Wayward genius: the young w. H. Auden | thearticle

I Nicholas Jenkins’ intelligent, well-researched and well-written book, _The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England_ (Belknap Press/Faber, £25), analyses Auden’s early poetry from 1922

to 1936, “the high point and the end in Auden of a positively valued commitment to England.”  Jenkins is especially good on the biographical, social and historical background. Auden’s

impressive father was a Cambridge-educated doctor who published many archeological and medical articles.  In 1908 he gave up a lucrative practice in York to become the chief school medical

officer in Birmingham, responsible for the health of 150,000 children.  He served as a doctor in the army from 1914 to 1919 and treated the wounded in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.  He

also had an affair in Egypt with an English nurse that lasted well beyond the war.  After the war, on a 1922 walking tour with his father and sharing a bed with him, the fifteen-year-old

Auden “suddenly had a violent longing to be fucked by him”.  He restrained himself, but did have sex with his older brother, John.  Jenkins does not explain Auden’s statement that in the

summer of 1927, “I once went to Yugoslavia with father and wished I was dead.”  In fact, he found it agonising to suppress his sexual longing for the handsome Slavic boys.  Auden claimed,

though there was no actual resemblance, that his father looked like his poetical father Thomas Hardy. Auden’s mother, who graduated from Royal Holloway College with a degree in French, was a

talented pianist and a religious fanatic.  A neighbour described her as “an unattractive, domineering kind of woman, who ruled all her three boys with a rod of iron”.  Rather dotty and

often ill, she quarreled bitterly with her unfaithful husband and with the adult Auden, and her severe disapproval of his homosexuality reduced him to tears.  T. E. Lawrence’s defensive

letter of April 14, 1927 about his own oppressive mother and his homosexuality illuminates Auden’s misery: “I have a terror of her knowing anything about my feelings, or convictions, or way

of life.  If she knew they would be damaged: violated: no longer mine.” Auden called the boys at his prep school, St. Edmund’s in Hindhead, Surrey, “a primitive tribe ruled by malignant

demons . . . teaching little boys to behave in a way which would get them locked up in ordinary society.”  The thirteen-year-old Auden was soon seduced, with pious reassurances, by the

school chaplain.  The total surveillance in the school, the feeling of being constantly spied on and the “license to spy on one’s peers” foreshadowed the world of Orwell’s _Nineteen

Eighty-Four._ According to Auden, he was the only boy in the school to be humiliated and beaten.  In _The Road to Wigan Pier,_ Orwell remarked that a working-class boy would never allow

himself to be caned, but Auden’s parents paid for that privilege.  His juvenile wartime experiences at school involved drilling with wooden rifles, “taking cover behind bushes and twirling

noise-makers to represent machine-gun fire.” Jenkins describes the young Auden in the 1920s and 1930s as Dostoyevskian: “a raw, intense, wounded, politically ambiguous, prophetic figure.” 

Auden portrayed himself as unbalanced and authoritarian, “someone talented but near the border of sanity, who might well, in a year or two, become a Nazi.”  His lifelong friend was the

bisexual Stephen Spender, whom Jenkins ambivalently calls “comical, exasperating, ardent, gossipy and blundering. . . . Never the most reliable source of information, but not the least

reliable either, and in any case someone in a unique position to know.”  Despite Jenkins’ doubts, he often relies on Spender for insights. Auden unkindly described the short but handsome

homosexual Christopher Isherwood as having a “squat spruce body and enormous head”. Nevertheless, Isherwood told the poet Thom Gunn that for years he and Auden “fucked like rabbits every

chance we got”.  (John Ashbery told me that he slept with the aged Auden “to see what it was like”—and didn’t much like it.)  Jenkins quotes Isherwood’s famous aesthetic credo in _Goodbye to

Berlin _(1939), “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,” without realising that it comes straight from Katherine Mansfield’s _Journal_ (October 1921):

“I’ve been a camera . . . I’ve been a selective camera, and it has been my attitude that has determined the selection.”  Auden also got two of his best phrases from Mansfield’s letters: “a

change of heart” and “the old gang” of right-wingers. At Oxford, Auden was fascinated by the fashionable homosexual clique led by Maurice Bowra, the Warden (not Dean) of Wadham College. 

When the dwarfish Bowra was knighted and the King said, “Arise, Sir Maurice,” he called out from below, “I am arisen.”  His most notorious _mot_ was “buggers can’t be choosers”. Auden felt

that the revolt against the norms of society made buggery exciting and called his 1928 postgraduate year in Berlin “the bugger’s dream”. Life was cheap and the choice was lavish in the queer

capital of Europe, which had 170 licensed male brothels. Auden kept the male pronoun out of his love poetry, but also included a lot of sly hints.  Though Jenkins is a close reader, he

doesn’t always twig.  As Auden declared, “since our desire cannot take that route which is straightest, / Let us choose the crooked.”  What Isherwood called “The Passions of a Pedagogue”

were also the passions of a paedophile, who slept with his students.  “Insider” means inside another man.  The “whole of England” is—like Baron Corvo’s _The Desire and Pursuit of the

