THE POET YOUNG
By DENIS DONOGHUE
EARLY AUDEN By Edward Mendelson. 407 pp. New York:
The Viking Press. $20.
August 9, 1981
THE life of W.H. Auden is
conveniently divisible into two unequal parts. Early Auden, born in York in
1907, went to school and college in England and stayed there, except for
frequent travels, till Jan. 19, 1939, when he sailed for New York. Late Auden
made himself a New Yorker if not entirely an American: He liked to keep up his
relation to Europe by spending some months of the year in places like Ischia,
and he returned to Oxford in his last few years, but he remained a New Yorker
on principle. He died in 1974.
Auden's decision to leave
England and settle in America caused a flurry among his English friends. It was
easy to represent his departure as a run for safety from war and bombs, which
he and nearly everybody knew were inevitable. In January 1938 Auden went with
Christopher Isherwood to China and Japan. They spent three months there and
came back through Canada and America. In New York they decided that America
would be their next place. Isherwood thought of an extended stay, short of
permanence, but Auden felt that the move should have such permanence as the
human condition would allow. But the decision had been made, by intention if
not yet in effect, in 1936. Auden was lonely and rather miserable. He
identified England with the drab 30's, the ''low dishonest decade'' he attacked
in the poem ''September 1, 1939.'' Disillusioned by his brief experience of the
Spanish Civil War, he thought Europe a hopeless mess. His writings during those
years were doom-laden and noisy, a combination many of his English friends
found tiresome. In 1938, William Empson parodied him in the poem ''Just a Smack
at Auden,'' presenting him as a poseur, a dandy of the apocalypse: Shall I turn
a sire, boys? Shall I choose a friend? The fat is in the pyre, boys, waiting
for the end. It was time to be up and go.
Edward Mendelson's book is
a history and interpretation of Auden's writings during the years 1927-39. It
is not a biography. There was a plan, a few years ago, that he and Stephen
Spender would write the authorized life of Auden, but the difficulties raised
by considerations of delicacy and tact proved insurmountable. Many of Auden's
lovers are living unruffled lives, some of them enjoying marital satisfaction.
It would be a wretched business to disturb them. So the biographical plan has
been dropped. Professor Mendelson has now directed his attention to the
writings, the poems, plays and essays which he edited and published in 1977 as
''The English Auden.'' These are, mainly, ''Paid on Both Sides'' (1928), ''The
Orators'' (1932), ''The Dance of Death'' (1933), ''The Dog Beneath the Skin''
(1936), ''Letter to Lord Byron'' and ''The Ascent of F6'' (both 1936),
''Letters from Ice
It is an odd book.
Professor Mendelson claims that Auden ''became the most inclusive poet of the
twentieth century, its most technically skilled, and its most truthful.'' The
claim is loosely worded: Before it could make sense, virtually every adjective
would have to be expounded, the necessary qualifications taken into account,
judicious comparisons made. But in any case the claim is effectively refuted by
the book itself. The dominant impression enforced by Professor Mendelson is
that Auden's moral and intellectual vanity kept him at every moment of his
early life excited and bewildered, able to talk loud but not to think straight.
Going through the early poems and plays, Professor Mendelson finds, mostly,
incoherence, contradiction, extravagance. Indeed, while he mocks those critics
who thought of Auden as a permanent undergraduate, a glittering adolescent, he
goes far toward proving them right. F.R. Leavis spoke of Auden achieving his
early success in a context ''in which the natural appetite for kudos is not
chastened by contact with mature standards, and in which fixed immaturity can
take itself for something else.'' Professor Mendelson adverts to this
assessment, without quoting it, but his account of Early Auden has the effect
of confirming it.
