kinds of highly entertaining bullshit.)
*
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.
*
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.’)
*
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.
*
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.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
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