CHRIST CHURCH LIBRARY NEWSLETTER Volume 4, Issue 1 Michaelmas 2007 IN AND ABOUT THE HOUSE : Some musical musings prompted by a Christ Church poet’s centenary Commemorating W.H.Auden Wystan Auden’s centenary in 2007 has been an Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions occasion of celebrations world-wide for this to all musicians, appear and inspire: remarkable literary figure. The celebrations had Translated Daughter come down and startle special relevance for Christ Church, of which he was Composing mortals with immortal fire. a devoted member and which deeply influenced him for a lifetime. These words, taken from W.H. Auden’s Anthem for Saint Cecilia’s Day, were set to music by Benjamin Auden came up to the House in 1925 from Britten in 1942 as the Hymn to Saint Cecilia while Gresham’s School (where his first poem appeared) aboard a liner returning to Europe from America. on an open Exhibition in Natural Science. In his first Ostensibly a paean to the patron saint of music, year he read chemistry with Dr A.S. Russell as his whose feast day was also Britten’s birthday (22 Tutor. Later Russell said that Auden would not last in November), the poem is a veiled portrait of the chemistry because his essays were capable of composer: beginning like this: “Of all the elements, beryllium is the most beautiful.” In his second year he switched to I cannot grow, I have no shadow to run away from… PPE and in his final year to English, with Nevill Impetuous child with the tremendous brain… Coghill as his Tutor. Numerous undergraduates were friends for life. His poetic flair was making itself ever The poem played its part in Auden’s strategy to more apparent. After graduation he continued to persuade Britten to escape the poet’s shadow and write, whilst he maintained himself by teaching in a return to his English roots, where he would be able to number of schools in the UK. His urge to travel was confront himself and his own history. (Britten’s next deep-seated and took him far, including to Iceland, major work was the opera Peter Grimes, based on China and various parts of Europe. In 1939, he took The Borough by George Crabbe, a poet from his the journey to the USA, more likely to be with friends native Suffolk.) and for creative opportunities, than for ulterior motives. With this, the British phase of his life came Auden understood Britten better than Britten did to a close temporarily. In the USA he continued to himself. teach, took US citizenship and was conscripted in the US Army. continued on page 2 continued on page 12 THIS ISSUE Commemorating W.H. Auden Pressing Matters Missing - One archive W.C. Cotton and Lewis Carroll Provenance Research and the EPB Project What’s on – Exhibitions Detail of illustration of W.H. Auden’s The Witnesses, Famous scores revisited by G. Raverat (from The Listener, 12 July 1933) Auden also understood music. In his ‘Notes on Music Much is revealed in these words not only about the and Opera’ written in homage to Igor Stravinsky, he musicality of Auden’s poetry but also about why begins with the fundamental question, “What is many composers have found his words so amenable music about?” His answer is rich and perceptive: to musical setting. In Britten Auden recognised an “extraordinary sensitivity in relation to the English language”; Britten – a technician who was a rare match for Auden – provided apt musical responses ranging from their first collaborations at the GPO Film Unit via the opera Paul Bunyan to some wonderful songs. If you want to hear a simple but exquisitely complementary presentation of words and music, then look no further than Funeral Blues, in which the irony of Auden’s mock elegy is perfectly caught by Britten’s wicked mock blues. Auden continues to appear and inspire musicians. In June, to mark the poet’s centenary, Christ Church hosted a major conference and library exhibition. “Man’s musical imagination seems to be derived almost exclusively from his primary experiences – his direct experience of his own body, its tensions and rhythms, and his direct experience of desiring and choosing – and to have very little to do with the experiences of the outside world brought to him through his senses”. The focal event was the performance by the Cathedral Choir of a setting of Auden by the composer Robert Saxton (Fellow of Worcester). Saxton selected verses from For the Time Being, written for Britten, but which Britten never got round to setting. The result was a beautiful, evocative and sensitive reading of the words. There were even touching (unintended) echoes of Britten. It seemed entirely fitting that Auden should have been remembered in this place, in this way. After all, Auden’s own memorial service held in the Cathedral in 1973 had had, as its centrepiece, a performance of the