THE PUZZLE OF W. H. AUDEN

The puzzle of Auden is rather that — despite the life he chose to lead, despite the cruel and obscene poetry he sometimes wrote, despite the glib schoolboy irony he frequently used to obscure the fact that he hadn’t thought his way through his poems — there often sounds in his writing an utterly convincing voice of orthodox Christianity, serious conservatism, and enormous good sense.

Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography, Auden (Pantheon, 406 pages, $ 30), contains much of the information necessary for making sense of the poet. Auden despised literary biography, the sniffing through writers” lives, the pawing through their papers. “When we were young,” he began a review of Oscar Wilde’s correspondence, “most of us were taught that it is dishonorable to read other people’s letters.” If there is an excuse for writing an author’s life, it can only be that afterwards we understand a writer’s work in a way we could not without understanding his life.

Davenport-Hines has rightly seen that Auden’s sometimes obscure writing requires knowledge of the poet’s history. In Auden, he justifies his literary biography, producing a well-written, fast-reading life that deserves serious attention. And yet, determined to show both that Auden’s homosexual life was perfectly normal and that the root of his unique poetic gift was his homosexuality, Davenport-Hines devotes much of his biography to what he thinks is a central dilemma in Auden’s life. He presents the poet as a man of pain — a man naturally detached from emotions, who sought in the self-caused suffering of unhappy sexual affairs the sorrowful wellsprings of the human condition.

Is the biographer correct? “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939), deservedly one of Auden’s most famous poems, ends with the remarkable quatrains:

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of ttte curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

Such lines, Auden’s sympathetic friend Hannah Arendt declared, pitch themselves “against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition,” convinced “that the gods spin unhappiness and evil things to mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs.”

That Auden suffered, and sought his own suffering, is certainly true. “God knows,” Arendt cried at his death, “the price is too high and no one in his right mind could be willing to pay it knowingly.” But the puzzle of Auden, a puzzle Davenport-Hines finds no answer to, is that the truths to which he gives brilliant and unique expression seem to have no connection to the suffering he cultivated, the life he led, and even the talent for ironic light verse that was his strongest poetic gift.

The solution to this puzzle is found, I think, in another famous line from the elegy for Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” To be any kind of poet is to see that language has a structure, that there is an order built into words. But to be a great poet is to see that the structure of language is at last a moral structure and presumes certain claims, whether we like it or not: that God exists, that human suffering cries out for redemption, that the universe exists under a moral law. Such claims may not be true, in the sense that they may not correspond to the real world outside of words. But Auden is a great enough poet to recognize that they are necessarily true of language. Somewhere inside language is the place of meaning, like a clearing upon which poetry stumbles from time to time. And that clear place makes nothing happen; it simply is:

The Hidden Law does not deny

Our laws of probability,

But takes the atom and the star

And human beings as they are,

And answers nothing when we lie.

Throughout his life, Auden maintained his sense of the essential frivolity of art. Not merely in his humorous poems — the wickedly funny “Letter to Lord Byron” (1936), the droll “Under Which Lyre” (1945), the clerihews and limericks he wrote throughout his career — but in all his serious work as well, the poet denigrates the power of poetry to do more than record the fact of truth: “When two lovers meet, then/There’s an end of writing.” Auden often succeeded in finding the moral order that governs language. But that is exactly what points out his failure to find the parallel moral order that governs the world outside of language. And his knowledge of the law built into language could only seem to him without influence upon the world, or even upon his own life:

“Poetry makes nothing happen.” Perhaps a better way to come at this same point is to take seriously Auden’s constant use of metaphors drawn from architecture and geography:

Yet maps and languages and names

Have meaning and their proper claims.

There are two atlases: the one

The public space where acts are done,

In theory, common to us all . . .

The other is the inner space

Of private ownership, the place

That each of us is forced to own.

In the early 1940s, the young American poet Randall Jarrell mocked Auden for describing men topologically. “His gift knew what he was — a dark disordered city,” Auden wrote of Matthew Arnold. “The squares of his mind were empty,/Silence invaded the suburbs,” he wrote of the dying Yeats. “No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame,” he wrote of A. E. Housman.

But such descriptions — each used to explain another poet — may in fact represent Auden’s sense of his own inner life. Auden once divided writers into Utopianists and Edenists — into those who demand the creation of a general Utopia and those who hope only to find an individual Eden. The description is finally a psychological one. For Auden, Happiness was a location, a serendipitous Eden in the mind. It is the Great Good Place — as Henry James called it, in a phrase which haunted Auden — that we can neither earn nor make any significant moral reform to bring about, but that seemed to Auden in his maturity best described in the precepts of Christian faith:

I know nothing of

Either, but when I try to imagine a

faultless love

Or the life to come, what I hear is the

murmur

Of underground streams, what I see is

a limestone landscape.

