Sunday Pages: "September 1, 1939"

A poem by W. H. Auden

Dear Reader,

History moves at a glacial pace. In the eight or so centuries between the development of medieval feudalism and the French Revolution, the lives of most Europeans changed so slowly and incrementally as to be almost unnoticeable. The population was much smaller (as were the people physically) and spread out far more. “The world of 1789 was therefore, for most of its inhabitants, incalculably vast,” writes the historian Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Revolution. “Most of them, unless snatched away by some awful hazard, such as military recruitment, lived and died in the county, and often the parish, of their birth,” and typically did not ever venture far beyond a day’s journey of that place. “The rest of the globe was a matter of government agents and rumour.” Those few newspapers that existed had laughably small circulations; even by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, most of the population could not read.

As a cyclist taking an arduous ride up a long mountain path every once in a while speeds downhill, so the velocity of history increases from time to time. But even then, change typically happens over a course of years if not decades. I speak of the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the Age of Exploration, the colonization of the New World, the Thirty Years’ War, and so on. Heretofore, the whole of the 21st century has had a similar vibe—of big, sweeping, world-altering global change, happening over the short course of a generation or two.

But sometimes, the god of history hurls a thunderbolt, and radical change happens instantaneously. One single twenty-four-hour interval indelibly marks the end of one era and the beginning of another. September 11, 2001 is one such example; when we say “9/11,” everyone knows what we mean, and the day of the attacks represents a clearly delineated before-and-after: there is a pre-9/11 and a post-9/11. Another critical date, and one that will be much in the news two weeks from now, is November 22, 1963. And December 7, 1941, remains, as FDR memorably said, a “date that will live in infamy,” all of the death and destruction that surprise attack portended expressed in a seemingly benign two-word shorthand: Pearl Harbor.

I’m sure I’m not the only American (or, indeed, the only citizen of the world) experiencing some creeping dread these last six days—as Trump Redux officially kicked off with a flurry of hateful, retrograde executive orders; corrupt, inept henchmen being confirmed by a docile, shit-eating Senate; and worrisome official appearances at “Pro-Life” events and disaster areas where POTUS threatened to withhold federal aid—that January 20, 2025 may wind up being another such flashpoint date. Not the insurrection, which after all was put down; not the 2024 election, which yet gave us two and a half more months to fight back (although our leaders chose instead to fold like a bad poker hand). The Second Inauguration is the Day of Reckoning.

The British poet W.H. Auden, who happened to be in New York when the Nazis rolled into Poland, saw September 1, 1939 as one of those world-changing dates. He banged out a Yeatsian poem about it, with the date as its title, and published it soon after. I shared it here previously, at the 20-year anniversary of 9/11—its lines about how The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night called to my mind the unspeakable reek emanating from Ground Zero that horrible day—but it is even more apt, alas, now. Swap “September” for “January” and revise the title, and what changes?

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 “low dishonest decade” in this sense begins with the Rough Beast riding down his gilded escalator in 2015, foreshadowing our sad national descent into despotism. We would be hard-pressed to find two adjectives that more accurately describe our collective feelings now than uncertain and afraid. And yes, waves of anger and waves of fear, sometimes in tandem, are indeed obsessing our private lives.

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.

The culture driven mad that Auden cites is the German one, which came into its own in the early sixteenth century, when Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation in the Saxon town of Wittenberg. Linz, in Austria—Österreich; literally the Eastern part of the German lands—is the hometown of Trump’s hero, Adolf Hitler. An imago is a vision one sees of oneself (the word also refers to a giant, fully-formed insect—a clever double meaning). It doesn’t take a genius, Auden is saying, to know that evil perpetuates itself.

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.

This stanza refers to The History of the Peloponnesian War, a contemporary account of the 27-year conflict between Athens and Sparta that began in 431 BCE, written by the Athenian general Thucydides. The “speech” is the funeral oration of Pericles, the great Athenian political leader, who addressed the crowd of mourners at the end of the first year of the war. The address is considered a eulogy for Athens—which is to say, for democracy:

Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others than of our imitating anyone else. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.

We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.

Pericles extols the virtues of the men who built Athens:

. . . what made [Athens] great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard. If they ever failed in an enterprise, they made up their minds that at any rate the city should not find their courage lacking to her, and they gave to her the best contribution that they could.

Make Athens great again!

Joe Biden could go on stage tomorrow and give this next part of a funeral oration first delivered a millennium and a half ago word for word, and nothing would have to be amended (other than the fact that he would finally have to acknowledge that we are, in fact, at war):

It is for you to try to be like them. Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous. Let there be no relaxation in fact of the perils of the war.

And for the Musks and Zucks and Bezoses of the world? Pericles hates their guts and (rightly) considers them pathetic, selfish cowards:

The people who have most excuse for despising death are not the wretched and unfortunate, who have no hope of doing well for themselves, but those who run the risk of a complete reversal in their lives, and who would feel the difference most intensely if things went wrong for them.

