when Auden was wrong

Anyone who has read much of my work knows how important W. H. Auden is to me, how much I love his poetry and revere him as a thinker. But as I am working on a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers I am reminded of something that I have often thought but never, until now, written: his famous essay on detective fiction, “The Guilty Vicarage,” is one of the worst things he ever wrote, and certainly the worst prominent essay he ever published. Let me count just some of the many ways.

One:

Greek tragedy and the detective story have one characteristic in common, in which they both differ from modern tragedy, namely, the characters are not changed in or by their actions: in Greek tragedy because their actions are fated, in the detective story because the decisive event, the murder, has already occurred.

How, exactly, does the occurence of the “decisive event” render it impossible for characters to be changed by their actions? The claim is evidently untrue: I can think of any number of detective novels in which one potentially defensible, or even accidental, killing leads to others, the killer becoming inured to murder or simply desperate.

Two:

The detective story requires … a closed society so that the possibility of an outside murderer (and hence of the society being totally innocent) is excluded; and a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect (cf. the thriller, which requires an open society in which any stranger may be a friend or enemy in disguise).

Obviously, only some detective stories meet this criterion, so he cannot mean what he says. Probably, then, he means that any truly excellent detective story must meet this criterion. But he then goes on to praise Sherlock Holmes as one of three and only three “completely satisfying detectives,” and the Holmes stories rarely meet the criterion announced. Indeed, the bustle and anonymity of London’s “open society” are often essential to the development of Conan Doyle’s plots. Are we to think that Holmes remains an ideal detective but maintains his ideality in stories that do not even meet Auden’s first requirement?

Three:

[The closed society] must appear to be an innocent society in a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis (for it reveals that some member has fallen and is no longer in a state of grace). The law becomes a reality and for a time all must live in its shadow, till the fallen one is identified. With his arrest, innocence is restored, and the law retires forever.

This too is absolute nonsense. In almost every detective story I can think of the society of the book, however peaceable it may appear, proves to be full of sins and crimes, jealousies and resentments, hatreds both rational and irrational. Indeed, if this were not the case then the story would lack multiple suspects: readers would be deprived of the pleasure of making their own guesses and the narrative would grow slack. Moreover, is there any imaginable society, no matter how small, in which the solving of one murder mystery would ensure the permanent retirement of the law? What is Auden even talking about here?

Four:

The characters in a detective story should, therefore, be eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical) — good, that is, either in appearance, later shown to be false, or in reality, first concealed by an appearance of bad.

Well, if they’re good only “in appearance” then they’re not good. They’re not ethical at all, much less “instinctively ethical,” whatever that means. (Is anyone since Adam and Eve, and maybe not even them, ever “instinctively ethical”? Must we not all learn?)

Five:

It is a sound instinct that has made so many detective-story writers choose a college as a setting. The ruling passion of the ideal professor is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake so that he is related to other human beings only indirectly through their common relation to the truth; and those passions, like lust and avarice and envy, which relate individuals directly and may lead to murder are, in his case, ideally excluded. If a murder occurs in a college, therefore, it is a sign that some colleague is not only a bad man but also a bad professor. Further, as the basic premise of academic life is that truth is universal and to be shared with all, the gnosis of a concrete crime and the gnosis of abstract ideas nicely parallel and parody each other.

I have no idea what that last sentence means, but the previous ones are poppycock. There is absolutely no reason why a bad man must also be a bad professor. Indeed, in some university-based mysteries it is precisely the good professor — the one who not only knows his stuff but loves his students — who turns out to be the murderer. It would almost be malpractice on the part of the novelist not to make such a person the killer. And whatever passions are “ideally excluded” from Auden’s imagined college, none of them ever are in real life or in any collegiate mystery I know of. (This goes back to my earlier comment on Auden’s criteria for an ideal closed society.)

I could go on, but I think I’ve said enough. The essay is not wholly without merit — his comment on Raymond Chandler is a shrewd one: “whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” — but its merits are few and small, and its crimes against logic and evidence very great.

A reasonable question at this point is: Why? Why did Auden, who wrote so brilliantly about many things, write so badly here?

My answer is that when he wrote it he was not really thinking about detective stories, but about his own poem-in-progress, The Age of Anxiety — a poem in which our universal anxiety arises from unacknowledged guilt, the murder we cannot allow ourselves to realize that we have committed. (Who is the victim? Perhaps the very one whose loss we grieve: “Mourn for him now, / Our lost dad, / Our colossal father.”) It is noteworthy that Auden writes this about Rosetta, the only woman in the poem and the character most closely connected to him:

So she returned now to her favorite day-dream in which she indulged whenever she got a little high — which was rather too often — and conjured up, detail by detail, one of those landscapes familiar to all readers of English detective stories, those lovely innocent countrysides inhabited by charming eccentrics with independent means and amusing hobbies to whom, until the sudden intrusion of a horrid corpse onto the tennis court or into the greenhouse, work and law and guilt are just literary words.

“The Guilty Vicarage” was published in the May 1948 issue of Harper’s but had probably been written more than two years earlier: in a letter to T. S. Eliot on 30 January 1946 he said that he had just written a paper on detective fiction that he was going to read at a theological seminary. (I wish I knew which seminary, but I am guessing that it was Union.) At that time he was doing little else aside from his work on The Age of Anxiety — in the more than two years he devoted to it he wrote only one other poem — and my strong suspicion is that he wrote this essay only nominally about detective fiction: its real purpose was to analyze an existential condition that he believed was afflicting the entire Western world, and could be described analogically through a highly stylized picture of the typical Golden Age English murder mystery.

P.S.: Here is my introduction to The Age of Anxiety.