Acquisitions (114): Eric Shipton

Eric Shipton: The Six Mountain-Travel Books (1985)

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Eric Shipton (1907-1977)

Eric Shipton: The Six Mountain-Travel Books (1985)
[Bookmark, Devonport - 13/6/24]:

Eric Shipton. The Six Mountain-Travel Books: Nanda Devi; Blank on the Map; Upon That Mountain; Mountains of Tartary; The Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition 1951; Land of Tempest. 1936, 1938, 1943, 1953, 1952 & 1963. London: Diadem Books Ltd. / Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1985.

H. W. Tilman: The Seven Mountain-Travel Books (1983)

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Himalaya

So it seems that two scruffy young Englishmen, Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, met in Kenya sometime in the late 1920s. The pair started to go on treks and climb mountains together, first in Africa, then in the Alps, and finally in the Himalayas. They shared a minimalist philosophy: a belief in small expeditions run on a shoe-string budget, composed of a couple of pals and a few locally recruited porters.

H. W. Tilman (1898-1977)

Not only this, but they each wrote a series of books about their expeditions, which have now been commodiously collected by the Mountaineers publishing house.

H. W. Tilman: The Eight Sea / Mountain Exploration Books (1987)

It is, I suppose, their joint exploits in the Himalayas which have guaranteed their fame. Shipton and Tilman either led or formed part of virtually all the post-Mallory British Everest expeditions, from the early 1930s until the 1950s. They also made many other pioneering explorations in the region.

Jim Perrin: Shipton and Tilman (2013)

If you'd like more information about all this, Jim Perrin's joint biography of the pair is indispensable. You may also find it profitable to look at the mountaineering books of their comrade Frank Smythe, himself an immensely prolific author, photographer and botanist.

Frank Smythe: The Six Alpine / Himalayan Climbing Books (2000)

Smythe is probably most celebrated for his discovery - during his succcessful 1931 expedition to climb Kamet (at the time the highest peak yet summitted) - of the "Valley of Flowers", now an Indian national park. It lies west of Nanda Devi, where Shipton and Tilman made some of their most important explorations.

Frank Smythe (1900-1949)

It was said of Smythe that:

he had a tendency for irascibility, something some of his mountaineering contemporaries said "decreased with altitude".

- Wikipedia: biography

Shipton, too, admitted to a certain shortness of temper under stress. Probably Bill Tilman was the least temperamental of the trio, though he, too, could be somewhat taciturn at times. He was also the only one of them old enough to have fought in the war, at the Battle of the Somme, and was twice awarded the Military Cross for bravery.

After all their years of climbing together, it's reported that the pair still addressed each other as "Shipton" and "Tilman", rather than by their first names.

W. H. Auden & Christopher Isherwood: The Ascent of F6 (1936)

They were accompanied on their 1937 "budget expedition" to the high Karakoram and Anghil region of the Himalayas by geologist John Bicknell Auden and surveyor Michael Spender, the elder brothers (respectively) of poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.

This (according to Wikipedia) "set a record for single-expedition achievement that has never been equalled." It was also the subject of Eric Shipton's Blank on the Map (1938). John Auden's earlier description of the approaches to the terrifying mountain K2 had provided inspiration for the Auden-Isherwood play, The Ascent of F6.

The list below is intended to show how comprehensively Shipton, Smythe and Tilman's respective books chronicle the various British expeditions to Mt. Everest between the two wars - and afterwards, up until 1951.

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Mount Everest (1900-1949)

Timeline of Major Everest Expeditions

[NB: Mount Everest's Nepali/Sanskrit name is Sagarmāthā, literally "goddess of the sky", or "the head in the great blue sky". The Tibetan name for Everest is Qomolangma, literally "holy mother". This is generally romanised as "Chomolungma".]

1. 1921: Reconnaissance

   The first British expedition — organized and financed by the newly formed Mount Everest Committee — under the leadership of Colonel Charles Howard-Bury, with Harold Raeburn as mountaineering leader. It also included George Mallory, Guy Bullock, and Edward Oliver Wheeler.

[Information from Charles Howard-Bury, George Mallory & A. F. R. Wollaston: Mount Everest, the Reconnaissance, 1921 (1922)]

2. 1922: First attempt

   The second British expedition, under General Charles Granville Bruce and climbing leader Lt-Col. Edward Lisle Strutt, again including George Mallory.

3. 1924: Mallory and Irvine

   The third British expedition was led by Brigadier-General Charles Bruce, until he was forced by illness to relinquish leadership to Lt-Col. Edward Norton. George Mallory was then promoted to climbing leader. After two summit attempts on June 2nd (Mallory and Geoffrey Bruce) and June 4th (Edward Norton and Howard Somervell), Mallory and Andrew Irvine set off for a third attempt on June 8th and were never seen again - except, controversially, by Noel Odell "on the ridge, nearing base of final pyramid", though he subsequently wavered over whether this meant the first or the second step.

