2
But artists, though, are human; and for man
To be a scivvy is not nice at all:
So everyone will do the best he can
To get a patch of ground which he can call
His own. He doesn’t really care how small.
So long as he can style himself the master:
Unluckily for art, it’s a disaster.
W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, July–October 1936.
British biographers of W. H Auden make something of the Auden family as members of the servant-employing class (those from the US, less so): listing a household’s domestics delivers an encapsulated item of social and historical information, as it has done since at least the early eighteenth century. Your readers will know a lot about your historical subject if you list the coachman, two maids, and the cook employed by George Augustus Auden (1872–1957), general physician of York, and his wife Constance Bicknell Auden (1869–1941) at the time of the birth of their third and youngest son Wystan Hugh, in 1907.1 The biographer may have a lot more to say about the rank, status, and background of the family, but it is not necessary to do so, if you mention the servants.2 Your subject may himself have written, quite frequently, about his father the doctor, his mother with a university degree, a ‘study full of books on medicine, archeology, the classics … a rain gauge on the lawn and a family dog … family prayers before breakfast, bicycle rides to collect fossils or rub church brasses, reading aloud in the evenings …’ without once mentioning the servants who supported their way of life; but you know the servants are there, dusting the study and preparing breakfast (in some accounts of the Auden household routine, they are required to attend morning prayers, so they would have been up betimes to get it ready for the family).3 They may have mown the lawn, though the Audens would have been usual in employing a bought-in gardener to do that, and in 1933 Dr Auden was doing his own winter garden tidy.4 The maids of Auden’s early childhood home were remembered by their categorical opposites, the servants working at his public school, Gresham’s at Holt in Norfolk, which he attended between 1920 and 1925: ‘the cooking, if undistinguished – no one seems ever to have solved the problem of school maids who are almost invariably slatternly and inefficient – was quite adequate’.5 He remembered one servant’s name from his childhood home, that of the presumably tidy and efficient ‘old cook Ada, [who] surely knew her stuff’.6 The servants were also present by default in the same essay when he contemplated the lessons taught to middle-class children of the era about relationships with working-class people. He wrote, he said, as ‘the son of book-loving, Anglo-Catholic parents of the professional class, the youngest of three brothers’. From ‘the monied classes’ he thought he was like all the other boys at Gresham’s, unable ‘to see the world picture of … [the working] class objectively’. ‘The public school boy’s attitude to the working-class and the not-quite-quite has altered very little since the war,’ he said in 1934. ‘He is taught to be fairly kind and polite, provided of course, they return the compliment, but their lives and needs remain as remote to him as those of another species.’7 Edward Mendelson discusses Auden’s thinking on social class in either sexual terms – ‘The erotic objects in his earlier poems were generally from the working classes, rarely his social or intellectual equals. They earned their living with their bodies’ – or as a twentieth-century writer’s problem of representation.8 But here is an analogous proposition: that any upper middle-class boy born in the early decades of the twentieth century learned how to think of the lower orders by means of his family’s domestic servants.
Auden’s upbringing had taught him lessons about social class; so too had a family history, which for him inscribed the eighteenth-century rise of the middling sort, the early industrial revolution, the growth of the professional bourgeoisie, and the opportunities offered to their class by rentier capitalism: ‘My father’s forbears were all Midland yeoman/ Till royalties from coalmines did them good’, he told the departed Lord Byron – though did not appear to know that Byron was a fellow, though much grander, Midlander, who had also derived some of his Newstead Abbey revenues from coal.9 But then, as he said when attempting explain changes in the creative arts and their markets between Byron’s lifetime (1788–1824) and 1936, ‘I’ve simplified the facts to be emphatic,/ Playing Macaulay’s favourite little trick/Of lighting that’s contrasted and dramatic’. This is the only indication, anywhere, that Auden had read Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s works of history and, interestingly, had a critical stance on Macaulay’s prose style. It’s far less interesting that Byron could not possibly have read a historian whose first works were published in the 1840s; but Macaulay’s judgement on Byron, that ‘he was himself the beginning, the middle, and the end of his own poetry – the hero of every tale – the chief object of every landscape’, is the ironic undertow to Letters from Iceland which contain the one to Byron.10
None of these lessons – about class, sex, and history – were taught in York. Wystan Auden was born in the city in February 1907, but in 1908, when he was eighteen months old, the family moved to Solihull, Warwickshire: Dr Auden had been appointed School Medical Officer for Birmingham. Solihull was then a large village some six miles south east of the city centre where the Birmingham Education Offices were located. It was served by the Great Western Railway, which offered a ten-minute journey into the city. The opening of Solihull Station in 1852 had prompted families with comfortable incomes from industry and investment and the professional bourgeoisie to purchase substantial villas within striking distance of the railway station; many of these were located in Lode Lane, the new Auden address. Perhaps the Lode Lane house was chosen with Dr Auden’s daily commute into Birmingham in mind; but 24 Lode Lane (or where No. 24 was; ‘Apsley’ or ‘Apsley House’ has been demolished) is a fair stretch to Solihull Station: half an hour at a brisk pace. Another reason for the choice of Solihull over other Warwickshire villages bordering Birmingham, or one of the city’s several salubrious suburbs, may have been its reputation as a strongly Anglican parish, though several biographical accounts suggest that Solihull churches were not high church enough for Mrs Auden.11 Up until 1905, Solihull had been under the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, but was then moved to the newly formed Diocese of Birmingham.12 Auden remembered discussion of the low-church proclivities of the Bishop of Birmingham (‘doctrinal and liturgical controversy’) in the two Solihull homes of his childhood.13 After 1911 and the appointment of the low-church Bishop Wakefield to the office, there was nowhere in the diocese that was liturgically very comfortable for high-church Anglicans. When the Audens relocated again in 1913 (little Wystan now 6 years old) it was to Homer Road, a mere five minutes from Solihull Station and very close to the parish church of St Alphege. In the year after the move, Dr Auden acted as sidesman and as parish lay representative to the Ruraldecanal Conference and the Diocesan Conference.14
