3 - Auden's England

Summary

On 19 January 1939, the Champlain left Southampton for New York, with Auden aboard. In England, where national insecurity lingered corrosively despite reassurances purchased at Munich in September, Auden's departure was bound to be construed negatively. The impending European war meant that Auden's journey took on the character of betrayal in the public mind. To the 'either-ors', 'the mongrel-halves' (NYL, line 821) or 'the Lords of Limit' who set 'a tabu 'twixt left and right' (EA, p.115), there were no shades of motive or meaning, and 'facts' were harder when, paradoxically, life could be made to take on the bold lineaments of myth.

As a product of the twenties and thirties – a period, as Robin Skelton pointed out almost forty years ago, unusually prone to self-mythologising – Auden did not distance himself from the myth-making impulse. His early poems are set in a world suffused with threat and mysterious urgency, yet oddly detached from history, and are in that sense mythic. Yet their preoccupation with liminality and transactions across borders made the secondary world of his imagination into an 'antimythological myth', to use his phrase from 'In Praise of Limestone'. In the decade before his departure for America, Auden certainly contributed in some measure to the discourse of the Lords of Limit and to the construction of the very myths according to which in 1939 he found himself alleged a traitor.