[Information on these expeditions from Wade Davis: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest (2011)]

4. 1933: Hugh Ruttledge

   A major expedition, under the leadership of Hugh Ruttledge. On the first summit attempt, Lawrence Wager and Percy Wyn-Harris intended to follow the Northeastern ridge, but were unable to reach it. A subsequent attempt by Eric Shipton and Frank Smythe followed the same route but Smythe, who pressed on alone when Shipton turned back because of illness, got no higher.

[Information from Frank Smythe: Camp Six: The 1933 Everest Expedition (1937)]

5. 1935: Reconnaissance (Shipton)

   Eric Shipton led a small reconnaissance expedition (including Bill Tilman) during the monsoon season, in preparation for the following year's expedition. Shipton decided that an ascent from the Western Cwm would be possible if entry from the Nepalese side could be made. This is the route by which the mountain was eventually climbed in 1953. It was also the first visit to Everest for Tenzing Norgay.

[Information from Tony Astill: Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance 1935: The Forgotten Adventure (2005)]

6. 1938: Bill Tilman

   Bill Tilman was appointed leader of the 1938 Everest expedition, which attempted the ascent via the North Col. The North Col was reached from the west for the first time and the team went on to over 27,200 ft before being forced down by bad weather and sickness.

[Information from H. W. Tilman: Everest 1938 (1948)]

7. 1950: Bill Tilman (Nepal)

   In 1950, Bill Tilman and a small party including Charles Houston, Oscar Houston, and Betsy Cowles undertook an exploratory expedition to Everest through Nepal along the route which has now become the standard approach to Everest from the south.

[Information from H. W. Tilman: Nepal Himalaya (1952)]

8. 1951: Reconnaissance (Shipton)

   A British expedition led by Eric Shipton, and including Edmund Hillary, Tom Bourdillon, W. H. Murray, and Mike Ward, travelled into Nepal to survey a new route via the southern face. Shipton and Hillary were able to see the whole of the Western Cwm and concluded that ascent was possible from the top of the Cwm to the west face of Lhotse followed by a traverse to the South Col. They spent the next month attempting to reach the Western Cwm through the Khumbu Icefall but were stopped just short of success.

[Information from Eric Shipton: The Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition 1951 (1952)]

9. 1952: Swiss

   A Swiss expedition led by Edouard Wyss-Dunant attempted to climb via the South Col and the southeast ridge. On May 27, four climbers (Raymond Lambert, Tenzing Norgay, Rene Aubert, and Leon Flory) started from their tents on the South Col. On May 28 in unsettled weather, the final assault team of Lambert and Tenzing turned back 500 ft short of the south summit.

[Information from Man of Everest: The Autobiography of Tenzing, Told to James Ramsey Ullmann (1955)]

10. 1953: Hillary and Tenzing

    In 1953, a ninth British expedition, led by John Hunt and organized and financed by the Joint Himalayan Committee, returned to Nepal. After Wilfrid Noyce and Annullu had forced a passage to the South Col, two climbing pairs attempted to reach the summit. The first pair, Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon, achieved the first ascent of the 28,700 ft South Summit, within as little as 300 ft of the final summit, but could go no further. Two days later, the summit was eventually reached at 11:30 am local time on May 29, 1953, by the New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepali, climbing the South Col route. There was intense public speculation as to which of the pair had set foot on the summit first. In 1955 Tenzing disclosed in his autobiography that it was Hillary. Returning to Kathmandu a few days later, Hillary and Hunt discovered that they had been knighted for their efforts.

[Information from John Hunt: The Ascent of Everest (1954); Edmund Hillary: High Adventure (1955); John Hunt: The Ascent of Everest (1954); & Man of Everest: The Autobiography of Tenzing, Told to James Ramsey Ullmann (1955)]

Many felt at the time that the Himalayan Committee's decision to replace Eric Shipton with John Hunt as leader of the 1953 expedition was made in a shabby and underhand way. Shipton did provide his critics with some potent ammunition, though. He admitted in a letter to the committee that: "My well-known dislike of large expeditions and my abhorrence of a competitive element in mountaineering might well seem out of place in the present situation." By making this comment he is said to have "sealed his own fate":

Several members of the British expedition had a strong loyalty to Shipton and were unhappy that he had been replaced. Charles Evans, for instance, stated, "It was said that Shipton lacked the killer instinct – not a bad thing to lack in my view." Edmund Hillary was among those most opposed to the change, but he was won over by Hunt's personality and by his admission that the change had been badly handled. George Band recalls Committee member Larry Kirwan, the Director/Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, saying that "they had made the right decision but in the worst possible way".

- Wikipedia: 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition

However posterity may judge his skills as a leader, Eric Shipton's contemplative personality, and lack of "the killer instinct", is probably one of the reasons we still savour his beguiling, richly evocative books today - along with (of course) those of his friends, Frank Smythe and Bill Tilman.

