Which brings us inevitably to this stanza.
The stanza.
The one that everyone talks about.
And I mean everyone.
I bump into an old friend on the street. They are not a bookish type, not at all. They ask me what I’m doing. I say I’m – still – writing a book about W. H. Auden. ‘We must love one another or die, eh?’ they say.
I’m talking to another friend, again definitely not a bookish type. They ask me how the book is going. I say fine. They ask, have I read Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie: they’ve just read it and it mentions Auden. They lend me the book. It’s a sort of self-help memoir in which Albom writes about his trips to see his wise old professor, who’s called Morrie:
‘Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, “Love each other or perish.”’
‘Love each other or perish.’ I wrote it down. Auden said that?
No, Auden didn’t say that. Auden wrote, ‘We must love one another or die.’
*
You can find these seven words – ‘We must love one another or die’ – quoted, misquoted, used, misused, discussed and pored over by literary critics, literary historians, in advertising and marketing materials, by writers and poets, and indeed by ‘the sensual man-in-the-street’. There’s really nothing you can say about ‘We must love one another or die’ that hasn’t been said before. Nonetheless.
We must discuss ‘We must love one another or die’, or – well, I suppose that’s the question, isn’t it?
What’s the alternative?
Or maybe, what are the consequences?
Auden’s ‘or’ could mean both, or either.
*
I sometimes imagine meeting Auden and asking him about ‘We must love one another or die’.
He says he has nothing to say to me about it, thank you, that he hasn’t already said.
(The critic Hugh Kenner, who was very skilled at the art of winning friends and influencing people, recalls in his preface to The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (1960) that ‘At my one meeting with Mr. Eliot, I offered to complete a book on his literary career without pestering him.’ When Kenner did inevitably pester, Eliot offered him just three pieces of information about his work: ‘a summary of the contents of the Ur-Waste Land, so far as he could remember them’, ‘a gloss on the word “lot” in Whispers of Immortality’, and the third, reveals Kenner, ‘The third had reference to cheese.’ Hard cheddar, perhaps?)
*
Over the years I have jotted down my notes and remarks on Auden’s poetry in its multiple versions in multiple books, and on photocopies, purply old mimeographs and Gestetnered sheets – and I can safely say that the lines around this one stanza, in every book and on every copy, look like an Ordnance Survey map, one of those really detailed ones, at a scale of 1:25,000.
*
(Lots of people underline and squiggle in books. I’m hardly alone. You probably do it yourself. Coleridge outdid all of us with his effusions, a habit which almost developed into a second career: his marginalia were published during his lifetime; they were a source of income. It’s a shame we can’t all be Coleridge. Wordsworth, on the other hand, could hardly be bothered to write in books at all – and he cut his pages with a buttery knife. Merely contemplating the effort involved in Coleridge’s note-making is overwhelming: the first part alone of the marginalia in the Bollingen Collected Works, volume 12, in three parts, consists of 879 pages. Coleridge was a bit like the graffiti artist who tags every wall and gable end in the neighbourhood – although obviously he was insinuating himself between the pages and into the margins of, say, Leibniz rather than throwing up his initials in six-foot-tall bubble-writing in a piss-stinking underpass. Personally, I have defaced and obscured the pages of my editions of Auden’s books with so many notes in pen and pencil, and with so many faded Post-its, that I can now barely read them. I’m writing on Auden, literally, because it creates an illusion of intimacy: it’s also a means of talking to myself, and a way, in the end, of erasing Auden. My Auden marginalia are a record of my own long, slow, sad self-development.)
*
Note, in my tiny handwriting, in the margins of ‘September 1, 1939’ in my copy of Robin Skelton’s Poetry of the Thirties, which I used when I was teaching at the West London Institute of Further Education, from a tip-off by my friend David: ‘John Ashbery, “Strange Things Happen at Night”, from And the Stars Were Shining (1994), “We must double up, or die.”’
Note, in my copy of the Collected Poems: ‘Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.’ It’s a book I still have on the shelf. I look it up. In a chapter called ‘Parenthesis’, Barnes offers a brilliant short discussion of ‘We must love one another or die’ and the meaning of love.
Note, on photocopied teaching notes, period and provenance unknown: ‘Mention Jarrell.’ (This perhaps refers, self-regardingly, to my one and only contribution to accurate literary scholarship, my article ‘Flouting Papa: Randall Jarrell and W. H. Auden’, in Auden Studies 3: ‘In Solitude, for Company’: W. H. Auden After 1940, in which I point out that Auden’s crucial revision of ‘We must love one another or die’ to ‘We must love one another and die’ may have been prompted by a passage in Randall Jarrell’s novel Pictures from an Institution, published in 1954, predating Auden’s correction by a year. As my children would say, big whoop.)
