The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter Number 22 ● November 2001 Editor’s Notes The cost of producing the Newsletter has increased considerably, and the Society has been lax in asking for subscription renewals. We Contents would be deeply grateful for renewals from members who have not sent payments in more than a year. Nicholas Jenkins: ”September 1, 1939” after September 11, 2001 5 Stan Smith: A Warwickshire Lad 8 Memberships and Subscriptions Andrew Epstein: Auden and the New York School Poets 19 Teresa Bruś: Polish Auden 28 Annual memberships include a subscription to the Newsletter: Mohammed Al-Sayed Dawoud: The Case of Auden Studies in Egypt 33 Individual members £ 9 $15 Edward Mendelson: A Note on Auden’s “Nursery Library” 36 Students £ 5 $8 Recent and Forthcoming Events 39 Editor’s Notes 42 Institutions £ 18 $30 Memberships and Subscriptions 42 New members of the Society and members wishing to renew should send sterling cheques or checks in US dollars payable to “The W. H. Auden Society” to Katherine Bucknell, 78 Clarendon Road, London W11 2HW. Receipts available on request. Payment may also be made by credit card through the Society’s web site at: audensociety.org/membership.html. Submissions to the Newsletter may be sent to the editor: Nadia Herman Colburn, Department of English, Columbia University, Mail Code 4927, New York NY 10027, or by e-mail to [email protected]. ISSN 0995-6095 The W. H. Auden Society Incorporated is a not-for-profit organization All writings by W. H. Auden in this number are copyright 2001 by The Estate of W. H. Auden. 42 The newly-formed Christopher Isherwood Foundation wishes to award grants to fiction writers and to scholars who wish to work with the Huntington Library’s collection of Isherwood manuscripts (which includes large holdings of Auden’s early work). For information, write to the foundation’s Executive Director, J. White, P.O. Box 650, Montrose AL 36559 (www.isherwoodfoundation.org). 41 been published in full for the first time in a special issue of the little magazine Unmuzzled Ox, with an introduction by the magazine’s editor, Michael Andre. The translation, made in 1962, was commis- “September 1, 1939” after September 11, 2001 sioned by the conductor Newell Jenkins for the Clarion Concerts se- ries, and was first performed at Town Hall, New York, on 11 Novem- “I sit in one of the dives | On Fifty-Second Street | Uncertain and ber 1965. The magazine is available from the publishers, Unmuzzled afraid | As the clever hopes expire | Of a low dishonest decade.” The Ox, 105 Hudson Street, New York NY 10013, and may be ordered drumming cadences at the start of “September 1, 1939” mark one of from booksellers. the most famous openings to a modern lyric poem in English. It is familiar not only to fanatical specialists like me—I am finishing a Donald Mitchell’s Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936, first book on the poetry of W. H. Auden, the author of these lines—but, as published in 1981, was reissued in paperback by the Boydell Press in I was recently reminded, to many people who would not ordinarily 2000. Members of the W. H. Auden Society may buy the book at 25% think of themselves as poetry-readers at all. off the $19.95 or £12.99 list price by writing to Boydell & Brewer, P.O. Poems draw their energies not only from the historical contexts Box 41026, Rochester NY 14604 (1-716-275-0419, fax 1-716-271-8778), within which they were written but from the ever-changing circum- e-mail to [email protected]. stances within which they are currently read and with which they sometimes, suddenly and disturbingly, seem to fuse. A poem can Richard C. Bozorth. Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Mean- light up the present. And the present can light up a poem. At the ings of Homosexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. moment, then, it is hard to read the date “September 1” and not to reflect that the mere addition of an extra “1” would make the title James Fenton. The Strength Of Poetry. London: Oxford University read “September 11.” My day-to-day work hasn’t really been Press; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. Includes three lec- changed substantively (at least so far . .) by the events of September tures on Auden, first printed in slightly different form in The New 11, 2001, except in the ways, psychological, economic, ethical, York Review of Books. imaginative, and cultural, that everyone’s work and life have been altered, if only ever so slightly and tangentially, by those events. Paola Marchetti. Landscapes of Meaning: From Auden to Hughes. Milano: However, I find that my thoughts about Auden’s poem have acquired