W. H. AUDEN’S USE OF POPULAR CULTURE

DURING THE 1930s

aMsî R. Michael Evers

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1980

Approved by Doctoral Committee :

Advisor L

ABSTRACT

During the 1930s in Britain a group of writers, W.H. Auden in par­

ticular, responded to the social crises of the Depression and the

approaching war by attempting to return to the idea of the poet as an

integral part of the community using the language of that community to

speak to it about matters of vital concern. The purpose of this study

is to show how, during the thirties, Auden used artifacts embodying that

language -- materials from folk and contemporary popular culture — to

reach that community, and to examine how successful he was in doing so.

Ideas about the social roots of language and literature, and the

roles of the artist in society prevalent during the period under consi­

deration are examined. Two intellectual traditions are found: first,

the idea of language as an entity in itself, a raw material to be shaped experimentally by an artist of refined sensibilities, and second, the

idea of language as the embodiment of the culture and experiences of the whole community to be used by the artist to speak to that community.

Although influenced by the first tradition, Auden and his group saw them­ selves as working in the second.

Auden's lighter verse during the period is examined under the following categories: (1) those drawing from popular music, particularly the sentimental ballad; (2) those drawing from the folk tradition, par­ ticularly the narrative ballad; (3) polemical verse drawing from the native tradition of Skelton and Burns; (4) light occasional verse, sometimes drawing from Byron. Auden's plays, including those written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, are then studied, showing the popular materials he used. II

In terms of appropriateness in his use of materials, Auden was

generally successful, except in his first and last plays. His success

in communicating to a large audience is in doubt, primarily because of his ambiguous feelings about popular culture and those who use it.

Nevertheless, those feelings are themselves a source of power in his work. If u

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER I ...... 7

CHAPTER II...... 23

CHAPTER III...... 54

A. The Sentimental and" Torch" Ballad...... 57

B. The Folk Idiom...... 71

C. Polemical Verse...... 106

D. Light Occasional Verse...... 116

CHAPTER IV...... 132

CONCLUSION . '...... 173

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 179 í

INTRODUCTION

In the conclusion to Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Raymond Williams

asserts that in Britain, between 1914 and 1945, a change occurred in the

ideas concerning the relationship between the artist and the society he

lived in. Previously, Williams says, the artist was seen as a defiant

exile; the virtues of art were values in themselves, with no relation to

the society around it. However, during the 1914-1945 period, a. "reinte­ gration of art with the common life of society"“'’ was attempted. It is

this attempted integration during one part of this period that I wish to

deal with in the following study.

Specifically, I wish to examine how one literary artist, W.H. Auden, reacting not only to the social crisis created by the Depression of the nineteen thirties, but also to the problems of the relationship between artist and audience raised by the experimentalism.in the arts associated with Modernism, came to advocate, both in theory and in practice, the

Idea of language as a common bond in a culture many felt was breaking up.

In doing so he drew from their popular culture, particularly from forms of popular entertainment both of his own time and from the past — the film, the music hall review, jazz and blues, and the popular ballad, to name a few — and adopted in many of his works a vernacular style close to common speech. Furthermore, the personae he used in many of his works, particularly in the lyrics, was a rejection of the isolated artist-persona that was one inheritance of Romanticism and which had found its way into

“'"Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), p. 296, (2)

works of their immediate predecessors such as Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, the pronouncements of the latter to the contrary.

The study will examine Auden's works, both the actual poetry as well as critical writings in order to get a broader view of the decade of the thirties, which, it seems to me, was crucial for two reasons. First, it was a time of intense social involvment for these writers, as well as for artists of all sorts. It was a time when those who had chosen to pursue artistic professions and who had grown up in comfortable circumstances began to question the value of their craft in the face of urgent social problems. Some writers, such as the critics Christopher Caudwell and R.

D. Charques, felt that literature should contribute to a social revolution they felt was going to occur in Britain. Others, such as Michael Roberts, were more moderate in insisting that art should contribute to the unifying of a culture which seemed to be coming apart. Another group of writers,

F.R. Leavis and those connected with the periodical Scrutiny, rejected the culture created by contemporary mass media,, yet continually asserted that a vital literature was one enriched by the language of the lower classes, particularly the peasantry. Also, writers began paying attention to popular culture: people such as George Orwell, for example, wrote about postcards and boys' magazines and were suspicious of literary modern ism.

Second, the decade of the thirties was important because, I feel, the writers working during this time were becoming increasingly aware not simply that their concerns did not always seem to be the concerns of ordinary humanity, but that literature itself did not have the importance it once had. Society was becoming "postliterate" in the sense that (3)

individuals were perceiving themselves and their environments not in images drawn from literature but in images drawn from the mass media. While this thesis is difficult to prove without wandering into territory peripheral to the subject of this study, it is helpful to remember, as Paul Fussell reminds us in his The Great War and Modern Memory, that

By 1914, it was possible for soldiers to be not merely literate but vigorously literary, for the Great War occurred at a special historical moment when two "liberal" forces were powerfully coinciding in England. On the one hand, the belief in the educative powers of classical and English literature was still extremely strong. On the other, the appeal of popular education and "self-improvement" was at its peak, and such education was still conceived largely in humanistic terms. It was imagined that the study of literature at Workmen's Insti­ tutes and through such schemes as the National Home Reading Union would actively assist those of modest origins to rise in the class system. The volumes of the World's Classics and Everyman's Library were to be the "texts." The intersection of these two forces, the one "aristocratic," the other "demo­ cratic," established an atmosphere of public respect for litera­ ture unique in modern times.2

Fussell adds that even ordinary people during the First World War did not feel that literature was somehow outside their experience, or that it was the exclusive property of critics, aesthetes, or teachers. The reason for this, he says, is that without cinema, radio, and television, amusement was found in sex, drinking, and "in language formally arranged, either in books, and periodicals or at the theater and music hall, or in one's own or one's friends’ anecdotes, rumors, or clever structuring of Q words.” The point Fussell is making Is that before the advent of the mass media and other popular forms of entertainment, literature had a central place not only in the culture of the elite but in popular culture

2 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 157. 3 Fussell, p. 158. (4)

as well. That it had been displaced by other forms of entertainment by

the 1930s was a complaint articulated by many, especially by the members

of the Leavis group. At any rate, it follows that if literature no longer occupied a central place in the culture, then those who were com­ mitted to literature felt displaced, and this feeling of displacement, as well as the social crisis, led many writers to seek a reintegration of artist and society.

This meant that whatever the personal and ideological differences between writers — and there were many -- they all felt that artists should have at least some concern for social and cultural problems, and that language and the art that came from language were social products created within a social context that could possibly be used for social ends. As a group, Auden and the writers associated with him exercised a tremendous influence on other writers and critics. The work of the British cultural critics Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, to name two important examples, was directly influenced by the notion that a common culture requires a common language accessible to all, and not merely to an elite.

So in examining Auden's work written during the thirties, we will be look­ ing at how this notion was put to work by a writer brought up not only on the works of the Victorians and later Victorians; a writer who, during the period of the nineteen thirties felt a need, often reluctantly, for a larger audience, and who felt that a closer connection would somehow heal the division between poet and people, between class and class.

This study, then, will explore these areas: (1) the development of the idea of the social roots of language and art as a basis for a common culture and social transformation; (2) the use, following this idea, of (5)

popular culture material in Auden's poetry and plays as well as his use

of a particular language and personae; (3) Auden's attitude toward this

material. We will find that this idea of the social basis of language,

advocated by radicals and moderates alike during the thirties, was a

guiding force behind the use by Auden of material from his contemporary

culture. We will also find that the problems that Auden had in reaching

the larger audience he wanted was in part due to his ambiguous feelings

about that audience's culture — if not that audience itself, and that

these feelings were, in fact, a source of power in his lighter work.

In the large amount of literature on Auden's work, there is much

reference to the first and second areas of inquiry mentioned above, but

no extensive treatment of the thirties "idea" -- the notion of the shared

social roots of language as a basis for a common culture — which was so

important to his thinking and so important to the thinking of later Bri­

tish cultural critics. The most prominent themes in studies on Auden

are the emphases on ideological shifting, theories of love, and the

divided heart. Monroe.J. Spears' The Poetry of W.H. Auden provides a valuable commentary on individual works and locates some work within popu­

lar traditions but is most concerned with the poet's ideas. Hoggart's

Auden: An Introductory Essay tries to give an overview of basic interests and the development of Auden's notion of love. A more recent work, Repogle's

Auden's Poetry, breaks helpful new ground, I think, in his study of Auden's persona and style and in his interest in Auden's later work. Another recent work, Samuel Hynes' The Auden Generation, gives a basic if somewhat superficial overview of Auden’s thinking and activities during the thirties. (6)

The first chapter of this study will deal with the ideas, prevalent during the thirties, of language and art as a cultural bond and how writers other than those to be studied expressed those ideas. The second chapter will examine Auden's own critical writings, as well as those of the other writers closely allied with him, and will show how they responded.

The third chapter will deal with Auden's poetry, the fourth with his plays. The final chapter will evalute the relative success or failure of Auden to create the kind of work he wished.

Finally, it should be noted that the particular issues raised in this study, whatever their historical peculiarities, are part of a larger question— the relation between the artist and art and the society it is produced in — raised, not always very well or very coherently, by people in all the arts. Within the past few years, for example, the old issues have surfaced in discussions of the visual arts, with sharp criticisms both of the isolation of art from society and the commercial underside of the art enterprise. In examining the arguments produced by this debate one is of course struck by their resemblance to those raised in the thir­ ties. So a study of how the "Auden group" writers dealt with them certainly has relevance to this latest round.

4An example of this is James S. Ackerman, "Toward a New Social Theory of Art," New Literary History, IV (Winter, 1973), 315-330. (7)

CHAPTER I

W.H. Auden and his group were particularly sensitive during the 1930s

to questions about the relationship of poetry and the poet to the creation

of culture. This is in itself nothing new — writers during the nineteenth

century, from the time of Wordsworth, had raised the question, and the

literary movement that we know as "modernism," which, according to most

literary historians, had begun with the work of certain French and British

writers later in the same century, had given a number of answers which

were influential at the time these men began writing: that the poet was

a kind of technician of language, shaping and honing his material in the

same manner that a painter shapes and hones a still life or a sculptor

shapes his stone; that content, or ideas, are not as important as this

shaping process; that the poet — the artist — while he was an individual

consciousness, was yet subservient to the making of art; and finally, that

his audience was limited to those who would understand the rigor of his vision.

This listing of ideas may oversimplify the notions of some of the major French and English poets and critics from the time of Baudelaire, yet I think it throws into relief the central climate of opinion that was current when Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice and Spender began their careers,

For they found themselves in a particular historical situation — the social crisis of the 1930s — which they found impossible to ignore, and they discovered that the received formulations listed above were not always adequate to provide a response to this crisis. Furthermore, they discovered themselves in a world inundated with what we know as "popular (8)

culture" — the new media of film, jazz music, and the musical comedy —

which, however threatening or contemptible it seemed to literary culture,

would not go away, and in fact seemed to be far more influential, or at

least far more discussed, than poetry. These two phenomena led them to

experiment with the notion of the poet as the user of common language, as

the person who would speak to a larger audience beyond the coterie of

sensitive readers, and who in fact would be a creator of a common culture

in which all could participate.

The point I wish to make is that the social crisis really brought about a reinvestigation of a tradition which ran counter to that of modern ism. Like those of modernism, the notions contained within this tradition had a quite clear social context. Those ideas posited a particular role for the poet and his or her source of vitality; and they contained within them an implied definition of popular culture and a proposition about its value.

Thus, this chapter will examine this counter-tradition, how it was expressed and used by writers during the thirties. It should be noted that I will be dealing largely with theoretical statements made not only by literary critics but also by poets and students of language. I am not particularly concerned about their veracity; what I wish to emphasize is their value as part of a poetic ideology, as part of a debate about what poets and poetry should do and how they should be doing it,

I will begin with a passage from Ezra Pound's 1916 essay on Vorticism because it contains some of the tenets that the counter-tradition struck against:

Whistler said somewhere in The Gentle Art; "The picture is interesting not because it is Trotty Veg, but because it (9)

is an arrangement in colour." The minute you have admitted that, you let in the jungle, you let in nature and truth and abundance and Cubism and Kandinsky and the lot of us. The Image is. the poet's pigment. The painter should use his color because he sees or feels it. I don't much care whether he is representative or non-representative. He should depend, of course, on the creative, not upon the mimetic or representational part in his work. It is the same in writing poems, the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics.!

Pound is here attempting to find the essential element of poetry

which distinguishes it from the other arts. Like Whistler quoted in the passage above, he recognizes that the basis of art is not what is expressed, but the technique by which one expresses emotion. In this case, the crucial part of poetry is the Image. Subject matter is not particularly important, nor are particular "systems," which are more pro­ perly the mundane area of argument. As in painting or sculpture, the shaping is what is important. The ultimate end of this poetry is'the work itself alone as well as the pleasure of writing it, not the utilitar ian function of teaching or moralizing.

This implies a certain amount of alienation from the public at large

The artist is a kind of specialist engaged in the complex task of creat­ ing art. When Pound speaks.of artists as "the lot of us" he is letting the public know what these specialists are doing. The essay on Vorticism is essentially a message from art professionals, explaining the mysteries of their specialization to those who do not understand. It is a version of the Romantic idea of artist as visionary seer, but it is transformed

''‘Ezra Pound, "Vorticism" repr. in The Modern Tradition: Back­ grounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Ferdelson, Jr.(New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p, 148, (10)

into the idea of artist as seer-technician; it is analogous to a biologist

explaining the germ theory and the wonders of scientific methodology. As

a specialist who knows more about his or her craft than the ordinary per­

son, the artist must be more "progressive" than the public; elsewhere in

the same essay, Pound says that "the public is always, and of necessity,

some years behind the artist's actual thought." Early in his career, Pound wrote in a letter that his own work was understood by about thirty people 2 at most.

This kind of elitism, and what it implied, had already received its fullest expression fifty years before in the works of the prophet of modernism, Stéphane Mallarmé:

The educational bases of the multitude need not include art; that is a mystery accessible only to the very few. The multitude would profit in that they would no longer waste time dozing over Virgil, and could devote that time to action and to practical purpose. Poetry, on its side, would profit be­ cause it would no longer be irritated (only a slight irritation, it must be admitted, for something which is immortal) by the barking sounds of a pursuing pack of creatures who, simply because they are educated and intelligent, think they have the right to judge it, or, even worse, dictate to it.^

Mallarmé makes the distinction between morality and beauty, and claims that the former is for the masses and the latter is for the artist.

Beauty is beyond good and evil. The central point, again, is that art is separated from the business of living, and that the artist, the pro­ fessional of beauty, works in a world relevant only to himself and to a coterie of sensitive individuals.

2 Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 13.

3Stephane Mallarmé, ’’Art for All," Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, tran. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1956), p. 12. (11)

T.S. Eliot also belongs to this tradition, but he is important, I

think, because he adds to it a sense of urgency brought about by the

social and cultural changes that occurred after the First World War. Like

Mallarmé and Pound, Eliot downplays the role of subject matter; however,

his concern is not with "images" or some ideal of beauty, but with the

concept of "complexity":

It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civiliza­ tion, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensi­ bility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.4

This statement implies propositions about the relationships between language and meaning, and the nature of the poet as compared to the nature of the ordinary individual. Both propositions center around the notion of complexity. First, while the statement does not say poetry should have no "meaning," it emphasizes language itself: a complex reac­ tion to complex civilization requires complex language. A poet's first obligation, Is toward the tool of his profession, language. Taken out of its context, Eliot's idea is highly problematical. If society is so complex, why not attempt to make it more coherent to those who do not understand it? But Eliot was attempting something else: he wanted to turn, as he claimed Donne, Laforgue, and Corbière had done, "ideas into sensations,

5 observations into states of mind."

^T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays (New York; Harcourt Brace, 1960), p, 248.

^Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," p. 249. (12)

Secondly, Eliot sees the poet as a "refined sensibility"; he is,

like Mallarmé's artist, an aristocrat of art. But Eliot's aristocrat

is also a believer in the Protestant Ethic; his complex reactions come

not only by natural talent but from a rigorous training in a particular

tradition, a tradition located in what he conceived to be the artistic

inheritance of Europe. Only with this tradition behind him could the

poet achieve suppleness of thought. Furthermore, this inheritance pro­

vided him with a "community" of accepted standards from which to operate.

(Again we see the obvious parallel to the professional ethos, the notion

that a professional is an individual who received training in a particu­

lar body of knowledge; and just as the doctor's client, for example, is

the body, the poet's is the "language of the tribe.") Eliot's essay on

Blake told the story of how a potentially great poet was hampered by the

lack of "accepted and traditional ideas"; and in "The Possibility of a

Poetic Drama," Eliot said that the Elizabethan dramatist had "less to do"

because he had the inherited form of drama at his disposal.

At the same time, however, Eliot seemed to be more concerned than

either Mallarmé or Pound about the need for a close relationship between the artist and members of his or her own class. This point is clearly

expressed in his essay on the music hall performer Marie Lloyd:

Marie Lloyd .'is art will, I hope, be discussed by more com­ petent critics of the theatre than I. My own chief point is that I consider her superiority over other performers to be a moral superiority: It was her understanding of the people and sympathy with them, and the people's recognition of the fact that she embodied the virtues which they.genuinely respected in.private life, that raised her to the position she occupied at her death.®

^Eliot, "Marie Lloyd,” Selected Essays, 406-7. (13)

The important points about this statement are two: first, in the only major essay that Eliot wrote on the subject of popular culture, he in nc:: way advocated it as being part of his own tradition. He uses the essay on Marie Lloyd to examine how an artist's popularity is an indica­ tion of a certain kind of superiority, one which is a reflection of the fact that she articulates the values of her class. If anything, Eliot is perhaps thinking of the relationship between himself and his own audi­ ence.

Eliot's notion of tradition, then — whatever a poem such as "The

Waste Land" may indicate — assumes no vital contact with the language and the art of popular culture. Although he could appreciate a popular artist from a distance, and perhaps see in the relationship between the popular artist and her audience a paradigm of the ideal artist-audience relationship, his own attitude toward his contemporary popular culture was that it was a symptom of a society that had lost its bearings. It is important to look, therefore, at a critical tradition which opposes this, a tradition that demands that good art must draw its life not only from other objects like itself, but also from the language and artifacts of ordinary people. I think it is important to examine this particular inheritance, as well as its assumptions, because the ideas which are a part of it were important to writers and critics during the

1930s.

An important representative of this tradition is William Morris, who is significant because, like the writers of the thirties, he lived during a period of acutely perceived social crisis and tried to formulate a theory of art which would be a part of a general solution to it. In (14)

"Art and Plutocracy," written during the early 1880s, Morris made a dis­

tinction between "Intellectual" and "Decorative" art. The former, he wrote, serves our "mental needs," while the latter consists of objects

for service of the body. Morris added that those periods in which art flourished the most had no hard distinctions between the Intellectual and the Decorative, and that each type of art worked with its opposite.

The following passage is quoted in full because it indicates the notions of art, audience, and artist that would be important during the 1930s:

The highest intellectual art was meant to please the eye, as the phrase goes, as well as to excite the emotions and train the intellect. It appealed to all men and to all the faculties of man. On the other hand, the humblest of the ornamental art shared in the meaning and emotion of the intellectual; one melted into the other by scare perceptible gradations; in short, the best artist was a workman still, the humblest workman an artist.?

Morris is not in this passage discussing literature, but his remarks are applicable to such a discussion. Morris insisted that successful art is that which is a combination of high and low cultures, with each culture adding what it does best to a particular work. Also, this art appeals to more than a mere specialized few. Third, the artist was a representative of this unified culture, since he or she was both artist and.worker. Fourth, and possibly the most important point, this art had a use, a very practical, empirical one, despite the fact that the artist's decorative talents produced nothing essential to the functioning and well-being of the community. Morris used these ideas to criticize capitalist culture, which he felt alienated classes from each other, forcing

7 William Morris, "Art Under Plutocracy," The Collected Works of William Morris. 23(London: Longman's, 1915), p. 165. (15)

the "gentlemen of art" to speak in "a language not understood by the people."8

Morris' ideas assume that a kind of creative surge that benefits

all of society comes from below, both literally and figuratively.

Literally, creativity comes from the lower classes and from the things

the lower classes do. Figuratively, the surge comes from the low, or

useful arts. Such assumptions come, in their most pristine form, from

Wordsworth, who saw nature, particularly rural nature, as the fount of

creativity, and who saw rural people as.the true source of profound ex­

pression. As he put it in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads:

The language too of these men is adopted because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived . . . Accordingly, such a language arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings is more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honors upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympa­ thies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation.

Wordsworth, however, was not willing to let nature alone; his Lyrical

Ballads, as he pointed out in the Preface, are after all adopted from

the language really spoken by men. Similarly, Morris does not insist that

useful art is the only kind that should exist in society, but simply that

the arts which appeal to the many give life to high art. In Wordsworth

also we see the complaint that the work of his contemporary artists is

"fickle" and "capricious"; in other words, rootless and useless.

8 Morris, "Art Under Plutocracy," p. 167.

^William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads?.'/1800 )The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 1(Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 124. (16)

Other writers, even though they have shared neither Morris' socialism

nor his views on art, have come close, in certain of their own views, to

the Morris tradition. William Butler Yeats' essay, "What is 'Popular

Poetry'?" is a defense of "strangeness and obscurity in poetry," but even

so, Yeats claims that this was something he learned from the common people

of Ireland themselves. From these people he also found that much of what

had ordinarily been considered'popular poetry," such as the work of

Longfellow, came from those parts of the middle class who had "unlearned

the unwritten tradition that binds the unlettered...and who have not

learned the written tradition which has been established upon the unwrit­ ten. "10 This makes it lifeless. And while.for Morris industrial

capitalism had created a split between the culture of.high and low, Yeats

found the villain in the soulless bourgeoisie. Good poetry, both that of

what Yeats called "coteries," and that of the people, presupposes a

tradition — the former a written one, the latter an unwritten one. The art of both, Yeats insisted, is difficult.

Although Yeats' conservatism differed from Morris's socialism, Yeats' analysis, in his essay on the cultural problem may remind us of Morris:

Indeed, it is certain that before the counting house had created a new class and a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister, the art of the people was closely mingled with the art of the coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in words full jf far-off suggestion, with the unchanging speech of the poets.

"''^William Butler Yeats, "What is Popular Poetry?" Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1924), p. 7. 11 Yeats, 12-13. (17)

To Morris, as we know from his writings, the Golden Age where high and low

intermingled in one common culture was the Middle Ages. Here Yeats also

posits a pre-capitalist Golden Age which is rural; his conception of an

ideal "people" is a peasantry, and "popular culture" is the collected

artifacts of that peasantry. We will see this pre-industrial nostalgia

again, not only in the writers and critics to be mentioned, but also in

the poets who are the subject of this study.

Another writer who fits this tradition in certain ways is the literary

critic and student of language Logan Pearsall Smith. Smith's Words and

Idioms, published in 1925, is outside the domain.of literary criticism,

since it is basically a study of terms that have made their way into

English speech. It is also outside the mainstream of linguistic study as

it has been known in this century. Nevertehless, I am including it because,

despite its amateurishness, it was influential in literary criticism

during the thirties, especially with F.R. Leavis. One of the chapters of

Smith's book, "Popular Speech and Standard English," concerns the entrance

of colloquial words into standard English, which he associates with the written language. Smith found standard English lifeless and dull because, unlike spoken language, it.does not have an "intimate association with 12 the acts and thoughts of men." Smith respected standard English as the repository of valuable memories and felt that, since it is the class dialect of the governing social order, it must be learned by anyone wishing to share in the privileges of that order. On the other hand, he felt that the vocabulary and grammar of literate English had become too rigid, and needed

12 ■ Logan Piersall Smith, Words and Idioms (London: . Constable, 19.57), p. 167. (18)

to be liberated by the language of the folk. Smith also felt that "men

of letters" were important mediators between the rustic speech of the

peasantry and standard English. In fact, the work of these creative indi­

viduals proves.their role not only as mediators, but also a kind of

binding glue between high and low. Smith, like Morris, also asserts the

identity between artist and lower class:

For both the peasant and the literary artist employ, after all, much the same kind of language; both are concerned more with life and idiom than with dictionaries and the rules of gram­ mar. Both.wish to express their feeling when they speak, and strive to clothe their thoughts with flesh and blood and make them visible to the heavens. A writer cannot create his own language; he must take what society provides him, and in his search for sensuous and pictured speech he naturally has recourse to the rich and living material created by generations of popular and unconscious artists.-*-®

What is of chief concern here is the common language and its revitalization,

and behind that, perhaps, an anxiety that a society torn by class conflict needed the binding force of language; at any rate, it is typical that Smith

saw this revitalization taking place by means of educated users of stand­ ard English coming in contact with the language of a rather idealized peasantry.

The ideas of the writers I have referred to are interesting partially because of their social content; the implication in the writings of Morris,

Yeats, and Smith is that the social divisions created by industrial capi­ talism are harmful to culture (meaning not only works of art but the social life that gives rise to them), and that a vital culture, which creates a vital art and language, requires that all classes somehow be integrated with each other. Even though the three writers mentioned above were quite

13 Smith, 155-6. (19)

far apart in their actual political beliefs, they all held, in one form

or another, this notion of language and culture. Morris, a political

radical, held that a new society would erase the divisions between workers

and the educated and bring back the ideal which he felt had been the heri­

tage of the Middle Ages. Yeats, the conservative, looked back to a period,

also somewhere in pre-industrial times, in which class division, including

the extremes of hut and manor, did not mean lack of class communication.

Finally, Smith, in his article on popular speech, appears to be a political —

or at least a linguistic — liberal, advocating a kind of reform of lan­

guage in which.the educated classes permit the language of the peasantry

to infiltrate standard English, the language of authority.

Critics of literature during the thirties, writing during the time

when Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, and Spender were producing the first

phases of their major, work, made use of parts of the tradition under dis­

cussion. In particular, F.R. Leavis and the group which wrote for the

journal Scrutiny were especially interested in the relationship between

language and the creation of art.and, by. extension, culture itself. Leavis

is important for our purpose because, as I have already mentioned, he was frequently critical of the poets who formed what was even then known as

"the Group," and because of his Arnoldian and to some extent Eliotic emphasis on a literary elite, schooled in a tradition of the artifacts of high culture, which would define the language of the tribe. Yet with

Leavis, as well as those who wrote for his journal, we again find the evocation of a pre-industrial society in which all contributed to the making of culture; and this evocation was used as an attack on the contemporary urban popular culture of the thirties. (20)

This is quite evident in an early Scrutiny article, "Joyce and the

Revolution of the Word," in which Leavis maintained that

strength of English belongs to the very spirit of the language — the spirit that was formed when the English people who formed it was predominantly rural.,, when one adds that speech in the old order was a popularly cultivated art, that people talked (instead of reading or listening to the wireless), it becomes plain that the promise of regeneration by American slang, popular city-idiom or the invention of transition-cosmpolitans is a flimsy consolation for our loss.-'-14’ 15 16

Scrutiny writers continued, during the thirties, to contrast the

value of pre-industrial culture, in which the language of "the people"

provided vitality to the literary tradition, with the contemporary culture.

Adrian Bell, also writing in 1933, found that "the country fathers are

the only relic of that illiterate class which (finding it almost extinct), 15 we realize now has ever been the source of renewal in our literature."

The rural person’s vitality of language comes because he is immersed in

rural life and tradition until he thinks as well as speaks in local idiom.

The quaint phrases of the country people are imaginative associations which

are close to poetry, Bell asserted, because they possess "that same instinct 16 by which the poet phrases words in striking propinquity." The poet, as

part of high culture, is thus closer to the illiterate than are the urban 17 classes, for "culture moves slowly, but in a circle," By contrast, modern education and civilization promote standardization and the death of

14 F.R. Leavis, "Joyce and the 'Revolution of the Word'," Scrutiny, IV (Sept. 1933), p. 199. 15 Adrian Bell, "English Tradition and Idiom," Scrutiny, 2(June, 1933), p. 48. 16Bell, 47.

17 Bell, 50. (21)

rural culture, which is the death of all culture. Similarly, John Speirs,

in a study of eighteenth century Scottish ballads, published in Scrutiny

two years later, found that these artifacts point to the existence of a

literary tradition, among the illiterate which they do not have now, for

contemporary popular entertainment — popular fiction, popular film, jazz music -- is of a "lower order." Speirs maintained that "there is such a

wide gap between popular culture and the literary tradition that it is

difficult to know how long the literary tradition itself, deprived of 18 sustenance from beneath, can persist." Finally, with regard to the indus­ trial working class culture, Q.D. Leavis found that a vital working class culture, as expressed in its literature, such as Pilgrim's Progress, is such 19 . because of its'participation in the national culture." This culture, she felt, was also threatened with extinction because of the film and the press.

Other less conservative critics were also harsh in their condemnation of contemporary culture and the radical split between high and low. The

Marxist writer R.D. Charques, for example, claimed that "the poet of today appears to have suffered no loss of faith in the world of his making. His faith, indeed, has grown stronger.and more exclusive of his poetic experi­ ences, that is to say., has become more individual, more singular, more and 20 . . more esoteric." Besides making this echo of Wordsworth's complaint of

"arbitrary and capricious habits of expression," Charques was also especi­ ally critical of the Eliotic notion of poetry, saying that is designed for

1 8 John Speirs, "The Scottish Ballads," Scrutiny, 4(June, 1935), p. 39.

Leavis, "Lady Novelists and the Lower Order," Scrutiny, 4 (Sept., 1935), p. 124.

20R.D. Charques, Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution (London: Martin Sicker, 1937), p. 61. (22)

a small class of.enlightened souls familiar with the great works of the

past. He was equally critical, however, of popular works; best sellers,

for example, at their best provide recreation, and at their worst exhibit 21 "an appalling tissue of social exclusiveness and class pretension."

Charques felt that in order for poetry to survive, the artist had to find

a relationship between himself and the common people. How this was to be done was unclear; Charques hoped that poets and novelists would concentrate on "social realities" and consider social revolution a possibility. But he seriously doubted whether the split between high and low culture could be mended in the existing order of society.

These, then, are representative writings from the 1930s, several from an influential periodical,. the other from a prominent Marxist critic. Scru- tiny derived from Wordsworth its suspicion of contemporary urban popular culture and a hostility to a.certain kind of sophistication in literary art which appeared.to be cut off from rural roots. If the Scrutiny writers accepted urban culture at all, they accepted a more nostalgic memory of it before it was supposedly ruined by the new media and exotic forms of music.

The Marxist, Charques, was also hostile to urban popular culture, but his salvation was not the pastoral past, but the pastoral future, when the

Revolution would join together high and low.

It remains to be seen, then, how Auden and his group confronted these issues.

21 Charques, p. 86. CHAPTER II

A recent study of literary and cultural criticism during the 1960s

has asserted that "where Americans championed the mass arts because

pleasure in them abolished the outworn and snobbish alienation, the Bri­

tish interest in popular culture was primarily a social concern. The man of culture need not defend one kind of culture over another; rather he extends his interest to kinds of culture and overcomes class snobbery."“'

The stT4dy compares the critic Susan Sontag for.whom the experience of the artifacts of mass culture was a way of changing sensibility, with Raymond Williams, who felt that culture was a whole way of life, not merely the Arnoldian conception of "the best that has been thought and said." The study continues:

For Williams then and the British critics generally, the man of culture is a man of the community. He has two central tasks; one is educational, the other political and social. His educa­ tional task is not to pose highbrown culture against a lowbrow, an aristocratic against a labor class culture, but to give everyone a sense of aesthetic and social values of all culture. His social task is to relate the problems of learned culture to the whole way of life and to work for changes that improve both.

