推荐给奥登爱好者两篇文章

王敖

Auden at Home
By James Fenton

"Art is born of humiliation," said the young Auden to the young hopeful Spender. And we saw in the first of these three essays how he continued to believe this.[1] He thought of the Sonnets as a private record of Shakespeare\'s humiliation at the hands of both the young man and the Dark Lady, for the sonnets addressed to her are "concerned with that most humiliating of all erotic experiences, sexu-al infatuation." "Simple lust," said Auden,

is impersonal, that is to say the pursuer regards himself as a person but the object of his pursuit as a thing, to whose personal qualities, if she has any, he is indifferent, and, if he succeeds, he expects to be able to make a safe getaway as soon as he becomes bored. Sometimes, however, he gets trapped. Instead of becoming bored, he becomes sexually obsessed, and the girl, instead of conveniently remaining an object, becomes a real person to him, but a person whom he not only does not love, he actively dislikes.
And Auden adds that "no other poet, not even Catullus, has described the anguish, self-contempt, and rage produced by this unfortunate condition so well as Shakespeare in some of these sonnets."

As for the young man:

The impression we get of his friend is one of a young man who was not really very nice, very conscious of his good looks, able to switch on the charm at any moment, but essentially frivolous, cold-hearted, and self-centered, aware, probably, that he had some power over Shakespeare—if he thought about it at all, no doubt he gave it a cynical explanation—but with no conception of the intensity of the feelings he had, unwittingly, aroused. Somebody, in fact, rather like Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice.
Auden thought that the Sonnets told the story "of an agonized struggle by Shakespeare to preserve the glory of the vision he had been granted in a relationship, lasting at least three years, with a person who seemed intent by his actions upon covering the vision with dirt."

More than one reader has sensed in these lines a bitterness deriving from Auden\'s own circumstances with Chester Kallman, his lover, with whom he continued to live for at least part of the year long after their sexual relations had ceased. Auden considered himself married to Kallman, but, since his friend had turned elsewhere for sex, he came to make his own sexual arrangements too. Since Auden is often depicted as the suffering victim in this relationship, it is worth pointing out that, if he had been attacking Kallman in his depiction of the young man in the Sonnets, he would (a) have been casting himself as Shakespeare, and (b) have been mounting an attack which would have been very hard for Kallman to counter. And how could you live happily with someone who attacks you in print?

Auden was powerfully aware of the difficulty involved in being on the receiving end of an intensely felt love, and you may remember that in his definition of the Vision of Eros he more or less excluded the possibility that the vision could be mutual. Beatrice, had she lived, could never have, as it were, reciprocated Dante\'s experience of her. As Auden put it: "The story of Tristan and Isolde is a myth, not an instance of what can historically occur." Auden also felt that the vision he was talking about could not long survive an actual sexual relationship. In a letter to David Luke, he emphasizes that "all the authorities agree that the vision cannot survive any prolonged sexual relations." But he doesn\'t say who all these authorities are.


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Actually the story Shakespeare\'s Sonnets tell, if they do tell a story, seems to me to be of relevance to Auden\'s life in a way he might not have acknowledged. You will remember that the conclusion of Sonnet 20 proposes that the young man should grant the poet his love, while bestowing his sexual attention on women: "Since she prick\'d thee out for women\'s pleasure," says the poet, "Mine be thy love, and thy love\'s use their treasure." The poet thinks he can split love in two, but this plan gets its comeuppance when the young man goes anywhere near the Dark Lady. In his own life, Auden felt that having made his commitment he should stick to it. If Kallman had shifted his sexual attentions elsewhere, perhaps Auden could still have his love in the important sense. He was not to waver from this unhappy ambition for the next, the last, thirty years of his life.

Sometimes in his poetry he expresses a stoic resignation:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
("The More Loving One")

This is one of those poems which was probably not much liked when it came out in 1958, but which hangs around, and reverberates, largely because of that couplet:

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

A thought that anyone might wish to take consolation from at some point in life.

But Auden was not always stoical or resigned in this way. His jealousy had been stirred by Kallman to such an extent that at one point—or so he believed—he came within an ace of strangling him. And that fury returned to haunt him.

Make this night loveable,
Moon, and with eye single
Looking down from up there
Bless me, One especial
And friends everywhere.

With a cloudless brightness
Surround our absences;
Innocent be our sleeps,
Watched by great still spaces,
White hills, glittering deeps.

Parted by circumstance,
Grant each your indulgence
That we may meet in dreams
For talk, for dalliance,
By warm hearths, by cool streams.

Shine lest tonight any,
In the dark suddenly,
Wake alone in a bed
To hear his own fury
Wishing his love were dead.
("Five Songs," V)

To be in love and wish your lover dead, to be in love and know that you have to conceal it, to be in the grip of a sexual obsession with someone you discover you dislike—all these humiliating experiences turn up in Auden\'s work, and it is worth noting that the humiliation did not begin with Kallman. From the earliest of Auden\'s published lyrics we are invited to see love as transitory:

Nor speech is close nor fingers numb,
If love not seldom has received
An unjust answer, was deceived.
I, decent with the seasons, move
Different, or with a different love.
("The Letter")

The lover behaves decently in the sense that he changes and accepts change. This is the behavior of nature. Love is seasonal. And it happens that in Auden\'s early poetry an incantatory style can create an effect of beauty while the subject under discussion might be something the reader, if he only understood it better, might be shocked by. It was Christopher Isherwood in Christopher and His Kind (1976) who explained that Auden had written a beautiful poem, just to please Isherwood, about a boyfriend of Isherwood\'s known as Bubi:

Before this loved one
Was that one and that one,
A family
And history
And ghost\'s adversity,
Whose pleasing name
Was neighbourly shame.
Before this last one
Was much to be done,
Frontiers to cross
As clothes grew worse,
And coins to pass
In a cheaper house,
Before this last one,
Before this loved one.
("This Loved One")

Perhaps it would always have been clear to the reader that there was something going on here which was not quite right—that, as the second stanza puts it, this love affair was "no real meeting," "a backward love." Perhaps also those frontiers to cross as clothes grew worse and coins to pass in a cheaper house suggested that what was going on was not, as it were, entirely respectable. But whether the words "rent boy" or "male prostitute" or "promiscuous sex" came to mind among the original readers of the poem is another question. Such words seem to come from a very different vocabulary from that of the poem.


