String Quartet No. 1 and A Song of Liberty: ‘For everything that lives is Holy’

From his schooldays, Tippett sought to ‘break free’ from his conventional middle-class background.¹⁵ The signs of rebellion he records in his account of boarding-school life were symptomatic of his awareness of difference.¹⁶ He refused to attend house prayers, engage in rough sports, play for hymns or join the cadet corps. He made clandestine visits to the local Anglo-Catholic church to observe the drama of the Mass and chose to read independently among the Greek classics. From this derived his love of ancient Greece and his appreciation of the Greeks’ ideal of male friendship, so antithetical to conventional morality in the West. Some years later he wrote to a friend, ‘I find for me that this man-love is hopelessly mixed up with Greece’.¹⁷ There was, he confessed, ‘a certain excitement in holding (even if you have no choice but to do so) the personal Greek-ness when you have accepted the outer social fact [of difference]’. But at fifteen his private ‘Greek world’ was irrupted when he was forced to report to the entire school the sexual behaviour of every boy of his acquaintance, including one with whom he had engaged in a sexual relationship. The result of this humiliation was that he left the school.¹⁸

Auden likened the public schools of his class and generation to a fascist state, parodying just such a scene as Tippett endured in ‘Address for a Prize-Day’ in The Orators (1931). The result of the draconian honour code in operation at Auden’s school, which required boys to rat on each other, had a detrimental effect, he later wrote, on ‘all those emotions, particularly the sexual, which are still undeveloped’.¹⁹ It also underlined how socially unacceptable same-sex relationships were – acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men were still punishable by two years’ hard labour and rates of conviction for those who reached court were extremely high.²⁰ Tippett was as conscious of the illegality of homosexual acts as anyone else. Once, in the early forties, when he was shocked to hear that a friend had outed him at a public meeting, he reminded the friend that homosexuality was ‘a criminal matter’.²¹

While still a student, Tippett’s friendships were with theatre enthusiasts, not musicians – he names Aubrey Russ and Roy Langford as friends in the mid-1920s. With Langford he shared a flat and some youthful ‘experimenting in sensuality’.²² Through Russ, Tippett was drawn into Auden’s circle. Russ had been at Oriel College, Oxford, and in 1927 he introduced Tippett to David Ayerst, a former Oriel history tutor. Ayerst himself had been to Christ Church, where he formed a friendship with Auden. Sometime in spring 1932 Tippett met Auden at the home of his friend Bill McElwee, another Christ Church Old Boy (whom Auden had attempted, but failed, to seduce). As though a ritual of initiation, Auden showed Tippett proofs of The Orators, whose ‘hero’, The Airman, is implicitly homosexual.²³ Some friends found the work difficult to comprehend; perhaps it was more accessible to Tippett than most others, but he managed to resist the blandishments (sexual and otherwise) of ‘the Wystan click’, as he called it.²⁴

The meeting with Auden was in fact eclipsed by another event: falling in love. In summer 1932 Ayerst introduced Tippett to Wilf Franks, a young Bauhaus-trained painter. For Tippett the meeting was ‘the deepest, most shattering experience of falling in love’.²⁵ But Franks was ostensibly, and frustratingly, heterosexual. Tippett told Ayerst the relationship was ‘Illusion, love and altruism on his side – and for all I know it’s much the same on mine, with greater accentuation on some one of the characteristics’.²⁶ He soon discovered how enervating the combination of intense physical desire and unrequited love could be. Tippett confided to Ayerst that ‘I shall be glad as the fervour of sudden physical desire dies away to something more placid – which it is doing slowly. Wilf is a hell of a mixture of love and altruistic friendship.’²⁷ Not only was the relationship one-sided, Franks had no income beyond what Tippett could spare him and had no apparent inclination to earn one. Part of Franks’s attraction, though, was his working-class ordinariness, and the most intense phase of Tippett’s relationship with Franks coincided with the peak of his participation in left-wing politics and workers’ movements. In a climate of economic depression and chronic unemployment Tippett sympathized with ‘the underdog; the little chap; the ordinary soldier; the workman; the dopey; the child; the scapegoat’.²⁸ Through Ayerst he became involved in work camps for the unemployed in Yorkshire. In the summers of 1933 and 1934 the camps gave him and Franks the opportunity to escape: alone, they went hiking in the Pennines with a tent. In this idyllic interval, and in a landscape of the rugged North, away from the intellectual and class-ridden South, Tippett spent some of the most blissful weeks of the relationship.²⁹ In this climate, too, he began the composition of the String Quartet in A (later No. 1). Falling in love had allowed what he described to Ayerst as an ‘impulsive release of emotion’ and, as a consequence, ‘we are both less repressed . . . consequently more open and frank to one another’.³⁰

