YEATS, W.B. The Tower [and:] The Winding Stair. YEATS, W.B. The Winding Stair.

Auden’s Copies

YEATS, W.B. The Tower [and:] The Winding Stair. YEATS, W.B. The Winding Stair. London: Macmillan and Co. 1928 and 1933.

[offered with:]

WILSON, Robert A[nton]. Auden’s Library. New York: [Privately Printed]. 1975.

Yeats: Two volumes, 8vo. Publisher’s green cloth designed by Thomas Sturge Moore and decorated in gilt and black, respectively; The Tower: pp. vi, 110, [2 (advertisements)]; The Winding Stair: pp. ix, [1 (blank)], 101, [1 (blank)], lacking 2 ff. (pp. 75–78, see below); cloth slightly rubbed and marked, else very good; slight toning, minor spotting and offsetting to prelims and endpapers, occasional finger-soiling; bookseller’s ticket to front pastedown of The Tower, ownership inscription of W.H. Auden to front free endpaper of The Tower, later pencil inscription ‘W.H. Auden’s copy | 2 leaves missing | bought from R. Wilson – who got it from Auden’ to front free endpaper of The Winding Stair.

Wilson: Small 8vo. Original printed card wrappers, stapled as issued; pp. [4], 7, [1 (colophon)]; printed on laid paper; a touch faded to spine, else fine.

W.H. Auden’s copies of Yeats’ two late masterpieces, both first editions, with a copy of Robert Wilson’s entertaining account of clearing the poet’s New York library, where the books were once housed.

Responding in 1964 to Stephen Spender’s request for a contribution to a projected volume of essays on W B. Yeats (which seemingly never materialised), Auden wrote: ‘I am incapable of saying a word about W.B. Yeats because through no fault of his, he has become for me a symbol of my own devil of unauthenticity, of everything which I must try to eliminate from my own poetry, false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities. […] His [poems] make me whore after lies.’

Though part of a private letter between friends, it is the clearest expression of one side of the complex relationship with Yeats that was maintained throughout Auden’s writing life. The pair, according to Roy Foster, may have met only once, but an exchange recorded by Joseph Brodsky suggests otherwise, as well as the mixture of admiration and exasperation with which Auden regarded his peers (though he always insisted that it was the writing alone, not the life, of an author that mattered): Auden: ‘I have known three great poets, each one a prize son of a bitch.’ Brodsky: ‘Who?’ Auden: ‘Yeats. Frost. Bert Brecht.’

It was also in 1964 that Robert Wilson, proprietor of the Phoenix Book Shop in New York, first met Auden, beginning, Wilson explains, ‘an acquaintance which terminated only when he left America to return to Oxford in 1972’ (a copy of Wilson’s entertaining account of the relationship, printed privately in an edition of 300 copies in 1975, accompanies the present volumes). When Auden decided to leave America in the early 1970s and return to Christ Church, Oxford, he phoned Wilson to ask ‘if, in a general way, I would be interested in buying that portion of his library that he did not wish to take with him.’ Wilson was keen. ‘When I got there’, he writes, ‘the apartment was in worse shambles than I had ever seen it’: ‘As Auden’s friends and visitors can testify, that is saying something. To separate the books he wanted to keep from those he would leave, he had gone to the shelves and thrown on the floor, literally, those he wanted to keep […] I shuddered inwardly a good many times, to see some of the books that would be treasures for any bibliophile being tossed about, and even kicked aside when a stack got too high. After a few more tosses, he announced, “Everything left on the shelves is for you.”’

The present volumes were among those left behind, The Tower bearing Auden’s ownership signature to the front free endpaper, while The Winding Stair carries a pencilled note: ‘W.H. Auden’s copy | 2 leaves missing | bought from R. Wilson – who got it from Auden.’ The missing leaves are consistent with Humphrey Carpenter’s account of ‘Auden’s practice when preparing anthologies to cut any pieces of poetry or prose that he wanted to include out of his own copies of books, thus permanently damaging several first editions.’ That Auden chose to abandon his copies of arguably the two greatest collections by a poet he loved, resisted and grappled with for decades carries symbolic weight. They stand as an intriguing token of the sustained, conflicted, but ultimately fruitful literary relationship between two of the century’s greatest poets.

Yeats died in France on 28 January 1939, three days after Auden, with Christopher Isherwood arrived in New York, having left England and Europe on the brink of war. Auden’s elegy ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ – one of the great elegies of the century – and a prose counterpart, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’, were among the first things he wrote in America. Attempts to measure Yeats’ significance, personal, literary, and historical, both are expressions of admiration tempered by ambivalence:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Yeats’s casting of the poet as oracular figure, his attachment to occult systems, association with wealthy patronesses (‘the parish of rich women’), and not least his flirtations with fascism; all were absurd or malign to Auden. ‘However diverse our fundamental beliefs may be’, he writes in ‘Yeats as an Example’ (1948), ‘the reaction of most of us to all that [‘Celtic mythology in his earlier phases, and occult symbolism in his later’] is, I fancy, the same: How on earth, we wonder, could a man of Yeats’s gifts take such nonsense seriously?’ But Auden’s judgement rested not on Yeats’s beliefs but his language: ‘The diction of The Winding Stair’, he declares, ‘is the diction of a just man, and it is for this reason that just men will always recognise the author as a master.’ If poetry makes nothing happen this, for Auden, was for the best.

The Tower, Yeats’ first major collection after winning the Nobel Prize in 1923, was published by Macmillan in February 1928 (2000 copies), and soon recognised as a masterpiece (‘one of the key books of the twentieth century’ [Foster]). The book’s title refers to Thoor Ballylee, the Norman tower Yeats restored in 1917 and which is depicted (with its reflection in water) in Thomas Sturge Moore’s celebrated cover design. The poems, including ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Leda and the Swan’, are among Yeats’ finest achievements. The Winding Stair, which followed in 1933 (2000 copies) is both companion and complement to The Tower, carrying over its central titular symbol, and conducting a sustained dialogue with the earlier collection. Dedicated to Edmund Dulac, the cover again bears an elaborate Sturge Moore cover design.

Wade 158 and 169. See Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (2003); Carpenter, W.H. Auden: A Biography (1981).

SKU: 2125159