America, England, and the Disinheritance of the Poets: Notes on W.H. Auden

I am, and will always be, a great lover of the poetry of W.H. Auden—and, come to think of it, of his prose and plays, too.  But any honest reader of Auden ought to ask two questions: why does W.H. Auden’s early, English work read as if the most important events of the time all took place in an English boarding school?  And why does his later, American period read as if it were inspired by the syllabus of a college course called, say, “Introduction to Western Civilization”?  I think the answers to both questions come when we look at the social situation of Auden and the groups with which he associated in the English and American periods of his career.  In each case, we’re dealing with very particular kinds of disinheritance, and with poetics that speak to different kinds of disinherited people.

Many people have noted the fixation on schoolboy stuff in Auden’s early poetry: there is, most famously, The Orators, a kind of sendup of prize-day orations at English boarding schools; and the early poems are full of a kind of students-vs-elders conflict.  And it’s not just Auden who writes this way. I remember first reading Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, and being astonished at what I took to be the narcissism of the piece: here was something claiming to be a novel that was really little more than a memoir of Isherwood’s school days, with scenes laid out as if they were of the greatest significance.  Edward Upward’s fiction can have much the same quality, Graham Greene edited a collection of essays called The Old School (to which Auden contributed) and Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, purportedly a book about what one must do to write a lasting piece of literature, consists for almost half of its length of recollections of Connolly’s time at Eton.  What gives?  Why this emphasis on one’s old school?

Connolly offers an answer that’s at least half right.  He writes, near the end of Enemies of Promise,

…were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence.  It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and their disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development.  From this it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious…

Well, it goes on, and includes a bit about homosexuality that many would feel reflects poorly on Connolly.  But for present purposes, the point is that the public schools (Americans would say private schools—both terms refer to schools paid for by individual fees, rather than by taxes) make a deep impression.  No doubt this is true: such schools are about forming an elite, and they work hard to give their students a sense of status, with duties and privileges, and with a sense of obligation to the old school itself.

Connolly’s theory of permanent adolescence, though, does not fully explain the school-obsession of the generation of English writers born between, say, 1902 and 1909.  After all, other generations before them had gone through the intense experience of elite boarding schools without having their work deeply marked by specifically boarding school themes and imagery.  What was so different about Auden’s generation?  The answer, I think, is disillusion and disinheritance.  It’s not just that they had intense experiences in school—it’s that their experiences involved a terrible dissonance between the values and expectations of school and the reality into which the schoolboys entered.  They were never able to fully rid themselves of school, because they were never able to fulfill the expectations the schools created for them.

Consider the timing of their births: Auden’s generation came of age too late to participate in the First World War.  They saw their elders at school—often their brothers—go out to war, to face what Isherwood called “the test”—the battle in which one would prove one’s value as a man, a leader, and a representative of one’s elite training. The schools preached sacrifice and the military virtues, knowing that they were creating officers for a desperate struggle, and even a future skeptic of all things jingoistic, the 11 or 13 year old Eric Blair (we know him as George Orwell) wrote poems in which he anticipated “the test.”  Here’s the first stanza of one called “Awake! Young Men of England”:

Oh! Give me the strength of the lion

  The wisdom of Reynard the Fox,

And I’ll hurl troops at the Germans,

  And give them the hardest of knocks.

One could go on quoting the rest of it, but the point is already clear: one must muster one’s courage and one’s wisdom, appeal to one’s God, and above all lead (it is the speaker who will, as an officer, hurl troops at the Germans).  That the result of all this will be the giving of hard knocks is enough to show us the puerility of the poet: this is no Wilfred Owen writing, but a child whose sense of war comes from the old men teaching at his school and telling stories about Nelson and Wellington trouncing Napoleon, or quoting from the more heroic passages of Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome.

