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Thekla Clark: Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallmann. London: Faber, £8.99.
W. H. Auden: As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, ballads lullabies, limericks and other light verse edited by Edward Mendelson. London: Faber, £6.99.

     One might think it strange that Patrick Kavanagh regularly rated Auden with the likes of Milton and Melville. Stranger still that he awarded to Auden the title of honorary Irishman - the height of the joke only being matched by the length of the compliment. But reading Thekla Clark’s account of her friendship with Auden in Italy, Austria and New York, together with Edward Mendelson’s selection of Auden’s so-called lighter poems, one is so struck by the breadth of his sympathies and the variety of his styles as to give Kavanagh’s judgement greater credit. What the Irish poet valued was the capacious, voracious nature of the Englishman’s imagination, so different from the provincial attitude of many (Irish!) writers at the time. Kavanagh, I think, could see that the spirit of Auden’s work meant that it could accommodate a certain degree of Irishness, just as it could take much from any nationality. This certainly accords with Auden’s quest for novel situations and his ability to adapt to new places.

     One of the reasons why Auden’s reputation suffers at times is that the very breadth of his influence means that there is no sectional group who will promote his case or defend him when necessary. So MacNeice, with whom Auden is often compared, has been championed in recent years by those Northern Irish writers who have wished to create a poetic father for themselves. MacNeice, of course, is a very good poet, but his work - in terms of ambition and development, of line and structure, of intellect and psychology - has nothing like Auden’s richness.

     For critical purposes, Auden’s career is usually divided in two periods, the English and the American. This division, which is a reflection of English (and, to some degree, American) provincialism, is ultimately unhelpful. Thekla Clark’s memoir puts new flesh on the later periods of his life and introduces us to two more manifestations of the poet - the Italian Auden and the Austrian Auden. Clark met Auden (or rather Thekla met Wystan - in this book Auden is very definitely Wystan) on the Italian island of Ischia and the first half of the book recalls the period in the fifties when the poet spent half the year in Forio, the island’s capital. The second half deals with the period between 1957 and the end of his life, when he lived much of the year in the Austrian village of Kirchstetten, having bought a house there with the proceeds of a literary prize. In each case, the setting is reflected in the mood and imagery of his work - the Italian period was the happier one and is reflected in the slightly sunburnt optimism  of poems like ‘In Praise of Limestone’. “It is the loveliest time of all”, Wystan wrote in a letter around the time, “wonderful clear lights and white-clouded skies”. The Austrian period by contrast swings heavily back to the colder North European feeling of Auden’s earlier work, as exemplified by his fascination with Goethe.

     ‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ is placed in Auden’s Collected Poems so as to end one period and begin another. In it Auden explains why Northerners of his sort come to the Mediterranean, while hinting as to why the experience may be disappointing. Typically for him it was as much a matter of exploring the self as of exploring the new environment:

     In middle age hoping to twig from
What we are not what we might be next, a question
     The South seems never to raise.

Sun-drenched and technologically under-developed, Ischia was a kind of Mediterranean Eden, only just being discovered by the “smart set”. Clark was an adventurous American socialite, amusing and glamorous, frank about her lack of intellectual clout, but by no means simple-minded. As her recollections demonstrate, she was observant, objective and sympathetic. Much of her time with Auden and his lover Chester Kallmann was spent engaged in conversation, which was usually a mixture of gossip and intellectual speculation:

We were filled with admiration for women ruled by their passions; for John [Clark, her husband], Hardy heroines were conceived to illustrate the author’s ideas, and Wystan maintained that they displayed the proper balance between self-confidence and humility. Voices were raised as each tried to put his point across. John turned his argument into a theory and Chester turned his into a performance. Wystan said that he and I were the only ‘true intuitives’, the difference being that he was a ‘thinking intuitive’. By then everyone had offended everyone else.

Auden’s use of a Jungian category to analyse a friend, as shown here, exemplified his capacity to study his close friends with detachment. It is also an example of his obsession with types. What Clark helps us to see, here and elsewhere, is the extent to which Auden’s fantastic intelligence created difficulties in his emotional life. He was capable of becoming a different kind of person to suit the needs of any situation, a fact which partly explains the extent to which he travelled around the world. This is not to suggest that he was some sort of human chameleon, a figure (like Woody Allen in Zelig) who would grow a beard in the company of Orthodox priests or break out in tartan around Scottish people. But he was keenly aware of the roles which any given situation demanded - a fact reflected, for example, in his letters which often sound over-adapted to the needs of any given occasion. His chatty letters are unstoppably loquacious, his consolatory letters are impeccably sensitive, the business-like letters are super-brusque and efficient-sounding.

