In Auden's Shadow: Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

At one of their first meetings, Auden asked Spender how often he wrote poetry.

Without reflecting, I replied that I wrote about four poems a day. He was astonished and exclaimed: 'What energy!' I asked him how often he wrote a poem. He replied: 'I write about one in three weeks.' After this I started writing only one poem in three weeks.

- Stephen Spender, World within World (1951): p.44.

That gives you some sense of the character of their relationship. It was a long time before Spender managed to climb out from under the older poet's shadow, and one might even argue that he never did.

Stephen Spender: World within World (1951)

His story is a complex one, however. There were times when his poetry was almost as highly regarded as Auden's, and anthology pieces such as 'My Parents' continue to resonate to this day:

My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes
Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud
While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

Some of the others, though - 'The Truly Great,' for instance - however highly regarded they may have been at the time, sound rather embarrassing now:

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

They 'left the vivid air signed with their honour,' eh? No wonder they nicknamed him 'Young Shelley.'

Stephen Spender: World within World (1951)

World within World, his autobiography, published in his early forties - though he lived to the age of 86 he never supplemented or continued it - remains, however, a strange, subtle piece of writing.

He records there how, after a brief indoctrination by Auden in the characteristics and requirements of modern poetry ('The poet is far more like Mr. Everyman than Kelley and Sheats. He cuts his hair short, wears spats, a bowler hat, and a pin-stripe city suit. He goes to the job in the bank by the suburban train' - World within World, p.53), Spender reluctantly concluded that there was no place for him there.

After I had known him six weeks he must have approved of as many of my lines. Therefore it was rather surprising to discover that he considered me a member of 'the Gang'. Once I told him I wondered whether I ought to write prose, and he answered: 'You must write nothing but poetry, we do not want to lose you for poetry.' This remark produced in me a choking moment of hope mingled with despair, in which I cried: 'But do you really think I am any good?' 'Of course,' he replied frigidly. 'But why?' 'Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation,' he added in his icy voice - and left me wondering when he could feel humiliated.

- World within World: pp.44-45.

It wasn't that Spender was insensitive to embarrassment. On the contrary, it's hard to imagine a man with a thinner skin, more naturally vain and self-regarding. It's just that he was willing to put all that on the record: to write down the whole of himself, silliness and all. Not even Auden could do that.

Stephen Spender: Journals, 1939-1983 (1985)

I never actually met the man, but I did ask him to sign his latest book - Journals 1939-1983 - for me on one occasion. It was at the Edinburgh Book Festival (one of the many sideshows to the Official Festival which take place in that city every year). I see from the ticket stub, which I still have, that it was in mid-1989, so he must have just turned 80.

He gave a brief poetry reading, then answered a few questions. The one I remember came from a woman with an exceptionally unctuous voice who asked why one particular early poem had been left out of the latest, 1985, edition of his Collected Poems, since it was (she claimed) such a wonderful piece of work.

'Oh, I don't know,' he replied, 'It just seemed a bit sentimental, I suppose.' The put-down of the woman and her level of taste was complete, and yet it seemed (almost) entirely offhand - as if it had never occurred to him that it might hurt her feelings.

She asked. He answered, as accurately as he could. That was that.

Stephen Spender: Collected Poems 1929-1985 (1985)

Then the line formed.

It turned out that almost nobody was there to hear one more reading by the eminent poet. On the contrary, they were all there to get him to sign their copies of his books. The line was snaking all the way round the tent before I could get anywhere near it, and I could dimly see, off in the distance, the old grey head rising and falling as he scribbled industriously in each tome.

I'd provided myself with his latest, in token of good faith - at least some small royalties might be going to him from the sale - but others were not so scrupulous. The man in front of me, for instance, presumably some kind of dealer, had an armful of Spenderiana from all periods of his career. And when, after half an hour or so, the line eventually got to us, the great man duly signed them, one by one.

I felt bad about adding one more tiny jot of effort to his day, but by then I'd waited so long that I simply couldn't face failure. I handed him my one book; he scribbled in it; I said 'thank you' in as unassuming a manner as possible; and that was all. There was no meeting of the eyes, no miraculous conveyance of sympathy from aspiring poet to master ... just an old man plying his pen as he'd clearly had to do so many times before.

After that, I think, he was dragged off to safety by one of his children, and the baying masses were forced to subside. I've always felt a little ashamed of the incident, as if I were guilty of contributing a little to his discomfiture that day, but perhaps it were 'to consider too curiously, to consider so.'

I'd felt terribly anxious to see the grand old man, last survivor of all those thirties poets I idolised, but the occasion seemed tainted somehow by the thronging of all those importunate bookhounds.

