W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood: Plays, and Other Dramatic Writings by W. H. Auden, 1928-1938 ed. by Edward Mendelson (review)

REVIEWS W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood: Plays, and Other Dramatic Writings by W. H. Auden, 1928-1938, ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. xxxiv + 680. $39.50. This excellent first volume in the projected eight-volume edition of The Complete Works of W. H. Auden contains his early dramatic pieces, Paid on Both Sides (1928) and The Dance of Death (1933); his three collaborations with Christopher Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1937-38); his verse commentaries for six documentary films; and two sketches for cabaret and radio respectively. It also contains the texts of The Enemies of a Bishop (1929) and The Chase (1934)—two earlier attempts at the subject matter of The Dog Beneath the Skin first published here. The high quality of this volume, evident in the text, the editing, and the printing, augers so well for the quality of the volumes to come that Edward Mendelson as editor and the Princeton University Press as publisher are to be commended for doing for Auden within two decades of his death what has not been done for Yeats in over half a century. An additional merit of this volume is that, besides furnishing the reader with clean, unencumbered texts, it provides all the advantages of a variorum edition. Auden once said, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." This has been even more true of his plays, particularly the apprentice pieces. It has always been difficult to establish anything approaching definitive texts for the Auden-Isherwood collaborations. In the case of The Ascent of F6, for example, the copy supplied to Faber for the first London edition in 1936 was revised before submission to Random House for the 1937 New York edition. Further extensive changes were made during 1937 in the course of a number of Group Theatre productions in England. These included at least two new endings. Additional new endings were separately devised for a small New York production in April 1939 and for an Old Vic production in June of that Year. Auden wrote yet another ending for a Swarthmore College production in 1945. (In 1942 he wrote in a friend's copy: "The end of this play is all wrong, because, as I now see, it required, and I refused it, a Christian solution.") The history of the earlier collaboration, The Dog Beneath the Skin, reveals a somewhat similar series of changes and variations, including three preliminary versions: The Chase, The Fronny, and The Enemies of a Bishop, first published here. And, of course, Auden produced successive versions of his own dramatic pieces, Paid on Both Sides and The Dance of Death. Hence the need for some equivalent of a variorum edition—a need supplied here in 140 pages of "Textual Notes." One impression gained from the plays, film commentaries, and broadcast pieces in this volume is that Auden's dramatic métier might very well have been the radio play rather than the stage. The appeal in his 284 Reviews285 dramatic writing is almost invariably to the ear. In his "voice over" commentaries for the General Post Office Film Unit documentaries, particularly Night Mail (1935) and The Way to the Sea (1936), such is necessarily the case. It is obviously the case, too, in the lyrical chorus introducing The Dog Beneath the Skin: The summer holds: upon its glittering lake Lie Europe and the islands; many rivers Wrinkling its surface like a ploughman's palm; and in the chorus between Acts One and Two: Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The Hunter's waking thoughts. Lucky the leaf Unable to predict the fall. . . . And it is also the case in those verse passages incorporated into the surviving fragment of The Fronny (c.1930) that have achieved independent fame as among the finest of Auden's early lyrics, including "Doom is dark, and deeper that any sea dingle," "What's on your mind, my dove, my coney," and "To ask the hard question is simple." The appeal of all of these is aural, as is also the appeal of the even more famous lyric. "Look stranger, on this...