Vin Audenaire

Another of my GCN book reviews, published in 1982 or early 1983. Turns out I was wrong about Chester Kallman's not rating his own biography: his friend and, later, stepmother Dorothy Farnan, published one in 1984. (I reviewed it and will eventually post that review here.) Thekla Clark's Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (Faber and Faber, 1995; Columbia University Press, 1996) is a beautifully written tribute to both men.

VIN AUDENAIRE; or, MISS MASTER

W. H. Auden: a Biography
by Humphrey Carpenter
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981

During the week that I spent reading this book I carried it around with me, and I was surprised to discover how many of the college undergraduates I know had no idea W. H. Auden was; even those who had heard of him usually had never read any of his poetry. For the benefit, then, of those readers of this review to whom Auden is at best one more famous queer: during the 1930s Auden was a widely-read and influential poet, thanks largely to such poems on political subjects as “Spain 1937” and “September 1, 1939”. But many of his non-political lyrics also became famous, such as “Lullaby” (“Lay your sleeping head, my love”) and “Musée des Beaux Arts” (“About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters”). When he died in 1973, he was arguably the greatest living poet in English. By then he had renounced “political” poetry and made himself irrelevant from that point of view, but he had never been an activist anyhow. He had been at most a journalist, and for those pre-television days a media star: when he and Christopher Isherwood decided to remain in the United States during World War II, there was controversy in the Daily Mail and confusion in Parliament (for details see page 291 of Carpenter's book). At about the same time he re-embraced the Anglican Christianity of his childhood, and religion became the ideology he expounded in his verse. Later he collaborated with his husband, Chester Kallman, on opera libretti -- most notably The Rake's Progress for Igor Stravinsky.

Humphrey Carpenter's biography is the second major life of Auden to see print in the past few years (the other is Charles Osborne's W. H. Auden: the Life of a Poet, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979). Auden was one of those people like W. Somerset Maugham who attempt to obstruct biographers by requesting friends to burn their letters – a request which was, naturally, for the most part disregarded in Auden's case as in Maugham's. “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” (Carpenter, page xv). In practice, Auden (like Maugham) loved gossip and didn't mind reading the biographies and published letters of other writers. For that matter, Neville Coghill, who tutored Auden in English literature at Oxford, once “arrived at his rooms to find Auden already there, reading one of Coghill's letters” (54). Auden looked up and said, “Ah, you're here. Good. What have you done with the second page of this letter?” (Osborne, 40). Later on, “Auden's friends found their drawers being rifled for any letters suitable for inclusion” in a projected three-volume study of schoolboy and collegiate homosexuality (Carpenter, 78). While Carpenter's is not an authorized biography, he did have access to Auden's papers, and got interviews and other help from Auden's family. If this makes voyeurs of the biographer and his readers, we are after all only following in the Master's footsteps.

The subject of our voyeurism, of course, is Auden's homosexuality, which was an open secret during most of Auden's life and about which he cautiously became more open in later years. The details Carpenter supplies should satisfy all but the most jaded: Auden's technical preferences (fellatio -- a word Carpenter inexplicably insists on italicizing -- and occasional light s&m) and Chester Kallman's (Chester liked to be fucked, preferably by trade), Auden's insecurities about his looks and the size of his cock, and the age at which Auden was circumcised (seven). There is also copious information about Auden's loves, including the relationship with Chester, which Auden himself considered a marriage “with all its boredoms and rewards” (258), as well as Auden's forays into the mysterious twilight world between the sexes of heterosexuality. (Happily, Carpenter -- unlike some reviewers of his book in the straight press -- is not inclined to crow overmuch about these latter; even the affair with Rhoda Jaffe in the late 1940s, after all, was essentially a digression.) Jade that I am, I'm less interested in the nitty-gritty trivia than in the relationships, and Carpenter chronicles Auden's love life pretty thoroughly, starting with Auden's unrequited love for Robert Medley in 1922, without too much heterosexual condescension. If Osborne is less gingerly in his handling of Auden's sexuality, he is also less informative.

