by Neil Powell
Even as late as 1 March 1942, Britten was still evasively telling his brother-in-law Kit Welford: ‘I am not quite sure what will happen to me … I have certain things I want to do & which I may or may not be able to do – when I know I’ll let you & Beth know, of course.’109 He didn’t let them know, and by failing to anticipate that he and Pears would have to spend five weeks aboard ship, during which time his family heard nothing from him, he risked causing at least as much worry as he had hoped to spare them. To the Brosas, ten days later, Pears could at last write: ‘Our draft board has graciously permitted us to be off, and off we go early next week.’ They were overjoyed at the prospect: ‘April is such a marvellous month. Think of seeing real spring again – Oh! Peggy and Toni, when shall we all see it together again.’110 That determination to look forward was positive and sustaining, but there was also, inevitably, the sense of an ending: it was, as Britten wrote in the Mayers’ visitors’ book on 6 March, ‘The end of the week-end (see Aug. 21st 1939).’111 At last, on 16 March, the two men boarded a Swedish cargo ship, the MS Axel Johnson, at New York. ‘I bring B. and P. to the boat at 3 p.m.,’ noted Elizabeth Mayer in her diary, adding in the margin: ‘The Ides of March.’112
CHAPTER 5
WHERE I BELONG
1942–47
1
The Axel Johnson wasn’t a bit like the Ausonia. It was, as Britten later told Bobby Rothman in a lively account of the voyage, ‘a rather decrepid old boat (a Swedish freighter) and everything went wrong with her’. First, they ‘sat for four days just off the Statue of Liberty while the steering was being repaired’.1 Then they travelled slowly up the east coast, calling at various ports: by 25 March they had only reached Boston, where they spent several days during further repairs to the steering. After that, the ship went on to Halifax, Nova Scotia, from where Pears sent a postcard (of the bandstand in the public gardens) to Beata: ‘So far so good though God how slow & boring! This town is the bottom of the pit…’2 They eventually set sail for England on 4 April. The customs authorities in New York had confiscated Britten’s manuscripts of work-in-progress – his setting of Auden’s Hymn to St Cecilia and the first movement of a possible clarinet concerto for Benny Goodman – on the grounds that they might contain coded information, although this may have been a blessing, as it kept him busily engaged in reconstructing the former from memory as well as working on A Ceremony of Carols; Pears, meanwhile, was drafting a number-by-number synopsis of Peter Grimes, of which at this early stage he had some thought of writing the libretto. They had a cramped two-berth cabin opposite the ship’s refrigerator, which Pears found faintly disconcerting; nor did he think much of the company, which included some ‘callow, foul mouthed, witless recruits’,3 although there was a French professor on whom they could practise their spoken (but not sung) French. They crossed the Atlantic in a convoy, by which they were temporarily abandoned when the ship’s funnel caught fire: ‘we stood quite still for ages, attracting all the submarines for miles – so we expected!’4 On 17 April, the Axel Johnson docked in Liverpool, where the two men disembarked and sent telegrams to their astonished relatives announcing that they were safely home.
Exactly where home might now be was another matter. They had relinquished the Hallam Street flat after the disastrous experience of Jackie Hewitt’s caretaking, so for the time being Pears had to stay with his parents in Barnes while Britten was based at the Old Mill or at his sister Barbara’s flat in Chelsea or at Northwood, Middlesex, where Beth and her husband Kit were now living in a house large enough to accommodate Barbara and her friend Helen Hurst as well if they needed to get out of central London; it was from there that Beth dashed into town when Barbara rang to say that she had received a telegram from their brother in Liverpool, asking whether she could put him up for the night. Beth remembered that Ben ‘looked much older’ and that he and Peter ‘were both very shocked to see the effects of the Blitz on London’:5 among the most shocking of these, from a musical point of view, had been the destruction of the Queen’s Hall, hitherto the home of the annual Promenade Concerts which now transferred to the Royal Albert Hall. The Welfords had looked after Britten’s Morris 8 for him, but petrol shortages severely curtailed the use he could make of it; instead, when he needed to get from Snape to London, he cycled to the railway station at Campsea Ashe, pedalling through Tunstall, where the village shop by the crossroads was called ‘Herring’s’, a name he stored away for future use.
