The Leader of the Gang

By Paul Gray

W.H. AUDEN: THE LIFE OF A POET by Charles Osborne Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 336 pages; $17.95

Poet W.H. Auden despised invasions of privacy and public self-revelations. "Literary confessors," he once wrote, "are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books." He argued repeatedly that a writer's private correspondence should stay that way and urged friends to destroy his letters to them. At the same time, employing his poetic license, he reveled in scandal, luxuriated in gossip. "Who," he asked BBC listeners during the 1930s, "would rather learn the facts of Augustus' imperial policy than discover that he had spots on his stomach? No one."

In spite of his first principle, Auden would probably have grudgingly liked this book. Biographer Charles Osborne, who knew the poet in his last years, glides easily over the surface of Auden's life. He slows down only for amusing anecdotes, witty remarks (chiefly Auden's) and occasional but discreet lists of who was sleeping with whom. A few of the subject's stomach spots are here, to be sure, but Osborne makes most of them look like beauty marks.

This sunny approach is largely justified by the facts. "I've had an exceptionally lucky life," Auden said some four years before his death in 1973, and indeed it seemed to be. He enjoyed those rarest experiences in English literature, a happy childhood and a pleasant public school education. At Oxford in the '20s he made some impressive lifelong friends and acolytes: Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis. A Cambridge graduate named Christopher Isherwood also joined what became known as the Auden Gang. The publication of Poems (1930) made Auden famous at 23.

Here was an unmistakably new and distinctive voice, conversant with Freud and Marx, sharply rhythmic and harshly prophetic: "Seekers after happiness, all who follow/ The convolutions of your simple wish,/ It is later than you think ..." Since he had no money of his own, Auden simply let his pen for hire, and it was one of the fastest in the West. His poetry continued to flow, but so did documentary scripts, radio plays, librettos, travel books, speeches, essays. Cyril Connolly marveled: "It is as if he worked under the influence of some mysterious drug, which gives him a private vision, a mastery of form, and of vocabulary."

Although he charted the symptoms of the Age of Anxiety, Auden never seemed to have more than a mild case. His loss of faith in the Anglicanism of his childhood, his later disillusionment with Communism, his conversion back to Christianity were accomplished with no public hand wringing and left no visible scars. His emigration to the U.S. in 1939 raised charges that he had cravenly abandoned England's sinking ship; he stoically endured the abuse.

Similarly, the discovery of his homosexuality was apparently less than traumatic. He gave prudent but liberal rein to his preference, fortunate that his famous presence was sure to attract admiring or ambitious young men.

His habits even left him free to perform a good deed; he married Thomas Mann's daughter Erika in order to get her out of Nazi Germany and safely under the protection of British citizenship. Auden later enlisted E.M. Forster in a campaign to persuade other homosexuals to perform such rescues.

Still, signs of inner strain were there: the chain-smoking, the use of drugs to get going in the morning and to stop at night, the increasingly heavy drinking. His remarkable face became a relief map of a ravaged land; Auden said he looked "like a wedding cake left out in the rain." Osborne does not flinch from presenting such evidence, but neither does he seem to know what to do with it: "On the Atlantic crossing back to England, he was uncharacteristically miserable, and on one occasion burst into tears, confessing to Isherwood that he could never find anyone to love him and that he believed himself to be a sexual failure. Arriving in London on 17 July, they went that evening to the theater."

Auden's shipboard squall may have been uncharacteristic, but it should clearly be given more biographical weight than his social calendar. Yet Auden's reticence about himself may hamper all potential biographers. To his lasting credit, he believed that the dark demons could be hedged in by civility, and he acted on this belief: "A suffering, a weakness, which cannot be expressed as an aphorism should not be mentioned." His love poem "Lullaby" is beautiful and moving precisely because of its reasoned equivocations, its rational tethers on emotion:

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.

"You were silly like us," Auden wrote of Irish Poet William Butler Yeats, but the truth is that Yeats was sillier, more willing to appear foolish and embrace mumbo jumbo in service to his art. Auden's way was very different, circumspect; his poetry achieved greatness but never reached out for Yeatsian grandeur. He wrote:

"The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me."

Osborne captures the second image but not the first; the poses are here, but the model remains mysterious.

--Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Auden now began to give readings of his poems at universities and colleges. He was one of the first poets to do so on a regular ... basis, and could fairly be said to have played his part in bringing into existence that traveling circuit which gave employment to so many poets, British and American, during the fifties and the sixties. He also made it known that he was available to lecture, provided that the fee was right. The lecture he gave at Harvard in 1947 on Don Quixote as part of a series commemorating the quatercentenary of the birth of Cervantes is still talked of, for he had consumed a few too many Martinis before lecturing, began by apologizing for his new set of dentures, and then launched upon Don Quixote by admitting that he'd never managed to read that novel through to the end, and doubting whether anyone in his audience had. When the noise of ruffling academic feathers had subsided, some years later Harvard offered Auden an impressive -- sum for a series of lectures. "

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