Picnics in the sun

Introducing his excellent anthology of Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets (1967), Auden properly addressed a problem of definition: what is a “minor poet”? Or, to ask the same question the other way round: what makes a poet “major”? Some of his answers were not surprising – abundance, variety, technical accomplishment, a distinctive vision or voice – but the last was more complicated and took the form of a thought experiment. You have a major poet on your hands, he says, if “confronted by two poems of his of equal merit but written at different times, the reader can immediately say which was written first”. This was nothing to do with aesthetic merit: some of Auden’s favourites – William Barnes, A. E. Housman, George Herbert – didn’t pass the test, while others who clearly did, such as Shelley, he never much liked. A similar figure from among the moderns was W. B. Yeats, about whom Auden also had distinctly mixed feelings, and who was, in his terms, exemplarily “major”: Yeats’s career is defined by a sense of writing differently at different stages, old aesthetic idioms rejected in favour of others altogether closer to the bone. Yeats himself was always keen to advertise that things were moving purposefully on (“there’s more enterprise / In walking naked”) which inspired Auden to a joke that he deployed on more than one occasion: “Yeats had to spend the first half of his life as a minor poet in order, in the second half, to write major poetry about his past as a minor poet”.

It’s a good gag about the intense self-consciousness with which Yeats handled his imagination, but its slightly waspish spirit suggests that something sensitive to do with Auden’s notion of himself could be in play. Years later he would describe Yeats as “a symbol of my own devil of inauthenticity”, and Yeats often crops up in his thinking as a sort of unwelcome double. For, quite as much as Yeats, Auden came to be understood by the critics in terms of “changes of attitude and rhetoric”, as Randall Jarrell put it in a once famous essay, whether those changes were to be commended or lamented; and in this they were positively encouraged by the way Auden handled his own oeuvre. His mullings over minority in the Victorian anthology came just a year after his Collected Shorter Poems (1966), an exercise in self-canonization in which he had grouped his works in sections that portrayed a writing life clearly organized by succeeding epochs.

Around the same time, his public repudiation of some of the most celebrated earlier poems, such as “Spain” and “September 1, 1939” (“trash” he said he was “ashamed to have written”), confirmed the impression of a career with an unambiguous sense of what was then and what was now. Auden liked to emphasize the discontinuity: “of the kind of things I wrote between about 1932 and 1939, the things I like now I sort of wrote by accident”, he said in a television interview in 1961. He may have professed on one occasion the ambition to become “a minor Atlantic Goethe”, but he was nothing if not “major” by his own criteria – and anyway the ambition to become, of all things, a minor Goethe seems a hopelessly compromised project from the start.

Nicholas Jenkins’s compendious and erudite new book returns to this defining aspect of Auden’s achievement, offering a portrait of the poet that Auden stopped being when he became the poet that he became. The Island is not exactly a full-blown Life in the school of Richard Ellmann on Joyce or Roy Foster on Yeats, though there are lots of biographical details. Nor is it a comprehensive companion like John Fuller’s W. H. Auden: A commentary (1998), though it gives extremely full readings of a dozen or so works that Jenkins takes to be especially pivotal. Nor does it describe the entire intellectual history, like Edward Mendelson’s indispensable Early Auden, Later Auden: A criticalbiography (2017). It is, rather, the study of a cast of mind and of how that mind was shaped by a compelling idea of England: its concern, that is to say, is in the broadest sense political, but not in the left-wing terms that critics have usually adopted. The politics of the Auden whom Jenkins puts forward are much more tangled up with his personal life and preoccupations and neuroses than with points of ideology or doctrine. The upshot of the author’s enquiries is a revisionary account of a young writer exhibiting not a commitment to common ownership of the means of production or the dictatorship of the proletariat, but rather “a positively valued commitment to England and Englishness and […] a desire for national representativeness”. But facilitating though it might have been for his poetry, this “genteel but intense version of nationalism” would prove an ambiguous gift; and the larger story of the book is Auden coming to realize that Englishness had to be shaken off before he could become what he was destined to be: a major poet.

