Stanza 7: the end is in sight.
If we can only make it through the crowds.
*
In 1926, Thomas Edison suggested that if New York kept on permitting the building of skyscrapers, ‘disaster must overtake us’:
When all the people in those skyscrapers start to flow out into the street at approximately the same moment or within a half-hour or an hour, try to get to the entrances of those buildings so that they may begin the day’s business, there must be such overcrowding of the streets near those skyscrapers as must stop traffic.
There were just too many people working in Manhattan. When the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit Company) opened the first New York City subway line in October 1904, more than 100,000 people took a ride on the very first day, arriving at their destinations from their subterranean travels blinking into the light.
Auden’s ‘conservative dark’ is both literal and metaphoric, his ‘dense commuters’ likewise. During the 1930s, New York’s subway lines had been extended, creating an even larger, sprawling metropolitan area from which to draw its vast workforce, far removed in their homes and in their personal lives from the heart of the city, with its skyscrapers, its dives and its liberal writers and intellectuals with their fancy-schmancy ideas about life and work.
*
Having spent the past twenty-five years as a commuter – a ‘dense’ commuter, indeed, part of that great weight and volume of people flooding into the cities from our ticky-tacky houses in the suburbs, the great undifferentiated and undistinguished, just like the commuters in Eliot’s The Waste Land, who ‘flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet’ – let me speak up on our behalf.
*
I know that for Auden, ‘work’ was an important legitimating term in both his poetry and his career as a poet.
I know that throughout his life he was drawn towards the idea of ‘work’ as a form of salvation (‘he who works shall find our Fatherhood,’ he writes in ‘Christmas 1940’; ‘Only his verses / Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working,’ states ‘Voltaire at Ferney’).
I know also that in 1939, Auden’s friends and defenders found it useful to appeal to the idea of his ‘working’ abroad, rather than fleeing from England. The poet Louis MacNeice wrote that ‘Auden … working eight hours a day in New York, is getting somewhere.’
But where he was getting exactly – and what he was getting at – is another matter.
An artist is not a doer of deeds but a maker of things, a worker.
(Auden, ‘Genius and Apostle’)
I must admit, I do find it a little aggravating, writers going on about workers and working, because when one reads the biographies and the autobiographies, what surely strikes anyone with an actual job is that even the hardest-working authors are, frankly, lightweights and part-timers: Trollope, renowned for his determined working habits, and often held up as an exemplar with his little charts and his writing slope and his 1000 words per page, or whatever it was, used to put in just a couple of hours a day, which is less time than my grandfather used to put in on his vegetable patch. But Trollope also worked at the Post Office, people say – well, so did my granddad. Writing, it seems to me, is a business full of boasters and shirkers who talk a lot of nonsense about craft and technique, for example, but the truth is, in order to publish anything, you have to be prepared to bodge and to skimp; you have to accept that this, in the end, will just have to do. If you don’t, you’re Harold Brodkey. Writing is a form of work, but it is not the same as working: it’s nothing like being a wage-slave or a commuter. If you still believe that writers work hard – poets in particular – go and live with one for a week, and the next time they’re whining about their sad and difficult lives pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge while having another coffee-break and trying to decide which notebook size really suits, dash the cup from their lips and offer to swap their life of ease for your own twelve-hour days at the chalk-face/coal-face/screen-face under cheap fluorescent lighting and machine coffee, working with shifty, scheming and very probably psychopathic colleagues, and cry out to them, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest’ (Ecclesiastes 9:10), or something similar. That might get their attention, although it probably won’t: most writers, in my experience, are so wrapped up in their own dawdlings that it’d take a smack in the face with a piece of two-by-four to get them to sit up and take notice of the world outside.
(Clearly, I have issues, which is neither here nor there, but what’s perhaps interesting is how, during the course of writing this book, the idea of the ‘conservative dark’ has crept up on us and found its voice and expression: the emergence of the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’, the Brexit vote in the UK, the rise of Trump. The long shadow of the average man: excluded, derided, put upon, ‘dense’.)
*
By the time he was putting in his hours in New York, Auden had passed through his crude Marxian stage of thinking about work (‘“Work” is action forced on us by the will of another’), and he eventually developed an understanding of the idea of work derived from the finessing theories of Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition (1958), in which she differentiates between work and labour as the activities of ‘homo faber’ and ‘animal laborans’, with labour prescribed by our biological make-up and work distinguished as ‘the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle’.
Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god – not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths.