It is significant that these ideas recurred during the 1960s, a time of great upheaval, both social and artistic. The fact is, however, that they "recurred"; they were present, at least in nascent form, during the

1930s, especially in the prose writings of Auden, MacNeice, Day-Lewis, and

Spender. Likewise, the ideas of these writers resembled.in many ways those

“'“Richard Wasson, "From Priest to Prometheus: Culture and Criticism in the Post-Modernist Period," Journal of Modern Literature, 3(July, 1974), p. 1193. 2 Wasson, p. 1194. (24)

of the writers belonging to the second tradition mentioned in the previous

chapter. Furthermore, as in the writings of Williams referred to above,

the work of the Auden group poets both indirectly and directly concerned

themselves with the question of how the middle-class artist, the person of

culture, can meaningfully work for social change with people of whom he

has little direct knowledge. One aspect of this problem — the relationship

between the poets and the social movements of the thirties — has been

discussed elsewhere. What is important here is how these poets saw the

situation with regard to the condition and writing of poetry. Their wri­

tings during the thirties and immediately after tend to focus on the

following questions: (1) What is the crisis in poetry, and how did it

occur? (2) What is the actual effect of the mass media on poetry, and how

can this effect be negated? (3) What kind of person should the poet be?

(4) What kind of poetry should he or she write? In examining their response to these questions, we will find a continued emphasis on the rapprochement with, if not specifically 'popular culture," at least with ordinary life, and an emphasis on the poet as ordinary man and.poetry as ordinary language.

The most articulate statement by the Auden group of the difficulties poets faced during this period was Auden's introduction to the Oxford Book of Light Verse. Auden's concern here was what he felt to be the division of poetry into (his words) "highbrow?' serious verse and "lowbrow" light verse. This split occurred and was in fact analogous to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Auden's analysis,in this work showed some simi­ larities to those of Morris and Yeats:

From a predominantly agricultural country, where the towns were small and more important as places for social intercourse than as wealth-producing centers, England became a country of large (25)

manufacturing towns, too big for the individual to know anybody else except those employed in the same occupation^. The division between classes became sharper and more numerous.

Auden noted that the wealth of the country as a whole increased, and he

singles out for attention, not the middle classes of Yeat's scorn, but the

appearance of "a new class who had independent incomes from dividends, and

whose lives felt ,ne.itlier the economic pressures of the wage earner nor

the burden of responsibility of the landlord." At the same time the

patronage system broke down, and the writer had the dismal choice either

of writing for the public or of following his artistic conscience into starvation.

Artists living in this new and unfamiliar society were suddenly de­ prived of their communities, and became confused and bewildered. As a result they turned to their own minds for subjects, or they attempted to create "imaginary worlds." The poet saw himself not as an entertainer, as he had been before, but one of two extremes — the "unacknowledged legisla­ tor of the world" or the Dandy proudly proclaiming the uselessness of his work.

There was, of course, nothing wrong with this new situation; no one had ever explored the private, mental world before, and in the course of the nineteenth century many technical discoveries were made in poetry.

However, according to Auden, a new problem arose:

The private world is fascinating, but it is exhaustible, Without a secure place in society, without an intimate relation between himself and the audience, without, in fact, those conditions which

3 W.H. Auden, Introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. W.H. Auden (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), XII-XIII. 4 Auden, Light Verse, p. XIII. (26)

make for Light Vgrse, the poet finds it difficult to grow beyond a certain point.

The condition of the poet is such that in the times when he or she

is united with the commonality — that is, when what interests him also

interests the mass of ordinary people, he will not feel he is in any way

unusual and will use language that is close to the ordinary speech of the

day. However, when his audience is specialized, he will be more aware of

his occupation and his language will stray from the language of normal dis­

course. On the other hand -- and here Auden emphasized what he was to

stress more strongly later on, as the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism had

become more apparent — the role of the poet in this (probably rather

theoretical) folk society is not ideal. As part of the whole, he has a

difficult time seeing things honestly, in a way "unbiased by the conven­

tional responses of his time." When, however, society is changing rapidly,

and the poet, is more alien from it, he can see more clearly but communicate

his perceptions less effectively. The ideal situation, as Auden saw it, was a period such as the Elizabethan when the artist was still rooted in

his community but was aware enough of new attitudes and ideas not to be

chained to it.

Despite the difficulties ; brought to poetry by the growth of commerce and industry, the nineteenth century saw the development of a special form of light verse,, nonsense poetry. Auden approved of this form, and compared it, in his introduction, with the work of Walt Disney. But as for "folk poetry" in general, changing social conditions meant that it would disappear

5 Auden, Light Verse, p. XVI. (27)

Even America, which in the previous hundred years had produced a type of

folk poetry, was now no longer able to do so.. Finally Auden noted:

The problem for the modern poet, as for everyone else today, is how to find or form a genuine community, in which each one has a valued place and can be at home. The old pre-industrial com­ munity is gone and cannot be brought back. Virtues which were once nursed unconsciously by the forces of nature must now be recovered and fostered by a deliberate effort of the will and intelligence.®

Again, we find the evocation of a pre-industrial past, in which language

and art grow, almost like plants, from the soil, and nourish all who come

into contact with it. Auden provided his readers with the sane realiza­

tion that this past cannot return to us; but he also insisted that the

communal ideal could be brought back by force of will. This, of course,

implied a social program, although its actual ideology was unclear. By

1940, Auden was still repeating this historical theme, but he had added

to it a new dimension: history itself is a series of waves of civiliza­

tions. At the crest of each wave, society is united in a community of

belief, by a generally recognized concept of what is true and what is real

But where there is a crest, there must be a trough. The trough occurs

when the belief system of society breaks up and people can only give per­

sonal, subjective answers to the problems which vex them. Our present

problem, he declared in 1940, is that the Machine has taken away the true

meaning even of words such as "society" and "class," and that, in place of

. community, society is now composed only of small groups united by the

interest of professional specialization. As for art, it disappeared com­

pletely in earlier trough periods, but in the present one it is being kept 7 alive by, and only by, "a tremendous exploitation of technical tricks."

g Auden, Light Verse, p. XIX.

?W.H. Auden, "Tradition and Value," The New Republic, 102(Jan. 15, 1940), p. 90. (28)

Auden was restrained in his pessimist), however, because he felt that civili­

zation was rising toward a "crest of socialist world order with a new

tradition in which artist and public will be linked once more in a community

of belief.

Further, by focusing attention on light verse, Auden was attempting

to promote in the realm of language something analogous to what he and

others of his generation.were attempting to do in society. As Erich

Auerbach has shown, European literature has, since the time of classical antiquity, made a distinction between "high style" — serious and often rhetorically stylized language used to depict the actions and thoughts of the nobility — and "low style" — a more colloquial and vernacular language used to depict the thoughts and language of those social classes which were not aristocratic. Traditionally, .the high style was used for the genres of tragedy and romance, whereas the low style was reserved for, as in

Petronius, "everything commonly realistic, everything pertaining to every­ day life," which "must not be treated on any level except the comic, which 9 admits no problematic probing." Auden seemed to be aware of this dichotomy, but in place of high and low styles he gave us the distinction between serious, experimental, often extremely subjective verse and light verse, that most often concerned with everyday occurrences and written in the common tongue. Lightness and the comic were associated with the popular, and the popular.artist was most often at one with his audience. At the

O Auden, "Tradition and Value," p. 90.

9Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tran. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953)p. 31. (29)

same time, however, Auden insisted— analogously to the idea that the comic Is not as deeply probing as the tragic — that the popular artist was more chained to the conventions of his time. However, by the mere fact that he did give importance to light verse, Auden seemed to be encour­ aging a reconciliation between the two styles which would parallel the hoped-for class reconciliation on the social level. ,

We find the same concerns in the writings of C. Day Lewis at the time, although Lewis was more adamant in his attacks, not on the division between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" art, but on contemporary popular culture itself. Day Lewis, like Auden, wanted the poet to be popular, that is, to speak to everyone, but principally because the voice of what actually passed for popular culture was so brutal. Like Auden, Day Lewis in A Hope for Poetry felt that the main reason for the obscurity of much modern poetry was "the expansion of the social unit to a size at which it becomes impos­ sible for the individual to have any real contact with his fellows and thus benefit from the group.Day Lewis followed this with a theory of modern neurosis which also attempted to account for the obscurity of contemporary verse, at least by extension?

Towns, founded by men's desire to live together, now condemn them to live separately. The successful social unit is one which both . adapts itself to the slowly widening circumference of individual imagination and is in itself the cause of.its extension. The social and the individual units obviously are interactive, so that with the sudden nightmare swelling of the former we get a similar morbid growth of the latter.H

Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1934), p. 36.

^A Hope for Poetry, p. 36. (30)

The problem with modern modes of communication — not only the film, news­

paper, and radio, but also modern methods of rapid transit, is that they

increase the boundaries of the individual's experience so rapidly that the

center of his being cannot cope with it; "the Individual is being pulled

out so forcibly in all directions that his personal life is attenuated and 12 dissipated."

Not only have the new media of popular culture made the individual's

personal life more frenzied, they have also led to a disastrous decline in

the position of poetry and the poet in the cultural life of the nation.

Until fifty years ago, he wrote in the pamphlet Revolution in Writing, every

one accepted poetry as the finest way to express human feelings; before

that, poetry as a way of knowing, of presenting insight into reality, was

universally honored. The poet himself was viewed "as the spokesman of his

social group: he expressed what they were, feeling both as a group and as 13 ... individuals." In fact, fifty years ago reading itself, as an activity,

was a common recreation, and the poet, like Shakespeare, was also an

entertainer. But newspapers, magazines, films, radio and popular fiction

have taken away, the entertainment function of the poet; the poet, on his

side, understands that he is no longer popular in the sense that the wide

audience he enjoyed previously does not exist. Consequently, the poet does

not feel compelled to play, the entertainer, and he begins to write for the

coteries.

12 Lewis, A Hope for Poetry, p. 36.

1 o C. Day Lewis, Revolution in Writing (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), p. 33. (31)

Lewis also attacked the mass media because he felt that they inhibited social change. Revolution in Writing insisted that "it has been in the interests of capitalism to keep the workers inarticulate." Art, on the other hand, because it speaks to the emotions, has a potentially revolution­ ary force. Just as capitalism gives the workers only the leavings of its production, so it also gives them merely the leavings of its art-production

— bad films, bad fiction, and other forms of mass tittillation. As the social situation grows more grave, Day Lewis wrote, society has become more flooded with trash art. What this has done has been to dull the sensibilities of the workers to good art, which presumably would make them more revolutionary: "Infected with false literature, they find it more ' . 14 difficult to catch the infection of vital and revolutionary literature."

In addition, the media, supposedly the creation of a more democratic age, actually tend to increase the division between highbrow and lowbrow.

In an interview in A New Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920-1940, published several years after, both Revolution in Writing and A Hope for Poetry, Day

Lewis complained that the BBC radio network did not present poetry well:

' For perhaps a quarter of an hour every other week, often just before midnight, they announce that someone is going to read poetry. The impression given is that of someone turning on a tap, very ceremoniously but very cautiously, from which a meagre trickle of culture will emerge. Instead of showing poetry as an activity lying at the roots of life and springing straight from its heart, they surely make the ordinary listener feel that is is^gomething detached, irrelevant, 'highbrow,' above its head.

14 ... Lewis, Revolution m Writing, p. 44.

^interview published in the Introduction to A New Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920-1940, ed. C. Day Lewis and L. A.. G. Strong (London: Methuen, 1941), xxiii. (32)

Lewis, like his contemporaries and others before him, felt that the

loss of the manor and the hovel meant the decline of poetry. Like MaUarme^, he was especially incensed against universal education, primarily because

it did not given the "minority" — that is, those capable of producing works of art — enough culture to give them an understanding of poetry; likewise, it did not raise the culture of the majority. The "superficial culture" dispensed in the classroom made it difficult, if not impossible, for the majority to appreciate poetry.

Modern civilization, furthermore, has bad effects not only on the public, but also the poet himself. The mass media, as we have seen above, produce a state of neurosis in the mind of the average person; these arti­ facts also act "upon the mind to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor." (The unusual pairing of the last two words — originally from

Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads — may reflect an attempt by

Day Lewis to reconcile the apparently contradictory effects he claimed for the mass media;, on the one hand.,, they produced a state of frenzy, and 16 on the other they dull the sensibilities.) The poet's reaction to the competition of the new media is either to attempt to compete — to make a louder cry in the wilderness — or to condemn modern life in general and withdraw into his own world.

Louis MacNeice concentrated his attack not so much against modern life as against the poet's reaction to it. For him, as for Auden, the poet was no longer essential to the community:

The modern poet is often both a 'rebel' against.and a parasite upon his community. He makes it his pride to have different

16 Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry, p. 35. (33)

values and beliefs from those of the community, while at the same time he demands that the community shall support him and his poetry for their own sake in the same way that an apprecia­ tive oyster might support the pearl that grows in it.

MacNeice did not approve of this because, after all, words are pro­

ducts of the community, no matter how many modern poets attempt to deny

it. Even the Imagists, who took their materials from modern life, are on

the wrong track because for them only the poem mattered, not its actual

subject. Similarly, the escapism of Mallarm^, in his attempts to create

a kind of poetry, a music of words without reference to meaning or subject,

is close to the more common kind of escapism available through the media.

In writing his poetry, Mallarmé, according to MacNeice, created neither a higher mathematics nojr1 music "but a dream world with a subtle mathematical • , „18 or musical structure.

The principal difficulty in approaching these critical writings of

Auden, Day Lewis, and MacNeice is that they cannot truly be considered examples of serious literary criticism or social or historial analysis.

It is true that they used concepts fashionable in intellectual circles at the time — the distinction between community and society, the pernicious effects of the mass media — but the purpose of their prose work at this time was not .analytical but polemical. What they wished to do was not necessarily to criticize the work of others — for, even though they are harsh on their contemporaries or predecessors, their harshness is relatively unfocused — but to explain what they or their friends are trying to do in their own work.

17 Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 2. 18 Modern Poetry, p. 20. (34)

For their own polemical purposes, then, the Golden Age of culture-

loving aristocrats and peasants gathering words from the soil along with

more conventional sorts of crops, served them well. Whatever its truth

in the objective world of history, the Golden Age was used as a kind of

myth of a happy world as it existed before the Fall — i.e., before the

coming of industrialism and its corresponding horrors of town life, modern

means of communication, and labor-free income. Most importantly, it was

a world seemingly without class.strife, a world in which every class had

its role to play in the scheme of things. Whatever may have been their

actual feelings about such.'a world — one is sure they, especially Auden,

knew better — their polemical writings occasionally make it seem that they

actually believed the world of Ben Jonson's "Ode to Penhurst," itself a

mythopoeic creation evoking the picture of class unity with the poet as the

celebpator of that unity. On the other hand, the Golden Age these writers

occasionally evoked may. have been for them no more than a theoretical

construct, something set up to oppose and explain the hideous present, rather than a matter of actual belief.

Part of the myth, as promulgated by these three writers, is that the entertainment function of poetry has been taken away by other forms of communication, and that this function must again be grafted onto verse, by an act of will if necessary. . We have already seen that the interest in light verse, the verse of writers consciously trying to be entertainers, may have been inspired by this renewed interest in the entertainment value of poetry. As for the comments by Day Lewis, the.biggest difficulty with them is the fact that he seems to confuse an essentially metaphorical use of language with reality itself. That is, he writes as if "entertainment" were a circumscribed entity, a property once.belonging to poetry the way (35)

family heirlooms belonged to a house, stolen away by the villainous mass

media. As a description of actual social processes, this idea is severely

limited.

A further difficulty in taking these writings seriously as critical

works is that they are almost entirely devoid of examples, either of work

they deplore or of work they praise. Day Lewis, as we have seen, dislikes

the "dream-world" of Mallarmé and likens it to the more mundane escape world

of the mass media; but this comparison seems to be more of a rehtorical

gesture than an actual insight. How is Mallarmé escapist? What are the

points of similarity between the escapism of Mallarmé and that of the

media? How is Mallarmé pernicious? In the "Postscript" to the 1936 edi­

tion of A Hope for Poetry, Day Lewis also attacks Dadaism — surely no

longer an important movement by that time — as an example of "pure art"

carried to extremes:

Once you start deliberately narrowing down the.field of communication -- the potential audience -- in the interests of a more refined, more concentrated, purer art, there is nothing theoretically to stop you arriving at a position where the audience is eliminated altogether.

This is another idea that cries for examples to take it beyond mere grumb­

ling; but again, Day Lewis is devoid of these examples, even from the

Dadaism he dislikes. MacNeice also has this tendency to attack straw men

when he criticizes the Imagists — certainly another group which, as an

active force, had disappeared twenty years before — for valuing the poem more than the actual subject of the poem. Auden, on the other hand, is

somewhat better than his colleagues in that he pays more attention to the

19 Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry. (1936 ed.), p, 86. (36)

causes of the disarray in contemporary poetry, but he, too, at least in

this period, fails to note in explicit detail the trends he truly dislikes.

Given these problems with their criticism — the phantom-like quality

of their enemies, their mythologizing of the poet and his historical rela­

tionship with the rest of society, and, especially with Day Lewis, the

muddle-headedness of their social criticism — it is difficult to disagree

with Julian Symons that they "were laying down rules for talking to an 20 empty room." But we must remember, after all, that these were important

poets, people who, in one way or another, were considered spokespersons of

their generation, people who in fact had published important volumes of

work with major publishers. Whatever we may feel are their faults as cri­

tics and analysts, it is significant that they did articulate a widespread

feeling of frustration at the social situation and about their possible role

in coping.with this situation.

The question they seemed to ask themselves again and again was the

old query, what is to be done? Their answers centered around a basic con­

ception of language and of its role in the community. Here the conflict

between a theoretically "pure" poetry, removed from the constraints of

normal discourse about particular subject matter, and a poetry with subjects

of universal concern, written in ordinary language, has its roots not only

in the works of the writers mentioned in the previous chapter, but also in nineteenth century debates on materialism and idealism. To be more specific, the conception of language held by Auden., Day Lewis, and MacNeice corresponds

20 Julian Symons, The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 23. (37)

to the statements of Marx.and Engels in The German Ideology, written little

more than a century earlier:

We find that man also possesses "consciousness"; but even so, not inherent, not "pure” consciousness. From the start the "spirit" is afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness, as it.exists for other men, and for that reason is really beginning to exist for me personally as well; for language, like conscious­ ness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal has no "relations" with anything, it cannot have any. For the animal, its relation-to others does not exist ; . 91 as a relation.

This statement was part of an attempt by Marx and Engels to prove that the

motive forces of historical change were not ideas but the actual material

forces of production, and that even consciousness means nothing until it

enters the world in the form of language, a material thing which is the

cement of human relationships, The objects of Marx and Engels' attack were quite clear — a group of German philosophically-minded reformers who made the mistake, as the two writers saw it, of opposing the "intellect" and "the masses," and of refusing to contribute to reform movements because they felt their ideas would be corrupted by the masses. While it is a commonplace that Marxist thought was a major influence on the writers of the thirties, especially those under discussion, it is important to note that their critcisms of the Imagists and other early exemplars of the modernist movement parallel Marx and Engels.' criticisms of the Young Hegel­ ians — that is, those writers of "pure poetry" ignore the fact that language is.a social product and that.all words come from a social context.

21 Karl Marx and.Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I and II, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1947), p. 19. (38)

MacNeice stressed this in Modern Poetry: those who feel that poetry

is merely a collection of beautiful words and forms, he wrote, those who

regard it as an artifact for the sensitive few, in short, those advocates 22 of "pure poetry" must realize that "every word is a community product."

Words are the outcomes of life, and the life of human beings is whatever

passes within communities. Pure poetry advocates, he claimed, tried to

drain life from their words and present them as something else. Day Lewis

in Revolution in Writing claimed the same, adding that all human activities

are to some.degree social activities, and since this is true human activity,

communication, words, the basis of communication, must bear a social respon­

sibility. Auden, in his later years, insisted on the same idea: "It is

both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private

property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of a human society which uses them for a thousand dif- 23 ferent purposes." Auden said that this fact was a problem for the poet because in modern society there is always the dangerthat his ear will be corrupted by the continual debasement of the language. However, the poet, unlike the composer or painter, is protected from another disease, that of

"solipsistic subjectivity": "However esoteric a poem may. be, the fact that alii its words have meanings which can be looked up in a dictionary makes it testify to the existence of other people. Even the language of Finnegans

Wake was not created by Joyce ex nihilo: a purely private verbal world is 24 not possible."

22 MacNeice, Modern Poetry, p. 3. 23 W.H. Auden, "Writing," in The Dyer's Hand (New.York: Random House, 1962), p. 23. 24 Auden, "Writing," p. 23. (39)

The "democratic" conception of the poet, like the "democratization"

of the conception of poetry demonstrated above, was likewise a response

to the particular situation of the middle-class writer, especially the

professional middle-class writer. Michael Roberts, the editor of the

important anthology New Signatures (1933), which contained material by

Auden, Day Lewis, and Spender, made this clear in his introduction. His

primary concern was the fact that capitalism seemed to be solving its

problems, but in ways which were not acceptable: people were being turned

into "mere buying machines," and the system was being "made to jog along

to a later crisis." Then he addressed his intended audience:

These are the questions which those of us who are engaged in engineering, teaching, law, literature, and medicine are com­ pelled to ask. Daily we see our efforts wasted or turned against society. Our researchers turn men out of work, not into decent leisure, but into starvation. And as the competitive machine forces the lowest level of standardization, so our •attempts as poets and teachers fail. How can you help people to . become kindly, intelligent, sensitive selves,..when it pays to purvey one form of entertainment for all, when Test Matches replace village cricket, when the whole system forces the ordi­ nary man to become passive, not active?^

This is a significant passage, not only because it specifically locates

the audience, but also because it indicates a new self-conception of ar­

tists. As we have seen from the previous chapter, poets such as Pound

compared the work of the poet to that of the scientist, in other words,

to the professional specialist engaged in acts of exploration and discovery

This was logical in what can only be described as the age of heroic pro­

fessionalism, when some of the more important discoveries in fields such

25 Michael Roberts, "Introduction," New Country: Prose and Poetry by the Authors of New.Signatures, ed. Roberts (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), p. 12, (40)

as medicine, biology, psychology, and architecture were being made by

specialists in these fields. What we have in this passage is an indication

of a new age, the age of the "helping" professions, those that serve society,

particularly by helping those who have not benefitted from the social and

economic system. It showed.an awareness, not entirely present before

this, of the professionals' actual social position as members of the pos­

sessing classes, as well as their ambivalence towards these same classes.

At the same time, these professionals recognized that they were not of the

people they were trying to help in their work — the poor, the unemployed, the laboring classes.

The poet, as Roberts saw it, is not necessarily the unacknowledged

legislator, or a prophet, but a kind of leader. In New Signatures, another of his anthologies that had appeared in 1932, he claimed that the poet is a special person, "a person of unusual sensibility," who "feels acutely 26 emotional problems which other people feel vaguely." This means, of course, that the poet does not necessarily have the capacity for soaring the heights of the Ideal; he may also have a deep sense of empathy, an essential attribute for one who wishes to be a member of the helping pro­ fessions. He must be a teacher or., more appropriately, a psychologist:

"It is his function not only to find the rhythms and images appropriate to the everyday experiences of normal human beings, but also to find an imagi- T1 native solution to their problems." The poet must be concerned with the normal person's problems if his work is not to be barren contemplation.

26 Michael Roberts, "Introduction," New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands, ed. Roberts, 4th ed. (.London: Hogarth Press, 1935), p. 10,

27 Roberts, New Signatures, p. 10. (41)

All'this means that the poet's work must he understood by the ordinary

reader; although the poet sees further than other people, as an effective

leader he cannot "lose sight of his followers."

For C. Day Lewis, the problem of one who wishes to speak to the work­

ing classes is one of language and, of course, ultimately one of class.

In his "Letter to a Young Revolutionary," published in Roberts' New Country,

he maintained that "the great difficulty for people of our class who believe

they have something to say to the people in general is to find a method of

getting it across. Speak in your natural voice, and few will hear it.

Talk down, and you will very naturally become suspect as well as endanger

your integrity. Infiltration and diffusion, that is the only hope to-day 28 for the prophet in the wilderness." Day Lewis recognized the position

of the person in the middle who is at the same time not a part of the

working class. The issue of language here Is not simply a reflection of what is known as "middle class guilt" ,— It is an important issue precisely to the person of the helping professions, who has chosen to do his work among those who, because they have not shared in the benefits of the social system, need to be "helped." However, Day Lewis still used the vocabulary of the older conception of the poet, "the prophet in the wilderness"; for him the poet is not the ordinary man.

It was Louis MacNeice, in Modern Poetry, who most clearly formulated the idea of the poet as the "average man." If Auden claimed, in 1935, that poetry was "memorable speech," and the good poem was like "talking to an intimate friend," MacNeice likewise found it . "regrettable that so many

28 C. Day Lewis, "Letter to a Young Revolutionary," in New Country, p. 31 (42)

people should think of poetry as an abnormal activity and of the poet as I a freak growth moving in the sphere.of fancy rather than fact, and subject 29 to a miracle called inspiration." In place of this notion, MacNeice

insisted that even though not everyone is willing or able to write poetry,

everyone knows how to use language poetically. All people, for example,

practice "love talk," trivial joke talk, and humorous talk, and all of these

are represented in poetry. In other words, poets practice the same speech

as do ordinary people.

The poet is not merely like everybody else, however. Like the help­

ing professional, he has a service to perform. Unlike the poets of the

past, the modern is not "the spokesman of the community," according to

MacNeice, because if he were, he would merely "tell it what it already

knows." The poet, instead, must be representative of the.best aspects of

the community, "its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct. ’

In other words, the poet can make use of his/her position as an outsider

to advantage as a critical voice. The person the poet speaks to is the

"ideal normal man who is an educated member of the community and is basic­

ally at one with the poet in his attitude to life."

Spender particularly stressed the importance of the poet's critical

faculty. . Of the four poets under discussion, Spender was most emphatic

in his rejection of contemporary culture and of that version of the artist-as-organie4;o-his-community theory which demanded that the poet write work that was propaganda, that would inspire the'masses to revolu­ tionary action. Yet like the others, he was aware that the concerns of

' 29 Modern Poetry, p. 31-2. (43)

poetry must be the concerns of the public. He criticized writers like

Joyce for "creating a culture which depends only on personal experience

and personal beliefs, which has no roots in the life around it, which

is blase and not even rebellious."30 The problem with this kind of art,

according to Spender, is that it makes artists even more marginal to so­

ciety than they already are, and that, at any moment, the community may

decide it can do without them. Spender, used Nazi Germany as an example

of where this had happened. Furthermore, Spender claimed that by appealing

to a larger group of people the artist also expands his subject matter;

"he draws strength from deeper roots." He found a good example of a wri­

ter in touch with his community in the Russian socialist realist writer

Gladkov who, whatever his faults, wrote about things which deeply concerned

the great mass of people without writing down to them. Spender's criticism of Auden, in fact, was that he was not popular enough;, The Orators, for example, "does not altogether escape the charge of being public or even 31 preparatory school satire." Still, Spender insisted that "the art which has 'roots in the masses' must be free to tell the truth and to criticize life."32

Despite this solution of the poet-as-everyman-critic, the poets still retained the ultimate dream that they would, once again, as in the mythic past, become true members of the community. They were too realistic, how­ ever, to see this happening in the present, so, as they idealized the past,

30 Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element (London: CAPG, 1938), p. 181. 31 The Destructive Element, p. 215. 32 The Destructive Element, p. 299. (44)

they idealized the future. This is especially true of Auden who, of the

four poets, seemed to have the most profound awareness of historical

change. During the middle thirties, he felt that it was difficult for an

artist to do his best except in a society united in "sympathy, sense of

worth, and aspiration"; later, in his introduction to the Oxford Book of

Light Verse, he insisted on the same, but with an emphasis on the critical

faculties of the members of his ideal community; "A Democracy in which each

citizen is as fully conscious and capable of making a rational choice as

in the past has been possible only for the wealthier.few, is the only kind

of society which in the future is likely to survive for long." Only in

such a society would the poet be able to write poetry which is "simple,

clear, and gay." Obviously, such a society did not exist at present. By

1940, as was pointed out above, he was anticipating this world in the new

socialist order he saw arising.

C. Day Lewis, in the middle thirties, also anticipated the new society

in which the problems of the contemporary poet would be resolved. As the

coming Revolution would sweep away the alienation of the worker, so would

it sweep away the alienation of the poet. Until the Revolution came, the

efforts of poets to reach a larger audience would ultimately be doomed.

With this notion, Day Lewis echoes the Marxist critic, Charques, who, as

we saw in the previous chapter, could admit the full development of litera­

ture only in post-revolutionary society. As for Day ¡Lewis, we find him in

Revolution in Writing saying that in his own time poets have become disen­ chanted with the limited coterie and are seeking a wider audience, and to

33 Auden, Oxford Book of Light Verse, xix. (45)

do so are "simplifying their way of saying things." Day Lewis, however,

was pessimistic about these efforts, because they could not get very far

without revolutionary change in society. "Many artists to-day," he wrote,

"are beginning to realize that the full exercise of their powers is only 34 possible under a classless society."

Such notions, if taken to their extreme-, would mean that the duty of

the artist is to remain silent until the great day when the Revolution

arrives. None of these poets did this, of course. What they did do, be­

sides write their own poetry, was attempt to formulate theories about the

type of poetry that should be written, its language, its images, its symbols

Firsthand most important, they insisted that poetry must be something

other than merely subjective outpourings. We have already seen this, of

course, but what is important is the teminology of their statements and

what they expected language to do. At the time of their first published

writing — in the volume Oxford Poetry: 1927, edited by Auden and Day

Lewis -- the editors declared that the cultural crisis, that is, the frag­

mented community, can be resolved by a new engagement of poetry in the

problems of the times. The comfort of church and enduring literary tradi­

tion was insufficient; what the poet had to do was find his/her language 35 in the present, in the new "environment" that.conditions values, In doing so, the poet would find a language which would ease the transition between past and present.

This was a prophetic concern, for it underlay, much of what the poets had to say about poetry in general and their own poetry In particular during

34 Day Lewis, Revolution in Writing, p, 34. 35 J.N. Riddel, C. Day Lewis (New York: Twayne, 1971), p, 41. (46)

the 1930s. In 1934, Day Lewis wrote in A Hope for Poetry that his con­

temporaries were attempting to "tap the power of science by absorbing

scientific data into their own work." By scientific data he meant "sense

data" or what science has developed — that is, all of modern civilization.

It is significant that Day Lewis used the word "power"; power seemed to

be, at least to him, the entity that modern life has that poetry does not

— power to move minds, power to endure. This .seemed to be exactly the

kind of power lacking in the nostalgic Georgians or the subjective aesthetes.

Day Lewis praised Spender's "pylon-carried wires" for communicating a "new

kind of power." Elsewhere in A Hope for Poetry, he saw poets using this

power for a kind of magical guerilla activity:

As a magician can prevail against a rival witch doctor by gaining possession of some hair from his head or a few of his toe-nails, vehicles by which the rival influence may.pass into the control of his own spirit, so it is possible for poetry to steal the thun­ der of science, to absorb these trivial business incantations and turn them to its own uses.3?

