W. H Auden's Typewriter
A paper by Philip Harvey given at a seminar on the poet W.H. Auden, as part of a joint presentation with Dr William Johnston at the Institute for Spiritual Studies, St. Peter's Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne, on Wednesday the 6th of April 2011.
1.
The Master of Versification
W. H. Auden (1907-1973) clearly had the view that a poet,
especially a great poet and he was only interested in being a great poet, had
to have command of all the poetic forms. When we open the Collected Works we
find every imaginable form of poem.
There is the villanelle or pantoum:
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
There is the limerick:
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling in money,
The screamingly
funny,
And those who are very well hung.
Later in life Auden turned his view about forms into promotion. He
would instruct younger poets to learn the forms as the basis of their craft,
and we should remember that he is doing this at a time in English when free
verse and free expression had become rapidly the norm, e.g the Beats. When
someone would mention to him some obscure oriental form of poem that he was
unfamiliar with it would make him grumpy because (1) he should have known about
this form already and (2) he hadn’t yet written a poem in this form, so was not
living up to his own expectations.
There is the haiku:
His thoughts pottered
From verses to sex to God
Without punctuation.
There is the medieval Welsh form the cywydd:
Among the leaves the small birds sing;
The crow of the cock commands awaking;
In solitude, for company.
Bright shines the sun on creatures mortal;
Men of their neighbours become sensible;
In solitude, for company.
It is difficult to say where Auden got this idea, that poets had
to write in every form. Although all poets have Shakespeare breathing down
their neck and Shakespeare was a marvel with the forms, it is a test to find
any poet before Auden for whom mastery of all the forms is not just clever but
a requirement. We think of Hardy and Browning, we think of Arnold and Keats,
all of whom wanted to break from the 18th century chains of the
couplet. But it does seem that Auden is new and his effect since in getting poets
to think in terms of the multiform has been huge.
There is the ode:
Dear, 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.
There is the clerihew:
Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.
When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must,
But only just.
Luther & Zwingli
Should be treated singly:
L hated the Peasants,
Z the Real Presence.
Nietzsche
Had the habit as a teacher
Of cracking his joints
To emphasize his points.
Here are some reasons for Auden’s ‘thing’ about being a master of
versification. First, poetry for Auden is a hoot. It is a schoolboy game. It is
about how many ways a schoolboy can say different things in different ways.
Second, poems are, as he says in one piece, “extensions of his power to charm.”
Third, Auden was a great great reader and an anthologist. What I mean is, he
didn’t just read everything, when it was poetry he saw a form and had to have a
go at it. This happens when a
literature is very rich and diverse and long. Auden looks into the literature
and must imitate all of it. In this way he joins the society of writers, he
writes himself into their history.
There is the couplet:
The situation of our time
Surrounds us like a baffling crime.
There lies the body half-undressed
We all had reason to detest,
And all are suspects and involved
Until the mystery is solved
And under lock and key the cause
That makes a nonsense of our laws.
One last consideration is how amazingly Auden takes forms and does
something new with them. He makes quantum leaps of imagination and this is a
main reason why Auden continues to have a big following, is read in preference
to many of his peers. He is the master of surprise. He makes unexpected
connections of idea and verse form that always prove to be just right.
There is the riposte:
Contra Blake
[The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom]
The Road of Excess
leads, more often than not, to
The Slough of Despond.
There is the elegy, with here lines to Freud:
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a
whole epoch
the frailty of our
conscience and anguish,
of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was
never enough but
hoped to improve a
little by living.
2. England and the United States
When we talk about the English Auden we are talking about the
1930s. We are talking about an amazing outpouring of sometimes very challenging
verbal objects. Auden was a prodigy.
From his early twenties he is making poetry that doesn’t sound like
anything else:
We honour founders of these starving cities
Whose honour is the image of our sorrow,
Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow
That brought them desperate to the brink of valleys;
Dreaming of evening walks through learned cities
They reined their violent horses on the mountains,
Those fields like ships to castaways on islands,
Visions of green to them who craved for water.
He writes of landscapes that are troubled, populated with looming
and doomed humans often playing out indeterminate roles. While someone might
like to call this nature poetry, the country and its inhabitants are uneasy.
Past and future are unresolved.
As well as being spectacular virtuoso performances, witness the
enduring delight of Letter to Lord Byron, right from the start Auden also is
running counter to many of the established traditions of English poetry, or
using them in new ways.
