Bells to St Wystan

This week sees the centenary of the birth in York of W. H. Auden. All over the world this season, Audenites should at 1755 hours precisely prepare a very cold, very dry Martini and at 1800 hours, six o’clock, again precisely, down it in praise and memory of a giant of English letters. Vital to be meticulous about the hour. As he said of himself in an autobiographical sketch:

So obsessive a ritualist
a pleasant surprise
makes him cross.
Without a watch
he would never know when
to feel hungry or horny.

Like many Oxford undergraduates of my generation (he was Professor of Poetry when I went up), I knew Auden slightly and dined with him a few times. He had aged prematurely, become repetitive and, away from the page, fairly boring. Like his friend and contemporary, John Betjeman, he had long invented a persona — dotty vicar in his case — but Auden got trapped by it. Prone to chant curious mantra —  ‘Yeats was not my idea of a gentleman’ or ‘Peeing in the washbasin is a male  privilege’ — he smelt like a forgotten cheese. Yet it was impossible to doubt his genius for a moment. The word may have  dwindled into hyperbole. It can nevertheless be defined, and when Auden died in 1973 it was defined by his friend V. S. Yanofsky: ‘There was in him some communion with the great human reality, as there was in Tolstoy — a trait characteristic of all geniuses, despite their fantasies.’ In conversation another friend of Auden, Isaiah Berlin, assented. Berlin thought there were two 20th-century Englishmen of genius, the other being Churchill.  

An American scholar, Samuel Hines, called the 1930s the Age of Auden. It is important, three-quarters of a century later, to be aware how celebrated Auden became as a young man — more so than any poet since Byron.