September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. Ian Sansom

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