‘One more thing,’ wrote Ralph Vaughan Williams to the great pianist Myra Hess, ‘please don't “Doctor” me – most of the young women of my acquaintance call me “Uncle Ralph” when they wish to be respectful, “V.W.” when otherwise inclined.’ He then continues, ‘Won't you do one or the other according as you consider me a man or a mouse’ (288). With the possible exception of ‘Papa Haydn’, ‘Uncle Ralph’ is surely the most misleading moniker ever espoused by a major composer, a cozy appellation that conjures up a delightfully harmless old codger padding about in carpet slippers writing pastoral rhapsodies. It was meant to do exactly that, of course: to protect the composer's fiercely guarded inner privacy by throwing the unwary off the scent. But a whiff of ambiguity wafts about Vaughan Williams's request to Hess: why, exactly, does he offer a choice of nicknames, ‘Uncle Ralph’ for his respectful adopted ‘nieces’ and ‘V.W.’ for those delicious girls who, taking him for a man, not a mouse, are ‘otherwise inclined’? Inclined, one wonders, to do what? (As Myra Hess was known by au courant members of the British musical establishment to be a lesbian, one imagines that she called him ‘Uncle Ralph’ in order to keep a respectful distance from his flirtatious attentions.)

One of the mysterious aspects of Vaughan Williams's achievement is that, as more and more information becomes available about his life and music, the ambiguity surrounding his beliefs, aesthetics, and character only deepens. The recent publication by Oxford University Press of a handsome volume of his letters, selected and edited with great skill, ingenuity, and insight by Hugh Cobbe, raises new and fascinating questions about the towering modernist composer who lurked behind the endearing and misleading persona of ‘Uncle Ralph’. These letters, which represent only a modest portion of Vaughan Williams's surviving correspondence, may well prompt a searching reassessment of both the man and his music: despite the playful choice offered to Hess, no reader of these letters will ever misconstrue this particular man as a ‘mouse’.

As revealed by these letters, the man behind the mask was torn between a cultivated reverence for the past and an irreverence for accepted traditions. Not for this composer the foolish consistency that is, as Emerson reminds us, the hobgoblin of little minds. Like those of any thoughtful person, Vaughan Williams's opinions evolved over his long life, sometimes dramatically: to be shocked by contradictions voiced over decades is a luxury reserved for only the most naïve of readers. In particular, his musical assessments could change dramatically. After decades of lavish public praise for his colleague Arnold Bax, for instance, and having once gone so far as to rebuke the editor of the Radio Times for placing Bax in the unworthy company of Stravinsky, Poulenc, Schoenberg, and Szymanowski, the elderly Vaughan Williams confided to Michael Kennedy, ‘As regards Bax, I am beginning to feel rather doubtful […]. He had, perhaps, more musical invention than any of his contemporaries, but, as you say, it was quite undisciplined’ (208–9, 588).

Several of Vaughan Williams's opinions on music remained impervious to reconsideration, however, such as his almost visceral loathing of Delius, Strauss, and, especially, Stravinsky. Despite the evident influence of the Russian composer's Petrushka upon the scherzo of A London Symphony (1914, rev. 1920 and 1933), and despite a mild fondness for L'oiseau de feu, Vaughan Williams repeatedly expressed his contempt for the Russian composer in no uncertain terms. In a letter to his prodigiously gifted pupil Elizabeth Maconchy, Vaughan Williams affectionately chides her that ‘there are certain stravynskyesque [sic] clichés which are not really you & are not worthy of you.’ He continues, ‘you are capable of so much finer thought than that Russian Monkey-brain & […] you injure your real self by condescending to use any of his monkey-tricks’ (235). Whether such declarations demonstrate professional jealousy or an enduring aesthetic allergy is hard to discern fully, but Vaughan Williams's iconoclasm may feel refreshing to those readers in the twenty-first century who have grown weary (and wary) of the recent undiscriminating adulation lavished upon Stravinsky's music.

In fact, Vaughan Williams often describes himself as a contrarian, especially in politics:

But in the same letter of 1952, addressed to the communist composer Rutland Boughton, Vaughan Williams sounds somewhat less than a ‘true blue Tory’ when he declares, ‘Ever since I have had a vote I have voted either radical or Labour except once, after the last war when I was so disgusted by what I considered the mean tricks of the Labour party in forcing an election’ (502–3). In his affectionate foreword to this volume, Michael Kennedy, who came to know Vaughan Williams in the last decade of the composer's life, opines that ‘to call him a Left Wing Socialist, as some have done, is wide of the mark’ (xi). But, while Kennedy is doubtless more accurate to call the elderly gentleman whom he knew ‘a liberal of the old school’, in his younger years, when he read Fabian tracts as an undergraduate in the waning years of Victoria's reign, Vaughan Williams might best be characterized as an habitual dissenter. His political convictions, in marked contrast to those held by most of his class and family, must have made Vaughan Williams an unconventional, indeed broadly radical, presence at Trinity College in the early 1890s.

