When, on January 19, 1939, VH Odn When he boarded the ship for New York at Southampton, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But a few months before that he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood (writer, author of “Farewell to Berlin”) that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost immediately upon arriving in New York, he began to rethink his vocation as a poet and, moreover, to question the social role of poetry. (He also began his spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to re-accept Christianity, the faith of his childhood.)
His works from this period were a combination of emphasizing the value of microcultures and a commitment to intellectual cosmopolitanism. He praised the “local understanding” of the informal salon she ran. Elizabeth Mayer, a German immigrant, from her home on Long Island, but what united the members of that salon was a combination of diverse cultures and nations with moral leanings. In a poem written immediately after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, he wrote:
Helpless in the night
The world lies dead to us;
Yet, scattered everywhere
ironic dots of light
sevnu gde god Pravedni
exchange messages...
The “righteous” are, like God in an ancient definition, a community whose center is everywhere and whose circle is nowhere. They are homeless in the world, but feel at home with each other.
Auden became an American citizen in 1946 - in fact, he was even temporarily drafted into the US Army - and would visit England only occasionally for the rest of his life. He seemed to care little about anything except the nature and fate of the country of his birth. But in a remarkable new book, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's New England (The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England), Nicholas Jenkins, a professor at Stanford University, invites us to forget everything I have just told about Odno's life from 1939 onwards. He invites us to free ourselves from what he calls the “lack of retrospectiveness”.
To understand what Jenkins means by this, we can turn to Geriju Solu Morisonu and his influential book “Narrative and Freedom” (1994), in which he introduces the idea of “afterthought”.
Hindsight can be defined as retroactive foreshadowing. The past is seen as containing signs that pointed to what would happen later, to events known to the observer looking back. These signs, now visible, could have been observed then. In essence, the present, as the future of the past, was already contained in the past. A more or less straight line is drawn from the observed past to the observer's present.
Thanks to the power of afterthought, we who know of Odno's departure from England, of his return to Christianity, of his localism and cosmopolitanism, can easily feel that, enriched by this knowledge, we are able to see his beginnings and see all the paths that led to his later career. But if we deny ourselves that knowledge and look at the first decade of Odno's career with unprejudiced eyes, what do we see? Jenkins is convinced that we see a poet whose whole idea of his calling is connected with belonging to England, with the history and fate of the island on which he was born.
Jenkins begins the book by describing how students at Gresham School in Norfolk in 1925 staged Shakespeare's "The Storm", a play in which the role of Caliban - "a native and monstrous slave", who was born on the island and will spend his entire life there, but is mastered by a magician who is not from there - is played by a student named Wistan Odn.
The book ends in November 1937, when Odin meets the new King of England, George VI, to be awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, in recognition of the poet's previously published collection "Look, Stranger!", which he had wanted to call "The Island" or "On This Island". (The editors did not like either of these solutions and, while Odén was in Iceland, unavailable, they came up with their own title. When he was signing a copy of the published book for a friend Cyril Connelly, Auden crossed out the title and wrote On This Island, and insisted that Random House use that title for the American edition.)
What connects the two events is not an arc but a sinusoid, as Auden contemplates and reexamines his relationship with the island of his birth. In Jenkins’s descriptions of Auden’s early career, we see an immensely gifted young man who feels like an outsider, an outcast, someone who is not who he should be. His alienation is compounded by his being gay, but more importantly by his being a Northerner in a country that is both culturally and economically dominated by the South. (Audden called the capital “terrible London.”) But perhaps his very distance from the center of things deepened his poetic reflections on the society he loves in such a complicated way. Jenkins concludes his description of The Tempest with these words:
“Within just ten years, using with extraordinary skill the language of art he had begun to learn at Gresham, this Caliban would transform himself into a figure who casts spells as often as he curses. He would imagine himself, and be imagined by others, as a visionary poet of a re-enchanted England, an island. Having emerged from the dark childhood of apocalyptic war, he would try to find the words to summon for a moment the emergence of a brighter, better society, and only a few years later, as if the drama were finally over, would he recognize the limitations of the wonderful fantasy that a poet could mend the world.”
