Picked-Up Pieces (40 page)

But in sum the twelve poems comprise an impressive essay upon Man the domestic animal; his domesticity is felt as a consecration of his animality.

Precise biological terms—clone, conurbation, neotene—insist on humanity’s living context. The poem on the dining-room with high wit summarizes the full organic history of dining:

The house abounds in remembrances of human prehistory: the cellar “Reminds our warm and windowed quarters upstairs that / Caves water-scooped from limestone were our first dwellings”; the archetype of the poet’s workroom is “Weland’s Stithy”; like the “prehistoric hearthstone, / round as a birthday-button / and sacred to Granny,” the modern kitchen is the center of the dwelling; in conclusion, “every home should be a fortress, / equipped with all the very latest engines / for keeping Nature at bay, / versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling / the Dark Lord and his hungry / animivorous chimeras.” Nor is history forgotten: the bathroom is seen as a shrunken tepidarium; the dining table is compared with “Christ’s cenacle” and “King Arthur’s rundle”; and the peace of the living-room is felt against “History’s criminal noise.” The function of each chamber is searched in such depth that a psychological portrait of man is achieved. Auden finds in defecation the prime Art, an “ur-act of making”; in swallowing “a sign act of reverence”; in sleeping a “switch from personage, / with a state number, a first and family name, / to the naked Adam or Eve.” His anatomization is controlled, at times playfully, by religious conceptions:

Biology tends toward theology; our personal and animal particulars are grounded in the divine ontology. Speech is “a work of re-presenting / the true olamic silence.” This sequence of poems, entitled “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” is an essay in architecture, which is to say the creation of a structure enabling the human organism to perform its supernaturally determined functions of praise and service. In a faithless age, there are

While one regrets that Auden’s Christian faith is so iffy, its presence has enabled him to organize his youthfully indiscriminate variety of perceptions and data into a credible humanism.

The second half of
About the House
, “In and Out” (a habitat has been previously defined as “a place / I may go both in and out of”), consists of poems, often about travelling, that are casual in tone and middling in quality. The best is the last, “Whitsunday in Kirchstetten,” a kind of annex to the house poems, wherein the poet is discovered temporarily domiciled in church. In the author’s favorite late style, the long lines, pedantic terms, and discursive sequiturs evoke what was rather conspicuously absent from the house sequence—a sense of the “public space,” the enveloping condition of the world:

Again, “Hammerfest,” a description of Auden’s visit to Norway’s northernmost township, frames within his baroque sense of lapsed time—“the glum Reptilian Empire / Or the epic journey of the Horse”—the geological innocence of a region whose “only communities … / Were cenobite, mosses and lichen, sworn to / Station and reticence.” And of the many (too many) poems in haiku-stanzas, I liked best “Et in Arcadia Ego,” a rephrasing of his habitual accusatory apostrophe to “Dame Kind”—who “Can imagine the screeching/Virago, the Amazon, / Earth Mother was?” The poem uses the exigencies of this Japanese form to generate lines of great energy, both polysyllabic (“Her exorbitant monsters abashed”) and monosyllabic (“Geese podge home”).

Auden is the supreme metrical tinkerer. Haiku, canzoni, ballades, limericks,
clerihews, alliterative verse (a whole eclogue’s worth)—there is nothing he will not attempt and make, to some extent, pay off. His ability, as in “Tonight at Seven-Thirty,” to coin an elaborate stanza-form and effortlessly to repeat it over and over, suggests the 17th-century metaphysicals and Tennyson: the latter more than the former. His technical displays cast doubt upon the urgency of his inspiration. It is one thing to sing in a form, whether it be Homeric hexameters or Popian couplets, until it becomes a natural voice; it is another to challenge your own verbal resources with insatiable experimentation. In any collection by Auden there are hardly two successive poems in the same form, which gives even his most integral sequences, such as the “Horae Canonicae” of
The Shield of Achilles
, a restless and wearing virtuosity. As a poet, his vocation begins in the joy of fabrication rather than in an impulse of celebration: in ways it is strength, enabling him to outlive his youth, to explore, to grow, to continue to think, even—blasphemous suggestion!—to believe, in order to feed the verse-making machine. He is that anachronism, the poet as maker; but he makes expressions rather than, by mimesis, men and deeds. Compared to Eliot, he has no dramatic imagination. Despite an almost desperate metrical juggling, his plays and dialogues are the monologues of one very intellectually imaginative voice. He dramatizes all sides of an issue, but lacks the modesty, the impish and casual self-forgetfulness, that tossed off Prufrock, Cousin Harriet, Sweeney, and the curiously vigorous phantoms of
The Waste Land
. If Eliot was a dramatist, Auden is an essayist, in the root sense: he will try anything, but his adventures never take him beyond the territory of the first-person singular. He is one of the few modern poets whose genius is for the long discursive poem; for all his formal invention, he has written best in two rather accommodating meters—a long, elegaic, unrhymed or loosely rhymed line less regular than pentameter, and the tetrameter quatrains or couplets associated with music hall lyrics and with light verse.

