Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Ian Sansom 2019

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover photograph © Getty Images/Hulton Archive/Stringer

Ian Sansom asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Unpublished writings by W. H. Auden are quoted with the permission of the Estate of W. H. Auden.

‘September 1, 1939’ from Another Time by W. H. Auden (1940, Faber & Faber).

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007557233

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780007557226

Version: 2020-06-17

Dedication

For N. J. Humphrey

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Wow!

7  September 1, 1939

8 Your Least Favourite Auden Poem?

9  Just a Title

10  1

11  I ≠ A

12  The Modern Poet

13  Not Standing

14  A Not Insignificant Americanism

15  A Rolling Tomato Gathers No Mayonnaise

16  Clever-Clever

17  Various Cosmic Thingummys

18  Offensive Smells

19  2

20  A Little Spank-Spank

21  Strangeways

22  Is Berlin Very Wicked?

23  Do Not Tell Other Writers to F*** Off

24  3

25  The Latin for the Judgin’

26  4

27  Aerodynamics

28  Get Rid of the (Expletive) Braille

29  Tower of Babel Time

30  5

31  The Liquid Menu

32  Below Average

33  Soft Furnishings

34  6

35  Talking Trash

36  You Can’t Say ‘Mad’ Nijinsky

37  7

38  Homo Faber

39  8

40  As Our Great Poet Auden Said

41  We Must Die Anyway

42  9

43  Twinkling

44  A New Chapter in My Life

45  Twenty-Five Years’ Worth of Reading

46  Also by Ian Sansom

47  About the Author

48  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Wow!

At just after five o’clock on 11 June 1956, W. H. Auden stood up to give his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry at the Sheldonian Theatre, the very heart of the university, adjacent to the Bodleian and the Clarendon Building, opposite Blackwell’s bookshop on Broad Street, and a short walk from Auden’s old college, Christ Church.

It was a warm afternoon. Auden, famously crumpled, had enjoyed, I imagine, a good lunch and was sweating in his thick black MA gown with its distinctive, gaudy crimson shot-silk hood. He was buzzing: he had long since adopted a strict chemical daily routine to enable him to work more efficiently. These ‘labor-saving devices’, in what he called his ‘mental kitchen’, included not only strategic quantities of alcohol, coffee and tobacco, but also the amphetamine Benzedrine, as a pick-me-up at breakfast, and the barbiturate Seconal, to bring him down at night. ‘If you ever get that depressed unable-to-concentrate feeling, try taking Benzidrine [sic] Tablets,’ he advised his friend Annie Dodds, ‘but not too many.’

The Sheldonian was full: the audience were expectant. The University Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors were in full fig – black gowns, gold lace, white tie. The undergraduates and graduate students wore subfusc and were crammed into the high-tiered seating under the lurid sunburst-orange ceiling fresco by King Charles II’s court painter Robert Streater, which depicts Truth descending upon the Arts and Sciences like the wolf on the fold, dispelling ignorance from the university.

It was quite a return.

In 1928 Auden had left Oxford with a miserable Third in English, and his appointment as professor was not without controversy. The university elects its Professor of Poetry unusually – indeed, uniquely – by a vote among its graduates, and Auden remained a divisive figure in England. The two other candidates were Harold Nicolson, a well-connected author, diplomat, politician and husband to Vita Sackville-West, and G. Wilson Knight, an eminent and massively prolific Shakespeare scholar, author of both the standard work on Shakespearean tragedy, The Wheel of Fire (1930), and the bestselling The Sceptred Isle: Shakespeare’s Message for England at War (1940).

Nicolson and Wilson Knight had obvious merits – they were sensible, distinguished, learned individuals. And they were easily and identifiably English. Auden, in contrast, was an eccentric, remote, supernational sort of a figure, a poet celebrity, English-born but now a self-proclaimed New Yorker who had developed a strange, drawling mid-Atlantic accent – recently further complicated after he’d had his few final teeth removed and been fitted with dentures – and who made a living ‘on the circuit’, touring American campuses delivering his lectures and reading his poems. He saw himself as a kind of itinerant preacher:

An air-borne instrument I sit,

Predestined nightly to fulfil

Columbia-Giesen-Management’s

Unfathomable will,

By whose election justified,

I bring my gospel of the Muse

To fundamentalists, to nuns,

to Gentiles and to Jews.

(Auden, ‘On the Circuit’)

Auden’s usual touring schedule did not include the English Midlands. The closest he came was spending his summers in bohemian fashion on the Italian island of Ischia with his lover Chester Kallman. (‘They engaged a handsome local boy known as Giocondo’, notes one biographer, ‘to look after the house, and possibly also to provide sexual services.’) Though popular among undergraduates, who weren’t entitled to vote, Auden was not considered a serious candidate for the professorship by the more senior members of the university.

There was also the small matter of his having abandoned England in 1939, and having taken the oath of allegiance and become an American citizen in 1946, something he was never allowed to forget, and for which he was certainly never forgiven. On learning of Auden’s death in 1973, the novelist Anthony Powell was rendered almost speechless with joy and disgust, declaring, ‘I’m delighted that shit has gone … It should have happened years ago … Scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a … like a …’ In 1956, memories of the war were still fresh. G. Wilson Knight had served as a dispatch rider in World War I, and in World War II Nicolson had been parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Information. Auden’s war record was rather less distinguished. When he had left England in 1939, questions were asked in Parliament about his departure: he was a disappointment to the nation. When he arrived back in London at the end of the war, wearing his honorary US Army major’s uniform, as part of his role in the US Strategic Bombing Survey, people were appalled.

But if England wasn’t too sure about Auden, Auden wasn’t at all sure he wanted to spend too much time in England delivering the one lecture per term required by the university statutes. ‘The winter months’, he wrote to Enid Starkie, the flamboyant, publicity-seeking, cigar-smoking Rimbaud scholar who had proposed him as a candidate, ‘are those in which I earn enough dollars to allow me […] to devote myself to the unprofitable occupation of writing poetry. I do not see any way in which I could earn the equivalent if I had to reside in England during that period.’ Nonetheless, he allowed his nomination to go forward.

On Thursday, 9 February 1956, the result was announced.

Wilson Knight had attracted just 91 votes. Nicolson had secured 192. And Auden topped the poll with 216. He was therefore elected as professor, succeeding his old friend Cecil Day Lewis.

‘You have chosen for your new Professor’, Auden began his inaugural lecture – typically teasing and self-effacing – ‘someone who has no more right to the learned garb he is wearing than he would have to a clerical collar.’ Setting out the terms of his professorship, he went on:

Speaking for myself, the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: ‘Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?’ The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: ‘What kind of a guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself?’

This book does a very simple thing. It asks Auden’s two obvious questions of his own poem ‘September 1, 1939’. How does it work? And what kind of a guy inhabits this poem?

In a sense, the first question is easy to answer. ‘September 1, 1939’ consists of 99 lines, written in trimeters, divided into nine eleven-line stanzas with a shifting rhyme scheme, each stanza being composed of just one sentence, so that – as the poet Joseph Brodsky has usefully pointed out – the thought unit corresponds exactly to the stanzaic unit, which corresponds also to the syntactic and grammatical unit. Which is neat.

Too neat.

Because, of course, this is only the beginning of an understanding of how the poem works. It takes us only to the very edge of the poem, to the outskirts of its territory. In order properly to understand ‘September 1, 1939’, we would have to investigate why Auden chose this rigorous, cramped, bastard form – and not, for example, an elegant villanelle, or a sestina, or a double sestina, traditional and virtuoso forms at which he excelled. And why did he begin a poem with an ‘I’, undoubtedly the most depressing and dreary little pronoun in the English language? And who is this ‘I’? And why do they ‘sit’ in one of the dives – why aren’t they standing? And how are they sitting? At a table? And where is this dive? And why is it a ‘dive’? And what exactly were the ‘clever hopes’ of this ‘low dishonest decade’? And why so many double adjectives? And so on and so on. This book will attempt to follow the route of some of these obvious but necessary questions, mapping the poem word by word, line by line and phrase by phrase.

And as for the ‘guy’ who inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? What is his notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal from himself?

These are also good questions.

‘September 1, 1939’ is an important poem, I believe, and worthy of scrutiny, because it provides us with a rare glimpse of a writer in the act of reinventing himself, at a culminating moment in world affairs. Like Ulysses and The Waste Land, like Guernica and The Rite of Spring, this poem is a snapshot of the artist in extremis, working at the farthest reaches of his capacities.

But ‘September 1, 1939’ is not only one of those rare coincidences in literature in which the force of history meets personal psychology and ideology, to produce something truly marvellous – it also represents a moment of crisis, where the great pressures at work both outside and inside the poem force certain flaws to become apparent. Not only that, it’s a poem whose troubled history involves its own self-destruction and reinvention: it therefore represents the art object as living organism, something that grows and changes, that is understood, misunderstood, appropriated, abandoned, recycled and reused, again and again. Above all, it is a poem that still reverberates with meaning and controversy, a poem that readers return to at times of personal and national crisis: it turns out that the ‘guy’ who inhabits Auden’s poem is us.

