Broadcasting in the Modernist Era 9781472512482, 9781472543455, 9781472505309

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Introduction: Broadcasting in the Modernist Era
Part One: Broadcasting Culture in the Modernist Era
1 Pub, Parlour, Theatre: Radio in the Imagination of W. B. Yeats
2 Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: New Technology and Flawed Power
3 ‘I Often Wish You Could Answer Me Back: And So Perhaps Do You!’ E. M. Forster and BBC Radio Broadcasting
4 Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King: The ‘Impersonation’ of Divinity: Language, Authenticity and Embodiment
5 T. S. Eliot on the Radio: ‘The Drama Is All in the Word’
6 David Jones: Christian Modernism at the BBC
Part Two: Broadcasting Politics in the Modernist Era
7 Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Broadcasting
8 J. B. Priestley: By Radio to a New Britain
9 ‘Keeping Our Little Corner Clean’: George Orwell’s Cultural Broadcasts at the BBC
10 Radio Broadcasting in Fascist Italy: Between Censorship, Total Control, Jazz and Futurism
11 Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment
12 ‘Conquering the Virtual Public’: Jean-Paul Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes and the Radio in France
Afterword: The Gentle Art of Radio Broadcasting
Index

Citation preview

Broadcasting in the Modernist Era

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Reader in Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK; and Erik Tonning, Director, Modernism and Christianity Project, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles: Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines, Laetitia Zecchini Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood

Broadcasting in the Modernist Era Edited by Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Mead

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, Erik Tonning and contributors 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-1248-2 PB: 978-1-4742-7558-3 ePDF: 978-1-4725-0530-9 ePub: 978-1-4725-1359-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Series Editor’s Preface Introduction Broadcasting in the Modernist Era Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Mead

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Part One Broadcasting Culture in the Modernist Era 1 2

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Pub, Parlour, Theatre: Radio in the Imagination of W. B. Yeats Charles I. Armstrong Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: New Technology and Flawed Power Finn Fordham ‘I Often Wish You Could Answer Me Back: And So Perhaps Do You!’ E. M. Forster and BBC Radio Broadcasting Peter Fifield Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King The ‘Impersonation’ of Divinity: Language, Authenticity and Embodiment Alex Goody T. S. Eliot on the Radio: ‘The Drama Is All in the Word’ Steven Matthews David Jones: Christian Modernism at the BBC Erik Tonning

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Broadcasting Politics in the Modernist Era

Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Broadcasting Randi Koppen J. B. Priestley: By Radio to a New Britain David Addyman

137 155

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‘Keeping Our Little Corner Clean’: George Orwell’s Cultural Broadcasts at the BBC Henry Mead 10 Radio Broadcasting in Fascist Italy: Between Censorship, Total Control, Jazz and Futurism Massimo Ragnedda 11 Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment Matthew Feldman 12 ‘Conquering the Virtual Public’: Jean-Paul Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes and the Radio in France Alys Moody Afterword The Gentle Art of Radio Broadcasting Daniela Caselli Index

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Series Editor’s Preface Historicizing Modernism This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, one burgeoning sub-discipline of Modernism, Beckett Studies, features heavily here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’ authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally based exploration shall also be included here. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very notion of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and

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this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

Editors’ Acknowledgement The editors wish to thank Regent’s Park College, Oxford for kindly hosting the original symposium where initial versions of the essays in this volume were presented.

Introduction Broadcasting in the Modernist Era Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Mead

This volume explores some of the many ways in which broadcasters and their audiences made sense of the new technology of radio in the modernist era, which creatively challenged traditional forms of expression. As a contribution to the Historicizing Modernism series, it contextually reconstructs a number of artistic models for both conceptualizing and realizing the early possibilities of what was initially called ‘wireless telegraphy’. Although not all of the authors included in this collection are unambiguously ‘modernist’ (such as Forster, Priestley and Orwell), the interwar arrival of broadcasting as a mass phenomenon certainly was. As the chapters in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era emphasize, in turn, this revolutionary device for mass communication – which, like so much else, came of age technologically during the Great War – in effect threw down the gauntlet not only to textual and verbal forms of mass communication like the novel or stump speech, but also to the arts more generally. Indeed, more than the ‘little’ or even ‘big magazines’ starting to flourish at this time, radio broadcasting held out the promise of reaching an audience of hundreds of thousands, and soon millions, whether ‘listening in’ via small groups gathered around the soon-ubiquitous sets in Europe, or alone. Yet with some important exceptions – such as the groundbreaking collection, Broadcasting Modernism, to which much of this volume is explicitly indebted – scholars of modernism have been reluctant to assign radio a central place in the development of the modern arts. This is questionable for several reasons addressed in this brief introduction. One guiding theme may, however, be identified at the outset: the intrinsically modern embrace of broadcasting by leading European artists helped establish an unprecedented effect that Timothy Campbell has labelled the ‘radio imaginary’ (Campbell 2006: xiii). Whether in broadcasting ideological

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propaganda or radio drama, both the putative possibilities and constrains of this new medium offered a rich source of energy for creative licence in the modernist era – whether for good or for ill. Surprisingly, though still in keeping with the many panoramic surveys of modernism, Peter Gay’s otherwise useful overview only includes three indexed references to ‘radio’; the first appearing in 1938 via the celebrated broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and the ‘collective hysteria’ engendered in American audiences senses a martian invasion was under way (Gay 2007: 385). Yet as this volume demonstrates, if amounting to less than a ‘collective hysteria’, an earlier effect of the new medium on arts in the modernist era was transformative and, indeed, collectively electric upon the literary imaginary. In thus ‘historicizing’ a number of canonical writers’ attempt to connect with mass audiences through newly formed radio companies – such as those in Britain (BBC Radio 1922); France, Germany and the USA (PTT, Vox-Haus and NBC, respectively, 1923); and Italy (URI 1924) – this volume aims to revisit some of the earliest artistic conceptions, debates and strategies for broadcasting between the early 1920s and the early 1950s. *** It may be observed that, at the start, radio not only carried a sense of physical transformation in the process of speaking and listening, but was also seen as metaphysical in its communicative novelty. For instance, Jeffrey Sconce and John Durham Peters have examined what were at first naively literal, and later metaphoric, notions of the radio as a ‘medium’ for spirits moving through the ‘ether’. The ‘metaphoric models’ with which modernist writers explained broadcasting technology and its potentialities were not always consistent, but jostled for prevalence in the popular mind; they ‘did not merely compete’ but ‘worked in creative tension to shape the culture of modernity and played out those tensions in Modernist texts on the levels of both content and form’ (Cohen et al 2009: 5). Later, as broadcast networks evolved in sophistication, the radio began to be conceived as a kind of collective consciousness, a nervous system or potential form of spiritual union for the community. Related to these figures of speech were, increasingly, attendant ideological commitments. In the case of the interwar BBC, for instance, whether in advancing Reithian values or in checking the advance of communism, the broadcasting system was cast as a powerful faculty for the political consciousness, binding together the body politic and raising

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questions of whether this would be a centralized, univocal medium expressing the government’s position (Harker 2013), or instead, as with the approach to radio by Brecht and Benjamin in Weimar Germany, a revolutionary platform for a plurality, even bilateral exchange, of voices (Wolf 2010: 20–25). As such, intimately connected to this new technological environment were fundamental questions of massification and democratization amongst peoples, in addition to the changing position of the intellectual as educator or moral leader – now on behalf of a very much expanded audience. Cohen et al. (2009) take the view that this ‘radio imaginary’ was somehow ephemeral as well as pervasive, simultaneously intangible and ubiquitous; in short, that it was rooted in a new form distinguished by ‘the very lack of an archive’ (2). This may be true of the aural phenomenology of live broadcasting, and indeed of the experience of listening live – and there are limitations to the recovery of the very earliest sound recordings. But it is the present editors’ contention that such a view plays down the vast resources of the BBC Written Archive and other similar collections around the world, hosting precisely the archives Cohen, Coyle and Lewty suggest are either ephemeral or lacking with respect to modernism. By recourse to some of these resources as well a historicizing of the role of radio in its first three decades of dominance – before being progressively dislodged by the advent of mass television transmission – the essays included here trace the private or behind-the-scenes processes whereby the ‘radio imaginary’ was drafted, consolidated, challenged and discussed (often between writer and controller). Yet even deeper digging in the archives by leaders in the sub-field of ‘archival modernist studies’ (e.g. Fordham, Tonning and Feldman) aids in revealing canonical authors’ negotiations with broadcasters, their private commentaries on the process of broadcasting or their response as listeners; in addition, it also provides evidence of how they constructed novels, essays and other printed works employing radio – but also film and early television – broadcasting as metaphor. The nascent radio imaginary, its complicated birthing and the occasional ambivalence of its creators are of central focus in the present collection of essays. This collection thus actively participates in the larger movement in modernist studies towards archival enquiry and empirically accurate, post-archival theorizing and thus, more specifically, extends a historicizing turn in research concerning technology and broadcasting. In terms of the latter, recent examples include Elizabeth Wall and Linda Hughes’s completion of Mary Lago’s edition of Forster’s broadcasts, as well as Jeffrey Heath’s edition of related material, both published in 2008. Margaret Fisher has also made use of archives to shed light on the Futurist Radio Manifesto of 1933 as well as the early radio operas of

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Ezra Pound. Allan Hepburn’s recent edition on Elizabeth Bowen (2010) adopts a similar approach, namely one that provides historical context for radio, whilst paving the way for – not closing down – subsequent critical discussions of authors in the modernist era that take the archive on board as crucial elements in analysis and assessment. Collectively, these publications represent valuable empirical work on individual writers. However, the present study wishes to press this line of enquiry further, and to do so comparatively, that is, to provide a discussion of a broader range of often-interacting modernist artists in order to illustrate broadcasting’s seeming omnipresence over a wide range of contexts and networks between the early 1920s and the early 1950s. In each of the contributors’ essays, the importance of the empirical sources – whether through unpublished manuscripts or through primary source collections – is foregrounded. In encouraging this approach, the editors have aimed to substantiate and deepen these literary-historical connections in order to empirically and interpretatively chart the development of literary modernism as a whole. This is intended both to pave the way for future research on radio engagements during the modernist era and to establish – or better, remember – the important role played by artists in the evolution of broadcasting in its most novel and formative phase. Such a broad, empirically grounded study of the construction of the broadcasting imaginary is in a position to significantly expand the academic understandings on the impact of radio – and, as Fordham’s chapter on Joyce shows, early uses of television – on literary modernism as well as its wider impact on the oft-remarked condition of modernity. In this regard, the choice of dates for the current study is deliberate and significant. It is noteworthy that modernist writing greatly overlaps with the rise of wireless in the early twentieth century as well as its post-war residua (arguably, with the rise of ‘poism’ and television in the 1950s and especially the 1960s). Indeed, as the sum of this volume’s parts argues, the two developments are significantly intertwined. In short, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era seeks to further the study of broadcasting’s long-term significance via archival manuscripts and primary sources, and crucially, to extend what is understood by the possibilities and limits of the ‘radio imaginary’, and concurrently of empirical approaches to the modernist era. Accordingly, this collection’s broadest intellectual foundations lie in general histories of broadcasting from an official or social-historical perspective, such as John Reith’s Broadcasting Over Britain (1924), Hilda Matheson’s Broadcasting (1933) and Rudolf Arnheim’s seminal Radio (1936). Indeed, as Randi Koppen’s essay in this volume shows, modernists like Virginia Woolf and

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her husband Leonard were themselves involved from the start in publishing and disseminating such works. In terms of the British context, Asa Briggs’s formidable History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 5 vols (1961–1995) remains a vital resource, whereas Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff ’s Social History of British Broadcasting (1991), Andrew Crisell’s Introductory History of British Broadcasting (rev. ed. 2002) and Kate Whitehead’s The Third Programme: A Literary History (1989) provide further important perspectives. Regarding American radio, excellent overviews are offered by Christopher H. Sterling’s and John M. Kittross’s Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting (1990) and Michele Hilmes’s Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (1997), as well as the extensive three-volume set by Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (1966–1970). These are augmented by other Anglophone accounts of broadcasting on the continent, for example in terms of Germany Daniel Gilfillan’s Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (2009); Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz’s Hitler’s Airwaves (1997); or the panorama provided by René Wolf ’s chapter ‘Radio and Modernity’ in his The Undivided Sky (2010: 17–45). Likewise in the French case, there are works such as Rosemary Chapman and Nicholas Hewitt’s Popular Culture and Mass Communication in Twentieth-Century France (1992) or Joelle Neulander’s more recent Programming National Identity: the Culture of Radio in 1930s France (2009). Amongst the national backdrops discussed here in terms of specific writers’ output in the modernist era, unusually, there is as yet no panoramic survey of radio broadcasting in Italy – whether in English or in Italian – a ‘weakness in Italian historiography’, argues Gianni Isola, due to the comparative lack of ‘archives or study centres in the field’ compounded by ‘little attention [paid] to the fate of broadcasting in Italy’ (393). One reason for this relative dearth in the Italian case – attended to by Ragnedda’s especially commissioned overview in this volume – may be further explained by the circumstances in which Unione Radiofonica Italiana was launched in December 1924. In the incisive view of Philip Cannistraro, referring to Mussolini’s Italy: ‘It is no accident that the birth of the totalitarian state coincided with the appearance of modern techniques of mass communications’. Thus, ‘Fascist Italy provides the most instructive and unique example’ whereby totalitarian governments have been largely responsible for the initial growth of the mass media – particularly films and the radio – in their respective countries [ …. ] the Fascists proceeded to develop and exploit the radio as a major instrument of their political and cultural policies. (1972: 1, X)

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As the Italian case implies, a key distinction obtains in academic thinking between ‘radio history’ and ‘radio studies’: the first consists of what Susan Merrill Squier has called ‘internalist’ histories largely, as above, by either country or broadcaster, for ‘the field of radio research has shifted from technological and institutional perspectives to an attention to social context, and then gradually to its symbolic, political and theoretical implications’ (Squier 2003: 3). The second, a somewhat livelier field, explores the impact of the new technology, as Avery understands it, on ‘the material conditions within which the aesthetic, social and ethical values were transmitted, shared and contested, synchronically to a given listening audience, and diachronically across time to later generations of listeners’. It considers a phenomenon that shaped ‘the development of, and dissemination of ideas about, modernist literature and arts’ (6). That is to say, unmistakably, radio studies have been dominated by those working in the social sciences. This is aptly reflected by D. L. LeMahieu’s A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communications and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (1988), or by the range of contributions to the gold standard Journal of Radio & Audio Media (1992–present). The latter publication addresses, according to one of its founding editors, ‘the full sweep of radio history from the 1870s to the present’, thus considering radio as a developing science and technology as well as a set of institutional practices. Similarly, the 1992 Radio-Sound issue of Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture marked the welcome expansion of the field from science research to textual and cultural analysis. Recent work in radio studies, such as Tim Crook’s Radio Drama (1999) and Sam Halliday’s Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (2013), oftentimes makes reference to new creative forms for the radio, particularly during the modernist era. The opening out of radio studies, described above, has additionally involved situating it within the larger context of a shift towards phenomenological human experience resulting from a range of technological innovations. In addressing these experiences, this volume therefore registers the significance of some works: Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (1983); Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1983); and Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985; trans. 1990), as well as John Carey’s helpfully contextual Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939 (1992). Likewise, Cecelia Tichi’s Shifting Gears (1987) records moments of overlap, in popular and literary discourse, between technological metaphors and earlier figures of speech, thus

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capturing a moment of epistemic transition. In stark contrast, R. L. Ruzky’s High Techne (1999) traces the rise of what Adorno termed ‘instrumental rationality’ via the application of modern technology. Moving more squarely into the preserve of cultural history, ‘sound theory’ is central to two crucial studies on the theoretical implications of radio’s treatment of sound, namely Wireless Imagination (1992), edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, which includes new essays by scholars, accompanied by excerpts from significant primary texts; as well as Sound States (1997), edited by Adelaide Morris. By applying sound theory to cultural production during the modernist era, these works set an important historiographical precedent for Broadcasting in the Modernist Era. However, their approach provides just one set of ideas amongst several that overlap within chapters in the proposed collection, and do little to engage with canonical writers of the modernist era. Similarly John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999) represents the kind of rich cultural history to which this edited volume contributes, as does Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media (2000). Both of the latter texts pay close attention to the metaphor associating radio broadcasting with spiritualist notions of the ‘ether’ and ‘communication’ between planes of existence – a persistent notion that contains recoverable traces well into the 1930s. More broadly, a convergence of the historical, social science approach of earlier studies, an interest in the impact of technology on modernity and in sound theory, alongside the treatment of radio as, in part, a textual form, are all apparent in Susan Merrill Squier’s aforementioned collection Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture. Growing out of a series of interlinked panels at the MLA conference, this 2003 edited study treats radio as a material and cultural production – even if not consistently empirical and historicizing in the manner attempted here – by ‘incorporating the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, science studies, and feminist theory, along with the more established field of radio history and the new field of radio studies’ (3). There have been numerous, scattered single-author studies of modernists, exploring the way literary writers altered their practice or responded to the radio. This final category tends to consider the deployment of radio in the modernist era alongside the more literary aspects of such authors’ thinking and indeed oeuvres in published essays, correspondence or works of fiction. These include Leonard Doob’s edited Ezra Pound Speaking (1978), W. J. West’s editions of George Orwell’s broadcasts and commentaries (Orwell 1985a; b) and David Smith’s closely researched account of H. G. Wells’s work for the BBC (1986), the

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latter updated by Todd Avery (2006). Other important studies in this vein include Jeremy Silver’s long essay on W. B. Yeats at the BBC (1987), Kate Whitehead’s and Todd Avery’s work on Bloomsbury broadcasters (1990 and 2006, respectively) and Mary Lago’s work, both alone (1990) and with Linda Hughes and Elizabeth Wall (2008), on E. M. Forster, supplemented by Jeffrey Heath’s study of Forster, Creator as Critic (2008). In terms of other modernist writers, breakthrough studies include Ralph Maud’s edition of Dylan Thomas’s broadcasts (1991); Jeffrey Mehlman’s book on Walter Benjamin’s broadcasts for children (1993) and much more theoretically, Daniel Tiffany’s study of Imagism’s affinities with radio technology (1995). From a more empirical perspective Michael Coyle’s extensive work on T. S. Eliot (1997, 2001 and 2006) set an important precedent for research on modernist broadcasting that joins theoretical and archival research in a manner closely chiming with the essays in this collection. Brendan Barrington’s edition of Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts for Nazi Germany (2000) and those transmitted against the Third Reich by Thomas Mann under the title Listen, Germany! Twenty-five radio messages to the German people over BBC (1943); Douglas Kerr’s more recent analysis of Orwell (2002); Margaret Fisher’s work on Pound’s radio operas (2002), including a detailed analysis of his relations with the BBC; Sarah Wilson’s analysis of Gertrude Stein’s radio work, first published in Modernism/Modernity (2004) and again in Broadcasting Modernism (2006); and Allan Hepburn’s edition of broadcasts by Elizabeth Bowen (2010), further and collectively demonstrate the range, if not comparability, of individual authors engaging with the radio during the pivotal years. The more recent of these studies tend to share two dimensions stressed by Broadcasting in the Modernist Era. As noted above, radio studies have become increasingly hospitable to literary and cultural perspectives, often incorporating more general accounts of how technological innovation has contributed to the modernist era. A theoretical awareness of the impact of technology upon the age, together with the ‘archival turn’ in modernist studies, points up the exciting potential of bringing these concerns to bear in the analysis of modernist literature specifically. Building on this work, these overlapping concerns regarding electronic communications and archival scholarship are even more firmly brought together here. In particular relation to modernism, the most relevant of these studies is surely the 2009 volume published by the University Press of Florida, Broadcasting Modernism. Lewty, Rae Cohen and Coyle’s collection of essays showcases research on radio modernism by some of the leading literary chroniclers of the broadcasting revolution. The first part of their collection is concerned with the

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‘radio imaginary’, that is, the metaphoric models employed to make sense of the impact of wireless technology. The essays collected in Broadcasting Modernism deal superbly with the decisive impact of radio technology on modernist writing, beginning with the potency of its initial invention in the minds of both popular and literary writers (Sconce considers its impact on popular fiction, for example); its impact over a longer period on society, politics and the arts; the identification of the ‘popular listener’, and not least, the well-known modernist ambivalence to this phenomenon. The effects that broadcasters sought to achieve through often idiosyncratic formal innovation are described in Lewty’s theoretical text on Pound and Campbell’s more manuscript-based piece on the Futurists. Each of these chapters helpfully draws out the particular appeal of radio technology to literary modernists. Given the welcome readability and importance of this text, from the methodology to canonical single-author studies and the purposely similar title, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era is thus self-consciously swimming in this landmark study’s impressive wake. All the same, it is still worth noting the distinctive strengths and limitations of Broadcasting Modernism’s employment of variegated methodologies. The current collection, in contrast, advances a consistently historicizing and empirical approach in each chapter. Likewise, Broadcasting Modernism’s series of case studies juxtaposes the American and British modernist experiences of radio over a similar period – raising another key difference with the present volume, which incorporates European case studies from Italy and France as well. Yet in keeping with Cohen et al. (for instance in Steven Connor’s essay on Beckett’s late 1950s and early 1960s radio dramas), this volume also seeks to look beyond the 1945 watershed that book-ends much criticism in modernist studies. All in all, then, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era is an addition to the small number of book-length studies attempting to note parallels and convergences with respect to the impact of radio on literature between roughly the end of the Great War and the first thaw of the Cold War. *** In reflecting the increasing turn in recent scholarship towards primary sources as a means for revisiting academic understandings of modernism – no less than their contexts and broader influences – this collection necessarily employs a mix of familiar and unknown sources. Of the latter, an enormous and strikingly underused cache of microfilm and manuscripts is available at the BBC Written Archive Centre (WAC), augmented by the more familiar archive of the

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BBC’s Listener magazine (now available online). In terms of the Anglophone modernism prioritized in this volume, the BBC WAC represents a treasure trove of texts by literally scores of modernist writers, recording their engagement with the new technologies of broadcasting, and revealing the complex ways in which their writing responded to, accommodated or rejected – but never ignored – this new and pervasive technology between the 1920s and the 1950s. Contributors to the present volume have made use of these materials as a starting point for exploring a broad range of modernist writing – from non-fiction to poetry. Some have drawn together material from multiple collections, using, for example, institutional archives alongside individual writers’ private papers in order to substantiate particular case studies. On the whole then, in terms of sources used, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era principally embraces not only the texts of spoken-word radio broadcasts, as well as supporting historical materials (e.g. correspondence, minutes and other paperwork regarding the planning and delivery of such broadcasts), but also post-archival criticism and interpretation based on previously published primary source collections and documents. Although arbitrary distinctions are invariably a sticky business, the above source-based methodology is broken into two broad areas of exploration here. The first subsection is that of broadcasting culture, understood broadly here to incorporate technology, aesthetics and religion. Commencing this volume’s essays is Charles Armstrong on W. B. Yeats’s series of readings for the BBC in the 1930s. The technological challenges posed to the poet, by this time in his 70s, were negotiated with surprising enthusiasm, not least on account of the promise held out by the mass dissemination of his lyric poetry and, as Armstrong shows, more autobiographical prose. In tropes to be taken up in many of the following essays, Yeats engaged some of the creative opportunities posed by the early development of radio, whether poetically – through the use of metaphor, or that of disembodiment and ‘meta-drama’ – no less than physically, as through recourse to musical accompaniment, or in challenging traditional literary genre by the ‘paradoxical combination of the solitary and the public’ offered by radio. Similarly, the possibilities of early television ‘bloomed’ in Joyce’s final spasms of writing Finnegans Wake, Finn Fordham contends, a consideration largely overlooked in modernist studies generally, and in Joyce studies in particular. ‘Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: New technology and flawed power’ further recalls that radio was not the only nascent mass technology in the 1930s. Although unique in this collection in dealing with interwar television, Fordham’s essay is nonetheless in close keeping with other chapters here by relying upon

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primary sources – in this case Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ notebooks from the 1920s and the 1930s, as well as the neglected historical context of early television broadcasting – to advance a groundbreaking argument. Put simply, could Shem be metaphorically identified with television? It is a tantalizing proposition; but at the very least, Joyce’s clear interest in television, and its incorporation into late drafts of his long-standing ‘Work in Progress’, signals a wider ambivalence by modernist writers about the perceptual changes engendered by emergent, mass technologies on the eve of World War II. If Joyce was concerned by the potential for televisual ‘violence’ upon genres of traditional representation, less avant-garde artists were often more optimistic about the collaborative possibilities of broadcasting. In returning to radio, whilst maintaining a close proximity to primary sources, Peter Fifield’s contribution of E. M. Forster’s long-available radio broadcasts for the BBC likewise breaks new interpretative ground. In switching culture stations from novels to broadcasting, Forster’s engagement with the radio from 16 July 1928 extended over 35 years, offering contemporary social criticism as well as channelling some of his creativity into BBC speeches for British and Indian audiences. In revealing a ‘profound attentiveness to the particular properties of the medium’ – technological, political and doubtless creative – Forster’s use of radio, according to Fifield, extended to an imaginative engagement with his listening audience. Yet it also, equally unusually, opened onto a disarming intimacy and self-reflective kind of fireside chattiness that worked against the monologic authority that was, equally, at one with Forster’s broader liberal individualism. These values were sorely tested by the crucible of war in Britain (and of course elsewhere), which surely goes some way towards explaining the ‘middlebrow’ writer and detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers’s, radio play The Man Born to Be King. With the first part initially transmitted to a hostile reception in late 1941, shortly after the twelfth instalment of this updated life of Jesus Christ in October 1942, plans were already afoot for the rebroadcast later that same year. This popularity only increased during the rest of the war years and thereafter; in fact, as Alex Goody points out, it has become such a ‘staple of religious broadcasting’ for the BBC that all parts were again rebroadcast by the BBC as recently as Spring 2011, for Lent and Easter. Through incisive engagement with holdings at the Written Archives Centre in Caversham, England, the BBC’s long-standing interest in Christianthemed broadcasts is connected to the technological promise and dramatic challenges of Sayer’s portrayal of the life of Jesus via modern language, indeed even contemporaneous slang. The results were not only a triumph of biblical adaptation but, as Goody maintains, a greater sense of realism in representing

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the life and death of Christ at a time when everyday life and death were closer than ever before for a nation in the midst of total war. The final two essays in this section, by Steven Matthews on T. S. Eliot and by Erik Tonning on the Welsh painter and poet David Jones, both take up ‘Christian modernism’ as mediated by the BBC, amongst other key themes in this volume, over the longue durée of radio broadcasting on either side of World War II. The first, ‘T.S. Eliot on the Radio: “The Drama is All In the Word” ’, also employs published radio broadcasts in both The Listener and in extant collections in order to reconsider key aspects of Eliot’s oeuvre between the 1930s and the 1950s. Matthews cannily deploys these to explore the role of radio voice and the ‘nature of culture’ – not least Early Modern culture in Britain – across Eliot’s more than 100 BBC broadcasts during these years. The result is yet another challenge to critical consensus, in this case through focus upon the radiogenetic qualities in Eliot’s use of idiom, allusion and, in particular, the revivifying possibilities of language once transposed to contemporaneous broadcasting. In terms of both speaking and listening, Eliot’s avowedly poetic approach to radio, even when dealing with Dryden, Donne and other historical-literary subjects, was an avowedly rhetorical and up-to-date ‘speaking to the noise of the modern world’. In the case of David Jones, the conservative, Catholic artist and poet championed by the BBC, an enormous cache of previously unseen manuscripts is unearthed by Erik Tonning. Tonning hones in on a talk entitled ‘Wales and the Crown’, first transmitted on 23 July 1953 for the BBC’s Welsh Regional Service, and repeated on the Third Programme (which was launched in 1946). Although Jones remains largely outside the canon of British modernists today, Tonning makes clear that this was most emphatically not the case with the BBC either before or, especially, after World War II. In fact, their profound ‘sympathy’ with Jones’s work and his broader ‘cultural theory’ – most notably in the case of ‘Christian modernism’ – is a theme that overlapped with much of the BBC’s ethos in its first three decades. As with Eliot, radio could be the site of both innovation and preservation of Christian tradition for Jones, whose rare post-war broadcasts were greeted with almost-unparalleled enthusiasm by BBC producers like his friend and fellow Catholic Harman Grisewood. One key reason for this, Tonning argues, was Jones’s attention to existing British values and traditions and the ammunition this provided in staunching public criticism of the overly ‘elitist’ Third Programme; but most of all, the BBC’s and Jones’s shared hope that cultural broadcasting – if done properly – might be able ‘to fulfil its lofty aim of revitalising modern culture’. The segue into the second part of this volume, more squarely concerned with politics – ideology, propaganda and, in part, the backdrop of total war – is

Introduction

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provided by Virginia Woolf ’s attack on ‘middlebrow’ broadcasting at the BBC. ‘Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Broadcasting’ argues that, along with her husband Leonard, Virginia’s view of radio was intensely political – one manifested in her diaries and letters, essays and even fiction – particularly in her writings from the 1920s and the 1930s. As Randi Koppen notes, this extended not only to the content of the BBC’s not-leftwingenough radio output, but also to aural developments and modern broadcasting technologies more widely. For both Woolfs, but especially for the canonical modernist, the flipside to the BBC’s reactionary politics was the genuine communicative possibilities held out by radio technology; and this, Koppen posits, was of real significance to Virginia’s later artistic production. Accordingly, culture and politics could never be so easily separated at the BBC, or for other national broadcasters; a theme also taken up by the Woolfs’s publishing arm at this time, The Hogarth Press. In short, whatever the applicability of the modern radio for literature and the other arts, a new cultural phenomenon of moulding public opinion via broadcasting was intrinsic to the power and (ir)responsibility of both national broadcasting and individual broadcasters. This was to be tested ever more severely in the cauldron of war by propagandists on both sides of the ‘fourth front’ provided by radio during World War II. Unlike Woolf ’s three BBC broadcasts, George Orwell’s career as broadcaster presents a sample case of a leftist who, though disgusted by British imperialism, offered his services on the home front. At first loath to participate in the Allied war effort, Orwell changed heart on realizing the scale of the threat posed by the Axis. Once in post, Orwell constantly sought to rationalize a sizeable intellectual commitment to an establishment he despised. A major factor in this attitude was a strain of patriotic sentiment that entered Orwell’s writing in the first months of the war, as witnessed in The Lion and the Unicorn. His renewed love of English culture, taste and freedom of expression – despite its foundations in a deeply unequal society – became a theme of his earliest BBC broadcasts, which in turn earned him a permanent post at the Indian Service. As Mead demonstrates, Orwell’s complex of ideological compromises as a broadcaster is illuminated by his preference for cultural and educational broadcasting over news reports, and his use of literary discussion to advance his ambivalent position somewhere between anti-fascism, anti-imperialism and a quite intuitive sense of English cultural character as fundamentally at odds with totalitarianism. Many of these themes are equally in evidence in David Addyman’s study of J. B. Priestley’s justly famous Postscripts, registering some 16 million auditors in 1940 and 1941. If Orwell was willing to look backwards to champion that which should be

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preserved amongst British – and more widely, liberal democratic – values under threat by the Axis powers, Priestley insisted upon looking forward to a more equitable post-war settlement between the classes. This repeatedly brought him into sharp conflict with functionaries at ‘the BBC, at the MOI and in the higher echelons of government’. Yet as stressed by thoughtful recourse to Priestley’s Postscripts and contextual documentation, ‘J.B. Priestley: By Radio to a New Britain’, there remains much more to tell in this oft-recounted encounter. Foremost amongst Priestley’s broadcasts was his prominent location of British culture as an engine for the ‘new Jerusalem’ to be created after World War II. Addyman details several of these consistent strategies, from employing diverse authors in the war effort to using his broadcasts in attempting to create an active and engaged populace. In this way, Priestley’s contribution to the British home front was about far more than resolve, or even socio-political reconstruction, but about ‘spreading new ideas’ via his broadcasts in order to champion ‘the key role that imagination and creativity’ needed to make life more rich, more rewarding, in the wake of the expected Allied victory. In contrast, public broadcasting in Italy co-evolved with an increasing Fascist totalitarianism from the early 1920s into the late 1930s. As Massimo Ragnedda’s contextual discussion of this period clarifies, Italy had much ground to make up on other ‘great powers’ in the sphere of radio. This was partly achieved on the verge of World War II through Fascist control and propaganda – both cultural and political in scope – ultimately under the umbrella of the Ministry of Popular Culture (only formally established in 1937, despite several cognate predecessors). Nonetheless, the development of totalitarian broadcasting in Fascist Italy reveals a number of surprises poorly served by Italian historiography to date, principal amongst them the recourse to ‘light entertainment’ such as tango and, in particular, jazz. If this American import seemed totally alien to an Axis dictatorship emphasizing ultra-nationalism and increasingly Nazi-style racism, the pseudonymizing of Louis Armstrong to ‘Luigi Braccioforte’ and Benny Goodman to ‘Beniamino Buonomo’ attempted to square this unseemly circle. So too with programmes directed at the peasantry in the south, Ragnedda argues, and all manner of propagandistic paternalism in Italy’s ill-starred embrace of radio during Mussolini’s rule. Moving this discussion into the war-torn 1940s – which witnessed little in the way of victories for Italian Fascism – Feldman turns this national focus towards one self-consciously propagandizing, expatriate American: Ezra Pound. In revisiting the critical literature on Pound’s radio speeches for the Axis during World War II, Feldman finds a striking variance between the published record and the thousands of radio items contained in

Introduction

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Pound’s archives held by Yale University, the FBI and Department of Justice, as well as papers housed in the National Archives of both Britain and the USA. This deluge of material has been overwhelmingly, and troublingly, neglected in wide-ranging discussions of the ‘Pound Case’ between the poet’s indictment for treason in July 1943 and late 2013, when Feldman’s study of material appeared with Palgrave under the title Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945. In fundamentally challenging the historiographical consensus formed over these seven decades, ‘Pound and Radio Treason: An empirical reassessment’ provides a look at Pound’s wartime years through archived speeches, correspondence and even payments in forcefully arguing that this period was less one of naïveté or madness than one of informed and committed propagation for the Axis cause – one reaching its apogee with Pound’s enthusiastic 1942 reading and subsequent application of Hitler’s chapter in Mein Kampf, tellingly entitled ‘Propaganda and Organisation’. That radio retained a cultural power after the war is attested by earlier essays on Jones and Eliot, but is given narrower focus in the concluding essay in this volume by Alys Moody, considering the case of post-war France. Moody is particularly concerned with the political contretemps sparked by the group informally headed by Jean-Paul Sartre. During the short-lived weekly broadcasts of this programme over three months in 1947, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other writers from the Les temps modernes stable provided a ‘semi-scripted’ discussion forum that, in Moody’s estimation, brought together ‘a number of the defining characteristics of French radio in the post-war period’. These included the changing role of state intervention vis-à-vis France’s national broadcaster, Radiodiffusion; the extent to which trenchant criticism of French economic and political decision-making had on the body politic; and more narrowly, the immense cultural capital wielded by the now-communist Sartre and his so-called collaborators. The power of radio was reciprocally appreciated by the Les temps moderns group, who believed they were sacked from orders at the highest level for refusing to toe the newly formed Schumann government’s line. With familiar use of primary sources to drive home a revisionist reading of post-war French radio, ‘ “Conquering the virtual public”: Jean-Paul Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes and the Radio in France’ thus underscores perhaps the principal thematic contention running throughout Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, namely, that radio played an enormous role in the European politics and culture before, during and after World War II. That literary elites in various countries played an instrumental role in this swift and potentially revolutionary development only serves to reinforce the contributors’

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collective call for more research on this pressing area of both modernist studies and contemporary cultural history. In her lapidary Afterword, Daniella Caselli reflects upon these themes, in addition to advancing some insightful empirical materials of her own. These drive home the very newness, indeed strangeness, of radio during these formative decades. This is not only the case with culture and politics, but as Caselli notes in conclusion, radio constituted a ‘new art’ for the masses in and of itself. It may have been seen by some as overly ‘highbrow’ or at times too ‘middlebrow’, but it was an unmistakeable fixture of the modern age, one demanding attention from literary artists no less than the wo/man on the street. It is this promising legacy, only at the beginning of its cultural recovery in modernist studies, that similarly demands the attention of all scholars working in the field.

Works cited Arnheim, Rudolf (1936). Radio. London: Faber and Faber. Avery, Todd (2006). Radio Modernism, Literature, Ethics and the BBC, 1922–1938. Aldershot: Ashgate. Barnouw, Erik (1966–1970). A History of Broadcasting in the United States. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. Bergmeier, Horst J. P. and Lotz, Rainer E. (1997). Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing. New Haven: Yale University Press. Berman, Marshall (1983). All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso. Brecht, Bertold (2000). Brecht on Film and Radio. Ed. Marc Silberman. London: Methuen. Briggs, Asa (1961–1995). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 6 vols Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Timothy C. (2006). Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Cannistraro, Philip V. (1972). ‘The Radio in Fascist Italy’, Journal of European Studies, 2.2 (June), pp. 127–152. Carey, John (1992). Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939. London: Faber. Chapman, Rosemary and Hewitt, Nicholas (1992). Popular Culture and Mass Communication in Twentieth-Century France. Lewiston, Lampeter: Mellen. Cohen, Debra Rae, Coyle, Michael and Lewty, Jane (eds.) (2009). Broadcasting Modernism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Coyle, Michael (1997a). ‘T.S. Eliot on the Air: “Culture” and the Challenges of Mass Communication’, in T. S. Eliot and our Turning World, Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. London: Macmillan, pp. 141–154.

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——— (1997b). ‘T. S. Eliot’s Radio Broadcasts, 1929–1963: A Chronological Checklist’, in T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. London: Macmillan, pp. 203–213. Crisell, Andrew (2002). Introductory History of British Broadcasting. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Crook, Tim (1999). Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London, New York: Routledge. Fisher, Margaret (2009). ‘Futurism and Radio’, Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Ed. Günter Berghaus, Amsterdam, New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., pp. 229–262. ——— (2012). ‘ “The Art of Radia”: Pino Masnata’s Unpublished Gloss to the Futurist Radio Manifesto Introduction’, Modernism/Modernity, 19.1 (Jan 2012), pp. 155–158. Forster E. M. (2008a). The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929–1960: A Selected Edition, Ed. Mary Lago, Linda Hughes and Elizabeth Walls; foreword by P. N. Furbank. Columbia, Mo.; London: University of Missouri Press. ——— (2008b). The Creator as Critic and Other Writings. Ed. Jeffrey M. Heath. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Gay, Peter (2007). Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond. London: Heinemann. Gilfillan, Daniel (2009). Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Halliday, Sam (2013). Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harker, Ben (2013). ‘ “The Trumpet of the Night”: Interwar Communists on BBC Radio’, History Workship Journal, 75/1 (Spring 2013), pp. 81–100. Hepburn, Allan (2010). Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hilmes, Michele (1997). Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Isola, Gianni (1995). ‘Italian Radio: History and Historiography’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 15/3, pp. 393–399. Kahn, Douglas (1995). Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. ——— and Whitehead, Gregory (eds.) (1994). Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kern, Stephen (1983). The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Kerr, Douglas (2002). ‘Orwell’s BBC Broadcasts: Colonial Discourse and the Rhetoric of Propaganda’, Textual Practice, 16/3, pp. 473–490. ——— (2004). ‘In the Picture: Orwell, India and the BBC’, Literature and History, 13/1 (Spring), pp. 43–57. Kittler, Friedrich (1990). Discourse Networks 1800/1900 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Lago, Mary (1990). ‘E. M. Forster and the BBC’, The Yearbook of English Studies, p. 20, Literature in the Modern Media: Radio, Film, and Television Special Number, pp. 132–151. LeMahieu, D. L. (1988). A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communications and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mann, Thomas (1943). Listen, Germany! Twenty-five radio Messages to the German People Over BBC. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Matheson, Hilda (1933). Broadcasting. London: T. Butterworth. Mehlman, Jeffrey (1993). Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, Adelaide (ed.) (1997). Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Neulander, Joelle (2009). Programming National Identity: The Culture of Radio in 1930s France. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Orwell, George (1985a). The War Broadcasts. Ed. W. J. West. London; Duckworth: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985. ——— (1985b). The War Commentaries. Ed. W. J. West. London; Duckworth: British Broadcasting Corporation. Peters, John Durham (1999). Speaking into the Air. Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press. Pound, Ezra (2002). Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments 1931–1933. Ed. Margaret Fisher. Boston: The MIT Press. ——— (2005). “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Ed. Leonard W. Doob. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Reith, John (1924). Broadcast Over Britain. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Rosenthal, Lecia (2011). Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation. New York: Fordham University Press. Ruzky, R. L. (1999). High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Scannell, Paddy and Cardiff, David (1991). The Social History of British Broadcasting. Oxford: Blackwell. Sconce, Jeffrey (2000). Haunted Media. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press. Silver, Jeremy (1987). ‘W. B. Yeats and the BBC: A Reassessment’, Yeats Annual 5, pp. 181–185. Smith, David (1986). H.G Wells. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. Squier, Susan Merrill (ed.) (2003). Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press. Sterling, Christopher H. and Kittross, John M.(1990). Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Stuart, Francis (2000). The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart: 1942–1944. Ed. Brendan Barrington. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Thomas, Dylan (1991). The Broadcasts. Ed. Ralph Maud. London: Dent. Tichi, Cecelia (1987). Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Tiffany, Daniel (1995). Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whitehead, Kate (1989). The Third Programme: A Literary History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——— (1990). ‘Broadcasting Bloomsbury’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 20, Literature in the Modern Media: Radio, Film, and Television, Special Number, pp. 121–131. Wilson, Sarah (2004). ‘Gertrude Stein and the Radio’, Modernism/Modernity, 11/2, pp. 261–278. Wolf, René (2010). The Undivided Sky: The Holocaust on East and West German Radio in the 1960s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part One

Broadcasting Culture in the Modernist Era

1

Pub, Parlour, Theatre Radio in the Imagination of W. B. Yeats Charles I. Armstrong University of Agder

On 8 February 1937, dismayed by the poor quality of a BBC broadcast of his poems, W. B. Yeats wrote an abject letter to the BBC Talks Producer, George Barnes. He described the broadcast as a ‘fiasco’, and lamented that his ‘old bundle’ of ‘tricks’ had proved to be ‘useless’.1 The recording had been made on the stage of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, with readings and songs by John Stephenson and Rita Mooney, and Yeats had thought that everything had come off nicely on the day. It did not, however, come across very well on the radio. Casting himself as a dated, hapless Prospero, Yeats was disconsolate: ‘Every human sound turned into the groans, roars, bellows, of a wild [beast]. I recognize that I am a fool & there shall be no more broad cast [sic] verse from the Abbey stage if I can prevent it’. Accompanying sound effects had seemed ‘very stirring’ on the stage, but – in an image that showed the humiliation felt by the 71-year-old poet – ‘on the wireless it was a school-boy knocking with the end of a penknife, or a spoon’. The anecdote reveals how fragile a fit there was between the expectations and techniques of an established and elderly poet, on the one hand, and the technological challenges of a new mass medium on the other. Yeats was, however, not terminally put off by this experience, and went on to produce more broadcasts the same year. This is reflective of a more overarching pattern in his career: Yeats was never averse to risk, and would rather court ignominious failure than settle into too well-established patterns of composition and performance. Indeed, the image of a poet who discovers that his old ‘tricks’ have become ‘useless’ found a celebrated parallel later the same year, when Yeats began the writing of ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’: there, the capsizing of the poetic process becomes the theme of a self-reflective immersion into the foundations of artistic activity, as a classic poem rises like a phoenix out of its own ashes.

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Yeats’s first BBC broadcast, an introduction to a performance of his translation of King Oedipus, was aired on 8 September 1931. The previous year Yeats’s friend and champion, the Poet Laureate John Masefield, had extolled the virtues of radio for granting a larger public access to live poetry readings (Schuchard 2008: 335). Yeats, too, was intrigued by the possibility of reaching new audiences. Over the next few years, he repeatedly returned to work for the BBC. Although not all were actually broadcast, he prepared 12 manuscripts specifically for radio between 1931 and 19382: 1. 2.

‘Oedipus the King’ (broadcast by BBC Belfast on 8 September 1931). ‘Reading of Poems’ (broadcast by the BBC National Programme on 8 September 1931). 3. ‘Poems about Women’ (broadcast by the BBC National Programme on 10 April 1932). 4. ‘The Growth of a Poet’ (broadcast by BBC Belfast on 17 March 1934; published in The Listener, 4 April 1934). 5. ‘The Irish Literary Movement’ (broadcast by Radio Éireann on 12 October 1935). 6. ‘Modern Poetry’ (broadcast by the BBC on 11 October 1936). 7. ‘Abbey Theatre Broadcast’ (broadcast by Radio Éireann on 1 February 1937). 8. ‘In the Poet’s Pub’ (broadcast by the BBC on 2 April 1937). 9. ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’ (broadcast by the BBC on 22 April 1937). 10. ‘My Own Poetry’ (broadcast by the BBC on 3 July 1937). 11. ‘My Own Poetry Again’ (broadcast by the BBC National Programme on 29 October 1937). 12. ‘I Became an Author’ (text for a BBC radio programme that was not broadcast; published in The Listener on 4 August 1938). Some of this work can be interpreted as a hands-on continuation of the radio dissemination of Yeats’s work, which had already been carried out – without any personal contribution from Yeats himself – during the preceding years, starting with a performance of the play The Hour Glass on 4 July 1926.3 The 11 October 1936 broadcast, where Yeats spoke about modern poetry, is of a more critical nature and belongs in the company of his essays and the preface to the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. A later broadcast that was not actually aired, but which was published in the Listener on 4 August 1938 as ‘I Became an Author’, is akin to the autobiographical prose that Yeats had been intermittently producing since 1914. The body of work in evidence here is, therefore, of a diverse kind: Yeats did not use radio for any single purpose, and seemed to approach it as

Radio in the Imagination of W. B. Yeats

25

a means of publication analogous (but by no means identical) to that of the printed word. It was, however, as a medium for the live performance of his poetry that his most interesting forays into radio work took place, and it was also through encounters with radio in this guise – as a specific channel for the poetry reading – that he was forced to reflect upon the singular form of the medium. This essay will use Yeats’s perspective on the peculiarities of radio to scrutinize the relationship between the poet and his listeners, as well as the role of genre and the relationship between poetry and music (and, by extension, between sense and sound). Contrary to recent work that has stressed the analogy between Yeats’s radio work and esoteric mediumship,4 I will explore a different tack in showing how the radio broadcasts brought up issues and techniques Yeats was familiar with not just due to public readings of his poetry, but also through his work for the theatre. The theatre, though, is only one kind of imagined space conjured up by Yeats in this context: the virtuality of the contact the medium established with its audience forced this major poet to come up with a varied set of metaphors, in order to make sense of this new mode of mass communication. Confronted with the strange new beast of radio, Yeats effectively tried to formulate what it struck him as being – and what it could be – in terms of spaces and activities that were more familiar. This was an exploratory activity, engaged in unearthing the possibilities of the medium in much the way that poets – according to Paul Ricoeur – use poetic metaphor to bring about ‘new ways of being in the world, of living there, and of projecting our innermost possibilities onto it’ (Ricoeur 1976: 60). Obviously fascinated by radio, Yeats let his developing thoughts concerning its potential and pitfalls both inform and seep into the actual work he prepared for transmission. Towards the end of the essay, the political stakes of the Irish poet’s cooperation with the BBC will be addressed. Throughout, there will be a focus on how Yeats forcefully brought his own contexts and techniques to bear – by both extending and modifying their use – in order to facilitate his encounter with an unfamiliar medium. When he started his radio work, Yeats was an experienced and popular live performer of his poetry. It was therefore natural for him to reflect on the difference between the face-to-face encounter with his audience, in the traditional reading, and the more mediated encounter that took place in the radio broadcast. Seen from the vantage point of the performer, the difference was not a flattering one for radio. After his second broadcast, a recitation of his own poems on ‘An Irish Programme’ on 8 September 1932, Yeats pointed out that ‘the microphone, a little oblong of paper like a visiting card, is a poor substitute for a crowded hall’.5 The speaker loses the sense of spectacle and space, and an impersonal object replaces

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the community of the live performance. The ‘visiting card’ simile also signals a suspicion of superficiality: without the close proximity of bodies, the encounter risks amounting to no more than a passing exchange of formal conventionalities. Yeats was thus not oblivious to the implicit limitations of the medium, which could easily be glossed as reflective of the limitations of modernity.6 Thankfully, however, his analysis did not stop there. His first comments on radio show a fascination with how alienation is paradoxically accompanied with a sense of intimacy. From early on in his career, Yeats had partaken in a modern obsession with crowds: he observed how the masses acted according to their own singular will, and could be influenced – for instance through symbols – through particular literary and demagogic techniques. As Marjorie Howes has shown, Yeats’s early experiments with drama were in part driven from a desire to convert the passive susceptibility of the crowd into a living, acting community.7 Later, disillusionment with the Abbey Theatre led him to eschew large, public stagings of his plays, as his experiments with the conventions of Japanese Noh theatre drove him to cultivate a form that had ‘no need of mob or press’ to pay its way – an ‘aristocratic form’, which could be performed ‘in a room for so little money that forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price’ (Yeats 2007: 163). When Yeats prepared his radio broadcasts, he was forced to reconsider the prospect of communicating with large crowds in performance – and he envisaged that radio could do so without giving up on the sense of concentrated intimacy that characterized his later drama. Radio’s paradoxical combination of the solitary and the public fascinated him. This is evident in statements made to local press after his second broadcast (Schuchard 2008: 339, 342), and it also became central to the framing of his 10 April 1932 broadcast, titled ‘Poems about Women’. In the introduction to the latter, Yeats reveals that he has been unsure about what kind of poems are appropriate to read on the radio. When his close friend and former lover Olivia Shakespeare recommended his reading poems about women, he had been sceptical about performing personal texts in such a public setting. Yeats’s own subsequent counter-argument to such an objection reiterates the parodic description of the poet’s encounter with the microphone, but does so in order to stress the peculiar possibilities of the medium: Then I remembered that I would not be reading to a crowd; you would all be listening singly or in twos and threes; above all that I myself would be alone, speaking to something that looks like a visiting card on a pole; that after all it would be no worse than publishing love poems in a book. Nor do I want to disappoint that old friend of mine for I am sure that she has had her portable

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wireless brought to her room, that she is at this moment listening to find out if I have taken her advice. (Yeats 2000: 234)

The poet, then, is spared his blushes because he is alone: unlike what is the case for a public reading in an auditorium, this medium depersonalizes the encounter between author and audience in a way that renders self-censorship unnecessary. Thus impersonality brings with it a broader range of opportunities, enabling the writer to transgress intersubjective norms and conventions that are otherwise in force. Yeats compares this to the effect of the written word, and as such this passage relates to Jacques Derrida’s claim that the writing and space of literature constitute ‘a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything’ (Derrida 1992: 36). Concomitant with the modern freedom of the literary word comes an idealization of the addressee as a being that transcends all existing members of the audience. Derrida sees this reader as being inherent in the iterability of the mark, whereas Yeats more concretely identifies him in the idealized figure named in the title of the ‘The Fisherman’. Yeats concluded a St. Patrick’s Night broadcast from Belfast on 17 March 1934 with this particular poem, which imagines an ideal reader ‘who does not exist,/A man who is but a dream’ (Yeats 1987: 348). Whilst Yeats celebrates and sees the inherent potential of the impersonal dimension in literary communication, in the ‘Poems about Women’ broadcast this dimension is nevertheless reined in by his linking it to an ongoing communication with one particular person: the public encounter with the anonymous listener is overlaid with the reference to (the unnamed) Olivia Shakespear, ensuring – in a manner reminiscent of a personal dedication – that the broadcast also is a personal, even intimate, affair. The effect is further complicated by the fact that readers of poetry traditionally are invited to identify with the intimate addressees of lyric love poetry: members of Yeats’s audience might have felt that they were excluded from the personal intercourse being staged on the air, but some would also intuitively have identified with one or both parties involved. By bringing up love poetry in this way, Yeats showed he was conscious of how a new medium would raise questions concerning the use of traditional genres. Having consummate command of the formal conventions of poetry, he was acutely aware of how historical change and circumstance necessarily affect the kind of utterances that are apposite for poetry. But the opposite is also true, as ‘genre is not just a matter of codes and conventions, but … also calls into play systems of use, durable social institutions, and the organization of physical space’

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(Frow 2006: 12). With regard to Yeats’s radio broadcasts, one of the most striking features is the predominance of the ballad genre: this is particularly emphatic in the two broadcasts from April 1937, ‘In the Poet’s Pub’ and ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’.8 These programmes included not only ballads by Yeats, but also several written by English poets. As the title of these broadcasts shows, the ballad does indeed bring with it associations concerning ‘the organization of physical space’: stressing intimacy rather than solitude, these titles elide the distance separating the poet and his listeners, imaginatively recasting the setting as a convivial and communal one. Thus the first of the two includes a passage where Yeats directly addresses his audience as follows: ‘I want you to imagine yourself in a Poets’ Pub. There are such pubs in Dublin and I suppose elsewhere. You are sitting among poets, musicians, farmers and labourers’ (Yeats 2000: 267). This act of prescribed, collective imagination recalls a similar moment in Yeats’s first broadcast, where he had asked listeners preparing for a performance of King Oedipus to ‘try and call up not the little Abbey Theatre but an open-air Greek theatre with its high-pillared stage, and yourselves all sitting tier above tier upon marble seats in some great amphitheatre cut out of a hillside’ (Yeats 2000: 220). The transposition to another time and place for the Greek play was of course not a simple one, Yeats admitted, ‘as I have never heard a play broadcasted I do not know whether I shall succeed in calling into my imagination that ancient theatre’. The slightly nostalgic flavour of the reference to ‘poets, musicians, farmers and labourers’ in ‘In a Poet’s Pub’ seems to imply that Yeats is engaged in conjuring up not only another space, but also another time: as Emily C. Bloom stresses in her reading of ‘The Curse of Cromwell’ in the context of its first public appearance in a radio recitation of 1937, there is at work here a kind of figurative mourning, on Yeats’s side, for ‘the loss of the society’ that once supplied the typical ballad singer ‘with patronage, friendship, and an ear for his poetry’ (Bloom 2011: 240). Similarly, the fictive casting of the next broadcast in a ‘Poet’s Parlour’ – where there is ‘a beautiful lady, or two or three beautiful ladies, four or five poets, a couple of musicians and all are devoted to poetry’ (Yeats 2000: 276) – also has something anachronistic about it. Arguably, this alludes back to the courtly culture of the Renaissance, repeatedly celebrated by Yeats’s poetry. Ronald Schuchard identifies a more recent, and more autobiographical, context: he describes it as ‘Yeats’s imaginative recreation of many Monday evenings in Woburn Buildings’ (Schuchard 2008: 381). By bringing Yeats’s memories of the artistic coteries of 1890s London to bear here, Schuchard points towards a historical frame that – as will be shown later in this essay – was of particular importance to Yeats’s radio

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work of the 1930s. Suffice it to say for now, though, that the experience of radio is unmoored from the present place and time, as the poet forcefully reframes the context according to his own imaginative needs. Jeremy Silver has claimed that Yeats’s ‘insistence on the centrality of spoken performances of his work leads to [his seeing] radio as a natural medium’ for his own work (Silver 1987: 183). In this respect, too, the ballad suggested itself as particularly relevant. For Yeats, this genre not only signified a particular kind of setting and community, but also a peculiar inflection of the poetic idiom: the ballad was to be understood as a collective, musical utterance. This stress on music also affected Yeats’s radio versions of poems that were not ballads. In his final broadcast, ‘My Poetry Again’ (29 October 1937), he pre-empted the listener’s possible reservations to his unusual rendering of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’: ‘Perhaps you will think that I go too near singing it. That is because every poet who reads his own poetry gives as much importance to the rhythm as to the sense. A poem without its rhythm is not a poem’ (Yeats 2000: 290). As a result of this emphasis, Yeats included musical elements in several of his broadcasts. But he was far from indifferent to the manner in which music and the spoken word interacted: the poetry should never be drowned out, or even overshadowed, by the music.9 The following explanation for the linking of the two was included in a draft version of the manuscript used in the ‘In the Poet’s Pub’ broadcast: I have suggested to the B.B.C. that it should use some musical instrument to fill up pauses, whether in the middle of a verse or at the end of it, to vary and to rest the attention. When I first produced a play at the Abbey Theatre some thirty years ago I told an actor to pause to mark a change of mood, and the impression he gave me was that of a man who had forgotten his lines. Then I told him to fill up the pause with a significant movement of his body and all was well. But when you are reciting to the wireless and nobody can see your body it seems right to fill up the pauses with musical sounds. (Yeats 2000: 403–4n. 471)

Yeats is explicitly drawing on his theatrical experience here, although the same desire for variation and rest also plays a salient role in how he generally structures his poetry: a need for ‘rest’ is not, in Yeats’s view, more characteristic of radio listeners than other audiences of his work. He also explicitly linked the use of refrains – sometimes nonsense refrains, such as in the ‘fol de rol de rolly O’ of ‘The Pilgrim’, included in ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’ – in ballads to this need for rest and variation. Both music and such musical verbal effects have a supplementary function, closely connected to the lack of visual access to the performing body – ‘nobody can see your body’ – in these broadcasts. It is a

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function that is strictly circumscribed, as the music is not allowed to take place simultaneously with speech or song: ‘the words need all our attention’ (Yeats 2000: 267). A particular hierarchy of aesthetic means is posited, not without parallel to the political forms of hierarchy courted by the later Yeats.10 Radio is envisaged as a vehicle for the poetic word: it has the potential of conveying an intense, verbal experience to a large number of people – but needs to be used in a highly premeditated manner, if this is to be brought about. Like Masefield before him, Yeats also used radio as an instrument with which one can proselytize. His audience was not only exposed to what Yeats considered to be poetry of high quality, but it was also asked – at the end of his 1936 broadcast on modern poetry – to uphold the correct standards and values necessary for the continued flourishing of this poetry: If anybody reads or recites poetry as if it were prose from some public platform, I ask you, speaking for poets, living, dead or unborn, to protest in whatever way occurs to your perhaps youthful minds; if they recite or read by wireless, I ask you to express your indignation by letter. William Morris, coming out of a hall where somebody had read or recited his Sigurd the Volsung said: ‘It cost me a lot of damned hard work to get that thing into verse.’ (Yeats 2000: 102)

Yeats’s manuscript had ‘a devil of a lot’, rather than ‘damned’, in the final sentence. When his passion for poetic technique got the better of him during live transmission, the BBC promptly cut him off (see Schuchard 2008: 374). This episode provides a small, but telling indication of that there was not necessarily a perfect fit between the agendas and needs of Yeats and the BBC, even if the collaboration between the two spanned several years. It is not unnatural to anticipate some dissension on the grounds of Anglo-Irish relations: the last few years of Yeats’s career, during which he worked with the BBC, includes some of his most outspoken attacks on British imperialism. Emily C. Bloom aptly uses Yeats’s reading of ‘The Curse of Cromwell’ and other poems dealing with Irish politics on the 3 July 1937 broadcast (titled ‘My Own Poetry’) to address related questions concerning ‘how Yeats imagined the politics and nationalities of his BBC audience’. She asks whether the poems were ‘offered to provoke a largely British listening public, or did he primarily address his Irish listeners – and, if so, toward what ends did this assortment of political poems lend themselves?’ (Bloom 2011: 241). Yeats’s relationship to Britain and Britishness was never a simple one, so one should be wary of reaching too facile solutions here. Certainly, he was experienced with dealing with different readerships on both sides of the Irish channel, and he was not averse to signal his own self-consciousness

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about this in the middle of a programme: ‘Many Irish men and women must be listening’, he suddenly interjected in his 1936 broadcast on modern poetry, ‘and they may wonder why I have said nothing of modern Irish poetry. I have not done so because it moves in a different direction and belongs to a different story’ (Yeats 1994: 100). Although he seems to cater for both Irish and English audiences without much friction in most broadcasts, the programme containing political poems dealing with the Easter Rising and Cromwell – as well as including the World War I poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, with the telling line ‘Those that I guard I do not love’ – brings latent tensions to the fore. Even here though, as Foster notes in his biography on Yeats, less political poems such as ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ work to defuse some of the tension (see Foster 2003: 587–588). The recent emphasis on post-colonial approaches to Irish literature should not lead to the neglect of other, less-exclusively national tensions in the relationship between Yeats and the BBC. Yeats’s broadcasts show him negotiating with, and at times subverting, the ideological tenor of the organization. While Michael Tratner’s claim that Yeats followed suit with a more generally modernist tendency to deal with mass politics in a way that eschewed individualism for a collectivist perspective might lead one to anticipate a seamless collaboration (see Tratner 1995), Yeats’s actual work with radio is, in actual practice, more idiosyncratic and difficult to map ideologically than might be assumed. If the BBC cut him off when he slipped a ‘damned’ into a broadcast, he nevertheless did manage, on other occasions, to include elements that seem to contradict the implicit values of the corporation. Here a parallel can be drawn to Todd Avery’s work on how Bloomsbury intellectuals subverted the ideals of the BBC and its early General Manager, John Reith. Avery has contrasted their positions as follows: For Reith and most of the other stewards of public service broadcasting, the public good was ineffaceably articulated with evangelical morality and nationalist, even imperialist, ideology. For the Bloomsbury Group, to the contrary, the good was linked to a politics that valorized both intimacy and internationalism in self-conscious resistance to evangelical, nationalist, and imperialist ideals. (Avery 2009: 163)11

Furthermore, Avery links the Bloomsbury stress on intimacy with a combination of ‘friendship, individual judgment, and pleasure’ that draws on the precedent of the Aestheticist movement (Avery 2009: 171). Since Yeats in the 1890s was part of the latter movement, or at least was affiliated with the Decadent

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movement that was intrinsically linked to it,12 it is perhaps not surprising that there is a partial confluence of aims and values here. In the second half of the 1930s, Yeats sought to revise the impression made in his 1922 memoir, The Tragic Generation: rather than being a period of defeat and otherworldliness, he wrote to Maurice Bowra in 1935, the ‘Nineties was in reality a period of very great vigour, thought and passion were breaking free from tradition’.13 The broadcast on modern poetry the following year starts off with a long passage of reminiscence of Yeats’s fellow poets and the milieu of the 1890s, and goes on to remember how York Powell had turned down the offer of becoming Proctor at Oxford on the grounds that ‘the older he grew the less and less difference he could see between right and wrong’ (Yeats 1994: 94). This is a far cry from the moralism associated with Reith, as is Yeats’s memory of how he in the 1890s ‘envied Dowson his dissipated life. I thought it must be easy to think like Chaucer when you lived among those morbid, elegant, tragic women suggested by Dowson’s poetry’ (Yeats 1994: 89). Yeats’s wife reacted enthusiastically to this particular broadcast, proclaiming that ‘during its twenty minutes [it] sounded as if you and the speaker and the drums were thoroughly enjoying yourselves and that you had locked the door on the solemn portentous BBC, and had no intention of unlocking the door until you had your final laugh’.14 Early on in his career, Yeats had contrasted the values of old ‘merrie’ England with its modern, bourgeois counterpart,15 and the boisterous and anti-elitist air of his radio broadcasts – full of ballads, drinking songs and poems about sailors – would seem to uphold the favouring of the former. There was also room for high jinks. In the ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’ broadcast, we find Yeats allowing his introduction of a poem by Lionel Johnson to be suddenly interrupted: Y-e-s? Will you pardon me for a moment while I read a note from our stage manager. (I will rustle paper). O-O-I understand. It seems that one or two of the poets present say that our programme is much too melancholy. That they were much more at home when we were in our pub [in the previous broadcast, ‘In the Poet’s Pub’]. They insist on taking charge at the end of Lionel Johnson’s poem. (Yeats 2000: 278)

This meta-dramatic incursion into Yeats’s script reflects the heritage of romantic irony and perhaps also his interest in Pirandello.16 In the process, the poet undermines his own position as the sole authority behind the messages and ideals being communicated, giving the audience an impossible choice between melancholia and bonhomie. This same tension recurs in ‘My Own Poetry’, his

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next broadcast: ‘You must permit the poet his melancholy. My last two broadcasts had cheerful moments but, being a poet, I cannot keep it up’ (Yeats 2000: 286). Whilst this plea for latitude recalls the description of Dowson as ‘timid, silent, a little melancholy’ in the modern poetry broadcast, it also signifies beyond being a mere reflex of Yeats’s loyalty to the 1890s. There is something defensive in this insistence upon the role of the poet, and the poet’s exceptionalism: it is as if Yeats – always fond of masks – is being forced, as a defensive measure, to hide behind a rather crude and cumbersome cliché. Certainly not all masks are beneficent. In ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ Yeats wrote of ‘That defiling and disfigured shape/The mirror of malicious eyes/ Casts upon his eyes until at last/He thinks that shape must be his shape’ (Yeats 1987: 479). Appearances may mislead, even to the point of becoming dangerous misrepresentations. This was one of the risks of radio: as the opening anecdote of this essay showed, Yeats was wary of his radio work turning into a ‘fiasco’ that would turn ‘human sound’ into something unrecognizable. One of the key poems of Yeats’s late career, ‘Man and the Echo’ (Yeats 1987: 632–633), addresses not only the potential of both alienation and discovery in the representation of sound, but also how poets can avoid becoming hamstrung by their own melancholia. I will use a short reading of this poem as a means to conclude this essay, showing how some of the key themes of Yeats’s engagement with radio fed back into his other work. Composed between July and October 1938, ‘Man and the Echo’ is mainly devoted to a troubled stocktaking of a long life: All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

At the end of the man’s two first speeches, the disembodied echo enters as a subversive alter ego, willing him on to enter even deeper into despondency: ‘all seems evil until I/Sleepless would lie down and die’ comes back to him as ‘Lie down and die’, whilst the vision of someone making a dismissive judgment of ‘all/Out of intellect and sight’ who ‘sinks at last into the night’ is baldly returned as ‘Into the night’. The echo works like a refrain, and indeed combines three features that MacNeice saw as coalescing in the refrains of Yeats’s late ballads, so central to much of his radio work: ‘pertinence of statement, effect of surprise, and subtlety of rhythm’ (MacNeice 1967: 148). The echo also has a

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force of its own, inexorably tempting the speaker to accept despondency, defeat and the limited horizons signified by its abridged rhythm. The man opposes this force with an embracing of tragic joy,17 finding even in ‘that great night’ a will to ‘rejoice’. Thus Yeats would appear to erect a heroic struggle between will and representation: the dying man must reject the inauthentic and external echo of his own innerness. However, just when the struggle is threatening to become a predictable deadlock between familiar romantic positions, the poem wanders off into a surprising, final digression: But hush, for I have lost the theme, Its joy or night seem but a dream; Up there some hawk or owl has struck Dropping out of sky or rock, A stricken rabbit is crying out And its cry distracts my thought.

The soul’s dialogue with its own misrepresentation is called short by a concern for another being. This is one of the more humane moments in Yeats’s later poetry, perhaps hinting at why he – despite having qualms about modern mass media – nevertheless entered into a surprising late adventure with radio. Radio was both an enabling medium and a disabling misrepresentation of his own thought and poetry. To be sure, it forced him into simplification and alien territory, returning him to some of the compromises he had left behind when he had previously turned his back on large-scale theatrical productions. Yet at the same time, it also provided a valued means for connecting with a large public, which otherwise may never have seriously grappled with his work. If radio were to prove a derailing experience akin to that of the ‘stricken rabbit’ of ‘Man and the Echo’, it too could be conceived of as a salutary distraction. One should not, however, underestimate the artistic merits and gains involved. Even if it remains a circumscribed and interrupted episode within a rich and widely ranging career, this essay has revealed that Yeats’s work with the BBC in the 1930s shows a poet responding to the possibilities of the new medium with ingenuity and verve. It helped him return to the ballad genre with reinforced urgency, rethinking his aims in relation to a large, public audience in the process, and also allowing him to reconsider the heritage of the 1890s. Whether he saw it as a pub, a parlour or a deracinated, virtual theatre, Yeats always adapted imaginatively to the demands of radio. The old poet’s tricks may have needed some adjustment, but they were still far from useless.

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Notes 1 In Barnes (1987), the wording is ‘Broadcast a fiasco … Perhaps my old bundle of poet’s tricks is useless’. In the electronic Intelex edition of Yeats’s collected letters, the second sentence is rendered as ‘Perhaps my old bundle of folk tricks is useless’ (Yeats 2002, Accession letter # 6798). 2 For an accessible introduction to the radio work, see Johnson (2000). Johnson is also the editor of the volume that collects all but one of Yeats’s radio manuscripts, making them readily available to the public for the first time: Yeats (2000). The remaining broadcast manuscript, the 1936 ‘Modern Poetry: A Broadcast’, has been published in Yeats (1994). 3 For a list of all BBC broadcasts of Yeats’s works from 1926 to 1930, see Silver (1987: 182–183). 4 I am grateful to Emilie Morin, University of York, for sharing with me her unpublished manuscript ‘ “I beg your pardon?”: Yeats and audibility’, which was presented at a conference on ‘Yeats and the Arts’ at NUI-Galway, 26 August 2011. It is to be published in the Yeats Annual, no. 19. 5 ‘A Poet Broadcasts’, Belfast News-Letter (9 September 1931), 6, cited in Schuchard (2008): 342. 6 On Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of the radio, see Jenemann (2009). 7 See Howes (1996: 66–101). 8 Ronald Schuchard has contextualized Yeats’s intense focus on the ballad form at this juncture in terms of his earlier experiments with the psaltery, as well as his career-long interest in the aural dimension of poetry. See the concluding chapter of Schuchard 2008. 9 For an exploration of the relationship between words and music in Yeats’s radio work, see Paterson 2011. 10 Yeats’s relationship to fascism during the last decade or so of his career has recently received intense scholarly attention. The most outspoken indictment is to be found in McCormack (2005). For a measured response, see Foster (2010). 11 For Reith and the ideology of early BBC, see also Chapter 1 of Avery 2006. 12 For a brief account linking Aestheticism with the Decadence of the 1890s, see Moran 2006: 121–124. 13 Letter to Maurice Bowra, 31 May 1935 (Yeats 2002; Accession letter # 6239). 14 Letter from George Yeats to W. B. Yeats, 3 April 1937, cited in W. B. Yeats and G. Yeats 2011: 466. 15 See for instance ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, which – in its defence of the character of Richard II – claims that Edward Dowden ‘forgot that England, as Gordon has said, was made by her adventurers, by her people of wildness and imagination and eccentricity’ (Yeats 2007: 78).

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16 For Pirandello’s influence on Yeats, see for instance Chapter 5 of McAteer (2010). 17 The concept of ‘tragic joy’ was important to Yeats, particularly in the 1930s. For a classic account, see Chapter 5 of Engelberg (1988).

Works cited Avery, T. (2006). Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938. Aldershot: Ashgate. ——— (2009). ‘Desmond MacCarthy, Bloomsbury, and the Aesthicist Ethics of Broadcasting’, in Broadcasting Modernism, Ed. D. R. Cohen, M. Coyle and J. Lewty. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, pp. 158–175. Barnes, G. (1987). ‘W.B. Yeats and Broadcasting [1940]’, in Yeats Annual No. 5, Ed. Warwick Gould. London: MacMillan, pp. 189–194. Bloom, E. C. (2011). ‘Yeats’s Radiogenic Poetry: Oral Traditions and Auditory Publics’, Éire-Ireland, p. 46(3 & 4), pp. 227–251. Derrida, J. (1992). Acts of Literature. Ed. D. Attridge. New York and London: Routledge. Engelberg, E. (1988). The Vast Design: Patterns in W. B. Yeats’s Aesthetic, second edition, expanded. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Foster, R. F. (2003). W. B. Yeats: A Life. II. The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2010). ‘Fascism’, in W. B. Yeats in Context, Ed. D. Holdeman and B. Levitas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 213–226. Frow, J. (2006). Genre. London and New York: Routledge. Howes, M. (1996). Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenemann, D. (2009). ‘Flying Solo: The Charms of the Radio Body’, in Broadcasting Modernism, Ed. D. R. Cohen, M. Coyle and J. Lewty. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, pp. 89–103. Johnson, C. (2000). ‘Yeats’s Wireless’, The Wilson Quarterly, 24(2), pp. 24–30. MacNeice, L. (1967). The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. London: Faber. McAteer, M. (2010). Yeats and European Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCormack, W. J. (2005). Blood Kindred: W. B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics. London: Pimlico. Moran, M. (2006). Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Continuum. Morin, E. (2013). ‘ “I beg your pardon?”: Yeats and Audibility’, unpublished manuscript. Paterson, A. (2011). ‘Music Will Keep Out Temporary Ideas: W. B. Yeats’s Radio Performances’, in Word and Music Studies 12: Performativity in Words and Music, Ed. W. Bernhart and M. Halliwell. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 43–76. Ricoeur, P. (1976). Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press.