The poet, like many in the 1930s, discovered psychoanalysis and
took it upon himself to be a psychoanalyst. He would analyse his friends and
colleagues, so for example when he had worked out how Benjamin Britten ticked
he not only told Britten in direct language, but then gave advice based on this
scintillating and insightful knowledge as to how Britten should behave in
future. Whatever the accuracy or truth of Auden’s case study, we see this as
one of the causes in the breakdown of relations between Auden and Britten. Is
it any wonder? But when Auden transfers this propensity for psychoanalysis to
society in general and through the poetry, very interesting things happen. He
gave to us, for example, the definition of the 1930s as The Age of Anxiety.
Auden is restless. He whoops it up in Berlin. He visits Iceland to
explore an ancestry that may or may not be verifiable. He goes to Spain to
assist the republicans but departs unconvinced and dismayed. He travels to
China with Christopher Isherwood, ostensibly to write journalism. While on the
way he stops off in Egypt. He writes this sonnet:
The Sphinx
Did it once issue from the carver’s hand
Healthy? Even the earliest conqueror saw
The face of a sick ape, a bandaged paw,
An ailing lion crouched on dirty sand.
We gape, then go uneasily away:
It does not like the young nor love nor learning.
Time hurt it like a person: it lies turning
A vast behind on shrill America,
And witnesses. The huge hurt face accuses
And pardons nothing, least of all success:
What counsel it might offer it refuses
To those who face akimbo its distress.
“Do people like me?” No. The slave amuses
The lion. “Am I to suffer always?” Yes.
Much has been said about why Auden went with Isherwood in 1939 to
live in America. When we look at his activities up until that time several
facts are prominent. Auden cannot settle in England. He is out of love. He
lives at odds with many of the mores of respectable English society. On the one
hand he is extremely popular with many of those he comes into contact with, on
the other hand he is unhappy and England is one of the sources of that
unhappiness. He is too familiar with the institutions of England, he knows them
too well. He carries his own wound. He is restless for new found lands. When it
comes to his first duty and vocation, the English language, the choice
elsewhere is obvious: New York City.
We shall never know what he would have done or written if he had
stayed in England, but we do know what he wrote when he went to America. Much
of his time is spent looking across the Atlantic at the unfolding catastrophe
of war and social disintegration. Much of his poetry in the next few years is
wrapped up in the very same analysis of the illnesses of society that lead to
such devastation. Here, for example, is part of a song sometimes titled
‘Refugee Blues’, which ought to be required reading in all schools and customs
departments today. It starts:
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.
And the song concludes:
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
3. Auden’s Rediscovery
of Christianity
Writing in 1956, Auden recalled his English
upbringing: “The atmosphere of my home was, I should say, unusually devout,
though not in the least repressive or gloomy. My parents were Anglo-Catholics,
so that my first religious memories are of exciting magical rites (at six I was
a boatboy) rather than of listening to sermons. For this I am very grateful, as
it implanted in me what I believe to be the correct notion of worship, namely,
that it is first and foremost a community in action, a thing done together, and
only secondarily a matter of individual feeling or thinking.
“It so happened that the bishop of our
diocese was an extreme modernist who refused to visit the church we attended;
consequently I was accustomed from my earliest years to doctrinal and
liturgical controversy. Dissenters and Low Churchmen were known as ‘Prots’ and
accused of squatting instead of kneeling; on the other hand, a firm line was
drawn between ‘Devotions’, which were all right, and ‘Benediction’, which was
definitely over the Roman border. I grew up, therefore, with a conception of
the Church which is, I suppose, uniquely Anglican, as a community in which wide
divergences of doctrine and rite can and do exist without leading necessarily
to schism or excommunication.”
Readers of Auden too often overlook or do not
properly appreciate his lifelong relationship to the Anglican Church. For those
familiar with Anglo-Catholic practice the image of Auden as a boatboy says a
great deal: he is an important in fact unique part of the action but he knows
he is just one part of the action. For Auden religion is cultural and deeply
engaged. It is about community, everybody is doing it and everybody has a
proper sense of what they are on about. It is a secure world and special, to be
respected. Indeed, it is so secure that he can leave it and come back to it
just as he feels. From his youth and through his twenties this is exactly what
happened. He lost interest in religion and took up all sorts of new causes,
including Marxism and Freudian psychology. The passage above shows that Auden’s
religious understanding is already formed long before the personal crisis of
1940-41 that led to his conversion and consequent dedication to Christianity. He
owns a developed sense of liturgy and church music that he keeps for his whole
life. He is well aware of religious difference but is tolerant and very certain
of his own grounding.
