In their biscuit-colored stone, many of the villages looked virtually identical to what Arnold and Clough might have seen in their student wanderings through the county. My own favorites were Forest Hill, in whose church Milton almost surely married his first wife (Mary Powell, who was half his age and who left him a few weeks after the wedding to return to her family and then failed to rejoin him for nearly three years), and Godstow (where, on the opposite bank from the eventually famous Trout Inn, Mr. Charles Dodgson—a don at Christ Church—told two young girls the story which he’d later publish as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under his pen name, Lewis Carroll). An even greater favorite was the small town of Woodstock which sported the vast Churchill family estate (presented by a grateful nation to the first Duke of Marlborough in thanks for his victory over the French and Bavarians in 1704 at Blenheim in Bavaria, hence the name of the house itself—Blenheim Palace, pronounced Blen-im in England). In those pre-tourist-flood days, the grounds were entirely open to random visitors—no tickets required. Michael could park us at one of the gates, and we’d wander the calmly natural park, designed by the apparently infallible landscape architect Capability Brown. Then we could lie by the lake with our books (weather permitting) and never be bothered by a single other human, reading till hunger or thirst compelled us into the nearby Bear Inn.
* * *
The addition of the Volkswagen encouraged thoughts of a summer trip to the Continent. Late in the term Michael got his driving license with no hitch; and given our good time in Italy, the two of us began to plan a long drive. We’d load the car on a ship to Norway, drive through Scandinavia, then down through Germany for a week with Jane and Liz in Munich, then up the Rhine to Holland and thence back to England. It was no doubt a half-insane project for a man who hoped to complete a substantial scholarly thesis by early in the autumn, then be successfully examined by a hard-nosed faculty board before I could win my degree and return home in the early summer of 1957. Well, at that point in my life, I still knew very little about my realistic rate of production in scholarship or fiction (though I’d already demonstrated my slowness during my final term at Duke when I completed my honors thesis—Milton’s entry into politics—on the morning it was due). I guessed I could accomplish all the jobs before me in the time available; and without consulting Miss Gardner or the Warden of Rhodes House who after all signed my checks, I joined Michael in planning more than a month’s wide loop round the Continent.
Meanwhile each of us also had the considerable problem of finding digs—lodgings—for the following year. In an increasingly crowded situation, Merton could only offer most undergraduates two years of in-college lodging; each grad student got a single year. We were soon to be thrown on the mercy of the city’s digs market. There were numerous widows and assorted others who advertised rooms with a central university bureau; and lists of such providers were available, as was a lively oral tradition of affable landladies who’d previously accommodated Mertonians. But each man was very much on his own in the run for space.
Although I don’t know the date of this photograph of W. H. Auden, it was taken by Erich Auerbach at what appears to be the time when I saw so much of Auden at Oxford—his Professor of Poetry years. He was in his early fifties by then; and while his face has begun its downward collapse into creasing, it’s still a face that could—until almost the end of his life—be repaired by a smile (as it so often was in the middle years before a monumental sadness—impelled by drink, daily barbiturates, and a fading of the only love he’d wanted—overcame him). Only one thing is lacking here; there’s no cigarette in his stained right hand. But isn’t the open document in his lap a musical score, and isn’t that a small piano in the left corner behind him? He and his partner Chester Kallman had written the libretto for Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress which had its premiere in Venice in 1951; and while it’s one of the very few post-Puccini/Strauss operas to have a vigorous ongoing life, none of his and Kallman’s several other libretti have met with such luck. Perhaps Auden holds another score here then, something for which he plans to write words (a complicated challenge) or a finished achievement. Above all, this is the heart and head that conceived and accomplished a quantity of poems surpassing all but a very few of the lines written by others in his lifetime—or since.
How we discovered her I no longer recall; but Michael and I quickly found an extraordinary woman at 2 Sandfield Road in Headington, an eastside—and very stellar—Oxford neighborhood (it housed C. S. Lewis who’d never moved to Cambridge, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Isaiah Berlin). Our landlady-to-be, Win Kirkby, was the wife of a New College scout named Jack Kirkby; and she had two sets of digs to offer. They consisted of two ground-floor private sitting rooms with separate bedrooms upstairs, a shared upstairs bath (shared also with the two Kirkbys, no children). All that, with full English breakfast provided, would cost us each two pounds, ten shillings per week (the equivalent of $56 today or $224 per month, a substantial sum for men on scholarships). But the rooms were likable, the street itself was remarkably quiet; and Win would be our bedmaker and breakfast cook, as well as a huge source of educational entertainment—our first meeting with her suggested that strongly. No deposit was required, only our gentleman’s word that we wanted the four rooms and would appear a few days before fall term.
* * *
Toward the end of spring term, one of the best surprises of the year saw the arrival in my pigeonhole of a small envelope—hand-addressed and bearing in the upper left corner a nearly illegible name. I thought it said W. H. Auden. I’d known that—the previous year, in a much-contested university election—Auden had been elected Professor of Poetry, a five-year appointment which required no residence in Oxford and only three lectures per year. I’d read a good deal about the controversy surrounding his election; and I knew that the fact he’d departed his native country for the United States essentially for good in 1939, as war with Hitler looked inevitable, hardly sat well with many of his former countrymen. In the interim, however, he’d become the most admired of still-working English-speaking poets—T. S. Eliot was no longer writing anything but occasional verse plays and critical essays. And despite a fierce campaign for votes, Auden’s reputation overwhelmed all opposition to his apparent disloyalty and his not especially concealed homosexuality. I’d heard him called “a traitorous bugger” more than once before I received his letter, and I’d heard of his imminent arrival.
