Another Time - W H Auden

 The 1930s were the era of Auden and his circle - the Auden Gang, the Pylon Poets, or (Gawd 'elp us) MacSpaunday.   It began with Auden's Poems and ended with Another Time.   By 1940 Auden was 'married' and living in the USA.   The UK, the England which he loved so profoundly and criticised so briskly in his early work, was at war.   The old gang - Day Lewis, MacNeice and Spender - had gone their separate ways.   Not that they had ever really been together.   The one and only thing they had in common was Auden, and he had been gone - to Germany, China, Iceland and now America - since the middle of the decade.

Another Time is the book in which Auden achieves full maturity.   His technique is refined and elegant, his thoughts serious and profound.   Here we have the magnificent 'Musee des Beaux Arts', the memorial poems for W B Yeats and Sigmund Freud, and the wondrous 'September 1, 1939'.   There are other gems and some dross.   Over all, though, it is a landmark in Auden's development and the development of English poetry as a whole in the Twentieth Century.

What I enjoy about Auden is the indirect approach, the way he draws us in to his way of thinking.   The texts are polished but the meanings are rich, diverse and require long reflection.   I've had this book beside my armchair for something like a year.   Certain poems (mainly the ones cites above) have been read many times until I feel I have finally found and unlocked the puzzles.   Another Time not only changed my mind about Auden, it made me a better person.

The hardback edition, for Faber's 90th anniversary, is a thing of beauty in itself.

Beatrice and Her Son - Arthur Schnitzler

Schnitzler was the Viennese novelist of the Freudian era.  Beatrice and Her Son is one of his mature works, published just a year before World War One.  It is is very short (three chapters and less than 100 pages) but very dense and ultimately quite shocking.  Beatrice is the widow of a celebrated actor.  She is probably not yet forty (Schnitzler is far too subtle to specify) and reasonably well off.  Some respectable but slightly dull men of around her own age are showing an interest, now that her mourning period can be considered to be decently done.  But on her summer holiday in the mountains with her son Hugo it is one of Hugo's schoolfriends that she takes to her bed.  Schnitzler is a psychological novelist and sets up many reasons for her scandalous behaviour,  Is it boredom, novelty, risk - or simply revenge?  Revenge because the young man Fritz has hinted that Beatrice's late husband (of whom he does a good impression) had affairs - and/or revenge because Hugo is sleeping with an older woman, a former actress who may or may not have been one of his father's mistresses.  Beatrice only regrets her amour when she overhears the boys talking?  Are they talking - sniggering - about her?  That same night Hugo comes home dejected.  Beatrice guesses that his lover has dispensed with his services.  How can she recover what she and Hugo had before the summer?  The innocent intimacy of mother and son...

This is depth that Schnitzler is able to cram into his novella.  He switches between profound internal monologue and meaningless social chit-chat.  He probes Beatrice's character and motivations so deeply that a single paragraph lasts ten pages.  Yet he never bores, probably because he keeps the novella so short, and he never lectures us with his ideas.  Crucially, he does not judge his character. He merely gives us the symptoms and leaves us to make our own diagnosis.

This book is superb - the novella, which I love, at its best.  I shall definitely be reading more Schnitzler.