W. H. Auden’s First Dramatization of Jung: The Charade of the Loving and Terrible Mothers

W. H. Auden’s First Dramatization of Jung: The Charade of the Loving and Terrible Mothers Edward Callan I The first of Auden’s longer works, Paid on Both Sides: A Charade—still placed first in Collected Poems, 1976—is osten­ sibly an episode in a continuing feud between two families who live some fifteen miles apart in the Lead Dales of the English north country on opposite sides of the Pennine watershed.1 The conflicting parties are the Shaws of Nattrass House, Garrigill, near Alston, Northumberland, and the Nowers of Linzgarth House, near Rookhope, in Durham. The central character in this episode, John Nower of Linzgarth, was bom prematurely during his mother’s state of shock on hearing that her husband, George, had been ambushed and killed by Red Shaw of Nattrass. John Nower grows up to ambush and kill his father’s murderer and several followers, and to have another Shaw executed as a spy; but, eventually, influenced by unconscious forces—and the unconscious is the stage on which the significant action in this drama occurs—he attempts to end the feud and bring about reconciliation by marrying Anne Shaw. During the wedding feast at Nattrass the Shaw matriarch instigates a renewal of the feud. John Nower is killed, and the charade ends as it began with a wife mourning the death of a husband. During the action of the charade, therefore, John Nower plays the role of an archetypal Everyman: he is given life by the mother who loves and nourishes him; he journeys from birth to death in the realm of conscious life governed by the sun; and he returns at the end of conscious life to the womb of Mother Earth. A final chorus recalls the final chorus in Oedipus Rex with its warning to call no man happy: 287 288 Comparative Drama Though he believe it, no man is strong. He thinks to be called fortunate, To bring home a wife, to live long. But he is defeated: let the son Sell the farm lest the mountain fall; His mother and her mother won. (CP, 35) Somewhat longer than a one-act play, the charade is a closet drama which, with a little resourcefulness, can be played out in the mind; but, other than Prospero who had spirits to command, producers seeking stage-worthy material might find the charade as unprepossessing as a half-plucked chicken. Auden’s ma­ chinery is cumbersome. In addition to a chorus of three persons, the play has twenty-six characters divided into three main groups. Two of these are the hostile parties, the Nowers of Linzgarth and the Shaws of Nattrass, distinguished on stage by “different coloured arm-bands.” A third, more heterogeneous group, takes part in a surrealistic dream scene when the action of the charade moves into the unconscious. They include, as principals, such archetypal manifestations as the Man-Woman; the conventional mummers’ play characters (Father Christmas, the Doctor, and the Doctor’s Boy); and, as extras, the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland and a jury wearing school caps. Despite its slapdash appearance, Auden seems to have in­ tended the charade as a vehicle for an ambitious allegory on the life and death instincts—a modem Morality of Eros and Thanatos—that could take its place beside Eliot’s The Waste Land. He drew quite as freely as Eliot had done on Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, and he chose the subtitle, A Charade, for its sea­ sonal associations with Christmas and mid-Winter to suggest that Christmas games, and for that matter the Christmas festival, were, like the mummers’ plays, survivals of ancient rituals for driving out winter and death and restoring life to the spring. Like the spring equinox poem, “It was Easter and I walked out in the public gardens,” in Poems, 1930, Paid on Both Sides is a variation on the Orpheus myth that Auden was to employ again with Marxist overtones in his next dramatic work, The Dance of Death (1933), where the Dancer performs a “Solo dance as Sun God, creator and destroyer” (DD, 11). In his Programme Notes...