Читать книгу September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem - Ian Sansom - Страница 11

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?

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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.

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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.

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It’s definitely not Auden.

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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.)

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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’.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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?’

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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.

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I ≠ A.

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‘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.

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(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.)

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Who the hell is W. H. Auden?