by Neil Powell
Love, love, love. I’m going to go sentimental & cry if I continue this letter. Try & change Xmas to next Sunday. Oh my darling, I love you. Yours ever, Wulff. Love, love, love, love. (Give my love to Peter & Lennox). Please send a post-card every day till end of week. I’m feeling absolutely desolate. Don’t ever leave me darling. xxxx187
We can’t quite blame it on the exams, nor is it just an adolescent crush, though there are elements of both these things. In a way, the letter’s most remarkable aspect is its sending of love to Peter and Lennox, both of whom he had by now met: this quite clearly asserts Wulff’s status as part of an emotionally engaged quartet, perhaps even adding a touch of condescension towards his two rivals for Ben’s affection. He and Lennox had met for the second time a fortnight earlier, at a party before the last night of On the Frontier, an uneasy occasion at his mother’s house; in a misguided attempt at rapprochement, Wulff suggested that the three of them should spend Christmas together at Snape. Berkeley, who had returned with Britten to the Old Mill, replied with a frankness which must have disconcerted Wulff (and may well have contributed to the altered tone of his letters to Ben): ‘I don’t think it would be any fun at all the three of us being here together. It’s a pity, because, strangely enough, I like you. You mustn’t worry yourself about me. That side of it is a matter between Ben and me, and so long as we have settled it, it is not your responsibility or even your concern.’188 It was, he said, ‘uncommonly nice’ of Wulff to have felt and thought as he had; all the same, that ‘strangely enough’ must have stung, while the idea that this was entirely a matter for him and Ben was nonsensical, since for him Wulff was the problem. For Ben, however, Lennox was the problem.
Lennox, who had spent much of the autumn living at the Old Mill (and doing the usefully practical things around house and garden which were beyond Ben), took himself off to old friends in Gloucestershire for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, he wrote a letter as emotionally overwrought as Wulff’s earlier in the month: ‘Darling, I must write because I can’t think of anything but you, everything seems drab and uninteresting except you, so I’m writing in dispair, hoping to feel better after,’ he began. He sent his love to Wulff, ‘though I can’t feel quite so well disposed towards him at the moment as I shd like to’.189 Ben telephoned as soon as he received this, but Lennox couldn’t speak freely in his host’s presence, so that evening he wrote again: ‘It’s almost impossible for me not to be haunted by the green-eyed monster when Wulff is with you … I feel an awful fool to have let myself fall in love so violently – I really ought to know better at my age.’ He seems to sense (and so perhaps do we) the presence of a mischievous Puck making fools of them all. All the same, he was going to spend January in Paris, which partly explains the bucking-up tone of Ben’s reply: ‘A very happy New Year to you! I am sure you’re feeling fine now that you’re in Paris & with José & all those friends of yours.’190 Of Christmas in Snape, he merely said that it had been ‘definitely good, in spite of the very thick snow’. Wulff remembered it as one of those magical times when he and Ben had the Old Mill to themselves: ‘Just the two of us walking, talking, trying to add pieces to the huge jigsaw puzzle on the table by the entrance; stoking the boiler before showering in the morning in that little outhouse…’ There seemed to be ‘Christmas dinner every night at one or another of Ben’s friends’ houses nearby’ and he told Tony Scotland that it ‘was a time when Ben and I cemented our relationship’.191 That is a slightly tricky phrase which may, with all the other evidence of their intimacy, suggest that during the winter of 1938–9 the relationship was sexually consummated, but it needs to be read against one of Wulff’s more guarded remarks to John Bridcut: ‘Oh yes, hugs and kisses – any time! The hugs, of course, were easy to accept, but kisses were more difficult. It was pleasant enough, but this isn’t quite what boys do!’192
If that were indeed the extent of their physical contact, it may explain Britten’s otherwise out-of-character behaviour in January. He was going to Brussels, to perform his piano concerto with the Belgian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Franz André on the 5th, and while there he would stay with Auden and Isherwood. Auden shrewdly or naughtily offered to fix him up with a sixteen-year-old boy who would ‘make you crazy … Such eyes. O la la.’193 Although this was just the sort of proposal to bring out the East Anglian puritan in Britten, on this occasion he not only looked forward to it but told his intimate friends, including Berkeley, who reacted with dismay: ‘I think you must try and behave nicely there in spite of being in the possession of mysterious addresses. I hate to think of you doing – I mean – oh damn, well you know what I mean.’ He went on to insist that this wasn’t ‘jealousy this time, but a sort of respect for you and a really deep kind of affection that makes me want you to be everything that’s marvellous and good’.194 There is no evidence that Britten actually took up Auden’s offer. On the day of the performance, he sent a picture postcard of the Maison du Roi to Wulff: ‘Having a v.g. time – the rehearsal was a wow this morning.’195 The card was also signed by Isherwood (who added a sentence: ‘Hoping to see you again before we sail for America’) and by Isherwood’s unreliable on–off lover Jackie Hewitt, who would later be unwisely installed as caretaker-lodger in Britten and Pears’s new London flat; after less than a year at Nevern Square, they had moved to 67 Hallam Street, W1, conveniently close to the BBC.
