The lives of others: Auden and biography

“Biography enchains the heart 

by irresistible interest.”

Samuel Johnson, Rambler 60 

W. H. Auden agreed with Walt Whitman’s scepticism in Leaves of Grass : “When I read the book, the biography famous, / And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?”  Humphrey Carpenter’s Preface to his Life of Auden (1981) quotes the poet’s moralistic opposition to the revelation of private life in literary biography:

Biographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.  

A writer is a maker, not a man of action.  To be sure, some, in a sense all, of his works are transmutations of his personal experiences, but no knowledge of the raw ingredients will explain the peculiar flavour of the verbal dishes he invites the public to taste: his private life is, or should be, of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.

Carpenter adds: “He was also (he said) opposed in principle to the publication of, or quotation from, a writer’s letters after his death, which he declared was just as dishonourable  as reading someone’s private correspondence while he was out of the room.  As to literary biographers, he branded them as, in the mass, ‘gossip-writers and voyeurs calling themselves scholars.’ ”  He asked “his friends to burn any of his letters that they might have kept, when they had ‘done with them,’ and should on no account show them to anyone else . . . in order ‘to make a biography impossible.’ ”

But Auden’s diktat has important qualifications.  If, as he concedes, all a poet’s works are based on personal experience, his private life must be of great interest to his readers.  Reading biographies is a literary, not a moral, choice.  There’s surely a vast difference between betraying a friend’s hospitality by prying into his private letters, and reading them when they’ve been publicly printed in a book.  Few friends complied with his wishes to burn his valuable letters.  Using his convenient escape clause, they held them until they were “done with them”—and kept them forever.  His strictures did not make a biography impossible; three lives of Auden have already been published (along with many memoirs) and more will inevitably follow.  

Auden’s attraction to and enthusiasm about diaries, letters and biographies in his numerous book reviews contradict his apparent hostility and personal prohibitions.  He states that “the business of the reviewer is to describe the contents of the books he reviews and to appraise their value.”  But he leaves out the most important element: to use his expertise to increase our knowledge of the subject.  His definition of how prose should be written—“the reader does not notice it any more than a man looking through a window at the landscape outside notices the glass”—comes straight from George Orwell’s observation in “Why I Write”: “Good prose is like a window pane.”

Though adamantly opposed to personal revelations, Auden sometimes exposes his youthful feelings and allows us to intrude on his own privacy.  At school he felt “grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. . . . He imagined that this arrangement was part of the eternal scheme of things, that he was doomed to a life of failure and envy. . . . I was unhappily in love—but because I half suspected that my own nature was both colder and more mercurial, I envied those who found it easy to feel deeply.”  He incongruously adds, “I cannot write objectively about Thomas Hardy because I was once in love with him,” and then proceeds to write subjectively about him.  Though he reviews many modern poets, Auden exposes his own prejudice and undermines his authority by confessing, “Poets are notoriously unreliable in their judgments on their contemporaries, being preoccupied with their own work and often as jealous of rivals as children.”

Writing in the 1950s and 1960s when the prevailing New Criticism considered biography irrelevant, Auden begins his recurrent onslaught by expressing regret that “knowing what a man is ‘really’ like has come to mean knowing his defects and weaknesses. . . . If the Muses could lobby for their interest, all biographical research into the lives of artists would probably be prohibited by law.”  But he soon contradicts this by admitting, paradoxically, that natural curiosity interests serious readers in gossipy books: “This trashingly written and exceedingly readable biography leaves us with considerable respect for its subject and little for its author either as a man or a literary gent.”  Auden unfairly attributes prurient motives to the naturally curious readers, and falsely claims that they shamefully admire the great man’s faults in order to absolve their own defects.  He dislikes the reader “who wishes to know every detail of their author’s private life, including those details and traits of which he himself is most ashamed.”  But it is precisely the vivid and sometimes negative personal details that make James Boswell’s Life of Johnson the greatest biography ever written.

In many reviews Auden fights a hopeless rearguard action against the modern biographer’s desire, beginning with Lytton Strachey’s irreverent Eminent Victorians (1918), to reveal the truth.  His review of Cesare Pavese’s Diaries yearns for the long-lost Victorian censorship and tries to impose his own prudish morality on contemporary readers.  He condemns diaries that “reveal a person’s secret weakness and shame.  In the good old days, a dead man’s literary executors destroyed or erased passages in his private papers which they thought discreditable to his memory. . . . About such unhappy matters we do not or ought not to want to know.”  

But we have now abandoned their old iconoclastic values and outworn creed.  Everyone now mourns the loss of Byron’s precious memoirs, burned by his mindless executors.  Auden praises those readers who avert their eyes and don’t want to know, and denies the natural interest of those who do .  Everyone reading Pavese’s Diaries would surely want to know why he committed suicide, and Auden’s offhand remark “he ran into bad girl-trouble”, merely arouses our curiosity.

