Described as 'a biography of a poem', Ian Sansom's contribution to Auden Studies should concentrate more on the poem and the poet. From the start, he is also writing about himself writing the book. That it took 25 years and was part of a personal Auden obsession is fine but, having told us in an introduction, that was all that was necessary.The analysis of the poem begins with the first word, ' I ', and a routine discussion of to what extent the ' I ' in a poem refers to the author. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't but in a 'biography of a poem' the biography of the biographer is intrusive, especially when it is to this extent. Ian Sansom is relentlessly self-deprecating and insists that he is 'not W.H. Auden' but that only begs the question of who ever thought he might be.
That having been said, the book arrived on Saturday lunchtime and its 300 short pages had been read by Sunday evening which is always a good sign. It is very readable if outlining several fairly standard ideas about poetry along the way and, as he says, is more for a general reader than the Auden scholar.
Once it begins to make its way through the poem, stanza by stanza, each of them consisting of a nine-line sentence, he provides some worthwhile commentary.
There would be nothing wrong with taking the poem word by word. Brodsky does that with a Hardy poem to great effect. Having discussed the first word, he moves on to the second, 'sit', which signals a laudable thoroughness to come. Of course that level of detailed analysis can't be sustained but he takes useful detours into the likes of 'dive', Linz, Thucydides and skyscrapers before arriving at the memorable climax.
Sansom acknowledges the authoritative work by John Fuller and Edward Mendelson and his book will do its readers a service if it directs them to those. A significant percentage of the text is taken up with quotes from Auden himself, other commentators and a good selection from Sansom's wide, and adjacent, reading. A number of times he relates his point to the book he is currently reading. It seems he gets through a lot of reading, which he clearly does, but then one remembers the book was written over 25 years.
The central, famous point about the poem is how Auden changed the crucial line,
We must love one another or die.
then removed the whole stanza and then disowned the whole poem.
Sansom might have investigated the motives behind that decision in more detail, even if it were only speculation. Apparently he said it was 'dishonest' because we must die anyway but that has never seemed to me the import of the original line.
The specific dating of the poem in the title refers to something immediate. 'We must love one another or die' is a choice to be made in the moment, not over the rest of our lives. It can't be beyond our notice that Europe, and the world, has been moving disturbingly to the right in recent years. Whether that trend can be halted before history repeats itself remains to be seen. But Auden was a great reviser. It might have been better if he had been a painter and once a canvas had been sold he couldn't return to it because it was on somebody else's wall.
Sansom provides a credible summary of Auden's 'afterlife', from Four Weddings and a Funeral, the reaction to 9/11 and times when his lines have gone beyond the insular world of 'poetry' to illustrate one of the reasons why he is ahead of the more frugal and stringent Elizabeth Bishop in my own thoughts about the Greatest Poet of the C20th.
In one of those paradoxes that both sum up and beset one's thinking, sincerity is not essential to poetry, Auden wrote that The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning and yet he withdrew September 1, 1939 because he didn't like it anymore. And, this from a man who struggled with a sort of Christian belief as a framework for his admirable anti-fascist morality and yet lived, with a chronically dissipated Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and others in a house that Peter Pears decsribed as 'sordid beyond belief', which may or may not have been what the gospels recommended. It is only natural to prefer the louche, liberal Auden to the dry, consistently high-minded Eliot.
Sansom ends by saying,
Maybe now I can begin.
He has led us through he own purging process and the book he should have written is the one he is in a position to write now, having thrown this one away. He has become more impressive as he has progressed towards a quick summary of those who have said they don't like poetry, including Marianne Moore's poem, I, too, dislike it.
He says he thoroughly dislikes it, in the first instance,
Because poetry embarrasses and humiliates us.
But he might have that the wrong way round. He must be thinking of 'great poetry' and feeling inadequate before it.
I don't like poetry because 90% or more of that which gets written is no good. The remaining 5% or so is tremendous but it's the words I like, not necessarily their authors. Most cricket is rubbish, too, but not Ben Stokes or Jofra Archer.
Ian Sansom does a good job on 'affirming flames' and finds some release in having finished his book. But the book is a disappointment, as befits Ian's beta-male mindset. It's as if he set out in craven, supplicant fashion to provide a superior fanzine. I might have been more sympathetic if he had left himself out and concentrated on the objective job he set himself.
It doesn't help that I recently read Ian Bostridge's book on Schubert's Winterreise, which is quite possibly the best book I've ever read. How far you get in the Cup depends on who you get drawn against in the early rounds.
