Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Sigmund Freud)

“Of course they called on God, but he went his way

down among the lost people like Dante, down

     to the stinking fosse where the injured

   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,

deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,

     our dishonest mood of denial,

   the concupiscence of the oppressor.”— W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” from Another Time (1940)

The death of Sigmund Freud in London occurred 75 years ago this week against the dark background of what he had called Civilization and Its Discontents: a war breaking out in Europe that would unleash the darkest impulses that human beings were capable of. It also came as a time of particular anguish for the pioneer of psychoanalysis: having left his beloved Vienna only when the Nazis who had thuggishly absorbed his country began to burn his books, he had been living in exile in London, suffering as mightily now in mind as much as in body.

Frequently, researchers will find on the Web articles that say that Freud died of cancer. This leaves out half of what happened—the more important part, even. To say that Freud was suffering from cancer doesn’t convey half of the horror he endured. As far back as 1923, he had been diagnosed with malignant oral epithelioma. The problem was that Freud could never bear to give up his cigars, which he thought made him more creative. By 1939, he was reduced to using prostheses to talk and eat, enduring repeated primitive X-rays and radium therapy, not to mention the post-op complications from 30 medical procedures.

No matter what one’s feelings about assisted suicide, it is difficult to accept the irony of a man who tried to help his patients cope with their psychic pain now battered by remorseless pain of his own—until, in a last stab of control of his life, Freud requested that his physician give him 21 milligrams of morphine. The request, fulfilled, ended his life.

The death of Freud also provided the occasion for another magnificent work, written in what might have been his annus mirabilus, by W.H. Auden. In 1939, a year of profound political and personal dislocation, Auden was inspired to write several of the poems that would be on the short list of his finest works: “September 1, 1939,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “To an Unknown Citizen,” and this.

For most of the prior two decades, Auden had substituted Freudian psychology and sociology for the High Anglican faith in which he had been raised. By the end of the “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s, he was questioning whether these were sufficient for understanding a suddenly darker world. (There is a hint of this in his elegy for Freud, with the line, “Only Hate was happy,” and there seems an uncanny premonition about the Final Solution in the phrase “covering the garden with ashes.”

The following year, Auden had returned to his former religious practice.

Yet, a dozen years after his return to religion, Auden had not so much rejected Freudianism as subordinated. In a 1952 New Republic essay, he posited that, even “if every one of his theories should turn out to be false, Freud would still tower up as the genius who perceived that psychological events are not natural events but historical and that, therefore, psychology, as distinct from neurology, must be based on the pre-suppositions and methodology, not of the biologist but of the historian.”

Extraordinarily, in a way that even the man Auden called “The Master” might not have anticipated, Auden laid out the case for Freud as a figure of moral agency: “In the long run, however, the welcome given to psychoanalysis by the public is based on a sound intuition that it stands for treating everyone as a unique and morally responsible person, not as a keyboard--it speaks of the narcissism of the Ego, but it believes in the existence of that Ego and its capacity to recognize its own limitations--and that in these days is a great deal.”

Quote of the Day (Frank O’Hara, on ‘The Day Lady Died’)

“Then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue  

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and  

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.”—Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen (1995)

Billie Holiday passed away at age 44 from liver and heart disease on this date in 1959, in circumstances as miserable as any she had known in her turbulent life. Denied a license to perform in any New York establishment where alcohol was served, she had seen her already meager savings evaporate. So fierce was her substance abuse that she felt the need to procure drugs on her deathbed in a New York hospital, leading police to stay outside her door, waiting to do again what had become a habit for them: arrest her.

You’ll find nothing about this in the above elegy by New York poet Frank O’Hara for the Angel of Harlem. Initially, there are only two indications that his poem is about the great jazz singer: the title (an inversion of her nickname, Lady Day) and the second line about “three days after Bastille day,” or July 17—the day of her death. Thereafter comes a procession of mundane details—planning for a vacation, buying cigarettes, summer heat—until the lines above.

O’Hara is alluding to the last time he saw Lady Day, at the Cooper Square jazz bar Five Spot, just a few months before. Friend Kenneth Koch, participating in a jazz-and-poetry night, was accompanied by Mal Waldrop. Holiday, there to cheer on the pianist, was eventually prevailed upon by the sympathetic, densely packed audience to sing—and, by so doing, break the law.

The singer displayed that night a husk of her once peerless instrument: “her voice [was] almost gone, just like a whisper, just like the taste of very old wine, but full of spirit,” Koch recounted years later in Brad Gooch’s 1993 biography of O’Hara, City Poet. O’Hara, back by the bathroom, absorbed the atmosphere.

Blessed with enough talent as a youngster to weigh becoming a professional concert pianist, O’Hara probably possessed more musical acumen than virtually everyone in that crowded venue that night. Yet he did not recapitulate all he heard. In fact, what happened then  passes swiftly in his final lines, much like Holiday’s life—and, as it turned out, his own. (He died seven years later: like Holiday, in his mid-forties, and like herself, in an almost bitterly bizarre fashion: struck down by a beach taxi on Fire Island.)

The poem circles back to the title in the last line: “everyone and I stopped breathing,” O’Hara writes. The audience’s mixture of awe and pity culminates in an action echoed in the most literal sense by Holiday’s death.

O’Hara’s was not the only work of literature inspired by Holiday. Langston Hughes and E. Ethelbert Miller would write poems; Elizabeth Hardwick, in Sleepless Nights, a vignette in her autobiographical novel; and Maya Angelou, a section in her memoir The Heart of a Woman. But the greatest amount of fiction penned about Holiday might have been written by the songstress herself, in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. Her opening—about her parents getting married when they were teenagers and she was three—is not true; they never married. The factual inaccuracies continue from that point.

In actuality, the music, full of beauty wrought from fierce pain, is where the truth of her life lies. Music critic Francis Davis, in an extremely perceptive December 2000 Atlantic Monthly essay on the jazz world’s “Our Lady of Sorrows,” noted: “With the obvious exception of Frank Sinatra, who was born in the same year as Holiday but outlived her by almost four decades, no other recording artist from the first half of the twentieth century seems more real to us -- more like our contemporary.”