Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock: A Friendship Revealed.(Review)

Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock: A Friendship Revealed. Edited by Barry Smith. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xxii, 542 p. ISBN 0-19-816706-7. $130.]

Anyone acquainted with seminal biographical works on Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock--or, as he appears in this book with his real name, Philip Heseltine--will have naturally retained a major fascination for the relationship between these two men of quite different temperaments. Some facts have been well known for many years: that Heseltine, though attracted to Delius's music beforehand, experienced an almost damascene conversion in 1911 when he heard Edward Mason conduct Songs of Sunset; that a relationship of mentor and disciple emerged that culminated in Heseltine's critical biography of Delius in 1923 (Frederick Delius [London: Bodley Head]) and the Serenade for Frederick Delius for string orchestra (1922); that Heseltine did a great deal to assist Delius before and during the onset of the latter's debilitating illness; and that, in the closing years of Heseltine's tragically short life (not unlike Friedrich Nietzsche's retreat from his earlier fanatical pursuit of Richard Wagner), he became, accordin g to Eric Fenby, much cooler toward Delius's music and artistic outlook as his earlier phase of youthful infatuation waned and his enthusiasms for other European developments (largely antipathetical to Delius) emerged.

Barry Smith's book, which presents "all the surviving letters" (p. xxi) between the two composers and runs to a generous 542 pages, opens with an introduction that is essential to the reader. First, Smith discusses the important issue of the manuscript sources of the letters themselves; after passing through the hands of Cecil Gray, Bernard van Dieren, van Dieren's son (who put the two sides of the correspondence up for auction in 1964 and 1967) and (in the case of Heseltine's letters to Delius) Elizabeth Poston, who "politely avoided any requests from anyone wishing to see the letters" (p. xiv), the correspondence was finally united in 1993 after Poston's death in 1987. Until this publication, Gray's biography of Heseltine (Peter Warlock: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine [London: Jonathan Gape, 1934]) was the only source of the Heseltine-to-Delius letters, and only a selection (unreliably cited) was included. (Some of the Delius-to-Heseltine letters appear in volume 2 of Lionel Carley's immense collection Deliu s: A Life in Letters, 1909-1934 [London: Scolar Press, 1983-88], which provides a useful context for Smith's detailed collation.) Second, and a matter of serious debate, is the very basis of the friendship between the two men. While Delius clearly appears to have enjoyed the discipleship of a man less than half his age, others, notably Thomas Beecham, were more critical of the influence the older man exerted on the younger. In fact, Beecham, a perspicacious judge of character, observed with sagacity that Delius's single-mindedness, tenacity, and iconoclasm differed markedly from Heseltine's emotionally arrested personality (which these letters powerfully reveal), and he believed that the disparity of their temperaments was potentially deleterious to the younger man. Warlock scholars beg to disagree, arguing that Delius's influence formed only one part of a much wider personality but was nevertheless vital to Heseltine, especially during the early years of his career. Smith avoids any further probing of this q uestion in ...