If I Could Tell You I Would Let You Know
Choice and responsibility are in fact two of the great themes in Auden’s earlier work. Responsibility cannot exist without choice: Aristotle emphasized that in his theory of moral responsibility, and the linkage between the two has remained at the heart of philosophical treatments of accountability since then. If I cannot do otherwise, if I have no choice, then I cannot be held responsible for what I do. We do not blame an automaton for his acts because there they do not represent any volition on his part; nor do we generally blame (although some might) those who act at the point of a gun. Those are extreme cases: there are many cases where the issue is less clear-cut and where it is consequently more difficult to determine the extent of individual responsibility.
A large part of my academic career was concerned with issues of responsibility for actions in the context of theories of criminal responsibility. I started off this fairly long tussle with the subject with a doctoral thesis on the subject of the criminal liability of those who committed crimes under duress. My interest in this was triggered at about the same time that I began to read Auden, although it was not Auden who led me to the subject in the first place. That was in Belfast, when I was working at the university there, and came across a case of a man who had been obliged to drive an IRA hit-team on an assassination mission. The driver knew that if he failed to comply with the team’s orders he would be shot; he complied and was subsequently charged with being an accessory to the murder they committed.
The question of the liability of those who take another’s life to save their own skin is a well-rehearsed one in criminal jurisprudence. Generations of law students have cut their teeth on the extraordinary criminal cases in which this issue has arisen—notably the Victorian cause célèbre of Dudley and Stephens, two shipwrecked sailors who killed and ate the cabin boy to stave off starvation. Such legal decisions as there have been in this area tend to exclude any excusing those who kill to save themselves—a principle endorsed at Nuremberg in the trials of war criminals. One can readily understand all that, but at a more prosaic level, in relation to ordinary wrongdoing, it is hard to ignore the extent to which our actions are the result of influences over which we have never had any real control. We are what we are because we are who we are, and who we are is usually not the result of choice on our part but is the result of factors outside our control. These include the fact of birth: in so many cases the bed in which one is born determines well nigh every major aspect our lives—our views, our chances, our careers. We may create ourselves to some extent—life would be bleak if we had no chance to do that—but the shape of our life is often determined by external factors such as geography and the sheer accident of being born into a particular society at a particular time.
My personal reflections over the years of the notion of responsibility seemed to lead me into an uncomfortably determinist position. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the territory of real responsibility—those things for which we had to shoulder complete blame—was small indeed. Auden’s insights into this issue were useful, as indeed he was useful on so many matters. One particularly resonant statement of this occurs in “September 1, 1939,” that hauntingly beautiful poem to which I find myself frequently returning, in spite of what Auden himself thought of it. Auden is talking about Germany, and about what went wrong:
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
This stanza is typical of the intellectual density of Auden’s poetry: a few lines pack in a vast amount of meaning, whole hinterlands of scholarship and understanding. Germany’s behavior is not random, he suggests: it can be explained by an understanding of the events that have shaped German culture since Luther and the beginning of Protestantism set off the split between feeling and intellect. This wound, as Auden thought of it, preoccupied him: we need, he thought, to restore our sense of identification with nature, with our past, with ourselves. This message, of course, will not sound strange to contemporary ears: it is what the Green movement has been preaching and continues to preach.
From Luther we move to Hitler, and to his hometown of Linz. The mention of what occurred in Linz is probably a reference to the events of Hitler’s childhood rather than to the later scenes of enthusiastic welcoming of the Anschluss. Auden’s view of Hitler as a psychopath will hardly be controversial; but even if some more complicated psychopathology was present, the issue is: what produces a personality like Hitler’s? An unhappy childhood? Neuro-anatomical abnormality? The willing choice of evil? Auden has a tendency to come up with the neat explanation, particularly if it can be made to sound good. This is not necessarily a fault in poetry, which needs the aphorism—indeed it would be difficult to imagine how a poet might make anything of the more subtle, nuanced explanation of reality: the pithy expression rarely admits of qualification. And here the poet sides with that approach. Auden and the public do not need to be told of Germany’s intellectual history or of Hitler’s pathological upbringing; they know that if you treat somebody badly, he or she in turn behaves badly. It is not a sophisticated adage, but it is one that is constantly being proved true.