We may well think that Auden’s generation should be grateful for having missed the slaughter, and I’m sure in some sense they were.  But in addition to a kind of survivor’s guilt, there’s a significant sense of not having been allowed to take the test for which one had prepared—a failure to fulfill one’s set task.  It’s important not to underestimate the effect of this on a generation whose elite status was in large measure justified by a rhetoric of service through leadership.  Many of Isherwood’s travels and adventures, including his dangerous trip to China during the Sino-Japanese war, were in his own estimation attempts to take “the test” he’d missed.  And Auden, the least militaristic of men, took an inordinate pride in his American major’s uniform when, after the Second World War, he worked as part of a group surveying the psychological damage caused by bombing.

There was another role the boys at England’s elite schools were meant to inherit, beyond that of military leadership: they were meant to rule over the greatest and most expansive economic empire the world had ever known.  This world, of course, was destroyed: war debt and the resulting taxation ruined the landed families, and the Depression (or, in English terms, the Slump) destroyed the industrial economy.  If you were a middle-class schoolboy, hoping to get ahead by your wits and your elite school credentials, you were in terrible trouble: of two million middle-class jobs in England during the Slump, some 400,000 disappeared.  Joining the workforce when one in five of the positions you might have aspired to has disappeared is a terrible thing, far worse than the dire conditions faced by current graduates in America, and more on a par with what we’re seeing now in Greece and Spain.  One was meant to be a valiant leader at war and a prosperous leader at peace, and instead all of one’s intense training and indoctrination at school led to… well, to a sense of failure, and perhaps of betrayal.  The arrested development and permanent adolescence of which Connolly speaks wasn’t just the product of intense school experiences: it was the product of the failure of these experiences to be fulfilled.  It was a matter of disinheritance.  And if you want feel how powerful a sense of disinheritance, consider how largely the American Civil War looms in the consciousness of the southern states as compared to the states of the north.  If we had to go by the numbers of war re-enactors, we’d think that the Confederates outnumbered the Union troops ten to one.

But what about Auden’s American period, from 1939 on?  I’m going to have to sit down and make a proper study of Auden’s vocabulary and allusions some day, but my sense is that there’s a marked turn away from psychological and Marxian terminology and a serious uptick on overt references to what we might call the classics of Western high culture after Auden settles in America.  It’s certainly true that his work appears in fewer political contexts and in more academic and cultural reviews (a quick survey of his bibliography reveals that about half of the appearances of his writings in journals during his English period appeared in politically-oriented publications, while only about 15% of them did during his American period, which would make sense for a poet shifting from theory and politics to high culture).  But let’s grant, on the basis of my experience as a longtime reader of Auden, the assertion that there are a lot more poems like “The Fall of Rome,” “The Shield of Achilles,” “Voltaire at Ferney,” and “At the Grave of Henry James” — that is, a lot more of the overtly high-culture themed poems—in the work of the American Auden than in the English Auden.  What explains this turn toward overt high-cultural references?

Once again, a certain kind of disinheritance comes into play.  We can get at it by first considering some words Edmund Wilson wrote about Auden in 1954.  Surveying Auden’s Collected Poems, Wilson notes a difference between the English Auden and the American Auden.  “He is no longer rebelling against British institutions,” writes Wilson, he is dealing with a very different world, a hypermodern, industrialized, commercialized, materialistic and rootless world, and with “the problem of how to live in it… to avoid being paralyzed or bought by it.”  Wilson continues:

It may well be that this aspect of Auden is more intelligible to an American than an Englishman, for this feeling oneself a member of a determined resistant minority has been now for nearly a hundred years a typical situation [for cultivated humanistic writers] in America.  Such people in the later nineteenth century were likely to be defeated or embittered.  In our own, they have felt the backing of a partly inarticulate public who are not satisfied with the bilge that the popular media feed them in their movies and magazines, and who are grateful to anyone who will take a stand for that right to think for themselves which is supposed to be guaranteed us by the Bill of Rights and that right to a high level of culture which the framers of the Constitution—taking it so much for granted—would never have thought to include.  These American writers of which I speak do not constitute a group, they do not frequent an official café; and on this account the visitor from Europe is likely to come to the conclusion that, except in universities, we have no intellectual life.  He cannot conceive that the American writers are functioning in the crevices of cities, on the faculties of provincial colleges or scattered all over the country in the solitude of ranches and farms.  This kind of life was now [since his arrival in 1939] to be Auden’s lot…

