Can’t you just see them all there, drinking together? Auden and Elizabeth Bishop and Jane Bowles? Maybe? Not? That’s because they’re all drinking in the VIP lounge.
If ‘September 1, 1939’ is a deeply troubled poem, which it certainly is, it’s partly because it is haunted by the lurking figure of the average man – ‘I and the public know’, the ‘Collective Man’, ‘our’ crude wish, the ‘dense commuters’, the ‘sensual man-in-the-street’ – who now looms fully into view and who is not, I think, entirely welcome.
The average man is Auden’s audience, his compatriots – and the enemy.
The average man is … well, me.
In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage – and that phantom is the public […]
A public is neither a nation, nor a generation, nor a community, nor a society, nor these particular men, for all these are only what they are through the concrete; no single person who belongs to the public makes a real commitment […]
A public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public, and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant.
(Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age)
Auden himself was anything but average. Prep school, public school, Oxford, all of that – and he was an out-and-proud gay man when it wasn’t easy to be an out-and-proud gay man, and he was a poet. He was definitely not average, but most of us are. Most of us are utterly ordinary. We can’t all be exceptional. In Philip Roth’s novel Everyman (2006), the grim Everyman figure of the book’s title, Roth’s protagonist, is granted the unusual gift of being able to observe his family grieving at his own graveside. To his horror, he realises that, for all his achievements, his life was nothing but average: ‘Up and down the state that day, there’d been five hundred funerals like his, routine, ordinary […] no more or less interesting than any of the others.’
*
According to the OED – which is itself a triumph of the art of averaging, a dictionary of the everyday usage as well of the historical development of words, a dictionary of the central tendencies of meaning in the English language – ‘Few words have received more etymological investigation’ than the word ‘average’. It is a word that has suffered a long, slow decline in meaning, from its ancient sense of being some kind of service due by tenants to their feudal lords, to the point at which it is now considered to be merely the opposite of ‘awesome’. ‘Averageness’, according to the OED, is ‘mediocrity’. Average has somehow become below average.
*
(For forty years Garrison Keillor would end his weekly monologue about his home town, Lake Wobegon, on the Prairie Home Companion radio show – which American friends would send me, on cassette, and which I would play in the car while driving – with the words ‘That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.’ Lake Wobegon does not exist. It is an imaginary place – and a statistical impossibility.)
*
Some words become sullied by association over time, others fall into misuse and others fall out of use entirely. The word ‘average’ has simply sunk in our estimation. Average is Over proclaims the title of one recent bestselling book about economics. Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average, and Do Work That Matters suggests the title of another. Conquering Average. Mastering Average. Overcoming Average. This is the mantra of our age.
(Or rather it was the mantra: while I’ve been writing this book, things have changed. Trump, Brexit, the gilets jaunes, the rise of the right-wing populists: one might interpret all these phenomena as the return or the revenge of the average. Even the Occupy movement, that great protest against social and economic inequality that swept through America and many other parts of the world a few years ago, and whose slogan was ‘We Are the 99%’, was premised on the idea that for the average person the economy, the ‘system’, wasn’t really working any more, that the fundamental promise offered by the governments and economies of the West – work hard, play by the rules and you will succeed – has been broken by the actions of governments, giant corporations and the global banking system, who represent the 1%. ‘We Are the 99%’ sounds a lot better – and is much more statistically compelling – than ‘We Are the Average’, but it amounts to the same thing. We have been excluded, we are overlooked and we’re angry. We’re deplorable.)
*
Of course, things could be even worse for the ‘average’. A recent paper published in the Journal of Positive Psychology analysing the appearance and frequency of words related to moral excellence and virtue in American books published between 1901 and 2000 found a decline in the use of general moral terms such as ‘virtue’ and ‘conscience’. (This doesn’t necessarily mean that we no longer have a shared moral framework, but it may mean that we’re beginning to lack the vocabulary to describe it.)
Our changing understanding of what it might mean to be ‘average’ perhaps indicates a crisis in how we think and talk about the social contract, about how we think and talk about each other – what makes us similar, what binds us together, and what constitutes a culture, a democracy and a commonweal.
And that crisis, I think, is already apparent in Auden’s use of ‘average’.
It is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of a human society which uses them for a thousand different purposes.
(Auden, ‘Writing’)
(Now, I am perfectly aware that all this might sound like just so much hogwash and hooey, an example of what the late great Gilbert Adair liked to refer to as ‘the Tardis doctrine of criticism’, the ludicrous idea that ‘within a single detail, a detail as humble and as measurable as a telephone booth, there may be contained a whole world’, but I suppose I am a bit of a critical Whovian and I happen to think that ‘average’ is one of those telephone booth-type words, or a trapdoor, or a portal; I think it leads to all sorts of strange and dark places.)
*
There’s a sequence of sonnets in his book New Year Letter in which Auden sets out to investigate the meaning of what he called ‘true happiness or authenticity of being’, and in one sonnet – titled, guess what, ‘The Average’ – he examines the sad case of a typical young man who has been encouraged by his well-meaning parents to think of himself as exceptional:
His peasant parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil
For any of those smart professions which
Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.
The pressure of their fond ambition made
Their shy and country-loving child afraid
No sensible career was good enough,
Only a hero could deserve such love.
So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town;
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;
The silence roared displeasure: looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the Exceptional, and ran.
Auden seems in sympathy with the young man’s plight, but there’s also a hint of danger: the Average Man as bogeyman.
*
Here comes the bogeyman.
*
Ezra Pound was an above-average poet with famously strong feelings about those he felt did not come up to the mark. ‘A miracle of ebulliency, gusto, and help’, James Joyce called him – but it rather depended on whether you were worth helping, or beyond saving. Pound has a poem, ‘Portrait d’une Femme’, published in 1912, long before his great notoriety as a propagandist for fascism, in which he imagines an adventuress who prefers her own life to ‘the usual thing’, ‘One dull man, dulling and uxorious, / One average mind – with one thought less, each year.’ It is but a short step from contempt for the average to disgust with the Untermensch – a step that Pound was more than willing to take. Objecting to some of his idiotic anti-Semitic ravings, Pound’s fellow poet Basil Bunting wrote to him, ‘Either you know men to be men, and not something less, or you make yourself an enemy of mankind.’
*
The enemies of mankind tend to despise the average – for what is mankind but an average, and what is the average man but an Everyman?
Auden, thank goodness, doesn’t go there, but is there perhaps just a hint of distaste in Auden’s bar, for the non-Martini-swilling masses?
*
And does it – in Auden’s case – have something to do with class? I hesitate even to mention it: I am conscious that it makes me look bad. R. H. Tawney, in Equality (1931): ‘The word “class” is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit.’
On the other hand:
It is fatal to repress doubt; it turns the doubter into a humorless bigot.
(Auden, A Certain World)
(I’m just finishing rewriting this chapter during the ongoing, seemingly never-ending Labour Party anti-Semitism crisis. ‘Whatever you do,’ says my wife, ‘don’t write about the Labour Party anti-Semitism crisis.’ I have promised I will not write about the Labour Party anti-Semitism crisis. There are some things you can’t say, or shouldn’t say.)