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Much of Auden\'s early poetry was written in a kind of code, and this was a source of its bewitching power. Readers of poetry divide into two kinds: those who, confronted with what appears to be like a code, insist that they must crack it, and those who are happy to listen to the spell, without inquiring too closely what it might mean.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree

—as Eliot so aptly put it in Burnt Norton. But what does it mean?

The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
And reconciles forgotten wars.

What is a trilling wire? Some people have to know the answer. Others don\'t. (I think a trilling wire is a telegram people used to send to Professor Lionel Trilling, begging for his help in elucidating passages like these.)

What Auden wrote in code—to the extent that his circle might possess a key to the code while the general public did not—would have been read within his circle with the sense of pleasure and privilege enjoyed by the initiate; perhaps too as a joke on the general public. How many readers do you think understood the dedication of Poems (1930) as having a sexual meaning?

Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

And would they have been right to do so? Does it mean: let us try to honor the living, although it is the dead we value? (An odd message, surely.) Or honor man in his active mode, though we value only the—what? The unconscious, the contemplative man?

A poem may be at the same time transparent and undisclosing, en code and en clair:

Dear, though the night is gone,
The dream still haunts to-day,
That brought us to a room
Cavernous, lofty as
A railway terminus,
And crowded in that gloom
Were beds, and we in one
In a far corner lay.

Our whisper woke no clocks,
We kissed and I was glad
At everything you did,
Indifferent to those
Who sat with hostile eyes
In pairs on every bed,
Arms round each other\'s necks,
Inert and vaguely sad.

O but what worm of guilt
Or what malignant doubt
Am I the victim of,
That you then, unabashed,
Did what I never wished,
Confessed another love;
And I, submissive, felt
Unwanted and went out.
("Twelve Songs," IV)

Our pronouns have preserved a tact which allows Auden to write a poem in this way without specifying what sexes are involved. And there is generosity in this, since any reader can be the lover, the speaker of this poem. It is based on a dream of Auden\'s about a particular male lover. Read as a poem about two men, it yields further meanings, hitherto perhaps concealed: the hostility of the other lovers comes across as the hostility of society, while the location of the dream in a railway terminus has associations with a particular kind of transient affair. But of course the fear expressed by the whole dream—the fear of being unwanted—is universal.

The speaker in the poem, on the other hand, has dreamed the dream and is aware not only of the miserable feeling of being unwanted, but also of having created the scenario, which implies that he might in some guilty way wish the affair with the lover to end. Likewise in "Lay your sleeping head, my love" it is the speaker, the poet, whose arm is faithless. It is the speaker who, while wishing to preserve the beautiful moment, is aware that it may pass on the stroke of midnight. And this sense of transience is not unwelcome—it is merely defied for the time being. This is the early Auden, the Auden of the Thirties, speaking. He may have suffered. He may have been humiliated, and his art may have come from this humiliation. But he could still, generally speaking, display a happy optimism in the matter of love.

This song was written for Benjamin Britten:

Underneath an 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.

Bells that toll across the meadows From the sombre spire,
Toll for those unloving shadows
   Love does not require.
All that lives may love; why longer Bow to loss With arms across?
Strike and you shall conquer.

Geese in flocks above you flying, Their direction know,
Icy brooks beneath you flowing, To their ocean go.
Dark and dull is your distraction: Walk then, come, No longer numb
Into your satisfaction.
("Twelve Songs," VII)

Just over half a dozen years after composing this, Auden, in 1943, wrote to Elizabeth Mayer that "being Anders wie die Andern"—he meant "Anders als die Andern," different from the others (it was the title of a film about homosexuality made in 1919)—"has its troubles. There are days when the knowledge that there will never be a place which I can call home, that there will never be a person with whom I shall be one flesh, seems more than I can bear, and if it wasn\'t for you, and a few—how few—like you, I don\'t think I could." Auden was not usually given to self-pity, and one is pulled up by the assertion that there would never be a place he could call home. He had lived, it is true, a peripatetic life—as a teacher and writer—but nothing so fractured as to mark him out from the rest of humanity in this respect.


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And yet it may be that Auden seriously believed that he was somehow condemned to be homeless. Even when he bought his house in Austria in 1957 and began to write the series of poems about it that were gathered in About the House, the series was called "Thanksgiving for a Habitat," as if the use of the word "home" might be somewhat pushing it. And in the dozen poems in the series, the word seldom crops up:

   …Territory, status,

and love, sing all the birds, are what matter: what I dared not hope for or fight for
is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft
where I needn\'t, ever, be at home to

those I am not at home with, not a cradle, a magic Eden without clocks,
and not a windowless grave, but a place
I may go both in and out of.

The second use of the word "home" is in the final poem, addressed to Kallman, which is about the living room. It simply says that "every home should be a fortress,/equipped with all the very latest engines/for keeping Nature at bay." He is referring to the fact that the living room had small windows, which he liked to keep tight shut.

To define one\'s home so baldly as "a place/I may go both in and out of" seems extremely odd until we turn to John Fuller\'s commentary, which gives us the reference to George Macdonald\'s Lilith. It comes from the advice a raven gives to Mr. Vane:

"The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home."
"How am I to begin that when everything is so strange?"
"By doing something."
"What?"
"Anything; and the sooner you begin the better! for until you are at home, you will find it as difficult to get out as it is to get in…. Home, as you may or may not know, is the only place where you may go out and in. There are places you can go into, and places you can go out of; but the one place if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home."[2]
The commentary suggests for Fuller that "what the quotation does not say, but which Auden may well have had in mind (significantly in the context of a poem about certain death and illusory Edens) is that the one place that you only come out of is the womb, and the one place you only go into is the tomb." Auden\'s riddling use of an anyway riddling Macdonald is an indication that there was some significance in his suppression of the subject "home."

