Either we serve the Unconditional, or ...

 AUDEN AND BIOGRAPHY 

‘Biographies of writers,’ declared W. H. Auden, ‘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 flavour 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.’ 

Auden wrote this towards the end of his life, but it was an opinion that he had held for many years. He even suggested that most writers would prefer their work to be published anonymously, so that the reader would have to concentrate on the writing itself and not at all on the writer. He was also (he said) opposed in principle to the publication of, or quotation from, a writer’s letters after his death, which he declared was just as dishonourable as reading someone’s private correspondence while he was out of the room. As to literary biographers, he branded them as, in the mass, ‘gossip-writers and voyeurs calling themselves scholars’. 

So it scarcely came as a surprise when, after his death in September 1973, his executors published his request that his friends should burn any of his letters that they might have kept, when they had ‘done with them’, and should on no account show them to anyone else. Auden himself had explained, in a conversation with one of his executors not long before his death, that this was in order ‘to make a biography impossible’. 

In the months that followed Auden’s death, a very few of his friends did burn one or two of his letters. But most preserved what they had, and several people gave or sold letters to public collections. Meanwhile many of his friends, far from doing anything to hinder the writing of a life, published (in various books and journals) their own memoirs of him, which provided valuable material upon which a biographer could work. 

At first sight it may seem as if they were riding roughshod over Auden’s last wishes. But it is not as simple as that. Here, as so often in his life, Auden adopted a dogmatic attitude which did not reflect the full range of his opinions, and which he sometimes flatly contradicted. 

Certainly he often attacked the principle of literary biography, but in practice he made a lot of exceptions. When reviewing actual examples of the genre he was almost always enthusiastic, finding a whole variety of reasons for waiving his rule. We need a biography of Pope, he said, because so many of Pope’s poems grew from specific events which need explaining; we want a life of Trollope because his autobiography leaves out a great deal; of Wagner because he was a monster; of Gerard Manley Hopkins because he had a romantically difficult relationship with his art. Auden’s ‘no biography’ rule was in other words (as his literary executor Edward Mendelson has put it) ‘flexible enough to be bent backwards’. 

The same is true of his attitude to writers’ letters. He usually reviewed published collections of them in friendly terms, and was only censorious when he thought that something private had been included which was merely personal and threw no light on the writer’s work. He himself made a selection of Van Gogh’s letters for publication, and he would have published an edition of the letters of Sydney Smith if someone else had not done it first. As to his own letters, he gave permission for a large number of quotations from them to be published, in academic books and the like, during his lifetime. 

He also left a great deal of autobiographical writing. He once declared: ‘No poet should ever  write an autobiography’; yet he did a great deal towards preserving a record of his own life. Not only does his poetry contain innumerable autobiographical passages, but several poems (including two of his longest, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and ‘New Year Letter’) are largely autobiographical in character. Among his prose writings, too, there are all kinds of remarks about events in his life. And in his later years he allowed journalists to visit him in his New York apartment and at his summer house in Austria, letting them publish interviews with him which often recorded highly personal details of his life. 

So there is a great deal of information for a biographer to draw upon. But would Auden, in the end, have approved of a biography being written? 

It is possible that he might on the grounds that he was something of a ‘man of action’, who lived a life so full of interest that it deserves to be recorded for its own sake. This was a justification of biography that he accepted – with one proviso. ‘The biography of an artist, if his life as a man was sufficiently interesting, is permissible,’ he wrote, ‘provided that the biographer and his readers realise that such an account throws no light whatsoever upon the artist’s work.’ 

This last point, of course, brings us back to Auden’s fundamental objection to a writer’s biography. ‘I do believe, however,’ he once added, ‘that, more often than most people realise, his works may throw light upon his life.

**

Two months after the outbreak of war, in November 1939, he went to a cinema in Yorkville, the district of Manhattan where he and Isherwood had lived for a few weeks in the spring. It was largely a German-speaking area, and the film he saw was Sieg im Poland, an account by the Nazis of their conquest of Poland. When Poles appeared on the screen he was startled to hear a number of people in the audience scream ‘Kill them!’ He later said of this: ‘I wondered then, why I reacted as I did against this denial of every humanistic value. The answer brought me back to the church.’ 

*

He had been through many changes of heart since reaching adulthood, but all the dogmas he had adopted or played with – post-Freudian psychology, Marxism, and the liberal-socialist-democratic outlook that had been his final political stance before leaving England – had one thing in common: they were all based on a belief in the natural goodness of man. They all claimed that if one specific evil were removed, be it sexual repression, the domination of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, or Fascism, then humanity would be happy and unrest would cease. Even the viewpoint which Auden had reached in the summer of 1939 during his ‘honeymoon’, a viewpoint (expressed in ‘The Prolific and the Devourer’) which might be called liberal humanism with religious and pacifist overtones, was still based on a belief in man’s natural goodness. Its message was, in the words of the poem which summed it up, ‘We must love one another or die’: that is, only the exercise of love between human beings would save humanity from self-destruction. The implication was that if humanity followed this precept and so obeyed a ‘divine law’ it could save itself, being fundamentally good. Auden’s experience in the Yorkville cinema in November 1939 radically shook this belief. He now became convinced that human nature was not and never could be good. The behaviour of those members of the audience who shouted ‘Kill them!’ was indeed, as he said, ‘a denial of every humanistic value’. 