“What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?” asks the batty headmaster of his pupils in Auden’s modernistic mini epic The Orators: An English study (1932). The main cause for such ubiquitous sickness emerges here as the First World War, memories of which were pervasive in the literary culture of the 1920s in which Auden grew up, exposed as he was to a succession of memoirs and novels, as well as the poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and others. The experience was naturally generational, but Jenkins is interested in the particular form that the boy’s experience took, which was one of absence: Dr George Auden, his father, volunteered in September 1914, served at Gallipoli and subsequently worked at the Imperial School in Cairo, returning home only in 1919.

During this protracted period the young Auden developed a passionate enthusiasm for the world of lead mines and underground workings, a “private sacred world” that he often recollected and to which he would attribute the origins of his identity as poet: losing himself in imaginary mines was, says Jenkins, “like going into a private bunker and sheltering from the world”. It served simultaneously as a sort of connection with his missing parent: Christopher Isherwood remembered that the books about geology and mineral extraction over which Auden pored at their prep school were from Dr Auden’s library. Thinking about the mineworks was, in Jenkins’s words, “in effect part of his psyche’s war work”, a psychological burden that the boy shared with everyone else, but with his own nuance of damage. When Auden started writing poems in the early 1920s, his first models were those to be expected – W. H. Davies and Walter de la Mare – but he suddenly found his feet when he began writing about desolate northern landscapes and abandoned workings, influenced by Thomas Hardy and Thomas. Auden, who liked to engage in psychoanalytical interpretation, would probably have warmed to Jenkins’s suggestion that these poems were “a semiconscious way of writing about soldiers and war”, and about his missing father more particularly.

Auden’s student years at Oxford normally come across in the biographies as rather larky – the mouldering orange kept on the mantelpiece to symbolize the decline of the West and so on – but Jenkins casts them as a time of crisis. Auden’s bleak versions of postwar pastoral felt like the work of a raw provincial, he says, when compared to the modernist sophistication of the in-crowd that populated “the imposing purlieus of Christ Church” [sic]; but his attempts to ape T. S. Eliot were no good. The breakthrough, as every reader of Auden will agree, was the poem later entitled, with all due moment, “The Watershed”:

Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to the wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living.

Auden depicts a landscape of fissures and rifts, and, as Jenkins says well, manages to make them real geological features as well as “rifts in the poet’s own psyche, and the divisions within English culture”. The poem is the first achieved example of the mode that Auden will make his own over the next few years, the “condition of England” poem. Needless to say, things are not looking good for England, as Auden dramatized in his striking verse drama Paid on Both Sides: A charade (1930), a dark tale of feuding northerners: William Empson, reviewing it in Granta, thought it possessed “the sort of completeness that makes a work seem to define the attitude of a generation”, and Jenkins, who wants to save it from merely “psychological” readings, would agree. Of course Auden’s genius is to have it both ways, so that private anxiety and public disaster mysteriously become expressions of the same “gradual ruin spreading like a stain”. “The neurosis involves all society”, said the American psychiatrist Trigant Burrow, whom Auden much admired, which articulates succinctly the key premiss of much of his greatest poetry.

The scholarship on show in all this is remarkable and certainly hard-won: the 140 or so pages of densely printed endnotes are an education in themselves and imply untiring hours in the stacks. Only one detail struck me as doubtful and so perhaps worth mentioning. Jenkins says that “it seems to be the case” that Auden and his brother “had sex together” while holidaying in the Lake District in 1922, a startling claim that comes and goes without further comment. The note tells you that the source of this story is a letter written by John, the brother, to Auden’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter in 1980, now in Columbia University library. The letter is a response to an enquiry from Carpenter about a rumour he had picked up that Auden had only one testicle, a query which John Auden obviously found rather divertingly absurd. “I was never aware of the possibility of there being only one testicle”, he wrote in reply, “even when Wystan and I shared a double bed together in late adolescence in 1922.” He goes on: “However, in sexual play testicles are not necessarily fondled with numerical intent and in intimacy it is surely not impossible that inquisitive search could stop at the first encounter”.