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Schuchard, R. (2008). The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silver, J. (1987). Yeats Annual No. 5. Ed. Warwick Gould. London: MacMillan, pp. 181–185. Tratner, M. (1995). Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yeats, W. B. (1987). The Variorum Edition of the Poems. Ed. P. Allt and R. K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan. ——— (1994). Later Essays. Ed. W. H. O’Donnell with assistance from E. B. Loizeaux. New York: Scribner. ——— (2000). Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written after 1900. Ed. C. Johnson. New York: Scribner. ——— (2002). The Collected Letters. InteLex Electronic Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2007). Early Essays. Ed. R. J. Finneran and G. Bornstein. New York and London: Scribner. ——— and Yeats, G. (2011). The Letters. Ed. Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2

Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake New Technology and Flawed Power Finn Fordham Royal Holloway, London

There may come a time … when we shall have ‘smellyvision’ and ‘tastyvision’. When we are able to broadcast so that all the senses are catered for, we will live in a world which no one has yet dreamt about. A. M. Low, Daily News, 30 Dec 1926, quoted in Burns 1998: 207 By contrast with the many explorations detailing how modernism relates to radio, to telegraphy, telephony or cinema, modernism rarely finds itself being glued to television. Specialist histories of the development of televisual technology and the associated industries abound (Aldridge 2012; Burns 1998; Darian-Smith and Turnbull 2012; Evans 2010); but the cultural myths of television generally concern its post-war embodiments, and the attendant critical and theoretical discourses have been predominantly post-war constructions. These myths and discourses have tended also to centre on America, history being written by the victors, even though (or because) America – while spearheading technical developments – was, in the 1930s, slow to establish public broadcasting companies, compared with Europeans, where techno-military rivalry and the threat of war spurred on development. A consequence of this bias in cultural history has been an occlusion of the cultural responses to television’s development during the interwar years. For television was in fact far more advanced than is commonly thought and discourses about it far more widespread. The London Department store Selfridges had a ‘radio and television department’ in 1929. When Baird and the BBC teamed up to transmit programmes experimentally in 1930, it was widely reported (BBC Documentary 1976). On 3 June 1931 Baird successfully transmitted the Derby – the first outside broadcast. The German service

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televised the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The BBC began regular programmes on 2 November 1936, so in 1937, George VIII’s coronation was broadcast. By 1 September 1939, the day on which the BBC interrupted transmission because of the impending war, some 19,000 sets had been sold in the UK. It is interesting to compare these figures with the USA where 5000 sets were in use in 1946, nearly a million in 1948 and 10 million in 1950 (Fang 1997: 156–157). That the long dreamt of possibility of transmitting live images as well as live voices over large distances had become a reality was of huge public interest. The war closed down development in Europe; it has also caused us to be divorced from television’s pre-war embodiments. These events and the broad range of responses form a vital if somewhat marginal context for the ‘high’ modernism in the 1930s. For it did not simply coincide with high modernism, nor was the interest one-way. Pirandello’s formally experimental The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, proved suitable, being a minimalist three hander, for early experiments transmitting television. Over the three years of BBC’s transmission before the start of the war, some 326 plays were broadcast, including T. S. Eliot’s highbrow Murder in the Cathedral which was thought appropriate for the new medium, and aired in 1937. One of the first documentaries ever shown on BBC television, in November 1936, called ‘Cover to Cover’, sponsored by the National Book Council, featured interviews with T. S. Eliot, Julian Huxley, Somerset Maugham and Rebecca West (BFI database). The range of speakers indicates concerns about highbrow and middlebrow literature that are now being examined in Modernist studies. John Piper gave talks on London Galleries (The Times, Wednesday, 10 February 1937); Paul Nash gave commentaries on art. There were formalist experiments – especially in dance and drama, such as ‘Fugue for Four Cameras’ arranged by Anthony Tudor, and a masque based on The Eve of St Agnes, broadcast in October 1937. TV was not a threat to cultural life, whether literary or intellectual, but promoted both, and even in the 1930s was playing a role in the development of the concept of the public intellectual. The cultural reaction to television itself was as established a phenomenon as TV itself. This paper will examine a selection of cultural responses to TV in the interwar period as a context for James Joyce’s engagement with television in Finnegans Wake during the late 1930s. The selection registers, for the most part, anxieties about the military context of television in a world of increasing international tensions. Joyce’s engagement is well known – at least amongst Joyceans – occurring in a particular section known as ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’. This was, for Donald Theall, ‘one of the first fiction scenes in literary history involving

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people watching TV in a bar-room’ (Theall 1997: 66). Although it may have been the first fictional representation, the presence of a TV in a bar didn’t require a miraculous leap of imagination on Joyce’s part. His vision was coinciding with actual consumer patterns of the period, as the following journal item indicates: ‘Among recent purchasers of television receivers are large numbers of owners of licensed premises who are finding them a profitable attraction. It is stated that this class are at present the largest purchasers and that the number of receivers in public houses now exceeds those in the large departmental stores’. (TSW 1937). I will identity three roles, which I believe Joyce plays: the accommodating sceptic, the accidental prophet, and the detached geek. In all three, Joyce responds to questions which the possibilities of television were raising about the nature of the human, and the power and value of this new technology. Joyce was sceptical towards the way the invention of TV was interpreted magically, providing an excuse for spiritualist concepts of the human; what Jeffrey Sconce diagnosed as a ‘collective fantasy of telepresence’ (Sconce 2000: 6). Just as ‘telegraphy’ gave new impulses to fantasies of ‘telekinesis’ (first usage according to the OED, 1890), so ‘television’ gave impulses to related fantasies of ‘teleportation’ (first usage 1931). As we will see, science fictions adapted the dramatic new transformations and transportation of images and turned them into melodramatic transformations of matter – human or otherwise. Such adaptations exploited the potential for violence in both technology and communication, and tended to demonize both in the process. Joyce, exploiting these transportations of television towards teleportation, of materialist science towards unheimlich spiritualism, was not particularly ahead of his time, but he did so in pantomimic ways that distinguish him from both technophobic demonization and spiritualized technophilia. The prophetic aspect of Joyce’s response consists in imagining what TV might be used for: we see a horse race and a battle scene, which are predictable enough, and in fact Baird had already transmitted the Derby, and the BBC had transmitted a boxing match. But we also witness in Joyce’s vaudeville a live televised public confession. Before the nineteenth century was over, H. G. Wells, always quick on the uptake, had already imagined what TV might show, and the form its display might take. In his novel When the Sleeper Wakes, vast public halls display enormous screens, known as ‘Babble Machines’, which relay live up-to-the-minute news, though Wells makes it clear they relay misinformation, ‘counter suggestions in the cause of law and order’ (Wells 1899: 234). Rather than the rise and fall of economic fortunes, Joyce pictures the rise and fall of the moral fortunes of international celebrities. In doing this, Joyce was pre-empting

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the dystopian world as projected by Orwell some ten years later, and the real world as mediated by Oprah Winfrey some 60 years later. Joyce’s prophetic fusion of ‘confession’ and television was determined by a pre-existing narrative structure in Finnegans Wake where a human – and the Human – is continually on trial, cross-examined, sometimes defending himself, at other times confessing, elsewhere getting off scot-free. In addition, Joyce was responding, I would suggest, to another dramatic piece of news at the time – the show trials in Stalin’s Soviet Russia, which unfolded from 1936 to 1938 and in which, amongst others, military leaders – Russian Generals, that is – made high-profile public confessions. The third set of these – in 1938 – was, indeed, filmed, and widely distributed. Joyce could see the power of television as a propaganda tool for the State and as a PR tool for individuals. Yet another response of Joyce’s is that of the geek. This involved becoming deeply versed in the actual technology of television. It is true, as Rice says, that Joyce associates TV with violence – but anxiety about the violent power of this technology is also curtailed by a satirical sense of its limits and inevitable failings. What results is a refusal of the paranoia that will dominate conceptions of, and discussions about, TV – paranoia about its effects on individuals, and about its exploitation in the hands of power. Technology may be an extension of the human and it may extend the human, but as such, it extends outwards from human failings into new kinds of error. Dystopias are built on fears of evil omnipotent forces, which extend themselves through new media – whether in the form of Huxley’s hynopedia and television or Orwell’s telescreen (Huxley 1932; Orwell 1949). The absence of dystopia in Finnegans Wake is a sign that Joyce is sceptical of such omnipotence. Whilst Joyce’s engagement with TV has in fact received considerable critical attention, that attention has not been plugged into modernist studies of media. It has tended to stay exclusively within the Joycean enclave (with the important exception of Marshall McLuhan) or has not been integrated with other cultural responses (with the exception of T. J. Rice’s recent work). As David Hayman’s genetic approach details, Joyce’s incorporation of developments in television began in 1927 and bloomed in 1937, as he was bringing the book’s composition to a close, and finally writing the long-planned climactic section, central to the book, about an assassination of a Russian leader (Hayman 2007: 275–277). The initial incorporation of television coincided with the development of a certain critical ressentiment against Wyndham Lewis on Joyce’s part which, in turn, led through satire to the discovery of a particular voice – that of a boastful, arrogant but compromised intellectual – modelled on the critical style of Lewis. In the

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1920s, Lewis had been a drinking companion of Joyce’s in Paris, but in 1927 Lewis published a swingeing attack on Joyce’s ‘time-obsession’ in his Time and Western Man (renamed in the Wake, ‘Spice and Westend Women’ (Joyce 2012: 292.06)). The voice in the Wake issues from one Professor Jones (the Welsh surname indicating Lewis’s Welsh background) who at one point dismisses the views of rival ‘Professors’ lacking the power he has as a result of the new technology, the development of which he seems to be overseeing: looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television, (this nightlife instrument needs still some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of the more refrangible angles to the squeals of his hypothesis on the outer tin sides), I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity as my ownhouse and microbemost cosm when I am reassured by ratio that the cube of my volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes ( … ) is to the feracity of Fairynelly’s vacuum. (Summer 1927. First draft of 1.6 section 2, simplified. (47473–207, JJA 47, 122; Joyce 2012: 150.32–151.07))

A translation of this might read looking at all this ill-formed rubbish of life, with my powerful technology, the ‘faroscope of television’ (which does still need some work), it’s easy for me to believe in how immense I am when, proportionally speaking, the volume of my work compared to the surface of its subjects, is like comparing the size of my testicles to those of the castrati Farinelli.

The proportion of something to nothing produces infinity; the volume of his ego is infinite, fills all space. Technology gives to humans this belief in being divine. This first allusion to TV in Finnegans Wake then is to the mechanical method being promoted at that time by John Logie Baird. Television is being framed by the speaker as a scopic attribute of imperial power, something that will help embody the will to conquer space, a drive that Joyce associated with Wyndham Lewis. More evidence of Joyce’s interest occurs in the early months of 1931, when Joyce was preparing notes for the Night Games chapter, by reading the second edition of George Trobridge’s Life of Emanuel Swedenborg (1912). He took several notes from Chapter XV headed ‘Signs of Seership’, which provides copious examples of Swedenborg’s ability to converse with the spirits of the dead. One of these notes reads ‘[ “television” ’ (VI.B. 33, 172 (f)). The editors of the Buffalo notebooks interpret this as a gloss on Swedenborg as a seer. ‘[’ is the sign for Shem, the twin brother of Shaun, his equal and opposite rival and, on rare occasions, partner. Shaun is a type associated with Professor Jones, the

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speaker of the passage already quoted, whereas Shem is at this point associated with Swedenborg. Both intriguingly have now been associated with television. But where Shaun, as Jones, had possessed a television, Shem is embodied as a television – a seer who is able to see far away events; events, even, of another world. Television is being associated with different but perhaps equal and opposite kinds of power, in both its worldly-material and also mystical-spiritual forms. This note is not transferred into Finnegans Wake, but it does indicate that Joyce was continuing to keep abreast of developments in television and the ever-increasing quantity of discourses that attended them. Since the BBC had begun transmitting in September 1929, five days a week for half an hour, it was much in the news. But there were also connections being made between TV, magic and psychical research (Andiopoulos 2005). The note, moreover, does not merely indicate an association but points to a full identification: Shem is a television. Such metonymic identification produces metaphors of the human that transform our sense of the human, just as, for instance, at another point of the text, a narrator wistfully announces: ‘When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes’ (295.10–12), as if the very capacity for memory, bringing distant things close to mind, is such that it makes us resemble the power of telescopes. In II.3, HCE, the father of Shem and Shaun will similarly be identified with a radio. Joyce’s constant play with (at least) double meanings invites such metaphorical identification. The character Taff is described as having a ‘grinner set’ (348.33) – an allusion to his set of teeth. But it is also an allusion to a new ‘set’ on which you can see people grinning: so Taff ’s teeth are a TV and the TV is Taff ’s teeth. Through metaphor, conceptions of the new technology and the human keep swapping places. In the mid-1930s, when revising the sheets of transition in which episodes of Finnegans Wake had already been appearing, Joyce made an addition to the third chapter (I.3), in which television provides a gloss on the ‘ear/eye’ binary, a binary that operates throughout the book and is projected onto Shem versus Shaun, music versus painting and Joyce versus Lewis. The context for the revision is as follows: Arthor of our doyne. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen! (Joyce 1927: 34)

Before the first assertive plea here for vision (after ‘Doyne’), Joyce inserted the following sentence: ‘Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil’ (47472–229 and 52.18). This resembles a newspaper headline, enforcing our eyes’ engagement; but at the same time its alliterative form calls on the attention of our ears. Joyce

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seems to be prophetically conjuring a somewhat typical domestic altercation in which one brother, watching television, wants the other, who is speaking on the phone, to shut up. Either one technology gains the upper hand over the other (the conversation is cut short and the phone put back on its receiver, so watching the TV show can continue), or, through metonymy, we actually have one brother killing the other. Alternatively, reading it literally and in the context of a history of media arts, visual culture destroys aural culture. If this is the case, then our own reading – which combines ear and eye – ironically qualifies this very news. In any case, the revision is preparing the ground for a stronger link between television and conflict, which will take place in II.3 and is the centrepiece of our discussion. The story tells of how Buckley, an Irish sniper in the Crimean War, once upon a time, while on duty, caught in his sights an enemy, and no ordinary enemy, but one of the Russian’s Generals. Though it was his duty to shoot him, Buckley was intimidated by the splendour of the uniform and hesitated. Then, pulling himself together, he got his finger back on the trigger … he looked down the barrel and secured him in his sights. He was about to shoot but, unexpectedly, all of a sudden, the General was unbuttoning his trousers and crouching down to relieve himself. Buckley was overcome by sympathy for this bare man before him, and felt he must respect the call of nature. He waited for the General to finish and get his clothes in order. But as he did so, Buckley saw, with disgust, the General wipe himself clean with a lump of earth. Overcoming all his finer feelings, he took aim and fired, blowing the half-dressed General to smithereens. This apparently comic story, which Joyce had heard from his father (and which has deeper roots than the Crimean setting implies), is reframed in Finnegans Wake within a dialogue between two vaudeville performers: Taff, the compère, and Butt, the narrator, reminiscing about his days as a soldier. Their dialogue is thought to be a television programme, being transmitted through a new set into a pub. It is temptingly useful to simplify and narrow things down to such a realist level, but uncertainties abound: are they televised, or standing on stage, or in a pub, beside a TV perhaps? Do the televised events interrupt the narrative as told by Butt and Taff, or offer a coincidental parallel to the events they relate? Acknowledging the stubborn presence of this uncertainty is as important as attempting to secure a ‘realist’ level. A reader needs to be able to occupy both states, and to move between them. But in any case, there are undoubtedly many references to television, in particular during the third of five intermissions that, somewhat disruptively, provide commentary on the narration. This intermission, which happens before

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Butt describes seeing the General relieve himself, provides some context for Butt’s vision, or a version of it. It begins with a cavalry assault – the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade – followed by the striking and ghostly appearance, through the battle-smoke, of the Russian General in all his magnificence. Unexpectedly, he turns into a vicar and begins a public confession (the implication being that shitting and confessing resemble each other as forms of unloading). During this confession the General breaks down, falling into pieces. In adapting this anecdote of the mid-nineteenth century – when photography was in its infancy – Joyce spreads over it twentieth-century material of a technological process that emerged out of photography – television. In the passage that follows, we pick up the text as Taff invites Butt to sing forth his material. In what follows I have underlined words that refer to televisual technology and which Joyce transferred from a late notebook (VI.B.46), in which he had recorded notes under the heading ‘Television’ (Rose 1978: 205–208). He did so from a source that has not yet been identified, but was probably some sort of technical manual. TAFF ( … passing the uninational toothbosh in smoothing irony over the multinotcheralled infructuosities of his grinner set) … . Sing in the chorias to the ethur! [In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, of tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade. Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses, with the bitts bugtwug their teffs, the missledhropes glitteraglatteraglutt, borne by their carnier walve. Spraygun rakes and splits them from a double focus: grenadite, damnymite, alextronite, nichilite: and the scanning firespot of the sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines. Shlossh! A gaspel truce leaks out over the caeseine coatings. Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there caoculates through the inconoscope stealdily a still, the figure of a fellowchap in the wohly ghast, Popey O’Donoshough, the jesuneral of the russuates. The idolon exhibisces the seals of his orders: the starre of the Son of Heaven, the girtel of Izodella the Calottica, the cross of Michelides Apaleogos, the latchet of Jan of Nepomuk, the puffpuff and pompom of Powther and Pall, the great belt, band and bucklings of the Martyrology of Gorman. It is for the castomercies mudwake surveice. The victar. Pleace to notnoys speach above your dreadths, please to doughboys. Hll,

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smthngs gnwrng wthth sprsnwtch! He blanks his oggles because he confesses to all his tellavicious nieces. He blocks his nosoes because that he confesses to everywhere he was always putting up his latest faengers. He wollops his mouther with a sword of tusk in as because that he confesses how opten he used be obening her howonton he used be undering her. He boundless alltogotter his manucupes with his pedarrests in asmuch as because that he confesses before all his handcomplishies and behind all his comfoderacies. And [ … ] he touched upon this tree of livings in the middenst of the garerden for inasmuch as because that he confessed to it on Hillel and down Dalem and in the places which the lepers in habit in the place of the stones and in pontofert jusfuggading amoret now he come to think of it jolly well ruttengenerously olyovyover the ole blucky shop. Pugger old Pumpey O’Dungaschiff ! There will be a hen collection of him after avensung on the feld of Hanar. Dumble down, looties and gengstermen! Dtin, dtin, dtin, dtin!] (Joyce 2012: 348.29–350.08)1

There has been diverse and valuable criticism on this passage, ranging from philological work that provides commentary, exegesis and genetic material (Campbell and Robinson 1946; Rose 1978), to theoretical work, which examines Finnegans Wake as a reflection on the history of media and the possibilities of a ‘techno-poetics’ (Armand 2003; McLuhan 1964; Theall 1997). Only T. J. Rice’s chapter in his Cannibal Joyce has sought to integrate Joyce’s interest with the contemporary impact of television. Rice’s emphasis on the historical context, which we’re extending here, marked an important intervention, especially given – as Rice points out – that as influential a commentator as William York Tindall was once able to say that ‘there was no TV at the time of … Joyce’s writing’ (Tindall 1957: 197). Exegesis, both early (in Campbell & Robinson) and more recent (Rose & O’Hanlon), has ‘translated’ this intermission into more or less plain English. Here’s my attempt: After Taff fades away and before Butt returns, all shiny, there’s a screening of the charge of the light brigade. Moving in syncopation down the slope, the misled troops, all a-glitter and a-clatter, tightly packed, are borne on the wave of their own energy. A gun rakes them from left to right. Gunners scan the lines of the six hundred, illustrious, now broken up and sinking. Splosh! It’s the end! A ghastly truth spreads among the French leaders in their silvery jackets. Out of the pungent smoke, the Russian General appears, showing off all the baubles of his office. It is the customary midweek service. A vicar. Please sit still and

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Such a translation hardly produces a naturalist level of narrative; it also reduces, of course, the multilayered quality of Joyce’s language; and it diminishes the role of interference that the many layers bring about. But it serves, nevertheless, as an introduction for analysing the layers and the interference. This interference, which is fairly constant throughout the book – what we might call the white noise of Joyce’s text – reflects Joyce’s sense of transformation in the field of communication, to which the new technologies were contributing. A crucial layer here is some technical vocabulary relating to the production of TV images, as indicated by the underlined words. Joyce had, with considerable care, absorbed the technical processes of producing a televisual image, an absorption which is extremely rare amongst those contributing to the cultural meanings of television. In Joyce’s fusion of televisual processes with a cavalry charge, it is tempting to interpret a projection on Joyce’s part of the violence of war onto the invasive power of this innovative technology. The screen – or the viewer themselves – receives, like an entrenched army, a ‘bombardment’ of light. A strong connection is thus made between war and television, pre-empting Friedrich Kittler’s recent analysis of the development of television as an offshoot of German military research in the 1920s and the 1930s (Kittler 2010: 208). If such an interpretation is justified, Joyce’s sense of violence resembles other early responses, especially within science fiction narratives, as the following two instances illustrate. The first of these is Conan Doyle’s 1929 short story, ‘The Disintegration Machine.’ It is one of Doyle’s ‘Challenger’ stories, his replacement for the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were never to be as successful. The machine in question can both dissolve and reconstitute objects – whether humans or battleships, or even cities. The machine is a translation of televisual technology. Where TV only ever dissolves, translates and reconstitutes images of things, the disintegration machine operates on things themselves. But the magic of TV was to make it seem as if it was able to do the former, as expressed decades later by David Byrne in the Talking Heads song ‘Television Man’: ‘the world crashes in to my living room. Television made me what I am.’ Conan Doyle’s fantasy betrays not only an anxiety of international violence, but a belief that actual bodies and

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electrical representations of those bodies are, being of the same order, equally transmittable, a voodoo fantasy about the power of representation and of art itself. In Doyle’s story, the inventor – one Nemor, a Latvian with sufficiently semitic features to indicate that he is a Jewish émigré (he lives in Hampstead) – is dastardly. As Challenger and the narrator Malone arrive, a group of Russian Communists is leaving. Since they have just expressed a dastardly interest in Nemor’s invention, London and world peace are threatened. But Challenger – brave, sceptical and resourceful – is at hand. The machine itself, with a ‘huge magnet’, a three-foot long ‘prism’, a chair on a ‘zinc platform’, ‘a sort of ratchet with numbered slots and a handle’ and many thick cables attached, would have conjured up, for the story’s readers, images of Baird’s mechanical system, then much in the news since Baird was beginning to win over sceptical audiences. The analogy with psychic research in this story is explicit when Nemor speaks about ‘apports’ in Western occultism (Doyle 1929: 3–10), something Doyle had infamously signed up to. At first Challenger refuses to believe Nemor but, after a couple of successful demonstrations, he is willing to undergo ‘disintegration’. In a comic turn, Nemor punishes Challenger for his initial doubts by reassembling him without the ‘glorious mane’ of his hair, a key component of Challenger’s persona. Challenger threatens Nemor physically in order to get his hair back. Then, inspecting the machine, and pretending to find some electricity leaking from it, Challenger lures Nemor onto the apparatus and suddenly activates the ratchet. Nemor disappears. Challenger pretends to be unable to reassemble Nemor, saying to his companion that ‘the interesting personality has distributed itself throughout the cosmos’. Another example of such teleportation by television may have grown out of Doyle’s story. In 1933, there was a low-budget mini-series produced for the cinema called The Whispering Shadow, starring Bela Lugosi. It centred around a mysterious criminal who was able to commit crimes by means of a gang he controlled by television and radio rays. ‘No man has ever seen the Shadow, but his genius for manipulating radio and television enables him to project his voice and shadow wherever he desires; he can see through doors, hear through walls and electrocute people by radio death ray’ (Clark and Herman 1933). The power of the Whispering Shadow is ballistic and hypnotic. It is as if film is expressing its own fears of this competing technology, which was threatening to pull people back from cinemas and into their homes. In both of these stories, it is human beings, not just images of humans, that are transmitted by some form of electricity. This imaginative adaptation of the new media accompanies dreams of world domination. Imperialism, whether

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in capitalist, communist or fascist guises, produced a global imaginary of territorial domination. Television had quickly become part of a technological modernity that would enable national forces to conquer space by making it shrink. World domination was not foreign to the development of television: Britain, America, Russia and Germany were the early key pioneers in the 1930s. The development of TV involved international collaboration and competition. When Joyce associates television with violence, it is not, I suggest, of this order, where TV is a psychic weapon for transporting human spirit through the ether. The association is a coincidence presented to us with no indication that the relation between television and violence is a necessary one. That people enjoy the spectacle of violence (as the ample amounts of bloody violence represented on the stage and the screen clearly witness) might explain their coexistence in representation here. But this is a representation of a certain taste, not a critique of the medium. And it seems a stretch to say that because an image is produced by a bombardment of electrons, it is a violent process necessarily commensurate with the bombardment of troops by shells. Rice says as much when he claims that Joyce found in television ‘an analogue with the butchery of war itself ’ and that his response overall was ‘profoundly negative’ (Rice 2008: 157, 140). Comparing the passage in the Wake with these tales of prospective world domination to be achieved through the televisual transmission of human beings, we note that Taff ‘fades’, Butt ‘reglows’ and the Popey O’Donoshough ‘caoculates’, a coagulation that blends ‘coagulates’ and ‘oculates’ – an obsolete word meaning ‘set eyes on’. This ‘Popey’ figure, moreover, also needs to be ‘collected’ at the end of the ‘service’ (Joyce punning on radio ‘service’ and a Church ‘service’). These verbs can apply to people in the flesh, or their images reproduced on the screen. Joyce is clearly inviting analogies between what happens with the production of televisual images, the way they glow and fade, and the way people too become vague or vivid to our sight or memories. We begin to see and imagine people in the way we see images of those people. Perceptions of the Human are transformed, become televisual. The magic of television is like the magic of spiritualism: the spectacular is fused with the spectral in the word ‘spectracular’, within which an echo of ‘Dracula’ can also be heard. The figure is of a ‘wohly ghast’, some wholly ghastly ghost. Joyce thus accommodates the spiritualist fantasies that were attaching themselves to the processes of these new media technologies. But where the science fictions rely on uncanny feelings towards television, and understandings of these transformations as horrifyingly actual, Finnegans Wake remains cheekily and consciously in the realm of the metaphorical, moving back and forth between reality and representation, between the transformation of

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images and the transformations of human beings. Because of the attention on the technical language, we can be aware that whatever magic there appears to be, is a trick of technique rather than real magic, just as the ghost that rises through the floor in a puff of smoke on the stage (as Stephen’s mother does in the burlesque theatre of ‘Circe’) is the projection of a theatrical production involving smoke, trapdoors and/or mirrors. The language of Finnegans Wake is key here in enabling such movements back and forth. Its distortions remind us continually of the constructedness and the materiality of the medium, the elaborate framing device that comes to constitute the entire piece of art, impeding our suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, the radical difference of this language also invites the perception of an entirely other and parallel world, the dream as reality. The science fictions, by contrast, rely for their effects on the suspension of disbelief. They also involve wilfully strong misreadings of the science, in order to contribute to a feeling of modern magic. Anxieties induced by technological innovation are fuelled by such misreadings, just as the misreadings feed off the anxieties. Joyce, especially in his precise and geekish deployment of the idioms around the technical processes, prevents his prose from indulging in the exploitative hysteria of these stories. When it comes to the global imaginary and how television will enable a new global consciousness (McLuhan’s ‘global village’), Joyce’s vision is at once more original and prophetic than his relation to the spiritualist projections of television’s ‘ghost in the machine’. But it is accidentally so: Joyce had always planned that HCE, as an accused figure, would, in one version of his trial, offer a confession. He had also always planned Buckley’s tale: confession and excretion, as mentioned, come together via the metaphor of ‘unloading’. The TV show, which Joyce used to frame the story, thus comes to contain a TV confession. Joyce’s vision of a televised future includes, by chance as it were, an international celebrity who astounds everyone (something must have gone wrong!) by making a confession, which is then transmitted to the whole world, the kind of sensational event that ‘reality TV’ craves. Combining a predetermined narrative structure with contingent developments in the field of communications, Joyce’s experiments have stumbled across the projection of a future, the prophecy of TV confessions, as of a televangelist, or a world leader, like Clinton. The figure, as any ‘Everyman’, is, typically, composite: ‘Popey O’Donoshough’ signals, all at once, a father, a Pope, an Irish noble (an ‘O’Donoghue of the Glens’), a Cossack military aristocrat (one of the Denisovs) and, last but not least, the cartoon character Popeye (for Denisovs, see Mikaberidze 2005: 72–74). In this composite form he is cartoonish, lumpily hybrid, like Popeye himself, and can

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mean at least something to an enormous audience from around the globe made up of Catholics, Irish, Americans, Russians and anyone else interested in global celebrity. The global village has found a scapegoat. Joyce’s writing at this time has also coincided with a series of trials that were being reported around the world: the Moscow Show Trials in which Stalin found a series of scapegoats, or ‘Trotskyite conspirators’. Joyce’s focus on an anecdotal assassination of a Russian General in this section led him to focus on Russia, both past and present. Joyce did have an austere attitude to political discussions, but he undoubtedly watched politics carefully, kept abreast of the international news, especially in the overheated 1930s. One of his closest companions in those days was Paul Léon, a Russian émigré. It is unthinkable that Joyce would not have been registering what was happening in the Soviet Union at that time. Reports of the show trials were widespread. Newspapers expressed scepticism about the ‘loathsome’ judicial processes, outrage at their ruthlessness and suspicion of torture (see Bibliography, The Times). On 14 June 1937, for example, The Times wrote of ‘Yesterday’s heroes … being execrated as monsters of turpitude; a nebulous and condemnatory epitaph has been issued over the signature of Marshal Voroshiloff ’ (15). In Joyce’s tale, the confession made by the Russian General is bizarre. It is formally highly structured, following – more or less – the pattern set by extreme unction, in which the body parts associated with the five senses (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands), and then the feet and, in the case of men, the loins, are all anointed with oil, as a purification before death, suggesting here an inevitable judgement of death. The syntax becomes increasingly tortuous (because he confessed … for inasmuch as that he confessed). The sins confessed to range from extreme triviality (‘he blocks his nosoes … ’ or picking his nose) to violent incestuous feelings towards his mother (‘he wollops his mouther … confesses how opten he used be obening her’). Following this confession, he is now ripe for execution, perhaps by buggery, and resembles the defeated subject of classical history, ‘Pompey’, assassinated while trying to disembark, pumping out a boat load of shite: ‘Pugger old Pumpey O’Dungaschiff!’ The public televised confession precedes an execution, though the latter does not seem to be televised. The usefulness of confession in speeding up a judicial process, as in the Moscow Show Trials, is combined with someone’s humbling attempt to clear their own name. Both lead to contempt at the hands of the audience who turn on the subject. There is an attempt to calm the threats of disorder, from looting and gangsters: ‘Dumble down, looties and gengstermen’.

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Joyce thus predicts the immense power of television as State Propaganda but also as tool for an individual’s PR. Huxley had already done this in Brave New World, with the ‘Bureaux of Propaganda by Television’ (Huxley [1932] 1994: 59), but it is the material of public confession that makes Joyce’s forecast original. Through the tool of television, the world can become a massive visitors’ gallery of a courtroom. Unlike in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), however, power in Finnegans Wake, whether technological or human, while it can take on gigantic and nightmarish proportions, does also always have flaws which lead to farcical effects. It is significant that the confession of sin – or error – is perceived as coming about through a technical hitch, registered in an interruption to the otherwise smoothly running transmission: ‘Hll, smthngs gnwrng wthth sprnswtch!’ Communication is already distorted here, the vowels squeezed out as if through a compression of the airwaves, evoking the clenched teeth of anger. Allowed to breathe, the exclamation would be ‘Hell, something’s gone wrong with the supersonic switch!’ The supersonic switch is a control on a TV set that would have determined the source of sound that accompanies the images: in the early days of television, image and sound were transmitted from two different stations, and also received separately. At a realist level, it’s as if we’re watching one scene on Channel 1, then suddenly getting interference from a different script on Channel 2. As in Singing in the Rain, the sound is not synchronized with the sight and an arbitrary comical ventriloquy results. But at another level, the different channel represents the eruption of the repressed: whereas a sermon from on high is expected, as at a religious service, instead a series of deeply embarrassing confessions issues forth, as if from the unconscious, from down below, a private hell flooding a scene of public virtue. Something has gone wrong with the messages we are receiving from on high. In such farcical moments, what might be tragic becomes comic. The inherent fallen-ness – as imperfection, rather than sin – of the human, and which constitutes of course central narratives and themes of Joyce’s book, is extended to technology. We look to Joyce for judgement that will confirm our views: for a celebration of democratizing popular culture; or a denigratory critique of the hypnotic controlling power of bland or sentimental propaganda; or a deferral of judgement, itself, of course, a position – that of the artist’s indifferent transcendence. But any clear judgement on Joyce’s part of the value of television is so embedded in complex mutually interfering layers, as to be inextricable. In engaging with this particular new mode of communication, this particular new form of modernity, Joyce manages to relay the wide spectrum of responses. TV has always had its

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critics, and maybe it is complicit with technologies of war, as Rice and Kittler have argued. But it also brings a promise of new sensory experiences, as A. M. Low imagined it might one day extend to smell and taste. It does indeed bring also a kind of global awareness to our homes, as Rudolf Arnheim was suggesting, in a richly if naively optimistic passage, in 1936: Television will not only portray the world as the film does … We shall be able to participate in distant events at the moment of their happening. … With television wireless becomes documentary. It lets us participate in what is going on in the great world around us. We can see in the principal square of the neighbouring town people streaming by on their way to a meeting, we can hear the ruler of the neighbouring state speaking, we can see the boxers on the other side of the sea fighting for the world’s championship, we can see English dance-bands, Italian coluraturas, German intellectuals, the rumbling crash of railway trains in collision, the masks of carnival, from an aeroplane we can see snowy mountains between clouds … The great world itself lives its life in our room … . relative of the car and the aeroplane. Merely a means of transmission, containing no such elements of a new mode of presenting reality as the film and non-pictorial wireless, but like the machines of locomotion that the last century gave us, it alters our relation to reality itself, teaches us to know it better, and lets us sense the multiplicity of what is happening everywhere at one moment. We … become more modest and less egocentric. TV implies a new and enormous conquest by our sense of space and time, and enriches the world of our senses to the most extraordinary degree. (Arnheim 1936: 279–280)

Arnheim’s technically wrong emphasis on ‘participation’ is curious and, given the date, ironic. TV hardly proved to be participatory. And yet the contrary assumption of passive audiences is not one that Joyce ascribes to either: after the TV show, the pub audience seem, in turning against the innkeeper, to have been incited to rebellion by the tales they have consumed, whether the medium of their representation is speech, print, radio or TV. And Arnheim, moreover, seems right that our senses were enriched. Joyce, I suggest, does not take sides in the debate for and against the new medium, which was already raging in the 1930s. What is clear, however, is a strong engagement with its technical aspects and an inventive exploration of the metaphorical dimensions of these new techniques. This exploration sees the production of images as dramatic and exciting. He twists the terms of the technology towards the book’s universal theme of our serial falls, large and small, into and out of representations, into and out of our senses; falls that befall

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us through sight and through sound, in image and in word. The comedy of such falls should work to alleviate technophobic fears of totalitarian dystopia. But the consumption of such a comedy as Finnegans Wake contains, was - like the consumption of television - in essence interrupted, as a war of totalitarian visions broke out.

Abbreviation TSW = Television and Short Wave World

Note 1

I have adopted two editorial changes both of which appear in Rose and O’Hanlon’s 2010 ‘restored’ edition of Finnegans Wake: (a) ‘of tastefully’ was ‘if tastefully’ in the 3rd edition and (b) I have deleted a comma after ‘missledhropes’.

Works cited Aldridge, M. (2012). The Birth of British Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Andiopoulos, S. (2005). ‘Psychic Television’, Critical Inquiry, 31.3, pp. 618–637. Anon, ‘Leader’, The Times, 25 August 1936. ———‘Leader’, The Times, 26 January 1937. ———‘Yesterday’s Heroes’, The Times, 14 June 1937. Armand, Louis (2003). Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology. Prague: Karolinium/Charles University Press. ——— and Vichniar, David (2010). Hypermedia Joyce. Prague: Karolinium/Charles University Press. Arnheim, R. (1936). Radio. London: Faber and Faber. British Film Institute, database entry for Cover-to-Cover, http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/ title/6146. Last accessed 30 January 2013. Burns, R. W. (1997). Television: An International History of the Formative Years. London: The Institution of Electrical Engineers. Campbell, Joseph and Robinson, M. H. (1946). A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’. London: Faber & Faber. Clark, C. and Herman, Albert (directors) (1933). The Whispering Shadow Darian-Smith, K. and Turnbull, S. (eds.) (2012). Remembering Television. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

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Doyle, Arthur Conan (1929). ‘The Disintegration Machine’, The Strand, 77 (January 1929), pp. 3–10. Evans, J. (2010). http://www.thevalvepage.com/tvyears/tvyears.htm. Last accessed 30 January 2013. Fang, I. (1997). A History of Mass Communication, Oxford: Focal Press. Hayman, D. (2007). ‘Male Maturity or the Public Rise & Private Decline of HC Earwicker: Chapter II.3’, in How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’, Ed. Sam Slote and Luca Crispi. London: Wisconsin University, pp. 250–303. Himles, Michele (2003). The Television History Book. London: BFI. Huxley, Aldous (1994). Brave New World. London: Flamingo. Joyce, James (1927). ‘Work in Progress’, Transition 3 (June). ——— (2012). Finnegans Wake. Ed. Finn Fordham, Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Kittler, F. (2010). Optical Media. London: Polity. Marchand, Philip (1998). Marshall McLuhan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge. Mikaberidze, A. (2005). Russian Office Corps of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: 1795–1815. Staplehurst: Spellmount. Moran, Maureen (2006). Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Continuum. Rice, T. J. (2008). Cannibal Joyce. Miami: University of Florida. Rose, Danis (1978). James Joyce’s The Index Manuscript: Finnegans Wake holography workbook VI.B.46. Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press. ——— and O’Hanlon (1982). Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake’, New York: Garland. Sconce, Jeffrey (2000). Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Slote, S. (2004). ‘Joyce and Science’, in Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, Ed. Jean-Michel Rabate. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 162–182. Theall, D. F. (1997). Joyce’s Techno-Poetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Television and Short Wave World. Wells, H. G. (1899). When the Sleeper Wakes. London: Harper and Brothers.

3

‘I Often Wish You Could Answer Me Back: And So Perhaps Do You!’ E. M. Forster and BBC Radio Broadcasting Peter Fifield St John’s College, University of Oxford

My audience, if I have one, can arrive or depart unobserved, it can come in off other wave lengths or retreat to them or switch off altogether. One cannot generalize about it as one could about audiences of the past, who were confined to a room or a theatre or a concert hall or a church. The extreme fluidity of broadcasting still puzzles me and sometimes paralyses. One person talks to a microphone, other people switch on or off. Addressing them is not such an easy job after all. BBC 411 With the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 E. M. Forster’s career as a novelist came stuttering to a standstill. The painfully extended genesis of that book, lasting a whole decade, was followed by his failure to complete the novel Arctic Summer, which he had begun in 1911, and ‘Entrance to an Unwritten Novel’, which would remain, as its later title indicates, without its anticipated text. Making his broadcasting debut on 16 July 1928 on the unpromising subject of ‘Railway Bridges’, his work with the BBC would see Forster transformed into something of a public intellectual.1 Offering comment on literature and culture this work would represent a significant new strand of activity for Forster, his speeches comprising 145 broadcasts over the next 35 years.2 Speaking on diverse subjects and channels, he would produce talks for British and Indian audiences and demonstrated a profound attentiveness to the particular properties of the medium, its technological intricacies and political implications.3 Both sympathetic and suspicious towards it, Forster’s broadcasts show a playful but humane experimentalism with radio address, its possibilities and problems.

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Early radio broadcasters, eager to make their programming effective, were profoundly engaged with understanding the constitution of their audience. As Gillian Beer writes, ‘Radio produced a new idea of the public, one far more intermixed, promiscuous and democratic than the books could cater for’ (Beer 1996: 151). In developing specific radiophonic techniques to address this troubling body, speakers on the BBC frequently combined two distinct forms, responsive to the different experiences of the radio for the listener and the speaker. The first, closer to the experience of the listener, was a conversational form as if one individual were in dialogue with another in a room of the listener’s house. The second, more faithful to the reality of the speaker, was a broader, lecture-like address, speaking without receiving a response, to an anonymous audience of indeterminate size. As an author profoundly concerned with the protection of individual liberty and the value of intimate interpersonal exchange, the unknown identity of this amorphous public forms one of the central concerns of Forster’s radio works. Forster not only sought to identify the audience for his broadcasts, discussing the BBC’s listenership with his producers and commissioners, but felt that he must, in order to pitch his broadcasts effectively, actively imagine them.4 With his humanist novelist’s experience Forster recognized that one of the first tasks of the radio speakers is to create their listeners in the mind’s eye, or perhaps ear. However, this imaginative task, whereby the speaker actively seeks to direct and define his listeners, runs quite counter to Forster’s natural inclination, which is rigorously anti-dictatorial. If this taste for democracy sets him apart from the more radical politics of much modernist writing, as Lago, Hughes and Walls have suggested, his desire to establish an effective literary form fit for the new technology confirms his modernist credentials in another important sense (BBC 9). Seeking a balance between sympathetic imagination and the active constitution and direction of an audience, Forster positively fears the ‘Great Men’ of his contemporary totalitarian regimes (Forster 1965: 80). For the increasingly explicit rhetoric of European dictators from the 1920s onwards relied on precisely the identification of an audience with a process of reshaping and re-energizing a nation, which would be constituted by a vigorous, self-determining, unified populace. Flattering and cajoling, threatening and exhorting the audience, these speeches would aim to capture and manipulate the public mood with the aim of harnessing their resources. For example, Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg speech to the Hitler-Jugend, captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will but also broadcast via radio, stated: You, standing here today, represent something that is happening all over Germany. And we want that you, German boys and girls, will absorb everything

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that we wish for Germany. We want to be one people, and through you, my youth, to become this people … We want this people not to become soft but to become hard, therefore you must steel yourselves for this in your youth. You must learn sacrifice and also never to collapse … And I know that it cannot be any other way as we bind ourselves together. (The Triumph of the Will 1935; my translation)5

The sound of totalitarianism in Europe in the twentieth century was that of the single authoritative voice speaking through the wireless to the populace, encouraging them to realize the vision of themselves presented by their leader. Before the sounds of Fascist Italy, Falangist Spain, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia became all too loud, one of Forster’s short stories imagined the sort of threat that the radio might come to pose. ‘The Machine Stops’, written in 1909, 13 years before the BBC was founded, is Forster’s notable venture into Science Fiction and portrays a world where humanity has been driven underground by a hostile surface environment. Each person lives alone in a set of standard rooms whose conditions are closely modulated by the titular Machine. The human body has been critically weakened by this cosseted lifestyle: the skin has become soft and vulnerable to damage, while the legs now barely support the weight of the body, human beings having become accustomed to riding around their apartments in an electric wheelchair. While this bodily decrepitude shows a suspicion of the spread of technology Forster reserves his profoundest fears for the psychological effects of the Machine. Invented by a human race whose scientific abilities have allowed them to conquer a range of natural obstacles and disasters, their trust in technological progress has become indistinguishable from a regression into ignorance and superstition. The Machine, the supposed symbol of scientific rationalism’s cultural victory, has become the object of blind faith and worship. Critically for our discussion of radio, the Machine allows for communication across what is effectively a videophone service, which connects the cell of every subject. But this has led to the radical devaluation of physicality, and even revulsion towards bodily proximity. The mother at the centre of Forster’s story, for example, is deeply reluctant to visit her son, unable to see why remote communication is insufficient to address his distress. This transfer to a technological medium has also profoundly damaged verbal communication itself, for, instead of a rich, multi-faceted system with many forms, uses and occasions, everyday discourse sees the conversation supplanted by the lecture. The purpose of communication is, accordingly, not to develop intimacy or be emotionally responsive, but to deliver or receive ‘ideas’. Abstract knowledge, usually developed without

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first-hand experience of any of the subjects involved in the lecture, has become the social currency that displaces emotional and corporeal values. This, I suggest, encapsulates some of Forster’s fears about technology, and particularly the radio. Weakening the social bonds that he sees as essential constituents of the human subject, a dematerialized contact reduces the human being to a damaged, passive creature, lacking empathy, affection and ambition. Language is reduced to a vehicle for data rather than relationship, and the reciprocity of dialogue is dismissed in favour of a depersonalized address. The encroachment of technology, and especially communication technology, into the domestic space makes human subjects lose agency, individuality, selfawareness and strength. They become hive-minded drones in a political scenario over which they cannot conceive, much less exercise, any control. In turn, however, the eventual destruction of the story’s civilization, which occurs, as the title has it, when the Machine stops, presages in turn the collapse of totalitarianism, even before – in proper historical terms – its proper emergence. It is, then, with a lively sense of the political and personal dangers of technological modernity that Forster begins to work with the BBC in 1928. These concerns were never, moreover, fully assuaged, but underpin his broadcasts throughout his career. We can see how Forster addresses these by considering his persona as a broadcaster, which is friendly, intimate and, critically, close in character to the imagined addressee. In ‘The Great Frost’ (15 February 1929), he adopts a form of address that establishes with the greatest humility the ground for his broadcast. It is not based on privileged information, expertise or insight, but on commonality. The speaker is, Forster makes explicit, so much one of his listeners that his speech is in fact gratuitous: ‘It seems rather impertinent to broadcast on the subject of the great frost, because you are in it as much as I am’ (BBC 51). The barrier between speaker and listener is further eroded by a gentle humour that posits a different speaker and another speech, never to be made or heard: ‘No one will broadcast to you on the topic of the Great Thaw. He, and you, will be otherwise occupied’ (BBC 51). Under the cover of passing the task of future broadcasting on to an unknown other, the ‘I’ has slipped from view, and has, it seems likely, been absorbed into the sensible mass who will be handling the flood waters. The speaker and his listeners thus share their experience and a general, practical character: ‘my impressions of the Great Frost are not on a heroic scale, but like you I have read of wonderful incidents in the newspapers’ (BBC 53). What Forster explicitly does not want to appear is an otherworldly observer on the phenomenon of frosts, that is, an academic. Reflecting on great cold snaps in English history, particularly when the Thames froze so that fires could be lit and animals cooked on it, he notes,

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I am … always a little incredulous at about those roast bullocks which have figured now and then in our island story. It seems to me that, however thick the ice, the heat of the fire would, after a time, melt a pool in it, and the bullock would be, if anything, a boiled one. However, this is captious. Bullocks have been roasted whole, the historians tell us, and the historians know. (BBC 52)

Forster manages to borrow the authority and data of his experts while sharing the listener’s scepticism. This gentle power, playing between identification with and differentiation from the audience, is at the very heart of Forster’s radio practice. It is also, we might notice, the forerunner of standard formats for certain radio and television programmes today, where dialogue is conducted between experts and an intelligent everyman figure, or short expert testimony is set within a more accessible narrative. Rather than separating these roles into two, however, Forster plays both parts himself. He uses a similar tactic when recommending C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters in February 1943. First, he chooses this volume ahead of the more intellectually demanding theology of The Problem of Pain, for while the latter is ‘interesting’, the former is ‘livelier’ (BBC 223). He proceeds to introduce the author in a way that admires his academic credentials while confessing a preference for a broader form of wit: ‘He is an Oxford don [ … and] besides being a theologian, Mr Lewis is as clever as they make “em”, if I may use the expression’ (BBC 223). The casual phrase is at once too casual and not casual enough. Dropping the ‘th’ places Forster at a conspicuous remove from the professorial authority of Lewis, but falls short of the idiomatic turn that his slightly prissy ‘if I may use the expression’ both announces and undermines. If he is not himself donnish he is still a careful speaker, and commands the consent of his listeners through linguistic facility combined with wholly popular taste. Equally, in a later broadcast to India in his ‘Some Books’ series (19 August 1942) he queries the authority of the broadcaster with the listener’s usually inaudible voice: You know how fond broadcasters are of employing the word ‘you’. It’s ‘you’ this and ‘you’ that, and it’s often ‘you’ ought to do this or that. (‘You’ generally seems to be in need of good advice.) When I switch on myself, and become a listener instead of a speaker, I get heaps of good advice, most of which is no use whatever to me. The ether, as it were, crackles with invisible uncles and aunts, who assume that they know what I’m like and how I shall react to their admonitions. They don’t know, and can’t know. (BBC 202)

Although by this time an accomplished broadcaster with 14 years of experience, Forster continues to incorporate into his radio persona all of the discomfort he felt with new technologies and his unease with the authoritative status of

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the wireless medium. Rather than readily adopting the imagined community provided by the other broadcasters, he cultivates the role of the perpetual radio novice, struck by the absurdity of established speakers’ methods. While he continually invokes his listeners during his own broadcasts, the speeches are always informed by a desire to flatten the broadcaster’s figurative rostrum, to return to being one of the crowd and so become unable to view it as a body subject to happy generalization. In this sense Forster’s radio persona is, I conjecture, an extended response to his farewell to serious novel-writing. Restaged throughout the course of the radio scripts is an imaginative construction of a listenership combined with a deconstruction of authoritative statement, so that we can hear Forster demonstrating the exceptional, insightful work of the novelist, but also enacting its repeated abandonment in favour of being simply one of the mass. The subsequent speculation as to the identity of his listeners in that same broadcast is thus conducted within the long shadow of his standing as a listener who, acting as one of the crowd, here ‘happens’ to have a chance to be heard. He writes: I keep speculating where you are sitting or standing, what you are like. And today I am going to draw a bow at a venture and tell you what you’re like. I’m going to describe you. I think, in the first place, that you’re Indian. You mayn’t be – I know that many who are not Indians tune in to this particular wavelength … Secondly I assume that you are a man – although I believe and hope that I may have women-listeners also. And my third assumption is that you are about thirty years of age. You may be much older and have high dignities and influence. Or you may be a student or a schoolboy. (BBC 202–203)

Having first allied himself with his listeners, his subsequent description never quite casts them as an other, despite their clear difference from the speaker. Thus, when he continues his review with an imagined trip to a London theatre, he suggests ‘that “you” as above defined shall come with me to one or two London theatres’ (BBC 203). With its inverted commas that vague ‘you’ becomes a hypothetical rather than an actual but unknown other. But it is subsequently reified by the cultural expedition that Forster proposes: ‘We must be in our seats by about half-past six’ (BBC 203). If the unknown Indian is an intangible, ambiguous figure not quite granted reality as a ‘you’, it is sufficiently real to be part of the ‘we’, and even to need a seat.6 Here, then, the cultural explorations that Forster conducts bring speaker and listener together into a community who are going to watch Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Watch

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on the Rhine. It is, of course, no coincidence that this diverse audience is united in two cases by that great English claim for universal humanity, Shakespeare. More than a rhetorical exercise, however, it was the imaginative labour of conjuring an audience, singular or plural, that Forster considered the particular work of broadcasting, and the measure of its success or failure. Writing to Zulfiqar Bokhari of the India Service on 20 September 1941, Forster confessed, ‘I wanted to see how I got on with the first three broadcasts, and, in particular, whether I could imagine whether people in India were listening to me, before I ventured further’. Developing a habit of showing the thoughts behind the broadcasts, this focus on the imagination is revealed to the listener herself. In his ‘We Speak to India’ broadcast of 4 March 1942 Forster comments on the role of the imagination in recalling England, and links this with his broadcasting: When I went out East myself, many years ago, it was extraordinary how Europe, including my own particular island, receded, until I could recall it by an effort of the imagination. Today its [sic] just my voice that goes East and reached [sic] India: the rest of me stays sitting in a London studio – worse luck – and it’s only by an effort of the imagination that I can guess where you’re sitting and what thoughts are in your minds. (BBC 174; underlining in original)

This is a slippery comparison, where memory and speculation are identified by the common involvement of the imagination. Where Forster’s memory fixes upon an experience of an actual England, his address seeks to borrow that same solidity for a wholly unknown listenership, making his gesture more like acquaintance than like invention. Nevertheless, his use of the term ‘imagination’ places his practice precisely within Lord Reith’s reciprocal imaginative economy: ‘The divine gift of imagination is an essential characteristic of the broadcaster … The exercise of imagination is required also on the part of the listener; it should act as a connecting link between the two’ (Reith 1924: 43). The speaker’s imagination, which has become the very figure of connectivity, depends upon the inequality of the participants’ positions. Thus, Forster is liberated by an act of invention that can be undertaken precisely because the listener cannot respond to him: This is the third time I have had the honour of speaking to you, and, as I’ve said, I don’t know who ‘you’ are – except when you are kind enough to write me letters of encouragement or regret. You begin to know who ‘I’ am, and when my voice starts you can switch off or not as the case may be, but the compliments can’t be reciprocated. Still for my own convenience I’ve made up an imaginary

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Broadcasting in the Modernist Era person whom I call ‘you’ and I’m going to tell you about it. Your age, your sex, your position, your job, your training – I know nothing about all that, but I have formed the notion that you’re a person who wants to read new books but doesn’t intend to buy them. (BBC 93)

Here the speaker’s confession of ignorance is the ground for his authority; he can speak because his unknown audience are freely imagined. But it is not clear whether he is really yearning for a future of talk show phone-ins or whether the listener’s silence is a prerequisite of this not-so-sympathetic speech. For, the impossibility of reciprocity is met by an act of imagination that places the listener at the speaker’s ‘convenience’. With the listener providing a service for the speaker rather than the other way around, a gap opens between the ‘you’ who has an age, sex, position, job and training, and the ‘you’ who needs to be told about such things. They both are and are not the same, and the disabling objectification of the speaker’s address is indicated by the insertion of that ‘it’, which is an idea or act of imagination, the anonymous audience, and the listening individual. Even before Forster became a regular BBC reviewer and cultural commentator his concerns about the authority of the intellectual intersected with his political views about the interactions of the state and the public. He vividly dramatized these in his 1932 contribution to the ‘Conversation in the Train’ series. This twohander is played out within a train compartment, whose occupants begin to talk after Forster’s character – who is confessedly Forster, but also a Forsterian character – threatens to throw the other’s suitcase out the window onto the receding platform, mistaking it for the property of a recently alighted passenger. The drama begins, then, with that most iconic Forsterian scenario: a muddle. As Mr Emerson, so often Forster’s mouthpiece in A Room with a View, says: ‘Take an old man’s word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror – on the things that I might have avoided’ (Forster 1990: 222). The near-victim in the carriage suggests that Forster might be ‘a little absentminded’; a tellingly inaccurate description (BBC 69). Forster’s flaw here is surely not forgetfulness but inattentiveness and impulsiveness. He threatens to behave in the manner of an inconsiderate broadcaster: with a naive confidence in the power of his own judgement and a readiness to impose it upon others. What prevents this? It is the other’s interruption, who is willing to speak out. If this dialogue represents some of Forster’s concerns about authority, as I suggest,

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what defends the individual is his ability to respond. That is, the very act denied by the medium of radio – reciprocity – is that which counters authoritarian impositions. This all makes more sense in the light of the ensuing dialogue, where the men begin to guess each other’s profession. For although the muddle is promptly untangled by Forster’s apology, a related argument develops. When the other speaker guesses that Forster – surrounded by paper and struggling to keep hold of his pen – is a novelist, the latter is immediately put in his place: it is a clear disappointment that Forster doesn’t write like Edgar Wallace or P. G. Wodehouse. And when the confession comes that the novels are of ‘the highbrow sort’ Forster is ‘reluctant but truthful’, as if such tastes were a cause for embarrassment (BBC 70; underlining in original). But this begins to change, as the other must eventually admit to being a policeman. In the light of this revelation, Forster confesses to a ‘Bad conscience’ that makes him jumpy around the police, but in doing so prepares the ground for a different sense of authority (BBC 72). The delightful irony of this discussion is that Bob Buckingham, who played the policeman, was Forster’s long-term lover. Indeed, their then-illegal relationship adds a comic strand to the dialogue for today’s readers. When Buckingham asks, ‘What was your latest crime?’ Forster replies, ‘Never you mind. No worse than anyone else’s. Everyone has a bad conscience – and meeting a policeman brings it out’ (BBC 72). As Forster moves from the scene’s animating force to the humbled highbrow, this also completes a reversal whereby the authority of the everyman passes from Buckingham, whose common tastes sweep aside Forster’s intellectual tendencies, to Forster, who is now brought happily low. Indeed, he not only avoids claiming a privileged authority but quite explicitly speaks ‘as the general public’, contrasting with Buckingham’s embodiment of the impersonal state (BBC 72). In this new role Forster claims, ‘Nobody’s naturally law-abiding, also nobody knows what the law is, it’s become so complicated. Everybody carries about a little secret load of guilt, and that’s why we – well I don’t want to annoy you again – but that’s why we don’t, speaking generally, like the police’ (BBC 72). That ‘we’, importantly, is no longer an exceptional group of novelists but ‘we [the] wretched public’ who, unlike the police, can’t grasp the law (BBC 72). And with this turn Forster again attains that gentle authority that becomes his signature on the BBC. As soon as he is identified as an intellectual he is proven to be a buffoon, but this puncturing also makes him profoundly normal and so legitimates his speaking on behalf of the group of listeners.

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So when Buckingham begins to explain the law, it is Forster who asks for mercy as ‘I always forget details’ (BBC 74). If he struggles with legal small print, however, what he has instead is the common sense to see the police’s mistakes, and the right to point them out. Thus, Forster becomes increasingly normalized, thrown into relief by Buckingham who leaves behind his original reasonable character to become increasingly representative of the state. Forster, now apparently sceptical of education, asks, ‘This excellent education they give you, this special training and all the rest of it: does it make you human?’ And Buckingham, adopting the opposing role, turns academic pedant: ‘Human? I suppose you mean humane?’ (BBC 74). But Forster does indeed mean human and Buckingham responds: ‘I should hope not [the public] wants us to be a machine on which it can rely just [to] get on with the job whatever happens’ (BBC 75). As Buckingham accedes to dehumanization Forster becomes ever more the reasonable everyman, objecting: ‘I’m the public and you’re not, and it’s no use your telling me what the public wants when I know and you don’t. We don’t want machine-made minds or machine-drilled faces, and if I may say so without offence – that’s what the Police tend to develop’ (BBC 74). Although we have, in only a few minutes of the speech, witnessed the initial roles swept away, this delivers the broadcast’s highlight. For how does Forster justify this latest claim? Not via the righteous indignation of the uninformed public, but because, ‘I was an official myself for a bit’ and being an official entails never having been ‘wrong as far as the public was concerned’ (BBC 75). Having exchanged the role of the paper-shuffling novelist for the democratic power of the ignorant citizen, Forster moves on to become the bureaucratic expert. Wanting all of these roles and none, he claims the full range of experience to allow argument combined with a naïve suspicion of any figure of authority or expertise. Each of these positions has its own claim to speak authoritatively, its own peculiar capacities and weaknesses, and only in combination do they make for a compelling broadcast. If Forster’s talks sought to avoid an over-reaching confidence, preferring a gentler authority, his involvement with radio did demand a certain practical ability with the developing technologies involved in broadcasting. In general, however, he was uneasy with the practicalities of new technologies. He didn’t have a telephone and handwrote most of his letters, private and professional (BBC 5n14). He didn’t like recording broadcasts in advance or even rehearsing them with the staff at the BBC as this would, he claimed, have destroyed the impression of spontaneity. The ‘impression’, however, is of vital importance. Arranging a discussion on ‘Efficiency and Liberty’ on 1 February 1938, John

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Pringle made clear that ‘The intention is that the discussion should not be impromptu, but should be fully prepared in advance’.7 This effect was to be achieved by hard work, though, and the illusion is central to the character and the potency of the medium. Pringle continues: To achieve a final effect of naturalism I am hoping that there will be a preliminary meeting here of all the speakers, when there could be an impromptu discussion between them on their prepared statements. This discussion would be taken down by stenographers, reduced and trimmed to the necessary length. After that, with one run-through of the revised text, we should be ready for the broadcast.

Forster was happy to join in with this procedure and Pringle wrote back on 18 February to praise his script, commenting, ‘I like your “personal” approach and use of “I believe” ’. This careful preparation for simulated ‘discussion’ was challenged by Forster’s long-standing refusal to rehearse. The producers had to trust the author for his expertise with timing the piece, as well as a satisfactorily smooth delivery. On 5 August, Forster wrote to N. G. Luker, who had advised a preparatory run-through: ‘I should prefer, if agreeable to you, not to have a rehearsal, for the reason that better results are, I think, to be obtained from me without one; I speak with more spontaneity if I have not gone through the script in the studio before’. This was not an easy task, though, and the artifice of spontaneity was not reliable. It was with full awareness of the aptness of his subject matter that Forster recalled the talk in a 1940 letter to R. A. Rendall: ‘I have already done a freedom debate, and though I took a good deal of trouble over it didn’t think my performance at all good. I find it awfully difficult to stimulate spontaneity’. Forster had to be reminded of the implications of this shared desire for the sound of spontaneity. In July 1953 P. H. Newby tells him to change references from ‘writing’ to ‘talking’, and advises that he must sound as if he’d just come from the street. ‘You see, I want you to sound as though without any premeditation at all you had popped into the studio to comment. At least not quite without premeditation, because you have Macaulay under your arm. I think it is the use of the work [sic] writing that check[s] one, when you are in fact talking’. Within the BBC, Forster’s broadcasting was also seen as adopting the technique of a written review. Roger Cary wrote to R. E. Gregson, Senior Producer of Overseas Talks, on 7 September 1953, musing: ‘Forster’s voice is good. I could only have wished that the review might have been a little more written for the spoken word in some places. The shape is so exactly that of the front of the “Times Literary

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Supplement”, of which I have long suspected that Forster has been on some occasions the author’. Shedding the association between Forster the speaker and the TLS’s literary in-crowd was important to the producers of the BBC, and so to its speakers. Forster was not constant in his attitude to the dynamics of seeming spontaneity, writing to Harman Grisewood, in September 1951, that a recorded broadcast of the ‘Fifth Anniversary Talk’ would be second best to live, but ill health would make the former preferable. At other times he recognized that the whole medium of radio was a mechanical intervention in human interaction and that the use of machinery and, one assumes, rehearsal, is inherent to the medium. Thus he wrote to Gerard Bullett on 1 September 1940 that, ‘I would myself just as soon listen to a record but perhaps this [?] is because I feel that the human voice is in any case mechanised by broadcasting, and the additional mechanisation is therefore negligible’. In June 1943, by contrast, he voiced just the opposite argument to his listeners: ‘I don’t like recording. It seems to me to interpose an extra piece of machinery between us, you and me, and there’s machinery enough already’ (BBC 227). Forster also seems to have been reluctant to take part in unscripted discussions, citing his general slowness as a reason for his objection. And where he preferred not to rehearse with his producer, lest his delivery lose its liveliness in the studio preparations, he expected the BBC to type up his scripts and return them to him in good time so that he could practice in private. The desire for apparent spontaneity born of little practice was quite probably due to a reluctance to rehearse in front of other people. Of course, these are typical of the technical discussions that occur within wireless production. But one of the most interesting things about Forster’s broadcasts is that these same concerns are played out on air and incorporated into the rhetorical tools that comprise his radio persona. Thus, his desire to question accepted authorities goes much further than it might. At various times he undermines his authority as a reviewer, the authority of the medium and the authority of the institution from which he speaks. Speaking in a broadcast to India he says ‘I never take much notice of what I read in the papers – or of what I hear on the wireless either, though this isn’t the moment quite for me to say this’ (BBC 152). This is a wonderfully paradoxical reframing of the broadcaster’s authority to suit Forster’s particular persona and politics: the listener can trust Forster because he is also a listener, and one, moreover, who doesn’t trust the wireless. Similarly, in a broadcast for sixth formers given in 1937 the antiauthoritarian Forster recommends none other than Matthew Arnold, while espousing the individual freedom of his young listeners to reject that advice.8 He

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thus suggests Arnold ‘as an example not as a recommendation. Different readers need different writers’ (BBC 134). Consequently he combines a strong espousal of literature’s value with a profound doubt as to his authority to do so, stating that ‘I believe that books are useful, but I don’t believe in giving lists of useful books’ (BBC 134). Indeed, even the title of his long-running series ‘Some Books’ is so undemanding and indeterminate – are these good books? Bad books? Old books? New? – so as barely to demand an audience’s attention for himself, let alone for their reading matter. In addition to laying bare the power relations implicit in broadcasting Forster relates the practical details involved. In a broadcast on the tercentenary of Milton’s Areopagitica in 1944 he speculates on Milton’s likely opinion of the medium of radio: ‘Would he have liked the wireless? Yes and No. He would have been enthusiastic over the possibilities of broadcasting, and have endorsed much it does, but he would not approve of the “agreed script” from which broadcasters are obliged to read for security reasons’ (Forster 1965: 62–63). He advises that one shouldn’t let the radio replace the personal face-to-face encounter, stating that ‘civilisation rests upon direct personal intercourse [ … ] and that broadcasting, even at its best and most intimate, is only a makeshift which will never be taken seriously by friends’ (BBC 227). He adds, ‘I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships’, and laments with his Indian audience that ‘It is difficult to broadcast on a subject like this. We ought to be face to face – you and I – while I am talking and able to interrupt each other’ (Forster 1965: 76; BBC 162). The ‘we’ who ought to be talking are precisely those engaged in broadcasting, working as part of the radio team. The desire to show the workings of radio and to dispel any misleading or even illusionistic qualities is, in fact, a recurring theme in Forster’s speeches, and often has an ethical or political inflection, as the topic of the Areopagitica indicates. In ‘Some Books’ from 20 June 1943 he expresses concern at the very imaginative process that Reith places at the core of radio’s success. Forster requires that ‘If you hear my voice now, and want to visualise me, don’t think of a human face. My face, such as it is, is away down in the country somewhere. Think instead of a needle moving down a groove, in a studio, for that’s what’s making the noise’ (BBC 227). Mis-imagining by the listener is dangerous because it may encourage the impression that the wireless provides a personal encounter: that noblest of interactions. To fail to make such things clear, he implies, would be an immoral act. We might note that the broadcaster’s position is entirely different from that of the novelist’s. Where the latter depends upon the creation of an illusion, the former seeks at regular intervals to deflate and dispel its imagined scenes.

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The ethical standing of the broadcaster, who is given the authority to command the assent of his listeners, is at the same time the object of Forster’s concern and an enjoyable prerogative. He confesses that radio is only the semblance of civilized, mutually consenting discourse, masking a more dictatorial address: ‘I say “with your permission”, well knowing that you cannot withhold it, and that I am in the position of a preacher who never hears his congregation cough. You can escape my sermons, but cannot interrupt them, and I am going to hold forth for a start on broadcasting generally as it concerns books’ (BBC 117). A fascinating version of this plays out in Forster’s 1943 ‘New Year’s Greeting’. There he promptly exposes the artifice of the broadcast, which is reliant on the imaginations of speaker and listeners. He begins: I send you these New Year Greetings from the portico of the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. I don’t mean that I am actually standing in the portico. I am not standing anywhere, I am sitting in a studio, reading from a prepared script, and a BBC studio, although decently upholstered, does not inspire to thoughts of art. The National Gallery does, so imagine me as standing in the portico. (BBC 217)

It’s not quite clear here whether the audience or Forster desires inspiration, and it is on this ambiguity that the collaborative project of radio is worked out. The source of the authority in the pairing, however, is made entirely clear. Forster is in command: ‘behind me is the Gallery itself. Let us go into it’ (BBC 218). Indeed, he reminds the listener of their missing senses, ‘The first thing you will notice, if the hour is midday, is the smell of coffee’ (BBC 218). Merging conversation with command – ‘you will notice’ – he makes his authority explicit: ‘if I add that the January sun is shining you are in no position to contradict me’ (BBC 218). Here is a playful authority that does not exploit its listener but demonstrates clearly the dynamic of order and obedience that the medium itself engenders. The possibility of misdirecting or deceiving his listeners, and the power that the radio gives him to do so, feeds into Forster’s vigorous scepticism towards the authority of the exceptional figure or charismatic leader, whose cultural effect is dangerously homogenizing. He writes, ‘I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper’ (Forster 1965: 80). Whilst this comment, made in the 1938 essay ‘What I Believe’, clearly refers to Nazism, Forster does not make a radical distinction from lesser dangers: this authority may be the same as that claimed by Lord Reith. Without doubt another Great Man, Reith’s vision for and of the wireless was politically engaged, albeit in a

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transnational rather than a national manner: ‘Broadcasting may help to show that mankind is a unity’ (Reith 1924: 218). This unifying gesture cannot be fully set apart from the flattened unity of the Nazi state, a troubling parallel for the BBC. Certainly Forster’s hostility to extensive government is so thoroughgoing that the creep of governmental power into previously unregulated areas is a source of significant anxiety. He notes, for example, that the curtailment of individual freedom in the modern British state extends into the rules for broadcasting, which, in the same way that it penetrates the private sound-space of the home, exerts a new legal force in the domestic space. Thus he writes in 1934 that, ‘In England – I am sorry to say that a boy named Wilfrid has made a private transmitting set. This is a very serious offence, because the ether belongs to the Post Office’ (BBC 126). What had not been a commodity at all – the air itself – is now owned and governed by an arm of the state. When he laments that ‘Organisation must lead to standardisation’, then, the critique is directed towards the very institution – the BBC – through and for which he is speaking (BBC 124). Although it is clear that Forster’s liberal values would see a community already made of innumerable ‘little’ men, his role as a BBC broadcaster makes him, inevitably, a part of a larger machine of state-legitimated standardization. His manipulation of the broadcaster’s voice may, then, be understood as an effort to avoid the totalitarian overtones that a more direct and forceful speaker carries. This curious dynamic of individual and institutional forces can be seen in action in a different scenario, when Forster had a private argument with the Controller of the Third Programme, John Morris, in 1953. Forster wrote to Morris on behalf of an acquaintance who had written a weak script on Chinese prison reform, which Morris had rejected. There is, in the letters around this event, a troubling nexus of personal and corporate responsibilities, which are at the core of Forster’s issues with the BBC. He begins manifestly reluctant on 12 January 1953: ‘Dear John, Here’s a tiresome letter’ and his advocacy is based along personal lines: ‘It was written by a man of integrity, intelligence and distinction who has had an unusual experience which he wants to convey’. But this line of argument is less significant than the issue that causes him to persevere. He objects to the perceived politicization of the BBC, and more specifically to the intervention of government censorship into programming: ‘What puzzles me most is your criticism that he showed “no sense of engagement”. I haven’t met the expression before, and feel bound to comment on its totalitarian tang. Engagement not with the truth as the speaker apprehends it, but with the alleged opinion of the majority of listeners. I do hope that the Third is not going to be

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run on these lines. It hasn’t been in the past’. Morris, writing back on 14 January, wouldn’t be cowed by Forster’s suggestion – or his pointed, literary-critical naivety ‘I haven’t met the expression before’ – and responds: I think you need have no fear that the Third Programme is now going to be run on totalitarian lines. I share your own views on the liberty of the individual, as indeed do all responsible people here. Nevertheless, I do not feel that belief in individual liberty necessarily implies an obligation to give every speaker his head; [ … ] as the one who is ultimately responsible for all that goes into the Third Programme I must assume certain editorial powers, just as you yourself, if you were editing a paper, would presumably wish to have the right to reject certain contributions offered to you.

Morris’s criticism of the report is that the speaker is not sufficiently knowledgeable, and may also be compromised by having been an official guest of the Chinese government. But while Morris greets Forster’s man-to-man approach with a BBC Editor’s response, he reinforces this with a personal appeal: ‘I ask you, too, as a personal friend whose advice and help I cherish’. The argument rumbled on beyond the meal, and in a letter from the following month Forster complained that ‘you seemed to be acting as the BBC’s mouthpiece: to what extent the BBC itself may be the mouthpiece of the F.O. [Foreign Office] I do not know’. The identification of the individual speaker and an arm of the government troubles Forster, I conjecture, quite as much as the perceived impositions of the Foreign Office. Indeed, the Corporation’s very motto indicates this muddle: ‘Nation shall speak unto nation’. The BBC itself does not have a stable broadcasting identity, but poses, sometimes simultaneously, as a free and impartial institution, national voice and a single speaker. If this worries Forster, his involvement compounds rather than resolves this play of identities. He is representative – or perhaps even symptomatic – rather than explanatory of the BBC’s strangely plural and singular, institutional and individual, identity. Indeed, the best indication of this may be Forster’s shift from writer to broadcaster. For, although his prestige was growing as a speaker, Forster’s standing as an author appears to have been far less secure at the BBC. For example, invited to give the Third Programme’s Fifth Anniversary talk in 1951 – which he delivered on 29 September – his short story ‘The Machine Stops’ had passed through the hands of a reader in the Drama Scripts Department earlier that year (16 March). The very story that engages so perceptively with technology within domestic and public spheres was dubbed ‘rather Wells in barley water’.9 In 1953 a similarly stark contrast can be seen. Asked to deliver

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that year’s Reith Lectures – which he turned down – his story ‘The Curate’s Friend’ was reviewed by script reader Mollie Greenhalgh. Her report of 23 September listed the requirements for radio drama and found Forster’s story wanting in every category: ‘Construction: Conventional. Dialogue: Quite unreal. Characterisation: Never escapes from literary. Remarks: A piece of whimsy which cannot stand dramatisation, especially of this elementary kind’. Forster’s wider cultural cachet was so substantial, however, that his was always a soughtafter opinion, even – or especially – in the role of the non-specialist. Thus, when John Morris in July 1954 sought a report on that year’s Bayreuth Festival he addressed ‘My dear Morgan’ but played on the authority and cache of the public man of letters, referring to him in the third person. ‘What I hoped we were going to get was E. M. Forster’s impression of sitting right through “The Ring” for the first time at Bayreuth, or the general effect of Bayreuth on E. M. Forster, or E. M. Forster on Bayreuth, or, in fact, E. M. Forster on anything that comes into his head!’. While the stock of Forster the author was barely steady, E. M. Forster the Public Intellectual and Broadcaster had become his prevailing personae and an essential cultural voice for the BBC. As a result of this growing status he could afford to make higher financial demands of his commissioners, and his correspondence shows a canny understanding of the economic rewards for accessing a larger listenership. When negotiating the arrangements for his talk for the Third Programme’s anniversary, he explicitly asks for higher than his usual fee. Knowing of the prestige of the commission he refused the first offer of 50 guineas and accepted 60 guineas with expenses, with extra for rebroadcasts. More than this, however, a repeat two days later may have been due to Forster himself. Writing to Grisewood on 23 May 1951, he made clear his disappointment at the plan to broadcast on the Third, and requesting first airing on the Home: [I] must confess that I am much disappointed at hearing that it is proposed to celebrate the Third Programme only on the Third Programme … I realise the difficulties, and also see that a talk of the length we contemplate will be impossible on the Home Service … I should certainly get to work on my own talk with better heart if this could be done. As it is, I feel a bit dashed.10

In addition to making disappointed noises he also plays on the Third’s evangelical function, reasoning, ‘surely this fifth anniversary offers a splendid opportunity for spreading the good news further’. With this discussion behind the scenes, Forster’s celebration of the Third turns, almost inevitably, into a discussion of audience: ‘I speak to a Third Programme audience. Though do I? Is there such a thing?’ (BBC

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114). In this most high profile of Forster’s radio talks he binds a celebration of the radio to the same anxiety that he expressed in his earliest speeches. If technology troubled Forster the radio was also the single device that most profoundly engaged his imagination. It posed very particular challenges to his liberal politics and to his long-held ennoblement of personal intimacy and intercourse, as immortalized in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howard’s End: ‘Only connect’ (Forster 2000: iii). But it also offered a new arena within which to establish a standard of humane and cultured values, and within which to forge a persona and a manner of address whose inheritors are in evidence in today’s radio and television programming. Refusing to condescend, to grandstand or to dictate, Forster’s radio talks manage to be conversational even before conversation with radio listeners became possible. They also, however, create a powerful set of strategies that, altogether more cunning than the dictator’s fulminations, command the attention and assent of the listener. Indeed, if the rant is the iconic address of totalitarianism, Forster’s discursive, quasi-casual manner might be the representative speech for liberal democratic government. No less forceful or political than its extreme counterpart the constant concern of Forster’s talks was finding a form of address appropriate to an audience and an audience receptive to its form of address. It is characteristic of Forster that, rather than developing a dull and responsible radio manner he created something far more engaging and even exciting. Instead of government by politeness and restraint – as one might expect of a respected but conservative fiction writer – he deployed a potent, playful and often forceful voice, which is abundantly stylish and, recognizable via its inheritors, deeply modern.

