← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
657 Auden's England (with Nicholas Jenkins) | My Last Book with Gabriele Pedulla
01:09:36
Loading summary
Transcript89 lines
- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and LitHub Radio.
- [00:09]
Ad Read 1
This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. With the Gemini app, you can talk live and have a real time conversation with an AI assistant. It's great for all kinds of things, like if you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm creative ideas. And by the way, this script was actually read by Gemini. Download the Gemini app for iOS and Android today. Must be 18 to use Gemini live.
- [00:35]
Ad Read 2
This episode is brought to you by Disney's Mufasa the Lion King. Get tickets now for the ultimate family holiday movie experience. Reunite with the characters you know and the untold story you'd never expect. Witness Mufasa's rise from orphan to king and see how the legendary villain Scar got his name. Disney's Mufasa the Lion King. In theaters everywhere. Now the kingdom awaits.
- [01:01]
Jack Wilson
Hello. His life is one that can fool the gods of artificial intelligence. Type Auden's England into Google and the first search that comes up is the question, when did Auden move to England? A good question, except that he was, of course, born there. Intensely British, intensely American. Maybe the hyphen between British American is where Auden truly resided. But when we talk about the poet and the poetry, what England do we mean? A place where one is stifled, A place to resent, A place to flee from, or a land to revere, to celebrate? A home base? What relationship did Auden have with this land of his birth? The land of his language, the land of his early success and the formation of his identity? Nicholas Jenkins will tell us about Auden on his island today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Let's get started. It is December. We know what that means. Roll it out, please, Gabriel.
- [02:48]
Nicholas Jenkins
That's right.
- [02:49]
Jack Wilson
That's the stuff. Holiday music played by wonderful performer, our friend Gabriel. Don't you wish you could play piano like this? It would be my dream. Okay, we take things day by day here at the History of Literature Podcast, because what else can we do? Days don't happen in multiplicity. Simultaneously they go one after the other in one direction only. And so we look forward to children opening their presents and families getting together, and maybe a little poetry under the tree. This year, I'm ordering up some Sylvia Plath that's on my wish list. Then the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which is poetry of a different sort. And Italy is never far away from my mind, which is why I want to tell you about this is not an ad, by the way. A listener emailed me and said, I'm working on a project.
- [03:46]
Nicholas Jenkins
Jack.
- [03:46]
Jack Wilson
It's a labor of love. I don't get paid for any of it. It's just something I want to do. And by the way, I'm Italian, and this labor of love is all about Italian poetry. He didn't ask for anything, didn't ask me to promote this, didn't ask for my feedback. He just wanted me to know that this was out there. And I checked it out, and it's wonderful listeners. It's worth your time if you're interested at all in Italian poetry, or if you're interested in the Italian language, or if you're just interested in literature in general and what can be done with literature online. It's a little website where our listener, Massimo, has uploaded audio of Italian poems being read in their original, beautiful language. I used to think Italian was the most beautiful language of all, bar none, and that no other language really even came close. I guess I still think that for spoken language, anyway, I haven't really heard better. But I did read an analysis arguing that Portuguese is the best language for songs. And after reading that, I thought, well, that's pretty hard to dispute. The Waters of March. Have you heard that song? Go check that out on YouTube. The version where Elise Regina and Antonio Carlos Yobeam are singing that to one another in a studio, just them against a black backdrop. This is from 1972. There's a microphone in between them. They have headphones on. Oh, my goodness, I'm getting chills. I've watched this video so many times, and it lifts my spirits every time. There are a handful of videos that do this for me that I'll seek out every few months or so. One is hey, Bulldog by the Beatles is one. One is a young woman who play. This is an unlikely one. A young woman who plays the ukulele and sings two of us with her mom for Mother's Day. Their voices blend and I start crying. It's so moving. And another one, another video for you to check out if you would like is the one with Paul McCartney by himself playing my favorite song on the guitar for no one. By himself. I mean, the song for no one. Not that he's playing for no one. He's by himself in a studio performing. He's talking. He talks at one point to George Martin, who's in the control booth, but he's just sitting on a stool playing that song, smiling now and then. And he does the French horn part in the middle. He hums it or, I don't know, beatboxes it. I don't know how you'd say it. It's so beautiful and charming and here come the waterworks. But Waters of March, getting back to that one, it's up there. It's just gorgeous, this relationship between the two of them, singing, celebrating the song and celebrating life. It makes me happy to be alive. Exclamation mark. Another exclamation mark. Five exclamation marks. Watch to the end and see the laughter and hear the laughter in their voices. In the song, you will fall in love and want to be in love. And yes, the Portuguese is beautiful. But don't sleep on Italian. So when you're on the Internet watching Waters of March and Paul McCartney and the ukulele duo, head on over to Massimo's site. Italian poetry.it this is Italian poetry for English speakers. It gives you the Italian and the English and the text and then there's audio. And if you're listening to it, it's synced up with the words so you can see what's being spoken and you can follow along and, and check the meaning in English. And there's a little description of the poems too. It's a simple concept, executed beautifully and it's great for everyone, those with a little Italian or a lot of Italian or no Italian at all. Bravo, Massimo and La Rezio, speaking of thankfulness, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving and now I hope you're headed toward the holidays as I am, with some good music queued up to set the mood. My thanks for the holiday music to Gabriel the piano composer, arranger, performer and teacher extraordinaire. And now lets bring out our first guest, Nicholas Jenkins, who will take us to the world of England on the island where a young man named Winston Hugh Auden was born in 1907. Nicholas Jenkins after this.
