W. H. Auden, page 1
W. H. Auden
A Biography
HUMPHREY CARPENTER
CONTENTS
Title Page
Illustrations
Author’s Note
Preface: Auden and Biography
Part One: England
1 Childhood
2 School
3 Poetry
4 Oxford
5 Berlin
6 Schoolmaster
7 Traveller
Part Two: America – and Europe
1 ‘Chester, my chum’
2 Conversion
3 Crisis
4 Teacher again
5 Ischia
6 ‘A minor Atlantic Goethe’
7 Return to England
Appendix A Bibliography
B Sources of quotations
C Acknowledgements
Index
Plates
About the Author
Copyright
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 (a) Auden in his mother’s arms (John Auden).
(b) Auden as a small child (Richard Layard).
2 (a) The Auden family on holiday at Rhayader in August 1913 (John Auden).
(b) Wystan leaning over the rail at the water-works, Rhayader, August 1913 (John Auden).
3 (a) The Auden brothers (John Auden).
(b) Wystan Auden during his days at preparatory school (Richard Layard).
4 (a) Wystan Auden during his schooldays (Richard Layard).
(b) Wystan, his father, and his brother John at the Lake District cottage during the 1920s (Richard Layard).
5 (a) and (b) Auden and Christopher Isherwood at Oxford in 1928 (A.S.T. Fisher).
6 (a) and (b) Further photographs from the 1928 session (A.S.T. Fisher).
6 (c) Sheilah Richardson, the nurse who was Auden’s fiancée for a few months.
7 (a) Gabriel Carritt in 1930 (Gabriel Carritt).
(b) Auden and John Layard in Germany in 1929 (Richard Layard).
8 (a) Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood at Rügen Island in 1931 (Gabriel Carritt).
(b) Auden, Isherwood and Spender photographed by Howard Coster in the early 1930s (National Portrait Gallery).
9 Part of the manuscript of ‘O love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven’ (Houghton Library, Harvard University).
10 The Downs School, Colwall, summer 1933 (Downs School).
11 (a) Auden and Erika Mann: a photograph taken just after their wedding on 15 June 1935 (Maurice Feild).
(b) Auden and Isherwood: a photograph probably taken in Portugal during March 1936 (Estate of E.R. Dodds).
12 (a) Louis MacNeice, photographed by Auden in Iceland, 1936 (Anthony Blunt).
(b) Auden and E. M. Forster, photographed in Dover by a sea-front photographer (Edward Upward).
13 (a) Auden and Isherwood leaving for China in January 1938 (National Portrait Gallery).
(b) Auden in the front line of the Sino-Japanese war, 1938 (from ‘Journey to a War’).
14 (a) Auden and Isherwood in Central Park, New York (Britten Estate).
(b) Auden and Benjamin Britten in New York during rehearsals for Paul Bunyan, 1941 (Britten Estate).
15 (a) The first photograph to be taken of Auden with Chester Kail man (Edward and Dorothy Kallman).
(b) Chester Kallman on Fire Island in 1946 (Edward and Dorothy Kallman).
16 (a) Elizabeth Mayer in the garden of her home at Amityville, Long Island (Beata Sauerlander).
(b) Auden and James Stern in Germany with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 1945 (Beata Sauerlander).
17 Auden in uniform, 1945 (Robert Wilson).
18 Auden reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit in the 1940s (James Stern).
19 (a) Chester Kallman, Rhoda Jaffe and Auden on Fire Island.
(b) Auden and Chester Kallman with Maurice Feild and his son John, 1948 (Alexandra Feild).
20 Auden in 1947: a photograph given to Rhoda Jaffe (Robert Wilson).
21 (a) Auden looks on while Chester Kallman talks to an uni dentified person (Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin).
(b) Yannis Boras and Chester Kallman at Kirchstetten in the mid 1960s (James Merrill).
22 (a) Auden at the wedding of his niece Rita, London, April 1965 (John Auden).
(b) Auden at Christ Church, Oxford, in the late 1960s (Billett Potter).
23 Auden in the late 1960s (Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin).
24 Four drawings of Auden made on the last night of his life by the Austrian artist Anton Schumich, at the poetry reading in the Palais Palffy (Charles Monteith).
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is the first account of Auden’s life to make use of the large number of his letters and other manuscripts which are now accessible, and, though the book is not an ‘authorised’ biography and was undertaken on my own initiative and not at the request of Auden’s executors, I am very grateful to his Estate for permission to quote from these previously unpublished writings.
It is not a book of literary criticism. I have not usually engaged in a critical discussion of Auden’s writings. But I have tried to show how they often arose from the circumstances of his life, and I have also attempted to identify the themes and ideas that concerned him. I hope I have also managed to convey my own huge enthusiasm for his poetry.
H. C.
Oxford, 1980
PREFACE: AUDEN AND BIOGRAPHY
‘Biographies of writers,’ declared W. H. Auden, ‘are always superfluous and usually in bad taste. A writer is a maker, not a man of action. To be sure, some, in a sense all, of his works are transmutations of his personal experiences, but no knowledge of the raw ingredients will explain the peculiar flavour of the verbal dishes he invites the public to taste: his private life is, or should be, of no concern to anybody except himself, his family and his friends.’