But perhaps Dr Auden did not take the train, but used a horse and trap for his commute and for his inspection of sanitary arrangements in Birmingham schools.15 There is no coachman recorded living-in at 24 Lode Lane; the employment of a live-out coachman, or one hired from a local livery company, would not have been recorded under servant tax legislation, or in the 1911 census.16 But in 1911 there were servants in the Lode Lane house. Ada Elizabeth Lowly was returned as the Audens’ cook. Her age (31 years, so not old at all) and her birthplace in West Hartlepool suggest that she may have come with the family from York. The housemaid Flora Munday, 17 years old and born in Rudge, Staffordshire was a West Midlands girl. There was also the exotic-sounding Emma Lucie Heiniger, 20 years old, of Swiss nationality though born in Colombia, South America, who was returned as governess.17 This was a smaller household staff than the Audens had supported in York. Both Carpenter and Davenport-Hines point out that George Auden had taken a drop in salary when he moved to the Birmingham post. It would be unusual, however, for the family not to have employed bought-in cleaners, charwomen, and jobbing gardeners to supplement their staff of three.18 W. H. Auden does not appear to have remembered the Swiss governess (he was 4 years old when she was enumerated). His older brother (John Bicknell Auden, 1903–1991) did, recalling her presence in the household from 1908 onwards, and that he had been ‘jealous no doubt of affection and attention being transferred to a new arrival’. He was happiest, he said, ‘between 1908–1911 while staying with my two aunts and an uncle who lived during vacation time in three houses at Wyesham, near Monmouth. I had been escorted there by a Swiss nanny. Wystan … was too young to remember that I was the only one of the three brothers who had a friend of my own, and all the way from Switzerland. Alas, sixty years later even her name is forgotten …’19
I have come to think of W. H. Auden as a servant-reared child; or if not reared by servants (for by all accounts Constance Auden was a very hands-on mother) as a typical product of the Edwardian three-servant household.20 One could see his rigid work routine, his insistence on early rising, his habit of leaving all social occasions at 9 pm, sometimes in mid-conversation, so that he might be tucked up in bed by 10, the punctual serving of meals at his table, the certain and absolute cocktail hour, on the dot … as legacies of highly organised household procedures in Lode Lane and Homer Road, Solihull. Humphrey Carpenter is particularly informative on the poet’s domestic routine and attributes it to ‘a deep nostalgic affection for the manners and rules of … [his] childhood’; it was partly an attempt to recreate a ‘strict Edwardian upbringing’, and ‘as his years in exile in America went by he began more and more to model his domestic life … according to a pattern of nursery strictness’.21 Of course, many bourgeois children served by maid and cook grow up without any such routine; some children of the poorer sort have routines quite as strict as Auden’s when they are grown: I really appreciate a day that starts with an alarm at 6, believing that if I haven’t begun work by 8 or, at the very latest, 9, I might as well give up and go shopping, for nothing can come of a late start. I am edgy if not tucked up by 10. Auden ‘never wrote at night – “Only the Hitlers of the world work at night; no honest artist does” ’.22 I know many who do write at night, who produce good prose and excellent history, and who are nothing like Hitler; but I have never done it myself. But working in a room with curtains drawn against the daylight (Harborne Birmingham, New York, Ischia; anywhere Auden wrote between 1930 and his death in 1973) I cannot fathom. Once when it was suggested that Auden accompany colleagues on a walk, he replied ‘What on earth for?’; I understand that no more than I do the Benzedrine and the downers that fuelled the working machine (I do understand the dissipation of the writing day in a stiff drink).23 But there is great satisfaction in reading about a working routine that was so productive of so very much poetry and prose (there is pleasure, as Auden said, in just reading about a writer’s working habits). His proclamation that ‘no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgement he respects’, is a fine motto for all writers, poetical or otherwise.24 Such practices of mind and everyday life may have had nothing at all to do with the habits and manners inculcated in a small child in a servant-keeping household of Edwardian Warwickshire. But it is a different matter with the housekeeping question, which is raised in all accounts of Auden’s middle and later years.
Auden once exclaimed to Edmund Wilson ‘I hate living in squalor – I detest it! – but I can’t do the work I want to do and live any other way.’25 The squalor has been endlessly displayed by biographers, journalists, playwrights, and literary critics high and low, contemporaneously and posthumously, these sixty years past. Many find the story of Vera Stravinsky, the chamber pot, and the chocolate pudding irresistible; it is certainly the most recycled dirty story told about Auden.26 I find the repeated stories of domestic dirt and disorder extremely depressing to read. In those moments of readerly imagination, as I get out my mop and pail and bottle of bleach and in a dour and resigned sort of way go about giving the place (wherever) a good going over, I am bound to think that Auden just didn’t know how; that he may have hated dirt and disorganisation, but that as a child of a servant-keeping household, had never learned how to put things right. I do not object to the dirt in itself, for I have my little Brillo pad to tackle the encrusted stove in some Auden kitchen, somewhere or other; it’s the retelling of the story of the dirt that offends and depresses. Even Alan Bennett cannot make me laugh at its recycling. This is perhaps because Bennett’s play The Habit of Art, which confronts Auden, his past, and his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, uses the most time-worn literary vehicle of the Western world for assessing character: Bennett employs the servants to do it.27 It’s 1972; we’re in Oxford, in Christ Church’s minimally converted old Brewhouse, which had been provided as ‘lodgings for one of its most distinguished sons’.28
Auden’s scout, Mr Boyle, in shirtsleeves and apron, though with collar and tie, is making ritual and ineffectual attempts to tidy the room, which is both messy and bleak … [He] is expressionless, emptying ash from various receptacles into a bucket … May, a middle-aged woman, has come on in outdoor coat and shopping bag. Boyle picks up a mouldy soup bowl and shows it to May. She picks up a cloth.
May Dishcloth?
Boyle His vest …
May I’ll rinse that out.
Boyle I wouldn’t. Where do you think he pees?
The servants then discuss Auden’s notorious habit of peeing in wash basins, his stinginess with lavatory paper, his habit of going without underwear.29 The servant’s voice elides criticism of the bourgeois employer as it has done in all kinds of literary production for (at least) the last 500 years. In their interminable recycling of the Auden dirt stories, few commentators make a distinction between household and personal squalor. Auden appears to have been (to this reader) pretty clean in his person; in many biographical accounts he is often in the bath. It seems to me rude beyond all measure for Nicolas Nabokov to have recalled his ‘astonishment at seeing the dirt of his fingernails’, and in a memorial volume to boot! How very inappropriate!30 It was just that Auden couldn’t be doing with the kitchen floor or the washing up. The practice of peeing in the washbasin (avoidance of flushing) is supposed to have been his response to a Californian water crisis, shortly after he moved to the US. But any child far from a lavatory, with knowledge of the nanny’s, or housemaster’s, or mother’s ears peeled for night time movement (any mother’s ears peeled, not just the bourgeois ones of Edwardian Solihull), learns to pee where and in what they can.
