O dear, why couldn't this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can't people be sensible? --Herod, from The Massacre of the Innocents, For the Time Being
What was Auden thinking about when he dreamt up the Oratorio? Here are some clues:
Likely he was thinking about love.
“Love is more serious than Philosophy/ Who sees no humor in her observation/ That Truth is knowing that we know we lie.”¹
Auden wrote For the Time Being between October 1941 and July 1942, during which time he was falling in love with the man who would become his life partner, eighteen-year-old poet Chester Kallman. This love, like most great ones, brought Auden joy, pain, and comfort, if not necessarily in that order. He referred to the union as a “marriage,” (rather forward-thinking for the times); he wore a ring. Yet by the time he completed the Oratorio his views on the relationship had evolved, and he saw Kallman more as his child than as his lover. By winter 1942 they shared a house but not a bed, an arrangement that would remain.
Likely he was thinking about religion.
“Therefore at every moment we pray that, following Him, we may/Depart from our anxiety into His peace.”²
Both of Auden’s grandfathers were clergymen. In 1940 he joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned as a boy. Whether what he saw in war and in his private life affected this choice to return to faith is unclear, but most signs point in that direction. He desired certainty in something, even as he accepted that faith finds its center in doubt. His verse allowed him to tease out this puzzle, among others. In his poems he could try on ideas via the voices of characters.
Likely he was thinking about war.
“These are stirring times for the editors of newspapers: History is in the making; Mankind is on the march.”³
Auden had moved to the States in 1939, much to the shock of his English intellectual peers who publicly criticized him for deserting home on the eve of war. Perhaps his most well known poem today is “September 1, 1939,” which contains the line, “we must love one another, or die,” a line Auden later edited out, claiming it was naïve. As he noted, “we must die anyway.” Auden may not have stood and fought but he wrestled with war’s consequences in his poems. The explicit references to military action in the Oratorio remind us that even leaders occasionally bemoan the necessity of force.
Undoubtedly, he was thinking about Christmas, about the myths and romances we tell ourselves at this time of year, every year. While there is no shortage of academic analysis on the Oratorio it remains, at base, a Christmas story. The Christmas story, made relevant for us today, tonight, this Christmas; the Christmas story as filled with doubting leaders and anxious Wise Men; with arguments between Thought, Intuition, Sensation and Feeling; with a Star of Nativity who warns us of her charms and wherein Herod admits he is flawed. This is a dream of the Nativity play with characters at once seduced by and afraid of the story’s conclusion. This birth of Christ is poetically sublime.
Love. Religion. War. Christmas. How can these things, all based in part on the faith in ideas, be reconciled with cool, rational, intellectual thought? What makes sense about falling in love? How is the attempt to make sense of our emotions related to making sense of believing in the birth of Christ, or the calculated extermination of a race, or even the simple ritual of placing colored lights on an evergreen? Something in Auden aimed to reconcile these things, and this is perhaps why he gives his strongest speech to Herod-the intellectual, the doubter. He has led for twenty years; he’s done well; his public is peaceful, if ignorant. He knows they are “homesick for disorder,” that they have outgrown the old myths and long for something new. They “kick Poetry downstairs and yearn for Prophecy,” and Herod—who clearly prefers the poets—is afraid. He sees the skull beneath the skin; he sees that once his people accept the story of the Nativity, Hell breaks loose. He must take action. And yet, when he questions why he must be the one to live through this, is he truly expecting an answer?
Today when we think about Christmas/holidays words like guilt, anxiety and hope follow closely on family, tradition, snow. This is what makes Auden’s Oratorio relevant, timeless. He forces us to see our contemporary attitudes, desires and failings in the Nativity. We are his Wise Men. We are his Herod, too. We cannot escape the story’s mirror of our own, and we cling to its promise just as we mourn the loss of its passing.
Pray for us romantics, pray. Indeed. We cannot help it; we want this story to end well even though we know exactly how it ends.
Well, so that is that. No we must dismantle the tree. Near the end of the Oratorio Auden gives us the simplest symbol of all: a child who grows up in an instant. After seeing the room where the presents are kept, the “system” of Santa Claus is broken. Well, wow. We all have our own locked doors, some of which (even if we are in possession of keys) we don’t dare to enter. Why do that, when the mundane task of packing up ornaments reinforces our reality. While not divine, it remains uniquely—tragically, joyfully—compelling. The Time Being is always now, and so we wait.
Lea Carpenter
Lea Carpenter is the former Deputy Publisher of The Paris Review and a Contributing Editor for Mens’ Vogue.
1 Auden, W.H., For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, At the Manger
2 Ibid., The Meditation of Simeon
3 Ibid., The Summons