Second in poetry, third in English
David Sexton
THE POET AUDEN: A PERSONAL MEMOIR by A. L. Rowse Methuen, £9.95 The Thirties writers have been written about far too much, thinks Dr Rowse. Only one of the clique, Auden, was an original genius', and even he may not have been truly 'great'. Yet there they are, hogging the literary histories. It is all very unsatisfactory. Dr Rowse has had the good idea of putting the matter to rights with this little book, which tells the stories of the poets Rowse and Auden side by side. Occasional encounters in person are mentioned, but mostly it is a meeting of minds only, via Dr Rowse's remarks in the margins of his copies of Auden's books.
Rowse was three years Auden's senior at Oxford. 'That makes all the difference at the university: seniority draws a line . . .'. Moreover Rowse took a first in History. Auden only got a third in English. Rowse now admits he was wrong in tending henceforth to disconsider him intellectual- ly', but still affirms that the difference between them was that Auden 'did not slowly, patiently, think things through.' Auden did not in the event learn all he might have done from Rowse. There was an unfortunate incident. One day, after a Poetry reading, the undergraduate Auden took the young don Rowse back to his rooms in Peck, sported the oak, pulled down the blinds and began reading again: in poems, but letters from a friend of his lo Mexico, employed in the Eagle Oil Company, about his goings-on with the boys'. A tricky situation. Rowse's sym- pathies may have been engaged, but, as he told himself, 'Fellows of All Souls don't do that sort of thing.' It was 'not a question of morals, but of taste and tenue.' Happily Tom struck four at the critical moment, and Rowse was able to get off by saying that he always took tea in the college common room at that hour.
This was the only personal connection between the two mentioned in the previous biographies of Auden, and it turns out to be pretty much the only one in this new book too. As Dr Rowse says, Wystan was never quite on all fours with me — if, in the circumstances, the expression may be par- doned — for years after that, really until he came back to Oxford at the end of his life, and I took him under my wing again.'
But their stories continued to entwine on another level. Auden's work expressed the experiences and preoccupations of his gen- eration. Rowse lived through the period too. Therefore he is qualified to respond directly to Auden's poetry, comparing Auden's life and work with his own throughout. No dreary impersonality here. Rowse carries his dialogue with Auden right down to the level of textual detail. In one of his American poems Auden says `Hard liquor causes everywhere/ A general détente . . 'Not wih me, I may say', chirps Dr Rowse. In the poem 'Spain' Auden famously wrote 'History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon', only later to withdraw it as a lie. Rowse disagrees with the revision: 'In fact history does not pardon the defeated: neither do I', he asserts stoutly. In 'The Orators' Auden included a mysterious `Letter to a Wound'. It is now known that the wound in question was a nasty .rectal fissure. Rowse is not altogether impressed: `His "wound" gave Wystan trouble for years — though nothing like so much as my duodenal trouble, and operations, gave me.'
On Auden's habits Rowse is positive. 'I couldn't put up with him in the house one day. He wasn't house-trained. . . Fifty cigarettes a day (ugh!)' he exclaims. He does not care for Auden's lovelife either. 'I could not have borne it for a moment — so squalid.' But then Dr Rowse is severe on the species as a whole. Reporting that Auden was so shocked by the sight of a troop train in Japan that he dropped his spectacles, he comments: 'Such are idiot humans.' He is Cornish himself, of course.
Even the politics of the Auden group looked feeble from his point of view. 'I observed them from the sidelines. Actual- ly, they were on the sidelines; I was in the thick of the Labour Movement.' Nor did their vaunted knowledge of Germany amount to much — 'I had my own contacts with Germany, which were more serious and altogether more significant than the frivolous ones of Auden, Isherwood and co.'
In the end, despite his 'protective elder- brotherly feeling' for him, Auden's poems do not give Rowse much pleasure. The best thing in them is judged to be the feeling for 'the scenery he perversely pre- ferred, Midlands machinery, especially if derelict, deserted factories and quarries, harsh limestone country.'
But who will read this book to find out about Auden? Surely it will be enjoyed chiefly for what Rowse dubs his 'gospel of solipsism'. It is a hymn by himself to himself. As such it is marvellously enter- taining, beginning to drag only when Rowse feels he must address himself to that wretched Wystan once more, and that is not too often.
Every reader will think him right not to have wasted time mugging up the subject as duller men — who will never appeal so much — must. There is style in his blithe confession that he has never seen nor heard The Rake's Progress, panache in his dismissal of Auden's favourite drink: 'a Bloody Mary' — I can't tell one drink from another, so I forget what it is made of.' How incisively he says that another of Auden's libretti was for an opera by 'the too diversely talented Nabokov. I am no authority on opera, and cannot speak of any of these works; still, I cannot believe that Nabokov's music would be much good.' Nor can I. Best of all, he has, with his printer's aid, credited Benjamin Con- stant with a novel called Romans. Would it be a better book without these freaks? Absolutely not.
Following Dr Rowse's own practice I jotted down for you in the margins some of the figures his style brought to mind. I came up, I see, with Kinbote, Mr Pooter, Lady Bracknell and the Red Queen. None of them is quite right. Dr Rowse is an original. The Americans couldn't do it.
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