Edmund Hillary with his photo of Tenzing Norgay Smythe (1953)

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Chomolungma [Mount Everest]

Everest

Authors:

1. Edmund Hillary (1919-2008)
2. John Hunt (1910-1998)
3. George Mallory (1886-1924)
4. Tenzing Norgay (1914-1986)
5. Eric Shipton (1907-1977)
6. Frank Smythe (1900-1949)
7. H. W. Tilman (1898-1977)
8. Secondary Literature

Books I own are marked in bold:

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Auckland War Memorial Museum: Hillary of Everest (1953)

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary
(1919-2008)

1. High Adventure. 1955. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1958.
2. [with George Lowe] East of Everest – An Account of the New Zealand Alpine Club Himalayan Expedition to the Barun Valley in 1954 (1956)
3. [with Vivian Fuchs] The Crossing of Antarctica: the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1955-58. 1958. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.
4. The New Zealand Antarctic Expedition (1959)
5. No Latitude for Error (1961)
6. [with Desmond Doig] High in the Thin Cold Air (1962)
7. Schoolhouse in the Clouds (1965)
8. Nothing Venture, Nothing Win. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975.
9. From the Ocean to the Sky: Jet Boating Up the Ganges (1979)
10. [with Peter Hillary] Two Generations (1984)
11. View from the Summit: The Remarkable Memoir by the First Person to Conquer Everest (2000)

Sir Edmund Hillary: Nothing Venture, Nothing Win (1975)

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IMDb: John Hunt (1953)

John Hunt, Baron Hunt
(1910-1998)

1. The Ascent of Everest. London: The Companion Book Club, 1954.
2. Our Everest Adventure: The Pictorial History from Kathmandu to the Summit. Leicester: Brockhampton Press Ltd., 1954.

John Hunt: The Conquest of Everest (1954)

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Find a Grave: George Mallory (1924)

George Herbert Leigh-Mallory
(1886-1924)

1. Boswell the Biographer (1912)
2. [with Charles Howard-Bury & A. F. R. Wollaston] Mount Everest, the Reconnaissance, 1921 (1922)
3. Davis, Wade. Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. 2011. Vintage. London: Random House, 2012.
4. Ghosts of Everest: The Authorised Story of the Search for Mallory & Irvine, by Jochen Hemmleb, Larry A. Johnson, & Eric R. Simonson of the Expedition Team that Found Mallory on Everest, as Told to William R. Nothdurft. 1999. Pan Books. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2000.

Wade Davis: Into the Silence (2011)

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Tenzing Norgay (1967)

Tenzing Norgay (born Namgyal Wangdi)
(1914-1986)

1. Man of Everest: The Autobiography of Tenzing, Told to James Ramsey Ullmann. 1955. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1955.

Tenzing of Everest: Tiger of the Snows (1955)

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Eric Shipton (1935)

Eric Earle Shipton
(1907-1977)

1. Nanda Devi (1936)
2. Blank on the Map (1938)
3. Upon That Mountain (1943)
4. The Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition 1951 (1952)
5. Mountains of Tartary (1953)
6. Land of Tempest (1963)
7. That Untravelled World (1969)
8. Tierra del Fuego: the Fatal Lodestone (1973)
9. The Six Mountain-Travel Books: Nanda Devi; Blank on the Map; Upon That Mountain; Mountains of Tartary; The Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition 1951; Land of Tempest. 1936, 1938, 1943, 1953, 1952 & 1963. London: Diadem Books Ltd. / Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1985.

Eric Shipton: Blank on the Map (1937)

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Frank Smythe (1937)

Francis Sydney [Frank] Smythe
(1900-1949)

1. Climbs and Ski Runs (1930)
2. The Kangchenjunga Adventure (1930)
3. Kamet Conquered (1932)
4. An Alpine Journey (1934)
5. The Spirit of the Hills (1935)
6. Over Tyrolese Hills (1936)
7. Camp Six (1937)
8. The Valley of Flowers (1938)
9. "Peaks and Flowers of the Central Himalayas." Geographical Magazine (1938)
10. The Mountain Scene (1937)
11. Peaks and Valleys (1938)
12. A Camera in the Hills (1939)
13. Mountaineering Holiday (1940)
14. Edward Whymper (1940)
15. My Alpine Album (1940)
16. Adventures of a Mountaineer (1940)
17. The Mountain Vision (1941)
18. Over Welsh Hills (1941)
19. Alpine Ways (1942)
20. Secret Mission (1942)
21. British Mountaineers (1942)
22. Snow on the hills (1946)
23. The Mountain Top (1947)
24. Again Switzerland (1947)
25. Rocky Mountains (1948)
26. Swiss Winter (1948)
27. Mountains in Colour (1949)
28. Climbs in the Canadian Rockies (1950)
29. The Six Alpine/Himalayan Climbing Books: Climbs and Ski Runs; The Kangchenjunga Adventure; Kamet Conquered; Camp Six; The Valley of Flowers; Mountaineering Holiday. 1930, 1930, 1932, 1937, 1938 & 1940. London: Bâton Wicks / Seattle: The Mountaineers, 2000.

