– all of them, combined.
*
(‘Is it one of those How So-and-So Changed My Life type of books?’ asks a friend. ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s a shame,’ they say. ‘People really like those sorts of books.’ ‘It’s more about my relationship with language, and literature, and ideas,’ I say. ‘Hmm,’ says my friend. ‘Well, good luck with that.’)
*
One of Auden’s great ambitions was to be included in the OED – ‘that inestimable successor to Holy Writ’, as the critic I. A. Richards called it – with his words and phrases listed as coinages and exemplars. It was an ambition he fulfilled many times over, being credited with more than 100 significant usages, including the phrase ‘Age of Anxiety’ (defined, in the second edition of the OED, as ‘the title of W. H. Auden’s poem applied as a catch-phrase to any period characterized by anxiety or danger’), the adjective ‘entropic’, and the noun ‘agent’ (abbreviated from ‘secret agent’). According to the biographer Humphrey Carpenter, describing Auden’s study in his house in Kirchstetten, ‘The most prominent object in the workroom was a set of the Oxford English Dictionary, missing one volume, which was downstairs, Auden invariably using it as a cushion to sit on when at table – as if (a friend observed) he was a child not quite big enough for the nursery furniture.’
*
(The missing volume – Auden’s hardback dictionary cushion – was, according to Carpenter, volume X of the OED: (Sole–Sz). Which might provide a nice alternative title for this book, would it not? Sole–Sz, a title which offers an obvious homophonic pun on ‘sole’ and which also usefully alludes to Roland Barthes’ S/Z, that impossibly complicated book about Balzac’s story ‘Sarrasine’, which was once required reading on every grad course in literary theory, with its typologies of interacting SEM codes and SYM codes, and REF, and ACT and HER codes, and which therefore might suggest that this book too is a work of great theoretical sophistication. Maybe not.)
*
So, not a book about my relationship with Auden. A book about my relationship with language.
*
But we all know – we don’t have to be a Roland Barthes to know – that there can be no simple explanation in language of our relationship with language. It’s like using a mirror to look at a mirror. Words are insufficient to do justice to words, let alone to everything else.
So the enterprise is doomed again.
*
This is all entirely obvious, I suppose, to most people. And barely needs stating.
All I can safely say, then, is that it has taken me twenty-five years to work out the entirely obvious.
And these are my notes.
In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps.
(Auden, ‘Writing’)
The reason (artistic) I left England […] was precisely to stop me writing poems like ‘September 1, 1939’, the most dishonest poem I have ever written.
(Auden, letter to Naomi Mitchison, 1 April 1967)
‘September 1, 1939’.
If you know anything about the poem – and you may well know more about it than I do, in which case I should warn you, this is probably not the book for you, it’s a book for my friends and my cousins, for everyone who has ever said to me, ‘W. H. Who? September the What?’ – you will know that it was a poem that over the course of his lifetime Auden variously revised and then disowned. It is a poem with a long and troubled history. It is a poem that has undergone a lot of changes. Perhaps that’s part of its appeal: it is a poem with another life, an afterlife. It is a poem, like a person, that comes with a lot of baggage.
Even the title changed. We may know it as ‘September 1, 1939’, but on first publication, in the American magazine the New Republic, on 18 October 1939, it was ‘September – 1939’; in Auden’s collection Another Time (1940) it then became simply number four in a sequence of ‘Occasional Poems’, thus, ‘IV. September 1, 1939’; and not until subsequent versions and revisions did it appear as both ‘1st September 1939’ and ‘September 1, 1939’.
Auden had a strong habit of revision. (He had strong habits generally: drug habits, writing habits.) He liked to change the titles of his poems, just as he liked to change all other aspects of his poems: ‘Palais des Beaux Arts’ became ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’; ‘The Territory of the Heart’ became ‘Please Make Yourself at Home’ became ‘Like a Vocation’; ‘The Leaves of Life’ became ‘The Riddle’; et cetera, et cetera; the list is very long.
Not everyone approved of all these rethinks and rewrites, of course. A lot of people thought them arrogant, or foolish, or merely eccentric. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell thought Auden’s revisions were not only arrogant, foolish and eccentric; he thought they were morally reprehensible: ‘Auden is attempting to get rid of a sloughed-off self by hacking it up and dropping the pieces into a bathtub full of lye,’ he wrote, figuring Auden both as a snake, and as an acid-bath murderer.
(If not the greatest critic of poetry in the twentieth century, Randall Jarrell was certainly the greatest reviewer of poetry in the twentieth century, and to be a great reviewer of anything you need to be given to peculiarly vivid language: Clive James writing on television was given to peculiarly vivid language; Anthony Lane writing on films in the New Yorker; Dorothy Parker; Virginia Woolf, oddly. But Jarrell was undoubtedly the greatest, the most vivid of all, and he had what one might generously describe as a love–hate relationship with Auden. According to fellow poet John Berryman, Jarrell knew Auden’s mind ‘better than anyone ought to be allowed to understand anyone else’s’, even when Auden was in two minds.)
*
But those tiny little adjustments to the title of this poem, do they really matter?
*
Yes.
No.
Of course.
Not really.
Same as anything else.
Does it matter if you leave out that little pinch of salt in your recipe? Would it matter if I was called Samson, instead of Sansom, or Sampson? Simpson? Ivan, not Ian? Ivor? Ifor? Oscar?
(Some years ago, invited to give a reading at a library, I was introduced as C. J. Sansom – the bestselling author of historical crime fiction, and no relation. When I explained that I was not, alas, C. J. Sansom, two women in the audience got up and left. Which was fine, really. The other half of the audience remained.)
I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. JOHNSON: ‘There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’
(Boswell, The