Auden wrote this towards the end of his life, but it was an opinion that he had held for many years. He even suggested that most writers would prefer their work to be published anonymously, so that the reader would have to concentrate on the writing itself and not at all on the writer. He was also (he said) opposed in principle to the publication of, or quotation from, a writer’s letters after his death, which he declared was just as dishonourable as reading someone’s private correspondence while he was out of the room. As to literary biographers, he branded them as, in the mass, ‘gossip-writers and voyeurs calling themselves scholars’.
So it scarcely came as a surprise when, after his death in September 1973, his executors published his request that his friends should burn any of his letters that they might have kept, when they had ‘done with them’, and should on no account show them to anyone else. Auden himself had explained, in a conversation with one of his executors not long before his death, that this was in order ‘to make a biography impossible’.
In the months that followed Auden’s death, a very few of his friends did burn one or two of his letters. But most preserved what they had, and several people gave or sold letters to public collections. Meanwhile many of his friends, far from doing anything to hinder the writing of a life, published (in various books and journals) their own memoirs of him, which provided valuable material upon which a biographer could work.
At first sight it may seem as if they were riding roughshod over Auden’s last wishes. But it is not as simple as that. Here, as so often in his life, Auden adopted a dogmatic attitude which did not reflect the full range of his opinions, and which he sometimes flatly contradicted.
Certainly he often attacked the principle of literary biography, but in practice he made a lot of exceptions. When reviewing actual examples of the genre he was almost always enthusiastic, finding a whole variety of reasons for waiving his rule. We need a biography of Pope, he said, because so many of Pope’s poems grew from specific events which need explaining; we want a life of Trollope because his autobiography leaves out a great deal; of Wagner because he was a monster; of Gerard Manley Hopkins because he had a romantically difficult relationship with his art. Auden’s ‘no biography’ rule was in other words (as his literary executor Edward Mendelson has put it) ‘flexible enough to be bent backwards’.
The same is true of his attitude to writers’ letters. He usually reviewed published collections of them in friendly terms, and was only censorious when he thought that something private had been included which was merely personal and threw no light on the writer’s work. He himself made a selection of Van Gogh’s letters for publication, and he would have published an edition of the letters of Sydney Smith if someone else had not done it first. As to his own letters, he gave permission for a large number of quotations from them to be published, in academic books and the like, during his lifetime.
He also left a great deal of autobiographical writing. He once declared: ‘No poet should ever write an autobiography’; yet he did a great deal towards preserving a record of his own life. Not only does his poetry contain innumerable autobiographical passages, but several poems (including two of his longest, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and ‘New Year Letter’) are largely autobiographical in character. Among his prose writings, too, there are all kinds of remarks about events in his life. And in his later years he allowed journalists to visit him in his New York apartment and at his summer house in Austria, letting them publish interviews with him which often recorded highly personal details of his life.
So there is a great deal of information for a biographer to draw upon. But would Auden, in the end, have approv
It is possible that he might on the grounds that he was something of a ‘man of action’, who lived a life so full of interest that it deserves to be recorded for its own sake. This was a justification of biography that he accepted – with one proviso. ‘The biography of an artist, if his life as a man was sufficiently interesting, is permissible,’ he wrote, ‘provided that the biographer and his readers realise that such an account throws no light whatsoever upon the artist’s work.’
This last point, of course, brings us back to Auden’s fundamental objection to a writer’s biography. ‘I do believe, however,’ he once added, ‘that, more often than most people realise, his works may throw light upon his life.’
I
England
1
Childhood
Wystan Hugh Auden was born on the twenty-first of February 1907, in the city of York in the north of England, the third and last child of George Augustus Auden and Constance Rosalie Bicknell.
He was the youngest of three boys. Later in his life he liked to point out that in fairy-tales it is the youngest of the three brothers who succeeds in the quest and wins the prize. ‘I, after all, am the Fortunate One,’ he wrote in a poem, ‘The Happy-Go-Lucky, the spoilt Third Son’.
He had hazel eyes, and hair and eyebrows so fair that they looked bleached. His skin, too, was very pale, almost white. His face was marked by one small peculiarity, a brown mole on the right cheek. He had big chubby hands, and soon developed flat feet. He was physically clumsy, and took to biting his nails.
The fairness of hair and skin were inherited from his father, but in features he looked more like his mother. From the time of his birth he was very close to her, partly because being the youngest child he was never displaced by another, partly, too, because there was a gap of several years between himself and his elder brothers, so that they tended to go off by themselves and leave him with their mother. (This large gap was the consequence of a miscarriage between the second and third births.) But his closeness to his mother was, he himself came to believe, chiefly the result of her wanting it to be that way. He felt that she had sought to achieve with him, from the beginning, ‘a conscious spiritual, in a sense, adult relationship’.
