AUDEN, W.H. Five first editions from the library of Julian Barnes.

Julian Barnes's Copies

AUDEN, W.H. Five first editions from the library of Julian Barnes. London: Faber and Faber. 1937–1974.

[ offered with :]

POSNER, David. The Deserted Altar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell . 1956.

Five Auden first editions from the library of the English novelist Julian Barnes (b. 1946), each bearing Barnes’ bookplate, two with dated ownership inscriptions; Thank You, Fog (1974) with, additionally, a loosely laid in manuscript note from Auden to the American poet David Posner (1921–1985).

It was an encounter with a shelf of W.H. Auden first editions, ‘seen in the glass-fronted bookcase of a neighbour’, that first ignited Julian Barnes’s passion for collecting ‘the old, the secondhand, the non-new book’. The neighbour in question was ‘a man […] who had actually known Auden decades previously, and even played cricket with him’, a connection that seemed astonishing to the young Barnes:

‘I had never set eyes on a writer, or known anyone who had known a writer. Yet here were the ownership copies of someone who had known one of the country’s most famous living poets. Further, these books contained Auden’s still-echoing words in the form in which they had first come into the world. I sensed this magic sharply, and wanted part of it. So, from my student years, I became a book-collector as well as a book-user, and discovered that bookshops weren’t all owned by W.H. Smith.’

During the 1960s and 1970s, Barnes would become ‘a furious book-hunter, driving to the market towns and cathedral cities of England in my Morris Traveller and loading it with books bought at a rate which far exceeded any possible reading speed’. It is from this period that the present books derive. Auden is a recurrent presence in Barnes’s novels, usually in relation to the relation between poetry and truth, writing and the world. When Auden compiled his Collected Shorter Poems (...) he famously omitted ‘September 1, 1939’, Barnes’ nimble treatment, in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), of Auden’s amendment of the line, ‘We must love one another or die’ (in ‘September 1, 1939’), to the more literal ‘We must love one another and die’ because, he argued, ‘we must die anyway’, is a case in point. Barnes writes:

‘When I first came across it, I applauded the honest rigour with which Auden the critic revised Auden the poet. If a line sounds ringingly good but isn’t true, out with it – such an approach is bracingly free of writerly self-infatuation. Now I am not so sure. We must love one another and die certainly has logic on its side; it’s also about as interesting on the subject of the human condition, and as striking, as We must listen to the radio and die or We must remember to defrost the fridge and die. Auden was rightly suspicious of his own rhetoric; but to say that the line We must love one another or die is untrue because we die anyway (or because those who do not love do not instantly expire) is to take a narrow or forgetful view.’

In Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Geoffrey Braithwaite, the retired doctor narrator, takes up another provocative line, this time from Auden’s 1939 elegy for Yeats:

‘Listen to Auden: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassière. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassière is the French for life-jacket.’

In a brief interview with Jacob Weisberg in 2005, Barnes spoke of a growing ambivalence about collecting books. ‘The first words out of his mouth’, Weisberg writes, ‘are that he’s an “ex-collector”’. In recent years, Barnes has tried to stop collecting because he ‘began to think I was fetishizing the first edition’, selling off some of his books, ‘Auden and John Betjeman among them’, collecting ‘vintage photographic portraits of writers and composers’ instead. This neatly explains this small group of first editions from Barnes’s library, all in impeccable condition, with his elegant bookplate to each front pastedown.

1. Spain (1937)

8vo. Original stapled white card wrappers with integral red card jacket lettered in black to front panel and flap, priced 1s. to front flap; pp. 12, [4]; fading to spine fold, small tear to area of fold over upper staple, both staples tarnished, rubbed to edges, with a few light surface marks and creases; a very good copy; bookplate of Julian Barnes to verso of front panel of wrapper, earlier ownership inscription and date (August 1937) to upper panel of the white card wraps, with a loosely inserted (earlier?) Faber poetry flyer.

Auden’s 1937 poem, described by George Orwell as ‘one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war’, was another ‘public’ poem which Auden would later renounce on grounds of dishonesty. ‘I once wrote’, he recalled in 1957, “History to the defeated | may say alas but cannot help nor pardon.” To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable.’

Barnes’s copy bears the contemporary ownership inscription (‘August [19]37’) of Laurien Beeslie (later Wade), a pivotal figure for the young Barnes. A university friend, Andrew Saint, has suggested that she may be a model for Susan MacLeod, the forty-eight-year-old married woman who conducts an affair with the nineteen-year-old Paul Roberts in Barnes’s novel The Only Story (2018), though Saint says he ‘never had any reason to suspect it was anything else but [a very close friendship].’ The pair met ‘during a university holiday, or perhaps earlier in the period between school and university’, when Barnes had a temporary job at the school Laurien’s father, Titanic survivor Lawrence Beesley, ran in Northwood (Laurien seems to use a different spelling of the surname). Barnes would have been eighteen or nineteen at the time, Wade and in her early fifties. Despite the age difference, the pair became close, Wade going as far as to buy a house in Oxford while Barnes was there, and when he later moved to North London, where Barnes remains to this day, she bought a house there. His first novel Metroland (1980) is dedicated to Wade, who must have given her copy of Spain, bought in the year of publication, to Barnes.

Published 20 May 1937 in an edition of 2913 copies (reprinted two months later).

Bloomfield A14a.

2. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1948)

8vo. Publisher’s yellow cloth, spine lettered in gilt, in the pale blue dust-jacket lettered in black; pp. 126, [2]; minor toning to spine of cloth and wrapper, a touch rubbed to upper spine tip of jacket; else a bright, near fine copy.