Hymn to Saint Cecilia. Even today Wystan shows us that, like Cecilia, he can still startle many a composing mortal with immortal fire. The beginning of Auden’s Cinders, Jonathan Cross autograph manuscript, 1926 2 In practice, the pieces of type are small and it can be Pressing Matters : Learning to hard to identify a letter in mirror-image, and without great care (or practice) errors are inevitable. It is for Print in the Bodleian this reason that proofs are taken. The lines of type are confined within wooden The books in the Upper Library at Christ Church are ‘furniture’ and adjustable metal ‘quoins’ and of interest from many perspectives: as texts transferred to the printing press. responding to each other, as collections reflecting their donors’ interests and motives, and as material This is when the novice printer discovers just how objects which have survived the centuries. many mistakes have been made: letters upside down or plain wrong; badly judged spacing; and damaged The binding is the most obvious aspect of a book pieces of type, all of which must be corrected. considered as an object, but it is important to understand the physical structure of the pages inside. I have been working with early printed books for nearly a decade, but it was only this summer that I had the chance to try my hand at printing with movable type. A dozen rare books librarians assembled in the basement of the New Bodleian building where printing presses of all sizes are gathered. Our instructor, Paul Nash, gave three fascinating introductory lectures before we each chose a short text to set and print on a hand-press. Now, the act of printing has become familiar and accessible to most of us without leaving our desks. It The Bodleian owns full-height standing presses in is no longer remarkable that this newsletter can be wood and iron, but for the course it was more designed and printed within Christ Church. But using practical to use a twentieth-century table-top press. metal type to set a single page, letter by letter, proved surprisingly tricky. Each of us took an impression of our finished page, both on a single sheet to serve as a souvenir and (with guidance from Paul Nash on orientation or ‘imposition’) facing our colleagues’ printing to form a pamphlet. The final step was to dismantle the page and distribute the type back into its cases. How do we know how the hand-press was used? I am cataloguing the Earl of Orrery's library, bequeathed to Christ Church in 1731, and shelved with his books on mathematics is a copy of Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing. Published in 1683, this is a meticulously illustrated record of the techniques of printing, written by Joseph Moxon, himself a practising printer in London. It is dedicated to Bishop Fell, Dean of Christ Church, who had revitalised the business of the University Press as well as its typography. Moxon details the work of making a book by hand, in which composition and printing are just two stages, preceded by the manufacture of the ink, paper and type and completed with gathering and folding the Composition, as this is called, is in principle a printed sheets prior to their stitching and binding. repetitive process of selecting the appropriate These procedures remained unchanged in outline character from the type-cases and placing it in the between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. composing ‘stick’ (a metal tray which holds about four lines of type). 3 spite of the absence of the original materials. A few of the more precious items have been kept here, and Janet has kindly allowed me to clutter up bits of the Library with items such as the Chapter Books. All the Governing Body minutes have also been retained. Please keep sending things for the archive; there will be a box or two set aside to receive new items, which will then be placed with the returning collection next autumn. Hands-on printing felt profoundly satisfying. But beyond personal satisfaction, it helped me understand book production as a human process prone to interruption and improvisation. The ways in which a text can be corrected, and the ways in which it is impractical to alter it, illuminate the bibliographical notions of edition, impression, issue and state. I have a new respect for the printers whose handiwork fills the Library shelves – and a new sympathy for their infrequent slips. Owen Massey Early Printed Books Project Further information and photographs: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/printingclasses.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/addedentry/sets/ Enquiries from external readers have already dropped off, thanks to the notices in my e-mails and Missing : One Archive on the Library web-site, but that doesn’t mean that I am twiddling my thumbs.