One may ask why Auden should be under the illusion—or burdened with the belief—that he had not had a home before moving to Austria. He had never been under any illusion about having roots—his roots, if he had had them, would have been in Birmingham. His mythical north of England (which began at Crewe station in that city), to which he often referred and returned in prose and verse, was well understood to be a place of his own invention. Nothing would have been simpler than to hop on a train to Carlisle, if hopping on that train would have met the need for home. But there was a forward impulse in Auden\'s life that involved renunciation. He had renounced in his poetry a certain kind of rhetoric. He had renounced political engagement. He had really renounced England, and that was not forgiven him.

I think also that this forward impulse of renunciation is reflected in the feeling he would have, after finishing a poem, that he would never be able to write another line again—as if by the end of each poem all his talent had been evacuated. And then there was a feeling, once when he was preparing a book of collected poems in New York, that he would put them all together in a book because he never wanted to write like that again. He would be shot of them.


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When Auden did go back, the upshot was often unhappy. This was true both of the trip to England he made at the end of the war, and of his attempt to move back to Oxford in the last year of his life. It is true also that when he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, he was terrified of giving his inaugural lecture. According to Richard Davenport-Hines\'s biography, it was partly the animosity that his election to this chair had aroused which gave him the dark-night-of-the-soul experience out of which he wrote "There Will Be No Peace":

   Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shire of your esteem
And its colors come back, the storm has changed you: You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale Prophesying your downfall.

You must live with your knowledge.
Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,
In moonless absences you never heard of, Who have certainly heard of you,
Beings of unknown number and gender: And they do not like you.

What have you done to them?
Nothing? Nothing is not an answer:
You will come to believe—how can you help it?— That you did, you did do something;
You will find yourself wishing you could make them laugh, You will long for their friendship.

There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of, Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now; They hate for hate\'s sake.

Nobody seemed to like this poem at the time. Thom Gunn wrote that it was "the worst of Auden\'s poems I have seen in book form." And even Edward Mendelson says it was "perhaps the least successful poem he had written in fifteen years," that Auden "did not translate or universalize the experience that had prompted it into something accessible to a sympathetic reader."[3] Auden said: "I don\'t know why critics have disliked this poem so much. However, I can\'t be objective about it, since it is one of the most purely personal poems I have ever written. It was an attempt to describe a very unpleasant dark-night-of-the-soul sort of experience which for several months in 1956 attacked me." And he later identified the theme as paranoia.


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Actually there seems to me to be something universally appreciable in the idea that there are beings out there who hate you, people unknown to you who have a longstanding inexplicable grudge against you. If it were not so, one\'s heart would not miss a beat in those innumerable films when the hero comes home to find his favorite cat nailed to the door, or his house sprayed with slogans.

We can take "There Will Be No Peace" as an evocation of the visceral dislike Auden encountered in Britain. We can also see it as a study of forces encountered within, forces that urge one to admit an unfounded guilt and to go for the humiliation of appeasement. That awareness in Auden, mentioned in the previous essay, of the proximity of the power of the poet\'s rhetoric to the power of the dictator was a longstanding theme. Terrifying powers work within us, or are carrying out their work through us, Auden thought. He said in 1940:

Jung hardly went far enough when he said "Hitler is the unconscious of every German"; he comes uncomfortably near being the unconscious of most of us. The shock of discovering through Freud and Marx that when we thought we were being perfectly responsible, logical, and loving we were nothing of the kind, has led us to believe that responsibility and logic and love are meaningless words; instead of bringing us to repentance, it has brought us to nihilistic despair.
Here is a poem written at that time which was first called "The Crisis" and is now called "They":

Where do they come from? Those whom we so much dread,
as on our dearest location falls the chill
of their crooked wing and endangers
the melting friend, the aqueduct, the flower.

Terrible Presences that the ponds reflect
back at the famous and, when the blond boy
bites eagerly into the shining
apple, emerge in their shocking fury,

and we realize the woods are deaf and the sky
nurses no one, and we are awake and these,
like farmers, have purpose and knowledge,
but towards us their hate is directed.

We are the barren pastures to which they bring
the resentment of outcasts; on us they work
out their despair; they wear our weeping
as the disgraceful badge of their exile.

We have conjured them here like a lying map;
desiring the extravagant joy of life,
we lured with a mirage of orchards,
fat in the lazy climate of refuge.

Our money sang like streams on the aloof peaks
of our thinking that beckoned them on like girls;
our culture like a West of wonder
shone a solemn promise in their faces.

We expected the beautiful or the wise,
ready to see a charm in our childish fibs,
pleased to find nothing but stones, and
able at once to create a garden.

But those who come are not even children with
the big indiscriminate eyes we had lost,
occupying our narrow spaces
with their anarchist vivid abandon.

They arrive, already adroit, having learned
restraint at the table of a father\'s rage;
in a mother\'s distorting mirror
they discovered the Meaning of Knowing.

For a future of marriage nevertheless
the bed is prepared; though all our whiteness shrinks
from the hairy and clumsy bridegroom,
we conceive in the shuddering instant.

For the barren must wish to bear though the Spring
punish; and the crooked that dreads to be straight
cannot alter its prayer but summons
out of the dark a horrible rector.

The tawny and vigorous tiger can move
with style through the borough of murder; the ape
is really at home in the parish
of grimacing and licking: but we have

failed as their pupils. Our tears well from a love
we have never outgrown; our armies predict
more than we hope; even our armies
have to express our need for forgiveness.

Quite a lot of "trilling wires" here, enough to provoke E.R. Dodds\'s wife, Annie Dodds, to ask Auden what crisis he was referring to. He replied: "\'The Crisis\' is just the spiritual crisis of our time, i.e. the division between the reason and the heart, the individual and the collective, the liberal ineffective highbrow and the brutal practical demagogue like Hitler and Huey Long."