Frank Smythe: The Valley of Flowers (1938)

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Sandy Lee: Bill Tilman

Harold William [Bill] Tilman
(1898-1977)

1. Snow on the Equator (1937)
2. The Ascent of Nanda Devi (1937)
3. When Men and Mountains Meet (1946)
4. Mount Everest 1938 (1948)
5. Two Mountains and a River (1949)
6. China to Chitral (1951)
7. Nepal Himalaya (1952)
8. Mischief in Patagonia (1957)
9. Mischief among the Penguins (1961)
10. Mischief in Greenland (1964)
11. Mostly Mischief (1966)
12. Mischief Goes South (1968)
13. In Mischief's Wake (1971)
14. Ice With Everything (1974)
15. Triumph and Tribulation (1977)
16. Adventures under Sail: Selected Writings. 1957, 1961, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1971, 1974 & 1977. Ed. Libby Purves. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1982.
17. The Seven Mountain-Travel Books: Snow on the Equator; The Ascent of Nanda Devi; When Men and Mountains Meet; Everest, 1938; Two Mountains and a River; China to Chitral; Nepal Himalaya. 1937, 1937, 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951 & 1952. Introduction by Jim Perrin. London: Diadem Books Ltd. / Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1983.
18. Eight Sailing/Mountain-Exploration Books: Mischief in Patagonia; Mischief among the Penguins; Mischief in Greenland; Mostly Mischief; Mischief Goes South; In Mischief's Wake; Ice With Everything; Triumph and Tribulation. 1957, 1961, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1971, 1974 & 1977. London: Diadem Books Ltd. / Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1987.

H. W. Tilman: Adventures Under Sail: Selected Writings (1982)

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Tony Astill: Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance 1935 (2005)

Secondary Literature

1. Astill, Tony. Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance 1935: The Forgotten Adventure. London: Tony Astill, 2005.
2. Auden, W. H. & Christopher Isherwood. The Ascent of F6 & On the Frontier. 1958. London: Faber, 1972.
3. French, Patrick. Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer. 1994. Flamingo. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.
4. Perrin, Jim. Shipton and Tilman: The Great Decade of Himalayan Exploration. 2013. Arrow Books. London: Random House, 2014.

Eric Shipton: The Six Mountain-Travel Books (1985)

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• category - Travel & Exploration: Exploration

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Acquisitions (91): Lord Byron

Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon (1816)

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Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828)

Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon (1816)
[The Book Exchange, Glen Eden - 27/4/2023]:

Lady Caroline Lamb. Glenarvon. 1816. Ed. Deborah Lutz. Valancourt Classics. Kansas City, Missouri: Valancourt Books, 2007.

Robert Bolt, dir. & writ. Lady Caroline Lamb (1972)

'Mad, bad, and dangerous to know ...'

I wish I could speak enthusiastically about the film Lady Caroline Lamb, which I saw many years ago on TV - shortly after watching a very interesting 'making of' documentary, which concentrated mainly on Robert Bolt's difficulties in transitioning from David Lean's favourite scriptwriter to directing a movie of his own.

Having previewed so many vignettes and set-pieces from it already, I'd expected something a little more arresting than the old-fashioned melodrama Bolt had actually put together. It reminded me quite a bit of Vivien Leigh's antics in Lady Hamilton - aka That Hamilton Woman - (1941), but at least the makers of that Olivier / Leigh star vehicle had the exigencies of wartime propaganda as an excuse.

Casting his wife, Sarah Miles, in the leading role was one problem. She was actually pretty good in Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970), but given the almost universal panning that film got on its first release, that wasn't exactly a strong recommendation. Richard Chamberlain was definitely miscast as Lord Byron. All in all, what with one thing and another, David Lean it wasn't - let alone a rival to Bolt's classic A Man for All Seasons.

But what about the real Lady Caroline Lamb? I've been reading a lot of Lord Byron's letters and other miscellaneous writings recently, and their famous affair was pretty front and centre in his correspondence for a couple of years after the return from his first grand tour, Childe Harold in hand.

Here, to start with, is a brief bibliography of her published writings:

Lady Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon (1816)

1. Glenarvon (1816)
2. [as Byron] "A New Canto" (1819)
3. Graham Hamilton (1822)
4. Ada Reis (1823)
5. Penruddock (1823)
6. The Works of Lady Caroline Lamb. Ed. Paul Douglass & Leigh Wetherall Dickson (2009)
   1. Glenarvon (1816)
   2. Graham Hamilton (1822) and Poems
   3. Ada Reis, A Tale (1823)
7. The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb. Ed. Paul Douglass (2006)

Secondary:


8. Cecil, Lord David. Melbourne: The Young Melbourne and Lord M in One Volume. 1939 & 1954. London: The Reprint Society, 1955.
9. Douglass, Paul. Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography (2004)
10. Fraser, Antonia. Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023)

Antonia Fraser: Lady Caroline Lamb (2023)

As you can see, she was not quite the society flibbertigibbet you might have expected. The first novel - the only one most people read - was written off at the time as a kind of Regency version of revenge-porn, but the fact that she went on to write three more, as well as a fairly convincing parody of Byron's serial-poem Don Juan, does show a certain seriousness as a writer.

Mind you, it is the connection to Byron which continues to make her memorable. Her husband, Lord Melbourne, achieved a kind of late fame as Queen Victoria's first - and probably favourite - Prime Minister, the one who gave her the grounding in English parliamentary politics indispensable to a constitutional monarch. He never remarried after Lady Caroline's death in 1828, though the two had separated three years before that. It's been said that she never really recovered from the news of Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824.

