Benjamin Britten

by Neil Powell

  His seventeenth birthday fell towards the end of his first term at the RCM and, like any other ambitious and creatively talented person of his age, he was beginning to develop a sense of his own potential place in cultural history. Perhaps by now he was quietly hoping that 1913, while more generally remembered as the last year of peace before the Great War, might one day also be remembered as the year Benjamin Britten was born. And he was now old enough to understand something which wouldn’t have been clear to him earlier in his childhood: the year 1913 was already significant in European musical history, and in ways which specifically mattered to him. For on 31 March 1913, a concert at the Musikverein in Vienna, including works by Berg, Mahler, Schoenberg and Webern, had famously ended in a riot to which the police were called (Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder consequently remained unheard); while almost exactly two months later, on 29 May in Paris, the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was greeted with comparable disturbances. What Britten now found frustrating was that these five composers, whose work he admired and whose stormy receptions had so aptly heralded his own birth, were still regarded as outlandish by the English musical establishment in general and the RCM in particular. But not by Frank Bridge.

  The support Britten received during his time at the RCM from Bridge and his wife Ethel – though to John Ireland it looked more like the theft of his brilliant pupil’s loyalty – was incalculable. Its most powerful aspect was also its simplest: they became deeply sympathetic surrogate parents who, living in Kensington Church Street, were conveniently close to the college. Again and again, particularly during his first few months in London, Britten’s diaries contain artlessly telling phrases such as ‘I go to see Mrs Bridge after breakfast’, ‘Go to see & have a second tea with Mr & Mrs Bridge’, ‘Go to Supper at Bridges’, ‘Go to see Mr Bridge after tea’, ‘Supper at the Bridges at 7.30’,28 and so on. They talked about music, obviously, but they also just talked. Sometimes an evening meal preceded or followed a concert which Bridge was conducting: Britten almost invariably found Bridge’s concerts ‘marvellous’ or ‘magnificent’ and, in this sense at least a typical late-teenager, he conceived an equal and opposite dislike for the ‘terrible execrable conductor’29 Adrian Boult. Hearing Bridge’s Enter Spring at a Prom, for the first time since that momentous Norwich Festival, he was again bowled over: it was ‘marvellous – that man’s a genius’.30 Soon Bridge was off to America, where he had ‘a magnificent reception’, according to Britten’s diary;31 but a letter home to his parents strikes an interestingly different note, one which was to recur through much of his life, about the musical philistinism of the English: ‘Isn’t it literally wicked,’ he wrote, ‘that England’s premier composer has to go out of the country (not only to the USA but to Europe) to have any recognition what-so-jolly-well-ever?’32 His diary entry for 12 June 1931 both demonstrates how much he had become part of the family and confirms his unbounded admiration for Bridge as a conductor: ‘After dinner go to marvellous BBC concert (at 9.45) at Studio, with Bridges … I have never known the orch. play better, they were enthusiastic about his conducting, & I don’t wonder.’33

  A fortnight later, Britten spent the weekend with them at their country home in the Sussex village of Friston (there is also a Suffolk village of Friston, close to Aldeburgh and Snape, a resonance which wouldn’t have been lost on him). He was and would always remain a coast-and-country boy at heart, delighted at the end of a term to leave London and return to Lowestoft; it must therefore have come as a pleasing surprise to discover in Sussex that this wasn’t just a matter of going ‘home’ but a natural affinity with the peace, and the pace, of rural life. ‘The country around here is too superb for words,’ he wrote. ‘No one about at all – lovely!’34 There was a tennis court in the garden, and Britten’s admiration for his mentor was further intensified by his discovery that Bridge not only played tennis but was ‘remarkably good’; he swam too and, when emerging from the water, looked ‘just like a walrus’, or so Beth Britten thought. Ben was met off the train at Eastbourne by Mrs Bridge and Marjorie Fass, whom he described, innocently or tactfully, as ‘a friend of theirs who lives v. near & is with them most of the day’; Beth would recall that ‘Marge Fass who lived next door seemed to be a part of the menage and adored Frank’, though this ‘did not seem to worry’ Ethel Bridge.35 According to Howard Ferguson and, following him, Humphrey Carpenter, it was ‘a contented ménage à trois’.36 The informal way in which they were all continually in and out of each other’s houses, sharing meals or listening to broadcast concerts in either place, made a notable change from the buttoned-up domestic manners to which Britten was accustomed. Marjorie Fass was quick to get the measure of young Benjy, as she called him – the Bridges were collectively the ‘Brits’, he ‘Mr Brit’ or ‘Franco’ – and later she would usefully puncture one or two of his grander notions. This was a relaxed, civilised and cultivated style of life away from the noise and the pressures of the city: its example would profoundly influence Britten’s own choice of a permanent home.

