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INTERVIEWER: What’s your least favourite Auden poem?

AUDEN: ‘September 1, 1939.’

Michael Newman, interview with W. H. Auden, The Paris Review (1972)

Me too.

*

I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden for twenty-five years.

It could not be described as a cost-effective enterprise.

It may not have been the best use of my time.

The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value; he may be paid ten pounds for a poem which he believes is very good and took him months to write, and a hundred pounds for a piece of journalism which costs him but a day’s work.

(Auden, ‘The Poet & The City’)

A lot can happen to someone in twenty-five years – though it hasn’t really happened to me. I have overcome no addictions. I have suffered no serious mental or physical breakdowns. There were no major achievements, no terrible lows: I am, in all regards, average to the point of being dull. There is, alas, no backstory to this story. This is not one of those books.

It is not a book about grief.

It is not a book about loss.

It is not a book about some great self-realisation.

I did not go – I have not been – on any kind of a journey with W. H. Auden.

I do not believe that Auden provides readers with the key to understanding life, the universe and everything. Reading Auden has not made me happier, healthier, or a better or more interesting person.

Perhaps the only strange or remarkable thing to have happened to me over the past twenty-five years is that I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden.

The only possible conclusion, I suppose, after all this time, is either that I haven’t been trying hard enough, or that I’m simply not up to the job.

Or, possibly, both.

*

Completed finally in my early fifties, in vain and solitary celebration, this – whatever this is – turns out to be proof against itself.

For decades I had imagined writing a big book about Auden’s life and work, a truly great book, a magnum opus.

I have managed instead to write a short book about just one of his poems. At the very moment of its completion, the work turns out to be evidence of failure. Opus minus.

In the end, one feels only depletion, disgust and disappointment, the sense that one has once again turned manna into gall, the everlasting taste of bitterness.

*

(I am reading the collected poems of Bertolt Brecht, in translation. I come across this, ‘Motto’:

This, then, is all. It’s not enough, I know.

At least I’m still alive, as you may see.

I’m like the man who took a brick to show

How beautiful his house used once to be.

This book is my brick: it is proof of how beautiful the house might have been.)

*

Auden wrote all of his prose, he claimed, because he needed the money.

I have written all of my prose because I am not a poet.

And I needed the money.

Underneath the abject willow,

Lover, sulk no more;

Act from thought should quickly follow:

What is thinking for?

Your unique and moping station

Proves you cold;

Stand up and fold

Your map of desolation.

(Auden, ‘Underneath the abject willow’)

Twenty-five years, though – can you imagine? – twenty-five years of failing to write a book.

*

It’s perhaps not entirely uncommon.

There are, of course, individuals who write great books at great speed, and with great success, and to great acclaim – Auden’s first book with Faber was published when he was just twenty-three and he went on to produce a book about every three years for the rest of his life. The truth is, it takes most of us years to get a book published, and even then those books end in massive failure: neglected, overlooked and forgotten.

(My own books, it should probably be admitted, have all ended in massive failure: neglected, overlooked and forgotten. It’s nature’s way. There’s a critic, Franco Moretti, notorious in literary studies, who has pioneered the study of literature as a kind of data set, and he has an essay, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, which is all about clues in detective literature, and which is an excellent essay, though I’m less interested in his thoughts about clues in detective literature than I am in his redolent title phrase – which he stole from Hegel, actually – because it acknowledges what is rarely acknowledged, which is the hard, painful truth that to study literature, never mind to participate in it, is to become a witness to the sheer horrors of literary history, as savage and violent as all history. ‘The majority of books disappear forever –’ writes Moretti, ‘and “majority” actually misses the point: if we set today’s canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published novels. And the other 99.5 percent?’ I am one of the 99.5 per cent: I am one of the living dead, the Great Unread. This book too will undoubtedly end up in the slaughterhouse, as it should and as it must.)

