Edward Mendelson's Later Auden

...Yet communicate he did, most famously in "Spain 1937," which he wrote in March a few weeks after returning to England...

...About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood BOOKS Its human position...

...They didn't know, and Auden asked elsewhere until he had the facts straight (late afternoon...

...In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster...

...Mendelson mentions that when Auden was drafting "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," he wrote to his publishers to learn the exact time of Yeats's death...

...An observation he made in 1939 about some fellow travelers applied to him as well: "There are many people, and they number some artists among them, who today seek in politics an escape from the unhappiness of their private lives, as once people sought refuge in the monastery and convent...

...After all, if Auden was always unlearning mistaken presuppositions, one can't help but wonder if all of Auden's presuppositions were mistakes...

...Mendelson's Auden is a poet who came to distrust the poem from which Forster plucked his moral talisman...

...On the one hand, Mendelson writes, the poem asserts that "all human actions are chosen by the 124 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 will," but on the other hand it also "maintains that some special actions in the political realm, actions directed at certain social goals, are the product not of will but of something very much like unconscious instinctive nature...

...Then there's E.M...

...I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring...

...In "Outside the Whale," the British historian E. P. Thompson claimed that Auden's post-1930s writing signaled "an abdication of intellectual responsibility in the face of all social experience...

...When Auden left England for Valencia in January 1937 to aid the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, the London papers covered his departure in the news pages, not the gossip columns...

...Auden became something different: a poet who sang of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress...

...Forster, who confessed that because Auden wrote the line "We must love one another or die" in "September 1, 1939," "he can command me to follow him...

...The poems in each stage of his career criticized those of the preceding stage," Mendelson explains, "not so much for being wrong as for letting a parable harden into a myth...

...Auden got involved in politics for the wrong reasons, and he was honest enough to admit it...

...Auden knew of what he spoke...

...Auden had failed Thompson because the poet no longer believed that art is a weapon or nothing at all...

...Republican Madrid was on the brink of surrender, and Auden gave a rousing speech defending democracy...

...BEFORE LONG, Auden concluded that politics was a dirty game best left to scoundrels...

...Dodds, in July 1939, the experience appalled him...

...He quit after a very short time and wandered toward the front in Aragon, intending to stay a month...

...When Mendelson picks up this story in Later Auden, Auden is writing poems that follow the moral example of Brueghel's The Fall of Icarus, one of the Old Masters to whom Auden apprenticed himself in "Musee des Beaux Arts" in 1938...

...Of Auden's first two books, Poems and Paid on Both Sides, Randall Jarrell wrote, "when old men, dying in their beds, mumble something unintelligible to the nurse, it is some of those lines that they will be repeating...

...And however I felt, I certainly didn't want Franco to win...

...0 ONE is better acquainted with Auden's papers than Mendelson, who was a...

...He generally beDISSENT / Fall 2000 n 123 BOOKS gan each new stage with a vehement renunciation of past errors, overstating his objections in order to rouse himself to find something new...

...The poem is a rhetorical tour de force...

...Another is to spell out how Auden often conducted arguments in his prose that either contradicted or were less extreme than the arguments made in his verse...

...In New York City in March 1939 he had appeared before the Foreign Correspondents' Dinner Forum, a group devoted to aiding Spanish refugees...

...The poem's pinnacle is Caliban's monologue, a thirty-page torrent of prose rife with classical eloquence and rude slang and rendered in a version of the late style of Henry James...

...Despair and regret were seductive to Auden as well as being his language of seduction...

...And unlike Eliot and Yeats, both of whom had fascist or authoritarian sympathies, Auden "woke to the recognition that an ideal order imposed on a recalcitrant citizenry, which included themselves, would be an arid despotism," Mendelson writes in Later Auden...

...He's a poet who was deeply uncomfortable about using poetry to advocate a partisan cause...

...126 n DISSENT / Fall 2000...

...Nor did he endorse his elders' attempts to restore to its full powers an earlier, nobler poetic language warped by some cultural cataclysm—the dissociation of sensibility in England or the devolution of the Protestant aristocracy in Ireland...

...Coming on the heels of "Spain 1937," Auden's statement is astonishing because nowhere in his remarks does he say anything about the Valencia government's merits...

