W. H. Auden by Alan Levy

Author:Alan Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504023337
Publisher: The Permanent Press

3

EXPERIENCING W. H. AUDEN

Begin toward the end of Auden’s life. It is the autumnal Auden in these pages. He will not detain you much longer; nor will he bore you; nor will reading the later Auden strike you as difficult. Certainly he will amuse you—with the latter-day clerihews of 1971s Academic Graffiti, which he’d just completed when I met him that Spring;

Oscar Wilde

Was greatly beguiled,

When into the Cafe Royal walked Bosie

Wearing a tea-cosy.*

and with any of the three collections of poetry that emerged from (and largely about) the farmhouse in Kirchstetten: About the House, City Without Walls, and Epistle to a Godson; small books (94, 124, and 77 pages, respectively) setting off sparklers that often pass for minor, but flashy, fireworks:

Some thirty inches from my nose

The frontier of my Person goes,

And all the untilled air between

Is private pagus or demesne.

Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes

I beckon you to fraternize,

Beware of rudely crossing it:

I have no gun, but I can spit.

In this “postscript” to the first poem (“Prologue: The Birth of Architecture”) in About the House, one hears the haughty, wary, but not unkind voice of the Auden I met in Kirchstetten. The first (and better) half of About the House is a rambing guided tour of Auden’s Austrian abode—“Thanksgiving for a Habitat” that includes attic, cellar, kitchen, table, and even, as we have seen, privy. There is nothing House & Garden about this tour: Auden, as always is breaking bread with the dead (in the third poem, “The Cave of Making,” he converses with and grieves for his late collaborator, Louis MacNeice, 1907-63) and celebrating the living (Chester Kallman) in his living room.

In the second part, called “In and Out,” Auden’s ode to the assassinated President Kennedy (“Why then, why there/why thus, we cry, did he die?”) is buried amidst “Four Occasional Poems,” sandwiched in-between tributes to J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and Elizabeth Mayer (to whom New Year Letter is dedicated, and with whom Auden translated Goethe’s Italian Journey) on her 80th birthday. Four difficult but deserving Slavic poets are “transliterated” by Auden in another quartet. About the House also houses at least two familiar, but glittering, gems from the outside world: “On the Circuit,” where lecturer Auden, airborne, sits among travelers “Lost on their lewd conceited way/ To Massachusetts, Michigan,/ Miami or L.A.,” considering not so much why “Sprit is willing to repeat/ Without a qualm the same old talk” or whether he is overpaid for doing so, but the overriding question of “What will there be to drink?” … and “At the Party,” where, over the fasionable cocktail chatter, Auden catches the unspoken despair (“Will no one listen to my little song?/ Perhaps I shan’t be with you very long”) and acknowledges:

A howl for recognition, shrill with fear,

Shakes the jam-packed apartment, but each ear

Is listening to its hearing, so none hear.

But, even there, at the end of his book, Auden brings us safely back to his Austrian sanctuary for “Whitsunday in Kirchstetten.”

In City Without Walls, the dimensions—despite the title—seem small, yet padded.

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