The New Criterion

Auden biography has now reached a sort of tertiary stage. First came the polite reminiscences; then, tell-all chronicles such as Humphrey Carpenter’s. Now, with Auden by Richard Davenport-Hines, we get an attempt to find figures in the stained, messy carpet of the life. The events of the writer’s life we can take as read (there is little new or newly handled here): he was born in 1907, the youngest of three sons of a kindly Yorkshire doctor and a snobbish, fragile mother; Oxford in 1925; a year in sexy Berlin; a spell of schoolteaching; Spain; Iceland with Louis MacNeice; China with Christopher Isherwood; to America with Isherwood in 1939 on the eve of war; settling in New York with Chester Kallman; shuttling back and forth in the postwar years from St. Mark’s Place to Ischia to Oxford to Austria, where he died in 1973. Ideas, feelings, and words must, of course, flesh out such a skeleton. It must be said that Auden’s ideas ran with fashion: first, Freud in the 1920s and 1930s; then, later, God. Quacks like Emile Coué, Homer Lane, Gerald Heard, and Marx were taken at points seriously. But poets, it will be said, notoriously whore after silly notions, and Auden did at last settle down into a philosophy of citified, cultivated comfiness. None of his systems, save perhaps the last, really offered a safe haven for his homosexuality, which therefore, while privately flaunting, in his published writings he disguised or generalized.

As if to compensate for the poet’s coded reticences, Davenport-Hines sees his homosexuality as central, is touchy and defensive about it, and labels virtually any criticism of Auden’s writing as homophobic. In his prewar heyday, when he was routinely and universally acclaimed as Eliot’s heir and perhaps superior, Auden’s weightiest critics were F. R. Leavis and George Orwell. Leavis thought Auden an arrested schoolboy and an artistic nullity: Davenport-Hines sees this view as exemplifying “the psychoanalytical derogation of homosexuality as an arrested development and the corresponding over-valuation of the ethical power of family life.” Leavis, notoriously, had a wife and children—enough, apparently, to excite this biographer’s suspicion that he was criticizing Auden from a parti pris. As for Orwell—well, Orwell, of course, lambasted the glib terrorist-chic of Auden’s “Spain 1937” (“To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,/ The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder”) as a “brand of immoralism … only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” That this was the legitimate reading of Auden’s words was tacitly admitted by the poet’s later squirming revisions of them. There may, too, have been a hint in Orwell at Auden’s having scampered off to safety from the Blitz. (This biographer seems, by the way, unaware of Evelyn Waugh’s savage caricature of Auden as the defecting poetaster Parsnip in Put Out More Flags, although he does say that to have criticized Auden for his expatriation was as wicked as to have criticized Oscar Wilde for his incarceration.) But for Davenport-Hines it’s just homophobia pure and simple; he refers to Orwell’s “sexual rubbishing” and “Etonian bullying” of poor Auden. But Orwell the gay-basher is only the half of it for Davenport-Hines. He cites, at second hand, minor litterateur Rayner Heppenstall’s delusion that Orwell had had, years back, a violent crush on him, Heppenstall. So! Now we know why Orwell had it in for the sainted Auden: he was not just a gay-basher but a conflicted closet gay.

And this is not an isolated performance: Davenport-Hines’s compulsive basher-sniffing is risible. It’s his King Charles’s head— and he wields it with the clumsy shrillness of yesteryear’s Marxists exposing the bourgeois roots of such-and-such a writer. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Davenport-Hines is more Catholic on this matter than his pope: Auden, for example, once said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that it is wrong to be queer.” And Auden, a fastidious writer, would have also parted company with Davenport-Hines in the matter of correct English; he would have been incapable of writing a phrase like “the specialists whom he believed were fragmenting human vision.” On the poetry itself Davenport-Hines does little but strew epithets: “September 1, 1939” is “neither contemptible nor insignificant”; “The Shield of Achilles” is “great”; “At the Grave of Henry James” is “superb”; about “In Praise of Limestone” we hear, otiosely, that “the beauty in flaws, and the necessity of faults, are the subject.” Davenport-Hines shows, in fact, no ability to discuss poetry at all; he is, for instance, silent about Auden’s proud technical virtuosity, his habile manipulation of meter, stanza, and rhyme. This, then, is a tendentious and incompetent book, unworthy of its subject, whatever one thinks of him.

