Feldman, Matthew, Et Al., Broadcasting in The Modernist Era (2014)

Broadcasting in the Modernist Era
Historicizing Modernism
Series Editors
Matthew Feldman, Reader in Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK;
and Erik Tonning, Director, Modernism and Christianity Project,
University of Bergen, Norway
Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK
Editorial Board
Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand;
Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham,
Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department
of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English,
University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature,
University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK.
Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an

empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary
sources made available over the last decade.
Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual

European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses
established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of
intellectual contexts and working methods.
Series Titles:
Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines,
Laetitia Zecchini
Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck
Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron
Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson
Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson,
Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid
Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle
Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar
Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong
Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker
Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley
Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey
Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon
Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling
Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood
Edited by
Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Mead
L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2014
© Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, Erik Tonning and contributors 2014
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permission in writing from the publishers.
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refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Introduction
Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Mead 1
Part One Broadcasting Culture in the Modernist Era 21
1 Pub, Parlour, Theatre: Radio in the Imagination of W. B. Yeats

Charles I. Armstrong 23
2 Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: New Technology
and Flawed Power
Finn Fordham 39
3 ‘I Often Wish You Could Answer Me Back: And So Perhaps Do You!’
E. M. Forster and BBC Radio Broadcasting
Peter Fifield 57
4 Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King
The ‘Impersonation’ of Divinity: Language, Authenticity
and Embodiment
Alex Goody 79
5 T. S. Eliot on the Radio: ‘The Drama Is All in the Word’
Steven Matthews 97
6 David Jones: Christian Modernism at the BBC
Erik Tonning 113
Part Two Broadcasting Politics in the Modernist Era 135
7 Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the Politics

of Broadcasting
Randi Koppen 137
8 J. B. Priestley: By Radio to a New Britain
David Addyman 155
vi Contents
9 ‘Keeping Our Little Corner Clean’: George Orwell’s Cultural

Broadcasts at the BBC
Henry Mead 169
10 Radio Broadcasting in Fascist Italy: Between Censorship,
Total Control, Jazz and Futurism
Massimo Ragnedda 195
11 Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment
Matthew Feldman 213
12 ‘Conquering the Virtual Public’: Jean-Paul Sartre’s
La tribune des temps modernes and the Radio in France
Alys Moody 245
Afterword
The Gentle Art of Radio Broadcasting
Daniela Caselli 266
Index 271
Series Editor’s Preface
Historicizing Modernism
This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth century

literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus
stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters,
diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing
monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors
and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study
and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as
mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has
laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature.
Correspondingly, one burgeoning sub-discipline of Modernism, Beckett
Studies, features heavily here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented
by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’
authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of
supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader
intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will
be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone
Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally based exploration shall also
be included here.
A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of
intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their
critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves
be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of
individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions
of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various
reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself.
Similarly, the very notion of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and
viii Series Editor’s Preface
this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches.

On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged
by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along
the way.
Matthew Feldman
Erik Tonning
Editors’ Acknowledgement
The editors wish to thank Regent’s Park College, Oxford for kindly hosting the
original symposium where initial versions of the essays in this volume were
presented.
Introduction
Matthew Feldman,
Erik Tonning and Henry Mead
This volume explores some of the many ways in which broadcasters and their
audiences made sense of the new technology of radio in the modernist era,
which creatively challenged traditional forms of expression. As a contribution
to the Historicizing Modernism series, it contextually reconstructs a number of
artistic models for both conceptualizing and realizing the early possibilities of
what was initially called ‘wireless telegraphy’. Although not all of the authors
included in this collection are unambiguously ‘modernist’ (such as Forster,
Priestley and Orwell), the interwar arrival of broadcasting as a mass phenomenon
certainly was. As the chapters in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era emphasize, in
turn, this revolutionary device for mass communication – which, like so much
else, came of age technologically during the Great War – in effect threw down
the gauntlet not only to textual and verbal forms of mass communication like
the novel or stump speech, but also to the arts more generally.
Indeed, more than the ‘little’ or even ‘big magazines’ starting to flourish at
this time, radio broadcasting held out the promise of reaching an audience of
hundreds of thousands, and soon millions, whether ‘listening in’ via small groups
gathered around the soon-ubiquitous sets in Europe, or alone. Yet with some
important exceptions – such as the groundbreaking collection, Broadcasting
Modernism, to which much of this volume is explicitly indebted – scholars of
modernism have been reluctant to assign radio a central place in the development
of the modern arts. This is questionable for several reasons addressed in this
brief introduction. One guiding theme may, however, be identified at the outset:
the intrinsically modern embrace of broadcasting by leading European artists
helped establish an unprecedented effect that Timothy Campbell has labelled
the ‘radio imaginary’ (Campbell 2006: xiii). Whether in broadcasting ideological
2 Broadcasting in the Modernist Era
propaganda or radio drama, both the putative possibilities and constrains of this
new medium offered a rich source of energy for creative licence in the modernist
era – whether for good or for ill.
Surprisingly, though still in keeping with the many panoramic surveys of
modernism, Peter Gay’s otherwise useful overview only includes three indexed
references to ‘radio’; the first appearing in 1938 via the celebrated broadcast of H.
G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and the ‘collective hysteria’ engendered in American
audiences senses a martian invasion was under way (Gay 2007: 385). Yet as this
volume demonstrates, if amounting to less than a ‘collective hysteria’, an earlier
effect of the new medium on arts in the modernist era was transformative and,
indeed, collectively electric upon the literary imaginary. In thus ‘historicizing’ a
number of canonical writers’ attempt to connect with mass audiences through
newly formed radio companies – such as those in Britain (BBC Radio 1922);
France, Germany and the USA (PTT, Vox-Haus and NBC, respectively, 1923);
and Italy (URI 1924) – this volume aims to revisit some of the earliest artistic
conceptions, debates and strategies for broadcasting between the early 1920s
and the early 1950s.
***
It may be observed that, at the start, radio not only carried a sense of physical
transformation in the process of speaking and listening, but was also seen as
metaphysical in its communicative novelty. For instance, Jeffrey Sconce and
John Durham Peters have examined what were at first naively literal, and later
metaphoric, notions of the radio as a ‘medium’ for spirits moving through
the ‘ether’. The ‘metaphoric models’ with which modernist writers explained
broadcasting technology and its potentialities were not always consistent,
but jostled for prevalence in the popular mind; they ‘did not merely compete’
but ‘worked in creative tension to shape the culture of modernity and played out
those tensions in Modernist texts on the levels of both content and form’ (Cohen
et al 2009: 5).
Later, as broadcast networks evolved in sophistication, the radio began to be
conceived as a kind of collective consciousness, a nervous system or potential
form of spiritual union for the community. Related to these figures of speech
were, increasingly, attendant ideological commitments. In the case of the interwar
BBC, for instance, whether in advancing Reithian values or in checking the
advance of communism, the broadcasting system was cast as a powerful faculty
for the political consciousness, binding together the body politic and raising
Introduction 3
questions of whether this would be a centralized, univocal medium expressing

the government’s position (Harker 2013), or instead, as with the approach to
radio by Brecht and Benjamin in Weimar Germany, a revolutionary platform
for a plurality, even bilateral exchange, of voices (Wolf 2010: 20–25). As such,
intimately connected to this new technological environment were fundamental
questions of massification and democratization amongst peoples, in addition to
the changing position of the intellectual as educator or moral leader – now on
behalf of a very much expanded audience.
Cohen et al. (2009) take the view that this ‘radio imaginary’ was somehow
ephemeral as well as pervasive, simultaneously intangible and ubiquitous; in short,
that it was rooted in a new form distinguished by ‘the very lack of an archive’ (2).
This may be true of the aural phenomenology of live broadcasting, and indeed
of the experience of listening live – and there are limitations to the recovery of
the very earliest sound recordings. But it is the present editors’ contention that
such a view plays down the vast resources of the BBC Written Archive and other
similar collections around the world, hosting precisely the archives Cohen, Coyle
and Lewty suggest are either ephemeral or lacking with respect to modernism. By
recourse to some of these resources as well a historicizing of the role of radio in
its first three decades of dominance – before being progressively dislodged by the
advent of mass television transmission – the essays included here trace the private
or behind-the-scenes processes whereby the ‘radio imaginary’ was drafted,
consolidated, challenged and discussed (often between writer and controller).
Yet even deeper digging in the archives by leaders in the sub-field of ‘archival
modernist studies’ (e.g. Fordham, Tonning and Feldman) aids in revealing
canonical authors’ negotiations with broadcasters, their private commentaries
on the process of broadcasting or their response as listeners; in addition, it also
provides evidence of how they constructed novels, essays and other printed works
employing radio – but also film and early television – broadcasting as metaphor.
The nascent radio imaginary, its complicated birthing and the occasional
ambivalence of its creators are of central focus in the present collection of essays.
This collection thus actively participates in the larger movement in modernist
studies towards archival enquiry and empirically accurate, post-archival
theorizing and thus, more specifically, extends a historicizing turn in research
concerning technology and broadcasting. In terms of the latter, recent examples
include Elizabeth Wall and Linda Hughes’s completion of Mary Lago’s edition
of Forster’s broadcasts, as well as Jeffrey Heath’s edition of related material, both
published in 2008. Margaret Fisher has also made use of archives to shed light
on the Futurist Radio Manifesto of 1933 as well as the early radio operas of
Ezra Pound. Allan Hepburn’s recent edition on Elizabeth Bowen (2010) adopts
a similar approach, namely one that provides historical context for radio, whilst
paving the way for – not closing down – subsequent critical discussions of
authors in the modernist era that take the archive on board as crucial elements
in analysis and assessment.
Collectively, these publications represent valuable empirical work on individual
writers. However, the present study wishes to press this line of enquiry further,
and to do so comparatively, that is, to provide a discussion of a broader range of
often-interacting modernist artists in order to illustrate broadcasting’s seeming
omnipresence over a wide range of contexts and networks between the early
1920s and the early 1950s. In each of the contributors’ essays, the importance of
the empirical sources – whether through unpublished manuscripts or through
primary source collections – is foregrounded. In encouraging this approach,
the editors have aimed to substantiate and deepen these literary-historical
connections in order to empirically and interpretatively chart the development
of literary modernism as a whole. This is intended both to pave the way for
future research on radio engagements during the modernist era and to establish
– or better, remember – the important role played by artists in the evolution of
broadcasting in its most novel and formative phase.
Such a broad, empirically grounded study of the construction of the
broadcasting imaginary is in a position to significantly expand the academic
understandings on the impact of radio – and, as Fordham’s chapter on Joyce
shows, early uses of television – on literary modernism as well as its wider impact
on the oft-remarked condition of modernity. In this regard, the choice of dates
for the current study is deliberate and significant. It is noteworthy that modernist
writing greatly overlaps with the rise of wireless in the early twentieth century
as well as its post-war residua (arguably, with the rise of ‘poism’ and television
in the 1950s and especially the 1960s). Indeed, as the sum of this volume’s parts
argues, the two developments are significantly intertwined. In short, Broadcasting
in the Modernist Era seeks to further the study of broadcasting’s long-term
significance via archival manuscripts and primary sources, and crucially, to
extend what is understood by the possibilities and limits of the ‘radio imaginary’,
and concurrently of empirical approaches to the modernist era.
Accordingly, this collection’s broadest intellectual foundations lie in general
histories of broadcasting from an official or social-historical perspective,
such as John Reith’s Broadcasting Over Britain (1924), Hilda Matheson’s
Broadcasting (1933) and Rudolf Arnheim’s seminal Radio (1936). Indeed, as
Randi Koppen’s essay in this volume shows, modernists like Virginia Woolf and
Introduction 5
her husband Leonard were themselves involved from the start in publishing
and disseminating such works. In terms of the British context, Asa Briggs’s
formidable History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 5 vols (1961–1995)
remains a vital resource, whereas Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff ’s
Social History of British Broadcasting (1991), Andrew Crisell’s Introductory
History of British Broadcasting (rev. ed. 2002) and Kate Whitehead’s The
Third Programme: A Literary History (1989) provide further important
perspectives. Regarding American radio, excellent overviews are offered by
Christopher H. Sterling’s and John M. Kittross’s Stay Tuned: A Concise History
of American Broadcasting (1990) and Michele Hilmes’s Radio Voices: American
Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (1997), as well as the extensive three-volume set by
Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (1966–1970).
These are augmented by other Anglophone accounts of broadcasting on the
continent, for example in terms of Germany Daniel Gilfillan’s Pieces of Sound:
German Experimental Radio (2009); Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz’s
Hitler’s Airwaves (1997); or the panorama provided by René Wolf ’s chapter
‘Radio and Modernity’ in his The Undivided Sky (2010: 17–45). Likewise in
the French case, there are works such as Rosemary Chapman and Nicholas
Hewitt’s Popular Culture and Mass Communication in Twentieth-Century
France (1992) or Joelle Neulander’s more recent Programming National
Identity: the Culture of Radio in 1930s France (2009).
Amongst the national backdrops discussed here in terms of specific writers’
output in the modernist era, unusually, there is as yet no panoramic survey
of radio broadcasting in Italy – whether in English or in Italian – a ‘weakness
in Italian historiography’, argues Gianni Isola, due to the comparative lack of
‘archives or study centres in the field’ compounded by ‘little attention [paid] to
the fate of broadcasting in Italy’ (393). One reason for this relative dearth in the
Italian case – attended to by Ragnedda’s especially commissioned overview in
this volume – may be further explained by the circumstances in which Unione
Radiofonica Italiana was launched in December 1924. In the incisive view of
Philip Cannistraro, referring to Mussolini’s Italy: ‘It is no accident that the birth
of the totalitarian state coincided with the appearance of modern techniques
of mass communications’. Thus, ‘Fascist Italy provides the most instructive and
unique example’ whereby
totalitarian governments have been largely responsible for the initial growth of
the mass media – particularly films and the radio – in their respective countries
[ …. ] the Fascists proceeded to develop and exploit the radio as a major
instrument of their political and cultural policies. (1972: 1, X)
As the Italian case implies, a key distinction obtains in academic thinking

between ‘radio history’ and ‘radio studies’: the first consists of what Susan
Merrill Squier has called ‘internalist’ histories largely, as above, by either country
or broadcaster, for ‘the field of radio research has shifted from technological and
institutional perspectives to an attention to social context, and then gradually to
its symbolic, political and theoretical implications’ (Squier 2003: 3). The second,
a somewhat livelier field, explores the impact of the new technology, as Avery
understands it, on ‘the material conditions within which the aesthetic, social
and ethical values were transmitted, shared and contested, synchronically to
a given listening audience, and diachronically across time to later generations
of listeners’. It considers a phenomenon that shaped ‘the development of, and
dissemination of ideas about, modernist literature and arts’ (6). That is to say,
unmistakably, radio studies have been dominated by those working in the social
sciences. This is aptly reflected by D. L. LeMahieu’s A Culture for Democracy:
Mass Communications and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars
(1988), or by the range of contributions to the gold standard Journal of Radio &
Audio Media (1992–present). The latter publication addresses, according to one
of its founding editors, ‘the full sweep of radio history from the 1870s to the
present’, thus considering radio as a developing science and technology as well
as a set of institutional practices. Similarly, the 1992 Radio-Sound issue of
Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture marked the welcome
expansion of the field from science research to textual and cultural analysis.
Recent work in radio studies, such as Tim Crook’s Radio Drama (1999) and
Sam Halliday’s Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and
the Arts (2013), oftentimes makes reference to new creative forms for the radio,
particularly during the modernist era.
The opening out of radio studies, described above, has additionally involved
situating it within the larger context of a shift towards phenomenological human
experience resulting from a range of technological innovations. In addressing
these experiences, this volume therefore registers the significance of some works:
Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (1983); Marshall
Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1983);
and Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1985; trans. 1990), as
well as John Carey’s helpfully contextual Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and
Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939 (1992). Likewise, Cecelia
Tichi’s Shifting Gears (1987) records moments of overlap, in popular and literary
discourse, between technological metaphors and earlier figures of speech, thus
Introduction 7
capturing a moment of epistemic transition. In stark contrast, R. L. Ruzky’s High

Techne (1999) traces the rise of what Adorno termed ‘instrumental rationality’
via the application of modern technology.
Moving more squarely into the preserve of cultural history, ‘sound theory’ is
central to two crucial studies on the theoretical implications of radio’s treatment
of sound, namely Wireless Imagination (1992), edited by Douglas Kahn and
Gregory Whitehead, which includes new essays by scholars, accompanied by
excerpts from significant primary texts; as well as Sound States (1997), edited
by Adelaide Morris. By applying sound theory to cultural production during
the modernist era, these works set an important historiographical precedent
for Broadcasting in the Modernist Era. However, their approach provides just
one set of ideas amongst several that overlap within chapters in the proposed
collection, and do little to engage with canonical writers of the modernist era.
Similarly John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999) represents the kind
of rich cultural history to which this edited volume contributes, as does Jeffrey
Sconce’s Haunted Media (2000). Both of the latter texts pay close attention to the
metaphor associating radio broadcasting with spiritualist notions of the ‘ether’
and ‘communication’ between planes of existence – a persistent notion that
contains recoverable traces well into the 1930s. More broadly, a convergence of
the historical, social science approach of earlier studies, an interest in the impact
of technology on modernity and in sound theory, alongside the treatment
of radio as, in part, a textual form, are all apparent in Susan Merrill Squier’s
aforementioned collection Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio
Culture. Growing out of a series of interlinked panels at the MLA conference,
this 2003 edited study treats radio as a material and cultural production – even
if not consistently empirical and historicizing in the manner attempted here – by
‘incorporating the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, science studies,
and feminist theory, along with the more established field of radio history and
the new field of radio studies’ (3).
There have been numerous, scattered single-author studies of modernists,
exploring the way literary writers altered their practice or responded to the
radio. This final category tends to consider the deployment of radio in the
modernist era alongside the more literary aspects of such authors’ thinking and
indeed oeuvres in published essays, correspondence or works of fiction. These
include Leonard Doob’s edited Ezra Pound Speaking (1978), W. J. West’s editions
of George Orwell’s broadcasts and commentaries (Orwell 1985a; b) and David
Smith’s closely researched account of H. G. Wells’s work for the BBC (1986), the
latter updated by Todd Avery (2006). Other important studies in this vein include
Jeremy Silver’s long essay on W. B. Yeats at the BBC (1987), Kate Whitehead’s and
Todd Avery’s work on Bloomsbury broadcasters (1990 and 2006, respectively)
and Mary Lago’s work, both alone (1990) and with Linda Hughes and Elizabeth
Wall (2008), on E. M. Forster, supplemented by Jeffrey Heath’s study of Forster,
Creator as Critic (2008). In terms of other modernist writers, breakthrough
studies include Ralph Maud’s edition of Dylan Thomas’s broadcasts (1991);
Jeffrey Mehlman’s book on Walter Benjamin’s broadcasts for children (1993)
and much more theoretically, Daniel Tiffany’s study of Imagism’s affinities with
radio technology (1995). From a more empirical perspective Michael Coyle’s
extensive work on T. S. Eliot (1997, 2001 and 2006) set an important precedent
for research on modernist broadcasting that joins theoretical and archival
research in a manner closely chiming with the essays in this collection.
Brendan Barrington’s edition of Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts for Nazi
Germany (2000) and those transmitted against the Third Reich by Thomas
Mann under the title Listen, Germany! Twenty-five radio messages to the German
people over BBC (1943); Douglas Kerr’s more recent analysis of Orwell (2002);
Margaret Fisher’s work on Pound’s radio operas (2002), including a detailed
analysis of his relations with the BBC; Sarah Wilson’s analysis of Gertrude
Stein’s radio work, first published in Modernism/Modernity (2004) and again in
Broadcasting Modernism (2006); and Allan Hepburn’s edition of broadcasts by
Elizabeth Bowen (2010), further and collectively demonstrate the range, if not
comparability, of individual authors engaging with the radio during the pivotal
years. The more recent of these studies tend to share two dimensions stressed by
Broadcasting in the Modernist Era. As noted above, radio studies have become
increasingly hospitable to literary and cultural perspectives, often incorporating
more general accounts of how technological innovation has contributed to
the modernist era. A theoretical awareness of the impact of technology upon
the age, together with the ‘archival turn’ in modernist studies, points up the
exciting potential of bringing these concerns to bear in the analysis of modernist
literature specifically. Building on this work, these overlapping concerns
regarding electronic communications and archival scholarship are even more
firmly brought together here.
In particular relation to modernism, the most relevant of these studies is
surely the 2009 volume published by the University Press of Florida, Broadcasting
Modernism. Lewty, Rae Cohen and Coyle’s collection of essays showcases
research on radio modernism by some of the leading literary chroniclers of the
broadcasting revolution. The first part of their collection is concerned with the
Introduction 9
‘radio imaginary’, that is, the metaphoric models employed to make sense of the
impact of wireless technology. The essays collected in Broadcasting Modernism
deal superbly with the decisive impact of radio technology on modernist writing,
beginning with the potency of its initial invention in the minds of both popular
and literary writers (Sconce considers its impact on popular fiction, for example);
its impact over a longer period on society, politics and the arts; the identification
of the ‘popular listener’, and not least, the well-known modernist ambivalence
to this phenomenon. The effects that broadcasters sought to achieve through
often idiosyncratic formal innovation are described in Lewty’s theoretical text
on Pound and Campbell’s more manuscript-based piece on the Futurists. Each
of these chapters helpfully draws out the particular appeal of radio technology to
literary modernists. Given the welcome readability and importance of this text,
from the methodology to canonical single-author studies and the purposely
similar title, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era is thus self-consciously swimming
in this landmark study’s impressive wake.
All the same, it is still worth noting the distinctive strengths and limitations
of Broadcasting Modernism’s employment of variegated methodologies. The
current collection, in contrast, advances a consistently historicizing and
empirical approach in each chapter. Likewise, Broadcasting Modernism’s series
of case studies juxtaposes the American and British modernist experiences of
radio over a similar period – raising another key difference with the present
volume, which incorporates European case studies from Italy and France as
well. Yet in keeping with Cohen et al. (for instance in Steven Connor’s essay
on Beckett’s late 1950s and early 1960s radio dramas), this volume also seeks to
look beyond the 1945 watershed that book-ends much criticism in modernist
studies. All in all, then, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era is an addition to
the small number of book-length studies attempting to note parallels and
convergences with respect to the impact of radio on literature between roughly
the end of the Great War and the first thaw of the Cold War.
***
In reflecting the increasing turn in recent scholarship towards primary sources

as a means for revisiting academic understandings of modernism – no less than
their contexts and broader influences – this collection necessarily employs a
mix of familiar and unknown sources. Of the latter, an enormous and strikingly
underused cache of microfilm and manuscripts is available at the BBC Written
Archive Centre (WAC), augmented by the more familiar archive of the
BBC’s Listener magazine (now available online). In terms of the Anglophone

modernism prioritized in this volume, the BBC WAC represents a treasure trove
of texts by literally scores of modernist writers, recording their engagement
with the new technologies of broadcasting, and revealing the complex ways
in which their writing responded to, accommodated or rejected – but never
ignored – this new and pervasive technology between the 1920s and the 1950s.
Contributors to the present volume have made use of these materials as a starting
point for exploring a broad range of modernist writing – from non-fiction to
poetry. Some have drawn together material from multiple collections, using,
for example, institutional archives alongside individual writers’ private papers
in order to substantiate particular case studies. On the whole then, in terms
of sources used, Broadcasting in the Modernist Era principally embraces not
only the texts of spoken-word radio broadcasts, as well as supporting historical
materials (e.g. correspondence, minutes and other paperwork regarding the
planning and delivery of such broadcasts), but also post-archival criticism and
interpretation based on previously published primary source collections and
documents.
Although arbitrary distinctions are invariably a sticky business, the above
source-based methodology is broken into two broad areas of exploration here.
The first subsection is that of broadcasting culture, understood broadly here
to incorporate technology, aesthetics and religion. Commencing this volume’s
essays is Charles Armstrong on W. B. Yeats’s series of readings for the BBC in
the 1930s. The technological challenges posed to the poet, by this time in his 70s,
were negotiated with surprising enthusiasm, not least on account of the promise
held out by the mass dissemination of his lyric poetry and, as Armstrong shows,
more autobiographical prose. In tropes to be taken up in many of the following
essays, Yeats engaged some of the creative opportunities posed by the early
development of radio, whether poetically – through the use of metaphor, or
that of disembodiment and ‘meta-drama’ – no less than physically, as through
recourse to musical accompaniment, or in challenging traditional literary genre
by the ‘paradoxical combination of the solitary and the public’ offered by radio.
Similarly, the possibilities of early television ‘bloomed’ in Joyce’s final spasms
of writing Finnegans Wake, Finn Fordham contends, a consideration largely
overlooked in modernist studies generally, and in Joyce studies in particular.
‘Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: New technology and flawed power’
further recalls that radio was not the only nascent mass technology in the 1930s.
Although unique in this collection in dealing with interwar television, Fordham’s
essay is nonetheless in close keeping with other chapters here by relying upon
Introduction 11
primary sources – in this case Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ notebooks from the
1920s and the 1930s, as well as the neglected historical context of early television
broadcasting – to advance a groundbreaking argument. Put simply, could Shem
be metaphorically identified with television? It is a tantalizing proposition; but
at the very least, Joyce’s clear interest in television, and its incorporation into late
drafts of his long-standing ‘Work in Progress’, signals a wider ambivalence by
modernist writers about the perceptual changes engendered by emergent, mass
technologies on the eve of World War II.
If Joyce was concerned by the potential for televisual ‘violence’ upon genres
of traditional representation, less avant-garde artists were often more optimistic
about the collaborative possibilities of broadcasting. In returning to radio, whilst
maintaining a close proximity to primary sources, Peter Fifield’s contribution
of E. M. Forster’s long-available radio broadcasts for the BBC likewise breaks
new interpretative ground. In switching culture stations from novels to
broadcasting, Forster’s engagement with the radio from 16 July 1928 extended
over 35 years, offering contemporary social criticism as well as channelling
some of his creativity into BBC speeches for British and Indian audiences. In
revealing a ‘profound attentiveness to the particular properties of the medium’ –
technological, political and doubtless creative – Forster’s use of radio, according
to Fifield, extended to an imaginative engagement with his listening audience. Yet
it also, equally unusually, opened onto a disarming intimacy and self-reflective
kind of fireside chattiness that worked against the monologic authority that was,
equally, at one with Forster’s broader liberal individualism. These values were
sorely tested by the crucible of war in Britain (and of course elsewhere), which
surely goes some way towards explaining the ‘middlebrow’ writer and detective
novelist Dorothy L. Sayers’s, radio play The Man Born to Be King. With the first
part initially transmitted to a hostile reception in late 1941, shortly after the
twelfth instalment of this updated life of Jesus Christ in October 1942, plans
were already afoot for the rebroadcast later that same year. This popularity only
increased during the rest of the war years and thereafter; in fact, as Alex Goody
points out, it has become such a ‘staple of religious broadcasting’ for the BBC that
all parts were again rebroadcast by the BBC as recently as Spring 2011, for Lent
and Easter. Through incisive engagement with holdings at the Written Archives
Centre in Caversham, England, the BBC’s long-standing interest in Christian-
themed broadcasts is connected to the technological promise and dramatic
challenges of Sayer’s portrayal of the life of Jesus via modern language, indeed
even contemporaneous slang. The results were not only a triumph of biblical
adaptation but, as Goody maintains, a greater sense of realism in representing
the life and death of Christ at a time when everyday life and death were closer
than ever before for a nation in the midst of total war.
The final two essays in this section, by Steven Matthews on T. S. Eliot and by
Erik Tonning on the Welsh painter and poet David Jones, both take up ‘Christian
modernism’ as mediated by the BBC, amongst other key themes in this volume,
over the longue durée of radio broadcasting on either side of World War II. The
first, ‘T.S. Eliot on the Radio: “The Drama is All In the Word” ’, also employs
published radio broadcasts in both The Listener and in extant collections in order
to reconsider key aspects of Eliot’s oeuvre between the 1930s and the 1950s.
Matthews cannily deploys these to explore the role of radio voice and the ‘nature
of culture’ – not least Early Modern culture in Britain – across Eliot’s more than
100 BBC broadcasts during these years. The result is yet another challenge to
critical consensus, in this case through focus upon the radiogenetic qualities in
Eliot’s use of idiom, allusion and, in particular, the revivifying possibilities of
language once transposed to contemporaneous broadcasting. In terms of both
speaking and listening, Eliot’s avowedly poetic approach to radio, even when
dealing with Dryden, Donne and other historical-literary subjects, was an
avowedly rhetorical and up-to-date ‘speaking to the noise of the modern world’.
In the case of David Jones, the conservative, Catholic artist and poet championed
by the BBC, an enormous cache of previously unseen manuscripts is unearthed
by Erik Tonning. Tonning hones in on a talk entitled ‘Wales and the Crown’, first
transmitted on 23 July 1953 for the BBC’s Welsh Regional Service, and repeated
on the Third Programme (which was launched in 1946). Although Jones remains
largely outside the canon of British modernists today, Tonning makes clear that
this was most emphatically not the case with the BBC either before or, especially,
after World War II. In fact, their profound ‘sympathy’ with Jones’s work and his
broader ‘cultural theory’ – most notably in the case of ‘Christian modernism’ – is
a theme that overlapped with much of the BBC’s ethos in its first three decades.
As with Eliot, radio could be the site of both innovation and preservation of
Christian tradition for Jones, whose rare post-war broadcasts were greeted with
almost-unparalleled enthusiasm by BBC producers like his friend and fellow
Catholic Harman Grisewood. One key reason for this, Tonning argues, was
Jones’s attention to existing British values and traditions and the ammunition this
provided in staunching public criticism of the overly ‘elitist’ Third Programme;
but most of all, the BBC’s and Jones’s shared hope that cultural broadcasting – if
done properly – might be able ‘to fulfil its lofty aim of revitalising modern culture’.
The segue into the second part of this volume, more squarely concerned
with politics – ideology, propaganda and, in part, the backdrop of total war – is
Introduction 13
provided by Virginia Woolf ’s attack on ‘middlebrow’ broadcasting at the BBC.

‘Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Broadcasting’
argues that, along with her husband Leonard, Virginia’s view of radio was
intensely political – one manifested in her diaries and letters, essays and even
fiction – particularly in her writings from the 1920s and the 1930s. As Randi
Koppen notes, this extended not only to the content of the BBC’s not-leftwing-
enough radio output, but also to aural developments and modern broadcasting
technologies more widely. For both Woolfs, but especially for the canonical
modernist, the flipside to the BBC’s reactionary politics was the genuine
communicative possibilities held out by radio technology; and this, Koppen
posits, was of real significance to Virginia’s later artistic production. Accordingly,
culture and politics could never be so easily separated at the BBC, or for other
national broadcasters; a theme also taken up by the Woolfs’s publishing arm at
this time, The Hogarth Press. In short, whatever the applicability of the modern
radio for literature and the other arts, a new cultural phenomenon of moulding
public opinion via broadcasting was intrinsic to the power and (ir)responsibility
of both national broadcasting and individual broadcasters. This was to be tested
ever more severely in the cauldron of war by propagandists on both sides of the
‘fourth front’ provided by radio during World War II.
Unlike Woolf ’s three BBC broadcasts, George Orwell’s career as broadcaster
presents a sample case of a leftist who, though disgusted by British imperialism,
offered his services on the home front. At first loath to participate in the Allied
war effort, Orwell changed heart on realizing the scale of the threat posed by the
Axis. Once in post, Orwell constantly sought to rationalize a sizeable intellectual
commitment to an establishment he despised. A major factor in this attitude was
a strain of patriotic sentiment that entered Orwell’s writing in the first months of
the war, as witnessed in The Lion and the Unicorn. His renewed love of English
culture, taste and freedom of expression – despite its foundations in a deeply
unequal society – became a theme of his earliest BBC broadcasts, which in turn
earned him a permanent post at the Indian Service. As Mead demonstrates,
Orwell’s complex of ideological compromises as a broadcaster is illuminated
by his preference for cultural and educational broadcasting over news reports,
and his use of literary discussion to advance his ambivalent position somewhere
between anti-fascism, anti-imperialism and a quite intuitive sense of English
cultural character as fundamentally at odds with totalitarianism. Many of these
themes are equally in evidence in David Addyman’s study of J. B. Priestley’s
justly famous Postscripts, registering some 16 million auditors in 1940 and 1941.
If Orwell was willing to look backwards to champion that which should be
preserved amongst British – and more widely, liberal democratic – values under
threat by the Axis powers, Priestley insisted upon looking forward to a more
equitable post-war settlement between the classes. This repeatedly brought
him into sharp conflict with functionaries at ‘the BBC, at the MOI and in
the higher echelons of government’. Yet as stressed by thoughtful recourse to
Priestley’s Postscripts and contextual documentation, ‘J.B. Priestley: By Radio to
a New Britain’, there remains much more to tell in this oft-recounted encounter.
Foremost amongst Priestley’s broadcasts was his prominent location of British
culture as an engine for the ‘new Jerusalem’ to be created after World War II.
Addyman details several of these consistent strategies, from employing diverse
authors in the war effort to using his broadcasts in attempting to create an active
and engaged populace. In this way, Priestley’s contribution to the British home
front was about far more than resolve, or even socio-political reconstruction, but
about ‘spreading new ideas’ via his broadcasts in order to champion ‘the key role
that imagination and creativity’ needed to make life more rich, more rewarding,
in the wake of the expected Allied victory.
In contrast, public broadcasting in Italy co-evolved with an increasing Fascist
totalitarianism from the early 1920s into the late 1930s. As Massimo Ragnedda’s
contextual discussion of this period clarifies, Italy had much ground to make up
on other ‘great powers’ in the sphere of radio. This was partly achieved on the
verge of World War II through Fascist control and propaganda – both cultural
and political in scope – ultimately under the umbrella of the Ministry of Popular
Culture (only formally established in 1937, despite several cognate predecessors).
Nonetheless, the development of totalitarian broadcasting in Fascist Italy
reveals a number of surprises poorly served by Italian historiography to date,
principal amongst them the recourse to ‘light entertainment’ such as tango
and, in particular, jazz. If this American import seemed totally alien to an Axis
dictatorship emphasizing ultra-nationalism and increasingly Nazi-style racism,
the pseudonymizing of Louis Armstrong to ‘Luigi Braccioforte’ and Benny
Goodman to ‘Beniamino Buonomo’ attempted to square this unseemly circle. So
too with programmes directed at the peasantry in the south, Ragnedda argues,
and all manner of propagandistic paternalism in Italy’s ill-starred embrace of
radio during Mussolini’s rule. Moving this discussion into the war-torn 1940s –
which witnessed little in the way of victories for Italian Fascism – Feldman turns
this national focus towards one self-consciously propagandizing, expatriate
American: Ezra Pound. In revisiting the critical literature on Pound’s radio
speeches for the Axis during World War II, Feldman finds a striking variance
between the published record and the thousands of radio items contained in
Introduction 15
Pound’s archives held by Yale University, the FBI and Department of Justice,
as well as papers housed in the National Archives of both Britain and the USA.
This deluge of material has been overwhelmingly, and troublingly, neglected in
wide-ranging discussions of the ‘Pound Case’ between the poet’s indictment for
treason in July 1943 and late 2013, when Feldman’s study of material appeared
with Palgrave under the title Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945. In
fundamentally challenging the historiographical consensus formed over these
seven decades, ‘Pound and Radio Treason: An empirical reassessment’ provides
a look at Pound’s wartime years through archived speeches, correspondence and
even payments in forcefully arguing that this period was less one of naïveté or
madness than one of informed and committed propagation for the Axis cause –
one reaching its apogee with Pound’s enthusiastic 1942 reading and subsequent
application of Hitler’s chapter in Mein Kampf, tellingly entitled ‘Propaganda and
Organisation’.
That radio retained a cultural power after the war is attested by earlier essays
on Jones and Eliot, but is given narrower focus in the concluding essay in this
volume by Alys Moody, considering the case of post-war France. Moody is
particularly concerned with the political contretemps sparked by the group
informally headed by Jean-Paul Sartre. During the short-lived weekly broadcasts
of this programme over three months in 1947, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other writers from the Les temps modernes stable
provided a ‘semi-scripted’ discussion forum that, in Moody’s estimation,
brought together ‘a number of the defining characteristics of French radio in
the post-war period’. These included the changing role of state intervention
vis-à-vis France’s national broadcaster, Radiodiffusion; the extent to which
trenchant criticism of French economic and political decision-making had on
the body politic; and more narrowly, the immense cultural capital wielded by
the now-communist Sartre and his so-called collaborators. The power of radio
was reciprocally appreciated by the Les temps moderns group, who believed they
were sacked from orders at the highest level for refusing to toe the newly formed
Schumann government’s line. With familiar use of primary sources to drive home
a revisionist reading of post-war French radio, ‘ “Conquering the virtual public”:
Jean-Paul Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes and the Radio in France’ thus
underscores perhaps the principal thematic contention running throughout
Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, namely, that radio played an enormous role
in the European politics and culture before, during and after World War II. That
literary elites in various countries played an instrumental role in this swift and
potentially revolutionary development only serves to reinforce the contributors’
collective call for more research on this pressing area of both modernist studies
and contemporary cultural history. In her lapidary Afterword, Daniella Caselli
reflects upon these themes, in addition to advancing some insightful empirical
materials of her own. These drive home the very newness, indeed strangeness, of
radio during these formative decades. This is not only the case with culture and
politics, but as Caselli notes in conclusion, radio constituted a ‘new art’ for the
masses in and of itself. It may have been seen by some as overly ‘highbrow’ or at
times too ‘middlebrow’, but it was an unmistakeable fixture of the modern age,
one demanding attention from literary artists no less than the wo/man on the
street. It is this promising legacy, only at the beginning of its cultural recovery in
modernist studies, that similarly demands the attention of all scholars working
in the field.
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Introduction 17
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Introduction 19
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Part One
Broadcasting Culture
in the Modernist Era
1
Pub, Parlour, Theatre

Radio in the Imagination of W. B. Yeats
Charles I. Armstrong
University of Agder
On 8 February 1937, dismayed by the poor quality of a BBC broadcast of his

poems, W. B. Yeats wrote an abject letter to the BBC Talks Producer, George
Barnes. He described the broadcast as a ‘fiasco’, and lamented that his ‘old bundle’
of ‘tricks’ had proved to be ‘useless’.1 The recording had been made on the stage
of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, with readings and songs by John Stephenson
and Rita Mooney, and Yeats had thought that everything had come off nicely
on the day. It did not, however, come across very well on the radio. Casting
himself as a dated, hapless Prospero, Yeats was disconsolate: ‘Every human
sound turned into the groans, roars, bellows, of a wild [beast]. I recognize that
I am a fool & there shall be no more broad cast [sic] verse from the Abbey stage
if I can prevent it’. Accompanying sound effects had seemed ‘very stirring’ on
the stage, but – in an image that showed the humiliation felt by the 71-year-old
poet – ‘on the wireless it was a school-boy knocking with the end of a pen-
knife, or a spoon’. The anecdote reveals how fragile a fit there was between the
expectations and techniques of an established and elderly poet, on the one hand,
and the technological challenges of a new mass medium on the other. Yeats was,
however, not terminally put off by this experience, and went on to produce more
broadcasts the same year. This is reflective of a more overarching pattern in his
career: Yeats was never averse to risk, and would rather court ignominious failure
than settle into too well-established patterns of composition and performance.
Indeed, the image of a poet who discovers that his old ‘tricks’ have become
‘useless’ found a celebrated parallel later the same year, when Yeats began the
writing of ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’: there, the capsizing of the poetic
process becomes the theme of a self-reflective immersion into the foundations
of artistic activity, as a classic poem rises like a phoenix out of its own ashes.
Yeats’s first BBC broadcast, an introduction to a performance of his

translation of King Oedipus, was aired on 8 September 1931. The previous year
Yeats’s friend and champion, the Poet Laureate John Masefield, had extolled
the virtues of radio for granting a larger public access to live poetry readings
(Schuchard 2008: 335). Yeats, too, was intrigued by the possibility of reaching
new audiences. Over the next few years, he repeatedly returned to work for the
BBC. Although not all were actually broadcast, he prepared 12 manuscripts
specifically for radio between 1931 and 19382:
1. ‘Oedipus the King’ (broadcast by BBC Belfast on 8 September 1931).

2. ‘Reading of Poems’ (broadcast by the BBC National Programme on
8 September 1931).
3. ‘Poems about Women’ (broadcast by the BBC National Programme on
10 April 1932).
4. ‘The Growth of a Poet’ (broadcast by BBC Belfast on 17 March 1934;
published in The Listener, 4 April 1934).
5. ‘The Irish Literary Movement’ (broadcast by Radio Éireann on
12 October 1935).
6. ‘Modern Poetry’ (broadcast by the BBC on 11 October 1936).
7. ‘Abbey Theatre Broadcast’ (broadcast by Radio Éireann on 1 February 1937).
8. ‘In the Poet’s Pub’ (broadcast by the BBC on 2 April 1937).
9. ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’ (broadcast by the BBC on 22 April 1937).
10. ‘My Own Poetry’ (broadcast by the BBC on 3 July 1937).
11. ‘My Own Poetry Again’ (broadcast by the BBC National Programme on
29 October 1937).
12. ‘I Became an Author’ (text for a BBC radio programme that was not
broadcast; published in The Listener on 4 August 1938).
Some of this work can be interpreted as a hands-on continuation of the radio

dissemination of Yeats’s work, which had already been carried out – without any
personal contribution from Yeats himself – during the preceding years, starting
with a performance of the play The Hour Glass on 4 July 1926.3 The 11 October
1936 broadcast, where Yeats spoke about modern poetry, is of a more critical
nature and belongs in the company of his essays and the preface to the 1936
Oxford Book of Modern Verse. A later broadcast that was not actually aired, but
which was published in the Listener on 4 August 1938 as ‘I Became an Author’, is
akin to the autobiographical prose that Yeats had been intermittently producing
since 1914. The body of work in evidence here is, therefore, of a diverse kind:
Yeats did not use radio for any single purpose, and seemed to approach it as
Radio in the Imagination of W. B. Yeats 25
a means of publication analogous (but by no means identical) to that of the

printed word. It was, however, as a medium for the live performance of his
poetry that his most interesting forays into radio work took place, and it was also
through encounters with radio in this guise – as a specific channel for the poetry
reading – that he was forced to reflect upon the singular form of the medium.
This essay will use Yeats’s perspective on the peculiarities of radio to scrutinize
the relationship between the poet and his listeners, as well as the role of genre
and the relationship between poetry and music (and, by extension, between
sense and sound). Contrary to recent work that has stressed the analogy
between Yeats’s radio work and esoteric mediumship,4 I will explore a different
tack in showing how the radio broadcasts brought up issues and techniques
Yeats was familiar with not just due to public readings of his poetry, but also
through his work for the theatre. The theatre, though, is only one kind of
imagined space conjured up by Yeats in this context: the virtuality of the contact
the medium established with its audience forced this major poet to come up
with a varied set of metaphors, in order to make sense of this new mode of
mass communication. Confronted with the strange new beast of radio, Yeats
effectively tried to formulate what it struck him as being – and what it could be –
in terms of spaces and activities that were more familiar. This was an exploratory
activity, engaged in unearthing the possibilities of the medium in much the way
that poets – according to Paul Ricoeur – use poetic metaphor to bring about
‘new ways of being in the world, of living there, and of projecting our innermost
possibilities onto it’ (Ricoeur 1976: 60). Obviously fascinated by radio, Yeats let
his developing thoughts concerning its potential and pitfalls both inform and
seep into the actual work he prepared for transmission. Towards the end of the
essay, the political stakes of the Irish poet’s cooperation with the BBC will be
addressed. Throughout, there will be a focus on how Yeats forcefully brought his
own contexts and techniques to bear – by both extending and modifying their
use – in order to facilitate his encounter with an unfamiliar medium.
When he started his radio work, Yeats was an experienced and popular live
performer of his poetry. It was therefore natural for him to reflect on the difference
between the face-to-face encounter with his audience, in the traditional reading,
and the more mediated encounter that took place in the radio broadcast. Seen
from the vantage point of the performer, the difference was not a flattering one
for radio. After his second broadcast, a recitation of his own poems on ‘An Irish
Programme’ on 8 September 1932, Yeats pointed out that ‘the microphone, a little
oblong of paper like a visiting card, is a poor substitute for a crowded hall’.5 The
speaker loses the sense of spectacle and space, and an impersonal object replaces
the community of the live performance. The ‘visiting card’ simile also signals a
suspicion of superficiality: without the close proximity of bodies, the encounter
risks amounting to no more than a passing exchange of formal conventionalities.
Yeats was thus not oblivious to the implicit limitations of the medium, which
could easily be glossed as reflective of the limitations of modernity.6 Thankfully,
however, his analysis did not stop there. His first comments on radio show a
fascination with how alienation is paradoxically accompanied with a sense
of intimacy. From early on in his career, Yeats had partaken in a modern
obsession with crowds: he observed how the masses acted according to their
own singular will, and could be influenced – for instance through symbols –
through particular literary and demagogic techniques. As Marjorie Howes has
shown, Yeats’s early experiments with drama were in part driven from a desire to
convert the passive susceptibility of the crowd into a living, acting community.7
Later, disillusionment with the Abbey Theatre led him to eschew large, public
stagings of his plays, as his experiments with the conventions of Japanese Noh
theatre drove him to cultivate a form that had ‘no need of mob or press’ to pay
its way – an ‘aristocratic form’, which could be performed ‘in a room for so little
money that forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price’ (Yeats 2007: 163).
When Yeats prepared his radio broadcasts, he was forced to reconsider
the prospect of communicating with large crowds in performance – and he
envisaged that radio could do so without giving up on the sense of concentrated
intimacy that characterized his later drama. Radio’s paradoxical combination of
the solitary and the public fascinated him. This is evident in statements made
to local press after his second broadcast (Schuchard 2008: 339, 342), and it also
became central to the framing of his 10 April 1932 broadcast, titled ‘Poems about
Women’. In the introduction to the latter, Yeats reveals that he has been unsure
about what kind of poems are appropriate to read on the radio. When his close
friend and former lover Olivia Shakespeare recommended his reading poems
about women, he had been sceptical about performing personal texts in such a
public setting. Yeats’s own subsequent counter-argument to such an objection
reiterates the parodic description of the poet’s encounter with the microphone,
but does so in order to stress the peculiar possibilities of the medium:
Then I remembered that I would not be reading to a crowd; you would all be
listening singly or in twos and threes; above all that I myself would be alone,
speaking to something that looks like a visiting card on a pole; that after all
it would be no worse than publishing love poems in a book. Nor do I want to
disappoint that old friend of mine for I am sure that she has had her portable
wireless brought to her room, that she is at this moment listening to find out if I
have taken her advice. (Yeats 2000: 234)
The poet, then, is spared his blushes because he is alone: unlike what is the
case for a public reading in an auditorium, this medium depersonalizes the
encounter between author and audience in a way that renders self-censorship
unnecessary. Thus impersonality brings with it a broader range of opportunities,
enabling the writer to transgress intersubjective norms and conventions that are
otherwise in force. Yeats compares this to the effect of the written word, and as
such this passage relates to Jacques Derrida’s claim that the writing and space
of literature constitute ‘a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say
everything’ (Derrida 1992: 36). Concomitant with the modern freedom of the
literary word comes an idealization of the addressee as a being that transcends
all existing members of the audience. Derrida sees this reader as being inherent
in the iterability of the mark, whereas Yeats more concretely identifies him in the
idealized figure named in the title of the ‘The Fisherman’. Yeats concluded a St.
Patrick’s Night broadcast from Belfast on 17 March 1934 with this particular
poem, which imagines an ideal reader ‘who does not exist,/A man who is but a
dream’ (Yeats 1987: 348). Whilst Yeats celebrates and sees the inherent potential
of the impersonal dimension in literary communication, in the ‘Poems about
Women’ broadcast this dimension is nevertheless reined in by his linking it to an
ongoing communication with one particular person: the public encounter with
the anonymous listener is overlaid with the reference to (the unnamed) Olivia
Shakespear, ensuring – in a manner reminiscent of a personal dedication –
that the broadcast also is a personal, even intimate, affair. The effect is further
complicated by the fact that readers of poetry traditionally are invited to identify
with the intimate addressees of lyric love poetry: members of Yeats’s audience
might have felt that they were excluded from the personal intercourse being
staged on the air, but some would also intuitively have identified with one or
both parties involved.
By bringing up love poetry in this way, Yeats showed he was conscious of
how a new medium would raise questions concerning the use of traditional
genres. Having consummate command of the formal conventions of poetry, he
was acutely aware of how historical change and circumstance necessarily affect
the kind of utterances that are apposite for poetry. But the opposite is also true,
as ‘genre is not just a matter of codes and conventions, but … also calls into play
systems of use, durable social institutions, and the organization of physical space’
(Frow 2006: 12). With regard to Yeats’s radio broadcasts, one of the most striking
features is the predominance of the ballad genre: this is particularly emphatic
in the two broadcasts from April 1937, ‘In the Poet’s Pub’ and ‘In the Poet’s
Parlour’.8 These programmes included not only ballads by Yeats, but also several
written by English poets. As the title of these broadcasts shows, the ballad
does indeed bring with it associations concerning ‘the organization of physical
space’: stressing intimacy rather than solitude, these titles elide the distance
separating the poet and his listeners, imaginatively recasting the setting as a
convivial and communal one. Thus the first of the two includes a passage where
Yeats directly addresses his audience as follows: ‘I want you to imagine yourself
in a Poets’ Pub. There are such pubs in Dublin and I suppose elsewhere. You are
sitting among poets, musicians, farmers and labourers’ (Yeats 2000: 267). This
act of prescribed, collective imagination recalls a similar moment in Yeats’s first
broadcast, where he had asked listeners preparing for a performance of King
Oedipus to ‘try and call up not the little Abbey Theatre but an open-air Greek
theatre with its high-pillared stage, and yourselves all sitting tier above tier upon
marble seats in some great amphitheatre cut out of a hillside’ (Yeats 2000: 220).
The transposition to another time and place for the Greek play was of course
not a simple one, Yeats admitted, ‘as I have never heard a play broadcasted I do
not know whether I shall succeed in calling into my imagination that ancient
theatre’.
The slightly nostalgic flavour of the reference to ‘poets, musicians, farmers and
labourers’ in ‘In a Poet’s Pub’ seems to imply that Yeats is engaged in conjuring up
not only another space, but also another time: as Emily C. Bloom stresses in her
reading of ‘The Curse of Cromwell’ in the context of its first public appearance
in a radio recitation of 1937, there is at work here a kind of figurative mourning,
on Yeats’s side, for ‘the loss of the society’ that once supplied the typical ballad
singer ‘with patronage, friendship, and an ear for his poetry’ (Bloom 2011: 240).
Similarly, the fictive casting of the next broadcast in a ‘Poet’s Parlour’ – where
there is ‘a beautiful lady, or two or three beautiful ladies, four or five poets, a
couple of musicians and all are devoted to poetry’ (Yeats 2000: 276) – also has
something anachronistic about it. Arguably, this alludes back to the courtly culture
of the Renaissance, repeatedly celebrated by Yeats’s poetry. Ronald Schuchard
identifies a more recent, and more autobiographical, context: he describes it as
‘Yeats’s imaginative recreation of many Monday evenings in Woburn Buildings’
(Schuchard 2008: 381). By bringing Yeats’s memories of the artistic coteries of
1890s London to bear here, Schuchard points towards a historical frame that – as
will be shown later in this essay – was of particular importance to Yeats’s radio
work of the 1930s. Suffice it to say for now, though, that the experience of radio
is unmoored from the present place and time, as the poet forcefully reframes the
context according to his own imaginative needs.
Jeremy Silver has claimed that Yeats’s ‘insistence on the centrality of spoken
performances of his work leads to [his seeing] radio as a natural medium’ for
his own work (Silver 1987: 183). In this respect, too, the ballad suggested itself
as particularly relevant. For Yeats, this genre not only signified a particular kind
of setting and community, but also a peculiar inflection of the poetic idiom:
the ballad was to be understood as a collective, musical utterance. This stress
on music also affected Yeats’s radio versions of poems that were not ballads.
In his final broadcast, ‘My Poetry Again’ (29 October 1937), he pre-empted
the listener’s possible reservations to his unusual rendering of ‘The Lake Isle of
Innisfree’: ‘Perhaps you will think that I go too near singing it. That is because
every poet who reads his own poetry gives as much importance to the rhythm
as to the sense. A poem without its rhythm is not a poem’ (Yeats 2000: 290).
As a result of this emphasis, Yeats included musical elements in several of his
broadcasts. But he was far from indifferent to the manner in which music and
the spoken word interacted: the poetry should never be drowned out, or even
overshadowed, by the music.9 The following explanation for the linking of the
two was included in a draft version of the manuscript used in the ‘In the Poet’s
Pub’ broadcast:
I have suggested to the B.B.C. that it should use some musical instrument to fill
up pauses, whether in the middle of a verse or at the end of it, to vary and to
rest the attention. When I first produced a play at the Abbey Theatre some thirty
years ago I told an actor to pause to mark a change of mood, and the impression
he gave me was that of a man who had forgotten his lines. Then I told him to fill
up the pause with a significant movement of his body and all was well. But when
you are reciting to the wireless and nobody can see your body it seems right to
fill up the pauses with musical sounds. (Yeats 2000: 403–4n. 471)
Yeats is explicitly drawing on his theatrical experience here, although the

same desire for variation and rest also plays a salient role in how he generally
structures his poetry: a need for ‘rest’ is not, in Yeats’s view, more characteristic
of radio listeners than other audiences of his work. He also explicitly linked
the use of refrains – sometimes nonsense refrains, such as in the ‘fol de rol de
rolly O’ of ‘The Pilgrim’, included in ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’ – in ballads to this
need for rest and variation. Both music and such musical verbal effects have a
supplementary function, closely connected to the lack of visual access to the
performing body – ‘nobody can see your body’ – in these broadcasts. It is a
function that is strictly circumscribed, as the music is not allowed to take place
simultaneously with speech or song: ‘the words need all our attention’ (Yeats
2000: 267). A particular hierarchy of aesthetic means is posited, not without
parallel to the political forms of hierarchy courted by the later Yeats.10 Radio is
envisaged as a vehicle for the poetic word: it has the potential of conveying an
intense, verbal experience to a large number of people – but needs to be used in a
highly premeditated manner, if this is to be brought about. Like Masefield before
him, Yeats also used radio as an instrument with which one can proselytize.
His audience was not only exposed to what Yeats considered to be poetry of
high quality, but it was also asked – at the end of his 1936 broadcast on modern
poetry – to uphold the correct standards and values necessary for the continued
flourishing of this poetry:
If anybody reads or recites poetry as if it were prose from some public platform,
I ask you, speaking for poets, living, dead or unborn, to protest in whatever way
occurs to your perhaps youthful minds; if they recite or read by wireless, I ask
you to express your indignation by letter. William Morris, coming out of a hall
where somebody had read or recited his Sigurd the Volsung said: ‘It cost me a lot
of damned hard work to get that thing into verse.’ (Yeats 2000: 102)
Yeats’s manuscript had ‘a devil of a lot’, rather than ‘damned’, in the final
sentence. When his passion for poetic technique got the better of him during
live transmission, the BBC promptly cut him off (see Schuchard 2008: 374).
This episode provides a small, but telling indication of that there was not
necessarily a perfect fit between the agendas and needs of Yeats and the BBC, even
if the collaboration between the two spanned several years. It is not unnatural to
anticipate some dissension on the grounds of Anglo-Irish relations: the last few
years of Yeats’s career, during which he worked with the BBC, includes some of
his most outspoken attacks on British imperialism. Emily C. Bloom aptly uses
Yeats’s reading of ‘The Curse of Cromwell’ and other poems dealing with Irish
politics on the 3 July 1937 broadcast (titled ‘My Own Poetry’) to address related
questions concerning ‘how Yeats imagined the politics and nationalities of his
BBC audience’. She asks whether the poems were ‘offered to provoke a largely
British listening public, or did he primarily address his Irish listeners – and, if
so, toward what ends did this assortment of political poems lend themselves?’
(Bloom 2011: 241). Yeats’s relationship to Britain and Britishness was never a
simple one, so one should be wary of reaching too facile solutions here. Certainly,
he was experienced with dealing with different readerships on both sides of
the Irish channel, and he was not averse to signal his own self-consciousness
about this in the middle of a programme: ‘Many Irish men and women must
be listening’, he suddenly interjected in his 1936 broadcast on modern poetry,
‘and they may wonder why I have said nothing of modern Irish poetry. I have
not done so because it moves in a different direction and belongs to a different
story’ (Yeats 1994: 100). Although he seems to cater for both Irish and English
audiences without much friction in most broadcasts, the programme containing
political poems dealing with the Easter Rising and Cromwell – as well as
including the World War I poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, with the
telling line ‘Those that I guard I do not love’ – brings latent tensions to the fore.
Even here though, as Foster notes in his biography on Yeats, less political poems
such as ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ work to defuse some of the tension (see Foster
2003: 587–588).
The recent emphasis on post-colonial approaches to Irish literature should
not lead to the neglect of other, less-exclusively national tensions in the
relationship between Yeats and the BBC. Yeats’s broadcasts show him negotiating
with, and at times subverting, the ideological tenor of the organization. While
Michael Tratner’s claim that Yeats followed suit with a more generally modernist
tendency to deal with mass politics in a way that eschewed individualism for
a collectivist perspective might lead one to anticipate a seamless collaboration
(see Tratner 1995), Yeats’s actual work with radio is, in actual practice, more
idiosyncratic and difficult to map ideologically than might be assumed. If the
BBC cut him off when he slipped a ‘damned’ into a broadcast, he nevertheless
did manage, on other occasions, to include elements that seem to contradict
the implicit values of the corporation. Here a parallel can be drawn to Todd
Avery’s work on how Bloomsbury intellectuals subverted the ideals of the BBC
and its early General Manager, John Reith. Avery has contrasted their positions
as follows:
For Reith and most of the other stewards of public service broadcasting,
the public good was ineffaceably articulated with evangelical morality and
nationalist, even imperialist, ideology. For the Bloomsbury Group, to the
contrary, the good was linked to a politics that valorized both intimacy and
internationalism in self-conscious resistance to evangelical, nationalist, and
imperialist ideals. (Avery 2009: 163)11
Furthermore, Avery links the Bloomsbury stress on intimacy with a combination

of ‘friendship, individual judgment, and pleasure’ that draws on the precedent
of the Aestheticist movement (Avery 2009: 171). Since Yeats in the 1890s
was part of the latter movement, or at least was affiliated with the Decadent
movement that was intrinsically linked to it,12 it is perhaps not surprising that
there is a partial confluence of aims and values here. In the second half of the
1930s, Yeats sought to revise the impression made in his 1922 memoir, The
Tragic Generation: rather than being a period of defeat and otherworldliness,
he wrote to Maurice Bowra in 1935, the ‘Nineties was in reality a period of
very great vigour, thought and passion were breaking free from tradition’.13 The
broadcast on modern poetry the following year starts off with a long passage
of reminiscence of Yeats’s fellow poets and the milieu of the 1890s, and goes on
to remember how York Powell had turned down the offer of becoming Proctor
at Oxford on the grounds that ‘the older he grew the less and less difference
he could see between right and wrong’ (Yeats 1994: 94). This is a far cry from
the moralism associated with Reith, as is Yeats’s memory of how he in the
1890s ‘envied Dowson his dissipated life. I thought it must be easy to think like
Chaucer when you lived among those morbid, elegant, tragic women suggested
by Dowson’s poetry’ (Yeats 1994: 89).
Yeats’s wife reacted enthusiastically to this particular broadcast, proclaiming
that ‘during its twenty minutes [it] sounded as if you and the speaker and the
drums were thoroughly enjoying yourselves and that you had locked the door
on the solemn portentous BBC, and had no intention of unlocking the door
until you had your final laugh’.14 Early on in his career, Yeats had contrasted
the values of old ‘merrie’ England with its modern, bourgeois counterpart,15
and the boisterous and anti-elitist air of his radio broadcasts – full of ballads,
drinking songs and poems about sailors – would seem to uphold the favouring
of the former. There was also room for high jinks. In the ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’
broadcast, we find Yeats allowing his introduction of a poem by Lionel Johnson
to be suddenly interrupted:
Y-e-s? Will you pardon me for a moment while I read a note from our stage
manager. (I will rustle paper). O-O-I understand. It seems that one or two of the
poets present say that our programme is much too melancholy. That they were
much more at home when we were in our pub [in the previous broadcast, ‘In the
Poet’s Pub’]. They insist on taking charge at the end of Lionel Johnson’s poem.
(Yeats 2000: 278)
This meta-dramatic incursion into Yeats’s script reflects the heritage of romantic
irony and perhaps also his interest in Pirandello.16 In the process, the poet
undermines his own position as the sole authority behind the messages and
ideals being communicated, giving the audience an impossible choice between
melancholia and bonhomie. This same tension recurs in ‘My Own Poetry’, his
next broadcast: ‘You must permit the poet his melancholy. My last two broadcasts
had cheerful moments but, being a poet, I cannot keep it up’ (Yeats 2000: 286).
Whilst this plea for latitude recalls the description of Dowson as ‘timid, silent,
a little melancholy’ in the modern poetry broadcast, it also signifies beyond
being a mere reflex of Yeats’s loyalty to the 1890s. There is something defensive
in this insistence upon the role of the poet, and the poet’s exceptionalism: it is as
if Yeats – always fond of masks – is being forced, as a defensive measure, to hide
behind a rather crude and cumbersome cliché.
Certainly not all masks are beneficent. In ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ Yeats
wrote of ‘That defiling and disfigured shape/The mirror of malicious eyes/
Casts upon his eyes until at last/He thinks that shape must be his shape’ (Yeats
1987: 479). Appearances may mislead, even to the point of becoming dangerous
misrepresentations. This was one of the risks of radio: as the opening anecdote
of this essay showed, Yeats was wary of his radio work turning into a ‘fiasco’
that would turn ‘human sound’ into something unrecognizable. One of the key
poems of Yeats’s late career, ‘Man and the Echo’ (Yeats 1987: 632–633), addresses
not only the potential of both alienation and discovery in the representation
of sound, but also how poets can avoid becoming hamstrung by their own
melancholia. I will use a short reading of this poem as a means to conclude this
essay, showing how some of the key themes of Yeats’s engagement with radio fed
back into his other work.
Composed between July and October 1938, ‘Man and the Echo’ is mainly
devoted to a troubled stocktaking of a long life:
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
At the end of the man’s two first speeches, the disembodied echo enters as a
subversive alter ego, willing him on to enter even deeper into despondency:
‘all seems evil until I/Sleepless would lie down and die’ comes back to him as
‘Lie down and die’, whilst the vision of someone making a dismissive judgment
of ‘all/Out of intellect and sight’ who ‘sinks at last into the night’ is baldly
returned as ‘Into the night’. The echo works like a refrain, and indeed combines
three features that MacNeice saw as coalescing in the refrains of Yeats’s late
ballads, so central to much of his radio work: ‘pertinence of statement, effect
of surprise, and subtlety of rhythm’ (MacNeice 1967: 148). The echo also has a
force of its own, inexorably tempting the speaker to accept despondency, defeat
and the limited horizons signified by its abridged rhythm. The man opposes this
force with an embracing of tragic joy,17 finding even in ‘that great night’ a will
to ‘rejoice’. Thus Yeats would appear to erect a heroic struggle between will and
representation: the dying man must reject the inauthentic and external echo of
his own innerness. However, just when the struggle is threatening to become a
predictable deadlock between familiar romantic positions, the poem wanders
off into a surprising, final digression:
But hush, for I have lost the theme,
Its joy or night seem but a dream;
Up there some hawk or owl has struck
Dropping out of sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out
And its cry distracts my thought.
The soul’s dialogue with its own misrepresentation is called short by a concern
for another being. This is one of the more humane moments in Yeats’s later
poetry, perhaps hinting at why he – despite having qualms about modern
mass media – nevertheless entered into a surprising late adventure with radio.
Radio was both an enabling medium and a disabling misrepresentation of his
own thought and poetry. To be sure, it forced him into simplification and
alien territory, returning him to some of the compromises he had left behind
when he had previously turned his back on large-scale theatrical productions.
Yet at the same time, it also provided a valued means for connecting with
a large public, which otherwise may never have seriously grappled with his
work.
If radio were to prove a derailing experience akin to that of the ‘stricken rabbit’
of ‘Man and the Echo’, it too could be conceived of as a salutary distraction. One
should not, however, underestimate the artistic merits and gains involved. Even
if it remains a circumscribed and interrupted episode within a rich and widely
ranging career, this essay has revealed that Yeats’s work with the BBC in the 1930s
shows a poet responding to the possibilities of the new medium with ingenuity
and verve. It helped him return to the ballad genre with reinforced urgency,
rethinking his aims in relation to a large, public audience in the process, and also
allowing him to reconsider the heritage of the 1890s. Whether he saw it as a pub,
a parlour or a deracinated, virtual theatre, Yeats always adapted imaginatively to
the demands of radio. The old poet’s tricks may have needed some adjustment,
but they were still far from useless.
Notes
1 In Barnes (1987), the wording is ‘Broadcast a fiasco … Perhaps my old bundle of

poet’s tricks is useless’. In the electronic Intelex edition of Yeats’s collected letters,
the second sentence is rendered as ‘Perhaps my old bundle of folk tricks is useless’
(Yeats 2002, Accession letter # 6798).
2 For an accessible introduction to the radio work, see Johnson (2000). Johnson is
also the editor of the volume that collects all but one of Yeats’s radio manuscripts,
making them readily available to the public for the first time: Yeats (2000). The
remaining broadcast manuscript, the 1936 ‘Modern Poetry: A Broadcast’, has been
published in Yeats (1994).
3 For a list of all BBC broadcasts of Yeats’s works from 1926 to 1930, see Silver (1987:
182–183).
4 I am grateful to Emilie Morin, University of York, for sharing with me her
unpublished manuscript ‘ “I beg your pardon?”: Yeats and audibility’, which was
presented at a conference on ‘Yeats and the Arts’ at NUI-Galway, 26 August 2011.
It is to be published in the Yeats Annual, no. 19.
5 ‘A Poet Broadcasts’, Belfast News-Letter (9 September 1931), 6, cited in Schuchard
(2008): 342.
6 On Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of the radio, see Jenemann (2009).
7 See Howes (1996: 66–101).
8 Ronald Schuchard has contextualized Yeats’s intense focus on the ballad form at
this juncture in terms of his earlier experiments with the psaltery, as well as his
career-long interest in the aural dimension of poetry. See the concluding chapter of
Schuchard 2008.
9 For an exploration of the relationship between words and music in Yeats’s radio
work, see Paterson 2011.
10 Yeats’s relationship to fascism during the last decade or so of his career has recently
received intense scholarly attention. The most outspoken indictment is to be found
in McCormack (2005). For a measured response, see Foster (2010).
11 For Reith and the ideology of early BBC, see also Chapter 1 of Avery 2006.
12 For a brief account linking Aestheticism with the Decadence of the 1890s, see
Moran 2006: 121–124.
13 Letter to Maurice Bowra, 31 May 1935 (Yeats 2002; Accession letter # 6239).
14 Letter from George Yeats to W. B. Yeats, 3 April 1937, cited in W. B. Yeats and
G. Yeats 2011: 466.
15 See for instance ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, which – in its defence of the character of
Richard II – claims that Edward Dowden ‘forgot that England, as Gordon has
said, was made by her adventurers, by her people of wildness and imagination
and eccentricity’ (Yeats 2007: 78).
16 For Pirandello’s influence on Yeats, see for instance Chapter 5 of McAteer (2010).
17 The concept of ‘tragic joy’ was important to Yeats, particularly in the 1930s. For a
classic account, see Chapter 5 of Engelberg (1988).
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——— and Yeats, G. (2011). The Letters. Ed. Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
2
Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

New Technology and Flawed Power
Finn Fordham
Royal Holloway, London
There may come a time … when we shall have ‘smellyvision’ and ‘tastyvision’.

