Edward Mendelson, WH Auden’s literary executor and editor, has called Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island “a Copernican revolution” in studies of the great poet. It’s a big claim, and for the first few dozen pages it looks as though it might be an exaggeration. The book – which combines elements of biography, history and literary criticism, and runs to 750 pages – develops its arguments at a very leisurely pace, and is studded with backward glances and repetitions. Until the reader adjusts to this, it’s hard not to worry that what evidently originated as scholarly devotion might in fact be a form of suffocation.
But after 100 pages, this anxiety starts to disperse. Although The Island is confined to a relatively brief period of time (Jenkins concentrates on the poems Auden produced from the moment he began writing them (in 1922, at the age of 15) until 1937, when he published his reputation-making second collection, called in England Look, Stranger! and in the US, On This Island), the quality of the work he’s able to discuss, and the complexities of Auden’s developing opinions, mean that his approach makes increasing sense. The pacing of the prose remains slow but the more substantial effect is of generosity of attention, breadth of vision, depth of knowledge, and subtlety of interpretation. The Island makes an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of both Auden’s intentions and his achievement in the first part of his writing life.
Previous studies of Auden have tended to prioritise the postmodern stylist (who ingeniously combines time-honoured rhetorical flourishes with up-to-date telegraphic urgencies), the left-leaning internationalist (quick to report on wars in China and Spain), and the restless didact, whose departure from the UK to the US in 1939 was either a form of betrayal or a necessary act of self-preservation, depending on the critic’s point of view. Jenkins is at once vaguer and more accommodating than his predecessors. “My focus on Auden’s explorations of the condition of nationality,” he says, “does not reduce his poems to a set of ideological polemics but is rather an attempt to expose more clearly the collective history distilled into their aesthetic structures. The Auden portrayed here looks more like a kind of lyric novelist than he does a poetic essayist or philosopher.” Jenkins’s Auden is more local, less radical, “more focused on the feel and workings of the social world and on relations between people in that world” than he is on international politics.
Central to this re-presentation is Jenkins’s effort to connect the private world of love, friendship and community with the public world of national identity and responsibility. It’s a theme that Auden himself often stated explicitly in his later work (“Private faces in public places/Are wiser and nicer/Than public faces in private places”), but in his early work it has a particularly rich and organic identity. This, as Jenkins makes clear, has a lot to do with Auden’s feelings about the legacy of the First World War. The haunted look of English landscapes, the daily reminders of personal loss and injury, the idealisation of natural beauty (and the sense that it crystallised a valuable idea of nationhood): all these things combined in Auden’s mind with a strong interest in German culture derived from his family’s musical interests, and a naturally keen appetite for reconciliation, to create a nexus of feeling in which a sense of “hurt” and a longing for “connection” were inseparable.
The “hurt” had a personal aspect as well as a social and historical one. Auden was born in York in 1907, raised in Birmingham (where his father worked as a medical officer and professor at the university), and educated in private schools in Surrey and Norfolk. Less well known is that Auden senior served at Gallipoli during the war – and Jenkins, across several pioneering pages, boldly argues that this loss of a significant male authority figure (complicated by the affair his father had while away) contributed to Auden’s early self-identification as gay. As early as 1920, the year that Auden left his prep school (St Edmund’s, in Hindhead, Surrey where Christopher Isherwood was his contemporary) and went to Gresham’s in Norfolk, he was beginning to create in his poems a landscape that was at once highly personal (a “dream country” of the mind) and also literal – a world of abandoned mines and lonely, rainswept northern uplands, where the ravages of recent history were interwoven with formative self-scrutinies.
The Waste Land had already been published for three years by the time Auden went up to Oxford in 1925, but he only read it for the first time when he got there. His more consequential early influences were Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost. Jenkins admits to being “struck not by the conventional idea that Auden trawled alone in some vast abstract sea of encyclopaedic learning” to develop his mature style, “but rather by the way that tiny circles of personally connected enthusiasts, friends, and colleagues were the seedbeds from which his intellectual and artistic enthusiasms grew”. The willingness to learn from Hardy and his acolytes is a case in point: their use of traditional forms, their pragmatic plain-speaking, their vision of nationhood as something that means most when it is in-dwelling, felt on the pulses, palpable as flints and chalk streams, came very close to embodying his own sense of belonging. It didn’t mean ploughing the same sentimental furrow as the Georgian poets. It meant adapting and reinventing their vision of national identity in such a way that allowed the neuroses of a distinctly modern life, and the consequences of the war in particular, to darken and develop its contours.
