W.H. AUDEN: THE LIFE OF A POET by Charles Osborne Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 336 pages; $17.95
Poet W.H. Auden despised invasions of privacy and public self-revelations. "Literary confessors," he once wrote, "are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books." He argued repeatedly that a writer's private correspondence should stay that way and urged friends to destroy his letters to them. At the same time, employing his poetic license, he reveled in scandal, luxuriated in gossip. "Who," he asked BBC listeners during the 1930s, "would rather learn the facts of Augustus' imperial policy than discover that he had spots on his stomach? No one."
In spite of his first principle, Auden would probably have grudgingly liked this book. Biographer Charles Osborne, who knew the poet in his last years, glides easily over the surface of Auden's life. He slows down only for amusing anecdotes, witty remarks (chiefly Auden's) and occasional but discreet lists of who was sleeping with whom. A few of the subject's stomach spots are here, to be sure, but Osborne makes most of them look like beauty marks.
This sunny approach is largely justified by the facts. "I've had an exceptionally lucky life," Auden said some four years before his death in 1973, and indeed it seemed to be. He enjoyed those rarest experiences in English literature, a happy childhood and a pleasant public school education. At Oxford in the '20s he made some impressive lifelong friends and acolytes: Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis. A Cambridge graduate named Christopher Isherwood also joined what became known as the Auden Gang. The publication of Poems (1930) made Auden famous at 23.
Here was an unmistakably new and distinctive voice, conversant with Freud and Marx, sharply rhythmic and harshly prophetic: "Seekers after happiness, all who follow/ The convolutions of your simple wish,/ It is later than you think ..." Since he had no money of his own, Auden simply let his pen for hire, and it was one of the fastest in the West. His poetry continued to flow, but so did documentary scripts, radio plays, librettos, travel books, speeches, essays. Cyril Connolly marveled: "It is as if he worked under the influence of some mysterious drug, which gives him a private vision, a mastery of form, and of vocabulary."
Although he charted the symptoms of the Age of Anxiety, Auden never seemed to have more than a mild case. His loss of faith in the Anglicanism of his childhood, his later disillusionment with Communism, his conversion back to Christianity were accomplished with no public hand wringing and left no visible scars. His emigration to the U.S. in 1939 raised charges that he had cravenly abandoned England's sinking ship; he stoically endured the abuse.
Similarly, the discovery of his homosexuality was apparently less than traumatic. He gave prudent but liberal rein to his preference, fortunate that his famous presence was sure to attract admiring or ambitious young men.