The aim of this book, then, is to demonstrate how a poem gets produced, consumed and incorporated into people’s lives – how, in the words of another of Auden’s great poems, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, the work of a poet becomes ‘modified in the guts of the living’, and not just modified, but colonised, metabolised, metastasised. It is a record of how and why we respond to great art.

Or, at least, it is a record of how and why I have responded to this particular example of great art, and of how the work of this particular poet has become modified in these particular guts – modified, metabolised and metastasised. There has been so much written about Auden by so many people – brilliant and insightful people – over so many years, that the best I can do is to try and explain the impact that reading and studying this poem has had on me. Not because there’s anything particularly interesting about me – on the contrary – but because I might usefully represent the common reader, the sensual man-in-the-street, the entirely average individual with a rather unusual interest in a particular work of art.

In the end, I hope that this book amounts to more than a record of my own peculiar tastes and notions and gives expression to that common sense of awe and inadequacy that we might all experience in the presence of great art, for how can one possibly begin to cope with someone like Auden, who was clearly a genius, and with something like this, which is clearly a masterpiece? What can one possibly say, except … ‘Wow!’?

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism’s face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow,

‘I will be true to the wife,

I’ll concentrate more on my work’,

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the deaf,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Your Least Favourite Auden Poem?

INTERVIEWER: What’s your least favourite Auden poem?

AUDEN: ‘September 1, 1939.’

Michael Newman, interview with W. H. Auden, The Paris Review (1972)

Me too.

*

I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden for twenty-five years.

It could not be described as a cost-effective enterprise.

It may not have been the best use of my time.

The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value; he may be paid ten pounds for a poem which he believes is very good and took him months to write, and a hundred pounds for a piece of journalism which costs him but a day’s work.

(Auden, ‘The Poet & The City’)

A lot can happen to someone in twenty-five years – though it hasn’t really happened to me. I have overcome no addictions. I have suffered no serious mental or physical breakdowns. There were no major achievements, no terrible lows: I am, in all regards, average to the point of being dull. There is, alas, no backstory to this story. This is not one of those books.

It is not a book about grief.

It is not a book about loss.

It is not a book about some great self-realisation.

I did not go – I have not been – on any kind of a journey with W. H. Auden.

I do not believe that Auden provides readers with the key to understanding life, the universe and everything. Reading Auden has not made me happier, healthier, or a better or more interesting person.

Perhaps the only strange or remarkable thing to have happened to me over the past twenty-five years is that I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden.

The only possible conclusion, I suppose, after all this time, is either that I haven’t been trying hard enough, or that I’m simply not up to the job.

Or, possibly, both.

*

Completed finally in my early fifties, in vain and solitary celebration, this – whatever this is – turns out to be proof against itself.

For decades I had imagined writing a big book about Auden’s life and work, a truly great book, a magnum opus.

I have managed instead to write a short book about just one of his poems. At the very moment of its completion, the work turns out to be evidence of failure. Opus minus.

In the end, one feels only depletion, disgust and disappointment, the sense that one has once again turned manna into gall, the everlasting taste of bitterness.

*

(I am reading the collected poems of Bertolt Brecht, in translation. I come across this, ‘Motto’:

This, then, is all. It’s not enough, I know.

At least I’m still alive, as you may see.

I’m like the man who took a brick to show

How beautiful his house used once to be.

This book is my brick: it is proof of how beautiful the house might have been.)

*

Auden wrote all of his prose, he claimed, because he needed the money.

I have written all of my prose because I am not a poet.

And I needed the money.

Underneath the abject willow,

Lover, sulk no more;

Act from thought should quickly follow:

What is thinking for?

Your unique and moping station

Proves you cold;

Stand up and fold

Your map of desolation.

(Auden, ‘Underneath the abject willow’)

Twenty-five years, though – can you imagine? – twenty-five years of failing to write a book.

*

It’s perhaps not entirely uncommon.

There are, of course, individuals who write great books at great speed, and with great success, and to great acclaim – Auden’s first book with Faber was published when he was just twenty-three and he went on to produce a book about every three years for the rest of his life. The truth is, it takes most of us years to get a book published, and even then those books end in massive failure: neglected, overlooked and forgotten.

(My own books, it should probably be admitted, have all ended in massive failure: neglected, overlooked and forgotten. It’s nature’s way. There’s a critic, Franco Moretti, notorious in literary studies, who has pioneered the study of literature as a kind of data set, and he has an essay, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, which is all about clues in detective literature, and which is an excellent essay, though I’m less interested in his thoughts about clues in detective literature than I am in his redolent title phrase – which he stole from Hegel, actually – because it acknowledges what is rarely acknowledged, which is the hard, painful truth that to study literature, never mind to participate in it, is to become a witness to the sheer horrors of literary history, as savage and violent as all history. ‘The majority of books disappear forever –’ writes Moretti, ‘and “majority” actually misses the point: if we set today’s canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published novels. And the other 99.5 percent?’ I am one of the 99.5 per cent: I am one of the living dead, the Great Unread. This book too will undoubtedly end up in the slaughterhouse, as it should and as it must.)

*

This book I began long before I had written or even contemplated writing any of my other books. It was the first – and it may be the last. It may be time to admit defeat, to admit to my own obvious lack of whatever it was that Auden had, which was just about everything. In Auden, one might say – if it didn’t sound so dramatic, if it didn’t sound like I was trying to talk things up by talking myself down – in Auden was my beginning and in Auden is my end.

*

One might, I suppose, console oneself with the knowledge that even some of Auden’s books were not entirely successful: Academic Graffiti, City Without Walls.

But to dwell on the minor faults and failings of the great is hardly a comfort.

It is merely another sign of one’s own inadequacies.

The greater the equality of opportunity in a society becomes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail, particularly for those who have some talent but not enough to win them second or third place.

(Auden, ‘West’s Disease’)

But surely – surely? – literature is not a competition. Literature is not a sport. One cannot measure oneself by the usual standards of success.

The writer who allows himself to become infected by the competitive spirit proper to the production of material goods so that, instead of trying to write his book, he tries to write one which is better than somebody else’s book is in danger of trying to write the absolute masterpiece which will eliminate all competition once and for all and, since this task is totally unreal, his creative powers cannot relate to it, and the result is sterility.

(Auden, ‘Red Ribbon on a White Horse’)

Let’s not kid ourselves.

It is a competition.

It is a sport.

One does measure oneself by the usual standards of success.

When writing about any great writer – or indeed about anyone who has achieved great things – one can’t help but compare oneself.

*

(Throughout his life, Philip Larkin often measured himself against Auden. Auden, for him, was the Truly Great Man: Philip Larkin loved Auden. When he bought a car in 1984, for example, an Audi, he said he liked the name ‘because it reminds me of Auden’. In a letter to a friend in 1959, extolling the virtues of Auden’s poem ‘Night Mail’, he wrote in horrible realisation, ‘HE’D BE ABOUT SEVEN YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME,’ but then quickly added, ‘I reckon he’d shot his bolt by the age of 33, actually.’ Again, when Larkin was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1965, he told an interviewer, ‘Take this Queen’s Medal. I’m 42, but he got it for “Look, Stranger!” when he was 30. Mind you, I feel he was played out as a poet after 1940.’ This scuttering between despair and disdain is typical of Larkin in general but it is also typical of his attitude towards Auden in particular. He prefaced a home-made booklet of poems in 1941 with the gulping confession ‘I think that almost any single line by Auden would be worth more than the whole lot put together.’ When, in 1972, Auden’s bibliographer Barry Bloomfield asked Larkin if he might be his next subject, Larkin expressed both delight and dismay: Bloomfield ‘has switched to me now Auden’s gone’, he told his friend Anthony Thwaite; ‘I am not much more than a five-finger exercise after Auden,’ he apologised to Bloomfield.)

*

If Philip Larkin was no more than a five-finger exercise compared to Auden, then this – this! – is, what? At the very best, a one-note tribute?

*

Polyphony

↓

Monophony

↓

Penny whistle and kazoo

*

Parnassus after all is not a mountain,

Reserved for A.1. climbers such as you;

It’s got a park, it’s got a public fountain.

The most I ask is leave to share a pew

With Bradford or with Cottam, that will do.

(Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’)

*

Park?

Fountain?

Pissoir.

*

Perhaps one of the only things the rest of us share with the truly great writers is the sense of struggle, the sense of inadequacy.

Flaubert: ‘Sometimes when I find myself empty, when the expression refuses to come, when, after having scrawled long pages, I discover that I have not written one sentence, I fall on my couch and remain stupefied in an internal swamp of ennuis.’

Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘Birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, / Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.’

Katherine Mansfield: ‘For the last two weeks I have written scarcely anything. I have been idle; I have failed.’

We all know that feeling, that sense of despair and woe-is-me and all-I-taste-is-ashes, and all-I-touch-has-turned-to-dust.

Great writers, it seems, are not necessarily those who are most confident about their own capacities or skills. They are more often keenly aware that words are failing them, and that they are failing words. Like us, they find it difficult.

*

Or rather, most of them find it difficult: Auden was convinced of his own skills and capacities from an early age and went on to fulfil and exceed his early promise.

(His tutor at Oxford, Nevill Coghill, recalled Auden announcing his intention to become a poet. Jolly good, said Coghill – or something donnish to that effect – that should help with understanding the old technical side of Eng. Lit., eh, old chap? ‘Oh no, you don’t understand,’ replied Auden – or again, words to that effect – ‘I mean a great poet.’)

He seems never to have been lacking in confidence. He seems always to have been convinced not merely of his brilliance but of his sovereignty.

‘Evidently they are waiting for Someone,’ he told his friend Stephen Spender.

He was that Someone.

*

And me, who am I?

If nothing else, one of the things I have realised over the course of the past twenty-five years, in trying to write a book about W. H. Auden, is the obvious fact that I AM NOT W. H. AUDEN.

*

Other people realise they’re not their heroes much earlier, but I was in the slow learners’ class in school and seem to be a slow learner still.

I think I probably believed that one day – through sheer willpower and determined slog, through dogged persistence and self-discipline – I might somehow overcome my weaknesses and become an artist of some significance.

It is only recently that I have come to accept my true role and status, which is, obviously, naturally, inevitably, as an utterly insignificant bit-part player in the world of literary affairs.

This is the real trouble with studying major writers: it reminds one of one’s minority status.

(Great Lies of Literature No. 1: reading great literature is good for the soul. The truth: reading the greats does not just uplift; it also casts down.)

*

F. R. Leavis once described E. M. Forster, when compared with Henry James, as ‘only too unmistakably minor’ – though Forster accurately remarked of James that though he might have been a ‘perfect novelist’, it wasn’t a ‘very enthralling type of perfection’. It hardly needs stating that I’m not in James’s league, nor in Forster’s – but, alas, the real truth is that I’m not even in Leavis’s league, which is a league no one in their right mind would want to be in anyway, a league whose entry requirements include anger, bitterness and envy. (He was not a great fan of Auden, Leavis, particularly not his irony, which he described as ‘self-defensive, self-indulgent or merely irresponsible’. God, one wonders, what would F. R. Leavis make of this?) Reading Leavis, it is clear that I am only too unmistakably minor even in relation to him writing about Forster writing about James – a gnat on a flea on the shoulders of giants. Forster has an essay, ‘The C Minor of that Life’, whose title is an allusion to Browning’s poem ‘Abt Vogler’, the last line of which begins ‘The C Major of this life’. This life is neither C Major nor Minor, but C very much Diminished.

*

(This book, clearly, is not just about Auden. It’s about everything else I’ve been thinking and reading while I’ve been thinking and reading Auden, and which has influenced my thinking and reading of Auden. As Mr Weller long ago explained to his son, Sam – the archetypal Cockney geezers – in The Pickwick Papers: ‘Ven you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. I rayther think it isn’t.’)

*

Other things I have come to realise, in passing, as I have been trying to write a book about W. H. Auden, over the course of the past twenty-five years:

 Despite what you may have heard, one’s talents do not necessarily grow and develop over time. One’s character does not necessarily blossom. Things do not necessarily work out. The unique gift that you might have thought you had to offer the world does not necessarily become apparent to you or to anyone else. There is not just the possibility of loss and waste and failure: failure and waste and loss are inevitable. (William Empson, in that wonderful remark about Gray’s ‘Elegy’, in Some Versions of Pastoral – my absolute favourite among all of Empson’s wonderful remarks: ‘And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy.’)

 There are many individuals whose natural talents far exceed your own.

 There are many individuals whose natural talents may seem far less than your own and yet who will inevitably succeed far beyond your own small successes.

 There will always be something, someone, some circumstance pushing you to the side of your life, something obscuring the view, something preventing you from doing what you thought you might do or being who you thought you might be. For me, that something, that someone, was Auden: for me, Auden was the problem as well as the solution. Perhaps this is always the case with the people who really matter: wives, husbands, lovers, friends.

*

So what is the final justification for this book, which has taken so long, for so little apparent reason, and which obviously amounts to so little – 70,000 words, give or take, expended in trying to explain Auden’s 99-line poem?

*

I can’t really claim, as is now often claimed by those attempting to write about their relationship to other – often, conveniently, dead – writers, that this is a record of a ‘relationship’. If it is a relationship, it is clearly a very odd sort of relationship, since I never met Auden and realistically never would have met Auden, and if I had done, it seems doubtful we would have got on. He could never have been, for me, as he was for the poet John Hollander, and for many others, ‘Like a clever young uncle’ or ‘like a wise old aunt’: I am not someone blessed with such uncles or such aunts. My actual uncle Dave was a minicab driver; my auntie worked at Yardley’s. There have been, for me, no mentors: there has been no extending of the hand, no leg-up, no hand-me-downs. (In Ulysses, Mr Deasy asks Stephen what an Englishman is proud of – ‘I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast, I paid my way … I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing? Can you?’ It’s true.) But then, in fairness, I was never really protégé material. My relationship with Auden – had there been anything like a relationship – would have been at best a very vague acquaintanceship, a relationship from a great distance, a one-sided sort of relationship, not so much teacher-to-pupil or guru-to-disciple, as master to his valet.

I am beginning to lose patience

With my personal relations:

They are not deep

And they are not cheap.

(Auden, ‘Case Histories’)

This book does not therefore record my ‘relationship’ with Auden – I have no relationship with Auden in any meaningful sense – so much as my relationship with language, or my relationship with language through Auden. Auden as the OED, as Roget’s, as Brewer’s, Fowler’s, Webster’s, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English – all of them, combined.

*

(‘Is it one of those How So-and-So Changed My Life type of books?’ asks a friend. ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s a shame,’ they say. ‘People really like those sorts of books.’ ‘It’s more about my relationship with language, and literature, and ideas,’ I say. ‘Hmm,’ says my friend. ‘Well, good luck with that.’)

*

One of Auden’s great ambitions was to be included in the OED – ‘that inestimable successor to Holy Writ’, as the critic I. A. Richards called it – with his words and phrases listed as coinages and exemplars. It was an ambition he fulfilled many times over, being credited with more than 100 significant usages, including the phrase ‘Age of Anxiety’ (defined, in the second edition of the OED, as ‘the title of W. H. Auden’s poem applied as a catch-phrase to any period characterized by anxiety or danger’), the adjective ‘entropic’, and the noun ‘agent’ (abbreviated from ‘secret agent’). According to the biographer Humphrey Carpenter, describing Auden’s study in his house in Kirchstetten, ‘The most prominent object in the workroom was a set of the Oxford English Dictionary, missing one volume, which was downstairs, Auden invariably using it as a cushion to sit on when at table – as if (a friend observed) he was a child not quite big enough for the nursery furniture.’

*

(The missing volume – Auden’s hardback dictionary cushion – was, according to Carpenter, volume X of the OED: (Sole–Sz). Which might provide a nice alternative title for this book, would it not? Sole–Sz, a title which offers an obvious homophonic pun on ‘sole’ and which also usefully alludes to Roland Barthes’ S/Z, that impossibly complicated book about Balzac’s story ‘Sarrasine’, which was once required reading on every grad course in literary theory, with its typologies of interacting SEM codes and SYM codes, and REF, and ACT and HER codes, and which therefore might suggest that this book too is a work of great theoretical sophistication. Maybe not.)

*

So, not a book about my relationship with Auden. A book about my relationship with language.

*

But we all know – we don’t have to be a Roland Barthes to know – that there can be no simple explanation in language of our relationship with language. It’s like using a mirror to look at a mirror. Words are insufficient to do justice to words, let alone to everything else.

So the enterprise is doomed again.

*

This is all entirely obvious, I suppose, to most people. And barely needs stating.

All I can safely say, then, is that it has taken me twenty-five years to work out the entirely obvious.

And these are my notes.

In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps.

(Auden, ‘Writing’)

Just a Title

The reason (artistic) I left England […] was precisely to stop me writing poems like ‘September 1, 1939’, the most dishonest poem I have ever written.

(Auden, letter to Naomi Mitchison, 1 April 1967)

‘September 1, 1939’.

If you know anything about the poem – and you may well know more about it than I do, in which case I should warn you, this is probably not the book for you, it’s a book for my friends and my cousins, for everyone who has ever said to me, ‘W. H. Who? September the What?’ – you will know that it was a poem that over the course of his lifetime Auden variously revised and then disowned. It is a poem with a long and troubled history. It is a poem that has undergone a lot of changes. Perhaps that’s part of its appeal: it is a poem with another life, an afterlife. It is a poem, like a person, that comes with a lot of baggage.

