September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem
This is a book about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry. This is a book about a poet – W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left. About a poem – ‘September 1, 1939’, his most famous and celebrated, yet one which he tried to rewrite and disown and which has enjoyed – or been condemned – to a tragic and unexpected afterlife. About a city – New York, an island, an emblem of the Future, magnificent, provisional, seamy, and in 1939 about to emerge as the defining twentieth-century cosmopolis, the capital of the world. And about a world at a point of change – about 1939, and about our own Age of Anxiety, about the aftermath of September 11, when many American newspapers reprinted Auden’s poem in its entirety on their editorial pages.
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4th Estate
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Ian Sansom 2019
Ian Sansom asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Unpublished writings by W. H. Auden are quoted with the permission of the Estate of W. H. Auden.
‘September 1, 1939’ from Another Time by W. H. Auden (1940, Faber & Faber).
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007557219
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780007557226
Version: 2019-08-02
For N. J. Humphrey
Contents
1 Cover
2 Title Page
3 Copyright
4 Dedication
5 Contents
6 Wow!
7 September 1, 1939
8 Your Least Favourite Auden Poem?
9 Just a Title
10 1
11 I ≠ A
12 The Modern Poet
13 Not Standing
14 A Not Insignificant Americanism
15 A Rolling Tomato Gathers No Mayonnaise
16 Clever-Clever
17 Various Cosmic Thingummys
18 Offensive Smells
19 2
20 A Little Spank-Spank
21 Strangeways
22 Is Berlin Very Wicked?
23 Do Not Tell Other Writers to F*** Off
24 3
25 The Latin for the Judgin’
26 4
27 Aerodynamics
28 Get Rid of the (Expletive) Braille
29 Tower of Babel Time
30 5
31 The Liquid Menu
32 Below Average
33 Soft Furnishings
34 6
35 Talking Trash
36 You Can’t Say ‘Mad’ Nijinsky
37 7
38 Homo Faber
39 8
40 As Our Great Poet Auden Said
41 We Must Die Anyway
42 9
43 Twinkling
44 A New Chapter in My Life
45 Twenty-Five Years’ Worth of Reading
46 Also by Ian Sansom
47 About the Author
48 About the Publisher
LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter
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At just after five o’clock on 11 June 1956, W. H. Auden stood up to give his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry at the Sheldonian Theatre, the very heart of the university, adjacent to the Bodleian and the Clarendon Building, opposite Blackwell’s bookshop on Broad Street, and a short walk from Auden’s old college, Christ Church.
It was a warm afternoon. Auden, famously crumpled, had enjoyed, I imagine, a good lunch and was sweating in his thick black MA gown with its distinctive, gaudy crimson shot-silk hood. He was buzzing: he had long since adopted a strict chemical daily routine to enable him to work more efficiently. These ‘labor-saving devices’, in what he called his ‘mental kitchen’, included not only strategic quantities of alcohol, coffee and tobacco, but also the amphetamine Benzedrine, as a pick-me-up at breakfast, and the barbiturate Seconal, to bring him down at night. ‘If you ever get that depressed unable-to-concentrate feeling, try taking Benzidrine [sic] Tablets,’ he advised his friend Annie Dodds, ‘but not too many.’
The Sheldonian was full: the audience were expectant. The University Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors were in full fig – black gowns, gold lace, white tie. The undergraduates and graduate students wore subfusc and were crammed into the high-tiered seating under the lurid sunburst-orange ceiling fresco by King Charles II’s court painter Robert Streater, which depicts Truth descending upon the Arts and Sciences like the wolf on the fold, dispelling ignorance from the university.
