W.H. Auden

Tony Sharpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415327350
• eBook ISBN: 9781317724421
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As both a politically engaged and stylistically versatile poet, W.H. Auden is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His work is not only widely studied and read, but has been used in musical scores and quoted in Hollywood films.

This guide to Auden's compelling work offers:

• an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Auden's texts, from publication to the present
• an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Auden's life and work, situated in a broader critical history
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of W.H. Auden and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

1

Life and contexts

Life

The first two subsections, on ‘English’ and ‘post-English’ Auden, offer a relatively factual account intended to provide an overview of the principal events in Auden’s life, which can then inform a reading of the following part, where that life is set successively in its ‘literary’, ‘historical’ and ‘personal’ contexts. The latter two categories are lengthier, and have also been thematically subdivided in hope that such indications of content will be found helpful; these are intended as aids rather than definitions, and I have not wanted to police the boundaries between categories with any dictatorial rigour. Although the book can be read continuously from beginning to end, so as to impart – I trust – a sense of intellectual accumulation in the process, I have also borne in mind the needs of the reader who wishes to use it for purposes of more specific or piecemeal consultation. Whichever kind of reader you are, I hope this book repays the attention you give it, and enhances your engagement with Auden’s writing.

English Auden

Born on 21 February 1907, Wystan Hugh Auden was the youngest of three brothers and the last child of his parents George and Constance Auden. His father had a successful medical practice in York, which he nevertheless left the year after Wystan’s birth to move to Birmingham, in which city he pursued a distinguished career as School Medical Officer and (additionally, after 1918) Professor of Public Health at Birmingham University. The family were ‘High Church’ Anglicans who started the day with prayers and, Auden recollected, tended to look down on less elevated forms of Protestantism – a tone which came especially from his mother, who was unusual for her time in having a degree, and who had met her future husband when nursing in a London hospital with a view to joining a Protestant medical mission to Africa. On the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, George Auden enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was posted overseas; the family house in Solihull was relinquished, and the war years were spent staying with relatives, friends and in boarding-houses during the holiday periods. In 1915 Auden joined his brother John at preparatory school in Surrey, and although there was much he enjoyed about these nomadic years – which gave him, on holiday in Derbyshire, his first sight of lead-mining country – looking back he thought that his father’s long absence, and his own consequent exposure to the influence of his mother, had been decisive factors for him.

At the school in Surrey, Auden first enountered his future friend and collaborator Christopher Isherwood; he remembered Isherwood’s wearing a black armband when his father had gone ‘missing in action’. George Auden, however, unlike so many fathers of that era, returned from the war, acquiring a house in Harborne, near Birmingham. From 1920 to 1925 Wystan boarded at Gresham’s School, Holt, in Norfolk; during this period he became more aware of his homosexual orientation and also had revealed to him, in early spring 1922 during a Sunday afternoon walk with an older boy on whom he had a crush, that what he really wanted to be was a poet and not, as he had hitherto supposed, a mining engineer. Nevertheless, in autumn 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford to read natural sciences, switching briefly to politics, philosophy and economics before settling on English – where he particularly enjoyed the Anglo-Saxon and Old English parts of the course. During this period he became acquainted with some of the aspiring Oxford poets with whom his name would later be linked – Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender – and also with one for whom his affinity was less remarked and a little more surprising – John Betjeman (whose poetry he would recommend to T.S. Eliot and, later still, introduce to America). He re-met Christopher Isherwood in London, and through him met Edward Upward, Isherwood’s friend. At Oxford, Auden further explored his homosexuality, meanwhile acquiring, not without effort, the reputation of being a brilliant eccentric, literary leader and poetic genius. Before the beginning of his final year, Auden had already written the poem subsequently called The Watershed’, which is the earliest work to survive into his self-selected canon; shortly after his graduation, Stephen Spender privately printed a pamphlet edition of his poetry. Auden’s third class honours surprised his friends: in that era there was even a fourth class to signify negligent disdain, nor had he – like Isherwood at Cambridge – deliberately thrown his degree.

