Looking back, I cannot think of a better preparation for writing about Hitler and Stalin than the familiarity I acquired at Oxford in the 1930s with Thucydides, Tacitus, and those sections of Aristotle’s Politics that deal with the Greek experience of tyranny.
(Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin)
OK. Ready, class, for stanza 3?
I promise, the pace picks up from here. And no more bad language.
*
The funeral oration spoken by Pericles at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War is – or was – perhaps the best-known passage in Thucydides, and therefore one of the best-known passages in all of Classical literature.
Though not by me, I should say.
(Ben Jonson wrote that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin, and less Greek’; I have absolutely none of either. I went to what is sometimes referred to in England as a ‘bog-standard comp’, where we trained not to be leaders of men but to be the followers, the factory machinists and the foot soldiers, so I have had to struggle through Thucydides in later life with a Loeb Classical Library edition and various ancient and modern translations. Personally, I would recommend the Rex Warner translation, though the recent Jeremy Mynott is excellent, and the Richard Crawley is the standard, published in 1874.)
Whatever. Whenever, wherever and however you get to grips with it, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides’ book, is tedious, difficult – and essential reading.
*
Rex Warner, by the way, in one of those inevitable coincidences, was a friend – or at least an acquaintance – of Auden’s. They met at Oxford. The two got on, as undergraduates do: they both liked to wear cloaks and silly hats, and wrote poetry, and they both got Thirds. In his 1929 ‘Verse-letter to C. Day-Lewis’, Auden wrote that Warner ‘looked at much and much saw through’. After Oxford, like Auden, Warner taught at the obligatory prep schools and he went on to write more poetry, and novels, and literary criticism, history, and popular translations of Aeschylus, Thucydides, Euripides, Plutarch and Xenophon. He was the Director of the British Institute in Athens, a professor in America, and an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He was married to a Rothschild. He died as recently as 1986, and most people have never heard of him.
I always think of Rex Warner as a sort of unlucky Auden.
*
(Though is it luck? Was Warner unlucky? Am I? I’m currently reading Oliver Sacks, another friend of Auden’s – but of course. A very disturbing passage in his posthumously published book The River of Consciousness:
Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement – such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind?
It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.
I have also been reading The Letters of Samuel Beckett, volume 4. ‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. Years and years of krapping away to no little, little and no avail.)
*
There’s a Peter Cook sketch from Beyond the Fringe in which he plays a miner: ‘I could have been a judge,’ he says, ‘but I never had the Latin for the judgin’. I never had it, so I’d had it, as far as being a judge was concerned.’
Maybe if I’d had the Greek, I could have been a poet.
*
(The poet Charles Olson once wrote of Herman Melville, ‘He read to write’, which is a profound tribute: it’s certainly better than writing to be read. One of the reasons to read Auden is to read what he’s been reading, and his reading is always unpredictable, in much the same way, say, that Alistair Cooke delivering his weekly Letter from America used to be unpredictable. Tuning in to Radio 4 when I was young, you never knew whether you were going to be hearing about golf, or Nixon, or Abraham Lincoln. It was an important part of my education, precisely because it was unpredictable and unexpected. Philip Larkin dismissed Auden’s later work as ‘a rambling intellectual stew’ – but some of us are grateful for any source of nourishment, and the more in the stew the better. What have I learnt from Auden? I have learnt about Thucydides, obviously, and lots of other things. Auden has acquainted me with my own vast, wide-ranging ignorance.)
*
(This book is not, I realise, the biography of a poem: it is the biography of a mind. But whose? ‘Oh, why am I not smart like Auden?’ – Theodore Roethke, letter to Louise Bogan, 1939, in Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke.)
*
Auden may have first come across Thucydides in his lessons at St Edmund’s preparatory school, where the headmaster, a Mr Cyril Morgan-Brown, was a strict Classicist who believed that Latin and Greek, plus a little mathematics and divinity, were all that were required for training the minds of young gentlemen. The adult Auden was inclined to agree. He was forever grateful for his early training in Classics:
Anybody who has spent many hours of his youth translating into and out of two languages so syntactically and rhetorically different from his own, learns something about his mother tongue which I do not think can be learned so well in any other way. For instance, it inculcates the habit, whenever one uses a word, of automatically asking: ‘What is its exact meaning?’
(Auden, A Certain World)
What’s often striking in Auden is the combination of terminological exactitude with wild and woolly thinking: Boris Johnson’s is perhaps a modern version of the manner. Public schoolboy cant.
*
Auden had been sent to St Edmund’s, at Hindhead in Surrey, in the autumn of 1915. He was eight years old. ‘For the first time I came into contact with adults outside the family circle’, he recalled in ‘The Prolific and the Devourer’ (1939), ‘and found them to be hairy monsters with terrifying voices and eccentric habits, completely irrational in their bouts of rage and good-humour, and, it seemed, with absolute power of life and death. Those who deep in the country at a safe distance from parents spend their lives teaching little boys, behave in a way which would get them locked up in ordinary society.’ (These days, they do get locked up.)
