The Bit Between My Teeth by Edmund Wilson

Author:Edmund Wilson [Wilson, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2018-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

*I am making the Wassons’ transliteration consistent with the standard one.

W. H. AUDEN IN AMERICA

IT IS INTERESTING to go back over Auden’s books and to try to trace the effect on his work of his residence in the United States, to which he first came in 1939 and which, now an American citizen, he has made his headquarters ever since. Let me say at the outset that this influence of America does not seem to me in the least to have diluted the Englishness of Auden or to have changed its essential nature. Auden’s genius is basically English—though in ways which, in the literary world, seem at present rather out of fashion. He is English in his toughness, his richness, his obstinacy, his adventurousness, his eccentricity. What America has done for Auden is to help him to acquire what is certainly today one of the best things an American can hope to have: a mind that feels itself at the center of things. It has given him a point of view that is inter- or super-national.

One can see now, in rereading Auden, that he had always a much more widely foraging habit of mind than most English writers of his generation. The chief theme of his early work was, to be sure, a British schoolboy conspiracy in which the Marxist crusade against capitalism was identified with the revolt of the young against schoolmasters and parents and their governments. The economic crisis of the thirties gave rise to such protests everywhere and inspired such subversive hopes, but the rebellion of Auden and his friends was so much in terms of the English world—of public school, university and Bloomsbury—in which they had grown up and been educated and in which they now felt themselves imprisoned—as scarcely to be intelligible elsewhere. A brilliant poem such as the Last Will and Testament of Auden and Louis MacNeice, included in their Letters from Iceland, will need eventually as many notes to explain its innumerable references to the Oxford-Cambridge-London group as the Testaments of Villon that suggested it (though it should always be able to speak for itself as the Testaments of Villon do). Yet there was more in this early Auden than the schoolboy loves and hates and the private jokes. The writer of this article, who first read Auden’s poems at a time when he had seen very little of England since the beginning of the First World War in the summer of 1914, was largely unaware of their interest as a commentary on English life. It was only in 1945, when, returning to the United States after spending some time in England, he looked into these early poems of Auden again, that he found in them an illuminating picture of an England he had not known till he saw it, in a further phase, at the end of the second war: an England suburbanized, industrialized, considerably Americanized, impoverished and sadly crippled but pretending that nothing had happened. One could see how young men

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