- [08:53]
Ad Read 3
Foreign.
- [09:01]
Ad Read 4
This episode is brought to you by Dutch Bros. Get stoked for all the holly jelly vibes this season at Dutch Bros. Stay cozy with returning winter faves. Hazelnut truffle mocha and candy cane mocha. Plus the new Winter Shimmer Rebel energy drink blends up sweet cream and blue razz flavor with soft top and shimmer springs to keep those spirits energized all winter long. Download the Dutch Bros app to find your nearest shop. Order ahead and start earning rewards.
- [09:31]
Ad Read 2
So you're getting hungry. Really hungry. Head to Jack in the Box and pick up a Smash Jack. It's a juicy, delicious smashed burger topped with cheese, pickles, grilled onions and Boss sauce and it's now available on Sourdough. The Smash Jack Only a jack in the box? Order one on the Jack app today.
- [09:55]
Ad Read 5
Looking for a pickup truck to get just about anything done? Look no further. The Chevy Silverado EV isn't just the most powerful Silverado ever with next level towing capability and technology. It also offers game changing versatility with the available multiflex midgate and tailgate, which means Silverado Evolution helps you carry large, bulky and oddly shaped items up to nearly 11ft in length. Chevrolet together. Let's drive. Visit Chevrolet.com to learn more.
- [10:37]
Nicholas Jenkins
Okay. Joining me now is Nicholas Jenkins, who teaches English literature at Stanford University. He's here today to discuss his book, which has a couple of titles. In the UK it's called the WH Auden and the Last of Englishness. Here in the States, it's the War and Belonging in Auden's England. Nicholas Jenkins, welcome to the History of Literature.
- [11:01]
Ad Read 3
Jack, thank you so much for inviting me on the show. It's going to be a pleasure to talk to you about Auden today. I'm really looking forward to it.
- [11:08]
Nicholas Jenkins
So I understand you grew up in England. Was Auden something that was present everywhere? Was he assigned in schools and when did you first encounter him?
- [11:20]
Ad Read 3
Yeah, I think he must have been assigned in schools. But, you know, I was pretty oblivious when I was at school to a lot of things, including whether I was reading any Orden poetry or not. So I don't actually remember whether I read any Auden poems when I was at school. I think I probably did. I think he was probably assigned by somebody at the school, a teacher. But like a lot of things that are important in a person's life, I didn't really know about it until afterwards. I only realized the significance of Auden a little bit later on. But when I was in school, it kind of just washed over my head.
- [11:58]
Nicholas Jenkins
And do you remember the first time that you decided that he was somebody that you were going to pursue in a more serious way? What were you thinking at that point? Was he one of a number of poets you were interested in, or was Auden kind of your guy?
- [12:18]
Ad Read 3
I just really didn't know what I was going to study at first. My friends and I when we were at college were because of the kind of college we went to, we pretty much thought that our options were either to become a banker, a lawyer or a journalist. And the people that I was hanging out with, fortunately didn't want to be any of those. And so we all stayed on to do postgraduate work. And then came the realization that we have to try and figure out what we were actually going to study. And I wasn't sure at first, but I had a professor who was an expert in Auden's work, and it sort of appealed to me a little bit. I didn't understand it very well. And then I was lucky enough to come to the States, and I got a fellowship to study in New York. And that was really the turning point for me, because Auden had made his life in New York. For the second half of his life, he lived in New York, or he lived in New York for a lot of a year. And so when I got here, I hadn't read any poems of Auden's when he was alive, as we've talked about. I didn't really know what was going on when I was at school, but I thought I would look into Auden a little bit further as I was trying to find a subject to study as a graduate student. And I also met a lot of people in New York who had known Auden. So I sort of began to tune into Auden a little bit when I was living in Manhattan. And it was fascinating meeting people who had known Auden. A lot of them were very significant in their own rights. They had their own artistic careers. They were really interesting, sometimes slightly offbeat people, all of whom, I think, were really generous to me and talked to me about Auden. I don't think I really felt like I began to understand Auden as an artist until I went to the New York public library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd street and in the Berg Collection there, started reading his notebooks. And that was the point where I really felt like it began to pick up the signal. I was also very fortunate to be working with Auden's literary executor, Professor Edward Mendelssohn of Columbia University, who is the preeminent Auden scholar in the world and has a vast knowledge, a vast archive, and he was generous enough to share all of his insights and the things that he'd learned over the years with me. But I think it was really when I was just sitting alone, looking at Auden's notebooks that I began to feel like, okay, here is something that I might actually have something to say about. And so it was strange in a way, Jack, because although I got close to Auden as a person through meeting his friends, it was only when I started reading his notebooks that I felt like I got closer to him as an artist.
- [15:29]
Nicholas Jenkins
How so?
