This piece is part of a new series at The Lemur called “Close Reading,” in which a resident lemur (writer) analyzes a short passage from a favorite work of literature, history, or philosophy, or perhaps a short work in its entirety. Informed by larger insights about how to approach the author’s writing and context about the work as a whole, these mini essays will hopefully provide insight on some of the briefest yet most brilliant passages in world literature.
This entry is on the poem “September 1, 1939” by W.H. Auden, the author’s favorite English-language poet in the English language.
Wystan Hugh Auden was a voice crying out in the wilderness. That wilderness was the political and moral madness of the 20th century, what Auden would come to call “The Age of Anxiety.” In this cautionary capacity, Auden served as a sort of foreign correspondent from Hell, sending vivid and urgent dispatches from the flame pits. He was a denizen of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, where he saw humanity at its absolute worst, and sometimes, in brief “flashes,” at its best.
The eponymous date of Auden’s famous poem we are discussing here is, of course, the fateful day that World War II began in Europe—the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Auden was living in America at the time—in New York City, where he watched with the horror of distance as the Old World sank back into its habitual barbarism of total war. But Auden was not just jousting at the atavism of the Continent. While he may have moved to America that year, Auden was under no illusions that he could escape the perpetual suffering of humanity’s mistakes anywhere, even in the New World which Churchill prophesied would come to the rescue of the Old.
To start the poem, Auden expends only a few choice adjectives for the departing decade: the 1930s, once full of “clever hopes,” turned out to be “low” and “dishonest.” Indeed, Auden suggests, if anything could drive someone to seek solace in the sweaty, sad human company of a midtown bar, it was the improbable rise of that “psychopathic god” that was the National Socialist from Austria, the epitome of lowness and dishonesty, but, tragically, also of cleverness. It was the birthing of that demon named Adolf Hitler (“what occurred at Linz”) which clarified for Auden everything “unmentionable” about the nasty human condition in the most Enlightened of ages. It was the existence of Hitler which reminded Auden to remind the rest of humanity that they were not, in fact, living in the most Enlightened of ages.
For a wordsmith, Auden was awfully convinced that words were powerless in the face of evil: “accurate scholarship can / Unearth the whole offence” of fascist virility and democratic impotence, he tells us. Sure, it can. But what’s the use? As Auden sees it, Thucydides already told us how politics worked (“all that a speech can say”) nearly twenty-four-hundred years ago in his Histories (what he famously termed his “possession for all time”) and nobody listened. Words can show us where we went wrong, but why waste the effort in figuring out the causa causans, when, once you do, the story has begun its new chapter, its new war? (in another poem, Auden reminded us that Homer’s “Shield of Achilles” showed us everything we ought to know about war and the human impulse towards violence. We forgot that, too.) All those wonderful virtues of modern society “driven away”—in their stead, “the habit-forming pain, / Mismanagement and grief.” Auden stared into his unwashed whiskey glass. “We must suffer them all again,” he muttered to himself.
Would anyone in America pick up on Auden’s “useless” words? It was still 1939, after all—America was “neutral air” until December 7, 1941. Yet while America had not been sucked into the maelstrom yet, Auden was under no illusion that Americans were any different when it came to the Fire and Ice of destruction. He was no Lemuel Gulliver, hoping to encounter through his travels an entirely different race of decidedly non-European, morally clear-eyed creatures. And despite his faith in the American spirit, reflected in this poem, Auden knew that he would not find an escape from the insanity of Europe’s eternally recurring evil in America: he knew that Americans weren’t different—that they weren’t, as they hoped to be, and aspirationally called themselves, “exceptional” (Evelyn Waugh, God rest his soul, was wrong to call Auden a coward for his move, but that’s a story for another day). Thinking, perhaps, of Waugh, Auden ordered another drink. “Each language pours its vain / Competitive excuse,” he scrawled on a bar napkin. If he could tell these Americans one thing, it would be that no country is special. We are, all of us, made of “Eros and dust.” Laws and literature and culture don’t change that fact. None of the eerily modern lies of nationalism can obscure it. Not the “folded lie,” the “lie of Authority” that tells you about the State and the nation. “There is no such thing as the State,” Auden slurred to the room, under the hum of the ballgame on the radio (the Yankees versus the Dodgers). He could agree with Waugh about one thing: it was time to stop putting out more flags.
Of course, Auden’s “lie” was not new. It was the exact same as Wilfred Owen’s “old Lie” from over twenty years earlier about the bone-dry hollowness of nationalism. The lie of World War I (Germany’s “Place in the Sun”) is the lie of the Peloponnesian War (of Pericles’ funeral oration) is the lie emblazoned into the hearts of every Teutonic Berliner: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
In the poem’s most powerful stanza, Auden gets to the heart of the liminal antebellum charade that was America in 1939. It’s Hitler’s world, and Americans are just living in it. Worse, they’re pretending otherwise.
“Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.”
Even though Auden sought refuge there, he knew America was no “fort.” The sweaty dancers and big bands, the faces that had suffered through something as severe as the Great Depression without ever scratching the surface of human darkness. These were Americans: perhaps still a little green in the world’s misery, but fundamentally no different from the rest of us. The last tribe to be brought fully into the waste land, and for good this time. Auden knew that no one could be fortified against the 20th century.
But the genius of Auden was that, even in a dive on 52nd street, on perhaps the darkest day in human history, he did not resort to the futility of despair. Auden saw those “flashes” of human brightness that I mentioned at the outset.
The last stanza:
“Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
Ironic points of light. It’s not a bad way to describe good literature. And it’s an excellent way to describe the poems of Wystan Hugh Auden, the only man who could send dispatches from Hell with a flame that was somehow still “affirming.”
by Zachary Partnoy
