The Poet Auden

...And C. Day Lewis came out with inanities like: "Revolution, revolution/Is the one correct solution—/ We've found it and we know it's bound to win...

...It doesn't interfere with any other software you use...

...PAPER CLU I 1ER makes you inefficient, frustrated, and may hurt your career...

...But, in just eight minutes per day, with SQUARENOTETM, our new software package, you can gain complete control over all your notes, clippings, letters, and documents...

...But even though he protests Larkin's conclusion that Auden "ended up a pompous `windbag,' " Rowse makes it clear that he also finds Auden's inflated verse full of the plainly nonsensical, the oracular, and the fatuously sententious...

...What Rowse has tried to do here is "to sleuth him in his work," to give an account of how the poet's life figures directly in the poems...

...Looking back, Rowse therefore has no sympathy whatsoever for the indiscipline, self-indulgence, and lack of scholarship in the middle-class Auden (and his left-wing circle), who played at revolution and ventilated in poetry their seamy homosexual affairs...

...In particular, Rowse is critical of the Auden group for glorifying Berlin in the twenties and thirties...

...They liked Germany because homosexuality was openly condoned there and handsome Nordic catamites were easily purchased for the night...

...Rowse tried to discourage Spender from joining the Communist party, believing that only the left agenda of the Labour party could save England, but he was unsuccessful...

...Instead of that they went for horrible German Expressionismus, the indiscipline of the Weimar Republic, the unspeakable vulgarity of Berlin...

...Actually, they were on the sidelines...

...and Christopher Isherwood—of whom Rowse remarks that he regards "the overestimation of him by all the media as gross and absurd...

...SQUARENOTE gathered all the research, organized it, and even printed out my lecture notes...

...After that their lives took sharply different turns...

...In America during the war, Auden was lionized by his students at Swarthmore and celebrated by American critics...

...This made a great difference between them and me...

...Think of it, opting for Berlin as against Paris...

...As a student at Oxford, Rowse (who came from working-class origins) succeeded, against great odds and despite great prejudice, by innate merit and hard work...

...Furthermore, Rowse cannot forgive the Auden circle for mixing up their homosexual predilections with left-wing politics...

...You can't find things when you need them...

...No psychoanalyst, Rowse nevertheless partly accounts for these changes in the poet's life through Auden's relationship to his mother, who died in 1941...

...I observed them from the sidelines...

...Auden, however, was resolutely anti-French: "Their famous clarte," he once remarked, "is thicker than the thickest Wiener treacle...

...Brash, brusque, and irreverent, full of snap judgments and sharp insights, The Poet Auden is neither a biography nor a work of literary criticism...

...Rowse claims to contemplate Auden's inversion from the point of view espoused by Bishop Butler: "Things are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be: why should we seek to be deceived...

...After the collapse in the James W. Tuttleton teaches English at New York University...

...the imitative Day Lewis...

...UnionSquareware, P.O...

...Isherwood hated Cambridge—fancy anybody hating so beautiful a place, young ass...

...Auden's private life in New York, which was the common stuff of Oxford gossip, leads the puritanical Rowse to ruminate: "I found it a little odd that committed Christians, like Wystan and his [Oxford] tutor Nevill Coghill, did not allow that to inhibit their sexual pleasures...

...In any case, Auden was no Eliot, and the Christian phase was nominal at best...

...Stephen Spender, who "had a genuinely lyrical early gift, which petered out as he became a literary figure...

...Both Auden and Isherwood were "really rather anti-academic," Rowse remarks, "—perhaps understandably, after they had done so badly at and by the university...

...WRITERS AND RESEARCHERS: LEND US YOUR MESSY DESKS, CLUTTERED DRAWERS, AND STUFFED BRIEFCASES FOR JUST 8 MINUTES A DAY...

...Rowse speculates that the openness of America appealed to Auden because he was essentially a middle-class misfit, fundamentally rootless, with an intellectual culture "wide rather than deep, discursive, ranging over the surface rather than sinking shafts into rich ground...

...Then, if you want to keep it, send us $99...

...And it is clear that, whatever may be the complexities of human sexuality, Rowse found these people looking for love in all the wrong places...

...I must honestly say, not much—chiefly the shorter poems, not much of the longer...

...But Auden really "saw very little of the war, and spent most of it in hotels in Barcelona and Valencia . . ." And of Au-den's postmortem in "A Communist to Others," Rowse can only remark "what naivete!—their only excuse that they were young and didn't know what they were playing with...

...YOU CAN LOCATE ANY DOCUMENT IN SECONDS...

...At this time he also began a lifelong relationship with the promiscuous and unfaithful Chester Kallman, vacationed at Fire Island, the summer hangout of New York City homosexuals ("this outpost where nothing is wicked/But to be sorry or sick," where "The Love that rules the sun and stars/Permits what He forbids"), and bemoaned his loneliness...

...In the late twenties and thirties, most of them had "no practical common sense, let alone political sense," and in his view, their camp rhapsodies over the handsome working-class boys and the coming revolution erotically idealized the class from which Rowse had escaped and trivialized the political process as well...

...That one of the most engage poets of the thirties should have turned his back on revolutionary Communist politics, abandoned his British friends, and exiled himself to America stunned the British literary establishment...

...Frequently Rowse reproduces his marginalia as, book by book, Auden's volumes appeared...

...We must love one another," he warned ominously, "or die...

...The poet--!`the Fortunate One/ The Happy-Go-Lucky, the spoilt Third Son," underwent in that year "a great personal crisis" and—like an emigrating Eliot in reverse—Auden converted to Christianity...

...Rowse is convinced of Auden's genius and has high praise for his virtuoso technique in all of the poetic forms from the most exalted down to the limerick and the clerihew...

