It is time for the destruction of error.
The chairs are being brought in from the garden,
The summer talk stopped on that savage coast
Before the storms, after the guests and birds:
In sanatoriums they laugh less and less,
Less certain of cure; and the loud madman
Sinks now into a more terrible calm.
Auden’s irreverent, aggressively modern verse, by turns boldly transparent and tantalizingly obscure, touched a nerve in menbers of Britain’s disillusioned younger generation, who in the decades after the First World War had come to feel that they were suffocating in what Auden called “this country of ours where nobody is well.” His gift for language and nuance—“Lay your sleeping head, my love / Human on my faithless arm”—won the praise of his elders, including Eliot and Yeats. As one critic wrote years later, “The mortality, the guilt, the faithlessness, the beauty of human beings were [Auden’s] themes. One of the great charms of his poetry was that he wrote as one of the guilty, one of the faithless, one of the moral.” But as poem after blinding poem exploded onto the 1930s literary scene in newspapers, journals, and a series of collections (Poems, 1930; The Orators, 1932; The Dance of Death, 1933; Look, Stranger!, 1936), readers his own age most treasured the urgency of his writing and its implicit assumption that the examined life was worth the struggle:
O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
Still in his twenties, the son of a Yorkshire physician had become the most admired young poet in Britain. One unforeseen result of this success was that he soon found himself put in the uncomfortable position of “representing” the post-World War I generation at a time when, in MacNeice’s words, “Young men were swallowing Marx with the same naive enthusiasm that made Shelley swallow Rousseau” and fascism was becoming more widely recognized as a force to be reckoned with. Auden’s artistic interests continued to be individual and moral rather than political; he freely admitted to being too bourgeois by nature ever to become a Communist. Nevertheless, he sympathized with leftist ideals. Swept up by what the already exiled Klaus Mann dryly referred to as the free world’s “vague social conscience,” he joined his fellow British artists in speaking out against fascism, signing petitions, and raising funds to aid the thousands of Germans now fleeing to Paris, Vienna, and Amsterdam.
The Spanish Civil War struck most members of the European and British intelligentsia as the first critical test of fascism’s ability to expand to the rest of Europe. For this reason if no other, it was obvious that General Franco must be defeated. An International Brigade was created of writers, activists, and workers willing to fight the Fascists. Auden, caught up in the fervor, decided to join them—if not as a soldier, at least as an ambulance driver or in some other noncombatant capacity. While considering himself a pacifist, he felt that his responsibilities as a writer required his direct involvement in the events in Spain. “I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier,” he wrote to a friend, “but how can I speak to/for them without becoming one?”
The scene Auden encountered in Spain was far worse than he had imagined. In Germany he had been appalled by the patriotic hysteria, lust for violence, and fierce repression he witnessed, but in Spain these behaviors extended to all-out bloody mayhem and mass murder. And this hell on earth—the burnt-out landscape of plundered villages and weeping children that was now Spain—had been created not just by the Fascists but also by the Republican army supported by Auden and his friends. Shocked by the evidence of Fascist rape, pillage, and summary executions, he was also profoundly disturbed by the sight of churches gutted and burned to the ground by the Republican forces and reports of Catholic priests pulled out into village squares to be shot. Although he himself had rejected the Anglican Church of his childhood, this violence against a religious institution created in Auden an almost visceral revulsion, and as a political activist he felt partly responsible.
Auden returned home from Spain months ahead of schedule, unwilling for once to discuss his experience. Years later he wrote, “No one I know who went to Spain during the Civil War who was not a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist came back with his illusions intact.” He now viewed the slogan-tossing, speechifying, committee-joining fervor of the British intelligentsia—activity for which he had served as a beacon on some occasions—as potentially as damaging as fascism at worst and, at best, utterly ineffectual in changing the course of world events. The only evidence of improvement that he could see was in the social and professional standing of those who had made connections and garnered attention by supporting “the cause.”
As a result, Auden lost what little taste he had ever had for politics. Yet he had become a bigger celebrity in England than ever before. He received the Gold Medal for Poetry and at around the same time was the focus of a special edition of the well-regarded poetry magazine New Verse, in which Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and others offered their praise. Such recognition, while gratifying, also carried with it an odd note of finality, reflected in Dylan Thomas’s sardonic footnote to his own contribution to the special issue: “P.S.—Congratulations on Auden’s seventieth birthday.” There was a sense that Auden, having been canonized by the age of thirty, had finished his great work and might as well now be dead.
In fact, Auden found this level of acclaim “extremely embarrassing because I knew that certain kinds of success one had, had nothing to do with what I really cared about, and of course one would have to pay for it later.” His conscience bothered him for his past know-it-all approach to political issues, and after Europe, the entire insular, competitive, backbiting world of literary England felt stifling. Having been home for less than a year, Auden resolved to leave again.