The poet who was most successful doing this, it. was felt, was Auden.

MacNeice in Modern Poetry praised Auden.for taking everything as his sub­

ject and for refusing to worry about vulgarity. Likewise, Auden was praised

for being modern enough to actually enjoy materials from popular culture;

MacNeice claimed an American ballad, "Cocaine Lil," was one of Auden's

favorites. Although much of what Auden had written was obscure, this was

not a kind of Eliotic obscurity; unlike Eliot, Auden selected "experiences 3 8 and ideas from criteria taken from actual life," In other words, Auden

3 6 Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry, p. 30. 37 A Hope for Poetry, p, 3Q. 38 MacNeice, Modern Poetry, p. 170. (47)

is different because, unlike Eliot, he draws not only his images but also

his values from contemporary l*ife. Spender noted that Auden’s work was

characterized by an extreme consciousness of imagery, having renewed the

complete stock of received images. To do this, Spender noted, he has used

not only psychological textbooks but also jazz songs such as Cole Porter's

"Let's Fall in Love" or George Gershwin's "My One and Only," as well as

movies. Spender maintained, however, that Auden did not use these artifacts

in themselves; his method was close to that of the newspaper office se­

quence in Ulysses, in which Joyce has Leopold Bloom think in the language

of journalism. However, Spender noted that Auden went a step further than

Joyce; in at least one of the poet's "songs," there is a note of serious­

ness; it is a "transcription, in contemporary imagery, of a genuine love 39 lyric of a simple ballad kind." Auden, in other words, had not only

used popular forms to parody them; he has also turned them into vehicles

for expressing genuine feeling. In fact, he used the genre to transcend

the limits of the genre by doing in fact what the genre only pretended to do

Auden was also extolled for successfully handling the great rediscov­

ery of the 1930s, light verse. Recall that Auden himself edited the

Oxford Book of Light Verse; others.were quick to praise his use of the

form. MacNeice, who admired the popular verse of the dance hall and the

music hall ("where the age-old cynical reaction to sex was represented

without any donnish pomposity"), as well as the verse of Porter and Rudolph

Bing (which "did full critical justice to the world of cocktail bars and night clubs"), felt Auden's attempts at light verse tried "to do justice

39 Spender, The Destructive Elément, p. 259. (48)

40 to the multiplicity of modern life." MacNeice thought Auden's ballads,

such as "The Ballad of Miss Gee," were too facile, but he thought the

ballad manner was more suited to "Song for a New Year,";.in which there

was a mixture of "sermon and fantasy." MacNeice was less enthusiastic

about Day Lewis' attempts at light verse, principally because Day Lewis

did not have what Auden had., an actual sympathy for the popular, the "buf­

foon world." Auden, unlike Day Lewis, had one foot in the world of Puck, and could be an entertainer in the profound sense -- that is, one who both amuses and instructs.

The most successful example of the use of light verse as a way of dealing with.contemporary life, according to MacNeice, was Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron.". In this long poem, Auden used the "easy Byronic stanza" to do criticism, autobiography, and, gossip. A complex society required a complex reaction, and the looseness of the Byronic stanza fit this reaction well. Auden was also praised by. MacNeice for believing that chat and gossip, which are, of course, everyday uses of language, also belong to poetry.

Finally, the collaboration of artists was important to these writers,

A previous generation of artists had seen, the changes that had been occurring in painting, sculpture, the dance, music, and literature, and also welcomed collaboration among the arts and artists. The difference between them and the writers of the 1930s was that those of the thirties saw working with other artists, including those involved in the newer media, as.a.way of removing the isolation of the poet, as a way of forcing him out of his subjectivity. In short, collaboration was a communal

40 . MacNeice, Modern Poetry, p. 190, (49)

activity, and acting in concert with other artists showed that the poet

was once again a part of the community. The poets of the thirties, for

example, accepted the idea that the new media, such as radio, could by

used by them. Part of the reason for their acceptance was simply the

idea, as we have noted above, that the poet could steal some of the "power"

of contemporary civilization and use it to fuel his own work, or, in fact,

use it against the very society which had spawned it. Another reason was

that they recognized that radio and film were ways of reaching large

numbers of people —■ this was part of their power — and it meant, possibly,

that the poet could exercise in modern society that role he had supposedly

exercised in the distant past. MacNeice, to give one Instance, saw that

collaboration of the artist with.other "craftsmen" (a word, after all,

of strongly anti-industrial connotations) was also collaboration with the public "which cannot make itself heard and he has to guess at its criti- 41 cisms." This also means that, according to MacNeice's theory that the poet is merely the ordinary man who is talented at writing poetry and what the audience requires is what he himself requires, the poet will discover the needs of his audience by working in the studio or on the stage better than by working in the study.

Again,MacNeice found Auden to be the prime example of how a poet should work; Auden had, after all, worked on G.P.O. films and had supplied the verse commentary for the documentary Night Mail. Furthermore, Auden had been helped, not hindered, by this experience; he was not a writer corrupted by the lure of the media. MacNeice claimed that Auden admired the capacity

41 Modern Poetry, p, 195. (50)

of film for reportage, and "Auden has always believed a good writer must 42 be a good reporter."

The poetic drama, which had been discussed years before by Eliot,

was seen as another prime vehicle for collaboration, not only between

artist and artist, but else between artist and audience. It was with these

motives that Rupert Doone, who had been.trained in classical ballet (the

collaborationists' vehicle of the previous decade), founded the Group

Theatre, which put on the work of Auden and Isherwood. Doone wanted not

only actors, but artists, poets, and musicians for his enterprise. Auden

wrote The Dance of Death specifically for the Group Theatre, and in the

program notes to the play emphasized the role of drama in the traditional

community but also the vividness of popular dramatic forms:

Drama began as the act of the whole community. Ideally, there would be no spectator. In practice every member of the audi­ ence should feel like an understudy. Drama is essentially an act of the body. The basis of acting is acrobatics, dancing, and all forms of physical skill. The music hall, the Christmas pantomime, and the country house charade are the most living drama of today,^3

The conception of the Group Theatre was that it would be popular and universal in the sense that the fairy tale was popular and universal. It would use stories that were familiar to its contemporaries, and the audience, "like a child listening to a fairy tale," would always know what was going to happen next. As. in the fairy tale, the characters would be simple and larger than life. The intended audience was.the working class

42 Modern Poetry, p. 86. 43 Quoted in Julian Symonds, The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London: Faber and Faber, 19.75), p, 77, (51)

and middle class intellectuals.

This illustrates, at. last, what.came to be the sense of what a popular

literature should be: something simple In theme and language, yet power­

ful enough to be heard by all and incisive enough to diagnose the ills of

the age. This popular literature could possibly be conveyed by the mass

media -- for the writers encouraged each other and others like themselves

to work for radio and film -- primarily to subvert the corrupting influence

of these media. Again, it is important to understand that, for all their

acceptance of the. qjparatus of modern civilization, these poets remained

powerfully anti-technology, anti-mass media, and like the tradition they

belonged to, the tradition we have examined in the previous chapter, what

they looked for in the end was a nostalgic version of popular culture,

fueled perhaps by their Golden Age notions of what the role of the poet had been in the past. The very idea that the productions of the Group

Theatre, for example, were intended to be like fairy tales -- the popular product of a previous age —. is significant, even though these productions used material from the mass media. Likewise, the fact that the audience was to be like a group of children listening to a fairy tale indicates not merely thecasting off of the conventional "what will happen next?" of the standard plot but, more profoundly, a conception of the audience as a child, as a group not always in command of its rational faculties.

By the 1940s, in.fact, Auden had become more strident in condemning the modern media and in putting in its place the values of th.e popular forms of an earlier era, again th.e fairy tale. The experience of Nazism, which, had presented itself to the world as a movement leading to an ideal folk- state, had dissipated much simple-minded nostalgia for the past; but combined with a new realism about the barbarities of the "organic" society (52)

was a bitter attack on the manipulatory powers of the modern media which

had been used to create this type of society. In a review of new edition

of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Auden insisted that "whoever today, whether in art

or politics, idolizes the folk-like and popular and disparages the highbrow

and difficult, is making, whether he means it or not, propaganda for the 44 Police State." What Auden was attacking was not the popular as such,

but the modern media, which reveal that "what today passes" for popular

art is not the creation of simple 'lowbrow' men and women, but a degenerate

'middlebrow' horror, mass-produced for profit by fully conscious, well- 45 educated young men who read the classics in their spare time." In fact,

as Auden saw it, those works which were genuinely like the true popular

literature of the past, like Moby.Dick and The Castle, were actually by

highbrow authors.

Auden asserted that the fairy tales of the past, such as those by the Grimm Brothers, offered "basic symbols" such as helpful beasts, guar­ dian dragons, the cave, and the fountain, and that the modern reader could add his or her own contemporary symbols such as railway stations and wrist watches. The modern problem, both for individuals and communities, was that people lack symbols which relate "one experience to another," and so they ferociously attach themselves to a few remaining symbols. Behind these notions was the central idea, which had been expounded years before, that what was needed was a universal culture which is the common heritage of all; and the problem with the mass media was that it was not universal but the

44 W.H. Auden, "In Praise of the Brothers Grimm," New York Tames, 12 November 19.44, Sect, 7, p, 1,

45 "In Praise of the Brothers Grimm," p. 1. (53)

product of an elite for the manipulation.of taste. Furthermore, behind

what Auden was writing was an implicit statement about the function of

the poet; and we can see that function, once again, as being related

to that of the service professions: the writer, even of so naive a form

as the fairy tale, can elicit the symbols which are able to make our dis­

parate experiences connect. In that sense he is a psychiatrist or healer.

So we see that during this period, there was, partially in revulsion

against contemporary society and its problems, partially in the sense of

a disappearing audience for poetry, a search for the popular element in

poetry. Once these writers accepted the idea that much contemporary poetry

was written for a select few, the question remained, "What is popular?"

For it was not merely the desire to be "popular" that moved these writers;

they were concerned as well with the very definition of "the popular."

The answer, to these writers, took many forms: a concern for social prob­

lems, the acceptance and use of colloquial elements, archaic but once uni­ versal genres, contemporary media, and finally,-the search for universally valid symbols whose revelation would, it was hoped, cure the sick indivi­ dual and the sick society; but behind these hopes lay the dream that the divisions of society would be healed, and that society would once again become a community, but without the accompanying barbarities of tightly knit communities of the past and present. We will examine further how

Auden's verse during the thirties reflected this search. CHAPTER III

The poetry that persons of most communities hear on a daily basis

is the song, words arranged in a regular metrical pattern that are set

to music. A song that owes its effects to its words as well as to its

music becomes popular when it describes a fear, an experience, or a wish

which, although often private, is held in common by a large number of

people. At times the words may form a background to the musical expres­

sion, intensifying it or counterpointing it; at other times the reverse

may be true, and the music may be background to the words.

When we speak of Auden's poetry as drawing from or using the popular

culture of his time, we are essentially talking of his interest in the

forms of popular music. If he wished to extricate himself from the sometimes

solipsistic privacy that lurks behind, at least potentially, every piece

of lyric verse, it was only natural that he was drawn .to the communal form

of the song — not only the art song, but the popular song as well,

Whatever may have been his ideological reasons for writing song v- and,

as this chapter will try to show, these reasons went hand in hand with,

his needs as an artist -- It is clear that his background and interests

led him in this direction.

Christopher Isherwood was probably the first to point out that Auden,

as a child, had a "sound musical education.,""'" In his later years, Auden

worked as a collaborator in the writing of opera libretti and wrote essays

"Christopher Isherwood, "'Some Notes on Auden's Early Poetry," New' Verse, 26-27 (Nov. 1937), p, 4, (55)

examining the relationship between music and the other arts, including 2 poetry. Monroe K. Spears adds that "Auden had a good musical education,

played the piano competently, sang in all his school choirs, and enter­

tained himself by playing and singing hymns," and says that by 1928, Auden 3 poems were already being sung. Likewise, many of the more familiar works

collected in Auden's Oxford Book of Light Verse were songs, both of the

traditional and the more modern, sentimental variety — spirituals, blues,

lullabies, protest songs, and soldier songs. In fact, a curious limita­

tion of The Oxford Book of Light Verse is that it does not contain notation

or at least an indication of the chord structure for the songs it includes.

Read as poetry, as words alone, the songs simply do not have . the ■. emotional

power they have when they are sung,

So, in examining Auden's popular works, we must be aware that he was

not simply "influenced" by popular music, whatever that may mean; he made

use of it, commented on it, made use of its conventions and cultural con­

text; he wrote it, in fact, although he kept in.mind that he was making

poetry to be spoken or read. Therefore we must examine the following poems as popular works as such, detailing how they are shaped by and how they transform the particular genre he happened to be using. As for evaluation, we must try to answer, the impossible question, "Is it popular?"

The question Is difficult because of its very vagueness; we must answer the questions "Popular to whom?" and "Popular in wh.at way,?" Of course, it is impossible to ask the ordinary person on the 1930s street, the listener

2 . See especially "Notes on Music and Opera," The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), p, 465-474, 3 ...... Monroe K. Spears, The Poetry of W.H, Auden: The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p, 113. (56)

of the music current at the time, how Auden's work appealed to him. We

can only infer through the work itself who his ultimate audience was and

how it affected it.

The emphasis I have given to the musical element in Auden's work

should not make us forget that his output of light verse during the thir­

ties was so large, and the reasons for writing it so diverse, that to

discuss it effectively we must put it into generic categories. Probably

the simplest way to do this is to begin with the types of light verse Auden

himself listed.in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse: (1)

Poetry, such as folk songs, written for performance -- that is, to be

spoken or sung before an audience;. (2.) Poetry which is to be read but which

has as its subject matter the everyday life of its period or the experien­

ces of the poet as. an average human being;. (3) Nonsense poetry or nursery

rhymes that have general appeal.

Now Auden's light verse does not quite fit these neat categories; many

of his poems belong to the first class, but the traditions they draw from

are too varied. The second type is easier to locate in his work. When

Auden wrote this type of poem, for example, he sometimes had in mind the poems of Byron — works written in a loose and easy meter, dealing with scattered insights, freewheeling social commentary, and gossip, Auden wrote several of these pieces, the most important being the appropriately titled "Letter to Lord Byron." The final class is the most problematic because he did not write nonsense verse as such, although, some of his light poems carry its attributes. Perhaps a more useful way of categorizing his popular works would be the following: (1) Poetry which, draws from contemp­ orary popular song, especially the sentimental and "torch"’ballad; (_21 (57)

Poetry drawn from what may loosely be called the "folk idiom" — ballads,

folksongs, and other works which use techniques and even outlooks associa­

ted with productions of a pre-mass communications culture; (3) Polemical

verse, some of it extremely vitriolic, which does not place emphasis on

complex statement, and whose primary purpose is criticism of a person or

a social condition; (4) Light occasional verse — that is, poetry referring

to Auden’s own experiences as an individual and sometimes intended, at

least initially, for a community of friends. These are the categories

which will subdivide this chapter.

A. The Sentimental and "Torch" Ballad

Certain of Auden's light works during the thirties can be related to

what is called the "sentimental" ballad, which differs from the traditional

ballad in that it is primarily a lyrical expression of the singer's feelings,

usually of love or of loss of love. The persona of the lyric is frequently

weak and vulnerable, and his or her emotion often overwhelms both him and

the song itself. When a narrative exists In the sentimental ballad, it

does so primarily to explain or justify the singer's feelings. The songs

are unreflective in the sense that the emotions and their sometimes extreme physical manifestions in the song itself are unquestioned; if anything, what the singer claims to do in the song -- cry, retreat from society is to be taken as evidence of his sincerity and his commitment to the life of the emotions, A perhaps prototypical example of this type of song is

"After the Ball," a turn-of-the-century commercial success, "After the

Ball" is atypical because it is principally a narrative about’a man who, in his youth, took, his girlfriend to a . dance and found her talking to someone else. Under the impression that, she had deserted.him,■he.left her (58)

and spends the rest of his life in seclusion. It.is not until he is an old

man that he discovers that she really had been talking to her brother. In

this song, the central subject is the "broken heart," and the central theme

is the devastating effects attendant upon this affliction; both subject

and theme make it prototypical. Likewise, the protagonist is weak and

vulnerable.

One of Auden's first works in a popular idiom shows similarities to

the sentimental ballad. This poem appeared as poem IX in the 1933 edition

of Poems, although it had been composed in 1929. Like all the poems in

this early volume, it was untitled; its first, line was "It's no use raising

a shout," and hereafter it will be referred to by that line. Compared with.

other poems written during this period, its diction is. entirely colloquial;

there is none of the by-now-familiar Audenism of the unexpected colloquial word or phrase introduced, into a formal context. The rhythmic structure

is ragged., changing from line to line. It is this very raggedness of rhythm and diction which is analogous to the harmonic distortions of jazz music.

But here the distortion does not stress vitality, but its opposite; the acutal theme of the poem is the standard Eliotic one, physical impotence and paralysis reflecting spiritual impotence:

It's no use raising a shout, No, Honey, you can cut that right out, I don't want any more hugs; Make me some tea, fetch me some rugs. Here I am, here are you: But what does it mean? What are we going to do?

The persona is surely Prufrockian: weak, .indecisive, and in this case, given to invalidism. The statements are short; there are pauses at the end of every line, as if the speaker had to. pause to take another breath. But (59)

it is important to note that what Auden has taken from the sentimental ballad is the weakness and self-pity of the speaker. While the actual rhythm of the verse seems to be taken from a blues or jazz song, the diction — tired, clichéd.. — undercuts any energy the song might contain.

The last two lines forma refrain that will continue in each of the stan­ zas .

The next stanza begins with the speaker's history; the first has com­ pleted the speaker's statement of his dismal state, and now the speaker searches for an explanation of it. Since the writer of the poem is Auden, the explanation in reality amounts to a diagnosis. . Unlike the writer of a sentimental song, he does not simply elicit our pity and dismay at what we collectively know about, I.e., the vagaries of romantic love; he wishes to examine a sick society:

A long time ago I told my mother I was leaving home to find another: I never answered her letter But I never found a better. Here .am I, here are you: But what does it mean? What are we going to do?

Symptomatic of the speaker's weakness is his attachment to his mother; this stanza recalls nineteenth-century sentimental songs and poems dealing with

"Mother" as an idealized figure of nurture and.comfort, Here it is that figure which, is criticized; neurotic dependence on the mother, or at least on some feminine principle, is seen both, as a cause of and a contribution to the speaker's present paralysis.

The first line in the next stanza should, be a statement but ends with a question mark: "It wasn't always like this?" The line indicates, per­ haps, that the speaker is so overwhelmed with, doubt that paralysis has (60)

struck his memory-forming ability. Once a traveler, he now rejects travel

as a way out: "When life fails,/What's the use of going to Wales?" Then

the next two stanzas attempt to locate the core of the disease:

In my spine there was a base, And I knew the general’s face: But they've severed all the nerves, And I can't tell what the general desires, Here am I, here are you. But what does it mean? What are we going to do?

In my veins there is a wish, And a memory of a fish: When I lie crying on the floor, It says, 'You've done this before.’ Here am I, here are you: But what does it mean? What are we going to do?

The diagnosis finds the disease in the body — in the spine and veins -

but this is merely emblematic of the speaker's actual mental and spiritual

state. The "general" may be God, the superego, or a vital force, but

whatever it is, it has been cut from the rest of the body, leaving him

unable to act. The memory of a fish may be Christianity on the one hand,

or awareness of biological evolution, with its implications of the inevita­

ble decline of a species, on the other; but all it does is heap scorn on

the speaker's inability to move. The crying on the -floor may remind us of

the extreme-emotional, responses of the sentimental ballad, but here it is

only wasted energy and certainly no evidence of deep feeling.

The final stanza is suitably Waste Land-like in its imagery;

A bird used to visit this shore: It isn't going to come here any more, I've come a very long way to prove No land, no water, and no love. Here am I, here are you: But what does it mean? What are we going to do? 4 His long evolutionary and spiritual journey has come to a dead end, and

u J.H. Watterstad, in'Auden's 'It's No Use Raising a Shout': A New Perspective," Concerning Poetry 2(Spring, 1970), p. 19 insists that "evolu­ tionary biology is involved in the poem." (61)

there is no relief in sight.

If this Is not a "popular song," it is not completely parody either,

as some have suggested, because it does not burlesque the form itself. It

uses elements of the popular song, particularly the rhythms of the jazz

song, the wan rhetoric and especially the hypermelancholic persona of the

sentimental ballad to analyze a state of spiritual torpor. In Eliot’s

"The Waste Land," popular songs are collages, fragments from and indications

of a sterile environment. Auden's early poem assumes a more thorough know­

ledge of contemporary mass culture, although it does not by any means take

that culture at face value.

Another song in this mode came somewhat later, in 1936, when Auden was

more committed to writing popular verse than he had been in 1929. Originally

it appeared in the Auden-Isherwood.play The Ascent of F6, but it was re­

printed in 1940 in the volume Another Time. The poem is as follows:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with, a muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let the aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead, Put crepe bows round the necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong,

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Considered as a song, it is a variant of the sentimental ballad commonly known as the "torch song," in which a deserted lover expresses his or Gmore (62)

frequently)her sense of loss and continuing love. Torch songs, or poems

bearing the same feelings, seemed to come quite easily to Auden, who always

had a deep sense of the human failings of romantic love. Like the persona

of the previous song, the singer here is overwhelmed with emotion; practi­

cally every line is a demand that the affective fallacy run rampant. Some

of the elements, such as the insistence on public mourning for what is on

one level a private hurt, are reminiscent of "The Streets of Laredo," a

cowboy song included in The Oxford Book of Light Verse; others, such as

the extravagant claims concerning the lover’s value, belong properly to the

torch song tradition. Yet while many of the metaphors are bald cliches,

they do not, oddly enough., indicate the singer's mental paralysis. Part

of the reason for this effect is the stronger rhetoric of the song ■—' most

of the sentences in the poem are imperatives, demands put on in an indif­

ferent universe. The loss of love may mean humiliation and loss of power, but the forlorn lover still has the option of giving rhetorical orders.

Likewise, the third stanza catalogs cliches, in such, profusion and with such, metrical force that they cease to be cliches and become Instead almost archetypal, universal emblems of .loss; and the final "I was wrong" of this stanza, the contrasting trochees, punctuates the verse with shock and bitter realization.

At the same time, the extremism of the imagery is appropriate; public mourning, after all, is a ceremony commemorating an actual loss to society,

In this poem, the loss has a religious dimension; "He Is Dead" indicates the death, of Christ or, more specifically, the death of religious meaning.

This is such a traumatic event that time (the clocks), normal human communi­ cation (the telephone), sexual desire or hunger (which, the. barking dog with. (63)

the "juicy bone" may indicate) has become meaningless. The whole universe,

in fact, is a needless encumbrance, for what has previously provided the

speaker with a totality of significance is now gone. If the death of the

cowboy was a drama of public significance in "The Streets of Laredo," the

death of a civilization’s center is to be given a ceremony of greater impor­

tance .

A third poem, again belonging to the torch-song category, is "Johnny,"

composed in 1937; it appeared in the "Lighter Poems" section of Another

Time and was reprinted in Harper's Bazaar in 1941. Reading it, we recall

the songs of Kurt Weill, popular - during .the thirties;, the famous "Surabaya,

Johnny" is an example of this. In the Weill song "Johnny" is an inexplica”

bly heartless lover for whom the singer still feels deep affection. The

important themes of the Weill song are two, the transitoriness of love and

its pain. We see the same themes in the Auden song. As in the previous lyrics we have discussed, the persona here is weak and abused:

0 the valley in the summer where I and my John Beside the deep river would walk on and on While the flowers at our feet and the birds up above Argued so sweetly on reciprocal love, And I leaned on his shoulder; '0,Johnny, let's play'; But he. frowned like thunder and went away,

0 that Friday near Christmas as I well recall When we went to the Charity Matinee Ball, The floor was so smooth, and the band so loud And Johnny so handsome I felt so proud; 'Squeeze me tighter, dear Johnny, let's dance till it's day': But he frowned like thunder and he went away.

Shall I ever forget at the Grand Opera When music poured out of each wonderful star? Diamonds and pearls they hung dazzling down Over each silver or golden silk gown; '0 John I'm in: heaven,’ I whispered to say: But he frowned like thunder and he went away, (64)

0 but he was as fair as a garden in flower, As slender and tall as the great Eiffel Tower, When the waltz throbbed out the long promenade 0 his eyes and his-smile they went straight to my heart; '0 marry me, Johnny, I'll love and obey': But he frowned like thunder and he went away.

0 last night I dreamed of you, Johnny, my lover, You'd the sun on one arm and the moon on the other, The sea it was blue and the grass it was green, Every star rattled a round tambourine; Ten thousand miles in a pit there 1 lay: But you frowned like thunder and you went away.

This is both a popular song and a criticism of one. Like the persona

of the previous poem, the singer here "thought love would last forever";

and, as in the previous lyric, he/she expresses feelings in commonplace

images. However, in this poem the.persona shows herself to have been

dazzled by these images, dazzled, in fact, by the affective fallacy itself.

She implicitly Imagines, for example, that the river is a symbol for lasting

love, that nature itself — the birds and flowers —is a kind of objective

correlative for her relationship. In the second, third, and fourth stanzas,

she goes, respectively, to a Charity Ball, the Grand Opera, and another

dance; In each case she is struck by gaudy images which confuse her about

the actual state of affairs. As for her lover, he is described at first

in banal hyperbole: He is as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and he frowns like

thunder. In the final stanza, the description of her dream, he is apotheo­

sized; this may suggest, as in the previous poem, a religious dimension.

What is important, however, is that in her simplicity she has been fooled

by the very images and symbols that are part of a popular song,

Not all of Auden's work in the. sentimental ballad tradition is tales

of unrequited love, either physical or spiritual. The following poem, written in 1936, takes its diction from contemporary song, and its purpose (65)

is not, as in the previous works discussed, an analysis of a particular

problem or "disease." More than the poems mentioned above, it is an

example of "light verse." Yet its meaning is not completely on the surface

The soldier love his rifle, The scholar loves his books, The farmer loves his horses, The film star loves her looks. There's love the whole world over Wherever you may be Some lose their rest for gay May West But you're my cup of tea.

Some talk of Alexander And some of Fred Astaire, Some like their heroes hairy Some like them debonair, Some prefer a curate, / And some an A.D.C., / Some like a tough to treat 'em rough, But you're my cup of tea.

Some are mad on Airedales And some on Pekinese, On tabby cats or parrots Or guinea pigs or geese. There are patients in asylums Who think that they're a tree; I had an aunt who loved a plant, But you're my cup of tea.

Some have sagging waistlines And some a bulbous nose And some a floating kidney And some have hammer toes, Some have tennis elbow And some have housemaid's knee, And some I know have got B.O., But you're my cup of tea.

The blackbird loves the earthworm, The adder loves the sun, The polar bear an iceberg, The elephant a bun, The trout enjoys the river The whale enjoys the sea, And dogs love most an old lamp-post, But you're my cup of tea. (66)

Once again, we have a variation on Auden's favorite subject, but

here there does not seem to be any serious examination of it, Unlike

"There's no use raising a shout," there is no devastatingly ironic dis­ tance from the speaker; the clicheZof the refrain seems to be no more

than what it is, a naive expression of a simple and unmediated feeling.

It is, in fact, close to nonsense verse.

However, it is after all poetry, and consequently reflective. What

saves it from sentimentality are two characteristics: First, the

elaborate nonsense of the lines that, in each stanza, precede the refrain,

and second, the way that this nonsense controls our attitude toward the

speaker. The nonsense comes from the sheer number and variety of devotions

catalogued and absurdly compared to the speaker's own affections. In this case our pleasure in the poem is comparable to the kind of pleasure we get from novelty songs, in which absurdity is delighted in for its own sake.

Furthermore, when we examine the absurdity a little closer, we find that the poem is slyer than it first appears. For it is a vision of the world: after all, the first stanza claims, "There's love the whole world over; wherever you may be," but most of the loves catalogued are closer to neurotic obsessions, to mental disease in fact, . The soldier, scholar, farmer, and film star may love the objects of their affection, but those objects are perhaps more indicative of self-love than anything else. Like­ wise, the hero worship dealt with in the second stanza, in which the heroes seem rather dubious, casts some doubt on the sanity of hero worship itself.

Neurotic obsession.with animals and plants is taken up in the. third stanza, and again the crucial problem is self-love. After all, the asylum patients (67)

who "think that they're a tree" have taken this kind of love to its conclu­

sion and have become the beloved object. The list of minor afflictions in

the fourth stanza reminds us that, to the Auden who was the advocate of

Homer Lane's theories, physical disease is an indication of.mental disorder;

but more importantly, their afflictions are here seen as "love," That Is,

they are indications of self-regard. Finally the love exhibited by the

animal kingdom is not as innocent as it first might appear. The adder’

loves the sun and the polar bear loves the thing it sits on — innocently

enough; but the elephant and the blackbird love the things they destroy and

consume, and the dog loves what it defaces. It is certainly possible to

see this unusual variety of attachment as an expression of the universality of love; however, considering Auden's fascination with.the delusions of self-love, there is no doubt that this theme can be .found in the poem as well.

The speaker himself, seen in this context, is a simpleton, precisely because he accepts all of these embodiments,of neurosis as normal. We are led to conclude either that the speaker's own affections are likewise neurotic in a world in which insanity is an integral part of everyday life, or that the speaker's love is something different from and, more beneficial than that of the creatures he discusses. Given the speaker's banality and his apparent inability to straighten out his non sequiturs., we can only conclude that it is the former which is closer to the truth,

The poem "Some say that Love's a little boy" is the final song I have put in the sentimental ballad category. It appeared in 19.40 in Another Time as one of "Four Cabaret Songs for Heidli Anderson," as well as the April,

19.41 Harper's Bazaar, The cabaret.,. popular in.Europe during the twenties (68)

and thirties, was a restaurant featuring short acts, and has found its place

in our mythology of that time as the center of the satirical, gynical

entertainment. Whether or not this reputation is deserved, the fact is

that this poem, despite its surface naivete, is harder and more vulgar

than the previous song discussed. It is a light piece, lighter than the

previous works discussed, yet it shares a number of characteristics with

them, as well as with other Auden poems.

The poem begins:

Some say that Love's a little boy And some say he's a bird, Some say he makes the world go round And some say that's absurd; . But when I asked the men next door Who looked as if he knew, His wife was. very cross indeed And said it wouldn't do.

The persona, as in "The soldier loves his rifle.," is naive, but even more

than in that poem, the naivete is false, On one hand, it parades its

ignorance; on the other, it gives a knowing wink to the audience. The persona who asks his neighbor about love knows very well how his wife will react and also feels married love is a sham, most likely because it envelops with a turgid duty the male passion. In this way Auden displays a theme found in other works at the time, notably "September 1, 1939," where his

"dense commuters" repeat, their morning vow, "I will be true, to the wife,"

For all his concern about universal love, married love did not, at least at this stage in his career, belong in that category.

The second stanza is interesting, not because of the theme, but because of contrasting "sharps and flats," that is, similes of the course alterna­ ting with, similes of the soft and bland: (69)

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas Or the ham in a temperance hotel, Does its odour remind one of llamas Or has it a comforting smell? Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is Or soft as eiderdown fluff, Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges? 0 tell me the truth about love.