Stephen Spender: Journals, 1939-1983 (signed)

The defining moment for the Auden group undoubtedly came at the very end of the thirties, that 'low, dishonest decade,' as he called it in his classic poem 'September 1, 1939.' Whatever his original intentions for the poem, it became a kind of 'Goodbye to All That' for both him and his friend Isherwood. Instead of returning to soon-to-be-war-beleaguered Britain, they decided to stay in the United States.

The other members of the group remained in the UK. All took part in the war effort in their various ways - not as combatants, but as active participants on the Home Front, as well as acting as war propagandists at various points. The Spanish war had united and - some would say - defined them as a group, however various their responses to it turn out, in retrospect, to have been.

It was the Second World War that divided them, turned Spender into a kind of suave literary politician, Day Lewis into a Hardy-esque pastoralist, MacNeice into a drunken BBC producer, and linked them definitively to the Old World rather than the New.

Edward Mendelson: Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography (2017)

Whether Auden could be said to have ever written as well in his newly adopted country as he did in the old is debatable. He certainly wrote differently, though. His explorations of inner worlds and the inner life may have been less lyrically effective than the gnarled, gnomic verse he composed in the thirties, but they were certainly no less ambitious in scope.

Isherwood, too, gave up the chance to be a kind of novelistic cross between Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene to become a narcissistic Californian navel-gazer. It would be many years before either of them would be forgiven back home for this perceived treachery in time of war.

Spender, too, became less poet than prose-writer and editor - though he never stopped writing poetry right up to the end, it's his earlier work that resonates, still, with most readers.

Should he have gone with them? Almost certainly not. For him the essential thing was simply to see less of Auden, define his own life choices, both professionally and sexually. His fiction from this period is exceptionally interesting in this regard - especially The Temple, an autobiographical novel about his experiences in the Weimar republic begun in the thirties but not finally completed and published until half a century later, in 1988.

It's often seemed anomalous - to some readers, at least - that the defining note of the Auden group, the so-called 'Pylon poets,' was initially struck by Spender, not their putative leader. The poem is certainly not the anthemic call to arms it must once have seemed, but that doesn't leave it without interest. The lapidary clarity of Spender's early style seems unlikely to date in this particular case, at least:

Construction of a High-Voltage Tower (1930's)

The Pylons

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.

John Sutherland: Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography (2004)

•


Stephen Spender: Collected Poems, 1928–1953 (1955)

Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Poems. London: Faber, 1933.
2. Poems. 1933. Second Edition. 1934. London: Faber, 1935.
3. Vienna (1934)
4. The Still Centre. 1939. London: Faber, 1941.
5. Ruins and Visions. 1942. London: Faber, 1942.
6. Spiritual Exercises (1943)
7. Poems of Dedication. 1947. London: Faber, 1947.
8. Selected Poems. 1940. London: Faber, 1947.
9. The Edge of Being (1949)
10. Collected Poems, 1928–1953 (1955)
11. Selected Poems (1965)
12. The Express (1966)
13. The Generous Days (1971)
14. Penguin Modern Poets 20: John Heath-Stubbs / F. T. Prince / Stephen Spender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
15. Selected Poems (1974)
16. Recent Poems (1978)
17. Collected Poems 1928-1985. London: Faber, 1985.
18. Dolphins. London: Faber, 1994.
19. New Collected Poems. Ed. Michael Brett. London: Faber, 2004.

Plays:


20. Trial of a Judge: A Tragic Statement in Five Acts. 1938. London: Faber, 1945.
21. Rasputin's End: Libretto (1958)

Translation:


22. Georg Büchner. Danton's Death: A Play in Four Acts. Trans. Stephen Spender & Goronwy Rees. London: Faber, 1939.
23. Rainer Maria Rilke. Duino Elegies: The German Text, with an English Translation, Introduction and Commentary. Trans. J. B. Leishman & Stephen Spender. 1939. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.
24. Schiller. Mary Stuart. Trans. Stephen Spender. Preface by Peter Wood. London: Faber, 1959.
25. Sophocles. Oedipus Trilogy: King Oedipus; Oedipus at Colonos; Antigone: A Version. Trans. Stephen Spender. 1985. New York: Random House Inc., 1985.

Fiction:


26. The Burning Cactus (1936)
27. The Backward Son (1940)
28. Engaged in Writing & The Fool and the Princess. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958.
29. The Temple. 1988. London: Faber, 1989.

