W. H. Auden in Context Edited by Tony Sharpe Frontmatter More Information

Home , About the House, Edward Mendelson, Faber and Faber, The Double Man (book)

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19657-4 - W. H. Auden in Context Edited by Tony Sharpe Frontmatter More information

W. H. Auden in Context

W. H. Auden is a giant of twentieth-century English poetry whose writings demonstrate a sustained engagement with the times in which he lived. But how did the century’s shifting cultural terrain affect him and his work? Written by distinguished poets and scholars, these brief but authoritative essays offer a varied set of coor- dinates by which to chart Auden’s continuously evolving career, examining key aspects of his environmental, cultural, political, and creative contexts. Reaching beyond mere biography, these essays present Auden as the product of ongoing negotiations between him- self, his time, and posterity, exploring the enduring power of his poetry to unsettle and provoke. The collection will prove valuable for scholars, researchers, and students of English literature, cultural studies, and creative writing.

Tony Sharpe is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of critically acclaimed books on W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens. His essays on modernist writing and poetry have appeared in journals such as Critical Survey and Literature and Theology, as well as in various edited collections.

W. H. Auden in Context

edited by

Tony Sharpe Lancaster University

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521196574

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data W. H. Auden in context / [edited by] Tony Sharpe, Lancaster University, England pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-19657-4 (hardback) 1. Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907–1973 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Sharpe, Tony, 1952– editor of compilation. PR6001.U4Z 8914 2012 811′.52–dc23 2012021040

ISBN 978-0-521-19657-4 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In Memory of My Father L. W. Sharpe (1920–2010)

Contents

List of Contributors page xi Acknowledgements xvii A Note on Editions and Abbreviations xix

introduction 1 Tony Sharpe

PART I CONTEXTS OF PLACE 1. Auden’s Northerliness 13 Tony Sharpe 2. Two Cities: Berlin and New York 24 Patrick Deer 3. ideas about England 35 Stan Smith 4. ideas of America 47 Aidan Wasley 5. At Home in Italy and Austria, 1948–1973 56 Justin Quinn

PART II SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS 6. Auden and the Class System 69 Adrian Caesar 7. The Church of England: Auden’s Anglicanism 79 Tony Sharpe 8. British Homosexuality, 1920–1939 89 Gregory Woods vii

viii Contents 9. American Homosexuality, 1939–1972 99 Richard R. Bozorth 10. Auden among Women 107 Janet Montefiore 11. Auden and the American Literary World 118 Aidan Wasley 12. Atlantic Auden 128 Michael Wood

PA RT III POLITICAL, HISTORICAL, AND THEORETICAL CONTEXTS 13. Communism and Fascism in 1920s and 1930s Britain 141 Matthew Worley 14. Auden and Wars 150 Patrick Deer 15. Auden and Freud: The Psychoanalytic Text 160 John R. Boly 16. Auden’s Theology 170 Alan Jacobs 17. Auden in History 181 Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb

PART IV (i) CREATIVE CONTEXTS 18. The Body 195 Edward Mendelson 19. The Cinema 205 Keith Williams 20. 1930s British Drama 217 Steve Nicholson 21. The Documentary Moment 228 David Collard 22. Travel Writing 237 Tim Youngs

Contents ix 23. Auden and Post-war Opera 246 Michael Symmons Roberts

Part IV (ii) Precursors and Contemporaries 24. Earlier English Influences 257 Chris Jones 25. Auden and Shakespeare 266 Stephen Regan 26. Yeats 276 Michael O’Neill 27. Eliot 286 Hugh Haughton 28. Some Modernists in Early Auden 297 Gareth Reeves 29. Auden in German 306 Rainer Emig 30. Auden and Isherwood 316 James J. Berg and Chris Freeman

PART V THE ‘MOST PROFESSIONAL’ POET 31. Auden in Prose 329 Sean O’Brien 32. Auden and Little Magazines 337 Andrew Thacker 33. double Take: Auden in Collaboration 347 Richard Badenhausen 34. Auden and Prosody 359 Sean O’Brien 35. Auden’s Forms 369 Seamus Perry

