Home | Sitemap | Books | Poems | Recordings | News | Notes | Criticism | Links | Newsletter | Archives | Members | Copyright | Search

Newsletter 18 (September 1998)



September 1998

The W. H. Auden Society

NEWSLETTER 18


Auden Theatre: Gresham's School, Holt

The names of two Gresham's boys whom Auden admired can be found carved with others on a board hanging over the piano in the hall at Farfield House, where Auden boarded at his public school. T. H. Wintringham was a captain of prefects in Farfield House in 1914; T. O. Garland was a captain of prefects there in 1920. To Tom Garland, whom Auden knew while at Gresham's, Auden later gave a draft notebook he had begun using not long after leaving Oxford; an autograph selection of Auden's schoolboy verse was recently found among the papers of Tom Wintringham, whom Auden may have met, possibly after leaving Gresham's. In youth, Auden must often have gazed upon their names on the wall (and indeed may have played the piano, though not the present one, in that very room).

Nowadays, pupils at Gresham's gaze at Auden's name. For the walls of the Big School Hall are lined with wooden panels spelling out in gold the names of old boys (and since the 1970s, old girls) who have achieved success (or notoriety) upon leaving the school: John Saltmarsh, Lennox Berkeley, Lord Reith, Benjamin Britten, Donald McLean, Stephen Spender, John Lanchester, and many others, with some names appearing over and over again as further heights were scaled. For the year 1925, W. H. Auden and Michael Spender are listed together, both going off to Oxford with Exhibitions in Natural Science. A few years later Spender appears again, having achieved a First Class Honours Degree; Auden, of course, is not listed for that year. But in 1937 he reappears with a King's Gold Medal for Poetry, and then, in 1956 as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

Thus the walls of this beautiful room, where students now often sit exams, serve as a perpetual results table in a kind of academic superleague. They also provide a miniature history of the school's contribution to human society and offer tribute to youthful potential fulfilled - counterbalancing the darker memorials listing the school's war dead on the walls of the chapel. Presumably the message to the students is: "Your name could be among these. Try". And indeed the panelled walls of Big School Hall are still half empty.

School, as Auden well knew, is a culture of prize giving. In the same hall in Big School hang portraits of old headmasters. J. R. Eccles, Auden's headmaster, is pictured behind piles of books with little slips of paper stuck in them - preparing to give out the academic prizes at Speech Day. The biggest prize of all is having a school building named after you. Benjamin Britten has a boarding house named after him, and now Auden has something even more unique and more uniquely suited to him: a theatre.

It is a high tech affair - exposed steel beams, padded seats, one entire wall of glass - aimed not just at the school, but at the whole community, something Auden would probably have liked. The theatre seats 300. It can be used for music as well as drama and includes teaching rooms, rehearsal spaces, and a lobby large enough for small concerts or readings. The school and its friends worked hard to raise the £1.6 million for the project, and the theatre took a year to construct. It was formally opened on June 25 by the Duke of Edinburgh, who took the opportunity to give out still more prizes to the many Gresham's students who have this year won Gold Medals in his award scheme.

On the opening day, I abandoned the formal proceedings to wander through the school woods with an English master, John Rayner, who for years has been accumulating knowledge about Auden at Gresham's. He took me to the outdoor amphitheatre (still in use) where summer theatricals were performed in Auden's day, and there, with a showman's timing, he produced a photograph of Auden, in full costume including a beard, acting the part of Shakespeare's Caliban on the very spot where we stood. Then he walked me to the nearby school pond - small, shallow, heavily overgrown - a sludgy but secure haven from which to retrieve rejected poems.