When we are able to broadcast so that all the senses are catered for, we will
live in a world which no one has yet dreamt about.
A. M. Low, Daily News, 30 Dec 1926, quoted in Burns 1998: 207
By contrast with the many explorations detailing how modernism relates to radio,
to telegraphy, telephony or cinema, modernism rarely finds itself being glued to
television. Specialist histories of the development of televisual technology and
the associated industries abound (Aldridge 2012; Burns 1998; Darian-Smith and
Turnbull 2012; Evans 2010); but the cultural myths of television generally concern
its post-war embodiments, and the attendant critical and theoretical discourses
have been predominantly post-war constructions. These myths and discourses
have tended also to centre on America, history being written by the victors, even
though (or because) America – while spearheading technical developments –
was, in the 1930s, slow to establish public broadcasting companies, compared
with Europeans, where techno-military rivalry and the threat of war spurred
on development. A consequence of this bias in cultural history has been an
occlusion of the cultural responses to television’s development during the
interwar years. For television was in fact far more advanced than is commonly
thought and discourses about it far more widespread. The London Department
store Selfridges had a ‘radio and television department’ in 1929. When Baird
and the BBC teamed up to transmit programmes experimentally in 1930, it was
widely reported (BBC Documentary 1976). On 3 June 1931 Baird successfully
transmitted the Derby – the first outside broadcast. The German service
televised the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The BBC began regular programmes
on 2 November 1936, so in 1937, George VIII’s coronation was broadcast. By
1 September 1939, the day on which the BBC interrupted transmission because
of the impending war, some 19,000 sets had been sold in the UK. It is interesting
to compare these figures with the USA where 5000 sets were in use in 1946,
nearly a million in 1948 and 10 million in 1950 (Fang 1997: 156–157). That
the long dreamt of possibility of transmitting live images as well as live voices
over large distances had become a reality was of huge public interest. The war
closed down development in Europe; it has also caused us to be divorced from
television’s pre-war embodiments.
These events and the broad range of responses form a vital if somewhat
marginal context for the ‘high’ modernism in the 1930s. For it did not simply
coincide with high modernism, nor was the interest one-way. Pirandello’s
formally experimental The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, proved suitable,
being a minimalist three hander, for early experiments transmitting television.
Over the three years of BBC’s transmission before the start of the war, some 326
plays were broadcast, including T. S. Eliot’s highbrow Murder in the Cathedral
which was thought appropriate for the new medium, and aired in 1937. One
of the first documentaries ever shown on BBC television, in November 1936,
called ‘Cover to Cover’, sponsored by the National Book Council, featured
interviews with T. S. Eliot, Julian Huxley, Somerset Maugham and Rebecca
West (BFI database). The range of speakers indicates concerns about highbrow
and middlebrow literature that are now being examined in Modernist studies.
John Piper gave talks on London Galleries (The Times, Wednesday, 10
February 1937); Paul Nash gave commentaries on art. There were formalist
experiments – especially in dance and drama, such as ‘Fugue for Four Cameras’
arranged by Anthony Tudor, and a masque based on The Eve of St Agnes,
broadcast in October 1937. TV was not a threat to cultural life, whether literary
or intellectual, but promoted both, and even in the 1930s was playing a role in
the development of the concept of the public intellectual. The cultural reaction
to television itself was as established a phenomenon as TV itself.
This paper will examine a selection of cultural responses to TV in the interwar
period as a context for James Joyce’s engagement with television in Finnegans Wake
during the late 1930s. The selection registers, for the most part, anxieties about
the military context of television in a world of increasing international tensions.
Joyce’s engagement is well known – at least amongst Joyceans – occurring in a
particular section known as ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’. This was,
for Donald Theall, ‘one of the first fiction scenes in literary history involving
Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake 41
people watching TV in a bar-room’ (Theall 1997: 66). Although it may have been
the first fictional representation, the presence of a TV in a bar didn’t require a
miraculous leap of imagination on Joyce’s part. His vision was coinciding with
actual consumer patterns of the period, as the following journal item indicates:
‘Among recent purchasers of television receivers are large numbers of owners of
licensed premises who are finding them a profitable attraction. It is stated that
this class are at present the largest purchasers and that the number of receivers in
public houses now exceeds those in the large departmental stores’. (TSW 1937). I
will identity three roles, which I believe Joyce plays: the accommodating sceptic,
the accidental prophet, and the detached geek. In all three, Joyce responds to
questions which the possibilities of television were raising about the nature of
the human, and the power and value of this new technology.
Joyce was sceptical towards the way the invention of TV was interpreted
magically, providing an excuse for spiritualist concepts of the human; what
Jeffrey Sconce diagnosed as a ‘collective fantasy of telepresence’ (Sconce 2000: 6).
Just as ‘telegraphy’ gave new impulses to fantasies of ‘telekinesis’ (first usage
according to the OED, 1890), so ‘television’ gave impulses to related fantasies
of ‘teleportation’ (first usage 1931). As we will see, science fictions adapted
the dramatic new transformations and transportation of images and turned
them into melodramatic transformations of matter – human or otherwise.
Such adaptations exploited the potential for violence in both technology and
communication, and tended to demonize both in the process. Joyce, exploiting
these transportations of television towards teleportation, of materialist science
towards unheimlich spiritualism, was not particularly ahead of his time, but
he did so in pantomimic ways that distinguish him from both technophobic
demonization and spiritualized technophilia.
The prophetic aspect of Joyce’s response consists in imagining what TV
might be used for: we see a horse race and a battle scene, which are predictable
enough, and in fact Baird had already transmitted the Derby, and the BBC had
transmitted a boxing match. But we also witness in Joyce’s vaudeville a live
televised public confession. Before the nineteenth century was over, H. G. Wells,
always quick on the uptake, had already imagined what TV might show, and
the form its display might take. In his novel When the Sleeper Wakes, vast public
halls display enormous screens, known as ‘Babble Machines’, which relay live
up-to-the-minute news, though Wells makes it clear they relay misinformation,
‘counter suggestions in the cause of law and order’ (Wells 1899: 234). Rather
than the rise and fall of economic fortunes, Joyce pictures the rise and fall of the
moral fortunes of international celebrities. In doing this, Joyce was pre-empting
the dystopian world as projected by Orwell some ten years later, and the real
world as mediated by Oprah Winfrey some 60 years later. Joyce’s prophetic
fusion of ‘confession’ and television was determined by a pre-existing narrative
structure in Finnegans Wake where a human – and the Human – is continually
on trial, cross-examined, sometimes defending himself, at other times
confessing, elsewhere getting off scot-free. In addition, Joyce was responding, I
would suggest, to another dramatic piece of news at the time – the show trials in
Stalin’s Soviet Russia, which unfolded from 1936 to 1938 and in which, amongst
others, military leaders – Russian Generals, that is – made high-profile public
confessions. The third set of these – in 1938 – was, indeed, filmed, and widely
distributed. Joyce could see the power of television as a propaganda tool for the
State and as a PR tool for individuals.
Yet another response of Joyce’s is that of the geek. This involved becoming
deeply versed in the actual technology of television. It is true, as Rice says, that
Joyce associates TV with violence – but anxiety about the violent power of
this technology is also curtailed by a satirical sense of its limits and inevitable
failings. What results is a refusal of the paranoia that will dominate conceptions
of, and discussions about, TV – paranoia about its effects on individuals, and
about its exploitation in the hands of power. Technology may be an extension
of the human and it may extend the human, but as such, it extends outwards
from human failings into new kinds of error. Dystopias are built on fears of evil
omnipotent forces, which extend themselves through new media – whether in
the form of Huxley’s hynopedia and television or Orwell’s telescreen (Huxley
1932; Orwell 1949). The absence of dystopia in Finnegans Wake is a sign that
Joyce is sceptical of such omnipotence.
Whilst Joyce’s engagement with TV has in fact received considerable critical
attention, that attention has not been plugged into modernist studies of media.
It has tended to stay exclusively within the Joycean enclave (with the important
exception of Marshall McLuhan) or has not been integrated with other cultural
responses (with the exception of T. J. Rice’s recent work). As David Hayman’s
genetic approach details, Joyce’s incorporation of developments in television
began in 1927 and bloomed in 1937, as he was bringing the book’s composition
to a close, and finally writing the long-planned climactic section, central to the
book, about an assassination of a Russian leader (Hayman 2007: 275–277). The
initial incorporation of television coincided with the development of a certain
critical ressentiment against Wyndham Lewis on Joyce’s part which, in turn, led
through satire to the discovery of a particular voice – that of a boastful, arrogant
but compromised intellectual – modelled on the critical style of Lewis. In the
1920s, Lewis had been a drinking companion of Joyce’s in Paris, but in 1927
Lewis published a swingeing attack on Joyce’s ‘time-obsession’ in his Time and
Western Man (renamed in the Wake, ‘Spice and Westend Women’ (Joyce 2012:
292.06)). The voice in the Wake issues from one Professor Jones (the Welsh
surname indicating Lewis’s Welsh background) who at one point dismisses
the views of rival ‘Professors’ lacking the power he has as a result of the new
technology, the development of which he seems to be overseeing:
looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television, (this nightlife
instrument needs still some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of
the more refrangible angles to the squeals of his hypothesis on the outer tin
sides), I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity as my
ownhouse and microbemost cosm when I am reassured by ratio that the cube of
my volumes is to the surfaces of their subjects as the sphericity of these globes
( … ) is to the feracity of Fairynelly’s vacuum. (Summer 1927. First draft of 1.6
section 2, simplified. (47473–207, JJA 47, 122; Joyce 2012: 150.32–151.07))
A translation of this might read

looking at all this ill-formed rubbish of life, with my powerful technology, the
‘faroscope of television’ (which does still need some work), it’s easy for me to
believe in how immense I am when, proportionally speaking, the volume of my
work compared to the surface of its subjects, is like comparing the size of my
testicles to those of the castrati Farinelli.
The proportion of something to nothing produces infinity; the volume of his ego
is infinite, fills all space. Technology gives to humans this belief in being divine.
This first allusion to TV in Finnegans Wake then is to the mechanical method
being promoted at that time by John Logie Baird. Television is being framed
by the speaker as a scopic attribute of imperial power, something that will help
embody the will to conquer space, a drive that Joyce associated with Wyndham
Lewis.
More evidence of Joyce’s interest occurs in the early months of 1931, when
Joyce was preparing notes for the Night Games chapter, by reading the second
edition of George Trobridge’s Life of Emanuel Swedenborg (1912). He took
several notes from Chapter XV headed ‘Signs of Seership’, which provides
copious examples of Swedenborg’s ability to converse with the spirits of the
dead. One of these notes reads ‘[ “television” ’ (VI.B. 33, 172 (f)). The editors
of the Buffalo notebooks interpret this as a gloss on Swedenborg as a seer. ‘[’ is
the sign for Shem, the twin brother of Shaun, his equal and opposite rival and,
on rare occasions, partner. Shaun is a type associated with Professor Jones, the
speaker of the passage already quoted, whereas Shem is at this point associated
with Swedenborg. Both intriguingly have now been associated with television.
But where Shaun, as Jones, had possessed a television, Shem is embodied as a
television – a seer who is able to see far away events; events, even, of another
world. Television is being associated with different but perhaps equal and
opposite kinds of power, in both its worldly-material and also mystical-spiritual
forms. This note is not transferred into Finnegans Wake, but it does indicate
that Joyce was continuing to keep abreast of developments in television and the
ever-increasing quantity of discourses that attended them. Since the BBC had
begun transmitting in September 1929, five days a week for half an hour, it was
much in the news. But there were also connections being made between TV,
magic and psychical research (Andiopoulos 2005). The note, moreover, does
not merely indicate an association but points to a full identification: Shem is
a television. Such metonymic identification produces metaphors of the human
that transform our sense of the human, just as, for instance, at another point
of the text, a narrator wistfully announces: ‘When I’m dreaming back like that
I begins to see we’re only all telescopes’ (295.10–12), as if the very capacity for
memory, bringing distant things close to mind, is such that it makes us resemble
the power of telescopes. In II.3, HCE, the father of Shem and Shaun will similarly
be identified with a radio. Joyce’s constant play with (at least) double meanings
invites such metaphorical identification. The character Taff is described as
having a ‘grinner set’ (348.33) – an allusion to his set of teeth. But it is also an
allusion to a new ‘set’ on which you can see people grinning: so Taff ’s teeth are
a TV and the TV is Taff ’s teeth. Through metaphor, conceptions of the new
technology and the human keep swapping places.
In the mid-1930s, when revising the sheets of transition in which episodes of
Finnegans Wake had already been appearing, Joyce made an addition to the third
chapter (I.3), in which television provides a gloss on the ‘ear/eye’ binary, a binary
that operates throughout the book and is projected onto Shem versus Shaun,
music versus painting and Joyce versus Lewis. The context for the revision is as
follows:
Arthor of our doyne. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!
(Joyce 1927: 34)
Before the first assertive plea here for vision (after ‘Doyne’), Joyce inserted the
following sentence: ‘Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil’ (47472–229 and
52.18). This resembles a newspaper headline, enforcing our eyes’ engagement;
but at the same time its alliterative form calls on the attention of our ears. Joyce
seems to be prophetically conjuring a somewhat typical domestic altercation in

which one brother, watching television, wants the other, who is speaking on the
phone, to shut up. Either one technology gains the upper hand over the other
(the conversation is cut short and the phone put back on its receiver, so watching
the TV show can continue), or, through metonymy, we actually have one brother
killing the other. Alternatively, reading it literally and in the context of a history
of media arts, visual culture destroys aural culture. If this is the case, then our
own reading – which combines ear and eye – ironically qualifies this very news.
In any case, the revision is preparing the ground for a stronger link between
television and conflict, which will take place in II.3 and is the centrepiece of our
discussion.
The story tells of how Buckley, an Irish sniper in the Crimean War, once upon
a time, while on duty, caught in his sights an enemy, and no ordinary enemy,
but one of the Russian’s Generals. Though it was his duty to shoot him, Buckley
was intimidated by the splendour of the uniform and hesitated. Then, pulling
himself together, he got his finger back on the trigger … he looked down the
barrel and secured him in his sights. He was about to shoot but, unexpectedly,
all of a sudden, the General was unbuttoning his trousers and crouching down
to relieve himself. Buckley was overcome by sympathy for this bare man before
him, and felt he must respect the call of nature. He waited for the General to
finish and get his clothes in order. But as he did so, Buckley saw, with disgust,
the General wipe himself clean with a lump of earth. Overcoming all his finer
feelings, he took aim and fired, blowing the half-dressed General to smithereens.
This apparently comic story, which Joyce had heard from his father (and which
has deeper roots than the Crimean setting implies), is reframed in Finnegans
Wake within a dialogue between two vaudeville performers: Taff, the compère,
and Butt, the narrator, reminiscing about his days as a soldier. Their dialogue
is thought to be a television programme, being transmitted through a new set
into a pub. It is temptingly useful to simplify and narrow things down to such a
realist level, but uncertainties abound: are they televised, or standing on stage,
or in a pub, beside a TV perhaps? Do the televised events interrupt the narrative
as told by Butt and Taff, or offer a coincidental parallel to the events they relate?
Acknowledging the stubborn presence of this uncertainty is as important as
attempting to secure a ‘realist’ level. A reader needs to be able to occupy both
states, and to move between them.
But in any case, there are undoubtedly many references to television, in
particular during the third of five intermissions that, somewhat disruptively,
provide commentary on the narration. This intermission, which happens before
Butt describes seeing the General relieve himself, provides some context for Butt’s
vision, or a version of it. It begins with a cavalry assault – the doomed Charge
of the Light Brigade – followed by the striking and ghostly appearance, through
the battle-smoke, of the Russian General in all his magnificence. Unexpectedly,
he turns into a vicar and begins a public confession (the implication being that
shitting and confessing resemble each other as forms of unloading). During this
confession the General breaks down, falling into pieces. In adapting this anecdote
of the mid-nineteenth century – when photography was in its infancy – Joyce
spreads over it twentieth-century material of a technological process that
emerged out of photography – television. In the passage that follows, we pick
up the text as Taff invites Butt to sing forth his material. In what follows I have
underlined words that refer to televisual technology and which Joyce transferred
from a late notebook (VI.B.46), in which he had recorded notes under the
heading ‘Television’ (Rose 1978: 205–208). He did so from a source that has not
yet been identified, but was probably some sort of technical manual.
TAFF ( … passing the uninational toothbosh in smoothing irony over
the multinotcheralled infructuosities of his grinner set) … . Sing in
the chorias to the ethur!
[In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of trans-

formed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow
of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, of taste-
fully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to
the charge of a light barricade. Down the photoslope in syncopanc
pulses, with the bitts bugtwug their teffs, the missledhropes
glitteraglatteraglutt, borne by their carnier walve. Spraygun
rakes and splits them from a double focus: grenadite, damny-
mite, alextronite, nichilite: and the scanning firespot of the
sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines.
Shlossh! A gaspel truce leaks out over the caeseine coatings.
Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there caoculates
through the inconoscope stealdily a still, the figure of a fellow-
chap in the wohly ghast, Popey O’Donoshough, the jesuneral
of the russuates. The idolon exhibisces the seals of his orders:
the starre of the Son of Heaven, the girtel of Izodella the Calot-
tica, the cross of Michelides Apaleogos, the latchet of Jan of
Nepomuk, the puffpuff and pompom of Powther and Pall, the
great belt, band and bucklings of the Martyrology of Gorman.
It is for the castomercies mudwake surveice. The victar. Pleace
to notnoys speach above your dreadths, please to doughboys. Hll,
smthngs gnwrng wthth sprsnwtch! He blanks his oggles because

he confesses to all his tellavicious nieces. He blocks his nosoes be-
cause that he confesses to everywhere he was always putting up his
latest faengers. He wollops his mouther with a sword of tusk in as
because that he confesses how opten he used be obening her howonton
he used be undering her. He boundless alltogotter his manucupes
with his pedarrests in asmuch as because that he confesses before
all his handcomplishies and behind all his comfoderacies. And [ … ] he touched
upon this tree of livings in the middenst of the garerden for inasmuch
as because that he confessed to it on Hillel and down Dalem and
in the places which the lepers in habit in the place of the stones
and in pontofert jusfuggading amoret now he come to think of it
jolly well ruttengenerously olyovyover the ole blucky shop. Pugger
old Pumpey O’Dungaschiff! There will be a hen collection of him
after avensung on the feld of Hanar. Dumble down, looties and
gengstermen! Dtin, dtin, dtin, dtin!]
(Joyce 2012: 348.29–350.08)1
There has been diverse and valuable criticism on this passage, ranging from
philological work that provides commentary, exegesis and genetic material
(Campbell and Robinson 1946; Rose 1978), to theoretical work, which examines
Finnegans Wake as a reflection on the history of media and the possibilities of a
‘techno-poetics’ (Armand 2003; McLuhan 1964; Theall 1997). Only T. J. Rice’s
chapter in his Cannibal Joyce has sought to integrate Joyce’s interest with the
contemporary impact of television. Rice’s emphasis on the historical context,
which we’re extending here, marked an important intervention, especially
given – as Rice points out – that as influential a commentator as William York
Tindall was once able to say that ‘there was no TV at the time of … Joyce’s
writing’ (Tindall 1957: 197).
Exegesis, both early (in Campbell & Robinson) and more recent (Rose &
O’Hanlon), has ‘translated’ this intermission into more or less plain English.
Here’s my attempt:
After Taff fades away and before Butt returns, all shiny, there’s a screening of the
charge of the light brigade. Moving in syncopation down the slope, the misled
troops, all a-glitter and a-clatter, tightly packed, are borne on the wave of their
own energy. A gun rakes them from left to right. Gunners scan the lines of the
six hundred, illustrious, now broken up and sinking. Splosh! It’s the end! A
ghastly truth spreads among the French leaders in their silvery jackets. Out of
the pungent smoke, the Russian General appears, showing off all the baubles
of his office. It is the customary midweek service. A vicar. Please sit still and
be quiet. Hell! Something’s gone wrong with the supersonic switch! Covering
his eyes he confesses publically, to all, his vicious sins. Blocking his nostrils he
confesses to picking his nose. Hitting his mouth, he confesses how he was always
sexually admiring his mother. Clasping his hands together he confesses to the
filthy mutual masturbation with his school mates. And holding his hand over his
loins, he confessed up hill, down dale and all over the shop. Bugger the old pile
of rubbish! He’ll be swept up after the show.
Such a translation hardly produces a naturalist level of narrative; it also reduces,

of course, the multilayered quality of Joyce’s language; and it diminishes the role
of interference that the many layers bring about. But it serves, nevertheless, as
an introduction for analysing the layers and the interference. This interference,
which is fairly constant throughout the book – what we might call the white
noise of Joyce’s text – reflects Joyce’s sense of transformation in the field of
communication, to which the new technologies were contributing. A crucial
layer here is some technical vocabulary relating to the production of TV
images, as indicated by the underlined words. Joyce had, with considerable care,
absorbed the technical processes of producing a televisual image, an absorption
which is extremely rare amongst those contributing to the cultural meanings
of television. In Joyce’s fusion of televisual processes with a cavalry charge, it
is tempting to interpret a projection on Joyce’s part of the violence of war onto
the invasive power of this innovative technology. The screen – or the viewer
themselves – receives, like an entrenched army, a ‘bombardment’ of light.
A strong connection is thus made between war and television, pre-empting
Friedrich Kittler’s recent analysis of the development of television as an offshoot
of German military research in the 1920s and the 1930s (Kittler 2010: 208).
If such an interpretation is justified, Joyce’s sense of violence resembles other
early responses, especially within science fiction narratives, as the following two
instances illustrate. The first of these is Conan Doyle’s 1929 short story, ‘The
Disintegration Machine.’ It is one of Doyle’s ‘Challenger’ stories, his replacement
for the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were never to be as successful. The machine
in question can both dissolve and reconstitute objects – whether humans or
battleships, or even cities. The machine is a translation of televisual technology.
Where TV only ever dissolves, translates and reconstitutes images of things, the
disintegration machine operates on things themselves. But the magic of TV was
to make it seem as if it was able to do the former, as expressed decades later by
David Byrne in the Talking Heads song ‘Television Man’: ‘the world crashes in to
my living room. Television made me what I am.’ Conan Doyle’s fantasy betrays
not only an anxiety of international violence, but a belief that actual bodies and
electrical representations of those bodies are, being of the same order, equally
transmittable, a voodoo fantasy about the power of representation and of art
itself. In Doyle’s story, the inventor – one Nemor, a Latvian with sufficiently
semitic features to indicate that he is a Jewish émigré (he lives in Hampstead) –
is dastardly. As Challenger and the narrator Malone arrive, a group of Russian
Communists is leaving. Since they have just expressed a dastardly interest in
Nemor’s invention, London and world peace are threatened. But Challenger –
brave, sceptical and resourceful – is at hand. The machine itself, with a ‘huge
magnet’, a three-foot long ‘prism’, a chair on a ‘zinc platform’, ‘a sort of ratchet
with numbered slots and a handle’ and many thick cables attached, would have
conjured up, for the story’s readers, images of Baird’s mechanical system, then
much in the news since Baird was beginning to win over sceptical audiences.
The analogy with psychic research in this story is explicit when Nemor speaks
about ‘apports’ in Western occultism (Doyle 1929: 3–10), something Doyle had
infamously signed up to. At first Challenger refuses to believe Nemor but, after a
couple of successful demonstrations, he is willing to undergo ‘disintegration’. In
a comic turn, Nemor punishes Challenger for his initial doubts by reassembling
him without the ‘glorious mane’ of his hair, a key component of Challenger’s
persona. Challenger threatens Nemor physically in order to get his hair back.
Then, inspecting the machine, and pretending to find some electricity leaking
from it, Challenger lures Nemor onto the apparatus and suddenly activates the
ratchet. Nemor disappears. Challenger pretends to be unable to reassemble
Nemor, saying to his companion that ‘the interesting personality has distributed
itself throughout the cosmos’.
Another example of such teleportation by television may have grown out
of Doyle’s story. In 1933, there was a low-budget mini-series produced for the
cinema called The Whispering Shadow, starring Bela Lugosi. It centred around
a mysterious criminal who was able to commit crimes by means of a gang he
controlled by television and radio rays. ‘No man has ever seen the Shadow, but
his genius for manipulating radio and television enables him to project his voice
and shadow wherever he desires; he can see through doors, hear through walls
and electrocute people by radio death ray’ (Clark and Herman 1933). The power
of the Whispering Shadow is ballistic and hypnotic. It is as if film is expressing
its own fears of this competing technology, which was threatening to pull people
back from cinemas and into their homes.
In both of these stories, it is human beings, not just images of humans, that
are transmitted by some form of electricity. This imaginative adaptation of the
new media accompanies dreams of world domination. Imperialism, whether
in capitalist, communist or fascist guises, produced a global imaginary of

territorial domination. Television had quickly become part of a technological
modernity that would enable national forces to conquer space by making it
shrink. World domination was not foreign to the development of television:
Britain, America, Russia and Germany were the early key pioneers in the 1930s.
The development of TV involved international collaboration and competition.
When Joyce associates television with violence, it is not, I suggest, of this order,
where TV is a psychic weapon for transporting human spirit through the ether.
The association is a coincidence presented to us with no indication that the
relation between television and violence is a necessary one. That people enjoy
the spectacle of violence (as the ample amounts of bloody violence represented
on the stage and the screen clearly witness) might explain their coexistence in
representation here. But this is a representation of a certain taste, not a critique
of the medium. And it seems a stretch to say that because an image is produced
by a bombardment of electrons, it is a violent process necessarily commensurate
with the bombardment of troops by shells. Rice says as much when he claims
that Joyce found in television ‘an analogue with the butchery of war itself ’ and
that his response overall was ‘profoundly negative’ (Rice 2008: 157, 140).
Comparing the passage in the Wake with these tales of prospective world
domination to be achieved through the televisual transmission of human beings,
we note that Taff ‘fades’, Butt ‘reglows’ and the Popey O’Donoshough ‘caoculates’,
a coagulation that blends ‘coagulates’ and ‘oculates’ – an obsolete word meaning
‘set eyes on’. This ‘Popey’ figure, moreover, also needs to be ‘collected’ at the end
of the ‘service’ (Joyce punning on radio ‘service’ and a Church ‘service’). These
verbs can apply to people in the flesh, or their images reproduced on the screen.
Joyce is clearly inviting analogies between what happens with the production of
televisual images, the way they glow and fade, and the way people too become
vague or vivid to our sight or memories. We begin to see and imagine people in the
way we see images of those people. Perceptions of the Human are transformed,
become televisual. The magic of television is like the magic of spiritualism: the
spectacular is fused with the spectral in the word ‘spectracular’, within which
an echo of ‘Dracula’ can also be heard. The figure is of a ‘wohly ghast’, some
wholly ghastly ghost. Joyce thus accommodates the spiritualist fantasies that
were attaching themselves to the processes of these new media technologies.
But where the science fictions rely on uncanny feelings towards television, and
understandings of these transformations as horrifyingly actual, Finnegans Wake
remains cheekily and consciously in the realm of the metaphorical, moving back
and forth between reality and representation, between the transformation of
images and the transformations of human beings. Because of the attention on

the technical language, we can be aware that whatever magic there appears to
be, is a trick of technique rather than real magic, just as the ghost that rises
through the floor in a puff of smoke on the stage (as Stephen’s mother does in the
burlesque theatre of ‘Circe’) is the projection of a theatrical production involving
smoke, trapdoors and/or mirrors.
The language of Finnegans Wake is key here in enabling such movements back
and forth. Its distortions remind us continually of the constructedness and the
materiality of the medium, the elaborate framing device that comes to constitute
the entire piece of art, impeding our suspension of disbelief. On the other hand,
the radical difference of this language also invites the perception of an entirely
other and parallel world, the dream as reality. The science fictions, by contrast,
rely for their effects on the suspension of disbelief. They also involve wilfully
strong misreadings of the science, in order to contribute to a feeling of modern
magic. Anxieties induced by technological innovation are fuelled by such
misreadings, just as the misreadings feed off the anxieties. Joyce, especially in his
precise and geekish deployment of the idioms around the technical processes,
prevents his prose from indulging in the exploitative hysteria of these stories.
When it comes to the global imaginary and how television will enable a
new global consciousness (McLuhan’s ‘global village’), Joyce’s vision is at once
more original and prophetic than his relation to the spiritualist projections of
television’s ‘ghost in the machine’. But it is accidentally so: Joyce had always
planned that HCE, as an accused figure, would, in one version of his trial, offer a
confession. He had also always planned Buckley’s tale: confession and excretion,
as mentioned, come together via the metaphor of ‘unloading’. The TV show,
which Joyce used to frame the story, thus comes to contain a TV confession.
Joyce’s vision of a televised future includes, by chance as it were, an international
celebrity who astounds everyone (something must have gone wrong!) by
making a confession, which is then transmitted to the whole world, the kind of
sensational event that ‘reality TV’ craves. Combining a predetermined narrative
structure with contingent developments in the field of communications, Joyce’s
experiments have stumbled across the projection of a future, the prophecy of
TV confessions, as of a televangelist, or a world leader, like Clinton. The figure,
as any ‘Everyman’, is, typically, composite: ‘Popey O’Donoshough’ signals,
all at once, a father, a Pope, an Irish noble (an ‘O’Donoghue of the Glens’),
a Cossack military aristocrat (one of the Denisovs) and, last but not least, the
cartoon character Popeye (for Denisovs, see Mikaberidze 2005: 72–74). In this
composite form he is cartoonish, lumpily hybrid, like Popeye himself, and can
mean at least something to an enormous audience from around the globe made
up of Catholics, Irish, Americans, Russians and anyone else interested in global
celebrity. The global village has found a scapegoat.
Joyce’s writing at this time has also coincided with a series of trials that were
being reported around the world: the Moscow Show Trials in which Stalin
found a series of scapegoats, or ‘Trotskyite conspirators’. Joyce’s focus on an
anecdotal assassination of a Russian General in this section led him to focus
on Russia, both past and present. Joyce did have an austere attitude to political
discussions, but he undoubtedly watched politics carefully, kept abreast of
the international news, especially in the overheated 1930s. One of his closest
companions in those days was Paul Léon, a Russian émigré. It is unthinkable
that Joyce would not have been registering what was happening in the Soviet
Union at that time. Reports of the show trials were widespread. Newspapers
expressed scepticism about the ‘loathsome’ judicial processes, outrage at their
ruthlessness and suspicion of torture (see Bibliography, The Times). On 14 June
1937, for example, The Times wrote of ‘Yesterday’s heroes … being execrated as
monsters of turpitude; a nebulous and condemnatory epitaph has been issued
over the signature of Marshal Voroshiloff ’ (15). In Joyce’s tale, the confession
made by the Russian General is bizarre. It is formally highly structured,
following – more or less – the pattern set by extreme unction, in which the
body parts associated with the five senses (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands), and
then the feet and, in the case of men, the loins, are all anointed with oil, as a
purification before death, suggesting here an inevitable judgement of death.
The syntax becomes increasingly tortuous (because he confessed … for inasmuch
as that he confessed). The sins confessed to range from extreme triviality
(‘he blocks his nosoes … ’ or picking his nose) to violent incestuous feelings
towards his mother (‘he wollops his mouther … confesses how opten he used be
obening her’). Following this confession, he is now ripe for execution, perhaps
by buggery, and resembles the defeated subject of classical history, ‘Pompey’,
assassinated while trying to disembark, pumping out a boat load of shite:
‘Pugger old Pumpey O’Dungaschiff!’ The public televised confession precedes
an execution, though the latter does not seem to be televised. The usefulness
of confession in speeding up a judicial process, as in the Moscow Show Trials,
is combined with someone’s humbling attempt to clear their own name. Both
lead to contempt at the hands of the audience who turn on the subject. There is
an attempt to calm the threats of disorder, from looting and gangsters: ‘Dumble
down, looties and gengstermen’.
Joyce thus predicts the immense power of television as State Propaganda

but also as tool for an individual’s PR. Huxley had already done this in Brave
New World, with the ‘Bureaux of Propaganda by Television’ (Huxley [1932]
1994: 59), but it is the material of public confession that makes Joyce’s forecast
original. Through the tool of television, the world can become a massive visitors’
gallery of a courtroom. Unlike in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), however,
power in Finnegans Wake, whether technological or human, while it can take on
gigantic and nightmarish proportions, does also always have flaws which lead to
farcical effects. It is significant that the confession of sin – or error – is perceived
as coming about through a technical hitch, registered in an interruption to
the otherwise smoothly running transmission: ‘Hll, smthngs gnwrng wthth
sprnswtch!’ Communication is already distorted here, the vowels squeezed out
as if through a compression of the airwaves, evoking the clenched teeth of anger.
Allowed to breathe, the exclamation would be ‘Hell, something’s gone wrong
with the supersonic switch!’ The supersonic switch is a control on a TV set that
would have determined the source of sound that accompanies the images: in the
early days of television, image and sound were transmitted from two different
stations, and also received separately. At a realist level, it’s as if we’re watching
one scene on Channel 1, then suddenly getting interference from a different
script on Channel 2. As in Singing in the Rain, the sound is not synchronized
with the sight and an arbitrary comical ventriloquy results. But at another
level, the different channel represents the eruption of the repressed: whereas
a sermon from on high is expected, as at a religious service, instead a series of
deeply embarrassing confessions issues forth, as if from the unconscious, from
down below, a private hell flooding a scene of public virtue. Something has
gone wrong with the messages we are receiving from on high. In such farcical
moments, what might be tragic becomes comic. The inherent fallen-ness – as
imperfection, rather than sin – of the human, and which constitutes of course
central narratives and themes of Joyce’s book, is extended to technology.
We look to Joyce for judgement that will confirm our views: for a celebration
of democratizing popular culture; or a denigratory critique of the hypnotic
controlling power of bland or sentimental propaganda; or a deferral of judgement,
itself, of course, a position – that of the artist’s indifferent transcendence. But
any clear judgement on Joyce’s part of the value of television is so embedded in
complex mutually interfering layers, as to be inextricable. In engaging with this
particular new mode of communication, this particular new form of modernity,
Joyce manages to relay the wide spectrum of responses. TV has always had its
critics, and maybe it is complicit with technologies of war, as Rice and Kittler
have argued. But it also brings a promise of new sensory experiences, as A. M.
Low imagined it might one day extend to smell and taste. It does indeed bring
also a kind of global awareness to our homes, as Rudolf Arnheim was suggesting,
in a richly if naively optimistic passage, in 1936:
Television will not only portray the world as the film does … We shall be able to
participate in distant events at the moment of their happening. … With television
wireless becomes documentary. It lets us participate in what is going on in the
great world around us. We can see in the principal square of the neighbouring
town people streaming by on their way to a meeting, we can hear the ruler of
the neighbouring state speaking, we can see the boxers on the other side of the
sea fighting for the world’s championship, we can see English dance-bands,
Italian coluraturas, German intellectuals, the rumbling crash of railway trains in
collision, the masks of carnival, from an aeroplane we can see snowy mountains
between clouds … The great world itself lives its life in our room … . relative
of the car and the aeroplane. Merely a means of transmission, containing no
such elements of a new mode of presenting reality as the film and non-pictorial
wireless, but like the machines of locomotion that the last century gave us, it
alters our relation to reality itself, teaches us to know it better, and lets us sense
the multiplicity of what is happening everywhere at one moment. We … become
more modest and less egocentric.
TV implies a new and enormous conquest by our sense of space and time,
and enriches the world of our senses to the most extraordinary degree.
(Arnheim 1936: 279–280)
Arnheim’s technically wrong emphasis on ‘participation’ is curious and, given

the date, ironic. TV hardly proved to be participatory. And yet the contrary
assumption of passive audiences is not one that Joyce ascribes to either: after
the TV show, the pub audience seem, in turning against the innkeeper, to have
been incited to rebellion by the tales they have consumed, whether the medium
of their representation is speech, print, radio or TV. And Arnheim, moreover,
seems right that our senses were enriched.
Joyce, I suggest, does not take sides in the debate for and against the new
medium, which was already raging in the 1930s. What is clear, however, is a
strong engagement with its technical aspects and an inventive exploration of
the metaphorical dimensions of these new techniques. This exploration sees
the production of images as dramatic and exciting. He twists the terms of the
technology towards the book’s universal theme of our serial falls, large and
small, into and out of representations, into and out of our senses; falls that befall
us through sight and through sound, in image and in word. The comedy of
such falls should work to alleviate technophobic fears of totalitarian dystopia.
But the consumption of such a comedy as Finnegans Wake contains, was - like
the consumption of television - in essence interrupted, as a war of totalitarian
visions broke out.
Abbreviation
TSW = Television and Short Wave World
Note
1 I have adopted two editorial changes both of which appear in Rose and O’Hanlon’s
2010 ‘restored’ edition of Finnegans Wake: (a) ‘of tastefully’ was ‘if tastefully’ in the
3rd edition and (b) I have deleted a comma after ‘missledhropes’.
Works cited
Aldridge, M. (2012). The Birth of British Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Andiopoulos, S. (2005). ‘Psychic Television’, Critical Inquiry, 31.3, pp. 618–637.
Anon, ‘Leader’, The Times, 25 August 1936.
———‘Leader’, The Times, 26 January 1937.
———‘Yesterday’s Heroes’, The Times, 14 June 1937.
Armand, Louis (2003). Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology. Prague:
Karolinium/Charles University Press.
——— and Vichniar, David (2010). Hypermedia Joyce. Prague: Karolinium/Charles
University Press.
Arnheim, R. (1936). Radio. London: Faber and Faber.
British Film Institute, database entry for Cover-to-Cover, http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/
title/6146. Last accessed 30 January 2013.
Burns, R. W. (1997). Television: An International History of the Formative Years. London:
The Institution of Electrical Engineers.
Campbell, Joseph and Robinson, M. H. (1946). A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’.
London: Faber & Faber.
Clark, C. and Herman, Albert (directors) (1933). The Whispering Shadow
Darian-Smith, K. and Turnbull, S. (eds.) (2012). Remembering Television. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars.
Doyle, Arthur Conan (1929). ‘The Disintegration Machine’, The Strand, 77 (January 1929),
pp. 3–10.
Evans, J. (2010). http://www.thevalvepage.com/tvyears/tvyears.htm. Last accessed 30
January 2013.
Fang, I. (1997). A History of Mass Communication, Oxford: Focal Press.
Hayman, D. (2007). ‘Male Maturity or the Public Rise & Private Decline of HC
Earwicker: Chapter II.3’, in How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’, Ed. Sam Slote and
Luca Crispi. London: Wisconsin University, pp. 250–303.
Himles, Michele (2003). The Television History Book. London: BFI.
Huxley, Aldous (1994). Brave New World. London: Flamingo.
Joyce, James (1927). ‘Work in Progress’, Transition 3 (June).
——— (2012). Finnegans Wake. Ed. Finn Fordham, Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik
Bindervoet. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.
Kittler, F. (2010). Optical Media. London: Polity.
Marchand, Philip (1998). Marshall McLuhan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London:
Routledge.
Mikaberidze, A. (2005). Russian Office Corps of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars:
1795–1815. Staplehurst: Spellmount.
Moran, Maureen (2006). Victorian Literature and Culture. London: Continuum.
Rice, T. J. (2008). Cannibal Joyce. Miami: University of Florida.
Rose, Danis (1978). James Joyce’s The Index Manuscript: Finnegans Wake holography
workbook VI.B.46. Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press.
——— and O’Hanlon (1982). Understanding ‘Finnegans Wake’, New York: Garland.
Sconce, Jeffrey (2000). Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Slote, S. (2004). ‘Joyce and Science’, in Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, Ed.
Jean-Michel Rabate. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 162–182.
Theall, D. F. (1997). Joyce’s Techno-Poetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Television and Short Wave World.
Wells, H. G. (1899). When the Sleeper Wakes. London: Harper and Brothers.
3
‘I Often Wish You Could Answer Me Back:

And So Perhaps Do You!’
E. M. Forster and BBC Radio Broadcasting
Peter Fifield
St John’s College, University of Oxford
My audience, if I have one, can arrive or depart unobserved, it can come

in off other wave lengths or retreat to them or switch off altogether. One
cannot generalize about it as one could about audiences of the past, who were
confined to a room or a theatre or a concert hall or a church. The extreme
fluidity of broadcasting still puzzles me and sometimes paralyses. One person
talks to a microphone, other people switch on or off. Addressing them is not
such an easy job after all.
BBC 411
With the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 E. M. Forster’s career as a

novelist came stuttering to a standstill. The painfully extended genesis of that
book, lasting a whole decade, was followed by his failure to complete the novel
Arctic Summer, which he had begun in 1911, and ‘Entrance to an Unwritten
Novel’, which would remain, as its later title indicates, without its anticipated text.
Making his broadcasting debut on 16 July 1928 on the unpromising subject of
‘Railway Bridges’, his work with the BBC would see Forster transformed into
something of a public intellectual.1 Offering comment on literature and culture
this work would represent a significant new strand of activity for Forster, his
speeches comprising 145 broadcasts over the next 35 years.2 Speaking on diverse
subjects and channels, he would produce talks for British and Indian audiences
and demonstrated a profound attentiveness to the particular properties of
the medium, its technological intricacies and political implications.3 Both
sympathetic and suspicious towards it, Forster’s broadcasts show a playful but
humane experimentalism with radio address, its possibilities and problems.
Early radio broadcasters, eager to make their programming effective, were

profoundly engaged with understanding the constitution of their audience.
As Gillian Beer writes, ‘Radio produced a new idea of the public, one far more
intermixed, promiscuous and democratic than the books could cater for’ (Beer 1996:
151). In developing specific radiophonic techniques to address this troubling body,
speakers on the BBC frequently combined two distinct forms, responsive to the
different experiences of the radio for the listener and the speaker. The first, closer
to the experience of the listener, was a conversational form as if one individual
were in dialogue with another in a room of the listener’s house. The second, more
faithful to the reality of the speaker, was a broader, lecture-like address, speaking
without receiving a response, to an anonymous audience of indeterminate size. As
an author profoundly concerned with the protection of individual liberty and the
value of intimate interpersonal exchange, the unknown identity of this amorphous
public forms one of the central concerns of Forster’s radio works.
Forster not only sought to identify the audience for his broadcasts, discussing
the BBC’s listenership with his producers and commissioners, but felt that he
must, in order to pitch his broadcasts effectively, actively imagine them.4 With his
humanist novelist’s experience Forster recognized that one of the first tasks of the
radio speakers is to create their listeners in the mind’s eye, or perhaps ear. However,
this imaginative task, whereby the speaker actively seeks to direct and define his
listeners, runs quite counter to Forster’s natural inclination, which is rigorously
anti-dictatorial. If this taste for democracy sets him apart from the more radical
politics of much modernist writing, as Lago, Hughes and Walls have suggested, his
desire to establish an effective literary form fit for the new technology confirms
his modernist credentials in another important sense (BBC 9). Seeking a balance
between sympathetic imagination and the active constitution and direction of an
audience, Forster positively fears the ‘Great Men’ of his contemporary totalitarian
regimes (Forster 1965: 80). For the increasingly explicit rhetoric of European
dictators from the 1920s onwards relied on precisely the identification of an
audience with a process of reshaping and re-energizing a nation, which would
be constituted by a vigorous, self-determining, unified populace. Flattering and
cajoling, threatening and exhorting the audience, these speeches would aim
to capture and manipulate the public mood with the aim of harnessing their
resources. For example, Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg speech to the Hitler-Jugend,
captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will but also broadcast via radio,
stated:
You, standing here today, represent something that is happening all over
Germany. And we want that you, German boys and girls, will absorb everything
E. M. Forster and BBC Radio Broadcasting 59
that we wish for Germany. We want to be one people, and through you, my
youth, to become this people … We want this people not to become soft but to
become hard, therefore you must steel yourselves for this in your youth. You
must learn sacrifice and also never to collapse … And I know that it cannot be
any other way as we bind ourselves together.
(The Triumph of the Will 1935; my translation)5
The sound of totalitarianism in Europe in the twentieth century was that of

the single authoritative voice speaking through the wireless to the populace,
encouraging them to realize the vision of themselves presented by their leader.
Before the sounds of Fascist Italy, Falangist Spain, Nazi Germany and
Stalinist Russia became all too loud, one of Forster’s short stories imagined the
sort of threat that the radio might come to pose. ‘The Machine Stops’, written
in 1909, 13 years before the BBC was founded, is Forster’s notable venture
into Science Fiction and portrays a world where humanity has been driven
underground by a hostile surface environment. Each person lives alone in a
set of standard rooms whose conditions are closely modulated by the titular
Machine. The human body has been critically weakened by this cosseted
lifestyle: the skin has become soft and vulnerable to damage, while the legs
now barely support the weight of the body, human beings having become
accustomed to riding around their apartments in an electric wheelchair. While
this bodily decrepitude shows a suspicion of the spread of technology Forster
reserves his profoundest fears for the psychological effects of the Machine.
Invented by a human race whose scientific abilities have allowed them to
conquer a range of natural obstacles and disasters, their trust in technological
progress has become indistinguishable from a regression into ignorance and
superstition. The Machine, the supposed symbol of scientific rationalism’s
cultural victory, has become the object of blind faith and worship. Critically for
our discussion of radio, the Machine allows for communication across what is
effectively a videophone service, which connects the cell of every subject. But
this has led to the radical devaluation of physicality, and even revulsion towards
bodily proximity. The mother at the centre of Forster’s story, for example, is
deeply reluctant to visit her son, unable to see why remote communication is
insufficient to address his distress. This transfer to a technological medium has
also profoundly damaged verbal communication itself, for, instead of a rich,
multi-faceted system with many forms, uses and occasions, everyday discourse
sees the conversation supplanted by the lecture. The purpose of communication
is, accordingly, not to develop intimacy or be emotionally responsive, but
to deliver or receive ‘ideas’. Abstract knowledge, usually developed without
first-hand experience of any of the subjects involved in the lecture, has become
the social currency that displaces emotional and corporeal values.
This, I suggest, encapsulates some of Forster’s fears about technology, and
particularly the radio. Weakening the social bonds that he sees as essential
constituents of the human subject, a dematerialized contact reduces the human
being to a damaged, passive creature, lacking empathy, affection and ambition.
Language is reduced to a vehicle for data rather than relationship, and the
reciprocity of dialogue is dismissed in favour of a depersonalized address.
The encroachment of technology, and especially communication technology,
into the domestic space makes human subjects lose agency, individuality, self-
awareness and strength. They become hive-minded drones in a political scenario
over which they cannot conceive, much less exercise, any control. In turn, however,
the eventual destruction of the story’s civilization, which occurs, as the title has
it, when the Machine stops, presages in turn the collapse of totalitarianism, even
before – in proper historical terms – its proper emergence. It is, then, with a
lively sense of the political and personal dangers of technological modernity
that Forster begins to work with the BBC in 1928. These concerns were never,
moreover, fully assuaged, but underpin his broadcasts throughout his career.
We can see how Forster addresses these by considering his persona as
a broadcaster, which is friendly, intimate and, critically, close in character to
the imagined addressee. In ‘The Great Frost’ (15 February 1929), he adopts a
form of address that establishes with the greatest humility the ground for his
broadcast. It is not based on privileged information, expertise or insight, but on
commonality. The speaker is, Forster makes explicit, so much one of his listeners
that his speech is in fact gratuitous: ‘It seems rather impertinent to broadcast
on the subject of the great frost, because you are in it as much as I am’ (BBC 51).
The barrier between speaker and listener is further eroded by a gentle humour
that posits a different speaker and another speech, never to be made or heard:
‘No one will broadcast to you on the topic of the Great Thaw. He, and you, will
be otherwise occupied’ (BBC 51). Under the cover of passing the task of future
broadcasting on to an unknown other, the ‘I’ has slipped from view, and has, it
seems likely, been absorbed into the sensible mass who will be handling the flood
waters. The speaker and his listeners thus share their experience and a general,
practical character: ‘my impressions of the Great Frost are not on a heroic scale,
but like you I have read of wonderful incidents in the newspapers’ (BBC 53).
What Forster explicitly does not want to appear is an otherworldly observer on
the phenomenon of frosts, that is, an academic. Reflecting on great cold snaps in
English history, particularly when the Thames froze so that fires could be lit and
animals cooked on it, he notes,
I am … always a little incredulous at about those roast bullocks which have

figured now and then in our island story. It seems to me that, however thick
the ice, the heat of the fire would, after a time, melt a pool in it, and the bullock
would be, if anything, a boiled one. However, this is captious. Bullocks have been
roasted whole, the historians tell us, and the historians know. (BBC 52)
Forster manages to borrow the authority and data of his experts while sharing the
listener’s scepticism. This gentle power, playing between identification with and
differentiation from the audience, is at the very heart of Forster’s radio practice.
It is also, we might notice, the forerunner of standard formats for certain radio
and television programmes today, where dialogue is conducted between experts
and an intelligent everyman figure, or short expert testimony is set within a
more accessible narrative. Rather than separating these roles into two, however,
Forster plays both parts himself.
He uses a similar tactic when recommending C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape
Letters in February 1943. First, he chooses this volume ahead of the more
intellectually demanding theology of The Problem of Pain, for while the latter
is ‘interesting’, the former is ‘livelier’ (BBC 223). He proceeds to introduce
the author in a way that admires his academic credentials while confessing a
preference for a broader form of wit: ‘He is an Oxford don [ … and] besides being
a theologian, Mr Lewis is as clever as they make “em”, if I may use the expression’
(BBC 223). The casual phrase is at once too casual and not casual enough.
Dropping the ‘th’ places Forster at a conspicuous remove from the professorial
authority of Lewis, but falls short of the idiomatic turn that his slightly prissy
‘if I may use the expression’ both announces and undermines. If he is not himself
donnish he is still a careful speaker, and commands the consent of his listeners
through linguistic facility combined with wholly popular taste. Equally, in a later
broadcast to India in his ‘Some Books’ series (19 August 1942) he queries the
authority of the broadcaster with the listener’s usually inaudible voice:
You know how fond broadcasters are of employing the word ‘you’. It’s ‘you’ this
and ‘you’ that, and it’s often ‘you’ ought to do this or that. (‘You’ generally seems
to be in need of good advice.) When I switch on myself, and become a listener
instead of a speaker, I get heaps of good advice, most of which is no use whatever
to me. The ether, as it were, crackles with invisible uncles and aunts, who assume
that they know what I’m like and how I shall react to their admonitions. They
don’t know, and can’t know. (BBC 202)
Although by this time an accomplished broadcaster with 14 years of experience,

Forster continues to incorporate into his radio persona all of the discomfort
he felt with new technologies and his unease with the authoritative status of
the wireless medium. Rather than readily adopting the imagined community
provided by the other broadcasters, he cultivates the role of the perpetual radio
novice, struck by the absurdity of established speakers’ methods. While he
continually invokes his listeners during his own broadcasts, the speeches are
always informed by a desire to flatten the broadcaster’s figurative rostrum, to
return to being one of the crowd and so become unable to view it as a body subject
to happy generalization. In this sense Forster’s radio persona is, I conjecture, an
extended response to his farewell to serious novel-writing. Restaged throughout
the course of the radio scripts is an imaginative construction of a listenership
combined with a deconstruction of authoritative statement, so that we can hear
Forster demonstrating the exceptional, insightful work of the novelist, but also
enacting its repeated abandonment in favour of being simply one of the mass.
The subsequent speculation as to the identity of his listeners in that same
broadcast is thus conducted within the long shadow of his standing as a listener
who, acting as one of the crowd, here ‘happens’ to have a chance to be heard. He
writes:
I keep speculating where you are sitting or standing, what you are like. And
today I am going to draw a bow at a venture and tell you what you’re like. I’m
going to describe you.
I think, in the first place, that you’re Indian. You mayn’t be – I know that
many who are not Indians tune in to this particular wavelength … Secondly
I assume that you are a man – although I believe and hope that I may have
women-listeners also. And my third assumption is that you are about thirty
years of age. You may be much older and have high dignities and influence. Or
you may be a student or a schoolboy. (BBC 202–203)
Having first allied himself with his listeners, his subsequent description never
quite casts them as an other, despite their clear difference from the speaker.
Thus, when he continues his review with an imagined trip to a London theatre,
he suggests ‘that “you” as above defined shall come with me to one or two
London theatres’ (BBC 203). With its inverted commas that vague ‘you’ becomes
a hypothetical rather than an actual but unknown other. But it is subsequently
reified by the cultural expedition that Forster proposes: ‘We must be in our
seats by about half-past six’ (BBC 203). If the unknown Indian is an intangible,
ambiguous figure not quite granted reality as a ‘you’, it is sufficiently real to be
part of the ‘we’, and even to need a seat.6 Here, then, the cultural explorations
that Forster conducts bring speaker and listener together into a community
who are going to watch Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Watch
on the Rhine. It is, of course, no coincidence that this diverse audience is united
in two cases by that great English claim for universal humanity, Shakespeare.
More than a rhetorical exercise, however, it was the imaginative labour
of conjuring an audience, singular or plural, that Forster considered the
particular work of broadcasting, and the measure of its success or failure.
Writing to Zulfiqar Bokhari of the India Service on 20 September 1941, Forster
confessed, ‘I wanted to see how I got on with the first three broadcasts, and,
in particular, whether I could imagine whether people in India were listening
to me, before I ventured further’. Developing a habit of showing the thoughts
behind the broadcasts, this focus on the imagination is revealed to the listener
herself. In his ‘We Speak to India’ broadcast of 4 March 1942 Forster comments
on the role of the imagination in recalling England, and links this with his
broadcasting:
When I went out East myself, many years ago, it was extraordinary how Europe,
including my own particular island, receded, until I could recall it by an effort
of the imagination. Today its [sic] just my voice that goes East and reached [sic]
India: the rest of me stays sitting in a London studio – worse luck – and it’s only
by an effort of the imagination that I can guess where you’re sitting and what
thoughts are in your minds. (BBC 174; underlining in original)
This is a slippery comparison, where memory and speculation are identified

by the common involvement of the imagination. Where Forster’s memory fixes
upon an experience of an actual England, his address seeks to borrow that
same solidity for a wholly unknown listenership, making his gesture more like
acquaintance than like invention. Nevertheless, his use of the term ‘imagination’
places his practice precisely within Lord Reith’s reciprocal imaginative
economy: ‘The divine gift of imagination is an essential characteristic of the
broadcaster … The exercise of imagination is required also on the part of the
listener; it should act as a connecting link between the two’ (Reith 1924: 43).
The speaker’s imagination, which has become the very figure of connectivity,
depends upon the inequality of the participants’ positions. Thus, Forster is
liberated by an act of invention that can be undertaken precisely because the
listener cannot respond to him:
This is the third time I have had the honour of speaking to you, and, as I’ve
said, I don’t know who ‘you’ are – except when you are kind enough to write me
letters of encouragement or regret. You begin to know who ‘I’ am, and when my
voice starts you can switch off or not as the case may be, but the compliments
can’t be reciprocated. Still for my own convenience I’ve made up an imaginary
person whom I call ‘you’ and I’m going to tell you about it. Your age, your sex,
your position, your job, your training – I know nothing about all that, but I have
formed the notion that you’re a person who wants to read new books but doesn’t
intend to buy them. (BBC 93)
Here the speaker’s confession of ignorance is the ground for his authority; he
can speak because his unknown audience are freely imagined. But it is not clear
whether he is really yearning for a future of talk show phone-ins or whether
the listener’s silence is a prerequisite of this not-so-sympathetic speech. For,
the impossibility of reciprocity is met by an act of imagination that places the
listener at the speaker’s ‘convenience’. With the listener providing a service for
the speaker rather than the other way around, a gap opens between the ‘you’
who has an age, sex, position, job and training, and the ‘you’ who needs to be
told about such things. They both are and are not the same, and the disabling
objectification of the speaker’s address is indicated by the insertion of that
‘it’, which is an idea or act of imagination, the anonymous audience, and the
listening individual.
Even before Forster became a regular BBC reviewer and cultural commentator
his concerns about the authority of the intellectual intersected with his political
views about the interactions of the state and the public. He vividly dramatized
these in his 1932 contribution to the ‘Conversation in the Train’ series. This two-
hander is played out within a train compartment, whose occupants begin to
talk after Forster’s character – who is confessedly Forster, but also a Forsterian
character – threatens to throw the other’s suitcase out the window onto the
receding platform, mistaking it for the property of a recently alighted passenger.
The drama begins, then, with that most iconic Forsterian scenario: a muddle. As
Mr Emerson, so often Forster’s mouthpiece in A Room with a View, says: ‘Take
an old man’s word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is
easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my
muddles that I look back with horror – on the things that I might have avoided’
(Forster 1990: 222).
The near-victim in the carriage suggests that Forster might be ‘a little absent-
minded’; a tellingly inaccurate description (BBC 69). Forster’s flaw here is surely
not forgetfulness but inattentiveness and impulsiveness. He threatens to behave
in the manner of an inconsiderate broadcaster: with a naive confidence in the
power of his own judgement and a readiness to impose it upon others. What
prevents this? It is the other’s interruption, who is willing to speak out. If this
dialogue represents some of Forster’s concerns about authority, as I suggest,
what defends the individual is his ability to respond. That is, the very act denied
by the medium of radio – reciprocity – is that which counters authoritarian
impositions.
This all makes more sense in the light of the ensuing dialogue, where the
men begin to guess each other’s profession. For although the muddle is promptly
untangled by Forster’s apology, a related argument develops. When the other
speaker guesses that Forster – surrounded by paper and struggling to keep hold
of his pen – is a novelist, the latter is immediately put in his place: it is a clear
disappointment that Forster doesn’t write like Edgar Wallace or P. G. Wodehouse.
And when the confession comes that the novels are of ‘the highbrow sort’ Forster
is ‘reluctant but truthful’, as if such tastes were a cause for embarrassment
(BBC 70; underlining in original). But this begins to change, as the other must
eventually admit to being a policeman. In the light of this revelation, Forster
confesses to a ‘Bad conscience’ that makes him jumpy around the police, but
in doing so prepares the ground for a different sense of authority (BBC 72).
The delightful irony of this discussion is that Bob Buckingham, who played the
policeman, was Forster’s long-term lover. Indeed, their then-illegal relationship
adds a comic strand to the dialogue for today’s readers. When Buckingham asks,
‘What was your latest crime?’ Forster replies, ‘Never you mind. No worse than
anyone else’s. Everyone has a bad conscience – and meeting a policeman brings
it out’ (BBC 72).
As Forster moves from the scene’s animating force to the humbled highbrow,
this also completes a reversal whereby the authority of the everyman passes from
Buckingham, whose common tastes sweep aside Forster’s intellectual tendencies,
to Forster, who is now brought happily low. Indeed, he not only avoids claiming a
privileged authority but quite explicitly speaks ‘as the general public’, contrasting
with Buckingham’s embodiment of the impersonal state (BBC 72). In this new
role Forster claims, ‘Nobody’s naturally law-abiding, also nobody knows what
the law is, it’s become so complicated. Everybody carries about a little secret load
of guilt, and that’s why we – well I don’t want to annoy you again – but that’s why
we don’t, speaking generally, like the police’ (BBC 72). That ‘we’, importantly,
is no longer an exceptional group of novelists but ‘we [the] wretched public’
who, unlike the police, can’t grasp the law (BBC 72). And with this turn Forster
again attains that gentle authority that becomes his signature on the BBC. As
soon as he is identified as an intellectual he is proven to be a buffoon, but this
puncturing also makes him profoundly normal and so legitimates his speaking
on behalf of the group of listeners.
So when Buckingham begins to explain the law, it is Forster who asks for
mercy as ‘I always forget details’ (BBC 74). If he struggles with legal small
print, however, what he has instead is the common sense to see the police’s
mistakes, and the right to point them out. Thus, Forster becomes increasingly
normalized, thrown into relief by Buckingham who leaves behind his original
reasonable character to become increasingly representative of the state. Forster,
now apparently sceptical of education, asks, ‘This excellent education they give
you, this special training and all the rest of it: does it make you human?’ And
Buckingham, adopting the opposing role, turns academic pedant: ‘Human?
I suppose you mean humane?’ (BBC 74). But Forster does indeed mean human
and Buckingham responds: ‘I should hope not [the public] wants us to be a
machine on which it can rely just [to] get on with the job whatever happens’
(BBC 75). As Buckingham accedes to dehumanization Forster becomes ever
more the reasonable everyman, objecting: ‘I’m the public and you’re not, and it’s
no use your telling me what the public wants when I know and you don’t. We
don’t want machine-made minds or machine-drilled faces, and if I may say so
without offence – that’s what the Police tend to develop’ (BBC 74).
Although we have, in only a few minutes of the speech, witnessed the initial
roles swept away, this delivers the broadcast’s highlight. For how does Forster
justify this latest claim? Not via the righteous indignation of the uninformed
public, but because, ‘I was an official myself for a bit’ and being an official entails
never having been ‘wrong as far as the public was concerned’ (BBC 75). Having
exchanged the role of the paper-shuffling novelist for the democratic power
of the ignorant citizen, Forster moves on to become the bureaucratic expert.
Wanting all of these roles and none, he claims the full range of experience to
allow argument combined with a naïve suspicion of any figure of authority or
expertise. Each of these positions has its own claim to speak authoritatively, its
own peculiar capacities and weaknesses, and only in combination do they make
for a compelling broadcast.
If Forster’s talks sought to avoid an over-reaching confidence, preferring a
gentler authority, his involvement with radio did demand a certain practical
ability with the developing technologies involved in broadcasting. In general,
however, he was uneasy with the practicalities of new technologies. He didn’t
have a telephone and handwrote most of his letters, private and professional
(BBC 5n14). He didn’t like recording broadcasts in advance or even rehearsing
them with the staff at the BBC as this would, he claimed, have destroyed the
impression of spontaneity. The ‘impression’, however, is of vital importance.
Arranging a discussion on ‘Efficiency and Liberty’ on 1 February 1938, John
Pringle made clear that ‘The intention is that the discussion should not be
impromptu, but should be fully prepared in advance’.7 This effect was to be
achieved by hard work, though, and the illusion is central to the character and
the potency of the medium. Pringle continues:
To achieve a final effect of naturalism I am hoping that there will be a preliminary
meeting here of all the speakers, when there could be an impromptu discussion
between them on their prepared statements. This discussion would be taken
down by stenographers, reduced and trimmed to the necessary length. After
that, with one run-through of the revised text, we should be ready for the
broadcast.
Forster was happy to join in with this procedure and Pringle wrote back on
18 February to praise his script, commenting, ‘I like your “personal” approach
and use of “I believe” ’. This careful preparation for simulated ‘discussion’ was
challenged by Forster’s long-standing refusal to rehearse. The producers had to
trust the author for his expertise with timing the piece, as well as a satisfactorily
smooth delivery. On 5 August, Forster wrote to N. G. Luker, who had advised
a preparatory run-through: ‘I should prefer, if agreeable to you, not to have a
rehearsal, for the reason that better results are, I think, to be obtained from
me without one; I speak with more spontaneity if I have not gone through the
script in the studio before’. This was not an easy task, though, and the artifice
of spontaneity was not reliable. It was with full awareness of the aptness of his
subject matter that Forster recalled the talk in a 1940 letter to R. A. Rendall: ‘I
have already done a freedom debate, and though I took a good deal of trouble
over it didn’t think my performance at all good. I find it awfully difficult to
stimulate spontaneity’.
Forster had to be reminded of the implications of this shared desire for the
sound of spontaneity. In July 1953 P. H. Newby tells him to change references
from ‘writing’ to ‘talking’, and advises that he must sound as if he’d just come from
the street. ‘You see, I want you to sound as though without any premeditation
at all you had popped into the studio to comment. At least not quite without
premeditation, because you have Macaulay under your arm. I think it is the use
of the work [sic] writing that check[s] one, when you are in fact talking’. Within
the BBC, Forster’s broadcasting was also seen as adopting the technique of a
written review. Roger Cary wrote to R. E. Gregson, Senior Producer of Overseas
Talks, on 7 September 1953, musing: ‘Forster’s voice is good. I could only have
wished that the review might have been a little more written for the spoken word
in some places. The shape is so exactly that of the front of the “Times Literary
Supplement”, of which I have long suspected that Forster has been on some
occasions the author’. Shedding the association between Forster the speaker and
the TLS’s literary in-crowd was important to the producers of the BBC, and so
to its speakers.
Forster was not constant in his attitude to the dynamics of seeming
spontaneity, writing to Harman Grisewood, in September 1951, that a recorded
broadcast of the ‘Fifth Anniversary Talk’ would be second best to live, but ill
health would make the former preferable. At other times he recognized that the
whole medium of radio was a mechanical intervention in human interaction
and that the use of machinery and, one assumes, rehearsal, is inherent to the
medium. Thus he wrote to Gerard Bullett on 1 September 1940 that, ‘I would
myself just as soon listen to a record but perhaps this [?] is because I feel that
the human voice is in any case mechanised by broadcasting, and the additional
mechanisation is therefore negligible’. In June 1943, by contrast, he voiced just
the opposite argument to his listeners: ‘I don’t like recording. It seems to me
to interpose an extra piece of machinery between us, you and me, and there’s
machinery enough already’ (BBC 227). Forster also seems to have been reluctant
to take part in unscripted discussions, citing his general slowness as a reason for
his objection. And where he preferred not to rehearse with his producer, lest his
delivery lose its liveliness in the studio preparations, he expected the BBC to
type up his scripts and return them to him in good time so that he could practice
in private. The desire for apparent spontaneity born of little practice was quite
probably due to a reluctance to rehearse in front of other people.
Of course, these are typical of the technical discussions that occur within
wireless production. But one of the most interesting things about Forster’s
broadcasts is that these same concerns are played out on air and incorporated
into the rhetorical tools that comprise his radio persona. Thus, his desire to
question accepted authorities goes much further than it might. At various times
he undermines his authority as a reviewer, the authority of the medium and the
authority of the institution from which he speaks. Speaking in a broadcast to
India he says ‘I never take much notice of what I read in the papers – or of what I
hear on the wireless either, though this isn’t the moment quite for me to say this’
(BBC 152). This is a wonderfully paradoxical reframing of the broadcaster’s
authority to suit Forster’s particular persona and politics: the listener can trust
Forster because he is also a listener, and one, moreover, who doesn’t trust the
wireless. Similarly, in a broadcast for sixth formers given in 1937 the anti-
authoritarian Forster recommends none other than Matthew Arnold, while
espousing the individual freedom of his young listeners to reject that advice.8 He
thus suggests Arnold ‘as an example not as a recommendation. Different readers

need different writers’ (BBC 134). Consequently he combines a strong espousal
of literature’s value with a profound doubt as to his authority to do so, stating
that ‘I believe that books are useful, but I don’t believe in giving lists of useful
books’ (BBC 134). Indeed, even the title of his long-running series ‘Some Books’
is so undemanding and indeterminate – are these good books? Bad books? Old
books? New? – so as barely to demand an audience’s attention for himself, let
alone for their reading matter.
In addition to laying bare the power relations implicit in broadcasting
Forster relates the practical details involved. In a broadcast on the tercentenary
of Milton’s Areopagitica in 1944 he speculates on Milton’s likely opinion of the
medium of radio: ‘Would he have liked the wireless? Yes and No. He would have
been enthusiastic over the possibilities of broadcasting, and have endorsed much
it does, but he would not approve of the “agreed script” from which broadcasters
are obliged to read for security reasons’ (Forster 1965: 62–63). He advises that one
shouldn’t let the radio replace the personal face-to-face encounter, stating that
‘civilisation rests upon direct personal intercourse [ … ] and that broadcasting,
even at its best and most intimate, is only a makeshift which will never be taken
seriously by friends’ (BBC 227). He adds, ‘I certainly can proclaim that I believe
in personal relationships’, and laments with his Indian audience that ‘It is difficult
to broadcast on a subject like this. We ought to be face to face – you and I –
while I am talking and able to interrupt each other’ (Forster 1965: 76; BBC 162).
The ‘we’ who ought to be talking are precisely those engaged in broadcasting,
working as part of the radio team.
The desire to show the workings of radio and to dispel any misleading or even
illusionistic qualities is, in fact, a recurring theme in Forster’s speeches, and often
has an ethical or political inflection, as the topic of the Areopagitica indicates. In
‘Some Books’ from 20 June 1943 he expresses concern at the very imaginative
process that Reith places at the core of radio’s success. Forster requires that
‘If you hear my voice now, and want to visualise me, don’t think of a human face.
My face, such as it is, is away down in the country somewhere. Think instead of
a needle moving down a groove, in a studio, for that’s what’s making the noise’
(BBC 227). Mis-imagining by the listener is dangerous because it may encourage
the impression that the wireless provides a personal encounter: that noblest of
interactions. To fail to make such things clear, he implies, would be an immoral
act. We might note that the broadcaster’s position is entirely different from that
of the novelist’s. Where the latter depends upon the creation of an illusion, the
former seeks at regular intervals to deflate and dispel its imagined scenes.
The ethical standing of the broadcaster, who is given the authority to command
the assent of his listeners, is at the same time the object of Forster’s concern
and an enjoyable prerogative. He confesses that radio is only the semblance of
civilized, mutually consenting discourse, masking a more dictatorial address:
‘I say “with your permission”, well knowing that you cannot withhold it, and that
I am in the position of a preacher who never hears his congregation cough. You
can escape my sermons, but cannot interrupt them, and I am going to hold forth
for a start on broadcasting generally as it concerns books’ (BBC 117).
A fascinating version of this plays out in Forster’s 1943 ‘New Year’s Greeting’.
There he promptly exposes the artifice of the broadcast, which is reliant on the
imaginations of speaker and listeners. He begins:
I send you these New Year Greetings from the portico of the National Gallery,
Trafalgar Square, London. I don’t mean that I am actually standing in the portico.
I am not standing anywhere, I am sitting in a studio, reading from a prepared
script, and a BBC studio, although decently upholstered, does not inspire to
thoughts of art. The National Gallery does, so imagine me as standing in the
portico. (BBC 217)
It’s not quite clear here whether the audience or Forster desires inspiration, and
it is on this ambiguity that the collaborative project of radio is worked out. The
source of the authority in the pairing, however, is made entirely clear. Forster is
in command: ‘behind me is the Gallery itself. Let us go into it’ (BBC 218). Indeed,
he reminds the listener of their missing senses, ‘The first thing you will notice, if
the hour is midday, is the smell of coffee’ (BBC 218). Merging conversation with
command – ‘you will notice’ – he makes his authority explicit: ‘if I add that the
January sun is shining you are in no position to contradict me’ (BBC 218). Here
is a playful authority that does not exploit its listener but demonstrates clearly
the dynamic of order and obedience that the medium itself engenders.
The possibility of misdirecting or deceiving his listeners, and the power that
the radio gives him to do so, feeds into Forster’s vigorous scepticism towards the
authority of the exceptional figure or charismatic leader, whose cultural effect
is dangerously homogenizing. He writes, ‘I distrust Great Men. They produce
a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always
feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper’ (Forster 1965: 80). Whilst
this comment, made in the 1938 essay ‘What I Believe’, clearly refers to Nazism,
Forster does not make a radical distinction from lesser dangers: this authority
may be the same as that claimed by Lord Reith. Without doubt another Great
Man, Reith’s vision for and of the wireless was politically engaged, albeit in a
transnational rather than a national manner: ‘Broadcasting may help to show

that mankind is a unity’ (Reith 1924: 218). This unifying gesture cannot be fully
set apart from the flattened unity of the Nazi state, a troubling parallel for the
BBC. Certainly Forster’s hostility to extensive government is so thoroughgoing
that the creep of governmental power into previously unregulated areas is
a source of significant anxiety. He notes, for example, that the curtailment
of individual freedom in the modern British state extends into the rules for
broadcasting, which, in the same way that it penetrates the private sound-space
of the home, exerts a new legal force in the domestic space. Thus he writes in
1934 that, ‘In England – I am sorry to say that a boy named Wilfrid has made a
private transmitting set. This is a very serious offence, because the ether belongs
to the Post Office’ (BBC 126). What had not been a commodity at all – the air
itself – is now owned and governed by an arm of the state. When he laments that
‘Organisation must lead to standardisation’, then, the critique is directed towards
the very institution – the BBC – through and for which he is speaking (BBC 124).
Although it is clear that Forster’s liberal values would see a community already
made of innumerable ‘little’ men, his role as a BBC broadcaster makes him,
inevitably, a part of a larger machine of state-legitimated standardization. His
manipulation of the broadcaster’s voice may, then, be understood as an effort to
avoid the totalitarian overtones that a more direct and forceful speaker carries.
This curious dynamic of individual and institutional forces can be seen in
action in a different scenario, when Forster had a private argument with the
Controller of the Third Programme, John Morris, in 1953. Forster wrote to
Morris on behalf of an acquaintance who had written a weak script on Chinese
prison reform, which Morris had rejected. There is, in the letters around this
event, a troubling nexus of personal and corporate responsibilities, which are at
the core of Forster’s issues with the BBC. He begins manifestly reluctant on 12
January 1953: ‘Dear John, Here’s a tiresome letter’ and his advocacy is based along
personal lines: ‘It was written by a man of integrity, intelligence and distinction
who has had an unusual experience which he wants to convey’. But this line
of argument is less significant than the issue that causes him to persevere. He
objects to the perceived politicization of the BBC, and more specifically to
the intervention of government censorship into programming: ‘What puzzles
me most is your criticism that he showed “no sense of engagement”. I haven’t
met the expression before, and feel bound to comment on its totalitarian tang.
Engagement not with the truth as the speaker apprehends it, but with the alleged
opinion of the majority of listeners. I do hope that the Third is not going to be
run on these lines. It hasn’t been in the past’. Morris, writing back on 14 January,
wouldn’t be cowed by Forster’s suggestion – or his pointed, literary-critical
naivety ‘I haven’t met the expression before’ – and responds:
I think you need have no fear that the Third Programme is now going to be run
on totalitarian lines. I share your own views on the liberty of the individual,
as indeed do all responsible people here. Nevertheless, I do not feel that belief
in individual liberty necessarily implies an obligation to give every speaker his
head; [ … ] as the one who is ultimately responsible for all that goes into the
Third Programme I must assume certain editorial powers, just as you yourself,
if you were editing a paper, would presumably wish to have the right to reject
certain contributions offered to you.
Morris’s criticism of the report is that the speaker is not sufficiently knowledgeable,
and may also be compromised by having been an official guest of the Chinese
government. But while Morris greets Forster’s man-to-man approach with a
BBC Editor’s response, he reinforces this with a personal appeal: ‘I ask you, too,
as a personal friend whose advice and help I cherish’. The argument rumbled on
beyond the meal, and in a letter from the following month Forster complained
that ‘you seemed to be acting as the BBC’s mouthpiece: to what extent the BBC
itself may be the mouthpiece of the F.O. [Foreign Office] I do not know’. The
identification of the individual speaker and an arm of the government troubles
Forster, I conjecture, quite as much as the perceived impositions of the Foreign
Office. Indeed, the Corporation’s very motto indicates this muddle: ‘Nation shall
speak unto nation’. The BBC itself does not have a stable broadcasting identity,
but poses, sometimes simultaneously, as a free and impartial institution, national
voice and a single speaker.
If this worries Forster, his involvement compounds rather than resolves this
play of identities. He is representative – or perhaps even symptomatic – rather
than explanatory of the BBC’s strangely plural and singular, institutional and
individual, identity. Indeed, the best indication of this may be Forster’s shift
from writer to broadcaster. For, although his prestige was growing as a speaker,
Forster’s standing as an author appears to have been far less secure at the BBC.
For example, invited to give the Third Programme’s Fifth Anniversary talk in
1951 – which he delivered on 29 September – his short story ‘The Machine Stops’
had passed through the hands of a reader in the Drama Scripts Department
earlier that year (16 March). The very story that engages so perceptively with
technology within domestic and public spheres was dubbed ‘rather Wells in
barley water’.9 In 1953 a similarly stark contrast can be seen. Asked to deliver
that year’s Reith Lectures – which he turned down – his story ‘The Curate’s
Friend’ was reviewed by script reader Mollie Greenhalgh. Her report of 23
September listed the requirements for radio drama and found Forster’s story
wanting in every category: ‘Construction: Conventional. Dialogue: Quite unreal.
Characterisation: Never escapes from literary. Remarks: A piece of whimsy
which cannot stand dramatisation, especially of this elementary kind’. Forster’s
wider cultural cachet was so substantial, however, that his was always a sought-
after opinion, even – or especially – in the role of the non-specialist. Thus, when
John Morris in July 1954 sought a report on that year’s Bayreuth Festival he
addressed ‘My dear Morgan’ but played on the authority and cache of the public
man of letters, referring to him in the third person. ‘What I hoped we were going
to get was E. M. Forster’s impression of sitting right through “The Ring” for
the first time at Bayreuth, or the general effect of Bayreuth on E. M. Forster, or
E. M. Forster on Bayreuth, or, in fact, E. M. Forster on anything that comes into
his head!’. While the stock of Forster the author was barely steady, E. M. Forster
the Public Intellectual and Broadcaster had become his prevailing personae and
an essential cultural voice for the BBC.
As a result of this growing status he could afford to make higher financial
demands of his commissioners, and his correspondence shows a canny
understanding of the economic rewards for accessing a larger listenership. When
negotiating the arrangements for his talk for the Third Programme’s anniversary,
he explicitly asks for higher than his usual fee. Knowing of the prestige of the
commission he refused the first offer of 50 guineas and accepted 60 guineas with
expenses, with extra for rebroadcasts. More than this, however, a repeat two days
later may have been due to Forster himself. Writing to Grisewood on 23 May
1951, he made clear his disappointment at the plan to broadcast on the Third,
and requesting first airing on the Home:
[I] must confess that I am much disappointed at hearing that it is proposed
to celebrate the Third Programme only on the Third Programme … I realise
the difficulties, and also see that a talk of the length we contemplate will be
impossible on the Home Service … I should certainly get to work on my own
talk with better heart if this could be done. As it is, I feel a bit dashed.10
In addition to making disappointed noises he also plays on the Third’s evangelical

function, reasoning, ‘surely this fifth anniversary offers a splendid opportunity for
spreading the good news further’. With this discussion behind the scenes, Forster’s
celebration of the Third turns, almost inevitably, into a discussion of audience: ‘I
speak to a Third Programme audience. Though do I? Is there such a thing?’ (BBC
114). In this most high profile of Forster’s radio talks he binds a celebration of the
radio to the same anxiety that he expressed in his earliest speeches.
If technology troubled Forster the radio was also the single device that most
profoundly engaged his imagination. It posed very particular challenges to his
liberal politics and to his long-held ennoblement of personal intimacy and
intercourse, as immortalized in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howard’s End:
‘Only connect’ (Forster 2000: iii). But it also offered a new arena within which to
establish a standard of humane and cultured values, and within which to forge
a persona and a manner of address whose inheritors are in evidence in today’s
radio and television programming. Refusing to condescend, to grandstand or to
dictate, Forster’s radio talks manage to be conversational even before conversation
with radio listeners became possible. They also, however, create a powerful set
of strategies that, altogether more cunning than the dictator’s fulminations,
command the attention and assent of the listener. Indeed, if the rant is the iconic
address of totalitarianism, Forster’s discursive, quasi-casual manner might be
the representative speech for liberal democratic government. No less forceful or
political than its extreme counterpart the constant concern of Forster’s talks was
finding a form of address appropriate to an audience and an audience receptive
to its form of address. It is characteristic of Forster that, rather than developing a
dull and responsible radio manner he created something far more engaging and
even exciting. Instead of government by politeness and restraint – as one might
expect of a respected but conservative fiction writer – he deployed a potent,
playful and often forceful voice, which is abundantly stylish and, recognizable
via its inheritors, deeply modern.
Abbreviation
BBC = Forster, E. M. (2008a). The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: A Selected Edition. Ed.
Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Macleod Walls. Foreword P. N.
Furbank. Columbia, MS: University of Missouri Press, 2008.
Notes
1 There is some disagreement as to the precise title of the talk. Jeffrey Heath (Forster
2008b) includes the text as ‘Railway Bridges’, whereas Mary Lago and her co-editors
(hereafter BBC) refer to ‘Of Railway Bridges’.
2 ‘Between 1928, when he began to broadcast, and 1963, Forster was heard 145
times in the Home and the Overseas Services and in the Schools Programme.
Between 1932 and 1963 he participated in 13 interviews or panels. Twenty-six talks
or interviews were translated or adapted for foreign-language transmission, and
exclusive of radio readings of excerpts there were 36 radio or television broadcasts
of his works or of adapted versions of them’ (Lago 1990: 134).
3 This chapter does not engage directly with the post-colonial arguments that are
latent in the context of Forster’s Indian broadcasts, hoping to take a broader survey
of the radio talks. Although I refer the reader to Morse’s article I do not want to
respond in detail to its post-colonial thesis precisely because the concerns with
audience and authority are not limited to a colonial context, a particular period or
a certain programme or format, but integral to all of Forster’s engagements with the
medium. To enter into the post-colonial conversation – to accept it is the animating
force in critical engagement – is already to concede ground that I would wish to
contest here.
4 Forster was suspicious of the BBC’s audience data. He mocked the process of
gathering information in ‘Fifth Anniversary Talk’ in 1951, and argued with the
head of Audience Research, Robert Silvey, in The Listener. In the face of the
quantification of qualitative data by the unit, Forster suggests that the central
issue is not the size of the audience but the quality of its attention. Hence his more
imaginative, novelistic approach to picturing an audience was not made without
information but in the desire for a ‘round’ – to use a preferred Forster term – and
human conception of the listener, rather than an arithmetic one.
5 Thornton Sinclair, reviewing the 1938 rally, noted how thoroughly oriented
towards broadcast media the events were: ‘all of the speeches must be in form for
publication, and Hitler’s for broadcasting as well [ … ] In fact, Hitler’s proclamation,
read in the afternoon, is repeated at a time more convenient for radio listeners’
(Sinclair 1938: 572, 582).
6 Although there is insufficient space to address it, it is on the identity of this ‘we’ that
a post-colonial argument has its greatest claim. For there is an interesting question
of communal identity based around nationality that plays out in Forster’s anti-Nazi
broadcasts. He makes it clear that where the Nazis want to be only German, to be
properly English is to transcend such exclusive national boundaries and belong
to the community of the world. Thus he writes, ‘We did not want England to be
England for ever; it seemed to us a meagre destiny’ (Forster 1965: 43–44), whereas
‘Germany is to be German forever, and more German with each generation’ (44).
This iterates a claim made in a broadcast with a far less explicit political agenda,
when reviewing a translation of a book about Marie Curie. In a Boxing Day
review of books from 1938 he promotes the book as an image of cross-cultural
cooperation that is, for Forster, quintessentially English: ‘Madame Curie was a Pole,
her biographer is a Frenchwoman, the translator, Mr Vincent Sheehan, is American;

yet her life belongs to English people because it belongs to humanity’ (BBC 141).
This is also the claim that Reith himself makes in Broadcast Over Britain: the
BBC is supra-national. A part of the rhetoric of Empire is the development of a
composite community both endlessly diverse and yet nationally delimited. If one
is most English when one is a hotchpotch of nationalities and cultures, there is a
justification for English government over diverse places and peoples.
7 All archival documents mentioned in this article are listed in the ‘Archives’ section
of the Bibliography.
8 In conversation in 1965, Forster confessed his admiration for Arnold but clarified,
‘I’m glad to say that we’re very different’ (Stone and Forster 1997: 71). Arnold
was one of Forster’s long-running interests, broadcasting on him at least three
times. (January 1944 ‘Unwillingly to School: Matthew Arnold’; June 1945 ‘The
Development of Criticism: Matthew Arnold’).
9 In a 1958 interview the delightfully ambivalent response to the question ‘Were
you consciously working in a Wellsian (or anti-Wellsian) manner in ‘The Machine
Stops’?’ was simply ‘Yes’ (Stone and Forster 66). The story is quite clearly, as Forster
establishes elsewhere, ‘a reaction against one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells’
(Furbank 1979: 162).
10 The speech lasted 25’50 (BBC 410).
Archival sources
BBC written archives

I. E. M. Forster File 1, 1934–1938, R CONT 1.
J. Pringle to E. M. Forster, 1 February 1938.
J. Pringle to Forster, 17 February 1938.
E. M. Forster to N. G. Luker, 5 August 1938.
II. E. M. Forster File 2, 1939–1940, R CONT 1.
E. M. Forster to R. A. Rendall, 4 February 1940.
E. M. Forster to G. Bullett, 1 September 1940.
III. E. M. Forster File 3, 1941, R CONT 1.
E. M. Forster to Z. Bokhari, 20 September 1941.
IV. E. M. Forster File 9A, 1949–1951, R CONT 1.
Reader’s Report, 16 March 1951.
E. M. Forster to H. Grisewood, 23 May 1951.
E. M. Forster to H. Grisewood, 23 May 1951.
E. M. Forster to H. Grisewood, 12 September 1951.
V. E. M. Forster File 9B, 1952–1954, R CONT 1.
E. M. Forster to J. Morris, 12 January 1953.

