What was his idea of love?
If a human relationship becomes more important than anything else in two people’s lives, it simply means that there is a lack of trust between these two human beings. A relationship is not a way of entering into a kind of dual subjectivity, a redoubled and reciprocal egotism; it is an alliance of two people who form an united front to deal with the problems of the objective world. The problem of married people is not to become absorbed in each other, but how not to become absorbed in each other; how, in a word, to trust one another in order to enter into a strong and satisfactory relationship with the outside world.
Stephen, so apparently open in his emotions, always kept something back. Auden had noticed this from the moment they’d met. Now Inez took stock of this characteristic and concluded that they’d reached a dead end. Tactfully, she wrote that if she were to return to Stephen, ‘although our affection is very solid, we could not get any further with our relationship and should both be profoundly dissatisfied’.
The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 coincided with the foundation of the magazine where my father worked for two years as co-editor together with Cyril Connolly. So eager was Stephen to have an editorial role that he handed over a flat he’d recently rented on Mecklenburg Square in order to provide Horizon with an office.
Connolly was a critic and writer who so far had produced one excellent novel, The Rock Pool, about expatriate bad behaviour in the Twenties. He was older than Stephen and belonged to the generation which placed fine writing above political commitment – a conviction that had been reinforced by the collapse of the Spanish Republic. By October, he’d settled into a wing chair covered with pink silk by the window overlooking Mecklenburg Square. He wore baggy flannels, a woollen tie and a tweed jacket, like a housemaster at a boarding school. ‘His movements like his voice were indolent, one had the impression he should be eating grapes, but at the same time his half-closed eyes missed nothing.’
As an editor, he described himself as going through ‘periods of intense energy, interspersed with long lulls of sloth’. He also confessed in an editorial that co-editorship with Spender had its ups and downs, with moments when each would be ‘sullenly burning manuscripts in different corners of the room’. Stephen wanted more political articles, Cyril wanted fine prose, and occasionally there were tensions.
Nevertheless the editorials, usually written by Cyril, tackled difficult questions about war aims and choices. Should the techniques of propaganda as perfected by modern advertising agencies be incorporated into the war effort? Would National Socialism of a British kind have to be introduced here? Nationalism – you cannot win a war without patriotism. Socialism – you cannot expect soldiers to fight without guaranteeing benefits for the families they leave behind. The great British capitalists and landlords were potentially Fascist, he wrote blandly. But: ‘below them come the enormous professional and commercial middle-class, which, though capitalist, could easily adapt itself to socialism, and which is morally and geographically anti-Hitler because it believes in Democracy, Christianity and the British Empire’. Cyril certainly believed in democracy, less so in Christianity, and not at all in the British Empire. But the message of Horizon was that England required major social changes if the war was to be won.
Auden and Isherwood had left England at the end of January 1939, nine months before the war broke out. Everyone at their farewell party knew they wouldn’t be coming back.
In January 1940, thinking of this anniversary, Connolly wrote an editorial in Horizon. Their departure was perhaps the most significant literary event of the war so far, he wrote. ‘They are far-sighted and ambitious young men with a strong instinct of self-preservation, and an eye on the main chance, who have abandoned what they consider to be the sinking ship of European democracy, and by implication the aesthetic doctrine of social realism that has been prevailing there.’
Cyril did not approve of the literature of ‘social realism’ so presumably his remark was meant to be supportive. Unfortunately the phrase ‘self-preservation and an eye on the main chance’ provoked endless repercussions. At cocktail parties all over London people asked: Is Cyril really saying that Wystan and Christopher are rats who’ve left the sinking ship? Questions were even asked in Parliament.
Stephen was away when Cyril wrote this comment. When he read it, he worried about how Wystan would take it. He immediately wrote to him. In his reply, Auden wrote briskly, ‘of course I wasn’t offended by the editorial which I thought was very fair’. He added, ‘I wish you were over here, not because I don’t support the allies – which in spite of everything I do – but because there doesnt seem anything that you cannot do just as well here as there.’ Meaning write poetry.
He confirmed this position in a conversation with Louis MacNeice, who appeared in New York for a three-month lecture tour. MacNeice, in a letter that appeared in Horizon, tried to play down the controversy. He said that Auden had told him that ‘an artist ought either to live where he has live roots or where he has no roots at all; that in England to-day the artist feels essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots, always in opposition to a group; that in America he feels just as lonely, but so, says Auden, is everybody else’.
Auden thought that the only obligation of a writer was to write. My father thought this avoided the issue. If Hitler won, writers in Europe would disappear – along with many of their readers. In his ‘Letter to a Colleague in America’, written for the New Statesman, Stephen wrote: ‘I wonder how much of value can be created, even in America, if the conditions in which we are living are so completely misunderstood.’ This was a tactful way of asking, how can one concentrate exclusively on writing while the Nazis are out there, threatening to destroy writing itself?
This evoked a private protest from Auden. ‘Your passion for public criticism of your friends has always seemed to me a little odd; it is not that you dont say acute things – you do – but the assumption of the role of the blue-eyed Candid Incorruptible is questionable … What you say is probably accurate enough, but the tone alarms me. “One is worried about Auden’s poetic future.” Really, Stephen dear, whose voice is this but that of Harold Spender, M.P.’
Bill Coldstream, who’d painted Wystan in numerous long sittings and who’d known him since they were adolescents, was convinced that Wystan had fallen in love. Otherwise he would have come back. There were many reasons why Auden failed to return: a suspicion that England would make a deal with Hitler, a dislike of taking human lives, a strong reluctance to being roped into writing patriotic poems in favour of the British war effort, along the lines of ‘Spain’, a work he’d come to dislike for what he saw as its insincere rhetoric. But of all the reasons to remain in the United States, love came first.
MY PARENTS MET in August 1940, a fortnight before the beginning of the Blitz. Tony invited a young pianist from the Royal College of Music to lunch at Horizon, just around the corner from where they happened to be: my mother, Natasha Litvin, aged twenty-one. She thought ‘Horizon’ was the name of a pub, not the magazine where my father worked. She wasn’t sure if she’d come. ‘Oh