AUDEN THE PARADOXICAL

Press, 14 November 1981, Page 17

AUDEN THE PARADOXICAL

W. H. Auden: A Biography. By Humphrey Carpenter. Allen and Unwin, 1981. 455 pp. Bibliography, notes, and index. $41.95. (Reviewed by John Goulter) Before his death in 1973, W. H. Auden asked that his friends should burn any of his letters they might have kept. His intention was, he said, to make a biography impossible. For biographies of writers are “always superfluous and usually in bad taste.” the work of "gossip writers and voyeurs calling themselves scholars."

Only a few followed his request, and in the years since his death numerous memoirs of Auden have appeared in books and journals, along with two major biographical works. Now there is a third account of the poet's life, and for all the world it looks like the “authorised biography.” With the permission of Auden's Estate, it draws fully on previously unpublished letters and manuscripts and can claim to be the definitive life.

If Humphrey Carpenter and Auden’s executors seem cavalier in ignoring the poet's wish, they take in their defence Auden’s own frequent contradictions of the pronouncements he was prone to make. He was often enthusiastic about various biographies of writers and, towards the end of his life, disarmingly forthright in his personal comments to journalists. In the words of his literary executor. Edward Mendelson, himself the author of a recent account of the young Auden, the no-biography rule was "flexible enough to be bent backwards.” Carpenter's book reveals a highly paradoxical figure: onC w'ho by his own admission felt that his early years under his mother's influence had much to do with his later “queerness," but who resolutely looked back on a wonderfully happy childhood: one who passed through an inordinantly long succession of phases and ideologies before coming out of a protracted adolescence and finding his own bearings, and all the while was being lionised as the spokesman and figurehead of his generation; one who insisted that the modern, post-Romantic poet should look like a stock broker, but who for most of his life could have passed more easily for a dishevelled and eccentric clergyman. Such a listing could be nearly endless. It is hard not to think sometimes that there were at least two Audens. One, for a good part of the 1930 s was a contented and apparently successful provincial public school master. But the other Auden was living out the “anger and fear” of a time he later put the definitive stamp on as a “low dishonest decade.”

His brush with the politics of that decade, with a vague and always ambiguous Marxism and a short-lived attempt to be involved in the Spanish Civil War, never seems to have been quite satisfactory, to Auden or his readers. Carpenter has little to add to what is already known of Auden’s few weeks in Spain which had promised, for him and many other young English liberals, to be a sort' of showdown for the forces of democracy against fascism. Auden reamined largely silent about his disillusionments there, apparently because he felt that his comments might have weakened the Republican cause, flawed as it was. He did however express his horror at the atrocities he saw the Republicans commit against clergy — a strange observation from an atheist Marxist, though his atheism was as vague as his Marxism.

It seems right to learn that the classic poem he did make from the experience, “Spain," was written nowhere near the Aragon Front, but back in the bourgeois comfort of the Lake District cottage his parents owned. He later suppressed that poem, along with others from the period, as dishonest and posed, but it was too late; they had already entered the literature. And then there was China, under the Japanese invasion. Commissioned to write a travelogue, Auden hoped for a “successful" war after his failure in Spain. “We’ll have a war all of our very own," Auden quipped as he and Christopher Isherwood were preparing to set out. The effect on Auden seems to have been even more profound than Spain, or at least he felt more free to talk about it. “War." he later wrote, "is. bombing a disused arsenal, missing it and killing a few old women . . . War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance."

But there were still two Audens. One, in Isherwood's account, was popping about like a public schoolboy, sure he could not be hurt "because Nanny would never allow it.” and sulking about not getting near enough to the action: “Why can’t they SHOOT? It’s not nearly LOUD enough." The other Auden was the writer of the fine Sonnets from China, probably his best poetic journalism: For we have seen a myriad faces Ecstatic from one lie. And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now. Nanking. Dachau. After China there was America, an escape from stultifying England. “The English have a greater talent than any other people for creating an agreeable family life; that is why it is such a threat to their intellectual life. If the atmosphere were not so charming it would be less of a temptation." America would be vast, anonymous, hard, "vibrating with the tension of the nervous New World, aggressively flaunting its rude steel nudity," as Isherwood recalled of their arrival in New York on the coldest day of the winter so far in January. 1939. But by the end of 1939 Auden had entered the firmest domestic commitment of his life. He was in love and "married" to the young undergraduate blonde Chester Kailman. The relationship, which Carpenter recounts in some detail, seemed to promise for Auden the emotional security lacking in his previous affairs. Eventually the two were sexually estranged, a fact which deeply hurt Auden, but they remained friends with the poet supporting and promoting the

younger writer for the rest of their life which, on and off. was together, but chaste.

The American years show Auden returning to the Christianity of his childhood. Never bothered by the moral constraints it might have placed on his sexual bias, he found in religion at last "a vision that objectifies." It was an ideology like the rest, but it w-orked and so he took to disappearing from his squalid New York pad for a couple of hours each Sunday morning to attend the nearby Episcopalian church. Carpenter shows Auden becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his private life and anxious to the point of neurosis about his future security. While becoming more prolific, if anything, in his writing, he was no longer the golden boy of the critics, and they were complaining about the "cosiness" of his poetry, its failure to deliver the easy rhetoric of earlier days. There were ’ moments of domestic contentment, which seems to be the happiness he most aspired to in spite of leaving England to escape it, and even visions of what he felt was true agape, but Carpenter's biography shows a series of near misses rather than unqualified successes in Auden's later life.

Quite suddenly in these pages he becomes an old man. By the 1950 s Igor Stravinsky was commenting on the wrinkles covering his face: “Quite soon we’ll have to smooth him out to see who it is.” There were proposals of marriage to women who might look after him in his last years. (Earlier, there had been a remarkably successful heterosexual love affair, but in spite of his apparent compatability with the lad.v. he later told a friend. "I tried to have an affair with a woman, but it was a great mistake. It was a sin.") To his friends Auden had become a lonely and doctrinaire old bachelor, often embarrassing them with his less than savoury personal habits and tasteless conversational gambits. He had become, in fact, the "pink old liberal” he had foreseen in the 19305, with a touch of the arch-conservative. When his church abandoned the Book of Common Prayer in favour of the new liturgy, he attempted to tolerate it, but eventually gave up and took to attending a Greek Orthodox church where he could hear the Mass in a language that was timeless. And on the Gay Rights Movement: “I’m no advocate of the purely Uranian society. I mean, I certainly don’t want to live only with queers." Carpenter’s book is a model of contemporary biography; ■ cool, comprehensive, and neither fawning nor apologetic about its subject. It will stand well alongside the likes of Noel Stock on Pound, or Constantine Fitz Gibbon on Dylan Thomas. It provides the sharpest of documentary lenses with wnich to view Auden’s life, ruthlessly but never quite pruriently hounding its subject down. The coyest sentence in the book comes at the end of a long list of acknowledgements where Carpenter thanks Auden himself for living a life that was so pleasurable to write about. That was a small enough enthusiasm after a massive book which is resolutely dispassionate in recording a confused and chaotic life, and leaves it firmly in the reader's hands to attempt any evaluation of the standing of the man who was Wystan Auden. In the end it is hard to imagine that Auden would object too strongly to the book: if Carpenter had not written the definitive life, somebody else no doubt would have, and probably not as well.