Abbreviation BBC = Forster, E. M. (2008a). The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: A Selected Edition. Ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Macleod Walls. Foreword P. N. Furbank. Columbia, MS: University of Missouri Press, 2008.

Notes 1 There is some disagreement as to the precise title of the talk. Jeffrey Heath (Forster 2008b) includes the text as ‘Railway Bridges’, whereas Mary Lago and her co-editors (hereafter BBC) refer to ‘Of Railway Bridges’.

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2 ‘Between 1928, when he began to broadcast, and 1963, Forster was heard 145 times in the Home and the Overseas Services and in the Schools Programme. Between 1932 and 1963 he participated in 13 interviews or panels. Twenty-six talks or interviews were translated or adapted for foreign-language transmission, and exclusive of radio readings of excerpts there were 36 radio or television broadcasts of his works or of adapted versions of them’ (Lago 1990: 134). 3 This chapter does not engage directly with the post-colonial arguments that are latent in the context of Forster’s Indian broadcasts, hoping to take a broader survey of the radio talks. Although I refer the reader to Morse’s article I do not want to respond in detail to its post-colonial thesis precisely because the concerns with audience and authority are not limited to a colonial context, a particular period or a certain programme or format, but integral to all of Forster’s engagements with the medium. To enter into the post-colonial conversation – to accept it is the animating force in critical engagement – is already to concede ground that I would wish to contest here. 4 Forster was suspicious of the BBC’s audience data. He mocked the process of gathering information in ‘Fifth Anniversary Talk’ in 1951, and argued with the head of Audience Research, Robert Silvey, in The Listener. In the face of the quantification of qualitative data by the unit, Forster suggests that the central issue is not the size of the audience but the quality of its attention. Hence his more imaginative, novelistic approach to picturing an audience was not made without information but in the desire for a ‘round’ – to use a preferred Forster term – and human conception of the listener, rather than an arithmetic one. 5 Thornton Sinclair, reviewing the 1938 rally, noted how thoroughly oriented towards broadcast media the events were: ‘all of the speeches must be in form for publication, and Hitler’s for broadcasting as well [ … ] In fact, Hitler’s proclamation, read in the afternoon, is repeated at a time more convenient for radio listeners’ (Sinclair 1938: 572, 582). 6 Although there is insufficient space to address it, it is on the identity of this ‘we’ that a post-colonial argument has its greatest claim. For there is an interesting question of communal identity based around nationality that plays out in Forster’s anti-Nazi broadcasts. He makes it clear that where the Nazis want to be only German, to be properly English is to transcend such exclusive national boundaries and belong to the community of the world. Thus he writes, ‘We did not want England to be England for ever; it seemed to us a meagre destiny’ (Forster 1965: 43–44), whereas ‘Germany is to be German forever, and more German with each generation’ (44). This iterates a claim made in a broadcast with a far less explicit political agenda, when reviewing a translation of a book about Marie Curie. In a Boxing Day review of books from 1938 he promotes the book as an image of cross-cultural cooperation that is, for Forster, quintessentially English: ‘Madame Curie was a Pole,

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Broadcasting in the Modernist Era her biographer is a Frenchwoman, the translator, Mr Vincent Sheehan, is American; yet her life belongs to English people because it belongs to humanity’ (BBC 141). This is also the claim that Reith himself makes in Broadcast Over Britain: the BBC is supra-national. A part of the rhetoric of Empire is the development of a composite community both endlessly diverse and yet nationally delimited. If one is most English when one is a hotchpotch of nationalities and cultures, there is a justification for English government over diverse places and peoples. All archival documents mentioned in this article are listed in the ‘Archives’ section of the Bibliography. In conversation in 1965, Forster confessed his admiration for Arnold but clarified, ‘I’m glad to say that we’re very different’ (Stone and Forster 1997: 71). Arnold was one of Forster’s long-running interests, broadcasting on him at least three times. (January 1944 ‘Unwillingly to School: Matthew Arnold’; June 1945 ‘The Development of Criticism: Matthew Arnold’). In a 1958 interview the delightfully ambivalent response to the question ‘Were you consciously working in a Wellsian (or anti-Wellsian) manner in ‘The Machine Stops’?’ was simply ‘Yes’ (Stone and Forster 66). The story is quite clearly, as Forster establishes elsewhere, ‘a reaction against one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells’ (Furbank 1979: 162). The speech lasted 25’50 (BBC 410).

Archival sources BBC written archives I. E. M. Forster File 1, 1934–1938, R CONT 1. J. Pringle to E. M. Forster, 1 February 1938. J. Pringle to Forster, 17 February 1938. E. M. Forster to N. G. Luker, 5 August 1938. II. E. M. Forster File 2, 1939–1940, R CONT 1. E. M. Forster to R. A. Rendall, 4 February 1940. E. M. Forster to G. Bullett, 1 September 1940. III. E. M. Forster File 3, 1941, R CONT 1. E. M. Forster to Z. Bokhari, 20 September 1941. IV. E. M. Forster File 9A, 1949–1951, R CONT 1. Reader’s Report, 16 March 1951. E. M. Forster to H. Grisewood, 23 May 1951. E. M. Forster to H. Grisewood, 23 May 1951. E. M. Forster to H. Grisewood, 12 September 1951. V. E. M. Forster File 9B, 1952–1954, R CONT 1.

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E. M. Forster to J. Morris, 12 January 1953. J. Morris to E. M. Forster, 14 January 1953. E. M. Forster to J. Morris, 7 February 1953. P. H. Newby to E. M. Forster, 21 July 1953. R. Cary to R. E. Gregson, 7 September 1953. Reader’s Report, 23 September 1953. J. Morris to E. M. Forster, 28 July 1954.

Works cited Beer, Gillian. (1996). ‘ “Wireless”: Popular Physics, Radio and Modernism’, in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, Ed. Spufford Francis and Uglow Jenny. London: Faber, pp. 149–166, p. 151. Forster, E. M. (1965). Two Cheers for Democracy. London: Penguin. ——— (1990). A Room with a View. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Penguin. ——— (2000). Howard’s End. Intro. and notes David Lodge. New York: Penguin. ——— (2008a). The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: A Selected Edition. Ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Macleod Walls. Foreword P. N. Furbank. Columbia, MS: University of Missouri Press. ——— (2008b). The Creator as Critic and Other Writings. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Furbank, P. N. (1979). E. M. Forster. (1979), A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lago, Mary. (1990). ‘E. M. Forster and the BBC’, Yearbook of English Studies, 20, Literature in the Modern Media: Radio, Film, and Television Special Number pp. 132–151, p. 134. Morse, Daniel Ryan. (2011). ‘Only Connecting? E. M. Forster, Empire Broadcasting and the Ethics of Distance’, Journal of Modern Literature, 34.3 (Spring), pp. 87–105. Reith, J. C. W. (1924). Broadcast Over Britain. London: Hodder and Stoughton, p. 43. Sinclair, Thornton. (1938). ‘The Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg’, The Public Opinion, October, pp. 570–583. Stone, Wilfred and E. M. Forster. (1997). ‘Some Interviews with E. M. Forster, 1957–58, 1965’, Twentieth Century Literature, 43.1 (Spring), pp. 57–74. Triumph of the Will. (1935). [Film]. Leni Riefenstahl. dir. Germany: ReichsparteitagFilms.

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Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King The ‘Impersonation’ of Divinity: Language, Authenticity and Embodiment Alex Goody Oxford Brookes University

At 3pm on 10 December 1941 the BBC held a press conference at the Berners Hotel in London, W1 to announce a new sequence of 12 radio plays entitled The Man Born to Be King. Written by Dorothy L. Sayers, the successful detective novelist, the plays were to dramatize the life of Jesus and the first of the sequence Kings in Judea was to be broadcast on December 21. The list of invitees to the BBC press conference included both national media and Christian periodicals. Newspaper headlines on the day following the press conference went from the relatively innocuous ‘ “Christ” to Speak in Radio Plays’ (Newcastle Journal) and ‘Christ in Woman Novelist’s “Radio Oberammergau” ’ (New Chronicle of Christian Education) to the attention-grabbing ‘Gangsterisms in Bible play’ (Daily Herald) and ‘BBC “Life of Christ” Play in U.S. Slang’ that the Daily Mail proclaimed. Such headlines amplified concerns that the BBC had hoped to mollify with their press briefing and contributed to a general outcry, headed by the Lord’s Day Observance Society, against a blasphemous ‘Radio Impersonation of Christ’.1 By 6 January 1942 the BBC had received 3457 letters about The Man Born to Be King of which 3085 were letters of criticism including 520 letters with 4116 signatures (BBC 1942a). However, as the subsequent 11 plays in the sequence were broadcast through to October 1942 the vehement criticism abated and by November 1942 Basil E. Nicolls, the BBC Programme Controller, had agreed with Dr James W. Welch, BBC Director of Religious Broadcasting, that the plays would be rebroadcast on key Sundays from 24 December 1942 to Lent 1943 and

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then on consecutive nights during Holy Week 1943. The last 5 plays of The Man Born to Be King were broadcast again in a new production during Holy Week in 1944, 1945 and 1946 and a new recording of the full sequence in 1948–1949, with another one in 1951–1952. Two subsequent versions of the sequence were recorded by the BBC (1965 and 1975), with the most recent national rebroadcast being in Spring 2011. That Sayers’s radio plays became a staple of BBC religious broadcasting in Lent and Holy Week does not detract from the original radical undertaking of the plays themselves and it is this aspect of The Man Born to Be King that is under consideration here. Rather than dealing with the plays, as previous critics have done, in terms of their relationship to Sayers’s Christian theology (notably her doctrine of human creativity explored in the 1941 The Mind of the Maker), explicating their interpretation of original New Testament sources, or evaluating the success of their depiction of figures such as Judas, this discussion explores how the plays specifically engage with the ‘impersonation’ of divinity through the ‘blind’ medium of radio.2 Examining Sayers’s undertaking that the life of Christ should be ‘realistically and historically’ depicted (Sayers 1943: 17), the following pages examine the means by which she translates the Word (of God) for her contemporary society, focusing on how the radiogenic form of The Man Born to Be King foregrounds particular issues of language, authenticity and embodiment. Sayers was first approached about a radio dramatization of the life of Christ in February 1940 by James Welch and it is clear that, from the outset, the plays were intended for a Sunday Children’s Hour broadcast; a letter from Welch to Sayers suggests a listening audience of children ‘between the ages of seven and fourteen’ (Reynolds 1997: 146). This would presumably build on the success of Sayers’s earlier Nativity radio play He That Should Come which had been broadcast on the Children’s Hour on Christmas Day 1938 to a very positive reception (Reynolds 1998; Low 1981: 126–127). Sayers had established her reputation as a religious dramatist with the verse drama The Zeal of the House, commissioned for performance in the Cathedral during the Canterbury Festival in 1937, and The Devil to Pay, her second play commissioned for the Festival in 1939.3 But in turning to write drama for radio Sayers was undertaking something very different from her previous pageant plays in verse. There were pageant plays on the radio, notably Clemance Dane’s [Winifred Aston] The Saviours: Seven Plays on One Theme (1940–1941), but in her version of the life of Jesus Sayers aimed for naturalistic realism rather than a ceremonial gravitas or invocation of communal, religious identity. Writing to Welch after his initial approach about the plays Sayers affirmed her desire to reproduce

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‘the same kind of realism I used in the Nativity play He That Should Come’ stating that ‘the prohibition against representing Our Lord directly on the stage or in films [ … ] tends to produce a sense of unreality which is very damaging to the ordinary man’s conception of Christianity’ (Reynolds 1997: 146–147). In her statement to the press before the first broadcast in December 1941 Sayers also stressed the importance of realism for her plays which she intended to be experienced, by listeners, as ‘a story about real people’, rather than ‘a piece of genteel piety in stained-glass manner’ (Sayers 1941: 4). In the later Introduction to the published version of The Man Born to Be King too, Sayers makes explicit her concern to emphasize the specificity of Jesus; ‘not only Man-in-general and God-in-His-thusness, but also God-in-His-thisness, and this Man, this person, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, who walked and talked then and there’ (Sayers 1943: 21). Sayers did have experience with BBC radio broadcasting beyond adaptations of her detective novels; she had been involved in two collaborative detective stories, Behind the Screen (1930) and The Scoop (1931), read by the authors as serials on the BBC,4 and made regular broadcast appearances until 1952. In 1941, while working on the scripts for The Man Born to Be King, Sayers gave six talks on the BBC Forces Programme on the Nicene Creed as well as National Service broadcasts on ‘The Religions Behind the Nation’ and ‘The Detective Novel’ (Sayers 2008). Sayers’s career thus parallels her contemporary T.S. Eliot who, from 1929, began making regular radio appearances,5 and was also exploring the theological and aesthetic ramifications of his Christian faith in drama, with Murder in the Cathedral commissioned for the 1935 Canterbury Festival, for example. Eliot’s engagement with radio and the success of his drama were key to his ‘increasingly public status’ and Michael Coyle argues that radio, for Eliot, ‘offered an invisible way of playing a very public role’ (Coyle 2001a: 148, 153). Like Eliot, Sayers’s dramatic success at Canterbury led to media attention to her writing and ideas, and to what Crystal Downing describes as ‘an increasing number of invitations to speak and write on theological topics’ (Downing 2004: 111). For both Sayers and Eliot one key intellectual function of the new broadcast technology of radio was to communicate to a mass audience the modern relevance of Christian belief. But, unlike Sayers, Eliot wrote neither poems nor plays directly for broadcast, even though his Murder in the Cathedral was broadcast live on BBC TV on 19 October 1936. Eliot may have used radio to explore a non-elitist religious understanding of culture in the face of a modern, mechanized world, but he did not explore the dramatic implications of the medium. In contrast, with The Man Born to Be King Sayers undertook

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to create a sequence of plays that engaged with the medium specificity of radio during a time when systems of culture, belief and ethics were being sorely tried by the pressures of World War II. Following Welch’s proposal in February and negotiations with the Children’s Hour Department, by July 1940 the BBC had contracted Sayers for The Man Born to Be King as twelve 30-minute programmes (BBC 1942b). But her relations with the Children’s Hour Department (especially with a Miss May Jenkin, assistant to Derek McCulloch the director of the department) were soured by perceived criticisms of her drafts and Sayers terminated the contract in January 1941.6 Although Welch subsequently persuaded Sayers to return to the project and negotiated a 45-minute Children’s Hour slot for the broadcasts, Sayers did insist that she work with Val Gielgud (who was currently Head of the Drama and Features Department, and had produced He That Should Come) as producer, corresponding with him closely during the writing of The Man Born to Be King in 1941 and 1942. Gielgud had been appointed Productions Director of the BBC’s Drama Department in 1929 and had presided over this department in the nascent years of radio drama on the BBC. Gielgud’s conception of radio as ‘national theatre’ was underpinned by a distinct idea of the listening audience, one that was in stark opposition to the notion of an undifferentiated mass of listeners who could be easily swayed by the monologic of one omnipresent broadcast. For Gielgud, radio might be a broadcast from a single point to a multitude of receivers but radio listeners were an ‘audience … composed of individuals or small groups, for the most part in a domestic environment’ and thus were ‘particularly susceptible to an intimacy of approach automatically denied in the theatre’ (Gielgud 1957: 87). Writing in 1936 Rudolf Arnheim had described ‘the great miracle of wireless’ as ‘the overlapping of frontiers, the conquest of spatial isolation’ (Arnheim 1936: 13), but Gielgud emphasizes even further the nearness of radio and its incursion into a private and familiar space. This highlights what Steven Connor terms the ‘uncannily intimate proximity’ of radio (Connor 1996: 205): radio is close and personal, it comes into the domestic zone, effortlessly crossing the distance between discrete individuals. Connor also points, in relation to the intimacy of radio, to its physicality; radio is an enacted form of electromagnetic fluctuation that produces a physical effect (vibrations) experienced on and in the body as ‘sound’. As Connor writes, ‘the act of hearing seems to take place in and through the body. The auditory self is an attentive rather than an investigatory self, which takes part in the world rather than taking aim at it’ (219). Understood in this way, the effect of radio listening on the auditor is not the construction of a separate, disembodied, visual consciousness but a receptive membranous self

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that is touched at a distance. The radio medium thus offers a distinct possibility for writers taking up the challenge to create a blind dramatic world while seeking to explore the disturbingly ambiguous realm of the auditory and its ability to ‘touch’ the listener. Principal in Sayers’s construction of a dramatic world in her radio life of Christ was the language she decided to employ. She wrote early on in the composition of the plays to Welch of the ‘difficulty’ in the ‘right choice of language’, pointing out that, while Christ’s speeches would be based on the Scriptures, if the ‘other characters “talk Bible”, the realism will be lost’. For Sayers it was ‘a question of choosing a language which is neither slangy on the one hand nor Wardour Street on the other’ (Sayers to Welch, 18 February 1940, Reynolds 1997: 147). In her press announcement Sayers uses a similar metonymical figure, pointing out that inventing ‘Bible English’ for her characters would make them ‘talk like Wardour St.-English and nobody who talks Wardour St.-English ever sounds even remotely like a real human being’. Despite the potential ‘affront and distress’ that might be caused by ‘stately sayings translated from their familiar and consecrated phrasing’, for Sayers the creation of something ‘vivid and human’ required a ‘modern English’ of ‘fleshand-blood people’ (Sayers 1941: 2). The affront that Sayers risked with the language of her plays became plain in the media coverage of the BBC announcement of The Man Born to Be King. It was the section of ‘modern English’ spoken by ‘flesh-and-blood people’ that Sayers read out at the press conference, from scene one of the fourth play The Heirs to the Kingdom where Matthew bemoans Phillip’s lack of commercial sense, that gave many journalists a hook for their reporting. Matthew says: Fact is, Philip my boy, you’ve been had for a sucker. Let him ring the changes in you proper. You ought to keep your eyes skinned, you did really, If I was to tell you the dodges these fellows have up their sleeves, you’d be surprised. (Sayers 1943: 117)

It was these lines that generated the ‘Gangsterisms’ and ‘U.S. Slang’ headlines in some newspapers, and which provoked angry letters to the BBC and the press. As Sayers points out in detail in her notes on the script, which were intended to help the producer and actors and which were included in the published version, the character of Matthew (the disciple who had been a tax collector) is ‘as vulgar a little commercial Jew as ever walked Whitechapel … with a frank Cockney accent’.7 Moreover, Matthew would be the first to cut down to size ‘any of the other disciples … slipping into rafeened [sic] speech’ (Sayers 1943: 113). Matthew’s belligerent use of slang (actually voiced in the persona of an East End

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wide boy rather than an American gangster) is pivotal in Sayers’s attempt to convey a more visceral sense of the narrative of Jesus’ life and death, to present an actuality rather than conform to a general attitude of reverence and piety towards the Authorised Version of the Bible.8 In the broadcast of The Heirs to the Kingdom on 8 March 1942, the accent adopted by Eliot Makeham in the role of Matthew (which he played in all the 1942 broadcasts) is distinctively different (a harsh East End) from all others accents in the play9; he is marked as an urban character, with attendant knowledge of money and finance, in contrast to the others who speak either SE or with softer regional accents. In dramatizing the Gospels in a language of ‘flesh-and-blood people’ Sayers was also exploring the theological implications of the Gospel narrative, of the word of God become flesh. As Sayers made clear in her February 1940 letter to Welch, she saw radio drama, a medium that stood outside the censorship and blasphemy regulations that attended theatre and film productions, as the ideal space to explore the incarnation of God: It seems to me that in broadcasting we are freed from any of the obvious objection which attend the visual representation of Christ by an actor, and are protected from the vulgarities and incongruities which the ordinary theatrical or film producer might import into a stage or screen representation. Radio plays, therefore, seem to present an admirable medium through which to break down Our Lord’s persona and might well pave the way to a more vivid conception of the Divine Humanity. (Sayers to Welch, 18 February 1940, Reynolds 1997: 147)

Welch similarly saw radio as a free space for revivifying understandings of Jesus and his sacrifice, emphasizing in a letter to the Children’s Hour Department Director that ‘radio has here a freedom which is not allowed to the films and stage, and that we ought to grasp it’ to ‘make radio history’ (Welch, 29 February 1940). But the BBC was sufficiently concerned about the possible ramifications of personifying one aspect of the Holy Trinity to contact the Lord Chamberlain’s Office at St. James’s Palace to explain that the Director of Religious Broadcasting (Welch) ‘would like to have an actor taking the part of Christ and speaking His words’ in a planned programme. The letter goes on to say that: although the figure [of Christ] may not appear on the stage … Dr Welch feels strongly that broadcasting here has a legitimate sphere as compared with physical representation and as a very short step further than the reading aloud of the New Testament which involves the speaking of the words of Christ and therefore some degree of impersonation … (Ogilvie, 27 August 1940)

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In their response, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office stated that ‘there would be no objection from our point of view … for no-one would appear publicly taking the part of Christ’, distinguishing clearly between the acceptable ‘speaking His Words’ and what could not be sanctioned; a visible, public impersonation: [w]hat we do not allow is any figure impersonating Our Saviour on the stage. If by any chance, you were intending at some future date to televise any programme of this description when the figure of Our Saviour would appear, then so far as I am concerned, as censor of plays, it would create a very difficult position in view of our existing regulations. (Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 28 August 1940)

The Lord Chamberlain’s Office here draws an apparent distinction between an aural imitation of Christ and a visual one, reinforcing the implicit hierarchy of a visualist paradigm in which the world as a separated object of knowledge is identified and known through the eye/I. Sound has no significance in such a scopic regime where it is the seen that registers presence while the heard, despite the essential materiality of sound (as sound waves and vibrations), can never be a ‘physical representation’. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office does not object to the broadcasting of ‘Words’ because no-one would publicly ‘appear’; Christ would only ‘figure’ in a blasphemous way if the broadcast transmission by the BBC was translated into a stream of electrons from a cathode ray tube. A 1941 letter to Gielgud Sayers characterized radio as ‘speech-without-sight’ (Sayers to Gielgud, 3 March 1941, Reynolds 1997: 238), highlighting thereby one of the central concerns of The Man Born to Be King: the authority of the Word of God and its role in a contemporary interpretation of Christianity. The whole sequence of plays is closely based on scriptural sources and begins with the indicative line ‘The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God’. The fidelity of Sayers’s interpretation of biblical revelation concerned critics at the time and continues to feature in scholarly examinations of the plays, not least because of Sayers’s express intention to offer a vivid but accurate dramatization of the Gospel narratives. The plays thus have a written source to draw on and in key episodes such as the crucifixion, Sayers includes no dialogue for Jesus other than the recorded Seven Words. But The Man Born to Be King works in an interesting way with the ambivalent aural realm of radio, and complicates the notion of a ‘reading aloud of the New Testament’ that the BBC letter to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office compared it to. The Man Born to Be King relies on the authority and authenticity of the spoken word, the voice as ‘metaphor of truth and authenticity’, what Christopher Norris reading Derrida describes as the assumption that ‘speech can safely

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be maintained within the zone of a privileged relation to truth’ (Norris 1987: 28, 65). At the same time, however, while the sanctioned words of biblical revelation are spoken, they are nevertheless subject to mediation through the radio technology in which, conversely, a play of meaning and conflict of interpretations enters into the authenticity of the voice. It is the spoken voice that reveals Jesus’ divinity, ‘you whom the voice called Son of God?’ (Sayers 1943: 79), but in the second play, The King’s Herald, this voice is audible only as Thunder, its meaning and revelation accessible solely to the child Isaac, John Baptist and Jesus himself, and not to the radio audience. In both the fifth and sixth plays Jesus makes the statement ‘I AM’ without a predicate (drawing on John 6:20 and John 8:58), a translation of the Greek ‘ego eimi’ or a transliteration of the Hebrew YHWH. In both instances in The Man Born to Be King this ‘I AM’ is understood by those who hear it as ‘Hebrew’ and ‘the great name of God’, ‘God’s name’ (Sayers 1943: 152, 179). This can be typographically marked in the written text quite easily, but in the broadcast plays there can be no tangible acknowledgement of the distinct ‘I AM’. This transliteration of the name of God is also, in the broadcast, necessarily spoken in English, so the verbal assertion of the self-presence of the Godhead in Jesus relies solely on the uncertain sense of radio presence. Similarly, the conventional capitalizations that mark the divinity of God the Father and his incarnation in Christ in the written script disappear in this blind medium where, for example, the distinction Jesus makes between his earthly ‘father’ and his ‘heavenly Father’ is textually invisible in the broadcast (A Certain Nobleman broadcast on 8 February 1942; Sayers 1943: 96). Sayers cannot rely on any visible markers of Jesus’ divinity; indeed The Man Born to Be King only passed the Lord Chamberlain’s Office because Jesus would not actually appear, so what the plays are left with is an acute concern with the possibilities of embodiment in the radio realm. Thus, the nobleman Benjamin, in the third play, A Certain Nobleman, testifies not just to the truth of Jesus, but to his voice as the active embodiment of the word of God; ‘I call all these to witness that your word is the living truth’ (Sayers 1943: 110). In seeking a ‘vivid conception’ of deity in her dramas and dramatizing the incarnation of God in Christ, Sayers was attempting a particular form of embodiment in the blind medium of radio. Incarnation is a persistent theme in Sayers’s press announcement: she argues that ‘the Nativity is not just a pretty story about a poor woman’s baby: it is the history of the Incarnation of God’, and talks of the importance of conceiving ‘God incarnate as a convincingly human being’. What Sayers sought to convey, and what she reiterates, is the ‘full theological implications’ of the dramas she is writing, the implications of rejecting a Humanist Gospel and presenting Christ as God and ‘altogether Man’ (Sayers 1941: 1).

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The BBC’s caution in contacting the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and Sayers’s careful attempt to explain her ‘translation’ of the New Testament to the contemporary medium of radio were not sufficient to placate the press and the public. Following from the newspaper headlines, the BBC, the press and Sayers herself received many letters and statements of complaint. In newspapers the issue of language was the most prominent, with the supposed ‘gangsterisms’ much concerning critics and letter writers. The most vociferous objections came from the Lord’s Day Observance Society who lodged a protest with the BBC (which was also published in national newspapers) claiming ‘this proposed theatrical exhibition will cause much pain to devout Christian people, who feel deeply that to impersonate the Divine Son of God in this way is an act of irreverence bordering on the blasphemous’. They called for the BBC to ‘refrain from staging on the wireless this revolting imitation of the voice of our Divine Saviour and Redeemer’. The Lord’s Day Observance Society had already campaigned against the Sunday opening of theatres and objected to the ‘recent continentalising of Sunday [BBC] broadcasts with Music Hall and Jazz Programmes’ (BBC, 1941– 1942). Their campaign against The Man Born to Be King, orchestrated by Herbert Henry Martin – the Society’s secretary, focused most closely on the potential blasphemy of the proposed plays, particularly on the issue of impersonation, and raised certain issues over the casting of Robert Speaight in the role of Jesus. Speaight, who played Thomas á Beckett in the 1936 televising of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, was the only cast member of The Man Born to Be King to be named either in the press conference or in the broadcast of the plays. A feature in the Sunday Graphic & Sunday News on 14 December 1941 described his career and proclaimed, by a studio picture of Speaight, ‘His Voice Will Raise a Storm’. This was certainly the case as a letter from Martin published in the Yorkshire Post on 17 January 1942 calls the BBC ‘a temple of blasphemy’ and goes on to claim that the ‘infamy’ of the broadcasts ‘is evidenced by the fact that the man chosen to impersonate the Lord Jesus Christ is a professional actor who won fame by his impersonation of Judas Iscariot at the Picadilly Theatre, London’. The anxiety over the voicing of Christ was shared, to some extent, by the whole production, as Sayers recalls of Speaight’s first appearance: everybody was fighting against a vague sense that Bobby Speaight was about to undergo a major operation … Bobby put a brave face on it, and said he was firmly looking at it as a job of professional work and trying not to think of anything else. (Sayers to Marjorie Barber, 27 January 1942, Reynolds 1997: 346)

The various letters, articles, protests and the cast’s own apprehension point to a pervasive ambivalence about whether Jesus, by being voiced, was actually

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appearing in these radio plays. It may have been possible for a more measured public debate about the issues raised over radio presence to have taken place in a period of national security and peace, but in 1941 it was difficult for this potential challenge to centuries of dramatic and religious status quo to be seen in isolation from the terrible external threats to British identity and national security. With many British cities struggling with the fallout of the Nazi strategic bombing in the Blitz and World War II escalating to a fully global conflict involving North Africa, Eastern Europe and finally the Pacific, letters of criticism to the BBC make explicit connections between the war and the blasphemy of The Man Born to Be King. A Mr J. Haney of Weston-Super-Mare writes of ‘two shocks [which] broke on us this past week. 1st the treacherous attack of Japan on the USA, 2nd A far greater shock – that the B.B.C. has sanctioned the dramatization of the Life of Christ to be broadcast in this country’ (Haney 1941); while three ‘mothers’ as they term themselves from Weymouth and Leigh-on-Sea jointly write ‘Is it any wonder that Britain is at War and suffering … when the BBC stoop to “slanging” the Life of Christ’ (‘three mothers’ 1941). Such complaints make it clear that, during the crucial war years of 1941–1942, a controversial dramatic undertaking like The Man Born to Be King had an amplified resonance for its potential audience. Sayers herself was interested in drawing direct parallels between the politics and history of Jesus’ time and her own contemporary world. In a letter written during the early composition of The Man Born to Be King Sayers explains that: My job, as I see it, is to present the thing, as best I can, as something that really did happen, as actually and unmistakably as the Battle of Britain, and all mixed up, like other events, with eating and drinking, and party politics, and rates and taxes, and working and sleeping and gossiping and laughing and buying and selling and coping with life in general. (Sayers to Father Taylor, 8 March 1941, Reynolds 1997: 355)

To present the Passion as ‘something that really did happen’ Sayers derives a context for her play from two aspects of current British history: the Empire and World War II. Writing to Derek McCulloch (the original Children’s Hour producer of the play) in October 1940 Sayers argues that ‘the complicated political position of Judea under the Roman Empire … is so very much like that of a tributary state to-day, under the British Empire, or in some cases under the Reich’ (Sayers, 11 October 1941). Thus, in her production notes for the fourth play, The Heirs to the Kingdom, she refers to the supposed attitudes of a representative ‘Sergeant Thomas Atkins’ a ‘soldier stationed in India’ to ‘witch-

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doctors’, ‘Hindu jugglers’ and ‘people claiming to be Gautamas’, as a way to explain the Centurion Sosius’ difference to Proclus, a seasoned Roman centurion, who has ‘the kind of understanding and tact … that an Anglo-Indian veteran might apply to Hindu regulations about caste and sacred cows’ (Sayers 1943: 114–115). In describing Pontius Pilate’s position in the ninth play, The King’s Supper, Sayers compares it to that of ‘a British magistrate in, say, Kenya [where the] natives are encouraged to administer their own law, and the foreign government will uphold the findings, if that trial has been properly conducted according the native code’ (Sayers 1943: 240). For clarifying the Jewish crowd’s clamouring for the release of Barabbas, the insurrectionary, over Christ in the tenth play, The Princes of this World,10 Sayers notes that ‘we must think of him [Barabbas] as a member of the I.R.A, arrested during “the troubles” with Jesus as the rival candidate presented by the English Governor General for the kindly consideration of a Dublin Crowd’ (Sayers 1943: 267). Sayers also mentions World War II in her notes, offering Judas’ plotting to manipulate Jesus in The Bread of Heaven as analogous to ‘certain religious elements forc[ing] France into defeat for her own good’ (Sayers 1943: 137). She refers to the Nazis at different points in the notes, in one case comparing Baruch the Zealot, a ‘pure politician’, to the ‘Nazi party’ and at another describing the expression of the crowd as ‘that frightful wild-beast noise made by Nazis’ (Sayers 1943: 136, 267). As her notes illustrate, Sayers was not interested in creating a simplistic parallel between Biblical forces of good and evil and a contemporary world: her Romans are British Imperialists as much as they are the Third Reich, and the oppressed Jews are variously colonial subjects, a Nazi rabble and insurrectionary heroes. One of Sayers’s intentions was to create a sense of recognition, of making the archaic events of the Passion resonant and relevant. As Alzina Stone Dale describes ‘by using the British Empire as a modern parallel to Rome, she made the plays real’ (Dale 1979: 79). But Sayers was also concerned to expose the politics of her own time, offering Biblical characters whose misdirected political zeal, ambition or nationalistic faith blinded them to the moral and spiritual truth. As she puts it in her Introduction ‘under the pressure of the Roman Imperium, their minds were exercised as ours are by problems about the derivation of authority, the conflict between centralised and decentralised government, the sanctions behind power-politics, and the place of national independence within a world-civilisation’ (Sayers 1943: 130). For Terrie Curran, Sayers ‘could and did shape the facts, cull and excise medieval dramatic precedents, and embroider … to form credible characters who demonstrated the machinations of the contemporary world’ (Curran 1979: 73). Above all, World War II pervades The Man Born to Be King, both within and outside the

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plays. During its composition and broadcast the bombers of the Third Reich continued their assault on Britain: Sayers notes in a letter to McCulloch that ‘the local warden has just come in to say that there is a time-bomb across the street’ and that she is off to ‘put the MS of the play in the air-raid shelter’ (Sayers, 5 November 1940). Moreover Nazi atrocities continued in Europe: writing two days after the broadcast of the eleventh play King of Sorrows Sayers tells Gielgud that ‘according to the news, Hitler has recently chosen to crucify 50 people in Jugo-Slavia [sic] … so we haven’t got very far in close on 2000 Years’ (Sayers, 22 September 1942). The connection between Sayers’s plays and current world historical events was made even firmer by proceedings in the Houses of Parliament on Friday, 10 December 1941 when Sir Percy Hurd (Conservative MP for Devizes) asked the Minister of Information to take steps to revise the scripts of The Man Born to Be King. The Ministry, formed the day after the declaration of war in 1939, was tasked with news and press censorship and home and overseas publicity and propaganda but, as Mr Thurtle, a Parliamentary Secretary, replied for the government, it was ‘not the function of the Minister of Information to exercise jurisdiction over religious plays by the BBC’.11 Despite this clear statement of government priorities during war time, the BBC did act further to avoid controversy, calling their Religious Advisory Committee to an emergency meeting and getting the Committee to review all scripts before broadcast. Nevertheless, after the initial controversy about the plays, and attendant publicity, The Man Born to Be King became significantly less prominent in both the wider media and BBC listings; by the time the whole sequence had been rebroadcast in 1943 Sayers notes, in a letter to B. E. Nicolls, that ‘the opposition has more or less folded up, and criticisms have been almost entirely confined to questions of verbal detail’ (Sayers to Nicolls, 12 May 1943, Reynolds 1997: 408). Written and produced in a time of war and restrictions, Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King is not an abstract or experimental play sequence: broadcast on Children’s Hour it remains fully within the remit of its brief of communicating to an audience of children and their parents and teachers. Nevertheless, there is a clear interest in the extra-semantic communicative power of the medium Sayers is working in, and with the need to create a convincing soundscape which her ‘story about real people’ inhabits. Sayers pays close attention, in her scripts and notes, to incidental music, to sound effects and to acousmatic sounds (such as the cock crow in Matthew 26:74), as well as to the power of voice to embody character. In her production notes Sayers suggests that Mary Virgin could have a ‘faint shadow’ of an Irish accent (Sayers 1943: 46) (this was not followed in

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Lillian Harrison’s portrayal of the role in the first broadcast), gives the disciple John a ‘little impulsive stammer’ (Sayers 1943: 68) which is easily discerned in the broadcast recordings of James McKechnie in the role, endows Matthew with the cockney accent already discussed and suggests for minor figures, such as Eunice, a Greek servant at the Public Baths, a ‘little foreign accent’, possibly French.12 With these intimate and careful details Sayers sought to ‘show’ her audience the differences between characters, to enable the voice to function as a form of embodiment. Intimacy is central to the life of Christ that Sayers endeavours to generate with her plays, and the primary source of this intimacy is the women in The Man Born to Be King. Throughout the plays, male characters express stereotypical attitudes to women – ‘that’s just like a woman – believing things without an atom of proof,’ ‘if once a woman makes up her mind to a thing – … Nothing will stop her’ (Sayers 1943: 174, 79) – and the idea of feminine physical and emotional extravagance is crystallized in the figure of Mary Magdalen. In the penultimate play on the crucifixion Sayers’s notes describe Mary Magdalen as ‘passionate, emotional, purely human’ (Sayers 1943: 289). But Sayers is far from endorsing a restrictive view of women and femininity; as her 1947 essay ‘Are Women Human?’ demonstrates, she is, rather, emphasizing the place of women in the matter of incarnation and embodiment. This is particularly the case in the depiction of the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, and her relationship with her son. As Sayers’s notes to the third play, A Certain Nobleman, explain, she is concerned, not to deify Mary but to ‘show the human mother faced with the reality of what her Son’s personality and vocation mean in practice’ (Sayers 1943: 92). The physical and personal bond between mother and son gives Mary a particular insight into Jesus’ vocation, as she says ‘I am his mother and I know him’ (Sayers 1943: 96), and Sayers is insistent on the importance of both this physical bond and this unique insight. Mary’s grief at the crucifixion is made viscerally real with her references to her bodily connection to Christ: My child, when he was small, I washed and fed him; I dressed him in his little garments and combed the rings of his hair. When he cried, I comforted him; when he was hurt, I kissed away the pain; and when the darkness fell, I sang him to sleep. Now he goes faint and fasting in the dust, and his hair is tangled with thorns. They will strip him naked in the sun and hammer the nails into his living flesh, and the great darkness will cover him. And there is nothing I can do. Nothing at all. This is the worst thing; to conceive beauty in your heart and bring it forth into the world, and then to stand by helpless and watch it suffer. (Sayers 1943: 294–295)

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What the crucifixion scene and Mary’s words epitomize is the way Sayers’s plays confront the effacement of embodiment in both the traditional approach to the life of Christ and the realm of radio. With The Man Born to Be King Sayers used the blind medium of radio, a medium that evaded the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, to revivify the biblical narrative of Christ. Despite the fears of the Lord’s Day Observance Society and others that a blasphemous impersonation was to be perpetrated, Sayers’s sequence of plays became a mainstay in the BBC’s religious broadcasting and Sayers herself spoke on a range of religious issues elsewhere in the radio schedule. But The Man Born to Be King was a challenging project, both because of the world of historical events surrounding it which amplified the resonance of any modification to traditional, religious ideas, and because of the way Sayers uses the ambiguous intimacy and physicality of the radio form. Sayers’s plays aim to ‘touch’ the listener with the reality of Jesus’ life and his sacrifice, not enforce a scriptural truth or impose a dogma. Linking the uncertainty of first-century Judea with the turbulence of contemporary world politics, stressing the ‘reality’ and ‘history’ of the life of Christ through the use of language and voice and offering an unstinting presentation of the origin of Jesus in Mary’s own body, The Man Born to Be King attempts not an impersonation, but a radio incarnation of the divine.

Notes 1 Full-page adverts taken out by the Lord’s Day Observance Society in the pages of The Christian (18 December 1941), the Church of England Newsletter (19 December 1941) and other newspapers and which reproduced the complaint they submitted to the BBC following the 11 December press briefing proclaimed ‘Radio Impersonation of Christ! A PROTEST’. 2 Writing on radio in 1936 the perceptual psychologist and art and film theorist Rudolf Arnheim titled a section ‘In Praise of Blindness’ (see Arnheim 1936). 3 Sayers’s other religious pageant plays were The Just Vengeance, Litchfield Cathedral Festival, 1946 and The Emperor Constantine, Colchester Festival, 1951. 4 Behind the Screen was broadcast during14 June–19 July 1930 and the other collaborators were Hugh Walpole, Agatha Christie, Antony Berkeley, E. C. Bentley and Father Ronald Knox; Sayers wrote and read Chapter III. The Scoop was broadcast during 10 January–4 April 1931 and the other collaborators were Agatha Christie, E. C. Bentley, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts and Clemence Dane; Sayers wrote and read Chapter I and Chapter XII (see Harmon and Burger 1997: 133, 136–137).

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5 Beginning in June 1929 Eliot made 81 radio broadcasts (poetry readings and cultural talks) over a 30-year period (for details see Coyle 2001b). 6 See Reynolds (1998: 338–345) and Low for a detailed account of these events; Sandra Percy also sketches out the production and reception of the plays (Percy 2010: 238–242). 7 Phrases such as this could be used to support the case, made by James Brazabon, for example, for Sayers as anti-Semitic, but Carolyn Heilbrun, Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis make convincing defences of Sayers’s attitude to and depiction of Jewish people (see Brazabon 1988; Heilbrun 1993; McGregor and Lewis 2000). 8 Sayers discusses this issue in her Introduction to the published version (Sayers 1943: 18–19). 9 Disc recordings were made of all the original 1941–1942 broadcasts, except for the first play ‘Kings of Judea’; digital versions of these recordings are available at the British Library, London. 10 The narrative of Barabbas is given in the non-canonical Gospel of Peter. 11 See the Manchester Guardian’s reporting of this exchange on 20 December 1941. 12 Eunice was played by Zita Gordon in the first broadcast, a Hungarian actress who was married to Lewis Gielgud; her accent in the British Library digital copy of the 1942 broadcast is not French but sounds like an attempt to reproduce an AsianEnglish inflection.

Archival sources BBC. (1941–1942). ‘Broadcasting Press Cuttings Programmes; Features, Variety, Drama Man Born to Be King’, From 01/01/1941 to 21/12/1942, BBC Written Archives, Book 3, Box 2 P183/3. BBC. (1942a). ‘Programme Correspondence Section Report’, BBC Written Archives, R1/102 P.C.S Man Born to Be King 1941–1942. BBC. (1942b). ‘Schedule of Production and Broadcast’ of Man Born to Be King, BBC Written Archives, R19/697, Entertainment, ‘Man Born to Be King’, 1942–1951. Haney, J. (14 December 1941). Letter to BBC, BBC Written Archive, R1 Publicity: Sayers, Dorothy L., File 1A 1941. Lord Chamberlain’s Office. (28 August 1940). Letter to James Welch, BBC Written Archive, R1/910 Sayers, Dorothy L. Children’s Hour File 1 1940. Ogilvie, F. W. [BBC Director-General] (27 August 1940). Letter to Lord Chamberlain’s office at St James’s Palace, BBC Written Archive, R1/910 Sayers, Dorothy L. Children’s Hour File 1 1940. Sayers, D. L. (5 November 1940). Letter to Derek McCulloch, BBC Written Archives: Sayers, Dorothy L.: Children’s Hour, File I, 1940, R1/910. Sayers, D. L. (1941). ‘B.B.C. Announcement: The Man Born to Be King’, December 10 1941, BBC Written Archives, R1 publicity: Sayers, Dorothy L. File 1B 1942–1943, 4.

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Sayers, D. L. (11 October 1941). Letter to Derek McCulloch, BBC Written Archives: Sayers, Dorothy L.: Children’s Hour, File I, 1940, R1/910. Sayers, D. L. (22 September 1942). Letter to Val Gielgud, BBC Written Archives: Sayers, Dorothy L.: Children’s Hour, File I, 1940, R1/910. ‘Three Mothers’, (11 December 1941). Letter to BBC, BBC Written Archive, R41/250/1 P.C.S. Man Born to Be King A-K 1941–1946. Welch, J. (29 February 1940). Letter to Children’s Hour Department, BBC Written Archives: Sayers, Dorothy L.: Children’s Hour, File 1 1940, R1/910.

Works cited Arnheim, R. (1936). Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read. London: Faber and Faber. Brazabon, J. (1988). Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography. London: Victor Gollancz. Brown, R. J. (1998). Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Connor, S. (1996). ‘The Modern Auditory I’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from Renaissance to the Present, Ed. Roy Porter. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 202–223. Coyle, M. (2001a). ‘T. S Eliot on the Air: “Culture” and the Challenges of Mass Communication’, in T. S. Eliot and our Turning World, Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ——— (2001b). ‘T. S. Eliot’s Radio Broadcasts, 1929–63: A Chronological Checklist’, in T. S. Eliot and our Turning World, Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 205–213. Curran, T (1979). ‘The Word Made Flesh: The Christian Aesthetic in Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King’, in As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ed. Margaret P. Hanney. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Dale, A. S. (1979). ‘The Man Born to Be King: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Best Mystery Plot’, in As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ed. Margaret P. Hanney. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Downing, C. (2004). Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Drakakis, J. (1981). ‘Introduction’, British Radio Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gielgud, V. (1957). British Radio Drama 1922–1956. London: Harrap and Co. Harmon, R. B. and Margaret A. Burger (1977). An Annotated Guide to the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Garland Publishing. Heilbrun, C. G. (1993). ‘Dorothy L. Sayers: Biography Between the Lines’, in Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration, Ed. Alzina Stone Dale. New York: Walker, pp. 1–14.

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Lenthall, B. (2007). Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Low, D. A. (1981). ‘Telling the Story: Susan Hill and Dorothy L. Sayers’, in British Radio Drama, Ed. John Drakakis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 111–138. McGregor, R. K. and Lewis, E. (2000). Counndrums for the Long Week-End: England, Dorothy L. Sayers and Peter Whimsey. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Norris, C. (1987). Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Percy, S. (2010). Dorothy L. Sayers: More Than a Crime Fiction Writer. North Charleston, SC: Create Space Books. Reynolds, B, ed. (1997). The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers Volume Two: 1937–1943 From Novelist to Playwright. Cambridge: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society. ——— (1998). Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Sayers, Dorothy L. (1943). The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. ——— (2008). The Christ of the Creeds and Other Broadcast Messages to the British People During World War II. Cambridge: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society.

5

T. S. Eliot on the Radio: ‘The Drama Is All in the Word’ Steven Matthews University of Reading

It has become commonplace, within discussions of literary modernism, to notice the fascination which was exerted upon writers in the early twentieth century by technology and the new media, including telephones, gramophones and radios. Juan A. Suárez, in an article on the poet T. S. Eliot and the gramophone, has noted the appeal of these devices in typical terms, describing how they equally ‘dissociate’ language ‘from human corporeality’, detach ‘oral language from the physical presence of the speakers’ and therefore ‘scatter’ the originating subject of the words through the air (Suárez 2001: 751). The action of the typist in Eliot’s ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land, who turns away from her sexual encounter automatically to put a record on the gramophone, is emblematic of a series of vocal projections in Eliot’s work which themselves speak to iconic modernist fears about fracture and abstraction. For Suárez, Eliot, with his alertness to the ‘different voices’ which punctuate the air of the modern cities, is but the more sensitive to the general atmosphere of his age. This essay will consider that alertness as it is specifically displayed within Eliot’s work for BBC radio, and as it speaks to Eliot’s contemporary creative output during the years of his broadcasts. In doing so, it will partly seek to challenge what has become a critical consensus around Eliot’s radio talks, a consensus which presumes that, in fact, he became deaf to some of his own intonations, as he deployed the emergent medium to proffer some of the conservative religious, cultural and political views which seem to have hallmarked his later career. Rather, I will argue, Eliot’s consciousness of the possibilities of radio often made him doubly aware of issues centred on voice, voicing and their uncertain connection to personification, issues which otherwise ran across Eliot’s career – early and late. Radio made him deliberate again on those qualities of self-attentiveness – including self-hearing – within a discourse, which are otherwise characteristic of Eliot’s poetics.

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The two pioneering critics who have written extensively and decisively about T. S. Eliot’s radio broadcasts have established those broadcasts’ tone and tenor within the moment in which they were given. Michael Coyle and Todd Avery have each determined Eliot’s presence on radio during the 1940s and the 1950s as being essential to the religio-political ambition of the poet’s later work. They have also declared Eliot’s radio presence as being almost uniquely integral to the governing ideal of the British Broadcasting Corporation at that stage in its development. As Coyle has usefully established for later scholars in this area, T. S. Eliot’s broadcasting career with the BBC lasted from 1929 through to 1963, a period during which Eliot spoke on radio more than a hundred times. Coyle has recently presented that broadcast career as moving through roughly distinctive phases, including an earlier period in which Eliot spoke on English poets and playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through to what Coyle describes as a time when Eliot mixed these literary topics with ‘church-related’ broadcasts. Eliot’s voice was heard relatively frequently during World War II, ‘partly as a contribution to wartime morale’, according to Coyle, as Eliot began more intensively to read his own poetry on air, predominantly for George Orwell’s BBC Eastern Service, directed chiefly at India. In his final phase of broadcasts, Coyle casts Eliot as speaking ‘primarily for the BBC’s highbrow Third Programme’ on a variety of favourite topics which allowed advocacy, in some cases, for those writers Eliot thought neglected at this moment in literary discussion: David Jones, Edwin Muir, John Davidson, Charles Williams amongst them (Coyle 2011: 146–147). As this précis of Coyle’s detailed work on Eliot’s broadcasts makes clear, for Coyle, and for Avery in his wake, the Eliot of the radio is an establishment, even imperial, presence, particularly in his wartime and post-war emanations. In various contexts, Michael Coyle has reiterated that he sees Eliot particularly harnessing ‘so distinctively Modernist a thing as radio’ for, ‘ironically enough’, inherently conservative purposes, purposes closer to the intellectual atmosphere of Eliot’s childhood than to the immediate historical trauma of the 1940s and the 1950s in which the broadcasts were made. For Coyle, the Eliot of the radio adopts the role of ‘late Victorian Sage’, not least in his concern with the ‘nature of culture’, a theme which recurs in many of Eliot’s broadcast talks: For Eliot, cultural vitality was a matter not of organisation so much as of organism. … Eliot’s readiness to find in historical particularities ‘symptoms’ of the general health or – more often – disease of a culture is among his more profound links with Victorian sages like Arnold or Ruskin. (Coyle 2001: 148)

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Eliot displays response to the pressures of the history of the time of his broadcasts, in Coyle’s view, only to the extent that his focus remains, as it had from the start of his career, upon a pan-European perspective towards ‘culture’. Even when broadcasting during World War II to India, for Coyle Eliot is reiterating a cultural utopianism centred firmly on what he perceived as the centuries-old continuities which ran across European civilization (Coyle 2009: 194). Todd Avery has expanded upon Coyle’s crucial work in several ways: he has established the consonance between Eliot’s broadcast views and the ethos of the BBC in its first three decades, and he has argued that those views were not, as Coyle had implied, determined solely by Eliot’s response to the eruption of a second war in Europe. Rather, Avery asserts, conservative religio-political ideals had been promulgated by Eliot from the early 1930s, once Eliot began talking on those ‘church-related’ topics mapped by Coyle. Avery conceives the early BBC as holding a moral mission: The Reithian BBC envisioned radio broadcasting as a golden opportunity … ‘to forge a link between the dispersed and separate listeners and the symbolic heartland of national life.’ This link would be forged, at the most basic level, by perforating the private sphere of the home and organizing … a new ‘social aggregate’ through the sending of disembodied voices through the air. (Avery 2006: 131)

Avery alters the parameters of Coyle’s phased sense of Eliot as broadcaster by locating Eliot’s four contributions to a 1932 series called ‘The Modern Dilemma’ as the ‘core’ of the poet’s ‘contribution to ethical discourse in the BBC’s Reithian era’ (119). It is in these talks, Avery avers, that Eliot most directly confronts his dissatisfaction with a ‘social fragmentation’, one brought on by the ‘more or less rational skepticism’ which had come to characterize the modern era, with its ‘thoughtless acceptance of the great moral value of mechanism’. Against such dissatisfaction, Eliot predominantly, in this series of four talks, sought to counter-assert ‘belief in holy living and holy dying’, a belief which, in Avery’s handling of it, might seem quaint given the ironies of the situation. As Avery is fast to point out, Eliot’s ‘dogmatic’ dismissal of all mechanism and technology would involve the ‘elimination of the specific communications medium whose existence he was harnessing to convey his message’ – radio (127). In this kind of deafness to the technologies of communication, as in the religious ‘message’ derived from Eliot’s negative diagnosis of modern culture, Avery concurs with Coyle’s characterization of the poet in his radio broadcasts as being at his most ‘Arnoldian’.

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Whilst acknowledging something of the power of this characterization of Eliot on the radio, and also the consonance between his radio persona and the ‘golden opportunity’ for cultural integration reached for by the early BBC, this essay will argue that there is a greater flexibility and sensitivity, greater struggle for authoritative definition, as well as real humour, in Eliot’s vocalizations on air than that presented by Avery and Coyle. More especially, there is something to be learned from the relation between the other consistent topic of Eliot’s broadcasting profile – his interests in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature – and the ‘church-related’ or ‘nature of culture’ preoccupations from the 1930s to the 1950s. Eliot’s consistent broadcasts on literature have been largely overlooked in this liberal critics’ quest to establish his pompous ‘sage’ credentials. Eliot’s on-air discussion and promotion of this earlier literature – what I have elsewhere explored as that of Eliot’s self-declared ‘favourite literary period’ (Matthews 2013: 20) – actually, as we will see at the end of this essay, have much to tell us about that degree of self-dramatization, role-playing and self-questioning in Eliot’s projection of a radio self. Avery notes the obvious correlation between the arrival of the BBC in the nation’s homes in 1922, and the annus mirabilis of modernist creation, which included the publication of The Waste Land in that year (Avery 2006: 1). But for Eliot as author of The Waste Land, the notion that within any one voice there resonate other vocalizations, both from history and in the present, might cause matter for reflection when asserting, as Coyle does, that Eliot on radio only and earnestly plays a ‘role as a late Victorian sage’ (Coyle 2001: 145). To what extent, in other words, this essay will ask, is Eliot’s radio persona itself a dramatic creation, even as the spoken voice through the air itself promulgates views about culture and Christianity which Eliot, in propria persona, might seem to wish to present as his direct opinion, in other of his prose writings? Eliot’s publishing career in this area might show him especially sensitive to the complications of this particular aspect of voicing and vocalization, and the connection between original oral communication in the new medium and the established written forms of the printed text. The decision to print, as an ‘Appendix’ to the three lectures collected as the book The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), ‘The following broadcast talk, delivered in February 1937 in a series on “Church, Community and State”, and printed in The Listener’ establishes Eliot’s sense of the multiple occasions and media of expression for some of his ‘ideas’ at this period. Those three original lectures, along with that broadcast, are then repackaged as a settled text between covers – The Idea of a Christian Society. The justification for inclusion of the talk as an ‘Appendix’ given by Eliot – the

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talk ‘has some relevance to the matter of the preceding pages of this book’ – is deeply sardonic, both offering and refusing to legitimate the addition of further pages to the argument (Eliot 1976: 71). The ‘Preface’ to Eliot’s related book on social and religious organization at this period, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), is even more enigmatic in this area. After an opening paragraph outlining the multiple previous versions of thoughts and chapters which underlie the Notes, the ‘Preface’ here simply tells us ‘I have added as an appendix the English text of three broadcast talks to Germany’, and gives the German title of the broadcast series, and its original German publisher (Eliot 1976: 83). The ‘some relevance’ which the talks on ‘The Unity of European Culture’ might be presumed to have on the already tentative-seeming Notes Towards is itself unarticulated amidst other questions of origin and translation (were these talks originally written in English, or who translated them?). In both these instances of adding radio appendices to collections of published lectures or essays, this question of origin is enigmatically to the fore: for The Idea of a Christian Society, the broadcast talk reprinted was simply ‘delivered’, then ‘printed’, as though agency is removed from the process; ‘The Unity of European Culture’ broadcasts seem simply proffered, the purpose of their inclusion undetermined by Eliot himself. This arrangement, which advertises the multiple (and non-written) provenance of aspects of the presented text in Eliot’s formulations of ‘culture’ and of ‘Christian society’, derives from a mid-career Eliot, who has undergone ‘a shift in his aesthetic views’ and become ‘a social thinker and moralist’ predominantly (Avery 2006: 131). Yet we can see operative here something of the shadow of the earlier relation between the poem The Waste Land and its ‘Notes’ (which are also of ‘some relevance to the matter of the preceding pages’). From 1922, Eliot had been using this sense of various provenances in his texts to dramatize their radical instabilities as texts; we can see that the move towards ‘publication’ and ‘fixing’ his radio work of the 1940s and the 1950s to an extent continues, rather than deflects, that tendency. Eliot in this respect explores something of the spectrum suggested in his ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ – itself originally a radio talk broadcast in late 1953. There, Eliot distinguishes between poems in which the poet speaks ‘to himself ’, or those in which he speaks ‘to others’, or, in the third possibility, offers a fully dramatic verse which deploys characters other than himself. Even as he makes this distinction, however, Eliot admits that every poem moves from private to public spaces of utterance, and shows various attentiveness to this fact. In poetic drama, all three voices are present at once, in those places where the characters’ voices can be heard to be ‘in unison’ with

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the author’s voice, whereas in other places ‘a more impersonal voice still than either that of the character or the author’ is to be heard (Eliot 1957: 99–100). My argument would be that, in his radio broadcasts themselves, and consequently in their multiple occurrences in print, Eliot concertedly draws our attention to these complexities of voicing at various removes from a spoken ‘self ’, and to the listening and self-listening which they incur. In his advertisement of the manifold provenance of the appendices to his most expansive treatment of his predominant concerns with Christian society and with culture, Eliot elaborated on the complex relation between (spoken) radio broadcast and the seeming finality of the printed book. The original ‘moment’ of the ideas given moves across media, or even across media and languages in the case of ‘The Unity of European Culture’, towards a ‘final’ ‘consecration’ (to adopt the word Avery uses for Eliot’s method for the BBC). Eliot plays upon the uncertain relation between the ephemeral (why are these broadcasts reprinted in the books?) and the canonical, even whilst presenting his most conservative and pastoral ideals against a consistently perceived ‘fragmentation’ of social, cultural and religious values in the modern era. The presentation, without warrant, of the three originally German broadcasts at the end of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture bears something of the unmediated expression of chunks of text in such earlier Eliot work as The Waste Land: they represent an accumulation of textual ‘evidence’, but it is for the reader to establish the grounds of relation between ‘main’ text and (reprinted) appendix. The ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ voices are difficult to distinguish in this particular context of Eliot’s output. Eliot’s aesthetic both early and late is imbued with investigation of the spectrum between idiomatic language from a specific speaker, and the highly wrought, Pan-European, allusiveness potential within literary – and specifically poetic – expression. ‘A Game of Chess’, the second section of The Waste Land, which opens with a sensuous language replete with connections to Shakespeare, John Webster, Milton, Virgil and Ovid, and ends with the 1910s scene in a London pub, might seem the classic site for such aesthetic arrangement. However, in his critical appreciation of literary influence and expression, Eliot could also show himself alert to the nuances of dramatic possibility around this issue of verbalization and vocalization within the medium of the new technologies such as radio. In the unlikely context of his essay on ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ (1927), Eliot marks at one end of this particular spectrum ‘The spoken play, the words which we read’, which ‘are symbols, a shorthand, and often, as in the best of Shakespeare, a

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very abbreviated shorthand indeed, for the acted and felt play’. The tension is already there, between ‘spoken’ and ‘read’ – but Eliot’s contrast is actually between the Elizabethan text, in which the ‘acted’ play is gestured towards, or symbolized, by the words on the page, and the plays of Seneca, with their ample soliloquies covering pages of text, where ‘the drama is all in the word, and the word has no further reality behind it’ (Eliot 1972: 68). There follows in ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ a hilarious page by Eliot in which he tries (but fails) to decipher the stage (and offstage) action of Seneca’s play Hercules Furens – itself a crucial source for his own Little Gidding IV – before Eliot comes to the resounding conclusion that Seneca’s play ‘is full of statements useful only to an audience which sees nothing. Seneca’s plays might, in fact, be practical models for the modern “broadcasted drama” ’ (70). The extensive verbalization of characters’ speeches in Seneca’s plays, in other words, operates in a simplified zone between life (‘reality’) and a kind of spoken thinness devoid of living reference: Seneca’s characters, he writes, ‘have no subtlety and no “private life” ’ (70). They exist, in contrast to their Elizabethan variants, nowhere other than, and in no extra-textual time than, the duration of their utterance. Tragic action, such as Hercules’ slaying of his family whilst maddened by Juno, exists nowhere outside ‘a running commentary by Amphitryon, whose business it is to tell the audience what is going forward’ (69). Amphitryon, in other words, is ‘broadcasting’ the event, in the only way possible, by speaking it – but in the process the event literally disappears within and behind his words. ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ shows Eliot’s early sensitivity to the effects of the sensory singularity (‘an audience which sees nothing’) of the newish medium of radio upon language and the spoken word, and finds unlikely classical precedent, and analogy, for it. With the ‘broadcasted’, Eliot seems to claim, all ‘drama’ resides solely within the rhetoric spoken at length into the microphone. To that extent, Eliot’s own dramatic work from Murder in the Cathedral (1935) onwards would seem to be ‘broadcasted’ rather than ‘acted and felt’; each play notably involves little action onstage, and the characters are often difficult to identify apart – something which the later works The Cocktail Party (1950) and The Confidential Clerk (1954) utilize as part of their comedy. The more perceptive characters in these plays note the limitation which this medium enforces upon the speaking voice. Harry, central figure of The Family Reunion, for instance, notes the frustration that ‘one cannot speak with several voices at once’ (Eliot 1939; Matthews 2013: 186). If that were achievable, the drama might move from ‘broadcast’ to ‘reality’; but it is an achievement, Eliot’s oeuvre would seem to imply, not possible to modernity.

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Eliot’s alertness to limitation within verbalization, its impact upon characterization and the connection to an extra-verbal ‘further reality’ seem particularly exacerbated within some aspects of his own radio broadcasts. Avery’s advocacy of Eliot’s four contributions to the 1932 radio series of speeches on ‘The Modern Dilemma’ pivots upon his reading of the opening paragraphs of the first of those talks, ‘Christianity and Communism’. This is a reading in which Avery rightly foregrounds Eliot’s rhetorical strategy of presenting himself as an ‘amateur’ on these matters, the better to advertise his proximity to the ‘general audience’ for his ideas. Although asking ‘a fundamental ethical question’, ‘How to live life well?’, and answering it by advocating the unfashionable notion of ‘Christian living’, Avery hints that the success of the broadcast derives from Eliot’s adoption in it of the persona of Everyman (the medieval play which was to be an important literary and poetic model for Murder in the Cathedral) (Avery 2006: 120). Yet, when considered in its original context, Avery’s limited sense of Eliot’s vocalization here might be taken as symbol for the rather po-faced quest for the Arnoldian he and Coyle have adopted in Eliot’s broadcasts throughout. As reprinted in The Listener, Eliot’s opening paragraphs here, in addressing the pofaced topic of ‘The Modern Dilemma’, had been typically more fleet and tonally unstable, besides being radically self-ironizing. Eliot’s professed amateurism was, in fact, advertised in this first talk by a highly risky adoption of masquerade: I have been tempted to begin my contribution to this discussion with the words of Trinculo in ‘The Tempest’: ‘The folly of this island! They say there’s but five upon this isle: we are three of them; if th’other two be brained like us, the state totters.’ I must add that I do not use the quotation in any invidious sense. But it had some relevance to my first thought when I began to prepare my talks … . (Eliot 1932: 382)

‘Some relevance’, again. Eliot’s adoption of the role of the unconscious jester, Trinculo, wandering drunkenly, and thence incited to usurpation by Caliban in Shakespeare’s play (Act II sc. ii, l.5ff), might seem unlikely in this context, associated as it originally is with confusion and magical distraction. Shakespeare’s scene ends with Caliban’s famous ‘this isle is full of noises’ speech (l. 133ff). The Tempest had underwritten The Waste Land, but here at the opening of his radio series, Eliot takes this issue of ‘broadcast’ into satiric mode. What is all the more surprising is that he continues in it in his succeeding phrases, as he presents himself to the audience as someone ‘whose only reasonable notoriety is due to the composition of verses and jingles’! Why, he asks (picking up on the mistakenness of such as Trinculo), ‘except under some mad delusion of

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vanity’, has he had the ‘temerity’ to accept the invitation to talk on ‘The Modern Dilemma’? This, especially, as he is forced to ask himself, in words which are excerpted as the first subheading of the reprinting of this talk in The Listener, ‘What is the Use?’ What is the use of his labour ‘to find the precise metric and the exact image to set down,’ in his ‘verses’, ‘feelings which, if communicable at all, can be communicated to so few’? In Trinculo-guise, in other words, Eliot would seem to be setting the ‘state’ of ‘myself ’, its public achievement to date, to ‘totter’, mocking as he does The Waste Land as just another ‘jingle’. Included in this vein might be the glance to the audience in my indented quotation from the opening of this talk: Eliot’s anticipation of a potential auditor’s response within his own discourse: ‘I do not use [i.e. in case you thought I did] the quotation in any invidious sense’. This redoubles the humour, given the wild inappropriateness of the quotation to the immediate philosophical circumstance. But the strategy of anticipation becomes typical of Eliot’s inclusion and/or exclusion of his audience when broadcasting: to take only one example, the third talk on ‘The Unity of European Culture’ even anticipates anticipation: The dominant force in creating a common culture between peoples each of which has its distinct culture, is religion. Please do not, at this point, make a mistake in anticipating my meaning. This is not a religious talk, and I am not setting out to convert anybody. I am simply stating a fact. (Eliot 1976: 199)

How is it possible to anticipate the meaning that is both ‘simply stated’ anyhow, but also ‘stated’ in ways that you, the audience, cannot have anticipated. ‘I’ know, Eliot avers, but ‘I’ have anticipated you. My reading might seem to display peculiar sensitivity to Eliot’s nuances, were it not that Eliot had played with this strategy from the very outset of his broadcasts. The ending of the final, fourth, of Eliot’s early contributions to the series on ‘The Modern Dilemma’ is sinister in this regard. Under the subheading ‘No Easy Recipes’, the talk titled ‘Building up the Christian World’ moves towards its inconclusive conclusion by binding its audience to its failure: At this point, you must be prepared for a disappointment. My advantage is that I was prepared from the first for your disappointment … Many of those who have had the patience to hear me out must have been expecting me to produce some nice little recipe for setting things right … I am not … (Eliot 1932a: 502)

Eliot’s refusal here ‘to commit my belief in the possibility of a Christian society to any practical scheme put forward at the moment, and still less to any of my own invention’, is followed by a ludicrous list of practical schemes which ‘you’ will

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not be given ‘now’ as a ‘solution’ to ‘the modern dilemma’, one which includes (but also doesn’t) nationalization of the banks, Free Trade, folk dancing, a United States of Europe and universal community singing. At the end of his hours of broadcasting on ‘The Modern Dilemma’, in other words, Eliot seems to return to his Trinculo self from their outset, with his chaotic plans to ‘totter’ the given state of things. If the talks ‘have left you unsatisfied’, his original audience was told, ‘I can only say that … I have only expressed the thoughts which were already in my own mind, have discussed with you only what I have already discussed with myself ’. The ‘personal’, but limited, sincerity of this is uneasy warrant for ‘your disappointment’, which the ‘I’ has already predicted and laid grounds for. Even as he defends, in signing off from this series of talks, ‘social justice’ and ‘the Resurrection’, therefore, Eliot is playing complex games with voices. It is not possible, in broadcasting, to mount an active ‘discussion’, but what we have here is a discussion of what has already been discussed ‘in my own mind’, an expression of what has already been expressed – that spiralling difficulty which is familiar from Eliot’s poetic and allusive practice. Todd Avery’s correctional sense that Eliot-the-sage was a creation of these talks in 1932, rather than the figure which emerged for Michael Coyle around the time of World War II, neglects this complex framing by Eliot. It is a parodic framing, but one which also shows Eliot’s attentiveness to the implications of the broadcast voice, a selfhearing, which extends across his radio career, in its anticipation of anticipation in later series of talks such as ‘The Unity of European Culture’. The experience of hearing the talks originally is that of hearing the voice of authority as a voice which is paradoxically impossible to locate. ‘A. Sugden’ from Ealing, on hearing the first talk in the series, ‘Christianity and Communism’, felt impelled to write a letter to The Listener which had published it, imploring: Will Mr T. S. Eliot describe as well as name the position from which he preaches? For he blames the communist for surrendering too much to society and the sceptic individualist for surrendering too little … Are we to rest more content with a perfect theory with which the practice is hopelessly at variance … ? (Sugden 1932: 443)

Sugden’s impatience seems eerily to anticipate the non-conclusive ending of ‘Building up a Christian World’, a talk in which Eliot had seemed to signal his wish to give airtime to such demurring voices. For he quotes in this final talk from ‘a private letter from a young man’, unidentified, who had written that Christianity was an ‘irrelevance’ which called up images of childhood Bible classes, rather than a ‘belief ’ which might resolve the ‘modern dilemma’ (Eliot 1932a: 502).

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Eliot’s spoken broadcasts, in other words, sometimes literally incorporate (written) dissent from unknown sources, and, in the process, complicate their own seeming sureties. The caveat which might be entered against the now-established picture of Eliot on the radio as an Arnoldian sage is that the voice spoken there seems always assailed by its own uncertainties and, in fact, by its own caveats, to the extent that its origination of authority recedes from any ‘lived’ reality beyond its own utterance. This is so, even where Eliot seems most concerned to promote the integrational cultural possibilities of Christianity in wartime. ‘Towards a Christian Britain’ of 1941 begins by asserting that if such a thing already existed ‘it is unlikely that any of us … would find ourselves perfectly at home in it’; he anticipates that ‘anti-climax’ might be a feeling from his audience at the end of the talk. Once again, the dilemma is predicated upon an inability to escape from the endless drama enacted between ‘words’ and ‘meaning’. Speaking of the terms upon which it might be possible to mount such a process as ‘Christian thinking’, Eliot acknowledges that ‘we’ ‘are apt to overlook the possibility of our giving them different interpretations, and accepting them only on our own terms’: It will make a vast difference how much phrases like ‘the laws of God’, ‘Divine vocation’, and ‘God’s gifts to the world’ happen to mean to you. The full meaning is tremendous. But if they come to you like familiar quotations, as something which you need make no fresh effort to understand, they will probably be lost on you. (Eliot 1941: 524)

There is an elaborate defence here of the unfamiliar, of that which is not ‘our own’ in ‘our own terms’, which it is the rhetorical strategy of the radio broadcasts constantly to fend off. Contrary to the single voice of the sage, ‘familiar quotations’ need to be made strange by the recognition that other interpretations are always possible, especially if ‘fresh effort’ is involved to recognize them. Ultimately, from Eliot’s radio broadcasts seen as a whole, and not just in the selective fashion of Coyle and Avery, this countering multiplicity and recognition might seem to be taken from the lessons for culture which Eliot has himself learnt through literature. As cast in these talks, literature is itself a place for encounter of these multiple possibilities of recognition and escape from the familiar, which are otherwise emblematic of religious ‘living’ and ‘thinking’. In defending Charles Williams in 1946, one of the several writers in the later talks he sought to recoup from advancing neglect, Eliot claimed that the important thing was not ‘simply that Williams was a Christian writer’; many Christians might believe in ‘spiritual reality’ but not thereby gain ‘experience of it’. To read

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Williams is ‘to be brought face to face with what Williams saw’, that is to be given precisely that experience which otherwise might be lacked. In terms which once more resurrect the ideas of ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, Eliot seeks here to reach beyond the ‘broadcast’ words to ‘reality’, to engage in some other dramatic relation with an audience through the radio. He remains, sceptically again, aware that such connection might already, of its nature, be impossible, since ‘the capacity for realising the realities to which Williams was trying to draw our attention, is numbed and almost atrophied in the world in which we live today’ (Eliot 1946: 895). The quest for a language which might ‘realize’ ‘reality’, spiritual or otherwise, is, of course, a keynote of the spoken monologues of Eliot’s later poetry, from Ash-Wednesday (1930) onwards. It comes to be the predominant concern of Four Quartets; as the first in the sequence, Burnt Norton (1935) classically sees it, ‘Words move, music moves/Only in time; but that which is only living/Can only die’ (Eliot 1977: 194). Eliot’s contemporary ‘solution’ for such potential ‘ossification’ or death of language in the later Quartets, as explained in his radio debate ‘The Writer as Artist’ of 1940, is to promote the ‘continuous reciprocal influence of colloquial speech on writing, and of writing on colloquial speech’. This is because ‘Writers must take their language as they find it spoken … but their business is to help to make it a vehicle for civilized thought and feeling’ (Eliot 1940: 774). As previously signalled by my drawing on the broadcast ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, Eliot’s default preoccupation when considering literature on the radio seemed to be to think about voice, as though radio were the natural medium to do so. He talked about ‘The Voice of his Time: On Tennyson’s In Memoriam’ in 1942. ‘The Approach to James Joyce’ in 1943 is defined surprisingly via a comparison between the Irish writer and John Milton. Both being sensorydeprived men (like radio listeners in Eliot’s surprising view on Seneca) through their blindness, Joyce and Milton in compensation had ‘great musical gifts’ which led their later work to make ‘its strongest appeal to the ear, and … give you very little to see’: Joyce’s last work has to be read aloud, preferably by an Irish voice; and, as the one gramophone record which he made attests, no other voice could read it, not even another Irish voice, as well as Joyce could read it himself. This is a limitation which has made more slow the appreciation and enjoyment of his last book. (Eliot 1943: 446)

The spoken voice of James Joyce is essential to the signature of his later work, yet at the same time its relative absence of attestation limits the effectiveness of

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his writing. ‘Joyce himself ’ is at issue in this paradigm, Joyce as reader to the auditor’s ear of his writing. Interestingly, this implicates issues of nationality as well within its various frameworks – ‘an Irish voice [but] not even another Irish voice’. Voice determines a writer’s distinctiveness, but, when it is not heard via a complete set of gramophone records (or through radio broadcasts), it ‘limits’ writing’s effectiveness. This, in many senses, is what Eliot had been telling us since near the beginning of his career in radio, in that first phase, as Coyle describes it, when he spoke predominantly about the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries towards which he was particularly drawn. Speaking of a favoured poet in 1930, John Donne, Eliot had claimed that: Besides the choice of vocabulary Donne’s great inventiveness is shown in his choice and variation of metres; and we may say that in metric he hovers between the singing and the spoken word, in content between thought and feeling, and in vocabulary between the technical word and the dramatic speech … . (Eliot 1930: 552)

When, in the next year, Eliot explored for his audience the efficacy of John Dryden’s poetry and poetic drama, he saw the similarities with Donne: ‘What Dryden did, in fact, was to reform the language, and devise a natural, conversational style of speech in verse in place of an artificial and decadent one’ (Eliot 1931: 621). As late as 1941, when speaking about John Webster’s play ‘The Duchess of Malfy’ on the BBC Eastern Service, Eliot was rehearsing this issue of the relation between the individual voice and its dramatic potentiality. Once again reminding us of the qualities which Webster shared with Donne, qualities of metric as well as of ‘spiritual terror’, Eliot fended off any immediate implication in his analogy: In comparing Webster to a poet who was not a dramatist, I do not mean to suggest that the value of his writing lies in the poetry and not in the drama. His verse is essentially dramatic verse, written for the theatre by a man with a very acute sense of the theatre. (Eliot 1941a: 826)

Eliot’s statements about Early Modern verse and drama in his radio broadcasts from the early 1930s onwards alert us to that particular ‘hovering’, which he praises Donne for achieving, one which enables the spoken voice of the text to rest somewhere between colloquial speech and poetry, between poetry and drama. The implication of his own unpredictable framing and vocalization in his talks for the radio medium, his persistent anticipations and caveats, would

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be that such a facility is one towards which his speaking yearns, but which now, at this mechanized point in twentieth-century history, cannot consistently be sustained. Right at the end of his broadcast career, Eliot was still considering for his audience at home the precedents for his own poetry. Thinking about the poets of the 1890s, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson and John Davidson, he remarked that [F]rom these men I got the idea that one could write poetry in an English such as one would speak oneself. A colloquial idiom. There was a spoken rhythm in some of their poems. (Eliot 1961: 9)

Eliot’s broadcasts had embroiled him into re-contemplating the momentous complications involved in having to ‘speak oneself ’, complications which concurrently evolved in his religious and cultural thinking, but, most significantly, in the development of his poetry from the later 1920s, at the time of his initial BBC broadcasts, onwards. Eliot’s early poetry, most compellingly The Waste Land, had obsessed over ‘different voices’. From 1927, the year of the thoughts on Seneca and ‘broadcasted drama’, through to 1930, the year of the series of talks on seventeenth-century poetry, Eliot was working on AshWednesday, and beginning a set of rhetorical enquiries within the poetry itself, which would stretch through to the last of the Four Quartets, Little Gidding, as well as to his own poetic dramas. Section V of Ash-Wednesday is traumatized by the possibility that ‘the word’ might be ‘lost’; God’s ‘Word unheard’. ‘Where shall the word be found, where will the word/Resound?’ the voice of the poem asks. ‘Not here, there is not enough silence’ (Eliot 1977: 102). Eliot’s BBC work led him to ponder more eloquently and variously than elsewhere over both the kinds of listening involved, and the kinds of scattering, in speaking to the noise of the modern world. In this, radio both informed and brought home Eliot’s signature dilemmas of speaking and of putting words down.

