quarta-feira, 15 de agosto de 2012

The Poet Himself By PAUL FUSSELL


The Poet Himself
By PAUL FUSSELL

W.H.AUDEN A Biography By Humphrey Carpenter.
Illustrated. 495 pp.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $15.95.

WITH Stephen Spender's ''W.H. Auden: A Tribute,'' Charles Osborne's''W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet'' and Edward Mendelson's recent ''Early Auden,'' it's clear that Auden has been superbly served by memory and criticism. This new full biography by Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote the life of J.R.R. Tolkien a few years back, is the best yet, so interesting, indeed, that it may have the effect of shifting attention from Auden's poems to his character and personality.
More people may soon be enjoying anecdotes about Auden than reading his work. In that respect, as a literary character he may come to resemble Samuel Johnson. And our fascination with his life, his sex life aside, arises from a characteristic he shares not just with Johnson but with the subjects of most rereadable biographies: his contradictoriness. Auden was a moralist who drank too much, a homosexual who thought homosexuality wicked, a subversive who chose to write in pedantically traditional verse forms, an eccentric opposed to the romantic theory of personality, a man obsessively punctual, sartorially sloppy. As a literary subject he is a gift to a biographer, a walking illustration, like Johnson, of Montaigne's observation: ''We are ... double in ourselves, so that we believe what we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.'' ''The Double Man'' is one of Auden's book titles. Limestone he singled out for praise in a poem because, as Mr. Carpenter notes, it ''produces a landscape which is as inconsistent and secret as the human personality.'' Auden's shifting and often inconsistent dogmatisms (''No gentleman can fail to admire Bellini'') are, like Johnson's, those of the orator who must constantly say interesting things in public.
As a personality, Auden is a type of manic schoolmaster, and one of the merits of Mr. Carpenter's biography is its emphasis on Auden's essential career, that of teacher. He taught at British boys' schools and the University of Michigan and the New School for Social Research and Swarthmore, always conveying the impression that he was brilliantly deranged, with his bitten fingernails and nonstop smoking. (Louis MacNeice said of him, ''Everything he touches turns to cigarettes.'') From one classroom to another he carried with him the tone of the math mnemonic he'd had to memorize as a child: Minus times Minus equals Plus; The reason for this we need not discuss.
One of his Swarthmore examinations in Elizabethan literature contained this question: ''Explain why the devil is (a) sad and (b) honest.'' One student remembers: ''Completely unconventional, striding about in a large black Flemish hat, waving an umbrella, he entranced us with his eccentricity, tireless energy and sense of fun. We called him Uncle Wiz.'' In many ways he remained a grown-up clever schoolboy anxious to instruct, and the weaknesses in his work, as T.S.Eliot observed, are often the result of his impulse to teach at all costs. ''One tires,'' said Eliot, ''of having things explained and being preached at.''
Auden suffered two periods of black disillusion which deeply affected his life and beliefs. One was his experience of the Spanish Civil War, where, instead of being welcomed as a liberal ready to do his bit for the success of the Republican cause by driving an ambulance, he was scorned and ignored because he didn't happen to be a member of the Communist Party. In Spain he first experienced the totalitarianism of the left, and the first stirrings of his later return to religion can be traced to his unexpected distress at finding the churches in Barcelona vandalized or blown up and the clergy systematically maltreated. The second blow to his illusions was the flagrant infidelity of Chester Kallman, with whom Auden was sure he could establish a lifelong cozy marriage. Kallman's violationof faith was a profound shock to Auden - he had worn a wedding ring to indicate his understanding of the relationship - and he went so far as to contemplate murdering Kallman's lover. He and Kallman finally lived together again, until the end, but without passion, and Auden settled into a state of expecting life (and poetry) to provide not joy and excitement but mild routine satis faction. Mr. Carpenter argues loyally that Auden's later poetry show s no decline, but he's not persuasive, and it takes a lot of effort to promote the later simplicities and whimsies to the status of such early poems as, say, ''In Memory of W.B. Yeats.''
But trying to appraise Auden's status as a major poet is tricky, for he arrived at a time in literary history that represented the dying phase of the 19th-century convention that a major poet, like Wordsworth or Rilke or Yeats or Eliot, should have some great ''philosophic '' message to convey. Auden was the harbinger of the more personal poetry of Robert Lowell and James Merrill and Philip Larkin, and his performance, especially when he's drawn in the direction of Noel Coward or Cole Porter (or toward Joe Orton in the plays he wrote with Christopher Isherwood), may indicate less about his poetic power than about his sensitivity to the historical moment he lived in. He remains a hero of technique and a wonderfully receptive can vasser of modern possibilities rather than a delineator of a compelling new consciousness.
Auden said he didn't want his biography written and exhorted correspondents to burn his letters. Most had better sense and installed them in libraries instead. Mr. Carpenter is careful to point out that this is not an ''authorized biography,'' in the sense that it was not written at the behest of Auden's executors. But it is as like an authorized one as we'll probably get for some time, for Mr. Carpenter has worked closely with Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, and it's obvious that nothing unauthenticated by Mendelson appears here. This includes all the sexual details, profuse and juicy enough to guarantee this book a wide following among those who normally never read literary biography. For this audience Mr. Carpenter is careful to explain what haiku and sestina and syllabic meter mean and to provide little middlebrow kickers like ''the French poet St-John Perse.''
Carpenter is sure to be abused for the audacity of some of these sexual revelations, but I think them harmless. They follow naturally from his old-fashioned assumption that the details of a writer's experience are likely to be reflected in the details of his work, and he has done an admirable job of identifying various of Auden's loves associated with many of the poems. If not terribly sophisticated critically (the reader can go to Joseph Mendelson's ''Early Auden'' for fine criticism), Carpenter's biography is pleasantly unpretentious, written in a transparent style that serves its subject and never invites the reader to pause to admire the biographer. The book grows especially delightful once Mr. Carpenter gets Auden to America, where he is exhibited as a type of the clumsy stranger avid to adapt, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. And curiously, the more dilute and sentimental Auden's poetry grows, the more interesting he seems as a person, which means the more inconsistent his behavior becomes. But the whole book is fascinating, wonderfully readable, funny and touching at once. If it makes no new friends for Auden's poetry, it will make many for the man.
Paul Fussell's most recent book is ''Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars.'' A collection of his essays will be published next year.

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