An author speaks out against social censorship: The Reith Lectures reviewed

‘The Age of Anxiety’, W. H. Auden’s book-length poem, has always been described as strange, and difficult. It is an eclogue, but set far from the countryside, in a bar in New York, in the middle of the second world war. It looks like a modern script on the page but metrically it sounds more like Old English. The text flits between conversation and inner thought and is steeped in Jungian philosophy, mysticism and mirrors.

When I first read it in my twenties, I gave up on trying to understand it and simply allowed the words to wash over me. It’s an approach I recommend taking while listening to Robin Brooks’s haunting new dramatisation of the poem on Radio 3. The reading extends to an hour and 40 minutes, which may strike some as a commitment, but is worth every second.

 We follow four strangers in the bar as they embark upon a not entirely sober voyage into modern consciousness. There is Quant, a shipping clerk who hates his job; Malin, a Canadian medical intelligence officer; Rosetta, a department-store buyer; and Emble, a man in uniform.

 Their descriptions of existential dread, sexual fragility, Benzedrine dependence and loneliness, often interpolated rather than quoted directly from the poem, transcend time. ‘In England one is lonely because everyone else is against one,’ says Rosetta, beautifully voiced by Genevieve Gaunt. ‘In America one is just lonely.’ Auden relocated to the States in 1939 and felt that same familiar struggle between helplessness and collusion.

 Hearing radio bulletins burst in upon the strangers with reports of rising prices, war in Europe, floods, fire and armament, we are sucked into their world and left feeling that we, too, are living in an age of anxiety.