A Bridge Too Far

A Bridge Too Far
* * * out of 4

- 1977 • released by United Artists
- directed by Richard Attenborough
- written by William Goldman (from book by Cornelius Ryan)
- starring Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, and numerous others
- 175 minutes

In the opening hour of Richard Attenborough's monumental Second World War epic, Major General Robert Urquhart, played by Sean Connery, is greeted upon parachuting into Holland by lunatics who have escaped from a nearby asylum. This image sums up perfectly the tragicomic circumstances of Operation Market Garden, an Allied offensive in 1944 that led to some 30,000 casualties between the two sides.

A Bridge Too Far is the last in cinema's tradition of grand battle epics, marked by such blockbusters as The Guns of Navarone, The Longest Day, and Patton. All of these titles sported major casts, large-scale action, and outstanding production values. While Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan has paved new roads for the genre, A Bridge Too Far marks the end of a special time in Hollywood when vast arrays of talent came together for a single project. It seems unlikely that another such film will appear in the near future with production costs skyrocketing, so it's quite appropriate that A Bridge Too Far has something of a last word on the Second World War's bloodshed.

Adapted by screenwriter William Goldman from Cornelius Ryan's popular book, A Bridge Too Far steers us through the hasty planning, poor execution, and horrific aftermath of Market Garden, a high-stakes offensive for ending the war in Europe by Christmas 1944. The plan, 'credited' to Bernard Montgomery, involved dropping 35,000 Allied soldiers into Holland to secure key bridges, funnel trailing armies into Germany, and capture Berlin. In other words, Market Garden - the largest aerial operation in world history - was a parachute version of D-Day.

Montgomery's plan was first revealed by Lieutenant General Frederick Browning, depicted as a snooty figure by Dirk Bogarde. Several generals received the plan with enthusiasm, such as Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks (Edward Fox) of British 30 Corps and U. S. Major General Maxwell Taylor (Paul Maxwell). Others, however, looked upon it with reservations: Robert Urquhart, Brigadier General James Gavin (Ryan O'Neal), and Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski (Gene Hackman) were amongst those who found the risks too great. Yet Allied leadership, seeking an end to the war, cooperated. Warnings from Dutch intelligence on the presence of German tank divisions were ignored and the Allied generals quickly discovered their mistake.

Most of the film's running time is comprised of Allied efforts to secure the Dutch bridges, with leading Hollywood and European actors making appearances. Included are Michael Caine, James Caan, Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, Liv Ullmann, and Hardy Krüger. Because of space limits, a great deal of talent must be left out here. Filmed at original battle sites, A Bridge Too Far is packed with tanks, jeeps, airplanes, and heavy artillery. Hundreds of extras, including paratroopers, fill expansive action scenes made years before the digital magic of CGI.

While sympathetic to men in combat, A Bridge Too Far portrays the Allies as bringing a great deal of failure upon themselves. Besides paratroopers fighting with rifles against German tanks, we hear of crystal radios that don't work, watch supply drops that always miss their target, and enjoy Allied vehicles standing on roadsides (in a plan of 'thunderclap surprise'). Caution should be exercised in watching history through the lens of a filmmaker, but it's hard not to think of Market Garden as a study in human ineptitude and ask how the Allied generals could've won any battles, let alone this one.

Bridge reaches its high point at the 130-minute mark when Allied soldiers become increasingly desperate to break through Nijmegen. In need of boats to move across the River Waal, a unit led by U. S. Major Julian Cook (Robert Redford) is forced to row through a smoke screen in rafts while S. S. Panzer divisions leisurely wait on the other side. Amidst these soldiers' incredible bravery, the operation takes on an air of farce, as if the Allied leadership planned these tactics while in a nightclub.

Richard Attenborough, whose directorial résumé includes Gandhi, A Chorus Line, and Chaplin, has given more than enough justice to these broad events. Despite having to manage a huge cast of stars, Attenborough makes his actors work as a cohesive unit, with none of the roles taking on a cameo-like feel. His characters are interwoven through the storyline, returning to the fore at various times and maintaining their human interest. Though William Goldman's script feels clichéd and spits up encyclopedic facts to keep the viewer informed, the actors' enthusiasm overcomes most of its weaknesses.

