The reason (artistic) I left England […] was precisely to stop me writing poems like ‘September 1, 1939’, the most dishonest poem I have ever written.
(Auden, letter to Naomi Mitchison, 1 April 1967)
‘September 1, 1939’.
If you know anything about the poem – and you may well know more about it than I do, in which case I should warn you, this is probably not the book for you, it’s a book for my friends and my cousins, for everyone who has ever said to me, ‘W. H. Who? September the What?’ – you will know that it was a poem that over the course of his lifetime Auden variously revised and then disowned. It is a poem with a long and troubled history. It is a poem that has undergone a lot of changes. Perhaps that’s part of its appeal: it is a poem with another life, an afterlife. It is a poem, like a person, that comes with a lot of baggage.
Even the title changed. We may know it as ‘September 1, 1939’, but on first publication, in the American magazine the New Republic, on 18 October 1939, it was ‘September – 1939’; in Auden’s collection Another Time (1940) it then became simply number four in a sequence of ‘Occasional Poems’, thus, ‘IV. September 1, 1939’; and not until subsequent versions and revisions did it appear as both ‘1st September 1939’ and ‘September 1, 1939’.
Auden had a strong habit of revision. (He had strong habits generally: drug habits, writing habits.) He liked to change the titles of his poems, just as he liked to change all other aspects of his poems: ‘Palais des Beaux Arts’ became ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’; ‘The Territory of the Heart’ became ‘Please Make Yourself at Home’ became ‘Like a Vocation’; ‘The Leaves of Life’ became ‘The Riddle’; et cetera, et cetera; the list is very long.
Not everyone approved of all these rethinks and rewrites, of course. A lot of people thought them arrogant, or foolish, or merely eccentric. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell thought Auden’s revisions were not only arrogant, foolish and eccentric; he thought they were morally reprehensible: ‘Auden is attempting to get rid of a sloughed-off self by hacking it up and dropping the pieces into a bathtub full of lye,’ he wrote, figuring Auden both as a snake, and as an acid-bath murderer.
(If not the greatest critic of poetry in the twentieth century, Randall Jarrell was certainly the greatest reviewer of poetry in the twentieth century, and to be a great reviewer of anything you need to be given to peculiarly vivid language: Clive James writing on television was given to peculiarly vivid language; Anthony Lane writing on films in the New Yorker; Dorothy Parker; Virginia Woolf, oddly. But Jarrell was undoubtedly the greatest, the most vivid of all, and he had what one might generously describe as a love–hate relationship with Auden. According to fellow poet John Berryman, Jarrell knew Auden’s mind ‘better than anyone ought to be allowed to understand anyone else’s’, even when Auden was in two minds.)
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But those tiny little adjustments to the title of this poem, do they really matter?
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Yes.
No.
Of course.
Not really.
Same as anything else.
Does it matter if you leave out that little pinch of salt in your recipe? Would it matter if I was called Samson, instead of Sansom, or Sampson? Simpson? Ivan, not Ian? Ivor? Ifor? Oscar?
(Some years ago, invited to give a reading at a library, I was introduced as C. J. Sansom – the bestselling author of historical crime fiction, and no relation. When I explained that I was not, alas, C. J. Sansom, two women in the audience got up and left. Which was fine, really. The other half of the audience remained.)
I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. JOHNSON: ‘There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’
(Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1791)
If one were a certain kind of critic I suppose one might note that a poem titled ‘September 1, 1939’ clearly, deliberately recalls Yeats’s poem ‘September 1913’, signalling that this is a poem written in response to another. (In his poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Auden calls Yeats ‘silly like us’, which he certainly was: silly like us for believing that we might be able to simplify and sum things up.)
One would also note that a poem titled ‘September 1, 1939’ clearly announces itself as an American poem: Americans write Month/Day/Year; in the UK we normally write Day/Month/Year.
One might note further that to use a date as a title perhaps suggests that the poem might be something like a diary entry, setting certain expectations and a tone. It suggests that the poem might have been composed or conceived on that specific date, for example – such as Wordsworth’s famous sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ (which was in fact originally published as ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1803’, which rather suggests that it might be foolish simply to read dates in poems as facts in a poet’s life, not least because the actual date of Wordsworth’s crossing Westminster Bridge, according to his sister Dorothy’s journal entry, was 31 July 1802).