The mass of detail with which Carpenter presents us is probably necessary in order to depict Auden with all his contradictions. He was enormously fastidious about poetic technique and became more so as he got older, at the same time that his personal sloppiness increased to outrageousness: “You pee in the toilet?” he once asked a houseguest. “Everyone I know does it in the sink. It's a male's privilege,” and his brother John noticed while visiting that “the basin stank horribly” (408 and note to 409) in Auden's New York City apartment. He was convinced he was ugly and unlovable, yet pursued prospective loves tenaciously. He was ambivalent about his homosexuality: while he seems to have had no doubt of the value of his love for Chester, he was capable of writing a primly disapproving preface to Rae Dalven's translation of the poems of Constantine Cavafy. He went through one ideology after another -- John Layard's mystical psychology, D. H. Lawrence's Leader-worship, Marxism – before settling on Anglicanism, leaving behind him a trail of cigarette ashes and empty wine bottles, always with the apparent zeal of a true believer, but in reality mainly in search of jargon with which to stuff his poems. While he claimed to take the Church seriously, it was really no different except that its childhood associations reminded him of his mother, whom he adored. He was capable of travestying both in later life, saying of himself, “Your mother is the resurrection and the life. If she be lifted up, she will lift up all men unto her.”

Chester seems to have been no less complicated, though he never quite emerges from the shadows of Carpenter's book. This is a pity, for he was certainly important in Auden's life, but probably doesn't rate a biography of his own. A poet himself, he found it difficult being married to one of the greatest poets in the English language; of course he never managed to establish an independent reputation. Cyril Connolly once asked him: “How does it feel to be Alice B. Toklas to Gertrude Stein?” Auden raged: “I shan't rest until Cyril Connolly is either dead or in a lunatic asylum” (316). Unfortunately, Chester lacked Alice's self-possession and strength. When Auden died, he drank himself to death in a year and a half.

At my age (thirty-two) I'm no longer looking for gay father-figures or role models, yet I have to admit that in the end Auden disappoints me. The drinking, the slovenliness, the ambivalence about his gayness, the retreat into religion are all depressing. There are of course the poems -- a fat collected volume -- the essays, and the libretti; and I suppose they ought to be enough to counterbalance the frequent dreariness of his life. Auden himself thought so, and said in 1965 that his life had, “so far, been unusually happy” (455). And Carpenter closes his acknowledgements, and the book, by thanking “Auden himself for living a life that has ben such a pleasure to write about” (482). I mustn't forget that most lives have their share of dreariness, and that Auden lived (as we still all do) in a society that insisted that homosexuals were degenerates. Like so many of our gay Elder Statesmen, Auden managed not only to survive but to succeed, and he emerges from Carpenter's pages defiantly, often exuberantly, human.

(Photo of Auden from "the BBC News website" via The National Library Board of Singapore.)

The Grand Old Party

Published in GCN, April 1980. I was embarrassed, as I was typing this in, to notice that I wrote confidently about the bulk of Maugham's writing as if I knew it. In fact I'd only read Of Human Bondage, and one or two his stories, and though I've had his collected stories on my shelves for many years, that is still all I've read. Time to do something about that, I guess.

Maugham
by Ted Morgan
Simon & Schuster, 1980

“Gossip is the food of the gods,” the noted raconteur and bon vivant Andrew Sutherland once remarked, and I don’t doubt that W. Somerset Maugham would have agreed with him. Gossip was the dust into which Maugham breathed the breath of life to make his best fictions, and what was the Villa Mauresque intended to be but his own private Olympus, where the witty and notable could sip ambrosia and be brilliant, with Maugham presiding over it all as Father Zeus? Complete, as Ted Morgan’s biography of Maugham reminds us, with thunderbolt.

Of course, Maugham’s fondness (indeed avidity) for gossip stopped short of his own affairs, and in his will he directed not only that all recipients of his letters should please destroy them, but that his estate should give no assistance to biographers. He had indulged in a certain amount of autobiographical writing, in which he had told the world as much as he was willing it should know. If he could not prevent the writing of biographies, he could at least hope to limit their revelations and their reliability. It is not surprising that few if any letters were burnt, but it is surprising that Maugham’s literary executor should have broken down and given his imprimatur to Ted Morgan’s Maugham, citing Morgan’s “scrupulous research” and “the fact that he had not attempted to pass any moral judgment on any character concerned.” About this “fact” I will have more to say presently.

The trouble with gossip about the great – and a biography is gossip – is that we who read it may not ourselves be great enough. We may titillate ourselves with shock that the famous (like our parents, another revelation from which many of us never quite recover) have genitals and use them. We may grab too eagerly at the subject's weaknesses for evidence that he was no better than we are, worse even, and so we are justified in being complacent.

