The Wider World
September 1, 1939, is the date of the outbreak of World War II - Auden wrote the poem to commemorate a historical event - as he did with "Spain 1937", and as Yeats did with "Easter 1916".
The BBC describes the events of September 1: "At 6 am on 1 September Warsaw was struck by the first of a succession of bombing raids, while two major German army groups invaded Poland from Prussia in the north and Slovakia in the south. Air supremacy was achieved on the first day, after most of Poland's airforce was caught on the ground. Panzer spearheads smashed holes in the Polish lines and permitted the slower moving German infantry to pour through into the Polish rear. In advance of the line of attack the Luftwaffe heavily bombed all road and rail junctions, and concentrations of Polish troops. Towns and villages were deliberately bombed to create a fleeing mass of terror-stricken civilians to block the roads and hamper the flow of reinforcements to the front... At 8am, on 1 September, Poland requested immediate military assistance from France and Britain, but it was not until noon on 3 September that Britain declared war on Germany, followed by France's declaration at 5.00pm. The delay reflected British hopes that Hitler would respond to demands and end the invasion." These are the events that Auden describes in the poem - the "unmentionable odour of death" that "offends the September night." The outbreak of World War II led in part from the conclusion of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles (which comes up, indirectly, when Auden references The Diary of Vaslav Nijisnky later in the poem). Auden also references Linz, the hometown of Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler. |
Auden on September 1st
The poem begins with the speaker saying "I sit in one of the dives/on Fifty-Second Street". Peter Levine says:
"That would be a gay bar, probably the Dizzy Club, to which Auden had been introduced by his American lover Chester Kallman....Kallman and a few others would recognize this particular bar, and maybe they knew or could imagine what Auden really did on the evening when Hitler invaded Poland. " And perhaps an article from The Guardian gives the rest of us an idea of what Auden did on September 1st. The article reports on three diaries of Auden's, which were sold to the British Library in 2013. The article says: "On [September 1] in 1939 the poet wrote in his diary of how he "woke with a headache after a night of bad dreams in which C [Chester Kallman] was unfaithful. Paper reports German attack on Poland … 6.0pm." He tells of how Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears came to lunch, how "Peter sang B's new settings of Les Illuminations and some H Wolf … which made me cry. B played some of Tristan which seems particularly apposite today. Now I sit looking out over the river. Such a beautiful evening and in an hour, they say, England will be at war … 10.30 Went to the Dizzy Club. A whiff of the old sad life. I want. I want. Je ne m'occupe plus de cela. Stopped to listen to the news coming out of an expensive limousine." |