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What Kind of Guy? Michael Wood 8/14/2015 Michael Wood reviews ‘Later Auden’ by Edward Mendelson · LRB 10 June 1999 Back to article page What Kind of Guy? Michael Wood Later Auden by Edward Mendelson Faber, 570 pp, £25.00, May 1999, ISBN 0 571 19784 1 ‘That is the way things happen,’ Auden writes in ‘Memorial for the City’, a poem Edward Mendelson dates from June 1949, for ever and ever Plum­blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall covers The cries of the whipped and the sighs of the lovers And the hard bright light composes A meaningless moment into an eternal fact Which a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile: One enjoys glory, one endures shame; He may, she must. There is no one to blame. Except that this is not the way things happen, only the way we have been taught to see them, by epic poets and the news camera. ‘Our grief is not Greek,’ Auden adds, meaning that the story of our time is not helpless pain and pity, however noble, not the repetitive horror of http://www.lrb.co.uk.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/v21/n12/michael­wood/what­kind­of­guy 1/12 8/14/2015 Michael Wood reviews ‘Later Auden’ by Edward Mendelson · LRB 10 June 1999 fame or disgrace or death without meaning on an indifferent earth. As we bury our dead We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear. We should probably add straightaway that the ancient Greeks also knew this, even if their reasons were different, so their grief wasn’t Greek in this sense either, but Auden’s point remains, a post­Holocaust secularisation of T.S. Eliot’s thoughts about time. ‘Only through time time is conquered,’ Eliot wrote, and for Auden human time, which he elsewhere calls ‘a City/where each inhabitant has/a political duty/nobody else can perform’, is the realm in which we find guilt and responsibility, and through them pardon. ‘In Time we sin,’ Auden writes in yet another poem. ‘But Time is sin and can forgive.’ Whereas The crow on the crematorium chimney And the camera roving the battle Record a space where time has no place. In ‘Homage to Clio’ (June 1955), Auden pursues similar thoughts, but is kinder to the camera, which becomes the means not of freezing time, but of marking the silent specificity of the passing moment. There are plenty of statues of Aphrodite and Artemis, and none of Clio, Auden says, but this doesn’t mean he hasn’t seen her. I have seen Your photo, I think, in the papers, nursing A baby, or mourning a corpse: each time You had nothing to say and did not, one could see, Observe where you were, Muse of the unique http://www.lrb.co.uk.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/v21/n12/michael­wood/what­kind­of­guy 2/12 8/14/2015 Michael Wood reviews ‘Later Auden’ by Edward Mendelson · LRB 10 June 1999 Historical fact ... ‘Lives that obey you move like music,’ the poem goes on, ‘Becoming now what they only can be once.’ And then: ‘It sounds/Easy, but one must find the time.’ Mendelson finds in this ‘casual­sounding’ play on words ‘a breathtakingly compressed and moving statement of the myriad challenges and regrets of private life’. And not only of private life. Finding the time means abandoning the privileged perch on the crematorium chimney, remembering in their unrepeatable individuality the baby and the corpse and the nurse and the mourner, and it may mean refusing the ‘hard bright light’ of many accepted notions of art, ancient and modern. ‘The moral argument of Auden’s whole career,’ Mendelson says, commenting on the passage I quoted at the start, ‘and the explicit argument of the later sections of this poem, is that someone is to blame.’ The difference between Eliot and Auden, Mendelson argues, is that Eliot believed that ‘the disasters of his time were the product of futile and anarchic disorder’, while Auden was inclined to see them as the product of ‘effective purposive evil’. Eliot, I suspect, fully believed in evil as well as futility and anarchy, and the trick here is not to make Auden sound simply more of a moraliser than Eliot was. Mendelson doesn’t always avoid this effect, and describes the average folk in Auden’s ‘Terce’ (October 1953), who are just trying to get through an averagely selfish day, as committed to ‘absolutely self­centred fantasies of a world in which reality has been suspended in one’s own favour’. It’s true that these people, who are us (‘At this hour we all might be anyone’), are about to take part in the Crucifixion, but our shallowness rather than any more grievous moral error is the point. Still, Mendelson’s overall argument, traced in meticulously documented detail, is very persuasive. ‘To be forgiven,’ Auden wrote in a prose work he never finished, ‘means to realise that one has never been judged except by oneself’, and it’s hard to imagine Eliot writing that. Hard even to imagine Auden writing it in the early, pre­American phase of his life. ‘Someone is to blame’ doesn’t mean pointing the finger or finding a scapegoat; it means accepting rather than eluding guilt, and for Auden the fact of blame is also a chance for forgiveness. http://www.lrb.co.uk.