ABSTRACT
Scholars of interwar modernism have repeatedly observed a heightened valuation of community in response to intensified feelings of fragmentation and isolation. War’s aftermath accentuated and clarified already-existing longings for preindustrial communal values and practices. A by-now classic account of this dynamic between loss and redemption is Lucy McDiarmid’s Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars, which describes the years between the wars as “a time when all three poets flourished and when the pressure to save civilization was felt by everyone, poets and political leaders alike … All three sought to save civilization through some form of communal identity based on inherited myths, legends, and religious truths.”1 McDiarmid examines how these poets shared a nostalgia for a pre-print relationship of poet to audience, a myth of an “auditory golden age” in which a “rapt, unified group” would illustrate that art’s significance lay in the community, the poet’s oral presence creating a direct, shared experience of time and place. All three poets turned to theater in their attempts to counter the printed word’s implication of a dispersed audience, unable to experience the work of art communally. The poet’s social role was to act as a “centripetal force in a disintegrating society,” and therein also lay the danger: the threat of the dictator’s voice, disseminated via radio, loudspeaker, or gramophone, haunted the poet’s oratorical presence, and all three poets, even in their longing for and promotion of communal forms of art, sought to “sustain the individual and the private within the collective.”2 We have seen this tension between the attraction of community
1 Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), xi. McDiarmid’s study harmonizes with that of Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns, which examines the “communal effort” among writers, artists, farmers, social historians, and musicians to remember the “organic community” and “bear witness to the dying arts of the countryside.” Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010), 142. Considerable tension arises over the degree to which such efforts are nostalgic, sentimental, and limited to a non-representative minority, rather than representing the views of a dominant culture. Peter Mandler provides the pivotal summary of the scholarship on nostalgic Englishness. Peter Mandler, “Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850-1940,” Transactions
and the desire to protect individuality and privacy in previous chapters. Between the Acts, for example, fluctuates between such lyrically aphoristic exaltations of wholeness as “Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken” and the highly ironic shattering of illusion in music’s cackling and cacophony.
