Happy Birthday, Wystan!

Today we celebrate the centenary of the birth of W.H. Auden, the modern poet whose technical facility and gift for aphorism remain unrivalled. Above all, he is poet as comforter and dispenser of wisdom in difficult times. But as Auden often reminds us, writers are merely conduits. It’s the words, not the man, that matter. A Christian who wrestled with his faith, Auden could be truculent and many observers confirm that his grooming left much to be desired. However:

“Biographies of writers, whether written by others or themselves, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste. A writer is a maker, not a man of action. To be sure, some, in a sense all, of his works are transmutations of his personal experiences, but no knowledge of the raw ingredients will explain the peculiar flavor of the verbal dishes he invites the public to taste: his private life is, or should be, of no concern to anybody except himself, his family and his friends.”

That’s from the Foreword to A Certain World, the commonplace book Auden published in 1970, three years before his death. In one of the rare comments Auden appends to an entry, in this case “Bores,” he writes, “Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one’s own.”

All true, except Auden includes no headings in his commonplace book for poetry, prosody, literature, books, or reading, though there is a brief section on writing – in other words, little shop talk except by metaphor or as it leaches in from other subjects. The volume is eccentric, unsystematic, absorbing, revealing and sometimes frustrating. Apart from identifying authors, Auden doesn’t specify sources, except indirectly on the acknowledgement pages at the back of the book.

Auden has favorites – seven entries from Samuel Johnson, eight from Karl Kraus, four each from Chekhov and Kierkegaard. He quotes most lavishly (18 entries) from Goethe, a writer who has never traveled well to the English-speaking world. There are no passages from Shakespeare, Keats, Lincoln, Whitman, Freud, Joyce, Eliot, Pound or Wallace Stevens, and only one each from Emerson, Hazlitt, Kafka and Henry James. This is among the book’s strengths. Like many of the best writers, Auden’s interests are not exclusively literary, and neither are his sources. Many of the books he draws from are unfamiliar even to ambitious readers. Auden pedantically files one of my favorites under “Lead Mine, Visit to a.” It’s attributed to T. Sopwith and runs to an unaphoristic six pages – the longest entry in the book. A little digging reveals it come from the diary kept by Thomas Sopwith (1803-1879), chief agent for a lead mining company in England.

Auden was born in York but his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, when he was a year old. As a child, Auden was imaginatively absorbed by the limestone landscape of the moors and the declining lead mines of the North. One of his brothers became a geologist and Auden’s poetry is studded with geological, mining and industrial references. Among his finest poems is “In Praise of Limestone.” In Forewords and Afterwords he writes:

“I spent a great many of my waking hours in the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining.”

His best biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, writes:

“He took his landscape seriously, and asked his mother and other adults to procure for him textbooks with titles such as Machinery for Metalliferous Mines, maps, guidebooks, and photographs; and he persuaded them to take him down a real mine if ever there was a chance. He especially relished the technical vocabulary of mining, the names of mines and of the veins found in them, and the geological terms relating to mining.”

I linger over Auden’s inclusion of the lead mine passage because it reveals something about his formative landscape, but also displays a quality I value in any writer – passionate attention paid to the details of the real world. In A Certain World, Auden includes such geological headings as “Alps, The,” “Climber, An Amateur,” “Climber, A Professional,” “Eruptions,” “Landscape: Basalt” and “Landscape: Limestone.” In the poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” he writes:

“Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.”

Auden’s choice of headings for his commonplace book is vast and varied – “Anesthesia,” “Conception, The Immaculate,” “Homer and Seeing,” “Inverted Commas, Transformation by,” “Kilns,” “Madness,” “World, End of the,” which creates, in the aggregate, a joyous ad hoc celebration of the world in all its plenitude. Marianne Moore wrote of Auden: “He is a notable instance of the poet whose scientific predilections do not make him less than a poet – who says to himself, I must know.” Edward Mendelson called Auden the first poet to feel at home in the 20th century. Of course, it’s quintessentially modern to embrace the outmoded, the fragmented, the abandoned, and to feel nostalgia for what is no longer modern – for “Tramlines and slagheaps.” In “Epithalamium,” written in 1965 for the wedding of his niece, Auden again reveals his breadth of interests, including the geological and biological:

“For we’re better built to last
than tigers, our skins
don’t leak like the ciliates’,
our ears can detect
quarter-tones, even our most
myopic have good enough
vision for courtship

“and how uncanny it is
we’re here to say so,
that life should have got to us
up through the City’s
destruction layers after
surviving the inhuman
Permian purges.”

In his Foreword to A Certain World, after derogating literary biographies, Auden admits his commonplace book is “a sort of autobiography” and, in an interesting astronomical/geological metaphor, “a map of my planet” – presumably, his sensibility, his life. Around the same time, in August 1969, Auden was writing “Moon Landing,” about the Apollo 11 mission. It’s not a celebration of the voyage of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins:

“Homer’s heroes were certainly no braver
than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector
was excused the insult of having
his valor covered by television.”

But it is, four years before his death, another Auden affirmation of poetry and its consolations:

“Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.”

Happy birthday, Wystan! Thanks for the blithing.

Happy birthday, David! My youngest is four years old today.