(One might speculate further, parenthetically, that a minor artist is someone who is very precisely not prepared to risk breaking and bending the rules a little. A definition of the minor artist – the non-Wordsworth, the un-Auden – is that they are not prepared to fiddle around with inconvenient details like dates and facts and figures. As everyone knows, Tennyson got it wrong in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ when he wrote, ‘Into the jaws of Death, / Into the mouth of Hell / Rode the six hundred’ – it was closer to 700 who rode into the jaws of death. But when challenged on the point, Tennyson is said to have remarked, ‘Six is much better than seven hundred metrically, so keep it.’ Poets are not historians, or statisticians.)
One might suggest, furthermore, that a poem whose title appears to commemorate some famous historic event is not necessarily a poem written with the sole intent of commemorating that event. Even Yeats, that great commemorator, who loved to use dates for titles – ‘September 1913’, written after the Dublin lock-out, and ‘Easter, 1916’ – wasn’t writing manifestos or reports. The titles may be significant but they are hardly a full explanation. Yeats’s poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, for example, was originally titled ‘Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World’, which suggests exactly the kind of meandering activity that is going on in much of his work, which is then given shape and focus by the addition of a date and title, rather than proceeding in a straight line either from or towards it.
Which might lead one, finally, towards the conclusion that though a title may appear to come first, very often it may in fact come last: a poem’s title may be a post hoc rationalisation. It might also be a false sign.
Or, ultimately, just a title.
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Anyway.
I’m not that kind of critic.
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September 1, 1939, as it happens, was a Friday.
Auden had just returned to New York from his road-trip honeymoon with his young lover Chester Kallman. For almost three months – ‘the eleven happiest weeks of my life’ – they had criss-crossed the nation, from New York to Washington, New Orleans, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada and on to California. ‘C is getting quite a tan’, Auden told Chester’s father, ‘and I scribble away.’
But now the summer of love was over. ‘At 32½ I suppose I shall not change physically very much for some time except in weight which is now 154lbs […] I am happy, but in debt […] I have no job. My visa is out of order. There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much.’
(There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much. It’s reassuring, isn’t it, that like us – whatever else was happening – Auden had stuff on. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down, and it was the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a New World Order, and I was in my early twenties and I was working as a farm labourer up in the Craigantlet Hills, just outside Belfast, and I’d listen to the news on the radio in the morning, but it was like listening to news from another planet: I was busy; I had work to do; I had stuff on. It’s the whole point of Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which is about Brueghel’s painting The Fall of Icarus: ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.’ It turns out that I have spent a lifetime walking dully along, unable and unwilling to recognise the extraordinary and the other while it’s happening all around me. Like Auden’s description of the dogs in his poem, I have simply ambled on, leading my doggy life. Attending to Auden is probably the closest I’ve ever come to stopping and noticing something truly amazing, an actual Icarus, a boy falling out of the sky.)
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On the long Greyhound bus journey back to New York on Tuesday, 29 August, Auden wrote to a friend in England, ‘There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other …’
In fact, people knew already: everybody knew already.
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In his novel Coming up for Air, published in June 1939, George Orwell has his narrator remark:
I can see the war that’s coming […] There are millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in pubs, bus drivers and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet.
Auden may have been enjoying his holiday in the sun, but things had been cracking and collapsing for some time.
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‘Europe’, writes Antony Beevor in his panoramic history The Second World War (2012), ‘did not stumble into war on 1 September 1939.’ She had been walking steadily towards it for years. In The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, H. G. Wells had predicted a total war by 1940: ‘The tension had risen to a point at which disaster seemed like relief and Europe was free to tear itself to fragments.’
The fragmentation had not begun months or years before: it had begun decades before.
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A. J. P. Taylor, in his account in The Origins of the Second World War (1961), claimed that a second world war ‘had been implicit since the moment when the first war ended’: it became explicit at exactly 4.30 a.m. on 1 September 1939, when the German panzer divisions which had been gathering on the Polish border began their advance, and the first air raids began. By the time the Soviets invaded northern China in September 1945 – the last campaign of the Second World War – almost 50 million people throughout the world had died, more than half of them civilians; approximately 1000 deaths per hour, every hour, for six years.