Auden was happy at Gresham's partly because he was left alone and allowed to do as he liked. Although the school has now proudly claimed him through the name of its new theatre, he still remains outside the school community and does not seem to live in school tradition. The June 25 opening ceremony took nothing from Auden except his name. Not a poem by him was mentioned, not a line from his plays performed, not one of his Britten songs sung. Surely the occasion called for a celebration of Auden's genius? As an adolescent he wrote a number of poems referring to the school and to nearby places; a few might have been hung up on the walls in poster size with photographs by present day students. Why not even, perhaps, a dramatic reading of "Address for a Prize Day" from The Orators? Auden was subversive of conventional school values, and the students who use the theatre named after him ought to know this. Probably they would learn a great deal from a comparison of their own school experience with the attitudes evoked by his poetry. Very few people I met at Gresham's actually knew much about Auden, and they seemed strangely reluctant to talk about him. Are they afraid of him?

Let's hope that in the future the lucky proprietors of the new Auden Theatre will find opportunities to read and perform Auden's work and to sponsor throughout the community a genuine appreciation and understanding of the achievement for which they have already awarded him so magnificent a prize. After all, Auden is not the only one to benefit from the unusual education he received; anyone who knows his work benefits.

KATHERINE BUCKNELL

Katherine Bucknell edited W. H. Auden's Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. She is now working on Christopher Isherwood's American diaries, of which the first volume was published in 1996.


Pavel Tchelitchew and "Adam's Grave"

Auden's "Vespers" (written probably in 1954) in the sequence "Horae Canonicae" opens with this verse paragraph:

This hill is not Auden's invention. It was suggested by a painting made in 1940 by Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957), whom Auden knew through Lincoln Kirstein, a close friend of both poet and painter. The painting, in oil on canvas, is titled "Fata Morgana (Derby Hill Theme, Summer)." Fata Morgana is the name of a fairy in various chivalric legends (known in the Arthurian cycle as Morgan le Fay), and later took on the secondary meaning "mirage."

Undisplayed Graphic

(The original canvas measures 20.75 x 25 5 inches. A color reproduction may be viewed on the Society's website, www.audensociety.org.)

Tchelitchew's painting corresponds closely but not precisely to the poem. Auden, not Tchelitchew, seems to have identified the two figures with Adam and Eve and added the detail that Adam's head is turned in the Utopian direction of the west. Auden has the male figure's right arm resting on the female figure's "haunch"; Tchelitchew has the male figure's left arm resting on the female figure's thigh.

Auden probably saw "Fata Morgana" either in Tchelitchew's studio or in the collection of Ruth Ford, where the painting is now. It seems to have been reproduced only after the poem was written: first in Parker Tyler's The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, a biography (New York: Fleet, 1957), then in Lincoln Kirstein's Tchelitchev (Santa Fe: Twelvetrees, 1994).

EDWARD MENDELSON


Peggy Garland, 1903-1998

"For Peggy Garland someone real in every feature..."

Auden came to think that "Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament" should not be republished after appearing in Letters From Iceland; it was "excessively private". Typifying his concern was his "bequest" to Peggy Garland, whom he first met through her husband, Tom Garland, once a fellow schoolboy of Auden's at Gresham's. Auden was part of a relatively small coterie of friends and acquaintances who knew Peggy for the accomplished portrait sculptor she was; and who later discovered her poetic ability also. This group alone would have appreciated the aptness of Auden's bequest.

I did not meet Peggy until she was ninety-three. Last year, I visited her twice at her house in Eynsham, Oxfordshire, whilst arranging her contribution to Newsletter No. 16 ("Peggy Garland's Memories of Auden"). My first attempt to draft this article, after listening to her reminiscences for a couple of hours, met short shrift. Within hours of receiving my draft, she was on the phone, pointing out the "23 errors" in my effort; she eventually typed out her own recollections. But I had plenty of time to observe at first hand her direct, even confrontational (though always good-natured) manner, which had often in her life gained her the reputation for being out-spoken and provocative.

Peggy Garland, née Withycombe, was born and brought up in Suffolk, but spent much of her youth in South Africa. After studying at the Slade under Henry Tonks - where her contemporaries included William Coldstream and Robert Medley - she spent several years living in and visiting South Africa, teaching in a Cape Town art school and producing sculpture. It was then that she worked on the native portrait heads, mostly in stone and bronze, that represent her best-known work.

