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This chapter examines the efforts of Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and several of their associates to create a European anti-fascist poetic community for which the bonds between the Auden Generation and the Spanish Generation of ’27 would be central. The frames for this work are the claims by Ortega, in several articles in English, and Altolaguirre, in his journal 1616: English and Spanish Poetry, that England and Spain shared a unique history that compelled cooperation; the attempts, led primarily by Spender, to channel Spanish voices of the conflict through British literary culture; and the battles over the political and cultural significance of Lorca’s assassination. Spender, one of Lorca’s earliest translators, found himself defending his view of the Spaniard’s mutable, populist figure against its misappropriation. With the aid of two Spanish collaborators, Spender influentially characterized him instead as an apolitical Spanish-European poet, and he edited the volume Poems for Spain, which intercalated British and Spanish voices on the war. At the same time, while Poems for Spain evinces the mutual influences of two literary generations, its publication in March 1939, when Franco’s victory was ensured, made it an elegy for the lost Republic. The awkward and ultimately failed literary endeavors taken up in this chapter underwent significant revisions both in Spender’s poetry and in later translations of Lorca.

This chapter discusses the poetry of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, exploring the complicated response of both to the Romantic bequest. The first section focuses on a variety of texts by Auden, including his Letter to Lord Byron, in order to bring out the intricately post-Romantic nature of his voice in his Thirties poetry. The section examines early poems such as ‘Who stands, the crux left of the watershed’ for their evidence of thwarted post-Romantic longing, as well as later poems such as ‘In memory of W. B. Yeats’ for the ways in which Auden reinvents for the modern age a poetry akin to the Romantics' in its concern to be both undidactic and ‘A way of happening’. Auden's practice in Letter to Lord Byron is compared with Byron's comic mode, and a mixture of admiration and necessary distance in Auden's view of Byron is discovered. The second section looks at Spender's attempts to preserve a Romantic lyric voice in the modern age; it compares, for example, his poem ‘Moving through the silent crowd’ with Blake's ‘London’, and sees his poetry voicing doubts about poetry of a kind inaugurated by the Romantics.

This chapter examines the British literature responding to the cinematic and photographic qualities of the Blitz. The cinematic properties of the Blitz were perhaps best captured in literature by three wartime firemen: Stephen Spender, Henry Green, and William Sansom. The wartime fiction of Elizabeth Bowen had always had an unnerving propensity to stir into life. Sansom's ‘Fireman Flower’ turns both the living and the dead into ghosts. Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear and Bowen's The Heat of the Day expose the arbitrary nature of international politics in a war that is fought by automata in the sky and by ghosts on the ground. The Blitz literature was necessarily cinematic because the bombing, like the film and the photograph, thrust its victims into the deathly tense of the has-been-there.

This chapter details the correspondence between the author and the Central Intelligence Agency regarding the release of information in line with the Freedom of Information Act. At the same time the chapter builds on an emerging body of scholarship that examines the relationship between American postwar ascendancy and “cultural diplomacy” in the early years of the Cold War and decolonization. Few studies have considered how the Congress for Cultural Freedom's (CCF) underwriting reshaped and refashioned the global literary landscape, altered the relationships between writers and their publics, and rendered those whom it supported more recognizable figures than others. These practices were conceived as part of an orchestrated imperial effort to occupy a global public space that by 1948 had been largely dominated by the socialist rhetoric of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform).

This chapter explores the cultural history of Vienna as a story of modernity, space, and power, from the late nineteenth century construction of the Ringstrasse to the postwar building of Red Vienna. It traces the city’s particular version of the geographical emotions of modernism, concentrating upon how the city’s architectural spaces helped shape an ‘inward turn’ in the mood or stimmung (Heidegger) of the modernism produced here, often producing notions of spatial phobias. It also analyses the importance of coffee houses as cultural spaces, and the ‘outsider’ figure of Jewish writers and thinkers in the city. After discussion of key Viennese figures such as Sigmund Freud and Robert Musil, it then traces how Anglophone visitors such as John Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison (in her Vienna Diary), Jean Rhys, and Stephen Spender (in his neglected long poem Vienna) represented the mood of the city in the interwar years. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man.

This chapter explores the 1930s experiments with camera consciousness. Christopher Isherwood has Edward Upward's tutor's capacity to magnify and distort objects. The hyperreality of 1930s Germany is made explicit by Stephen Spender in his 1951 autobiography. In Spender's account, the party is not merely unreal because it is filmed. Louis MacNeice's former Birmingham student Walter Allen shared the poet's fear that the ghostly, nightmarish aspects of cinema were rendering experience unreal. Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square is an account of life in the seedier parts of London and Brighton in the lead-up to war. Joris Ivens depicted the civilians' and soldiers' struggle to survive in The Spanish Earth. Robert Capa's controversial Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death or The Falling Soldier typify the hyperreal aspect of the Spanish Civil War. Like Albert Speer's chimeric buildings, which reconstitute architecture as light, the political itself has been redefined in terms of cinema.

