Fuller, John - A Reader's Guide To W.H. Auden - 1970 [PDF]

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A Reader's Guide toW. H. Auden John Fuller

THAMES AND HUDSON · LONDON

FOR KATE AND ROY

© JOHN FULLER 1970 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Fakenham and Reading 500 14015 4 clothbound 500 15006 0 paperbound

Contents 7

FOREWORD

Part One

THE EARLY POETRY

1 Paid on Both Sides 2 Poems 1927-1932 3 The Orators Part Two 4 5

THE MID-THIRTIES

77 99

The Plays Poems 1933-1938 Part Three

13 30 51

THE LONG POEMS

6 New Year Letter 7 For the Time Being 8 The Sea and the Mirror 9 Poems 1939-1947 10 The Age of Anxiety

131 148 157 166 188

Part Four 11 12 13 14

LATER POEMS

The Libretti Poems 1948-1957 About the House Some Poems Outside the Canon

205 212 240 251

NOTES

262

BIBLIOGRAPHY

269

INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

271

GENERAL INDEX

283

Errata On p. 269, at the foot of the page, please read as follows:

NYL FTB

The Double Man (New York, 1941), known in England as New Year Letter For the Time Being (New York, 1944)

In the General Index, entries referring to the Notes (pp. 262-8) are one page out: thus for p. 265, please read p. 264.

Foreword This book is intended to serve primarily as a commentary on Auden's poetry and drama, taken in their chronological sequence. My main concern has been to help the reader with difficult passages and to trace some of the sources and allusions, since despite the now happily increasing volume of Auden criticism, there is still nothing quite as systematic or as detailed as the reader would like. I have omitted unpublished and uncollected poems, translations, prose, radio scripts, and so on. But I believe that there is an advantage to be gained from concentrating on Auden's central reuvre: I have been able to give the space due to the works that the reader will wish to know most about, and I have been able to arrange the volume in such a way that it may conveniently be read in company with the Collected Shorter Poems (1966) and the Collected Longer Poems (1968).1 This simplification will, I hope, increase the book's usefulness. Auden's work falls into fairly well-defined periods, and I have followed his own four-part division of the 1966 Collected Shorter Poems in my own arrangement, too. The period 1927-32 covers his last year in Oxford, the Berlin visit and the years he spent teaching in Scotland (where The Orators was written). The period 1933-38 sees him teaching in Gloucestershire, working in films and in the theatre, and travelling in Belgium, Iceland, Spain and China. The years 1939-47 are the New York period, when he wrote the four long poems; he emigrated before the outbreak of war and became an American citizen in 1946. From 1948 to 1957 he began to spend

8

W. H. AUDEN

the summers in Ischia, and this is the time of his greatest activity in opera and criticism. In 1957 he moved to Austria, and from 1956 to 1961 was Professor ofPoetry at Oxford. I have been concerned on the whole to acknowledge Auden's own estimate of his work, and thus to use the latest editions, for two reasons: it is handier for his readers (which is the main point, after all), and it gives Auden some overdue credit for knowing what he is doing. This is not to say that I am not sometimes disturbed by revisions and omissions (and I have felt it necessary to include a chapter on some of the famous poems at present omitted from the canon), but I do feel that Auden criticism has suffered from excessive ideological and bibliographical niggling, and that the time has come to call a slight halt. Auden's evolution has amply displayed his many talents. He has been a brilliant undergraduate digesting Eliot and Stein; an inventive mouthpiece of the post-Freudians; a social prophet; a religious synthesizer; an aphoristic critic; and so on. For breadth, wisdom, myth, moral power and sheer technical excitement, he is for me the greatest living poet writing in English. Many would share this view, but there is no doubt that he has been under fire for a variety of reasons, and his reputation even today is uncertain. Auden is frighteningly at ease with ideas, and likes occasionally to both tease and hector his readers. He is not often emotionally demonstrative in his poetry, and is one of the most challengingly adroit versifiers there has ever been. He has been his own kind of Lawrentian, his own kind of Marxist and his own kind of Anglican. He left England for good on the eve of the Second World War. One could multiply such reasons for his alienating certain sectors of the reading public, and some of the reasons would probably not have much to do with poetry. But only a great and unignorable poet could infuriate in ways like these, and Auden is big enough to disappoint or perplex those who have expected him to stand still and perpetuate a stance. The main accusation is that Auden lost his key subject and his emotional impetus when war at last broke out in 1939. This widely held view is considered to be almost biographically self-evident. If Auden had been a mere journalist of political doom, this would be true; but in fact his treatment of events and their implications goes