Even the title changed. We may know it as ‘September 1, 1939’, but on first publication, in the American magazine the New Republic, on 18 October 1939, it was ‘September – 1939’; in Auden’s collection Another Time (1940) it then became simply number four in a sequence of ‘Occasional Poems’, thus, ‘IV. September 1, 1939’; and not until subsequent versions and revisions did it appear as both ‘1st September 1939’ and ‘September 1, 1939’.

Auden had a strong habit of revision. (He had strong habits generally: drug habits, writing habits.) He liked to change the titles of his poems, just as he liked to change all other aspects of his poems: ‘Palais des Beaux Arts’ became ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’; ‘The Territory of the Heart’ became ‘Please Make Yourself at Home’ became ‘Like a Vocation’; ‘The Leaves of Life’ became ‘The Riddle’; et cetera, et cetera; the list is very long.

Not everyone approved of all these rethinks and rewrites, of course. A lot of people thought them arrogant, or foolish, or merely eccentric. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell thought Auden’s revisions were not only arrogant, foolish and eccentric; he thought they were morally reprehensible: ‘Auden is attempting to get rid of a sloughed-off self by hacking it up and dropping the pieces into a bathtub full of lye,’ he wrote, figuring Auden both as a snake, and as an acid-bath murderer.

(If not the greatest critic of poetry in the twentieth century, Randall Jarrell was certainly the greatest reviewer of poetry in the twentieth century, and to be a great reviewer of anything you need to be given to peculiarly vivid language: Clive James writing on television was given to peculiarly vivid language; Anthony Lane writing on films in the New Yorker; Dorothy Parker; Virginia Woolf, oddly. But Jarrell was undoubtedly the greatest, the most vivid of all, and he had what one might generously describe as a love–hate relationship with Auden. According to fellow poet John Berryman, Jarrell knew Auden’s mind ‘better than anyone ought to be allowed to understand anyone else’s’, even when Auden was in two minds.)

*

But those tiny little adjustments to the title of this poem, do they really matter?

*

Yes.

No.

Of course.

Not really.

Same as anything else.

Does it matter if you leave out that little pinch of salt in your recipe? Would it matter if I was called Samson, instead of Sansom, or Sampson? Simpson? Ivan, not Ian? Ivor? Ifor? Oscar?

(Some years ago, invited to give a reading at a library, I was introduced as C. J. Sansom – the bestselling author of historical crime fiction, and no relation. When I explained that I was not, alas, C. J. Sansom, two women in the audience got up and left. Which was fine, really. The other half of the audience remained.)

I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. JOHNSON: ‘There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’

(Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1791)

If one were a certain kind of critic I suppose one might note that a poem titled ‘September 1, 1939’ clearly, deliberately recalls Yeats’s poem ‘September 1913’, signalling that this is a poem written in response to another. (In his poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Auden calls Yeats ‘silly like us’, which he certainly was: silly like us for believing that we might be able to simplify and sum things up.)

One would also note that a poem titled ‘September 1, 1939’ clearly announces itself as an American poem: Americans write Month/Day/Year; in the UK we normally write Day/Month/Year.

One might note further that to use a date as a title perhaps suggests that the poem might be something like a diary entry, setting certain expectations and a tone. It suggests that the poem might have been composed or conceived on that specific date, for example – such as Wordsworth’s famous sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ (which was in fact originally published as ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1803’, which rather suggests that it might be foolish simply to read dates in poems as facts in a poet’s life, not least because the actual date of Wordsworth’s crossing Westminster Bridge, according to his sister Dorothy’s journal entry, was 31 July 1802).

(One might speculate further, parenthetically, that a minor artist is someone who is very precisely not prepared to risk breaking and bending the rules a little. A definition of the minor artist – the non-Wordsworth, the un-Auden – is that they are not prepared to fiddle around with inconvenient details like dates and facts and figures. As everyone knows, Tennyson got it wrong in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ when he wrote, ‘Into the jaws of Death, / Into the mouth of Hell / Rode the six hundred’ – it was closer to 700 who rode into the jaws of death. But when challenged on the point, Tennyson is said to have remarked, ‘Six is much better than seven hundred metrically, so keep it.’ Poets are not historians, or statisticians.)

One might suggest, furthermore, that a poem whose title appears to commemorate some famous historic event is not necessarily a poem written with the sole intent of commemorating that event. Even Yeats, that great commemorator, who loved to use dates for titles – ‘September 1913’, written after the Dublin lock-out, and ‘Easter, 1916’ – wasn’t writing manifestos or reports. The titles may be significant but they are hardly a full explanation. Yeats’s poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, for example, was originally titled ‘Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World’, which suggests exactly the kind of meandering activity that is going on in much of his work, which is then given shape and focus by the addition of a date and title, rather than proceeding in a straight line either from or towards it.

Which might lead one, finally, towards the conclusion that though a title may appear to come first, very often it may in fact come last: a poem’s title may be a post hoc rationalisation. It might also be a false sign.

Or, ultimately, just a title.

*

Anyway.

I’m not that kind of critic.

*

September 1, 1939, as it happens, was a Friday.

Auden had just returned to New York from his road-trip honeymoon with his young lover Chester Kallman. For almost three months – ‘the eleven happiest weeks of my life’ – they had criss-crossed the nation, from New York to Washington, New Orleans, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada and on to California. ‘C is getting quite a tan’, Auden told Chester’s father, ‘and I scribble away.’

But now the summer of love was over. ‘At 32½ I suppose I shall not change physically very much for some time except in weight which is now 154lbs […] I am happy, but in debt […] I have no job. My visa is out of order. There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much.’

(There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much. It’s reassuring, isn’t it, that like us – whatever else was happening – Auden had stuff on. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down, and it was the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a New World Order, and I was in my early twenties and I was working as a farm labourer up in the Craigantlet Hills, just outside Belfast, and I’d listen to the news on the radio in the morning, but it was like listening to news from another planet: I was busy; I had work to do; I had stuff on. It’s the whole point of Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which is about Brueghel’s painting The Fall of Icarus: ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.’ It turns out that I have spent a lifetime walking dully along, unable and unwilling to recognise the extraordinary and the other while it’s happening all around me. Like Auden’s description of the dogs in his poem, I have simply ambled on, leading my doggy life. Attending to Auden is probably the closest I’ve ever come to stopping and noticing something truly amazing, an actual Icarus, a boy falling out of the sky.)

*

On the long Greyhound bus journey back to New York on Tuesday, 29 August, Auden wrote to a friend in England, ‘There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other …’

In fact, people knew already: everybody knew already.

*

In his novel Coming up for Air, published in June 1939, George Orwell has his narrator remark:

I can see the war that’s coming […] There are millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in pubs, bus drivers and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet.

Auden may have been enjoying his holiday in the sun, but things had been cracking and collapsing for some time.

*

‘Europe’, writes Antony Beevor in his panoramic history The Second World War (2012), ‘did not stumble into war on 1 September 1939.’ She had been walking steadily towards it for years. In The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, H. G. Wells had predicted a total war by 1940: ‘The tension had risen to a point at which disaster seemed like relief and Europe was free to tear itself to fragments.’

The fragmentation had not begun months or years before: it had begun decades before.

*

A. J. P. Taylor, in his account in The Origins of the Second World War (1961), claimed that a second world war ‘had been implicit since the moment when the first war ended’: it became explicit at exactly 4.30 a.m. on 1 September 1939, when the German panzer divisions which had been gathering on the Polish border began their advance, and the first air raids began. By the time the Soviets invaded northern China in September 1945 – the last campaign of the Second World War – almost 50 million people throughout the world had died, more than half of them civilians; approximately 1000 deaths per hour, every hour, for six years.

*

1 September 1939 inaugurated an entirely new kind of war. World War I had been fought by infantrymen moving slowly, heroically and predictably into battlefields prepared for war: ‘They fell with their faces to the foe’, in the words of Laurence Binyon’s famous poem ‘For the Fallen’. But on 1 September, Hitler unleashed ‘blitzkrieg’ – lightning war, impersonal war, war that was intended to lead to Vernichtungsschlacht, annihilation. First came the air attacks and bombing raids, then the motorised infantry and the tanks, followed by the SS Death’s Head regiments who conducted what were euphemistically referred to as ‘police and security’ measures to ensure what Himmler called the ‘radical suppression of the incipient Polish insurrection in the newly occupied parts of Upper Silesia’. Within a week, Cracow, with a population of a quarter of a million, was under German control. Twenty-four thousand SS troops had moved into Poland, by train, by plane and on foot; the massacres of civilians began. Villages and towns were set alight. There were public executions.

*

The front-page headline of the New York Times on Friday, 1 September 1939 tapped it all out in telegraphese: ‘GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND; CITIES BOMBED, PORT BLOCKADED; DANZIG IS ACCEPTED INTO REICH’. With their trochaic-patterned strong-stressed syllables, one might almost rearrange the lines into verse:

German army attacks Poland;

Cities bombed, port blockaded;

Danzig is accepted into Reich.

The lead column then begins with the words ‘BRITISH MOBILIZING’.