John was rather squeamish about Carpenter going on too much about Auden’s sexual proclivities, so it seems extremely unlikely that he would come clean about such an episode in quite so casual a manner; but it seems to me tolerably clear that he is confessing nothing of the kind. Two teenage brothers sharing would be nothing to write home about; and the sentence about sexual play is John being (typically) droll about the odd sort of things people get up to in bed. There are some aspects of Auden’s sexual history that a modern reader may find troublesome, to be sure; but I don’t think same-sex sibling incest is one of them.

It is once Auden is out of Oxford that Jenkins’s book deviates most strikingly from those of other Auden commentators. The nine months he spent in Germany, depicted colourfully by Carpenter and Norman Page and others, were certainly a time of emotional and sexual adventure, but in this book they acquire a weighty allegorical duty. Berlin could have been “a place in which to enact a symbolic healing in the psyche of the war’s wounds”, says Jenkins; but that doesn’t happen: in some sense the war was still going on. Isherwood, whose father had been killed in the war, would remember the hope that in embracing his German boyfriend he might “fall in love with and possess the entire nation”, but Auden’s ambitions seem always to have been less heroically salvific. (And Isherwood is clearly regarding his younger self with a certain indulgent irony.) Unless you invoke unconscious motivations, then, it is difficult to judge the merits of Jenkins’s thesis that, hopes of spiritual renewal having failed in Germany, Auden returned to England full of “a desire for collective belonging, for national coherence, for a gathering of its resources into a unified whole”: what he called in a poem “a change of heart”, which is glossed by Jenkins as a “vaguely psychological program for renewal in a struggling country”.

The political mood music here is not palatable: Jenkins uses Wyndham Lewis’s book about Hitler (1931) to gloss the German aspiration toward social wholeness that Auden is supposed to have brought back to England with him, though he does not claim explicitly that Auden was inspired by it. He acknowledges that Lewis’s is indeed a “toxic ideal” and, understandably, dwells on a striking letter that Auden wrote to Stephen Spender in 1933, in which he gamely conceded “my tendency to National Socialism”. What did Auden mean? Insofar as the poems that Jenkins considers advocate any political position at all, they seem to suggest, in his judicious words, that “true national feeling can only exist in smaller and more cohesive groups than a vast modern nation-state”, which seems much more like Edmund Burke or Wordsworth than it does Hitler. The “redeemed English world” that Jenkins pictures Auden striving to realize – his “poetic veneration for the enclave of an English rural world” – turns out, in the poems of the mid-1930s that he considers with such fair-minded scrupulousness, to be the record of precious experiences of friendship in which Auden finds himself absorbed, yet nevertheless unable to forget the historical realities that underwrite so privileged an existence, one whose participants

… gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,
What violence is done;
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.

Jenkins’s readings are more finely tuned than his encompassing thetic statements, and his account of this poem, “A Summer Night”, makes connections with the guilt-ridden liberalism of E. M. Forster that seem to me extremely astute. Whether there is much to be said for the more general proposition that Auden at some point manifested what Jenkins calls an “Edenic poetic conservatism” feels to me rather less sure.

Conservatism rears its ugly head, I suppose, because England seems a nationalist and therefore innately conservative idea: his attraction to writing a poetry of the English enclave therefore makes Auden “an oddly conservative figure”, in Jenkins’s formulation, and even “a type of conservative, inward-turning, nationalist poet”. But as John Lucas argued in England and Englishness: Ideas of nationhood in English poetry, 1688–1900 (1990), the thing can work both ways: England can of course be a marshalling flag for the interests of the ruling class, but when it is invoked by, say, William Blake, one of Auden’s favourites during this period, it is bursting with radical energy (“Receive the Lamb of God to dwell / In England’s green and pleasant bowers”). D.H. Lawrence, another hero, although full of the bitterest contempt for the place, nevertheless conceded: “I am English, and my Englishness is my very vision”. George Orwell wanted very much to believe that Englishness and the genius of socialism had a kind of kinship, and he was even prepared to endorse Shakespeare’s view that “naught shall make us rue / If England to herself do rest but true” – “right enough”, he said, “if you interpret it rightly”.