- [15:30]
Ad Read 3
You could Just see talismanic phrases from poems that I'd become very familiar with, things that I'd read in print many times. You could actually see them emerging out of the kind of graphite mist on the page. Jordan used to write in pencil a lot when he was just drafting things at this stage in his career. He used all kinds of different colored inks at different stages of his poetic career. Something I've thought about and wondered about. But when he was a young poet in the period that I cover in my book, he wrote sometimes in just a standard blue fountain pen, but very often you'd write in pencil. And I would see these moments when something that I only knew as a fully achieved, perfect work of art was really just kind of coming into existence. And that was really inspiring and exciting to me. Gave me a real sense of the pulse and the heartbeat of his poetry as I was seeing it. And then, of course, as I did some research and dug up letters that Auden had written to friends where he said things that he definitely wouldn't have said in public or didn't want to tell the whole world about, or sometimes when he gave off the cuff remarks in interviews when he went to a college to give a reading somewhere, I began to feel like, oh, yeah, here's this big puzzle that I can. The pieces are scattered at the moment, but I can put them together into a shape. But it was really a feeling for ordinary as poet rather than necessarily as a person with idiosyncrasies and opinions and ideas and foibles. Once I got past that and started to think about him in a kind of purer sense as an artist, that I really felt like I had something that I wanted to study as intensively as I was able to.
- [17:27]
Nicholas Jenkins
Even as an artist, though Auden, he's multifaceted. Would you say that you were drawn to him for his. The way he was able to discuss history and import kind of big ideas, or were you drawn to his language or his poems on love or what? Is there anything you could pinpoint as why he appeals to you in particular as a poet?
- [17:52]
Ad Read 3
I think you put your finger on a really crucial issue about who Auden is as a poet.
- [17:58]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [17:59]
Ad Read 3
So one of the ways of discussing Auden that has been very influential and dominant has been to think of him as a thinker. And of course, there's no question that Auden was a hyper smart, extraordinarily intelligent person. But for what it's worth, my own intuition about Auden as a poet was that his creativity came from Something else, somewhere else inside him, somewhere maybe a little deeper, a little closer to the unconscious than just the front part of his forehead. So I. I felt there was an untold story about the emotionality and the inspirational, vatic, intuitive, prophetic, haunted quality of Auden that really appealed to me, and that had been missed out by some other people who've written about Auden. And I'd say, just as a footnote to that, Jack, that one of the things that is difficult with a poet like Auden, it's true of some other poets as well. But just in the case that we're talking about today, at the end of his life, Auden had very decided ideas about his poetry and about what it meant. And he tended, I think, almost as though he were throwing up a smokescreen for his readers. He tended to talk about it in very abstract, sometimes moralistic and intellectualized terms. And that was that kind of keynote that a lot of people afterwards took in order to write their accounts of what Auden's poetry meant. Auden died in 1973. So there's a long span of time separating us now from the moment when he passed. And I think in that time, we have been able to see that there's a lot more about Auden, which is a social writer, an emotional writer, I would say, as opposed to being an Apollonian intellectual, being a more Dionysian kind of poet. And so I think that Auden's ideas have been well covered in the past, exhaustively covered. But to me, anyway, I wanted to do justice to the young man who was an inspired artist, writing out of a sense of foreboding and intuition about the world with shadows of history looming over the page. And also, of course, his personal life, his life as an artist, but also as a gay man in a very, very homophobic society. That seemed more important to me to stress now than going through one more time a few of the books that Auden had read.
- [21:05]
Nicholas Jenkins
Right, okay. So your book takes up Auden at a particular period in his life. What years exactly do you cover? How old was Auden and what was he doing at that point?
- [21:17]
Ad Read 3
Yeah, so Auden wrote his first poem in 1922, when he was 15. And that's really where I start. And then I follow the arc of a story through till about 1937, when Auden was 30 years old. And that was the moment when Auden decided, unconsciously, I think, not as a deliberate thing, that the place that he'd invested so much emotional, artistic capital in England, the rural English world that crops up again and again in his poetry as the setting for many of his most famous love poems, because Auden was one of the great love poets of the 20th century. But Auden decided, for reasons that we could get into a little bit later, perhaps that England had kind of given him all that it could, or perhaps it was that he'd given England all that he could. And he decided he was going to travel more. And the next few years of his life were really an incredible odyssey. He visited a huge number of countries. For poets who very often, at least for a prior generation, didn't travel that much, Auden stands in stark contrast because he traveled to a very many quite far flung places. For him, in the end of the 1930s, he was in Spain, he was in Europe, but he was also in Egypt, he was in China, he was in Canada, he was in the United States, he was in Iceland. So Auden began traveling in a kind of rootless, almost existentially troubled way. And he ended up at the end of the 1930s, beginning of the 1940s in the United States. But I leave off my story, at least in this part of the story that I want to tell. I think there might be a part two that I'll come to at some point in the future, if God gives me enough years. But for now, I just wanted to end when Auden left England. Because the subject that is really at the core of my book is belonging. What does it mean to belong to a community, to a national community? What does it mean to speak on behalf of more than just yourself, to speak on behalf of a collective group like a nation? And I think by 1937, Auden, having started out in 1922, being inspired by the English world and by the English, had run through the whole spectrum of feelings about that place and felt like as an artist, he had to move in order to develop, perhaps even to survive.
- [24:01]
Nicholas Jenkins
So what is his poetry like in this, I guess, of roughly a 15 year period? Do any of his more famous works come from this? Or are we seeing Auden the Apprentice? Or how would you characterize the body of work he's producing at during this stretch of time?
