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James – a gnat on a flea on the shoulders of giants. Forster has an essay, ‘The C Minor of that Life’, whose title is an allusion to Browning’s poem ‘Abt Vogler’, the last line of which begins ‘The C Major of this life’. This life is neither C Major nor Minor, but C very much Diminished.

      *

      (This book, clearly, is not just about Auden. It’s about everything else I’ve been thinking and reading while I’ve been thinking and reading Auden, and which has influenced my thinking and reading of Auden. As Mr Weller long ago explained to his son, Sam – the archetypal Cockney geezers – in The Pickwick Papers: ‘Ven you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. I rayther think it isn’t.’)

      *

       Despite what you may have heard, one’s talents do not necessarily grow and develop over time. One’s character does not necessarily blossom. Things do not necessarily work out. The unique gift that you might have thought you had to offer the world does not necessarily become apparent to you or to anyone else. There is not just the possibility of loss and waste and failure: failure and waste and loss are inevitable. (William Empson, in that wonderful remark about Gray’s ‘Elegy’, in Some Versions of Pastoral – my absolute favourite among all of Empson’s wonderful remarks: ‘And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy.’)

       There are many individuals whose natural talents far exceed your own.

       There are many individuals whose natural talents may seem far less than your own and yet who will inevitably succeed far beyond your own small successes.

       There will always be something, someone, some circumstance pushing you to the side of your life, something obscuring the view, something preventing you from doing what you thought you might do or being who you thought you might be. For me, that something, that someone, was Auden: for me, Auden was the problem as well as the solution. Perhaps this is always the case with the people who really matter: wives, husbands, lovers, friends.

      *

      So what is the final justification for this book, which has taken so long, for so little apparent reason, and which obviously amounts to so little – 70,000 words, give or take, expended in trying to explain Auden’s 99-line poem?

      *

      I am beginning to lose patience

      With my personal relations:

      They are not deep

      And they are not cheap.

      (Auden, ‘Case Histories’)

      This book does not therefore record my ‘relationship’ with Auden – I have no relationship with Auden in any meaningful sense – so much as my relationship with language, or my relationship with language through Auden. Auden as the OED, as Roget’s, as Brewer’s, Fowler’s, Webster’s, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English – all of them, combined.

      *

      (‘Is it one of those How So-and-So Changed My Life type of books?’ asks a friend. ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s a shame,’ they say. ‘People really like those sorts of books.’ ‘It’s more about my relationship with language, and literature, and ideas,’ I say. ‘Hmm,’ says my friend. ‘Well, good luck with that.’)

      *

      *

      (The missing volume – Auden’s hardback dictionary cushion – was, according to Carpenter, volume X of the OED: (Sole–Sz). Which might provide a nice alternative title for this book, would it not? Sole–Sz, a title which offers an obvious homophonic pun on ‘sole’ and which also usefully alludes to Roland Barthes’ S/Z, that impossibly complicated book about Balzac’s story ‘Sarrasine’, which was once required reading on every grad course in literary theory, with its typologies of interacting SEM codes and SYM codes, and REF, and ACT and HER codes, and which therefore might suggest that this book too is a work of great theoretical sophistication. Maybe not.)

      *

      So, not a book about my relationship with Auden. A book about my relationship with language.

      *

      So the enterprise is doomed again.

      *

      This is all entirely obvious, I suppose, to most people. And barely needs stating.

      All I can safely say, then, is that it has taken me twenty-five years to work out the entirely obvious.

      And these are my notes.

      In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps.

      (Auden, ‘Writing’)

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