Six Poets (14 page)

Auden is good at casting a spell, hinting at horrors just around the corner, and he uses Hitchcock's technique of investing the ordinary and domestic with nightmare and suspense. Some of it manages to be prophetic. If Auden is a great poet, this ability to prophesy is one constituent of his greatness.

I shouldn't dance.

We're afraid in that case you'll have a fall;

We've been watching you over the garden wall

For hours

The sky is darkening like a stain;

Something is going to fall like rain,

And it won't be flowers.

Nobody in the thirties was quite sure what war would be like, whether there would be gas, for instance, or aerial bombardment. There's a stock and rather a silly question: ‘Why was there no poetry written in the Second World War?' One answer is that there was, but it was written in the ten years before the war started.

Auden was a landscape poet, though of a rather particular kind. The son of a doctor, he was born in York in 1907 but brought up in Solihull in the heart of the industrial Midlands. Not the landscape of conventional poetic inspiration but, for Auden, magical:

But let me say before it has to go,

It's the most lovely country that I know;

Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on

The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

Long, long ago, when I was only four,

Going towards my grandmother, the line

Passed through a coal-field. From the corridor

I watched it pass with envy, thought ‘How fine!

Oh how I wish that situation mine.'

Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,

That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.

At Oxford, he was already writing and publishing poetry. To his contemporaries, he was a magnetic figure, partly because he seemed to have all the answers, a characteristic that his later self came to deplore, though he remained a bit of an intellectual bully all his life. As a man, he was insecure and unhappy and doesn't seem to have fallen in love until he went to America in 1939, but this didn't stop him prescribing for the love affairs of his friends.

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard says that there are two ways: one is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another suffers. Auden was to play both roles in his time; but when he was an undergraduate, he was undoubtedly a professor.

A shilling life will give you all the facts:

How Father beat him, how he ran away,

What were the struggles of his youth, what acts

Made him the greatest figure of his day:

Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,

Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:

Some of the last researchers even write

Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honours on, he sighed for one

Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;

Did little jobs about the house with skill

And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still

Or potter round the garden; answered some

Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

Auden taught at various prep schools in the early thirties, and one of the criticisms that contemporaries made of his poetry was that his view of the world was dictated by his unhappy experiences at school. ‘The best reason I have for opposing Fascism', he said, ‘is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.' Not a statement that would commend itself to someone actually having to live in a Fascist state, and the kind of remark that made him blush once he got away from England in 1939. ‘All the verse I wrote,' Auden said later,

all the positions I took in the thirties didn't save a single Jew. These writings, these attitudes only help oneself. They merely make people who think like one admire and like one, which is rather embarrassing.

Which is true, but which says nothing about the poetry, and embarrassing though the older Auden found his younger self, the poetry of that younger self survives the embarrassment.

The turning point in Auden's life came, or is supposed to have come, when he and Isherwood went to the United States at the start of 1939 and stayed there, both eventually becoming American citizens. Silly people at the time took this to be cowardice, which it wasn't, and even people who admired him thought Auden's poetry was never as good afterwards. But this wasn't true either.

Why Auden left England has been much discussed. Auden liked feeling at home, but he didn't like feeling at home where
he felt at home. England was too cosy. He would never grow up there, he thought. He would always be the
enfant terrible
, the prisoner of his public and court poet to the Left. At least this is how Auden came to see it.

But it wasn't quite like that either. All that had happened was that he had gone to America in 1939, seemingly with no plans to stay, and, for the first time in his life, he had fallen in love – with Chester Kallman, with whom he was to live happily and unhappily for the rest of his life. It just happened that change in private places went with change in public places, love and war coinciding: Auden really was just an early ‘GI bride'. Somebody who cared more about what people thought would have come back when war started, but Auden – and it was one of the winning characteristics in a personality that was not always attractive – didn't care tuppence what people thought.

As it turned out, going to America turned out to be a deliverance, the kind of escape an established writer often craves, a way of eluding his public, of not having to go on writing in the same way, of not having to imitate himself. ‘By the time you have perfected a style of writing', said George Orwell, ‘you have always outgrown it.' ‘You spend twenty-five years learning to be yourself,' said Auden, ‘and then you find you must now start learning not to be yourself' – and it took him a while. This next poem Auden called a ‘hangover from home'. He wrote it in America, but one of the reasons he left England, he said, was to stop writing poetry like this.

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,