The third stanza tells where the persona has heard about love: in

history books, on Trans-Atlantic boats, in suicide accounts and in railway

guides. The fourth stanza compares it to singing, and, true to the spirited

nonsense of the peom, the first line refers to the singing of a dog:

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian Or boom like a military band, Could one give a first-class imitation On a saw or a Steinway Grand, Is its singing at parties a riot, Does 'it only like Classical stuff, Will it stop when, one wants to be quiet? 0 tell me the truth about love.

The dog's howling suggests the instinctual base of the feeling, and at the

same time, perhaps, introduces the theme that love inspires art — all

kinds of art, from the highest to the most incompetent trash. Also, for

the first time.we are told, in the line before the refrain, about the

speaker himself: He wants his emotions to be easily controlled, to be turned off when they cease to be appropriate.

The next stanza describes where he has searched for it: Thames at

Maidenhead, Brighton, and "underneath the bed," and again the juxtaposition of the commonplace and the absurdly commonplace tell us that the naif is perhaps not aware of his malady, but we are still conscious of the conspir­ atorial wink Auden is giving his audience.. The sixth stanza poses additional questions about the subject, questions in the form of easy generalizations and stereotypical political opinions, .Can love.make faces, or is it (70)

"usually sick on a swing?" Does it have its own views about money, or

think patriotism is.enough?. Are the stories it tells "vulgar but funny"?

The final two stanzas direct our attention to the speaker. In the

previous lines we have seen him as a simpleton, one of the masks, as we

have seen, of the singer of the sentimental ballad. Here the simpleton

puts on his Prufrockian face:

Your feelings when you meet it, I Am told you can't forget, I've sought it since I was a child But haven't found it yet ; I'm getting on for thirty-five And still I do not know What kind of creature it can be That bothers people so.'

When it comes, will.it come without warning , Just as I'm picking my nose, Will it knock on my door in the morning Or tread in the bus on my toes, Will it come like a change in the weather, Will its greeting be courteous or bluff, Will it alter my life altogether? 0 tell me the truth about love.

The singer is aging, unloved, and not a little crazy. To say he is self­

absorbed may miss the point; his neurosis is that he cannot love, that he

suffers a blind spot in this area which makes an ordinary human emotion an

uncharted wilderness onto which he projects his commonplace guesses. What he hopes for, and like . Prufrock, half fears, is that love, whatever it may be, will somehow change his life and make him undergo a change of heart

This is why, at the end, the refrain "0 tell me the truth about love" — the flat cliche”* in popular song idiom which ironically counterpoints the exercise in baroque personification .-- becomes in the end. a rather pathetic cry.

These then are the characteristics of Auden's "popular" songs, derived (71)

in part from the tradition of the sentimental ballad as it originated in

the nineteenth century and was disseminated, in its various forms, in the

twentieth-century mass media and theatre: (1) the concern with love, or the loss of love, an interest appropriate to Auden's notion of Love as an entity which could bring a "change of heart" and end human misery; (2) the weak persona of the singer.who appears.in one guise as an impotent and aging

Prufrock, in other guises as the naif or faux-naif; (.3) the use of cliches drawn from this tradition, either in a context which undercuts them or the speaker, or attempts to revitalize them. Whether or not his poems can ultimately be classed as "popular" is a question whose answer must await the end of this chapter.

B., The Folk Idiom

The material in this section has been chosen because it represents, in one way or another, Auden's use of the folk idiom. It is, of course, difficult to define this idiom and to distinguish it from the above-mentioned popular idiom, but I will do so by isolating the elements of the work which are associated with the folk tradition, Monroe K, Spears, in his Poetry of W.H. Auden, devotes a section to what he calls "popular songs," and, however useful this section is, it does not make a clear distinction between popular and folk material. It is important to do so, I feel, because the work that is primarily folk in inspiration sometimes expresses different themes from that which, evokes the sentimental ballad.

To be specific, then, the folk material is drawn from songs and poetry from pre-industrial times or from communities which are not primarily urban and have not been influenced extensively by fwentieth-century mass media.

The distinguishing characteristics, of Auden's folk material are these: (72)

(1) It is written from an omniscient point of view or, if written in the

first person, the persona is extremely stylized and in fact is a simple

conduit for the truths expressed in the work; the first person is really

a mask for an omniscient narrator. . There is no sentimental speaker here,

one who we can either identify with or establish an ironical distance from.

(2) The organization is frequently narrative and often the narrative is

starkly dramatic. (3) The rhetoric is heightened and formalized; there

is far less contemporary colloquial diction. (.4) Imagery, while often

stock, as is true in the sentimental ballad, is closer to that of the tra­

ditional ballad; it is, for example, more, frequently drawn from the natural

world. While the images in the sentimental ballad tend to be cliches, the

images in the material under discussion below .tend to take the form of

archetypes, although., as we shall see, Auden occasionally deflates these archetypes, (.5) Verse forms and meter are taken from traditional forms such as the ballad.

An important example of a work in this category is. the "Epilogue" to The Orators which Auden later put,in the "Songs" section of the 1945

Collected Poetry: .

'0 where are you going?' said reader to rider, 'That valley is fatal, where furnaces burn. Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden, That gap. is the rave where the tall return,'

'0 so you imagine,' said fearer to farer, . . 'That dusk, will delay on your path to the pass, Your diligent looking discover the lacking Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?'

'0 what was that bird,' said horror to hearer, 'Did you see that shape in the twisted trees? Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?! (73)

'Out of this house' — said rider to reader 'Yours never will' — said farer to fearer 'They're looking for you' said hearer to horror As he left them there., as he left them there.

. As Spears points out in his discussion of this poem, the pattern is

taken from the folksong "The Cutty Wren," which Auden included in the

Oxford Book of Light Verse. This song begins:

0 where are you going, says Milder to Malder, 0, I cannot tell, says Fostel to Fose, We're going to the woods, says John the Red Nose,^ We're going to the woods, says John the Red Nose,

"The Cutty Wren" is a question and answer song about a proposed journey

into a forest to hunt and kill a wren.. Each stanza follows the pattern

exhibited in the above verse. Milder asks a question about what is to be

done, or expresses doubt about various steps of the proposal G"0 that will

not do," he says in. the fourth stanza); Fostel, always in the second line,

voices his indecision, John the Red Nose, never described but obviously

a man of action, resolves the question in the repeated last two lines. He tells how the animal will be killed, cleaned, cooked and distributed (the

spare ribs will be given to the poor), >

Auden's "Epilogue," of course, is more complicated., although, the resemblances to the source are important, and they suggest why the song was used. A perilous journey is being undertaken in the Auden poem, although its nature is unclear. Thus, the poem carries the motif of the journey which. Auden used in many of his works during the thirties, The pattern of doubt and resolution continues,in the Auden poem, although, the resolution

— actually a series of contemptuous replies — does .not appear until the

5 ... "The Cutty Wren," The Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed, W.H, Auden (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 39.3. ■ (74)

final stanza. Milder and Festel become reader, fearer, and horror,

expressing their doubts about the.journey; and John the Red Nose becomes

rider, farer, and hearer.

The emphasis in the poem is not the procedure of the quest, but the

anxieties involved in it, In the first stanza, the "Reader" is possibly

a sedentary individual, perhaps an intellectual with an overheated imagina

tion and an inability to act. The valley where the rider Is going is

fatal, a grave, he says. Likewise, the "fearer" is also afraid of action,

specifically because he worries about the loss of security the journey

would bring as the "farer" steps from granite to grass, "Horror" unleashe

his gothic fantasies -- the shape in the twisted trees, the undefined

figure approaching from behind, the terrible disfiguring disease. To each

one, the rider, the farer, and hero are as blunt as is John the Red Nose

in "The Cutty Wren." The rider announces his departure to reader; to

fearer, farer replies that the hesitant person's feet will never make the transition from granite to grass; and to horror, the hearer suggests that his terrors exist only in his own imagination.

The repeated anapests of the final line emphasize the hero's decisive­ ness; he has already gone, dashing away on his journey,. In fact, the whole forceful rhythm and rhetorical pattern underline the feeling of urgent necessity in this poem, a feeling which was not, of course, present in the source. From a folksong about a journey into the woods to hunt a wren, Auden creates a poem whose theme is the desirability of action des­ pite the terrors it can bring. Although, the reason for action is unclear, we may assume, as Auden's readers did at the.time, that the action was political. Note also that the "Epilogue" has. none of the flatness and (75)

and triteness of the sentimental, songs discussed in the previous section;

it is a dramatically organized dialogue, with a th.ird-pepson narrator whose

purpose is to reveal a truth applicable to the whole community,

Another song which evokes the folk idiom is "'0 who can ever look his

fill'," which first appeared in New Statesman and Nation in 1937, later was

put into Letters from Iceland, and went under the title.of "Death's Echo"

in the 1945 Collected Poetry. Like many of the poems written during this

time, including ones already mentioned, it is infected with a sense of hu­ man imperfection and a feeling that ideals, such as perfect love, perfect friendship, and the perfect society, are themselves illusions, mere mean- derings of the crooked heart. This poem, and others that bear the same themes, may be seen as laying the groundwork for Auden's conversion to

Christianity; the sense of Original Sin and the inevitability of death is so pervasive that a return to religion may have been the only answer,

Like the previous poem discussed, this one begins.with a question, and also like, the previous poem, there is a response, although, here the reply is stated in a refrain :

'0 who can ever gaze his fill’, Farmer and fisherman say, 'On native shore and local hill, Grudge, aching limb or callus on the hand? Fathers, grandfathers .stood upon this land, And here the pilgrims from our loins shall stand,' , So farmer and fisherman say In their fortunate heyday: . But Death's soft answer drifts across Empty catch, or harvest loss Or an unlucky May: ...... The earth is an oyster with, nothing ins.ide it ' Not to be boxy, is the best for man The end'of his toil is a bailiff's order...... Throw down the mattock, and dance while you can.

Farmer and fisherman are embodiments of those who work to achieye a land (76)

of pastoral plenty to be enjoyed by their children. Like the persona in

"Johnny," they are dazzled by what they see before their eyes; but the

land itself is, like the dance floor and the baubles of. the torch song,

merely something into which they project their wishes, The narrator brings

in death's answer and reminds us of the fickleness of nature, and the

answer is a blunt statement that the earth yields nothing and there is no

heaven on earth.

The next stanza disposes, of friendship:

*0 life’s too short for friends who share', Travellers think in their hearts, 'The city's common bed, the air, The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach, Where incidents draw every day from each. Memorable gesture and witty speech.' So travellers think in their hearts, Till malice or circumstance parts Them from their constant humour; And slyly Death's coercive rumor In the silence starts: A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus Not to be born is the best for man An active partner in. something disgraceful Change your partner, dance while you can,

Travelers are those who are by nature rootless and.who constantly leave friends, whatever their original intentions. The very context of their words betray them: They praise the community in those places where strangers gather and depart —- the city, the "mountain bivouac," and the beach. What they remember are isolated incidents, gestures, and speech.. None of this has the continuity that friendship demands. Death, replies that friendship is really nothing more than self-love, the "something disgraceful" of the second-last line.

The next stanza deals with the familiar theme of the impermanence of romantic love. Like, the words of the traveler, the lover's betray him in (77)

the Audenesque fashion of inserting the incongruous word which deflates

the import of the message: . .

'0 stretch your hands across the sea', The impassioned lover cries, ’Stretch, them towards your harm and me,'

The lover points out the greenery, the grass and the stream where the

"vegetarian beasts are fed." But pleasure dies, and death, sitting on

the bedpost, mocks that "the greater the love, the more false to its object,"

and that the desire to kill is only steps away from the desire to kiss.

The last stanza is an eschatological vision that may have both reli­

gious and political overtones. It is an appropriate culmination of all

that has come before, because it locates the problem in the. very nature of

man :

'I see the guilty world forgiven', Dreamer and drunkard sing, 'The ladders let down out of heaven; The laurel springing from the martyrfe blood; The children skipping where the weepers stood; the lovers natural, and the beasts all good,' So dreamer and drunkard, sing Till day their sobriety bring; Earrotwi.se with death's reply From whelping fear and nesting lie, Woods and their echoes ring; ; The desires of the heart are as crooked'as corkscrews N°t to be born is the best.for man . The second best, is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can­ , Dance, dance, for the figure is easy ... . The tune is catching and will not stop... Pance Till the stars come down with the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

The coordinating "and" in the second line Identifies dreamer and drunkard

as brothers. Like the farmer and fisherman, they envision their toil, as bringing about a new world, a heaven on earth,. The "children skipping" are the "pilgrims" of the first stanza— the reward of the pain and suffering (78)

involved in apocalyptic transformation. Similarly, love is uncontaminated

and the natural world is no longer hostile. However, true nature — the

nature of "whelping fear and nesting, lie" -- echoes death's response, that

men's desires .are themselves crooked, and that the desire for redemption

may he the most crooked of them all.

This remains a problematic poem, however. The very simplicity of

the message — it seems, on the surface., to be a variant of the old carpe diem theme -- is diffused by several difficulties. First, is it really true, as death repats over and over again, that "Not to be born is the best for man"? Is this statement, in its way, a form of sentimental pessimism, just as the utterances of the various figures in the poem are varieties of sentimental optimism? This would be.so if that were the only conclusion and death had nothing further to say. However, death gives a further injunc­ tion to "dance while you can"; but this raises, another problem: What precisely is the dance? On one hand,.it appears to be a more "enjoy your­ self while you can"; but the final refrain, longer than the others, gives a clue. The dance's pattern is "second best" ■— that is, it is not so good as the utopian order envisioned by the dreamers and drunkards. Yet it is still a type of order, easier and ultimately more in,tune with the possi­ bilities and. limitation’s inherent in the human condition. It could be argued, for example, that politically it might mean a retreat from revolu­ tionary ideology to an acceptance of a more liberal creed -- something more in keeping with Auden's own sympathies — but whatever, it signifies, it seems to tell us that the apocalyptic orders we envision are hollow and sentimental projections of our own twisted desires. And it is couched in a way that evokes the John the Red Nose response -— blunt, simple, making (79)

clear what is and what should be done. This is how — along with the

question and answer pattern, the idealized figures Cwhich also recall Yeats,

and which, along with the personification of ideas and conditions, are one

of Auden's distinguishing features), and the narrator whose dramatization

unveils the truth that is applicable to all and which has always been true —

the poem evokes the folksong,

A poem with a similar theme, although using the language not so

much of the folksong as of archaic colloquial speech., appeared as poem

XXIV in Look, Stranger! I include it-here not because, it directly recalls

folk material, but because its diction is a harsher kind of everyday speech, unlike the flat banalities of the sentimental ballad. Furthermore, its technique is the dramatized use of utterances by idealized figures, in this case "six beggared cripples," and there is a refrain which, is. not used as a direct reply but rather as an ironical counterpoint to what these men say: here the narrator himself is John the Red Nose, .

The first stanza indicates that, we are once again in the realm of twisted desire, although the very exuberance of the language seems to hint that Auden is more sympathetic to these strange creatures than he Is to some of his other characters: .

0 for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges . To dine with.Lord.Lobcock and Count.Asthma on the. platinum benches, With, the somersaults and fireworks, the roast and the smacking kisses-- Cried the six cripples to the silent statue, ’ The six beggared cripples,

"Lobcock" means " a dull inanimate fellow" and also "a large relaxed penis" ■ ... 0 according to the.1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, where. Auden got

• • • • • • C1QT1 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: A Dictionary of Buckish. Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence, comp, Frances.Grose, with "Modern Changes and Improvements by a Member of the Whip Club" (London:C, Chappel, 1811). (80)

some of the terms for this poem. But the specific idea here is that these

beggared cripples, for all their.deflating appraisal of the posh party,

still want to attend. Their reasons are simple: they want display, food,

and sex. As the refrain shows, however, the possibility of their attendance

is remote, and the silent statue, to which they make known their desires,

indicates their madness.

The next stanza deals with their sexual fantasies, derived from the

movies and from popular versions of history, and is loaded with traditional

sexual imagery. They hope for "Garbo's and Cleopatra’s wits to go astraying,"

and in their madness to lie with them in a. "feather ocean" where they will

go "fishing and playing"; the beggars —- and here,, of course, the Auden

reader will note .the self-deception — will still be happy, "when the cock

has burst with crowing." In the stanza that follows, they wish to be at

the horse races with a crystal ball., obviously dreaming of the cash prizes.

Then they focus on the dream of a pastoral utopia; they want the square in

which they are standing to turn into a ship which will take them to "shaded,

feverless islands" — always, in Auden's moral geography, a place of iso­

lating self-concern — where the "melons are big,"

The final two stanzas show that the beggars' desires are not merely

fantasies, but also reflections of their own human limitations. Although they wish for the garden -- another archetypal place where the heart's de­

sire is fulfilled and the struggles of nature, have been obliterated -- their wish for revenge cohabits with that desire:

And these shops to be turned to tulips in a garden bed, And me with my stick to thrash each merchant dead As he pokes from a flower his bald and wicked head -— Cried the six cripples to the silent statue, The six beggared cripples. (81)

One facet of the pastoral vision, whether of island or garden, is that

the absence of conflict precludes ary need for postures or objects of

defense; in other words, it appeals to our desire to shed whatever physical or

psychic armor we need for the daily struggle and to become more vulnerable. In

the beggar's vision of paradise, however, this vulnerability merely

becomes an opportunity for continuing the old struggle; the surrealistic

picture of bald-headed (the sign of vulnerability to which I am referring)

merchants poking from flowers is a projection of their Hobbesian wishes

rather than their benign ones. Finally, this poem, like the previous

one, turns eschatological:

And a hole in the bottom of heaven, and Peter and Paul And each smug surprised saint like parachutes to fall, And every one-legged beggar to haye no legs at all -- Cried the six cripples to the silent statue, The six beggared cripples.

This stanza not only calls down the smug saints from heaven, but also prays that their equals — other beggars — will become less than they, and pre­ sumably ripe for exploitation, Thus, the speakers' afflictions are spiritual ones, afflictions which are intended to apply to the reader as well -- that is, human desires, here seen as the desire for social tranformation which will bring wealth, power, and sexual fulfillment, are "as crooked as corkscrews"; and that the realization of these dreams would mean the continuation of oppression because this is the nature of things,

Auden was often strongest, in. dealing with folk material, when he was working in the ballad tradition. As we have seen in the examination of the previous poems, his instincts for strong dramatization, sometimes even for the comically melodramatic, were very strong. This is not surpri­ sing for one who was also a playwright and who, ,in his. earlier works, made (82)

almost obsessive use of the paraphernalia of spies and frontiers. In longer,

more diffuse works, such as The Orators, the use of.dramatic situation and

incident betrays perhaps a confusion of purpose; but in shorter works it

contains an economy of imagery and then, that does achieve a purpose <— to

deliver universally valid utterances to a community.

Not everybody agreed with Auden's use of this material. Louis MacNeice,

one of those who, as we saw in the second chapter, wanted modern poetry to

speak to a larger community, was a doubter. In the special "Auden Number"

of a 1937 New Verse, devoted entirely to critical commentary on Auden by

other writers, he voiced in an open letter the fears that too large an

audeience would dilute his message. While praising Auden's "return to

versification in more regular stanzas and rhymes," he added that he was

a little doubtful about your present use of the ballad form. It is very good fun but it does not. seem.to be your natural form as I doubt you can put over what you want to say in it, Of course if you can put over half of.what you want to say to a thousand people, that may well be better., than putting over two thirds of it to a hundred people. But I hope that you will not start writing down to the crowd for, if you write . down far enough, you will have to be careful to give them nothing that they don't know already, and then you will be defeated.?

This assumes that the purpose of a poem is to convey difficult and new in­ formation, as.if, for example, the subject of Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" were not. a universally valid experience but something relevant only to a highly literate elite. The real question is how appropriate Auden's use of the ballad form is for the purposes for which he wishes to use it.

The most familiar of the Auden ballads, and the most frequently dis­ cussed, is "As I Walked Out," which made its appearance in 19.38 in New

7 ...... Louis MacNeice, "Letter to W.H. Auden," New Verse, 26-27 (November, 1937), p. 12. (83)

Statesman and Nation under the title "Song." It is not truly a ballad in

the sense that it is not a narrative; Auden himself called it a "pastiche 8 of a folksong." It is closer in fact to the statement/response poems

discussed before, with its fatuous lover and the quick response, not of

death but of "the clocks in the city." What evokes the ballad is the

quatrain form, the conventional beginning, the use of imagery from the

natural world, and the ballad-conventional rhetoric. To this, Auden

adds his own imagery, which, while strange and not always.clear, is still

appropriate to the tone as well as hauntingly evocative.

Unlike other poems mentioned in. this section, "As I Walked Out" is

told ostensibly in the first person:

As I walked out one eyening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat.

Except in the second line of the second stanza, the narrator never appears

again, not even at the end, as is often true in the folk ballad, to say

that he has learned some "profound and true" lesson. Instead, the action

is dramatized,, and the narrator becomes omniscient. As mentioned above,

the imagery is drawn from the natural, world, but is done so in a more sophis­ ticated manner than in-a folk ballad. The "fields of harvest wheat" iden­ tified with the crowd is actually a diminishing metaphor. At first it appears that this is a visual comparison, until we realize that harvest wheat is grain ready for mowing. Thus we have an intimation of the theme.

The narrator then introduces the lover:

g quoted in Spears, The Poetry of W.H. Auden, p, 110, (84)

And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under the arch of a railway: 'Love has no ending.

He is next to the lover's traditional river, although the railway arch,

. 9 . as Brooks and Warren point out, shows that we are in an urban environment.

"Love has no ending" is the lover's thesis, but the very bluntness of what

he says, after the enjambment of the. three preceding lines, gives it a

flattening effect. The lover continues his promise:

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky,

'The years shall run like rabbits . . For in my arms I hold . The Flower of the Ages And the first love of the world,'

These are precisely the promises found in a popular song, extravagant, unrealistic. In fact, Auden increases their extravagance to the point of absurdity. The "seven stars" probably refer to the "seven stars in the sky" from line 9 of the folk song "Green Grow the Rushes, 0," also included in the Oxford Book of Light Versethe fact that they "squawk," however, is a deflating discordance. The lover, so carried away by his feelings, jumbles-his metaphors, confusing perhaps his own sexual desires C"The years shall run like rabbits") with his idealistic notions of the beloved.

Whatever his verbal errors, they indicate a genuine ignorance of reality

g Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston., 1960), p. 33,

J-0The Oxford Book of Light Verse, p. 207. (85)

itself. It might also be said that the images the lover uses are as false

as the objects that played such an important part in. the fantasy life of

the singer in "Johnny."

The clocks then "whirr" their reply, saying that Time cannot be con­

quered. The imagery of the following stanzas becomes surrealistic, although

more powerful than that used by the lover.. Time interferes with the lover’s

kiss in one stanza; in the next, Time is a rake who "will have his fancy/

To-morrow or to-day." The "Appalling snow" drifts into "green valleys,"

and time breaks up the "threaded dances," The illusions of homey domesti­

city, the common dream of an eternal h.earthlife, are themselves threatened:

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

Instead of a full larder, Time promises only cold emptiness; the marriage bed is the scene of impotent sterility; and the crack in the teacup is a

homely emblem of the approaching end when all things are reversed:

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white boy is a Roarer And Jill goes down on her back,

In the face of death, values are reversed, and the lie is given to clichés.

The bourgeois conception of money as sacred object is contaminated by sacrilege; the heroism.of the lesser defeating the greater is refuted by the fact that the giant's power enchants Jack.(a theme, we have seen in the poem just discussed); the lily-white boy, also from "Green Grow the Rushes,

0" is a "Roarer," that is, a boisterous lout; and Jill's tumble loses its innocence.

Then, after adding that "Life remains a blessing/Althougk you cannot (86)

bless" — that is, people are too guilty, too trapped in Auden’s version

of Original Sin for salvation -- Auden repeats his favorite theme of this

period: "You shall love your crooked neighbor/With your crooked heart,"

Desires in this poem are "crooked," just as they were crooked in "0 who

can ever gaze his fill," and just as the lovers' words are crooked: they

are confused, mistaken meanderings, well-meaning, perhaps, but ultimately

false.

The lovers probably do not hear the voice of the clocks; it is their

nature not to. In the last stanza they have gone and the clocks have

stopped chiming. What is left in the last;line is the "deep river," no

longer "brimming," but running on as it had done before they entered the scene and as it will presumably continue to do, The use of the river here is appropriate because it gives us a clue to Auden's purpose in using the ballad form: it is an archetypal Image, permanently in the repertoire of archetypes available to humanity, and it expresses, as Auden seemed to want to express,, something basic and permanently true about the human con­ dition. The ballad form, because of. its very universality, suggests itself as the proper medium for the presentation of raw truths. Of course,

Auden does the very thing that MacNeice complains about:, he tells the audience what it already knows. Surely we all know that we are going to die and that the fact of death deflates what we may feel are our deepest passions. The danger with a poem of this sort is not that it tells us what we know, but that it does so in such a way -- such as being heavy­ handedly moralistic -- that will, avoid a confrontation.with the truth of the work. After all, the image of the clocks chiming, their answer is one so commonplace that it could potentially put awareness to sleep; but the (87)

very extravagance of what the clocks have to say, with their cohering of

the mundane and the universal, arouses awareness. Thus Auden's use of the

ballad form works in a kind of loosely Hegelian fashion: It takes the

original form, negates it by deflating its cliches, and produces a newer

form by the contrivances that the older form used, and remains true to

the purposes of the older form -- that is, to express a common truth to a

large community. It is also noteworthy that this poem is probably most

successful when read aloud; the verbal techniques such as the generally regular meter, the rhyming, the repetition of words, the extensive use of consonance all come from a time when poetry was primarily a spoken activity.

Despite the fact that some of the images are "difficult," and others are rather obscure, it is not principally a reflective poem; it is one which draws its power from the nonrational, nonreflective "music of words,"

An earlier poem, also containing elements of the ballad form and using them to good effect is "0 what is that sound," first published in a 1934 issues of New Verse as "Ballad," and later put in the 1958 Selected Poetry as "The Quarry." Although it comes earlier than "As I walked but," I put it here because it makes more sophisticated use of ballad,conventions. It

Is formed in quatrains and follows the question/answer pattern of other ballad poems, but there is no easy ironical distance here as there was with the lover of "As I walked out." The questioner of "Q what is that sound," if not meant to be completely identified with, at least has our sympathy; he or she is not a fatuous fool. Furthermore, the purpose is not so much to urge a life of action, as in "0 where are you going," or to reveal a truth; what Auden tries in this poem is to display the mechanism of fear and panic, all the more Intense because its source is inchoate. . (88)

The first stanza gives an indication of Auden's method:

0 what is that sound which, so thrills the ear Down in the valley drumming, drumming? Only the. scarlet soldiers, dear, The soldiers coming.

As in "0 where are you going," the rapid tempo is produced by the use of

quick anapests, although here they alternate with the trochees of the

repeated words of the second line. Rhetorically, the questioner is full

of doubt, while the reply is flatter and more colloquial as it tries to

put the questioner at ease. Yet, as we have seen before, when an Auden

"character" or persona uses colloquial diction, it is usually a sign that

he or she is self-deceiving; in this poem, however, the speaker may simply

be a deceiver.

In the first stanza the questioner hears the soldiers; in the one

that follows, he or she does not see them yet, but merely sees flashes,

Like the word "thrill" in the first line of the first stanza, the "flashing"

of the second is double-edged. The flashes are either the sun on the

weapons, as the respondent claims, in which case they are conventional romantic images of soldiering; or they are images of destructive explosions.

In the succeeding stanzas, the questioner sees the soldiers, but only briefly, and the questions then concern what they could possibly be doing.

The questions -- "0 haven't they stopped for the doctor's care," "0 is it the parson they want with white hair," and "0 it must be the farmer who lives so near" -- are not so much actual queries as increasingly hysterical attempts to fit this sudden encroachment into.the framework of normal, everyday life.

The laconic reply to the last question — about the farmer — intro­ duces the approaching climax: "They have passed the farm already dear,/ (89)

And now they are running." Then comes the shocked.realization of betrayal;

0 where are you going? Stay with me here! Were the vows you swore me deciving, deceiving? No, I promised to love you, dear, But I must be leaving,

0 it’s broken the lock and splintered the door, 0 it's the gate where they're turning, turning; Their feet are heavy on the floor And their eyes are burning.

The answerer exits, leaving the questioner alone, and what is described in

the last stanza -- fragments of bodies -- stresses the inhuman destructive­

ness of what is about to happen. "It" breaks the lock onifthe door, the

"feet" stomp on the floor, and the "eyes" burn.

This is a narrative, like a traditional ballad so frequently is; there

is a question/answer pattern, and action in time. But the movement is

primarily psychological, from doubt mixed with a certain excitement, to

doubt to increasing hysteria which culminates in the shock of betrayal,

isolation, and terror. The techniques Auden uses are those of a good gothic

story: Evil is not simply described but suggested until it strikes the

isolated individual with all the inhuman inevitability of a falling boul­ der. In this way it evokes the most primordial fears of impotence in the face of overwhelming disaster. It is easy to find the source of this fear - the turbulent social disorder of the European thirties .with, its resultant totalitarianisms of right and left. Perhaps it also shows Auden's own fear of social, revolution -—: "the scarlet, soldiers" is particularly ambi­ guous in this respect — for Auden's leftism was always hesitant, Whatever the ultimate source of terror may be, it is left undefined in the poem.

As for the music of the poem, Spears relates the pattern to a movement toward a crescendo, and declares, that it would be difficult to set "0 what (90)

is that sound" to music since it has "its own music built in, so to speak,""'''''

Finally, Auden does not simply "talk down" to an audience, or "tell it

what it already knows," but draws forth, in a work of apparent simplicity

but with an appropriate complexity of technique, a poem describing a truth

about the times.

More closely drawn from narrative ballads are three poems written in

1937, "Miss Gee," "Victor," and "James Honeyman," Like many ballads, they

are cautionary tales, here about the disastrous consequences of repression

of sexuality and creativity, They are "modern" in the sense that we do not

simply follow the movement of action and draw the conclusion, usually

simply stated, of the narrator; we are asked to analyze the psychological

causes of the disasters that occur in the poems. "James Honeyman" was

originally printed in a. different periodical from the other two, and was

not included in the 1945 Collected Poetry; it is more topical than they

and therefore I am putting it in the next section,

"Miss Gee" is probably the most controversial of the. three, not because

of any radical newness of theme and content, but because the narrator takes uncommon delight in the misfortunes of the poem's central character, In any terms, it is an ugly little story. Written in quatrains in conventional ballad meter, it tells the tale of a lower middle class girl of heavily puritanical views, living a cramped life, who dies of cancer (although this is not clear; it appears that her death, is actually caused by the ministra­ tions of the surgeon). As such, it illustrates Auden's notion, already mentioned before, that physical problems are indications of deeper psycho­ logical or moral difficulties.

The poem begins with her address — apparently not a fashionable part

11 Spears, p. 109. (91)

of town:

Let. me tell you a little story About Miss Edith Gee; She lived in Clevedon Terrace At Number 83.

It then continues with a description of her physical appearance; she is ugly and undeveloped. Her apparel is designed for utility: a "purple mac for wet days,/A green umbrella too to take," and symbolically she uses a bicycle with a "hard back-pedal brake." Her principal activity is knit­ ting for the bazaar of a nearby church.

