So before I thought that, if pushed, I would probably have to say that maybe Auden was, overall, my favourite (non-classical) poet. Well, now I know he’s my favourite poet.
Only for Auden would I wake up at 5am and have leftover ravioli for breakfast, for example. OK, I didn’t actually have to get up at 5, I could have slept in for longer, and nor was the ravioli that necessary, really. But anyway, that’s what happened, so that by 7 o’clock the Oxford Express was already coming out of London and I was on it, snoozing.
The event itself, which was at Christ Church, was…interesting. I mean, it was really good, and the whole day was just a bit bizarre, for some reason. I got in and drank tea in the same room that the Christopher Tower thing had been in, and there were a lot of (it has to be said, mainly old) people generally ignoring me, and so I wandered around the college for a bit. (There were a few younger people around later, by the way – including Rees Arnott Davies, another CT winner, although our paths just didn’t cross for the whole day somehow, so I never spoke to him.)
It started at 9.30, in a different room. First there was some general talk about Auden, and Peter McDonald spoke and someone who had known Auden told us a few anecdotes that I’ve helpfully forgotten. (I took tonnes of paper with me but in the end felt too self-conscious – or lazy? – to take notes.) Then three poets who had been to Christ Church read some of their poetry. Olivia Cole was FANTASTIC – her first collection’s coming out soon and I reckon it’ll be worth buying. She read this one poem about Mussolini playing tennis that was just brilliant, and I think it helped that she had the kind of voice that’s perfect for reading aloud. Tim Kendall was alright – bit too much nature poetry which isn’t really my thing to be honest. And then Anthony Thwaite, who was hilarious and has his Collected Poems coming out soon, and plugged it shamelessly.
Morning refreshments found me basically drinking tea and wolfing down shortbread, having kind of a standard yes-I-come-from-Moscow-yes-it-is-a-very-interesting-city conversation with an old woman called Anne. (I don’t want to sound snobbish or anything, but these conversations come up very often – basically every time someone inquires about my surname – so I kind of tend to reel out the usual answers to the usual questions without thinking.)
The next lecture was about “Auden and Film”, and they showed Night Mail, the film he collaborated on with Benjamin Britten. My view was a little bit obscured by a woman in front of me, who was wearing a big straw hat with green badges all over it even though a) we were indoors and b) it was a stupid hat, but I leaned to the left a bit and it was OK. It was really bizarre, actually, the way post used to work in those days, and the rhythm of the steam trains and the men in their flat caps and that old, Audenesque English landscape – well, it was all quite touching, actually. I thought about our local post office downsizing into a corner in the back of WHSmith and felt a bit sad.
After that the actor Neil Dudgeon read some of Auden’s poems, and this was the best bit because he read all the ones I love – a few early ones, like ‘Control of the passes was, he saw, the key’, ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts’, ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love”, and then Musee Des Beaux Arts, In Memory of W.B.Yeats, September 1st 1939 (which someone later pointed out was basically Auden imitating Yeats – NEVER noticed that but it’s sort of true, look at the title). He read some later poems too, On The Circuit (“God bless the USA, so large/ So friendly, and so rich.”) and Talking To Myself (apparently Larkin really slagged that one off).
The best bit, however, was when he read As I Walked Out One Evening. It was probably the highlight of the whole day, because this is my favourite Auden poem, I think, it was the first one I read and that was when I was first getting into poetry and it's just – it’s just so perfect. As he read it, a clock started chiming somewhere. It was noon, so the bell rang 12 times, as he read
“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.”
and so on. And it was incredibly sombre and haunting, AND THEN as he got to the last stanza:
“It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.”
At that third line the chiming stopped. And I was just like, “WOW.” It was such a brilliant, perfect moment. I actually had chills running down my spine.
It was lunchtime after that – in the Harry Potter dining hall! Actually apart from the amazing location, lunch wasn’t that great. I managed to sit in a seat that was in between two groups of people, and I spoke to them but wasn’t really near enough to be fully part of either conversation. And opposite me was some guy whose nametag read Dr. Bubb or Dr. Blubb or something (seriously), who was really boring and wouldn’t talk, and took about half the potatoes but didn’t offer them to anyone else, and at one point he actually got out his Blackberry, at the table – which is just rude. My one attempt at talking to him went like this:
Me: “So, are you a big fan of Auden then?”