In the weeks that followed this experience he considered its implications. It was not just a question of shattered optimism: the whole ground of his outlook had shifted beneath his feet. If humanity were not innately good, then on what basis could he legitimately object to the murderous shouts of the Germans in that cinema audience, or indeed to the behaviour of Hitler himself? Were not the Nazis merely being true to their own nature, to all our natures? What reason could he give for his strong, instinctive, ineradicable hatred of the Nazis and all that they stood for? He had to find some new objective ground from which to argue against Hitler. ‘There had’, as he put it, ‘to be some reason why [Hitler] was utterly wrong.’ 

Auden began to remark to his friends on this desperate need for objective criteria from which to oppose Hitler: ‘The English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to,’ he told Erika Mann’s brother Golo; ‘they have nothing to offer and their prospects echo in empty space.’ It seemed utterly clear to him now that liberalism had a fatal flaw in it. 

‘The whole trend of liberal thought’, he wrote during 1940, ‘has been to undermine faith in the absolute… It has tried to make reason the judge… But since life is a changing process… the attempt to find a humanistic basis for keeping a promise, works logically with the conclusion, “I can break it whenever I feel it convenient.”’ He was now certain that he must renew that ‘faith in the absolute’ which appeared to him to be the only possible ground for moral judgement. As he put it in a poem written a short time after visiting the Yorkville cinema: 

Either we serve the Unconditional

Or some Hitlerian monster will supply

An iron convention to do evil by.

So it was that he now began a search for, in the words of this same poem, ‘the vision that objectifies’. He began to read some books of theology.

**

Six pages of The Descent of the Dove are taken up with an acount of the ideas of a Christian thinker whose works Auden had apparently not yet read, but which he now quickly began to study, very probably as a result of the passage about them in Williams’s book. This was Søren Kierkegaard. On 11 March 1940 Auden wrote to E. R. Dodds: ‘Am reading Kierkegaard’s Journal at the moment which is fascinating.’ Soon he had studied the greater part of Kierkegaard’s writings, and, as he later put it to a friend, they ‘knocked the conceit’ out of him. He was, he said, ‘bowled over by their originality… and by the sharpness of their insights’. 

Again, as with Williams’s book, he must in a sense have recognised himself in Kierkegaard’s writings, for Kierkegaard’s early intellectual development bore a marked resemblance to his own. Kierkegaard had, like Auden, been brought up in the Church by one parent especially, in his case his father; and like Auden he had a very ambiguous attitude towards that parent. He felt that his childhood had been responsible for his neurosis, and compared himself to a ship that had sustained damage at its launching. He also believed that there could be no such thing as ‘inherited’ Christianity; each individual must rediscover his religious beliefs for himself. And he argued that this was likely to happen in three stages or categories of experience – stages which exactly corresponded to those that Auden had been through in the past fifteen years. 

Kierkegaard’s first stage of experience was the ‘aesthetic’, in which the individual lives merely for the joys of the present moment – much as Auden had done in his largely amoral days as an undergraduate. This, said Kierkegaard, would soon prove inadequate and would offer the individual the choice of moving into a higher, ‘ethical’ stage. If he took that choice, this ‘ethical’ stage would be one in which he made moral judgements and abided by them – much as Auden had tried to do during the years in which he interested himself in politics and the crises of society. But, declared Kierkegaard, this ‘ethical’ state would soon in its turn prove inadequate, because it made no claims on any transcendent notion of eternity, and because its foundation, a belief in the individual’s (or humanity’s) basic righteousness would soon prove false – which was precisely what Auden had just realised. In consequence, Kierkegaard argued, a new decision becomes necessary. The individual must either abandon himself to despair, or must throw himself entirely on the mercy of God. 

If he accepts the latter choice, he enters at last a ‘religious’ state in which he is ‘alone with his guilt before God’ – though in doing so he ‘finally chooses himself and his relation to the Origin of his self’. This final step can be made not by logical reasoning, but only by faith. Indeed it is not a step at all, but a leap – ‘a leap into the void, a total surrender to God in which Man abandons any foothold and in an ultimate choice realizes his freedom’. Nor can this choice, once made, be shaken: ‘By a leap, faith takes man beyond all rational thought into a new world.’ 

While Auden was reading Williams and Kierkegaard, late in 1939 and early in 1940, he was beginning, for the first time since adolescence, to go now and then to church, though only (as he put it) ‘in a tentative and experimental sort of way’. He was also starting a long poem which was to give expression to the ideas now occupying his mind.

W. H. Auden

 A Biography 

HUMPHREY CARPENTER