*

This book I began long before I had written or even contemplated writing any of my other books. It was the first – and it may be the last. It may be time to admit defeat, to admit to my own obvious lack of whatever it was that Auden had, which was just about everything. In Auden, one might say – if it didn’t sound so dramatic, if it didn’t sound like I was trying to talk things up by talking myself down – in Auden was my beginning and in Auden is my end.

*

One might, I suppose, console oneself with the knowledge that even some of Auden’s books were not entirely successful: Academic Graffiti, City Without Walls.

But to dwell on the minor faults and failings of the great is hardly a comfort.

It is merely another sign of one’s own inadequacies.

The greater the equality of opportunity in a society becomes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail, particularly for those who have some talent but not enough to win them second or third place.

(Auden, ‘West’s Disease’)

But surely – surely? – literature is not a competition. Literature is not a sport. One cannot measure oneself by the usual standards of success.

The writer who allows himself to become infected by the competitive spirit proper to the production of material goods so that, instead of trying to write his book, he tries to write one which is better than somebody else’s book is in danger of trying to write the absolute masterpiece which will eliminate all competition once and for all and, since this task is totally unreal, his creative powers cannot relate to it, and the result is sterility.

(Auden, ‘Red Ribbon on a White Horse’)

Let’s not kid ourselves.

It is a competition.

It is a sport.

One does measure oneself by the usual standards of success.

When writing about any great writer – or indeed about anyone who has achieved great things – one can’t help but compare oneself.

*

(Throughout his life, Philip Larkin often measured himself against Auden. Auden, for him, was the Truly Great Man: Philip Larkin loved Auden. When he bought a car in 1984, for example, an Audi, he said he liked the name ‘because it reminds me of Auden’. In a letter to a friend in 1959, extolling the virtues of Auden’s poem ‘Night Mail’, he wrote in horrible realisation, ‘HE’D BE ABOUT SEVEN YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME,’ but then quickly added, ‘I reckon he’d shot his bolt by the age of 33, actually.’ Again, when Larkin was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1965, he told an interviewer, ‘Take this Queen’s Medal. I’m 42, but he got it for “Look, Stranger!” when he was 30. Mind you, I feel he was played out as a poet after 1940.’ This scuttering between despair and disdain is typical of Larkin in general but it is also typical of his attitude towards Auden in particular. He prefaced a home-made booklet of poems in 1941 with the gulping confession ‘I think that almost any single line by Auden would be worth more than the whole lot put together.’ When, in 1972, Auden’s bibliographer Barry Bloomfield asked Larkin if he might be his next subject, Larkin expressed both delight and dismay: Bloomfield ‘has switched to me now Auden’s gone’, he told his friend Anthony Thwaite; ‘I am not much more than a five-finger exercise after Auden,’ he apologised to Bloomfield.)

*

If Philip Larkin was no more than a five-finger exercise compared to Auden, then this – this! – is, what? At the very best, a one-note tribute?

*

Polyphony

↓

Monophony

↓

Penny whistle and kazoo

*

Parnassus after all is not a mountain,

Reserved for A.1. climbers such as you;

It’s got a park, it’s got a public fountain.

The most I ask is leave to share a pew

With Bradford or with Cottam, that will do.

(Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’)

*

Park?

Fountain?

Pissoir.

*

Perhaps one of the only things the rest of us share with the truly great writers is the sense of struggle, the sense of inadequacy.

Flaubert: ‘Sometimes when I find myself empty, when the expression refuses to come, when, after having scrawled long pages, I discover that I have not written one sentence, I fall on my couch and remain stupefied in an internal swamp of ennuis.’

Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘Birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, / Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.’

Katherine Mansfield: ‘For the last two weeks I have written scarcely anything. I have been idle; I have failed.’

We all know that feeling, that sense of despair and woe-is-me and all-I-taste-is-ashes, and all-I-touch-has-turned-to-dust.

Great writers, it seems, are not necessarily those who are most confident about their own capacities or skills. They are more often keenly aware that words are failing them, and that they are failing words. Like us, they find it difficult.

