Two geniuses meet after decades of estrangement. One is the finest poet of his generation; the other the finest composer. Thirty years earlier they had been close colleagues and friends, and perhaps more than that (for both men are gay). Then the composer started to resent the way that the poet tried to influence his music, politics and even personal life. After seven years of collaboration, growing bitterness forced them apart.
Now, though, both men are ill. They know time is running out. The composer has embarked on what he rightly suspects will be his last opera: a setting of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. It's about a dying writer who, through his helpless infatuation with a gorgeous boy, finally succumbs to the dark, dangerous Dionysian passions that he had struggled to sublimate through his art.
For the composer, this is painfully personal stuff — for he, too, has struggled all his life to sublimate a desire for beautiful boys in a series of operas in which innocent lads are in constant danger of harm or corruption. So the composer decides to break the 30-year estrangement and talk to the poet. Why? Because, decades earlier, the poet had persistently urged the composer to recognise and act upon his homoerotic desires.
This meeting is the subject of The Habit of Art, the Alan Bennett play that will receive its premiere at the National Theatre next month. And it’s not fiction. The poet is W. H. Auden, the composer Benjamin Britten. And their relationship was exactly as I’ve outlined above — except for one crucial thing. When they went their separate ways in 1942, it was for ever. Britten never contacted the dying Auden for advice when he was composing Death in Venice in the early 1970s. In fact when Auden died in 1973 (three years before Britten) the composer didn't even attend his memorial — though his music was played at it. So this last meeting between the two is Bennett’s brilliant conjecture.
Nevertheless, it leads us straight to the heart of one of the most gripping and symbolic relationships in 20th-century culture: gripping because it was a real clash of two mighty creative minds; symbolic because it was so redolent of the political, artistic and sexual times in which it was nurtured — the 1930s, or (as Auden labelled it), the Age of Anxiety.
Auden and Britten were educated in the 1920s at the same boys’ school: Gresham’s in Norfolk. But Auden was nearly seven years older, and they didn’t meet until 1935. By then the 22-year-old Britten, a precocious prodigy with hundreds of compositions already to his name, had been snapped up as the in-house composer for the GPO Film Unit, which produced short documentaries on British life. Auden was writing flowery scripts for the same unit. The two started collaborating on documentary classics such as Night Mail and Coal Face.
But the susceptible and desperately inexperienced Britten, who was still writing letters of passionate endearment to his mother back in Suffolk, was also drawn into Auden's worldly circle — a gang of left-wing, atheist, pacifist and (mostly) flamboyantly homosexual young writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender. He wrote incidental music for their political theatre group. And when Auden became impassioned about the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War (even going to Spain as a civilian volunteer), Britten composed Ballad of Heroes to commemorate the young men who died in the anti-fascist cause.
All this must have been liberating, stimulating and pleasantly shocking for Britten, whose East Anglian background was culturally narrow and politically reactionary. But undoubtedly the biggest attraction was Auden himself. Even in his twenties the poet was charismatic, incredibly well read, opinionated on every subject, inclined to be an intellectual bully, and amazingly frank about his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still an imprisonable offence.
Britten was dazzled from the start. “Auden is the most amazing man,” he wrote in his diary on the day that they met. Later he records feeling “very young and very stupid”, and of developing a “bad inferiority complex in company of brains like Wystan Auden”. He started to ape Auden’s political views. In the 1936 cantata Our Hunting Fathers the pair collaborated on a major choral piece that managed, albeit rather creakily, to attack both the English foxhunting classes and Fascism in continental Europe.
It was in the field of sexuality, however, that Auden tried most forcefully to help Britten to “grow up” — as he saw it. Britten, a perpetual boy himself (he was still using Letts Schoolboy Diaries in his forties), liked the company of attractive teenage boys. Two, in particular, featured in his life in the 1930s: a 14-year-old called Piers Dunkerley, whom Britten took to the cinema and concerts; and Wulff Scherchen, the 18-year-old son of a German conductor.
