Auden

I’ve just finished reading Richard Davenport-Hines’s 1995 biography of WH Auden. D-H is a wonderfully fluent and involved writer and his book on Gothic (subtitled ‘Four Hundred Years of Excess,Horror, Evil, and Ruin’) is still, I believe, the best thing written on the subject. I enjoyed the Auden book though it is, I understand, not without its omissions and flaws. It struck me that this kind of literary biography is virtually impossible now, not only because we write so little down and communicate electronically when at one time it would have been done by letter, but because I think times have changed and behaviour has changed. There was a whole class of twentieth-century intellectuals who were constantly reaching judgements and conclusions about one another, and gossiping to each other about them in those letters and documents; a lot of this book rests on that kind of gossip, in the form of Auden’s friends’ confident opinions about him and his about them. I’m not sure we do this in the same way: certainly I don’t. This may be something to do with the post-modern collapse of grand narratives. Auden, for instance, comes across as full of insights and interesting opinions, but they come from a series of fixed beliefs, conclusions and attitudes which he contracted fairly early on and then used to analyse the world, and people, around him. Sometimes they hit the target; and quite often they didn’t. Sometimes they read terribly sententiously but on examining them you wonder what they’re actually about. Do we really do this any more?