The only way to atone for the sin of writing is to annihilate what is written. But that can be done only by the author; destruction leaves that which is essential intact. I can, however, tie negation so closely to affirmation that my pen gradually effaces what it has written. In so doing it accomplishes, in a word, what is generally accomplished by ‘time’ – which, from among its multifarious edifices, allows only the traces of death to subsist. I believe that the secret of literature is there, and that a book is not a thing of beauty unless it is skilfully adorned with the indifference of the ruins.
(Georges Bataille, L’Abbé C, trans. Philip A. Facey)
I am teaching Chekhov, the short stories. The students are enjoying Chekhov: the pathos. We’re looking at the endings, the way in which Chekhov leaves the outcomes uncertain and the characters in motion:
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long way to go, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
(‘The Lady with the Dog’)
And when he walked back to the tavern, looking at the houses of the rich publicans, cattle-dealers, and blacksmiths, he reflected how nice it would be to steal by night into some rich man’s house!
(‘The Horse Stealers’)
The bass was singing in the hall. A little while after, Kryukov’s racing droshky was bumping along the dusty road.
(‘Mire’)
They did not heed each other; each of them was living in his own life. The sheep were pondering, too.
(‘Happiness’)
No one answered him, and they walked on in silence with drooping heads.
(‘The New Villa’)
‘September 1, 1939’ does not end like a Chekhov short story.
*
The New York World’s Fair took place between April 1939 and October 1940, occupying more than a thousand acres at Flushing Meadows Park in Queens: it attracted more than 44 million visitors. According to the official guide,
The eyes of the Fair are on the future – not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines.
To its visitors the Fair will say: ‘Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made. They are all interesting and much effort has been expended to lay them before you in an interesting way. Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future.’
The most popular exhibit at the Fair was a diorama designed by Norman Bel Geddes and sponsored by General Motors: it was called Futurama, a vision of the United States in 1960. Visitors to Futurama were seated on moving benches with built-in speakers which guided them through the exhibit. The magazine Business Week described it thus:
More than 30,000 persons daily, the show’s capacity, inch along the sizzling pavement in long queues until they reach the chairs which transport them to a tourist’s paradise. It unfolds a prophecy of cities, towns, and countrysides served by a comprehensive road system. Somewhere in the rolling davenport a disembodied angel explains the elysium.
(‘Motoring at 100 M.P.H’, Business Week, 29 September 1939)
In the final stanza of his poem, Auden becomes the disembodied voice of the elysium.
This is his vision.
This is Futurama, Auden style.
The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.
(Northrop Frye, The Great Code)
He was, it has to be said, always rather prone to this sort of thing – the big summing-up, th’angelic choir rejoicing, the great glittering generalities. In a sense, it doesn’t matter what he did with the line ‘We must love one another or die’, because in the end the whole poem swells to become a sort of secular sermon. It’s all a bit too much.
(George Orwell pointed out that in Auden’s earlier work there was always a bit of ‘an atmosphere of uplift’, and it never really goes away. ‘Teach the free man how to praise,’ Auden writes in ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. In ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, he announces that ‘There is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.’ After his first meeting with Marianne Moore in 1939, he wrote her a thank-you note that was also a fan letter, in which he enthused that ‘Like Rilke, you really do “praise”.’)
*
One might, if one were so inclined, trace a history of twinkliness in Auden’s work, which finds its fullest expression here in the image of the ironic points of light flashing out messages from the Just, but which can be found shining bright in his very first surviving poem, written in 1922, aged just fifteen:
The twinkling lamps stream up the hill
Past the farm and past the mill
Right at the top of the road one sees
A round moon like a Stilton cheese.
(Auden, ‘California’)
You get a hint of it also in ‘A Walk After Dark’ (1948), from his collection Nones:
But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgement waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.
These affirming flames were clearly an important part of Auden’s vision of the world.
*
(I remember, I hadn’t been to a big stadium concert in maybe twenty years and then I took my daughter to see Ed Sheeran, and towards the end of the concert he asked everyone to get out their phones and I thought, ‘Does he want us to call someone?’, but of course it was for everyone to switch on the lights on their phones: communication devices used as illumination devices. It was a reminder that networks of illumination and communication are also part of a vast network of control, the momentary flicker on our screens binding us together, but also connecting us to our provider.)
*
Not that Auden invented affirming flames, of course: the contrast between dark and light representing the difference between death and life and solitude and community, et cetera et cetera, is as old as literature itself. The Book of Genesis begins with darkness upon the face of the deep, until God lights it all up; and in John’s Gospel, ‘The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not’; and you can find the same sorts of image complex at work in Shakespeare, and in Milton – and in Alexander Pope. I don’t think any scholars have identified Alexander Pope and his vision of ‘Universal Darkness’ in The Dunciad as a possible source for Auden’s ironic points of light, but I wonder, could they be? Might they be?
