Auden and Anxiety - Coronavirus Blues (X)

W. H. Auden was lucky. Unlike our semi-locked-down selves, he was allowed to retreat to a bar and muse upon the incoming catastrophe. In his second most famous poem, 'September 1, 1939', Auden sits 'in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street’, thinking and waiting. Read it afresh and be dazzled and horrified at how it chimes with our time and predicament. In just nine stanzas, the poem explores the history and circumstances that have led the human race to the brink of the latest calamity, before insisting - optimistically and rather naively - that 'we must love one another or die'.

Fifty-second Street, New York (1948)

Auden's historical reach stretches all the way back to Ancient Greece. Thucydides might not have invented objectivity, but he certainly tried. Auden's poem needs an oracle, and with war looming large on the horizon, the Athenian historian and author of The History of the Peloponnesian War is perfect.       

Exiled Thucydides knew

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. 

Less we forget, Thucydides also wrote eloquently and extensively about the plague that was laying waste to Athens, and the social response to it. People grow selfish and attitudes to their fellow man harden. 

'The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. For the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law. Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness. Seeing how quick and abrupt were the changes of fortune ... people now began openly to venture on acts of self-indulgence which before then they used to keep in the dark. As for what is called honour, no one showed himself willing to abide by its laws, so doubtful was it whether one would survive to enjoy name for it. No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately. As for offences against human law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to trial and punished: instead everyone felt that a far heavier sentence had been passed on him.' 

Thucydides, better looking than Herodotus

We are not quite at that stage yet: my quixotic side resists thinking that we are bound there, even if our gods are weaker and more distant than the Greek ones were. But what of the closing lines to this powerful stanza and what it is that we must suffer? In the past, I've seen something lacklustre and bathetic in that word 'mismanagement'. For our current situation, though, particularly in the UK, it is perfect. Boris Johnson the prime minister and Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health are not dictators. Dictators tend to have a crude plan. The current government do not; they are winging it, making it up between the latest snap polls and the next car crash news conference. And so 'mismanagement' couples itself with 'grief', and that is where we are, focusing on the personal, immediate impact of Covid-19. For now, anyway.

  

What I love most about this poem is the contrast between the global situation and our own private, intimate concerns. Indeed, the poem flits effortlessly between what is going on in the wider world and the personal. We hang out in the comfort of a shabby bar, musing on the smaller stuff, safe from the 'haunted wood' and the mad dictators outside. But Auden's words sniff out the nastiness within us all, 'the error bred in the bone'. Peculiarly, he turns to the tempestuous relationship of Diaghilev and Nijinsky - director and dancer; organiser and genius - to illustrate this. 

The windiest militant trash 

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev     

Is true of the normal heart; 

For the error bred in the bone 

Of each women and each man 

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love 

But to be loved alone. 

For the most part - and this doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to resist - we are selfish and, returning to Thucydides, 'self-indulgent'. We are also vain, and wish 'to be loved alone'. Nijinsky wrote lots about Diaghilev, not least about just how much of a tyrant the older man was. And sure enough, it is his comments on vanity that return me to our own international villains.  

'Diaghilev dyes his hair so as not to be old. Diaghilev's hair is grey. Diaghilev buys black hair creams and rubs them in. I noticed this cream on Diaghilev's pillows, which have black pillowcases. I do not like dirty pillowcases and therefore felt disgusted when I saw them.' 

I can't not but think - and the poem is inviting us to imagine both the small-time bully and the larger tyrant anyway - of the American President when I read these lines: caked in fake tan, obsessing about his hair, resting his head on his pillow next to Melania's at the end of another busy day of tweeting, vivid orange streaks smearing onto The White House pillows. Yes, I know Donald Trump is a notorious germaphobe and probably showers to excess, but the minor vanities at the heart of the monster still ring true.         

Nijinsky and Diaghilev

Again, am I and many others becoming hysterical? We are not on the verge of the horrors of the death camps and the atomic bomb, surely? But remember, Auden writes his own words ignorant of the horrors of the next half-decade. His poem is, above all, one of anxiety. He had just embarked upon his grande-passion with the much younger Chester Kallman and the thought of war and which side of the Atlantic he should base himself on, is foremost in his mind. Anxiety may have its roots in the plight of the wider world, but it is what it immediately threatens that touches us most deeply.  

I think it was Alan Bennett who wrote about how biography can get in the way of Auden's poetry. I think about Auden a lot, but don't actually read him as much as I should. And in a piece that touches on vanity, I'm drawn towards those bas-relief wrinkles that came on with age. It's actually a medical condition, Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome, and one that leads to me musing on my grandma (Nan) who, as she sailed through her seventies, developed the same etched furrows. The condition is hereditary, so I hope my amateur diagnosis is off the mark and that my own vanity will be spared. Whatever, Auden was proud of his features describing them as a 'wedding cake left out in the rain' (the not particularly tricky riddle of Richard Harris's McArthur Park surely solved) and would probably not have been overly offended by David Hockney's remarks that 'if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?' 

'Someone left the cake out in the rain'

And there it is. A poem that concerns itself with incoming global catastrophe, finally leaves me thinking about the poet's testicles. The urge to bury your head in the sand - and it is one way to combat anxiety - is felt stronger when we read a poem like this. 

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 the haunted wood

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good. 

We are left floundering in the midst of this, the fifth stanza, clinging to what we still hope can be our 'average day', not wanting to face the issues that consume our world: Coronavirus, Black Lives Matter, Brexit, Wealth Inequality, and Climate Change. The call to arms - Auden's almost hopeless moment of affirmation - comes in the final stanza, and right now, not enough of us are even beginning to register it. 

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.