Domhnall

The Orators was Auden’s second book, published in 1932 when he was still only starting out in his career as a poet. It occupies 93 pages in Faber’s 2015 edition, and readily justifies its standing as a separate volume. However, it is excluded from the Collected Poems not because of its length, but because Auden himself was dissatisfied with it, albeit it can be found instead in “The English Auden” –which includes many poems or versions of poems omitted from the Collected Poems. The thing is that I cannot see the reasoning for its exclusion, because I am approaching this work while reading Auden’s poems in date order, it is clearly a major step in his development as a writer, and whatever its limitations it is a significant piece of work with many attractive features. It would be absurd, to my mind, to omit this work from any serious attempt to follow his development. This is surely confirmed by the fact that Samuel Hynes, in his 1976 book “The Auden Generation,” devotes at least ten pages to a detailed discussion of The Orators, and draws from it a great deal that is interesting. At the time of reading Hynes, I went potty searching for this material in the Collected Poems, confused that it was supposedly not worth including there.

The Orators is not only lengthy but also technically diverse, switching from prose – itself varied, and incorporating quite a number of extensive lists - to various poetic styles and even incorporating some diagrams to illustrate his point at one stage. Just the physical architecture of the work is thus a source of fascination and entertainment. Auden’s use of language is also skilful and at times delightful, to the point that there is sufficient justification to spend time with this work even without having any clear grasp of what it is intended to mean or convey. In all honesty, his first publication was itself both obscure and dense; this one is in reality far more accessible. There are a number of poems or prose passages that would readily stand on their own, and be a pleasure to read for their own sake.

“There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal,
By seeming kindness trained to snaring,
They feel no falseness

Under the spell completely
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greenness.
Their flight looks fleeter.

But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under cover.

...Alas, the signal given.
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living.”

It is not hard to see in this volume Auden’s debt to the legacy of TS Eliot’s Wasteland or Joyce’s Ulysses, and it is not really a handicap since he works so well with his material but it is also interesting to look for his efforts to break away from that and establish a different voice, bearing in mind the extent to which Auden himself would become a similar inspiration and obstacle for a later generation of English poets, such as Ted Hughes say, although also for his own generation.

"Life is many; in the pine a beam, very still; in the salmon an arrow leaping the ladder. The belly receives; the back rejects; the eye is an experiment of the will. Jelly fish is laziest, cares very little. Tapeworm is most ashamed; he used to be free. Fish is most selfish; snake is most envious, poisoned within; bird is most nervous; he is shot for his spirit. Eagle is proudest. Bull is stupidest..."

“The man shall love the work; the woman shall receive him as the divine representative; the child shall be born as the sign of the trust; the friend shall laugh at the joke apparently obscure... The leader shall be a fear; he shall protect from panic; the people shall reverence the carved stone under the oak-tree.”

The Orators has a coherent political theme, as an exploration of the ideas which were transforming his society at this time. Hynes concentrates on the continuing legacy of the First World War, the frothing battle of ideas from Left and Right across Europe and America in a period of economic crisis, and the emerging consensus that another world war might soon be in prospect. He notes the extent to which Auden draws on the privileged social lives of England’s wealthy elite, with their shared experiences of public school, their cars, their weekends out of town and their country house parties; this certainly grates on my nerves when I read it – notably in his satirical Address for a Prize Day.

I myself thought the poems also contained references, never very overt, to the role of these public school graduates in the administration of a vast empire and the physical coercion of its people. The prominence given to the airman, in particular, brought to my mind the role played by the RAF in the suppression of revolt or resistance in far flung peasant villages across the Middle East and Africa. I admit I become cynical when European or British politics is discussed without acknowledging this wider context. Americans might also have a rude awakening if they looked more critically at their country's foreign interventions under even the most "liberal" administrations.

The political analysis is not necessarily all that successful, but it is certainly not guilty of either simplifying the nature of society’s ills nor of glorifying the potential role of any emerging leader. There is a great deal of irony to be mastered before asserting anything definite here. It would be quite insane to attempt to read this work in the light of events as they developed after its publication. It is more interesting and surely more informative to take the work as a comment on the prevailing political debate and the prevailing sense of confusion, anxiety and fear. For a poet as much as any other public figure, it is hard to take a definite position on issues that are still only emerging from the fog of current affairs, with all sorts of possible futures yet to be pruned down by the course of events. What I do suspect is that the issues discussed in this work from 1932 are topical in 2019 for reasons that are not so hard to identify.

Whatever the experts say, I found The Orators fascinating and well worth investigating. I may return to it after reading more of Auden and his generation, to see if it survives greater scrutiny. However, I don’t feel required to see it as an object out of context, rather than a comment on both Auden’s development and also perhaps on the political evolution of his generation. Analogies with the politics of 2019 might also bear more exploration.