Was he glad to be back? For quite some time, he wouldn’t be sure. He found that, while people hadn’t essentially changed, they had somehow become more like themselves, ‘the nice ones, much nicer, & the unpleasant ones, a little worse’; there had been ‘no suggestion of vindictiveness’ but (a shrewd observation) one or two instances of ‘over-kindness, which makes one suspicious’.6 In May, he wrote to Elizabeth Mayer that he was ‘horribly homesick for my American home’: he had been poring over a map with the Welfords, showing them ‘where you all lived, where we went, & what we did when we got there’, and he felt that ‘the greater part of my life must be spent with you all on your side of the Atlantic’. Yet no sooner had he written those words than he inadvertently demonstrated why they would never be true: ‘Snape is just heaven. I couldn’t believe that a place could be so lovely. The garden was looking so neat & intentional, & the house is so comfortable and so lovely to look at – & the view … over the village to the river & marshes beyond.’7 That is the authentic voice of belonging, and we shall hear it again.
A major reason for his vacillating emotions about England was the fraught process of registering as a conscientious objector. The decision of his first tribunal, on 28 May, was that he be registered ‘as a person liable under the Act to be called-up for service but employed only in non-combatant duties’; however, after a successful appeal to the Appellate Tribunal, he was granted complete exemption. Mitchell and Reed point out that the chairman of this second tribunal was Sir Francis Floud, whose son Peter had been at Gresham’s with Britten – which made him more appreciative than others might have been of the appellant’s outstanding musical talent – and also that ‘if Britten had not declared himself a pacifist and had been called up for military service, he would almost certainly have been found medically unfit’.8 In this respect, he may have chosen, as he often did, to do things the hard way. Certainly, the fulsome protestations of Christian belief in his statements may strike us now as embarrassingly awkward for a man of uncertain religious convictions; in preparing these, and in his tribunal appearances, he was assisted by Canon Stuart Morris, General Secretary of the Peace Pledge Union, for whom he had composed his Pacifist March in 1937. Although he felt typically guilty about it, there was no denying that he had ‘got the best possible result’, as he told Elizabeth Mayer in September: ‘I am now left completely free to go on with my work … Stuart Morris who was my council was very good, & both Montagu Slater & William Walton were excellent witnesses…’9 By this time Pears too had successfully registered.
Both Britten and Pears lost no time in immersing themselves in work as soon as possible after their return home. For Britten, this included tidying up the Hymn to St Cecilia and the Ceremony of Carols, writing music for two BBC/CBS radio series (Britain to America and An American in England), toying with abortive projects (a harp concerto and a sonata for orchestra) and, above all, planning Peter Grimes: the libretto was to be by Montagu Slater who, by early June, was ‘steaming ahead’ with it. Pears, meanwhile, had been offered the title role in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman at the Strand Theatre within days of arriving back in London: when it opened on 6 May, ‘Peter sang so well, acted so delightfully, and was such a ravishing personality on stage … that everyone was delighted & more than surprised.’10 During the latter part of the month and throughout June, the production toured the north of England and Scotland, with great success, but Britten was devastated to be separated from his partner for so long; when Peter managed to get a couple of days off, catching an overnight trai
n from Glasgow, Ben ‘walked five miles to the station (Chelsea to King’s Cross) by 7.10 in the morning (started at 5.50) to meet him – I’m pretty proud of that!’11 The letters between them, though discreetly signed with initials, are unreservedly passionate and, in one case, hysterically angry. This was on 1 June, when a little drama of missed telephone calls led to a furious outburst from Britten: ‘Why the hell can’t you organise your times abit – why the hell don’t you do what you say, be in till 10.15 – why the hell – well, & so on. And all because I wanted to speak to you so badly. Boohoo. Boohoo.’12 But there was another reason for his unhappiness, for he had just spent a disastrous afternoon with Wulff: ‘Poor dear, he’s had such a hell of a time – but it’s accentuated the old hard, vindictive side of him; the old conventional communist, materialist side; the boasting, garrulous side too – so that he’s