- [24:20]
Ad Read 3
Yeah, so Auden had a really strong evolutionary urge as a writer. So he starts off with one kind of poetry. And even in this relatively short span of time that we're discussing today, he did change quite a lot. He started off writing poems that were quite conservative formally. Then he began to write poetry that was very cryptic, almost like coded messages in verse, full of hints and prophecies of Disaster. Really beautiful, airy poems, which it's hard to identify the exact subject of, Almost like oracles. Then Auden went to Germany, which I think had a major impact on his imagination. Became a little bit more involved in political issues. His poetry opened up a little bit, became a little bit easier to understand. Then he fell in love. He started to write some really great, I would say, Shakespearean love poetry. And then as his relationship with England and also with this main lover that he had in the first half of the 1930s began to founder, it's very often quite hard to tease apart his feelings about England and Englishness from his feelings about his lover. He wrote a lot of poems about dreams and disaster and loss. And one poem that has become particularly famous that he wrote just at the end of his period begins, Stop all the clocks, Cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, Let the mourners come. So that was a poem that he wrote originally for a play that he and Christopher Isherwood were composing in Portugal, where they rented a house for a little while. And it's sort of a fascinating story, this poem. It's a very memorable poem. I think most people who've even read it or heard it once can recall it quite easily. But for a long time, that poem, stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, nobody paid much attention to it. And then I think in the 1990s, there was a movie called Four Weddings and a Funeral. Fantastic film. And it's a very moving scene in the film when a lover recites this poem over the coffin containing the dead body of a beloved. And that poem took off at that point in a really extraordinary way. I think we're just in the days when we didn't have the same meaning of viral that we have today, because the Internet was still in its infancy at that point. But if there could be a pre Internet viral, that poem was it. And it sold a large number of copies in a chat book that Auden's publishers issued. And in a way that I find very moving and telling, a lot of people have subsequently, especially in the uk, have chosen that poem to be something that is read out at funerals. So it's had a great impact on the life of many people who wouldn't even say that they read poetry habitually. I think that's one of the fascinating things about Auden. I would say it's true of some other writers that they kind of get over the wall of the academy and make a break for everyday life. And, I mean, I think of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, perhaps Philip Larkin, writers who just have a way of being able to speak on behalf of people who find their own feelings reflected or mirrored in their work. And that poem of Auden's, Stop all the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone, which was written just at the end of this period when Auden was thinking about whether he really belonged or could fit into English life and how his life seemed to be going wrong to him. That poem has propagated endlessly amongst people who have gained all kinds of different meanings from it. I think it's enormously to the credit both of those people and to Avorden that he was able to find a way of writing on behalf of people at a moment of stress and bereavement. So, yeah, there are a lot of poems that are memorable from this period. Some of his greatest hits lie ahead, but some of his greatest hits also came in this very period that we're talking about today.
- [29:07]
Nicholas Jenkins
Now, what exactly was his relationship with England and the idea of England? And we're really talking about the. The period in between the world wars here. And I've. We know from other authors that even though we try not to look back at a period with the benefit of. Of hindsight, the writers and thinkers and people were aware of storm clouds on the horizon, and it was a very troubled time in terms of what they saw as this sort of mounting rush toward war and for World War II. And yet some poets and writers kind of use that period to turn away from politics, and others got even more engaged. And was he turned off by what he was seeing and kind of the obligations to participate in the fray, or was he taking up that challenge and trying to define himself against the current events of the time?
- [30:13]
Ad Read 3
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, Jack. And I think that the place where we'd have to start in thinking about it is with the First World War, the catastrophe, total societal catastrophe. Something that really changed life in Europe and in Britain forever, I think. And there were many, many significant artists who fought in the war, but of course, also lots of other people, millions of other people who were touched by the war in different ways, including Auden's father, who was a medical doctor. And so Dr. Auden spent the formative part, or part of the formative part of Auden's childhood away from home at the First World War, tending to horribly wounded and in many cases, obviously dying people who were caught up in the maelstrom of the conflict. And Auden always maintained that he wasn't affected by the First World War at all. And I think that that is a kind of fib. I think actually he was deeply, deeply affected by the war, by the home front atmosphere, which was a poisonous, sullen, very vindictive world. There's a moment that Auden often recalled towards the end of his life when he was away, because he was an upper middle class boy, he was sent away to a boarding school. And these kids are sitting in the dining hall at the boarding school being told not to eat any more than they could help because of food being rationed towards the end of the war. And Auden recalls putting out his hand to take a second slice of bread with synthetic margarine of some unmentionable kind on it, and the loud whisper of a master who wanted the whole of the school to hear saying, auden, I see, wants the Huns to win. Auden wants the Germans to win. And that moment, clearly, even though small in the scheme of things, seared into his imagination. I'm sure that most of us have moments that we are still troubled by decades later, where something small happened that really burned us. And this was one that really burned Orden. So Auden grew up in a pretty poisonous atmosphere in wartime England, but also with the anxiety of his father away from home. And I think that that had an enormous impact on the shock shape of his imagination, the kinds of poems and subjects that he took on when he started writing poetry. And one thing that happened in England after the war ended in 1918. Auden's father was demobilized in 1919 was that a lot of people just turned away from the world of society and people and civilization and looked back to nature and the natural world, tried to recover some kind of sanity after the insanity of the conflict that they'd suffered through. And Auden, again, this is something that hasn't really been much explored by people in the past. Auden really grew up in the countryside. He might sound often in his later work, like he's a very urbane, sophisticated writer. Indeed he is. But he was a country boy at heart. He grew up in a world where there was silence, where there was. There were creatures living their lives all around him, where the rhythm of the seasons had a meaning. He didn't grow up in cities. He hated London. He only lived there for two brief periods during his lifetime. So he grew up in a world which is like an antidote, an emotional antidote to the chaos and tragedy of war and Then, as you say, so he had the shadow of the war looming over him, the First World War looming over him. And as you say, it was clear by the early 1930s that some people even conceptualized it this way. The end of the First World War had been more an armistice before fighting broke out again. And the shadow of the Second World War loomed up over the 1930s, even though it didn't start in Europe until 1939. And so Auden was aware of the impending catastrophe as well. And I think one thing that is striking when you read about the times that Auden lived through, including living through a little bit later on, the revelations about the Holocaust. I mean, Auden was in Germany in 1945 and interviewed people who'd been just recently, very, very recently liberated from Dachau and was shocked to his core by what he heard from them. So Auden lived in a time when civilization, when European civilization particularly, was just rocking on its foundations and the anxiety and uncertainty. Auden is the person who wrote a book called the Age of Anxiety and who popularized that phrase as one of his key terms, anxiety. But you can understand why that resonated with so many people, because the world really did seem to be falling apart in a very rapid fashion. And I think the fear, the anxiety, the stress, the uncertainty, the foreboding of the world that Auden lived in, all of that filters in a very profound and paradoxically beautiful way into the poetry that he wrote.