She met and married Tom Garland in the Thirties (he was the ship's doctor on a vessel returning from the Cape). They moved in a left-wing intellectual circle which included Auden (see her article in Newsletter No. 16 for more details) in the Thirties. In 1947, Tom was offered a government medical position in Wellington, New Zealand and the family - now including six children - emigrated there. Peggy returned to the England in 1961 after her marriage broke up, but during her time in New Zealand she became a published poet and something of a public figure - albeit controversial - as a journalist and broadcaster. She also got to know her cousin, Patrick White, very well (his novel The Solid Mandala contains the character, Arthur Brown, based on her youngest son, Philip, who was born brain-damaged).

After returning to England, Peggy lived with Philip in the cottage in Eynsham, and after his death remained there. Increasingly she painted rather than worked in stone as the latter became physically more difficult for her. But she remained mentally alert and feisty - as I found out myself - right up until her death on April 17.

MICHAEL KILBY


Book Reviews

John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. 613pp. £30.

In 1970 John Fuller wrote A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden, during the poet's lifetime, which sought to elucidate and explain Auden's poetry, and to trace the source of many of his allusions. More than a quarter of a century later, this work is still of prime importance to Auden scholars: dog-eared copies still come on sale in Blackwell's second-hand department at the end of each academic year. Future undergraduates and lovers of Auden (of his work, his work) need no longer suffer the irritation of reading Fuller's masterly expositions through the marginalia of countless previous undergraduates. Fuller's Commentary, published in June 1998, expands upon his Reader's Guide and is more inclusive (in 1970, Auden was still writing poems and since his death in 1973 many more of his earlier poems have reached print). Above all, this new book makes available the fruits of a lifetime's scholarship to a wider and - with Auden's star firmly in the ascendancy again - more enthusiastic audience.

In his Foreword to the Commentary, Fuller says that he has "attempted to say something useful about every original poem, play or libretto of [Auden's] written in English that has so far reached print" - except for most of Auden's juvenilia, because this had already been edited and published by Katherine Bucknell. "For every separate work by Auden", Fuller writes "I encapsulate the publishing history, paraphrase difficult passages, explain allusions, point out interesting variants (including material abandoned in drafts), identify sources and influences, look at the verse form and offer critical interpretation". In doing so, there is already (and undoubtedly will be more) duplication with Edward Mendelson's textual notes to the definitive edition of Auden's works. But few people will be able to access the definitive edition (when it is complete) except through central libraries; Fuller's book can be owned by us all. And when both works are available it will be very tempting to compare the comments of the two scholars regarding Auden's sources, variants and allusions.

Fuller's comments on the poems are presented chronologically by publication date of the individual collections that Auden published and are treated under the first line of each poem. The poems can also be cross-referenced by title(s) - if Auden ever titled them - through a title and first line index. It is tempting to compare the Reader's Guide and the Commentary in detail to show the immense amount of new knowledge that has come to light in the intervening generation. The title of the charade "Paid on Both Sides" is recognised as being effectively a quotation from Beowulf. Of Auden's important poem from his Berlin days, later titled "1929" (this cannot be cross-referenced, appearing only by its first line "It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens"), Fuller has re-thought his earlier comments on the fourth section, no longer seeing the still-obscure "lolling bridegroom" as a periphrasis for the dead Christ, though still seeing in this "Easter" poem both a spiritual and sexual framework. The second ode in The Orators is now included in the Commentary (during Auden's lifetime it was fitting to omit commentary on poems Auden himself had excluded from his canon). The precursors to Auden's first collaborative play (with Isherwood), The Dog Beneath the Skin - The Enemies of a Bishop, The Fronny, The Chase - are discussed and analysed, and an exhaustive list provided of all known examples of Auden's cannibalising of material from the uncompleted poem "In the year of my youth..." for both The Dog Beneath the Skin and other poems.

