The imperial W.H. Auden - Washington Examiner

In 1933, the English poet W.H. Auden told his friend Stephen Spender, “I entirely agree with you about my tendency to National Socialism, and its dangers.” It’s a surprising confession. He’d later travel to Spain to serve in the Republican medical corps, praising the soon-to-be vanquished loyalists in the Marxisant poem “Spain 1937.” He befriended the socialist playwright Ernst Toller, whose elegy he penned when Toller, in penurious exile from Nazi Germany, killed himself. He married Erika Mann to help save her from the Nazis. And his poetry registered the rise of Europe’s fascist regimes. “September 1, 1939” exhorted future historians to “Find what occurred at Linz / What huge imago made / A psychopathic god.” In “Danse Macabre” (1937) he saw “the Devil has broken parole and arisen, / He has dynamited his way out of prison.”

Perhaps only someone susceptible to fascism could see its full menace. Still, Auden’s confession should prompt serious thought. So says Nicholas Jenkins in The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England. He shifts how we read early Auden: the period that stretches up to the publication of On this Island in 1936. He believes that Auden sought to become the poetic voice of the English nation. While some of Auden’s early poems are engagé leftist, more often there’s a subterranean patriotic current. The early poems, Jenkins writes, “were underwritten by an anti-metropolitan celebration of an ideal of organic, egalitarian, communal rootedness […] nationalist by implication and feeling,” perhaps even with “some vaguely cult-like elements.”  

That’s why Auden recognized a fascist streak within himself and why he told Spender that “emotional symbols are of necessity national emblems.” A year before the Spender letter, he wrote The Orators, with the following verse: 

On English earth
Restores, restores will, has restored
To England’s story
The direct calm, the actual glory. 

That collection is suffused by vaguely fascistic hero-worship. It celebrates the regenerative potential of force. Following its publication, Auden said that it had “meant to be a critique of the fascist outlook” but that it could instead “be interpreted as a favourable exposition.” He said that his “name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity, who might well, in a year or two, become a Nazi.” That he had that realization, of course, meant that he knew how to check his political impulses. But it’s impoverishing, Jenkins says, to read him without noticing that his English nationalism, like fascism itself, had been shaped by the violence of World War I. 

With hundreds of thousands killed serving their country, the English set out to find what England really meant. The word “Englishness,” Jenkins notes, had in fact hardly been used before the war, but it became ubiquitous in the years that followed. Rural travelogues became bestsellers: H.V. Morton’s In Search of England, published in 1927, had gone through 21 impressions by 1934. It’s in this period, Jenkins observes, that the “Heritage Britain” iconography of the English countryside emerged, with its “gently swelling southern fields, neatly sectioned by hedgerows and meandering lanes gleaming in afternoon sunlight.” Dr. Samuel Johnson once remarked that someone tired of London is tired of life. But Auden much preferred the idyllic Malvern Hills or the Lake District to bustling London. In “A Happy New Year,” he praised what Jenkins terms his “provincial, unglamorous setting.”

Permit our town here to continue small,
What city’s vast emotional cartel
Could our few acres satisfy
Or rival in intensity
The field of five or six, the English cell? 

But for Auden, this rural England wasn’t reassuringly nostalgic. Even in his schoolboy poems, the English landscape is freighted with images of war. Jenkins suggests, I think plausibly, that those “who must walk the lanes of darkness blind to stars” in Auden’s teenage poem “Frost” refers to the “aimless legion of disabled or shell-shocked unemployed war-veterans […] hobbling around the country in the 1920s as tramps.” And in one of the early rural poems, Auden hears the “surge of wind through writhing trees / The huddled clouds of lead, / The waste of cold dark-featured seas /And the men that are dead.” The reference isn’t to preceding generations but to the men killed in Flanders or France. 

It’s roughly at this point the critic should bring up some shortcoming of the book under review, if only to prove that he’s not a complete hack. But I’ve enjoyed it so much that I’d rather not. Still, I guess it isn’t for the casual reader. It’s more than 500 pages of recondite literary criticism. And sometimes it’s written as if it weren’t meant to be read widely. Take, for example, the following sentence: “In place of a hypotactic subordination and hierarchization of language, enforced by a complex syntax, Auden’s poem works by accretion.” Perfectly intelligible, but not what blurb-writers tend to call “captivating.” 

And perhaps there’s a shade too much Freudianism. But only a shade. It’s via Freud that Jenkins excavates the buried meaning of Auden’s poetic imagery. He shows how mines, so ubiquitous in the early poetry, recall the trenches on the Western Front. He traces the parallel of mining with warfare through Wilfred Owen and Ernst Junger to Christopher Isherwood, who compared Cornwall’s tin mines with “shell-craters, surrounded with barbed-wire.” Auden himself, Jenkins suggests, subconsciously used mines to symbolize trenches, as in “The Miner’s Wife,” where a woman is informed of her husband’s fate by a man, much like “one of those messengers who at front doors handed over the fatal telegram from the War Office.” 

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Auden later claimed that The Orators had been a stage in his “conversion to Communism.” But Jenkins will have none of it: Auden’s poetry “is never militant about class conflict […] it is much more concerned with emotional healing.” He was no real communist. With more truth, he once called himself a pinkish Little Englander — intensely patriotic but opposed to empire. But as the 1930s progressed, he found the role of national poet increasingly limiting, increasingly false. The rest of the world intruded into his insular, hobbit-like island. Provincial England, in other words, was part of the imperial metropole — which he had hardly noted before. The empire, Jenkins observes, is “curiously occluded” in early Auden, though there’s hints of it in poems like “Out on the lawn” (1933), where “we” prefer not to inquire “what doubtful act allows / Our freedom in this English house, / Our picnics in the sun.” As Jenkins puts it, “The word ‘picnics’ artfully suggests the consumption of sugar, fruits, and spices that probably did not originate in the fields around Colwall.” 

By the latter half of the 1930s, the British Empire emerged in full view. Isherwood and Auden travelled to China in 1938. In the sonnet “Hongkong,” Auden sees “The bugle on the Late Victorian hill / Puts out the soldier’s light” while “off-stage, a war / Thuds like the slamming of a distant door.” A little later, in Shanghai, they had what Jenkins calls “an awkward moment” when a group of Japanese men extemporize on their empire’s benevolent intentions toward China. As they insisted that the emperor invaded China in order to “save her from herself, to protect her from the Soviets,” Auden looked out the window and saw the warship HMS Birmingham steaming upriver. He had observed, living in Berlin, the germinal moments of Nazism. And now he saw the prelude to World War II. No man, Donne said, is an island — Auden had come to see that the “English Island” was no island onto itself either. 

Gustav Jönsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.