Whole_—the lover’s hole.  “Both wish to play _Officer_, / Neither _Other Ranks_” suggests the desire to take the dominant sexual role. Dr. Auden wrote about, and his son was fascinated by,

the case of suicide by “asphyxiation as the high-heeled shoe crushed a man’s windpipe.”  Chokings had a powerful erotic element, created intensely pleasurable feelings, and often produced

erections and orgasms.  A character in the “Cyclops” chapter of Joyce’s _Ulysses_ recalls that when they cut down a hanged man, “after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a

poker.”  But Auden’s hedonism was burdened by what he called unhappiness, self-loathing and guilt, drilled into his sodomised body by a painful and punishing anal fistula.  His strange,

off-putting line, “walking through the park to it to ease the bowels,” may refer to the difficulty he had with his intestinal movement and to the public toilet that was also a notorious

pick-up place.  In a futile attempt to say goodbye to all that, Auden had a short-lived engagement to an English nurse (who had the same profession as his father’s mistress), and even —

absurdly — proposed to Hannah Arendt in 1960. A few errors have crept into the text.  Uranian means homosexual (not pederast); Hitler was officially named _Führer_ in 1934 (not 1922). 

Jenkins also misses many of Auden’s allusions.  Auden’s “watcher in the dark” echoes Keats’ “watcher of the skies” in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”.  “Played up” recalls “Play up!

and play the game!” in Henry Newbolt’s “Vitai Lampada” (“the torch of life”).  “Our hunting fathers”, in Auden’s 1936 song for Benjamin Britten, comes from the travel writer H. M. Tomlinson.

  Jenkins says that “no one has discovered” the source of Auden’s lines, “what was godlike in this generation / Was never to be born.”  This idea comes from Sophocles’ _Oedipus at Colonus,_

“Never to have been born is best,” and recurs in Ecclesiastes 4:3 and Matthew 26:24.  The British hated the French after World War I because their initial defeats by Germany led to massive

allied casualties (not because they oppressed the Germans after the war). The photographs in this book are also revealing. Auden’s 1928 photo with pipe and broad-brimmed felt hat imitates

Wyndham Lewis’ self-portrait as “The Enemy” 1928 photo with pipe and broad-brimmed felt hat imitates Wyndham Lewis’ self-portrait as “The Enemy”.  In a brilliant personal and political

couplet Auden wrote: “There’s Wyndham Lewis fuming out of sight, / That lonely old volcano of the Right.”  Auden had declared, “the poet’s sympathies are always with the enemy,” and Lewis,

one of Auden’s favorite authors, called him a “national institution”.  The lost photo of Auden posing in a silk kimono probably looked like the campy 1931 photo of him in a silk dressing

gown. Jenkins’ comments on Auden’s poetry and modern literature are sometimes misleading.  Auden was not “pathologically prolific” nor a “masochistic” self-critic; he was fortunately fluent

and shrewd about his work.  His lines, “A ploughing peasant with my father’s features, / Boys playing leapfrog and blowing trumpets,” is nothing like the glittering lines in Alexander Pope’s

“The Rape of the Lock”: “Fate urg’d the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain, / But airy substance soon unites again.” When Wyndham Lewis wrote, “The War is such a tremendous landmark that

locally it imposes itself upon our computations of time like the birth of Christ”, he meant that it was a major turning point in modern history (not that it “paralleled in depth of meaning

Christ’s murder”).  Jenkins argues that the modern period began in 1922 with _The Waste Land _and _Ulysses_, and ended in the non-literary General Strike of 1926.  Echoing Virginia Woolf’s

far-fetched, “On or around December 1910, human character changed,” Jenkins absurdly asserts, without evidence, “On or around 1926 modernism died in Britain.”  The dates of his third

chapter, “1925-1927,” have no break in 1926. The worst faults in this book are the tedious repetitions.  Jenkins seems to feel that either his arguments are unclear or his readers too dim to

understand them.  In the text he lists 36 birds in Auden’s poetry, then speaks of his “bird-crowded” poems and calls him a “bird poet”.  On page 78, for example, he states that Auden was

losing interest in mining when his father returned from the war, his mining fixation sprang up when his father was at war, miners had imaginative connections to his absent father, his “lost”

father was associated with geology, metals and machines, he connected his father to mineral science, and Dr. Auden symbolically owned geology, metals and machines.  Jenkins thanks 16

editors—with egoistic and ostentatious gratitude—but none of them improved his overlong 748-page book by cutting the repetitions. II Auden believed that poetry is concerned “with extending

our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible to make a rational and

moral choice”.  But his own political choices were often irrational and immoral.  Jenkins defines the themes of the early poetry as “trauma, identity, nationality, belonging, love” and the

contrast between the Great War and the English landscape.  But Auden was cynical about the possibilities of love, and riveted by the ruined machinery and abandoned mines that had desecrated

rural England: “Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires; / Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires.”  (Jenkins misprints “Power” as “Powers.”)