Works cited Avery, T. (2006). Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938. Aldershot: Ashgate. Coyle, M. (2001). ‘T. S. Eliot on the Air: “Culture” and the Challenges of Mass Communication’, in T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. London: Macmillan.

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——— (2009). ‘ “We Speak to India”: T. S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers of Culture’, in Broadcasting Modernism, Ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewty. Garnesville: University of Florida Press. ——— (2011). ‘Radio’, in T. S. Eliot in Context, Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1930). ‘The Devotional Poets of the Seventeenth Century: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw’, The Listener, 3.63 (26 March). ——— (1931). ‘John Dryden I – ‘The Poet who Gave the English Speech’, The Listener, 5.118 (15 April). ——— (1932). ‘Christianity and Communism’. The Listener, 7.166 (16 March). ——— (1932a). ‘Building up the Christian World’. The Listener, 7.169 (6 April). ——— (1939). The Family Reunion. London: Faber. ——— (1940). ‘The Writer as Artist – A Discussion between T. S. Eliot and Desmond Hawkins’, The Listener, 24.620 (28 November). ——— (1941). ‘Towards a Christian Britain’, The Listener, 35.639 (10 April). ——— (1941a). ‘The Duchess of Malfy’, The Listener, 26.675 (18 December). ——— (1943). ‘The Approach to James Joyce’, The Listener, 30.770 (14 October). ——— (1946). ‘The Significance of Charles Williams’, The Listener, 36.936 (19 December). ——— (1957). On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber. ——— (1961). ‘Preface’, in John Davidson: A Selection of his Poems, Ed. Maurice Lindsay. London: Hutchinson (excerpt from original radio broadcast ‘Mankind Has Cast Me Out: A Centenary Tribute to John Davidson’ 7 April 1957). ——— (1972). Selected Essays. London: Faber. ——— (1976). Christianity and Culture. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc. ——— (1977). Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber. Matthews, S. (2013). T. S. Eliot & Early Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suárez, Juan A. (2001). ‘T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Gramophone, and the Modernist Discourse Network’, New Literary History, 32.3 (Summer 2001), pp. 747–768. Sugden, A. (1932). ‘Letter’, The Listener, 6.167 (23 March).

6

David Jones: Christian Modernism at the BBC Erik Tonning University of Bergen

In the BBC Written Archives there is an annotated memo dated 27 August 1953 that speaks volumes about the long-standing relationship between the poet and painter David Jones (1895–1974) and the Corporation.1 Its author is Douglas Cleverdon, a close friend and collaborator of Jones’s since 1927,2 who had joined the BBC West Region in 1939, moving to London in 1940. At the time of writing, Cleverdon had made his career as a distinguished Features producer who had, amongst much else, adapted both of Jones’s long and difficult modernist prosepoems In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952) for the radio. The former adaptation, first performed in 1946 and revived in 1948 (and again in 1955), and featuring Dylan Thomas in the leading role of Dai Greatcoat, was a recognized ‘radio classic’, ‘one of the finest achievements in radio technique that we have made in the Third Programme’.3 The memo is addressed to the Chief Assistant for the Third Programme, Christopher Holme, with whom, as we shall see, Jones had conducted an interesting correspondence in 1952. Cleverdon is asking Holme to approve a repeat on the Third of Jones’s recent talk for the Welsh Home Service called ‘Wales and the Crown’, originally broadcast on 23 July 1953. This talk was Jones’s first, and what had stirred him to write it and submit it as an unsolicited script4 was one of the defining broadcasting moments of post-war Britain, the coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. While he was clearly deeply moved by the sacramental rite that publicly invested the new monarch with the effective signs of kingship, this event also provoked a complex response from Jones on the uneasy unity of Welshness and Britishness, a lifelong preoccupation for this artist. In a handwritten note on the memo, Anna Kallin – a famously original and brilliant talks producer5 who was also friendly with Jones and corresponded with him over many years – comments that ‘I would

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certainly recommend [the repeat] – anything from D. J. is welcome – we never could get him and always wanted to. It explains a lot of “Anathemata” ’. And the talk was in fact repeated, on 29 November 1953. Finally, the memo contains a brief pencil note (simply asking Miss Kallin to advise on this matter) by the man who was both closest to Jones and also most powerful within the BBC hierarchy: Harman Grisewood, the Controller of the Third Programme from 1948 to 1952, and Director of the Spoken Word from 1952 to 1955 (after which he was made chief assistant to the director-general). Grisewood and Jones met in 1928, and Grisewood would remain a constant sounding-board for Jones’s developing artistic work, and for his reflections on the role of the artist within a modern civilization obsessed by technology and ‘the utile’. Grisewood is thanked profusely in the prefaces to both In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, and he would later edit Jones’s essay collections Epoch and Artist (1959) and The Dying Gaul (published posthumously, 1978). Grisewood, like Jones, was a committed Roman Catholic, and when he was in charge of the Third with Christopher Sykes as his second-in-command, there had been whispers of a ‘Catholic take over’ (Whitehead 1989: 27).6 In fact, Douglas Cleverdon retrospectively summarized both Grisewood’s Catholicism and his whole programming policy as being ‘instinctively in sympathy with David Jones’s (quoted in Whitehead 1989: 27).7 The surprising story told by this memo and surrounding archival sources is that the name of David Jones – now little-known outside a circle of scholars and enthusiasts – carried great prestige and significant influence within the BBC, even years before he himself began to contribute regularly to radio broadcasting. Of course, this prestige was due to more than his personal contacts within the BBC. Jones had received the Hawthornden prize for In Parenthesis in 1938, and the successful 1946 broadcast added to his reputation as a poet. He was involved in major exhibitions in 1948 and 1949, and in 1949 the first monograph (by Robin Ironside) on Jones’s distinguished artistic career appeared. The Anathemata was published in 1952 and adapted for radio in two separate versions, for the Third and the Welsh Home Service, in 1953. He was awarded a Civil List pension in 1954 and an OBE in 1955. And he was very active in the late 1940s and the early 1950s as a book reviewer and essayist, developing his original cultural and aesthetic theory.8 This essay will therefore begin by examining what use the BBC Third Programme producers might have made of Jones’s thought, and especially his cultural theory, to define the Third’s much-debated identity in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. What would a programming policy ‘in sympathy with David Jones’s actually entail? Conversely, it should be asked what Jones himself made

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of such a quintessentially modern medium as the radio, and later, television? Two snapshots of Jones’s engagement with broadcasting suggest some tentative answers here: first, three draft letters by Jones commenting in depth on the two distinct adaptations of The Anathemata, by Cleverdon and by Elwyn Evans; and second, a closer look at his first talk on ‘Wales and the Crown’ itself. On the evidence submitted here, Jones was strongly sympathetic to the high cultural aims of the post-war BBC: and he saw no essential conflict between his own distinctly Christian modernism9 and the self-consciously ‘civilising’ mission of the Third Programme in particular. And this itself is testimony to the unique combination of cultural experimentalism and tradition that characterized this period in British broadcasting. *** When Anna Kallin commented that ‘anything from D.J. is welcome – we never could get him and always wanted to’, she was not exaggerating. There had been attempts to solicit talks and readings from Jones at least since 1946,10 and this gentle pressure would continue all the way up to his last contribution in 1965 (a reading of his story ‘The Fatigue’). For example, on 20 January 1947, Kallin had written to Jones to invite him to contribute to a series of talks for the Third called ‘The Crisis’: ‘The idea of this programme is to have poets, writers, a musician and a painter speaking on the book or picture or work of art which produced a break in their lives’. Jones wrote back immediately (on 21 January) saying that the theme ‘might be very interesting indeed’ and that he recognized the relevance of such a crisis to his own work; however, he was unwell and would have to decline. Jones suffered from periodic depression and nervous breakdowns, which had recently been triggered again by hearing Cleverdon’s adaptation of In Parenthesis in November 1946. This ‘vivid externalisation of the horrors of trench warfare’ (Cleverdon 1972: 76) – in which he had taken part during World War I – led to an illness which he would not master until January 1948. Despite this devastating impact, though, Jones in no way took against the radio medium itself, and his friendly response did not discourage further attempts from the producers. Another was made in 1951, on Harman Grisewood’s prompting; Kallin sent Jones the script of a talk on Oswald Spengler – a substantial influence upon Jones – by Erich Heller, which was due to be broadcast on 21 June (Kallin’s letter is dated 19 June): ‘Harman thought that this script would interest you, and also told me (I’m too frightened to ask you myself) to ask you to give us a talk on the same subject [ … ] We expect that you will disagree with Heller

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about Spengler being wicked. Anyhow what we would adore to have from you is a talk’. There appears to be no record of Jones’s response here, but the reverent tone adopted by Kallin in this letter is interesting in that it is quite typical of approaches to Jones by BBC staff.11 In addition to persistent requests for talks, there were also definite schemes – again initiated by Grisewood – for employing Jones as a consultant on programming generally. A minor example of this is a letter from Kallin dated 20 June 1950: ‘Harman Grisewood told me that you spoke to him about a master of Russian, L. Walton, and Harman thought that he might be “Thirdworthy” ’. On the 23rd, Jones responded with some further information. More interestingly, however, around October 1952, Grisewood arranged to have some of Jones’s writings circulated to his colleagues, which resulted in an enthusiastic response. On 2 October, Christopher Holme sent round the following general memo: You will, I know, be interested in these ‘letters from David Jones’. It suggests to me two things which I would like to put forward: 1) that David Jones be invited to listen for a fortnight to the Third Programme talks output and then to come to a Monday meeting with us; and 2) that we try to persuade him himself to give a talk or talks.

Even before Holme had the chance to send off an official invitation, another member of the Talks Department, Leonie Cohn, had written to Jones (on 13 October) to express her enthusiasm and to send along some recent talk scripts that she felt could be of interest to Jones: I can hardly hope that you will remember me and I would not have presumed to approach you on the basis of such a slight acquaintance had it not been for the fact that Mr. Grisewood kindly allowed my colleagues and myself to see your letters about the dichotomy between ‘the arts’ and ‘life’, with special reference to broadcasting.

The official invitation by Holme was sent on 16 October: Harman Grisewood has shown me one or two of your fascinating letters about the modern world, and they have suggested to me that it would be very interesting to all of our Talks Producers if you would care to come to one of our Monday meetings and talk to us in the general context of our Third Programme output. Perhaps a good preparation for such a meeting would be if you could listen for a fortnight to our talks output. We have thought it a sound plan from time to time to set aside one of our talks meetings for the critical discussion of talks recently broadcast and a review of policy, and have found that we are

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greatly helped in this by hearing the views of someone who knows our work but who himself is outside it. If you felt that you could be such a person we should like to offer you a consultant’s fee, say, of twenty guineas.

Jones’s response (dated 22 October) was again friendly, but negative: It is very good of you to be interested in the few comments I made in these letters – the whole business of the arts in our world is naturally a thing about which I’ve had to think a good bit – as indeed I suppose in different ways most of us have – I don’t think I have anything constructive to say much – but I’m jolly interested in any data coming from any source which seeks to define the problems of some one particular art, thereby throwing light on the problem of the arts in general in our set-up. Of course, it’s an inexhaustible subject but it’s also of inexhaustible interest. I wish I could be, in some limited capacity, of some use to your discussion-groups in the way you have been good enough to suggest, but, at least, at the moment, I can’t manage it, because, as I say, I’m not well.

Holme’s reply on 28 October expresses the hope that this is only a temporary postponement, but it was not to be. In the light of all these past exchanges, the programmers’ enthusiasm over having received something so exceptional as the unsolicited script of ‘Wales and the Crown’ is more than understandable. What, though, did these ‘letters about the dichotomy between “the arts” and “life”, with special reference to broadcasting’ – or ‘letters about the modern world’ – actually contain? Needless to say, answering this question would help focus any discussion of Jones’s possible influence upon policy debates within the Third Programme. Unfortunately, the record is scanty here, and to my knowledge the only item that is clearly identifiable from these descriptions is an incomplete manuscript draft of an undated letter to The Listener, deposited with Jones’s papers in the National Library of Wales. Here, then, is a transcription of the bulk of these drafts: Sir, The correspondence which has appeared in The Listener under the above heading12 has indicated how necessary it is [ … ] to consider [ … ] the civilizational phase in which we now live. We should not then [ … ] blame those whose aesthetic opinions we do not like when our trouble lies in the dichotomies which are inseparable from our civilisation itself. One might as well blame chorus-girls, sheep-farmers and marine-engineers as blame artists, art-critics and directors of galleries for the ‘divorce’ between ‘the arts’ and ‘life’ which necessarily characterises our mass-civilisation. We are all in the same boat as far as the situation is concerned. [ … ] If we are by profession ‘artists’ we have no alternative but to make our works, according to such aesthetic

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perceptions and endowments as may have been granted to us, within this situation of diverse theories, of mutually contradictory tendencies, of emerging awarenesses, of fragmented and vestigial ‘traditions’ that fuse, or separate out, in our mechanistic, technological, [ … ] and extremely ‘Alexandrian’ epoch megalopolis. 2 reflection is of no immediate relevance to us, as artists, for we have, willynilly, to pursue our quarry here and now and not in a posited new young-time with its presumed new integrations, tabors, canons, orientations, simplicities, barbarities, myth-patterns and possible splendours. In any case we can know nothing of the shape of the future nor which way the cat may jump. We are far removed also from those past phases when a common culture-tradition informed, nourished and determined the entire art-forms of whole societies. On the contrary it happens to be our lot, as artists, to be occupied with an art that is largely fragmentary, ecletic, exploratory and tentative. At least, these are some of the qualities most to be expected of us. Further, we work, for the most part, as separate individuals. It is inevitable to such a situation that there should be much that is merely experimental, a good deal that is quite ephemeral and that pastiches and crazes of various sorts should not be lacking. But if then in this jeremiad – and one could add to these reproaches – there is also this evangel: From within this same situation there has been a stirring and a vivification of the plastic arts analogous to that which has invigorated the art of poetry. There has been much that is sensitive, a good deal that is genuinely creative and there have not been wanting works of real greatness. These divergent but interrelated trends, awarenesses & things accomplished in a number of quite separate arts are not to be accounted for by a supposed connivance between coteries and interested parties. The astringency and punch of Pound and Wyndham Lewis from 1914 and onwards, the moving serenities of Ben Nicholson’s abstractions of to-day, the terse forms of the harbinger, GM Hopkins of 1880, the various feats of Picasso, the spell-binding and terminal achievement of Joyce … You may detest it all, but you cannot explain it away. [END OF PAGE] we have to make our works here and now and not in some posited new ‘young-time’ with its [ … ] possible new integrations, its own taboos, canons, ‘inscape’ and feeling … We may know a nostalgia for such culture phases, such as the world has from time to time experienced but we are not of such a time. We are far removed from those phases when a common culture-tradition determined and nourished the art-forms of whole societies. We, willy-nilly, have to pursue what sensitivities we may possess, as individual persons, isolated, for the most part, from our fellow practitioners and almost wholly isolated from our

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contemporaries in other walks of life. It is inevitable that such a situation should be characterised by various sophistications, specialisations, the pursuit of some one perfection at the expense of others [ … ] and the a concern for much that is ephemeral & experimental. All this, is determined by our ‘Alexandrian’ situation. A situation for which [ … ] the artists & art critics are no more responsible than is the BBC for the Crimean War.

Of course, both Cohn and Holme speak of several letters, and these could be letters either from Jones to other journals or to Grisewood himself, but the others cannot be positively identified. The above letter must presumably have been circulated to BBC staff in a more complete version, though it was never in fact published in The Listener. Although there is an intriguing reference to the BBC in the draft, it is perhaps too undeveloped (at least in this version) to fit Miss Cohn’s talk of a ‘special reference to broadcasting’; however, the explicit mention of ‘dichotomies’ and a divorce between the arts and life seem to establish that the above is indeed a draft of one of the letters to which she (and thus also Holme) refers. Before approaching this letter directly, a few background notes about Jones’s cultural theory and its intellectual context may be helpful. His thought centres on the essential nature of man-as-maker or artist. Human poesis or form-making is sharply distinguished from the strictly utilitarian making of the animals by containing an element of the gratuitous, and by including the making of signs: If we could catch the beaver placing never so small a twig gratuitously we could make his dam into a font, he would be patient of baptism – the whole ‘signworld’ would be open to him, he would know ‘sacrament’ and would have a true culture, for a culture is nothing but a sign, and the anathemata of a culture, the ‘things set up’, can only be set up to the gods. (Jones 1959: 88)

The theological orientation of this is obvious, and Jones’s attraction to the Catholic faith was grounded in the dignity and seriousness attributed to signmaking in the liturgy and sacramental tradition of that church. An important phrase for Jones derives from the French theologian and liturgist Maurice de la Taille’s book The Mystery of Faith (1934): ‘He placed Himself in the order of signs’ (quoted in Jones 1959: 179). Christ makes use of bread and wine, the work of human hands, and of the words and gestures of the priest, to make his body and blood present upon the altar: ‘Something has to be made by us before it can become for us his sign who made us. This point he settled in the upper room. No artefacture no Christian religion’ (Jones 1959: 127). Both the professional artist and the priest therefore depend on the universally human faculty of signmaking: ‘Art is the distinguishing dignity of man and it is by art he becomes

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dignified’, and it is ‘the right of man to exercise his distinctive function as man, i.e. as artist – as culture-making animal’ (Jones 1959: 89). However, for Jones, modern civilization in its emphasis on mere technology and utilitarian efficacy on every level of thought and practice has grown increasingly inhuman, to the point where ‘the utile is all [man] knows and his works take on something of the nature of the works of the termites’; indeed, ‘nothing could surpass the “eccentricity” of the “normal” life and works of megalopolitan man today – and tomorrow’ (Jones 1959: 95). This is not a situation that any individual artist has the power to change, yet authentic art here necessarily becomes a contradiction, a fifth-column, within that civilization, and here it shares the honours of sabotage with the tradition of religion, for both are disruptive forces, both own allegiance to values in any event irritant, and easily becoming toxic to those values which of necessity dominate the present world-orders. (Jones 1959: 100)

Jones’s own experimental modernist art – in both painting and poetry – is an art of the conglomerate and the palimpsest, where a variety of past and present cultural ‘deposits’ jostle for space. The very act of setting up a new ‘thing’ out of the fragments of previously efficacious signs thus becomes for him an act both of sabotage and of worship. Jones’s draft letter to The Listener was in all probability directed at a letter signed Sylvia Sprigge and published there on 7 February 1952 under the heading ‘Non-representational Art’.13 Sprigge’s letter criticizes a positive review (25 January 1952) of an exhibition of William Hayter’s abstract painting – which she has not seen – with shameless philistine aplomb. She accuses abstract-artistsin-general of an unhealthy preoccupation with undigested, transient ‘moods’. These are purveyed by dreadful ‘palimpsestic doodles’ quickly and incoherently done, which reveal only the artist’s egocentrism, and which no artist would have dared sell in the Renaissance or even in the nineteenth century. The only reason why they can now ride roughshod over the sensibilities of the ordinary viewer (which ‘have not really changed so very much down the ages’) is due to the influence of fashionable but insular coteries of collectors, art-critics and fellow non-representationalists. Jones’s response then argues that this whole view rests on a misunderstanding of modern ‘mass-civilisation’, described as a ‘mechanistic, technological, and extremely “Alexandrian” megalopolis’. The term ‘Alexandrian’ here refers to Oswald Spengler’s critique in The Decline of the West: We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200.

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There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of ‘the new style’, of ‘unsuspected possibilities’, theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists [ … ]. (Spengler 1926: 294)

Sprigge has aligned herself unknowingly with Spengler on the precise point where Jones took strong issue with the German: in his marginal annotation of this passage in Spengler (dating from c. 1942), Jones claims that ‘it is a foolish mistake and lack of understanding not to admit the real vitality of some painting in the last 50 years [ … ] “Contemporary” painting has produced some quite “new” beauties which could only belong to this particular “late” stage’.14 For Jones, as we have seen, the modern world itself is profoundly at odds with the fundamental nature of man-as-maker: and no single artist or ‘coterie’ could be to blame for this discrepancy. The artist working within this civilization cannot draw on an integrated ‘common culture-tradition’ such as existed in certain past societies; nor can he or she work as if some future cultural ‘young-time’ were already in place. The authentic artist here works alone and experimentally, striving heroically against the current of a technocratic ‘masscivilisation’; and much is necessarily produced that is merely ephemeral. Yet from this ‘jerimiad’ there emerges an ‘evangel’: a modernist ‘vivification’ in the plastic arts and literature which Jones recalls by mentioning the names of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, the ‘harbinger’ Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pablo Picasso and James Joyce, whose achievements the likes of Sprigge may ‘detest’, but not explain away. This list contains only one practising Christian, and it is obvious that Jones’s ‘Christian modernism’ allows for a strongly positive valuation of artists who were by no means believers: for their work could still function as a revitalizing antidote to the mainstream products of a mass civilization.15 As Harman Grisewood points out in his memoir, One Thing at a Time, this mode of thinking was a fresh departure for many English Catholics interested in the arts in the 1930s: ‘The proper end of anything is something good’, St. Thomas had written. The art works of Cocteau, of James Joyce, of the post-impressionists in France and of Ben Nicholson and David Jones in England seemed to us to have realised their ‘proper end’; since the expressions of good are related in the celestial order, there should in the terrestrial order be no estrangement. [ … ] The generation of Catholics a little older than mine tended to distrust such ideas because of their aesthetic implications. [Jacques] Maritain in France – Eric Gill and David Jones in England – were concerned to assert an autonomy for art, whereas the Catholic world around us tended to judge all art works according to their conformity with Christian precept. We did not accept the distinction between sacred and

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profane. We did not believe that the art of Salvator Rosa was ‘religious’ because he painted so many pious Madonnas and the art of Renoir was not because he painted none. [ … ] We were concerned then with an inclusive civilisation. (Grisewood 1968: 80)

There is no doubt that Grisewood carried these avant-garde Catholic ideas directly into his role as Controller of the Third Programme. As Humphrey Carpenter has shown, Grisewood consistently favoured ‘quality’ over ‘popularisation’, and the context of Jonesian ‘Christian modernism’ is clearly behind statements such as the following: What is at stake is something fundamental to our civilisation. It is what I call the principle of refinement … the attempt at perfection in the Christian sense … If such an enterprise as the Third Programme cannot flourish in our society … such a rejection would in my opinion be likely to include the whole tradition of refinement and much else that is taken to be essential to civilisation as Europe has understood it. (quoted in Carpenter 1996: 97)16

The criticism consistently levelled at the Third was, as Carpenter points out, that of promoting an irrelevant elitism; typical here is an Evening Standard leading article from March 1949, a few months before Grisewood’s forceful address just quoted. The heading screamed ‘PRETENTIOUS CULTURE: NO WONDER THE “THIRD” AUDIENCE DWINDLES’, and the article registered exasperation at, amongst other things, ‘some selections by the Modern Imagist Poets, including the notorious Ezra Pound. It seems rather that the obscure is preferred to the intelligible; the esoteric to the beautiful; the peculiar to the classical. Who listens to this spawn of the musical coteries and the literary bunfights?’ (quoted in Carpenter 1996: 95). The terms of ‘the Standard versus Grisewood’ would be fairly closely replayed in ‘Sprigge versus Jones’ three years later: no wonder, then, that Grisewood circulated Jones’s writings to his colleagues. To account for their apparent collective enthusiasm, though, it seems necessary to at least speculate on what Leonie Cohn called Jones’s ‘special reference to broadcasting’ in his letters. Jones’s whole argument offers a sophisticated antidote to the growing criticism of the BBC, and especially the Third Programme, as elitist, pretentious and out of touch with the modern world and its own audience. Any mere counter-accusation of philistinism was clearly too simplistic and would only harden the fronts in the long run. By contrast, Jones’s – profoundly modernist – idea that modern civilization had now changed in such unprecedented fashion that confrontation with this situation was inevitable for authentic art subtly reverses the terms of the debate. Being out of touch has suddenly come to mean being (like Sprigge and the

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Standard) unaware of what has happened. Jones’s perspective seems to suggest a set of delicate balances to be maintained by serious broadcasting. First, the transmission of cultural tradition without indulging in mere nostalgia for the unrecapturable past. Second, persistent attention to contemporary arts, including the difficult and the experimental. And third, a conscious effort to unify and even revitalize an increasingly fragmented culture in need of an ‘evangel’ to point, however tentatively, towards some new ‘young-time’. Jones’s consultant role, then, was intended to help the Third Programme maintain that balance by scrutinizing their actual output. Finally, if we recall Jones’s comment on the BBC being no more responsible for the present ‘Alexandrian’ state of culture than for the Crimean war, we begin to glimpse the full attraction of Jones’s view for Grisewood and his colleagues. For, at least in outline, this analogy connects the whole act of maintaining the difficult balance just described to another pillar of the BBC’s self-understanding, fortified by the recent war: namely, accurate and impartial reporting. Far from pandering to closed coteries, therefore, the Third Programme on this reading was performing a vital and irreplaceable service to the nation as a whole by, as it were, reporting the cultural facts on the ground. *** Given this strong interest in Jones’s views from within the BBC, any direct comments by Jones himself on broadcasting would of course be helpful in elucidating his relationship to the Corporation and to the medium itself. These are in fact somewhat few and far between; but the following three draft letters to Denis Tegetmeier and Elwyn Evans, about two recent adaptations of Anathemata, do provide a basis for further discussion. To Tegetmeier, 9 May 1953, about Cleverdon’s adaptation of the whole poem: I liked some parts of it, but could not abide other parts of it. I liked best the Welsh women in the part before the end called Mabinog’s Liturgy. That was said almost exactly as I intended it to be said. And Dylan Thomas said all his bits absolutely O.K. In that section the speakers preserved the poetry, & you could feel the shape of the words & sentences. But in some of the earlier parts I could not stand the exaggerated shouting & stage cockney & the excited speed. Particularly I found the Redriff part quite awful in this respect. The girl who did The Lady of the Pool was not so bad in places where she was quiet & natural but I loathed it when she got coy. I think they all tried to do their very best, & Douglas C. worked tremendously hard to get what he had in mind. He’s a remarkable chap, & spares no effort. But it’s terribly hard to make people understand that, in poetry, the words themselves & their arrangement & juxtaposition are sufficient

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to give the required feeling without histrionics and exaggerated emphases. I know it was a terribly hard thing to attempt in dramatized form and I knew that the author is bound to get a shock over the interpretation. [ … ] The music I thought sounded most beautiful, as perfect as could be. I chose the things I wanted sung – which was quite a business to find the right bits for the right parts – but I think they did that superbly. That Agios O Theos to Palestrina: setting is a real knock out. And I thought the priest chanting the Preface for Corpus Xti at the beginning was terribly well done. It was nice hearing that Preface loud & clear on the wireless, I must say. What glorious stuff the chant is. There is no music like it in the world.

To Elwyn Evans, dated 9 June 1953, after hearing the quite separate adaptation of the ‘Mabinog’s Liturgy’ section of Anathemata by Evans for the Welsh Regional Service: Hearing this broadcast of this part of Ana. [by Evans] and also hearing the adaptation of the whole [by Cleverdon] has made me cogitate a good deal on the problems attending the broadcasting of longish works of, so to say, poetry. [ … ] As I see it, the main difference of approach to rendering a work must be whether one conceives it as a straight reading or whether one conceives it as a dramatized performance. Nevertheless, in the case of the radio the two very separate conceptions tend to merge into each other. [ … ] In a dramatized version a number of contradictory factors come in. Certain auxiliary techniques deriving from the Stage are employed which sometimes aid and sometimes damage the ‘poetry’. It is then rather a matter of balancing a number of techniques to obtain a desired effect. [ … ] Here the problem of a single voice, or of several, or many, voices comes in. In a work that is written as a play where all the lines are allotted to respective characters this problem does not, of course, arise. But in a work which is written as a continuous narrative here & there fully dramatic in character, in other places less dramatic, & elsewhere not dramatic at all, yet without any clear demarcations between these disparate elements, the problem of presentation does become much more tricky. Whenever I have listened to anything of this nature on the radio I have always found myself, almost unconsciously, considering whether or no the form, the feeling, the intention of the work was being aided or marred by the employment of several voices

From a second draft letter to Evans, dated 13 June 1953 (like the others probably not sent): I still adhere to my personal obsession which I mentioned in conversation: that in reading works of this nature I think the fewer voices the better. [ … ] My reason for thinking this is that when one person is reading one a fairly lengthy passage one gets accustomed to the mean tonality & average inflection of that voice,

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this provides a, so to say, criterion by which to measure the more pronounced emphases & inflections & thus the formal unity of the poetry is better preserved. When a new voice breaks in one has to readjust one’s ears to a new tempo and one is not sure whether the new inflections, emphases, etc, are because of the actual demands of the feeling of the text or whether they are accidental to that new voice. [ … ] However, I’m in no sense competent to judge concerning the problems of radio production. I merely offer one opinion as to the snags that seem to me, as an occasional listener, to be implicit when many voices are employed in the rendering of works not written as plays. I don’t necessarily imply that one voice should be employed throughout. I feel only that the fewer the better as far as getting the unbroken unity of the form is concerned. [ … ] To leave these considerations of works in general & to return to a brief comment on this stuff of mine. The difficulty with Ana. & such like works is that they are strictly ‘narrations’ throughout, though long passages take on the character of spoken drama & other passages are more or less dramatic in disposition, other passages are not dramatic at all. Further these disparate elements come & go & rise up & fade out without any clear demarcation. So that the question of how best to present such works is very tricky. The changing feeling & character of the work is held together only by the form of the ‘poetry’ – so that the employment of a variety of voices as though representing ‘characters’ in a play does become a very different problem, much more easy to create effectively in some passages than in others. But just as I think (& indeed know) that my ‘method’ of unity is of necessity in the nature of an experiment, so I think the reading of it must be regarded as largely experimental. It was partly for this reason that I welcomed the chance of hearing part of Ana. rendered by two quite different sets of readers each with their own conceptions of how best to present it. As I have already said I found a great deal to like in your ‘experiment’, as indeed I did with D.C.’s ‘experiment’. The latter rendering was definitely a, so to say, dramatized adaptation, drawing upon a number of techniques (as music, etc.) to convey to the listener the general import of the several phases of the whole work, and I think it was most skilfully done and there is evidence that it did help a number of people, to whom the book itself was a closed book, to gain a lively impression of the themes. It may also have been instrumental in causing some listeners to have a shot at reading the actual work. Your rendering of that selected passage, was, on the other hand, in the nature of a straight reading and I very much welcomed the experiment as such. Without any prejudice toward a dramatized conception, which indeed offers various possibilities & subtleties of development & which have its own particular virtue & character & method of interpretation, it remains true that, in the case of Ana. the essential form of the work is that of a recited narrative, without any deletions.

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Jones’s reflections here largely speak for themselves, but one or two general observations can be made. Clearly, Jones’s direct involvement with production and ‘broadcasting technique’ was limited: his selection of music for Cleverdon’s adaptation notwithstanding, he mostly left his friend to get on with things. He was thus willing to give over his works to the ‘experimentation’ of others, even if this meant suffering the effects of occasional histrionic overemphasis or the confusion of multiple voices. This is by no means a self-evident attitude. Samuel Beckett, for instance, would never allow any ‘dramatisation’ of his prose or poetry, and even straight readings were only reluctantly granted; whereas, when he actually wrote for the radio, he specified every single sound, and thematized explicitly the very particularities of the medium – somewhere between pure voice and embodied theatre – that troubled Jones. Unlike Beckett, Jones clearly felt that the presentation of his own experimental modernist works to a wider audience justified at least some concessions, and the question he circles around is what kinds of necessarily experimental broadcasting methods stand the best chance of conveying at least a flavour of those works: so that even listeners for whom his book had been a closed one might be tempted to open it after all. His comment to Tegetmeier about the special pleasure of hearing an otherwise rarely available performance of the chant Preface for Corpus Christi ‘loud and clear on the wireless’ seems to represent an ideal here17: Jones valued the radio precisely for its ability to provide such experiences, both of traditional work and of the more explicitly ‘fifth-columnist’ modernist kind. In his statement to the Bollingen foundation in 1959, Jones wrote that in our present megalopolitan technocracy the artist must still remain a ‘rememberer’ (part of the official bardic function in earlier phases of society). But in the totally changed and rapidly changing circumstances of today this ancient function takes on a peculiar significance. For now the artist becomes, willy-nilly, a sort of Boethius, who has been nicknamed ‘the Bridge’, because he carried forward into an altogether metamorphosed world certain of the fading oracles which had sustained antiquity. (Jones 1978b: 11)

In order for Jones’s own work to act as ‘some sort of single plank in some sort of bridge’ (11) to the future, his books had to be known; even if that involved a degree of popularization through the quintessentially modern mass medium of broadcasting. This brings us back to the theory of culture from a new angle: that of the audience for broadcasting. If serious broadcasting were to fulfil its lofty aim of revitalizing modern culture, what precisely was its audience expected to do? In an interesting chapter of his pamphlet Broadcasting and Society: Comments from

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a Christian Standpoint (1949), entitled ‘Society’s Responsibility for Broadcasting’, Jones’s friend Grisewood analysed the ‘danger’ that through ‘habitual listening to the wireless the “real” world from which the wireless programmes are drawn is apt to recede’ (Grisewood 1949: 77): The danger is that this multifarious world which supplies broadcasting should become impoverished. If the quality of the wireless programme is high it is so because the standard is high in the various activities upon which the programmes draw. [ … ] The danger is that by the ease and comfort of participating in these activities through the wireless we should be beguiled into forgetting that they exist only by our own active engagement in them. What we must avoid is the sterile and absurd conception of a society that consists on the one hand of the BBC and of the other of a nation of listeners to the BBC programmes. The responsibility indicated here is not so much to broadcasting but to the activities upon which broadcasting and indeed the vigour of society itself depends. In this danger there is, too, a threat to the invigorating diversity which should characterise society. The danger is that the broadcast item because of its enormously wide distribution should assume an inordinate importance in relation to the activity it represents. (Grisewood 1949: 77–78)

And the remedy? ‘The true safeguard lies in the vigour of society itself, which will receive broadcasting as a stimulus to its own creativity and not as a substitute for it’ (Grisewood 1949: 80; my italics). Given Jones’s passionate attachment, at least since his time with Eric Gill’s guild-like artistic communities in Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin in the 1920s, to the supreme value of craftsmanship and individual creativity, this is hardly a point on which he would have disagreed with Grisewood. An audience that treated even genuinely challenging artistic experiences as just one more indifferent or mildly entertaining stimulus, masticated into a common pulp by the culture industry, would be the stuff of nightmares for Jones. It can safely be assumed that Jones worried so meticulously over the dramatization of his work not least because he saw the value of engaging an audience that could receive these experimental broadcast versions as a creative stimulus for cultural renewal. And it is in this light, too, that we should read his first broadcast talk, written shortly after the letters to Tegetmeier and Evans above, in the wake of the towering broadcast moment of the immediate post-war era: the coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. *** The coronation was an event that moved Jones profoundly, as is clear from a letter to The Tablet published 18 July 1953, where he takes issue with the

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dismissal by Fr Crehan, a Catholic theologian, of any ‘sacramental’ character in the present English Coronation Rite. Jones notes that one may well grant (as was already done before the Reformation) the non-clerical character of the monarch. But then, what is the precise nature of the ‘laic’ character of the person on whom the visible signs of the concept of the Monarchy of Britain is publicly conferred? Is this not still ‘sacramental’ in a less narrow sense – conferring some form of ‘sacredness’? For ritual strippings, anointings, the putting on of significant garments, the conveyance of rods and rings and such like cannot be done without giving a very positive impression. [ … ] And here the signs would seem to warrant some actual otherness, some setting apart, some making over to divine use, some placing in the state of a victim. All of this was unexpectedly made much more apparent by the actual sight of these rites. What emerged with surprising vividness was the dedicated and sacred figure of immemorial tradition. The impression of regal splendour, let alone of mere pomp, was altogether eclipsed by something far deeper, more primal, and quite ageless. The impression was of something sacrificial. A person appeared to have been ‘made sacra’. (Jones 1959: 49–50)

Jones’s emphasis on ‘impression’, ‘appearance’ and ‘actual sight’ here registers the impact of the superbly orchestrated television broadcast. Jones, like so many others, was struck by the ‘majestic drama of the Coronation’ in which, Asa Briggs writes, ‘the television cameras were inside the Abbey for the first time and the public, if still a limited one, could feel that it was participating instead of watching. New meaning was given to an ancient rubric as the young Queen was the first monarch to be crowned “in the sight of all the people” ’ (Briggs 2005: 420). Here, then, was a supreme example of the new technology of television broadcasting making available and reinvigorating ‘immemorial tradition’. Jones was strongly supportive of the monarchy, and one might perhaps have expected his radio talk simply to stress the national unity suggested by this moment – and the continued validity of sacramental symbolism as an antidote to technocracy. However, his letter also contains a note of scepticism; his ‘impression’ may, he writes, after all have been merely a subjective one, and he has little time for ‘mere pomp’, or ceremony-as-entertainment. His talk would in fact respond much more obliquely and ambiguously, by interrogating this very event that had made such an impression on him by way of one of his own chief creative sources: Welshness. The opening of Jones’s talk recalls a defining episode in Welsh history: the death of Llywelyn, the ‘last ruler’ of Wales in December 1282, at the hands of King Edward I’s army, in Buellt wood on the border of England and Wales. Jones

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tells how on his pierced body there was found a relic of the so-called Cross of Refuge; a reminder, for Jones, of the ‘Tree of the Cross as the axial beam around which all things move’ (Jones 1959: 39) – a point to which we shall return. All this is, to put it mildly, a complex starting point for celebrating the recent coronation: But it may be asked why, on a joyful occasion when the unity of the Island is supposed to be our theme, I should deliberately recall an event of long ago which was far from joyful and which is sharply remindful of disunity and otherness. (Jones 1959: 40)

The answer is that ‘unity’ in this case is nothing simple, and one of the things that the concept of the Monarchy of Britain must somehow contain is the whole complex history of Wales. The reason why one can speak of ‘Wales and the Crown’ at all is because of the ‘remarkable continuance of a Welsh pattern of life after independence’ (Jones 1959: 42), an impossibility had the Age of Princes (culminating in Llywelyn) not lasted as long as it did. Aspects of the Welsh past – Celtic, Roman, Christian – are lovingly recalled by Jones, but here we can only attend to his overall conclusion (which invokes Gerard Manley Hopkins): A great confluity and dapple, things counter, pied, fragmented, twisted, lost: that is indeed the shape of things all over Britain, but Wales has her own double-dapple. [ … ] It follows that if we would understand the worth of what is comprehended under the concept, the Monarchy of Britain, we must first grasp the nature of the several haecceities or this-nesses of the several peoples of this Island. [ … ] Who would re-present this Island must be clothed in a mantle of variety. (Jones 1959: 46–47)

In the Coronation Rite itself, the act of consecration was followed by acts of fealty: and Jones is finally asking, on what terms can I, a Welsh-English artist, offer such fealty? This is further complicated by his Roman Catholicism, and the old, painful question of the ultimate loyalties of a ‘papist’ is not far from the surface of these reflections. What Jones’s attempt at sorting out and directing his loyalties amounts to is a difficult, implicit analogy between a priest offering the various prayers and intentions of the congregation on their behalf at the Sacrifice of the Mass – and the person of the Queen as it were gathering up the complex fealty of her subjects and offering up the Monarchy of Britain, ‘So help me God’. Again the link is sign-making, and the validation of sign-making for Jones derives from He who ‘placed Himself in the order of signs’. Consideration of the Monarch of Britain thus leads back to the Cross: Jones cites a monastic motto to the effect that the Cross stands still while the world revolves around it, and Jones’s subject here is nothing less than the ‘world-dance which has for

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its maypole the gleaming Tree on which the world-ransom was weighed’ (Jones 1959: 39). To join in this world-dance is to be broken, dismantled, to suffer disunity; but also to enact a pattern and a unity yet to be revealed. Jones’s creative response to the Coronation here becomes a model and a challenge to the broadcasting audience. It is a model of how to actively re-engage with the complex ‘reality’ re-presented through broadcasting – in Grisewood’s terms, with those very ‘activities upon which broadcasting and indeed the vigour of society itself depends’. In this case, that involves a double challenge for the audience. How do you, against all kinds of dappled and fragmented backgrounds, propose to offer your fealty? And, what is your own relationship to the whole sign-world invoked in doing so? Here, then, is ‘society’s responsibility for broadcasting’ amplified to a pitch. That is not to say that Jones was any less aware than Grisewood of the many ‘dangers’ attendant on such a major broadcast moment. We have seen his concern with the danger of reducing something of ageless significance to ‘mere pomp’; and, more generally, that of asserting a unity that is too easy and superficial, requiring no difficult and living fealty. Jones well knew that his own attitudes here were out of fashion, and in a letter to Anna Kallin a few years later (26 February 1957), he recorded his frustration at the negative reaction to the recent readings on the Third Programme of Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’, another impressive broadcasting moment for Jones: Lord! how right you are about the amount of philistinism there is – and it crops up most unexpectedly [ … ] it might be said to be the chief work of ‘neoElizabethan’ England – and it’s very elusive in many of its manifestations. [ … ] I certainly feel the rendering of Piers Plowman is a real event. At last a lot of us can hear what that wonderful poem should sound like.

The idea of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’ was much touted around the time of the Coronation, and Jones’s slightly bitter jab here surely registers a frustration at the continuing mismatch between inflated rhetoric and cultural reality, which his 1953 talk had been carefully designed to counteract. Nonetheless, he clearly sees the BBC, and the Third Programme in particular, as being very much on the right side of the cultural battlefield, and he goes on to tell Kallin of a letter he has written to The Times defending the ‘Piers Plowman’ broadcast. This was eventually published in The Listener instead (4 April 1957), and the conclusion demonstrates beyond any commentary what this paper has tried to establish: the mutually productive and reciprocal influence of David Jones and the BBC:

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In one passage Langland wrote: … and Rose the dissheres, Godfrey of garlekehithe, and gryfin the walshe And upholderes an hepe … and in saying Deo gratias for these Third Programme broadcasts I speak as one having some consanguinity with ‘gryfin the walshe’, and I do very much hope that the English Roses, Godfreys, and upholsterers among listeners and among your readers are saying Deo gratias too. Certainly they should be; for if ever there was a work that could be rightly described (along with the embroideries) as opus anglicum it is this work done when, as the simple statement reads, ‘William Langland made pers plowman’. Though no work could be more belonging to this island, or be more rooted in a given locality and its people, yet, at the same time, no work could be more dependent on something other: the religion-culture, without which the poem could not, conceptually, have been. Not only the poet’s ‘maistres and doctours’ but everything within his purview is, in some sense, ‘under criste and crounyng in tokne’. Professor George Keane’s broadcast entitled ‘The Symbol of Piers’ should be mentioned as contributing to a further understanding of the work within its context. I would conclude by again paying tribute to the Third Programme for giving us a fresh glimpse of this crucial, but somewhat obscured, bit of our heritage.

Acknowledgements Special thanks are due to David Addyman, Archival Research Fellow for the ‘Modernism and Christianity’ research project at the University of Bergen, for procuring digital photographs of essential archive materials drawn upon in this text. Quotations from Jones’s works are reproduced by kind permission of the trustees of the Jones Estate. Thanks also to the BBC Written Archives, Caversham, UK, and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, for permission to quote archival documents.

Notes 1 All archival documents mentioned in this article are listed in the ‘Archives’ section of the Bibliography. 2 They first collaborated on an edition of S. T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (see Alldritt 2003: 65).

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3 George Barnes, Controller of the Third Programme, quoted in Whitehead (1989: 120). See also Douglas Cleverdon’s essay ‘David Jones and Broadcasting’, quoting Richard Burton’s opinion that performing the climax of this radio play was one of the high points of his acting career (Cleverdon 1972: 77). 4 A memo from ‘Head of Welsh Programmes’ to ‘Controller Third Programme’, 4 August 1953 notes that the Welsh Home Service had been delighted to receive the talk unsolicited. 5 See Carpenter (1996: 66) for an account of Kallin. 6 See Whitehead (1989: 27). 7 Douglas Cleverdon, quoted in Whitehead (1989: 27). 8 See Alldritt (2003: 135–168) for details on Jones’s post-war achievements. 9 For a more detailed discussion of Jones as a ‘Christian modernist’, see Chapter 2 in my monograph Modernism and Christianity (Tonning 2014). 10 Douglas Cleverdon did manage to get a very short expansion of his original ‘Preface’ to In Parenthesis out of him in 1946, for broadcasting use. This was Jones’s first appearance on the air. See Cleverdon (1972: 75–76) for this text. 11 See for instance the memo from Leonie Cohn to ‘D. S. W.’ dated 25 March, 1954: ‘Not without trepidation and quite against all hope, I have suggested David Jones as reviewer of “The Voices of Silence” by Malraux’. It should be emphasized that Jones’s influence within the Third was not restricted to his friendship with Grisewood and Cleverdon (and later Kallin): the archives suggest that he was something of a household name for the programmers at large. 12 The heading is not specified in these drafts, but it was most likely ‘Nonrepresentational Art’ (see below). 13 My thanks to David Addyman for bringing this letter to my attention. 14 Jones’s marginalia (found in his edition of Spengler 1926: 293) is quoted in Staudt (1994: 123). Staudt explains that while Jones approved of Spengler’s cyclical analysis of culture from ‘the first stirrings of culture growing out of a primitive peasant society’ to a ‘golden age in the arts, political structures, architecture, and religious life’ towards decline into a ‘megalopolitan civilization, where the power struggles of imperialist rulers take precedence’ (1994: 118), he nonetheless deplored Spengler’s insistence on accepting the inevitability of this ‘destiny’ without ‘nostalgia’ (122). For Jones, in another marginal note, ‘men must be nostalgic in a “civilisation” [as opposed to a golden age “culture”] – only the bastards can feel otherwise’; indeed one must ‘hope for its collapse’ (quoted in Staudt 1994: 122). Again, the artist is figured here not only as a saboteur and a fifth-columnist within modernity, but also as aiming, somehow, for a future vital Golden Age. 15 For an incisive account of modernism as a ‘revitalisation movement’, see Griffin (2007), especially Chapters 2 and 3. My account of ‘Christian modernism’ in Tonning (2014) (Chapters 1 and 2) draws on Griffin’s model.

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16 Grisewood, ‘The Third Programme and its Audience’, talk to the Workers’ Educational Association, July 1949; quoted in Carpenter (1996: 97). 17 See also the letter to Anna Kallin, 27 February 1957, discussed below.

Archival sources BBC written archives I. David Jones ‘Talks’ file I, 1946–1962 Anna Kallin to David Jones (letter), 20 January 1947. David Jones to Anna Kallin (letter), 21 January 1947. Anna Kallin to David Jones (letter), 19 June 1951. Memo from Christopher Holme to the BBC ‘Talks’ department, 2 October 1952. Leonie Cohn to David Jones (letter), 13 October 1952. Christopher Holme to David Jones (letter), 16 October 1952. David Jones to Christopher Holme (letter), 22 October 1952. Christopher Holme to David Jones (letter), 28 October 1952. Memo from ‘Head of Welsh Programmes’ to ‘Controller Third Programme’, 4 August 1953. Memo from Douglas Cleverdon to Christopher Holme (with annotations by Harmon Grisewood and Anna Kallin), 27 August 1953. Memo from Leonie Cohn to ‘D. S. W.’, 25 March, 1954. II. Anna Kallin ‘Correspondence’ file. David Jones to Anna Kallin (letter), 23 June 1950. David Jones to Anna Kallin (letter), 26 February 1957.

David Jones Papers, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Anna Kallin to David Jones (letter), 20 June 1950 [CT 4–7]. David Jones, draft letter to The Listener (1952) [CF 2–17]. David Jones, draft letter to Denis Tegetmeier, 9 May 1953 [CF 2–26]. David Jones, draft letter to Elwyn Evans, 9 June 1953 [CF 2–26]. David Jones, draft letter to Elwyn Evans, 13 June 1953 [CF 2–26].

Works cited Alldritt, Keith. (2003). David Jones: Writer and Artist. London: Constable. Briggs, Asa. (2005 [1979]). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume IV, Sound and Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carpenter, Humphrey. (1996). The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio Three 1946–1996. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Cleverdon, Douglas. (1972). ‘David Jones and Broadcasting’, Poetry Wales, 8.3, pp. 72–81.

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De la Taille, Maurice. (1934). The Mystery of Faith. Trans. John O’Connor. London: Sheed and Ward. Griffin, Roger. (2007). Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. London: Palgrave. Grisewood, Harman. (1949). Broadcasting and Society: Comments from a Christian Standpoint. Rochester: The Stanhope Press. ——— (1968). One Thing at a Time. An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. Jones, David. (1952). The Anathemata. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1959). Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1978a [1937]). In Parenthesis. London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1978b). The Dying Gaul and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber. Spengler, Oswald. (1926). The Decline of the West. Volume 1. London: George Allen and Unwin. Staudt, Kathleen Henderson. (1994). At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics. Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press. Tonning, Erik. (2014). Modernism and Christianity. London: Palgrave. Whitehead, Kate. (1989). The Third Programme: A Literary History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Part Two

Broadcasting Politics in the Modernist Era

7

Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Broadcasting Randi Koppen Bergen University

A specimen day, yesterday: a specimen of the year 1935 when we are on the eve of the Duke of Gloucester’s wedding: of a general election: of the Fascist revolution in France: & in the thick of the Abyssinian war … at 2.30 we went to the BBC & listened to some incomparable twaddle – a soliloquy which the BBC requests me to imitate (a good idea, all the same, if one were free) with all the resources of the BBC behind one: real railway trains; real orchestras; noises; waves; lions & tigers &c. Virginia Woolf, Diary, 5 November 1935; D4: 351 Some might think it a bit of a turn-off to begin an essay on Woolf and broadcasting by noting her relative lack of interest in the phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is the precise nature and shape of this dearth the following discussion pursues. Many have remarked upon Woolf ’s characteristic ambivalence towards wireless as a means of dissemination and communication. A more precise formulation of her position, however, would be to say that her take on broadcasting is always primarily political. This is not to say that Woolf lacked understanding of modern sound technologies and their phenomenology, or indeed a degree of readiness to meet the requirements of the medium and its genres. The impatient dismissal of BBC’s radiophonic ‘soliloquy’ in the diary entry above has probably more to do with the fact that she had herself explored, perhaps exhausted, the aural potential of soliloquy with her composition of The Waves five years previously. The radiophonic qualities of this prose experiment were recognized at the time by the actress Virginia Isham who approached Woolf in January 1933 to secure the rights for a wireless version. Woolf, though ‘rather in the dark’ as to what Isham had in mind, was delighted: ‘It would interest me immensely to see what

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you could do with it’ (L5: 149–150). While Isham’s plans never materialized, it doesn’t take much to recognize the resonances between Woolf ’s ‘eyeless’ writing for voices in this novel and contemporary radio art ‘in praise of blindness’, as Rudolf Arnheim put it in Radio (1936). Woolf ’s disembodied and partly overlapping soliloquies, spoken by six voices and interspersed with passages of depersonalized prose, have much in common with the ‘voices without bodies’ and ‘pure aural world’ Arnheim finds in contemporary radio drama, especially in recent developments of the monologue where speech is distributed amongst a ‘kaleidoscope’ of voices to remind us of what Arnheim calls the ‘magic’ of words: their ability not only to bring into being a world dissociated from vision, but also to alert us to the auratic, somatic and ‘spiritual’ dimensions of sound as aural experience (Arnheim 1936: 175). A strong case has also been made by Woolf scholars such as Pamela Caughie and Melba Cuddy-Keane, for reading the modern soundscapes in Woolf ’s fiction as developing in conjunction with wireless technology, radiophonic art and the ‘surround-sound’ of radio more generally. Melba Cuddy-Keane proposes new terms such as ‘diffusion’ and ‘auscultation’ for this purpose, showing how texts like the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts create rich environmental soundscapes in words, resembling radiophonic and electroacoustic art in the combination of disparate sounds broadly diffused from different points in space and in the non-hierarchical mixing of voices and noises (Cuddy-Keane 2000). Woolf herself broadcast on three separate occasions, in 1927, 1929 and 1937. Of these only about eight minutes of the last one survives, an aural trace that hardly lends itself to fetishization. Jane Lewty describes Woolf ’s voice as ‘slurred and sulky’ (Lewty: 159); to her nephew Quentin Bell it appeared deprived of depth and resonance, barely recognizable (Bell 1972: 235). Perhaps its unsettling foreignness testifies to Woolf ’s discomfort with the mechanics of broadcasting: the requirements of timing, the red light over the door and the notice ‘to say that if one rustles one’s manuscript thousands will be deafened’ (L3: 403). And yet, she reflects in her diary, ‘I got my pecker up & read with ease & emotion; was then checked by the obvious fact that my emotion did not kindle George Barnes [the producer]’ (D5: 83). A similar willingness to master the medium and engage the audience informs her first attempt at broadcasting, a collaborative project with Leonard Woolf in a typical BBC format, the conversational debate, which both appear to have taken on with vigour and enthusiasm. The Woolfs were invited to broadcast by Lance Sievekind who had special responsibility for topical talks in 1926. The topic, ‘Are

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Too Many Books Written and Published?’, was proposed by Leonard, and the Woolfs were invited to draft a manuscript in the form of a conversation between the two of them. The ‘informal’ dialogue was an established BBC format, but as Cuddy-Keane has observed, the fact that the Woolfs were given the freedom to propose the topic and draft the script was a departure from normal BBC procedure, indicating a large measure of trust and respect (Cuddy-Keane 2006: 236). The script preserved at the BBC Written Archives Centre bears the evidence of an intricately collaborative work with minimal editorial intervention, though with considerable effort expended by Virginia in particular, in revising her part for added clarity and fluency. The result is a clearly structured yet lively and entertaining conversation that is faithful to the genre of the radio debate as it had evolved, topical in its choice of theme and accessible to a wide audience in its presentation of opposite perspectives on a complex historical process: the rise of mass publishing and its consequences for the writing, production and consumption of books. Virginia’s second broadcast ‘Beau Brummell’ could perhaps be categorized as ‘celebrity journalism’, if that term is used to refer to the kind of pieces Woolf and other ‘Bloomsbury’ members contributed to Vogue and similar fashionable publications in the 1920s, serving to promote their own market value along with modernism as aesthetic and style of life. As a promotion of modern lifestyles, Woolf ’s talk on the first of the dandies connects with the gender mutability and camp aesthetic that defines Orlando (1928). In the end, however, any ‘subversive’ potential of this broadcast was defused by the BBC. The talk was aired on 20 November 1929, after the nine o’clock news, to what may be presumed a predominantly adult audience, as the second in a three-part series entitled ‘Miniature Biographies’. The other two speakers were Bloomsbury friends Harold Nicholson and Desmond MacCarthy. Woolf ’s original commission included a talk on Dorothy Wordsworth, which was advertised in the Radio Times for 15 November 1929. At the last moment, as Woolf fumed in a letter to T. S. Eliot, ‘the BBC condemned Dorothy Wordsworth and made me castrate Brummel’ (L4: 111). Woolf was ‘in the devil of a temper’, her ‘poor little article [ … ] completely ruined’. Worse still, Hilda Matheson’s presence in the studio affected her ‘as a strong purge’ and ‘a cold in the head’ (L4: 110–111). The talk, as broadcast and printed in The Listener on 27 November, portrayed the making and unmaking of a fashion icon and modern celebrity in a style that was characteristically ‘light’ and entertaining, with the camp aesthetic carefully contained. Apart from what seems to have been a general willingness to communicate, along with the occasional reference to the ‘talks’ frame and to a community

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of listeners, one would be hard put to point to any radiophonic experiment, or even much radiophonic awareness, in Woolf ’s radio work. What we have is one fairly ‘standard’ radio dialogue and two straightforward radio talks, which Woolf referred to in private as ‘articles’, complaining that the ‘talks element’ cramped and ruined them (D5: 81). Before pursuing the nature of Woolf ’s engagement with radio, however, deciding in what sense Woolf might have been ‘broadcasting modernism’ or thinking about wireless as conjoined with a modernist project, it is helpful to make a distinction which I believe a simple alignment of Woolf ’s literary modernism with radiophonic experiment serves to occlude, a discrimination between what in Marxist terms might be called the technology of production and the means of production. This distinction is key to grasping at least two opposed positions in the 1930s’ broadcasting debate. In 1935, a few months prior to Woolf ’s ironic dismissal of the BBC’s ‘real railway trains [ … ] waves, lions & tigers &c’, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, at the Hogarth Press, had published Raymond Postgate’s pamphlet What to Do with the B.B.C., a text which presents a strong argument against the ‘ballyhoo which wireless newspapers and radio experts attempt to stuff us with’ (Postgate 1935: 61). ‘Wireless’, insists Postgate, ‘is not a new art, or a new method of living. The radio set in our homes is a convenience just as a bathroom tap is a convenience … in the end it deserves no more attention than a bathroom tap deserves’ (61). For the socialist Postgate, the time had come to return to the chief question: ‘what is broadcast, and what are the effects of the material broadcast’ (61). What he offered, however, is not an analysis of the ideological content of BBC programmes, but a narrative of the means of production: the money, the people and the organization that produce the broadcast. Beyond offering a diagnosis of what is wrong with the broadcasting corporation (such as a lack of transparency and accountability, autocratic control over staff and programming) and pointing to the risk of a totalitarian takeover of the organization and technology, Postgate’s pamphlet proposes an alternative, decentralized organization partly modelled on the Russian socialist system of broadcasting, intended to secure democratic access to the means of production, and actual communication rather than transmission and passive reception. His objective in making this intervention (and perhaps the Woolfs’ in publishing it), is that of offering a practical and strategic model for wireless democracy, and to do so by uncovering a narrative of the means of production that even the denaturalizing and dialectical radio experiments conducted by Brecht and Benjamin failed to bring to light.

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The ‘hullabaloo’ Postgate heard in contemporary culture referred to a dual tendency: to aestheticize the medium and its technology, and to fetishize it as an icon and instrument of modernity – a tendency of which Arnheim’s study was a prime example. Radio clearly belongs to those narratives of technology that celebrate its magic even while exposing the secrets of its workings. His interest, as he made clear in the opening chapter, was only marginally in broadcasting as a means of transmission and dissemination, and almost exclusively in the specificity of wireless as a medium, ‘a new experience for the artist, his audience and the theoretician’, where ‘everything that takes place at the microphone’, whether radio drama or announcement of the news, ‘is submitted to the rules of aural art’ (14, 18). His aim was to convey to the reader ‘some of the many extraordinary sensations associated with the broadcasting house and the wireless receiver’, from ‘the carpeted rooms where no footstep sounds and whose walls deaden the voice’, to ‘the serious young man at the control-board who with his black knobs turns voices and sounds off and on like a stream of water’, and ‘the loneliness of the studio where you sit alone with your voice and a scrap of paper and yet before the largest audience that a speaker has ever addressed; the tenderness that affects one for the little dead box suspended by garter-elastic from a ring, richer in treasure and mystery than Portia’s three caskets’ (Arnheim 1936: 19–20). The intention of the foregoing discussion is certainly not to conflate Woolf ’s views on broadcasting with those of Postgate, or, indeed, Virginia’s with Leonard’s. However, it does appear that, by publishing this pamphlet, the Woolfs were making an intervention into a current debate that reflected in many ways their own, fundamental and political views of broadcasting. These views related to a democratic project that provided a political context for their broadcasts and written work distinct from the ‘liberal’ or ‘ethical’ frames that are sometimes invoked. Virginia and Leonard Woolf shared a view of broadcasting that resisted aestheticization (and fetishization) of wireless technology, thinking of radio first and foremost as an instrument for moulding public opinion. Their interest is in questions of access and organization, whether broadcasting figures as a Habermasian ‘public sphere’ or as appropriated within a project of dialectical cultural critique, as Virginia was to propose in Three Guineas. In general terms, as others have observed, their thinking on these questions resonated with the wider debate running through the 1920s and the 1930s of the social use of technology and the cultural anxieties surrounding the enhanced possibilities of propaganda (Cuddy-Keane 2003). A concern within this chapter, however, is to disengage Woolf ’s thinking about the politics of the

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‘loudspeaker’ from a generalized context of defensive ambivalence or retrograde scepticism. Woolf, as a cultural and political agent, is connected (more or less peripherally and ambivalently) with a loose network of (predominantly leftist) intellectuals engaged in attempts at understanding and potentially changing historical and material relations between information, opinion and citizenship. Her thinking on broadcasting is primarily political and can be traced across her work, connecting her activities as writer, publisher and cultural critic. Her two most important broadcasts, ‘Are Too Many Books Written and Published’ and ‘Craftsmanship’, both deal with questions of public communication and citizenship, the manufacture of assent and the possibility of dissent, enacting the principles of what might be called ‘wireless democracy’.

Democracy in the age of mechanical reproduction Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s first broadcast was aired from 10.20am to 10.35am on Friday, 15 July 1927, between performances of an operetta (Les cloches de Corneville by Robert Planquette) and Whittaker Wilson’s ‘Four Songs of Morocco’ (Cuddy-Keane 2006: 244), and seems at least on Virginia’s part to have been prepared within a general frame of optimism. ‘Can’t you see that nationality is over? All divisions are now rubbed out, or about to be’, she says to Harold Nicholson in a discussion about British imperialism a fortnight before the broadcast, pointing out the aeroplanes flying above while the portable wireless plays dance music on the terrace (D3: 145). Similar hopes for the potentially democratic and anti-imperialist effects of modern communications technologies are played out with much fun and inventiveness in Virginia’s part in the radio debate. The topic for this dialogic enquiry is the rise of mass publishing and its consequences for the writing, production and consumption of books, with Leonard taking a more or less anti-Benjaminean line, tracing the qualitative and quantitative transformations from craft to machine production, from individual act of creation to serial production and aural loss, but without Benjamin’s belief in any inherent dialectical potential in the process. His concern is with the effects of the machine on culture (on the individual mind as well as on the social body), and with the standardization, quantification and trivialization of mind that seem to follow from a technocratic, capitalist society, where books, like boots, have become mass-produced objects. Significantly, this is not a

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Leavisian, liberal-intellectual argument against the age of the machine. Leonard was speaking from the perspective of the small, independent publisher and the Labour Party member, considering the consequences of the free market for labour, with only a few writers earning ‘a living wage’, and average wages below those of the mining industry. At the other end of the process of production, consumers were swamped by low-quality goods and ‘best-sellers’ created by advertising. What was required, Leonard argued, was better organization and regulation of the publishing business, to secure the future of writing and reading within a democratic, public sphere rather than a free market. In playful, inventive counterpoints to Leonard’s practical, grounded perspective, Virginia conducted the other half of the enquiry, speaking in favour of increased access to the means of production as well as to available products, of making books as cheap and expendable as a packet of cigarettes, and offering prizes to induce new people to write. An increase in availability meant less standardization, not more, if books are written and read by tramps and duchesses, plumbers and Prime Ministers. Virginia’s part was to enliven the debate format through surprise and paradox, hyperbole and flights of fancy. She recklessly threw overboard Leonard’s social-economic framework, speaking of writing and publishing as a ‘lottery’, ‘with its chance of a motor-car and its chance of a garret’, the chance of making a fortune overnight by selling the film rights of a novel to Hollywood. She playfully embraced the opportunities of the market economy and the celebrity culture that came with the age of mechanical reproduction, figuring the communications machine as fundamentally generative, a means of transportation and democratic proliferation, as much as serialization. Needless to say, one should be wary of taking this staged dialogue as representing distinct and opposed views. The dialogue was not conclusive, but serves to demystify the process of book production as well as the end product, exposing both the aura surrounding the past and the processes of fetishization at work in the present culture of the commodity and the celebrity. Its most conclusive point, voiced by both speakers, concerns the advantages of democratic access to the public sphere that literary culture constitutes, of multiplying the number of writers as well as resisting readers. In practical terms, it anticipates the policy adopted by The Hogarth Press from the late 1920s, as well as the critical praxis Virginia was to recommend for the ‘Outsiders Society’ in Three Guineas (1938), a thoroughgoing cultural critique based on the potentially liberating technologies of the typewriter and the duplicating machine.

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A Ramble Round Words If ‘Beau Brummell’ was an instance of celebrity journalism, it didn’t do much for Woolf ’s market value on air. She was paid £15 15s. for the broadcast in 1927, and £4 14s. for its appearance in print. Eight years later she was offered the same (£20 in total) for ‘Craftsmanship’, which she thought was ‘d – d mangy … considering that they print it in The Listener too’. ‘Next time you’ll be able to bargain’, her contact at the BBC assured her: ‘He told me, in confidence, that all the well known writers, like ourselves, are now holding out for more … Winston [Churchill] asks £300 but doesn’t get it’ (L6: 109–110). In the end, however, ‘Craftsmanship’ turned out to be Woolf ’s last broadcast. Judged by the quality of the script, it is probably also her best, though Woolf was reluctant to make concessions either to the medium or to the format, referring to her talk as an ‘article’ and damning the ‘talk element that upsets it’: ‘Yet of course there’s a certain thrill about writing to read aloud – I expect a vicious one’ (D5: 81). The ‘talk element’ refers to the meretricious note, the tendency towards performative excess that Woolf, herself a manic talker, detected in speech generally and that she feared would infect her writing. It also referred to the cutting and stitching required to fit a talk that is ‘alternately 25 & then 15 minutes’ into the specified 17, till in the end one felt like ‘an incompetent tailor making trouser legs that [don’t] match’ (D5: 81; L6, 6 May 1937). The topic proposed by George Barnes, however, was a close fit. The idea was for a ten-part series under the title ‘Words Fail Me’ with talks by various experts on language. Other speakers included Professor A. Lloyd James on the importance of grammar, Allen Ferguson on the rapid expansion of vocabulary in current English and Logan Pearsall Smith on borrowing from other languages. The series was broadcast on the National Programme on Thursday evenings between 8 April and 17 June 1937. In his written invitation to Woolf, suggesting the title ‘Craftsmanship’, Barnes writes: ‘The talk has been specially included in order to lure you into the series, and my idea for it was that whatever the scientists and the philologists may have said in the preceding talks, it remains true that a skilful writer or a skilful orator can arouse the strongest passions for playing skilfully with words’ (Woolf 1994: 99). It is significant that the topic was not the performative, illocutionary force of words (which Woolf distrusted and feared), but an incitement for the ‘ordinary man’ to use language with greater confidence and freedom. Once again, Woolf was left relatively free to devise her talk, Barnes inviting her to be ‘fanciful to any extent you wish’ (Brosnan 1997: 136, 140). Woolf duly began

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by substituting her own title –‘A Ramble Round Words’ – for the one she has been given, conveying to the listener that good writing is never a craft and that words by their nature are never useful. With characteristic playfulness she takes the listener on a flight of fancy that demonstrates the ability of words to transport themselves and us along lines of memory and association, to unexpected and even unwanted destinations, showing how the useful word that was going to return you home took you for a ride instead, to King’s Cross rather than to Russell Square. Words, she says, make us do what we should not. They make us careless and adventurous, trespassers onto forbidden ground. Democratic and promiscuous, one as good as the other, they mate across boundaries of country and race, education and class. Woolf ’s free play along the signifying chain in this talk might be taken as broadcasting a modernist aesthetic. More importantly, however, what was broadcast is an exemplary practice of writing and reading in which one allows oneself to be instructed by language, a strategic immersion in the radical power of words. Arguing that the resources for a democratic practice of writing and reading are available in the native language and in the literacy of the common reader, Woolf spoke against not only the essence of the Reithian project, but also the institutionalization of reading to which, ironically, the political left also contributed. Like her first dialogue with Leonard, the last talk promotes the wireless approach to a culture of juxtaposition and association, metonymy and montage, channel switching and airwave travel, listening in and tuning out.

Figuring wireless It is interesting and quite instructive to juxtapose Woolf ’s exemplary metonymic practice in her 1937 talk with her figurations of wireless ten years earlier, in the essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, where wireless appears amongst the defining conditions of modern life, making literal modernism’s fantasies of corpuscular bodies in relations of mutuality and contact. Not a metaphor, but a material fact of life, along with changes in housing and demography, ‘as suggested by a walk through the streets of any large town’, the wireless conditions the modern mind: The long avenue of brick is cut up into boxes, each of which is inhabited by a different human being who has put locks on his doors and bolts on his windows to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to his fellows by wires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof and speak aloud to him of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world. (Woolf 2008: 77–78)

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Isolated, yet ‘wired’ to his fellows, Woolf ’s modern individual is ‘extremely alive to everything’, ‘immensely inquisitive’, ‘and the most marked characteristic – the strange way in which things that have no apparent connection are associated in his mind’ (78). The idea of wireless as aligned with a capacity for association and montage, of making connections amongst the seemingly disparate, reappears in Three Guineas, which Woolf was composing when she gave her ‘Craftsmanship’ talk. Here wireless is figured as a ‘public psychometer’, an instrument that enables soundings of culture. Along with libraries and public galleries, the wireless provides the educated man’s daughter with a point of entry to culture radically different from Reith’s Arnoldian civilizing project: that of the dialectical fragment. Reading The Antigone, for instance, gives one the most accurate analysis of the effects of power and the duties of the individual – ‘far more profound … than any of our sociologists can offer us’ (Woolf 1991: 94). At the same time, ‘the wireless of the daily press’ may be consulted as a source in a critical inquiry, to hear what answer fathers are making to the old question from their daughters: what it is that disqualifies women from property, the professions, civil liberties. The wireless gives us the ‘clamour, the uproar’ of the patriarch’s phallic fixation, a deafening, ventriloquizing noise ‘such that we can hardly hear ourselves speak; it takes the words out of our mouths; it makes us say what we have not said’ (62). As the narrator listens to the radio voice intoning: ‘Homes are the real places of the women’, she seems to hear an ancient cry, ‘Ay, ay, ay, ay [ … ] it is not a new cry, it is a very old cry. Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past’ (62). The ‘ay, ay, ay’ that resounds on the airwaves is the cry that sounded in ancient Greece, the voice of Creon, the dictator, still reverberating through the loudspeakers of Hitler and Mussolini in Woolf ’s present. More than the loudspeaker of the dictator, an instrument of indoctrination and ventriloquism, the wireless here is depicted as a vehicle for metonymic transposition, transporting us through time and space, establishing the links between the radically disparate Woolf identified as a feature of wireless listening in ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’. More precisely, the wireless as ‘psychometer’ enters into the politics of the dialectical fragment – the project of montage, the transposing and reframing of information – that Three Guineas enacts. The impact of the wireless as a deafening, invasive noise becomes increasingly dominant in Woolf ’s thinking through the build-up to war in the late 1930s, as articulated in her diary entries, essays and talks. ‘The Leaning Tower’ and ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, both written during the air raids of 1940,

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articulate the experience of wireless as an increasingly monologic voice, intrusive, besieging and ventriloquist. The pressures brought to bear by modern war reporting appears as a defining condition of the present, and of contemporary writing, and are apparent in ‘The Leaning Tower’, Woolf ’s address to the WEA in Brighton 27 April 1940: Today we hear the gunfire in the channel. We turn on the wireless; we hear an airman telling us how this very afternoon he shot down a raider; his machine caught fire … Scott never saw the sailors drowning at Trafalgar; Jane Austen never heard the cannon roar at Waterloo. Neither of them heard Napoleon’s voice as we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an evening. (161)

In December 1939, just as Woolf had accepted the invitation from the WEA, she wrote about the news of the German battleship the Graf Spee in her diary. Under siege in Uruguay it blew itself up rather than submit: the Graf Spee is going to steam out of Monte Video today into the jaws of death. And journalists & rich people are hiring aeroplanes from which to see the sight. This seems to me to bring war into a new angle; & our psychology … the eyes of the whole world (BBC) are on the game; & several people will lie dead tonight, or in agony. And we shall have it served up for us as we sit over our logs this bitter winter night. (D5: 251–252)

Woolf was clearly interested in the changing nature of news and its impact on group psychology. She was reading Freud’s Group Psychology at the time, but, as she said, she did not have time to work it out and it did not reach her fiction. ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ was originally intended as a contribution to an American Women’s Symposium, and written in the late summer of 1940 when the Battle of Britain was raging. Woolf was living at Rodmell in Sussex, but made regular day trips to London and experienced the frequent air raids, writing about it in her diary and reflecting on the chasm between the realities of war and ‘the brave, laughing heroic boy panoply which the BBC spreads before us nightly’ (298). During these months she struggled to think and feel against the ‘current’ of the ‘communal BBC dictated feeling’ (306). Much of this comes out in the essay, whose argument resembles that of Three Guineas, focusing on ‘the subconscious Hitlerism’, ‘the desire to dominate and enslave’ that drives men to war (169). By this time, months before her suicide, ‘the voices of [wireless] loudspeakers’, their ‘cry with one voice’, their ‘spate of words’ was the current that ‘has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circling there among the clouds’ (169).