But travel only took him to another war. In 1938, a few weeks after George Davis arrived in London and persuaded Auden and Isherwood to publish their work in Harper’s Bazaar, the pair left for China to begin the adventure on which they would base their book Journey to a War. The Sino-Japanese War had ended with a truce in 1933, but it had recently resumed with a vengeance with the Nanking Massacre, in which 140,000 Chinese civilians were murdered. The two young writers, buffered by their British hosts’ efforts to give them only “a tourist’s acquaintance with China,” took a lighthearted approach to their assignment at first. But they grew more sober as they encountered such sights as a dog feeding on the carcass of a dead spy and experienced what Isherwood described as the “dull, punching thud” of bombs falling on city streets, “the concussions that made you catch your breath; the watchers [exclaiming] softly, breathlessly: ‘Look! Look! There!’ . . . It was as tremendous as Beethoven, but wrong.” It was the pointlessness of the carnage, perhaps, that shocked them the most. “War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it, and killing a few old women,” Auden wrote. “War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains, shooting at something moving in the undergrowth. War is waiting for days with nothing to do; shouting down a dead telephone; going without sleep, or sex, or a wash. War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance.”
The pair were still in China on March 12, 1938, interviewing Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek, when they heard that the Germans had invaded Austria. “The bottom seemed to drop out of the world,” Isherwood wrote, as he and Auden endured the assurances of a German adviser to the Chinese government that “of course, it had to happen. And now I hope that England and Germany will be friends. That’s what we Germans have always wanted. Austria was only causing trouble between us.” The Fascist takeover of Spain, no matter how strongly encouraged by the German Nazis, had been an internal affair. But the invasion of Austria meant that another all-out European war was imminent. Even more chilling were the reports of the enthusiastic welcome given by the Austrian public to the German tanks rolling across their borders and the crowd of eighty
thousand celebrants who welcomed Hitler into Vienna. It was, in the words of one writer, “clearly no national rape but a marriage in which the groom found himself overwhelmed by his bride’s enthusiasm.” Still, the British, the French, and the Americans chose not to respond.
Auden and Isherwood continued through China, but both men were losing any hope that the political conditions in the world might improve in the near future. Violence was “successful like a new disease,” Auden wrote in “Sonnets from China,” his contribution to Journey to a War, “And Wrong a charmer everywhere invited.” Fascism no longer appeared to be an evil force, visited on the public from above or below, but a sickness that lived within each individual and could be easily tapped, given the appropriate circumstances and timing:
Behind each sociable home-loving eye,
The private massacres are taking place;
All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human race.
The first poems from Journey to a War began to appear in British journals just as Auden and Isherwood returned to England by way of New York. While Auden’s “Sonnets from China” caused him to be dropped by the Daily Worker crowd, the response by the rest of the British public was enthusiastic and strong. It was already clear that, despite his youth and an eccentric demeanor, the thirty-one-year-old’s place in the British literary tradition was assured. His calendar was filled with engagements to speak about war, his telephone rang, and the newspapers and literary journals reported his every word and action. Once again, in spite of his own best intentions, his moral protest against political events only served to propel his own career forward while making no discernible change in the victims’ lives.
From the age of fifteen, Auden had resolved to spend his life becoming a great poet—not necessarily famous but great. He had clear opinions on what this entailed: a great poet does not waste his days basking in the comfort of his own celebrity, monitoring his advancement within the literary community while spouting ill-informed political opinions for the BBC. A great poet arranges his life so that he can focus on his work—work that should consist of making himself and others “more aware of ourselves and the world around us,” as he later wrote. “I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient; I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.” More than ever, England, with its arts society chairmanships, lectureships, and awards, struck Auden as intellectually incestuous and ultimately stifling. “That English life,” he would remark, “. . . is for me a family life,” a pleasant enough environment that nevertheless limited his development as an artist. “I love my family very dearly, but I don’t want to live with them,” he added. Life in England was preventing him from growing up.
It was now the late summer of 1938, and the international situation had continued to deteriorate. The Loyalist cause in Spain was clearly doomed, and the British Communists were distracted by the last of Stalin’s trials. Hitler, having absorbed Austria, moved methodically forward, demanding the surrender of more than eleven thousand square miles of territory at the western end of Czechoslovakia. Surely, the British public assumed, this outrageous land grab would not be tolerated. Germany’s neighbors would have to resist. As the threat of war that had hovered in the distance for the past six years became more of a reality, London was seized with what MacNeice described as the “dumb, chattering terror of beasts in a forest fire.” The British intelligentsia, once so eager for political debate, now “sat in the Café Royal moaning about their careers,” while in Piccadilly Circus at midnight, “hand after hand shot out as if from robots, grabbing the Extra Editions” to learn whether their own plans and dreams would now be put on hold.
Auden and Isherwood worried over the fate of their German friends. The prospect of an all-out war with Germany weighed heavily on their minds as they imagined former lovers lured or forced into Nazi uniforms, and they wondered how they could join a conflict against a people whose individual members they had known and loved. A few months later, Auden attempted to express the uneasy sensation of knowing of others’ suffering while one is safe and sound:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along . . .