The production was nicely filmed by Geoffrey Unsworth (Cromwell, Superman) and superbly edited by Antony Gibbs (Rollerball, Dune). Composer John Addison has made a repetitive soundtrack, but gives appropriate color to the film's plotline. Interestingly, Addison was a soldier in British 30 Corps during the Market Garden operation.

While epic war films are nowadays compared to Saving Private Ryan, much has to be said for A Bridge Too Far, which offers a different perspective on how the Second World War was fought. Aside from moments of lame humor, Gene Hackman's bad Polish accent, and (for many viewers) an extreme running time, Attenborough's opus is a fitting tribute to the men who fought in an operation of good intentions but atrocious design.

In 2005, MGM appropriately released a collector's edition DVD set of A Bridge Too Far with commentary and extras. Already in wide circulation is a 1998 disc with only United Artists' theatrical trailer supplied. Though this earlier release is lacking in sound balance, its visual transfer is well-done with minimal artifacts. The film is presented in widescreen with its original stereo track and a French 'dubbing' option; subtitles are provided in French and English. Monumental by today's standards, A Bridge Too Far is an absolute must for war film collectors and those with historical interests in Europe.

The Colossus & Other Poems

The Colossus & Other Poems
by Sylvia Plath
1957 (reprinted 1998) • Vintage International
96 pages / ISBN 0375704469 (paperback)

In a well-known 1962 radio interview with Peter Orr of the British Council, Sylvia Plath downplayed her achievements in The Colossus by explaining that she was 'bored' with the poems. By this time, she had entered the period of freer forms and dazzling imagery that fueled Ariel, a volume now securing her legacy.

Plath died at a young age and might have changed her mind about The Colossus poems had she lived long enough to reevaluate them. Fortunately, her public sees a great deal of the collection's value, at least in terms of its refinement and precision. Even when disregarding its subject matters, The Colossus can be viewed as a woman's treatise on the poetic art.

First published in 1960, The Colossus & Other Poems offers forty titles, many of which were written at the Yaddo artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, and published in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Encounter. The poems do not follow a specific order, but are arranged to supply contrasts in mood. Several of Plath's best known poems, including 'Night Shift,' 'The Colossus,' 'The Disquieting Muses,' 'The Beekeeper's Daughter,' and 'The Stones,' can be found in this 84-page collection.

On the surface, Plath's early poetry looks naïve. Her stanzas are always flush left with capital letters. The number of lines per stanza is usually consistent. Her metrics are flawless. But when examining the poems repeatedly, it becomes clear that Plath's work has manifold meanings; how deeply we see is based on how deeply we're willing to look. Even in simple narratives like 'Sow,' 'The Bull of Bendylaw,' and 'Snakecharmer,' Plath seems to be winking at us through her underlying ideas on human relationships.

Perhaps the strongest element of Plath's verse is its compactness. For such a range of images and emotions, her poems are quite short, rarely lasting beyond two pages. By her mid-to-late twenties, Plath had already disposed of excess, working powerful ideas into taut lines and stanzas. She had also completely mastered techniques such as 'internal' rhyme, alliteration, and enjambment, helped by her love of Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, Auden, and other immortals.

Plath's choice of 'The Colossus' as her focal poem is interesting, since female oppression does not seem a prevailing theme of this volume. 'The Colossus' is a poem of thirty lines, the first-person account of a woman who must serve as caretaker to the Colossus of Rhodes, a crumbling monument for god Helios. This poem foresees the later Plath of 'Daddy,' 'Lady Lazarus,' and 'The Moon and the Yew Tree,' where she openly rebels against a society that has confined women to limited roles.

Signs of the later Plath are also noticeable in poems such as 'Lorelei,' 'The Ghost's Leavetaking,' 'Full Fathom Five,' and 'The Stones.' These poems are intensely personal, stem from Plath's distinctly feminine voice, and seamlessly combine the real with the subconscious. The only factor working against this volume is the repetitiveness of Plath's imagery as her poems roll on: we are shown oceans, the Moon, and rocks a few times too many. Still, this can be forgiven with the variety of form and approach that Plath offers us. Even if we are looking at a sea or rock for the umpteenth time, we are never looking at it in exactly the same way.

