September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. Ian Sansom

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СКАЧАТЬ famous for shuffling around outside in his carpet slippers, but how exactly did he walk? What was his gait? The truth is, I know both too much about Auden – endless, useless facts about him – and absolutely nothing. I know a lot of useless facts about a lot of writers: about William Burroughs, I know how he injected his morphine and how he scored his Benzedrine inhalers; I know the precise details of his sexual relationship with Allen Ginsberg, including the size of his penis; I know all about Marianne Moore’s tricorne hats, and Elizabeth Bishop’s taste in home furnishings; I know about Jack London’s sweet tooth; I have read Reiner Stach on Kafka; and Richard Ellmann and Michael Holroyd on everyone. All of these books, all of this endless information about writers – and for what? If Auden were in the distance now, walking away from me, I wouldn’t be able to recognise him. After all these years, I couldn’t spot him in a crowd. He remains a total stranger.)

      In grasping the character of a society, as in judging the character of an individual, no documents, statistics, ‘objective’ measurements can ever compete with the single intuitive glance.

      (Auden, ‘The American Scene’)

In his essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823), William Hazlitt recalls one fine morning, in the middle of winter in 1798, going for a walk with Coleridge:

      I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the foot-path to the other. This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at the time connect it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a straight line.

      Coleridge’s strange saunter was matched only by his curious conversation. ‘In digressing,’ writes Hazlitt, ‘in dilating, in passing from subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice.’

      I can’t imagine Auden sliding, or indeed shimmering, like Jeeves. Striding, maybe? No. Slouching? A little. Sauntering? Strolling? Strutting? Slinking? Shambling? No. No. No. Schlepping? Maybe, a little.

      Auden, I imagine, would have schlepped like a mensch.

      *

      (He loved this sort of thing himself, of course, categorising people according to some weird feature. In The Orators, for example:

      Three kinds of enemy walk – the grandiose stunt – the melancholic stagger – the paranoic sidle.

      Three kinds of enemy bearing – the condor stoop – the toad stupor – the robin’s stance.

Three kinds of highly entertaining bullshit.)

      *

      Just because he’s sitting, he’s not necessarily immobile. He’s not inactive. He is observing. He is concentrating. He is preparing himself for the poem, perhaps, gathering his energies. When we think of authors sitting, we imagine them sitting with single-mindedness and with purpose – don’t we? – sitting still but getting somewhere, going inwards.

      *

      Or maybe he’s just posing. He’s pouting. He’s sitting for a portrait.

(There is no recent book-length study of the phenomenon of the poet as pin-up, as far as I know. The best I can find is David Piper’s The Image of the Poet, which was published in 1982, long before our current crop of selfie-loving Insta poets. Auden would have made an excellent Insta poet: he loved the camera. He was arguably – at least, I shall argue here, now – the first poet of the technologised twentieth century, his career formed not just through books but through the media of film, photography, radio, television, mass-circulation newspapers and poetry readings. Not only was he enormously ambitious, he was endlessly inventive. He used all the tools available to him. He took a camera to Iceland in 1936, and the photographs were included in his and MacNeice’s travelogue, Letters from Iceland. At his parties in the 1950s, long before Warhol’s snapping and spooling at the Factory, he would go around photographing his guests. The critic Edmund Wilson describes a truly Warholian scene at Auden’s birthday party in 1955: ‘Hordes of people arrived; the room became crowded and smoke-filled and the conversation deafening. Wystan went around with a camera taking flashlights of his guests. When he came to the group in which I was, I hung a handkerchief over my face at the moment he was taking the picture.’)

      *

      Or perhaps he’s ‘sitting in’, in the way a jazz musician sits in on a session.

      The songwriter and historian of American popular music Arnold Shaw explains what it means to ‘sit in’:

      A man who sits in plays music that is unrehearsed, improvised and spontaneous. But the difference is that he invades a place where a set group of musicians is in residence at union rates. He comes for the sheer love of playing, for the stimulus of exchanging ideas with others, for the pleasure of speaking and communicating through his instrument.

      ‘Sitting in’ implies a freedom of movement, a body of shared feelings and a camaraderie that tended to disappear with the rise of bop and with the stringent enforcement of union regulations against free play. It was also based on a rare community of interests between performer and audience that placed communication and expression on the same level as entertainment. When the adventure worked, all three phases were present at a peak of excitement.

      (Arnold Shaw, 52nd St: The Street of Jazz)

      Communication, expression, entertainment: as good a definition as any of what one might expect from a work of art.

      *

Of course, the mere fact of sitting – whatever kind of sitting it is – says something. It says, ‘I am here with you.’ When we sit next to somebody we are sitting with them. We sit alongside them, or opposite them. We sit shiva. We sit and wait. We sit and eat.

      ‘You must sit down’, says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

      So I did sit and eat.

      (George Herbert, ‘Love: Love bade me welcome’)

      In The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 70, no. 5 (May 1970), there is a letter to the editor from Louise Ryssmann, R.N.:

      I would like to contribute this idea to other nurses. When I am talking with patients, I sit in a chair next to the bed, rather than standing. By sitting, I can establish a closer rapport with patients because the physical distance is less and I am talking directly across rather than down to the patient. Sitting also creates a more relaxed atmosphere and the patient feels the nurse is not rushed and has time to talk. And as an additional benefit, I am not nearly as tired at the end of an eight-hour shift.

      At the beginning of the poem Auden settles down, establishes a close rapport and starts to talk. Like a nurse, or a priest, or a therapist.

      Or a man in a bar.

A Not Insignificant Americanism

      I want the poem to be completely American in language.

      (Auden on The Age of Anxiety, in The Table Talk of W. H. Auden)

      *

      So, the speaker of the poem is sitting in a dive, and a dive, according to the OED, is ‘An illegal drinking-den, or other disreputable place of resort, often situated in a cellar, basement, СКАЧАТЬ