  2

  ‘It’s ghastly to think of tomorrow – of course London’s marvellous but home’s so good,’ Britten writes in his diary for 6 January 1931, the day before setting off for his second term at the RCM.37 This sense of something close to dread, though perfectly comprehensible, is perhaps a little disconcerting: a talented young man from the provinces, pursuing his creative ambition and discovering the capital, might have been glad to see the back of his conventional, repressive home; especially if, as in Britten’s case, he happened to be a homosexual, with no chance of establishing a personal life on his respectable dentist-father’s doorstep in Lowestoft. Yet there’s little sign of Britten deliberately lying to himself or to his diary. The next day, insisting in a telling phrase that ‘home is so beastly nice’, he records how his sister Beth does most of his packing, then drives him ‘with Mummy’ to the station, while at Liverpool Street he is met by his sister Barbara and they go off in a taxi together; again, where another young man would have been relieved to escape from his fussing female relatives, Britten registers only loss and loneliness, as he unpacks in his digs that evening.

  During his first year in London, he had only to walk across Kensington Gardens to reach the college. 51 Prince’s Square, Bayswater, run by Miss Thurlow Prior, was a ‘respectable boarding house’: ‘a nice place, but rather full of old ladies’, one of whom – the landlady’s sister Miss May Prior – turned out to be ‘a member of the National Chorus & knew Mummy at Lowestoft’.38 This, though evidently the connection which enabled Mrs Britten to hear of the establishment and give it her blessing, was something Britten only discovered on his arrival there; he seems to have accepted it calmly enough as a natural extension of the family cocoon on which he was still so dependent. But it set the tone for a domestic life constricted by his pleasantly dull fellow residents and recorded in crushingly bathetic diary entries such as ‘The Hendersons go out after dinner’ and ‘Play cards with Tumpty Henderson after tea’:39 Nora and Tumpty Henderson were a pair of spinster sisters in whose company Britten spent a good deal of his leisure time. On Sundays, one or other of them sometimes accompanied him to church. He became fond of Tumpty, with whom he would occasionally go to concerts or films, but not of her sister: ‘Nora Henderson is an absolute revelation to me, in how awful a person can be.’40

  Of course, the social life of a typical student in 1930, except for the minority who enjoyed those privileges familiar from Brideshead Revisited, was more restricted than it would become in 1960 or 1990. Apart from the indispensable Bridges, Britten’s London friendships were mostly confined to three small circles – his family and relations, his fellow lodgers and landladies, and the relatively few student musicians with whom he rehearsed and performed – which were occasionally augmented by fleeting visits from old school chums. He seems scarcely to have bumped into anyone studying another discipline at the various London colleges or to have struck up even casual acquaintances in the
metropolitan world around him, about which he remained shyly incurious and unobservant. For instance, every few weeks from his arrival at the college until his departure at the end of 1933, his diary meticulously records his haircut at Whiteley’s, the Bayswater department store, a fact which Donald Mitchell quite reasonably sees as evidence that the diaries offer ‘vital information about almost every sphere of his activities’. This is true; yet one can’t help feeling that anyone else, over this lengthy period of time, would have at least got to know the barber’s name and that any other diarist would have described such a regularly recurring figure, perhaps even recording the jokes traditionally told by barbers to their captive audiences. Although Britten sometimes met his sister Barbara and one or two friends for lunch at Selfridges or an ABC and often had a meal with the Bridges before or after a concert, he drank little and seldom visited pubs: his diaries are hangover-free. While capable of admiring reckless behaviour in others, in his own conduct he remained correct, cautious, and a little prim: a habit of social remoteness, for which he would find himself censured much later on, was there from the beginning.

