DISCUSSION OF SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 BY W H AUDENTickey de Jager In 1984 Joseph Brodsky gave a lecture on this poem at Columbia University. It is printed on 53 pages in his book, Less Than One. This discussion is little more (or may be less) than a shorter version of that. It is written as a guide to the poem for people who do not have access to Brodsky's work, or would find 53 pages too intimidating. Because this is not for publication, I will quote Brodsky whenever I feel it will help the reader. I hope that seeing the quality of his writing will encourage some of my readers to read this and other works of Brodsky. Here is the poem. The discussion starts on page 3. I sit in one of the dives 1 On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can 2 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. Exiled Thucydides knew 3 All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Page 1 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939.doc "I will be true to the wife. I'll concentrate more on my work. Who can reach the deaf. Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream. Faces along the bar 5 Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out. Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. From the conservative dark 7 Into the ethical life The dense commuters come. The music must always play. For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have. Lost in a haunted wood. All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home. Lest we should see where we are.doc .Into this neutral air 4 Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man. Repeating their morning vow. Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Who can speak for the dumb? Page 2 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939. Out of the mirror they stare. Not universal love But to be loved alone." And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now. The windiest militant trash 6 Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart. All of this Auden rejected. he differed from his modernist predecessors such as Yeats. Eliot or Pound. As early as 1936 he sensed that if he were ever to escape the temptations to fame and to the power to shape opinion that led him to accept this role. When Auden looked back into history. but with a maturer vision. that he may act better and more effectively in the future. Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair. . 9 Let someone first introduce Auden. he would have to leave England. "The shift from private to public concerns that occurred in Auden's work in the early thirties Page 3 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939.. early in 1939. Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police. His continuing subject was the task of the present moment: erotic and political tasks in his early poems. The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone. a northern industrial landscape marred by the same violence that marred his own. as it was for the modernists. Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I. and no longer distracted by the claims of a public. We must love one another or die. Edward Mendelson in the preface to his Selected Poems of Auden: "Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century.". Yet. Lawrence. but a past that had always been ruined.. and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time. hierarchy secure. composed like them Of Eros and of dust. Defenceless under the night Our world in stupour lies.doc . In this. The past his poems envisioned was never a southern classical domain of unreflective elegance. recapitulating his earlier one in a drastically different manner. all its variety of language and event. ethical and religious ones later. Show an affirming flame. dotted everywhere. who turned away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified." . He began to explore once again the same thematic and formal territory he had covered in his English years. it was to seek the causes of his present condition.. "Auden was never altogether happy in his role as poetic prophet to the English left." . and he was often most divided when he appeared most committed..All I have is a voice 8 To undo the folded lie. "When he arrived in America to stay. he set to work on what was virtually a new career. . as in almost everything else. not its scourge and prophet. 1 I sit in one of the dives 1 On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth. If you write in English for all people who speak the language. . His departure from England proved not to have been a rejection of all public roles. ‘Fifty-second Street’ continues his American stance. Numbers on the left show where discussion of that stanza starts. He is writing for two audiences: the people in England and the people in America. And the bulk of his accusers were precisely those who saw no peril coming: the left.occurred again in the mid-forties. although now he was without ambition for social influence and lived in a country where poets traditionally had none. but a rejection of the wrong ones. He now became an interpreter of his society. Brodsky: "His departure caused considerable uproar at home. the pacifists. you must master all its idioms. Auden left England in 1938 to live in America and wrote the poem just after the start of the war in 1939. He was charged with desertion. saying where he is reporting from: I sit in one of the dives 1 On Fifty-second Street His use of ‘dives’ is a reflection of his desire to give his language an American flavour. the right. And the living nations wait Each sequestered in his hate. Brodsky: "At any rate 'Fifty-second Street' rings enough of a bell on both sides of the Atlantic to make Page 4 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939." Now let us start with the poem. but lightens it and makes it more familiar to his audience in England because at the time Fifty-second Street was the jazz strip of the world. The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. His In Memory of W B Yeats published on 8th March 1939 contains the lines: In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark. He starts off by writing like a reporter." Auden sounded warnings on the threat of war for years. Obsessing our private lives. with abandoning his country in a time of peril . . as he thought at the time.doc . Page 5 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939. and to those who are enlightened (in the eyes of the West) and those who are not. The Germans certainly felt evil had been done to them in the way they were treated after the first World War. The previous decade was certainly low and dishonest. plain . so it's they who ‘circulate’. What we get here is the level. presumably. All of a sudden the certitude of that Fifty-second Street dive is gone and you get the feeling that perhaps it was displayed there in the first place because he was ‘uncertain and afraid’ in the very beginning. the poet plummets us into the very private diction of 'Uncertain and afraid. As the fear about Hitler grew. ‘Waves of anger and fear’ are the radio waves. just as we've recognised this public voice and have been lulled into regularity by his trimeters. I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street answers those requirements. It is the idealised or fantasized figure. especially in the absence of a real father. that's why he clung to its concreteness. In the beginning of every poem. or with.doubt.' Now this is not the way reporters talk. this is the voice of a scared child rather than of a seasoned. Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. 2 The first stanza ended on a highly emotional note with ‘The unmentionable odour of death’. He has to be convincing." Finding the reasons for this uncertainty and fear is a large part of the poem. Auden wants to come down from that high emotional level. often a father. ‘Imago’ is a term from psychoanalysis. so did the argument. He has to speak with a public voice. 'Uncertain and afraid' denotes what? . They do evil in return when they feel evil has been done to them. confident voice of one of us. And this is precisely where this poem . Accurate scholarship can 2 Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad. art in general. What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn.people listen. ‘the bright and darkened lands of the earth’ refers both to the lands in daylight or night. and all the more so if it is a public subject he deals with. trench-coated newsman. that things would somehow come right.the way. People do not only do evil in return when evil has been done to them. Newspapers have a circulation. starts for real: in. the public itself is. a poet has to dispel that air of art and artifice that clouds the public's attitude to poetry. Find what occurred at Linz. The first reason is ‘the clever hopes’ of people in England who had pinned their hopes on pacifism and appeasement. especially on the Continent.doc . of a reporter who speaks to us in our own tones. so he becomes objective and dispassionate with ‘Accurate scholarship can’. whose standards then become a model for his behaviour in adult life. from a person's early childhood. doubt.indeed poetry in general. And just as we are prepared for him to continue in this reassuring fashion. Linz is the place where Hitler grew up without a father. had exorcised what to her was the principal spectre. knowing that it had spelt the end of Classical Greece.doc . Chapter 4 of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. As Brodsky says: "We must remember that Auden landed in New York just eight months earlier. Analysed all in his book. overbearing. right on Germany's doorstep and threatening to overwhelm her." The German soldiers. but he does not have the advantage of hindsight that Thucydides had. Humphrey Carpenter says that Auden was rereading Thucydides at the time he wrote this poem. tyrannical neighbour. The enlightenment driven away. For this he was exiled from the city he passionately loved. The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave. a huge. fragmentation and the communication of violent and overstressed emotion. It is at the start of Book Two. on December 26 1938. In a sense he wants to be a Thucydides for our time. Auden visited Germany several times after leaving Oxford and saw at first hand the people whose social fabric and economy were completely undone.) The speech that Auden mentions was the speech by Pericles for the soldiers who fell in the war. were shocked when they heard of the surrender. which Athens lost. The habit-forming pain. It is probably the greatest speech about democracy ever made. the very date the Spanish Republic fell. ‘Exiled Thucydides knew’. The sense of helplessness which presumably overcame this poet (who had by that time issued more and better warnings against Fascism than anyone else in the field) on this September night simply seeks solace in the parallel with the Page 6 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939. (You can find this on page 17 of The Pageant of Greece by R W Livingstone.) In his biography of Auden. was being fertilised to produce evil. Thucydides wrote his history after the war. 3 Exiled Thucydides knew 3 All that a speech can say About Democracy. Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories give a good picture of Germany at that time. (p 116 in the Penguin Classics edition. And what dictators do. On page 104 of the same book he says: "Germany had fought the war principally from fear of the growing industrial and military strength of Russia. So that was another reason for them to feel that evil had been done to them. German Expressionism flourished with its stress on distortion. Thucydides the historian was also the general Thucydides who arrived too late to save the important town of Amphipolis because the Spartan general Brasidas had offered the city moderate terms to surrender. despite desperate struggles on the Western Front. The ground. including 29-year-old Hitler. By the middle of 1918 Germany.Paul Johnson gives an account of this treatment on page 26 of A History of the Modern world from 1917 to 1980. Auden realised that great change for our own times loomed on the horizon. Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. especially in the youth. Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream. so they are blind. small towns have no tall buildings.Greek historian who dealt with the phenomenon at hand no less extensively. Skyscrapers are always a sign of dense population. is pure King James Bible. It also helps to let the poet seem objective. Why are skyscrapers blind? The word ‘window’ comes from the German ‘wind auge’. Seldom is the relationship between cause and effect so poignantly expressed in two successive words as in ‘Mismanagement and grief’. Auden moves from the past into the present. Mismanagement and grief’ Auden has again ended a stanza in an emotionally loaded way. that brought the whole tragedy about. Brodsky thinks that the lines The habit-forming pain. he is writing in America and at this stage America is still neutral. In any country. the indifference. But above all. The rest of stanza 4 deals with the attitudes. there is no better adjective for air than ‘neutral’. Auden is supposed to have gone through three stages: Freudian. 