From the exterior description we move into her psychological interior.

We are given a description of her dream, the symbolism of which is obvious to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with Freud, She dreams she is the "Queen of France" asked to dance by the church vicar, who suddenly is transformed into a raging bull, "charging with lowered horns," whom she cannot escape because of her bicycle brake. In another stanza she goes to church and hears the church organ and the singing of the choir, and it moves her — another sign of the life inside which she is trying to repress

And her prayer is "Lead me not into temptation/But make me a good girl please," the conjunction here being a sign both of her sense of guilt that 1 surpasses whatever actions she may have done, and of her interior torment.

The day of reckoning comes when she visits the doctor who asks

"Why didn't you come before?" At home with his wife, he explains his

(and Auden's) theory of the origins of cancer:

Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner Though his wife was waiting to ring; Rolling his bread into pellets, Said: 'Cancer's a funny thing. (92)

'Nobody knows what the cause is, Though some pretend they do; It's like some hidden assassin Waiting to strike at you.

'Childless women get it, And men when they retire; It's as if there had to be some outlet For their foiled creative fire,'

Auden may have been uncomfortable with the device of using the doctor to

explain the significance of the disease; having him make nervous gestures

before he begins to speak may be an attempt to distance this man from our

complete approval, but at any rate, the device does not completely integrate

the theme with the action of the narrative.

In the final stanzas, Miss Gee is brought to the hospital, "a, total

wreck," where she is cut in half in front of an audience of laughing students

find, brought to a room where anatomy is studied to have her knee dissected by a group of moral rearmament people, whose obsessions cause them to miss the central problem and show their own repression,

When "Miss Gee" was published, a note added that the "tune" was "St,

James' Infirmary," an American blues song also included in the Oxford Book of Light Verse, a song which has been traced to English sources. As John

T. Irwin points out, however, singing "Miss Gee" to this melody would be 12 nearly impossible. It is much too long for the blues melody, which traditionally belongs to shorter poems, to sustain.. Irwin asserts that the references to "St. James' Infirmary" are allusive; that is, its story of a lover's lament for his mistress, which, like the end of the Auden poem, takes place in a hospital, counterpoints Auden's tale of an unloved woman,

12 John T, .Irwin, "MacNeice, Auden, and the Art Ballad," Contemporary Literature, 2(Winter, 1970), p. 5, (93)

Thus, in place of Eliot's use of classical literature to counterpoint the

meanness of everyday modern.life, Auden uses popular material in much the

same way, with the same kind of allusiveness.. In this context it is inte­

resting to note that for Eliot, the American, the acculturation necessary

for the creation of art was a movement up, the attainment of the classics;

while for Auden, the European with an education presumably in the classics,

acculturation was a movement downward., the attainment of works in the

popular idiom.

As for the cruelty of the poem, there is no doubt that it is present.

Despite his social conscience, Auden had the prejudices of his class and

sex, and the brief description of Miss Gee, particularly at.the beginning

of the poem, is composed almost entirely.of code words, for "narrow petty

bourgeois prude," Even so, her passions are understood and even sympathized

with, and.this gives the poem a pathos which would not be'present if it

were merely a satirical attack on the weak and powerless by someone who

should know better. However, we cannot avoid the fact that what happens

to Miss Gee is, among other things, a satirical revenge,. It is noteworthy

that some of the early poems, of Bertolt Brecht, to which "Miss Gee" and

"Victor” have been compared, and which were themselves drawn from a German popular ballad tradition, have similarly violent incidents and the narra­ tor's stance Is.much more distant and less sympathetic,

"Victor" is a more interesting poem because it makes better use of dramatic narrative conventions of the ballad form and because the analysis of Victor’s malady is more sophisticated. When this poem was published, an attached note said it was to be set to "Frankie and Johnny." Again, we are not meant to take this literally; it is simply an allusion. The (94)

American song, also from English sources, is about the murder of a pimp

by his jealous whore, and this counterpoints Auden's violent story about

the murder of a faithful wife by her fanatically repressed husband. Again,

the story is told in ballad meter,

Victor's first-problem is his father., who gives him pieces of advice

in the first three stanzas.: "Don't dishonor the family name," "Don't you

ever tell lies," and "Blessed are the pure in heart," In the fourth

stanza, the father dies of a heart attack, "while lacing up his boots."

(.We are here reminded of Miss Gee, who always wore her dresses buttoned

up to the neck,)-. Victor.takes a job at a bank, where "his figures were

neat and. his margins straight/And his cuffs were always clean," In Freudian

terms, he is a classic anal-retentive personality. He also takes a room

in the same type of drabbly respectable house that Miss Gee lived in,

Auden then introduces his favorite character, the harbinger of existential confrontation: "And time watched Victor day after day/As a cat will watch a mouse,"

A woman, Anna, comes to the boarding.house, significantly in the stanza following the one in which. Victor reads about the fate of Jezebel, Anna is a contradiction between appearance and reality;

She looked as pure as a schoolgirl On her First Communion day But her kisses were like the best champagne When she gave herself away.

She has had a notorious past, but wants to settle down. Like many of Auden's characters, Victor is fooled by appearances. Seeing her on the stairs in a fur coat, he falls in love with, her. She agrees to marry him as they walk by the Reservoir, kisses him and tells him, "You are my heart's desire," (95)

the empty romantic words contrasting ironically, with. the. sordid urban

scene. Once married, he calls her "my Helen of Troy," showing the Inflated and clichéd idealization that will soon turn into an equally inflated demonization.

This happens almost immediately, Victor hears his fellow workers talking about her premarital activities, and a transformation takes place,

He walks to the edge of town to the rubbish heaps and discovers he has been deserted by God:

Victor looked up at the sunset As he stood there all alone; Cried: 'Are you in Heaven, Father?' But the sky said 'Address not known,'

The stern father of the first stanzas has been, changed into the stern God whom Victor addresses. The forces of nature -- the wind and the river -- tell him he must kill her.

He returns home filled with his mission. If he had invoked one clas­ sical figure, Helen of Troy, at the time of his marriage, he invokes another,

Othello, at the moment of that figure's greatest tragedy;

Victor picked up a carving-knife, His features were set and drawn, Said: 'Anna, it would have been better for you If you had not been born,'

He catches and kills her, and the blood sings a colloquialized "I'm the

Resurrection and the Life,"

The end of the poem, is a mock apotheosis in which... Victor, now in a mental institution, has transformed himself Into God the Father, Unable to find a woman who would meet his specifications, a "Helen of*Troy" who has also been virtuous from the cradle,.he ends by making a, woman of his own out of clay. (96)

. A nearly perfect narrative, this poem introduces its characters with

simplicity and economy. It shows us the nature of the characters and the relevant features of their pasts and, once we understand these, the events rush to their conclusion with all the forceful inevitability of a good murder ballad. Furthermore, the narrative is not interrupted by someone, such as the doctor in "Miss Gee," who analyzes the problem of the major character; the theme of this poem is clearly built into it. Also effective is the use of empty romantic statement, usually placed at the end of a stanza, written in a shorter meter than the previous lines, which provides an ironic anticlimax to those lines.

Besides the ballad, Auden also tried his hand at the 'blues' song,

"Stop all the clocks," discussed earlier in this chapter, was printed in

Another Time as "Funeral Blues," although I have placed it in the torch-song tradition. As with many popular musical, genres, however, "blues" is hard to define; frequently the music is associated with a "blue" or melancholy mood. The more traditional blues, which Auden and his peers must certainly have been familiar with, consisted of a melody of twelve measures, set in stanzas of three lines, The first line states the singer's particular problem; the second.line restates it, sometimes in the same words, sometimes with variations; and the third line resolves the problem or moves to a more general.^statement, either, tragic or comic or both. In the melody, the blues feeling is stressed by minor or flattened chords inserted into majors, along with a frequently slow tempo. Like the sentimental ballad, the blues song is basically a lyric with disappointment in love and sometimes social oppression as its central subject. Narrative elements are either de.empha- 13 sized or are. briefly sketched to underscore the central feeling. What (97)

is important for our purposes, however, is its outlook of despair and

fatality — the very thing-that seemed to appeal to European artists

during the period between the two world wars. How it was used, by someone

other than Auden, can be seen in this refrain from Noel Coward's "Twentieth

Century Blues" from his successful 1931 revue Cavalcade;

Blues, Twentieth Century Blues, Are getting me down. Who' s Excaped those weary Twentieth Century Blues, Why, If there's a. God in the sky, Why shouldn't he grin? High Above this dreary Twentieth Century din, In this strange confusion, People seem to lose their way. What is there, to strive, for, Love or keep alive for? Say -- Hey, hey, call it a day. Blues, Nothing to win or lose. It's getting me down. Blues, 1U I've got those Twentieth Century Blues,

In this song, the flatting of the final line, as well as the slow tempo give it its "blue" effect. However, just as pervasive is the kind of melan­ choly described by the words, the key one of which is "weary," The persona in this song is not so much a participant in the scene as an observer, perhaps close to the point of view of the "God in the sky." The reason for the blues is vaguely seen to be modern "din and confusion," anomie,

13 • • I am indebted for this too-brief description of the traditional blues song to Sigmund Spaeth, ' A History of Popular Music in America (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 390-1,

^Noel Coward, The Lyrics of Noel Coward (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 113. (98)

and loss of meaning. Appropriately, "weariness" may be seen as a kind of

wistful ennui that surveys the scene, finds nothing of value, smiles,

"calls it a day," and sinks into restless passivity. This, of course,

is far from its original Afro-American source of ihspiration. It is easy

to imagine Bessie Smith, for example, as sick and tired, but never "weary"

in the fashion of the singer of the Coward song. This may be because

her feelings stem from the actions that she has engaged in; the alienated

observer, the condescending dandy, are not in her repertoire of personae.

But it is important to see how the music of one cultural context was appro

priated to fit the needs of another.

What Auden took from the blues song was its.brevity, its colloquial diction, and its sense of fatality. His first "blues" —- at least to be labeled as such, was the seven-stanza "Blues (For Heidli Anderson)," pub­ lished in New Verse in 1934. The performance context, with its mention in the first stanza of "eating and drinking," is evidently a cabaret:

Ladies and gentlemen, sitting here, Eating and drinking and warming a chair, Feeling and thinking and drawing your breath, Who's sitting next to you? It may be Death.

While the traditional blues song bewails, sometimes humorously, the fate of men and women crossed by love or racial oppression, this one attempts to be more universal. Earlier Auden poems had castigated the gentry for being insufficiently aware of the forces of History; this one warns them that they are insufficiently cognizant of the force of Nature which plays such an important part, as we have seen, in his work during the later thirties. Thus he transforms the originally American form into a cabaret song (which here bears little resemblance to a traditional blues song) which is a memento mori lighted by the comic personifications used to (99)

describe his subject.

One of Auden’s techniques during the thirties was to personify an

abstraction -- usually an evil —■ in terms of some easily recognizable

figure, either from life of from popular culture, and he does that in this

poem. In the second stanza, Death is a "high-stepping blondie with eyes

of blue" who will make the reader a "sugar daddy;" in the third stanza he

is a G-man out of pulp fiction who will "send you to the hot seat or plug

you through the heart." In later stanzas he is a doctor who says he will

help the reader stop breathing, a realtor seeling real estate which will

not depreciate, and a teacher whose one subject is "the Tomb," something

even "the dumbest pupil can understand." Finally, Auden reasserts the

universality of death:

So whether you’re standing broke in the rain, Or playing poker or drinking champagne, Death's looking for you, he's already on the way, So look out for him tomorrow or perhaps to-day.

Aside from the.last line, the colloquial diction is forceful; it gives the poem an energy that the Coward blues song does not have, and like the use of personification, prevents it from becoming simply moralistic.

More closely related to the blues genre is "Roman Wall Blues," origi­ nally from a 1937 radio script Hadrian's Wall. Here the blues line arrange­ ment, tempo, and overall melancholy are more appropriate, primarily because the persona is an individual — a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian's Wall —

In a situation in which he is isolated and consigned to a fate from which he cannot escape. Despite the fact that he lives in a time far removed from our own, Auden's soldier's complaints are effective because they bring to mind the remembered conditions of ordinary soldiers from all periods of (100)

history, and in particular those from the previous war; World War I and

fears of a new war are very much in mind in this poem.

"Roman Wall Blues" contains seven two-line stanzas; he drops the tra­

ditional blues song's second repeated line because it is, after all, a

poem:

Over the heather the wet wind blows, I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky, I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone, My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place, I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish; There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away; I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

The problems are all here: cold, isolation, jealousy, obnoxious companions,

lack of money and sex. The final stanza, although it avoids the sometimes

violently self-destructive resolutions of the blues song (such as laying one's head on a railroad track), still .retain the essential passivity of that resolution, and it carries at least two reverberations: it recalls the situation of the veterans of World War I, wounded, shell-shocked, and unemployed, and it Is a kind of ironic nirvana — he will approach a state of contemplation, not because of any great enlightenment, but because injury and despair have forced this option upon him. Finally, the poem carries an implied condemnation of an imperialist policy which forces com­ moners into the absurd position of guarding dismal outposts far from home. (101)

Another use of the blues idiom appeared in Another Time as "Refugee

Blues," which commented on the plight, of German Jewish refugees trying to

escape from Hitler's Germany. Again, the use of the form is appropriate: like the soldier, the refugee of this poem is in a situation in which he

Is isolated and from which he cannot escape. The use of the "blues" to describe the fate of refugees had already been tried in 1923, again by

Noel Coward; his concern was the Russian emigre sent packing after the victory of the Bolshevik revolution. Typically enough, Coward's refugee was "weary" and his language mawkishly sentimental:

All day long I've got those Russian Blues, The blues I'll never lose Until I die. For while I'm sleeping The lovely melodies come creeping, Just to remind me of days gone by. Fairy tales That I learned at my mother's knee, And the echo of the nightingales In a magical tree. Then I find I'm waking with a sigh, That's the reason why I've got those Russian blues.

Coward's song is appropriate for comparison with Auden's because it dealt with the problems of a people with whom he was not directly involved.

Coward's refugee.does not dwell on his present fate; he only remembers, in his sleep, pleasant, fanciful visions of long ago. His attitude is wistful; no traditional blues singer awakes with a sigh.

Auden's poem, on the other hand,, makes more direct use of blues ma­ terial. He adapts the three-line blues stanza, although he does not follow its formulaic development:

15 Coward, Lyrics, p. 11. (102)

Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes; Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's.no place for us.

The persona states the immediate problem of the displaced person. The prob­

lem is not restated in the second, but the repetition in the third line, also part of the blues tradition, tends to reinforce the hopelessness of his condition.

The second and third stanzas are significant because they relate to the refugee's memories, and this opens opportunities, which Coward has taken with relish, for sentimentality. But in.place of dreams of melodies and fairy tales, Auden gives us a map, the only way home can be located and identified. Even the memory of the tree.in the churchyard jerks the speaker back into the present, reminding, him that passports are excluded from Nature's consoling life cycle:

Once we had a country and we. thought it fair, Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there: We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew, Every spring it blossoms, anew: Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

In the next three stanzas, the speaker goes to different persons — the consul, the committee, and the public meeting — for a solution to his difficulty. In this way, he recalls the blues singer, who consults readily familiar professionals, usually doctors, for help. However, the consul is no help; he tells the speaker that his people are "officially dead." The committee offers him a chair, but then asks him to return next year. The speaker at the public meeting is more hostile; he says the refugees "will steal our daily bread." And always at their backs is the threat: (103)

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky; It was Hitler over Europe, saying: "They must die"; 0 we were in his mind, my dear, 0 we.were in his mind.

Like many of the stanzas in this poem, the one above utilizes the familiar

blues technique of dropping the first person subject pronoun at the begin­

ning of a line. Hitler's voice reminds us of the voice in Victor's head,

and conjures up the same sense of cosmic irrationality.

If passports are excluded from Nature's cycle, the speaker is likewise

banned from the apparent freedom and security enjoyed by wildlife. He

notes that a cat is let into the house, but he is not; that fish swim "as

if they were free" in the harbor, but he is not free; and that birds, which have no politicians among them, sing easily in the trees. The speaker

also dreams, but again, they are not sugar-coated recollections of the past:. They are a building "with a thousand floors/A thousand windows and a door," a fantasy based on present need. Finally, the poem concludes with the speaker standing on a plain while the snow falls, aware that "Ten thousand soldiers marched,to and fro:/Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me." So we have, within the framework of a blues song, a persona who speaks very much in the colloquial everyman voice of "0 what is that sound," and who conveys, although not as dramatically as in that poem, the same kind of insecurity in the face of threatened danger. It may be argued, in comparing "Refugee Blues" with "0 what is that sound," that the very use of the blues form is inappropriate for bearing the sense of threat from behind and. locked doors in front.; a narrative form, such as the ballad, would have been more correct. However, what the blues form does is bring here — as it did in Auden's other blues songs — that feeling of fatality and defeat, of possibilities closed. (104)

Finally, Auden wrote several poems that evoked nursery rhymes, but

as with his work in the sentimental ballad genre, these poems are commen­

taries on the form itself, as well as, in this case, the world of childhood

innocence as seen through the lens of experience. The first, published in

Poems in 1930, is an example of this:

The silly fool, the silly fool Was sillier in school But beat the bully as a rule.

The youngest son, the youngest son Was certainly no wise one Yet could surprise one.

Or rather, or rather . ■ To be posh, we gather • One should have no father.

Simple to prove That deeds indeed In life succeed But love in love And tales in tales Where no one fails.

The signs of the nursery rhyme are here: the repetition of phrases, the rhymes at the end of every line, the galloping iambics here alternating

occasionally with anapests. It is important to note, however, that the nursery rhyme is evoked only in the first three stanzas; the first two evoke the childhood fantasy and fairy tale; the third continues in the same form but is actually a type of psychocriticism of fairy tales. The final stanza has an elliptical style, with articles dropped, a characteristic of Auden's early period. This stanza is presumably the voice of experience, saying that although deeds succeed in life, "love and tales" succeed only in stories in which failure is not present.

A more sophisticated piece which again does not so much act as a nursery rhyme as evoke the world of nursery rhymes and fairy tales is "Now (105)

the leaves are falling fast," published in Look, Stranger and set to music 16 in 1937 by Benjamin Britten. In this poem, childhood has already past:

the iambics and anapests of the five quatrains are more muted, and the tone

is elegaic:

Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last; Nurses to the graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbors, left and right, Pluck us from the real delight ; And the active hands must freeze Lonely on the separate knees.

Dead in hundreds at the back Follow wooden in our track, Arms raised stiffly to reprove In false attitudes of love.

Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come.

Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain's lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress.

In place of childhood we now have "whispering neighbors" who would take away the child's delight and who would freeze love. The dead — not, of course, the physically dead — reprove the action with beneficent repression

Trolls, figures of hostility.in fairy tales, are here more violent because of starvation. The nightingale does not sing, and there is no rescuing angel. The mountainside — the end of the quest — is impossible and dis­ tant. The nostalgic memory of the childhood world as a free but ordered

16°There is only one known recording of this song, and it is no longer commercially available. I have drawn information on the musical setting from Spears, p. 119. (106)

place has been perverted into the present world of disorder — the pram

with no nurse — and repression. Britten's setting is piu lento, supposedly

reminiscent of Purcell at his most pathetic, and this evocation of the

famous composer perhaps recalls an England of the past.

C. Polemical Verse

Auden wrote a number of polemical poems during the early thirties

when he and his friends were discovering an interest in political action

as well as the ideas of Marx. Some of these poems were changed after

their first appearance; none of them went into the 1945 Collected Poems.

The vitriol of these early works softened in Auden's later, more analytical, topical works such as "Spain, 1937," or became more sharply honed irony

in poems such as "Refugee Blues," discussed above. This section will focus on those early polemical works as well as some of the work done in the later thirties.that retains.a sense of anger. They are certainly

"lighter" works in that they are easily comprehended (in fact, they were intended to be so), and do not need a great deal of literary analysis to make their meaning clear. What, is important to understand is where they succeed and fail, and what Auden was ultimately trying to do with them.

"Brothers who when the sirens roar," originally published in New Coun- try as "A Communist to Others" and revised in Look, Stranger! Illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of verse. It is the revised version which I am dealing with here. The poem is presumably addressed to the British working class:

Brothers, who when the sirens roar From office, shop and factory pour 'Neath evening sky; By cops directed to the fug Of talkie-houses for a drug, (107)

Or down canals to find a hug Until you die: We know, remember, what it is That keeps you celebrating this Sad ceremonial; We know the terrifying brink From which in dreams you nightly shrink. 'I shall be sacked without,' you think, 'A testimonial.'

Even though the message of these stanzas is "I understand your problems," the words can hardly be those of one "brother" to another. They are the words of the pastor, the psychologist, the social worker, someone who is aware of their condition, but in his own terms which happen to be, not surprisingly, primarily aesthetic. That is, the speaker is really saying,

"I understand your problems; your activities are miserable, monotonous escapes C'Sad ceremonial' is especially condescending), and you will go on this way until you die." Perhaps.sensing this inability to speak to those with whom he should be allied, the speaker in the third stanza says,

"We cannot put on airs with you/The fears that hurt you hurt us too," and adds that if the working class would help "us" — that is, the speaker and his middle class bretheren -- he would help them open their eyes and make

"night day."

The fourth stanza compounds the foot-in-mouth nature of this poem:

On you our interests are set Your sorrow we shall not forget While we consider Those who in every country town For centuries have done you brown, But you shall see them tumble down Both horse and rider.

The middle class intellectual's sights are set on the proletariat as the great hope of History, and so the speaker will certainly not forget its miseries as he "considers" what is ultimately the major interest of the poem (108)

the oppressor to be identified and attacked.

They are a strange group of oppressors: an upper class member of

the "horsey set," a mystically-inclined religious person, academics, and

liberals. This is hardly a collection of obnoxious ruling class members,

people who have made miserable the lives of the working class. Instead,

these are people whom Auden and his friends seem to be particularly

offended by, and, given Auden's life history as we know it, the possibility exists that he and they may have found elements of themselves in these characterizations, elements they were anxious to reject. So in the end this poem may not be so much.an attack on the bourgeoisie by a radical poet as evidence of a family quarrel among the upper middle class or even a quarrel within Auden's own mind.

The "splendid" aristocrat, "Whose lovely hair and shapely limb/Year after year are kept in trim," and whose physical figure is so admired, is warned that the future, which seems to be his now., will deceive him later on. As for the mystic, he may preach personal regeneration (as Auden him­ self did, again and again, whether it was psychological or religious), but after his religious ecstasy, nothing remains for him except the "dark night of the soul." Furthermore, he is no better than anyone else; the only difference between him and the normal selfish individual is that he hopes "to corner as reward/All that the rich can here afford." The wise man, with a "nicely balanced view," fatuously utters the obvious as if it were a great profundity, and the liberal, the "Cambridge ulcer," offers only false friendship. Other academic sycophants maintain that poverty is only a state of mind..

Auden's analysis of the mystic shows the problems he had with diction in this poem: (109)

Dare-devil mystic who hear the scars Of many spiritual wars And smoothly tell The starving that their,one salvation Is personal regeneration By fasting, prayer and contemplation; Is it? Well,

Others have tried it, all delight Sustained in that ecstatic flight Could not console When through exhausting hours they'd flown From the alone to the Alone, Nothing remained but . the dry-as-bone Night of the soul.

Auden here is trying to use colloquial diction — as he was to do more

successfully later on — as a surgical tool. The problem, however, is

that he is dealing with a rather complex experience which is usually descri­

bed in literary language. . There is no doubt that the language of the street

can evaluate and criticize the mystical state, but Auden has not here found

a way to do it; his mask as comrade keeps slipping off.

However, Auden concludes with what is the strongest element in the

poem, the invective:

Let fever sweat them till they tremble . Cramp rack their limbs till they resemble Cartoons by Goya: Their daughters sterile be In rut, May cancer rot their herring gut, The circular madness on them shut, Or paranoia.

Their splendid people, their wiseacres, Professors, agents, magic-makers, Their poets and apostles, Their bankers and their brokers too, And • ironmasters shall turn blue Shall fade away like morning dew With club-room fossils.

As such, it recalls the Robert Burns of "Holy Willy's Prayer," and in fact uses, as does the entire poem, Burns' tailed rhyme verse. What makes (110)

these lines more powerful than the previous ones is that Auden no longer

darts uneasily from colloquial diction to a kind of strained informal edu­

cated speech. This may be because he has a literary model for his invective,

something found in literary language which is here appropriate. But even

so, the unsureness of audience is evident. Everyone can understand the

curse of disease and madness, and even, perhaps, Auden's understanding

of disease's connection with the unliberated life; but the "cartoons by

Goya" is a reference that probably would have meaning only to an educated

person whose knowledge of history includes more than a simple sense of class

struggle — in other words, Auden and other vaguely left-wing intellectuals.

Another poem, "I have a handsome profile," which appeared in the first

issue of New Verse (1933) and was never reprinted, seems to me to be more

successful because it avoids the problems encountered in "Brothers."

Joseph Warren Beach, in The Making of the Auden Canon, calls this a ballad, but it is not a true ballad in the sense that "Victor" or "Miss Gee” are.

What does evoke the ballad is a dialogue — really an alternating statement and reply — between a member of the upper classes and a left-wing intellec­ tual of the same class whose knowledge of the workers, while not deep, is at least more profound than his adversary's. The first two stanzas give an indication . of the pattern of the poem:

I have a handsome profile I've been to a great public school I've a little money invested. Then why do I feel such a fool As if I owned a world that has had its day?

You certainly have a good reason For feeling as you do No wonder you are anxious Because it's perfectly true You own a world that has had its day. (Ill)

In the following stanza the aristocrat decides to throw his money in the

gutter where workmen can pick it up; his respondent says that armament

manufacturers will get it instead. Undaunted, the man then decides to get

a job in a factory and play darts with workers in a pub. Auden's answer

may have come from the personal experiences of those who actually tried

to involve themselves with the lives of the proletariat:

They won't tell you their secrets Though you pay for their .drinks in the bar They'll tell you lies for your money For they know you for what you are That you live in a world that has had its day.

But the speaker has other ideas: he will go and live on an island "Where

the natives shall set me free"; he will write a controversial book in an

attic; he will go to a brothel, take drugs, and "go poaching on my own

estate." To all this, the reply is basically the same: nothing you do

will prevent you from leaving "a world that has had its day." Nor can

he be any good behind the barricades, although his son may amount to some­

thing. ..

What makes this poem successful is that it does not pretend to talk

to an audience about which it knows very little; it is actually a quarrel

between a father and son who, although their ideas may be very different,

at least share the same basic frame of reference which is enclosed in the

same language. In the end, the quarrel is about what "our" relationship

should be with "them." Both recognize, with discomfort, that their day

is at an end; the rich man's answer, is various eccentric alternatives, while the answer of the other is the "barricades," a solution that may be no

less problematical but which has the appeal of the apocalyptic dream that all contradictions may suddenly be eliminated in revolutionary action. (112)

This is light verse, and successful as such, but the all-too-simple solu­

tion may have been the reason Auden chose never to reprint it.

A third poem from this period, again an invective in the tradition of

Burns, is "Beethameer," placed in Book II of The Orators, the section in

which the Airman's "enemy" is described. "Beethameer" and the other

character, "Heathcliffe," are thinly disguised references to the owners

of scurrilous right wing newspapers. Little subtlety can be found in this

attack; Beethameer's face is "as fat as a farmer's bum," and he poisons

the public which, although it may be dumb, will some day "give you the

thrashing you richly deserve," a refrain which is repeated at the end of

each of the five stanzas.

Beethameer is castigated for appearing as a savior, for pretending to be all-knowing in the areas of art, religion, science, and sex. In this way he is seen as a competitor, a person who uses language, not as a means for uncovering the truth, but to browbeat his readers for his own profit and to prop up a sick society. He will fail, however, as did his predecessor, "Heathcliffe," who advertised "idiocy, uplift, and fear," but in the end "grasped at God but God gave him the slip." This consoles the speaker with the thought that Beethameer too will receive his just reward. As in the invective section of "Brothers, who when the sirens roar," the use of invective here is successful because it derives from a particu­ lar native satirical tradition and because it uses direct and often vulgar colloquial language, not to be "one of the boys (the public is 'they')," but as.-a representative of a group which uses language as a tool of analy­ sis and a weapon.

The later poems of a satirical nature were written when Auden's (113)

interest in light verse had become more fully articulated. "James Honeyman,"

one of the: ballads printed in Another Time along with "Miss Gee" and "Vic­

tor," is included in this section because it is more directly topical than

the other two. Auden apparently did not think it was one of his more

successful poems; at any rate, he did not put it in the Collected Poems

of 1945. The poem has been taken by Beach to be an aesthete's attack on

science, and it certainly is that; but more important, I think, is that

it is an analysis of a particular kind of repression related to those

examined in "Victor" and "Miss Gee."

As in "Victor," we are first introduced to the central figure when he

is a child:

James Honeyman was a silent child He didn't laugh or cry; He looked at his mother With curiosity.

Mother came up to the nursery, Peeped through the open door, Saw him striking matches Sitting on the nursery floor.

At the very beginning, Honeyman is seen as someone without emotion, or whose emotions have been repressed and in their place Is an obsessive detached curiosity about natural phenomena. In the third stanza he goes to a children's party and sits in a trance, dissolving sugar into his tea.

He later goes to college and gets a first-class degree after spending all his time in the laboratory. He finds a job and marries at the suggestion of his landlady. The newlyweds get a house in a typically dingy environ­ ment: "On their left a United Dairy/A.cinema. on their right."

Honeyman then begins working on the major project of his life. The story of this is a grim parody of popular success stories, heightened by (114)

a number of rather heavy ironies. For example, at the end of his garden,

he builds his shed where he will make his poison gas. When he goes on a

Sunday walk with his wife and child in pram, he tells her, "I’m looking

for a gas, dear;/A whiff will kill a man." Her reply, the answer of the devoted wife, is equally parodic:

'I'm going to find it, That’s what I'm going to do.' Doreen squeezed his hand and said: 'Jim, I believe in you.'

Finally, he makes his discovery, rushes to his wife and, after kissing his son, tells her what he has accomplished. In a mock romantic scene, they sit together in the moonlight by the window, and he tells her, "At last

I've done something/That's worthy of you, dear."

Honeyman is at first unsuccessful in finding someone to use his crea­ tion, but to a neighbor who is "the agent/Of a foreign power" he sells his gas (Honeyman's.N.P.C.); then, as he sits at home in his garden, bombers fly over, dropping the gas on the cinema, the dairy, and finally, his home.

What happens then is the strongest evocation of the traditional ballad in the entire poem. The next six stanzas.are entirely dialogue. First the child speaks, echoing perhaps the pathetic last stanza of "Barbara Allen," in which the hero dies of love; here, of course, death is caused by some­ thing quite different. Then the wife speaks, asking where her husband is.

His answer recalls.the forlorn lovers in ballads, but again, his despair is caused by love perverted;

'I wish I were a salmon Swimming in the sea, I wish. I were a dove That coos upon the tree,'

'Oh hide me in the mountains, Oh drown me In the sea. Lock me in the dungeon And throw away the key.' (115)

Honeyman's problem is not that he is a scientist, but that repression

of his natural instincts has perverted his creativity, and this ends by

unleashing destruction upon himself. Miss Gee's repression caused her

cancer, and it drove Victor mad; here it destroys a community. The evoca­

tion of the ballad, particularly in the last stanzas, points this out; bal­

lad lovers die for love, but Honeyman, his wife, and child die of the

absence of love. It is ironic that this poem, which was not reprinted

after its appearance in Another Time, is in fact the'most "popular" of

the three ballads — but it is popular in the bad sense, with its obvious

ironic juxtapositions and its easy moralizing. It is for these reasons,

and not for its dated topicality, as Spears suggests, that it is ultimately

unsuccessful.

A poem, also appearing in Another Time, which has had a longer life

is "The Unknown Citizen." Published again :in the Collected Poetry, it

has found its way into a variety of anthologies. It is easy to see why.

The poem is light verse, the theme is easy to understand, and it makes accessible all of the familar complaints about modern urban life and the so-called "mass man." The language of the poem is what Spears calls

"low colloquial," as opposed to the regular colloquial style of a poem such as "Musee des Beaux Arts" —■ that is, it uses cliches and bureau­ cratic language for satirical purposes. The persona of "The Unknown Citi­ zen" is the state, with its bureaus,.its experts, and its reports all working for their own self-perpetuation and seeking out any potential troublemakers.

. The point.about the Unknown Citizen is that he was not a troublemaker.

He worked in a factory, belonged to a "sound" union, was a good companion, (116)

a good spender, had the correct number of children, and did not hold any

unusual political views: "He held the proper opinions for the time of

year;/When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war,/he went."

As for what might be considered the ultimate question, the answer is simple:

"Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:/Had anything been

wrong, we should certainly have heard." Except possibly for the last lines,

the poem is condescending and to a certain extent beats a straw man; it is

easy to read this poem and to identify it with other people, but never with

ourselves. But it is popular (somewhat in the manner, as has been suggested,

of Ogden Nash), and more important, shows Auden using his colloquial voice,

now free of the rough and sometimes vulgar invective of the early thirties.

D. Light Occasional Verse

The poems in this section were either intended originally for friends,

or were intended for a wider audience but ultimately dealt' with the

poet's life as an ordinary person. As any public relations specialist knows,

items about the private life of an important person make up our total per­

ception of him. In this, a writer is no.different from any other public

figure; once he gathers a community of readers, the events in his life

will have an importance they did not have before. This importance will in

all probability increase his awareness that he Is a public figure and will

ultimately have an effect on the persona he wishes to project in his

writing.

For example, when Auden mentions Spender or Isherwood in one of his poems, or writes of his defects as he does in "Letter to Lord Byron," these items assume a greater importance than, for example, our mentioning our friends in a private letter. However much Auden may have yearned for (117)

the days when a poet was an integral part of a community, the fact Is that

from the beginning of his career he was quite aware of his own importance,

aware that he had a public that grew larger as time went on, and this

awareness affected the public "Auden" he tried to project In his work,

This persona is characterized by easy, informal diction which speaks

as if to familiars in a conversational tone, although fully aware that

it is speaking to a larger public. It is, in fact, an extension of Auden's

"airman" persona: that is, it surveys what it discusses from above,

whether this be its own life, the life of its friends, or the life of so­

ciety, in a detached manner-.. It is the voice of the airman as he. speaks

to us from his easy chair or next to us in a tavern. The poems in which he uses this persona, are usually based on an event in his Own life or the life of a friend, I have chosen to categorize these works as "Light

Occasional verse" to distinguish, them from more formal occasional pieces, such as "In Memory of W.B. Yeats,"

An early example of this is the fourth Ode from The Orators, a poem written in celebration of the birth, of a child of Rex Warner, As an example of Light Occasional verse, it shows both, the strengths and limita­ tions of its type. The poem also makes fun of a certain type of classical verse of complimentary prophecy^0 but this is not its primary Intent.

The poem begins with, a mock invocation: "Roar Gloucestershire, do yourself proud;/The news I tell you should make you move/As a pride of lions or an exaltation of larks.." But from these heights it quickly descends to the depths of bathroom imagery: "It is John, son of Warner, has pulled my chain," Then, from the subject of John, Wanner's son,

Auden moves in the next stanza to consider John Bull, whom he addresses

16 Spears, p. 55. (118)

as one would a stupid and overly eager dog:

Calm, Bull, calm, news is coming in time; News coming, Bull; calm, Bull, Fight it down, fight it down, That terrible hunger; calm, Bull;

Before Bull is to have his food, Auden must first survey the state

of England. In the next stanza he deals with the proletariat in the

short-lined, alliterative, multiple-rhymed drumbeat verse characteristic

of another satirist, the fourteenth century poet John Skelton:

0 my, what peeps At disheartened sweeps — Fitters and moulders, Wielders and welders. Dyers and bakers And boiler-tube makers, Poufs and pounces, All of them dunces, Those over thirty, Ugly and dirty, What are they doing Except just stewing?

The problem with the proletariat, he says, is that it is. too content to remain as it is, complaining, living miserably on a shabby diet of movie, romances and soap box oratory; it is "uninteresting and hopeless,"

The upper classes fare no better; what powers for. self-liberation they might have are inhibited by over-cautiousness and the fear of giving offense,

As a result, they have ailments, ultimately rooted in psychological causes

— they cannot sleep at night, feel terrible in the morning, and look miserable. The democratic politicians -— MacDonald, Hoover, Baldwin, and

Briand -- are. mere"beginners," while the totalitarian rules make too much, noise. As for the youth., that hope of every aging loser, Auden feels

"most of them [are] dummies who want their mummies," and are ultimately too tied to parental authority to amount to much.. This is partially- because (119)

of their teachers; in a separate stanza Auden indulges in some schoolboy

diowning to.inveigh against "Masters Wet, Dim, Drip and Bleak."

To all of England's dispirited social groups, Auden offers John Warner

as the Savior; John Bull finally has his bone. The child will be a dancing

master to the "awkward pairs" trying to learn modern dances in upstairs

studios; he will teach them to dance "without difficulty" and "to dance

for joy." John's birthday is indeed a birthday for all of England, but

there need by no candles on the cake, for "we're born again." John, the

natural athlete, embodiment of the Life Force., will draw from all corners

of England the repressed who will free themselves. This will, of course,

be upsetting to the agents of repression whom Auden lists in another stanza 18 of high-spirited invective:

Middleton.Murry's looking in pain, Robert and Laura spooning in Spain, Where is Lewis? Under the sofa. Where is Eliot? Dreaming of nuns, Their day is over, they shall decorate the Zoo, With Professor Jeans and Bishop Barnes at 2d a. view, Or be ducked in a gletch.er, as they ought to be, . With the Simonites, the Mosleyites and the I,L,P,

John will fight repression both personal and social; he will introduce

"the gauche and the lonely," and will make them happy. Those who wish it

will be taught; the rest "All of the women and most of the men" -- will

work with, their hands and never have to use. their minds. Auden then becomes more serious, returning to the high style of his more "difficult" verse:

18 Earlier published versions of this poem substitute Mon.tmere charac­ ters for these well-known figures who were., nevertheless, present in the manuscript verion. which, was printed In The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1977), p, 105. (120)

This is the season of the change of heart, The final keeping of the ever-broken vow, The official marriage of the whole and part, The poor in employment and the country sound, Over is the tension, over the alarms, The falling wage, and the flight from the pound, The privates are returning now to the farms, The silo is full, the marsh under plough, The two worlds in each other's arms.

Even here, however, the easy familiarity with which he discusses the

archetypal utopian dream suggests a certain distance from it, a lack

of the true believer's passion; but the final lines point out that any birth on English soil restores "The directed calm, the actual glory."

So, inspired by a piece of "gossip" — the birth of a friend's son —

Auden fashions a poem which is at once venomous satire, parody, and serious verse for the occasion. In this poem can he seen.the advantages of the colloquial style as Auden used it, not directed, as it was in "Brothers who when the sirens roar," to an audience which does not speak his language, but to a friend and ultimately to others like him, who do. The advantages of this colloquial style are obvious: Auden can slip from one mask to another; he can play the Skeltonic satirist in one place, the schoolboy clown in another, and can play the;-serious, concerned poet — and we do not sense any great incongruity. The disadvantage of this type of verse, which may have been Auden's own defect, has already been implied in the commentary on the end of the poem: his basic distance from all he sur­ veys. He is on such easy terms with everything, including his own ideas and his own versification, that it is difficult to find the.core of what moves him, the man behind the masks. The airman may survey, the doctor may dissect, but their objects of interest always remain mere objects.

Another gossip poem, this time based.on AudenTs own experiences, (121)

was written during a trip to China that he and Isherwood had taken as

part of a contract with Random House in the late thirties to write a travel

book on Asia. Entitled "Passenger Shanty," it remained in manuscript form 19 and was not published until recently. The poem evokes a familiar ribald

song popular with British and American soldiers during World War I, "Parlez

Vous.” The theme of the popular song is the confrontation of a foreigner

with another culture, and Auden used it to comment on his experiences

aboard a ship bound for China. Given Auden's predilections, the evocation

of this song is perfect: He remains the observer aboard a ship of fools,

a foreigner among neurotics. The opening stanza alludes to the song —

The ship weighed twenty thousand ton Parlez-vous The . ship, weighed twenty thousand ton Parlez-vous She left Marseille at a quarter-to-one For the China War and the topical sun. Inky-pinky-parlez-vous.

— as does the closing stanza. The rest are rhyming tercets, each descri-.

bing a different variety of fool.

The second stanza, in fact, announces what is going to come:

The passengers are rather triste, There's many a fool, and many a beast, Who ought to go west, but Is bound for the East.

The fools are many: there Is Mr. Jackson, who buys and sells rubber, and

who thinks he should have been born during the time of Queen Elizabeth;

there is his wife, who reads astrology; there is a Malay planter who plays games and is "starved for sex"; and there Is a journalist who has photographed

19 m The English Auden, p. .233-4.. (122)

one of the more notorious tragedies of the Spanish Civil War, and who now occupies his time pinching bottoms. There are also Dominican monks, who

"have their own mysterious fun," vain, petty women, a right-wing student, and an overanglicized Siamese doctor. Engineers run the boat and stewards bring the drinks which help to make the trip bearable., Auden then turns to some private gossip which, if nothing else, shows that his colleague,

Christopher Isherwood, has his own problems; Auden of course is above all this:

Christopher sends off letters by air,. He longs for someone who isn't there, But Wystan says: 'Love is exceedingly rare.'

He then closes, returning to the evocation of the song in the first stanza.

This Is Auden in his high-spirited mood, lashing fools as he lashed pedants and hypocrites in the early thirties. The poem is light verse, with easy colloquial diction, slipping into slang and (when the irony becomes particularly icy) into French. The theme is, as it is in many of the poems we have discussed, that repression (especially in men) and self-regard (especially In women) has turned these people into eccentrics.

However, this theme is not expressed as strongly as Is the satire Itself.

As a poem, it gives the impression of being a clever man's way of working off the ennui of a dull trip. It is, perhaps, too much of a gossip poem; that it, it makes use of private information with no reason for doing so except to unload spleen. Probably for this reason it was never published during Auden's lifetime.

But the "Letter to Lord Byron," written as part of the 1936 Letters from Iceland, Is the centerpiece of Auden's varied attempts at light verse.

It is gossip, commentary, aesthetic discussion, autobiography, and a defense (123)

of the use of light verse itself. Auden addresses Byron as a like-minded

cosmopolitan, an aristocrat with a few populist instincts, comfortable

enough in his role and audience to be at ease in his style and mannerisms.

Despite the bleakness of some of what it surveys, "Letter to Lord Byron"

is a fundamentally optimistic poem. Perhaps the idea of the Popular Front,

the idea of union of all shades of liberal and radical opinion against the

threat of Fascism, which was so prevalent among European intellectuals at

the time, was at the root of the high feelings; but, more appropriately,

it may have been that in this poem Auden found that he was able to move

away from the poetic letter to intimates, of which "Roar Gloucestershire" was an example, to a poetic letter to a large audience of intimates. To be more precise, the large audience that Auden and his peers had talked

about had become, with this poem, the Auden group itself.

The poem is written in rhyme royal — Auden tells Byron that the ottava rima of Don Juan is too difficult for him; "Rhyme royal's difficult enough to play," he says. Two stanzas in the middle of Part I give an indication of his intentions:

Every exciting letter has enclosures, And so shall this -- a bunch of photographs, Some out of focus, some with wrong exposures, Press cuttings, gossip, maps, statistics, graphs; I don't intend to do the thing by halves. * I'm going to be very up to date Indeed. It's a collage that you're going to read.

I want a form that's large enough to swim In, And talk on any subject that I choose, From natural scenery to men and women, Myself, the arts, the European news: And since she's on a holiday, my Muse Is out to please, find everything delightful And only now and then be mildly spiteful..

Rhyme royal requires an ababbcc pattern, and., to a certain extent, requires (124)

a thematic pattern to fit the scheme. As seen in the above stanzas, the

first four lines express the central idea; the fifth either restates,

summarizes, or, as in the second stanza above, begins the concluding state­

ment which acts as-a summary and sometimes a punch.line. Of course, Auden

in the 186 stanzas that make up this poem, varies the pattern, and much

of the pleasure in reading it comes with observing his variations, watching

him jokingly try to find rhymes, and watching him succeed in doing so.

The poem begins' with an apology; this is a kind of fan letter, he says, which must seem irritating to the famous. Auden includes examples of the

sort of thing a public figure is likely to receive ■— demands for cash, proclamations of love, compromising photographs, ignorant criticism, manu­

scripts and more manuscripts. However, Auden mentions that he has just read and enjoyed Don Juan, and, furthermore, he is in a place where he does not understand the language, and, to compound his misery, he has the flu.

The climate is cold, "So looking round for something light and easy/I pounced upon you as warm and civilise." Auden defends what he is going to do; he knows he is neither Lawrence nor Hemingway, and his publishers may complain, but he will at least enjoy himself, and his poem will be "cheery/

Like English bishops on the quantum theory"; that is, good natured. If a little muddled.

Part II might be entitled "News from Home." Auden :is sure that Byron, whatever his complaints about the "moral" North, is eager for information about the England of 1936. He claims that. England seems to be entering, according to Mumford, an "Eotechnic Phase," a world of steel, chrome, and glass; this is only the surface appearance, however. Auden is not only basically unsympathetic to this new world^ he recognizes it to be a lie. (125)

A trip to the north country, to Warrington or Wigan, reveals something com­ pletely different:

There on the old historic battlefield, The cold ferocity of human wills, The scars of struggle are as yet unhealed; Slattern the tenements on sombre hills, And gaunt in valleys the square-windowed mills That, since the Georgian house, in my conjecture Remain the finest native architecture.

This stanza shows that Auden can drop his humorous mask and become serious without making the poem too disjointed. However, it also reveals, in spite of the moral seriousness that marks the tone of the first four lines, that Auden's values are ultimately aesthetic, and that his values are con­ servative.

This conservatism, which also extends to the social sphere, is apparent in the stanzas that follow. Everyone in England is educated, so "There is no lie our.children cannot read," and advertisements prove that dandruff and body odor are fates worse than death. The Industrial Revolution and capitalism have brought a mixing of social classes, so that now there is

"no snobbish feeling/Against the’more efficient modes of stealing." Auden then takes his mentor on a tour of England's various social classes, a pattern of organization followed inrthe poem Rex Warner's son.

In the tour of "Letter to Lord Byron" the rancour is gone but the irony remains. First, he looks at the smart set, engulfed in triviality, then at the highbrows, noting their fads, using the by now well-worn meta­ phor of the literary stock market:

Joyces are firm and there there' s nothing new. Eliots.have hardened just a point or two. Hopkins are brisk, thanks to some recent boosts. There's been some further weakening in Prousts.. (126)

Next he surveys the people, noting that l'homme moyen sensuel is still in

many ways as he always was, although there is a difference now; his self-

confidence is gone, and like the early Mickey Mouse, he bears a hidden

grudge. Repressed in youth by bureaucrats and teachers, he resents the

"ogre" — the ultimate agent of repression -- but the ogre nourishes his

dream of liberation, and so the little man paradoxically prefers to have the dream rather than the unease and responsibility of real freedom. The ogre, after all, offers security, and "Those who would really kill his dream's contentment/He hates with real implacable resentment."

Byron might have been a hero to slay the ogre, if he had been alive; he might even have walked away in the United Front with Andre Gide. But. whatever Byron may have done, Auden insists that the ogre has always been with us, and invokes Milton and Bunyan as those members of the English literary tradition who recognized it. He apologizes again to Byron for telling him all this, "For asking you to hold the baby for us," and returns to more serious style:

Yet though the choice of what is to be done Remains with the alive, the rigid nation Is supple still within the breathing one; Its sentinels yet keep their sleepless station, And every man in every generation, Tossing In his dilemma on his bed, Cries to the shadows of the noble dead.

Yet in the last stanza of Part II he again descends .to the vulgar, wishing for a "quick one," but postponing it to write a letter to his mother.

Part III talks shop, and repeats many of the same ideas mentioned in the Introduction to the Oxford Book of Light Verse. Auden appreciates Byron because he was "a good townee,/Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie."

Others may think him vulgar, but one must judge a poet by his intention; he (127)

did not aim for serious thought. High seriousness is appropriate in its

place, but comedy deserves honor as well, for "Only on a varied diet can

we live;/The pious fable and the dirty story/Share in the total literary

glory." Art's subject is not landscape, as the Wordsworthians, with their

nature sentimentality and obsession with the "Universal-Complex" maintain,

but-the human being. Ultimately, Auden claims, art ends with the "attempt

to entertain our friends." This is in fact his central point, whether the

friends are intimates or that extension of intimates, the public. The

problem with the aesthetes of the nineteenth century was that, like every­

one else with his own garden to cultivate, they were overspecialized and

could only speak to each other; in short, their one subject was shop.

Whatever technical Innovations they may have.made, their heirs today are

mad, retired, or looking for something new. As for their potential audi­

ence, it was too busy either making money or starving to care very much.

The next section was written on the trip home from Iceland to England.

Normally a trip home is a time for reflection, and Auden suitably uses the

section to provide his readers with autobiographical material. Although his ostensible purpose is to answer the future schoolchild's question,

"what's/An intellectual of the middle classes?", Auden indulges himself in a light verse apologia pro sua vita without obsessive self-justification.

It includes his literary tastes, his bad habits, and even a self-deprecating look at his personal appearance. He writes of his childhood interests — machines and mines -- and discusses his years at school, and he concludes that the neurosis-creating atmosphere of the old-style public school Is preferable to that of the modern progressive version. He tells about his decision to.become a poet, his sojourn in Berlin, his Influences, and his (128)

return to England to become a schoolmaster. He summarizes with a number

of "tame conclusions." The stress in this section is that, although Auden

may have some special talents, he is really only typical of his class and

time, and his conclusions from this point of view are, as he sees it,

rather commonplace. He is like his readers, mortal and guilty, but he

is also confident of his place and his public.

The final part, written in England, mentions rumors of war, economic

times, and "the crack between employees and employers." The vacation is

over, and there is a recognition that he is after all English and has to learn to live with the country of his birth. Despite the misery, there are signs of life: Spender, Eliot, Yeats, MacNeice, even Wyndham Lewis.

He addresses Byron in Hell because Hell "gets nearly all the. brains."

Heaven is for those who never, had any complexes. No one, after all, begins thinking until he has a problem, whether it be Complex or Poverty.

Certainly this is an entertaining poem in the best and worst sense of the word. As was mentioned before, it shows Auden secure In his discur­ sive, colloquial style, secure In his audience which has become a larger extension of the Auden group, the friends whom art tries to entertain.

It also shows him secure in the English poetic tradition, and secure in the knowledge that this tradition Is relevant to the needs of contemporary readers. It passes on information to a community of readers from a man who is sophisticated, well-educated, who has traveled a great deal (it is difficult fo remember that Auden was only twenty-nine at the time ), and who has reflected on "life" and "art." The .problem is not, as the

MacNeice quote complained in another context, that Auden tells his audience what it already knows, but that the very form, the organizational pattern, (129)

and rhythm.of this light verse style invites too easy an assent. It tells

its audience what it knows, certainly, but it also ignores a great deal of what it also knows. For example, the anti-utopianism of the final section may tell us that all'creativity is produced by struggle, which is certainly true, but it fails to tell us what is also true, that the Complex and

Poverty can also inhibit creativity and thinking. Further, it becomes a justification for the very status quo which Auden and his peers had com­ mitted themselves to changing. However:muddleheaded the MacNeice quote may have been, it reveals a core of truth which is itself a commonplace: that form influences and often determines content and response. Thus, Auden's rather charming self-deprecations, for example, really become a form of special pleading: accept what I say, they say, because I am like you, and we understand each other. This is the.community of barroom conversation.

Was this work popular? There is no doubt that Auden's poetry, judged by the sales of his hooks, did increase in popularity during the thirties.

The first edition of Auden's Poems had sold 1,000 copies by the end of

1933, and The Orators (not surprisingly) had fared less well; in the whole period from 1932-1943, when another reprint was ordered, it sold only 20 ...... 2,000 copies. On the other hand, .2300 copies of Look,.Stranger were published in 1936, and three months later a reprint of 2,000 copies was ordered. In our own day of multi-million-copy best sellers, these numbers may seem insignificant, but they were substantial numbers for the time, and especially for a poet. Auden must have seemed bankable to his publishers,

Faber and Faber and Random House, for he received an advance (mentioned in.

20 ...... Julian Symons, The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 33. (130)

"Letter to Lord Byron") to write about his Iceland trip, and later he was

commissioned to write about his and Isherwood's trip to China. Nor must

we forget that this so-called radical.poet was awarded the King's Gold

Medal for Poetry in 1938.

However, his audience could scarcely be considered wide. He could

not truly speak to the working class; he had tried this in some of his

early work and had not been entirely successful. As we have seen, this

was due largely to his own class bias; he could never see the working

class as anything else but "them" — passive, inert, and most importantly,

ugly. In addition, his tastes were basically conservative; he had a wide

familiarity, as we have seen, with the popular culture of his time, but

as the ballads show, his inspiration was from popular forms belonging to

pre-industrial times. He was cognizant of more modern types of song, such

as the sentimental ballad and torch song, but these genres mainly insprired

his gift for parody. Cinemas and newspapers filled him with disgust, even

though he himself had spent six months with the BBC Documentary Unit, and

had written poems for documentary films. The magazines he published in

were those read by people like himself -- well-educated professionals of

somewhat liberal opinion.

He was successful, I think, in his use of popular works as a kind of

alternate tradition. Auden was the kind of poet — even more so than

Eliot, who wrote about the artist's need for.a tradition to work from — who.was most successful when he had a tradition, to evoke. Like an eighteenth century composer or an Elizabethan poet, he had a strong sense of forms, which meant that he knew the appropriate occasion to.use the forms and the ultimate themes that they encapsulated. He also knew how to vary them to (131)

make them convey what he wished, and knew how to avoid the inherent diffi­

culties of following models which were obsolete. The fact that some of

these models were popular in origin made no difference. That only appealed

to Auden's catholicity of taste and his love of masks, and it coincided

neatly with an ideology, prevalent at the time, of making verse accessible

to all.

Auden not only labored to make his verse appeal to a wider audience, but also worked with that most public of literary forms, the drama. What

he attempted in his plays of the nineteen-thirties, and how successful he was, will be discussed in the next chapter. CHAPTER IV

Auden's interest in the theatre was a lifetime preoccupation, though

the nature of that interest changed after the 1930s when he became more

interested in the opera. His work during the 1930s,. which concerns us

here, particularly the plays he wrote for the Group Theatre, were, like

his poetry, inspired in part by the desire to integrate himself more

completely with a wider community of hearers. As in his poems of the

period, he tried to include folk and popular material in these works to

give them the universality he was striving for.

Nevertheless, none of these'plays enjoyed critical success, either

with commentators at the time or with historians of the theatre. Eric

Bentley lists him as one of the important modern writers — the others are

Joyce, Lawrence, and Henry James — who "fancied himself as a dramatist

with largely unhappy consequences.."3 Raymond Williams, speaking of Auden's

inclusion of popular, even banal material Into otherwise serious plays,

concludes that "It is in the achievement of any adequate dramatic integrity 2 that Auden and Isherwood failed." Still, most contemporary commentators

find them interesting experiments, and worth reading as such.

Our purpose, as in the previous chapter, will be to investigate the plays to see when and how folk and popular material was used, and how successfully. In. general, I think it can be shown that, however successful the plays may be, the "popular" quality ultimately eludes all but one for

3Eric Bentley, The Modern Theatre: A Study of Dramatists and the Drama (London: Robert Hale, 194-8), p. 65. 2 , .... . Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), p. .256. (133)

the same reasons that it eluded the poems: first, because of Auden's

feelings of ambivalence about popular culture, especially mass culture,

and second, because of his ambivalence towards the people for whom, for

better or worse, this culture was sustenance and comfort.

The idea of a "people's theatre," distinct from that of either a

wealthy, cultivated bourgeoisie or a literary avant-garde, had been

important in the theatrical history of nineteenth-century Europe. It

was an offshoot of demands for a national theatre which occurred around the time of the French Revolution. Europeans inspired by the ideas of the

Revolution, such as Mercier in France and Schiller in Germany, tried to write plays for a new audience, people freed from the bonds of the ancien

/ . . regime. The theatre was to be an arena of celebration and enlightenment; mass entertainment and spectacle were to be emphasized. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, People's Theatres were established in Vienna,

Berlin, and Brussels, as well as in a number of cities in France. By this time, the projected audience of many of those involved in these theatres had changed to the industrial working class. In 1901, for example, Romain

Rolland gave a performance of his play Danton to an audience of workmen on strike.

Rolland is significant because he articulated not only ideas for the founding of the modern people's theatre but also because he Indicated the problems inherent in such an enterprise; he also indicated why dramatists were attracted to it. In his polemic The People's. Theatre, taken from articles written early in this century, Rolland at one point conveys some of the excitement involved in the formation of the Theatre populaire in

1903. It was, Rolland said, located "in the very heart of the workingmen's (134)

quarter in Paris," in a hall which could seat close to two thousand

spectators. The experiment, he says, was a success, particularly because

of the audiences, who, in his experience, were always enthusiastic:

This Belleville People's Theatre has a public of quick intelligence. I watched especially the young men and women, people with splendid faces, but many of them pale and pinched and worn with the fatigue of constant labor. Beneath the transparent and mobile faces there seemed to float great waves of desire, and care, and changing moods of irony. A truly intelligent class — almost too intelli­ gent — with a touch of the morbid: the people of a large city. And this public might in a few years become the ideal audience: intellectual and passionate.

At the same time, Rolland recognizes some of the problems involved in

forming his people's theatres. The audience was not always enthusiastic,

particularly in Paris where a process of embourgeoisement seems to have

been taking place:

The people of Paris seem to have lost all sense of class dis­ tinction. The demoralizing atmosphere of a city rolling in luxury, pleasure, and business, appears to have debilitated all of the inhabitants. Or, to be more exact, there are two peoples In Paris: the one that has just emerged from a state of downright poverty, and is at once taken into the Bourgeoisie. The other is vanquished by its more fortunate brothers, and is in a state of abject misery. The first will not have a people's theatre, the second obviously cannot attend one.®

The goals of both revolutionary art and politics demanded that these two be brought together without negating their differences.

Rolland's requirements for a true people's theatre were three.

First, it must be a recreational activity; that is, it should occur in a comfortable place, and should produce plays which are not unduly pessi­ mistic. Second, the theatre should give the worker energy to face his

Q ^Romaine Rolland, The People1 s Theatre, trän. Barrett H. Clark (New York: Henry Holt, 1918), p. 92.

^Rolland, p. 94.

^Rolland, p. 97. (135)

tasks: the dramatist, to do this, should be "a congenial traveling com­

panion, alert, jovial, heroic if need be, on whose arm they may lean, on

whose good humor they may count to make them forget the fatigue on the 6 journey." This did not mean the dramatist was merely to be a friendly

counselor; the third requirement was that the theatre was to appeal to

the intelligence; it should teach the worker to see clearly and to judge.

Above all, the theatre should be made for great masses of people,

both on stage and in the audience. This implied the drama of spectacle;

intimacy had no place here. The writer should concentrate only on well- known stories;.he should provide plenty of marching, fights, dances, and pantomimes, all of short duration; his lyrics should be simple and contain

only a single thought. Music should likewise be broad and simple. Indivi­

dual conflicts should give way to group conflicts.

This was written before the First World War, and Rolland's essential optimism reflects the optimism of that period. Playwrights who came to maturity after the war, and who wished to work for larger audiences outside of the standard commercial theatre, found, themselves in a different situa­ tion. Significantly, they felt the influence ■— and competition of the mass media and new spectacles. In the.writing of Bertolt Brecht, one of the most important of these playwrights and often cited, sometimes for dubious reasons, as an "influence"on Auden, we find this stated clearly.

One of his early articles, written in 1926, contrasts the large, enthusias­ tic audiences of the sporting arenas with the dismal attendance of the theatres. This did not mean the people were at fault, for the audience at

°Rolland, p. 105. (136)

the sporting arenas was the "fairest and shrewdest audience in the world."

The reason they went to sports events and not to the theatre was that they

knew what was going to happen, and that their expectations were met. Op­

posed to this, Brecht feels, the.German theatre had neither character nor

sense of purpose.

Brecht recognized that times had changed and the theatres must also

change, not act as a bastion of "culture" against change. What this meant

was that the playwright, writing for a new audience, must avoid trying to

involve the.audience emotionally with .his characters; instead, he must

present problems faced by the audience in such a way that the spectator would be made to face them, to reflect on them, and to understand bov? to

solve them. The audience would become an. observer, watching what is represented, on the stage in the same way that a biologist observes a microbe through a microscope. This so-called "alienation effect" was necessary for good, instructive drama, Brecht felt. Modern theatrical techniques, such as introducing film, photographs, and signs, and having actors appear in fantastic makeup, were.-not inappropriate as long as they contributed to conveying an actual picture of a current situation as the audience under­ stood it.

Further, as long as a play conveyed the problem accurately, the audience would have no ¡trouble understanding it. "Popularity" therefore meant being

intelligible to the broad masses, taking over their own forces of expression and enriching them/adopting and consolidating their standpoint/representing the most progressive section of the people in such a way that it can take over the leadership: thus

7 Bertolt Brecht, "Emphasis on Sport," Brecht on Theatre: The Develop- ment of An Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 6. (137)

intelligible to other sections too/linking with tradition and carrying it further/handing on the achievement of the section now leading to the section of the people now struggling for - the lead.®

The workers did not reject innovation, as long as its purpose was to tell

the truth; they rejected only the trivial and the ordinary. They under­

stood complexity and were generous.

Auden’s first evening in Berlin in 1928 was spent at a performance

of Brecht's Threepenny Opera, although he knew no German at the time; and

Brecht's early book of poems, the Hauspostille, was part of his introduc- 9 tion to the language. Later in his life Auden translated, the early Brecht

plays. The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagoriny and The Seven Deadly

Sins, and worked briefly with Brecht on an adaptation of The Duchess of

Malfi in 1943. Brecht also wanted Auden;to translate the songs for an

American rendering of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In general, their pro­

fessional relationship was one of mutual admiration while their personal

relationship seemed to be marked by uncongeniality of temperament and belief Auden once described Brecht as a "good writer but an unpleasant man,"3* °

and in 1966 told Robert Craft, Stravinsky's biographer, that he would have

found it enjoyable to execute Brecht, even though he would have given the • playwright a good last meal.33 This, of course, was said in jest, but it

does point out a strain between the two men. As for direct influence on the plays, the current view, supported in part by interviews with Auden and

^Brecht, "The Popular and the Realistic," Willet, p. 108.

q . A.R. Braunmiller, "Introduction," The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, tran. W.H. Auden and Chester Kallmann (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976), p? 19.

3°Char.les Osborne, W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1979), p. 249.

33Braunmiller, p. 22. (138)

Isherwood, is that there is very little and that the main sources are 12 primarily English. The principal point for our purposes is that

Brecht provided an alternative both to the commercial and avant-garde

theatres, one which used music, spectacle, .and drama, which dealt with

public (as opposed to private) problems, and which attempted to appeal to

a working class audience in a way which respected the intelligence of

that audience.

Auden’s first attempt at drama was "Paid on Both Sides" in 1928, and

even then it indicated his interest in popular materials. He called it

a "charade," possibly meaning that it was intended for entertainment and

also that the characters presented were masks.:for conflicting principles.

As mentioned previously, Auden felt the country house charade was one of his times’ few living dramatic forms. In fact, he originally intended it to be performed at a country house, the home of a friend to which he had been invited, but, as he later wrote to Isherwood, "They refuse to do the 13 play, as they say the village won’t stand for it." This is not too sur­ prising, for much of the verse is obscure and private to the point of being indecipherable. Furthermore, all of its elements do not fully cohere.

But it does indicate Auden's central preoccupations as a dramatist.

Though no scenery was required -- a break, byfthat time fairly commonplace, with the naturalistic theatre ;— the action takes place In the English countryside, though at least some of it centers around the family blood feuds of the Icelandic sagas, in which Auden was interested at the time. It begins with, the birth of John Nower, who is born immediately

12 See Braunmiller and Breon Mitchell, "W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood: The 'German Inf luenceOxford Germán Studies, 1(1966), 163-172.

13 . Quoted m Osborne, p. 53. (139)

after his father is killed as part of the ongoing struggle between the

Nower and Shaw families. Nower's mother, who has had difficulty giving birth to her son, predicts more sorrow.

After the chorus speaks, the intoning that death in time of trouble wears down not only individuals but also "old systems," Nower, fully grown, enters with a friend who is leaving for the "Colonies," presumably

America. Nower, who is staying, then orders one of his men to kill a member of the Shaw family. This is done and in a dramatic monologue Nower complains that his father taught him to avoid weakness, and that he now. finds what he is doing hateful. This leads to a ''central dream sequence in which Father Christmas (for all this takes place on Christmas Eve) sits as a judge In a trial of a spy for the Shaws. John Nower is the prosecutor, and "Bo" and "Po" argue, respectively, that the old ways of vengeance should he thrown, aside and that they are worth keeping. A "Man-Woman" then appears who assails them all. Nower, impatient, shoots the Spy. A comic doctor revives.him, and Nower and the Spy plant a tree together.

The feud continues, but then an engagement is announced; John Nower will marry Anne Shaw, thus ending the fight. Another Shaw invites the couple to emigrate with him and Nower's brother to America, but Nower again refuses. The wedding party begins; there is a dance, and the party retires for dinner, but as they do, Anne Shaw’s mother tells Seth Shaw, another brother; to kill Nower and that he will be a coward if he hesitates.

The order is obeyed: John.Nower and Aaron Shaw are killed. Anne Shaw is left alone and the chorus claims the victory of the Mothers — those terrible creatures who prophesy and solicit death.

William Empson, writing in a 1931 issue of Experiment, claimed that (140)

most of the piece was a "straightforward play." However, there were a

number of items which gave readers difficulties. First, it contained a

radical anachronism of setting and action. The lack of scenery and the

noncontemporary strife performed by contemporaries provide a strangely

timeless atmoshpere, and gives the theme a universality which would not

be present in a strictly naturalistic presentation. However, along with this satisfactory use of anachronism are a number of references to very contemporary school games, spoken by Nower underlings. For example, immediately after Nower orders Red Shaw to be killed, Kurt and Cully, two

Shaw men, enter with this exchange:

K. There's time for a quick one before changing. What's yours? C. I'll have a sidecar, thanks. K. Zeppel, one sidecar and one C.P.S. I hear Chapman did the lake in eight. C. Yes, he is developing a very pretty style. I am not sure though that Pepys won't beat him next year if he can get out of that double kick. Thanks. Prosit. K. Cheerio.I4

The spectacle of two men discussing school sports before they change to go off to kill someone is one of the more sardonic moments of contemporary

English drama. What it does is make an uncertain analogy between blood feaids -- and, by extension, national warfare — and schoolboy sports.

Also, sometimes the comparing of the "world outside" to school life produces an unintended shift of tone. Early in the play, John Nower's mother appears with her child and her dead husband, .and says:

Not from this life, not from this life is any To keep; sleep, and. play would not help there Dangerous to new ghost; new ghost learns from many Learns from old termers what death is, where.. (60)

14 W.H. Auden, "Paid, on Both Sides," Poems (New York:. Random House, 1934), 63-4. Subsequent references in the text are from this edition. (141)

This analogy of experienced and ultimately mortal individuals to upper­

classmen stretches the comparison too far and trivializes it, pointing

out the weaknesses of seeing the public school experiences as a mirror

of the adult world. It also shows, like the references to his friends

scattered throughout the play, that no matter who Auden's consciously

intended audience was — the village -- the real audience was Auden's

friends, still fresh with memories of their school days.

Another difficulty -- actually it is less a difficulty than a tech­

nique which requires elucidation — is the dream sequence in the middle

of the play, the Father Christmas episode. At least two critics have 15 traced this section directly to the English mummer's play. It occurs directly after Red Shaw has been killed, a spy has been caught, and Nower's bitter soliloquy has been delivered. As a whole, the sequence symbolizes

Nower's psychological conflict; he has the option of renewing the feud or leaving it.

Father Christmas enters and promises the audience "a little surprise," and asks them to bring their friends and '„'the kiddies" but to keep the whole proceedings a secret. In the mummers' play, a "presenter" actually comes in and harangues the audience and introduces the players."'"8 At any rate, the dream play proper then begins; this is the trial, already summarized. It is roughly comparable to the second part of a mummers * play, in which two combatants make boasts and threats and then fight until one is killed or wounded. In this play the combatants are ostensibly

j_5 F.W. Cook, "Primordial Auden," Essays In Criticism 4(Dct. 1962), 402-412, and Forrest E. Hazard. "The Father Christmas Passage in 'Paid on Both Sides,1" Modern Drama, 12(Sept., 1969), 555-64.

"'"^Hazard, p. 157. (142)

John and the Spy -- although the Spy merely groans at the end of each

speech ■— but the true combatants are the conflicts in John Nower's

head. The real verdict is brought out in the speech of the Man-Woman

whose tone resembles the colloquial manner of the speaker of the 1929 poem

later entitled "Venus Will Now Say a Few Words"; and, as in this poem,

essentially private accusations merge with broader cultural commentary.

The Man-Woman does appear in the mummers' plays, often as a minor charac­

ter; Auden uses him/her in his play as a way of dissolving the dualities that plague the Nowers and the Shaws. The.Man-Woman accuses the hearers of engaging only In selfish love:

Love was not love for you but episodes, Traffic in memoirs, and:

I lay with you; you made that an excuse For playing with yourself, but homesick because Your mother told you that's what flowers did. And thought you lived since you were bored, not dead, And could not stop. (71-2)

The Man-Woman further accuses them of ignoring his/her teachings, of being unwilling to put forth the effort involved in changing their lives.

John Nower, unable to bear the tension, shoots the Spy. Voices call for the Doctor, and he enters. In the mummers' play the entrance of the doctor is followed by a great deal of low comedy In which the doctor bar­ gains for his fees, boasts of his cures, and engages in repartee with his assistant. There is no bargaining in the Auden play, but there is repartee and the Doctor brags that he can cure "Tennis elbow, Grave's Disease, Derby shire neck and Housemaid's.knees." He tells Nower to keep away, because

"Your presence will be necessary at Scotland Yard when the criminals of war will be tried, but your evidence will not be needed. It is valueless." (143)

With a huge pair of pliers, he extracts a large tooth from the.Spy,

and his speech, as Forrest E. Hazard points out, Is taken almost verbatim 17 from a mummers' piece, the Weston Sub-Edge Play. On a symbolic level,

the tooth extraction may refer to birth, as it did in the works of Georg

Groddeck, whom Auden admired, or it may refer to a dream symbol of castra- 18 tion as a punishment for masturbation, as it did for Freud. The latter

reference is probably more relevant,.since the Man-Woman's speech has just

accused the courtroom members of practicing a kind of masturbation, self-

love.

The Spy is revived, and a photographer takes his picture. Father

Christmas announces, "All Change.” John Nower returns, running; Christmas

asks for his pass. Nower turns back his lapel, Christmas retires, and

John and the Spy plant a tree, another conventional symbol of rebirth.

Their dialogue suggests reconciliation and possible escape from pursuit,

as well as understanding in silence:

John: Sometimes sharers of the same house We know not the builder nor the name of his son. Now cannot mean to them; boy's voice among dishounoured portraits To dockside barmaid speaking Sorry through wires, pretended speech.

Spy: Escaped Armies pursuit, rebellion and eclipse Together in a cart After all journeys We stay and are not known. (74-5)

This quotation also points out that a third difficulty of the work, its sometimes obscure elliptical verse. This is, of course, a characteris­ tic of much of Auden's early published "serious" work, and while the verse

^Hazard, p. 160.

] o Hazard, p. 161. (144)

is often brilliantly and poignantly suggestive, it can inhibit understanding.

Who has escaped? The boy talking to the barmaid? The Spy and Nower? Why

are they talking to a barmaid in particular? Some of the obscurity is a

result of private reference, and, as one sympathetic critic points out, "At

its worst it may leave the reader feeling, among other things, that he 19 does not belong to the right set." The purpose of the ellipses seems

to be a minimalist desire to eliminate superfluity to concentrate on the

essentials of the situation in a way that is spare and cogent. At its best,

the verse succeeds in doing this in much the same way that the lack of a naturalistic setting eliminates the superfluities of a particular space

and time. Still, if Auden is trying to write for a community — not only the wealthy inhabitants of a country house where charades were performed, but also for the "villagers" -- the verse does not succeed.

"Paid on Both Sides" is by no means a "popular" work, although it does show where Auden was headed. Its use of folk material prefigures what he would do in later plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood; it also prefigures his interest in appealing to. a broader community of readers and/or listeners. Likewise, it indicates his interest in the prob­ lems of exceptional individuals, something which, probably also prevented him from becoming the popular writer he wished to be. Furthermore, it shows even these individuals being ultimately controlled and destroyed by their circumstances; this is probably what distinguishes him the most from

Brecht, at least Brecht the theoretician, who felt that social problems should be shown to be soluble.

19 . "Richard Hoggart, Auden: An Introductory Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 19. (145)

Finally, it shows his lack of interest in conventional plot develop­ ment; motivation is present, but not sufficiently developed. The various scenes are actually tableaus linked by the demands of the central conflict.

We are not shown, for example, the development of the John Nower/Anne Shaw romance; it is only a "given," a possible alternative to the bloodshed and chaos, soon to be steamrollered by that chaos. The story itself is "known" in the sense that fate tells its own dismal tale, which we all know. This use of tableau to present a given situation for our analysis, the lack of character development, and the use of chorus and soliloquy may give the play a superficial resemblance to Brecht's Epic Theatre, but, again, we must beware of any supposed direct influence.

Auden's next plays, including those he wrote with Christopher Isher­ wood, were done under the aegis of the Group Theatre. Formed in 1932 by

Rupert Doone, the Group Theatre was intended to be an acutal social force.

Doone, who had worked with Diaghilev as a dancer, and with Max Reinhart, called for a permanent company of actors, artists, poets, and musicians who 20 would create new theatrical forms "to express the life of today." What this cooperative group was supposed to produce would not be unintelligible plays, but pieces "analogous to modern musical comedy or the premedieval folk play." Since theatre was "an art of the body," it was to depict Fa life of action and the senses," two phrases which inspired a great deal of excitement in the early thirties. Originally, Doone had asked Auden to write a play based on the subject of Orpheus and Eurydice, and to include a role for a dancer (to be played by Doone himself). Instead, Auden wrote

2°Julian Symons, The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 76. 21 Symons, p. 76. (146)

"The Dance of Death," which was produced by the Group Theatre in 1934.

The stage for "The Dance of Death" is bare, like that of "Paid on

Both Sides." It also uses a small jazz orchestra. An announcer sits on

steps in front of the stage "like an umpire at a tennis tournament," and

he speaks at first to the audience: "We present to you this evening a

picture of the decline of a class, of how its members dream of a new

life, but secretly desire the old, for there is. death inside.them. We 22 show you that death as a dance."

As in a musical comedy, there is an opening chorus. All early musi­

cal comedies, as well as those of today, opened with a song and dance that

identified the period and locale of the.show and was really intended to be,

not so much an integral part of the show, hut an appendage designed to

cover the noise of latecomers. In addition, such openings, with their

handsome men and women, show the audience that the evening would be fun 23 and not mentally taxing. Auden's chorus opens with singing and dancing,,, but with.a difference. First,.his chorus functions as an actual character throughout the show. Second, even though there are good-looking specimens

— they come out In silk dressing gowns, which they remove to reveal "hand­ some two-piece bathing suits" — and what they sing, with. Its refrain of

"Come out into the sun," is an invitation to frolic, the intent of the opening is blatantly ironic. The chorus is a group of upper class men and women who use their mania for physical fitness to ignore their own problems and those of the world;

no "The Dance of Death," Poems (New York: Random House, 1934), p. 185. Subsequent references in the text are from this edition.

Lehmann. Engel, The Making of a Musical. (New York: MacMillan, 1.977), p. 64. (147)

Strip off your shirt Kick off your shoes It won't hurt To'leave behind those office blues Here on the beach You're out of reach Of sad news, bad news You can refuse The invitation To self-examination Come out into the sun. (186)-

The dancer appears — in the.first production it was Rupert Doone — and the cast, including members who are part of the audience, find him attractive. The announcer tells the chorus to "take a plunge," and they choose partners and dance to an "old-time waltz," after which they go off to swim. The dancer dances as the Sun God and steals the clothes from the chorus. When the chorus members return, they are upset at having lost their clothes, and two members of the audience, a working class mother and her son, accuse the dancer. The announcer, fearful of a fracas, calls the.stage manager, a comic Jew, who orders a stagehand to find the.clothes.

The stagehand returns with a basket, but it is filled with uniforms from a World War I stage revue. The chorus decides to wear them, but the audi­ ence, who is the.principal hero of the play, takes up a revolutionary chant which has, with variations, remained to this day:

One, two, three, four The last war was a bosses' war. Five, six, seven, eight Rise and make a workers' state. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve Seize the factories and run. them yourself. (1.95)

The manager tells the announcer to do something about the behavior of the audience and chorus, and as the Dancer "dances as a demagogue," the announcer spouts the fascist rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon, racial purity. At his instigation, (148)

the chorus, now anti-Semitic, beats the Stage Manager and forms itself .)

into.a ship (of state) which follows the dancer. The audience makes

noises of waves and storm; but the ship formation disintegrates and the

dancer falls into a fit.

Summoned from the audience, a doctor first declares the dancer too

sick to work, but after being bribed by another member of the audience,

the physician pronounces him fit; however, he must avoid excitement and

is told to go to the country. Following this, the chorus proposes to

"live on a farm" and obey only the inner voice. After some preliminary

squabbling about equal rights for women on this "colony," the chorus

sings and dances again, this time In praise of its new solution, the rustic life.

One of the chorus, however, rejects this, and Insists that

He who would prove The Primal love Must leave behind All. love of his kind And fly alone To the Alone. (206)

Thai is, he must engage in mystic contemplation. The Dancer is transformed into„a pilot with the public charisma of a Lindbergh. As he is being rubbed down for his journey to the "Alone," the Announcer plays the part of a radio newscaster describing the gifts this hero has received, the speeches given in his honor, the bets being placed, and a pickpocket being caught and thrashed by the crowd. The dancer dances, but finally collapses, para­ lyzed. The chorus is in despair; it has exhausted all of its fads:

Get him into a chair And give him some air If we only knew What we could do Does anyone know Where we can go? (210) (149)

The Manager announces he is forming a nightclub — the Alma Mater —

to remind everyone of home. The Announcer reads off the Dancer's will to

the tune of Casey Jones. Alternating with his verses is a comic Marxist

review of the history of the West. The clock strikes twelve; it is New

Year’s and a chorus of boys, girls, thieves, blackmailers, coiners, and

"Old Hacks and Trots," sing the praises of the true Alma Mater, England.

The Announcer notes that the Dancer is dead, and Karl Marx appears with

two young communists, saying, "The Instruments of production have been too

much for him. He is liquidated." The play is over.

As we can see from this summary, there Is a great deal of activity

in this play, perhaps too much for one so short. Basically, the pattern

is to move from one fad to another, each one punctuated by dance and a

song which closely resembles a piece of popular music. Because the trans­

formation of both chorus and Dancer are so rapid, and in each section so

different, the play, perhaps unintentionally, becomes a fast-moving revue

and the satire tends to lose focus. Possibly the most effective part is the second last chorus, the.review of history which alternates with a reading of the Dancer's will to the ironic Alma Mater chorus; but this is followed by the sudden, dramatically inappropriate -- as all commentators recognize -— entrance of Karl Marx.

Equally a dramatic problem is the chorus. The idea of turning the musical comedy chorus of beautiful boys and girls into flabby-minded members of the gentry is a good satirical idea, but when Marx appears, they are also willing to accede to his ideas, to the tune of Mendelssohn's Wedding March:

0 Mr. Marx, you've gathered All the material facts You know the economic Reasons for our acts. (218) (150)

One wonders if this is really an acceptance of objective reality, as Auden

seems to intend, or merely another form of intellectual chic. More appro­ priate, given the character of the chorus, would have been to include a different chorus at the end, perhaps one made up of members of the audience.

"The Dance of Death'" has never been a great favorite of Auden critics, but some of the criticism seems misplaced. F.R. Leavis, in his Scrutiny review of the play, wrote that "Auden can seldom have written more easily, but appears to know little better than the characters of his drama what 24 the point of it is." Of course, the point of "The Dance of Death" is quite clear -- the Announcer states it in the beginning. What Leavis is responding to is the above-mentioned loss of satirical focus that results from the scattered stage business. Stewart Ewart, writing in New Verse, claimed that the verse "might have been written by Mr. Coward or Mr. Herbert, .25 almost by any writer of dance lyrics." If Auden was seeking a larger audience, however, he could hardly have been Insulted by this.

As for the problem of audience, Kenneth Allott, writing some years later in the same journal, commented that "It is fun to act (I suppose), but too puzzling for anything except an audience of personal frierids -- this 2 6 frame of mind is not one you can reasonably expect 'anybody' to assume."

As we have seen in the previous chapter, this was a frequent and sometimes fair criticism of Auden’s.early work. If what is meant by "state of mind" is the actual theme of the play, we must remember that satire is not, in

Oh F.R. Leavis, "Auden, Bottral, and Others," Scrutiny, 3(June, 1934), p. 70. 25 Gavin Ewart, "Audenesque," New Verse, 7(February, 1934), p. 21.

^Kenneth Allott, "Auden in the Theatre," New Verse, 26-7 (Nov. 1937), 17-18. (151)

fact, for "anybody"; it is for an audience which holds essentially the

same values as the author. This is especially true of a satirical revue

such as "The Dance of Death" in which the audience is the only real hero.

Still, the critique does point out an audience problem which is the“same as that in the poem "Brothers, who when the sirens roar." If the audience represents the force of History, as it seems to here, it should be, in

Marxist terms, the working class or those progressive members of that class in whom Brecht placed so much faith. However, the actual subject of the play, which is also the subject.of "Brothers," is the..intellectual mean- derings of the upper class which, however foolish, are not of direct concern to workers. The play seems to be more a satire for left wing intellectuals

— not only Auden's friends -- who belong to the same class as those depicted.

One reason why Auden may have tried to.use the revue format, usually a casual succession of music and sketches, is that, oddly enough, it suited his lifelong attraction to the quest pattern of narrative, in which a central figure or figures seek the Way. Auden's early enthusiasm for epics bears this out, as well as his early imitations of epic verse patterns (such as "Doom is dark and deeper than any sea dingle," written in 1930). The advantage of the revue format for Auden was that it enabled, him to concentrate on events during his character's searches and to mine the potential of these events., for representing conditions or Intellectual, choices. Furthermore, it permitted him to avoid the problems of character development. Even "The Dance of Death" Is to some extent a quest by thoroughly unsympathetic, largely passive characters to find meaning to their lives, a question, which ultimately ends in failure.. Auden’s next (152)

play, The Dog Beneath the Skin, uses the quest motif within the revue format to greater effect.

The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936) is Auden's first active collabora­ tion with Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood gave suggestions during the writing of "The Dance of Death," but in this one he contributed important scenes in each act of the play. The choruses and songs, as well as most 27 of the play itself, however, were written by Auden. Some commentators feel that The Dog Beneath the Skin is Auden's most successful play. In fact, it is much more inventive than the two preceding plays; the.use of the chorus is more consistent, and it is organized more coherently. The quest motif is used more openly, and it is centered around the mission of the. hero, Alan Norman, a simple, wide-eyed naif whom we feel sympathetic toward. Norman fulfills one of the primary demands of a good musical comedy libretto which requires, according to Lehmann Engel, that the major characters be "prototypes without (hopefully) being stereotypes, which. means that they are easily identifiable, uncomplicated, and easy for audi- 28 ences to relate to, without being ordinary or stale."

The first scene opens at the Vicarage of Pressan Ambo, a representative

English village. The stage directions mention that "the scene suggests the setting of a pre-war musical comedy," and includes villagers promenading to the sounds of a band. Major characters — the Vicar, the General, the

General's wife, and Iris Crewe ■— walk to the footlights and introduce themselves, and the chorus repeats its last lines In a refrain that suggests

27 Osborne, p. 114. CO Engel, p. 74-75. (153)

the work of Gilbert and Sullivan. The purpose of the.assembly is explained

by the Vicar, a pompous, banal man who functions as the leader of the

community. Ten years before, the heir to the Pressan Ambo land, Francis

Crewe, disappeared after a quarrel with his father, and each year since

-his father's death, the village has chosen by lottery a person to seek

the heir. The reward for finding Francis is his sister, Iris. Up to

this point, no one Has been successful; this time, Alan Norman, a village

innocent, is chosen, and in the company of a dog and a chorus, he sets

off for post-war Europe to accomplish bis mission.

On a channel steamer bound for the continent, Alan and the dog meet

two journalists. This is a scene written by Isherwood, and it is effective

primarily because It introduces us to the Europe Alan is actually going

to see, and the cynicism of the journalists, who accompany him throughout

most of the play, provides a counterpoint to Alan's naivete. The journa­

lists decide to accompany Alan and the dog to Ostnia, a corrupt monarchy.

The cheerful and. voluble king of this country is, at the time of

their arrival, In the process of executing some workers. He suggests that

to find Sir Francis, they should go to the red light district where, as

.the chorus says, all "who have compounded envy and hopelessness into

desire/Perform here their magical rites of identification/Among the Chinese 29 lanterns and champagne served in shoes." ‘ There they meet Dopey Jim, an

addict who was once Soho Lamb, another quester from Pressan. Ambo, now

happy in his solipsistic prison. Alan, the dog, and the journalists leave,

and the whorehouse proprietors sing a blues song.

29 - . . W.H. . Auden and Christopher Isherwood., The Dog Beneath, 'the Skin., or Where Is Francis? (New York: Random House, 1933), p. 49,. Subsequent references'in the'text are from this edition. (154)

Their next stop is Westland, a parody of a dictatorship. Symbolically

enough, they find themselves in an asylum in which lunatics wander about

beneath a talking portrait of the Leader. The lunatics tie up Alan, but

he escapes with the help of the journalists. On a train they meet a

financier who takes Alan into his confidence and directs him to Paradise

Park, a place where most "wasters and cranks" — including the.financier's

own son, a poet — "end up sooner or later, if they've still got some cash

to be swindled out of." Taking his advice, Alan and the dog go there, and

they find-that it Is a paradise only for the self-obsessed. They meet

the financier's son, a vain man who believes he is the.only real person

in the world; they also meet two .cooing lovers in Dutch teapot costumes,

a number of invalids, one of whom is a former Pressaw Ambo quester, Chimp

Eagle, now about to be operated, on. In a comic operation scene, the.care­

less surgeon and his assistants kill him.

Alan, and..the dog enter a city -- apparently London -- and proceed to

the Nineveh Hotel; in its restaur-ant, a Madame Bubbi sings a patriotic music hall song which Is not so much a parody of this form as the genuine

article. Then the Nineveh Girls, a cabaret group, sing about themselves.

Following this, in a section written by Isherwood, Destructive Desmond,

a music hall entertainer, slashes a Rembrandt after giving the crowd a

choice between destroying it and a cheap print of a Victorian landscape painting. At this point Alan falls in love with Miss VIpond, a star. The love scene between Alan and Miss Vipoond — she Is in reality a mannikin, and her responses are actually uttered by Alan. — are preceded by a satiric epithalamium. Alan’s new.found passion causes him to.overspend (without getting much In return), and as a result, the hotel.manager wants his (155)

money. Suddenly Francis Crewe climbs out of the dog's skin -- he has been

disguised as a dog all along. He reveals himself to Alan, and the two

leave the hotel as the police are pounding at the door.

When, Alan, Francis, and the two journalists return to Pressan Ambo,

they discover that the'Vicar has organized a fascist troop whose benefac­

tress is Iris Crewe, Alan's bride-to-be. Francis reveals himself to the

startled villagers, and in a long speech tells them what he has learned

as a dog:

I had begun to regard you in a new light. I was fascinated and horrified by you all. I thought such obscene, cruel, hypocritical, mean, vulgar creatures -had never existed before in the history of the planet .... As a dog, I learnt with what mixture of fear, bullying, and condescending kindness you treat those whom you consider your inferiors, but on whom you. are dependent for your pleasure.- It's an awful shock to start seeing people from underneath, (154-5)

Francis sees himself as a part of a great army fighting against the

forces of fascism. Alan decides to join him. The Vicar cannot believe this has happened, and the journalists reply that it hasn't since they

do not choose to report it. Instead, the journalists ask those who remain to pose for a picture. They do; there is a flash., and the General, Vicar,

Iris, and others reappear, posed, wearing animal .- masks. The plays ends in.a chorus of bestial sounds.

As a musical play, The Dog Beneath the Skin is more coherently organi­ zed than "The Dance of Death," even though., as this long summary shows, the stage business is complex. As mentioned before, the action is.mostly observed by a sympathetic central figure whose views are counterpointed first by the journalists and then by Francis Crewe himself. Songs have useful functions in the play: some Introduce and characterize people, such (156)

as the opening number in Act I, scene i, and financier's song in Act II,

scene ii; others may introduce a scene, such as the waltz tune verse on

Paradise Park that opens Act II, scene iii; and one song illustrates a

particular theme, the song of the brothel proprietors in Act I, scene v.

All of the songs are essentially comedy pieces in the sense that they

are shaped, by a setup, a development, and a payoff which usually occurs

in the chorus or refrain. The song of the journalists, which also punctuates

the scene of their first meeting with Alan, is an example of this. The

first journalist plays the piano, and the second journalist sings:

The General Public has no ..notion Of what's behind the scenes. They vote at times with some emotion But don't know what it means. Doctored information Is all they have to judge things by; The hidden situation Develops secretly. (35)

The theme has been developed; the payoff is in the chorus that follows,

with the kind of comic paranoia that Auden does so well in some of his light

verse:

If the Queen of Poland swears If the Pope kicks his cardinals down the stairs, If the Brazilian Consul Misses his train, at Crewe, If the Irish Clergy Lose their energy And dons have too much to do: . The reason is simply this: They're in the racket, too. (35)

The second set of verses also counterplays the ponderously significant with the trivial, and the third set of verses gives a self-characterization of the journalists as men of the world who are "in the know":

There's lots of little things that happen Almost every day That show the way the wind Is blowing So keep awake, we say. (157)

We have got the lowdown On all European affairs; To History we'11 go down As the men with the longest ears. (36)

The final chorus gives another conclusion which is also a payoff.

Engel notes that most comedy songs are complaints sung by a discontented, though sincere and naive person singing about himself in the first person, and implies that the humor is found in the disparity between what we actually 30 know about the character and what the character actually says. In some of Auden’s light verse, such as "Some say that Love's a Little Boy," this type of dramatic irony develops when the speaker naively reveals something about himself within the poem; in The Dog Beneath the Skin, in the finan­ cier's song, the irony develops from what we already know about the character through his previous dialogue. The self-pitying whine which occurs after we discover the extent of his power and influence is accompanied by the dining car attendant with a gong:

When I was young I showed such application, I worked the.whole day long; I hoped to rise above my station, To rise just like a song: I did so want to be a hero In just a rich man's way But I might just as well he Nero, And this is all I have to say:

CHORUS (with ATTENDANT and JOURNALISTS)

Why are they so rude to me? It seems so crude to me, I want to be friendly But It's no good, for No one has love for me, They bait me and hate me, I'm Misunderstood. (77)

^Engel, p. 57. (158)

The songs themselves are scattered irregularly throughout the play;

the above-mentioned musical comedy technique of concluding a scene with a

song occurs only twice, and the last scene does not end with a song as is

usually the case. What takes the place of these missing songs are Auden's

spoken choruses which either set the scene or conclude it by telling where

the characters are or where they are going to next and by adding appro­

priate commentary. This gives the play the continuity not found in "The

Dance of Death’’; likewise, usually characters tell where they are about

to go.

Sometimes the play's satire misfires. The Destructive Desmond scene

is an example of this and it Is pertinent because It indicates, once again,

the ambiguous feelings of a middle class intellectual towards the mass

culture of the public to whom he was trying to appeal. Supposedly the

scene illustrates the debasing effect of capitalism on public taste. How­

ever, nowhere Is Capitalism seen to be the enemy; the taste of the audience

is already quite debased. The scene Is essentially an attack on the culture

of the music hall audience, too befuddled to know the.difference between

good work and trash. In fact, it seems to criticize the audience for not being proper consumers, that is, for not knowing the true monetary worth

of a product. Before destroying the picture, Desmond asks an art expert how much, it is worth, and the expert ..replies, "about sixty thousand pounds."

Later the expert stammers that the Rembrandt work is ’’Something unique . . . a work of genius . , . which can’t be replaced . . . priceless," and this implies that the "greatness" of a work: of art cannot be explained in language as concrete as that of pounds and shillings. However, part of the reason we are supposed to feel appalled at the atrocity of the painting’s (159)

destruction is that an expensive piece of art has been ruined. For these

reasons, possibly, the episode was removed from the performance of the.

i 31 play.

