Tuesday, January 28, 2025

auden's New Year's Poem part two: trans- and the palimpsest subject

 last bit on Auden's New Year's Letter

In the beginning was the letter.
And the letter was a sorter, a lister, a control.
In the beginning was the letter. And the letter here was an element in a postal system, however named or organized. The alphabetical letter and the epistolary form called a letter, and finally literature as “letters” are layered on top of each other – this is the modernist insight. And the modernist subject is a palimpsest – a layering. While the lyrical subject might have two souls in its breast, the palimpsest subject has layers it is unaware of, tracing a destiny in letters that moves at different levels of history and myth.
Tiresias in the Wasteland, Bloom in Ulysses – these palimpsest subjects opened up a way in which the poetic form could absorb the collagist techniques of the tabloid, the daily, in which headlines and stories hang together in a community of contemporaneity. One learns to scan the newspaper and segregate topics. On January 1, 1940, The front page of the New York Times had five headlines. The headline with the largest font read: FINNS SMASH A RED DIVISION; HALT MOVE TO CUT COUNTRY;NAZI DRIVE ON BRITAIN SEEN. Next to it, on the left, is BOARD SANCTIONS SALE BY U.S. LINES OF EIGHT VESSELS, then LABOR HEADS WARN WAR ‘PROSPERITY’ WILL NOT END ILLS, then in smaller font 1940 Bornin Wild Revelry; Good Year for Nation Seen, and then, finally, REPUBLICAN FIGHT ON NEW DEAL LOOMS IN CONGRESS. The educated reader does not see this as a chaos, a confetti of wildly different topics. Down to the size of the font, this reader can follow the various stories, even as the headlines sometimes dissolve into telegraphy.
So, too, can the reader of the New Year’s Letter trace through its various stanzas a certain newspaper like flow of topic. According to Edward Mendelson’s Late Auden, the three parts were “mechanically” devoted to Kierkegaard’s divisions: the aesthetic, the religious and the ethical. But Mendelson doesn’t believe this is the deep structuring principle of the poem – rather, as a New Year’s resolution, it is a way of saying the poet’s way to acting and writing under a certain structure of belief – the belief being in the future. Talking himself into believing this belief – within the framework of a letter to Elizabeth May, who Mendelson portrays as “mother” figure to Auden.
“A German refugee” living with her psychiatrist husband on Long Island, who Auden was introduced to by Benjamin Britten.
But this isn’t a testimonial poem even if it encompasses the current news and the whole Decline of the West. It isn’t Muriel Rukeyser. It is distinctly a letter poem, subordinating the topical structure to the conversational, meditative flow of the epistle. As in Pope’s Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot, or Donne’s verse letters. Donne’s letter to Henry Wotton lights up when contrasted with Auden’s New Year’s letter, and vice versa. So I pick from Donne this:
“For in best understandings sin began;
Angels sinned first, then devils, and then man.
Only perchance beasts sin not; wretched we
Are beasts in all but white integrity.
I think if men, which in these places live,
Durst look in themselves, and themselves retrieve,
They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then
Utopian youth grown old Italian.”
Utopian youth – that’s a phrase for Auden, coming off the decade of the thirties!
The ultimate letters for a man turned Christian are, of course, Paul’s. Utopian youth here – the Jesus romance of the Gospels – is followed by didactic letter from one whose knowledge of what Jesus actually said and meant was, naturally, a little shaky, a little oral, a kind of gossip. Yet as Paul was convinced he had seen Jesus, had been physically blinded and then by further miracle given back his sight by Jesus, and so he winged it – choosing the letter form to mix news and doctrinal improvisation.
This is what the rhymes in Auden’s New Year’s Letter do – they make the doctrinal seem improv, and thus put it to another cadence.
If I am right about the palimpsest subject, than that subject naturally tends to the trans – trans-sexual, trans-historic, trans-Atlantic, trans-class – the latter being the privileged position of the clerks in the system of circulation. The trans figure is everywhere – Tiresias in the Wasteland, Bloom in Nighttown, the characters in Djuna Barnes Paris nightlife oratorio, Nightwood – with its shout out to Thelma Wood. And one might think that this is where Auden will end up.
He doesn’t, though, and one of the tales in the many tellings in the New Year’s Letter is a renunciation of this kind of modernist self, this kind of styling of the self’s transformative powers. He takes, instead, an Augustan turn – but unlike a Queer writer like Firbank, who also adored mixing an eighteenth century tone with cocktails, Auden ends up firmly on the side of identity, against the devil’s confusions of Meum and Tuum.
However, as Auden plays with the philosophical poem, his vocabulary and the music of the couplet rather lose an energy that Pope could summon in the eighteenth century. The second and third sections are exercises in the diminishing returns of an epistle poem that wants, as well, to be a conceptual summary. Auden seems to want to stand radically for some not at all radical blend of social responsibility and hedonism: the Cold War creed, in fact, elevated to abstractions that not only lose us, but weaken the muscle tone of the jaunty hard-boiled tone of the first section:
“Hell is the being of the lie
That we become if we deny
The laws of consciousness and claim
Becoming and Being are the same,
Being in time, and man discrete
In will, yet free and self-complete;
Its fire the pain to which we go
If we refuse to suffer, though
The one unnecessary grief
Is the vain craving for relief…”
This is a version of Hell that seems sprung more from late English utilitarianism, from the kind of philosophy undergraduate scene that begins Forster’s The Longest Journey, than from the peasant knowledge of torture: the shrinking from fire, the pain of knives and bullets and cudgels, the pain of starvation, the pain of being utterly unable to protect one’s nearest from the vilest violence. And in none of those hells, these bodily enacted horrors, do we shrink from Becoming and Being being the same. Neither the torturer nor the tortured would either understand that business or think it was somehow enacted in the theatre of concentration camp vioence.
There are moments in the movement from Utopian youth to Anglican casuistry that do make me think of the caricature of Auden and Isherwood in Put out more Flags as Parsnip and Pimpernell. Or like the college boys in The Longest Journey:
“The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, “She is there, the cow. There, now.”
“You have not proved it,” said a voice.
“I have proved it to myself.”
“I have proved to myself that she isn’t,” said the voice. “The cow is not there.” Ansell frowned and lit another match.”
The poem is not damned by these weaker moments; within it there is a New Year’s message for this New Year, 2025, weird as I find that date, weird as I living in this century that has brought me, personally, much love, but in my perception of the community to which I once felt I belonged, just shame on shame, year after year. So much wealth and all of it just shit, just adding to disaster and the lifestyle of desperation from which no party, no movement promises a rescue.
Blah blah blah. That’s what the politics says.
“Whatever nonsense we believe,
”Whomever we can still deceive,
Whatever language angers us,
Whoever seems the poisonous
Old dragon to be killed if men
Are ever to be rich again,
We know no fuss or pain or lying
Can stop the moribund from dying,
That all the special tasks begun
By the Renaissance have been done.”
This is the Anglican turn with a vengeance, a tempting quietism that sits down by the Waters of Babylon and … dithers. Too broad a view can incorrigibly blur the particulars; an epistle poem must have the touch of the letter, of someone on the other end receiving it, to justify its form.
Still: this poem distils sentiments that will come into intellectual life only after the war. The Cold War liberal with his Popperian aversion to utopia and its misleading apostles, from Plato to Rousseau, sounds out in this poem from 1940 – and it would be easy to draw the line, here, from Auden to Hayek. In this sense, we are coming to a period when “the special tasks begun/by the New Deal have been done.”

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