Mr. Auden & Miss God

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The New York Sun

M’ iss God” was W.H. Auden’s whimsical way of referring to the deity, a fact that you will not learn in Arthur Kirsch’s lopsided depiction of his character, “Auden and Christianity” (Yale University Press, 198 pages, $30). Mr. Kirsch marginalizes the poet’s irreverence and glosses over the mental deterioration that made his last years so painful for all concerned.


Brought up in the High Church (which also meant the High Camp) tradition, Auden was fond of ritual and ceremony; for him, religion was a branch of aesthetics rather than the other way around, as Mr. Kirsch supposes. His return to practicing Christianity in 1940 was strictly on his own terms. Mr. Kirsch records his objections to the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth (basically, that they deprived poor Mary of a sex life) and his unease about the historicity of the Resurrection. He saw the Crucifixion as, in Mr. Kirsch’s words, “a reenactment of the Fall by post-lapsarian men and women,” a tragic vision which undercut its redemptive nature.


Auden undoubtedly had a sense of the sacredness of life, especially physical life, and a sure grasp of the anti-dualistic implications of the doctrine of the Incarnation, but no one can read the moving letter he addressed to Chester Kallman in December 1941 – weeks after he had discovered Kallman’s unfaithfulness to him – without concluding that the supreme incarnation for him was his lover’s body: “Because it is through you that God has chosen to show me my beatitude, / As this morning I think of the Godhead, I think of you.” Auden’s creed, in short, was nothing if not idiosyncratic.


The major question for readers of Auden is not his orthodoxy or the degree to which his private life vindicated his beliefs, but whether the poetry he wrote as a result of holding them is any good. (Auden himself did not take this view; for him it was more important that a poet should write what he believed than what he thought worked artistically.) Mr. Kirsch, assuming Auden’s greatness as a poet, comments only lightly on the poems he quotes and never explains in detail just what it is that Auden did with words that seems to him so admirable. It is a critical cliche to say that Auden wrote better poetry before he went to America in 1939. Mr. Kirsch thinks this judgment stems from anti-religious prejudice since “the American Auden is emphatically a Christian Auden.” Perhaps, but what, really, is one to make of lines like these:


O Unicorn among the cedars, To whom no magic charm can lead us. (“New Year Letter”) already the mind begins to be vaguely aware Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought Of Lent and Good Friday. (“For the Time Being”)


The slackness and vagueness are embarrassing, as is the sub-Eliot musing of the sequence “Horae Canonicae”:


And I know that I am, here, not alone But with a world and rejoice Unvexed, for the will has still to claim This adjacent arm as my own. (“Prime”) The crowd sees only one thing (which only the crowd can see), an epiphany of that which does whatever is done. (“Sext”)


To write in this way is to show an incapacity to grasp thoughts concretely enough to render them in terms of imaginative power or rhythmic energy. The reader’s quarrel is not with Auden’s beliefs, which indeed remain nebulous, but with the inertia of the style. Mr. Kirsch’s most valuable chapter is on Auden’s criticism. Here, when he had something external to himself to react to, he was acute, even profound. His discussions of the sadness of the Homeric world, in which emotions are forever felt immediately but do not constitute a pattern of character development, of the superiority of marriage to mere romance as a literary subject, of the “worldliness” in “Antony and Cleopatra,” of the challenge thrown down to the Venetian world not by Shy lock’s race but by his unswerving seriousness, of Captain Ahab as a negative Don Quixote, are all things to be grateful for.


His essay on the Hal/Falstaff relationship in “Henry IV” shows a characteristic sentimentalizing weakness; he makes Falstaff into an eternal child, innocent and good, an absurd oversimplification; even less justifiably, Falstaff is made to symbolize Christian charity. His callous treatment of his recruits is misunderstood by Auden; he seems to think Falstaff’s description of them as “food for powder” is ironic and that he really valued them (Mr. Kirsch speaks of the “peculiar penetration” of the remark). I can see no warrant for this in the text – Falstaff admits that he has “led them where they are peppered” – and agree with William Empson that Auden’s religion warped his view here.


This point has a wider relevance. I suspect that Auden’s compulsive idealism about childhood stemmed from his guilt about his homosexuality (an unfashionable feeling nowadays), and that this, coupled with his quixotic commitment to the reprehensible Kallman, made him see not only his adult self but adulthood in general as tainted. The body of a pubertal boy, he wrote, will be “Hostile to his quest for truth” because the sexual impulse is independent of the “world of right and wrong” – a telling comment if ever there was one!


In a weak poem, “A Lullaby,” written in the year of his death, Auden pictures his aged body curled up in bed at night, freed from sexual torment. “The old Greeks got it all wrong,” he says, “Narcissus is an oldie,” falling in love with himself only when he no longer desired others. For all his lifelong struggle with the conflicting demands of flesh and spirit, Auden must have felt his flesh had badly let him down, yet the biographical evidence is that his spirit did, too, and that he ended in darkness.


Mr. Kirsch would like to think otherwise, but there may be more truth than is comfortable in the cruel epigram someone made: “Wystan doesn’t really love God, he just fancies Him.”


Mr. Dean is head of English at the Dragon School, Oxford.


The New York Sun

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