*
‘All I have is a voice.’ I have written in the margin of one of my copies of the poem, ‘all I have is voices’ (underlined three times).
As a rhetorical device, quotation can serve to accommodate, to incorporate, to falsify (when wrongly or even rightly paraphrased), to accumulate, to defend, or to conquer – but always, even when in the form of a passing allusion, it is a reminder that other writing serves to displace present writing, to a greater or lesser extent, from its absolute, central, proper place.
(Edward Said, Beginnings)
All we have is our voice: and that voice usually belongs to someone else. Freud, in the Strachey translation of Civilization and its Discontents, remarks that ‘Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person’ – persons, one might say, underlining it at least three times. (The philosopher Stanley Cavell has an interesting remark about the voice in his autobiography, A Pitch of Philosophy. Finding one’s voice implies, he writes, the ‘standing threat of not finding it, or not recognizing it, or of its not being acknowledged’. Finding one’s voice also raises the question of what Cavell calls ‘plagiarism in human identity’, the ‘self-theft of culture’ in which the discovery of one’s voice becomes an act of vampirism. I’m very conscious that what I am doing is sucking the lifeblood from Auden.)
*
On another copy of the poem, I have simply put a question mark after the word ‘voice’. I think what I meant to ask is, what we do mean by ‘voice’, or what might it possibly involve: pitch, pace, volume, pronunciation, stress, intonation, etc. And also, what did Auden mean by ‘voice’? We know that he was highly attuned to the oral/aural/physical aspects of poetry. ‘No poetry […] which when mastered is not better heard than read is good poetry,’ he announced in the introduction to The Poet’s Tongue in 1935, and in later life, as he honed his skills on the poetry-reading circuit, he re-emphasised this essential performative aspect of verse:
One can never grasp a poem one is reading unless one hears the actual sounds of the words, and its meaning is the outcome of a dialogue between the words of the poem and the response of whoever is listening to them.
(Auden, Secondary Worlds)
And again and again:
The characteristic style of ‘Modern’ poetry is an intimate tone of voice, the speech of one person addressing one person, not a large audience; whenever a modern poet raises his voice he sounds phony.
(Auden, ‘The Poet & The City’)
Even the most formal and elevated styles of poetry are more conditioned by the spoken tongue, the language really used by the men of that country, than by anything else.
(Auden, ‘American Poetry’)
As for his actual voice? ‘He had the power’, according to Stephen Spender in World Within World, ‘to make everything sound Audenesque, so that if he said in his icy voice, separating each word from the next as though on pincers, lines of Shakespeare or of Housman, each sounded simply like Auden.’ Stravinsky, in the chapter on ‘Writers’ in his Dialogues and a Diary, provides a kind of musical notation of his famous friends’ conversational styles. Aldous Huxley, ‘too serenely high in tessitura’, is represented in Stravinsky’s notes as a trill, ‘ppp’ and an octave above the stave. Auden’s speech is rendered by a line with peaks and troughs, as on an oscillograph. We know Auden wasn’t exactly mad keen on his voice himself. (‘Who,’ he asks in one of his late little ‘Shorts’, ‘upon hearing / a tape of his speaking voice, / is not revolted?’ This revulsion, by the way, is not uncommon, because of the limited frequency response of recording and transmitting systems. I can never really ‘hear’ my voice.)
*
In his later life, on the circuit, Auden’s voice became his instrument, a crucial part of his performance, his shtick. (At the Poetry International Festivals, for example, held at the South Bank Centre in London in the late 1960s and 1970s, Auden was the star. The Festivals were intended as an expression of global unity in which poets, famous and undiscovered, from all around the world, were allotted an equal time – twenty minutes – to contribute their words to a poetic ‘universal language’. Between 1967 and 1973, Auden appeared at every Poetry International – the only poet to make such regular appearances – usually reading on the last night and drawing capacity crowds. Joseph Brodsky, who appeared with him at the Festival in 1972, recalled that Auden ‘leaned on the lectern, and for a good half hour he filled the room with the lines he knew by heart. If I ever wished for time to stop, it was then, inside that large dark room on the south bank of the Thames.’ I wish I could have been there. Last year my eldest son graduated from college in a ceremony held at the South Bank Centre and I wondered if Auden had ever crossed the walkway on the Hungerford Bridge – if so, this was probably the closest I’d ever come to walking in his footsteps.)
*
On another copy, next to ‘All I have is a voice’, I have written ‘Really?’ All I have is a voice? Clearly not. I have a lot of things apart from – in addition to – my voice.