Guide to Further Reading 381 Index 391

Contributors

Richard Badenhausen is Professor and Kim T. Adamson Chair at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where he also directs the Honours program. He teaches classes in the humanities, war literature, theories of place, and trauma studies and is the author of T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration (Cambridge University Press, 2005). James J. Berg is Dean of Arts and Sciences at the College of the Desert in California. He is co-editor, with Chris Freeman, of three books: the Lambda Literary Award–winning collection The Isherwood Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), Conversations with Christopher Isherwood (University Press of Mississippi, 2001), and Love, West Hollywood (Alyson Books, 2008). He also edited and introduced Isherwood on Writing (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). John R. Boly teaches modern literature and theory at Marquette University. He is the author of Reading Auden: The Returns of Caliban (Cornell University Press, 1991). Richard R. Bozorth is Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He has written on modernism and LGBT literature, and is author of Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality (Columbia University Press, 2001). Adrian Caesar was formerly Associate Professor of English at UNSW@ADFA, and is currently an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is the author of three literary-critical studies, a prize-winning non-fiction novel, and four books of poetry. His latest book of poems is High Wire (Pandanus Press, ANU, 2006). David Collard is an independent scholar based in London. He is currently researching Auden on Film, a study of all the poet’s writings

for and about the cinema. xi

xii Contributors Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University, where he focuses on war literature and culture, modernism, and contemporary British literature. He is the author of Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009) and was Guest Editor of The Ends of War, a special issue of Social Text 91 (Summer 2007). He is currently writing Deep England: Forging British Culture After Empire. Rainer Emig is Chair of English Literature and Culture at Leibniz University in Hanover, Germany. His publications include Modernism in Poetry (Pearson, 1995), W. H. Auden (Macmillan, 1999), and essays on Auden in Translation and Nation (Multilingual Matters, 2001), The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (2004), and The Oxford Book of British and Irish War Poetry (2006). Chris Freeman is co-editor, with James J. Berg, of The Isherwood Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); Conversations with Christopher Isherwood (University Press of Mississippi, 2001), and Love, West Hollywood (Alyson Books, 2008). He teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where she is associate chair of the English Department and director of the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and Workshop. She is the author of Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford University Press, 2003) and the editor of Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2007). Her current book project is entitled The Importance of Metaphysics: The Intellectual Heresies of W. H. Auden. Hugh Haughton is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the editor (with Valerie Eliot) of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, volumes 1 and 2 (Faber, 2009). Other recent publications include The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford University Press, 2007), an edition of Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (Penguin, 2003), and Second World War Poems (Faber, 2004). Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. He has published a critical edition of Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (Princeton University Press, 2011) and is currently working on an edition of For the Time Being. His most recent book

Contributors xiii is The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011). Chris Jones is the author of Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006). He teaches English at the University of St Andrews. Edward Mendelson teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden. Janet Montefiore is Professor of Twentieth Century English Literature at the University of Kent, where she has taught since 1978. Her books include Feminism and Poetry (Pandora, 1987, 1993, 2004), Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (Routledge, 1996), and Rudyard Kipling (British Council/Northcote House, 2007). Steve Nicholson is Professor of Twentieth Century Theatre and Performance and Director of Theatre in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. He has written extensively about aspects of theatre and politics in the inter-war period and also about contemporary playwrights. He is currently completing the fourth and final volume of a study of theatre censorship in Britain between 1900 and 1968, as well as a book about British theatre in the 1960s for Methuen’s new Modern British Playwriting series. Sean O’Brien’s latest book of poems, November (Picador, 2011), is a Poetry Book Society Choice; his previous collection, The Drowned Book (Picador, 2007), won the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. His recent books include, as editor, The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010) and a study of Romantic poetry’s influence on poets since 1900 (including Auden), The All-Sustaining Air (Oxford University Press, 2007; paperback 2012). He is the co-author, with Michael D. Hurley, of The Cambridge Introduction to Poetic Form (2012) and the author of two collections of poetry, The Stripped Bed (Collins Harvill, 1990) and Wheel (Arc, 2008). Seamus Perry is a Fellow of Balliol College, where he is Tutor in English Literature, and a lecturer in the Faculty of English at the