(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)
Arendt’s definitions provided both a philosophical justification for Auden’s view of himself as a worker and a philosophic language for him better to describe his notion of the poet as ‘homo faber’: in his 1932 essay ‘Writing’, he wrote, figuratively, ‘People write books because they enjoy it, as a carpenter enjoys making a cupboard’; in his 1967 T. S. Eliot Memorial lectures, he made the same point conceptually, echoing Arendt: ‘The artist is not a man of action but a maker, a fabricator of objects. To believe in the value of art is to believe that it is possible to make an object, be it an epic or a two-line epigram, which will remain permanently on hand in the world.’
*
As far as I know, Sigmund Freud never actually said whatever it was he was supposed to have said about the importance in people’s lives of love and work (lieben und arbeiten), but they are important, obviously, and they were important to Auden: work is a central feature of his work. Which marks him out not only among his contemporaries but even now. With a few notable exceptions, most writers don’t make a habit of writing about what’s at the centre of most people’s lives – which is work. (Not sex. Not God. They’re peripheral.)
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. […] Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one – if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses.
(Freud, Civilization and its Discontents)
(One of the most famous poems in the English language about work is Philip Larkin’s ‘Toads’ – ‘Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?’ etc. – and I have occasionally wondered if Larkin’s working toad comes from Auden, who introduced an unpleasant early-morning toad in a passage in New Year Letter: ‘the heart / As Zola said, must always start / The day by swallowing its toad / Of failure and disgust.’ Auden’s toad in fact comes not from Zola but from Chamfort – the quotation is correctly attributed in Auden’s Book of Aphorisms: ‘A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.’ Chamfort – Auden – Larkin. The toad as a metaphoric tool handed down through generations. It’s a nice idea, but I’ll leave that to the scholars.)
*
Anyway, in New York, for all his theorising, Auden was also learning the hard way how to make a living: lectures, teaching, reviewing.
(One of the pieces of work he undertook in 1939 was writing the libretto for an operetta by Benjamin Britten. Britten and Auden had worked together in England on documentary films, radio scripts and cabaret songs, but this was a much bigger project and it was Auden who settled on the subject matter: the story of an American folk hero, the lumberjack Paul Bunyan. The project gave Auden the opportunity to address what he called the ‘matter of America’: the conquering and taming of a continent. Paul Bunyan may be a minor work in Auden’s oeuvre, but it tells us much about how he conceived of his own activities: as a latter-day Bunyan or John Henry, hammer in hand. If you’re interested in Paul Bunyan, might I refer you to my learned essay on the subject in the programme notes to the Royal Opera House production in 1997: the closest I have ever come to writing an opera being, of course, writing about Auden’s opera.)
‘We’re pretty busy,’ he wrote to Mrs Dodds in March 1939. He was so busy, one might almost think of him as a martyr to his craft.
*
Which doesn’t mean he was a saint. (Donald Attwater, who revised Alban Butler’s standard eighteenth-century collection of The Lives of the Saints and who also translated Hippolyte Delehaye’s Legends of the Saints, helpfully points out that ‘The according of public veneration to a certain category of Christian men and women, and the giving to each of them of the appellation Saint, originated in the reverence given to martyrs.’)
What I mean is, Auden was self-sacrificing, in a very particular way.
The nineteenth century created the myth of the Artist as Hero, the man who sacrifices his health and happiness to his art and in compensation claims exemption from all social responsibilities and norms of behaviour.
(Auden, ‘Calm Even in the Catastrophe’)
Auden did not claim exemption from all social responsibilities and norms of behaviour – some, maybe. There is a compelling account of Auden’s many acts as a citizen in an article by Edward Mendelson, ‘The Secret Auden’, in which he lists some of the ways in which Auden made ‘unobtrusive gifts of time, money, and sympathy’. The list includes:
Basically, Auden did good: he did the right thing. (Also, you have to respect him for the respect he paid to others in their work. He was certainly no Studs Terkel – his poetry is not filled with the voices of working men and women – but when he had the opportunity to acknowledge his fellow workers, he did. ‘Let me take this opportunity’, he wrote in a piece for the New York Times on 18 March 1972, bidding farewell to New York, ‘to thank in particular Abe and his co-workers in the liquor store; Abe the tobacconist; On Lok, my laundryman; Joseph, Bernard and Maurice in the grocery store at Ninth and Second Avenue; Harold the druggist; John, my mailman; Francy from whom I buy my newspaper, and Charles from whom I buy seeds for my Austrian garden.’ Patronising? Maybe. Self-important? No. Generous? Yes.)
*
But he devoted himself above all to his work, which was poetry.
His friends and contemporaries tended to devote themselves to other things.
