At the age of 53, Wystan Hugh Auden is widely considered one of the greatest poets in English of this century, along with Yeats and Eliot. His work is profound, varied, and prolific, and as I discovered, his conversation reaches similar heights.
The following interview took place over the telephone, after I was unexpectedly prevented from visiting Oxford, where Auden is professor of poetry. It is not an arduous post, requiring the delivery of three lectures a year (his are very popular) and leaving plenty of time for reflection. Auden began by saying that he had been thinking about the position of a poet invited to give lectures or criticism.
“The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a grain of salt,” he said, speaking with a heavy smoker’s rasp. “For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.”
“So why bother to publish such private thoughts?"
“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”
Chuckle, cough.
“What about full-time critics,” I wondered, “is their approach more objective?”
Auden told me good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists. When I asked why, he suggested, “One reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say—‘Life is more important than anything I can say about it’—than to say—‘Mr A’s work is more important than anything I can say about it.’”
“When did you begin writing poetry?”
“One Sunday afternoon in March 1922.”
He was then about 15.
“Were you inspired by poetry you had read?”
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“I scarcely knew any poems and I took little interest in what is called Imaginative Literature. Most of my reading had been related to a private world of Sacred Objects. Aside from a few stories like George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, Jules Verne’s The Child of the Cavern, the subjects of which touched on my obsessions, my favourite books bore such titles as Underground Life, Machinery for Metalliferous Mines, Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor, and my conscious purpose in reading them had been to gain information about my sacred objects. Between the ages of seven and twelve my fantasy life was centered around lead mines.”
Auden speaks in perfectly formed sentences, and even paragraphs. I’d become so preoccupied in taking notes that I hadn’t interrupted for a while, but the lead mines demanded notice.
“What?” I barked.
Another chuckle. “I spent many hours imagining in the minutest detail the Platonic Idea of all lead mines. In planning its concentrating mill, I ran into difficulty: I had to choose between two types of a certain machine for separating the slimes. One I found more ‘beautiful’ but the other was, I knew from my reading, the more efficient. My feeling at the time, I remember very clearly, was that I was confronted by a moral choice and that it was my duty to choose the second.”
Auden was born in York in 1907, and published his first book of poems (called Poems) at the tender age of 23. He was an almost instant success and quickly gained a reputation as a declamatory left-wing writer. Preaching ran in his family – while his father was a doctor and mother a nurse, both his grandfathers had been vicars.
“How did you learn to write poetry?” I asked. “Did you have a mentor?"
“A would-be poet serves his apprenticeship in a library. This has its advantages. Though the Master is deaf and dumb and gives neither instruction nor criticism, the apprentice can choose any Master he likes, living or dead, the Master is available at any hour of the day or night, lessons are all for free, and his passionate admiration of his Master will ensure that he work hard to please him. To please means to imitate and it is impossible to do a recognisable imitation of a poet without attending to every detail of his diction, rhythms and habits of sensibility.”
“And —”
“Later in life, incidentally, he will realise how important is the art of imitation, for he will not infrequently be called upon to imitate himself.”
One of the irritatingly wide range of talents Auden is blessed with is humour, deployed so effectively it often obscures his firm views.
“What does a poet need before he can break away from his masters?” I asked.
“He will never know what he himself can write until he has a general sense of what needs to be written. And this is the one thing his elders cannot teach him, just because they are his elders; he can only learn it from his fellow apprentices with whom he shares one thing in common, youth. The discovery is not wholly pleasant. If the young speak of the past as a burden it is a joy to throw off, behind their words may often lie a resentment and fright at realising that the past will not carry them on its back.”
“What should a young poet study at university?” I asked.
“There is nothing a would-be poet knows he has to know. He is at the mercy of the immediate moment because he has no concrete reason for not yielding to its demands and, for all he knows now, surrendering to his immediate desire may turn out later to have been the best thing he could have done. It is hardly surprising, then, if a young poet seldom does well in his examinations.”
Auden studied at Christ Church at Oxford, changing from biology to English and obtaining a third-class degree.
I ventured the opinion that more and more young people these days want to become writers, and he agreed. “In our age,” he said, after another brief coughing fit, “if a young person is untalented, the odds are in favour of his imagining he wants to write. In our society, the process of fabrication has been so rationalised in the interests of speed, economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically all workers have become reduced to labourers. It is only natural, therefore, that the arts, which cannot be rationalised in this way, should fascinate those who, because they have no marked talent, are afraid, with good reason, that all they have to look forward to is a lifetime of meaningless labour.”