Commentary on Auden's important sestina "Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys" (Paysage Moralisé) expands on the importance of the symbolic key words, especially "sorrow" and "water", and on the importance of Sidney's sestinas in the design of Auden's own poem. The love poems from Look, Stranger! are clearly explicated, especially "The Earth turns over, our side feels the cold" and "Easily my dear, you move, easily your head" (better known as "A Bride in the 30s"). Fuller is reticent to identify the object of Auden's affection in these and other contemporary poems, but careful reading of the commentary here and in the section relating to Letters from Iceland may reward the amateur detective!

Letters from Iceland is rendered more interesting to the modern reader by detailed explication of all the references, direct and veiled, in "Letter to Lord Byron" and in "Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament". It is intriguing to compare Fuller's comments concerning the latter poem especially with the textual notes compiled by Mendelson and Richard Davenport-Hines in W. H. Auden: Prose 1926-1938. The bequest to Randolph Churchill of un bel pezzo equates to "a pretty little piece" in Mendelson and "a well-endowed man" in Fuller. Poor Compton-Mackenzie is a "miscellaneous writer" in the former but Fuller elevates him to a novelist. Peggy Garland's bequest would be clarified if the Commentary reminded us that she was a sculptor; mention that Robert Graves and Laura Riding were living on Mallorca hardly explains the bequest to them of the Isle of Wight because "An Italian island is no good place to write", which remains a confusing reference.

In Journey to a War both the sonnets and Auden's "woozy" verse commentary are summarised and explicated - with literary references exposed - in an admirably abridged manner. One can read the original and refer to the Commentary for difficult points without losing the thread of Auden's message. I recommend reading Fuller's summarisation before re-reading "Spain" ("Yesterday all the past. The language of size"). The poems of Auden's Brussels period fairly bristle with on-the-spot research. "Musée des Beaux Arts" or "About suffering they were never wrong", Auden's much-anthologised poem that he wrote after viewing the Breugel scenes in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts explains which paintings Auden took his inspiration from (he was himself confused later on). To take minor issue with John Fuller: I am not clear why the poem suggests that the ship which sails on regardless is "setting out on a quest" rather than heading for harbour as it appears in the painting. But this is a picayune point.

And so the marvellous Commentary continues, through Auden's emigration and "Part II" of his career. Commenting on The Double Man, Fuller clarifies perfectly to me (in a way I was incapable of working out for myself) the difficulty I have encountered in attempting to enjoy this long poem:

The octosyllabic couplet is perhaps just too narrow for discursive verse without descending into quaintness or whimsy...and thus in order to be serious appears to be continually pushing further and further away the decisive statement . . . Auden's natural critical categorising and qualifying accentuates this effect of postponing the decisive statement, and so do the "Notes". The reader turns to the back, as if to find the answer, but usually finds an extension to the problem.

Fuller is at his best (and most needed) in his explication of some of Auden's later and denser poems. "In Praise of Limestone" or "If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones" to use its cumbersome first line treatment in Commentary, is one of these. Fuller's explication of the labyrinthine threads of this poem is very helpful, as are his occasional "stepping-back" sentences, like "At the heart of the poem is praise of moderation". "One Circumlocution" had been one too many for me until I read the Commentary. I would never have spotted the dichotomous conclusions in "Hammerfest" and "Iceland Revisited", written in 1964, and in "Journey to Iceland", written in 1936 but revised contemporaneously with the former poems, if Fuller had not made the connection.

On just a very few occasions I felt that Commentary was needlessly terse, deferring explanation like the "Notes" to "New Year Letter". Auden's poem "At peace under this mandarin sleep, Lucina", an epitaph to one of his cats, is an englyn, according to the Commentary. I didn't know the word, nor could I find it except with a magnifying glass in the Compact Edition of the OED (in Welsh poetry, a quatrain of a certain metrical structure). "Sessile, unseeing" (p. 547) is a poem whose title one only understands if one remembers the explanation of "sessile" on page 62 in relation to "1929". Here one is directed to "the late poem `Possible?' ", which does not exist in the Commentary. (Could this be a misprint for "Progress?", Auden's title for "Sessile, unseeing"?)

Ignore these cavils. Buy this book. Your enjoyment of Auden's poetry will greatly increase.