...In Early Auden and Later Auden, Mendelson argues that although Auden mastered a few key lessons of literary modernism— its formal inventions, its ability to be both comic and grotesque, its embrace of contradiction— he was hardly its disciple...

...Auden, of course, grew so embarrassed by "Spain 1937" that he revised it for publication in Another Time in 1939 and banished it from the volumes of collected poems he published after the 1950s...

...As in The Age of Anxiety, a dialogue between three men and a woman who meet in a New York bar in wartime that Auden published in 1948, "The Sea and the Mirror" recognizes that such ordinary disappointments and dilemmas are not the husk of knowledge but its very seed...

...The expensive delicate ship in `Musee des Beaux Arts' had somewhere to get to—as history did in Spain'—but the defeated victim it left behind, a boy falling out of the sky, was a unique and vulnerable person, neither a class nor an army...

...the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water...

...Reading Later Auden, however, it's hard not to conclude that Auden was right to give up politics to explore arguments with himself...

...Even as Mendelson accounts for Auden's accomplishments, he never spares criticism of Auden's errors of judgment...

...Auden's concern is each character's conflicted thoughts about love, morality, and art, which he casts into an astonishing range of forms, such as a villanelle, a sestina, and Dantesque triplets...

...The poety he wrought from that language was not ideological and decisive...

...Verse techniques, historical interpretations, psychological insights, and ethical imperatives he had labored to devise in response to earlier personal and public crises had gradually settled, he thought, into mere habits and conventions...

...and whose understanding of responsibility became morally acute when he cast aside communist notions of Utopia for Christian notions of imperfection and original sin...

...Defeat and suffering no longer seemed to occur in the grand decisive struggles of 'Spain,' but happened almost without being noticed, while someone else was eating or opening the window," Mendelson observes...

...Did not any retain their usefulness...

...the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure...

...Auden's first major attempt to burrow into ordinary lives was "The Sea and the Mirror," a series of monologues for fictional characters borrowed from Shakespeare's The Tempest and the subject of one of the strongest chapters of Later Auden...

...He claims that Auden's work exhibits a recurring pattern...

...How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree...

...Auden appointed him executor in 1972 after Mendelson used his cache of copies of Auden's work to help the poet assemble a collection of prose, Forewords and Afterwords .) So it's no surprise that in Later Auden Mendelson meticulously weaves together a vast array of materials—collected and uncollected poems, draft manuscripts of poems, collected and uncollected prose, and correspondence to evoke Auden's climate of opinion...

...I will"), and actions overseen by some ineradicable progressive force ("Our moments of tenderness blossom / As the ambulance and the sandbag...

...yet he also knew, as he told the interviewer, that any disillusionment he felt about the Republican cause "could only be an advantage to Franco...

...graduate student at Yale when he first met Auden in 1970...

...Yet when that face is seen in a less forgiving light, one glimpses there the terrified look of a poet hostage to indecision and interminable self-analysis...

...it was unorthodox and beautiful and enigmatic, much like the inadequate but indispensable landscape he traversed in "In Praise of Limestone": It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself It does not neglect, but calls into question All the Great Powers assume...

...As Auden revealed to an interviewer in the 1960s, he was, like many other volunteers on the left, deeply disillusioned by what he witnessed in Spain...

...who tapped fully into his creative powers only when he stopped using a didactic tone to disguise the arguments he had with himself about social contradictions and personal problems...

...Mendelson, however, by drawing out the contradictions within "Spain 1937" as well as among the other poems and essays Auden wrote at the time, shows that the younger Auden was just as divided over "Spain 1937" as his older self was...

...What Mendelson characterizes as Auden's eloquent self-scrutiny others might consider an elegant diffidence...

...Of several religious poems Auden wrote in the early 1940s, Mendelson claims that "the contemplative saints briefly but disastrously took over much of his work, and they ruined every poem they touched...

...To build the just city...

...And though Later Auden is primarily a critical work, Mendelson often draws an apt detail from Auden's life to embellish his analysis of the poet's methods and ideas...

...Mendelson argues persuasively that the poem rides on two contradictory notions of history: choices made by individuals ("`What's your proposal...

...But Mendelson doesn't dwell on such mistakes, treating them instead as mere blemishes to the heroic face he puts on Auden's meditations...