Indeed they were – and had been for some time.

*

In England, ever since the Munich Agreement of September 1938, trenches had been dug, air-raid shelters constructed and barrage balloons floated above London. The pictures from the National Gallery had been packed up and sent off to Wales. Most of the British Museum’s treasures were safely stored in an underground tunnel in Aberystwyth. Rationing was being planned.

*

And meanwhile, back in America … what exactly was Auden up to?

We know roughly what he was up to.

*

On 12 June 2013, the British Library acquired an Auden manuscript at Christie’s in London for £47,475. It was Auden’s diary for August and November 1939, written in a ‘National’ notebook, made in the USA, ‘this book contains eye-ease paper, “Easy on the Eyes”.’ The diary is incorrectly dated, by Auden, ‘August 1938’. The entry for 1 September begins ‘Woke with a headache after a night of bad dreams in which C [Chester Kallman] was unfaithful. Paper reports German attack on Poland.’ There follow several pages of notes on scientific and political subjects – beginning with ‘Good News,’ [underlined]. ‘A scanning microscope has been invented.’

(‘A scanning microscope’ is another way of describing a poem.)

*

At 9.30 p.m. on 1 September, the British government issued an ultimatum to the Nazis to withdraw from Poland.

At 9 a.m. on 3 September, a second ultimatum was issued to the German Foreign Office in Berlin: Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador, read out the ultimatum to a deserted room.

And then finally, at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcast to the nation on the BBC. The country, he announced, was at war:

This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

Also on 3 September, the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, made his own radio broadcast, of a very different kind: ‘Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields. At this moment there is being prepared a proclamation of American neutrality.’ There would be, Roosevelt promised, ‘no blackout of peace in the United States’.

(The proclamation, the American neutrality, the promise of no blackout of peace: Roosevelt’s words seem to echo in the words of Auden’s poem, which indeed contains a ‘proclaim’, a ‘neutral’ and the famous ironic points of light. How many poems, one wonders, are plucked from the ether, and how many from the airwaves? Poets are like thieves and spies; they’re always listening in. It’s like that film The Lives of Others, the one about the spy in East Germany, eavesdropping with his headphones on. Poems are the words of others – the words of us all. There’s a poem by Denise Riley, ‘Lure, 1963’, for example, which is composed of snatches of half-remembered pop lyrics – ‘The Great Pretender’ by The Platters, ‘The Wanderer’ by Dion, ‘It’s in His Kiss’ by Betty Everett. One of the truly great works of literary criticism, John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, a study of the work of Coleridge, basically consists of Lowes eavesdropping on Coleridge’s eavesdroppings, tracing every image to its source in Coleridge’s reading. As a model, Lowes is probably best avoided: the book is pretty much unreadable; The Road to Xanadu contains too many detours.)

*

(‘Does your book have an argument?’ asks my editor. ‘It’s more a series of detours,’ I say. ‘And cul-de-sacs. And dead ends. And stoppings-short.’ ‘Like a journey?’ ‘Sort of like a journey.’ This is not a journey. And I am no John Livingston Lowes. This is either the beginning of the preparations for a journey, or the aftermath.)

*

In London, in the days leading up to 1 September, according to The Times, things were ‘largely normal’:

London at this time of tension has retained its usual appearance to a remarkable extent, but there are differences which the continuing crisis has made unavoidable. In the streets one of the most obvious is the banking of sandbags which now shields many buildings. Londoners are carrying on much the same as usual, except that every one is contributing something towards ensuring complete preparedness for any emergency. No worried casualties in a war of nerves are to be seen; the population remain calm, hopeful, and resolute.

(‘London Largely Normal: Calm in Time of Tension, Defence Activities’, The Times, Thursday, 31 August 1939)

Calm, hopeful, resolute? Maybe it was. I don’t know.

My family were all Londoners. I wish I could have asked them what it was like, but they had things to do. They were busy.

*

On 1 September 1939, my father was busy being evacuated:

The Government decision that evacuation should begin to-day as a precaution was made known yesterday in the following announcement by the Minister of Health, Mr. Elliot, and the Secretary of State for Scotland, Mr. Colville, which was broadcast several times during the day: — It has been decided to start evacuation of the school children and other priority classes as already arranged under the Government scheme to-morrow (Friday, September 1) […] Mothers and other persons in charge of children below school age should take hand luggage with the same equipment for themselves and their children as for school children. The names of the children should be written on strong paper and sewn on to their clothes. No one can take more than a little hand luggage.

(‘Evacuation To-Day: Official Advice to Parents, “A Great National Undertaking”’, The Times, Friday, 1 September 1939)

And my grandfather – who knows? He may well have been busy with the rest of the East End, all those cheerful Cockney geezers preparing for war:

East London is prepared, and the people living in this lively, crowded, industrially important part of the capital are justifiably proud of what they have done towards completing the nation’s defences. A tour of East London yesterday was a stirring and heartening experience. At one point, not far from the docks, a piece of waste land had fallen into the hands of a big squad of willing and tireless workers, whose picks and spades were quickly supplying fillings for thousands of sandbags. Stripped to the waist, the men dug vigorously, pausing only now and then to make a fellow-worker laugh with a cheerful quip.

(‘Cheerfulness in East London: Voluntary Help, Willing and Tireless Workers’, The Times, Friday, 1 September 1939)

The whole scene sounds highly unlikely, frankly – a fantasy of the Times reporter – but on the other hand I can certainly imagine him, my grandfather, George Sansom, stripped to the waist, filling sandbags, ready with a cheerful quip. He was a boxer, a tough guy, a sweet man, and born the same year as Auden, coincidentally, 1907, though his life and Auden’s could not have been more different. When Auden was moving from prep school to boarding school, George Sansom was leaving school to go and work at Windsor and Newton paint manufacturers in east London. When Auden was going up to Oxford, George Sansom was going off to work in a factory making orange boxes. And while Auden sat out the war, safe in New York, he served in the Merchant Navy. The year Auden died, George Sansom was retiring from the Post Office, where he’d worked as a postman for most of his adult life. Auden died in Austria, where he’d bought a home on the proceeds of book sales and awards. My grandfather died in Essex, having moved from his council flat in Poplar into sheltered accommodation on a busy main road in Romford. At Auden’s funeral, they played Siegfried’s Funeral March from Tristan und Isolde. After my granddad’s funeral at the crematorium, when all the family got together to clear out the flat, I was not surprised to find that there were no books in the house, not a single one, and that he owned only the clothes he stood up in, some bed linen, a few pots and pans, and three LPs: the Massed Bands of the Royal Marines; an Elvis Christmas album; and The Best of Pavarotti. His life savings were exactly one hundred and one pounds. When Auden speaks on others’ behalf in this poem, as he so often liked to do – ‘I and the public’, ‘We must suffer them all again’, ‘our wish’, ‘We must love one another or die’ – I wonder if he thought he was speaking on behalf of people like my grandfather. If he did, my grandfather certainly would not have thanked him for it.

*

(I make no apology for bringing in these family matters here, though I’ll try not to make a habit of it. Auden’s reviews and essays are defiantly personal, of course – but that’s always been a perk of the privileged; they’re allowed to be defiantly personal, because of who they are. They’ve earned it. The rich and the famous, we assume, and they assume, are just more interesting than the rest of us. They have permission to do and say what they want. Auden begins an early review, for example, ‘If the business of a reviewer is to describe the contents of the books he reviews and to appraise their value, this is not going to be a review.’ Well, in that case: this is not going to be a book.)

Anyway, all of this is just to be clear at the outset that a lot was happening on 1 September 1939.

And a lot is happening in ‘September 1, 1939’.

1

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

I ≠ A

The first words of the poem: I sit.

It’s hardly a stirring start, is it?

Who on earth begins a poem from a seated position?

And who sits?

Auden sits?

*

There is no reason to assume that the ‘I’ who is sitting here at the beginning of the poem is necessarily the poem’s author, Wystan Hugh Auden, who was born in York on 21 February 1907, the youngest of three brothers, son of George Augustus Auden, a doctor, and Constance Rosalie Auden (née Bicknell), who had trained as a nurse and who loved opera and who doted on her precocious son. (Of his parents, Auden remarked that ‘Ma should have married a robust Italian who was very sexy […] Pa should have married someone weaker than he and utterly devoted to him. But of course, if they had, I shouldn’t be here.’)

The ‘I’ could be this Auden – the Auden who we know attended Gresham’s School in Holt in Norfolk and who in 1925 went up to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating three years later with an inglorious Third, and who in the late 1920s and 1930s worked variously as a teacher, a reviewer and as a documentary film-maker with the GPO Film Unit. It could be the Auden who travelled to Weimar Berlin and to Iceland, and who went to Spain to support the newly formed Republican government, where he witnessed the brutalities of the civil war and where he wrote some of his most famous poems, ‘A Communist to Others’ and ‘Spain 1937’, poems which, as with ‘September 1, 1939’, he later disowned, describing them as ‘dishonest’.