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Wireless democracy Returning to the 1920s and the early 1930s, we find Woolf ’s more optimistic vision of broadcasting as a potentially democratic public sphere. At a time when politics was becoming a shared national experience she described herself ‘listening in’ with her servants Nellie Boxall and Lottie, hoping for news of the General Strike in 1926 and the Labour victory in the 1929 General Election, reflecting on the novelty of the experience. As Alison Light observes, such moments of shared assent also bring home some unpleasant truths about the theoretical nature of their alliance: ‘ “We are winning” Nelly said at tea. I was shocked to think that we both desire the Labour party to win – why? Partly that I don’t want to be ruled by Nelly. I think to be ruled by Nelly & Lottie would be a disaster’ (D3: 230). Nonetheless, Woolf continued to claim political and strategic allegiance to the working class, expressing her views on the BBC’s role in class politics. Ironically, Woolf ’s most outspoken criticism of the BBC exists as a public letter written but never sent to The Statesman. Later published by Leonard in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), ‘Middlebrow’ was written in response to J. B. Priestley’s radio talk ‘To a Highbrow’ in October 1932, debating the position of the intellectual in the question of mass culture and the interests, culture and politics of the working class – precisely the questions that had also preoccupied the Woolfs in their first radio talk. Countering Priestley’s attack on the highbrow in his broadcast, Woolf speaks out against the middlebrow policy of the BBC, which in her view served to divide liberal intellectuals from the working class rather than unite them in resistance against establishment respectability and cultural insipidness: ‘If the B.B.C. stood for anything but the Betwixt and Between Company they would use their control of the air not to stir strife between brothers, but to broadcast the fact that highbrows and lowbrows must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and living’. The ‘bloodless and pernicious pest’ in question is the middlebrow: the bland, decorous culture signified, for Virginia and Leonard alike, above all by the BBC and the bowler hat (Woolf 1966: 202). After ‘Craftsmanship’, Virginia had vowed never to broadcast again; Leonard, however, did, giving six talks on democracy and the modern state in 1931. He also wrote on broadcasting, and had articles published in The Spectator and the Political Quarterly in the early 1930s with titles like: ‘Democracy Listens-In’, ‘Broadcasting and a Better World’ and ‘The Future of British Broadcasting’. To him the future of democracy and the future of British broadcasting were closely

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connected. Both hinged on the organization and constitution of the BBC: how to continue to run it as a semi-public and semi-independent corporation, how to retain its monopoly and its answerability to Parliament, while getting rid of its policy of suppressing true debate and free expression of opinion. The Woolfs’ most radical and practical intervention represents in many ways an extension of the views expressed by Leonard in his writing; one that seems to have informed their broadcasting work. It came with the publication of Postgate’s pamphlet What to Do with the B.B.C. in 1935. The immediate context for this publication was a Royal Commission on the BBC appointed in 1935 to report in the following year; the pamphlet was intended to influence their conclusions. It is interesting to note that The Hogarth Press had published Postgate’s How to Make a Revolution in 1934. In both cases the press had to seek legal advice: the first book was banned in India, while the second was potentially libellous (Woolf, L: 325–327). Leonard was directly involved in both cases, which suggests something about the radical nature of the press and the level of involvement on the part of its owners. Postgate’s book was ultimately published as part of the Day to Day series of socio-political pamphlets (1930–1939), along with titles on Russia, anti-imperialism, fascism and communism. A left-wing journalist and writer, a member (like the Woolfs) of the 1917 Club, the Fabian Society and the Labour Party, Postgate took a strong political interest in radio as a potentially powerful instrument of propaganda that needed close monitoring. He thus published several articles on this topic during the early 1930s in The New Statesman and Nation and Time and Tide. These articles were ambivalent about the BBC, depicting it on the one hand as an autonomous body and an example of ‘the new kind of Socialism’, ‘a public service corporation, permitting no private profit and as free from direct political influence as its founders knew how to make it’; and on the other, as an instrument of autocratic control and suppression of political controversy and debate (Postgate J. and M. 1994: 170). Much of the material for the alternative organization he proposed in What to Do with the BBC came out of a visit organized by the New Fabian Research Bureau in 1932 to study and report on life in the Soviet Union. The Woolfs’ friend Margaret Cole was leader of the group and edited the resulting publication, Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia. A former member of the Communist Party and editor of The Communist, Postgate retained an enormous respect and regard for the Soviet Union. Like most of the participants on the study trip, he saw it as the hope of the world, while tolerating all its defects. During the visit in fact he was invited to broadcast from Radio Moscow. His talk, in English, was on ‘The Broadcasting System of the Soviet Union’ and was evidently intended

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by the authorities mainly for consumption overseas. In it he expressed his admiration for the Soviet system and criticized the BBC (Postgate J. and M. 1994: 173). His article in Twelve Studies, ‘Radio, Press and Publishing’, attempted to give a factual presentation of the Soviet system of broadcasting, organization, programming and communication with listeners. Postgate was particularly interested in the system of substations, which, to his mind, showed most clearly the difference between Soviet and capitalist broadcasting: ‘these sub-stations or “receiving points” are of very low power – 30 watts or so – and serve only the factory, farm, or park to which they are allotted’ (Postgate 1933: 228). In one example from a Moscow factory; ‘The station receives 75 per cent of its programme from the big stations, by the ether, and relays it over the wires to the factory loud-speakers … The remaining quarter is supplied from the factory [the factory art brigade]’. New flats built for the workers were wired to the station and the worker was able to switch on by merely plugging in a loudspeaker. The most interesting section of the programme was the spoken material, consisting of a news bulletin and short speeches by the workers on factory problems and reasons for discontent: ‘The freedom of the workers in making these complaints is jealously guarded. No previous censorship is allowed’ (228–229). This is the system he envisages for Britain in What to Do with the B.B.C. Very simplified, Postgate’s pamphlet attempted three things: it offered a diagnosis of what was wrong with the broadcasting corporation (lack of transparency and accountability, autocratic control over staff and programming); pointed to the risk of a totalitarian, fascist takeover of the organization and technology; and proposed an alternative, decentralized organization modelled on the Russian system of broadcasting, intended to secure democratic access to the means of production, and actual two-way communication rather than transmission and passive reception. This is not the place to go into the details of Postgate’s analysis and proposals. By means of conclusion, there are one or two striking aspects which resonate quite clearly with the Woolfs’ own thinking. The scenario Postgate envisaged of a fascist takeover of the airwaves described and in part anticipated very precisely the development in Italy and Germany from the early to mid-1930s, a development of which few people in Britain – and certainly not the BBC itself – were aware, with Virginia and Leonard Woolf amongst the notable exceptions. His proposed strategy to safeguard against such a development in Britain emphasized the need for direct access to the means of wireless production: a system of substations and rediffusion under the control of democratically elected town and village councils (Postgate 1935: 66). With such

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a system in place, ‘In every Welsh valley … the miners would have their own local substation, on which they could hear not only a choice of national programme, not only their colliery band, but also, from the lips of their fellows exactly how their own mine was being run and whether the experiment of socialization was being a success’ (66). This is not to say that the Woolfs shared or endorsed Postgate’s views in any simple sense. Their decision to publish reflects a long-standing commitment to the question of broadcasting and public opinion, but also their continuing reflections upon the space opened up by modern communications technologies for forms of democratic agency and radical cultural praxis. Far from uninformed about phenomenology and aesthetics, they were both conscious that aesthetization of the medium and fetishization of the technology did not mean control over means of production, or, indeed, the realization of a radical critical potential. Significantly, this was also a distinction carefully maintained through Woolf ’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), where technologies for the recording and amplification of sound appeared with uncertain dialectical potential. The pageant form Woolf was ironically citing in the novel is a cross between the patriotic Empire Day pageants and the pageants performed and published by the Communist Party during the popular front period (Harker 2011: 437). While the Woolfs were, to some extent, involved with the popular front, her own version of the pageant neither denied nor endorsed the radical potential such groups invested in the modern technologies of sound. As Ben Harker points out, the megaphone was a device used by leftist theatre groups from Berlin’s Rote Sprachror to British groups affiliated to the Workers’ Theatre Movement (Harker 2011: 448). In Between the Acts its meaning wavers between the dialectical and the dictatorial, while the gramophone, another potentially dialectical technology, serves both to unite and to disperse the audience. It is foregrounded as technology, as in the radiophonic experiments of Brecht and Benjamin. Woolf ’s gramophone chuffs and ticks, grinds and blares, and gets its needle stuck. On a level with the inept actors and rag-tag costumes made up of tinsel and dishcloths, it ironically foregrounds the precariousness of the pageant’s revivalist project and the high hopes attaching to it: the creation of a community founded on English cultural tradition. Never settling for unified meanings, Woolf ’s pageant restates what we have come to understand: that in the age of mechanical reproduction any inherent, dialectical potential as often as not – or rather more often than not – remains unrealized.

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Abbreviations L = The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. N. Nicholson. 4 vols. London: Hogarth Press. D = The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. London: Penguin.

Works cited Arnheim, R. (1936). Radio. London: Faber & Faber Ltd. Avery, T. (2006). Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. ——— (2009). ‘Desmond MacCarthy, Bloomsbury, and the Aestheticist Ethics of Broadcasting’, in Broadcasting Modernism, Ed. D. R. Cohen, M. Coyle and J. Lewty. Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009. Brosnan, L. (1997). ‘ “Words Fail Me”: Virginia Woolf and the Wireless’, Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins. NY: Pace University Press, pp. 134–141. Cuddy-Keane, M. (2000). ‘Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality’, in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Ed. P. L. Caughie. New York: Garland Publishing, pp. 69–96. ——— (2003). Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2006). ‘Introduction to “Are Too Many Books Written and Published?” ’, PMLA, 121.1, pp. 235–244. Gillespie, D. and L. K. Hankins. (1997). Virginia Woolf and the Arts. New York: Pace University Press. Harker, B. (2011). ‘ “On Different Levels Ourselves Went Forward”: Pageantry, Class Politics and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf ’s Late Writing’, ELH 78.2, pp. 433–456. Lewty, J. (2007). ‘Virginia Woolf and the Synapses of Radio’, in Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place, Ed. Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 148–166. Light, A. (2008). Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. London: Bloomsbury Press. Postgate, R. (1933). ‘Radio, Press and Publishing’, in Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia, Ed. M. I. Cole. London: Victor Gollancz, pp. 225–247. ——— (1935). What to Do with the B.B.C. London: The Hogarth Press. ——— and M. (1994). A Stomach for Dissent: The Life of Raymond Postgate: 1896–1971. London: Keele University Press. Southworth, H. E. ed. (2010). Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Whitehead, K. (1990). ‘Broadcasting Bloomsbury’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 20, 121–131. Woolf, L. (1930). ‘Democracy Listens-In’, The Spectator (13 December), pp. 931–932. ——— (1931). ‘The Future of British Broadcasting’, Political Quarterly, 2.2, pp. 172–185. ——— (1989). Letters of Leonard Woolf. Ed. F. Spotts. New York: Harcourt Brace. ——— and Woolf, V. (2009). ‘Are Too Many Books Written and Published?’, PMLA, 121.1, pp. 235–244. Woolf, V. (1929). ‘Beau Brummell’, The Listener (27 November), pp. 720–721. ——— (1966). ‘Middlebrow’, in Collected Essays. Vol. 2. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 196–203. ——— (1975–1980). The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 4 vols. Ed. N. Nicholson. London: Hogarth Press. ——— (1977–1984). The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Penguin. ——— (1991). Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press. ——— (1992a). Between the Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (1992b). ‘The Leaning Tower’, in A Woman’s Essays, Ed. Rachel Bowlby. London: Penguin, pp. 159–178. ——— (1992c). The Waves. London: Penguin. ——— (1993). ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, Ed. Rachel Bowlby. London, Penguin, pp. 168–172. ——— (1994). ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, in Selected Essays, Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 74–84. ——— (2009a). ‘Beau Brummell’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol 6, Ed. S. Clarke. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 617–624. ——— (2009b). ‘Craftsmanship’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6. Ed. S. Clarke. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 624–627.

8

J. B. Priestley: By Radio to a New Britain David Addyman University of Bergen

The story of J. B. Priestley’s broadcasts for the BBC during 1940 and 1941 – the ‘Postscripts to the News’ – has been told a number of times, most comprehensively by Sian Nicholas in her seminal 1995 work, The Echo of War. Using previously unexamined documents in the BBC Written Archive Centre at Reading, Nicholas tells the fascinating story of Priestley’s battle with officialdom within the BBC, at the MOI and in the higher echelons of government. The narrative that emerges is of a man ahead of his time, moving broadcasting into areas which would become its preserve by the end of the war, but which at the beginning of the war were highly controversial. Nicholas’s perspective is thus that of a historian of radio, exploring the impact that Priestley’s broadcasts had on the BBC. Indispensable as her account is, it leaves out the creative use to which Priestley put the radio, and its part in his vision of the role of art and entertainment in the community. It is this aspect which I will explore here. First, though, a brief recap of the facts as Nicholas presents them. When Priestley began broadcasting the Postscripts in 1940 he came to a BBC which was unsure of the role it was expected to play in the war, and was receiving much criticism both from the public and from the government. At the onset of war a number of factors combined to create a radio service which was ill-equipped to answer the needs of the public more generally and wartime listeners more specifically. One of these was a continuing adherence to Reithian principles of top-down broadcasting, whereby the BBC decided what was best for the nation; the most notorious example of this was ‘the Reithian Sunday’, characterized by sober music and religious observance. Another factor was the restrictions on the amount and type of news that could be broadcast: the BBC had long been banned from broadcasting any news before 6pm in order to protect newspaper sales. But even after 6pm, it was limited in what it could report, as a

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result of a failure on the part of the government, the MOI and the BBC to reach a decision on what role the radio should play in the dissemination of propaganda, and specifically whether it was desirable to report (1) bad news, (2) information that could be used by the enemy or even (3) untruths. In addition, the perceived snobbishness of the BBC, with its exclusive use of announcers with RP, was alienating listeners of lower social classes. Thus, in the early years of the war, the public felt that the BBC had lost its independence and objectivity, and was giving them only second-rate drama, poor music and no news of interest. The result was a drift to foreign stations broadcasting in English, which catered for the British public’s desire to know more about the war situation. The most infamous example of this is the early wartime craze for the broadcasts of ‘Lord Haw Haw’. These began on 11 September 1939, and their attraction was that they at least gave the British public some news, even if it came with the inevitable Nazi spin. The figures speak for themselves: 16 million tuned to the BBC 9 o’clock news, but only 9 million stayed tuned for the following BBC talk, while 6 million retuned to Lord Haw Haw. Nicholas shows how the Haw Haw broadcasts underlined the absurdity of the BBC News Department’s position: denied accounts of British operations by the MOI, the public tuned in to German radio, meaning that in effect the MOI was driving Britons into the hands of enemy propaganda.1 There was mounting concern amongst politicians that the BBC was not doing all it could in the war effort. In a speech in parliament Clement Attlee lamented the failure of the BBC at a time when it was most needed. Arthur Greenwood MP called on the government to stop sheltering the public and to trust them with news, arguing that the war would be won ‘by informed, instructed, articulate opinion, the opinion of the free peoples of the world’ (cited in Nicholas 1996: 32). Nicholas notes a threefold response on the part of the BBC to government and public criticism, and to the popularity of Lord Haw Haw: first, the Listener Research Department was expanded in order to better gauge what listeners wanted; second, the light entertainment service, The Forces Programme, was created, addressing the charge of elitism and snobbishness; and third, the BBC began a search for personalities to broadcast topical new commentaries to compete with Lord Haw Haw (see Nicholas 1996: 41). It was in this climate that Priestley began broadcasting his Postscripts in summer 1940. Nicholas points out how his predecessor, Maurice Healy, had done little to address the public’s complaints about the radio. He had been elitist, inflammatory towards the Germans, and made sneering references to

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Lord Haw Haw. The search thus began for a ‘contrast in voice, upbringing and outlook’ (cited in Nicholas 1996: 59). Priestley was an obvious candidate, having already attained some popularity with radio audiences with his serialized novel, Let the People Sing, broadcasting of which began the very day war was declared, 3 September 1939. Another attraction was Priestley’s accent: as Hanson explains, ‘in an era of “received pronunciation” and broadcasting of such formality that announcers wore dinner jackets, Priestley’s unpretentious manner and warm North Country vowels were a breath of fresh air’ (Hanson and Priestley 2008: 204). Priestley had also already achieved enormous success with his broadcasts on the Overseas Service, which had begun on 24 May 1940. The fact that he was easily the most successful Talks broadcaster thus far made him a natural choice for the Postscripts. His first Postscript was aired on Wednesday, 5 June 1944, one day after the end of the Dunkirk evacuations, to which his talk responded. He was an immediate success, attracting some 30 per cent of the adult population, and went on to broadcast a further 20 Postscripts in the first series, before requesting a rest in October 1940, his last Postscript for the time being going out on Sunday, 20 October 1940. Despite the success of the Postscripts, Priestley famously courted controversy in the broadcasts. The familiar narrative is that, at first ‘gently and with good humour’ (Cullingford) in the fifth Postscript of 7 July 1940, he began to be more critical of the government, partly over its reluctance to use radio to its fullest effect as propaganda, but mostly over its refusal to talk about ‘war aims’ or ‘peace aims’ – the controversial question of ‘what we are fighting for’ (see Hanson and Priestley 2008: 219). More or less successful attempts on the part of the BBC to promote a national identity and to remind the public of ‘the Britain we are fighting to preserve’, through celebration of its landscape and customs, could not silence a growing desire in much of the population to talk about reconstruction after the war had finished, and the feeling that there was a chance to create a new society free from the poverty and unfairness of the pre-war years. Nicholas demonstrates a ‘new mood of economic and social radicalism … constantly remarked upon by wartime commentators’; however, she notes that Churchill opposed any discussion of peace aims, feeling that they distracted from the task of winning the war (Nicholas 1996: 241). Nicholas points out that Priestley repeatedly incorporated ‘reconstruction’ themes in his broadcasts, giving the seventh Postscript by way of an example, in which Priestley discussed ‘this silent town [Margate] that once was gay’, saying, ‘we’re ready to accept all this [i.e. the sacrifices of war] … if we know that we can march forward – not merely to

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recover what has been lost, but to something better than we’d ever known before’ (Priestley 1967: 49; see also Nicholas 1996: 242). The following week’s Postscript was more explicit, saying ‘We’re actually changing over from the property view to the sense of community which simply means that we realise we’re all in the same boat … an ark in which we can all finally land in a better world’ (Priestley 1967: 57). The theme continued to appear, such that by September the MOI had begun to be concerned about Priestley’s influence on the public, while Priestley was equally concerned by government timidity and the lack of official recognition for his part in keeping up the morale of the people (see Nicholas 1996: 243), leading to his giving what was to be ‘perhaps the last’ Postscript he would ever do at the end of October (Priestley 1967: 140). His departure was saw as a result of government muzzling by some members of the public, a feeling which Priestley did nothing to dispel in his comments in the national press. Nevertheless, he returned for a second series of Postscripts in January 1941, but this series again ended in acrimony after only eight broadcasts, Priestley suspecting that his removal from the air had been requested by none other than Churchill.2 So much for the historical facts. What this account leaves out is all but the most overt criticisms of the government and the most obvious mentions of ‘reconstruction’ themes. This omission is significant, since it obfuscates the role which Priestley saw the writer – and the radio – playing in society. A closer analysis of the earlier Postscripts will redress this imbalance, and show that Priestley’s vision of a new post-war society pervades the broadcasts from the very start. Cécile Vallée’s study, ‘J. B. Priestley, artiste de propagande à la radio: au service de quelles idées?’ argues that Priestley was adept at ‘putting government propaganda into broadcasting terms and sustaining morale on the Home Front’.3 Her study identifies correspondences between Priestley’s Postscripts and official directives on propaganda. She shows, for example, through her close lexical analysis, how Priestley toes the MOI line on work – broadcasting that the citizen’s participation in the war effort was crucial and that industry had to be recalibrated to ensure the survival of the country. She notes that the Postscripts refer 7 times to the word ‘factory’, 13 times to ‘work’ and 5 times to ‘working’; she points out further that ‘work’ is mentioned in 9 out of 20 broadcasts, usually with humour, as in the Postscript of 25 August and 30 June, and that of 11 August, which she quotes, before concluding, ‘Encore une fois, on aurait tort de voir dans cet extrait une critique du gouvernement. Au contraire, Priestley collabore ici à la politique de propagande officielle’ [once more, one

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would be mistaken to see in this extract a criticism of the government. On the contrary, Priestley here collaborates with the official propaganda]. However, she recognizes that Priestley’s language ‘sometimes verged on subversive political ideology’: His obvious attempts at propagating the vision of a New Jerusalem with its socialist innuendoes were judged as going against the war effort and against national unity. Indeed, the fight against capitalism and the creation of a new world order were not exactly part of the government’s agenda. Notwithstanding, there is another, more philosophical, dimension to Priestley’s 1940 Postscripts which must not be neglected: that of the beauty of the English countryside, and the wonder such beauty should inspire. The Postscripts are also a eulogy to humour, joy, and human relationships, as well as to the community spirit and the continuity of English history, a eulogy to art and knowledge, philosophy and humanities, and, last but not least, to poetry and the power of emotions.4

It is noticeable here that Vallée makes no attempt to link the subversive content with the eulogistic – the paean to humour, human relationships and the English countryside – saying simply ‘there is another … dimension’. However, the two are in fact connected. While Priestley undoubtedly follows official directives to some extent, he does so only in so far as they correspond to his own views on society and on how the radio should be used in wartime. And although Priestley undeniably becomes more explicit in his call for ‘peace aims’ in the later Postscript, these in fact suffuse his broadcasts from the first Postscript onwards, and are part of his motivation for turning to the medium of radio, as well as part and parcel of his strategy for bringing about a new order in society. In order to understand this, it is necessary first to look at Priestley’s views on the role of the author in society, and then to analyse the Postscripts in more detail, in order to ascertain the extent to which they are consistent with – but also extend – his ideas of the author’s place in his community. A number of Priestley’s published works give an indication of what he feels is the role of the work of art, and help build a sense of what he may have been hoping to achieve in his move to the radio. In Literature and Western Man (1960), Priestley sketches out his view of the artist’s role, suggesting that the novelist may find that If his fiction is concerned with men in a particular society, and with the character of that society, then this highly subjective, interior monologue, haloand-envelope method will not serve his purpose at all. In the unending dazzle of thoughts and impressions, society disappears. (cited in Stevenson 1986: 33)

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The ‘halo and envelope method’ alludes to the modernists’ – and particularly Virginia Woolf ’s (Priestley is belatedly repaying Woolf for an earlier insult) – stream of consciousness, which Priestley considers ill-suited to the times, preferring more explicit references to social problems. His 1941 work, The Aerodrome, for example, explores the ‘ideological antitheses of his era’, while Daylight on Saturday (1944) explores the favourite Priestley themes of the British leadership’s bungling of the lead-up to war, and the working class’s resistance to capitalist industrialism. However, this should not be taken to suggest that Priestley believes that fiction should always discuss social problems so explicitly, nor that he denies ‘high modernist’ texts any value. In his three-page contribution to The Book Crisis, a 1940 appeal to the government on behalf of the ‘National Committee for the Defence of Books’, that it abandons plans to increase taxation on books, Priestley argues that, far from making books more expensive, the government should be giving them away – whether those written by Priestley or those by T. S. Eliot, he does not mind which (McAllister et al. 1940: 24). He argues that people at war need books – any books – more than ever, and that the government should be making more use of authors in the war effort: Authors are really having a very bad time in this war, because they are not being used. There is an assumption that men who have spent 20 to 30 years learning how to write are less successful at writing than Civil Servants, that in some extraordinary way they are much less persuasive, and that they know much less about the public than people who spend their time between Whitehall and the Athenaeum Club. But we have a kind of dogged belief that we could render some service to the Government in this emergency. So far we have not been able to persuade the Government to make very much use of our services. (McAllister et al. 1940: 25)

This echoes comments he made elsewhere: in a letter to the BBC, Priestley says he is ‘disappointed with a Government which does not make the big imaginative gesture needed at this juncture’ (cited in Nicholas 1996: 250).5 But Priestley’s complaint is not just that the government fails to use authors in the war effort; they actually dismiss them: ‘the wretched Author is debarred from any form of National Service; he is told to get on with writing his jolly little novels to please those of inferior minds who do not happen to work in Whitehall’ (McAllister et al. 1940: 26; see also Hanson and Priestley 2008: 192). The ‘official’ view (as caricatured by Priestley) that books should merely please is close to an attitude that Priestley discerned and lamented in English theatregoers and critics in the 1930s. In Margin Released (1962), he accused these groups of being

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stuck in a frame of mind in which they still felt the need to defy ‘the prohibitions of the puritans’ (Priestley 1962: 203) – approaching the theatre demanding to be entertained. He complains of their tendency to arrange theatre parties in order ‘to have a night out’ and to book seats at a ticket agency ‘as they would order champagne for a spree’, but above all he laments their insisting on laughing ‘every few minutes,’ adding ‘and if you don’t provide them with something [at which to laugh] they will laugh at anything’ (Priestley 1926: 203, 199). This concern surfaces again and again in the third part of Margin Released; he says later, ‘In London especially, people giggle and guffaw too easily: they visit a theatre to be tickled’ (Priestley 1962: 208). Although he claimed that he ‘held out against the giddiness and silliness,’ he was aware that the effort had only moderate success: ‘Time after time,’ he says, ‘I was condemned for writing plays that either had too much social content or were too experimental’ (Priestley 1962: 206). His 1949 play, Home Is Tomorrow, is a case in point. The play ‘lasted only a few weeks’, and Priestley’s comments on the play’s failure are revealing: he expresses frustration at losing the opportunity to say something ‘topical’ – specifically, about the role of the United Nations – and that the critics who attended the first night, and were presumably indirectly responsible for the play’s short run, ‘neither knew nor cared anything about the United Nations and its special agencies’. He adds, ‘I would have done better with an audience of Eskimos’ (Priestley 1962: 205). Again, the accusation seems to be that the critics demanded ‘frivolity’ and ‘silliness’, and were not prepared to answer the play’s demand for, in Priestley’s words, ‘an alert audience’. This is consistent with Maggie Barbara Gale’s contention that Priestley sought ‘an innovative theatre which offered more than superficial entertainment’ (Gale 2008: 13). In fact, Priestley’s desire is to create an ‘alert audience’. This is apparent in the final section of his piece for the Book Crisis volume: you must all believe, unless you are Fifth Columnists, and you do not look like that, that books will play a great part in winning this war; they will do a good deal to keep the public spirit going; they will help us to disseminate new and inspiring ideas. (Priestley 1940: 25–26)

In other words, not to allow authors and their books to help win the war is tantamount to treachery. Granted, Priestley described Let the People Sing – which he offered to the BBC (having always previously refused permission for his books to be serialized in newspapers or magazines) ‘partly because [he] felt [Britain] we might be at war in the autumn – when they were going to serialise it – and that broadcasting would then be extremely valuable to the public’ – as

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‘something light’ (Priestley 1939). As Hanson points out, though, ‘Let the People Sing is an upbeat novel that avoids mention of the looming war, but it is impossible to miss the martial echoes in some sections, and the hope for a better world emerging from the conflict’ (Hanson and Priestley 2008: 191). Priestley does not see the author’s role as merely providing entertainment; rather, the author must keep up the morale and spread new ideas. It is noteworthy that the first of these tallies with the official government view of the role of entertainment during the war, while the second is more particular to Priestley. It also fits in with Priestley’s belief in the key role that imagination and creativity have to play in social reform. This belief resurfaces again and again in his work, especially those written around the time of the Postscripts. In Out of the People (1941), for example, as Alison Cullingford summarizes, Priestley explicitly refused to list the precise reforms or structures that would be needed for the society he dreamed of: he believed that the new values, fellowship, imagination, must come first and the structures would follow naturally. Starting with the structures felt wrong to him.6

The way to bring about the new society which, Priestley hopes, can be realized in Britain after the war is therefore through stimulating the public’s imagination and creativity, and their sense of community, and not (initially) through government programmes in education or social reform. Explicit reference to the role of imagination is made in the Postscripts, for example, in the last of the 1940 batch: ‘I’ve always pleaded for more imagination’ (Priestley 1967: 140). Indeed, Priestley’s feeling that he himself was no longer stimulating the public’s imagination is his reason for bringing the first series of Postscripts to a halt: ‘I am in danger of becoming one of the war bores myself ’ (Priestley 1967: 140) – that is, in danger of no longer providing the stimulus to imagination. He criticizes public and politicians alike when they are unimaginative. Labour, he feels, is ill-suited to the task of leading Britain into the future due to its allegiance to the trade union movement: There is nothing wrong with Trades Unionism in its own field of industrial relations. But the typical Trades Union mind is an uncreative mind, equally incapable of long views and bold planning. And now, if we are to save ourselves, we need courageous and creative intelligences. (cited in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 183)

In an article for The News Chronicle he stresses how effective Nazi propaganda has been, adding, ‘To imagine this does not matter is the height of stupidity’

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(cited in Hanson, 197). Regarding Britain’s own propaganda, he believed that the country had ‘a magnificent case’ but that it was handling it ‘very badly’, by not stimulating what he felt was the natural propensity of the English towards art: The official tradition in England is hostile to art, and so I think is the social tradition based on prejudices of a ruling landed class, the feudal England. But a great many of the English, because they are dominated by what lies in the unconscious, are genuine if only half-developed artists. (cited in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 192)

In the light of this, Priestley’s aim in the Postscripts must be seen as an attempt to bring out this half-developed artist, by stimulating creative engagement with the broadcasts. It seems possible that the desire to stimulate the public’s imagination and to create an ‘alert audience’ was behind Priestley’s turn to the radio. Throughout the 1930s he had experimented in various media in order to reach the widest section of society. Looking back on this time in Margin Released he describes himself as ‘a kind of three-ring circus’, working in the theatre, in prose and in journalism: ‘I never saw myself as a man who was either a novelist or nothing’ (Priestley 1962: 191, 190). The attraction of the radio may be in part due to its transient nature, an aspect shared by a theatre performance, and something on which Priestley comments favourably: ‘It is all going, going, gone’ (Priestley 1962: 212). As a result theatre – and presumably radio too – makes an additional added demand on the imagination of the listener, involving the audience in the act of re-creation. In what remains I will examine the manner in which the Postscripts seek to work on the listener’s imagination, and how this contributes to the creation of an audience which is ready to imaginatively embrace ‘long views and bold planning’ and a new social order. This is consistent with my claim for the pervasiveness of reconstruction themes throughout the Postscripts. The idea that Priestley would switch on and off at will his belief in the possibility of the creation of an imaginative fellowship – the idea that only certain passages in the broadcasts contain the ‘real’ Priestley – seems implausible. Indeed, Priestley himself disavowed this; writing in an undated Preface to All England Listened (1967), he said that at the time of the Postscripts, I believed we had to fight that war, cost what it might. I also believed – though this brought me some powerful enemies – that we could not fight it simply to restore the same rotten world that had nourished Hitler and his Nazis. On those beliefs I took my stand whenever I faced the microphone. (Priestley 1967: xxiv, emphasis added)

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Something of Priestley’s concerns in the early Postscripts can be discerned by contrasting the first of them (that of Wednesday, 5 June 1940) with Churchill’s ‘We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches’ speech delivered to the House of Commons the previous day – after the Operation Dynamo, the Dunkirk evacuation. As Nicholas Hawkes points out, ‘Churchill’s powerful speeches inspired people for the military struggle, but offered no vision of the future; this was the key point on which they differed [from Priestley’s]’ (Hawkes 2008: 18). In his speech Churchill stresses the role of the military commanders and the professional soldiers in the event’s success. He makes little mention of the civilian ships – the so-called ‘little ships of Dunkirk’ – which took part in the operation, alluding to them only: ‘the Royal Navy, with the willing help of countless merchant seamen, strained every nerve to embark the British and Allied troops; 220 light warships and 650 other vessels were engaged’. By contrast, it is precisely through his focus on these ‘little ships’ that Priestley broaches the subject of post-war Britain: fully half of the first Postscript is devoted to the ships. Coming as it did a day after Churchill’s speech, the Postscript can be seen to quietly undermine Churchill’s account of the evacuation. Though both agreed that the need for the evacuation was the result of political and military errors, and though Priestley concedes the role of the Navy, his focus is squarely on the role of the pleasure ships: ‘to my mind what was most characteristically English about [the evacuation … ] was the part played in the difficult and dangerous embarkation – not by the warships, magnificent though they were – but by the little pleasure-steamers’. Through his personification of these little ships – he calls them ‘fussy little steamers’, praising ‘the boldest of them’, and noting how ‘They liked to call themselves “Queens” and “Belles” ’ (Priestley 1967: 5–6) – he evokes the personnel that crewed them, and thus stresses the part played by the people – as opposed to the professionals – in the success of the evacuation. At this period such an emphasis was inextricable from a call to discuss reconstruction themes. As John Baxendale explains, Priestley more than anyone became associated with the notion of the ‘People’s War’: that this was a war in which the active participation and commitment of ordinary people was paramount, and that this had implications for what the war meant, for the way it was run, and for what would happen after it was over. (cited in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 223)

For Priestley, the public’s involvement in the war meant that they had a right to know – and to demand – what they were fighting for. In his 16 October 1939 piece for The News Chronicle he had written that the ‘important personages’ who

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decided policy ‘only pay lip service to this new notion of a people’s war and are not really converted to it’ (cited in Hanson, 198). For his part, Churchill was openly hostile to any discussion of peace aims: for him, ‘war aims’ were the only legitimate subject of parliamentary discussion – and broadcasts (see Hanson and Priestley 2008: 224–258). Subtly, then, Priestley already in the first Postscript aired the subjects which would cause such controversy in the later broadcasts. But he did so in a way which nurtured the public’s imaginative engagement. One way in which he did so was by asking his listeners to imagine the events of Dunkirk from the perspective of the future: now that it’s over, and we can look back on it, doesn’t it seem to you to have had an inevitable air about it – as if we had turned a page in the history of Britain and seen a chapter headed ‘Dunkirk’ – and perhaps seen too a picture of the troops on the beach waiting to embark? And now that this whole action is completed we see that it has a definite shape, and a certain definite character. (Priestley 1967: 3)

He ends the Postscript on a similar note: ‘our great grand-children, when they learn how we began this War by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious’ (Priestley 1967: 7). His strategy is precisely to nurture the ‘long view’ that he found lacking in Trade Unionism, and from there, presumably, the ‘bold planning’ that he felt the same movement also lacked. He calls for the creative involvement of his listeners, in contradistinction to the ‘big rich organisations’, which, he complained in the 1939 News Chronicle article, ‘prefer to debase public taste instead of improving it’: he argued that the ‘Beaverbrook-Rothermere press’ ‘deliberately tries to keep its public half-witted’ by fixing their attention of ‘rubbishy stuff – silly films, “glamour girls” etc.’ (cited in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 199). As a corrective to this he called for ‘a drive along all fronts together, not only political and economic but cultural’ (cited in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 199), and as he said in a letter to Edward Davison in April 1940, ‘I think it’s our particular job – I mean, yours and mine [i.e. authors’] – to see that people don’t become robots and spiritually dead’ (cited in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 200). Tellingly, Priestley’s criticism of the Germans in the first Postscript speaks of them in precisely these terms – as spiritually dead robots: They don’t make such mistakes [i.e. those that the Allies had made leading up to Dunkirk] … but also – they don’t achieve such epics. There is never anything to inspire a man either in their victories or their defeats; boastful when they’re

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winning, quick to whine when threatened with defeat – there is nothing about them that ever catches the world’s imagination. That vast machine of theirs can’t create a glimmer of that poetry of action which distinguishes war from mass murder. It’s a machine – and therefore has no soul. (Priestley 1967: 4–5)

Priestley’s efforts to stimulate the listener’s imagination very often take the form of asking them to picture places – and indeed these are perhaps what are most memorable about the Postscripts: I don’t think there has ever been a lovelier spring than this last one, now melting into full summer. Sometimes [ … ] I’ve gone out and stared at the red japonica or the cherry and almond blossom, so clear and so exquisite against the mossstained wall – and have hardly been able to believe my eyes [ … ]. Never have I seen [ … ] such a golden white of buttercups and daisies in the meadows. I’ll swear the birds have sung this year as they never did before. Just outside my study, there are a couple of blackbirds who think they’re still in the Garden of Eden. (Priestley 1967: 8)

Other memorable passages are the description of a deserted Margate in the 14 July Postscript, his account of losing his way in the Welsh mountains in the broadcast of 25 August 1940, and his visit to Bradford in the 29 September broadcast. These descriptions contribute to Priestley’s aim of bringing about a creative, imaginatively receptive audience, who can conceive of a new Britain, even though they have never seen it. If the listener can imagine a place that he/ she has never seen (Margate, Bradford) then it is only a small step to imagining a Britain which he/she has never seen. Just as it might be possible to imagine what Margate would look like from one’s experience of, say, Scarborough, it might be possible to imagine what a new Britain would look like based on the familiar Britain. Priestley’s vision of a new society, then, is inseparable from his belief in the role of imagination and creativity in bringing this about. All the Postscripts – and not just the later ones – must be seen as part of this project, as an effort to stimulate the public’s imagination and to broach the subject of their role in the war, and thence their right to know what they were fighting for. Despite the efforts of the right to silence him – and his efforts to provoke them7 – the BBC called him back for a second series of Postscripts in 1941. Immediately, in the very first of these, he again called for a discussion of peace aims and reconstruction. Once more, too, it was to imagination that he appealed in the fight against Nazi propaganda: the ‘dreary old political platitudes’, he said, would have no effect (cited in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 290).

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Notes 1 Priestley himself noted the effectiveness of this Nazi propaganda. See Hanson and Priestley (2008: 196–199). 2 Nicholas Hawkes has uncovered evidence which suggests that this was in fact the case. In a diary entry of 1970, Priestley’s successor, A. P. Herbert, wrote that he had ‘at his [i.e., Churchill’s] request reluctantly done 4 or 5 of those difficult Sunday radio Epilogues in the wake of J. B. Priestley’ (Hawkes 2008: 39, emphasis Hawkes’s). 3 Cécile Vallée, ‘J. B. Priestley, artiste de propagande à la radio: au service de quelles idées?’, Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, 6.1 (2008); online since 15 June 2009; accessed 22 November 2011; http://lisa.revues.org/497. 4 In English in the original. 5 See also Priestley’s ‘Do Not Underrate Nazis’ Propaganda’, in The News Chronicle (in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 196–199). 6 http://specialcollectionsbradford.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/postscriptsunday-21-july-1940/ 7 Priestley wrote in a piece for Harper’s Magazine in January 1939, ‘It is indeed difficult for a thoroughgoing Tory mind not to have some tenderness for such an authoritarian and intolerant form of government [as Nazism]’ (cited in Hanson & Priestley 2008: 174).

Works cited Churchill, Winston. (1940). ‘We Shall Fight on the Beaches’, speech given to the House of Commons, 4th June. http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speechesof-winston-churchill/128-we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches. Cullingford, Alison. (2010). ‘Postscript Sunday 21 July 1940’, Special Collections at the University of Bradford. http://specialcollectionsbradford.wordpress. com/2010/07/21/postscript-sunday-21-july-1940/. Gale, Maggie B. (2008). J. B. Priestley. London: Routledge. Hanson, Neil with Tom Priestley (eds.) (2008). Priestley’s Wars. Ilkley: Great Northern Books. Hawkes, Nicholas. (2008). The Story of J. B. Priestley’s Postscripts. Shipley: The J. B. Priestley Society. McAllister, Gilbert, Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley, G. C. Faber, J. J. Mallon, Kenneth Lindsay and Henry George Strauss. (1940) The Book Crisis. London: Faber and Faber (for the National Committee for the Defence of Books). Nicholas, Siân. (1996). The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Priestley, J. B. (1939). ‘Author’s Note’ to Let the People Sing. London: Heinemann. ——— (1962). Margin Released: Reminiscences and Reflections. London: Heinemann. ——— (1967). All England Listened: The Wartime Postscripts of J. B. Priestley. New York: Chilmark Press. Stevenson, Randall. (1986). The British Novel since the Thirties: An Introduction. London: Batsford.

9

‘Keeping Our Little Corner Clean’: George Orwell’s Cultural Broadcasts at the BBC Henry Mead University of Teesside

In May 1942 the anarchist George Woodcock wrote to the American left-wing monthly The Partisan Review to attack the journal’s London correspondent George Orwell: Comrade Orwell, the former police official of British imperialism (from which the Fascists learnt all they know) in those regions of the Far East where the sun at last sets for ever on the bedraggled Union Jack! Comrade Orwell, former fellowtraveller of the pacifists and regular contributor to the pacifist Adelphi – which he now attacks! Comrade Orwell, former extreme Left-Winger, I.L.P. partisan and defender of Anarchists (see Homage to Catalonia)! And now Comrade Orwell who returns to his old imperialist allegiances and works at the B.B.C. conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian masses! (CW XIII: 395)1

Woodcock’s letter did not appear in the journal until September 1942, by which time Orwell had prepared a reply to be published in the same number, addressing each charge. He said he had resigned his Burmese post in disgust at what it entailed; Woodcock had failed to see that he was not only ‘against imperialism’, but that he ‘[knew] something about it from the inside.’ Indeed, he pointed out, ‘the whole history of this is to be found in my writings, including a novel [Burmese Days]’. Admitting his association with the journal The Adelphi, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and the Spanish anarchist group POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista),2 Orwell asked how this contradicted his ‘present anti-Hitler attitude’ (CW XIII: 398). In fact, these allegiances, however temporary (he had left the ILP by 1940), helped crystallize Orwell’s mature socialism and, eventually, his support for the British war effort. This was despite his lingering sense of the moral equivalence of fascism and British imperialism, expressed frequently during his brief membership of the ILP.

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Finally he addressed the outcome of that positioning: his willingness to work for the BBC’s Empire Service. ‘Does Mr Woodcock really know what kind of stuff I put out in the Indian broadcasts?’ Nor, Orwell implied, did his interlocutor know the people associated with these broadcasts, including Herbert Read (whom Woodcock had mentioned with approval), T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Reginald Reynolds, Stephen Spender, J. B. S. Haldane and Tom Wintringham. Moreover, Orwell emphasized, most of his broadcasters were ‘Indian left-wing intellectuals [ … ] some of them bitterly anti-British’. They didn’t contribute to BBC programming ‘to “fox the Indian masses” ’ but because they knew ‘what a Fascist victory would mean to the chances of India’s independence’ (CW XIII: 398–9). This attitude, and the BBC post it led him to take, required that Orwell collude in government deferrals of Indian demands for independence – but he did so in view of India’s interests, as well as Britain’s. On this logic, India deserved freedom, but in 1941 was vulnerable, upon the withdrawal of one imperial power, to domination by another, whether German or Japanese. Thus Orwell’s commentaries at the BBC and elsewhere conceded that immediate British compliance with nationalist demands would merely lead to another, more virulent form of foreign influence. That said, while Orwell pragmatically balanced his anti-fascism against his opposition to imperialism, another element shaped his writing after 1940. A quite emotional and non-intellectual colouring was evident in his BBC broadcasts a genuine patriotic investment in British culture in its own right. Despite the inequalities of power and wealth Britain perpetuated, at home and abroad, its cultural character, and in turn the distinctive sensibility of its grass-roots population, was, he believed, intrinsically opposed to the spirit of totalitarian oppression – and, as such, it was worth defending for its own sake. It was indeed worth celebrating, and presenting as mitigating evidence to those oppressed peoples whom it had most touched. Orwell concluded his self-defence by challenging Woodcock, ‘why not try to find out what I am doing before accusing my good faith?’ (399) Indeed, by the time this correspondence appeared in print, Orwell had already extended this invitation privately. Woodcock had agreed to attend a recording of Voice, the poetry magazine devised by Orwell for the Indian Service.3 Woodcock recorded that: [a] few days later I went to the wartime studios which the BBC has improvised in the basement of a requisitioned department store in Oxford Street. The panel

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which Orwell had gathered together was an impressive one for a single broadcast on a foreign network: [Mulk Raj Anand, Read, William Empson, Edmund Blunden and Orwell]. The radio program turned out to be a made-up discussion which Orwell had prepared quite skilfully beforehand, and which the rest of the participants were given a chance to amend before it went on the air. All of us objected to small points as a matter of principle, but the only real change came when Orwell himself produced a volume of Byron and, smiling around at the rest of us, suggested that we should read ‘The Isles of Greece’ to show that English poets had a tradition of friendship for the aspirations of subject peoples. At that time the British government was opposed to the Indian independence movement (Gandhi and Nehru were still in prison), but all of the participants in the broadcast supported it in sentiment at least, and as Herbert Read read the ringing verses of revolt, the program assumed a mild flavour of defiance which we all enjoyed. (Woodcock 1966: 6)

Byron’s poem recorded the poet’s partisan role in the Greek War of Independence. Its resonance with recent Indian experience was clear. At a time when the Indian National Congress was leading the ‘Quit India’ campaign against British rule, which involved widespread strikes and protests and led to Gandhi’s and Nehru’s imprisonment, Orwell asked Read to recite a romantic evocation of popular resistance to foreign oppression, a call to arms for insurgency to those on the brink of rebellion. The reading served two interests: exhibiting the riches of British national culture, appealing to those educated Indians who took pride in their acquaintance with Byron, but also gesturing not only at Britons’ ‘friendship with subject peoples’ , but at their active support of popular rebellion against oppression. It thus captures in one text Orwell’s personal position, the uneasy balance between patriotic pride in British culture and the commitment to domestic and foreign revolution that he had struck since 1941. It may be that this text was carefully selected by Orwell as a retort to Woodcock, a way of proving his point: he could assume that Woodcock would appreciate the subtext, and had chosen Herbert Read, whom Woodcock respected as a fellow anarchist, to read the poem aloud. Indeed, the younger man seems to have forgotten his objections and, perhaps a little awed by the company into which he was admitted, even admired the ‘mild flavour of defiance’ that Orwell managed to convey. Orwell thus staged the vindication of his role as BBC producer. The anecdote presents several paradoxes that deserve unpicking. Woodcock seems untroubled that he was expected to participate in a ‘made-up discussion’. Orwell had prepared a script for other individuals

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to read: opinions to evince, under their own names, which were not entirely their own. This was in line with BBC practice before the war, permitting the broadcast of apparently coherent spontaneous debate, where in fact lines had been much rehearsed and honed. In the emergent interwar aesthetic of radio, pre-scripted ‘discussion’ was a formal device, practical but disingenuous; in a wartime context, when government representatives surveyed every utterance over the airwaves, it occurred on a spectrum of manipulation, of startling new methods of propaganda – for example, the Russian show trials, one source for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where ‘two and two’ could be made to make ‘five’ (CW IX: 84, 261–264). In fact, the exigencies of radio production bred forms of dishonesty even before a political motive entered the equation. Orwell himself had experienced this from his first radio broadcast onwards: his first piece for the BBC, ‘The Proletarian Writer’ (1940), was written entirely by himself, before being given to his producer Desmond Hawkins, who edited it to create a dialogue, which he then performed with Orwell, splitting the lines between them (CW XII: 294–299). Orwell himself undertook this editing role for many of the speakers he invited. Voice was no exception, and earlier scholarly accounts have perhaps not registered how much content was derived from Orwell personally, before other contributors made amendments. Voice (rather than Voices) was orchestrated by a Big Brother, Orwell himself. Paradoxically, this stage-managed discussion was one of Orwell’s most successful vehicles – not least through its concentration on poetry – to convey his powerful, personal sense of what distinguished British from German culture. This spirit of individual liberty and sensibility, borne of a liberal tradition with potential for further fruition under socialism, could be used to appeal to the Indians and to cement their somewhat ambivalent support for the Allied rather than Axis powers. Correspondingly, I want to stress here Orwell’s sense of the power of poetry to convey a political point, as spelt out in his earliest radio broadcasts on the theme of literature and ideology.

From imperialism to pacifism to patriotism Between 1942 and 1943 Orwell broadcast on the state-run and censored BBC, delivering what he openly described as ‘propaganda’ to British-occupied India. His commitment to this corner of the British war effort casts light on the paradoxes and ambivalences of his entire career.4 This section explores his

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interest in cultural broadcasting at the BBC as resulting from a series of shifts of attitude that reflected international events as well as personal circumstances. Orwell’s anti-imperialism, dating back to his experiences in the Burma police, was strongly expressed from his first articles of 1929 onwards. One of his earliest pieces, published in the Parisian journal Le Progrès Civique on 4 May 1929, was entitled ‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma’, and identified the nature of imperialism as economically parasitic (CW X: 142–7). His first novel, Burmese Days (1934), was a major, early statement of his contempt for both British and Burmese behaviour within this relationship. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he identified his reaction to imperialism as the root of his whole political outlook. The treatment of subject peoples had provided a pattern for his criticism of class relations at home: ‘my thoughts turned towards the English working class … because they supplied an analogy. They were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma’ (CW V: 138). His fascination with ‘untouchable’ classes, and his desire to ‘submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants’ (139), was evident through his early social chronicles in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), The Road to Wigan Pier and numerous shorter essays. In recounting Orwell’s commitment to the BBC, one must bear in mind that he did not support the British war effort until 1940. The experiences recorded in Homage to Catalonia (1938) – in particular, the Stalinist suppression of heterodox socialist factions in Barcelona – had made him sceptical of left-wing calls for a broadly anti-fascist ‘Popular Front’. Moreover, he was aware that to fight for Britain was to support an imperial power guilty of oppressive practices not dissimilar to those of the fascists. Communism, capitalist imperialism and fascism blurred before his eyes: the antagonists of the imminent war were equally compromised by their abuse of human liberty and their logic of violence: ‘if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours’ (CW VII: 360). He was convinced, perhaps naively, that a collective refusal to fight by a global community of working men would prevent the coming war, a position also held by the ILP (Davison 2010: 121).5 In the months before the war Orwell lent public support to the ILP’s pacifism, citing British complicity in forms of foreign oppression (CW XI: 167–169).6 This position was also noticeably close to that taken by the Indian National Congress, who, arguing that British imperialism was morally equivalent to fascism, withheld support for the British war effort, despite Lord Linlithgow’s

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declaration of war on behalf of the Indian people. In a resolution of 10 October 1939, the Congress Working Committee condemned German aggression, but also stated that India could not associate herself with the Allied war effort. Orwell’s understanding of colonialism as a form of economic exploitation was restated powerfully in an Adelphi review from July 1939: How can we ‘fight Fascism’ except by bolstering up a far vaster injustice? … For of course it is vaster. What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so. (CW XI: 360)

His mind, however, was changed decisively when Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Soviet-Nazi Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939, making clear the Soviets’ abandonment of anti-fascism to further their national interests. Orwell then accepted his personal need to fight for England. His 1940 essay ‘My Country Right or Left’ thus acknowledged that the dictatorial powers now presented a front greatly in contrast with British political culture (CW 269–272). Accordingly, there was a revision in Orwell’s view of Britain’s standing, particularly in the essays published together as The Lion and the Unicorn (1941).7 While still critical of the Empire and inequalities at home, Orwell now set these in balance with a culture generated by a spirit of individual freedom. Admittedly, this freedom was most enjoyed by an economic and social elite, but it notionally applied to all. A distinctive feature of British society was a traditional class system, which outweighed economic or political power relations: the impecunious aristocrat remained socially superior to the rich businessman. Although oppressive, these were organically developed social strata, as opposed to the artificial power relations of fascism; and they were accompanied by a faith in justice that outweighed ideological influence. Orwell proposed a revolution to overthrow outdated social codes while appealing to the sense of moral order that underlay them – to redistribute wealth and power both at home and abroad while retaining the tradition of free expression under the law. He could thus, albeit uneasily, ally himself with the official position of the British government on India. A government statement of 17 October 1939 held that the British war’s aim was to extend freedom, and that it would thus plan for reform according to the 1935 Government of India Act, in line with the

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Congress’s position. Although the replacement of Chamberlain with Churchill in May 1940 would jeopardize this contract with the Indian people, making it difficult for Orwell to keep his resolve, in 1940 he was able to declare himself a patriot, denouncing the pacifism of the Left and its facile equation of fascism and Western capitalism. On the strength, then, of an anticipated post-war English revolution, Orwell sought to fight for his country, but was prevented from doing so: a bronchial haemorrhage in 1938 and the injury to his throat inflicted in Spain meant that he failed the Army medical examination. Lacking funds, he wrote film reviews during the early months of the war while energetically working within the Volunteer Defence Force (later renamed the Home Guard). He remained frustrated, however, and it is understandable that in 1942, after delivering a series of talks for the BBC Home Service, Orwell accepted a post as Talks Assistant for the Indian Service, working for Zulfiqar Bokhari. This was a chance to contribute substantively and regularly to the British war effort, which would also provide a much-needed income. The job, however, demanded a sustained, fraught reconciliation of Orwell’s strongly felt anti-imperialism with his anti-fascism. Hired to mollify a restive subject people, with whom he deeply sympathized, he was confronted daily with the tension between his patriotic commitment and his disapproval of social oppression both abroad and at home.

Orwell’s first broadcasts A number of leading scholars have dealt in depth with Orwell’s news reviews (West 1985b; Fleay and Sanders 1989; Kerr 2002, 2004; Davison 2011). Yet there remains more to be said specifically on Orwell’s literary and cultural broadcasts – how they reflected, from a particular angle, his evolution from imperial police officer, to anti-imperialist socialist, to patriot, to propagandist, to satirist of propaganda.8 The Lion and the Unicorn established Orwell’s distinctive synthesis of patriotism and socialism, but it was his earliest broadcasts of 1940–1941 that specified the value of the British literary tradition as a humanizing influence, setting it in contrast with the poverty of European culture under fascism. Orwell first appeared on the radio on 6 December 1940, as a guest on Desmond Hawkins’ programme ‘Writer in the Witness Box’. The subject of

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their discussion was ‘Proletarian Literature’. He was then invited to broadcast a series of five more programmes on the Indian Section of the Empire Service, starting on 30 April 1941. These included a discussion with Hawkins and V. S. Pritchett on ‘What’s Wrong with the Modern Short Story’, and four lectures in a series entitled ‘Literary Criticism’: ‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’, ‘The Meaning of a Poem’, ‘Tolstoy and Shakespeare’ and ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’.9 All four, produced prior to his formal employment at the BBC, touched upon the humanizing effects of literature. They begin with a discussion of literature and propaganda, and culminate with Orwell’s major statement on that subject. ‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’ argues that the 1930s had ‘destroyed the illusion of pure aestheticism’, driving home the fact that ‘propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose – a political, social and religious purpose – that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs’. The anticipation of conflict helped purge literature of the modernist aestheticism that prevailed during the previous decade. The coming war had thoroughly ‘debunked art for art’s sake’ (CW XII: 486). Orwell thus set out lines of an argument to be expanded in ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, in which he drew a distinction between German and British cultures. Indeed, both broadcasts, extensions of his argument in The Lion and the Unicorn, were of a piece with that very recently published work. There was the same striking recognition of the cultural advantages of the liberal, capitalist individualism that Orwell had earlier attacked. An ideology once excoriated as morally equivalent to fascism was now acknowledged for its part in producing the great works of Western literature; for treasuring the right of individuals to do, and to write, as they pleased.10 Orwell now recognized that British democratic institutions preserved free expression, and correspondingly, good literature, while totalitarianism had reduced Germany, Italy and Russia to cultural penury. In language redolent of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he noted how fascist and Soviet governments dictated what individuals should think, ‘govern[ing] your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct’. (503) Could literature thrive in such an atmosphere? Given that ‘writing is largely a matter of feeling’, and ‘writing of any consequence can only be produced when a man feels the truth of what he is saying’ it was clear, Orwell concluded, ‘if totalitarianism triumphs throughout the world, literature as we have known it is at an end.’ (504-5) How could authors ‘feel … the truth’ under the condition of compulsory ‘sudden emotional changes’ that were ‘psychologically impossible?’ (504)

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(CW XII: 504). Intriguingly, Orwell anticipates a revival of literature that would sustain a liberal humanist freedom of expression albeit under conditions of socialist equality: I said earlier that liberal capitalism is obviously coming to an end, and therefore I may have seemed to suggest that freedom of thought is also inevitably doomed. But I do not believe this to be so … I believe the hope of literature’s survival lies in those countries in which liberalism has struck its deepest roots, the non-military countries, western Europe and the Americas, India and China. I believe – it may be no more than a pious hope – that though a collectivized economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form of Socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of economic individualism. That, at any rate, is the only hope to which anyone who cares for literature can cling. Whoever feels the value of literature, whoever sees the central part it plays in the development of human history, must also see the life and death necessity of resisting totalitarianism, whether it is imposed on us from without or from within. (CW XII: 505)

All four broadcasts were marked by the shadow of war, but the third, entitled ‘The Meaning of a Poem’, opened new ground in its analysis of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Felix Randall’, a poem Orwell had learned by heart during night-time sentry duties in Spain. Despite a long-standing enthusiasm for poetry, Orwell had limited success in this field, as recorded in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). However, he remained a keen reader and critic, and his account of Hopkins’s verse is reminiscent of critical exercises then being encouraged by the Leavisite school. This piece would foreshadow Orwell’s most original contribution to BBC programming, the poetry ‘magazine’, Voice. He was already considering the possibilities of poetry reading and exposition over the airwaves, a practise he expanded upon in his later essay ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ (1945). It is significant that this lecture series was delivered before Orwell had any formal contract with the BBC, and that they appeared in print under his name in The Listener. These first forays onto the airwaves were not exercises in propaganda; Orwell wrote independently, and his words indicated continuity in his thinking, moving steadily from ‘My Country Right or Left’, through The Lion and the Unicorn, towards a belief in the redemptive power of British culture. This tradition could serve as a fund of propaganda relatively unscathed by political machination. It is also notable that when Orwell was offered a fulltime position on the strength of this performance, Bokhari immediately drew to his attention a plan to complement the university syllabuses of Calcutta and

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Bombay Universities with educational programming.11 Although news reviews and commentaries would take up much of Orwell’s time at the BBC, his focus was already directed towards cultural and educational broadcasting, in which field he would prove an innovator.

Talking to India Orwell began his BBC career by broadcasting a series of talks on war-related subjects, ‘Paper is Precious’, ‘Britain’s Rations and the Submarine War’, ‘Money and Guns’, ‘The Meaning of Scorched Earth’ and ‘The Meaning of Sabotage’. Shortly thereafter his work as a news broadcaster began in earnest. He started broadcasting newsletters by November 1941; as Peter Davison has scrupulously chronicled, these involved series not only to India, but also to Japaneseoccupied Malaya and Indonesia (CW XIII: xxiii– xxv). Orwell also wrote news commentaries for translation into other languages. Altogether, these amounted to a regular workload of one or two news commentaries per week. Orwell’s words were read for him by Bokhari for the first year of his employment; thereafter, from November 1942, he read them himself.12 His commentaries, though carefully phrased to avoid stating views which he did not take, were however slanted to support the British cause, and disparities between Orwell’s private beliefs and the ‘facts’ that he had to report have been detailed by Douglas Kerr (2002: 482 and 2004: 43–57). Educational programming, an important dimension of his work, came to the fore towards the end of Orwell’s first year at the BBC. As these duties grew, he organized a vast number of lecture series on literature, the arts and modern science, conceived in line with the aforementioned University syllabuses at Bombay and Calcutta Universities.13 Such broadcasts were addressed to a certain class, as Orwell stated in his introduction to a short collection of broadcast pieces, published in 1943, Talking to India. He had a clear view of the very specific audience he could expect to reach in English language broadcasts. Although ‘the total number of English speakers cannot be more than 3 per cent of the Indian population’, they were ‘distributed all over the subcontinent, and also in Burma and Malaya’. Moreover, ‘the people who speak English are also the people likeliest to have access to short-wave radio sets’. He went on to give particular emphasis to programming on poetry: At least one half-hour programme every month has been devoted to broadcasting contemporary English poetry. Obviously the listening public

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for such programmes must be a small one, but it is also a public well worth reaching, since it is likely to be composed largely of University students. Some hundreds of thousands of Indians possess degrees in English literature, and scores of thousands more are studying for such degrees at this moment. (CW XV: 322)

University students were the opinion-formers and future leaders of the nation. Closely related was the ‘large English-language Indian Press’, which had affiliations in Britain, including ‘a respectable number of Indian novelists and essayists (Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Cedric Dover and Narayana Menon, to name only four) who prefer to write in English’. This group was representative of the educated minority whom Orwell hoped to reach; several of them were personal friends of Orwell and worked with him at the BBC. It was ‘these people, or rather the class they represent, that our literary broadcasts have been aimed at’ (CW XV: 322). Orwell had a number of significant encounters with this educated class in his earlier life. His broadcasts to India were informed by an intimate knowledge of colonial life apparent from his first writings. For example, in Burmese Days (1934) he captured in the character of Dr Veraswami, the Indian-born lover of English letters, a type that the bigoted and ignorant colonial administrators routinely snubbed. The Orwellian protagonist, John Flory, a ‘bolshie’ at odds with his colleagues, cultivates friendship with the sensitive and learned doctor, but remains sceptical of his esteem for the British. Through Flory’s eyes, Orwell reports the ‘rather unappetizing little library, mainly books of essays, of the Emerson-Carlyle-Stevenson type’, that the doctor collects on his shelves, remarking how he ‘liked his books to have what he called a “moral meaning” ’ (CW II: 35). In a key passage, Flory challenges his friend’s faith in the triumphs of the Imperial power: My dear doctor … how can you make out that we are in this country for any purpose except to steal? It’s so simple. The official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets … Of course we keep the peace in India, in our own interest, but what does all this law and order business boil down to? More banks and more prisons – that’s all it means. (CW II: 38, 40)

Orwell’s nagging, impatient voice is recognizable here, but it fails to dampen Veraswami’s enthusiasm for his oppressor’s canon of great works: ‘My friend, what you do not see iss that your civilization at its very worst iss for us an advance … I see the British, even the least inspired of them, ass–ass–’ the

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doctor searched for a phrase, and found one that probably came from Stevenson – ‘ass torchbearers upon the path of progress.’ (CW II: 41)

Veraswami’s sentiment remains intact to the book’s end. Although Orwell in 1930 might have shared Flory’s cynicism, he was, ten years later, convinced that literature was a key British export, mitigating its imperial abuses. His BBC broadcasts thus cater to just such tastes: amongst Orwell’s imaginary auditors was the Veraswami type: the admirer of an alien culture whose official representatives fell beneath its highest ideals. In a central scene of the novel, the doctor stands amidst his riotous fellow Burmese, obstructing the violent overthrow of their colonial masters (CW II: 264–5). Indeed, the vignette sheds much light on the tone Orwell struck in his broadcasts – reaching out to the sympathetic Anglophile listener and asking them to pacify the masses at a moment of incipient rebellion. Later in Burmese Days, the racist timber-merchant Ellis beats and blinds a local youth. The incident recalls an occasion when, jostled by a crowd of schoolboys and university undergraduates at a railway station, Orwell struck a student with his cane. Unlike the events recorded in ‘The Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ – confessional first-person essays – this assault could perhaps only be rendered in fiction; it might, however, rank amongst a series of experiences that left Orwell disillusioned with his colonial work. The confrontation was witnessed by Maung Htin Aung, later rector of the University of Rangoon. An admirer of Orwell’s writing, he published a memoir setting this incident within the context of the burgeoning Burmese independence movement. Many of the young men who challenged Orwell on this occasion were enrolled at the ‘National Schools’. As Htin Aung notes, Rangoon University had proved a disappointment in its regimented imposition of British values. The new universities correspondingly spurned the British curriculum, and ‘from being merely pro-Burmese, gradually became anti-English’. After about 1930, ‘most of the leaders of the national movement for freedom … were products of those schools’ (Htin Aung 1971: 20–30). In lashing out, Orwell was ‘merely reflecting the general attitude of his English contemporaries towards Burmese students, especially those from the National schools’ (Htin Aung 1971: 25). By contrast, Htin Aung had schooled in England, attending both Oxford and Cambridge. He records how the students remonstrated with Orwell: ‘when we shouted and argued and quarrelled, he addressed his explanations mostly to me; perhaps he saw in my eyes a gleam of understanding and sympathy, because only a year before I was running across the playing fields of Dulwich pursued by a huge crowd of English school-boys, jeering and shouting “Tally ho! Catch that young Gandhi!” ’ (Htin Aung 1971: 30).

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Here, too, was an appeal to the Anglicized colonial subject for support – a relation Orwell cultivated in his cultural broadcasts to South Asia. A very similar class produced Indian leaders like Gandhi, who had studied at University College London from 1888 to 1891; and Nehru, who was schooled at Harrow, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court between 1905 and 1912. Both admired the democratic institutions of England and were well-read in the canon of English literature, although they (particularly Gandhi) had turned that knowledge to clarify a distinct sense of Indian identity.14 Orwell was therefore aiming his broadcasts at a small group of educated men who knew British culture, and were attempting to break free of it. This did not preclude their emotional ties to that culture, and there is little doubt that men like Gandhi or Nehru would have understood the import of the Byron poem Orwell selected for the first number of Voice. Orwell’s ideal commonwealth, like his ideal socialist state, was one that could retain the treasures of a culture generated by centuries of inequality and oppression. This paradoxical appreciation of the British literary tradition was replicated in the work of Orwell’s close friend, Mulk Raj Anand. A leading Indian Anglophone writer, Anand’s works included the breakthrough novel Untouchable (1935) and the important wartime work The Sword and the Sickle (1942). He had been acknowledged and praised for his finely honed style, clearly influenced by the canon of British novelists. Like Orwell, Anand was opposed to imperialism, committed to socialism and admiring of English culture. He at first declined invitations to work for the wartime BBC on the grounds that an Indian could hardly speak in support of the state that oppressed his people (quoted in West 1985a: 15). By 1942 the threat of Axis domination of India had swung the balance and Anand began to work for the Indian Service, often in collaboration with Orwell.15 Veraswami, Htin Aung and Anand might, then, have furnished types for Orwell’s imagined audience. Add to these the Anglicized INC leaders, the most prominent Indians of the day. Orwell’s sensitivity to their ambivalence helped him play the role of double agent, promoting the British cause while sending coded gestures of support to nationalists through literary allusion. The recital of Byron’s poem is an obvious example. The multi-vocal layering of Orwell’s news reviews has been described precisely by Kerr (2002) as ‘participat[ing] in colonial discourse in being part of that body of statements that shapes the relation between the colonial power and its colonised subjects’. This participation is such that ‘any utterance beyond the elementary is multi-authored, determined

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by a number of authorities – linguistic, ideological, discursive, psychological – of varying force’ (475). Amongst the multiple forces impacting Orwell’s radio work, the most powerful was the authority of the state (476); another ‘institutional participant’ was the BBC, with its ‘rhetorical habits of judiciousness, restraint and a gentlemanly tone’ (477). Finally, Kerr emphasizes the role of Orwell’s own personal inclinations, tastes and complexities (478). This analysis can be applied also to cultural broadcasts, perhaps most effectively to Voice, the poetry magazine devised by Orwell in 1942, which encapsulated his faith in the power of literature to persuade India to support the liberal culture of Britain, despite its imperialism.

Voice The seven editions of Voice – described by Orwell as ‘a bit of private lunacy’ (CW XIV: 213–215) – constitute a seminal experiment in the poetic possibilities of broadcasting technology. They also had a small but important status within the larger propaganda effort. This might surprise readers of the surviving scripts, which contain only peripheral and intermittent references to the war. Still, there was a distinct undertow of persuasion, refracted through literary critical debate. The disguise was very effective; indeed, Orwell felt the programme’s seeming detachment required an explanation. The first number of Voice begins with an echo of The Lion and the Unicorn: This is the worst time to be starting a magazine. While we sit here talking in a more or less highbrow manner – talking about art and literature and whatnot – tens of thousands of tanks are racing across the steppes of the Don and battleships upside down are searching for one another in the wastes of the Pacific. I suppose during every second that we sit here at least one human being will be dying a violent death. (CW XIII: 459)

Yet, Orwell went on, it remained a worthy task. This was no ‘dilletante’ activity, airily disregarding the realities of ‘bombs and bullets’. No apology was required: Voice took up no paper, no printing press; it required no booksellers – ‘just a little electrical power and half a dozen voices’. Moreover, Orwell restated his case for the arts at a time of war: ‘it is exactly at times like the present that literature ought not to be forgotten’; indeed, ‘this business of pumping words into the ether … has its solemn side’ (459). He provided a vivid new metaphor to explain the work at hand. Such broadcasts may radiate not merely around the world but away from it – ‘in which case what we say this afternoon should

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be audible in the great nebula in Orion nearly a million years hence’. The importance placed upon the humanities is thus reframed within this grander scheme of things: ‘if there are intelligent beings there … it won’t hurt them to pick up a few specimens of twentieth century verse, along with the swing music and the latest wad of lies from Berlin’ (459). Although fantastical, Orwell’s rhetoric was consistent with that of ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, and his introduction to Talking to India (1943a). The discussion of modern poetry may seem far removed from the war effort, but in fact such programming had a ‘solemn’ role: to record the contrasting forms of Western culture at a historical point of existential crisis. Similarly, Orwell would later publish a speech by the German sympathizer, Subhas Chandra Bose, in his anthology of wartime recordings, as if presenting a ledger recording the clash between world views. As he introduced his poetry magazine, his eye was firmly placed upon the cultural-history books. Orwell clearly felt that the programme was a notable success in his BBC career, perhaps even a step towards the egalitarian democratic culture that he hoped would emerge after the war. Indeed, in its radiogenic experimentation, Voice paved the way towards the BBC’s post-war Third Programme. A striking feature is Orwell’s decision to model it upon the printed poetry magazines of the day. As discussed in the introduction to this volume and in Charles Armstrong’s chapter on W. B. Yeats, early radio used just such analogies to help listeners grasp the potentialities of the still-new medium. Paul Ricoeur has shown how metaphors are employed commonly to explain new experience through comparison with the familiar (Ricoeur 1976: 60). Orwell, like many others, was evoking an old technology to explain a new one. The result might be termed a skeuomorph: an innovative design that reassures the user by imitating a more familiar form.16 Orwell’s conceit regarding the journal was informed by a long acquaintance with the literary press: he had for years scraped a living through contributions to papers like The Adelphi and Horizon. Voice was presented as just such a little magazine, ‘a small volume, about twenty pages’ with ‘a light blue or nice light grey’ cover. (CW XIII: 460). Though broadcast across a vast subcontinent, it was conceived in the familiar form of a coterie publication, and indeed its ‘readership’ was a tiny, scattered minority. The effect doubtless needed some refinement: the imaginary contents page, complete with page numbers, read aloud by Orwell in his introduction, seems a clumsy device – although summaries of items ‘coming up’ have become a

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conventional radio form. The introduction of contributors similarly remains a feature of broadcast programmes, although more briskly delivered. As the programme continued, references to page numbers were dropped in, with Orwell directing the reader to ‘now please turn to page ten’ and so on (CW XIII: 463). After a few readings, the conceit was usually put aside, and a brief discussion was allowed to expand. Looking back at the enterprise, Orwell explained that the magazine format was devised to facilitate the conveyance of ‘comment and explanation’ required by ‘those who know your language but don’t share your cultural background’. The concept was refined in the second number, with Orwell asking listeners to imagine ‘the editorial committee … sitting in their office, discussing what to put into the next number’ (CW XVII: 75). Orwell took a practical view in analysing the dimensions of the programme: six was about the right number of voices, a theme gave unity to what otherwise might seem shapeless. Recalling the second number, which took war as its theme, he noted that the programme’s readings (two poems by Edmund Blunden, Auden’s ‘September 1 1939’, an extract from G.S. Fraser’s ‘A Letter to Ann Ridler’, and Byron’s ‘Isles of Greece’), ‘together with the arguments that preceded and followed them, covered reasonably well the possible attitudes towards war’ (CW XIII: 75). Clearly the programme was planned to accommodate points of view that were not wholly in line with government policy. Their occurrence in a multi-vocal discussion following a poetry reading apparently neutralized their subversive power and made them acceptable to the censors. It is difficult to judge the degree of freedom contributors had in this ‘made up discussion’. Taking the first number of Voice as an example, William Empson makes a combative case for pacifist and anti-war writing. The effect can seem comical, with Orwell appearing at times out of his depth in discussion with literary specialists – but bearing in mind the prepared nature of the talk, this may be deceptive. Orwell permitted Empson to interject within a quite tame discussion of form, inserting his own, more radical observations. In the first number, for example, the speakers discuss two poems by Henry Treece: Orwell: ‘The second poem is in quite a different category. It’s more like a ballad’. Empson: ‘It’s actually a savage attack on militarist sentiment’. Orwell: ‘Possibly, but as I was saying … .’ (CW XIII: 466)

Though it reads as though Orwell, amid his pedestrian remarks, had been caught unawares by Empson’s brisk assertion of the poem’s radical political meaning, the entire dialogue was certainly pre-rehearsed, and the script on the page existed

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before the words were uttered on air. Moreover, the message Empson found in the poem recalls Orwell’s earlier personal pacifism. It would surely be unacceptable for a programme to present ‘a savage attack on militarist sentiment’ outright, but to have a member of a discussion panel identify this sentiment in lines by a combatant poet provided sufficient distance to allow it to be aired. The device exemplifies the humanistic goals of the BBC: to preserve a sense of detached factual record and to permit its contributors a freedom of expression. Orwell’s hand remained on the tiller as a representative of the institution, with the note of dissent being disguised by the brisk pace of discussion, Empson’s political point interpolated between Orwell’s rudimentary observations on form. If the discussions seem sometimes slight in content, it is worth noting how, in Orwell’s view, the broadcast of poetry itself was just as important. It was the act of reading words over the air that most interested him, as he made clear in a reflective essay looking back on his experiment.

