Bells to St Wystan

Grey Gowrie This week sees the centenary of the birth in York of W. H. Auden. All over the world this season, Audenites should at 1755 hours precisely prepare a very cold, very dry Martini and at 1800 hours, six o'clock, again precisely, down it in praise and memory of a giant of English letters. Vital to be meticulous about the hour. As he said of himself in an autobiographical sketch: So obsessive a ritualist a pleasant surprise makes him cross.

Without a watch he would never know when to feel hungry or horny.

Like many Oxford undergraduates of my generation (he was Professor of Poetry when I went up), I knew Auden slightly and dined with him a few times. He had aged prematurely, become repetitive and, away from the page, fairly boring. Like his friend and contemporary, John Betjeman, he had long invented a persona — dotty vicar in his case — but Auden got trapped by it. Prone to chant curious mantra — 'Yeats was not my idea of a gentleman' or 'Peeing in the washbasin is a male privilege' — he smelt like a forgotten cheese. Yet it was impossible to doubt his genius for a moment. The word may have dwindled into hyperbole. It can nevertheless be defined, and when Auden died in 1973 it was defined by his friend V. S. Yanofsky: 'There was in him some communion with the great human reality, as there was in Tolstoy — a trait characteristic of all geniuses, despite their fantasies.' In conversation another friend of Auden, Isaiah Berlin, assented. Berlin thought there were two 20th-century Englishmen of genius, the other being Churchill.

An American scholar, Samuel Hines, called the 1930s the Age of Auden. It is important, three-quarters of a century later, to be aware how celebrated Auden became as a young man — more so than any poet since Byron. Allowing for immense differences in the means of communication and what was then a smaller, though more expert, educational base, you have to think of someone like John Lennon to get the feel of Auden's fame in his twenties. Like others, he had fallen for T. S. Eliot's vivid depiction of a civilisation breaking up: the fragments 'shored against my ruin' in The Waste Land. But as a disciple of poets older than Eliot like Hardy, Frost and Edward Thomas, Auden translated the modern movement into the language of ordinary educated men and thereby democratised it. Patriotic, about the English industrial landscape in particular, Auden became an exemplar of Ezra Pound's dictum (though he never much cared for Pound) that poets are the antennae of the race. His rhythms and imagery orchestrated an appropriate foreboding for what in a great, later repudiated, poem about the outbreak of the second world war, he called a low, dishonest decade. Like Churchill, Auden read the writing on the wall long before the full text was revealed in all its horror. He immersed himself in psychology, for he believed that holding a mirror up to the wasteland was not enough. You had to examine the behavioural pathways out.

Auden domesticated the modern movement for the English, therefore, rather in the way Elvis Presley domesticated black rhythm-and-blues for white Americans or the Beatles (whom Auden admired) anglicised rock-and-roll in their early years. He was a hit. His versatility — plays, verse dramas, prose poems, songs and musical pieces, verbal charades, versified essays, doggerel, 'straight' poems in the great pentametrical tradition — served only to draw attention to his antennae, the early warning system he contrived by taking familiar toys out of the English middleclass cupboard and arranging them in ominous patterns to fit his unique, authoritative tone.

It is time for the destruction of error.

The chairs are being brought in from the garden ...

And in the same poem: It is later than you think; nearer that day Far other than that distant afternoon Amid rustle of frocks and stamping feet They gave the prizes to the ruined boys.

A synoptic 1938 sonnet about League of Nations diplomats ends: Far off, no matter what good they intended, The armies waited for a verbal error With all the instruments for causing pain, And on the issue of their charm depended A land laid waste with all its young men slain, The women weeping and the towns in terror.

In the context of Palestine, Kosovo or Iraq this still speaks to us, and poignantly.

By the end of the 1930s Auden was, as he described Freud in his 1939 elegy, no longer a person now but a climate of opinion. His intense lyrical gifts — remember the electrifying effect of the young gay reading 'Funeral Blues' in the hit film Four Weddings and a Funeral — propelled his fame. If you want to know what he was like, or recreate the sheer effect of him, read the long poem 'Letter to Lord Byron' which he wrote on a 1936 trip to Iceland with the Ulster poet Louis MacNeice, another fine centenarian. Written in the stanza form of Byron's Don Juan, the only English poem Auden found both comic and sublime, it is self-knowing and selfcritical. It is also an astonishingly assured autobiographical performance for someone not yet 30 and uses wit in the way of Clive James or Alan Bennett today. Next year Auden wrote a great (again repudiated later) poem on the Spanish Civil War. With Christopher Isherwood, he 'covered' the Sino-Japanese conflict; imagine the Daily Mail sending Simon Armitage, say, to report, in verse, on current Baghdad. Auden won the King's Medal for poetry. John Masefield may have held the title but Auden in the 1930s was as much the Laureate of English society as Philip Larkin became two decades later. I emphasise the word because poets as different as Robert Graves, David Jones and Ted Hughes reveal that there is more to poetry than social preoccupations or an ability to hit a particular mood at a particular time. Auden would have agreed with them. He was becoming most unhappy with his political role as the spokesman of a generation.