Auden’s was a life lived with servants. There were servants in the Solihull and Harborne households; maids and cooks, cleaners, gardeners, and odd-job men at his preparatory and public schools, and at his Oxford college. Households like the Audens’ were structured by the servant’s labour, or by its absence: at Constance Auden’s end in 1941 Dr Auden told the story of her death (in a letter to a friend) in terms of domestic service: ‘She had been in failing health for some time & had a bad heart attack on Whit Tuesday, but … was soon active. We have had no maid since Maggie married eighteen months ago & later only a woman coming in for 3 hours more or less daily …’31 Auden employed servants during his US years, from 1940 onwards. ‘Oh, my Negro maid has left me’, he told Alan Ansen, of his Cornelia Street apartment in December 1947. ‘She didn’t show up after the day she cursed me.’ He contrasted his current establishment with the one he grew up in: ‘It’s a disgrace I have to live like this. It’s so hard to get accommodation in this country. I make as much money as my father did when he was my age, and he had a wife and three children to support, and he was able to afford a house and an adequate staff of servants while I have to live in two rooms and keep my bed in a working room, something I dislike extremely.’32 There were servants of a sort in the Ischian household throughout the 1950s up until the retreat to Kirchstetten, Austria, in 1958, where he also employed domestic help. The presence of servants in the Christ Church College Brewhouse has been noted, though college scouts and cleaners were not in Auden’s pay. All the others were. The woman with a Brillo pad in her hand feels sorry for the two nameless black servants ‘who cleaned and cooked the meals – formal heavy meals, which were eaten in the basement with plush-covered furniture’ of the bohemian – commune, you have to call it, avant la lettre – run by Auden in Brooklyn in the early 1940s.33 They are not named; but English literary history teaches how unlikely it would be if they were; and whilst they may not have had murder in their heart (how can we tell their heart, when they have no name?) as they plunged the greasy dishes into the sink, ‘the barest expository mention of a servant’s existence is sufficient to place … [Auden’s] life in problematic relation to the labouring community’.34
The servant stories from Ischia are more amusing than the dirty ones. Auden and Chester Kallman spent their summers on the island between 1947 and 1957, wintering in New York. One of the houses they inhabited came with Giocondo; he is called a houseboy, or majordomo, depending on the disposition of the biographer, some of whom remark that the name was improbable, whilst not caring to discover what was his last, or family, name.35 In the Forio house, Giocondo lived in, gardened, tidied up around the place, laid the table, and cooked when Kallman was away. Carpenter thinks that he was also (possibly) employed ‘to provide sexual services’.36 Edward Mendelson says that the poems Auden wrote in Italy ‘were the first that noticed the daily ordinariness of a place where he actually lived’, and there is more written evidence of the couple’s domestic routine from Ischia than from anywhere else Auden lived.37 Auden also appears as an Ischian householder involved with the provisioning and maintenance of a domestic sphere – much more so than in the stories told of New York and Kirschstetten, though in Kirschstetten he was reported as happy with ‘the absurdities of Frau Emma, his housekeeper … Her death was one of the factors which darkened the last years of his life’ – happy with a servant in a way he had not been since his childhood.38
Maybe ‘amusing’ is the wrong word for the Giocondo story (none of this is to say anything at all about the actually-existing Signor Sacchetti). But it is about something less sad than the ghosts of numberless young men and women in the back kitchens of Western modernity, up to their elbows in filthy water whilst they (the high-ups, the appropriators, the masters and mistresses) get on with their incomprehensible but clearly more satisfying lives – elsewhere; on the other side of the kitchen door.39 The Giocondo story is a good one because it repeats the ur-story of English state and social formation, as first expounded by Samuel Richardson in Pamela, in 1740. Auden was not likely to have recognised this, as not only had he not read Pamela, but said he never would.40 Pamela, the eponymous 15-year-old servant of Richardson’s epistolary fiction, not only has a highly articulate and well thought-through discourse on the idea of doing the dishes (an empirical political philosophy, derived from John Locke, to say why she shouldn’t be asked to do the washing up),41 but she also constitutes a major reference point for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century employers supplying their domestics with rules and regulations: ‘Never tell the affairs of the family you belong to; for that is a sort of treachery … but kept their secrets and have none of your own’; ‘Whatsoever happens in your master’s house is never to be spoken out of your master’s doors. A tale-bearing servant is always an unfaithful servant.” ’42 ‘This’, says Bruce Robbins, ‘is the servant’s original sin: the making known outside the dialogue of what goes on within [a household].’43 Pamela made Mr B.’s gentry household open to all by means of her letters home; Giocondo did not write his stories of the goings-on in the Auden household.44 But after a fatal embezzlement of his employers’ money, or the forging or cashing of a cheque he shouldn’t have cashed (or … there are multiple variants of the tale), he was dismissed his service by Auden and Kallman, set himself up in a café-bar in town, and reaped a modest living by supplying journalists and other interested inquirers with stories of their household, ‘told out of doors’, well after the couple had left for Austria.45
So Auden had servants, and servant troubles, not so very different from those of the employing classes of the Atlantic world from the early modern period through to the mid-twentieth century.46 He also possessed a theology of service – or a theology of servants – believing that in literature, at least, a figure like Jeeves in P. J. Wodehouse’s cycle of novels expressed Christianity’s highest form of love: charity, or caritas; the love of God for man and of man for God: ‘So speaks comically – and in what other mode … could it on earth truthfully speak? – the voice of Agape, of Holy Love’, he wrote of butler Jeeves.47 Then, in 1963, ‘to illustrate the use of the master-servant relationship as a parable of agape’ he took examples from ‘books which present the parable in a clear simplified form, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne and the Jeeves series’.48 He also explored the psychology of the relationship – and of the servant – by means of Dickens’ Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers. (Here was one of the [fictional] ‘working-class and the not-quite-quite’ whose life and needs were not utterly remote to him.)49
Not every aspect of Auden’s theology of service would have been recognised by English gentlemen of the employing classes during the long English eighteenth century; but many would. There were powerful Christian narratives to promote the thesis that master and servant were really relations; that the one was part of the other and that they were bound together in a love that recognised – some said, inscribed – hierarchy and subordination. Religious tract material repeated the injunction that the servant was bound in obedience and subordination to a master who was also a kind of father; it promoted the Biblical texts that carried this message well into the nineteenth century. High court judges sometimes appeared to aver this principle too, for was not the perfection of the English common law that it embodied the tenets of the reformed faith? But despite all the repeated prescriptions for godly relations within a household, as far as I can discover, the anonymous author of Laws Concerning Master and Servants of 1785 was the last legal voice to aver that ‘Master and Servants are Relatives’; and in any case his declaration was accompanied by a brisk affirmation of modern contractual relations: ‘And a Servant in the Intendment of our Law seems to be such a one as by Agreement and retainer oweth Duty and Service to another, who therefore is called Master’.50 Even Anon’s first proclamation, from a much older religious and political world, confirmed the modern legal commentator’s brisk view that ‘servitude is nothing else but plain Contract, and to be guided by the Rules and Conditions of that Bargain Invariably’.51