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1 September 1939 inaugurated an entirely new kind of war. World War I had been fought by infantrymen moving slowly, heroically and predictably into battlefields prepared for war: ‘They fell with their faces to the foe’, in the words of Laurence Binyon’s famous poem ‘For the Fallen’. But on 1 September, Hitler unleashed ‘blitzkrieg’ – lightning war, impersonal war, war that was intended to lead to Vernichtungsschlacht, annihilation. First came the air attacks and bombing raids, then the motorised infantry and the tanks, followed by the SS Death’s Head regiments who conducted what were euphemistically referred to as ‘police and security’ measures to ensure what Himmler called the ‘radical suppression of the incipient Polish insurrection in the newly occupied parts of Upper Silesia’. Within a week, Cracow, with a population of a quarter of a million, was under German control. Twenty-four thousand SS troops had moved into Poland, by train, by plane and on foot; the massacres of civilians began. Villages and towns were set alight. There were public executions.
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The front-page headline of the New York Times on Friday, 1 September 1939 tapped it all out in telegraphese: ‘GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND; CITIES BOMBED, PORT BLOCKADED; DANZIG IS ACCEPTED INTO REICH’. With their trochaic-patterned strong-stressed syllables, one might almost rearrange the lines into verse:
German army attacks Poland;
Cities bombed, port blockaded;
Danzig is accepted into Reich.
The lead column then begins with the words ‘BRITISH MOBILIZING’.
Indeed they were – and had been for some time.
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In England, ever since the Munich Agreement of September 1938, trenches had been dug, air-raid shelters constructed and barrage balloons floated above London. The pictures from the National Gallery had been packed up and sent off to Wales. Most of the British Museum’s treasures were safely stored in an underground tunnel in Aberystwyth. Rationing was being planned.
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And meanwhile, back in America … what exactly was Auden up to?
We know roughly what he was up to.
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On 12 June 2013, the British Library acquired an Auden manuscript at Christie’s in London for £47,475. It was Auden’s diary for August and November 1939, written in a ‘National’ notebook, made in the USA, ‘this book contains eye-ease paper, “Easy on the Eyes”.’ The diary is incorrectly dated, by Auden, ‘August 1938’. The entry for 1 September begins ‘Woke with a headache after a night of bad dreams in which C [Chester Kallman] was unfaithful. Paper reports German attack on Poland.’ There follow several pages of notes on scientific and political subjects – beginning with ‘Good News,’ [underlined]. ‘A scanning microscope has been invented.’
(‘A scanning microscope’ is another way of describing a poem.)
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At 9.30 p.m. on 1 September, the British government issued an ultimatum to the Nazis to withdraw from Poland.
At 9 a.m. on 3 September, a second ultimatum was issued to the German Foreign Office in Berlin: Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador, read out the ultimatum to a deserted room.
And then finally, at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcast to the nation on the BBC. The country, he announced, was at war:
This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.
Also on 3 September, the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, made his own radio broadcast, of a very different kind: ‘Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields. At this moment there is being prepared a proclamation of American neutrality.’ There would be, Roosevelt promised, ‘no blackout of peace in the United States’.
(The proclamation, the American neutrality, the promise of no blackout of peace: Roosevelt’s words seem to echo in the words of Auden’s poem, which indeed contains a ‘proclaim’, a ‘neutral’ and the famous ironic points of light. How many poems, one wonders, are plucked from the ether, and how many from the airwaves? Poets are like thieves and spies; they’re always listening in. It’s like that film The Lives of Others, the one about the spy in East Germany, eavesdropping with his headphones on. Poems are the words of others – the words of us all. There’s a poem by Denise Riley, ‘Lure, 1963’, for example, which is composed of snatches of half-remembered pop lyrics – ‘The Great Pretender’ by The Platters, ‘The Wanderer’ by Dion, ‘It’s in His Kiss’ by Betty Everett. One of the truly great works of literary criticism, John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, a study of the work of Coleridge, basically consists of Lowes eavesdropping on Coleridge’s eavesdroppings, tracing every image to its source in Coleridge’s reading. As a model, Lowes is probably best avoided: the book is pretty much unreadable; The Road to Xanadu contains too many detours.)
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(‘Does your book have an argument?’ asks my editor. ‘It’s more a series of detours,’ I say. ‘And cul-de-sacs. And dead ends. And stoppings-short.’ ‘Like a journey?’ ‘Sort of like a journey.’ This is not a journey. And I am no John Livingston Lowes. This is either the beginning of the preparations for a journey, or the aftermath.)
