WH Auden: The scourge of a sick England

WH Auden, born 100 years ago, was far from the effete intellectual he might have seemed. Behind the mask is a revolutionary poet of caustic wit and memorable soundbites, writes Boyd Tonkin

A poet's anniversary jamboree - such as the tributes and talkfests that will greet the centenary of WH Auden's birth in York on 21 February 1907 - always carries a private face into a public place. Auden's verse famously dwells, at least in its prodigious early days, on the crossing of disputed frontiers. But this particular moment of transit always meant, for him, a meeting-point of desire and dread. "Private faces in public places," runs the dedication, to his friend and poetic ally Stephen Spender, of The Orators in 1932, "Are wiser and nicer/ Than public faces in private places."

Obvious enough, you might conclude. Yet his galaxy of august admirers, from Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show to Andrew Motion at the Shaw Theatre and James Fenton at the Cooper Union in New York, will be able to celebrate Auden precisely because this champion of intimacy and individuality crafted such a distinctive public face - even if, in later years, he thought that its striated contours brought to mind "a wedding-cake left out in the rain".

As he wrote of Edward Lear, Auden himself "became a land", his personal geography packed with must-visit sites. Poster-boy for the 1930s poetic revolution, standard-bearer of the anti-Fascist cultural left, keen-eyed reporter on Midlands foundries or Icelandic glaciers or Chinese wars, martini-sipping New York sophisticate, Christian mystic and seeker, semi-reluctant gay icon and camp gossip, mandarin expatriate in Austria and Italy, apostle of friendship and domesticity: Auden wore many social masks, all authentic, over his 66 productive years. But his mindscape was, over the decades, fissured by tension between the temptations of the public realm and the fulfilments of the private life.

"Poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/ In the valley of its making," he so quotably asserted in his 1939 elegy for WB Yeats. In truth, Auden had to argue himself out of a youthful conviction that art could indeed act as "a midwife to society". Most reputable critics concur that he had done so, in New York, by the early 1940s and with works such as New Year Letter - and never looked back. I'm not so sure. Even at his most quietist, the mature Auden sounds a suspiciously declamatory kind of private man.

His 1930s longing for the artist to show a public face was vehemently rejected in the next decade. Still, it lives on like an underground stream in one of his beloved limestone landscapes. It takes the form of a taste for the prophetic mode, an enduring flair for self-dramatisation, a relish for collaboration on opera libretti (with Britten, Stravinsky and Henze), on translations and anthologies. Most of all, it persists in Auden's special talent for laying down the law about vast spans of human history and evolution in flowing poetic narrative, from the late 1930s sonnets of "In Time of War" to "Horae Canonicae" in the early 1950s and "River Profile", his last great creative splash, in the late 1960s. And in his final years (he died in his sleep in a Vienna hotel room in September 1973), the social and even political world made a fitful comeback in his verse.

In the caustic epigram "August 1968", Auden responds to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia with a vision of the totalitarian "Ogre". This tongue-tied monster can re-draw the map of Europe at will but fails to master human speech; therefore "drivel gushes from its lips". Partly thanks to Auden's own progress, the Anglo-American artistic world now takes it for granted that any poet who even tries to make anything happen must needs be a hack, a fraud - or else the Ogre's deluded creature. One reason for paying special attention to the Auden centenary will be to grasp just how far our easily bought complacency depends on his hard-won, and always fragile, serenity.

Go back to The Orators, written a year after the Oxford graduate's starburst debut with Poems (1930), and you can trace his perception of a risky kinship between poet and politician taking shape. That kinship resides in the power of persuasive speech. A multicoloured rag-bag, The Orators is a surreal prank in verse and prose. It enlists public-school parodies, social satire, revolutionary fantasy, even gay in-jokes to diagnose the condition of England - "this country of ours where nobody is well" - and to imagine the drastic coups, in the state and the arts, that might set its wrongs to right.

