September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. Ian Sansom
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Belfast, and I’d listen to the news on the radio in the morning, but it was like listening to news from another planet: I was busy; I had work to do; I had stuff on. It’s the whole point of Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, which is about Brueghel’s painting The Fall of Icarus: ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.’ It turns out that I have spent a lifetime walking dully along, unable and unwilling to recognise the extraordinary and the other while it’s happening all around me. Like Auden’s description of the dogs in his poem, I have simply ambled on, leading my doggy life. Attending to Auden is probably the closest I’ve ever come to stopping and noticing something truly amazing, an actual Icarus, a boy falling out of the sky.)
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On the long Greyhound bus journey back to New York on Tuesday, 29 August, Auden wrote to a friend in England, ‘There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other …’
In fact, people knew already: everybody knew already.
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In his novel Coming up for Air, published in June 1939, George Orwell has his narrator remark:
I can see the war that’s coming […] There are millions of others like me. Ordinary chaps that I meet everywhere, chaps I run across in pubs, bus drivers and travelling salesmen for hardware firms, have got a feeling that the world’s gone wrong. They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet.
Auden may have been enjoying his holiday in the sun, but things had been cracking and collapsing for some time.
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‘Europe’, writes Antony Beevor in his panoramic history The Second World War (2012), ‘did not stumble into war on 1 September 1939.’ She had been walking steadily towards it for years. In The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, H. G. Wells had predicted a total war by 1940: ‘The tension had risen to a point at which disaster seemed like relief and Europe was free to tear itself to fragments.’
The fragmentation had not begun months or years before: it had begun decades before.
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A. J. P. Taylor, in his account in The Origins of the Second World War (1961), claimed that a second world war ‘had been implicit since the moment when the first war ended’: it became explicit at exactly 4.30 a.m. on 1 September 1939, when the German panzer divisions which had been gathering on the Polish border began their advance, and the first air raids began. By the time the Soviets invaded northern China in September 1945 – the last campaign of the Second World War – almost 50 million people throughout the world had died, more than half of them civilians; approximately 1000 deaths per hour, every hour, for six years.
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1 September 1939 inaugurated an entirely new kind of war. World War I had been fought by infantrymen moving slowly, heroically and predictably into battlefields prepared for war: ‘They fell with their faces to the foe’, in the words of Laurence Binyon’s famous poem ‘For the Fallen’. But on 1 September, Hitler unleashed ‘blitzkrieg’ – lightning war, impersonal war, war that was intended to lead to Vernichtungsschlacht, annihilation. First came the air attacks and bombing raids, then the motorised infantry and the tanks, followed by the SS Death’s Head regiments who conducted what were euphemistically referred to as ‘police and security’ measures to ensure what Himmler called the ‘radical suppression of the incipient Polish insurrection in the newly occupied parts of Upper Silesia’. Within a week, Cracow, with a population of a quarter of a million, was under German control. Twenty-four thousand SS troops had moved into Poland, by train, by plane and on foot; the massacres of civilians began. Villages and towns were set alight. There were public executions.
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The front-page headline of the New York Times on Friday, 1 September 1939 tapped it all out in telegraphese: ‘GERMAN ARMY ATTACKS POLAND; CITIES BOMBED, PORT BLOCKADED; DANZIG IS ACCEPTED INTO REICH’. With their trochaic-patterned strong-stressed syllables, one might almost rearrange the lines into verse:
German army attacks Poland;
Cities bombed, port blockaded;
Danzig is accepted into Reich.
The lead column then begins with the words ‘BRITISH MOBILIZING’.
Indeed they were – and had been for some time.
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In England, ever since the Munich Agreement of September 1938, trenches had been dug, air-raid shelters constructed and barrage balloons floated above London. The pictures from the National Gallery had been packed up and sent off to Wales. Most of the British Museum’s treasures were safely stored in an underground tunnel in Aberystwyth. Rationing was being planned.
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And meanwhile, back in America … what exactly was Auden up to?
We know roughly what he was up to.
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On 12 June 2013, the British Library acquired an Auden manuscript at Christie’s in London for £47,475. It was Auden’s diary for August and November 1939, written in a ‘National’ notebook, made in the USA, ‘this book contains eye-ease paper, “Easy on the Eyes”.’ The diary is incorrectly dated, by Auden, ‘August 1938’. The entry for 1 September begins ‘Woke with a headache after a night of bad dreams in which C [Chester Kallman] was unfaithful. Paper reports German attack on Poland.’ There follow several pages of notes on scientific and political subjects – beginning with ‘Good News,’ [underlined]. ‘A scanning microscope has been invented.’
(‘A scanning microscope’ is another way of describing a poem.)
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At 9.30 p.m. on 1 September, the British government issued an ultimatum to the Nazis to withdraw from Poland.
At 9 a.m. on 3 September, a second ultimatum was issued to the German Foreign Office in Berlin: Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador, read out the ultimatum to a deserted room.
And then finally, at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcast to the nation on the BBC. The country, he announced, was at war:
This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.
Also on 3 September, the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, made his own radio broadcast, of a very different kind: ‘Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields. At this moment there is being prepared a proclamation of American neutrality.’ There would be, Roosevelt promised, ‘no blackout of peace in the United States’.
(The proclamation, the American neutrality, the promise of no blackout of peace: Roosevelt’s words seem to echo in the words of Auden’s poem, which indeed contains a ‘proclaim’, a ‘neutral’ and the famous ironic points of light. How many poems, one wonders, are plucked from the ether, and how many from the airwaves? Poets are like thieves and spies; they’re always listening in. It’s like that film The Lives of Others, the one about the spy in East Germany, eavesdropping with his headphones on. Poems are the words of others – the words of us all. There’s a poem by Denise Riley, ‘Lure, 1963’, for example, which is composed of snatches of half-remembered pop lyrics – ‘The Great Pretender’ by The Platters, ‘The Wanderer’ by Dion, ‘It’s in His Kiss’ by Betty Everett. One of the truly great works of literary criticism, John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the