Ode to Autumn Journal

I thought this year I'd join my friend in his annual reading of Autumn Journal. I bought mine several years ago in Chichester and began it on the station waiting for the train back but as with so many books these days I remember being impressed by it but not much else about it.

It might almost be where Auden took his later, more discursive style from. In some ways it seems more Audenesque than MacNeice-ish if we concentrate on the long lines, the extended meditation, the political tenor and tendency towards something mildly didactic. Like Auden often does, he takes a wide perspective but his concern is above all for the ordinary. 'Society', for want of a better word, is a bigger thing than the individuals with their selfish priorities who don't appreciate that the best thing we have is each other, not ourselves,

                                a monologue

Is the death of the language and that a single lion

    Is less himself, or alive, than a dog and another dog.

 

He's also dubious about his dubious status,

As it is, the so-called humane studies

    May lead to cushy jobs

But leave the men who land them spiritually bankrupt

    Intellectual snobs.

 

And,

     I hasten to explain

That having once been to the University of Oxford

    You can never really again

Believe anything that anyone says and that of course is an asset

    In a world like ours;

The rhymes might be prominent in those lines but for the most part they can pass unobtrusively, as part of the design but not dominating the sound like an C18th poem. I can see why it's a book one would return to. There's room in it, a finely-tuned 'voice' and attitude at work and, as work of significance is often said to, it comes from a time of some historical importance as well as from the time when Auden was also doing his best work and doing equally well, in Musée des Beaux Arts, at rhyming discreetly.

Also in common with that, what Autumn Journal recognizes is the worth of everyday life when it is threatened by a crisis like the ominous prospect of war or the misadventure of flying too close to the sun. The relatively mundane is much under-rated.

It's a bit of a stretch, perhaps, to make much of parallels with Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had precious little opportunity to enjoy ordinariness. At last, I've got myself a copy of the late stories, Apricot Jam (Canongate, 2011). A battered copy but cheap and it's the words inside I want it for.

To simplify Sozhenitsyn down to one sentence, his theme is that of the title of his play Candle in the Wind. The precarious commodity of 'life' is the candle and the wind, in his case, is the Soviet regime, mostly in the personality of Stalin, but the metaphor can be extended for personal use to any such life-reducing system which we may think of as religion, doctrine or institutions like Catholicism, libertarianism, campus Marxism - to name a few of my own- that go too far in imposing their supposedly well-intentioned gospels onto their long-suffering subjects. 

Solzhenitsyn had something to write about but could hardly be expected to write about anything else. He couldn't be expected to take time out to reflect on a painting by Brueghel, the night an imaginary fox appeared to him while he was writing or that when he was old he would wear purple. Whether he wanted to or not I don't know but he had more pressing concerns. His writing makes the subject matter of writers who lived in less demanding times seem a bit superfluous but on the other hand it is that they should have the opportunity to do so that concerns him. As it is, it's grim but we need to know.

What Nastenka realizes in what is possibly the best of these stories is that,

poets and writers did not create their works guided by free inspiration: though the writers themselves might have been unaware of it, unwittingly but objectively they were fulfilling someone else's command.

Solzhenitsyn might have Socialist Realism and the sort of censorship that Shostakovich was subject to, but subtly subverted, in mind there but it's an idea that can be extended to apply further afield. We all comply to some expectations whether we think they're of our own choosing or not. 'Freedom' is an illusory thing and although we surely have more of it than artists in the USSR did, it becomes a banal and treacherous word when used by Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg to promote their cynical agendas.

 

What middle-blass twits we are

To imagine for one second

That our privileged ideals

Are divine wisdom,

said Derek Mahon in Afterlives, although I don't think it says 'twits' in the version he first wrote and meant.

And how privileged we are to be able to enjoy the luxuries of Dr. Johnson nearly 240 years since he departed this life. He set some sort of standard of how to read, and write about, other writers. My copy of The Lives of the Poets, a Selection arrived yesterday, all pristine and gorgeous and with a few more lives and a different editor than the library's edition.

I'm glad to see John Mullan's introduction saying much what I've said below. Maybe I get a B+.

I'm glad to see Johnson is supposed to be funny but also so many other things that he knew all that time ago that not everybody seems to know now.

Johnson is 'unenchanted' by the writers he writes about,

In a 'Rambler' essay he noted how disappointment was the likely reflex of any admiring reader who discovered something of the life of the writer.

Yes, I know, with special reference to the letters of Thom Gunn and James Joyce but not only them. Of course, the writing and the writer are two different things. A widespread assumption that Shakespeare was a great human being is based solely upon him being ostensibly a great writer but that is no evidence at all. And, as elsewhere below here, Johnson 'ruefully catalogues the occupational delusions of authors' which he knows because he is one and, ever more gladly, both Prof. Mullan and now I can re-echo these thoughts, appreciating that Johnson 'found fault' with iconic poets so that future generations might imitate only those features of their work that fitted with his prescriptive recipe for poetry and avoid the failings.

'The corrosive influence of patronage', the fall-out from the difficult relationship between writing and money and Johnson's natural scepticism are all succinctly summarized by Mullan, of who I could read plenty more but it's Johnson who we admire for being who he was and the Lives is a sort of scripture for those who would write about poetry and I'm confidently expecting more of the same from the Essays.