The powers that suddenly and terrifyingly appear are, as Mendelson glosses them,

the chthonic powers that our intellectual pride has banished from ourselves, and they exist, paradoxically, because we banished them. Evolutionary and erotic instincts were inseparable from the whole being of a lower animal; they took on separate existence only when we human beings divided ourselves into proletarian Matter and aristocratic Idea, and excluded from both the instincts that had once informed the whole.
Auden believed that though we are under the illusion that we live and act, we are in fact "lived"—unknown and irrational forces work through us.

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

It is their to-morrow hangs over the earth of the living
And all that we wish for our friends: but existence is believing
We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving.

That comes from an elegy for the German poet Ernst Toller, who had committed suicide in New York in 1939 (which explains the reference to the powers directing "even our hand"). While Auden was contemplating these powers, and the awful way they seemed to be shaping the destiny of Europe, while he was trying to shake off one way of thinking and explore another—shake off a way of thinking based on the belief in the inevitability of human progress, explore a way of thinking suggested to him by the theologies of the time—while he was doing this, and writing the poems which came out of his contemplation of the war and its meaning—Auden would have thought that he was doing what he was set on earth to do. He had written in 1938:

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient;I hope not.
I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato\'s downwards, have deeply distrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbours start talking.
So if Auden was working (as he always was), he felt that he was doing the right thing. He had a gift, and he was at this time particularly conscious of his responsibilities toward it. Mendelson quotes a stanza from one of the poems Auden refused to republish in his 1945 collection, "ascal":

Yet like a lucky orphan he had been discovered
And instantly adopted by a Gift;
And she became the sensible protector
Who found a passage through the caves of accusation,
And even in the canyon of distress was able
To use the echo of his weakness as a proof
That joy was probable and took the place
Of the poor lust and hunger he had never known.

The Gift is your protector against your accusers.


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When Golo Mann first met Auden in Switzerland in 1935, his manner was, Mann later put it,

appealingly awkward, but at the same time self-confident. If one studied him closer, he had the air of one who was used to being primus inter pares, one might even say a triumphant air, so long as this does not suggest anything exaggerated or theatrical.
Mann goes on to say:

He was the most intelligent man I have known, or rather, because "intelligence" only suggests insight and understanding, the cleverest, with a cleverness which was essentially creative. He thought truths out for himself. Many of them could have been expanded into whole books. But he only presented them, in his own particular way, unsystematically. So there is no Auden "philosophy."
Golo Mann later shared that famous house in Brooklyn Heights with Auden, along with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Paul and Jane Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee. Mann tells us:

Benjamin Britten soon left Brooklyn and returned to England, presumably because he did not wish to remain far away from his native country in time of war. Auden remained. This did not endear him to his countrymen, soon to be his ex-countrymen. When I showed him a hostile article in an English paper and said it required some reply from him, he cut me short: "There is no point." It was another example of his independence, self-confidence and pride. He knew that he would survive such a crisis, best of all by taking no notice of it.
Mann means that Auden knew he would survive being attacked in the press, not, as might at first seem, that he knew he would survive the war best by taking no notice of it. Auden\'s "There is no point" might be taken to mean, "Whatever I say in my defense will be useless." And that has certainly proved the case, since the accusation of cowardice pursued him all his life, and afterward too. In the first of these Auden essays I traced an irritating little scholarly tradition, which began by calling Auden a hypocrite and ended up detecting what Katherine Duncan Jones described as "a characteristic instance of [his] cowardice."


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Ursula Niebuhr, the theologian wife of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a man who was critical of pacifism, gives an account of Auden\'s commencement address at Smith College in 1940, from part of which I have already quoted. Auden called his address a sermon, but he put the text of the sermon at the end. It is from Rilke\'s Letters to a Young Poet:

The only courage that is demanded of us: [is] to have courage for the most extraordinary, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter…. Only he or she who is ready for everything…will live the relation to another as something alive…. We must always hold to what is difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most hostile will become what we most trust and find most faithful…. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
And Ursula Niebuhr goes on to recall how Auden

wrote sympathetically about Rilke\'s negative reaction to the First World War. "Not to understand: yes, that was my entire occupation in these years"; and commented on these words of Rilke, "To be conscious but to refuse to understand, is a positive act that calls for courage of the highest order." But he admitted that, "It may at the time be difficult for the outsider…to distinguish it from selfish or cowardly indifference." For him, Rilke was the writer to whom to turn, "for strength to resist the treacherous temptations that approach us disguised as righteous duties."
I think of Blake\'s question:

Thou hast a lap full of seed
And this is a fine country.
Why dost thou not cast thy seed
And live in it merrily.

To which the answer must be: if only it were as easy as that. If only what the question supposes were true. Auden had the greatest gifts of any of our poets in the twentieth century, the greatest lap full of seed. And it was given him to know this, and to doubt it, to know and to doubt it. The sense of being primus inter pares, the sense of always being the youngest person in the room, the spirit that could say to posterity "You did not live in our time—be sorry": all this was given him. And then, to be conscious but to refuse to understand, to live not in a fine but in a lean country, to hold to what was most difficult, to face that which was most hostile—this too was given him. To make mistakes, to cling to impossible ideals, to fail, to find himself hated, to know humiliation—this too was given him. To find himself wronged or in the wrong, to find his courage taken for cowardice, to find himself human, in short—all this was given him. "erhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us," and perhaps that forward impulse of renunciation implied a gesture toward the terrible. This was where his Gift had brought him, to this lean country and to these caves of accusation.


—This is the last of three articleson W.H. Auden.

Notes
[1] "Auden and Shakespeare," The New York Review, March 23, 2000.

[2] John Fuller, W.H. Auden: A Commentary (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 273.

[3] Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 406.