Julian Farino, dir.: Byron (2003)

Lady Caroline was portrayed by Irish actress Camilla Power in the two-part BBC drama Byron, alongside Jonny Lee Miller in the title role, and Vanessa Redgrave as her conniving mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne.

Camilla Power (1976- )

Does she make a better job of the role than Sarah Miles? Power did have the advantage of not having had to dress up in blackface, but then (strangely enough) that was not considered offensive by most people at the time of the original film, some fifty years ago now.

Sarah Miles (1941- )

All in all, it's a pity that Byron is still better known for his affairs of the heart than for the poetic revolution for which he was at least partially responsible: the growth of the "egotistical sublime" - as John Keats called it - in Romantic literature. That, and his brief friendship with Percy and Mary Shelley and their entourage during (and after) the famous "haunted summer" of 1816: the summer of Frankenstein.

I discussed some of the screen portrayals of this relationship in the section called "Byron-'n'-Shelley-'n'-Mary-Shelley films" in my blogpost on Movies about Writers a few years ago. I went a little further into the subject in a post on Mary Shelley herself a couple of years later.

It's hard to imagine writers such as Hölderlin, Hugo, Kleist, Lermontov, Musset, Pushkin, Vigny - even Goethe himself - developing in quite the way they did without the example of the fateful Lord Byron. He may have seen himself more as a follower of such eighteenth century satirists as Pope and Swift, but the age persisted in regarding him as something quite new: more sinister and alluring by far - the literary embodiment of Bonapartism.

Leslie Marchand, ed.: Byron's Letters and Journals (1974-1994)

This is not really the main impression given by his letters, though. They're surprisingly genial and approachable. He does a good deal of apologising for unintended slights, and is seen far more often in the role of peacemaker than touchy, "Byronic" aristocrat.

His favourite correspondents seem to be other poets like Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers, as well as cynical old ladies such as Lady Wellesley, Lady Caroline's mother-in-law. There are, of course, a lot of business letters which give one the general impression that he was pretty much always on his uppers, but he seems to contrive to stay cheerful most of the time.

I'd say, in fact, that these occasional writings of his are far more in tune with his late, discursive masterpiece Don Juan than in the more affected mode of Childe Harold and its immediate successors.

W. H. Auden & Louis MacNeice: Letters from Iceland (1937)

Perhaps W. H. Auden says it best, in "Letter to Lord Byron", one of the various epistolary bits and pieces - including an account of a pony trek around Iceland in the company of a group of English schoolgirls - that go to make up his and Louis MacNeice's delightful joint travel book:

Excuse, my lord, the liberty I take
In thus addressing you. I know that you
Will pay the price of authorship and make
The allowances an author has to do.
A poet’s fan-mail will be nothing new.
And then a lord — Good Lord, you must be peppered,
Like Gary Cooper, Coughlin, or Dick Sheppard,

With notes from perfect strangers starting, ‘Sir,
I liked your lyrics, but Childe Harold’s trash,’
‘My daughter writes, should I encourage her?’
Sometimes containing frank demands for cash,
Sometimes sly hints at a platonic pash,
And sometimes, though I think this rather crude,
The correspondent’s photo in the nude.

... So if ostensibly I write to you
To chat about your poetry or mine,
There’s many other reasons: though it’s true
That I have, at the age of twenty-nine
Just read Don Juan and I found it fine.
I read it on the boat to Reykjavik
Except when eating or asleep or sick.

So much for the preamble. This frame-narrative serves mostly as a pretext for discursive (and very amusing) autobiographical reminiscences on Auden's part, but he does provide some analysis of Byron himself as well:

I like your muse because she’s gay and witty,
Because she’s neither prostitute nor frump,
The daughter of a European City,
And country houses long before the slump;
I like her voice that does not make me jump:
And you I find sympatisch, a good townee,
Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie.

A poet, swimmer, peer, and man of action,
- It beats Roy Campbell’s record by a mile -
You offer every possible attraction.
By looking into your poetic style,
And love-life on the chance that both were vile,
Several have earned a decent livelihood,
Whose lives were uncreative but were good.

You’ve had your packet from the critics, though:
They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
A ‘vulgar genius’ so George Eliot said,
Which doesn’t matter as George Eliot’s dead,
But T. S. Eliot, I am sad to find,
Damns you with: ‘an uninteresting mind’.

A statement which I must say I’m ashamed at;
A poet must be judged by his intention,
And serious thought you never said you aimed at.
I think a serious critic ought to mention
That one verse style was really your invention,
A style whose meaning does not need a spanner,
You are the master of the airy manner.

That's it exactly: the quintessence of the genuine Byronic style (rather than the ersatz, super-serious version which swept the continent after his early, unfortunate demise): "the airy manner":

By all means let us touch our humble caps to
La poésie pure, the epic narrative;
But comedy shall get its round of claps, too.
According to his powers, each may give;
Only on varied diet can we live.
The pious fable and the dirty story
Share in the total literary glory.

There’s every mode of singing robe in stock,
From Shakespeare’s gorgeous fur coat, Spenser’s muff
Or Dryden’s lounge suit to my cotton frock,
And Wordsworth’s Harris tweed with leathern cuff.
Firbank, I think, wore just a just-enough;
I fancy Whitman in a reach-me-down,
But you, like Sherlock, in a dressing-gown.

