Harry Cochrane

‘Begin with the name,’ begins Peter Ackroyd. ‘Wystan is singular and arresting. Auden himself... confessed that he would be furious if he found that anyone else possessed it.’ It is certainly a name on which much ink has been spilt. Ackroyd’s biography comes barely 18 months after Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island, an exhaustive study of the poet and his work up to 1939 and his flight to America. Unlike Jenkins’s book, Ackroyd’s has the advantage of being a life rather than a half-life, though it accelerates through the later years as Auden tipped into ‘premature old age’. The frequent quotations also help the pacing, though we might have wanted chunkier extracts from, say, ‘September 1st 1939’.

‘I am by trade a man of letters,’ Evelyn Dolman tells us as the curtain rises on Venetian Vespers. ‘I had a middling reputation in the period coming to be known, in our increasingly Frenchified age, as the fin de siècle, that is, the 1890s.’ If his writing mostly appears in the review sections, his marriage to Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of an American oil baron, is front-page stuff. But Laura has proved to be a distant, phantasmal partner. Even during the Dolmans’ sole night of physical intimacy, ‘it was as if, clasping me to her breast, she were at the same time looking aside and past my shoulder’. It moreover transpires that T. Willard Rensselaer, dead in mysterious circumstances, has cut his daughter out of his will.

Colm Toibin’s new novel starts with a bang – or rather, the results of one. It is only on the second page that an Irishman arrives at Eilis Fiorello’s house and threatens to leave his wife’s love child on her doorstep, it being also the doorstep of the father, Tony. ‘If anyone thinks I am keeping an Italian plumber’s brat in my house and have my own children believe that it came into the world as decently as they did, they can have another think.’ As a sequel to Brooklyn, it makes sense that Long Island is quick out of the blocks. Which is exactly what Eilis and Tony are out of, having moved with the entire Fiorello family to the sweeping developmentia of Lindenhurst. There is no privacy. Patriarchy governs.