W. H. Auden Returns to Faith

The projector clattered above us like a loose chain. Rows of men in overcoats leaned forward, their collars turned up against the January chill that still clung to the theater even with the doors shut. I had come with Auden because he wanted company and because neither of us had anything else to do that afternoon. The film was German newsreel footage of the Polish campaign, shown without subtitles, the commentary a steady drumbeat of German that most of the audience understood.

A Polish soldier appeared on the screen, hands raised, helmet gone. Someone behind me shouted first. Then the whole block of men took it up. “Kill him! Kill him!” The words came in English but the voices were the same ones that had filled the beer halls two decades earlier. They were not drunk. They were precise, as if they had waited months to say it aloud in a public place.

Auden stood. He did not look at me. He simply rose, coat already over his arm, and walked the aisle without hurry. I followed because the shouting had turned the air thick and because I did not want to sit there alone. Outside, the lobby lights were too bright. He kept walking until we reached the corner where the wind cut between the buildings.

He asked what a man could answer to that sound. Not in the poem he would write later, but right then, with his hands in his pockets and the marquee still visible behind us. He said the question had been forming for years and the answer had always been some version of reason or progress or the decent instincts of educated people. The theater had shown him the answer was not enough.

We did not speak again for several days. I heard he had gone back to the same neighborhood church he had visited once or twice the year before. He went on a weekday morning when the pews were nearly empty. He stayed through the whole service and came out with snow on his shoulders. After that he went again, sometimes twice in a week. He did not announce it. He simply stopped saying he would not go.

By spring he was writing letters that mentioned the creeds without apology. He told one friend the old political answers had left him with nothing to say when the neighbor demanded blood. He began to keep the hours of the prayer book on his desk. The desk itself stayed as untidy as ever, but the pages he tore from it now carried the collects instead of the old manifestos.

He still went to the same bars and still argued past midnight, only now the arguments circled back to the same claim: that love of neighbor was not a sentiment but a command that outlasted every theory. Some of the old circle drifted away. Others stayed and listened because the voice had not changed, only the ground it stood on.

In the summer he took the train to the coast and walked the beaches where the lifeguards drilled in case of invasion. He wrote about the drills in a letter and added that the drills would not save anyone unless the reason for them was clearer than fear. He came back thinner and with the habit of checking the time against the church bells on his block.

The poems that followed carried the same line lengths and the same rhymes, but the voice inside them no longer trusted the speaker to save himself. He said once, in passing, that the only thing the church had given him so far was the certainty that he could not manage alone. He did not call it comfort. He called it the beginning of a workable answer.