W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, and Paul Bunyan

Abstract

Somewhat to the surprise of the critics and the public, the exiled company of the Royal Opera House had a great success with their production of Benjamin Britten's “operetta,” Paul Bunyan, just before Christmas, 1997. Everyone knew the difficulties in advance – for instance, the piece has absolutely no dramatic momentum – but no one seems to have foreseen that the splendid music would carry all before it in a theatre, or that a highly accomplished cast would find so many moments of real comedy and pathos in performance. Even now it is hard to imagine the piece entering the regular repertory, but it is easy to foresee frequent revivals, and still more frequent concert performances.

To an Americanist, however, the work presented as many unexpected problems as pleasures. The fault was entirely W. H. Auden's. His libretto is in many respects as brilliant and beautiful as the music (though at times it sinks to doggerel) but the theme he expounds sticks in my craw. Once upon a time the New World, he says, was nothing but virgin forest. Then Paul Bunyan, the giant, was born, and dreamed of felling trees – of being the greatest logger in history. And such he became. When the forests had all been cleared, “America” had emerged – the America of the farmer, the clerk, the hotel manager, and Hollywood. Paul Bunyan therefore moved on, leaving his followers with the message, “America is what you make it.”

The difficulty is not simply that this myth of America seems ecologically and historically unsound to anyone who knows something of the pollution and despoliation inflicted by American logging companies; nor even that the total elimination of the natives from the story (except for one reference to fighting Indians) is a grave falsification; nor even that the accumulation of these and many other simplifications produce an effect that in today's terms is politically incorrect and in 1941 seems to have been thought patronizing. It is that to anyone with actual knowledge, however slight, of American history, Auden's myth is so inaccurate as to make any suspension of disbelief largely impossible. To take but one detail: as Auden said himself, Paul Bunyan is a post-industrial-revolution myth: he is a product of the nineteenth-century frontier, in the tall-tale tradition. The loggers, like the mountain men, the boatmen, the cowboys, and the slaves, were at the mercy of large economic forces; they consoled themselves for their impotence by developing the legend of the giant lumberjack who was invincible and omnipotent. The forests were far from virgin: if they were silent it was because first the game and then the original inhabitants had been driven off by the process of European settlement. Even in 1939, when the influence of F. J. Turner was at its height, Auden could have discovered these points – probably did discover them. But he chose to ignore them.