The party they gave there on 17 January was both a house-warming for them and a farewell for Auden and Isherwood, who were sailing from Southampton on the following day. William Coldstream, one of the guests, noted that the others present included ‘Christopher’s new boy friend, a German boy friend of Benjamin’s, and Hedli Anderson’.196 Britten himself was both flattered and alarmed by the way in which his relationship with Wulff was now regarded: ‘our little friendship seems to be rumoured all over the continent’. ‘I personally don’t care what people say,’ he claimed, a little disingenuously, ‘but it might react badly on you – a foreigner in England. I should love to shout it to the skies – as you know.’197 This, given the prevailing legal position, would have been most unwise, although his sense that in early 1939 a German in England should tread carefully was sound enough; either way, the party and his casual introductions (‘This is Wulff’, ‘You’ve heard me talk about Wulff’) did nothing to quash the rumours. Hedli Anderson sang Britten’s Cabaret Songs and Pears a subsequently lost setting of Stephen Spender’s ‘Not to you I sighed’, while Britten played the piano ‘with great gusto … He likes doing what he does well all the time.’ Spender himself was among the appreciative guests and Wulff, writing after his return to Cambridge, was appreciative too: ‘I’m beginning to fall in love with Peter in the way one falls in love with a friend and not a sex-maniac like you … Tell Peter he’s a darling & tell Jackie I hope to see him again soon. “Tell me the truth about love” & the Spender song have completely obsessed me since I returned.’198 Britten replied that he was glad Wulff liked Peter but that he disliked ‘being called a s.-m – even by your fairy lips. See? T’aint true – Oim a good boy, Oi am.’199 It reads like an artful double bluff: the switch into urchin dialect seems to imply that he isn’t at all a good boy, yet an impression of badness is just what the tediously virtuous might wish to give. Roger Nichols connects this with Miles’s ‘You see, I am bad, I am bad, aren’t I?’ in The Turn of the Screw, and the register is indeed strikingly similar.200
At the beginning of February, Berkeley returned to Snape. While love letters (and love poems) continually arrived from Cambridge, and while Britten replied in terms of almost equal passion – and began, with Wulff in mind, to work on Les Illuminations – Lennox tried desperately to rebuild his relationship with Ben. It was hopeless, of course, as a letter from Britten to Pears in mid-March makes clear: ‘we’ve had a bit of a crisis and I’m only too thankful to be going away. I had the most fearful feeling of revulsion the other day – conscience and all that – just like old days. He’s been very upset, poor dear – but that m
akes it worse!’201 Among Berkeley’s peace offerings was a splendid fast car, ‘a heavenly thing – 16 h.p. A.C. Coupé & goes like the wind’.202 It belonged to Lennox, but even when he was away from the Old Mill he left it there for Ben to drive. And drive it he certainly did, reporting to its absent owner that he had taken it on the Newmarket road at 85 mph ‘just to show that the wheels were going round properly’,203 while Wulff remembered that ‘we buzzed down the long straight stretch of the new Brighton road at over 90 mph’.204 By this time, Lennox had gone back to Paris, and Ben seems to have given Wulff the impression that the car was a delayed twenty-fifth birthday present: there is a photograph, taken by Britten at the Old Mill, of the AC with its headlights blazing and Wulff in the passenger seat, a trophy within a trophy. This remained for Wulff, like ‘a sudden cold shower down the back of the neck’, the one troubling feature of an otherwise idyllic period: he knew that Lennox had been given ‘a definite and brutal brush off’ and couldn’t understand ‘why Ben had not returned his present when making the break’.205 The answer – that it wasn’t a present and anyway it couldn’t be returned to an owner who was out of the country – doesn’t quite exonerate Britten.