The Colossus & Other Poems is too frequently judged as a testing ground for Ariel rather than as a mature collection in its own right. The fact that Ariel became a posthumous sensation hasn't helped The Colossus at all, but it has luckily held its ground amongst readers. I have to claim myself as a member of the group who prefers these poems over Ariel. As a person interested in new ways to utilize old ideas, I am fascinated by how Plath used strict forms as a foundation for her modern creative energies.

Those who have read The Colossus may recall a Vintage softcover edition with blue and orange bars on its cover. In 1998, Vintage International made cosmetic changes; while the inside retains its large typeface, the cover is now in orange, black, and cream with a famous photograph of Plath sitting with her typewriter atop a stone barrier in Yorkshire. This edition and past releases are available just about everywhere, along with her Ariel poems, prose, and published journals.

Christmas Holiday

Christmas Holiday
by W. Somerset Maugham
1939 • P. F. Collier & Son
314 pages (hardcover)

It has been said that the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature is adverse to mass-market success, which may explain in part why W. Somerset Maugham never received its honor. During the 1930s, a period of economic collapse and social turmoil, Maugham was the world's highest-paid author and lived a comfortable life at his house on the French Riviera. The Englishman was a household name amongst readers and is widely known today, but his success during a bleak period caused resentment in the literary set.

A second disadvantage, perhaps even more glaring, was Maugham's use of an obsolete writing style. Though considered a modernist, his fiction is cast in a simplified Victorian language that at times seems out of place with the subject matter. Even through the 1940s, Maugham's approach went practically unchanged while a younger generation of writers broke new ground. When Maugham, for instance, published his incomparable The Razor's Edge in 1944, George Orwell had just completed Animal Farm and Samuel Beckett had published his short story cycle More Pricks Than Kicks ten years before.

Christmas Holiday, first published in 1939, is a later Maugham novel that receives no favors from his archaic, straightlaced prose. Though effective at times, his storytelling doesn't fit the era it is depicting and reads like a 1930s social commentary through the eyes of Anthony Trollope. Published just before the outbreak of World War II, it is an unbalanced, often neurotic tale in which Maugham seems to be fighting against developments that endangered western tradition. It is difficult for an author of Maugham's talent to write a 'bad' novel, but he was extremely close with Christmas Holiday to achieving the feat.

Set in 1930s Paris, Christmas Holiday is divided into ten lengthy chapters. The focal character is Charley Mason, a 23-year-old Cambridge graduate and descendant of a property-owning family who is vacationing alone on Christmas week. Most of his dealings are with Simon Fenimore, a boyhood friend now working as a journalist, and Lydia, a Russian prostitute to whom Simon introduces him. As a sensitive, artistic young man who acts out of pity for her sordid lifestyle, Charley travels through the city and shares a depressing hotel room with Lydia for nearly his entire visit.

Charley's trip becomes something of an underground odyssey. Lydia is the wife of Robert Berger, a thief who was sent to French Guiana for murdering a horse racing bookie. We learn through her recollections and those of Simon, who covered Berger's trial, about a love affair with tragic results. These accounts, told in flashback style, carry a high amount of suspense and are made quite interesting by the fact that Simon, a devoted nihilist, was amused by Berger's personality. Charley also encounters the Russian refugee community and two survivors of Guiana who further build up his perspective on life.

Maugham, who was 65 at the time of Christmas Holiday's publication, seems to be rehashing a great deal of his earlier novels. Charley's initial dilemma of becoming an artist and earning decent income is akin to Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence, while his dealings with Lydia and her sexual ambivalence mirror Philip Carey with Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage. The deceit and violence of Robert Berger can also be found in several of Maugham's writings, especially his short story 'The Letter.' For those acquainted with his fiction, Maugham seems to be walking old territory and desperate to understand the social landscape where tradition and values were falling apart.