completely unbearable.’13 They went to see a film, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, which was ‘easier than talking to him – but a lousy picture’.14 A few days later, writing to Elizabeth Mayer, he could put the matter more calmly: Wulff was ‘rather altered’, ‘rather vindictive, and hard’, but ‘underneath he is an awfully sweet boy. Perhaps if he could find the right girl whom he could marry…’15 In being hard on Wulff, he was really being hard on himself: what he hadn’t quite appreciated was how far he too had been changed (he was ‘much older’, as Beth had noted) by the experience of the past three years. They did meet again in September when, at Boosey & Hawkes in Regent Street, Britten gave him a miniature score of Les Illuminations inscribed: ‘For Wulff of course – Benjamin B. September 1942, i.e. 3 years too late.’16
Despite a summer of anxiety and illness – he blamed overwork and lack of vitamins, but his ‘nice new doctor, a Norwegian’ was taking him ‘very seriously’ and prescribing ‘bottle after bottle of the most revolting medicines’17 – Britten had cause for satisfaction in the way his work was at last being appreciated. On 22 July, the first English performance of the Sinfonia da Requiem was given at the Proms by the LPO under Basil Cameron, an occasion preceded by articles in the BBC’s two weeklies (‘The Virtuosity of Benjamin Britten’ by Jack Westrup in the Listener and ‘Britten’s New Symphony’ by Ralph Hill in the Radio Times) and followed by positive reviews, among which William Glock’s in the Observer was especially perceptive. Glock saw the Sinfonia as deriving from Liszt and Fauré but also from Mahler and Berg. Like other critics, he rather undervalued the transcendental power of the third movement – although this may have been due to the performance – but he greatly admired the first: ‘And although we can take Britten’s orchestral imagination for granted by now,’ he wrote, ‘the invention here is on the Berlioz–Mahler level.’18 Britten told his old friend Mary Behrend that he was ‘happy about the show – with all its defects it was a much better performance than I had expected, a grand reception, & on the whole kind criticisms’.19 Further performances were scheduled for London, Manchester, Liverpool and, as Britten wonderingly noted, Stockholm.
A still more significant occasion followed on 23 September at Wigmore Hall, when the first public performance of Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo was given by Pears, the work’s dedicatee, accompanied by Britten at the piano. Although Pears’s vocal technique and confidence had improved immeasurably in the two years since the cycle’s completion, this remained a very special challenge, while Britten, who suffered appalling stage fright before performing, was terrified: ‘I was dreadfully nervous … it was rather like parading naked in public.’20 He knew, nevertheless, that it had to be done and done well and, no less crucially, seen to be done well: in an uncharacteristically confident piece of self-promotion, he told Ernest Newman, chief music critic of the Sunday Times, ‘I am so keen for you to hear them [the Sonnets], as I am pleased with them myself – a very rare occurrence with me!’21 Newman was indeed in the audience and thought that the songs were ‘evidently of exceptional quality, but the style is so unexpectedly different from that of Mr Britten’s other recent works … that one can record only the general impression made by the first performance’. The Times gratifyingly noted that Pears’s ‘pleasing voice’ had ‘grown more robust and his skill consolidated by experience’, while Ferruccio Bonavia in the Telegraph nicely caught the distinction of Britten’s setting: ‘The writing is lyrical and, at the same time, utterly unconventional.’ It was, however, Edward Sackville-West in the New Statesman and Nation who made the largest and most memorable claim: ‘I suggest that these are the finest chamber songs England has had to show since the seventeenth century, and the best any country has produced since the death of Wolf.’22 The audience response was rapturous, although a later Telegraph critic, Peter Stadlen, remembered that it was preceded by ‘a second or two of tense silence’:23 the two men on the stage were, after all, well known as pacifists in wartime, but were they also – in these settings of homoerotic poems dedicated by one to the other – quietly yet firmly declaring something else? An elderly Wigmore Hall stagehand, congratulating Britten on the performance, ‘added that he hadn’t been aware of their “particular (hm) friendship”’.24 That Britten and Pears were announcing a more than musical partnership seems to have been tacitly understood and accepted with tactful generosity by many, perhaps most, of those present.