Auden\'s Enchantment
By James Fenton
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE

Later Auden
by Edward Mendelson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pp., $16.00 (paper, to be published in May) (paper)

The Dyer\'s Hand
by W.H. Auden
Vintage, 527 pp., $18.00 (paper)

The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939
by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson
Faber and Faber, 496 pp., $33.95 (paper)

W.H. Auden: A Commentary
by John Fuller
Princeton University Press, 640 pp., $35.00

Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, 1926-1938
by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson
Princeton University Press, 836 pp., $85.00

The Table Talk of W.H. Auden
by Alan Ansen, edited by Nicholas Jenkins
Ontario Review Press, 119 pp., $15.95

1.

Auden, when an undergraduate at Oxford, took a look at the literary scene in general and decided that it offered an empty stage. "Evidently they are waiting for Someone," he said with, Stephen Spender tells us, "the air of anticipating that he would soon take the center of it." Auden\'s fantasy, however, was to be at the center, not to be the sole figure. Christopher Isherwood was to be the novelist. Robert Medley was to be the painter. Cecil Day-Lewis was in there in some poetic capacity, as were Louis MacNeice and Spender. Spender told Auden he wondered whether he, Spender, ought to write prose. But Auden put his foot down. "You must write nothing but poetry, we do not want to lose you for poetry." "But do you really think I\'m any good?" gulped Spender. "Of course," Auden frigidly replied. "But why?" "Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation."

In the end, Spender did write some prose, including World Within World, the autobiography from which I am quoting, and a rare book called European Witness, which I strongly recommend.[1] He kept an important journal, and also tried his hand at fiction, as did Day-Lewis. The real division of the spoils was between Auden and Isherwood, the preeminent poet and the preeminent novelist. Isherwood kept away from poetry, apart from a few very early verses and some translations. Auden kept away from anything remotely like the novel. The two men collaborated on drama—it was territory which they could divide up amicably. Isherwood wrote film scripts while Auden wrote fine texts for documentaries, two of which (Coal Face and Night Maid) have held their own as poems. Isherwood later worked on a Frankenstein movie, for which Jonathan Keates later suggested the sub-title Mr. Norris Changes Brains. Auden got opera. Isherwood took Hollywood. Neither stepped on the other\'s turf.

Prose, though, prose could not be easily divided up, or left, as we have heard, to Spender as his own. Prose is too important, too unsatisfactory a concept, too interesting in its ramifications. How could Auden have been given Poetry, Isherwood the Novel, and Spender—Prose? It doesn\'t add up. It doesn\'t divide up. And besides—Auden needed prose.

He needed it in various ways, one of which was to make a living, for, as he claimed in the introduction to The Dyer\'s Hand, he wrote all his lectures, introductions, and reviews because he needed the money. He hoped some love went into their writing. But when he looked over his criticism again he decided to reduce it to a set of notes. There was something, in his opinion, false about systematic criticism. When Alan Ansen, who compiled a collection of Auden\'s "table talk," said to him in 1946, "I should think you might almost be ready to issue a volume of collected prose," Auden said, "I don\'t think so. Criticism should be casual conversation."

And indeed his table talk is and was very much like the opening sections of The Dyer\'s Hand:

The most painful of all experiences to a poet is to find that a poem of his which he knows to be a forgery has pleased the public and got into the anthologies. For all he knows, the poem may be quite good, but that\'s not the point; he should not have written it.
No poet or novelist wishes that he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
These come from the page, whereas this comes from conversation:

Yeats spent the first half of his life writing minor poetry, and the second half writing major poetry about what it had been like to be a minor poet.
And this:

Eliot wrote nothing but late poetry (smiling) after "Gerontion," anyway.
The word "smiling" is put in by Ansen to mark Auden\'s realization that what he had said wasn\'t really true.


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For a long time Auden\'s periodical criticism remained uncollected, until Auden himself had probably forgotten much of what he had written and where it was to be found. The Dyer\'s Hand, first published in 1962, was put together under Auden\'s direction by an assistant whose job it was to go to the libraries and copy out the pieces in question. Presumably Auden then carried out his paring down of the essays. Forewords and Afterwords (1973), the prose book published ten years later, was selected and overseen by Edward Mendelson, who became Auden\'s literary executor and who published in 1977 The English Auden, which collected for the first time the journalism of the Thirties. Until that publication, it would have been only a very attentive reader, and one with a long memory, who could have formed an opinion of Auden\'s work overall. And I should add that Mendelson\'s recent, definitive collection—Prose 1926-1938—is only the beginning of the gathering of the fugitive pieces. Although we are in a much better position now than we recently were to see Auden whole, we will not truly be able to do so until we can see the prose whole.

The reason for this is not that we expect it to outshine the poetry, or to supplement its perceived deficiencies. The reason is that in Auden\'s work, prose and poetry interpenetrate to a far greater extent than in the work of any other English-language poet of this century. There are vectors in Auden\'s work—the Blake vector, the late Henry James vector—which can be traced in prose and poetry alike:

The sword sung on the barren heath,
The sickle in the fruitful field:
The sword he sung a song of death,
But could not make the sickle yield.

Amoeba in the running water
Lives afresh in son and daughter.
\'The sword above the valley\'
Said the Worm to the Penny.

Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.

Those who will not reason
Perish in the act:
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason.

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
He who undertakes anything, thinking he is doing it out of a sense of duty, is deceiving himself and will ruin everything he touches.
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.
The Prolific and the Devourer: the Artist and the Politician. Let them realise that they are enemies, i.e., that each has a vision of the world which must remain incomprehensible to the other. But let them also realise that they are both necessary and complementary, and further, that there are good and bad politicians, good and bad artists, and that the good must learn to recognise and to respect the good.
To the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains; but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.
But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer, as a sea, received the excess of his delights….
These two classes of men are always upon earth, and they should be enemies: whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
That was Blake, Auden, Blake, Auden, Blake, Auden, Blake, Auden, Blake. I edited out Blake\'s ampersands.


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Blake sat at Auden\'s left when he wrote, urging concision, definite views, plain language. He was not the Blake of the long line, of the interminable prophetic books, but the fiery Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the Blake of the notebooks.

