Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

W. H. Auden (Review of The Orators)

The Orators by W. H. Auden was published in 1932 when Auden was twenty-five. It is an immensely precocious, rambling, difficult and eccentric work, mainly in prose and almost entirely forgotten. Today, outside libraries, it is only available in The English Auden, a collection of his poems, essays and dramatic writings from 1927 to 1939. The Orators, I suppose, is subsumed under “dramatic writings,” but it’s not in any sense a play, or even a piece for several voices. It is in actual fact an un-classifiable oddity, a maverick work in Auden’s output, impossible to label or pigeonhole. It is fiction, but it’s neither a novel or a short story. It contains parodies, lists, geometric drawings, diagrams, odes, doggerel and straightforward poems too. And, to be honest, it is long-winded occasionally, and, at times, maddeningly opaque with a rich seam of cockeyed, socio-cultural analysis. Auden himself, in later life, said of it, “My name on the title page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented, but near the border of sanity.” So why do I keep on reading it all the time?

Two main answers and lots of minor ones. I re-read it chiefly because it’s very funny and also for the access I gain into an astonishingly vivid, entrancing and daft imagination. Auden is my favourite poet, but in the prose of The Orators the control and discipline of poetry are abandoned. If you like the Audenesque tone of voice, its particular tropes and obsessions, then here you will find it writ large, lavishly piled on. It is, I think, something to be dipped into or picked over and, although it was vaguely designed as a coherent statement, its parts are infinitely richer than its whole.

The Orators is subtitled “An English Study” and is, rather as The Waste Land intended, meant to be a survey of the state of England, and the moral and spiritual health of the populace. This all sounds eminently serious and dull but, being Auden, it is Englishness that comes through rather than gravitas, and the ills of society are very idiosyncratically diagnosed. There is none of the monumental distanced angst striven for in Eliot’s poem. The needs and desires voiced — though genuine — are much more the needs and desires of W. H. Auden Esq., one suspects, rather than the unspoken pleas of a generation.

The book is divided into three sections, sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue. Part One is called “The Initiates” and is itself subdivided. It opens with an “Address for a Prizeday,” a hectoring speech analysing the current problems of the population. The English, it transpires, can be classed as four different types of lover. Excessive Lovers of Self, Excessive Lovers of Neighbours, Defective Lovers and Perverted Lovers. All this has at root some ostensibly serious purpose, to do largely with Auden’s preoccupation with psychosomatic illness as inspired by people like Groddeck and Layard. But this can be safely set aside, for the “seriousness” of The Orators, it seems to me, is only a starting point — a sort of skeleton of the book which gives it a rough structure and shape but which is really only there to provide support for the fleshing out of the text. It provides Auden’s talent with the excuse it has been waiting for. Having classified the population in this way he can now get on with describing them. The Excessive Lovers of Self: “Habitués of the mirror, famous readers, they fall in love with the voice of the announcer, maybe, from some foreign broadcasting station they can never identify.” The Defective Lovers: “They sit by fires they can’t make up their minds to light, while dust settles on their unopened correspondence … Wearers of soiled linen, the cotton wool in their ears unchanged for months. Anaemic, muscularly undeveloped and rather mean. Hit them in the face if necessary.” And so on for two delightful pages.

The following sections, “Argument” and “Statement,” introduce the atmosphere of war, insurrection, civil unrest and the emergence of a Leader who will guide the true of heart to victory and a new life. Once again the rather “loony” message is the excuse for more virtuoso comic description. A bizarre and fantastic atmosphere of risk, threat and paranoia is conjured up. And here too are all the familiar ingredients of the Audenesque landscape: public schools, the OTC, mines, mills, crags, borders and spies. “The fatty smell of drying clothes, the smell of cordite in a wood, and the new moon seen along the barrel of a gun … Rook shadows cross to the right. A schoolmaster cleanses himself at half term with a vegetable offering; on the north side of a hill, one writes with his penis in the snow ’resurgam.’”

You will be beginning to gain some idea of the tone of The Orators— the sinister-comic-eccentric voice at its most developed. The mood is sustained in the final section “Letter to a Wound.” This is based on Auden’s own experience after an operation he underwent on an anal fissure which took many months to heal. The letter forms a curious coda: a love letter, it shows the extent to which illness and sufferer become one.

