What would Auden have deemed evil in our time? European jingoism

‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it in an anthology, and it puzzled him because he had not then visited Italy. A little later, Smith found Auden’s elegy to Sigmund Freud, and was enthralled by its promise that psychoanalysis frees people ‘to approach the future as a friend/ without a wardrobe of excuses, without/ a set mask of rectitude or an/ embarrassing over-familiar gesture.’ When Smith began his careful, systematic reading of Auden while living under civil war conditions in Belfast, he found the hostility, menace and anxiety of Auden’s pre-1939 poems attuned to his environment.

The poet’s hold on Smith’s imagination and intellect has not slackened. There is no other writer whose work he carries in his suitcase when travelling, ‘as a priest may carry his missal’; no other writer who poses questions and offers answers that still seem so urgent to Smith. His fictional detective Isabel Dalhousie quotes Auden, and the poet’s literary executor and finest exponent, Edward Mendelson, appears in a Dalhousie novel. Little surprise, then, that McCall Smith has written a kindly, avuncular, contemplative opusculum sharing his enthusiasm with the uninitiated.

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He sketches Auden’s life and character, and discusses the poems that resonate for him. ‘A Summer Night’ (1933) expresses Auden’s vision of agape, and urges readers to love and value other people for their humanity, without self-interest or conditions. Although Smith seems not to have any religious faith, the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbour — as reiteratively expressed by Auden — seems momentous to him. He thus gives prominence to some lines of Auden: ‘O every day in sleep and labour/ Our life and death are with our neighbour/ And love illuminates again/ The City and the lion’s den.