Once Auden begins writing the poems that would make his name (his first commercially published book, accepted for Faber by Eliot, appeared in 1930), Jenkins is able to support his account of this process by resting it on one dazzling example after another.
First up is “The Watershed”. This great lyric – it’s astonishing to think that Auden wrote it when he was only 20 years old – arises like so many of his other major poems from the need to heal a damaged society, while at the same time suggesting that efforts to do so are bound to fail.
Jenkins recognises this is his subtle reading of the poem, and develops the insight through a subsequent and equally impressive reading of Paid on Both Sides and the four-part poem beginning “It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens”. In all three pieces, we see the impulses that had driven Auden from the beginning (his war-haunted melancholy, his appetite for a revitalised idea of Englishness) gaining a new and magnificent range of application. And once again, Jenkins is adept at explaining why this might be so: he alerts us to the diversification of Auden’s reading during this period of his life (he had begun to absorb works of anthropology and psychology by Jung, Freud, John Layard and WHR Rivers – whom his father admired, and who had worked with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon during their time in Craiglockhart Hospital during the last years of the war); and he reminds us that Auden lived in Berlin from October 1928 to the following July.
Both these developments helped to create the rapid maturing of his mind and voice, and confirmed his ambition to write poems that proposed an idea of emotional healing, in a geographic context that was tolerantly inclusive but at the same time specific and identifiable. His aim was not simply to be among the English poets; he wanted to be the poet of Englishness.
He knew that such an ambition came with a risk that his interest in nationalism would drag his politics to the right (“I entirely agree with you,” he told Stephen Spender as he finished writing The Orators in 1933, “about my tendency to National Socialism, and its dangers”), but this was not the only reason that his style began to develop again in the 1930s. He also developed a deeper sense that his ambition to be the “mouthpiece of an epoch” depended as much on personal obsessions as it did on values and ideas sanctioned by society at large. For this reason he began to make more room in his poems for commonplace actions and everyday details. The marvellous poem beginning “Out on the lawn I lie in bed” is the supreme example of the synthesis – a profound reconciliation of interior and exterior worlds but a poem that combines the thrill of discovery and self- and national-realisation with the threat of collapse:
Soon through the dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent,
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river-dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.
The last 150 pages of Jenkins’s book are especially well judged in their use of biographical material to discuss Auden’s early love poems, many of which were written for Michael Yates, a pupil of Auden’s at the Downs School in Colwall, Herefordshire, where he taught from 1933 to 1935. Yates was 13 years old and Auden 26 when they first met and, while Jenkins says their friendship didn’t immediately turn into an affair, he acknowledges that it stirred up a good deal of scandalised gossip at the school and among those friends of Auden who knew what was going on. In its maturity, it was the occasion for such major love poems as “Lay your sleeping head…”. The same tact and shrewdness colours Jenkins’s treatment of Auden’s marriage (of convenience and genuine affection to Erika Mann in 1935), his work for the GPO Film Unit in 1935, and his preparation of Look, Stranger! (1936), the collection that would establish him as the major poet of Englishness that he always aspired to become.
The same convergence of influences and ideas that brought Auden to this pinnacle of fame was also those that persuaded him that he had to turn his back on his native land. “A part of me at least has been wanting to die,” he wrote in a journal in 1939, the year he left England for the US. It wasn’t that he had fallen out of love with England; more that he needed to create an objectivising distance – an “intimate anonymity” – between himself and his subjects. It was a decision, as Jenkins says, that helps us to understand why his poems, which are so firmly rooted in their own time, remain so necessary in ours: “The desire for isolation,” he says, “the knowledge that it is impossible – these are the two poles between which the needle of the British compass continues to waver.”
The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness
Nicholas Jenkins
Faber & Faber, 768pp, £25
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This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble