History Teaches . . . Reflections & Warnings From Poets & Scolds
Of Folded Lies, Affirming Flames, and the Stark Necessity of Love
For research, I’m reading the AIDS/HIV play by writer and activist Larry Kramer, “The Normal Heart,” first performed in 1985. This is Kramer the founding scold of the confrontational activist group ACT UP (meaning, it was his call for the gay community to do more in the face of mass indifference over mass suffering and death that inspired the founding of the transformational civil disobedience ranks of ACT UP in 1987) — and before that, in the era when he wrote the play, Kramer as cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in 1982. If the play is to be believed, Kramer was always a kind of haranguing and disbelieved Jewish prophet, who demanded more action from the political authorities and the skittish media, including the gay men who had power in the media but were afraid to associate themselves with a disreputable group (their own group) or a disreputable illness. But, where ACT UP was militant and law-breaking, definitely not business as usual and therefore is remembered as the change agent in the crisis, GMHC as an organization was committed to service delivery and advocacy to meet people’s needs — and only more politely to the effort to move the needle on public policy so that the government would do what it should in the face of what Kramer saw as an AIDS Holocaust.
In the first scene of the book, set in 1981, just as the first cases of the “gay cancer” are appearing in numbers on the West and East Coasts, a New York City doctor character named Emma says to the protagonist, Ned, a near facsimile of author Kramer:
Emma: “You’re the writer fellow who’s scared. I’m scared too. I hear you’ve got a big mouth.”
Ned: “Is big mouth a symptom?”
Emma: “No, a cure.”
That’s a pretty good capsule of Kramer’s philosophy, and a good prescription to think about today, too.
Kramer’s title, “The Normal Heart,” and the play’s epigraph, both come from the poem below, “September 1, 1939,” by the gay British poet and librettist Wystan Hugh (W.H.) Auden — from Another Time (1940), the first book Auden published after leaving England for the United States, in the context of continued anti-gay repression in his home country (think: trial of Oscar Wilde and no legislative change from Parliament until 1967), as well as the Nazi and affiliated encroachments of the 1930s on the European continent.
The title poem of that collection is a call for us — all of us — to meet the current crisis, to remember: “It is today in which we live,” whether we like it or not, and whether these conflicts, these particular forms of repression and response, are the ones we would choose or not. “So many try to say Not Now/ So many have forgotten how/ To say I Am, and would be/ Lost, if they could, in history.”
Auden understands our “wishing to belong,” and yet insists that our old verities of belonging — nation, flag, language, family, possessions, let’s say also religion or creed, race, sex, gender — must recede in the face of today’s urgencies: “Another time,” he writes, “has other lives to live.”
Auden understands, too, as Kramer does, the ineffable ties between each person’s “normal heart,” our yearning for love and connection, deluded perhaps by assurances from on high that Power cares for us and is on our side, and our responsibility to reveal the “folded lie . . . And the lie of Authority.” We are human, the great poet celebrates and laments, “composed . . . Of Eros and of dust,” and yet can “Show an affirming flame” against the bleak pessimistic efforts to snuff us out.
By the way, the part of Auden’s 1939 poem that has long been known to me is the 3-line verselet that ends the second-to-last stanza: “Hunger allows no choice/ To the citizen or the police; / We must love one another or die.” I know it as an historian of the 1960s and of poverty in the United States. The verslet ends the short, lyrical introduction to the Catholic socialist Michael Harrington’s classic prod to liberal conscience, The Other America (1962) , a work that has been held responsible for the iteration of the War on Poverty initiated before John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963. That book helped to pierce the pieties of a period of “affluence” and political, racial, global, and gender repression by revealing millions of people, in specific categories, whose left-out-ness from American affluence resulted from patterns and not personal failings. (It has been said that it was not the book itself but a review of it in The New Yorker magazine that caught President Kennedy’s attention, demonstrating that the problem of political leaders not really reading books has long been with us, but we can leave that quibble aside.)
As all of us do, I have a lot of thoughts about what’s happening in the United States right now and wish for the kind of writerly intuition Harrington had, to know how to pierce the bubble of self-satisfying but destructive assumptions that are, for the moment, keeping the play onstage and hurtling toward its tragic endings. I will attend at least three meetings this week at my university to discuss our shared fates as scholars and teachers and at least one community rally, in behalf of the unjustly imprisoned graduate student Mohsen Madahwi, who is being held in a Vermont prison and will have a court date in the morning on April 23. But for the moment, Auden, by way of Kramer, is what I find I need. I hope the words offer something to others, as well.
Images below: Larry Kramer, writer and activist, a balding Jewish man in suspenders and black t-shirt, with an open right hand and left hand over sheaf of papers, speaking at a podium. Publicity photo for documentary film, “Larry Kramer in Love and Anger” (2015), HBO, https://www.hbo.com/movies/larry-kramer-in-love-and-anger; and book cover in gray, washed, mustard-y yellow, black, and off-white, reading “W.H. Auden, Another Time.”
September 1, 1939
W. H. Auden (1907 –1973)
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev [note that Nijinsky, the great male dancer, born in Ukraine, and Diaghilev, founding director of Ballets Russes, were lovers]
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by the Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. From https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939