Auden recounts that before he went to New
York in 1939 he had already had experiences of holiness felt in the presence of
other people. He talks about these encounters as moments where he felt
“transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base
or unloving.” Auden is saying that he sees the Holy Spirit at work in people.
When
he goes to Spain during the Civil War he is shocked to see that all the
churches are closed and there are no clergy in sight. He is shocked and
disturbed by this and cannot dismiss it as “a mere liberal dislike of
intolerance, the notion that it is wrong to stop people from doing what they
like, even if it is something silly like going to church.” He discovers that
church is important to him, even if he cannot say why. This experience is
related to a much bigger reality in Europe at the time, fascism.
The United States is a very religious country with many
churches. It can be observed that Auden escapes his English world when he goes
to New York, but the one English thing he doesn’t give up is his religion. And
of all the possibilities on offer, he rediscovers his Anglicanism in New York.
It is here, in the Episcopal Church and in the company of such mighty
Protestant theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, that Auden attains
positions about Christianity that can respond to the fascists who make a
mockery of justice, liberty, and love of neighbour. He needs to find answers to
the barbarous indifference and cruelty of fascism and finds, not without some
surprise in fact, that the answer is in Christianity.
The other historical situation that moves
Auden into conversion is personal. Auden is someone with a deep need for love,
affirmation and personal lifelong companionship. The person with whom he
believes he has a found this relationship betrays him, leaving him not just
devastated but prone to demonic and destructive forces. How to deal with those
forces inside him is something he knows he must learn.
In literary terms, Auden’s take on Christian
teaching and practice can be seen everywhere in his work. The Australian poet
Peter Porter thought Auden was the tops but was always troubled by his
religion. Late in life Porter would say that Auden didn’t really believe in God
but that he thought God was a good idea. This opinion tells us more about
Porter than Auden and reminds us that many of Auden’s greatest fans remain
uncomfortable with Auden’s Christianity.
Theologically, Auden became unquestionably
Nicene, to the degree that he loved to play spot-the-heresy when confronted
with any new theory about anything. But Auden also said that doctrines of the
church are like shaggy dog stories and that you miss the point as soon as you
go into too much analysis. Auden endorsed Dietrich Bonhoeffer's line:
"We ought not to try and be more religious than God Himself."
He also liked to quote
Bonhoeffer to this effect: “There is always a danger of intense love destroying
the ‘polyphony’ of life. What I mean is that we should love God eternally with
our whole hearts, yet not so as to compromise or diminish our earthly
affections, but as a kind of cantus fermus to which the other
melodies of life provide the counterpoint. Earthly affection is one of those
contrapuntal themes, a theme which enjoys an autonomy of its own." We can
see why this musical analogy for love in its different forms would appeal to
Auden. Bonhoeffer is affirming the love we have for one another, including
erotic love, as distinct from but completely part of and intelligible through
our love of God.
A theological view that seems
also to be a powerful rebuke to too much theology is this line of Ferdinand
Ebner’s, often quoted by Auden: “To talk about God, except in the
context of prayer, is to take His name in vain.”
Another view of the religion
that I would ascribe to an Anglican sensibility comes in a sermon given in
Westminster Abbey in 1966, where Auden says: "Those of us who have the
nerve to call ourselves Christians will do well to be extremely reticent on
this subject. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that
he is somebody who knows he isn't one, either in faith or
morals....Where faith is concerned, very few of us have the right to say more
than -- to vary a saying of Simone Weil's -- I believe in a God who is like the
True God in everything except that he does not exist, for I have not yet reached
the point where God exists." His view that, in effect, no one can be
a Christian (it’s too difficult, if not indeed impossible to be like Christ)
and that we can only try to be more and more Christian, is a very useful key
when reading much of Auden’s poetry.
Auden
too would have come to identify with Samuel Johnson’s saying: "To be of no
church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is
animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless
it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to
worship, and the salutary influence of example." For thirty-three years,
starting with his ‘rediscovery’ of Christianity, Auden attended High Church
worship, mainly at his Episcopal parish church of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, New
York City. He once said that “The truth is Catholic, but the search for it is
Protestant.” It is difficult to imagine a Roman Catholic expressing this view,
and not that many Protestants either; but it is perfectly possible to imagine
an Anglican seeing this as a ground rule. Furthermore, a position that is at
once based in a common, agreed certainty while permitting a constant searching
after the truth explains a great deal about the great intellectual impetus, range
and originality of Auden’s poetry.