J. Morris to E. M. Forster, 14 January 1953.
E. M. Forster to J. Morris, 7 February 1953.
P. H. Newby to E. M. Forster, 21 July 1953.
R. Cary to R. E. Gregson, 7 September 1953.
Reader’s Report, 23 September 1953.
J. Morris to E. M. Forster, 28 July 1954.
Works cited
Beer, Gillian. (1996). ‘ “Wireless”: Popular Physics, Radio and Modernism’, in Cultural
Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, Ed. Spufford Francis and Uglow Jenny.
London: Faber, pp. 149–166, p. 151.
Forster, E. M. (1965). Two Cheers for Democracy. London: Penguin.
——— (1990). A Room with a View. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Penguin.
——— (2000). Howard’s End. Intro. and notes David Lodge. New York: Penguin.
——— (2008a). The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: A Selected Edition. Ed. Mary Lago, Linda
K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Macleod Walls. Foreword P. N. Furbank. Columbia, MS:
University of Missouri Press.
——— (2008b). The Creator as Critic and Other Writings. Toronto: Dundurn Press.
Furbank, P. N. (1979). E. M. Forster. (1979), A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lago, Mary. (1990). ‘E. M. Forster and the BBC’, Yearbook of English Studies, 20,
Literature in the Modern Media: Radio, Film, and Television Special Number
pp. 132–151, p. 134.
Morse, Daniel Ryan. (2011). ‘Only Connecting? E. M. Forster, Empire Broadcasting and
the Ethics of Distance’, Journal of Modern Literature, 34.3 (Spring), pp. 87–105.
Reith, J. C. W. (1924). Broadcast Over Britain. London: Hodder and Stoughton, p. 43.
Sinclair, Thornton. (1938). ‘The Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg’, The Public Opinion,
October, pp. 570–583.
Stone, Wilfred and E. M. Forster. (1997). ‘Some Interviews with E. M. Forster,
1957–58, 1965’, Twentieth Century Literature, 43.1 (Spring), pp. 57–74.
Triumph of the Will. (1935). [Film]. Leni Riefenstahl. dir. Germany: Reichsparteitag-
Films.
4
Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King

The ‘Impersonation’ of Divinity: Language,
Authenticity and Embodiment
Alex Goody
Oxford Brookes University
At 3pm on 10 December 1941 the BBC held a press conference at the Berners
Hotel in London, W1 to announce a new sequence of 12 radio plays entitled
The Man Born to Be King. Written by Dorothy L. Sayers, the successful detective
novelist, the plays were to dramatize the life of Jesus and the first of the sequence
Kings in Judea was to be broadcast on December 21. The list of invitees to the
BBC press conference included both national media and Christian periodicals.
Newspaper headlines on the day following the press conference went from
the relatively innocuous ‘ “Christ” to Speak in Radio Plays’ (Newcastle Journal)
and ‘Christ in Woman Novelist’s “Radio Oberammergau” ’ (New Chronicle of
Christian Education) to the attention-grabbing ‘Gangsterisms in Bible play’
(Daily Herald) and ‘BBC “Life of Christ” Play in U.S. Slang’ that the Daily Mail
proclaimed. Such headlines amplified concerns that the BBC had hoped to
mollify with their press briefing and contributed to a general outcry, headed by
the Lord’s Day Observance Society, against a blasphemous ‘Radio Impersonation
of Christ’.1
By 6 January 1942 the BBC had received 3457 letters about The Man Born to
Be King of which 3085 were letters of criticism including 520 letters with 4116
signatures (BBC 1942a). However, as the subsequent 11 plays in the sequence
were broadcast through to October 1942 the vehement criticism abated and by
November 1942 Basil E. Nicolls, the BBC Programme Controller, had agreed
with Dr James W. Welch, BBC Director of Religious Broadcasting, that the plays
would be rebroadcast on key Sundays from 24 December 1942 to Lent 1943 and
then on consecutive nights during Holy Week 1943. The last 5 plays of The Man
Born to Be King were broadcast again in a new production during Holy Week
in 1944, 1945 and 1946 and a new recording of the full sequence in 1948–1949,
with another one in 1951–1952. Two subsequent versions of the sequence were
recorded by the BBC (1965 and 1975), with the most recent national rebroadcast
being in Spring 2011. That Sayers’s radio plays became a staple of BBC religious
broadcasting in Lent and Holy Week does not detract from the original radical
undertaking of the plays themselves and it is this aspect of The Man Born to Be
King that is under consideration here. Rather than dealing with the plays, as
previous critics have done, in terms of their relationship to Sayers’s Christian
theology (notably her doctrine of human creativity explored in the 1941 The
Mind of the Maker), explicating their interpretation of original New Testament
sources, or evaluating the success of their depiction of figures such as Judas, this
discussion explores how the plays specifically engage with the ‘impersonation’ of
divinity through the ‘blind’ medium of radio.2 Examining Sayers’s undertaking
that the life of Christ should be ‘realistically and historically’ depicted (Sayers
1943: 17), the following pages examine the means by which she translates the
Word (of God) for her contemporary society, focusing on how the radiogenic
form of The Man Born to Be King foregrounds particular issues of language,
authenticity and embodiment.
Sayers was first approached about a radio dramatization of the life of Christ
in February 1940 by James Welch and it is clear that, from the outset, the plays
were intended for a Sunday Children’s Hour broadcast; a letter from Welch to
Sayers suggests a listening audience of children ‘between the ages of seven and
fourteen’ (Reynolds 1997: 146). This would presumably build on the success
of Sayers’s earlier Nativity radio play He That Should Come which had been
broadcast on the Children’s Hour on Christmas Day 1938 to a very positive
reception (Reynolds 1998; Low 1981: 126–127). Sayers had established her
reputation as a religious dramatist with the verse drama The Zeal of the House,
commissioned for performance in the Cathedral during the Canterbury Festival
in 1937, and The Devil to Pay, her second play commissioned for the Festival
in 1939.3 But in turning to write drama for radio Sayers was undertaking
something very different from her previous pageant plays in verse. There
were pageant plays on the radio, notably Clemance Dane’s [Winifred Aston]
The Saviours: Seven Plays on One Theme (1940–1941), but in her version of
the life of Jesus Sayers aimed for naturalistic realism rather than a ceremonial
gravitas or invocation of communal, religious identity. Writing to Welch after
his initial approach about the plays Sayers affirmed her desire to reproduce
Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King 81
‘the same kind of realism I used in the Nativity play He That Should Come’
stating that ‘the prohibition against representing Our Lord directly on the stage
or in films [ … ] tends to produce a sense of unreality which is very damaging
to the ordinary man’s conception of Christianity’ (Reynolds 1997: 146–147). In
her statement to the press before the first broadcast in December 1941 Sayers
also stressed the importance of realism for her plays which she intended to be
experienced, by listeners, as ‘a story about real people’, rather than ‘a piece of
genteel piety in stained-glass manner’ (Sayers 1941: 4). In the later Introduction
to the published version of The Man Born to Be King too, Sayers makes explicit
her concern to emphasize the specificity of Jesus; ‘not only Man-in-general and
God-in-His-thusness, but also God-in-His-thisness, and this Man, this person,
of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, who walked and talked then
and there’ (Sayers 1943: 21).
Sayers did have experience with BBC radio broadcasting beyond adaptations
of her detective novels; she had been involved in two collaborative detective
stories, Behind the Screen (1930) and The Scoop (1931), read by the authors
as serials on the BBC,4 and made regular broadcast appearances until 1952.
In 1941, while working on the scripts for The Man Born to Be King, Sayers
gave six talks on the BBC Forces Programme on the Nicene Creed as well as
National Service broadcasts on ‘The Religions Behind the Nation’ and ‘The
Detective Novel’ (Sayers 2008). Sayers’s career thus parallels her contemporary
T.S. Eliot who, from 1929, began making regular radio appearances,5 and was
also exploring the theological and aesthetic ramifications of his Christian faith
in drama, with Murder in the Cathedral commissioned for the 1935 Canterbury
Festival, for example. Eliot’s engagement with radio and the success of his drama
were key to his ‘increasingly public status’ and Michael Coyle argues that radio,
for Eliot, ‘offered an invisible way of playing a very public role’ (Coyle 2001a:
148, 153). Like Eliot, Sayers’s dramatic success at Canterbury led to media
attention to her writing and ideas, and to what Crystal Downing describes as
‘an increasing number of invitations to speak and write on theological topics’
(Downing 2004: 111). For both Sayers and Eliot one key intellectual function of
the new broadcast technology of radio was to communicate to a mass audience
the modern relevance of Christian belief. But, unlike Sayers, Eliot wrote neither
poems nor plays directly for broadcast, even though his Murder in the Cathedral
was broadcast live on BBC TV on 19 October 1936. Eliot may have used radio
to explore a non-elitist religious understanding of culture in the face of a
modern, mechanized world, but he did not explore the dramatic implications
of the medium. In contrast, with The Man Born to Be King Sayers undertook
to create a sequence of plays that engaged with the medium specificity of radio
during a time when systems of culture, belief and ethics were being sorely tried
by the pressures of World War II.
Following Welch’s proposal in February and negotiations with the Children’s
Hour Department, by July 1940 the BBC had contracted Sayers for The Man Born
to Be King as twelve 30-minute programmes (BBC 1942b). But her relations with
the Children’s Hour Department (especially with a Miss May Jenkin, assistant
to Derek McCulloch the director of the department) were soured by perceived
criticisms of her drafts and Sayers terminated the contract in January 1941.6
Although Welch subsequently persuaded Sayers to return to the project and
negotiated a 45-minute Children’s Hour slot for the broadcasts, Sayers did insist
that she work with Val Gielgud (who was currently Head of the Drama and
Features Department, and had produced He That Should Come) as producer,
corresponding with him closely during the writing of The Man Born to Be King
in 1941 and 1942.
Gielgud had been appointed Productions Director of the BBC’s Drama
Department in 1929 and had presided over this department in the nascent years
of radio drama on the BBC. Gielgud’s conception of radio as ‘national theatre’
was underpinned by a distinct idea of the listening audience, one that was in
stark opposition to the notion of an undifferentiated mass of listeners who could
be easily swayed by the monologic of one omnipresent broadcast. For Gielgud,
radio might be a broadcast from a single point to a multitude of receivers but
radio listeners were an ‘audience … composed of individuals or small groups, for
the most part in a domestic environment’ and thus were ‘particularly susceptible
to an intimacy of approach automatically denied in the theatre’ (Gielgud
1957: 87). Writing in 1936 Rudolf Arnheim had described ‘the great miracle
of wireless’ as ‘the overlapping of frontiers, the conquest of spatial isolation’
(Arnheim 1936: 13), but Gielgud emphasizes even further the nearness of radio
and its incursion into a private and familiar space. This highlights what Steven
Connor terms the ‘uncannily intimate proximity’ of radio (Connor 1996: 205):
radio is close and personal, it comes into the domestic zone, effortlessly crossing
the distance between discrete individuals. Connor also points, in relation to the
intimacy of radio, to its physicality; radio is an enacted form of electromagnetic
fluctuation that produces a physical effect (vibrations) experienced on and in the
body as ‘sound’. As Connor writes, ‘the act of hearing seems to take place in and
through the body. The auditory self is an attentive rather than an investigatory
self, which takes part in the world rather than taking aim at it’ (219). Understood
in this way, the effect of radio listening on the auditor is not the construction of
a separate, disembodied, visual consciousness but a receptive membranous self
that is touched at a distance. The radio medium thus offers a distinct possibility
for writers taking up the challenge to create a blind dramatic world while seeking
to explore the disturbingly ambiguous realm of the auditory and its ability to
‘touch’ the listener.
Principal in Sayers’s construction of a dramatic world in her radio life of
Christ was the language she decided to employ. She wrote early on in the
composition of the plays to Welch of the ‘difficulty’ in the ‘right choice of
language’, pointing out that, while Christ’s speeches would be based on the
Scriptures, if the ‘other characters “talk Bible”, the realism will be lost’. For
Sayers it was ‘a question of choosing a language which is neither slangy on
the one hand nor Wardour Street on the other’ (Sayers to Welch, 18 February
1940, Reynolds 1997: 147). In her press announcement Sayers uses a similar
metonymical figure, pointing out that inventing ‘Bible English’ for her
characters would make them ‘talk like Wardour St.-English and nobody who
talks Wardour St.-English ever sounds even remotely like a real human being’.
Despite the potential ‘affront and distress’ that might be caused by ‘stately
sayings translated from their familiar and consecrated phrasing’, for Sayers the
creation of something ‘vivid and human’ required a ‘modern English’ of ‘flesh-
and-blood people’ (Sayers 1941: 2).
The affront that Sayers risked with the language of her plays became plain
in the media coverage of the BBC announcement of The Man Born to Be King.
It was the section of ‘modern English’ spoken by ‘flesh-and-blood people’ that
Sayers read out at the press conference, from scene one of the fourth play The
Heirs to the Kingdom where Matthew bemoans Phillip’s lack of commercial
sense, that gave many journalists a hook for their reporting. Matthew says:
Fact is, Philip my boy, you’ve been had for a sucker. Let him ring the changes
in you proper. You ought to keep your eyes skinned, you did really, If I was
to tell you the dodges these fellows have up their sleeves, you’d be surprised.
(Sayers 1943: 117)
It was these lines that generated the ‘Gangsterisms’ and ‘U.S. Slang’ headlines in
some newspapers, and which provoked angry letters to the BBC and the press.
As Sayers points out in detail in her notes on the script, which were intended to
help the producer and actors and which were included in the published version,
the character of Matthew (the disciple who had been a tax collector) is ‘as vulgar
a little commercial Jew as ever walked Whitechapel … with a frank Cockney
accent’.7 Moreover, Matthew would be the first to cut down to size ‘any of
the other disciples … slipping into rafeened [sic] speech’ (Sayers 1943: 113).
Matthew’s belligerent use of slang (actually voiced in the persona of an East End
wide boy rather than an American gangster) is pivotal in Sayers’s attempt to

convey a more visceral sense of the narrative of Jesus’ life and death, to present
an actuality rather than conform to a general attitude of reverence and piety
towards the Authorised Version of the Bible.8 In the broadcast of The Heirs to the
Kingdom on 8 March 1942, the accent adopted by Eliot Makeham in the role of
Matthew (which he played in all the 1942 broadcasts) is distinctively different
(a harsh East End) from all others accents in the play9; he is marked as an urban
character, with attendant knowledge of money and finance, in contrast to the
others who speak either SE or with softer regional accents.
In dramatizing the Gospels in a language of ‘flesh-and-blood people’ Sayers
was also exploring the theological implications of the Gospel narrative, of the
word of God become flesh. As Sayers made clear in her February 1940 letter to
Welch, she saw radio drama, a medium that stood outside the censorship and
blasphemy regulations that attended theatre and film productions, as the ideal
space to explore the incarnation of God:
It seems to me that in broadcasting we are freed from any of the obvious
objection which attend the visual representation of Christ by an actor, and are
protected from the vulgarities and incongruities which the ordinary theatrical
or film producer might import into a stage or screen representation. Radio
plays, therefore, seem to present an admirable medium through which to
break down Our Lord’s persona and might well pave the way to a more vivid
conception of the Divine Humanity. (Sayers to Welch, 18 February 1940,
Reynolds 1997: 147)
Welch similarly saw radio as a free space for revivifying understandings of Jesus
and his sacrifice, emphasizing in a letter to the Children’s Hour Department
Director that ‘radio has here a freedom which is not allowed to the films and stage,
and that we ought to grasp it’ to ‘make radio history’ (Welch, 29 February 1940).
But the BBC was sufficiently concerned about the possible ramifications of
personifying one aspect of the Holy Trinity to contact the Lord Chamberlain’s
Office at St. James’s Palace to explain that the Director of Religious Broadcasting
(Welch) ‘would like to have an actor taking the part of Christ and speaking His
words’ in a planned programme. The letter goes on to say that:
although the figure [of Christ] may not appear on the stage … Dr Welch feels
strongly that broadcasting here has a legitimate sphere as compared with
physical representation and as a very short step further than the reading aloud
of the New Testament which involves the speaking of the words of Christ and
therefore some degree of impersonation … (Ogilvie, 27 August 1940)
In their response, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office stated that ‘there would be no
objection from our point of view … for no-one would appear publicly taking
the part of Christ’, distinguishing clearly between the acceptable ‘speaking His
Words’ and what could not be sanctioned; a visible, public impersonation:
[w]hat we do not allow is any figure impersonating Our Saviour on the stage. If
by any chance, you were intending at some future date to televise any programme
of this description when the figure of Our Saviour would appear, then so far as I
am concerned, as censor of plays, it would create a very difficult position in view
of our existing regulations. (Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 28 August 1940)
The Lord Chamberlain’s Office here draws an apparent distinction between an

aural imitation of Christ and a visual one, reinforcing the implicit hierarchy of
a visualist paradigm in which the world as a separated object of knowledge is
identified and known through the eye/I. Sound has no significance in such a
scopic regime where it is the seen that registers presence while the heard, despite
the essential materiality of sound (as sound waves and vibrations), can never be
a ‘physical representation’. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office does not object to the
broadcasting of ‘Words’ because no-one would publicly ‘appear’; Christ would
only ‘figure’ in a blasphemous way if the broadcast transmission by the BBC was
translated into a stream of electrons from a cathode ray tube.
A 1941 letter to Gielgud Sayers characterized radio as ‘speech-without-sight’
(Sayers to Gielgud, 3 March 1941, Reynolds 1997: 238), highlighting thereby
one of the central concerns of The Man Born to Be King: the authority of the
Word of God and its role in a contemporary interpretation of Christianity. The
whole sequence of plays is closely based on scriptural sources and begins with
the indicative line ‘The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God’. The
fidelity of Sayers’s interpretation of biblical revelation concerned critics at the
time and continues to feature in scholarly examinations of the plays, not least
because of Sayers’s express intention to offer a vivid but accurate dramatization
of the Gospel narratives. The plays thus have a written source to draw on and
in key episodes such as the crucifixion, Sayers includes no dialogue for Jesus
other than the recorded Seven Words. But The Man Born to Be King works in
an interesting way with the ambivalent aural realm of radio, and complicates the
notion of a ‘reading aloud of the New Testament’ that the BBC letter to the Lord
Chamberlain’s Office compared it to.
The Man Born to Be King relies on the authority and authenticity of the
spoken word, the voice as ‘metaphor of truth and authenticity’, what Christopher
Norris reading Derrida describes as the assumption that ‘speech can safely
be maintained within the zone of a privileged relation to truth’ (Norris 1987:

28, 65). At the same time, however, while the sanctioned words of biblical
revelation are spoken, they are nevertheless subject to mediation through
the radio technology in which, conversely, a play of meaning and conflict of
interpretations enters into the authenticity of the voice. It is the spoken voice
that reveals Jesus’ divinity, ‘you whom the voice called Son of God?’ (Sayers
1943: 79), but in the second play, The King’s Herald, this voice is audible only
as Thunder, its meaning and revelation accessible solely to the child Isaac, John
Baptist and Jesus himself, and not to the radio audience. In both the fifth and
sixth plays Jesus makes the statement ‘I AM’ without a predicate (drawing on
John 6:20 and John 8:58), a translation of the Greek ‘ego eimi’ or a transliteration
of the Hebrew YHWH. In both instances in The Man Born to Be King this ‘I AM’
is understood by those who hear it as ‘Hebrew’ and ‘the great name of God’,
‘God’s name’ (Sayers 1943: 152, 179). This can be typographically marked in
the written text quite easily, but in the broadcast plays there can be no tangible
acknowledgement of the distinct ‘I AM’. This transliteration of the name of God
is also, in the broadcast, necessarily spoken in English, so the verbal assertion of
the self-presence of the Godhead in Jesus relies solely on the uncertain sense of
radio presence. Similarly, the conventional capitalizations that mark the divinity
of God the Father and his incarnation in Christ in the written script disappear
in this blind medium where, for example, the distinction Jesus makes between
his earthly ‘father’ and his ‘heavenly Father’ is textually invisible in the broadcast
(A Certain Nobleman broadcast on 8 February 1942; Sayers 1943: 96). Sayers
cannot rely on any visible markers of Jesus’ divinity; indeed The Man Born to Be
King only passed the Lord Chamberlain’s Office because Jesus would not actually
appear, so what the plays are left with is an acute concern with the possibilities of
embodiment in the radio realm. Thus, the nobleman Benjamin, in the third play,
A Certain Nobleman, testifies not just to the truth of Jesus, but to his voice as the
active embodiment of the word of God; ‘I call all these to witness that your word
is the living truth’ (Sayers 1943: 110).
In seeking a ‘vivid conception’ of deity in her dramas and dramatizing the
incarnation of God in Christ, Sayers was attempting a particular form of
embodiment in the blind medium of radio. Incarnation is a persistent theme in
Sayers’s press announcement: she argues that ‘the Nativity is not just a pretty story
about a poor woman’s baby: it is the history of the Incarnation of God’, and talks
of the importance of conceiving ‘God incarnate as a convincingly human being’.
What Sayers sought to convey, and what she reiterates, is the ‘full theological
implications’ of the dramas she is writing, the implications of rejecting a Humanist
Gospel and presenting Christ as God and ‘altogether Man’ (Sayers 1941: 1).
The BBC’s caution in contacting the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and Sayers’s
careful attempt to explain her ‘translation’ of the New Testament to the
contemporary medium of radio were not sufficient to placate the press and the
public. Following from the newspaper headlines, the BBC, the press and Sayers
herself received many letters and statements of complaint. In newspapers the
issue of language was the most prominent, with the supposed ‘gangsterisms’ much
concerning critics and letter writers. The most vociferous objections came from
the Lord’s Day Observance Society who lodged a protest with the BBC (which
was also published in national newspapers) claiming ‘this proposed theatrical
exhibition will cause much pain to devout Christian people, who feel deeply
that to impersonate the Divine Son of God in this way is an act of irreverence
bordering on the blasphemous’. They called for the BBC to ‘refrain from staging
on the wireless this revolting imitation of the voice of our Divine Saviour and
Redeemer’. The Lord’s Day Observance Society had already campaigned against
the Sunday opening of theatres and objected to the ‘recent continentalising of
Sunday [BBC] broadcasts with Music Hall and Jazz Programmes’ (BBC, 1941–
1942). Their campaign against The Man Born to Be King, orchestrated by Herbert
Henry Martin – the Society’s secretary, focused most closely on the potential
blasphemy of the proposed plays, particularly on the issue of impersonation,
and raised certain issues over the casting of Robert Speaight in the role of Jesus.
Speaight, who played Thomas á Beckett in the 1936 televising of Eliot’s Murder
in the Cathedral, was the only cast member of The Man Born to Be King to be
named either in the press conference or in the broadcast of the plays. A feature in
the Sunday Graphic & Sunday News on 14 December 1941 described his career
and proclaimed, by a studio picture of Speaight, ‘His Voice Will Raise a Storm’.
This was certainly the case as a letter from Martin published in the Yorkshire Post
on 17 January 1942 calls the BBC ‘a temple of blasphemy’ and goes on to claim
that the ‘infamy’ of the broadcasts ‘is evidenced by the fact that the man chosen
to impersonate the Lord Jesus Christ is a professional actor who won fame by
his impersonation of Judas Iscariot at the Picadilly Theatre, London’. The anxiety
over the voicing of Christ was shared, to some extent, by the whole production,
as Sayers recalls of Speaight’s first appearance:
everybody was fighting against a vague sense that Bobby Speaight was about
to undergo a major operation … Bobby put a brave face on it, and said he was
firmly looking at it as a job of professional work and trying not to think of
anything else. (Sayers to Marjorie Barber, 27 January 1942, Reynolds 1997: 346)
The various letters, articles, protests and the cast’s own apprehension point to
a pervasive ambivalence about whether Jesus, by being voiced, was actually
appearing in these radio plays. It may have been possible for a more measured
public debate about the issues raised over radio presence to have taken place
in a period of national security and peace, but in 1941 it was difficult for this
potential challenge to centuries of dramatic and religious status quo to be seen
in isolation from the terrible external threats to British identity and national
security.
With many British cities struggling with the fallout of the Nazi strategic
bombing in the Blitz and World War II escalating to a fully global conflict
involving North Africa, Eastern Europe and finally the Pacific, letters of criticism
to the BBC make explicit connections between the war and the blasphemy of The
Man Born to Be King. A Mr J. Haney of Weston-Super-Mare writes of ‘two shocks
[which] broke on us this past week. 1st the treacherous attack of Japan on the
USA, 2nd A far greater shock – that the B.B.C. has sanctioned the dramatization
of the Life of Christ to be broadcast in this country’ (Haney 1941); while three
‘mothers’ as they term themselves from Weymouth and Leigh-on-Sea jointly
write ‘Is it any wonder that Britain is at War and suffering … when the BBC
stoop to “slanging” the Life of Christ’ (‘three mothers’ 1941). Such complaints
make it clear that, during the crucial war years of 1941–1942, a controversial
dramatic undertaking like The Man Born to Be King had an amplified resonance
for its potential audience.
Sayers herself was interested in drawing direct parallels between the politics
and history of Jesus’ time and her own contemporary world. In a letter written
during the early composition of The Man Born to Be King Sayers explains that:
My job, as I see it, is to present the thing, as best I can, as something that really
did happen, as actually and unmistakably as the Battle of Britain, and all mixed
up, like other events, with eating and drinking, and party politics, and rates and
taxes, and working and sleeping and gossiping and laughing and buying and
selling and coping with life in general. (Sayers to Father Taylor, 8 March 1941,
Reynolds 1997: 355)
To present the Passion as ‘something that really did happen’ Sayers derives a
context for her play from two aspects of current British history: the Empire
and World War II. Writing to Derek McCulloch (the original Children’s Hour
producer of the play) in October 1940 Sayers argues that ‘the complicated
political position of Judea under the Roman Empire … is so very much like that
of a tributary state to-day, under the British Empire, or in some cases under
the Reich’ (Sayers, 11 October 1941). Thus, in her production notes for the
fourth play, The Heirs to the Kingdom, she refers to the supposed attitudes of a
representative ‘Sergeant Thomas Atkins’ a ‘soldier stationed in India’ to ‘witch-
doctors’, ‘Hindu jugglers’ and ‘people claiming to be Gautamas’, as a way to explain

the Centurion Sosius’ difference to Proclus, a seasoned Roman centurion, who
has ‘the kind of understanding and tact … that an Anglo-Indian veteran might
apply to Hindu regulations about caste and sacred cows’ (Sayers 1943: 114–115).
In describing Pontius Pilate’s position in the ninth play, The King’s Supper, Sayers
compares it to that of ‘a British magistrate in, say, Kenya [where the] natives are
encouraged to administer their own law, and the foreign government will uphold
the findings, if that trial has been properly conducted according the native code’
(Sayers 1943: 240). For clarifying the Jewish crowd’s clamouring for the release
of Barabbas, the insurrectionary, over Christ in the tenth play, The Princes of this
World,10 Sayers notes that ‘we must think of him [Barabbas] as a member of the
I.R.A, arrested during “the troubles” with Jesus as the rival candidate presented
by the English Governor General for the kindly consideration of a Dublin
Crowd’ (Sayers 1943: 267). Sayers also mentions World War II in her notes,
offering Judas’ plotting to manipulate Jesus in The Bread of Heaven as analogous
to ‘certain religious elements forc[ing] France into defeat for her own good’
(Sayers 1943: 137). She refers to the Nazis at different points in the notes, in one
case comparing Baruch the Zealot, a ‘pure politician’, to the ‘Nazi party’ and at
another describing the expression of the crowd as ‘that frightful wild-beast noise
made by Nazis’ (Sayers 1943: 136, 267). As her notes illustrate, Sayers was not
interested in creating a simplistic parallel between Biblical forces of good and
evil and a contemporary world: her Romans are British Imperialists as much as
they are the Third Reich, and the oppressed Jews are variously colonial subjects,
a Nazi rabble and insurrectionary heroes. One of Sayers’s intentions was to create
a sense of recognition, of making the archaic events of the Passion resonant and
relevant. As Alzina Stone Dale describes ‘by using the British Empire as a modern
parallel to Rome, she made the plays real’ (Dale 1979: 79). But Sayers was also
concerned to expose the politics of her own time, offering Biblical characters
whose misdirected political zeal, ambition or nationalistic faith blinded them
to the moral and spiritual truth. As she puts it in her Introduction ‘under the
pressure of the Roman Imperium, their minds were exercised as ours are by
problems about the derivation of authority, the conflict between centralised and
decentralised government, the sanctions behind power-politics, and the place of
national independence within a world-civilisation’ (Sayers 1943: 130). For Terrie
Curran, Sayers ‘could and did shape the facts, cull and excise medieval dramatic
precedents, and embroider … to form credible characters who demonstrated
the machinations of the contemporary world’ (Curran 1979: 73). Above all,
World War II pervades The Man Born to Be King, both within and outside the
plays. During its composition and broadcast the bombers of the Third Reich
continued their assault on Britain: Sayers notes in a letter to McCulloch that ‘the
local warden has just come in to say that there is a time-bomb across the street’
and that she is off to ‘put the MS of the play in the air-raid shelter’ (Sayers, 5
November 1940). Moreover Nazi atrocities continued in Europe: writing two
days after the broadcast of the eleventh play King of Sorrows Sayers tells Gielgud
that ‘according to the news, Hitler has recently chosen to crucify 50 people in
Jugo-Slavia [sic] … so we haven’t got very far in close on 2000 Years’ (Sayers, 22
September 1942).
The connection between Sayers’s plays and current world historical events
was made even firmer by proceedings in the Houses of Parliament on Friday,
10 December 1941 when Sir Percy Hurd (Conservative MP for Devizes) asked
the Minister of Information to take steps to revise the scripts of The Man Born
to Be King. The Ministry, formed the day after the declaration of war in 1939,
was tasked with news and press censorship and home and overseas publicity
and propaganda but, as Mr Thurtle, a Parliamentary Secretary, replied for the
government, it was ‘not the function of the Minister of Information to exercise
jurisdiction over religious plays by the BBC’.11 Despite this clear statement
of government priorities during war time, the BBC did act further to avoid
controversy, calling their Religious Advisory Committee to an emergency
meeting and getting the Committee to review all scripts before broadcast.
Nevertheless, after the initial controversy about the plays, and attendant
publicity, The Man Born to Be King became significantly less prominent in both
the wider media and BBC listings; by the time the whole sequence had been
rebroadcast in 1943 Sayers notes, in a letter to B. E. Nicolls, that ‘the opposition
has more or less folded up, and criticisms have been almost entirely confined to
questions of verbal detail’ (Sayers to Nicolls, 12 May 1943, Reynolds 1997: 408).
Written and produced in a time of war and restrictions, Sayers’s The Man
Born to Be King is not an abstract or experimental play sequence: broadcast on
Children’s Hour it remains fully within the remit of its brief of communicating
to an audience of children and their parents and teachers. Nevertheless, there
is a clear interest in the extra-semantic communicative power of the medium
Sayers is working in, and with the need to create a convincing soundscape which
her ‘story about real people’ inhabits. Sayers pays close attention, in her scripts
and notes, to incidental music, to sound effects and to acousmatic sounds (such
as the cock crow in Matthew 26:74), as well as to the power of voice to embody
character. In her production notes Sayers suggests that Mary Virgin could have
a ‘faint shadow’ of an Irish accent (Sayers 1943: 46) (this was not followed in
Lillian Harrison’s portrayal of the role in the first broadcast), gives the disciple
John a ‘little impulsive stammer’ (Sayers 1943: 68) which is easily discerned
in the broadcast recordings of James McKechnie in the role, endows Matthew
with the cockney accent already discussed and suggests for minor figures, such
as Eunice, a Greek servant at the Public Baths, a ‘little foreign accent’, possibly
French.12 With these intimate and careful details Sayers sought to ‘show’ her
audience the differences between characters, to enable the voice to function as a
form of embodiment.
Intimacy is central to the life of Christ that Sayers endeavours to generate
with her plays, and the primary source of this intimacy is the women in The Man
Born to Be King. Throughout the plays, male characters express stereotypical
attitudes to women – ‘that’s just like a woman – believing things without an
atom of proof,’ ‘if once a woman makes up her mind to a thing – … Nothing
will stop her’ (Sayers 1943: 174, 79) – and the idea of feminine physical and
emotional extravagance is crystallized in the figure of Mary Magdalen. In the
penultimate play on the crucifixion Sayers’s notes describe Mary Magdalen as
‘passionate, emotional, purely human’ (Sayers 1943: 289). But Sayers is far from
endorsing a restrictive view of women and femininity; as her 1947 essay ‘Are
Women Human?’ demonstrates, she is, rather, emphasizing the place of women
in the matter of incarnation and embodiment. This is particularly the case in
the depiction of the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, and her relationship with
her son. As Sayers’s notes to the third play, A Certain Nobleman, explain, she
is concerned, not to deify Mary but to ‘show the human mother faced with the
reality of what her Son’s personality and vocation mean in practice’ (Sayers
1943: 92). The physical and personal bond between mother and son gives Mary
a particular insight into Jesus’ vocation, as she says ‘I am his mother and I know
him’ (Sayers 1943: 96), and Sayers is insistent on the importance of both this
physical bond and this unique insight. Mary’s grief at the crucifixion is made
viscerally real with her references to her bodily connection to Christ:
My child, when he was small, I washed and fed him; I dressed him in his little
garments and combed the rings of his hair. When he cried, I comforted him;
when he was hurt, I kissed away the pain; and when the darkness fell, I sang
him to sleep. Now he goes faint and fasting in the dust, and his hair is tangled
with thorns. They will strip him naked in the sun and hammer the nails into his
living flesh, and the great darkness will cover him. And there is nothing I can
do. Nothing at all. This is the worst thing; to conceive beauty in your heart and
bring it forth into the world, and then to stand by helpless and watch it suffer.
(Sayers 1943: 294–295)
What the crucifixion scene and Mary’s words epitomize is the way Sayers’s plays
confront the effacement of embodiment in both the traditional approach to the
life of Christ and the realm of radio.
With The Man Born to Be King Sayers used the blind medium of radio, a
medium that evaded the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, to revivify
the biblical narrative of Christ. Despite the fears of the Lord’s Day Observance
Society and others that a blasphemous impersonation was to be perpetrated,
Sayers’s sequence of plays became a mainstay in the BBC’s religious broadcasting
and Sayers herself spoke on a range of religious issues elsewhere in the radio
schedule. But The Man Born to Be King was a challenging project, both because
of the world of historical events surrounding it which amplified the resonance
of any modification to traditional, religious ideas, and because of the way Sayers
uses the ambiguous intimacy and physicality of the radio form. Sayers’s plays aim
to ‘touch’ the listener with the reality of Jesus’ life and his sacrifice, not enforce
a scriptural truth or impose a dogma. Linking the uncertainty of first-century
Judea with the turbulence of contemporary world politics, stressing the ‘reality’
and ‘history’ of the life of Christ through the use of language and voice and
offering an unstinting presentation of the origin of Jesus in Mary’s own body,
The Man Born to Be King attempts not an impersonation, but a radio incarnation
of the divine.
Notes
1 Full-page adverts taken out by the Lord’s Day Observance Society in the
pages of The Christian (18 December 1941), the Church of England Newsletter
(19 December 1941) and other newspapers and which reproduced the complaint
they submitted to the BBC following the 11 December press briefing proclaimed
‘Radio Impersonation of Christ! A PROTEST’.
2 Writing on radio in 1936 the perceptual psychologist and art and film theorist
Rudolf Arnheim titled a section ‘In Praise of Blindness’ (see Arnheim 1936).
3 Sayers’s other religious pageant plays were The Just Vengeance, Litchfield Cathedral
Festival, 1946 and The Emperor Constantine, Colchester Festival, 1951.
4 Behind the Screen was broadcast during14 June–19 July 1930 and the other
collaborators were Hugh Walpole, Agatha Christie, Antony Berkeley, E. C. Bentley
and Father Ronald Knox; Sayers wrote and read Chapter III. The Scoop was broadcast
during 10 January–4 April 1931 and the other collaborators were Agatha Christie, E. C.
Bentley, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts and Clemence Dane; Sayers wrote
and read Chapter I and Chapter XII (see Harmon and Burger 1997: 133, 136–137).
5 Beginning in June 1929 Eliot made 81 radio broadcasts (poetry readings and
cultural talks) over a 30-year period (for details see Coyle 2001b).
6 See Reynolds (1998: 338–345) and Low for a detailed account of these events;
Sandra Percy also sketches out the production and reception of the plays (Percy
2010: 238–242).
7 Phrases such as this could be used to support the case, made by James Brazabon,
for example, for Sayers as anti-Semitic, but Carolyn Heilbrun, Robert McGregor
and Ethan Lewis make convincing defences of Sayers’s attitude to and depiction of
Jewish people (see Brazabon 1988; Heilbrun 1993; McGregor and Lewis 2000).
8 Sayers discusses this issue in her Introduction to the published version (Sayers
1943: 18–19).
9 Disc recordings were made of all the original 1941–1942 broadcasts, except for the
first play ‘Kings of Judea’; digital versions of these recordings are available at the
British Library, London.
10 The narrative of Barabbas is given in the non-canonical Gospel of Peter.
11 See the Manchester Guardian’s reporting of this exchange on 20 December 1941.
12 Eunice was played by Zita Gordon in the first broadcast, a Hungarian actress who
was married to Lewis Gielgud; her accent in the British Library digital copy of the
1942 broadcast is not French but sounds like an attempt to reproduce an Asian-
English inflection.
Archival sources
BBC. (1941–1942). ‘Broadcasting Press Cuttings Programmes; Features, Variety, Drama

Man Born to Be King’, From 01/01/1941 to 21/12/1942, BBC Written Archives, Book
3, Box 2 P183/3.
BBC. (1942a). ‘Programme Correspondence Section Report’, BBC Written Archives,
R1/102 P.C.S Man Born to Be King 1941–1942.
BBC. (1942b). ‘Schedule of Production and Broadcast’ of Man Born to Be King, BBC
Written Archives, R19/697, Entertainment, ‘Man Born to Be King’, 1942–1951.
Haney, J. (14 December 1941). Letter to BBC, BBC Written Archive, R1 Publicity:
Sayers, Dorothy L., File 1A 1941.
Lord Chamberlain’s Office. (28 August 1940). Letter to James Welch, BBC Written
Archive, R1/910 Sayers, Dorothy L. Children’s Hour File 1 1940.
Ogilvie, F. W. [BBC Director-General] (27 August 1940). Letter to Lord Chamberlain’s
office at St James’s Palace, BBC Written Archive, R1/910 Sayers, Dorothy L.
Children’s Hour File 1 1940.
Sayers, D. L. (5 November 1940). Letter to Derek McCulloch, BBC Written Archives:
Sayers, Dorothy L.: Children’s Hour, File I, 1940, R1/910.
Sayers, D. L. (1941). ‘B.B.C. Announcement: The Man Born to Be King’, December 10
1941, BBC Written Archives, R1 publicity: Sayers, Dorothy L. File 1B 1942–1943, 4.
Sayers, D. L. (11 October 1941). Letter to Derek McCulloch, BBC Written Archives:
Sayers, Dorothy L.: Children’s Hour, File I, 1940, R1/910.
Sayers, D. L. (22 September 1942). Letter to Val Gielgud, BBC Written Archives: Sayers,
Dorothy L.: Children’s Hour, File I, 1940, R1/910.
‘Three Mothers’, (11 December 1941). Letter to BBC, BBC Written Archive, R41/250/1
P.C.S. Man Born to Be King A-K 1941–1946.
Welch, J. (29 February 1940). Letter to Children’s Hour Department, BBC Written
Archives: Sayers, Dorothy L.: Children’s Hour, File 1 1940, R1/910.
Works cited
Arnheim, R. (1936). Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read. London: Faber
and Faber.
Brazabon, J. (1988). Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography. London: Victor Gollancz.
Brown, R. J. (1998). Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties
America. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
Connor, S. (1996). ‘The Modern Auditory I’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from
Renaissance to the Present, Ed. Roy Porter. London and New York: Routledge,
pp. 202–223.
Coyle, M. (2001a). ‘T. S Eliot on the Air: “Culture” and the Challenges of Mass
Communication’, in T. S. Eliot and our Turning World, Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
——— (2001b). ‘T. S. Eliot’s Radio Broadcasts, 1929–63: A Chronological Checklist’, in
T. S. Eliot and our Turning World, Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, pp. 205–213.
Curran, T (1979). ‘The Word Made Flesh: The Christian Aesthetic in Dorothy L. Sayers’s
The Man Born to Be King’, in As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work
of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ed. Margaret P. Hanney. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Dale, A. S. (1979). ‘The Man Born to Be King: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Best Mystery Plot’,
in As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ed.
Margaret P. Hanney. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Downing, C. (2004). Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Drakakis, J. (1981). ‘Introduction’, British Radio Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gielgud, V. (1957). British Radio Drama 1922–1956. London: Harrap and Co.
Harmon, R. B. and Margaret A. Burger (1977). An Annotated Guide to the Works of
Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Garland Publishing.
Heilbrun, C. G. (1993). ‘Dorothy L. Sayers: Biography Between the Lines’, in Dorothy
L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration, Ed. Alzina Stone Dale. New York: Walker,
pp. 1–14.
Lenthall, B. (2007). Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Low, D. A. (1981). ‘Telling the Story: Susan Hill and Dorothy L. Sayers’, in British Radio
Drama, Ed. John Drakakis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 111–138.
McGregor, R. K. and Lewis, E. (2000). Counndrums for the Long Week-End: England,
Dorothy L. Sayers and Peter Whimsey. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Norris, C. (1987). Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Percy, S. (2010). Dorothy L. Sayers: More Than a Crime Fiction Writer. North
Charleston, SC: Create Space Books.
Reynolds, B, ed. (1997). The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers Volume Two: 1937–1943 From
Novelist to Playwright. Cambridge: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society.
——— (1998). Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Sayers, Dorothy L. (1943). The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
——— (2008). The Christ of the Creeds and Other Broadcast Messages to the British
People During World War II. Cambridge: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society.
5
T. S. Eliot on the Radio: ‘The Drama Is All

in the Word’
Steven Matthews
University of Reading
It has become commonplace, within discussions of literary modernism, to notice

the fascination which was exerted upon writers in the early twentieth century by
technology and the new media, including telephones, gramophones and radios.
Juan A. Suárez, in an article on the poet T. S. Eliot and the gramophone, has
noted the appeal of these devices in typical terms, describing how they equally
‘dissociate’ language ‘from human corporeality’, detach ‘oral language from the
physical presence of the speakers’ and therefore ‘scatter’ the originating subject
of the words through the air (Suárez 2001: 751). The action of the typist in Eliot’s
‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land, who turns away from her sexual
encounter automatically to put a record on the gramophone, is emblematic of
a series of vocal projections in Eliot’s work which themselves speak to iconic
modernist fears about fracture and abstraction. For Suárez, Eliot, with his
alertness to the ‘different voices’ which punctuate the air of the modern cities, is
but the more sensitive to the general atmosphere of his age.
This essay will consider that alertness as it is specifically displayed within
Eliot’s work for BBC radio, and as it speaks to Eliot’s contemporary creative output
during the years of his broadcasts. In doing so, it will partly seek to challenge
what has become a critical consensus around Eliot’s radio talks, a consensus
which presumes that, in fact, he became deaf to some of his own intonations, as
he deployed the emergent medium to proffer some of the conservative religious,
cultural and political views which seem to have hallmarked his later career. Rather,
I will argue, Eliot’s consciousness of the possibilities of radio often made him
doubly aware of issues centred on voice, voicing and their uncertain connection
to personification, issues which otherwise ran across Eliot’s career – early and
late. Radio made him deliberate again on those qualities of self-attentiveness –
including self-hearing – within a discourse, which are otherwise characteristic
of Eliot’s poetics.
The two pioneering critics who have written extensively and decisively about
T. S. Eliot’s radio broadcasts have established those broadcasts’ tone and tenor
within the moment in which they were given. Michael Coyle and Todd Avery
have each determined Eliot’s presence on radio during the 1940s and the 1950s
as being essential to the religio-political ambition of the poet’s later work. They
have also declared Eliot’s radio presence as being almost uniquely integral to
the governing ideal of the British Broadcasting Corporation at that stage in its
development. As Coyle has usefully established for later scholars in this area,
T. S. Eliot’s broadcasting career with the BBC lasted from 1929 through to
1963, a period during which Eliot spoke on radio more than a hundred times.
Coyle has recently presented that broadcast career as moving through roughly
distinctive phases, including an earlier period in which Eliot spoke on English
poets and playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through to
what Coyle describes as a time when Eliot mixed these literary topics with
‘church-related’ broadcasts. Eliot’s voice was heard relatively frequently during
World War II, ‘partly as a contribution to wartime morale’, according to Coyle,
as Eliot began more intensively to read his own poetry on air, predominantly for
George Orwell’s BBC Eastern Service, directed chiefly at India. In his final phase
of broadcasts, Coyle casts Eliot as speaking ‘primarily for the BBC’s highbrow
Third Programme’ on a variety of favourite topics which allowed advocacy, in
some cases, for those writers Eliot thought neglected at this moment in literary
discussion: David Jones, Edwin Muir, John Davidson, Charles Williams amongst
them (Coyle 2011: 146–147).
As this précis of Coyle’s detailed work on Eliot’s broadcasts makes clear, for
Coyle, and for Avery in his wake, the Eliot of the radio is an establishment,
even imperial, presence, particularly in his wartime and post-war emanations.
In various contexts, Michael Coyle has reiterated that he sees Eliot particularly
harnessing ‘so distinctively Modernist a thing as radio’ for, ‘ironically enough’,
inherently conservative purposes, purposes closer to the intellectual atmosphere
of Eliot’s childhood than to the immediate historical trauma of the 1940s and
the 1950s in which the broadcasts were made. For Coyle, the Eliot of the radio
adopts the role of ‘late Victorian Sage’, not least in his concern with the ‘nature of
culture’, a theme which recurs in many of Eliot’s broadcast talks:
For Eliot, cultural vitality was a matter not of organisation so much as of
organism. … Eliot’s readiness to find in historical particularities ‘symptoms’ of
the general health or – more often – disease of a culture is among his more
profound links with Victorian sages like Arnold or Ruskin. (Coyle 2001: 148)
T. S. Eliot on the Radio 99
Eliot displays response to the pressures of the history of the time of his broadcasts,
in Coyle’s view, only to the extent that his focus remains, as it had from the
start of his career, upon a pan-European perspective towards ‘culture’. Even
when broadcasting during World War II to India, for Coyle Eliot is reiterating
a cultural utopianism centred firmly on what he perceived as the centuries-old
continuities which ran across European civilization (Coyle 2009: 194).
Todd Avery has expanded upon Coyle’s crucial work in several ways: he has
established the consonance between Eliot’s broadcast views and the ethos of the
BBC in its first three decades, and he has argued that those views were not, as
Coyle had implied, determined solely by Eliot’s response to the eruption of a
second war in Europe. Rather, Avery asserts, conservative religio-political ideals
had been promulgated by Eliot from the early 1930s, once Eliot began talking on
those ‘church-related’ topics mapped by Coyle. Avery conceives the early BBC as
holding a moral mission:
The Reithian BBC envisioned radio broadcasting as a golden opportunity …
‘to forge a link between the dispersed and separate listeners and the symbolic
heartland of national life.’ This link would be forged, at the most basic level,
by perforating the private sphere of the home and organizing … a new ‘social
aggregate’ through the sending of disembodied voices through the air. (Avery
2006: 131)
Avery alters the parameters of Coyle’s phased sense of Eliot as broadcaster

by locating Eliot’s four contributions to a 1932 series called ‘The Modern
Dilemma’ as the ‘core’ of the poet’s ‘contribution to ethical discourse in the
BBC’s Reithian era’ (119). It is in these talks, Avery avers, that Eliot most
directly confronts his dissatisfaction with a ‘social fragmentation’, one brought
on by the ‘more or less rational skepticism’ which had come to characterize
the modern era, with its ‘thoughtless acceptance of the great moral value of
mechanism’. Against such dissatisfaction, Eliot predominantly, in this series
of four talks, sought to counter-assert ‘belief in holy living and holy dying’,
a belief which, in Avery’s handling of it, might seem quaint given the ironies
of the situation. As Avery is fast to point out, Eliot’s ‘dogmatic’ dismissal of
all mechanism and technology would involve the ‘elimination of the specific
communications medium whose existence he was harnessing to convey
his message’ – radio (127). In this kind of deafness to the technologies of
communication, as in the religious ‘message’ derived from Eliot’s negative
diagnosis of modern culture, Avery concurs with Coyle’s characterization of
the poet in his radio broadcasts as being at his most ‘Arnoldian’.
Whilst acknowledging something of the power of this characterization of

Eliot on the radio, and also the consonance between his radio persona and the
‘golden opportunity’ for cultural integration reached for by the early BBC, this
essay will argue that there is a greater flexibility and sensitivity, greater struggle
for authoritative definition, as well as real humour, in Eliot’s vocalizations on
air than that presented by Avery and Coyle. More especially, there is something
to be learned from the relation between the other consistent topic of Eliot’s
broadcasting profile – his interests in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
English literature – and the ‘church-related’ or ‘nature of culture’ preoccupations
from the 1930s to the 1950s. Eliot’s consistent broadcasts on literature have been
largely overlooked in this liberal critics’ quest to establish his pompous ‘sage’
credentials. Eliot’s on-air discussion and promotion of this earlier literature –
what I have elsewhere explored as that of Eliot’s self-declared ‘favourite literary
period’ (Matthews 2013: 20) – actually, as we will see at the end of this essay,
have much to tell us about that degree of self-dramatization, role-playing and
self-questioning in Eliot’s projection of a radio self. Avery notes the obvious
correlation between the arrival of the BBC in the nation’s homes in 1922, and
the annus mirabilis of modernist creation, which included the publication of
The Waste Land in that year (Avery 2006: 1). But for Eliot as author of The Waste
Land, the notion that within any one voice there resonate other vocalizations,
both from history and in the present, might cause matter for reflection when
asserting, as Coyle does, that Eliot on radio only and earnestly plays a ‘role as a
late Victorian sage’ (Coyle 2001: 145). To what extent, in other words, this essay
will ask, is Eliot’s radio persona itself a dramatic creation, even as the spoken
voice through the air itself promulgates views about culture and Christianity
which Eliot, in propria persona, might seem to wish to present as his direct
opinion, in other of his prose writings?
Eliot’s publishing career in this area might show him especially sensitive
to the complications of this particular aspect of voicing and vocalization, and
the connection between original oral communication in the new medium and
the established written forms of the printed text. The decision to print, as an
‘Appendix’ to the three lectures collected as the book The Idea of a Christian
Society (1939), ‘The following broadcast talk, delivered in February 1937 in a
series on “Church, Community and State”, and printed in The Listener’ establishes
Eliot’s sense of the multiple occasions and media of expression for some of his
‘ideas’ at this period. Those three original lectures, along with that broadcast, are
then repackaged as a settled text between covers – The Idea of a Christian Society.
The justification for inclusion of the talk as an ‘Appendix’ given by Eliot – the
talk ‘has some relevance to the matter of the preceding pages of this book’ – is
deeply sardonic, both offering and refusing to legitimate the addition of further
pages to the argument (Eliot 1976: 71). The ‘Preface’ to Eliot’s related book on
social and religious organization at this period, Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture (1948), is even more enigmatic in this area. After an opening paragraph
outlining the multiple previous versions of thoughts and chapters which
underlie the Notes, the ‘Preface’ here simply tells us ‘I have added as an appendix
the English text of three broadcast talks to Germany’, and gives the German
title of the broadcast series, and its original German publisher (Eliot 1976: 83).
The ‘some relevance’ which the talks on ‘The Unity of European Culture’ might
be presumed to have on the already tentative-seeming Notes Towards is itself
unarticulated amidst other questions of origin and translation (were these talks
originally written in English, or who translated them?). In both these instances
of adding radio appendices to collections of published lectures or essays, this
question of origin is enigmatically to the fore: for The Idea of a Christian Society,
the broadcast talk reprinted was simply ‘delivered’, then ‘printed’, as though
agency is removed from the process; ‘The Unity of European Culture’ broadcasts
seem simply proffered, the purpose of their inclusion undetermined by Eliot
himself.
This arrangement, which advertises the multiple (and non-written)
provenance of aspects of the presented text in Eliot’s formulations of ‘culture’ and
of ‘Christian society’, derives from a mid-career Eliot, who has undergone ‘a shift
in his aesthetic views’ and become ‘a social thinker and moralist’ predominantly
(Avery 2006: 131). Yet we can see operative here something of the shadow of
the earlier relation between the poem The Waste Land and its ‘Notes’ (which
are also of ‘some relevance to the matter of the preceding pages’). From 1922,
Eliot had been using this sense of various provenances in his texts to dramatize
their radical instabilities as texts; we can see that the move towards ‘publication’
and ‘fixing’ his radio work of the 1940s and the 1950s to an extent continues,
rather than deflects, that tendency. Eliot in this respect explores something of
the spectrum suggested in his ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ – itself originally a
radio talk broadcast in late 1953. There, Eliot distinguishes between poems in
which the poet speaks ‘to himself ’, or those in which he speaks ‘to others’, or,
in the third possibility, offers a fully dramatic verse which deploys characters
other than himself. Even as he makes this distinction, however, Eliot admits that
every poem moves from private to public spaces of utterance, and shows various
attentiveness to this fact. In poetic drama, all three voices are present at once,
in those places where the characters’ voices can be heard to be ‘in unison’ with
the author’s voice, whereas in other places ‘a more impersonal voice still than
either that of the character or the author’ is to be heard (Eliot 1957: 99–100). My
argument would be that, in his radio broadcasts themselves, and consequently
in their multiple occurrences in print, Eliot concertedly draws our attention to
these complexities of voicing at various removes from a spoken ‘self ’, and to the
listening and self-listening which they incur.
In his advertisement of the manifold provenance of the appendices to his most
expansive treatment of his predominant concerns with Christian society and
with culture, Eliot elaborated on the complex relation between (spoken) radio
broadcast and the seeming finality of the printed book. The original ‘moment’
of the ideas given moves across media, or even across media and languages
in the case of ‘The Unity of European Culture’, towards a ‘final’ ‘consecration’
(to adopt the word Avery uses for Eliot’s method for the BBC). Eliot plays
upon the uncertain relation between the ephemeral (why are these broadcasts
reprinted in the books?) and the canonical, even whilst presenting his most
conservative and pastoral ideals against a consistently perceived ‘fragmentation’
of social, cultural and religious values in the modern era. The presentation,
without warrant, of the three originally German broadcasts at the end of Notes
Towards the Definition of Culture bears something of the unmediated expression
of chunks of text in such earlier Eliot work as The Waste Land: they represent
an accumulation of textual ‘evidence’, but it is for the reader to establish the
grounds of relation between ‘main’ text and (reprinted) appendix. The ‘personal’
and ‘impersonal’ voices are difficult to distinguish in this particular context of
Eliot’s output.
Eliot’s aesthetic both early and late is imbued with investigation of the
spectrum between idiomatic language from a specific speaker, and the
highly wrought, Pan-European, allusiveness potential within literary – and
specifically poetic – expression. ‘A Game of Chess’, the second section of The
Waste Land, which opens with a sensuous language replete with connections
to Shakespeare, John Webster, Milton, Virgil and Ovid, and ends with the
1910s scene in a London pub, might seem the classic site for such aesthetic
arrangement. However, in his critical appreciation of literary influence and
expression, Eliot could also show himself alert to the nuances of dramatic
possibility around this issue of verbalization and vocalization within the
medium of the new technologies such as radio. In the unlikely context of
his essay on ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ (1927), Eliot marks at one
end of this particular spectrum ‘The spoken play, the words which we read’,
which ‘are symbols, a shorthand, and often, as in the best of Shakespeare, a
very abbreviated shorthand indeed, for the acted and felt play’. The tension
is already there, between ‘spoken’ and ‘read’ – but Eliot’s contrast is actually
between the Elizabethan text, in which the ‘acted’ play is gestured towards,
or symbolized, by the words on the page, and the plays of Seneca, with their
ample soliloquies covering pages of text, where ‘the drama is all in the word,
and the word has no further reality behind it’ (Eliot 1972: 68).
There follows in ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ a hilarious page by Eliot
in which he tries (but fails) to decipher the stage (and offstage) action of Seneca’s
play Hercules Furens – itself a crucial source for his own Little Gidding IV – before
Eliot comes to the resounding conclusion that Seneca’s play ‘is full of statements
useful only to an audience which sees nothing. Seneca’s plays might, in fact,
be practical models for the modern “broadcasted drama” ’ (70). The extensive
verbalization of characters’ speeches in Seneca’s plays, in other words, operates
in a simplified zone between life (‘reality’) and a kind of spoken thinness devoid
of living reference: Seneca’s characters, he writes, ‘have no subtlety and no
“private life” ’ (70). They exist, in contrast to their Elizabethan variants, nowhere
other than, and in no extra-textual time than, the duration of their utterance.
Tragic action, such as Hercules’ slaying of his family whilst maddened by Juno,
exists nowhere outside ‘a running commentary by Amphitryon, whose business
it is to tell the audience what is going forward’ (69). Amphitryon, in other words,
is ‘broadcasting’ the event, in the only way possible, by speaking it – but in the
process the event literally disappears within and behind his words.
‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’ shows Eliot’s early sensitivity to the effects
of the sensory singularity (‘an audience which sees nothing’) of the newish
medium of radio upon language and the spoken word, and finds unlikely
classical precedent, and analogy, for it. With the ‘broadcasted’, Eliot seems to
claim, all ‘drama’ resides solely within the rhetoric spoken at length into the
microphone. To that extent, Eliot’s own dramatic work from Murder in the
Cathedral (1935) onwards would seem to be ‘broadcasted’ rather than ‘acted and
felt’; each play notably involves little action onstage, and the characters are often
difficult to identify apart – something which the later works The Cocktail Party
(1950) and The Confidential Clerk (1954) utilize as part of their comedy. The
more perceptive characters in these plays note the limitation which this medium
enforces upon the speaking voice. Harry, central figure of The Family Reunion,
for instance, notes the frustration that ‘one cannot speak with several voices at
once’ (Eliot 1939; Matthews 2013: 186). If that were achievable, the drama might
move from ‘broadcast’ to ‘reality’; but it is an achievement, Eliot’s oeuvre would
seem to imply, not possible to modernity.
Eliot’s alertness to limitation within verbalization, its impact upon

characterization and the connection to an extra-verbal ‘further reality’ seem
particularly exacerbated within some aspects of his own radio broadcasts.
Avery’s advocacy of Eliot’s four contributions to the 1932 radio series of speeches
on ‘The Modern Dilemma’ pivots upon his reading of the opening paragraphs
of the first of those talks, ‘Christianity and Communism’. This is a reading in
which Avery rightly foregrounds Eliot’s rhetorical strategy of presenting himself
as an ‘amateur’ on these matters, the better to advertise his proximity to the
‘general audience’ for his ideas. Although asking ‘a fundamental ethical question’,
‘How to live life well?’, and answering it by advocating the unfashionable notion
of ‘Christian living’, Avery hints that the success of the broadcast derives from
Eliot’s adoption in it of the persona of Everyman (the medieval play which was
to be an important literary and poetic model for Murder in the Cathedral) (Avery
2006: 120).
Yet, when considered in its original context, Avery’s limited sense of Eliot’s
vocalization here might be taken as symbol for the rather po-faced quest for
the Arnoldian he and Coyle have adopted in Eliot’s broadcasts throughout. As
reprinted in The Listener, Eliot’s opening paragraphs here, in addressing the po-
faced topic of ‘The Modern Dilemma’, had been typically more fleet and tonally
unstable, besides being radically self-ironizing. Eliot’s professed amateurism
was, in fact, advertised in this first talk by a highly risky adoption of masquerade:
I have been tempted to begin my contribution to this discussion with the words
of Trinculo in ‘The Tempest’: ‘The folly of this island! They say there’s but five
upon this isle: we are three of them; if th’other two be brained like us, the state
totters.’ I must add that I do not use the quotation in any invidious sense. But
it had some relevance to my first thought when I began to prepare my talks … .
(Eliot 1932: 382)
‘Some relevance’, again. Eliot’s adoption of the role of the unconscious jester,
Trinculo, wandering drunkenly, and thence incited to usurpation by Caliban
in Shakespeare’s play (Act II sc. ii, l.5ff), might seem unlikely in this context,
associated as it originally is with confusion and magical distraction. Shakespeare’s
scene ends with Caliban’s famous ‘this isle is full of noises’ speech (l. 133ff).
The Tempest had underwritten The Waste Land, but here at the opening of his
radio series, Eliot takes this issue of ‘broadcast’ into satiric mode. What is all
the more surprising is that he continues in it in his succeeding phrases, as he
presents himself to the audience as someone ‘whose only reasonable notoriety
is due to the composition of verses and jingles’! Why, he asks (picking up on
the mistakenness of such as Trinculo), ‘except under some mad delusion of
vanity’, has he had the ‘temerity’ to accept the invitation to talk on ‘The Modern
Dilemma’? This, especially, as he is forced to ask himself, in words which are
excerpted as the first subheading of the reprinting of this talk in The Listener,
‘What is the Use?’ What is the use of his labour ‘to find the precise metric and
the exact image to set down,’ in his ‘verses’, ‘feelings which, if communicable at
all, can be communicated to so few’?
In Trinculo-guise, in other words, Eliot would seem to be setting the ‘state’
of ‘myself ’, its public achievement to date, to ‘totter’, mocking as he does The
Waste Land as just another ‘jingle’. Included in this vein might be the glance
to the audience in my indented quotation from the opening of this talk: Eliot’s
anticipation of a potential auditor’s response within his own discourse: ‘I do not
use [i.e. in case you thought I did] the quotation in any invidious sense’. This
redoubles the humour, given the wild inappropriateness of the quotation to the
immediate philosophical circumstance. But the strategy of anticipation becomes
typical of Eliot’s inclusion and/or exclusion of his audience when broadcasting:
to take only one example, the third talk on ‘The Unity of European Culture’ even
anticipates anticipation:
The dominant force in creating a common culture between peoples each of
which has its distinct culture, is religion. Please do not, at this point, make a
mistake in anticipating my meaning. This is not a religious talk, and I am not
setting out to convert anybody. I am simply stating a fact. (Eliot 1976: 199)
How is it possible to anticipate the meaning that is both ‘simply stated’ anyhow,
but also ‘stated’ in ways that you, the audience, cannot have anticipated. ‘I’
know, Eliot avers, but ‘I’ have anticipated you. My reading might seem to display
peculiar sensitivity to Eliot’s nuances, were it not that Eliot had played with this
strategy from the very outset of his broadcasts.
The ending of the final, fourth, of Eliot’s early contributions to the series on
‘The Modern Dilemma’ is sinister in this regard. Under the subheading ‘No
Easy Recipes’, the talk titled ‘Building up the Christian World’ moves towards its
inconclusive conclusion by binding its audience to its failure:
At this point, you must be prepared for a disappointment. My advantage is that I
was prepared from the first for your disappointment … Many of those who have
had the patience to hear me out must have been expecting me to produce some
nice little recipe for setting things right … I am not … (Eliot 1932a: 502)
Eliot’s refusal here ‘to commit my belief in the possibility of a Christian society to
any practical scheme put forward at the moment, and still less to any of my own
invention’, is followed by a ludicrous list of practical schemes which ‘you’ will
not be given ‘now’ as a ‘solution’ to ‘the modern dilemma’, one which includes
(but also doesn’t) nationalization of the banks, Free Trade, folk dancing, a United
States of Europe and universal community singing. At the end of his hours of
broadcasting on ‘The Modern Dilemma’, in other words, Eliot seems to return to
his Trinculo self from their outset, with his chaotic plans to ‘totter’ the given state
of things. If the talks ‘have left you unsatisfied’, his original audience was told,
‘I can only say that … I have only expressed the thoughts which were already in
my own mind, have discussed with you only what I have already discussed with
myself ’. The ‘personal’, but limited, sincerity of this is uneasy warrant for ‘your
disappointment’, which the ‘I’ has already predicted and laid grounds for.
Even as he defends, in signing off from this series of talks, ‘social justice’ and
‘the Resurrection’, therefore, Eliot is playing complex games with voices. It is
not possible, in broadcasting, to mount an active ‘discussion’, but what we have
here is a discussion of what has already been discussed ‘in my own mind’, an
expression of what has already been expressed – that spiralling difficulty which
is familiar from Eliot’s poetic and allusive practice. Todd Avery’s correctional
sense that Eliot-the-sage was a creation of these talks in 1932, rather than the
figure which emerged for Michael Coyle around the time of World War II,
neglects this complex framing by Eliot. It is a parodic framing, but one which
also shows Eliot’s attentiveness to the implications of the broadcast voice, a self-
hearing, which extends across his radio career, in its anticipation of anticipation
in later series of talks such as ‘The Unity of European Culture’. The experience
of hearing the talks originally is that of hearing the voice of authority as a voice
which is paradoxically impossible to locate. ‘A. Sugden’ from Ealing, on hearing
the first talk in the series, ‘Christianity and Communism’, felt impelled to write a
letter to The Listener which had published it, imploring:
Will Mr T. S. Eliot describe as well as name the position from which he preaches?
For he blames the communist for surrendering too much to society and the
sceptic individualist for surrendering too little … Are we to rest more content
with a perfect theory with which the practice is hopelessly at variance … ?
(Sugden 1932: 443)
Sugden’s impatience seems eerily to anticipate the non-conclusive ending of

‘Building up a Christian World’, a talk in which Eliot had seemed to signal his wish
to give airtime to such demurring voices. For he quotes in this final talk from ‘a
private letter from a young man’, unidentified, who had written that Christianity
was an ‘irrelevance’ which called up images of childhood Bible classes, rather
than a ‘belief ’ which might resolve the ‘modern dilemma’ (Eliot 1932a: 502).
Eliot’s spoken broadcasts, in other words, sometimes literally incorporate

(written) dissent from unknown sources, and, in the process, complicate their
own seeming sureties.
The caveat which might be entered against the now-established picture of
Eliot on the radio as an Arnoldian sage is that the voice spoken there seems
always assailed by its own uncertainties and, in fact, by its own caveats, to the
extent that its origination of authority recedes from any ‘lived’ reality beyond its
own utterance. This is so, even where Eliot seems most concerned to promote
the integrational cultural possibilities of Christianity in wartime. ‘Towards a
Christian Britain’ of 1941 begins by asserting that if such a thing already existed
‘it is unlikely that any of us … would find ourselves perfectly at home in it’; he
anticipates that ‘anti-climax’ might be a feeling from his audience at the end of
the talk. Once again, the dilemma is predicated upon an inability to escape from
the endless drama enacted between ‘words’ and ‘meaning’. Speaking of the terms
upon which it might be possible to mount such a process as ‘Christian thinking’,
Eliot acknowledges that ‘we’ ‘are apt to overlook the possibility of our giving
them different interpretations, and accepting them only on our own terms’:
It will make a vast difference how much phrases like ‘the laws of God’, ‘Divine
vocation’, and ‘God’s gifts to the world’ happen to mean to you. The full meaning
is tremendous. But if they come to you like familiar quotations, as something
which you need make no fresh effort to understand, they will probably be lost
on you. (Eliot 1941: 524)
There is an elaborate defence here of the unfamiliar, of that which is not ‘our
own’ in ‘our own terms’, which it is the rhetorical strategy of the radio broadcasts
constantly to fend off. Contrary to the single voice of the sage, ‘familiar quotations’
need to be made strange by the recognition that other interpretations are always
possible, especially if ‘fresh effort’ is involved to recognize them.
Ultimately, from Eliot’s radio broadcasts seen as a whole, and not just in
the selective fashion of Coyle and Avery, this countering multiplicity and
recognition might seem to be taken from the lessons for culture which Eliot has
himself learnt through literature. As cast in these talks, literature is itself a place
for encounter of these multiple possibilities of recognition and escape from the
familiar, which are otherwise emblematic of religious ‘living’ and ‘thinking’. In
defending Charles Williams in 1946, one of the several writers in the later talks
he sought to recoup from advancing neglect, Eliot claimed that the important
thing was not ‘simply that Williams was a Christian writer’; many Christians
might believe in ‘spiritual reality’ but not thereby gain ‘experience of it’. To read
Williams is ‘to be brought face to face with what Williams saw’, that is to be
given precisely that experience which otherwise might be lacked. In terms which
once more resurrect the ideas of ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, Eliot seeks
here to reach beyond the ‘broadcast’ words to ‘reality’, to engage in some other
dramatic relation with an audience through the radio. He remains, sceptically
again, aware that such connection might already, of its nature, be impossible,
since ‘the capacity for realising the realities to which Williams was trying to draw
our attention, is numbed and almost atrophied in the world in which we live
today’ (Eliot 1946: 895).
The quest for a language which might ‘realize’ ‘reality’, spiritual or otherwise,
is, of course, a keynote of the spoken monologues of Eliot’s later poetry, from
Ash-Wednesday (1930) onwards. It comes to be the predominant concern of Four
Quartets; as the first in the sequence, Burnt Norton (1935) classically sees it, ‘Words
move, music moves/Only in time; but that which is only living/Can only die’ (Eliot
1977: 194). Eliot’s contemporary ‘solution’ for such potential ‘ossification’ or death
of language in the later Quartets, as explained in his radio debate ‘The Writer as
Artist’ of 1940, is to promote the ‘continuous reciprocal influence of colloquial
speech on writing, and of writing on colloquial speech’. This is because ‘Writers
must take their language as they find it spoken … but their business is to help to
make it a vehicle for civilized thought and feeling’ (Eliot 1940: 774).
As previously signalled by my drawing on the broadcast ‘The Three Voices
of Poetry’, Eliot’s default preoccupation when considering literature on the radio
seemed to be to think about voice, as though radio were the natural medium to
do so. He talked about ‘The Voice of his Time: On Tennyson’s In Memoriam’
in 1942. ‘The Approach to James Joyce’ in 1943 is defined surprisingly via a
comparison between the Irish writer and John Milton. Both being sensory-
deprived men (like radio listeners in Eliot’s surprising view on Seneca) through
their blindness, Joyce and Milton in compensation had ‘great musical gifts’
which led their later work to make ‘its strongest appeal to the ear, and … give
you very little to see’:
Joyce’s last work has to be read aloud, preferably by an Irish voice; and, as the
one gramophone record which he made attests, no other voice could read it,
not even another Irish voice, as well as Joyce could read it himself. This is a
limitation which has made more slow the appreciation and enjoyment of his last
book. (Eliot 1943: 446)
The spoken voice of James Joyce is essential to the signature of his later work,
yet at the same time its relative absence of attestation limits the effectiveness of
his writing. ‘Joyce himself ’ is at issue in this paradigm, Joyce as reader to the
auditor’s ear of his writing. Interestingly, this implicates issues of nationality as
well within its various frameworks – ‘an Irish voice [but] not even another Irish
voice’. Voice determines a writer’s distinctiveness, but, when it is not heard via
a complete set of gramophone records (or through radio broadcasts), it ‘limits’
writing’s effectiveness.
This, in many senses, is what Eliot had been telling us since near the beginning
of his career in radio, in that first phase, as Coyle describes it, when he spoke
predominantly about the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
towards which he was particularly drawn. Speaking of a favoured poet in 1930,
John Donne, Eliot had claimed that:
Besides the choice of vocabulary Donne’s great inventiveness is shown in his
choice and variation of metres; and we may say that in metric he hovers between
the singing and the spoken word, in content between thought and feeling, and
in vocabulary between the technical word and the dramatic speech … . (Eliot
1930: 552)
When, in the next year, Eliot explored for his audience the efficacy of John
Dryden’s poetry and poetic drama, he saw the similarities with Donne:
‘What Dryden did, in fact, was to reform the language, and devise a natural,
conversational style of speech in verse in place of an artificial and decadent one’
(Eliot 1931: 621).
As late as 1941, when speaking about John Webster’s play ‘The Duchess of
Malfy’ on the BBC Eastern Service, Eliot was rehearsing this issue of the relation
between the individual voice and its dramatic potentiality. Once again reminding
us of the qualities which Webster shared with Donne, qualities of metric as well
as of ‘spiritual terror’, Eliot fended off any immediate implication in his analogy:
In comparing Webster to a poet who was not a dramatist, I do not mean to
suggest that the value of his writing lies in the poetry and not in the drama. His
verse is essentially dramatic verse, written for the theatre by a man with a very
acute sense of the theatre. (Eliot 1941a: 826)
Eliot’s statements about Early Modern verse and drama in his radio broadcasts
from the early 1930s onwards alert us to that particular ‘hovering’, which he
praises Donne for achieving, one which enables the spoken voice of the text
to rest somewhere between colloquial speech and poetry, between poetry and
drama. The implication of his own unpredictable framing and vocalization in
his talks for the radio medium, his persistent anticipations and caveats, would
be that such a facility is one towards which his speaking yearns, but which now,
at this mechanized point in twentieth-century history, cannot consistently be
sustained.
Right at the end of his broadcast career, Eliot was still considering for his
audience at home the precedents for his own poetry. Thinking about the poets
of the 1890s, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson and John Davidson, he remarked
that
[F]rom these men I got the idea that one could write poetry in an English such
as one would speak oneself. A colloquial idiom. There was a spoken rhythm in
some of their poems. (Eliot 1961: 9)
Eliot’s broadcasts had embroiled him into re-contemplating the momentous

complications involved in having to ‘speak oneself ’, complications which
concurrently evolved in his religious and cultural thinking, but, most
significantly, in the development of his poetry from the later 1920s, at the time
of his initial BBC broadcasts, onwards. Eliot’s early poetry, most compellingly
The Waste Land, had obsessed over ‘different voices’. From 1927, the year of
the thoughts on Seneca and ‘broadcasted drama’, through to 1930, the year of
the series of talks on seventeenth-century poetry, Eliot was working on Ash-
Wednesday, and beginning a set of rhetorical enquiries within the poetry itself,
which would stretch through to the last of the Four Quartets, Little Gidding, as
well as to his own poetic dramas. Section V of Ash-Wednesday is traumatized
by the possibility that ‘the word’ might be ‘lost’; God’s ‘Word unheard’. ‘Where
shall the word be found, where will the word/Resound?’ the voice of the poem
asks. ‘Not here, there is not enough silence’ (Eliot 1977: 102). Eliot’s BBC work
led him to ponder more eloquently and variously than elsewhere over both the
kinds of listening involved, and the kinds of scattering, in speaking to the noise
of the modern world. In this, radio both informed and brought home Eliot’s
signature dilemmas of speaking and of putting words down.
Works cited
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Coyle, M. (2001). ‘T. S. Eliot on the Air: “Culture” and the Challenges of Mass
Communication’, in T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker.
London: Macmillan.
——— (2009). ‘ “We Speak to India”: T. S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers
of Culture’, in Broadcasting Modernism, Ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle and
Jane Lewty. Garnesville: University of Florida Press.
——— (2011). ‘Radio’, in T. S. Eliot in Context, Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Eliot, T. S. (1930). ‘The Devotional Poets of the Seventeenth Century: Donne, Herbert,
Crashaw’, The Listener, 3.63 (26 March).
——— (1931). ‘John Dryden I – ‘The Poet who Gave the English Speech’, The Listener,
5.118 (15 April).
——— (1932). ‘Christianity and Communism’. The Listener, 7.166 (16 March).
——— (1932a). ‘Building up the Christian World’. The Listener, 7.169 (6 April).
——— (1939). The Family Reunion. London: Faber.
——— (1940). ‘The Writer as Artist – A Discussion between T. S. Eliot and Desmond
Hawkins’, The Listener, 24.620 (28 November).
——— (1941). ‘Towards a Christian Britain’, The Listener, 35.639 (10 April).
——— (1941a). ‘The Duchess of Malfy’, The Listener, 26.675 (18 December).
——— (1943). ‘The Approach to James Joyce’, The Listener, 30.770 (14 October).
——— (1946). ‘The Significance of Charles Williams’, The Listener, 36.936 (19 December).
——— (1957). On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber.
——— (1961). ‘Preface’, in John Davidson: A Selection of his Poems, Ed. Maurice Lindsay.
London: Hutchinson (excerpt from original radio broadcast ‘Mankind Has Cast Me
Out: A Centenary Tribute to John Davidson’ 7 April 1957).
——— (1972). Selected Essays. London: Faber.
——— (1976). Christianity and Culture. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc.
——— (1977). Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber.
Matthews, S. (2013). T. S. Eliot & Early Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Suárez, Juan A. (2001). ‘T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Gramophone, and the
Modernist Discourse Network’, New Literary History, 32.3 (Summer 2001),
pp. 747–768.
Sugden, A. (1932). ‘Letter’, The Listener, 6.167 (23 March).
6
David Jones: Christian Modernism at the BBC

Erik Tonning
University of Bergen
In the BBC Written Archives there is an annotated memo dated 27 August 1953
that speaks volumes about the long-standing relationship between the poet and
painter David Jones (1895–1974) and the Corporation.1 Its author is Douglas
Cleverdon, a close friend and collaborator of Jones’s since 1927,2 who had joined
the BBC West Region in 1939, moving to London in 1940. At the time of writing,
Cleverdon had made his career as a distinguished Features producer who had,
amongst much else, adapted both of Jones’s long and difficult modernist prose-
poems In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952) for the radio. The
former adaptation, first performed in 1946 and revived in 1948 (and again in
1955), and featuring Dylan Thomas in the leading role of Dai Greatcoat, was a
recognized ‘radio classic’, ‘one of the finest achievements in radio technique that
we have made in the Third Programme’.3 The memo is addressed to the Chief
Assistant for the Third Programme, Christopher Holme, with whom, as we shall
see, Jones had conducted an interesting correspondence in 1952. Cleverdon is
asking Holme to approve a repeat on the Third of Jones’s recent talk for the
Welsh Home Service called ‘Wales and the Crown’, originally broadcast on 23
July 1953.
This talk was Jones’s first, and what had stirred him to write it and submit
it as an unsolicited script4 was one of the defining broadcasting moments of
post-war Britain, the coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. While he was
clearly deeply moved by the sacramental rite that publicly invested the new
monarch with the effective signs of kingship, this event also provoked a complex
response from Jones on the uneasy unity of Welshness and Britishness, a lifelong
preoccupation for this artist. In a handwritten note on the memo, Anna Kallin –
a famously original and brilliant talks producer5 who was also friendly with
Jones and corresponded with him over many years – comments that ‘I would
certainly recommend [the repeat] – anything from D. J. is welcome – we never

could get him and always wanted to. It explains a lot of “Anathemata” ’. And the
talk was in fact repeated, on 29 November 1953. Finally, the memo contains
a brief pencil note (simply asking Miss Kallin to advise on this matter) by the
man who was both closest to Jones and also most powerful within the BBC
hierarchy: Harman Grisewood, the Controller of the Third Programme from
1948 to 1952, and Director of the Spoken Word from 1952 to 1955 (after which
he was made chief assistant to the director-general). Grisewood and Jones met
in 1928, and Grisewood would remain a constant sounding-board for Jones’s
developing artistic work, and for his reflections on the role of the artist within a
modern civilization obsessed by technology and ‘the utile’. Grisewood is thanked
profusely in the prefaces to both In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, and he
would later edit Jones’s essay collections Epoch and Artist (1959) and The Dying
Gaul (published posthumously, 1978). Grisewood, like Jones, was a committed
Roman Catholic, and when he was in charge of the Third with Christopher Sykes
as his second-in-command, there had been whispers of a ‘Catholic take over’
(Whitehead 1989: 27).6 In fact, Douglas Cleverdon retrospectively summarized
both Grisewood’s Catholicism and his whole programming policy as being
‘instinctively in sympathy with David Jones’s (quoted in Whitehead 1989: 27).7
The surprising story told by this memo and surrounding archival sources is
that the name of David Jones – now little-known outside a circle of scholars and
enthusiasts – carried great prestige and significant influence within the BBC, even
years before he himself began to contribute regularly to radio broadcasting. Of
course, this prestige was due to more than his personal contacts within the BBC.
Jones had received the Hawthornden prize for In Parenthesis in 1938, and the
successful 1946 broadcast added to his reputation as a poet. He was involved in
major exhibitions in 1948 and 1949, and in 1949 the first monograph (by Robin
Ironside) on Jones’s distinguished artistic career appeared. The Anathemata was
published in 1952 and adapted for radio in two separate versions, for the Third
and the Welsh Home Service, in 1953. He was awarded a Civil List pension in
1954 and an OBE in 1955. And he was very active in the late 1940s and the
early 1950s as a book reviewer and essayist, developing his original cultural and
aesthetic theory.8
This essay will therefore begin by examining what use the BBC Third
Programme producers might have made of Jones’s thought, and especially his
cultural theory, to define the Third’s much-debated identity in the late 1940s and
the early 1950s. What would a programming policy ‘in sympathy with David
Jones’s actually entail? Conversely, it should be asked what Jones himself made
David Jones: Christian Modernism at the BBC 115
of such a quintessentially modern medium as the radio, and later, television?

