Highlights from the Last Will and Testament of W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice

As put down in 1937's Letters from Iceland. It's an amazing poem, a crazy mixture of undergraduate in-jokeyness, sincere political concern, and a sort of passionate desperation to bid farewell to the "low dishonest decade" of the 30s three years early. You get the feeling that Auden and MacNeice really believed they were going to die soon, or that the world would end. These were some of the choicer bits that I copied out in the New York Public Library; I really need to get a copy of this for myself:

"First to our ancestors…
We leave the values of their periods,
The things which seemed to them the things that mattered"

"all the lives by France gently stopped
We leave to Rome"

"Item, to Wittgenstein who writes such hits
As the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
We leave all readers who can spare the wits"

"…the Surrealists shall have
J.A. Smith as an Objet Trouvé in disguise."

"To our fellow writers, to the whole literary race
The Interest itself in all its circumstances
That each may see his vision face to face."

"To our two distinguished colleagues in confidence,
To Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, we assign
Our minor talents to assist in the defence
Of the European Tradition and to carry on
The Human Heritage."

[W.H.A.] "For my friend Benjamin Britten, composer, I beg
That fortune send him a passionate affair."

"…to Alfred Hitchcock, with sincerest praise of Sabotage"

[L.M.] "a copy of Marx and £1000 a year
And the picture of Love Locked Out by Holman Hunt"

[both] "To Dylan Thomas a leek on a gold plate"

"A terrible double entendre in metre or in prose
To William Empson"

"We leave with our best compliments the Isle of Wight
To Robert Graves and Laura Riding, because
An Italian island is no good place to write."

"The twin towers of the Crystal Palace we would leave
To Leonard and Virginia Woolf"

"our pudenda we leave or rather fling
Our biographers and The Thames Conservancy Board"

"Our humour, all we think is funny,
To Dr. Leavis and almost every psychoanalyst"

[W.H.A.] "hope that Erika, my wife, may have her wish
To see the just end of Hitler and his unjust rule"

[both] "We leave their marvelous native tongue
To Englishmen, and for our intelligent island pray
That to her virtuous beauties by all poets sung
She add at last an honest foreign policy."

$$$ ₤₤₤ ₣₣₣ ℳℳℳ

H0w much of the particular character of Modernism can be accounted for by major transformations in the world economy in the first 30 years of the century: e.g., the Panic of 1907 and subsequent bail-out by J.P. Morgan (see Williams' poem on this subject in Spring and All); the slow collapse of Germany's national economy under the mountain of national debts incurred after the First World War; and, climactically, the stock market crash of 1929? Think of some of the individual modernist authors who experienced drastic changes in their financial positions during this period, for these and a variety of other reasons: Proust; Eliot; Yeats; Woolf; Stephen Spender; George Oppen; Nabokov. (You'll have to help me out with the Americans, Adrienne. Didn't Faulkner's family lose a bunch of money? Or was that during Reconstruction?) For these writers, all of whom were raised in an atmosphere of affluence that was later significantly reduced or threatened, how could the expression of despair and cynicism one normally associates with the Modernist moment not also be, in some way, a panic fear about a change in their personal situations? (Others, of course, improved their situations in this period, notably Pound and Joyce — mostly because they were both relatively poor to start with. And how significant is it that, despite living until almost the end of WWII, Joyce never wrote any fiction set later than 1904, when all of these catastrophes were still on the horizon?)

Thus those who become writers during the time of Modernism often give the impression not of entering a new, higher rentier class (which would be the typical role of the author in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) but of giving expression to a certain loss of value, a certain fall from grace. (In contrast, the postmodernists — the Americans, anyway — are largely back in the upwardly mobile position, though at this point they are competing for smaller slices of the cultural capital pie, and those usually attached to positions at major American universities. In this context, Nabokov, who grew up as the child of liberal aristocrats, becomes an impoverished European émigré, moves to the U.S. and gets on the academic-job treadmill, and finally finds himself accidentally a Great American Author and rich and famous culture hero, cuts a particularly interesting figure.)

With these circumstances in mind, I can see why Anglo-American Modernism displays such a cautiously exploratory attitude toward the radical positions of Continental Modernism (Surrealism in particular), which by 1920 had largely accepted that important literature was now the province of either the radical Bohemian fringes or the future Marxist state.

So I think we need (if it doesn't exist already) a financial history of these and other relevant figures: an audit of Modernism, as it were. Who got poorer, who got richer, who was in danger and who was not, and how do these various positions affect their writing?

Yes, this has got me thinking.