The acclaimed poet wrote just once for NR. Why is that the case?
The acclaimed poet wrote just once for NR. Why is that the case?
M ore than a decade after he exploded an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer became death, the destroyer of National Review’s budding relationship with one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed poets. Oppenheimer, more precisely, acted as the trigger mechanism and not the uranium or plutonium.
National Review’s two resident Anglophiles — editor William F. Buckley Jr. and literary editor Frank Meyer — aggressively recruited Englishmen to bolster the quality of this fledgling American journal of opinion. J. R. R. Tolkien begged off. It went better with W. H. Auden. Then it didn’t.
Joseph Epstein writes in a review of Peter Ackroyd’s Auden in NR’s September print edition that the subject of that biography wrote “reviews” — plural — for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books but only once for National Review. Why once? Why not many times?
In January 1959, Auden reviewed The Image of the City and Other Essays, a posthumous collection of writings from Charles Williams. The essays included assigned articles, Auden notes, but “as every writer knows, being given a subject to write on can often stimulate thought and imagination so what at first seemed a purely hack job can turn out to be much more interesting than the writer anticipated.”
So great was Auden’s devotion to Williams that the scion of Anglican clergymen reportedly read Williams’s church history The Descent of the Dove annually after his 1940 return to the Church of England. So the prospect of offending Auden through an overbearing or uncareful edit of his two-page homage to Williams certainly existed. Nothing that he read in his article in Books, Arts & Manners alarmed Auden. Instead, a short item in the front of the magazine outraged him.
“A few years ago, there was something in the papers about Dr. Oppenheimer’s having told a lot of lies to various officers of the government,” read a six-paragraph item in The Week on the nuclear scientist’s obtaining a $90,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. “It is perhaps indecorous to mention the matter again. Is it right to suggest that the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study may be untruthful?”
The item vaguely referenced Oppenheimer’s admission that he had lied to the Army about an approach from a communist espionage agent and wondered why the government should entrust one who had deceived its employees on so consequential a matter with an award equivalent today to about $1 million. It playfully seized upon the tic of some highbrains to reflexively dismiss concerns over science from commoners because they lacked the proper credentials to hold an opinion.
So incensed was National Review’s newest contributor that he described this as “base” in a letter sent from St. Mark’s Place to the magazine five days before the issue’s cover date. This conclusion, he wrote, resulted not from his own disbelief in Oppenheimer’s dishonesty but because “I am perfectly certain the writer does not believe it either.”
Auden maintained that he cared little for the political leanings of the publications for which he wrote articles and reviewed books. He volunteered, “I can only hope that other contributors to the National Review besides myself will feel their personal honor has been tarnished by being associated with such dirt.”
One might credit Auden’s eccentricities — a passing pill- or potion-infused dramatic episode, or vague political leanings, despite his claim to the contrary — for the epistolary outburst. Perhaps one or more of the above fueled the “Dear John” letter. But other theories, more flattering to Auden, seem equally plausible.
His father worked as a physician, which allowed the son to indulge in his scientific library. Before Oxford, Auden’s education emphasized not literature but science. He studied under the assumption that engineering, not poetry, beckoned. Just as the Christian Oxonian felt a protectiveness to the Inkling and Church of England man Williams, he regarded men of science such as Oppenheimer as servants of an honorable calling incapable of dishonesty even, apparently, when they cop under oath to past dishonesty.
A second explanation stems from Auden’s unhappy flirtations with politics. “He was a poet who also sought to be an intellectual,” Epstein informs in his review, “though it is far from clear that the two mix. At least they never quite did for Auden, for the poet’s milieu is feelings; the intellectual’s is ideas.”
But in his most controversial foray into the world of ideas Auden demonstrated that feelings very much contributed to the intellectual’s milieu. In 1937, Auden made — like George Orwell, John Cornford, and other British writers — the obligatory pilgrimage to Spain. Unlike Orwell, Cornford, and the others, his use to the Spanish left in its civil war against Francisco Franco’s nationalists perplexed. Did he go to provide medical aid or in a journalistic capacity to observe and write? Auden surely did not travel to Spain to fight.
The less accomplished poet but more renowned political activist John Reed noted, “This class struggle plays hell with your poetry.” Auden more or less discovered this, too. Unlike Reed, he ultimately chose poetry over politics.
His experiences on the Iberian Peninsula allowed for one of his most famous poems, 1937’s “Spain,” that “arid square” of land “nipped” from Africa and “soldered” to Europe. Therein, Auden shifts from the “art for art’s sake” position of all good poets to the “art is a weapon” position of all good communists. He writes of “a people’s army,” “the necessary murder,” and history as an “operator” and “organizer” in a Marxist sense amid an occasional refrain about “the struggle.” What the seductive siren of the “Be All That You Can Be” jingle did for potential U.S. Army recruits in 1987, “Spain” did for potential International Brigades enlistees in 1937. The poet, therefore, took on the uncomfortable role of advertising pitchman and military recruiter. The political connotations that endeared the poem to readers of a certain persuasion disenchanted its author. As Mark Ford of University College London observed, “No poem has been criticized more ferociously than ‘Spain’ by Auden himself.”
Auden traveled to Spain in 1937 because it seemed the thing to do. Possibly, he disowned National Review 22 years later for the same reason. Nothing in the January 31, 1959, issue of National Review does much to help explain the disavowal. Everything else over the rest of Auden’s life proves illuminating.
In a vacuum, Auden’s rejection of National Review comes across as proto-cancel culture in which a politicized writer seeks the safety of the approved writers by denouncing the maverick ones. In context, Auden, in his clumsy and factually incorrect letter, reveals something charming about himself. He wished to say goodbye to all that and not again obscure the poet through the distracting haze of politics. That he never quite realized this wish does not detract from the nobility of the ambition.