We see, then, early poetry that builds on the intimate psychological turmoil of the New Age - often a turmoil over personal sexuality - and the collapse of Europe in the echoes of the Great War across ancient British landscapes, especially those of the north. (The idea that the north retained some elements of the former magical world even after the mercantile south was ravaged by its own wealth is not uncommon, and has found its way into some of the great literary works, including Pynchon “Mason and Dixon” and “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” Suzane Clark.)
After taking his first steps in that direction, Auden spent some time in Germany, mostly in Berlin, in a kind of experiment in cosmopolitanism, but he rejected further treading that path as impossible for him. That is, he began to believe that he could find his own meaning, and the meaning of his poetic calling, only on his Island.
He returns and immerses himself in the intellectual and social life of the island. He writes poems, of course; he teaches for a time, in Scotland and England; he becomes a private tutor in “terrible London” and later joins a venture called the Group Theatre; he writes verses to accompany documentaries. He seeks out joint artistic ventures whenever he has the opportunity, but he is increasingly discouraged. In a diary entry from 1939, he stated that only a year earlier “at least part of him wanted to die.”
One of the more unusual events in Odno's life was his wedding, in June 1935, to Eric Man, the daughter of a writer Thomas Mann. Oden was gay and Erika was bisexual; he married her to prevent her from being deported back to Nazi Germany, where she did not fare well. (By the way, the two became close friends, and Erika's brother Golo (He even thinks there was a “slightly erotic touch” to their relationship.) Odin liked to joke about his famous father-in-law from then on, but these jokes tended to conceal something much more serious: Odin was increasingly convinced that, like Thomas Mann, he would have to become an exile from his own homeland. He began to feel that he could respond more healthily and wisely to the island of his birth only if he sailed away and found a home elsewhere. Hence the irony of receiving the King’s Order for Poetry just as he began to realize that he would soon be leaving the country.
Jenkins writes judiciously about the entirety of Auden’s work from the 1930s, but he is particularly brilliant when he discusses the aforementioned 1936 collection (let’s keep Auden’s title rather than Faber’s) “On This Island”. The book is a collection of poems, but (as he would do on other occasions, most notably in the 1955 collection “Achilles’ Shield”) he tried to shape it into a coherent whole. He did this by choosing the poems and their order, but above all by beginning the collection with a “Prologue” and ending with an “Epilogue”. That opening poem is a meditation on ancient England, which emerges beautifully as the poet searches for “love” to…
...make us like Newton, who is in the garden looking
As the apple falls towards England, he became aware
Eternal bonds between myself and her.
But, alas, he must admit that “that dream that has so long strengthened our will/I think, of uniting the dead into a glorious empire” will not come true: He is “already retreating”.
In the "Epilogue", Odin turns his gaze to the continent - he does not mention figures from England, but Schweitzer, Freud, Kafka, Proust - but what he sees there, in 1936, is “the malice of death”: “Protruding and violent faces are celebrated”. It is time to think about the future: “And tomorrow/It arrives. That is the world. That is the path”. And he chooses that Path. He goes abroad.
Towards the end of the book, Jenkins writes:
What makes Auden's poetry of the first half of the 1930s at least partly sobering and thought-provoking is that the myths of England, which he has condensed into poems of unforgettable literary eloquence like the "Prologue," myths of identity, of English history, of English conviviality, seem so enduring, yet somehow fragile. The arc set out in his 1936 collection is long and rich in many ways, but it is drawn towards a void—as if, after centuries and centuries of lyrical flourishes, Auden's point in the "Epilogue" is that there is something exhausted and incurable in the myths that underpin English tradition and its values. If Auden deserves the title of prophet, as he himself may have sometimes hoped, then much of his prophecy is contained therein.
This is a thorough summary of what happened to the greatest English poet of the 20th century in the second half of the 1930s. Edvard Mendelson, who looks after Odno's literary legacy, declared that “The Island” is “a Copernican revolution in the study of Odno.” And it is.
(Glif editorial team; source: The Hedgehog Review; translated by: Matija Jovandić)
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