At last, however, he only found it best described in Christianity. The quality of Auden’s faith — the sincerity of his return to the Anglican church in the late 1930s — is impossible to gauge. But the Christianity in Auden’s poems seems strangely incomplete when set beside Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Charles Williams, and the early Protestant mystics — the religious authors Auden especially admired. The weakest moments of Davenport- Hines’s Auden come when he discusses theology. Perhaps his worst mistake comes when he translates the Latin tag Felix Culpa, traditionally rendered as the “Fortunate Fall,” as “Happy to Err” — thereby turning the recognition that Adam’s Fall opens the way for Christ into a bizarre apology for sin. (“Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid,” Auden himself quotes from St. Paul in his 1942 Christmas oratorio For the Time Being.)

And yet there is more than a touch of “Happy to Err” in the poet’s Christianity. Devoid of good works, and devoid of faith as well, Auden’s inner Great Good Place is simply a world of grace and language — a world of graceful language — and offers us no help in our real struggles to live a moral life. Davenport-Hines is almost certainly correct to take as Auden’s own experience of conversion the third-person description the poet put in an essay on Christianity. But the experience came before Auden found ” Christianity” as the rubric with which to name it. The earlier poetic account of the conversion, “Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed” (1933), remains resolutely secular.

Part of this early resistance to religion may simply be a function of his times. Born in 1907, Auden emerged in his early twenties as the leader of a group of poets — Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Cecil Day Lewis — who found in Eliot’s jazzy voice in “The Waste Land” and in the ironic resurrection of unpopular verse-forms the solution to the poetic problems of their age. Of them all, Auden had the greatest gift: the jazziest voice, the largest talent for difficult forms, the surest touch with irony.

Now the leaves are falling fast,

Nurses’ flowers will not last:

Nurses to the graves are gone,

But the prarns go rolling on.

“To Throw Away the Key,” a poem excerpted from the 1928 play Paid on Both Sides (his first published collaboration with Christopher Isherwood), and the 1929 sonnet “Sir, No Man’s Enemy, Forgiving All” (with its concluding demand for “New styles of architecture, a change of heart”) stand as Auden’s most successful early poems. Learning to begin a sonnet in the middle of a story, doling out small clues along the way, he developed by 1930 a voice capable of inserting significant lines into his ironic verse and seemed to find a way past that escalating self-consciousness that often makes the British such bright boys and such dull men, that makes them shoot to such green heights and go to seed.

“Good poets have a weakness for bad puns,” Auden once declared. Editing the 1938 Oxford Book of Light Verse, he retained throughout his life a love of deliberately simple and often obscene-verse. As late as 1948, he composed an (at the time) unprintable poem, “The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral.” But through the 1930s, his verse kept breaking through its jazzy irony into poetry. “Stop All the Clocks,” from the 1936 play The Ascent of F6 (another collaboration with Isherwood), begins as mockery of Victorian mourning verse and ends in a pair of genuinely moving stanzas. (This is the poem that got quite a run when it was recited in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.) “As I Walked Out One Evening” (1937) opens as a ballad- parody and becomes a serious vehicle for poetic thought:

The glacier knocks in the cupboard

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

Even in his early verse, Auden 6 would sometimes find he had “Adopted what I would disown/The preacher’s loose immodest tone,” and the stern inflections of his later poems have their foreshadowing in his first volumes, Poems (1930) and The Orators (1932). Through a year in Berlin with Isherwood, a term of schoolteaching, a journey to Iceland that produced his “Letter to Lord Byron,” and success in the British literary world, Auden gradually found the moral seriousness he desired in the Marxism that swayed much of his generation, making in 1937 his virtually mandatory tour of duty in the Spanish Civil War.

George Orwell said of the poetry that issued from his Spanish sojourn such verse as “History to the defeated/May say Alas but cannot help or pardon” that it combined “the gangster and the pansy.” Added Orwell: “Mr. Auden’s brand of moralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

Davenport-Hines tends to attribute any criticism of the poet to a hatred of homosexuals. The critic F. R. Leavis’s distaste for Auden Davenport-Hines dismisses as providing “the highbrow counterpart to police bullying,” and Orwell’s devastating comments on Auden’s Marxism he attributes to Orwell’s repressed homosexual crushes on poets at Eton.