In fact, he has little good
to say about Early Auden. Most of his commentaries are impatient with what he
regards as Auden's pretention. Virtually nothing elicits his approval or stirs
him to warmth, except for ''A Summer Night'' (1933), a poem whose values were
gained only to be lost again before the ink was dry. At one point Professor Mendelson
refers with capitalized irony to ''critics for whom the young Auden is the One
True Auden,'' and he makes it clear that he is not among them. But there is
more, if not more good, to be said about the early Auden. His imagery has not
worn well: Helmeted airmen, spies, groups of initiates crossing frontiers with
doubtful passports, these have receded into the early cinema, Garboland, the
stuff of revivals on Bleecker St. Auden did a lot of loose thinking under the
guise of a meditation on History: For a man who wrote so much about this
abstraction, his span of attention was remarkably short; he was mostly to be
found twitching from one enthusiasm to another. Momentary vibrations were
enthralling to him, so long as they were intense. He expressed passing opinions
with the assertiveness, but not the authority, of convictions. When people are
both unhappy and discerning, as Kenneth Burke has said, they tend to believe
that their unhappiness is derived from their discernment. So in Auden's early
poems and plays; but the belief did not assure him that he would make for
himself a future consistent with his merit. Nevertheless, Auden's early work is
more forceful than Professor Mendelson's account of it suggests. Bewildered as
he often was, and unduly receptive to casual notions, he had a voice distinct
from the other fainter voices which issued from much the same experiences.
Empsom has praised Auden's ''curl of the lip,'' and it is worth a critic's
while to ask how the lip got curled and what its curl meant. Besides, years
were not wasted which yielded such poems as ''This Lunar Beauty,'' ''That Night
When Joy Began,'' ''What Siren Zooming,'' ''Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love,''
'Miss Gee,'' ''The Watershed,'' ''Paysage Moralise'' and ''A Summer Night.''
The plays are interesting because they were written by the author of these
poems, but not for any other reason.
Professor Mendelson is
informative on the early influences: mainly T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Freud, John
Layard, Homer Lane, D.H. Lawrence, the other Lawrence (T.E.), Trigant Burrow,
Marx and Edward Upward. But these are standard issues by now. Sometimes he gets
himself into such a hurry that he gets things wrong. A glance at Eliot's
Criterion or at Perry Meisel's ''Twentieth Century Views on Freud'' would have
saved him from the error of saying that ''Auden was the first imaginative
writer in English to take Freud seriously -Lawrence dismissed him, Joyce
derided him, everyone else ignored him.'' He makes a fuss about Auden's theory
of the origin of language, but it is clear that the theory was Malinowski's
rather than Auden's. These lapses issue, I think, from Professor Mendelson's
impatience: He is anxious to move along to what really engages him, Later
Auden. The implication of the present book is that the best thing about Early
Auden was that he eventually thought straight enough to make himself Later
Auden.
The change began, for
Professor Mendelson, in the months between Auden's final decision to leave
England, July 1938, and his departure for New York in January 1939. During that
period, Professor Mendelson says in an arresting sentence, Auden ''sought
poetic subjects in knowledge that he could share, rather than in knowledge that
set him apart.'' At this point Professor Mendelson's book is nearly finished, but
the best pages in it are the last; nothing becomes him so much as the warmth
with which he points beyond this book to his next, a study of Later Auden. If
it takes up where the vivacity of these last pages leaves off, it will be
splendid. At the end, Professor Mendelson gives what I assume is the plot of
the next volume:
''Without pomp or melodrama
Auden has made the one discovery that can release him from his private island.
All his daring splendid projects for changes of heart and history led to
contradiction and defeat. But his small private hopes, which he had scarcely
noticed, brought lasting rewards. For a young poet, praised by the crowd and
conscious of his genius, this realization was both unsettling and exhilarating:
if he was not so special as he hoped, then he need not be so isolated as he
feared.''
Well said. There is clearly
a relation between Auden's later styles and the decision to settle for minor
recognitions in the absence of a grand unity. The later work has much to do
with the middle style, music, opera, Christianity, the gratifications of
weather and landscape. But these are matters for another book, Professor
Mendelson's next.
Denis Donoghue is the Henry James Professor of
Letters at New York University. His most recent book is ''FerociousAlphabets.''
Land'' (1937), ''On the Frontier'' (1938) and ' Journey To A War (1939)
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