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In London, in the days leading up to 1 September, according to The Times, things were ‘largely normal’:
London at this time of tension has retained its usual appearance to a remarkable extent, but there are differences which the continuing crisis has made unavoidable. In the streets one of the most obvious is the banking of sandbags which now shields many buildings. Londoners are carrying on much the same as usual, except that every one is contributing something towards ensuring complete preparedness for any emergency. No worried casualties in a war of nerves are to be seen; the population remain calm, hopeful, and resolute.
(‘London Largely Normal: Calm in Time of Tension, Defence Activities’, The Times, Thursday, 31 August 1939)
Calm, hopeful, resolute? Maybe it was. I don’t know.
My family were all Londoners. I wish I could have asked them what it was like, but they had things to do. They were busy.
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On 1 September 1939, my father was busy being evacuated:
The Government decision that evacuation should begin to-day as a precaution was made known yesterday in the following announcement by the Minister of Health, Mr. Elliot, and the Secretary of State for Scotland, Mr. Colville, which was broadcast several times during the day: — It has been decided to start evacuation of the school children and other priority classes as already arranged under the Government scheme to-morrow (Friday, September 1) […] Mothers and other persons in charge of children below school age should take hand luggage with the same equipment for themselves and their children as for school children. The names of the children should be written on strong paper and sewn on to their clothes. No one can take more than a little hand luggage.
(‘Evacuation To-Day: Official Advice to Parents, “A Great National Undertaking”’, The Times, Friday, 1 September 1939)
And my grandfather – who knows? He may well have been busy with the rest of the East End, all those cheerful Cockney geezers preparing for war:
East London is prepared, and the people living in this lively, crowded, industrially important part of the capital are justifiably proud of what they have done towards completing the nation’s defences. A tour of East London yesterday was a stirring and heartening experience. At one point, not far from the docks, a piece of waste land had fallen into the hands of a big squad of willing and tireless workers, whose picks and spades were quickly supplying fillings for thousands of sandbags. Stripped to the waist, the men dug vigorously, pausing only now and then to make a fellow-worker laugh with a cheerful quip.
(‘Cheerfulness in East London: Voluntary Help, Willing and Tireless Workers’, The Times, Friday, 1 September 1939)
The whole scene sounds highly unlikely, frankly – a fantasy of the Times reporter – but on the other hand I can certainly imagine him, my grandfather, George Sansom, stripped to the waist, filling sandbags, ready with a cheerful quip. He was a boxer, a tough guy, a sweet man, and born the same year as Auden, coincidentally, 1907, though his life and Auden’s could not have been more different. When Auden was moving from prep school to boarding school, George Sansom was leaving school to go and work at Windsor and Newton paint manufacturers in east London. When Auden was going up to Oxford, George Sansom was going off to work in a factory making orange boxes. And while Auden sat out the war, safe in New York, he served in the Merchant Navy. The year Auden died, George Sansom was retiring from the Post Office, where he’d worked as a postman for most of his adult life. Auden died in Austria, where he’d bought a home on the proceeds of book sales and awards. My grandfather died in Essex, having moved from his council flat in Poplar into sheltered accommodation on a busy main road in Romford. At Auden’s funeral, they played Siegfried’s Funeral March from Tristan und Isolde. After my granddad’s funeral at the crematorium, when all the family got together to clear out the flat, I was not surprised to find that there were no books in the house, not a single one, and that he owned only the clothes he stood up in, some bed linen, a few pots and pans, and three LPs: the Massed Bands of the Royal Marines; an Elvis Christmas album; and The Best of Pavarotti. His life savings were exactly one hundred and one pounds. When Auden speaks on others’ behalf in this poem, as he so often liked to do – ‘I and the public’, ‘We must suffer them all again’, ‘our wish’, ‘We must love one another or die’ – I wonder if he thought he was speaking on behalf of people like my grandfather. If he did, my grandfather certainly would not have thanked him for it.
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(I make no apology for bringing in these family matters here, though I’ll try not to make a habit of it. Auden’s reviews and essays are defiantly personal, of course – but that’s always been a perk of the privileged; they’re allowed to be defiantly personal, because of who they are. They’ve earned it. The rich and the famous, we assume, and they assume, are just more interesting than the rest of us. They have permission to do and say what they want. Auden begins an early review, for example, ‘If the business of a reviewer is to describe the contents of the books he reviews and to appraise their value, this is not going to be a review.’ Well, in that case: this is not going to be a book.)
Anyway, all of this is just to be clear at the outset that a lot was happening on 1 September 1939.
And a lot is happening in ‘September 1, 1939’.