- [36:15]
Nicholas Jenkins
Let's take a quick break and come back with more from Nicholas Jenkins.
- [36:32]
Ad Read 6
This episode is brought to you by Allstate. Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking Allstate first. Like, you know, to check the date of the big game first before you accidentally buy tickets on your 20th wedding anniversary and have to spend the next 20 years of your marriage making up for it. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate Savings. Vary terms apply. Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.
- [37:03]
Ad Read 2
This year, Santa's bringing the power of Energizer into his workshop.
- [37:07]
Ad Read 3
Whoa.
- [37:08]
Nicholas Jenkins
The Energizer bunny's got so much power.
- [37:10]
Ad Read 4
Wait, he's powered up all the toys?
- [37:12]
Nicholas Jenkins
I think that means we're done for the year.
- [37:14]
Ad Read 3
I love this bunny.
- [37:16]
Ad Read 2
He's the harmony hardest working helper the North Pole has ever seen. And he wants all your gifts to have the power of the number one longest lasting AA battery. So this holiday season, stock up on Santa's and the elves favorite battery, Energizer Ultimate Lithium.
- [37:42]
Ad Read 3
Foreign.
- [37:47]
Nicholas Jenkins
Okay, we're back. So, Nick, your book is called the Island.
- [37:50]
Jack Wilson
And.
- [37:50]
Nicholas Jenkins
And I'm curious now, given Auden's relationship with England, if he viewed the island aspects, was England, did he view it as kind of a paradise set away from the rest of the world, a kind of haven? Or was it an island in the sense of a place you need to escape from? Because it's almost like a prison, that it's detached from the rest of the world and it's too isolated and provincial for someone who has bigger ambitions.
- [38:22]
Ad Read 3
Yeah. So Auden was of two minds about many things, and I think it was all of the above for him about England. One of his best definitions of the thing that he spent his whole life doing, the thing that was most important to him was he said that poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings. And so, as you would expect, he had very, very mixed feelings about England. I think on the one hand, love of the landscape or particular parts of the English landscape, love of the language. Auden was incredibly sensitive to language in ways that just continually astonished me as I was writing my book. And I had been sweating it trying to figure out what these poems mean. And I know because Auden was writing so much that he couldn't spend that long working on any one thing. But it took me sometimes months to be able to realize the depths of what he was saying, because his mastery of the English language is so great. And then I think he was also very in love with some of the culture of England and Englishness. But at the same time, he was a very anxious and guilty person. Probably many people would say, over judgmental about himself, over guilty about things that weren't really directly his responsibility. But I think Auden, as many people at the time from the middle classes did feel guilt over. Auden was guilty about the class, the deep, deep class structure of English society and about the bombastic, theatrical, exploitative, punitive, cruel nature of the British Empire. And so he's very mixed up in a rich and productive and artistically beneficial way about England. I think you're totally right to say that he both loved it as a kind of haven, exempted from the pressures and the tragedies of European politics in the 1930s, and also thought of it as a kind of prison somewhere. Very insular, to come back to that word that you used, that he had to escape from. So, you know, like a lot of the most important things in a person's life, he was of very Very great ambivalence about what this place that he'd grown up in and identified with and was repelled by and came back to and oscillated away from meant. And that's part of the drama and the story of his life as a poet. And I think if we. I mean, I should say just in passing, but importantly here, that Auden really was focused on England, not the British Isles. And the sensibility that he was digging into and exploring poetically was really Englishness. It wasn't Britishness, it wasn't Welshness or Scottishness or Irishness. It was Englishness, this hegemonic, dominant culture that is somehow, in a lot of accounts of literary history, almost invisible. It's easy to talk about Yeats's Irishness or about the Scottishness of Hugh MacDiarmid, but we found it harder to talk about what does it mean to be an English poet, and what are the costs and limitations of that? I think that's part of what Auden was trying to explore. But more generally, I think anybody who grows up, we all have to grow up somewhere in some kind of community and world. And as we evolve and grow and think and reflect, we come to feel very different things about this world. That at first we're just a given it was the world, and then with more experience, we come to see that. Oh, yeah, it's just a little bit more limited than that. And it has some things I like, maybe some things I love, but also some things I don't like at all or I feel disaffiliated from. And so I think anybody, even if they don't happen to be English, can read Auden's struggles with his identity as an English person, growing up and becoming an artist and writing about England as a kind of parable for whatever their own experiences of community and belonging and disaffiliation had to be.