Already, in his early twenties and as the Depression began to bite, the precocious poet and his chums (who included Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward) had devised a sparkling serio-comic method of sending up English institutions. Later generations of mischievous insider-outsiders, from the Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python teams to the Lindsay Anderson of If..., would add little more than footnotes to the breakthrough burlesques of the 1930s Auden gang. But The Orators tempers its mockery with a fascination for charismatic leadership, from the head's speech that surely inspired the Alan Bennett of Forty Years On ("Commemoration. Commemoration. What does it mean?... It's a facer, isn't it, boys?") to the conspiratorial airman, a sort of Bolshevik Biggles, with his plans for the aftermath of an English revolution: "Few executions except for the newspaper peers."

It's a critical commonplace to say that Auden's youthful verse looks down on his sick society from a lofty, predatory height ("like a hawk or a helmeted airman"). In doing so, it exercises the very language of power that would later so dismay him. The son of a public-spirited doctor (director of schools health in Birmingham), Auden knew and appreciated the scientific cast of mind, from geology to anthropology. Added to his personal charisma were this ruthless objectivism and his knowing advocacy of the unsettling legacies of Marx and Freud. The results combusted with the passion for secrecy and espionage, for plots and putsches, that runs through his pre-war work. "Control of the passes was, he saw, the key/ To this new district, but who would get it?" - the answer, as the young master slipped rapidly into unchallenged leadership of a literary generation ("Audenesque" became an adjective as early as 1933), was evidently Auden himself.

Reading him in the 1930s must have felt like taking a crash course in the modern world. Seeking "a change of heart" in England and Europe, he delivers sardonic, sweeping views from the control-room, down the microscope and through the newsreel * * lens, all couched in verse that glints with addictive slogans and soundbites. Save, perhaps, for his sexuality, the younger Auden developed a profile that perfectly fitted the period's craving for the artist as insurrectionary hero.

His scintillating 1930s ventures into pop culture stretched from cabaret lyrics to topical revues and the gnomic ballads (such as "Victor") that eerily prefigure Bob Dylan. But the pop Auden perhaps endures best in the verse voiceover for the 1936 documentary Night Mail, produced for John Grierson, with its contagious chuffa-chuffa rap ("This is the night mail crossing the border/ Bringing the cheque and the postal order..."). When Auden worked, briefly, for the GPO film unit, he not only wrote scripts but also began to direct - to take charge. Maybe the mature poet could write so feelingly about the seductions of power because the brilliant newcomer had so slickly practised them.

Many readers know the story of how Auden came back from his brief ambulance-driving stint in the Spanish Civil War to write the fundraising pamphlet-poem "Spain" in 1937. It spoke of "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder", later revised to "the fact of murder", before Auden ditched the "dishonest" poem entirely. George Orwell, in Inside the Whale, censured the chilling demagoguery that Auden could show at such moments. And the poet himself was disgusted at the ease with which he once made a tub-thumping speech about Spain. In Auden's glimpses of bullies and dictators, there is always a hint of the self-portrait - and that affinity lends these figures their admonitory force. "Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after," runs the 1939 "Epitaph on a Tyrant", "And the poetry he invented was easy to understand" - much like Auden's fatally catchy rhythms and jingles of the time.

Auden's journey into New York exile, with Isherwood in 1939, was taken by his enemies as the unpatriotic flight of a "pansy poet" reluctant to do his duty in the coming fight. True, Auden fled in part because he loathed the prospect of the public mantle that would descend on him in wartime Britain. He may also have feared that he could perform that flag-waving role dangerously, soul-breakingly well. His meditative New Year Letter may inaugurate an American Auden of contemplation and retreat rather than engagement, but it begins with a citation from Montaigne hinting that "we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn".

Auden took up the bohemian life in Brooklyn with glee, staying in a shared house with Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles and the intellectual stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. (Always stronger on abstract domesticity than on tidying up, he was known there as "Miss Mess".) Yet he kept up his contacts in high places as well as low dives, and returned to Europe in 1945 to survey bomb damage in the uniform of a US air force major - a real airman this time, looking down on the ruins of a wasted civilisation from a great official height.