     Ischia itself allowed Auden the opportunity to play another part, that of the Lucky One in Paradise. The Forians themselves encouraged the narcissism and affectation of the visitors, as Clark observes:

We played the parts assigned to us, our unpronounceable names changed by the Forians into indicators like lo scrittore, the writer; lo studioso, the scholar; I was la biondona, the big blonde. The important thing was to play the parts well. It was as though we lived in the third person; we were what we appeared to be to others. Wystan studied it, I revelled in it and Chester accepted it unquestioningly.

Often when we think about Auden we consider him in relation to some important twentieth-century event: the General Strike, Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, Spain, the Sino-Japanese war and so on. Here he is shown reacting to a period which is a gateway, if you like, to our world, one which we instinctively recognise, where people take regular holidays in exotic places, where women are more assertive, where homosexuality is more openly expressed, where America is by far the most powerful and influential country and where one may choose one’s personality from a wide range of options.

     But there was something in the setting, warm and beautiful as it was, that did not really suit his temperament. One of the many telling passages in Clark’s book renders this in her characteristically chatty and unpretentious tone:

When I think of [Ischia] I think of Wystan striding along with that dreadful dog of his, swinging a soiled string bag crammed with books and the day’s shopping. When I asked him years later if he really had been the person he seemed to be - that enchanted foreigner trying to belong - he said ‘Yes, and that is why I had to leave.’

     What is notable about the new selection of Auden’s Light Verse, As I Walked Out One Evening, is that it shows the slightly eccentric chameleon element in Auden’s personality meant that he was able to capture the voices of many widely differing characters: the voice of the innocent girl (‘Miranda’s Song’); of a lecherous sailor (‘Song of the Master and Boatswain’); of a melancholy soldier (‘Roman Wall Blues’); of grotesque horror (‘Victor’); of serenity (‘Lullaby’); of exultation (‘Song’); of frank tragedy (‘Gold in the North Came the Blizzard to Say’); of ecstasy (‘Warm are the Still and Lucky Miles’); of avuncular charm (‘Many Happy Returns’). Often beneath a fairly simple surface the voice is modulating between melancholic philosophy and comic energy as in ‘O Tell Me the Truth About Love’. In this kind of verse one can see that he could create something so light-seeming that one might think it was not poetry at all:

  Does it look like a pair of pyjamas
     Or the ham in a temperance hotel,
  Does its odour remind one of llamas
     Or has it a comforting smell?
  Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is
     Or soft as eiderdown fluff,
  Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
        O tell me the truth about love.

Auden’s definitions of Light Verse, of which the above is a good example, lay a heavy emphasis on the idea of an audience, of having a wide community which will attend, with a reasonable degree of comprehension, to what one is saying. There were three principal categories into which he divided Light Verse, and one can see how he relates all of them to the projected existence of a well-informed - but not elitist - group:

1. Poetry written for performance, to be spoken or sung before an audience (e.g. Folksongs, the poems of Tom Moore)
2. Poetry intended to be read, but having for its subject-matter the everyday social life of its period or the experiences of the poet as an ordinary human being (e.g. the poems of Chaucer, Pope, Byron)
3. Such nonsense poetry as, through its properties and  techniques, has a general appeal (Nursery rhymes, the poems of Edward Lear)

Auden’s Light Verse aimed for immediacy and accessibility, seeking out popular forms which could be blended with more highbrow literary methods. The effects were often striking. He could use jazz rhythms, for instance, to render the plight of refugees, and invest the slack urgency of the form with the anxiety of the displaced:

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

Auden’s songs and Light Verse, in general, have a mood of suppressed excitement. That is to say, whether they are celebrating or protesting or lamenting, they share a common energy which is generated by their controlled and consistent rhythms. Over these rhythms Auden was capable of the most intricate tonal manipulation. ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’, for instance, begins with an air of lazy serenity:

   As I walked out one evening
         Walking down Bristol Street,
  The crowds upon the pavement
         Were fields of harvest wheat.

The discrete emotional signals sent out by the colloquial repetition of the verb, the lack of detail in the evocation of the crowds, the sense of slanting sunlight created by the rose-coloured image of the wheat all harmonise well with the ballad genre. Ten stanzas after the opening the mood has completely changed:

  The glacier knocks in the cupboard
          The desert sighs in the bed,
  And the crack in the tea-cup opens
          A lane to the land of the dead.

Into the poetry of this period, he was able to insert some very unpoetic-seeming clichés. One can see this at work in a poem like ‘At Last the Secret is Out’:

At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end, 
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend; 
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire.

Today, much of the conversational tone and the popular slant of contemporary poetry, including that of the two most prominent New Generation poets, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, owes a tremendous amount to Auden’s example. One can only hope that more books like these, which further refine our knowledge of his life and work, will bring us to a proper estimate of his importance. As Kavanagh would have liked.