These were innocent crushes — innocent in that, as far as is known, no physical contact was involved. But Auden’s view, which he made very clear to Britten, was that the composer’s penchant for boys whom he knew he couldn’t touch was a way of avoiding a full, physical relationship with an adult man. One Auden poem that Britten set to music, and which was clearly aimed at the composer, has the lines: “Your unique and moping station proves you cold; stand up and fold your map of desolation.” What’s more, Auden maintained that this fear of acknowledging his true sexuality was trapping Britten in “bourgeois conventions” when, as an artist, he ought to be embracing wild bohemianism. “Your attraction to thin-as-a-board juveniles, ie, to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom of this,” he wrote to Britten.
In fact Britten had formed a stable relationship with an adult: a relationship that became one of the most famous and enduring of gay “marriages”. The man was a young tenor called Peter Pears. They met in 1937 and Pears became Britten’s lover, muse, protector, rock and mother hen for the remaining 39 years of the composer’s life. Nevertheless, Auden’s influence on Britten persisted for several years after that. In 1939 the poet left Britain for America (where he later became a US citizen) — claiming that in England “the artist feels essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots, always in opposition to a group”. (Odd that this great denunciator of fascism should abandon his homeland as it embarked on a life-or-death struggle against fascism.) Britten and Pears dutifully followed suit, and it was in America that Britten and Auden collaborated on their biggest project — a folk opera called Paul Bunyan. But it’s clear that Britten was increasingly distancing himself from the poet. The final straw seems to have been the period when Britten and Pears joined Auden’s louche and sozzled household at Brooklyn Heights in New York. The household consisted, at one time or another, of Salvador Dalí, MacNeice, Gypsy Rose Lee, Chester Kallman (then Auden’s teenage lover) and a dozen other flamboyantly camp luminaries of the New York avant-garde. Britten and Pears, puritanical English public schoolboys at heart, were shocked at the goings-on. Pears later called them “sordid beyond belief”. Besides, both were homesick. They returned to England in 1942. And, as far as the relationship between Auden and Britten was concerned, that was it.
Three things probably killed it. The first was that Britten, initially dazzled by Auden’s virtuosic poetic style, may have found his verbal flourishes increasingly irksome to set to music. Auden’s brilliant rhymes and metaphors called too much attention to themselves; they demanded that music act as their servant, not their equal. The second was that, as Britten gained in confidence and fame as a composer, he increasingly seems to have resented Auden’s head-prefect injunctions about art, politics, the Universe and everything. Britten was on the verge of greatness, with Peter Grimes just three years ahead; whereas Auden’s most influential days were behind him. It’s significant that, after Auden, Britten always took care to boss his librettists. And none lasted more than one or two operas.
And the third reason? That was to do with style and sexuality. Auden was far ahead of his time. He believed in flaunting his homosexuality, in being overtly “proud to be gay” decades before that became a slogan. Britten, by contrast, had a quintessential English reticence, and a horror of being perceived as “abnormal”. He and Pears sought a discreet, private relationship. The last thing they wanted was to become icons of sexual liberation.
Instead, Britten poured it all — his obsession with youths, his horror of “corruption”, his Peter Pan yearning for the innocence of childhood, his sympathy for the misunderstood, mob-persecuted “outsider” — into his operatic masterpieces. Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Rape of Lucretia, The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave: all of them, one way or another, play out their composer’s psychological turmoil behind the camouflage of drama. Then, in 1973, came Death in Venice, the opera in which he seems finally to acknowledge that the advice Auden gave him three decades earlier — to act on his desires — was right all along.
Or does he? Perhaps, as the punning title of Alan Bennett's play seems to suggest, this is just another instance of the “habit” of art concealing the real man within. Britten was certainly good at that.
The Habit of Art is at the Lyttelton Theatre, National Theatre, SE1 (020-7452 3000; www.nationaltheatre.org.uk), from Nov 5 to Jan 24
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