There is an old Norfolk rhyme about a spot on the coast where deep water meets land as the cliffs peter out, making it perfect for invasion by sea: “He who would all England win / Must at Weybourne Hope begin.” I thought of it during the first chapter of Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness, when the young poet is spotted “very early one day several miles from school alone on the shore at Weybourne, looking at the sea”. Jenkins doesn’t cite the proverb, but it supports his thesis: that Auden would one day try to “win” England to a new vision of itself.
More than any other 20th-century British poet, Auden has attracted the devotion of expert readers, resulting in critical epics that pay tribute to a heroic body of work. In 1993, at the age of 70, the American poet Anthony Hecht published The Hidden Law, a study that reflected his lifelong reading of Auden; a few years later, the English poet and Oxford don John Fuller produced WH Auden: A Commentary, the result of quarter of a century of research. Both ran to well over 400 pages. Around the same time, a young Nicholas Jenkins co-founded the Auden Society, and began an academic career immersed in Auden scholarship. Now, three decades later, he has produced his own magnum opus, which is both narrower in scope than those earlier overviews (The Island ends in 1936; Auden died in 1973) and, at more than 700 pages, significantly longer.
Auden was a great poet of vertiginous scale, often writing as if from a godlike height: “The clouds rift suddenly—look there / At cigarette-end smouldering on a border”. So it seems appropriate that the smallest detail of his life can be made to loom large. But there is also a practical limit to the labours he inspires. A few years ago, Ian Sansom published a witty confession of failure in the form of an aphoristic “biography” of one of Auden’s most famous works, “September 1, 1939”—a poem composed in New York at the outbreak of the Second World War and widely circulated again after 9/11. For 25 years, Sansom said, he had wanted to write “a big book about Auden’s life and work, a truly great book”—but eventually settled for “a short book about just one of his poems”.
Jenkins has not settled so readily in writing a book that has also taken many years—but I still reached the end with a sense of an epic curtailed. I’ve often taught a class on TS Eliot using a brilliant essay Jenkins once published about Auden’s elegy “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1940), which convincingly argues that, in describing Freud as “an important Jew who died in exile”, Auden was implicitly rebutting the antisemitism of Eliot, the elder poet who was also his editor. Jenkins ingeniously characterises the Freud elegy as a form of “post-national poetry”, reflecting Auden’s self-exile, at the end of the 1930s, from England to the United States (the opposite direction to Eliot’s transatlantic life-journey).
The Island often seems to be heading towards this moment of maturity, but begins too far back to reach it. Auden was a remarkably precocious teenage poet, but to say that his first surviving poem, written at 15, “carefully reworks the old idea that the moon is made of cheese”—by comparing it to a wheel of Stilton—feels generous. The expansiveness with which the early work is treated means we are more than halfway through the book before the pivotal moment, in 1929, when Auden began consciously to assert “his identity as an English poet”. Jenkins is a deeply knowledgeable guide to the unnervingly original verse that Auden began to write while still a student at Oxford, striking words together like flints to light up a ruined landscape: “Metals run / Burnished or rusty in the sun”. But, even as someone who has loved these cryptic visions for years, I found myself wanting to move faster through them, just as they speed us telegraphically through their “lean country”; to have the essential insight without the elaboration, which can indulge the academic tendency to hear echoes of other canonical poets at every turn (“The Waste Land’s elegant ‘sled’ has its counterpoint in the workers’ ‘fallen bicycles’ in Auden’s poem”).
The First World War shaped and warped Auden’s childhood
There’s a structural tension in the way that The Island is two kinds of book: “an argument but also a story”, to quote the blurb. The UK edition, from Faber, Auden’s own publisher, with its enigmatic subtitle WH Auden and the Last of Englishness, feels pitched as a biography; the US edition, however, is from Harvard University Press, and subtitled War and Belonging in Auden’s England, which sounds like a social history. An absorbing opening chapter manages to be both, giving us a richly imagined account of how the First World War shaped and warped Auden’s childhood, before any of his poems were written. Jenkins deftly evokes an Edwardian world in which “the glint of empire flickered on patriotically emblazoned biscuit tins” and Auden’s middle-class parents pursued “ethically serious crafts” with a high-mindedness that would inform their son’s respect for poetic form. But then Auden’s father was conscripted as an army doctor and, although he survived, brought the trauma of Gallipoli back into the house. Auden was flippant in print about the end of the war (“Butter and Father had come back again”), but he also believed, unhappily, that his father’s long absence was the formative cause of his own homosexuality. Jenkins, more subtly, links it to the preoccupation of the early poems with a bare, broken England where death and violence are everywhere. Auden’s boyhood obsession with abandoned mines is plausibly attributed to a desire to escape from sudden fatherlessness into a fantasy world, while also exploring the reality of a war in which men were literally digging themselves in to survive.
