Reviews and Features

Luke Kennard A Warmth that Wasn’t

W H Auden
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Edited Alan Jacobs), Princeton $22.95

WH Auden is better known today for his shorter lyric poems – not least for their suitability at weddings and funerals – than for the long, difficult works that founded his career and reputation. His first collection, Poems, came out in 1928, followed by the brilliantly strange, formally adventurous The Orators in 1932. It wasn’t until the 1936 publication of Look, Stranger! that Auden reached a wider audience. No less intellectually engaging, the work had an emotional immediacy and accessibility, coupled with strong form. By the time he moved to the USA on a temporary visa in 1939, Auden was already well established and much celebrated as an engaged, left-wing poet (by which you can infer his work expressed a certain sympathy for the down-trodden; he wasn’t terribly comfortable with the label). Many have since maligned him for his emigration as a deserter but in fact, at thirty-two with no military qualifications, Auden would not have been drafted and was told as much when he offered to return. When he was called up to the US Army in 1942 he was rejected on health grounds.

The Age of Anxiety was published in 1947, a year after he became an American citizen. It has something of the emotional resonance of his best lyric work, something of his resolution to rejuvenate complex poetic forms and more than a hint of his earlier obscurity and intellectual playfulness. It’s also an ornery poem from the subtitle onwards. An eclogue is ‘a classical form, associated since Virgil with the meditations of shepherds’. Eclogues are rural, dialogic works, which touch on the mundane and the divine as the shepherds wander and converse. Not baroque, in other words, and not usually set in a city. The equivalent of the shepherds in The Age of Anxiety are four strangers who meet in a New York bar: Emble, a young sailor; Quant, a businessman; Malin, a retired airman; and Rosetta, a buyer for a department store. Each represents ‘one of the Faculties... Quant is Intuition; Malin, Thought; Rosetta, Feeling; Emble, Sensation’. The purpose is to take the pulse of a displaced people – none of the four is a native New Yorker – and thereby the state of the Western world at the tail-end of World War Two. No mean feat given that everyone has a lot on their minds. Tougher still given the form: a kind of poem-play wherein the four either speak or think their lines (sometimes inspired by a radio announcement, sometimes in reaction to one another) as a series of linked soliloquies. The line is unrhymed, alliterative verse based on Piers Plowman:

For Lot in his lifetime for liking of drink
 Did with his daughters what the Devil liked.
(Piers Plowman, ‘Passus 1’)

As above, the rule in The Age of Anxiety is three strong alliterations per line and Auden barely departs from this for the poem’s hundred pages, which is impressive, if a little extreme,

And the godless growing like green cedars
On righteous ruins. The reticent earth...

He endstops less (insofar as it is possible to endstop unrhymed alliterative verse), but never misses the alliterative pattern on stressed syllables, even in the middles of words. There are moments where the language takes on a brilliantly euphemistic quality that is facilitated by the form:

                       they were not supported,
They swallowed and sank, ceased thereafter
To appear in public...

It is an ex-Polly. The whole poem comprises six parts, which delineate Quant, Malin, Rosetta and Emble meeting in a bar, reacting to the radio news, getting very drunk, taking some kind of hallucinatory voyage together, getting a cab to Rosetta’s apartment where she dances with Emble, who then passes out on her bed. Quant and Malin go home (Rosetta hadn’t intended to invite the two older men, but they didn’t realize she was only being polite). It doesn’t summarize well; what matters here, in this new world of ‘multiple Hamlets’, is the inner life of the four protagonists. Indeed, textual references to Hamlet are rife – ‘His utopias tempt to eternal youth / Or self-slaughter’. The tragedy is global.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger once said that, of all his books, he felt fondest of his failures. The ones that overreached, that came so close to being great but didn’t quite close in on a form, remained chaotic, heroic. Unusually for a failure, when it was published in 1947 The Age of Anxiety was a big hit. Significant poets and critics raved about it. Its title became a stock- phrase. It sold thousands. It won Auden the Pulitzer. Leonard Bernstein wrote a symphony, Jerome Robbins a ballet (which Auden hated). If this is surprising given its relative obscurity in his oeuvre now, it becomes downright baffling when you actually read it. Enough has changed in the poetic landscape in the last sixty- five years to maroon The Age of Anxiety somewhere between the Dadaists and the Confessionals, as a loopy outpost of formalist obscurity, occasionally breathtaking, frequently maddening, and largely opaque. Its importance is undeniable, but forging my way through it made me take up smoking again.

Not to say there aren’t innumerable compensations. This is a beautiful new edition of the book-length poem (the last long poem Auden wrote) , with a witty and engaging introduction by Alan Jacobs, illuminating Auden’s intentions and remaining good-humoured as to their success. It’s not hard to make a case for its significance, either: ‘The Age of Anxiety is among the first poems in English, perhaps the very first, to register the fact of the Nazi’s genocidal murder of millions of Jews’. I say opaque... I guess the issue is that Auden’s sources, esoteric and allusive in the first place, are applied the way a magpie applies a bottle-cap. The foundational work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, for instance, is apparently key to understanding the longest (and weirdest) third part of the poem and yet, to quote Jacobs, ‘Auden is not borrowing this structure so much as riffing on it’. And he’s simultaneously riffing on Jung’s collective unconscious. Riffing on either one would be ambitious enough.

