Planet of the Mind

A CERTAIN WORLD: A COMMONPLACE BOOK by W.H. Auden. 438 pages. Viking. $10.

Autobiographies or biographies of writers, W.H. Auden has said, "are always superfluous and usually in bad taste. A writer is a maker, not a man of action. His private life is, or should be, of no concern to anybody except himself, his family and his friends." Accordingly, in place of any vulgar chronicle of his life, Auden is offering this wise and diverting annotated anthology.

"Commonplace books" were popular in the 18th and 19th century. Habitual readers kept journals by copying out passages from their favorite books and appending their reactions. Auden has been collecting his for much of his life. Quite correctly, he calls it a map of his secret planet. It is arranged in alphabetical order by a fascinating variety of subjects: "World, End of the"; "Owls, Barn"; "Prose, Purple"; "Prose, Annihilating." Under each heading come one or more literary quotations interspersed with Auden's comments. To anyone who has read Auden, the book reveals the sources of his poetry as fully and incisively as any autobiography could. It also provides the casual reader with some of the most provocative and diverse literary strolling in years.

Auden, who is now 63, has always been a cultural gamesman. Word schemes, puzzles and categories delight him. There are entries for acronyms, angelology, mnemonics, numbers, foreign phrase books. Always a zealous listmaker, he has included long entries of little-known names for woodpeckers and cuckoos and even lesser-known names for the human genitals (17 for the male and a lavish 28 for the female), as well as a wealth of arcane anecdote. Flipping to "Anagrams," for instance, the reader finds the story of a 17th century British eccentric named Eleanor Audley who, having plucked REVEALE O DANIEL out of her name, launched a brilliant career as a clairvoyant. Arrested by a jittery government for predicting the deaths of King Charles I and the Duke of Buckingham, she was reminded by the judge that her married title. Dame Eleanor Davis, kaleidoscoped to NEVER so MAD A LADIE.

Lighter Side. Literary lunacies abound. Under "Shakespeare and the Computers" is a revelation from an Enfield College of Technology scholar who used a computer to crack the cipher of the sonnets. Solution: Shakespeare was really Edward VI, who, contrary to popular belief, died at 125 instead of 16 after writing all of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and Don Quixote.

The lighter side of literary scholarship gives A Certain World only a small part of its total impact. Auden has involved himself in a great variety of intellectual pursuits, from his boyhood mania for lead mining to his mature infatuation with opera. They are all charted on this mental map, though music is slighted because, as the poet points out, "nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad."

Over the decades, the ebullient young radical who wrote The Dog Beneath the Skin has grown more religious and conservative. His entries deplore new Bible translations, the primacy of machines, behaviorism ("Of course it works," he sneers. "So does torture"). Yet Auden never fails to see the irony in his newly occupied or lately vacated philosophic positions. He remarks that if he hadn't become a writer he might have made a good bishop, "politically liberal, theologically and liturgically conservative." He adds ruefully that he might also have been intolerant. Feeling that all men were symbolically present at Golgotha on Good Friday, he imagines himself as a Hellenized Jew who asks, "Why can't authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock, as they did with Socrates?"

Auden's humanity goes much deeper than his manner might suggest. Almost obsessively he returns to the obscenities of concentration camps and to Hitler's brutalities. One of the more frequently cited authors is Bruno Bettelheim. The poet shares Dr. Bettelheim's concern with autistic children. He even compares the inner sanctuary of his own creative imagination to autism. Describing the "private world" of childhood, he writes:

"My sacred world was autistic, that is to say, I had no wish to share it with others nor could I have done so."

Today, however, he can describe the topography of this sacred world in detail.

Its mysterious Tigris and Euphrates are the lead mining industry in his native Yorkshire and a limestone landscape in the Pennine Moors. As he wrote in "In Praise of Limestone," one of his greatest poems:

. . . when I try to imagine a fault less love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

He is no less specific about the poets who influenced him most: Brecht, Bridges, Cavafy, Frost, Graves, Hardy, David Jones, Lawrence, De la Mare, Marianne Moore, Wilfred Owen, Laura Riding, Edward Thomas, William Carlos Williams. The vastness of the list tends to obscure its two surprising omissions.

When Poems, Auden's first book, burst like a rocket upon the literary scene in 1930, it showed the obvious influence of T.S. Eliot. Nor is Yeats mentioned, though some later Auden lyrics -- including "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" -- bear structural resemblances to his work.

A Certain World inevitably awakens nostalgia for Auden's poetic voice, but that is not the book's nature or function. It is the poet's mind, not his work, that is on display. Auden's mind, seen through his reading, shows exceptionally broad learning and intellectual tolerance. The man is also quirky, traditionalist and playful with a patrician fondness for the recondite--whether in the lore of language or nature. His compilation belies the term "commonplace" with properly Audenesque irony.

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