‘To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse,’ W. H. Auden wrote in 1950. The same isn’t quite true of Auden — a warehouse wouldn’t be necessary — but it has to be said that only a bookshelf of substantial proportions would be capable of accommodating the entirety of his work. Auden wrote a lot of poetry; but he wrote an awful lot of other stuff as well. That other stuff included plays (with Christopher Isherwood), opera librettos (with long-term partner Chester Kallman), song lyrics, lectures, radio broadcasts, record-sleeve notes, introductions to other writers’ work, essays, theological tracts and reams of journalism. This is the third volume of his collected prose, and it takes us only up to 1955 (Auden died in 1973). The series editor, Edward Mendelson, whose labours on the Complete Works are well into their third decade, doesn’t reveal how many volumes are still to come; perhaps it is a subject he prefers not to think about.
How did Auden do it? A clue, I think, comes in a piece on Byron (another paragon of productivity), in which he writes of the poet: ‘The essential thing to avoid was introspective reflection which might uncover something terrible and send him mad.’ Byron, he continues, would ‘panic at the suggestion of stopping to think’. There is something of the same attitude on display in these pages. The pieces collected here offer evidence of a great deal of thinking, but it is not, you feel, thinking that was a long time in the making — which is to say, of an introspective kind. The impression you get is rather of someone whose views on any subject could be conjured up at roughly the speed that they could be transmitted to paper. Auden, like Byron, preferred to think — and write — on his feet.
With this mental efficiency went an extraordinary fearlessness. Auden tore into the world with his thoughts, parcelling it up into a bewildering array of categories and typologies. He delighted in assertion, abstraction and Capital Letters; his standard method of attack was the sweeping generalisation. Here he is in an essay on opera: ‘All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.’ Or here he is, in metaphysical mode, in a piece entitled ‘Nature, History and Poetry’: ‘Man exists as a unity in tension of four modes of being, Soul, Body, Mind and Spirit.’ It would be easy to mistake such bald authoritativeness for arrogance or pomposity, but in fact there was nothing precious or puffed up about Auden. His certainty revealed, instead, a scrupulous honesty. It said to the world: I know very well what I think, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Perhaps Auden’s capacity for definiteness came from the fact that, ultimately, being right wasn’t what he cared about most; the game he was playing was for higher stakes. In a revealing passage, he writes:
If the occasional criticism of successful poets and novelists is, despite their lack of scholarship and their often absurd prejudices, usually readable and illuminating, one reason is that their vanity has been satisfied elsewhere.
Auden’s vanity was satisfied by his poetry; this gifted a wonderful freedom to his prose.
The pieces in this volume (mostly written while Auden was living in New York) cover an enormous number of topics. There are, as one would expect, weighty theoretical reflections on history and aesthetics. It was during the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Mendelson informs us in his introduction, that Auden formulated his idiosyncratic theory about the realms of history and nature. Although the basic distinction between the two is straightforward (historical events are unique and irreversible whereas natural ones are cyclical), the theory had, in Auden’s hands, so many ramifications and elaborations that its application could be bewildering. (I am still not clear, for example, why music belongs to the realm of ‘irreversible historicity’ whereas a ‘string quartet is as natural …. as a molecule of water’.) Also included in this volume are two famous works of literary criticism — The Enchafed Flood, Auden’s book-length reflections on the role of the sea in the romantic imagination, and ‘The Dyer’s Hand’, his essay on the nature of poetry — as well as numerous reflections on prosody, the state of modern culture and religion.
But to my mind the best thing about the collection is the large number of reviews and one-off pieces for magazines and newspapers that it restores to life. Auden’s tastes weren’t quite omnivorous — he confesses to being ‘a passionate hater of the juke box and the television’ — but they were extraordinarily wide-ranging. And he was game for pretty much anything: as well as contributing to the likes of the New Yorker and the Partisan Review, he wrote sketches for Madamoiselle and Vogue. A delightful piece for the former imagines a parallel life for its author, if he had been ‘born a lady and an American’ and had been ‘one of the original readers of Madamoiselle’. Auden had in almost embarrassing abundance that most crucial of journalistic gifts: the ability to make any topic fascinating — if necessary by stretching it well beyond its obvious limits. A piece about a memoir by the (now forgotten) writer Anzia Yezierska thus becomes an interrogation of the nature of happiness; the article on Byron contains a brilliant excursion on the concept of the bore (Henry James was one, apparently, whereas Pope wasn’t).
Auden’s speed of thought made him a natural aphorist, and this book is, among other things, a storehouse of morsels of profundity delivered in a single, bracing line. For example: ‘One is usually right to distrust the artist who is notorious, for notorious people nearly always begin soon to act their own roles and become fakes’. Or: ‘If I suffer, the responsibility may not be mine, but if I am unhappy nobody is responsible but myself.’ Above all, Auden was not only capable of dissecting the varieties of humour (see his ‘Notes on Comedy’), but was a brilliantly funny writer himself. This, allied to his intelligence and sensitivity, made him an ideal book reviewer. It is hard to imagine, for example, a more perfect start to a review than this, the opening to a piece on Ronald Firbank:
The nine or ten short novels — what a shame it is that the publishers have only been able or seen fit to include five in this volume — of Ronald Firbank are, for me, an absolute test. A person who dislikes them, like someone who dislikes the music of Bellini or prefers his steak well-done, may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality but I do not wish ever to see him again.