*
And finally, on yet another copy, a note, a snippet from Carpenter’s Biography – but what a snippet. Carpenter is discussing Auden’s role in Germany after the war as a Bombing Research Analyst in the Morale Division of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, during which time he visited concentration-camp survivors in a hospital in Munich. In a letter to his friend Elizabeth Mayer he wrote, ‘I was prepared for their appearance but not for their voices: they whisper like gnomes.’
*
As for the rest of the stanza, my notes are a terrible rat’s nest, with multiple lines of connection that make no sense, or lead nowhere, or run off into long irrelevant detours, worse even than the rest.
From what I can make out, and without wishing to duplicate the work of others:
For ‘folded lie’, I have written ‘Newspaper?’, ‘Fuller?’, and then page references to various articles in the New York Times and The Times for 1939.
For ‘The romantic lie in the brain’, I have written, most clearly, ‘See Mendelson, “Against the Devourer”’ (which refers to a chapter in his book Later Auden).
For ‘the sensual man-in-the-street’, I have written ‘the average man’, ‘the reasonable man in English law?’, ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus?’ and ‘Quetelet’ (which of course refers to Adolphe Quetelet, and which relates to about two months’ enjoyably pointless work in which I set out to discover the source of the phrase ‘the sensual man-in-the-street’ and all its possible cognates and related terms, tracing them back to this Quetelet, who of course I’d never heard of, but who turned out to be a classic example of the nineteenth-century universal man – a poet, astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist who founded and directed the Brussels Observatory, was the permanent secretary of the Brussels Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts, and somehow still found time to translate Byron into French and to write opera libretti – and who, in his book Anthropométrie, ou Mesure des différentes facultés de l’homme (1870), claimed that by using statistical charts and tables of growth showing the height and weight and other aspects and dimensions of select groups (the chest measurements of Scottish soldiers, for example), it was possible to arrive at ‘the average of […] individual constants […] that I assign to a fictitious being whom I call the average man’, or, in his words, ‘l’homme moyen’).
For ‘the lie of Authority’: again, a lot of nonsense mostly, recycling other people’s ideas, but perhaps most amusingly, a recent note that reads, ‘Sleaford Mods’ “Kebab Spider”?’, referencing a song which has absolutely nothing to do with Auden, but which I have been listening to on repeat in the final redraft of the redrafts of the rewrites, and which has the refrain ‘Who knew, who knew, who knew / They got the experts in’.
For ‘Whose buildings grope the sky’: it’s odd, I note, having the word ‘grope’ in the stanza of the poem that is talking about love. (‘Auden back in the dive?’ reads my note.) And then a reference to a book by someone called Sheila Sullivan, Falling in Love: A History of Torment and Enchantment (1999), which clearly caught my eye: ‘The sex organs engorge, the skin tingles […] the eyes dilate, the heart beats faster, the rate of breathing rises, and it is possible that the excited body also puts out aphrodisiac chemical odours.’
For ‘And no one exists alone’: I have copied out by hand a quote from Jerome J. McGann’s book The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985), which is a much better book than its title suggests, in which he defines poetry as ‘experience’ and ‘event’:
Poetry is, from the individual’s point of view, a particular type of human experience; from a social point of view, however, it is an event. Criticism studies these experiences and events in their successive and interrelated apparitions. A work of poetry is not a thing or an object, nor should criticism conceive it as such; it is the result of an interactive network of productive people and forces.
And next to that I’ve written ‘Bruno Latour’ – a reference, presumably, to Actor–Network Theory.
For ‘Hunger allows no choice’: one word, ‘Hamsun’, referring to Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian author of the novel Hunger, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an enthusiastic Nazi, to whom Auden – fair play to him – wrote a scathing open letter, which was published in the magazine Common Sense in August 1940. I have a copy of the letter – from the Bodleian? the British Library? – in a folder marked ‘Hunger Allows No Choice’. The folder contains absolutely nothing else.
Sir:
Where you are or what you are doing, I have no idea. Doubtless you are physically safe; having played your little literary part in their annihilation of Norwegian liberty and the destruction of Norwegian cities, your new masters, the ‘youths with the jewelled eyes,’ may be content for a while at least, to let you be. Unless a realization of what you have done has made you afraid to be alone, you may, for all I know, have retired once more to that farm which the proceeds of a literary career, that might have been more honourable but could not have been more successful, has enabled you to purchase.
In the margins of my copy of this letter I have written a single word – which I could have written a thousand times on a thousand of these documents relating to Auden:
‘Yes!’