Stanza 5, and frankly we all deserve a drink.
So, to the bar. But there are bars, and there are bars.
(And this is definitely a bar, not a dive. We’ve maybe moved on from 52nd Street: this bar’s more like a bar in some New Yorker cartoon.)
You know the old joke. Two men are in a bar, old friends, drinking silently. After a couple of hours, one of the men raises his glass to the other and says, ‘Cheers.’ To which his friend responds, ‘Did we come here to talk or to drink?’
*
Auden is definitely here to talk. And to drink. His capacity for both was extraordinary.
*
Robert Craft, in his book Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, writes of a typical evening in January 1964, ‘Auden for dinner. He drinks a jug of Gibsons before, a bottle of champagne during, a bottle (sic) of Cherry Heering (did he think it was Chianti?) after dinner […] Despite this liquid menu, he not only is unblurred, but also performs mental pirouettes for us […] the only sign of tipsiness is an initial lurch at departure, after which a gyroscope seems to take over.’
Let’s lurch a little, before the gyroscope takes over.
ALAN ANSEN: I should think you might almost be ready to issue a volume of collected prose.
AUDEN: I don’t think so. Criticism should be a casual conversation.
(Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden)
In his 1946 essay ‘The Moon Under Water’, George Orwell described his perfect pub: ‘only two minutes from a bus stop … on a side-street … its whole architecture and fittings … uncompromisingly Victorian … The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece – everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.’
Orwell’s Victorian fun palace boasted a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies’ bar and a dining room. Creamy stout was served in pewter mugs, there were matronly barmaids, liver-sausage sandwiches and mussels for bar snacks, with a good lunch also available – ‘a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll – for about three shillings’. Outside there was a large garden with plane trees, with swings for the children.
The only problem with the Moon Under Water, as Orwell acknowledged at the end of his essay, was that it did not exist. He was describing a fantasy. Nonetheless, the Moon Under Water is what one might regard as the quintessentially – or Platonically – English pub.
There are some important differences between English pubs and American bars. And indeed, I might add, between English pubs, American bars and Irish pubs and bars, certainly from the perspective of where I’m sitting, which is not in fact a bar or a pub, but which will be soon, and which bears little resemblance to either Orwell’s or Auden’s, but is not far from Louis MacNeice’s:
In the road is another smile on the face of day.
We stop at random for a morning drink
In a thatched inn; to find, as at a play,
The bar already loud with chatter and clink
Of glasses …
… in sheer
Rebuttal of the silence and the cold
Attached to death.
(Louis MacNeice, Autumn Sequel, Canto XX)
The most famous New York bar in American literary history is probably Charles Pfaff’s beer cellar, on Broadway near Bleecker (recently re-established at 643 Broadway). In the mid-nineteenth century, Pfaff’s became a popular meeting place for writers and artists. Rumours abounded of its bohemian clientele. Walt Whitman has an unfinished poem in praise of Pfaff’s (‘The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse / While on the walk immediately overhead, pass the myriad feet of Broadway’), and on 2 August 1862, the New York Illustrated News described it thus:
As so much has been said in the papers, from time to time, about Pfaff’s it may be well to state that the name is descriptive, simply, of a restaurant and lager bier saloon, kept at No. 647 Broadway, by a Teuton of that name, and which, partly from its central position, and partly from the excellence of its fare, has been such a favorite resort, for several years, for artists, litterateurs, actors, managers, editors, critics, politicians, and other public characters, as to have become quite famous. It is not, as has been often reported, the rendezvous of a particular clique or club of Bohemians (whatever they may be), but simply a general and convenient meeting-place for cultivated men, and one where, almost any evening, you may meet representatives of nearly every branch of literature and art, assembled, not by appointment, nor from habit even, but met by chance, the usual way.
In Pfaff’s they may have assembled by chance, but in England the litterateurs liked to gather by appointment. During the 1930s, for example, the Eagle and Child, opposite St John’s College on St Giles’ in Oxford, played host to the so-called Inklings – J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, you know the lads – who would get together on Monday lunchtimes to drink half pints of warm beer and discuss literature, theology and their various works in progress.