The quartet was completed on 23 September 1935. Tippett was thirty and had finally composed a work that signalled his compositional maturity. Falling in love, he recollected, ‘was a major factor underlying the discovery of my own individual musical “voice” – something that couldn’t be analysed purely in technical terms: all that love flowed out in the slow movement of my First String Quartet, an unbroken span of lyrical music in which all four instruments sing ardently from start to finish’.³¹ The mood at the outset of that movement is one of sweet contentment, with melodic lines that soar ecstatically upwards in pitch and dynamic. It is not without tension, which builds in intensity to an extended fortissimo climax before abruptly subsiding to a more quiescent tranquillo section and ending with the same gentle appoggiatura in the viola with which it began. By contrast, the robust finale, metrically unpredictable and irrepressibly energetic, represents the sudden unleashing of Tippett’s rhythmic gift. Its blithe free-spiritedness is complemented by the intellectual rigour of fugue; both elements seem to hark back to the vitality of a golden age (encompassing the Elizabethans as well as late Beethoven) as an antidote to the present one. On the manuscript of this movement Tippett wrote a quotation from William Blake – ‘Damn braces, bless relaxes’ – those few words signifying the jettisoning of the restraints produced, as Blake makes clear elsewhere, by the words ‘Thou shalt not’.³²

The full significance of the epigraph becomes clear in Tippett’s following work, a setting of Blake’s ‘A Song of Liberty’ from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Soon after the completion of the quartet, Tippett’s relationship with Franks began to fall apart. In about 1936 he wrote to Ayerst that Franks visited on weekends but they no longer slept together. ‘Suffice it to say that physically I’m very turned in on myself at home, very lecherous in the street after handsome young men, apparently longing to be married and with a home, but none of these stop the work which is at high pressure.’³³ Setting Blake was a tribute to Franks, who worked with him on the text. But such was Tippett’s mental anguish that he decided he needed to see the psychoanalyst John Layard because, as he wrote to Ayerst, ‘I’m absolutely lost’.³⁴

If the published sequence of letters to Ayerst is correct, some time during the composition of A Song of Liberty (1937) Tippett was introduced by Ayerst to Layard, who had been instrumental in enabling both Auden and Isherwood to come to terms with sexual guilt and repression.³⁵ Layard was a Cambridge-educated anthropologist who, after a year of research in Malekula (Vanuatu), had returned to England and suffered a nervous breakdown, whereupon he became a patient of American psychotherapist Homer Lane. Lane believed that human nature was innately good and devised a doctrine of ‘Original Goodness’ that proposed complete freedom of behaviour and expression. Layard revered Lane and developed his theories into a theology in which God represents physical desires and the Devil the conscious control of them. He also subscribed to Georg Groddeck’s theory of the psychosomatic origins of illness, assuming that all disease was in some way the consequence of the subject’s self-deception. In Isherwood’s transcription of Layard’s ideas,

For Isherwood, as for Auden, these were ‘life-shaking words’. Layard’s ideas owed as much to Blake as they did to Lane or to D. H. Lawrence, and as the seeds of Tippett’s own rebelliousness were ‘sown by Blake’ Layard’s ideas may have seemed to offer confirmation of the views Tippett had already formed.³⁷