Wilson is describing a very real America, one dominated by a materialistic elite that, in the later part of the nineteenth century, displaced the old cultivated and civic-minded elite of which the purest model is the Boston Brahmin.  It is the world T.S. Eliot, whose family had once dominated St. Louis and paternalistically run the town as a kind of colony of cultivated Boston, fled, seeking to find something like it surviving in England.  And it was a world from which Wilson, himself descended from the older and more cultivated and paternalistic elite, felt profoundly alienated.  Here’s something he wrote only two years after the piece on Auden, something about the destruction of the old elite by the new ruthlessly commercial and materialistic elite, and how that destruction effected his father’s generation:

The period after the Civil War—both banal in a bourgeois way and fantastic with giant fortunes—was a difficult one for Americans brought up in the old tradition…. They had been educated at Exeter and Andover and at an eighteenth-century Princeton, and had afterwards been trained… for what had once been called the learned professions; but they had then to deal with a world in which this kind of education and the kind of ideals it served no longer really counted for much…. Of my father’s close friends at college, but a single one was left by the time he was in his thirties; all the rest were dead—some had committed suicide.  My father, though highly successful, cared nothing about making a fortune or keeping up with current standards of luxury, which in our part of the world were extravagant.  Like many Americans who studied law, he had in his youth aimed at public life…. But he could not… be induced to take part in the kind of political life that he knew at the end of the century…

The new America that arrived in the late nineteenth century was triumphant in the middle of the twentieth, and disinherited class of people committed to high culture functioned, in mid-fifties America, as a kind of resistance to the dominant commercial culture, and its badge of membership came in the form of references to that culture.  All this would change soon enough: generations that saw no conflict in citing Henry Adams and Mickey Mouse in the same novel or poem were on their way.  But the view from Wilson’s desk in 1954 was of a high culture that was a form of resistance to the values of commodity and commerce—the disdain for pop culture implicit in his statement about Auden is almost at an Adornan level.  And there was a sense among a broader segment of the population that there was something to this sense of high culture as resistance: it’s what sent the young Allen Ginsberg to the poems of Blake, for example, and caused him, in a poem written in the year between these two passages of Wilson’s prose, to denounce America as “Moloch”—an ancient Ammanite god, and hardly a figure out of popular culture. 

Auden was, of course, caught between the residual world of the American poet as highbrow or leftover Brahmin, and the then-incipient, now-dominant world of the American poet as academic (or, more precisely, as creative writing professor).  His work wore the badge of the older, highbrow caste, and his poems provided something the caste, and those sympathetic to its resistance to commercial culture, needed: the Collected Poems that Wilson reviewed sold some 30,000 copies—a success even in the commercial terms that dominated, and still dominate, American life.

Rabbitarse Revealed!

In W.H. Auden's long poem "Letter to Lord Byron," he compares the lives of poets of his own generation to the hyper-glamorous bad-boy life of Byron.  Unsurprisingly, the comparison leads him to find the lives of his peers in the financially-strapped England of the 1930s a bit unglamorous:

The only thing you never turned your hand to

    Was teaching English in a boarding school.

Today it’s a profession that seems grand to

    Those whose alternative’s an office stool;

    For budding authors it’s become the rule.

To many an unknown genius postmen bring

Typed notices from Rabbitarse and String.

