The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume IV, 1956-1962
Edward Mendelson, Editor
Princeton University Press
982 pages, $65
POETS WRITING literary criticism do so to generate income, to communicate æsthetic values to the public, and to build an audience for their imaginative work. Would readers of the 1950’s and 60’s have paid much attention to Randall Jarrell the poet if he hadn’t been a sharp-witted and engaging critic? Probably not. As for W.H. Auden, I can offer some personal testimony from nearly four decades ago. I didn’t get very far with reading Auden’s poetry until by chance I stumbled on The Dyer’s Hand (1962), a collection of his essays and lectures. Massively intelligent and lucidly written, they convinced me to spend more time with his poetry. After acquiring some familiarity with it, I returned to the prose and saw how it reflected themes and approaches in his poems. Crisscrossing between the two genres illuminated both, which, as I soon saw, co-existed in a symbiotic relationship, and not only at the æsthetic level, but also at a practical level.
With his Oxford degree as a credential, Auden had done some primary and secondary school teaching early on, but after the 1940’s he never again took salaried work. Commissions for opera librettos and resulting royalties, public lectures, and critical pieces provided him with the income needed to support his poetry habit. He turned out vast amounts of copy, and you can’t help wondering if he’d have managed to write so much without the amphetamines he took every morning throughout this period.
For several years now, Princeton University Press has been engaged in editing the complete works of Auden, with three hefty earlier volumes already in print (for the most part prose, but including his plays and opera librettos). The current volume comprises Auden’s critical writing during the years 1956 to 1962, a period that almost exactly coincides with his appointment to the Oxford Chair of Poetry. Because job responsibilities included giving a series of lectures on literary topics to the university audience, candidates were expected to possess some critical ability. Auden had published one earlier book-length critical work, The Enchafèd Flood (1950), and a large number of reviews and essays. This dossier, added to his international fame as a poet, qualified him to be considered. Auden’s biographers tell that the news of his election to the chair threw him into a state of anxiety, and it’s interesting to consider the cause. First, his and Christopher Isherwood’s move from the UK to the USA in 1939 (both were eventually naturalized as American citizens) had provoked a national uproar in the mother country. The move was vilified as an unpatriotic abandonment of their country in a moment of dire crisis. Inferences about the two men’s sexuality also came into the picture, and there was an attempt to connect gay sexuality with cowardice. It seems no one stopped to reflect that the decision to be known as gay in that era required a lot of courage, not only because of social animosity towards gay people but also because of the criminal charges regularly brought against gay men in that era. (Lesbian sex was never made a crime in the UK.) Almost overnight, the British public stopped regarding Auden and Isherwood as the standard-bearers of a new literary generation and instead despised them as deserters with a prominent yellow streak. Auden ignored these attacks and continued to write as industriously as ever, but his post-1939 work was held up for scorn in Britain, and the decline was ascribed to harmful American influences. To this day, most British readers prefer the English Auden to the American. Auden would naturally have had qualms about returning to live, even for a short time, in the country where so many scarifying things had been said about him. Besides that, he was intimidated by the Oxford dons who were to be his colleagues. As an undergraduate at Christ Church College, he had received only a third-class degree and feared that his unscholarly efforts at criticism would be sneered at when he gave his opening address to the customary assembly of black-gowned PhDs. But the lecture was well received, and he seems to have enjoyed the esteem of Oxford’s intellectual elite during his tenure. This fact partly explains why he decided, after his five-year term ended, to collect his lectures (adding to them other reviews and essays) in order to make up the work later published as The Dyer’s Hand. On the basis of that book by itself, I can give this collection a strong recommendation, even though it takes up only 380 of the book’s 982 pages. Meanwhile, the balance of Volume IV is devoted to prose works that before now only Auden specialists were aware of, in particular Edward Mendelson, who edited this volume and provided its perceptive preface. Characterizing Auden’s work of the late 1950’s, Mendelson says that his “central theme during these years was the troubled relations in literature, language, and society between the Poet and the Historian,” a tandem Auden himself had earlier characterized as being in “uneasy tension.” Is poetry a timeless art, its content only myth, graceful emotion, and musical form; or is it a sibling of the newspaper and scientific discovery, an unsentimental forum for dealing with problems that arise in the real world? Is it mainly a song or a diagnosis? This is the question that Auden approached in dozens of guises during this period, the record of his conclusions parceled out in the many reviews and essays he published at the