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Overview
Arthur Kirsch, a leading Auden scholar, discusses the poet’s boyhood religious experience and the works he wrote before emigrating to the United States as well as his formal return to the Anglican Communion at the beginning of World War II. Kirsch then focuses on Auden’s criticism and on neglected and underestimated works of the poet’s later years. Through insightful readings of Auden’s writings and biography, Kirsch documents that Auden’s faith and his religious doubt were the matrix of his work and life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300128659 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Arthur Kirsch is Professor of English, Emeritus, University of Virginia. He has written extensively on Shakespeare as well as Auden and recently edited a new edition of Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”
Read an Excerpt
Auden and Christianity
By ARTHUR KIRSCH
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2005 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10814-9
Chapter One
Early Years
Though generally reticent about his personal life, Auden wrote what he called a "rather shy-making" autobiographical essay about his Christian faith in 1956, observing that "the Christian doctrine of a personal God implies that the relation of every human being to Him is unique and historical, so that any individual who discusses the Faith is compelled to begin with autobiography." He pointed out that both of his grandfathers and four of his uncles were Anglican priests, and that the atmosphere of his home "was, I should say, unusually devout, though not in the least repressive or gloomy. My parents were Anglo-Catholics, so that my first religious memories are of exciting magical rites (at six I was a boat-boy) rather than of listening to sermons." "For this," he said, "I am very grateful, as it implanted in me what I believe to be the correct notion of worship, namely, that it is first and foremost a community in action, a thing done together, and only secondarily a matter of individual feeling or thinking." Auden always considered sermons extrinsic to worship and avoided them whenever he could. In his draft notes on religion and theology he said, "In my opinion sermons should be a) fewer b)longer c) more theologically instructive and less exhortatory. I must confess that in my life I have very seldom heard a sermon from which I derived any real spiritual benefit. Most of them told me that I should love God and my neighbour more than I do, but that I knew already." But the rituals of worship forever interested him. Services on Sunday when he was a boy included "music, candles and incense," and "at Christmas a crèche was rigged up in the dining-room, lit by an electric-torch battery, round which we sang hymns." Auden cherished such childhood memories, and his association of the ceremoniousness and rituals of the liturgy with the music and magical thinking of his childhood was an irreducible element of his faith. He always assumed that the liturgy is an action that can actually change people, as art cannot.
Two other "saving" influences affected Auden when he was a boy and a young man. First, he said, he was "lucky enough to have a voice and a musical sense" that allowed him to be a member of school choirs, first as a student and later as a teacher, and that consequently, "however bored I might be at the thought of God, I enjoyed services in His worship very much, more, probably, than many who were more devout than I but who had no active role to play." Second, he "was lucky enough to be born in a period when every educated person was expected to know the Bible thoroughly" (all undergraduates, for example, were required to pass a divinity examination) and that, consequently, "whatever attitude one might take towards the Bible, that it was great literature, an interesting anthropological document, or what have you, the events and sayings upon which Christianity is founded were as familiar to one as Grimm's fairy tales."
The analogy between Christianity and Grimm's fairy tales is revealing. Ursula Niebuhr noted that the imagery and mythology of theology fascinated Auden, feeding his imagination and making him "much more theological than many academic theologians." The poetic fascination with the language and images as well as the rites of Christian worship-again associated with memories of childhood-lasted Auden's entire lifetime and helps account for his outraged response to the reform of the liturgy in his later years, especially to the reading of "the Epistle and Gospel ... in some appalling 'modern' translation." As opposed to Roman Catholics, he said, who had to start from scratch with their vernacular liturgy, "we had the extraordinary good fortune in that our Book of Common Prayer was composed at exactly the right historical moment. The English language had become more or less what it is today," and "the ecclesiastics of the sixteenth century still possessed a feeling for the ritual and ceremoniousness which today we have almost entirely lost. Why should we spit on our luck?"
Auden was also drawn to the communal service of the liturgy because of his lifelong sense of isolation. As his many friends testified, Auden had a wish, and a gift, for friendship; he was intellectually exuberant and good-hearted; and he was fun to be with. At the same time, however, his warmth was accompanied, as a university friend remarked, by "the sharpness and power of his ice-cold imagination." Other friends, early and late, wrote of his essential shyness and loneliness, and in numerous essays Auden himself spoke of the difficulty he had in fully believing in and accepting the existence of other people. "At sometime or other in human history," he wrote in 1932, "when and how is not known exactly, man became self-conscious; he began to feel, I am I, and You are Not-I; we are shut inside ourselves and apart from each other. There is no whole but the self." "The more this feeling grew," Auden continued, the more man "felt the need to bridge over the gulf, to recover the sense of being as much part of life as the cells in his body are part of him."
