Bad news

W.H. Auden, you know him? The guy I used to really, really love (sometimes)? The guy who wrote "Musee de Beaux Arts", which I read a dozen times during my boring-ass senior English class and copied in its entirety into my commonplace book? The guy on whose behalf I got all persnickety at Lord Alfred Douglas, one of several poets I always look for in the poetry section at the bookstore so that I can point out mentally to Bosie down in hell the fact that these people he dismissed so cavalierly and thought he was so much better than had managed to survive the test of time whereas nobody had even heard of him and his lame loser poetry?

(God, I sound so mean, so filled with rage at Alfred Douglas, so lacking in perspective that I continue to feel hatred for a dead guy I never met. But I don't do this bookshop thing anymore. I'm over that phase. At least until I read Salome's Last Veil or Oscar Wilde and Myself again, which will definitely get me riled up.)

Well, anyway, that W.H. Auden. He's not dead to me, but I'm really, really cross with him. He's going to have to do something pretty magnificent to make it up to me. He can be thinking about that while I finish up my essays for this semester, and I'm going to read a biography of him after exams are done, and if I don't find anything that consoles me, I'm putting him in the section of my brain reserved for writers who irritate me as people so I wish I didn't like any of their books or poems, ever. I will sandwich him right between Robert Frost and Orson Scott Card.

Basically this is what happened. I was reading Tipping the Velvet (not as spare and elegant as The Night Watch (it wasn't intended to be, of course), but I'm enjoying it), and the main character's begun dressing as a boy, and she's just about to become a renter, and the guy, her prospective client, says this:

He said, 'A sovereign, for a suck or for a Robert' – he meant, of course, a Robert Browning. 'Half a guinea for a dubbing.'

I was reading this and I was like "WHAT? Wait, wait, wait, Sarah Waters, there's no "of course" here. What could this possibly mean?" I was so confused that I seriously went to her website to see if I could email her and find out the meaning of this bizarre phrase. But it was all publishery and I was too embarrassed, and I haven't given up hope that the book will eventually tell me. I'm also kind of thinking that if I were slightly less naive it would be obvious. And probably once someone (hi, Bonnie!) with a dirtier mind reads this and comments, I will feel silly for not getting it straight away. But anyway, there's the excerpt. Figure it out. I couldn't.

I did a bunch of Google searches trying to work out what this meant, and nothing turned up, except for this blog post of writers saying mean things about each other. Mostly unremarkable, but W.H. Auden, man, he was fucking ruthless. He said that Poe was an "unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse." Which, okay, seemed really harsh, but fair enough, Edgar Allan Poe had such a messed-up sex life that I doubt I'd say anything even if the Marquis de Sade started getting on Edgar Allan Poe's case. But then I scrolled down a little bit and you know what else W.H. Auden said, DO YOU KNOW?

I don't think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn't care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.

Said W.H. Auden! Of whom I used to be very, very fond! Granted, my fondness peaked during that period when I was spending my senior English class time reading his poems instead saying a lot of rude things to my classmates as they tried to decide amongst themselves whether Hamlet was really contemplating suicide or just pretending to (because he was faking the crazy thing! we can't trust him!), but still, I was very fond of W.H. Auden! Why would he say such a thing, why, why, why, why? Why would anyone say such a thing about dear, sweet, darling Robert Browning? He was such a sweet darling dear! Why would you?

And also, don't say his wife in that manner! She's not just some nobody nothing, she's Elizabeth Barrett Browning!

I was going to try and stop myself from making personal comments about W.H. Auden but he's driving me to it. I can no longer contain my feelings of anger because this is one of those times at which speaking one's mind ceases to be a moral duty and becomes a pleasure. Because unlike SOME PEOPLE who make MARRIAGES OF CONVENIENCE and have NO STABLE RELATIONSHIPS EVER, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were happily married for ages and ages and did not PERPETUALLY break off relationships all the time always like a BIG DUMB LOSER. Besides which neither of them were named WYSTAN or HUGH.

Excuse me while I go take some Valium.

Okay, some of that was unfair. He married for convenience, but he didn't marry some nobody nothing either, she was Thomas Mann's daughter and literary executor (I think), and he married her so she could have a British passport and escape from the Nazis. And yes, he didn't have any stable relationships, but also it would have been trickier for a gay couple to swing that than a straight couple (though of course the Brownings did not have the easiest path to bliss that has ever existed in the world). And Wystan Hugh is not his fault and maybe neither was his apparent relationship dysfunction because maybe his parents were awful and messed him up for life.

So I think W.H. Auden was just jealous, which means the above-quoted remark is much more sad than it is nasty, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgive him for trash-talking dear, sweet, darling, lovely Robert Browning. JUST SHUT UP, W.H. Auden. Nobody asked YOU.