  At the start of his second year at the college, Britten moved to Burleigh House, 173 Cromwell Road: there, as he soon discovered, his fellow residents were less tolerant of their hard-working music student than their predecessors at Prince’s Square. By the beginning of December 1931 there were ‘rows about my practising – people threaten to leave if it doesn’t stop’; but what upset him most, according to his diary, was the way in which they would be ‘moaning’ behind his back while telling him to his face that they didn’t mind it. ‘The av. person,’ he concluded, ‘seems to be a dishonest fool.’41 He tactfully decamped to the college’s practice rooms for the rest of the term. When he returned to Cromwell Road after Christmas, he transferred to a top-floor room and hired a piano of his own, which fitted (he said) ‘quite well’; it proved not to his taste, however, and on 22 February, accompanied by his indefatigable mother, he was off ‘to see a Pft (grand) that a Mrs Audrey Melville is going to lend me here’.42 This was duly delivered ten days later, and its predecessor taken away, all in the space of an hour: ‘there really is quite a lot of room in my room now surprisingly enough’, he noted; as attics go, his was a capacious one. In January, he had been joined there by his sister Beth, who was embarking on a dressmaking course in London and moved into the adjacent room. The family cocoon was re-forming around him; his term-time diary entries for the next two years usually mention time spent with Beth or Barbara or both his sisters.

  Britten the college student often seems less mature than the schoolboy who had proclaimed his enthusiasm for Schoenberg, Picasso and Proust. His reading, in particular, lurched backwards in a nostalgic attempt to reinhabit the world he had left; but the attraction of the school stories he chose to read was double-edged for, while they offered comforting revisitations of childhood, they also tended to include explorations of compromised or corrupted innocence. Among them were F. W. Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little, Hugh Walpole’s Jeremy at Crale and H. A. Vachell’s The Hill, a novel about Harrow whose homosexual aspects had attracted some notoriety when it first appeared in 1905; but the novel to which he returned obsessively, reading it ‘for the umpteenth time’ in May 1932, was David Copperfield, which he judged to be ‘an absolutely first rate book – inspired from beginning to end’.43 Many readers will find that praise excessive: we are more likely to regard David Copperfield as memorable though flawed and ultimately sentimental, inferior to Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend or to more compact masterpieces such as Great Expectations and Hard Times. Yet it’s easy to see why Britten should have been so attracted to it, for some of its most powerful elements are uncannily close to themes which were to recur in his work: there are the scenes evocatively set in the fishing community of Great Yarmouth, the next town up the East Anglian coast from Lowestoft; and there is young David’s appalled relationship with his sadistic stepfather Murdstone, his hero-worship of the unreliably charismatic Steerforth and his gradual discovery of a corrupt adult world. Much later, Britten told Charles Osborne that he had ‘seriously’ considered an opera based on David Copperfield, but decided that he ‘would find the overall shape almost impossible to cope with’.44 Then, within days of that ‘umpteenth’ reading, Britten found himself listening on the radio to ‘a wonderful, impressive but terribly eerie & scary play’:45 this was a dramatisation of Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. He read the book the following winter and decided it was an ‘incredible masterpiece’.46 It too would stay with him.

