Humphrey Carpenter - W. H. Auden: A Biography

Biographies of writers, declared W. H. Auden, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste. A writer is a maker, not a man of action. To be sure, some, in a sense all, of his works are transmutations of his personal experiences, but no knowledge of the raw ingredients will explain the peculiar flavour of the verbal dishes he invites the public to taste: his private life is, or should be, of no concern to anybody except himself, his family and his friends.

Auden wrote this towards the end of his life, but it was an opinion that he had held for many years. He even suggested that most writers would prefer their work to be published anonymously, so that the reader would have to concentrate on the writing itself and not at all on the writer. He was also (he said) opposed in principle to the publication of, or quotation from, a writers letters after his death, which he declared was just as dishonourable as reading someones private correspondence while he was out of the room. As to literary biographers, he branded them as, in the mass, gossip-writers and voyeurs calling themselves scholars.

So it scarcely came as a surprise when, after his death in September 1973, his executors published his request that his friends should burn any of his letters that they might have kept, when they had done with them, and should on no account show them to anyone else. Auden himself had explained, in a conversation with one of his executors not long before his death, that this was in order to make a biography impossible.

In the months that followed Audens death, a very few of his friends did burn one or two of his letters. But most preserved what they had, and several people gave or sold letters to public collections. Meanwhile many of his friends, far from doing anything to hinder the writing of a life, published (in various books and journals) their own memoirs of him, which provided valuable material upon which a biographer could work.

At first sight it may seem as if they were riding roughshod over Audens last wishes. But it is not as simple as that. Here, 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.

Certainly he often attacked the principle of literary biography, but in practice he made a lot of exceptions. When reviewing actual examples of the genre he was almost always enthusiastic, finding a whole variety of reasons for waiving his rule. We need a biography of Pope, he said, because so many of Popes poems grew from specific events which need explaining; we want a life of Trollope because his autobiography leaves out a great deal; of Wagner because he was a monster; of Gerard Manley Hopkins because he had a romantically difficult relationship with his art. Audens no biography rule was in other words (as his literary executor Edward Mendelson has put it) flexible enough to be bent backwards.

The same is true of his attitude to writers letters. He usually reviewed published collections of them in friendly terms, and was only censorious when he thought that something private had been included which was merely personal and threw no light on the writers work. He himself made a selection of Van Goghs letters for publication, and he would have published an edition of the letters of Sydney Smith if someone else had not done it first. As to his own letters, he gave permission for a large number of quotations from them to be published, in academic books and the like, during his lifetime.

He also left a great deal of autobiographical writing. He once declared: No poet should ever write an autobiography; yet he did a great deal towards preserving a record of his own life. Not only does his poetry contain innumerable autobiographical passages, but several poems (including two of his longest, Letter to Lord Byron and New Year Letter) are largely autobiographical in character. Among his prose writings, too, there are all kinds of remarks about events in his life. And in his later years he allowed journalists to visit him in his New York apartment and at his summer house in Austria, letting them publish interviews with him which often recorded highly personal details of his life.

So there is a great deal of information for a biographer to draw upon. But would Auden, in the end, have approved of a biography being written?

It is possible that he might on the grounds that he was something of a man of action, who lived a life so full of interest that it deserves to be recorded for its own sake. This was a justification of biography that he accepted with one proviso. The biography of an artist, if his life as a man was sufficiently interesting, is permissible, he wrote, provided that the biographer and his readers realise that such an account throws no light whatsoever upon the artists work.

This last point, of course, brings us back to Audens fundamental objection to a writers biography. I do believe, however, he once added, that, more often than most people realise, his works may throw light upon his life.