These statements reveal a preoccupation that was to absorb Auden for the rest of his life. In this early essay, he argued that human speech evolved to bridge the gulf, and in later essays he treated it more as a religious issue, quoting Simone Weil's statement, for example, that "belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love." But his own basic sense of apartness remained a fulcrum of his thinking and temperament. This was to some degree a result of a clinical disposition he had inherited from his father, who was a physician. Christopher Isherwood remarked in 1937 that Auden had acquired a "scientific outlook and technique of approach" and was particularly fond of the word clinical. Stephen Spender-never free of envy of Auden's talent and fame-said, less charitably, of Auden's clinical inclinations that "Auden, despite his perceptiveness, lacked something in human relationships. He forced issues too much, made everyone too conscious of himself and therefore was in the position of an observer who is a disturbing force in the behaviour he observes. Sometimes he gave the impression of playing an intellectual game with himself and with others, and this meant that in the long run he was rather isolated." Spender doubted if Auden "completely broke away from the isolation in human relationships which was simply the result of his overwhelming cleverness as a very young man." Auden himself wrote to Spender in 1940, "As you know my dominant faculties are intellect and intuition, my weak ones feeling and sensation. This means I have to approach life via the former; I must have knowledge and a great deal of it before I can feel anything"; and he wrote in an article in the same year that he was attracted to Thomas Hardy's poetry when he was young "because I half suspected that my own nature was both colder and more mercurial, and I envied those who found it easy to feel deeply."
Auden was also isolated by his homosexuality, the practice of which was a criminal offense in both Britain and the United States for most of his lifetime. His boyhood friend Robert Medley said that "Wystan was and felt himself to be alone; set apart by the crucial experience of the self-realization that he had to face up to, and in which he had refused to deny his nature and the source of his creative being." Writing of his later years, his brother John said, "In spite of his fame and wide friendships throughout America and Europe, he was lonely, lacking as a result of his personal psychology, a family of his own, but remembering our own happy early years.... Seen unawares in an armchair, The Times crossword puzzle on his knee, a vodka martini by his side and cigarette-ends covering large dishes, there was an isolation and sadness which arose from his uprooted and solitary existence." Auden himself said in a commencement address at Smith College that "each of us" must accept "the fact that in the last analysis we live our lives alone. Alone we choose, alone we are responsible. So many people try to forget their aloneness, and break their heads and hearts against it." Auden also often referred to Kierkegaard's religious sense of "always being out alone over seventy thousand fathoms," and in "New Year Letter" he wrote, "Aloneness is man's real condition." Toward the end of his life, Auden directly related his faith to his sense of isolation, writing in a notebook, "In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter." One may speculate that for such a temperament the worship of the liturgy, "first and foremost a community in action, a thing done together, and only secondarily a matter of individual feeling or thinking," would have satisfied a deep need, providing not only continuity with his past but also a communal sanctuary, a refuge from the isolating tendencies of his intellect, his personality, and his situation. Auden said he was sorry that his deeply religious friend Dag Hammerskjöld, the secretary general of the United Nations, had not participated "in the liturgical and sacramental life of a church.... because it is precisely the introverted intellectual character who stands most in need of the ecclesiastical routine both as a discipline and as a refreshment." "In solitude, for company," Auden wrote in the refrain of "Lauds," the poem in "Horae Canonicae" that celebrates worship.
In early adolescence, Auden lapsed from his childhood belief. "At thirteen," he wrote, "I was confirmed. To say that shortly afterwards I lost my faith would be melodramatic and false. I simply lost interest." The time of lost interest was the period in the 1920s and 1930s in which his work was more apparently preoccupied with politics and psychology and in which he eventually became celebrated as an artistic spokesman for his generation. Auden attributed the lapse in his interest in religion to several factors. As a young man, he said, he had a natural wish to assert his independence and "enjoy the pleasures of the world and the flesh," and he also became disenchanted with the motives of apparently religious people around him. He observed that many Christians were merely conventionally Christian, believing the Nicene Creed as they believed in proper manners or proper dress, and that many others were consciously unbelievers, Christian only officially, in order to fulfill a condition of their employment. He also felt that the religiousness of many ardent believers seemed to be prompted by some mental or physical infirmity. Behind his own youthful Schwärmerai, he said, his "pseudo-devout phase" of religious enthusiasm, for example, "lay a quite straightforward and unredeemed eroticism." He was therefore "apt ... to draw the conclusion that people only love God when no one else will love them." Finally, he remarked, he became acutely conscious of "the gulf between the language and imagery of [the Church's] liturgies and devotions and those of contemporary culture.... Agnus Dei has the attraction, at least, of a magical and musical spell; Lamb of God, in a culture, mainly urban, to which the notion of animal sacrifice is totally strange, is liable to evoke ridiculous images." Thus, having just reached an age when personal belief became "possible," he found that "the terms in which the Church" expected "him to think about God (as distinct, of course, from what she expects him to think)" were not terms in which either he or any of his contemporaries, "Christian or not," could "think, sincerely or accurately, of anything."
