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W.H. Auden

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LoveNDino Grand Master

LoveNDino

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Andrew Sullivan, in an article on how to cope in these times, wrote about W.H. Auden. Lovely piece! I excerpted the part with W.H. Auden...

 

I’m particularly drawn to W. H. Auden these days, not simply because of the transfixing wisdom and beauty of his poetry, but because of who he was, and how he led his life. I recommend two essays about him, one by Hannah Arendt in 1975 in The New Yorker and one by Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books. I stumbled upon both recently and am glad I did.

 

Auden is an antidote to Trump and to our times. He despised celebrity; he ran from fame and money; he never “signaled” his many virtues to anyone; in fact, he went to great lengths to hide them from view. “Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery in New York,” Mendelson recalls. “She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again.” He privately paid for the tuition of a succession of war orphans until his death; he made himself look like an asshole in demanding immediate payment for some work — but only so he could quietly give the money to Dorothy Day’s homeless shelter in New York. Mendelson also recalls how “I got a phone call from a Canadian burglar who told me he had come across Auden’s poems in a prison library and had begun a long correspondence in which Auden gave him an informal course in literature. Auden was especially pleased to get him started on Kafka.” It turns out that there were countless such acts of quiet generosity.

 

He hated to grandstand. He knew the temptations of the easy political stance. He gave a public speech in the U.S. just after he arrived here in 1939 and got a rapturous response from the liberal crowd. But he wrote to a friend afterward: “I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring … It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.” He took full, deep responsibility for his misjudgments born out of excessive, if well-intentioned, zeal. Arendt noted: “He turned against his early leftist beliefs because events (the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and experiences during the Spanish Civil War) had proven them to be ‘dishonest’ — ‘shamefully’ so.” She goes on: “In the 1940s there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether.”

 

Most important of all, he never succumbed to the belief that evil was always on the other side, that those fighting for the good weren’t also capable of great wickedness, and self-deception. He was not one of those, in Mendelson’s words, “who can say of themselves without irony, ‘I am a good person,’ who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own … He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland.” I love that line. But what he saw most potently was that victims are also capable of becoming victimizers, that the best intentions come wrapped in the crumpled tissue of human fallibility, that “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” He was, like Orwell, a patron saint of anti-tribalism.

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bigvalboy Grand Master

bigvalboy

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Andrew Sullivan, in an article on how to cope in these times, wrote about W.H. Auden. Lovely piece! I excerpted the part with W.H. Auden...

 

I’m particularly drawn to W. H. Auden these days, not simply because of the transfixing wisdom and beauty of his poetry, but because of who he was, and how he led his life. I recommend two essays about him, one by Hannah Arendt in 1975 in The New Yorker and one by Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books. I stumbled upon both recently and am glad I did.

 

Auden is an antidote to Trump and to our times. He despised celebrity; he ran from fame and money; he never “signaled” his many virtues to anyone; in fact, he went to great lengths to hide them from view. “Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery in New York,” Mendelson recalls. “She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again.” He privately paid for the tuition of a succession of war orphans until his death; he made himself look like an asshole in demanding immediate payment for some work — but only so he could quietly give the money to Dorothy Day’s homeless shelter in New York. Mendelson also recalls how “I got a phone call from a Canadian burglar who told me he had come across Auden’s poems in a prison library and had begun a long correspondence in which Auden gave him an informal course in literature. Auden was especially pleased to get him started on Kafka.” It turns out that there were countless such acts of quiet generosity.

 

He hated to grandstand. He knew the temptations of the easy political stance. He gave a public speech in the U.S. just after he arrived here in 1939 and got a rapturous response from the liberal crowd. But he wrote to a friend afterward: “I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring … It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.” He took full, deep responsibility for his misjudgments born out of excessive, if well-intentioned, zeal. Arendt noted: “He turned against his early leftist beliefs because events (the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and experiences during the Spanish Civil War) had proven them to be ‘dishonest’ — ‘shamefully’ so.” She goes on: “In the 1940s there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether.”

 

Most important of all, he never succumbed to the belief that evil was always on the other side, that those fighting for the good weren’t also capable of great wickedness, and self-deception. He was not one of those, in Mendelson’s words, “who can say of themselves without irony, ‘I am a good person,’ who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own … He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland.” I love that line. But what he saw most potently was that victims are also capable of becoming victimizers, that the best intentions come wrapped in the crumpled tissue of human fallibility, that “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” He was, like Orwell, a patron saint of anti-tribalism.

 

Bless you for this...

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s1conrad Enthusiast

s1conrad

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“I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.”

- William Carlos Williams

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Charlie Grand Master

+ Charlie

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Auden is one of my favorite poets. However, in person he was not a particularly easy person to adore. He chain-smoked cigarettes he rolled himself from some kind of revolting tobacco, and he reeked of them--I could hardly get past the stench of his clothes when he was close to me. His skin was stained from them, and his face was a mass of wrinkles. I was a somewhat fastidious young man, and I cringed when he appeared to be cruising me.

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Gar1eth Grand Master

+ Gar1eth

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams

 

Auden, Williams. Names I've not heard since high school.

 

My favorite poets are Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante etc..

 

I hope think my favorite poem is The Bells by Poe.

 

 

Auden is one of my favorite poets. However, in person he was not a particularly easy person to adore. He chain-smoked cigarettes he rolled himself from some kind of revolting tobacco, and he reeked of them--I could hardly get past the stench of his clothes when he was close to me. His skin was stained from them, and his face was a mass of wrinkles. I was a somewhat fastidious young man, and I cringed when he appeared to be cruising me.

 

You and several other members always have such fascinating stories. Can you relate how you happened to meet him?

 

As for being fastidious, I think even if I would have accepted being gay when I was young, if a guy my age now had tried to pick me up, unless he was in incredible shape, I would have freaked.

 

Gman

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Charlie Grand Master

+ Charlie

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I hope think my favorite poem is The Bells by Poe.

 

 

 

 

You and several other members always have such fascinating stories. Can you relate how you happened to meet him?

 

As for being fastidious, I think even if I would have accepted being gay when I was young, if a guy my age now had tried to pick me up, unless he was in incredible shape, I would have freaked.

 

Gman

He was on an American tour, and one of my English professors arranged for him to visit our school for a couple of days and speak with students.

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Moondance Grand Master

Moondance

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It's not every day that W. H. Auden comes up, but coincidentally with @LoveNDino's post, he is also mentioned at the start of an article in the March 2018 Esquire (in a manner apropos of @Charlie's observation) ...

... He chain-smoked cigarettes ... and he reeked of them--I could hardly get past the stench of his clothes when he was close to me. His skin was stained from them, and his face was a mass of wrinkles ...

The Esquire article ("Heavy Duty") begins, ... I have always been interested in people who make ugly work for them. Take the poet W.H. Auden, whose face became so wizened with age that David Hockney said after drawing him, "I kept thinking, if his face looks like that, what must his balls look like?"

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2301/3378/1600/Auden.jpg

 

f08b3e1d03702bfa1ee05baa319877b6.png

 

Ah, but the poetry ...

Edited by Moondance
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