Two snapshots of Jones’s engagement with broadcasting suggest some tentative
answers here: first, three draft letters by Jones commenting in depth on the two
distinct adaptations of The Anathemata, by Cleverdon and by Elwyn Evans; and
second, a closer look at his first talk on ‘Wales and the Crown’ itself. On the
evidence submitted here, Jones was strongly sympathetic to the high cultural
aims of the post-war BBC: and he saw no essential conflict between his own
distinctly Christian modernism9 and the self-consciously ‘civilising’ mission of
the Third Programme in particular. And this itself is testimony to the unique
combination of cultural experimentalism and tradition that characterized this
period in British broadcasting.
***
When Anna Kallin commented that ‘anything from D.J. is welcome – we never
could get him and always wanted to’, she was not exaggerating. There had been
attempts to solicit talks and readings from Jones at least since 1946,10 and this
gentle pressure would continue all the way up to his last contribution in 1965
(a reading of his story ‘The Fatigue’). For example, on 20 January 1947, Kallin had
written to Jones to invite him to contribute to a series of talks for the Third called
‘The Crisis’: ‘The idea of this programme is to have poets, writers, a musician
and a painter speaking on the book or picture or work of art which produced a
break in their lives’. Jones wrote back immediately (on 21 January) saying that the
theme ‘might be very interesting indeed’ and that he recognized the relevance
of such a crisis to his own work; however, he was unwell and would have to
decline. Jones suffered from periodic depression and nervous breakdowns,
which had recently been triggered again by hearing Cleverdon’s adaptation of
In Parenthesis in November 1946. This ‘vivid externalisation of the horrors of
trench warfare’ (Cleverdon 1972: 76) – in which he had taken part during World
War I – led to an illness which he would not master until January 1948. Despite
this devastating impact, though, Jones in no way took against the radio medium
itself, and his friendly response did not discourage further attempts from the
producers. Another was made in 1951, on Harman Grisewood’s prompting;
Kallin sent Jones the script of a talk on Oswald Spengler – a substantial influence
upon Jones – by Erich Heller, which was due to be broadcast on 21 June (Kallin’s
letter is dated 19 June): ‘Harman thought that this script would interest you,
and also told me (I’m too frightened to ask you myself) to ask you to give us
a talk on the same subject [ … ] We expect that you will disagree with Heller
about Spengler being wicked. Anyhow what we would adore to have from you
is a talk’. There appears to be no record of Jones’s response here, but the reverent
tone adopted by Kallin in this letter is interesting in that it is quite typical of
approaches to Jones by BBC staff.11
In addition to persistent requests for talks, there were also definite
schemes – again initiated by Grisewood – for employing Jones as a consultant
on programming generally. A minor example of this is a letter from Kallin
dated 20 June 1950: ‘Harman Grisewood told me that you spoke to him
about a master of Russian, L. Walton, and Harman thought that he might be
“Thirdworthy” ’. On the 23rd, Jones responded with some further information.
More interestingly, however, around October 1952, Grisewood arranged to
have some of Jones’s writings circulated to his colleagues, which resulted in
an enthusiastic response. On 2 October, Christopher Holme sent round the
following general memo:
You will, I know, be interested in these ‘letters from David Jones’. It suggests to
me two things which I would like to put forward:
1) that David Jones be invited to listen for a fortnight to the Third Programme
talks output and then to come to a Monday meeting with us; and
2) that we try to persuade him himself to give a talk or talks.
Even before Holme had the chance to send off an official invitation, another
member of the Talks Department, Leonie Cohn, had written to Jones (on 13
October) to express her enthusiasm and to send along some recent talk scripts
that she felt could be of interest to Jones:
I can hardly hope that you will remember me and I would not have presumed to
approach you on the basis of such a slight acquaintance had it not been for the
fact that Mr. Grisewood kindly allowed my colleagues and myself to see your
letters about the dichotomy between ‘the arts’ and ‘life’, with special reference to
broadcasting.
The official invitation by Holme was sent on 16 October:

Harman Grisewood has shown me one or two of your fascinating letters
about the modern world, and they have suggested to me that it would be very
interesting to all of our Talks Producers if you would care to come to one of our
Monday meetings and talk to us in the general context of our Third Programme
output. Perhaps a good preparation for such a meeting would be if you could
listen for a fortnight to our talks output. We have thought it a sound plan from
time to time to set aside one of our talks meetings for the critical discussion
of talks recently broadcast and a review of policy, and have found that we are
greatly helped in this by hearing the views of someone who knows our work but
who himself is outside it. If you felt that you could be such a person we should
like to offer you a consultant’s fee, say, of twenty guineas.
Jones’s response (dated 22 October) was again friendly, but negative:

It is very good of you to be interested in the few comments I made in these
letters – the whole business of the arts in our world is naturally a thing about
which I’ve had to think a good bit – as indeed I suppose in different ways most
of us have – I don’t think I have anything constructive to say much – but I’m
jolly interested in any data coming from any source which seeks to define the
problems of some one particular art, thereby throwing light on the problem of
the arts in general in our set-up. Of course, it’s an inexhaustible subject but it’s
also of inexhaustible interest. I wish I could be, in some limited capacity, of some
use to your discussion-groups in the way you have been good enough to suggest,
but, at least, at the moment, I can’t manage it, because, as I say, I’m not well.
Holme’s reply on 28 October expresses the hope that this is only a temporary
postponement, but it was not to be. In the light of all these past exchanges, the
programmers’ enthusiasm over having received something so exceptional as the
unsolicited script of ‘Wales and the Crown’ is more than understandable.
What, though, did these ‘letters about the dichotomy between “the arts”
and “life”, with special reference to broadcasting’ – or ‘letters about the modern
world’ – actually contain? Needless to say, answering this question would help
focus any discussion of Jones’s possible influence upon policy debates within
the Third Programme. Unfortunately, the record is scanty here, and to my
knowledge the only item that is clearly identifiable from these descriptions is an
incomplete manuscript draft of an undated letter to The Listener, deposited with
Jones’s papers in the National Library of Wales. Here, then, is a transcription of
the bulk of these drafts:
Sir,
The correspondence which has appeared in The Listener under the
above heading12 has indicated how necessary it is [ … ] to consider [ … ] the
civilizational phase in which we now live. We should not then [ … ] blame
those whose aesthetic opinions we do not like when our trouble lies in the
dichotomies which are inseparable from our civilisation itself. One might as
well blame chorus-girls, sheep-farmers and marine-engineers as blame artists,
art-critics and directors of galleries for the ‘divorce’ between ‘the arts’ and ‘life’
which necessarily characterises our mass-civilisation. We are all in the same
boat as far as the situation is concerned. [ … ] If we are by profession ‘artists’
we have no alternative but to make our works, according to such aesthetic
perceptions and endowments as may have been granted to us, within this
situation of diverse theories, of mutually contradictory tendencies, of emerging
awarenesses, of fragmented and vestigial ‘traditions’ that fuse, or separate out,
in our mechanistic, technological, [ … ] and extremely ‘Alexandrian’ epoch
megalopolis.
2
reflection is of no immediate relevance to us, as artists, for we have, willy-
nilly, to pursue our quarry here and now and not in a posited new young-time
with its presumed new integrations, tabors, canons, orientations, simplicities,
barbarities, myth-patterns and possible splendours.
In any case we can know nothing of the shape of the future nor which way the
cat may jump. We are far removed also from those past phases when a common
culture-tradition informed, nourished and determined the entire art-forms of
whole societies. On the contrary it happens to be our lot, as artists, to be occupied
with an art that is largely fragmentary, ecletic, exploratory and tentative. At least,
these are some of the qualities most to be expected of us. Further, we work, for
the most part, as separate individuals. It is inevitable to such a situation that
there should be much that is merely experimental, a good deal that is quite
ephemeral and that pastiches and crazes of various sorts should not be lacking.
But if then in this jeremiad – and one could add to these reproaches – there is
also this evangel: From within this same situation there has been a stirring and
a vivification of the plastic arts analogous to that which has invigorated the art
of poetry. There has been much that is sensitive, a good deal that is genuinely
creative and there have not been wanting works of real greatness.
These divergent but interrelated trends, awarenesses & things accomplished
in a number of quite separate arts are not to be accounted for by a supposed
connivance between coteries and interested parties. The astringency and punch
of Pound and Wyndham Lewis from 1914 and onwards, the moving serenities
of Ben Nicholson’s abstractions of to-day, the terse forms of the harbinger, GM
Hopkins of 1880, the various feats of Picasso, the spell-binding and terminal
achievement of Joyce … You may detest it all, but you cannot explain it away.
[END OF PAGE]
we have to make our works here and now and not in some posited new
‘young-time’ with its [ … ] possible new integrations, its own taboos, canons,
‘inscape’ and feeling …
We may know a nostalgia for such culture phases, such as the world has from
time to time experienced but we are not of such a time.
We are far removed from those phases when a common culture-tradition
determined and nourished the art-forms of whole societies. We, willy-nilly, have
to pursue what sensitivities we may possess, as individual persons, isolated, for
the most part, from our fellow practitioners and almost wholly isolated from our
contemporaries in other walks of life. It is inevitable that such a situation should

be characterised by various sophistications, specialisations, the pursuit of some
one perfection at the expense of others [ … ] and the a concern for much that is
ephemeral & experimental. All this, is determined by our ‘Alexandrian’ situation.
A situation for which [ … ] the artists & art critics are no more responsible than
is the BBC for the Crimean War.
Of course, both Cohn and Holme speak of several letters, and these could be
letters either from Jones to other journals or to Grisewood himself, but the
others cannot be positively identified. The above letter must presumably have
been circulated to BBC staff in a more complete version, though it was never
in fact published in The Listener. Although there is an intriguing reference to
the BBC in the draft, it is perhaps too undeveloped (at least in this version)
to fit Miss Cohn’s talk of a ‘special reference to broadcasting’; however, the
explicit mention of ‘dichotomies’ and a divorce between the arts and life seem
to establish that the above is indeed a draft of one of the letters to which she
(and thus also Holme) refers.
Before approaching this letter directly, a few background notes about Jones’s
cultural theory and its intellectual context may be helpful. His thought centres
on the essential nature of man-as-maker or artist. Human poesis or form-making
is sharply distinguished from the strictly utilitarian making of the animals by
containing an element of the gratuitous, and by including the making of signs:
If we could catch the beaver placing never so small a twig gratuitously we could
make his dam into a font, he would be patient of baptism – the whole ‘sign-
world’ would be open to him, he would know ‘sacrament’ and would have a true
culture, for a culture is nothing but a sign, and the anathemata of a culture, the
‘things set up’, can only be set up to the gods. (Jones 1959: 88)
The theological orientation of this is obvious, and Jones’s attraction to the

Catholic faith was grounded in the dignity and seriousness attributed to sign-
making in the liturgy and sacramental tradition of that church. An important
phrase for Jones derives from the French theologian and liturgist Maurice de
la Taille’s book The Mystery of Faith (1934): ‘He placed Himself in the order of
signs’ (quoted in Jones 1959: 179). Christ makes use of bread and wine, the work
of human hands, and of the words and gestures of the priest, to make his body
and blood present upon the altar: ‘Something has to be made by us before it can
become for us his sign who made us. This point he settled in the upper room.
No artefacture no Christian religion’ (Jones 1959: 127). Both the professional
artist and the priest therefore depend on the universally human faculty of sign-
making: ‘Art is the distinguishing dignity of man and it is by art he becomes
dignified’, and it is ‘the right of man to exercise his distinctive function as man,
i.e. as artist – as culture-making animal’ (Jones 1959: 89). However, for Jones,
modern civilization in its emphasis on mere technology and utilitarian efficacy
on every level of thought and practice has grown increasingly inhuman, to the
point where ‘the utile is all [man] knows and his works take on something of
the nature of the works of the termites’; indeed, ‘nothing could surpass the
“eccentricity” of the “normal” life and works of megalopolitan man today – and
tomorrow’ (Jones 1959: 95). This is not a situation that any individual artist has
the power to change, yet authentic art here necessarily becomes
a contradiction, a fifth-column, within that civilization, and here it shares
the honours of sabotage with the tradition of religion, for both are disruptive
forces, both own allegiance to values in any event irritant, and easily becoming
toxic to those values which of necessity dominate the present world-orders.
(Jones 1959: 100)
Jones’s own experimental modernist art – in both painting and poetry – is an

art of the conglomerate and the palimpsest, where a variety of past and present
cultural ‘deposits’ jostle for space. The very act of setting up a new ‘thing’ out of
the fragments of previously efficacious signs thus becomes for him an act both
of sabotage and of worship.
Jones’s draft letter to The Listener was in all probability directed at a letter
signed Sylvia Sprigge and published there on 7 February 1952 under the
heading ‘Non-representational Art’.13 Sprigge’s letter criticizes a positive review
(25 January 1952) of an exhibition of William Hayter’s abstract painting – which
she has not seen – with shameless philistine aplomb. She accuses abstract-artists-
in-general of an unhealthy preoccupation with undigested, transient ‘moods’.
These are purveyed by dreadful ‘palimpsestic doodles’ quickly and incoherently
done, which reveal only the artist’s egocentrism, and which no artist would have
dared sell in the Renaissance or even in the nineteenth century. The only reason
why they can now ride roughshod over the sensibilities of the ordinary viewer
(which ‘have not really changed so very much down the ages’) is due to the
influence of fashionable but insular coteries of collectors, art-critics and fellow
non-representationalists.
Jones’s response then argues that this whole view rests on a misunderstanding
of modern ‘mass-civilisation’, described as a ‘mechanistic, technological, and
extremely “Alexandrian” megalopolis’. The term ‘Alexandrian’ here refers to
Oswald Spengler’s critique in The Decline of the West:
We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis
sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200.
There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic

progress, of personal peculiarity, of ‘the new style’, of ‘unsuspected possibilities’,
theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists [ … ]. (Spengler 1926: 294)
Sprigge has aligned herself unknowingly with Spengler on the precise point
where Jones took strong issue with the German: in his marginal annotation of
this passage in Spengler (dating from c. 1942), Jones claims that ‘it is a foolish
mistake and lack of understanding not to admit the real vitality of some painting
in the last 50 years [ … ] “Contemporary” painting has produced some quite
“new” beauties which could only belong to this particular “late” stage’.14
For Jones, as we have seen, the modern world itself is profoundly at odds
with the fundamental nature of man-as-maker: and no single artist or ‘coterie’
could be to blame for this discrepancy. The artist working within this civilization
cannot draw on an integrated ‘common culture-tradition’ such as existed
in certain past societies; nor can he or she work as if some future cultural
‘young-time’ were already in place. The authentic artist here works alone and
experimentally, striving heroically against the current of a technocratic ‘mass-
civilisation’; and much is necessarily produced that is merely ephemeral. Yet from
this ‘jerimiad’ there emerges an ‘evangel’: a modernist ‘vivification’ in the plastic
arts and literature which Jones recalls by mentioning the names of Ezra Pound,
Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, the ‘harbinger’ Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pablo
Picasso and James Joyce, whose achievements the likes of Sprigge may ‘detest’,
but not explain away.
This list contains only one practising Christian, and it is obvious that Jones’s
‘Christian modernism’ allows for a strongly positive valuation of artists who
were by no means believers: for their work could still function as a revitalizing
antidote to the mainstream products of a mass civilization.15 As Harman
Grisewood points out in his memoir, One Thing at a Time, this mode of
thinking was a fresh departure for many English Catholics interested in the arts
in the 1930s:
‘The proper end of anything is something good’, St. Thomas had written. The
art works of Cocteau, of James Joyce, of the post-impressionists in France and
of Ben Nicholson and David Jones in England seemed to us to have realised
their ‘proper end’; since the expressions of good are related in the celestial order,
there should in the terrestrial order be no estrangement. [ … ] The generation of
Catholics a little older than mine tended to distrust such ideas because of their
aesthetic implications. [Jacques] Maritain in France – Eric Gill and David Jones
in England – were concerned to assert an autonomy for art, whereas the Catholic
world around us tended to judge all art works according to their conformity
with Christian precept. We did not accept the distinction between sacred and
profane. We did not believe that the art of Salvator Rosa was ‘religious’ because
he painted so many pious Madonnas and the art of Renoir was not because
he painted none. [ … ] We were concerned then with an inclusive civilisation.
(Grisewood 1968: 80)
There is no doubt that Grisewood carried these avant-garde Catholic ideas directly
into his role as Controller of the Third Programme. As Humphrey Carpenter has
shown, Grisewood consistently favoured ‘quality’ over ‘popularisation’, and the
context of Jonesian ‘Christian modernism’ is clearly behind statements such as
the following:
What is at stake is something fundamental to our civilisation. It is what I
call the principle of refinement … the attempt at perfection in the Christian
sense … If such an enterprise as the Third Programme cannot flourish in our
society … such a rejection would in my opinion be likely to include the whole
tradition of refinement and much else that is taken to be essential to civilisation
as Europe has understood it. (quoted in Carpenter 1996: 97)16
The criticism consistently levelled at the Third was, as Carpenter points out, that
of promoting an irrelevant elitism; typical here is an Evening Standard leading
article from March 1949, a few months before Grisewood’s forceful address just
quoted. The heading screamed ‘PRETENTIOUS CULTURE: NO WONDER
THE “THIRD” AUDIENCE DWINDLES’, and the article registered exasperation
at, amongst other things, ‘some selections by the Modern Imagist Poets,
including the notorious Ezra Pound. It seems rather that the obscure is preferred
to the intelligible; the esoteric to the beautiful; the peculiar to the classical. Who
listens to this spawn of the musical coteries and the literary bunfights?’ (quoted
in Carpenter 1996: 95). The terms of ‘the Standard versus Grisewood’ would be
fairly closely replayed in ‘Sprigge versus Jones’ three years later: no wonder, then,
that Grisewood circulated Jones’s writings to his colleagues.
To account for their apparent collective enthusiasm, though, it seems
necessary to at least speculate on what Leonie Cohn called Jones’s ‘special
reference to broadcasting’ in his letters. Jones’s whole argument offers a
sophisticated antidote to the growing criticism of the BBC, and especially the
Third Programme, as elitist, pretentious and out of touch with the modern
world and its own audience. Any mere counter-accusation of philistinism
was clearly too simplistic and would only harden the fronts in the long run.
By contrast, Jones’s – profoundly modernist – idea that modern civilization
had now changed in such unprecedented fashion that confrontation with this
situation was inevitable for authentic art subtly reverses the terms of the debate.
Being out of touch has suddenly come to mean being (like Sprigge and the
Standard) unaware of what has happened. Jones’s perspective seems to suggest

a set of delicate balances to be maintained by serious broadcasting. First, the
transmission of cultural tradition without indulging in mere nostalgia for the
unrecapturable past. Second, persistent attention to contemporary arts, including
the difficult and the experimental. And third, a conscious effort to unify and
even revitalize an increasingly fragmented culture in need of an ‘evangel’ to
point, however tentatively, towards some new ‘young-time’. Jones’s consultant
role, then, was intended to help the Third Programme maintain that balance by
scrutinizing their actual output. Finally, if we recall Jones’s comment on the BBC
being no more responsible for the present ‘Alexandrian’ state of culture than
for the Crimean war, we begin to glimpse the full attraction of Jones’s view for
Grisewood and his colleagues. For, at least in outline, this analogy connects the
whole act of maintaining the difficult balance just described to another pillar of
the BBC’s self-understanding, fortified by the recent war: namely, accurate and
impartial reporting. Far from pandering to closed coteries, therefore, the Third
Programme on this reading was performing a vital and irreplaceable service to
the nation as a whole by, as it were, reporting the cultural facts on the ground.
***
Given this strong interest in Jones’s views from within the BBC, any direct
comments by Jones himself on broadcasting would of course be helpful in
elucidating his relationship to the Corporation and to the medium itself.
These are in fact somewhat few and far between; but the following three draft
letters to Denis Tegetmeier and Elwyn Evans, about two recent adaptations of
Anathemata, do provide a basis for further discussion.
To Tegetmeier, 9 May 1953, about Cleverdon’s adaptation of the whole poem:
I liked some parts of it, but could not abide other parts of it. I liked best the
Welsh women in the part before the end called Mabinog’s Liturgy. That was
said almost exactly as I intended it to be said. And Dylan Thomas said all his
bits absolutely O.K. In that section the speakers preserved the poetry, & you
could feel the shape of the words & sentences. But in some of the earlier parts I
could not stand the exaggerated shouting & stage cockney & the excited speed.
Particularly I found the Redriff part quite awful in this respect. The girl who did
The Lady of the Pool was not so bad in places where she was quiet & natural but I
loathed it when she got coy. I think they all tried to do their very best, & Douglas
C. worked tremendously hard to get what he had in mind. He’s a remarkable
chap, & spares no effort. But it’s terribly hard to make people understand that, in
poetry, the words themselves & their arrangement & juxtaposition are sufficient
to give the required feeling without histrionics and exaggerated emphases.

I know it was a terribly hard thing to attempt in dramatized form and I knew
that the author is bound to get a shock over the interpretation. [ … ] The music
I thought sounded most beautiful, as perfect as could be. I chose the things I
wanted sung – which was quite a business to find the right bits for the right
parts – but I think they did that superbly. That Agios O Theos to Palestrina:
setting is a real knock out. And I thought the priest chanting the Preface for
Corpus Xti at the beginning was terribly well done. It was nice hearing that
Preface loud & clear on the wireless, I must say. What glorious stuff the chant is.
There is no music like it in the world.
To Elwyn Evans, dated 9 June 1953, after hearing the quite separate adaptation of
the ‘Mabinog’s Liturgy’ section of Anathemata by Evans for the Welsh Regional
Service:
Hearing this broadcast of this part of Ana. [by Evans] and also hearing the
adaptation of the whole [by Cleverdon] has made me cogitate a good deal on
the problems attending the broadcasting of longish works of, so to say, poetry.
[ … ] As I see it, the main difference of approach to rendering a work must be
whether one conceives it as a straight reading or whether one conceives it as
a dramatized performance. Nevertheless, in the case of the radio the two very
separate conceptions tend to merge into each other. [ … ] In a dramatized version
a number of contradictory factors come in. Certain auxiliary techniques deriving
from the Stage are employed which sometimes aid and sometimes damage the
‘poetry’. It is then rather a matter of balancing a number of techniques to obtain
a desired effect. [ … ] Here the problem of a single voice, or of several, or many,
voices comes in. In a work that is written as a play where all the lines are allotted to
respective characters this problem does not, of course, arise. But in a work which
is written as a continuous narrative here & there fully dramatic in character, in
other places less dramatic, & elsewhere not dramatic at all, yet without any clear
demarcations between these disparate elements, the problem of presentation does
become much more tricky. Whenever I have listened to anything of this nature
on the radio I have always found myself, almost unconsciously, considering
whether or no the form, the feeling, the intention of the work was being aided or
marred by the employment of several voices
From a second draft letter to Evans, dated 13 June 1953 (like the others probably
not sent):
I still adhere to my personal obsession which I mentioned in conversation: that
in reading works of this nature I think the fewer voices the better. [ … ] My reason
for thinking this is that when one person is reading one a fairly lengthy passage
one gets accustomed to the mean tonality & average inflection of that voice,
this provides a, so to say, criterion by which to measure the more pronounced

emphases & inflections & thus the formal unity of the poetry is better preserved.
When a new voice breaks in one has to readjust one’s ears to a new tempo and
one is not sure whether the new inflections, emphases, etc, are because of the
actual demands of the feeling of the text or whether they are accidental to that
new voice. [ … ] However, I’m in no sense competent to judge concerning the
problems of radio production. I merely offer one opinion as to the snags that
seem to me, as an occasional listener, to be implicit when many voices are
employed in the rendering of works not written as plays. I don’t necessarily
imply that one voice should be employed throughout. I feel only that the fewer
the better as far as getting the unbroken unity of the form is concerned. [ … ]
To leave these considerations of works in general & to return to a brief
comment on this stuff of mine. The difficulty with Ana. & such like works is
that they are strictly ‘narrations’ throughout, though long passages take on
the character of spoken drama & other passages are more or less dramatic
in disposition, other passages are not dramatic at all. Further these disparate
elements come & go & rise up & fade out without any clear demarcation. So
that the question of how best to present such works is very tricky. The changing
feeling & character of the work is held together only by the form of the ‘poetry’ –
so that the employment of a variety of voices as though representing ‘characters’
in a play does become a very different problem, much more easy to create
effectively in some passages than in others.
But just as I think (& indeed know) that my ‘method’ of unity is of necessity
in the nature of an experiment, so I think the reading of it must be regarded as
largely experimental. It was partly for this reason that I welcomed the chance of
hearing part of Ana. rendered by two quite different sets of readers each with
their own conceptions of how best to present it. As I have already said I found a
great deal to like in your ‘experiment’, as indeed I did with D.C.’s ‘experiment’. The
latter rendering was definitely a, so to say, dramatized adaptation, drawing upon a
number of techniques (as music, etc.) to convey to the listener the general import
of the several phases of the whole work, and I think it was most skilfully done and
there is evidence that it did help a number of people, to whom the book itself was
a closed book, to gain a lively impression of the themes. It may also have been
instrumental in causing some listeners to have a shot at reading the actual work.
Your rendering of that selected passage, was, on the other hand, in the
nature of a straight reading and I very much welcomed the experiment as such.
Without any prejudice toward a dramatized conception, which indeed offers
various possibilities & subtleties of development & which have its own particular
virtue & character & method of interpretation, it remains true that, in the case
of Ana. the essential form of the work is that of a recited narrative, without any
deletions.
Jones’s reflections here largely speak for themselves, but one or two general
observations can be made. Clearly, Jones’s direct involvement with production
and ‘broadcasting technique’ was limited: his selection of music for Cleverdon’s
adaptation notwithstanding, he mostly left his friend to get on with things. He
was thus willing to give over his works to the ‘experimentation’ of others, even
if this meant suffering the effects of occasional histrionic overemphasis or the
confusion of multiple voices. This is by no means a self-evident attitude. Samuel
Beckett, for instance, would never allow any ‘dramatisation’ of his prose or
poetry, and even straight readings were only reluctantly granted; whereas, when
he actually wrote for the radio, he specified every single sound, and thematized
explicitly the very particularities of the medium – somewhere between pure
voice and embodied theatre – that troubled Jones. Unlike Beckett, Jones clearly
felt that the presentation of his own experimental modernist works to a wider
audience justified at least some concessions, and the question he circles around
is what kinds of necessarily experimental broadcasting methods stand the best
chance of conveying at least a flavour of those works: so that even listeners for
whom his book had been a closed one might be tempted to open it after all.
His comment to Tegetmeier about the special pleasure of hearing an otherwise
rarely available performance of the chant Preface for Corpus Christi ‘loud and
clear on the wireless’ seems to represent an ideal here17: Jones valued the radio
precisely for its ability to provide such experiences, both of traditional work and
of the more explicitly ‘fifth-columnist’ modernist kind.
In his statement to the Bollingen foundation in 1959, Jones wrote that
in our present megalopolitan technocracy the artist must still remain a
‘rememberer’ (part of the official bardic function in earlier phases of society).
But in the totally changed and rapidly changing circumstances of today this
ancient function takes on a peculiar significance. For now the artist becomes,
willy-nilly, a sort of Boethius, who has been nicknamed ‘the Bridge’, because he
carried forward into an altogether metamorphosed world certain of the fading
oracles which had sustained antiquity. (Jones 1978b: 11)
In order for Jones’s own work to act as ‘some sort of single plank in some sort
of bridge’ (11) to the future, his books had to be known; even if that involved a
degree of popularization through the quintessentially modern mass medium of
broadcasting.
This brings us back to the theory of culture from a new angle: that of the
audience for broadcasting. If serious broadcasting were to fulfil its lofty aim of
revitalizing modern culture, what precisely was its audience expected to do? In
an interesting chapter of his pamphlet Broadcasting and Society: Comments from
a Christian Standpoint (1949), entitled ‘Society’s Responsibility for Broadcasting’,

Jones’s friend Grisewood analysed the ‘danger’ that through ‘habitual listening to
the wireless the “real” world from which the wireless programmes are drawn is
apt to recede’ (Grisewood 1949: 77):
The danger is that this multifarious world which supplies broadcasting
should become impoverished. If the quality of the wireless programme is
high it is so because the standard is high in the various activities upon which
the programmes draw. [ … ] The danger is that by the ease and comfort of
participating in these activities through the wireless we should be beguiled into
forgetting that they exist only by our own active engagement in them. What
we must avoid is the sterile and absurd conception of a society that consists on
the one hand of the BBC and of the other of a nation of listeners to the BBC
programmes. The responsibility indicated here is not so much to broadcasting
but to the activities upon which broadcasting and indeed the vigour of society
itself depends. In this danger there is, too, a threat to the invigorating diversity
which should characterise society. The danger is that the broadcast item because
of its enormously wide distribution should assume an inordinate importance in
relation to the activity it represents. (Grisewood 1949: 77–78)
And the remedy? ‘The true safeguard lies in the vigour of society itself, which will
receive broadcasting as a stimulus to its own creativity and not as a substitute for it’
(Grisewood 1949: 80; my italics). Given Jones’s passionate attachment, at least
since his time with Eric Gill’s guild-like artistic communities in Ditchling and
Capel-y-ffin in the 1920s, to the supreme value of craftsmanship and individual
creativity, this is hardly a point on which he would have disagreed with Grisewood.
An audience that treated even genuinely challenging artistic experiences as just
one more indifferent or mildly entertaining stimulus, masticated into a common
pulp by the culture industry, would be the stuff of nightmares for Jones. It can
safely be assumed that Jones worried so meticulously over the dramatization of
his work not least because he saw the value of engaging an audience that could
receive these experimental broadcast versions as a creative stimulus for cultural
renewal. And it is in this light, too, that we should read his first broadcast talk,
written shortly after the letters to Tegetmeier and Evans above, in the wake of
the towering broadcast moment of the immediate post-war era: the coronation
of Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953.
***
The coronation was an event that moved Jones profoundly, as is clear from
a letter to The Tablet published 18 July 1953, where he takes issue with the
dismissal by Fr Crehan, a Catholic theologian, of any ‘sacramental’ character in

the present English Coronation Rite. Jones notes that one may well grant (as was
already done before the Reformation) the non-clerical character of the monarch.
But then, what is the precise nature of the ‘laic’ character of the person on whom
the visible signs of the concept of the Monarchy of Britain is publicly conferred?
Is this not still ‘sacramental’ in a less narrow sense – conferring some form of
‘sacredness’?
For ritual strippings, anointings, the putting on of significant garments, the
conveyance of rods and rings and such like cannot be done without giving a very
positive impression. [ … ] And here the signs would seem to warrant some actual
otherness, some setting apart, some making over to divine use, some placing in
the state of a victim. All of this was unexpectedly made much more apparent
by the actual sight of these rites. What emerged with surprising vividness was
the dedicated and sacred figure of immemorial tradition. The impression of
regal splendour, let alone of mere pomp, was altogether eclipsed by something
far deeper, more primal, and quite ageless. The impression was of something
sacrificial. A person appeared to have been ‘made sacra’. (Jones 1959: 49–50)
Jones’s emphasis on ‘impression’, ‘appearance’ and ‘actual sight’ here registers

the impact of the superbly orchestrated television broadcast. Jones, like so
many others, was struck by the ‘majestic drama of the Coronation’ in which,
Asa Briggs writes, ‘the television cameras were inside the Abbey for the first
time and the public, if still a limited one, could feel that it was participating
instead of watching. New meaning was given to an ancient rubric as the young
Queen was the first monarch to be crowned “in the sight of all the people” ’
(Briggs 2005: 420). Here, then, was a supreme example of the new technology
of television broadcasting making available and reinvigorating ‘immemorial
tradition’. Jones was strongly supportive of the monarchy, and one might perhaps
have expected his radio talk simply to stress the national unity suggested by
this moment – and the continued validity of sacramental symbolism as an
antidote to technocracy. However, his letter also contains a note of scepticism;
his ‘impression’ may, he writes, after all have been merely a subjective one, and
he has little time for ‘mere pomp’, or ceremony-as-entertainment. His talk would
in fact respond much more obliquely and ambiguously, by interrogating this
very event that had made such an impression on him by way of one of his own
chief creative sources: Welshness.
The opening of Jones’s talk recalls a defining episode in Welsh history: the
death of Llywelyn, the ‘last ruler’ of Wales in December 1282, at the hands of
King Edward I’s army, in Buellt wood on the border of England and Wales. Jones
tells how on his pierced body there was found a relic of the so-called Cross of
Refuge; a reminder, for Jones, of the ‘Tree of the Cross as the axial beam around
which all things move’ (Jones 1959: 39) – a point to which we shall return. All this
is, to put it mildly, a complex starting point for celebrating the recent coronation:
But it may be asked why, on a joyful occasion when the unity of the Island is
supposed to be our theme, I should deliberately recall an event of long ago which
was far from joyful and which is sharply remindful of disunity and otherness.
(Jones 1959: 40)
The answer is that ‘unity’ in this case is nothing simple, and one of the things
that the concept of the Monarchy of Britain must somehow contain is the whole
complex history of Wales. The reason why one can speak of ‘Wales and the
Crown’ at all is because of the ‘remarkable continuance of a Welsh pattern of life
after independence’ (Jones 1959: 42), an impossibility had the Age of Princes
(culminating in Llywelyn) not lasted as long as it did. Aspects of the Welsh past –
Celtic, Roman, Christian – are lovingly recalled by Jones, but here we can only
attend to his overall conclusion (which invokes Gerard Manley Hopkins):
A great confluity and dapple, things counter, pied, fragmented, twisted, lost:
that is indeed the shape of things all over Britain, but Wales has her own
double-dapple. [ … ] It follows that if we would understand the worth of what is
comprehended under the concept, the Monarchy of Britain, we must first grasp
the nature of the several haecceities or this-nesses of the several peoples of this
Island. [ … ] Who would re-present this Island must be clothed in a mantle of
variety. (Jones 1959: 46–47)
In the Coronation Rite itself, the act of consecration was followed by acts of
fealty: and Jones is finally asking, on what terms can I, a Welsh-English artist,
offer such fealty? This is further complicated by his Roman Catholicism, and
the old, painful question of the ultimate loyalties of a ‘papist’ is not far from the
surface of these reflections. What Jones’s attempt at sorting out and directing
his loyalties amounts to is a difficult, implicit analogy between a priest offering
the various prayers and intentions of the congregation on their behalf at the
Sacrifice of the Mass – and the person of the Queen as it were gathering up the
complex fealty of her subjects and offering up the Monarchy of Britain, ‘So help
me God’. Again the link is sign-making, and the validation of sign-making for
Jones derives from He who ‘placed Himself in the order of signs’. Consideration
of the Monarch of Britain thus leads back to the Cross: Jones cites a monastic
motto to the effect that the Cross stands still while the world revolves around
it, and Jones’s subject here is nothing less than the ‘world-dance which has for
its maypole the gleaming Tree on which the world-ransom was weighed’ (Jones
1959: 39). To join in this world-dance is to be broken, dismantled, to suffer
disunity; but also to enact a pattern and a unity yet to be revealed.
Jones’s creative response to the Coronation here becomes a model and a
challenge to the broadcasting audience. It is a model of how to actively re-engage
with the complex ‘reality’ re-presented through broadcasting – in Grisewood’s
terms, with those very ‘activities upon which broadcasting and indeed the
vigour of society itself depends’. In this case, that involves a double challenge
for the audience. How do you, against all kinds of dappled and fragmented
backgrounds, propose to offer your fealty? And, what is your own relationship to
the whole sign-world invoked in doing so? Here, then, is ‘society’s responsibility
for broadcasting’ amplified to a pitch.
That is not to say that Jones was any less aware than Grisewood of the
many ‘dangers’ attendant on such a major broadcast moment. We have seen
his concern with the danger of reducing something of ageless significance to
‘mere pomp’; and, more generally, that of asserting a unity that is too easy and
superficial, requiring no difficult and living fealty. Jones well knew that his own
attitudes here were out of fashion, and in a letter to Anna Kallin a few years later
(26 February 1957), he recorded his frustration at the negative reaction to the
recent readings on the Third Programme of Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’, another
impressive broadcasting moment for Jones:
Lord! how right you are about the amount of philistinism there is – and it
crops up most unexpectedly [ … ] it might be said to be the chief work of ‘neo-
Elizabethan’ England – and it’s very elusive in many of its manifestations. [ … ]
I certainly feel the rendering of Piers Plowman is a real event. At last a lot of us
can hear what that wonderful poem should sound like.
The idea of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’ was much touted around the time of the
Coronation, and Jones’s slightly bitter jab here surely registers a frustration at
the continuing mismatch between inflated rhetoric and cultural reality, which
his 1953 talk had been carefully designed to counteract. Nonetheless, he clearly
sees the BBC, and the Third Programme in particular, as being very much
on the right side of the cultural battlefield, and he goes on to tell Kallin of a
letter he has written to The Times defending the ‘Piers Plowman’ broadcast.
This was eventually published in The Listener instead (4 April 1957), and the
conclusion demonstrates beyond any commentary what this paper has tried
to establish: the mutually productive and reciprocal influence of David Jones
and the BBC:
In one passage Langland wrote:

… and Rose the dissheres,
Godfrey of garlekehithe, and gryfin the walshe
And upholderes an hepe …
and in saying Deo gratias for these Third Programme broadcasts I speak as one
having some consanguinity with ‘gryfin the walshe’, and I do very much hope
that the English Roses, Godfreys, and upholsterers among listeners and among
your readers are saying Deo gratias too. Certainly they should be; for if ever there
was a work that could be rightly described (along with the embroideries) as
opus anglicum it is this work done when, as the simple statement reads, ‘William
Langland made pers plowman’.
Though no work could be more belonging to this island, or be more rooted in a
given locality and its people, yet, at the same time, no work could be more dependent
on something other: the religion-culture, without which the poem could not,
conceptually, have been. Not only the poet’s ‘maistres and doctours’ but everything
within his purview is, in some sense, ‘under criste and crounyng in tokne’.
Professor George Keane’s broadcast entitled ‘The Symbol of Piers’ should be
mentioned as contributing to a further understanding of the work within its
context. I would conclude by again paying tribute to the Third Programme for
giving us a fresh glimpse of this crucial, but somewhat obscured, bit of our heritage.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks are due to David Addyman, Archival Research Fellow for the ‘Modernism
and Christianity’ research project at the University of Bergen, for procuring digital
photographs of essential archive materials drawn upon in this text.
Quotations from Jones’s works are reproduced by kind permission of the trustees of
the Jones Estate. Thanks also to the BBC Written Archives, Caversham, UK, and the
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, for permission to quote archival documents.
Notes
1 All archival documents mentioned in this article are listed in the ‘Archives’ section
of the Bibliography.
2 They first collaborated on an edition of S. T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient
Mariner (see Alldritt 2003: 65).
3 George Barnes, Controller of the Third Programme, quoted in Whitehead

(1989: 120). See also Douglas Cleverdon’s essay ‘David Jones and Broadcasting’,
quoting Richard Burton’s opinion that performing the climax of this radio play
was one of the high points of his acting career (Cleverdon 1972: 77).
4 A memo from ‘Head of Welsh Programmes’ to ‘Controller Third Programme’, 4
August 1953 notes that the Welsh Home Service had been delighted to receive the
talk unsolicited.
5 See Carpenter (1996: 66) for an account of Kallin.
6 See Whitehead (1989: 27).
7 Douglas Cleverdon, quoted in Whitehead (1989: 27).
8 See Alldritt (2003: 135–168) for details on Jones’s post-war achievements.
9 For a more detailed discussion of Jones as a ‘Christian modernist’, see Chapter 2 in
my monograph Modernism and Christianity (Tonning 2014).
10 Douglas Cleverdon did manage to get a very short expansion of his original
‘Preface’ to In Parenthesis out of him in 1946, for broadcasting use. This was Jones’s
first appearance on the air. See Cleverdon (1972: 75–76) for this text.
11 See for instance the memo from Leonie Cohn to ‘D. S. W.’ dated 25 March, 1954:
‘Not without trepidation and quite against all hope, I have suggested David Jones as
reviewer of “The Voices of Silence” by Malraux’. It should be emphasized that Jones’s
influence within the Third was not restricted to his friendship with Grisewood
and Cleverdon (and later Kallin): the archives suggest that he was something of a
household name for the programmers at large.
12 The heading is not specified in these drafts, but it was most likely ‘Non-
representational Art’ (see below).
13 My thanks to David Addyman for bringing this letter to my attention.
14 Jones’s marginalia (found in his edition of Spengler 1926: 293) is quoted in Staudt
(1994: 123). Staudt explains that while Jones approved of Spengler’s cyclical analysis
of culture from ‘the first stirrings of culture growing out of a primitive peasant
society’ to a ‘golden age in the arts, political structures, architecture, and religious
life’ towards decline into a ‘megalopolitan civilization, where the power struggles of
imperialist rulers take precedence’ (1994: 118), he nonetheless deplored Spengler’s
insistence on accepting the inevitability of this ‘destiny’ without ‘nostalgia’ (122).
For Jones, in another marginal note, ‘men must be nostalgic in a “civilisation”
[as opposed to a golden age “culture”] – only the bastards can feel otherwise’;
indeed one must ‘hope for its collapse’ (quoted in Staudt 1994: 122). Again, the
artist is figured here not only as a saboteur and a fifth-columnist within modernity,
but also as aiming, somehow, for a future vital Golden Age.
15 For an incisive account of modernism as a ‘revitalisation movement’, see Griffin
(2007), especially Chapters 2 and 3. My account of ‘Christian modernism’ in
Tonning (2014) (Chapters 1 and 2) draws on Griffin’s model.
16 Grisewood, ‘The Third Programme and its Audience’, talk to the Workers’
Educational Association, July 1949; quoted in Carpenter (1996: 97).
17 See also the letter to Anna Kallin, 27 February 1957, discussed below.
Archival sources
BBC written archives

I. David Jones ‘Talks’ file I, 1946–1962
Anna Kallin to David Jones (letter), 20 January 1947.
David Jones to Anna Kallin (letter), 21 January 1947.
Anna Kallin to David Jones (letter), 19 June 1951.
Memo from Christopher Holme to the BBC ‘Talks’ department, 2 October 1952.
Leonie Cohn to David Jones (letter), 13 October 1952.
Christopher Holme to David Jones (letter), 16 October 1952.
David Jones to Christopher Holme (letter), 22 October 1952.
Christopher Holme to David Jones (letter), 28 October 1952.
Memo from ‘Head of Welsh Programmes’ to ‘Controller Third Programme’, 4 August 1953.
Memo from Douglas Cleverdon to Christopher Holme (with annotations by Harmon
Grisewood and Anna Kallin), 27 August 1953.
Memo from Leonie Cohn to ‘D. S. W.’, 25 March, 1954.
II. Anna Kallin ‘Correspondence’ file.
David Jones to Anna Kallin (letter), 23 June 1950.
David Jones to Anna Kallin (letter), 26 February 1957.
David Jones Papers, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Anna Kallin to David Jones (letter), 20 June 1950 [CT 4–7].
David Jones, draft letter to The Listener (1952) [CF 2–17].
David Jones, draft letter to Denis Tegetmeier, 9 May 1953 [CF 2–26].
David Jones, draft letter to Elwyn Evans, 9 June 1953 [CF 2–26].
David Jones, draft letter to Elwyn Evans, 13 June 1953 [CF 2–26].
Works cited
Alldritt, Keith. (2003). David Jones: Writer and Artist. London: Constable.
Briggs, Asa. (2005 [1979]). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume
IV, Sound and Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carpenter, Humphrey. (1996). The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third
Programme and Radio Three 1946–1996. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Cleverdon, Douglas. (1972). ‘David Jones and Broadcasting’, Poetry Wales, 8.3, pp. 72–81.
De la Taille, Maurice. (1934). The Mystery of Faith. Trans. John O’Connor. London:
Sheed and Ward.
Griffin, Roger. (2007). Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under
Mussolini and Hitler. London: Palgrave.
Grisewood, Harman. (1949). Broadcasting and Society: Comments from a Christian
Standpoint. Rochester: The Stanhope Press.
——— (1968). One Thing at a Time. An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson &
Co. (Publishers) Ltd.
Jones, David. (1952). The Anathemata. London: Faber and Faber.
——— (1959). Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings. London: Faber and Faber.
——— (1978a [1937]). In Parenthesis. London: Faber and Faber.
——— (1978b). The Dying Gaul and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber.
Spengler, Oswald. (1926). The Decline of the West. Volume 1. London: George Allen
and Unwin.
Staudt, Kathleen Henderson. (1994). At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and
Modern Poetics. Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press.
Tonning, Erik. (2014). Modernism and Christianity. London: Palgrave.
Whitehead, Kate. (1989). The Third Programme: A Literary History. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Part Two
Broadcasting Politics
in the Modernist Era
7
Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf

and the Politics of Broadcasting
Randi Koppen
Bergen University
A specimen day, yesterday: a specimen of the year 1935 when we are on the
eve of the Duke of Gloucester’s wedding: of a general election: of the Fascist
revolution in France: & in the thick of the Abyssinian war … at 2.30 we went
to the BBC & listened to some incomparable twaddle – a soliloquy which the
BBC requests me to imitate (a good idea, all the same, if one were free) with all
the resources of the BBC behind one: real railway trains; real orchestras; noises;
waves; lions & tigers &c.
Virginia Woolf, Diary, 5 November 1935; D4: 351
Some might think it a bit of a turn-off to begin an essay on Woolf and broadcasting
by noting her relative lack of interest in the phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is the
precise nature and shape of this dearth the following discussion pursues. Many
have remarked upon Woolf ’s characteristic ambivalence towards wireless as a
means of dissemination and communication. A more precise formulation of
her position, however, would be to say that her take on broadcasting is always
primarily political.
This is not to say that Woolf lacked understanding of modern sound
technologies and their phenomenology, or indeed a degree of readiness to
meet the requirements of the medium and its genres. The impatient dismissal
of BBC’s radiophonic ‘soliloquy’ in the diary entry above has probably more
to do with the fact that she had herself explored, perhaps exhausted, the aural
potential of soliloquy with her composition of The Waves five years previously.
The radiophonic qualities of this prose experiment were recognized at the time
by the actress Virginia Isham who approached Woolf in January 1933 to secure
the rights for a wireless version. Woolf, though ‘rather in the dark’ as to what
Isham had in mind, was delighted: ‘It would interest me immensely to see what
you could do with it’ (L5: 149–150). While Isham’s plans never materialized, it
doesn’t take much to recognize the resonances between Woolf ’s ‘eyeless’ writing
for voices in this novel and contemporary radio art ‘in praise of blindness’,
as Rudolf Arnheim put it in Radio (1936). Woolf ’s disembodied and partly
overlapping soliloquies, spoken by six voices and interspersed with passages of
depersonalized prose, have much in common with the ‘voices without bodies’
and ‘pure aural world’ Arnheim finds in contemporary radio drama, especially
in recent developments of the monologue where speech is distributed amongst a
‘kaleidoscope’ of voices to remind us of what Arnheim calls the ‘magic’ of words:
their ability not only to bring into being a world dissociated from vision, but also
to alert us to the auratic, somatic and ‘spiritual’ dimensions of sound as aural
experience (Arnheim 1936: 175).
A strong case has also been made by Woolf scholars such as Pamela Caughie
and Melba Cuddy-Keane, for reading the modern soundscapes in Woolf ’s fiction
as developing in conjunction with wireless technology, radiophonic art and the
‘surround-sound’ of radio more generally. Melba Cuddy-Keane proposes new
terms such as ‘diffusion’ and ‘auscultation’ for this purpose, showing how texts
like the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the
Acts create rich environmental soundscapes in words, resembling radiophonic
and electroacoustic art in the combination of disparate sounds broadly diffused
from different points in space and in the non-hierarchical mixing of voices and
noises (Cuddy-Keane 2000).
Woolf herself broadcast on three separate occasions, in 1927, 1929 and 1937.
Of these only about eight minutes of the last one survives, an aural trace that
hardly lends itself to fetishization. Jane Lewty describes Woolf ’s voice as ‘slurred
and sulky’ (Lewty: 159); to her nephew Quentin Bell it appeared deprived of
depth and resonance, barely recognizable (Bell 1972: 235). Perhaps its unsettling
foreignness testifies to Woolf ’s discomfort with the mechanics of broadcasting:
the requirements of timing, the red light over the door and the notice ‘to say that
if one rustles one’s manuscript thousands will be deafened’ (L3: 403). And yet,
she reflects in her diary, ‘I got my pecker up & read with ease & emotion; was
then checked by the obvious fact that my emotion did not kindle George Barnes
[the producer]’ (D5: 83).
A similar willingness to master the medium and engage the audience informs
her first attempt at broadcasting, a collaborative project with Leonard Woolf in a
typical BBC format, the conversational debate, which both appear to have taken
on with vigour and enthusiasm. The Woolfs were invited to broadcast by Lance
Sievekind who had special responsibility for topical talks in 1926. The topic, ‘Are
Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Broadcasting 139
Too Many Books Written and Published?’, was proposed by Leonard, and the
Woolfs were invited to draft a manuscript in the form of a conversation between
the two of them. The ‘informal’ dialogue was an established BBC format, but
as Cuddy-Keane has observed, the fact that the Woolfs were given the freedom
to propose the topic and draft the script was a departure from normal BBC
procedure, indicating a large measure of trust and respect (Cuddy-Keane
2006: 236). The script preserved at the BBC Written Archives Centre bears the
evidence of an intricately collaborative work with minimal editorial intervention,
though with considerable effort expended by Virginia in particular, in revising
her part for added clarity and fluency. The result is a clearly structured yet lively
and entertaining conversation that is faithful to the genre of the radio debate as
it had evolved, topical in its choice of theme and accessible to a wide audience
in its presentation of opposite perspectives on a complex historical process: the
rise of mass publishing and its consequences for the writing, production and
consumption of books.
Virginia’s second broadcast ‘Beau Brummell’ could perhaps be categorized as
‘celebrity journalism’, if that term is used to refer to the kind of pieces Woolf
and other ‘Bloomsbury’ members contributed to Vogue and similar fashionable
publications in the 1920s, serving to promote their own market value along with
modernism as aesthetic and style of life. As a promotion of modern lifestyles,
Woolf ’s talk on the first of the dandies connects with the gender mutability and
camp aesthetic that defines Orlando (1928). In the end, however, any ‘subversive’
potential of this broadcast was defused by the BBC. The talk was aired on 20
November 1929, after the nine o’clock news, to what may be presumed a
predominantly adult audience, as the second in a three-part series entitled
‘Miniature Biographies’. The other two speakers were Bloomsbury friends Harold
Nicholson and Desmond MacCarthy. Woolf ’s original commission included a
talk on Dorothy Wordsworth, which was advertised in the Radio Times for 15
November 1929. At the last moment, as Woolf fumed in a letter to T. S. Eliot,
‘the BBC condemned Dorothy Wordsworth and made me castrate Brummel’
(L4: 111). Woolf was ‘in the devil of a temper’, her ‘poor little article [ … ] completely
ruined’. Worse still, Hilda Matheson’s presence in the studio affected her ‘as a
strong purge’ and ‘a cold in the head’ (L4: 110–111). The talk, as broadcast and
printed in The Listener on 27 November, portrayed the making and unmaking of
a fashion icon and modern celebrity in a style that was characteristically ‘light’
and entertaining, with the camp aesthetic carefully contained.
Apart from what seems to have been a general willingness to communicate,
along with the occasional reference to the ‘talks’ frame and to a community
of listeners, one would be hard put to point to any radiophonic experiment,

or even much radiophonic awareness, in Woolf ’s radio work. What we have is
one fairly ‘standard’ radio dialogue and two straightforward radio talks, which
Woolf referred to in private as ‘articles’, complaining that the ‘talks element’
cramped and ruined them (D5: 81). Before pursuing the nature of Woolf ’s
engagement with radio, however, deciding in what sense Woolf might have
been ‘broadcasting modernism’ or thinking about wireless as conjoined with a
modernist project, it is helpful to make a distinction which I believe a simple
alignment of Woolf ’s literary modernism with radiophonic experiment serves
to occlude, a discrimination between what in Marxist terms might be called
the technology of production and the means of production. This distinction
is key to grasping at least two opposed positions in the 1930s’ broadcasting
debate.
In 1935, a few months prior to Woolf ’s ironic dismissal of the BBC’s ‘real
railway trains [ … ] waves, lions & tigers &c’, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, at
the Hogarth Press, had published Raymond Postgate’s pamphlet What to Do
with the B.B.C., a text which presents a strong argument against the ‘ballyhoo
which wireless newspapers and radio experts attempt to stuff us with’ (Postgate
1935: 61). ‘Wireless’, insists Postgate, ‘is not a new art, or a new method of
living. The radio set in our homes is a convenience just as a bathroom tap is
a convenience … in the end it deserves no more attention than a bathroom
tap deserves’ (61). For the socialist Postgate, the time had come to return to
the chief question: ‘what is broadcast, and what are the effects of the material
broadcast’ (61). What he offered, however, is not an analysis of the ideological
content of BBC programmes, but a narrative of the means of production: the
money, the people and the organization that produce the broadcast. Beyond
offering a diagnosis of what is wrong with the broadcasting corporation
(such as a lack of transparency and accountability, autocratic control over
staff and programming) and pointing to the risk of a totalitarian takeover of
the organization and technology, Postgate’s pamphlet proposes an alternative,
decentralized organization partly modelled on the Russian socialist system of
broadcasting, intended to secure democratic access to the means of production,
and actual communication rather than transmission and passive reception. His
objective in making this intervention (and perhaps the Woolfs’ in publishing it),
is that of offering a practical and strategic model for wireless democracy, and
to do so by uncovering a narrative of the means of production that even the
denaturalizing and dialectical radio experiments conducted by Brecht and
Benjamin failed to bring to light.
The ‘hullabaloo’ Postgate heard in contemporary culture referred to a dual

tendency: to aestheticize the medium and its technology, and to fetishize it as an
icon and instrument of modernity – a tendency of which Arnheim’s study was
a prime example. Radio clearly belongs to those narratives of technology that
celebrate its magic even while exposing the secrets of its workings. His interest,
as he made clear in the opening chapter, was only marginally in broadcasting
as a means of transmission and dissemination, and almost exclusively in the
specificity of wireless as a medium, ‘a new experience for the artist, his audience
and the theoretician’, where ‘everything that takes place at the microphone’,
whether radio drama or announcement of the news, ‘is submitted to the rules
of aural art’ (14, 18). His aim was to convey to the reader ‘some of the many
extraordinary sensations associated with the broadcasting house and the
wireless receiver’, from ‘the carpeted rooms where no footstep sounds and whose
walls deaden the voice’, to ‘the serious young man at the control-board who with
his black knobs turns voices and sounds off and on like a stream of water’, and
‘the loneliness of the studio where you sit alone with your voice and a scrap of
paper and yet before the largest audience that a speaker has ever addressed; the
tenderness that affects one for the little dead box suspended by garter-elastic
from a ring, richer in treasure and mystery than Portia’s three caskets’ (Arnheim
1936: 19–20).
The intention of the foregoing discussion is certainly not to conflate Woolf ’s
views on broadcasting with those of Postgate, or, indeed, Virginia’s with
Leonard’s. However, it does appear that, by publishing this pamphlet, the Woolfs
were making an intervention into a current debate that reflected in many ways
their own, fundamental and political views of broadcasting. These views related
to a democratic project that provided a political context for their broadcasts and
written work distinct from the ‘liberal’ or ‘ethical’ frames that are sometimes
invoked. Virginia and Leonard Woolf shared a view of broadcasting that resisted
aestheticization (and fetishization) of wireless technology, thinking of radio
first and foremost as an instrument for moulding public opinion. Their interest
is in questions of access and organization, whether broadcasting figures as a
Habermasian ‘public sphere’ or as appropriated within a project of dialectical
cultural critique, as Virginia was to propose in Three Guineas.
In general terms, as others have observed, their thinking on these questions
resonated with the wider debate running through the 1920s and the 1930s
of the social use of technology and the cultural anxieties surrounding the
enhanced possibilities of propaganda (Cuddy-Keane 2003). A concern within
this chapter, however, is to disengage Woolf ’s thinking about the politics of the
‘loudspeaker’ from a generalized context of defensive ambivalence or retrograde

scepticism. Woolf, as a cultural and political agent, is connected (more or less
peripherally and ambivalently) with a loose network of (predominantly leftist)
intellectuals engaged in attempts at understanding and potentially changing
historical and material relations between information, opinion and citizenship.
Her thinking on broadcasting is primarily political and can be traced across
her work, connecting her activities as writer, publisher and cultural critic. Her
two most important broadcasts, ‘Are Too Many Books Written and Published’
and ‘Craftsmanship’, both deal with questions of public communication and
citizenship, the manufacture of assent and the possibility of dissent, enacting the
principles of what might be called ‘wireless democracy’.
Democracy in the age of mechanical reproduction
Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s first broadcast was aired from 10.20am to
10.35am on Friday, 15 July 1927, between performances of an operetta
(Les cloches de Corneville by Robert Planquette) and Whittaker Wilson’s ‘Four
Songs of Morocco’ (Cuddy-Keane 2006: 244), and seems at least on Virginia’s
part to have been prepared within a general frame of optimism. ‘Can’t you see
that nationality is over? All divisions are now rubbed out, or about to be’, she
says to Harold Nicholson in a discussion about British imperialism a fortnight
before the broadcast, pointing out the aeroplanes flying above while the portable
wireless plays dance music on the terrace (D3: 145). Similar hopes for the
potentially democratic and anti-imperialist effects of modern communications
technologies are played out with much fun and inventiveness in Virginia’s part
in the radio debate.
The topic for this dialogic enquiry is the rise of mass publishing and its
consequences for the writing, production and consumption of books, with
Leonard taking a more or less anti-Benjaminean line, tracing the qualitative and
quantitative transformations from craft to machine production, from individual
act of creation to serial production and aural loss, but without Benjamin’s
belief in any inherent dialectical potential in the process. His concern is with
the effects of the machine on culture (on the individual mind as well as on the
social body), and with the standardization, quantification and trivialization of
mind that seem to follow from a technocratic, capitalist society, where books,
like boots, have become mass-produced objects. Significantly, this is not a
Leavisian, liberal-intellectual argument against the age of the machine. Leonard

was speaking from the perspective of the small, independent publisher and the
Labour Party member, considering the consequences of the free market for
labour, with only a few writers earning ‘a living wage’, and average wages below
those of the mining industry. At the other end of the process of production,
consumers were swamped by low-quality goods and ‘best-sellers’ created by
advertising. What was required, Leonard argued, was better organization and
regulation of the publishing business, to secure the future of writing and reading
within a democratic, public sphere rather than a free market.
In playful, inventive counterpoints to Leonard’s practical, grounded
perspective, Virginia conducted the other half of the enquiry, speaking in
favour of increased access to the means of production as well as to available
products, of making books as cheap and expendable as a packet of cigarettes,
and offering prizes to induce new people to write. An increase in availability
meant less standardization, not more, if books are written and read by tramps
and duchesses, plumbers and Prime Ministers. Virginia’s part was to enliven
the debate format through surprise and paradox, hyperbole and flights of fancy.
She recklessly threw overboard Leonard’s social-economic framework, speaking
of writing and publishing as a ‘lottery’, ‘with its chance of a motor-car and its
chance of a garret’, the chance of making a fortune overnight by selling the film
rights of a novel to Hollywood. She playfully embraced the opportunities of the
market economy and the celebrity culture that came with the age of mechanical
reproduction, figuring the communications machine as fundamentally
generative, a means of transportation and democratic proliferation, as much as
serialization.
Needless to say, one should be wary of taking this staged dialogue as
representing distinct and opposed views. The dialogue was not conclusive, but
serves to demystify the process of book production as well as the end product,
exposing both the aura surrounding the past and the processes of fetishization
at work in the present culture of the commodity and the celebrity. Its most
conclusive point, voiced by both speakers, concerns the advantages of democratic
access to the public sphere that literary culture constitutes, of multiplying the
number of writers as well as resisting readers. In practical terms, it anticipates
the policy adopted by The Hogarth Press from the late 1920s, as well as the
critical praxis Virginia was to recommend for the ‘Outsiders Society’ in Three
Guineas (1938), a thoroughgoing cultural critique based on the potentially
liberating technologies of the typewriter and the duplicating machine.
A Ramble Round Words
If ‘Beau Brummell’ was an instance of celebrity journalism, it didn’t do much for

Woolf ’s market value on air. She was paid £15 15s. for the broadcast in 1927, and
£4 14s. for its appearance in print. Eight years later she was offered the same (£20
in total) for ‘Craftsmanship’, which she thought was ‘d – d mangy … considering
that they print it in The Listener too’. ‘Next time you’ll be able to bargain’, her
contact at the BBC assured her: ‘He told me, in confidence, that all the well known
writers, like ourselves, are now holding out for more … Winston [Churchill]
asks £300 but doesn’t get it’ (L6: 109–110). In the end, however, ‘Craftsmanship’
turned out to be Woolf ’s last broadcast. Judged by the quality of the script, it is
probably also her best, though Woolf was reluctant to make concessions either
to the medium or to the format, referring to her talk as an ‘article’ and damning
the ‘talk element that upsets it’: ‘Yet of course there’s a certain thrill about writing
to read aloud – I expect a vicious one’ (D5: 81). The ‘talk element’ refers to the
meretricious note, the tendency towards performative excess that Woolf, herself
a manic talker, detected in speech generally and that she feared would infect her
writing. It also referred to the cutting and stitching required to fit a talk that is
‘alternately 25 & then 15 minutes’ into the specified 17, till in the end one felt
like ‘an incompetent tailor making trouser legs that [don’t] match’ (D5: 81; L6,
6 May 1937).
The topic proposed by George Barnes, however, was a close fit. The idea
was for a ten-part series under the title ‘Words Fail Me’ with talks by various
experts on language. Other speakers included Professor A. Lloyd James on the
importance of grammar, Allen Ferguson on the rapid expansion of vocabulary in
current English and Logan Pearsall Smith on borrowing from other languages.
The series was broadcast on the National Programme on Thursday evenings
between 8 April and 17 June 1937. In his written invitation to Woolf, suggesting
the title ‘Craftsmanship’, Barnes writes: ‘The talk has been specially included
in order to lure you into the series, and my idea for it was that whatever the
scientists and the philologists may have said in the preceding talks, it remains
true that a skilful writer or a skilful orator can arouse the strongest passions for
playing skilfully with words’ (Woolf 1994: 99). It is significant that the topic was
not the performative, illocutionary force of words (which Woolf distrusted and
feared), but an incitement for the ‘ordinary man’ to use language with greater
confidence and freedom.
Once again, Woolf was left relatively free to devise her talk, Barnes inviting her
to be ‘fanciful to any extent you wish’ (Brosnan 1997: 136, 140). Woolf duly began
by substituting her own title –‘A Ramble Round Words’ – for the one she has
been given, conveying to the listener that good writing is never a craft and that
words by their nature are never useful. With characteristic playfulness she takes
the listener on a flight of fancy that demonstrates the ability of words to transport
themselves and us along lines of memory and association, to unexpected and
even unwanted destinations, showing how the useful word that was going
to return you home took you for a ride instead, to King’s Cross rather than to
Russell Square. Words, she says, make us do what we should not. They make us
careless and adventurous, trespassers onto forbidden ground. Democratic and
promiscuous, one as good as the other, they mate across boundaries of country
and race, education and class. Woolf ’s free play along the signifying chain in this
talk might be taken as broadcasting a modernist aesthetic. More importantly,
however, what was broadcast is an exemplary practice of writing and reading in
which one allows oneself to be instructed by language, a strategic immersion in
the radical power of words. Arguing that the resources for a democratic practice
of writing and reading are available in the native language and in the literacy of the
common reader, Woolf spoke against not only the essence of the Reithian project,
but also the institutionalization of reading to which, ironically, the political left
also contributed. Like her first dialogue with Leonard, the last talk promotes the
wireless approach to a culture of juxtaposition and association, metonymy and
montage, channel switching and airwave travel, listening in and tuning out.
Figuring wireless
It is interesting and quite instructive to juxtapose Woolf ’s exemplary metonymic

practice in her 1937 talk with her figurations of wireless ten years earlier, in
the essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, where wireless appears amongst
the defining conditions of modern life, making literal modernism’s fantasies
of corpuscular bodies in relations of mutuality and contact. Not a metaphor,
but a material fact of life, along with changes in housing and demography,
‘as suggested by a walk through the streets of any large town’, the wireless
conditions the modern mind:
The long avenue of brick is cut up into boxes, each of which is inhabited by a
different human being who has put locks on his doors and bolts on his windows
to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to his fellows by wires which pass overhead,
by waves of sound which pour through the roof and speak aloud to him of battles
and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world. (Woolf 2008: 77–78)
Isolated, yet ‘wired’ to his fellows, Woolf ’s modern individual is ‘extremely alive
to everything’, ‘immensely inquisitive’, ‘and the most marked characteristic – the
strange way in which things that have no apparent connection are associated in
his mind’ (78).
The idea of wireless as aligned with a capacity for association and montage,
of making connections amongst the seemingly disparate, reappears in Three
Guineas, which Woolf was composing when she gave her ‘Craftsmanship’ talk.
Here wireless is figured as a ‘public psychometer’, an instrument that enables
soundings of culture. Along with libraries and public galleries, the wireless
provides the educated man’s daughter with a point of entry to culture radically
different from Reith’s Arnoldian civilizing project: that of the dialectical fragment.
Reading The Antigone, for instance, gives one the most accurate analysis of the
effects of power and the duties of the individual – ‘far more profound … than
any of our sociologists can offer us’ (Woolf 1991: 94). At the same time, ‘the
wireless of the daily press’ may be consulted as a source in a critical inquiry, to
hear what answer fathers are making to the old question from their daughters:
what it is that disqualifies women from property, the professions, civil liberties.
The wireless gives us the ‘clamour, the uproar’ of the patriarch’s phallic fixation,
a deafening, ventriloquizing noise ‘such that we can hardly hear ourselves speak;
it takes the words out of our mouths; it makes us say what we have not said’ (62).
As the narrator listens to the radio voice intoning: ‘Homes are the real places of
the women’, she seems to hear an ancient cry, ‘Ay, ay, ay, ay [ … ] it is not a new
cry, it is a very old cry. Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past’ (62). The
‘ay, ay, ay’ that resounds on the airwaves is the cry that sounded in ancient Greece,
the voice of Creon, the dictator, still reverberating through the loudspeakers
of Hitler and Mussolini in Woolf ’s present. More than the loudspeaker of the
dictator, an instrument of indoctrination and ventriloquism, the wireless here is
depicted as a vehicle for metonymic transposition, transporting us through time
and space, establishing the links between the radically disparate Woolf identified
as a feature of wireless listening in ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’. More precisely,
the wireless as ‘psychometer’ enters into the politics of the dialectical fragment –
the project of montage, the transposing and reframing of information – that
Three Guineas enacts.
The impact of the wireless as a deafening, invasive noise becomes increasingly
dominant in Woolf ’s thinking through the build-up to war in the late 1930s,
as articulated in her diary entries, essays and talks. ‘The Leaning Tower’ and
‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, both written during the air raids of 1940,
articulate the experience of wireless as an increasingly monologic voice, intrusive,

besieging and ventriloquist. The pressures brought to bear by modern war
reporting appears as a defining condition of the present, and of contemporary
writing, and are apparent in ‘The Leaning Tower’, Woolf ’s address to the WEA
in Brighton 27 April 1940:
Today we hear the gunfire in the channel. We turn on the wireless; we hear an
airman telling us how this very afternoon he shot down a raider; his machine
caught fire … Scott never saw the sailors drowning at Trafalgar; Jane Austen
never heard the cannon roar at Waterloo. Neither of them heard Napoleon’s
voice as we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an evening. (161)
In December 1939, just as Woolf had accepted the invitation from the WEA, she
wrote about the news of the German battleship the Graf Spee in her diary. Under
siege in Uruguay it blew itself up rather than submit:
the Graf Spee is going to steam out of Monte Video today into the jaws of death.
And journalists & rich people are hiring aeroplanes from which to see the sight.
This seems to me to bring war into a new angle; & our psychology … the eyes of
the whole world (BBC) are on the game; & several people will lie dead tonight,
or in agony. And we shall have it served up for us as we sit over our logs this
bitter winter night. (D5: 251–252)
Woolf was clearly interested in the changing nature of news and its impact on
group psychology. She was reading Freud’s Group Psychology at the time, but,
as she said, she did not have time to work it out and it did not reach her fiction.
‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ was originally intended as a contribution
to an American Women’s Symposium, and written in the late summer of 1940
when the Battle of Britain was raging. Woolf was living at Rodmell in Sussex,
but made regular day trips to London and experienced the frequent air raids,
writing about it in her diary and reflecting on the chasm between the realities of
war and ‘the brave, laughing heroic boy panoply which the BBC spreads before
us nightly’ (298). During these months she struggled to think and feel against
the ‘current’ of the ‘communal BBC dictated feeling’ (306). Much of this comes
out in the essay, whose argument resembles that of Three Guineas, focusing on
‘the subconscious Hitlerism’, ‘the desire to dominate and enslave’ that drives men
to war (169). By this time, months before her suicide, ‘the voices of [wireless]
loudspeakers’, their ‘cry with one voice’, their ‘spate of words’ was the current
that ‘has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circling there
among the clouds’ (169).
Wireless democracy
Returning to the 1920s and the early 1930s, we find Woolf ’s more optimistic
vision of broadcasting as a potentially democratic public sphere. At a time
when politics was becoming a shared national experience she described herself
‘listening in’ with her servants Nellie Boxall and Lottie, hoping for news of the
General Strike in 1926 and the Labour victory in the 1929 General Election,
reflecting on the novelty of the experience. As Alison Light observes, such
moments of shared assent also bring home some unpleasant truths about the
theoretical nature of their alliance: ‘ “We are winning” Nelly said at tea. I was
shocked to think that we both desire the Labour party to win – why? Partly that
I don’t want to be ruled by Nelly. I think to be ruled by Nelly & Lottie would be a
disaster’ (D3: 230). Nonetheless, Woolf continued to claim political and strategic
allegiance to the working class, expressing her views on the BBC’s role in class
politics.
Ironically, Woolf ’s most outspoken criticism of the BBC exists as a public
letter written but never sent to The Statesman. Later published by Leonard in
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), ‘Middlebrow’ was written in
response to J. B. Priestley’s radio talk ‘To a Highbrow’ in October 1932, debating
the position of the intellectual in the question of mass culture and the interests,
culture and politics of the working class – precisely the questions that had also
preoccupied the Woolfs in their first radio talk. Countering Priestley’s attack
on the highbrow in his broadcast, Woolf speaks out against the middlebrow
policy of the BBC, which in her view served to divide liberal intellectuals from
the working class rather than unite them in resistance against establishment
respectability and cultural insipidness: ‘If the B.B.C. stood for anything but the
Betwixt and Between Company they would use their control of the air not to stir
strife between brothers, but to broadcast the fact that highbrows and lowbrows
must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and
living’. The ‘bloodless and pernicious pest’ in question is the middlebrow: the
bland, decorous culture signified, for Virginia and Leonard alike, above all by
the BBC and the bowler hat (Woolf 1966: 202).
After ‘Craftsmanship’, Virginia had vowed never to broadcast again; Leonard,
however, did, giving six talks on democracy and the modern state in 1931. He
also wrote on broadcasting, and had articles published in The Spectator and the
Political Quarterly in the early 1930s with titles like: ‘Democracy Listens-In’,
‘Broadcasting and a Better World’ and ‘The Future of British Broadcasting’. To
him the future of democracy and the future of British broadcasting were closely
connected. Both hinged on the organization and constitution of the BBC: how
to continue to run it as a semi-public and semi-independent corporation, how
to retain its monopoly and its answerability to Parliament, while getting rid of its
policy of suppressing true debate and free expression of opinion.
The Woolfs’ most radical and practical intervention represents in many ways
an extension of the views expressed by Leonard in his writing; one that seems to
have informed their broadcasting work. It came with the publication of Postgate’s
pamphlet What to Do with the B.B.C. in 1935. The immediate context for this
publication was a Royal Commission on the BBC appointed in 1935 to report
in the following year; the pamphlet was intended to influence their conclusions.
It is interesting to note that The Hogarth Press had published Postgate’s How
to Make a Revolution in 1934. In both cases the press had to seek legal advice:
the first book was banned in India, while the second was potentially libellous
(Woolf, L: 325–327). Leonard was directly involved in both cases, which suggests
something about the radical nature of the press and the level of involvement on
the part of its owners. Postgate’s book was ultimately published as part of the
Day to Day series of socio-political pamphlets (1930–1939), along with titles on
Russia, anti-imperialism, fascism and communism.
A left-wing journalist and writer, a member (like the Woolfs) of the 1917
Club, the Fabian Society and the Labour Party, Postgate took a strong political
interest in radio as a potentially powerful instrument of propaganda that needed
close monitoring. He thus published several articles on this topic during the
early 1930s in The New Statesman and Nation and Time and Tide. These articles
were ambivalent about the BBC, depicting it on the one hand as an autonomous
body and an example of ‘the new kind of Socialism’, ‘a public service corporation,
permitting no private profit and as free from direct political influence as its
founders knew how to make it’; and on the other, as an instrument of autocratic
control and suppression of political controversy and debate (Postgate J. and M.
1994: 170). Much of the material for the alternative organization he proposed
in What to Do with the BBC came out of a visit organized by the New Fabian
Research Bureau in 1932 to study and report on life in the Soviet Union. The
Woolfs’ friend Margaret Cole was leader of the group and edited the resulting
publication, Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia. A former member of the Communist
Party and editor of The Communist, Postgate retained an enormous respect and
regard for the Soviet Union. Like most of the participants on the study trip, he
saw it as the hope of the world, while tolerating all its defects. During the visit
in fact he was invited to broadcast from Radio Moscow. His talk, in English, was
on ‘The Broadcasting System of the Soviet Union’ and was evidently intended
by the authorities mainly for consumption overseas. In it he expressed his

admiration for the Soviet system and criticized the BBC (Postgate J. and M.
1994: 173). His article in Twelve Studies, ‘Radio, Press and Publishing’, attempted
to give a factual presentation of the Soviet system of broadcasting, organization,
programming and communication with listeners. Postgate was particularly
interested in the system of substations, which, to his mind, showed most clearly
the difference between Soviet and capitalist broadcasting: ‘these sub-stations
or “receiving points” are of very low power – 30 watts or so – and serve only
the factory, farm, or park to which they are allotted’ (Postgate 1933: 228). In
one example from a Moscow factory; ‘The station receives 75 per cent of its
programme from the big stations, by the ether, and relays it over the wires to
the factory loud-speakers … The remaining quarter is supplied from the factory
[the factory art brigade]’. New flats built for the workers were wired to the station
and the worker was able to switch on by merely plugging in a loudspeaker. The
most interesting section of the programme was the spoken material, consisting
of a news bulletin and short speeches by the workers on factory problems and
reasons for discontent: ‘The freedom of the workers in making these complaints
is jealously guarded. No previous censorship is allowed’ (228–229). This is the
system he envisages for Britain in What to Do with the B.B.C.
Very simplified, Postgate’s pamphlet attempted three things: it offered
a diagnosis of what was wrong with the broadcasting corporation (lack of
transparency and accountability, autocratic control over staff and programming);
pointed to the risk of a totalitarian, fascist takeover of the organization and
technology; and proposed an alternative, decentralized organization modelled
on the Russian system of broadcasting, intended to secure democratic access
to the means of production, and actual two-way communication rather than
transmission and passive reception. This is not the place to go into the details
of Postgate’s analysis and proposals. By means of conclusion, there are one or
two striking aspects which resonate quite clearly with the Woolfs’ own thinking.
The scenario Postgate envisaged of a fascist takeover of the airwaves described
and in part anticipated very precisely the development in Italy and Germany
from the early to mid-1930s, a development of which few people in Britain –
and certainly not the BBC itself – were aware, with Virginia and Leonard Woolf
amongst the notable exceptions. His proposed strategy to safeguard against such
a development in Britain emphasized the need for direct access to the means of
wireless production: a system of substations and rediffusion under the control of
democratically elected town and village councils (Postgate 1935: 66). With such
a system in place, ‘In every Welsh valley … the miners would have their own local
substation, on which they could hear not only a choice of national programme,
not only their colliery band, but also, from the lips of their fellows exactly how
their own mine was being run and whether the experiment of socialization was
being a success’ (66).
This is not to say that the Woolfs shared or endorsed Postgate’s views
in any simple sense. Their decision to publish reflects a long-standing
commitment to the question of broadcasting and public opinion, but
also their continuing reflections upon the space opened up by modern
communications technologies for forms of democratic agency and radical
cultural praxis. Far from uninformed about phenomenology and aesthetics,
they were both conscious that aesthetization of the medium and fetishization
of the technology did not mean control over means of production, or,
indeed, the realization of a radical critical potential. Significantly, this was
also a distinction carefully maintained through Woolf ’s last novel, Between
the Acts (1941), where technologies for the recording and amplification of
sound appeared with uncertain dialectical potential. The pageant form Woolf
was ironically citing in the novel is a cross between the patriotic Empire
Day pageants and the pageants performed and published by the Communist
Party during the popular front period (Harker 2011: 437). While the Woolfs
were, to some extent, involved with the popular front, her own version of
the pageant neither denied nor endorsed the radical potential such groups
invested in the modern technologies of sound. As Ben Harker points out,
the megaphone was a device used by leftist theatre groups from Berlin’s Rote
Sprachror to British groups affiliated to the Workers’ Theatre Movement
(Harker 2011: 448). In Between the Acts its meaning wavers between the
dialectical and the dictatorial, while the gramophone, another potentially
dialectical technology, serves both to unite and to disperse the audience. It is
foregrounded as technology, as in the radiophonic experiments of Brecht and
Benjamin. Woolf ’s gramophone chuffs and ticks, grinds and blares, and gets
its needle stuck. On a level with the inept actors and rag-tag costumes made
up of tinsel and dishcloths, it ironically foregrounds the precariousness of the
pageant’s revivalist project and the high hopes attaching to it: the creation of a
community founded on English cultural tradition. Never settling for unified
meanings, Woolf ’s pageant restates what we have come to understand: that
in the age of mechanical reproduction any inherent, dialectical potential as
often as not – or rather more often than not – remains unrealized.
Abbreviations
L = The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. N. Nicholson. 4 vols. London: Hogarth Press.
D = The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. London: Penguin.
Works cited
Arnheim, R. (1936). Radio. London: Faber & Faber Ltd.

Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
——— (2009). ‘Desmond MacCarthy, Bloomsbury, and the Aestheticist Ethics of
Broadcasting’, in Broadcasting Modernism, Ed. D. R. Cohen, M. Coyle and J. Lewty.
Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009.
Brosnan, L. (1997). ‘ “Words Fail Me”: Virginia Woolf and the Wireless’, Virginia Woolf
and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed.
Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins. NY: Pace University Press, pp. 134–141.
Cuddy-Keane, M. (2000). ‘Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality’,
in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Ed. P. L. Caughie.
New York: Garland Publishing, pp. 69–96.
——— (2003). Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
——— (2006). ‘Introduction to “Are Too Many Books Written and Published?” ’, PMLA,
121.1, pp. 235–244.
Gillespie, D. and L. K. Hankins. (1997). Virginia Woolf and the Arts. New York: Pace
University Press.
Harker, B. (2011). ‘ “On Different Levels Ourselves Went Forward”: Pageantry, Class
Politics and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf ’s Late Writing’, ELH 78.2, pp. 433–456.
Lewty, J. (2007). ‘Virginia Woolf and the Synapses of Radio’, in Locating Woolf: The
Politics of Space and Place, Ed. Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth. Basingstoke:
Palgrave, pp. 148–166.
Light, A. (2008). Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in
Bloomsbury. London: Bloomsbury Press.
Postgate, R. (1933). ‘Radio, Press and Publishing’, in Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia, Ed.
M. I. Cole. London: Victor Gollancz, pp. 225–247.
——— (1935). What to Do with the B.B.C. London: The Hogarth Press.
——— and M. (1994). A Stomach for Dissent: The Life of Raymond Postgate: 1896–1971.
London: Keele University Press.
Southworth, H. E. ed. (2010). Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the
Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Whitehead, K. (1990). ‘Broadcasting Bloomsbury’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 20,

121–131.
Woolf, L. (1930). ‘Democracy Listens-In’, The Spectator (13 December), pp. 931–932.
——— (1931). ‘The Future of British Broadcasting’, Political Quarterly, 2.2, pp. 172–185.
——— (1989). Letters of Leonard Woolf. Ed. F. Spotts. New York: Harcourt Brace.
——— and Woolf, V. (2009). ‘Are Too Many Books Written and Published?’, PMLA,
121.1, pp. 235–244.
Woolf, V. (1929). ‘Beau Brummell’, The Listener (27 November), pp. 720–721.
——— (1966). ‘Middlebrow’, in Collected Essays. Vol. 2. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London:
Hogarth Press, pp. 196–203.
——— (1975–1980). The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 4 vols. Ed. N. Nicholson. London:
Hogarth Press.
——— (1977–1984). The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell.
London: Penguin.
——— (1991). Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press.
——— (1992a). Between the Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— (1992b). ‘The Leaning Tower’, in A Woman’s Essays, Ed. Rachel Bowlby. London:
Penguin, pp. 159–178.
——— (1992c). The Waves. London: Penguin.
——— (1993). ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life,
Ed. Rachel Bowlby. London, Penguin, pp. 168–172.
——— (1994). ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, in Selected Essays, Ed. David Bradshaw.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 74–84.
——— (2009a). ‘Beau Brummell’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol 6, Ed. S. Clarke.
London: Hogarth Press, pp. 617–624.
——— (2009b). ‘Craftsmanship’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6. Ed. S. Clarke.
London: Hogarth Press, pp. 624–627.
8
J. B. Priestley: By Radio to a New Britain

David Addyman
University of Bergen
The story of J. B. Priestley’s broadcasts for the BBC during 1940 and
1941 – the ‘Postscripts to the News’ – has been told a number of times, most
comprehensively by Sian Nicholas in her seminal 1995 work, The Echo of War.
Using previously unexamined documents in the BBC Written Archive Centre at
Reading, Nicholas tells the fascinating story of Priestley’s battle with officialdom
within the BBC, at the MOI and in the higher echelons of government. The
narrative that emerges is of a man ahead of his time, moving broadcasting into
areas which would become its preserve by the end of the war, but which at the
beginning of the war were highly controversial. Nicholas’s perspective is thus
that of a historian of radio, exploring the impact that Priestley’s broadcasts had
on the BBC. Indispensable as her account is, it leaves out the creative use to
which Priestley put the radio, and its part in his vision of the role of art and
entertainment in the community. It is this aspect which I will explore here. First,
though, a brief recap of the facts as Nicholas presents them.
When Priestley began broadcasting the Postscripts in 1940 he came to a
BBC which was unsure of the role it was expected to play in the war, and was
receiving much criticism both from the public and from the government. At
the onset of war a number of factors combined to create a radio service which
was ill-equipped to answer the needs of the public more generally and wartime
listeners more specifically. One of these was a continuing adherence to Reithian
principles of top-down broadcasting, whereby the BBC decided what was best
for the nation; the most notorious example of this was ‘the Reithian Sunday’,
characterized by sober music and religious observance. Another factor was the
restrictions on the amount and type of news that could be broadcast: the BBC had
long been banned from broadcasting any news before 6pm in order to protect
newspaper sales. But even after 6pm, it was limited in what it could report, as a
result of a failure on the part of the government, the MOI and the BBC to reach a
decision on what role the radio should play in the dissemination of propaganda,
and specifically whether it was desirable to report (1) bad news, (2) information
that could be used by the enemy or even (3) untruths. In addition, the perceived
snobbishness of the BBC, with its exclusive use of announcers with RP, was
alienating listeners of lower social classes.
Thus, in the early years of the war, the public felt that the BBC had lost its
independence and objectivity, and was giving them only second-rate drama,
poor music and no news of interest. The result was a drift to foreign stations
broadcasting in English, which catered for the British public’s desire to know
more about the war situation. The most infamous example of this is the early
wartime craze for the broadcasts of ‘Lord Haw Haw’. These began on 11
September 1939, and their attraction was that they at least gave the British public
some news, even if it came with the inevitable Nazi spin. The figures speak for
themselves: 16 million tuned to the BBC 9 o’clock news, but only 9 million stayed
tuned for the following BBC talk, while 6 million retuned to Lord Haw Haw.
Nicholas shows how the Haw Haw broadcasts underlined the absurdity of the
BBC News Department’s position: denied accounts of British operations by the
MOI, the public tuned in to German radio, meaning that in effect the MOI was
driving Britons into the hands of enemy propaganda.1
There was mounting concern amongst politicians that the BBC was not
doing all it could in the war effort. In a speech in parliament Clement Attlee
lamented the failure of the BBC at a time when it was most needed. Arthur
Greenwood MP called on the government to stop sheltering the public and
to trust them with news, arguing that the war would be won ‘by informed,
instructed, articulate opinion, the opinion of the free peoples of the world’ (cited
in Nicholas 1996: 32). Nicholas notes a threefold response on the part of the
BBC to government and public criticism, and to the popularity of Lord Haw
Haw: first, the Listener Research Department was expanded in order to better
gauge what listeners wanted; second, the light entertainment service, The Forces
Programme, was created, addressing the charge of elitism and snobbishness;
and third, the BBC began a search for personalities to broadcast topical new
commentaries to compete with Lord Haw Haw (see Nicholas 1996: 41).
It was in this climate that Priestley began broadcasting his Postscripts in
summer 1940. Nicholas points out how his predecessor, Maurice Healy, had
done little to address the public’s complaints about the radio. He had been
elitist, inflammatory towards the Germans, and made sneering references to
J. B. Priestley: By Radio to a New Britain 157
Lord Haw Haw. The search thus began for a ‘contrast in voice, upbringing and
outlook’ (cited in Nicholas 1996: 59). Priestley was an obvious candidate, having
already attained some popularity with radio audiences with his serialized novel,
Let the People Sing, broadcasting of which began the very day war was declared,
3 September 1939. Another attraction was Priestley’s accent: as Hanson explains,
‘in an era of “received pronunciation” and broadcasting of such formality
that announcers wore dinner jackets, Priestley’s unpretentious manner and
warm North Country vowels were a breath of fresh air’ (Hanson and Priestley
2008: 204). Priestley had also already achieved enormous success with his
broadcasts on the Overseas Service, which had begun on 24 May 1940. The fact
that he was easily the most successful Talks broadcaster thus far made him a
natural choice for the Postscripts. His first Postscript was aired on Wednesday,
5 June 1944, one day after the end of the Dunkirk evacuations, to which his talk
responded. He was an immediate success, attracting some 30 per cent of the
adult population, and went on to broadcast a further 20 Postscripts in the first
series, before requesting a rest in October 1940, his last Postscript for the time
being going out on Sunday, 20 October 1940.
Despite the success of the Postscripts, Priestley famously courted controversy
in the broadcasts. The familiar narrative is that, at first ‘gently and with good
humour’ (Cullingford) in the fifth Postscript of 7 July 1940, he began to be more
critical of the government, partly over its reluctance to use radio to its fullest
effect as propaganda, but mostly over its refusal to talk about ‘war aims’ or ‘peace
aims’ – the controversial question of ‘what we are fighting for’ (see Hanson and
Priestley 2008: 219). More or less successful attempts on the part of the BBC
to promote a national identity and to remind the public of ‘the Britain we are
fighting to preserve’, through celebration of its landscape and customs, could not
silence a growing desire in much of the population to talk about reconstruction
after the war had finished, and the feeling that there was a chance to create a
new society free from the poverty and unfairness of the pre-war years. Nicholas
demonstrates a ‘new mood of economic and social radicalism … constantly
remarked upon by wartime commentators’; however, she notes that Churchill
opposed any discussion of peace aims, feeling that they distracted from the
task of winning the war (Nicholas 1996: 241). Nicholas points out that Priestley
repeatedly incorporated ‘reconstruction’ themes in his broadcasts, giving the
seventh Postscript by way of an example, in which Priestley discussed ‘this silent
town [Margate] that once was gay’, saying, ‘we’re ready to accept all this [i.e. the
sacrifices of war] … if we know that we can march forward – not merely to
recover what has been lost, but to something better than we’d ever known before’
(Priestley 1967: 49; see also Nicholas 1996: 242). The following week’s Postscript
was more explicit, saying ‘We’re actually changing over from the property view
to the sense of community which simply means that we realise we’re all in the
same boat … an ark in which we can all finally land in a better world’ (Priestley
1967: 57). The theme continued to appear, such that by September the MOI
had begun to be concerned about Priestley’s influence on the public, while
Priestley was equally concerned by government timidity and the lack of official
recognition for his part in keeping up the morale of the people (see Nicholas
1996: 243), leading to his giving what was to be ‘perhaps the last’ Postscript he
would ever do at the end of October (Priestley 1967: 140). His departure was
saw as a result of government muzzling by some members of the public, a feeling
which Priestley did nothing to dispel in his comments in the national press.
Nevertheless, he returned for a second series of Postscripts in January 1941,
but this series again ended in acrimony after only eight broadcasts, Priestley
suspecting that his removal from the air had been requested by none other than
Churchill.2
So much for the historical facts. What this account leaves out is all but the
most overt criticisms of the government and the most obvious mentions of
‘reconstruction’ themes. This omission is significant, since it obfuscates the role
which Priestley saw the writer – and the radio – playing in society. A closer
analysis of the earlier Postscripts will redress this imbalance, and show that
Priestley’s vision of a new post-war society pervades the broadcasts from the
very start.
Cécile Vallée’s study, ‘J. B. Priestley, artiste de propagande à la radio: au
service de quelles idées?’ argues that Priestley was adept at ‘putting government
propaganda into broadcasting terms and sustaining morale on the Home
Front’.3 Her study identifies correspondences between Priestley’s Postscripts
and official directives on propaganda. She shows, for example, through her
close lexical analysis, how Priestley toes the MOI line on work – broadcasting
that the citizen’s participation in the war effort was crucial and that industry
had to be recalibrated to ensure the survival of the country. She notes that the
Postscripts refer 7 times to the word ‘factory’, 13 times to ‘work’ and 5 times
to ‘working’; she points out further that ‘work’ is mentioned in 9 out of 20
broadcasts, usually with humour, as in the Postscript of 25 August and 30 June,
and that of 11 August, which she quotes, before concluding, ‘Encore une fois, on
aurait tort de voir dans cet extrait une critique du gouvernement. Au contraire,
Priestley collabore ici à la politique de propagande officielle’ [once more, one
would be mistaken to see in this extract a criticism of the government. On the

contrary, Priestley here collaborates with the official propaganda]. However, she
recognizes that Priestley’s language ‘sometimes verged on subversive political
ideology’:
His obvious attempts at propagating the vision of a New Jerusalem with its
socialist innuendoes were judged as going against the war effort and against
national unity. Indeed, the fight against capitalism and the creation of a new
world order were not exactly part of the government’s agenda. Notwithstanding,
there is another, more philosophical, dimension to Priestley’s 1940 Postscripts
which must not be neglected: that of the beauty of the English countryside,
and the wonder such beauty should inspire. The Postscripts are also a eulogy to
humour, joy, and human relationships, as well as to the community spirit and
the continuity of English history, a eulogy to art and knowledge, philosophy and
humanities, and, last but not least, to poetry and the power of emotions.4
It is noticeable here that Vallée makes no attempt to link the subversive content
with the eulogistic – the paean to humour, human relationships and the English
countryside – saying simply ‘there is another … dimension’. However, the two
are in fact connected. While Priestley undoubtedly follows official directives to
some extent, he does so only in so far as they correspond to his own views on
society and on how the radio should be used in wartime. And although Priestley
undeniably becomes more explicit in his call for ‘peace aims’ in the later
Postscript, these in fact suffuse his broadcasts from the first Postscript onwards,
and are part of his motivation for turning to the medium of radio, as well as part
and parcel of his strategy for bringing about a new order in society. In order to
understand this, it is necessary first to look at Priestley’s views on the role of the
author in society, and then to analyse the Postscripts in more detail, in order to
ascertain the extent to which they are consistent with – but also extend – his
ideas of the author’s place in his community.
A number of Priestley’s published works give an indication of what he feels
is the role of the work of art, and help build a sense of what he may have been
hoping to achieve in his move to the radio. In Literature and Western Man
(1960), Priestley sketches out his view of the artist’s role, suggesting that the
novelist may find that
If his fiction is concerned with men in a particular society, and with the
character of that society, then this highly subjective, interior monologue, halo-
and-envelope method will not serve his purpose at all. In the unending dazzle
of thoughts and impressions, society disappears. (cited in Stevenson 1986: 33)
The ‘halo and envelope method’ alludes to the modernists’ – and particularly
Virginia Woolf ’s (Priestley is belatedly repaying Woolf for an earlier
insult) – stream of consciousness, which Priestley considers ill-suited to the
times, preferring more explicit references to social problems. His 1941 work,
The Aerodrome, for example, explores the ‘ideological antitheses of his era’, while
Daylight on Saturday (1944) explores the favourite Priestley themes of the British
leadership’s bungling of the lead-up to war, and the working class’s resistance
to capitalist industrialism. However, this should not be taken to suggest that
Priestley believes that fiction should always discuss social problems so explicitly,
nor that he denies ‘high modernist’ texts any value. In his three-page contribution
to The Book Crisis, a 1940 appeal to the government on behalf of the ‘National
Committee for the Defence of Books’, that it abandons plans to increase taxation
on books, Priestley argues that, far from making books more expensive, the
government should be giving them away – whether those written by Priestley
or those by T. S. Eliot, he does not mind which (McAllister et al. 1940: 24). He
argues that people at war need books – any books – more than ever, and that the
government should be making more use of authors in the war effort:
Authors are really having a very bad time in this war, because they are not being
used. There is an assumption that men who have spent 20 to 30 years learning
how to write are less successful at writing than Civil Servants, that in some
extraordinary way they are much less persuasive, and that they know much less
about the public than people who spend their time between Whitehall and the
Athenaeum Club. But we have a kind of dogged belief that we could render some
service to the Government in this emergency. So far we have not been able to
persuade the Government to make very much use of our services. (McAllister
et al. 1940: 25)
This echoes comments he made elsewhere: in a letter to the BBC, Priestley says
he is ‘disappointed with a Government which does not make the big imaginative
gesture needed at this juncture’ (cited in Nicholas 1996: 250).5
But Priestley’s complaint is not just that the government fails to use authors
in the war effort; they actually dismiss them: ‘the wretched Author is debarred
from any form of National Service; he is told to get on with writing his jolly little
novels to please those of inferior minds who do not happen to work in Whitehall’
(McAllister et al. 1940: 26; see also Hanson and Priestley 2008: 192). The ‘official’
view (as caricatured by Priestley) that books should merely please is close to
an attitude that Priestley discerned and lamented in English theatregoers and
critics in the 1930s. In Margin Released (1962), he accused these groups of being
stuck in a frame of mind in which they still felt the need to defy ‘the prohibitions
of the puritans’ (Priestley 1962: 203) – approaching the theatre demanding to be
entertained. He complains of their tendency to arrange theatre parties in order
‘to have a night out’ and to book seats at a ticket agency ‘as they would order
champagne for a spree’, but above all he laments their insisting on laughing ‘every
few minutes,’ adding ‘and if you don’t provide them with something [at which
to laugh] they will laugh at anything’ (Priestley 1926: 203, 199). This concern
surfaces again and again in the third part of Margin Released; he says later,
‘In London especially, people giggle and guffaw too easily: they visit a theatre to
be tickled’ (Priestley 1962: 208).
Although he claimed that he ‘held out against the giddiness and silliness,’ he
was aware that the effort had only moderate success: ‘Time after time,’ he says,
‘I was condemned for writing plays that either had too much social content or
were too experimental’ (Priestley 1962: 206). His 1949 play, Home Is Tomorrow,
is a case in point. The play ‘lasted only a few weeks’, and Priestley’s comments on
the play’s failure are revealing: he expresses frustration at losing the opportunity
to say something ‘topical’ – specifically, about the role of the United Nations –
and that the critics who attended the first night, and were presumably indirectly
responsible for the play’s short run, ‘neither knew nor cared anything about
the United Nations and its special agencies’. He adds, ‘I would have done better
with an audience of Eskimos’ (Priestley 1962: 205). Again, the accusation seems
to be that the critics demanded ‘frivolity’ and ‘silliness’, and were not prepared
to answer the play’s demand for, in Priestley’s words, ‘an alert audience’. This
is consistent with Maggie Barbara Gale’s contention that Priestley sought
‘an innovative theatre which offered more than superficial entertainment’
(Gale 2008: 13). In fact, Priestley’s desire is to create an ‘alert audience’. This is
apparent in the final section of his piece for the Book Crisis volume:
you must all believe, unless you are Fifth Columnists, and you do not look like
that, that books will play a great part in winning this war; they will do a good
deal to keep the public spirit going; they will help us to disseminate new and
inspiring ideas. (Priestley 1940: 25–26)
In other words, not to allow authors and their books to help win the war is
tantamount to treachery. Granted, Priestley described Let the People Sing –
which he offered to the BBC (having always previously refused permission for
his books to be serialized in newspapers or magazines) ‘partly because [he] felt
[Britain] we might be at war in the autumn – when they were going to serialise
it – and that broadcasting would then be extremely valuable to the public’ – as
‘something light’ (Priestley 1939). As Hanson points out, though, ‘Let the People
Sing is an upbeat novel that avoids mention of the looming war, but it is impossible
to miss the martial echoes in some sections, and the hope for a better world
emerging from the conflict’ (Hanson and Priestley 2008: 191). Priestley does
not see the author’s role as merely providing entertainment; rather, the author
must keep up the morale and spread new ideas. It is noteworthy that the first
of these tallies with the official government view of the role of entertainment
during the war, while the second is more particular to Priestley. It also fits in
with Priestley’s belief in the key role that imagination and creativity have to play
in social reform. This belief resurfaces again and again in his work, especially
those written around the time of the Postscripts. In Out of the People (1941), for
example, as Alison Cullingford summarizes,
Priestley explicitly refused to list the precise reforms or structures that would be
needed for the society he dreamed of: he believed that the new values, fellowship,
imagination, must come first and the structures would follow naturally. Starting
with the structures felt wrong to him.6
The way to bring about the new society which, Priestley hopes, can be realized
in Britain after the war is therefore through stimulating the public’s imagination
and creativity, and their sense of community, and not (initially) through
government programmes in education or social reform. Explicit reference to
the role of imagination is made in the Postscripts, for example, in the last of
the 1940 batch: ‘I’ve always pleaded for more imagination’ (Priestley 1967: 140).
Indeed, Priestley’s feeling that he himself was no longer stimulating the public’s
imagination is his reason for bringing the first series of Postscripts to a halt: ‘I am
in danger of becoming one of the war bores myself ’ (Priestley 1967: 140) – that
is, in danger of no longer providing the stimulus to imagination. He criticizes
public and politicians alike when they are unimaginative. Labour, he feels, is
ill-suited to the task of leading Britain into the future due to its allegiance to the
trade union movement:
There is nothing wrong with Trades Unionism in its own field of industrial
relations. But the typical Trades Union mind is an uncreative mind, equally
incapable of long views and bold planning. And now, if we are to save ourselves,
we need courageous and creative intelligences. (cited in Hanson and Priestley
2008: 183)
In an article for The News Chronicle he stresses how effective Nazi propaganda
has been, adding, ‘To imagine this does not matter is the height of stupidity’
(cited in Hanson, 197). Regarding Britain’s own propaganda, he believed that the
country had ‘a magnificent case’ but that it was handling it ‘very badly’, by not
stimulating what he felt was the natural propensity of the English towards art:
The official tradition in England is hostile to art, and so I think is the social
tradition based on prejudices of a ruling landed class, the feudal England. But
a great many of the English, because they are dominated by what lies in the
unconscious, are genuine if only half-developed artists. (cited in Hanson and
Priestley 2008: 192)
In the light of this, Priestley’s aim in the Postscripts must be seen as an attempt
to bring out this half-developed artist, by stimulating creative engagement
with the broadcasts. It seems possible that the desire to stimulate the public’s
imagination and to create an ‘alert audience’ was behind Priestley’s turn to the
radio. Throughout the 1930s he had experimented in various media in order to
reach the widest section of society. Looking back on this time in Margin Released
he describes himself as ‘a kind of three-ring circus’, working in the theatre, in
prose and in journalism: ‘I never saw myself as a man who was either a novelist
or nothing’ (Priestley 1962: 191, 190). The attraction of the radio may be in
part due to its transient nature, an aspect shared by a theatre performance, and
something on which Priestley comments favourably: ‘It is all going, going, gone’
(Priestley 1962: 212). As a result theatre – and presumably radio too – makes
an additional added demand on the imagination of the listener, involving the
audience in the act of re-creation.
In what remains I will examine the manner in which the Postscripts seek
to work on the listener’s imagination, and how this contributes to the creation
of an audience which is ready to imaginatively embrace ‘long views and bold
planning’ and a new social order. This is consistent with my claim for the
pervasiveness of reconstruction themes throughout the Postscripts. The idea
that Priestley would switch on and off at will his belief in the possibility of the
creation of an imaginative fellowship – the idea that only certain passages in
the broadcasts contain the ‘real’ Priestley – seems implausible. Indeed, Priestley
himself disavowed this; writing in an undated Preface to All England Listened
(1967), he said that at the time of the Postscripts,
I believed we had to fight that war, cost what it might. I also believed – though this
brought me some powerful enemies – that we could not fight it simply to restore the
same rotten world that had nourished Hitler and his Nazis. On those beliefs I took
my stand whenever I faced the microphone. (Priestley 1967: xxiv, emphasis added)
Something of Priestley’s concerns in the early Postscripts can be discerned by

contrasting the first of them (that of Wednesday, 5 June 1940) with Churchill’s
‘We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches’ speech delivered to the House of Commons
the previous day – after the Operation Dynamo, the Dunkirk evacuation. As
Nicholas Hawkes points out, ‘Churchill’s powerful speeches inspired people for
the military struggle, but offered no vision of the future; this was the key point
on which they differed [from Priestley’s]’ (Hawkes 2008: 18). In his speech
Churchill stresses the role of the military commanders and the professional
soldiers in the event’s success. He makes little mention of the civilian ships – the
so-called ‘little ships of Dunkirk’ – which took part in the operation, alluding
to them only: ‘the Royal Navy, with the willing help of countless merchant
seamen, strained every nerve to embark the British and Allied troops; 220
light warships and 650 other vessels were engaged’. By contrast, it is precisely
through his focus on these ‘little ships’ that Priestley broaches the subject
of post-war Britain: fully half of the first Postscript is devoted to the ships.
Coming as it did a day after Churchill’s speech, the Postscript can be seen to
quietly undermine Churchill’s account of the evacuation. Though both agreed
that the need for the evacuation was the result of political and military errors,
and though Priestley concedes the role of the Navy, his focus is squarely on
the role of the pleasure ships: ‘to my mind what was most characteristically
English about [the evacuation … ] was the part played in the difficult and
dangerous embarkation – not by the warships, magnificent though they were –
but by the little pleasure-steamers’. Through his personification of these little
ships – he calls them ‘fussy little steamers’, praising ‘the boldest of them’, and
noting how ‘They liked to call themselves “Queens” and “Belles” ’ (Priestley
1967: 5–6) – he evokes the personnel that crewed them, and thus stresses the
part played by the people – as opposed to the professionals – in the success of
the evacuation. At this period such an emphasis was inextricable from a call to
discuss reconstruction themes. As John Baxendale explains,
Priestley more than anyone became associated with the notion of the ‘People’s
War’: that this was a war in which the active participation and commitment of
ordinary people was paramount, and that this had implications for what the
war meant, for the way it was run, and for what would happen after it was over.
(cited in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 223)
For Priestley, the public’s involvement in the war meant that they had a right to
know – and to demand – what they were fighting for. In his 16 October 1939
piece for The News Chronicle he had written that the ‘important personages’ who
decided policy ‘only pay lip service to this new notion of a people’s war and are
not really converted to it’ (cited in Hanson, 198). For his part, Churchill was
openly hostile to any discussion of peace aims: for him, ‘war aims’ were the only
legitimate subject of parliamentary discussion – and broadcasts (see Hanson
and Priestley 2008: 224–258).
Subtly, then, Priestley already in the first Postscript aired the subjects which
would cause such controversy in the later broadcasts. But he did so in a way
which nurtured the public’s imaginative engagement. One way in which he
did so was by asking his listeners to imagine the events of Dunkirk from the
perspective of the future:
now that it’s over, and we can look back on it, doesn’t it seem to you to have had
an inevitable air about it – as if we had turned a page in the history of Britain and
seen a chapter headed ‘Dunkirk’ – and perhaps seen too a picture of the troops
on the beach waiting to embark?
And now that this whole action is completed we see that it has a definite
shape, and a certain definite character. (Priestley 1967: 3)
He ends the Postscript on a similar note: ‘our great grand-children, when they
learn how we began this War by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept
on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion
to hell and came back glorious’ (Priestley 1967: 7). His strategy is precisely to
nurture the ‘long view’ that he found lacking in Trade Unionism, and from there,
presumably, the ‘bold planning’ that he felt the same movement also lacked.
He calls for the creative involvement of his listeners, in contradistinction to
the ‘big rich organisations’, which, he complained in the 1939 News Chronicle
article, ‘prefer to debase public taste instead of improving it’: he argued that the
‘Beaverbrook-Rothermere press’ ‘deliberately tries to keep its public half-witted’
by fixing their attention of ‘rubbishy stuff – silly films, “glamour girls” etc.’ (cited
in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 199). As a corrective to this he called for ‘a drive
along all fronts together, not only political and economic but cultural’ (cited in
Hanson and Priestley 2008: 199), and as he said in a letter to Edward Davison in
April 1940, ‘I think it’s our particular job – I mean, yours and mine [i.e. authors’] –
to see that people don’t become robots and spiritually dead’ (cited in Hanson and
Priestley 2008: 200). Tellingly, Priestley’s criticism of the Germans in the first
Postscript speaks of them in precisely these terms – as spiritually dead robots:
They don’t make such mistakes [i.e. those that the Allies had made leading up
to Dunkirk] … but also – they don’t achieve such epics. There is never anything
to inspire a man either in their victories or their defeats; boastful when they’re
winning, quick to whine when threatened with defeat – there is nothing about
them that ever catches the world’s imagination. That vast machine of theirs can’t
create a glimmer of that poetry of action which distinguishes war from mass
murder. It’s a machine – and therefore has no soul. (Priestley 1967: 4–5)
Priestley’s efforts to stimulate the listener’s imagination very often take the form
of asking them to picture places – and indeed these are perhaps what are most
memorable about the Postscripts:
I don’t think there has ever been a lovelier spring than this last one, now melting
into full summer. Sometimes [ … ] I’ve gone out and stared at the red japonica
or the cherry and almond blossom, so clear and so exquisite against the moss-
stained wall – and have hardly been able to believe my eyes [ … ]. Never have
I seen [ … ] such a golden white of buttercups and daisies in the meadows. I’ll
swear the birds have sung this year as they never did before. Just outside my
study, there are a couple of blackbirds who think they’re still in the Garden of
Eden. (Priestley 1967: 8)
Other memorable passages are the description of a deserted Margate in the 14

July Postscript, his account of losing his way in the Welsh mountains in the
broadcast of 25 August 1940, and his visit to Bradford in the 29 September
broadcast. These descriptions contribute to Priestley’s aim of bringing about a
creative, imaginatively receptive audience, who can conceive of a new Britain,
even though they have never seen it. If the listener can imagine a place that he/
she has never seen (Margate, Bradford) then it is only a small step to imagining a
Britain which he/she has never seen. Just as it might be possible to imagine what
Margate would look like from one’s experience of, say, Scarborough, it might be
possible to imagine what a new Britain would look like based on the familiar
Britain.
Priestley’s vision of a new society, then, is inseparable from his belief in the role
of imagination and creativity in bringing this about. All the Postscripts – and not
just the later ones – must be seen as part of this project, as an effort to stimulate
the public’s imagination and to broach the subject of their role in the war, and
thence their right to know what they were fighting for. Despite the efforts of the
right to silence him – and his efforts to provoke them7 – the BBC called him back
for a second series of Postscripts in 1941. Immediately, in the very first of these,
he again called for a discussion of peace aims and reconstruction. Once more,
too, it was to imagination that he appealed in the fight against Nazi propaganda:
the ‘dreary old political platitudes’, he said, would have no effect (cited in Hanson
and Priestley 2008: 290).
Notes
1 Priestley himself noted the effectiveness of this Nazi propaganda. See Hanson and
Priestley (2008: 196–199).
2 Nicholas Hawkes has uncovered evidence which suggests that this was in fact
the case. In a diary entry of 1970, Priestley’s successor, A. P. Herbert, wrote that
he had ‘at his [i.e., Churchill’s] request reluctantly done 4 or 5 of those difficult
Sunday radio Epilogues in the wake of J. B. Priestley’ (Hawkes 2008: 39, emphasis
Hawkes’s).
3 Cécile Vallée, ‘J. B. Priestley, artiste de propagande à la radio: au service de quelles
idées?’, Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, 6.1 (2008); online since 15 June 2009; accessed
22 November 2011; http://lisa.revues.org/497.
4 In English in the original.
5 See also Priestley’s ‘Do Not Underrate Nazis’ Propaganda’, in The News Chronicle
(in Hanson and Priestley 2008: 196–199).
6 http://specialcollectionsbradford.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/postscript-
sunday-21-july-1940/
7 Priestley wrote in a piece for Harper’s Magazine in January 1939, ‘It is indeed
difficult for a thoroughgoing Tory mind not to have some tenderness for such an
authoritarian and intolerant form of government [as Nazism]’ (cited in Hanson &
Priestley 2008: 174).
Works cited
Churchill, Winston. (1940). ‘We Shall Fight on the Beaches’, speech given to the House
of Commons, 4th June. http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-
of-winston-churchill/128-we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches.
Cullingford, Alison. (2010). ‘Postscript Sunday 21 July 1940’, Special Collections
at the University of Bradford. http://specialcollectionsbradford.wordpress.
com/2010/07/21/postscript-sunday-21-july-1940/.
Gale, Maggie B. (2008). J. B. Priestley. London: Routledge.
Hanson, Neil with Tom Priestley (eds.) (2008). Priestley’s Wars. Ilkley: Great Northern
Books.
Hawkes, Nicholas. (2008). The Story of J. B. Priestley’s Postscripts. Shipley: The J. B.
Priestley Society.
McAllister, Gilbert, Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley, G. C. Faber, J. J. Mallon, Kenneth
Lindsay and Henry George Strauss. (1940) The Book Crisis. London: Faber and Faber
(for the National Committee for the Defence of Books).
Nicholas, Siân. (1996). The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC,
1939–1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Priestley, J. B. (1939). ‘Author’s Note’ to Let the People Sing. London: Heinemann.
——— (1962). Margin Released: Reminiscences and Reflections. London: Heinemann.
——— (1967). All England Listened: The Wartime Postscripts of J. B. Priestley. New York:
Chilmark Press.
Stevenson, Randall. (1986). The British Novel since the Thirties: An Introduction.
London: Batsford.
9
‘Keeping Our Little Corner Clean’: George

Orwell’s Cultural Broadcasts at the BBC
Henry Mead
University of Teesside
In May 1942 the anarchist George Woodcock wrote to the American left-wing
monthly The Partisan Review to attack the journal’s London correspondent
George Orwell:
Comrade Orwell, the former police official of British imperialism (from which
the Fascists learnt all they know) in those regions of the Far East where the sun at
last sets for ever on the bedraggled Union Jack! Comrade Orwell, former fellow-
traveller of the pacifists and regular contributor to the pacifist Adelphi – which he
now attacks! Comrade Orwell, former extreme Left-Winger, I.L.P. partisan and
defender of Anarchists (see Homage to Catalonia)! And now Comrade Orwell
who returns to his old imperialist allegiances and works at the B.B.C. conducting
British propaganda to fox the Indian masses! (CW XIII: 395)1
Woodcock’s letter did not appear in the journal until September 1942, by
which time Orwell had prepared a reply to be published in the same number,
addressing each charge. He said he had resigned his Burmese post in disgust
at what it entailed; Woodcock had failed to see that he was not only ‘against
imperialism’, but that he ‘[knew] something about it from the inside.’ Indeed, he
pointed out, ‘the whole history of this is to be found in my writings, including a
novel [Burmese Days]’. Admitting his association with the journal The Adelphi,
the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and the Spanish anarchist group POUM
(Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista),2 Orwell asked how this contradicted
his ‘present anti-Hitler attitude’ (CW XIII: 398). In fact, these allegiances,
however temporary (he had left the ILP by 1940), helped crystallize Orwell’s
mature socialism and, eventually, his support for the British war effort. This was
despite his lingering sense of the moral equivalence of fascism and British
imperialism, expressed frequently during his brief membership of the ILP.
Finally he addressed the outcome of that positioning: his willingness to

work for the BBC’s Empire Service. ‘Does Mr Woodcock really know what
kind of stuff I put out in the Indian broadcasts?’ Nor, Orwell implied, did
his interlocutor know the people associated with these broadcasts, including
Herbert Read (whom Woodcock had mentioned with approval), T. S. Eliot,
E. M. Forster, Reginald Reynolds, Stephen Spender, J. B. S. Haldane and Tom
Wintringham. Moreover, Orwell emphasized, most of his broadcasters were
‘Indian left-wing intellectuals [ … ] some of them bitterly anti-British’. They
didn’t contribute to BBC programming ‘to “fox the Indian masses” ’ but
because they knew ‘what a Fascist victory would mean to the chances of India’s
independence’ (CW XIII: 398–9).
This attitude, and the BBC post it led him to take, required that Orwell
collude in government deferrals of Indian demands for independence – but
he did so in view of India’s interests, as well as Britain’s. On this logic, India
deserved freedom, but in 1941 was vulnerable, upon the withdrawal of one
imperial power, to domination by another, whether German or Japanese. Thus
Orwell’s commentaries at the BBC and elsewhere conceded that immediate
British compliance with nationalist demands would merely lead to another,
more virulent form of foreign influence.
That said, while Orwell pragmatically balanced his anti-fascism against his
opposition to imperialism, another element shaped his writing after 1940. A quite
emotional and non-intellectual colouring was evident in his BBC broadcasts -
a genuine patriotic investment in British culture in its own right. Despite the
inequalities of power and wealth Britain perpetuated, at home and abroad,
its cultural character, and in turn the distinctive sensibility of its grass-roots
population, was, he believed, intrinsically opposed to the spirit of totalitarian
oppression – and, as such, it was worth defending for its own sake. It was indeed
worth celebrating, and presenting as mitigating evidence to those oppressed
peoples whom it had most touched.
Orwell concluded his self-defence by challenging Woodcock, ‘why not try to
find out what I am doing before accusing my good faith?’ (399) Indeed, by the
time this correspondence appeared in print, Orwell had already extended this
invitation privately. Woodcock had agreed to attend a recording of Voice, the
poetry magazine devised by Orwell for the Indian Service.3 Woodcock recorded
that:
[a] few days later I went to the wartime studios which the BBC has improvised
in the basement of a requisitioned department store in Oxford Street. The panel
George Orwell at the BBC 171
which Orwell had gathered together was an impressive one for a single broadcast
on a foreign network: [Mulk Raj Anand, Read, William Empson, Edmund
Blunden and Orwell]. The radio program turned out to be a made-up discussion
which Orwell had prepared quite skilfully beforehand, and which the rest of
the participants were given a chance to amend before it went on the air. All of
us objected to small points as a matter of principle, but the only real change
came when Orwell himself produced a volume of Byron and, smiling around at
the rest of us, suggested that we should read ‘The Isles of Greece’ to show that
English poets had a tradition of friendship for the aspirations of subject peoples.
At that time the British government was opposed to the Indian independence
movement (Gandhi and Nehru were still in prison), but all of the participants
in the broadcast supported it in sentiment at least, and as Herbert Read read the
ringing verses of revolt, the program assumed a mild flavour of defiance which
we all enjoyed. (Woodcock 1966: 6)
Byron’s poem recorded the poet’s partisan role in the Greek War of
Independence. Its resonance with recent Indian experience was clear. At a
time when the Indian National Congress was leading the ‘Quit India’ campaign
against British rule, which involved widespread strikes and protests and led to
Gandhi’s and Nehru’s imprisonment, Orwell asked Read to recite a romantic
evocation of popular resistance to foreign oppression, a call to arms for
insurgency to those on the brink of rebellion. The reading served two interests:
exhibiting the riches of British national culture, appealing to those educated
Indians who took pride in their acquaintance with Byron, but also gesturing
not only at Britons’ ‘friendship with subject peoples’ , but at their active support
of popular rebellion against oppression. It thus captures in one text Orwell’s
personal position, the uneasy balance between patriotic pride in British culture
and the commitment to domestic and foreign revolution that he had struck
since 1941.
It may be that this text was carefully selected by Orwell as a retort to
Woodcock, a way of proving his point: he could assume that Woodcock would
appreciate the subtext, and had chosen Herbert Read, whom Woodcock
respected as a fellow anarchist, to read the poem aloud. Indeed, the younger
man seems to have forgotten his objections and, perhaps a little awed by the
company into which he was admitted, even admired the ‘mild flavour of
defiance’ that Orwell managed to convey. Orwell thus staged the vindication of
his role as BBC producer. The anecdote presents several paradoxes that deserve
unpicking. Woodcock seems untroubled that he was expected to participate
in a ‘made-up discussion’. Orwell had prepared a script for other individuals
to read: opinions to evince, under their own names, which were not entirely
their own. This was in line with BBC practice before the war, permitting the
broadcast of apparently coherent spontaneous debate, where in fact lines had
been much rehearsed and honed. In the emergent interwar aesthetic of radio,
pre-scripted ‘discussion’ was a formal device, practical but disingenuous; in a
wartime context, when government representatives surveyed every utterance
over the airwaves, it occurred on a spectrum of manipulation, of startling new
methods of propaganda – for example, the Russian show trials, one source for
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where ‘two and two’ could be made to make ‘five’
(CW IX: 84, 261–264). In fact, the exigencies of radio production bred forms of
dishonesty even before a political motive entered the equation. Orwell himself
had experienced this from his first radio broadcast onwards: his first piece
for the BBC, ‘The Proletarian Writer’ (1940), was written entirely by himself,
before being given to his producer Desmond Hawkins, who edited it to create a
dialogue, which he then performed with Orwell, splitting the lines between them
(CW XII: 294–299). Orwell himself undertook this editing role for many of the
speakers he invited. Voice was no exception, and earlier scholarly accounts have
perhaps not registered how much content was derived from Orwell personally,
before other contributors made amendments. Voice (rather than Voices) was
orchestrated by a Big Brother, Orwell himself.
Paradoxically, this stage-managed discussion was one of Orwell’s most
successful vehicles – not least through its concentration on poetry – to convey
his powerful, personal sense of what distinguished British from German culture.
This spirit of individual liberty and sensibility, borne of a liberal tradition with
potential for further fruition under socialism, could be used to appeal to the
Indians and to cement their somewhat ambivalent support for the Allied rather
than Axis powers. Correspondingly, I want to stress here Orwell’s sense of the
power of poetry to convey a political point, as spelt out in his earliest radio
broadcasts on the theme of literature and ideology.
From imperialism to pacifism to patriotism
Between 1942 and 1943 Orwell broadcast on the state-run and censored
BBC, delivering what he openly described as ‘propaganda’ to British-occupied
India. His commitment to this corner of the British war effort casts light on
the paradoxes and ambivalences of his entire career.4 This section explores his
interest in cultural broadcasting at the BBC as resulting from a series of shifts

of attitude that reflected international events as well as personal circumstances.
Orwell’s anti-imperialism, dating back to his experiences in the Burma
police, was strongly expressed from his first articles of 1929 onwards. One
of his earliest pieces, published in the Parisian journal Le Progrès Civique on
4 May 1929, was entitled ‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in
Burma’, and identified the nature of imperialism as economically parasitic
(CW X: 142–7). His first novel, Burmese Days (1934), was a major, early
statement of his contempt for both British and Burmese behaviour within this
relationship. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he identified his reaction to
imperialism as the root of his whole political outlook. The treatment of subject
peoples had provided a pattern for his criticism of class relations at home: ‘my
thoughts turned towards the English working class … because they supplied an
analogy. They were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in
England as the Burmese played in Burma’ (CW V: 138). His fascination with
‘untouchable’ classes, and his desire to ‘submerge myself, to get right down
among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants’
(139), was evident through his early social chronicles in Down and Out in Paris
and London (1933), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), The Road to Wigan Pier
and numerous shorter essays.
In recounting Orwell’s commitment to the BBC, one must bear in mind that
he did not support the British war effort until 1940. The experiences recorded
in Homage to Catalonia (1938) – in particular, the Stalinist suppression of
heterodox socialist factions in Barcelona – had made him sceptical of left-wing
calls for a broadly anti-fascist ‘Popular Front’. Moreover, he was aware that to
fight for Britain was to support an imperial power guilty of oppressive practices
not dissimilar to those of the fascists. Communism, capitalist imperialism
and fascism blurred before his eyes: the antagonists of the imminent war
were equally compromised by their abuse of human liberty and their logic of
violence: ‘if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours’ (CW VII: 360).
He was convinced, perhaps naively, that a collective refusal to fight by a global
community of working men would prevent the coming war, a position also
held by the ILP (Davison 2010: 121).5 In the months before the war Orwell
lent public support to the ILP’s pacifism, citing British complicity in forms of
foreign oppression (CW XI: 167–169).6
This position was also noticeably close to that taken by the Indian National
Congress, who, arguing that British imperialism was morally equivalent to
fascism, withheld support for the British war effort, despite Lord Linlithgow’s
declaration of war on behalf of the Indian people. In a resolution of 10 October

1939, the Congress Working Committee condemned German aggression, but
also stated that India could not associate herself with the Allied war effort.
Orwell’s understanding of colonialism as a form of economic exploitation was
restated powerfully in an Adelphi review from July 1939:
How can we ‘fight Fascism’ except by bolstering up a far vaster injustice? … For
of course it is vaster. What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of
the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa. It is not
in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial
wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so.
(CW XI: 360)
His mind, however, was changed decisively when Ribbentrop and Molotov
signed the Soviet-Nazi Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939, making
clear the Soviets’ abandonment of anti-fascism to further their national
interests. Orwell then accepted his personal need to fight for England. His
1940 essay ‘My Country Right or Left’ thus acknowledged that the dictatorial
powers now presented a front greatly in contrast with British political culture
(CW 269–272).
Accordingly, there was a revision in Orwell’s view of Britain’s standing,
particularly in the essays published together as The Lion and the Unicorn
(1941).7 While still critical of the Empire and inequalities at home, Orwell now
set these in balance with a culture generated by a spirit of individual freedom.
Admittedly, this freedom was most enjoyed by an economic and social elite,
but it notionally applied to all. A distinctive feature of British society was
a traditional class system, which outweighed economic or political power
relations: the impecunious aristocrat remained socially superior to the rich
businessman. Although oppressive, these were organically developed social
strata, as opposed to the artificial power relations of fascism; and they were
accompanied by a faith in justice that outweighed ideological influence. Orwell
proposed a revolution to overthrow outdated social codes while appealing to
the sense of moral order that underlay them – to redistribute wealth and power
both at home and abroad while retaining the tradition of free expression under
the law. He could thus, albeit uneasily, ally himself with the official position of
the British government on India. A government statement of 17 October 1939
held that the British war’s aim was to extend freedom, and that it would thus
plan for reform according to the 1935 Government of India Act, in line with the
Congress’s position. Although the replacement of Chamberlain with Churchill

in May 1940 would jeopardize this contract with the Indian people, making it
difficult for Orwell to keep his resolve, in 1940 he was able to declare himself a
patriot, denouncing the pacifism of the Left and its facile equation of fascism
and Western capitalism.
On the strength, then, of an anticipated post-war English revolution, Orwell
sought to fight for his country, but was prevented from doing so: a bronchial
haemorrhage in 1938 and the injury to his throat inflicted in Spain meant
that he failed the Army medical examination. Lacking funds, he wrote film
reviews during the early months of the war while energetically working within
the Volunteer Defence Force (later renamed the Home Guard). He remained
frustrated, however, and it is understandable that in 1942, after delivering
a series of talks for the BBC Home Service, Orwell accepted a post as Talks
Assistant for the Indian Service, working for Zulfiqar Bokhari. This was a
chance to contribute substantively and regularly to the British war effort, which
would also provide a much-needed income. The job, however, demanded a
sustained, fraught reconciliation of Orwell’s strongly felt anti-imperialism
with his anti-fascism. Hired to mollify a restive subject people, with whom
he deeply sympathized, he was confronted daily with the tension between his
patriotic commitment and his disapproval of social oppression both abroad
and at home.
Orwell’s first broadcasts
A number of leading scholars have dealt in depth with Orwell’s news reviews
(West 1985b; Fleay and Sanders 1989; Kerr 2002, 2004; Davison 2011). Yet
there remains more to be said specifically on Orwell’s literary and cultural
broadcasts – how they reflected, from a particular angle, his evolution from
imperial police officer, to anti-imperialist socialist, to patriot, to propagandist,
to satirist of propaganda.8 The Lion and the Unicorn established Orwell’s
distinctive synthesis of patriotism and socialism, but it was his earliest
broadcasts of 1940–1941 that specified the value of the British literary tradition
as a humanizing influence, setting it in contrast with the poverty of European
culture under fascism.
Orwell first appeared on the radio on 6 December 1940, as a guest on
Desmond Hawkins’ programme ‘Writer in the Witness Box’. The subject of
their discussion was ‘Proletarian Literature’. He was then invited to broadcast

a series of five more programmes on the Indian Section of the Empire Service,
starting on 30 April 1941. These included a discussion with Hawkins and
V. S. Pritchett on ‘What’s Wrong with the Modern Short Story’, and four lectures
in a series entitled ‘Literary Criticism’: ‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’,
‘The Meaning of a Poem’, ‘Tolstoy and Shakespeare’ and ‘Literature and
Totalitarianism’.9 All four, produced prior to his formal employment at the
BBC, touched upon the humanizing effects of literature. They begin with a
discussion of literature and propaganda, and culminate with Orwell’s major
statement on that subject.
‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’ argues that the 1930s had ‘destroyed
the illusion of pure aestheticism’, driving home the fact that ‘propaganda in some
form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a
purpose – a political, social and religious purpose – that our aesthetic judgements
are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs’. The anticipation of conflict
helped purge literature of the modernist aestheticism that prevailed during the
previous decade. The coming war had thoroughly ‘debunked art for art’s sake’
(CW XII: 486). Orwell thus set out lines of an argument to be expanded in
‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, in which he drew a distinction between German
and British cultures. Indeed, both broadcasts, extensions of his argument in The
Lion and the Unicorn, were of a piece with that very recently published work.
There was the same striking recognition of the cultural advantages of the liberal,
capitalist individualism that Orwell had earlier attacked. An ideology once
excoriated as morally equivalent to fascism was now acknowledged for its part
in producing the great works of Western literature; for treasuring the right of
individuals to do, and to write, as they pleased.10 Orwell now recognized that
British democratic institutions preserved free expression, and correspondingly,
good literature, while totalitarianism had reduced Germany, Italy and Russia to
cultural penury. In language redolent of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he noted how fascist
and Soviet governments dictated what individuals should think, ‘govern[ing]
your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct’. (503) Could literature
thrive in such an atmosphere? Given that ‘writing is largely a matter of feeling’,
and ‘writing of any consequence can only be produced when a man feels the
truth of what he is saying’ it was clear, Orwell concluded, ‘if totalitarianism
triumphs throughout the world, literature as we have known it is at an end.’
(504-5) How could authors ‘feel … the truth’ under the condition of compulsory
‘sudden emotional changes’ that were ‘psychologically impossible?’ (504)
(CW XII: 504). Intriguingly, Orwell anticipates a revival of literature that would
sustain a liberal humanist freedom of expression albeit under conditions of
socialist equality:
I said earlier that liberal capitalism is obviously coming to an end, and therefore
I may have seemed to suggest that freedom of thought is also inevitably doomed.
But I do not believe this to be so … I believe the hope of literature’s survival lies in
those countries in which liberalism has struck its deepest roots, the non-military
countries, western Europe and the Americas, India and China. I believe – it may
be no more than a pious hope – that though a collectivized economy is bound
to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form of Socialism which is
not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of
economic individualism. That, at any rate, is the only hope to which anyone who
cares for literature can cling. Whoever feels the value of literature, whoever sees
the central part it plays in the development of human history, must also see the
life and death necessity of resisting totalitarianism, whether it is imposed on us
from without or from within. (CW XII: 505)
All four broadcasts were marked by the shadow of war, but the third, entitled
‘The Meaning of a Poem’, opened new ground in its analysis of Gerard Manley
Hopkins’ ‘Felix Randall’, a poem Orwell had learned by heart during night-time
sentry duties in Spain. Despite a long-standing enthusiasm for poetry, Orwell
had limited success in this field, as recorded in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
However, he remained a keen reader and critic, and his account of Hopkins’s
verse is reminiscent of critical exercises then being encouraged by the Leavisite
school. This piece would foreshadow Orwell’s most original contribution to
BBC programming, the poetry ‘magazine’, Voice. He was already considering
the possibilities of poetry reading and exposition over the airwaves, a practise
he expanded upon in his later essay ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ (1945).
It is significant that this lecture series was delivered before Orwell had
any formal contract with the BBC, and that they appeared in print under his
name in The Listener. These first forays onto the airwaves were not exercises in
propaganda; Orwell wrote independently, and his words indicated continuity
in his thinking, moving steadily from ‘My Country Right or Left’, through
The Lion and the Unicorn, towards a belief in the redemptive power of British
culture. This tradition could serve as a fund of propaganda relatively unscathed
by political machination. It is also notable that when Orwell was offered a full-
time position on the strength of this performance, Bokhari immediately drew
to his attention a plan to complement the university syllabuses of Calcutta and
Bombay Universities with educational programming.11 Although news reviews

and commentaries would take up much of Orwell’s time at the BBC, his focus
was already directed towards cultural and educational broadcasting, in which
field he would prove an innovator.
Talking to India
Orwell began his BBC career by broadcasting a series of talks on war-related

subjects, ‘Paper is Precious’, ‘Britain’s Rations and the Submarine War’, ‘Money
and Guns’, ‘The Meaning of Scorched Earth’ and ‘The Meaning of Sabotage’.
Shortly thereafter his work as a news broadcaster began in earnest. He started
broadcasting newsletters by November 1941; as Peter Davison has scrupulously
chronicled, these involved series not only to India, but also to Japanese-
occupied Malaya and Indonesia (CW XIII: xxiii– xxv). Orwell also wrote news
commentaries for translation into other languages. Altogether, these amounted
to a regular workload of one or two news commentaries per week. Orwell’s words
were read for him by Bokhari for the first year of his employment; thereafter,
from November 1942, he read them himself.12 His commentaries, though
carefully phrased to avoid stating views which he did not take, were however
slanted to support the British cause, and disparities between Orwell’s private
beliefs and the ‘facts’ that he had to report have been detailed by Douglas Kerr
(2002: 482 and 2004: 43–57).
Educational programming, an important dimension of his work, came to
the fore towards the end of Orwell’s first year at the BBC. As these duties grew,
he organized a vast number of lecture series on literature, the arts and modern
science, conceived in line with the aforementioned University syllabuses
at Bombay and Calcutta Universities.13 Such broadcasts were addressed to
a certain class, as Orwell stated in his introduction to a short collection of
broadcast pieces, published in 1943, Talking to India. He had a clear view of the
very specific audience he could expect to reach in English language broadcasts.
Although ‘the total number of English speakers cannot be more than 3 per cent
of the Indian population’, they were ‘distributed all over the subcontinent, and
also in Burma and Malaya’. Moreover, ‘the people who speak English are also
the people likeliest to have access to short-wave radio sets’. He went on to give
particular emphasis to programming on poetry:
At least one half-hour programme every month has been devoted to
broadcasting contemporary English poetry. Obviously the listening public
for such programmes must be a small one, but it is also a public well worth
reaching, since it is likely to be composed largely of University students.
Some hundreds of thousands of Indians possess degrees in English literature,
and scores of thousands more are studying for such degrees at this moment.
(CW XV: 322)
University students were the opinion-formers and future leaders of the nation.
Closely related was the ‘large English-language Indian Press’, which had
affiliations in Britain, including ‘a respectable number of Indian novelists and
essayists (Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Cedric Dover and Narayana Menon, to
name only four) who prefer to write in English’. This group was representative
of the educated minority whom Orwell hoped to reach; several of them were
personal friends of Orwell and worked with him at the BBC. It was ‘these people,
or rather the class they represent, that our literary broadcasts have been aimed
at’ (CW XV: 322).
Orwell had a number of significant encounters with this educated class in
his earlier life. His broadcasts to India were informed by an intimate knowledge
of colonial life apparent from his first writings. For example, in Burmese Days
(1934) he captured in the character of Dr Veraswami, the Indian-born lover
of English letters, a type that the bigoted and ignorant colonial administrators
routinely snubbed. The Orwellian protagonist, John Flory, a ‘bolshie’ at odds
with his colleagues, cultivates friendship with the sensitive and learned doctor,
but remains sceptical of his esteem for the British. Through Flory’s eyes,
Orwell reports the ‘rather unappetizing little library, mainly books of essays,
of the Emerson-Carlyle-Stevenson type’, that the doctor collects on his shelves,
remarking how he ‘liked his books to have what he called a “moral meaning” ’
(CW II: 35).
In a key passage, Flory challenges his friend’s faith in the triumphs of the
Imperial power:
My dear doctor … how can you make out that we are in this country for any
purpose except to steal? It’s so simple. The official holds the Burman down while
the businessman goes through his pockets … Of course we keep the peace in
India, in our own interest, but what does all this law and order business boil
down to? More banks and more prisons – that’s all it means. (CW II: 38, 40)
Orwell’s nagging, impatient voice is recognizable here, but it fails to dampen

Veraswami’s enthusiasm for his oppressor’s canon of great works:
‘My friend, what you do not see iss that your civilization at its very worst iss for
us an advance … I see the British, even the least inspired of them, ass–ass–’ the
doctor searched for a phrase, and found one that probably came from Stevenson –
‘ass torchbearers upon the path of progress.’ (CW II: 41)
Veraswami’s sentiment remains intact to the book’s end. Although Orwell in

1930 might have shared Flory’s cynicism, he was, ten years later, convinced
that literature was a key British export, mitigating its imperial abuses. His BBC
broadcasts thus cater to just such tastes: amongst Orwell’s imaginary auditors was
the Veraswami type: the admirer of an alien culture whose official representatives
fell beneath its highest ideals. In a central scene of the novel, the doctor stands
amidst his riotous fellow Burmese, obstructing the violent overthrow of their
colonial masters (CW II: 264–5). Indeed, the vignette sheds much light on the
tone Orwell struck in his broadcasts – reaching out to the sympathetic Anglophile
listener and asking them to pacify the masses at a moment of incipient rebellion.
Later in Burmese Days, the racist timber-merchant Ellis beats and blinds
a local youth. The incident recalls an occasion when, jostled by a crowd of
schoolboys and university undergraduates at a railway station, Orwell struck a
student with his cane. Unlike the events recorded in ‘The Hanging’ and ‘Shooting
an Elephant’ – confessional first-person essays – this assault could perhaps only
be rendered in fiction; it might, however, rank amongst a series of experiences
that left Orwell disillusioned with his colonial work. The confrontation was
witnessed by Maung Htin Aung, later rector of the University of Rangoon.
An admirer of Orwell’s writing, he published a memoir setting this incident
within the context of the burgeoning Burmese independence movement. Many
of the young men who challenged Orwell on this occasion were enrolled at
the ‘National Schools’. As Htin Aung notes, Rangoon University had proved
a disappointment in its regimented imposition of British values. The new
universities correspondingly spurned the British curriculum, and ‘from being
merely pro-Burmese, gradually became anti-English’. After about 1930, ‘most
of the leaders of the national movement for freedom … were products of those
schools’ (Htin Aung 1971: 20–30). In lashing out, Orwell was ‘merely reflecting
the general attitude of his English contemporaries towards Burmese students,
especially those from the National schools’ (Htin Aung 1971: 25). By contrast,
Htin Aung had schooled in England, attending both Oxford and Cambridge.
He records how the students remonstrated with Orwell: ‘when we shouted and
argued and quarrelled, he addressed his explanations mostly to me; perhaps he
saw in my eyes a gleam of understanding and sympathy, because only a year
before I was running across the playing fields of Dulwich pursued by a huge
crowd of English school-boys, jeering and shouting “Tally ho! Catch that young
Gandhi!” ’ (Htin Aung 1971: 30).
Here, too, was an appeal to the Anglicized colonial subject for support – a
relation Orwell cultivated in his cultural broadcasts to South Asia. A very
similar class produced Indian leaders like Gandhi, who had studied at University
College London from 1888 to 1891; and Nehru, who was schooled at Harrow,
Cambridge, and the Inns of Court between 1905 and 1912. Both admired the
democratic institutions of England and were well-read in the canon of English
literature, although they (particularly Gandhi) had turned that knowledge to
clarify a distinct sense of Indian identity.14 Orwell was therefore aiming his
broadcasts at a small group of educated men who knew British culture, and were
attempting to break free of it. This did not preclude their emotional ties to that
culture, and there is little doubt that men like Gandhi or Nehru would have
understood the import of the Byron poem Orwell selected for the first number
of Voice.
Orwell’s ideal commonwealth, like his ideal socialist state, was one that
could retain the treasures of a culture generated by centuries of inequality and
oppression. This paradoxical appreciation of the British literary tradition was
replicated in the work of Orwell’s close friend, Mulk Raj Anand. A leading
Indian Anglophone writer, Anand’s works included the breakthrough novel
Untouchable (1935) and the important wartime work The Sword and the
Sickle (1942). He had been acknowledged and praised for his finely honed
style, clearly influenced by the canon of British novelists. Like Orwell, Anand
was opposed to imperialism, committed to socialism and admiring of English
culture. He at first declined invitations to work for the wartime BBC on the
grounds that an Indian could hardly speak in support of the state that oppressed
his people (quoted in West 1985a: 15). By 1942 the threat of Axis domination of
India had swung the balance and Anand began to work for the Indian Service,
often in collaboration with Orwell.15
Veraswami, Htin Aung and Anand might, then, have furnished types for
Orwell’s imagined audience. Add to these the Anglicized INC leaders, the most
prominent Indians of the day. Orwell’s sensitivity to their ambivalence helped
him play the role of double agent, promoting the British cause while sending
coded gestures of support to nationalists through literary allusion. The recital
of Byron’s poem is an obvious example. The multi-vocal layering of Orwell’s
news reviews has been described precisely by Kerr (2002) as ‘participat[ing]
in colonial discourse in being part of that body of statements that shapes the
relation between the colonial power and its colonised subjects’. This participation
is such that ‘any utterance beyond the elementary is multi-authored, determined
by a number of authorities – linguistic, ideological, discursive, psychological – of

varying force’ (475). Amongst the multiple forces impacting Orwell’s radio work,
the most powerful was the authority of the state (476); another ‘institutional
participant’ was the BBC, with its ‘rhetorical habits of judiciousness, restraint
and a gentlemanly tone’ (477). Finally, Kerr emphasizes the role of Orwell’s
own personal inclinations, tastes and complexities (478). This analysis can be
applied also to cultural broadcasts, perhaps most effectively to Voice, the poetry
magazine devised by Orwell in 1942, which encapsulated his faith in the power
of literature to persuade India to support the liberal culture of Britain, despite
its imperialism.
Voice
The seven editions of Voice – described by Orwell as ‘a bit of private lunacy’
(CW XIV: 213–215) – constitute a seminal experiment in the poetic possibilities
of broadcasting technology. They also had a small but important status within
the larger propaganda effort. This might surprise readers of the surviving scripts,
which contain only peripheral and intermittent references to the war. Still, there
was a distinct undertow of persuasion, refracted through literary critical debate.
The disguise was very effective; indeed, Orwell felt the programme’s seeming
detachment required an explanation. The first number of Voice begins with an
echo of The Lion and the Unicorn:
This is the worst time to be starting a magazine. While we sit here talking in a
more or less highbrow manner – talking about art and literature and whatnot –
tens of thousands of tanks are racing across the steppes of the Don and battleships
upside down are searching for one another in the wastes of the Pacific. I suppose
during every second that we sit here at least one human being will be dying a
violent death. (CW XIII: 459)
Yet, Orwell went on, it remained a worthy task. This was no ‘dilletante’ activity,
airily disregarding the realities of ‘bombs and bullets’. No apology was required:
Voice took up no paper, no printing press; it required no booksellers – ‘just a
little electrical power and half a dozen voices’. Moreover, Orwell restated his
case for the arts at a time of war: ‘it is exactly at times like the present that
literature ought not to be forgotten’; indeed, ‘this business of pumping words
into the ether … has its solemn side’ (459). He provided a vivid new metaphor
to explain the work at hand. Such broadcasts may radiate not merely around
the world but away from it – ‘in which case what we say this afternoon should
be audible in the great nebula in Orion nearly a million years hence’. The
importance placed upon the humanities is thus reframed within this grander
scheme of things: ‘if there are intelligent beings there … it won’t hurt them to
pick up a few specimens of twentieth century verse, along with the swing music
and the latest wad of lies from Berlin’ (459). Although fantastical, Orwell’s
rhetoric was consistent with that of ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, and his
introduction to Talking to India (1943a). The discussion of modern poetry may
seem far removed from the war effort, but in fact such programming had a
‘solemn’ role: to record the contrasting forms of Western culture at a historical
point of existential crisis. Similarly, Orwell would later publish a speech by
the German sympathizer, Subhas Chandra Bose, in his anthology of wartime
recordings, as if presenting a ledger recording the clash between world views.
As he introduced his poetry magazine, his eye was firmly placed upon the
cultural-history books.
Orwell clearly felt that the programme was a notable success in his BBC
career, perhaps even a step towards the egalitarian democratic culture that he
hoped would emerge after the war. Indeed, in its radiogenic experimentation,
Voice paved the way towards the BBC’s post-war Third Programme. A striking
feature is Orwell’s decision to model it upon the printed poetry magazines
of the day. As discussed in the introduction to this volume and in Charles
Armstrong’s chapter on W. B. Yeats, early radio used just such analogies to
help listeners grasp the potentialities of the still-new medium. Paul Ricoeur
has shown how metaphors are employed commonly to explain new experience
through comparison with the familiar (Ricoeur 1976: 60). Orwell, like many
others, was evoking an old technology to explain a new one. The result
might be termed a skeuomorph: an innovative design that reassures the user
by imitating a more familiar form.16 Orwell’s conceit regarding the journal
was informed by a long acquaintance with the literary press: he had for
years scraped a living through contributions to papers like The Adelphi and
Horizon. Voice was presented as just such a little magazine, ‘a small volume,
about twenty pages’ with ‘a light blue or nice light grey’ cover. (CW XIII: 460).
Though broadcast across a vast subcontinent, it was conceived in the familiar
form of a coterie publication, and indeed its ‘readership’ was a tiny, scattered
minority.
The effect doubtless needed some refinement: the imaginary contents page,
complete with page numbers, read aloud by Orwell in his introduction, seems
a clumsy device – although summaries of items ‘coming up’ have become a
conventional radio form. The introduction of contributors similarly remains

a feature of broadcast programmes, although more briskly delivered. As the
programme continued, references to page numbers were dropped in, with
Orwell directing the reader to ‘now please turn to page ten’ and so on (CW
XIII: 463). After a few readings, the conceit was usually put aside, and a brief
discussion was allowed to expand.
Looking back at the enterprise, Orwell explained that the magazine format
was devised to facilitate the conveyance of ‘comment and explanation’ required
by ‘those who know your language but don’t share your cultural background’.
The concept was refined in the second number, with Orwell asking listeners to
imagine ‘the editorial committee … sitting in their office, discussing what to put
into the next number’ (CW XVII: 75). Orwell took a practical view in analysing
the dimensions of the programme: six was about the right number of voices, a
theme gave unity to what otherwise might seem shapeless. Recalling the second
number, which took war as its theme, he noted that the programme’s readings
(two poems by Edmund Blunden, Auden’s ‘September 1 1939’, an extract from
G.S. Fraser’s ‘A Letter to Ann Ridler’, and Byron’s ‘Isles of Greece’), ‘together
with the arguments that preceded and followed them, covered reasonably well
the possible attitudes towards war’ (CW XIII: 75). Clearly the programme
was planned to accommodate points of view that were not wholly in line with
government policy. Their occurrence in a multi-vocal discussion following a
poetry reading apparently neutralized their subversive power and made them
acceptable to the censors.
It is difficult to judge the degree of freedom contributors had in this ‘made
up discussion’. Taking the first number of Voice as an example, William Empson
makes a combative case for pacifist and anti-war writing. The effect can seem
comical, with Orwell appearing at times out of his depth in discussion with
literary specialists – but bearing in mind the prepared nature of the talk, this
may be deceptive. Orwell permitted Empson to interject within a quite tame
discussion of form, inserting his own, more radical observations. In the first
number, for example, the speakers discuss two poems by Henry Treece:
Orwell: ‘The second poem is in quite a different category. It’s more like a ballad’.
Empson: ‘It’s actually a savage attack on militarist sentiment’.
Orwell: ‘Possibly, but as I was saying … .’ (CW XIII: 466)
Though it reads as though Orwell, amid his pedestrian remarks, had been caught
unawares by Empson’s brisk assertion of the poem’s radical political meaning, the
entire dialogue was certainly pre-rehearsed, and the script on the page existed
before the words were uttered on air. Moreover, the message Empson found in the
poem recalls Orwell’s earlier personal pacifism. It would surely be unacceptable
for a programme to present ‘a savage attack on militarist sentiment’ outright,
but to have a member of a discussion panel identify this sentiment in lines by a
combatant poet provided sufficient distance to allow it to be aired. The device
exemplifies the humanistic goals of the BBC: to preserve a sense of detached
factual record and to permit its contributors a freedom of expression. Orwell’s
hand remained on the tiller as a representative of the institution, with the note
of dissent being disguised by the brisk pace of discussion, Empson’s political
point interpolated between Orwell’s rudimentary observations on form. If the
discussions seem sometimes slight in content, it is worth noting how, in Orwell’s
view, the broadcast of poetry itself was just as important. It was the act of reading
words over the air that most interested him, as he made clear in a reflective essay
looking back on his experiment.
Poetry and the Microphone
Written about a year after the Voice series had come to an end, Orwell’s reflective
article ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ reveals his aspirations as broadcaster,
including an intriguing debt to Eliot’s theory of democratic poetry, as set out
in ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’ (1920). Notably, Eliot had contributed to
programmes at Orwell’s invitation, including two editions of Voice. In his essay,
Eliot argued:
The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which wanted entertainment of
a crude sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry; our problem should be to
take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it
a form of art. Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best material. I am aware
that this is a dangerous suggestion to make. For every person who is likely
to consider it seriously there are a dozen toymakers who would leap to tickle
æsthetic society into one more quiver and giggle of art debauch. Very few treat
art seriously. There are those who treat it solemnly, and will continue to write
poetic pastiches of Euripides and Shakespeare; and there are others who treat it
as a joke. (Emphasis in original; Eliot 1920: 441–447; italics in original)
Orwell was evidently aware of this view as he conceived Voice:

It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised again without some
deliberate effort at the education of public taste, involving strategy and perhaps
even subterfuge. T. S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic

poetry, might be brought back into the consciousness of ordinary people
through the medium of the music hall; he might have added the pantomime,
whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been completely explored.
‘Sweeney Agonistes’ was perhaps written with some such idea in mind, and it
would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a
revue. I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed
out its technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet.
(CW XVII: 78–79)
Orwell thus adapted Eliot’s campaign for cultural unity to suit wartime needs;
in doing so, he contributed to a much longer tradition. John Reith had of course
conceived of the BBC on a similar Arnoldian model to help unify a stratified
society. The Indian Service pursued a similar goal of integrating imperial power
with its subsidiary outposts; in wartime this had become a geopolitical necessity.
Terry Eagleton’s recent travesty of Arnold’s position (‘if the masses are not
thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades’) might be
a more accurate description of Orwell’s dialogue with India (Eagleton 1996: 21).
For this was a very real kulturkampf: Orwell believed that his poetry magazine
represented a ‘small and remote out-flanking movement in the radio war’. It
had, indeed, been designed with that purpose: ‘the essential point was that our
literary broadcasts were aimed at the Indian university students, a small and
hostile audience, unapproachable by anything that could be described as British
propaganda’ (CW XVII: 75). This adds invaluable insight to the introduction
of Talking to India – not only was this a crucial audience, but it was a resistant
one – it had to be won over, seduced, by indirect means. One of those means was
to appeal to their elite status: ‘It was known in advance that we could not hope
for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an excuse
to be more “highbrow” than is generally possible on the air’ (75). This was not
an Arnoldian pursuit of integrity between high and low cultures, but between
English and Indian intelligentsia. Highbrow spoke to highbrow, appealing to a
sense of cultural capital, flattering those who enjoyed an English education –
proffering the secret handshake of Western humanistic learning.
In the development of Voice, another humanizing effect of the arts became
apparent. Orwell came to see that the BBC’s propaganda effort was self-
neutralizing on the same principle that ‘totalitarianisation … is mitigated by
another process which it was not easy to foresee even as short a time as five
years ago’. The ‘huge bureaucratic machines … work creakily … [and although]
the tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the modern
intellect … every state, especially under pressure of war, finds it more and more
in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it’ (CW XVII: 79). That is to say,
centralized government was incapable of generating artists, poets, musicians, not
to mention scientists of various kinds, to do its necessary work. Instead, it had to
call upon people with special interests, often people with unconventional ideas.
Through sheer force of necessity, the totalitarian state began again to rely upon
those with imaginative, idiosyncratic points of view; thus a certain freedom of
the individual was revived. Orwell was clearly thinking of the BBC here, and of
the other ministries of the British government that now hired members of the
literati:
The British Government started the present war with the more or less openly
declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it; yet after three
years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history
or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC … The
Government has absorbed these people, unwillingly enough, because it found
itself unable to get on without them. (CW XVII: 79)
As Kerr has shown, Orwell’s diaries sometimes express feelings quite at variance
with his statements on the BBC. But these differences did not merely distinguish
the need for officially sanctioned ‘propaganda’. Writing outside the reach of the
BBC censor, in the New Saxon Pamphlet, he painted a far more positive picture
of Voice than he had done with George Woodcock, for example. So, too, did he
take a different position with other friends. Orwell’s co-editor for the ‘Search-
light’ book series, Tosco Fyvel, recalled one frank conversation:
I said … that … his job did not appear to be so bad. He worked with interesting
people, he had that famous critic and wit, William Empson, as his neighbour in
the next cubicle. He had had the chance to bring such literary figures as T.S. Eliot
and E.M. Forster to the microphone and had written some good talks himself.
Relatively it appeared to me an agreeable war job … It was quite the wrong thing
to say – an agreeable job in which to endure the war was the last thing Orwell
had in mind. He said that even when the BBC talks were purely cultural, in the
context they were propaganda; somehow any idea that was politically unsuitable,
however good it was, managed to be eliminated. (Fyvel 1982: 122–124)
His defence of his radio work in ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ stands in stark
contrast with the disillusion thus expressed privately. Fyvel concluded that
Orwell … could not adapt himself to the mere psychological warfare needs of the
war machine. His view on the need for Indian independence was what he saw as
the truth: he could not change from it. He could not become a spokesman for a
merely cultural British viewpoint, however polite and liberal. This was especially
as he always had in mind that in fighting against Hitler and the Japanese, Britain
had allied herself with the tyranny of Stalin’s Soviet Union. War or no war, he
was concerned with the truth as he saw it. He could not be happy in the wartime
BBC. (Fyvel 1982: 122–124)
Orwell chose to resign his position in 1943, following negative reports on his,
and the Indian Service’s, efficacy and reach as a broadcaster to the subcontinent.
A depressing survey of audience figures and responses compiled by Orwell’s
friend and colleague Laurence Brander was distributed within the BBC on 11
January 1943. It naturally disheartened Orwell to discover that he was one of the
least popular speakers on a radio service barely registered by the vast majority of
the Indian population (Shelden 1991: 377–380); moreover, the arrival of this bad
news coincided with a series of disagreements with his superiors, resulting from
breaches of the censor’s regulations by visiting speakers like Kingsley Martin
(see Shelden 1991: 374–375). Increasingly frustrated by conditions imposed
upon him by the censors and BBC administrators, he accepted invitations to
write for David Astor’s Observer and Aneurin Bevan’s Tribune, where he would
soon begin his ‘As I Please’ series (Shelden 1991: 382, 384–385). His BBC work
appeared to him, he said in one letter to a friend, to amount to ‘two wasted years’
(CW XVI: 22). Yet, in his formal letter of resignation of 24 September 1943, he
would also write:
I am not leaving because of any disagreement with BBC policy and still less on
account of any kind of grievance. On the contrary I feel that throughout my
association with the BBC I have been treated with the greatest generosity and
allowed very great latitude. On no occasion have I been compelled to say on the
air anything that I would not have said as a private individual. (CW XV: 251)
Orwell’s ‘cultural’ programming remained subject to censorship and

interference, but, through levels of allusion and resonance, it allowed Orwell
a greater sincerity than much of his other BBC work. Kerr, in his survey of
Orwell’s rhetoric in his regular news reports, remarks how his cultural
broadcasts were equally subject to the limits of State control, to the distinctive
ethos demanded by the BBC and to the complex ‘echo chamber’ of Orwell’s own
conflicted position, an ambivalence resulting from his upbringing, schooling
and disjointed career (Kerr 2002: 477–478). These eddying circles of influence
operated somewhat differently, and diffusely, in his cultural broadcasting. The
evidence suggests that Orwell was more comfortable with such work, in which
a political message was certainly embedded, than he was with circumlocutory

and sometimes fabricated news commentary. He felt he was truer to himself
here, as we can see from Woodcock’s anecdote and his own account in ‘Poetry
and the Microphone’.
Going beyond the discussion of poetry, Orwell’s other cultural activities
at the BBC permitted a similar freedom – for example, through the
adaptation of selected works of literature for radio broadcast (‘featurising’),
a practice he refined towards the end of his BBC career, producing radio
versions of Anatole France’s ‘Crainquebille’, Ignazio Silone’s ‘The Fox’, H. G.
Wells’ ‘A Slip Under the Microscope’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The
Emperor’s New Clothes’ (Davison 1996: 118). Orwell’s class consciousness
is at the fore in the France and Wells translations – tales of social injustice
very specific to Western Europe, but which might translate to the Indian
experience of the caste system and subordination to imperial power. The
adaptation of the short story ‘The Fox’, with its metaphoric association of
a fascist collaborator in hiding with a fox raiding a farmyard, is notable in
its anticipation of Animal Farm. Orwell’s interests in the fairy tale form and
the phenomenon of ‘crowd psychology’ (explored in his 1945–6 essays ‘New
Words’ and ‘Politics and the English Language’) are evident in his version of
‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.
Another experiment of 1942 was entitled ‘A Story by Five Authors’. Orwell
provided the opening instalment and the story was completed by L.A.G. Strong,
Inez Hold, Martin Armstrong and E.M. Forster. It begins with the Orwellian
protagonist Gilbert Moss discovering a wealthy acquaintance, ‘the honourable
Charles Coburn’, lying unconscious in a bombed out house. Coburn represents
the ‘old, snobbish, money-ruled England … fashionable London with its clubs
and gunsmith and its doormen and its footmen in striped waistcoats, the London
of before the deluge when money ruled the world’. Recalling an unspecified but
‘outrageous, mean injury’ done to him by Coburn, Moss is tempted to bludgeon
his enemy to death. (CW XIV: 89-93). The mood of the piece falls somewhere
between Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The enmity felt
towards Coburn appears to be an exaggerated version of the tension between
Orwell and certain wealthy friends who supported him through loans and
literary commissions through the 1930s. Moss’s murderous impulse recalls
various bitter moments in Orwell’s fiction, for example when Winston Smith,
under the impression that his future lover Julia is a committed follower of the
state (and, in particular, of the ‘Anti-Sex League’), imagines ‘smashing her skull
in with a cobblestone’ (CW IX). This uneven radiogenic experiment of 1943

thus anticipates Nineteen Eighty-Four’s reframing of such personal frustrations
as facets of a totalitarian future rather than of a dying Edwardian capitalism.
As Orwell put it, the ‘Story by Five Authors’ proved to be ‘unsuccessful’.
(CW XIV: 129). Asking Forster to help salvage the project, Orwell wrote that
the other contributors, aside from Martin Armstrong, had misunderstood
the nature of the piece (CW XIV: 129). Forster’s final instalment surely
pleased Orwell, re-orientating the story as it did as a study in unresolved
class resentment. (CW XIV: 163–167). What the tale would have meant to an
Indian audience can only be guessed at: perhaps Orwell intended an allegorical
connection pointing to his corresponding feelings about imperial abuses and
social inequalities at home. Despite his story’s London setting, he may have
been implying some kind of link between forms of caste system: the rich man
representing the imperial master, the tormented protagonist, the educated
but socially precarious middle class. Indeed, as noted above, such social
stratification at home was closely linked in Orwell’s mind to that underpinning
the Empire.
Ultimately, it seems, Orwell’s experience at the BBC was deeply frustrating,
as he told Fyvel, and the limitations it entailed clearly informed the writing of
Nineteen Eighty-Four. He would rather have fought for his country than lied for
it, but his cultural broadcasts particularly strove, as he explained to Woodcock,
to maintain a standard of decency and sincerity in contrast with Axis broadcast
propaganda; in an often dirty war of words, ‘to keep … our little corner clean’
(CW XIV: 214). Yet, for all that, Orwell at the BBC remains an ambivalent figure.
The comments reported by Fyvel sound like the exaggerated assertions of one
friend to another, at odds with Orwell’s thoughtful account in ‘Poetry and the
Microphone’. The latter seems to prove his real engagement with the task at hand.
His ‘propaganda’ appealed to the humanizing potential of radio technology, to
good taste, and in this way he distinguished himself from the hectoring voices
of the enemy.
Abbreviation
CW = T
he Complete Works of George Orwell. Ed. Peter Davison, Ian Angus, and Sheila
Davison. 20 vols. London: Secker and Warburg.
Notes
1 Woodcock’s letter was dated 11 May 1942, Orwell’s 12 July; both were included in
the autumn number. See CW XIII: 392–400 (395).
2 Orwell published much of his early writing in the left-wing journal The Adelphi
under the editorship of Sir Richard Rees. He was a member of the ILP, between 1938
and 1939, and fought with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’
Party of Marxist Unification) in Spain. See Homage to Catalonia (1938), CW VI.
3 Woodcock attended the recording of Voice’s second number, broadcast on 8
September 1942, CW XIV: 14–25.
4 For biographical accounts of this period, see Empson (1971: 94–99); Crick
(1980: 413–440); West (1985a: 13–68); Shelden (1991: 370–390); Davison (1996:
111–120); Meyers (2000: 213–226), Bowker (2003: 281–303) and Taylor (2003).
5 Eileen Orwell recounted this belief in a letter of 1938, commenting that Orwell
‘who has an extraordinary political simplicity despite everything … wants to
hear what he calls the “voice of the people” ’. Eileen Orwell to Marjorie Dakin, 27
September 1938; Davison (2010: 121).
6 See ‘Why I Join the I.L.P.’, CW XI: 167–169.
7 This was the first in a series of pamphlets in the ‘Searchlight Books’ series Orwell
was then editing with Tosco Fyvel, later his colleague at the BBC.
8 Kerr notes that ‘Orwell’s art and features programmes for the BBC are certainly
worth a separate study’ (2004: 475).
9 ‘Proletarian Literature’, no. 10 in the series ‘The Writer in the Witness Box’,
broadcast on 6 December 1940; CW XII: 294–299. Printed in The Listener,
19 December 1940. ‘What’s Wrong with the Modern Short Story?’, broadcast
after 19 December 1940, see editorial note, CW XII: 513. ‘The Frontiers of Art
and Propaganda’, broadcast on 30 April 1941; CW XII: 483–486; ‘Tolstoy and
Shakespeare’, broadcast on 7 May 1941. Printed in The Listener, 5 June 1941; CW
XII: 491–493; ‘The Meaning of a Poem’, broadcast on 14 May 1941, printed in The
Listener, 12 June 1941; CW: 800; ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, broadcast 21 May
1941; published in The Listener, 19 June 1941; CW XII: 501–506. The talk was given
again to the Oxford University Democratic Socialist Club on 23 May 1941; see
editorial note, CW XII: 506–507.
10 Orwell’s choice of the title ‘As I Please’ for his Tribune column after 1942 surely
reflects his frustration with his BBC work.
11 Bokhari to Orwell, 23 September 1941, CW XIII: 10–12 (11).
12 See CW XIII: 3–21; Davison (2010: 116–118).
13 There is no room here to survey the extensive series on literature, drama, science
and psychology and ‘books that changed the world’, which Orwell organized and
produced. See Davison 1994: 117 for a summary.
14 See Fischer 1982: 37–42; Woodcock 1972: 21–24, 29, 35. As Erikson puts it
(1993: 152): ‘he left England an augmented Indian’.
15 See Nasta (2011) for a full account of Orwell’s friendship with Anand.
16 ‘skeuomorph, n.’. 2. ‘An object or feature copying the design of a similar artefact in
another material’ OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press.
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Bokhari to Orwell. (23 September 1941). CW XIII.846, pp. 10–12 (11).

Bowker, Gordon. (2003). George Orwell. London: Little, Brown.
Crick, Bernard. (1980). George Orwell: A Life. London: Secker and Warburg.
Davison, Peter. (1996). George Orwell: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
——— (1997). ‘Introduction’, CW XIII, pp. xxiii–xv.
——— Ed. (2010). George Orwell: A Life in Letters. London: Harvill Secker.
——— (2011). ‘ “Two Wasted Years”: Orwell at the BBC’. Finlay Publisher (January–
March). http://www.finlay-publisher.com/archives/Jan-Mar%202011-Peter%20
Davison.pdf. Accessed June 2013.
——— (2012). ‘Orwell Goes East’. The Orwell Society (26 December 2012). http://www.
orwellsociety.com/2012/12/26/orwell-goes-east-by-peter-davison. Accessed June
2013.
Eagleton, Terry. (1996). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Eliot, T. S. (1920). ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’, The Dial, 69.5 (November),
pp. 441–447.
Empson, William. (1971). ‘Orwell at the BBC’, The World of George Orwell. Ed. Miriam
Gross. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 94–99.
Erikson, Erik. (1993). Gandhi’s Truth. 1969; London: Norton.
Fischer, Louis. (1982). The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. London: Grafton.
Fleay, C. and Sanders, M. L. (1989). ‘Looking into the Abyss: George Orwell at the BBC’,
Journal of Contemporary History, 24.3 (July), pp. 503–518.
Fyvel, Tosco. (1982). George Orwell: A Personal Memoir. London: Macmillan.
Gross, Miriam Ed. (1971). The World of George Orwell. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson.
Htin Aung, Maung. (1971). ‘George Orwell and Burma,’ The World of George Orwell,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 20–30.
Kerr, Douglas. (2002). ‘Orwell’s BBC Broadcasts: Colonial Discourse and the Rhetoric
of Propaganda’, Textual Practice, 16.3 (December), pp. 473–490.
——— (2004). ‘In the Picture: Orwell, India and the BBC’, Literature and History, 13.1
(Spring), pp. 43–57.
Meyers, Jeffrey. (2000). George Orwell: The Wintry Conscience of a Generation. London;
New York: Norton & Co.
Nasta, Susheila. (2011). ‘Sealing a Friendship: George Orwell and Mulk Raj Anand at
the BBC’, Wasafari, 264 (December 2011), pp. 14–21.
Newsinger, John. (2001). Orwell’s Politics. London: Palgrave.
Orwell, George. (1929). ‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma’, Le
Progrès Civique (4 May 1929). CWX, pp. 142–147.
——— (1934). Burmese Days. New York: Harper and Brothers. Repr. as CW II.
——— (1935). A Clergyman’s Daughter. London: Gollancz. Repr. as CW III.
——— (1935). The Road to Wigan Pier, London: Gollancz, 1937. Repr. as CW VII.
——— (1936). Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London: Gollancz. Repr. as CW IV.
——— (1939). Coming up for Air, London: Gollancz, 1939. Repr. as CW XI.
——— (1939). ‘Review of “Union Now” by Clarence K. Streit’, Adelphi (July 1939), CW
XI, pp. 358–361.
——— (1940). ‘My Country Right or Left’, Folios of New Writing, 2 (Autumn), 36–41.
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XII, pp. 483–486.
——— (1941b). ‘Tolstoy and Shakespeare’, broadcast on 7 May 1941. Printed in The
Listener, (5 June 1941). CW XII, pp. 491–493;
——— (1941c). ‘The Meaning of a Poem’, broadcast on 14 May 1941. Printed in The
Listener (12 June 1941). CW XII.
——— (1941d). ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, broadcast 21 May 1941; published in
The Listener (19 June 1941). CW XII.804, pp. 501–506. The talk was given again to
the Oxford University Democratic Socialist Club on 23 May 1941; see editorial note,
CW XII, pp. 506–507.
——— (1942a). ‘Voice,’ 1: A Magazine Programme, broadcast 11 August 1942.
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——— (1943b). To Rushbrook Williams (24 September 1943). CW XV. p. 251.
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Davison. 20 vols. London: Secker and Warburg.
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Montreal: Black Rose.
10
Radio Broadcasting in Fascist Italy: Between

Censorship, Total Control, Jazz and Futurism
Massimo Ragnedda
Northumbria University
The rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century was closely linked to

technological modernity and the formation of a mass society. The role of the
radio in these developments was central. As Philip Cannistraro argued as long
ago as 1972, ‘it is no accident that the birth of the totalitarian state coincided with
the appearance of the modern techniques of mass communications’ (1972: 127).
Despite the complex parentage of both these quintessentially modern phenomena,
the most recognizable mass communication device and earliest totalitarian state
were in fact both born in Italy: Marconi invented the wireless in 1897 and, 26
years later, the Italian journalist Giovanni Amendola described Mussolini’s
Italy as an experiment in ‘totalitarianismo’. Following the passage of the 1923
Acerbo Law, Mussolini had granted a broadcasting monopoly to the first Italian
radio company, Unione Radiofonica Italiana, and in 1925 appropriated the term
‘totalitarianism’ to describe his dictatorship of the Fascist PNF party and interwar
Italy: ‘Our formula is this: everything within the state, nothing outside the state,
no one against the state’ (Mussolini in Milan; cited in Roberts 2006: 272).
As Friedrich and Brzezinski claimed more than 50 years ago in their landmark
study Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), recognizable attributes of
totalitarianism include the state claiming unchallenged supremacy in ideology
and party politics; dictatorial leadership and ‘terror’; and total control of national
communications, economics as well as law and order (e.g. military, police and
both paramilitary units, like the Squadristi, and secret police, such as the OVRA).
A totalitarian regime is therefore characterized by the following elements: the
use of violence to seize and maintain power; the total control of the economy
as well as law and order by the state; political power monopolized by a single
party via a controlling ideology; and most importantly for the purposes of this
paper, control of the tools of communication. Of course the discussion is much

more complicated, as scholars of both totalitarianism generally (Hans Maier,
Emilio Gentile) and Italian Fascist autocracy (David Roberts, MacGregor Knox
and Philip Morgan) have demonstrated in detail (see also Greil 1977; Chabod
1963; Kogan 1968; Lyttelton 1973; Organski 1968; Palmieri 1962; Sarti 1970; De
Felice 1969; Acquarone 1965; Woolf 1968). It is not my present aim to survey the
literature about totalitarianism and its various connections with modernity –
aptly summarized in Roger Griffin’s 2007 Modernism and Fascism. What shall
be examined in this chapter is the mutually evolving connection between radio
and Italian Fascism, in addition to how the radio in Italy was used by the PNF
(Partito Nazionale Fascista) – at least before the outbreak of World War II – in
a manner very different than that in Nazi Germany. The role of the radio as a
key tool of propaganda in Fascist Italy has been neglected in a way that Nazism’s
use of broadcasting, the Volkskaempfer, and hierarchical direction of Goebbels’
Reichskulturkammer, has not.1
For one thing, in Fascist Italy it was possible to listen to jazz and tango, not
typical Italian music, but sounds that have had an important international
influence on the radio. Of course, in totalitarian Italy, as in totalitarian
Germany, the radio was used as a vehicle for propaganda and cultural
hegemony (or Gleichschaltung). However, for three fundamental reasons
radio was not as powerful in Fascist Italy as in Nazi Germany: first; at the
beginning, Mussolini was sceptical about the political value of radio and he
preferred the printing press for advancing the values of the regime. Second,
technological obstacles complicated the possibilities for reaching the whole
country (especially transmission stations in the south and the limited amount
of broadcast content). Finally, there was the cost involved, for most Italians
could not afford a wireless set or the subscription fee before the mid-1930s.
Indeed, in the beginning many Italians seem to have been unsatisfied with
the cultural output on Italian Radio and did not think it worth the money
to invest in a wireless set and subscription to the public service broadcaster
EIAR (Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche). Nonetheless, the radio was
increasingly pivotal in the process of building consensus through use of the
mass media as a propaganda tool. Accordingly, this chapter will consider the
way in which the PNF attempted to overcome these challenges in order to make
radio broadcasting a key component in the ‘modernization’ of rural Italy from
the ground up, no less than in the consolidation of totalitarian control by the
regime from the top down.
Radio Broadcasting in Fascist Italy 197
Similar to other totalitarian regimes, Fascism, in its process of maintaining

and expanding power, moves in two directions: building consensus and the
repression of dissent. This dynamic, long recognized by scholars, is a cornerstone
of totalitarian rule, and is typically marked by ideological propaganda in the
latter and extrajudicial violence in the former. Under Fascist rule, both of
these variables were at work in Italy: repression was expressed by banning and
censoring what was considered dangerous for the regime (closing independent
newspapers for example; see George Talbot 2007), or by arrests (of the communist
PCI leader Antonio Gramsci), killings (of the socialist PSU leader Giacomo
Matteotti) and persecutions (of Benedetto Croce, Luigi Sturzo, Amendola and
many others) of those who tried to contest the regime’s monopolization of
power. On the other hand, consensus building, as encapsulated by the expressed
‘fascistization of spare time’, simply entailed spreading the values of the Fascist
revolution (Baldoli 2003; De Grazia and Luzzato 2002). To achieve this
propaganda aim, the radio was considered a fundamentally important tool. In
fact, all totalitarian dictatorships, both new and old, use every available medium
to spread its message: cinema, radio, newspapers, weekly magazines, sport and
trade journals, posters and so on.
Indeed, even if not immediately, the Fascists soon realized the potential of
radio as a new medium for regime propaganda, capable of reaching vast numbers
of people simultaneously and everywhere in Italy, from remote villages to urban
centres. One radio in every house was the dream of Duce, even if, as will be
shown later, the dream remained just that. By the mid-1920s, Mussolini came to
appreciate just how important the radio was in order to cultivate and disseminate
fascist ideology, alongside modernizing the country through projects of socio-
economic engineering such as draining the marshes, road building, renovating
Rome and so on.
Naturally, the most notorious example of totalitarian propaganda derived
from the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who exploited existing
German resources in order to create a plan for forging consensus unequalled
in history (Bergmeier and Lotz 1997; Kallis 2005). As Adorno and Horkheimer
(1944) underlined during the war itself: ‘The Nazis knew that the radio would
give its form to their cause just as the Press had to reform’. Following Nazi
Germany’s example, Mussolini became a true superstar of Italian radio playing,
with his high-pitched tones, a major role in the propaganda campaigns of the
1930s. He would even come to insist that announcers reading his words on air
had voices resembling his own. Thus, upon realizing the importance of the radio
as a vehicle of propaganda, Fascism began to deploy the wireless as a major

tool of their cultural and political policies by the start of the 1930s (Cannistraro
1972: 128).
As previously noted, having been a successful journalist most notably
at Avanti, Mussolini favoured print media, and he correspondingly viewed
broadcasting technology as unreliable. Although Mussolini persisted in thinking
that the press was the most powerful propaganda tool for up to a decade
after taking power in October 1922, by this time, Goebbels had effectively
harnessed the power of radio in consolidating Hitler’s power (Richeri 1980;
Muhlberger 2004). By the time Mussolini realized the importance of the radio,
he began to invest significant resources in broadcasting, entrusting the project
first to Costanzo Ciano (up to 1934 as Minister of Communications), then to
his son (and later son-in-law of Mussolini and ultimately Foreign Minister)
Galeazzo Ciano. It was the younger Ciano who, between 1933 and 1935,
transformed the Undersecretariat into a full-fledged Ministry for Press and
Propaganda, directed from 1936 by Dino Alfieri. This transformation ‘brought
the government press officer into the cabinet as a minister. The ministry was
given enhanced responsibilities which would eventually extend to books, film,
theatre, tourism, and very belatedly, radio’ (Talbot 2007: 89). This would later
herald the incorporation of radio broadcasting into a counterpart of the Nazi
Reichskulturkammer, Minculpop, short for the Ministry of Popular Culture.
As might be expected this area has been substantially better covered than
the formative years of Fascist broadcasting, and this chapter will accordingly
examine the earlier development of radio in Italy, focusing upon how the PNF
deployed it and, in turn, the way in which the development of radio in Italy
actually benefited from several regime policies – revealing a striking dynamic in
the development of the Italian radio under the Fascist regime.
Brief history of the radio in Italy
Italy, entered but recently in the field of radio, still has great strides to make
before it can reach the position enjoyed by other nations [ … ] the radio must be
extended and extended rapidly. It will contribute much to the general culture of
the people. (‘La radiofonia in Italia’, Il Giornale d’Italia, 4 December 1926, cited
in Cannistraro 1972: 129)
Although most credit the invention of radio to the Italian inventor Guglielmo
Marconi, when Mussolini seized power a quarter century later in 1922, wireless
transmission was still in an experimental stage in Italy, lagging ‘considerably

behind other countries in the development of a nation-wide broadcasting system’
(Cannistraro 1972: 127). The first Italian legislation on wireless communications
dated from 1910 and was the result of a bill drafted by Carlo Schanzer, Minister
of Post and Telegraphs in the third Giolitti government. The project put radio
broadcasting under political control for the first time in Italy, and thus facilitated
controlled concessions to private companies. This derived from law number 395
from 30 June 1910, inspired by military and national security concerns especially
of war in Libya rather than through considerations about the intrinsic nature of
innovation. The Great War stopped all private projects for the diffusion of the
Italian radio, while in the meantime in other parts of Europe and especially the
USA the radio began to take hold. Indeed between 1912 and 1916 US authorities
released more than 8500 licences to broadcast; in July 1921 the station known
by its call sign WJY famously broadcast the Dempsey–Carpenter boxing match
to more than 300,000 people (Monteleone 1992: 7). At the same time in Italy, by
contrast, one of the earliest, rudimentary radio transmissions, by Radio Arallo,
was followed only by a handful of people (Balbi 2010: 786–808).
It was only under the Fascist regime – and thus significantly later than in
other western countries like Germany, Britain, France and the USA – that
broadcasting began to be an important political tool. Indeed only a month
after Mussolini seized power he received a private memorandum from Filippo
Bonacci, concerning the formation of a radio monopoly in Italy. This document
not only underlines how the Fascist regime had important economic and
political interests in the rapid development of Italian radio, but also shows
that from the start Mussolini knew about the importance of developing radio
broadcasting via groups of private investors interested in developing this
technology. For this key document reminded Mussolini that Italy was the only
major country that had yet to establish a complete and organized international
radio service for the public, of the type able to advance Italian interests abroad
(Monteleone 1992: 11).
Alongside several other private investors, figures no less than Marconi applied
to establish a company called SISERT (Società Italiana Servizi Radiotelegrafici e
Radiofonici), which would have a public monopoly on wireless broadcast – both
within Italy and abroad. For several reasons Mussolini rejected this proposal,
even if Marconi continued to pursue this aim.
In the summer of 1923, the newly established PNF regime concluded
an agreement with French and German companies (Telefunken) for the
establishment of an Italian Radio, funded by a subscription paid to Italian
commercial banks. In this way, the Marconi Company began an extensive

series of contacts in order to unify Italian radio. Then, by 1924 the Ministry of
Communications was born, headed by Costanzo Ciano. It was established on 27
August through an agreement between two Roman companies, Radiofono and
SIRAC (Società Italiana Radio Audizioni Circolari). This led to the formation of
the URI (Unione Radiofonica Italiana) which, a few months later, obtained an
exclusive concession to broadcast by the Fascist state.
Over the next four years, although still rudimentary via the URI, ‘radio was
for the Fascist regime an indirect means of social control but not of planned
manipulation’ (Richeri 1980: 50). This is largely because the mid-1920s radio
transmissions were generally poor: while in 1926 radio had reached 1,230,000
subscribers in Britain and 1,022,000 in Germany, in Italy the corresponding
number of subscribers was only 26,850. To reiterate this point it is worth noting
that, by the end of 1928, the number of subscribers had more than doubled but
was still less than 60,000. From 6 October 1924, the start of regular service in
Italy, the radio offered both simple and diverse programmes: classical music,
news bulletins and rare programmes of conversation. The cost of radio and also
the lack of popular programming were thus the two main reasons for this initial
lack of success. Furthermore, at this time musical consumption via radio was
hardly a mass phenomenon. Indeed, as Richeri points out: ‘In 1924 no more
than 1314 gramophones and 10,459 records were sold in the whole of Italy’
(1980: 50).
At this stage there was greater interest in technical means rather than radio
content, for the audience was composed mainly of young amateurs (the so-
called ‘sanfilisti’ – from the French sans fil = wireless). For his part, Mussolini
spoke on the radio for the first time on 4 November 1925, although this was an
unsuccessful transmission due to technical problems. This event only served to
increase the Duce’s initial scepticism regarding the radio.
The regular broadcasting of news started around 1929 when, by the insistence
of the government, a radio journal was created called Radio Giornale, which
broadcast daily accounts of the regime and its political activities. Thanks to the
radio, the regime thought it could introduce propaganda directly into the homes
of Italians even if, as was noted above, radio was neither popular nor widely
diffused at this time. In response, Fascism sought to promote a widespread
distribution of the radio, through which all Italians could listen to the speeches
of Mussolini, intended as a series of radio-motivated propaganda aimed at
the whole of society. The spread of radio to the rural masses predominately
in the South, was, however, virtually non-existent as late as the 1930s. For this
reason Mussolini began to consider the need for a new radio able to reach all
Italian homes. To this end, two large ‘campaigns’ for the purchase of radio were
undertaken in 1937 and 1939, witnessing the regime promoting two devices,
‘Radio Balilla’ and ‘Radio Rome’ These cost, respectively, 450 and 430 Lire. Yet
these ‘campaigns’ did not have the desired effect: radio equipment costs, added
to those of mandatory subscription, meant that they were still incompatible
with most Italians’ means. Thus radios, even by the end of the regime, were
possessed by relatively few individuals, with sets concentrated in schools, offices
and Fascist Party halls.
Ente Radio Rurale (ERR)
The development of Italian radio under the Fascist regime in the beginning
occurred almost entirely despite Mussolini’s failure to realize its potential as a
vehicle for propaganda. Indeed as Talbot has pointed out ‘throughout the first
decade in power the Fascist conception of journalism rarely strayed beyond the
print media, despite the opportunities for mass communication presented by
radio and cinematic news-reel technologies. Mussolini understood how to run a
newspaper and he surrounded himself with newspaper men, promoting former
journalists and press officers to positions of great power within his government’
(Talbot 2007: 77). Upon progressively appreciating radio’s importance in
forming a participatory relationship with listeners, the PNF held a referendum
in February 1927. The aim of this referendum was clear: ‘to know the exact tastes
and trends of the general public to better satisfy it’. The most important results
were moderately positive ratings for programming; catering for an audience not
always young; a middlebrow cultural output; and, perhaps of greater concern for
the regime, a largely apolitical audience profile.
Yet only a few years later, in 1931, the High Commission for Radio Inspectorate
issued an interesting report revealing two key weaknesses deriving from the
radio: the limited number of devices accessible by the peasants and workers; and,
just as important, the need to develop new techniques for radio as an instrument
of culture. The Commission recommended that, in order to overcome these
obstacles, the government should provide radios to rural groups for use after
work and on the weekends, as well as in schools and colleges; furthermore,
the radio should transmit a greater volume of programming geared towards
the cultural and political indoctrination of the masses. The idea of deploying
radio for teaching purposes was reinforced by leading members of the regime,
including Arnaldo Mussolini, who emphasized one of the most important tasks
for the development of radio: not the spreading of songs, but the fulfilment of a
propaganda function. In this way, he was more similar to the Matthew Arnold-
inspired, Reithian conception of the BBC than to other fascist voices in the PNF,
happy for the masses to be diverted with patriotic song. Of course, there was also
a key difference: the development in Fascist Italy was monitored and controlled,
as the radio was supposed to be a public service steered by a totalitarian rather
than a liberal praxis.
Thanks to Law No. 15 of June 1933, Ente Radio Rurale (ERR) was established.
This law was particularly supported by Arturo Marescalchi and Costanzo Ciano
advocating its aim ‘to contribute to the cultural and moral elevation of the rural
population’. In other words, radio was intended to aid in the modernization of
the countryside on behalf of the Fascist revolution, thus exposing traditionally
isolated inhabitants in rural parts of Italy to Fascist propaganda and thereby
integrating the rural existence into the mainstream of national life. Aiming to
promote this rural acculturation, ERR began to broadcast in the latter half of
1933, initially to schools. The Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, amongst
others, soon realized that radio was a potentially crucial tool for controlled
education. Radio serials were produced evoking mythic moments or anecdotes
from Italian history; they sang the praises of the regime, first documenting
efforts to modernize the country, followed by hagiographic accounts of Italy’s
military force. In this way the Fascist state, with its values and ideas now beamed
directly to students, could help teachers inculcate the Fascist ‘new man’. Thus,
for Mussolini and the regime, ‘after a decade of indecision on a direction for the
culture of the regime, where the publishing industry had been shaken up, but the
popular potential of cinema and radio had been missed, Mussolini set the course
for a brave new world’ (Talbot 2007: 139).
Correspondingly, the ERR started to sell radio receivers to schools and other
public institutions in rural towns and municipalities. Given the insistent pressure
from Party ideologues, in November 1934 Mussolini decided to transfer the
ERR to the direct control of the secretary of the PNF, Achille Starace. Thereafter,
radio rural programmes teaching ‘Fascist culture’ and describing the process
of Italian modernization took pride of place. Interesting enough, a popular
Sunday morning programme broadcast by the ERR – at a time competing
with the newly formed Vatican Radio – was entitled L’ora dell’agricoltore [‘The
Farmer’s Hour’]. Aired between 1934 and 1945, this gave basic agronomy tips,
along with ‘nuggets of domestic wisdom’ exemplified by a dialogue between the

stereotypical characters Menico, Timoteo and Dorotea.
Initially the scriptwriters hoped to reach listeners by dramatizing technical
and political messages through dialogues, featuring three fictional peasants:
Timoteo, the traditionalist who had not improved his land, Menico the
agricultural modernizer and Dorotea, a tireless worker and ‘prolific mother’ of
seven children (presented as ‘the prosperity of the home’ in the first dialogue). In
these dialogues gender roles were presented as very rigid but it is worth noting
that Dorotea is a strong character and a fount of information (in one dialogue for
example, it is she who lectures the men on how to prevent accidents in the field).
(Willson 2002, 161)
These figures were highly stylized and sometimes appeared farcical (Isola 1990:
115–141). Clearly many southern Italian workers thought these ‘lessons’ were
quite silly, and were often explained in a condescending way. Nonetheless, given
this rhetoric and its propagandistic output, this was a key part of the regime’s
attempts to propagate the new values of Fascism to a segment of the population
otherwise difficult to reach.
Thus Mussolini’s project of ‘modernization’ intending to narrow the cultural
gap between city and country by spreading Fascist ideology to the most rural
parts of Italy emphasized the achievements of the regime in terms of agricultural
modernization, land improvement and land reclamation. In turn, these projects
were headed by the Agro Pontino and Radio Rurale and, in particular, found
their voice in the L’ora dell’agricoltore’s valorization of Fascism’s new land
cultivation using modern means. The dialogues between Menico, Timoteo and
Dorotea reflected these regime imperatives. Furthermore, transmission helped
break down the isolation of rural life and brought to the rural masses musical
intervals considered by some to be signs of cultural diffusion. Thanks to this
programme the regime, now in direct contact with the masses, took on the guise
of paternalistic social peacemaker, attentive to the general improvement of rural
working conditions. Harvest tips, suggestions for rural work, plating methods
and crop improvement were all deployed in a simple and direct way. It is thus
possible to say that the ‘modernization’ of rural Italy was a principal subject for
Fascist radio propaganda.
By the 1930s the radio ceased to be a hobby for enthusiasts, but was
increasingly seen by the regime as a tool of mass communication able to create a
‘meeting place’ for families and the local community. Speakers during sporting
events, or in celebration of the regime, often interviewed people in the street
by way of attempting to forge a sense of nationalism. As noted earlier, however,

the real limitation of this project centred upon the difficulty of obtaining the
Radiorurale (later Radiobalilla) receiver. What made this project so flawed was
a serious lack of organizational flexibility and entrepreneurial spirit. That said,
although the popularity of radio was steadily building, it had yet to become a
constant presence in the everyday life of Italians.
As seen above, at the beginning of Fascist broadcasting, radio was absent
from the countryside and the ERR tried to fill this void. By contrast, the radio
was far more popular with the urban middle classes and younger audiences.
As a consequence, the radio paid particular attention to this audience in its
programming. In 1926 Elisabetta Oddone, for example, broadcast programmes
like Cantuccio dei bambini and L’angolo dei bambini [Kids’ Corner] that were
launched from Milan. Furthermore, the famous transatlantic pilot Italo Balbo
sponsored a series of radio celebrations for aviation that was aimed at Italian
youth. This series began by documenting Balbo’s flight across the Atlantic in
1927 via a programme entitled ‘From Columbus to De Pinedo’. Similar cultural
projects, such as Radio Nonno [‘Grandfathers’ Radio’], took place on the radio
as well. These programmes underscore the cultural role that radio, especially in
the 1930s, had on the process of Italian domestic education and modernization,
co-evolving the new values of Fascism.
The controversial relationship with jazz
That Italian Fascism was punctuated by different impulses was typical of

all societies, even totalitarian ones, in the well-known dialectic between
the continuity and change of cultural mores on the side of more reactionary
impulses, such as Catholicism, monarchism and ruralism. On the other hand,
counteracting these, were modern innovations like the diffusion of film and
radio, both accompanied by non-Italian music like jazz and tango. Indeed
the radio in Fascist Italy did not always entail total control of musical output,
although it is true that by the late 1930s Mussolini imitated Nazi cultural policies,
such as prohibiting the broadcasting of music by Jewish composers. Despite this,
in January 1938, even before the official announcement of Italy’s racial laws that
July, in a note sent to EIAR director Raul Chiodelli, Mussolini wrote: ‘I have
told Alfieri [at that time Minister of Popular Culture] to reduce the amount of
Jewish music on the radio. Last night, however, I heard a piece by Mendelssohn.
Correct this situation’ (cited in Cannistraro 1972: 143).
Of course Fascism also extended its censorship over musical content (albeit
the words more than the notes). Yet this control never reached the level of Nazi
Germany, because of what one scholar has described as:
the historical backwardness of Italy in terms of musical culture: what prevented
the managers then, to understand fully the mechanisms and act accordingly,
as happened in the Soviet Union with the dictates of socialist realism. Music,
songs, dances and even Jazz floated in a free zone, in which we could move with
a fair amount of freedom as long as you follow certain rules. (Prato 2010: 190)
To be sure, music played a crucial role in the advancement of Fascist leisure

and entertainment. Of particular significance was the scheme used by the Dopo
Lavoro to provide affordable entertainment for the working classes. One of the
main radio themes sung over the airwaves in the 1930s, for example, celebrated
working in the field. Indeed composers were encouraged by the Ministry of
Popular Culture to create songs exalting the virtues of specific Italian regions
as well as the importance of the countryside more generally. By the same token,
there was a more defensive impulse towards the preservation of Italian culture,
headed in particular by Pietro Mascagni – a leading Italian academic at the
time and an ardent defender of authentic traditions in the Italian opera, who
developed a vociferous campaign against modern music, especially jazz.
Despite the contradictions characterizing their diffusion, jazz and tango
played an important role in Italian society between the wars. In the early
twentieth century, tango was identified with the Latin world and the spread
of its dance culture. Although hampered by both Church and the regime, it
nevertheless represented an important cultural aspect of interwar Italian society.
This was something that in Nazi Germany would have been more difficult, even
if in Germany, too, jazz developed an unexpected importance and particular
evolution (Kater 1992).
In the early days of Italian radio jazz was welcomed, even to the extent of airing
‘EIAR Jazz’. Thus on 1 February 1926, from the station at Milan, EIAR broadcast
the first live musical programme by a jazz band in Italy, directed by Stefano
Ferruzzi. Still later, in the mid-1930s, following an increasing appreciation for
jazz music throughout Europe, there was a flowering of interest in Italy. For the
first time, for example, Louis Armstrong played at Chiarella Theater in Turin on
14 January 1935, and the same Italian city witnessed the birth of the first ‘Hot
Club Circle’. The official founding of the ‘Hot Jazz Club’ in Milan occurred in
the next year by a collaboration of pioneers and enthusiasts who, despite being a
small elite, gathered to listen to records and exchange jazz news. In this way, the
culture of jazz was diffused with the seeming tolerance of the regime.
Yet as the PNF exerted increasing control over censorship and radio output
over the later 1930s, jazz began to be referred to in Italy as ‘degenerate music,
barbarism, opium, cocaine, nefarious and injurious to the tradition’. Following
Mussolini’s 1938 Racial Laws, the thrust of cultural production became overtly
racial. Consequently jazz, being of Afro-American origin, was placed under
strict control before the outbreak of World War II. Nonetheless, jazz was still
to be heard on the radio in Fascist Italy, at least until 1938, though sometimes
through recourse to curious nicknames or pseudonyms for composers. This
meant that, on Italian radio Louis Armstrong became ‘Luigi Braccioforte’, Benny
Goodman became ‘Beniamino Buonomo’, while a number of classic songs were
simply retitled: thus Con stile was transformed from ‘In the Mood’; Le tristezze
di San Luigi was used instead of ‘St. Louis Blues’; Manna dal cielo instead of
‘Pennies from Heaven’, and so on.
As such, both jazz and tango were played by the radio under Fascism, and
had a significant impact upon musical culture in Italy. Improbably, the diffusion
of foreign music under a nationalist regime that was supposed to preserve the
Italian culture is one of the many contradictions of the Fascist regime in terms of
conflict between modernization and preservation. This is just one of the various
contradictions marking the Fascist Regime in Italy. These have led Roger Griffin
to ask:
how did a regime dedicated to destroying the ‘progressive’ forces of socialism and
renewing Italy’s Roma heritage attract the active collaboration of so many of its
most prominent modern artists, architects, designers, and technocrats? … What
led Filippo Marinetti, the founder of one of the most radical forms of aesthetic
modernism, to see Mussolini’s peculiar brand of nationalism as the vehicle for
his Futurist war on the decadence of “pastism”. (Griffin 2007: 18–19)
The above reference to modernism raises, briefly in conclusion, the reaction by

Italian intellectuals, and in particular the Futurists, when the radio arrived on
the public scene.
Italian interwar intellectuals and the radio
Freedom from all point of contact with literary and artistic tradition. Any attempt
to link la radia with tradition is grotesque. (Marinetti and Masnada 1933)
Italian Fascism claimed that it ‘emphasized spirit over matter, faith against reason,
action over thought’. Like the Futurists, the Fascists praised the purifying effects
of violence while vociferously condemning pacifism and internationalism. For

the Fascists, as for F. T. Marinetti and his band of Futurists, the future of Italy lay
with the ‘young, the strong, and the living’. Like Gabriele D’Annunzio in Fiume
before him, Benito Mussolini had a vision of politics that glorified voluntarism
and struggle – one suffused with the sexual imagery of domination and virility,
the religious rhetoric of sacrifice and belief and, above all, the role of the ‘new
men’ of action ‘who could control the mass and mould it to his own design’ (Koon
1985: 4). Some of the artists and intellectuals supporting Italian Fascism, such as
Marinetti, Sironi, D’Annunzio, Pirandello and others, reacted in very different
ways to the development of radio in Italy. In this respect, especially interesting is
the relationship between Futurism and the radio, which concludes this chapter.
Massimo Bontempelli, an important exponent of Futurism, for instance,
was more attracted by the possibilities of cinematic language than the
new possibilities offered by the radio. By contrast Filippo Marinetti, for
example, immediately understood what was congenial to the new medium
for Futurism. In 1933, Marinetti and Pino Masnata published the ‘Manifesto
of Radio’, known as ‘La Radia: The Futurist Manifesto’.2 This highlighted the
importance of broadcasting – facilitating a direct relationship between artist
and audience without the mediation of institutions and intellectuals. According
to this manifesto, which first appeared in the Torino Gazzetta del Popolo on 22
September 1933 and soon after across Europe and South America, the radio
spoke the language of modernity, and favoured innovation over tradition. The
development of radio, according to Marinetti and Pasnata, was in line with more
general Futurist approaches to art and culture. Futurism thus saw in the radio
further evidence that it was necessary – in order to keep pace with the changes
of the present era – to destroy everything that was not modern. Futurists viewed
the radio as an instrument of subversion for art, politics and culture. Indeed at
the time Italian radio was producing but a few programmes, and many Futurists
in fact seemed to prefer other languages – or worse, Italian regional dialects – for
carrying out the modern revolution. Some of the Futurists accepted the radio
with enthusiasm for precisely these modernizing effects, arguing that wireless
broadcasting was synonymous with progress.
However, before Futurism’s ‘La Radia Manifesto’, several other exponents
tried their hand at works for the radio, further demonstrating interest in this
new medium. In 1924, for instance, Luciano Folgore created a successful radio
programme, Il grammofono della verità [The Record of Truth], which ran for some
ten years. During the first year of regular broadcasting, 1925, 11 transmissions by
Futurists and one radio article about Marinetti were included (Fisher 2011: 242).
Other key Futurists also fully engaged with radio in Italy, including Balilla
Pratella, Guido Sommi-Picenardi and Italo Bertaglio, who all worked for Italian
state radio. Similarly in 1931, Masnati, the co-author of ‘La Radia’, wrote the
radio piece La bambina ammalata [The Sick Child], published in Oggi e domani
(on 31 August 1931) but not broadcast in his lifetime. Much more importantly,
‘On December 20, 1931 Masnata as librettist and composer Carmine Guarino
made history when they broadcast the first Italian opera written specifically for
radio (arguably the first radio opera), the 15-minute Tum tum ninna nanna or
Wanda’s heart (Il cuore di Wanda)’ (Fisher 2011: 2).
Crucially, Filippo Marinetti not only co-wrote the ‘Manifesto of Radio’, but
composed ‘The Bombardment of Adrianopoly’ which was broadcast a few years
before, in February 1929. In Philip Cannistraro’s words this was ‘considered the
most important cultural broadcast of the period’. Still another influential cultural
broadcast during the late 1920s was a set of weekly programmes on:
‘Fascism and the Fascist Revolution’ … presented to radio audience in the forms
of lectures by Fascist intellectuals such as Giuseppe Bottai, Augusto Turati,
Cesare De Vecchi … In addition, selections from the works of Italian writers
such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alessandro Manzoni, Enrico Corradini and other
authors favored by the regime were occasionally read over the radio. These
literacy programmes were prefaced by brief historical sketches showing how the
works to be heard reflected Fascist ideals. (Cannistraro 1972: 131)
Marinetti also gave several radio talks for the ‘solemn official celebration’,
and his name was, from the very first year of URI, was on a list of approved
speakers authorized by Ministry of Communication (Monteleone 1992: 70).
Yet Marinetti’s series of broadcasts, most of which were lectures on Futurism
broadcast monthly for more than a decade, consistently argued that radio was
a fundamental tool in the development of modern Italian culture. As might be
expected Marinetti spoke with his colourful language and style, and arguably
‘introduced the concept of radio personality in Fascist Italy’ encouraging those
who, like himself, hoped to make the radio an avant-garde form.
However it must be said, aside from modernist technology, the radio was
little studied by the Futurists (Ottieri 2004), at least when compared to the
amount of studies they produced on the modern theatre. According to Fisher,
one of the reasons can be found in the restrictions imposed by a political
bureaucracy that ‘affected radio institutions in ways that did not accord
Futurism the chance to contribute to the new medium in the manner Marinetti
was keen to do’ (2011: 229).
Finally, the case of Marinetti reveals that the radio, unlike cinema, was largely
devoid of links with the past. Radio was therefore able to introduce a new code
of expression, one that was both absolutely new and truly ‘futurist’. The radio
represented a new form of expression and language, one that was autonomous
and different from the languages traditionally used in theatre or poetry (Ottieri
2004: 69–70). At the same time, given this revolutionary method and manner
of expression, the only acceptably revolutionary (if predictable) use of this new
technology soon became the ‘preferred’ way for regime to broadcast a theatre
or musical events. In partial consequence, following the initial enthusiasm and
curiosity around the new medium of radio broadcasting in Fascist Italy, by the
outbreak of World War II much of the enthusiasm for radio had effectively
disappeared – like the enthusiasm for the regime that had fostered it.
Notes
1 See Bergmeier and Lotz (1997) for an account of broadcasting policy in Nazi
Germany for an account of the German experience.
2 They decided to call the Radio, Radia because, as they stated, as Scultura
(Sculpture) Poesia (Poetry), cinematografia (cinema) also the entirely radio
expressions must, linguistically talking, terminated with the ‘A’ (Verdone 1990: 83).
Works cited
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Italian Broadcasting’, Technology and Culture, 51.4 (October), 786–808.
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——— (2011). ‘New Information Regarding the Futurist Radio Manifesto’, Italogramma,
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default/files/cikkek/letoltheto/pdf/Fisher_radio.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2013.
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11
Pound and Radio Treason:

An Empirical Reassessment
Matthew Feldman
Teesside University
On 8 May 1945, the very day Allied nations in Europe were celebrating V-E
Day, one of the United States’s leading poets was being interrogated by the FBI
on treason charges. He was one of seven radio broadcasters thus charged by the
USA, a majority of the dozen treason charges brought against US citizens for
wartime treason. Unlike the other six, and in an irony befitting an iconic poet
long resident in Italy, Ezra Pound was held within eyeshot of the Leaning Tower
of Pisa, that beautiful and poignant reminder of human imperfection. Initially
detained at the US Army Disciplinary Training Center in what he later called
a ‘gorilla cage’, Pound must have been reminded by that tower of his wartime
hubris, of the impossibility of creating an earthly paradise – what he was to
call a paridiso terrestere – and of the effects that resulted from serving Benito
Mussolini’s crumbling, crooked regime to the very last. As this essay will show,
Pound’s descent has been poorly understood by scholars or the wider public.
Large swathes of criticism on what quickly became known as the ‘Pound Case’
tend towards either the exculpatory or the tautological. By the latter I mean that
Pound’s insanity defence – which he assisted in (hardly a fact which tells against
mental incapacity) – has been taken at face value, and then projected backwards
to his wartime activities, if not further. This manoeuvre has the benefit of leaving
unquestioned some of the less-savoury aspects of modernism, and driving
a wedge between art and everything else (sanity, personal life, politics and so
forth). Furthermore, Pound’s insanity defence seems to preclude some of the
more considered reasons for his radio broadcasts: needing money; difficulty in
moving his aged parents; real commitment to his life in Italy; and especially, to
his political fanaticism – which, by the outbreak of World War II, had reached
boiling point. The insanity plea of late 1945, in short, may not have ultimately
served the cause of justice or of Ezra Pound – subsequently institutionalized in
poor conditions and without charge for nearly 13 years – but it certainly served
the nascent ‘new critical’ approaches to modernism that so neatly separated
art and politics. As this chapter will argue by turning to the neglected case of
Pound’s engagement with Fascist radio propaganda, such an untenable position
has long occluded understanding of the trajectory and depth of Pound’s wartime
propaganda. This will be reappraised by looking at, in turn, the content, extent
and dating of Pound’s war broadcasts.
The content of Pound’s broadcast scripts
‘What do you N. Zealanders expect to get out of being sold BY London jews
to New York jews, any way?’, Pound demanded in a three-page typescript
entitled ‘You New Zealanders’: ‘Your men have been sent to die for the Negus, a
black king of a slaving country, that we had started to civilize. You won’t KEEP
Abyssinia. You will merely die for a temporary occupation of it, and what is
it to you any way? What profit do you get from jew-owned mines in Africa?’1
Likely beamed to Allied troops in North Africa during 1941, this text highlights
the expansive nature of Pound’s wartime propaganda. It was not only North
American and British audiences at which Pound aimed his broadcasts, but
shortwave transmissions to North Africa and elsewhere. During the height of
Axis conquest, similar Fascist transmissions to China were also discussed at
EIAR. On 22 April 1941, Pound enthusiastically responded to Adriano Ungaro,
an English-language censor at Radio Rome, recommending his rendering of a
‘Confucian’ Axis as propaganda material:
As to Italian radio in Shanghai/// what about a bit of Confucius/ my line that
Mussolini and Hitler APPLY Confucian principles//
Does the Shanghai relay stuff from Rome? //
All nonsense China staying out of the Axis system.
Also nothing against Italy telling China to divide up Australia with Japan.
Not for me to say/ but it[’s] plain horse sense.2
Corresponding to the above enquiry is one of Pound’s more unusual first-

person texts, a four-page typescript dated 31 January 1943. In his ‘Message
to Tuan Tzetsun’s Friends’ Pound highlighted his readings of Confucius over
Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment 215
Radio Rome ‘which belong in a certain way to the Axis powers’, before directly
addressing his presumed Chinese audience:
With the sunrise: make it new. Those ideograms were cut in your great emperors
bathtub, and they are now better known in Europe. They have been used on the
front pages of books.
I have seen signs as clear as any map on the back of a tortoise. When both
Mussolini and Hitler have quoted Confucius, not I think, consciously but when
in their orders, when in their designs for the new Europe I have found the same
sentences that you find in the Great Learning, the mature study, the integral, or
total study, it is I think time for China to seek for more intimate knowledge of
the aims of the Axis powers.
There is a simple ideogram that has often translated ‘middle’, it is not from an
idle desire for novelty but from a desire to make clear its meaning that I translate
that sign the PIVOT or axis, and that looking again at the signs, I would translate
the second of the Four Classics: ‘The unwavering Axis’.3
Pound did, in fact, translate the second Confucian Ode as L’Asse che non vacilla
[The Axis Will Not Waiver]; with that provocative title, the likely reason advancing
Allied armies pulped it in February 1945. Underscoring that Confucius, too,
could be pressed into wartime service, Pound declared in one of many translated
letters in his FBI File, ‘Confucius is the material which should be taken into the
trenches’.4 In the same way that the neat division critics have long held between
Pound’s propaganda and his other work no longer holds, it simply can no longer
be maintained he was only writing (and likely transmitting) broadcasts for the
USA and Britain but, at the very least, to several other countries at war as well.
Nor were Pound’s broadcasts solely written or transmitted in English. While
Pound’s non-Anglophone propaganda remains largely beyond the scope of this
essay – including his sizeable Italian journalism from this period (EPPP VII:
460–475; VIII 1–253) – there are hundreds of items in Italian, largely from the
period of the Salò Republic. While ‘only a few traces of his late collaboration
with Germany survive’, Benjamin Friedlander rightly observes, an extant one-
page script in German is headed ‘23 November 1943 Salò’. This contains an
unsigned translation commencing, ‘No I do not speak against my country’,
before continuing:
Until the liberation of Mussolini, the big newspapers were in the hands of
plutocrats.
Many people think the war was a whim of Hitler and Mussolini. From the
moment Mussolini recognized the collaboration between Moskau [sic] and
New York Jewry, the international Jewry condemned him. And as soon as
Hitler announced publicly Gottfried Feder’s thesis that in the kapitalist system
the power to buy lies mainly with those who do not work themselves, the war
against him broke out.5
Pound’s FBI Files also reveal that he composed at least two broadcast typescripts
in French. Counterpart of the Anglophone division, EIAR’s Francophone division
broadcast Italian Fascist propaganda daily to French North Africa and, it appears
especially, to the neighbouring Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain. In
response to Pétain’s infamous collaborationist speech the day before – the same
day it appeared, in fact, translated and reproduced, in the New York Times –
Pound declared, interestingly, in the first person: ‘Marshal Pétain recognized
that Germany was fighting for European civilization [ … ] now that your reforms
are so fascist in form, you can penetrate fearlessly in the fascist spirit, in the
constructive spirit’. Whereas Pétain alluded to a ‘usurious control’ and ‘slowness
in building a new order or, more correctly, in imposing one’ on 12 August 1941,
Pound was more forthright in his FBI-translated French address the next day:
‘The France of pretexts was a Jewish France, a usurious France. You are late, in
fact you are very late in your purging of usurers, Jews [ … an] especially putrid
bands of Swiss usurers. You need my small treatises on monetary economy, if you
are to find Jean Barral [ … ] as a preface to the new era’.6 This high praise for the
French economist and anti-Semitic author of the 1924 La Suprématie universelle
des juifs et la Société des nations – with whom Pound also corresponded between
1933 and 1942 – is clarified in a second French typescript entitled ‘Jean Barral’.
The latter comprises a five-page typescript, alongside a heavily scored fair-copy
of the same length. As with the year before, and perhaps on other occasions as
well, this text recalls Pound’s earlier periods spent in France ‘in the footsteps
of the troubadours’. As this English rendering suggests, this typescript was
similarly recorded, translated and reproduced in Pound’s FBI File. Also like the
Pétain script, Pound’s ‘Jean Barral’ urges collaboration in the ‘new order’ under
Axis hegemony:
Barral would have led you to avoid the war of 1939. Like Quisling would have led
Norway to avoid the war [ …. ] in knowing Fascism better Barral can very well
adjust his ideas with ours, which are more improved. France needs him and his
books. The new Europe will find a place for France as soon as France will find a
place for Barral.7
More often noted regarding the nature of these wartime propaganda broadcasts
are the ‘variety of accents, English and American’ in which the Pound’s recorded
broadcasts were delivered. For Humphrey Carpenter, Pound’s ‘folksy manner’ of
delivery provided for a ‘masterly performance. The voice is clearly pitched – the
absurdly rolled r’s help to throw the words across the poor-quality short-wave
transmission, so that he comes over far better than the professional announcer’.8
Less charitably, John Tytell hears little more than ‘bile and personal complaint’
suffusing Pound’s broadcasts, arguing that his ‘persona would shift according to
accent and diction, and he would use a folky western twang, a southern drawl,
an ironic cockney whine, a flat toneless rages. Sometimes he slurred, often he
seemed to be ranting’9 (Tytell 1987: 262). According to C. David Heymann, the
latter two qualities apparently compounded the difficulty in hearing Pound’s
shortwave transmissions:
The palaver poured forth in a variety of tongues – flat, pedantic, scolding tones
intermingled with exaggerated Southern drawls. Western plainsman lulls,
Cockney growls. He switched from one to another without warning, breaking
at times into a torrid rage, slurring his words, ranting at a low pitched roar.
Often the reception was poor and added to the bizarre vocal inflections, making
it impossible for transcribers to distinguish between words. When they did
understand what was being said they were often unfamiliar with the subject
matter. Their transcriptions were full of errors. (Heymann 1976: 105–106)
Whatever the case audibly, speculation over the reception of Pound’s broadcasts
nonetheless raises a final three points. First, scholars currently know virtually
nothing about the nature of Pound’s pseudonymous texts; his foreign-language
compositions; nor about his anonymous instructions and slogans – let alone
whether, and which, typescripts held at Yale’s Beinecke Library were personally
delivered at EIAR studios. Only 170 of Pound’s broadcasts seem to have been
recorded and stored by the FCC, leaving many questions unanswerable: how
many impersonations did Pound do and how many other voices, persona or
imitations might Pound have also undertaken? Without additional recordings,
of course, it is impossible to know. Still, there are interesting glimpses of other
voices, and other broadcasts, that Pound undertook for Radio Rome. To be
sure, he participated in several round-table discussions and interviews – again,
just how many cannot be adjudged – documented by a few references and
transcriptions from an EIAR programme from spring 1943 titled ‘Round the
Microphone’.10 While presumably contributing to this discussion in his normal
voice, another revealing letter to Ungaro laments: ‘I don’t suppose anybody but
me can IMITATE Winston’s voice and accent’.11 With recorded sound rather
than text, it is clear, the empirical terrain is far less sure. Nevertheless, pace the
references above, it is safe to speculate that, as with so much of Pound’s radio
propaganda, his activities were far more extensive than previously seen.
Second, in terms of the reception of wartime speeches aimed at Britain and

the USA as a whole, most ex post facto accounts stress that Pound’s broadcasts
made little sense. This supposed incomprehensibility has also been assumed to
be of Pound’s making; going so far as to argue, in Gibran van Ert’s phrase: ‘The
most striking aspect of Pound’s “propaganda” is his nearly complete disregard
for the listener’s ability to understand it’ (Ert 1994: 56). This judgement is starkly
contrasted by Pound’s voluminous correspondence; in one telling instance, for
example, to the aforementioned Adriano Ungaro:
5 Aug. 1942
Caro Ungaro
Transmission so BAD for last three nights that I am on point of telegraphing
you. It must be the transmitting microphone [ … ] effect is either whisper or a
rattle/ a bump bump bump, the minute one turns on enough current to hear. do
fer Xt’z ache have the microphones looked at.12
Yet delving into the archives is unnecessary to demonstrate that – whether

successfully or not – Pound was quite aware of dangers of ‘incomprehensibility’.
He thus did what he could do to address this directly. Several such asides, from
his broadcasts entitled ‘Continuity’ (6 July 1942), ‘That Illusion’ (19 February
1943) and ‘To Consolidate’ (c 1942), were reprinted by Leonard W. Doob 35
years ago:
Had I the tongue of men and angels I should be unable to make sure that even
the most faithful listeners would be able to hear and grasp the whole of a series
of my talks. (Pound 1978: #52)
******
I am taking my whole time on one point durin’ this little discourse. Sometimes
I try to tell you too much. I suspect I talk in a what-is-called incoherent manner:
’cause I can’t (and I reckon nobody could) tell where to begin. (Pound 1978: #61,
******
As I can not AT ALL count on the present hearers, if there are any present
hearers, [not] having read a line of [my] writing I have, for the sake of clarity, to
repeat things I have said before. (Pound 1978: #115)
Exceptions were encountered not when Pound chose a particularly arcane

subject, it seems, but rather when receiving conditions hampered short-wave
reception. Like every other wartime broadcaster, Pound was less a prisoner of
his own esotericism than changes in the weather.
A third and final point concerns the transmission of Pound’s wartime

broadcasts. While reiterating that this chapter is mainly concerned with Pound’s
propaganda texts rather than the separate question of their transmission and
reception, it is clear that Radio Rome’s shortwave output was consistently
marred by difficulties of audibility. Similar to his 5 August 1942 complaint to
Ungaro above, in praising his ‘handler’ at EIAR, Prince Ranieri di San Faustino’s,
delivery the year before, Pound also noted the static background in much of
the transmission: ‘Excellent delivery last night. Voice absolutely clear and every
word “visible”, except for a few ORful KRRumpzzz! of static or atmospheric
or whatever BLITZED out a few phrases’ (Rachewiltz 1979–1980: 164). This
problem faced auditors and transcribers alike around the wartime world, not
least as radio technology was still undergoing rapid development during the war
years. This was particularly true of shortwave transmissions, used to broadcast
across continents by bouncing transmissions off the earth’s atmosphere (rather
than with medium- and long-wave, beamed directly from stations over a range
of miles depending upon the power of the transmitter).
At the forefront of this technology was the BBC in Britain, hosting some 43
shortwave stations by November 1943 and, perhaps, then the most advanced
and well-staffed Monitoring Station in the world. Covering each day of World
War II in meticulous detail, the BBC’s wartime Summary of World Broadcasts
correspondingly recorded the main radio transmissions of every belligerent
country – sometimes extending to more than 50 pages on a particularly
‘newsworthy’ day. Accompanying these invaluable summaries were all manner
of memoranda, correspondence and guidelines for wartime transcription of
shortwave radio. For example, one wartime transcriber for the BBC, the art
historian and cultural critic of later fame, E. H. Gombrich, added a hearing note
for auditors highly relevant to the reception of Pound’s short-wave transmissions.
‘Listening to bad reception is a very strenuous affair’, he conceded, potentially
compounded by a transcriber’s ‘pet projection’ of meaning onto an unfamiliar
context. Owing to poor reception and invariable ‘mismonitoring’ – so evident
across the FCC’s 125 transcriptions of Pound’s broadcasts (frequently turning
Mencius into Mencken, amongst countless others) – Gombrich argued that
broadcasters ‘talk much less nonsense than they are credited with’. Adjusting to
these challenges, ‘[o]ur main hypothesis must be that the sound makes sense’. To
explain, Gombrich recounted this story:
Rather than giving examples from our daily experience I’ll fix on the stock story
of mismonitoring which appears to be older than monitoring itself. It is the story
of signaler who misheard the urgent message ‘Send reinforcements, am going
to advance’ as ‘Send three and fourpence, am going to a dance’. Now it is well

possible that the sound test could not have told him he was wrong. Rhythm and
vowels of the stressed syllables are identical. Nor was there any context to help
him. But I think he should have been sacked because three and fourpence is an
unlikely sum to ask for – dance or no dance. This should have warned him to
keep his projection detachable and to try again.
(More recent examples on personal application, though I prefer to forget
them[.])13
With only 11 shortwave stations in 1943 – six of which were housed in Rome –
it is clear that broadcasting in Fascist Italy was a smaller and less-sophisticated
affair than that of its principal wartime rivals (Germany, Britain, France, Japan,
the USSR and the USA).14 Yet EIAR was still able to transmit by shortwave to
Italian East Africa as well as, intermittently, to ‘merchant crews’ in Eastern Asia,
the Middle East, India, Ireland and Latin America. These were supplemented
by two programmes (‘A’ and ‘B’) on EIAR’s home service – apparently needing
to share wavelengths with Fascist Italy’s overseas service, broadcasting from
February 1940 in a minimum of 25 languages (including Persian, Hindi and
Afrikaans).15 In consequence, EIAR was faced with several problems regarding
its overseas transmissions. First, compounding the invariable problems of
shortwave reception faced by all wartime broadcasters was the fact that EIAR
only had a quarter of BBC’s shortwave stations at its disposal; the former’s
output was much less powerful, and consequently much less clear, than those
of other wartime powers. Furthermore, EIAR wavelengths had to be shared
between home and overseas services, meaning there was a considerable amount
of irregularity in the schedule of broadcasts. With respect to Pound – doubtless
amongst other Radio Rome broadcasters – one BBC transcriber noted, in
response to an internal query about his Axis propaganda, that ‘Ezra Pound is
broadcasting fairly frequently but irregularly from Rome principally to N. America
at 4.10 or 23.00’.16 In sum, quite apart from the tricky business of recording
unfamiliar broadcasts in occasionally inclement conditions, transmissions from
Radio Rome were clearly far less powerful, and far less standardized, than other
overseas broadcasts.
Finally, adding the complexity and frequently arcane nature of Pound’s
broadcasts into the mix – irrespective of how effective his delivery or emphatic
his message – the persistent problems of reception and transcription by the
FCC and, less so, the BBC, become far more explicable. A last, key aspect of
this problem regarded the discs upon which Pound recorded at EIAR studios.
Apparently also lacking a full complement of Anglophone propagandists,
recordings of Pound’s broadcasts were typically retransmitted – seemingly

sometimes on a whim as ‘filler’ for North American- or British-directed
programmes short of material. Recorded broadcasts could, it seems, be played
a maximum of three times before the sound quality made them virtually
inaudible. In turn, this only serves to reinforce the importance of original
manuscripts rather than recordings or, still worse, second-hand transcriptions
when attempting to reconstruct Pound’s propaganda broadcasts. As with other
shortwave propagandists – especially in wartime Italy – the circumstances
and contexts of Pound’s shortwave transmissions were constraining, no doubt
contributing to later charges of his broadcasting ‘incomprehensibility’. Rather
more reliably, letters from colleagues like San Faustino expressed that Pound
was ‘the most important person on our staff ’, and needed defending against
‘people who otherwise would have liked to push you out. Remember that not all
of us understand what you are trying to do, or what you represent [ …. ] Your
dischi are still going all the time. In other words they are going on the air twice
a week for N.A. and on Sundays for G.B’.17
The extent of Pound’s broadcasting
The broadcast texts composed by Pound in wartime extend, quite literally,

into the thousands. A tip of this iceberg has been glimpsed over the decades in
three volumes: Olga Rudge’s 1948 reproduction of four cultural broadcasts in
If This Be Treason; William Levy’s more polemical presentation of 18 broadcast
scripts comprising his 1975 collection, Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound:
from the recordings and transcriptions of his wartime broadcasts, Rome, 1941–
1943; followed in 1978 by the most scholarly and widely consulted edition,
Doob’s aforementioned ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II,
containing fully 110 ‘broadcasts recorded by the FCC’, along with ten additional
‘speeches written before the FCC monitoring unit had been established, some
read by Pound and some read by others, as well as speeches either not used or
not monitored’ (Pound 1978: xii). Here Doob provides an insight as to why
only a fraction of Pound’s radio scripts have received comment. Through
recourse to Pound’s helpful, if limited Department of Justice file, it is clear that
Pound’s treason investigation went into overdrive via the very top of the US
government: on 1 October 1942, to be exact, from a memorandum to Attorney
General Francis Biddle by President Roosevelt.18 Thereafter, various agencies of
state marked out their territories – the War Department, FCC, Department of
Justice (hereafter ‘DOJ’) and, most importantly, the FBI, which soon dispatched
agents to Italy in search of Pound – within months drawing together materials
for his indictment. With bare scholarly exceptions like those provided by Doob
and Tim Redman, then, the rare archival materials consulted on Pound’s radio
propaganda derive from the government’s (ultimately abortive) prosecution
case for treason. As a consequence, enormous chunks have been passed over
in critical silence.
Long before Doob’s groundbreaking reproduction of scripts, scholars had
known about the FCC ‘broadcasts of record – those monitored by the Federal
Communications Commission from 7 December 1941, to 2 July 1943, when
the Department of Justice moved to indict Pound’ (Norman 1948: 47). To
Charles Norman’s 1948 identification of 125 (of 170) broadcast recordings were
added ‘the texts of some 70 unpublished broadcasts delivered by Pound prior to
December 7, 1941’, discussed in a rarely cited article from 1972, ‘Ezra Pound and
the Italian Ministry for Popular Culture’. Decrying the fact that earlier views ‘are
based on what has been a rather selective publication of the documents in the
case’, Robert Corrigan asserts that ‘all of the original typescripts (complete with
handwritten corrections) for Pound’s broadcasts are to be found in the files of
the Department of Justice’; the latter forming the basis of his article (Corrigan
1972: 771, 775, 780). This is certainly incorrect, as the ensuing overview of
previously unpublished materials will show. (Puzzlingly, only four years later,
Heymann’s 1976 Ezra Pound: The Last Rower put the number of Radio Rome
broadcasts at ‘more than 300’, although without indicating why) (Heymann
1976: 144). The original radio typescripts were eventually recovered by Pound
and posthumously deposited, it seems overwhelmingly, at the Beinecke Library.
Amongst more than 300 boxes of Pound papers, according to the Beinecke’s
online catalogue, a minimum of eight boxes of manuscripts cover Pound’s
wartime radio propaganda – listing, by folder, all manner of typescripts and
drafts; rejected scripts and fragments; instructions and slogans; payments
and receipts; sometimes jumbled alongside correspondence, timetables and
handwritten drafts in varying stages of completion. Placing this in relief, the
previously employed manuscripts on Pound’s propaganda for wartime radio
would comfortably fit into one of the Beinecke Library boxes, and this chapter
can only indicate the full scope of extant texts.
The archival records show, in the first place, that Pound’s propaganda scripts
certainly started earlier, and ended later, than previously argued. The latter date
is easier to affix on the basis of the FBI’s reproduction of Pound’s letters to Carl
Goedel on 18 April 1945, referring to Harry F. Truman (Roosevelt died on 12 April
1945, with Vice President Truman immediately sworn in). The previous page of
Pound’s FBI File contains a photocopy of an original typescript, opening:
Pound anonimo No. 199 3 Aprile XXIII
NATURALLY
The prime minister of Assstralia says Australia wants population. Well; well/
What a nice place for the jews. For once a place they could go/ only they dont
WANT a national home; they want the earth, and an abundance of slaves.19
Clearly part of a larger series for the Salò Republic, these documents demonstrate
that Pound continued radio propaganda until the dying days of the Axis regime.
Somewhat surprisingly, the date of Pound’s earliest broadcast typescripts is more
difficult to affix with such certainty.
Leonard Doob’s preface to ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’ places the start of Pound’s
writings for EIAR ‘toward the end of 1940’, whereas in ‘January [1941, Pound]
was able to record his own speeches, which were broadcast, on an average, twice
a week. He wrote the texts at his home in Rapallo and on occasion in Rome
where he traveled to record on discs a batch of 10 to 20 speeches’. Benjamin
Friedlander has recently added that, in November 1940 ‘– five months after Italy
entered the war and a year after his initial overtures – the Ministry of Popular
Culture invited him to submit scripts’ (Pound 1978: xi; Nadel 2011: 118). This is
borne out by a 9 November 1940 letter of explanation to the Ministry of Popular
Culture’s (Minculpop) chief radio functionary, Gabriele Paresce, found amongst
Pound’s scripts: ‘I am sending you a draft of what might be of use. Nothing
solemn or formal will hold the American auditor. If I don’t sound a bit cracked
and disjointed they will merely twirl the button [ … ] Hence the indications
of American dialects etc. in the spelling’. The typescript attached to this note,
entitled ‘Now that the Elections are Over’ – referring to the second re-election
of President Roosevelt – was obviously intended to be read by Pound. Referring
to his first broadcast in early 1935, a one-off on 11 January, Pound begins:
‘Of course this isn’t the first time I have approached (approached is the right
word) the microphone. Shortly after they started short wave Rome to America
that is several years ago I came down here and said a few words about Major
Douglas Social Credit Scheme’ (YBL & quoted in Rachewiltz 1979–1980: 162).20
Mary de Rachewiltz, who makes effective use of this typescript in what was
then – as now – one of the very few non-FCC transcripts to be analysed, claims
that even after this meeting Pound ‘received a polite letter saying the Ministry of
Popular Culture, Radio Department, was not able at present to make use of his
writing’ (Rachewiltz 1979–1980: 163).21 However on 6 May 1945, in a detailed
six-page ‘statement’ to FBI agents – seemingly his earliest recorded interrogation

