The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England by Nicholas Jenkins (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2024)
A new book that W. H. Auden’s literary executor, editor, and most knowledgeable interpreter, Edward Mendelson, rather dramatically calls in his blurb “a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies” is irresistible—if you feel, as I do, that Auden is modern poetry in English. We could never do without Frost, Yeats, Eliot, Moore; but their successor is to me first among equals. So it matters what Mendelson may mean by “Copernican” in Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England.
He probably means, among other things, that from Jenkins we learn that Auden’s earliest love poems of importance were about 13-year-old Michael Yates—whom his teacher, the 26-year-old Auden, fell hard for, groomed, and subsequently seduced: behavior in a 1933 English boarding school that was common and not much discouraged. In years to come, Auden would visit Yates’s family in the guise of a platonic friend; or take Yates along on his travels, including the 1936 trip with Louis MacNeice that would become Letters from Iceland. Yet Auden strikes me as more sinned against than sinning, replaying a pattern of abuse which he, too, suffered: in a six-page chronology that telegraphs events in family life, Jenkins also gives us “March/April 1920: sex with the school chaplain at St. Edmund’s.” Auden had been thirteen himself. And later we’ll read about a camping trip in which Auden and his older brother John, both teenagers, “had sex together.” Other revelations are matters of emphasis and mostly literary: most notably, Auden’s father’s intellectual interests are shown to be more important an influence on the poet than in other accounts. That said, this is “not a biography,” Jenkins warns; it’s meant as a historical contextualizing and thematic overview for Auden’s poems written between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and to which Jenkins also devotes many pages of close reading.
I find only two faults in this otherwise superb book. The first is that it doesn’t take sufficiently into account that even the most devoted of Auden’s general readers are unlikely to be familiar with many of the early poems. We might recognize some of these (usually untitled) poems by their opening lines: “Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,” “Consider this and in our time,” or “Our hunting fathers told the story.” But not everyone will have on hand the poet’s Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928, the recherché, though first-rate, critical edition of Auden’s first poems edited by Katherine Bucknell. (She figures that Auden wrote at least two hundred poems between age fifteen and twenty-one.) Nor will everyone turn to Mendelson’s eight-hundred-page annotated edition of the years that directly follow, Poems 1927-1939: Volume I. In The Island, Jenkins quotes large chunks of any early poem he finds important, but rarely are we given it all. Readers would have profited from seeing the most arcane samples reprinted intact in Jenkins’s own appendix, or at least listed in the index. That brings me to the second fault: no index! How can such an important scholarly undertaking not be supported with this tool?
This pair of faults is far outweighed, though, by the riches contained in The Island. Jenkins’s title was almost overdetermined, given that the span of Auden’s life covered in this book concludes with the 1937 publication of his second volume of poems, entitled On This Island in America. (His publishers in England had called it Look, Stranger!—not even close to what Auden wanted.) In Jenkins’s view, this second collection “is simultaneously the high point and the end in Auden of a positively valued commitment to England and Englishness and of a desire for national representativeness.” Jenkins’s book supplies other aptly thought-out parallels to Auden’s work, homages to it in fact, embedded in its structures. “Every Englishman is an island”: so runs the witty epigraph by the nineteenth-century German poet Novalis. Only after you’ve read all 537 pages of text and nearly 140 pages of endnotes do you realize how artfully this account of Auden’s first thirty years has been made. England as a land, for instance, is given weight by the book’s three divisions: “Marsh,” “Moor,” and “Garden.”
The Island opens with a prologue and ends with an epilogue—a common enough device; but in that epilogue, Jenkins elegantly links the beginning and end of Auden’s On This Island, which itself opens with a poem called “Prologue” and concludes with one called “Epilogue.” Jenkins’s prologue begins with its own epigraph by W. L. George: “The price of nationality is war.” The effect of World War I on Auden’s generation in England—who missed being called up and were never allowed to forget it—will be a major theme: even very young boys had compulsory officer training in school. In a nice touch, Jenkins’s prologue is subtitled “Caliban’s Island”; it turns out that W. L. George was the author of a novel called Caliban, which George Orwell had praised. All of this is deep background for the inviting first pages of Jenkins’s book, which opens on a July day in 1925. We’re at Gresham’s School, where eighteen-year-old W.H. Auden, soon to graduate, is playing Caliban in The Tempest, this year’s iteration of the school’s annual Shakespeare production. (Amazingly, charmingly, there is a fuzzy photograph reproduced here of Auden in a costume of hides.)