  His reading during these years was focused not just on childhood but on the past; with such resolutely unmodernist exceptions as W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare and Robert Graves (each of whose work he enjoyed and set), this was as true of poets as it was of novelists. There is nothing to suggest that he had come across the era-defining poem of the 1920s, The Waste Land; nor, though his arrival in London in the autumn of 1930 coincided with the publication by Faber of Auden’s first commercially produced book, Poems, would he yet have recognised himself as an inhabitant of the region described by Samuel Hynes, in The Auden Generation, as ‘Auden Country’. Nevertheless, without being aware of it, he was. Hynes calls Paid on Both Sides – the ‘charade’ which accompanies the thirty lyrics of Poems – ‘an apprehensive parable of immaturity, marked, inevitably, by Auden’s homosexuality, but in a tradition that is not overtly homosexual – the Public School, First World War tradition of the games-playing male society’.47 Almost every word of that is exactly applicable to the young Britten. ‘Auden Country’, according to Hynes, was a ‘dense mingling of public and private, school and war, nature and machinery, which in the poetry of the ’thirties becomes a familiar landscape’.48 It would in due course become familiar, even intimate, to Britten, but for the time being he had no sense that these things, many of which must have been buzzing around in his head, could be the components of creative life. He hadn’t properly connected with the contemporary intellectual world: for this, the curious pattern of his education – his long years at a philistine prep school followed by a relatively brief spell, without sixth-form experience, at Gresham’s – was largely to blame. Consequently, his developing taste in poetry, unshaped either by an academic canon or by contact with the literary world around him, was randomly eclectic; yet the sheer oddness of the poems he grew to like would often serve him surprisingly well when he came to set them to music.

  A comparable degree of randomness – and a cheerful acceptance of the middlebrow which sharply contrasts with his views on music – is evident in his visits to the theatre and the cinema, often dictated by the tastes of his fellow lodgers in London or his family in Lowestoft. Plays, including musicals, would at best prompt him to unqualified schoolboyish enthusiasm: he found The Song of the Drum ‘absolutely sidesplitting … dancing & scenary were stupendous’, while Stand Up and Sing was ‘a perfectly topping, side-splitting, rolicking good show’.49 Yet such terms already seem stretched and ill-fitting, like grown-out-of clothes, and his more interesting reactions began to include almost apologetic reservations: The Vagabond King was ‘quite amusing – tho’ of course nothing in it’50 and, as for Paul Robeson (appearing with ‘an Vaudville company’), ‘He has a remarkable organ, but didn’t seem able to use it.’51 It seems extraordinary that he could have been persuaded to endure Lilac Time, with its dreadful reorchestrations of Schubert, although he did his best: ‘Very amusing in parts, scenary v. pretty,’ he conceded, before adding, ‘Music arranged excruciatingly.’52 He thought Noël Coward’s Cavalcade ‘Magnificently produced – & with some fine & moving ideas’, a phrase which strikes an unexpectedly serious critical note until qualified by this quite subtle afterthought: ‘Not an especially great play tho’.’53

  About films, as perhaps befits the medium, he was more brashly demotic: Charlie’s Aunt was ‘Screemingly funny’ and Canaries Sometimes Sing ‘Screaminly funny’,54 two ways of not quite saying the same thing. On the other
hand, he recorded seeing ‘2 putrid films’ without even naming them and ‘some utter tosh’ called Strictly Dishonourable. Charlie Chaplin in City Lights received unqualified praise – ‘A wonderful piece of acting’ – and Hell’s Angels had ‘Marvellous photography spoilt by slop’.55 He didn’t at all care for sentimental ‘slop’: it represented both a sexual taste he didn’t share and an aesthetic sense he would always find suspect. At the end of a summer’s day in 1932, which he had cheerfully spent walking and bathing at Lowestoft before meeting a new musician friend, Christopher Gledhill, over tea, he was dragged off to the cinema in the evening: ‘Go to “Mata Hari” at Palace with Beth to see Greta Garbo. She is most attractive, I suppose, but what slop!’56 The dismissive detachment of that ‘I suppose’ is rather magnificent.