Like many an Auden reader before me, I'd long assumed that Rabbitarse and String were Auden's comical names for fictitious minor public schools of the sort at which a young poet might find himself employed.  In reading over a great many Auden-related documents for the chapter on his work I'm writing for a book I'm writing (now called Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society, Poetry for Itself), I noticed something that led me to believe I must have been wrong in my assumption.  The employment agency that placed young university graduates with various schools was called Gabbitas and Thring.  That this was, indeed, the source of Auden's phrase was confirmed by a look at No Home But the Struggle, the third novel in Auden-generation writer Edward Upward's trilogy The Spiral Ascent.  Here, we're told that the character Richard (based on Auden) invented the nickname "Rabbitarse and String" specifically for the Gabbitas and Thring agency.

These are dark times for humanistic scholarship, people, times in which the relevance of our work is questioned by bean-counting utilitarians.  Let the triumph of this moment, in which the meaning of Rabbitarse is revealed, be trumpeted from the hills.  Let the narrow-minded vocationalists and fetishizers of marketable research outcomes tremble.  More research funding, please!

Six Passages: Introducing Michael Benedikt

Hot news!  We're only weeks away from the appearance of Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt, in which the intrepid editors John Gallaher and Laura Boss bring together poems from throughout the career of this often wonderful, often under-rated poet, whose work combined New York School wit and panache with neo-Surrealist uncanniness.  The book will come with three introductory essays: one on the man, one on the strange tale of the white suitcase full of Benedikt's unpublished works that led to the creation of the book, and one on the poetry itself.  I am the author of this last one, and here it is:

*

 Six Passages: Introducing Michael Benedikt

           

In the introduction to his 1976 book The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, Michael Benedikt defines the prose poem as having six special qualities: an attentiveness to the unconscious; a impression of external reality as something mediated by our inner worlds; a feeling for the fluctuations of consciousness; a commitment to colloquial speech; a sense of humor; and a “hopeful skepticism.” Benedikt’s selections in the anthology give this definition a surprising degree of credence, but Benedikt’s list doesn't just describe the style of the prose poem: it provides the best possible brief definition of the qualities of his own writing, in poetry and prose poetry alike.

1

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is both distant and true, the stronger the image will be…

            —Pierre Reverdy, “The Image”

            Benedikt came by his interest in the unconscious through a long, deep, and fruitful engagement with Surrealism. Encouraged by Robert Bly in 1963 to investigate Surrealism, Benedikt became devoted to French Surrealism in particular, and in the early sixties alternated between undertaking translations from the French and writing his own poems, as if deliberately seeking the guidance of the Surrealist tradition. Indeed, by the time Benedikt’s anthology The Poetry of Surrealism appeared in 1974, he had become one of the leading American experts on Surrealist writing. So central had Surrealism become to his sense of what was most valuable in literature that, in his introduction to the anthology, he recruited his immediate influences—New York School poets like Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch—and his favorite poets from the English Romantic school—Wordsworth and Coleridge—to the Surrealist camp. Benedikt eventually became wary of being too closely identified with Surrealism, though, claiming in 1977 that Surrealism was no longer central to his work. But, as the poems in the present volume attest, from the earliest to the latest work, his poetry frequently alternates or fuses passages of dream reality with empirical reality, following the proto-Surrealist Pierre Reverdy’s description of the process by which strong images are born via the juxtaposition of distant realities.

2

Modernity in the broadest sense as it has asserted itself historically, is reflected in the irreconcilable opposition between sets of values corresponding to (1) the objectified, socially measurable time of capitalist civilization… and (2) the personal, subjective, imaginative durée, the private time created by the unfolding of the ‘self.’