‘How shall we find the concord of this discord?’ It is worth remembering that concord was found: that all four men – Ben, Peter, Lennox and Wulff – were to spend their later years in exceptionally long and stable partnerships (Wulff Scherchen married Pauline Woolford on 10 October 1943; Lennox Berkeley married Freda Bernstein on 14 December 1946). However, in the spring of 1939, it was a mathematical inevitability that two of them would be hurt. During the previous year’s happier spring, Britten and Berkeley had discussed the idea of a joint visit to America, but nothing had come of it. Now, the possibility recurred to Britten in rather different terms, partly because, as he told Wulff on 7 February, ‘I may have an offer from Holywood for a film’:206 the subject was to have been King Arthur and the director Lewis Milestone. He could no longer stand the thought of Lennox as his travelling companion and he obviously couldn’t take Wulff (ironically, it was the British authorities who would in due course export him to Canada as an enemy alien); but in Peter Pears he had a close friend for whom he had begun to write songs and whom he could accompany at the piano. They were both pacifists who would be not only useless but conceivably imprisoned in the event of a European war; their friends Auden and Isherwood were already in the States. By early March they had settled on a plan which involved first of all sailing to Canada at the end of April. Britten told Mary Behrend that ‘the real reason is to do some really intensive thinking & for me personally to do some work to please myself ’. At this stage, they anticipated that Peter would be ‘back at the end of the summer’, although Ben had ‘other ideas & may stay on abit or go to the U.S.A.’207 And, apart from all the other excellent reasons for going, an indefinite stay in America would solve both the actual problem of Lennox and the potential problem of Wulff.
In these circumstances, Pears’s later account of their departure, in Tony Palmer’s film A Time There Was, may look evasive or euphemistic: ‘Ben began to feel that he wasn’t doing much good, although he had actually done quite well … And in ’39, Ben and I decided that he was not getting anywhere fast enough, as it were…’208 But Britten’s (for him) meagre output in the early months of 1939 confirms this. His one substantial work was Ballad of Heroes, Op. 14, for tenor, chorus and orchestra, composed in early March and first performed by Walter Widdup, the London Co-operative Chorus and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Constant Lambert, at the Queen’s Hall on 5 April: conceived as a memorial to British members of the International Brigade killed in Spain, it sets two poems by Randall Swingler and one by Auden. The Swingler texts, ‘You who stand at your doors’ and ‘Still though the scene of possible Summer recedes’, are solemnly didactic and entirely apt; the Auden, a truncated version of his ‘Danse Macabre’ (‘It’s farewell to the drawing-room’s civilized cry…’), apparently used without the poet’s consent, is more problematical, largely because the combination of faster tempo and denser language renders it incomprehensible. The work is undeniably powerful, with echoes of Mahler and Shostakovich, and was well received; yet it marks the end of an era, of a decade and of a period in the composer’s life, a sense confirmed by the fact that the Spanish Civil War officially ended just four days before its first performance.
By contrast, the work-in-progress which looked forward to Britten’s future was Les Illuminations. Sophie Wyss remembered returning from a recital with him by train in 1938: ‘he came over to me very excitedly as we were unable to sit together, and said that he had just read the most wonderful poetry by Rimbaud and was so eager to set it to music’.209 She thought that he had ‘seen a copy of Rimbaud’s works while he was recently staying with Auden in Birmingham’, a likelihood corroborated by Auden’s sonnet ‘Rimbaud’,210 written in December 1938. When, about this time, Britten started to think seriously about the songs, the relationship between the transgressive young poet and his older friend Verlaine would have acquired a special resonance for him. Indeed, it was to Wulff that he excitedly wrote on 19 March, having just composed ‘Being Beauteous’ and ‘Marine’: ‘Written two good (!) songs this week – French words. Arthur Rimbaud – marvellous poems. I’ll show you them later.’211 These two songs were first performed by Sophie Wyss in a BBC midday concert from Birmingham on 21 April, together with the Bridge Variations, Simple Symphony, three songs from On This Island and one from Friday Afternoons, the first occasion on which an all-Britten programme had been broadcast. When he discovered that Wulff hadn’t bothered to tune in, Britten erupted in fury, first by telephone and then by letter, in a manner which was less tirade-and-apology than serve-and-volley:
I’m sorry I was such a pig on the ’phone tonight but I felt so damn sick that you hadn’t taken the trouble to listen to my concert. You see – the first complete concert of one’s music is a pretty good trial – & the fact that it was a great success makes one rather bucked – BUT the fact that you didn’t hear it – especially as I was thinking about you so much during it (especially in the new Rimbaud songs) – is very gruelling. However one looks at it it is beastly. But I was writing this just to comfort you, but it doesn’t seem to do it – perhaps it is a good thing I’m going away. Blast it. – Anyhow Lennox will have listened.212
Perhaps it was a good thing, too, for Wulff who, despite being in love with Ben and flirtatiously fond of his friends’ admiration, had become increasingly ill at ease when he found himself among the London gay clique – but then so was Britten, who would never really return to it. Les Illuminations would be finished on a different continent, almost in a different life.
