Stanza 4, almost halfway, and with tales of the ancient Greeks behind us, we’re now back on the streets of New York: we’ve gone from looking back to looking up. We are hurtling through this poem now.
Auden’s always moving around like this. He’s a terrible fidget. It’s what makes the poems entertaining, and infuriating.
(I remember when the children were young, some of my favourite books to read with them were Miroslav Šašek’s This is … series: This is London, This is Paris, This is Rome, This is Venice. I picked up a set in an Oxfam shop. This is New York was published in 1960. Šašek’s signature storytelling style is to glance around everywhere, like an overgrown child, or an excited visitor: it creates a sensation of being overwhelmed; it allows for that thrill of discovery. ‘New York’, he writes, ‘is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, and it is full of the Biggest Things.’)
So, let’s go and look around the city with Uncle Wystan, shall we? Let’s look up. Let’s look at the sky.
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What on earth is neutral air?
*
Gerard Manley Hopkins writes of air ‘that’s fairly mixed / With, riddles, and is rife / In every least thing’s life’. Air is everywhere, in other words, and it is everywhere in ‘September 1, 1939’: the radio waves, the windy militant trash. In a sense, air is the empty space through which a poem moves – like a plane sky-writing through big blue skies, or through silence, or margins, or prose. I suppose air might be considered neutral insofar as it’s difficult to consider in and of itself.
(And even more difficult to consider when you do. Philosophical fashions come and go, but in recent years there’s been a marked interest in what one might call the ‘aerological’, from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air, in which he claims that the deployment of chlorine gas in the First World War unleashed a new kind of ‘atmo-terrorism’, to Steven Connor’s The Matter of Air, a tornado-strength tour de force on all things ethereal, and Tonino Griffero’s atmospheric Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces – but I have to admit that I have struggled to comprehend and contain all these ideas and theories, and am only still just catching the drift of Gaston Bachelard’s L’air et les songes, published way back in 1943, in which he makes the case for air as providing a model for our understanding of dreamlike states and environments. Air, I will say, though – having had an intoxicating sniff of these notions, and so being emboldened to offer a little philosophical puff of my own – air seems to me to be neutral like ideology. It is invisible until you notice it, and then it’s everywhere.)
The air rippled like camouflage. Behind it something else seemed to carry on in secret. At any moment the illusion they stood on would dissolve and they would fall to earth.
(Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow)
The idea of neutral air also perhaps suggests America as a land of opportunity, a big blank space. The music journalist Greil Marcus – a writer who really achieved something, who almost single-handedly made rock criticism respectable – argues in his book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006) that ‘America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, crime and liberation, lynch mobs and escapes; its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings, Biblical allusions that lose all their certainties in American air.’ Auden, I think, would agree with Mr Marcus, that the invented and unscripted nature of America is what constitutes its appeal and its vulnerability. As the American story is retold and its dreams and promises fulfilled, betrayed and undermined, so the great drama continues.
Neutral air: endless opportunities.
Above them, expensive and lovely as a rich child’s toy,
The aeroplanes fly in the new European air,
On the edge of that air that makes England of minor importance.
(Auden, ‘Dover’)
Yet the neutral also suggests the suspension of all activity and meaning. Two years before his death at the age of sixty-four in 1980, Roland Barthes delivered a course, ‘Le Neutre’, ‘The Neutral’, at the Collège de France, in which he offered all sorts of ideas and versions of the neutral. ‘I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing: I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral.’ (Uh-huh, you might say, if not French, ‘Mr Barthes, would you mind just clarifying …’). ‘The Neutral’, Barthes goes on, means both violence and the suspension of violence, wherein lies ‘the paradox of the desire for the Neutral’.
The neutral represents both violence and the suspension of violence: perplexing as it seems, this may be close to what Auden is thinking about in the poem.
*
Because, of course, what he’s actually thinking about is an entirely obvious kind of neutrality.
In August 1935, the United States Congress passed the first of a series of Neutrality Acts, designed to limit American involvement in future wars. And, sure enough, when the future war did come to Europe, Roosevelt was quick to reassure his neutral nation:
At this moment there is being prepared a proclamation of American neutrality. This would have been done even if there had been no neutrality statute on the books, for this proclamation is in accordance with international law and in accordance with American policy. This will be followed by a proclamation required by the existing Neutrality Act. And I trust that in the days to come our neutrality can be made a true neutrality.
But he went on:
This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience.
(Roosevelt, 3 September 1939, Fireside Chat 14)
Examine your conscience, you neutrals, the poem says. Open your mind. Look around!