- [43:07]
Nicholas Jenkins
Did his sexuality. I mean, how did he grapple with that? Because he's also living in a society that has kind of condemned him and the people he loves, and we're not that far beyond the example of Oscar Wilde. And was his conception of England tangled up in his conception of. Well, this is a society that has rejected me and is treating me as an outsider and as a kind of outlaw.
- [43:39]
Ad Read 3
Yeah, I mean, it's a crucial question, and I think it's fascinatingly ambiguous, really. So Robert Medley, who was the boy who inspired Auden to start writing poetry in 1922? They were both at the same school in the countryside in Norfolk on the east coast of England. And Robert Medley, who became a distinguished painter later in his life and who was himself gay, said that and knew Auden very, very well, said that Auden was very clear about his sexuality even as a young man. He didn't really hide it, but he had. Medley said, and this is a quotation from, he had a bad conscience about it. He felt guilty. The world had made him feel guilty about it. It's another of the instances of mixed feelings that filtered into his poetry. And then, as you say, as a poet, Auden had to grapple with this in very artful ways. During the 1930s, when Auden was becoming very well known as a writer very rapidly, there was a lot of blatantly homophobic criticism of Auden in ways that I think now to our eyes, look both not surprising but also still shocking. And Auden had to be very careful not to self convict and not to self convict in a very literal sense. So that he's very particular and meticulous and I would say artful in his poetry about pronouns. It's often impossible to tell with certainty what the gender of the person in an old love poem is. But looking back at his poetry now, what's so striking about it, to me anyway, is how obviously his sexuality comes through in it. It's always there everywhere, as an aura, as a shadow, as an implication. And I'm impressed by the fact that Auden really didn't run away from it. He didn't run away from his sexuality. He found ways to articulate it inside this very judgmental culture, but without ever crossing the line into saying something that was so explicit that somebody could have called him on it. So I think he found ways to live within this fundamentally unjust world. But there's a deeper layer to your question, Jack, that I just want to bring out that I think is profound in what you've articulated for us. And that is, I think Auden had a sense that there was something. He didn't use the term gay. He often uses the term queer. I think there was something that, in his poetry, anyway, Auden is hinting is very queer about Englishness. Like there's actually something very. The most truthful expressions of Englishness are often written by gay or queer people. And of course, that was completely unpalatable to the mainstream world. But part of what impresses me about Auden is his courage as a writer, his unflinching determination to say the thing that seems true, even if he has to say it in a little bit of a coded way. And So I think that Auden occasionally brings up the idea that the deepest truths are often told by people who are in some ways identified as outsiders. He often thought about the First World War poet Wilfred Owen, for example, who was killed in 1918, just at the end of the war, and who was gay and who also finds ways to cipher that into his poetry. But Owen also had a sense, like Auden, of himself as having a central voice in the definition of what Englishness is. I think another person that critics had to tiptoe around was Shakespeare and Shakespeare's sexuality, too. And so Auden had to negotiate the world that he found himself in, but at the same time find ways to say the things that he believed and wanted to feel were true, I would say, amongst his contemporaries or close contemporaries. That was also true of a writer who meant a lot to Auden, the novelist, the M. Forster, who also is constantly bringing up these subjects, but finding ways to cipher them into language that will be acceptable to the mainstream, but nonetheless unmistakable. So these artists, some of the people that I just named, but also centrally Auden, were conflicted, ambivalent, in Auden's case, I think guilty throughout his life about it, he had some very complex theological ideas about his sexuality, but he also put it front and center in his poetry. But you had to look at it with the right kind of eyes to be able to see it. Otherwise, you could ignore it if you wanted to, but that would be your loss if you did.
- [49:02]
Nicholas Jenkins
So what kind of life was he facing in England when he decided to leave? I mean, at that point he had had some success. Was he. Can you tell what sort of future he might have faced? Or was he fleeing something in particular, or why did he leave and what was behind his departure?
- [49:24]
Ad Read 3
Yeah, I mean, I think the whole spread of English culture tells you that it's perfectly possible for gay people to coexist with English culture. There's a huge amount of camp in English culture. Lots of people who became significant artists of Auden's generation stayed behind or returned. The most obvious instance of that being the musician, the composer Benjamin Britten and his love of Peter Pears, who became kind of core pillars of the establishment in the post World War II period. And Britten, of course, finds amazing ways to cipher his sexuality into these works that were at the same time acceptable to English mainstream life. So I don't really think it was to do with Auden's sexuality that drove him to leave England in the later 1930s. I would just, if I was going to try and kind of dramatize it for you in a scene. I would say that it was the future that loomed in front of Auden in 1937, when after he'd been awarded the King's Gold Medal for poetry, which was a new award that was being given out by the new monarch, George vi, Auden, wearing a set of tails that he had to borrow from a friend because he didn't own a set of tails himself, was escorted into Buckingham palace by John Macefield, who was the poet laureate in England at that time. And then he was taken into a room where Masefield and George VI had a brief ceremony where the King presented Auden with a medal. And I think that what we're looking at there in a kind of crystallized dramatic form is Auden's future if he had stayed in England as a member of the establishment. And the one thing that Auden really didn't like was power and authority. And I think he saw himself as being inevitably co opted by the enormously powerful forces of the British establishment. And in fact, in later life, Auden implied very clearly that one of the principal reasons why he left England was to avoid becoming Winston Churchill's poet laureate. So I think he wanted to flee becoming institutionalized as a kind of boring stuffed shirt kind of artist, somebody who was speaking in pompous, official tones on behalf of the nation. I think Auden wanted to be like he said Yeats was by Ireland, hurt into poetry. And he left so that he. Orden left so that he could continue to be hurt into poetry and not just become an official spokesman for the British nation.