On 28 April, there was another farewell party at Hallam Street; among those present were Barbara Britten, Beth and Kit Welford (with their month-old son Thomas, Britten’s nephew), Hedli Anderson, John Pounder, Trevor Harvey and Antonio Brosa. Next morning, Britten and Pears took the train – ‘the way to the sea’ – to Southampton, from where they were to sail aboard the Cunard White Star Ausonia to Quebec. At the quayside, they were greeted by two unexpected friends, Frank and Ethel Bridge, who had driven over from Friston to see them off. As they exchanged farewells, Bridge suddenly produced a parting gift for Britten, his own Giussani viola, accompanied by a note:
So that a bit of us accompanies you on your adventure.
We are all ‘revelations’ as you know. Just go on expanding.
Ever your affectionate
& devoted
Ethel & Frank
Bon voyage & bon retour.213
Thus a symbolic baton was passed from the outstandingly gifted English musician of one generation to his still more brilliant protégé. They would never meet again.
CHAPTER 4
AMERICAN OVERTURES
1939–42
1
‘What a fool one is to come away,’ wrote Britten, aboard the Ausonia, on 3 May: he was missing Snape and missing Wulff; there was no
thing to do except ‘Eat, sleep, ping-pong, eat, walk, decks, eat, eat, deck-tennis, eat, read, sleep’; and ‘the last two days [during which there had been ‘a terrific gale’] have been unadulterated misery’.1 Then things began to improve: he discovered ‘nice people’ on board – including R. J. Yeatman, the co-author of 1066 and All That – and some of them recognised Britten from his photograph which had appeared in a London periodical, the Bystander. He and Pears were persuaded to give a recital, which pleased ‘the old ladies’ but must have pleased them too. A small boy had ‘attached himself – a nice kid of 14, but inclined to cling rather’, he told Lennox Berkeley, and there was a ‘nice Purser who’s terrifically hot at ping-pong’: Britten was determined to beat him at it ‘before this interminable week is out’.2 In contrast to his letters to friends in England was one to the composer Aaron Copland, whom he had met in London at the 1938 ISCM Festival and who had visited Snape one hot weekend, written amid icebergs on 8 May: ‘At last, & look where I am! On the way to Canada, & surrounded by ice. A thousand reasons – mostly “problems” – have brought me away, & I’ve come to stay in your continent for the Summer.’ One of those ‘problems’ was that he’d become ‘heavily tied up in a certain direction’: Wulff or Lennox or the problematical combination of the two. He outlined his tentative plans, emphasised that nothing was settled, and added: ‘I’ve come with the guy I share a flat with in London. Nice person, & I know you’d approve.’3
That is beautifully and tactfully put: one especially notices the flatteringly adoptive Americanism of ‘guy’. He was indeed fortunate in his travelling companion, and would remain so; for now, there were practical advantages (such as giving impromptu recitals) in being with a singer, rather than with a composer or a student just turning nineteen. And Pears was clear about his own position as the junior partner: ‘I realised that I was much less important … I was perfectly aware of his [Ben’s] stature and how great he was, there’s no doubt about that.’4 They reached Quebec on 9 May and went first to Montreal, where they visited the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who ‘treated us like kings’;5 a performance of the Bridge Variations, introduced (though not conducted) by the composer, and a song recital by Britten and Pears were to be broadcast from Toronto in June, and there would also be a commission for a new work from the CBC. Then they travelled on to Gray Rocks Inn at St Jovite Station in the Laurentian Mountains, where they stayed for three weeks in a hillside log cabin overlooking a lake among forests. It was a working holiday, with ironic echoes of the one Britten and Berkeley had spent in their Cornish chalet, but this time the personal chemistry was very different. ‘We are getting on well together & no fights,’6 Ben told Beth, with magnificent understatement. He was finishing off a BBC commission (incidental music for The Sword in the Stone, broadcast between 11 June and 16 July that year), as well as working on Les Illuminations and the violin concerto while Peter practised his singing: ‘We usually work it that when he wants to make noises I go out for a walk & he walks when I want to work.’7