In a Savonarola-like bonfire of the vanities, Auden claims that “it would have been very much better if three-quarters of Beethoven’s correspondence had been destroyed by its recipients [as he himself had requested] immediately after reading it”.  He believes it is “immoral” to publish “letters which are to the writer’s discredit, which reveal the flaws and weaknesses in his character and his private sufferings. . . . What profit is it to us that we should learn ugly little secrets about  another human being?”  It’s obvious, however, that censorship and whitewashing give a false and useless impression, and that it’s essential to learn the truth about a great man and to see how he overcame his all-too-human weaknesses.

Auden could declare, like Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.”  In his “In Defence of Gossip” he lets his guard down and confesses, “Let’s be honest.  When you open your newspaper . . . what do you look at?  Why, gossip columns!”  Biography, he concedes, “can also afford the reader a certain guilty enjoyment, like reading the News of the World, if the facts revealed are sufficiently spicy.”  

Egoism, Auden admits, also attracts readers to biography: “Self-love must always make us interested in the lives of the obscure of another historical period. . . . Our first question is: ‘What should I have done if I’d been there?’  We want to know what kind of job we should have had, how much money we should have made, what we should have eaten, what hobbies we should have taken up, what sort of things would have irritated or amused us.”

Like a prosecutor granting merciful exceptions, Auden admits that if the process of creative work in the scientist and the artist are strikingly similar, “then lives of the poets are certainly worth writing. . . . The study of the poet’s biography or psychology or social status cannot explain why he writes well, but it can help us to understand why his poetry is of a particular kind”—which surely justifies a biography.

Despite his severe strictures, Auden validates the biographies of three representative major authors who had tormented or extraordinary lives: “The artists whom we want to know personally, and [Gerard Manley] Hopkins is one, are those whose relation to their art is romantically difficult, full of rows, infidelities, miscarriages, strain.”  The same is true, of course, of Poe, Rimbaud and many other agonised writers. 

He argues that Joseph Hone’s life of W.B. Yeats “is important because it is an amusing, detailed and unbiased account of an individual who was a part of the consciousness of his age, which cannot be understood without him.”  According to Auden, Yeats now explains his era just as his era explains Yeats.  Franz Kafka also merits special attention and gets a free pass: “In the case of the ordinary novelist or playwright, a knowledge of his personal life and character contributes almost nothing to one’s understanding of his work, but in the case of a writer of parables like Kafka, biographical information is, I believe, a great help.”  But Kafka is certainly not the only great exception.  Knowledge of an author’s life contributes a great deal, not “almost nothing,” to an understanding of his art.  

Like a slave throwing off his shackles, Auden proceeds to admire the very genre he’s been attacking, and undermines his own argument by praising letters, diaries and biographies.  The correspondence of Yeats, “a man of genius who has varied and exciting experiences, cannot fail to contain many good things.”  Thinking of his own operatic collaboration with Igor Stravinsky on The Rake’s Progress, he allows that the letters of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal are a “striking example [that provides] a detailed record” of their collaboration on Der Rosenkavalier and other great operas.  Their correspondence is “so fascinating and so important for the light it sheds…upon a kind of human relationship about which we know all too little”—and want to know more. Stressing impersonality rather than self-revelation, he maintains, “The great masters of letter-writing as an art have probably been more concerned with entertaining their friends than disclosing their innermost thoughts and feelings.”  But this is certainly not true of the greatest letter-writers: among them Byron, Keats and D.H. Lawrence.

Auden believes that Stendhal’s Diaries present an unusual challenge: “A man who was either really paranoid or obsessed with playing the role of a paranoid would have kept his diaries locked up. . . . How are we, then, to take Stendhal, who excites the hypothetical snooper to read his diary by warning him not to?”  But few writers are real or pretentious paranoids, and Stendhal’s admonition is an obvious ploy to arouse his reader’s interest.  Unlike the bold Stendhal, Auden wants to puritanically deny the reader one of the great pleasures, which he shares, of reading biographies: the satisfaction of natural curiosity.

Abandoning his condemnation as the scales drop from his eyes, Auden also praises many literary biographies.  Leslie Marchand’s three volumes on Byron are “as fascinating to read as they are informative.”  James Clifford’s biography of Samuel Johnson shows “by skillful documentation in a most interesting way how early in life both his critical attitudes and his style were formed.”  Auden quotes Johnson on the Swiss theologian Jean-Pierre de Crousaz—“he lets nonsense pass without censure: Can anything consume and nourish at the same time?”—and both writers surprisingly miss the allusion to Shakespeare’s description of love in Sonnet 73: “Consumed by that which it was nourished by.”  

Ernest Jones’ The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Auden writes, is “a biography of the first rank.”  Alluding to the paradoxical phrase in Shakespeare’s As You Like It —“the truest poetry is the most feigning” [false]—Auden adds, “since the work of the artist is openly subjective, a ‘feigned’ history, what matters is not what happened to him but what he has made his experiences into.”  Yet everyone, of course, wants to know the exact nature of the original experiences that inspired this art.