A Song of Liberty was completed, symbolically, on May Day in 1937. Blake’s text is a call to revolution: he identifies the sickness of Albion and exhorts ‘the citizen of London’ to recognize the forces of oppression that inhibit the growth of the (political) body. By recasting words from Revelation, Blake foreshadows a time when society would be released from the fetters of orthodox religion, when ‘the Priests of the Raven’ will no longer ‘curse the sons of joy’. The final line, ‘For everything that lives is Holy’, corresponds to Layard’s idea that desires are inherently good, and that repression is unwarranted. Tippett’s setting is an expression of the shedding of restraint: an emphatic arpeggiating statement in which, in Kemp’s words, ‘compressed musical energy is released in soaring intertwining contrapuntal lines’ ( Ex.5.1).³⁸ By ventriloquizing Blake, Tippett harnessed an elliptical poetic language to his own political ends. But the work is as much a protest against Britain’s benighted history of social puritanism as it is a political manifesto.

Ex. 5.1 A Song of Liberty, ‘For everything that lives is Holy’, opening

A Child of Our Time (1939–41): ‘an impression of something suffered’³⁹

Tippett’s relationship with Franks ended abruptly in August 1938, when Franks announced that he intended to marry. But it had been a festering sore well before that. In a letter to Ayerst from 1937 Tippett referred to the ‘intensity and pain’ of the experience, which made him ‘less sure and happy about myself’.⁴⁰ He had no regrets – ‘it hardly matters if my life does get buggered up a bit in consequence [because] I have also gained in width and love’ – but all of the quandaries of homosexual identity now returned.⁴¹ ‘Queerness’ brought feelings of shame and inferiority. As he began to realize the cost that conscientious objection would bring he empathized more than ever with ‘the outcast and the scapegoats’.⁴² He could not bear the thought of ‘lads’ such as those he met in Yorkshire having to fight; nor could he countenance the annihilation of those children he had met on holidays at the Odenwaldschule in Heppenheim. Such was his identification with the oppressed that when he was finally sent to prison, after years of anxiety and confrontation, he felt he had ‘come home’.⁴³

Only three months after the break with Franks, and during the few months that Tippett underwent formal psychoanalysis with Layard, he read newspaper reports of an attack on Ernst vom Rath, a German official at the embassy in Paris, shot by a seventeen-year-old stateless Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. The boy seemed too young to have committed such an act, looking, as the Daily Worker reported, hardly more than thirteen.⁴⁴ Separated from family members, who had been ‘driven like cattle to the Polish frontier’, the boy was quoted in the papers declaring ‘there was no other way to express my will’.⁴⁵ Vom Rath died two days later, and on the following day German mobs took their revenge on Jews in the infamous Kristallnacht, sanctioned by Goebbels as ‘justified indignation’ for a ‘cowardly assassination’.⁴⁶ Tippett immediately drafted the text of an oratorio documenting the historical moment. He included references to the ‘scapegoats’ of the Great War, the ‘starvation’ he had himself witnessed in the North, the ‘persecution’ and ‘pogroms’ perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the desperate state of dispossessed people at a ‘frontier’. All of this is, however, allegorical of the situation of the young homosexual in thirties English society, too young to have sat ‘the Test’ of masculinity that was the Great War, unfitted for the conventions of marriage and home, persecuted both in print and according to the law, and mired on the borders of acceptable society.⁴⁷ Much later, when Tippett sent Layard the score of the completed work, he confided, ‘You will see a great deal of the roots [?] of the words, wh[ich] others will not & some of the metaphors will be comprehensible, wh[ich] others find meaningless. As you will see at once, there is a psychological as well as social & dramatic plane.’⁴⁸ Layard, more than any other, would have recognized that ‘the child’ of the title is not only ‘a child of my time’, as Tippett told Anthony Clare, but Tippett himself.⁴⁹