The late 1940s brought Schuman back in touch with his Jewish roots through various encounters and queries that occurred. Leonard Bernstein, in particular, was in a state of wonderment at the birth of Israel, and he tried to interest his good friend Schuman in it. Notwithstanding these various reminders of his own background and heritage, Schuman reaffirmed his coolness to organized religion. He expressed himself through his music, and the Sixth Symphony (1948) is a major testament to Schuman's ideas and ideals. During this period of time, Koussevitzky died, and with him Schuman lost a champion of his music. He gained, however, another champion in the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy. This chapter includes a cameo by English writer Stephen Spender and a look at a withdrawn work that would become the nucleus of the Seventh Symphony (1960).

Nabokov’s first opera, on a libretto he wrote jointly with Spender, was premiered, as Rasputin’s End, in Louisville, in 1958, and, in a revised and expanded version, in Cologne the following year. In addition to the long genesis of the work (also covered in the previous chapter), this section discusses his other two important works of the period, the cantata Symboli chrestiani and the Pasternak Songs. It describes his second trip to India (and Burma), the main outcome of which was his meeting with the French Indianist Alain Daniélou. On the CCF side, he spoke at the Future of Freedom conference in 1955 and, following the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he played a key role, with the help of Mehuhin and Dorati, in the establishment of the Philharmonia Hungarica, an orchestra regrouping exiled musicians who had fled their country.

While the city has been at the center of literary modernist studies through such influential formulations as Raymond Williams’s “metropolitan forms of perception,” the influence of architectural modernism has received comparatively little attention. Far from a lagging branch of the modern movement, architecture and design instigated one of the defining divides in British literary modernism, between Vorticism and Bloomsbury. At a time when Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were just starting their careers, Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry formulated rival utopias, to be achieved through an architecture and design-driven mass modernism. These debates culminated in D. H. Lawrence’s end-of-life call to “Pull down my native village to the last brick” and use modernist planning to “[m]ake a new England.” The conflation of creation and violent destruction initially inspired members of the Auden Group but ultimately caused many mid-century authors to become wary of uniting aesthetic revolution with political revolution.

This chapter addresses the question of how modernist writers represented in literature the idea and phenomenologies of Beethoven masks and portrait busts. Many writers in the period referred to Beethovenian portrait busts and masks because they brought with them a ready-made set of allusive undertones. They knew that such objects are freighted with symbolic meanings and that mentioning them at key moments in a novel or poem allowed them to draw on an established history of social and cultural associations. Many of the writers who used the Beethovenian iconography in this way did so to help them comment satirically on the nature of bourgeois culture. Others did so to evaluate the nature of the Beethovenian iconography itself. Two works in particular appear to do both: the revised edition of Wyndham Lewis’s novel Tarr (1928) and Stephen Spender’s poem ‘Beethoven’s Death Mask’ (1930).

This chapter on the interwar origins of the UK’s premier national cultural agency considers why literature—a form seemingly opposed to the more obvious forms of propaganda—was attractive to state investment. It does so by showing how literary policy was first yoked to foreign policy, amid the growing national rivalries of the 1930s, in ways that posed challenges for the cultural philosophy of the British state. It then turns to Stanley Unwin’s Books and Periodicals Committee to show how the British state deferred to literary experts and industry insiders, including to commission libraries of ‘world literature’ on decidedly English terms. The chapter concludes by discussing the contrasting approaches taken by T.S. Eliot and Stephen Spender to working for the state cultural ‘machine’ via the British Council.

In the (often left-wing) writings on the Spanish Civil War, the idea of sacrifice (both transitive and intransitive) is intertwined with theories and practices of class conflict. The secular bent to much left-wing thinking did not preclude using associations with religious sacrifice to characterize the war’s fatalities; the bombing of Guernica and Madrid, for example, were both described as ‘martyrdoms’. Even in those views of the war that emphasized the importance of dialectical materialism, there is often an inherent logic of self-sacrifice—particularly for those middle-class and intellectual members of the Communist left whose commitment to revolution included a commitment to the supersession of their own individuality in the name of the party. This chapter examines how such ideological figurings of sacrifice are presented in lyrical and elegiac poems by poets such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Clive Branson, George Barker, Margot Heinemann, and Cecil Day Lewis.

Chapter Four examines the BBC's role as a major patron of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s through Caribbean Voices, a weekly literary program. Using extensive archival sources, this chapter argues that the BBC served both imperialist and anti-imperialist agendas at the same time. Although the BBC, through its overseas programming, was designed to maintain a cultural empire of English speakers, Caribbean writers used the organization for their own purposes, allowing them to subtly criticize metropolitan dominance. Additionally, important "Windrush" writers such as George Lamming, VS Naipaul, and Sam Selvon parlayed their experience at the BBC into concrete professional opportunities in London.

Nabokov’s next initiative was the organization of another festival, in Rome in 1954, this time devoted largely to new music, and in which, in addition to Stravinsky, friends such as Blacher and Dallapiccola were involved, though it provoked a contretemps between Nabokov and Pierre Boulez. This chapter also deals with Nabokov’s involvement in the CCF’s science programs and the founding of the Congress-sponsored London magazine Encounter, edited jointly by Lasky and Stephen Spender. It ends with Nabokov’s first trip to India, where he met with Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.