'I Leave Him, Full of Envy'

Without resorting to clues, who do you think Eugenio Montale is talking about: 

“He is a strong, cordial, human man, whom one seems to have always known.”

 

One hint: it’s a poet. Among major poets, the pickings are slim. Strong? Scratch Cavafy. Cordial? There goes Frost. “Human man”? Not sure what that means but it’s certainly not Pound. Montale gives readers a new way of looking at a poet we thought we’ve always known: W.H. Auden.

 

Montale is in Venice in September 1951 to attend the premier of Igor Stravinsky’s three-act opera The Rake’s Progress, with a libretto by Auden and Chester Kallman. On the night before the opening, Montale meets Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender in a restaurant. He knew the other two but hadn’t before met Auden. In “On the Trail of Stravinsky,” Montale writes:

 

“According to Stravinsky, who chose him on the advice of Huxley, Auden is the Bach of modern poetry. He does what he likes and knows every secret of technique. And in fact his poetry is sweet like Spenser’s, ironic and witty like Pope’s, dry and discursive like Eliot’s. He jumps from the old to the new with perfect nonchalance, enjambs his stanzas like the best of Byron’s Don Juan, juggles modern thought with acrobatic agility; moving through time and space among the ghosts of Kierkegaard and the invective of Karl Barth, he has abandoned the religion of Marxism for the Anglo-Catholicism into which he was born; and finally (and for me, today, this is his greatest attraction) he loves opera and in the libretto of the Rake has succeeded in writing a master-work of the genre.”

 

There’s something reassuring about a writer we admire admiring another we comparably prize. Auden was a wizard of technique – but never failed to be Montale’s “human man” in his work. He could write in any form. Yes, Auden grew up in the late 1930s, around the time he moved to the United States and abandoned his silly, kneejerk Leftism. Indulge me. Here’s some more of Montale:                              

 

“[S]ince Auden is the kind of personality who excites the air that surrounds him, this  evening in the Frezzeria a little breeze was blowing, more redolent of sacred oratorio than comic opera. ‘When will this scandal of three divided Churches (Roman, Orthodox and Anglican) come to an end?’ Auden asked me. Yet he practices his own religion ‘in progress,’ and doesn’t expect the lesson to come down from on high, from the ‘bosses’ or gerarchs. It's a difficult endeavor, which needs to be begun by small groups of ‘private citizens,’ by individuals.”

 

Montale is charming in his fondness for Auden. “I leave him,” he writes, “full of envy.” – an admission few poets would make of a fellow poet.

 

[Montale’s original article appeared in Corriere della Sera. Translated in the Spring 1980 issue of New England Review by Jonathan Galassi, it was included in his translation of Montale's The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays (1982). In 2000, Galassi gave us his translation of Collected Poems 1920-1954.]