The music was composed after nine months of intensive, self-directed Jungian analysis of Tippett’s dreams – one final dream produced the release he needed to begin work. Certain isolated numbers present the autobiographical drama, and without clues provided by knowledge of Tippett’s own psychological journey much of it seems deliberately opaque. In No. 2 Tippett paints a portrait of psychological disorder, described in his notes as ‘the accumulation of unconscious, dark, destructive powers that burst up in man as a disease, war, revolution and so forth’.⁵⁰ The ‘living God’, a figure that can be interpreted in Layard’s terms as the physicality of desire, has been entrapped. Equally, the ‘cancer’ that develops is, taking Groddeck’s view, symptomatic of a disordered mind.⁵¹ Here is the ‘darkest’ hour of the work, a morbid ‘turn’ from the E minor of the opening to a bleak E♭ minor. The interior drama is made more explicit in No. 6 when, after the tenor soloist (the boy) sings of his hunger in an unsullied minor mode, chromaticism infects his confession that he is ‘caught between my desires and their frustration’. The following line, ‘How can I grow to a man’s stature?’, is an impassioned fortissimo outburst that is a deliberate reminiscence of the sinister descending chromatic line of the theme of the earlier ‘Chorus of the Oppressed’ (Exx. 5.2 (a) and 5.2 (b)). Its awkward prosody and sinking spirits place his voice at odds with the simple gaiety of the habanera accompaniment. Here is Tippett drawing an analogy between the poverty and isolation of the dispossessed and the anguish of a boy forced to remain a boy. In doing so he appears to suggest a link between the state’s rapaciousness and its nurture of the forces of sexual repression.

Ex. 5.2 A Child of Our Time: (a) No. 5, ‘Chorus of the Oppressed’, opening, sopranos only; (b) No. 6, tenor solo, ‘I have no money for my bread’, Fig. 46:5–9

In No. 17, ‘A curse is born’, the alto (the anima, who in Jungian terms is the feminine ‘soul’ of man) observes the consequences: the boy’s ‘other self’, which is ‘demonic and destructive’, overwhelms him. He shoots ‘the official’, who is not vom Rath but the boy’s ‘dark brother’. There is a remarkably similar scene in Auden’s play Paid on Both Sides, one that was added to the work’s first draft after Auden met Layard in Berlin in 1928. Auden’s plot is superficially a Romeo and Juliet-type tale of two feuding families: John, the son of one, falls in love with Anne, the daughter of the other. The origin of the feud – a correlative of Tippett’s ‘curse’ – has been lost to memory, leading John to search for it in a dream. The dream takes the form of a trial in which John is the prosecutor and a Spy (Anne’s brother) is the accused. John goes to shoot the Spy, an indication that he is ‘very very ill’.⁵² But a cure is promised. A ‘Man-Woman’ appears, a figure symbolically imprisoned by barbed wire who accuses John of ‘playing with himself’.⁵³ Thus if there is an illness that needs a cure, Auden suggests that its basis is psychological and its symptoms are sexual. Unable to bear the accusations, John shoots the Spy, who is revived by a comic doctor. The dream ends when John and the Spy plant a tree (a sign that ‘Spring will come’) and John recognizes that he and the Spy are ‘sharers of the same house’ – two halves of a single personality.⁵⁴ Afterwards, John and Anne proceed to marriage. But in a tragic conclusion that suggests the ‘cure’ was not a cure after all, the cycle of feuding is renewed by the families’ mothers. Whereas, through his dream, John had repaired his divided psyche, and thereby gained the hope of marrying, the action of the mothers ensures that the play ends with his death. As he does elsewhere, Auden blames mothers for their sons’ inability to grow up or out of a suffocating past. In his own case, he gave credence to the Freudian cliché that ‘the bugger gets too much mother love so sheers off women altogether’.⁵⁵ Tippett’s relationship with his mother was similarly troubled – disclosing his sexuality to her produced an amnesia he alleged lasted for decades.⁵⁶ That personal rift, and Auden’s/Layard’s interpretation of its psychological origins, clarifies why it is that in the oratorio draft of No. 6 (the boy’s expression of his sexual frustration) he complains that ‘Women have hold on my entrails’.⁵⁷ Although Tippett omitted this perhaps too graphic line in the final version, it is the work’s mother (not Grynszpan’s sister as it was in reality) who writes to the boy, the mother he cries out to from prison, and the mother who confesses ‘What have I done to you, my son?’. There is no father figure in either Paid on Both Sides or the oratorio.