But Auden himself quickly came to regret poems like “Spain 1937.” “The interest in Marx taken by myself and friends was more psychological than political,” he admitted in 1955; “we were interested in Marx in the same way we were interested in Freud.” By the late 30s, Auden had already left his brief Marxist phase behind and was writing the best poetry of his life. After an extended tour of China, he moved with Isherwood to New York in 1939, hoping to settle down away from the politics of British literary life: ” England to me is my own tongue,/And what I did when I was young.”

His strong voice emerging toward the decade’s end did not prevent occasional ventures in his old style of verse. In 1937, he produced a brilliant and utterly heartless ballad-parody, “Miss Gee,” that mocks a spinster’s painful death from cancer. Shortly after his arrival in New York, he wrote a weak political satire, “The Unknown Citizen,” that unfortunately became his most anthologized poem. But he wrote as well “September 1, 1939” — the poem that expressed for his entire generation the disillusioned end of the 30s:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade.

Unhappy with the implications of the line “We must love one another or die” — the line misquoted in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 anti-Goldwater ad of a petal- plucking girl obliterated by an atom bomb — Auden later suppressed the poem. “If by memorability, you mean a poem like “Sept. 1st 1939,” he wrote one reviewer, “I pray to God that I shall never be memorable again.” In the anonymity of neighborhoods in New York, he decided to make his stand:

Across East River in the night

Manhattan is ablaze with light . . .

More even than in Europe, here

The choice of patterns is made clear,

. . . what

Is possible and what is not,

To what conditions we must bow

In building the Just City now.

In New York as well he met Chester Kallman, a young American with whom he formed an unhappy liaison that lasted the rest of his life. Despite his constant praise of love, Auden before 1939 seemed to pride himself on his romantic inconstancy — writing in 1937 the extraordinary poem declaring the faithfulness of a one-night stand: “Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human on my faithless arm.” Lasting relations came to mean more to him, however, as he reached his thirties. In 1935 he married the German novelist Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika to provide her with a British passport. Devoting his next book to her, he never renounced the unconsummated marriage or sought a divorce.

Unhappy as his affair with Kallman remained, it provided at least the stability Auden seemed to need — though it does not seem to have stopped him from indulging in casual encounters whenever he desired. Davenport-Hines is sometimes led astray by imprecise knowledge of America: “Auden’s experiments in neighborhood and sexuality and his submission to the duty of happiness were occurring in a puritan environment,” he writes in an aside at exactly the point Auden buys a shack for his liaisons on Fire Island.

Auden’s Anglican Christianity seemed to provide some stability as well. The demolished churches he saw in China, the priests he knew the Republican forces had murdered in Spain, gave him a name to apply to his emerging sense of the “Law Like Love.” For the rest of his life, he never hesitated to be identified as a Christian, and — though he never gave up his mastery of light and ironic verse — he mostly sought in remaining books an explication of his interior Great Good Place: The Age of Anxiety (1947), Nones (1951), The Rake’s Progress (a 1951 libretto he wrote with Kallman for Igor Stravinsky), The Shield of Achilles (1955), About the House (1965), and the posthumous Thank You, Fog (1974).

Eventually, though, the life he led got to him: the 15,000 unfiltered cigarettes a year, the daily doses of benzedrine, the homosexual affairs, and the booze — especially the booze. It came at last to wreck him.

Developing what Davenport-Hines identifies as “Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome,” in which the skin on the face and hands thickens and droops, Auden seemed ready to collapse long before the end. “My face,” he declared, “looks likes a wedding cake left out in the rain.” After a turn as poetry professor at Oxford, he died in Austria on September 29, 1973.

To the problems of English poetry after Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Auden’s first solution was his schoolboy irony. His second and more profound solution, however, was to aim his poems at the Great Good Place — the place of truth and Edenic happiness inside language. And that “poetry makes nothing happen” is the unfortunate but inescapable consequence of his aim.

In the prayer beginning “O Unicorn among the cedars” that ends the 1941 New Year Letter in which he acknowledged his return to the church, Auden proved that he could forge rich Christian images in the style developed by Eliot. In poems like “The Shield of Achilles,” he even proved that he could imagine what difference Christianity might make:

 

That girls are raped, that two boys

 

knife a third,

 

Were axioms to him, who’d never heard

 

Of any world where promises were kept,

 

Or one could weep because another

 

wept.

But faith is for Auden finally a picture rather than a life. The constant reality of sin and human failure not only confirmed the poet in his belief of the truth of Christianity, but confirmed him as well in the notion that such a truth is merely true and makes nothing happen — even in the believer’s own life.

Auden was a perpetual visitor who accidentally stumbled upon the land of faith; he never heard the invitation to stay.

J. Bottum is associate editor of First Things.