"‘The art of humiliation is born,’ said the young Auden to the young hopeful donor. And we saw in the first of these three essays, how he came to believe, he continued this.1 The sonnets thought of as a private record of Shakespeare's humiliation at the hands of both the young man and the Dark Lady, for whom the sonnets addressed to her are 'with this humiliating of all erotic experiences, gender-al love concerned.' 'Simple lust,' said Auden, 'is impersonal, i.e., the pursuer sees himself not as a person, but the object of his pursuit as a thing, to whose personal qualities, if it has any, he is indifferent, and if he succeeds, he expects to be in a position to discard it safely as soon as he is bored. Sometimes, however, he gets caught. Instead of getting bored, he becomes sexually obsessed, and the girl, instead of remaining conveniently an object, becomes a real person to him, but a person whom he not only does not love, he actively dislikes.'"
Auden adds that "no other poet, not even Catullus, has expressed the agony, self-contempt, anger of this unhappy condition as well as Shakespeare in some of these sonnets."
As for the young man: the impression we get of his friend is one, from a young man who was not really very beautiful, very conscious of his good looks, able to switch on the charm at will, but fundamentally trivial, cold-hearted, and egotistical, probably knowing that he had some power over Shakespeare—would have, if he thought about it at all—no doubt gave it a cynical explanation, but with no conception of the intensity of the feelings he had, unwittingly, aroused. Someone rather like Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice.
Auden thought that the sonnets told the story "of a tortured struggle by Shakespeare to preserve the glory of the vision which he had been granted in a relationship lasting for a period of at least three years, with a person who deliberately seemed through his actions bent on dirtying the vision."
More than one reader has sensed in these lines a bitterness derived from Auden's own relations with Chester Kallman, his beloved, with whom he continued to live, at least for part of the year, long after their sexual relationship had ceased. Auden remained married to Kallman, but since his lover had turned elsewhere for sex, he came to make his own arrangements. Since Auden is often portrayed as the suffering victim in this relationship, it is noteworthy that if he were attacking Kallman in his portrayal of the young man in the sonnets, he (a) would thereby be casting himself as Shakespeare, and (b) would be committing an act of cruelty which might well have made things very hard for Kallman to bear. And how could you live happily with someone who attacks you in print?
Auden was more aware of the difficulty of being on the receiving end of an intensely felt love, and they can, that in his definition of the vision of Eros he might remember or less the possibility that the vision might be mutually exclusive. Beatrice, had she lived, could never, as she was, have moved Dante's experience of her back and forth. As Auden expressed it: "The story of Tristan and Isolde is a myth, not an instance, of what can happen historically." Auden also felt that the vision he spoke of could not long survive an actual sexual relationship. In a letter to David Luke, he emphasized that "all authorities agree that the vision cannot survive any longer sexual relationships." But he does not say who all these authorities are.
Actually, the history of Shakespeare's sonnets, if they do tell a story, seems to me of significance to Auden living in a way he could not have acknowledged. You will remember that the conclusion of Sonnet 20 suggests that the young man roams the poet’s love, thus modeling his sexual attentions onto women: "Because she did thee prick'd out for women's pleasure," says the poet, "mine be thy love and thy love their treasure." The poet thinks he can split love into two parts, but this plan gets its comeuppance when the young man goes somewhere near the Dark Lady. In his own life, Auden felt that with his engagement he should hold fast to. If Kallman shifted his sexual attentions elsewhere, perhaps Auden could still cling to his love in the important sense. He was unwavering in this unhappy ambition for the next thirty years of his life. Sometimes in his poems, he expresses a stoic resignation:
I looked up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all the care they lavish on the earth,
They couldn't give a damn, but it's nothing to me:
For why should I despair more than they despair?
Admirer as I believe I am
Of stars that look down on a lot of dirt,
I can't, now I see them, help saying
I missed a very wonderful day.
For all the stars to vanish or die out,
I should learn, under an empty heaven
And looking entirely dark sublime,
Although this may take me a little time.
("The More Loving One")
This is one of those poems that probably did not go down well when it came out in 1958, but which hangs around and resonates, especially because of this couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let me love the more loving one.
Thought that someone might perhaps take comfort from a certain point in life.
