why is he sitting at the start of the poem?
And how is he sitting?
Is he on a chair? A stool? A bench?
Is he perched on a stoop or a stairwell?
*
(And – my wife asks, appalled, having read the first draft of this book, twenty-five years after I embarked upon it – are you really going to spend all that time worrying over every single word in the poem?)
Many poets have some idiosyncrasy or tic of style which can madden the reader if he finds their work basically unsympathetic, but which, if he likes it, becomes endearing like the foibles of an old friend.
(Auden, ‘Walter de la Mare’)
Of course I’m not going to worry over every single word in the poem. That would be ludicrous – unfeasible, and unhealthy.
*
(Really unhealthy. Fatal. In a lecture on ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’, collected in his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov remarks that ‘In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth […] and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit […] are the highest forms of consciousness.’ Twenty-five years of falling to my death, gazing around, wondering at trifles.)
*
Let me reassure you: we may have started out on the scenic route, but I promise there are going to be short-cuts. There’s just a lot of heavy lifting to get through at the start. Think of all this as backstory. Think of these early chapters as foundation stones, as building blocks, as … bricks.
(In Joe Brainard’s cult classic I Remember he writes, ‘I remember a back-drop of a brick wall I painted for a play. I painted each red brick in by hand. Afterwards it occurred to me that I could have just painted the whole thing red and put in the white lines.’ I’m not going to be painting each red brick by hand: after a while, I’ll be sketching in white lines.)
Civilization is a precarious balance between what Professor Whitehead has called barbaric vagueness and trivial order.
(Auden, ‘The Greeks and Us’)
(I have been reading – I have been teaching – Erich Auerbach’s essay ‘Odysseus’ Scar’, the first chapter of his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, published in 1946. It is surely one of the last great, readable works of literary criticism, in which Auerbach distinguishes between Hellenistic and Hebraic modes of storytelling:
It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’
It’s like that old Lenny Bruce routine – Jewish or goyish? In Bruce’s estimation, Count Basie is Jewish, Ray Charles is Jewish – but Eddie Cantor, Eddie Cantor is goyish. The joke being that Eddie Cantor was Jewish, but he was nothing more than a smooth, crowd-pleasing entertainer. ‘If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish.’ Auden was a High Church Anglican, but he’s definitely Jewish, in the same way Count Basie and Ray Charles are Jewish: his best poems are Hebraic rather than Hellenistic. They are fraught with background.)
*
I imagine Auden sitting in a straight-backed chair, both feet flat on the floor, upright, sitting slightly forward, intent – like a sphinx, benevolent, ferocious, strong.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
(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.’)
*
And if he’s not standing, he’s certainly not walking.
*
(After
