| Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden are habitually grouped together as principals of a critical construct called the Auden Group. The members of this group, it is maintained, were middle-class, Oxford or Cambridge educated, young men who, during the 1930s, made their left-wing political enthusiasms the subject of essentially homogenous writing and, with the advent of the Second World War, abandoned the politics that had been the fuel for the best writing they would ever produce.In three connected essays, this study argues that this well-entrenched critical view is inadequate and obscures a more nuanced understanding of Auden's and Isherwood's writing.The first section focuses upon Journey to a War, a collaboratively written travel book which has been almost universally dismissed as a frivolous rag-bag, unworthy of its serious subject (the Sino-Japanese war). I show how the discontinuous form of the book is the result of a particular authorial strategy, according to which the authors court triviality as a weapon with which to challenge traditional colonial discourse.Part two concentrates exclusively on Isherwood's The Berlin Stories . Isherwood's justly famous book is, I maintain, famous partly for the wrong reasons. Accustomed to describing The Berlin Stories in terms of its value as documentary, scholars neglect the popular forms whose cross-currents are everywhere felt in the text. By drawing upon inherited forms, Isherwood produces a text that is more genuinely innovative and provocative than the work of reportage with which he is routinely credited.The concluding section takes as its subject two texts from the 1960s---a period in which Auden's and Isherwood's critical reputations had sunk to all-time lows. Auden's About the House was dismissed as a trivial volume, written by a poet grown complacent and stale. Isherwood's A Single Man was deemed sordid and small in scope, an infinitely lesser text than its Berlin forbears. As in each of the other sections of this study, I argue that such estimates are insufficient to the material, that the seemingly trivial aspects of the texts are strategic, and that, read properly, these strategies reveal renewed ethical commitments towards which both authors are striving. |
