September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem

One of the most famous of the early photographs of Auden is the head-and-shoulders snap taken by Eric Bramall in 1928, showing Auden sitting with head bowed, lighting a cigarette. Or at least, I think he’s sitting – I’m not entirely sure. It’s not quite clear. The image has been reproduced numerous times on book covers and in feature articles and probably owes its enduring appeal to its ambiguity: the pose is simultaneously feminine and macho, coy and defiant; Bramall has captured a gesture of the kind that Roland Barthes describes, in Camera Lucida (1980), as ‘apprehended at the point in its course where the normal eye cannot arrest it’, providing a privileged glimpse that stimulates in the viewer a secret or erotic thrill. W. H. Auden is Humphrey Bogart. He is Marlene Dietrich. Joan Didion. Tom Waits. (The critic Cyril Connolly admitted to having been ‘obsessed’ with Auden’s physical appearance, recalling a homoerotic dream in which Auden ‘indicated two small firm breasts’ and teased him with the words, ‘Well, Cyril, how do you like my lemons?’)

There’s no denying it. Look at the photos.

Auden is sexy.

Seriously.

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Anyway. How he is sitting is less important than the fact that he is sitting: at the outset of the poem, he is assuming a definite relationship with and towards the world and towards the reader. He is adopting a particular posture.

What he’s not doing is standing.

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After a decade of running around all over the place – travelling to Iceland and to China and to Spain, and also undertaking vast intellectual journeys, from Marx to Freud and on towards Kierkegaard – sitting was something that Auden now believed people should be doing: being rather than doing, thinking rather than acting. He began his Smith College Commencement Address in June 1940 with these words:

On this quiet June morning the war is the dreadful background of the thoughts of us all, and it is difficult indeed to think of anything except the agony and death going on a few thousand miles to the east and west of this hall. While those whom we love are dying or in terrible danger, the overwhelming desire to do something this minute to stop it makes it hard to sit still and think. Nevertheless that is our particular duty in this place at this hour.

It is our particular duty in this place at this hour to sit with him.

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(In the poems where Auden is most truly himself, he is either sitting or lying down: ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’; ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love’; the flirtatious male of ‘In Praise of Limestone’ who ‘lounges / Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting / That for all his faults he is loved.’)

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And if he’s not standing, he’s certainly not walking.

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(After all these years, I realise I have no idea how Auden might have walked. I know in his later life he was 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.

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(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.)

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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.

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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.’)

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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.

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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.