xiv Contributors University of Oxford. He has published on a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, and his 2008 Chatterton lecture to the British Academy was on Auden. Justin Quinn is Associate Professor at the University of Western Bohemia and Charles University, Prague. He has published two studies of twentieth-century American poetry and, most recently, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000. His fifth collection of poetry is Close Quarters (Gallery Press, 2011). Gareth Reeves is part-time Reader in English at Durham University. He is the author of T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (Macmillan, 1989) and T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (Harvester, 1994) and, with Michael O’Neill, of The Thirties Poetry: Auden, MacNeice, Spender (Macmillan, 1992). As well as many essays on twentieth-century English, American, and Irish poetry, he has also published two volumes of poetry, Real Stories (Carcanet, 1984) and Listening In (Carcanet, 1993). To Hell with Paradise: New and Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2012. Stephen Regan is Professor of English at Durham University. His publications include books and essays on Philip Larkin and other modern poets, including W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Louis MacNeice, and Seamus Heaney. He is the editor of Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1798–1939, and he is currently preparing a new edition of George Moore’s Esther Waters, both titles in the Oxford World’s Classics series. Michael Symmons Roberts’s poetry has won the Whitbread Poetry Award (for Corpus) and been shortlisted for the Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. As a libret- tist, working primarily with composer James MacMillan, his work has been performed around the world; The Sacrifice received the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Opera. He is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Tony Sharpe was for several years Head of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, where he still teaches. He is the author of books on T. S. Eliot (Macmillan, 1991), Vladimir Nabokov (Edward Arnold, 1991), Wallace Stevens (Palgrave, 2000), and W. H. Auden (Routledge, 2007), as well as of various essays and chapters reflecting his interest in modern poetry generally and Auden’s work in particular.

Contributors xv Stan Smith, Professor Emeritus in English at Nottingham Trent University, has published widely on modern and contemporary literature. He has edited The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (2004) and published two critical studies of the poet (Blackwell, 1985; British Council/Northcote House, 1997). Recent books include Poetry and Displacement (Liverpool University Press, 2007), Patrick Kavanagh (ed., Irish Academic Press, 2009), and, with Jennifer Birkett (eds), Right/Left/Right: Revolving Commitments, France and Britain 1929– 1950 (Cambridge Scholars, 2008). A sonnet sequence, Family Fortunes (Shoestring Press), appeared in 2008. Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth Century Literature at De Montfort University, where he is also Director of the Centre for Textual Studies. He is the author or editor of several books on modernism including The Imagist Poets (2011) and The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol.1: Britain and Ireland (2009). He is an editor of the journal Literature & History and is currently Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies. Aidan Wasley teaches British and American poetry at the University of Georgia and is the author of The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene (Princeton University Press, 2011). Keith Williams is Senior Lecturer in the English and Film pro- gramme at the University of Dundee and chairs the Scottish Word and Image Group. He is the author of several books and articles on literature and inter-mediality in the early twentieth century, including British Writers and the Media, 1930–45 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). His most recent monograph is H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool University Press, 2007), and he is currently completing a study of James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film. Michael Wood teaches at Princeton University, where he is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His most recent book is Yeats and Violence (Oxford University Press, 2010). Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His main critical books are Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry collections are We Have the Melon (1992), May I Say

xvi Contributors Nothing (1998), The District Commissioner’s Dreams (2002), Quidnunc (2007), and An Ordinary Dog (2011), all from Carcanet Press. Matthew Worley is Reader in History at the University of Reading. He is the author of several books on British political history, including Oswald Mosley and the New Party (Palgrave, 2010). Tim Youngs is Professor of English and Travel Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His books include Travellers in Africa (Manchester University Press, 1994), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (ed. with Peter Hulme, 2002), and a forthcoming multi-volume anthology of travel writing criticism, edited with Charles Forsdick. He con- tinues to edit Studies in Travel Writing, the journal he founded in 1997.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful, first of all, to contributors who believed in this project and whose work is represented here; some offered helpful behind-the- scenes advice, as did some Auden scholars who couldn’t personally par- ticipate. Lancaster University assisted with a period of leave. Ray Ryan at Cambridge University Press suggested the volume and has had to draw on reserves of patience he may not have realized he possessed in awaiting its completion; my wife, Jane, has philosophically endured the travails of one whose partner has been long immersed in typescript. The dedication gratefully remembers another who merited Auden’s tribute to his own, ‘No gentler father ever lived’.

