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astonished critics, lived at home;
    Did little jobs about the house with skill
    And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
    Or potter round the garden; answered some
    Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

    Auden taught at various prep schools in the early thirties, and one of the criticisms that contemporaries made of his poetry was that his view of the world was dictated by his unhappy experiences at school. ‘The best reason I have for opposing Fascism’, he said, ‘is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.’ Not a statement that would commend itself to someone actually having to live in a Fascist state, and the kind of remark that made him blush once he got away from England in 1939. ‘All the verse I wrote,’ Auden said later,
    all the positions I took in the thirties didn’t save a single Jew. These writings, these attitudes only help oneself. They merely make people who think like one admire and like one, which is rather embarrassing.
    Which is true, but which says nothing about the poetry, and embarrassing though the older Auden found his younger self, the poetry of that younger self survives the embarrassment.
    The turning point in Auden’s life came, or is supposed to have come, when he and Isherwood went to the United States at the start of 1939 and stayed there, both eventually becoming American citizens. Silly people at the time took this to be cowardice, which it wasn’t, and even people who admired him thought Auden’s poetry was never as good afterwards. But this wasn’t true either.
    Why Auden left England has been much discussed. Auden liked feeling at home, but he didn’t like feeling at home wherehe felt at home. England was too cosy. He would never grow up there, he thought. He would always be the
enfant terrible
, the prisoner of his public and court poet to the Left. At least this is how Auden came to see it.
    But it wasn’t quite like that either. All that had happened was that he had gone to America in 1939, seemingly with no plans to stay, and, for the first time in his life, he had fallen in love – with Chester Kallman, with whom he was to live happily and unhappily for the rest of his life. It just happened that change in private places went with change in public places, love and war coinciding: Auden really was just an early ‘GI bride’. Somebody who cared more about what people thought would have come back when war started, but Auden – and it was one of the winning characteristics in a personality that was not always attractive – didn’t care tuppence what people thought.
    As it turned out, going to America turned out to be a deliverance, the kind of escape an established writer often craves, a way of eluding his public, of not having to go on writing in the same way, of not having to imitate himself. ‘By the time you have perfected a style of writing’, said George Orwell, ‘you have always outgrown it.’ ‘You spend twenty-five years learning to be yourself,’ said Auden, ‘and then you find you must now start learning not to be yourself’ – and it took him a while. This next poem Auden called a ‘hangover from home’. He wrote it in America, but one of the reasons he left England, he said, was to stop writing poetry like this.

September 1, 1939
    I sit in one of the dives
    On Fifty-second Street
    Uncertain and afraid
    As the clever hopes expire
    Of a low dishonest decade:
    Waves of anger and fear
    Circulate over the bright
    And darkened lands of the earth,
    Obsessing our private lives;
    The unmentionable odour of death
    Offends the September night.
    Accurate scholarship can
    Unearth the whole offence
    From Luther until now
    That has driven a culture mad,
    Find what occurred at Linz,
    What huge imago made
    A psychopathic god:
    I and the public know
    What all schoolchildren learn,
    Those to whom evil is done
    Do evil in return.
    Exiled Thucydides