China and the West

Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war [ID D3432].
Sekundärliteratur
Plomer, William. Review of Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war [ID D3432]. In : London Mercury ; vol. 39 (April 1939).
Commissioned by their publishers to write a travel book about the Far East, Messrs. Auden and Isherwood chose to go to China, and spent four months there last year. They now offer the reader who has never been there 'some pmpression of what he would be likely to see, and of what kind of stories he would be likely to hear '. The book contains a travel dairy by Mr. Isherwoods, and poems and many excellent photographs by Mr. Auden.
That these two writers were enterprising goes without saying. Starting from Hong Kong, they journeyed by way of Cantin, Hankow, and Sian, and ended up at Shanghai. They travelled by boat, by car, by train, by rickshaw, on horse-back, on foot. As guests, as interviewers, as English visitors, as fellow-travellers, they encountered all kinds of people, ambassadors, beggars, an American bishop, Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife, doctors, missionaries, Mr. Peter Fleming, servants, soldiers, intellectuals. They visited hospitals and film-studios, dealt with bugs and dystnery, air-raids and ennui, and made their way to the front, or perhaps we had better say the scene of military operations.
All this has resulted in a various and lively commentary ; no bouquet of recollections in transquillity ; not the work of someone with a knowledge of the Chinese language, or of Chinese or Japanese history and culture ; but a collection of snapshots by two extremely animated minds, and like any collection of snapshots uneven and miscellaneous…
He [Isherwood] gives us, so to speak, a feature-film of China at war, the sense of distances, of millions of people very much at sea, of political cross-currents, of chaos, and reminds us continually the 'war is untidy, inefficient, ofscure and largely a matter of chance '. In the end one is left, perhaps inevitably, with a clearer impression of the Europeans and Americans encountered than the Chinese…
Neither Mr. Auden nor Mr. Ishterwood attempts at all to account for the behavior of the Japanese or to make the least allowance for that race, which like very other, has its virtues – and its liberal intellectuals. They are satisfied to see China as a 'cultured pacific ountry ' attacked by a 'brutal upstart enemy '…

Edward Callan : First part : "London to Hong-Kong", is a series of poems by Auden on the outward journey via the Mediterranean, Suez, and the Red Sea. It includes The voyage, The sphinx, and The ship, written on the journey, and Macao and Hong Kong added later.
Second part : "Travel-Diary", is Isherwood's prose account of their experiences in China – derived from their separate diaries – which comprises most of the book.
Third part : "Picture Commentary" has forty-five photographs, mostly by Auden, and two stills from the Chinese film Flight in the Last.
Fourth part : "In Time of War : a sonnet sequence with a verse commentry", Auden's verse contribution. Of the twenty-seven sonnets, twenty are retained, slightly revised and rearranged, as Sonnets from China in Auden's Collected poems.

Douglas Brown : Reread today, Journey appears as a pivotal work registering turning points in the careers of both Auden and Isherwood, and intimating interrelated developments in twentieth-century political, social, literary, religious and sexual history. Complicated by multiplying ironies and compositional discontinuities, Journey reveals incipient postcolonial and postmodernist sensibilities, and involves significant statements about fascism, communism, imperialism, democracy, war, representation and the ethics of modern homosexuality. Journey unfolds a particularly transformative Chinese encounter, in which the experiences of China's otherness and its military disaster are the essential motivating occasions of the acute state of self-reflexivity and the ideological and ethical turning points that Journey records. Though the book achieves less as a study of China than as an instance of exemplary literary self-consciousness and Western self-examination, it has been more frequently appreciated for its historical details than its literary merit. Journey offers vital glimpses of Kuomintang China consumed by the Anti-Japanese War, of the consequent refugee catastrophe, of the tempered optimism of the Nationalist/Communist United Front, and of the febrile hopefulness in the provisional capital of Wuhan in the months after the Nanking atrocity. It also memorably presents the situations of a diverse array of foreigners then active in China.