Auden has a self-referential sense of humour about this, too – each of the six parts has a prose intro and outro: ‘So it was now as they sought that state of prehistoric happiness which, by human beings, can only be imagined in terms of a landscape bearing a symbolic resemblance to the human body’. Really? And yet there’s an idea that the locations of the Zohar are a kind of metonym for the human body and the senses. The city in The Age of Anxiety, which is imaginary, a group dream, is supposed to do the same. It very nearly works – it feels like a conversation rendered as a place – but ultimately you’re left with an odd image of the four lying face down on their table, drunk, while the poem spins out of control:

Quant says:
                Thank God I was warned
To bring an umbrella and had bribes enough
For the red-haired rascals, for the reservoir guard
A celluloid sandwich, and silk eggs
For the lead smelters; for Lizzie O’Flynn...

Nevertheless, let’s call this MO the freedom of a powerful intellect and a fertile imagination: the poetic licence of genius. It’s always been what has made Auden’s work great, but hands up who’s actually read the Zohar? Well, hands up who’s going to read it for next week’s seminar? No, I didn’t think so; and I’ll wager that the same went for Auden’s readers and critics in the late forties, and they didn’t even have Wikipedia.

The poem appropriates other forms with the same abandon: hymns, newspaper articles, the language of economics and history are parodied by Auden with his customary brio. The vows exchanged by Emble and Rosetta at their symbolic wedding keep up the alliterative form, and even have some of the accessible whimsy of Look, Stranger! :

If you blush, I’ll build breakwaters.
When you’re tired, I’ll tidy your table.
If you cry, I’ll climb crags.
When you’re sick, I’ll sit at your side.

Jacobs argues that ‘Auden understood, profoundly, that literary forms are ways of discerning the world: each of them reveals some aspect of experience while concealing others. (Things can be said in the epic that cannot be said in satire, and comedy discerns truths to which tragedy is blind)’. This is beautifully put, but it also clarifies the problem with the poem: The Age of Anxiety is an epic-satirical-tragi-comedy.

The tragic element is genuinely affecting. Malin, the retired airman, recalls his service, with ‘gravity a god greater than love’. When you can actually follow the argument, the syllabic alliteration fades (as it should) into the background:

                        dully we mourned each
Flare as it fell with a friend’s lifetime,
While we hurried on to our home bases
To the safe smells and a sacrament
Of tea with toast...

This mix of Christian and quotidian symbolism within a military context has something of David Jones’s In Parenthesis, an equally difficult long poem published a decade previously. But where In Parenthesis plays the bluff humour of the soldiers off against the work’s bookishness and theological depth, a good third of The Age of Anxiety takes place in a proto-Jungian imaginary city, which our four heroes enter in an alcohol induced haze. If it could only be coherent enough to play one thing off another: ‘The scene has all the signs of a facetious culture, / Publishing houses, pawnshops and pay-toilets’. Well, quite.

And yet there is a careful interplay between irony and sincerity, appearance and reality. When Rosetta and Emble dance to the record player at her flat, Malin and Quant sing fragmentary ballads, both bawdy and melancholy. However, as in wartime any display of affection takes on a symbolic aspect, to all four of them ‘this quite casual attraction seemed and was of immense importance’. There’s a tenderness to the caveat and was – maybe the performance of sincerity is backed by genuine sincerity. As Auden has already pronounced: ‘Besides, only animals who are below civilization and the angels who are beyond it can be sincere’. Perhaps it’s fitting then, in a work obsessed with depth and surface, style and content, that the form is adhered to with such strictness that there are times when it feels Oulipian, the social commentary indistinguishable from the linguistic game:

                scented assassins, salad-eaters
Who murder on milk, merry expressives,
Pert pyknics with pumpkin heads,
Clever cardinals with clammy hands,
Jolly logicians with juvenile books,
Farmers, philistines, filles-de-joie,
The successful smilers the city can use.

The issue is not that this isn’t delightful in itself, and not that it isn’t without a self-sabotaging underlying meaning (albeit a rather snobbish one); the unifying factor of these everyday grotesques is their glibness. Rather it’s that in spite of its self-consciousness, the poem demands to be taken seriously, and there are times when that’s a real effort, a curious feeling given that I really wanted to take it seriously – like getting the giggles in a job interview. Take Rosetta’s five page monologue after Emble passes out on her bed:

Blind on the bride-bed, the bridegroom snores,
Too aloof to love. Did you lose your nerve
And cloud your conscience because I wasn’t
Your dish really?

It has something of the genius of Molly Bloom’s conclusion to Ulysses, but also something of Bugs Bunny refusing to die. Much later in the same speech:

Your creed is creased. But have Christian luck.
Your Jesus has wept; you may joke now,
Be spick and span, spell out the bumptious
Morals on monuments...

At times it’s like going to see a celebrated jazz saxophonist playing the spit valve for two hours; it sounds awful, but my god, the technique.

All in all, then, it’s easy to see why The Age of Anxiety hasn’t remained the brightest light in Auden’s legacy. What remains fascinating and engaging, though, are the moments of sincerity. Even Rosetta’s speech turns moving by the end: a lullaby for her passed-out would-be paramour: ‘We both were asking / For a warmth there wasn’t, and then wouldn’t write’. In Part 3, Malin, marooned with the young Emble, for whom he has the hots, reflects candidly on desire, inspired by a moment’s eye-contact:

Girlishly glad that my glance is not chaste,
He wants me to want what he would refuse:
For sons have this desire for a slave also.

The same goes for Auden’s deeply considered morality and theology, later manifesting in Malin’s conflicted Christianity and self-accusing conclusion:

                                           in choosing how many
And how much they will love, our minds insist on
Their own disorder as their own punishment.

That’s a typically brilliant Auden logic puzzle, even if it is the less ordered moments that really shine here.