Despite his misgivings about his teachers, Auden spent much of his life in the same profession.
*
After returning from Berlin in 1929 – where he sometimes traded impromptu English lessons for sexual favours – he worked first as a tutor in London, and then as a schoolmaster teaching English and French at the Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh, Scotland. He then moved on to the Downs School in Herefordshire for a number of years, until the summer of 1935. ‘I teach English, Arithmetic, French, Gym and Biology,’ he told his friend Naomi Mitchison (pupils recall his gym classes as being ‘giggly’). Later, in America, he taught at a number of colleges and universities, before finally returning to Oxford as Professor of Poetry. He was, in other words, serious about teaching and about education. (As his biographer Humphrey Carpenter points out, there were family precedents: Auden’s great-uncle, the Reverend Thomas Auden, had been headmaster of Wellingborough Grammar School, and another great-uncle had been tutor to King Edward VII when Prince of Wales.) In Kirchstetten, the Austrian town where Auden bought a house in 1957, within driving distance of Vienna for the opera, and where he spent much of his later life, he was known by the locals as ‘Herr Professor’.
*
(Biographers and critics always take this fact – the honour paid the poet by the locals – entirely at face value, though I often wonder if the people of Kirchstetten were half-mocking or speaking in jest. I happen to have spent most of my adult life as a teacher, and the only people who ever refer to me as ‘Professor’ are always taking the proverbial. Mustafa, my barber, for example, always calls me ‘The Professor’, with ill-concealed contempt, and rightly so: he taught himself English in six months by reading Dickens and watching Only Fools and Horses; his favourite book is Les Misérables, which he read in French, he claims, in three days, twelve hours a day, using a dictionary; and he speaks Turkish, Arabic, English, German, some language I’ve never heard of, and some Spanish. ‘I should have been a professor, like you,’ he always likes to say, when he’s tackling my nose hair and my eyebrows. ‘Why didn’t you become a professor?’ I always reply. The answers vary. ‘Because I am a black sheep,’ I remember he said once, ‘I am not a good person.’ ‘Why are you not a good person?’ I asked. ‘Because I drink and I smoke. I love women.’ ‘I know a lot of professors who drink and who smoke and love women,’ I said. ‘Not in my country,’ said Mustafa. There is a difference between being a professor and being professorial. Auden was both.)
*
Though himself a practitioner of unorthodox teaching methods – he was renowned for insisting that his students memorise long passages of prose and poetry, including an entire canto of Dante’s Inferno, in Italian – Auden claimed not to approve of newfangled and progressive educational ideas and theories. In ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936), he says he has ‘no use for all these new academies’:
Where readers of the better weeklies send
The child they probably did not intend,
To paint a lampshade, marry, or keep pigeons,
Or make a study of the world religions.
Not surprisingly, then, when he set out a possible programme for poets, in the form of a curriculum for a ‘daydream College for Bards’ in his essay ‘The Poet & The City’ (1962), it focused largely on Classics, and gardening:
Doubtless one of the passages Auden would have asked his students to memorise would have been Pericles’ funeral oration.
*
Just to recap, for those of us without the benefit of Auden’s Classical education: we know little about Thucydides, born c.460 BC, died c.400, except that he was an Athenian and a general, who was exiled from Athens in his late thirties for having failed in battle against the Spartans, at which point he wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War (which was named after the Peloponnesus peninsula), which lasted for twenty-seven years. It was Thucydides’ hope that his History – in the words of the Crawley translation – would be ‘a possession for all time’, and so it has become. His account of the war has long been a favourite not just among Classical scholars, for its eyewitness accounts and its eye-wateringly complex rhetoric, but also among politicians and military leaders, for what it says about democracy and war.
*
Exactly what it says about democracy and war is complex and ambiguous. (What any writers say about democracy and war is often complex and ambiguous: Plato, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Rousseau. Yet these days we often expect thinkers and writers – poets and novelists in particular – all to be tender- and liberally minded. We certainly expect them to agree, say, about the value of democracy. This has not always been the case. In his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey made a persuasive claim that ‘the principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their humanity’. To take just one example, D. H. Lawrence, in his book Fantasia of the Unconscious, which we know Auden read ‘avidly’: ‘I don’t intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it.’)
*
Anyway, this is Pericles, by Thucydides, making his speech about democracy, in the Rex Warner translation:
Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbours’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognised; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbour if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.
What we have here is a speech that, in the words of Tony Blair’s one-time chief speechwriter Philip Collins, contains ‘democratic multitudes’: the importance of the many, not the few; the importance of equal justice; the idea of the meritocracy; private liberty; public interest; respect for institutions.
Yet in both this speech and throughout the History, Thucydides contradicts and undermines his own arguments: democracy is a great thing, he seems to suggest, but it can also be dangerous; it relies on the participation of the many, but is determined by the few; leadership is essential, and misleading is inevitable; the populace must judge rightly the evidence of speech-makers and law-givers, but they will happily believe lies about the past and about the future.
