auden's new years poem: part one

 

1.

“Auden and Isherwood arrived in New York on 26 January 1939. Ice blocks floating on the Hudson greeted them. The afternoon of their arrival brought news that Barcelona had fallen to Franco; two days later, news reached them that Yeats had died in the south of France. Taken together these two events resulted – as Richard Davenport-Hines says in his biography - in Auden' s mood being a mixture of apprehension and zest.” – Michael Murphy, Neoclassicism, Late Modernism, and W. H. Auden's 'New Year Letter'

I was prepared, as well as a human unit could be, for the worst this January. Living in Paris rather cushions me from the American shocks, but since I was born and bred a redneck, another Calibanish creole from the states, the shocks nevertheless tingle.

I decided to do a dry January. It was a surprisingly easy thing to do, and on the plus side, we have thrown out much fewer bottles this month. On the minus side, there is really something boring and platitudinous about no wine and no beer, the welcome guests who enter at evening and restore one’s faith in, well, whatever fuckery one has been engaged in during day.

I also decided to think of the onset, once again, of Trump in the U.S. – and the continuing decay in France, under the odious Macron – in conjunction with Auden’s New Year’s Letter, which was his sort of great spell to dispel the low, dirty decade of the 30s.

Apprehension and zest. Exactly.

2.

I have often tried to put my finger what I find disturbing about Auden’s poetry; I think it is the preach-y side of it. Inside the clever enjambments and post-Jazz age cocktails, there is a homily wanting to get out. Since a sermon is essay-adjacent, I should be more appreciative, I suppose. Yet the homily always seems to return us to wooly Anglican half-truths, etiolated since the age of piracy and territorial seizures, since the time that the English appetite took huge chunks out of the world, into a bunch of teatime truths, Fabian socialism.

Unfair. I know.

At the root of the evil, I think, is Auden’s growing conviction that poetry does nothing. Which is derived from the late romantic divide between art and life, one of those puzzles Auden shared with Yeats. But far from doing nothing, poetry in the largest sense – the newspapers, the movies, the radio, etc. etc. – moved the masses as never before. Poetry had moved out of the village, and out of the salon, via steam and electricity and Mr. Edison’s inventions.

Yeats was not being just a romantic when he wrote:

“Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman's reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?”

In the New Year’s Letter, Auden is still arguing this point.

“Art is not life and cannot be

A midwife to society,

For art is a. fait accompli.

What they should do, or how or when

Life-order comes to living men

It cannot say, for it presents

Already lived experience

Through a convention that creates

Autonomous completed states.”

In this, he is anticipating a Cold War order in which art – poetry, for instance – finds its place outside of politics, and can only be corrupted if it gets stuck in such small partisan doings. This division, on which the pathos of the poem depends, strikes me as simply wrong. But to an extent, I don’t care. That is, I think it is an incorrect map of the world that is necessary for the poem to work; and the poem does work.

3.

Looking at the small bore authoritarianism which is drifting out of D.C. – the authoritarianism of post-viagra Trump pitted against the nudgery of the technocratically smug Democrats – the New Year’s Letter has a certain timely vibe:

“Twelve months ago in Brussels, I

Heard the same wishful-thinking sigh

As round me, trembling on their beds,

Or taut with apprehensive dreads,

The sleepless guests of Europe lay

Wishing the centuries away,

And the low mutter of their vows

Went echoing through her haunted house,

As on the verge of happening

There crouched the presence of The Thing.

All formulas were tried to still

The scratching on the window-sill,

All bolts of custom made secure

Against the pressure on the door,

But up the staircase of events

Carrying his special instruments,

To every bedside all the same

The dreadful figure swiftly came.”

I love this, and I love that Auden’s filters authoritarianism through the stylistics of the Who dunnit, of the special English variety he loved: Agatha Christie at the Parsonage.  This should diminish our sense of the boot coming down – but instead, by domesticating horror, we see how horror has grown in the domestic space.  That it comes to our bedsides in bedsits; that exiles are our future.

4.