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/v21/n12/michael­wood/what­kind­of­guy 3/12 8/14/2015 Michael Wood reviews ‘Later Auden’ by Edward Mendelson · LRB 10 June 1999 Mendelson describes Later Auden as ‘a history and an interpretation of W.H. Auden’s work from the time he moved from England to the United States in 1939 until his death in 1973’. The book is not a biography, although it frequently and usefully adduces biographical details. Or perhaps it is a biography of the work, with a little help from the life of the man. ‘The best part of a writer’s biography,’ Nabokov said, ‘is the story of his style,’ but Later Auden is not quite that. Mendelson has a very good ear, and there are plenty of remarks about verse forms and diction, but the bulk of the book concerns Auden’s working and reworking of his shifting themes, his shabby­looking but entirely honourable quest for what Mendelson calls ‘wisdom’. Auden himself, quoted by Mendelson, said he had two questions when reading a poem. ‘The first is technical: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: “What kind of guy inhabits this poem?” ’ Mendelson likes and understands the contraptions, but his book is about the guy in the poems. Mendelson is Auden’s literary executor and tireless editor, and he effectively goes back over Auden’s working life, reading his reviews, his lectures, his letters, his notes, alongside the poems and the libretti, never losing track or patience. He is not unduly polite about Auden, or excessively discreet, and he has a mind of his own. He is less defensive about Modernism than he was in his Early Auden (1981), more convinced that Auden’s stature can take care of itself. The storyline of the book is pretty compelling for such a quiet life, mainly because Auden’s mind is so interesting, and because it left so many traces. His love affair with Chester Kallman figures quietly but firmly throughout the book, along with his summers (from 1948) in Italy, and his purchase (in 1958) of a house in Austria. We learn a lot about his reading, and quite a bit about his politics. In America he moved from left to centre, and then off again towards the dissident left. One of his finer semi­political gestures was his gift of money to a charitable shelter accompanied by his unsuccessful attempt to say on American television that charity should go to ‘the undeserving poor’. Mendelson sees very astutely that Auden was more troubled by honours and success than he was by apparent failures and defections. ‘He had shrugged off the denunciations in the British press and Parliament that followed his departure for America in 1939, but he could not so easily shrug off the inner wound inflicted http://www.lrb.co.uk.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/v21/n12/michael­wood/what­kind­of­guy 4/12 8/14/2015 Michael Wood reviews ‘Later Auden’ by Edward Mendelson · LRB 10 June 1999 by public honour in 1948’ – i.e. the Pulitzer Prize. But I’m not sure Auden shrugged off any of the denunciations all that easily, and I’m pretty sure he couldn’t shrug off a wound at all, but the point is a good one. For Auden the inner accuser was always louder than the outer one – the second is the one to be found ‘crying in a cocktail glass’, as we read in The Age of Anxiety – and the inner one had a field day when Auden was being rewarded for something. Although he was happy and flattered to return to Oxford to become Professor of Poetry, he had, at the same time, what he called ‘a very unpleasant dark­night­of­the­soul sort of experience’. This seems a bit excessive, even for a person going back to his old college, but the excess, I take it, is in the psychological pattern rather than the description. There are one or two moments of bathos. Kallman becomes Auden’s Beatrice, because he tells him to stop biting his nails, and Auden stops.
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