scapegoat and saviour: auden again

Louis MacNeice: he couldn't do that now

The centenary continues: here in Baroque Mansions we still blow the candles out every night. Faber's new Auden Collected is finally out,* and Ian Sansom has had a bet each way after reading it.

It is interesting how the centenary this year has been like an opportunity to rake open all the old festering resentment towards him for defecting to America in 1939. I've always taken Auden's greatness so much for granted (more on this later in the year, as MacNeice's centenary gets nearer) that I wasn;t even aware of how much anti feeling there is. (And of course some people's only reason for ever saying something nice is so they can pause meaningfully and then say, "but...")

Sansom's review in Saturday's Guardian begins grippingly:

"WH Auden is to blame for everything that went wrong with English poetry. Absurdly overpraised when young, he remained naive and immature both as a person and as a poet, his preciosities and youthful good looks becoming vile and monstrous. He was dictatorial in his approach and his opinions, imprisoned by his own intelligence, intellectually dishonest, atrociously showy in diction and lexical range, technically ingenious rather than profound, pathetically at the mercy of contemporary fashions and ideas, facetious, self-praising, vulgar and ultimately merely quaint."

Well! I don't know about you but I was rather shocked. Great paragraph, though. Maybe I'm just a bit delicate, what with the gall bladder and everything. Sansom continues, reviewing the book in a responsible and conscientious manner, until the end: "if Auden is the scapegoat of English poetry, and he is and deserves to be, then he is also its saviour." Still a bit harsh, you might feel, though I know people who utterly deride Auden. I don't understand it (just as I never understand people who deride James Merrill for being arch, of all things: you might as well write poems about dinner parties as anything else), but this review brings me closer to understanding that it might have to do with leaving the second half off the quoted sentence. Then again, the conundrum is troublingly encapsulated in a stanza claimed by Sansom to be "Auden's most perfect stanza":**

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

This stanza is not what I was expecting to see after that sentence. It is one I have always enjoyed, and it is utter Auden in its cadences and tone. Yes. But is it most perfect Auden? Isn't there something bathetic about those reindeer? They are very much reindeer viewed through the window of a very English imagination. I have never once read it without somehow, somewhere, feeling a naughty urge to giggle. Is this stanza, in its perfected Auden-ness, telling us that we must learn to expect irony with every meal? Can we never do without it?

After all, we know Auden could write movingly about love, death and hopelessness. It may be that claiming this as the perfect auden stanza is another way of shrinking him down to size - rather like those reindeer, who always seem to me very small, for all that the herds are vast.The Auden tone is usually at least a little bit complicated. At his best, including in the above stanza, he is also strangely (even if very fast-) moving.***

So after all, do I really want this book? Sansom hasn't really told me if I should. He has told me I should read Auden, which I can do anyway in my Collected Shorter Poems, Collected Longer Poems, Letters From Iceland, The Shield of Achilles, or The English Auden. (To be honest, I sometimes wonder if the reason I found Auden so daunting for so many years was because he came spread out through so many books.) I might be afraid of collecting him up all in one place: would it make him appear somehow smaller, more easily comprehended? Would that be a good thing? But the edition itself gets a rather short treatment. What is it about this Collected, aside from the fact that somebody thought they ought to do it as it was the centenary, that should make me want to have it? I mean, have to have it?

I didn't think all of this through instantaneously. But after I read the review I did a curious thing. I went onto amazon.co.uk, and dawdled through a few book searches and things, as you do. And then I bought the magisterial new MacNeice Collected. (But anyway that's understandable: I bought it for the picture.)

(Disclaimer: this whole post needs editing and if I get a chance I will do it. Words cannot describe how tired I was when I wrote it. Though it does approximately get at what I think.)

* a watched pot that boiled.

** I was sort of expecting to see this, which even now always somehow surprises with its final rhyme:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

*** Would I be happy if I'd written it? Yes.