Book review: The Crooked Heart of W. H. Auden

In his great elegy for the psychologist Sigmund Freud, W. H. Auden wrote that Freud was “no more a person / Now but a whole climate of opinion.” The 20th century saw a fair number of writers and thinkers whose life and works seemed to follow the great narrative of their time and who, in turn, seemed to shape the age through which they lived. Among poets writing in English, however, we can say this only of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Auden himself. To read Auden’s Complete Works therefore is not just to encounter the inventions of a polymathic, often ingenious writer and poet, but to enter into a “whole climate of opinion,” to explore an age by way of one of its representative figures.
Auden frequently appears in his writing, even in his mature work, as a precocious Oxford undergraduate not quite the master of his own cleverness. Nonetheless, the great historical crises of the last century, from the decline of religious faith to the rise of the violent and destructive political ideologies that sparked World War II and shaped the Cold War, were also very much the personal crises of the poet, which he struggled to understand in his voluminous writings.
Voluminous indeed. No one, an old professor of mine once declared, has read all of W. H. Auden. Not that the work was unavailable. Auden’s literary executor, Edward Mendelson, has done a meticulous job of keeping the works of prose and verse in print, including commissioning annotated editions of some of the more important long poems. Rather, the difficulty lies in the sheer abundance. The Princeton Complete Works comes to six thick volumes of prose, two of plays and librettos, and now two volumes of poems, not to mention a promised final volume of personal writings.
Perhaps only Mendelson will ever read it all, but for those of us who wander as deeply into the pages as we dare, the hours will prove edifying. In his poetry above all, Auden reckoned with the great historical forces of his age and struggled — genuinely — to arrive at an accurate understanding of and a moral response to them. These new volumes make that struggle visible to us in a way that it has not been since the days of Auden’s first readers. The Collected Poems published during Auden’s lifetime included only the poems that he wished to preserve, often in revised form and in roughly chronological order; this minimized and concealed the growth of and debate within the poet’s mind. In these new volumes, Mendelson has reconstituted the original collections of poems in, more or less, their earliest published forms. We see the moral debate play out, volume by volume.
Auden’s first two books of poems, Poems and The Orators, established him as a prominent voice in English poetry, but it is now a bit hard to see why. The early lyrics are spare, gnomic, ominous in tone but obscure in style. Sometimes they sound as if a spy were telegraphing headquarters in secret code:
What comes through is a general sense of foreboding. The modern European political order is collapsing, the culture of Victorian England failing, and the young poet delights in being a prophet of the new. This poem ends with the command to “look shining at / New styles of architecture, a change of heart.”
His deliberately modern voice and proclamation of a new age was evident but unexplained. In The Orators, Auden provides the explanation. Having discovered Freud and other modern psychologists, he had begun to analyze what we might call the “fascist personality,” and he found fascist personalities everywhere. At the center of The Orators is a prize-day speech at an English public school; Auden took the stoic humanism of such traditional elite institutions to be a training ground for the totalitarian spirit. He was hardly the only one to do so (the 1968 film If . . . levels a similar charge, for instance), but it was not a just perception.
Behind those two books lay Auden’s engagement in homosexual liaisons both at home and abroad. Freud’s influence seems to have led him to think of the fascist will to power as a kind of desire to dominate and be dominated in turn. He saw the same will in his own lusts. In consequence, in both his poems and plays, we find a critique of fascism that is driven by a strange, indeed perverse, attraction. It was not just the fascism of others that Auden was trying to explain, but the power and necessity of lust that maimed his own life.
By the time he published his third book of poems, On This Island (1936), Auden had coupled his wariness of the fascist will to power with a rather bookish but public and influential conversion to communism. A change of civilization would come not chiefly through the destructive will of the fascist but through Marx’s “scientific” theory about the historical necessity of class conflict and revolution. In a poem from the volume, Auden writes of one spouse asking about the origin of a noise outside and the other answering that it is the army of revolution:
Here too the young Auden seems to be perversely attracted to the inevitability of violence, but where his study of fascism was in part critique and self-reproach, the poems he wrote under the spell of communism seem to revel in the “necessary murder” (as he called it, in “Spain”) soon to arrive — even if it carries off the bourgeois Auden with it. As Mendelson has argued in his important critical biographies of Auden, the immorality and dishonesty of this position soon became evident to the poet.
