What Happened to Auden

What Happened to Auden

by Clive James

His stunning first lines burst out of the page

Like a man thrown through a windscreen. His flat drawl

Was acrid with the spirit of the age –

The spy’s last cigarette, the hungry sprawl

Of Hornby clockwork train sets in ‘O’ gauge,

Huge whitewashed slogans on a factory wall –

It was as if a spotlight when he spoke

Brilliantly pierced the histrionic smoke.

 

Unsentimental as the secret police,

Contemporary as a Dinky Toy,

On holiday in Iceland with MacNeice,

A flop-haired Cecil Beaton golden boy,

Auden pronounced like Pericles to Greece

The short time Europe had left to enjoy,

Yet made it sound as if impending doom

Could only ventilate the drawing room.

 

Splendidly poised above the ashtray’s rim,

The silver record-breaking aeroplane

For streamlined utterance could not match him.

Oblique but no more often than the rain,

Impenetrable only to the dim,

Neurotic merely not to be insane,

He seemed to make so much sense all at once

Anyone puzzled called himself a dunce.

 

Cricket pavilion lust looked a touch twee

Even to devotees, but on the whole,

Apart from harsh reviews in Scrutiny,

All hailed his triumph in Cassandra’s role,

Liking the chic he gave her, as if she

Wore ankle-strap high heels and a mink stole –

His ambiguity just further proof

Here was a man too proud to stand aloof.

 

By now, of course, we know he was in fact

As queer as a square grape, a roaring queen

Himself believing the forbidden act

Of love he made a meal of was obscene.

He could be crass and generally lacked tact.

He had no truck with personal hygiene.

The roughest trade would seldom stray to sleep.

In soiled sheets he was left alone to weep.

 

From the Kurfürstendamm to far Shanghai

He cruised in every sense with Isherwood.

Sadly he gave the talent the glad eye

And got out while the going was still good.

New York is where his genius went to die

Say those who disapproved, but though they could

Be right that he lost much of his allure,

Whether this meant decline is not so sure.

 

Compatriots who stuck it out have said

Guilt for his getaway left him unmanned,

Whereat his taproot shrivelled and went dead,

Having lost contact with its native land.

Some say it was the sharing of his bed

With the one man nobody else could stand

That did him in, since poets can’t afford

The deadly risk of conjugal concord.

 

But Chester made bliss hard enough to take,

And Wystan, far from pining for his roots,

Gaily tucked into the unrationed steak.

An international figure put out shoots.

Stravinsky helped the progress of the rake:

Two cultural nabobs were in cahoots.

No, Auden ageing was as much at home

On the world stage as Virgil was in Rome,

 

If less than salonfähig still. Regret

By all accounts he sparingly displayed

When kind acquaintances appeared upset,

Their guest rooms wrecked as if by an air raid.

He would forgive himself and soon forget.

Pig-like he revelled in the mess he made,

Indecorous the more his work lost force,

Devoid of shame. Devoured, though, by remorse,

 

For had he not gazed into the abyss

And found, as Nietzsche warned, that it gazed back?

His wizardry was puerile next to this.

No spark of glamour touched the railway track

That took whole populations to the hiss

Of cyanide and stoked the chimney stack

Scattering ash above a vast expanse

Of industry bereft of all romance.

 

The pit cooled down but still he stood aghast

At how far he had failed to state the case

With all those tricks that now seemed so half-arsed.

The inconceivable had taken place.

Waking to find his wildest dreams outclassed

He felt his tongue must share in the disgrace,

And henceforth be confined, in recompense,

To no fine phrase devoid of plain prose sense.

 

The bard unstrung his lyre to change his tune,

Constrained his inspiration to repent.

Dry as the wind abrading a sand dune,

A tightly drafted letter of intent,

Each rubric grew incisive like a rune,

Merest suggestions became fully meant.

The ring of truth was in the level tone

He forged to fit hard facts and praise limestone.

 

His later manner leaves your neck-hair flat,

Not standing up as Housman said it should

When poetry has been achieved. For that,

In old age Auden simply grew too good.

A mortal fear of talking through his hat,

A moral mission to be understood

Precisely, made him extirpate the thrill

Which, being in his gift, was his to kill.

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He would up as a poor old fag at bay,

Beleaguered in the end as at the start

By dons appalled that he could talk all day

And not draw breath although pissed as a fart,

But deep down he had grown great, in a way

Seen seldom in the history of his art –

Whose earthly limits Auden helped define

By realizing he was not divine.