Henry James sat on Auden\'s right, suggesting fascinating syntaxes and ways of prolonging a sentence, giving a nuance to a nuance. This is the late Henry James, making his appearance as early as the early 1940s. "A mannered style," Auden wrote later, "that of Góngora or Henry James, for example, is like eccentric clothing: very few writers can carry it off, but one is enchanted by the rare exception who can." And again, in his essay on James\'s The American Scene, Auden says:

James had been evolving a style of metaphorical description of the emotions which is all his own, a kind of modern Gongorism, and in The American Scene this imagery, no longer inhibited by the restraining hand of character or the impatient tug of plot, came to its fullest and finest bloom.
Indeed, perhaps the best way to approach this book is as a prose poem of the first order…relishing it sentence by sentence, for it is no more a guidebook than the "Ode to a Nightingale" is an ornithological essay.
And he recommends the reader who finds James\'s late manner hard to get on with to read the last paragraph of the chapter on Richmond, describing the statue of General Lee—"a purple patch," he calls it, adding that there are many others which match it. It reads:

The equestrian statue of the Southern hero, made to order in far-away uninterested Paris [and how like Auden that phrase sounds], is the work of a master and has artistic interest—a refinement of style, in fact, under the impression of which we seem to see it, in its situation, as some precious pearl of ocean washed up on a rude bare strand. The very high florid pedestal is of the last French elegance, and the great soldier, sitting his horse with a kind of melancholy nobleness, raises his handsome head as he looks off into desolate space. He does well, we feel, to sit as high as he may, and to appear, in his lone survival, to see as far, and to overlook as many things; for the irony of fate, crowning the picture, is surely stamped in all sharpness on the scene about him. The place is the mere vague centre of two or three crossways, without form and void, with a circle half sketched by three or four groups of small, new, mean houses. It is somehow empty in spite of being ugly, and yet expressive in spite of being empty. "Desolate," one has called the air; and the effect is, strangely, of some smug "up-to-date" specimen or pattern of desolation. So long as one stands there the high figure, which ends for all the world by suggesting to the admirer a quite conscious, subjective, even a quite sublime, effort to ignore, to sit, as it were, superior and indifferent, enjoys the fact of company and therefore, in a manner, of sympathy—so that the vast association of the futile for the moment drops away from it. But to turn one\'s back, one feels, is to leave it alone again, communing, in its altitude, which represents thus some prodigious exemplary perched position, some everlasting high stool of penitence, with the very heaven of futility. So at least I felt brought round again to meeting my first surprise, to solving the riddle of the historic poverty of Richmond. It is the poverty that is, exactly, historic: once take it for that and it puts on vividness. The condition attested is the condition—or, as may be, one of the later, fainter, weaker stages—of having worshipped false gods. As I looked back, before leaving it, at Lee\'s stranded, bereft image, which time and fortune have so cheated of half the significance, and so, I think, of half the dignity, of great memorials, I recognized something more than the melancholy of a lost cause. The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have been gained.
So Auden heard this music, this Gongorism, and was enchanted. And he needed this prose for his own prose, and this poetry for his own poetry. He was not alone in his love of the late James, but he was not, on the other hand, one of a mob, and that sense, perhaps, of personal discovery, that sense that the late James was lying around neglected, made his appropriations possible.


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To those who were anyway disillusioned with Auden (Randall Jarrell thought he had never repeated the success of Poems, 1930, while Philip Larkin dated the decline from the outbreak of World War II), this Jamesian influence was unwelcome. But Auden needed influences. He always needed influences. When he ran out of influences, he entered a depression and very soon died. So we should think twice before bemoaning the James vector, or wishing it away. Here is the opening passage of "At the Grave of Henry James," the poem Auden wrote in the spring of 1941, which began life as a twenty-eight-stanza blockbuster, by 1945 had been reduced to twenty-four, and finally got boiled down to ten stanzas only. This version comes from the 1945 Collected Poems:

The snow, less intransigeant than their marble,
Has left the defence of whiteness to these tombs; For all the pools at my feet
Accommodate blue now, and echo such clouds as occur
To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the passing Moment remarks they repeat

While the rocks, named after singular spaces
Within which images wandered once that caused All to tremble and offend,
Stand here in an innocent stillness, each marking the spot
Where one more series of errors lost its uniqueness And novelty came to an end.

To whose real advantage were such transactions
When words of reflection were exchanged for trees? What living occasion can
Be just to the absent? O noon but reflects on itself,
And the small taciturn stone that is the only witness To a great and talkative man

Has no more judgment than my ignorant shadow
Of odious comparisons or distant clocks Which challenge and interfere
With the heart\'s instantaneous reading of time, time that is
A warm enigma no longer in you for whom I Surrender my private cheer

Startling the awkward footsteps of my apprehension,
The flushed assault of your recognition is The donnée of this doubtful hour:
O stern proconsul of intractable provinces,
O poet of the difficult, dear addicted artist, Assent to my soil and flower.

In his book Later Auden (1999), Edward Mendelson calls this poem "dismayingly loquacious"—a judgment with which Auden eventually concurred, as we have seen. And it is true that in the original version—and to a lesser extent in its final truncated form—Auden turns James into a saint, who is asked to pray for him. Mendelson says: "James could safely be called upon to pray when he was dead, however seldom he had prayed in life."

Mendelson points out an interesting circumstance of this poem\'s first publication. It came out first in Horizon, later in Partisan Review, where it would have been read, Mendelson writes, as part of a critical battle "to canonize American literature as a precursor of English and European modernism." The key figure in this movement was an acquaintance of Auden\'s, F.O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance came out later in the same year. Auden\'s enthusiasm for James and Melville was genuine and unaffected, but still one might suppose that there was a particular pleasure in paying tribute to the culture in which he was making his home (the grave of Henry James, incidentally, being in the family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts). On the poem\'s first English publication, the New Statesman commented that James and Auden had one thing in common: "They both changed nationality for the same reason—the neutrality of the United States."