“But they must like literature, surely?”
“This fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artist works; he, and in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue, not of some special talent, but of their humanity, could do if they tried.”
“Are poets nice people?”
“Every ‘original’ genius, be he an artist or a scientist, has something a bit shady about him, like a gambler or a medium.” (Pause) “Only a minor talent can be a perfect gentleman; a major talent is always more than a bit of a cad.”
“Is the twentieth century conducive to being an artist?”
“In the purely gratuitous arts, poetry, painting, music, our century has no need, I believe, to be ashamed of its achievements, and in its fabrication of purely utile and functional articles like airplanes, dams, surgical instruments, it surpasses any previous age. But whenever it attempts to combine the gratuitous with the utile, to fabricate something which shall be both functional and beautiful, it fails utterly. No previous age has created anything so hideous as the average modern automobile, lampshade or building.”
Auden moved to America in 1939, partly, he said, to escape his reputation as a left-wing poet. By then his views were becoming more nuanced, and he was soon to become a Christian. I asked him if it was a good thing for poets to be politically engaged. No doubt drawing on his own past, he said, “The cause, I fear, is less their social conscience than their vanity; they are nostalgic for a past when poets had a public status.”
“Why can’t they produce useful insights nonetheless?”
“Poets are, by the nature of their interests and the nature of artistic fabrication, singularly ill-equipped to understand politics or economics. Their natural interest is in singular individuals and personal relations, while politics and economics are concerned with large numbers of people.” He stopped, and I was about to ask another question when he went on: “The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value; he may be paid ten pounds for a poem which he believes is very good and took him months to write, and a hundred pounds for a piece of journalism which costs him but a day’s work. If he is a successful poet he is a member of the Manchester school and believes in absolute laisser-faire; if he is unsuccessful and embittered, he is liable to combine aggressive fantasies about the annihilation of the present social order with impractical daydreams of Utopia. Society has always to beware of the utopias being planned by artists manques over cafeteria tables late at night.”
“Modern poetry seems to have alienated much of poetry’s traditional audience, hasn’t it?”
“There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behaviour; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?”
“You have never produced an autobiography. Do you approve of the genre?”
“Biographies of writers, whether written by others or themselves, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.”
“Could you explain?”
“An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.” After another cough, he added: “No man, however tough he appears to his friends, can help portraying himself in his autobiography as a sensitive plant.”
“Do you think about yourself very much?”
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“The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to confession to a priest: be brief, be blunt, be gone,” he replied, and then quoted with approval Cesare Pavese’s opinion: “‘One ceases to be a child when one realises that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.’”
I am not sure of the therapeutic value of this advice, but it might have professional utility. Possibly Auden, like many artists, has an instinctive awareness that if he understood himself too well, he would no longer need to produce art.
Moving on, I said, “You’ve said you find detective stories an addiction. Why must there be a murder, why won’t any other crime do, no matter how awful?”
“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution. It is the one crime in which society has a direct interest,” Auden explained, and went on to suggest that the murder should occur in a peaceful society, some Great Good Place, (for contrast) and a closed one (to limit the number of suspects.)
“Chandler is different, isn't he?”
“I think Mr Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.”
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“Which authors of the classical stories do you admire?”
“The job of the detective is to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one. Since the murderer who caused their disjunction is the aesthetically defiant individual, his opponent, the detective, must be either the official representative of the ethical or the exceptional individual who is himself in a state of grace. Completely satisfactory detectives are extremely rare. Indeed, I only know of three: Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), Inspector French (Freeman Wills Croft), and Father Brown (Chesterton). The amateur detective genius may have weaknesses to give him aesthetic interest, but they must not be of a kind which outrage ethics. The most satisfactory weaknesses are the solitary oral vices of eating and drinking or childish boasting. In his sexual life, the detective must be either celibate or happily married.”
Holmes, Auden said, is “in a state of grace because he is a genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of a heroic passion. He pays the price for his scientific detachment by being the victim of melancholia which attacks him whenever he is unoccupied with a case (eg, his violin playing and cocaine taking).”
And Father Brown?
“He solves his cases, not by approaching them objectively like a scientist or a policeman, but by subjectively imagining himself to be the murderer.”