...Apropos of their German fixation, Rowse writes: I thought that French discipline, the classic standards of French literature and art, the clarity of the language, were just what Auden-Spender-Isherwood needed...

...Or return it and you owe us nothing...

...However, Rowse is far from neutral about Auden's private affairs, as reflected in the poetry...

...It works on any system with Winner of PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award "This program saved ply neck when faced with teaching two new courses and two months to prepare...

...Instead of recognizing the rising Nazi menace and the need for a unified Britain under the Labour party, according to Rowse, they went Communist and merely played with the idea of revolution, trying to shock the English bourgeoisie...

...Later, Auden temporarily settled in Austria and finally returned in old age to Oxford, where Rowse in the last years took him under his wing...

...He became a youthful Marxist trained in history, a no-nonsense empiricist, and a passionate Labour party advocate (and failed party candidate...

...Rowse stayed on at All Souls as a don and lived a studious life, publishing over the years a number of books on Shakespeare and the sonnets as well as biographies of Marlow, Milton, Swift, and Arnold...

...Still, he is not inclined to agree with the poet Philip Larkin, who claimed that Auden's move to America produced a poet whose later work holds "the reader's attention only sporadically if at all...

...The memoir is thus very well informed and extremely personal...

...For Rowse, Auden during this period "was spoiled by the Americans," with the effect that "prose came to dominate—no crime—but it was a pity that there was so much of it in Auden's verse...

...At the same time, the memoir provides Rowse an opportunity to pay off some old scores that, in tactlessness and sheer infelicity of phrasing, will simply leave the reader agape...

...It's the only country where you feel there's no ruling class...

...the two were often in touch by letter, and their paths crossed many times in foreign countries...

...This judgment seems just about right...

...A basic, essential tool for anyone doing research...

...Rowse's Auden is a rhetorician of willed attitudes, exiguous inspiration, and little passion or heart...

...Although the lifestyle of Auden and his friends was degraded, Rowse remarks, "I do not condemn the Auden circle, but I preferred the sedateway of life, the lifestyle of Eliot, sad as that was (and so was mine...

...Rowse was a senior classmate of Auden (1907-1973) at Christ Church, Oxford, in the mid-1920s...

...I was in the thick of the Labour Movement, an active Party candidate all through that hopeless decade...

...We believe so strongly in SQUARENOTE's effectiveness for you that we are making a special offer to readers of The American Spectator who respond to this ad: Call us now at (617) 623-3023, and we'll send you a copy of SQUARENOTE to try, at our risk, no payment required, for 30 days...

...He oracularly declared that "poetry makes nothing happen" and that "the political history of the world would have been the same if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed...

...They were, Rowse argues, "middle-class rebels, in revolt against their class upbringing...

...Try it for 30 days...

...he then comments on his youthful responses from the curmudgeonly vantage of old age...

...He finds nothing of aes40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 thetic merit in these Auden poems that cracked private homosexual jokes for the initiated—for example, "He's marvellous/He's Greek/When I see him/ My legs go weak...

...This circle included "the sainted guru, E. M. Forster, moral mentor of them all," who is described as a "milksop...

...Or the dedication of Auden's first volume Poems to Isherwood: "Let us honour if we can/ The vertical man/Though we value none/But the horizontal one...

...THE POET AUDEN: A PERSONAL MEMOIR A. L. Rowse/Weidenfeld & Nicolson/$14.95 James W. Tuttleton A. L. Rowse's memoir of his long and complicated friendship with the poet Wystan Hugh Auden is one of the liveliest—and crustiest—books to be published this year...

...Box 228, Somerville, MA 02143 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 41...

...SQUARENOTE is the easiest-tolearn, easiest-to-use software ever created for the IBM PC and compatibles...

...During Auden's far wandering, Rowse kept up with Auden's poetry...

...Having tracked Auden the man in his work, Rowse concludes by asking, "How much of it gives pleasure...

...W ith the end of the thirties—that "low dishonest decade," as Auden called it—the poet went to America, disillusioned with the failure of his poetry to inspire class revolution or to avert world war...

...To understand this memoir several facts about A. L. Rowse must be kept in mind...

...In fact, Auden did throw himself into the Communist cause when the Spanish Civil War broke out, the Daily Worker exclaiming that "the most famous of the younger English poets and a leading figure in the anti-Fascist movement" was going to Spain to "serve as an ambulance driver...

...Auden, after graduation, went down to London, where he made his mark as a poet, and from there went on to America, where he was lionized in the forties and fifties...

...He became ostentatiously religious and poetically espoused—in works like For the Time Being (1944) and Nones (1951)—a Christianity fated to be superficial, unconvincing, and temporary...

...And We'll Give You Complete Control Over Your Scattered Notes, Memos, Clippings, Research Drafts, and Letters...

...ECS, Ilion, NY floppies or hard disk and 256K memory...

...thirties of his youthful left-wing political dream, he, like Burckhardt, retired to scholarship and—knowing firsthand about working-class squalor—developed what can only be called the aristocratic attitudes of the conservative don...

...In his political poems in The Dance of Death (1933), Auden announced that "The English revolution/is the only solution/We take a resolution/to follow thee...

...He notes that, in declining Auden's proposition, "an invisible line" had been drawn between himself and the poet and his friends...

...the promiscuous Cambridge Apostle Guy Burgess...

...He became an American citizen in 1946, remarking superficially that "the attractiveness of America to a writer . . . is its openness and lack of tradition...

...There's just a lot of people...

...On the subject of "the prime question in Wystan's life"—Auden's openly avowed homosexuality—Rowse remarks that, as a young don, he was early on propositioned by Auden but, in typically English fashion, was saved by an Oxford bell: " 'Four o'clock,' I said, `I'm always in the Common Room at All Souls for tea at four,' and got away...