Abstract
Ruin was fashionable in the 1930s. Cyril Connolly’s ‘Theory of Permanent Adolescence’, set out in Enemies of Promise in 1938, gave it a rationale which has become part of the mythology of the ‘Auden generation’:
It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis, homosexual. Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over… now, in their early thirties, they are haunted ruins.1
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Notes
Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1938; revised edition, London: Deutsch, 1988) p. 271.
T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933; this edition 1970) p. 69.
C. Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1934) p. 4.
W. H. Auden, Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930; second edition 1933). Auden’s prefatory note to the second edition records that he has omitted some poems from the first edition and substituted others. All poems not subsequently tagged in the present essay can be found in these volumes.
W. H. Auden, ‘Honour’, in Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934) pp. 9–20.
Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows (London: The Hogarth Press, 1938; this edition, London: Methuen, 1979) pp. 157–8.
W. H. Auden, ‘Paid on Both Sides: A Charade’, in Poems (1930); originally published in T. S. Eliot’s journal, Criterion, vol. ix, no. 35 (January 1930) pp. 268–90.
W. H. Auden, ‘Oxford’, Another Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1940); originally published in The Listener (9 February 1938).
W. H. Auden, Poems (1928), privately printed by Stephen Spender (n.p.: S. H. S., 1928) poem II.
Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (eds), W. H. Auden: ‘The Map of All My Youth’, Auden Studies I (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990) p. 60.
W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber and Faber, 1937). The passages referred to can be found on pp. 205–8.
W. H. Auden, The Orators: An English Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1932; 2nd edition, 1934; 3rd edition, 1966); 1934 text, pp. 7, 112, 110, 103–9 passim. All Biblical references in the present essay are to The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments… appointed to be read in Churches: Authorised King James Version (London: Collins, 1953).
On Auden and the Larchfield School, Helensburgh, with some recollections by former pupils, see Stan Smith, ‘Loyalty and Interest: Auden, Modernism, and the Politics of Pedagogy’, in Textual Practice, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 1990) pp. 54–72.
W. H. Auden, Poems (1928), privately printed by Stephen Spender (n.p.: S. H. S., 1928) poem IV; reprinted in Poems (1930).
W. H. Auden, Look, Stranger! (London: Faber and Faber, 1936).
Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (London: Macmillan, 1937; new edn, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1946) p. 257 ff. For a further discussion of this issue, see Stan Smith, W. H. Auden (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) pp. 49–50. As I suggest there, the words ‘conversion’ and ‘capital’ in the poem ‘Who will endure’ are both polyvalent. I have developed this argument in Stan Smith, ‘The Dating of Auden’s “Who will endure” and the Politics of 1931’, in Review of English Studies, vol. XLI, no. 163 (August 1990).
Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (London: Macmillan, 1937; new edn, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1946) p. 257 ff. For a further discussion of this issue, see Stan Smith, W. H. Auden (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) pp. 49–50. As I suggest there, the words ‘conversion’ and ‘capital’ in the poem ‘Who will endure’ are both polyvalent. I have developed this argument in Stan Smith, ‘The Dating of Auden’s “Who will endure” and the Politics of 1931’, in Review of English Studies, vol. XLI, no. 163 (August 1990).
Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (London: Macmillan, 1937; new edn, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1946) p. 257 ff. For a further discussion of this issue, see Stan Smith, W. H. Auden (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) pp. 49–50. As I suggest there, the words ‘conversion’ and ‘capital’ in the poem ‘Who will endure’ are both polyvalent. I have developed this argument in Stan Smith, ‘The Dating of Auden’s “Who will endure” and the Politics of 1931’, in Review of English Studies, vol. XLI, no. 163 (August 1990).
W. H. Auden, ‘In Time of War’, in W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (London: Faber and Faber, 1939) pp. 259–301.
W. H. Auden, review of G. B. Dibblee, Instinct and Intuition: A Study in Mental Duality, Criterion, vol. IX, no. 36 (April 1930) pp. 567–9.
W. H. Auden, ‘Psychology and Art To-day’, in Geoffrey Grigson (ed.), The Arts To-day (London: Bodley Head, 1935) pp. 1–21.
W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, Another Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1940).
W. H. Auden, ‘The Good Life’, in John Lewis (ed.), Christianity and the Social Revolution (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935) pp. 31–50.
W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber and Faber, 1937). The passages referred to can be found on pp. 206 and 234.
See W. H. Auden, ‘The Wandering Jew’, New Republic, vol. CIV, no. 1367 (10 February 1941) p. 186; ‘Democracy is Hard’, The Nation, vol. CXLIX, no. 15 (7 October 1939) pp. 386 and 388.
W. H. Auden, ‘A Thanksgiving’ Thank You, Fog (London: Faber and Faber, 1974).
W. H. Auden, review of B. H. L. Hart, T. E. Lawrence, in Now and Then, vol. 47 (Spring 1934) pp. 30 and 33; reprinted in Then and Now: A Selection… (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935).
W. H. Auden, Five Poems, New Verse, no. 5 (October 1933) pp. 14–71.
W. H. Auden, Another Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1940).
W. H. Auden, ‘Not as that dream Napoleon’ ibid.; subsequently entitled ‘Like a Vocation’, in Collected Shorter Poems1930–1944 (London: Faber and Faber, 1950).
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Smith, S. (1995). Ruined Boys: W. H. Auden in the 1930s. In: Day, G., Docherty, B. (eds) British Poetry, 1900–50. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24000-5_8
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