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.

The Sacred Wood - T S Eliot

 Eliot's first book of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood, came out in 1920, and consists largely of work that had been published in journals and papers slightly earlier.    Yet there is no mention, not the slightest hint, of the war that set Europe on fire or the covid apocalypse that was currently decimating the survivors.   Instead the man who was yet to write The Waste Land gives us criticism in the style and shadow of the Victorians.   Who now cares about Swinburne or Hopkins?   Yet these are the 'moderns' he writes about whilst admitting that even in 1920 they were somewhat forgotten.   Most of the other critics he discusses are lost to us today.

And yet The Sacred Wood is well worth reading.   It may even be essential to understanding the man who broke the mould and thus dominated English poetry for more than half a century.   His references might be obscure but his reasoning is valid.   He especially stresses the critical dissociation which, certainly to me, still throws a veil over the Four Quartets.   

Eliot and I will have to disagree over William Blake.   We are, however, in accord over the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.   Indeed, I was surprised to find that Eliot shares my belief that Shakespeare was a team-leader rather than a singular genius.   We are in absolute accord over the genius of Dante.  We couldn't be further apart on his youthful ideas about poetic drama.   In that respect I have the advantage of hindsight, but that doesn't explain how I seem to know a great deal more about poetic drama in English in the first quartet of the Twentieth Century than he, as a London-based member of the literati seems to have done.  Where is his mention of Masefield or Yeats?   I shall have to investigate further.

Ghost Light - Joseph O'Connor

 I enjoyed Shadowplay, O'Connor's novel about Bram Stoker and Henry Irving, but Ghost Lights is even better.  It"s an evocation of the affair between the dying genius of the Irish National Theatre, J M Synge, and his street urchin muse Molly Allgood, who starred, under her stage name Maire O'Neill, as Pegeen in his subversive masterwork Playboy of the Western World.

Forty-five years on from Synge's death and Molly is living alone in London, only her cat and the drink for company.  Today, however, in late October 1952, she has a gig - an old admirer has booked her for a BBC radio play, and Molly has the entire day to ensure she gets there on time.  As she walks through autumnal London she polishes her memories of better times, as a teenage actress in Dublin, of Synge and his eccentric courtship.

It is all beautifully done.  The tragedy that strikes at the end is so masterfully handled that I was almost overwhelmed.  Dublin, London and New York are all vibrantly conjured.  I recognised the foyer of Old Broadcasting House; the same for Molly as it was for me a quarter-century later.  It is only more recently that I have come to realise how important the Abbey Players and the Playboy were to the emergence of a radical arts theatre around the world.  I think I read the Playboy for the first time around the time Joseph O'Connor was writing Ghost Light.  What took me so long, I wonder?  Don't know that I would have appreciated it properly had I been any younger.  By God, I get it now - and I loved Ghost Light for reminding me.