Poetry and the Microphone Written about a year after the Voice series had come to an end, Orwell’s reflective article ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ reveals his aspirations as broadcaster, including an intriguing debt to Eliot’s theory of democratic poetry, as set out in ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’ (1920). Notably, Eliot had contributed to programmes at Orwell’s invitation, including two editions of Voice. In his essay, Eliot argued: The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which wanted entertainment of a crude sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry; our problem should be to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art. Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best material. I am aware that this is a dangerous suggestion to make. For every person who is likely to consider it seriously there are a dozen toymakers who would leap to tickle æsthetic society into one more quiver and giggle of art debauch. Very few treat art seriously. There are those who treat it solemnly, and will continue to write poetic pastiches of Euripides and Shakespeare; and there are others who treat it as a joke. (Emphasis in original; Eliot 1920: 441–447; italics in original)

Orwell was evidently aware of this view as he conceived Voice: It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised again without some deliberate effort at the education of public taste, involving strategy and perhaps

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even subterfuge. T. S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought back into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the music hall; he might have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been completely explored. ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ was perhaps written with some such idea in mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a revue. I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. (CW XVII: 78–79)

Orwell thus adapted Eliot’s campaign for cultural unity to suit wartime needs; in doing so, he contributed to a much longer tradition. John Reith had of course conceived of the BBC on a similar Arnoldian model to help unify a stratified society. The Indian Service pursued a similar goal of integrating imperial power with its subsidiary outposts; in wartime this had become a geopolitical necessity. Terry Eagleton’s recent travesty of Arnold’s position (‘if the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades’) might be a more accurate description of Orwell’s dialogue with India (Eagleton 1996: 21). For this was a very real kulturkampf: Orwell believed that his poetry magazine represented a ‘small and remote out-flanking movement in the radio war’. It had, indeed, been designed with that purpose: ‘the essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience, unapproachable by anything that could be described as British propaganda’ (CW XVII: 75). This adds invaluable insight to the introduction of Talking to India – not only was this a crucial audience, but it was a resistant one – it had to be won over, seduced, by indirect means. One of those means was to appeal to their elite status: ‘It was known in advance that we could not hope for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an excuse to be more “highbrow” than is generally possible on the air’ (75). This was not an Arnoldian pursuit of integrity between high and low cultures, but between English and Indian intelligentsia. Highbrow spoke to highbrow, appealing to a sense of cultural capital, flattering those who enjoyed an English education – proffering the secret handshake of Western humanistic learning. In the development of Voice, another humanizing effect of the arts became apparent. Orwell came to see that the BBC’s propaganda effort was selfneutralizing on the same principle that ‘totalitarianisation … is mitigated by another process which it was not easy to foresee even as short a time as five years ago’. The ‘huge bureaucratic machines … work creakily … [and although] the tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the modern

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intellect … every state, especially under pressure of war, finds it more and more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it’ (CW XVII: 79). That is to say, centralized government was incapable of generating artists, poets, musicians, not to mention scientists of various kinds, to do its necessary work. Instead, it had to call upon people with special interests, often people with unconventional ideas. Through sheer force of necessity, the totalitarian state began again to rely upon those with imaginative, idiosyncratic points of view; thus a certain freedom of the individual was revived. Orwell was clearly thinking of the BBC here, and of the other ministries of the British government that now hired members of the literati: The British Government started the present war with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it; yet after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC … The Government has absorbed these people, unwillingly enough, because it found itself unable to get on without them. (CW XVII: 79)

As Kerr has shown, Orwell’s diaries sometimes express feelings quite at variance with his statements on the BBC. But these differences did not merely distinguish the need for officially sanctioned ‘propaganda’. Writing outside the reach of the BBC censor, in the New Saxon Pamphlet, he painted a far more positive picture of Voice than he had done with George Woodcock, for example. So, too, did he take a different position with other friends. Orwell’s co-editor for the ‘Searchlight’ book series, Tosco Fyvel, recalled one frank conversation: I said … that … his job did not appear to be so bad. He worked with interesting people, he had that famous critic and wit, William Empson, as his neighbour in the next cubicle. He had had the chance to bring such literary figures as T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster to the microphone and had written some good talks himself. Relatively it appeared to me an agreeable war job … It was quite the wrong thing to say – an agreeable job in which to endure the war was the last thing Orwell had in mind. He said that even when the BBC talks were purely cultural, in the context they were propaganda; somehow any idea that was politically unsuitable, however good it was, managed to be eliminated. (Fyvel 1982: 122–124)

His defence of his radio work in ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ stands in stark contrast with the disillusion thus expressed privately. Fyvel concluded that Orwell … could not adapt himself to the mere psychological warfare needs of the war machine. His view on the need for Indian independence was what he saw as the truth: he could not change from it. He could not become a spokesman for a

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merely cultural British viewpoint, however polite and liberal. This was especially as he always had in mind that in fighting against Hitler and the Japanese, Britain had allied herself with the tyranny of Stalin’s Soviet Union. War or no war, he was concerned with the truth as he saw it. He could not be happy in the wartime BBC. (Fyvel 1982: 122–124)

Orwell chose to resign his position in 1943, following negative reports on his, and the Indian Service’s, efficacy and reach as a broadcaster to the subcontinent. A depressing survey of audience figures and responses compiled by Orwell’s friend and colleague Laurence Brander was distributed within the BBC on 11 January 1943. It naturally disheartened Orwell to discover that he was one of the least popular speakers on a radio service barely registered by the vast majority of the Indian population (Shelden 1991: 377–380); moreover, the arrival of this bad news coincided with a series of disagreements with his superiors, resulting from breaches of the censor’s regulations by visiting speakers like Kingsley Martin (see Shelden 1991: 374–375). Increasingly frustrated by conditions imposed upon him by the censors and BBC administrators, he accepted invitations to write for David Astor’s Observer and Aneurin Bevan’s Tribune, where he would soon begin his ‘As I Please’ series (Shelden 1991: 382, 384–385). His BBC work appeared to him, he said in one letter to a friend, to amount to ‘two wasted years’ (CW XVI: 22). Yet, in his formal letter of resignation of 24 September 1943, he would also write: I am not leaving because of any disagreement with BBC policy and still less on account of any kind of grievance. On the contrary I feel that throughout my association with the BBC I have been treated with the greatest generosity and allowed very great latitude. On no occasion have I been compelled to say on the air anything that I would not have said as a private individual. (CW XV: 251)

Orwell’s ‘cultural’ programming remained subject to censorship and interference, but, through levels of allusion and resonance, it allowed Orwell a greater sincerity than much of his other BBC work. Kerr, in his survey of Orwell’s rhetoric in his regular news reports, remarks how his cultural broadcasts were equally subject to the limits of State control, to the distinctive ethos demanded by the BBC and to the complex ‘echo chamber’ of Orwell’s own conflicted position, an ambivalence resulting from his upbringing, schooling and disjointed career (Kerr 2002: 477–478). These eddying circles of influence operated somewhat differently, and diffusely, in his cultural broadcasting. The evidence suggests that Orwell was more comfortable with such work, in which

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a political message was certainly embedded, than he was with circumlocutory and sometimes fabricated news commentary. He felt he was truer to himself here, as we can see from Woodcock’s anecdote and his own account in ‘Poetry and the Microphone’. Going beyond the discussion of poetry, Orwell’s other cultural activities at the BBC permitted a similar freedom – for example, through the adaptation of selected works of literature for radio broadcast (‘featurising’), a practice he refined towards the end of his BBC career, producing radio versions of Anatole France’s ‘Crainquebille’, Ignazio Silone’s ‘The Fox’, H. G. Wells’ ‘A Slip Under the Microscope’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ (Davison 1996: 118). Orwell’s class consciousness is at the fore in the France and Wells translations – tales of social injustice very specific to Western Europe, but which might translate to the Indian experience of the caste system and subordination to imperial power. The adaptation of the short story ‘The Fox’, with its metaphoric association of a fascist collaborator in hiding with a fox raiding a farmyard, is notable in its anticipation of Animal Farm. Orwell’s interests in the fairy tale form and the phenomenon of ‘crowd psychology’ (explored in his 1945–6 essays ‘New Words’ and ‘Politics and the English Language’) are evident in his version of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Another experiment of 1942 was entitled ‘A Story by Five Authors’. Orwell provided the opening instalment and the story was completed by L.A.G. Strong, Inez Hold, Martin Armstrong and E.M. Forster. It begins with the Orwellian protagonist Gilbert Moss discovering a wealthy acquaintance, ‘the honourable Charles Coburn’, lying unconscious in a bombed out house. Coburn represents the ‘old, snobbish, money-ruled England … fashionable London with its clubs and gunsmith and its doormen and its footmen in striped waistcoats, the London of before the deluge when money ruled the world’. Recalling an unspecified but ‘outrageous, mean injury’ done to him by Coburn, Moss is tempted to bludgeon his enemy to death. (CW XIV: 89-93). The mood of the piece falls somewhere between Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The enmity felt towards Coburn appears to be an exaggerated version of the tension between Orwell and certain wealthy friends who supported him through loans and literary commissions through the 1930s. Moss’s murderous impulse recalls various bitter moments in Orwell’s fiction, for example when Winston Smith, under the impression that his future lover Julia is a committed follower of the state (and, in particular, of the ‘Anti-Sex League’), imagines ‘smashing her skull

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in with a cobblestone’ (CW IX). This uneven radiogenic experiment of 1943 thus anticipates Nineteen Eighty-Four’s reframing of such personal frustrations as facets of a totalitarian future rather than of a dying Edwardian capitalism. As Orwell put it, the ‘Story by Five Authors’ proved to be ‘unsuccessful’. (CW XIV: 129). Asking Forster to help salvage the project, Orwell wrote that the other contributors, aside from Martin Armstrong, had misunderstood the nature of the piece (CW XIV: 129). Forster’s final instalment surely pleased Orwell, re-orientating the story as it did as a study in unresolved class resentment. (CW XIV: 163–167). What the tale would have meant to an Indian audience can only be guessed at: perhaps Orwell intended an allegorical connection pointing to his corresponding feelings about imperial abuses and social inequalities at home. Despite his story’s London setting, he may have been implying some kind of link between forms of caste system: the rich man representing the imperial master, the tormented protagonist, the educated but socially precarious middle class. Indeed, as noted above, such social stratification at home was closely linked in Orwell’s mind to that underpinning the Empire. Ultimately, it seems, Orwell’s experience at the BBC was deeply frustrating, as he told Fyvel, and the limitations it entailed clearly informed the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He would rather have fought for his country than lied for it, but his cultural broadcasts particularly strove, as he explained to Woodcock, to maintain a standard of decency and sincerity in contrast with Axis broadcast propaganda; in an often dirty war of words, ‘to keep … our little corner clean’ (CW XIV: 214). Yet, for all that, Orwell at the BBC remains an ambivalent figure. The comments reported by Fyvel sound like the exaggerated assertions of one friend to another, at odds with Orwell’s thoughtful account in ‘Poetry and the Microphone’. The latter seems to prove his real engagement with the task at hand. His ‘propaganda’ appealed to the humanizing potential of radio technology, to good taste, and in this way he distinguished himself from the hectoring voices of the enemy.

Abbreviation CW = The Complete Works of George Orwell. Ed. Peter Davison, Ian Angus, and Sheila Davison. 20 vols. London: Secker and Warburg.

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Notes 1 Woodcock’s letter was dated 11 May 1942, Orwell’s 12 July; both were included in the autumn number. See CW XIII: 392–400 (395). 2 Orwell published much of his early writing in the left-wing journal The Adelphi under the editorship of Sir Richard Rees. He was a member of the ILP, between 1938 and 1939, and fought with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) in Spain. See Homage to Catalonia (1938), CW VI. 3 Woodcock attended the recording of Voice’s second number, broadcast on 8 September 1942, CW XIV: 14–25. 4 For biographical accounts of this period, see Empson (1971: 94–99); Crick (1980: 413–440); West (1985a: 13–68); Shelden (1991: 370–390); Davison (1996: 111–120); Meyers (2000: 213–226), Bowker (2003: 281–303) and Taylor (2003). 5 Eileen Orwell recounted this belief in a letter of 1938, commenting that Orwell ‘who has an extraordinary political simplicity despite everything … wants to hear what he calls the “voice of the people” ’. Eileen Orwell to Marjorie Dakin, 27 September 1938; Davison (2010: 121). 6 See ‘Why I Join the I.L.P.’, CW XI: 167–169. 7 This was the first in a series of pamphlets in the ‘Searchlight Books’ series Orwell was then editing with Tosco Fyvel, later his colleague at the BBC. 8 Kerr notes that ‘Orwell’s art and features programmes for the BBC are certainly worth a separate study’ (2004: 475). 9 ‘Proletarian Literature’, no. 10 in the series ‘The Writer in the Witness Box’, broadcast on 6 December 1940; CW XII: 294–299. Printed in The Listener, 19 December 1940. ‘What’s Wrong with the Modern Short Story?’, broadcast after 19 December 1940, see editorial note, CW XII: 513. ‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’, broadcast on 30 April 1941; CW XII: 483–486; ‘Tolstoy and Shakespeare’, broadcast on 7 May 1941. Printed in The Listener, 5 June 1941; CW XII: 491–493; ‘The Meaning of a Poem’, broadcast on 14 May 1941, printed in The Listener, 12 June 1941; CW: 800; ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, broadcast 21 May 1941; published in The Listener, 19 June 1941; CW XII: 501–506. The talk was given again to the Oxford University Democratic Socialist Club on 23 May 1941; see editorial note, CW XII: 506–507. 10 Orwell’s choice of the title ‘As I Please’ for his Tribune column after 1942 surely reflects his frustration with his BBC work. 11 Bokhari to Orwell, 23 September 1941, CW XIII: 10–12 (11). 12 See CW XIII: 3–21; Davison (2010: 116–118). 13 There is no room here to survey the extensive series on literature, drama, science and psychology and ‘books that changed the world’, which Orwell organized and produced. See Davison 1994: 117 for a summary.

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14 See Fischer 1982: 37–42; Woodcock 1972: 21–24, 29, 35. As Erikson puts it (1993: 152): ‘he left England an augmented Indian’. 15 See Nasta (2011) for a full account of Orwell’s friendship with Anand. 16 ‘skeuomorph, n.’. 2. ‘An object or feature copying the design of a similar artefact in another material’ OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press.

Bibliography Bokhari to Orwell. (23 September 1941). CW XIII.846, pp. 10–12 (11). Bowker, Gordon. (2003). George Orwell. London: Little, Brown. Crick, Bernard. (1980). George Orwell: A Life. London: Secker and Warburg. Davison, Peter. (1996). George Orwell: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave MacMillan. ——— (1997). ‘Introduction’, CW XIII, pp. xxiii–xv. ——— Ed. (2010). George Orwell: A Life in Letters. London: Harvill Secker. ——— (2011). ‘ “Two Wasted Years”: Orwell at the BBC’. Finlay Publisher (January– March). http://www.finlay-publisher.com/archives/Jan-Mar%202011-Peter%20 Davison.pdf. Accessed June 2013. ——— (2012). ‘Orwell Goes East’. The Orwell Society (26 December 2012). http://www. orwellsociety.com/2012/12/26/orwell-goes-east-by-peter-davison. Accessed June 2013. Eagleton, Terry. (1996). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Eliot, T. S. (1920). ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, The Dial, 69.5 (November), pp. 441–447. Empson, William. (1971). ‘Orwell at the BBC’, The World of George Orwell. Ed. Miriam Gross. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 94–99. Erikson, Erik. (1993). Gandhi’s Truth. 1969; London: Norton. Fischer, Louis. (1982). The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. London: Grafton. Fleay, C. and Sanders, M. L. (1989). ‘Looking into the Abyss: George Orwell at the BBC’, Journal of Contemporary History, 24.3 (July), pp. 503–518. Fyvel, Tosco. (1982). George Orwell: A Personal Memoir. London: Macmillan. Gross, Miriam Ed. (1971). The World of George Orwell. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Htin Aung, Maung. (1971). ‘George Orwell and Burma,’ The World of George Orwell, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 20–30. Kerr, Douglas. (2002). ‘Orwell’s BBC Broadcasts: Colonial Discourse and the Rhetoric of Propaganda’, Textual Practice, 16.3 (December), pp. 473–490. ——— (2004). ‘In the Picture: Orwell, India and the BBC’, Literature and History, 13.1 (Spring), pp. 43–57. Meyers, Jeffrey. (2000). George Orwell: The Wintry Conscience of a Generation. London; New York: Norton & Co.

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Nasta, Susheila. (2011). ‘Sealing a Friendship: George Orwell and Mulk Raj Anand at the BBC’, Wasafari, 264 (December 2011), pp. 14–21. Newsinger, John. (2001). Orwell’s Politics. London: Palgrave. Orwell, George. (1929). ‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma’, Le Progrès Civique (4 May 1929). CWX, pp. 142–147. ——— (1934). Burmese Days. New York: Harper and Brothers. Repr. as CW II. ——— (1935). A Clergyman’s Daughter. London: Gollancz. Repr. as CW III. ——— (1935). The Road to Wigan Pier, London: Gollancz, 1937. Repr. as CW VII. ——— (1936). Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London: Gollancz. Repr. as CW IV. ——— (1939). Coming up for Air, London: Gollancz, 1939. Repr. as CW XI. ——— (1939). ‘Review of “Union Now” by Clarence K. Streit’, Adelphi (July 1939), CW XI, pp. 358–361. ——— (1940). ‘My Country Right or Left’, Folios of New Writing, 2 (Autumn), 36–41. Repr. in CW XII, pp. 269–272. ——— (1940a). ‘Proletarian Literature’, no. 10 in the series ‘The Writer in the Witness Box’, broadcast on 6 December 1940. Printed in The Listener, 19 December 1940. CW XII, pp. 294–299. ——— (1940b). ‘What’s Wrong with the Modern Short Story?’, broadcast after 19 December 1940, see editorial note in CW XII, p. 513. ——— (1941a). ‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’, broadcast on 30 April 1941; CW XII, pp. 483–486. ——— (1941b). ‘Tolstoy and Shakespeare’, broadcast on 7 May 1941. Printed in The Listener, (5 June 1941). CW XII, pp. 491–493; ——— (1941c). ‘The Meaning of a Poem’, broadcast on 14 May 1941. Printed in The Listener (12 June 1941). CW XII. ——— (1941d). ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, broadcast 21 May 1941; published in The Listener (19 June 1941). CW XII.804, pp. 501–506. The talk was given again to the Oxford University Democratic Socialist Club on 23 May 1941; see editorial note, CW XII, pp. 506–507. ——— (1942a). ‘Voice,’ 1: A Magazine Programme, broadcast 11 August 1942. ———, Savage, D. S., Woodcock, G., and Comfort A. (1942b). ‘Pacifism and the War: A Controversy’, Partisan Review 9 (September–October 1942), pp. 414–421. Repr. in CW XIII, pp. 392–400. ——— (1942c). To George Woodcock (2 December 1942). CW XIV: 213–215 (213). ——— (1943a). ‘Introduction’ to Talking to India. Ed. George Orwell. London: G.A. Allen (1943). CW XV: pp. 322–323. ——— (1943b). To Rushbrook Williams (24 September 1943). CW XV. p. 251. ——— (1945). ‘Poetry and the Microphone’, The New Saxon Pamphlet, 3 (March 1945), n.p. Repr. CW XVII, pp. 74–80. ——— (1946). ‘Politics and the English Language’, Horizon 13.76 (April 1946), pp. 252–265. Repr. In CW XVII, pp. 421–432.

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——— (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg. Repr. as CW IX. ——— (1986–1998). The Complete Works. Ed. Peter Davison, Ian Angus, and Sheila Davison. 20 vols. London: Secker and Warburg. Paczulla, Jutta. (2007). ‘ “Talking to India”: George Orwell’s Work at the BBC, 1941–1943’, Canadian Journal of History, 42 (Spring–Summer 2007), pp. 53–70. Ricoeur, P. (1976) Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. Shelden, Michael. (1991). George Orwell: The Authorised Biography. London: Heinemann. Taylor, D. J. (2000). George Orwell: The Life. London: Chatto and Windus. West, W. J. (1985a). Orwell: The War Broadcasts. London: Duckworth; British Broadcasting Corporation. ——— (1985b). Orwell: The War Commentaries. London: Duckworth; British Broadcasting Corporation. Woodcock, George. (2005). The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (1966; repr.). Montreal: Black Rose.

10

Radio Broadcasting in Fascist Italy: Between Censorship, Total Control, Jazz and Futurism Massimo Ragnedda Northumbria University

The rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century was closely linked to technological modernity and the formation of a mass society. The role of the radio in these developments was central. As Philip Cannistraro argued as long ago as 1972, ‘it is no accident that the birth of the totalitarian state coincided with the appearance of the modern techniques of mass communications’ (1972: 127). Despite the complex parentage of both these quintessentially modern phenomena, the most recognizable mass communication device and earliest totalitarian state were in fact both born in Italy: Marconi invented the wireless in 1897 and, 26 years later, the Italian journalist Giovanni Amendola described Mussolini’s Italy as an experiment in ‘totalitarianismo’. Following the passage of the 1923 Acerbo Law, Mussolini had granted a broadcasting monopoly to the first Italian radio company, Unione Radiofonica Italiana, and in 1925 appropriated the term ‘totalitarianism’ to describe his dictatorship of the Fascist PNF party and interwar Italy: ‘Our formula is this: everything within the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state’ (Mussolini in Milan; cited in Roberts 2006: 272). As Friedrich and Brzezinski claimed more than 50 years ago in their landmark study Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), recognizable attributes of totalitarianism include the state claiming unchallenged supremacy in ideology and party politics; dictatorial leadership and ‘terror’; and total control of national communications, economics as well as law and order (e.g. military, police and both paramilitary units, like the Squadristi, and secret police, such as the OVRA). A totalitarian regime is therefore characterized by the following elements: the use of violence to seize and maintain power; the total control of the economy as well as law and order by the state; political power monopolized by a single party via a controlling ideology; and most importantly for the purposes of this

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paper, control of the tools of communication. Of course the discussion is much more complicated, as scholars of both totalitarianism generally (Hans Maier, Emilio Gentile) and Italian Fascist autocracy (David Roberts, MacGregor Knox and Philip Morgan) have demonstrated in detail (see also Greil 1977; Chabod 1963; Kogan 1968; Lyttelton 1973; Organski 1968; Palmieri 1962; Sarti 1970; De Felice 1969; Acquarone 1965; Woolf 1968). It is not my present aim to survey the literature about totalitarianism and its various connections with modernity – aptly summarized in Roger Griffin’s 2007 Modernism and Fascism. What shall be examined in this chapter is the mutually evolving connection between radio and Italian Fascism, in addition to how the radio in Italy was used by the PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista) – at least before the outbreak of World War II – in a manner very different than that in Nazi Germany. The role of the radio as a key tool of propaganda in Fascist Italy has been neglected in a way that Nazism’s use of broadcasting, the Volkskaempfer, and hierarchical direction of Goebbels’ Reichskulturkammer, has not.1 For one thing, in Fascist Italy it was possible to listen to jazz and tango, not typical Italian music, but sounds that have had an important international influence on the radio. Of course, in totalitarian Italy, as in totalitarian Germany, the radio was used as a vehicle for propaganda and cultural hegemony (or Gleichschaltung). However, for three fundamental reasons radio was not as powerful in Fascist Italy as in Nazi Germany: first; at the beginning, Mussolini was sceptical about the political value of radio and he preferred the printing press for advancing the values of the regime. Second, technological obstacles complicated the possibilities for reaching the whole country (especially transmission stations in the south and the limited amount of broadcast content). Finally, there was the cost involved, for most Italians could not afford a wireless set or the subscription fee before the mid-1930s. Indeed, in the beginning many Italians seem to have been unsatisfied with the cultural output on Italian Radio and did not think it worth the money to invest in a wireless set and subscription to the public service broadcaster EIAR (Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche). Nonetheless, the radio was increasingly pivotal in the process of building consensus through use of the mass media as a propaganda tool. Accordingly, this chapter will consider the way in which the PNF attempted to overcome these challenges in order to make radio broadcasting a key component in the ‘modernization’ of rural Italy from the ground up, no less than in the consolidation of totalitarian control by the regime from the top down.

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Similar to other totalitarian regimes, Fascism, in its process of maintaining and expanding power, moves in two directions: building consensus and the repression of dissent. This dynamic, long recognized by scholars, is a cornerstone of totalitarian rule, and is typically marked by ideological propaganda in the latter and extrajudicial violence in the former. Under Fascist rule, both of these variables were at work in Italy: repression was expressed by banning and censoring what was considered dangerous for the regime (closing independent newspapers for example; see George Talbot 2007), or by arrests (of the communist PCI leader Antonio Gramsci), killings (of the socialist PSU leader Giacomo Matteotti) and persecutions (of Benedetto Croce, Luigi Sturzo, Amendola and many others) of those who tried to contest the regime’s monopolization of power. On the other hand, consensus building, as encapsulated by the expressed ‘fascistization of spare time’, simply entailed spreading the values of the Fascist revolution (Baldoli 2003; De Grazia and Luzzato 2002). To achieve this propaganda aim, the radio was considered a fundamentally important tool. In fact, all totalitarian dictatorships, both new and old, use every available medium to spread its message: cinema, radio, newspapers, weekly magazines, sport and trade journals, posters and so on. Indeed, even if not immediately, the Fascists soon realized the potential of radio as a new medium for regime propaganda, capable of reaching vast numbers of people simultaneously and everywhere in Italy, from remote villages to urban centres. One radio in every house was the dream of Duce, even if, as will be shown later, the dream remained just that. By the mid-1920s, Mussolini came to appreciate just how important the radio was in order to cultivate and disseminate fascist ideology, alongside modernizing the country through projects of socioeconomic engineering such as draining the marshes, road building, renovating Rome and so on. Naturally, the most notorious example of totalitarian propaganda derived from the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who exploited existing German resources in order to create a plan for forging consensus unequalled in history (Bergmeier and Lotz 1997; Kallis 2005). As Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) underlined during the war itself: ‘The Nazis knew that the radio would give its form to their cause just as the Press had to reform’. Following Nazi Germany’s example, Mussolini became a true superstar of Italian radio playing, with his high-pitched tones, a major role in the propaganda campaigns of the 1930s. He would even come to insist that announcers reading his words on air had voices resembling his own. Thus, upon realizing the importance of the radio

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as a vehicle of propaganda, Fascism began to deploy the wireless as a major tool of their cultural and political policies by the start of the 1930s (Cannistraro 1972: 128). As previously noted, having been a successful journalist most notably at Avanti, Mussolini favoured print media, and he correspondingly viewed broadcasting technology as unreliable. Although Mussolini persisted in thinking that the press was the most powerful propaganda tool for up to a decade after taking power in October 1922, by this time, Goebbels had effectively harnessed the power of radio in consolidating Hitler’s power (Richeri 1980; Muhlberger 2004). By the time Mussolini realized the importance of the radio, he began to invest significant resources in broadcasting, entrusting the project first to Costanzo Ciano (up to 1934 as Minister of Communications), then to his son (and later son-in-law of Mussolini and ultimately Foreign Minister) Galeazzo Ciano. It was the younger Ciano who, between 1933 and 1935, transformed the Undersecretariat into a full-fledged Ministry for Press and Propaganda, directed from 1936 by Dino Alfieri. This transformation ‘brought the government press officer into the cabinet as a minister. The ministry was given enhanced responsibilities which would eventually extend to books, film, theatre, tourism, and very belatedly, radio’ (Talbot 2007: 89). This would later herald the incorporation of radio broadcasting into a counterpart of the Nazi Reichskulturkammer, Minculpop, short for the Ministry of Popular Culture. As might be expected this area has been substantially better covered than the formative years of Fascist broadcasting, and this chapter will accordingly examine the earlier development of radio in Italy, focusing upon how the PNF deployed it and, in turn, the way in which the development of radio in Italy actually benefited from several regime policies – revealing a striking dynamic in the development of the Italian radio under the Fascist regime.

Brief history of the radio in Italy Italy, entered but recently in the field of radio, still has great strides to make before it can reach the position enjoyed by other nations [ … ] the radio must be extended and extended rapidly. It will contribute much to the general culture of the people. (‘La radiofonia in Italia’, Il Giornale d’Italia, 4 December 1926, cited in Cannistraro 1972: 129)

Although most credit the invention of radio to the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, when Mussolini seized power a quarter century later in 1922, wireless

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transmission was still in an experimental stage in Italy, lagging ‘considerably behind other countries in the development of a nation-wide broadcasting system’ (Cannistraro 1972: 127). The first Italian legislation on wireless communications dated from 1910 and was the result of a bill drafted by Carlo Schanzer, Minister of Post and Telegraphs in the third Giolitti government. The project put radio broadcasting under political control for the first time in Italy, and thus facilitated controlled concessions to private companies. This derived from law number 395 from 30 June 1910, inspired by military and national security concerns especially of war in Libya rather than through considerations about the intrinsic nature of innovation. The Great War stopped all private projects for the diffusion of the Italian radio, while in the meantime in other parts of Europe and especially the USA the radio began to take hold. Indeed between 1912 and 1916 US authorities released more than 8500 licences to broadcast; in July 1921 the station known by its call sign WJY famously broadcast the Dempsey–Carpenter boxing match to more than 300,000 people (Monteleone 1992: 7). At the same time in Italy, by contrast, one of the earliest, rudimentary radio transmissions, by Radio Arallo, was followed only by a handful of people (Balbi 2010: 786–808). It was only under the Fascist regime – and thus significantly later than in other western countries like Germany, Britain, France and the USA – that broadcasting began to be an important political tool. Indeed only a month after Mussolini seized power he received a private memorandum from Filippo Bonacci, concerning the formation of a radio monopoly in Italy. This document not only underlines how the Fascist regime had important economic and political interests in the rapid development of Italian radio, but also shows that from the start Mussolini knew about the importance of developing radio broadcasting via groups of private investors interested in developing this technology. For this key document reminded Mussolini that Italy was the only major country that had yet to establish a complete and organized international radio service for the public, of the type able to advance Italian interests abroad (Monteleone 1992: 11). Alongside several other private investors, figures no less than Marconi applied to establish a company called SISERT (Società Italiana Servizi Radiotelegrafici e Radiofonici), which would have a public monopoly on wireless broadcast – both within Italy and abroad. For several reasons Mussolini rejected this proposal, even if Marconi continued to pursue this aim. In the summer of 1923, the newly established PNF regime concluded an agreement with French and German companies (Telefunken) for the establishment of an Italian Radio, funded by a subscription paid to Italian

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commercial banks. In this way, the Marconi Company began an extensive series of contacts in order to unify Italian radio. Then, by 1924 the Ministry of Communications was born, headed by Costanzo Ciano. It was established on 27 August through an agreement between two Roman companies, Radiofono and SIRAC (Società Italiana Radio Audizioni Circolari). This led to the formation of the URI (Unione Radiofonica Italiana) which, a few months later, obtained an exclusive concession to broadcast by the Fascist state. Over the next four years, although still rudimentary via the URI, ‘radio was for the Fascist regime an indirect means of social control but not of planned manipulation’ (Richeri 1980: 50). This is largely because the mid-1920s radio transmissions were generally poor: while in 1926 radio had reached 1,230,000 subscribers in Britain and 1,022,000 in Germany, in Italy the corresponding number of subscribers was only 26,850. To reiterate this point it is worth noting that, by the end of 1928, the number of subscribers had more than doubled but was still less than 60,000. From 6 October 1924, the start of regular service in Italy, the radio offered both simple and diverse programmes: classical music, news bulletins and rare programmes of conversation. The cost of radio and also the lack of popular programming were thus the two main reasons for this initial lack of success. Furthermore, at this time musical consumption via radio was hardly a mass phenomenon. Indeed, as Richeri points out: ‘In 1924 no more than 1314 gramophones and 10,459 records were sold in the whole of Italy’ (1980: 50). At this stage there was greater interest in technical means rather than radio content, for the audience was composed mainly of young amateurs (the socalled ‘sanfilisti’ – from the French sans fil = wireless). For his part, Mussolini spoke on the radio for the first time on 4 November 1925, although this was an unsuccessful transmission due to technical problems. This event only served to increase the Duce’s initial scepticism regarding the radio. The regular broadcasting of news started around 1929 when, by the insistence of the government, a radio journal was created called Radio Giornale, which broadcast daily accounts of the regime and its political activities. Thanks to the radio, the regime thought it could introduce propaganda directly into the homes of Italians even if, as was noted above, radio was neither popular nor widely diffused at this time. In response, Fascism sought to promote a widespread distribution of the radio, through which all Italians could listen to the speeches of Mussolini, intended as a series of radio-motivated propaganda aimed at the whole of society. The spread of radio to the rural masses predominately

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in the South, was, however, virtually non-existent as late as the 1930s. For this reason Mussolini began to consider the need for a new radio able to reach all Italian homes. To this end, two large ‘campaigns’ for the purchase of radio were undertaken in 1937 and 1939, witnessing the regime promoting two devices, ‘Radio Balilla’ and ‘Radio Rome’ These cost, respectively, 450 and 430 Lire. Yet these ‘campaigns’ did not have the desired effect: radio equipment costs, added to those of mandatory subscription, meant that they were still incompatible with most Italians’ means. Thus radios, even by the end of the regime, were possessed by relatively few individuals, with sets concentrated in schools, offices and Fascist Party halls.

Ente Radio Rurale (ERR) The development of Italian radio under the Fascist regime in the beginning occurred almost entirely despite Mussolini’s failure to realize its potential as a vehicle for propaganda. Indeed as Talbot has pointed out ‘throughout the first decade in power the Fascist conception of journalism rarely strayed beyond the print media, despite the opportunities for mass communication presented by radio and cinematic news-reel technologies. Mussolini understood how to run a newspaper and he surrounded himself with newspaper men, promoting former journalists and press officers to positions of great power within his government’ (Talbot 2007: 77). Upon progressively appreciating radio’s importance in forming a participatory relationship with listeners, the PNF held a referendum in February 1927. The aim of this referendum was clear: ‘to know the exact tastes and trends of the general public to better satisfy it’. The most important results were moderately positive ratings for programming; catering for an audience not always young; a middlebrow cultural output; and, perhaps of greater concern for the regime, a largely apolitical audience profile. Yet only a few years later, in 1931, the High Commission for Radio Inspectorate issued an interesting report revealing two key weaknesses deriving from the radio: the limited number of devices accessible by the peasants and workers; and, just as important, the need to develop new techniques for radio as an instrument of culture. The Commission recommended that, in order to overcome these obstacles, the government should provide radios to rural groups for use after work and on the weekends, as well as in schools and colleges; furthermore, the radio should transmit a greater volume of programming geared towards

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the cultural and political indoctrination of the masses. The idea of deploying radio for teaching purposes was reinforced by leading members of the regime, including Arnaldo Mussolini, who emphasized one of the most important tasks for the development of radio: not the spreading of songs, but the fulfilment of a propaganda function. In this way, he was more similar to the Matthew Arnoldinspired, Reithian conception of the BBC than to other fascist voices in the PNF, happy for the masses to be diverted with patriotic song. Of course, there was also a key difference: the development in Fascist Italy was monitored and controlled, as the radio was supposed to be a public service steered by a totalitarian rather than a liberal praxis. Thanks to Law No. 15 of June 1933, Ente Radio Rurale (ERR) was established. This law was particularly supported by Arturo Marescalchi and Costanzo Ciano advocating its aim ‘to contribute to the cultural and moral elevation of the rural population’. In other words, radio was intended to aid in the modernization of the countryside on behalf of the Fascist revolution, thus exposing traditionally isolated inhabitants in rural parts of Italy to Fascist propaganda and thereby integrating the rural existence into the mainstream of national life. Aiming to promote this rural acculturation, ERR began to broadcast in the latter half of 1933, initially to schools. The Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, amongst others, soon realized that radio was a potentially crucial tool for controlled education. Radio serials were produced evoking mythic moments or anecdotes from Italian history; they sang the praises of the regime, first documenting efforts to modernize the country, followed by hagiographic accounts of Italy’s military force. In this way the Fascist state, with its values and ideas now beamed directly to students, could help teachers inculcate the Fascist ‘new man’. Thus, for Mussolini and the regime, ‘after a decade of indecision on a direction for the culture of the regime, where the publishing industry had been shaken up, but the popular potential of cinema and radio had been missed, Mussolini set the course for a brave new world’ (Talbot 2007: 139). Correspondingly, the ERR started to sell radio receivers to schools and other public institutions in rural towns and municipalities. Given the insistent pressure from Party ideologues, in November 1934 Mussolini decided to transfer the ERR to the direct control of the secretary of the PNF, Achille Starace. Thereafter, radio rural programmes teaching ‘Fascist culture’ and describing the process of Italian modernization took pride of place. Interesting enough, a popular Sunday morning programme broadcast by the ERR – at a time competing with the newly formed Vatican Radio – was entitled L’ora dell’agricoltore [‘The Farmer’s Hour’]. Aired between 1934 and 1945, this gave basic agronomy tips,

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along with ‘nuggets of domestic wisdom’ exemplified by a dialogue between the stereotypical characters Menico, Timoteo and Dorotea. Initially the scriptwriters hoped to reach listeners by dramatizing technical and political messages through dialogues, featuring three fictional peasants: Timoteo, the traditionalist who had not improved his land, Menico the agricultural modernizer and Dorotea, a tireless worker and ‘prolific mother’ of seven children (presented as ‘the prosperity of the home’ in the first dialogue). In these dialogues gender roles were presented as very rigid but it is worth noting that Dorotea is a strong character and a fount of information (in one dialogue for example, it is she who lectures the men on how to prevent accidents in the field). (Willson 2002, 161)

These figures were highly stylized and sometimes appeared farcical (Isola 1990: 115–141). Clearly many southern Italian workers thought these ‘lessons’ were quite silly, and were often explained in a condescending way. Nonetheless, given this rhetoric and its propagandistic output, this was a key part of the regime’s attempts to propagate the new values of Fascism to a segment of the population otherwise difficult to reach. Thus Mussolini’s project of ‘modernization’ intending to narrow the cultural gap between city and country by spreading Fascist ideology to the most rural parts of Italy emphasized the achievements of the regime in terms of agricultural modernization, land improvement and land reclamation. In turn, these projects were headed by the Agro Pontino and Radio Rurale and, in particular, found their voice in the L’ora dell’agricoltore’s valorization of Fascism’s new land cultivation using modern means. The dialogues between Menico, Timoteo and Dorotea reflected these regime imperatives. Furthermore, transmission helped break down the isolation of rural life and brought to the rural masses musical intervals considered by some to be signs of cultural diffusion. Thanks to this programme the regime, now in direct contact with the masses, took on the guise of paternalistic social peacemaker, attentive to the general improvement of rural working conditions. Harvest tips, suggestions for rural work, plating methods and crop improvement were all deployed in a simple and direct way. It is thus possible to say that the ‘modernization’ of rural Italy was a principal subject for Fascist radio propaganda. By the 1930s the radio ceased to be a hobby for enthusiasts, but was increasingly seen by the regime as a tool of mass communication able to create a ‘meeting place’ for families and the local community. Speakers during sporting events, or in celebration of the regime, often interviewed people in the street

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by way of attempting to forge a sense of nationalism. As noted earlier, however, the real limitation of this project centred upon the difficulty of obtaining the Radiorurale (later Radiobalilla) receiver. What made this project so flawed was a serious lack of organizational flexibility and entrepreneurial spirit. That said, although the popularity of radio was steadily building, it had yet to become a constant presence in the everyday life of Italians. As seen above, at the beginning of Fascist broadcasting, radio was absent from the countryside and the ERR tried to fill this void. By contrast, the radio was far more popular with the urban middle classes and younger audiences. As a consequence, the radio paid particular attention to this audience in its programming. In 1926 Elisabetta Oddone, for example, broadcast programmes like Cantuccio dei bambini and L’angolo dei bambini [Kids’ Corner] that were launched from Milan. Furthermore, the famous transatlantic pilot Italo Balbo sponsored a series of radio celebrations for aviation that was aimed at Italian youth. This series began by documenting Balbo’s flight across the Atlantic in 1927 via a programme entitled ‘From Columbus to De Pinedo’. Similar cultural projects, such as Radio Nonno [‘Grandfathers’ Radio’], took place on the radio as well. These programmes underscore the cultural role that radio, especially in the 1930s, had on the process of Italian domestic education and modernization, co-evolving the new values of Fascism.

The controversial relationship with jazz That Italian Fascism was punctuated by different impulses was typical of all societies, even totalitarian ones, in the well-known dialectic between the continuity and change of cultural mores on the side of more reactionary impulses, such as Catholicism, monarchism and ruralism. On the other hand, counteracting these, were modern innovations like the diffusion of film and radio, both accompanied by non-Italian music like jazz and tango. Indeed the radio in Fascist Italy did not always entail total control of musical output, although it is true that by the late 1930s Mussolini imitated Nazi cultural policies, such as prohibiting the broadcasting of music by Jewish composers. Despite this, in January 1938, even before the official announcement of Italy’s racial laws that July, in a note sent to EIAR director Raul Chiodelli, Mussolini wrote: ‘I have told Alfieri [at that time Minister of Popular Culture] to reduce the amount of Jewish music on the radio. Last night, however, I heard a piece by Mendelssohn. Correct this situation’ (cited in Cannistraro 1972: 143).

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Of course Fascism also extended its censorship over musical content (albeit the words more than the notes). Yet this control never reached the level of Nazi Germany, because of what one scholar has described as: the historical backwardness of Italy in terms of musical culture: what prevented the managers then, to understand fully the mechanisms and act accordingly, as happened in the Soviet Union with the dictates of socialist realism. Music, songs, dances and even Jazz floated in a free zone, in which we could move with a fair amount of freedom as long as you follow certain rules. (Prato 2010: 190)

To be sure, music played a crucial role in the advancement of Fascist leisure and entertainment. Of particular significance was the scheme used by the Dopo Lavoro to provide affordable entertainment for the working classes. One of the main radio themes sung over the airwaves in the 1930s, for example, celebrated working in the field. Indeed composers were encouraged by the Ministry of Popular Culture to create songs exalting the virtues of specific Italian regions as well as the importance of the countryside more generally. By the same token, there was a more defensive impulse towards the preservation of Italian culture, headed in particular by Pietro Mascagni – a leading Italian academic at the time and an ardent defender of authentic traditions in the Italian opera, who developed a vociferous campaign against modern music, especially jazz. Despite the contradictions characterizing their diffusion, jazz and tango played an important role in Italian society between the wars. In the early twentieth century, tango was identified with the Latin world and the spread of its dance culture. Although hampered by both Church and the regime, it nevertheless represented an important cultural aspect of interwar Italian society. This was something that in Nazi Germany would have been more difficult, even if in Germany, too, jazz developed an unexpected importance and particular evolution (Kater 1992). In the early days of Italian radio jazz was welcomed, even to the extent of airing ‘EIAR Jazz’. Thus on 1 February 1926, from the station at Milan, EIAR broadcast the first live musical programme by a jazz band in Italy, directed by Stefano Ferruzzi. Still later, in the mid-1930s, following an increasing appreciation for jazz music throughout Europe, there was a flowering of interest in Italy. For the first time, for example, Louis Armstrong played at Chiarella Theater in Turin on 14 January 1935, and the same Italian city witnessed the birth of the first ‘Hot Club Circle’. The official founding of the ‘Hot Jazz Club’ in Milan occurred in the next year by a collaboration of pioneers and enthusiasts who, despite being a small elite, gathered to listen to records and exchange jazz news. In this way, the culture of jazz was diffused with the seeming tolerance of the regime.

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Yet as the PNF exerted increasing control over censorship and radio output over the later 1930s, jazz began to be referred to in Italy as ‘degenerate music, barbarism, opium, cocaine, nefarious and injurious to the tradition’. Following Mussolini’s 1938 Racial Laws, the thrust of cultural production became overtly racial. Consequently jazz, being of Afro-American origin, was placed under strict control before the outbreak of World War II. Nonetheless, jazz was still to be heard on the radio in Fascist Italy, at least until 1938, though sometimes through recourse to curious nicknames or pseudonyms for composers. This meant that, on Italian radio Louis Armstrong became ‘Luigi Braccioforte’, Benny Goodman became ‘Beniamino Buonomo’, while a number of classic songs were simply retitled: thus Con stile was transformed from ‘In the Mood’; Le tristezze di San Luigi was used instead of ‘St. Louis Blues’; Manna dal cielo instead of ‘Pennies from Heaven’, and so on. As such, both jazz and tango were played by the radio under Fascism, and had a significant impact upon musical culture in Italy. Improbably, the diffusion of foreign music under a nationalist regime that was supposed to preserve the Italian culture is one of the many contradictions of the Fascist regime in terms of conflict between modernization and preservation. This is just one of the various contradictions marking the Fascist Regime in Italy. These have led Roger Griffin to ask: how did a regime dedicated to destroying the ‘progressive’ forces of socialism and renewing Italy’s Roma heritage attract the active collaboration of so many of its most prominent modern artists, architects, designers, and technocrats? … What led Filippo Marinetti, the founder of one of the most radical forms of aesthetic modernism, to see Mussolini’s peculiar brand of nationalism as the vehicle for his Futurist war on the decadence of “pastism”. (Griffin 2007: 18–19)

The above reference to modernism raises, briefly in conclusion, the reaction by Italian intellectuals, and in particular the Futurists, when the radio arrived on the public scene.

Italian interwar intellectuals and the radio Freedom from all point of contact with literary and artistic tradition. Any attempt to link la radia with tradition is grotesque. (Marinetti and Masnada 1933)

Italian Fascism claimed that it ‘emphasized spirit over matter, faith against reason, action over thought’. Like the Futurists, the Fascists praised the purifying effects

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of violence while vociferously condemning pacifism and internationalism. For the Fascists, as for F. T. Marinetti and his band of Futurists, the future of Italy lay with the ‘young, the strong, and the living’. Like Gabriele D’Annunzio in Fiume before him, Benito Mussolini had a vision of politics that glorified voluntarism and struggle – one suffused with the sexual imagery of domination and virility, the religious rhetoric of sacrifice and belief and, above all, the role of the ‘new men’ of action ‘who could control the mass and mould it to his own design’ (Koon 1985: 4). Some of the artists and intellectuals supporting Italian Fascism, such as Marinetti, Sironi, D’Annunzio, Pirandello and others, reacted in very different ways to the development of radio in Italy. In this respect, especially interesting is the relationship between Futurism and the radio, which concludes this chapter. Massimo Bontempelli, an important exponent of Futurism, for instance, was more attracted by the possibilities of cinematic language than the new possibilities offered by the radio. By contrast Filippo Marinetti, for example, immediately understood what was congenial to the new medium for Futurism. In 1933, Marinetti and Pino Masnata published the ‘Manifesto of Radio’, known as ‘La Radia: The Futurist Manifesto’.2 This highlighted the importance of broadcasting – facilitating a direct relationship between artist and audience without the mediation of institutions and intellectuals. According to this manifesto, which first appeared in the Torino Gazzetta del Popolo on 22 September 1933 and soon after across Europe and South America, the radio spoke the language of modernity, and favoured innovation over tradition. The development of radio, according to Marinetti and Pasnata, was in line with more general Futurist approaches to art and culture. Futurism thus saw in the radio further evidence that it was necessary – in order to keep pace with the changes of the present era – to destroy everything that was not modern. Futurists viewed the radio as an instrument of subversion for art, politics and culture. Indeed at the time Italian radio was producing but a few programmes, and many Futurists in fact seemed to prefer other languages – or worse, Italian regional dialects – for carrying out the modern revolution. Some of the Futurists accepted the radio with enthusiasm for precisely these modernizing effects, arguing that wireless broadcasting was synonymous with progress. However, before Futurism’s ‘La Radia Manifesto’, several other exponents tried their hand at works for the radio, further demonstrating interest in this new medium. In 1924, for instance, Luciano Folgore created a successful radio programme, Il grammofono della verità [The Record of Truth], which ran for some ten years. During the first year of regular broadcasting, 1925, 11 transmissions by Futurists and one radio article about Marinetti were included (Fisher 2011: 242).

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Other key Futurists also fully engaged with radio in Italy, including Balilla Pratella, Guido Sommi-Picenardi and Italo Bertaglio, who all worked for Italian state radio. Similarly in 1931, Masnati, the co-author of ‘La Radia’, wrote the radio piece La bambina ammalata [The Sick Child], published in Oggi e domani (on 31 August 1931) but not broadcast in his lifetime. Much more importantly, ‘On December 20, 1931 Masnata as librettist and composer Carmine Guarino made history when they broadcast the first Italian opera written specifically for radio (arguably the first radio opera), the 15-minute Tum tum ninna nanna or Wanda’s heart (Il cuore di Wanda)’ (Fisher 2011: 2). Crucially, Filippo Marinetti not only co-wrote the ‘Manifesto of Radio’, but composed ‘The Bombardment of Adrianopoly’ which was broadcast a few years before, in February 1929. In Philip Cannistraro’s words this was ‘considered the most important cultural broadcast of the period’. Still another influential cultural broadcast during the late 1920s was a set of weekly programmes on: ‘Fascism and the Fascist Revolution’ … presented to radio audience in the forms of lectures by Fascist intellectuals such as Giuseppe Bottai, Augusto Turati, Cesare De Vecchi … In addition, selections from the works of Italian writers such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alessandro Manzoni, Enrico Corradini and other authors favored by the regime were occasionally read over the radio. These literacy programmes were prefaced by brief historical sketches showing how the works to be heard reflected Fascist ideals. (Cannistraro 1972: 131)

Marinetti also gave several radio talks for the ‘solemn official celebration’, and his name was, from the very first year of URI, was on a list of approved speakers authorized by Ministry of Communication (Monteleone 1992: 70). Yet Marinetti’s series of broadcasts, most of which were lectures on Futurism broadcast monthly for more than a decade, consistently argued that radio was a fundamental tool in the development of modern Italian culture. As might be expected Marinetti spoke with his colourful language and style, and arguably ‘introduced the concept of radio personality in Fascist Italy’ encouraging those who, like himself, hoped to make the radio an avant-garde form. However it must be said, aside from modernist technology, the radio was little studied by the Futurists (Ottieri 2004), at least when compared to the amount of studies they produced on the modern theatre. According to Fisher, one of the reasons can be found in the restrictions imposed by a political bureaucracy that ‘affected radio institutions in ways that did not accord Futurism the chance to contribute to the new medium in the manner Marinetti was keen to do’ (2011: 229).

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Finally, the case of Marinetti reveals that the radio, unlike cinema, was largely devoid of links with the past. Radio was therefore able to introduce a new code of expression, one that was both absolutely new and truly ‘futurist’. The radio represented a new form of expression and language, one that was autonomous and different from the languages traditionally used in theatre or poetry (Ottieri 2004: 69–70). At the same time, given this revolutionary method and manner of expression, the only acceptably revolutionary (if predictable) use of this new technology soon became the ‘preferred’ way for regime to broadcast a theatre or musical events. In partial consequence, following the initial enthusiasm and curiosity around the new medium of radio broadcasting in Fascist Italy, by the outbreak of World War II much of the enthusiasm for radio had effectively disappeared – like the enthusiasm for the regime that had fostered it.

Notes 1 See Bergmeier and Lotz (1997) for an account of broadcasting policy in Nazi Germany for an account of the German experience. 2 They decided to call the Radio, Radia because, as they stated, as Scultura (Sculpture) Poesia (Poetry), cinematografia (cinema) also the entirely radio expressions must, linguistically talking, terminated with the ‘A’ (Verdone 1990: 83).

Works cited Acquarone, Alberto. (1965). L’organizzazione dello stato fascista. Turin: Einaudi. Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. (1997). Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. [1944]. Balbi, Gabriele. (2010). ‘Radio Before Radio: Araldo Telefonico and the Invention of Italian Broadcasting’, Technology and Culture, 51.4 (October), 786–808. Baldoli, C. (2003). Exporting Fascism: Italian Fascists and Britain’s Italians in the 1930s. New York; Oxford: Berg Publishers. Bergmeier, Horst and Lotz, Rainer. (1997). Hitler’s Airwaves. The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cannistraro, Philip V. (1972). ‘The Radio in Fascist Italy’, Journal of European Studies, 2.2 (June), pp. 127–152. Chabod, F. (1963). A History of Italian Fascism. London: Weindenfeld and Nicolson. De Felice, Renzo. (1969). Le interpretazioni del fascismo. Bari: Laterza. De Grazia, Victoria and Luzzato, Sergio. (eds) (2002). Fascismo. Un Dizionario Critico, vol. 1. Turin: Einaudi.

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Fisher, Margaret. (2009). ‘Futurism and Radio’, in Futurism and the Technological Imagination, Ed. RodopiGünter Berghaus. Amsterdam, New York: Editions Rodopi B.V, pp. 239–262. ——— (2011). ‘New Information Regarding the Futurist Radio Manifesto’, Italogramma, the Journal of Italian Studies on-line of the Italian Institute, Faculty of Letters, Università Eötvös Loránd in Budapest, 2011, in: http://italogramma.elte.hu/sites/ default/files/cikkek/letoltheto/pdf/Fisher_radio.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2013. Friedrich, Carl J., and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. (1956). Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gentile, E. (2001). Il culto del Littorio. Roma: Laterza. Greil, Arthur L. (1977). ‘The Modernization of Consciousness and the Appeal of Fascism’, Comparative Political Studies, 10.2 (July), pp. 213–238. Griffin, Roger. (2007). Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Isola, G. (1990). Abbassa la tua radio, per favore: Storia dell’ascolto radiofonico nell’Italia fascista. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Kallis, Aristotle. (2005). Nazi propaganda in the Second War World. Basingstone: Palgrave, 2005. Kater, Michael. (1992). Different Drummers. Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kogan, N. (1968). ‘Fascism as a Political System’, in The Nature of Fascism, Ed. S. J. Woolf. London: Weindenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 11–18. Koon, Tracy H. (1985). Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922–1943. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Lyttelton, Adrian. (1973). The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Marinetti, Filippo and Masnada, Pino. (1933). ‘La radia. Futurist Manifesto of October 1933’, Gazzetta del Popolo, 22 September. Monteleone, F. (1992). Storia della radio e della televisione Italiana. Venezia: Marsilio. Mühlberger, Detlef. (2004). Hitler’s Voice: The Völkischer Beobachter, 1920–1933. Vol. II, Nazi ideology and Propaganda. Oxford: Peter Lang. Organski, A. F. K. (1968). ‘Fascism and Modernization’, in The Nature of Fascism, Ed. S. J. Woolf. London: Weindenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 19–41. Ottieri, Alessandra. (2004). ‘Il futurismo e la radio: Un’occasione mancata’, Sinestesie: Rivista di studi sulle letterature e le arti europee, 2.1, pp. 68–71. Palmieri, M. (1962). ‘The Philosophy of Fascism’, in Communism, Fascism and Democracy, The Theoretical Foundation, Ed. C. Cohene. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 344–360. Prato, P. (2010). La musica italiana: Una storia sociale dall’Unità ad oggi. Roma: Donzelli. Richeri, Giuseppe. (1980). La radio. Milano: Mondadori.

Radio Broadcasting in Fascist Italy Roberts, David D. (2006). The Totalitarian Ex.periment in Twentieth Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics. New York; London: Routledge. Sarti, Roland. (1970). ‘Fascist Modernization in Italy: Traditional or Revolutionary?’, American Historical Review, 75 (April), pp. 1029–1045. Talbot, George. (2007). Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43. New York: Palgrave. Verdone, Masrio. (1990). Diario parafuturista. Roma: Lucarini. Willson, Perry R. (2002). Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurali. London: Routledge. Woolf, S. J. (1968). The Nature of Fascism. New York: Vintage. Zwerin, Mike. (2000). Swing under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom. New York: Cooper Square Press.

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Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment Matthew Feldman Teesside University

On 8 May 1945, the very day Allied nations in Europe were celebrating V-E Day, one of the United States’s leading poets was being interrogated by the FBI on treason charges. He was one of seven radio broadcasters thus charged by the USA, a majority of the dozen treason charges brought against US citizens for wartime treason. Unlike the other six, and in an irony befitting an iconic poet long resident in Italy, Ezra Pound was held within eyeshot of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that beautiful and poignant reminder of human imperfection. Initially detained at the US Army Disciplinary Training Center in what he later called a ‘gorilla cage’, Pound must have been reminded by that tower of his wartime hubris, of the impossibility of creating an earthly paradise – what he was to call a paridiso terrestere – and of the effects that resulted from serving Benito Mussolini’s crumbling, crooked regime to the very last. As this essay will show, Pound’s descent has been poorly understood by scholars or the wider public. Large swathes of criticism on what quickly became known as the ‘Pound Case’ tend towards either the exculpatory or the tautological. By the latter I mean that Pound’s insanity defence – which he assisted in (hardly a fact which tells against mental incapacity) – has been taken at face value, and then projected backwards to his wartime activities, if not further. This manoeuvre has the benefit of leaving unquestioned some of the less-savoury aspects of modernism, and driving a wedge between art and everything else (sanity, personal life, politics and so forth). Furthermore, Pound’s insanity defence seems to preclude some of the more considered reasons for his radio broadcasts: needing money; difficulty in moving his aged parents; real commitment to his life in Italy; and especially, to

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his political fanaticism – which, by the outbreak of World War II, had reached boiling point. The insanity plea of late 1945, in short, may not have ultimately served the cause of justice or of Ezra Pound – subsequently institutionalized in poor conditions and without charge for nearly 13 years – but it certainly served the nascent ‘new critical’ approaches to modernism that so neatly separated art and politics. As this chapter will argue by turning to the neglected case of Pound’s engagement with Fascist radio propaganda, such an untenable position has long occluded understanding of the trajectory and depth of Pound’s wartime propaganda. This will be reappraised by looking at, in turn, the content, extent and dating of Pound’s war broadcasts.

The content of Pound’s broadcast scripts ‘What do you N. Zealanders expect to get out of being sold BY London jews to New York jews, any way?’, Pound demanded in a three-page typescript entitled ‘You New Zealanders’: ‘Your men have been sent to die for the Negus, a black king of a slaving country, that we had started to civilize. You won’t KEEP Abyssinia. You will merely die for a temporary occupation of it, and what is it to you any way? What profit do you get from jew-owned mines in Africa?’1 Likely beamed to Allied troops in North Africa during 1941, this text highlights the expansive nature of Pound’s wartime propaganda. It was not only North American and British audiences at which Pound aimed his broadcasts, but shortwave transmissions to North Africa and elsewhere. During the height of Axis conquest, similar Fascist transmissions to China were also discussed at EIAR. On 22 April 1941, Pound enthusiastically responded to Adriano Ungaro, an English-language censor at Radio Rome, recommending his rendering of a ‘Confucian’ Axis as propaganda material: As to Italian radio in Shanghai/// what about a bit of Confucius/ my line that Mussolini and Hitler APPLY Confucian principles// Does the Shanghai relay stuff from Rome? // All nonsense China staying out of the Axis system. Also nothing against Italy telling China to divide up Australia with Japan. Not for me to say/ but it[’s] plain horse sense.2

Corresponding to the above enquiry is one of Pound’s more unusual firstperson texts, a four-page typescript dated 31 January 1943. In his ‘Message to Tuan Tzetsun’s Friends’ Pound highlighted his readings of Confucius over

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Radio Rome ‘which belong in a certain way to the Axis powers’, before directly addressing his presumed Chinese audience: With the sunrise: make it new. Those ideograms were cut in your great emperors bathtub, and they are now better known in Europe. They have been used on the front pages of books. I have seen signs as clear as any map on the back of a tortoise. When both Mussolini and Hitler have quoted Confucius, not I think, consciously but when in their orders, when in their designs for the new Europe I have found the same sentences that you find in the Great Learning, the mature study, the integral, or total study, it is I think time for China to seek for more intimate knowledge of the aims of the Axis powers. There is a simple ideogram that has often translated ‘middle’, it is not from an idle desire for novelty but from a desire to make clear its meaning that I translate that sign the PIVOT or axis, and that looking again at the signs, I would translate the second of the Four Classics: ‘The unwavering Axis’.3

Pound did, in fact, translate the second Confucian Ode as L’Asse che non vacilla [The Axis Will Not Waiver]; with that provocative title, the likely reason advancing Allied armies pulped it in February 1945. Underscoring that Confucius, too, could be pressed into wartime service, Pound declared in one of many translated letters in his FBI File, ‘Confucius is the material which should be taken into the trenches’.4 In the same way that the neat division critics have long held between Pound’s propaganda and his other work no longer holds, it simply can no longer be maintained he was only writing (and likely transmitting) broadcasts for the USA and Britain but, at the very least, to several other countries at war as well. Nor were Pound’s broadcasts solely written or transmitted in English. While Pound’s non-Anglophone propaganda remains largely beyond the scope of this essay – including his sizeable Italian journalism from this period (EPPP VII: 460–475; VIII 1–253) – there are hundreds of items in Italian, largely from the period of the Salò Republic. While ‘only a few traces of his late collaboration with Germany survive’, Benjamin Friedlander rightly observes, an extant onepage script in German is headed ‘23 November 1943 Salò’. This contains an unsigned translation commencing, ‘No I do not speak against my country’, before continuing: Until the liberation of Mussolini, the big newspapers were in the hands of plutocrats. Many people think the war was a whim of Hitler and Mussolini. From the moment Mussolini recognized the collaboration between Moskau [sic] and New York Jewry, the international Jewry condemned him. And as soon as

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Hitler announced publicly Gottfried Feder’s thesis that in the kapitalist system the power to buy lies mainly with those who do not work themselves, the war against him broke out.5

Pound’s FBI Files also reveal that he composed at least two broadcast typescripts in French. Counterpart of the Anglophone division, EIAR’s Francophone division broadcast Italian Fascist propaganda daily to French North Africa and, it appears especially, to the neighbouring Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain. In response to Pétain’s infamous collaborationist speech the day before – the same day it appeared, in fact, translated and reproduced, in the New York Times – Pound declared, interestingly, in the first person: ‘Marshal Pétain recognized that Germany was fighting for European civilization [ … ] now that your reforms are so fascist in form, you can penetrate fearlessly in the fascist spirit, in the constructive spirit’. Whereas Pétain alluded to a ‘usurious control’ and ‘slowness in building a new order or, more correctly, in imposing one’ on 12 August 1941, Pound was more forthright in his FBI-translated French address the next day: ‘The France of pretexts was a Jewish France, a usurious France. You are late, in fact you are very late in your purging of usurers, Jews [ … an] especially putrid bands of Swiss usurers. You need my small treatises on monetary economy, if you are to find Jean Barral [ … ] as a preface to the new era’.6 This high praise for the French economist and anti-Semitic author of the 1924 La Suprématie universelle des juifs et la Société des nations – with whom Pound also corresponded between 1933 and 1942 – is clarified in a second French typescript entitled ‘Jean Barral’. The latter comprises a five-page typescript, alongside a heavily scored fair-copy of the same length. As with the year before, and perhaps on other occasions as well, this text recalls Pound’s earlier periods spent in France ‘in the footsteps of the troubadours’. As this English rendering suggests, this typescript was similarly recorded, translated and reproduced in Pound’s FBI File. Also like the Pétain script, Pound’s ‘Jean Barral’ urges collaboration in the ‘new order’ under Axis hegemony: Barral would have led you to avoid the war of 1939. Like Quisling would have led Norway to avoid the war [ …. ] in knowing Fascism better Barral can very well adjust his ideas with ours, which are more improved. France needs him and his books. The new Europe will find a place for France as soon as France will find a place for Barral.7

More often noted regarding the nature of these wartime propaganda broadcasts are the ‘variety of accents, English and American’ in which the Pound’s recorded broadcasts were delivered. For Humphrey Carpenter, Pound’s ‘folksy manner’ of

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delivery provided for a ‘masterly performance. The voice is clearly pitched – the absurdly rolled r’s help to throw the words across the poor-quality short-wave transmission, so that he comes over far better than the professional announcer’.8 Less charitably, John Tytell hears little more than ‘bile and personal complaint’ suffusing Pound’s broadcasts, arguing that his ‘persona would shift according to accent and diction, and he would use a folky western twang, a southern drawl, an ironic cockney whine, a flat toneless rages. Sometimes he slurred, often he seemed to be ranting’9 (Tytell 1987: 262). According to C. David Heymann, the latter two qualities apparently compounded the difficulty in hearing Pound’s shortwave transmissions: The palaver poured forth in a variety of tongues – flat, pedantic, scolding tones intermingled with exaggerated Southern drawls. Western plainsman lulls, Cockney growls. He switched from one to another without warning, breaking at times into a torrid rage, slurring his words, ranting at a low pitched roar. Often the reception was poor and added to the bizarre vocal inflections, making it impossible for transcribers to distinguish between words. When they did understand what was being said they were often unfamiliar with the subject matter. Their transcriptions were full of errors. (Heymann 1976: 105–106)

Whatever the case audibly, speculation over the reception of Pound’s broadcasts nonetheless raises a final three points. First, scholars currently know virtually nothing about the nature of Pound’s pseudonymous texts; his foreign-language compositions; nor about his anonymous instructions and slogans – let alone whether, and which, typescripts held at Yale’s Beinecke Library were personally delivered at EIAR studios. Only 170 of Pound’s broadcasts seem to have been recorded and stored by the FCC, leaving many questions unanswerable: how many impersonations did Pound do and how many other voices, persona or imitations might Pound have also undertaken? Without additional recordings, of course, it is impossible to know. Still, there are interesting glimpses of other voices, and other broadcasts, that Pound undertook for Radio Rome. To be sure, he participated in several round-table discussions and interviews – again, just how many cannot be adjudged – documented by a few references and transcriptions from an EIAR programme from spring 1943 titled ‘Round the Microphone’.10 While presumably contributing to this discussion in his normal voice, another revealing letter to Ungaro laments: ‘I don’t suppose anybody but me can IMITATE Winston’s voice and accent’.11 With recorded sound rather than text, it is clear, the empirical terrain is far less sure. Nevertheless, pace the references above, it is safe to speculate that, as with so much of Pound’s radio propaganda, his activities were far more extensive than previously seen.

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Second, in terms of the reception of wartime speeches aimed at Britain and the USA as a whole, most ex post facto accounts stress that Pound’s broadcasts made little sense. This supposed incomprehensibility has also been assumed to be of Pound’s making; going so far as to argue, in Gibran van Ert’s phrase: ‘The most striking aspect of Pound’s “propaganda” is his nearly complete disregard for the listener’s ability to understand it’ (Ert 1994: 56). This judgement is starkly contrasted by Pound’s voluminous correspondence; in one telling instance, for example, to the aforementioned Adriano Ungaro: 5 Aug. 1942 Caro Ungaro Transmission so BAD for last three nights that I am on point of telegraphing you. It must be the transmitting microphone [ … ] effect is either whisper or a rattle/ a bump bump bump, the minute one turns on enough current to hear. do fer Xt’z ache have the microphones looked at.12

Yet delving into the archives is unnecessary to demonstrate that – whether successfully or not – Pound was quite aware of dangers of ‘incomprehensibility’. He thus did what he could do to address this directly. Several such asides, from his broadcasts entitled ‘Continuity’ (6 July 1942), ‘That Illusion’ (19 February 1943) and ‘To Consolidate’ (c 1942), were reprinted by Leonard W. Doob 35 years ago: Had I the tongue of men and angels I should be unable to make sure that even the most faithful listeners would be able to hear and grasp the whole of a series of my talks. (Pound 1978: #52) ****** I am taking my whole time on one point durin’ this little discourse. Sometimes I try to tell you too much. I suspect I talk in a what-is-called incoherent manner: ’cause I can’t (and I reckon nobody could) tell where to begin. (Pound 1978: #61, ****** As I can not AT ALL count on the present hearers, if there are any present hearers, [not] having read a line of [my] writing I have, for the sake of clarity, to repeat things I have said before. (Pound 1978: #115)

Exceptions were encountered not when Pound chose a particularly arcane subject, it seems, but rather when receiving conditions hampered short-wave reception. Like every other wartime broadcaster, Pound was less a prisoner of his own esotericism than changes in the weather.

