Carpenter W. H. Auden

A Biography
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28088-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

W. H. Auden disapproved of literary biography. Or did he? The truth is far more equivocal than at first seems apparent. There is no denying he delivered himself of such unambiguous pronouncements as 'Biographies of writers are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.'; and that he asked for his friends to burn his letters at his death, but, against that, Auden himself often reviewed literary biographies and normally with enthusiasm. Moreover he argued for biographies of writers such as Dryden, Trollope, Wagner and Gerard Manley Hopkins as their lives would tell us something about their art. Humphrey Carpenter himself nicely summarizes Auden's ambiguity on this question. 'Here (referring to literary biography), as so often in his life, Auden adopted a dogmatic attitude which did not reflect the full range of his opinions, and which he sometimes flatly contradicted.' Although the biography was not authorized it did receive the co-operation of the Auden Estate which gave permission for letters and unpublished works to be quoted. The result is a biography that was widely praised on first publication in 1981 and which continues to hold its own. Now is the obvious time to reissue it with the character of Humphrey Carpenter playing an important role in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. In his introduction Alan Bennett writes 'When I started writing the play I made much use of the biographies of both Auden and Britten written by Humphrey Carpenter and both are models of their kind. Indeed I was consulting his books so much that eventually Carpenter found his way into the play.' 'Carpenter is a model biographer - diligent, unspeculative, sympathetic, and extremely good at finding out what happened when and with whom . . . admirably detailed and researched study.' John Bayley, The Listener 'an illuminating book; full of information, unobtrusively affectionate, it describes with unpretentious elegance the curve of a great poet's life and work' Frank Kermode, Guardian 'sharpens and usually lights up even the most canvassed parts of the Auden life and myth . . . a deeply interesting book about a deeply interesting life' Roy Fuller, Sunday Times ' . . . the story of a remarkable man told by one of the best living biographers' David Cecil, Book Choice

Humphrey Carpenter was born and educated in Oxford, and attended the Dragon School and Keble College. He was a well-known biographer and children's writer, and worked previously as a producer at the BBC. He wrote biographies of J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ezra Pound, C. S. Lewis and Dennis Potter. Among his many books for children were the best-selling Mr Majeika series. He also wrote several plays for the theatre and radio. A keen musician, he was a member of a 1930s-style jazz band, Vile Bodies, which was resident at the Ritz Hotel in London for a number of years. He died in 2005.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carpenter, Humphrey

Leseproben

1

Childhood

Wystan Hugh Auden was born on the twenty-first of February 1907, in the city of York in the north of England, the third and last child of George Augustus Auden and Constance Rosalie Bicknell.

He was the youngest of three boys. Later in his life he liked to point out that in fairy-tales it is the youngest of the three brothers who succeeds in the quest and wins the prize. ‘I, after all, am the Fortunate One,’ he wrote in a poem, ‘The Happy-Go-Lucky, the spoilt Third Son’.

He had hazel eyes, and hair and eyebrows so fair that they looked bleached. His skin, too, was very pale, almost white. His face was marked by one small peculiarity, a brown mole on the right cheek. He had big chubby hands, and soon developed flat feet. He was physically clumsy, and took to biting his nails.

The fairness of hair and skin were inherited from his father, but in features he looked more like his mother. From the time of his birth he was very close to her, partly because being the youngest child he was never displaced by another, partly, too, because there was a gap of several years between himself and his elder brothers, so that they tended to go off by themselves and leave him with their mother. (This large gap was the consequence of a miscarriage between the second and third births.) But his closeness to his mother was, he himself came to believe, chiefly the result of her wanting it to be that way. He felt that she had sought to achieve with him, from the beginning, ‘a conscious spiritual, in a sense, adult relationship’.

Besides being the youngest child he was also the youngest grandchild in the family; and later at school, being a bright boy, he was very often the youngest in the class. All this gave him, he said, ‘the lifelong conviction that in any company I am the youngest person present’. Certainly to the end of his life he behaved like a precocious and highly praised youngest child.

His elder brothers were called Bernard and John. By contrast his own first name, Wystan, was exotic; but it reflected one of his father’s great interests in life. George Auden was a doctor of medicine by profession, but he was also widely read in many other fields, among them Saxon and Norse antiquities. This was partly the result of his having been educated at Repton School in Derbyshire, for the parish church there has a particularly fine Saxon crypt which attracted his attention when he was young. The church is dedicated to St Wystan, a Mercian prince who was murdered in the year 849 after he had objected to the uncanonical marriage of his widowed mother to his uncle – ‘a rather Hamlet-like story’, remarked Wystan Auden.

The story of St Wystan is recorded in a Little Guide to Shropshire, under the entry for Wistanstow, the place in that county where he was martyred. The author of the Little Guide was Wystan Auden’s uncle, the Rev. J. E. Auden, and Wystan carefully preserved his own copy of it. He was very possessive about his first name; he said he would be ‘furious’ if he ever met another Wystan.