MICHAEL KILBY

Marsha Bryant, Auden and Documentary in the 1930s. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1998. 208 pp., $35.00.

Two reviews of this book have been received. Excerpts from both are included below.

Marsha Bryant contributes to the abundance of scholarship that defends Auden as a social poet. Drawing careful lines between her study and previous "traditional influence" studies that offer only a "one-way dynamic" of interpreting the poet in light of artistic movements, Bryant offers a way of reading "Auden and documentary through one another", thus offering something "new" and "larger" than previous studies. Citing her indebtedness to cultural studies, to the act of locating "the sources of meaning not in individual reason or subjectivity, but in social relations, communication, cultural politics", Bryant explains that "Instead of continuing the standard debates about Auden's individual politics, I am more interested in examining the politics of Thirties representations". It is the difficulties of representations themselves that she ponders in this regard, the difficulties of documenting (itself a political act) the individual laborer or war refugee as a type while at the same time speaking or acting on the individual person's behalf.

In a text interspersed with thirty-three photographs taken by Auden, Bryant's six chapters are: "Introduction: The Auden Generation Meets the Documentary Decade"; "Documentary and Masculinity: Auden and `the Worker' of Industrial Britain"; "Documentary and Modernism: Public Collage in Letters from Iceland"; "Documentary and Cultural Memory: Spain, The Spanish Earth, and Capa's Falling Soldier"; "Documentary Dilemmas: Shifting Fronts in Journey to a War"; "Afterword: "I Am Not a Camera". The chapter titles themselves give a clue to Bryant's attempt to read the history behind the literature. In light of this focus, Bryant's claim that she is examining "actual" rather than "textual" events seems curiously blind to the textual events in the titles, for the relationship between history and aesthetics there speaks for the recursively interwoven relationship between actual and textual events.

A closer look at the chapter "Documentary and Modernism: Public Collage in Letters from Iceland" reflects this trend; the subtitles read "Documentary Vision in Letters from Iceland"; "Decentering the Documentary Observer and Viewer"; "Reinventing Modernist collage" and "Poetic Parables of Alternative Vision". As the language in such titles further reveals, decentering and reinventing Auden's poetry and the 1930s comes from Bryant seeing the Modernist period through the (aesthetic, deconstructive) lenses of her postmodern criticism. Thus she writes:

In Letters from Iceland Auden often counters documentary's privileged gaze by blurring the line between observer and observed. He employs two strategies in decentering documentary authority - exposing the observer and dislocating the viewer. Each strategy employs modernist fragmentation in a more populist style. His first method appears in the odd chapter, "Sheaves from Sagaland," a compilation of quotations from travel books about Iceland. Many of the travellers that Auden cites do not allow a counterperspective from the Icelanders; they subjugate native people and customs to their own sensibility. Auden subverts such appropriating vision by arranging the quotations under his own headings. His strategy becomes a political act as he exposes the travellers' judgments of Iceland as unintended self-portraits.

The ideas of blurring the line between observer and observed, decentering, dislocating, subverting, appropriating and exposing, demonstrate the aesthetics of Bryant's deconstruction. There are obvious strengths in her approach. She brings to Auden studies not only a working knowledge of photography and film but also an abundance of biographical details of Auden's experiences as a man, a homosexual, and a writer in the 1930s. In her chapter on documentary and masculinity, Bryant investigates other factors besides class that were responsible for the "social instability" of the age: namely "the social act of `being a man' " that confronted writers such as Auden with situations that were "less scripted" than those of their "fathers and older brothers".

In all of these investigations, Bryant shows her strength as a deconstructionist, and this strength becomes the ironic source of her own entrapment in trying to document Auden. Thus Bryant observes, continuing from the passage quoted above, that Auden's section titled "The Natives": "tells as much about the observers as about its ostensible subject", that is, in providing subtitles that "reframe" the quotations that he provides from Sir George MacKenzie's Travels in Iceland (1812), Auden commits a political act. For example, Auden puts the title "Concerning their lack of education" over MacKenzie's observation that "It is not uncommon in Iceland for people of all ranks, ages, and sexes to sleep in the same apartment. Their notions of decency are unavoidably not very refined; but we had sufficient proof that the instances of this which we witnessed proceeded from ignorance, and expressed nothing but perfect innocence." Bryant then argues that the politics behind Auden's title criticise MacKenzie:

Although he purports to assess Icelandic values, McKenzie [sic] inadvertently comments on his own - revealing upper-class British ideology to be repressive and self-righteous. His narrowly focused, aggressive gaze creates such hierarchical oppositions as decent and indecent, sophisticated and ignorant, English and Icelandic.