The poem sweeps to a triumphant close with the following vision of the poet's future state:

I hope this reaches you in your abode,
This letter that’s already far too long,
Just like the Prelude or the Great North Road;
But here I end my conversational song.
I hope you don’t think mail from strangers wrong.
As to its length, I tell myself you’ll need it,
You’ve all eternity in which to read it.

Let's hope that is how it really is for Byron, wrapped in a somewhat louche silk dressing-gown, drinking his morning chocolate, and chuckling over this latest piece of correspondence to reach him in eternity ...

Henry James Richter: Byron and his Muse (1840)

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Thomas Phillips: Lord Byron (1813)

George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron
(1788-1824)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Poetry:


1. Hours of Idleness (1807)
2. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
3. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I & II (1812)
4. The Giaour (1813)
5. The Bride of Abydos (1813)
6. The Corsair (1814)
7. Lara, A Tale (1814)
8. Hebrew Melodies (1815)
9. The Siege of Corinth (1816)
10. Parisina (1816)
11. The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)
12. The Dream (1816)
13. Prometheus (1816)
14. Darkness (1816)
15. Manfred (1817)
16. The Lament of Tasso (1817)
17. Beppo (1818)
18. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos III & IV (1818)
19. Don Juan (1819–1824)
    • Don Juan. Ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, & W. W. Pratt. 1973. Penguin English Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
    • Don Juan. Ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, & W. W. Pratt. Penguin English Poets. 1973. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.
20. Mazeppa (1819)
21. The Prophecy of Dante (1819)
22. Marino Faliero (1820)
23. Sardanapalus (1821)
24. The Two Foscari (1821)
25. Cain (1821)
26. The Vision of Judgment (1821)
27. Heaven and Earth (1821)
28. Werner (1822)
29. The Age of Bronze (1823)
30. The Island (1823)
31. The Deformed Transformed (1824)
32. The Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. Oxford Standard Authors (1904)
    • The Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. 1904. Rev. ed. 1945. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
33. The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann & Barry Weller. 7 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-1993.
    1. Poems 1807-1812: Hours of Idleness; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; Hints from Horace. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1980)
       • The Complete Poetical Works. Volume 1. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
    2. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 1812-1818. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1980)
    3. Poems 1813-1816: The Giaour; The Bride Of Abydos; The Corsair; Lara; Hebrew Melodies; The Siege of Corinth. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1981)
    4. Poems 1816-1820: Manfred; Beppo; Mazeppa; Morgante Maggiore. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1986)
    5. Don Juan. 1819-1824. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1986)
    6. Poems & Plays 1821-1822: The Two Foscari; Sardanapalus; Cain: A Mystery; The Deformed Transformed. Ed. Jerome J. McGann & Barry Weller (1991)
    7. Poems 1823-1824: The Age of Bronze; The Island; Appendices & Indexes. Ed. Jerome J. McGann (1993)

Prose:


34. Letters and Journals. Ed. Thomas Moore. 2 vols (1830)
35. Selections from Poetry, Letters and Journals. Ed. Peter Quennell. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1949.
36. Byron's Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray / Harvard University: Belknap Press, 1973-94.
    1. ‘In my hot youth’ - Vol. 1: 1798-1810. 1973. London: John Murray, 1974.
    2. ‘Famous in my time’ - Vol. 2: 1810-1812. 1973. London: John Murray, 1974.
    3. ‘Alas! the love of Women!’ - Vol. 3: 1813-1814. London: John Murray, 1974.
    4. ‘Wedlock’s the devil’ - Vol. 4: 1814-1815. London: John Murray, 1975.
    5. ‘So late into the night’ - Vol. 5: 1816-1817. London: John Murray, 1976.
    6. ‘The flesh is frail’ - Vol. 6: 1818-1819. London: John Murray, 1976.
    7. ‘Between two worlds’ - Vol. 7: 1820. London: John Murray, 1977.
    8. ‘Born for opposition’ - Vol. 8: 1821. London: John Murray, 1978.
    9. ‘In the wind’s eye’ - Vol. 9: 1821-1822. London: John Murray, 1979.
    10. ‘A heart for every fate’ - Vol. 10: 1822-1823. London: John Murray, 1980.
    11. ‘For freedom’s battle’ - Vol. 11: 1823-1824. London: John Murray, 1981.
    12. ‘The Trouble of an Index’ - Vol. 12: Anthology of Memorable Passages and Index to the Eleven Volumes. London: John Murray, 1982.
    13. ‘What comes uppermost’ - Vol. 13: Supplementary Materials. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray / Harvard University: Belknap Press, 1994.
37. Selected Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 1982. London: Picador Classics, 1988.
38. The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Ed. Andrew Nicholson. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Secondary:


39. Longford, Elizabeth. Byron’s Greece. Photographs by Jorge Lewinski. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1975.
40. Longford, Elizabeth. Byron. 1976. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1978.
41. O'Brien, Edna. Byron in Love. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2009.
42. Origo, Iris. The Last Attachment: the Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, as Told in Their Unpublished Letters and Other Family Papers. 1949. The Fontana Library. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1962.
43. Quennell, Peter. Byron: The Years of Fame / Byron in Italy. 1935, 1941. Rev. ed. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1974.