In fact, there seemed to be no clear-cut issues, no purely good side, anywhere in 1938, and they could anticipate years of moral floundering, slogan-shouting, and the slow collapse of Europe’s culture ahead. Under the circumstances, Auden’s recent visit to New York with Isherwood took on a greater retrospective glow, and George Davis’s sales pitch resounded ever more strongly. Europe, Auden and Isherwood suspected, was drowning in its own history. It was impossible to see clearly in a world trapped by centuries of tradition, whereas in America there was “no past. No tradition. No roots—that is in the European sense . . . It’s the only country where you feel there’s no ruling class. There’s just a lot of people.” The idea of living without such boundaries or restrictions was frightening, Auden admitted. But it was also an exciting prospect to rely solely on one’s own conscience and experience.
While visiting his brother in Belgium that September, Auden impulsively visited a fortuneteller, who told him there would be no European war. Returning to London, he passed on the prediction to Isherwood, and the two agreed to emigrate to America together. Then they looked at the newsstands. The headlines told of the British prime minister’s agreement with Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler to fully yield to Hitler’s demands for part of Czechoslovakia in exchange for his promise not to seek further territory. The Munich Accord, a final attempt to appease Hitler for the sake of peace, came to symbolize the culminating moment in Europe’s humiliating and shortsighted attempts at containing the expansion of the German empire. Yet for now, the utter relief in Britain was palpable. War had been postponed.
In January 1939, Auden and Isherwood set sail on the Champlain, packed with European refugees, for America’s vast, innocent, wide-open territory. They would reach New York, “penniless as before, but this time not friendless,” Isherwood wrote to George Davis. “I do hope you’ll be around when we arrive?”
George was unable to greet them on the freezing-cold day that the Champlain pulled into New York Harbor, but Erika and Klaus Mann arrived on the quarantine launch to welcome their friends with great excitement and a full supply of juicy gossip. Soon Isherwood and Auden were installed in the friendly and inexpensive George Washington Hotel in midtown Manhattan—a place Isherwood hated and Auden loved, as it could allow him to live as “a lonely,” like everyone else in this country, he believed, and with “140 million lonelies around,” he need not waste his time conforming to or rebelling against anyone else’s expectations.
But loneliness was not an issue for the two writers. Not only was Auden’s poetry already well known on this side of the Atlantic, but both Journey to a War and Isherwood’s Good-bye to Berlin were soon to be published in the United States. Parts of both books had already appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, where the young authors had been flatteringly photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe and described as “the leaders of a highly gifted and rebellious group of young English writers who live and write with a fiery spirit English literature has not known since Byron and Shelley.” As a result, the pair found themselves in the center of a literary and social whirlwind, dragged from editor’s office to society gathering to theater opening to Harlem nightclub.
Auden and Isherwood did their best to cope with this unexpected onslaught of flattery and praise. Isherwood, with his affable manner and winning smile, found it relatively easy to satisfy his American hosts’ image of a clever young British writer on his way to the top, but Auden, shyer by nature, struck some at first as arrogant or dogmatic. Recalling the impressive effects of the drug regimen introduced by George Davis the year before, Auden turned for relief to a dose of Benze
drine each morning and Seconal at night and found that this “chemical life” solved all his problems. Overnight, he felt, he became not only brilliantly talkative and entertaining at society dinners but a more productive writer as well. Having been advised of the possibility of being subsidized by one of their Park Avenue hostesses if they behaved appropriately, the pair jealously defended their best prospects against other aspiring artists and thanked God for the English accents that the Americans so obviously admired. When no patron materialized immediately—discouraged, perhaps, by Auden’s nicotine-stained fingers, nearsighted squint, and remarkably stained and wrinkled clothes—the poet got to work writing articles and book reviews for the New Republic, The New Yorker, and the Nation and lecturing once a week at the New School for Social Research, a university for adult students whose faculty included a number of other accomplished emigres.
By February, not yet realizing that New York did not represent the country at large, Auden and Isherwood had developed strong opinions about their adopted home. “The Americans want everything canned,” Isherwood wrote to his mother. “They want digests of books, selections of music, bits of plays. Their interest is hard to hold for long. No great reputation is safe. Everybody is constantly being reconsidered. This is partly good, of course. But there is a lot of cruelty in the public’s attitude to has-beens.”
Auden enjoyed his new home more, especially as he found opportunities for the anonymous life he craved. He found, for example, that it was possible to write for hours at a corner table at Schrafft’s without being disturbed, and he began to do so almost daily. Still, he had to agree with Isherwood that the people in this country were, for the most part, shockingly oblivious to the danger posed by the Nazis’ movements across the Atlantic. Even as a new wave of exiles washed ashore from Western Europe, the United States continued to do business with Germany and allowed Hitler’s embassy to remain open. When, in March, Germany violated the Munich Accord by sending troops across the Czech border and proclaiming that Czechoslovakia as a nation no longer existed, Americans shook their heads, according to the British writers, and smugly pronounced the rest of Europe “a goner.” It irritated Auden and Isherwood to witness, as they worried for their friends back home, the lack of understanding in America that Czechoslovakia’s fate could become their own.
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