At War with W.H. Auden

The English tennis star Henry Wilfred “Bunny” Austin, sometimes known as H.W. Austin, was talented enough to make the singles final at Wimbledon in 1932 and 1938. He cut a fine figure on the court, being the first to grace it wearing shorts. In later life, his friend Peter Ustinov described him as having been “disgracefully ostracised by the All-England Club because he was a conscientious objector”, and for a brief time in June 1940, he was mistaken for the poet of the moment, W.H. Auden.

In parliament, Jocelyn Lucas had asked a question of Ralph Assheton, Winston Churchill’s Minister for Labour, seeking clarification as to whether citizens of military age, who had sought refuge in other countries, would be summoned back to Britain and called up for military service. Lucas cited the writers “Mr Christopher Isherwood and Mr W.H. Auden” as examples and added that they had expressed their intention not to return home until war’s end. Assheton answered that he had no information on the Mr Isherwood in question, but assured the honourable member that “Mr Austin [sic] gave an undertaking before leaving the country that he would return if called upon to do so; he is outside the age groups so far required to register under the National Service (Armed Forces) Act.”

Assheton clearly had no idea who Auden and Isherwood were, and his confusing the well-known tennis player’s name with Auden’s had eager pressmen, desperate for copy, relaying stories to their papers suggesting that it was Isherwood and Austin who had fled England for the US. Lucas, who had survived the ghastly battle at Ypres during the Great War and bred a brand of terriers that bore his name, could smell blood. In a similar manner to which he had once admonished a colleague in the House for wearing suede shoes, he then asked: “Is my honourable friend aware of the indignation caused by young men leaving the country and saying that they will not fight? If they are not registered as conscientious objectors will he see that they lose their citizenship?” The flummoxed Assheton could only mutter that exit permits were no longer being issued by the Home Office.

The indignation with which Lucas spoke was real and shared by most associates of Isherwood and Auden. Wyndham Lewis, in the Bystander, had suggested that Auden return his King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, sarcastically suggesting a cere­mony take place in which the medal would be:

publicly detached from the poet’s bosom by the Poet Laureate, standing in a hollow of Foot Guards, after which the poet’s fountain pen is formally broken across his knee by a sergeant-major amid the rolling of drums … A little job on the frontline could then probably be found for all the returned prodigals of good health and military age.

Lively debate regarding the departure of Auden and Isherwood ensued throughout 1940 in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine, and Evelyn Waugh satirised the outcry in his novel Put Out More Flags (1942). Meanwhile Auden was in Massachusetts delivering his Smith College Commencement Address. It contained the following:

On this quiet June morning the war is the dreadful background to the thoughts of us all, and it is difficult indeed to think of anything except the agony and death going on a few thousand miles to the east and west of this hall. While those whom we love are dying or in terrible danger, the overwhelming desire to do something this minute to stop it makes it hard to sit still and think. Nevertheless that is our particular duty in this place at this time.

Auden and Isherwood had arrived in New York towards the end of January 1939. By May, Isherwood had decided to go to Hollywood. Auden, on the other hand, had met eighteen-year-old Chester Kallman, fallen in love, and gone on an extended “honeymoon” road-trip that took in New Orleans and New Mexico. When he and Kallman returned to New York in September, Auden, feeling a need to honour their “marriage”, wrote, “There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much.” The fact that he had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika in 1935 was neither here nor there, since that was solely to provide her with British citizenship and protection of sorts from the rise of the Nazis. Auden had wryly described the wedding as “a bugger’s duty” while Joseph Goebbels revoked Mrs Auden’s German citizenship on the same day.

The September in question is the same September in which Auden write another poem, and one which is most discussed. “September 1, 1939” begins:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.

It contains the famous line “We must love one another or die”, one that would be appropriated by American presidents during election campaigns, and in times of tragedy such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Auden later renounced the poem: “the whole poem, I realised, was infected with an incurable dishonesty”. He insisted it be omitted from the publication of his Collected Shorter Poems 1927–57, and only agreed to its inclusion in a Penguin anthology, Poetry of the Thirties, on the proviso that it be stated he was ashamed to have written it. He claimed he had left England with the purpose of avoiding writing what he himself described as “such trash”. It was a view he maintained; in a 1972 interview for the Paris Review, when asked what was his least favourite poem, he unhesitatingly answered “September 1, 1939”.

