Скачать книгу

      *

      Just because he’s sitting, he’s not necessarily immobile. He’s not inactive. He is observing. He is concentrating. He is preparing himself for the poem, perhaps, gathering his energies. When we think of authors sitting, we imagine them sitting with single-mindedness and with purpose – don’t we? – sitting still but getting somewhere, going inwards.

      *

      Or maybe he’s just posing. He’s pouting. He’s sitting for a portrait.

      *

      Or perhaps he’s ‘sitting in’, in the way a jazz musician sits in on a session.

      The songwriter and historian of American popular music Arnold Shaw explains what it means to ‘sit in’:

      A man who sits in plays music that is unrehearsed, improvised and spontaneous. But the difference is that he invades a place where a set group of musicians is in residence at union rates. He comes for the sheer love of playing, for the stimulus of exchanging ideas with others, for the pleasure of speaking and communicating through his instrument.

      ‘Sitting in’ implies a freedom of movement, a body of shared feelings and a camaraderie that tended to disappear with the rise of bop and with the stringent enforcement of union regulations against free play. It was also based on a rare community of interests between performer and audience that placed communication and expression on the same level as entertainment. When the adventure worked, all three phases were present at a peak of excitement.

      (Arnold Shaw, 52nd St: The Street of Jazz)

      Communication, expression, entertainment: as good a definition as any of what one might expect from a work of art.

      *

      ‘You must sit down’, says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

      So I did sit and eat.

      (George Herbert, ‘Love: Love bade me welcome’)

      In The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 70, no. 5 (May 1970), there is a letter to the editor from Louise Ryssmann, R.N.:

      I would like to contribute this idea to other nurses. When I am talking with patients, I sit in a chair next to the bed, rather than standing. By sitting, I can establish a closer rapport with patients because the physical distance is less and I am talking directly across rather than down to the patient. Sitting also creates a more relaxed atmosphere and the patient feels the nurse is not rushed and has time to talk. And as an additional benefit, I am not nearly as tired at the end of an eight-hour shift.

      At the beginning of the poem Auden settles down, establishes a close rapport and starts to talk. Like a nurse, or a priest, or a therapist.

      Or a man in a bar.

      I want the poem to be completely American in language.

      (Auden on The Age of Anxiety, in The Table Talk of W. H. Auden)

      *

      So, the speaker of the poem is sitting in a dive, and a dive, according to the OED, is ‘An illegal drinking-den, or other disreputable place of resort, often situated in a cellar, basement, or other half-concealed place, into which frequenters may “dive” without observation.’

      A dive is not, therefore, just a place to be seen or to look, but a place to disappear.

      Auden is using a half-concealed place as a site of contemplation.

      *

      ‘Dive’, by the way, is an Americanism. It’s worth pointing out. It is not insignificant.

      *

      In a poem for his old friend Louis MacNeice, Auden wrote of his own desire to become a ‘minor Atlantic Goethe’.

      Which is exactly what he became.

      *

      *

      Though for America, one should probably read New York.

      Who am I now?

      An American? No, a New Yorker,

      who opens his Times at the obit page.

      (Auden, ‘Prologue at Sixty’)

      He had arrived in New York with Christopher Isherwood on 26 January 1939. The two men had already visited America in the summer of 1938, on their way back from China, but this time they were there to stay.

      On arrival in New York, they found rooms in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue, and by spring 1939 they had moved into an apartment together on East 81st Street. Auden began reviewing for magazines and started to undertake speaking and lecturing engagements. He was getting his feet under the table.

      *

      Poor little Poppet.

      *

      (It’s easy to mock, but I too have taken Auden’s move to America personally, as a kind of

Скачать книгу