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A third and final point concerns the transmission of Pound’s wartime broadcasts. While reiterating that this chapter is mainly concerned with Pound’s propaganda texts rather than the separate question of their transmission and reception, it is clear that Radio Rome’s shortwave output was consistently marred by difficulties of audibility. Similar to his 5 August 1942 complaint to Ungaro above, in praising his ‘handler’ at EIAR, Prince Ranieri di San Faustino’s, delivery the year before, Pound also noted the static background in much of the transmission: ‘Excellent delivery last night. Voice absolutely clear and every word “visible”, except for a few ORful KRRumpzzz! of static or atmospheric or whatever BLITZED out a few phrases’ (Rachewiltz 1979–1980: 164). This problem faced auditors and transcribers alike around the wartime world, not least as radio technology was still undergoing rapid development during the war years. This was particularly true of shortwave transmissions, used to broadcast across continents by bouncing transmissions off the earth’s atmosphere (rather than with medium- and long-wave, beamed directly from stations over a range of miles depending upon the power of the transmitter). At the forefront of this technology was the BBC in Britain, hosting some 43 shortwave stations by November 1943 and, perhaps, then the most advanced and well-staffed Monitoring Station in the world. Covering each day of World War II in meticulous detail, the BBC’s wartime Summary of World Broadcasts correspondingly recorded the main radio transmissions of every belligerent country – sometimes extending to more than 50 pages on a particularly ‘newsworthy’ day. Accompanying these invaluable summaries were all manner of memoranda, correspondence and guidelines for wartime transcription of shortwave radio. For example, one wartime transcriber for the BBC, the art historian and cultural critic of later fame, E. H. Gombrich, added a hearing note for auditors highly relevant to the reception of Pound’s short-wave transmissions. ‘Listening to bad reception is a very strenuous affair’, he conceded, potentially compounded by a transcriber’s ‘pet projection’ of meaning onto an unfamiliar context. Owing to poor reception and invariable ‘mismonitoring’ – so evident across the FCC’s 125 transcriptions of Pound’s broadcasts (frequently turning Mencius into Mencken, amongst countless others) – Gombrich argued that broadcasters ‘talk much less nonsense than they are credited with’. Adjusting to these challenges, ‘[o]ur main hypothesis must be that the sound makes sense’. To explain, Gombrich recounted this story: Rather than giving examples from our daily experience I’ll fix on the stock story of mismonitoring which appears to be older than monitoring itself. It is the story of signaler who misheard the urgent message ‘Send reinforcements, am going

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to advance’ as ‘Send three and fourpence, am going to a dance’. Now it is well possible that the sound test could not have told him he was wrong. Rhythm and vowels of the stressed syllables are identical. Nor was there any context to help him. But I think he should have been sacked because three and fourpence is an unlikely sum to ask for – dance or no dance. This should have warned him to keep his projection detachable and to try again. (More recent examples on personal application, though I prefer to forget them[.])13

With only 11 shortwave stations in 1943 – six of which were housed in Rome – it is clear that broadcasting in Fascist Italy was a smaller and less-sophisticated affair than that of its principal wartime rivals (Germany, Britain, France, Japan, the USSR and the USA).14 Yet EIAR was still able to transmit by shortwave to Italian East Africa as well as, intermittently, to ‘merchant crews’ in Eastern Asia, the Middle East, India, Ireland and Latin America. These were supplemented by two programmes (‘A’ and ‘B’) on EIAR’s home service – apparently needing to share wavelengths with Fascist Italy’s overseas service, broadcasting from February 1940 in a minimum of 25 languages (including Persian, Hindi and Afrikaans).15 In consequence, EIAR was faced with several problems regarding its overseas transmissions. First, compounding the invariable problems of shortwave reception faced by all wartime broadcasters was the fact that EIAR only had a quarter of BBC’s shortwave stations at its disposal; the former’s output was much less powerful, and consequently much less clear, than those of other wartime powers. Furthermore, EIAR wavelengths had to be shared between home and overseas services, meaning there was a considerable amount of irregularity in the schedule of broadcasts. With respect to Pound – doubtless amongst other Radio Rome broadcasters – one BBC transcriber noted, in response to an internal query about his Axis propaganda, that ‘Ezra Pound is broadcasting fairly frequently but irregularly from Rome principally to N. America at 4.10 or 23.00’.16 In sum, quite apart from the tricky business of recording unfamiliar broadcasts in occasionally inclement conditions, transmissions from Radio Rome were clearly far less powerful, and far less standardized, than other overseas broadcasts. Finally, adding the complexity and frequently arcane nature of Pound’s broadcasts into the mix – irrespective of how effective his delivery or emphatic his message – the persistent problems of reception and transcription by the FCC and, less so, the BBC, become far more explicable. A last, key aspect of this problem regarded the discs upon which Pound recorded at EIAR studios. Apparently also lacking a full complement of Anglophone propagandists,

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recordings of Pound’s broadcasts were typically retransmitted – seemingly sometimes on a whim as ‘filler’ for North American- or British-directed programmes short of material. Recorded broadcasts could, it seems, be played a maximum of three times before the sound quality made them virtually inaudible. In turn, this only serves to reinforce the importance of original manuscripts rather than recordings or, still worse, second-hand transcriptions when attempting to reconstruct Pound’s propaganda broadcasts. As with other shortwave propagandists – especially in wartime Italy – the circumstances and contexts of Pound’s shortwave transmissions were constraining, no doubt contributing to later charges of his broadcasting ‘incomprehensibility’. Rather more reliably, letters from colleagues like San Faustino expressed that Pound was ‘the most important person on our staff ’, and needed defending against ‘people who otherwise would have liked to push you out. Remember that not all of us understand what you are trying to do, or what you represent [ …. ] Your dischi are still going all the time. In other words they are going on the air twice a week for N.A. and on Sundays for G.B’.17

The extent of Pound’s broadcasting The broadcast texts composed by Pound in wartime extend, quite literally, into the thousands. A tip of this iceberg has been glimpsed over the decades in three volumes: Olga Rudge’s 1948 reproduction of four cultural broadcasts in If This Be Treason; William Levy’s more polemical presentation of 18 broadcast scripts comprising his 1975 collection, Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound: from the recordings and transcriptions of his wartime broadcasts, Rome, 1941– 1943; followed in 1978 by the most scholarly and widely consulted edition, Doob’s aforementioned ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II, containing fully 110 ‘broadcasts recorded by the FCC’, along with ten additional ‘speeches written before the FCC monitoring unit had been established, some read by Pound and some read by others, as well as speeches either not used or not monitored’ (Pound 1978: xii). Here Doob provides an insight as to why only a fraction of Pound’s radio scripts have received comment. Through recourse to Pound’s helpful, if limited Department of Justice file, it is clear that Pound’s treason investigation went into overdrive via the very top of the US government: on 1 October 1942, to be exact, from a memorandum to Attorney General Francis Biddle by President Roosevelt.18 Thereafter, various agencies of state marked out their territories – the War Department, FCC, Department of

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Justice (hereafter ‘DOJ’) and, most importantly, the FBI, which soon dispatched agents to Italy in search of Pound – within months drawing together materials for his indictment. With bare scholarly exceptions like those provided by Doob and Tim Redman, then, the rare archival materials consulted on Pound’s radio propaganda derive from the government’s (ultimately abortive) prosecution case for treason. As a consequence, enormous chunks have been passed over in critical silence. Long before Doob’s groundbreaking reproduction of scripts, scholars had known about the FCC ‘broadcasts of record – those monitored by the Federal Communications Commission from 7 December 1941, to 2 July 1943, when the Department of Justice moved to indict Pound’ (Norman 1948: 47). To Charles Norman’s 1948 identification of 125 (of 170) broadcast recordings were added ‘the texts of some 70 unpublished broadcasts delivered by Pound prior to December 7, 1941’, discussed in a rarely cited article from 1972, ‘Ezra Pound and the Italian Ministry for Popular Culture’. Decrying the fact that earlier views ‘are based on what has been a rather selective publication of the documents in the case’, Robert Corrigan asserts that ‘all of the original typescripts (complete with handwritten corrections) for Pound’s broadcasts are to be found in the files of the Department of Justice’; the latter forming the basis of his article (Corrigan 1972: 771, 775, 780). This is certainly incorrect, as the ensuing overview of previously unpublished materials will show. (Puzzlingly, only four years later, Heymann’s 1976 Ezra Pound: The Last Rower put the number of Radio Rome broadcasts at ‘more than 300’, although without indicating why) (Heymann 1976: 144). The original radio typescripts were eventually recovered by Pound and posthumously deposited, it seems overwhelmingly, at the Beinecke Library. Amongst more than 300 boxes of Pound papers, according to the Beinecke’s online catalogue, a minimum of eight boxes of manuscripts cover Pound’s wartime radio propaganda – listing, by folder, all manner of typescripts and drafts; rejected scripts and fragments; instructions and slogans; payments and receipts; sometimes jumbled alongside correspondence, timetables and handwritten drafts in varying stages of completion. Placing this in relief, the previously employed manuscripts on Pound’s propaganda for wartime radio would comfortably fit into one of the Beinecke Library boxes, and this chapter can only indicate the full scope of extant texts. The archival records show, in the first place, that Pound’s propaganda scripts certainly started earlier, and ended later, than previously argued. The latter date is easier to affix on the basis of the FBI’s reproduction of Pound’s letters to Carl Goedel on 18 April 1945, referring to Harry F. Truman (Roosevelt died on 12 April

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1945, with Vice President Truman immediately sworn in). The previous page of Pound’s FBI File contains a photocopy of an original typescript, opening: Pound anonimo No. 199 3 Aprile XXIII NATURALLY The prime minister of Assstralia says Australia wants population. Well; well/ What a nice place for the jews. For once a place they could go/ only they dont WANT a national home; they want the earth, and an abundance of slaves.19

Clearly part of a larger series for the Salò Republic, these documents demonstrate that Pound continued radio propaganda until the dying days of the Axis regime. Somewhat surprisingly, the date of Pound’s earliest broadcast typescripts is more difficult to affix with such certainty. Leonard Doob’s preface to ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’ places the start of Pound’s writings for EIAR ‘toward the end of 1940’, whereas in ‘January [1941, Pound] was able to record his own speeches, which were broadcast, on an average, twice a week. He wrote the texts at his home in Rapallo and on occasion in Rome where he traveled to record on discs a batch of 10 to 20 speeches’. Benjamin Friedlander has recently added that, in November 1940 ‘– five months after Italy entered the war and a year after his initial overtures – the Ministry of Popular Culture invited him to submit scripts’ (Pound 1978: xi; Nadel 2011: 118). This is borne out by a 9 November 1940 letter of explanation to the Ministry of Popular Culture’s (Minculpop) chief radio functionary, Gabriele Paresce, found amongst Pound’s scripts: ‘I am sending you a draft of what might be of use. Nothing solemn or formal will hold the American auditor. If I don’t sound a bit cracked and disjointed they will merely twirl the button [ … ] Hence the indications of American dialects etc. in the spelling’. The typescript attached to this note, entitled ‘Now that the Elections are Over’ – referring to the second re-election of President Roosevelt – was obviously intended to be read by Pound. Referring to his first broadcast in early 1935, a one-off on 11 January, Pound begins: ‘Of course this isn’t the first time I have approached (approached is the right word) the microphone. Shortly after they started short wave Rome to America that is several years ago I came down here and said a few words about Major Douglas Social Credit Scheme’ (YBL & quoted in Rachewiltz 1979–1980: 162).20 Mary de Rachewiltz, who makes effective use of this typescript in what was then – as now – one of the very few non-FCC transcripts to be analysed, claims that even after this meeting Pound ‘received a polite letter saying the Ministry of Popular Culture, Radio Department, was not able at present to make use of his writing’ (Rachewiltz 1979–1980: 163).21 However on 6 May 1945, in a detailed

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six-page ‘statement’ to FBI agents – seemingly his earliest recorded interrogation by FBI officials – Pound was quite clear on the genesis of his radio propaganda for Minculpop. He had been encouraged at some point in 1939, following a discussion with Alessandro Pavolini, to ‘talk over the Italian Radio to the American people for the purpose of pointing out the fine work which Mussolini had done in Italy’. Then, Pound continued, he was invited to further discuss the matter with Paresce and Telesio Interlandi in spring 1940; and thereafter, ‘was finally allowed to give two broadcasts to the United States and one broadcast per week to England. I began broadcasting in person over the Italian Radio about the Summer of 1940’.22 Yet critical commentaries no less than the tenor of the above script seem to suggest otherwise; namely, that wartime broadcasts in Pound’s own name only started on, or shortly after, 9 November 1940. Also problematically, according to Anne Conover, on 22 August 1940 Pound wrote to his mistress and collaborator, Olga Rudge, following a trip to Minculpop: ‘Waaal, mebbe papa bring home the bacon/not official, but sum under consideration diece mille [lire]’ (Pound, quoted in Conover 2001: 140). Similarly supporting Pound’s account to the FBI are a handful of radio typescripts in the Beinecke Library dating from 1940. One tentatively dated in the online catalogue [1940?] is entitled ‘Communications’, and is delivered in the first person; so too is ‘The Quiet Disposition’, bearing the earliest proposed date for radio propaganda as April-May 1940 – even before Italian entry into World War II, which would be in line with Pound’s account to the FBI. That typescript, in turn, explicitly recalls his 19 August 1939 Action text on the imminent war, presumably published only months before: ‘On Aug. 19 I wrote what wd/ happen to PO/land. It has happened. Wash it off. I am not here to look backward. What I wanna know is what NEXT!’23 Several alternatives suggest themselves. First, it is clear from internal evidence – for instance, to Vice President Wallace in ‘Alliance’ (Henry Wallace only took office on 20 January 1941) – that several of the proposed 1940 scripts are simply misdated, and should read 1941 instead.24 Nor are extant manuscripts, although exhaustive, by any means ‘complete’ for this period. Still another possibility is that scripts composed before November 1940 were principally broadcast (and possibly retained) by other Radio Rome announcers. Or yet again, early on, Pound may have fallen foul of Fascist censors. He suggested as much in the aforementioned FBI interrogation: I consistently fought for more time on the air to get my ideas to the American and English peoples. At first, for a very brief time, I used to speak directly over the air, but on one occasion during 1940 I made some remarks not in the

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manuscript previously approved by the Ministry of Popular Culture, simply a repeat of a main point, and after that incident I was ordered by Paresce to record my talks on a disc, and this disc would be rebroadcast over the air [ …. ] During 1942 and the first of 1943, at Rapallo, I would write about twenty or twenty one radio manuscripts or talks, and then I would go to Rome where I visited the registration room of the Ente Italiana Audizione [sic] Radiofoniche and make discs for rebroadcasts of my talks. I usually remained Rome about three weeks, making three recordings per day. I made these recordings only after my manuscripts had been approved by Mr. Ungaro, sub-head of the Radio Section of the Ministry of Popular Culture.25

If the precise origins of Pound’s initial radio propaganda remain debatable, his transition to steady broadcasting in January 1941 is far more certain. Decisively coming to his aid was the influential Camillo Pellizzi, previously the facilitator of Pound’s propaganda for the Italian Fascists Abroad publication, the BritishItalian Bulletin. As Redman reports, Pound complained on 11 January that ‘I will BUST if some use isn’t made of me’. Pellizzi responded later that day: ‘I phoned to Ungaro and Paresce of our radio (foreign) service; you are going to hear from them’.26 Without doubt, Pellizzi achieved results quickly. Most scholars have agreed upon the date of 23 January 1941 for the commencement of Pound’s short-wave transmissions; although according to Anne Conover, only a dozen days following his exchange with Pellizzi, Pound wrote to Olga Rudge: ‘made 2 discs yesterday … 9 discursi in a fortnight’ (Conover, Rudge and Pound 2001: 143). Nonetheless, despite persisting objections from a few officials (Heymann 1976: 99ff), it seems Pound’s broadcasting career properly began to take off. At points, it seems he occasionally stayed with Pellizzi when travelling to Rome, recorded in a letter of thanks on 15 February 1941, wherein he also declared: ‘I got some comfort out of looking through my British Italian Bulletin stuff, two days ago. Something ought to be done about reprinting it [ …. ] I ought to have six or eight men working under my direction/ for KULCHUR/ hell, there are lame, halt, consumptive blokes not in the trenches’.27 Yet if Pellizzi was unable to help with Pound’s more fanciful requests, he surely opened doors at the start of his broadcasting career. Pound’s well-known complaint to Harry Meacham and others that it ‘took me, I think it was, TWO years, insistence and wangling etc to GET HOLD of their microphone’, then, may well have included the first half of 1941 (Stock 1970: 390). This is borne out by the ‘Daily Broadcast Reports’ undertaken by the BBC wartime monitoring stations. Only a handful of broadcasts are transcribed by Pound before five summaries from June 1941; rising to 15 in July, with a

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similar number each month until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, examined below. Scores of BBC holdings for 1941 thus further demonstrate that FCC transcripts comprise but a fraction of Pound’s propaganda broadcasts. A final example of BBC transcription methods must suffice here, from a Daily Broadcast Report of 1 November 1941, which represents the first fifth of a ten-minute EIAR broadcast to Britain and the USA. It again returns to Pound’s anti-Semitic ‘prophecy’ in the 19 August 1939 number of the aforementioned British Union of Fascists’ publication, Action: ROME 221.1m IN ENGLISH FOR ENGLAND AND U.S.A 22.00 (10 mins) 1.11.41 Talk by Ezra Pound: “A Word to the Rabbis” War and American Jewry Before this bloody war started I told the Poles and the Jews what would happen to Poland if she let Britain get her into a war; I told them then that there would not be any Poland. Today I say to American Jewry, if the 6,000,000 Jews of the U.S.A. get her into this war, that won’t be a bright day for American Jewry – no, nor a bright tomorrow.28

The next day, this broadcast was praised, with telling detail on the nature of his scripts, by Pound’s ‘line manager’, Prince Ranieri di San Faustino: Your ‘word to the Rabbis’ was, by far the best thing that you’ve turned out so far. Diction was eccelent [sic] and the text was super super. The damned fool announcer last night didn’t give your name before you spoke and I’ll bet that you were on to it. Transmission was not so good because the record has gone twice before for North America, the quallity [sic] of the records is so bad these days that we can’t use them more’n twice, or at the outside, three times.

As recorded by BBC monitors, an earlier transmission of this text took place on the tenth of the preceding month.29 In turn, demonstrating the thematic proximity of Pound’s broadcasts with those of regime functionaries during World War II, Vincent Arnold’s survey of Italian propaganda provides brief details of the following five anti-Semitic broadcasts ‘encouraged’ by Minculpop and also broadcast in October: ‘The Protocols of Zion’ by Alberto Luchini, ‘Judaism Against Western Civilization’ by Giulio [Julius] Evola, ‘Judaism Against Rome’ by Massimo Scaligero, ‘The Jewish International’ by Piero Pellicano and ‘Judaism Wanted This War’ by Giovanni Preziosi (Arnold 1998: 143). Amongst this gallery of racist ideologues, as Archie Henderson has recently noted, Alberto Luchini is particularly relevant. Having been appointed in May 1941 to the Racial Bureau attached to the Minculpop, Luchini organized the above

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five radio broadcasts for EIAR, published the next year in Rome as Gli ebrei hanno voluto la guerra [The Jews wanted war]. Most important in the present context, Pound was corresponding with Luchini from 1943 while, as Henderson further points out, ‘Pound’s copy of Gli ebrei is in the Ezra Pound library at the University of Texas at Austin’ (Pound 2009: 851).30 Two final points deserve mention in respect of these neglected files. The first and most revealing is Pound’s recourse to pseudonyms in his broadcast scripts. Some of these pseudonymous names have been alluded to in the literature to date, if not yet pursued. Ezra Pound: The Last Rower provides a good example: Much of the time he was involved in more than simply the writing and reading of his own Radio Rome speeches. The [FBI] records indicate that Pound performed various functions. He wrote press releases for other broadcasters to read, edited manuscripts, created slogans, helped organize the network’s propaganda campaign. At points he coauthored broadcasts and frequently shared the microphone with fellow announcers, participating in a number of news discussions and symposiums. And just as he had once churned out art and music criticism for The New Age under the pseudonyms B.H. Dias and William Atheling, he now broadcast, frequently, under the assumed name of Giovanni Del Bene. (Heymann 1976: 110–111; italics added)

Heymann’s paragraph surely cries out for further explanation. What was the nature of Pound’s other ‘various functions’? Were the propaganda themes in these additional activities in keeping with his radio broadcasts, and with wartime Axis propaganda more generally? Lastly and most relevantly is the implication that, once more needing money from any source possible, Pound returned to writing under pseudonyms. In addition to ‘Giovanni Del Bene’, Carpenter adds that ‘four or five’ scripts under the name ‘Piero Mazda’ were read over Radio Rome in August 1943 (during the notorious ‘45 days’ when Mussolini was under house arrest); while another pseudonymous creation, ‘Mr. Dooley’, was seemingly used on behalf of the Nazi-controlled shortwave station Radio Milan from spring 1944 (Carpenter 1988: 626, 633; Heyman 1976: 150–151).31 Yet with respect to pseudonyms – and notwithstanding Pound’s undertakings during the little-known period of the Salò Republic (September 1943–May 1945) – quite literally, that is not the half of it. Beyond ‘Giovanni Del Bene’, ‘Piero Mazda’ and ‘Mr. Dooley’, Pound compiled typescripts under another ten names. These included the following pseudonyms: ‘Bruce Bairnsfather’, ‘Langdon Billings’, ‘Julian Bingham’, ‘Pietro and Manilo Squarcio’ and ‘Marco Veneziano’. More general noms de guerre

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extended to ‘American Imperialist’ and ‘Colonel Blimp’, as well as the two anonymous series, ‘News from Nowhere’ and ‘Notes in the Margin’. Noting that his reading of ‘Giovanni Delbene’ broadcasts had received ‘favourable comment’, Pound stressed how that persona, unlike other creations, was ‘purposely studded with cliches’. In contrast to the Stalinist Radio Revolution or Nazism’s Radio Bremen, Pound further pointed out, ‘we must be different/ we can’t be the liv[e]liest/ so must be the most signorile [elegant]. It is our only line’. To this end, Pound concluded his letter to Ungaro by decrying the dearth of talent at EIAR: ‘A dozen voices (which we aint got) with a dozen convictions/ or one conversationalist and a dozen interruptions containing three ideas (at maximum) per dozen’.32 Pound’s adoption of pseudonymous personae, by and large, appears geared towards satire. Like the dozens of scripts simply headed ‘Pound/anonymous’, moreover, writing under pseudonyms would have allowed Pound – should he wish – to make statements he could not, or would not, make officially in his own name. This consideration is borne out by one many of the internal instructions heading the first page of Pound’s typescripts, such as that from 11 July 1942: Explanatory note for the office/ not for transmission. The ‘Imperialist’s’ point of view is NOT my point of view, and it is not fascist. It is I00% MATERIALIST. The personality of ‘American Imperialist’ should be kept quite distinct/ someone ELSE must appear to be writing these notes. If I slip and put in picturesque expressions, or something TOO obviously my own/ CUT IT OUT Imperialist must use a certain number of cliches/ And also keep off certain cliches. He must be a little dull. That is intentional.33

Of the 585 folders composing the ‘Pound Radio’ collection, at least oneeighth are given over to scripts explicitly anonymous or pseudonymous in composition. This raises a second and more technical point regarding the texts for Pound’s broadcasts. Generally the titled folders, irrespective of the person/a heading them, include typescripts averaging roughly five pages, although some also include a fair copy, thus rising to ten manuscript pages. Still other folders contain multiple texts, or shorter slogans. An overview of Box 126, containing most of Pound’s pseudonymous scripts held at Yale, is instructive here. It comprises 23 folders of scripts under the alphabetical names ‘American Imperialist’ (14 folders), ‘Bruce Bairnsfather’ (1 folder), ‘Langdon Billings’ (1 folder) and ‘Julian Bingham’ (7 folders). In turn, these comprised single typescripts ranging from three pages (5221) to eight pages (5238), save for two

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folders of 16 and 26 pages, respectively. The former, like many of these folders without a headed date of composition or transmission, contains a five-page script entitled ‘Gangsters Together’, along with a fair copy of similar length. Appended at the end, unexpectedly, are two copies of another one-and-halfpage typescript, providing internal recommendations in Italian and English. These include suggestions like ‘SHORTEN ALL introductory phrases. E.P.’s talk can b[e] announced as “talk followed BY Mozart’s 13 sonata”; or whatever’; instructions including ‘SLOWLY the list of wave lengths’; advice on concision regarding ‘News (condensato, come se per ogni parola inutile ci fosse una multa [condensed, as if for each unnecessary word there is a fine])’; and the following two phrases advocated for broadcast, ‘SLOGAN/ Wherever etc/ the British go, there is famine. Wherever the Americans go to save the inhabitants, they shoot the inhabitants’.34 In addition to the typescripts and notices described above, Box 126 contains a final folder of 26 pages with various items by ‘American Imperialist’. Underscoring Pound’s point about sarcasm, this persona admired President Grover Cleveland (first elected in 1885, the year Pound was born) and advocated the American annexation of the remainder of North, Central, South America, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in ‘American Imperialist Answers a Question’. The second script, also of five pages, is entitled ‘London Opinion’, whereas the next is one page, and unlike the others, carries no title, name or pagination; it is doubtful if any text from this page was broadcast. Thereafter, another five-page script entitled ‘American Imperialist Writes’ is headed with the instruction ‘(fill in date of day before transmission) American Imperialist writes us, as the above date’. This is followed by three pages with four shorter notes and slogans – the last satirizing the ‘Old Establishment firm of John Bull, now Bull and Bullstein (to be read in a nasty chewish voice)’ – before the final item in Folder 5234, a six-page typescript entitled ‘Notes of an American Imperialist’. Concluding his pastiche on the unlikely American annexation of Brazil, on the one hand, and in keeping with Pound’s complete devotion to Fascism on the other, ‘American Imperialist’ suggests: If Mr Roosevelt is to confer any solid benefits on his electorate by the ownership of Brazil, de facto, or de jure, or both, he will, I think, have to take several more lessons from the New Europe than he seems at present likely to take. His Bizantinsim [sic] is not a good imitation of fascist or nazi order. It is open to all the charges levied against fascism and seems to contain few or none of the benefits which abler leaders have conferred on the Rising Order in Europe.35

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In Box 126, Folder 5234, then, there are nine different standalone texts, all in a register far removed from Pound’s simultaneous ‘official’ broadcasts. At the same time, this rhetoric corresponded closely to the official line at the time, as Vincent Arnold contends: ‘Fascist propaganda portrayed Roosevelt as a “warmonger” whose plutocratic cabinet was infested with Jews’ (Arnold 1998: 152). By way of a final example of the extent of Pound’s broadcasts scripts which also raises the issue of dating examined below, mention of a final four folders from the Beinecke Library’s subsequent box is merited. Box 127 gives further credence to the argument here that the estimate for the total number of scripts written or broadcast by Pound should be revised upwards from 200 by a digit – coming to a precise number is beyond the scope of this study and needs to be methodologically delimited using full and fair typescripts, drafts in various stages as well as other short texts (such as slogans and announcements). Following the remainder of the explicitly pseudonymous scripts, this box then moves on to some of the many folders marked ‘Anon.: typescript’. Amongst the dozen such folders in this single box, Folder 5267 contains 49 pages of typescripts covering 1–27 February 1942, while the preceding three folders also include effectively daily items between 9–29 December 1941 (5264); 1–10 January (5265); and 10–31 January 1942 (5266), respectively. In total, there are more than 100 radio items from these months alone, held in four of the fully 46 folders comprising Box 127. By far the most important of these, Folders 5264–5266, amongst other materials highlighted in the subsection below, are taken from a period in which Pound was thought to have ‘retired’ from radio propaganda – the weeks following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. In addition to this nearubiquitous critical view on Pound’s alleged reconsideration of his broadcasting role, it has also been claimed that he considered returning to the USA at that time (as he had considered doing more than a year earlier, when his income was at its most uncertain). For instance, according to J. J. Wilhelm’s 1994 monograph Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972, ‘Pound clearly entered a month and a half of silent contemplation over the gravity of his situation, mulling over the difficulties of moving a daughter whose nationality was not clearly established, a lover, a wife, an aged mother, and a severely disabled father’ (Wilhelm 1994: 184). Both for emphasizing the number of Pound’s radio manuscripts and in highlighting some of the misunderstandings around the dating of Pound’s talks more generally, then, Pound’s December 1941 and January 1942 broadcast typescripts deserve closer consideration.

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Dating of Pound’s broadcasts The period between 7 December 1941 and 29 January 1942 is one of the several periods in which Pound has been alleged to have gone quiet during Italy’s involvement in World War II. A second key period, if less consistently advanced, nonetheless also stresses that Pound stopped broadcasting between July 1942 and February 1943. Correcting these two inaccuracies is the purpose of the present subsection, commencing with widely circulated reports that Pound had ‘retired to Rapallo to continue his study of Chinese philosophy’ in the weeks following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the words of Benjamin Friedlander’s otherwise insightful ‘Radio Broadcasts’ essay: ‘initially Pound did retire from broadcasting, preparing a statement that Time magazine cited with relief in January – the issue was still on the newsstands when Pound returned to the air’ (Nadel 2011: 117–118). Again this lacuna is reinforced by Doob’s ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’ in the space between scripts numbered five (‘Those Parentheses’, 7 December 1941) and six (‘On Resuming’, 29 January 1942). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pound wrote the original disclaimer personally – with his handwriting in the margin: ‘repeat in several transmissions’ – which concludes: ‘His views have at no time been suggested by us, and have, in fact, often been formed before Italian opinion was ready to accept them’.36 To date, however, critical discussion has only focused upon scripts and broadcasts Pound made in his own name. During these weeks, Pound wrote, and may have broadcasted (equally, they may have been read by another announcer), scores of shorter items in the aforementioned ‘Anonymous’ folders, as well as a longer 26 December 1941 typescript by ‘Giovanni Delbene’ proclaiming, in part: All the anglo-saxon countries are years late in learning the lesson of the two great European revolutions. Many englishmen and americans have NEVER given ten minutes thought to ANY of the fundamental issues involved, indeed they had never even begun to be THOUGHTFUL until the Japanese ran up the SunRise flag over Hong Kong.37

Intimations that Pound never ‘retired’ during this period were long ago raised by Tim Redman’s ‘The Repatriation of Ezra Pound, 1939–1942: A View from the Archives’. Although mainly dealing with Pound’s abortive attempts at returning to the USA in later 1940 and again, half-heartedly, in December 1941 ‘as one of about a thousand Americans who remained in Italy’ at that time, Redman draws upon two important exchanges of correspondence. The first is the

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aforementioned Adriano Ungaro, whereas the second is Cornelio di Marzo, Pound’s editor at ‘the prestigious’ Il Meridiano di Roma, with whom ‘more than 100 articles [were] published between 24 April 1938 and 12 September 1943, with the greatest number written during the triennium 1940–1942’ (Redman 1979; 1992: 197).38 Similar to Heymann’s suggestive leads from the one-sided FBI file, Pound’s explicit desire to continue broadcasting has simply been neglected since Redman’s groundbreaking article: Even if America declares war on the Axis, I see no reason (from my own point of view) why I should not continue to speak in my own name, so long as I say nothing that can in any way prejudice the results of American military or naval (or navel) action, the armed forces of the U.S.A. or the welfare of my native country. But contrary to a suggestion made to me yesterday, I see considerable reason for NOT continuing an indirect participation [ … ] As the U.S. is not yet legally at war with Italy I shall continue to send you notes signed and unsigned (9 December 1941) It seems to me that my work must continue. Twenty, or more visibly, ten years of work for a New Europe. (16 December 1941) It seems to me that my speeches on the radio must continue IN MY OWN NAME, and with my voice, and NOT anonymously. (28 December 1941) (Redman 1979: 448, 455–456)39

Further detail on this obscured period is provided by four folders of pivotal correspondence between Pound and Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, a Fascist apparatchik for EIAR and, it appears, Pound’s closest radio collaborator and immediate superior. Their exchanges put both at the heart of Anglophone propaganda efforts for wartime Italy prior to Mussolini’s July 1943 arrest. For example, they shared authorship of the ‘News from Nowhere’ slogans and ‘short jabs’ that, in San Faustino’s view, were ‘the best thing you have turned out till now’ and ‘the kind of thing that will put Rome on the map’. He then concluded: ‘Turned out four of them yesterday, but lack the master touch’.40 Responding the same day, Pound addressed the nature of his different typescripts, with shorter texts sent by post anonymously or pseudonymously (like the ‘News from Nowhere’ series), with longer scripts to ‘go in my own voice, except when real reason for its being impersonal’. Four days later, San Faustino declared that Pound was ‘the most important personage that the Italian Radio has, and I don’t want to cheapen anything that you may say by putting over the air small items that might be written by anyone’. San Faustino was also more than just a co-author and cheerleader for Pound and, in October 1941, recommended that Pound ‘standardise the Europe

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calling, Ezra Pound speaking, business. In one talk you said it and in another you left out the Europe calling’.41 This was clearly a close and productive working relationship, indicated not only by their revealing correspondence as much as by the extent of the ‘News from Nowhere’ typescripts. Amongst Pound’s papers are four folders in the Beinecke Library dedicated to this ‘News from Nowhere’ series, dating between March 1941 and September 1942 – with many additional phrases interspersed with typescripts earmarked for inclusion – of which the first, Folder 5597, contains 55 pages of slogans from 8 March to 31 December 1941. Conclusively demonstrating that Pound never retired in the period following American entry into World War II, the following ‘News from Nowhere’ item is dated 18 December 1941 and headed ‘Pound/ anonymous’: Washington dispatches state that Mr Roosevelt has appointed a commission to exhonorate Mssr [sic] Knox, Stimpson and Roosevelt (F.D.) from engineering the defeat, not to say wash-out of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour. It seems that this move has given universal satisfaction.42

Of Pound’s supposed ‘retirement’, furthermore, on the very day the US declared war on Italy – less than 100 hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor – Pound asserted to San Faustino that it was ‘torture to be out of action’: The moment Roosevelt called it war on national socialism/ (which is what I believe he said) it ceases to be a war of nations and is recognized officially by the old tub as an ideological or social war [ … .] That I think VERY important, not only for my personal position, but for the whole leverage of discussion/ Guerra ideological etc/ You will prob/ see the notes I am sending to the office today/ and those sent yesterday.

Should this not be clear, Pound reiterated his position on 16 December 1941: The conflict is a conflict between two ORDERS. I can’t see that I have any right to withdraw from it [ … .] At any rate my work ought to go ON. Whether direct or indirect/ whether transmitted or whether it go on building cultural foundation and mechanism. (as in my translation of Confucius)43

Two days later Pound was still more succinct: ‘The world situation is unique. My position is unique, at least so far as I know. No one else has been fighting the enemy from just my position. The question now is: HOW am I to continue?’ By way of an answer, the next day San Faustino recommended writing to Pavolini directly (then Minister for Popular Culture in Fascist Italy) ‘since you are for all intents and purposes an enemy alien’, even though he firmly agreed with Pound’s position: Your collaboration has got to go on, for many reasons which, I think and many other people in high places think, are self evident.

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Maybe you don’t know more than anybody else, but what you do know is so much more than most people, hence our desire for more and more collaboration. Naturally this collaboration will have to be slightly modified. You will have to be more impersonal, more work will have to be anonymous, and anything that you will give over the air, in your own name, will have to be of a cultural kind for propaganda reasons.44

It seems both men agreed that Pearl Harbor placed only a temporary barrier to the resumption of Pound’s normal work for Radio Rome – even if his personal broadcasts apparently had to wait until 26 January 1942 for official permission from the wartime ‘Italian Supreme Command to remain in Italy for the duration of the war’ (Heymann 1976: 112). By mid-December 1941, the matter of Pound’s continued collaboration appeared settled amongst EIAR staff, and he was back to discussing propaganda strategy with San Faustino: ‘No use merely d[u]placating Haw Haw; for example [ … ] the MAIN job, has been recently defined by Hitler/ to make sure that even 15 or 20 years, the kike kahal or Stank of England will NOT be in a position to start another strangling movement’.45 Yet once again, San Faustino scarcely needed to be told, with Vincent Arnold summarizing Fascist propaganda at the end of 1941: ‘It was now a war being fought to defend the Italian people from the economic and territorial aspirations of the Jew-ridden Allies’ (Arnold 1998: 140). Folders 5364–5266 are equally revealing. Of the 21 items in Folder 5264 (ranging from 9 to 31 December 1941), most are concerned with USA entry into the war. The earliest, scored ‘Not Sent’ in blue pencil at the top of the first page, already speaks of Roosevelt’s ‘moral defeat’, concluding ‘ANYthing like a MORAL basis for Anglo American propaganda was annihilated the day they made common cause with soviet Russia. A fact which even American patriots will be loath to deny.’ The final item, like the others shorter (a page or less) and headed ‘Pound/ anonymous/ 31 Dec.’, reads in full: HOT WIRE/ Washington/ day of atonement. While it is not expected that there will BE any more Presidential elections in the U.S., it has nevertheless been decided that if the formality of swearing in a President ever recurs the OATH will be administered on the Talmud, and not on the bible as heretofore. Dr. Litvinof has expressed his appreciation of this attention.46

Folder 5265 continues with on same theme, with two short notes proclaiming the next day: ‘England and the U.S.A. are now in jewish hands. They are headed for Soviet condition[s]. [T]he jew never changes. Put him in charge and you get

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sweat shops’. A subsequent, eight-page typescript dated the same day, entitled ‘Quisling’, concludes: QUISLING proposed a WAY TO PEACE, it was NOT a way to Italian advancement in particular, and we can therefore do it justice without being in any way partial to Quisling’s aims. ANY man who desired peace before I939 was OUTLAW to Churchill; Mendel; Blum, jewry, and the international money sharks. Among whom we include Roosevelt and his companions.

The next day, another anonymous, seven-page typescript in this folder declared: Italy’s radio-transmissions have been directed to the THINKING minority. This may be a tactical mistake on our part, but we doubt that it is so. It takes longer to get an effect. It may NEVER have an effect. You may go on dragging out the war for a decade. It would take the Japanese some time to get to Fort Knox [ … ]. The immediate decision depend[s] on stukas. No flights of oratory on our part will wring the faintest desire for justice from the anglo-judeo-american oligarchy. If were [sic] were a group of yellow dogs like Churchill, Roosevelt and Donovan we would be appealing to that minority to riot, to shoot from behin[d] stable doors, the[n] run amok with pocket machine guns.47

Just over a week later, in the first of another score of shorter typescripts commencing Folder 5266, Pound praised the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – which he first read in April 1940 – ‘not written by them but which is without shadow of doubt or turning a compendium of the method employed to make wars’.48 A further two-page typescript is headed ‘Pound/ anonymous/ (or giovanni delbene) 16 Genn’, and concludes thus: ‘The aim of this is to leave a small group of jews in control of ALL america and to reduce the american farmers to the level of russian serfs. The AXIS stands for the homestead; for individual initiative in business up to the absolute maximum co[m]patible with the good of the whole nation’.49 On the whole, if anything, these anonymous scripts are clearer and less compromising than Pound’s personal broadcasts, even if the propaganda themes remain consistent. If the language increasingly smacked of Nazi propaganda, for Pound as for Fascist Italy, as Jeffrey Herf incisively shows, much is owed to the anti-Semitic propaganda offensive launched by the Third Reich in summer 1941. Exemplifying ‘The Alliance of Bolshevism and Plutocracy’, a Reich Press Office directive of 8 August 1941 concludes: Today Jewry again seeks world domination. That British and American plutocrats on the one hand and Bolsheviks on the other appear with apparently distinct political goals is only Jewish camouflage. The Jew strives for world

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domination in order to rob and plunder the world for his exclusive benefit, without distraction or hindrance.

The ‘Office of Enlightenment and Speaker Information Materials’ also under Otto Dietrich’s control and in the wake of initial military success against the USSR similarly produced a pamphlet resorting to a familiar metonymizing of leading international Jews, allegedly starting the war against the Axis: Plutocracy and Bolshevism have one master, the Jews! [ … .] These all-powerful forces include, to name only a few, the following names: in America, Schiff, Warburg, Guggenheim, Morgenthau, Goldman, Baruch, Bullit, Untermeyer, and so on; in England, Hore-Belisha, Salmon, Stern, Reading, Green, Isaacs, and so on; in the Soviet state, Kaganovich, Bermann, Schwernik, Mechlis, Maisky, and so on.50

Despite a second misconception regarding the dating of his broadcasts, it seems Pound never stopped during wartime. He was too committed, and too connected, for that. Yet many accounts of the period have given a different impression. Most notably, Torrey has intuited a ‘silent period’ lasting some six months between 20 August 1942 and 4 February 1943 (acknowledging two exceptions on 19 September and 9 December): ‘suddenly, in mid-August 1942, Pound became silent [ … ] Financial receipts for payments made to Pound also stopped abruptly on 12 August and did not resume until 19 October. There is, then, a period of at least two months in the middle of the war in which Ezra Pound dropped from view’. Torrey ascribes this silence to the possibility of a trip by Pound to Nazi Germany at this time, or alternatively, to learning of the treason charges being prepared against him (Torrey 1984: 164–165). Neither of these scenarios seems likely and, in any case, Pound neither stopped speaking nor ceased receiving payment by Minculpop until the end of World War II. Once more, the Beinecke Library collection is instrumental in dispelling myths surrounding the dating of Pound’s propaganda typescripts. Amongst the texts indexed under the heading ‘Radio Articles A-Z’, three are directly relevant to Pound’s supposed second ‘silent period’. The first, ‘Borderline Cases’ in Folder 5375, is dated 11 September 1942 in the ‘Guide to the Ezra Pound Papers’, with a corresponding ‘used 11/9’ handwritten at the top of the first page. A six-page script entitled ‘A Segment’ then speculates on the causes of World War II in Folder 5688, dated 17 September 1942: ‘There is no use in regarding this war as anything save a segment of the long persisting war of the jews against the rest of humanity’.51 Finally, Folder 5370 contains another typescript titled ‘Blinder Alleys’. Dated 20 September 1942 (and quite possibly the ‘exception’

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noted by Torrey), in addition to praising fascist ideology, an excerpt from this text reveals that these scripts were at least intended for broadcast in Pound’s own name: The fascist and nazi movements are prob[ably] more interesting to me than to those of you who have NOT been interested in reform movements[;] monetary reform movements for the past 20 or 35 years/ they are prob. more interesting to me than even to the itals/ and germans/ who have lived their revolutions and not observed failure of reform in other countries/ [ … .] fascism was created to remedy the glaring defects of dem/ govt. And the maintenance of that hoax is all B.B.C. and all jew propaganda. [ … . handwritten in the margin: In Engl. dem(ocracy) a mere word] The axis stands for the direction of the will to something better than lucre. It stands for a scale of values.52

Lastly bearing upon this ‘silent period’ is a highly revealing ledger suggesting Pound’s September 1942 typescripts were indeed broadcast, alongside several other items he either wrote or delivered that month. In all, Folder 5301 details 195 payments from the Ministry of Popular Culture to Pound, from 22 April 1941 to 26 January 1944. Many of these entries are for longer scripts at 350 lire per broadcast, usually in multiples of two or three, whereas shorter notes earned 250 lire and those announced by another EIAR propagandist earning up to 300 lire.53 In addition many greater, obviously composite sums are also included amongst Pound’s payments (such as 2052 lire on 15 September 1941; the largest amount, 3100 lire on 21 July 1942; 1050 lire on 26 January 1944, and so on). Payments for the quite representative month of September 1942 – typically processed, alongside several other payments, at end of the month – further reflect the extent of his continued engagement with EIAR: 300 lire; 350 lire; 350 lire; 350 lire; 1399 lire; 350 lire; and 650 lire (italics added). Similarly, during his supposed ‘retirement’ over December 1941, Pound earned 3100 lire in six payments of 700 lire × 3; 350 lire × 2; and one typescript for 300 lire, collectively paid on 28 December 1941. In terms of scripts, so too in terms of payment: there appears to be no pause in Pound’s propaganda output. Moreover, like many of the manuscripts encountered above, the bottom right-hand side of the first page contains a date from early May 1945 – often, as in this case, 7 May 1945, the day Pound provided the FBI ‘written permission to search’ his home and ‘to take any and all documents of interest’– and the initials of one of two FBI agents sent to Italy to apprehend Pound (here, Special Agent in Charge Ramon Arrizabalaga; it was typically his deputy, Frank Lawrence Amprim).54 Unusually, however, Pound signed the tenth and final page of this document on 13 May 1945, under his handwritten declaration: ‘I have no reason to suppose there is

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any error in this account’. Above his note is the cumulative figure for these 33 months: 153,060 lire.55 Putting the above figure into context, Pound’s 1941 translation of Odon Por’s Italy’s Policy of Social Economics 1939/1940 took about him around a month in total (including corrections and proofs), for which he earned 2500 lire from the Fascist Confederation of Industrial Workers (Redman 1992: 208).56 As has already been shown, Pound wrote and broadcast for Fascist Italy well before April 1941, and continued to do so long after January 1944. He thus likely received another year or 18 months’ wages – granted, much of which was received during a period (1944–1945) when food became more valuable than money – in addition to that recorded in Folder 5301. Surely offsetting this inflation, as his 6 May admission sets out, the Republican Ministry of Popular Culture ‘used to send me about eight thousand lire per month’, before a raise took this figure to as much as 11,000 lire per month; the final payment arriving at the end of March 1945.57 At a conservative estimate it therefore appears that, through a variety of undertakings for Italian radio propaganda between summer 1940 and spring 1945, Pound earned a minimum of 250,000 lire (about $12,500 US dollars in wartime currency; the buying power of an estimated $185,000 today). Whatever else Pound’s wartime broadcasts for Fascist Italy were, they were at least comparatively well paid.

Abbreviations TNA/WO BBC/WAC

The National Archives War Office file on Ezra Pound. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham: various manuscripts on WWII monitoring and propaganda. BBC/SWB Daily Broadcast Record. Summary of World Broadcasts, Section 3B, Italy Abroad. Bod/FCC Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, FCC transcriptions of Pound speeches. FBI/Pound Ezra Pound’s FBI File, divided into 12 sections on microfilm. DOJ/Pound Ezra Pound’s Department of Justice File, divided into six parts and available online. YBL Box/Folder ‘Ezra Pound Papers’, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library YCAL 43.

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Archival sources Yale Beinecke Library The Ezra Pound Papers (YCAL MSS 43) are housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, New Haven, CN. Amongst the several hundred boxes of manuscripts comprising this collection of papers, the large majority consulted here fall into relevant correspondence, cited by box and folder; or far more neglected, the 585 files of radio typescripts between YCAL MSS 43 Box 126, Folder 5220 to (hereafter) YBL 134/5804, all corresponding to the most recent ‘Guide to the Ezra Pound Papers’ (last revised December 2002; available at: drs.library.yale.edu:8083/ fedora/get/ beinecke:pound/PDF). Dating provided for Pound’s YBL manuscripts corresponds to this essential online guide unless otherwise indicated below, such as brackets following an indication of ‘no date’ [hereafter (‘n.d.’)].

BBC Written Archive Centre ‘Daily Broadcast Reports’ for radio compiled by monitors at the BBC Monitoring Station in Eversham (and, from 1942, Caversham), England. Now housed at the BBC Written Archives Centre (hereafter ‘WAC’) in Caversham, Reading, the recording section’s daily designation for Italy abroad (‘3B’; Pound’s outlet) was summarized daily over several pages of varying length. Given the BBC’s global monitoring of wartime radio output, relevant papers on monitoring and propaganda analysis were also sampled from the BBC WAC’s enormous collection of all manner relating to the development of (mostly British) radio from the 1920s to the 1970s.

FBI file on Ezra Pound Commercially purchased microfilm copies of the 1500+ page Federal Bureau of Investigations, ten-part file on Pound.

The National Archives The National Archives in Kew, London War Office file on Ezra Pound from 1945 (TNA/ WO 204/12602).

Department of Justice Ezra Pound’s online files from the Department of Justice (hereafter ‘DOJ’; available at: http://www.justice.gov/criminal/foia/records/ezra-pound-p1.pdf, last accessed 14 October 2013.

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Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Microfilm of Pound’s 170 FCC-recorded broadcasts, as well as various pro-Fascist Anglophone pamphlets from the mid-1930s both in the archives of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (respectively ‘Transcripts of talks broadcast from Rome, 7 Dec. 1941–25 July 1943’, Films 27 (Bod/FCC), and the Taylorian Library’s Foligno Collection). Quotations from Ezra Pound are reproduced by kind permission of Palgrave MacMillan, for permission to reproduce parts of Chapter 5, ‘Pound’s Radio Propaganda, Revisiting the Critical Literature’ in Matthew Feldman’s 2013 study, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945.

Notes 1 Pound, ‘You New Zealanders’: typescript, [1941?], YBL 134/5802. All archival sources are given in endnotes for ease of reference. 2 Pound to Ungaro, 22 April 1941, YBL 53/2406; all spelling in original. 3 Pound, ‘Message to Tuan Tzetsun’s Friends’: typescript, 31 January [1943], YBL 132/5581. 4 Pound to Ubaldi 2 November 1944, FBI/Pound, Section 7. 5 Pound, ‘Articles in German “Nein ich spreche nicht” [Germ]’: typescript, 23 November 1943, YBL 128/5291. 6 Pound, ‘Le Mereschal Petain … ’ [no title]: typescripts, 13 August 1941, YBL 132/5643; English translation in FBI/Pound, Section 9. Philippe Pétain’s 12 August 1941 proclamation was translated by the New York Times on 13 August 1941, online at: www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1941/410812a.html. 7 Pound, ‘Barral’: typescript, July–August 1942, YBL 129/5362; FBI/Pound, Section 8. 8 Pound, cited in Stock, 393; and Carpenter, 569. 9 Apparently internal objections had been raised by Pound’s southern accent at EIAR; Pound to San Faustino, 19 September 1941, YBL 43/2020. 10 ‘Round the Microphone’, 5 May 1943, excerpted in de Rachewiltz, ‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’, 167; untitled programme of 12 May 1943 [‘Round the Microphone’?], Charles Norman, The Case of Ezra Pound (Funk and Wagnalls, New York: 1968 [1948]), 55ff; and ‘Round the Microphone’, 30 June. 1943, Bod/FCC. 11 Pound to Ungaro, 11 November 1941, YBL 53/2410. 12 Pound to Ungaro, 5 August 1942, YBL 53/2409. Employing Pound’s FBI File, Redman cites all but the last sentence presented here, 222. 13 E. H. Gombrich, ‘Some Axioms, Musings, and Hints on Hearing’, 15 June 1945, ‘Monitoring Service Memos: Misc.’, BBC/WAC, E8/1091. 14 BBC Internal Circulating Memo, ‘Foreign Language Broadcasts From Italy’, 23 February 1940, in BBC/WAC, E8/1091. See also ‘Broadcasting Organisation in

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15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

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Italy’, 15 December 1942, ‘Foreign Gen/European Intelligence Papers/Surveys of Broadcasting Organisations 1942–1943’, BBC/WAC, E2/189. ‘BBC Audience Estimates: Italy’, ‘Tangye Lean’s Office: Italian Radio, 1943–1948’, BBC/WAC, E20/54. BBC Internal Circulating Memo, ‘English Broadcast Memo’ of 25 July 1942, in ‘Monitoring Service Memos: Misc.’, BBC/WAC, 2 E8/1091; italics added. San Faustino to Pound, 19 August 1941, YBL 46/2020. See my ‘The Pound Case in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview’, (2011) Journal of Modern Literature 35/2; and Roosevelt’s memorandum in DOJ/Pound, Part 1. Pound to Carl Goedel, 18 April 1945; and Pound, ‘Naturally’, 3 April 1945, FBI/ Pound, Section 11. Pound’s covering letter to Gabriele Paresce, 9 November 1940 (with ‘Now That the Elections Are Over’: typescript’), YBL 132/5608; and Pound, cited in de Rachewiltz, ‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’, 162. de Rachewiltz, ‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’, 163. TNA/WO, 204/12602, 13c and 13d. Pound, ‘Communications’: typescripts [1940?], YBL 129/5411; and Pound, ‘The Quiet Disposition’, typescript, April–May 1940, YBL 126/5214. This pertains to ‘Alliance’ (5 August 1940, YBL 128/5316); ‘Brain Mistrust’ (5 July 1940, YBL 127/5377); and the various items in YBL 129/5348 for 30 August 1940; all should read 1941. TNA/WO, 204/12602, 13d. Pound to Pellizzi, 11 January 1941, cited in Redman, 207; and Pellizzi to Pound, 11 January 1941, YBL 40/1691. Pound to Pellizzi, 11 January 1941; Pellizzi to Pound, 11 January 1941; and Pound to Pellizzi, 15 February 1941, YBL 43/1691. Pound, ‘A Word to the Rabbis’, 1 November 1941, BBC/SWB. San Faustino to Pound, 2 November 1941, YBL 46/2020; and Pound, 10 October 1941, BBC/DBR. ‘Luchini, Alberto’, Archie Henderson, “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated, 851. I am grateful to Archie Henderson for drawing my attention to Pound’s connection with Luchini, underscored by their correspondence between 1943 and 1959, YBL 30/1285. Carpenrer, 626, 633; and Heymann, 150–151. Pound to Ungaro (n.d.) [early March 1942?], YBL 53/2010. Pound, ‘An American Imperialist Writes’, 11 July [1942?], YBL 130/5450. Pound, ‘Langston Billings: ‘Gangsters Together’: typescript, [January 1943?], YBL 127/5236. Pound, ‘American Imperialist’, various undated texts, YBL 127/5234. In his 6 May 1945 statement to FBI interrogators, Pound claimed: ‘So far as I know I wrote all the broadcasts made under the name of “American Imperialist”. Various people

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51 52 53

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Broadcasting in the Modernist Era read over the air the articles which I wrote under the name “American Imperialist” ’. TNA/WO, 204/12602, 13d. Pound, ‘Announcements by RAI after Pearl Harbour [sic]: typescript’, January 1942, YBL 128/5292. Pound, ‘Delbene: Dichotomy’: Typescript’, 26 December [1941?], YBL 127/5246. Redman, ‘The Repatriation of Ezra Pound, 1939–1942: A View from the Archive’, Paideuma 8/3 (1979), 443; and Redman, 197. Pound’s latter two letters to Cornelio di Marzio are translated in Redman (1979). Pound to San Faustino, 17 September 1941; and San Faustino to Pound, 15 September 1941, YBL 46/2020. Pound to San Faustino, 15 September 1941; San Faustino to Pound, 19 September 1941; and San Faustino to Pound, 27 October 1941, YBL 46/2020. Pound, ‘News from Nowhere’, 18 December 1941, YBL 132/5597. Pound to San Faustino, 11 and 16 December 1941, YBL 43/2020. Pound to San Faustino, 18 December 1941; and San Faustino to Pound, 19 December 1941, in YBL 43/2020. Pound to San Faustino, 23 December 1941, YBL 43/2020. Pound, 9 and 31 December 1942, untitled, ‘Anon.: typescript’ 9–29 December 1941, amongst various items in YBL 127/5264. Pound, 1 and 2 January 1942, untitled, in ‘Anon.: typescript’ of 1–10 January 1942, amongst various items in YBL 127/5265. Pound, 10 January. 1942, untitled, in ‘Anon.: typescript’ of 10–31 January 1941, amongst various items in YBL 127/5266. On Pound’s April 1940 reading of the Russian Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, see Redman, 202. Pound, untitled, 16 January 1942, in YBL 127/5266. Reich Press Office Periodical Service, 8 August 1941; and Germany Has Entered the Fight to the Finish with the Jewish-Bolshevik System of Murder, Reich Propaganda Directorate, 21 July 1941 both cited in Herf 2006: 155, 99–101, respectively. Pound, ‘No. 33 ‘Borderline Cases’: typescript’, 11 September 1942 YBL 129 5375; and Pound, ‘No. 99: ‘A Segment’: typescript’, 17 September [1942?], YBL 133/5688. Pound, ‘No. 98, ‘Blinder Alleys’: typescript, 6L.’, [20 September] 1942, YBL 129/5370. ‘You asked whether the mandate [payment] came through. They WERE coming regularly, but since my return I have only one and that for 250, instead of 350/ I supposed it was for a note, not a dis/corso’, Pound to Ungargo, 16 June 1941, YBL 53/2407. FBI/Pound, Section 7, letter from Frank L. Amprim to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, 31 May 1945. ‘Pound’s Italian investments and receipts’, (n.d.), YBL 128/5301. Redman points out that Pound’s first draft took just over two weeks to complete.

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57 TNA/WO 208/12602, 13f; and ‘Pound’s Italian investments and receipts for broadcasts’, (n.d.), YBL 128/5301. On this folder, see Friedlander 2011: 119.

Works cited Arnold, W. Vincent. (1998). The Illusion of Victory: Fascist Propaganda and the Second World War. New York: Peter Lang. Carpenter, Humphrey. (1988). A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Conover, Anne. (2001). Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: “What thou lovest well … .”. London: Yale University Press. Corrigan, Robert. (1972). ‘Ezra Pound and the Ministry for Popular Culture’, Journal of Popular Culture, 5/4, pp. 767–781. Doob, Leonard Ed. (1978). ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. Ert, Gibran van. (1994). ‘Empty Air: Ezra Pound’s World War Two Radio Broadcasts’, Past Imperfect, 3/56. Feldman, Matthew. (2011). ‘The Pound Case in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview’, Journal of Modern Literature, 35/2, pp. 83–97. Friedlander, Benjamin. (2011). ‘Radio Broadcasts’, in Ezra Pound in Context, Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–124. Herf, Jeffrey. (2006). The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Ideology and Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Heymann, C. David. (1976). Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, A Political Profile. New York: Seaver Books. Nadel, Ira B. (2011). Ezra Pound in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norman, Charles. (1968). The Case of Ezra Pound. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Pétain, Philippe. (1941). 12 August proclamation, translated by the New York Times, 13 August, http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1941/410812a.html. Accessed 10 October 2013. Pound, Ezra. (1948). “If This Be Treason–”, Ed. Olga Rudge. Venice: Tipo-Litografia Armena. ——— (1976). Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound: From the Recordings and Transcriptions of His Wartime Broadcasts, Rome, 1941–1943, Ed. William P. Levy. Rotterdam: Cold Turkey Press. ——— (1991). Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, volumes VII and VIII, Ed. Litz Walton Leah Baechler and James Longenbach. London: Garland Publishing. ——— (2009). “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound/Agresti Correspondence, Ed. Archie Henderson. Houston, Texas: Archie Henderson.

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——— (1991), Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, Ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz and James Longenbach. New York: Garland Publishing. VII. Rachewiltz, Mary de. (1979–1980). ‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’, Agenda, 17.3–4, 18/1. Redman, Tim. (1979). ‘The Repatriation of Ezra Pound, 1939–1942: A View from the Archive’, Paideuma, 8.3, pp. 447–457. ——— (1992). Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stock, Noel. (1970). The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Torrey, E. Fuller (1984). The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St Elizabeths. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Tytell, John. (1987). Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. New York: Doubleday. Wilhelm, James J. (1994). Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years (1925–1972). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

12

‘Conquering the Virtual Public’: Jean-Paul Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes and the Radio in France Alys Moody University of Waikato

On the evening of Monday, 21 October 1947, La Tribune de Paris – a daily radio programme that provided a forum for discussion and analysis of current events – gave over its nightly news review, from 8:30 to 8:50, to ‘Jean-Paul Sartre et ses collaborateurs’.1 This new programme, scheduled to run weekly on Monday evenings, was La tribune des temps modernes. Sartre’s ‘collaborateurs’ were a rotating group of fellow editors of his journal, Les temps modernes, for which the radio programme was named. They included Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as regulars, alongside important contributions from Jean Pouillon, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Alain Bonafé.2 Structured as a semiscripted discussion, La tribune des temps modernes ran in the regular weekly slot for six weeks, before being abruptly cancelled in December, following a controversial run and – probably crucially – a change of government. La tribune des temps modernes is a curious and instructive artefact of radio broadcasting history. At once famous (or notorious, depending on one’s sources) and little studied, its brief history encapsulates a number of the defining characteristics of French radio in the post-war period. La tribune des temps modernes found itself caught between radio’s self-image as the voice of the nation, its reality as a rather variably wielded tool of the state and its ambiguous relationship to intellectual life in France. At the same time, it proved both an expression of and a turning point for Sartre’s own thinking about radio. This essay argues that La tribune des temps modernes functions in part as an indicator of the nature, status and meaning of radio in post-war France, embodying important aspects of contemporary French intellectual culture, including its uncomfortable relationships to mass media, on the one hand, and to the tumultuous politics of the day, on the other.

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State power In 1947, French radio was still seeking to define its role in the aftermath of World War II and amidst the political tumult of the post-war years. In the years between the launch of radio in France in 1921 and the outbreak of World War II, French radio had been under the control of an ostensible state monopoly. In practice, however, the government granted a number of licenses to private operators, ensuring that the state monopoly was almost never in full force during this period. During the war, radio’s importance grew substantially as a tool of both communication and propaganda. Both the Vichy government and the occupied north operated their own radio stations that combined government propaganda with entertainment. At the same time, the BBC became an important source of information for the Resistance and a crucial and highly symbolic mouthpiece for Charles de Gaulle’s government-in-exile. In a very real sense, radio, as a site of both resistance and government propaganda, was a key battleground in the struggle for public support during the war years (Kuhn 1995: 83–89). Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that successive French governments after Liberation would place a high value on radio as the voice of the nation – and, at times, also as the voice of the state. The radio’s post-war nationalization was mooted by the Resistance throughout the war years, and when France was liberated in 1944, the radio was established as a state monopoly. As Hélène Eck explains, on 26 March 1945 a set of provisional conditions of operation for French radio established ‘an administration with a supplementary budget, directly attached to the Ministry of Information and with a governmentappointed director’ (Eck 1991: 130–131). These supposedly temporary terms, which granted the government extremely direct control over the day-to-day operation of the radio, remained in force until 1959. In contrast to pre-war French radio, the state monopoly was rigorously enforced in post-war France on French soil. Nonetheless, there sprung up alongside this a number of radio stations – known in French as radios périphériques – which, based just outside France, recorded on and broadcast into French territory. These stations, which included Europe 1, Radio Luxembourg, Radio-MonteCarlo and Sud Radio, won an increasingly large share of the listening public during the decades following the end of World War II. They provided a form of competition for the state monopoly – although with the French government owning a controlling share in most of the radios périphériques (with the notable exception of Radio Luxembourg), this competition was largely illusory (Kuhn 1995: 92–94). From the 1970s, these stations were joined by illegal pirate

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radio stations, which broadcast from within France itself and which ultimately contributed to the fracturing of the monopoly and its eventual collapse, as part of an election promise by François Mitterand, on 9 November 1981. The actual level of control exercised over the radio stations during the immediate post-war years seems to have been quite variable. Unlike the BBC, Radiodiffusion Française (later Radiodiffusion-Télévision française or RTF and, after 1965, ORTF) was never granted a proper charter, so its independence from government involvement was never guaranteed (Todd 1999: 193). Raymond Kuhn (1995: 91) notes that those who were seen as opposing the structures of the state – specifically, the communists, and de Gaulle and his followers – were ‘largely denied access to state broadcasting’ during these years, even as the high degree of government instability in post-war France made close state control of the radio relatively rare until the Algerian war. At the same time, Eck (1991: 131) observes that ‘radio was an instrument of government, and it seemed normal that those who governed should come to explain their plans and their tasks, as well as their policies’. If complete government control of radio was rare, politicians’ understanding of the radio as a ready-made propaganda tool was not. And there were certainly notable instances of government censorship, most famously the 1947 cancellations of La Tribune des journalistes parlementaires, a discussion forum in which parliamentary journalists debated issues of the day – and the cancellation, in the same year, of Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes. La tribune des temps modernes reveals just how close the relationship between radio broadcasting and government could sometimes be in this environment. Its cancellation after only six episodes (although a total of nine were recorded) can be traced directly to state intervention in radio broadcasting, and it is this event that has won the programme its place in histories of French radio (see, e.g. Kuhn 1995; Eck 1991: 144). La tribune des temps modernes in fact courted this threat from its first programme, a vicious, entertaining and highly theatrical antiGaullist polemic, notable, amongst other outrages, for the lengthy comparison drawn by Bonafé between de Gaulle and Hitler.3 The programme predictably provoked outrage amongst de Gaulle’s supporters and in the furore that followed, Simone de Beauvoir (1999: 87) wrote to her lover Nelson Algren, predicting that they would be fired in response. Christopher Todd (1999: 188n26), noting that Radio 47, the official radio programme, fails to list La tribune des temps modernes in its expected slot for 28 October, speculates that the cancellation of the programme may have been mooted by radio administration in the aftermath of this outcry. But in fact, Sartre’s radio show lasted for another five episodes. When it was finally censored, it seems that the initial controversy over the

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anti-Gaullist first episode was less the issue, than the change of government that ensued. Until 19 November 1947, the French government was led by socialist Prime Minister Paul Ramadier. Following widespread strikes in November 1947 that forced his resignation and left France without a government for a week in November, Ramadier was replaced by Robert Schuman, a Christian Democrat who was significantly less sympathetic to Sartre’s carefully anti-Gaullist, anticommunist leftist politics. The week Schuman assumed power, La tribune des temps modernes was cancelled. If the violently anti-Gaullist sentiments provided the germ of resistance to Sartre’s programmes, it nonetheless seems that the change of government was the clear proximate cause of their eventual censorship. There are, however, suggestions that political meddling was a feature of La tribune des temps modernes from its very inception. Writing in 1993, Michael Scriven highlights a debate over the nature and extent of the involvement of the Ramadier government in the programme. The charge is that La tribune des temps modernes, far from serving as an agent of free expression that was cut off in its prime, was in fact ‘an agency of government propaganda’ by the Ramadier government, a dispute that Scriven (1993: 86) resists resolving. In fact, Beauvoir’s letters to Nelson Algren – first published in French in 1997 and in English in 1998, some four or five years after Scriven’s study – show conclusively that not only was the radio programme commissioned and supported at the behest of Ramadier, but also that Sartre and his co-presenters knew this before the first programme went to air.4 Writing on 14 October 1947, just under a week before the programme’s launch, Beauvoir explains: The story of the radio turned a strange way. We learnt it was all contrived by the government, by Ramadier, because he wanted us to do some anti-communist and anti-Gaullist propaganda just before the elections. And we were going to be paid not by the radio (which depends upon the government but has and must have its autonomy) but by Ramadier himself. Then, we are anticommunist and anti-Gaullist, indeed, but we do not intend to support Ramadier’s policy; chiefly what he did in Indochina disgusts us. So yesterday we had prepared something rather funny and striking about de Gaulle, but we decided to drop everything. Now something will happen for Ramadier though the radio people (who being mostly communist do not want our participation) had purposely said to us we were governmental agents, which he himself had tried to hide, in order to get our demission. He got very angry and told them to ask themselves for our regular participation or he would fire them. So now they are very annoyed. For us it seems a very French story and rather sad. (Beauvoir 1999: 81–82)

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Despite her claim to ‘drop everything’, the radio men asked them back as Beauvoir had predicted, and the members of the Tribune des temps modernes team must have relented – despite Beauvoir’s (1999: 83) lament that ‘Everything seems dirty in this business, all these people stink’ – for the de Gaulle episode described above aired, perhaps with a week’s delay, on 21 October. In Force of Circumstance, her memoirs of the period, Beauvoir offers a slightly different – and no doubt somewhat sanitized – account of the programme’s origins. Here she claims, ‘One of [Sartre’s] old colleagues, called Bonafé, knew Ramadier well and suggested to him that we should be entrusted with a radio programme to express our views: Sartre accepted. We did not wish to be dependent on the Présidence du Conseil; the Temps modernes hour was attached to the “literary and dramatic programs” department’ (Beauvoir 1965: 137). This version – down to the ‘hour’ that, in the event, was only a half hour – seems to accord with Beauvoir’s initial understanding of the genesis of the programme, while effacing the later revelations about government involvement. It also highlights the probably central status of Alain Bonafé. A colleague of Sartre’s from the Lycée François I in Le Havre and the only regular contributor to La tribune des temps modernes who did not appear frequently in the pages of Les temps modernes during 1947, Bonafé was the connection to Ramadier, apparently the conduit for the initial proposal of the programme – and also the contributor who caused such a stir with his tactless political commentary in the first episode. Beauvoir, describing the programme’s cancellation to Algren, concludes with a sharp sense of the political motivations that shaped the existence of La tribune des temps modernes. ‘The new government Schumann [sic]’, she writes, ‘fired us from the radio. God gave it to us (under Ramadier’s features) and God took it from us, as said old wise Job. It is all right, since we were interested but did not enjoy to do this. I have better be in a quiet room and write for myself ’ (Beauvoir 1999: 118). For Beauvoir, the political machinations that permitted the existence of the programme are parallel to those that led to its cancellation, with the show and its presenters cast as pawns within a larger political game or – to use her own metaphor – as the playthings of competing political gods. In certain respects, this ‘dirty’ situation echoes Beauvoir’s own earlier and far more controversial engagement with the radio during World War II. In 1943, Beauvoir was commissioned by Radio-Vichy to produce a series of radio programmes, which eventually appeared in 1944, about the origins of the music hall. These light, entertainment-oriented programmes – they appear to have been aural collages of music and street noises from various historical moments that were central to the development of music-hall, narrated by two anonymous guides –

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had no political content, but, as Ingrid Galster (1996) explains, formed part of a strategy by the Vichy government to increase the audience of their official radio station and thus of their propaganda. Small wonder, then, that she should finish by rejecting the politicized, social world of radio in favour of a retreat into the calmer world of writing alone and for oneself. If it is clear that Ramadier played a central role in providing the Temps modernes team with a platform, it is less certain whether this exerted any sustained influence on the show’s content. Beauvoir’s letters emphasize that Ramadier himself believed that the combination of anti-Gaullism and anticommunism that characterized the politics of Sartre and his friends at this time was in itself enough to serve as effective propaganda for his government, without further influence from him (this is implicit in the fact that he intended their role as propagandists to be kept from them). La tribune des temps modernes delivers amply on this promise, dedicating the first show to a violent attack on de Gaulle and his supporters, the second to a sharp critique of communism and the third to a series of rebuttals of the criticism provoked by these first two programmes. Even as later episodes became more philosophical in content, they continued to call for a third way, domestically, between de Gaulle and communism, and internationally, between American capitalism and Russian communism. In this sense, they no doubt delivered on the promise that Ramadier saw in them, even if in doing so they were merely affirming their own political beliefs. Despite the political and current affairs-oriented nature of much of La tribune des temps modernes, direct discussion of the Ramadier government and of Ramadier himself is strikingly absent from the programme. In this sense, it is possible that their general strategy was to simply ignore and avoid all discussion, ensuring that they could be cast as neither advocates nor critics of the prime minister. Similarly, although various contributors were keen to highlight their sympathy with colonized peoples and their support for decolonization in passing, there is no substantial discussion of decolonization or of the Ramadier government’s policy in Indochina, which Beauvoir highlights as one of the key points of political difference between Sartre and Ramadier.5 This is particularly striking, in the light of the fact that the Indochina issue dominated the pages of Les temps modernes in the months before the radio programme began, producing an issue devoted to Indochina in March 1947, as well as a number of articles on the matter, including some written by regular radio contributors Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1947) and Jean Pouillon (1947), the latter mentioning Indochina as part of a larger attack

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on French parliamentary politics. In this context, their on-air restraint with regard to both Indochina and governmental flaws more generally can easily be interpreted as a trace of Ramadier’s influence. Ramadier himself is mentioned by name only once in the show’s run, in the third episode, where Sartre responds to his critics. Discussing an article that appeared in L’Humanité, the mouthpiece of the French Communist Party, in response to the previous week’s episode attacking communism, Bonafé introduces the article: ‘My poor Sartre, you learnt from this article that you have been sold to Ramadier’. Sartre mockingly replies: Oh yes, I have been sold to Ramadier like I have been sold to Stalin. But how did Ramadier sell me to the United States? At the end of the day, it’s the Americans who have bought me … If you are from one of the two blocs, only half the listeners will accuse me of having been sold. But since I don’t belong to either one, you see, I’ve been bought by everyone at the same time: Ramadier, Truman and Stalin. (Sartre et al. 1989c)

As we have seen, though, the accusation that he had been bought by Ramadier is, if not strictly accurate (it is unclear from Beauvoir’s letters whether Ramadier retained his financial responsibility for the programme after their discovery of his influence), certainly one that would have to be taken seriously. Given what Beauvoir and, almost certainly, Sartre and Bonafé themselves knew of how this radio programme came about, their sarcastic tone and dismissive attitude are rather disingenuous. On the whole, though, if Ramadier got what he hoped for out of La tribune des temps modernes, it was not direct advocacy, but a simple statement of their own pre-existing beliefs, which he hoped would lead voters to favour his own leftist, anti-communist and anti-Gaullist politics. Sartre and his fellow contributors hardly needed Ramadier’s influence to promote such a stance. On the other hand, it seems impossible to tell how far their avoidance of direct discussion of Ramadier, his government and those of his policies with which they disagreed should be read as an act of deference to the man who made such a public forum possible in the first place. Either way, it is clear that La tribune des temps modernes contains nothing that the contributors would not otherwise have endorsed, but also nothing that would not have ultimately pleased Ramadier. Ultimately, of course, this careful balancing act saved neither Ramadier nor the contributors to La tribune des temps modernes, all of whom had lost their jobs within six weeks of the programme first going to air.

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Intellectuals Engagés Even if we accept that the content of La tribune des temps modernes was largely unaffected by its association with Ramadier, it remains true that the taint of political corruption must have rendered the whole affair a good deal dirtier – as Beauvoir put it – than was really desirable. The question, then, becomes why Sartre and his team went along with it at all, once Ramadier’s behind-the-scenes involvement was revealed. In a letter to Algren on 26 September, Beauvoir (1999: 68–69) provides an insight into the team’s initial enthusiasm: ‘You know what it means? The possibility of reaching thousands of people, and trying to make them think and feel in the way we believe right to think and feel’. In Beauvoir’s first flush of excitement, the possibility of radio is understood above all as the possibility of a large audience. This has a particular relevance, and no doubt provoked a particular excitement, for the founders and editors of Les temps modernes, a journal that was established in 1945 with the express goal of fostering and promoting a ‘littérature engagée’. In his essay ‘Introducing Les temps modernes’, first published as ‘Présentation des temps modernes’ in the inaugural issue of Les temps modernes in October 1945, Sartre famously declares that, ‘The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverberations. As does his silence’ (Sartre 1988: 252). He goes on to lay out the aims of the review: our intention is to help effect certain changes in the Society that surrounds us … we align ourselves on the side of those who want to change simultaneously the social condition of man and the concept he has of himself. Consequently, concerning the political and social events to come, our journal will take a position in each case … If we are able to live up to what we promise, if we succeed in persuading a few readers to share our views, we will not engage in exaggerated pride; we will simply congratulate ourselves for having rediscovered a good professional conscience, and for literature’s having become again – at least for us – what it should never have stopped being: a social function. (Sartre 1988: 255)

It is easy to hear echoes of Sartre’s hope of persuading a few readers to share his views in Beauvoir’s excitement about the possibility of an audience that ‘think[s] and feel[s] in the way we believe right to think and feel’. Moreover, the radio programme seems to offer, at key points, great scope for pursuing these original aims of the journal. As a more immediate medium – some of the episodes were recorded the same day that they were broadcast – it offered a unique opportunity to take an active and direct stand on the issues of the day. At

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the same time, the discursive format allowed Sartre and the others to weave this topical commentary together with analysis of both the ‘social condition of man’ and ‘the conception he has of himself ’ in a novel and engaging way. In this sense, La tribune des temps modernes must be understood as pursuing the goals of Les temps modernes by other means. This is closely tied to one of the great preoccupations that Sartre shared with post-war French society more generally: anxiety about the status of the intellectual in post-war France. Sunil Khilnani (1993: 51–52) sees Sartre’s postwar advocacy of the engaged intellectual as a response to two very serious charges levelled against French intellectuals in the aftermath of World War II: on the one hand, that they were ‘social parasite[s] with nothing to contribute to the material revival of [their] country’, and, on the other, that the purges of Fascist writers and intellectuals after the war left all writers ‘open to charges of political naiveté and to injunctions against their further meddling in politics’. For Khilnani, Les temps modernes was Sartre’s attempt to resist these criticisms, offering ‘a platform in his campaign to propagate a view of writing that at once guarded its independence and endowed it with a new public importance’ (52). In practice, La tribune des temps modernes may have had only mixed success in fulfilling these goals: although it offered a new audience and a new forum for the promotion of this vision of the intellectual’s public importance, Ramadier’s involvement must have, to some degree, shaken his independence. Nonetheless, there are a number of reasons why the radio might have seemed like an ideal forum for an engaged intellectual in France in 1947. On a philosophical level, Hélène Eck (1991: 129) explains that radio in the immediate aftermath of the war was initially conceived of as a public forum that would ideally need to become ‘a voice, capable of achieving the synthesis of democracy and culture’. Although these high-minded ideals were sullied by the government intervention described earlier, and despite the fact that an attempt to attract writers to the radio generally failed to achieve any sustained or substantive engagement from France’s most famous literary names, Eck concludes that ‘it did succeed in asserting itself and in making itself known as a cultural middleman with whom the elite could do business’ (145). The radio was therefore uniquely positioned to act as a means of disseminating intellectual ideas to a wider audience – and that audience was indeed wide. In 1946, the French owned 5.5 million radio sets, for a population of 40 million (Kuhn 1995: 90). Nor did these sets go unused: in 1950, the average French adult spent 118 minutes per day listening to the radio (79). As a platform for reaching a wide audience, the radio was unrivalled in 1947.

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In What Is Literature?, serialized in Les temps modernes the year that La tribune des temps modernes went to air, Sartre reveals himself to be both keenly aware of the possibilities offered by the radio and somewhat wary and ambivalent about its potential. In this account, radio, like other forms of mass media, has a kind of outreach or even reconnaissance function in Sartre’s great battle for the hearts and minds of the population: We make contact with people, without ever wanting to do so, by new means, with new angles of incidence. Of course, the book is still the heavy infantry which clears and occupies the terrain. But literature has its airplanes, its V1’s and V2’s which go a great distance, upsetting and harassing, without bringing the actual decision. (Sartre 1949: 244)

The usefulness of radio in this account, as in Beauvoir’s, lies in the enormity of its potential audience and the ‘great distance’ it can travel – he cites a radio adaptation of his play No Exit, which was broadcast on the BBC to an audience that he estimates at half a million. This boon comes, however, with a considerable drawback, for although the audiences are large, they are unprepared and unreceptive. In place of a discerning and critical theatre audience, Sartre worries that his radio audience simply ‘wanted to hear, as usual, the Thursday drama broadcast. As soon as it was over, they forgot it, as they did the preceding ones’ (245). The worry is that these large audiences transform literature into background noise and passing entertainment. It might even be asked whether the limited role accorded to them in Sartre’s earlier military metaphor – where radio features as a small plane making incursions without winning the battle – is not too generous in this context. Where the earlier metaphor seems to imply that mass media is responsible for dissemination but true and lasting persuasion must rely on books, an audience that is truly as disconnected and disinterested as Sartre claims might retain his name and a hint of his reputation, but little else. It risks, therefore, losing all hope of communicating ideas, surely defeating the purpose of such dissemination. If the analysis stopped there, it would be hard to see why Sartre should have bothered with radio at all, except perhaps, as Todd (1999: 196) claims, as ‘merely another publicity stunt’. But Beauvoir’s letters offer a quite different account of the Temps modernes group’s attitude towards this programme, describing it as one of ‘these opportunities of doing something real and concrete’ (Beauvoir 1999: 72), observing that the radio’s potential to reach such a large audience ‘must be managed with much care’ (69), and often complaining about the long hours and obsessive effort devoted to the programme. This points to a sense of

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commitment and seriousness in their approach to La tribune des temps modernes, which seems to carry them far from the flippancy of Todd’s ‘publicity stunt’. As Sartre’s discussion of radio and mass media in What Is Literature? continues, he begins to gesture towards a sounder foundation for radio’s appeal. For Sartre, the problem to which radio might be a solution is, crucially, one of audience; specifically, the problem is that contemporary French writers have ‘readers but no public’ (Sartre 1949: 246). Although bourgeois, they are alienated from their origins by their commitment to overturning the oppression of which the bourgeoisie is instrument and beneficiary. On the other hand, the Communist Party has dominated the working class, preventing them from finding a public there. As such, writers struggle to speak to a class, to form a community through their writings: they lack, in short, a public. To counteract this, Sartre argues that committed writers must seek out their ‘virtual readers, that is, the social categories that do not read us, but which might’ in an attempt to ‘incorporate some of our potential readers into our actual public’ (267–268). For this, Sartre proposes enlisting the help of the mass media, which he describes as ‘the real resources at our disposal for conquering the virtual public’ (268). But how to deploy these resources without falling into the trap described earlier, whereby the passive and disinterested audience encounters then forgets the programme, without ever according its ideas the full and close attention they require? Sartre’s solution lies in a refusal of adaptation in favour of specificity to the medium: ‘It is by no means a matter of letting our works be adapted for the screen or the broadcasts of the French Radio. We must write directly for the movies and the airwaves’ (269). The primary reason that he gives for this demand is the need to avoid and circumvent the industrial processes that underpin the mass media and which seek to make works mediocre in order to appeal to the public more successfully. In place of adaptations of works written for other media, Sartre insists that ‘there is a literary art of radio, film, editorial and reporting. There is no need to popularize’ (268). The potential for taking advantage of the radio, then, is understood as relying on an ability to creatively exploit the specificities of the medium. For Sartre, the specificity of radio, in particular, seems to lie in its intimacy. Describing the possibilities that it could offer an astute writer, he explains: The radio surprises people at the table or in bed, at the moment when they are most defenceless, in the almost organic abandon of solitude. At the present time, it makes use of its opportunity to fool them, but it is also the moment when one might better appeal to their good faith; they have not yet put on or have laid

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aside the personality with which they face the world. We’ve got one foot inside the door. We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the ideas of our books into these new languages. (Sartre 1949: 268)

Unlike books, which he describes as ‘inert’ in their need to be chosen by the listener, the radio is capable of infiltrating people’s lives in their most exposed and vulnerable moments. The combination of surprise and intimacy makes the radio a double-edged sword: capable of becoming highly exploitative, but also of appealing to an audience in a more direct manner, of bypassing the defences erected and maintained by their public faces, as well as by their choice of reading material. To the vast scale of the listening public, Sartre adds radio’s unusual intimacy, a combination that makes it uniquely suited to the reconnaissance function he attributes to mass media. At the same time, though, radio, like all mass media, retains its secondary status in relation to books. Ideas are never formulated directly in the ‘languages’ of radio and other mass media; rather, books remain the privileged site of real intellectual work, while radio and related media function exclusively as translations.

