414 - W. H. Auden: Poet of Parables

W. H. Auden: Poet of Parables
By Carlos Baker

The sudden death of W. H. Auden in Vienna, Austria, on September 28, 1973, deprived Anglo-American poetry of its most brilliant practitioner, bar none. The worst of it was that he was still practicing, and would very likely have given us yet more of his memorable verse, to say nothing of that inimitable critical prose of which be was always so copious a producer. During the last forty-five of his sixty-six years he had accumulated an astonishingly large body of both verse and prose, beginning with that far-off day at Oxford in 1928 when Stephen Spender, whose hobby then was printing, set by hand and then "published" the first slender volume of Poems by W. H. Auden.

It was another September day, this time in 1939, when the death of the great Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud, prompted Auden to a memorial poem which began:

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
When grief has been made so public, and exposed
To the critique of a whole epoch
The frailty of our conscience and anguish,
Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
Among us, those who were doing us some good,
And knew it was never enough but
Hoped to improve a little by living.

Such phrases as "doing us some good" and "improve a little by living" suggest that actual or incipient preacher in Auden, who often made prayers a part of his poems, wrote extensively about Christian subjects, and was, after all, the grandson of two Anglican clergymen. He was fully aware of this tendency. "There must always be two kinds of art," be once wrote, "escape art, for man needs escape as be needs food and deep sleep, and parable art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love." Much of what he wrote, whether in prose or verse, could fittingly be called parable art, and he shrank neither from the label nor the practice. At the same time be commented extensively and often on the difference between the artist and "the man with a message."

"The artist," he tells us in The Dyer's Hand, "the man who makes, is less important to mankind, for good or evil, than the apostle, the man with a message. Without a religion, a philosophy, a code of

Carlos Baker, who received his education at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton, is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. He has written numerous books, including novels, poetry, and literary criticism, and is the author of Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969).

415 - W. H. Auden: Poet of Parables

behavior, . . . men cannot live at all; what they believe may be absurd or revolting, but they have to believe something. On the other hand, however much the arts may mean to us, it is possible to imagine our lives without them. As a human being every artist holds some set of beliefs or other but, as a rule, these are not of his own invention; his public knows this and judges his work without reference to them. We read Dante for his poetry not for his theology because we have already met the theology elsewhere."

Auden met theology early in life through the Anglo-Catholic household in which he was raised. Although he might have carried the beliefs of his childhood without severe examination into the years of early manhood, he would not then have been the Auden we knew. Confirmed at age thirteen, as his best critic tells us, he thereafter soon lost interest and belief together. In and out of Oxford between the ages of twenty and thirty, he relentlessly explored the poetry of William Blake, the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, and especially the synoptic writings of Marx, Freud, and Groddeck. All their various "kerygmas," as he later said, could be called Christian heresies in the sense that one could not imagine "their coming into existence except in a civilization which claimed to be based, religiously, on the belief that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and that in consequence, matter, the natural order, is real and redeemable, not a shadowy appearance or the cause of evil, and historical time is real and significant, not meaningless or an endless series of cycles." Like most heretics, these arose in order to make "a doctrinal protest against what one might call a heresy of behavior exhibited by the orthodox of their day," finding in that behavior certain actions or attitudes of which the heretics vigorously disapproved, and hence leading to the promulgation of "a doctrine equally one-sided in the opposite direction."

Having, as it were, cut and sharpened his intellectual teeth upon such doctrinal heresies, Auden gradually returned to Christianity at some indefinable time in his early thirties. The immediate catalyst seems to have been a visit to the Spanish Civil War in 1937, when he strolled through the streets of Barcelona only to discover that the churches were all closed, and the priesthood disbanded or in hiding. The experience shocked him profoundly. For though he had consciously, and even conscientiously, stayed clear of formal worship since 1920 or 1921, he was now forced to admit that churches, and especially what went on inside them, bad been "very important' to him during the whole decade and a half of his pseudoheretical life and growth. There were, naturally enough, many other contributory factors in his gradualistic change of heart, particularly if we extend the influence of that organ to engagement with the intellect as well as the emotions. Not least among his discoveries of those years was the work of Kierkegaard. According to

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Monroe K. Spears, to whose admirable book, The Poetry of W. H. Auden, I am heavily indebted for this sketchmap of directions in the poet's religious development, Auden presently arrived at a kind of existentialist position.

He pointed out that the existential philosopher is less concerned with "the objects of human knowledge" than with "Man's immediate experience as a subject," that is to say "a being in need, an interested being whose existence is at stake." Such a Christian existentialist as Kierkegaard represented a level of thought beyond those levels explored by Marx and Freud. If, as Auden said, "the basic human problem is man's anxiety in time," this problem was manifested in the Freudian formulation as man's present anxiety over himself in relation to his past and his parents." It appeared in the Marxian formulation as man's 'present anxiety over himself in relation to his future and his neighbors." And it was finally shown in the Kierkegaardian formulation as man's "present anxiety over himself in relation to eternity and God." If this statement, like many of Auden's paradigmatic constructs, seems too pat and a shade too clever, it was nevertheless useful to him as a shorthand summary of his own intellectual progression through the forests of Angst from the early 1920's to the early 1940's. Apart from the works of Kierkegaard and the philosophy of Collingwood, three other books strongly influenced Auden's thought during the second world war. These were Reinhold Niebuhr's Christianity and Power Politics and The Nature and Destiny of Man, which he reviewed separately in different journals in 1941, and C. N. Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture, which he read "many times" between its appearance in 1940 and his review of it in 1944.

Although he continued, as always, to engage religious ideas and motifs in his poetry whenever it suited him, he held religiously to his conviction that a poet's poems must be read as works of art rather than as theological tracts. If a poet wrote about the crucifixion, he said, there was no means of knowing whether he believed in it as a Christian, or whether he was using it only as a convenient myth for organizing the emotions expressed by the poem. He was fond of saying that "Poetry makes nothing happen," at least in the sense that no one he knew or could imagine had ever been converted from unbelief solely by a work of art. He held that a write is integrity as an artist was paramount, wittily remarking that it was always more endangered "by appeals to his social conscience" or his "political or religious convictions" than by appeals to his cupidity. As he joyously put it, "it is morally less confusing to be goosed by a traveling salesman than by a bishop." He signalized his sense of the great divorce between the artist and the philosopher-theologian by using as an epigraph to his collection of prose

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pieces, The Dyers Hand, the observation of Nietzsche that "we have Art in order that we may not perish from Truth."

Yet he often wrote as if he thought that poetry might conceivably serve at least as a hortatory counterforce to human benightedness. Freud's death in 1939 followed that of W. B. Yeats by only a few months, and Auden's elegiac stanzas for his fellow poet not only complement those he wrote for Freud but also suggest some of the ways in which even an artist can "do us some good" and "improve us a little by living. " The poem ends in the following couplets:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

With a modicum of tinkering here and there, both of Auden's elegies for his eminent contemporaries could be made to serve as epitaphs for his own distinguished career, although his heirs, for reasons of space, will probably be obliged to content themselves with some such simpler memorial words as "Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907-1973." It does not matter much, anyhow. His books are what we will remember him by.