Implicit in both works is not just the problem of the aetiology of same-sex desire but the problem of masculinity in a society that associated homosexuality with effeminacy. ‘All buggers,’ according to Auden, ‘suffer under the reproach, real or imaginary, of “Call yourself a man”.’⁵⁸ Sensuality and emotion in a man were suspiciously feminine, which explains Tippett’s constant apology in his correspondence for his sensitivity, emotional fragility and impulsive sensuality. In the wake of Franks’s preference for heterosexual marriage, Tippett was only too conscious of his lack of conformity to the masculine norm, and what this denied him. His theorizing on the subject is poured into the oratorio ‘almost like revelation’ and more explicitly in his letters to Douglas (Den) Newton, a nineteen-year-old poet and conscientious objector whom he met in 1939.⁵⁹ As an artist, Tippett knew he was pigeonholed as a feminine man – he told Newton:

Wholeness, according to A Child of Our Time, can only be achieved when the anima is no longer denied (or imprisoned, as in Auden’s play). Then, ‘The soul of man is impassioned like a woman’ (No. 27). At first, however, the alto/anima’s angular vocal line perpetuates the slippery semitone-infested descent seen in Nos. 2 and 6. But, with the promise that ‘the soul’ will be ‘illuminated by the sun’, the chromaticism is displaced by diatonic F major. ‘Hope’ and ‘spring’ are declared in ecstatic upward leaps that coincide with an arrival in the key of A major. The boy does not find love or marry, and remains outcast, just as Tippett believed himself to be. But the ‘spring’ (or rebirth) he prescribes is more unequivocal than Auden’s because Tippett has achieved something more valuable: passage, in Blakean terms, from the state of Innocence to the knowledge of Experience.⁶¹ As Tippett explained to Layard in 1941, ‘The war happened for me inside, all the years with Wilf. Now it’s a different sort of war – I am at peace – voluntarily in a world where the demonic forces have been let loose, or broke loose again. Whichever way I travel I can’t in myself go under to them, that is all in the past.’⁶² He accepted the complementarity of masculine and feminine in himself, deciding, as he told Newton, that if the intellectual life was ‘active and virile, then sensitivity, the feminine within us, becomes eventually a source of width and strength’.⁶³ ‘Anyhow’, he concluded with references to both Blake and Layard, ‘follow the instincts however they come out and take the joy as it flies’.⁶⁴

The Heart’s Assurance (1950–1): memorial of the ‘personal wound’

A few months after completing the oratorio Tippett informed Layard that ‘Even the biggest price of all, the once shameful buggery, is [now] seen as the inexhaustible mystery, leading straight back to Hermes & the endless shadow world.’⁶⁵ ‘Hermaphroditism’ was no longer a ‘stigma’ but ‘a fecundity’. John Amis recalls the thriving homosociality of Tippett’s home in the war years and that lovers were present from time to time.⁶⁶ In 1941 Tippett dreamed of ‘a sort of gay and sensual notion of sexual life’ with the painter Karl Hawker (another conscientious objector).⁶⁷ But Hawker married during the war, shattering that dream. In 1943, when Den Newton advised Tippett of a girlfriend, Tippett conceded his hurt, which was ‘simply the old sore, or wound that is for a second fingered’.⁶⁸ Knowing he would be asked for an explanation, he deflected it with the remark ‘It’s all in the Child.’ Although not deprived of companionship he sometimes felt starved of sex, and confided to the now-distant Newton: ‘I fall for soldiers in the train – and even they for me – but they get out at other stations.’⁶⁹ Over the course of the next ten years Tippett pursued an intermittent relationship with a young conductor, John Minchinton, but he too had girlfriends and eventually married.⁷⁰

Occasionally Tippett’s friend Francesca Allinson shared his cottage, and although bisexual she attempted to persuade him of the possibility of having children together. She was three years older than Tippett, and they had many interests and convictions in common, including pacifism. But her health was increasingly depleted by the effects of goitre and in 1945 she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Stour. She left Tippett a note and a photo of them both with children taken on a visit to Germany, implying that another cause of her actions was that, in her early forties, she knew she would never have children. Her death was a cataclysm for Tippett. Questioning, as he did, whether he had contributed to her despair reopened a ‘personal wound’ that he knew would never heal.⁷¹ In 1950 he began a song cycle in Allinson’s memory, following her instructions to ‘keep a place warm for me in your heart’.⁷² Coincidentally, it is called The Heart’s Assurance.