Writing for the radio La tribune des temps modernes, which went to air the same year that What Is Literature? was published, remains Sartre’s only serious engagement with the radio and his only real attempt to realize his hopes for the medium. It therefore offers a fascinating insight into what he understood ‘writing directly for the … airwaves’ to look like. Indeed, La tribune des temps modernes is nothing if not written – or conceived – directly for radio. It exploits its medium in a range of ways, from its discursive format and its emphasis on audience involvement, to its integration of current events with philosophical discussion, and its use of theatrical and comic elements. It was clearly conceived as a dynamic and engaged dialogue with an audience with whom the contributors have been granted an unusual intimacy. A full understanding of how precisely Sartre ‘writes for the radio’ requires a consideration of the format and form of La tribune des temps modernes. The evidence for this comes primarily from a series of cassette recordings, released by Radio France in 1989, of nine episodes of this programme. These recordings exclude the initial 6 October episode that Todd highlights, but include the remaining six episodes, first broadcast between 20 October and 24 November 1947, alongside an additional three programmes that were recorded prior to the

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show’s cancellation and projected for broadcast on 1, 8 and 15 December. The episodes available through this series are, in order of first broadcast: 20 October 27 October 3 November 10 November 17 November 24 November 1 December 8 December 15 December

Gaullism and the RPF Communism and anti-communism Listeners’ letters and definitions of existentialism Liberalism and socialism The crisis of socialism Union movements and social conflicts The true meaning of the workers’ demands Two appeals to international opinion David Rousset on his return from Germany

These recordings have been taken from a rebroadcast (or, in the case of the latter three, first broadcast) of the entire series on France Culture in August 1989. The cassette versions therefore include the addition of a small amount of contextual information at the beginning of the broadcasts, short interviews with relevant figures at the end and a helpful voice-over explaining who is speaking during the programme itself. Each episode features at least four contributors engaged in discussions that, while often framed by Sartre and often consensual in their conclusion, were clearly conceived to give the impression of genuine but civil debate. The participants frequently interrupt each other, correct each other and pose questions either to the group or directly to one or the other of the contributors. Although individual speakers are given time to develop their thoughts and arguments in some detail, and although Sartre and – when present – Merleau-Ponty are given more airtime and more central roles than the others, the overall effect is of a congenial, if passionate and in-depth, discussion amongst friends. In this, the programme adopts the tribune format popularized by La Tribune de Paris and La Tribune des journalistes parlementaires. Sartre had experimented with conversational formats in print before – there is, for example, a lengthy post-lecture discussion reproduced at the conclusion of L’existentialisme est un humanisme, which was published the year before (see Sartre 1996: 79–109) – but the conversational mode of La tribune des temps modernes is distinguished by the fact that it seems to produce a genuine and relatively non-hierarchical discussion. Given that they were originally aired at 8:30 in the evening, La tribune des temps modernes was likely to have ‘surprise[d] people at the table’, and the programme’s format, like

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that of other contemporaneous discussion-based radio shows, can be read as an attempt to stage and participate in the evening dinner table conversation. The listening public were envisaged as partaking in this conversation, with Sartre in particular seeking to work audience responses into the fabric of the radio programme. In the wake of the polemical attacks on Gaullism and communism in the programme’s first two episodes, and of the vehement public reaction they provoked in the press and media of the day, the third episode of La tribune des temps modernes is given over to Sartre’s responses to his outraged listeners. As several of his collaborators read out letters or summarize news articles about the programme, Sartre offers his provocative and satirical responses. But if the format is designed to incorporate a certain responsiveness to listeners’ concerns, its rhetoric treats them more as objects for study than as interlocutors in a genuine dialogue. Sartre opens the episode by announcing: I have received letters of congratulations, naturally, and equally naturally, letters of attack and insult. It is these latter that I want to speak to you about, because I find that they express a curious and worrying state of mind. (Sartre et al. 1989c)

By reading these responses as symptomatic of a broader French malaise, Sartre avoids engaging them directly in any kind of debate. Selecting extreme accusations, he ridicules their assertions before holding them up as examples of his analysis of post-war French society. Thus, their logical flaws are read as indicative of ‘the idea that the value of thought has been undermined, the supremacy of the lie over the truth, of tactic over logic, of interests over the thought of the interested’. Similarly, claims that he is operating as an agent for either the Russians, the Americans or Ramadier are seen as emblematic of the paranoid French mindset of the day: ‘We think we are still under the occupation … we think that there is a foreign dictator in France, threatening and murderous, who reveals himself everywhere in everyday life, as well as in major events … At bottom, we think the situation of ’47 with the words and the means of 1943’. If this stands as an interesting analysis of post-war French society, it also has the effect of silencing his critics by denying the autonomy and value of their claims. But in an important sense, La tribune des temps modernes is not speaking to these critics. As What Is Literature? reveals, Sartre conceived of radio as a way of reaching a ‘virtual public’ of those predisposed towards his ideas, but who do not yet constitute an actual public. It seems hardly likely that he would have included listeners who referred to himself as ‘un dégueulasse’ (a swine) and Simone de Beauvoir as ‘une bonne femme boche’ (a good kraut woman) amongst such potential supporters.

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Nonetheless, La tribune des temps modernes does show signs of addressing itself directly to the ‘virtual public’. The eighth episode of the series, one of those which was recorded but never broadcast, is particularly illustrative in this regard. This episode, often dismissed by commentators as amongst the most dull, consists primarily of the reading of two manifestos, both calling for the emergence of a strong, unified and socialist Europe as a bulwark against the emergent Cold War tensions between the USA and the USSR. Introduced as explicitly written texts, which need to be ‘read’ on air and which Sartre claims at the beginning of the episode have recently appeared in unnamed newspapers, these manifestos stray furthest from Sartre’s call to write directly for radio, rather than simply adapting texts from the print media. In practice, this episode strives to make these manifestos an occasion for debate, with Pontalis and Bonafé assuming the roles of a sceptical audience, whose broad agreement with Sartre on many issues is pitted against a professed reluctance to sign such statements blindly. After having forced Sartre to defend the manifestos at length, the programme concludes with an appeal to their listening audience: ‘I believe that it would be good to ask the listeners to send their agreement, if they agree, or their disagreement … to say whether … they too want to sign this manifesto and to say it by sending it to the radio’ (Sartre et al. 1989h). If audience response remains significant here, this episode takes a dramatically different approach to the mockery and analysis of the third. Here, Pontalis and Bonafé emerge as the avatars of Sartre’s ‘virtual public’, interrogating Sartre’s position before standing aside at the end of the programme to allow the virtual public to sign on as an actual public. The attention to radio broadcasting as a specific genre of speech takes its frames of reference not only from Sartre’s elaboration of the intimacy of radio as a form, but also from the nature of radio discussion as practiced on French radio in 1947. The title of La tribune des temps modernes echoes both La Tribune de Paris, of which it was a part, and La Tribune des journalistes parlementaires, the journalist’s discussion forum, which was banned twice in 1947. The tribune was in fact something of a radio genre in its own right, in which contributors discussed the events of the day in a round-table format. In this sense, the conversational format of La tribune des temps modernes can be understood as reasonably conventional, as can its highly topical subject matter. In fact, current affairs and contemporary politics remain a constant touchstone for Sartre’s radio programme. The first episode, broadcast the day after de Gaulle’s newly formed party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) enjoyed sweeping success at the municipal elections, is a vicious attack on de Gaulle. The second episode, an attack on communism, is also highly topical, coming as it does

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during the early days of the Cold War and during the year in which the PCF was exiled from government and figures such as Léon Blum were arguing for a third way between the RPF and the PCF. Merleau-Ponty’s attack on the inequality and state oppression in the USSR seems particularly prescient for a leftist in 1947. After a foray into more philosophical discussion of political movements such as liberalism and socialism in episodes 4 and 5, La tribune des temps modernes returns to the issues of the day with an extended examination of the extensive strikes that shook France in November 1947. The sixth episode features an interview with a trade union leader opposed to the strikes, whereas the unbroadcast seventh episode promises an interrogation of ‘the real meaning of the worker’s demands’. The eighth consists of the manifestos discussed above. The recorded programmes conclude with an interview with David Rousset, a former concentration camp inmate who had risen to prominence with the publication of a fictional and a non-fictional account of the camps, and who would, the following year, be the co-founder of Sartre’s own short-lived political party. In the ninth episode, Rousset discusses a recent trip to Germany, giving a detailed report on the political and social circumstances of contemporary Germany. In keeping with the cultural focus of La Tribune de Paris, La tribune des temps modernes moves fluidly from these discussions of current events and contemporary politics to larger philosophical questions. The third episode is again exemplary here, using the diagnosis of listeners’ letters as a means of moving from the news-driven analyses of Gaullism and communism, to a more explicit exposition of existentialism as a philosophical movement with a political interest. Sartre, disdaining popular misappropriations of existentialism, insists: what I prefer is to try to demonstrate precise points by which this philosophy forces a choice on us, a political choice, and forces us to struggle against the present situation. The existentialist’s big idea is precisely to struggle against sentiment and impotence. We think that man is never impotent, except when he believes he is. (Sartre et al. 1989c)

This cornerstone of existentialist thought therefore becomes a diagnostic tool for contemporary French society. Similar movements characterize the following two episodes in particular. The fourth, for example, evaluates liberalism and socialism through an analysis of different kinds of and claims to freedom, dismissing liberalism’s ‘abstract rights’ in favour of what they see as socialism’s greater concreteness (Sartre et al. 1989d). The fifth episode follows directly on from this, reading the philosophical discussion of the fourth against contemporary

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events, as Merleau-Ponty advances a claim for the crisis of socialism, noting carefully, ‘when I spoke the other day about a crisis of socialism, I didn’t mean a crisis of a theory or a doctrine, but above all of the crisis of a movement’ (Sartre et al. 1989e). This back-and-forth is typical of the discussion on La tribune des temps modernes, where political analysis is always informed by the contributors’ underlying philosophical stance and philosophical claims are often tested against contemporary events. The result is a programme that assiduously tries to speak in the language of radio and abide by its conventions while avoiding popularization that might trivialize or simplify the philosophical component.

Postscript La tribune des temps modernes therefore seems to have been a serious endeavour for Sartre, an attempt to realize his hopes of reaching a wider public. Nonetheless, it remains exceptional in his career as his only attempt to use the radio in this way and as one of his few appearances on the radio at all. This is not true of all members of La tribune des temps modernes group – Merleau-Ponty, for instance, went on to deliver a series of lectures on perception on Radio France the following year (published as Merleau-Ponty 2004). So why did Sartre abandon the radio in this way? Todd (1999: 191) claims that, in the wake of the controversy surrounding La tribune des temps modernes, ‘there seems to have been a positive effort to prevent [Sartre] from using the radio as a political forum again’. Be that as it may, Sartre himself seems to have been resistant to further attempts to use radio broadcast as a political or philosophical medium after the cancellation of La tribune des temps modernes. At the very least, even if he were unofficially banned from Radio France, he could always have pursued broadcasts on the radios périphérique, as he did briefly during the 1968 manifestations, when he voiced his support for the protestors on RTL. That he chose not to pursue this any further implies a wider disillusionment with radio as a medium for communicating his ideas. This is confirmed by Sartre’s other major theoretical discussion of the radio, in his 1960 work Critique of Dialectical Reason. In this, his most political work of philosophy, Sartre condemns radio as an example of a ‘collective’, his term for a collection of individuals who, in their isolation, fail to achieve the integration necessary to become a group capable of achieving political change. Sartre’s critique of radio is interesting not only for his brusque dismissal of

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radio’s political potential, but also because its terms of analysis seem to imply the inevitable failure of his attempts to write for the radio. Sartre offers radio as an example of what he calls an ‘indirect gathering’, in which the listeners, joined together in the event of the radio broadcast, are isolated from others and experience their fellow listeners only in their absence from them. He proceeds to offer an analysis of radio from two perspectives: the relationship of the listener to the radio broadcaster and that of the listener to other listeners. In the case of the former, he argues that ‘the relation between the broadcaster and myself is not a human one: in effect, I am passive in relation to what is being said’ (Sartre 2004: 271). He goes on to characterize this passivity in terms of the lack of reciprocity between listener and broadcaster: The broadcaster’s voice, in contrast [to that of a public speaker], in its reality as a human voice, is, in principle, mystifying: it is based on the reciprocity of discourse, and therefore on a human relation, but it is really a reifying relation in which the voice is given as praxis and constitutes the listener as object of praxis; in short, it is a univocal relation of interiority, similar to that of the organism acting on a material environment, but one in which I, as an inert object, am subjected as inorganic matter to the human work of the voice. (Sartre 2004: 272)

It is precisely this objectifying lack of reciprocity that Sartre’s engagement with his audience attempts to guard against. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, however, this possibility seems to have been removed and the inhuman relation between broadcaster and listener rendered structural. He dismisses both the possibility of individual listeners ‘speaking back’ to the radio and that of listeners simply turning the radio off, on the grounds that in both cases the response is ineffective unless it is expressed en masse. And here, the problem of absence raises its head. He writes that, ‘as soon as I imagine some practical action against what the broadcaster says, I can conceive of it only as serial: I would have to take the listeners one by one … . Obviously, this seriality is a measure of my impotence’ (Sartre 2004: 273). Because we have no direct relation to other listeners, the possibility of mobilizing them as a group is seriously attenuated. Nonetheless, he emphasizes, it is on their behalf that we worry: our fury at a radio broadcast with which we disagree arises from our concern that other listeners may be persuaded – and that, in our absence from them, we will have no recourse, no platform from which to refute these false claims. By 1960, then, radio had become an embodiment of political impotence, of organizations of individuals rendered powerless by the structure in which they are caught. This is a far cry from the guarded optimism of the analysis of radio in What Is Literature? and it implies a significant shift in perspective. Where What

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Is Literature? speaks as a ‘we’ that includes writers-as-radio-broadcasters, about a ‘they’ of the listening public, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre assumes the position of the alienated listener, describing the experience in the first person singular. As such, the focus of the radio’s political potential is no longer on the ability of the broadcaster to mobilize popular opinion – a tactic that seems to have been recast as both ethically and politically questionable – but rather on the ability of the radio broadcast to function as an occasion for concerted communal action. Where there was some hope for the former for Sartre in 1947, the structural conditions of radio seem to have ensured the impossibility of the latter by 1960. If La tribune des temps modernes seemed to Sartre to have been a doomed experiment, it seems clear that by 1960 he was attributing this failure not simply to the political interference that surrounded it, but to the very nature of radio itself.

Notes 1 On La Tribune de Paris, see Nord (2010: 353). On the timing and details of Sartre’s radio programme, see Todd (1999: 185). 2 Bonafé is sometimes confused with Lucien Bonnafé, a well-known French psychiatrist who was also active in Paris in this period. Nonetheless, he is clearly identified in all radio broadcasts as ‘A. Bonafé’ and a Bonafé appears in several of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical works, identified not as a psychiatrist but as a high-school literature teacher (see, e.g. Beauvoir 1990a; b: 103). 3 Todd (1999: 186) disagrees that this was in fact the first episode and cites an earlier one, on 6 October. He cites contemporary French radio guides to support this claim. However, as I have been able to find no further reference to this episode, either in histories of the radio and Sartre’s engagement with it or in Simone de Beauvoir’s letters and memoirs, and as this initial programme is not included amongst those rebroadcast and subsequently released on cassette by Radio France in 1989, I have used the more widely verified starting date. 4 If Todd is correct about the 20 October episode in fact being the second of the Tribune des temps modernes series – a claim that is neither confirmed nor denied by Beauvoir’s letters – this might provide an alternate explanation for why the programme failed to air as expected on 13 October. 5 In the second episode, ‘Communisme et anticommunisme’, Merleau-Ponty attacks the USSR for having a ‘colonial policy that threatens the liberation of colonised peoples,’ while in the fifth, on ‘La crise du socialisme’, Pontalis cites ‘the war that the colonised countries wage for their independence’ as an instance of the contemporary relevance of class warfare.

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Works cited Beauvoir, S. de (1965). Force of Circumstance, trans. R. Howard. London: Deutsch. ——— (1990a). Journal de guerre. Paris: Gallimard. ——— (1990b). Lettres à Sartre. Paris: Gallimard. ——— (1999). Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947–1968. London: Phoenix. Eck, H. (1991). ‘Radio, Culture and Democracy in France in the Immediate Postwar Period, 1944–50’, in France and the Mass Media, Ed. B. Rigby and N. Hewitt. Houndmills: Macmillan, pp. 129–146. Galster, I. (1996). ‘Simone de Beauvoir et Radio-Vichy: A propos de quelques scenarios retrouvés’, Romanische Forschungen, 108.1–2, pp. 112–132. Khilnani, S. (1993). Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kuhn, R. (1995). Media in France. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2004). The World of Perception, trans. O. Davis. London: Routledge. Nord, P. G. (2010). France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pontalis, J.-B. (1947). ‘Un soldat français en Indochine’, Les temps modernes, 17, pp. 895–905. Pouillon, J. (1947). ‘Mythe contre mythe’, Les temps modernes, 20, pp. 1345–1360. Sartre, J.-P. (1949). What Is Literature?, trans. B. Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library. ——— (1988). ‘Introducing Les temps modernes’, in ‘What Is Literature?’ and Other Essays, trans. J. Mehlman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 249–267. ——— (1996). L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Gallimard. ——— (2004). Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1, Ed. J. Rée, trans. A. SheridanSmith. London: Verso. ———, S. de Beauvoir, M. Merleau-Ponty, J.-B. Pontalis and A. Bonafé (1989a). ‘Le Gaullisme et le R.P.F’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First broadcast 20 October 1947. ———, S. de Beauvoir, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Bonafé and J.-B. Pontalis (1989b). ‘Communisme et anticommunisme’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First broadcast 27 October 1947. ———, S. de Beauvoir, J. Pouillon, A. Bonafé and J.-B. Pontalis (1989c). ‘Lettres d’auditeurs et définitions de l’existentialisme’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First broadcast 3 November 1947. ———, S. de Beauvoir, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Bonafé, J.-B. Pontalis and J. Pouillon (1989d). ‘Libéralisme et socialisme’, in Tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First broadcast 10 November 1947.

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———, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Bonafé and J.-B. Pontalis (1989e). ‘Crise du socialisme’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First broadcast 17 November 1947. ———, A. Bonafé, J.-B. Pontalis and J. Pouillon (1989f). ‘Mouvements syndicaux et conflits sociaux’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First broadcast 24 November 1947. ———, S. de Beauvoir, A. Bonafé, J.-B. Pontalis and J. Pouillon (1989g). ‘Vrai sens des revendications ouvrières’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. ———, S. de Beauvoir, A. Bonafé and J.-B. Pontalis (1989h). ‘Deux appels à l’opinion internationale’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. ———, A. Bonafé, J.-B. Pontalis and J. Pouillon (1989i). ‘David Rousset de retour d’Allemagne’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. Scriven, M. (1993). Sartre and the Media, New York: St Martin’s Press. Todd, C. (1999). ‘Sartre Flirts with the Radio’, in Making Connections: Essays in French Culture and Society in Honour of Philip Thody Ed. J. Dolamore. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 183–196.

Afterword The Gentle Art of Radio Broadcasting Daniela Caselli The University of Manchester

After writing about phonographic recording laboratories in 1918, amateur wireless in 1919 and ‘what the radio telephone service means’ in 1922, Austin C. Lescarboura, regular contributor to Scientific American, lets his readers into the broadcasting studio: If it is your first time at radio-phone broadcasting, you will experience all sorts of queer sensations; for this, in truth, is no ordinary task. The studio in which you are to speak is small and home-like enough, and there are just a few persons present. There is barely room for an excuse to be shy. Yet it is the very weirdness of the whole business that makes you uneasy – the thought of speaking through a little hole in a cylinder hanging in front of you, to an audience that mounts up into the hundreds of thousands. (Lescarboura 1922: 376)1

The intimacy of the second person reproduces the ‘queer sensations’ that the radio as a new medium is able to generate. The reader is no longer the listener who a mere three months earlier was instructed in ‘Radio for Everybody’: ‘with the apparatus properly tuned, one station may be heard; then, by slightly altering the tuning, another station will be heard, and so on.’2 Now, Lescarboura astutely sees aural identification as one of the medium’s most promising features and translates it into a ‘scenery’. Here, the reader/listener has become the artist facing the disquieting opposition between the small and homely setting and the awareness that your invisible audience numbers hundreds of thousands. Lescarboura lucidly notes the imperfections of this ‘new art’, barely one year old at the time of his writing, and concomitantly declares himself certain of ‘the permanency of radio-phone broadcasting’ (Lescarboura 1922: 377). Strikingly, he is also very precise in identifying what remain today main areas of interest in thinking about broadcasting in the modernist era: the experimentalism that goes with a new art; the interplay of intimate dialogue and mass communication; and the constraining technological complexity of this young and ‘temperamental’

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medium destined to unquestionable stardom – a complexity able to create havoc and generate juicy anecdotes about orchestras playing while vacuum tubes blow out and announcers instructing outraged prima donnas ‘to stand by for three minutes to hear distress calls’.3 The very act of reading a popular scientific publication during the years immediately preceding and following the advent of radio broadcasting in both Britain and the USA brings home the ‘weird’ quality of a new medium in its nascent stage, dramatizing history’s simultaneous familiarity and strangeness. Broadcasting the Modernist Era attempts to stage both the encounter between the modernist artist and radio as new medium and the encounter between the literary critic and historian confronted with the broadcasting archives. The queer coexistence of the homely and the impersonal is an experience both intimate and estranging, and one that is central to E. M. Forster’s imagining – and charming – his audience, while at times almost cheekily playing with it (Fifield). The dialectic between intimacy and crowd is essential to Yeats’s spatial organization of his imaginary ‘poet’s pub’ and ‘poet’s parlour’ (Armstrong) and to the wider interplay between religious familiarity and state religion, especially when we look at the so-called Reith era at the BBC with its formal, pseudo-Arnoldian vision of the sacralization of culture (Addyman).4 Via the contributions of both Tonning and Goody we can also recuperate the sense of how religion was very much part of a modernist era which we might have become used to seeing as severed from theological preoccupations. Goody’s analysis is exemplary in foregrounding the democratic impulses behind Dorothy L. Sayers’s impersonation of divinity through the blind medium of radio in The Man Born to Be King (1941), while not papering over the way in which the script attributes anti-Semitic connotations to Matthew’s Cockney accent. Tonning’s piece on David Jones shows how national and religious preoccupations interact via radio and poetry, while Matthews’ emphasis on Eliot’s complex self-dramatization on the radio via sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry brings us back to the metadramatic strategies employed by both Yeats and Forster. The published and unpublished literary texts discussed in this volume engage with how ‘sound waves, it appears, have a way of playing numerous and inexplicable tricks at almost any time, upsetting the calculations of even experts’ (Lescarboura 1918: 164). Feldman’s materialist discussion of crackling sounds on Italian radio assesses their repercussions on the reception of Pound’s broadcasts; Mead’s analysis of Orwell’s investment in the poetic possibilities of radio technology shows the intimate relation between broadcasting practices (such as pre-scripted discussions) and politics; however, Fordham’s reading

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of Finnegans Wake focuses on different kinds of waves, looking at how Joyce does not so much take sides in the debate for and against television as a new medium, but engages instead ‘with its technical aspects’, exploring inventively its ‘metaphorical dimensions’. This is a modernist era whose relationship towards modernity refines theories of the great divide while showing remarkable enthusiasm towards technology: the awe inspired by the invisible listening masses is scientific rather than mystical. In addition to being a regular contributor to Scientific American, Lescarboura was a member of the ‘Abrams Investigations Committee’, set up by the magazine to demonstrate the bogusness of Dr Albert Abrams’s ‘so-called electronic reactions technique of diagnosis and treatment and indirectly of the numerous electronic, radio, radiant energy and similar pseudo-scientific diagnostic procedures and cures’ (Lescarboura 1924: 158–160). In 1923, he also took part in another Committee whose main aim was to demonstrate how séances were simply money-making enterprises whose workings could be nicely illustrated through scientific diagrams (Bird 1923: 14). Rather than partaking in late nineteenth-century mysteriously esoteric discourses, radio’s uncanny familiarity works according to strict scientific explanations: the tricks played by these air waves are at the opposite end of the spectrum to those taking place in the séance. Money matters of course accompany this lack of mystery (which is not, however, a lack of awe). As a mass medium, radio poses from its inception the problem of its economic survival. Lescarboura focuses mostly on the features that in his eyes guarantee the economic survival of a medium whose popularity shows great potential and yet remains ‘anomalous’ from ‘a business point of view’: there are over one-hundred stations providing speeches, news, music and so on for hundreds of thousands of listeners, yet deriving no direct financial returns. Granted, these same organizations are for the large part engaged in the manufacture of radio apparatus are reaping an astounding harvest of business,[sic] the fact remains that there are many other radio manufacturers harvesting just as rich a crop without spending a single cent or devoting a single moment to the sowing of that crop. It is highly unfair, to be sure. (Lescarboura 1922a: 377)5

Attention is given throughout this volume to the fees paid to the authors, who sometimes are ambivalent about radio as a source of income and a way of being attributed a market value (Koppen). Conversely, the book also looks at the BBC as an institution debating the relationship between financial survival and public

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good, showing how such a dilemma is still at the core of the institution. Radio lives in the space between World War I, which was essential to the development of the wireless (especially on the vacuum tube and the ‘buried’ antenna) (Lescarboura 1919: 689), and World War II, during which radio technology was not only a military instrument but also a tool of political propaganda. By focusing on Britain in particular and Europe more generally (especially Italy and France, see Ragnedda, Moody, Feldman) Broadcasting in the Modernist Era places politics at the centre of the study of broadcasting, analysing political concerns ranging from anarchism to propaganda, from taste to the common good. Proposing a radically revised chronology of Pound’s Italian broadcasts, Feldman sees radio as central to a discussion of modernism and fascism; Koppen argues that Virginia Woolf ’s reflections on her broadcasts shed light on the often-debated political nature of her writing; and Moody shows how both Sartre and de Beauvoir were keenly aware of the political and economic complications of their radio programme La tribune des temps modernes. Broadcasting in the Modernist Era wants to be attentive to the historical materiality of literary and technological transaction while also asking ‘What makes radio communication so fascinating?’ Perhaps, with Scientific American, we can still say that the answer may be found in its ‘super-eaves-dropping features’ (Lescarboura 1919: 688).

Notes 1 See also Lescarboura and Goldsmith (1930). 2 ‘Only a short twelve months ago the hobby of radio was indulged by boys and young men, with occasionally a full-grown man, who, perhaps, were more fascinated by the technicalities of the radio art than by the actual fact of communication through space. [ … ] Then came the radio service, not as an occasional thing to startle the radio amateurs already engaged in sending and listening to the dot-dash-dot messages, but as a regular established practice’ (Lescarboura 1922b: 166–168 and 220). 3 ‘Early in the history of radio-phone broadcasting, all stations were required to “stand by” or remain inactive for a period of three minutes, every fifteen minutes, in order to listen for di stress signals from ships at sea’ (Lescarboura 1922a: 377). 4 For a debate on this issue, see Avery (2006: 11–31). See also Steven Matthews’ revision of that debate in the light of Eliot’s broadcasts in this volume. 5 Lescarboura’s exploration of broadcasting as a business is continued elsewhere. See Lescarboura (1922c, 8–9 and 70–71).

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Works cited Avery, Todd. (2006). Radio Modernism. Burlington: Ashgate. Bird, J. Malcolm (1923). ‘Our First Test Seances’, Scientific American, 129.1 (July), p. 14. Lescarboura, Austin C. (1918). ‘At the Other End of the Phonograph: How Science and Humour Blend in the Work of the Phonographic Recording Laboratory’, Scientific American, 119.9 (31 August), p. 164 and p. 178, p. 164. ——— (1919). ‘Amateurs in Name Only: A Story of What the War Has Done for the Cause of Amateur Wireless’, Scientific American, 120.26 (28 June), pp. 688–711. ——— (1922a). ‘The Gentle Art of Radio Broadcasting: With the Speakers and Artists Who Are Heard but Not Seen Over the Radio-phone’, Scientific American, 126.6 (June), pp. 376–377. ——— (1922b). ‘Radio for Everybody: What the Radio Telephone Service Means and How It Can Be Applied in the Home and Business’, Scientific American, 126.3 (March), pp. 166–168 and p. 220. ——— (1922c). ‘The Business of Broadcasting: A Survey of the Present Radio-Phone Broadcasting Situation and a Speculation as to Its Future’, Scientific American, 127.1 (July), pp. 8–9 and pp. 70–71. ——— (1923). ‘Our First Test Seances’, Scientific American, 129.1 (July), p. 14. ——— (1924). ‘Our Abrams Verdict’, Scientific American, 131.3 (September), pp. 158–160. ——— and Goldsmith, Alfred N. (1930). This Thing Called Broadcasting. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Index Note: Locators followed by the letter ‘n’ refer to notes. Locators are in italics refer to chapter discussions. Abbey Theatre 23, 24, 26 Abram, Albert 268 ‘Abrams Investigation Committee’ 268 Acerbo Law 195 Acquarone, Alberto 196 Action 226 Addyman, David 13–14, 132n. 13, 267 Adelphi, The 169, 174, 183, 191n. 2 Adorno, Theodor 7, 197, 35n. 6 Aestheticist Movement 31, 35n. 12 Age of Princes 129 Agro Pontino 203 Ahmed, Ali 179 Aldridge, M. 39 Alfieri, Dino 198, 204 Algren, Nelson 247 Alldrit, Keith 131n. 2, 132n. 8 Amendola, Giovanni 195, 197 ‘American Imperialist’ 228, 229, 241n. 33, 241n. 35 Amphitryon 103 Amprim, Frank L. 237, 242n. 54 Anand, Mulk Raj 171, 179, 181, 192n. 15 The Sword and the Sickle 181 Untouchable 181 Anderson, Hans Christian 189 ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ 189 Andiopoulos, S. 44 Antigone, The 146 Armand, Louis 47 Armstrong, Charles 10, 183, 267 Armstrong, Louis 14, 205, 206 Armstrong, Martin 189, 190 Arnheim, Rudolf 4, 54, 82, 92n. 2, 138, 141 ‘In Praise of Blindness’ 92n. 2 Radio 4, 141 Arnold, Matthew 68–9, 76n. 8, 98–102, 104, 106, 107, 146, 186, 202, 267

Arnold, Vincent 226, 230, 234 Arrizabalaga, Ramon 237 Aston, Winifred 80 Astor, David 188 ‘Atheling, William’ 227 Atheneaum, The 160 Attlee, Clement 156 Auden, W.H. 184 ‘September 1 1939’ 184 Avanti 198 Avery, Todd 6, 8, 31, 35n. 11, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107, 269n. 4 Baird, John Logie 39, 41, 43, 49 ‘Bairnsfather, Bruce’ 227, 228 Balbo, Italo 204 Baldoli, C. 197 Barabbas 89, 93n. 10 Barber, Marjorie 87 Barnes, George 23, 35n. 1, 132, 138, 144 Barnouw, Erik 5 A History of Broadcasting in the United States 5 Barral, Jean 216, 240n. 7 La Suprématie universelle des juifs et la Société des nations 216 Barrington, Brendan 8 Baruch the Zealot 89, 236 Baxendale, John 164 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 2, 8, 11–12, 24, 39, 79, 81, 87, 119, 123, 130, 148, 161, 169, 202 ‘BBC Audience Estimates: Italy’ 241n. 15 BBC Belfast 24 BBC Department of the Spoken Word 114 BBC Drama Department 82 BBC Eastern Service 98, 109 BBC Empire Service 170

272 BBC Forces Programme 156 BBC Home Service 73, 75n. 2 BBC India Service 13, 63, 170, 175, 181, 188 BBC Monitoring Station 219 BBC National Programme 24, 144 BBC Overseas Service 75n. 2 BBC Religious Broadcasting 79, 84 BBC Schools Programme 75n. 2 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts 219 BBC Third Programme 12, 72, 73, 98, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 123, 130, 131, 132n. 3, 132n. 11, 183 BBC Welsh Home Service 113, 132n. 4 BBC Welsh Programmes 132n. 4 BBC Welsh Regional Service 12 BBC West Region 113 BBC Written Archive Centre 9, 11, 113, 139, 155, 239 Beaverbrook, Lord 165 Beckett, Samuel vii 9, 126 Beckett, Thomas á 87 Beer, Gillian 58 Belfast News-Letter 35n. 5 Bell, Quentin 138 Benjamin, Walter 3, 8, 140, 142, 151 Bentley, E.C. 92n. 4 Bergmeier, Horst 5, 197, 209n. 1 Berkeley, Anthony 92n. 4 Berlin Olympics 40 Berman, Marshall 6 All That is Solid Melts in the Air: The Experience of Modernity 6 Bermann, Matvei 236 Berners Hotel 79 Bertaglio, Italo 208 Bevan, Aneurin 188 Bible, The 79, 83, 84, 106, 234 Biddle, Francis 221 Beinecke Library 217, 222, 224, 230, 233, 236, 239 ‘Billings, Langdon’ 227, 228, 241n. 34 ‘Bingham, Julian’ 227, 228 Bird, Malcolm J. 268 ‘Blimp, Colonel’ 228 Bloom, Emily C. 28, 30 Bloomsbury Group 8, 31, 139 Blum, Léon 234, 260 Blunden, Edmund 171, 184

Index Bokhari, Zulfiqar 63, 175, 176, 177, 178, 191n. 11 Bollingen foundation 126 Bonacci, Filippo 199 Bonafé, Alain 245, 247, 249, 251, 259, 263n. 2 Bonnafé, Lucien 263n. 2 Bontempelli, Massimo 207 Book Crisis, The 160, 161 Bose, Subhas Chandra 183 Bowen, Elizabeth 4, 8 Bowker, Gordon 191n. 4 Bowra, Maurice 32, 35n. 13 ‘Braccioforte, Luigi’ 14, 206 Brander, Lawrence 188 Brazabon, James 93n. 7 Brecht, Benjamin 3, 140, 151 Briggs, Asa 5, 128 History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom 5 British Library 93n. 9, 93n. 12 British Union of Fascists (BUF) 226 Broadcasting Modernism 1, 8, 9 Broadcasting Organisation in Italy’ 240–1 Brummell, Beau 139 Brzezinksi, Zbigniew 195 Buckingham, Bob 65–6 Buellt Wood 128 Bullett, Gerard 68 Bullit, W.C. 236 ‘Buonomo, Beniamino’ 14, 206 Burger, Margaret A. 92n. 4 Burns, R.W. 39 Burton, Richard 132n. 3 Byrne, David 48 Byron, Lord 171, 181 ‘The Isles of Greece’ 171, 181, 184 Caliban 104 Cambridge 180, 181 Campbell, Joseph 47 Campbell, Timothy 1, 9 Cannistraro, Philip V. 5, 195, 198, 199, 204, 208 Cantuccio dei bambini 204 Carlyle, Thomas 179 Carey, John 6 Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939, 6

Index Carpenter, Humphrey 121, 132n. 5, 133n. 16, 216, 227, 240n. 8, 241n. 31 Cary, Roger 67 Caselli, Daniela 16 Caughie, Pamela 138 Chabod, F. 196 Chamberlain, Neville 174 Chapman, Rosemary 5 Charge of the Light Brigade 46 Chaucer, Geoffrey 32 Chiarella Theater 205 Children’s Hour 82, 84, 88, 90 Chiodelli, Raul 204 Christ, Jesus 11, 83–7, 89, 92 Christian modernism 12 Christian, The 92n. 1 Christianity 107 Christie, Agatha 92n. 4 Church of England Newsletter 92n. 1 Churchill, Winston 158, 144, 164, 165, 174, 217, 235 ‘We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches’ 164 Ciano, Constanzo 198, 200, 202 Ciano, Galeazzo 198 Civil List 114 Clark, C. 49 Cleveland, Grover 229 Cleverdon, Douglas 113, 114, 115, 123, 125, 126, 132n. 3, 132n. 10, 132n. 11 ‘David Jones and Broadcasting’ 132n. 3 Clinton, Bill 51 Coburn, Charles 189 Cocteau, Jean 120 Cohen, Debra Rae 3, 8, 9 Cohn, Leonie 116, 119, 121, 132n. 10 Cold War 9 Cole, Margaret 149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 131n. 1 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ 131n. 1 Communism 250, 251, 259–60 ‘Communisme et anticommunisme’ 263n. 5 Communist, The 149 Con stile 206 Confucius 214–15, 233

273

Congress Working Committee 173 Connor, Steven 9, 82 Conover, Anne 224–5 Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 6 Coronation 129, 130 Corrigan, Robert 222 ‘Cover to Cover’ 40 Coyle, Michael 3, 8, 81, 98–100, 106–7, 109 Crehan, Fr 128 Crick, Bernard 191n. 4 Crimean War 45, 119 Crisell, Andrew 5 Introductory History of British Broadcasting 5 Croce, Bernadetto 197 Crofts, Freeman Wills 92n. 4 Cromwell, Oliver 31 Crook, Tim 6 Cross of Refuge 129 Cuddy-Keane, Melba 138, 139, 141, 142 Cullingford 157, 162 Curie, Marie 75n. 6 Curran, Terri 89 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 207 ‘Daily Broadcast Reports’ 225–6 Daily Herald 79 Daily Mail 79 Daily News 39 Dakin, Marjorie 191n. 5 Dale, Alzina Stone 89 Dane, Clemence 80, 92n. 4 Darian-Smith, K. 39 Davidson, John 98, 110 Davison, Edward 165 Davison, Peter 175, 178, 191n. 4, 191n. 5, 191n. 12, 191n. 13 De Beauvoir, Simone 15, 245, 247–52, 254–5, 258, 263n. 2, 263n. 3, 263n. 4 Force of Circumstance 249 De Felice, Renzo 196 De Gaulle, Charles 246, 247, 259 De Grazia, Victoria 197 De Rachewiltz, Mary 219, 223, 240n. 10, 241n. 21 ‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’ 240n. 10, 241n. 21

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Decadent Movement 31, 35n. 12 ‘Del Bene, Giovanni’ 227, 228, 231 Dempsey-Carpenter boxing match 199 Department of Justice 15, 221–2 Derrida, Jacques 27, 85–6 ‘Dias, B.H.’ 227 Di Marzo, Cornelio 232, 242n. 39 Dietrich, Otto 236 Ditchling 127 Donne, John 12, 109 Doob, Leonard W. 218, 221–3, 231 Ezra Pound Speaking 7, 231 ‘Dooley, Mr.’ 227 Donovan, William 234 Dover, Cedric 179 Doyle, Arthur Conan 47 ‘The Disintegration Machine’ 48–9 ‘Challenger’ stories 48 Sherlock Holmes stories 48 Dowden, Edward, fn 15, 35 Downing, Crystal 81 Dowson, Edward 32, 33 Dowson, Ernest 110 Drama Scripts Department 72 Dryden, John 12, 109 Dunkirk evacuation 164–5 Eagleton, Terry 186 Easter Rising 31 Eck, Hélène 246, 247, 253 Edward I 128 EIAR (Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche) 196, 204, 205, 214, 216–17, 220, 223, 225, 228, 232, 234, 237 Eliot, T.S. 8, 12, 15, 40, 81, 87, 93n. 5, 97–110, 139, 160, 170, 185–6, 267, 269n. 4 ‘A Game of Chess’ 102 Ash-Wednesday 108–10 ‘Building up a Christian World’ 105–6 Burnt Norton 108 ‘Christianity and Communism’ 104, 106 ‘Church, Community and State’ 100 Four Quartets 108, 110 Little Gidding 103, 110 Murder in the Cathedral 40, 81, 87, 103–4 ‘No Easy Recipes’ 105

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture 101–2 ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ 102–3, 108 Sweeney Agonistes 186 ‘The Approach to James Joyce’ 108 The Cocktail Party 103 The Confidential Clerk 103 The Family Reunion 103 ‘The Fire Sermon’ 97 The Idea of a Christian Society 100 ‘The Modern Dilemma’ 104–6 ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’ 185 ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ 101, 108 ‘The Unity of European Culture’ 101–2, 105–6 ‘The Voice of his Time. On Tennyson’s In Memoriam’ 108 The Waste Land 97, 100, 104–5, 110 ‘The Writer as Artist’ 108 ‘What is the Use?’ 105 Elizabeth II 113, 127 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 179 Empson, William 171, 184–5, 187, 191n. 4 Engelberg, E. 36n. 17 English Coronation Rite 128 ‘English Broadcast Memo’ 241n. 15 Epoch and Artist 114 Erikson, Erik 192n. 14 ERR (Ente Radio Rurale) 201, 202, 203, 204 Euripides 185 Evans, J. 39 Evans, Elwyn 115, 123–4 Eve of St. Agnes, The 40 Evening Standard 121, 123 Evola, Julius 226 ‘Judaism Against Western Civilisation’ 226 Existentialism 260 Fang, I. 40 Fascism 149, 169–70, 173–6, 197–8 Fascist Italy 196, 209 Fascist Confederation of Industrial Workers 237 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 15, 213, 215, 222, 232, 237, 241n. 35 FCC (Federal Communications Commission) 221, 222 Feder, Gottfried 216

Index Feldman, Matthew 3, 14–5, 267, 269 Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda 1935-1945, 15 ‘The Pound Case in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview’ 241n. 18 Ferguson, Allen 144 Ferruzzi, Stefano 205 Fifield, Peter 11, 267 Fifth Columnists 161 Fischer, Louis 192n. 14 Fisher, Margaret 3, 8, 207, 208 Fleay, C. 175 Flory, John 179–80 Folgore, Luciano 207 Fordham, Finn 3, 4, 10, 11, 267 ‘Foreign Gen/European Intelligence Papers/Surveys of Broadcasting Organisations 1942-1943’ 241n. 14 ‘Foreign Language Broadcasts from Italy’ 240n. 14 Foreign Office 72 Forster, E.M. 1, 3, 8, 11, 57–76, 170, 187, 189, 190, 267 A Passage to India 57 A Room With a View 64 Arctic Summer 57 ‘Conversation in the Train’ 64–6 ‘Efficiency and Liberty’ 66–7 ‘Entrance to an Unwritten Novel” 57 ‘Fifth Anniversary Talk’ 68, 75n. 4 Howard’s End 74 ‘New Year’s Greeting’ 70 ‘Railway Bridges’ 57, 74n. 1 ‘Some Books’ 61, 68–9 ‘The Curate’s Friend’ 73 ‘The Development of Criticism: Matthew Arnold’ 76n. 8 ‘The Great Frost’ 60 ‘The Machine Stops’ 59, 72, 76n. 9 ‘Unwillingly to School: Matthew Arnold’ 76n. 8 ‘We Speak to India’ 63–4 ‘What I Believe’ 70 Foster, Roy 31, 35n. 10 France, Anatole 189 ‘Crainquebille’ 189 Fraser, G. S. 184 ‘A Letter to Ann Ridler’ 184

Freud, Sigmund 147 Group Psychology 146 Friedlander, Benjamin 215, 223, 231, 243n. 57 ‘Radio Broadcasts’ 231 Friedrich, Carl 195 ‘From Columbus to De Pinedo’ 204 Frow, J. 28 Futurist Radio Manifesto 3 Futurism 9, 206–7, 208, 209n. 2 Fyvel, Tosco 187–8, 190, 191n. 7 Gale, Maggie Barbara 161 Galster, Ingrid 250 Gandhi, Mohandas 171, 180, 181 Gay, Peter 2 Gentile, Emilio 196 Gentile, Giovanni 202 George VIII 40 Gielgud, Lewis 93n. 12 Gielgud, Val 82, 85 Gilfallan, Daniel 5 Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio 5 Gill, Eric 120, 127 Giolitti government 199 Gleichschaltung 196 Goedel, Carl 241n. 19 Gloucester, Duke of 137 Goldman, Henry 236 Goebbels 196, 197, 198 Goedel, Carl 222–3 Gombrich, E.H. 219–20, 240n. 13 ‘Some Axioms, Musings, and Hints on Hearing’ 240n. 13 Goodman, Benny 14, 206 Goody, Alex 11, 267 Gordon, General 35n. 15 Gordon, Zita 93n. 12 Gospels 84, 85, 86, 90, 93n. 10 Graf Spree 147 Gramsci, Antonio 197 Great War 9, 199 Greatcoat, Dai 113 Greek War of Independence 171 Greenhalgh, Mollie 73 Greenwood, Arthur 156 Gregson, R. E. 67 Greil, Arthur L. 196

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Index

Griffin, Roger 132n. 15, 196, 206 Modernism and Fascism 196 Grisewood, Harman 12, 68, 73, 114, 116, 119, 120, 121, 126–7, 130, 132n. 11, 133n. 16 One Thing at a Time 121–2 Broadcasting and Society: Comments from a Christian Standpoint 126–7 ‘Society’s Responsibility for Broadcasting’ 127 Guarino, Carmine 208 Tum tum ninna nanna 208 Guggenheim, Solomon 236 Haldane, J.B.S. 170 Halliday, Sam 6 Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts 6 Haney, J. 88 Hanson Neil 162–5, 167n. 1 Harker, Ben 3, 151 Harman, R.B. 92n. 4 Harper’s Magazine, 167n. 5 Harrison, Lillian 91 Harrow 181 Hawkes, Nicholas 164, 167n. 2 Hawkins, Desmond 172, 175, 176 Hawthornden Prize 114 Hayman, David 42 Hayter, William 120 Healy, Maurice 156 Heath, Jeffrey 3, 8, 74n. 1 The Creator as Critic 8 Heilbron, Carolyn 93n. 7 Heller, Erich 115 Henderson, Archie 226–7 “I cease not to yowl!” Reannotated 241n. 30 ‘Luchini, Alberto’ 241n. 30 Hepburn, Allen 4, 8 Herbert, A.P. 167n. 2 Hercules Furens 103 Hercules 103 Herf, Jeffrey 235 Herman, Albert 49 Hewitt, Nicholas 5 Popular Culture and Mass Communication in Twentieth-C France 5

Heymann, C. David 217–18, 222, 227, 232, 234, 241n. 31 The Last Rower 222, 227 High Commission for Radio Inspectorate 201 Hilmes, Michele 5 Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952, 5 Hitler, Adolf 15, 75n. 5, 90, 146, 163, 188, 198, 214–15, 234, 247 Mein Kampf 15 ‘Propaganda and Organisation’ 15 Hitler-Jugend 58 Hogarth Press 13, 140, 143, 149 Holden, Inez 189 Holme, Christopher 113, 116, 119 Holy Trinity 84 Home Guard 175 Hoover, J. Edgar 242n. 54 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 118, 120 Hore-Belisha, Leslie 239 Horizon 183 Horkheimer, Max 197 ‘Hot Club Circle’ 205 ‘Hot Jazz Club’ 205 House of Commons 164 Houses of Parliament 90 Howes, Marjorie 26, 35n. 7 Htin Aung, Maung 180, 181 Hughes, Linda K. 3, 8, 58 Hurd, Sir Percy 90 Huxley, Aldous 42, 53 Brave New World 53 Huxley, Julian 40 Il grammofono della verità 207 Il Meridiano di Roma 232 Imagism 8, 121 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 169, 173 Indian National Congress 171, 173, 181 Inns of Court 181 Interlandi, Telesio 224 ‘In the Mood’ 206 Ironside, Robin 114 Iscariot, Judas 87, 89 Isham, Virginia 137 Isola, Gianni 5 James, A. Lloyd 144 Japanese Noh Theatre 26

Index Jenkin, May 82 Johnson, Lionel 32, 35n. 2 Jones, David 113–33, 267 Epoch and Artist 114 In Parenthesis 113, 114, 115, 123 Mabinog’s Liturgy 123 Preface to In Parenthesis 132n. 10 Redriff 123 The Anathameta 114, 123, 125 The Dying Gaul 114 ‘The Fatigue’ 115 The Lady of the Pool 123 ‘Wales and the Crown’ 113, 115, 117, 129 Journal of Radio and Audio Media 6 Joyce, James 4, 10–11, 39–55, 108–9, 118, 121, 268 Finnegans Wake, 10, 39–55, 268 ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’ 40 ‘Work in Progress’ notebook 11 Joyce, William (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) 234 Juno 103 Kaganovich, Lazar 236 Kahn, Douglas 7 Wireless Imagination 7 Kallin, Anna 113, 114, 115, 130, 132n. 5, 132n. 11, 133n. 17, 197, 205 Keane, George 131 The Symbol of Piers 131 Kern, Stephen 6 The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, 6 Kerr, Douglas 8, 175, 178, 181–2, 187, 191n. 8 Kittler, Friedrich 6, 48 Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 6 Kittross, John M. 5 Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting 5 Knox, Father Ronald 92n. 4 Knox, Macgregor 196 Knox, Frank 233 Kogan, N. 196 Koon, Tracy H. 207 Kuhn, Raymond 246, 247, 253 Koppen, Randi 4, 13, 268

277

L’angolo dei bambini 204 ‘La crise du socialisme’ 263n. 5 L’ora dell’agricole 202, 203 Labour Party 143 La Tribune de Paris 245, 257, 259 La Tribune des journalistes parlementaires 247, 257, 259 La tribune des temps modernes 15, 245–63, 263n. 4 Lago, Mary 3, 8, 58, 74n. 1, 75n. 2 Langland, William 130–1 ‘Piers Plowman’ 130–1 Lawrence, T.E. 184 Revolt in the Desert 184 Le Progres Civique 173 Le tristezze di San Luigi 206 Leavis, F.R. 143, 177 LeMahieu, D.L. 6 A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars 6 Léon, Paul 52 Lescarboura, Austin C. 266–9, 269n. 1, 269n. 2, 269n. 5 ‘Radio for Everybody’ 266 Les Temps Modernes 15, 249, 250, 252–3, 254, 269 Levy, William 221 Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound 221 Lewis, C. S. 61 The Problem of Pain 61 The Screwtape Letters 61 Lewis, Ethan 93n. 7 Lewis, Wyndham 42–3, 118, 120 Time and Western Man 43 Lewty, Jane 3, 8, 9, 138 Light, Alison 148 Listener Research Department 156 Listener, The 10, 12, 24, 75n. 4, 100, 104–6, 117, 119, 120, 130, 139, 144, 177, 191n. 9 Llywelyn 128, 129 Lord Chamberlain’s Office 84–5, 87, 92 ‘Lord Haw Haw’ 156 Lord Linlithgow 173 Lord’s Day Observance Society 79, 87, 92, 92n. 1

278

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Lotz, Rainer E. 5, 197, 209n. 1 Hitler’s Airwaves 5 Low, A.M. 39, 53 Low, D.A. 93n. 6 Luchini, Alberto 226–7, 241n. 30 ‘The Protocols of Zion’ 226, 235, 242n. 48 Gli ebrei hanno voluto la guerra 227 Lugosi, Bela 49 Luker, N. G. 67 Luzzato, Sergio 197 Lycée François 249 Lyttelton, Adrian 196 Macauley, Thomas 67 MacCarthy, Desmond 139 MacNeice, Louis 33 Magdalen, Mary 91 Maier, Hans 196 Maisky, Ivan 236 Makeham, Eliot 84 Malraux, André 132n. 11 ‘The Voices of Silence’ 132n. 11 Manchester Guardian 93n. 11 Mann, Thomas 8 Listen, Germany! Twenty-five Radio Messages to the German People Over the BBC 8 Manna dal cielo 206 Marconi Company 195, 199–200 Marconi, B. 199 Marconi, Guglielmo 198 Marescalchi, Arturo 202 Marinetti, Filippo 206–7, 208, 209 ‘Manifesto of Radio’ 208 ‘The Bombardment of Adrianopoly’ 208 ‘Manifesto of Radio, aka ‘La Radia: The Futurist Manifesto’ Maritain, Jacques 120 Martin, Herbert Henry 87 Martin, Kingsley 188 Mascagni, Pietro 205 Masefield, John 24 Masnata, Pino 206, 207, 208 La bambina ammalata 208 ‘La Radia’ 207 Tum tum ninna nanna 208 Matheson, Hilda 4, 139 Matteotti, Giacomo 197

Matthew, St. 83–4 Matthews, Steven 12, 100, 103 Maud, Ralph 8 Maugham, Somerset 40 ‘Mazda, Piero’ 227 McAllister, Gilbert 160 McCormack, W.J., 35n. 10 McCulluch, Derek 82, 88, 90 McGregor, Robert 93n. 7 McKechnie, James 91 McLuhan, Marshall 47, 51, 52 Meacham, Harry 225 Mead, Henry 13, 267 Mechlis, Lev 236 Mehlman, Jeffrey 8 Mendel, Gregor 234 Mendelssohn, Felix 204 Menon, Narayana 179 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15, 245, 257, 260, 261, 263n. 5 Meyers, Jeffrey 191n. 4 Milton, John 69, 102, 108 Areopagitica 69 Ministry for Popular Culture (Minculpop) 14, 198, 205, 223–4, 225, 233, 237, 238 Ministry for Press and Propaganda 198 Ministry of Communication 200, 208 Ministry of Information 158 MLA (Modern Languages Association) 7 Modernism/Modernity 8 Molotov, Vyacheslav 174 ‘Monitoring Services Memos: Misc’ 240n. 13, 241n. 15 Monteleone, F. 199, 208 Moody, Alys 15, 269 Mooney, Rita 23 Moran, M. 35n. 12 Morgan, Philip 196 Morgenthau, Hans 236 Morin, Emilie, ‘Yeats and the Arts’ 35n. 4 Morris, Adelaide 7 Sound States 7 Morris, John 71–2, 73 Morris, William 30 Morse, Daniel 75n. 3 Moscow Show Trials 52, 172 Moss, Gilbert 189 Muhlberger, Detlef 198 Muir, Edwin 98

Index Mussolini, Benito 5, 14, 146, 195–207, 214–15, 232 Mystery of Faith, The 119 Nadel, Ira B. 223, 231 Nash, Paul 40 Nasta, Susheila 192n. 15 National Archives 15 National Book Council 40 ‘National Committee for the Defence of Books’ 160 National Gallery 70 National Library of Wales 117 NBC (National Broadcasting Company) 2 Nehru, Jawaharlal 171, 181 Neulander, Joelle 5 Programming National Identity: The Culture of Radio in 1930s France 5 New Age, The 227 New Chronicle of Christian Education 79 ‘New Elizabethan Age’ 130 New Saxon Pamphlet 186 News Chronicle, The 162–3, 164–5, 167n. 5 New Statesman and Nation, The 149 New Testament 80, 84, 85, 87 Newby, P. H. 67 Newcastle Journal 79 New Fabian Research Bureau 149 New York Times 240n. 6 Nicholas, Sian 155–6, 157, 158, 160 The Echo of War 155 Nicholls, Basil, E. 79, 90 Nicholson, Ben 118, 120 Nicholson, Harold 139, 142 Nine o’clock News 156 1935 Government of India Act 174 1938 Racial Laws 206 Non-Aggression Pact 174 Nord, P.G. 263n. 1 Norman, Charles 222, 240n. 10 ‘Ezra Pound and the Italian Ministry for Popular Culture’ 222 Norris, Christopher 85–6 Observer, The 188 O’Hanlan, John 47, 55n. 1 Oddone, Elisabetta 204 ‘Office of Enlightenment and Speaker Information Materials’ 236 Oggi e domain 208

279

Ogilvie, F.W. 84 Operation Dynamo 164 Organski, A.F.K. 196 Orwell, Eileen 191n. 5 Orwell, George 1, 7, 8, 13, 42, 53, 98, 169–92, 267 A Clergyman’s Daughter 173 ‘A Story by Five Authors’ 189–90 Animal Farm 189 ‘As I Please’ 191n. 10 ‘British Rations and the Submarine War’ 178 Burmese Days 169, 173, 178 Down and Out in Paris and London 173 Homage to Catalonia 169, 173, 191n. 2 ‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma’ 173 Keep the Aspidistra Flying 177, 189 ‘Literary Criticism’ 176 ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’ 176–7, 191n. 9 ‘Money and Guns’ 178 ‘My Country Right or Left’ 174, 177 ‘New Words’ 189 Nineteen Eighty-Four 53, 172, 176, 189, 190 ‘Paper is Precious’ 178 ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ 177, 185, 190 ‘Politics and the English Language’ 189 ‘Shooting an Elephant’ 180 Talking to India 178, 182, 186 ‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’ 176, 191n. 9 ‘The Hanging’ 180 The Lion and the Unicorn 13, 174, 175, 176, 177, 182 ‘The Meaning of a Poem’ 176, 177, 191n. 9 ‘The Meaning of Sabotage’ 178 ‘The Meaning of Scorched Earth’ 178 ‘The Proletarian Writer/Literature’ 172, 176, 191n. 9 The Road to Wigan Pier 173 ‘Tolstoy and Shakespeare’ 176, 191n. 9 Voice 170–2, 177, 182–5, 186, 191n. 3 ‘What’s Wrong with the Modern Short Story’ 176, 191n. 9

280

Index

‘Why I Joined the I.L.P.’ 191n. 6 ‘Writer in the Witness Box’ 175, 191n. 9 Ottieri, Alesandra 208, 209 Ovid 102 OVRA (Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo) 195 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, The 24 OED (Oxford English Dictionary) 41, 192n. 16 Paideuma 242n. 38 Palmieri, M. 196 Paresce, Gabriele 223–5, 241n. 20 Partisan Review, The 169 Paterson, Adrian 35n. 9 Pavolini, Alessandro 224, 233 PCF (Parti communiste français) 260 Pellicano, Piero 226 ‘The Jewish International’ 226 Pellizzi, Camilli 225, 241n. 26, 241n. 27 ‘Pennies from Heaven’ 206 Percy, Sandra 93n. 6 Pétain, Phillippe 216, 240n. 6 Peters, John Durham 2, 7 Speaking Into the Air 7 Picasso, Pablo 118, 120 Piccadilly Theatre 87 Pilate, Pontius 89 Piper, John 40 Pirandello 32, 40, 207, 36n. 16 The Man with the Flower in his Mouth 40 Planquette, Robert 142 PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista) 195–201 Political Quarterly, The 148 Pontalis, Jean-Bernard 245, 250, 259, 263n. 5 Popeye 51 Por, Odon 238 Italy’s Policy of Social Economics 1939/1940, 238 Postgate, Raymond 140, 141, 149–51 How to Make a Revolution 149 ‘Radio, Press and Publishing’ 150 ‘The Broadcasting System of the Soviet Union’ 149 What to Do With the B.B.C. 140, 149–51 Pouillon, Jean 245, 250 POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) 169, 173, 191n. 2

Pound, Ezra 4, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 118, 121, 122, 213–43, 267, 269 ‘A Segment’ 236, 242n. 51 ‘A Word to the Rabis’ 226, 241n. 28 ‘Alliance’ 241n. 24 ‘American Imperialist Answers a Question’ 229 ‘An American Imperialist Writes’ 229, 241n. 33 ‘Announcements by RAI after Pearl Harbour [sic]’ 242n. 36 ‘Articles in German “Nein ich spreche nicht” [Germ]’ 240n. 5 ‘Blinder Alleys’ 236, 242n. 52 ‘Borderline Cases’ 236, 242n. 51 ‘Brain Mistrust’ 241n. 24 ‘Communications’ 224, 241n. 23 ‘Continuity’ 218 ‘Delbene: Dichotomy’ 242n. 37 ‘Gangsters Together’ 228, 241n. 34 Italy’s Policy of Social Economics 1939/1940, 238 ‘Jean Barral’ 216, 240n. 7 ‘L’Asse che non vacilla’ 215 ‘La Mereschal Pétain…’ 240n. 6 ‘London Opinion’ 229 ‘Message to Tuan Tzetsun’s Friends’ 214, 240n. 3 ‘Naturally’ 241n. 19 ‘News from Nowhere’ 228, 232, 233 ‘Notes in the Margin’ 228 ‘Notes of an American Imperialist’ 229 ‘Now That The Elections Are Over’ 241n. 20 ‘On Resuming’ 231 ‘Quisling’ 235 ‘That Illusion’ 218 ‘The Quiet Disposition’ 224, 241n. 23 ‘Those Parentheses’ 231 ‘To Consolidate’ 218 ‘You New Zealanders’ 214 ‘Pound’s Italian investments and receipts’ 242n. 55, 243n. 57 Powell, York 32 Pratella, Balilla 208 Preface for Corpus Christi 126 Présidence du Conseil 249 Preziosi, Giovanni 226 ‘Judaism Wanted This War’ 226 Priestley, J.B. 1, 13–14, 148, 155–67

Index Daylight on Saturday 160 ‘Do Not Underrate Nazis’ Propaganda’ 167n. 5 Home Is Tomorrow 161 Let the People Sing 161–2 Literature and Western Man 159 Margin Released 160, 163 Out of the People 162 ‘Postscripts’ 13, 155–67 Preface to All England Listened 163 The Aerodrome 160 Pringle, John 66–7 Pritchett, V.S. 176 Proclus 89 PSU (Partito Socialista Unitario) 197 Queen 129 Quisling, Vidkun 216, 235 ‘Quit India’ campaign 171 Racial Bureau 226 Radio Arallo 199 Radio Drama 6 ‘Radio Balilla’ (radiorurale) receiver 201, 204 Radio Bremen 228 Radio éireann 24 Radio France 263n. 3 Radio Giornale 200 Radio Luxembourg 246 Radio Montecarlo 246 Radio Nonno 204 Radio PTT 2 Radio Revolution 228 ‘Radio Rome’ 201, 219, 220, 227, 234 Radio Three 183 Radiodiffusion Française (RDF) 247 Radiodiffusion-Télévision française (RTF) 247 Radiodiffusion 15 Radiofono 200 Radios périphérique 246, 261 Radio Times 139 Radio-Vichy 249–50 Ragnedda, Massimo 5, 14, 269 Ramadier, Paul 248–51 Rangoon University 180 Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) 257, 259, 260 Read, Herbert 170, 171

281

Redman, Tim 222, 225, 231–2, 238, 240n. 12, 241n. 26, 242n. 38, 242n. 39, 242n. 48, 242n. 56 ‘The Repatriation of Ezra Pound 1939-1942’ 231–2, 242n. 38 Rees, Sir Richard 191n. 2 Reichskulturkammer 196, 198 Reich Press Office 235, 242n. 50 Germany Has Entered the Fight to the Finish with the Jewish-Bolshevik System of Murder 242n. 50 Reith Lectures 73 Reith, Sir John 2, 4, 31, 35n. 11, 63, 70–1, 99, 145, 146, 186, 202 Broadcast Over Britain 75n. 6 Religious Advisory Committee 90 Rendall, R. A. 67 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 121 Revue LISA/LISA, 167n. 3 Reynolds, B. 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 90, 93n. 5 Reynolds, Reginald 170 Ribbentrop, Joachim 174 Rice, T. J. 42, 47, 50, 53 Cannibal Joyce 47 Richard II 35n. 15 Richeri, Guiseppe 198 Ricoeur, Paul 25, 183 Riefenstahl, Leni 58 The Triumph of the Will 58–9 Roberts, David 196 Robinson, M. H. 47 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 221–3, 229–30, 233, 235 Rosa, Salvatar 121 Rose, Danis 47, 55n. 1 Rote Sprachror 151 Rothermere, Lord 165 ‘Round the Microphone’ 217, 240n. 10 Rousset, David 257, 260 Royal Navy 164 Rudge, Olga 224–5 Ruskin, John 98 Ruzky, R.L. High Techne 7 Salò Republic 215, 223 San Faustino, Prince Ranieri di 219, 221, 226, 232–4, 240n. 9, 241n. 17, 241n. 29, 242n. 40, 242n. 41, 242n. 42, 242n. 43, 242n. 44, 242n. 45

282 Sanders, M. L. 175 Sarti, Roland 196 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15, 245–63, 269 Critique of Dialectical Reason 261–3 L’existentialisme est un humanisme 257 No Exit 254 What Is Literature? 254–6 Sayers, Dorothy L. 11, 79–93, 267 A Certain Nobleman 86, 91 ‘Are Women Human?’ 91 Behind the Screen 81, 92n. 4 He That Should Come 80, 81 Heirs to the Kingdom 83–4, 88 King of Sorrows 90 ‘The Detective Novel’ 81 The Devil to Pay 80 ‘The Emperor Constantine 92n. 3 ‘The Just Vengeance 92n. 3 The King’s Herald, 86 The King’s Supper 89 The Man Born to Be King 79–93, 267 The Mind of The Maker 80 ‘The Princes of this World 89 ‘The Religions Behind the Nations’ 81 The Scoop 81, 92n. 4 The Zeal of the House 80 Scaligero, Massimo 226 ‘Judaism Against Rome’ 226 Scannell, Paddy 5, & Cardiff, David 5 Social History of British Broadcasting 5 Schanzer, Carlo 199 Schiff, John M. 236 Schuchard, Ronald 24, 26, 28, 35n. 5, 35n. 8 Schuman, Robert 248 Schwernik, Nikolai 236 Scientific American 266, 268, 269 Sconce, Jeffrey 2, 7, 41 Haunted Media 7 Scriven, Michael 247 Search-light books 187, 191n. 7 Selfridges 39 Seneca 103, 110 Shakespeare, Olivia 26 Shakespeare, William 63, 102, 104, 185 Macbeth 62 Merry Wives of Windsor 62 The Tempest 104 Sheehan, Vincent 76n. 6

Index Shelden, Michael 188, 191n. 4 Shem 11 Stock, Noel 225, 240n. 8 Sievekind, Lance 138 Silone, Ignazio 189 ‘The Fox’ 189 Silver, Jeremy 8, 29, 35n. 3 ‘St. Louis Blues’ 206 Silvey, Robert 75n. 4 Sinclair, Thorton 75n. 5 Singing in the Rain 53 SIRAC (Società Italiana Radio Audizioni Circolari) 200 Sironi, Mario 207 SISERT (Società Italiana Servizi Radiotelegrafici e Radiofonici) 199 Smith, David 7 Smith, Logan Pearsall 144 Smith, Winston 189 Sommi-Picenardi 208 Sosius 89 Speaight, Robert 87 Spectator, The 148 Spender, Stephen 170 Spengler, Oswald 115–16, 120–1, 132n. 14 The Decline of the West 120–1 Sprigge, Sylvia 120–2 ‘Non-Representational Art’, [Letter] 120, 132n. 12 Squadristi 195 ‘Squarcio, Manilo’ 227 ‘Squarcio, Pietro’ 227 Squier, Susan Merrill 6–7 Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture 6–7 St. James’s Palace 84 St. Thomas 120 Stalin, Josef,42, 52 Starace, Achille 202 Statesman, The 148 Staudt, Kathleen H. 132n. 14 Stein, Gertrude 8 Stephenson John 23 Sterling, Christopher H. 5 Stevenson, Randall 159 Stevenson, Robert Louis 159, 179 Stimpson, Henry 233 Stone, Wilfred 76n. 8 Strong, L.A.G. 189

Index Stuart, Francis 8 Sturzo, Luigi 197 Suàrez, Juan A. 97 Sud Radio 246 Sugden, A. 106 Sunday Children’s Hour 80 Sunday Graphic and Sunday News 87 Swedenborg, Emanuel 43 Sykes, Christopher 114 Symons, Arthur 110 Tablet, The 127–8 Taille, Maurice de la 119 Talbot, George 201 Talbot, George 197, 198, 201 Talking Heads 48 ‘Tangye Lean’s Office: Italian Radio 1943-1948’ 241n. 15 Taylor, D.J. 191n. 4 Tegetmeier, Denis 123, 126 Telefunken 199 ‘The Alliance of Bolshevism and Plutocracy’ 235 ‘The Crisis’ 115 ‘The Farmer’s Hour’ 202–3 Theall, Donald 40, 47 Third Reich 89, 90 Thomas, Dylan 8, 113, 123 Thurtle, Mr. 90 Tichi, Cecelia 6 Shifting Gears 6 Tiffany, David 8 Time and Tide 149 Time Magazine 231 Times, The 40, 52, 130 Times Literary Supplement 67–8 Tindall, William York 47 Todd, Christopher 247, 256, 263n. 1, 263n. 3, 263n. 4 Tonning, Erik 3, 12, 132n. 9, 132n. 15, 267 Modernism and Christianity 132n. 9, 132n. 15 Torino Gazetta del Popolo 207 Torrey, Fuller 236–7 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy 195 Trade Unionism 165 transition 43

283

Tratner, Michael 31 Tree of the Cross 129 Treece, Henry 184 Tribune, The 188, 191n. 10 Trinculo 104 Trobridge, George 43 Life of Emanuel Swedenborg 43 Truman, Harry F. 222–3, 251 Tudor, Anthony 40 ‘Fugue for Four Cameras’ 40 Turnbull, S. 39 Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia 149 Tytell, John 217 Uberti, Ubaldo degli 240n. 4 Ungaro, Adriano 214, 218–19, 225, 228, 232, 240n. 2, 240n. 11, 240n. 12, 241n. 32, 242n. 53 United Nations 161 University College London 180 Untermeyer, Louis 236 URI (Unione Radiofonica Italiana) 2, 195, 200, 208 US Army Disciplinary Training Center 213 Vallée, Cécile 158–9, 167n. 3 ‘J.B. Priestley, artiste de propaganda à la radio: au service de quelles idées’ 158 Van Ert, Gibran 218 Vatican Radio 202 Veneziano, Marco 227 Veraswami, Dr. 179–80, 181 Verdone, Masrio 209n. 2 Virgil 102 Virgin Mary 91–2 Volkskaempfer 196 Vogue 139 Volunteer Defence League 175 Voroshiloff, Marshall 52 Vox-Haus 2 Wagner, Richard 73 The Ring 73 Wall, Elizabeth 3, 8 Wallace, Edgar 65 Wallace, Henry 224 Walls, Elizabeth Macleod 58

284 Walpole, Hugh 92n. 4 Walton, L. 116 Wanda’s Heart (Il cuore di Wanda) 208 Warburg, James 236 War Department 221 Watch on the Rhine, The 62–3 WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) 147 Workers’ Theatre Movement 151 Webster, John 102, 109 ‘The Duchess of Malfy’ 109 Weimar Germany 3 Welch, James W. 79, 80, 82, 83 Wells, H.G. 2, 7, 41, 76n. 9, 189 ‘A Slip Under the Microscope’ 189 When the Sleeper Wakes 41 West, Rebecca 40 West, W.J. 7, 175, 181, 191n. 4 Westminster Abbey 128 Whispering Shadow, The 49 Whitehead, Gregory 7 Wireless Imagination 7 Whitehead, Kate 5, 8, 114, 132n. 3, 132n. 6, 132n. 7 The Third Programme: A Literary History 5 Wilhelm, J.J. 230 Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925-1972, 230 Williams, Charles 98, 107–8 Wilson, Sarah 8 Wilson, Whittaker 142 ‘Four Songs of Morocco’ 142 Winfrey, Oprah 42 Wintringham, Tom 170 WJY station 199 Wodehouse, P. G. 65 Wolf, René 3, 5 The Undivided Sky 5 Woodcock, George 169–72, 187, 189, 191n. 3, 192n. 14 Woolf, S.J. 196 Woolf, Leonard 5, 13, 138–9, 140, 142–3, 148–9, 150 ‘Broadcasting and a Better World’ 148 ‘Democracy Listens-In’ 148 ‘The Future of British Broadcasting’ 148

Index Woolf, Virginia 4, 13, 137–51, 160, 269 ‘A Ramble Round Words’ 145 ‘Are Too Many Books Written and Published’ 138–9, 142 ‘Beau Brummel’ 139, 144 Between the Acts 151 ‘Craftsmanship’ 142, 144 Death of the Moth and Other Essays 148 ‘Middlebrow’ 148 Orlando 139 ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ 145, 146 ‘The Leaning Tower’ 147–8 The Waves 137 ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ 146, 147, 148 Three Guineas 141, 143, 146, 147 Wordsworth, Dorothy 139 Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) 133n. 16 World War I 31 World War II 11, 13, 15, 99, 196 Yale University 15 Yeats, George 35n. 14 Yeats, W.B. 8, 10, 23–36, 183, 267 ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 33 ‘A Poet Broadcasts’ 35n. 5 ‘Abbey Theatre Broadcast’ 24 ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ 31 ‘An Irish Programme’ 25 ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ 35n. 15 ‘I Became an Author’ 24 ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’ 24, 28 ‘In the Poet’s Pub’ 24, 28 King Oedipus 24, 28 ‘Man and the Echo’ 33, 34 ‘Modern Poetry’: 24, 35n. 2 ‘My Poetry Again’ 24 ‘My Own Poetry’ 24, 29, 30, 32 ‘Oedipus the King’ 24 ‘Poems about Women’ 24, 26 ‘Preface’ to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 24 ‘Reading of Poems’ 24 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 31

Index ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion 23 ‘The Curse of Cromwell’ 28, 30 ‘The Fisherman’ 27 ‘The Growth of a Poet’ 24 ‘The Irish Literary Movement’ 24

‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 29 ‘The Pilgrim’ 29 The Hour Glass 24 The Tragic Generation 32 Yorkshire Post, The 87

285