September 1, 1939. Ian Sansom

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