4. Bohemianism versus
Bourgeois Domesticity
When Auden goes to New York he lives what would be called a
bohemian lifestyle. He shares a house with people like the striptease artist
Gypsy Rose Lee, the musician Benjamin Britten, the writers Carson MacCullers,
Richard Wright, Paul and Jane Bowles. What a crowd! Certainly his domestic
situation by all reports was chaotic, with a kitchen full of unwashed plates
and utensils, and rooms piled high with books and papers. He is also part of
what today we would call the gay scene, with all the campery behaviour and
necessary special social codes that went with that territory. It is an adult
world and a long way from England. He encourages in others the breaking of
restraints that harm and limit creativity or that bring psychological damage.
He goes to Ischia in the Mediterranean to extend this frantic playful existence
of sensuality and literary effervescence.
Auden’s take on Christian teaching and practice can be seen everywhere
in his work. ‘Horae Canonicae’ is one of the most overt testaments to his
beliefs. Auden knew that the canonical hours are explicit in the arrangement of
The Book of Common Prayer, yet his title reminds us that we are talking about
the Breviary of the Divine Office, used in its Latin form since at least the
time of St. Benedict (6th cent.). By the 1950s Auden needs more than ever
routine and stability in order to get the work done. He starts making
pronouncements about how “Bohemia won’t do, my dear.” By the time he leaves
Ischia to buy a house in the Austrian town of Kirchstetten near Vienna, he has
established a daily life that is even more time-conscious than a Benedictine’s.
So that in Auden, both in the life and the work, we must be aware in him of
strong but contradictory forces: between bohemianism on the one hand and
bourgeois domesticity on the other; between the desire to shock and surprise on
one side and the desire for respectability and general social acceptance on the
other; between what is counter-cultural and original even dangerous on the one
hand and what is culturally normative, traditional and even cosy on the other
hand.
The poems in ‘Horae Canonicae’ are about ordering the day. They
also state that in any day we are both alone and together in the process of
living. Dailiness has become accepted, even dailiness that must of very
necessity involve the witness to sacrifice and loss. Auden recognises in the
Hours of the Benedictines the structure that humans must put on their existence
to make it liveable and meaningful.
5. Auden in old age
In the last ten years or so of his life we see a deepening of what for Auden is a matter of supreme interest: we are all individual humans, our own persons. He tries for completer expression of what it is to be human. Here I want to warn against the idea that this is just some effort at celebrating our ‘common humanity’. He is not interested in such platitudes. He is interested in how it is we are human and how we can, through our own wills, become less human or more human. He has learnt how easy it can be for others to become fascist, how easy it is for people not to question such things. He had to find another way. He keenly studies new discoveries – scientific, technological, psychological, neurological, literary – and asks, what does this mean for being human? The results are poetry.
Unpredictably, decades ago, You arrived
Among that unending cascade of creatures spewed
From Nature’s maw. A random event, says Science.
Random my bottom! A true miracle, say I,
For who is not certain that he was meant to be?
As You augmented and developed a profile,
I looked at Your looks askance. His architecture
Should have been much more imposing: I’ve been let down!
By now, though, I’ve gotten used to Your proportions
And, all things considered, I might have fared far worse.
When we read poetry we want to know what it means, but this is not the most important question. What we have to ask is, why was this written? Where is this coming from? How does it speak? How does it speak to me? The lines I have just quoted from ‘Talking to Myself’ enact a monologue the poet is having with his own body. With Auden I think a root cause of poetry is this desire to understand how God’s creatures love and understand themselves and the world. We can be sure he is not a Manichean: in another poem of this period he discusses with fascination all the microbes that his body keeps alive and that keep him alive. When he studies his ageing flesh he is fascinated by all the good that it can do, by the fact that each of us lives as a self inside this amazing human form.
If for Auden one of the main tasks in life is to love our neighbours as ourselves, then understanding better who our neighbours are is an important exercise. He wishes to share his findings with the rest of us.
In the last years Auden lives an increasingly lonely life. His lifelong partner Chester Kallman stays most of the time in Europe when Auden is in New York. Auden writes poems about the mice he befriends in his New York flat. For me, one of the signs of this isolation in the writing is the excited use of obscure English words that he fishes from the Oxford English Dictionary, which was in a permanent place before him in the room wherever he wrote poetry.