It could be – couldn’t it? – this Auden, the Auden who in January 1939 sailed to America with his friend the playwright Christopher Isherwood, their departure seen by many in England as a betrayal of their country in its hour of need, and the Auden who soon after arriving in New York met the eighteen-year-old Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong companion and lover. (They exchanged rings and behaved to all intents and purposes as a married couple – for better and for worse – even though in 1935 Auden had already married Erika Mann, the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, in order to assist her escaping Nazi Germany, an act he described as a ‘bugger’s duty’.)

It could be him: the Auden who lived his adult life mostly in New York, teaching at various colleges and universities, who in 1945 served as a major in the US Air Force in their Strategic Bombing Survey, and who in 1946 became a US citizen. It could be the Auden who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961, the Auden who summered on the Italian island of Ischia, the Auden who bought a house in Kirchstetten in Austria and who published during his lifetime more than a dozen books of poetry, as well as volumes of essays, plays and libretti, the very Auden who died in Vienna on 29 September 1973, the death certificate giving the cause of death as ‘hypertrophy of the heart’.

It could be that Auden.

But probably not.

*

There is no need to assume it is Auden who is sitting here at the beginning of the poem, any more than we need assume that the often sad and lonely ‘I’ in Shakespeare’s sonnets, in sonnet 29, say (‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state’), is necessarily or entirely the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, who may or may not have been the author of the plays that bear his name and who famously left his wife Anne his second-best bed; or that the wildly jubilant ‘I’ of Walt Whitman’s ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ is the big-bearded bard from Long Island; or that when we read at the beginning of Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Double Image’ that ‘I am thirty this November’ we can safely assume that Sexton herself was thirty that November, though she was and we do, we almost always assume that the speaker of a poem, the voice on the page, is indeed the ‘I’ of the poet.

*

It’s definitely not Auden.

*

It’s Auden.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

(Gustave Flaubert, letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 March 1857)

This is what we do know: an ‘I’ is not always a self; an ‘I’ is not a proxy for a person.

We feel that in the cases in which ‘I’ is used as subject, we don’t use it because we recognise a particular person by his bodily characteristics; and this creates the illusion that we use this word to refer to something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body. In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, ‘Cogito ergo sum’.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 1958)

(This is one of the things that poems do for us: they present us with an ‘I’ that is not a body – but which may be a person. Or if not a person, an ego. Or if not an ego, then a thinking machine. The ‘I’ is a function. It is an algorithm. A process. The ‘I’ is – or can be – simply the poem.)

*

You can tie yourself in all sorts of philosophical knots with this sort of thing, obviously: who am I, what is ‘I’, is ‘I’ an unchanging object through time and space? But this way metaphysics and ontology lies – which is a route I cannot follow. I am not equipped.

A better, blunter, bluffer question might be not ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Who is “I”?’, but rather ‘Who cares?’

To which the honest answer is probably: no one. No one cares at all.

Not even if you’re W. H. Auden.

Which is, of course, why we write ‘I’.

I says ‘I am’.

*

Or ‘I Am!’

I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,

My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

I am the self-consumer of my woes,

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;

And yet I am! and live with shadows tost.

(John Clare, ‘I Am!’)

John Clare wrote this poem in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the last twenty years of his life. Clare – or the ‘I’ of the poem – clearly feels alone and isolated, the ‘self-consumer’ of his woes. ‘And yet I am!’ he writes. It is in this act of defiance, in the act of writing, that he lives.

*

Writing, for many people – for those of us who keep diaries no one will ever read; for those of us who write only for ourselves and perhaps a few others; as for those who pursue literary fame for its own end; and indeed even for those, like Auden, who seem destined for true greatness and are proclaimed geniuses by the world at large – writing, for all of us, in different ways, is a way of saying, ‘And yet I am!’ Writing is a form of self-proclamation, of self-avowal.

(Philip Roth describes the urge to live on paper in his novel Exit Ghost: ‘Isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.’ To write is to live the unlived.)

To write is to reveal oneself.

*

It is also a wonderful disguise. Poets, like all other writers, are liars, confabulators and cheats – just read a biography of a poet. Any poet. They’re all the same: poets are self-pleasuring beings who like to play around with their ‘I’, just as they like to play around with everything else.

*

With his ‘I’ at the beginning of this poem, Auden is donning a disguise. He is putting on a mask.

*

In middle age his face indeed became a mask – a ‘wedding cake left out in the rain’ is how he liked to describe it. He looked, he said, like ‘an unmade bed’. That face, that ruined, piteous, covetable, comfortable face – ‘I have a face of putty,’ he told Stephen Spender, ‘I should have been a clown’ – has long been a source of fascination to writers and artists. The philosopher Hannah Arendt remarked that it was ‘as though life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the “heart’s invisible furies”’. (Humboldt, in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, is described as having ‘developed in his face all the graver, all the more important human feelings’. Wouldn’t you just love a face, like Auden’s, like Humboldt’s, in which you had developed all the more important human feelings?) According to Randall Jarrell, Auden looked ‘like a disenchanted lion’. The poet Gavin Ewart charted his appalled fascination with Auden’s face – what another poet, John Hollander, calls simply ‘The Face’ – in a poem titled ‘Auden’:

Photographed, he looked like Spencer Tracy

or even Danny Kaye –

in the late Forties. But later it was wiser

to look the other way.

A young David Hockney, asked to sketch a portrait of Auden, was absolutely horrified: ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’

*

Whatever it looks like, whatever it appears to be, perhaps all we can be sure of is that the ‘I’ in the work of a poet is a complex act of self-dramatisation, a performance. The ‘I’ in a poem may appear to be referring to something – to someone – but we need not postulate the poet’s self as its referent. The ‘I’ in a poem is not necessarily a proxy for a name.

The I ≠ Auden.

*

I ≠ A.

*

‘I’ is a persona. Though the persona may of course be Auden: it may be a clever double bluff; ‘I’ am I; either I am the mask, or the mask has eaten into the face, the performance having become the true self. Henry David Thoreau, at the beginning of Walden, reminds his readers that even when the ‘I’ appears to be absent it’s always there, hiding: ‘In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.’

Writers are always hiding in plain sight.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

*

(A couple of years ago I published a book of short stories. Everyone assumed they were autobiographical. Some were autobiographical. But not the ones that people thought.)

*

Whether we know it or not, we bring great expectations to a poem: we are conditioned to expect something from a poem, as soon as it declares itself a poem, and even more so when an ‘I’ declares itself at the beginning of a poem. A poetic ‘I’ implies a particular kind of poem, a lyric poem, the kind of poem we are familiar with from school, a poem which usually promises and delivers intense personal emotions presented in the first person. M. H. Abrams, who was one of those literary critics everyone used to read and now almost no one has heard of – the fate of all critics – defined the Romantic lyric poem as a meditation that ‘achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem’. This is the kind of poem we know what to do with.

So what are we going to get here, in ‘September 1, 1939’? An insight? A reckoning? A decision? A resolution?

*

In ‘September 1, 1939’ we get all of that, and more – which is exactly the trouble, and what Auden hated about the poem, which he described as ‘the most dishonest’ he had ever written.

*

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s just assume for a moment – as we naturally do – that the ‘I’ here is an unproblematic person, that the ‘I’ here is Auden.

Fine.

*

Who the hell is W. H. Auden?

The Modern Poet

‘It’s odd to be asked today what I saw in Auden,’ replied the American poet John Ashbery to a wet-behind-the-ears interviewer in 1980. ‘Forty years ago when I first began to read modern poetry no one would have asked – he was the modern poet.’

*

In his 1937 ‘Letter to W. H. Auden’, the poet Louis MacNeice addressed his friend, ‘Dear Wystan, I have to write you a letter in a great hurry and so it would be out of the question to try to assess your importance. I take it that you are important.’

*

He was more than important: he was an absolute star. In his book The Personal Principle (1944), the literary critic D. S. Savage claimed that during the 1930s Auden was ‘the centre of a cult’ and, in a telling phrase, described Auden’s position thus: ‘A new star had arisen, it seemed, in the English sky.’ John Berryman recalled that even in America ‘by 1935 … the Auden climate had set in strongly’. What Tom Driberg in the Daily Express called ‘awareness of Auden’ was everywhere: it affected things generally; as Boswell breathed the Johnsonian ‘oether’, so the 1930s breathed the air of Auden. When the London Mercury was published for the last time on the eve of the Second World War, Stephen Spender summed things up in an article titled ‘The Importance of W. H. Auden’: ‘Auden’s poetry is a phenomenon, the most remarkable in English verse of this decade.’