Aside from subject matter, Christmas Holiday is sloppy in execution and in need of a rewrite. Maugham's characters sometimes break from their personality for no reason at all (Lydia suddenly jumps into a well-turned argument on politics) and the use of flashback and story-within-story cuts into the novel's pace as a whole. The book seems to lag and never really catches fire the way it should. Christmas Holiday manages to be engaging, but it ranks far below classics like Razor, Of Human Bondage, and The Painted Veil. I would only recommend it to Maugham completists and those with an appreciation of Paris during the Great Depression.

Maugham's novels are available in softcover from Vintage Classics, while I have on my bookshelf (but not for long) a hardback copy of its 1939 printing from P. F. Collier & Son. Released in 2000, the Vintage edition appears to reuse Collier's original type, which is large and clear. All of Maugham's fiction, however, is worth reading.

Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation

Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation
by Jeffrey Meyers
2000 • W. W. Norton & Company
400 pages / ISBN 0-393-32263-7 (paperback)

Jeffrey Meyers set to work on his authoritative biography of George Orwell with the advantage of an engaging writing style and the opportunity to right mistakes by other historians. Meyers, a thorough and conscientious researcher, finished his 400-page book at a later stage of the game, well after names such as Peter Stansky, William Abrahams, Bernard Crick, and Michael Shelden published their efforts with varying results.

Anyone interested in writers' lives should familiarize himself with Meyers, whose publishing history includes books on Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Conrad, Poe, Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Fusing thorough research with lucid prose, Meyers makes biography stimulating and entertaining; his work is of the page-turner variety that few biographers manage to achieve. And in the case of Meyers, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, this achievement seems nearly without effort.

Not that Meyers has to go out of his way in making Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation an exciting book. Anyone in search of an interesting person to read about cannot go wrong with Orwell, the Englishman whose journalism and novels drastically altered the world political scene for all times. Meyers's biography is a superbly-handled account of Orwell from birth to death (1903-1950), describing his social life, career path, political commitments, and eccentricities in rich detail.

Meyers, who has researched Orwell at various points in his career, is the first biographer to make use of Peter Davison's Complete Works, a twenty-volume, 8,500-page collection of Orwell's novels, essays, letters, diaries, and miscellaneous papers. Until recently, biographers faced a repression of key documents by Orwell's surviving wife Sonia Brownell or an inability to locate their whereabouts. With Orwell's truly 'collected' works now published and his unpublished holdings at University College, London, now freely accessible, Meyers's interests in Orwell have an ideal time to flourish.

The main text of Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation is divided into seventeen chapters, each reflecting a phase of Orwell's social development. His public and private life are equally considered, drawing from primary sources and interviews with those who knew him, including David Astor, Jacintha Buddicom, Susan Watson, Anne Popham Bell, and his adoptive son Richard. Meyers tracks Orwell's life in strictly chronological order, allowing us to follow his progression from Eton scholar to Burmese policeman to London pseudo-tramp to ill-fated enlistee in the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that solidified his position against Communism.

Meyers describes Eric Arthur Blair - he became 'George Orwell' upon publication of his first novel - as the product of a rigid, middle-class upbringing. Eric's father Richard Blair was a minor official in the Indian Opium Police for his entire working life; Eric and his two sisters were raised by mother Ida Limouzin Blair, a woman 18 years Richard's junior, on her own in England. While Eric hardly knew his father until young adulthood, he received an upright education at the dreary St. Cyprian's School in Sussex and renowned Eton College.

Eric's childhood is presented as one of guilt and repression, feelings that the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London and Nineteen Eighty-Four constantly struggled against and looked to purge. Meyers uses recollections by Orwell's intimates, published writings, diaries, and letters to prove that he fought a constant war against his childhood, always sympathizing with the underprivileged classes but never able to fully shed his elitist background. The result was a writer firmly dedicated to social justice and journalistic integrity, though at times it was laughably overblown.

Illness also figures heavily in Orwell's life, especially the years 1947-50 when he alternated between home and hospital with worsening tuberculosis. Despite having TB for nearly his entire forty-seven years, Orwell did little to reduce its symptoms, smoking heavily and engulfing himself in the worst living conditions possible. For four years, Orwell and his first wife Eileen lived at The Stores, a dilapidated cottage without electricity or adequate heating in Wallington, Hertfordshire; following Eileen's death in 1945, Orwell lived for extended stretches on Jura, an undeveloped island 16 miles off the west coast of Scotland where the bulk of Nineteen Eighty-Four was written. Besides a desire to live simply and privately, Orwell also exhibited a self-abasing, masochistic streak through his crude homes and neglect of his well-being.