By October 1940, Auden was sharing an ultra-bohemian communal lifestyle, in a five-storey brownstone near the Brooklyn Bridge, with the likes of Paul and Jane Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Louis MacNeice, Carson McCullers, Golo Mann (son of Thomas) and the striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee.

Richard Wright would live there for a time, as would Salvador Dali, as well as various circus animals and their trainers. To his brother John, Auden wrote: “all that we can do, who are spared the horrors, is to be happy and not pretend out of a sense of guilt that we are not, to study as hard as we can, and keep our feeble little lamps burning in the big wind.”

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent entry into the war, Auden was directed to report to the US draft board in August 1942. A month later, and having been interviewed by a psychiatrist whom Auden found “both unpleasant and grotesquely ignorant”, he was deemed unsuitable for service due to his homosexuality. “If I’d had a heart condition or something like that,” he informed fellow poet Alan Ansen, “I should have been delighted,” but being rejected on the grounds of his sexual preference, he felt, was tantamount to humiliation. However, he eventually wore a uniform.

In 1945, four months before the war’s end, he began service as a major in the US Air Force. His appointment to the Morale Division of the Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany enabled him to fly to England en route to Germany. Never noted for tact, his bragging pun of being the first major poet to fly the Atlantic brought more sneers than laughs, and old friends such as Stephen Spender and John Lehmann found his eulogising on the cultural vitality of America, as opposed to England’s oppressive discomfort, tiresome. Auden also made the mistake of telling Lucian Freud that he had been the only person really worth seeing, a comment which Freud briskly spruiked around the traps, bringing responses such as that by Robert Graves who described Auden as a rat returning to an “unsunk ship”. In his autobiography, I Am My Brother (1960) Lehmann complained: “There was no mention from Uncle Sam Auden about what we had endured … the unremitting industrial and military effort without which the fortress of Western civilization could never have held.”

From England, Auden sailed to Germany and then went to what little remained of Darmstadt. Here, on September 11, 1944, an allied air raid lasting fifty minutes had created a firestorm that destroyed most of the city and killed many thousands. It was Auden’s brief to ask questions of survivors. As he put it, “We received no answers that we didn’t expect.” In a further tour of Bavaria, he met concentration camp survivors, and in a letter to the German-born translator and editor Elizabeth Mayer he wrote, “I was prepared for their appearance but not for their voices: they whisper like gnomes.”

Auden became an American citizen in 1946 (as did Isherwood). To what degree his fleeting visit to England had helped make up his mind is open to conjecture. He did attempt to explain why—as well as his reasoning behind leaving England seven years earlier—in a letter to Robin Maugham (nephew of Somerset):

England is terribly provincial—it’s all a family business. I know exactly why Guy Burgess went to Moscow. It wasn’t enough to be a queer and a drunk. He had to revolt more to break away from it all. That’s just what I’ve done by becoming an American citizen. You can become an Italian or French citizen—and that’s alright. But become an American citizen and you’ve crossed to the wrong side of the tracks … I also find criticism in England very provincial. In the literary world in England, you have to know who’s married to whom, and who’s slept with whom and who hasn’t. It’s a tiny jungle. America is so much larger.

In 1940 he had written to MacNeice:

In England to-day the artist feels essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots, always in opposition to a group … in America, he is just lonely, but so … is everybody else; with 140 million lonelies milling around him he need not waste his time in conforming or rebelling.

The perception that Auden had betrayed his country lingered for the remainder of his life, so too the notion that he had fled, as Evelyn Waugh put it, “at the first squeak of an air-raid warning”.

Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”

Yet, as Ian Sansom has pointed out, this was in direct contrast to what everybody else seemed to know already—a war was inevitable. George Orwell’s narrator in Coming Up for Air, published in June 1939, verbalised what most felt:

I can see the war that’s coming … There are millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in pubs, bus drivers and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet.

After the war, in 1956, Auden was elected with a narrow majority as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, a position he held until 1961. The highly-regarded Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight (91 votes) and writer and politician Harold Nicolson (192 votes) were the two other candidates. Auden had received 216 votes despite the fact that many of the senior dons were unimpressed with his absence during the war and his becoming an American citizen. Auden himself was unsure whether he wanted to spend the time in England required to deliver the public lectures expected of him each university term. And as he explained to his proposer, Enid Starkie, he was able to make more money in America.

That being the case, in his inaugural Oxford lecture, Making, Knowing and Judging, he stated:

the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: “What kind of a guy inhabits this poem?”