“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”: this has the ring of nursery wisdom to it—the sort of adage that one encounters, or used to encounter, in a child’s picture book or as the carefully worked text of a Victorian sampler. (I remember a teacup from my boyhood on which the words “Say not always what you know but always know what you say” were imprinted around the rim. We rarely forget these sayings of childhood, and their continuing power must be immense.) Nursery references crop up in a number of Auden’s poems, where there are allusions to the safe world of childhood and occasionally, as in “As I Walked Out,” to the characters of that world who may not behave as they are expected to. Jack, for example, is treated well by the Giant, and Jill, it turns out, is sexually voracious. Similarly in “Nursery Rhyme” the sinister nature of many of these rhymes is gleefully explored. The world of the nursery rhyme is turned upside down: cheerful kings made toffee on their stoves but only until the everything went wrong—the loaves rotted, woolly bears began to pursue the spotted dogs, our bowls of milk became full of drowning frogs, and so on.
The gist of that stanza in “September 1, 1939,” is that our disposition will be, in some measure, the result of our upbringing. There is hardly anything earth-shattering in this observation—we often reflect on that when we contemplate the behavior of others. But I am not sure that we are prepared to think through the consequences of this view when it comes to determining responsibility and allocating blame. The youth from a deprived background, brought up in a climate of disregard for the law, will not surprise us when he conforms to expectations and commits a crime. But that is often as far as our understanding goes: we may be very unwilling to take that into account in determining blame. Had he been given more opportunities, had he had a father to control him, then he might not have done what he did. Had Hitler been born into a stable and loving home, then he might not have done what he did. Yes, but does that relieve him of responsibility for what he did? The answer must surely be no: nothing excuses that. But what about lesser tyrants? What about the doers of smaller acts of cruelty, minor malefactors, who might well not have acted as they did if only they had experienced human love in more generous quantities? As for evil, can that be solved—or at least understood—by understanding what psychological factors lie behind it? Auden’s view on this changed between the 1930s and 1940s, as they did on a number of issues, and his experience of this change helps us, perhaps, in our own confrontation with evil in its contemporary, though ultimately very familiar, forms. One wonders where Auden would find evil in our own twenty-first century world: possibly in the murderous fanaticism of the jihadists, in the ruthlessness of the drug-trafficking barons of Mexico and Colombia; in the child pornographers of the Internet. And how exactly should we deal with it, whatever its causes?
Understanding helps us deal with most threats, and seeking to understand must be our first response to evil, just as it is to anything else with which we have to deal. But there will be limits to our understanding, as Auden points out in “If I Could Tell You.” Some things, we come to learn, just are.
“If I Could Tell You” is one of the more musical of Auden’s poems, written in the form of a villanelle. It is also one of his more enigmatic works, with lines that demonstrate Auden’s consummate ability to create arresting imagery that proves unexpectedly difficult to interpret. We read the line and it seems so easy, so true. And then we ask ourselves exactly what it means, and our earlier assumption of understanding begins to look much weaker.
The refrain throughout the poem is that time will say nothing but I told you so. This answer will be given by time no matter what surprising events occur:
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so …
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
These two stanzas contain two of the most entrancing lines in Auden’s entire opus. “If we should weep when clowns put on their show” is a line that is itself surely enough to make one weep. And then “The winds must come from somewhere when they blow” is deeply evocative. Who among us has not felt the wind on our skin and been in some way transported?
Time, though, has no explanations other than the shrugged “I told you so.” This must be because the puzzling or contradictory things that occur in our world are beyond explanation by any overarching force or figure, including Time, who, in one view, presides over our human affairs. This poem invokes the image of Time in Poussin’s magnificent painting Dance to the Music of Time: Time, in his chariot, rides past on a sea of cloud while below him the figures engage in dance. Of course such a figure is not going to descend to our level to explain these mysteries; he is well above all that.