Jenkins also shows how, when Auden was sent away from home to public school, the war haunted a quasi-militaristic atmosphere that, in time, “minted psychic wrecks”, and which the poet later compared to a foretaste of “a Fascist state”. Helping himself to extra bread and butter at his prep school, Auden was accused by a teacher of wanting “the Huns to win” and later thought this had psychologically associated Germany with “forbidden pleasures”. Jenkins cleverly suggests that the notably Germanic quality of Auden’s early poems—with their interest in Old English poetry and their glimpses of modern Berlin—expressed a cultural desire to make peace. Certainly, I believe him when he asserts, with a fine metaphor, that in Auden’s poems “the First World War appears like a light, always on […] discernible as a glow even through the fabric of a closed curtain”. Among other things, this illuminates an inspired but grim simile that Auden cut from “Night Mail” (1935), his famous script for a documentary about the wonders of transporting post by rail: “uplands heaped like slaughtered horses”.
What, though, of “Englishness”, the promised subject of the subtitle? It is a vague term, as Jenkins acknowledges when discussing Auden’s almost-mystical use of the “breathy word, ‘English’”. But he also establishes, startlingly, what a “modern concept” and coinage it is, used only occasionally in the 19th century and in no poem or novel published before 1900. To call Auden a poet of “the last of Englishness”, then, is ironically to make him an elegist for something only just invented. This is where the strength and originality of Jenkins’s word-by-word approach to the poems emerges, which shows how mercurially Auden assimilated his present moment. As well as making the language of psychoanalysis a resonant poetic register, he magpied new words such as “sexy”, “television set” and—in the first line of a spectacular but abandoned alliterative epic—“yoyo” (“In the year of my youth when yoyos came in”). Sensitive as a camera-film to his fast-moving world, Auden became its scribe. As Jenkins perceptively puts it, his second book, The Orators: An English Study (1932) is “a massive, Whitmanesque beehive of independent yet interconnected national activity”.
Jenkins’s intellectually honest examination of the politically contradictory “Englishness” of Auden’s life and work is aimed, as he notes early on, at countering a tendency to treat him “as a sage or philosopher who teaches lessons (which by chance are written as poems)”. Instead, he shows how the poems create a forcefield of radiant suggestion, “transmitting the contours of life” through the “beautiful scrimshandering” of echoes and symmetries that have an enchanting effect. As a biographer, his sympathetic but unevasive treatment of the fact that Auden’s love life during this period centred on a teenage boy he met as a schoolteacher also makes clear that his hero—though evidently witty, charismatic and loveable—was far from infallible.
The problem for poets who aspire to speak for a nation: a nation is never of one mind
Fallibility was something that Auden would increasingly diagnose in his early poems. Looking back at The Orators in 1966, he saw that its ambition to criticise a “fascist outlook” was “obscure and equivocal” and could be read as the opposite. This encapsulates the problem for poets who aspire to speak for a nation: a nation is never of one mind. But people want heroes, and Auden—elevated to the status of a “genius” by the great and the good of his country before the age of 30—came to see that he had to escape the role, as war in Europe loomed again and with it the pressure to “speak for England”.
The last book of poems he published while still living in England was Look, Stranger! (1936)—a title Eliot gave it, but which Auden disliked; in the US, it would be called On This Island. Both titles echo the book’s glittering lyric of chalk-cliff Englishness, “Look, stranger, at this island now”. Jenkins treats this to a superb close reading, which braids together strands of insight that have been patiently threaded through hundreds of pages. He finds the poem’s commanding tone simultaneously “spellbinding” and “coercive”, and wisely reflects: “One may wonder if poetry criticism, mirroring its subject, must also be an expression of mixed feelings.”
As another big book about Auden (with a feast of footnotes), The Island is a marvellous, mixed success: always fascinating, sometimes frustrating, but fundamentally admirable in its determination to resist simplification of this restlessly English writer.