by FBI officials – Pound was quite clear on the genesis of his radio propaganda
for Minculpop. He had been encouraged at some point in 1939, following
a discussion with Alessandro Pavolini, to ‘talk over the Italian Radio to the
American people for the purpose of pointing out the fine work which Mussolini
had done in Italy’. Then, Pound continued, he was invited to further discuss the
matter with Paresce and Telesio Interlandi in spring 1940; and thereafter, ‘was
finally allowed to give two broadcasts to the United States and one broadcast per
week to England. I began broadcasting in person over the Italian Radio about
the Summer of 1940’.22
Yet critical commentaries no less than the tenor of the above script seem to
suggest otherwise; namely, that wartime broadcasts in Pound’s own name only
started on, or shortly after, 9 November 1940. Also problematically, according to
Anne Conover, on 22 August 1940 Pound wrote to his mistress and collaborator,
Olga Rudge, following a trip to Minculpop: ‘Waaal, mebbe papa bring home
the bacon/not official, but sum under consideration diece mille [lire]’ (Pound,
quoted in Conover 2001: 140). Similarly supporting Pound’s account to the FBI
are a handful of radio typescripts in the Beinecke Library dating from 1940. One
tentatively dated in the online catalogue [1940?] is entitled ‘Communications’,
and is delivered in the first person; so too is ‘The Quiet Disposition’, bearing the
earliest proposed date for radio propaganda as April-May 1940 – even before
Italian entry into World War II, which would be in line with Pound’s account to
the FBI. That typescript, in turn, explicitly recalls his 19 August 1939 Action text
on the imminent war, presumably published only months before: ‘On Aug. 19 I
wrote what wd/ happen to PO/land. It has happened. Wash it off. I am not here
to look backward. What I wanna know is what NEXT!’23
Several alternatives suggest themselves. First, it is clear from internal
evidence – for instance, to Vice President Wallace in ‘Alliance’ (Henry Wallace
only took office on 20 January 1941) – that several of the proposed 1940 scripts
are simply misdated, and should read 1941 instead.24 Nor are extant manuscripts,
although exhaustive, by any means ‘complete’ for this period. Still another
possibility is that scripts composed before November 1940 were principally
broadcast (and possibly retained) by other Radio Rome announcers. Or yet
again, early on, Pound may have fallen foul of Fascist censors. He suggested as
much in the aforementioned FBI interrogation:
I consistently fought for more time on the air to get my ideas to the American
and English peoples. At first, for a very brief time, I used to speak directly
over the air, but on one occasion during 1940 I made some remarks not in the
manuscript previously approved by the Ministry of Popular Culture, simply a

repeat of a main point, and after that incident I was ordered by Paresce to record
my talks on a disc, and this disc would be rebroadcast over the air [ …. ] During
1942 and the first of 1943, at Rapallo, I would write about twenty or twenty
one radio manuscripts or talks, and then I would go to Rome where I visited
the registration room of the Ente Italiana Audizione [sic] Radiofoniche and
make discs for rebroadcasts of my talks. I usually remained Rome about three
weeks, making three recordings per day. I made these recordings only after my
manuscripts had been approved by Mr. Ungaro, sub-head of the Radio Section
of the Ministry of Popular Culture.25
If the precise origins of Pound’s initial radio propaganda remain debatable, his
transition to steady broadcasting in January 1941 is far more certain. Decisively
coming to his aid was the influential Camillo Pellizzi, previously the facilitator
of Pound’s propaganda for the Italian Fascists Abroad publication, the British-
Italian Bulletin. As Redman reports, Pound complained on 11 January that
‘I will BUST if some use isn’t made of me’. Pellizzi responded later that day: ‘I
phoned to Ungaro and Paresce of our radio (foreign) service; you are going
to hear from them’.26 Without doubt, Pellizzi achieved results quickly. Most
scholars have agreed upon the date of 23 January 1941 for the commencement
of Pound’s short-wave transmissions; although according to Anne Conover,
only a dozen days following his exchange with Pellizzi, Pound wrote to Olga
Rudge: ‘made 2 discs yesterday … 9 discursi in a fortnight’ (Conover, Rudge and
Pound 2001: 143). Nonetheless, despite persisting objections from a few officials
(Heymann 1976: 99ff), it seems Pound’s broadcasting career properly began to
take off. At points, it seems he occasionally stayed with Pellizzi when travelling
to Rome, recorded in a letter of thanks on 15 February 1941, wherein he also
declared: ‘I got some comfort out of looking through my British Italian Bulletin
stuff, two days ago. Something ought to be done about reprinting it [ …. ] I ought
to have six or eight men working under my direction/ for KULCHUR/ hell, there
are lame, halt, consumptive blokes not in the trenches’.27 Yet if Pellizzi was unable
to help with Pound’s more fanciful requests, he surely opened doors at the start
of his broadcasting career.
Pound’s well-known complaint to Harry Meacham and others that it ‘took
me, I think it was, TWO years, insistence and wangling etc to GET HOLD of
their microphone’, then, may well have included the first half of 1941 (Stock
1970: 390). This is borne out by the ‘Daily Broadcast Reports’ undertaken by the
BBC wartime monitoring stations. Only a handful of broadcasts are transcribed
by Pound before five summaries from June 1941; rising to 15 in July, with a
similar number each month until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7
December 1941, examined below. Scores of BBC holdings for 1941 thus further
demonstrate that FCC transcripts comprise but a fraction of Pound’s propaganda
broadcasts. A final example of BBC transcription methods must suffice here,
from a Daily Broadcast Report of 1 November 1941, which represents the first
fifth of a ten-minute EIAR broadcast to Britain and the USA. It again returns
to Pound’s anti-Semitic ‘prophecy’ in the 19 August 1939 number of the
aforementioned British Union of Fascists’ publication, Action:
ROME 221.1m IN ENGLISH FOR ENGLAND AND U.S.A 22.00 (10 mins)
1.11.41
Talk by Ezra Pound: “A Word to the Rabbis”
War and American Jewry
Before this bloody war started I told the Poles and the Jews what would
happen to Poland if she let Britain get her into a war; I told them then that
there would not be any Poland. Today I say to American Jewry, if the 6,000,000
Jews of the U.S.A. get her into this war, that won’t be a bright day for American
Jewry – no, nor a bright tomorrow.28
The next day, this broadcast was praised, with telling detail on the nature of his
scripts, by Pound’s ‘line manager’, Prince Ranieri di San Faustino:
Your ‘word to the Rabbis’ was, by far the best thing that you’ve turned out so
far. Diction was eccelent [sic] and the text was super super. The damned fool
announcer last night didn’t give your name before you spoke and I’ll bet that you
were on to it. Transmission was not so good because the record has gone twice
before for North America, the quallity [sic] of the records is so bad these days
that we can’t use them more’n twice, or at the outside, three times.
As recorded by BBC monitors, an earlier transmission of this text took place

on the tenth of the preceding month.29 In turn, demonstrating the thematic
proximity of Pound’s broadcasts with those of regime functionaries during
World War II, Vincent Arnold’s survey of Italian propaganda provides brief
details of the following five anti-Semitic broadcasts ‘encouraged’ by Minculpop
and also broadcast in October: ‘The Protocols of Zion’ by Alberto Luchini,
‘Judaism Against Western Civilization’ by Giulio [Julius] Evola, ‘Judaism Against
Rome’ by Massimo Scaligero, ‘The Jewish International’ by Piero Pellicano and
‘Judaism Wanted This War’ by Giovanni Preziosi (Arnold 1998: 143). Amongst
this gallery of racist ideologues, as Archie Henderson has recently noted,
Alberto Luchini is particularly relevant. Having been appointed in May 1941
to the Racial Bureau attached to the Minculpop, Luchini organized the above
five radio broadcasts for EIAR, published the next year in Rome as Gli ebrei
hanno voluto la guerra [The Jews wanted war]. Most important in the present
context, Pound was corresponding with Luchini from 1943 while, as Henderson
further points out, ‘Pound’s copy of Gli ebrei is in the Ezra Pound library at the
University of Texas at Austin’ (Pound 2009: 851).30
Two final points deserve mention in respect of these neglected files. The first
and most revealing is Pound’s recourse to pseudonyms in his broadcast scripts.
Some of these pseudonymous names have been alluded to in the literature to
date, if not yet pursued. Ezra Pound: The Last Rower provides a good example:
Much of the time he was involved in more than simply the writing and reading
of his own Radio Rome speeches. The [FBI] records indicate that Pound
performed various functions. He wrote press releases for other broadcasters
to read, edited manuscripts, created slogans, helped organize the network’s
propaganda campaign. At points he coauthored broadcasts and frequently
shared the microphone with fellow announcers, participating in a number of
news discussions and symposiums. And just as he had once churned out art and
music criticism for The New Age under the pseudonyms B.H. Dias and William
Atheling, he now broadcast, frequently, under the assumed name of Giovanni
Del Bene. (Heymann 1976: 110–111; italics added)
Heymann’s paragraph surely cries out for further explanation. What was the
nature of Pound’s other ‘various functions’? Were the propaganda themes in
these additional activities in keeping with his radio broadcasts, and with wartime
Axis propaganda more generally? Lastly and most relevantly is the implication
that, once more needing money from any source possible, Pound returned to
writing under pseudonyms. In addition to ‘Giovanni Del Bene’, Carpenter adds
that ‘four or five’ scripts under the name ‘Piero Mazda’ were read over Radio
Rome in August 1943 (during the notorious ‘45 days’ when Mussolini was
under house arrest); while another pseudonymous creation, ‘Mr. Dooley’, was
seemingly used on behalf of the Nazi-controlled shortwave station Radio Milan
from spring 1944 (Carpenter 1988: 626, 633; Heyman 1976: 150–151).31 Yet with
respect to pseudonyms – and notwithstanding Pound’s undertakings during the
little-known period of the Salò Republic (September 1943–May 1945) – quite
literally, that is not the half of it.
Beyond ‘Giovanni Del Bene’, ‘Piero Mazda’ and ‘Mr. Dooley’, Pound
compiled typescripts under another ten names. These included the following
pseudonyms: ‘Bruce Bairnsfather’, ‘Langdon Billings’, ‘Julian Bingham’, ‘Pietro
and Manilo Squarcio’ and ‘Marco Veneziano’. More general noms de guerre
extended to ‘American Imperialist’ and ‘Colonel Blimp’, as well as the two

anonymous series, ‘News from Nowhere’ and ‘Notes in the Margin’. Noting
that his reading of ‘Giovanni Delbene’ broadcasts had received ‘favourable
comment’, Pound stressed how that persona, unlike other creations, was
‘purposely studded with cliches’. In contrast to the Stalinist Radio Revolution
or Nazism’s Radio Bremen, Pound further pointed out, ‘we must be different/
we can’t be the liv[e]liest/ so must be the most signorile [elegant]. It is our only
line’. To this end, Pound concluded his letter to Ungaro by decrying the dearth
of talent at EIAR: ‘A dozen voices (which we aint got) with a dozen convictions/
or one conversationalist and a dozen interruptions containing three ideas
(at maximum) per dozen’.32
Pound’s adoption of pseudonymous personae, by and large, appears geared
towards satire. Like the dozens of scripts simply headed ‘Pound/anonymous’,
moreover, writing under pseudonyms would have allowed Pound – should he
wish – to make statements he could not, or would not, make officially in his own
name. This consideration is borne out by one many of the internal instructions
heading the first page of Pound’s typescripts, such as that from 11 July 1942:
Explanatory note for the office/ not for transmission.
The ‘Imperialist’s’ point of view is NOT my point of view, and it is not fascist.
It is I00% MATERIALIST.
The personality of ‘American Imperialist’ should be kept quite distinct/
someone ELSE must appear to be writing these notes. If I slip and put in
picturesque expressions, or something TOO obviously my own/ CUT IT OUT
Imperialist must use a certain number of cliches/
And also keep off certain cliches.
He must be a little dull. That is intentional.33
Of the 585 folders composing the ‘Pound Radio’ collection, at least one-
eighth are given over to scripts explicitly anonymous or pseudonymous in
composition. This raises a second and more technical point regarding the texts
for Pound’s broadcasts. Generally the titled folders, irrespective of the person/a
heading them, include typescripts averaging roughly five pages, although
some also include a fair copy, thus rising to ten manuscript pages. Still other
folders contain multiple texts, or shorter slogans. An overview of Box 126,
containing most of Pound’s pseudonymous scripts held at Yale, is instructive
here. It comprises 23 folders of scripts under the alphabetical names ‘American
Imperialist’ (14 folders), ‘Bruce Bairnsfather’ (1 folder), ‘Langdon Billings’
(1 folder) and ‘Julian Bingham’ (7 folders). In turn, these comprised single
typescripts ranging from three pages (5221) to eight pages (5238), save for two
folders of 16 and 26 pages, respectively. The former, like many of these folders
without a headed date of composition or transmission, contains a five-page
script entitled ‘Gangsters Together’, along with a fair copy of similar length.
Appended at the end, unexpectedly, are two copies of another one-and-half-
page typescript, providing internal recommendations in Italian and English.
These include suggestions like ‘SHORTEN ALL introductory phrases. E.P.’s
talk can b[e] announced as “talk followed BY Mozart’s 13 sonata”; or whatever’;
instructions including ‘SLOWLY the list of wave lengths’; advice on concision
regarding ‘News (condensato, come se per ogni parola inutile ci fosse una multa
[condensed, as if for each unnecessary word there is a fine])’; and the following
two phrases advocated for broadcast, ‘SLOGAN/ Wherever etc/ the British go,
there is famine. Wherever the Americans go to save the inhabitants, they shoot
the inhabitants’.34
In addition to the typescripts and notices described above, Box 126 contains
a final folder of 26 pages with various items by ‘American Imperialist’.
Underscoring Pound’s point about sarcasm, this persona admired President
Grover Cleveland (first elected in 1885, the year Pound was born) and advocated
the American annexation of the remainder of North, Central, South America,
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in ‘American Imperialist Answers a Question’.
The second script, also of five pages, is entitled ‘London Opinion’, whereas the
next is one page, and unlike the others, carries no title, name or pagination; it is
doubtful if any text from this page was broadcast. Thereafter, another five-page
script entitled ‘American Imperialist Writes’ is headed with the instruction ‘(fill in
date of day before transmission) American Imperialist writes us, as the above
date’. This is followed by three pages with four shorter notes and slogans – the
last satirizing the ‘Old Establishment firm of John Bull, now Bull and Bullstein
(to be read in a nasty chewish voice)’ – before the final item in Folder 5234, a
six-page typescript entitled ‘Notes of an American Imperialist’. Concluding his
pastiche on the unlikely American annexation of Brazil, on the one hand, and
in keeping with Pound’s complete devotion to Fascism on the other, ‘American
Imperialist’ suggests:
If Mr Roosevelt is to confer any solid benefits on his electorate by the
ownership of Brazil, de facto, or de jure, or both, he will, I think, have to take
several more lessons from the New Europe than he seems at present likely to
take. His Bizantinsim [sic] is not a good imitation of fascist or nazi order. It
is open to all the charges levied against fascism and seems to contain few or
none of the benefits which abler leaders have conferred on the Rising Order
in Europe.35
In Box 126, Folder 5234, then, there are nine different standalone texts, all
in a register far removed from Pound’s simultaneous ‘official’ broadcasts. At
the same time, this rhetoric corresponded closely to the official line at the
time, as Vincent Arnold contends: ‘Fascist propaganda portrayed Roosevelt
as a “warmonger” whose plutocratic cabinet was infested with Jews’ (Arnold
1998: 152).
By way of a final example of the extent of Pound’s broadcasts scripts which
also raises the issue of dating examined below, mention of a final four folders
from the Beinecke Library’s subsequent box is merited. Box 127 gives further
credence to the argument here that the estimate for the total number of scripts
written or broadcast by Pound should be revised upwards from 200 by a digit
– coming to a precise number is beyond the scope of this study and needs to be
methodologically delimited using full and fair typescripts, drafts in various stages
as well as other short texts (such as slogans and announcements). Following the
remainder of the explicitly pseudonymous scripts, this box then moves on to
some of the many folders marked ‘Anon.: typescript’. Amongst the dozen such
folders in this single box, Folder 5267 contains 49 pages of typescripts covering
1–27 February 1942, while the preceding three folders also include effectively
daily items between 9–29 December 1941 (5264); 1–10 January (5265); and 10–31
January 1942 (5266), respectively. In total, there are more than 100 radio items
from these months alone, held in four of the fully 46 folders comprising Box 127.
By far the most important of these, Folders 5264–5266, amongst other materials
highlighted in the subsection below, are taken from a period in which Pound
was thought to have ‘retired’ from radio propaganda – the weeks following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. In addition to this near-
ubiquitous critical view on Pound’s alleged reconsideration of his broadcasting
role, it has also been claimed that he considered returning to the USA at that
time (as he had considered doing more than a year earlier, when his income was
at its most uncertain). For instance, according to J. J. Wilhelm’s 1994 monograph
Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972, ‘Pound clearly entered a month and
a half of silent contemplation over the gravity of his situation, mulling over the
difficulties of moving a daughter whose nationality was not clearly established,
a lover, a wife, an aged mother, and a severely disabled father’ (Wilhelm
1994: 184). Both for emphasizing the number of Pound’s radio manuscripts and
in highlighting some of the misunderstandings around the dating of Pound’s
talks more generally, then, Pound’s December 1941 and January 1942 broadcast
typescripts deserve closer consideration.
Dating of Pound’s broadcasts
The period between 7 December 1941 and 29 January 1942 is one of the
several periods in which Pound has been alleged to have gone quiet during
Italy’s involvement in World War II. A second key period, if less consistently
advanced, nonetheless also stresses that Pound stopped broadcasting between
July 1942 and February 1943. Correcting these two inaccuracies is the purpose
of the present subsection, commencing with widely circulated reports that
Pound had ‘retired to Rapallo to continue his study of Chinese philosophy’ in
the weeks following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the words of Benjamin
Friedlander’s otherwise insightful ‘Radio Broadcasts’ essay: ‘initially Pound did
retire from broadcasting, preparing a statement that Time magazine cited with
relief in January – the issue was still on the newsstands when Pound returned
to the air’ (Nadel 2011: 117–118). Again this lacuna is reinforced by Doob’s
‘Ezra Pound Speaking’ in the space between scripts numbered five (‘Those
Parentheses’, 7 December 1941) and six (‘On Resuming’, 29 January 1942).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pound wrote the original disclaimer personally –
with his handwriting in the margin: ‘repeat in several transmissions’ – which
concludes: ‘His views have at no time been suggested by us, and have, in fact,
often been formed before Italian opinion was ready to accept them’.36 To date,
however, critical discussion has only focused upon scripts and broadcasts
Pound made in his own name. During these weeks, Pound wrote, and may have
broadcasted (equally, they may have been read by another announcer), scores of
shorter items in the aforementioned ‘Anonymous’ folders, as well as a longer 26
December 1941 typescript by ‘Giovanni Delbene’ proclaiming, in part:
All the anglo-saxon countries are years late in learning the lesson of the two
great European revolutions. Many englishmen and americans have NEVER
given ten minutes thought to ANY of the fundamental issues involved, indeed
they had never even begun to be THOUGHTFUL until the Japanese ran up the
SunRise flag over Hong Kong.37
Intimations that Pound never ‘retired’ during this period were long ago raised
by Tim Redman’s ‘The Repatriation of Ezra Pound, 1939–1942: A View from the
Archives’. Although mainly dealing with Pound’s abortive attempts at returning
to the USA in later 1940 and again, half-heartedly, in December 1941 ‘as one
of about a thousand Americans who remained in Italy’ at that time, Redman
draws upon two important exchanges of correspondence. The first is the
aforementioned Adriano Ungaro, whereas the second is Cornelio di Marzo,

Pound’s editor at ‘the prestigious’ Il Meridiano di Roma, with whom ‘more than
100 articles [were] published between 24 April 1938 and 12 September 1943,
with the greatest number written during the triennium 1940–1942’ (Redman
1979; 1992: 197).38 Similar to Heymann’s suggestive leads from the one-sided FBI
file, Pound’s explicit desire to continue broadcasting has simply been neglected
since Redman’s groundbreaking article:
Even if America declares war on the Axis, I see no reason (from my own point of
view) why I should not continue to speak in my own name, so long as I say nothing
that can in any way prejudice the results of American military or naval (or navel)
action, the armed forces of the U.S.A. or the welfare of my native country.
But contrary to a suggestion made to me yesterday, I see considerable

reason for NOT continuing an indirect participation [ … ] As the U.S. is not yet
legally at war with Italy I shall continue to send you notes signed and unsigned
(9 December 1941)
It seems to me that my work must continue. Twenty, or more visibly, ten years
of work for a New Europe. (16 December 1941)
It seems to me that my speeches on the radio must continue IN MY OWN

NAME, and with my voice, and NOT anonymously. (28 December 1941)
(Redman 1979: 448, 455–456)39
Further detail on this obscured period is provided by four folders of pivotal

correspondence between Pound and Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, a Fascist
apparatchik for EIAR and, it appears, Pound’s closest radio collaborator and
immediate superior. Their exchanges put both at the heart of Anglophone
propaganda efforts for wartime Italy prior to Mussolini’s July 1943 arrest. For
example, they shared authorship of the ‘News from Nowhere’ slogans and ‘short
jabs’ that, in San Faustino’s view, were ‘the best thing you have turned out till
now’ and ‘the kind of thing that will put Rome on the map’. He then concluded:
‘Turned out four of them yesterday, but lack the master touch’.40 Responding the
same day, Pound addressed the nature of his different typescripts, with shorter
texts sent by post anonymously or pseudonymously (like the ‘News from Nowhere’
series), with longer scripts to ‘go in my own voice, except when real reason for
its being impersonal’. Four days later, San Faustino declared that Pound was ‘the
most important personage that the Italian Radio has, and I don’t want to cheapen
anything that you may say by putting over the air small items that might be written
by anyone’. San Faustino was also more than just a co-author and cheerleader for
Pound and, in October 1941, recommended that Pound ‘standardise the Europe
calling, Ezra Pound speaking, business. In one talk you said it and in another
you left out the Europe calling’.41 This was clearly a close and productive working
relationship, indicated not only by their revealing correspondence as much as
by the extent of the ‘News from Nowhere’ typescripts. Amongst Pound’s papers
are four folders in the Beinecke Library dedicated to this ‘News from Nowhere’
series, dating between March 1941 and September 1942 – with many additional
phrases interspersed with typescripts earmarked for inclusion – of which the first,
Folder 5597, contains 55 pages of slogans from 8 March to 31 December 1941.
Conclusively demonstrating that Pound never retired in the period following
American entry into World War II, the following ‘News from Nowhere’ item is
dated 18 December 1941 and headed ‘Pound/ anonymous’:
Washington dispatches state that Mr Roosevelt has appointed a commission to
exhonorate Mssr [sic] Knox, Stimpson and Roosevelt (F.D.) from engineering
the defeat, not to say wash-out of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour.
It seems that this move has given universal satisfaction.42
Of Pound’s supposed ‘retirement’, furthermore, on the very day the US declared

war on Italy – less than 100 hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor – Pound
asserted to San Faustino that it was ‘torture to be out of action’:
The moment Roosevelt called it war on national socialism/ (which is what I
believe he said) it ceases to be a war of nations and is recognized officially by the
old tub as an ideological or social war [ … .] That I think VERY important, not
only for my personal position, but for the whole leverage of discussion/ Guerra
ideological etc/ You will prob/ see the notes I am sending to the office today/ and
those sent yesterday.
Should this not be clear, Pound reiterated his position on 16 December 1941:
The conflict is a conflict between two ORDERS. I can’t see that I have any right to
withdraw from it [ … .] At any rate my work ought to go ON. Whether direct or
indirect/ whether transmitted or whether it go on building cultural foundation
and mechanism. (as in my translation of Confucius)43
Two days later Pound was still more succinct: ‘The world situation is unique. My
position is unique, at least so far as I know. No one else has been fighting the enemy
from just my position. The question now is: HOW am I to continue?’ By way of
an answer, the next day San Faustino recommended writing to Pavolini directly
(then Minister for Popular Culture in Fascist Italy) ‘since you are for all intents
and purposes an enemy alien’, even though he firmly agreed with Pound’s position:
Your collaboration has got to go on, for many reasons which, I think and many
other people in high places think, are self evident.
Maybe you don’t know more than anybody else, but what you do know is so
much more than most people, hence our desire for more and more collaboration.
Naturally this collaboration will have to be slightly modified. You will have to
be more impersonal, more work will have to be anonymous, and anything that
you will give over the air, in your own name, will have to be of a cultural kind
for propaganda reasons.44
It seems both men agreed that Pearl Harbor placed only a temporary barrier to
the resumption of Pound’s normal work for Radio Rome – even if his personal
broadcasts apparently had to wait until 26 January 1942 for official permission
from the wartime ‘Italian Supreme Command to remain in Italy for the duration
of the war’ (Heymann 1976: 112). By mid-December 1941, the matter of Pound’s
continued collaboration appeared settled amongst EIAR staff, and he was back to
discussing propaganda strategy with San Faustino: ‘No use merely d[u]placating
Haw Haw; for example [ … ] the MAIN job, has been recently defined by Hitler/
to make sure that even 15 or 20 years, the kike kahal or Stank of England will
NOT be in a position to start another strangling movement’.45 Yet once again, San
Faustino scarcely needed to be told, with Vincent Arnold summarizing Fascist
propaganda at the end of 1941: ‘It was now a war being fought to defend the
Italian people from the economic and territorial aspirations of the Jew-ridden
Allies’ (Arnold 1998: 140).
Folders 5364–5266 are equally revealing. Of the 21 items in Folder 5264
(ranging from 9 to 31 December 1941), most are concerned with USA entry
into the war. The earliest, scored ‘Not Sent’ in blue pencil at the top of the first
page, already speaks of Roosevelt’s ‘moral defeat’, concluding ‘ANYthing like a
MORAL basis for Anglo American propaganda was annihilated the day they
made common cause with soviet Russia. A fact which even American patriots
will be loath to deny.’ The final item, like the others shorter (a page or less) and
headed ‘Pound/ anonymous/ 31 Dec.’, reads in full:
HOT WIRE/ Washington/ day of atonement.
While it is not expected that there will BE any more Presidential elections in
the U.S., it has nevertheless been decided that if the formality of swearing in a
President ever recurs the OATH will be administered on the Talmud, and not
on the bible as heretofore.
Dr. Litvinof has expressed his appreciation of this attention.46
Folder 5265 continues with on same theme, with two short notes proclaiming
the next day: ‘England and the U.S.A. are now in jewish hands. They are headed
for Soviet condition[s]. [T]he jew never changes. Put him in charge and you get
sweat shops’. A subsequent, eight-page typescript dated the same day, entitled
‘Quisling’, concludes:
QUISLING proposed a WAY TO PEACE, it was NOT a way to Italian
advancement in particular, and we can therefore do it justice without being in
any way partial to Quisling’s aims. ANY man who desired peace before I939
was OUTLAW to Churchill; Mendel; Blum, jewry, and the international money
sharks. Among whom we include Roosevelt and his companions.
The next day, another anonymous, seven-page typescript in this folder declared:
Italy’s radio-transmissions have been directed to the THINKING minority. This
may be a tactical mistake on our part, but we doubt that it is so. It takes longer to
get an effect. It may NEVER have an effect. You may go on dragging out the war
for a decade. It would take the Japanese some time to get to Fort Knox [ … ]. The
immediate decision depend[s] on stukas. No flights of oratory on our part will
wring the faintest desire for justice from the anglo-judeo-american oligarchy. If
were [sic] were a group of yellow dogs like Churchill, Roosevelt and Donovan we
would be appealing to that minority to riot, to shoot from behin[d] stable doors,
the[n] run amok with pocket machine guns.47
Just over a week later, in the first of another score of shorter typescripts
commencing Folder 5266, Pound praised the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – which
he first read in April 1940 – ‘not written by them but which is without shadow
of doubt or turning a compendium of the method employed to make wars’.48
A further two-page typescript is headed ‘Pound/ anonymous/ (or giovanni
delbene) 16 Genn’, and concludes thus: ‘The aim of this is to leave a small group
of jews in control of ALL america and to reduce the american farmers to the level
of russian serfs. The AXIS stands for the homestead; for individual initiative in
business up to the absolute maximum co[m]patible with the good of the whole
nation’.49 On the whole, if anything, these anonymous scripts are clearer and less
compromising than Pound’s personal broadcasts, even if the propaganda themes
remain consistent. If the language increasingly smacked of Nazi propaganda,
for Pound as for Fascist Italy, as Jeffrey Herf incisively shows, much is owed to
the anti-Semitic propaganda offensive launched by the Third Reich in summer
1941. Exemplifying ‘The Alliance of Bolshevism and Plutocracy’, a Reich Press
Office directive of 8 August 1941 concludes:
Today Jewry again seeks world domination. That British and American
plutocrats on the one hand and Bolsheviks on the other appear with apparently
distinct political goals is only Jewish camouflage. The Jew strives for world
domination in order to rob and plunder the world for his exclusive benefit,
without distraction or hindrance.
The ‘Office of Enlightenment and Speaker Information Materials’ also under

Otto Dietrich’s control and in the wake of initial military success against the
USSR similarly produced a pamphlet resorting to a familiar metonymizing of
leading international Jews, allegedly starting the war against the Axis:
Plutocracy and Bolshevism have one master, the Jews! [ … .] These all-powerful
forces include, to name only a few, the following names: in America, Schiff,
Warburg, Guggenheim, Morgenthau, Goldman, Baruch, Bullit, Untermeyer,
and so on; in England, Hore-Belisha, Salmon, Stern, Reading, Green, Isaacs, and
so on; in the Soviet state, Kaganovich, Bermann, Schwernik, Mechlis, Maisky,
and so on.50
Despite a second misconception regarding the dating of his broadcasts, it seems

Pound never stopped during wartime. He was too committed, and too connected,
for that. Yet many accounts of the period have given a different impression. Most
notably, Torrey has intuited a ‘silent period’ lasting some six months between
20 August 1942 and 4 February 1943 (acknowledging two exceptions on 19
September and 9 December): ‘suddenly, in mid-August 1942, Pound became
silent [ … ] Financial receipts for payments made to Pound also stopped abruptly
on 12 August and did not resume until 19 October. There is, then, a period of at
least two months in the middle of the war in which Ezra Pound dropped from
view’. Torrey ascribes this silence to the possibility of a trip by Pound to Nazi
Germany at this time, or alternatively, to learning of the treason charges being
prepared against him (Torrey 1984: 164–165). Neither of these scenarios seems
likely and, in any case, Pound neither stopped speaking nor ceased receiving
payment by Minculpop until the end of World War II. Once more, the Beinecke
Library collection is instrumental in dispelling myths surrounding the dating of
Pound’s propaganda typescripts.
Amongst the texts indexed under the heading ‘Radio Articles A-Z’, three are
directly relevant to Pound’s supposed second ‘silent period’. The first, ‘Borderline
Cases’ in Folder 5375, is dated 11 September 1942 in the ‘Guide to the Ezra Pound
Papers’, with a corresponding ‘used 11/9’ handwritten at the top of the first page.
A six-page script entitled ‘A Segment’ then speculates on the causes of World
War II in Folder 5688, dated 17 September 1942: ‘There is no use in regarding
this war as anything save a segment of the long persisting war of the jews against
the rest of humanity’.51 Finally, Folder 5370 contains another typescript titled
‘Blinder Alleys’. Dated 20 September 1942 (and quite possibly the ‘exception’
noted by Torrey), in addition to praising fascist ideology, an excerpt from this

text reveals that these scripts were at least intended for broadcast in Pound’s own
name:
The fascist and nazi movements are prob[ably] more interesting to me than to
those of you who have NOT been interested in reform movements[;] monetary
reform movements for the past 20 or 35 years/ they are prob. more interesting
to me than even to the itals/ and germans/ who have lived their revolutions
and not observed failure of reform in other countries/ [ … .] fascism was created
to remedy the glaring defects of dem/ govt. And the maintenance of that hoax
is all B.B.C. and all jew propaganda. [ … . handwritten in the margin: In Engl.
dem(ocracy) a mere word] The axis stands for the direction of the will to
something better than lucre. It stands for a scale of values.52
Lastly bearing upon this ‘silent period’ is a highly revealing ledger suggesting
Pound’s September 1942 typescripts were indeed broadcast, alongside several
other items he either wrote or delivered that month. In all, Folder 5301 details
195 payments from the Ministry of Popular Culture to Pound, from 22 April
1941 to 26 January 1944. Many of these entries are for longer scripts at 350
lire per broadcast, usually in multiples of two or three, whereas shorter notes
earned 250 lire and those announced by another EIAR propagandist earning
up to 300 lire.53 In addition many greater, obviously composite sums are also
included amongst Pound’s payments (such as 2052 lire on 15 September 1941;
the largest amount, 3100 lire on 21 July 1942; 1050 lire on 26 January 1944,
and so on). Payments for the quite representative month of September 1942
– typically processed, alongside several other payments, at end of the month
– further reflect the extent of his continued engagement with EIAR: 300 lire; 350
lire; 350 lire; 350 lire; 1399 lire; 350 lire; and 650 lire (italics added). Similarly,
during his supposed ‘retirement’ over December 1941, Pound earned 3100 lire
in six payments of 700 lire × 3; 350 lire × 2; and one typescript for 300 lire,
collectively paid on 28 December 1941. In terms of scripts, so too in terms of
payment: there appears to be no pause in Pound’s propaganda output. Moreover,
like many of the manuscripts encountered above, the bottom right-hand side of
the first page contains a date from early May 1945 – often, as in this case, 7 May
1945, the day Pound provided the FBI ‘written permission to search’ his home
and ‘to take any and all documents of interest’– and the initials of one of two FBI
agents sent to Italy to apprehend Pound (here, Special Agent in Charge Ramon
Arrizabalaga; it was typically his deputy, Frank Lawrence Amprim).54 Unusually,
however, Pound signed the tenth and final page of this document on 13 May
1945, under his handwritten declaration: ‘I have no reason to suppose there is
any error in this account’. Above his note is the cumulative figure for these 33
months: 153,060 lire.55
Putting the above figure into context, Pound’s 1941 translation of Odon
Por’s Italy’s Policy of Social Economics 1939/1940 took about him around a
month in total (including corrections and proofs), for which he earned 2500
lire from the Fascist Confederation of Industrial Workers (Redman 1992: 208).56
As has already been shown, Pound wrote and broadcast for Fascist Italy well
before April 1941, and continued to do so long after January 1944. He thus
likely received another year or 18 months’ wages – granted, much of which
was received during a period (1944–1945) when food became more valuable
than money – in addition to that recorded in Folder 5301. Surely offsetting this
inflation, as his 6 May admission sets out, the Republican Ministry of Popular
Culture ‘used to send me about eight thousand lire per month’, before a raise
took this figure to as much as 11,000 lire per month; the final payment arriving
at the end of March 1945.57 At a conservative estimate it therefore appears that,
through a variety of undertakings for Italian radio propaganda between summer
1940 and spring 1945, Pound earned a minimum of 250,000 lire (about $12,500
US dollars in wartime currency; the buying power of an estimated $185,000
today). Whatever else Pound’s wartime broadcasts for Fascist Italy were, they
were at least comparatively well paid.
Abbreviations
TNA/WO The National Archives War Office file on Ezra Pound.

BBC/WAC BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham: various manuscripts on
WWII monitoring and propaganda.
BBC/SWB Daily Broadcast Record. Summary of World Broadcasts, Section 3B,
Italy Abroad.
Bod/FCC Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, FCC transcriptions of Pound
speeches.
FBI/Pound Ezra Pound’s FBI File, divided into 12 sections on microfilm.
DOJ/Pound Ezra Pound’s Department of Justice File, divided into six parts and
available online.
YBL Box/Folder ‘Ezra Pound Papers’, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
YCAL 43.
Archival sources
Yale Beinecke Library

The Ezra Pound Papers (YCAL MSS 43) are housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at Yale University, New Haven, CN. Amongst the several hundred
boxes of manuscripts comprising this collection of papers, the large majority consulted
here fall into relevant correspondence, cited by box and folder; or far more neglected,
the 585 files of radio typescripts between YCAL MSS 43 Box 126, Folder 5220 to
(hereafter) YBL 134/5804, all corresponding to the most recent ‘Guide to the Ezra Pound
Papers’ (last revised December 2002; available at: drs.library.yale.edu:8083/ fedora/get/
beinecke:pound/PDF). Dating provided for Pound’s YBL manuscripts corresponds to
this essential online guide unless otherwise indicated below, such as brackets following
an indication of ‘no date’ [hereafter (‘n.d.’)].
BBC Written Archive Centre

‘Daily Broadcast Reports’ for radio compiled by monitors at the BBC Monitoring Station
in Eversham (and, from 1942, Caversham), England. Now housed at the BBC Written
Archives Centre (hereafter ‘WAC’) in Caversham, Reading, the recording section’s daily
designation for Italy abroad (‘3B’; Pound’s outlet) was summarized daily over several
pages of varying length. Given the BBC’s global monitoring of wartime radio output,
relevant papers on monitoring and propaganda analysis were also sampled from the BBC
WAC’s enormous collection of all manner relating to the development of (mostly British)
radio from the 1920s to the 1970s.
FBI file on Ezra Pound

Commercially purchased microfilm copies of the 1500+ page Federal Bureau of
Investigations, ten-part file on Pound.
The National Archives

The National Archives in Kew, London War Office file on Ezra Pound from 1945 (TNA/
WO 204/12602).
Department of Justice
Ezra Pound’s online files from the Department of Justice (hereafter ‘DOJ’; available
at: http://www.justice.gov/criminal/foia/records/ezra-pound-p1.pdf, last accessed 14
October 2013.
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Microfilm of Pound’s 170 FCC-recorded broadcasts, as well as various pro-Fascist
Anglophone pamphlets from the mid-1930s both in the archives of the Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford (respectively ‘Transcripts of talks broadcast from Rome,
7 Dec. 1941–25 July 1943’, Films 27 (Bod/FCC), and the Taylorian Library’s Foligno
Collection).
Quotations from Ezra Pound are reproduced by kind permission of Palgrave
MacMillan, for permission to reproduce parts of Chapter 5, ‘Pound’s Radio Propaganda,
Revisiting the Critical Literature’ in Matthew Feldman’s 2013 study, Ezra Pound’s Fascist
Propaganda, 1935–1945.
Notes
1 Pound, ‘You New Zealanders’: typescript, [1941?], YBL 134/5802. All archival
sources are given in endnotes for ease of reference.
2 Pound to Ungaro, 22 April 1941, YBL 53/2406; all spelling in original.
3 Pound, ‘Message to Tuan Tzetsun’s Friends’: typescript, 31 January [1943], YBL
132/5581.
4 Pound to Ubaldi 2 November 1944, FBI/Pound, Section 7.
5 Pound, ‘Articles in German “Nein ich spreche nicht” [Germ]’: typescript, 23
November 1943, YBL 128/5291.
6 Pound, ‘Le Mereschal Petain … ’ [no title]: typescripts, 13 August 1941, YBL
132/5643; English translation in FBI/Pound, Section 9. Philippe Pétain’s 12 August
1941 proclamation was translated by the New York Times on 13 August 1941, online
at: www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1941/410812a.html.
7 Pound, ‘Barral’: typescript, July–August 1942, YBL 129/5362; FBI/Pound, Section 8.
8 Pound, cited in Stock, 393; and Carpenter, 569.
9 Apparently internal objections had been raised by Pound’s southern accent at EIAR;
Pound to San Faustino, 19 September 1941, YBL 43/2020.
10 ‘Round the Microphone’, 5 May 1943, excerpted in de Rachewiltz, ‘Fragments of an
Atmosphere’, 167; untitled programme of 12 May 1943 [‘Round the Microphone’?],
Charles Norman, The Case of Ezra Pound (Funk and Wagnalls, New York: 1968
[1948]), 55ff; and ‘Round the Microphone’, 30 June. 1943, Bod/FCC.
11 Pound to Ungaro, 11 November 1941, YBL 53/2410.
12 Pound to Ungaro, 5 August 1942, YBL 53/2409. Employing Pound’s FBI File,
Redman cites all but the last sentence presented here, 222.
13 E. H. Gombrich, ‘Some Axioms, Musings, and Hints on Hearing’, 15 June 1945,
‘Monitoring Service Memos: Misc.’, BBC/WAC, E8/1091.
14 BBC Internal Circulating Memo, ‘Foreign Language Broadcasts From Italy’, 23
February 1940, in BBC/WAC, E8/1091. See also ‘Broadcasting Organisation in
Italy’, 15 December 1942, ‘Foreign Gen/European Intelligence Papers/Surveys of

Broadcasting Organisations 1942–1943’, BBC/WAC, E2/189.
15 ‘BBC Audience Estimates: Italy’, ‘Tangye Lean’s Office: Italian Radio, 1943–1948’,
BBC/WAC, E20/54.
16 BBC Internal Circulating Memo, ‘English Broadcast Memo’ of 25 July 1942, in
‘Monitoring Service Memos: Misc.’, BBC/WAC, 2 E8/1091; italics added.
17 San Faustino to Pound, 19 August 1941, YBL 46/2020.
18 See my ‘The Pound Case in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview’, (2011)
Journal of Modern Literature 35/2; and Roosevelt’s memorandum in DOJ/Pound,
Part 1.
19 Pound to Carl Goedel, 18 April 1945; and Pound, ‘Naturally’, 3 April 1945, FBI/
Pound, Section 11.
20 Pound’s covering letter to Gabriele Paresce, 9 November 1940 (with ‘Now That the
Elections Are Over’: typescript’), YBL 132/5608; and Pound, cited in de Rachewiltz,
‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’, 162.
21 de Rachewiltz, ‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’, 163.
22 TNA/WO, 204/12602, 13c and 13d.
23 Pound, ‘Communications’: typescripts [1940?], YBL 129/5411; and Pound, ‘The
Quiet Disposition’, typescript, April–May 1940, YBL 126/5214.
24 This pertains to ‘Alliance’ (5 August 1940, YBL 128/5316); ‘Brain Mistrust’ (5 July
1940, YBL 127/5377); and the various items in YBL 129/5348 for 30 August 1940;
all should read 1941.
25 TNA/WO, 204/12602, 13d.
26 Pound to Pellizzi, 11 January 1941, cited in Redman, 207; and Pellizzi to Pound, 11
January 1941, YBL 40/1691.
27 Pound to Pellizzi, 11 January 1941; Pellizzi to Pound, 11 January 1941; and Pound
to Pellizzi, 15 February 1941, YBL 43/1691.
28 Pound, ‘A Word to the Rabbis’, 1 November 1941, BBC/SWB.
29 San Faustino to Pound, 2 November 1941, YBL 46/2020; and Pound, 10 October
1941, BBC/DBR.
30 ‘Luchini, Alberto’, Archie Henderson, “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated, 851. I am
grateful to Archie Henderson for drawing my attention to Pound’s connection with
Luchini, underscored by their correspondence between 1943 and 1959, YBL 30/1285.
31 Carpenrer, 626, 633; and Heymann, 150–151.
32 Pound to Ungaro (n.d.) [early March 1942?], YBL 53/2010.
33 Pound, ‘An American Imperialist Writes’, 11 July [1942?], YBL 130/5450.
34 Pound, ‘Langston Billings: ‘Gangsters Together’: typescript, [January 1943?], YBL
127/5236.
35 Pound, ‘American Imperialist’, various undated texts, YBL 127/5234. In his 6 May
1945 statement to FBI interrogators, Pound claimed: ‘So far as I know I wrote all
the broadcasts made under the name of “American Imperialist”. Various people
read over the air the articles which I wrote under the name “American Imperialist” ’.
TNA/WO, 204/12602, 13d.
36 Pound, ‘Announcements by RAI after Pearl Harbour [sic]: typescript’, January 1942,
YBL 128/5292.
37 Pound, ‘Delbene: Dichotomy’: Typescript’, 26 December [1941?], YBL 127/5246.
38 Redman, ‘The Repatriation of Ezra Pound, 1939–1942: A View from the Archive’,
Paideuma 8/3 (1979), 443; and Redman, 197.
39 Pound’s latter two letters to Cornelio di Marzio are translated in Redman (1979).
40 Pound to San Faustino, 17 September 1941; and San Faustino to Pound, 15
September 1941, YBL 46/2020.
41 Pound to San Faustino, 15 September 1941; San Faustino to Pound, 19 September
1941; and San Faustino to Pound, 27 October 1941, YBL 46/2020.
42 Pound, ‘News from Nowhere’, 18 December 1941, YBL 132/5597.
43 Pound to San Faustino, 11 and 16 December 1941, YBL 43/2020.
44 Pound to San Faustino, 18 December 1941; and San Faustino to Pound, 19
December 1941, in YBL 43/2020.
45 Pound to San Faustino, 23 December 1941, YBL 43/2020.
46 Pound, 9 and 31 December 1942, untitled, ‘Anon.: typescript’ 9–29 December 1941,
amongst various items in YBL 127/5264.
47 Pound, 1 and 2 January 1942, untitled, in ‘Anon.: typescript’ of 1–10 January 1942,
amongst various items in YBL 127/5265.
48 Pound, 10 January. 1942, untitled, in ‘Anon.: typescript’ of 10–31 January 1941,
amongst various items in YBL 127/5266. On Pound’s April 1940 reading of the
Russian Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, see Redman, 202.
49 Pound, untitled, 16 January 1942, in YBL 127/5266.
50 Reich Press Office Periodical Service, 8 August 1941; and Germany Has Entered the
Fight to the Finish with the Jewish-Bolshevik System of Murder, Reich Propaganda
Directorate, 21 July 1941 both cited in Herf 2006: 155, 99–101, respectively.
51 Pound, ‘No. 33 ‘Borderline Cases’: typescript’, 11 September 1942 YBL 129 5375;
and Pound, ‘No. 99: ‘A Segment’: typescript’, 17 September [1942?], YBL 133/5688.
52 Pound, ‘No. 98, ‘Blinder Alleys’: typescript, 6L.’, [20 September] 1942, YBL
129/5370.
53 ‘You asked whether the mandate [payment] came through. They WERE coming
regularly, but since my return I have only one and that for 250, instead of 350/ I
supposed it was for a note, not a dis/corso’, Pound to Ungargo, 16 June 1941, YBL
53/2407.
54 FBI/Pound, Section 7, letter from Frank L. Amprim to FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover, 31 May 1945.
55 ‘Pound’s Italian investments and receipts’, (n.d.), YBL 128/5301.
56 Redman points out that Pound’s first draft took just over two weeks to complete.
57 TNA/WO 208/12602, 13f; and ‘Pound’s Italian investments and receipts for
broadcasts’, (n.d.), YBL 128/5301. On this folder, see Friedlander 2011: 119.
Works cited
Arnold, W. Vincent. (1998). The Illusion of Victory: Fascist Propaganda and the Second
World War. New York: Peter Lang.
Carpenter, Humphrey. (1988). A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Conover, Anne. (2001). Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: “What thou lovest well … .”.
London: Yale University Press.
Corrigan, Robert. (1972). ‘Ezra Pound and the Ministry for Popular Culture’, Journal of
Popular Culture, 5/4, pp. 767–781.
Doob, Leonard Ed. (1978). ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II.
Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
Ert, Gibran van. (1994). ‘Empty Air: Ezra Pound’s World War Two Radio Broadcasts’,
Past Imperfect, 3/56.
Feldman, Matthew. (2011). ‘The Pound Case in Historical Perspective: An Archival
Overview’, Journal of Modern Literature, 35/2, pp. 83–97.
Friedlander, Benjamin. (2011). ‘Radio Broadcasts’, in Ezra Pound in Context, Ed. Ira B.
Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–124.
Herf, Jeffrey. (2006). The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Ideology and Propaganda During World
War II and the Holocaust. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Heymann, C. David. (1976). Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, A Political Profile. New York:
Seaver Books.
Nadel, Ira B. (2011). Ezra Pound in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Norman, Charles. (1968). The Case of Ezra Pound. New York: Funk and Wagnalls.
Pétain, Philippe. (1941). 12 August proclamation, translated by the New York Times, 13
August, http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1941/410812a.html. Accessed 10 October
2013.
Pound, Ezra. (1948). “If This Be Treason–”, Ed. Olga Rudge. Venice: Tipo-Litografia
Armena.
——— (1976). Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound: From the Recordings and
Transcriptions of His Wartime Broadcasts, Rome, 1941–1943, Ed. William P. Levy.
Rotterdam: Cold Turkey Press.
——— (1991). Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, volumes VII
and VIII, Ed. Litz Walton Leah Baechler and James Longenbach. London: Garland
Publishing.
——— (2009). “I cease not to yowl” Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound/Agresti
Correspondence, Ed. Archie Henderson. Houston, Texas: Archie Henderson.
——— (1991), Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, Ed. Lea Baechler,
A. Walton Litz and James Longenbach. New York: Garland Publishing. VII.
Rachewiltz, Mary de. (1979–1980). ‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’, Agenda, 17.3–4, 18/1.
Redman, Tim. (1979). ‘The Repatriation of Ezra Pound, 1939–1942: A View from the
Archive’, Paideuma, 8.3, pp. 447–457.
——— (1992). Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stock, Noel. (1970). The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Torrey, E. Fuller (1984). The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St
Elizabeths. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Tytell, John. (1987). Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. New York: Doubleday.
Wilhelm, James J. (1994). Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years (1925–1972). University Park,
PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
12
‘Conquering the Virtual Public’: Jean-Paul

Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes
and the Radio in France
Alys Moody
University of Waikato
On the evening of Monday, 21 October 1947, La Tribune de Paris – a daily

radio programme that provided a forum for discussion and analysis of current
events – gave over its nightly news review, from 8:30 to 8:50, to ‘Jean-Paul
Sartre et ses collaborateurs’.1 This new programme, scheduled to run weekly on
Monday evenings, was La tribune des temps modernes. Sartre’s ‘collaborateurs’
were a rotating group of fellow editors of his journal, Les temps modernes, for
which the radio programme was named. They included Simone de Beauvoir and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty as regulars, alongside important contributions from
Jean Pouillon, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Alain Bonafé.2 Structured as a semi-
scripted discussion, La tribune des temps modernes ran in the regular weekly
slot for six weeks, before being abruptly cancelled in December, following a
controversial run and – probably crucially – a change of government.
La tribune des temps modernes is a curious and instructive artefact of
radio broadcasting history. At once famous (or notorious, depending on
one’s sources) and little studied, its brief history encapsulates a number of the
defining characteristics of French radio in the post-war period. La tribune des
temps modernes found itself caught between radio’s self-image as the voice of the
nation, its reality as a rather variably wielded tool of the state and its ambiguous
relationship to intellectual life in France. At the same time, it proved both an
expression of and a turning point for Sartre’s own thinking about radio. This
essay argues that La tribune des temps modernes functions in part as an indicator
of the nature, status and meaning of radio in post-war France, embodying
important aspects of contemporary French intellectual culture, including
its uncomfortable relationships to mass media, on the one hand, and to the
tumultuous politics of the day, on the other.
State power
In 1947, French radio was still seeking to define its role in the aftermath of World
War II and amidst the political tumult of the post-war years. In the years between
the launch of radio in France in 1921 and the outbreak of World War II, French
radio had been under the control of an ostensible state monopoly. In practice,
however, the government granted a number of licenses to private operators,
ensuring that the state monopoly was almost never in full force during this
period. During the war, radio’s importance grew substantially as a tool of both
communication and propaganda. Both the Vichy government and the occupied
north operated their own radio stations that combined government propaganda
with entertainment. At the same time, the BBC became an important source of
information for the Resistance and a crucial and highly symbolic mouthpiece
for Charles de Gaulle’s government-in-exile. In a very real sense, radio, as a site
of both resistance and government propaganda, was a key battleground in the
struggle for public support during the war years (Kuhn 1995: 83–89).
Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that successive French governments
after Liberation would place a high value on radio as the voice of the nation –
and, at times, also as the voice of the state. The radio’s post-war nationalization
was mooted by the Resistance throughout the war years, and when France was
liberated in 1944, the radio was established as a state monopoly. As Hélène
Eck explains, on 26 March 1945 a set of provisional conditions of operation
for French radio established ‘an administration with a supplementary budget,
directly attached to the Ministry of Information and with a government-
appointed director’ (Eck 1991: 130–131). These supposedly temporary terms,
which granted the government extremely direct control over the day-to-day
operation of the radio, remained in force until 1959.
In contrast to pre-war French radio, the state monopoly was rigorously enforced
in post-war France on French soil. Nonetheless, there sprung up alongside this
a number of radio stations – known in French as radios périphériques – which,
based just outside France, recorded on and broadcast into French territory.
These stations, which included Europe 1, Radio Luxembourg, Radio-Monte-
Carlo and Sud Radio, won an increasingly large share of the listening public
during the decades following the end of World War II. They provided a form
of competition for the state monopoly – although with the French government
owning a controlling share in most of the radios périphériques (with the notable
exception of Radio Luxembourg), this competition was largely illusory (Kuhn
1995: 92–94). From the 1970s, these stations were joined by illegal pirate
The Radio in France 247
radio stations, which broadcast from within France itself and which ultimately
contributed to the fracturing of the monopoly and its eventual collapse, as part
of an election promise by François Mitterand, on 9 November 1981.
The actual level of control exercised over the radio stations during the
immediate post-war years seems to have been quite variable. Unlike the BBC,
Radiodiffusion Française (later Radiodiffusion-Télévision française or RTF and,
after 1965, ORTF) was never granted a proper charter, so its independence from
government involvement was never guaranteed (Todd 1999: 193). Raymond
Kuhn (1995: 91) notes that those who were seen as opposing the structures of
the state – specifically, the communists, and de Gaulle and his followers – were
‘largely denied access to state broadcasting’ during these years, even as the high
degree of government instability in post-war France made close state control
of the radio relatively rare until the Algerian war. At the same time, Eck (1991:
131) observes that ‘radio was an instrument of government, and it seemed
normal that those who governed should come to explain their plans and their
tasks, as well as their policies’. If complete government control of radio was rare,
politicians’ understanding of the radio as a ready-made propaganda tool was
not. And there were certainly notable instances of government censorship, most
famously the 1947 cancellations of La Tribune des journalistes parlementaires, a
discussion forum in which parliamentary journalists debated issues of the day –
and the cancellation, in the same year, of Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes.
La tribune des temps modernes reveals just how close the relationship between
radio broadcasting and government could sometimes be in this environment. Its
cancellation after only six episodes (although a total of nine were recorded) can
be traced directly to state intervention in radio broadcasting, and it is this event
that has won the programme its place in histories of French radio (see, e.g. Kuhn
1995; Eck 1991: 144). La tribune des temps modernes in fact courted this threat
from its first programme, a vicious, entertaining and highly theatrical anti-
Gaullist polemic, notable, amongst other outrages, for the lengthy comparison
drawn by Bonafé between de Gaulle and Hitler.3 The programme predictably
provoked outrage amongst de Gaulle’s supporters and in the furore that followed,
Simone de Beauvoir (1999: 87) wrote to her lover Nelson Algren, predicting
that they would be fired in response. Christopher Todd (1999: 188n26), noting
that Radio 47, the official radio programme, fails to list La tribune des temps
modernes in its expected slot for 28 October, speculates that the cancellation of
the programme may have been mooted by radio administration in the aftermath
of this outcry. But in fact, Sartre’s radio show lasted for another five episodes.
When it was finally censored, it seems that the initial controversy over the
anti-Gaullist first episode was less the issue, than the change of government that
ensued. Until 19 November 1947, the French government was led by socialist
Prime Minister Paul Ramadier. Following widespread strikes in November 1947
that forced his resignation and left France without a government for a week in
November, Ramadier was replaced by Robert Schuman, a Christian Democrat
who was significantly less sympathetic to Sartre’s carefully anti-Gaullist, anti-
communist leftist politics. The week Schuman assumed power, La tribune des
temps modernes was cancelled. If the violently anti-Gaullist sentiments provided
the germ of resistance to Sartre’s programmes, it nonetheless seems that the
change of government was the clear proximate cause of their eventual censorship.
There are, however, suggestions that political meddling was a feature of La
tribune des temps modernes from its very inception. Writing in 1993, Michael
Scriven highlights a debate over the nature and extent of the involvement of
the Ramadier government in the programme. The charge is that La tribune des
temps modernes, far from serving as an agent of free expression that was cut off
in its prime, was in fact ‘an agency of government propaganda’ by the Ramadier
government, a dispute that Scriven (1993: 86) resists resolving. In fact, Beauvoir’s
letters to Nelson Algren – first published in French in 1997 and in English in
1998, some four or five years after Scriven’s study – show conclusively that not
only was the radio programme commissioned and supported at the behest of
Ramadier, but also that Sartre and his co-presenters knew this before the first
programme went to air.4 Writing on 14 October 1947, just under a week before
the programme’s launch, Beauvoir explains:
The story of the radio turned a strange way. We learnt it was all contrived by the
government, by Ramadier, because he wanted us to do some anti-communist
and anti-Gaullist propaganda just before the elections. And we were going to be
paid not by the radio (which depends upon the government but has and must
have its autonomy) but by Ramadier himself. Then, we are anticommunist and
anti-Gaullist, indeed, but we do not intend to support Ramadier’s policy; chiefly
what he did in Indochina disgusts us. So yesterday we had prepared something
rather funny and striking about de Gaulle, but we decided to drop everything.
Now something will happen for Ramadier though the radio people (who being
mostly communist do not want our participation) had purposely said to us
we were governmental agents, which he himself had tried to hide, in order to
get our demission. He got very angry and told them to ask themselves for our
regular participation or he would fire them. So now they are very annoyed. For
us it seems a very French story and rather sad. (Beauvoir 1999: 81–82)
Despite her claim to ‘drop everything’, the radio men asked them back as
Beauvoir had predicted, and the members of the Tribune des temps modernes
team must have relented – despite Beauvoir’s (1999: 83) lament that ‘Everything
seems dirty in this business, all these people stink’ – for the de Gaulle episode
described above aired, perhaps with a week’s delay, on 21 October.
In Force of Circumstance, her memoirs of the period, Beauvoir offers a slightly
different – and no doubt somewhat sanitized – account of the programme’s
origins. Here she claims, ‘One of [Sartre’s] old colleagues, called Bonafé, knew
Ramadier well and suggested to him that we should be entrusted with a radio
programme to express our views: Sartre accepted. We did not wish to be
dependent on the Présidence du Conseil; the Temps modernes hour was attached
to the “literary and dramatic programs” department’ (Beauvoir 1965: 137). This
version – down to the ‘hour’ that, in the event, was only a half hour – seems to
accord with Beauvoir’s initial understanding of the genesis of the programme,
while effacing the later revelations about government involvement. It also
highlights the probably central status of Alain Bonafé. A colleague of Sartre’s
from the Lycée François I in Le Havre and the only regular contributor to La
tribune des temps modernes who did not appear frequently in the pages of Les
temps modernes during 1947, Bonafé was the connection to Ramadier, apparently
the conduit for the initial proposal of the programme – and also the contributor
who caused such a stir with his tactless political commentary in the first episode.
Beauvoir, describing the programme’s cancellation to Algren, concludes
with a sharp sense of the political motivations that shaped the existence of La
tribune des temps modernes. ‘The new government Schumann [sic]’, she writes,
‘fired us from the radio. God gave it to us (under Ramadier’s features) and God
took it from us, as said old wise Job. It is all right, since we were interested but
did not enjoy to do this. I have better be in a quiet room and write for myself ’
(Beauvoir 1999: 118). For Beauvoir, the political machinations that permitted
the existence of the programme are parallel to those that led to its cancellation,
with the show and its presenters cast as pawns within a larger political game
or – to use her own metaphor – as the playthings of competing political gods. In
certain respects, this ‘dirty’ situation echoes Beauvoir’s own earlier and far more
controversial engagement with the radio during World War II. In 1943, Beauvoir
was commissioned by Radio-Vichy to produce a series of radio programmes,
which eventually appeared in 1944, about the origins of the music hall. These
light, entertainment-oriented programmes – they appear to have been aural
collages of music and street noises from various historical moments that were
central to the development of music-hall, narrated by two anonymous guides –
had no political content, but, as Ingrid Galster (1996) explains, formed part of a
strategy by the Vichy government to increase the audience of their official radio
station and thus of their propaganda. Small wonder, then, that she should finish
by rejecting the politicized, social world of radio in favour of a retreat into the
calmer world of writing alone and for oneself.
If it is clear that Ramadier played a central role in providing the Temps
modernes team with a platform, it is less certain whether this exerted any
sustained influence on the show’s content. Beauvoir’s letters emphasize that
Ramadier himself believed that the combination of anti-Gaullism and anti-
communism that characterized the politics of Sartre and his friends at this time
was in itself enough to serve as effective propaganda for his government, without
further influence from him (this is implicit in the fact that he intended their role
as propagandists to be kept from them). La tribune des temps modernes delivers
amply on this promise, dedicating the first show to a violent attack on de Gaulle
and his supporters, the second to a sharp critique of communism and the third
to a series of rebuttals of the criticism provoked by these first two programmes.
Even as later episodes became more philosophical in content, they continued
to call for a third way, domestically, between de Gaulle and communism, and
internationally, between American capitalism and Russian communism. In this
sense, they no doubt delivered on the promise that Ramadier saw in them, even
if in doing so they were merely affirming their own political beliefs.
Despite the political and current affairs-oriented nature of much of La
tribune des temps modernes, direct discussion of the Ramadier government
and of Ramadier himself is strikingly absent from the programme. In this
sense, it is possible that their general strategy was to simply ignore and
avoid all discussion, ensuring that they could be cast as neither advocates
nor critics of the prime minister. Similarly, although various contributors
were keen to highlight their sympathy with colonized peoples and their
support for decolonization in passing, there is no substantial discussion of
decolonization or of the Ramadier government’s policy in Indochina, which
Beauvoir highlights as one of the key points of political difference between
Sartre and Ramadier.5 This is particularly striking, in the light of the fact that
the Indochina issue dominated the pages of Les temps modernes in the months
before the radio programme began, producing an issue devoted to Indochina
in March 1947, as well as a number of articles on the matter, including some
written by regular radio contributors Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1947) and Jean
Pouillon (1947), the latter mentioning Indochina as part of a larger attack
on French parliamentary politics. In this context, their on-air restraint with

regard to both Indochina and governmental flaws more generally can easily be
interpreted as a trace of Ramadier’s influence.
Ramadier himself is mentioned by name only once in the show’s run, in the
third episode, where Sartre responds to his critics. Discussing an article that
appeared in L’Humanité, the mouthpiece of the French Communist Party,
in response to the previous week’s episode attacking communism, Bonafé
introduces the article: ‘My poor Sartre, you learnt from this article that you have
been sold to Ramadier’. Sartre mockingly replies:
Oh yes, I have been sold to Ramadier like I have been sold to Stalin. But how did
Ramadier sell me to the United States? At the end of the day, it’s the Americans
who have bought me … If you are from one of the two blocs, only half the
listeners will accuse me of having been sold. But since I don’t belong to either
one, you see, I’ve been bought by everyone at the same time: Ramadier, Truman
and Stalin. (Sartre et al. 1989c)
As we have seen, though, the accusation that he had been bought by Ramadier
is, if not strictly accurate (it is unclear from Beauvoir’s letters whether Ramadier
retained his financial responsibility for the programme after their discovery of
his influence), certainly one that would have to be taken seriously. Given what
Beauvoir and, almost certainly, Sartre and Bonafé themselves knew of how this
radio programme came about, their sarcastic tone and dismissive attitude are
rather disingenuous.
On the whole, though, if Ramadier got what he hoped for out of La tribune des
temps modernes, it was not direct advocacy, but a simple statement of their own
pre-existing beliefs, which he hoped would lead voters to favour his own leftist,
anti-communist and anti-Gaullist politics. Sartre and his fellow contributors
hardly needed Ramadier’s influence to promote such a stance. On the other
hand, it seems impossible to tell how far their avoidance of direct discussion of
Ramadier, his government and those of his policies with which they disagreed
should be read as an act of deference to the man who made such a public forum
possible in the first place. Either way, it is clear that La tribune des temps modernes
contains nothing that the contributors would not otherwise have endorsed, but
also nothing that would not have ultimately pleased Ramadier. Ultimately, of
course, this careful balancing act saved neither Ramadier nor the contributors to
La tribune des temps modernes, all of whom had lost their jobs within six weeks
of the programme first going to air.
Intellectuals Engagés
Even if we accept that the content of La tribune des temps modernes was largely
unaffected by its association with Ramadier, it remains true that the taint of
political corruption must have rendered the whole affair a good deal dirtier – as
Beauvoir put it – than was really desirable. The question, then, becomes why
Sartre and his team went along with it at all, once Ramadier’s behind-the-scenes
involvement was revealed. In a letter to Algren on 26 September, Beauvoir (1999:
68–69) provides an insight into the team’s initial enthusiasm: ‘You know what
it means? The possibility of reaching thousands of people, and trying to make
them think and feel in the way we believe right to think and feel’. In Beauvoir’s
first flush of excitement, the possibility of radio is understood above all as the
possibility of a large audience.
This has a particular relevance, and no doubt provoked a particular excitement,
for the founders and editors of Les temps modernes, a journal that was established
in 1945 with the express goal of fostering and promoting a ‘littérature engagée’. In
his essay ‘Introducing Les temps modernes’, first published as ‘Présentation des
temps modernes’ in the inaugural issue of Les temps modernes in October 1945,
Sartre famously declares that, ‘The writer is situated in his time; every word he
utters has reverberations. As does his silence’ (Sartre 1988: 252). He goes on to
lay out the aims of the review:
our intention is to help effect certain changes in the Society that surrounds us … we
align ourselves on the side of those who want to change simultaneously the social
condition of man and the concept he has of himself. Consequently, concerning
the political and social events to come, our journal will take a position in each
case … If we are able to live up to what we promise, if we succeed in persuading
a few readers to share our views, we will not engage in exaggerated pride; we
will simply congratulate ourselves for having rediscovered a good professional
conscience, and for literature’s having become again – at least for us – what it
should never have stopped being: a social function. (Sartre 1988: 255)
It is easy to hear echoes of Sartre’s hope of persuading a few readers to share

his views in Beauvoir’s excitement about the possibility of an audience that
‘think[s] and feel[s] in the way we believe right to think and feel’. Moreover,
the radio programme seems to offer, at key points, great scope for pursuing
these original aims of the journal. As a more immediate medium – some of
the episodes were recorded the same day that they were broadcast – it offered a
unique opportunity to take an active and direct stand on the issues of the day. At
the same time, the discursive format allowed Sartre and the others to weave this
topical commentary together with analysis of both the ‘social condition of man’
and ‘the conception he has of himself ’ in a novel and engaging way. In this sense,
La tribune des temps modernes must be understood as pursuing the goals of Les
temps modernes by other means.
This is closely tied to one of the great preoccupations that Sartre shared
with post-war French society more generally: anxiety about the status of the
intellectual in post-war France. Sunil Khilnani (1993: 51–52) sees Sartre’s post-
war advocacy of the engaged intellectual as a response to two very serious
charges levelled against French intellectuals in the aftermath of World War II:
on the one hand, that they were ‘social parasite[s] with nothing to contribute
to the material revival of [their] country’, and, on the other, that the purges of
Fascist writers and intellectuals after the war left all writers ‘open to charges of
political naiveté and to injunctions against their further meddling in politics’.
For Khilnani, Les temps modernes was Sartre’s attempt to resist these criticisms,
offering ‘a platform in his campaign to propagate a view of writing that at once
guarded its independence and endowed it with a new public importance’ (52).
In practice, La tribune des temps modernes may have had only mixed success in
fulfilling these goals: although it offered a new audience and a new forum for
the promotion of this vision of the intellectual’s public importance, Ramadier’s
involvement must have, to some degree, shaken his independence.
Nonetheless, there are a number of reasons why the radio might have
seemed like an ideal forum for an engaged intellectual in France in 1947. On a
philosophical level, Hélène Eck (1991: 129) explains that radio in the immediate
aftermath of the war was initially conceived of as a public forum that would
ideally need to become ‘a voice, capable of achieving the synthesis of democracy
and culture’. Although these high-minded ideals were sullied by the government
intervention described earlier, and despite the fact that an attempt to attract
writers to the radio generally failed to achieve any sustained or substantive
engagement from France’s most famous literary names, Eck concludes that ‘it did
succeed in asserting itself and in making itself known as a cultural middleman
with whom the elite could do business’ (145). The radio was therefore uniquely
positioned to act as a means of disseminating intellectual ideas to a wider
audience – and that audience was indeed wide. In 1946, the French owned 5.5
million radio sets, for a population of 40 million (Kuhn 1995: 90). Nor did these
sets go unused: in 1950, the average French adult spent 118 minutes per day
listening to the radio (79). As a platform for reaching a wide audience, the radio
was unrivalled in 1947.
In What Is Literature?, serialized in Les temps modernes the year that La tribune
des temps modernes went to air, Sartre reveals himself to be both keenly aware of
the possibilities offered by the radio and somewhat wary and ambivalent about
its potential. In this account, radio, like other forms of mass media, has a kind
of outreach or even reconnaissance function in Sartre’s great battle for the hearts
and minds of the population:
We make contact with people, without ever wanting to do so, by new means,
with new angles of incidence. Of course, the book is still the heavy infantry
which clears and occupies the terrain. But literature has its airplanes, its V1’s
and V2’s which go a great distance, upsetting and harassing, without bringing
the actual decision. (Sartre 1949: 244)
The usefulness of radio in this account, as in Beauvoir’s, lies in the enormity

of its potential audience and the ‘great distance’ it can travel – he cites a
radio adaptation of his play No Exit, which was broadcast on the BBC to an
audience that he estimates at half a million. This boon comes, however, with a
considerable drawback, for although the audiences are large, they are unprepared
and unreceptive. In place of a discerning and critical theatre audience, Sartre
worries that his radio audience simply ‘wanted to hear, as usual, the Thursday
drama broadcast. As soon as it was over, they forgot it, as they did the preceding
ones’ (245). The worry is that these large audiences transform literature into
background noise and passing entertainment. It might even be asked whether
the limited role accorded to them in Sartre’s earlier military metaphor – where
radio features as a small plane making incursions without winning the battle –
is not too generous in this context. Where the earlier metaphor seems to imply
that mass media is responsible for dissemination but true and lasting persuasion
must rely on books, an audience that is truly as disconnected and disinterested
as Sartre claims might retain his name and a hint of his reputation, but little else.
It risks, therefore, losing all hope of communicating ideas, surely defeating the
purpose of such dissemination.
If the analysis stopped there, it would be hard to see why Sartre should have
bothered with radio at all, except perhaps, as Todd (1999: 196) claims, as ‘merely
another publicity stunt’. But Beauvoir’s letters offer a quite different account of
the Temps modernes group’s attitude towards this programme, describing it as
one of ‘these opportunities of doing something real and concrete’ (Beauvoir
1999: 72), observing that the radio’s potential to reach such a large audience
‘must be managed with much care’ (69), and often complaining about the long
hours and obsessive effort devoted to the programme. This points to a sense of
commitment and seriousness in their approach to La tribune des temps modernes,

which seems to carry them far from the flippancy of Todd’s ‘publicity stunt’.
As Sartre’s discussion of radio and mass media in What Is Literature? continues,
he begins to gesture towards a sounder foundation for radio’s appeal. For Sartre,
the problem to which radio might be a solution is, crucially, one of audience;
specifically, the problem is that contemporary French writers have ‘readers
but no public’ (Sartre 1949: 246). Although bourgeois, they are alienated from
their origins by their commitment to overturning the oppression of which the
bourgeoisie is instrument and beneficiary. On the other hand, the Communist
Party has dominated the working class, preventing them from finding a public
there. As such, writers struggle to speak to a class, to form a community through
their writings: they lack, in short, a public. To counteract this, Sartre argues
that committed writers must seek out their ‘virtual readers, that is, the social
categories that do not read us, but which might’ in an attempt to ‘incorporate
some of our potential readers into our actual public’ (267–268). For this, Sartre
proposes enlisting the help of the mass media, which he describes as ‘the real
resources at our disposal for conquering the virtual public’ (268).
But how to deploy these resources without falling into the trap described
earlier, whereby the passive and disinterested audience encounters then forgets
the programme, without ever according its ideas the full and close attention they
require? Sartre’s solution lies in a refusal of adaptation in favour of specificity
to the medium: ‘It is by no means a matter of letting our works be adapted
for the screen or the broadcasts of the French Radio. We must write directly
for the movies and the airwaves’ (269). The primary reason that he gives for
this demand is the need to avoid and circumvent the industrial processes that
underpin the mass media and which seek to make works mediocre in order to
appeal to the public more successfully. In place of adaptations of works written
for other media, Sartre insists that ‘there is a literary art of radio, film, editorial
and reporting. There is no need to popularize’ (268). The potential for taking
advantage of the radio, then, is understood as relying on an ability to creatively
exploit the specificities of the medium.
For Sartre, the specificity of radio, in particular, seems to lie in its intimacy.
Describing the possibilities that it could offer an astute writer, he explains:
The radio surprises people at the table or in bed, at the moment when they are
most defenceless, in the almost organic abandon of solitude. At the present time,
it makes use of its opportunity to fool them, but it is also the moment when one
might better appeal to their good faith; they have not yet put on or have laid
aside the personality with which they face the world. We’ve got one foot inside
the door. We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the ideas of our books
into these new languages. (Sartre 1949: 268)
Unlike books, which he describes as ‘inert’ in their need to be chosen by the

listener, the radio is capable of infiltrating people’s lives in their most exposed
and vulnerable moments. The combination of surprise and intimacy makes the
radio a double-edged sword: capable of becoming highly exploitative, but also
of appealing to an audience in a more direct manner, of bypassing the defences
erected and maintained by their public faces, as well as by their choice of reading
material. To the vast scale of the listening public, Sartre adds radio’s unusual
intimacy, a combination that makes it uniquely suited to the reconnaissance
function he attributes to mass media. At the same time, though, radio, like all
mass media, retains its secondary status in relation to books. Ideas are never
formulated directly in the ‘languages’ of radio and other mass media; rather,
books remain the privileged site of real intellectual work, while radio and related
media function exclusively as translations.
Writing for the radio
La tribune des temps modernes, which went to air the same year that What Is
Literature? was published, remains Sartre’s only serious engagement with the radio
and his only real attempt to realize his hopes for the medium. It therefore offers a
fascinating insight into what he understood ‘writing directly for the … airwaves’
to look like. Indeed, La tribune des temps modernes is nothing if not written – or
conceived – directly for radio. It exploits its medium in a range of ways, from its
discursive format and its emphasis on audience involvement, to its integration of
current events with philosophical discussion, and its use of theatrical and comic
elements. It was clearly conceived as a dynamic and engaged dialogue with an
audience with whom the contributors have been granted an unusual intimacy.
A full understanding of how precisely Sartre ‘writes for the radio’ requires
a consideration of the format and form of La tribune des temps modernes. The
evidence for this comes primarily from a series of cassette recordings, released
by Radio France in 1989, of nine episodes of this programme. These recordings
exclude the initial 6 October episode that Todd highlights, but include the
remaining six episodes, first broadcast between 20 October and 24 November
1947, alongside an additional three programmes that were recorded prior to the
show’s cancellation and projected for broadcast on 1, 8 and 15 December. The

episodes available through this series are, in order of first broadcast:
20 October Gaullism and the RPF

