Anyway, finally – finally! – we are at the end of the first stanza, with the ‘unmentionable odour of death’, and this is where things start to get really uncanny and unpleasant.
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must. The smell of corpses, distinctly perceptible under those of grass and humus mingled, I do not find unpleasant, a trifle on the sweet side perhaps, a trifle heady, but how infinitely preferable to what the living emit, their feet, teeth, armpits, arses, sticky foreskins and frustrated ovules. And when my father’s remains join in, however modestly, I can almost shed a tear.
(Samuel Beckett, ‘First Love’)
(One of my grandfathers, my other grandfather, my mother’s father, was at Belsen. He was with the Royal Engineers. He was a digger driver. He died when I was quite young, but I remember this about him: he barely ate anything at all; dry toast and boiled eggs. He could not bear the smell of food, which reminded him, no doubt, of the unmentionable odour of death.)
*
There is an article to be written, if it hasn’t already been written, on the scentscape, the scentsibilities of Auden’s poems, and their peculiar human qualities. In Part III of Book I of The Orators, ‘Statement’ has a list of human types: ‘One charms by thickness of wrist; one by variety of positions; one has a beautiful skin, one a fascinating smell. One has prominent eyes, is bold at accosting. One has water sense; he can dive like a swallow without using his hands.’
The smellscape of Auden’s work: tracing the references to smells in the work. But then there’s the smell of the work: the dried prunish note of the books, rotting and mulching on my shelves for twenty-five years; my own long exposure to the physical, biological fact of the work; our olfactory reception of books.
*
As for the odour in this poem, it could be that Auden remarks upon it because he was struck by the strange, disorientating smell of New York, of America, of the New World, the stink, the stench and the reek of it, compared to Olde England, that strange smell of a different place, a different city, with all the little ‘infrahuman’ smells, the fragrance of men and women raised on all-American diets. The smell of sex, the whiff of the sad old life: the funk of the dive. Or it could be memories of China, of Spain: the actual unmentionable odour of death.
In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.
(Auden, ‘The Justice of Dame Kind’)
Whatever it is, this strong-smelling phrase is an important part of the lingering effect of the poem, and precisely because – alas – it ‘Offends the September night’.
*
(When we think of a phrase beginning ‘the odour of’ we might usually think of the proverbial phrase ‘the odour of sanctity’ – and the poem undoubtedly reeks of that too. What does it smell like? ‘Dr. George Dumas, of Paris, some time ago made a critical investigation of a number of cases in which mention is made of the odour of sanctity in the lives of certain saints, and he supplies physical explanations of them. The odour varies, being compared to the smell of the lily, the rose, the violet, the pineapple, and so forth. Subject to special modifications, Dumas gives the following general formula for the odour of sanctity: C6 H12 O2’ – ‘The Odour of Sanctity’, British Medical Journal, 2:2706, 9 November 1912.)
*
In Here is New York, published in 1949, E. B. White remarked that:
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
The lightning was eventually loosed on 11 September 2001, in a series of coordinated attacks on New York by the terrorist group al-Qaeda.
*
Of the 2,749 murder victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, only 292 ‘whole’ bodies were ever recovered: the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office defines ‘whole’ as 75 per cent or more of the body. According to Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, an adviser to a number of 9/11 family advocacy groups, ‘thousands of fragments of human bodies descended with the grey ash of the World Trade Center that rained over the city. The human detritus ended up on rooftops and in sewers and intermixed with the steel and concrete of the skyscrapers.’ That grey ash contained also burning rubber, plastic, metal, man-made fibres, silica, pulverised glass, concrete dust, lead, mercury and all sorts of other heavy metals, and led to the creation of a choking dust cloud over Ground Zero – which we now know has caused high levels of cancer among those working and living in the area at the time, including the thousands of men and women involved in rescue, recovery and reconstruction. (Christine Todd Whitman, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, under George W. Bush at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and who told the public the air was safe to breathe, has since admitted that she was wrong.)
The unending unmentionable odour of death.
*
After 9/11, Auden’s poem immediately struck a chord.
Last Wednesday I e-mailed W. H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’ to members of my family. Two days later a friend e-mailed it to me, having received it from another friend who was circulating it. On Saturday my mother told me that Scott Simon had read portions of it on NPR. And on Monday my wife, a prep school teacher, saw it lying on the faculty photocopy machine.
(Eric McHenry, ‘Auden on Bin Laden’, Slate, 20 September 2001)
Newspapers published the poem on their editorial pages. It was discussed and circulated everywhere.
*
This terrible, incredible moment in the poem’s afterlife has been exhaustively researched and discussed by Stephen Burt, in ‘“September 1, 1939” Revisited: Or, Poetry, Politics, and the Idea of the Public’, an essay published in American Literary History (2003). It’s a good essay. It’s a great essay. Crucially, Burt asks the central important question, which is why this poem should have been the one that was adopted by readers at a time of national crisis.
There are lots of reasons for the poem’s continuing appeal – this book is about some of them – but it’s important to acknowledge the simple fact that ‘September 1, 1939’ found a new audience at that particular moment in American and world history because it just so happens to be a poem that mentions September, and New York, and circulating fears, and the unmentionable odour of death, all in the first stanza. It was the right poem, in the right place, for a wrong time.
*
(In October 2001, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti claimed that henceforth poetry would be dated as ‘B.S. and A.S. – Before and After September 11’. Auden’s poem is unique in that it spans, and seems to speak directly to, two eras and two centuries.)
*
Whatever the reasons, the horror of 9/11 reminded readers of Auden. ‘In the past year, Auden has been everywhere, by the sheer force of popular will,’ wrote Adam Gopnik in a piece in the New Yorker on the first anniversary of 9/11. ‘Even fashion models, and not just fashion models, now name their sons Auden, as they might ten years ago have called them Dylan, and pose with them on the cover of Vogue.’
*
So, at the end of the first stanza, we have some unnamed individual, sitting in a dive in New York, speaking of their fears and concerns.
(You get the feeling that they’re lonely – don’t you? – this ‘I’. Keith Douglas’s great unfinished poem ‘Bête Noire’ contains the lines ‘The trumpet man to take it away / blows a hot break in a beautiful way / ought to snap my fingers and tap my toes / but I sit at my table and nobody knows / I’ve got a beast on my back.’)
And this is surely one of the things that draws us towards Auden’s poem, again and again: that lonely frightened figure, surveying the world outside.
(Perhaps all great poems represent or contain such a figure, and express such a fear? The Psalms? Shakespeare? Milton? Wordsworth?)
*
‘The attractiveness of America to a writer’, Auden told an interviewer for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1940, ‘is its openness and lack of tradition. In a way it’s frightening. You are forced to live here as everyone will be forced to live. There is no past. No tradition. No roots – that is, in the European sense.’
Welcome, everyone.
This is the modern world.