W.H. Auden: A Portrait of the Sage as a Slob

‘Auden’By Peter AckroydReaktion Books, 400 pagesThe English writer Peter Ackroyd, who has written biographies of William Blake, Charles Dickens, and Thomas More, now turns his attention to the poet Wystan Hugh Auden, as gifted a poet as ever ventured a verse. Mr. Ackroyd begins with that unusual first name. It comes from the Old English for “sanctuary stone.” As good an appellation as any for a wizard of words. Auden comes from the Icelandic, and could descend from aelfwine, or “elf-friend.”“The North,” Mr. Ackroyd writes of Auden, “became for him the principal point of the compass. It was the home of the sacred.” Long before the current prime minister was styled the “King of the North,” the York-born and Birmingham-raised Auden was its poet laureate. Auden’s terroir, though, was different from William Wordsworth’s Lake District. The later poet was drawn to abandoned mines, Anglo-Saxon crosses, and Norman ruins.Auden was born in 1907, too young for the Great War but in time for the heyday of Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. He attended several British “public” schools — “private” in American parlance — and studied English, indifferently, at Oxford. The poet T.S. Eliot was an early patron from his perch as a director of Faber & Faber. Auden’s “Poems,” 1930, contains what Mr. Ackroyd reckons “some of the most intriguing poetry of the new century.”Other early influences alongside Eliot included William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, and Thomas Hardy. Soon critics were hyping the emergence of an “Auden Group,” a loose constellation that included Auden himself as well as Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood. The last of those would be a collaborator and sometimes lover of Auden, whose homosexuality plays no small part in Mr. Ackroyd’s account.Mr. Ackroyd writes that Auden “displays a mastery of metric possibilities, whether it be Skeltonic couplet or Yeatsian trimeter, and rides on the rhythms of poets as diverse as Tennyson and Dickens.” A less starry eyed account is given by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who reports that Auden was a “sort of senior undergraduate, altogether delightful but his fingers are eaten to the bone with dirt and wet, like a preparatory schoolboy.”These contradictions structure “Auden” like an AB rhyme scheme. The poet was obsessive about timing, but lived in squalor and disorder. His verse was pristine, but he hardly ever showered. He could be extravagantly social, and loved collaboration, but also was afflicted by a bleak loneliness. Mr. Ackroyd writes that Auden “claimed to have written a poem in every known metre,” but even during his years of fame he lived in hovels without hot water.Like Eliot, Auden was a poet who straddled the Atlantic. British to his bones, he left London for New York as clouds gathered in 1939, a move that drew condemnation. In 1928, he had seen Weimar up close during a liberating — and libertine —year at Berlin. From Manhattan he wrote in “September 1, 1939” that “I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street/ Uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade.”The dive bar was also the setting for Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety,” a long poem in six parts that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Its title turned shorthand for an era. In 1945, he returned to Europe with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and became an American in 1946. He would eventually spend half the year on St. Marks Place and half in Europe, first in Italy and then Austria. His longtime romantic partner, Chester Kallman, was also a literary collaborator. Auden was gifted at elegies. Of Yeats he wrote “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all/ The parish of rich women, physical decay/ Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry/ Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,/ For poetry makes nothing happen.” He called Sigmund Freud “an important Jew who died in exile” and reckoned that “to us he is no more a person/ now but a whole climate of opinion.”Auden’s most anthologized poem could be “Musée des Beaux Arts,” from 1938. It begins with some of the most pitch perfect lines of the 20th century — “About suffering they were never wrong/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ Its human position.” It charts how the world ambles along notwithstanding “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.” Meanwhile, the “dogs go on with their doggy life.” In the 1930’s Auden married Erika Mann, the lesbian daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, to help her escape the Nazis. At the end of Auden’s life he was in such desperate straits — despite being a poet of worldwide acclaim — that he knocked on the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s door and proposed marriage. She refused. She writes “I don’t know what to do. When he left he was completely drunk, staggering into the elevator. I did not go with him.”

W.H. Auden: A Portrait of the Sage as a Slob

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