edited by Stephen Spender
1974 • Macmillan
255 pages / 61294 (hardcover)
When W. H. Auden left England for the United States in 1939, he created a permanent divide in his identity and critical reception. An analogy is often drawn between his years spent on different continents and the craggy face that seemed to house rivers and tributaries. Perhaps the only legitimate rival of T. S. Eliot amongst twentieth-century English language poets, Auden's life was a tiring yet enlightened run of upheaval.
Had Auden not left England while on the verge of war against Germany, there is a vague possibility that he would have been nominated for British Poet Laureate. Though not one to compromise his art for the sake of production, Auden was a poet of remarkable skill and flexibility who could spin verse for any occasion. He was also a talent who could view the human experience from many different perspectives, as one comes to realize in this 1974 tribute volume edited by Stephen Spender.W. H. Auden: A Tribute is a 255-page collection of essays that is both unsentimental and informative. For anyone who has cared to discover Auden the personality ('character' isn't far off a word), Spender's nicely-arranged volume leaves us feeling as if we were chums with this poet for years and knew him on an everyday basis. The tribute brings together various names who lived, worked, and collaborated with Auden during his 66 years on Earth, bringing out his gifts, eccentricities, and dedication to the craft of writing.
Spender, who met Auden at Oxford and privately distributed his first book of verse in 1928, knew the poet for his entire adult life and was highly qualified to serve as editor. The essays follow Auden's life chronologically, from when a middle-class child in Birmingham until the aging man who occupied his springs and summers in Kirchstetten, an Austrian town west of Vienna. Spender arranges these memoirs to reflect the psychological, artistic, and spiritual changes experienced by Auden over eight decades, although so multifaceted that they are impossible to summarize neatly.
Memories of his earlier years include those by John Auden, his elder brother who became a successful geologist; Rosamira Bulley, an instructor at St. Edmund's Preparatory School in Surrey; and John Betjeman, eventual Poet Laureate who knew Auden (to a degree) at Oxford. Perhaps most fascinating are memoirs from the 1930s, when Auden was at his physical and intellectual height. Here we find essays by painter William Coldstream, magazine editor Cyril Connolly, and longtime friend Michael Yates. It is the Yates memoir that is most inspiring of this book, a description of the famous 1936 trip to Iceland by Auden, Yates, and poet Louis MacNeice that resulted in Letters from Iceland. The lengthy trip seems a microcosm of Auden's commitment to understanding, friendship, and community - the 'agape,' or universal love that he previously discovered.
Spender's volume makes an appropriate tone change as its essays begin dealing with the Auden of post-1939. It was during this stretch that Auden made his transition from pseudo-Marxism to Christianity, rejoining the Anglican Church in 1940. Anne Fremantle, a theological author, and Ursula Niebuhr, a fellow instructor at Barnard College, have written substantial essays on Auden's Christian beliefs. These are intriguingly offset by Second World War colleague James Stern, ballet organizer Lincoln Kirstein, composer Nicolas Nabokov, and Robert Craft, the long-time assistant of Igor Stravinsky. While never underestimating Auden's devotion to the Church, these other essays show his role as a man of the world and the worldly - a fellow who loved bawdy poems, vodka martinis, and outrageous (yet harmless) behavior.
The latter pages are rather dim, covering Auden's brief return to Oxford as a lecturer in 1972. While Auden continued to impress those he met, he was becoming further and further isolated as declining health set in and social traditions underwent their usual change. David Luke, a tutor of German at Oxford, supplies details of Auden having gone full circle in his intellectual life, age making him something of a curiosity piece amongst students and younger faculty. Spender reprints the valediction he gave at Auden's 1973 memorial service in Christ Church, shortly after an honorary burial in Kirchstetten. Topping off the volume are 100 photographs, including book covers and Auden's three sittings with Cecil Beaton.
The lasting impression that Spender's volume creates is one of a typically Piscean figure (he was born on February 21st) who seemed to bear many personalities at once: a devout Christian while shamelessly worldly; an impressive public figure while decidedly private; and a poet who despised war yet supported the Republican cause in Spain. He also registers as a man of humor and often painful wryness, someone you wouldn't mind chatting with about mankind's problems. Auden, however, was frequently more than talk, as shown by his marriage to Erika Mann, which secured the British passport that rescued her from Nazi persecution, and his efforts as a member of the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey after the Second World War had concluded in Europe.
For the most part, this is a strong tribute volume, although there could have been more substantial feedback from names like Christopher Isherwood (his essay is basically a reprint with postscript notes), Chester Kallman (just a poem written in 1970 with post-mortem stanzas added), and Leonard Bernstein, who for reasons unknown is not in this volume at all, despite basing his Symphony No. 2 on Auden's poem The Age of Anxiety. The writing by certain figures is also lackadaisical and uses vague generalizations in trying to pin Auden down, but this is to be expected for a poet who was constantly changing in both views and temperament.
The tribute volume, first published by Macmillan in 1974, is a much-sought collector's item; if wanting to know Auden on sympathetic terms, this is probably the book to have. It is found in hardcover with a tricolor dust jacket, often at libraries, on the Internet, and in used bookstores. Several copies are available at the Strand Bookstore in New York City, where I was fortunate enough to pick mine up. And needless to say, Auden's poems, plays, and essays have their spot in the essential twentieth century canon.
