a lot of books about Auden in the half-century since his death in 1973. The prolific English novelist, historian, and biographer, Peter Ackroyd, has now added another. Magnificent though Auden is, it is hard to know what to think of him. He kept picking up lives and dropping them. He was the grandson of two clergymen, and never wholly abandoned the Christianity of his youth—but he embraced high Anglicanism (Anglo-Catholicism) with a fervor in his 30s and practiced it for the rest of his life. He was a leftist—though not a Communist Party member—as a young man. Just as he was winning fame in England, he uprooted himself and moved to the United States, where he would be a fixture in both the East Village and Ann Arbor. And he led his whole life as a homosexual in a variety of environments—sometimes wholesomely at the heart of bourgeois institutions, but often at society’s tawdry and violent edge.
Ackroyd’s life is less complete than Humphrey Carpenter’s standard biography, his readings of Auden’s poems more superficial than those in Edward Mendelson’s great two-volume study. But this is a book with real strengths, the greatest of which is Ackroyd’s skepticism about Auden’s early poetry.
When Auden was just 22, T.S. Eliot called him “about the best poet that I have discovered in several years.” Eliot was wrong. But poetry can be a fake-it-till-you-make-it line of work, and Auden would grow into others’ unfounded expectations of him. (Closer to our time, the career of the late novelist Martin Amis described a similar arc.) Auden’s early poetry is fresh and striking, but not particularly coherent or good. Those to whom Auden means a lot tend to talk themselves into overestimating it—surely if one knew enough about communism, say, or homosexuality, it would yield up some of the vividness and acuity we think of as Audenesque. But it does so only in flashes. Ackroyd faults the “deliberate obscurity” of these hectoring and pompous early poems. He finds them “highly contrived” and off-putting.
What marks Auden’s rise to greatness is his embrace of formal poetic structures in the mid-1930s. Ackroyd is quite right to sense that the long “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), composed on a trip to Iceland in seven-line stanzas of rhyme royal, was a turning point. It freed him from the felt need to be political or oratorical or important. “A fundamental gaiety flows through this technical precision,” Ackroyd writes, and the poems between Look, Stranger (1936) and The Shield of Achilles (1955) show Auden at the height of his powers. He sometimes writes Beowulfian litanies (“In the year of my youth when yoyos came in …”), sometimes sonnets, sometimes brief, epigrammatic poems like his “Epitaph on a Tyrant”:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
His creativity was inseparable from his erudition. Auden, like Bob Dylan in folk music, knew every riff and trick and technique that the masters of his craft had used across the generations. This made him a great anthologist and a “schoolmaster of genius,” as Ackroyd puts it. He was a classroom wiseacre. He taught a course at Swarthmore on “Romanticism from Rousseau to Hitler.” He encouraged his students to learn how poems worked by writing parodies of them. His lectures on Shakespeare were full of psychological and theological insights: “It is harder for the guilty to admit guilt, and accept forgiveness,” he said in one, “than for the innocent to forgive.”
Auden’s reverence for poetic traditions and forms bespoke a conservative temperament that was evident to everyone he knew, in every context. When his old friend Christopher Isherwood took up the study of the Hindu Vedas in 1941, Auden told him, “My dear, it’s simply not a gentleman’s religion.” His love of form and precedent also left Auden open to the basic attack that critics would level decades later at postmodernist artists of all kinds: that they are not creating out of their own stock of inspiration but ventriloquizing others’ work. His friend Stephen Spender described Auden as “dogmatic by temperament and yet holding no metaphysical or moral beliefs whatever.” Ackroyd generally defends Auden against these charges.
What interests Ackroyd even more than Auden’s poems is his sexuality. There are subjects on which Ackroyd’s knowledge is shaky—North American geography, for instance. He believes Montreal is on the U.S. border and that Indiana University is 200 miles north of Chicago. But about homosexuality in modern Europe he seems infallible. He notes that the young Auden “told other friends that he picked up passengers on trains and soldiers in London, but he would also have been aware of famous trysting places: the parks, the public lavatories, and of course the towpath along the Oxford Canal.” (“Of course”!) For much of the book the subject is not a poet who happened to be homosexual but a homosexual who happened to be a poet.
The most important episode of Auden’s love life is familiar from earlier biographies: Shortly after arriving in the United States, he fell in love with one of his gifted students, the aspiring poet Chester Kallman, who was a decade-and-a-half younger than he. While their relationship would endure till Auden’s death, and while Auden often wished for it to be more like a marriage, it was never stable. The handsome Kallman “had a roving eye,” as Ackroyd gently puts it, and Auden never did lose his habit of hiring prostitutes, many of them quite rough. Those in search of more graphic descriptions of who did what and to whom will find them in the book.
There is a certain vulnerability about Auden that Ackroyd, like any reader of the poems, cannot help but develop an affection for. He was a loving character with a solitary destiny. He took terrible care of himself, smoking constantly, burning holes in clothes that he wore for days, biting his nails down to stubs, and leaving a mess everywhere. The translator James Stern, one of his closest friends, said, “The speed at which he could wreck a room was barely credible.” Igor Stravinsky, for whom he wrote a number of opera libretti, described him as “the dirtiest man I have ever liked.” He had dentures by his mid-40s.
His progress was always toward sincerity. He came to despise what he saw as the phoniness and obscurity of his own earlier poems, often vitiating them decades later with over-fussy revisions. He would excuse himself by saying, “In the historical circumstances under which we grew up, the temptations to fake feelings were unusually strong.” But by the time he died in 1973, Auden had managed to acquire a secure place in the great tradition of English poetry—albeit with a painful awareness that that tradition might be nearing its end.
Auden
by Peter Ackroyd
Reaktion Books, 400 pp., $30
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books.
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