Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at.
Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and it’s seldom explicitly referenced in the verse. But in Jenkins’s version he’s a war poet. The Great War, Jenkins argues, is
most profoundly a landscape, a history and an atmosphere in the poems that made Auden famous at the end of the 1920s and the start of the 1930s… As in a dream, the story of the war’s violence is there in the bleak, empty northern spaces described in Auden’s early poems, in the roll-calls of the names of obscure hills and villages, in the deserted moors filled, like the recent battlefields, with tunnels, holes and shattered machinery…
With that came a fragile and ambivalent anxiety about what it meant to be English in the interwar world, one Auden explored through landscape, the idea of the island, and an ongoing negotiation with the relationship between the individual and the collective: local affinities, friendship groups, tribes. In this, Auden the 1930s leftie, as we tend to think of him, is a far more conservative figure; and sometimes more than that. He may at one point have called The Orators ‘a stage in my conversion to communism’; at another he called it ‘a catharsis of the author’s personal fascism’.
Well, he is large. He contains multitudes. So did his early life. There’s the religiose and frustrated mother; the father overseas for years; the stint at a hated boarding school; the fascination for mines and pitworks; the early sense of his homosexuality (about which he had ‘a bad conscience’); a rather lonely undergraduate career at Oxford (where he was excluded from the smart set around Maurice Bowra); a brief engagement to a woman (that was never likely to work out) and then a career of writing and teaching. But in between: passionate literary friendships, a chaotic and sybaritic stint in Berlin, the turn at the GPO Film Unit which gave us ‘The Night Mail’, a yikes-making anal fistula, and eventually an actual mariage blanc to Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, who was seeking a way out of Germany as the Nazis took power.
Auden is large. He contains multitudes. So did his early life
There is, too, candid detail on something that wasn’t, I think, unknown to scholars but hasn’t had as much of an airing as you’d expect. Were this book to be serialised in one of the less high-minded papers the headline might be something like ‘Paedo poet groomed 13-year-old’. While teaching at the Downs School in 1933, Auden ‘fell in love’ with one of his pupils, Michael Yates (who would be the addressee of ‘Lullaby’). Auden was 26. Yates was 13. ‘Unless further evidence emerges,’ Jenkins writes, ‘no one can ever say with certainty when Auden and Yates began to have sex with each other’, but Jenkins’s best guess is that it was shortly after Yates turned 15. Neither ever expressed regret about it, but autres temps, autres moeurs doesn’t completely cover it.
But he’s right to look steadily at how the poetry grew out of the life, however we may judge the latter, and how Auden, supposedly the great poet of ideas, was a poet of feelings first. (Though as any reader of Auden knows, the ‘abstract insight’ and ‘the hermit’s carnal ecstasy’ go together.)
Jenkins asks us to see Auden’s ideas and influences as being drawn not from some Platonic realm or intellectual Kwik-E-Mart but growing from the soil of his chance affections and friendships. He comes to Holderlin through Stephen Spender; the Norse myths through his father; and it’s through his doctor father, too, that Auden comes to psychoanalysis – not in its Viennese form but, initially, through the Englishman W.H.R. Rivers. You can see the young poet cycling furiously through influences: trying on and trying out. Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Wilfred Owen, (briefly and to no great advantage) high modernist Eliot, Anglo-Saxon verse, the visual vocabulary of film.
Jenkins tweaks the usual narrative, which puts the pivot of Auden’s early career as his departure for the States in 1939. He sees the 1936 publication of Auden’s second full collection, Look, Stranger!, as marking the hinge. Auden has, by this stage, already renounced what Jenkins sees as the project of his career to date; which is, essentially, to be a distinctively English national poet. The muse had left the country before the flesh and blood poet did.
I should say that this handsome trade book, though accessibly written, is a little in the academic direction. Early Auden is tricky and riddling and contains few of the greatest hits. Paid on Both Sides and The Orators are easier to admire than enjoy. The astounding formal virtuosity is there from the get-go, as is the unfailing instinct for the glinting phrase. But so, too, is the ambitious battiness – Jenkins fastidiously traces schemes of ideas crammed in from forgotten theorists such as Rivers, John Layard, Trigant Burrow, Gerald Heard and H.J. Massingham – and the disconcerting double style. Auden swerves, often within the same poem, between windy vatic abstractions or personifications, and crunchy details of the here and now: real people and places, dates, recent inventions, scientific or medical terms of art (Jenkins quotes Edward Mendelson calling this Auden’s ‘up-to-date’ mode).
Jenkins is a hugely able guide through the thickets; as good a reader of Auden, I’d say, as Hugh Kenner was of Eliot. He’s alert to phrasal echoes of everyone from Langland to Hopkins, clocks where this or that obscure stanza form was used a century or three earlier, and traces with extraordinary care the hidden architectures of the poems – the networks of sound or image or grammatical consonance that hold them together. Almost nothing gets by him; though sometimes he seems to miss when Auden (whom in the opening pages he casts as Caliban and in the closing pages as Prospero) is being puckish.
It’s a joy (and you can read it in his own enthusiasm) when Jenkins applies that close reading to the poems where Auden really starts to hit his stride; the title poem of Look, Stranger!, for instance, or ‘Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys’, or ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’. I hope this is the first book in a sequence. I would love to see Jenkins go to town on the extraordinary poems that, as he bids farewell to his subject, still lie in the future.
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