...It's a truism among some Auden enthusiasts that Auden believed every word of "Spain 1937," and they often chastise him for judging it against the standards of his later work...

...The poem "repeatedly invites its reader to assent to one character's plausible argument, then brings in another character who explodes it," Mendelson argues...

...The pamphlet statement is a record of disillusionment embraced...

...I N LATER AUDEN, Mendelson looks at the poetry Auden wrote shortly after his arrival in New York City in January 1939 until his death in Austria in 1973...

...LATER AUDEN by Edward Mendelson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999 570 pp $30 DURING THE 1930s, W. H. Auden populated his poems and plays with heroes struggling to put their shoulders to the wheel of History, and his admirers anointed him a hero in return...

...Auden went to Spain in January 1937, intending to drive an ambulance, but officials in Barcelona asked him to broadcast radio propaganda...

...In Mendelson's telling, Auden's career becomes something like a modernist long poem, a continuously evolving work that dutifully catalogs its failures, teems with styles and points of view always veering toward their antitheses, and coheres occasionally around a gorgeous makeshift work of consolation—"Lay your sleeping head, my love," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," "Musee des Beaux Arts," "In Praise of Limestone...

...The Auden who emerges from Edward Mendelson's Later Auden is no less commanding than the committed poet lauded during the thirties, but he's of an entirely different cast of mind...

...It "is designed to educate and disenchant through a progressive series of disillusionments...

...And, my dear, it is so exciting but so absolutely degrading...

...It is always a moral problem when to speak...

...Auden lashed out at DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 125 BOOKS Eliot's anti-Semitism and shuddered at Yeats's enthusiasm for fairies and unchanging historical cycles...

...Mendelson's Auden has a more liberal or skeptical bent...

...What's more, he explains that in July 1937 Auden wrote a prose statement supporting the Valencia government for inclusion in the pamphlet Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War...

...One of Mendelson's characteristic turns, particularly in the second volume, is to explain how Auden spent months or years "unlearning mistaken presuppositions, experimenting unsuccessfully with new ones, and cleaning others off his workbench, not because they were wrong, but because they had outlasted their usefulness...

...Auden left politics to immerse himself in social experience, not retreat from it...

...Like the ploughman, Auden was turning from the extraordinary to the ordinary...

...he returned to England after several days...

...Critics have not been kind to Auden for turning away from politics in his verse...

...I felt just covered with dirt afterwards...

...Forster and Thompson expected Auden to cut a monumental figure, perhaps like "The leader looking over / Into the happy valley" in Auden's early poem "From scars where kestrels hover...

...JOHN PALATTELLA'S essays and reviews have appeared in Dissent, Lingua Franca, and other publications...

...how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking duly along...

...and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on...

...Lay your sleeping head, my love" is typical: an acknowledgment of fallibility ("Human on my faithless arm") follows hard on the opening moment of seductive charm...

...In the early 1940s, while under the sway of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, Auden urged Peter Drucker's The Future of Industrial Man on his friends as an example, in Mendelson's words, "of Christian thought applied to the practicalities of management...

...Yet that purposive force, which Auden dubs "History" in the poem's famous closing lines, "cannot help or pardon...

...Still, reading Later Auden one cannot escape the fact that Auden made an art out of mistrusting himself...

...He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y...

...Mendelson also notes regularly that when "Auden wrote a long poem he recognized as grand, emphatic, and false, he immediately followed it with one that was quiet, tentative, and truthful...

...Mendelson first described this pattern in Early Auden, published in 1981, most notably in his discussion of several poems Auden wrote about events surrounding the Spanish Civil War...

...it disturbs our rights...

...Spain 1937," in Mendelson's words, "is the record of a disillusionment half accepted, half denied...

...The audience cheered loudly...

...Our hours of friendship into a people's army...

...The enemy was and still is the politician, i.e., the person who wants to organise the lives of others and make them toe the line," he wrote in the summer of 1939 in The Prolific and the Devourer, a collection of aphorisms unpublished during his lifetime...

...But as he explained to his English confidante, A.E...

...to accept intellectual responsibility, not abdicate it...

...He realized the war was a battle between the agents of Hitler and those of Stalin...