The New Criterion

Yesterday, James Piereson weighed in on Lyndon Johnson and liberal sentimentality--a huge topic, that. It would take a different sort of Robert Caro, one attuned to the political uses of mendacity, rhetorical subterfuge, and the smarmy parade of virtue concealing the raw lust for power, to do justice to the subject of LBJ and sentimentality. Caro wrote a thousand pages, it seems, and barely had Johnson into long pants. Really to analyze the topic of LBJ and liberal sentimentality would take many times that number of pages.

You’ll be relieved to learn that I do not propose to anything like that here. I just want to add a quick footnote to Jim’s piece. Remember the phrase "We must all love another or we must die" that features in the nauseating flower-child-incinerated-by-a-nuclear-bomb anti-Goldwater TV commercial that Jim refers to? It is perhaps not widely known that it was lifted (and slightly misquoted) from W. H. Auden’s famous poem "September 1, 1939." It is one of Auden’s most oft-quoted poems, chiefly, I suspect, for its memorable opening:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade . . .

There was a time when you couldn’t cross the street without hearing the phrase. And as for "We must love one another or die, well, E. M. Forster said that because Auden had written that "he can command me to follow him." Oh dear.

Let’s draw a veil over the following-Forster (he’s the chap, remember, who wrote in 1939 that he would sooner betray his country than betray his freind). I want simply to note that you won’t find "September 1, 1939" in Auden’s Collected Poems. (It can, however, be found in The English Auden.) As Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and acolyte nonpareil, explains in his book Later Auden, by the late 1950s Auden had repudiated the poem ("I loathe that poem," he said in 1957). Why? Because of its sentimentality, i.e., its rhetorical excess, its fundamental untruthfulness to experience.

Whatever uneasiness Auden felt about the poem in 1957 was sharply increased in 1964 when an ad man appropriated the lines for the anti-Goldwater TV commercial. It was then that Auden decided to drop "September 1, 1939"altogether from future editions of his work. (When Mendelson asked Auden about the poem, Auden asked that it not be reprinted in his lifetime. The English Auden, edited by Mendelson, appeared in 1977, four years after Auden died.)

Mendelson’s account of the episode can be found on pages 477ff of Later Auden. A very good account it is, too, though in describing the TV spot Mendelson bizarrely suggests that Goldwater was "eager to use nuclear weapons." Oh, I say again, dear. Mendelson is a smart man, a gifted critic, more knowledgeable about Auden than anyone. But even now, in 2005, it is apparently just too much to ask that a Professor of Literature at Columbia University take on board the thought that Barry Goldwater, a staunch Republican conservative, was not therefore a war monger.