Non-fiction:


30. The Destructive Element. 1935. The Life and Letters Series, 87. London: Jonathan Cape, 1938.
31. Forward from Liberalism (1937)
32. Life and the Poet (1942)
33. Citizens in War – and After (1945)
34. European Witness (1946)
35. Poetry since 1939. The Arts in Britain, 1. 1946. London: The British Council, 1949.
36. André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, & Louis Fischer. The God That Failed. Ed. Richard Crossman. 1950. New York: Bantam Books, 1959.
37. World within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender. 1951. London: Readers Union, 1953.
38. Learning Laughter (1952)
39. The Creative Element (1953)
40. The Making of a Poem (1957)
41. The Struggle of the Modern. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963.
42. The Year of the Young Rebels (1969)
43. Love-Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.
44. Eliot (1975)
45. The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933-75). London: Fontana / Collins, 1978.
46. [with David Hockney]: China Diary. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1982.

Edited:


47. Horizon (1939-41)
48. Encounter (1953-66)
49. Great Writings of Goethe. Ed. Stephen Spender. A Mentor Book. New York: New American Library, 1958.
50. Penguin Modern Poets 23: Geoffrey Grigson / Edwin Muir / Adrian Stokes. Guest Ed. Stephen Spender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
51. W. H. Auden: A Tribute. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975.

Letters & Journals:


52. Letters to Christopher: Stephen Spender’s Letters to Christopher Isherwood, 1929-1939, with “The Line of the Branch” – Two Thirties Journals. Ed. Lee Bartlett. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1980.
53. Journals 1939-1983. London: Faber, 1985.
54. New Selected Journals, 1939–1995 (2012)

Secondary:


55. Sutherland, John. Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography. 2004. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2005.

Stephen Spender & George Orwell: Lansdowne Terrace

In Auden's Shadow

Cecil Beaton: W. H. Auden (1930)

I guess it must be pretty obvious to anyone who's ever looked at this blog just how much I've been influenced by the life and works of the late Wystan Hugh Auden. I tried to explain the obsession here, but it's quite a tall order to sum up so long a course of reading and thinking in one short post.

I first encountered his poetry at school, in the mid-1970s. I can remember the moment, in fact. I was standing in the school store-room, waiting my turn to be 'seen' by one of the teachers (I think there was some lesson in how to ace a job interview going on, but I could be wrong about that).

W. H. Auden: Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957 (1966)

I noticed a book with an exceptionally garish cover lying on the table, and picked it up to see what it was. I was already a great fan of the poetry of A. E. Housman, so the first poem I picked from the table of contents was, I think, Auden's sonnet about him:

A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame
(Blame if you like the human situation):
Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin Scholar of his generation.

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.

In savage foot-notes on unjust editions
He timidly attacked the life he led,
And put the money of his feelings on

The uncritical relations of the dead,
Where only geographical divisions
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.

It enraged me! How dare he speak so flippantly of so wonderful a writer! 'His private lust' indeed! How could he know? I went around fulminating about the cheek of 'modern' poets who dared to criticise their elders and betters for weeks afterward.

It enraged me - but also fascinated me. I'd had a chance to look at some of the other poems in the book and, while I didn't understand everything I was reading (still don't, for that matter), I understood enough for them to stay with me, keep nagging at me, get under my skin against my will.

W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (1976)

My Christmas present that year (1977) was Auden's newly published Collected Poems. By then I'd got to the stage of writing a sign for my door which read:

W. H. Auden rules!
And Edward Mendelson is his prophet ...

Mendelson's editing seemed amazingly accomplished and abstruse to me at the time, especially given the maze of competing readings and revisions he had to deal with as the poet's literary executor. Auden (like Wordsworth - or, for that matter, Yeats) was one of those poets who could never leave well enough alone.

Stephen Spender, ed. W. H. Auden: A Tribute (1975)

A great deal of my interest came from the book above, however. The fascinating essays and reminiscences it contained seemed to open up a whole cornucopia of thirties imagery and lifestyles. There was a photo-montage of Night Mail (the film, and the poem Auden wrote for it), pieces by Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, a host of other old friends - virtually everyone who was anyone, in fact, except for those who'd predeceased him.

And so the obsession began to spread, gradually encompassing all the other writers whose lives he'd touched, or in whose books he'd somehow been recorded. I've written elsewhere on this blog about Isherwood, who would have to rank first in that pantheon, but there were many others as well: basically all the members of the so-called Auden Group:

Samuel Hynes: The Auden Generation (1977)

Hence, some 45 years after "first looking into Auden's Poems", this projected series of posts about those who have ended up - fairly or unfairly - in Auden's shadow. Auden could be a dominant, some would say a domineering figure. What of those other writers and poets? What might one say about them?

