TLS on Leninist Auden

Comrade Auden

Unpublished verses by W. H. Auden that show him learning his trade – as a documentary film-maker

by David Collard

For some six months in 1935–6, W. H. Auden was employed by the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit on a modest salary of £3 a week, even less than he had made in his previous job as a schoolmaster. (His friend and collaborator Christopher Isherwood, by contrast, would soon be earning £200 a month working for Alexander Korda at Shepperton Studios.) For this whole period Auden would be intensively and productively engaged – as scriptwriter, assistant director, lecturer, writer and, on one occasion, in front of the camera, dressed as a department store Father Christmas. Harry Watt, the co-director of Night Mail, the most celebrated product of Auden’s time in the film industry, recalled him at work (in his memoir Don’t Look at the Camera):
Auden sat down to write his verse . . . . He got a bare table at the end of a dark, smelly corridor. We were now bursting at the seams, and the last corner available was in what was inevitably called “the back passage”. It ran parallel with the theatre, where films were constantly being shown. At one end, a bunch of messenger boys played darts, wrestled, and brewed tea.
At the other end, Auden, serene and uncomplaining, turned out some of the finest verse he has ever written. As it was a commentary, it had, of course, to fit the picture, so he would bring sections to us as he wrote them. When it did not fit, we just said so, and it was crumpled up and thrown into the waste-paper basket! Some beautiful lines and stanzas went into oblivion in this casual, ruthless way. Auden just shrugged, and wrote more.
In addition to the low wages, which his documentary colleagues saw as proof of their uncompromising, high-minded, non-commercial integrity, the Unit offered Auden a congenial, predominantly male working environment and an atmosphere of shoestring budgets, cheap digs, creative exuberance and missionary zeal.
In October 1935, soon after Auden had joined the Unit, a man named Ivor Montagu was organizing a Sunday afternoon screening at the New Gallery Cinema in Regent Street. Montagu (1904–84) is an original and likeable figure. Born into a wealthy banking family, he overcame his advantages and in 1925 was co-founder of the Film Society, which mounted one-off screenings of mostly foreign films, early silents, avant-garde shorts and the latest productions of the emerging documentary film movement, and lasted until 1939. Predictably, the contemporary press mocked its intellectual pretensions and even Montagu’s mother referred to “Ivor’s Sunday afternoons of gloom”, but it was an immediate success and a forerunner of today's British Film Institute. These 1930s screenings were challenging, unpredictable and wide-ranging.
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One programme consisted entirely of films made by women, including Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman, memorably rejected by the British censors as being “so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If it has a meaning it is doubtless objectionable”. Montagu was also politically active – initially as a member of the Labour Party (Holborn Branch), later joining the Communist Party, learning Russian and befriending Sergei Eisenstein during the great director’s American period. He was the first ever film critic for the Observer, and worked with Michael Balcon as associate producer on such Hitchcock classics as The 39 Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage (the last-named being a particular favourite of Auden’s). Auden was a paid-up member of the Society, and a regular at the New Gallery.
The supporting programme at the forthcoming October screening would include a dazzling abstract work by Len Lye, Edgar Anstey’s influential Housing Problems, and the premiere of the experimental Coal Face, the first collaboration between Auden and the promising young composer Benjamin Britten. The main feature, though, was to be the world premiere of a Russian propaganda film commissioned by Joseph Stalin to mark the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. The director was Denis Kaufman (1896–1954), better known by his adopted name Dziga Vertov (“Spinning Top”). His new film was called Three Songs of Lenin and was structured around peasant folk songs eulogizing the dead Soviet leader and promoting Stalin as his political heir. Montagu was busy arranging subtitles and intertitles, and soon realized that the songs deserved a more poetic treatment in English. He needed advice, and urgently. What about that chap working for the Post Office?
In December last year I was working through the Ivor Montagu papers, which entered the BFI’s Special Collections archive in 1985. My main interest was in the first screening of Coal Face, but the next item in the pile was a stiff white envelope that contained a typed note: “The following titles are ‘verse’ titles to be held up for a few days while wording is checked in consultation with Auden”, dozens of scruffy typescript sheets in an unfamiliar format, and three manuscript pages in Auden’s best handwriting, blue ink on cheap unwatermarked paper, held together by a paper clip, a 1930s original by the look of it. The Montagu collection is one of the most frequently consulted in the BFI’s archive, but until now no one seemed to have recognized the importance of this material. Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor, confirmed that these poems had never been published and that this was a significant find.
The papers fell into four separate categories: (a) an eleven-page typescript, being a literal translation by Montagu of the three songs and prose commentary; (b) three pages of handwritten verses by Auden, with pencil corrections by Montagu; (c) a second typescript (thirteen pages long, but incomplete) incorporating Auden’s renderings into instructions for the title-makers; and (d) another copy in an unknown hand of the three songs, with some minor variations from (b) and (c). The typescripts are evocative working documents, covered in scribbled numbers, calculations and erasures, and were clearly passed from Auden to Montagu and then to the title-makers and back again. They show that Auden was already capable of working within the severe technical constraints imposed by the documentary medium, composing verses timed to accompany a rapid, headlong montage sequence, collaborating with others in what amounts to a trial run for Night Mail, with its relentless mechanized rhythms. By comparing the literal translation with the final version it is also possible to see how Auden’s genius engaged with the unpromising source material.
The intertitled print of the film has not survived, and so for over seventy years the only known record of Auden’s contribution was a rather terse programme note: “The Society thanks Mr W. H. Auden for kindly advising on the English rendering of many passages in the songs”. This manages to be both condescending and inaccurate, given that Auden clearly did far more than offer a few tips. Consider for example the literal translation of the first lines of Song One as it appears in typescript (a), complete with erratic punctuation and grammar, describing the political awakening of a veiled peasant woman:

My face was in a dark prison
blind was my life
without light or learning
I was slave though unchained
but into this dark came
a light-ray
The ray of the truth of Lenin.

Auden’s versions of Songs One and Two are reproduced in full opposite, along with the version of Song Three as it appears in typescript (c). Immediately striking is how very English these verses appear; they could almost have sprung from the pages of Hymns Ancient and Modern. There are direct links, as Mendelson has pointed out, to the vibrant choruses in The Dog Beneath the Skin, Auden’s theatre collaboration with Isherwood, also of 1935.
Although the three-page Auden manuscript appears complete it does not include a rendering of the Third Song. It may be that the original prose version was judged adequate, or that tight deadlines would not allow for completion. It is possible that Montagu and Auden disagreed over the content before the Third Song was worked up into verse. This would not be unlikely, given Auden’s lack of serious political commitment, his chronic playfulness, and Montagu’s own ideological zeal. There is an intriguing example of what appears to be Montagu’s revisionism in a line in Song Two. Auden’s neat handwritten version runs:
We loved him as we loved our steppes; no more than that.
A pencilled comma (not in Auden’s hand and presumably therefore Montagu’s) alters the line to read:
We loved him as we loved our steppes; no, more than that.
Presumably Auden intended the meaning indicated by the inserted comma, but it is at least possible that he didn’t. Auden’s whole manuscript is very lightly punctuated, and he was in any case notoriously slipshod in such matters, but it is worth noting how drastically that comma changes the meaning of the line from one of level-headed peasant good sense (i.e., we loved our leader and our land in equal measure) to an overblown rhetorical sentiment which doesn’t ring true (ie, the thought suddenly occurs to us that we loved our leader even more than we love our land). Auden’s punctuation was consistently erratic, however, and the Stalinist implications of a single comma should not be taken too seriously.
Following its New Gallery showing, Three Songs of Lenin was screened in New York the following month at what was incorrectly claimed to be the world premiere, on November 6. This was one day ahead of the first public screening in Russia, an ominous sign that the production had not met with official approval. The American programme notes include extracts from alternative translations of the three songs (“A veil of darkness. Then slowly – light”) and there are breathless eulogies from such figures as Will Rogers, André Malraux and H. G. Wells (“One of the greatest and most beautiful films I have ever seen”). Since then the film has all but disappeared from view, eclipsed by the political horrors of the Stalin era and critical indifference. Dziga Vertov’s reputation has changed over the years. Man With a Movie Camera (1929) was universally acclaimed, is still in circulation and remains his best-known achievement, but by the mid-1930s he had fallen out of favour with the Stalin regime and his career had ground to a halt by the time of his death in 1954. He has since been described as a practitioner of totalitarian cinema, and as an apologist for the Stalin era. Though complete nonsense, this is the sort of thing that rapidly becomes an established critical orthodoxy.
