And so the trouble comes, in the very next line of the poem, with ‘Waves of anger and fear’.
*
(And yes, yes, this is still the first stanza of the poem, but we’re nearly there: the foundations are almost laid. At least, I hope the foundations are almost laid. I remember I was putting in some foundations for a small retaining wall in our front garden a few years ago, and I rang my dad for some advice and told him the dimensions of the wall and he suggested the depth of the footing required, the amount of concrete I might need and the number of blocks, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered to go to all that trouble, so instead I just cut down the height and dimensions of the wall and went for shallow footings and a dry concrete mix for the base. ‘It’s a rustic look,’ I said to my sister when she came to survey the wobbly, uneven construction, a wall so low it looks more like a path. It could almost be the remains of a Bronze Age hut found in an archaeological dig. Civilisation needs proper foundations.)
*
They’re radio waves, as it turns out, the ‘Waves of anger and fear’, rather than ocean waves, although we don’t learn that until the next line – and no matter how many times I read the poem I can’t quite get away from thinking that there is a hint of moisture in this first stanza (the dives, the waves), just as there’s fire (the points of light, the affirming flame) in the last stanza, and earth and air in between (the neutral air, the haunted wood).
*
(This is doubtless wilful, wild and whimsical misreading on my part – John Berryman begins one of his Dream Songs ‘Misunderstanding. Misunderstanding, misunderstanding’, and I hear you, John – but it’s also because I’m coming at the poem with certain expectations. I am conditioned to expect waterworks in Auden’s work.)
*
In his juvenilia and at the early stages of his career, Auden could barely begin a poem without recourse to water imagery of some kind: ‘The twinkling lamps stream up the hill’; ‘The sprinkler on the lawn’; ‘Who stands, the crux left of the watershed’; ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle’; ‘Fish in the unruffled lakes’. Auden was obsessed with water as an element which the poet must in some way regulate and control: images of water provide a way of dramatising moments of crisis in his work, of inviting and overcoming threats and challenges, and, finally, they provide a way for him to imagine much-longed-for rest and bliss. In the poem ‘Lullaby’, from his last volume, Thank You, Fog (1974), the speaker yearns for oceanic oblivion:
Now you have licence to lie,
naked, curled like a shrimplet,
jacent in bed, and enjoy
its cosy micro-climate:
Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.
(According to several sources, Auden believed his greatest success was to have been quoted by a prostitute in prison complaining about the infrequency of showers with a line from his poem ‘First Things First’: ‘Thousands have lived without love, not one without water’.)
*
I am conscious of having opened a floodgate here, but let’s follow this little tributary for a moment. It may get us somewhere.
*
While teaching at the Larchfield Academy in 1931, Auden wrote to his friend Gabriel Carritt:
The school gathers mildew. Numbers down, the headmaster partially blind, his wife growing gradually mad in a canvas shelter in the garden. I spend most of my time adjusting the flow of water to the lavatories.
Humphrey Carpenter dismisses this account, claiming that it contains a ‘certain amount of fantasy’, but the critic Tom Paulin has made the valuable point that ‘Auden the amateur plumber is a witty version of his view of the poet as a responsible maker, a kind of social engineer.’ Paulin is correct: poet as plumber is indeed a domesticated version of a dominant trope in Auden’s early poetry, which figures the writer as stowaway, sailor, even as a ship, the Wystan Auden Esquire, battling against the sea.
*
In a review in 1933 he wrote:
What is a highbrow? Someone who is not passive to his experience but who tries to organise, explain and alter it, someone in fact, who tries to influence his history: a man struggling for life in the water is for the time being a highbrow.
Waves and water always provoke excitement and anxiety in Auden; his poetry exhibits what, in the work of Freud’s great follower Sandor Ferenczi, is called a ‘thalassal regressive’ tendency, associating water with the water of the womb and with man’s prehuman development, what Ferenczi, in Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1938), called a ‘striving towards the aquatic mode of existence abandoned in primeval times’. In his poetry written in early adulthood Auden often imagines the sea as a hostile force, ‘ungovernable’ and transgressive, and resorts naturally to the sea as an image of crisis: ‘the dangerous flood of history’ in his poem ‘August for the people’, and ‘Time’s toppling wave’ in ‘Fish in the unruffled lakes’. In an intense love lyric first published in 1934 and later retitled as ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, he compares life and love to a seafaring journey and describes ‘My sea’ as ‘empty’ and its waves as ‘rough’.
*
I could go on. But I don’t need to: Auden usefully gathered together his thoughts about waves and oceans in a series of tour-de-force lectures at the University of Virginia in 1949, published as The Enchafèd Flood in 1950, in which he describes the sea as ‘that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse’.
*
(The poet Ivor Gurney wrote of Walt Whitman,‘he has taken me like a flood’.)
*
The waves in ‘September 1, 1939’ turn out to be radio waves, but no less dangerous than the waves of encroaching oceans.
Radio waves really were circulating over the bright and darkened lands from New York in 1939: the new national radio networks were based in midtown, NBC having made its inaugural broadcast in 1926 from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, and CBS having set up its studio at 52nd Street and Madison Avenue in 1929. (The old RKO symbol showed a radio mast set atop the globe, beaming out to the hemispheres.)
Radio waves were everywhere during the 1930s: in America, these were the pioneering years of radio soaps and comedy hours, of radio jingles, and of FDR’s fireside chats. The waves brought news, and entertainment, and reports and dramatisations of horror, mystery and crime. They were also a useful means of announcing states of emergency, both real and imagined: Orson Welles had broadcast his dramatisation of The War of the Worlds on CBS a year previously, at 8 p.m. on Sunday, 30 October 1938. (Recent research suggests that the story of mass panic excited by the programme is in fact a myth, a sort of hoax around a hoax: it seems that more people were listening to a popular Sunday-night comedy variety show, hosted by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, which was airing on NBC at the same time, than were listening to Orson Welles ventriloquising H. G. Wells.)
*
In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan describes radio as a tribal medium – which is nicely put. Demagogues and lunatics in every age are always looking for the means to influence the language of the tribe: radio, TV, Facebook, Twitter. In 1937, a film called The Girl From Scotland Yard featured a villain who fired ‘radio thunderbolts’ down from his plane, like Zeus, or some poet, or a president spraying out their words, obsessing our private lives.
*
In his comedy of manners Private Lives (1930), Noël Coward has Amanda say, ‘I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there’s no knowing what one mightn’t do.’
The fusing of cosmic thingummys is now about to happen – unexpectedly, entirely unbeknown to Auden – in this poem, in the very final lines of the very first stanza. But before the final lines, I should probably say something about the stanza as a whole. It is an important technical matter.
*
Remember Auden’s two questions?
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?’
And remember, in a sense, that 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 …
Pause.
Note: each stanza is composed of just one sentence.
So, that means that ‘September 1, 1939’ is a poem that consists of just nine sentences. Nine. Nine! The grammarian and the linguist may speak of clauses and phrases and parts of speech, but for most of us, for everyday purposes, the standard unit of meaning and of style is the sentence. We might think of the sentence, therefore, not merely as the foundations, and the bricks, and the planks, the pantiles and the timber frame of a work of art, but also as the pelmets, the architraves, the knick-knacks and the soft furnishings. Without the sentence, not only would there be no house; there would be no home. It is by the sentence that the writer stands or falls. Or, indeed, crawls, or wanders, or runs. And Auden uses just nine sentences in this poem, to build and furnish the whole thing. There are nine sentences in this stupid paragraph alone; I know, I’ve counted.
*
(‘First I write one sentence: then I write another. That’s how I write. And so I go on. But I have a feeling writing ought to be like running through a field.’ Lytton Strachey, quoted by Virginia Woolf in A Writer’s Diary, 1 November 1938.)
*
A sentence can fizz, or swish, or gabble. It can be solemn. It can be heroic. It may be hollow. When we admire a writer, what we are admiring are their sentences. And a beautiful sentence will be as different as are all beautiful things. It may be graceful, or gorgeous, or comely. It may – in the parlance of the property developer and the estate agent – be ‘stunning’.
And I think that a lot of the time, with his sentences in this poem, Auden is attempting to dazzle: he wants to be stunning.
*
And why not? Why shouldn’t he? George Saunders has an essay, ‘The Perfect Gerbil’, about the short-story writer Donald Barthelme, in his book The Braindead Megaphone (2007), in which he explains that a part of the appeal of Barthelme’s work ‘involves the simple pleasure of watching someone be audacious’. Saunders claims that ‘the real work’ of a story ‘is to give the reader a series of pleasure-bursts’.
If nothing else, in ‘September 1, 1939’, in the very shape and structure of ‘September 1, 1939’, Auden is being audacious. Each stanza a sentence, no more, no less: let’s be honest, it’s showing off. It’s a game.
*
And the metre! Ah, the metre: roughly, trimeters throughout, just three metrical feet per line, a cramped little space compared to the standard stretch of pentameter. Trimeters: a verse form more suited to love songs and ballads than big discursive statements about the state of the world. Again, Auden is setting himself a challenge. (Yeats uses the same metre in ‘Easter 1916’, so it’s like, if he can do it, I can do it. ‘Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it,’ writes Doris Lessing, in her preface to my old Flamingo paperback of The Golden Notebook, 1972.)
The impulse toward the metrical organization of assertions seems to partake of the more inclusive human impulse toward order. Meter is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern – which means repetition – emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance.
(Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form)
We know that Auden believed metrical order, regularity, to be a primary defence against disorder, a method of preventing the great flood of ideas and language overwhelming him.
Writing in his essay ‘Tennyson’ (1944), he wondered about
the relation between the strictness and musicality of a poet’s form and his own anxiety. It may well be, I think, that the more he is conscious of an inner disorder and dread, the more value he will place on tidiness in the work as a defense, as if he hoped that through his control of the means of expressing his emotions, the emotions themselves, which he cannot master directly, might be brought to order.
Musicality, strictness, tidiness – Auden adopted these themes as principles in his own practice and also as the criteria for judging his readers. ‘Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look-out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.’
I am not, by any means, Auden’s dream reader – I can barely tell my bacchics from my choriambs – but I think I can safely say that the showy, stunning, extraordinary prosodic and structural features of this poem are not insignificant.