*
Auden was not one to discuss with chums his work in progress, nor was he much of a half-pint man: he tended to hold forth in ex cathedra fashion, and his favourite tipple was a Martini.
*
The Martinis are sending a clear signal:
The Martini sends seven Simple Messages. I call these messages simple because they are binary in form (the Martini is x, it is not y, the opposite of x). They are:
MESSAGE ONE: The Martini is American – it is not European, Asian, or African
MESSAGE TWO: The Martini is urban and urbane – it is not rural or rustic
MESSAGE THREE: The Martini is a high-status, not a low-status, drink
MESSAGE FOUR: The Martini is a man’s, not a woman’s, drink
MESSAGE FIVE: The Martini is optimistic, not pessimistic
MESSAGE SIX: The Martini is the drink of adults, not of children
MESSAGE SEVEN: The Martini belongs to the past, not to the present
[…] The fact remains that the binary oppositions on which the Simple Messages are based include a potentially disturbing hierarchical ranking. The first term is good or superior, the second bad or inferior:
AMERICAN: European, Asian, African
URBAN, URBANE: rural, rustic
UPPER-CLASS: lower-class
MALE: female
OPTIMISTIC: pessimistic
ADULT: immature
PAST: present
The net result for the Martini is politically incorrect, to say the least.
(Lowell Edmunds, Martini, Straight Up)
Auden was omnibibulous, but he was also a superior drinker.
*
Interviewing Auden in 1972, for the Paris Review, Michael Newman noted that Auden ‘drank Smirnoff martinis, red wine, and cognac’ – during the interview, though? it’s not entirely clear – ‘shunned pot, and confessed to having, under a doctor’s supervision, tried LSD: “Nothing much happened, but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me.”’ At poetry readings later in his life he occasionally turned up drunk, and famously celebrated his daily ‘Martini-time’ – 6 p.m. – in a poem (‘The Garrison’), his preferred preparation being one part vermouth, Noilly Prat, to three parts vodka, with both the vodka and the glasses being first cooled in the refrigerator. As he grew older, he liked to take a bottle of wine – a Valpolicella, preferably – to bed, as well as a glass of vodka, which, according to Humphrey Carpenter, ‘he would swallow as a soporific after his trip to the lavatory’.
In some poems you’re taking the risk of sentiment brimming over into sentimentality.
Am I? I don’t understand the word sentimentality. It reminds me of Dylan Thomas’s definition of an alcoholic: ‘A man you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.’ I think sentimentality is someone you don’t like feeling as much as you do. But you can’t win, can you?
(John Haffenden, interview with Philip Larkin, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation)
You can’t win.
These days, the way he carried on, Auden might be counted by many as a slovenly, drink- and drug-addicted boor – and indeed he probably was. But by the standards of old? I don’t know. In all sorts of ways, what we now regard as unacceptable, our parents and grandparents would have regarded as normal, just as what we now accept as everyday and average, they would have regarded as abnormal, irregular, extreme and outrageous. When he was at work, my father would go to the pub at lunchtime before operating heavy machinery: at least Auden was only using a pen. The American poet Howard Nemerov has a poem called ‘Life Cycle of Common Man’, published in 1960, well within living memory, in which the common man, an ‘average consumer of the middle class’, is said to get through, in a lifetime, ‘Just under half a million cigarettes / Four thousand fifths of gin and about / A quarter as much vermouth.’ Nemerov’s account of the average American consumer now seems about as strange and outlandish as a Victorian explorer’s account of the lives of primitive tribespeople in some distant land. Half a million cigarettes? Four thousand fifths of gin? A quarter as much vermouth? It’s like watching Mad Men, season 1. Presumably we watch historical drama on TV, or old footage of our parents and grandparents caught on cine film, because the past really is another country: they really did do things differently there. No one swings a scythe like that any more. No one wears a suit like that. And no one now drinks and smokes like Auden. (When his friend James Stern commented to Auden about his constantly chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, which Stern reckoned worked out at about 15,000 cigarettes a year, Auden responded, ‘Ah, but I don’t inhale!’)
