Books
Nest of stifled lovebirds
Jonathan Keates
Britten & Auden in the Thirties Donald Mitchell (Faber, pp. 176 £7.50).
Among the best of many good stories told about Tennyson is that concerning one of his later visits to Cambridge, when in the fullest bloom of laureate grandeur. The welcoming throng at the Senate House included the repellent figure of Oscar Browning (no relation — the detail is relevant) who finds a niche in several autobiographies as a somewhat sinister influence on the more lissom and cherubic upper-class undergraduates of the day. Never backward in coming forward where celebrities were there to hobnob with, 0. Browning thrust to the front of the crowd and, approaching the bard, made to shake his hand, crying 'I'm Browning' to which Tennyson coolly and devastatingly replied: `No you're not.'
The 'I'm Browning' syndrome is a bit like those scenes in panto (do they still go on'?) when the Dame is prevented from pulling Puss's tail by a shrill `Oh no you don't!' from the gleeful audience. There are several moments in the annals of Eng. Lit. when it comes forcibly to mind, and one of these is occasioned by the following lines: I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade . . .
This, of course, is the opening of Auden's admired and frequently anthologised 'September 1, 1939'. On certain levels (its absolute metrical assurance, for example) such admiration is well justified. It is not the expression so much as the pose, a sort of smugly-assumed despair acquired from looking at too many fin-de-siècle lithographs, and the sanctimonious kick in the teeth administered to the Thirties by one who contributed so much to their unique character, which makes us cry 'Fudge!' to it all.
This was, indeed, the same Auden who was later at pains to suppress a poem containing the lines 'History to the defeated may say alas, but cannot help or pardon'. Fear and uncertainty were never a perceptible part of the poet's makeup, but that did not deter him from capitalising on his own alertness to collective apprehensions of disaster. He ends a magnificent sonnet on Edward Lear with the simple statement 'He became a land'. Auden himself, by the same token, became a decade, in a way that others whose writing is often more irrevocably rooted in the period did not. His output after that time thus comes to seem even more extraordinary in its range and volume.
Britten, on the other hand, made no such conditioning mark. Dr Mitchell speaks somewhat vaguely of the inaccessibility of his music, and a significant factor in our appreciation of him has been that much of his early work (Peter Grimes is the terminus ad quem here) is either hardly ever performed or else has been totally put to silence. This much is true of some of his later pieces: when did you last hear 'The Prince of the Pagodas', for instance, a dazzling score undervalued perhaps even by its creator? Pious archaeology occasionally uncovers other juvenile fragments, and a kind of ei la recherche during Britten's last years gave us the doubtful benefits of a complete performance of 'Paul Bunyan', a morsel of thigh-slapping idiocy based on 'a popular American folk myth' of which no American has ever heard.
Saved by his chosen period Donald Mitchell is able politely to avoid detailed discussion of this most embarrassing product of the Auden-Britten synthesis, choosing to concentrate instead on 'Our Hunting Fathers', 'On This Island' and the documentaries such as 'Night Mail' and 'The Way to the Sea'. The first of these, a vocal suite to texts either written or chosen by the poet, is firmly embedded in its epoch, a child of its time if ever there was, with the same curiosity value as Beethoven's Ode on the Death of Joseph II or Wagner's Huldigungsmarsch. Much is nowadays made of young composers 'finding a voice', as though their earliest choice of imitative models were somehow inauthentic. For what such a consideration is worth, Britten's voice remained emphatically his own from the very beginning, and brilliantly transcended the formal caprices of this oddly fascinating, if dated work.
The author's response to the problems offered by `Our Hunting Fathers' is typical of his stance throughout these lectures, which, with their voluminous notes (often more interesting than the text they are designed to support) take an unblushinglY partisan view of their chosen subjects. We can scarcely blame Mitchell, Britten's official biographer (that dire 20th-century phenomenon) for focusing on the composer at the poet's expense. It is somehow always to be Auden's fault whenever the collaborative mechanism jams. Thus 'Our Hunting Fathers' ends 'in some confusion, perhaps because of Auden's 'private language'. An exceedingly clever set of verses from 'Paul Bunyan', plainly influenced by Cole Porter, is quoted in order to show how unsuitable some of his jyrics were for music. More obviously they were unsuited to Britten who, `Albert Herring' notwithstanding, was hardly a bundle of laughs. Though he would probably rather have died than do so, he ought to have looked at the settings of Gilbert by Sullivan, a composer whose deft touch with words was justly admired by Stravinsky. Still, Mitchell is doubtless right in taking 'On This Island' as seriously as he does in terms of its effect on Britten's subsequent development. The poems chosen are some of Auden's best – terse, vigorous and searching – and the music has a kind of knowing simplicity Which ideally complements their crispness of diction. As a first set of songs they are also the first to show a mature sense of how music can deal with poetry, and, more Significant with regard to Britten's later achievements, with English poetry.
Auden's influence on him was thus a direct and fruitful one, but Britten seems never fully to have understood what lay beyond that disconcertingly headmasterly manner he was content to adopt towards those he fundamentally respected .0neof the disappointing aspects of these lectures is that they signally fail to cast any further light on the dissolution of the friendship during the early years of the war. A logical progress would have taken us right through the association, up to the 'Bunyan' fiasco and Britten's departure for England with Pears in 1942. As it is, Mitchell prints, apparently for the first time, an 'intriguing letter from the poet to the musician. The tone is characteristically no-nonsense: 'You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself in this way i.e. to build yourself a warm nest of love (of course, when you get it, you find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable talented little boy'. Those of us who view Britten's career with slightly less awe than Dr Mitchell will not need telling that this is a pretty shrewd diagnosis of what was mainly the trouble with those hieratic rites at Aldeburgh, especially during the last years. But a stronger character than Britten's would hardly welcome an analysis given with such evident patronage. Dr Mitchell is the tenth in a distinguished roster of Eliot Memorial lecturers, including George Steiner, Dame Helen Gardner and Auden himself, whose 'Secondary Worlds' began the series. The lecture form has inevitably cramped him at moments when some sort of elaboration would have been useful, yet, this said, it seems a pity that at times he should not have been more carefully selective of his material. In the .Sound-tracks' section, for example, there is an utterly needless digression on the composer's mother. No doubt Mrs Britten was a potent force in her son's early life, but remarks like 'it is impossible not to speculate a little about her feelings about her remarkable son' reduce Mitchell's work to something on a par with 'what must have been Frau Bach's emotions as she pondered over the cradle of the infant Johann Sebastian?'
Nor are his quotations from Britten's diary especially illuminating. He cites a summary of the 1936 political situation which is wholly unworthy of note, as if it were an example of superior prescience granted to fledgling genius. That, indeed, is the trouble with all the lectures, that they are too close to their subject (Britten, not Auden, for whom Mitchell has little sympathy or understanding) to be really worthwhile. The entire topic needs the broad, dispassionate treatment which essays of this kind cannot hope to encompass.
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