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      Who can release them now,

      Who can reach the deaf,

      Who can speak for the dumb?

      All I have is a voice

      To undo the folded lie,

      The romantic lie in the brain

      Of the sensual man-in-the-street

      And the lie of Authority

      Whose buildings grope the sky:

      There is no such thing as the State

      And no one exists alone;

      Hunger allows no choice

      To the citizen or the police;

      We must love one another or die.

      Our world in stupor lies;

      Yet, dotted everywhere,

      Ironic points of light

      Flash out wherever the Just

      Exchange their messages:

      May I, composed like them

      Of Eros and of dust,

      Beleaguered by the same

      Negation and despair,

      Show an affirming flame.

      INTERVIEWER: What’s your least favourite Auden poem?

      AUDEN: ‘September 1, 1939.’

      Michael Newman, interview with W. H. Auden, The Paris Review (1972)

      Me too.

      *

      I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden for twenty-five years.

      It could not be described as a cost-effective enterprise.

      It may not have been the best use of my time.

      The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value; he may be paid ten pounds for a poem which he believes is very good and took him months to write, and a hundred pounds for a piece of journalism which costs him but a day’s work.

      (Auden, ‘The Poet & The City’)

      It is not a book about grief.

      It is not a book about loss.

      It is not a book about some great self-realisation.

      I did not go – I have not been – on any kind of a journey with W. H. Auden.

      I do not believe that Auden provides readers with the key to understanding life, the universe and everything. Reading Auden has not made me happier, healthier, or a better or more interesting person.

      Perhaps the only strange or remarkable thing to have happened to me over the past twenty-five years is that I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden.

      The only possible conclusion, I suppose, after all this time, is either that I haven’t been trying hard enough, or that I’m simply not up to the job.

      Or, possibly, both.

      *

      Completed finally in my early fifties, in vain and solitary celebration, this – whatever this is – turns out to be proof against itself.

      For decades I had imagined writing a big book about Auden’s life and work, a truly great book, a magnum opus.

      I have managed instead to write a short book about just one of his poems. At the very moment of its completion, the work turns out to be evidence of failure. Opus minus.

      *

      (I am reading the collected poems of Bertolt Brecht, in translation. I come across this, ‘Motto’:

      This, then, is all. It’s not enough, I know.

      At least I’m still alive, as you may see.

      I’m like the man who took a brick to show

      How beautiful his house used once to be.

      This book is my brick: it is proof of how beautiful the house might have been.)

      *

      Auden wrote all of his prose, he claimed, because he needed the money.

      I have written all of my prose because I am not a poet.

      And I needed the money.

      Underneath the abject willow,

      Lover, sulk no more;

      Act from thought should quickly follow:

      What is thinking for?

      Your unique and moping station

      Proves you cold;

      Stand up and fold

      Your map of desolation.

      (Auden, ‘Underneath the abject willow’)

      *

      It’s perhaps not entirely uncommon.

      There are, of course, individuals who write great books at great speed, and with great success, and to great acclaim – Auden’s first book with Faber was published when he was just twenty-three and he went on to produce a book about every three years for the rest of his life. The truth is, it takes most of us years to get a book published, and even then those books end in massive failure: neglected, overlooked and forgotten.

      *

      This book I began long before I had written or even contemplated writing any of my other books. It was the first – and it may be the last. It may be time to admit defeat, to admit to my own obvious lack of whatever it was that Auden had, which was just about everything. In Auden,

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