Besides being the youngest child he was also the youngest grandchild in the family; and later at school, being a bright boy, he was very often the youngest in the class. All this gave him, he said, ‘the lifelong conviction that in any company I am the youngest person present’. Certainly to the end of his life he behaved like a precocious and highly praised youngest child.
His elder brothers were called Bernard and John. By contrast his own first name, Wystan, was exotic; but it reflected one of his father’s great interests in life. George Auden was a doctor of medicine by profession, but he was also widely read in many other fields, among them Saxon and Norse antiquities. This was partly the result of his having been educated at Repton School in Derbyshire, for the parish church there has a particularly fine Saxon crypt which attracted his attention when he was young. The church is dedicated to St Wystan, a Mercian prince who was murdered in the year 849 after he had objected to the uncanonical marriage of his widowed mother to his uncle – ‘a rather Hamlet-like story’, remarked Wystan Auden.
The story of St Wystan is recorded in a Little Guide to Shropshire, under the entry for Wistanstow, the place in that county where he was martyred. The author of the Little Guide was Wystan Auden’s uncle, the Rev. J. E. Auden, and Wystan carefully preserved his own copy of it. He was very possessive about his first name; he said he would be ‘furious’ if he ever met another Wystan.
His second Christian name, Hugh, was chosen in honour of his mother’s brother-in-law Hugh Culley, headmaster of Monmouth Grammar School. In adult life Wystan Hugh Auden became addicted to crosswords and liked to work out anagrams from his own name. One of his favourites was ‘Why shun a nude tag?’ Another was ‘Hug a shady wet nun’. He remarked that all you can get from ‘T. S. Eliot’ is ‘litotes’.1
His father had a medical practice as a general physician in York, and by the time of his third son’s birth he was doing very well. Dr Auden had begun work in York eight years earlier, in 1899, just after his marriage, when (at the age of twenty-seven) he had set up home and surgery at 76 Bootham, a big and rather ugly brick house in a smart street just outside the old city wall, within sight of York Minster. By the time that Wystan was born in 1907 he had moved his family to a larger and more attractive house just down the road. This was 54 Bootham, built in the Georgian style, with a portico around the front door. Things were going well enough for Dr Auden to employ a coachman to drive him round to his patients, and for him and his wife to have two maids and a cook to run the house.
It is true that prosperity did not in itself secure the Auden family’s social position. The status of doctors in Edwardian society was ambiguous to say the least. In the York street-directory Dr Auden, like other medical men, was listed not under Private Residents, but under Commercial – which amounted to saying that doctors were no better than tradesmen. When Wystan Auden’s mother had announced to one of her aunts that she was going to marry a doctor, she was told: ‘Marry him if you must, but no one will call on you!’ On the other hand Dr Auden was the son of a clergyman, and this made him rather more acceptable socially. Moreover he was making something of a mark in York because of his intellectual accomplishments. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science held a meeting in the city in the year before Wystan’s birth, Dr Auden was chosen to edit the Historical and Scientific Survey of York and District which was published to mark the occasion, and himself wrote the chapter on the region’s prehistory and archaeology.
So there would probably have been a secure future for the Audens if they had remained in York. Wystan’s childhood would have been spent in the shadow of York Minster, one of the finest medieval cathedrals in England, and he would have lived, during those years in which his imagination was developing, in a city that still looked much as it had done before the Industrial Revolution. But that was not what happened. When he was one and a half, in 1908, his family left York and moved south to Birmingham.
His father had been appointed Birmingham’s first School Medical Officer, a pioneer job which would chiefly mean inspecting and where necessary improving the sanitary arrangements in the schools controlled by the city’s Education Committee. It would not be easy work, for Birmingham and the surrounding suburbs had grown during the nineteenth century into one of the biggest industrial sprawls in the Midlands. Its schools were often poorly built, and many of the children were being brought up in grim conditions. The job also meant a drop in salary for Dr Auden, for the Birmingham Education Committee could not afford to pay him as much as he had earned in his lucrative practice in York. This did not really matter very much, for he had a small private income, and the family could still afford to keep servants after the move to Birmingham. Nevertheless Wystan, looking back, was certain that the decrease in salary had cost a real moral effort to his father, who he said was ‘one of those persons who cannot disburse even the smallest sums without mental anguish’.
Though Dr Auden’s work was in Birmingham itself, the house he acquired for his family stood some miles outside the city, in Solihull, which is nowadays a suburb of Birmingham but was then a large village a little detached from the south-eastern edge of the city. It was here, at ‘Apsley House’ in Lode Lane, that Wystan began to be aware of his surroundings.
These were not at first sight very interesting. Solihull was an undistinguished settlement of houses and small shops, most of them recently built. Down the road, however, was something that the small boy did find exciting: the local gasworks. He was often taken there on walks because, though sturdy and generally healthy, he did have slight bronchial trouble, and the fumes from the gasworks were thought to be good for his chest. He loved it there. ‘Those at the gasworks were my favourite men,’ he wrote of his early childhood, remembering the smells and pipes and huge gasometers which rose and fell. The gasworks was the first place that seemed to him (he said) ‘numinous’, arousing a feeling of wonder and awe.