Edna O'Brien: Byron in Love (2009)

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• category - English Poetry (pre-1900): Nineteenth Century

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Acquisitions (74): W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden: The Sea and the Mirror (1944 / 2003)

W. H. Auden: The Age of Anxiety (1948 / 2011)

W. H. Auden: For the Time Being (1944 / 2013)

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Richard Avedon: W. H. Auden (1960)


W. H. Auden: Critical Editions (2001-2013)
[Amazon.com.au - 28/7-12/8/2022]:

The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest". 1944. Ed. Arthur C. Kirsch. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. 2003. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. 1947. Ed. Alan Jacobs. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.

For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. 1944. Ed. Alan Jacobs. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.

W. H. Auden: Juvenilia (2003)


W. H. Auden: Critical Editions

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) - or 'hug a shady wet nun', to quote his own favourite acronym - has already been the subject of quite a few posts by me on various platforms. There's a general overview here, a comprehensive bibliography here, a breakdown of the newly completed ten-volume edition of his collected works here, and even a discussion of a group of writers somewhat artificially designated as being 'in Auden's shadow' here. Anyone would think I was obsessed with the man!

The recent appearance of Professor Edward Mendelson's two-volume edition of Auden's Complete Poems has prompted me to look back on another project overseen by Mendelson, the series of Critical Editions of particular works of Auden's which appeared from Princeton University Press between 2001 and 2013.

It's hard to tell if this series is ongoing or not. I can certainly foresee a need for annotated editions of such longer works as The Orators (1932) or New Year Letter (1941) at some point in the future, but whether or not this actually happens probably depends on the response to the five volumes which have already been issued. They are, in order of appearance:

W. H. Auden: Lectures on Shakespeare (2000)

1. Lectures on Shakespeare. Reconstructed and edited by Arthur C. Kirsch, with a new preface by the editor. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. 2001. Princeton Classics. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019.
2. Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. Ed. Katherine Bucknell. 1994. Expanded Paperback Edition. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003.
3. The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest". 1944. Ed. Arthur C. Kirsch. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. 2003. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.
4. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. 1947. Ed. Alan Jacobs. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.
5. For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. 1944. Ed. Alan Jacobs. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.

W. H. Auden: Lectures on Shakespeare (2019)

The fact that the first volume in the list has recently been reprinted under the 'Princeton Classics' banner might well imply an end to the series as a whole, but then who knows? Speculating about the intentions of publishers is as chancy a business as any other enquiry into the unaccountable ways of eschatological entities.

W. H. Auden: Juvenilia (1994)

The second volume, the Juvenilia, is also an interesting case. In its original form (as you can see from the image above), it was clearly designated as an outlier of British publisher Faber & Faber's Complete Works of W. H. Auden. There is no mention of a 'Critical Edition' series on either the cover or the title-page.

However, Faber seem to have given up on the idea of collaborating in the 'Complete Works' series sometime in the late 1990s. Thank God their American partners, Princeton University Press, were there to seize the baton! Otherwise us critical edition junkies would have been forced back on our own resources to document the minutiae of Auden's texts, with all their successive layers of revision ...

Does anyone care? Well I do, I'm afraid. It matters to me that in his 1966 Collected Shorter Poems Auden substituted the expression "it has lost / The certainty that constitutes a thing" for the original "it has lost / The qualities that say ‘I am a Thing.’" in his 1938 sonnet "Brussels in Winter." I can make my own conjectures about the reasons behind such revisions to his earlier work, but I do need more information about the chapter and verse of each change: when it took place and in which publication.

Before the appearance of the Complete Poems earlier this year, this short list of 'Critical Editions' was one of the few accurate sources for such information. Are they still necessary now that we have the larger work? I would say so, yes. Much though I admire his decades of steady work on the canon, I still sometimes hanker for an alternative to Edward Mendelson's authorised version of Auden's oeuvre. Alan Jacobs' and Arthur Kirsch's introductions and notes to these three editions of Auden's long poems of the 1940s, albeit compiled under his general editorship, give me at least some hint of that.

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W. H. Auden: ‘The Map of all My Youth’ (1990)

Another approach to the documentation of his evolving canon can be found in the 'Auden Studies' series compiled under the general editorshop of Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins for Oxford University Press in the early 1990s.

It took me quite a while to get hold of all three volumes of this, but I'm happy to say that I've now succeeded.

W. H. Auden: ‘The Language of Learning and the Language of Love’ (1994)

1. W. H. Auden: ‘The Map of all My Youth’. Early Works, Friends & Influences. Auden Studies 1. Ed. Katherine Bucknell & Nicholas Jenkins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
2. W. H. Auden: ‘The Language of Learning and the Language of Love’. Uncollected Writings, New Interpretations. Auden Studies 2. Ed. Katherine Bucknell & Nicholas Jenkins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
3. W. H. Auden: ‘In Solitude, For Company’. W. H. Auden after 1940: Unpublished Prose and Recent Criticism. Auden Studies 3. Ed. Katherine Bucknell & Nicholas Jenkins. London: Clarendon Press, 1995.

