The Muse in Middle Age

ABOUT THE HOUSE by W. H. Auden. 84 pages. Random House. $3.

He has the head of an old lion and in a high rolling roar he makes some of the most spectacular conversation of the century. At 58, Wystan Hugh Auden is the only man left in the English-writing world who can be called a major poet, but unhappily he has fallen on lean years; for more than a decade his verse has lacked verve. In About the House, no sudden reanimation of the muse is evident; yet in these pages the poet attempts to draft a new lease on creative life. Auden in his previous poetry has systematically sublimated private feeling into public statement; in this volume, with wavering will and sometimes with quavering hand, he ventures to describe the private person who hides behind the public performer.

About the House is about the house that Auden bought in Austria a few years ago, and about the new life he has found there: the life of a successful middle-aged man who ponders the pleasures and problems of success and middle age. It is certainly too much to say that W. H. Auden, the enfant terrible of the '30s, has become the Edgar Guest of the '60s--but listen to this:

what I dared not hope or fight for is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft where I needn't, ever, be at home to those I am not at home with, not a cradle, a magic Eden without clocks, and not a windowless grave, but a place I may go both in and out of.

And so it goes. The old bourgeois-baiter composes a contented ode to his new kitchen and a hymn to hot baths, a worried incantation against insomnia and some earnest lines on the higher significance of regularity. It is both absurd and touching to see the aging lion mew so meekly. He seems humbly grateful for the small favors of existence, humbly aware of the failures of his private life. In a poem about bedrooms he writes sadly: about blended flesh . . .

I know nothing, therefore about certain occult antipathies perhaps too much.

In Auden's house there are still many doors that are closed to the reader of his verse. As in earlier volumes, he papers them over with epigram and excogitation, versiflage and vocabulary. But what is real and alive in this volume is the new natural tone in which Auden speaks of himself and the things that go on inside him:

Really, must you,

Over-familiar

Dense companion,

Be there always?

The bond between us

Is chimerical surely:

Yet I cannot break it.

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