*
(‘The whole earth is the tomb of famous men,’ proclaims Pericles, and, alas, it is the case. I have been writing this book for so long that I have seen the likes of Blair and Obama come and go, with their fine rhetoric about hope, and in their stead the rise of the populists, with their rhetoric of fear, and the language of speech-making and public discourse become malignant.)
*
Auden knew only too well ‘All that a speech can say / About Democracy’. It can say everything and mean nothing, and amount to nothing. Or it can mean the opposite of what it appears, and have consequences that last for generations. If speech-making is essential to democracy, it can also be a lie. After giving a speech at a political meeting in March 1939, a dinner held to raise money for refugees from the war in Spain, Auden wrote to his friend Annie Dodds:
I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring […] It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.
Auden may have felt like he was covered in dirt, but the whole world was about to become engulfed in filth.
What was the most powerful Hitlerian propaganda tool? Was it the individual speeches of Hitler and Goebbels, their pronouncements on this or that theme, their rabble-rousing against the Jews, against Bolshevism? […]
No, the most powerful influence was exerted neither by individual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters or flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions.
Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. […] Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. […] The Third Reich coined only a very small number of the words in its language, perhaps – indeed probably – none at all. […] But it changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence, it makes common property out of what was previously the preserve of an individual or a tiny group, it commandeers for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures in its poison. Making language the servant of its dreadful system, it procures it as its most powerful, most public and most surreptitious means of advertising.
(Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich)
In a review of Reinhold Niebuhr’s book The Nature and Destiny of Man in 1941, Auden wrote that ‘It has taken Hitler to show us that liberalism is not self-supporting.’ And as he became disillusioned with the limits of liberalism, so he became disillusioned with politicians (‘I think we should do very well without politicians,’ he told an interviewer in 1972. ‘Our leaders should be elected by lot’) and suspicious of himself. In his 1962 essay ‘The Poet & The City’, he compared the poet with the authoritarian ruler:
A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror for, given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.
A reported speech, from the New York Times, on 1 September 1939: ‘Hitler Tells the Reichstag “Bomb Will Be Met by Bomb”’:
Chancellor Adolf Hitler of Germany, in a world broadcast this morning, opened ‘a fight until the resolution of the situation’ against Poland, announcing that ‘from now on bomb will be met by bomb.’
At the same time he announced, to face any eventuality, that if anything ‘happened’ to him, Field Marshal Hermann Goering was to be in charge; if to Marshal Goering, Rudolph Hess; if to Herr Hess, the Senate, which he proposes to appoint, will select a successor. […]
In the early part of his address, Herr Hitler electrified his audience with this declaration: ‘We have all been suffering under the tortures that the Versailles treaty has been inflicting upon us.’
‘We have all been suffering,’ says Herr Hitler. ‘We must suffer them all again,’ writes Auden.
*
Auden had some odd and interesting ideas about suffering, many of them picked up from Homer Lane, who was an eccentric American educationalist – ‘a mountebank’, according to Auden biographer Richard Davenport-Hines; Lane was deported from England in 1925, accused of being ‘a dangerous charlatan and an adventurer, who, for the safety of the public, ought to be out of the country’ – and from the German psychologist Georg Groddeck, who ran a water-therapy institute at Baden-Baden. Both Lane and Groddeck believed that people brought suffering upon themselves, an idea that Auden took seriously and literally. In ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, Auden asserts that ‘No one thinks unless a trauma makes them’ – really? – and in his poem ‘Miss Gee’ he imagines a Miss Gee who has so repressed her sexual longings and desires as to develop a tumour – again, really? In his notes to New Year Letter, Auden claimed that ‘In the expression of suffering […] Wagner is perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived’ – which, in fairness, may be correct – and when, in the body of the poem, he describes the activities of a Wagnerian ‘mental hero’ (Siegfried? Tristan?), they conform with this image of Wagner as the genius of suffering:
Loud Wagner, put it on the stage:
The mental hero who has swooned
With sensual pleasure at his wound,
His intellectual life fulfilled
In knowing that his doom is willed
Exists to suffer; borne along
Upon a timeless tide of song,
The huge doll roars for death or mother,
Synonymous with one another;
And Woman, passive as in dreams,
Redeems, redeems, redeems, redeems.
*
(Another final passing observation on technical matters, which I hope is not entirely irrelevant to the tone and purpose of the poem. As in this stanza, ‘September 1, 1939’ is studded throughout with semicolons. I know that Auden was casual with his punctuation, but I’ve just been reading Armageddon in Retrospect, a posthumously published collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s prose. One of the last things Vonnegut ever wrote was a speech, in 2007, written shortly before his death aged eighty-four, in which he offers some sage advice about semicolons, advice which I know he had often offered before, but which is certainly worth repeating: ‘My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semicolons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.’ Vonnegut’s semicolon warning identifies the characteristic pitch and tone of Auden’s work: it is definitely poetry written by someone who went to college. One might imagine a parlour game in which all authors are reduced down to a representative punctuation mark, to their actual pointe, as it were, to the punctum: Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville to their em-dashes; Lewis Carroll to his exclamation marks; and Henry James and Auden stripped down to their semicolons.)