 

In Michael Murphey’s essay on the poem, there is, as one would expect, first a bit of situating. Is Auden late modernist? Post-modernist? Murphey quotes from Randall Jarrell’s review of the poem, which is already busy doing situation work:

“In April 1941, in a characteristically spirited review of Auden's recently published The Double Man, Randall Jarrell began by declaring: In 1931 Pope's ghost said to me, 'Ten years from now the leading young poet of the time will publish ... a didactic epistle of about nine hundred tetrameter couplets.' I answered absently, 'You are a fool'; and who on earth would have thought him anything else. But he was right: the decline and fall of modernist poetry . . . were nearer than anyone could have believed.”

I find that a rather vexing proposition: “the decline and fall of modernist poetry” was inscribed in the themes of modernist poetry, with its re-appropriation of the conversational – literally in some of Apollinaire’s poems and some bits of the Wasteland – and its strong citational bent make Auden’s poems, to my eyes, ultra modernist – which, thematically, means the kind of poetry that takes its reference points from World Literature, like good little Goethians, rather than from a narrow Anglophone, or at best cross-Channel, tradition. Auden, writing a poem that is dosed with the parsonage murder motif from New York City, about the world wide coming of fascism, has, contrary to Jarrell, put on his hundred mile modernist boots and gone a-walkin’. Or at least that is my reading.

5.

I’m one of those sad souls who expect, on the highest level, prophecy from the poem.

Prediction is science’s domain. The model smooths out the exceptions, operates on the theoretically largest scale – a million light years here, a million light years there. As Keynes said, and as all science agrees: in the long run we are all dead.

The prophetic poem has no model, but sees the future in the lurid light of a dream. And in the long run and the short, we all dream. We can’t help it, it is the REM feature in our neurology.

So, here I am, thinking about Auden’s New Year’s letter, and the New Year, 1940, and I read through the first couplets of the second part, and I think immediately, as anybody trained as I was in the University in the 1980s, about Walter Benjamin:

Tonight a scrambling decade ends,

And strangers, enemies and friends

Stand once more puzzled underneath

The signpost on the barren heath

Where the rough mountain track divides

To silent valleys on all sides,

Endeavouring to decipher what

Is written on it but cannot,

Nor guess in what direction lies

The overhanging precipice.

Of course, this route for Walter Benjamin, still alive in 1940, was to come, in September of that year, the 23rd: from Banyuls, France, taking the path through Pyrenees passes down to Spain. Lisa Fittko, the guide for his party, has published a memoir of that trip – the translation into French of part of it is published on the En attendant Nadeau site.

« Benjamin arrived that day from Marseille, where he had made a first unlucky attempt to escape by hiding on a cargo ship, disguised as a French sailer … An improbable gesture of despair. »

Auden, like many English leftists – including the Kim Philby – had enrolled in networks to help refugees from the Nazi menace. When Auden and Isherwood came to New York City in 1939, they were met by two high profile refugees – Erika and Klaus Mann. And they quickly connected with the refugee community in New York City. It was this year that he wrote Refugee blues:

“The consul banged the table and said,

"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":

But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.”

In the New Year’s Letter, the muse underneath it all is a Jewish woman – one without her own name – Lot’s wife.

“And now and then a nature turns

To look where her whole system burns

And with a last defiant groan

Shudders her future into stone.”

Interestingly, in Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, the lynching of a Jewish couple in the beginning of the book – unplaced, a pogram that could have happened in 1905 in Galicia or could have happened in 1938 in the Austrian countryside – also reaches for Lot.

“Lot refused to surrender the angels who were his guests. Lot stood on the threshold, and the mob seized him by the arm, trying to pull him out into the street to be punished for the hospitality he extended, wanting to have at least him to strike at, spit on, trample and abuse; but the angels took hold of his other arm from inside the house with their angelic hands, and they were strong, they smote his attackers with blindness, pulled Lot back into the house, shut the door between him and the people, and those outside could no longer see one another, could no longer even see the door to Lot’s house, they groped their way along the walls and had no choice but to withdraw. Make no tarrying o my God. She doesn’t have the strength of angels, she doesn’t succeed in puller her husband up to where she is…”

Does the New Year’s Letter become more poignant as we place it next to this year, when the refugee is the target of orchestrated televisual/social media rage? Or does all poetry that works renew itself on the blood, for there is always blood, of the present?