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primæval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
As Argus’ eyes by Hermes’ wand opprest,
Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
Maybe.
But then visions of light, in flashes and fires, come streaming everywhere in literature.
I’ve just been teaching Conrad, Heart of Darkness:
The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman light-house, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway – a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
And Conan Doyle, ‘The Sign of Four’:
It was a September evening, and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light – sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more. I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan’s manner that she was suffering from the same feeling. Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences. He held his open note-book upon his knee, and from time to time he jotted down figures and memoranda in the light of his pocket-lantern.
I could go on. There are lots of other examples.
No more other examples, suggest my beta-readers – enough now of your affirming flames.
*
(My sister, who lives in Australia, persuades me I should buy a barbecue. I don’t particularly like barbecues, either the food or the event. Christopher Isherwood tripped over a barbecue once and got an infection. I can’t imagine Auden at a barbecue. I say, ‘We have never had a barbecue,’ which is not really an argument. My sister says, ‘You’re a long time dead,’ which is not an argument either. But, nevertheless. We go to Homebase and buy a cheap one. ‘The children will love it,’ she says. I burn the chicken on the barbecue, because I’m too busy doing other things, like looking after the children. ‘You have to watch it the whole time,’ says my sister. Really? ‘The whole time?’ ‘The whole time. It’s not like an oven. You have to watch for flames.’ I may not be cut out for barbecuing.)
There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.
(Auden, quoting G. K. Chesterton, A Certain World)
The general atmosphere of Auden’s work? The pattern and structure of growth? The flora and fauna?
It’s all affirming flames, wherever you look.
At different times and in different places, Auden’s landscape of ideas features mystical experiences; and vivid apprehensions of nature; and longings for a lost Eden and a New Jerusalem; and of course the famous Vision of Dame Kind that he defines in his essay ‘The Protestant Mystics’ (‘The basic experience is an overwhelming conviction that the objects confronting him have a numinous significance and importance, that the existence of everything he is aware of is holy. And the basic emotion is one of innocent joy, though this joy can include, of course, a reverent dread’); and ‘There is less grief than wonder on the whole,’ he writes in his poem ‘Objects’; and it’s all good, good, it’s all all good.
And politicians love this sort of stuff.
*
‘I have always thought’, Auden wrote in 1962, ‘one might learn much about the cultural history of a country by going through the speeches made by its public men over a certain period, in legislatures, in law courts, and at official banquets, and making a list of the books quoted from without attribution.’
*
Auden’s words have been used without attribution in many speeches, most notably and disturbingly by American politicians: Anthony Hecht points out that Peggy Noonan borrowed the ‘points of light’ for the campaign speeches of President George Bush, and Edward Mendelson recalls a choice example from the 1960s when the phrase ‘We must love one another or die’ was adapted for a campaign advertisement for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 election campaign. (In England, Auden’s words have tended to be put to rather more prosaic public uses. The 1993 Annual Report for the Transport Users’ Consultative Committee for Western England, for example, recorded the suggested development of twenty-eight park-and-ride stations providing a shuttle service to urban centres, and made its point with a quotation from Auden.)
*
(President Roosevelt, in his address at the opening of the World’s Fair, echoing the official line, added a few twinkles of his own that sound just like bad Auden: ‘The eyes of the United States are fixed on the future. Our wagon is hitched to a star. But it is a star of good will, a star of progress for mankind, a star of greater happiness and less hardship, a star of international good will, and above all, a star of peace. May the months to come carry us forward in the rays of that hope.’ Those rays of hope carried forth until 7 December 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor finally brought the United States into World War II.)
*
It’s precisely because Auden does not specify who are the Just, or what is the exact nature of their messages, that politicians have been able to borrow his phrases for their own purposes – you can take the words and bend them and shape them according to your needs.
The time may have come for me to claim them for my own purposes.
I suppose that’s what I’ve been doing here all along.
National identity can be a benign influence only if it is tolerant of ambivalence, or multiple affiliation. Individuals who simultaneously are English, British, European, and have some overall sense of global citizenship, may regard one of these as their overriding identity, but this need not prevent them accepting the others too. Xenophobic nationalism is the opposite: the nation is ‘one, indivisible’. It is culturally protectionist, assuming the nation has a ‘destiny’ – that it is not only set apart from but superior to other nations. But nations don’t have destinies and all nations, without exception, are ‘mongrel nations’. The nation is not something given in nature, and whatever remote connections they may have to earlier ethnic communities, nations are a product of relatively recent history. They have all been built from a diversity of cultural fragments.
(Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy)
We want to participate, we want to debate, we want to make our voices heard in public, and we want to have a possibility to determine the political course of our country. Since the country is too big for all of us to come together and determine our fate, we need a number of public spaces within it. […] [I]f only ten of us are sitting around a table, each expressing his opinion, each hearing the opinions of others, then a rational formation of opinion can take place through the exchange of opinions. There, too, it will become clear which one of us is best suited to present our view before the next higher council, where in turn our view will be clarified through the influence of other views, revised, or proved wrong. […] In this direction I see the possibility of forming a new concept of the state.
(Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic)
But just a reminder – to myself, as much as to anyone, before we get carried away with all this – a reminder about the exact nature of Auden’s points of light.
They’re ironic.
In his book The Alluring Problem, the poet D. J. Enright suggests that irony provides us with ‘a way of making statements, not unlike that of poetry, which through the unexpectedness and the avoidance of head-on assertion had a stronger chance of discomposing, if not winning over, the person addressed’.
An ironic point of light might be ironic in a number of senses: it might, for example, be signalling an ironic message.
A secret message.
A nod and a wink.
Whatever it is, it is worth bearing in mind that the messages exchanged by the Just are not necessarily head-on assertions. They’re not statements. They’re ironic points of light.
In the late fifties a wire-service transmitted a greatly exaggerated report of Auden’s death, and one college organized a memorial service before a correction arrived, reading ‘Auden not dead.’
(Edward Mendelson, W. H. Auden, 1907–1973)
If you’re really looking for the living flame of Auden and his work, I suggest looking elsewhere, away from the bright shiny lights of the Just.
*
(Edward Lear, in Auden’s poem, ‘became a land’, and Auden himself has become a street – actually three streets named after him in Austria – and there are various memorials dotted around the world. A tablet in Christ Church Cathedral, another in Westminster Abbey, plaques at 1 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn, and at the hotel in Vienna where he died. According to Derek Walcott, ‘A great writer can make even tourism happen,’ and during the 1950s, according to Harold Norse, in the wake of Auden, the island of Ischia became ‘an Anglo-American literary colony’, a popular literary hang-out. These days, you can also visit Auden’s house in Kirchstetten, which is the closest thing there is to an actual Auden Museum – Wienerstrasse 32, 3062 Kirchstetten; visits by appointment only – which really is ironic, because although Auden was awarded the Staatspreis, the most prestigious Austrian literary prize, he knew little if anything of Austrian literature, and Austrian writers were little interested in him. Asked if he wanted to meet Auden, the novelist Thomas Bernhard politely declined. There should really be an Auden museum on 52nd Street.)
*
But never mind the big statements and the monuments: by far the most astonishing aspect of Auden’s afterlife has been the continual flood of poems to, for and about him. Little flashes and flames.
It’s like people lighting candles for Jim Morrison at Père-Lachaise.
*
The poems addressed to Auden are remarkable for both their abundance and their variety. Auden’s work features in other people’s poems in a number of ways, as one might expect – through allusion, quotation, imitation, parody and pastiche. Quotations from Auden occur as prompts to poems, within poems and in the margins of poems, as epigraphs and as notes. Some poets, meanwhile, use Auden’s own forms as a means of addressing him: Anna Adams’s A Reply to Intercepted Mail (1979), for example, is a verse-letter to Auden in the rhyme-royal of his own ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. Francis Spufford’s ‘A Letter to Wystan Auden, from Iceland’ is the same, as is David Grant’s Letter to W. H. Auden (1993).
The most common tributes to Auden are the personal poems from friends and admirers wishing him birthday greetings: Edmund Wilson and Louise Bogan’s ‘To Wystan Auden on his Birthday’, Geoffrey Grigson’s ‘To Wystan Auden, 1967’, Charles Causley’s ‘Letter from Jericho’, William Meredith’s ‘Talking Back’.
After his death, there were poems recording and remembering encounters: Anne Rouse’s ‘Memo to Auden’, Lincoln Kirstein’s ‘Siegfriedslage’, Roy Fuller’s ‘Visiting the Great’.
His death also prompted a number of elegiac summings-up and assessments, and poets have continued to mine this vein: Robert Greacen’s ‘Auden’, Derek Walcott’s ‘Eulogy to W. H. Auden’, Clive James’s ‘What Happened to Auden’, Elizabeth Jennings’s ‘Elegy for W. H. Auden’, Karl Shapiro’s ‘W.H.A.’, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Alphabet for Auden’. Other poets have written indirectly in praise of his inspiring influence (Richard Wilbur’s ‘For W. H. Auden’, Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Dedication’), or about their discovery of his work (Christy Brown’s ‘W. H. Auden’).
But if I had to pick my favourite? The pilot light?
James Schuyler – the great overlooked Schuyler, the greatest, in my opinion, of the New York School of poets, who worked for a while as Auden’s assistant – produced what I think is the finest elegy for Auden.
It is sprawling, delightful, and sad.
And this is just a fragment.
So much
to remember, so little to
say: that he liked martinis
and was greedy about the wine?
I always thought he would live
to a great age. He did not.
Wystan, kind man and great poet,
goodbye.