Ian Sansom - September 1, 1939 - A Biography of a Poem

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

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Unpublished writings by W. H. Auden are quoted with the permission of the Estate of W. H. Auden.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

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

Landmarks CoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

List of Pages iii iv v 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 2526 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 151 153 154 155 156 157 158 159160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 169 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 193 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 239 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 255 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 ii

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.

It was quite a return.

In 1928 Auden had left Oxford with a miserable Third in English, and his appointment as professor was not without controversy. The university elects its Professor of Poetry unusually – indeed, uniquely – by a vote among its graduates, and Auden remained a divisive figure in England. The two other candidates were Harold Nicolson, a well-connected author, diplomat, politician and husband to Vita Sackville-West, and G. Wilson Knight, an eminent and massively prolific Shakespeare scholar, author of both the standard work on Shakespearean tragedy, The Wheel of Fire (1930), and the bestselling The Sceptred Isle: Shakespeare’s Message for England at War (1940).

Nicolson and Wilson Knight had obvious merits – they were sensible, distinguished, learned individuals. And they were easily and identifiably English . Auden, in contrast, was an eccentric, remote, supernational sort of a figure, a poet celebrity, English-born but now a self-proclaimed New Yorker who had developed a strange, drawling mid-Atlantic accent – recently further complicated after he’d had his few final teeth removed and been fitted with dentures – and who made a living ‘on the circuit’, touring American campuses delivering his lectures and reading his poems. He saw himself as a kind of itinerant preacher:

An air-borne instrument I sit,

Predestined nightly to fulfil

Columbia-Giesen-Management’s

Unfathomable will,

By whose election justified,

I bring my gospel of the Muse

To fundamentalists, to nuns,

to Gentiles and to Jews.

(Auden, ‘On the Circuit’)

Auden’s usual touring schedule did not include the English Midlands. The closest he came was spending his summers in bohemian fashion on the Italian island of Ischia with his lover Chester Kallman. (‘They engaged a handsome local boy known as Giocondo’, notes one biographer, ‘to look after the house, and possibly also to provide sexual services.’) Though popular among undergraduates, who weren’t entitled to vote, Auden was not considered a serious candidate for the professorship by the more senior members of the university.