This appears to have been a difficult period: not only was his result a disappointment, but Auden was also sufficiently concerned about his homosexuality to undergo in August 1928 some sort of psychoanalysis at Spa, Belgium, intended to correct what he inclined always to believe was ‘wrong’ with him. He became engaged to be married, like his father before him to a nurse; he had probably already lost his heterosexual virginity (on a trip to Austria in 1926), and there would be later occasions when he proposed marriage or entered into sexual relations with a woman. Despite this, however, when George Auden offered to finance a post-university year, Wystan chose to spend it in Berlin: partly in reaction against the dominant Francophilia that sent so many aspiring artists to Paris, but also because he was allured by the reputed sexual adventurousness of the Weimar Republic’s capital. He left for Berlin in October and, apart from short visits back, was in Germany almost continuously until late July 1929, when he returned to England and started looking for a job. For some of this time in Berlin he was joined by Isherwood, whom he had visited during a Christmas break in England. Since meeting up again their friendship had deepened, and Auden regarded Isherwood as an important literary counsellor to whose judgement he deferred, submitting drafts of poems for his approval. As well as this, their relationship became physical: Isherwood’s biographer believes Auden to have been the more in love, but they certainly reinforced each other’s homosexual inclinations, which for both were confirmed in Berlin. When Auden returned in the summer, one of the first things he did was to break off his engagement.

His father’s allowance came to an end, and he needed to earn his living. The new decade opened with the publication in T.S. Eliot’s prestigious journal The Criterion (January 1930) of Auden’s charade ‘Paid on Both Sides’, written before Berlin but there revised and enlarged. This was a startling debut, in which a saga-like story of feuding families, intermingled with elements derived from Mummers’ plays and music-hall, takes place in a geography Auden based on Alston Moor in Cumberland, with whose landscape of decaying lead-mines he had become familiar since 1919 – a fascination he would never entirely outgrow. The individuality of Auden’s new talent was further underscored by the publication, that autumn, of his first commercial volume, Poems (1930), issued – again under Eliot’s imprimatur – by Faber & Faber, who would thereafter be his British publisher. This appearance as a poet coincided with his taking up a profession which he found, on the whole, to be unexpectedly congenial: from the summer term of 1930 to the end of the school year 1935 Auden worked as a schoolmaster, first at the Larchfield Academy at Helensburgh near Glasgow, and then, from Autumn 1932, at the Downs School at Colwall near the Malvern Hills. Larchfield, where Auden succeeded his friend Day-Lewis in the job, was then a fading establishment; during his time there he wrote his second book of poetry, The Orators (1932), to which the Helensburgh background contributed many details. The Downs School was a Quaker boys’ school, and near enough to Cheltenham, where Day-Lewis taught, for the two poets to visit each other. At Colwall, Auden passed what were certainly his happiest years in England, and possibly of his life: the poem later called ‘A Summer Night’ (1933) commemorates this period.

At this time he was also writing drama, stimulated by an association with Rupert Doone’s ‘Group Theatre’, which aimed at small-scale experimental productions: at one such evening in London, Auden’s first play The Dance of Death (1934) was performed alongside Eliot’s ‘Aristophanic melodrama’ Sweeney Agonistes. Subsequent dramas were the result, sometimes through several versions, of collaboration with Isherwood (The Dog beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier; published respectively in 1935,1936 and 1938); and in the latter part of the decade, Auden was involved in further collaborative ventures. He left his job at the Downs School to work with the GPO Film Unit in London, principally as writer but also in other roles; the most memorable result of this was the short film Night Mail, with music by the young Benjamin Britten, at this period very much impressed by Auden. Other collaborations were with Louis MacNeice on their travel book Letters from Iceland (1937); and on the book Journey to a War (1939), where prose mainly by Isherwood and poetry and photographs by Auden recounted their 1938 travels to the Sino-Japanese conflict taking place. Before then Auden had, at the beginning of 1937, celebratedly if somewhat anticlimactically paid a shorter-than-anticipated visit to the Spanish Civil War, to show sympathy and give support to the anti-Franco forces; the chief literary consequence of this was the poem ‘Spain’ (May 1937), which he subsequently altered and would eventually exclude altogether from his collected poems.

