Auden in an age of anxiety

Auden in the Age of Anxiety

A recent BBC programme on WH Auden sent me back to his poems, and to the biography by Humphrey Carpenter. The programme sought to bring Auden’s poetic themes to bear on our “Age of Anxiety” (so labelled by the programme’s title). Auden’s own Age of Anxiety was, of course, the 1930s, when Europe and other parts of the world once more lurched towards global war.

The dress rehearsal, in Europe, was the Spanish Civil War. The Republican (government) cause was supported by leftist and liberal writers and intellectuals, many of whom went to Spain and fought with the International Brigades.

Auden was no exception. He volunteered to go to Spain and become an ambulance driver for Republican forces.

One would think that, as a writer, Auden would have produced a vivid memoir, like Orwell, or at least vivid letters, articles or diaries. But, while indeed he wrote a great meditative poem, Spain 1937, he was otherwise silent. Why? Carpenter writes: “….the longer he remained in Spain the more he seems to have become aware of the impossibility of giving the Republican cause his wholehearted support”. This is not very elegantly written – that seems to have become aware of the impossibility.. is an odd way of describing what must have been vivid impressions and Auden’s instinctive  reactions.

There was great cruelty on both sides (the Nationalist victors carrying off the gruesome prize for inflicting the most deaths). But elements (mostly anarchist) on the Republican side especially targeted the clergy. Carpenter goes on to quote Auden’s conversation “many years later”: “I was upset by many things I saw or heard about..[including] the treatment of priests”.

This bewilderment was doubtless not helped by Auden’s failure to find any useful role in Spain. A mixture of official incompetence and chaos meant that he never got to drive an ambulance. (A friend commented that this was fortunate for the wounded.)

Auden was always against Franco, and said that his contemporary silence was in large part due to not wishing to give comfort to the Nationalists by criticising the Republic: “Any disillusion of mine could only be of advantage to Franco. And, however I felt, I certainly didn’t want Franco to win. It’s always a moral problem when to speak. To speak at the wrong time can do great harm.”

This made me realise, or perhaps re-realise, a larger point. Although a quiz question: “pre-eminent political poet of the 1930s” might correctly be answered: “Auden”, he was rarely, if ever, a polemicist for a cause, or a protagonist in a fight.

He has two main perspectives on the troubled, increasingly frightening, political scene in the 1930s. One is the detached, soaring eagle’s view, surveys from a great height -almost literally in Spain:

“On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe,

On that tableland scored by rivers,

Our fever’s menacing shapes are precise and alive.”

But often and poignantly, Auden pits the personal against the political. This is Lullaby, written around the time of his Spanish excursion:

“Certainty, fidelity

On the stroke of midnight pass

Like vibrations of a bell,

And fashionable madmen raise

Their pedantic boring cry:

Every farthing of the cost,

All the dreaded cards foretell,

Shall be paid, but from this night

Not a whisper, not a thought,

Not a kiss or look be lost.”

And this is from the poem written on the eve of the Second World  War – 1^st September 1939:

“Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.”

Optimism is not radiated. Auden’s poetic sensibility is fatalistic. As the shadows draw in, one must cling to and celebrate the shrinking patches of joy and light. (In the case of the Just, maybe their tiny lights will last through

 the time of shadows…).

There’s a even deeper point lurking. Auden’s fatalism embraced the fundamental indifference of the World, of History, to the individual. This from the Musee des Beaux Arts:

“About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along..”

And this from Spain, again:

“We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and

History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”

Against such thoughts and feelings it is hard to set up an opposing philosophy of life. One option is religion – which is what Auden chose, from the 1940s. Not a very militant or evangelical religion, it is true; rather the ceremonies and un-totalitarian Catholicism of High Anglicanism.

Oct 2017