Part Two is “Journal of an Airman” and the triumph of The Orators. It should be included in every anthology of the English short story. In it the vague impulses and solutions, needs and prognoses that preoccupied Part One are splendidly focused and dramatized in the diary of a neurotic aviator. The battle lines are drawn. The airman and his comrades face the Enemy. Although meant to function as a metaphor, the Enemy turn out to be suspiciously like the English middle classes at their smug, bourgeois worst. A strange civil war or revolution seems to be in progress in a landscape which is half Icelandic, half Cotswolds, with moors and ice floes, golf links and country pubs. The airman’s tortured and paranoid voice leads us through the mounting conflict with notes and jottings, attempts at aphorisms and pensées. The need for a true Leader re-emerges, while the airman frets about his fear of his mother and his love for his homosexual uncle Harry. The voice is uniquely Auden’s — D. H. Lawrence meets P. G. Wodehouse by way of Freud and Ealing comedies, if you see what I mean.

Throughout, the airman keeps trying to define and fix the Enemy in his mind and encourage in himself the right elements of daring and fearlessness. “Three kinds of enemy walk — the grandiose stunt — the melancholic stagger — the paranoic sidle. Three kinds of enemy face — the fucked hen — the favourite puss — the stone in the rain. Three enemy traits — refusal to undress in public — proficiency in modern languages — inability to travel back to the engine. Three kinds of enemy hand — the marsh — the claw — the dead yam.” And manically on and on. The journal has all the elisions, fractures, non sequiturs and private references one would expect. But what is most striking and admirable is the way Auden has seized on the potentiality of this literary form and exploited it to the full. Hint, allusion and half-meaning suddenly become potent assets: the briefest references can conjure up the density and detail of a long novel.

Here are some examples.

Tea today at Cardross Golf Club. A hot bed. Far too many monks in Sinclair Street.

Thursday

The Hollies. Some blazers lounge beneath a calming tree; they talk in birds’ hearing; girls come with roses, servants with a tray, skirting the sprinkler preaching madly to the grass, where mower worries in the afternoons.

Fourteenth anniversary of my uncle’s death. Fine. Cleaned the airgun as usual. But what have I done to avenge, to disprove the boy’s faked evidence at the inquest? NOTHING.

Monday — Interviewed A about his report.

Tuesday — Pamphlet dropping in the Bridgenorth area.

Wednesday — Address at Waterworm College.

Thursday — The Hollies. 7.30.

Friday — See M about the gin to be introduced into the lemonade at the missionary whist drive.

Saturday — Committee meeting.

Sunday — Break up the Mimosa’s lecture on blind flying.

We are drawn into the batty, surreal world of the airman. We are his confidant, his confessor. We share his worries (his errant love of Uncle Harry, his betrayal of Derek), his grief (Derek’s death, a crash: “His collar bone was sticking through his navel”); his love for E; the dangers of war (“A feint landing by pleasure paddle steamers near the bathing machines”); his own perpetual struggle to be heroic (28th. 3.40 am. Pulses and reflexes normal … Some cumulus cloud at 10,000 feet. Hands in perfect order”).

The final section of The Orators is all poetry — six odes — with examples of Auden at his most silly (“Christopher stood, his face grown lined with wincing/In front of ignorance—’Tell the English,’ he shivered,/‘Man is a spirit’”); evocative (“After a night of storm was a lawn in sunlight”); and typical (“Go south, lovey, south by Royal Scot/Or hike if you like it, or hire a Ford”). But the odes are a mixed bunch, and the best have been reprinted elsewhere, as have the other poems in the body of the book. As a result the work itself has fallen into obscurity, remembered if at all as the original context for a few more famous poems (“By landscape reminded of his mother’s figure” and the superb sestina “We have brought you, they said, a map of the country”). This is a real shame, for in The Orators one encounters the Audenesque at its most vivid and ill-disciplined and, accordingly, most fecund and distinctive. But more than that it reveals the vast range and scope of Auden’s astonishing eye for detail, Dickensian in its precision and accuracy, and provides us with that rare opportunity: to find in prose the word by word, line by line delights of poetry.

1984