September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. Ian Sansom

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СКАЧАТЬ therefore, just a place to be seen or to look, but a place to disappear.

      Auden is using a half-concealed place as a site of contemplation.

      *

      ‘Dive’, by the way, is an Americanism. It’s worth pointing out. It is not insignificant.

      *

      In a poem for his old friend Louis MacNeice, Auden wrote of his own desire to become a ‘minor Atlantic Goethe’.

      Which is exactly what he became.

      *

He took the oath of allegiance and became an American citizen on 20 May 1946. His Collected Poetry had been published in America by Random House a year previously and had gone into its fourth impression, having already sold over 14,000 copies. (That’s a lot of copies for a book of poems. It’s a lot of copies for a book of anything. I would love a book of mine to sell 14,000 copies – even a third of 14,000 copies would do, a quarter. A tenth. I’ll be honest, I’d take a tenth.) On this evidence, the critic Edmund Wilson pronounced that Auden had achieved ‘almost the circulation of an American family poet’. Auden had, in other words, made it in America.

      *

      Though for America, one should probably read New York.

      Who am I now?

      An American? No, a New Yorker,

      who opens his Times at the obit page.

      (Auden, ‘Prologue at Sixty’)

      He had arrived in New York with Christopher Isherwood on 26 January 1939. The two men had already visited America in the summer of 1938, on their way back from China, but this time they were there to stay.

      On arrival in New York, they found rooms in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue, and by spring 1939 they had moved into an apartment together on East 81st Street. Auden began reviewing for magazines and started to undertake speaking and lecturing engagements. He was getting his feet under the table.

      *

Their departure from England caused considerable controversy. During 1940, the pages of Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon were given over to a long-long-running debate about the rights and wrongs of the two young men’s decision to remain in America, and in June 1940 Sir Jocelyn Lucas MP asked in the House of Commons ‘whether British citizens of military age, such as Mr. W. H. Auden and Mr. Christopher Isherwood […] will be summoned back for registration and calling up, in view of the fact that they are seeking refuge abroad’. The whole fuss was satirised by Evelyn Waugh in his novel Put Out More Flags (1942), in which Auden and Isherwood are caricatured as Parsnip and Pimpernell: ‘The name of the poet Parsnip, casually mentioned, re-opened the great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy which was torturing Poppet Green and her friends.’

      Poor little Poppet.

      *

      (It’s easy to mock, but I too have taken Auden’s move to America personally, as a kind of rebuke, just as I’ve done with friends who’ve moved to America over the years. I mean, it always makes one wonder, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t I? Couldn’t I? What might have been, could have been? As I get older, it gets worse, the challenge seems all the greater. ‘What have I done for you, / England, my England?’ asks W. E. Henley in his much-maligned poem ‘Pro Rege Nostro’. Not a lot, is the honest answer: paid my taxes, kept out of trouble, apologised unnecessarily as and when required, and suffered in silence as the country becomes slowly but surely despoiled and divided up among tax-shy corporations and the south-east super-rich. Why not go to America, Auden seems to be asking, if you’re just going to sit around complaining and doing nothing?)

      *

(I will confess: years ago, in an attempt to write this book, to reinvent myself, I went to New York, to follow in Auden’s footsteps, with nothing more to sustain me than a pacamac, a bar of Kendal mint cake and a pair of good stout shoes. I lasted about two weeks.)

      *

      There were many who felt that Auden’s remaining in America during the war was both a personal let-down and a matter of serious consequence. Poets, naturally, expressed their disappointment in verse: Christopher Lee, in a poem titled ‘Trahison des Clercs’, wrote wistfully about ‘the poets we took for leaders’, ‘these swift migrating birds’; and Alan Ross took up the plaintive chant in his poem ‘A Lament for the “Thirties” Poets’, bemoaning ‘They who for us were’, and drily observing ‘Their world and their words subsiding like flat champagne’.

      Some people had good reason to take umbrage at Auden’s behaviour: John Lehmann, for example, in the second volume of his autobiography, I Am My Brother (1960), describes a visit from Auden in 1945 on his way to Germany to work with the US Strategic Bombing Survey, during which Auden boasted to Lehmann about America’s contribution to the war: ‘There was no word from Uncle Sam Auden about what we had endured, the various skills, the faith, the unremitting industrial and military effort without which the fortress of Western civilization could never have held.’

      And there were others who simply never forgave Auden for leaving. I think I have already mentioned the novelist Anthony Powell: ‘I’m delighted that shit has gone … It should have happened years ago … Scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a … like a …’

Like a … like a … like a … Like a what exactly, Anthony? Spit it out, man. Like a …? What is Auden?

      I’ll tell you what he is: he is neither/nor.

      *

      After his trip to America in 1909, Freud remarked to Ernest Jones, ‘America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake.’ Auden’s move to America has often been viewed in similar terms, both by his contemporaries and by the literary historians and anthologists whose attempts to accommodate the move have obscured his place in literary history. In 1950, T. S. Eliot expressed his delight that Auden’s ‘influence, on both sides of the Atlantic, has only increased year by year; he can now justly be called “a famous poet”’. In fact, Auden’s transatlantic fame and influence had only been achieved at the cost of his being disowned by both sides, by both England and America.

      *

      In his introduction to the 1970 anthology British Poetry Since 1945 – standard issue when I was at school – Edward Lucie-Smith announced that he had decided not to include work by Auden because his ‘long residence in America seemed to make him an American rather than a British writer’, a decision ratified by George Watson in his 1991 critical survey British Literature since 1945 – standard issue when I started teaching – from which Auden is excluded, along with Isherwood and Robert Graves, for being an ‘expatriate’.

      (It is interesting to compare the disapprobation that attaches to the word ‘expatriate’ with the valorisation of the word ‘exile’ in the formation of a writer’s reputation.)

Unfortunately for Auden, the official keepers of American poetry have long been happy enough without him. For the mighty Norton anthologies, for example, Auden’s residence in America was simply not enough: he does not figure in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, but he is included in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and is safely ensconced in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ‘a wide and deep sampling of the best poetry written in the English СКАЧАТЬ