  In _The Road to Wigan Pier, _Orwell admires “the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their huge shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed”. Auden

describes the mines, though he never descended into them, but not the miners.  Later on, his poems moved from the dark underground to the symbolic “mountain top, the lonely place of truth”.

Bertrand Russell believed that people born after 1914, who’d never known the long Victorian and Edwardian peace, “were incapable of happiness”.  Auden was a schoolboy with a noise-maker

during the war, and when his father returned he never spoke about the war.  So Auden’s noncombatant war poetry—influenced by the “gangster-virtues” of Anglo-Saxon verse, and obsessed with

violence, heroism and wounds—seems inauthentic and unearned: “Control of the Passes was, he saw, the key. . . . The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming. . . . They would shoot, of

course, / Parting easily who were never joined.” Unlike the writer C. S. Lewis and other active warriors, Auden never experienced “the frights, the cold, the smell of H. E. [high explosive],

the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass.”  D. H. Lawrence, married to a

German and suspected of wartime spying, was expelled from the coast of Cornwall.  His novel _Women in Love _(1920) brilliantly portrays the traumatic effects of war on civilians. Jenkins

follows, with proper acknowledgments, two excellent books: Edward Mendelson’s _Early Auden_ (1981) and John Fuller’s _W. H. Auden: A Commentary_ (1998).  The English edition of Jenkins’ book

was brought out by Auden’s publisher Faber, which allowed Jenkins to strengthen his work and quote extensively from the poetry without paying permission fees.  But he tends to overrate the

“great” early poetry in order to justify his protracted interpretations.  He breaks a butterfly upon a wheel with long analyses of admittedly “tiny” minor poems, and devotes four pages to

“California”, about an oddly named village in Norfolk.  Many of the early poems are stark, abrasive, hermetic imitations of Eliot.  The obscure, pro-fascist themes of _The Orators_ (1932)

are hero-worship, conspiracies and force.  Foreshadowing the behaviour of Putin and Trump, Auden declared: “Three kinds of enemy walk—the grandiose strut—the melancholic swagger—the

paranoiac sidle.” Auden has startling opening lines, but he cannot always sustain this intense imaginative level throughout the poems.   He addresses God as “Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving

all”; “Consider this and in our time / As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman”; “August for the people and their favourite islands”; “Look, stranger, at this island now / The leaping

light for your delight discovers”; and “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.”  “Out on the lawn I lie in bed / Vega conspicuous overhead” contrasts eight

monosyllabic words in the first line with three multi-syllabic words in the second.  Paradoxically, the bed is outside, not inside, the school dorm.  Vega, an unusually bright star, shines

in the dark firmament; earth is opposed to sky, lawn to star, the fixed observer to the moving celestial light. The poignant “Funeral Blues” responds to the death of an all-encompassing

lover as the natural world collapses around him and he accepts the prospect of a desolate future life: He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My

noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away

the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good. This poem had an astonishing popular resurgence after it was read, with a strong Scottish accent, by the actor

John Hannah (as Matthew) over his lover’s coffin in the brilliant film _Four Weddings and a Funeral_ (1994).  But the truly great poems came later: “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “In Memory of W.

B. Yeats,” “Under Which Lyre,”  “In Praise of Limestone” and “Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno.” Despite Auden’s formidable intellect, he groped for guidance in the 1930s and weakened his verse

by humbly adopting the crankish notions of now-forgotten figures: “loony” John Layard, Homer Lane, Gerald Heard, Trigant Burrow and the Nazi-sympathiser Rolf Gardiner.  Auden’s constantly

shifting political ideas ranged, without serious commitment to either, from Communism to Nazism, both of which clashed with his insular love for England. Jenkins is perceptive about Auden’s

masters and mentors: Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Thomas Mann.  Auden’s personal and political connections with the talented, eminent and exiled Mann family

severed his flirtation with the Nazi regime.  In June 1935 Auden married Mann’s lesbian and stateless daughter, Erika, to give her a British passport.  (Two of her brothers, Klaus and Golo,

were also homosexual.)   In their wedding photo, the blunt-featured Erika looks more masculine than the boyish Auden.  Though attracted to young men, Thomas Mann was not an active and

“closeted” homosexual, and his favorite child was not Erika but Elisabeth, portrayed in “Disorder and Early Sorrow”. Jenkins concludes by noting the influence of Germany and the Manns: “From

Auden’s father’s cult of the North and his familiarity with German culture, as well as his later interest in German medical science . . . through their trip together in 1925 to Austria,

where Auden began to learn German . . . his visits to Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and his marriage to Erika Mann in 1935, Germany and its people are always at least in the

background of the work Auden produced and of the life he chose.”  Thomas Mann moved to America in 1938, Auden moved there in 1939. _Jeffrey Meyers interviewed six of Auden’s friends for his

life of Wyndham Lewis: Henry Moore, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Hugh Gordon Porteus, Walter Allen and Naomi Mitchison_ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s

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