For Nicholas Jenkins, WH Auden’s piercingly brilliant early poems emerge in the devastated wake of the first World War. Although it is absent as a named subject, war is presented as the crucial illuminating backdrop and shaping context for the poems, penetrating his home life and education. Auden’s doctor father served in Gallipoli, while Auden’s schools trained the young men whose numbers were more than decimated by the war.
Jenkins shows that Auden understood the link between pride-in-place and the postwar power of “national socialism”. Auden was a poet of English towns and the countryside – he only ever lived in London for a few months – and his poems somehow avoid the heritage industry version of the nation, charting the resonant depths of moors and valleys pockmarked by industrial interventions, places he walked as a schoolboy and student. The poems were hugely successful and admired, but in a key scene, Auden borrows appropriate clothes to receive, at the age of 31, the king’s gold medal for poetry, and realises almost simultaneously that he must leave England if he is to remain alive as a writer.
Away from the broad sweep of his argument, however, Jenkins struggles with Auden’s necessarily hermetic love life. His discoveries about Auden’s sexual activity – as a schoolboy with a vicar and teachers, with a landlady, with his older brother, with prostitutes and with his own students – are sensational, but as a critic he seems poorly equipped to discuss them. Rather than contextualisation of the lives of gay middle-class men in the 1920s and 1930s, Jenkins offers doggedly Freudian readings of individual poems, ignoring what is now in plain sight.
Despite this, Jenkins is an enthusiastic advocate for a poet whose originality and line-by-line intelligence are still an inspiration: at a time when nationalism and identity politics permeated the arts, he believed “the poet’s sympathies are always with the enemy” and defiantly if inaccurately reimagined England as “This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp, / The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea”. When, at the end of Jenkins’ study, Auden notices how quickly he is co-opted into nativist narratives, he too leaves for “exile-crowded seas”.
John McAuliffe’s new poetry collection, National Theatre, will be published this autumn
