Auden’s love of the Pennines has inspired a new song cycle by Bolivian composer Agustín Fernández. Its librettist, the poet and playwright O’Brien, reveals the origins of Notes from Underground
WH Auden concludes his great poem “In Praise of Limestone” (1948): “when I try to imagine a faultless love / Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur / Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.” This geological attachment had a long history. As a boy, Auden (1907-73) had acquired books about mining and engineering. As well as being absorbed by the technicalities of the subject, he also viewed mining machinery and mining landscapes as having a magical or religious significance, and this sense of things remained with him for the rest of his life. On the wall of his workroom at Fire Island near New York, he displayed a map of Alston Moor in the north Pennines, and he was later to revisit the region. Many poets have a founding myth of place to animate and sustain their writing. Dante in exile had the city of Florence, Wordsworth had the Cumbrian lakes and Seamus Heaney had the bogland of rural County Derry. Auden’s myth was located among the fells and lead-mines.
A Tyneside-born friend described the north Pennines, which are both close at hand and strangely far off, as “the Wild West”. The description was borne out in the summer of 1991 when Harry Collinson, chief planning officer for Derwentside, was shot dead by Albert Dryden as council staff and policemen approached with a bulldozer to knock down the bungalow that Dryden had illegally erected on land he owned near the defunct steel town of Consett. The raw and tragic violence of the confrontation gave it the aspect of a range war, waged in a place where feuds might linger. Not far away, Chopwell, “Little Moscow”, where Marx and Lenin Terrace can still be found, was the last place to give up during the 1926 general strike. Memories are long. Feuds were also of interest to Auden, whose early play Paid on Both Sides (1928) concerns a blood feud in the lead-mining landscape, waged between the Nower and Shaw families, drawing on Auden’s love of Icelandic sagas. There is an ancient lawlessness just under the surface of the Reiver territory along Hadrian’s Wall. In the 16th century it became ungovernable.
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