I wondered what sort of person reads detective novels, and Auden said, “Like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin. The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from which the guilty other has been expelled. The fantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden.”
“You’ve spent some years in the United States. Do you find Americans very different from Europeans?”
“Our different pasts have not yet been completely erased. The most striking difference between an American and a European is the difference in their attitudes towards money. Every European knows, as a matter of historical fact, that, in Europe, wealth could only be acquired at the expense of other human beings, either by conquering them or by exploiting their labour in factories. In the United States, wealth was also acquired by stealing, but the real exploited victim was not a human being but poor Mother Earth and her creatures who were ruthlessly plundered.”
“The Indians—”
“It is true that the Indians were expropriated or exterminated, but this was not, as it had always been in Europe, a matter of the conqueror seizing the wealth of the conquered, for the Indian had never realised the potential riches of his country. Thanks to the natural resources of the country, every American, until quite recently, could reasonably look forward to making more money than his father. What an American values, therefore, is not the possession of money as such, but his power to make it as proof of his manhood; once he has proved himself by making it, it has served its function and can be lost or given away. In no society in history have rich men given away so large a part of their fortunes.”
I hadn’t asked Auden enough about love. His personal relationships are largely unknown (he is homosexual), but his poetic reflections seem to indicate an almost romantic hunger for permanent relationships.
“Do you believe in love?” I asked.
“No notion of our Western culture has been responsible for more human misery and more bad poetry than the supposition that a certain mystical experience called falling or being ‘in love’ is one which every normal man and woman can expect to have. The experience certainly does occur, but only, I should guess, to those with a livelier imagination than the average. Under its influence the poet should write better poetry—about something else.”
“Do you believe in marriage?” I asked.
“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.”
After this original response – I was trying to recall if I’d ever read a novel about a happy marriage – the phone went dead, and my attempts to ring back were unsuccessful. Auden had given me a wonderful interview. Perhaps, like a completed poem, he now regarded the matter as finished. He is, apart from everything else, a great one for moving on.
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W.B. Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist. Some of his poetry is inspired by Irish legends and the occult, although he also drew upon Greek legends, as in his poem, ‘Leda and the Swan’, Christian mythology, as in ‘The Second Coming’ as well as Irish politics and Ireland’s struggle for independence. His poem, ‘Easter 1916’ was inspired by an uprising by Irish republicans against British rule with the aim of establishing an Irish republic. Dublin's General Post Office became the rebels’ headquarters, but the British were able to quickly put down the rebellion. Many were latter executed. Yeats’s poem mentions a number of the fighters by name.
Yeats also contributed to Irish theatre. He co-founded the Abbey Theatre. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, and also served two terms as a Senator.
T.S. Eliot was an American-born poet, playwright and critic. He is best known for his poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and his longer poem ‘The Waste Land’ which draws upon Arthurian Legends and makes representations of English society.
Eliot moved to England at the age of 25 and became an English citizen at the age of 39. He was a leading figure in the Modernist movement and had associations with the Bloomsbury group, a group of writers and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf.
Eliot is also popularly known for his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats which inspired Andrew Lloyd Webbers musical, Cats.
He approved the publication of an early edition of Auden’s poetry by Faber and Faber in 1930.
The Princess and the Goblin is a children’s fantasy written by George MacDonald and published in 1872. Princess Irene lives alone in a castle with her nursemaid. Her mother is dead and her father is absent. Irene discovers that nearby mines are inhabited by goblins. The plot revolves around the goblins’ attempts to kidnap Irene so that she can be married to a goblin prince, and how they are thwarted.
A common theme in the books mentioned by Auden in this interview is the presence of an underground world which he associates with his understanding of the ‘sacred’.
The Child of the Cavern is a story by Jules Verne about a Scotish mining community. James Starr sets out for an old mine after receiving a letter from an former colleague and finds a family living in the mine who have discovered a large seam of coal.
Mysterious occurrences convince some people in the community that goblins inhabit the mine, but further explorations reveal a young girl living there, as well as a former employee of the mine, Silfax, who is responsible for the mysterious events that have spooked the townspeople and made them believe in goblins.
A common theme in the books mentioned by Auden in this interview is the presence of an underground world which he associates with his understanding of the ‘sacred’.