W. H. Auden: ‘In Solitude, For Company’ (1995)

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Bloomfield & Mendelson: W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924-1969 (1972)

B. C. Bloomfield & Edward Mendelson. W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924–1969. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972.

Mind you, that reallly just scratches the surface of Audeniana in general. For a start, there's the comprehensive bibliography pictured above. Then there's a steadily growing web of commentary, critical and biographical, on all aspects of the poet and his work:

Humphrey Carpenter: W. H. Auden: A Biography (1981)

Biographies (in chronological order):


1. Osborne, Charles. W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet. 1979. London: Papermac, 1982.
2. Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. 1981. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1983.
3. Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. 1981. London: Faber, 1999.
4. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden. 1995. Vintage. London: Random House, 2003.
5. Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. 1999. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
6. Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography. 1981, 1999. With a new preface by the author. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017.

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

Charles Osborne's biography was rushed out in a hurry, a few years after the poet's death. It's really Humphrey Carpenter's 1981 book which still has to be seen as the standard life.

Which leaves us with the interesting case of Edward Mendelson's two-part 'critical biography' - if that's what it is. I must confess that it hadn't really occurred to me that it was a biography until he reissued a revised version of it it under that title. It seemed more like a chronologically arranged meditation on the poet's work as a whole than a conventional life and works.

However you define it, though, it's a deeply insightful work: especially part one, Early Auden (1981), which quite revolutionised my understanding of his work when I first read it sometime in the early 1990s.

Dorothy J. Farnan: Auden in Love (1984)

Personal Memoirs:


1. Spender, Stephen, ed. W. H. Auden: A Tribute. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975.
2. Farnan, Dorothy J. Auden in Love. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
3. Rowse, A. L. The Poet Auden: A Personal Memoir. London: Methuen, 1987.
4. Ansen, Alan. The Table Talk of W. H. Auden. Ed. Nicholas Jenkins. 1990. London: Faber, 1991.
5. Clark, Thekla. Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Introduction by James Fenton. London: Faber, 1995.

Alan Ansen: The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (1990)

I've already mentioned in an earlier post how much I'm indebted to Stephen Spender's pioneering anthology of reminiscences about Auden. There's much of interest to be gleaned from these other memoirs, too. If his Table Talk is a little disappointing, the same could certainly not be said of (especially) Dorothy Farnan and Thekla Clark's very different accounts.

Monroe K. Spears, ed.: Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays (1964)

Literary Criticism:


1. Everett, Barbara. Auden. 1964. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969.
2. Spears, Monroe K., ed. Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.
3. Fuller, John. A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden. London: Thames & Hudson, 1970.
4. Fuller, John. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. 1998. London: Faber, 2007.
5. Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. 1976. London: Faber, 1979.
6. Haffenden, John, ed. W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. The Critical Heritage Series. Ed. B. C. Southam. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
7. Smith, Stan. W. H. Auden. Rereading Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.
8. Bryant, Marsha. Auden and Documentary in the 1930s. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
9. Fuller, John. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. 1998. London: Faber, 2007.
10. Smith, Stan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
11. Wasley, Aidan. The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Aidan Wasley: The Age of Auden (2011)

This is, of course, a mere selection from the ocean of commentaries, selected editions, and other aids to reflection on the art of Auden. Stan Smith is, in my view, one of the most illuminating commentators on him, but of course John Fuller's work is also indispensable. As for the others, some concentrate more on the social history of the 1930s and the post-war era than on Auden's particular contribution to it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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Donald Mitchell: Britten and Auden in the 1930s (1981)

Donald Mitchell. Britten and Auden in the 1930s: The Year 1936. T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, 1979. Aldeburgh Studies in Music, 5. Foreword by Alan Hollinghurst. Washington DC: Boydell Press, 1981.

There are also a number of less easily definable works. Benjamin Britten's collaborations with Auden have already attracted a good deal of commentary from his own biographers.

Nor can one easily ignore such oddities as James Merrill's strange poetic compilation of ouija board messages from Auden and Chester Kalman (among sundry others). Is it great poetry? Not in my opinion, no, but it's certainly far more readable than most booklength poems, old or new (including some of Auden's own, I fear).

James Merrill: The Changing Light at Sandover (1982)

James Merrill. The Changing Light at Sandover: Including the whole of The Book of Ephraim, Mirabell’s Books of Number, Scripts for the Pageant and a new coda, The Higher Keys. 1992. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Other recent books about the poet include one from Scottish detective novelist Alexander McCall Smith, and another from English detective novelist Ian Sansom:

Alexander McCall Smith: What W. H. Auden Can Do for You (2013)

Alexander McCall Smith. What W. H. Auden Can Do for You. Writers on Writers. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Ian Sansom: September 1, 1939 (2020)

Ian Sansom. September 1, 1939: W. H. Auden and the Afterlife of a Poem. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.

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W. H. Auden: Commemorative plaque (Brooklyn Heights, New York)

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• category - English Poetry (post-1900): Authors

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