- [52:29]
Nicholas Jenkins
So what did England mean for him then when he was gone? I mean, was he looking back and did he have a wave of nostalgia towards it, or was he still uneasy about its role in the world? Or how did he adjust once he was living in America to what England and what it had meant for him?
- [52:51]
Ad Read 3
Well, so I think he probably looked back on it again with a mix of feelings. On the one hand, nostalgic. He did make a lot of trips to England, still had a lot of friends in England after the Second World War, when people were beginning to travel back and forth again, he would make fairly regular stop offs on his way to his holiday homes. First in Italy, in this little island in the Bay of Naples called Ischia, where he had a home for a few years and then he bought a home. It was actually the first home that he ever bought. One of the strange things about a lot of the artistic figures of the middle part of the 20th century is how they weren't homeowners. So ordinani bought a home in Austria right towards the end of his life. But when he was traveling from New York to Italy and then to Austria, he would often start off in England. He would be part of the literary circuit there. He never really stayed very long. And I think he was probably filled with anxiety about Englishness, what English people thought of him, about the forces and pressures that he felt bearing down on himself. In fact, in the 1950s, Auden was elected the professor of Poetry at Oxford. It was a bit of a surprise at the time. He hadn't been expected to win. But one of the things that that meant was when he was elected as professor of poetry for this, I think it was a five year stint, he had to go and give lectures regularly. And he told a friend of his, the poet Steven Spender, that when he was writing his first lecture as professor of Poetry, he was breaking out into sweating fits. He was so upset and anxious about having to go back and stand at the place where he had gone to college himself, Oxford University, and give a lecture to an audience that he probably suspected was quite hostile to him. So he made these flying visits. He continued to sound like a displaced or expatriated English person in his poetry and in his life. But there's never any sense until right at the very end of his life that he wanted to go back and live there. At the same time, I think that he probably felt that part of that blueprint of his imagination have been created by his early life in England, just like all of us find our early lives structuring the way that we see the world, even if it changes somewhat afterwards. And so I think that Auden recognized that for better or worse, and I think he would have thought it was for both. He was still English, but he just wasn't living in England anymore.
- [55:37]
Nicholas Jenkins
I had heard once that he was asked, are you English or American? And his response was, well, go ask T.S. eliot. And whatever he says, I'm the opposite. Which is kind of a glib answer, but it sounds like it would have been a difficult thing for him to answer anyway. In a simple word, he probably would have had to take a lot of time to explain exactly how he felt about being English or being American.
- [56:06]
Ad Read 3
I think you're really right. And I mean, that probably would have been a difficult question for Elliot as well. It is true that people were swapping nationalities at that time. So Elliot became naturalized as a British citizen in 1928, and it was in the 1940s when Orton became a US citizen. So it wasn't like something that had never happened before. So people were also living in this apocalyptic period that we discussed earlier, when it might have seemed very uncertain about a Whether the world was actually going to continue. There might have been a Third World War, a nuclear obliteration, whether countries were going to continue to exist in the form that they had. In 1940, Winston Churchill offered France the union, a political union with Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if France and Britain had become one nation at that time? So I think the whole question of nationality was becoming a very uncertain one. Are we going to continue to have nationalities? Looking back to earlier periods, people didn't really have nationalities. They had local affiliations in the same way. And then part of what the modern world endowed or cursed us with is this sense of being part of a national collective. But maybe that's a very limited historical frame. And Auden, who is such an adventurous and profound thinker, I can imagine thinking that maybe we're all going to cease to be national in the future. So he may have had lots of mixed feelings about it, including thinking that I might see the end of what it means to be a national person myself. As the story turned out, that's not how it really went down. And we've in many ways re embedded and concretized nationality and nationalism in ways that I think we watch playing out today in our contemporary political landscape. But nationality for a while may have been something that might have been about to fade away. It just turned out that history took a different turn.
- [58:25]
Nicholas Jenkins
But what's so interesting about Auden and his poetry is, as you've been saying, he's somebody who not only wrestles with that on kind of a geopolitical scale and a big thinker kind of scale, but also what it would mean for the individual and how identity is shaped and how it feels to be someone who is wrestling with these kinds of questions. And that seems like what you were saying about our shift, kind of the to and fro of our shift pro nationalism and against it. And sometimes it seems like the world is all one big net now, and it's connected in ways that it never was before and the boundaries have fallen. But also you see that turning away from that idea. And it seems like there's material in Auden for us to help us sort through these kinds of questions.
