Auden and I
I was in the last graduating year from High School in Quebec, before the CEGEP system was put into place. Which meant that I went directly from High School to University. And that was almost a total disaster for me. I had already skipped a grade in elementary school so I started at McGill at the age of 16. In High School (which I loathed) I had top grades and I was given early acceptance to McGill when I was only 15. In the first year of McGill (which I absolutely loved because I did almost no work) I was only saved from flunking out by the fact that the passing grade was 50. It took me two and a half years to claw my way back up to good grades and I was partially rewarded by being chosen to be a student rep. by the English Department. The idea of having student reps. was a very new thing, brought about largely as a result of multiple student demonstrations at McGill and Concordia (and all over the Western World).
Asa consequence of this rise in social status, in the late winter/early spring of my graduating year (1971), I was invited to attend a faculty get-together (in the prestigious Faculty Club) to meet a special guest: the poet W.H. Auden. Auden was doing a bit of a tour of North American Universities in order to rake up some spare cash. He wasn’t particularly obliged to do anything at these University appearances, like reading his poetry, he was just expected to be there. Any that’s what he did/was. He was, however, engaged at McGill to read to a large audience that evening and we were just the aperitifs. I remember going to hear him read and he was animated and wonderful. I found out, only recently that John "Buffy" Glassco was there as well.
At that date Auden had just turned 64 (younger than I am now) but he looked positively ancient. That was partially because I was positively juvenile (19),and partially because he was the most wrinkled man I have ever seen in my life(look at a photo of him at that age on Wikipedia – he had Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome which caused the wrinkles, for which he was famous; see “Samizdat Blog” Friday June 21, 2013) – and partially because he looked absolutely depressed and uninterested (or unaware) of what was going on around him. He just sat in his armchair, silent, expressionless and unmoving, except to chain smoke, while we stared at him in awe. He must have thought that we were all a colossal waste of his time, but it was in his contract and he would get a lovely gin and tonic afterward.
Anyway, I could at least say that I had shaken the great man’s hand in a ceremony that was remarkably like kissing the Pope’s ring and I promptly forgot all about the experience until 50 years later – and now it haunts me. Auden died two years late at 66 in Austria and he’s buried there, although rightfully he belongs in the Abbey. Perhaps the thought of that fate (the Abbey) is partially what drove him to live in Austria – he was certainly no friend to the Fascists. I’ve learned to greatly admire his poetry although a lot of his prose is less than fine. But not his verse. He was an extraordinary word mechanic, and he made the very difficult seem very easy. And while a lot of prominent critics do not place him up there with Eliot and Frost and whoever else is hot this season, they certainly do quote him a lot. As in below:
This is one they all like. Auden, himself, absolutely hated it. Listen to Dylan Thomas read it on YouTube. Now there’s another interesting poet.
September 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
[First published October 11, 1939]
NB.This is particularly apt considering what is unfolding in Ukraine this week.