Vaughan Williams was ever on the side of the underdog, and this is vividly evident in certain of his earlier writings, most notably in the 1912 polemic ‘Who Wants the English Composer’, a short essay that infuriated his choleric teacher at the Royal College of Music Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. In this article Vaughan Williams had the temerity to recommend that British composers throw off the pretentions of ‘high art’ – especially, more particularly, ‘holy German art’ – and predicate their music upon that of the urban proletariat: the songs of factory girls, Welsh hymns, Salvation Army bands, Cockney concertinas, and other such ‘unclean’ sources.Footnote ¹ (He does not mention rural folk-song at all, a curious omission given that he had already been collecting such songs for years.) True, he says that art should ‘serve the State’, a recommendation that has since caused a certain amount of anxious comment. In the broader context of his argument, however, he could hardly be referring to a government. It is clear that Vaughan Williams believes that ‘the State’ consists of the very working-class citizens whose musical traditions he has just celebrated; he uses the term ‘State’ in the way that a Christian believer refers to the ‘Communion of Saints’. Following the populist precedent set by Elgar in his rollicking Cockaigne Overture, Vaughan Williams took his own advice: he composed A London Symphony, within which the listener hears echoes (or, in a very few brief passages, direct quotations) of the proletarian music valorized in his essay. Furthermore, in his ‘morality’ The Pilgrim's Progress (1951) one sees the depraved denizens of Vanity Fair hailing from the upper classes, while middle-class hypocrisy is fleshed out by the shiftless and prevaricating By-Ends; among the working-class characters one finds the beatific Woodcutter's Boy and the earnest Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains. Most tellingly, Vaughan Williams based the work on a simple, popular book by a nonconformist preacher and political dissident, one John Bunyan.

But the very idea of turning Bunyan's ‘little book’ into a work for the secular opera house – Vaughan Williams was insistent that his Pilgrim's Progress was not meant for semi-staged amateur performances in cathedrals – raises the vexed question of the composer's religious convictions, or, rather, the lack of them. Certain of his assertions, such as his blunt declaration concerning his Mass in G Minor (1922) that there ‘is no reason why an atheist could not write a good mass’, have pained the more dogmatic of his Christian admirers, who wonder, with some reason, why an atheist would bother to write a mass in the first place, much less a large body of vocal music using sacred texts. In her biography of Vaughan Williams, his second wife, Ursula, attempted to settle the question of his cognitive dissonance in regard to religious belief: ‘although a declared agnostic, he was able, all through his life, to set to music words in the accepted terms of Christian revelation as if they meant to him what they must have meant to George Herbert or to Bunyan.’Footnote ² (Given the author's canny use of ‘as if’ in this seemingly simple declaration, nothing is clarified.) Biographers, even those who strive for unvarnished accuracy, cannot help but see their subjects as refracted through the prism of their own biases, but Ursula Vaughan Williams's biography of her husband is an exceptional performance in this regard: she dances insouciantly over the chasm of full disclosure while balanced on a tightrope of expert concealment, all the while holding a small parasol of protective euphemism. Read once, her book appears to be a straightforward account of her husband's life; read again with more vigilance, all that is said and left unsaid reveals a deeper truth partially hidden beneath the confiding, confidential tone of voice. Written by a subtle and accomplished poet, Ursula Vaughan Williams's account is poised elegantly between obfuscation (‘What the hell is going on here?’) and revelation (‘Mercy day! They were lovers, both married, and his first wife an invalid!’).

