Early Auden/W.H. Auden: A Biography

...Auden quickly replied: "I think you have the wrong number...

...Through no fault of his own Yeats became what Auden called "a symbol of my own devil of unauthenticity...

...He was an enthusiastic and original teacher, who once threatened to mutilate himself if the boys continued to misbehave and even brought out a knife to horrified cries of "No, sir...

...Auden's relation to Yeats, who addressed political issues from a personal perspective, was more problematical...

...He compared T. E. Lawrence to the heroic Lenin, and believed he exemplified "most completely what is best and significant in our lives, our nearest approach to a synthesis of feeling and reason, act and thought...

...Jeffrey Meyers EDWARD MENDELSON convincingly argues that Auden, the first English writer to absorb the lessons of modernism, "became the most inclusive poet of the twentieth century, its most technically skilled, and its most truthful...

...During the first twelve years of his career," Mendelson observes, "the years that are the subject of this book, Auden made the difficult passage from a private poetry to a public one, from apparent formal disorder to manifest artifice, from lonely severity to a community of meaning...

...Auden based Ransom, the neurotic and self-destroying hero of his play, The Ascent of F-6, on T. E. Lawrence, whose life (he felt) was "an allegory of the transformation of the Truly Weak Man into the Truly Strong Man...

...The main defect in Carpenter is a certain vagueness toward the end of the book when he fails to specify the name of Auden's literary agent, his Italian prize, the reasons for his estrangement from Benjamin Britten, the nature of his friendship with William Walton...

...Auden later renounced the falsity of major poems like "September 1, 1939" and Spain...

...In his lonely later years Auden (a prodigious worker) became compulsive about time, but lived in personal chaos and squalor...

...But both books are indispensable for any future study of Auden as a versatile poet, dramatist, librettist, travel writer, critic, translator, and anthologist...

...Poetry became ominous, flat, and social...

...Au-den's witty, ironic, sophisticated poetry-serious in meaning if not in tone-is informed by intellectual scope, dazzling virtuosity, and oral force, last quatrain of "The Fall of Rome," for example, combines precise observation with breadth of vision to suggest an antidote to the horrors of modern urban life: Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast...

...Mendelson notes that innovative lyrics like "Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm," describe the moral consequences of sexual success and emotional failure in an ambiguous tone of celebration and regret: "It is the first English poem in which a lover proclaims, in moral terms and during a shared night of love, his own faithlessness...

...elliptical and indistinctly allusive...

...He never mentions that Auden was best man at Theodore Roethke's wedding and invited him to his summer house on Ischia...

...Randall Jarrell noted his generosity at Princeton in 1951: "Auden came over to tell me that Seven-League Crutches was 'frightfully good.' This seemed awfully kind of him considering what severe things I've said about his later work...

...But, as Auden's literary executor, bibliographer and editor, his interpretations are backed with the authority of personal conversations, manuscripts and unpublished letters that cast new light on Auden's intellect, ideas, and intentions...

...casual in tone and form...

...frightening in import...

...Carpenter's biography-less lively but much more thorough and accurate than Charles Osborne's life (1980)-is a' perfect complement to Mendelson's critical study (each writer thanks the other for his assistance...

...have the wrong number...

...John Berryman noted that by 1935 "the Auden climate had set in strongly...

...Mendelson is especially good on three dominant influences on Auden during the 1930s: D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats...

...But his observation that Auden used the example of the dead to teach the living and "praised Freud's charity, his wish to share the gifts of mercy that restore and recover," makes us eager for his second volume on the later poetry...

...Auden expressed his artistic credo in Letter to Lord Byron and applied it to his urbane and tender homosexual love lyrics: To me Art's subject is the human clay, And landscape but the background to a torso...

...Mendelson's book is not as original as those of his predecessors Monroe Spears (1963) and John Fuller (1970)-he is sound rather than brilliant-and his rather relentless exposition of scores of complex poems makes difficult reading...

...He successfully based the rhetorical splendors of "September 1, 1939" on the meter and form of Yeats's poem on the Irish revolution, "Easter 1916...

...Don't do it...

...Sustained for twenty years by "uppers and downers" (benzedrine and seconal), he also taught at many schools and universities in America...

...But Auden found that he contradicted his own beliefs whenever he followed the example of Yeats and attempted to express "the thoughts of a wise man in the speech of the common people...

...Auden's powerful personality and intellect had an immense influence on his Oxford contemporaries in the mid-1920s, and his didactic gifts led him (as it had led the young D. H. Lawrence, Eliot, Huxley, Waugh and Orwell) to begin his career as a schoolmaster in Scotland...

...Seeing that they have been at school for twelve years, their ignorance is incredible, and their lack of wish to know anything sad...

...He aged suddenly in the mid-1950s, and his corrugated face became etched in wrinkles that looked like the parched desert earth or (as he said) "like a wedding-cake left out in the rain...

...His first volume, Poems, was privately printed by Stephen Spender at Oxford in 1928, when Wyndham Lewis found him like a rather "fey" oriental ambassador: "He was very crafty and solemn: I felt I was being interviewed by an emissary of some highly civilized power...

...All Cezanne's apples I would give away For one small Goya or a Daumier...

...I remember seeing a drunken disaster at Memorial Hall in Cambridge in 1960 when Auden, in a grotesque parody of his noble character, lurched forward on the lectern, pushed off his papers (which fluttered into the audience) and could not continue coherently...

...Mendelson does not give full consideration to Auden's great elegies on Yeats and Freud, who died after he left England for America in January 1939...

...Shortly before he returned to live in Oxford, his telephone rang late one night in New York and a rough voice shouted: "We are going to castrate you and then kill you...

...But Mendelson, who calls the latter "the record of a [political ] disillusionment half accepted, half denied," has rightly restored both poems to the canon in his edition of The English Auden...

...But his wit was as sharp as ever...

...His poetry readings were far less successful, for he read woodenly, spoke indistinctly and often stumbled over words...

...But he rightly thought that the standard of education in America was unbelievably low: "No one does any work or learns anything...

...Auden's ideas on education, politics, psychology, and religion were influenced by D. H. Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious and Apocalypse, particularly by his life-affirming Romantic belief that "to act on one's deepest impulses is to be happy and virtuous, immune to neurosis, a living beacon to the tormented and the ill...