Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Buggery and Montage
his friends to his appointment: “‘But my dear,’ they said. ‘You will not be able to live in
Birmingham!’ Birmingham was darkest Africa” (Strings 128). He describes the university
itself as “a mass, a mess of grimy neo-Gothic” that “could have passed for a typical block of
insurance offi ces” (130). Th e students came in for a similarly unfavourable reaction: “they
were all so unresponsive, so undernourished, I just could not be bothered” (131).
It was after his marriage broke up that MacNeice began to appreciate Birmingham
and to make friends with students like Walter Allen. He wrote that he surprised himself
with the discovery that “the students were human” and found that they were refreshingly
free from the obsession with politics prevalent amongst students at Oxbridge (154). He
and Allen became friends in 1934 and Allen documents the friendship in his autobiography.
He describes dinners in Louis’s fl at after the end of his marriage, always accompanied
by Betsy, the handsome Borzoi bitch who Allen cites as “one of the hazards of visiting
Louis”: “she had the habit of poking her long snout into the private parts of his guests,
behaviour which seemed to amuse him rather than not. I had the feeling that he saw one’s
reaction to Betsy as a test one passed or did not pass” (46). Th eir friendship continued after
MacNeice and Allen had both made the transition from Birmingham to Bloomsbury,
and perhaps reached its peak the day after Chamberlain came back from Munich, waving
his ineff ectual piece of paper:
MacNeice telephoned me to say that, since there’d be war by Monday and petrol,
even if obtainable at all, would be rationed, he’d just sold his car for £14. Would
I join him for lunch at the Café Royal? I think both of us assumed it was the last
good meal we’d have and we did ourselves proud. Th en, fl oating on brandy and
cigar-perfumes, we took a taxi to the Tottenham Court Road, where a cinema
was showing one of our favourite Westerns. (114)
With MacNeice, of course, came Auden, and both Hampson and Allen got to know
Auden fairly well, with Allen acting in the fi rst staged reading of Th e Ascent of F6 at Birmingham
University. Auden himself was from Birmingham, and Allen included him in
a BBC Midland Region series he wrote on Midlands authors, the others being Henry
Green, C. Day Lewis, and Hampson. Allen met Auden whilst writing the programme and
saw him sporadically over the next few years. Although Auden claimed that: “Clearer than
Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on / Th e view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton”
(88), Allen said that he did not think Auden actually regarded himself as a true Birmingham
man. Hampson’s own friendship with Auden was cemented by his bizarre wedding.
Auden himself by this point had married Th omas Mann’s daughter, Erika, in order to
save her from Nazi Germany. He prevailed on Hampson to marry Erika’s friend, Th erese.
Hampson asked Allen what he thought of the suggestion and Allen writes:
I said all the conventional things; I advised caution; later, he might discover he
wasn’t a homosexual, fall in love with a woman and want to marry in the real
sense…. He listened to me and said: “Wystan says, what are buggers for?” I knew
I was defeated. Put in that form, Auden’s appeal, I realised, was irresistible. (56)
Th e ceremony itself is described by Allen, who vied for years with MacNeice over the
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