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Clio’s Clerk

by
February 23, 2007

"It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio's clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum with his two poor u's, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine." — Nabokov, The Eye

One smiles to see the sage of Montreaux at his grumpy, anti-Hegelian best. Nabokov had no time for History — much less the uncapitalized variety, when filtered through the wrong alembic of fiction — and we all know what he thought about his motherland after 1917. Still, being "Clio's clerk" might not make for bang-up political economy, but it has its uses in literature. Adam Kirsch makes a vigorous case for esteeming Auden's spirit-of-the-age poetry (I once heard someone describe this as "zeitfeisty") as much as his later disillusionment with it:

If the Auden centenary sees any major change in the poet's reputation, it is that such a dismissal of the later, American Auden now looks definitely mistaken. It is still tempting, reading Auden's work chronologically, to regret some of the changes that came in the train of his emigration, and to wonder what poems he might have written if he had stayed in England during World War II. The later Auden will never be as mesmerizing as the early Auden. But it is now clear that he was not, like Wordsworth, a poet who wrote himself out early but still kept on publishing.

Rather, Auden's breaking of his own style now looks like one of the key moral gestures of 20th-century English literature. Auden was one of the first great writers to recognize that, after World War II, the modernist vision — with its abstractions and myths, its glamorizing of danger and sacrifice — was no longer sustainable. Poetry, to be credible in a new world, had to be ethical in a new way: scrupulous about its claims, its concepts, even its language.

Auden was the keystone of that triumphal arch on the quadrangles of Oxford in the 30's, a group of poets collectively and derisively known as "Macspaunday," encompassing Louis MacNeice, Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. If the careers of many well-known conservative critics today are really second act repudiations of everything those critics once got up to in the sixties, then it can equally be said that Late Auden was a systematic undoing of the Macspaunday ethos.

What was that ethos? A deep, semi-mystical engagement with modernity and radical politics, but fed through a pastoral processor. His romantic verses were conscious emulations of Hardy and Wordsworth and also, I think, Shelley. I wish I had the specific line to hand, but there's something about a broken pillar or column lying in the sand in one of Auden's early poems that always reminds me of "Ozymandias": "'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies." Even Edward Mendelssohn, Auden's executor and flame-tender, didn't know quite what to make of the obscure re-imaging of this scene of classical decay. If the poet's meaning was often elusive, then this was purposeful and satisfactory because symbolism loses its frisson the minute the symbols are explained away.

Auden was an internationalist who nevertheless had an abiding regard for the Anglo-Saxon idiom and well knew the linguistic history of it; he was said to have whiled away his university days in the library absorbing pre-Beowulf roots and etymologies.

The famed dissolution of his "set" was, then, exaggerated: work and play were at rough parity with each other. He once told a BBC interviewer that "fun" was his chief objective in composition. This probably contributed to the antagonism many critics had toward his on-the-page frivolity, to say nothing of his off-the-page kind.

Leaving England for America with Christopher Isherwood, just as war had been declared against Nazi Germany, earned the poet no small amount of scorn and condescension. Evelyn Waugh satirized the pair as Parsnip and Pimpernell in Put Out More Flags. Though getting abused for cowardice and fatuous party allegiances long predated the invasion of Poland.

"Fashionable pansies" was Orwell's animadversion on the rhyming Communists who thought that hopping it to Catalonia in '36 was tantamount to a trip to a day spa. Orwell was unfair and not just cruel on this point: Auden briefly drove an ambulance in Spain during the civil war, no lighter a task than doing so during World War I would have been. He may have eventually given up the Communism, but the homosexuality was a harder self-identification to shake.

"Lullaby" — more commonly known as "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love" — is probably the gayest poem in the English language. (Kingsley Amis apparently once met the boy this dreamy love song was written for). Or perhaps I should say, it's the second gayest poem. There's always "The Fall of Rome." Try this on for size:

Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city.

Leaving aside the ominous fact this was written before the flu-infected cities became San Francisco and New York, would any care to guess as to the implied gender of that unimportant clerk or what it was that caused him to grow so disgruntled on the job? Auden was having coy fun at the expense of an old joke: What brought down an ancient empire — Christianity or buggery? Some of his dirty limericks struck a less portentous note on the same ribald theme:

The Anglican dean of Hong Kong Had a thing that was twelve inches long; He thought that the waiters Were admiring his gaiters When he went to the loo. He was wrong.

Homage to Auden – February 21, 2007 – The New York Sun

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Michael is an editor of Nextbook and a contributing editor of Jewcy. His work has appeared in Slate, Gawker, New York, Democratiya, Reason, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, City Journal and Standpoint. His blog is Snarksmith.

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