Stung Auden was not always stoic or resigned in this way. His jealousy of Kallman was so hurt that at one point—or so—he believed he nearly strangled him. And that anger returned to haunt him:
Set in this night lovely, a moon,
And with eye only alooking
Down from there above
Bless me, one special
And everywhere friends
With a cloudless
Lightness surround our absences;..
Innocent sleep our watched
By a vast yet empty space,
White hush, glittering depths.
Parted by circumstances,
Grant each other pardon
That we in dreams
For speech meeting can, for caresses,
By warm firesides, through cool streams.
Shine tonight altogether, in
The dark suddenly, awake,
Alone in a bed
To hear his own rage
Wishing his love were dead.
("Five Songs," V)
To be in love and wish your loved one dead is, to be in love and know that they hide it, to be caught in the clutches of a sexual obsession with someone you discover you do not like—all these humiliating experiences must have surfaced in Auden's work, and it is remarkable that the humiliation does not begin with Kallman. From the earliest published texts of Auden's, we are invited to see love as transient:
Yet speech is still near fingers numb,
When love not infrequently has kept
An unjust answer, been deceived,
I, decorously with the seasons, to move. Another calculus,
Or with another love.
("The Letter")
The lover behaves decorously in the sense that he accepts change. This is the behavior of nature. Love is seasonal. And it happens that in early Auden lyrics an incantatory style can create an effect of beauty while the subject under discussion might be something that could shock the reader if he only understood it better. It was Christopher Isherwood in *Christopher and His Kind* (1976) who said that Auden had written a beautiful poem just to please Isherwood, about a friend of Isherwood's known as Bubi:
Before these loved ones
What, that one and another,
A family
And history
And ghostly hindrances
Whose pleasant name
Neighborhood shame was.
Before this last
What much ado,
Frontiers to
As clothing worse cross until
And coins pass
In a cheaper house,
Before this last,
Before this loved one.
("This Loved One")
Perhaps it would always have been clear to the reader that something was amiss here, that—when the second stanza says it was—"not a real encounter," "a backward love." Perhaps crossing boundaries too, as clothing got worse and coins passed in a cheaper house suggested that what was going on was not, as it seemed, quite respectable. But whether the words "rent boy" or "male prostitute" or "promiscuity" came to mean anything to the original readers of the poem is another question. Such words seem from a totally different lexicon than that of the poem.
Much of Auden's early lyrics were written in a kind of code, and that was a source of their bewitching power. Readers of lyric poetry divide into two kinds: those who, confronted with what seems to be a code, insist on cracking it, and those who are happy to hear the spell without asking too closely what it means. Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bed-axe tree
—as Eliot so aptly put it in Burnt Norton. But what does it mean?
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings beneath ingrained scars
And reconciles forgotten wars.
What is a trilling wire? Some people know the answer. Others don't. (I think a trilling wire is a telegram people used to send to Professor Lionel Trilling, begging for his help in explaining passages like this.)
What Auden wrote in code—so far as his circle could possess a key to the code, while the general public could not—was enjoyed with a sense of pleasure and privilege, perhaps also as a joke on the general public. How many readers thought they understood the dedication of the poem (1930) as having a sexual meaning?
Let us honor, if we can, the
Vertical man
Though we value none
Lying on the horizontal one.
And should they have been right to do so? Does it mean: let us try to honor the living, though it is the dead we value? (A quotation message, certainly.) Or honor the human being in his active mode, though we are—the which value?? The unconscious, the contemplative human?
A poem can be simultaneously transparent and undisclosed, encoded and en clair:
A dear, though the night is gone,
The dream haunts still by day, brought us to that
A space
Cavernous, high in
A head station, and
In this gloom
For all beds upset, and we in a
Long corner to lay.
Our whisper woke no clocks, and
Kissed and I was glad
At all they did,
Indifferent to those
Who with hostile eyes
In pairs sat on every bed, rounds
Arms round each other's necks,
Intertwined and vaguely sad.
Oh but what worm of guilt
Or what malign doubt
Am I the victim of,
That they then, did unashamed,
What I never wanted,
Confessed love each other!
And I, humbly, felt
Unwanted and went out.
("Twelve Songs," IV)