It’s not Auden’s best poem or (since “Funeral Blues” appeared in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral) his most famous. It’s not even one he cared for: “The most dishonest poem I have ever written” he called it, and after an abortive attempt at revision he eventually disowned it. But as Ian Sansom says “September 1, 1939” is “a poem that still reverberates with meaning and controversy, a poem that readers return to at times of personal and national crisis”. His richly entertaining book explores what goes on in the poem and why it has had such an impact. Having spent the past 25 years failing to write a magnum opus on Auden, he opts for something quirkier: a jaunt round 99 lines of verse. “I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street / Uncertain and afraid” the poem begins.
Poets can’t always be trusted when they say “I” but Auden’s diary confirms that he did indeed go to a bar (the Dizzy Club) that evening. As he sat there he may have been as troubled by a bad dream he’d had, of his lover Chester Kallman being unfaithful, as by the German invasion of Poland. Perhaps he also brooded on his abandonment of Europe for New York earlier that year, for which he’d been attacked in the UK. But such private anxieties went unspoken: nazism, Hitler, the threat to democracy and freedom – it’s the state of the world that preoccupies him over the poem’s nine stanzas.
Sansom can’t be said to rush us through them. It’s page 112 before he finishes looking at the first verse. He’s apologetic and self-mocking about this. Not that he’s sluggish, but he can’t resist a detour; half the book is made up of parentheses.
After a decade of frenetic travel and intellectual activity, Auden sits himself down in order to think – then shares his thoughts, as if we’re sitting next to him. His poem is public yet intimate – a feat so difficult to pull off that Sansom spends 300 pages trying to understand it and still inevitably falls short. Though he hero worships Auden and thinks him a genius, he’s not uncritical. The man at the bar can be a bore at times, gesturing and sermonising rather than conversing. He can also be naive in his psychologising, as when attributing the rise of nazism to the treaty of Versailles or explaining Hitler’s wickedness in terms of his childhood traumas (“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”). “Banal, deficient and silly” Sansom calls him at one point. But the flaws come as a relief: “If I’ve learned anything reading Auden, it’s how wearying unceasing brilliance can be, so much so that one cherishes any sign of weakness.”
The persona Auden creates – a man in a bar, overwhelmed by cataclysmic world events – partly explains the poem’s popularity after 9/11. More to the point, it’s set in New York in September. And to anyone seeing (or smelling) the ash clouds from the World Trade Center, the line “the unmentionable odour of death” couldn’t help but resonate. A spookier connection is the poem’s form, nine 11-line stanzas. Sansom notes that each of these is a single sentence and though Auden stretches the syntax to achieve that (with some dubious colons and semi-colons), they’re undeniably single units of thought.
A dazzling achievement, then, but one that Auden regretted, if only because of the last line of the penultimate stanza: “We must love one another or die”, an assertion he dismissed as a lie, on the grounds that we have to die anyway. It’s a pedantic objection to a rhetorical flourish, and Sansom struggles to say anything new on the subject, despite the “rat’s nest” of notes he has written. He moves briskly on to talk about Auden’s death instead and then arrives at the last stanza, with its “affirming flame”, after which, decades on, he finally escapes the poem – freedom! – and can think about beginning whatever’s next.
Though he scolds himself for taking so long over the book, its slowness in coming has several advantages – not just in showing how Auden’s poem continues to reverberate today (the references to Blair, Obama, Trump and Boris Johnson aren’t in the least gratuitous), or in the number of books he has drawn on, relatively few about Auden, as part of his research (the select bibliography runs to 40 pages), but in the originality of his approach. This isn’t a biography or literary-critical monograph, but nor is it a memoiristic tribute such as Nicholson Baker’s U and I: A True Story or Nell Stevens’s Mrs Gaskell and Me. Least of all is it a personal journey of redemption, since Auden’s brilliance makes Sansom feel a failure, serving only to underline what a nonentity he is by comparison.
That said, we learn a fair bit about Ian Sansom along the way – about his Christian missionary phase, family relations, teaching methods, ineptitude at barbecuing meat or building walls, and love of crime fiction (which he brings to bear on Auden’s line “unearthing the whole offence”). Shandyesque and magpie-like, scholarly yet frolicsome, the book makes room for all manner of diverse material, to great effect. Not that Sansom would admit as much: he keeps telling us how boring and ordinary he is. But the self-abasement doesn’t convince. His book is distinctly above average.
• September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
