I was a chapter or two into The Island: WH Auden and the Last Of Englishness before I recognised the coincidence. The author, an Associate Professor of English at Stanford, shares his name with the narrator of Antony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Both works cover a similar period (although Powell starts earlier and finishes later) and both deal (although in very different ways) with a sense of national identity.
Despite my admiration for both Auden and Powell, I hadn’t until this point thought of the two writers in the same breath. They occupied different rooms in the same mansion, but never met. In this mansion, there was no common room, no common ground.
I was attracted to Auden by his left-wing, quasi-Marxist politics. The poems which I knew by heart were the poems he later repudiated: Spain, of course, and September 1, 1939.
My admiration for Powell is for the wry, sardonic observations of society. Powell’s Nick Jenkins is a sponge, an everyman who watches and listens.
What they have in common is a focus on the nature of Englishness. Powell’s sequence is a study of English society and politics. Auden’s earlier work is self-consciously English, and self-consciously social.
“What’s become of Wystan?” asked Larkin. And so did I as a teenager, working his way through the self-consciously clever later poems.
I wish that Nick Jenkins had encountered an Auden, perhaps in a version of La Bas’s House at Gresham’s. But there is no character that can be linked to Auden, nor indeed any of the poets we would associated with “The Thirties”. (Actually, I seem to remember reading somewhere that aspects of Mark Members are “suggestive” of Stephen Spender.)
We do not know how Powell would have fictionalised Auden. Or why he chose not to use Auden.
They knew each other. Powell felt betrayed by the emigration to the US of Auden and Isherwood. Where Evelyn Waugh mocked him, referring to the two emigrants as Parsnip and Pimpernell, Powell was unforgiving.
The name Auden did not pass his lips again. Auden was, forever, “that shit”.
Which, when one comes to think of it, is a very English response.
Today from the everysmith vaults: Prompted by the musings above, I am playing The Capriol Suite by Peter Warlock, AKA Maclintick.
Despite my admiration for both Auden and Powell, I hadn’t until this point thought of the two writers in the same breath. They occupied different rooms in the same mansion, but never met. In this mansion, there was no common room, no common ground.
I was attracted to Auden by his left-wing, quasi-Marxist politics. The poems which I knew by heart were the poems he later repudiated: Spain, of course, and September 1, 1939.
My admiration for Powell is for the wry, sardonic observations of society. Powell’s Nick Jenkins is a sponge, an everyman who watches and listens.
What they have in common is a focus on the nature of Englishness. Powell’s sequence is a study of English society and politics. Auden’s earlier work is self-consciously English, and self-consciously social.
“What’s become of Wystan?” asked Larkin. And so did I as a teenager, working his way through the self-consciously clever later poems.
I wish that Nick Jenkins had encountered an Auden, perhaps in a version of La Bas’s House at Gresham’s. But there is no character that can be linked to Auden, nor indeed any of the poets we would associated with “The Thirties”. (Actually, I seem to remember reading somewhere that aspects of Mark Members are “suggestive” of Stephen Spender.)
We do not know how Powell would have fictionalised Auden. Or why he chose not to use Auden.
They knew each other. Powell felt betrayed by the emigration to the US of Auden and Isherwood. Where Evelyn Waugh mocked him, referring to the two emigrants as Parsnip and Pimpernell, Powell was unforgiving.
The name Auden did not pass his lips again. Auden was, forever, “that shit”.
Which, when one comes to think of it, is a very English response.
Today from the everysmith vaults: Prompted by the musings above, I am playing The Capriol Suite by Peter Warlock, AKA Maclintick.
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