So I am not sure that “England” in itself is quite enough to pin Auden as a conservative, and more generally I cannot say I really recognize the “consistently quietist, nostalgic figure” introduced in the opening pages of The Island, least of all from the 550 pages of Jenkins’s intricate prose that follow the opening provocation. Auden was keen in later life to suggest how blithely unpolitical he was as a young man, never opening a newspaper or joining any clubs; but his tutor Nevill Coghill remembered him bursting into tutorials, eager to talk about “some Communist proposition” or to debate the Marxist credentials of William Morris, and I have never believed that his decision to drive a car for the trade unions during the General Strike, and not to become a special constable, as most Oxford boys did, was the simply whimsical act that he later claimed.

However locally provocative, Jenkins’s overall argument is in one way familiar. The book ends with Auden subconsciously recognizing, in 1936, that he has to quit the island, and we glimpse on the horizon what is called his “new, stateless poetic style”. The author’s early Auden is distinguished by his representativeness, his being the spokesman for an epoch; and that is just what Philip Larkin (among others) saw in the 1930s poetry too, an identification of writer and age that was destroyed by emigration to America and the outbreak of the Second World War. “At one stroke”, said Larkin, “he lost his key subject and emotion – Europe and the fear of war – and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.” Jenkins is arguing almost exactly the same, with the difference that, unlike Larkin, he thinks the change from early to late for the better. He doesn’t have space to make the critical case, but it sounds as though the shift was justified not least because Englishness was clapped out: there was, he says, “something exhausted and terminal about the myths underwriting English traditions and values”. That makes you think of another book about English literary insularity, Hugh Kenner’s exasperated A Sinking Island: The modern English writers (1988), a modernist tour de forcethat condemns everything from Kingsley Amis to British Rail sandwiches; but, bedraggled as no doubt it was, Englishness went on to demonstrate an odd kind of creative tenacity, represented not least by Larkin himself, who learnt more from Auden than from anyone else apart from the poet for whom they shared an equal reverence: Hardy. Despite the rough review, Auden admired Larkin greatly.

Auden’s appearance in Contraflow, an attractive anthology of poems about Englishness of one kind or another, is “A Summer Night”, one of the poems Jenkins puts in the foreground, and certainly one of his greatest. England is both cherished and under threat in the poem, and this combination of feelings crops up in many of the selections that John Greening and Kevin Gardner have made: “England is still out there somewhere”, says Dennis O’Driscoll, balancing certainty and doubt in his enjoyably Audenesque catalogue poem “England”. “Without nostalgia who could love England?”, asks that excellent poet Anne Stevenson. The sense of precariousness is all but ubiquitous in the book: England turns out to be a bit like nature, something you don’t feel compelled to think about until you realize that its days are numbered and its adherents dwindling, apart from that small number who, as C. H. Sisson says, “dare to dream, and be, of England still”.

That strikes rather a solemn note, and no doubt the whole thing lends itself to a good degree of flannel, as Christopher Reid delightfully implies in his travelogue poem “Bollockshire”. Sean O’Brien is no less sharp: “though you bury stuff forever, it keeps on coming back”, he observes in “Another Country”, written in the metre of Auden’s “Get there if you can”, which it quotes as an epigraph. The general tenor is, as one of the editors remarks in their introductory dialogue, “‘not what we used to be’, whatever that was”, but something roughly akin to the Blitz spirit seems to prevail. I think all the contributors would acknowledge the pertinence of the headmaster’s question: “What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?”

When Geoffrey Grigson reviewed Edward Mendelson’s edition of the younger Auden, he rightly expressed gratitude for the enterprise, but demurred at the title, The English Auden: Poems, essays and dramatic writings 1927–1939 (1978). Being English, he resorted to a metaphor drawn from Association football: “It implies that if Auden were English at the kick-off, he became American, in substance, before half-time”. Grigson’s Auden was an Englishman to the end. Did he ever leave? Some of the later masterpieces, such as “In Praise of Limestone” and “Not in Baedeker”, are so full of England, it hurts. They might just about confirm the sentiment of some lines by Peter Porter, which appear as an epigraph in Contraflow: “You cannot leave England, it turns / A planet majestically in the mind”.

Seamus Perry is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is writing a Life of Auden

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