There are a great many to choose from. For a start, there are the other three components of 'Macspaunday' (a derogatory epithet coined by pro-Fascist writer Roy Campbell for this set of largely left-wing poets): Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis = Mac / sp /aun / day - get it?

Then there are those notorious lines from Day-Lewis's long poem The Magnetic Mountain (1933), much mocked and denigrated at the time by George Orwell (who referred to Auden as 'a kind of gutless Kipling'):

Then I'll hit the trail for that promising land;
May catch up with Wystan and Rex my friend ...

"Wystan" is, of course, W. H. Auden; "Rex" is Rex Warner. Ought he, too, to go on the list, then?

And then there are the editors and anthologists who promoted - some would say pushed - this literary movement at the time: Michael Roberts, whose two anthologies New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933) constituted the first real attempt to define it; and Geoffrey Grigson, whose magazine New Verse (1933-39) existed - as he himself said - primarily to promote and print the work of Auden and his friends.

Paul Theroux: Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents (1998)

This, then, is my list of writers left unfairly - at least arguably - in Auden's shadow (I must confess to having found some inspiration for my title in Paul Theroux's memoir of his long and difficult friendship with West Indian writer V. S. Naipaul):

1. Michael Roberts (1902-1948)
2. Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)
3. Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985)
4. Rex Warner (1905-1986)
5. Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
6. Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

I'll put up the blogposts as I finish them, in no particular order, to avoid any invidious implications of primacy or degrees of importance. The list above, however, is arranged chronologically in order of date of birth. It's important, at times, to remember that Day-Lewis was three years Auden's senior, and Spender two years his junior.

Such details generally matter little for people you encounter as an adult, but the Auden group met first at school (Isherwood and Edward Upward), then at university (Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis), and a certain in-built competitiveness was the inevitable result.

There are plenty of other people I could have included: Charles Madge, of Mass-Observation fame, who did after all run off with Stephen Spender's first wife, and whose unfortunate account of first reading Auden (from his 'Letter to the Intelligentsia') remains extant to haunt him:

But there waited for me in the summer morning
Auden fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew.
And all the world's stationary things
In silence moved to take up new positions

Edward Upward the surrealist, too, was closely involved with the group. And if you count in their enemies: George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, Dylan Thomas, George Barker, the list could grow to include virtually everyone prominent in the arts in the 1930s ...

Let's begin with the six authors above, then. I think there are important things to be said about each of them - or if not, it isn't from lack of effort on my part in collecting their various works.

Cecil Beaton: W. H. Auden (1930)

The Machine Stops

E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops (1909)

Clearly I'm not the first one to notice the extraordinary prescience shown by E. M. Forster in his long short story "The Machine Stops," first published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909.

Forster envisages a world where people live cocooned in little cells, with audiovisual contact with one another, and minimal travel from place to place. His protagonist, Vashti, is largely content with her situation, and displays nothing but irritation at the attempts of her son, Kuno, to interest her in the forbidden regions outside.

Everything - nourishment, entertainment, contact - is supplied by the Machine, which is now the main deity worshipped by mankind, despite having been originally designed to serve them. Now, however, the machine has started to falter, to lag in its daily attentions to the human parasites that infest it.

Kuno wants his mother to accompany him outside, where he is sure that he once saw some living human beings. Her reluctance to do so spells her own doom. As the two of them die, however, they at least have the satisfaction of seeing the possibility of escape from the Machine's mechanical womb.

"But, Kuno, is it true? Are there still men on the surface of the earth? Is this - this tunnel, this poisoned darkness - really not the end?"
He replied: "I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the mist and the ferns until our civilisation stops. Today they are the Homeless - tomorrow -"
"Oh, tomorrow - some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow."
"Never," said Kuno, "never. Humanity has learnt its lesson."
As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An airship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after galley with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.

H. G. Wells: When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)

Forster himself called his story "a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells" - presumably the one depicted in the latter's novel When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) - reissued, in revised form, as The Sleeper Awakes in 1912.

Henri Lanos: Illustration for When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)

Not that Wells's picture of the future - in this novel, at least - is a narrowly utopian one. The society his sleeper, Graham, wakes into is a profoundly troubled one. The amount of his own savings have accumulated, due to compound interest, during the long centuries of his sleep, to such an incredible total that they are now the principal economic mainstay of the world. The rest of the book examines the implications of such capitalist plutocracy as against the apparent hope provided by revolutionary socialism.

Both are found wanting in this bleak early vision by a writer later criticised for his naive acceptance of purely scientific values. Once again, if you read his books yourself rather than accepting such bland critical summaries, the actual implications of his work are far more nuanced and complex.