He’d asked for that specific part, he tells his close friend and later lover Robert Medley, to whom we should all remain forever grateful: Medley was the one who, when the boys were both fifteen, had happened to ask Auden if he wrote poetry. In his marvelous and comic memoir-poem of 1936, “Letter to Lord Byron,” Auden recalls his answer: “I never had, and said so, but I knew / That very moment what I wished to do.” By the age of eighteen, Auden has already written some impressive work. He has told Medley he wants to play Caliban in order “to express his dislike of ‘the Masters.’” He has good reason: the man playing Prospero, who clearly thinks the school is his island, is its headmaster, who at least once has caned Auden. Jenkins argues that “Caliban incarnates Auden’s disruptiveness. . . . He is the Dionysian force in this artist so often and so misleadingly understood as an Apollo.”
We are appropriately situated first, then, in a dialectic—Auden’s thought and behavior were full of them—and also in The Tempest, which haunted the poet’s imagination for the rest of his life. It’s a play with conservative views on statehood and hierarchy, but it’s also about statelessness on the magical island of art. Nineteen years after his turn as Caliban, Auden will write one of his greatest works, the long poem sequence The Sea and the Mirror, in which each of the characters of The Tempest speaks in a different verse form and manner, and in which Caliban speaks longest, in a prose poem. As Auden wrote to a friend, “Caliban to the Audience” is intended as a parody of Henry James’s late style. It delivers with great artifice Auden’s philosophy of art’s limits, in what is to me the most brilliantly realized of all the gems in the sequence. Despite its fitness for Jenkins’s island theme, he only glancingly mentions this long poem—because it is published in 1944, and The Island ends in 1937. You get the sense that Jenkins is wary about peeking ahead, because that way madness and a two-thousand-page book might lie. Jenkins has loftier reasons, too; he says explicitly that he is intent on showing the young poet “in a dawn light,” and “as if the young Auden’s future were largely unknown.” He’s right to define his terms, right to remind us that Auden doesn’t know his whole life story as he’s living it. And yet all such decisions have their drawbacks. Auden lived only to the age of sixty-six, but he was so prolific that he may as well have died still scribbling at ninety-nine. Mendelson had needed to divide his own biographically inflected critical work on Auden into two volumes: Early Auden and Later Auden. But Mendelson separates early from later by means of the year 1939, when Auden, aged thirty-two, leaves England for America, and World War II begins.
Here we come to another division, this one between life and art: life doesn’t come with prologues or epilogues, and “early” and “later” may not be obvious until after the fact. Often, an “early” and “later” in a life is determined too by a “here” and a “there.” For Jenkins, 1937 serves as a dividing line in Auden’s life not only because of the publication of the remarkably mature work On This Island but because this year is essentially when the poet leaves the island: December 1937 would be his last Christmas in England for decades to come. Before moving to New York in 1939, he will spend a great deal of time abroad.
While he is with Louis MacNeice in 1936, writing what will be their Letters from Iceland, the Spanish Civil War breaks out. Myopic Auden volunteers in Spain as an ambulance driver (it is his poor eyesight which later renders him ineligible to serve in World War II); he ends up doing something more suited to his talents: writing anti-Franco propaganda. A poem from that time, “Spain”—famous today for its phrase “the necessary murder” and Auden’s thorough repudiation of it afterward—was significant in that it cemented his intention never again to write something he did not wholly believe. He would go on to revise, or excise from his oeuvre, quite a few poems on this principle. As early as 1932, Jenkins tells us, Auden had written in a review that “Nationalism fails not because the nation is too small a group but because it is too large,” and added in a poem that year that every person needs a more intimate unit, a “group where for his hour / Loved and loving he may flower.” These reflections come a full year before his mystical experience, recorded both in prose and in the poem “Out on the lawn I lie in bed,” of reclining with some colleagues on a lawn and realizing a moment of perfect, selfless love among them.
He would continue to think deeply about what poetry can, and can’t, make happen. In 1938 Auden and Christopher Isherwood took a commission from their publishers to travel in China for six months. They produced in prose and poetry Journey to a War (1939): Auden’s poems, mostly sonnets, are sometimes set in China (“Macao”), and sometimes in his English head (“To E. M. Forster”), and represent some of his finest work to date. Much of the writing is about traveling itself; his male, British circle was one that was privileged to be tourists or would-be journalists, not soldiers or refugees. I wonder if the poem that opens Auden’s “London to Hongkong” section, “The Voyage,” was in Elizabeth Bishop’s mind when she wrote her great poem “Questions of Travel,” which contains a long line of puzzlers such as “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?” Auden’s question-packed poem asks:
And, alone with his heart at last, does the traveller find
In the vaguer touch of the wind and the fickle flash of the sea
Proofs that somewhere there exists, really, the Good Place,
As certain as those the children find in stones and holes?
But he kept on traveling. After China, a few brief visits to Brussels in 1938 produced little masterpieces, especially “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which Auden crystallizes another important theme—our usual indifference to the suffering of others.