This embrace of poverty largely inspired the writings for which Orwell is known today. Orwell had an uncanny knowledge of socioeconomic conditions around the globe, helped greatly by first-hand experiences with the poor, distant travels, a brief stint as commentator for BBC Radio, and mastery of language. An author of nine novels and truckloads of essays, Orwell's determination to separate fact from propaganda has made him a revered figure throughout the literary world; in his own time, he won support from many literary names while alienating plenty of others who chose to toe political lines.

To the biographer's credit, Meyers does not fall into idol-worship that has become rather common in describing Orwell. Meyers explains that Orwell was a remarkable man but not a 'saint,' as V. S. Pritchett once called him (he also called Orwell the 'wintry conscience' of Meyers's subtitle). The usually kind writer also had a sadistic bend, confessing, for example, to fairly rough treatment of the Burmese he was policing and cutting open a jackdaw that he and a friend killed at Eton. It appears that Orwell was much a lady's man, having dawdled with Burmese prostitutes and enjoyed post-marital excursions with female friends. He disrespected Eileen during these affairs (though she appears to have been just as unfaithful) and talked her into wasting a university education on tending animals and living in squalor.

Still, the pervading idea of Orwell is a warmhearted, though remote, figure who tried to separate his public life from what was private. Besides his cozy circle of friends like Arthur Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge, David Astor, and Cyril Connolly, he also befriended people you would never have expected him to - T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and to an extent, P. G. Wodehouse. His legacy as a writer endures through an unwavering commitment to socialism and a fiery opposition to totalitarianism that became the prime subject of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If there is a flaw to be pointed out in Meyers's book, it is the noticeable lack of photographs. Since photos of Orwell and his intimates have been constantly printed and seen by the reading public, Meyers has limited this section to 32 images, several of which had never been committed to print. Unfortunately, there are moments in the text when Meyers describes well-known photos of Orwell that can be found in other books but not in his own. I am not sure if Meyers chose to do this because of space considerations or issues of copyright, but it was frustrating to rely on memory. The text also feels slightly weighted towards Orwell's later years, moving at a rather brisk pace through his childhood and adolescence. So neatly does Meyers bring the life story to a close, however, that it's barely noticeable.

Orwell died sadly, but he realized fame in his own time and his presence in world literature was bound to increase. He certainly ranks as one of the greatest political commentators in the English language and may very well rank as the greatest journalist of the modern era. While far from an ideal man, Orwell felt strongly enough about his convictions to make them the guiding spirit of his work. Meyers always brings this element of Orwell to the fore, galvanized by his superb investigation and engrossing style. The book, published by W. W. Norton, is a must-buy for studiers of twentieth-century English literature and those with political or journalistic interests.

W. H. Auden: A Tribute

W.H. Auden: A Tribute
edited by Stephen Spender
1974 • Macmillan
255 pages / 61294 (hardcover)

When W. H. Auden left England for the United States in 1939, he created a permanent divide in his identity and critical reception. An analogy is often drawn between his years spent on different continents and the craggy face that seemed to house rivers and tributaries. Perhaps the only legitimate rival of T. S. Eliot amongst twentieth-century English language poets, Auden's life was a tiring yet enlightened run of upheaval.

Had Auden not left England while on the verge of war against Germany, there is a vague possibility that he would have been nominated for British Poet Laureate. Though not one to compromise his art for the sake of production, Auden was a poet of remarkable skill and flexibility who could spin verse for any occasion. He was also a talent who could view the human experience from many different perspectives, as one comes to realize in this 1974 tribute volume edited by Stephen Spender.

W. H. Auden: A Tribute is a 255-page collection of essays that is both unsentimental and informative. For anyone who has cared to discover Auden the personality ('character' isn't far off a word), Spender's nicely-arranged volume leaves us feeling as if we were chums with this poet for years and knew him on an everyday basis. The tribute brings together various names who lived, worked, and collaborated with Auden during his 66 years on Earth, bringing out his gifts, eccentricities, and dedication to the craft of writing.