In his early career Auden publish three collections of poetry with the same title: Poems. The first edition was published by Auden’s friend, Stephen Spender, in 1928. There were no more than 45 copies printed in this edition.
Auden’s second edition of poetry to use the same title was accepted by T.S. Eliot and published by Faber and Faber in 1930. Only a few of the original poems remained in this new volume, with new poetry added. The cover shown here is from that 1930 edition for which a thousand were printed.
The 1933 edition of Auden’s third book entitled Poems dropped seven of the poems from the previous edition and included other poems written after the 1930 edition.
The title is not enticing and the subject matter may seem arcane. Yet Machinery for Metalliferous Mines is now considered a book of historical importance and so is available in digitally reconstructed editions like the edition pictured here. But if you’re merely machine-curious, Google provides an online edition which you can view by clicking here. Even if you’re not interested in reading any part of the book, the illustrations of machinery featured on the page are interesting.
Auden was interested in mining machinery, mining landscapes and mines. For him they had a mystical or magical property which was to stay with him for life.
A common theme in the books mentioned by Auden in this interview is the presence of an underground world which he associates with his understanding of the ‘sacred’.
Raymond Chandler
Auden’s phrase ‘the great wrong place’ is referencing an essay he wrote, The Guilty Vicarage, in which he outlines his own typology for good detective fiction. On the subject of setting Auden wrote:
Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighbourhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum.
Auden is speaking of detective fiction as a moral universe in which the setting, by being a ‘good’ place, accentuates the horrific nature of the crime. It is aim of the detective to return the community to this ‘Edenic-like’ state by solving the crime.
In contrast, Chandler set his detective fiction in Los Angeles where he accentuated the seedier side of humanity. In doing so, Chandler upends one of the precepts upon which Auden believed detective fiction was based. Charles Wasserburg says of Chandler’s use of setting that,
the physical city is emblematic of the pastless, valueless society it contains, with as much cultural as criminal deception taking place within its bounds. And it is Marlowe’s job to ferret out both.
Charles Wasserburg, ‘Raymond Chandler’s Great Wrong Place,’ Southwest Review, Vol 74, No 4, Autumn 1989, page 535
Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is the fictional detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is arguably the best known fictional detective in the world. He calls himself a ‘consulting detective’, since he is a private detective who sometimes aids the police in their investigations. He is known for his amazing powers of observation, of his knowledge of arcane subjects like the various kinds of cigar ash, and is able to deduce facts from clues using reason and scientific methods to solve difficult cases. This is often demonstrated when he first meets someone by his observation of the details of character and background by observing salient features of their appearance.
Holmes is also a famous opium addict who cannot bear to be bored. He needs to apply his mind to problems. He plays the violin and sometimes uses disguises to conduct his cases.
Sherlock Homes first appeared in the novel, A Study in Scarlet in 1887. Doyle would write fifty-eight short stories and four novels about his detective, with a break in publication after he killed off Holmes in ‘The Final Problem’ in 1893. However, Doyle brought back his character in 1901 with the publication of his novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Sherlock Holmes has been played by many actors in thousands of adaptations of Doyle’s stories for the stage and screen, and is represented traditionally by actors like Basil Rathbone who appeared in fourteen films as Sherlock Holmes between 1939 and 1946, or modern adaptations like Elementary starring Johnny Lee Miller as Holmes, or Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
Mark Williams as Father Brown
Father Brown is a crime solving Catholic priest who appeared in over fifty short stories by G.K. Chesterton. Father Brown is a small and unimposing man who carries an umbrella, and is described by Chesterton in the first Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’, as having “a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling.” His status and his unimposing physical stature make him non-threatening and allow him to easily observe his subjects.
Father Brown’s method of solving crimes differs to his more famous counterpart, Sherlock Holmes. He tends to base his deductions on intuition and a knowledge of human nature, along with insights into the criminal mind which he has gained from listening to many confessions as part of his duties as a Catholic priest. However, while the solutions to Father Brown stories are not always realistic as one might expect from real criminal cases, Father Brown does apply reason over superstition when approaching crime, and asserts the need for reason: “I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way . . . Alone on Earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bounded by reason.” The stories sometimes touch upon theological issues.
Father Brown is humble, devout and represents ideals of the Catholic priesthood that Chesterton may have valued as a convert to Catholicism.
The Father Brown stories were adapted for television by the BBC and first started airing in 2013 with Mark Williams as Father Brown.