But the late eighteenth-century assertion of contractual over godly relations may not have made much sense to Auden, had he ever come across it, for he appeared to believe that ‘contract’ was a different thing from ‘law’ and that the service relationship came into being through the ‘conscious volition’ of two equal parties. ‘A contractual relationship … is … asymmetric’, he conceded: ‘What the master contributes e.g., shelter, food and wages, and what the servant contributes, e.g., looking after the master’s clothes and house, are qualitatively different and there is no objective standard by which one can decide whether the one is or is not equivalent to the other.’ That is why contract was different from law, he said: in law ‘all sovereignty lies with the law or with those who impose it and the individual has no sovereignty … the relationship of all individuals to a law is symmetric; it commands or prohibits the same thing to all who come under it … Of a contract, on the other hand, one can only ask the historical question, “Did both parties pledge their word to do it?” ’ He quotes Sam Weller asserting these things to Mr Pickwick, and Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, to underscore his point about the relative freedom of the individual in a relationship in which he is bound to serve, and in which all four of his examples express the implacable hierarchies of Christian love.52 A gentleman of the late eighteenth- century might have had trouble following this argument, for several reasons. First, contract was law in eighteenth-century England (and still is) and the law of service in relation to the Poor and Settlement laws was widely accessed across the society.53 Second, legal commentators and theorists had worked hard throughout the century to place law (rather that God) at the heart of the service relationship. Reiterating the century-old political philosophy of John Locke, John Barry Bird told magistrates and masters in 1799 that, really, ‘in strictness everybody ought to transact his own affairs’ – wash his own dishes, get rid of his own fag ends, though these were not his examples; it was only ‘by the favour and indulgences of the law that he can delegate the power of acting for him to another’.54 This was a lesson that you taught small children at the century’s end: servants were there to do what was actually the employers job, by virtue of the legal relationship between them. ‘I pay her wages to do my business for me’ insists one fictional mother in 1783 to a horribly behaved fictional child who has just slapped her nursemaid. She never wants the servants to do anything for the child ‘unless they are desired in a pretty manner’.55
By virtue of contract, the servant might be understood as a prosthesis, or extra limb of the master or mistress.56 It was the retainer, the monetary (or equivalent) handing over of something to the servant and the understanding or agreement or contract enacted in the moment of hiring that made him or her one under the Laws of Master and Servant, which governed labour relations in Britain and her colonies up until the 1950s.57 But there is no reason at all why a poet should not construct a theology – or philosophy of service – disconnected from the history of service in the societies he inhabited and from his own experience of it. Indeed, some say that the whole point of the serving class, when depicted in novel or stage play, is to allow the masters and mistresses to remove themselves from the social and legal reality that ties them to their servants –and from the meaning of those servants – in a class society.58 But the work of literature is not one a master or mistress can delegate to paid subordinates, though there was a good laugh to be had in the eighteenth century at the idea of those who tried.59
Given Auden’s personal and historical relationship with servants and the Christian idea of service as agape, as holy love; given his frequently expressed philosophy of service; what do we make of his assertion that the poet’s devices of language are his servants? ‘Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest,’ he wrote as one of a series of aperçus about writing.60 Are the servants just a figure of speech? It wouldn’t be the last time they were employed in this way; advice to inexperienced writers still instructs how to make writing their servant by not being a servant to the words, even though modern student readers of internet composition advice sites may not find much experiential resonance in the servant simile. But the advice to master words comes easier in the modern era; early modern counsel to students was to master writing (correct posture; proper wielding of the pen; the pen itself to be correctly cut, so as to leave no blot, the paper placed at a precise angle on the table, etc.), not words. Students were taught how to become skilled at writing, not so much to master words, which bore an edgy relationship to the Word, over which God’s creatures could not have dominion.61
That Auden enjoyed the comparison between rhymes and metre and the drunken servant of English literary culture (the Solihull servants of his childhood – we must presume this – were not drunkards) is suggested by his contemplation of the servantless man in the shape of ‘the poet who writes “free verse” ’. He who is not catered to by rhyme scheme and stanza form ‘is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself’. To be sure, ‘manly independence’ may be the result of doing without servants; it may sometimes ‘produce something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor – dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor’. The poet John Berryman thought that the ‘showpiece’ of the essays published in The Dyer’s Hand was the ‘study of the Master-Servant relation in literature, “Balaam and his Ass”: Quixote-Sancho, Lear-Fool, Giovanni-Leporello, others’.62 But the servants were on Auden’s mind throughout. If the ‘Prologue’ to the book, which includes ‘Reading’ and ‘Writing’, was written in the early 1960s, it was done in a serviced apartment in New York, or in the not un-serviced calm of the Kirchstetten house. In Alan Bennett’s imagination, in another serviced scene of writing, as we have seen, a college servant, ‘expressionless’, empties fag ash into a bucket, into all eternity: once you have the servants on your mind, as both Bennett and Auden had, they do not leave.63
Just as servants, imagined and real, did the work of exposing social contradiction throughout the long transition to Western modernity, so ‘the barest expository mention of a servant’s existence’ in a poet’s prose writing is enough to expose his. For Auden was contradictory in his statements about words, poetry, and poetics. In writing poetry, words were sometimes the master, and he freely admitted it. Words could not be dominated; they could not be ordered about: ‘It is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of human society, which uses them for a thousand different purposes.’64 They are multi-purpose things, but they keep to their own edges.65 ‘A sentence uttered makes a world appear’, he observed in a sonnet included in the collection Homage to Clio. In the poetic utterance – the words, arranged as they are by rhyme and metre – ‘all things happen as it says they do;/ We doubt the speaker, not the tongue we hear:/ … Syntactically, though it must be clear;/One cannot change the subject half way through,/Nor alter tenses to appease the ear’.66 You cannot order them about to do things they cannot do. And then there were the inhibitions and resources of a poet’s first language. Auden frequently compared French and English poetry in regard to their sound structure, the one syllable-timed, the other timed by stress, or accent.
If French poets have been more prone than English to fall into the heresy of thinking that poetry ought to be as much like music as possible, one reason may be that, in traditional French verse, sound effects have always played a much more important role than they have in English verse. The English-speaking peoples have always felt that the difference between poetic speech and the conversational speech of everyday should be kept small, and, whenever English poets have felt the gap … was growing too wide, there has been a stylistic revolution to bring them closer again. In English verse, even in Shakespeare’s grandest rhetorical passages, the ear is always aware of its relation to everyday speech.67
Later, in the Dyer’s Hand, he suggested that ‘Accent has always played so important a role in English prosody that no Englishman, even if he has been brought up on the poetry written according to the traditional English prosodic convention in which lines are scanned by accentual feet, iambics, trochees, anapaests, etc., has any difficulty in recognizing … a formal and rhythmical … poem … which is written in an accentual meter.’68 As discussed later in this book, and in his later life, Auden laboured hard to make syllabic poetry fully English (in language terms), though not necessarily more like French poetry, for there was always the irreducible quiddity of a stress-timed language, lurking in the kitchen, drinking by the fire in a slovenly kind of way, ignoring the increasingly frantic ringing of the bell: an unmastered servant, blind drunk.