A cutting remark, one of the first of many, for Auden\'s decision to move to the United States was held against him. In fact although he applied for American citizenship in 1940, he did not receive it until 1946. The adaptation of an American prose style for poetic purposes might well have contained an element of needling defiance of the English reader of the time—especially for the kind of reader who wanted his Auden sharp and political, wanted more of the Popular Front-style rhetoric which the poet had deliberately decided to put behind him.

2.

Auden was a rhetorician. He knew himself to be a rhetorician of the highest powers, and, when he saw the power he had, he recoiled from it in deep horror. And as he recoiled, he filled his followers with dismay, since they could not see the furies that he saw. They saw the beauty of the rhetoric of "Spain," that astonish-ingly simple device of repetition and change between "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow," sustained over 104 lines with such a profusion of im-agery. Auden heard only the lines of which Maynard Keynes wrote, "In this he is speaking for many chivalrous hearts."

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death;
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder—

the lines which provoked Orwell\'s first, scurrilous attack in the Adelphi (December 1938):

Our civilisation produces in increasing numbers two types, the gangster and the pansy. They never meet, but each is necessary to the other. Somebody in eastern Europe "liquidates" a Trotskyist; somebody in Bloomsbury writes a justification of it. And it is, of course, precisely because of the utter softness and security of life in England that the yearning for bloodshed—bloodshed in the far distance—is so common among our intelligentsia. Mr. Auden can write about "the acceptance of guilt for the necessary murder" perhaps because he has never committed a murder, perhaps never had one of his friends murdered, possibly never even seen a murdered man\'s corpse. The presence of this utterly irresponsible intelligentsia, who "took up" Roman Catholicism ten years ago, "take up" Communism to-day and will "take up" the English variant of Fascism a few years hence, is a special feature of the English situation. The importance is that with their money, influence and literary facility they are able to dominate large sections of the Press.[2]
It is interesting that Nicholas Jenkins, who researched what little is known about Auden\'s six weeks in Spain during the Civil War, comes to the conclusion that "Spain," the poem, takes sides in the internecine political battles that were taking place on the Aragon front. He quotes Cyril Connolly\'s formulation of the two oppos-ing positions: "The Communists and Socialists say \'First win the war, then attend to the revolution.\' …The younger Anarchists and the POUM say, \'The war and the revolution are indivisible and we must go on with both of them simultaneously."\' Jenkins thinks that "To-morrow…/All the fun under/Liberty\'s masterful shadow…/ To-morrow…/The eager election of chairmen/By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle"[3] —such deferrals of the revolution allude to the Communist or Socialist line as against that of Orwell\'s POUM. If that is true, it helps to explain the particular dislike that Orwell took to a poem which he also affected to believe was "one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war."

It depends, though, what Auden meant by the struggle, and I do not necessarily think that he would have considered the war and the revolution to be divisible, or that the revolution should be deferred. After all, the lines "To-day the expending of powers/on the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting" define political work as part of the present struggle. Furthermore, Orwell does not, in the notorious passage in "Inside the Whale," object to Auden on the grounds that Jenkins\'s theory would lead us to expect. He quotes two stanzas:

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

Now Orwell travesties the second stanza. He says that it

is intended as a sort of tabloid picture of a day in the life of a "good party man." In the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes\' interlude to stifle "bourgeois" remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying.

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Of course it is Orwell who has inserted the "good party man," the political murders, the bourgeois remorse, the luncheon, and the evening chalking walls. All this by way of inducing outrage, softening the reader up for what follows:

But notice the phrase "necessary murder." It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men—I don\'t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means—the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don\'t advertise their callousness, and they don\'t speak of it as murder; it is "liquidation," "elimination" or some other soothing phrase. Mr. Auden\'s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don\'t even know that fire is hot.[4]
Auden, it seems clear to me, had used the word "murder" as an intensifier, not in any casual sense: to kill, even in defense of the Spanish Republic, is murder, and we have to accept this. But the noncombatant pansy poet had injured the deepest vanity of Orwell, the man of action, the veteran of the colonial police, who had fought with the POUM and who knew that killing on the battlefield and murder were two quite different things. So, we may ask, after Orwell\'s strident assertion of his credentials, what does distinguish the dead on the battlefield from the bodies of the murdered? "The terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells"—what essential difference is there here? One might sympathize with Orwell if he had addressed what was really upsetting him—that Auden had inadvertently accused him of being a murderer. Orwell did have a clear sense of the distinction to be made between the different kinds of killing going on in Spain, and he made it, not in his attack on Auden, but in the classic Homage to Catalonia.

Auden himself, who thought Orwell\'s attack "densely unjust," wrote to Monroe K. Spears in 1963:

I was not excusing totalitarian crimes but only trying to say what, surely, every decent person thinks if he finds himself unable to adopt the absolute pacifist position. (1) To kill another human being is always murder and should never be called anything else. (2) In a war, the members of two rival groups try to murder their opponents. (3) If there is such a thing as a just war, then murder can be necessary for the sake of justice.
Point one in this argument is evidently wrong if we accept that there is such a thing as a legal definition of murder, but the fact remains that Auden was emphasizing, rather than overlooking, the nastiness of war, and he was not condoning political liquidations.


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It is true that there were writers involved with Spain and the Communist Party who, so far from shying away from the murder side of things (the liquidations on the Republican side), considered it a mark of their seriousness that they accepted that "you can\'t make an omelet without breaking eggs." A good example of this type of character is Hemingway, who derided John Dos Passos for coming to Spain in the Civil War and trying to find out what had happened to his friend José Robles. The Popular Front officials, who wanted to keep him in line, were trying to protect Dos Passos from the news that Robles had been executed. Hemingway, on learning of Robles\'s execution, decided that he must, a priori, have been a spy. He not only told Dos Passos the news, at a festive lunch to honor the XVth International Brigade. He also told his friend that Robles had got what he deserved. Dos Passos refused to believe that Robles had been guilty of treason.

