Newsletter 33
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The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter Number 33 ● April 2010 Memberships and Subscriptions Annual memberships include a subscription to the Newsletter: Individual members £9 $15 Students £5 $8 Institutions and printed copies £18 $30 New members of the Society and members wishing to renew should send sterling cheques or checks in US dollars payable to “The W. H. Auden Society” to Katherine Bucknell, 78 Clarendon Road, London W11 2HW. Receipts available on request. Payment may also be made by credit card through the Society’s web site at: http://audensociety.org/membership.html The W. H. Auden Society is registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales as Charity No. 1104496. The Newsletter is edited by Farnoosh Fathi. Submissions may be made by post to: The W. H. Auden Society, 78 Clarendon Road, London W11 2HW; or by e-mail to: [email protected] All writings by W. H. Auden in this issue are copyright 2010 by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Please see the Appeal to Members that appears on the Contents page of this number. Contents David Mikics: Rachel Wetzsteon (1967–2009) 5 David Collard: Uncle Wiz and the Gyroscope 6 Steven Frimmer: Auden at the Mid-Century Book Society 16 Stephen Burt: “Too Sad to Sing” 19 Book Review: Meghan Davis on “Gubbins at a Desk: Auden’s Cave” 21 Notes and Queries 24 Recent and Forthcoming Books and Events 24 Memberships and Subscriptions 27 An Appeal to Members The Society operates on a proverbial shoestring (almost on a literal one), and membership fees do not quite cover the cost of printing and mailing the Newsletter . Because the costs of a sending a reminder let- ter are prohibitive, we rely on members to send their annual renewals voluntarily. If you have not sent a renewal in the past year, could you kindly do so now? Payment can conveniently be made by any of the methods described on the last page of this number. On 27 February 2010, the National Theatre’s “A Study of Art” series presented a discussion of Auden by Professor Stan Smith, poet An- drew Motion, as well as David Buckingham and Paul Kent, both colleagues of Auden’s from Oxford. The panel was chaired by James Naughtie. A performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, inspired by Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, at the Royal Festival Hall, 21 April 2010, was preceded by a public discussion of the poem by Glyn Maxwell at the South Bank Centre, on 18 April. An essay by Maxwell on the poem and symphony appeared in the Guardian newspaper on 10 April 2010, and may easily be found on the newspaper’s web site, guardian.co.uk . A new production by the Young Vic and the English National Opera of Hans Werner Henze’s opera Elegy for Young Lovers, with a libretto by Auden and Chester Kallman, was presented in London in late April and early May 2010. The production by Fiona Shaw was uni- versally praised by reviewers. A new volume in the Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Prose, Volume IV, 1956-1962, is scheduled for publication by Princeton University Press in October 2010. The book includes the complete text of The Dyer’s Hand together with Auden’s essays, reviews, and broadcasts from his years as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The book also in- cludes the English texts of the Creweian Orations that he delivered (in Latin translations prepared for him by an Oxford classicist) on alternate years when he was Professor of Poetry. These orations are splendid examples of Auden’s formal playfulness and wit. A critical edition of Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, edited by Alan Jacobs, will appear probably early in 2011 in the series W. H. Auden: Critical Editions, published by Princeton University Press. 25 Notes and Queries Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009) Ian Hamilton, in his Writers in Hollywood 1915-1951 (Heinemann, Rachel Wetzsteon, who died in December at the age of forty-two, was 1990, p. 151), describes Aldous Huxley’s time as a scriptwriter and in a distinguished poet, as well as a scholar and lover of Auden. She was particular his collaboration with Isherwood (on an unmade film educated at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia, where she earned about faith-healing), his rejected adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for her Ph.D., and she taught at William Paterson University, as well as Walt Disney and “… a saga of negotiations about a possible movie of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA. Rachel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (with Isherwood, Auden, and even Samuel was the author of four books of poetry, most recently Sakura Park Beckett somehow involved as possible co-writers).” This seems un- (Persea, 2006), as well as a critical book on Auden, Influential Ghosts likely. Beckett was published by Grove Press, which also published (Routledge, 2006). The fourth collection of her poems, Silver Roses , is Lawrence, so perhaps a rumour was spread that Hamilton mischie- forthcoming from Persea on 1 September 2010. vously perpetuated. As for the Auden connection, I have so far found Her poems, like her, were ardent, witty, and full-flavored. nothing elsewhere linking this unlikely combination of writers. Can She was a passionate native of the Upper West Side. Rosanna Newsletter readers throw any light on the subject?” Warren wrote that Rachel “made Manhattan her beat, the New York of the single girl-woman, flaneuse, heartbreak survivor, smoker, wit, DAVID COLLARD and bookworm.” Several poems in Sakura Park (“Little Song for a Big Night”, “Evening News”) evoke Auden’s song-like lyrics, to pro- David Collard may be reached via postal mail through the Society, or by elec- foundly moving effect. Her second book, Home and Away (Penguin, tronic mail at: [email protected] 1998), contains a memorable elegy for Auden, whom she pictures as “a little wrinkled maybe,/ but always upright.” Her critical study of Auden is especially perceptive in its discussion of the poet’s own ele- Recent and Forthcoming Books and Events gies, and of Hardy’s influence on him. Rachel was an inspired and inspiring friend, someone who sus- On 27 January 2010, as part of the Gresham College series “Creative tained all who knew her with her powers of heart and mind. She had Inspiration”, the acclaimed ensemble Chamber Domaine, led by the habit of rescuing us, sometimes without our knowing it, from Thomas Kemp, performed the Auden-Britten collaborations On This troubles of all kinds. Her devotion to Auden knew no limits: I re- Island, Fish on the Unruffled Lakes, and Les Illuminations , as well as a member fervent conversation with her about her beloved New Year chamber arrangement of Auden and Britten’s cabaret Songs. Letter, and about Forewords and Afterwords , a book we both cherished. Rachel was truly and deeply—even a bit madly—learned, and with- On 20 February 2010, as part of the National Theatre’s series entitled out a trace of pedantry; her spirited, endlessly sympathetic personal- “A Study of Art”, the theatre and opera director Phyllida Lloyd, ity, full of warmth and screwball excitement, will be much missed on alongside music expert Colin Matthews and Philip Reed, editor of middle earth. May her memory be for a blessing, in that “one land- Britten’s diaries, discussed their respective relations to Britten’s work. scape that we, the inconstant ones, / Are consistently homesick for.” These conversations were interspersed with performances by the Royal Opera House’s soprano Elisabeth Meister singing Auden and DAVID MIKICS Britten’s cabaret songs. David Mikics ([email protected] ) is Professor of English at the University of Houston. His most recent books are A New Handbook of Literary Terms (Yale University Press, May 2007) and, with Stephen Burt, The Art of the Sonnet (Harvard University Press, April 2010). 24 5 Uncle Wiz and the Gyroscope amination of Auden’s methods as they relate to broader questions of poetic inspiration. Smith considers how the location where a poet One morning in December last year I arrived at the British Film Insti- writes uniquely works its way into a poem in the construct he intri- tute’s Special Collections archive in central London to sift through guingly terms “the mythological present.” And as Auden himself has their collection of Ivor Montagu papers. The plan was to research much to add to this discussion, Smith is wise to lead us to “The Cave Auden’s documentary debut, the short avant-garde work Coal Face, of Making”, a part of the larger poem “Thanksgiving for a Habitat” which had been premiered at a 1935 screening. I wanted to learn that Auden wrote in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria, in the only house more about the people involved in that event and thought that the he ever owned. Smith explains that it is here that Auden offers “the Montagu material might yield some useful background correspon- fullest, most symbolically charged account of what he calls ‘our dence. Anyone interested in British film culture between the wars lonely dens’, those places of solitary activity where, in a significantly will soon come across the name of Ivor Montagu (1904-84), a co- passive voice, ‘silence/ is turned into objects.’” For Auden, the Muse founder of The Film Society, whose papers have been frequently con- is most likely to visit a silent place, a place “devoid of / flowers and sulted since entering the archive in the 1980s. I wasn’t expecting to family photographs”, where “all is subordinate/ here to a function, find anything new but, a few minutes after settling down to a long designed to / discourage daydreams.” This environment is intention- day of note-taking, I opened a pristine white envelope and eased out ally lonely, yet it allows the poet both to commune with the dead and the fragile contents, the most immediately striking of which gave me to people the air with words, to separate himself from the surround- a jolt.