‘By comparison with French, English seems an anarchic language’, wrote Auden when he started to write poetry by syllable rather than stress. ‘But this very anarchy, if it stimulates the proper revolt against it, can give rise to new and living structures.’ He wondered if Valery, for example, would ‘have finished his poetic career so soon if he had had the vast resources of our tongue, with all the prosodic possibilities which its common syllables permit, to play with?’69 His appreciation of the syllabic poetry of Marianne Moore has already been mentioned. He conceded that her poetry wasn’t for those looking for something as ‘far removed as possible from … prose’; that ‘the syllabic verse employed by Miss Moore, which disregards accents and permits rhyming on unaccented syllables, is far harder to grasp at first hearing’. Moore’s ‘must be uttered in a conversational tone with only the slightest line-end pauses’, he wrote in 1959.70 ‘A syllabic verse, like Miss Moore’s … is very difficult for the English ear to grasp’, he reiterated in 1963.71 What distinguished it from ordinary conversation was ‘not so much rhythm or tone as the articulation of the thoughts expressed, the sequence of ideas’, he said.72 We shall return to this point.
Edward Mendelson says that Auden ‘transformed syllabic verse into one of the great permanent resources of English poetry’.73 His use of the syllabic line had started before the 1950s; he used it for the thinking he most cared to do and the ideas that earned his attention. It is used in ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, as Mendelson further points out, as a ‘rejection of his [the poet’s?] assertive power’. In a syllabic structure (Mendelson calls it a ‘syllabic metre’) each line has a fixed number of syllables, but no recurring pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Auden is quoted as saying that he had become ‘interested in the possibilities of syllabic metre as one way of achieving a balance between freedom and order’; that he ‘wanted to get away from conventional patterns of iambics and trochees, and, at the same time, not to lose the sense of pattern’.74 The verse forms favoured by a poet ‘indicate the kind of coherence and order he sees, or wants to see, in the world outside’, Mendelson further remarks. But as he also points out, ‘there is no getting away from the fact that English is inherently accentual, like all Germanic languages, and Auden’s syllabic verse was the product of more complex and difficult negotiations than he implied’. Later discoveries about the rhythmic structure of the English language – the peculiarity of English stress-timing – and the relatively new view that its distinctiveness as a language lies in the ‘coexistence, in some degree of tension, of two series of energy pulses in speech – those that produce the syllables, and those that augment the certain syllables with stress’, owes much to Auden’s earlier discoveries.75
The thing is, elaborate workings out of Auden’s evolution from a poet who employed stress-timing to a poet using syllable-timing makes things harder for a reader of his poetry, and raises the questions you don’t want to ask, for they seem so very naive: is his syllabic verse to be read silently, voiced in the head, or spoken out loud? English readers tend not to hear the syllables in verse organised syllabically, so attuned are they to stress. It is said that in his later poetry, Auden exploited this tendency of readers by various technical means, so that the pattern on the page diverged from its audible expression.76 We already have the testimony of a nineteenth-century working-class poet who argued that if you were not a master yourself, but a worker who had to compose poetry in your head because your hands were busy all day at your shoemaker’s bench, lines timed by syllables rather than stress were much easier to remember when it came to writing them down. But Robert Bloomfield didn’t actually write syllabic verse; he wrote five-beat lines; he remembered by syllable-count, he didn’t compose by it. But with Auden’s great, late poetry, once you know that its organisation is syllabic rather than by metric feet, you constantly hover in some liminal space between seeing and hearing the poetry. In reading aloud you cannot force syllabification on the English language, as it is generally spoken.
You might, as a reader of the 1950s, and had your parents provided you with Naomi Mitchison’s An Outline for Boys and Girls way back in 1932, be even more stranded between two systems for describing versification, one learned in childhood, one now (in the 1950s and 1960s) promulgated by the poet. Auden made a contribution on ‘Writing’ (including ‘Verse Form’) to this encyclopaedia for children.77 (At the time of writing, Auden had been teaching at Larchfield Academy, Helensburgh for two years, moving to the Downs School, Herefordshire in 1932.) To explain metre to children, he proceeded by analogy: ‘Metre is group excitement among words’, he told them; it is ‘a series of repeated movements … Rhythm is what is expected by one word of another … There is always some degree of rhythm in all language. The degree depends on the power of feeling.’ He went on to explain stress, or ‘accents’, which he also described as ‘long and short syllables’. They were really ‘quite simple’, he said. As in a dance ‘the motion or metre of a line of poetry can be described in different ways according to how you choose to look at it. In English poetry … we generally describe it by accents – light and heavy steps – because that is the most obvious feature about the movements of English speech. But remember always that such a description of movements is only a description; it isn’t the movement itself.’78 Understanding a line of poetry was the same as understanding its meaning: ‘You will always read a line of poetry right if you know its meaning.’ Which of course, is another rather severe problem with the later poetry (in its ambiguity of meaning, also is its glory. Of course).
Later, ‘rhymes, meters, stanza forms’ would cavort away in his kitchen, at their own private servants’ ball, as the employer took up with the syllable, and started to rely on its services. A late eighteenth-century employer would have been discomforted if he ever found out about their autonomous life, quite independent of what law and legal theory said they were: mere aspects of the master’s personality, exercising his own (unused) capacity to wash floors and empty the ashtrays (or, produce poetry), as kinds of proxy.79 Hovering at the kitchen door, you can’t quite see them, or make out what they’re saying. Perhaps the Muse may tell us more of how Auden wanted the words to serve him. The Muse we put our questions to right now must be Calliope, Muse of epic poetry, or Terpsichore, she of chorus and dancing, for as we already know, his Clio’s defining characteristic was her silence. Auden did not master the Muses, or even try. He said he was in love with them (or her), telling the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1951 that a poet is ‘somebody who makes something and who therefore has a duty to see that what is made is well, and not shoddily made … [as] what I make are verses which say something, it is my duty to see that so far as I know and as far it goes, what they say is true and not false … Why do I do this? … because … [I am] in love … with the muse of poetry.’80 But she wasn’t that reliable a girl, for she ‘is always whispering to you, and fifty percent of what the Muse says is rubbish and has to be rejected. What you wait for is for the Muse to speak with authority …’81 Then he grows in confidence with her, as a kind of equal: ‘the Muse, like Beatrice in Much Ado, is a spirited girl who has little use for an abject suitor as she has for a vulgar brute’.82 Perhaps she allows you to forget the servants, whom you cannot master; he certainly never wanted Clio to be a servant to him.