Jenkins’s decision to spend not much time on the poems written in 1937 and 1938—not even all of 1936, when Auden is writing his simply perfect “Letter to Lord Byron” in Iceland—means we miss hearing him discuss some essential work written when the poet was still very young. Perhaps Jenkins judged that these poems have been sufficiently addressed elsewhere; he seems most committed to providing new readings of the least known poems. And yet 1937 also marks the moment when the “disruptive,” “Dionysian” poet becomes ratified as an establishment figure, elected by a committee of famous literary elders to receive the King’s Medal in Poetry. (King George VI breaks tradition by volunteering to hand it to the young man in person.) Auden’s precociousness would likely have been his condition whenever he was born, but his early fame and indeed the fame of the writers around him, called then and now “the Auden Generation,” was in itself historic. It probably could not have happened if so many poets, or potential poets, of their fathers’ generation had not already died in the trenches.
No getting around it: despite unforgettable world events and personal crises, life is mostly messy and porous, and begs us to see our own lives not only in islanded time periods or locations but also in continuities of temperament and theme. That’s why any date, like 1937 or 1939, meant to divide a life in two, to locate where and when events and feelings “belong,” is bound to be both useful and frustrating. And only in looking back on certain lives, like Auden’s, can we ask ourselves whether a sense of belonging in one’s own place and time was the same as a sense of nationality—one of Jenkins’s essential questions. (Interestingly, Jenkins, like Auden, is British-born and Oxford-educated but has been living in America and teaching at Stanford for many years; he seems particularly equipped to ask these questions.) As a genius recognized extremely early and as a gay man in a less open era, Auden was destined to feel he never entirely belonged. That’s true even in his first nationality-tinged poems, where he describes and to some extent idealizes England’s pastoral scenes, as many English poets had before him, and its mining and other industrial sites, which they mostly hadn’t. (“Indeed,” Auden said in a late lecture to a psychoanalytic association, “when I visited real mining areas, I preferred abandoned mines to working ones.”) For all his love affairs and oblique poems about them, and for all his successful creative collaborations with fellow major artists like MacNeice and Isherwood and Benjamin Britten, Auden was, as Jenkins emphasizes, one of our most important poets of solitude.
Further complications: Auden embarked on decades of life based in New York, and became an American citizen, at about the time he re-embraced the religion of his English childhood. Both developments gave him at least some sense of belonging, as did purchasing, at the age of fifty, his first and last house—in Kirchstetten, Austria. Auden’s father, Dr. George Auden, had taken him on a trip to Salzburg and Kitzbuhel when the boy was eighteen: that this was his first trip abroad clearly went on mattering. Another tenet in Jenkins’s book is that Auden’s life and mind are about as Germanic as you could ask a native Anglophone’s to be. Not since Coleridge or George Eliot, he asserts, have we seen so many Germanic strains in an English writer. This point is inextricable from Jenkins’s argument that Auden’s father, who was absent from family life while he served as a medic in World War I and often emotionally distant when he returned, made at least as important an impression on Wystan, the youngest of three boys, as his forcefully present mother, Constance. One of Auden’s most beautiful long works, For the Time Being, “A Christmas Oratorio,” is dedicated to his mother’s memory and, by implication, her devout faith. Jenkins gives us, as counterbalance, a neat summary of the ramifying effects on Auden of father George’s German bent, begun as an interest in his ancestral roots in Iceland and in that country’s myths and sagas:
From Auden’s father’s cult of the North and his familiarity with Germanic culture, as well as later his interest in German medical science, to Dr. Auden’s long absence from 1914 to 1919 as a result of the war with Germany, through their trip together in 1925 to Austria, where Auden began to learn German, to Auden’s early experiments with Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, his visits to Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and his marriage to Erika Mann in 1935, Germany and its people are always at least in the background of the work Auden produced and of the life he chose.
As a son of the generation of English males that was decimated by the war against Germany and its allies, Auden was not alone in turning to German culture: Jenkins theorizes that some of Auden’s countrymen actively sought such knowledge as a way of making peace, and perhaps averting more war. Auden’s father barely escaped death on the battlefield several times, and Jenkins thinks he never fully recovered from the experience. In alluding to Auden’s “visits” to interwar Berlin, Jenkins means the period he describes thoroughly elsewhere, when Auden spent about a year in a city that was uniquely attractive to him, as a gay Englishmen’s haven. Auden’s parents paid for that post-Oxford year abroad, knowing and disapproving of their son’s homosexuality and probably wishing to look the other way. In one of many instances of dogged research producing artful writerly touches, Jenkins tells us that Berlin’s most popular gay monthly was called Der Insel—The Island.