Books in Brief: Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936

Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936, by Donald Mitchell (University of Washington Press, 176 pp.. $15). Four years ago, Donald Mitchell took time out from work on his authorized biography of Benjamin Britten to put together Benjamin Britten: Pictures from a Life, a sumptuous and carefully researched collection of documents, photographs, and other primary-source material, with a connecting text detailed enough to serve as a quasi-biography. Now Mitchell a notoriously slow worker, alas—has published what amounts to a second “interim report” on the life of his subject, who is increasingly coming to be regarded as among the most important composers of this century. Mitchell’s new book, Britten and Auden in the Thirties, a revised and expanded version of his 1979 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, is an illuminating study of the Britten-Auden partnership which concentrates on the events of 1936. Making extensive use of Britten’s unpublished diaries, Mitchell has drawn an extremely detailed and perceptive picture of the difficult collaboration between Britten, a shy and inhibited prodigy of leftish disposition, and the already-celebrated Auden, who quickly managed to antagonize his musical partner with incessant displays of extreme dogmatism, condescendingly paternal role-playing, and “ostentatious, donnish . . . verbal dexterity and mental adroitness.” (That the collaboration worked at all, one gathers, is a wonder; that it resulted in an operetta, two song cycles, an assortment of miscellaneous smaller works, and numerous films, radio features, and plays with elaborate incidental music would seem to have been something of a minor miracle.) Apart from Michael Kennedy’s Britten volume in the Master Musicians series, not yet available on this side of the Atlantic, Britten and Auden in the Thirties, despite its limited scope, must be counted the single most penetrating biographical study of Britten to date. One cavil: these lectures date from 1979, just before the unofficial ban on public discussion of Britten’s homosexuality finally fell by the wayside, and Mitchell’s (understandable) lack of candor on the subject is therefore a minor irritation. Rumor has it that, on his deathbed, Britten instructed Mitchell to “tell all” in the authorized biography, a book which interested parties are awaiting with a mounting impatience that the present work, however excellent, can only serve to exacerbate.