Auden’s verses apart, there are admittedly prose sections in Three Songs of Lenin which will provoke a modern audience to uneasy laughter. What are we to make, for instance, of the following titles from Song Three, which awaited Auden’s approval, and which appear partly in strident upper case? “THE GREAT PUPIL OF THE GREAT LENIN, STALIN, HAS LED US INTO BATTLE. / Into battle with our age-long backwardness.”
Does that second title contain a deliberate, undermining ambiguity? Is “backwardness” the thing against which the speaker is battling? Or is it the quality that defines followers of “the great pupil”? And what of the double-edged cry repeated five times towards the end of the film: “If Lenin could see our country now!”? Much of the film’s English commentary seems to a modern audience a balance between plain seriousness and a more troubling, equivocal tone. The show trials and purges of the Stalin era were still in the future, of course, but other poets, such as Osip Mandelstam in his “Stalin Epigram” (1933), were already ferocious in their denunciation of Lenin’s successor in the wake of enforced collectivization and the famine which followed, killing millions.
Soon we shall have the chance to judge for ourselves, thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of Nathalie Morris, the Special Collections curator at the BFI, and her colleagues. Highlights from the original programme, including a rare print of Three Songs for Lenin, will be given a special screening at the BFI Southbank (formerly National Film Theatre) in London at 6.15 on June 8. Auden’s verses will be read by the actor Simon Callow and for the first time in almost seventy-five years Uncle Wiz and the Spinning Top will be reunited.


W. H. Auden’s versions of the anonymous songs are copyright by the Estate of W. H. Auden and printed by permission.

Song One

My face in a dark prison lay
And blind by life remained
No learning mine nor light of day,
A slave although unchained
Till through my darkness shone a ray
And Lenin’s truth I gained

We never looked upon his face
We never heard his voice
Yet closer than a father he
Much closer to us was

No father for his children did
What LENIN did for us

From darkness thick he made a light
From deserts gardens green
And out of death the life he brought
Through him the [weak] poor have seen.
A million sand grains make a mound
A million corn a sack
A million of the weakest straws
Break the strong camel’s back.

With all he had he took our part
He gave his brain, his blood, his heart.



Song Two

We loved him as we loved our steppes; no [,] more than that.
If he would but return, we would give away our tents and steppes [,]
If he would but return, we would give away our lives.

Never will we forget him; our grandchildren’s grandchildren shall remember
He founded our party of steel; he built it from year to year
Taught it and tempered it; in the stubborn and ceaseless struggle it was tempered
He was tireless in work; his eyes were full of irony and sparking with wisdom
Now he smiles kindly, [deleted “now”] his burning speech is inspiring the masses

He was simple and straight in his manner; the Russians called him just Ilytch
He lived in a hut; in a hut beyond the marshes

Song Three

(Montagu typescript)

in Moscow
in the big
stone city
in a square there
stands a tent
and in it lies
LENIN
and if ever you should
be in sorrow
then go you to this
tent and look
on LENIN
an your grief will pass
away from you, like water (x2)
and your sorrow float away,
like leaves upon the brook
our life is become
sturdy and joyful –
true is our Lenin
path



David Collard works for an educational charity and is researching "Auden on Film", a study of the poet’s engagement in cinema in the 1930s and 60s.