In a lecture from the 1970s Tippett referred to the ‘wound’ as a canker in the psyche.⁷³ Tippett could not have been unaware of Auden’s ‘Letter to a Wound’ which forms a section of The Orators. The title of the letter is a pun on a literal wound, an anal fissure that Auden jokingly referred to as ‘the stigmata of Sodom’.⁷⁴ Had it been a war wound, Auden might have boasted of it as the mark of a manly warrior. Instead, it was a guilty secret. ‘The surgeon was dead right’, he confides in the terms of a lover, ‘Nothing will ever part us.’⁷⁵ Tippett’s notion of an ineradicable wound was drawn from the myth of Philoctetes, a Greek warrior who possessed a magic bow capable of ensuring victory in the war with Troy. But because of an incurable and putrid wound he is ostracized and abandoned on an island until rescued by a warrior wanting the bow. In about 1944 Tippett read Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow’, which develops the corollary that ‘genius and disease, like strength and mutilation, may be inextricably bound up together’.⁷⁶ Tippett immediately wrote to Allinson of the myth’s potential for operatic translation. In reflections on the myth’s kinship to elements of the opera scenario he was then crafting he mused on the magic weapon as a ‘profound dream symbol . . . a sexual weapon & many other things (modern war & revolution)’.⁷⁷ What most resonated with Tippett was Wilson’s explanation of the concept of a superior strength that is inseparable from some defect. Tippett, by referring to his own wound, was signifying something socially repugnant, even unspeakable, which can nevertheless be seen as a source of potency.

The Heart’s Assurance began simply as a memorial to the dead, but the dead are, explicitly, ‘young men’. For his texts Tippett chose three poems (‘Song’, ‘Compassion’ and ‘The Dancer’) by Alun Lewis, a young Welsh non-combatant killed accidentally in Burma in 1944. A further two poems (‘Song: The Heart’s Assurance’ and ‘Remember Your Lovers’) are by Sidney Keyes, who died mysteriously at the age of twenty while serving in Africa. For some, Keyes was the most important poet of the war, allotting him a status comparable to Wilfred Owen and A. E. Housman, who Tippett cherished from the previous one. Both poets were pacifist by nature. Lewis is described as ‘a divided man’ struggling with the conflict between his active and contemplative natures, distressed at having to participate in war and being unable to pursue his creative work. Some said Keyes had a ‘split personality’, crazy ‘with the utter futility, destructiveness and emptiness’ of his life, for whom love was ‘a sort of battle and one that never brings any victory, but only unrest and passion’.⁷⁸ Both poets wrote of the tribulations of love: Lewis left a wife in Wales and a lover in India, while Keyes was profoundly affected by the end of an affair that took place when he was a student at Oxford.

The first, third and fifth poems are demonstrably poems of war, the first addressing a soldier-lad, the third depicting a wife tending the bloodied wounds of a dying man, and the last portraying young men ‘in the carven beds of death’. Each addresses the subject of love, predominantly that of husband and wife. Unusually, the voice of the last poem is that of the living, who remind already dead ‘young men’ of the love they shared. But whereas Tippett wrote publicly that this voice was that of ‘a young woman singing out over the Elysian fields to the young men in the fields beyond’, for him personally this voice was male.⁷⁹ Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears premiered the work. Tippett wrote to Britten that he could ‘so clearly . . . hear Peter calling to the young men in the fields of death, even though formally it may be supposed to be a woman. I can’t quite tell why, but the man’s voice seems right-er – and Peter’s particularly.’⁸⁰ The visual and audible double entendre of Pears singing in remembrance of war dead allows for a reading of the piece’s private as well as public meaning.