Spender, who met Auden at Oxford and privately distributed his first book of verse in 1928, knew the poet for his entire adult life and was highly qualified to serve as editor. The essays follow Auden's life chronologically, from when a middle-class child in Birmingham until the aging man who occupied his springs and summers in Kirchstetten, an Austrian town west of Vienna. Spender arranges these memoirs to reflect the psychological, artistic, and spiritual changes experienced by Auden over eight decades, although so multifaceted that they are impossible to summarize neatly.

Memories of his earlier years include those by John Auden, his elder brother who became a successful geologist; Rosamira Bulley, an instructor at St. Edmund's Preparatory School in Surrey; and John Betjeman, eventual Poet Laureate who knew Auden (to a degree) at Oxford. Perhaps most fascinating are memoirs from the 1930s, when Auden was at his physical and intellectual height. Here we find essays by painter William Coldstream, magazine editor Cyril Connolly, and longtime friend Michael Yates. It is the Yates memoir that is most inspiring of this book, a description of the famous 1936 trip to Iceland by Auden, Yates, and poet Louis MacNeice that resulted in Letters from Iceland. The lengthy trip seems a microcosm of Auden's commitment to understanding, friendship, and community - the 'agape,' or universal love that he previously discovered.

Spender's volume makes an appropriate tone change as its essays begin dealing with the Auden of post-1939. It was during this stretch that Auden made his transition from pseudo-Marxism to Christianity, rejoining the Anglican Church in 1940. Anne Fremantle, a theological author, and Ursula Niebuhr, a fellow instructor at Barnard College, have written substantial essays on Auden's Christian beliefs. These are intriguingly offset by Second World War colleague James Stern, ballet organizer Lincoln Kirstein, composer Nicolas Nabokov, and Robert Craft, the long-time assistant of Igor Stravinsky. While never underestimating Auden's devotion to the Church, these other essays show his role as a man of the world and the worldly - a fellow who loved bawdy poems, vodka martinis, and outrageous (yet harmless) behavior.

The latter pages are rather dim, covering Auden's brief return to Oxford as a lecturer in 1972. While Auden continued to impress those he met, he was becoming further and further isolated as declining health set in and social traditions underwent their usual change. David Luke, a tutor of German at Oxford, supplies details of Auden having gone full circle in his intellectual life, age making him something of a curiosity piece amongst students and younger faculty. Spender reprints the valediction he gave at Auden's 1973 memorial service in Christ Church, shortly after an honorary burial in Kirchstetten. Topping off the volume are 100 photographs, including book covers and Auden's three sittings with Cecil Beaton.

The lasting impression that Spender's volume creates is one of a typically Piscean figure (he was born on February 21st) who seemed to bear many personalities at once: a devout Christian while shamelessly worldly; an impressive public figure while decidedly private; and a poet who despised war yet supported the Republican cause in Spain. He also registers as a man of humor and often painful wryness, someone you wouldn't mind chatting with about mankind's problems. Auden, however, was frequently more than talk, as shown by his marriage to Erika Mann, which secured the British passport that rescued her from Nazi persecution, and his efforts as a member of the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey after the Second World War had concluded in Europe.

For the most part, this is a strong tribute volume, although there could have been more substantial feedback from names like Christopher Isherwood (his essay is basically a reprint with postscript notes), Chester Kallman (just a poem written in 1970 with post-mortem stanzas added), and Leonard Bernstein, who for reasons unknown is not in this volume at all, despite basing his Symphony No. 2 on Auden's poem The Age of Anxiety. The writing by certain figures is also lackadaisical and uses vague generalizations in trying to pin Auden down, but this is to be expected for a poet who was constantly changing in both views and temperament.

The tribute volume, first published by Macmillan in 1974, is a much-sought collector's item; if wanting to know Auden on sympathetic terms, this is probably the book to have. It is found in hardcover with a tricolor dust jacket, often at libraries, on the Internet, and in used bookstores. Several copies are available at the Strand Bookstore in New York City, where I was fortunate enough to pick mine up. And needless to say, Auden's poems, plays, and essays have their spot in the essential twentieth century canon.