"First of all, anybody in addition to what he happens to do-if he's an attorney, a doctor, a writer-will have views about certain things that happen," he said, discussing the relationship of politics and poetry. "What I think they must remember is that by writing they are not going to change the course of history. The history of Europe would be the same today if Chaucer, Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, had never lived. When it comes to political and social evils, political action and straight journalistic reportage of facts can change history, but poetry cannot.
"In Russia," he continued, after reflecting a moment, "where they've never had a free press-not under the Czars and not now-a writer can have an effect. He can say something which others haven't the right to say. In the thirties, I wrote things against Hitler, and I wouldn't take back any of them. Only "-and he smiled-" I feel a little embarrassed that I was the only person who gained anything from them-my reputation, you know. All the poems I wrote didn't save one Jew from being gassed." He paused and lit a cigarette.
It is the time for the destruction of
error.
The chairs are being brought in from
the garden.
The summer talk stopped on that
savage coest
Before the storms, after the guests
and birds:
In sanatoriums they laugh less and
less,
Less certain of cure; and the loud
madman
Sinks now into a terrible calm...
This is the dragon's day, the devourer's:
Orders are given to the enemy for a
time...
to enforce
Conformity with the orthodox bone.
With organized fear, the articulated
skeleton.
1929
Auden traveled to Berlin in 1927 and was joined by Isherwood two years later. "My parents said I could go abroad for year," he recalled. "The generation before mine was influenced heavily by French culture. I went to ??????? Paris. As it turned out, it was an interesting time to go. In the midtwenties, you can't imagine how safe life seemed. My father had been at the war, but I had never thought any thing might happen to him. At Berlin, I realized the foundations were shaking." And at Berlin, surrounded by the hysteria, madness, and mission that culminated in Adolf Hitler, Auden wrote extraordinary poetry, and people noticed. The people included T. S. Eliot, who, as an editor at Faber and Faber, published Auden's first book. And so, Auden's career began.
It was in Spain, as one of the leftist intellectuals who supported-and often died for-the Loyalist cause, that Auden wrote his most political poetry. A left sympathizer, but never committing himself to Communism, he celebrated the relentless pace of Marx's History. Disillusioned and frightened by the approaching Nazi apocalypse, infatuated with a romantic conception of the working class, cagier to write for a Cause, Auden and his friends wrote poetry of violent revolution. Twenty years later, editing a collection of his works Auden amitted "Spain 1937," one of his most famous poems.
Today the inevitable increase in the
chances of death;
The conscious acceptance of guilt in
the fact of murder;
Today the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamliplet and
the boring meeting...
The stars are dead; the animals will
not look:
We are left alone with our day, and
the time is short and
History to the defcated
May say Alas but cannot help or
pardon.
SPAIN 1937
"The end [of "Spain 1937"] is a very wicked thing-the statement that History is always on the side of the winner," Auden explained. "War may be necessary," and again he smiled, "but it's still murder."
Necessary? murder? In January, 1968, Auden was quoted in Newsweek as saying that American troops must remain in Vietnam. "I thought politically that one would have to stay till there was negotiation; I didn't say I supported the war," he remarked. "But things of course have gotten a lot worse. What we should do is get out, after taking precautions that people can leave the country if they want to." Auden has never written about Vietnam, "because one should write about what one knows." He has not been to Vietnam, he said, and he doesn't know enough about it.
Has he ever regretted becoming an American citizen? "No." Prompt and positive. He left England in 1939 because, he said, "English cultural life was a family life. Well "-and there went the smile again-" I love my family very dearly, but I don't want to live with them." As for New York: "at times it's absolutely dreadful, but one has many good friends ??????? forward with the slight grin of the experienced storyteller-" there's a Jewish delicatessen on Second Avenue where I used to get kippers. I ate them as a boy, and there aren't many places one can get them here. Well, I come back this fall-they've gone macrobiotic!" And the clipped, British words collapsed into laughter.
CITIES and the situation of urban man are favorite themes of Auden. In 1946 he called our time "The Age of Anxiety, haunted by the horror of the atomic bomb, uncertain of the existence of a future. When asked to discuss it, he chuckled, "I wish I had parented it" But soon he became serious "Everyone is anxious about the future," he said. "I hope I shall be dead before the worst happens."
"... hermits perforce are all today.
" with numbered caves in enormous
jails,
hotels designed to deteriorate
their ?? already cor?? guests,
factories in which the functional
Hobbe?? Man is mass-produced. "
And the men of the future?
????
????
????
numbering by fives, with no zero,worshiping a ju-ju General Mo,
in groups ruled by grandmothers,hirsute witches who on winter nights"fable them stories of fair-hairedElveswhose magic made the mountain
dam,
of Dwarves, cunning in craft, who
smithied
the treasure boards of tin cans? they flatten out for their hut roofs. "
After presenting his apocalyptic vision, Auden closes "City Without Walls" with his listeners' irritable request that he go back to sleep. Insomnia, apparently, is the immediate cause of his pessimism. "One has to be careful about taking a certain kind of pleasure in talking about the awful things that might happen," he said, explaining why he decided to add the last lines. "One must avoid saying, 'You see, I told you so.'"