            —Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity

            A confirmed agoraphobe, Benedikt was always more than ordinarily attuned to the boundaries between the public world of objective events and the world of private experience. In an interview with Naomi Shihab, Benedikt spoke of how the problem of communication for the poet had to do with “bringing the internal world and the external world together” linking or “playing off or perhaps testing the language of travel folders, the language of banking, of instruction manuals” against another world altogether, the world of “internal, ‘personal,’ or psychological things.” This, he goes on to say is “not only an aesthetic imperative but a moral imperative.” We get a sense, from this comment, of just how seriously Benedikt took the fusing of dream and external realities. There are moments in his work, though, when the moral imperative to connect the inner and the outer seems almost too great for him to bear. Condsider Mole Notes, the most sustained and most powerfully imagined work in Benedikt’s oeuvre. This sequence of prose poems represents something approaching a total retreat from the external world. Here, the world out there is dangerous, and the tunneling Mole retreats in pessimism to a world of the literal and psychological underground. One understands the urge to retreat, especially given the events of 1971, the year in which Mole Notes appeared: the Weather Underground bombing of the Capitol building; the conviction of both Charles Manson, and of the America lieutenant found guilty in the Mai Lai massacre; the arrest of 12,000 anti-war protestors; the Pentagon Papers bringing to light corruption and cynicism at the highest levels; genocide in Bangladesh; the prison riots at Attica; and the continuing specter of nuclear annihilation looming over the entire planet. If, as Benedikt claimed, Mole Notes and his next book, Night Cries, represented a “black pessimism,”it was pessimism well-grounded in events. It was also a pessimism that faded, and the poems of The Badminton at Great Barrington; or Gustave Mahler & the Chattanooga Choo-Choo find Benedikt once again fearlessly exploring the boundary between the subjective and the objective realms, this time giving us a protagonist who, unlike Mole, is excessively drawn to the excitements and allures of the external world.

3

Their purpose of writing was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking, or, in Pascal's words, la peinture de la pensée. They knew that an idea separated from the act of experiencing is not the idea that was experienced. The ardor of its conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth…

          —Morris W. Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose”

In an essay much-loved and quoted by poets as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Bernstein, the critic Morris W. Croll described the tenor and technique of baroque prose, which eschewed classical reserve for “the energy and labor of minds seeking the truth, not without dust and heat.” Benedikt’s work frequently proceeds in the baroque manner, showing the probings of the conscious mind as well as the interweaving of the rational and the irrational. Not for Benedikt the paring down of an initial prolixity into the austere perfection of the mot juste in the manner of, say, the young Ezra Pound when he cut the 36 lines of an initial draft down to the spare couplet that is “In a Station of the Metro.” Instead, Benedikt shows the mind working to find the right expression. Consider “Invitation to Previously Uninvited Guests” from Mole Notes, in which the smoke of a rare cigar melting into a room full of guests is described as being “like a sugar cube melting on the tongue” and “like honey in the mind of a diabetic,” similes which launch a long catalog other comparisons:

…like your wallet in the hands of a prostitute, like chopped liver in the heart of the professional caterer, like surviving leaves in midwinter sleet, like ant feces in a vat full of nitrate, like an inexpensive tieclip before the onslaughts of rust, like conversation into silence among boring company, like the conception of generosity after December 26^th, like space beneath even the tiniest hand caressing even the tallest lover discovering the joys of some novel perversion, like the idea of 18^th century chamber music in the minds of the oppressed, like truth in a Latin-American newspaper, like dialogue in the mouth of the megalomaniac, like meaning in the mind of the poet.

What we see here is the mind of the poet seeking the mot juste, rather than the mot juste itself. While there’s a certain humorous quality to the proliferation of similes—when we arrive at the final image of meaning dispersing like smoke in the mind of the poet, we’ve reached a point of comic exasperation—there’s a serious purpose to Benedikt’s method. Just as he saw the exploring of the intersection of the inner and outer worlds as a moral imperative, he saw the depicting of the mind in thought as a moral as well as an aesthetic matter. His representation of the mind’s processes, he once claimed, had to do with “incorporating more and more and the incorporation doesn’t make you lose focus… but rather makes you get a greater part of your mind in focus.” For Benedikt, if one is to write truthfully, one must write the process of the mind into the poem.

4

That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.

            Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto”

            The comic quality of Benedikt’s work comes with an impressive pedigree. An exclamation-mark laden, buoyant, faux-naïve quality is especially evident in the earlier work, which was very much written in the shadow of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, whose works the young Benedikt would often read for an hour or so before setting down to write his own poems. A decade or so younger than the leading poets of the New York School, Benedikt was, like most of the more established poets, a Francophile, an ivy leaguer, and a professional art critic. Like them, too, he tended to write with an awareness of the hip, knowing intimacy of the New York poetry scene.  He’s not above dropping a proper name or two in a poem, and once you start counting the pronouns in Benedikt’s poetry, you’ll be surprised at how many times you’ll find “you,” “we,” and “us”— both of these are techniques that help to build a sense of reader-writer community. Indeed, much of the charm and warmth of Benedikt’s comic gestures depends on one’s sense of being taken into a little imaginative circle, where we communicate as intimates. His is a poetry that cracks a wry smile in a small room, rather than sounding a barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

5

The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination...

            William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

           

            Benedikt was prone to abuse T.S. Eliot in his critical writings, and one understands why. Unlike Eliot, whose strongest work could read like a polyglot tissue of quotations from classic or arcane texts, Benedikt insisted on a certain plain-spokenness, an ordinary language as the medium for poetry. He complained in Poetry about poets who asserted their bardic privilege, which was really nothing more than a “bardic abuse,” whose method was tediously “‘kultural,’ involving ponderously ‘literary’ phrases or phrases whose grace is meant to astonish, representing, by stuffing implication, the poetic soul.” This is not to say that Benedikt limits his range of diction to that of the ordinary man on the street, as the high incidence of the Romantic exclamatory or classically apostrophic “oh!” in his writing makes plain. What Benedikt does, though, is to shy away from the notion of the poet as a kind of collagist piecing together the fragments of tradition, and insist on language that appears to be the expression of a speaking subject, a talker talking to us. The notion is at least as venerable as Wordsworth, and as modern as Frank O’Hara, with his idea that the telephone can replace the poem—and it is an idea Benedikt inherits from both poets.

6

A particularly perceptive analysis of Benedikt's Mole Notes contains the following passage:

Ironically, what Mole seeks by way of unreason is a more reasonable, rationally utopian world. Throughout the poem… Mole’s dominant emotion is, as Benedikt puts it, disappointment…. Mole-Benedikt cannot locate or establish Mole City on earth as it is; he finds only war, riots, crime, delusion. The great climax of the poem occurs therefore in what the poet calls Mole’s apotheosis, his literal flying through space like a projectile. What in the individual man amounts to a personal Thoreauvian-like revolt must perforce divorce him from society.

            —Louis Gallo, “Benedikt’s Blues: Reason and Unreason in Poetry”

The passage captures the hopeful skepticism of Benedikt’s work: skeptical of any great claims for poetry or the renewal of the world, his poetry remains optimistic about the power and prospects of the individual imagination. Even after he had given up on many things—academe, fame, even the publication of his work, Benedikt could ask that we

…suppose then that, following our sudden realizations & quasi-epiphanies, madly
                inspired

With our eyes rolling around wildly, our tongue hanging out & our hair standing
                            up on end despite the breeze,

One of us rushes to our clattery, old-fashioned, pre-computer-era typewriter,

      To make at least a temporary little household racket…

Even if this racket might “Risk being mistaken by some, for a ‘Throwaway Poem’” that the poet writes only “for the light amusement of himself or herself & perhaps a few old friends” it remains the medium of enthusiasm and hair-raising enthusiasm. And even if the unpublished poems were tucked away in a suitcase, the hope remained—it is there in that line about the poem being “mistaken” as something only for the poet’s friends—that they would find their way out into the world, to you.

A Wedding Cake in the Rain: Notes on Auden's Face

"If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?" asked the painter David Hockney after first meeting W.H. Auden.  For my money, it's the best, and cruelest, comment made about Auden's face in the last two decades of his life.  Other contenders include Auden's own remark "My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain" and Hannah Arendt's rather grandiose claim that "life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape" on Auden "to make manifest the heart's invisible furies." James Merrill's description of the face as "runneled and seamed" and Christopher Isherwood's claim that such a face "really belonged in the British Museum" are weak entries in the field, especially coming from such talented writers.  Perhaps their admiration for the poet held their tongues in check.