1 Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden. A Biography, Faber and Faber, London (1981, 1983), 2010, p. 4.
2 Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden, Heinemann, London, 1995, pp. 6–33; Carpenter, W. H. Auden, pp. 1–12.
3 For a similar ‘Childhood’, lived some twenty years before Auden’s and which also never once accounts for the servants, see R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography, Oxford University Press, London, 1939, pp. 1–5. For Auden’s reading of Collingwood and a notably similar fondness for gasometers and industrial machinery inculcated in both little boys, below, pp. 164–167. ‘The Childhood’ was a post-romantic literary form, much used in the later nineteenth century. Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller. Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1984.
4 W. H. Auden, The Prolific and the Devourer (1976, 1981), Ecco Press, Hopewell NJ, 1994, p. 9, quoted by Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 14; for the servants at morning prayers, Adrian Caesar, ‘Auden and the Class System’, Tony Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 69–78; 69. For the winter tidy – ‘My father down the garden in his gaiters’ – ‘the enormous comic …, drawn from life;/My father as an Airedale and a gardener …’, W. H. Auden, ‘Poem’, New Verse, 7 (February 1934), pp. 6–7.
5 W. H. Auden, ‘Honour [Gresham’s School, Holt]’, Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School. Essays by Divers Hands, Jonathan Cape (1934), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984, pp. 1–12.
6 W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936), W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1991, pp. 81–113; 106.
7 Auden, ‘Honour’, p. 3.
8 Of Auden’s time working with John Grierson at the GPO Film Unit, with a film maker who made strenuous attempts to discard comic stereotypes of the working class, to portray ‘fishermen and miners in a dignified and realistic light’, Mendelson says that Auden had real doubts about whether it was possible to portray anyone outside one’s own class. Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (1981), Faber and Faber, London, 1999, pp. 211, 282–283; Donald Mitchell, Britten and Auden in the Thirties. The Year 1936 (1981), Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2000, p. 57; Ian Aitken, ‘Grierson, John (1898–1972)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004; online edn, January 2015. Also Jonathan Foltz, ‘Vehicles of the Ordinary. W. H. Auden and Cinematic Address’, Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin (eds), Auden at Work, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015, pp. 49–68.
9 Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, p. 105; John Beckett with Sheila Aley, Byron and Newstead. The Aristocrat and the Abbey, University of Delaware Press, Newark NJ and Associated University Presses, London, 2001, pp. 55, 156, 165.
10 Auden, ‘Letter’, p. 103; Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son. Architects of Imperial Britain, Yale University Press, London, 2012, pp. 259–329; Fiona MacCarthy, Byron. Life and Legend, John Murray, London, 2002, pp. 211–212, citing Macaulay’s review of Thomas Moore, Life of Lord Byron, Edinburgh Review, June 1831.
11 Michael John Protheroe, ‘The Development of Elementary Education in a Voluntary School, 1862–1992. A Study of Change and Continuity in the National Elementary School, Solihull, between the Revised Code and the Geddes Axe’, thesis submitted for the Diploma in Education, University College, 1974, p. 30; John Burman, Solihull and Its Schools, Cornish, Birmingham, 1939, passim; Robert Pemberton, Solihull and Its Church, for the author, Exeter, 1905. For Mrs Auden’s Anglicanism, Carpenter, W. H. Auden, pp. 5–6.
12 Pemberton, Solihull and Its Church, p. 28.
13 W. H. Auden, ‘W. H. Auden’, Dean of New York (ed.), Modern Canterbury Pilgrims. The Story of Twenty-three Coverts and Why they chose the Anglican Communion, Mowbray, London, 1956, pp. 32–43; p. 33. ‘The bishop of our diocese [who] was an extreme modernist [and] who refused to visit the church we attended’ was Henry Wakefield (Bishop 1911–1924). His predecessor Charles Gore (Bishop 1905–1911) had been a key figure in the Anglican high-church movement. There is no mention of Bishop Wakefield in the Solihull Parish Magazine from 1911 to 1919, when the Audens moved from Solihull into Birmingham: Solihull’s St Alphege’s was the high church the low-church Bishop did not visit.
14 Solihull Parish Magazine, 33:2 (February 1913); 38:16 (April 1914).
15 Richard R Trail, ‘George Augustus Auden, b.27 August 1872 d.3 May 1957 MB Cantab (1897) MD Cantab (1900) DPH Cantab (1910) MRCS LRCP (1896) FSA (1920) MRCP (1909) FRCP (1919)’, Royal College of Physicians, Lives of the Fellows, http://munksroll.rcplondon.ac.uk/Biography/Details/155 (accessed 12 October 2017). Dr Auden’s work for the Birmingham Education Committee was varied and innovative. See, for example, Richie Nimmo, Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human. Purifying the Social, Routledge, Abingdon, 2010, pp. 62–63; Birmingham Central Library, Birmingham Archives Heritage and Photography, BCC/1/BH/1/1/1, Education Committee and Its Related Sub-committees, 1903–1937, Annual Reports to the City of Birmingham Education Committee of the School Medical Officer; George Augustus Auden, ‘Height and weight of Birmingham school children in relation to infant mortality’; School Hygiene, 1:5 (1910), pp. 290–291; ‘The open-air school and its place in educational organization’, Public Health, 7 (1912), p. 253; ‘The Local Authority and the Health of the Child’, Charles William Kimmins (ed.), The Mental and Physical Welfare of the Child, Partridge, London, 1927, pp. 171–178. Dr Auden’s involvement with School Hygiene suggests acquaintance with luminaries of child health, mental and physical, Margaret McMillan, David Eder, Ernest Jones, and with James Kerr, the famous schools medical officer of Bradford and, later, the LCC. Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain. Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931, Virago, London, 1990, pp. 97, 204, 210.
16 Male servants ‘within the meaning’ of eighteenth-century legislation were a taxable item for their employers up until 1937. Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 129–171.
17 There were Heinigers in York (and all over the UK) in the 1890s. A York Heiniger married a woman who became purveyor of provisions; but none of their daughters were of the right age to be Emma. There may have been Swiss geological and other scientific expeditions to Colombia before the famous Helevetic Expedition of 1910, and a child born to a Swiss father in 1891 or 1892, her birth registered in Switzerland.