The dissatisfaction implicit in Auden’s retrospective acts of self-censorship is perhaps also to be seen in the restlessness, that so often took him beyond the England in which he established himself as the dominant poetic voice of his generation. During this decade he visited Austria, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Denmark, Portugal, France, Egypt, China, Japan, and the USA, as well as countries already mentioned. His collection Look, Stranger! (1936; published as On This Island in the USA, 1937) had sold well and been well-received by critics; he had accepted the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry from George VI. Having himself been influenced by Eliot, in an era in which a considerable number of aspiring poets were turning out unintentional imitations of the Master’s style, Auden was unique in influencing Eliot’s poetry in his turn. Despite all this, he was not settled, and he was not personally happy. Evidently he did not feel guilty about or encumbered by his homosexuality, and had love affairs (most notably with the sleeping youth addressed in the 1937 poem subsequently called ‘Lullaby’); but the relationships had not lasted, and according to Isherwood, on the last stage of their voyage back from China, Auden had tearfully confessed his fear that he would never be truly loved. On his return Auden spent little time in England, before moving to Brussels for a month, by which stage, according to John Auden who visited him there in September 1938, he had made up his mind to emigrate to the USA: in January 1939 he and Isherwood set sail for New York. Although published after the move to America, his next collection, Another Time (1940), containing some of his best-known shorter poems (such as ‘Lullaby’, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ and ‘September 1, 1939’), really represents the last poetry of his English phase: according to his editor Edward Mendelson, this is suggested by the volume’s title.

Post-English Auden

Auden and Isherwood had arrived in cold, snowy New York two days before Yeats’s death, which provoked the famous elegy, first published in March 1939. Auden now set to work to establish himself in the new country, earning money by commissioned reviews and articles as well as poetry and by teaching at adult education and college levels. His first volume of poetry written in America was published as The Double Man (1941) in New York, and as New Year Letter in London – the British title coming from the long poem that was its major component. This ‘letter’ was addressed to Elizabeth Mayer, whose psychologist husband was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany; Auden had met her through Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, and in her small Long Island house he had enjoyed much-valued hospitality. He and Britten (who spent the early years of the war in the USA) were renewing the collaboration which had previously seen the composer set some Auden poems to music; this time they were attempting something larger, and the fruit was the opera Paul Bunyan, which was performed at Columbia University in May 1941, and thereafter sank without very much trace. Britten and Pears briefly shared the chaotic ambiance of the house on 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn, over which Auden presided; other occupants included the writer Carson McCullers and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. This was not for them, however, and they decided to return to wartime England; there then commenced an evident cooling of Britten’s regard for Auden, which caused the poet some distress.

In Elizabeth Mayer, Auden felt he had found a surrogate mother; and when his own mother died in 1941, he sent Mrs Mayer a photograph of himself as a baby in Constance’s arms, implying the extension of Elizabeth’s maternal duties. She was not, however, the most momentous of the new acquaintances he made in America: that person’s identity had already been signalled by the dedication of Another Time, ‘To Chester Kallman’. Auden had met Kallman in April 1939, when the latter attended a reading he gave in New York along with Isherwood and MacNeice, and followed up with a visit to their apartment, ostensibly to undertake an interview for his college magazine. Aged 18, Kallman was fourteen years younger than Auden; the son of a Jewish dentist, his mother had died when he was four, and subsequent stepmothers had treated him coldly. In 1939 he was a good-looking blond, well-read, quick-witted and happy to signal his sexual availability; within a little while Auden had fallen in love, buying gold rings to signify that Kallman represented the love of his life, the person whom he had tearfully told Isherwood he feared never meeting. He wrote excitedly about this new relationship to confidants in England, and his sense of attachment and responsibility, as of a husband to a wife, gave him an additional reason for not returning when war broke out in September 1939. By that stage he and Kallman had undertaken a long bus journey across America, including a stay at the D.H. Lawrence ranch in New Mexico and a visit to Isherwood, now transplanted to California. This was intended as their honeymoon but, notwithstanding, Auden still found time to work on a book of prose called The Prolific and the Devourer, partly aphoristic and partly autobiographical; he abandoned it on their return to New York, which they reached just before war was declared in Europe.