*

Now, to be clear: not everyone admired Auden. Some people despised him. Hugh MacDiarmid thought him a ‘complete wash-out’. Truman Capote, when asked what he thought of Auden’s poetry, replied, ‘Never meant nothin’ to me.’ (Though – note – even MacDiarmid, in his polemical autobiographical prose work Lucky Poet (1943), attempting to define ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’, had to devote much of his time to defining ‘the kind of poetry I don’t want’, i.e. ‘the Auden–Spender–MacNeice school’.) The argument against Auden is certainly worth stating and goes something like this:

‘W. H. Auden is to blame for everything that went wrong with English poetry in the late twentieth century. Absurdly overpraised when young, he remained naive and immature both as a person and as a poet, his preciosities and youthful good looks becoming vile and monstrous. He was dictatorial in his approach and his opinions, imprisoned by his own intelligence, intellectually dishonest, irresponsible and incoherent, atrociously showy in diction and lexical range, technically ingenious rather than profound, pathetically at the mercy of contemporary cultural and political fashions and ideas, facetious, frivolous, self-praising, self-indulgent, vulgar and ultimately merely quaint: the ruined schoolboy; an example, indeed the ultimate example, the epitome, the exemplum, not of mastery but of Englishness metastasised. Auden undoubtedly thought he was it and the next big thing, when in fact he was It: the disease, the enemy, The Thing.’

*

This sort of argument has been thoroughly rehearsed down through the years by readers such as F. R. Leavis, and Randall Jarrell (during the hate phase of his love–hate relationship), and Philip Larkin (ditto), and Hugh MacDiarmid, and William Empson. One would perhaps expect all of them to complain – they were world-class complainers – but when someone like Seamus Heaney, that Seamus Heaney, the Seamus Heaney, a poet and critic with perfect manners, whose kindness and generosity knew almost no bounds, when even Seamus Heaney, in a review of Auden’s Collected Poems, writes dismissively of Auden’s ‘educated in-talk’ and of his tone ‘somewhere between camp and costive’, one might begin to think that there is indeed a serious case to be made against him. Maybe Auden was just a coterie poet; maybe he was just a flash in the pan; a poet merely of his class and his place and his time. William Empson has a poem, ‘Just a Smack at Auden’, which is certainly very funny, mocking Auden’s 1930s doom-mongering (‘Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend, / Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end’), but Heaney’s summation of Auden’s achievement as ‘a writer of perfect light verse’ is potentially more wounding.

(We may well return to the question of ‘light’ verse later. But an obvious question has to be, does great literature necessarily have to be ‘heavy’? Does it have to be serious and difficult? Does it have to be exhausting and challenging and exceptional? Does every book have to be a pick-axe breaking the frozen sea in our souls? Sometimes it’s nice – isn’t it? – to hear the sound of a swizzle stick tinkling away at the ice.)

*

Anyway, and nonetheless, and despite the quibbles and the doubts, it would be safe to say that in the 1930s, for those whom it affected, the Auden phenomenon was as disturbing as it was remarkable. The title of Geoffrey Grigson’s contribution to the special 1937 New Verse Auden double issue, ‘Auden as a Monster’, is indicative of the fear and excitement generated by Auden’s reputation. ‘Auden does not fit. Auden is no gentleman. Auden does not write, or exist, by any of the codes, by the Bloomsbury rules, by the Hampstead rules, by the Oxford, Cambridge, or the Russell Square rules,’ enthused Grigson; Auden’s poetry, he claimed, had a ‘monstrous’ quality. Other contributors to New Verse were similarly impressed by Auden’s peculiar strength and power: Edwin Muir described Auden’s imagination as ‘grotesque’; Frederic Prokosch described his talents as ‘immense’; Dylan Thomas described him as ‘wide and deep’; Bernard Spencer claimed that he ‘succeeds in brutalizing his thought and language’.

*

Auden was clearly regarded – as great writers often are by their contemporaries – as somehow superhuman, or rather subhuman, inhuman, freakish. (Stephen Spender, in his Journals, recalls being accused of making Auden ‘sound a bit inhuman’: ‘This did ring a bell,’ he writes, ‘because I remember when we were both young thinking of him as sui generis, not at all like other people and of an inhuman cleverness. I did not think of him as having ordinary human feelings.’)

*

(I tend to fall into this trap today, with writers I know and admire: they are just not, I think, like me. They are different; they are special; they are odd. Which is both true, as it happens, and entirely false.)

*

With its emphasis on Auden’s ‘monstrous’ qualities, his physicality, his animality, his otherness, the New Verse double issue inaugurated a significant theme in subsequent figurations of Auden. In numerous books, reviews, essays and poems, Auden is figured as a kind of predatory Übermensch, possessing great physical prowess and preternatural powers. The English poet Roy Fuller, for example, described him as a ‘legendary monster’, an ‘immense father-figure’,‘ransacking the past of his art’. The poet Patrick Kavanagh claimed that ‘a great poet is a monster who eats up everything. Shakespeare left nothing for those who came after him and it looks as if Auden is doing the same.’ Such language can’t help but admire as much as be appalled.

Auden is a hero.

Auden is a monster.

*

His intelligence was superlative and frightening. (He was ‘the greatest mind of the twentieth century’, according to the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. ‘At one or another time there must be five or six supremely intelligent people on earth,’ writes Howard Moss in his book Minor Monuments. ‘Auden was one of them.’)

His appearance was outlandish. (‘I was struck by the massive head and body and these large, strong, pudgy hands, […] the fine eyes did not look at oneself or at any individual but directly at concepts,’ wrote the critic G. S. Fraser.)

And his troubled career was strangely exemplary. (Seamus Heaney’s decision to leave Northern Ireland and move to Wicklow in 1972, for example, was read by some critics as a symbolic gesture similar to Auden’s move to America in 1939.)

He was a creature to be feared as well as admired, an obstacle to be negotiated as well as an inspiration.

‘He set standards so lofty that I developed writer’s block,’ recalls the poet Harold Norse in his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (1989).

Even now he remains a barrier. This book, for example: both blocked and enabled by Auden, a classic example of reading in abeyance, a testament to his posthumous power, and a confession and demonstration of my own lowly subaltern status and secondariness.

*

(My interest in Auden, like anyone’s interest in any poet, any writer or artist, any great figure who has achieved and excelled in a field in which one wishes oneself to achieve and excel, represents an expression of awe, and disappointment, and self-disgust – and goodness knows what other peculiar and murky impulse is lurking down among the dreck at the bottom of one’s psyche. My interest in Auden represents perhaps a desire, if not actually to be Auden, then at least to be identified with Auden. My grandfather used to sing a song, ‘Let me shake the hand that shook the hand of Sullivan’, referring to John L. Sullivan, the one-time world heavyweight champion. How much literary criticism, one wonders, is in fact a vain attempt to shake the hand of Sullivan? U & I is the title of the novelist Nicholson Baker’s book about his – non-existent – relationship with John Updike, for example. An alternative title for this effort might be A & I. But this implies an addition. Better: I − A?)

The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you.

(Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman)

‘Biographers are invariably drawn to the writing of a biography out of some deep personal motive,’ according to Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James. Freud’s famous criticism of biographers was that they are ‘fixated on their heroes in a quite special way’, and that they devote their energies to ‘a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models – at reviving in him, perhaps, the child’s idea of his father’.

I don’t think I am reviving in Auden an idea of the father. But it’s possible that I might be reviving in him an idea of the uncle. The kind of uncle I never had.

(Auden was, by all accounts, an excellent uncle. He sponsored war orphans to go to college. He supported the work of Dorothy Day’s homeless shelter for the Catholic Worker Movement. He did not stint in doing good.)

*

He was many things to many people. As every critic notes, Auden’s book The Double Man (1941) begins with an epigraph from Montaigne, ‘We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’

*

But he wasn’t really double, any more than anyone is double: anyone, everyone is multiple.

So, to go back to that question, who the hell was W. H. Auden?

He was a poet, a dramatist, a librettist, a teacher, an amateur psychologist, a journalist, a reviewer, an anthologist, a critic, a Yorkshireman, an Englishman, an American.

That’ll do, for starters.

Not Standing

So why is he sitting at the start of the poem?

And how is he sitting?

Is he on a chair? A stool? A bench?

Is he perched on a stoop or a stairwell?

*

(And – my wife asks, appalled, having read the first draft of this book, twenty-five years after I embarked upon it – are you really going to spend all that time worrying over every single word in the poem?)

Many poets have some idiosyncrasy or tic of style which can madden the reader if he finds their work basically unsympathetic, but which, if he likes it, becomes endearing like the foibles of an old friend.

(Auden, ‘Walter de la Mare’)

Of course I’m not going to worry over every single word in the poem. That would be ludicrous – unfeasible, and unhealthy.

*

(Really unhealthy. Fatal. In a lecture on ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, collected in his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov remarks that ‘In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth […] and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit […] are the highest forms of consciousness.’ Twenty-five years of falling to my death, gazing around, wondering at trifles.)

*

Let me reassure you: we may have started out on the scenic route, but I promise there are going to be short-cuts. There’s just a lot of heavy lifting to get through at the start. Think of all this as backstory. Think of these early chapters as foundation stones, as building blocks, as … bricks.