*
I imagine Auden at the bar rather as he’s recalled in this poem by Bertolt Brecht:
Lunching me, a kindly act
In an alehouse, still intact
He sat looming like a cloud
Over the beer-sodden crowd.
(Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956)
(The two men met on numerous occasions and worked together on Brecht’s adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi for the Broadway stage, which turned out to be a disaster. Auden thought Brecht an ‘odious’ person, while Brecht thought Auden filthy.)
*
My point is, Auden was convivial – intellectually, I mean, as well as socially. In ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, for example, he turns T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ inside out and upside down, with the imperial heights of Eliot’s ‘Theory of Impersonal Poetry’ refigured as a ‘Mad Hatter’s Tea-Party’:
Could he look into a memory, the literary historian would find many members of that species which he calls books, but they are curiously changed from the books he finds in his library. The dates are all different. In Memoriam is written before The Dunciad, the thirteenth century comes after the sixteenth […] Piers Ploughman III is going about with Kierkegaard’s Journals, Piers Ploughman IV with The Making of the English Landscape. Most puzzling of all, instead of only associating with members of their own kind, in this extraordinary democracy every species of being knows every other and the closest friend of a book is rarely another book. Gulliver’s Travels walks arm in arm with a love affair, a canto of Il Paradiso sits with a singularly good dinner.
Auden’s idea of a canon is an eccentric one, appealing to personal experience as its judge, with the final criterion for judgement being the quality of the experience being shared by persons, or between persons and poems as what he called ‘pseudo-persons’. Indeed, he seems to have understood personal relations as the paradigm and basis for all literary production, which explains many of the seemingly disconnected elements in his work: the insistent forms of address, the tendency towards argument and explanation, the confusion of personified hosts who inform his poetics, and, might I say, the exemplary idiosyncrasies of his criticism and reviews, the effect of which can be shocking, even now, as when he begins an essay on Thomas Hardy with the words ‘I cannot write objectively about Thomas Hardy because I was once in love with him.’
(We don’t expect such explicitness from critics. We do get it now occasionally, with the likes of, say, Maggie Nelson, and those working under the influence of affect theorists like Rita Felski, but at one time William Empson was one of the few who, like Auden, was prepared to own up to the effects of his affections on his work. Empson wrote of Eliot that ‘I do not propose here to try to judge or define the achievement of Eliot; indeed I feel, like most other verse writers of my generation, that I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented.’ Writing about Auden, Empson on several occasions calls him ‘wonderful’, and the epithet is not trivial nor its object single-minded; its meaning connects Empson’s excitement with Auden’s own.)
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As for the other faces along the bar with Auden? I imagine perhaps Elizabeth Bishop (I’m thinking of her poem ‘A Drunkard’, with its lines ‘I had begun / to drink, & drink – I can’t get enough’); Jane Bowles (who lived with Auden in Brooklyn and used to get up at 6 a.m. after a hard night’s drinking to do his typing for him); the American poet Richard Wilbur (who in an interview in the indispensable Auden Society Newsletter, recalled that ‘Auden had ordered a martini and I had ordered a martini, and we talked about martinis, and we discussed the fact that if you are devoted to martinis, it’s very hard to get a good one away from home’); Joseph Brodsky (who in his cups would sob and confess that he loved Auden: ‘When I am on the road, I am thinking of Wystan – of Wystan all the time – as if he was a girl, wohhl […] You think I am sick?’); and maybe Bernard Kops (who in his poem ‘On a Brief Meeting with Auden’ recalls him ‘Leaning against the bar / as if receiving extreme unction […] Pissed out of his mind in total elation, / beautiful boys surrounding him in / absolute adulation’).