I'd long wondered just what had happened to Auden's face, which was pale and smooth in his youth.  Indeed, I'd developed a number of theories over my many years of reading Auden.

1.  Cigarettes and Benzedrine

Auden was, by any standard, an epic smoker.  Indeed, I've often suspected that a play he co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6, names its fictional mountain after a German cigarette brand.  And for many years he took a daily dose of amphetamines (it may well have been the secret behind his Stakhanovite literary productivity, as it was for Sartre and Ayn Rand).  Could these have been the culprits behind Auden's sad decline into scrotum-facedness?

An English physician, Douglas Model, shown a photo of Auden, offered a diagnosis of "smoker's face."  It is certainly true that smoking can have deleterious effects on one's skin, but Auden's seems to be a special case.  No similar condition afflicted his many smoking friends.

2.  Pale Skin in Ischia

In his later years, Auden took to spending a good portion of every year on the Italian island of Ischia, where the sun beats mercilessly down on the near-white sand of the beaches.  Auden, who took pride in his Scandinavian heritage, was not equipped for such a climate, and his friends reported with alarm his bleached hair and perpetually peeling skin.  Could this lie behind the wedding cake face?  It seemed plausible to me for some time, although the lack of a similar effect on Chester Kallman, Auden's unswarthy companion of many years, raises questions.

3. Squalor

No friend of Auden could go without noting the filth and squalor in which he lived.  Edmund Wilson devotes paragraphs to it in his journals; Stephen Spender (perhaps wishing to score points off the man in whose shadow he lived and wrote) composes prose arias to the abject state of Auden's surroundings, and Igor Stravinsky's housekeeper was appalled at Auden's refusal to bathe or shower when he visited the composer while working on the libretto to The Rake's Progress. I'm no dermatologist, but I have found myself speculating about Auden hosting a vast population of mites or other parasites of the sort that thrive (one imagines) on the unbathed skin of the more bohemian literati.

4. The Truth

As it turns out, none of my theories was correct.  Indeed, inasmuch as they all blame Auden for his condition, they turn out to be not only incorrect, but vaguely puritanical.  It is to Richard Davenport-Hines that the world owes a true explanation of Auden's imposing—nay, geological facial folds and fissures.  He writes, in his biography of the poet

Auden had apparently been suffering since early manhood from Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome in which the skin of the forehead, face, scalp, hands and feet becomes thick and furrowed and peripheral periostitis in the bones reduces the patient's capacity for activity.  There was no therapy for the syndrome, which does not affect either life expectancy or mental status, but which accounted for Auden's striking appearance of grave, lined melancholy.

The condition is inherited rather than contagious, and quite rare.  So it seems most of us, regardless of any smoking, ill-advised beach exposure, or squalor, will be saved from inciting such questions as that asked by Mr. Hockney.


**UPDATE**

Marcel Inhoff, head fact-checker at Samizdat Blog's German Research Bureau, has just sent in, by urgent telex, fax, and pneumatic tube message canister, the following important observation: "As a former citizen of the GDR I can confirm that F6 is actually a post-1950s brand of shitty socialist cigarette.  The name itself stands for 'filter cigarettes of the 1960s.'"  Thus dies all speculation about the tobacco-oriented subtext of The Ascent of F6.

Emancipation of the Dissonance!

"The Emancipation of the Dissonance," my retrospective review of C.S. Giscombe's career in poetry, has been republished by The Volta, and is online in its entirety — have a look!

The Last Habsburg Poet: Marjorie Perloff on Paul Celan

Richard Strier was already a few minutes into his introduction when I & my colleague Josh Corey stumbled into a packed room in the University of Chicago's new Logan Center to hear Marjorie Perloff talk about Paul Celan yesterday afternoon.  We slipped into the very last seats, just behind Michael Anania, Simone Muench, and Garin Cycholl, and next to Ray Bianchi.  Chicu Reddy was perched across the aisle.  Just as I cracked open my notebook and took in the large map of the Habsburg empire, Marjorie began her talk.