*

Or rather, most of them find it difficult: Auden was convinced of his own skills and capacities from an early age and went on to fulfil and exceed his early promise.

(His tutor at Oxford, Nevill Coghill, recalled Auden announcing his intention to become a poet. Jolly good, said Coghill – or something donnish to that effect – that should help with understanding the old technical side of Eng. Lit., eh, old chap? ‘Oh no, you don’t understand,’ replied Auden – or again, words to that effect – ‘I mean a great poet.’)

He seems never to have been lacking in confidence. He seems always to have been convinced not merely of his brilliance but of his sovereignty.

‘Evidently they are waiting for Someone,’ he told his friend Stephen Spender.

He was that Someone.

*

And me, who am I?

If nothing else, one of the things I have realised over the course of the past twenty-five years, in trying to write a book about W. H. Auden, is the obvious fact that I AM NOT W. H. AUDEN.

*

Other people realise they’re not their heroes much earlier, but I was in the slow learners’ class in school and seem to be a slow learner still.

I think I probably believed that one day – through sheer willpower and determined slog, through dogged persistence and self-discipline – I might somehow overcome my weaknesses and become an artist of some significance.

It is only recently that I have come to accept my true role and status, which is, obviously, naturally, inevitably, as an utterly insignificant bit-part player in the world of literary affairs.

This is the real trouble with studying major writers: it reminds one of one’s minority status.

(Great Lies of Literature No. 1: reading great literature is good for the soul. The truth: reading the greats does not just uplift; it also casts down.)

*

F. R. Leavis once described E. M. Forster, when compared with Henry James, as ‘only too unmistakably minor’ – though Forster accurately remarked of James that though he might have been a ‘perfect novelist’, it wasn’t a ‘very enthralling type of perfection’. It hardly needs stating that I’m not in James’s league, nor in Forster’s – but, alas, the real truth is that I’m not even in Leavis’s league, which is a league no one in their right mind would want to be in anyway, a league whose entry requirements include anger, bitterness and envy. (He was not a great fan of Auden, Leavis, particularly not his irony, which he described as ‘self-defensive, self-indulgent or merely irresponsible’. God, one wonders, what would F. R. Leavis make of this?) Reading Leavis, it is clear that I am only too unmistakably minor even in relation to him writing about Forster writing about James – a gnat on a flea on the shoulders of giants. Forster has an essay, ‘The C Minor of that Life’, whose title is an allusion to Browning’s poem ‘Abt Vogler’, the last line of which begins ‘The C Major of this life’. This life is neither C Major nor Minor, but C very much Diminished.

*

(This book, clearly, is not just about Auden. It’s about everything else I’ve been thinking and reading while I’ve been thinking and reading Auden, and which has influenced my thinking and reading of Auden. As Mr Weller long ago explained to his son, Sam – the archetypal Cockney geezers – in The Pickwick Papers: ‘Ven you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. I rayther think it isn’t.’)

*

Other things I have come to realise, in passing, as I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden, over the course of the past twenty-five years:

 Despite what you may have heard, one’s talents do not necessarily grow and develop over time. One’s character does not necessarily blossom. Things do not necessarily work out. The unique gift that you might have thought you had to offer the world does not necessarily become apparent to you or to anyone else. There is not just the possibility of loss and waste and failure: failure and waste and loss are inevitable. (William Empson, in that wonderful remark about Gray’s ‘Elegy’, in Some Versions of Pastoral – my absolute favourite among all of Empson’s wonderful remarks: ‘And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy.’)

 There are many individuals whose natural talents far exceed your own.

 There are many individuals whose natural talents may seem far less than your own and yet who will inevitably succeed far beyond your own small successes.

 There will always be something, someone, some circumstance pushing you to the side of your life, something obscuring the view, something preventing you from doing what you thought you might do or being who you thought you might be. For me, that something, that someone, was Auden: for me, Auden was the problem as well as the solution. Perhaps this is always the case with the people who really matter: wives, husbands, lovers, friends.

