must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
(Gustave Flaubert, letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 March 1857)
This is what we do know: an ‘I’ is not always a self; an ‘I’ is not a proxy for a person.
We feel that in the cases in which ‘I’ is used as subject, we don’t use it because we recognise a particular person by his bodily characteristics; and this creates the illusion that we use this word to refer to something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body. In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, ‘Cogito ergo sum’.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 1958)
(This is one of the things that poems do for us: they present us with an ‘I’ that is not a body – but which may be a person. Or if not a person, an ego. Or if not an ego, then a thinking machine. The ‘I’ is a function. It is an algorithm. A process. The ‘I’ is – or can be – simply the poem.)
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You can tie yourself in all sorts of philosophical knots with this sort of thing, obviously: who am I, what is ‘I’, is ‘I’ an unchanging object through time and space? But this way metaphysics and ontology lies – which is a route I cannot follow. I am not equipped.
A better, blunter, bluffer question might be not ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Who is “I”?’, but rather ‘Who cares?’
To which the honest answer is probably: no one. No one cares at all.
Not even if you’re W. H. Auden.
Which is, of course, why we write ‘I’.
I says ‘I am’.
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Or ‘I Am!’
I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost.
(John Clare, ‘I Am!’)
John Clare wrote this poem in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the last twenty years of his life. Clare – or the ‘I’ of the poem – clearly feels alone and isolated, the ‘self-consumer’ of his woes. ‘And yet I am!’ he writes. It is in this act of defiance, in the act of writing, that he lives.
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Writing, for many people – for those of us who keep diaries no one will ever read; for those of us who write only for ourselves and perhaps a few others; as for those who pursue literary fame for its own end; and indeed even for those, like Auden, who seem destined for true greatness and are proclaimed geniuses by the world at large – writing, for all of us, in different ways, is a way of saying, ‘And yet I am!’ Writing is a form of self-proclamation, of self-avowal.
(Philip Roth describes the urge to live on paper in his novel Exit Ghost: ‘Isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.’ To write is to live the unlived.)
To write is to reveal oneself.
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It is also a wonderful disguise. Poets, like all other writers, are liars, confabulators and cheats – just read a biography of a poet. Any poet. They’re all the same: poets are self-pleasuring beings who like to play around with their ‘I’, just as they like to play around with everything else.
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With his ‘I’ at the beginning of this poem, Auden is donning a disguise. He is putting on a mask.
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In middle age his face indeed became a mask – a ‘wedding cake left out in the rain’ is how he liked to describe it. He looked, he said, like ‘an unmade bed’. That face, that ruined, piteous, covetable, comfortable face – ‘I have a face of putty,’ he told Stephen Spender, ‘I should have been a clown’ – has long been a source of fascination to writers and artists. The philosopher Hannah Arendt remarked that it was ‘as though life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the “heart’s invisible furies”’. (Humboldt, in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, is described as having ‘developed in his face all the graver, all the more important human feelings’. Wouldn’t you just love a face, like Auden’s, like Humboldt’s, in which you had developed all the more important human feelings?) According to Randall Jarrell, Auden looked ‘like a disenchanted lion’. The poet Gavin Ewart charted his appalled fascination with Auden’s face – what another poet, John Hollander, calls simply ‘The Face’ – in a poem titled ‘Auden’:
Photographed, he looked like Spencer Tracy
or even Danny Kaye –
in the late Forties. But later it was wiser
to look the other way.
A young David Hockney, asked to sketch a portrait of Auden, was absolutely horrified: ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’
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Whatever it looks like, whatever it appears to be, perhaps all we can be sure of is that the ‘I’ in the work of a poet is a complex act of self-dramatisation, a performance. The ‘I’ in a poem may appear to be referring to something – to someone – but we need not postulate the poet’s self as its referent. The ‘I’ in a poem is not necessarily a proxy for a name.
The I ≠ Auden.
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I ≠ A.
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‘I’ is a persona. Though the persona may of course be Auden: it may be a clever double bluff; ‘I’ am I; either I am the mask, or the mask has eaten into the face, the performance having become the true self. Henry David Thoreau, at the beginning of Walden, reminds his readers that even when the ‘I’ appears to be absent it’s always there, hiding: ‘In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.’
Writers are always hiding in plain sight.
Madame Bovary, c’est moi.
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(A couple of years ago I published a book of short stories. Everyone assumed they were autobiographical. Some were autobiographical. But not the ones that people thought.)
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Whether we know it or not, we bring great expectations to a poem: we are conditioned to expect something from a poem, as soon as it declares itself a poem, and even more so when an ‘I’ declares itself at the beginning of a poem. A poetic ‘I’ implies a particular kind of poem, a lyric poem, the kind of poem we are familiar with from school, a poem which usually promises and delivers intense personal emotions presented in the first person. M. H. Abrams, who was one of those literary critics everyone used to read and now almost no one has heard of – the fate of all critics – defined the Romantic lyric poem as a meditation that ‘achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem’. This is the kind of poem we know what to do with.
So what are we going to get here, in ‘September 1, 1939’? An insight? A reckoning? A decision? A resolution?
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