E. M. Forster (1879-1970)

Be that as it may, Wells' truths were certainly different from Forster's. In a sense they embody two contradictory world-views - based, respectively, on the private and the public life. Forster concerned himself almost exclusively with the personal values bound up in his famous adage: "Only connect." His books are all about moments of emotional epiphany and contact over seemingly unbridgeable gulfs of background and class.

W. H. Auden perhaps expressed it best in the last of his 1938 group of Sonnets from China:

XXI

(to E.M. Foster)

Though Italy and King's are far away,
And Truth a subject only bombs discuss,
Our ears unfriendly, still you speak to us,
Insisting that the inner life can pay.

As we dash down the slope of hate with gladness,
You trip us up like an unnoticed stone,
And, just when we are closeted with madness,
You interrupt us like the telephone.

Yes, we are Lucy, Turton, Philip: we
Wish international evil, are delighted
To join the jolly ranks of the benighted

Where reason is denied and love ignored,
But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery
Comes out into the garden with a sword.

H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

Wells, by contrast, ended in a state of utter despair, as the Second World War erupted to dash into pieces all his hopes of international betterment. The title of his last book Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) says it all.

Having said that, though, much though I enjoy Forster's fiction and essays, if it came to a choice between the two, I would go for Wells every time. Forster's Collected Short Stories (1950) is 246 pages long. Wells's Short Stories (1927) runs to over 1,000 pages, and includes such masterpieces as "The Time Machine," "A Story of the Days to Come," "A Dream of Armageddon," and dozens of others - it's one of the great books of the twentieth century.

Luckily, I don't have to choose. I can enjoy both of their different insights, and shelve them side-by-side in a propinquity I fear they could never have achieved in their lifetimes.

•


Twelve Modern Short Novels
[illustrated by B. Biro (c.1950s)]

Twelve Modern Short Novels: A Collection of the Shorter Works of Writers of Distinction from the Eighties of the Last Century to the Present Day. Decorations by B. Biro. London: Odhams Press Limited, n.d. (c. 1950s).

I see from the inside of my copy (which is light blue rather than red in colour, but is otherwise identical with that pictured above) that I purchased it on 30th September 1977. It was certainly an auspicious day for me.

You can see from the list of contents below just what a treasure-house of stories this book contains. I'd read very few of these authors previously, and it had the effect of introducing me to some of the real triumphs of late nineteenth / early twentieth-century prose.

1. [1887] - Oscar Wilde: "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime: A Study of Duty"


2. [1888] - Rudyard Kipling: "The Man Who Would Be King"


3. [1902] - Joseph Conrad: "Heart of Darkness"


4. [1911] - E. M. Forster: "The Machine Stops"


5. [1919] - Max Beerbohm: "Enoch Soames"


6. [1922] - Aldous Huxley: "The Gioconda Smile"


7. [1927] - Thornton Wilder: "The Bridge of San Luis Rey"


8. [1936] - Katherine Anne Porter: "Noon Wine"


9. [1936] - Graham Greene: "The Basement Room"


10. [1939] - Ernest Hemingway: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"


11. [1945] - Mary Lavin: "The Becker Wives"


12. [1946] - H. E. Bates: "The Cruise of 'The Breadwinner'"

Balint Stephen ('Val') Biro (1921-2014)

No editor's name for the volume is given - only that of the illustrator, a certain 'B. Biro' (later to be known as Val Biro). He may - for all I know - have chosen the contents as well, but the contingency seems an unlikely one, given his youth at the time, and the sheer size of his graphic output: "3,000 covers in less than 40 years," as Nick Jones revealed in his "Interview with Val Biro, Artist, Illustrator, Author and Book Cover Designer" in Existential Ennui (4/8/14).

Whoever it was who selected these particular stories certainly did me a great favour, though. I suppose that I would have read the more canonical ones sooner or later, but authors such as Katharine Anne Porter and Thornton Wilder were much less familiar currency at the time.

Also, would I really have appreciated "The Machine Stops" quite so much if it hadn't been bookended between the dark profundities of "Heart of Darkness" and the bittersweet satire of Beerbohm's "Enoch Soames"?

Carol Reed & Graham Greene

"The Basement Room," too. It would be many years before I saw Carol Reed's film The Fallen Idol (1948), and then, I'm afraid, my main impulse was to exclaim that he'd got it wrong. The squalid suburban horrors of Greene's parable had somehow been transferred to the glamorous setting of an embassy.

The lessons screenwriter and director learnt from this experience must have supplied at least some of the ingredients which went into their next collaboration, the immortal Third Man (1949).

Twelve Modern Short Novels