At the beginning of October, I drew attention to Auden's Amazing Vanishing
Dildo in "In Praise of Limestone."

At the time, I couldn't fathom why Auden had made the change, given that the
lines as originally written were relatively innocuous.

As originally printed, the lines read:

     What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
     For her son, for the nude young male who lounges
     Against a rock displaying his dildo, never doubting
     That for all his faults he is loved ...

(as printed in the _Selected_, p 185, 1979.)

After the original magazine publication (and until their reappearance the
1979 _Selected_),
the lines were revised, and printed as:

     What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
     For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
     Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
     That for all his faults he is loved ...

(as printed in the _Collected_ , p. 414, 1976)

Why would Auden make this change from an original magazine publication in
May, 1948? The words may have been risqué but are hardly extreme in the
sexual climate of America at that time.

The reason for the change lies, I think, less in the sexual than the
political context.

In 1941, Bertold Brecht left Finland and came to the United States, where he
remained until 1947.

During Brecht's time in the US, there are several connections with Auden.
(Though you might not guess this if you look in the obvious place, Edward
Mendelson's biography, _Later Auden_ - on which, see below.)

Auden and Brecht met for the first time in 1943 in New York. In 1944,
Brecht and Auden began work on an adaptation of John Webster's _The Duchess
of Malfi_, which opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York City in
October 1946. [See Auden, _Libretti_, pp. 430 ff.]

In 1948, _The Caucasian Chalk Circle_ was staged in English, in Eric
Bentley's translation, but with the lyrics translated by Auden, at Carleton
College in Minnesota.

[Actually, this is probably wrong -- it seems as if there were two separate
translations -- one by Bentley, staged in 1948, and another by Stern, with
the lyrics by Auden, being written at the same time but rejected for
production in favour of the Bentley version. But it's all a bit of a
muddle, that I can't seem to straighten out at the moment with the materials
I have to hand.]

So between 1943 and 1948, there is a degree of connection between Brecht and
Auden, a collaboration which is particularly public between 1946 and 1948.

The relevance of these connections between Brecht and Auden, and why they
may possibly explain the removal of That Dildo from "In Praise of Limestone"
, becomes clearer when we consider the reason for Brecht's departure from
America.

"In Praise of Limestone" was first published (with dildo) in May, 1948.

Less than a year earlier, in October of 1947, Brecht had precipitously left
America, the day after he testified before the Committee of Un-American
Activities.

Auden (one-time author of the since-disowned "Spain") would be in some
considerable danger of (at that time) guilt-by-association. This would make
the toning-down of "Limestone", and the removal of the dildo, make more
sense that it would otherwise. Auden, after the initial magazine
publication of the poem, was being hyper-cautious.

So we can finally blame Senator Joe McCarthy for Auden's lost dildo.

This still leaves (whether or not we accept the Brecht/McCarthy/Auden/"
Limestone" link-up) several questions.

Auden is conspicuously voluble as to why he rejects "Spain" and "September
1, 1939" from his personal canon, and why he drops the Claudel/Kipling
stanzas from "In Memory of W.B.Yeats". He is (so far as I know) singularly
silent over The Dropping of the Dildo from "In Praise of Limestone".

But it isn't only Auden who is silent here - consider his literary executor
and biographer, Edward Mendelson.

Given the importance of Brecht, and the (relative) wealth of links between
Brecht and Auden during Brecht's time in America in the early forties, I (at
 least) would expect this to be dealt with in _Later Auden_. What do we
have? Three references in total to Brecht in _Later Auden_, the longest of
which reads as follows:

"Auden began remarking to friends that he had met three great lyric poets
who were monsters: Yeats, Brecht, and Frost. He had admired and imitated all
of them, but was repelled by their cruelty and indifference to vulnerable
younger people around them, and in varying degrees he came to see in their
poetry the same sterile Promethean egoism that he now condemned in his own
earlier work." (p. 447 - the notes give this as taken from an interview in
1967.)

There is also a brief notice on p. 438 referring to Auden and Kallman's
translation of _Mahagonny_, and a footnote on p. 441 referring to Auden
taking a phrase from _Mahagonny_ - "Grub first, then ethics".

Nothing, anywhere, on the Auden/Kallman translation of _The Seven Deadly
Sins_. Nothing +whatsoever+ on the relation between Brecht and Auden in
America in the middle forties.

What does Mendelson have to say about "In Praise of Limestone"? Quite a
lot, in _Later Auden_, between pp. 292-296. Specifically, on page 293, he
addresses the dildo passage:

"It is a region not of great public works but of minor local modifications
"from weathered outcrop / To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to /
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard." (It is also the
fittest background for "the nude young male who lounges / Against a rock
displaying his dildo"-called that, instead of the name of its real
counterpart, because in this poem the body is inherently feminine and the
dildo is an object of artifice and display, like the hilltop temple and
conspicuous fountain.)"

The presence of the nude young male's dildo is obviously crucial to
Mendelson's reading of the poem. Curious, then, that all he should have to
say with respect to the textual change is a note tucked away (unsignalled,
as all Mendelson's endnotes are, in the body of the text) on p. 546:

"292 "In Praise of Limestone"; SP 184; revised in CP 540"

The dog which didn't bark in the night .

To summarise then: two separate but perhaps not distinct issues .

1) The possibility that Auden made the revision to the printed text of "In
Praise of Limestone" in May 1948 due to the circumstances surrounding Brecht
's departure from America in the wake of Brecht's being called before the
Un-American Activities Committee less than a year before Auden published the
original version of the poem; coupled with [at the time] a fairly-public
association of Brecht and Auden, signalled by their joint work at this time
in America on Webster's _Duchess_, and Auden's translation of the lyrics in
_The Caucasian Chalk Circle_.

2) Mendelson's Curious Silence over the links between Auden and Brecht,
particularly on the crucial period between 1943 and 1948.

[I'd like especially to thank Dr. Carol Barton, who drew my attention to the
significance of the date of publication of "In Praise of Limestone", and the
activities in America of Senator Joe McCarthy. Needless to say, she shouldn
't be held responsible for any infelicities or idiocies in the above post.

Caveat emptor.]

Robin Hamilton

ADDENDUM:

Humphrey Carpenter, in _W.H.Auden: A Biography_ (1981) provides fuller (and
discrepant) details of the relationship between Auden and Brecht both before
and in America. Crucially, there is the issue of just +when+ Auden obtained
his American citizenship, which would seem to suggest even +more+ reasons
for Auden being cautious around this time:

"At about this time another producer commissioned an English translation of
Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle for Broadway. It was agreed that Auden
should be responsible for it, together with James and Tania Stern. The
translation was completed, with Auden providing what were in effect entirely
fresh song-lyrics which recreated the originals in his own terms. But he
took no part in the prose translation, and Brecht complained that there was
'too much Stern and too little Auden'. The proposed production never took
place, though the Stern-Auden text, somewhat revised, was eventually
published, and became the standard English version of the play.

On 20 May 1946 Auden officially became, at last, a citizen of the United
States - after he had submitted to thorough questioning. 'I was asked
whether I'd read Karl Marx,' he told Alan Ansen. 'I answered yes.
He asked me if my wife was charging me with infidelity. . . The questions
are simply in case somebody makes an enquiry in Congress.'"

(338-339: 339. Cf. p. 425 for Auden on Brecht ["a horrid man"].
Altogether, Carpenter is more satisfactory on Brecht and Auden than
Mendelson is.)