*
(Stephen Spender, for example, might be described as a poet who was too busy doing other interesting things – writing plays, autobiographies, journals, novels, translations and criticism; editing magazines, working for UNESCO, teaching, lecturing, and making friends with the famous – to have actually got round to writing any great poetry. In a letter to Spender in 1928, while they were still undergraduates at Oxford, Auden told him, ‘Stephen, you are just not trying.’ The truth is, he was probably trying too hard. Wading through the knee-deep Romanticism and the flood of poorly plumbed imitation Auden in his early verse, one eventually comes across a poem which stands out as a rock and a marker above all the others, the poem which begins:
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
The ‘truly great’ haunt, taunt and eventually dement Spender’s poetry, so that he ends up sounding like the sad old man down the pub with no money who’s always talking about his rich and famous friends. I’m definitely not W. H. Auden. But please God, I’m not Stephen Spender.)
Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.
(1 Corinthians 3:13)
*
For all its harping on fundamental themes, this stanza seems to me to date the poem rather: it’s maybe because the idea of commuters pouring into the city in the early morning seems so Eliot-y and early twentieth-century. The many changes in our living and working habits over the past eighty years are the consequence of all sorts of factors (globalisation, the rise of the corporation, the growth in mechanised production, the expansion of the service sector compared to the relative decline of manufacturing, the development of networked computers – you don’t need me to tell you this stuff), which have helped to redefine the shape and pattern of the average working life.
*
Or maybe it’s not the poem that’s dated at all, it’s just me that’s getting older. Maybe it’s because I am no longer an early-morning commuter but have become a helpless governor. (I am writing this, in fact, over a weekend, failing again to enjoy a weekend. My wife and children are out and I’m here with my laptop, a Wi-Fi connection and an inbox full of emails, repeating my morning vow: ‘I will not work this weekend.’ I always work at the weekend.)
*
Auden’s governors are who? Pilate? Faceless bureaucrats? Everyone’s enemies in admin? Whoever they are, they are facing some profound questions and difficulties.
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
These are perhaps my least favourite lines in my least favourite stanza in the whole poem. They seem to me banal, deficient and silly.
(Though I can understand the impulse. When I first left school I went to work for Jesus, preaching good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captive, testifying, as with great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus (Acts 4:33). I was also interested in restoring sight to the blind (Luke 4:18), casting out demons (Luke 9:1), making the lame walk (Matt. 15:31), cleansing lepers (Matt. 8:1–4), taking up poisonous serpents (Mark 16:18), feeding thousands (Luke 9:10–17) and raising the dead (John 11:1–43). I never quite managed to do any of those, fine ambitions though they are.)
Auden sounds here to me like a bad amateur theologian. In America he had started to read Kierkegaard, as well as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr – who were good, professional theologians – and he eventually became rather churchy. You can read all about it in the biographies: the late Christian Auden is another phase in his development. There’s no doubt he took it seriously.
But maybe in these lines he takes himself too seriously. Because the plea at the end of this stanza – basically, where are the healers? – rather implies that the poet might have an answer, which indeed he does. (The end of this stanza sets up the call to which the next is a response.)
*
Not that this is really a criticism. From where I’m standing, from my perspective, it’s rather good if the poem takes a bit of a dive. If I’ve learnt anything reading Auden, it’s how wearying unceasing brilliance can be, so much so that one cherishes any sign of weakness.
*
(Max Beerbohm, on Goethe in ‘Quia Imperfectum’: ‘A man whose career was glorious without intermission, decade after decade, does sorely try our patience.’)
*
This is an important lesson, which I have to learn again and again, in different ways with different writers.
(I’ve just been reading Death in Venice, for example, in the car, outside the school, waiting to pick up the children, on an unreasonably warm afternoon, and I am suddenly struck by a thought. Frustrated and disappointed by the many purple passages, the descriptions of sun and heat and the dream and the vision, it occurs to me, after thinking, momentarily, how much better the book would be without them, that the book would be nothing without them, or less than it is. The imperfections – which are considerable in this case – constitute the effect of reading the whole. In fact, they almost justify the rest.)
*
There are always faults and quirks in any work of art, there are always insufficiencies: art necessarily fails. Indeed, in a sense all art arises from error. (This has long been a philosophical objection to the artistic enterprise: Plato, in The Republic, contends that the ideal civilisation would banish artists because they distort the truth. And it’s true, they do. We can only make art for the same reason we can make mistakes: which is because we can make the world as it is not. Art is, fundamentally, a misprision. An impression. A false impression. A confabulation. A concoction. A fiction.)
You don’t have to be Hannah Arendt – although it might help – to see that the potential in failure, in deceit and in lying, is also the potential in art. In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1968), Arendt claims that ‘our ability to lie – but not necessarily our ability to tell the truth – belongs among the few obvious, demonstrable data that confirm human freedom’.
If I want Auden to be Auden, I have to let him go about his work.
If he wants to preach, sure, he can preach.