All this is well-worn: the absurdly fast rise (TS Eliot published Auden’s 1930
Poems a couple of years after the latter had left Oxford), the vague but compelling leftism that turned to a strange deep religiosity, the abandoning of England on the eve of war. And this is the problem. The Auden story is so much a story, so uncannily representative of its epoch — he went to Spain! He was quoted by Lyndon B Johnson, and hated it! — that the real person vanishes. We’ve inherited a mythos, a mass of relics, some labelled ‘bitter poetry of imperial decay’ and others ‘property of Richard Curtis’. The dazzle of the name — Samuel Hynes wrote of an ‘Auden Generation’ — blinds us to the real, slightly dishevelled poet slinking out the back door. Almost everything I read about Auden leaves me feeling like a panting detective charging into the room to see an open window, curtains billowing. Auden eludes. Zoom out too far, and you make him the shapeless allegory of a century. Go microscopic, as Nicholas Jenkins does in his new book
The Island — I now know which flight Auden caught to Copenhagen in January 1935 — and you risk losing some of a human being’s necessary holism.
Jenkins, in fairness, does also propose a big picture. (It was ‘the KLM morning flight from Croydon Aerodrome.’)
The Island, roughly equal parts biography, social history, and close reading, reconstructs Auden’s life and work, and their various contexts, across his first three decades. (At over 500 pages excluding notes, this works out to about, and only occasionally feels like, six weeks a page.) The argument is that Auden’s early career, up until about 1936, is best seen in the light of his conflicted and changing idea of ‘Englishness’ — a word which, as is nicely observed, doesn’t show up much in newspapers until the 1920s.
Born in York in 1907 and raised mainly in Solihull, Auden spent the first decade of his writing life trying out various visions of nation and nationality. After an undergraduate Eliot phase, his first canonical poems are set in a blasted Northern landscape, scarred by abandoned mines and weighty with foreboding. ‘The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming.’
Jenkins, mostly convincingly, reads these early works as indirect reactions to the trauma of the First World War, and the subsequent little-England period as a response to this response, a new and self-consciously idealistic pastoralism salvaged from the ruins of 1918. Auden himself had been too young to fight, but his father, a child psychologist, was on medical duty for the disaster at Gallipoli, and his absence hung heavy in the family home.
... But I want something more, or other. What I really want to know is why, for instance, the final lines of Part III of ‘1929’ are so obviously written by Auden and nobody else; how it is that, aged twenty-two (twenty-two!), he found himself in and giving voice to a ‘winter, winter for earth and us, / A forethought of death that we may find ourselves at death / Not helplessly strange to the new conditions.’
Maybe these are unanswerable questions. Still, if Auden can be found anywhere, it might be in lines like these: in the King James cadence of ‘that we may find ourselves at death’, the dry deflection of ‘Not helplessly strange’, the unplaceable tone, either a bored god or an office manager, of ‘the new conditions’.
‘The real “life-wish”’, he wrote in his journal, ‘is the desire for separation’. One of the few things that remained constant across his poetic career was this desire for dislocation, a sudden change of scene.
—
a review of Nicholas Jenkins’s new biography of W. H. Auden![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith
