Auden at Work / Edited by Bonnie Costello, Rachel Galvin
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Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin 2015 Individual chapters © Contributors 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–45292–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Auden at work / edited by Bonnie Costello, Rachel Galvin. pages cm ISBN 978–1–137–45292–4 (hardback) I. Costello, Bonnie, editor. II. Galvin, Rachel Judith, editor. PR6001.U4Z55 2015 811’.52––dc23 2015012339 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Notes on Contributors x Introduction 1 Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin 1 “Still Doing It By Hand”: Auden and the Typewriter 5 Hannah Sullivan 2 Auden’s 1939 Journal: A Wartime Writer at Work 24 Rachel Galvin 3 Vehicles of the Ordinary: W. H. Auden and Cinematic Address 49 Jonathan Foltz 4 Stages in Life’s Way: Theatres of W. H. Auden 69 Daniel Jean 5 Auden and the Art of Illustration 86 Emily Hyde 6 A Marriage of True Minds: Collaborative Creativity in the Auden–Kallman Libretti 111 Reena Sastri 7 Setting Out for “Atlantis” 133 Bonnie Costello 8 The Fallen Empire 156 Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb 9 Shakespeare’s Auden 179 Michael Wood 10 “Thinking-Intuitive Types”: Poetic Affinities in W. H. Auden and Paul Valéry 191 Lisa Goldfarb 11 Auden’s Preoccupations: Education and The Orators 216 Evan Kindley 12 Auden’s Cold War Fame 231 Justin Quinn v Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 vi Contents 13 Auden and the Work of The Age of Anxiety 250 Claire Seiler 14 “No Permission to be Idle”: W. H. Auden’s Work Ethics 275 Tony Sharpe Select Bibliography 294 Index 305 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Introduction Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin When an interviewer asked W. H. Auden near the end of his life if he ever went back and corrected his work, he replied, Oh yes, because I agree very much with Paul Valéry, who said: “A poem is never finished; it’s only abandoned.” It isn’t that one revises ideas, but one is aware that the language isn’t right. It is too vague or is unmusical. You feel “I want to tighten it up.” One can never tell how good or bad something one writes is, but what one can tell—not always at once but sooner or later—is whether a poem is authentic, that is, really written in one’s handwriting or forgery.1 The changes Auden made to poems he viewed as “forgeries” have become some of the most famous revisions in the history of twentieth-century poetry. The prime example, “September 1, 1939,” he saw as a forgery because “the rhetoric is far too inflated,” as he told his interviewer.2 But Auden also revised other, “authentic” poems, sometimes multiple times, even after they had been in print for decades. Revision was also an intricate part of his com- position process. Stephen Spender reported that Auden would save the “best lines” from his early drafts, using “lines from a rejected poem” in a new one “as though a poem were not a single experience but a mosaic held together by the consistency of an atmosphere, a rhythm, or an idea common to all its parts.”3 Writing, for him, was ongoing work that reflected the turning of mind and circumstance—and all his scraps and drafts were fair game. Auden’s restless revision at every stage of his career has received less critical attention than his shifts with regard to religion and politics. One of the aims of the essays collected here is to delve into the trove of Auden’s papers—his drafts, notes, correspondence, diaries, incidental reviews, and talks—for what they can tell us about his writing process. In so doing, the volume draws attention to Auden’s artistic practice: his rigorous discipline, his self-critical imagination, his active engagement with everything he read, his compulsion to transform his work, and his constant reflection on the 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 2 Auden at Work nature of creativity. Genetic criticism (critique génétique) provides an apt framework, in that it treats the published text as part of an unfolding pro- cess of composition, rather than as a terminal result of authorial intention. It seeks to offer a dynamic sense of the author’s lived experience and writing’s historical context. It is an approach that emphasizes “movement, action, creative gesture, solidified ephemera”4 and aims to reconstruct the “the chain of events in a writing process.”5 Valéry once wrote that literary composition can be considered “as a dance, as fencing, as the construction of acts and expectations,”6 and texts might thus be compared to “the footprints on the ground after a dance is over,” as the editors of Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes write.7 In this spirit, Auden at Work takes up Auden’s unpublished and unexplored archival material (the documents that preceded and surrounded his texts, the avant-texte) to understand the nature of his writing and his formal craft. Auden was also continually revising his ideas about the role and function of poetry. In a notebook he kept from about 1945, he jotted down a series of metaphors for poetry. He begins: “A poem or a novel is a gratuitous not a use- ful object like a lathe or an automobile. […] nor a consumer’s good offered for consumption, like a tin of soup, which once it has been eaten and so depleted leaves no permanent influence.”8 The image of the automobile seems to pay homage to the venerable roots of the term “metaphor,” to carry, transfer, or transport—so central to poetry—but Auden casts it aside. After crossing out several phrases, he decides that a poem or novel (“if it has any merit”) is actu- ally a “useful object” like a lathe. After all, the poet “designs it for human pur- poses which he knows in advance.” Also, “it is intended to endure—to be read any number of times by any number of people, as a lathe is intended to be used any number of times.” The poem is a tool here, not a finished product, and the reader uses it to make his own meaning and pleasure. It may sharpen or even shape the mind of its reader. But maybe a poem is like a can of soup after all, Auden continues: “On the other hand it is like a new tin of soup and unlike a lathe, in that the author cannot know his public in advance.” Ultimately, he is not really interested in deciding the issue—a poem or novel is all of these things, and none of them. But together, these comparisons suggest that poetry is something everyday and useful; they also associate poetry with process, and writing with exploration. The usefulness (and changeability) of poets and poetry are themes that emerge in this volume, as our contributors take a range of approaches to the idea of Auden “at work.” As Tony Sharpe shows, Auden thought a great deal about the nature of work in its technical and moral dimensions. Several essays consider the work Auden did to make a living—as journalist, teacher, reviewer, and interviewer—in conjunction with his literary practice. Evan Kindley explores how Auden’s experience as a student and then as a teacher shaped his representation of poetic and social authority. Justin Quinn shows that while we may think of Auden’s fame as a consequence of his creative Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–45292–4 Introduction 3 work, it also bore an influence on it, shaping his rhetorical stance and sub- ject matter during the Cold War era. Auden’s imagination thrived on dialogue with other writers. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb demonstrates how Auden worked out his ideas about history and his differences from poets of reverie like Baudelaire and Yeats, and propagandists of empire like Kipling, in his radio plays, poems, and reviews.