Quite aside from any technical misapprehensions Auden may have had, he had already made it clear, as we have seen, that he loathed the “guy” (by this stage he had something of an American drawl) who inhabited “September 1, 1939”. But what was this different “guy” now making of England? On reflection, he told Maugham: “When I went back to Oxford I just found I didn’t belong … In America I won’t open my mouth for less than three hundred dollars. In England I found people expected me to speak for five pounds.”

And what of his old friends? How did they find him? Auden knew the answer himself. Some verses that he collectively titled Profile (1965-66) contained his most honest self-appraisal. Most found him:

In his cups neither savage nor maudlin
but all too prone
to hold forth.

A few years after these “profiles”, now in his mid-sixties, and following on from a rejected and bizarre marriage proposal to Hannah Arendt (Erika Mann having recently died), Auden began to drop hints that he would like to return to England and live at Oxford’s Christ Church. No doubt he had in mind the sort of arrangement that E.M. Forster had at Cambridge. Forster had been granted rooms at King’s College, and lived at Cambridge as an honorary fellow from 1946 until his death in 1970.

The hints were taken, and Auden expressed his delight at being granted an honorary degree from Oxford in 1971. Early in the following year the university proved even more generous by offering him tenancy of a cottage in the grounds known as the Brewhouse. His stay there got off to a dismal start however, and it seemingly provided a portent for the remainder. The Sun reported:

Poet W.H. Auden went to court yesterday, unshaven and wearing carpet slippers, and told of the night he gave a man a £50 cheque after listening to a hard luck story. But two hours later, the man burgled his rooms and stole his wallet, £50 cash and an IOU, he claimed.

Auden found the whispers around the university insisting that he had been unlucky with some rough trade demeaning.

This, and the fact that common-room conviviality had diminished significantly since his stint as Poetry Professor more than a decade earlier depressed him. The dons now tended to depart hastily at the end of the evening meal, and talking shop was considered poor form. So was drinking the post-dinner port and brandy alone.

Not surprisingly, he soon felt ostracised. The German literature scholar and translator David Luke and novelist J.I.M. Stewart offered friendship, but for the most part Auden was considered during this final stay at Oxford a bore and a drunk whose conversation had increasingly become centred on bodily functions and sex. In short, he was considered ungentlemanly. Luke, who had played a role in Auden gaining his residency, received complaints such as, “Look here, if Auden wants to drink himself to death, please could you ask him to do so in the Brewhouse and not in the Common Room.”

Representations made to Auden himself were, of course, embarrassing for both parties, and his decision to spend only the autumn and spring terms at Christ Church gave everyone, for a time, some relief. As it happened, his sudden death occurred while he was away (in Austria) in 1973, and only hours before a planned return to Oxford.

At the beginning of the war Anthony Powell had composed a piece of witty satiric verse that played on the titles of Auden and Isherwood’s collaborative 1935 poetic drama, The Dog Beneath the Skin, and Isherwood’s novel of that year, Mr Norris Changes Trains. It appeared in the New Statesman early in 1940 over the monicker “Viper” and read:

The literary (or left wing) erstwhile well-wisher would
Seek vainly now for Auden or for Isherwood;
The Dog-beneath-the-skin has told the brains
To save it, Norris-like, by changing trains.

As we have seen, this was by no means out of accord with the sentiments of the time. But the extent to which some still harboured disgust over this “changing trains” is evidenced by Powell’s response to learning of Auden’s demise some three and a half decades later. Sharing breakfast with Kingsley Amis, and having read that day’s obituaries in the newspaper, he startled his guest with the sudden gleeful announcement: “No more Auden!” and continued (according to Amis): “I’m delighted that shit has gone. It should have happened years ago … scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a—like a—like a …”—so wound up that he could not finish his sentence.

Isherwood’s recall of the reasons for the two leaving England are worth considering. His diaries reveal a conversation that he and Auden had upon the deck of the Champlain as they sailed for New York: “I turned to Auden and said: ‘You know I just don’t believe in any of it anymore—the united front, the party line, the antifascist struggle’.” To his surprise, Auden agreed, and as Isherwood remembered it:

Now, in a few sentences, with exquisite relief, we confessed our mutual disgust at the parts we had been playing and resolved to abandon them, then and there. We had forgotten our real vocation. We would be artists again, with our own values, our own integrity, and not amateur socialist agitators, parlour reds.

Barry Gillard lives in Geelong. A frequent contributor on literature and history, he wrote on Wittgenstein in the July-August issue.