Every decade of the 20th century was one of great cultural change. Those biographers who write about Auden in the 1960s lived through it and choose to see him as out of step with the times, lost in the new world of personal freedom and excess. Whereas I think that Auden was a contemporary, a vital and important presence in the period. But curiously, when we turn to the main theme of this paper it’s a mixed story.
Liturgical change was a significant part of church life in the 1960s, something Auden found difficult to cope with. Although he actually assisted in an advisory capacity with some of the changes to wording at his own church of St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, he at the end started going to the Greek Orthodox Church in New York because he said that he wanted a liturgy that was "timeless". It needs to be understood, this doesn’t mean Auden left the Anglican Church, only that his need for a traditional worship that he could relate to was a huge incentive: this is something we have seen in Auden since he was a child. Late in his life he would say, "I like to think that if I hadn’t been a poet, I might have become an Anglican bishop – politically liberal, I hope; theologically and liturgically conservative, I know."
6. What is poetry?
Lazy literati love to quote one of Auden’s most famous lines: ‘Poetry
makes nothing happen.’ I say ‘lazy literati’ because the line is used as an
excuse for not having much to do with poetry, it’s dismissive, it sees this
whole business as peripheral to the main deal, whatever that is. The thinking goes
that if Auden thinks that poetry makes nothing happen, then who are we to
argue? Also, it sounds impressive and is no doubt a good starter for seminars
and book clubs. But this is not what Auden meant. The line is from an elegy to W. B. Yeats and is saying that no matter what we do about poetry "Ireland has her madness and her weather still," in other words Yeats’s work has not changed certain social problems or climatic conditions, which we will always have. The line is written after his experience of the Spanish Civil War. Englishmen like Auden went to Spain in the belief that their words and actions really could make a difference to the course of events. They didn’t. The line itself expresses not so much disillusion at that expectation as realism about how poetry can possibly hope to influence politics. Readings of this line proliferate. There is a metaphysical reading of the line: poetry is an affirmation of the internalising strength of poetry: it can delineate the soul. It is a koan: poetry makes ‘nothing’ happen. The koan itself may become ironical, as we read the decades of proliferation of readings of this line and ask mockingly, poetry makes nothing happen? The lazy literati don’t quote the other definitions in the verse:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making, where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
I like the idea of a poem flowing south down the page, though clearly Auden also means that poetry (indeed all our important words) are native and come to life as they move from one place to the next and that we will have them, whatever. Though we’re told they make nothing happen, they are a way of happening, they meet a need, they live inside those who take them up and remember. Poetry is a mouth, that is our individual speech, which is carried on and effects meaning.
In the Yeats elegy Auden is questioning the absolute or hallowed or romantic ideas about the poet that existed at the time and that were epitomised in the public idolising of Yeats himself, an idolising that Yeats did little to deter. I would argue that this ironic subversion inside the elegy is Christian, it attacks the self-importance of the poet. While honouring the artistic process and the value of art, Auden undermines the concept of poetry as some absolute. He is also saying to himself and others, who cares about poetry? What is its importance? The larger indifference of the public to poetry, whether in England or America, is a matter about which Auden is intensely aware.
It is hard today to recall that in that time there were those who argued for poetry as a means to personal salvation, and that it offered alternative visions or answers to the pragmatic problems of existence, including political and economic problems. Auden wouldn’t have any of this. For him, individual salvation is a very important question, but one quite separate from Works, including the Works of the creative human. He is already heading towards faith as an explanation for how to live. Also, although he spends a lifetime writing poetry about economics and politics, he has removed himself from those who extol literature as a game-changer; for him this is ultimately delusory.
This role for the poet is described, again not without irony, in that incredible poem ‘In praise of limestone’:
The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth.
We notice here that the poet is in an inescapable bind with his poem and that he is making myths or fictions even as he tries to deny them.
And in conclusion, without comment, here are some lines from ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’ (we don’t need to ask who is he giving thanks to) and the poem ‘The Cave of Making’, words about the room where we create things like poems, dedicated to his friend Louis MacNeice:
Who would, for preference,
be a bard in an oral culture,
obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy
of some beefy illiterate burner,
giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a
Baroque prince, expected,
like his dwarf, to amuse? After all, it’s rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status-trophy by rising executives,
cannot be ‘done’ like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored: our handful
of clients at least can rune.
Thank you for this thoughtful reading.
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