Pudney and Auden

One of the discoveries of Thank Goodness for Cake was that John Pudney was at school with Auden. He was two years older and fell in love with Pudney in his final term at Gresham’s in a very decorous manner “We still addressed each other by our surnames”. Pudney was awed by this older boy and as they were in separate houses their contact was limited to ‘long rambling walks’ which Pudney found magical. “Wystan did not talk like a boy. He spoke a language which was mature, worldly, intellectually challenging”. They discussed poetry and Auden showed Pudney the poems which would be published by Faber although Pudney was too admiring to be able to offer much criticism whereas Auden was very critical of Pudney’s efforts. Later Auden wrote to him

“Never write from your head, write from your cock. Don’t force yourself mentally. Unless the original impulse comes from the guts and gives you a nice warm feeling up the spine, it is cerebral and bogus… Much poetry today is of this kind, emotional frigging.”

Of Auden’s Poems, which were published by Faber in 1930 Pudney says

“The volume itself made a greater impact on me than any work before or since. The tattered thumbed text is still treasured, not only for itself, but as a symbol of some magic, bright, quick, hard which illuminated the autumn sky in my twenty-first year” TGFC p52

Pudney continues “The following year, Auden himself made a very different impact. He was staying in London and wrote me a note asking for my photograph”. Pudney realises this was to see if he’d grown up pretty as he had been at school. He had and so Auden visits him but “When he came round, there were no concessions to love. It was just meat he was after.”

Pudney gave Auden more of his poems to read and Auden writes to him

18th September 1932

My dear John,

I've read your poems through a number of times. They're no use. They're very much better than what two or three thousand young Englishmen with literary interests are doing; any living writer under forty who is any good has written the same sort of thing, but in themselves they are quite worthless. Don't think I despise you for writing them; your ego has got to shed its droppings just as your intestines have to; but they've exactly the same hygienic value and no more. They're droppings and not babies. Don't ask me what you're to do because I havent the slightest idea. What I feel inclined to say is, chuck all this literary business. Go and do something useful like digging roads or organising strikes. Forget about yourself, learn to say 'I'm very ordinary' and one day perhaps it will come back to you. He who loses his life shall find it. The literatteur is as useless to society as a collar stud to a nude woman.

If I can ever help you in any way let me know.

Love

Wystan Auden

I think I’d have given up writing poems at this point but Pudney perseveres and his first collection, Spring Encounter published in 1933.  

Thank Goodness for Cake

John Pudney at the National Portrait Gallery

In an earlier blog entry I mentioned my interest in John Pudney and having come across references to his autobiography Thank Goodness for Cake (TGFC), I ordered it sight unseen. It was published in 1978 the year after he died. I anticipated finding out more about his wartime service in the RAF, his writing, his marriage, his children and his poems. Well as I discovered TGFC is an altogether different book from the ‘I did this and then I did that’ memoir. He dismisses his previous autobiographical gambit – Home and Away in the opening paragraph as a ‘well mannered, urbane account of the accepted and acceptable. No offence, no compelling interest’. So instead TGFC deals with the reality of his life. That is what he means by cake – cake is the reality and drink is the illusion. Drink blurs; Cake substantiates.

He was an alcoholic and the book deals with his decision to give up alcohol and all that entailed – ‘I was never recklessly drunk, I was never sober. The intake had been craftily and disastrously spread out over twenty-four hours – with such organised items as the brandy miniature in the pyjama pocket for shaving time.’

But he doesn’t just write about alcohol. TGFC is a beguiling book with glimpses of his childhood, his parents and their respective families, growing up, work, relationships and his poetry. It is all characterised by honesty. He must have been dying from cancer as he wrote it and so there was no need to pretend anymore.

It is also a celebratory account of the people and places that were important to him whilst being unsparing in its analysis of his owns shortcomings. I found myself liking him more and more as I read on.

And his wartime experience? At the start of the seventh chapter, The Square peg he writes “I have no wish now to recall or write about the war. I can only remember episodes and have to search my diaries to see if they existed or if there are bits of personal embroidery…. In my later life I’ve taken to constructive amnesia, deliberately de-memorising events and the people that went with them. This is not the same as forgetting. It is rather clearing the past into a limbo nearly out of mind, in order to leave more room and capacity for the present”. So instead of the war he writes about the poems that came out of it and a discussion with Benjamin Britten at the Albert Hall. Was I disappointed? Not at all – I was entranced with the book by this stage.