Auden's ambivalence about the exercise of power stems, it seems to me, from a troubled awareness of his own supremely forceful powers of speech. This doesn't turn him into some closet Mussolini of the arts; but it might explain the charge of excitement that attaches to his evocations of spellbinding "Authority". In the 1936 verse play The Ascent of F6, co-written with Isherwood, the doomed heroism of the mountaineer Michael Ransom - a would-be national saviour - comes both garlanded with glamour and undermined by irony. The airman, the explorer, the orator, the spy: in these guises the poet puts on, and enjoys, the uniforms of power. By 1939, Auden could write an apologia defending the eccentricities of WB Yeats against "the Public", which calls for social leadership in art, and proclaim that "art is a product of history, not its cause". Yet in the same year his memoir The Prolific and the Devourer admits that his work as a teacher had shown that he "had more political ambition, that I enjoyed influencing others, more than I had imagined".

The post-war private Auden, snugly embedded in his summer villa on Ischia and in the Austrian farmhouse he shared with his on-off lover and lifelong companion Chester Kallman, sought to influence others only in the direction of human sympathy and liberal Christian charity. Yet he makes a real, noisy meal out of this withdrawal from the public sphere. So much so that even the installation of a labour-saving American kitchen in the Kirchstetten house prompts an elaborate ode that ropes in Brecht, Plato and Mozart, with lashings of theology: "... surely those in whose creed/ God is edible may call a fine/ omelette a Christian deed". Late Auden always overeggs his own unworldliness.

Given that he never lost a fondness for the grandstanding gesture, I doubt that Auden would have fretted much about his recent, spectacular returns to the spotlight. First, in 1994, John Hannah intoned "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone...") over the coffin of Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral. It prompted some 300,000 sales of a rush-released pamphlet of Auden love poems, and innumerable re-readings at genuine funerals. This lament had begun life satirically, as an elegy for a politician in The Ascent of F6, but Auden - the grandson of two country clergymen - would surely have been utterly chuffed to become a much-loved English graveside companion.

Then, five years ago, the history that "Spain" tells us "cannot help or pardon" bestowed an even more extraordinary sort of poetic afterlife. Auden had repudiated the rapt melancholia of "September 1, 1939", written as Germany invaded Poland and "the clever hopes expire/ Of a low, dishonest decade", after US politicians started to enlist its memorable dicta for electoral gain ("We must love one another or die"). Suddenly, 62 years after the poem's composition, "the unmentionable odour of death/ Offends the September night" in Manhattan - not as distant metaphor but as hideously local fact. "September 1, 1939" became the thoughtful New Yorker's post-September 11 standby, e-mailed, photocopied and recited at memorials. Thirty years after his death, Auden the grateful New Yorker by adoption became the city's public poet in its hour of need. As a focus for mourning and healing, that poem made plenty happen; it did far more than just survive.

Perhaps, in his centenary year, another Auden masterpiece deserves an honoured place in public life. In 1952, after the H-bomb and the Korean War showed that the fall of Fascism had not delivered peace, he wrote "The Shield of Achilles" (a stanza appears on our cover). Thetis, mother of Achilles, observes aghast as the divine armourer Hephaestos engraves the "shining metal" with grim scenes of warfare, massacre and execution. These reveal the blank-faced army of "A million eyes, a million boots in line/ Without expression, waiting for a sign", or the "ragged urchin" orphaned by conflict, "who'd never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept/ Or one could weep because another wept".

This terrifying, marvellous poem captures the guilty impotence of the onlooker who watches the ordeals of Sarajevo or Darfur, Rwanda or Abu Ghraib. It indicts the artist (or journalist) who captures suffering without compassion, and the viewer or reader who connives at the spectacle of human misery. It arraigns the corruption of the public voice, and eye, but does so with all the social force of prophecy and witness Auden had at his command. We don't, as it happens, have memorable new poems to cite and recite about Darfur or Abu Ghraib. We do have "The Shield of Achilles", which offers one more good reason to make a healthy public fuss about the beginning, 100 years ago, of WH Auden's deeply private life.

Melvyn Bragg presents a 'South Bank Show' on WH Auden on Sunday on ITV1 at 11.10pm. A centenary reading, with Andrew Motion, John Fuller and Sean O'Brien, takes place at the Shaw Theatre, London NW1 (020-7387 6864), at 7pm on Wednesday 21 February