His light vein is very rich. What could be better than, say, this stanza from “On the Circuit”?—

Or this, from “After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics”?—

In his present pleasant house, to which his dream of the City has congenially dwindled, Auden portrays his workroom, “The Cave of Making,” with “windows averted from plausible / videnda but admitting a light one / could mend a watch by.” By such dry clear light, a dictionary at hand, he is best read—not, as he hopes, as “a minor atlantic Goethe” (the difference in generosity may be less between Goethe and himself than between Goethe’s Europe and our America), but as a man who, with a childlike curiosity and a feminine fineness of perception, treats poetry as the exercise of wit. For almost always, in his verse, the oracular and ecstatic flights fail; what we keep are the fractional phrases that could be expressed in prose, but less pointedly. He defined light verse, for his anthology of it, as poetry written in the common language of men. Powerfully attracted by the aristocratic and the arcane, he has worked to preserve his democratic loyalties, his sense of poetry as a mode of discourse between civilized men.
About the House
, though it contains no single poem as fine as “Ode to Gaea” from
The Shield of Achilles
, has nothing in it as tedious as the infatuated concept-chopping of the “Dichtung und Wahrheit” interlude of
Homage to Clio;
and on the whole marks a new frankness and a new relaxation in tone. Auden remains, in the Spirit as well as by the Letter, alive.

G
REAT
T
OM
:
Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot
, by T. S. Matthews. 219 pp. Harper & Row, 1974.

T. S. Matthews, in
Great Tom
, gives an impressively suave and sprightly demonstration of how to write a book when the book isn’t there. You begin by including in your Acknowledgments a gracious mention of “those who did not answer my letters, or who denied me access to various unpublished papers, or who refused to see me.” You go on to discuss, with unabashed candor, the New York publisher who approached you to write upon a subject in which you have neither scholarly interest nor personal involvement: Mr. Matthews met Eliot on a few “widely spaced occasions,” and, like Eliot, emigrated from America to England, but the publisher seemed bewitched chiefly by the congruence of their first two initials, and his excitement was further whetted by a letter from Eliot’s widow and executrix flatly declining to assist in any way; “for reasons which I still fail to understand,” Matthews confides, “the publisher found this letter encouraging. I did not; but by this time the idea of writing Eliot’s biography had begun to appeal to me strongly. I signed a contract for the book. Was this a mistake? Some people have said so; and if they read this book perhaps they may see no reason to change their minds.”

By now, the reader has been roused to a great pitch of suspense as to how the bulk of pages still unread in his hand will be filled. The suspense becomes well-nigh unbearable under a hail of goose-flesh-raising questions:

The Lord only knows; with the same long breath Mr. Matthews admits that, “in the pages that follow,” these “awkward questions” have to be asked, “whether or not they can be satisfactorily answered.” This is indeed, as he names the genre, “a biography, of sorts.”

Well, forewarned is disarmed, and only the most impatient seeker of
truth could fail to be beguiled by the succeeding parade of types of padding. There is the irrelevant catalogue:

The vacuous speculation:

The impudent assertion:

The water-treading rumination:

The mystery of Eliot’s early sexual attitudes and experience evokes from Matthews the tone of a hectoring bully:

Out of wholly thin air he constructs an imaginary “facts of life” interview between Henry Eliot and his thirteen-year-old son:

The primly liberated biographer unconscionably equates the Eliots’ Unitarianism with Calvinism (against which it was a liberal revolt), treats St. Louis as a suburb of a cliché-Puritan Boston, and takes poetic evidence of Eliot’s sensuality (“so rank a feline smell”) to mean unqualified repugnance. He assures us on no given evidence that the young Eliot was chaste both at Harvard and in Paris, and, more fascinatingly but with little more substantiation, portrays his first marriage as one long sexual rejection by the clever and neurotic Vivienne. Matthews’ discussion of this marriage includes the enchanting disclaimer “Here again some significant facts are available, even if we cannot always be quite certain of their significance.”