FOREWORD

9

deeper than this. I hope I have shown how th~ major works of the 'forties are, among other things, ambitious analyses of human weakness; and I hope I have shown how his work since then has built constructively upon such basic analyses a gentle and humane quest for man's positive, if limited, ideals in life. Auden's career is never quite the retreat it is accused of being: few, I agree, actually prefer the later work, but it is surprising, in the face of Auden's developing moral and artistic integrity, that this fact should so frequently issue ' in rebukes. Auden's great theme is the integration of life, and his progress from Saga to High Table centres on this. Indeed, the progress itself is part of its meaning, since Auden has had to exorcize in his myth of the failed Leader his inherited notion of the artist as hero. This notion is a humanist one, and humanism, as Auden endlessly pointed out, has no resources against a Hitler. Thus he created for himself a viable Christian system. His Christianity (or something like it) can be seen with hindsight to be lurking in a good deal of the very early work. Auden's mind is not the scavenging one that it superficially appears to be. H~ is someone who needs to be fully satisfied at any time of what he feels to be the truth, and thus many apparent contortions are giant simplifications viewed from a rather unexpected angle. In 1933, a great year for discarded neo-Marxist work, a year in which Lawrence seems to have been put behind him, and a year evidently of some artistic turmoil and choice of direction, one might well have expected a more decisive move towards a religious position. But Auden's energies in the following half-dozen years were to a great degree technical: in ideas he stood fairly still. And this is what admirers of the ballad-and-cabaret Auden tend to like. We know it now to have been only a phase, just as the early oblique poetry of disappointed love was a phase, and the middle Rilkean period of historical analysis was a phase. Throughout the most popular period, Auden was trying intermittently to resolve the central problems raised by war as the prime example of man's fallible nature. When the first real approaches to the Christian position were made in a rather personal group of poems published in the Autumn 1939 issue of Southern Review (see pp. 169-71), this should not have seemed surprising. I

10

W. H. AUDEN

hope that my commentary will in general imply the continuity in Auden's thought throughout his career. I have provided a comprehensive index of poems, giving titles and first lines, and referring the reader to the main treatment of each poem in the text. This main treatment in the text includes details of publishing history, given in square brackets immediately after the title of the poem. These details are not comprehensive, but do indicate first publication, alternative titles, first collected appearance, and page references in the bulkier collected editions. The abbreviations used are explained in the first part of the Bibliography on p. 271. The second part of the Bibliography contains only a selection of useful Auden criticism. Nobody writing on Auden can fail to feel gratitude for the work of Monroe Spears and B. C. Bloomfield. I would particularly like to thank the latter for supplying me with some facts from the forthcoming second edition of his invaluable Auden Bibliography. For allowing me to quote from the works of W. H. Auden, I am grateful to the author himself, and to Messrs Faber and Faber, London, and Random House, New York, the publishers of the English and American editions, respectively. J.L.F.

Part One

THE EARLY POETRY

1 Paid on Both Sides 'I have sent you the new Criterion,' wrote T. S. Eliot to E. McKnight Kauffer, 'to ask you to read a verse play Paid on Both Sides, by a young man I know, which seems to me quite a brilliant piece of work .... This fellow is about the best poet that I have discovered in ~cveral years. '1 Interest in Auden's self-styled 'charade' was maintuined when it was reprinted with only one small excision in the Poems of the same year, and it earned a respectful analysis from William Empson in Experiment, No. 7 (1931). Paid on Both Sides was written in Berlin in 1928, and can be regarded jointly with Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes (1927) as a major influence on English poetic drama of the 'thirties. However, it owes little to Eliot's play. Paid, which derives from English sources like the Mummers' Play and uses dreams in the manner of contemporary