While the religious convictions of Vaughan Williams's elusive first wife, Adeline, are unrecorded (though as a member of the Fisher family, it is unlikely that she was a professing Christian), those who knew Ursula Vaughan Williams can testify that she was not merely a non-believer but flamboyantly irreligious. Given her incapacity for religious feeling, the evaluations she made of her husband's vacillating metaphysics must be taken with a rather large serving of salt. However, the recent edition of his letters confirms that about one thing Ursula is absolutely correct: truly, Ralph Vaughan Williams was ‘never a professing Christian’.Footnote ³ Nor was he a professing Anglican, as he makes clear in a 1931 letter refusing a Lambeth Doctorate in Music proffered by the Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I have no real connection with anything ecclesiastical & no longer count myself a member of the Church of England’ (199). He started life as the son of a rural vicar who died when Ralph was a very small child, leaving him to be raised by his strict mother and his eccentric Aunt Sophie, who both espoused the fervent evangelicalism that pervaded the Darwin and Wedgwood families in which they had been reared.Footnote ⁴ A visit to Coldharbour Church, the austere pile near Leith Hill Place where the Vaughan Williams family worshipped, elucidates better than any words the comfortless, evangelical austerity that encompassed the young Vaughan Williams at home. No wonder he rebelled in favour of the sensual delights that attended his embrace of ‘cheerful agnosticism’.Footnote ⁵

There was yet another side to Vaughan Williams's reaction against his upbringing, his equally illicit attraction to the seductive romance of ritual. (Forget atheism – what did his formidable Low Church mother make of her son's incense-laden mass?) For a surprisingly long time Vaughan Williams occasionally attended High Mass at the Roman Catholic cathedral in London, ostensibly to savour the sixteenth-century polyphony of Byrd and Tallis performed by R. R. Terry's superb choir of men and boys. But his repeated visits to Westminster Cathedral might just as well be explained by a voluptuous indulgence in the lavish majesty of liturgy and music as then practised by the Roman Catholic Church – a decided contrast to Morning Prayer at Coldharbour Church.

In a similar fashion Vaughan Williams relished the resounding cadences of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which he quotes often throughout these letters. Essentially indifferent to the import of the biblical message, he loved the Jacobean grandeur that pervades the language of the Authorized Version. In this enjoyment he was partaking in a selective and very modernist connoisseurship of antiquity – that of both ancient Palestine and seventeenth-century England – that separated him yet further from the Christian epistemology of the text.Footnote ⁶ Anticipating Marshall McLuhan, Vaughan Williams posited that the medium is just as important as the message, and, for him, the medium – the basis of his personal epistemology, as it were – was a complex and contradictory set of signifiers that he called ‘beauty’.Footnote ⁷

The term ‘beauty’ resounds like the stroke of a bell throughout Vaughan Williams's writings, including the correspondence found in the present volume. Those such as HubertFoss, Frank Howes, Michael Kennedy, and Ursula Vaughan Williams who have written abouthis aesthetics and his music echo but rarely attempt to explain what the composer meant by that slippery word. In early scores such as Willow-Wood (1903) ‘beauty’ was invoked in the blowsy terms that the Pre-Raphaelites borrowed from Keats: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ As he grew older, Vaughan Williams jettisoned Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics by drawing a sharp distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘sham’, whether in sincerity or beauty. For the mature Vaughan Williams ‘real’ beauty possessed an unmistakable quality of directness, a courage and clarity of purpose that he termed the artist's ‘thought’. Writing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Vaughan Williams first grouses at perceived minor imperfections in the score in an exasperating attempt to qualify his praise of a Teutonic composer, but finally casts aside his nationalistic scruples as he goes to the heart of the matter:

By the time Vaughan Williams completed this essay in 1939, just at the beginning of the second horrific conflagration of the last century, he had no illusions about the more unpalatable aspects of ontology and the compromised, even sullied, nature of a beauty that reflected such a hard, unyielding ‘truth’. Three years before he finished his essay on Beethoven, Vaughan Williams received a letter from Robert Longman rejecting the harrowing modernist dissonance of the composer's Fourth Symphony and was stung into an unusually revealing response:

Vaughan Williams might well have added the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to this list of uncompromising beauty arising from the artist's unwavering, unblinking gaze at the often ugly tragedy of life – its ‘truth’. What he admired in all of the works listed here was the directness with which Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and Wagner responded to their superficially ‘unbeautiful’ subject matter. Blind the old Duke of Gloucester onstage? Paint a corpse being dissected? Illustrate through music the cupidity, greed, and duplicity of two malign dwarfs? To do so, Vaughan Williams argues, is to eschew comfortable notions of facile prettiness and reveal the beauty which is the coeval of a hard-won authenticity that is far from Keats's use of the word ‘truth’. True beauty is found, then, in its reflecting power rather than in the intrinsic value of the thing reflected – which is why repeated hearings reveal that Vaughan Williams's ravishing ‘pastoral’ works, such as The Lark Ascending, possess just as unsentimental an expressive core as do dissonant modernist scores such as the Fourth Symphony. Vaughan Williams understood that for each to be true to his art, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and Wagner had no other option than to transcend themselves and their times by sending out their ‘thought in utter nakedness’ towards the ‘eternal source of truth’.