- [59:22]
Ad Read 3
I couldn't agree with you more, Jack. I mean, I think that we see a pendulum swing going back and forth in many different countries between a dream of a borderless world and then a dream of havens and enclaves from the rest of humanity. And we can even see it in a British context with Brexit. Brexit was a turn away from the continent of Europe. It was a re embedding in a national community based on a set of islands. And so the tensions and the difficulties that Auden was exploring in his poetry almost 100 years ago are still resonating through contemporary life. I would say the thing that's really great and convincing about Auden as a writer is that he locates all of these issues not at an abstract level, but in the felt reality of everyday experience. There's a wonderful poem of his from the end of the period that I was writing about in my book where he's on holiday in this poem in a boarding house on another island, an island within an island, so to speak, the Isle of Man, just off the coast of England, between England and island, the country. And it's a poem that begins August for the people in these favorite islands. And it's written as a letter to a friend who's elsewhere. And Auden can feel all the shadows of history looming over this idyllic place. And in fact, some of the people that Auden was on holiday with within a few years would be dead or in prisoner of war camps. Then he has this wonderful last stanza, which I just love to share with you, if I may, where he pulls the poem back to just himself and thinking about the uncertainty of the future. From the narrow window of my fourth floor room I smoke into the night and watch reflections stretch in the harbor, in the houses the little pianos are closed and a clock strikes and all sway forward on the dangerous flood of history that never sleeps or dies and held one moment burns the hand all sway forward on the dangerous flood of history. That's really what Gordon's poetry is afloat on too. Just like we all are on the dangerous flood of history that never sleeps or dies and held one moment burns her hand.
- [62:15]
Nicholas Jenkins
That's a perfect place to end. The book is called the War and Belonging. In Auden's England or in the uk it's the Island WH Auden and the last of Englishness, Nicholas Jenkins. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [62:33]
Ad Read 3
Jack, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
- [62:42]
Jack Wilson
And finally today, since we are on the subject of Italian or we were at the beginning, let's check in with our guests from episode 595. Gabriele Pedula, who was here to discuss Machiavelli. After we looked at the bonds of politics and the author of the Prince, I asked Gabriele this special question.
- [63:09]
Nicholas Jenkins
Okay.
- [63:10]
Jack Wilson
I'm joined now by Professor Gabriele Pedula, an expert in Italian literature and the author of the book on Niccolo Machiavelli. Gabriele, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [63:31]
Gabriele Pedula
I will say that it's too early to answer this question.
- [63:36]
Jack Wilson
You're too young.
- [63:38]
Gabriele Pedula
It is never too early. I know. It is never too early. I would. I was joking. Okay, I think I will go for A book does not exist yet. Or at least that I do not know yet. Let me think. I would like to be surprised, for sure. I mean, for the last time, I would like to be surprised.
- [63:59]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [64:00]
Gabriele Pedula
And possibly I'd like a very earthly human book, sort of hymn to transiency, maybe.
- [64:09]
Jack Wilson
Oh, a hymn to transiency, okay.
- [64:13]
Nicholas Jenkins
Of human life.
- [64:14]
Gabriele Pedula
Yes, exactly. Human experience of being.
- [64:18]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. What form do you think it'll come in? Do you think it'll be. It almost sounds like maybe a book of poetry. Or are you thinking more of an essay or.
- [64:29]
Gabriele Pedula
I go for a novel.
- [64:31]
Jack Wilson
A novel? Yeah. Okay.
- [64:33]
Gabriele Pedula
A long novel. If it must be my last book. A very long novel.
- [64:38]
Jack Wilson
Very long novel.
- [64:39]
Gabriele Pedula
Yes. In many volumes.
- [64:41]
Jack Wilson
Many volumes. But all about the impermanency of things.
- [64:45]
Gabriele Pedula
Exactly.
- [64:48]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
- [64:48]
Nicholas Jenkins
Gabrieli Pedula, thank you so much for.
- [64:51]
Jack Wilson
Joining me on the history of literature.
- [64:53]
Gabriele Pedula
Thank you.
- [64:54]
Ad Read 3
Bye.
- [65:01]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. A hymn to transiency in the form of a novel. I would look forward to reading that as well. My thanks to Gabriele Pedula and Nicholas Jenkins for joining me today and to all of you for joining me as well. We will be hearing a special story by Nathaniel Hawthorne read by a special guest next week. And between now and then, we have Lev Grossman talking about King Arthur and some literary journeys with a beautiful coffee table book. Put it on your wish list. You'll hear all about it on Thursday. James Baldwin with Colm Toy Bean is around the corner. And I think we're traveling to Ireland. Re traveling to Ireland. Let's say after that that one is by popular listener request. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [66:32]
Ad Read 4
I did consider Barney a friend, and he's still a friend to this day.
- [66:35]
Nicholas Jenkins
The idea of Barney is something that.
- [66:39]
Ad Read 3
I want to live up to. You know I love you, you love me. I call it the Purple Mantra.
- [66:46]
Jack Wilson
Barney taught me how to be a man.
- [66:50]
Ad Read 1
Generation Barney A podcast about the media.
- [66:52]
Ad Read 3
We loved as kids and how it shapes us.
- [66:55]
Ad Read 1
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [67:03]
J
From Academy Award winning actor Matthew McConaughey's soulful and humorous picture book to New York Times best selling author Kristin Hannah's the Women Moms don't have Time to Read Books is an author interview podcast. Unlike any Interview Other In 30 minutes or less, each episode of this chart topping and Webby Award winning show dives deep beneath the COVID fostering friendship and camaraderie, support and curiosity, connection and compassion. Hosted by me, Zibby Owens, author, bookstore owner and head of what the LA Times called the Zibby Verse, Moms don't have Time to Read Books has something for everyone, whether you're a mom like like me or simply a busy reader. So don't miss out. Follow Moms don't have Time to Read Books on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now. New episodes are released every weekday, bringing books to life.