On WH Auden (2) Reading September 1, 1939

September 11th 2001

I took particular notice of this bit from writer Alexander McCall Smith:

Years after his death, when the World Trade Center towers were brought to the ground, traumatised New Yorkers faxed each other copies of a poem he had written for an earlier and greater crisis, “September 1, 1939”. They took comfort in his words even if many of those who received them must have had no idea who he was.

Reference: Book of a lifetime: Collected Shorter Poems by WH Auden.

I was working for a US consulting firm, and that morning of September 11th, I was in a client meeting at our Chicago office.  In fact I had come in early to beginning our meeting, and it was a curious scene in our office, as I walked my client out.  My colleagues were huddled in a small room, where we had a small TV.  When I walked back to my office, I joked Get back to work!  But they ignored me, as they were all glued to the TV.  I quickly saw what they were watching, and if memory serves me right, we saw the second plane crash into that tower, as captured in the photo above. In fact I just wrote about that date and my visit to New York City two months later: Breakthrough Ideas for the 21st Century.

I had encountered September 1, 1939 a few times before, but it wasn't until now that something resonated with me and captured me.  Perhaps it was the reference to traumatized New Yorkers, or the synchronicity of my having just written about September 11th.  But no matter, it is a prompt for me to look into and write about it.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

September 1, 1939, by WH Auden.

In the next article, I post two recitations of this poem.  I want to keep the printed and the video versions separate, because the former may bring us closer to when and where Auden wrote it: It was in the first few days of World War II, and he was visiting the father of his lover Chester Kallman, apparently in New Jersey, not New York City as the first two lines suggest.  Auden was evidently plunged in a dark mood, and understandably so all the world must've had that stench, that a colleague described for me, as I visited New York City two months after September 11th.