4 With ‘Habit-forming pain. with his weaker voice and bigger crowd?" Auden probably expects us to contrast Thucydides-Athens-Democracy-Enlightenment as against Sparta-Dicatorship. if Thucydides failed to convince the Greeks. neutral. Mismanagement and grief: has them all. two millennia ago. In this stanza. the inertia. And anyway. In other words. (Afrikaans: ‘wind oog’). religious.doc . what chance is there for a modern poet. and among the faces in the mirror. ‘mismanagement’ refers to the political economy. Page 7 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939. But the skyscrapers do not see through their many windows. they always proclaim the existence of ‘collective man’. Out of the mirror they stare. Brodsky claims that the poem is mainly about shame. I wonder whether they proclaim his strength. Marxist. It is an opening through which the wind can come in and an eye through which we can see out. Auden sees his own. ‘Habit-forming pain’ is a term from psychoanalysis in which Auden was well versed. Into this neutral air 4 Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man. Imperialism's face And the international wrong. and ‘this neutral air’ helps to lower the tone. and ‘grief’ in which the lines culminate. Lost in a haunted wood. "just as we are ready fully to enjoy its deriding air comes Is not so crude as our wish . Lest we should see where we are. . For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have. . or even mainly. The music must always play. failing to comfort us even with the equation of an exact rhyme.5 In the next stanza we are in the ordinary. for what is wrong. For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have. which not only robs us of a scapegoat and states our own responsibility for the rotten state of affairs but tells us that we are worse than those we blame to the extent that ‘wish’ assonates with ‘trash’. like ‘important Persons’ who shout ‘militant trash’. Not universal love But to be loved alone. Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. In this stanza Auden comes to what he thought was the root cause of what was wrong in this era: selfishness. Not universal love But to be loved alone does not refer only.” 6 The windiest militant trash 6 Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart. to jealousy or selfishness in love between men and Page 8 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939. 6 It is very comforting to blame others. Just read it and enjoy it. "But" says Brodsky. All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home. I won't destroy it by analysis.doc . everyday world. Faces along the bar 5 Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out. always wanting more. not to light. Individuals as well as nations.doc . i.” Throughout his discussion Brodsky makes much of Auden's use of assonant rhyme. Its function is to make us vividly aware Page 9 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939. Brodsky: “On the whole the stanza depicts a dispirited mechanical existence where ‘governors’ are not in any way superior to the governed and neither are able to escape from the enveloping gloom they have spun for themselves. to the ancient Greek vice of pleonexia. That is not its function. or at least possible impact. but to ‘the ethical life’. Who can speak for the dumb? In the first two lines we go from ‘the conservative dark’. the role of stanza 7 is to finish the job of the previous one. more public level of diction. and indeed Auden reaches the marrow. since he had already said in his poem in memory of Yeats that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. one needs a break. Brodsky says that Auden quotes verbatim from Nijinsky's diary at the end of the stanza. I'll concentrate more on my work.e. But where can one find it? 7 Brodsky: " On the whole. which employs less pointed thinking and a more general. and strongly recommends that we read the diary. after this. but to selfishness in general. Naturally enough. such as ‘love-have-Diaghilev’ in the sixth stanza and ‘dark-work-wake’ in this one. "I will be true to the wife. and the break comes in the next stanza. to trace the malaise to its origins. of what he is writing and says: All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie Which is odd." And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now. Repeating their morning vow." From the conservative dark 7 Into the ethical life The dense commuters come. 8 At this stage Auden has doubts about the value. Who can reach the deaf.women. 9 Auden's In Memory of W B Yeats has the lines Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress The next stanza of September 1 starts on the same high lyrical note with Defenceless under the night Our world in stupour lies. for all its stoical timbre.of something. Brodsky: "And this ‘I’ is no longer wrapped in a newsman's trench coat: what you hear is incurable sorrow. We must love one another or die. Such presumption is not in the nature of poetry or that of Auden. In this stanza Auden moves from impersonal objectivity to a personal. but would never presume to offer a cure. he need not be so despondent about his work. The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone. Quite right. subjective note. ‘The sensual man-in-the-street’. awareness. using ‘I’ for only the second time in the poem. Page 10 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939. ‘Authority’ . too. not to reform it or try to cure its ills. Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police. Stephen Spender said that Auden was very good at diagnosis.doc . If he can undo the folded lie in the brain of the sensual man-inthe-street and the lie of authority. He has done his job as a poet: to interpret his society. All I have is a voice 8 To undo the folded lie. human sympathy are necessary. Except that an increase in insight. though not sufficient for such reform or cure. and ‘the citizen or the police’ are just instances of ‘each woman and each man’." This stanza echoes the theme of ‘universal love’ versus ‘to be loved alone’ in stanza 6. Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I. So let that stanza be. ‘Well. the brighter shine the little lights. Page 11 of 11 Article on Auden' September 1 1939. 9 Wordsworth has a warning against what I have been doing in this discussion: Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things: We murder to dissect. Defenceless under the night Our world in stupour lies." The meaning of a poem is its beauty. at all events I'm still here. . I don't like it very much. dotted everywhere. composed like them Of Eros and of dust. signalling. just be. reassuring one another. The purpose of Brodsky's discussion was to try to find out what the poem means.though the greater the darkness. To understand a poem is to be moved by its beauty. but how are you?’ Unquenchable lights of my aristocracy! Signals of the invincible army!" There will be something in the next stanza that will remind you of that. In I Believe E M Forster writes : "It's a humiliating outlook . Show an affirming flame. just be. However. .doc .And the lyricism comes from the same rapture of distress. . Yet. when we come to the last stanza he says: "But you don't dissect a bird to find the origins of its song. Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair.