It was both hailed as 'his best work to date' and damned as
'his one failure'. Leonard Bernstein's symphony, inspired by the poem, is the
better work of art, argues Glyn Maxwell
W. H. Auden
In 1944, in New York City,
against a background of a changed and frightening world, the finest – and most
controversial – English poet of the day began work on a new long poem. On its
publication three years later it would garner some of the worst reviews he ever
got and leave many of his devotees cold: while TS Eliot hailed it as "his
best work to date", the Times Literary Supplement deemed it "his one
dull book, his one failure". It would inspire a symphony and a ballet and
win the Pulitzer prize. It was the last long poem he would write.
"The Age of Anxiety" is
the strangest flower of a marvellously fertile period. The decade following WH
Auden's emigration to New York in 1939 produced not only the long poems
"For the Time Being", "New Year Letter" and "The Sea
and the Mirror" – his sublime meditation on The Tempest – but some of the
finest works of this or any 20th-century poet: "In Memory of WB Yeats",
"At the Grave of Henry James", "If I Could Tell You",
"The Fall of Rome", "The Quest". And the great – and
latterly disavowed – lament for a falling world "September 1st,
1939".
There are still, remarkably, some
who believe Auden's gift deserted him when he left England on the eve of the
second world war, as if this perceived treachery to the motherland crippled him
creatively, but another reason for this position is suggested by the words of
Anthony Powell on Auden's death in 1973, as reported by Kingsley Amis, with
whom Powell was breakfasting: "I'm delighted that shit has gone . . . It
should have happened years ago . . . scuttling off to America in 1939 with his
boyfriend like a . . . like a . . ." But there'll always be an England.
It is in "September 1st,
1939" that we first glimpse the setting for what would become "The
Age of Anxiety":
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play . . .
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
At the outset of "The Age of
Anxiety" Auden spotlights four of these faces, solitary drinkers in a
wartime New York bar: Malin, a Canadian airman; Quant, a world-weary clerk;
Rosetta, a buyer for a department-store; and Emble, a young naval recruit. Over
six sections – a prologue, a life-story, a dream-quest, a dirge, a masque and
an epilogue – they meditate on their lives, their hopes, their losses, and on
the human condition. In real terms they get talking at the bar, grab a booth
together, get plastered and stagger back to Rosetta's place. There they drink
some more and dance a bit until the two older gents drift home and the younger
one pledges undying love to Rosetta before crashing out on her bed.
Between these mundane characters
and what Auden requires of them stretches a dizzying gulf. Each of his modern
Americans speaks, most of the time, in long speeches of alliterative
tetrameter, an English form so old as to suggest firelight and the mead-hall.
To a mid-20th-century ear, tetrameter would always seem to have a rhyme planned
ahead, but alliteration is what English used to bind ideas before it used
rhyme, and that's good enough this time for the proudly nordic Auden: "My
deuce, my double, my dear image, / Is it lively there, that land of
glass". The never-fulfilled expectation of rhyme is a suitable curse on
any lonesome quartet of drinkers at any bar, a milieu that Auden calls "an
unprejudiced space where nothing particular ever happens".
Unsurprisingly Malin, Quant,
Rosetta and Emble all sound like Auden, who wrote some lively charades but
wasn't really a playwright. Then again, because they sound like Auden, what
they say is mostly brilliant, beautiful, or both. Here is Malin's description
of the death of an airman: "We fought them off / But paid a price; there
was pain for some. / 'Why have They killed me?' wondered our Bert, our / Greenhouse
gunner, forgot our answer, / Then was not with us . . ." While Quant
imagines the decay of the dead: "Soil accepts for a serious purpose / The
jettisoned blood of jokes and dreams . . ." And Rosetta imagines, with
striking prescience, the world to come: "Odourless ages, an ordered world
/ Of planned pleasures and passport-control, / Sentry-go sedatives, soft drinks
and / Managed money, a moral planet / Tamed by terror . . ."
After several pages of the poem
one is aware only of Auden. I defy anyone new to the poem to conceal the
characters' names and correctly guess which of the four is talking. Auden's
prose introduction to them furnishes us with one man who happens to know his
mythology, one man who is "trying to recapture the old atmosphere of laboratory
and lecture-hall", a woman who daydreams of "those landscapes
familiar to all readers of English detective stories" and a young man
"fully conscious of the attraction of his uniform to both sexes".
That is to say, Auden fourfold. When it becomes clear that the puppet-master
has handed out abstractions to all his characters – Malin is
"Thought", Quant "Intuition", Rosetta "Feeling"
and Emble "Sensation" – one can sympathise with the Horizon reviewer
who called the poem "a re-hash of Auden's psychology divided by
four". John Berryman, who regarded Auden as "one of the best living
poets", none the less called them "the four vaguest characters in
modern literature".
Auden's burned-out Manhattanites
are under no more obligation to chat in American slang than Hamlet is to murmur
in Middle Danish. The speeches are meant to be taken as inward monologues,
dream-soliloquies, while the uniform shape of utterance suggests a commonality,
a shared and inescapable plight. Verse should be neither too free nor too
formed, as human experience is also neither: breath and bloodstream hold in
place a struggling spirit, and Auden is a master of human utterance only
insofar as he's a master of form.
But for all its local wonders,
its unceasing appeal to grace and intelligence – plus some welcome bursts of
satiric laughter – there is something formally wrong with "The Age of
Anxiety". If one is going to create puppets then one has to make them
move, and they don't. They don't really move each other, let alone us. They
begin in thought – "Quant was thinking", "Malin thought",
"Emble was thinking" – and move into conversation – "Malin suggested"
"Quant approved", "So did Rosetta" – but in their actual
speeches they show only the faintest traces of attention to one another. In the
third section, "The Seven Stages", Auden has them leaving the bar
behind, not literally, but, by dint of being drunk, fanning out into a
dream-landscape on a spiritual quest (is any drink that good?) at which point
one wonders why he set it in a bar at all.
The quest requires that at one
point the four ascend "the same steep pass", the only physical effect
of which is to shorten their speeches, but paradoxically this causes them to
sound more than ever like projections of abstractions: Rosetta (Feeling) has
"a horror of dwarfs / And a streaming cold", Malin (Thought) muses
that "The less I feel / The more I mind", while Emble (Sensation)
complains "I hate my knees / But like my legs". One voice hardly ever
responds to what another has said, as if the four abstractions were true
oppositions, or sealed off from each other like the four elements. Those may
be, but voices aren't.
The fifth section, "The Masque",
set in Rosetta's apartment, with Malin ogling Emble and Emble pawing Rosetta,
would seem to require the most interaction, but the four remain symbolic
mouthpieces, and when Emble and Rosetta dance and finally kiss, they render the
following sweet nothings:
Emble said:
Till death divide
May the Four Faces Feeling can make
Assent to our sighs.
She said:
The snap of the Three
Grim Spinning Sisters' Spectacle Case
Uphold our honors.
And so to bed. It's easy to
chuckle at this, but it's merely the sound of a form stretched to its furthest
premise and, well . . . snapping. And yet there are traces of beautifully
resonant writing, evoking the moment, bringing human faces close to our own,
throughout "The Age of Anxiety" – they're just all in prose. They're
the stage-directions.
Malin is watching Emble and
Rosetta flirting. He "had been building a little altar of sandwiches. Now
he placed an olive upon it and invoked the Queen of love". A little while
before, when the group arrives at Rosetta's place, they "all felt that it
was time something exciting happened and decided to do their best to see that
it did. Had they been perfectly honest with themselves, they would have had to
admit that they were tired and wanted to go home alone to bed." Quant
"waved his cigar in time to the music" and "invoked the local
spirits". Rosetta, having seen the older men to the elevator, finds Emble
comatose on her bed: "She looked down at him, half-sadly, half-relieved .
. ."
One must love Auden's poetry to
be able to speak this heresy, but I can't help wondering what fun he might have
had – we might have had – with, instead of the poem, a wartime novel in the
vein of Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen. In virtually the last words of the poem
something is revealed: "[Malin] returned to duty, reclaimed by the actual
world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest .
. ." This points to the problem with "The Age of Anxiety": time
is real to real people. Abstractions can't change, so they don't listen.
A lesser poet wrote a greater
poem for the age of anxiety: in Louis MacNeice's "Autumn Journal",
set in London on the brink of the war, a recognisably human voice is blown
hither and thither by memories, lusts and terrifying headlines. Auden's
"The Age of Anxiety" isn't even the best work of art called "The
Age of Anxiety": if I'm a junior minister in Auden's world, I'm barely a
tea-boy in that of Leonard Bernstein, but I'd accord that honour to his
Symphony No 2. Bernstein found the poem "fascinating and hair-raising".
From the time he read "The Age of Anxiety" in 1948 "the
composition of a symphony based on [it] acquired an almost compulsive
quality", he wrote, describing an "extreme personal identification of
myself with the poem, the essential line [of which] is the record of our difficult
and problematic search for faith." Three years after the Holocaust, in the
year of the founding of Israel, one can scarcely imagine how "difficult
and problematic" faith had become for Bernstein.
Like the poem, the symphony is
divided into six movements, each movement itself sub-divided, but many of the
movements fade or blur into each other. By his own admission, Bernstein
followed the poem very closely, with the piano representing the self in quest
of meaning and faith, struggling to be understood, to be loved, against a
backdrop of jazzily detached and distracted woodwinds, horns, celesta and wild
percussion. For the quest section, the piano descends a tentative,
untrustworthy scale, like the onset of dream, while "The Masque" –
the bit in Rosetta's apartment – is a scintillating piano solo, a real dance
for dear life. Bernstein's daughter Jaime called it "ridiculously
difficult . . . one of the hardest parts ever written", and it does
magnificently what the poem can't do – spins the characters out beyond reason
in their desire to blot out the dismal world.
Throughout the piece instruments
explode into life, peter out suddenly or are drowned out by others, yet the
same fragile theme struggles on. This gives the symphony the concision and
cohesion wanting in the poem. It is short (for a symphony) and electrifying.
Its voices hear each other. And if the grand closing chords seem more resolved
than anything at the end of the poem – notwithstanding Malin's Christian
optimism as his train crosses the Manhattan bridge at sunrise – perhaps, at
that point where genius in language and music meet, only the latter can seem to
mend what's broken.