*

So what is the final justification for this book, which has taken so long, for so little apparent reason, and which obviously amounts to so little – 70,000 words, give or take, expended in trying to explain Auden’s 99-line poem?

*

I can’t really claim, as is now often claimed by those attempting to write about their relationship to other – often, conveniently, dead – writers, that this is a record of a ‘relationship’. If it is a relationship, it is clearly a very odd sort of relationship, since I never met Auden and realistically never would have met Auden, and if I had done, it seems doubtful we would have got on. He could never have been, for me, as he was for the poet John Hollander, and for many others, ‘Like a clever young uncle’ or ‘like a wise old aunt’: I am not someone blessed with such uncles or such aunts. My actual uncle Dave was a minicab driver; my auntie worked at Yardley’s. There have been, for me, no mentors: there has been no extending of the hand, no leg-up, no hand-me-downs. (In Ulysses, Mr Deasy asks Stephen what an Englishman is proud of – ‘I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast, I paid my way … I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing? Can you?’ It’s true.) But then, in fairness, I was never really protégé material. My relationship with Auden – had there been anything like a relationship – would have been at best a very vague acquaintanceship, a relationship from a great distance, a one-sided sort of relationship, not so much teacher-to-pupil or guru-to-disciple, as master to his valet.

I am beginning to lose patience

With my personal relations:

They are not deep

And they are not cheap.

(Auden, ‘Case Histories’)

This book does not therefore record my ‘relationship’ with Auden – I have no relationship with Auden in any meaningful sense – so much as my relationship with language, or my relationship with language through Auden. Auden as the OED, as Roget’s, as Brewer’s, Fowler’s, Webster’s, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English – all of them, combined.

*

(‘Is it one of those How So-and-So Changed My Life type of books?’ asks a friend. ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s a shame,’ they say. ‘People really like those sorts of books.’ ‘It’s more about my relationship with language, and literature, and ideas,’ I say. ‘Hmm,’ says my friend. ‘Well, good luck with that.’)

*

One of Auden’s great ambitions was to be included in the OED – ‘that inestimable successor to Holy Writ’, as the critic I. A. Richards called it – with his words and phrases listed as coinages and exemplars. It was an ambition he fulfilled many times over, being credited with more than 100 significant usages, including the phrase ‘Age of Anxiety’ (defined, in the second edition of the OED, as ‘the title of W. H. Auden’s poem applied as a catch-phrase to any period characterized by anxiety or danger’), the adjective ‘entropic’, and the noun ‘agent’ (abbreviated from ‘secret agent’). According to the biographer Humphrey Carpenter, describing Auden’s study in his house in Kirchstetten, ‘The most prominent object in the workroom was a set of the Oxford English Dictionary, missing one volume, which was downstairs, Auden invariably using it as a cushion to sit on when at table – as if (a friend observed) he was a child not quite big enough for the nursery furniture.’

*

(The missing volume – Auden’s hardback dictionary cushion – was, according to Carpenter, volume X of the OED: (Sole–Sz). Which might provide a nice alternative title for this book, would it not? Sole–Sz, a title which offers an obvious homophonic pun on ‘sole’ and which also usefully alludes to Roland Barthes’ S/Z, that impossibly complicated book about Balzac’s story ‘Sarrasine’, which was once required reading on every grad course in literary theory, with its typologies of interacting SEM codes and SYM codes, and REF, and ACT and HER codes, and which therefore might suggest that this book too is a work of great theoretical sophistication. Maybe not.)

*

So, not a book about my relationship with Auden. A book about my relationship with language.

*

But we all know – we don’t have to be a Roland Barthes to know – that there can be no simple explanation in language of our relationship with language. It’s like using a mirror to look at a mirror. Words are insufficient to do justice to words, let alone to everything else.

So the enterprise is doomed again.

*

This is all entirely obvious, I suppose, to most people. And barely needs stating.

All I can safely say, then, is that it has taken me twenty-five years to work out the entirely obvious.

And these are my notes.

In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps.

(Auden, ‘Writing’)