How WH Auden Used Culture To Reconsider His Place In The World

When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry. (He also began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to embrace the Christian faith of his childhood.)

His work of this period combined a proclamation of the value of microcultures with a commitment to an intellectual cosmopolitanism. He celebrated the “local understanding” achieved in the informal salon run by a German émigré, Elizabeth Mayer, from her home on Long Island, but what bound the members of that salon to one another was the combination of cultural and national diversity with moral sympathy. In a poem composed immediately after the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, he wrote:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages….

Like God in one ancient definition, “the Just” are a community whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. They are homeless in the world but at home with one another.

By 1946, Auden would be an American citizen—indeed, he even had a temporary commission in the US Army—and for the rest of his life visited England only infrequently. His concerns seemed to encompass almost everything except the character and destiny of his native land. But in an extraordinary new book, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, Stanford University professor Nicholas Jenkins invites us to forget everything I have just narrated about Auden’s life from 1939 onward. He invites us to liberate ourselves from what he calls “the disadvantage of hindsight.”

To understand what Jenkins means by that, we might turn to Gary Saul Morson’s seminal book Narrative and Freedom (1994), in which he introduces the concept of “backshadowing”:

Backshadowing may be defined as foreshadowing after the fact. The past is viewed as having contained signs pointing to what happened later, to events known to the backshadowing observer. Visible now, those signs could have been seen then. In effect, the present, as the future of the past, was already immanent in the past. A more or less straight line is drawn between the past period under examination and the observer’s present.

Thanks to the power of backshadowing, we who know about Auden’s departure from England, his return to Christianity, his localism and cosmopolitanism, may well feel that, equipped with that knowledge, we can look at his early career and see all the ways it pointed to his later one. But if we deprive ourselves of that knowledge and look at the first decade of Auden’s career with unprejudiced eyes, what do we see? Jenkins believes that we see a poet whose entire conception of his calling is bound up with his Englishness, with the history and destiny of his native island.

Jenkins begins his book with an account of a staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by students at Gresham’s School in Norfolk in 1925, a performance in which the part of Caliban—the “savage and deformed slave” who was born on the island and will spend his whole life there but is ruled over by a wizard from elsewhere—was played by a student named Wystan Auden. The book concludes with the moment, in November 1937, when Auden met the new King of England, George VI, to be presented with the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry in recognition of Auden’s recent book, Look, Stranger!—which he had wished to call The Island or On This Island. (The editors hadn’t liked either option, and, when Auden was in Iceland and inaccessible, they came up with their own title. When inscribing a copy of the finished book for his friend Cyril Connolly, Auden struck through the title and replaced it with On This Island, which he also insisted Random House use for the American edition.)

What runs between these two events is not an arc but rather a sine wave, as Auden negotiates and renegotiates his relationship with the island on which he was born. In Jenkins’s account of Auden’s early career, we see a prodigiously gifted young man who feels himself an outsider, a reject, one who is not what he ought to be. That he is gay contributes to his alienation, but it’s more important that he is a Northerner in a country culturally and economically dominated by its South. (Auden referred to the capital city as “horrible London.”) Perhaps, though, his very distance from the center of things can deepen his poetic reflection on the society that he in such complicated ways loves. Jenkins concludes his account of that performance of The Tempest thus:

Within a mere ten years, using with extraordinary dexterity the artistic language that he had begun learning at Gresham’s, this Caliban will be transformed into a figure who casts spells as often as he utters curses. He will imagine himself, and be imagined, as the visionary poet of a reenchanted England, the island. Emerging from a darkened childhood in an apocalyptic war, he will try to find words to summon for a moment a brighter, better society into being and, just a few years after that, as if the drama were finally over, he will recognize the limits of the beautiful fantasy that a poet can remake the world.

We see, then, an early poetry that superimposes Auden’s personal psychological distress—often distress over his sexuality—and the brokenness of Europe in the aftermath of the Great War upon an ancient British landscape, primarily the landscape of the North. (The idea that the North retained some elements of an earlier magical world long after the commercial South had been disenchanted by its own wealth is a common one, and has been central to some great fiction, including Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.) After making his first efforts in this direction, Auden spends some time in Germany, primarily in Berlin, as a kind of experiment in cosmopolitanism, but he rejects that path as impossible for him. That is, he comes to believe that he can only make sense of himself and make sense of his calling as a poet back in his native island.

He returns and immerses himself in the intellectual and social life of that island. He writes poems, of course; he teaches for a time, in Scotland and England; in “horrible London,” he becomes a private tutor and, later, gets involved in an endeavor called the Group Theater; he writes verse to accompany documentary films. He seeks collaborative artistic endeavors whenever it’s possible for him to do so, but he grows increasingly discouraged. Writing in a journal in 1939, he commented that just a few years earlier “a part of me at least has been wanting to die.”

One of the more curious events in Auden’s life was his marriage, in June 1935, to Erika Mann, the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann. Auden was gay and Erika bisexual; Auden married her only to prevent her from being repatriated to Nazi Germany, where her fate would not have been a happy one. (That said, they did become close friends, and Erika’s brother Golo thought there might even be “a slight erotical touch” to their relationship.) Auden thereafter liked to make jokes about his famous father-in-law, but the jokes had a tendency to mask something more serious: Auden increasingly suspected that, like Thomas Mann, he would have to become an exile from his native country. He came to feel that he could respond healthily and wisely to the island on which he was born only after he had sailed away from it and found a new home elsewhere. Thus the irony of receiving the King’s Medal for Poetry just as he began to realize he would soon leave the country.

Jenkins writes incisively about all of Auden’s work in the 1930s, but he is especially brilliant on the aforementioned 1936 collection (let us use Auden’s title rather than Faber’s), On This Island. The book is a collection of poems, but (as he would do on other occasions, most notably his 1955 collection The Shield of Achilles) he sought to shape the book into something coherent. He did this through the selection of poems and through their ordering, but above all through beginning the collection with a “Prologue” and ending it with an “Epilogue.” That initial poem meditates on an ancient England, which it invokes beautifully as the poet asks “love” to

…make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching
The apple falling towards England, became aware
Between himself and her of an eternal tie.

But, alas, he must acknowledge “that dream which so long has contented our will, / I mean, of uniting the dead into a splendid empire” will not come true: It is “already retreating.”

In the “Epilogue,” Auden turns his gaze toward the Continent—he mentions no English figures but rather Schweitzer, Freud, Kafka, Proust—but what he sees there, in 1936, is “the malice of death”: “The peaked and violent faces are exalted.” It is time to think of the future: “And tomorrow / Comes. It’s a world. It’s a way.” And this Way he takes. He goes elsewhere.

Near the end of his book, Jenkins writes,

Part of what makes the story of Auden’s poetry in the first half of the 1930s sobering and thought-provoking is that the myths about England that he summoned in poems full of unforgettable literary grandiloquence, such as “Prologue,” myths about English identity, English history, English sociability, seem so enduring but somehow also so fragile. The arc traced in his 1936 collection is long and in so many ways rich, but it bends toward emptiness—as if, after hundreds of years of lyrical rhetoric, Auden’s end point in “Epilogue” is that there was something exhausted and terminal about the myths underwriting English traditions and values. If Auden deserves the title of a prophet, as perhaps he sometimes hoped he did, then this was a large part of what his prophecy said.

This is a profound summation of what was happening, in the second half of the 1930s, to the greatest English poet of the century. Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor, has declared that The Island is “a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies.” That it is.