Auden – Truth Out of Time

‘One Sunday afternoon in March 1922, a school friend casually asked me if I wrote poetry. I, who had never written a line or even read one with pleasure, decided at that moment that poetry was my vocation.’ Just like that. And therein lies the mystery of Auden. The critic and novelist John Bayley writes: ‘That he turned out to be a brilliant poet . . . does not alter the arbitrariness of his decision to become one.’ Art and will conjoined; fame and success followed. Poems, published in 1930 by Faber and Faber (T. S. Eliot’s initial rejection had been a great disappointment), made his name and almost immediately. Edward Mendelson in his introduction to The Collected Poems points out that, in the history of English literature, only Byron became famous more quickly. Two further collections, The Orators (1932) and Look Stranger!, led to two Gold Medals for Poetry, one from the Queen, one from the King – George VI. During a lifetime as a poet, playwright, essayist and librettist, W. H. Auden garnered further awards and honours on both sides of the Atlantic. In America he won the Gold Medal for Poetry, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

‘Poetry’, he once wrote, is ‘memorable speech’. His poems contain some of the most succinct, elegant and unforgettable lines in literature. His psychological and philosophical insights into the workings of time, the nature of love, of isolation, the ethical choices of the state and the individual, sear themselves into our consciousness. A poetic inquisitor, he drills deep in ‘the deserts of the heart’. His poems throw down a moral challenge – can we win ‘Truth out of Time’? Even in the gladiatorial arena of love and sex, an arena in human life in which self-deception often rules, he remains clear-sighted. His love for Chester Kallman, ‘the wrong blond’ (so named because Auden, who was expecting another male guest when Chester turned up at his hotel room, exclaimed, ‘But it’s the wrong blond!’), lasted on its own terms, mostly Chester’s, for the rest of his life. ‘The triple situation of being sexually jealous like a wife, anxious like a nanny, and competitive like a brother, is not easy for my kind of temperament. Still, it is my bed and I must lie on it.’ He knew the cost when he wrote ‘If equal affection cannot be/Let the more loving one be me’.

Auden, like Kipling, had a purpose. ‘In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant, and disintoxicate.’ And yet he himself as Edward Mendelson points out had been ‘enchanted’. One night in 1933, ‘something happened’: his ‘Vision of Agape’, captured in a Dali-like image, in the poem ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’. Of this seminal experience Auden wrote, ‘I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly – because, thanks to the power, I was doing it – what it means to love one’s neighbour as oneself.’

The disenchanter as an ecstatic points less to fierce internal conflict than to what John Bayley describes in his essay ‘The Flight of the Enchanter’ as a ‘dualism’ in Auden. Bayley notes that a certain vulnerability in the poet is cited in both Humphrey Carpenter’s biography and Edward Mendelson’s critical study as the possible cause. Charles Osborne in his biography notes the same lifelong trait. Evidently a favourite quotation of Auden’s was that of Montaigne: ‘We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’ Certainly it is impossible to miss the almost carefully balanced contradictions.

Born in York, in 1907, the youngest of three sons of a middle-class professional family, Wystan Hugh Auden became an Anglo-Catholic Communist and volunteered to fight in Spain in the civil war. Many believe he left the battlefield when England was itself at war (in fact, he left with Christopher Isherwood, in January 1939, before war was declared, volunteered in America and was turned down). He was a hugely disorganised man, one of the most sartorially challenged in literature, often wearing his socks on his head – yet his working hours were monastically disciplined. A homosexual, he married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, who had been declared an enemy of the Nazi state. Marriage to Auden provided her with a passport. Christopher Isherwood, who had been initially approached, had rejected the idea. Honourably, Auden stepped in. ‘Delighted,’ he said. He may have believed that his dominant faculties were ‘intellect and intuition’, his weak ones ‘feeling and sensation’, yet he wrote one of the loveliest
lyrics in the language: ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love,/Human on my faithless arm;’ An independent man, he nevertheless, even in his forties, feared loneliness. ‘I shall,’ he wrote, ‘probably die alone at midnight, in a hotel, to the great annoyance of the management.’ He did just that. In the Altenburgerhof, in Vienna, on 28 September 1973, Auden died of a heart attack, which he’d once told Charles Osborne was ‘the nicest way’ to go; ‘it’s cheap and it’s quick.’ He was definitely alone. The reaction of the management is not recorded.

The poetry of such a man should confuse. In fact, it has powerful simplicity. It is his pursuit of truth that gives his poetry its moral tone. His poems sound a warning bell. As they summon us to undo ‘the folded lie,/The romantic lie in the brain/Of the sensual man-in-the-street’ they also remind us: ‘We must love one another or die.’

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