A political thunderclap, Auden's celebrated departure for New York in January 1939, changed things. This was partly on account of rage at what some felt was an attempt to save his skin. Evelyn Waugh's phoney war novel Put Out More Flags satirised Parsnip and Pimpernel (Auden and Isherwood) for, somewhat literally, buggering off. 'I am glad that shit is dead,' Anthony Powell is reported (by Kingsley Amis) as saying when Auden died. The timing was wrong for such criticism. During the winter of 1938-39 appeasement was still the order of the day. And indeed after war broke out and Auden had written '1st September 1939"in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street', he volunteered to return to Britain and join up. He was told he would be called when needed. The Americans first rejected him as a GI for being homosexual, but after he had taken citizenship commissioned him and contrived a task in occupied Germany. Isherwood was a pacifist; Auden was not. Nevertheless Auden's status as a public figure made him a target and to a degree it still does. This centenary is unlikely to be celebrated as warmly here as Betjeman's a year ago.

In New York Auden cultivated a spiritual and sexual life which did not even, like Graham Greene's 1951 novel The End of the Affair, elevate renunciation into a principle but insisted on happiness and personal fulfilment being a valid objective for society as well as for individuals. A liberal conservative through background and disposition, Auden had come to loathe being treated as a Marxist intellectual in Britain. It was one of the reasons he left, though less important than the need to make a living by writing full-time. Given his fame, this was possible in the United States.

What also made the abandoned Auden generation — leftist, at best agnostic — so angry was his return in New York to the High Anglican Christianity of his upbringing. It deregulated senses and disappointed expectations. Auden did not give a fig. He had fallen in love with the 18-year-old son of a Brooklyn dentist, Chester Kallman. A streetwise kid, used to vamping older males, Chester knew all about opera and educated Wystan in the field. Amazingly, for that society and that time, Chester's father encouraged the friendship. As an affair, it was sexual for a year or two only. As a relationship (Auden said he managed to combine the role of anxious mum with jealous lover), it lasted for life. Chester confirmed for Auden that vision of eros without which social or brotherly love degenerates into an unsustainable piety and religion likewise. In common with John Updike in our own day, Auden is one of the few 20th-century writers untroubled by the connection between sexual and religious feelings. As he had written in another 1938 sonnet, about Macao: Churches beside the brothels testify That faith can pardon natural behaviour.

In time of war Auden wrote four long poems: 'New Year Letter', 'A Christmas Oratorio', 'The Sea and the Mirror' and 'The Age of Anxiety'. They may not live up to Eliot's Four Quartets or Pound's Pisan Cantos as war work or even, in Auden's own estimation, his beloved Tolkien's epic, The Lord of the Rings. But it is well worth a general reader visiting or revisiting them, 'The Sea and the Mirror', Auden's take on The Tempest, especially. No dialogue between a living writer and two dead ones (Shakespeare and Henry James) could be more entertaining; Shakespeare's spirit comes alive in the poem in a way Virgil's never can in Dante. And, as always, there are sensational lyrics: 'Miranda's Song' and the duet between the Master and the Boatswain.

Making poems lively and fun became a post-Kallman imperative. Auden had learned, too, from Robert Frost that the darkest themes can be rhetorically most authentic when you treat them lightly. He was a conventional modern (American perhaps only in this) in seeking to create a conversational, even gossipy style and turn his back on Romantic portentousness. Yeats and Rilke were influences he strove to jettison, not least because he had the technical ability to compete with them. For mastery of the tricks of his particular trade, Auden compares with Picasso rather than with any other writer.

Although he was now a US citizen, for the rest of his life Auden wrote most of his poems in Europe: first in Ischia; then, after purchasing it with a $30,000 Italian literary award, in the only home he ever owned, at Kirchstetten near Vienna. He wanted a German-speaking, wine-drinking country with opera nearby. There he died, drinking and chain-smoking to the end. His Christianity was thoroughly European (lots of jolly local saints) and light years from the American habit of enthusiastic fundamentalism. It was Dantesque, also, in being informed by his acute perception, in the 1930s, of the Inferno to come; by his vision of a Paradisal or beatific love when he met the young Kallman; and by his humane affection for the Purgatory of our common life here on 'middle earth'. He was never a mystic and the tone of his greatest poems, which I believe to have been written between 1947 and 1955, is conversational, sunlit, unhurried, Mediterranean. He looked at the natural world through overlapping filters of human culture, something hard to do in America, whose tradition is making it new. The coda of 'In Praise of Limestone', which Steven Spender rightly called one of the century's greatest poems, is a summation of this vision and reveals Auden's unique, even Shakespearian comprehendingness: Dear, I know nothing of Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

How wonderful, too, that `Nones', another work of the period and perhaps the best Crucifixion poem since the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, should have been written, not by a Herbert or a Newman or a Hopkins, but by a middleaged homosexual on an Italian island who would stop work in mid-line or mid-stanza when the exact hour struck for his Martini.