Granting, at last, that the story of a poet’s life would be worthwhile, Auden explains what such a book should achieve.  The biography of an artist “traces the steps by which a person realises his latent possibilities and finally succeeds in becoming what from the beginning he desired or was meant to be. . . . The main interest lies in the decisions taken by himself, in watching how he surmounts obstacles and seizes opportunities and thus makes his own history.”

Since Auden took obvious pleasure in reading biographies, why did he so often disdain them?  He was mainly and self-defensively opposed to this genre because he didn’t want his homosexuality to be publicly exposed.  He reviewed at least a dozen books by and about homosexuals, including Hopkins, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Jean Cocteau, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch and John Ashbery.  But except for veiled hints in his notices of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Oscar Wilde, Frederick Rolfe, A.E. Housman and Constantine Cavafy, he rarely mentions the love that dare not speak its name.  Writing about Wilde and perhaps thinking about himself, he makes the unconvincing generalisation: “a person with a need to be loved universally is frequently homosexual.”  He then self-reflectively adds that Wilde’s ideal is a world “with plenty of sunshine and lots of yummy scantily-clad teenagers who can’t say No”.  “Yummy” is camp; “can’t say No” alludes to a song about a sexually available girl.  

Auden thinks that A.J.A. Symons’ “fascinating biography” of Rolfe provides great pleasure and (using a favorite diagnostic last word) gives the voyeuristic reader the “interesting experience of knowing that he is looking at the world through the eyes of a homosexual paranoid.”  He states that “whenever Housman  tried to disguise himself as somebody else, as a heterosexual rustic or a soldier, the result was, poetically, a failure.”  He quotes the poem in which an innocent young man is sent to prison “for the colour of his hair,” a euphemism for being indelibly queer.  Auden says that Housman’s couplet of bitter renunciation that puns on “lie”—“Where you would not, lie you must, / Lie you must and not with me”—“is as much the expression of an aggressive vengeance on ‘hearts that loved me not again’ as it is one of sympathetic regret.”  Auden  unconvincingly claims that his interpretation is based solely on the poem, though he was well aware of Housman’s secret life.  Surrendering to what he calls “prurient curiosity,” he “fears that most of us have wondered, like E.M. Forster, ‘whether Professor Housman ever tasted of those stolen waters which he recommends so ardently to others.’. . . The most plausible, to my mind, is that he did not.”  Auden’s speculation was right.  Housman was homosexual, but his great love, Moses Jackson, was not.  Housman displaced his thwarted passion on to the vilification of his academic rivals and enemies.

Auden is most revealing about his attitude toward sex in his long Introduction to The Complete Poems of Cavafy (1961).  He states that the Greek poet (1862-1933) was frank about his sexual tastes, physically but not emotionally satisfied and surprisingly without guilt:

Cavafy was a homosexual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal the fact. . . . As a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest.  He neither bowdlerizes nor glamorizes nor giggles.  The erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs.  Love, there, is rarely more than physical passion, and when tenderer emotions do exist, they are almost always one-sided.  At the same time, he refuses to pretend that his memories of moments of sensual pleasure are unhappy or spoiled by feelings of guilt.

But Cavafy’s poem “The Beginning,” for example, does express his guilt:

The fulfillment of their deviate, sensual delight

is done.  They rose from the mattress,

and they dress hurriedly without speaking.

They leave the house separately, furtively; and as

they walk somewhat uneasily on the street, it seems

as if they suspect that something about them betrays

into what kind of bed they fell a little while back.

The Alexandria of Cavafy’s day in practice had a much more tolerant attitude toward homosexuality than England, where it was a crime until 1967.  Still, the male lovers remain silent, sneak out, stride uneasily and fear they’ll be betrayed by their guilty sensuality.  Instead of a tender embrace, they have a frantic tumble and a sad farewell.

Auden’s comments on the pioneering biographer Samuel Johnson reveal that he saw life-writing as a potentially dangerous attack on his worst personal qualities: “If I were to see a new volume about myself, I should, of course, at first be delighted, but how, I wonder, should I feel if, on looking at the index, I were then to find such entries as the following: ‘laziness; lessons, methods of getting; masochistic traits; melancholia;  memory; negligent pose; outsider, feeling of being; physical handicaps.’ ”  Auden desperately tried to hide the details of his private life, which he thought would damage his reputation, and sought to keep it quite separate from his poetry.  He lived openly for many years with Chester Kallman, but didn’t use the male pronoun in his love poems.  He wrote poems about rural landscapes and industrial wastelands, but his famous epigram shows that he greatly valued the knowledge of a writer’s life: “Geography is about Maps.  But biography is about Chaps.”  Auden, who both condemned and admired biography, felt it was all right to publish one—as long as it was not about himself.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Homosexuality and Literature (1977; reprinted 1987 and 2016), and 28 biographies of authors, actors and artists.

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