In a sense, Auden never entirely abandoned such reservations, even after his return to the Church in 1940, and they were always a stimulus to his faith, to what he considered the process of becoming, rather than simply being, a Christian. Late in his life he wrote, "Every Christian has to make the transition from the child's 'We believe still' to the adult's 'I believe again.' This cannot have been easy to make at any time, and in our age it is rarely made, it would seem, without a hiatus of unbelief." Auden tended to see the continuing enactment of this transition in adult life as peculiarly Protestant. In a review of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man in 1941 he wrote that "the Catholic emphasizes the initial act of intellectual assent" in his faith, "the Protestant the continuous process of voluntary assent." He added, "The former is therefore always in danger of identifying the eternal with some particular historical social form; the latter is always in danger of ignoring the concrete realities of a historical situation altogether"; and he praised Niebuhr's "balanced statement of orthodox Protestantism" for its clear consciousness of those realities. Decades later, making essentially the same distinction about belief, he said that in his relation to God, "it is personal experience which enables me to add to the catholic We believe still the protestant I believe again." He also wrote in a notebook, however, without any sectarian emphasis, that the "liturgy uses we for the general confession, because each of us is in part responsible for the sins of our neighbour, but in the creed it says credo, not credamus-nobody can put the responsibility for his faith upon others." He noted that in the rite of Baptism "promises are made on behalf of the child by its godparents," whereas in the rite of Confirmation the confirmand is fully aware of what he is saying and "gives his personal assent to a life-long commitment to the faith." Confirmation should thus "be postponed until the individual has reached the age of spiritual consent, which in the average case can well be over 25. Child confirmation is as absurd as child marriage."
Auden exaggerated his faithlessness as a young man, since many of his interests in that period were really an attempt to find an alternate, though still Christian, epistemology. He said as much himself: "The various 'kerygmas,' of Blake, of Lawrence, of Freud, of Marx, to which, along with most middle-class intellectuals of my generation, I paid attention between twenty and thirty, had one thing in common." "They were all," he noted, "Christian heresies; that is to say, one cannot imagine their coming into existence except in a civilization which claimed to be based, religiously, on belief that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and that, in consequence, matter, the natural order, is real and redeemable, not a shadowy appearance or the cause of evil, and historical time is real and significant, not meaningless or an endless series of cycles." These are distinctions that animated Auden's thought and work throughout his career.
The Orators: An English Study, a long, hectic, brilliant, and often obscure work in a mixture of verse and prose that Auden published in 1932, offers some evidence of such a Christian background. There are biblical allusions throughout the poem, and it seems haunted by a remembered faith, especially in the opening sections. In "Address for a Prize-Day," Auden refers admiringly to The Divine Comedy and uses Dante's division of sinners into three main groups in the Purgatorio to describe contemporary "England, this country of ours where nobody is well." Auden's citations of Dante are not entirely accurate, and the tone of the address has a manic and satiric edge, but the aura of the Purgatorio is nonetheless present. A subsequent section has transparent Christian overtones in Auden's parodic description of an anxious search for an absent Leader. The final sentence of the section, "The priest's mouth opens in the green graveyard, but the wind is against it," maintains the parodic tone, but the reference to the priest is elegiac as well.
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Excerpted from Auden and Christianity by ARTHUR KIRSCH Copyright © 2005 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
W.H. Auden is one of the great Christian poets of the twentieth century. What a delight to have this penetrating, elegantly written study of Auden’s Christian faith as articulated in some of the finest poems and essays of our time.—The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, Dean, Washington National Cathedral
A marvelous work of scholarship. . . . Auden and Christianity fills a niche that has surprisingly, until now, remained empty.—Pericles Lewis, Yale University
Kirsch's excellent book frames an informed and sensitive reading of the fascinatingly idiosyncratic Christianity presented in the life and writings of this major poet and modern intellectual.—John Hollander, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English, Yale University