Britten, Auden and ‘otherness’

Abstract

I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are: they'll have me whipp'd for speaking true, thou'lt have me whipp'd for lying; and sometimes I am whipp'd for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o'thing than a fool... King Lear , Act i scene 4 In late September 1938 – in the aftermath of the Anschluss and the German invasion of Austria, and in the fool's-gold glow of the Munich conference – The Times published a delightfully pompous editorial: At moments like this it is especially fitting that we should pay homage to poets – not for their own sakes (they are sufficiently blessed in ‘their magic robes, their burning crown’), but for the sake of that clearer vision which their eyes, superimposed on our own failing sight, can restore to us. Less than two years later, with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood discovering a brave new American way of life, an epigram was printed in the Spectator (its author rumoured to be the Dean of St Paul's): ‘This Europe stinks’, you cried – swift to desert Your stricken country in her distress. You may not care, but still I will assert Since you have left us, here the stink is less. This short journey from the public's conscience to its whipping boy of course reflects the change in Britain's and Auden's domestic circumstances; yet it also delineates a public conception of the poet's role in society. This was a relatively new phenomenon – one shaped on the Somme and at Ypres but ultimately refined in the politically turbulent 1930s. Moreover, this public delineation of role came from both sides of the political debate: The Times was the Establishment newspaper, while the Spectator – not yet the right-wing zoo it would delight in being fifty years later – published many young and left-wing intellectuals of the day.

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