A poem such as ‘The Prophets’ (1939), which represents Kallman as the destined culmination of Auden’s boyhood enrapturement with illustrated books of machinery and then landscapes of decayed lead-mining, showed something of the importance its writer attributed to this love. It suggests, also, something of the pressure such expectations would place on a contentedly promiscuous young man; for a short while Auden’s happiness in their relationship was unalloyed, as Kallman introduced him to opera as well as to the particular ambiance of his New York Jewish roots, but in July 1941 came a crisis. Auden viewed their relationship as marriage, duly monogamous; but Kallman saw matters differently, and when, that month, the poet confronted him over his infidelity, the young man rebelled, making plain that he was not prepared to submit to any requirement of exclusivity and that, moreover, he would in future not consent to be Auden’s sexual partner at all (their particular preferences were not especially compatible, in any case). Despite this calamity, Auden did not renounce his side of the commitment, nor abandon what he saw as the truth of their love; instead, he set himself the task – undertaken at what some observers would feel to be enormous personal cost – of being ‘the more loving one’, in a relationship that obliged him to tolerate Kallman’s promiscuity alongside his inability ever to earn his own living.

The reputation Auden had acquired in England during the 1930s was of a poet committed to the political left; he now wished to withdraw from that arena and write a different kind of poetry, less publicly engaged. His literary reaction to his mother’s death came in the form of a ‘Christmas oratorio’ called For the Time Being, finished in July 1942 but not published until September 1944. Auden had hoped this would be set to music by Britten, but its eventual length made this impractical, and although the composer did set parts of it, his coldness towards Auden was beginning. The oratorio’s theological concerns were the emphatic signal of an interior development as momentous as, externally, Auden’s crossing of the Atlantic had been: for in 1940, at almost the same time that he had set in motion the process by which he would attain American citizenship six years later, he had also rejoined the ‘high’ Anglican communion of his childhood (or as near to it as he could come in New York). Soon after finishing this work, Auden began a long poem based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which he wrote during the period when he was teaching at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and spending summers in New York. The Sea and the Mirror’ was published in For the Time Being, and almost simultaneously in August 1944 Auden was starting to work on his next long poem, published three years later. In April 1945 his American publishers, Random House, brought out The Collected Poetry, notable for its curt authorial foreword giving voice to the cold eye Auden now cast over much of his earlier work, which he had discontentedly re-read in order to compile the book, and also for his method of arranging poems in alphabetical order of their first line. This was designed to disrupt any assumptions about the nature of his development which over-familiar readers and reviewers might otherwise bring to this first collected volume.

That same month, Auden flew the Atlantic, attached to the US Strategic Bombing Survey as a uniformed civilian with rank equivalent to major; the purpose was to undertake a study of the effects on German morale of the intensive Allied bombing. He was able to spend a few days in England on the outward and inward flights, visiting his father and also Spender, but intervening weeks were spent among the ruined cities of Germany, undertaking interviews which were at times harrowing. Also on this assignment was his friend the writer James Stern, who probably took the photograph (Tribute: 82–3) showing Auden aboard a jeep in devastated Nuremberg; miraculously preserved in the background, a statue of Dürer perhaps suggests how Art triumphantly transcends historical disaster. Auden’s view of matters, however, was different; increasingly suspicious of art’s self-applaudingly magical orderliness, his scale of values is better illustrated by Stern’s reminiscence of having inadvertently interrupted his early-morning prayers, and registering Auden’s anguish at the intrusion. He and his wife Tania had been dedicatees of ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, and shortly after the return from Germany in mid-August 1945, they and Auden shared ownership of a shack on the not-yet-fashionable New York resort of Fire Island, where Auden spent the summers: visitors noted the map of Alston Moor prominently displayed on one of its walls. In adddition to what he earned from poetry, Auden made money by teaching at a variety of colleges and by undertaking reviews and editing anthologies. That autumn he rented the first of a series of apartments in New York, later shared with Kallman.

In July 1947 the publication of The Age of Anxiety, subtitled ‘A Baroque Eclogue’ and dedicated to John Betjeman, brought to a close the series of long poems which had been his chief output in these American years. In the spring of 1948 he sailed the Atlantic with Kallman, for whom it was the first visit to Europe, where Auden introduced him to English friends an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: Life and contexts
• 2: Works
• 3: Criticism
• Chronology
• Further reading
• Select bibliography
• Index