But back to the poem. Auden tells us that the lessons Thucydides learned almost 25 centuries ago—in a great war between a democracy and a dictatorship—would have to be learned again, in real time, along with the attendant pain, grief, mismanagement, and banishment of enlightened thought.

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.

Midtown Manhattan, where the poet sits at his dive bar, is a monument to the amazing things we can accomplish, when we work together. But all of that futuristic euphoria is a dream; it’s not real. Imperialism—that greedy compulsion which destroyed Athens—negates all the wondrous achievements.

Turning his attention to more prosaic matters, Auden surveys the dive bar, where he sees entertainment and drink papering over our collective terror:

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 bar is a fortress—a bulwark against the ineluctable encroachment of our unhappiness, our fear, and, deep down inside, in places we don’t want to acknowledge, our innate capacity for evil.

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.

Vaslav Nijinsky, a young and brilliant Russian ballet dancer, was the lover of Sergei Diaghilev, who headed up the dance company that made Nijinsky famous. They had a falling out when Nijinsky got engaged, and Diaghilev responded with venomous jealousy. Nijinsky subsequently suffered from schizophrenia and spent much of the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution. I don’t know that Auden’s assertion about being “loved alone” is true, but it speaks to how jealousy and desire lead to quarrels that can throw the world into disarray.

(Auden was in New York to visit the father of his partner, the much younger poet Chester Kallman. With this somewhat obscure reference, was he suggesting that Kallman was the Nijinsky to his Diaghilev? Kallman, incidentally, died in Athens.)

This next odd stanza suggests that people have different sides of themselves—night and day; dark and ethical—and walk about trapped in bubbles of their own, which cannot be penetrated:

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?

And then comes the part that made the poem—and, indeed, Auden himself—famous:

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.

The last line is deceptively simple. We must love one another or die can be read many different ways: as a statement of objective fact, as an aspirational self-help-style aphorism, as a paradox, as a veiled threat, as a fait accompli that is destined to fail.

Then the final stanza, which calls to mind the “thousand points of light” referenced by George H.W. Bush in his own inaugural address:

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.

The world remains in a stupor—now more than ever, perhaps. The Just—the “helpers” Fred Rogers talks about—remain out there, operating in the gloaming, and always will. The light will pierce through the darkness. Our individual job, Auden suggests, is simply to keep the flame going.

Almost immediately after releasing the poem to the world, Auden came to regret it. He considered it “trash,” and did not like its inclusion in anthologies. “September 1, 1939” was his “Piano Man,” his “Crocodile Rock,” his “American Pie.” He was sick of it, embarrassed by it, incredulous that that poem, and that one line specifically, would be his lasting legacy—but it also made his name and underwrote his existence. Did he stop believing in it? Did he realize, too late, that in fact most of us do love each other but die regardless—or, conversely, that even those who hate meet their Maker (if not soon enough)? Did old age make him misanthropic, curmudgeonly, and bitter? There were verses he cut from the published version, in which he espoused faith in “educated man” to know better than to go to war. He quickly decided that that was bunk. What was it that disillusioned him? In the months that followed September 1939, Lord knows, there was no shortage of awful events to shatter one’s belief in human decency.

Athens lost the Peloponnesian War. Sparta, with help from the Persians, won. Thus was democracy defeated by—uh-oh—an alliance of oligarchs and a hostile foreign power.

To ambitious and selfish men (it’s mostly men), oligarchy has a certain appeal—in 431 BC and today. As Athenagoras puts it, in a speech recorded by Thucydides:

It will be said, perhaps, that democracy is neither wise nor equitable, but that the holders of property are also the best fitted to rule. I say, on the contrary, first, that the word demos, or people, includes the whole state, oligarchy only a part; next, that if the best guardians of property are the rich, and the best counsellors the wise, none can hear and decide so well as the many; and that all these talents, severally and collectively, have their just place in a democracy. But an oligarchy gives the many their share of the danger, and not content with the largest part takes and keeps the whole of the profit; and this is what the powerful and young among you aspire to, but in a great city cannot possibly obtain.

That is what today’s American oligarchs want: all of the reward and none of the risk. Was January 20, 2025 the date when things shifted permanently in their favor—when the United States went from being Athens to being Sparta, when Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the other goober overlords finally got the green light to take it all away from the rest of us? And why do so many Americans still walk around in a fog, oblivious to the swirl of change around them, ignorant of the ill intent of the oligarchs, in denial about the malefic character of our once and current President? Will anything—can anything—pierce the bubble? If plague couldn’t, then what? And: once reanimated, will these Fox News zombies even be capable of admitting they’d been had?

For that, we look to a passage from a long poem by Auden, winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, which title is similar to the titles of Eric Hobsbawm’s history books, and perfectly describes our current moment: The Age of Anxiety.

We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

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ICYMI

Fascinating discussion on Friday’s Five 8 with the brilliant historian Manisha Sinha:

I explain what we can expect from Project 2025 going forward:

And Lolo shows off her pipes in our song parody, with animation by Chunk:

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Photo credit: the Spartan leader Lysander outside the walls of Athens. 19th century lithograph.