Copyright by Emily Catherine Bloom 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Emily Catherine Bloom Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Air-Borne Bards: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 Committee: Elizabeth Cullingford, Co-Supervisor Mia Carter, Co-Supervisor Alan W. Friedman Coleman Hutchison Robert J. Savage, Jr. Air-Borne Bards: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 by Emily Catherine Bloom, A.B.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2012 Acknowledgements Without the dedication and support of my co-supervisors Elizabeth Cullingford and Mia Carter, this dissertation would not have been possible. I thank Liz for convincing me to attend the University of Texas at Austin and then setting an extraordinary example as a writer and a scholar through her unparalleled rigor and honesty. My whole-hearted thanks go to Mia for her enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge in media studies and transnational modernisms, and for her unflagging intellectual and emotional support. Committee members Alan Friedman, Coleman Hutchison, and Robert J. Savage Jr. read numerous drafts and provided invaluable feedback along the way; I especially thank Alan for the opportunities he has provided me to publish, research, and edit on various topics related to modernist studies. Several archival institutions and individuals have graciously permitted me to quote from their works and collections. I gratefully acknowledge the BBC Written Archive at Caversham for permission to quote from their materials, the Harry Ransom Center for permission to quote from the Samuel Beckett and Elizabeth Bowen Collections, J.T. Carpenter for permission to reproduce an image from “The Cape,” and the Irish Academic Press for permission to reproduce Maurice McGonigal’s illustration of “The Curse of Cromwell.” Individuals that I would like to thank for their assistance with archival research include Louise North at the BBC Written Archive, Ike Egbetola at the British Library, Ann Mann for contributing a recording from her BBC lecture on Yeats’s broadcasts, and Gabriela Redwine at the HRC for allowing me access to the sound archives and for her insights into the challenges of archival obsolescence. To the ever-vigilant members of my dissertation groups—James Jesson, Charlotte Nunes, Alyson LaBorde, Andi Gustavson—I express appreciation for all the hours spent reading drafts and offering perceptive feedback. Further thanks go to Jason Leubner, iv Stephanie Rosen, Rachel Schneider, Hala Herbly, Molly Hardy, Matt King, Sean McCarthy, and Jean Cannon for being outstanding colleagues and friends. To Pearl Brilmyer, in particular, I owe a debt of gratitude for sticking with me from the beginning and holding me to a higher standard. I thank my parents, David and Martha Bloom, for their unwavering support of this quixotic endeavor and for setting examples of commitment and curiosity that I try my best to emulate. Finally, to Dustin Stewart: for helping bring this work to life and giving me a life beyond this work. v Air-Borne Bards, Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 Emily Catherine Bloom, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisors: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford and Mia Carter This dissertation defines and explores “radiogenic aesthetics” in late modernism that emerged alongside radio broadcasting, World War II era propaganda, censorship, and paper shortages, and the transnational networks forming in the shadow of British imperial collapse. The Anglo-Irish writers in this study—W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett—addressed a changing media environment that mapped on to the socio-cultural flux of the period following Irish Independence. Transcending the newly minted national boundaries between Ireland and England, the British Broadcasting Corporation became a locus for shaping transnational literary networks, this in spite of the nationalist rhetoric surrounding broadcasting. By analyzing broadcasts alongside print literature, I identify a circuit of influence coursing between modernism and broadcasting, rather than a unidirectional flow. This body of work, which includes drama (radio and stage), feature broadcasts, poetry, and fiction, offers a counter-narrative to literary historical theories that position modernist aesthetics as a reaction against popular mass media. Motifs of uncanny repetition—returns, echoes, and hauntings, which are far from benign—are typical of these radiogenic aesthetics and reveal tensions between orality and literacy, embodiment and disembodiment, communalism and individualism, ephemerality and permanence, and tradition and “the now.” These tensions become definitive features vi of late modernism as the self-assurance of modernism’s first practitioners gives way to troubling questions about the future of literature in the unstable media environments surrounding WWII. Adapting traditional literary forms from the novel, poem, and play for the broadcast medium and incorporating radio’s epistemologies into their literary theories, Yeats, MacNeice, Bowen, and Beckett draw attention to fundamental questions about mediation itself. In so doing, they anticipate the hypermediacy of postmodernism without, however, relinquishing the modernist pursuit of authenticity or the quest for forms capable of transcending the widening distance between author and audience. vii Table of Contents List of Illustrations................................................................................................. ix Introduction: Wireless Crossings.............................................................................1 Wireless Crossing I: Nation ...........................................................................6 Wireless Crossing II: Orality and Literacy ...................................................15 Radiogenic Aesthetics...................................................................................21 Chapter One: W.B. Yeats’s Radiogenic Poetry.....................................................32 “Never open a book of verses again”............................................................35 Stages, Pubs, and Parlors: Broadcasting Poetry............................................44 Love Poetry on Air: “Sweet Dancer”............................................................52 Broadcasts/Broadsides: “The Curse of Cromwell”.......................................63 Chapter Two: Louis MacNeice in the Echo Chamber...........................................78 “Incorrigibly Plural” .....................................................................................84 “Augur[ies] of War”: Echoes in MacNeice’s Poetry....................................90 Echoes of Freedom: BBC Propaganda .........................................................97 Echoes Remediated: The Dark Tower ........................................................102 Final Echoes................................................................................................113 Chapter Three: Elizabeth Bowen’s Spectral Radio .............................................116 Listening in “the Now” ...............................................................................120 Wireless Temporalities in A World of Love................................................134 Post-Script, Post-Radio: The Little Girls and Eva Trout ............................151 Chapter Four: Samuel Beckett’s Sound Archives ...............................................159 Beckett the Broadcaster ..............................................................................166 Voices of the Dead: All That Fall...............................................................176 The Self-Consuming Archive: Krapp’s Last Tape .....................................184 Tragi-Comedies of the Archive ..................................................................191 Coda: Sounding the Literary in the Digital Age ..................................................202 Works Cited .........................................................................................................217 viii List of Illustrations Illustration 1: “The Curse of Cromwell” by Maurice McGonigal........................69 Illustration 2: “The Cape” by J.R. Carpenter......................................................212 ix Introduction: Wireless Crossings In Autumn Sequel (1954) the Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice recounts a conversation during which he was persuaded to join the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a staff writer, or, as one of his fictionalized BBC officials describes it, to become “an air- borne bard” (388). This description suggests the connections between radio’s mass- mediated orality and ancient bardic traditions of oral poetry. These connections were common at the time: to take another example, Donald McWhinnie, Samuel Beckett’s BBC producer, also points to the bard as a forbear of the broadcaster in The Art of Radio. He describes the close affinities between radio broadcasting and the bardic arts: “like them it has to win the listener’s ear, charm it with words, melody, rhythm, pattern; it has to communicate a complex inner vision in what appear to be the simplest, most inevitable terms” (McWhinnie 42). As defined by McWhinnie, the bard provides a model of simplicity, rhythm, music, and magic, which the successful radio writer follows.