Vol. 16 No. 17 · 8 September 1994
pages 12-13 | 2904 words
Young Wystan
Ian Hamilton
- Juvenilia: Poems 1922-28 by W.H. Auden, edited by Katherine Bucknell
Faber, 263 pp, £25.00, July 1994, ISBN 0 571 17140 0
W.H. Auden once revealed his ‘life-long conviction that in any company I am the youngest person present.’ This confession, made when he was 58, perhaps raised a shifty smile among those of his acolytes who had grown used to the crotchety, old-womanish persona of his later years – the early nights, the carpet slippers, and so on. Old when young and young when old: the ageing of our most-wrinkled-ever poet has always seemed a somewhat mysterious process.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 19 · 6 October 1994
From Stan Smith
Ian Hamilton writes (LRB, 8 September) of Auden’s juvenilia: ‘One never feels that there is anything of his own … pressing for a point of entry. As de la Mare, he can “see the fairies dancing in the ring”; as Housman, he exhorts, “Take up your load and go, lad/And leave your friends behind.” ’ I wonder My father, who was Auden’s exact contemporary, could remember a schoolboy joke that went: ‘“Miss, miss, I’ve lost my rubber.” “Then use the boy’s behind.”’ Such puerile word-play certainly appealed to the grown-up Auden. Witness his observation in A Certain World (1971), under the heading of ‘Double-Entendre, Unconscious’: ‘It must have been sheer in-attention … that permitted Laurence Binyon to write: “Why hurt so hard by little pricks?” ’
Nor is it so far away from that which, on a more elevated plane, might have resolved Clarence Brown’s dilemma, elsewhere in the same issue. Brown writes that English cannot translate the play on byt and bytie in Russian, which hovers between ‘everyday existence and … higher – or inner – being’. The title of an Auden book which explored this particular intersection had a pretty good try: For the Time Being. Viktoria Schweitzer’s biography might well have been felicitously translated as Marina Tsvetaeva for the Time Being, or some such. As Auden wrote in 1953, ‘good poets have a weakness for bad puns,’ and it is ‘tall tales, the luck of verbal playing’ that can often best ‘trick [our] lying nature’ into the truth.
Stan Smith
University of Dundee