Hemingway was so keen to prove himself the kind of guy who knew that you couldn\'t make an omelet without breaking eggs that he denounced Dos Passos, first in a public meeting in New York, later in an article called "Treachery in Aragon," and subsequently in one called "Fresh Air on an Inside Story" in which an absurd figure, a famous American writer, decides there is terror in Madrid.

"You can\'t deny there is a terror," said this expert. "Everywhere you can see evidences of it."
"I thought you said you hadn\'t seen any evidences."
"They are everywhere," said the great man.
I then told him that there were half a dozen of us newspaper men who were living and writing in Madrid whose business it was, if there was a terror, to discover it and report it. That I had friends in the Seguridad that I had known from the old days and could trust, and that I knew three people had been shot for espionage that month. I had been invited to witness an execution but had been away at the front and had waited four weeks for there to be another. That people had been shot during the early days of the rebellion by the so-called "uncontrollables" but that for months Madrid had been as safe and well policed and free from any terror as any capital in Europe. Any people shot or taken for rides were turned in at the morgue and he could check for himself as all journalists had done.

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This awful insiderism (which is not as far as it should be from Orwell\'s "Don\'t talk to me about murder, I know more about murder than you do"), this "Don\'t be a bourgeois liberal wimp and ask why your worthless traitor friend has disappeared," this boasting of reliable friends in the secret police, all this is very far from Auden\'s spirit. Auden went to Spain and wrote a short descriptive article for the New Statesman. He worked for a while, perhaps, in radio propaganda. He visited the Aragon front. He seems to have been shocked rigid by some experiences, although no one appears to have found out what these were.[5] He wrote "Spain," which was sold to raise money for medical aid. After Orwell\'s attack on him, he tried to change the offending lines:

Today the inevitable increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder….

But it was no good in the long run, for he began to see the ending of the poem as grotesquely immoral. So he dropped it and suppressed it. And at the same time he tried to suppress in himself the urge to create a stirring rhetoric which would move men or classes to action. It is no exaggeration to say that the horror he felt at his own powers—or his own potential—was, though in differing degree, the same kind of horror with which he observed the power of Hitler. From this horror proceeded much that his admirers observed with dismay: the self-deflation, the retreat from activism, the putting of a distance between himself and his followers, the return to religion.

Imagine someone who has grown up a great admirer of Blake. He or she leaves the university, gets married, has a baby. One day the babysitter goes mad and kills the baby. A few months later, the grieving parent happens to pick up a copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and reads the line: "Sooner murder an infant in its cra-dle than nurse unacted desires." One would think: I used to like this, as a thought expressed with a curious extremism; now I can hardly look at the page.

And Blake himself, having once been such an oddity that he seemed beyond normal reproach, would suddenly lose the benefit of the doubt. Suddenly one would ask—if one turned to him at all—exactly what manner of meaning any one of his strange pronouncements was supposed to have, and one would be soon impatient. For instance, under the maxim I have quoted comes the next: "Where man is not, nature is barren." Once it might have seemed to possess a mysterious beauty—a beauty often possessed by statements that are, strictly speaking, untrue. But now one would have lost patience with that sort of untruth, and with one\'s former self, as one who used to delight in it.

You have to imagine Auden, at the end of the Thirties, reading his own works in rather the same spirit as our imaginary parent reading Blake. Once, in his invented world, Auden could, at a stroke of the pen, have a spy taken out and shot. Now he has passed through a world where spies are indeed taken out and shot, and where revolutionary rhetoric, such as he had once delighted in, had proved deadly. So he reads his own works, and those of his more ambiguous heroes, with wariness and impatience. He takes Lawrence\'s dictum: "Anger is sometimes just, justice is never just." It is, he says, "admirable advice to lovers, [but] applied politically can only mean: \'Beat up those who disagree with you."\' He says:

Writers who try, like D.H. Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent, to construct political systems of their own, invariably make fools of themselves because they construct them in terms of their own experience, and treat the modern State as if it were a tiny parish and politics as if it were an affair of personal relations, whereas modern politics is almost exclusively concerned with relations that are impersonal.

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"Lawrence, Blake and Homer Lane"—of the old trinity it was Blake who lasted longest with Auden, and whose manner he was closely imitating in "The Prolific and the Devourer," the prose work he wrote, but never published, in 1939. For instance, the thought quoted earlier—"He who undertakes anything, thinking he is doing it out of a sense of duty, is deceiving himself and will ruin everything he touches"—comes in the context of a discussion of the writer\'s relation to politics:

Crisis. Civilisation is in danger. Artists of the world unite. Ivory Tower. Escapist. Ostrich.
Yes, the Crisis is serious enough, but we shall never master it, if we rush blindly hither and thither in blind obedience to frantic cries of panic….
You cannot give unless you also receive. What is it that you hope to receive from politics? excitement? experience? Be honest.
The artist qua artist is no reformer. Slums, war, disease are part of his material, and as such he loves them. The writers who, like Hemingway and Malraux, really profited as writers from the Spanish Civil War, and were perhaps really some practical use as well, had the time of their lives there.
The voice of the Tempter: "Unless you take part in the class struggle, you cannot become a major writer."
And it is in "The Prolific and the Devourer" that we find, placed in apposition: "The Dictator who says \'My People\': the Writer who says \'My Public."\' And: "If the criterion of art were its power to incite to action, Goebbels would be one of the greatest artists of all time."

The nights, the railway-arches, the bad sky,
His horrible companions did not know it;
But in that child the rhetorician\'s lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.

That was Auden on Rimbaud, at the end of 1938. The child becomes a poet when the rhetorician\'s lie bursts. But what if the rhetorician is the poet himself? "Crisis. Civilisation is in danger. Artists of the world unite. Ivory Tower. Escapist. Ostrich." It has been pointed out that the wording is reminiscent of a letter composed by Nancy Cunard in 1937, requesting contributions for a book, Authors Take Sides on Spain. Auden may well have allowed his signature to be appended before he saw the text, which begins:

SPAIN

The Question.

Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

It is clear to many of us throughout the whole w