His second Christian name, Hugh, was chosen in honour of his mother’s brother-in-law Hugh Culley, headmaster of Monmouth Grammar School. In adult life Wystan Hugh Auden became addicted to crosswords and liked to work out anagrams from his own name. One of his favourites was ‘Why shun a nude tag?’ Another was ‘Hug a shady wet nun’. He remarked that all you can get from ‘T. S. Eliot’ is ‘litotes’.1

His father had a medical practice as a general physician in York, and by the time of his third son’s birth he was doing very well. Dr Auden had begun work in York eight years earlier, in 1899, just after his marriage, when (at the age of twenty-seven) he had set up home and surgery at 76 Bootham, a big and rather ugly brick house in a smart street just outside the old city wall, within sight of York Minster. By the time that Wystan was born in 1907 he had moved his family to a larger and more attractive house just down the road. This was 54 Bootham, built in the Georgian style, with a portico around the front door. Things were going well enough for Dr Auden to employ a coachman to drive him round to his patients, and for him and his wife to have two maids and a cook to run the house.

It is true that prosperity did not in itself secure the Auden family’s social position. The status of doctors in Edwardian society was ambiguous to say the least. In the York street-directory Dr Auden, like other medical men, was listed not under Private Residents, but under Commercial – which amounted to saying that doctors were no better than tradesmen. When Wystan Auden’s mother had announced to one of her aunts that she was going to marry a doctor, she was told: ‘Marry him if you must, but no one will call on you!’ On the other hand Dr Auden was the son of a clergyman, and this made him rather more acceptable socially. Moreover he was making something of a mark in York because of his intellectual accomplishments. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science held a meeting in the city in the year before Wystan’s birth, Dr Auden was chosen to edit the Historical and Scientific Survey of York and District which was published to mark the occasion, and himself wrote the chapter on the region’s prehistory and archaeology.

So there would probably have been a secure future for the Audens if they had remained in York. Wystan’s childhood would have been spent in the shadow of York Minster, one of the finest medieval cathedrals in England, and he would have lived, during those years in which his imagination was developing, in a city that still looked much as it had done before the Industrial Revolution. But that was not what happened. When he was one and a half, in 1908, his family left York and moved south to Birmingham.

His father had been appointed Birmingham’s first School Medical Officer, a pioneer job which would chiefly mean inspecting and where necessary improving the sanitary arrangements in the schools controlled by the city’s Education Committee. It would not be easy work, for Birmingham and the surrounding suburbs had grown during the nineteenth century into one of the biggest industrial sprawls in the Midlands. Its schools were often poorly built, and many of the children were being brought up in grim conditions. The job also meant a drop in salary for Dr Auden, for the Birmingham Education Committee could not afford to pay him as much as he had earned in his lucrative practice in York. This did not really matter very much, for he had a small private income, and the family could still afford to keep servants after the move to Birmingham. Nevertheless Wystan, looking back, was certain that the decrease in salary had cost a real moral effort to his father, who he said was ‘one of those persons who cannot disburse even the smallest sums without mental anguish’.

Though Dr Auden’s work was in Birmingham itself, the house he acquired for his family stood some miles outside the city, in Solihull, which is nowadays a suburb of Birmingham but was then a large village a little detached from the south-eastern edge of the city. It was here, at ‘Apsley House’ in Lode Lane, that Wystan began to be aware of his surroundings.

These were not at first sight very interesting. Solihull was an undistinguished settlement of houses and small shops, most of them recently built. Down the road, however, was something that the small boy did find exciting: the local gasworks. He was often taken there on walks because, though sturdy and generally healthy, he did have slight bronchial trouble, and the fumes from the gasworks were thought to be good for his chest. He loved it there. ‘Those at the gasworks were my favourite men,’ he wrote of his early childhood, remembering the smells and pipes and huge gasometers which rose and fell. The gasworks was the first place that seemed to him (he said) ‘numinous’, arousing a feeling of wonder and awe.

Beyond home and Solihull lay, to the north, industrial Birmingham. Nothing was more exciting to Wystan than a train ride from Solihull into the city with its smoking chimneys and huge warehouses, and then (if he was lucky) onwards by another train, further north, where the line ran to Wolverhampton – past the canal, and between mile after mile of blackened factories with furnaces flaring up as the train passed. He never forgot this sight:

Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on

The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

At home, his first memories were largely of the minor crises of family life: his father lancing an abscess in the terrier’s foot, and the occasion when he himself nearly poisoned his mother by stuffing tobacco into the coffee pot. But the abiding impression was of a childhood ‘full of love and good things to eat’.

Not that everything was exactly idyllic. The food, produced by Ada the cook, was just the usual stuff of Edwardian households, though it was no less welcome to the Auden boys for that. ‘There are certain tastes which those who have never experienced them as children can neither understand nor cure,’ wrote Wystan towards the end of his life. ‘Who but an Englishman, for example, can know the delights of stone cold leathery toast for breakfast, or the wonders of “Dead Man’s Leg”?’ – a nickname for suet pudding. Nor were things entirely perfect where love was concerned. His parents were in some ways oddly matched. His mother was strong-willed and...