Inspector French was the creation of Freeman Wills Croft, an author from what is known as the Golden as of Detective Fiction. The character first appeared in Inspector French’s Greatest Case, and would eventually appear in a further 28 novels as well as short stories. Inspector French is adept at challenging suspects’ alibis.
The character was fairly static over the course of the series and had no major problems in his personal life which has made other fictional detectives more appealing.
The character does not appear in any major films, but at the time of writing there is a television series that may be developed.
A chain elevator, as featured in Machinery for Metalliferous Mines by E. Henry Davies
A year after Wystan Auden’s birth in 1907 his family moved to the industrial town of Birmingham. During his childhood Auden became imaginatively interested in his surroundings which consisted of lead mines and factories that surrounded the city.
Auden and his brothers often walked to the local gasworks in Solihull and admired the mechanical equipment. Auden would talk to the gasworks workers and watch them work. Auden’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, writes that the gasworks were “the first place that seemed to him numinous, arousing a feeling of wonder and awe”. Auden would eventually explore the surrounding industrial districts, taking train rides to view the factories, warehouses and chimneys, which provided imaginative inspiration, and as a child inspired him to want to be a lead miner.
Auden was obsessed by the different states of the machinery – at work and in its silent stillness – and was inspired by industrial landscapes, especially mines and the way abandoned mines were reclaimed by nature. Auden’s ‘sacred objects’ included the machinery used in these industrial processes.
For Auden, ‘sacred objects’ were not necessarily the traditional objects associated with religion, but objects that could inspire imaginative awe which could bring him to a sense of the divine. Auden believed that there were false and true sacred objects. False sacred objects might overpower the senses with their aesthetic appeal, playing upon our emotions and leaving little resistance to their appeal, thereby reducing our agency to choose, and so our selfhood, since passions can easily lead us into self-deception. This is due to Auden’s belief in the imperfection of humanity due to the Fall in the Garden of Eden.
The true sacred, on the other hand, are objects which speak imaginatively to us and fill us with awe and wonder, not through their appeal to the senses or our passions. Auden argues that, “Christ did not enchant men . . . He demanded that they believe Him.”
Auden recognised that art – potentially poetry – appealed to aesthetic sensibilities which could detract from someone’s experience of the sacred: that the appeal of art lies with a dissatisfaction with the real world. But Auden also believed that art, if its limits were understood and the artist used it properly had the potential to free us from “false enchantments”.
Auden’s reading materials as a child and teenager helped to foster his imaginative connection to mines and industrial landscapes, and were formative in his conception of the sacred.
References:
Jeremy Davis Jagger, ‘Evolvong Wilds: Auden, Ecology, and the Formation of a New Poetics’, A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, May 2020
Eugene Webb, ‘The Religious Thought of W.H. Auden: The Ambiguity of the Sacred’, An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol 57, No 4, Winter 1974, pp 439-457
Auden began his essay The Guilty Vicarage with an admission that he was addicted to Detective Fiction:
For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this are: Firstly, the intensity of the craving — if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it.
Martin Edwards acknowledges Auden’s interest in detective fiction and his connection with members of the Detection Club in his book The Golden Age of Murder. The club was formed by a group of writers in 1930 with G.K. Chesterton as its president. The club helped to publish a number of works in an era of crime publishing which became known as the Golden Age of Crime, as well as formulate rules that helped to define the genre.
Edwards writes of Auden’s connection with Cecil Day-Lewis (father of the famous actor, Daniel Day-Lewis), a poet who also wrote detective stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, most of which featured his detective Nigel Strangeways. Both Auden and Day-Lewis “wrote political and polemical verse reflecting dismay at the economic malaise of the Thirties and the rise of fascism in Europe.” (Edwards) Auden helped him secure a teaching job.
Edwards also writes of Auden’s connection with P.D. James:
“When P.D. James, later a pillar of the Detection Club, was first published by Faber, a pleasing suggestion was made that Auden might write a few poems masquerading as the work of her detective, the police officer and poet Adam Dalgleish. Auden died before the plan came to fruition, but he enjoyed James’ books as he had enjoyed Golden Age mysteries”
Martin Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder, Harper Collins Publishers, 2015, page 279
NB: The first line of the poem is missing from the recording
NB: Contains a short musical introduction
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels. Attributed to Pieter Brueghel