W.H. Auden, a Biography [Hardcover]

Humphrey Carpenter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 1981

Few of W. H. Auden's friends adhered to his request to burn his letters after he died. Humphrey Carpenter's study quotes much of this correspondence for the first time, as well as drawing on other such rare material as Auden's unpublished verse, juvenilia, notebooks, and the journal the young poet kept during a stay in Berlin. This biography traces the artistic development of the most influential English poet of his generation, explaining the in-jokes in his early work, and the romantic crisis that inspired his last three long poems.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Simply as a scrupulous gathering of data - much of it from previously unavailable sources - this literate, sensible, yet oddly unsatisfying biography will take a secure place on the Auden shelf; and such slighter efforts as Charles Osborne's casual W. H. Auden (1979) will now seem even less reliable. Carpenter (J. R. R. Tolkien) views the young Auden's by-now-familiar "ideological muddle" - from post-Freudian psychologies (interestingly detailed here) to disillusioning Marxism to the liberalism of the selflessly loving "Agape" - with dry shrewdness . . . though he gives more serious weight than most to Auden's pessimistic, WW II conversion-back to the comforting "absolute" of Christianity. (Carpenter has also written on Jesus and C. S. Lewis.) And the problematic private life is painstakingly detailed without lapses into gossip-mongering: the "satisfied lust and unsatiable love" of Auden's cheerful early promiscuity; the liaison with lsherwood ("they could become schoolboys by getting into bed together"); the tendency toward impossible, unrequited passions (perhaps "he entered into such relationships . . . in order to stimulate his art"); the longterm attachment to "remorselessly promiscuous" Chester Kailman in New York and Europe; a heterosexual affair in the mid-'40s; the uppers and downers ("he liked drugs because they made him efficient"); his role in many friendships as a self-appointed "analyst-leader-healer." But somehow Carpenter's thoughtful, decade-by-decade documentation - travel, homes, collaborations, moods - doesn't add up either to a strong projection of personality or a convincingly developed life history. And his treatment of Auden's writing itself (which makes no claims to literary criticism) is descriptive and annotative rather than illuminating, with especially detailed summaries of the dramatic works; only in the last chapters does Carpenter tackle the poetry head-on-in an unpersuasive defense of late Auden, which was not a decline, he says, but "an attempt to purge his poetry of false rhetoric and to make it serve the interests of truth at whatever cost." (This revisionist view seems parallel to that of Auden-executor Edward Mendelson, Early Auden, p. 669). Not a commandingly involving or enlightening biography, then, but an expansively informative one which is also crisply readable and reasonably balanced. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 495 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (September 25, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395308534
• ISBN-13: 978-0395308530
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,835,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Auden Bio, February 5, 2011

By 

disco75 "disco75" (State College, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: W. H. Auden (Paperback)

Having read Carpenter's bio after February House, Wystan and Chester, and The Berlin Years, I feel as though I came to know the man (rather than the celebrity) only with Carpenter's portrayal. This bio is written in a dignified, articulate manner that does not, as one might fear with the 1981 publication date, censor the sexuality that is central to who Auden was.

Although Auden was an amateur psychoanalyst, Carpenter does not theorize about the poet's formative experiences as much as he presents the events in a way that lets the reader thread them together. In this way, we can see that the marital relationship to Kallman was a reflection of the maternal attachment that also was reflected in Auden's spiritual development, his political leanings, and his writing goals. We watch as his life changes after Kallman was largely residing in other countries without a formal break, and can speculate how the marital relationship grounded his friendships, teaching style, and writing. We witness the heartbreaking effects of stimulant and alcohol addiction on his face, his socializing, his memory, and his residence. We can enjoy the sweep of history that Auden participated in and become fascinated by his cohort.

The book is detailed without being dense. The poetry is vital to the story but this is not a literary analysis, rather a full-blooded biography. Auden was often a comical character as well as intellectual, giving Carpenter many chances to have the reader laughing out loud.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "We must all love each other or die", October 9, 2010

By 

M. A Newman (Alexandria, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: W. H. Auden (Paperback)

I think that some of the reviews of Humphrey Carpenter's book on Auden have undervalued its contribution to a genuine understanding of both Auden the man and his work.

To begin with, no life of Auden could avoid the taint of being "gossipy." Auden led a completely messy life complete with all manner of free and easy sexual encounters. Auden not only led this kind of life, but documented it for the amusement of similarly inclined friends. No one who examines the primary source documents, letters, diaries and even poetry can do anything more than to write a gossipy life. When not only menages a trois, but menages a quatre are the norm, it is impossible to write any other kind of biography unless the naughty bits were rendered in Latin as they were formerly in Suetonius..

What I liked about the book is that Carpenter breaks Auden's inner life into three distinct phases. At Oxford he was under the spell of D.H. Lawrence and even Freud. During the hungry thirties, like most European intellectuals, it was Marx and Communism. It appears that time in Spain contributed to Auden's disillusionment with "the God that failed." His third intellectual period was more orthodox embracing the Anglicanism of his youth and Kirkegaard coincided with his the beginning of his years in New York City.

For me, Carpenter's book filled in a number of blanks for me, mainly concerning Auden's emigration. Knowing more of the work than the man, I was under the impression that Auden decided to take up residence in America at the beginning of World War II rather than nearly a year before. His return to Oxford and Britain coincided with failing health and desire to return to his native land (though still an American citizen).

Another aspect of the work that I noticed was a shift in Auden's work in his later years. Critics have, I think unfairly, blamed the decline in quality of the poems on residence in America. What I think Carpenter demonstrates is that while Auden's poetry lost some of its edge, Auden was becoming more settled, more domestic in his later years and perhaps for this reason the themes involved more commonplace topics. Perhaps in reaction to these critiques, Auden tended to disown some of his more important poems, including the famous "September 1 1939", with its indictment of the thirties as "a low dishonest decade" (a poem that had particular resonance for me after the financial crash of 2008).

The picture that Carpenter paints of Auden is a person who probably would be better read than lived with. He was in a constant state of dishevelment and his living quarters were always characterized by visitors for the profound state of untidiness. Still Auden did write some of the best verse of the 20th century and even branched out less successfully into the fields of opera (Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress) and even the theatre (the work here seems to be dreadful, proving no one can be good at everything). As a teacher, his methods appear to be original and oriented more toward making students think about what they were reading (a sample exam on Elizabethan literature, "explain why the devil is both sad and honest.").

I think that Carpenter does an admirable job in this life of Auden. I think that other than a thorough read of Auden's collected works (and there is yet to be published a single good collection), this is probably as good a work on Auden as one is likely to find.