18 Lucy Delap, Knowing their Place. Domestic Service in Twentieth-century Britain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, pp. 35–41.
19 John Auden, ‘A Brother’s Viewpoint’, Stephen Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden. A Tribute, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1975, pp. 25–26.
20 For the historical resonance of the three-servant household, Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England, Greenwood Press, Westport CT, 1996, p. 52.
21 Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 305; also pp. 203, 265, 299, 320, 325, 364, 392, 412, 424, 434; also Thekla Clark (with an Introduction by James Fenton), Wystan and Chester. A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Faber and Faber, London, 1995, pp. 9–18.
22 Orlan Fox, ‘Friday Nights’, Spender, W. H. Auden, pp. 173–181; p. 174, quoted Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 279.
23 Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 391; James Stern, ‘The Indispensable Presence’, Spender, W. H. Auden, pp. 123–127. ‘What on earth for?’ was from his later years when, according to Thekla Clark, he suffered terribly from his feet. When living in Forio, Ischia, and despite the feet, he appears to have walked into town daily for the shopping. And he had a dog to walk as well. Clark, Wystan and Chester, p. 18 and passim. He was a good walker (‘I like to walk, but not to walk too far’, he told Lord Byron); Carpenter’s pages are full of walks.
24 W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Faber and Faber, London, 1963, p. 14.
25 Edmund Wilson, The Fifties. From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, Leon Edel (ed.), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1986, pp. 292–293, quoted by Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 284. Also Rebecca Mead, ‘Ink A Home-EC Bible and W. H. Auden’, The New Yorker, 20 March 2000, p. 46.
26 1952 – Christmas dinner at Auden’s and Chester Kallman’s loft apartment – greasy plates and cutlery, immense quantities of booze –Vera Stravinsky visits the grubby lavatory, finds a basin of dirty fluid on the floor, helpfully empties it down the pan – come dessert the company discovers that she has flushed away Chester’s chocolate pudding, put down to set in a chamber pot. This version from Davenport-Hines, Auden, pp. 284–285, citing several other accounts. The fashion for using Victorian chamber pots (and washstand basins and ewers) as tableware developed in the UK in the 1970s in its long Laura-Ashley moment of home decor, and this was New York in the early 1950s. But a chamber pot is a good receptacle for pudding-for-crowds, and a bathroom floor probably the coolest place to set it, it being too big for the refrigerator. Alan Bennett told the pudding story in his review of Dorothy Farnan’s Auden in Love (1985): ‘The Wrong Blond’, London Review of Books, 7:9 (23 May 1985), pp. 3–5. I am disappointed to find no reference to chamber pots in Katharine Whitehorne’s Cooking in a Bedsitter (1961), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963, for I had believed that’s where I first learned of culinary uses for china bedroom ware.
27 Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand. English Fiction from Below (1986), Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1993, pp. 27–32. For the servant as Fate, passim.
28 Alan Bennett, The Habit of Art, Faber and Faber, London, 2009, p. viii.
29 Bennett, Habit, pp. 11–14. Also for Auden’s last days in Oxford, Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, Faber and Faber, London, 1999, pp. 509–511; Carpenter, W. H. Auden, pp. 441–447; Davenport-Hine, Auden, pp. 337–340. Auden himself wrote about the ‘very nice cleaning woman’ who did the Brewhouse. Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 445.
30 Nicolas Nabokov, ‘Excerpts from Memories’, Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden, pp. 133–148; 133.
31 Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 215.
32 Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (1989), Nicholas Jenkins (ed.), intro. Richard Howard, Faber and Faber, London, 1990, pp. 93–94. Also, Davenport-Hines, Auden, pp. 243–261.
33 And very sorry indeed for the poor agency maid who came in one a week to clean the St Mark’s Place apartment in New York in the 1960s; Carpenter W. H. Auden, pp. 408–409. For the 1940s Middagh Street household, Davenport-Hines, Auden, pp. 207–208, here quoting Golo Mann, ‘A Memoir’, Spender (ed.), W. H. Auden, pp. 98–103. Also Bonnie Costello, ‘Setting Out for “Atlantis” ’, Costello and Rachel Galvin (eds), Auden at Work, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015, pp. 133–155; 133–134.
34 Robbins, Servant’s Hand, p. 123, for ‘the silent messenger … with murder on his face as he takes orders for tea’.
35 But James V. Hatch, Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One. The Life of Owen Dodson, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago IL, pp. 190–194, notes that he was Giocondo Sacchetti.
36 Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 363.
37 Edward Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 291; Clark, Wystan and Chester, pp. 1–36.
38 Basil Boothby, ‘An Unofficial Visitor’, Spender, W. H. Auden, pp. 93–97. Lots of lighting up and wreaths of cigarette smoke when journalist Polly Platt interviewed Auden and Kallman in their ‘Austrian peasant’s house’ in 1966 – but no overflowing ashtrays. This picture of perfect domestic order and cleanliness is rarely mentioned when describing Auden’s household arrangements. Polly Platt and W. H. Auden, ‘Interview: W. H. Auden’, The American Scholar, 36:2 (1967), pp. 266–270.
39 Steedman, Labours Lost, passim and pp. 65–100, 228–254.
40 ‘I shall never read Kalevala [nineteenth-century epic poem composed by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish folklore and oral sources], The Anatomy of Melancholy, or Pamela’. W. H. Auden, ‘The World that Books Have Made’, Prose Volume III. 1949–1955, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2008, pp. 270–272; orig. New York Times book review, 2 December 1951.
41 When the Comical Girl (Pamela is very funny, and intended to be so) believes she has been dismissed her place, she combines John Locke’s empirical philosophy of experience with some misremembered chapbook Story of the Protestant Martyrs, to declaim that: ‘I have read of a good bishop that was to be burnt for his religion; and he tried how he could bear it, by putting his fingers into the lighted candle: So I, t’other day, tried, when Rachel’s back was turned, if I could not scour a pewter plate she had begun. I see I could do’t by degrees: It only blistered my hand in two places. All the matter is, if I could get plain-work enough, I need not spoil my fingers. But if I can’t, I hope to make my hands as red as a blood-pudding, and as hard as a beechen trencher, to accommodate them to my condition.’ Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Vol. 1, Letter XXIV.
42 Anon., Domestic Management, or the Art of Conducting a Family with Instructions to Servants in General, Addressed to Young Housekeepers, H. D. Symonds at the Literary Press, London, 1800, p. 92; Charles Jones, The History of Charles Jones, the Footman. Written by Himself, J. Marshall (Printer to the Cheap Repository for Religious and Moral Tracts), London, 1796, pp. 4–5.
43 Robbins, Servants Hand, p. 83.
44 ‘I can’t let her stay, I’ll assure you’, says the master to his house-steward; ‘not only for her own freedom of speech, but her letter-writing of all the secrets of my family.’ Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Vol. 1, Letter XXVIII.
