A 50-YEAR-OLD old reminiscence of W. H. Auden in The New Yorker set me thinking about the changes in culture journalism over that time. It would never have been even considered by a commissioning editor today: the poet had died two years before, and the author, Hannah Arendt, had never slept with him.
She had, however, been a friend, bound by mutual respect as joint exiles from the past of Weimar Germany and witnesses to the horrors that succeeded it. She called him a “profoundly apolitical” poet, who had been driven into the the chaotic politics of the 20th century by his compassion for the wretched, “as distinguished from any need for action toward public happiness, or any desire to change the world”.
Auden fascinates me in his character as a Christian intellectual, not just a great poet. One poem in particular, “Memorial for the City”, expresses his wrestling with the unending awfulness of history — of what actually happens — while
We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear,
That our hurt is not a desertion, that we are to pity
Neither ourselves nor our city;
Whoever the searchlights catch, whatever the loudspeakers blare,
We are not to despair.
And Arendt writes with sympathetic understanding and penetration about the background to this and his other Christian poems: “The Hitler-Stalin pact was the turning point for the left; now one had to give up all belief in history as the ultimate judge of human affairs.
“In the forties, there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether. . .
“I am reasonably sure that his sanity, the great good sense that illuminated all his prose writings (his essays and book reviews), was due in no small measure to the protective shield of orthodoxy. Its time-honoured coherent meaningfulness that could be neither proved nor disproved by reason provided him, as it had provided Chesterton, with an intellectually satisfying and emotionally rather comfortable refuge against the onslaught of what he called ‘rubbish’; that is, the countless follies of the age.”
None of us today is Hannah Arendt, but, even for mere journalists, there are things that she did for that piece which would be unthinkable in newspapers today. She took whatever time she needed; she re-read all his poems in chronological order, and we can assume that she did so with real thought and care. She assumed her readers had at least read the ones that she quoted — and could understand a quatrain of Brecht in the original German; perhaps oddest to eyes accustomed to the formulas of contemporary journalism, she never quoted anything that he’d said — only things that he’d written.
There are some very touching personal reminiscences of what she understood to be his misery and loneliness, but there are no fresh quotes, only fresh thought.
TWENTY years ago, it was still possible to do some journalism in that style: The Guardian flew me to New York to profile Oliver Sacks, and allowed me three or four weeks to read all his books, and talk to some of his friends. Our interview took several hours. Because I had less to say than Hannah Arendt, I took more words than she did — we could have 4500 in the middle of G2 then, whereas her piece is only 3200.
Nothing like that survives in daily papers, where the trend is to write about authors rather than their works, and to concentrate on their idiosyncrasies instead of their ideas. We have interviews, quite often conducted over Zoom, which are almost the opposite of human conversation. The reader is not intended to reflect at the end, but to buy something.
Of course, the audience for daily papers has also gone away. It’s now online, where two YouTube oafs with an audience of 2.3 million last week interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu. Not a word about Gaza, but they did ask him what his favourite McDonald’s hamburger was. Auden speaks to us very directly about what it is to lose all faith in history, if we will only read and listen.
