Areas of Darkness

In October 1939, Hitler gave a speech in the Reichstag and pronounced: ‘There are no more islands today’. Even though the statement is almost parenthetical in Nicholas Jenkins’s magnificent account of Auden’s early years, it might be taken as the expression of a worldview that the young poet did everything in his power to reject.

In isolation, the quote sounds benign, akin to our prevailing sentiment that, for reasons involving technology, commerce and geopolitics, no nation stands alone. In the Führer’s throat, however, it was a repudiation of islands, one in particular – and a warning that they were about to become annexed or annihilated. Through an adroit reading of the Auden canon from 1922 to 1937, Jenkins shows that the early poems were not only prophetic in outlook; they marked an exploration of national identity – of what it meant to be English between the wars.

Auden, Isaiah Berlin remarked in 1935, was ‘fundament-
ally a patriotic poet’. In the same sentence, quoted in The Island, Berlin conceded that Auden wrote ‘most eloquently when vaguely fascist’. He may have been referring to a work such as The Orators (1932), in one section of which the speaker assumes the role of a drillmaster giving a prize-day speech:

Draw up a list of rotters and slackers, of prescribed persons under headings like this. Committees for municipal or racial improvement – the headmaster. Disbelievers in the occult – the school chaplain. The bogusly cheerful – the games master – the really disgusted – the teacher of modern languages. All these have got to die without issue.

Even Auden, in a later preface to the book, acknowledged that its author sounded like ‘someone talented but near to the border of sanity, who might well, in a year or two, become a Nazi’.

Yet this was written in 1965. The Island manages, against all odds, to lend a fresh and varied perspective to Auden’s early poems by applying social and intellectual history, psychoanalytical theory (Jenkins is an unabashed Freudian) and archival resourcefulness to illumine their local details. ‘Local’ is the operative word. Rather than conflate Auden’s Englishness with a trite jingoism or interrogate the young poet’s stance within a post-Brexit framework, Jenkins dwells lovingly on images, metaphors and figures of speech within the poems. He connects these elements to themes from Auden’s readings, prose writings, dreams and family history.

There is, for example, Jenkins’s treatment of the poem beginning ‘Who stands, the crux left of the watershed’ (later published as ‘The Watershed’), which he rightly calls ‘indeed a “watershed” moment in Auden’s career’. Jenkins dramatizes the asymmetrical break in this blank-verse poem of thirty lines. The first verse paragraph, he notes, carries the assured tones of a mountain guide, ‘someone who has a mastery of visual specifics and local lore’. It is a lofty, privileged position, from which the speaker can survey ‘dismantled washing-floors’, ‘snatches of tramline’ and ‘a ramshackle engine’ – all symbols of a post-industrial England that were to become co-opted by the ‘Pylon Poets’ tag he would share with Spender, MacNeice and Day Lewis.

This much we know already. But Jenkins helpfully contrasts the first and second parts of the poem, showing how the confident speaker who earlier had appraised, with equanimity, ‘an industry already comatose’, is himself weighed and rebuked in the second stanza:

Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock,
Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:
This land, cut off, will not communicate […]

‘Now, eerily, the country itself seems to speak, rejecting the stranger’s attempt to know the land or its people’, Jenkins writes. His analysis extends to comparing the line ‘Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall’ with the entry of an automobile in the oeuvre of a quintessentially English poet: Thomas Hardy, whose poem ‘Nobody Comes’ (1924) apprehends a car’s ‘lamps full-glare, / That flash upon a tree’. The nocturnal setting of this part of Auden’s lyric evokes, according to Jenkins, ‘an entirely conjectural and conditional inner journey with a spectral, unreal quality’.

But the fissure between the first and second parts of ‘The Watershed’ is not limited to a psychological or erotic disturbance. For Jenkins, the poem chronicles ‘class division, unrequited longing, emotional alienation, and a culture broken apart’. At the same time, he notes an ‘uncontaminated self-sufficiency of this world’ – this island – as affirmed by ‘the poem’s last seven lines’, which form ‘a beautiful, right-hanging chain of nouns: wall, wind, sea, elm, spring, grass, and danger’.

Thus, when it comes to England at large, or the concept of ‘Englishness’ (a term which, Jenkins relates, was absent from poetry and novels before 1900), Auden’s alternating modes of belonging and estrangement signify larger vacillations within the nation’s consciousness in the decade before the
Second World War. Jenkins is adept at measuring the wreckage of the First World War in terms of the wounded civic and interior landscapes that Auden and his peers had to navigate while growing up. These areas of darkness find expression in all those abandoned mines in the early poems. More revealing still is Jenkins’s placement of Auden’s father, a doctor whose wartime service ripped him away from his son for years, as central to the poet’s development.

The Island portrays many of Auden’s extra-literary activities throughout the 1930s as attempts to mitigate these personal and national traumas. His uninhibited pursuit of gay sex and love in Berlin (‘Although landlocked, Berlin is a kind of island’, Jenkins writes); his headlong affair with a schoolboy student, Michael Yates; his commitment to marry Erika Mann and rescue her from Nazi Germany (a gesture that Jenkins characterizes as not ‘purely a question of altruism’) – all these exploits are cast as reconciliatory and healing influences.

If we as readers go the distance with Jenkins, it is because he has convinced us by giving unstinting care to the poems. By the late 1930s, these no longer could be circumscribed by the myths and dramas of an island nation. As Auden came to realize, his art and gift were far more absorbent than he had credited, primed to confront any crisis in his past or future. As he would write later, from another country, ‘All I have is a voice’. In other words, Auden was island enough.