At first, I was a little surprised by the direction she took: I'd been expecting Big Ideas, but what we were getting was a mixture of biography and geography.  Marjorie talked about Celan's birth in Czernowitz, an outpost of the West far, far from the German or French spheres, more oriented toward the Ottoman Empire than Paris or London, and about the polyglot, multiethnic nature of the place: Romanian but not Romanian, Christian, Jewish, with an endless number of languages, including a German quite different from the German of Berlin.  She then talked in great detail about Celan's poetry, but not the poetry most known to American readers.  She described his early Surrealist poems, his Romanian poems, and, above all, his love poetry—something he wrote for many years, and used in his role as expert seducer, often presenting the same poems to different women, with generally successful results.

I wasn't at all sure where this was all leading, but when Marjorie said it was a version of material that would form the epilogue to a book on Austro-Modernism it all began to come into focus.  And, indeed, it all began to seem part of a very Big Idea indeed, and a good one.  This wasn't just a ramble in poetic biography: the point of all of the context and focus on Celan's particular brand of Austrian German language was to recontextualize Celan entirely, and, in so doing, to propose not just a new way of understanding Celan, but a new way of understanding a whole branch of modern European literature.

We tend to see Celan almost exclusively in the context of Holocaust writing, with John Felstiner's Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew as the great explanatory text.  Celan certainly is a Holocaust poet—plausibly the greatest of Holocaust poets—but we are wrong to think that this exhausts his meaning and the range of his achievement.  In focusing on Celan's early life and his love poetry (which he continued to write after the war) Perloff showed us a fuller, less iconic, more humanized figure, a Celan who wasn't just a Survivor, but a man, with all the foibles and idiosyncrasies one might expect in a somewhat coddled aesthete raised by adoring and indulgent parents (Jean Daive has been working on something along these humanizing lines as well).

Not only did Perloff reveal this Celan to us: in stressing the differences between his German and the German spoken in Frankfurt or Berlin (and, indeed, in stressing the vast geographic removal of Czernowitz from Germany proper) she showed us Celan as a representative of a culture quite distinct from that of Germany: the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the traditionally Habsburg (alternately Hapsburg) lands.  The Empire's German was distinct, and Marjorie was quite convincing in demonstrating that many of the legendary 'difficulties' of Celan's poems are actually quite clear, at least to one hearing "with an Austrian ear."  And the Empire was by no means an Empire of German:  it was a polyglot culture of many languages, and no one spoke just one.  Indeed, the multicultural Imperial identity, in which many peoples felt equally enfranchised, was utterly different from German identity, and it showed in the culture: "There is no way Wittgenstein could have been a German writer," Marjorie said, "and no way Heidegger could have been an Austro-Hungarian one."

Celan the product of this multicultural and polyglot sphere, to which belong the works of Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, and Franz Kafka—but he was the product of this world in a special way, because he was the product of that world's dissolution.  Born just two years after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he came of age in the penumbra of loss, with a sense of the ghostliness of his own multicultural and polyglot identity.

In the end, Marjorie wasn't just telling us that we would do well to think of Celan in the broad context of the dying Habsburg culture: she was telling us that we have a great deal of work ahead of us in reconstructing the lost Empire as a cultural field, and in finding the meaning of its writers not in some generalized Germanic tradition, but in the shadows and fragments of a dying polyglot state.  We would be as wrong to discuss Musil or Kafka or Celan outside this context as we would to discuss William Carlos Williams without reference to his Americanness.  This, I thought, is a big idea—it proposes not just a new understanding of Celan, but a new field of literary study.

The room in the Logan center was full of bright looking young graduate students.  If they had their ears open, they now know they've got their work cut out for them.