xvii

A Note on Editions and Abbreviations

Auden’s revisions and expurgations of his own work have practical con- sequences for a book like this, as do other aspects of his complicated publication history. Although when completed the Collected Works will solve most problems of reference, having already covered dramatic and operatic work and the majority of his prose, the poetry still poses problems, with different editions sometimes offering different versions of the ‘same’ poem. Nor can the problems be simply solved by citing individual volumes of poetry as first published, because of variations between English and American versions: occasionally different pagination and in two cases different titles for the same volume Look, ( Stranger! and On This Island; The Double Man and New Year Letter). These differences per- sisted into the collected volumes Auden oversaw in his lifetime, when the Random House and Faber versions were similar but not identical. Under Edward Mendelson’s editorship, the Collected Poems issued in 1976 was revised and reset in 1991 and, further revised, was reissued to coincide with Auden’s centenary in 2007. In addition to the poems, this handsome volume contains a good deal of important material, including Auden’s earlier forewords to collected volumes and a description of the different titles he used for poems at different periods. While valuable as a record of Auden’s judgment on what he wanted his canon to include, it is the end product of processes of authorial revision not universally applauded; poems included he sometimes radically altered (usually by shortening), and poems excluded are some that readers deem indispensable: notably, ‘September 1, 1939’. If it is truthful as a historical reflection of Auden’s literary taste applied to his own poetry late in his life, in another way it falsifies the historical record by occluding the sequence and nature of his poetic output and its interactions with current events: the omission of ‘Spain’ and its modified successor ‘Spain, 1937’ suppresses an important aspect of his literary career. Although Auden’s savagest editorialism pre- dominantly affected the poetry written before or soon after his move to xix

xx A Note on Editions and Abbreviations America, what many consider to be his finest post-war poem, I‘ n Praise of Limestone’, has some significant differences in its Collected Poems version from what had appeared in Nones. The debate whether Auden’s alterations improved or damaged his poems can be noted here, but not resolved. My own preference is for the earlier versions, but the highest priority of a volume such as this must be to assist its readers, not all of whom will have easy access to a research-standard university library with complete first editions of his work. For pre-1940 poetry, references are given to The English Auden, which contains reliable versions of the earliest book publication of that period’s poems – except- ing ‘Spain’, which was printed as a pamphlet and never collected: ‘Spain’ is most easily available in Mendelson’s editions of the Selected Poems. For subsequent poetry I have not wished to impose an editorial preference on contributors who might disagree with it; whether they have chosen to use the Collected Poems (CP) or cite individual volumes I have left to them; but to help readers find quotations where individual volumes have been cited I have added page references to Collected Poems (2007). The warn- ing must be given, however, that the CP version may not be identical: in instances where two such references are given, the first is always defini- tive of source. A less urgent duality occurs in relation to the prose, where Auden’s own books of criticism, The Enchafèd Flood and The Dyer’s Hand, have now appeared in the collected edition; here I have not followed a parallel procedure of doubled reference, as this seems unnecessary.

Abbreviations AN The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter (earlier issues available in archive, accessible via the W. H. Auden Society Web site; current issues available by subscription) Ansen Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (London: Faber and Faber, 1991) AS I, AS II, AS III Auden Studies, vols. I, II, III, ed. Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, 1994, 1996) AT W. H. Auden, Another Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1940) AtH W. H. Auden, About the House (London: Faber and Faber, 1966)

A Note on Editions and Abbreviations xxi Carpenter Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1981) CCWHA The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, ed. Stan Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2004) CP 2007 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Random House, 2007). This is a further revision of the reset 1991 edition that itself revised the 1976 edition. Cunningham 1988 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford University Press, 1988) CW W. H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1970) DH W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). First published USA, 1962. DM W. H. Auden, The Double Man (New York: Random House, 1941) EA The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977) Early Auden Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981) F&A W. H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords, selected by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973) Fuller 1998 John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1998) Haffenden John Haffenden, ed., W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) HtC W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio (London: Faber and Faber, 1960) JtW W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (London: Faber and Faber, 1939) Juv Katherine Bucknell, ed., W. H. Auden Juvenilia: Poems 1922–1928, ‘expanded paperback edition’ (Princeton University Press, 2003)

xxii A Note on Editions and Abbreviations LA Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) LfI W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber and Faber, 1937) Lib W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings 1939–1973 (London: Faber and Faber; Princeton University Press, 1993) MCP J. A. Pike, Modern Canterbury Pilgrims (Oxford: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1956) N W. H. Auden, Nones (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) NYL W. H. Auden, New Year Letter (London: Faber and Faber, 1941) Plays W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Plays and Other Dramatic Writings 1928–1938, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber; Princeton University Press, 1989) Prose I W. H. Auden, Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Vol. I: 1926–1938, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber; Princeton University Press, 1996) Prose II W. H. Auden, Prose, Vol. II: 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber; Princeton University Press, 2002) Prose III W. H. Auden, Prose, Vol. III: 1948–1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber; Princeton University Press, 2008) RD-H 1995 Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1995) SP 1979 W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1979) SP 2007 W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) ‘expanded edition’ SW W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) Tribute Stephen Spender, ed., W. H. Auden: A Tribute (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975)