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11 Journeys to War: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and William Empson in China Hugh Haughton I “Where does the journey look which the watcher upon the quay . . . so bitterly envies?” These are the opening words of “The Voyage,” the poem which launches Journey to a War, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s account of their 1938 journey to China during the Sino-Japanese war.The poem, a partial response to Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” raises some of the fundamental questions of travel literature, setting up an opposition between the “true” and “false” journey, asking whether travel is ultimately about a quest for “the Good Place,” and invoking the “watcher on the quay” as a figure of the envious reader. The question “Where does the journey look?” displaces the more usual “Where is the journey going?”. The sonnet “The Ship” re-frames it in political terms: It is our culture that with such calm progresses Over the barren plains of a sea; somewhere ahead The septic East, a war, new flowers and new dresses Somewhere a strange and shrewd To-morrow goes to bed Planning the test for men from Europe; no one guesses Who will be most ashamed, who richer, and who dead.1 The book is a record of two Englishmen heading to Asia for the first time, but also a study of “our culture” looking at a reality which bears closely upon itself (it is a “test” for them). The camp phrase “New flowers and new dresses” captures the exotic appeal of travel writing in “our culture,” but “war” and the “septic East” challenge it. This is not the “exotic East” and the term “septic” makes the reader ponder the source of the wound. Auden has already said “the false journey” is “really an illness” (making the illness the 148 Hugh Haughton traveler’s), but later we read about literal infections in the wartime Chinese hospitals they visit and Isherwood’s metaphorical account of bombers caught in searchlights over Hankou “as if a microscope had brought into focus the bacilli of a fatal disease” (71). The “fatal disease” here is the war China had been afflicted with since 1927 and would continue to be until after the defeat of Japan and Mao’s victory in 1949. “Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky / Throbs like a feverish forehead,” Auden writes later (272), and that “we” aligns the “men from Europe” and the Chinese in the same “feverish” “now,” with Europe poised on the brink of the war that will start “Tomorrow.” Auden’s question “Where does the journey look?” reflects on what Valentine Cunningham calls the “huge audience for travel books” in the 1930s.2 Indeed Samuel Hynes identifies “the journey” as “the most insistent of ’thirties metaphors,” arguing that “the travel books simply act out, in the real world, the basic trope of the generation” as “the perimeter of awareness and the community of disaster expanded — to Africa, to Mexico, to China, to the whole troubled world.”3 Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War was also part of the vogue for politically inflected travel discussed in Bernard Schweizer’s Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s (2001). Martha Gellhorn wrote that she had no idea, back in the 1930s, “you could be what I became, an unscathed tourist of wars” and Journey, like Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Evelyn Waugh’s Waugh in Abyssinia, is a version of that distinct sub-species of travel literature, a war book.4 Indeed Samuel Hynes calls Journey “the war-book of the period just before the war became the Second World War.”5 The bond between war reporter, travel writer and journalist in Orwell, Greene and Waugh makes Journey to a War a sign of the times, and, like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, an example of the new genre of literary “war tourism.” Journey to a War had a mixed press. Evelyn Waugh, the author of a contemporary novel about war correspondents entitled Scoop (1937), writing from the Right concluded that while Auden, the “official young rebel” laureate had become “a public bore,” Isherwood “had no news sense” and “nowhere in China did he seem to find the particular kind of stimulus that his writing requires.”6 On the other side of the political fence, Randall Swinger in The Daily Worker thought the authors “too pre-occupied by their own psychological plight...

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