As much generosity of spirit is required to write a biography as to read one. The biographer, flush with knowledge and power, may take too much pleasure in bringing a legend to earth. Maugham’s best fiction was an invitation to join him on a lofty, omniscient level where to understand all was to forgive all, to be as worldly and unshockable as the Old Party himself, to feel empathy with rather than smug superiority to the frailties of others. Biography can offer the same invitation, provided its literary model is Madame Bovary and not the National Enquirer. Mr. Morgan, it seems to me, tends toward the latter.

On one hand, reading Maugham requires the reader to play biographer. Mr. Morgan has certainly done his homework, and has assembled a huge mass of data – letters, gossip, interviews, summaries of Maugham’s books and plays with excerpts from reviews, passages from memoirs by Maugham’s friends and enemies, and trivia such as the number of the stateroom Maugham once occupied on the Queen Mary – and dumped it all together, undigested, imposing on it only a chronological order. Someone could write a fine shorter book on Maugham using this one as a source, and I wish someone (preferably gay) would. I can’t imagine anyone reading Mr. Morgan for, or with, pleasure. At best his prose is competent. It’s a pity he didn’t have the humility, as Maugham did, to ask a grammarian to pick over his manuscript.

On the other hand, where Mr. Morgan has made some effort to digest his material, I find myself grateful for the large amounts he leaves more or less untouched. He has a tendency to attribute statements to his sources indirectly so that it is hard to tell where the source ends and he begins. For example, he neds a long paragraph footnoted to Lady Alfred Ayer with the comment, “Homosexuality … had contributed to the death of the heart.” Who is passing judgment here? That Alan Searle’s “sexual services were still needed” by Maugham in his seventies is attributed to Searle, but judging by direct quotation from Searle elsewhere I don’t believe he would have worded it so clinically. Would Mr. Morgan sum up a heterosexual marriage in such terms as “In addition, he provided sexual relief whenever Maugham required it”? Barbara Back’s parties may have been known to heterosexual London “for the size of their heterosexual contingent,” a bigot’s way of saying that gays at at her parties were not required to wear a straight façade. If the isle of Capri became “a sanctuary for the third sex,” a sanctuary was, after all, needed. Mr. Morgan may feel impressively Olympian when he adopts these clinical, patronizing, and snide turns of phrase, but I have the impression that homosexuality makes him uncomfortable. But he is such a bad writer that I can’t be sure.

Mr. Morgan is also given to facile psychologizing, so that he hardly needs the moral judgments which Maugham’s executor praised him for eschewing. He tries to pin Maugham’s misogyny on feelings of abandonment caused by his mother’s death when he was eight. “Women, going back to his mother, were a disappointment, an unreliable species,” he speculates on Maugham’s motivation. “He appears to have enjoyed turning [actresses] down for parts, as if through them he were punishing all women,” Morgan writes later, as though Maugham weren’t equally petty in the exercise of power over men. He seems to think Maugham’s homosexuality was caused by his misogyny, but if that were true there would be few straight men in the world. He goes on at great length about Maugham’s stammer – there are twenty-eight entries under “Maugham, W. Somerset, stammer of” in the index – citing “the list of negativistic syndromes developed by the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan,” into which “Maugham’s behavior fits quite neatly.” The fact that “its origins are quite unknown” does not prevent Mr. Morgan from saying things like “a stammer is something you do to yourself,” “a way of telling the world that he was not like others,” “a way of guaranteeing the situation that you foresee.” “The stammerer has some quarrel with himself, he sets up his own roadblocks.” With comments like these, who needs moral judgments?

Still, the book is valuable. Everything you ever wanted to know about W. Somerset Maugham, plus much else, is in it: Maugham’s unhappy childhood, his wretched marriages (to Sylvie Barnardo and Gerald Haxton – Maugham once said of Haxton to Godfrey Winn, a young writer, “You do not know what it is like, Godfrey, and I hope you never will, to be married to someone who is married to drink”), his humiliating senescence (“If you think I’m gaga, you should see Winston [Churchill]”, he told S. N. Behrman). Yet he was a fascinating figure: his writing career spanned sixty-five years, he was famous for most of it, and he hobnobbed with the literary and social lions of three generations. It’s easy to despise him – he made it easy – and as a role model for gays he had little to offer. He never spoke up for the repeal of the British Sexual Offenses Act (but neither did W. H. Auden or that old darling E. M. Forster), and he never spoke again to one man who tried to get him to do so. But Maugham himself summed up the matter best, in a passage about Wagner quoted by Morgan:

I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving some of their virtues.