27 October Communism and anti-communism
3 November Listeners’ letters and definitions of existentialism
10 November Liberalism and socialism
17 November The crisis of socialism
24 November Union movements and social conflicts
1 December The true meaning of the workers’ demands
8 December Two appeals to international opinion
15 December David Rousset on his return from Germany
These recordings have been taken from a rebroadcast (or, in the case of the latter
three, first broadcast) of the entire series on France Culture in August 1989. The
cassette versions therefore include the addition of a small amount of contextual
information at the beginning of the broadcasts, short interviews with relevant
figures at the end and a helpful voice-over explaining who is speaking during
the programme itself.
Each episode features at least four contributors engaged in discussions that,
while often framed by Sartre and often consensual in their conclusion, were clearly
conceived to give the impression of genuine but civil debate. The participants
frequently interrupt each other, correct each other and pose questions either to
the group or directly to one or the other of the contributors. Although individual
speakers are given time to develop their thoughts and arguments in some detail,
and although Sartre and – when present – Merleau-Ponty are given more airtime
and more central roles than the others, the overall effect is of a congenial, if
passionate and in-depth, discussion amongst friends. In this, the programme
adopts the tribune format popularized by La Tribune de Paris and La Tribune
des journalistes parlementaires. Sartre had experimented with conversational
formats in print before – there is, for example, a lengthy post-lecture discussion
reproduced at the conclusion of L’existentialisme est un humanisme, which was
published the year before (see Sartre 1996: 79–109) – but the conversational
mode of La tribune des temps modernes is distinguished by the fact that it seems
to produce a genuine and relatively non-hierarchical discussion. Given that they
were originally aired at 8:30 in the evening, La tribune des temps modernes was
likely to have ‘surprise[d] people at the table’, and the programme’s format, like
that of other contemporaneous discussion-based radio shows, can be read as an

attempt to stage and participate in the evening dinner table conversation.
The listening public were envisaged as partaking in this conversation, with
Sartre in particular seeking to work audience responses into the fabric of the radio
programme. In the wake of the polemical attacks on Gaullism and communism
in the programme’s first two episodes, and of the vehement public reaction they
provoked in the press and media of the day, the third episode of La tribune des
temps modernes is given over to Sartre’s responses to his outraged listeners. As
several of his collaborators read out letters or summarize news articles about
the programme, Sartre offers his provocative and satirical responses. But if the
format is designed to incorporate a certain responsiveness to listeners’ concerns,
its rhetoric treats them more as objects for study than as interlocutors in a
genuine dialogue. Sartre opens the episode by announcing:
I have received letters of congratulations, naturally, and equally naturally, letters
of attack and insult. It is these latter that I want to speak to you about, because I
find that they express a curious and worrying state of mind. (Sartre et al. 1989c)
By reading these responses as symptomatic of a broader French malaise,

Sartre avoids engaging them directly in any kind of debate. Selecting extreme
accusations, he ridicules their assertions before holding them up as examples
of his analysis of post-war French society. Thus, their logical flaws are read
as indicative of ‘the idea that the value of thought has been undermined, the
supremacy of the lie over the truth, of tactic over logic, of interests over the
thought of the interested’. Similarly, claims that he is operating as an agent
for either the Russians, the Americans or Ramadier are seen as emblematic
of the paranoid French mindset of the day: ‘We think we are still under the
occupation … we think that there is a foreign dictator in France, threatening and
murderous, who reveals himself everywhere in everyday life, as well as in major
events … At bottom, we think the situation of ’47 with the words and the means
of 1943’. If this stands as an interesting analysis of post-war French society, it
also has the effect of silencing his critics by denying the autonomy and value of
their claims. But in an important sense, La tribune des temps modernes is not
speaking to these critics. As What Is Literature? reveals, Sartre conceived of radio
as a way of reaching a ‘virtual public’ of those predisposed towards his ideas, but
who do not yet constitute an actual public. It seems hardly likely that he would
have included listeners who referred to himself as ‘un dégueulasse’ (a swine)
and Simone de Beauvoir as ‘une bonne femme boche’ (a good kraut woman)
amongst such potential supporters.
Nonetheless, La tribune des temps modernes does show signs of addressing

itself directly to the ‘virtual public’. The eighth episode of the series, one of
those which was recorded but never broadcast, is particularly illustrative in this
regard. This episode, often dismissed by commentators as amongst the most
dull, consists primarily of the reading of two manifestos, both calling for the
emergence of a strong, unified and socialist Europe as a bulwark against the
emergent Cold War tensions between the USA and the USSR. Introduced as
explicitly written texts, which need to be ‘read’ on air and which Sartre claims
at the beginning of the episode have recently appeared in unnamed newspapers,
these manifestos stray furthest from Sartre’s call to write directly for radio, rather
than simply adapting texts from the print media. In practice, this episode strives
to make these manifestos an occasion for debate, with Pontalis and Bonafé
assuming the roles of a sceptical audience, whose broad agreement with Sartre
on many issues is pitted against a professed reluctance to sign such statements
blindly. After having forced Sartre to defend the manifestos at length, the
programme concludes with an appeal to their listening audience: ‘I believe that
it would be good to ask the listeners to send their agreement, if they agree, or
their disagreement … to say whether … they too want to sign this manifesto and
to say it by sending it to the radio’ (Sartre et al. 1989h). If audience response
remains significant here, this episode takes a dramatically different approach to
the mockery and analysis of the third. Here, Pontalis and Bonafé emerge as the
avatars of Sartre’s ‘virtual public’, interrogating Sartre’s position before standing
aside at the end of the programme to allow the virtual public to sign on as an
actual public.
The attention to radio broadcasting as a specific genre of speech takes its
frames of reference not only from Sartre’s elaboration of the intimacy of radio
as a form, but also from the nature of radio discussion as practiced on French
radio in 1947. The title of La tribune des temps modernes echoes both La Tribune
de Paris, of which it was a part, and La Tribune des journalistes parlementaires,
the journalist’s discussion forum, which was banned twice in 1947. The tribune
was in fact something of a radio genre in its own right, in which contributors
discussed the events of the day in a round-table format. In this sense, the
conversational format of La tribune des temps modernes can be understood as
reasonably conventional, as can its highly topical subject matter. In fact, current
affairs and contemporary politics remain a constant touchstone for Sartre’s
radio programme. The first episode, broadcast the day after de Gaulle’s newly
formed party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) enjoyed sweeping
success at the municipal elections, is a vicious attack on de Gaulle. The second
episode, an attack on communism, is also highly topical, coming as it does
during the early days of the Cold War and during the year in which the PCF
was exiled from government and figures such as Léon Blum were arguing
for a third way between the RPF and the PCF. Merleau-Ponty’s attack on the
inequality and state oppression in the USSR seems particularly prescient for
a leftist in 1947. After a foray into more philosophical discussion of political
movements such as liberalism and socialism in episodes 4 and 5, La tribune des
temps modernes returns to the issues of the day with an extended examination
of the extensive strikes that shook France in November 1947. The sixth episode
features an interview with a trade union leader opposed to the strikes, whereas
the unbroadcast seventh episode promises an interrogation of ‘the real meaning
of the worker’s demands’. The eighth consists of the manifestos discussed above.
The recorded programmes conclude with an interview with David Rousset,
a former concentration camp inmate who had risen to prominence with the
publication of a fictional and a non-fictional account of the camps, and who
would, the following year, be the co-founder of Sartre’s own short-lived political
party. In the ninth episode, Rousset discusses a recent trip to Germany, giving
a detailed report on the political and social circumstances of contemporary
Germany.
In keeping with the cultural focus of La Tribune de Paris, La tribune des
temps modernes moves fluidly from these discussions of current events and
contemporary politics to larger philosophical questions. The third episode
is again exemplary here, using the diagnosis of listeners’ letters as a means of
moving from the news-driven analyses of Gaullism and communism, to a more
explicit exposition of existentialism as a philosophical movement with a political
interest. Sartre, disdaining popular misappropriations of existentialism, insists:
what I prefer is to try to demonstrate precise points by which this philosophy
forces a choice on us, a political choice, and forces us to struggle against the
present situation. The existentialist’s big idea is precisely to struggle against
sentiment and impotence. We think that man is never impotent, except when he
believes he is. (Sartre et al. 1989c)
This cornerstone of existentialist thought therefore becomes a diagnostic tool for

contemporary French society. Similar movements characterize the following two
episodes in particular. The fourth, for example, evaluates liberalism and socialism
through an analysis of different kinds of and claims to freedom, dismissing
liberalism’s ‘abstract rights’ in favour of what they see as socialism’s greater
concreteness (Sartre et al. 1989d). The fifth episode follows directly on from
this, reading the philosophical discussion of the fourth against contemporary
events, as Merleau-Ponty advances a claim for the crisis of socialism, noting

carefully, ‘when I spoke the other day about a crisis of socialism, I didn’t mean a
crisis of a theory or a doctrine, but above all of the crisis of a movement’ (Sartre
et al. 1989e). This back-and-forth is typical of the discussion on La tribune des
temps modernes, where political analysis is always informed by the contributors’
underlying philosophical stance and philosophical claims are often tested
against contemporary events. The result is a programme that assiduously tries
to speak in the language of radio and abide by its conventions while avoiding
popularization that might trivialize or simplify the philosophical component.
Postscript
La tribune des temps modernes therefore seems to have been a serious endeavour
for Sartre, an attempt to realize his hopes of reaching a wider public. Nonetheless,
it remains exceptional in his career as his only attempt to use the radio in this
way and as one of his few appearances on the radio at all. This is not true of all
members of La tribune des temps modernes group – Merleau-Ponty, for instance,
went on to deliver a series of lectures on perception on Radio France the
following year (published as Merleau-Ponty 2004). So why did Sartre abandon
the radio in this way? Todd (1999: 191) claims that, in the wake of the controversy
surrounding La tribune des temps modernes, ‘there seems to have been a positive
effort to prevent [Sartre] from using the radio as a political forum again’. Be that
as it may, Sartre himself seems to have been resistant to further attempts to use
radio broadcast as a political or philosophical medium after the cancellation
of La tribune des temps modernes. At the very least, even if he were unofficially
banned from Radio France, he could always have pursued broadcasts on the
radios périphérique, as he did briefly during the 1968 manifestations, when
he voiced his support for the protestors on RTL. That he chose not to pursue
this any further implies a wider disillusionment with radio as a medium for
communicating his ideas.
This is confirmed by Sartre’s other major theoretical discussion of the
radio, in his 1960 work Critique of Dialectical Reason. In this, his most political
work of philosophy, Sartre condemns radio as an example of a ‘collective’, his
term for a collection of individuals who, in their isolation, fail to achieve the
integration necessary to become a group capable of achieving political change.
Sartre’s critique of radio is interesting not only for his brusque dismissal of
radio’s political potential, but also because its terms of analysis seem to imply
the inevitable failure of his attempts to write for the radio. Sartre offers radio
as an example of what he calls an ‘indirect gathering’, in which the listeners,
joined together in the event of the radio broadcast, are isolated from others and
experience their fellow listeners only in their absence from them. He proceeds to
offer an analysis of radio from two perspectives: the relationship of the listener
to the radio broadcaster and that of the listener to other listeners.
In the case of the former, he argues that ‘the relation between the broadcaster
and myself is not a human one: in effect, I am passive in relation to what is being
said’ (Sartre 2004: 271). He goes on to characterize this passivity in terms of the
lack of reciprocity between listener and broadcaster:
The broadcaster’s voice, in contrast [to that of a public speaker], in its reality
as a human voice, is, in principle, mystifying: it is based on the reciprocity of
discourse, and therefore on a human relation, but it is really a reifying relation in
which the voice is given as praxis and constitutes the listener as object of praxis;
in short, it is a univocal relation of interiority, similar to that of the organism
acting on a material environment, but one in which I, as an inert object, am
subjected as inorganic matter to the human work of the voice. (Sartre 2004: 272)
It is precisely this objectifying lack of reciprocity that Sartre’s engagement with

his audience attempts to guard against. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason,
however, this possibility seems to have been removed and the inhuman relation
between broadcaster and listener rendered structural. He dismisses both the
possibility of individual listeners ‘speaking back’ to the radio and that of listeners
simply turning the radio off, on the grounds that in both cases the response is
ineffective unless it is expressed en masse. And here, the problem of absence
raises its head. He writes that, ‘as soon as I imagine some practical action against
what the broadcaster says, I can conceive of it only as serial: I would have to
take the listeners one by one … . Obviously, this seriality is a measure of my
impotence’ (Sartre 2004: 273). Because we have no direct relation to other
listeners, the possibility of mobilizing them as a group is seriously attenuated.
Nonetheless, he emphasizes, it is on their behalf that we worry: our fury at a
radio broadcast with which we disagree arises from our concern that other
listeners may be persuaded – and that, in our absence from them, we will have
no recourse, no platform from which to refute these false claims.
By 1960, then, radio had become an embodiment of political impotence, of
organizations of individuals rendered powerless by the structure in which they
are caught. This is a far cry from the guarded optimism of the analysis of radio in
What Is Literature? and it implies a significant shift in perspective. Where What
Is Literature? speaks as a ‘we’ that includes writers-as-radio-broadcasters, about a

‘they’ of the listening public, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre assumes the
position of the alienated listener, describing the experience in the first person
singular. As such, the focus of the radio’s political potential is no longer on the
ability of the broadcaster to mobilize popular opinion – a tactic that seems
to have been recast as both ethically and politically questionable – but rather
on the ability of the radio broadcast to function as an occasion for concerted
communal action. Where there was some hope for the former for Sartre in 1947,
the structural conditions of radio seem to have ensured the impossibility of the
latter by 1960. If La tribune des temps modernes seemed to Sartre to have been
a doomed experiment, it seems clear that by 1960 he was attributing this failure
not simply to the political interference that surrounded it, but to the very nature
of radio itself.
Notes
1 On La Tribune de Paris, see Nord (2010: 353). On the timing and details of Sartre’s
radio programme, see Todd (1999: 185).
2 Bonafé is sometimes confused with Lucien Bonnafé, a well-known French
psychiatrist who was also active in Paris in this period. Nonetheless, he is clearly
identified in all radio broadcasts as ‘A. Bonafé’ and a Bonafé appears in several of
Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical works, identified not as a psychiatrist but as
a high-school literature teacher (see, e.g. Beauvoir 1990a; b: 103).
3 Todd (1999: 186) disagrees that this was in fact the first episode and cites an earlier
one, on 6 October. He cites contemporary French radio guides to support this
claim. However, as I have been able to find no further reference to this episode,
either in histories of the radio and Sartre’s engagement with it or in Simone de
Beauvoir’s letters and memoirs, and as this initial programme is not included
amongst those rebroadcast and subsequently released on cassette by Radio France
in 1989, I have used the more widely verified starting date.
4 If Todd is correct about the 20 October episode in fact being the second of the
Tribune des temps modernes series – a claim that is neither confirmed nor denied
by Beauvoir’s letters – this might provide an alternate explanation for why the
programme failed to air as expected on 13 October.
5 In the second episode, ‘Communisme et anticommunisme’, Merleau-Ponty attacks
the USSR for having a ‘colonial policy that threatens the liberation of colonised
peoples,’ while in the fifth, on ‘La crise du socialisme’, Pontalis cites ‘the war
that the colonised countries wage for their independence’ as an instance of the
contemporary relevance of class warfare.
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pp. 895–905.
Pouillon, J. (1947). ‘Mythe contre mythe’, Les temps modernes, 20, pp. 1345–1360.
Sartre, J.-P. (1949). What Is Literature?, trans. B. Frechtman. New York: Philosophical
Library.
——— (1988). ‘Introducing Les temps modernes’, in ‘What Is Literature?’ and Other
Essays, trans. J. Mehlman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 249–267.
——— (1996). L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Gallimard.
——— (2004). Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1, Ed. J. Rée, trans. A. Sheridan-
Smith. London: Verso.
———, S. de Beauvoir, M. Merleau-Ponty, J.-B. Pontalis and A. Bonafé (1989a).
‘Le Gaullisme et le R.P.F’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First
broadcast 20 October 1947.
———, S. de Beauvoir, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Bonafé and J.-B. Pontalis (1989b).
‘Communisme et anticommunisme’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio
France. First broadcast 27 October 1947.
———, S. de Beauvoir, J. Pouillon, A. Bonafé and J.-B. Pontalis (1989c). ‘Lettres
d’auditeurs et définitions de l’existentialisme’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris:
Radio France. First broadcast 3 November 1947.
———, S. de Beauvoir, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Bonafé, J.-B. Pontalis and J. Pouillon
(1989d). ‘Libéralisme et socialisme’, in Tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio
France. First broadcast 10 November 1947.
———, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Bonafé and J.-B. Pontalis (1989e). ‘Crise du socialisme’, in

La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First broadcast 17 November
1947.
———, A. Bonafé, J.-B. Pontalis and J. Pouillon (1989f). ‘Mouvements syndicaux
et conflits sociaux’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France. First
broadcast 24 November 1947.
———, S. de Beauvoir, A. Bonafé, J.-B. Pontalis and J. Pouillon (1989g). ‘Vrai sens des
revendications ouvrières’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France.
———, S. de Beauvoir, A. Bonafé and J.-B. Pontalis (1989h). ‘Deux appels à l’opinion
internationale’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France.
———, A. Bonafé, J.-B. Pontalis and J. Pouillon (1989i). ‘David Rousset de retour
d’Allemagne’, in La tribune des temps modernes. Paris: Radio France.
Scriven, M. (1993). Sartre and the Media, New York: St Martin’s Press.
Todd, C. (1999). ‘Sartre Flirts with the Radio’, in Making Connections: Essays in French
Culture and Society in Honour of Philip Thody Ed. J. Dolamore. Bern: Peter Lang,
pp. 183–196.
Afterword
The Gentle Art of Radio Broadcasting
Daniela Caselli
The University of Manchester
After writing about phonographic recording laboratories in 1918, amateur

wireless in 1919 and ‘what the radio telephone service means’ in 1922, Austin C.
Lescarboura, regular contributor to Scientific American, lets his readers into the
broadcasting studio:
If it is your first time at radio-phone broadcasting, you will experience all sorts
of queer sensations; for this, in truth, is no ordinary task. The studio in which
you are to speak is small and home-like enough, and there are just a few persons
present. There is barely room for an excuse to be shy. Yet it is the very weirdness
of the whole business that makes you uneasy – the thought of speaking through
a little hole in a cylinder hanging in front of you, to an audience that mounts up
into the hundreds of thousands. (Lescarboura 1922: 376)1
The intimacy of the second person reproduces the ‘queer sensations’ that the
radio as a new medium is able to generate. The reader is no longer the listener
who a mere three months earlier was instructed in ‘Radio for Everybody’: ‘with
the apparatus properly tuned, one station may be heard; then, by slightly altering
the tuning, another station will be heard, and so on.’2 Now, Lescarboura astutely
sees aural identification as one of the medium’s most promising features and
translates it into a ‘scenery’. Here, the reader/listener has become the artist
facing the disquieting opposition between the small and homely setting and the
awareness that your invisible audience numbers hundreds of thousands.
Lescarboura lucidly notes the imperfections of this ‘new art’, barely one year
old at the time of his writing, and concomitantly declares himself certain of ‘the
permanency of radio-phone broadcasting’ (Lescarboura 1922: 377). Strikingly,
he is also very precise in identifying what remain today main areas of interest in
thinking about broadcasting in the modernist era: the experimentalism that goes
with a new art; the interplay of intimate dialogue and mass communication; and
the constraining technological complexity of this young and ‘temperamental’
Afterword 267
medium destined to unquestionable stardom – a complexity able to create havoc

and generate juicy anecdotes about orchestras playing while vacuum tubes blow
out and announcers instructing outraged prima donnas ‘to stand by for three
minutes to hear distress calls’.3
The very act of reading a popular scientific publication during the years
immediately preceding and following the advent of radio broadcasting in both
Britain and the USA brings home the ‘weird’ quality of a new medium in its
nascent stage, dramatizing history’s simultaneous familiarity and strangeness.
Broadcasting the Modernist Era attempts to stage both the encounter between
the modernist artist and radio as new medium and the encounter between the
literary critic and historian confronted with the broadcasting archives.
The queer coexistence of the homely and the impersonal is an experience
both intimate and estranging, and one that is central to E. M. Forster’s
imagining – and charming – his audience, while at times almost cheekily
playing with it (Fifield). The dialectic between intimacy and crowd is essential
to Yeats’s spatial organization of his imaginary ‘poet’s pub’ and ‘poet’s parlour’
(Armstrong) and to the wider interplay between religious familiarity and state
religion, especially when we look at the so-called Reith era at the BBC with its
formal, pseudo-Arnoldian vision of the sacralization of culture (Addyman).4 Via
the contributions of both Tonning and Goody we can also recuperate the sense of
how religion was very much part of a modernist era which we might have become
used to seeing as severed from theological preoccupations. Goody’s analysis is
exemplary in foregrounding the democratic impulses behind Dorothy L. Sayers’s
impersonation of divinity through the blind medium of radio in The Man Born
to Be King (1941), while not papering over the way in which the script attributes
anti-Semitic connotations to Matthew’s Cockney accent. Tonning’s piece on
David Jones shows how national and religious preoccupations interact via radio
and poetry, while Matthews’ emphasis on Eliot’s complex self-dramatization on
the radio via sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry brings us back to the
metadramatic strategies employed by both Yeats and Forster.
The published and unpublished literary texts discussed in this volume
engage with how ‘sound waves, it appears, have a way of playing numerous
and inexplicable tricks at almost any time, upsetting the calculations of even
experts’ (Lescarboura 1918: 164). Feldman’s materialist discussion of crackling
sounds on Italian radio assesses their repercussions on the reception of Pound’s
broadcasts; Mead’s analysis of Orwell’s investment in the poetic possibilities of
radio technology shows the intimate relation between broadcasting practices
(such as pre-scripted discussions) and politics; however, Fordham’s reading
268 Afterword
of Finnegans Wake focuses on different kinds of waves, looking at how Joyce

does not so much take sides in the debate for and against television as a new
medium, but engages instead ‘with its technical aspects’, exploring inventively its
‘metaphorical dimensions’.
This is a modernist era whose relationship towards modernity refines
theories of the great divide while showing remarkable enthusiasm towards
technology: the awe inspired by the invisible listening masses is scientific rather
than mystical. In addition to being a regular contributor to Scientific American,
Lescarboura was a member of the ‘Abrams Investigations Committee’, set up by
the magazine to demonstrate the bogusness of Dr Albert Abrams’s ‘so-called
electronic reactions technique of diagnosis and treatment and indirectly of
the numerous electronic, radio, radiant energy and similar pseudo-scientific
diagnostic procedures and cures’ (Lescarboura 1924: 158–160). In 1923, he
also took part in another Committee whose main aim was to demonstrate how
séances were simply money-making enterprises whose workings could be nicely
illustrated through scientific diagrams (Bird 1923: 14). Rather than partaking
in late nineteenth-century mysteriously esoteric discourses, radio’s uncanny
familiarity works according to strict scientific explanations: the tricks played by
these air waves are at the opposite end of the spectrum to those taking place in
the séance.
Money matters of course accompany this lack of mystery (which is not,
however, a lack of awe). As a mass medium, radio poses from its inception the
problem of its economic survival. Lescarboura focuses mostly on the features
that in his eyes guarantee the economic survival of a medium whose popularity
shows great potential and yet remains ‘anomalous’ from ‘a business point of
view’:
there are over one-hundred stations providing speeches, news, music and
so on for hundreds of thousands of listeners, yet deriving no direct financial
returns. Granted, these same organizations are for the large part engaged
in the manufacture of radio apparatus are reaping an astounding harvest of
business,[sic] the fact remains that there are many other radio manufacturers
harvesting just as rich a crop without spending a single cent or devoting a single
moment to the sowing of that crop. It is highly unfair, to be sure. (Lescarboura
1922a: 377)5
Attention is given throughout this volume to the fees paid to the authors, who
sometimes are ambivalent about radio as a source of income and a way of being
attributed a market value (Koppen). Conversely, the book also looks at the BBC
as an institution debating the relationship between financial survival and public
Afterword 269
good, showing how such a dilemma is still at the core of the institution. Radio lives
in the space between World War I, which was essential to the development of the
wireless (especially on the vacuum tube and the ‘buried’ antenna) (Lescarboura
1919: 689), and World War II, during which radio technology was not only
a military instrument but also a tool of political propaganda. By focusing on
Britain in particular and Europe more generally (especially Italy and France, see
Ragnedda, Moody, Feldman) Broadcasting in the Modernist Era places politics at
the centre of the study of broadcasting, analysing political concerns ranging from
anarchism to propaganda, from taste to the common good. Proposing a radically
revised chronology of Pound’s Italian broadcasts, Feldman sees radio as central
to a discussion of modernism and fascism; Koppen argues that Virginia Woolf ’s
reflections on her broadcasts shed light on the often-debated political nature of
her writing; and Moody shows how both Sartre and de Beauvoir were keenly
aware of the political and economic complications of their radio programme La
tribune des temps modernes.
Broadcasting in the Modernist Era wants to be attentive to the historical
materiality of literary and technological transaction while also asking ‘What
makes radio communication so fascinating?’ Perhaps, with Scientific American,
we can still say that the answer may be found in its ‘super-eaves-dropping
features’ (Lescarboura 1919: 688).
Notes
1 See also Lescarboura and Goldsmith (1930).

2 ‘Only a short twelve months ago the hobby of radio was indulged by boys
and young men, with occasionally a full-grown man, who, perhaps, were
more fascinated by the technicalities of the radio art than by the actual fact of
communication through space. [ … ] Then came the radio service, not as an
occasional thing to startle the radio amateurs already engaged in sending and
listening to the dot-dash-dot messages, but as a regular established practice’
(Lescarboura 1922b: 166–168 and 220).
3 ‘Early in the history of radio-phone broadcasting, all stations were required to
“stand by” or remain inactive for a period of three minutes, every fifteen minutes,
in order to listen for di stress signals from ships at sea’ (Lescarboura 1922a: 377).
4 For a debate on this issue, see Avery (2006: 11–31). See also Steven Matthews’
revision of that debate in the light of Eliot’s broadcasts in this volume.
5 Lescarboura’s exploration of broadcasting as a business is continued elsewhere.
See Lescarboura (1922c, 8–9 and 70–71).
270 Afterword
Works cited
Avery, Todd. (2006). Radio Modernism. Burlington: Ashgate.

Bird, J. Malcolm (1923). ‘Our First Test Seances’, Scientific American, 129.1 (July), p. 14.
Lescarboura, Austin C. (1918). ‘At the Other End of the Phonograph: How Science and
Humour Blend in the Work of the Phonographic Recording Laboratory’, Scientific
American, 119.9 (31 August), p. 164 and p. 178, p. 164.
——— (1919). ‘Amateurs in Name Only: A Story of What the War Has Done for the
Cause of Amateur Wireless’, Scientific American, 120.26 (28 June), pp. 688–711.
——— (1922a). ‘The Gentle Art of Radio Broadcasting: With the Speakers and Artists
Who Are Heard but Not Seen Over the Radio-phone’, Scientific American, 126.6
(June), pp. 376–377.
——— (1922b). ‘Radio for Everybody: What the Radio Telephone Service Means
and How It Can Be Applied in the Home and Business’, Scientific American, 126.3
(March), pp. 166–168 and p. 220.
——— (1922c). ‘The Business of Broadcasting: A Survey of the Present Radio-Phone
Broadcasting Situation and a Speculation as to Its Future’, Scientific American, 127.1
(July), pp. 8–9 and pp. 70–71.
——— (1923). ‘Our First Test Seances’, Scientific American, 129.1 (July), p. 14.
——— (1924). ‘Our Abrams Verdict’, Scientific American, 131.3 (September), pp. 158–160.
——— and Goldsmith, Alfred N. (1930). This Thing Called Broadcasting. New York:
Henry Holt & Co.
Index
Note: Locators followed by the letter ‘n’ refer to notes. Locators are in italics refer to
chapter discussions.
Abbey Theatre 23, 24, 26 Arnold, Vincent 226, 230, 234

Abram, Albert 268 Arrizabalaga, Ramon 237
‘Abrams Investigation Committee’ 268 Aston, Winifred 80
Acerbo Law 195 Astor, David 188
Acquarone, Alberto 196 ‘Atheling, William’ 227
Action 226 Atheneaum, The 160
Addyman, David 13–14, 132n. 13, 267 Attlee, Clement 156
Adelphi, The 169, 174, 183, 191n. 2 Auden, W.H. 184
Adorno, Theodor 7, 197, 35n. 6 ‘September 1 1939’ 184
Aestheticist Movement 31, 35n. 12 Avanti 198
Age of Princes 129 Avery, Todd 6, 8, 31, 35n. 11, 98, 99, 100,
Agro Pontino 203 101, 104, 106, 107, 269n. 4
Ahmed, Ali 179
Aldridge, M. 39 Baird, John Logie 39, 41, 43, 49
Alfieri, Dino 198, 204 ‘Bairnsfather, Bruce’ 227, 228
Algren, Nelson 247 Balbo, Italo 204
Alldrit, Keith 131n. 2, 132n. 8 Baldoli, C. 197
Amendola, Giovanni 195, 197 Barabbas 89, 93n. 10
‘American Imperialist’ 228, 229, 241n. 33, Barber, Marjorie 87
241n. 35 Barnes, George 23, 35n. 1, 132, 138, 144
Amphitryon 103 Barnouw, Erik 5
Amprim, Frank L. 237, 242n. 54 A History of Broadcasting in the
Anand, Mulk Raj 171, 179, 181, 192n. 15 United States 5
The Sword and the Sickle 181 Barral, Jean 216, 240n. 7
Untouchable 181 La Suprématie universelle des juifs et la
Anderson, Hans Christian 189 Société des nations 216
‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ 189 Barrington, Brendan 8
Andiopoulos, S. 44 Baruch the Zealot 89, 236
Antigone, The 146 Baxendale, John 164
Armand, Louis 47 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
Armstrong, Charles 10, 183, 267 2, 8, 11–12, 24, 39, 79, 81, 87, 119,
Armstrong, Louis 14, 205, 206 123, 130, 148, 161, 169, 202
Armstrong, Martin 189, 190 ‘BBC Audience Estimates: Italy’ 241n. 15
Arnheim, Rudolf 4, 54, 82, 92n. 2, 138, 141 BBC Belfast 24
‘In Praise of Blindness’ 92n. 2 BBC Department of the Spoken Word 114
Radio 4, 141 BBC Drama Department 82
Arnold, Matthew 68–9, 76n. 8, 98–102, BBC Eastern Service 98, 109
104, 106, 107, 146, 186, 202, 267 BBC Empire Service 170
272 Index
BBC Forces Programme 156 Bokhari, Zulfiqar 63, 175, 176, 177, 178,
BBC Home Service 73, 75n. 2 191n. 11
BBC India Service 13, 63, 170, 175, 181, Bollingen foundation 126
188 Bonacci, Filippo 199
BBC Monitoring Station 219 Bonafé, Alain 245, 247, 249, 251, 259, 263n. 2
BBC National Programme 24, 144 Bonnafé, Lucien 263n. 2
BBC Overseas Service 75n. 2 Bontempelli, Massimo 207
BBC Religious Broadcasting 79, 84 Book Crisis, The 160, 161
BBC Schools Programme 75n. 2 Bose, Subhas Chandra 183
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts 219 Bowen, Elizabeth 4, 8
BBC Third Programme 12, 72, 73, 98, 114, Bowker, Gordon 191n. 4
115, 116, 117, 121, 123, 130, 131, Bowra, Maurice 32, 35n. 13
132n. 3, 132n. 11, 183 ‘Braccioforte, Luigi’ 14, 206
BBC Welsh Home Service 113, 132n. 4 Brander, Lawrence 188
BBC Welsh Programmes 132n. 4 Brazabon, James 93n. 7
BBC Welsh Regional Service 12 Brecht, Benjamin 3, 140, 151
BBC West Region 113 Briggs, Asa 5, 128
BBC Written Archive Centre 9, 11, 113, History of Broadcasting in the
139, 155, 239 United Kingdom 5
Beaverbrook, Lord 165 British Library 93n. 9, 93n. 12
Beckett, Samuel vii 9, 126 British Union of Fascists (BUF) 226
Beckett, Thomas á 87 Broadcasting Modernism 1, 8, 9
Beer, Gillian 58 Broadcasting Organisation in Italy’ 240–1
Belfast News-Letter 35n. 5 Brummell, Beau 139
Bell, Quentin 138 Brzezinksi, Zbigniew 195
Benjamin, Walter 3, 8, 140, 142, 151 Buckingham, Bob 65–6
Bentley, E.C. 92n. 4 Buellt Wood 128
Bergmeier, Horst 5, 197, 209n. 1 Bullett, Gerard 68
Berkeley, Anthony 92n. 4 Bullit, W.C. 236
Berlin Olympics 40 ‘Buonomo, Beniamino’ 14, 206
Berman, Marshall 6 Burger, Margaret A. 92n. 4
All That is Solid Melts in the Air: Burns, R.W. 39
The Experience of Modernity 6 Burton, Richard 132n. 3
Bermann, Matvei 236 Byrne, David 48
Berners Hotel 79 Byron, Lord 171, 181
Bertaglio, Italo 208 ‘The Isles of Greece’ 171, 181, 184
Bevan, Aneurin 188
Bible, The 79, 83, 84, 106, 234 Caliban 104
Biddle, Francis 221 Cambridge 180, 181
Beinecke Library 217, 222, 224, 230, 233, Campbell, Joseph 47
236, 239 Campbell, Timothy 1, 9
‘Billings, Langdon’ 227, 228, 241n. 34 Cannistraro, Philip V. 5, 195, 198, 199,
‘Bingham, Julian’ 227, 228 204, 208
Bird, Malcolm J. 268 Cantuccio dei bambini 204
‘Blimp, Colonel’ 228 Carlyle, Thomas 179
Bloom, Emily C. 28, 30 Carey, John 6
Bloomsbury Group 8, 31, 139 Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and
Blum, Léon 234, 260 Prejudice among the Literary
Blunden, Edmund 171, 184 Intelligentsia 1880-1939, 6
Index 273
Carpenter, Humphrey 121, 132n. 5, Congress Working Committee 173

133n. 16, 216, 227, 240n. 8, Connor, Steven 9, 82
241n. 31 Conover, Anne 224–5
Cary, Roger 67 Continuum: The Australian Journal of
Caselli, Daniela 16 Media and Culture 6
Caughie, Pamela 138 Coronation 129, 130
Chabod, F. 196 Corrigan, Robert 222
Chamberlain, Neville 174 ‘Cover to Cover’ 40
Chapman, Rosemary 5 Coyle, Michael 3, 8, 81, 98–100, 106–7, 109
Charge of the Light Brigade 46 Crehan, Fr 128
Chaucer, Geoffrey 32 Crick, Bernard 191n. 4
Chiarella Theater 205 Crimean War 45, 119
Children’s Hour 82, 84, 88, 90 Crisell, Andrew 5
Chiodelli, Raul 204 Introductory History of British
Christ, Jesus 11, 83–7, 89, 92 Broadcasting 5
Christian modernism 12 Croce, Bernadetto 197
Christian, The 92n. 1 Crofts, Freeman Wills 92n. 4
Christianity 107 Cromwell, Oliver 31
Christie, Agatha 92n. 4 Crook, Tim 6
Church of England Newsletter 92n. 1 Cross of Refuge 129
Churchill, Winston 158, 144, 164, 165, Cuddy-Keane, Melba 138, 139, 141, 142
174, 217, 235 Cullingford 157, 162
‘We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches’ Curie, Marie 75n. 6
164 Curran, Terri 89
Ciano, Constanzo 198, 200, 202
Ciano, Galeazzo 198 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 207
Civil List 114 ‘Daily Broadcast Reports’ 225–6
Clark, C. 49 Daily Herald 79
Cleveland, Grover 229 Daily Mail 79
Cleverdon, Douglas 113, 114, 115, Daily News 39
123, 125, 126, 132n. 3, 132n. 10, Dakin, Marjorie 191n. 5
132n. 11 Dale, Alzina Stone 89
‘David Jones and Broadcasting’ 132n. 3 Dane, Clemence 80, 92n. 4
Clinton, Bill 51 Darian-Smith, K. 39
Coburn, Charles 189 Davidson, John 98, 110
Cocteau, Jean 120 Davison, Edward 165
Cohen, Debra Rae 3, 8, 9 Davison, Peter 175, 178, 191n. 4, 191n. 5,
Cohn, Leonie 116, 119, 121, 132n. 10 191n. 12, 191n. 13
Cold War 9 De Beauvoir, Simone 15, 245, 247–52,
Cole, Margaret 149 254–5, 258, 263n. 2, 263n. 3,
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 131n. 1 263n. 4
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ Force of Circumstance 249
131n. 1 De Felice, Renzo 196
Communism 250, 251, 259–60 De Gaulle, Charles 246, 247, 259
‘Communisme et anticommunisme’ De Grazia, Victoria 197
263n. 5 De Rachewiltz, Mary 219, 223, 240n. 10,
Communist, The 149 241n. 21
Con stile 206 ‘Fragments of an Atmosphere’
Confucius 214–15, 233 240n. 10, 241n. 21
274 Index
Decadent Movement 31, 35n. 12 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

‘Del Bene, Giovanni’ 227, 228, 231 101–2
Dempsey-Carpenter boxing match 199 ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’
Department of Justice 15, 221–2 102–3, 108
Derrida, Jacques 27, 85–6 Sweeney Agonistes 186
‘Dias, B.H.’ 227 ‘The Approach to James Joyce’ 108
Di Marzo, Cornelio 232, 242n. 39 The Cocktail Party 103
Dietrich, Otto 236 The Confidential Clerk 103
Ditchling 127 The Family Reunion 103
Donne, John 12, 109 ‘The Fire Sermon’ 97
Doob, Leonard W. 218, 221–3, 231 The Idea of a Christian Society 100
Ezra Pound Speaking 7, 231 ‘The Modern Dilemma’ 104–6
‘Dooley, Mr.’ 227 ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’ 185
Donovan, William 234 ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ 101, 108
Dover, Cedric 179 ‘The Unity of European Culture’ 101–2,
Doyle, Arthur Conan 47 105–6
‘The Disintegration Machine’ 48–9 ‘The Voice of his Time. On Tennyson’s
‘Challenger’ stories 48 In Memoriam’ 108
Sherlock Holmes stories 48 The Waste Land 97, 100, 104–5, 110
Dowden, Edward, fn 15, 35 ‘The Writer as Artist’ 108
Downing, Crystal 81 ‘What is the Use?’ 105
Dowson, Edward 32, 33 Elizabeth II 113, 127
Dowson, Ernest 110 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 179
Drama Scripts Department 72 Empson, William 171, 184–5, 187, 191n. 4
Dryden, John 12, 109 Engelberg, E. 36n. 17
Dunkirk evacuation 164–5 English Coronation Rite 128
‘English Broadcast Memo’ 241n. 15
Eagleton, Terry 186 Epoch and Artist 114
Easter Rising 31 Erikson, Erik 192n. 14
Eck, Hélène 246, 247, 253 ERR (Ente Radio Rurale) 201, 202, 203, 204
Edward I 128 Euripides 185
EIAR (Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Evans, J. 39
Radiofoniche) 196, 204, 205, 214, Evans, Elwyn 115, 123–4
216–17, 220, 223, 225, 228, 232, Eve of St. Agnes, The 40
234, 237 Evening Standard 121, 123
Eliot, T.S. 8, 12, 15, 40, 81, 87, 93n. 5, Evola, Julius 226
97–110, 139, 160, 170, 185–6, 267, ‘Judaism Against Western Civilisation’ 226
269n. 4 Existentialism 260
‘A Game of Chess’ 102
Ash-Wednesday 108–10 Fang, I. 40
‘Building up a Christian World’ 105–6 Fascism 149, 169–70, 173–6, 197–8
Burnt Norton 108 Fascist Italy 196, 209
‘Christianity and Communism’ 104, 106 Fascist Confederation of Industrial
‘Church, Community and State’ 100 Workers 237
Four Quartets 108, 110 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 15,
Little Gidding 103, 110 213, 215, 222, 232, 237, 241n. 35
Murder in the Cathedral 40, 81, 87, FCC (Federal Communications
103–4 Commission) 221, 222
‘No Easy Recipes’ 105 Feder, Gottfried 216
Index 275
Feldman, Matthew 3, 14–5, 267, 269 Freud, Sigmund 147

Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda Group Psychology 146
1935-1945, 15 Friedlander, Benjamin 215, 223, 231,
‘The Pound Case in Historical 243n. 57
Perspective: An Archival Overview’ ‘Radio Broadcasts’ 231
241n. 18 Friedrich, Carl 195
Ferguson, Allen 144 ‘From Columbus to De Pinedo’ 204
Ferruzzi, Stefano 205 Frow, J. 28
Fifield, Peter 11, 267 Futurist Radio Manifesto 3
Fifth Columnists 161 Futurism 9, 206–7, 208, 209n. 2
Fischer, Louis 192n. 14 Fyvel, Tosco 187–8, 190, 191n. 7
Fisher, Margaret 3, 8, 207, 208
Fleay, C. 175 Gale, Maggie Barbara 161
Flory, John 179–80 Galster, Ingrid 250
Folgore, Luciano 207 Gandhi, Mohandas 171, 180, 181
Fordham, Finn 3, 4, 10, 11, 267 Gay, Peter 2
‘Foreign Gen/European Intelligence Gentile, Emilio 196
Papers/Surveys of Broadcasting Gentile, Giovanni 202
Organisations 1942-1943’ 241n. 14 George VIII 40
‘Foreign Language Broadcasts from Italy’ Gielgud, Lewis 93n. 12
240n. 14 Gielgud, Val 82, 85
Foreign Office 72 Gilfallan, Daniel 5
Forster, E.M. 1, 3, 8, 11, 57–76, 170, 187, Pieces of Sound: German
189, 190, 267 Experimental Radio 5
A Passage to India 57 Gill, Eric 120, 127
A Room With a View 64 Giolitti government 199
Arctic Summer 57 Gleichschaltung 196
‘Conversation in the Train’ 64–6 Goedel, Carl 241n. 19
‘Efficiency and Liberty’ 66–7 Gloucester, Duke of 137
‘Entrance to an Unwritten Novel” 57 Goldman, Henry 236
‘Fifth Anniversary Talk’ 68, 75n. 4 Goebbels 196, 197, 198
Howard’s End 74 Goedel, Carl 222–3
‘New Year’s Greeting’ 70 Gombrich, E.H. 219–20, 240n. 13
‘Railway Bridges’ 57, 74n. 1 ‘Some Axioms, Musings, and
‘Some Books’ 61, 68–9 Hints on Hearing’ 240n. 13
‘The Curate’s Friend’ 73 Goodman, Benny 14, 206
‘The Development of Criticism: Goody, Alex 11, 267
Matthew Arnold’ 76n. 8 Gordon, General 35n. 15
‘The Great Frost’ 60 Gordon, Zita 93n. 12
‘The Machine Stops’ 59, 72, 76n. 9 Gospels 84, 85, 86, 90, 93n. 10
‘Unwillingly to School: Graf Spree 147
Matthew Arnold’ 76n. 8 Gramsci, Antonio 197
‘We Speak to India’ 63–4 Great War 9, 199
‘What I Believe’ 70 Greatcoat, Dai 113
Foster, Roy 31, 35n. 10 Greek War of Independence 171
France, Anatole 189 Greenhalgh, Mollie 73
‘Crainquebille’ 189 Greenwood, Arthur 156
Fraser, G. S. 184 Gregson, R. E. 67
‘A Letter to Ann Ridler’ 184 Greil, Arthur L. 196
276 Index
Griffin, Roger 132n. 15, 196, 206 Heymann, C. David 217–18, 222, 227,
Modernism and Fascism 196 232, 234, 241n. 31
Grisewood, Harman 12, 68, 73, 114, 116, The Last Rower 222, 227
119, 120, 121, 126–7, 130, 132n. 11, High Commission for Radio Inspectorate 201
133n. 16 Hilmes, Michele 5
One Thing at a Time 121–2 Radio Voices: American Broadcasting
Broadcasting and Society: Comments 1922-1952, 5
from a Christian Standpoint 126–7 Hitler, Adolf 15, 75n. 5, 90, 146, 163, 188,
‘Society’s Responsibility for 198, 214–15, 234, 247
Broadcasting’ 127 Mein Kampf 15
Guarino, Carmine 208 ‘Propaganda and Organisation’ 15
Tum tum ninna nanna 208 Hitler-Jugend 58
Guggenheim, Solomon 236 Hogarth Press 13, 140, 143, 149
Holden, Inez 189
Haldane, J.B.S. 170 Holme, Christopher 113, 116, 119
Halliday, Sam 6 Holy Trinity 84
Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Home Guard 175
Literature, Culture and the Arts 6 Hoover, J. Edgar 242n. 54
Haney, J. 88 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 118, 120
Hanson Neil 162–5, 167n. 1 Hore-Belisha, Leslie 239
Harker, Ben 3, 151 Horizon 183
Harman, R.B. 92n. 4 Horkheimer, Max 197
Harper’s Magazine, 167n. 5 ‘Hot Club Circle’ 205
Harrison, Lillian 91 ‘Hot Jazz Club’ 205
Harrow 181 House of Commons 164
Hawkes, Nicholas 164, 167n. 2 Houses of Parliament 90
Hawkins, Desmond 172, 175, 176 Howes, Marjorie 26, 35n. 7
Hawthornden Prize 114 Htin Aung, Maung 180, 181
Hayman, David 42 Hughes, Linda K. 3, 8, 58
Hayter, William 120 Hurd, Sir Percy 90
Healy, Maurice 156 Huxley, Aldous 42, 53
Heath, Jeffrey 3, 8, 74n. 1 Brave New World 53
The Creator as Critic 8 Huxley, Julian 40
Heilbron, Carolyn 93n. 7
Heller, Erich 115 Il grammofono della verità 207
Henderson, Archie 226–7 Il Meridiano di Roma 232
“I cease not to yowl!” Imagism 8, 121
Reannotated 241n. 30 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 169, 173
‘Luchini, Alberto’ 241n. 30 Indian National Congress 171, 173, 181
Hepburn, Allen 4, 8 Inns of Court 181
Herbert, A.P. 167n. 2 Interlandi, Telesio 224
Hercules Furens 103 ‘In the Mood’ 206
Hercules 103 Ironside, Robin 114
Herf, Jeffrey 235 Iscariot, Judas 87, 89
Herman, Albert 49 Isham, Virginia 137
Hewitt, Nicholas 5 Isola, Gianni 5
Popular Culture and Mass
Communication in Twentieth-C James, A. Lloyd 144
France 5 Japanese Noh Theatre 26
Index 277
Jenkin, May 82 L’angolo dei bambini 204

Johnson, Lionel 32, 35n. 2 ‘La crise du socialisme’ 263n. 5
Jones, David 113–33, 267 L’ora dell’agricole 202, 203
Epoch and Artist 114 Labour Party 143
In Parenthesis 113, 114, 115, 123 La Tribune de Paris 245, 257, 259
Mabinog’s Liturgy 123 La Tribune des journalistes parlementaires
Preface to In Parenthesis 132n. 10 247, 257, 259
Redriff 123 La tribune des temps modernes 15, 245–63,
The Anathameta 114, 123, 125 263n. 4
The Dying Gaul 114 Lago, Mary 3, 8, 58, 74n. 1, 75n. 2
‘The Fatigue’ 115 Langland, William 130–1
The Lady of the Pool 123 ‘Piers Plowman’ 130–1
‘Wales and the Crown’ 113, 115, 117, Lawrence, T.E. 184
129 Revolt in the Desert 184
Journal of Radio and Audio Media 6 Le Progres Civique 173
Joyce, James 4, 10–11, 39–55, 108–9, 118, Le tristezze di San Luigi 206
121, 268 Leavis, F.R. 143, 177
Finnegans Wake, 10, 39–55, 268 LeMahieu, D.L. 6
‘How Buckley Shot the Russian A Culture for Democracy: Mass
General’ 40 Communication and the Cultivated
‘Work in Progress’ notebook 11 Mind in Britain Between the Wars 6
Joyce, William (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) 234 Léon, Paul 52
Juno 103 Lescarboura, Austin C. 266–9, 269n. 1,
269n. 2, 269n. 5
Kaganovich, Lazar 236 ‘Radio for Everybody’ 266
Kahn, Douglas 7 Les Temps Modernes 15, 249, 250, 252–3,
Wireless Imagination 7 254, 269
Kallin, Anna 113, 114, 115, 130, Levy, William 221
132n. 5, 132n. 11, 133n. 17, Certain Radio Speeches of Ezra Pound
197, 205 221
Keane, George 131 Lewis, C. S. 61
The Symbol of Piers 131 The Problem of Pain 61
Kern, Stephen 6 The Screwtape Letters 61
The Culture of Time and Space Lewis, Ethan 93n. 7
1880-1918, 6 Lewis, Wyndham 42–3, 118, 120
Kerr, Douglas 8, 175, 178, 181–2, 187, Time and Western Man 43
191n. 8 Lewty, Jane 3, 8, 9, 138
Kittler, Friedrich 6, 48 Light, Alison 148
Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 6 Listener Research Department 156
Kittross, John M. 5 Listener, The 10, 12, 24, 75n. 4, 100, 104–6,
Stay Tuned: A Concise History of 117, 119, 120, 130, 139, 144, 177,
American Broadcasting 5 191n. 9
Knox, Father Ronald 92n. 4 Llywelyn 128, 129
Knox, Macgregor 196 Lord Chamberlain’s Office 84–5, 87,
Knox, Frank 233 92
Kogan, N. 196 ‘Lord Haw Haw’ 156
Koon, Tracy H. 207 Lord Linlithgow 173
Kuhn, Raymond 246, 247, 253 Lord’s Day Observance Society 79, 87, 92,
Koppen, Randi 4, 13, 268 92n. 1
278 Index
Lotz, Rainer E. 5, 197, 209n. 1 Matthew, St. 83–4

Hitler’s Airwaves 5 Matthews, Steven 12, 100, 103
Low, A.M. 39, 53 Maud, Ralph 8
Low, D.A. 93n. 6 Maugham, Somerset 40
Luchini, Alberto 226–7, 241n. 30 ‘Mazda, Piero’ 227
‘The Protocols of Zion’ 226, 235, McAllister, Gilbert 160
242n. 48 McCormack, W.J., 35n. 10
Gli ebrei hanno voluto la guerra 227 McCulluch, Derek 82, 88, 90
Lugosi, Bela 49 McGregor, Robert 93n. 7
Luker, N. G. 67 McKechnie, James 91
Luzzato, Sergio 197 McLuhan, Marshall 47, 51, 52
Lycée François 249 Meacham, Harry 225
Lyttelton, Adrian 196 Mead, Henry 13, 267
Mechlis, Lev 236
Macauley, Thomas 67 Mehlman, Jeffrey 8
MacCarthy, Desmond 139 Mendel, Gregor 234
MacNeice, Louis 33 Mendelssohn, Felix 204
Magdalen, Mary 91 Menon, Narayana 179
Maier, Hans 196 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15, 245, 257, 260,
Maisky, Ivan 236 261, 263n. 5
Makeham, Eliot 84 Meyers, Jeffrey 191n. 4
Malraux, André 132n. 11 Milton, John 69, 102, 108
‘The Voices of Silence’ 132n. 11 Areopagitica 69
Manchester Guardian 93n. 11 Ministry for Popular Culture (Minculpop)
Mann, Thomas 8 14, 198, 205, 223–4, 225, 233, 237,
Listen, Germany! Twenty-five Radio 238
Messages to the German People Over Ministry for Press and Propaganda 198
the BBC 8 Ministry of Communication 200, 208
Manna dal cielo 206 Ministry of Information 158
Marconi Company 195, 199–200 MLA (Modern Languages Association) 7
Marconi, B. 199 Modernism/Modernity 8
Marconi, Guglielmo 198 Molotov, Vyacheslav 174
Marescalchi, Arturo 202 ‘Monitoring Services Memos:
Marinetti, Filippo 206–7, 208, 209 Misc’ 240n. 13, 241n. 15
‘Manifesto of Radio’ 208 Monteleone, F. 199, 208
‘The Bombardment of Adrianopoly’ Moody, Alys 15, 269
208 Mooney, Rita 23
‘Manifesto of Radio, aka ‘La Radia: Moran, M. 35n. 12
The Futurist Manifesto’ Morgan, Philip 196
Maritain, Jacques 120 Morgenthau, Hans 236
Martin, Herbert Henry 87 Morin, Emilie, ‘Yeats and the Arts’ 35n. 4
Martin, Kingsley 188 Morris, Adelaide 7
Mascagni, Pietro 205 Sound States 7
Masefield, John 24 Morris, John 71–2, 73
Masnata, Pino 206, 207, 208 Morris, William 30
La bambina ammalata 208 Morse, Daniel 75n. 3
‘La Radia’ 207 Moscow Show Trials 52, 172
Tum tum ninna nanna 208 Moss, Gilbert 189
Matheson, Hilda 4, 139 Muhlberger, Detlef 198
Matteotti, Giacomo 197 Muir, Edwin 98
Index 279
Mussolini, Benito 5, 14, 146, 195–207, Ogilvie, F.W. 84

214–15, 232 Operation Dynamo 164
Mystery of Faith, The 119 Organski, A.F.K. 196
Orwell, Eileen 191n. 5
Nadel, Ira B. 223, 231 Orwell, George 1, 7, 8, 13, 42, 53, 98,
Nash, Paul 40 169–92, 267
Nasta, Susheila 192n. 15 A Clergyman’s Daughter 173
National Archives 15 ‘A Story by Five Authors’ 189–90
National Book Council 40 Animal Farm 189
‘National Committee for the Defence ‘As I Please’ 191n. 10
of Books’ 160 ‘British Rations and the Submarine
National Gallery 70 War’ 178
National Library of Wales 117 Burmese Days 169, 173, 178
NBC (National Broadcasting Company) 2 Down and Out in Paris and London
Nehru, Jawaharlal 171, 181 173
Neulander, Joelle 5 Homage to Catalonia 169, 173,
Programming National Identity: The 191n. 2
Culture of Radio in 1930s France 5 ‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British
New Age, The 227 Empire in Burma’ 173
New Chronicle of Christian Education 79 Keep the Aspidistra Flying 177, 189
‘New Elizabethan Age’ 130 ‘Literary Criticism’ 176
New Saxon Pamphlet 186 ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’ 176–7,
News Chronicle, The 162–3, 164–5, 167n. 5 191n. 9
New Statesman and Nation, The 149 ‘Money and Guns’ 178
New Testament 80, 84, 85, 87 ‘My Country Right or Left’ 174, 177
Newby, P. H. 67 ‘New Words’ 189
Newcastle Journal 79 Nineteen Eighty-Four 53, 172, 176, 189,
New Fabian Research Bureau 149 190
New York Times 240n. 6 ‘Paper is Precious’ 178
Nicholas, Sian 155–6, 157, 158, 160 ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ 177, 185,
The Echo of War 155 190
Nicholls, Basil, E. 79, 90 ‘Politics and the English Language’ 189
Nicholson, Ben 118, 120 ‘Shooting an Elephant’ 180
Nicholson, Harold 139, 142 Talking to India 178, 182, 186
Nine o’clock News 156 ‘The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda’
1935 Government of India Act 174 176, 191n. 9
1938 Racial Laws 206 ‘The Hanging’ 180
Non-Aggression Pact 174 The Lion and the Unicorn 13, 174, 175,
Nord, P.G. 263n. 1 176, 177, 182
Norman, Charles 222, 240n. 10 ‘The Meaning of a Poem’ 176, 177,
‘Ezra Pound and the Italian Ministry 191n. 9
for Popular Culture’ 222 ‘The Meaning of Sabotage’ 178
Norris, Christopher 85–6 ‘The Meaning of Scorched Earth’ 178
‘The Proletarian Writer/Literature’ 172,
Observer, The 188 176, 191n. 9
O’Hanlan, John 47, 55n. 1 The Road to Wigan Pier 173
Oddone, Elisabetta 204 ‘Tolstoy and Shakespeare’ 176, 191n. 9
‘Office of Enlightenment and Speaker Voice 170–2, 177, 182–5, 186, 191n. 3
Information Materials’ 236 ‘What’s Wrong with the Modern Short
Oggi e domain 208 Story’ 176, 191n. 9
280 Index
‘Why I Joined the I.L.P.’ 191n. 6 Pound, Ezra 4, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 118, 121,
‘Writer in the Witness Box’ 175, 191n. 9 122, 213–43, 267, 269
Ottieri, Alesandra 208, 209 ‘A Segment’ 236, 242n. 51
Ovid 102 ‘A Word to the Rabis’ 226, 241n. 28
OVRA (Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e ‘Alliance’ 241n. 24
la Repressione dell’Antifascismo) 195 ‘American Imperialist Answers a
Oxford Book of Modern Verse, The 24 Question’ 229
OED (Oxford English Dictionary) 41, ‘An American Imperialist Writes’ 229,
192n. 16 241n. 33
‘Announcements by RAI after Pearl
Paideuma 242n. 38 Harbour [sic]’ 242n. 36
Palmieri, M. 196 ‘Articles in German “Nein ich spreche
Paresce, Gabriele 223–5, 241n. 20 nicht” [Germ]’ 240n. 5
Partisan Review, The 169 ‘Blinder Alleys’ 236, 242n. 52
Paterson, Adrian 35n. 9 ‘Borderline Cases’ 236, 242n. 51
Pavolini, Alessandro 224, 233 ‘Brain Mistrust’ 241n. 24
PCF (Parti communiste français) 260 ‘Communications’ 224, 241n. 23
Pellicano, Piero 226 ‘Continuity’ 218
‘The Jewish International’ 226 ‘Delbene: Dichotomy’ 242n. 37
Pellizzi, Camilli 225, 241n. 26, 241n. 27 ‘Gangsters Together’ 228, 241n. 34
‘Pennies from Heaven’ 206 Italy’s Policy of Social Economics
Percy, Sandra 93n. 6 1939/1940, 238
Pétain, Phillippe 216, 240n. 6 ‘Jean Barral’ 216, 240n. 7
Peters, John Durham 2, 7 ‘L’Asse che non vacilla’ 215
Speaking Into the Air 7 ‘La Mereschal Pétain…’ 240n. 6
Picasso, Pablo 118, 120 ‘London Opinion’ 229
Piccadilly Theatre 87 ‘Message to Tuan Tzetsun’s Friends’
Pilate, Pontius 89 214, 240n. 3
Piper, John 40 ‘Naturally’ 241n. 19
Pirandello 32, 40, 207, 36n. 16 ‘News from Nowhere’ 228, 232, 233
The Man with the Flower in his Mouth ‘Notes in the Margin’ 228
40 ‘Notes of an American Imperialist’ 229
Planquette, Robert 142 ‘Now That The Elections Are Over’
PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista) 195–201 241n. 20
Political Quarterly, The 148 ‘On Resuming’ 231
Pontalis, Jean-Bernard 245, 250, 259, 263n. 5 ‘Quisling’ 235
Popeye 51 ‘That Illusion’ 218
Por, Odon 238 ‘The Quiet Disposition’ 224, 241n. 23
Italy’s Policy of Social Economics ‘Those Parentheses’ 231
1939/1940, 238 ‘To Consolidate’ 218
Postgate, Raymond 140, 141, 149–51 ‘You New Zealanders’ 214
How to Make a Revolution 149 ‘Pound’s Italian investments and receipts’
‘Radio, Press and Publishing’ 150 242n. 55, 243n. 57
‘The Broadcasting System of the Soviet Powell, York 32
Union’ 149 Pratella, Balilla 208
What to Do With the B.B.C. 140, Preface for Corpus Christi 126
149–51 Présidence du Conseil 249
Pouillon, Jean 245, 250 Preziosi, Giovanni 226
POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación ‘Judaism Wanted This War’ 226
Marxista) 169, 173, 191n. 2 Priestley, J.B. 1, 13–14, 148, 155–67
Index 281
Daylight on Saturday 160 Redman, Tim 222, 225, 231–2, 238, 240n. 12,
‘Do Not Underrate Nazis’ Propaganda’ 241n. 26, 242n. 38, 242n. 39, 242n. 48,
167n. 5 242n. 56
Home Is Tomorrow 161 ‘The Repatriation of Ezra Pound
Let the People Sing 161–2 1939-1942’ 231–2, 242n. 38
Literature and Western Man 159 Rees, Sir Richard 191n. 2
Margin Released 160, 163 Reichskulturkammer 196, 198
Out of the People 162 Reich Press Office 235, 242n. 50
‘Postscripts’ 13, 155–67 Germany Has Entered the Fight to the
Preface to All England Listened 163 Finish with the Jewish-Bolshevik
The Aerodrome 160 System of Murder 242n. 50
Pringle, John 66–7 Reith Lectures 73
Pritchett, V.S. 176 Reith, Sir John 2, 4, 31, 35n. 11, 63, 70–1,
Proclus 89 99, 145, 146, 186, 202
PSU (Partito Socialista Unitario) 197 Broadcast Over Britain 75n. 6
Religious Advisory Committee 90
Queen 129 Rendall, R. A. 67
Quisling, Vidkun 216, 235 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 121
‘Quit India’ campaign 171 Revue LISA/LISA, 167n. 3
Reynolds, B. 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 90, 93n. 5
Racial Bureau 226 Reynolds, Reginald 170
Radio Arallo 199 Ribbentrop, Joachim 174
Radio Drama 6 Rice, T. J. 42, 47, 50, 53
‘Radio Balilla’ (radiorurale) receiver 201, Cannibal Joyce 47
204 Richard II 35n. 15
Radio Bremen 228 Richeri, Guiseppe 198
Radio éireann 24 Ricoeur, Paul 25, 183
Radio France 263n. 3 Riefenstahl, Leni 58
Radio Giornale 200 The Triumph of the Will 58–9
Radio Luxembourg 246 Roberts, David 196
Radio Montecarlo 246 Robinson, M. H. 47
Radio Nonno 204 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 221–3, 229–30,
Radio PTT 2 233, 235
Radio Revolution 228 Rosa, Salvatar 121
‘Radio Rome’ 201, 219, 220, 227, 234 Rose, Danis 47, 55n. 1
Radio Three 183 Rote Sprachror 151
Radiodiffusion Française (RDF) 247 Rothermere, Lord 165
Radiodiffusion-Télévision française (RTF) ‘Round the Microphone’ 217, 240n. 10
247 Rousset, David 257, 260
Radiodiffusion 15 Royal Navy 164
Radiofono 200 Rudge, Olga 224–5
Radios périphérique 246, 261 Ruskin, John 98
Radio Times 139 Ruzky, R.L. High Techne 7
Radio-Vichy 249–50
Ragnedda, Massimo 5, 14, 269 Salò Republic 215, 223
Ramadier, Paul 248–51 San Faustino, Prince Ranieri di 219,
Rangoon University 180 221, 226, 232–4, 240n. 9,
Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) 241n. 17, 241n. 29, 242n. 40,
257, 259, 260 242n. 41, 242n. 42, 242n. 43,
Read, Herbert 170, 171 242n. 44, 242n. 45
282 Index
Sanders, M. L. 175 Shelden, Michael 188, 191n. 4

Sarti, Roland 196 Shem 11
Sartre, Jean-Paul 15, 245–63, 269 Stock, Noel 225, 240n. 8
Critique of Dialectical Reason 261–3 Sievekind, Lance 138
L’existentialisme est un humanisme 257 Silone, Ignazio 189
No Exit 254 ‘The Fox’ 189
What Is Literature? 254–6 Silver, Jeremy 8, 29, 35n. 3
Sayers, Dorothy L. 11, 79–93, 267 ‘St. Louis Blues’ 206
A Certain Nobleman 86, 91 Silvey, Robert 75n. 4
‘Are Women Human?’ 91 Sinclair, Thorton 75n. 5
Behind the Screen 81, 92n. 4 Singing in the Rain 53
He That Should Come 80, 81 SIRAC (Società Italiana Radio Audizioni
Heirs to the Kingdom 83–4, 88 Circolari) 200
King of Sorrows 90 Sironi, Mario 207
‘The Detective Novel’ 81 SISERT (Società Italiana Servizi
The Devil to Pay 80 Radiotelegrafici e Radiofonici) 199
‘The Emperor Constantine 92n. 3 Smith, David 7
‘The Just Vengeance 92n. 3 Smith, Logan Pearsall 144
The King’s Herald, 86 Smith, Winston 189
The King’s Supper 89 Sommi-Picenardi 208
The Man Born to Be King 79–93, 267 Sosius 89
The Mind of The Maker 80 Speaight, Robert 87
‘The Princes of this World 89 Spectator, The 148
‘The Religions Behind the Nations’ 81 Spender, Stephen 170
The Scoop 81, 92n. 4 Spengler, Oswald 115–16, 120–1, 132n. 14
The Zeal of the House 80 The Decline of the West 120–1
Scaligero, Massimo 226 Sprigge, Sylvia 120–2
‘Judaism Against Rome’ 226 ‘Non-Representational Art’, [Letter]
Scannell, Paddy 5, & Cardiff, David 5 120, 132n. 12
Social History of British Broadcasting 5 Squadristi 195
Schanzer, Carlo 199 ‘Squarcio, Manilo’ 227
Schiff, John M. 236 ‘Squarcio, Pietro’ 227
Schuchard, Ronald 24, 26, 28, 35n. 5, Squier, Susan Merrill 6–7
35n. 8 Communities of the Air: Radio Century,
Schuman, Robert 248 Radio Culture 6–7
Schwernik, Nikolai 236 St. James’s Palace 84
Scientific American 266, 268, 269 St. Thomas 120
Sconce, Jeffrey 2, 7, 41 Stalin, Josef,42, 52
Haunted Media 7 Starace, Achille 202
Scriven, Michael 247 Statesman, The 148
Search-light books 187, 191n. 7 Staudt, Kathleen H. 132n. 14
Selfridges 39 Stein, Gertrude 8
Seneca 103, 110 Stephenson John 23
Shakespeare, Olivia 26 Sterling, Christopher H. 5
Shakespeare, William 63, 102, 104, 185 Stevenson, Randall 159
Macbeth 62 Stevenson, Robert Louis 159, 179
Merry Wives of Windsor 62 Stimpson, Henry 233
The Tempest 104 Stone, Wilfred 76n. 8
Sheehan, Vincent 76n. 6 Strong, L.A.G. 189
Index 283
Stuart, Francis 8 Tratner, Michael 31

Sturzo, Luigi 197 Tree of the Cross 129
Suàrez, Juan A. 97 Treece, Henry 184
Sud Radio 246 Tribune, The 188, 191n. 10
Sugden, A. 106 Trinculo 104
Sunday Children’s Hour 80 Trobridge, George 43
Sunday Graphic and Sunday News 87 Life of Emanuel Swedenborg 43
Swedenborg, Emanuel 43 Truman, Harry F. 222–3, 251
Sykes, Christopher 114 Tudor, Anthony 40
Symons, Arthur 110 ‘Fugue for Four Cameras’ 40
Turnbull, S. 39
Tablet, The 127–8 Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia 149
Taille, Maurice de la 119 Tytell, John 217
Talbot, George 201
Talbot, George 197, 198, 201 Uberti, Ubaldo degli 240n. 4
Talking Heads 48 Ungaro, Adriano 214, 218–19, 225, 228,
‘Tangye Lean’s Office: Italian Radio 232, 240n. 2, 240n. 11, 240n. 12,
1943-1948’ 241n. 15 241n. 32, 242n. 53
Taylor, D.J. 191n. 4 United Nations 161
Tegetmeier, Denis 123, 126 University College London 180
Telefunken 199 Untermeyer, Louis 236
‘The Alliance of Bolshevism and URI (Unione Radiofonica Italiana) 2, 195,
Plutocracy’ 235 200, 208
‘The Crisis’ 115 US Army Disciplinary Training Center
‘The Farmer’s Hour’ 202–3 213
Theall, Donald 40, 47
Third Reich 89, 90 Vallée, Cécile 158–9, 167n. 3
Thomas, Dylan 8, 113, 123 ‘J.B. Priestley, artiste de propaganda à
Thurtle, Mr. 90 la radio: au service de quelles idées’
Tichi, Cecelia 6 158
Shifting Gears 6 Van Ert, Gibran 218
Tiffany, David 8 Vatican Radio 202
Time and Tide 149 Veneziano, Marco 227
Time Magazine 231 Veraswami, Dr. 179–80, 181
Times, The 40, 52, 130 Verdone, Masrio 209n. 2
Times Literary Supplement 67–8 Virgil 102
Tindall, William York 47 Virgin Mary 91–2
Todd, Christopher 247, 256, 263n. 1, Volkskaempfer 196
263n. 3, 263n. 4 Vogue 139
Tonning, Erik 3, 12, 132n. 9, 132n. 15, Volunteer Defence League 175
267 Voroshiloff, Marshall 52
Modernism and Christianity 132n. 9, Vox-Haus 2
132n. 15
Torino Gazetta del Popolo 207 Wagner, Richard 73
Torrey, Fuller 236–7 The Ring 73
Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy Wall, Elizabeth 3, 8
195 Wallace, Edgar 65
Trade Unionism 165 Wallace, Henry 224
transition 43 Walls, Elizabeth Macleod 58
284 Index
Walpole, Hugh 92n. 4 Woolf, Virginia 4, 13, 137–51, 160, 269

Walton, L. 116 ‘A Ramble Round Words’ 145
Wanda’s Heart (Il cuore di Wanda) 208 ‘Are Too Many Books Written and
Warburg, James 236 Published’ 138–9, 142
War Department 221 ‘Beau Brummel’ 139, 144
Watch on the Rhine, The 62–3 Between the Acts 151
WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) ‘Craftsmanship’ 142, 144
147 Death of the Moth and Other Essays
Workers’ Theatre Movement 151 148
Webster, John 102, 109 ‘Middlebrow’ 148
‘The Duchess of Malfy’ 109 Orlando 139
Weimar Germany 3 ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ 145,
Welch, James W. 79, 80, 82, 83 146
Wells, H.G. 2, 7, 41, 76n. 9, 189 ‘The Leaning Tower’ 147–8
‘A Slip Under the Microscope’ 189 The Waves 137
When the Sleeper Wakes 41 ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’
West, Rebecca 40 146, 147, 148
West, W.J. 7, 175, 181, 191n. 4 Three Guineas 141, 143, 146, 147
Westminster Abbey 128 Wordsworth, Dorothy 139
Whispering Shadow, The 49 Workers’ Educational Association (WEA)
Whitehead, Gregory 7 133n. 16
Wireless Imagination 7 World War I 31
Whitehead, Kate 5, 8, 114, 132n. 3, World War II 11, 13, 15, 99, 196
132n. 6, 132n. 7
The Third Programme: A Literary Yale University 15
History 5 Yeats, George 35n. 14
Wilhelm, J.J. 230 Yeats, W.B. 8, 10, 23–36, 183, 267
Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 33
1925-1972, 230 ‘A Poet Broadcasts’ 35n. 5
Williams, Charles 98, 107–8 ‘Abbey Theatre Broadcast’ 24
Wilson, Sarah 8 ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’
Wilson, Whittaker 142 31
‘Four Songs of Morocco’ 142 ‘An Irish Programme’ 25
Winfrey, Oprah 42 ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ 35n. 15
Wintringham, Tom 170 ‘I Became an Author’ 24
WJY station 199 ‘In the Poet’s Parlour’ 24, 28
Wodehouse, P. G. 65 ‘In the Poet’s Pub’ 24, 28
Wolf, René 3, 5 King Oedipus 24, 28
The Undivided Sky 5 ‘Man and the Echo’ 33, 34
Woodcock, George 169–72, 187, 189, ‘Modern Poetry’: 24, 35n. 2
191n. 3, 192n. 14 ‘My Poetry Again’ 24
Woolf, S.J. 196 ‘My Own Poetry’ 24, 29, 30, 32
Woolf, Leonard 5, 13, 138–9, 140, 142–3, ‘Oedipus the King’ 24
148–9, 150 ‘Poems about Women’ 24, 26
‘Broadcasting and a Better World’ 148 ‘Preface’ to The Oxford Book of
‘Democracy Listens-In’ 148 Modern Verse 24
‘The Future of British Broadcasting’ ‘Reading of Poems’ 24
148 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 31
Index 285
‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion 23 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 29

‘The Curse of Cromwell’ 28, 30 ‘The Pilgrim’ 29
‘The Fisherman’ 27 The Hour Glass 24
‘The Growth of a Poet’ 24 The Tragic Generation 32
‘The Irish Literary Movement’ 24 Yorkshire Post, The 87

Feldman, Matthew, Et Al., Broadcasting in The Modernist Era (2014)

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Broadcasting in the Modernist Era

Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK

Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an

Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2014

© Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, Erik Tonning and contributors 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-1248-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Series Editor’s Preface vii

Part One Broadcasting Culture in the Modernist Era 21

1 Pub, Parlour, Theatre: Radio in the Imagination of W. B. Yeats

Part Two Broadcasting Politics in the Modernist Era 135

7 Rambling Round Words: Virginia Woolf and the Politics

9 ‘Keeping Our Little Corner Clean’: George Orwell’s Cultural

This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth century

this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches.

questions of whether this would be a centralized, univocal medium expressing

As the Italian case implies, a key distinction obtains in academic thinking

capturing a moment of epistemic transition. In stark contrast, R. L. Ruzky’s High

In reflecting the increasing turn in recent scholarship towards primary sources

BBC’s Listener magazine (now available online). In terms of the Anglophone

provided by Virginia Woolf ’s attack on ‘middlebrow’ broadcasting at the BBC.

Arnheim, Rudolf (1936). Radio. London: Faber and Faber.

——— (1997b). ‘T. S. Eliot’s Radio Broadcasts, 1929–1963: A Chronological Checklist’,

Pub, Parlour, Theatre

On 8 February 1937, dismayed by the poor quality of a BBC broadcast of his

Yeats’s first BBC broadcast, an introduction to a performance of his

1. ‘Oedipus the King’ (broadcast by BBC Belfast on 8 September 1931).

Some of this work can be interpreted as a hands-on continuation of the radio

a means of publication analogous (but by no means identical) to that of the

Yeats is explicitly drawing on his theatrical experience here, although the

Furthermore, Avery links the Bloomsbury stress on intimacy with a combination

1 In Barnes (1987), the wording is ‘Broadcast a fiasco … Perhaps my old bundle of

Early Television and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

There may come a time … when we shall have ‘smellyvision’ and ‘tastyvision’.

A translation of this might read

seems to be prophetically conjuring a somewhat typical domestic altercation in

[In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of trans-

smthngs gnwrng wthth sprsnwtch! He blanks his oggles because

Such a translation hardly produces a naturalist level of narrative; it also reduces,

in capitalist, communist or fascist guises, produced a global imaginary of

images and the transformations of human beings. Because of the attention on

Joyce thus predicts the immense power of television as State Propaganda

Arnheim’s technically wrong emphasis on ‘participation’ is curious and, given

TSW = Television and Short Wave World

Aldridge, M. (2012). The Birth of British Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

‘I Often Wish You Could Answer Me Back:

My audience, if I have one, can arrive or depart unobserved, it can come

With the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 E. M. Forster’s career as a

Early radio broadcasters, eager to make their programming effective, were

The sound of totalitarianism in Europe in the twentieth century was that of

I am … always a little incredulous at about those roast bullocks which have

Although by this time an accomplished broadcaster with 14 years of experience,

This is a slippery comparison, where memory and speculation are identified

thus suggests Arnold ‘as an example not as a recommendation. Different readers

transnational rather than a national manner: ‘Broadcasting may help to show