Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

54 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
literary rights to the wedding. Present were Allen, MacNeice, Auden, Reggie Smith, and
the happy couple. Auden played the part of the MC in the “prep school or scoutmaster
vein” (56). He bought tickets, produced the ring, and, arriving at the station, in a “voice
that had become high-pitched, demanded a taxi of astonished porters” (56). A taxi was
found and they were dispatched with all haste to Solihull registry offi ce which turned
out to be only a hundred yards away. During the service, Auden answered every question,
barely giving bride or groom a chance to speak and plying the clerk with questions
throughout: “Would you say this is a popular registry offi ce? What do you fi nd the favourite
month for weddings in Solihull?” (57). After the service Auden took them all to the
nearest pub, ordered brandies and demanded whether there was a piano:
“Yes sir,” the barmaid answered “but you can’t play it.” Th is made Wystan very
indignant. “Who is to stop me?” he wanted to know. Th e girl answered: “It’s Mr ...
He’s dead. He’s in there.” She pointed to the billiard room. Led by Auden, we rose
and went into the billiard room. Th ere was a coffi n on the billiard table. (57-58)
Hampson and Th erese had a brief honeymoon at the cinema in Birmingham and did
in fact consummate the marriage. Hampson’s sister stated that “John said there should
no mistake about her being a British subject” (cited in Croft 23). And thus Hampson
achieved his status as a fully paid up member of Bloomsbury, willing to love in triangles
and live in squares and fulfi l his true role as an intellectual bugger.
It seems appropriate that the honeymoon of the marriage between Birmingham and
Bloomsbury should have taken place in a cinema. And that MacNeice and Allen’s trip to
the Western should have provided a cinematic end to a decade of peace. Appropriate in
more ways than one, because cinema was not only the dominant medium of the thirties;
cinematic technique, and particularly montage, was the dominant technique for thirties
politically engaged writing, and can be seen as one of the strongest factors linking the
literature produced in Birmingham and Bloomsbury.
Allen wrote that in Birmingham “it was in the Film Society more than anywhere else
that young artists came together” and he himself was an active member, and later became
more involved in cinema as a reader for MGM (42). Hampson made documentaries for
the BBC during the war and Auden’s involvement with John Grierson’s GPO fi lms is wellknown,
as is MacNeice’s work at the BBC.
In Birmingham, montage was the order of the day. At this point, I should defi ne
montage, which is essentially the cutting and pasting of shots, and say that I am referring
principally to Eisensteinian shock montage, which tends to involve the juxtaposition of
discordant extremes. Eisenstein saw montage as inextricably linked with radical leftist
politics. He defi ned cinema as “fi rst and foremost, montage” and said that through montage,
cinema becomes a “tractor ploughing over the audience’s psyche in a particular class
context” (Taylor 82, 56).
In Hampson’s letter advising Brierley on the novel that would become Means-Test
Man he suggests a montage between work and unemployment: “Make capital of each
and every diff erence between the state of the man in employment and the man workless.
Th e idea of contrast is, I feel, important” (cited in Croft 178). Saturday Night at the