Finally, one standard feature of the musical comedy libretto is

omitted in this particular play: the boy-girl romance. It never appeared

in "The Dance of Death," and appeared in "Paid on Both Sides" only as a

symbol of the doomed possibility of reconciliation — the same use made of it in the last Auden-Isherwood collaboration, On the Frontier. Auden, whose love lyrics, such as "Lay your sleeping head, my love" are well known and frequently anthologized works, seemed unwilling or unable to express the feeling dramatically. Part of this may have been due to

Auden's homosexuality; his love poems are addressed to male lovers, and this type of feeling could not at that time be portrayed on the.stage without alienating a large part of the audience he hoped to attract. Part of it may also have been due to the antiromantic tenor of the noncommercial theatre of the time; the plays of Brecht, full of betrayals, are examples of this. Whatever the reasons, some of the best satire of the play is devoted to depicting conventional romantic passion as debilitating selfish­ ness, the Infatuation of Narcissus for his own image. This is explicitly shown in Alan's sudden passion for Lou Vipond and the technique of having

Alan himself utter her responses in their "love scene," which.Is preceded by the comedy song of the hotel employees on the befuddlement of passion.

The banal teapot lovers in Paradise Park Is another example. Not only is conventional passion portrayed as narcissistic, but it is also seen as a

■ 33Monroe K. Spears, The Poetry of W.H. Auden:'■The Disenchanted Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 99.. (160)

distraction from the pursuit of "higher things," in this case Alan's

mission and what Alan's mission ultimately signifies. This, of course,

is a theme that runs through the tradition of Christian mythology, as

does its.misogynist corollary — also given body in the play by Miss

Vipond-and Iris Crewe — that women are fickle betrayers.

In fact, we might say that the true romance of The Dog Beneath the

Skin is between Francis and Alan. Of all the characters in the play,

Francis is the one who shows Alan the most loyalty, and Alan returns that

loyalty. Alan'.s decision to. forget Iris and Miss Vipond and join Francis

in his "army" is not only given as a sign of his maturation but also func­

tions as a substitute for the pre-marriage arrangements found at the end

of the traditional musical comedy as wel.l as most other dramatic comedies.

Despite its weaknesses, The Dog Beneath the. Skin is probably the most "popular" play Auden ever wrote. It is not popular in the sense that it achieved a large audience or unanimous critical acclaim -- none of

Auden's plays ever did that -— but because it uses popular material in a way that was appropriate to subject and theme. Since it is basically a light work -- analogous in. some ways to Auden's light verse -- there is little chance for the shifts in tone that Is a problem in "Paid on Both.

Sides." It contains — much more successfully than any of the other,plays the drama of spectacle: there are songs, dances, and pantomime, all of short duration, and the lyrics are pointed, and simple. It is certainly not working class theatre, but does not aspire to be. It is the very thing

Rolland asked for, but for an intellectually liberal audience.

Auden's.and Isherwood's next collaboration. The Ascent of F6, first produced by the Group Theatre In. February, 1937, raises the’ question of (161)

whether serious material — usually meant to be subtlety.of characteriza­

tion — can be adequately combined with popular material. This play,

about a mountain climbing expedition, is perhaps the least "popular" of

all the Auden-Isherwood plays; that is, there are fewer elements drawn

from the'commercial theatre. Nevertheless, it is good to remember that the actual play is presumed to have been based on a'1924 Everest expedi­ . 32 .... tion, and that mountain climbers, like aviators, were popular heroes of the.1920s and 30s, a fact attested to by the number of popular mountain climbing movies made during the period, particularly in Germany. Thus, while The Ascent of F6 does .not use elements of popular culture in the way of the previous play, it actually.does act as a commentary on popular culture, particularly in regard, to how and why a person becomes a popular hero.

Unlike "The Dance of Death" or The Dog Beneath the Skin, this play opens with a soliloquy by the hero, Michael Ransom. It is quite serious; he explains that mountain climbing, the conquest of inanimate objects, is preferable to the treacheries and stupidities of sentient beings. This soliloquy is a signal that the primary conflict of the play will be inter­ nal. Immediately after this scene, two common people, Mr. and Mrs. A., complain about their miserable lives from an illuminated stage box: they want "something to live for." The next, scene presents the power elite -­ a newspaper baron, a general, a society woman, and a politician, Michael's brother James — who are discussing a crisis in Sudoland, a colonial pos­ session. Ostnians, whose colonial territory borders this possession, are

32 •John Fuller, A Reader's Guide to.W.H. Auden (London:. Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 92. - (162)

threatening it by inciting the natives to riot. The only solution is a

mountain, F6, which straddles the.borderline between the two territories;

the natives believe that the first white man to climb it will reign over

both. The Ostinians are mounting an expedition, and the four speakers

feel they need to do the same. In the next scene, they try to persuade ..

Michael to climb the mountain, but he.refuses; to him, climbing the moun­

tain is a spiritual act, not to be sullied by politics. But James brings

in their mother who tells Michael, she has repressed her affection for him

to make him strong, and Michael yields to his mother and accepts the task.

Michael’■ s . Oedipal dependence on his mother is one of the. primary themes

of the play.

In the next act, Michael and his companions -- Shawcross, Lamp, Gunn,

and the Doctor — are about to make their ascent when they are approached

by monks from a monastery on the mountain. The abbot of the.monastery

carries, a prophetic crystal which each member of the expedition looks into-,

each seeing his own fate bound by bis particular obsession. Ransom talks

with, the abbot afterward about his own obsession: the desire to "conquer

the Demon," redeem and be a leader of mankind. To do so, however, he must

exercise his will, which itself Is evil. The abbott's answer to this is

to renounce the will and live as a monk; however, the abbot admits that,

as leader of the monastery, he cannot totally renounce the will himself.

At any rate, Michael recognizes that the implications of his ascent are not totally spiritual, and that it is too late to turn back. On the way up the mountain, Lamp, a botanist, is killed in an avalanche after discov­ ering a rare plant he has been.searching for. Before the final ascent,

Michael chooses Gunn, a commonplace sensualist, to go with.him.in place (163)

of the Doctor and Shawcross. The Doctor accepts this decision, but

Shawcross, emotionally crippled by his worship of Michael and.his jealousy

of Gunn, commits suicide.

Five hundred feet below the.summit, Gunn dies of exposure, and Michael

himself collapses. Then begins a dream sequence, which like the Father

Christmas episode in "Paid on Both Sides," has as its.purpose the revela­

tion of the hero's interior conflicts. In this passage, James.appears as

a dragon and he and Michael play chess. James wins, but Michael looks at

a figure on the summit of the mountain, and asks if his victory was "real."

With the words, "It was not Virtue -— it was not Knowledge — it was

Power!" James collapses. What follows next is a series of clichéd eulo­ gies by James Ransom,’s friends, and then a trial of Ransom, presided over by the Abbot. The.witnesses are Michael's friends, and all are seen as victims of the Demon. But Ransom appears to identify with the Demon — a figure who stands at the summit of the mountain — and before the Abbot can utter his verdict, rushes to protect the figure. As the chorus and

James' friends deliver the verdict — that Michael should "die for England," the Demon is revealed to be Ransom's mother; and the scene ends with verses of a chorus alternating with lullaby-like verse, suggesting that the Demon was of Ransom's own making -- his Oedipal love. The curtain falls as

Ransom's body appears on the summit. The final scene shows James and his friends delivering a .propagandistic eulogy of Michael, In many cases repeating the same speeches they used to deliver the verdict. National unity demands a martyr, and. they have one.

It Is obvious from this summary that the play, particularly,the.parts referring to Ransom's psychological conflicts, could hot be?called "popular.1 (164)

Ransom is given several Shakespearean speeches, one to a skull. The play

is concerned with the problem of the exceptional individual, perhaps even

the artist. In fact, the whole theme may be the inability of the creative

act to remain untainted by power or, more exactly, by politics. F6 is less

revue-like and seems to be more influenced by the avant-garde theatre than

previous plays. What popular elements there are do not contribute to the

most important sections. For example, the friends of James Ransom are

stereotyped ruling class figures, types which had appeared in The Dog

Beneath the.Skin. The character of Stagmantle, the newspaper baron, first

appeared as the financier in the earlier play; the General is much like the

earlier play's General Hotheim; Lady Isabel Welwyn's original was General

Hotheim's wife.. As Fuller points out, . their dialogue "is based largely on

the cliches of the middlebrow novel; but this is quite deliberate. It 33 makes these exemplars of naked power appear clearly as stereotyped bogeys."

Perhaps this is why Ransom finds it easy to refuse their request, even

though he cannot refuse his mother's.

Along with this, the play concentrates its satiric attacks on mass

culture and its victims. On either side of the.stage, Mr. and Mrs. A.

comment on the.action as they hear about it from the radio or newspapers.

They are unhappy with their cramped lives and want something to live for.

They cut out articles on the expedition from the newspaper. At one point, the expedition, "Something the.least can understand," causes them so much excitement they decide to take a weekend trip. When one member of the expedition dies, Mr. A., in.a moment of Insight, claims, he died, merely "to

33 Fuller, p. 92. (165)

satisfy our smug suburban pride." Later they get tired of hearing about

Ransom's exploits and want new forms of entertainment, such as a dance band, which will make them forget their troubles. All in all they are seen as pathetic, fickle, and, though imbued with a cheap cynicism, easily misled by their leaders. Auden frequently puts their words in doggerel couplets to emphasize the monotony of their lives.

There is song in The Ascent of F6, but it is not put to extensive use as it is in The Dog Beneath the Skin. At the end of Act I, scene iii.

Ransom's.mother sings a love song full of cliche:

Michael, you shall be renowned When the Demon you have drowned, A cathedral we will build When the Demon you have killed When the Demon is dead, You shall have a lovely clean bed.

You shall be mine, all mine, You shall have kisses like wine. When the wine gets into your head, Mother will see that you're not misled; A saint..am_I and a saint are you, - It's perfectly, perfectly, perfectly true.

Like the verse which Mr. and Mrs. A speak, and like the.dialogue between the various power-structure characters, this impoverished verse, drawn.in part from sentimental ballad formulas, indicates impoverishment of mind.

Perhaps the most that can be said about the play for our purposes is that it does not make use of popular culture as much as it comments upon, it,. Like a great deal of Auden's. early work, it is a meditation on the phenomenon of heroism — the motivations, noble and. neurotic, that make a

8i4W.H. Aud.en'and Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts (New York: Random House, 1.937)-, p. 54. (166)

hero do what he does. It is also done in The Dog Beneath the Skin, hut in

that play popular materials are also used for their energy as well.

The final collaboration between Auden and Isherwood was On thé Frontier:

A Melodrama in Three Acts, published in October, 1938 and first performed

by the Group Theatre in October of the same year. Auden had more to do with this . 35 ' play than he had in> the previous collaborations. Of all the plays, it

is closest to the conventions of the realistic drama of its time and,

perhaps because of that, lacks the vigor of The Dog Benëath thé Skin and

the psychological probing of The Ascent of F6. While It alludes to a

popular form -- the melodrama -- as a vehicle for a protest against war,

and includes singing and dancing, it is perhaps the.most disappointing

of all the Auden-Isherwood plays.

Much.-of the action takes place on a divided stage, one half represent-

ing Westland, the other half representing Ostnia — the two mythical

European countries of the previous plays. The play begins by focusing on

Westland, a dictatorship under the control of a Leader, modeled loosely on

Hitler and behind him, the person really in control, the Industrialist

Valerian. The first scene establishes Valerian’s.character; he Is a more

fully developed version of the newspaper baron in F6 : talkative, cynical,

fully in control, he recalls Undershaft in Shaw's Major Barbara. He has

no respect for the workers, whose rebellion he dismisses, or the Leader,

whom.he.sees as weak and insecure. Despite the fact that he Is a stereo­ typical capitalist, he Is so charming and intelligent and generally correct

in his assessments of others that he Is the most interesting and sympathetic

35 "'Osborne, p. 179. (167)

character in a play populated by one-dimensional dullards.

The next scene establishes representative characters of the Westland/

Ostnia citizenry, both groups represented by a bourgeois family. The

Westlanders are Dr. Thorvald, a university professor, his wife, his sister

Martha, and his son, Eric; the Ostnians are the retired Colonel Hussek,

his daughter Louisa Vrodny, her drunken.brother-in-law Oswald, and her

daughter, Ann. Each side of the stage has a radio, the announcements from

which show how the approaching Ostnia-Westland war impinges on their

private lives. Both the Thorvalds and the Brodnys are, like Mr.,and Mrs.

A of The ,,Ascen,t of F6, afraid of external events and frustrated in their

private lives, and their fear makes them)jingoistic and receptive to the lies of their leaders. The only dissent is voiced by the.younger members of the families, Eric Thorvald, a pacifist, and Anna Vrodny.. Their roles are largely symbolic; Eric watches Anna from his side of the stage, and., in a dream sequence In Act II, they speak to each other.

Nobody in. the Westland power structure wants war; Valerian thinks it will never happen and the Leader himself, despite his.saber rattling speeches, plans to negotiate. News of an Ostnian invasion causes him to change his mind, however; and Act III shows the disastrous consequences of war on the Thorvald and Vrodny households. The Thorvalds are burning their furniture for heat; Eric, the.pacifist, is in prison; and Dr. Thorvald;has come to the realization that war is a useless horror. The Vrodnys are pawn­ ing their valuables, and both families are stricken, with, plague. As for

Valerian, everything he has worked for is now threatened by revolution and civil war: his subordinates leave him, and one of the Leader's guards greets.him with the.news that the man has been killed; this guard, once a (168)

Valerian employee who was fired unfairly, and whose parents' shop was

ruined by the price-cutting practices of a large Valerian store, sees

this moment as an opportunity to shoot the industrialist.

The last scene is a dream episode between Anna and Eric, both in

separate.beds and attended by a doctor and a nurse. Eric has discovered

the.inadequacy of his pacifism:

We cannot choose our world, Our time, our class. None are Innocent, none. Causes of violence lie so deep in all our lives it touches every act. Certain it is for all we do We shall pay dearly. Blood Will mine for vengeance in our children's happiness, Distort our truth like an arthritis. Yet we must kill and suffer and know why.

Choruses occur before the.scenes. Workers introduce the play, singing a dirge reminiscent of Auden's "blues songs" discussed in the previous chapter. Likewise, they prepare for the.action commented on in the play, the revolution that occurs in Act III. Before the second scene, a group of prisoners deflate the Leader to the.tune of "Sweet Betsy from Pike."

In Act II, two "Left-wing political workers" debate the war issue with, some apolitical dancers. Soldiers appear before the scene In which Valerian is killed, singing a complaint against the war, this time to the tune of

"Mademoiselle from Armentiers." The final chorus, and perhaps the best, is appropriately enough, five readers of five newspapers which cover the political spectrum. All read what their papers have to say about the war.

The final reader reads and, unable to bear the lies any longer, covers his face with, his hands and says, "Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh. dear!"

5^ * " W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, On the’..'Frontier: A Melodrama in Three’ Acts (London: Faber g Faber, 1938), p. 120-121. .. Subsequent references in the text are from this edition. (169)

Less demanding than any of Auden's plays, it should have had the potential

of being one of his better known; in fact, its very accessibility demands

nothing more than a large audience. Yet it is one of the least memorable

of Auden's works. Part of the difficulty is, as a number of commentators

have pointed out, that it is very much a part of its.time and has dated

badly. The characters, particularly the Brodnys and the Thorvalds, belong

to middle class families so peculiar?to pre-World War II Europe that today

they seem creatures from another planet.

Furthermore, for all its following of the conventions of realistic

character development, the characters are uninteresting. The Vrodnys and

the Thorvalds are almost interchangeable; they are simply victims of their

own narrowness and circumstances and, although it seems to intend to, the

play does not give them the dignity of pathos. As for the characterization

of the Leader, it is surely facile. Guy Burgess, whose familiarity with

totalitarian regimes was more Intimate than either Auden's.or Isherwood’s.

(he was later revealed to be a Soviet spy), told John Lehmann; "The.trouble

with Wystan, Christopher and Stephen Is that they haven't got the foggiest 37 notion what politicians are really like!" This statement may be little more than self-aggrandisement, but the fact remains that by focussing on

the Leader's insecurities, the authors miss the source of his power.

Whatever their high-minded ideals, the authors were probably basically

suspicious of, and in the end uninterested in political power themselves,

and as a result, could only conceive of a dictator in terms that have

less truth than the grossest newspaper cartoon. Only Valerian has any

37 Quoted in Osborne, p. 178. (170)

life, and his death is perhaps the one event in the play that has a sense

of tragedy.

Also in this play there remains an uncertainty of attitude. The chorus is composed of sympathetic workers and soldiers, joining together, preparing for revolution. But when the revolution actually comes, its acts -- the murder of the Leader and, in particular, the murder of

Valerian — are carried out in the spirit of narrow revenge. The agitprop workers of the choruses are quite different from Valerian’s assessment of them — "a nation of grumblers" — and his assessment is close to

Auden's in the."letter" to John Warner, discussed in the.previous chapter.

Even though Valerian Is ultimately wrong, the revolution that destroys him, In the.character of Grimm, Is not something we sympathize, with..

Closely related to this is the.problem of the characters of Eric and Anna. They serve the function of the.John Nower/Anne Shaw pair in

"Paid on Both.Sides," whose union was also destroyed by warring factions.

Like them, Eric and Anna are primarily symbolic figures. Nevertheless, we are clearly meant to identify with them in a way.we were not with Nower and Shaw. Some of their lines, however,.approach bathos. Regarding the

Leader's.picture early In the play, Eric says:

Tell me what Is it you really want? Why do you make that fierce face? You're not fierce, really. You have eyes like my father's. Are you lonely, are you unhappy behind that alarming beard? Yes, I see you are. Perhaps you only want love -— like me . . . (36)

Significantly enough, they both end up in hospital beds as invalids, perhaps signifying the helplessness the authors felt people .like themselves had fallen into. The conclusion, that Eric draws in the.end;-- that violence and corruption are endemic to human behavior -- is quite.similar to the (171)

realization Ransom has toward the end of The Ascent of F6, but in On the

Frontier it does not come as part of the drama. The corollary to this

conclusion is that others, not themselves, are laboring, despite error,

"To build the city where/The will of love is done/And brought to its full

flower/The dignity of man" (122-23). Eric and Anna’s last verse dialogue

is in fact the true chorus of the play, not the soldiers! and workers'

songs, and makes On the Frontier, despite its propagandistic intent,

a pessimistic panorama by and for people who feel they have neither con­

trol nor part in the affairs that concern them the most.

The plays we have discussed, then,.-all in their own ways attempt to

move away from standard dramatic procedure in hope of conveying a sense

of the times and achieving a rather elusive "popularity" which, while it

would not be the popularity of the commercial theatre, would still be one

which would join them to a progressive community. "Paid on Both Sides"

did not succeed primarily because of the obscurity of its verse and the

lack of integration of its light and serious elements. "The Dance of

Death" was more successful, but it showed a confusion of audience and a

lack of coherent action. The Dog Beneath the Skin was perhaps Auden's

most successful use of popular materials. The Ascent of F6, although we might today reject its psychology, has a great deal more depth although

it is not a "popular" play; its popular materials are more scattered

and are used mostly to characterize people negatively. Finally, On the

Frontier does not succeed because of its weak characterization, flaccid moralizing, and ultimate air of helplessness. It might be worthwhile to

speculate that the reasons for the success of The Dog Beneath the Skin (172)

and the failure of On the Frontier have more to do with external events than with the abilites of the authors. Dog was performed early in 1936, a time of great hope for liberal and left-wing forces as well as for the ideas that authors could make change by appealing to a broader community as part of a popular front. By later 1938, when Frontier was performed, that optimism was waning. The Spanish war was clearly lost, and the general feeling was that another war was inevitable. The play reflects this spirit. Likewise, Auden's views regarding human evil were not so much changing as becoming more apparent. Auden and Isherwood left the idea of an original, popular theatre to other hands. 1-73

CONCLUSION

The poetry and plays of W.H. Auden during the 1930s mark and attempt

to return to the notion of the artist, particularly the poet, as in integral

member of the community, who conveys matters of importance to it in language

that is accessible. This idea is in part a reaction against the idea of

the artist as exile which had begun with the Romantics and which was

given its first distinctively modern voice in the French poets Baudelaire,

Mallarmé, and Rimbaud, and which reached its height in the work of T.S.

Eliot in the 1920s. As we have seen, this interest in the community

was a part of the desire of a number of artists during, the 1930s -- Spender,

MacNeice, and Day Lewis are others that have been discussed — to assess

the broad movement which is generally labeled "modernism," to note its

limitations, and to make modern poetry work in the unifying of a culture

which seemed to be coming apart from within by class conflict and from

without by the threat of war.

Their desires were given additional urgency not only because of

the social conflicts of the times, but also by the postwar infusion of new mass media — particularly radio, film, popular newspapers, and popular music — which, many felt, tended to degrade language and make it a vehicle for mere escapism, and which tended to be used by the upper classes as a tool to cynically manipulate and consolidate their hold over the lower. Equally, if not more important, these artists felt the power of the new media and understood that this power worked to devalue the binding power of poetry, in fact, of literary language itself. In the .. (174)

critical and poetic writings of these poets during.the thirties, we find

a not always pleasurable recognition that what unites culture now are the

images and languages conveyed by the new media. To some extent, their

desire was to negate the effect of the media by making what they had to

offer their own.

Like the other poets mentioned, Auden was conscious of his public voice—that is,he was .conscious of his voice speaking to others, to a

"public." This is why, for example, he often turned to occasional verse - work on the death of a poet or on trips, for example -- as a platform to air views on larger issues. Even in work in which he spoke primarily of himself in the first person, such as "Letter to Lord Byron," he was con­ scious of himself first of all as a public speaker with a certain role in the community. At the same time, his musical tastes in particular meant that he had a wide range of material to draw from in the making of his poetry. Even as he criticized mass culture, he responded to it, and he was able to take the forms, techniques and images of folk and popular culture and turn them to his own uses, to use them as masks from which to express his view of the world, the neurosis of twentieth century society, and the position of the artist in that society.

The difficulty for the poet who wanted to reach this audience was to identify it. There was always the minority audience who enjoyed poetry especially modern poetry, but this was precisely the audience the writers wished to expand. There was another group, people like Auden himself: university educated, schooled and influenced by the artistic movements of the previous sixty years, generally liberal or left in politics, who felt (175)

cut off and impotent in the face of the threatening disasters of the 1930s.

There was also the industrial working class, with whom the latter group felt an affinity, at least in its alienation from society as a whole. Many also felt that this working class would be the ruling class of the future.

So when writers of the thirites felt like speaking to a larger group, this is the group they meant.

So partly because it pleased him to express his ideas through a series of masks, and partly because he wished to find a larger audience, he wrote the kind of work he did. For his poetry, particularly his light verse, he drew from a number of sources -- the popular song, the "folk song," particularly the narrative ballad and blues song, and the nursery rhyme. He also wrote polemical and the kind of conversational verse which

I have called Light Occasional Verse. The sentimental ballad material gave him an opportunity to continue his ongoing investigation into the nature of love and, more exactly, its perversions. The narrative ballad he found useful because of the universality it invokes in a form which encourages starkly dramatic presentation; and the blues form was used as a vehicle of social protest which underscored an essential feeling of fatalism. The polemical verse was written in the spirit of Burns, to castigate those classes in society Auden was irritated with at the time, and the "gossip" verse, except with less spleen. Finally, Auden's use of drama permitted him to draw from popular materials, this time for an actual audience that could be seen and heard. For his plays he drew from the techniques of musical comedy and revue as well as from native folk materials such as the mummer’s plays.

There is no doubt that much of this was successful and appropriately (176)

used. Whether it ever reached a larger audience is another question.

As we saw in Chapter III, his books of poetry sold relatively well for

an author of his "serious" reputation, and certainly his prestige was great enough so that even a work generally considered a failure, such as

On the Frontier, managed to be played in a West End theatre for a time.

But his audience could never, I think, be seen as anything larger than those who were like him, the university educated political liberals mentioned above. Even if we do not have direct evidence for this, interior evidence from some of the poems and plays suggests it. Further, since he was a man of his time, class, and education, he could not help feeling a certain suspicion toward the popular culture around him and a certain condescension toward those who shared it.

This is not too surprising, for the artifacts and people of another culture or class will almost always be an "other" to a person who does not belong to that culture or class. While most people will take these others and view them through the distorting lenses of stereotype,.the person of artistic bent will frequently make them serve his own aesthetic purposes. Thus Picasso used African masks to develop his notions of

Cubist portraiture, and Walker Evans turned his Georgia sharecroppers into the formalist arrangements of his photographs. Neither intended to create artworks for the people they drew from. Auden was doing something similar although behind some of his work of the thirties was a desire to appeal to the audience from whom he derived some of his material.

Furthermore, we might say that the very power of Auden's light work during the thirties derived in part from his ambiguous feelings about the popular culture he was trying to use. The dilemma of every modern artist is that, ideologically, he values originality of expression and tends to distrust the capabilities of ordinary language to convey what he wishes (177)

to say. These values put him in opposition to the community at large for

whom the language of everyday life and the forms of expression that use

this language are immediately comprehensible and serve as sources of in­

formation and emotional sustenance. This language is often banal and the

forms of popular culture — the sentimental ballad, the musical comedy,

the commercial, for example — are frequently formulaic and full of cliches

designed to produce instant emotional responses. The conflict between

originality and formula, between the isolated artist producing for a

specialized coterie and the artist producing for a. larger audience has

sometimes been generalized into a conflict between elite and popular

culture. This oversimplifies the issue, especially in our own day when

artists work with popular forms of expression, such as rock musicians, . cartoonists, and filmakers, have tended to see themselves as individuals exploring the limitations of their chosen media, and have even appropri­ ated techniques once assumed to be the exclusive property of the avant- garde. The fact is that the conflict is found within different artistic subcultures. Both popular singers and symphony orchestra conductors, for example, know the frustrating experience of dealing with paying audiences who only want to hear what they know and feel secure with.

But fifty years ago, when the mass media were asserting themselves, popular culture was seen as the villain by those who valued originality of expression and exploration of the possibilities of language. For Auden, confronting the dilemma had positive results: if popular culture, and the people who used it, offended his high-culture sensibilities, he responded to it in a way no other poet of his time, including those poets (178)

in the "Auden group," did. Not only did he find in folk and popular cul­ ture forms which suited his purposes, but he found an energy, a vitality there which he transferred to his light work. In the lyrics drawn from the sentimental ballads, for example, even though they implicitly satirize their sources, there is a directness which could only come from those sources. This energy is even more apparent in its urgency in the ballads, and is apparent in the most successful of his plays in the popular mode,

The Dog Beneath the Skin. In all of these works, the vitality arises in two ways: in a negative way from his awareness of the limitations of the formulas he appropriates as well as the mental and emotional limitations of those who respond to them; and in a positive way from his awareness that the limitations of the formulas are in themselves a method of channeling feeling in a novel and interesting way. This is why much of the work we have examined here, in spite of its ultimate failure to reach a (perhaps mythical) broader community of readers, was some of the most important work he did in his life. (179)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, James S. "Toward a New Social Theory of Art." New Literary History, 4 (Winter, 1973), 315-30.

Allott, Kenneth. "Auden in the Theatre." New Verse, 26-27(Nov., 1937), 17-21.

Auden, W.H. The Dyer's Hand. New York: Random House, 1962.

. "In Praise of the Brothers Grimm." New York Times, 12 Nov. 1944, Sect. 7, pp. 1, 28.

, ed. The Oxford Book of Light Verse. London: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1938.

. Poems. New York: Random House, 1934.

'Tradition and Value." The New Republic, 102 (Jan. 15, 1940), 90-91.

and Christopher Isherwood. The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts. New York: Random House, 1937.

• The D°g Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis? New York : Random House, 1935.

. On the Frontier: A Melodrama in Three Acts. London: Faber and Faber, 1938.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Litera­ ture. tran. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.

Bell, Adrian. "English Tradition and Idiom." Scrutiny, 2(June, 1933), 45-50.

Bentley, Eric. The Modern Theatre: A Study of Dramatists and Drama. London: Robert Hale, 1948.

Braunmiller, A.R. "Introduction." The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. tran. W.H. Auden and Chester Kallmann. Boston: David R. Godine, 1976.

Charques, R.D. Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution. London: Martin Sicker, 1937.

Cook, F.W. "Primordial Auden." Essays in Criticism 4(0ct., 1962), 402-12. (180)

Day Lewis, Cecil. A Hope for Poetry. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1934.

______. "Letter to a Young Revolutionary." New Country: Prose and Poetry by the Authors of New Signatures. ed Michael Roberts. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.

______. Revolution in Writing. London: Hogarth Press, 1935.

______._____ , and L.A.G. Strong, eds. A New Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920-1940. London: Methuen, 1941.

Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960.

Ellmann, Richard, and Charles Ferdelson, Jr., eds. The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Engel, Lehmann The Making of a Musical. New York: MacMillan, 1977.

Ewart, Gavin. "Audenesque." New Verse, 7(February, 1934), 21-22.

Fuller, John. A Reader's Guide to W.H. Auden. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1975.

Grose, Francis, comp. 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence. with "Modern Changes and Improvements by a Member of the Whip Club." Lon­ don: C. Chappel, 1811.

Hazard, Forrest E. "The Father Christmas Passage in 'Paid on Both Sides.'" Modern Drama, 12(Sept., 1969), 555-64.

Hoggart, Richard. Auden: An Introductory Essay. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.

Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. New York: Viking, 1976.

Isherwood, Christopher. "Some Notes on Auden's Early Poetry." New Verse, 26-27(Nov., 1937), 4-8.

Leavis, E.R. "Auden, Bottral, and Others." Scrutiny, 3(June, 1934), 70-83.

. "Joyce and the 'Revolution of the Word.'" Scrutiny, 4(Sept., 1933), 193-201.

Leavis, Q.D. "Lady Novelists and the Lower Orders." Scrutiny, 4(Sept., 1935), 111-32. (181)

MacNeice, .Louis. "Letter to W.H. Auden." New Verse, 26-27(Nov., 1937), 11-12. .

Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.

Mallarme, Stéphane. Prose, Poems, Essays, and Letters. tran. Bradford Cook. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1956.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology, Parts I and II. ed. R. Pascal. New York: International Publishers, 1947.

Mendelson, Edward, ed. The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939. New York: Random House, 1977.

Mitchell, Breon. "W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood: The 'German Influence.'" Oxford German Studies, 1(1966), 163-72.

Morris, William. The Collected Works of William Morris. 24 vols. London: Longman's, 1910-1915.

Osborne, Charles. W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Repogle, Justin. Auden's Poetry. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969.

Riddel, J.N. C. Day-Lewis. New York: Twayne, 1971.

Roberts, Michael, ed. New Country : Prose and Poetry by the Authors of New Signatures. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.

, ed. New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands. 4th ed. London: Hogarth Press, 1935.

Rolland, Romaine. The People's Theatre. tran. Barrett H. Clark. New York: Henry Holt, 1918.

Smith, Logan Pearsall. Words and Idioms. London: Constable, 1957.

Spaeth, Sigmund. A History of Popular Music in America. New York: Random House, 1948.

Spears, Monroe K. The Poetry of W.H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York: Oxford University.Press, 1963.

Spender, Stephen. The Destructive Element. London: Cape, 1938.

. The Struggle of the Modern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. (182)

Symons, Julian. The Thirties: A Dream Revolved. London: Faber and Faber, 1975 .

Wasson, Richard. "From Priest to Prometheus: Culture and Criticism in the Post-Modernist Period." Journal of Modern Literature, 3(July, 1974), 1188-202.

Watterstad, J.H. "Auden's 'It's No Use Raising a Shout'.: A New Perspec­ tive." Concerning Poetry, 2(Spring, 1970), 17-20.

Willett, John, ed. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1960.

Drama from Ibsen to Eliot. London: Chatto and Windus,

Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

Yeats, William Butler. Essays. New York: MacMillan, 1924.