W.H. Auden’s wish to die, his hatred of women, and his acerbic view of novels about ‘peasants and inarticulate people’ have been revealed in a journal that has eluded scholars for decades.
Throughout his life he changed his mind rapidly and often. But he was always able to express his current opinion with great authority.
Writing in his 1935 essay, ‘The Poet’s Tongue’, Auden states: ‘There must always be two kinds of art: escape art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.’
Somehow his hatred of women contradicts his statement, for he never learnt to love women, nor show any tolerance to speak of regarding ‘peasants and inarticulate people’.
Although the poet once hinted in a letter that he kept a diary in 1939, Auden experts presumed that the journal had been lost until it was offered at auction at Christie’s this month.
The contents, which clearly show the poet speaking from the heart as the Second World War broke out, will be made public for the first time after the British Library bought it for £47,475.
One of the most revealing and candid passages, written in tight, controlled script, describes how he wanted to die until he fell in love with Chester Kallman, an eighteen-year-old man fourteen years his junior. Amid public recrimination, Auden left for America in 1939 as the prospect of war with Germany loomed. His first diary entry, written on 30th August as Germany invaded Poland, begins with an unfortunate prediction: ‘The prospect of war seems slightly less,’ he writes. ‘It is curious how the knowledge of being loved can change one’s attitude completely. Last September, in Brussels, I was really hoping there would be a war. The miraculous second coming. This year the possibility of leaving C [Chester Kallman] if war breaks out makes me burst into tears while listening to the radio waves. I realise now that for the last four years a part of me has been wanting to die.’
Auden is brutally unguarded about his misogyny and snobbishness. He declares on 9th September: ‘My hatred of women is such that if I’m not afraid of them and have anything to do with them I am cruel.’ He writes that Cyril Connolly’s review of The Dog Beneath the Skin, which Auden wrote with Christopher Isherwood, is accurate when it notes that the female characters are ‘small, derogatory roles’. Auden adds: ‘Both Chester and Christopher like them to talk to, Christopher because they are good listeners and Chester because it’s easy to impress them. I don’t unless they correct me.’
He also pours scorn on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which charts the misery and exploitation of ordinary people during the Great Depression, because ‘failures are boring as central characters’. He adds: ‘Peasants and inarticulate people are not suited to the medium of the novel, which shows characters through verbal dialogue. They belong to the film, which can show physical movements. Let’s have no more novels about the primal physical violence of the dumb oxen.’
John Sutherland, emeritus professor of English at UCL, said that the entry exposed Auden’s thoughtless side. ‘That’s a gob-stopper,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit harsh in the context of the Great Depression when so many people suffered. That throws a rather nasty, patrician, snobbish light on him.’
The journal will be available to read next year.
What a piece of work Auden must have been. A brute and a bigot, consumed with hatred and lacking humanitarian compassion for the defenceless and the weak in our midst; people of his ilk are a menace to civilised society and should be ostracised and given the kind of vitriol they dish out to others. What a pity that they happen to be endowed with a brilliant intellect, only to use it to demean the human race.