Dr. Bubb/ Blubb/ Bleh: “No, not really.”
Pause.
Me: “Do you work in Oxford?”
Dr. Bubb/ Blubb/ Bleh: “Yes.” *eats potatoes*
I left lunch pretty quickly. Took a walk around Oxford for a while – up some cobbled path – watched students sauntering along, thought, “Wow, they’re so relaxed, so at home – this is like – they LIVE here. That’s so…amazing.”
It suddenly occurred to me then that I’d been to Oxford three times in three months, and that at some point, without meaning to, I’d fallen in love with the place. Which is just a big pile of oops.
Anyway, came back to CC and then there was a panel discussion with Peter McDonald, John Fuller (!), Peter Porter (!) and Simon Armitage (!). (My brain: “That’s Simon Armitage. THAT’S SIMON ARMITAGE! SIMON! ARMITAGE!”) JF’s just written a huge book about Auden, so he rambled quite interestingly. PP just rambled (sorry, but he annoyed me a bit). They discussed things like Auden’s attitude to Yeats, and what he would have been like as a poet if he hadn’t gone to America (still great but different, was the – kind of obvious, really – conclusion). After that there was a tiny break, and then there were two more lectures – “Auden and Music” and “Auden and Opera”. I was quite tired by now, but the music lecture was pretty good – it was all about him and Britten, and they played some extracts of their collaborations (which are damn good). They even played some of Funeral Blues, which apparently started out as a funny poem which Britten put in a cabaret-style arrangement. Needless to say, THAT was amazing.
By the time the opera lecture started I was shattered and kept drifting off, and it didn’t help that oh dear god, the opera guy was dull. I don’t know what the point was – Auden wrote, like, one article about opera for Vogue once (of all magazines!) and this guy basically dissected the article, which really meant he described random operas at length and then told us Auden’s opinion on them. A bit of a low point, then, and it went on for about fifty years.
Afternoon refreshments – tea, shortbread, chat – and then Peter Porter, John Fuller, Simon Armitage and James Fenton – OH MY GOD, some train in the distance just blew its horn and it sounded EXACTLY like Beethoven’s Fifth!!! Er, anyway – they read some Auden and also some of their poetry. PP was once again annoying, the rest were good, especially SA who read some poems about how he and Glyn Maxwell (who I love) went to Iceland just like Auden and Louis MacNeice did.
And then Peter McDonald did a little summary of everything, and that was it – the day was over. There was optional evensong, which I’d been planning to go to, but I was bloody tired by then and my arse hurt from sitting down (sorry), so I left and wandered around Oxford for an hour and a half. That in itself would require another massively long entry, and I’m sure at some point I’ll write some uni-panicking splat in here, but let’s just say that at 7.30 I got the bus back and was home by 10.30 due to traffic jams and stuff.
It was, overall, a bloody amazing day.
This entry was loooong. Today was Work Hell, tomorrow is the classics dinner, on Tuesday I’m going to Cambridge for the first time ever, and on Wednesday I get to collapse.
Christmas in Amersham = Christmas on the outskirts of Moscow in all but location. A lot of our Russian friends (including us) have this constant battle of wanting to stick as rigidly to the customs and traditions they knew back in Russia while sliding slowly, inevitably into Britishness. (Not that 'sliding' implies it's like a downward spiral or anything.) So there are these phases each family is going through, ranging from the "We've just moved here, WTF is shepherd's pie?" phase of headscarves, sticking carpets to walls and coming to dinner parties armed with salads and jars of gherkins, right through to the "Our kids don't speak Russian and we shall lament this fact once a year by gathering together to drink vodka and sing weepy songs about the-good-old-days-of-Novgorod" phase. (My family is at the latter end of the spectrum: Mum has recently been saying, to the horror of my dad, that we should just stop celebrating Russian Christmas on the 7th January altogether because there's no point and we don't go to church anyway.)
