The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England

By Nicholas Jenkins

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2024

The US edition of The Island, a big, wonderfully textured and thought-provoking study by Stanford English professor Nicholas Jenkins, has the subtitle: “War and Belonging in Auden’s England,” and, intriguingly, the UK edition’s subtitle is “”W. H. Auden and the End of Englishness.” The former, printed in the New World, stresses “belonging,” but the latter stresses not inclusion but an end, a fall, the loss of an intangible collective identity that isn’t quite clarified even in 500 pages.

Though Jenkins does try. For instance, since The Island is principally about how the strange, melancholy interwar years filtered into the minds and works of an entire generation of novelists and poets, Jenkins looks closely at the job Auden took in 1932 at Downs School in Colwall, Hereford, right in the heart of the very kind of simple rural landscape at issue. “This was idealized as a world of gentle, cultivated landscapes, hedgerows, small villages, organic and supposedly harmonious social arrangements, downland and coast,” Jenkins writes, “a natural repository of the mythic wealth and values not of Britishness but of Englishness: moderation, reasonableness, expertise, natural bounty, and social cohesion.”

That differentiated “Englishness,” though damned elusive, is the essential subject of the book, the search for it, the yearning descriptions of it, the mirage nature of it. In The Island’s telling, the national ravages of the First World War prompted both a heightened awareness of both the slow, bucolic world of the English countryside and its fragility, perhaps its inevitable death. This is the world captured in such subtly evocative prose by H. V. Morton in his 1927 bestseller In Search of England, and Jenkins traces that search, often pursued haltingly and at cross-purposes, by Auden and many of his artistic peers in the interwar years. “In this period, a whole phalanx of writers set out to enact the re-enchantment, and by extension the moral and even economic rebirth, of rural England,” Jenkins writes. “Auden’s writing belongs among the work of these writers at a time when an idealized country world was often associated with a ‘true’ England.”

Jenkins is often excellent in searching the work of these writers for this particular kind of resonance and its darker inverted reflections. When more formidable older generation of writers, figures like Nevill Coghill, CS Lewis, and JRR Tolkien, are invoked, it always makes for fascinating reading:

Coghill’s, Lewis’s, and Tolkien’s fascination with the austere, blood-soaked worlds of Old English and Old Norse literatures was a displaced return to the ‘dark world’ of the front in an attempt to master it or understand it. Far from being merely dispassionate academic specialists, they gazed intently at their personal wartime experiences through the lens of their studies of Old and medieval English and through their own creative efforts.

Mentions like this naturally produce an urge to flip to the back of the book and consult the author’s sources, but although The Island has nearly 300 pages of endnotes (including a good many interesting prolonged discussions of various points), it inexcusably has no bibliography, so readers interested in where Jenkins did his reading will have to comb through his endnotes for fifteen or twenty days and construct a bibliography of their own. Absent this free labor, they’ll nevertheless be impressed by the reach of the social and poetical considerations on display here. “Although Auden was too young to go to war himself,” Jenkins writes in something like the foundational claim of his book, “he lived it vicariously in his poems, where imagined war experiences ‘mould and colour’  the representation of the rural world.” 

As is almost inevitable when dealing with English professors, there are occasional academic overreaches. Commenting on the teenage Auden’s taste for rough sex with blond Germans (“I am a mass of bruises,” he wrote to a friend at the time), Jenkins makes some grand pronouncements about how “every strange or secret meeting, every illicit connection, was, symbolically, a small act of peacemaking,” which at least has the benefit of being funny, although the chaser is more ponderous: “The ritualized passage from struggle to embraces is the allegory of a collective longing to heal the wounds of war with acts of love.” And since Jenkis is the literary executor of the great (and famously deadpan) Lincoln Kirstein, readers can hope that other lines are cast in po-faced humor, as when Jenkins, mentioning Auden’s 1930 operation for an anal fistula, adds, “About which he joked with some friends but not with others.” Well yes, one would expect.

The Island is a genuinely fascinating foray into understanding not only the young, forming Auden and the forces that did the forming. It’s easy, confident sweep will make it irresistible not only to Auden fans but to everybody intrigued by the vortex of interwar forces that still aren’t fully mapped. And if the book sparks some cynical reactions or starts some arguments, there’s that vast quarry of endnotes to delve at leisure.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News