But Vaughan Williams did not use the phrase ‘eternal source of truth’ in either a sentimental or a specifically Christian manner, and it is notable that he never turns ‘truth’ into an absolute through capitalization. What, one might well ask of this agnostic composer, is the ‘eternal source of truth’ to which he alludes, if not the inconsistent deity of the Bible? Whence this ‘truth’? In the letter quoted above, Vaughan Williams implies an answer that might paradoxically be called ‘agnostic mysticism’: the ‘eternal source of truth’ is within everyone, if people will only seek it by turning inwards. For Vaughan Williams, ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ are modified in the guts of the living, apprehended in different ways by each individual who embarks on an inward pilgrimage. As he once tellingly declared, ‘A work of art is like a theophany which takes different forms to different beholders.’Footnote ¹⁰ Vaughan Williams's quarrel with Christianity was not with its symbols, poetry, and rituals – all of which he found inspiring – but with the deadening specificity, petty restrictions, and prosaic concreteness of dogma masquerading as history. Art, not religion, was the fingerpost by which humanity could find the path that would lead it from Vanity Fair to the Celestial City.

That said, a persistent question continues to nag Christian believers who are deeply moved by the composer's music using religious texts: did Vaughan Williams believe in God? Intermittently, perhaps, but after he served in the trenches of the First World War, it was difficult for him to descry the hand of a beneficent Creator in human affairs, something contemporary Christian practice seemed to demand. Did he believe in a life after death? All of his statements concerning the survival of the soul after earthly dissolution are hedged about with equivocation. Even when called on to comfort Herbert Howells, whose little son had perished horribly of poliomyelitis, Vaughan Williams could not set aside his habitual ambivalence for even a moment: ‘I don't think that it is really any comfort – indeed “comfort” would be just an impertinence – but I cannot help believing that a life once begun can never really stop – though it has stopped for us and that there may, after all, be a real joining up some day’ (240). Distraught over the loss of a beloved child, did Howells take note of the telltale use of ‘may’ and the wilderness of double negatives and subjunctives that hopelessly undermine this stammering attempt at consolation? Writing shortly after the death of one far dearer to him, Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams could bring himself to voice only a half-expressed ambiguous wish, also qualified by a quietly poignant ‘may’: ‘He may have now found in new regions that which his music ever seemed to be seeking.’Footnote ¹¹

Aside from raising these and other questions about the composer's convictions, both aesthetic and metaphysical, this book provides the best self-portrait imaginable. Providing a glimpse of the hot-tempered and imperious man who lurked beneath the benign façade of ‘Uncle Ralph’, these letters reveal repeatedly that Vaughan Williams did not suffer fools gladly and told them so, as when he ticked off an officious bureaucrat at the BBC: ‘I am sorry that you thought it necessary to call me 10 minutes early for rehearsal as I am not in the habit of being late for my appointments’(219). (In fact, Vaughan Williams was almost pathologically obsessed with punctuality.) A number of letters testify to the sheer infuriating cussedness that drove E. M. Forster to exclaim that Vaughan Williams could be ‘chuckle-headed – a goose in matters of judgement’.Footnote ¹² But other letters reveal why Forster, in virtually the same breath, called the composer a ‘noble’ man: Vaughan Williams frequently gave financial support for causes and individuals alike on strict condition of anonymity; he lavished enormous time and (his own) money on assisting Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, rescuing careers and saving lives in the process; and he generously encouraged younger composers such as Herbert Howells, Gerald Finzi, Douglas Lilburn – and the singularly ungrateful Benjamin Britten.

Like one of his admired poets, Walt Whitman, albeit in a very different way, Vaughan Williams contained ‘multitudes’ within himself: as these letters illustrate, he was an expansive and capacious personality who was virtually incapable of pettiness. A modest, courteous man, he was never humble: he knew his worth and insisted that it be recognized properly. Despite his multivalent ambivalences, he refused to compromise on matters of principle, even at the risk of being ‘chuckle-headed’. Women he loved, nay, adored, and he flirted (and more) with them joyously. However, as these letters amply attest, he respected women as profoundly as he cherished them: he clearly believed that Elizabeth Maconchy was the equal of any of her male contemporaries, including Stravinsky and Britten. In short, these letters reveal the man in all his flawed and inconsistent grandeur of spirit. Anyone who has seen an example of Vaughan Williams's handwriting understands the heroic nature of the task that Hugh Cobbe undertook to produce this superb volume; all those who love Vaughan Williams's music and want to experience something of the man – not the mouse – are forever in his debt.