Immediately after the performance, they were approached with an offer to record the Sonnets commercially, which they did at EMI’s Abbey Road studios on 20 November. The records, produced by Walter Legge and released as a pair of plum-label HMV 78s (one 10″ and one 12″), were an immediate success and they remain astonishing: Pears’s declamatory confidence is balanced by wry hints of intimacy, and the unaccompanied paragraph at the start of the final sonnet has never sounded more glorious. Pears and Britten gave further performances of the cycle at a National Gallery lunchtime concert on 22 October and at Charlton House, Greenwich, on 2 May 1943, in aid of the Friends War Relief Service. But they also included the work in the recitals they gave, sometimes in improbably remote venues, for CEMA, the recently established Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (and forerunner of the Arts Council): William Glock wrote in the Observer that Britten ‘had introduced his Michelangelo Sonnets to an audience in Bishop’s Stortford, who fell completely in love with them’25 on 18 November. These recitals were undertaken as a contribution to the war effort and would have daunted or depressed many professional musicians, but Britten, who always enjoyed bringing music to non-specialist audiences, enthusiastically described them to Elizabeth Mayer:
We go all over the place, under the strangest conditions – playing on awful old pianos – singing easy, but always good, programmes – & really have the greatest successes with the simplest audiences … I feel it is absolutely worth it, because, as we have so often agreed, it does get music really to the people, finds out what they want & puts the emphasis on the music, & not the personality of the artist, or their previous fame. One starts completely from ‘scratch’ as it were, since more often than not, they haven’t even heard of Schubert – much less, Britten or Pears!26
To Bobby Rothman, he added that he had to ‘play on pianos all out of tune, when some of the notes won’t go down & those that do won’t come up’.27 On one occasion, after performing for CEMA at Melksham in Wiltshire, Britten and Pears went on to give a shorter recital at a school three miles away; an admiring pupil, Claire Purdie, having walked to hear them in Melksham, walked back to the school to hear them again. But by the time she arrived on foot, their second programme was over: ‘I was so upset that I marched in without thinking and told them what had happened. Whereupon BB opened the piano lid and PP sang “Down by the Salley Gardens” just for me.’28
In August, Britten and Pears had moved to 104a Cheyne Walk, SW10, the house of their old friend Ursula Nettleship, who was working as an administrator for CEMA and responsible for organising many of their recitals; but, although she was out of London much of the time, the arrangement could only be a temporary one. ‘We still haven’t found a nice place to live i
n London, though we have tried everywhere,’ Britten told Elizabeth Mayer in November, quite reasonably adding: ‘It’s very difficult not being able to unpack one’s things.’29 And there were other, more personal difficulties: the lack of a permanent London home, combined with Pears’s increasingly hectic touring schedule, led to misery when they were apart and rows when they were together. Their letters and telephone calls were filled with affectionate attempts to repair the damage inflicted by ‘our miserable tiffs’, as Pears called them. Early in December, Britten wrote to him – somewhere in the West Midlands, where he was singing to factory audiences – to apologise for an ‘uncommunicative’ phone conversation: ‘Ursula was in the room & I couldn’t say much. We have patched up our little scrap, but I find living here very difficult. She has been in bed all day & had to be waited on abit.’30 It’s possible that Ursula Nettleship didn’t realise her tenants were lovers, though likelier that the reticent Britten simply didn’t wish an emotional conversation to be overheard. She certainly treated them as formal tenants: Letters from a Life reproduces her signed and intemised receipt for the eight weeks to 31 January 1943, with a fairly hefty total of £27 (rent £16, light and heat £2, telephone £9).31