I. S. U. Università Cattolica, 2001. another, unexpectedly contemporary dimension as a result of what happened a few months ago. It is, for me at least, no longer quite the Other news same poem it was. That is partly that so many of its lines and phrases articulate so A six-page manuscript of “Case-Histories,” an early group of short starkly and evocatively the look and feel of New York now as well as poems by Auden, was sold at auction by Phillips in London on 15 then: the “blind skyscrapers,” for instance, who “use | Their full June 2001. Auden submitted the twenty-three poems in the manu- height to proclaim | The strength of Collective Man,” the skyscrapers script to The Adelphi magazine in 1931, but only four were printed. that Auden returns to with an instinct for their symbolic significance Some poems in the group appeared in later publications, and others near the end of the poem when he talks about “the lie of Authority | survive in a manuscript notebook in the British Library and in a type- Whose buildings grope the sky.” The poem finds what is distinctive script also titled “Case-Histories” that Auden sent to Christopher and representative about the city in its architectural emblems of mod- Isherwood. The exact text of the poem that Auden submitted to The ernity B precisely the same emblems that, because so distinctive and Adelphi was previously unknown. The manuscript was bought by an representative, made such direly meaningful targets for the terror anonymous American collector for £14,950, and has again disap- attackers of 2001, intent on staging a symbolic assault on secularism, peared from view, but the full text can be reconstructed from other capitalism, and modern power. And after September 11, 2001 and all surviving manuscripts and will be published in the future. 40 5 those photographs of workers in boots and masks picking through hills of twisted steel and powdered concrete, who cannot now feel some strangely prophetic reverberations in lines such as those about Recent and Forthcoming Events the “unmentionable odour of death” that “Offends the September night”? Lines that in their original context had a purely figural Michael Yates meaning. But it is not only that Auden=s poem is acutely and resonantly We deeply regret to report that Michael Yates died on 28 November aware of the outer landscape in which history then as now must be 2001 at the age of 82. Michael Yates was one of the Bryanston School lived and in which tragedies must take place. (This is a subject that pupils who accompanied Auden to Iceland in 1936, and, together Auden had also tackled brilliantly a few months earlier in “Musée with his wife Marny, he remained one of Auden’s most valued des Beaux Arts.”) It is also that “September 1, 1939” gives an friends for the rest of Auden’s life. He attended the Yale School of unparalleled vivacity to the inner world of metropolitan emotions Drama in the late 1930s, was a prisoner of war in Germany during and thought patterns. And I believe it is mainly for these reasons, World War II, and worked as a theatrical designer, notably for relating to a delineation of the internal landscape, that, in the wake of Granada Television, before his retirement in the 1970s. He is survived the catastrophes in NYC, DC, and Pennsylvania, “September 1, 1939” by his wife and by his wife’s two sons by a previous marriage. Auden a poem that Auden composed in self-imposed exile in New York at dedicated his last book, Thank You, Fog!, to Michael and Marny Yates the very start of the Second World War in far-off Europe, began to be with this epigraph: discussed in the United States by people who normally wouldn’t bother themselves with such things. None of us as young The upsurge of interest was widespread and spontaneous enough as we were. So what? for me to take it as culturally significant as well as being revelatory of Friendship never ages. some essential part of the poem=s meaning. Many citizens somehow needed to borrow words from somewhere to express their feelings of New books and reprints sudden dread, their sensation of staring the unforeseen directly in the face. And it was to Auden=s writing that they often gravitated. In the A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques days after September 11, 2001 “September 1, 1939” was read out on Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Readers’ Subscription and Mid- National Public Radio, it was earnestly analyzed in the online maga- Century Book Clubs, edited with an introduction by Arthur Krystal zine Slate, it began to circulate widely in the discursive hinterland of (New York: The Free Press, 2001) reprints for the first time fifteen of the web, the newsgroups.