And what to think of him? To Hugh Kenner, he is a light versifier, marginal to modern poetry; for Edward Mendelson, his excellent editor, he is “the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century.” Mendelson sees Auden as having trumped the modernists at their own game, saying that

he welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernist predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. All of this Auden rejected. His continuing subject was the task of the present moment: erotic and political tasks in his early poems, ethical and religious ones later.

This eloquent assessment has, I fear, the disadvantage of being totally and demonstrably untrue. The four poets cited as hewing to a grand style were actually, in very different ways, radical innovators in diction, music, and content. Think just of the demotic sounds in fierce Yeats, urgent Lawrence, angry Pound, tormented Eliot. By contrast, Auden’s lifelong diction was polite, generalizing, urbane, wry, composed.

As for the notion that Auden introduced the twentieth century into verse, could that survive the most cursory glance at, say, “Easter 1916” or “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” or “The Waste Land”? And as for hankering after illusory Edens, was it not Auden’s mind and language that were steeped in the topoi and symbolic personalities of classical literature? And although Auden presents thoughts in his verse, he does not think--actually wrestle with concepts—in verse, as do great modern poets like Stevens and Rilke, both of whom put standard verse lengths to radical purposes. Auden deals out commonplaces—or faux commonplaces. He seems less a modernist—any kind of modernist—than an Augustan, and a minor Augustan at that; he might be a graver Gay. But Auden’s much-dreamed-of City is never anything as specific as Gay’s London: it stays always the Idea of a City, although Auden was in other ways a very anti-Platonic Platonist.

Like a good Augustan, Auden naturally thought in categories and generalities. He was an inveterate binary taxonomist: artists are either placid Alices or touchy Mabels; citizens are either hedonist Arcadians or coercive Utopians (“Vespers”); students are either playful followers of Hermes or careerist devotees of Apollo (“Under Which Lyre”); intemperate passion becomes either Tristan-Isolde Lesbianism or serial Don Giovanni cruising. His pen is a fountain of bifurcations, trifurcations, lists and diagrams; his writing sports an Alexandrian learning and a genially attractive wisdom. What he is not is a major poet; his sort of mind ranges freest and liveliest and most unbuttoned in prose. Even his best verse has the mellowly, laxly discursive, thesis-antithesis, meac n-deac verve of a certain kind of expository prose. His best poetic achievements involve the use for grim irony of normally light meters: trimeters like those of “September 1, 1939” or octosyllabics like those of “The Fall of Rome.”

I would give his poetic corpus for The Dyer’s Hand, that inexhaustibly suggestive volume of essays. Open anywhere and he’s delightfully at it: Falstaff and Don Quixote as antithetical types; the genius versus the apostle as Ibsenian heroes. In the essay “The Guilty Vicarage,” he memorably anatomizes the detective story: “There are three classes of crime… . For suspects the five principal causes of guilt are… .” I’ll conclude with this from The Dyer’s Hand, so typical in its half-satisfying, half-irritating mixture of profound and superficial, frivolous and serious: “One can conceive of Heaven having a Telephone Directory, but it would have to be gigantic, for it would include the Proper Name and address of every electron in the Universe. But Hell could not have one, for in Hell, as in prison and the army, its inhabitants are identified not by name but by number. They do not have numbers, they are numbers.” There are moments when Auden’s ease works and he does indeed seem to achieve what may be thought to have been his goal of combining Johnsonian generalizing grandeur with Mozartian lightness. Or, to put it in another way that would not displease him, he marries the taxonomic frenzy of Thomas Aquinas to the whimsical logic of Lewis Carroll.

A great poet? No. But a tonic presence in the meadows of letters—our century’s Peacock, perhaps. And he has a successor in the essay, someone whose prose strives with Russian intensity not to be intense but to be Audenesque: Joseph Brodsky.