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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