It is not enough to show how clever we are by showing how obscure everything is.
(J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’)
A lot of clever things have been written by a lot of clever people about the exact meaning of the ‘clever hopes’ of Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’, but it’s probably worth remarking that ‘clever’ in the context of this poem is a bad thing.
(Indeed, in many poems, and in British English generally, ‘clever’ is a bad thing: it usually implies ‘clever-clever’, a clever dick, a clever clogs, a clever boots, a clever shins, a cleverkins. The closest American equivalent to a clever dick is probably a smart ass, but smart ass implies street smarts while a clever dick is likely to have their nose in the air and their head in the clouds. In Browning’s poem ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855), Blougram accuses the journalist Gigadibs of being ‘clever to a fault / The rough and ready man who write apace, / Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less.’ The English are suspicious of ‘clever’: ‘To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening,’ remarks Saki in one of his short stories.)
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If in later life Auden was often accused of being pompous, whimsical and clumsy, in his early life he was often dismissed as being merely ‘clever’. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, for example, writing about Auden’s early book The Orators, remarked that ‘On the lowest level it is very clever’: clever clearly being only entry-level for serious consideration by a reviewer in the TLS. (Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds was described in the same paper – which is essentially a paper for clever clogs, by clever clogs about clever clogs – as being ‘as clever as paint’, which is a backhanded compliment, paint being only clever insofar as it covers a multitude of sins.)
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(And clever, note, is not scholarship: a review of Auden’s Nineteenth Century Minor Poets splutters, ‘Neither in Mr Auden’s introduction, nor in the notes […] is there a word about textual sources’ – Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1967, p. 670. Disgraceful!)
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Auden’s clever hopes, then, are really clever-clever hopes – too-clever-by-half hopes, not-as-clever-as-they-think-they-are hopes, hopes that are destined to disappoint. The clever hopes he’s presumably referring to include the Treaty of Versailles, the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Dawes Plan, the Locarno Treaties, the Young Plan, the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, the Tanggu Truce, the Pact of Friendship, Neutrality and Nonaggression between Italy and the Soviet Union, the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviet–Czechoslovakia Treaty of Mutual Assistance, the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, the Anti-Comintern Pact, the Munich Agreement, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact … and every other pact, treaty and agreement after the First World War, all of which we now think of as leading directly to the Second World War, but which at the time were largely intended to avoid any such thing.
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And what exactly – in brief – was ‘low’ about the ‘low dishonest decade’? The definitive account can be found in the historian Piers Brendon’s book The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (2000) – a 700-page masterpiece – which enumerates the many ways in which ‘During the ten years after 1929 […] America, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan and Russia […] traversed a dark valley inhabited by the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear.’
I shan’t traverse that dark valley so many before me have trod – or indeed attempt a climb I cannot hope to achieve.
Who in his daydreams does not prefer to see himself as a leader rather than a follower, an explorer rather than a cultivator and a settler? Unfortunately, the possibility of realizing such a dream is limited, not only by talent but also by time, and even a superior gift cannot cancel historical priority; he who today climbs the Matterhorn, though he be the greatest climber who ever lived, must tread in Whymper’s footsteps.
(Auden, foreword to Adrienne Rich’s A Change of World, 1951)
But I shall venture to suggest, if I may, that Auden has descended here, at a startlingly early point in his poem, to the kind of grand gesturing that will eventually rather spoil and overwhelm ‘September 1, 1939’.
If you’re summing up a decade, after all, why not a century or an epoch? And why not start issuing edicts and instructions? Why not start telling your readers how they think, and what to think, and how they behave, and how to behave? Which is exactly what Auden goes on to do in the poem – ‘low dishonest decade’ is therefore, one might argue, the exact moment when the rot sets in.
(Great writers, alas, and poets in particular, are often tempted to write about the human condition with a capital H and a capital C: it’s the price we pay for their wisdom and their fancy phrases; every genius, it seems, is more than capable of writing guff about the Human Condition and the State of the World. Personally, I always get a little queasy when writers start to pronounce on these matters, though of course I like nothing better than to pronounce on them myself.)
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In a letter to his friend E. R. Dodds, Auden once claimed that a poet should have ‘direct knowledge’ of the major political events of his time. He certainly did have direct knowledge of the political events of his time, of the clever hopes of the low dishonest decade: he’d been in Spain during the civil war; and he’d been in China with Isherwood, where they wrote Journey to a War (1939), their reflections on the Sino-Japanese War. Perhaps he felt that this first-hand knowledge gave him the right to make his great oracular pronouncements, although as he grew older he rather changed his mind. In his T. S. Eliot Memorial lectures in 1967, he remarks:
In our age we are familiar with the case of a man, by nature a novelist or poet, who has to decide whether he will devote himself to his art alone or become politically engagé. On this issue his conscience is genuinely divided. One voice tells him, quite correctly, that politics is a dirty business, and if he meddles with it he will have to compromise his artistic integrity. Another voice tells him, equally correctly, that the voice of social justice is more important than the cause of art. And as a rule, backing the second voice, is a motive of which he’s not conscious – the ambition of every man to shine in a field which is not his natural one: in the case of the artist, to come out of his cave and play a public role.
For better or for worse, ‘a low dishonest decade’ sees Auden emerging from his cave to play a public role.
One thing’s for sure: once you start bandying about such grand phrases, there is trouble ahead.