‘[A] dialogue between a woman [Rosetta], and three men [Quant, Malin, and Emble]: the place, first a bar on Third Avenue, second, an apartment on the West Side of New York; the time an All Souls’ Night during the War’ ( from the jacket ). Dedicated to John Betjeman, The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948 and was the inspiration for Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (1949), subtitled after Auden’s poem.

Published 17 September 1948 in an edition of 3000 copies (following the US edition).

Bloomfield A29b.

3. The Shield of Achilles (1955)
8vo. Original burgundy cloth lettered in gilt to spine in yellow dust-jacket lettered in black with red ‘shield’ to front panel; pp. 80; softening to spine tips; numerous nicks, chips, and short closed tears to edges, front flap neatly price-clipped; a bright, very good copy; bookplate plate of Julian Barnes to front pastedown.

The greatest of Auden’s middle-period collections, containing, alongside the great title-poem, the ‘Bucolics’ and ‘Horae Canonicae’, two of the poet’s finest later sequences.
The book was winner of the 1956 National Book Award and was published 11 November 1955 in an edition of 4000 copies (following the US edition).

Bloomfield A35b.

4. Homage to Clio (1960)

8vo. Original burgundy cloth lettered in gilt to spine in green dust-jacket lettered in black and red, priced 12s 6d net to front flap; pp. 91, [5]; tiny nicks to upper spine and lower corner; else a bright, near-fine copy; bookplate of Julian Barnes to front pastedown, with Barnes’s ownership inscription dated ‘23. iv. 66’ in black ink to front free endpaper.

Published five years after The Shield of Achilles, Clio picks up where its predecessor left off. Measured and authoritative, these poems bear their learning and formal intricacies lightly: ‘time will go on, importantly or not, outside the borders of poetry – though it is in fact Auden who establishes and looks across those borders’ (Sean O’Brien, TLS , 1995).

Barnes has written his name and a 1966 date to the front free endpaper. By this time, he would have been well into his Modern Languages degree at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Published 8 July 1960 in an edition of 4000 copies (following the US edition).

Bloomfield A42b.

5. Thank You, Fog (1974)

8vo. Original quarter blue cloth over grey paper-covered boards, lettered in gilt to spine, in the black, grey, and white dust-jacket with Horst Tappe’s photographic portrait of Auden to rear panel, priced £1.75 net to front flap; pp. [1], 1–57, [5]; boards a touch bowed, with a little marginal fading; else near fine in a fine, bright jacket; bookplate of Julian Barnes to front pastedown, with Barnes’ ownership inscription and date, ‘MCMLXXIV’, in black ink to upper edge of front free endpaper.

Auden’s final, posthumously published collection may be the only one of the five books here that Barnes bought brand new. Loosely laid in is a short manuscript note on headed Christ Church, Oxford, notepaper (with hand-addressed envelope), from Auden to the American poet David Posner, arranging dinner: ‘Dear David: | Let’s have dinner together tonight. | Come here (Tom 2.1) at about 7.0 p.m | Wystan’.

Towards the end of his life, in February 1972, Auden moved back to his old college, Christ Church, having been offered a cottage in its grounds – the Brewhouse, now known as ‘Auden Cottage’. The reference to Tom 2.1 (Tom Quad, Staircase 2, Room 1), however, suggests the note may date from the later 1950s, when Auden was Oxford Professor of Poetry and a regular guest of the college. Among the duties that came with the post was to judge the Newdigate Prize, founded in 1806 and still awarded annually. Previous winners include Matthew Arnold (1843), Oscar Wilde (1878), James Fenton (1968) and Alan Hollinghurst (1974). In 1956, Auden’s first year as professor, the prize was awarded to Posner for his verse sequence The Deserted Altar . A signed copy of the pamphlet containing the poem, published in Oxford the same year, is also included here.

Born in New York, Posner received his BA from Kenyon College, where he majored in French, and an MA in English Literature from Harvard in 1947. He must have met Auden as an undergraduate: a copy of Auden and Isherwood’s play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), inscribed by Auden to Posner in 1941, additionally signed by Isherwood, was sold at auction in 2021. Following study at the Sorbonne and a job in French radio, Posner pursued his keen interest in archaeology, accompanying an expedition searching for a Phoenician city in Libya and working at the Palace of Minos in Crete, experiences that must have fed into his prize-winning sequence (which is described in the prefatory note as ‘an expedition eastward toward a new faith’).

In 1953, Posner returned to academia and, like Barnes after him, studied Modern Languages at Oxford. He went on to teach at the State University of New York at Buffalo, later becoming Assistant Professor of English at the University of California. Auden and Posner kept in touch, Posner later publishing an elegy for the older poet.

5. POSNER, David. The Deserted Altar (1956); not from Julian Barnes’s library.

8vo. Original stapled pale blue card wrappers, lettered in black, front panel illustrated by ‘Dario’, priced 3s. 6d. to rear panel; pp. 20; wrappers with marginal toning and fading, scattered spots to rear panel; a very good copy; presentation inscription to title page, ‘Mrs Warsbury [?] | with affect[ionate] | regards | David | June 20’ | 1956’.

‘The following is about an expedition eastward toward a new faith. However, nowhere in the poem does a definition of this new faith occur, except in terms of the deserted altar.’ ( author’s prefatory note ). The dedication is ‘For Anne Shakespeare’; whether this refers to Anne Hathaway or a friend of Posner’s is unclear.

SKU: 2124526