time. Readers already familiar with Auden will know that he came down (gently) in favor of “diagnosis,” without, even so, abandoning his admiration for a poetry musically disengaged from contemporary history. Meanwhile, the number and variety of his prose writings during this period is impressive. He seldom touches on visual art, but his reflections on literature and music are very far from being amateur critical efforts. It doesn’t come as a surprise to see him returning again and again to Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, but I hadn’t expected a lively interest in writers like D. H. Lawrence, Nathanael West, or Cesare Pavese, all of whom receive sympathetic treatment. At the level of attitude and tone, Auden is commendable in that, even when he dislikes some aspect of the author being discussed, he never sneers. A respectful detachment is always maintained, both toward his subjects and us readers, whom Auden seems to regard as equals, even though we may not have read as many books as he, and not pondered that smaller number as deeply. One occasional piece, titled “The Poet as Professor,” was written when Auden was about to leave his five-year post at Oxford. He remarked, “Oxford should feel very proud of herself for having anything so comically absurd as a Chair of Poetry.” Nevertheless, he stands at the lectern and sketches out a plan for a “Bardic College,” with a series of requirements that include learning at least one ancient language, like Greek or Hebrew; at least two modern languages besides English; instruction in prosody, rhetoric, and comparative philology; the same for the natural sciences, archæology and mythology; and exercises like the writing of pastiches and parodies of existing authors. Outside the library or studio, the novice should have a garden, raise and care for a domestic animal, and learn how to cook. After reading this many years ago, I attempted to rise to the challenge and managed about eighty percent, if tending to a partner substitutes for the animal husbandry he recommended. Strangely enough, his curriculum doesn’t mention the study of history or following the news; but I already did that on my own, and it’s hard to imagine any contemporary poet not doing the same. A fact unearthed by biographers is that Auden, though insisting on good food, was himself a middling-to-poor cook. He seems to have relied on his life partner, Chester Kallman, for that service. So perhaps we can regard his curriculum for the bardic degree as at least in part fanciful. Auden is more systematic in treating his subjects than we might expect from a poet. He likes to divide and conquer his topic while introducing crucial distinctions, much in the way students used to be required to produce a logical “outline” before actually writing a term paper. Auden’s default mode of logical analysis can be daunting for the reader who sees the arts in general, and poetry in particular, as a less than orderly process. So it comes as a relief when in some passages he admits that he’s preaching to himself, setting up a list of standards that he and not necessarily anyone else should follow. Because of his enormous verbal facility, it was apparently very easy for Auden to mimic other poets’ preoccupations and voices. His strictures about style and content were designed to keep him on the right path in order to write the poems he consciously believed he should write. Keats’s theory about the Chameleon Poet, available to all sorts of feelings and artistic impulses, Auden rejects because in his view this turns poetry into forgery. Fine, but for much of its history, poetry has been what Shakespeare called “feigning.” The insistence on utter sincerity and authenticity as an æsthetic virtue was moved into the foreground by the Romantic movement, just as it promoted individual identity and consciousness as the subject for art. It isn’t usual to class Auden as a Romantic poet, yet that is probably the most accurate description of him, even though few poets have known the literary classics as well as he did. The self he labored to present to the world was one that knew Western civilization extremely well—in fact, a self only too ready to quote tags from its literary monuments in Latin, Italian, French, and German, without bothering to translate. Even so, I should report that Auden, though always ready to plunge into the stream of learned and serious discourse, is easily available to the spirit of play and also enjoyed splashing about for fun just as much as he liked the critical equivalent of swimming laps. This susceptibility is evident in the following metaphoric passage that opens the essay “Hic et Ille,” collected in The Dyer’s Hand. Its subject is the “mirroring” of ourselves that we all engage in throughout our lives: A parlor game for a wet afternoon—imagining the mirrors of one’s friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace. The temptation to play this game is too strong to resist. If I try to imagine Auden’s “mirror,” what I come up with is neither Narcissus’ pool out in the wild nor a smart little vanity in an Art Deco bedroom, but instead a pair of tall facing mirrors of the kind you used to see in old townhouses. They reflect the viewer’s image, though always smaller, ad infinitum in two directions—which might also be figured as the past and the future, with the Romantic-Classical poet as the pivot point between both. Alfred Corn is the author of nine books of poems, a novel, and two volumes of criticism. This past spring his play Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery
