London is prepared, and the people living in this lively, crowded, industrially important part of the capital are justifiably proud of what they have done towards completing the nation’s defences. A tour of East London yesterday was a stirring and heartening experience. At one point, not far from the docks, a piece of waste land had fallen into the hands of a big squad of willing and tireless workers, whose picks and spades were quickly supplying fillings for thousands of sandbags. Stripped to the waist, the men dug vigorously, pausing only now and then to make a fellow-worker laugh with a cheerful quip.
(‘Cheerfulness in East London: Voluntary Help, Willing and Tireless Workers’, The Times, Friday, 1 September 1939)
The whole scene sounds highly unlikely, frankly – a fantasy of the Times reporter – but on the other hand I can certainly imagine him, my grandfather, George Sansom, stripped to the waist, filling sandbags, ready with a cheerful quip. He was a boxer, a tough guy, a sweet man, and born the same year as Auden, coincidentally, 1907, though his life and Auden’s could not have been more different. When Auden was moving from prep school to boarding school, George Sansom was leaving school to go and work at Windsor and Newton paint manufacturers in east London. When Auden was going up to Oxford, George Sansom was going off to work in a factory making orange boxes. And while Auden sat out the war, safe in New York, he served in the Merchant Navy. The year Auden died, George Sansom was retiring from the Post Office, where he’d worked as a postman for most of his adult life. Auden died in Austria, where he’d bought a home on the proceeds of book sales and awards. My grandfather died in Essex, having moved from his council flat in Poplar into sheltered accommodation on a busy main road in Romford. At Auden’s funeral, they played Siegfried’s Funeral March from Tristan und Isolde. After my granddad’s funeral at the crematorium, when all the family got together to clear out the flat, I was not surprised to find that there were no books in the house, not a single one, and that he owned only the clothes he stood up in, some bed linen, a few pots and pans, and three LPs: the Massed Bands of the Royal Marines; an Elvis Christmas album; and The Best of Pavarotti. His life savings were exactly one hundred and one pounds. When Auden speaks on others’ behalf in this poem, as he so often liked to do – ‘I and the public’, ‘We must suffer them all again’, ‘our wish’, ‘We must love one another or die’ – I wonder if he thought he was speaking on behalf of people like my grandfather. If he did, my grandfather certainly would not have thanked him for it.
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(I make no apology for bringing in these family matters here, though I’ll try not to make a habit of it. Auden’s reviews and essays are defiantly personal, of course – but that’s always been a perk of the privileged; they’re allowed to be defiantly personal, because of who they are. They’ve earned it. The rich and the famous, we assume, and they assume, are just more interesting than the rest of us. They have permission to do and say what they want. Auden begins an early review, for example, ‘If the business of a reviewer is to describe the contents of the books he reviews and to appraise their value, this is not going to be a review.’ Well, in that case: this is not going to be a book.)
Anyway, all of this is just to be clear at the outset that a lot was happening on 1 September 1939.
And a lot is happening in ‘September 1, 1939’.
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.
The first words of the poem: I sit.
It’s hardly a stirring start, is it?
Who on earth begins a poem from a seated position?
And who sits?
Auden sits?
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There is no reason to assume that the ‘I’ who is sitting here at the beginning of the poem is necessarily the poem’s author, Wystan Hugh Auden, who was born in York on 21 February 1907, the youngest of three brothers, son of George Augustus Auden, a doctor, and Constance Rosalie Auden (née Bicknell), who had trained as a nurse and who loved opera and who doted on her precocious son. (Of his parents, Auden remarked that ‘Ma should have married a robust Italian who was very sexy […] Pa should have married someone weaker than he and utterly devoted to him. But of course, if they had, I shouldn’t be here.’)
The ‘I’ could be this Auden – the Auden who we know attended Gresham’s School in Holt in Norfolk and who in 1925 went up to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating three years later with an inglorious Third, and who in the late 1920s and 1930s worked variously as a teacher, a reviewer and as a documentary film-maker with the GPO Film Unit. It could be the Auden who travelled to Weimar Berlin and to Iceland, and who went to Spain to support the newly formed Republican government, where he witnessed the brutalities of the civil war and where he wrote some of his most famous poems, ‘A Communist to Others’ and ‘Spain 1937’, poems which, as with ‘September 1, 1939’, he later disowned, describing them as ‘dishonest’.
It could be – couldn’t it? – this Auden, the Auden who in January 1939 sailed to America with his friend the playwright Christopher Isherwood, their departure seen by many in England as a betrayal of their country in its hour of need, and the Auden who soon after arriving in New York met the eighteen-year-old Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong companion and lover. (They exchanged rings and behaved to all intents and purposes as a married couple – for better and for worse – even though in 1935 Auden had already married Erika Mann, the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann, in order to assist her escaping Nazi Germany, an act he described as a ‘bugger’s duty’.)
It could be him: the Auden who lived his adult life mostly in New York, teaching at various colleges and universities, who in 1945 served as a major in the US Air Force in their Strategic Bombing Survey, and who in 1946 became a US citizen. It could be the Auden who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961, the Auden who summered on the Italian island of Ischia, the Auden who bought a house in Kirchstetten in Austria and who published during his lifetime more than a dozen books of poetry, as well as volumes of essays, plays and libretti, the very Auden who died in Vienna on 29 September 1973, the death certificate giving the cause of death as ‘hypertrophy of the heart’.
It could be that Auden.
But probably not.
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There is no need to assume it is Auden who is sitting here at the beginning of the poem, any more than we need assume that the often sad and lonely ‘I’ in Shakespeare’s sonnets, in sonnet 29, say (‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state’), is necessarily or entirely the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, who may or may not have been the author of the plays that bear his name and who famously left his wife Anne his second-best bed; or that the wildly jubilant ‘I’ of Walt Whitman’s ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ is the big-bearded bard from Long Island; or that when we read at the beginning of Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Double Image’ that ‘I am thirty this November’ we can safely assume that Sexton herself was thirty that November, though she was and we do, we almost always assume that the speaker of a poem, the voice on the page, is indeed the ‘I’ of the poet.
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