Of course MacKenzie's observations reveal certain cultural traits in his thinking; that is the nature of language. Bryant, however, does not see that her observations about MacKenzie inadvertently tell us about her own aggressive gaze. In this respect she overlooks the playfulness in Auden's subtitle that draws attention to the supposed ineptitude of the one writing such a title having read such an entry. In her attempt to document Auden (to reduce his texts to their abstract and/or political ideas), Bryant forgets the dual spirit of both playfulness and seriousness in which Auden wrote Letters from Iceland. As he declared, in retrospect, in the "Foreword" to what would be his 1967 edition:

Rereading a book written half a lifetime ago has been an odd experience, and what readers under thirty will make of it I cannot imagine. Though written in a "holiday" spirit, its authors [Auden and Louis MacNeice] were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - worldwide unemployment, Hitler growing every day more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.

JO-ANNE CAPPELUTI

Jo-Anne Cappeluti is a Lecturer at California State University, Fullerton.

Marsha Bryant's wonderfully lucid Auden and Documentary in the 1930s invites a cultural dialogue across decades. She examines the politics and crises of representations of the "low and dishonest decade" by locating "the sources of meaning not in individual reason or subjectivity, but in social relations, communication, cultural politics". The assumption of Auden's unquestionably defining position of the Thirties spokesman and his use of documentary ("our centuries' principal discourse of reality") serve Bryant as a key to reread a network of multiple narratives. In the successive chapters of this book they cover the discursive instability of documentary, its framing and subversion, masculinities, modernism, cultural memory and intervention.

Bryant surrounds herself with seemingly valid master plots of Auden's social engagement and his contribution to the decade. She acknowledges their half-satisfying fragmentation only to shift perspectives to accommodate a different polyvocal reading. This democratic critical interaction incorporates an impressive body of Auden's texts: cinepoems, carefully arranged photo images, and photo texts stretching from progressive forms of documentary - as in Coal Face - to those like Journey to a War which destroyed documentary authoritative standing and revealed its inadequacy and superficiality. It is a pleasant surprise to participate in the cultural interrogation with which Bryant challenges the discourse on Auden and not feel the usual venom of many texts indebted to cultural studies.

The title of Bryant's book suggests a connection between the individual and a mode of representation emerging in British culture in the Thirties. It promises to be an uneasy pairing to handle. Yet Bryant succeeds in persuading us to the contrary. The relationship between Auden and documentary proved an alternative if not subversive affair which unveiled the working of the politics of representation uneasily mediating between oppositions of private and public, body and mind, observer and observed. And it was Auden who helped to "shape[], reflect[] and interrogate[] documentary representation, not only through his film work, but also through its poetry, essays, dispatches, photographs, and documentary travelogues". Not surprisingly in this male-dominated decade, these texts came to expose the poet's - and his fellow British travelling companions' - insecurities and contradictory attitudes towards manliness.

The author's handling of gender, class and nationality constructions in the decade is enriched by perspectives from the main contributors to the British documentary film movement. Its roots in promoting "industrial subject matter", its dedication to social problems and its stressing of artistic commitments as well as masculine optics defined the character of British documentary representation in the decade. Its dynamics operated on competing grounds with narrative fictional cinema. Thus the story of the exclusively male production of documentaries intertwines with the creation of a strong narrative of conflicting masculinities with Auden as both subject and object of its repositioning images.

THERESA BRUS

Theresa Brus is a Polish scholar and academic. She is currently working on her PhD thesis on Auden's light verse and teaching at the Department of English at Wroclaw University.