45 Carpenter, W. H. Auden, pp. 386–387; Clark, Wystan and Chester, p. 35; Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 295. For those interested in analogies between the Pamela-figure and the Giocondo-figure in the story of domestic service in the West, it is interesting to note that every word Mr B. utters about or addresses to Pamela, every move he makes (on her), is occasioned by the passion that grips him for her pretty little person, her clever little mind. For some, the always unequal sexual relationship between employer and servant is the narrative of service. See Kristina Straub, Domestic Affairs. Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2008.
46 But Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor. The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC and London, 1991, for the differences between British and US servant-employing cultures, and the preference, from the seventeenth century to the present day, of US domestic workers to be called ‘help’ rather than ‘servant’.
47 W. H. Auden, ‘Balaam and the Ass. The Master-Servant Relationship in Literature’, Prose Volume III, pp. 445–472; orig. Thought, Summer 1954; Encounter, July 1954.
48 Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, p. 139.
49 W. H. Auden, ‘Dingley Dell and the Fleet’, Dyer’s Hand, pp. 407–428; p. 419. For other reflections on the psychology of the employer, W. H. Auden, ‘Am I That I Am?’, Prose Volume III, pp. 527–532. This was a review of Nigel Dennis’ 1955 novel, Cards of Identity, orig. Encounter, April 1955. ‘I have read no novel published in the last fifteen years with greater pleasure and admiration’, wrote Auden of this satire on psychologists and their ‘Identity Club’, which meets once a year to promote various theories of identity. The story line also involves local townspeople coerced into becoming the Club’s servants.
50 Gentleman of the Inner Temple, Law Concerning Master and Servants, Viz Clerks to Attornies and Solicitors … Apprentices … Menial Servants … Labourers, Journeymen, Artificers, Handicraftmen and other Workmen, His Majesty’s Law Printer, London, 1785, p. 1.
51 John Taylor, Elements of the Civil Law, privately printed, Cambridge, 1767, p. 413.
52 Auden, ‘Balaam and His Ass’, pp. 107–109.
53 Steedman, Labours Lost, pp. 10–26; 172–198.
54 James Barry Bird, The Laws Respecting Masters and Servants, Articled Clerks, Apprentices, Manufacturers, Labourers and Journeymen, W. Clarke, London, 1799, p. 6.
55 Steedman, Labours Lost, pp. 48, 232–233. Dorothy Kilner, Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, John Marshall, London, 1781, pp. 18–19, 28–32.
56 Carolyn Steedman, ‘The servant’s labour. The business of life, England 1760–1820’, Social History, 29:1 (2004), pp. 1–29; Labours Lost, 46–50.
57 Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (eds), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC and London, 2004.
58 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Servants and their relationship to the unconscious’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), pp. 316–350.
59 Steedman, ‘Servants’, pp. 316–318. And there’s still fun to be had by reading the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel so that it turns out to be the servant who wrote it. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 193–216; Labours Lost, pp. 22–23. Also Jean Fernandez, Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy, Routledge, London and New York NY, 2010. All servants who, in the fictional realm, write as their employer’s or author’s prosthetic hand, are Pamela’s daughters (and sons). Robert Palfrey Utter and Gwendolyn Bridges Needham, Pamela’s Daughters (1936), Russell and Russell, London, 1972.
60 Auden, ‘Writing’, Dyer’s Hand, pp. 13–27; p. 22.
61 Roger Chartier, ‘The Practical Impact of Writing’, Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life. III. Passions of the Renaissance, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1989, pp. 111–159; James Jerome Murphy (ed.), A Short History of Writing Instruction. From Ancient Greece to Contemporary America, Routledge, New York NY, 2012.
62 John Berryman, ‘Auden’s Prose’, New York Review of Books, 1 February, 1963.
63 Platt, ‘Interview. W. H. Auden’, pp. 266–270; Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 452–453; Alan Levy, W. H. Auden. In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety, Permanent Press, Sag Harbor NY, 1983.
64 Auden, ‘Writing’, p. 23.
65 The phrase is from ‘Objects’, Collected Shorter Poems, p. 412.
66 W. H. Auden, ‘Words’, Homage to Clio, Faber and Faber, 1960, p. 28. ‘Objects’ is the preceding sonnet. On both of them, Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 412–413.
67 Auden, Dyer’s Hand, p. 24. See Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 85–86 for these differences in the timing and stress of different European languages.
68 Auden, Dyer’s Hand, pp. 296–297.
69 W. H. Auden, ‘L’Homme d’Esprit. Introduction to Analects by Paul Valery’, Prose Volume III, pp. 590–596. Written 1955; orig. Hudson Review, Autumn 1969. He was funnier in his irritation at French verse when out of print: Basil Boothby remembered many conversations which ‘included angry repetitions of French alexandrines with English stresses, making … [them] sound like “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold … ” to show that “Frogs” … didn’t understand poetry’. ‘Unofficial Visitor’, p. 96.
70 W. H. Auden, ‘Miss Marianne Moore, Bless Her!’, Prose Volume IV. 1956–1962, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2010, pp. 226–229. Review of Moore, How to Be a Dragon; orig. Mid-Century, Fall 1959.
71 Auden, ‘Marianne Moore’, Dyer’s Hand, pp. 296–305; 296–297.
72 Auden, ‘Miss Marianne Moore’, Prose Volume IV, p. 227.
73 Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 85–86.
74 Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 85–86.
75 Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge, Meter and Meaning. An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry, Routledge, New York NY and London, 2003.
76 Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, ‘Auden in History’, Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, pp. 181–192; p. 187: his syllabic verse employed what he called ‘the fullest elision’, that is, he always elided ‘between the contiguous vowels or through h’.
77 Naomi Mitchison, An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents, Victor Gollancz, London, 1932.
78 W. H. Auden, Prose Volume I. 1926–1938, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Faber and Faber, London, 1996, pp. 12–24, reproduces ‘Writing’.
79 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Servants’, pp. 316–350. See above, p. 31.
80 W. H. Auden, ‘Address to the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom’, Prose Volume III, pp. 246–250. Congress held 28–31 March 1951. For the (now) sinister connotations of the Congress and its fellow-travellers (including Auden) as Cold War warriors, Matthew Spender, A House in St John’s Wood. In Search of My Parents (2015), Collins, London, 2016, pp. 44–48, 87–101, and passim.
81 W. H. Auden, ‘A Symposium on Art and Morals’, Appendix III, Public Lectures and Courses, Prose Volume III, pp. 663–670; Smith College 23–24 April 1953.
82 Auden, Dyer’s Hand, p. 16.