Underlining the suggestions of homoeroticism that lie in Tippett’s imagining of its performance are the literal memories embedded in the music. The opening ascending fifth of ‘Remember Your Lovers’ is an unmistakable reference to the ‘Last Post’, and so to the fallen of the Great War. Its iridescent setting of the word ‘remember’ is an echo of the ‘magic’ of Purcell’s setting of the word and it was Allinson who had introduced Tippett to Purcell.⁸¹ Yet that relationship was chaste. The lovers Tippett himself remembers from the war years are those he brought ‘home’ into a ‘lust as bright as candle flame’ – not Allinson but men such as Hawker and Newton. For it was Newton who brought him the ‘pleasure’ that in the song is ‘pure and unmixed’ and it was in Newton’s arms that he recalled lying ‘happy as a child’.⁸² When the stuttering piano chords first heard on the word ‘remember’ culminate at the phrase ‘We brought you . . . home’ in a recognizable allusion to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, and so to one of Tippett’s personal ‘gods’, this ‘home’ with its consonant point of rest is identified as Tippett’s own (see Ex. 5.3). The song memorializes his own lost loves and suggests, furthermore, that only memories and music survive. As Tippett told Layard, ‘my serenity and gaiety have always been at a price’, and this price was not just that as a pacifist and a homosexual he was obliged to sit ‘with the scapegoats & the outcasts’ but that as an artist he might have to surrender love itself.⁸³ Tippett may have believed that his personal wounds would never heal, but it is plain that for him it was in music (as in Lewis’s ‘Song’) that ‘what’s transfigured will live on / Long after Death has come and gone’.

Ex. 5.3 The Heart’s Assurance, No. 5, ‘Remember Your Lovers’, bars 32–4

Afterword: ‘sheer old British battiness’?⁸⁴

Through the 1930s and into the 1940s – emotionally turbulent years for Tippett – composition allowed him to explore or evaluate his states of mind. Expressions of love, loss, pleasure and sexual frustration are all present in the works of those decades, amounting to a kind of Bildungsroman of the modern homosexual. Reading those works now, with the benefit of personal papers and the insights of queer studies,⁸⁵ allows a reinterpretation of the idiosyncratic language often mocked as an indication of Tippett’s ‘battiness’. But regardless of his detractors, Tippett was determined to sustain an element of ambiguity, if not mystery, in his works with poetic texts, and in the 1930s and 40s he was intent on discovering a method of ‘transmuting’ the personal through myth and metaphor, a method soon codified into a ‘rule’ that was to hold for the remainder of his output.⁸⁶ In doing so, he arrived at a mode of communication that synthesized private and public worlds. The private remains, both present and absent: present to those privileged few who have access to its codes, and absent because it has not been declared and remains deniable. Yet as much as Tippett might have portrayed himself (and seen himself) as a loner, he was not the only left-wing homosexual artist formulating what Bozorth identifies as ‘a queer aesthetic with a political conscience’, as is shown by correspondences between Auden’s poetry of the thirties and A Child of Our Time.⁸⁷ Nor is there any coincidence in the separation by only a few years of A Child of Our Time and Peter Grimes, works which both allegorize the oppression of the homosexual. If Philip Brett can marvel at how a work such as Grimes could have been written as early as 1945, how much more astonishing is Tippett’s mythologization of ‘queer’ experience in a work completed in 1941.⁸⁸ But where Britten’s Grimes suffers an obliteration that the composer never experienced, the ‘hero’ of A Child (and Tippett himself) reaches a much more positive reconciliation of the psyche. The serenity that Tippett gained in the late 1940s was not won through the resolution of the personal or social dilemmas of his sexuality, but because he understood that what society considered disordered or even diseased could be the stuff of art. This ‘coming out to oneself’ was succeeded, eventually, by a coming out to society itself. If in very old age his ‘spectacularly camp’ appearance in ‘psychedelically swirling trousers’ was for Rupert Christiansen evidence that Tippett had ‘gone a bit potty’, he sensed there was every possibility that ‘it is with Blake and Yeats that his silliness more sublimely belongs’.⁸⁹