(In Joe Brainard’s cult classic I Remember he writes, ‘I remember a back-drop of a brick wall I painted for a play. I painted each red brick in by hand. Afterwards it occurred to me that I could have just painted the whole thing red and put in the white lines.’ I’m not going to be painting each red brick by hand: after a while, I’ll be sketching in white lines.)

Civilization is a precarious balance between what Professor Whitehead has called barbaric vagueness and trivial order.

(Auden, ‘The Greeks and Us’)

(I have been reading – I have been teaching – Erich Auerbach’s essay ‘Odysseus’ Scar’, the first chapter of his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, published in 1946. It is surely one of the last great, readable works of literary criticism, in which Auerbach distinguishes between Hellenistic and Hebraic modes of storytelling:

It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’

It’s like that old Lenny Bruce routine – Jewish or goyish? In Bruce’s estimation, Count Basie is Jewish, Ray Charles is Jewish – but Eddie Cantor, Eddie Cantor is goyish. The joke being that Eddie Cantor was Jewish, but he was nothing more than a smooth, crowd-pleasing entertainer. ‘If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.’ Auden was a High Church Anglican, but he’s definitely Jewish, in the same way Count Basie and Ray Charles are Jewish: his best poems are Hebraic rather than Hellenistic. They are fraught with background.)

*

I imagine Auden sitting in a straight-backed chair, both feet flat on the floor, upright, sitting slightly forward, intent – like a sphinx, benevolent, ferocious, strong.

*

One of the most famous of the early photographs of Auden is the head-and-shoulders snap taken by Eric Bramall in 1928, showing Auden sitting with head bowed, lighting a cigarette. Or at least, I think he’s sitting – I’m not entirely sure. It’s not quite clear. The image has been reproduced numerous times on book covers and in feature articles and probably owes its enduring appeal to its ambiguity: the pose is simultaneously feminine and macho, coy and defiant; Bramall has captured a gesture of the kind that Roland Barthes describes, in Camera Lucida (1980), as ‘apprehended at the point in its course where the normal eye cannot arrest it’, providing a privileged glimpse that stimulates in the viewer a secret or erotic thrill. W. H. Auden is Humphrey Bogart. He is Marlene Dietrich. Joan Didion. Tom Waits. (The critic Cyril Connolly admitted to having been ‘obsessed’ with Auden’s physical appearance, recalling a homoerotic dream in which Auden ‘indicated two small firm breasts’ and teased him with the words, ‘Well, Cyril, how do you like my lemons?’)

There’s no denying it. Look at the photos.

Auden is sexy.

Seriously.

*

Anyway. How he is sitting is less important than the fact that he is sitting: at the outset of the poem, he is assuming a definite relationship with and towards the world and towards the reader. He is adopting a particular posture.

What he’s not doing is standing.

*

After a decade of running around all over the place – travelling to Iceland and to China and to Spain, and also undertaking vast intellectual journeys, from Marx to Freud and on towards Kierkegaard – sitting was something that Auden now believed people should be doing: being rather than doing, thinking rather than acting. He began his Smith College Commencement Address in June 1940 with these words:

On this quiet June morning the war is the dreadful background of the thoughts of us all, and it is difficult indeed to think of anything except the agony and death going on a few thousand miles to the east and west of this hall. While those whom we love are dying or in terrible danger, the overwhelming desire to do something this minute to stop it makes it hard to sit still and think. Nevertheless that is our particular duty in this place at this hour.

It is our particular duty in this place at this hour to sit with him.

*

(In the poems where Auden is most truly himself, he is either sitting or lying down: ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’; ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love’; the flirtatious male of ‘In Praise of Limestone’ who ‘lounges / Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting / That for all his faults he is loved.’)

*

And if he’s not standing, he’s certainly not walking.

*

(After all these years, I realise I have no idea how Auden might have walked. I know in his later life he was famous for shuffling around outside in his carpet slippers, but how exactly did he walk? What was his gait? The truth is, I know both too much about Auden – endless, useless facts about him – and absolutely nothing. I know a lot of useless facts about a lot of writers: about William Burroughs, I know how he injected his morphine and how he scored his Benzedrine inhalers; I know the precise details of his sexual relationship with Allen Ginsberg, including the size of his penis; I know all about Marianne Moore’s tricorne hats, and Elizabeth Bishop’s taste in home furnishings; I know about Jack London’s sweet tooth; I have read Reiner Stach on Kafka; and Richard Ellmann and Michael Holroyd on everyone. All of these books, all of this endless information about writers – and for what? If Auden were in the distance now, walking away from me, I wouldn’t be able to recognise him. After all these years, I couldn’t spot him in a crowd. He remains a total stranger.)

In grasping the character of a society, as in judging the character of an individual, no documents, statistics, ‘objective’ measurements can ever compete with the single intuitive glance.

(Auden, ‘The American Scene’)

In his essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823), William Hazlitt recalls one fine morning, in the middle of winter in 1798, going for a walk with Coleridge:

I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the foot-path to the other. This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at the time connect it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a straight line.

Coleridge’s strange saunter was matched only by his curious conversation. ‘In digressing,’ writes Hazlitt, ‘in dilating, in passing from subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice.’

I can’t imagine Auden sliding, or indeed shimmering, like Jeeves. Striding, maybe? No. Slouching? A little. Sauntering? Strolling? Strutting? Slinking? Shambling? No. No. No. Schlepping? Maybe, a little.

Auden, I imagine, would have schlepped like a mensch.

*

(He loved this sort of thing himself, of course, categorising people according to some weird feature. In The Orators, for example:

Three kinds of enemy walk – the grandiose stunt – the melancholic stagger – the paranoic sidle.

Three kinds of enemy bearing – the condor stoop – the toad stupor – the robin’s stance.

Three kinds of highly entertaining bullshit.)

*

Just because he’s sitting, he’s not necessarily immobile. He’s not inactive. He is observing. He is concentrating. He is preparing himself for the poem, perhaps, gathering his energies. When we think of authors sitting, we imagine them sitting with single-mindedness and with purpose – don’t we? – sitting still but getting somewhere, going inwards.

*

Or maybe he’s just posing. He’s pouting. He’s sitting for a portrait.

(There is no recent book-length study of the phenomenon of the poet as pin-up, as far as I know. The best I can find is David Piper’s The Image of the Poet, which was published in 1982, long before our current crop of selfie-loving Insta poets. Auden would have made an excellent Insta poet: he loved the camera. He was arguably – at least, I shall argue here, now – the first poet of the technologised twentieth century, his career formed not just through books but through the media of film, photography, radio, television, mass-circulation newspapers and poetry readings. Not only was he enormously ambitious, he was endlessly inventive. He used all the tools available to him. He took a camera to Iceland in 1936, and the photographs were included in his and MacNeice’s travelogue, Letters from Iceland. At his parties in the 1950s, long before Warhol’s snapping and spooling at the Factory, he would go around photographing his guests. The critic Edmund Wilson describes a truly Warholian scene at Auden’s birthday party in 1955: ‘Hordes of people arrived; the room became crowded and smoke-filled and the conversation deafening. Wystan went around with a camera taking flashlights of his guests. When he came to the group in which I was, I hung a handkerchief over my face at the moment he was taking the picture.’)

*

Or perhaps he’s ‘sitting in’, in the way a jazz musician sits in on a session.

The songwriter and historian of American popular music Arnold Shaw explains what it means to ‘sit in’:

A man who sits in plays music that is unrehearsed, improvised and spontaneous. But the difference is that he invades a place where a set group of musicians is in residence at union rates. He comes for the sheer love of playing, for the stimulus of exchanging ideas with others, for the pleasure of speaking and communicating through his instrument.

‘Sitting in’ implies a freedom of movement, a body of shared feelings and a camaraderie that tended to disappear with the rise of bop and with the stringent enforcement of union regulations against free play. It was also based on a rare community of interests between performer and audience that placed communication and expression on the same level as entertainment. When the adventure worked, all three phases were present at a peak of excitement.

(Arnold Shaw, 52nd St: The Street of Jazz)

Communication, expression, entertainment: as good a definition as any of what one might expect from a work of art.

*

Of course, the mere fact of sitting – whatever kind of sitting it is – says something. It says, ‘I am here with you.’ When we sit next to somebody we are sitting with them. We sit alongside them, or opposite them. We sit shiva. We sit and wait. We sit and eat.

‘You must sit down’, says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

So I did sit and eat.

(George Herbert, ‘Love: Love bade me welcome’)

In The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 70, no. 5 (May 1970), there is a letter to the editor from Louise Ryssmann, R.N.:

I would like to contribute this idea to other nurses. When I am talking with patients, I sit in a chair next to the bed, rather than standing. By sitting, I can establish a closer rapport with patients because the physical distance is less and I am talking directly across rather than down to the patient. Sitting also creates a more relaxed atmosphere and the patient feels the nurse is not rushed and has time to talk. And as an additional benefit, I am not nearly as tired at the end of an eight-hour shift.

At the beginning of the poem Auden settles down, establishes a close rapport and starts to talk. Like a nurse, or a priest, or a therapist.

Or a man in a bar.

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