Arts and Letters

For his friends, Auden's death means several things. Firstly, there is the shock of loss. There was something so established about him, like a much-weathered indestructible building. Since he had survived two of his thirties colleagues, MacNeice and Day Lewis, and had delivered an oration at All Souls' Longham Place for MacNeice, I rather took it for granted that he would survive the third of those whose names, when we were young, were associated with his: namely me. Some years ago when he was staying a weekend with us in London, we were each, by a funny grisly coincidence, writing the other's obituary for the most august of London newspapers. Out of some sense of honor or superstition, we did not show each other his effort. But I had a recurrent fantasy: it was that I would die and read Auden's obituary on the "other side."

One imagined him going on because he seemed so enduring and—a better reason—because in his work he will go on. His death is the loss of someone who supported his civilization—ours, this skin-deep shrinking civilization at the edge of a volcano, our little community of writers, artists, and public—with magnanimity, tolerance, humor, more firmly than anyone I can think of. But this loss also brought that sense of completeness which one rarely feels when a poet dies. My own reaction when other poets who are my contemporaries have died has been in every case to think "Oh, but he has scarcely started!" which is very much the thought about myself with which I wake every morning. The sense of not having started is not necessarily connected with the amount of work that has been achieved. It is rather the sense that a whole life, which makes up a world, has not been transformed into poetry. For this world consists of the poet's life transformed by his temperament and sensibility. The state of history and contemporary society enter into it as well as his passions and humours and eccentricities: and with Auden, beyond this wholeness of his lived contemporaneity, there was also the past—his reading of, and conversation with, the dead.

So when Auden died one had the sense of his amazing completeness. This is not an occasion on which to compare his achievement with that of other great poets of this century—of Yeats, Eliot, or Pound, for example, but I think one can make one generalization about him and his work, which relates to them and theirs. This is that whereas when one thinks of Yeats, Pound, or Eliot one instinctively separates in one's mind the part of the life that was poetic and which went into the poetry, from other parts which were unpoetic and did not do so, while with Auden everything he saw and thought about and everything he was, went into the poetry. His work had the completeness of a great sum, a house of many mansions. Even what was not poetic went into his poetry. On the lower slopes of his Parnassus, he cultivated poetry out of a prose.

He wrote, as you all know, a volume called About the House, the subject of which was the house he had at Kirchstetten near Vienna, which he loved so much. (He told me once that sometimes he stood in the garden with tears of gratitude and surprise at the fact that he possessed this home.) The house might have stood as a metaphor for his oeuvre and for himself. More than a metaphor really: you might say that the house was the poetry was Auden. Perhaps the poems in this volume are not his greatest, but they are entirely characteristic of his best qualities: plenitude, benevolence, gratitude, lack of any trace of snobbery. The house is an organic community in which all the rooms and all their functions exist together on completely human terms, though not, of course, as equals. He was averse to egalitarianism. There are poems for the study, cellar, attic, "the geography of the house," bedroom, guest room, dining room, kitchen.

By extension the house becomes a world which Auden's poetry familiarizes. Through the filtering machinery of his idiosyncratic sensibility, words pour out of the fourteen-volume Oxford English Dictionary, and cover the landscape and the whole society, each word closing in onto its object and giving it an epithet and a name, within the virtuosity of form. With Auden transformation of this kind happened on such an immense scale that, now he is dead, we feel that one of the great machineries for converting encroaching barbarism into terms of our civilization, has left us. Perhaps I am speaking too much as a member of my own generation in saying that there is a sense of being abandoned about this loss. During the whole of my adult life there seems always to have been Wystan "getting on with the job," as Louis MacNeice put it, sitting in his room, occupied with making word objects in his working hours, and his recreations being mostly gymnastic verbal exercises across the parallel bars and trapezes of The Times' crossword puzzles—or five-finger exercises of clerihews and limericks. When he visited one's house he transformed it into his own time-table and space, subject to his own rules. Now someone is no longer sitting in the next room making his peculiar patterns of sense out of the surrounding bellowing traffic of nonsense. No one is poring over the Scientific American and turning the article on, say, the parasites that inhabit the human body into an extremely witty meditation in the manner of Goethe's Roman Elegies; nor taking up the newspaper and reading there, say, of the latest invasion by a super-power of a neighbouring satellite country whose leaders have dared toy with the dangerous idea of freedom—and producing a terse authoritative summation of the invasion in words that have the axe-edge of a public execution, as Auden did:

The ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The ogre cannot master speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

This comment on the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russia in August 1968 should remind us that Auden did, until the end of his life, continue to care about human freedom. During the thirties this caring was to do with the struggle against Fascism, but in the latter half of his life it was about the destruction of the values of the private life by the public world. What Auden loved was the Edenic world of unspoiled limestone landscape, private pleasures, music, whose communication was between one speaker and one listener or reader, receiving what was written or said separately, personally, uniquely. What he hated was the world of slogans, advertising, power politics, super-powers in which the propaganda and the crashing of power interests out-noises every other sound, makes hideous the landscape.

He died at a moment when "history" (as we used to call the surrounding life during the thirties) seems to have taken a nose dive, the public life which conditions all our separate lives, a turn for the worse. When I attended his funeral in the little village of Kirchstetten on a singularly mellow autumn day, I couldn't help thinking that Wystan who had extraordinary control over the outward as well as the inward circumstances of his life had chosen well both the manner and the occasion of his dying. He had died when his friend Chester Kallmann was with him in Austria. He had that very evening given a very successful reading of the kind which was his only happy communication with a public and which he somehow transformed by his very appearance into a private occasion for everyone present. He had resisted invitations to go to a party after the reading, and had gone back to his hotel and fallen asleep, and then died in his sleep.

It was a very bright October morning at Kirchstetten and as the little funeral procession of villagers and a few friends went along the road towards the church, one saw, in orchards, green and red apples hanging like shining stones on branches almost stripped of leaves and looking like wires; and, through hedges, in gardens, chrysanthemums, dahlias, asters, those autumnal flowers that have the look of sea anemones, under a pale clear sky. The day had a golden quality as though hung in a frame that separated it from all other days.

Just before the funeral procession formed, and while Wystan's brother and other relations and a few friends were waiting in the living room of his house, I mentioned to Chester Kallmann that Wystan had told me once that the music he would like for his funeral was Siegfried's Funeral March: a wish expressed as a joke, of course, but when I said it, Chester replied: "Oh, I'm so glad you've confirmed that. We just have time to play it." He put the record on the phonograph. This great noise cut across the scene of the village band assembling in the street outside, like villagers in Figaro. It reminded one that Wystan's innermost idea of Eden was contained in music, a world divided into two kingdoms, one that of the Baroque perpetually self-inventing and vanishing divine yet temporal liquid architecture of Mozart, the other the Nordic, epic, primal, grandiose camp of Wagner.