Notes and Queries

San Saturnino

"Sext" names three saints, "St Phocas, St Barbara / San Saturnino," who are evidently patrons of specific crafts or craft guilds. Phocas is a patron of sailors, Barbara of artillery-makers. Can anyone tell me what craft San Saturnino is patron of? A few saints named Saturnino or Saturninus are listed in standard sources; one is patron of the city of Pamplona, another of the city of Cagliari (a perhaps more likely candidate), but neither of these seems to be a patron of a craft.

EDWARD MENDELSON

Department of English, Mail Stop 4927,
Columbia University, New York NY 10027


Editor's Notes

This will be the last Newsletter that I will edit. I have very much enjoyed the last three years - during which time I have edited six issues. Nadia Herman Colburn will take over later this year; in the interim, contributions may be sent to Professor Edward Mendelson, Department of English, Mail Stop 4927, Columbia University, New York NY 10027.

Macmillan Press will be publishing Auden and Isherwood, The Berlin Years in the next month or so. This 212 page book is written by Norman Page, a Society member. It will be published at £20 but members in Europe can obtain a copy for £15 if they write direct, quoting their Society membership, to: Karen Brett, Macmillan Press, FREEPOST, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6ZY. Members in other continents should contact the same address to find out how they can obtain a publisher's discount.

For those members like myself who are unfamiliar with modern technology, I have reproduced the listing of new and forthcoming books from the W. H. Auden Society's website (www.audensociety.org) which, with some modifications made for suitability to the print medium, reads as follows:

New and forthcoming books

Pascal Aquien. W. H. Auden: de l'Eden perdu au jardin des mots. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996; ISBN 2-7384-4683-3. (This book seems to be out of print. Readers outside France may attempt to order it by a link on the Society's web page to an online bookselling service.)

Cicero Bruce. W. H. Auden's Moral Imagination. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998.

Marsha Bryant. Auden and Documentary in the 1930s. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997; ISBN 0-8139-1756-5. (This book is now available.)

John Fuller. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. London: Faber and Faber, 1998; ISBN 0-571-19268-8. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. (Completely rewritten and greatly expanded from the same author's A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden. Both editions are now available.)

Alan Jacobs. What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, July 1998; ISBN 1-55728-503-9. (This book is now available.)

David Garrett Izzo. Aldous Huxley and W. H. Auden: On Language. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1998; ISBN 0-933951-80-9. (This book is now available.)

Edward Mendelson. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; London: Faber and Faber, early 1999.

Norman Page. Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years. London: Macmillan, September 1998; ISBN 0-333-72022-9. New York: St. Martin's Press, September 1998; ISBN 0-312-21173-2. (The Macmillan edition is now available.)

Stan Smith. W. H. Auden. Plymouth: Northcote House, in association with the British Council, 1997 (Writers and Their Work); ISBN 0-7463-0736-5.

"Rereading Auden" on BBC Radio 3

During the week of 28 September 1998, BBC Radio 3 broadcast "Rereading Auden," five brief talks in the "Postscripts" series. The speakers were Katherine Bucknell, Peter Scupham, George Szirtes, Edward Mendelson, and Ian Sansom,with Auden's poems read by actors.

Auden on the web site of the Academy of American Poets

A dozen poems by Auden and a brief essay about his work may be found on the web site of the Academy of American Poets. These pages include a recording of Auden reading "On the Circuit."

The Auden Museum in Austria

The study in Auden's house in Kirchstetten, Austria, has been converted into a public museum. Travel directions and a photograph have been posted on the Internet by the Austrian Government.


Memberships and Subscriptions

Annual subscriptions are as follows:

Past issues of the Newsletter are available, apply to the editor.

New members (and members wishing to renew) should send checks (cheques) - payable to "W. H. Auden Society" - to Katherine Bucknell, 78 Clarendon Road, London W11 2HW.
Receipts on request.

All writings by W. H. Auden Copyright 1998 by The Estate of W. H. Auden.


Return to home page or to top of this page or to general contents page.