Auden’s early work suffered from three interrelated weaknesses. It was obscure in conformity with the trends of modernist poetry. In this effort to be up-to-date, Auden built his poetry largely out of academic leftist politics and a psychoanalysis that reduced all human action to unconscious yearnings of lust. And, finally, with these intellectual trappings, the poetry seemed at once serious, politically engaged, and yet callow. Decades later, he would call his early poems “trash” that he was ashamed to have written.
By 1936, when he voyaged to Iceland and composed a travel book with his fellow poet Louis MacNeice, Auden was looking to overcome all three weaknesses, and in doing so he would become one of the wisest and most humane poets of the century — in his writing at least. His actual life would remain something of a mess, as he notes in his poem to Henry James, where he confesses, “There are many whose works / Are in better taste than their lives.” The work for which Auden will be remembered begins in 1936. First, he wrote “Letter to Lord Byron,” a long poem in rhyme royal that sheds entirely the unintelligibility of the early work. The prospect of communist violence is still present, if just barely, in the poem, but its witty light-verse lines have abandoned the ominous tone in favor of trying to draw poets and people together, not for the sake of the revolution but in a shared community of laughter.
In his next book, Another Time, Auden with difficulty discovers that lust, or eros, is distinct from agape, that is, selfless love. These poems and others show his effort to understand human beings in existential terms as free individuals responsible to choose between lust and love, domination and self-giving. His own choice culminated in his return to the Anglican Christianity of his parents.
To read Another Time as it is regathered in this edition is to see Auden’s struggle as it takes place. There he published some of the poems that orient the work he did later, such as the major long poems he would compose after the outbreak of World War II, including New Year Letter (1940), The Sea and the Mirror (1944), and For the Time Being (1944). Another Time also includes some of his best-known poems but ones that he later suppressed (“Spain” among them) because they were still too redolent of his zealous and ideological early style.
The poems written in the remainder of his career may best be understood as a running verse commentary on human freedom and obligation, not very different in voice from the books of the Protestant theologians that drew him back to the faith. Their style is suave but oratorical, the prosody often traditional and almost always clever, their moral seriousness patent. The signature Auden note in all of them is what we might call, to quote yet another elegy, that for W. B. Yeats, the recognition that poets are “silly.” With this word, Auden deflated all his ideological and prophetic pretensions and attained a Christian humanism that could explore the moral choices human beings face in every age, not only during the “Age of Anxiety” (another long poem’s title), when ideology and war force us to decision.
To confess to being “silly” means to know that one is prone to self-deception and evasion, to taking oneself too seriously, as the fascist superman and the communist intellectual do. Only by first recognizing this personal defect can one stand back at what Auden calls (in another poem he sought to suppress, “September 1, 1939”) an “ironic” distance and come to grips with the moral responsibility that existence itself lays upon us; it is to acknowledge that only grace, not historical necessity, can save us.
To be silly does not mean to be unserious. It resembles the familiar and easy nihilistic “giggle” of postmodern art only on the surface. Auden’s late poem “The Shield of Achilles” is among the most stark and compelling presentations in our literature of the sorts of moral failures displayed in the Stalinist and Nazi genocides. The poem is a cry for repentance. His “Horae Canonicae” constitutes a profound meditation on the meaning of Christ’s death and our temptation to ignore it. To be silly, then, is to confess that we are fallen and capable of radical evil but that we are also capable of choosing agape despite its inconvenience to our egos. The great lesson of Auden’s life was that seemingly scientific ideas of historical determinism, Marxist or otherwise, were really an evasion of responsibility. His work as a whole counsels us, as does his poem “As I walked out one evening,” to look honestly at the evils of historical life. Rather than blaming and succumbing to them, you must “love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.”

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