My envelope proved to contain a brief note, saying that our mutual friend Frank Lyell had suggested he should look me up upon his arrival in Oxford. Would I join him then, for a drink in his rooms, a few days from now? I accepted at once, acquired a volume of his poems, and consumed many with great admiration (I’d known some of them for years). I also read his latest volume, published only a few months earlier. It contained the poem that gave its name to the collection, a poem that would come to be seen by many as the lyric height of his enormous output—“The Shield of Achilles.” In admiration but serious uncertainty then—I’d heard of his rudeness and, of all things, his silliness—I found my way up his tall staircase in the southeast corner of Tom Quad in Christ Church to meet a man who, whatever world-class strengths he’d attained in poetry, promised to be a strange bird.
Promptness has always been my sole major virtue, and I knocked on his door at five. Through the ensuing hour—Auden was downing a tumbler of gin; I chose sherry—it was clear that my host was as nervous as I. Was my presence the cause, or was it some disturbance in Auden’s recent life? (He’d chosen not to bring his notoriously queer partner, Chester Kallman, even though Kallman had been Auden’s serious collaborator on the libretto for Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress, one of only two or three operas since Puccini’s Turandot that has entered the ongoing repertoire of world-class opera houses). Auden had said in a recent interview that he felt, on arrival, like a new boy at a public school—a public school in Britain was an American private school. Or was he simply a poor companion for conversation? My
own later experience suggests that, in attempted dialogue, Auden was hardly a companion. At Oxford he was a performer, awaiting his next moment to perform.
Whatever, I can remember only that he asked if I knew the work of M. F. K. Fisher. I confessed that I hadn’t heard of Fisher. He said that she wrote entirely about food and was the finest living writer of prose (I’d soon learn that Auden was given to eccentric claims). When I mentioned my work on Milton, he had almost nothing to say. I mentioned my love of Emily Dickinson; he nodded with no enthusiasm—“Very little-bitty at times, don’t you feel?” When he asked if I liked opera, I could honestly say I did—a lot. That seemed to get me to first base at least.
He asked for my favorite opera composer. I said Wagner; he grinned, shut his eyes in bliss, tilted his head back, and said “I’m having ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’ played at my funeral, and I long to direct a production of Tristan und Isolde with two large lesbians—no man and woman could ever carry on so fervently about one another” (a recording of the clangorous “Funeral March” would in fact be played just before Auden’s funeral, years later in a gathering of his friends in the Austrian home he’d shared with Chester Kallman; but he never directed his ideal Tristan, though I later learned he’d told the story to hundreds of friends).
As I stood to leave at the end of an hour, Auden said he meant to have his coffee each day at eleven in the Cadena Café on the Corn-market. I’d be welcome to drop by with any other students who might be interested. He also hoped we could dine together soon. Only a moment later as I was descending the stairs, it occurred to me—from earlier reading—that the nineteenth-century room and the famous rooftop photographic studio of Lewis Carroll must have been nearby. Well, Auden was at least as peculiar a fellow and at least as true a genius (in retrospect he seems to me, for all his flaws and late absurdities, to have been the greatest English-language poet since Eliot).
Unfortunately I waited too late to go to the Sheldonian Theatre on the afternoon of his superb inaugural lecture and was unable to gain entry—he’d packed the place. I did, however, take up his morning-coffee invitation more than once—well before other students were prepared to face such a formidable creature. And speaking of face, it’s realistic, if inevitably unkind, to broach the problem of Auden’s face; but since he allowed himself to be photographed often, right to the end of his life, he didn’t conceal the fact. Pictures from his youth suggest that he was a near-albino in some respects—abnormally pale and thin-skinned. Perhaps that genetic endowment, plus the fact of long decades of chain-smoking—not to mention heavy drinking and pill-taking—had left the skin of his face phenomenally creased and gullied, though when he returned to Oxford, he was only in his late forties.
More than one joke on the subject made the local rounds. Even the kindly David Cecil said “If a fly were to walk across Wystan’s face, it would break its legs.” (I can vouch for David’s invention of that one.) And Stravinsky was reported to have said “We’re going to have to iron Wystan soon.” I don’t know that Auden ever heard the jokes; but for anyone with as keen a sense of physical beauty as he possessed, even the daily shave at the mirror may have been difficult. I can report, for what it’s worth, that in numerous jokey remarks about himself, I never heard him allude to his wrinkles—maybe an indication of their painfulness.
The Cadena hours, with or without other students, were more relaxed. He’d have generally brought along a book in case no one turned up (incredibly it was often the case that Auden sat there alone amid the shopping housewives who’d paused for their own elevenses), and that lack of company gave him at least one thing he could volubly deplore, if a student appeared and nothing else surfaced as a subject for conversation. As a man who produced so much, and worked on a mercilessly regular schedule, he was addicted to midmorning and evening company.
Of all the books he brought, I remember only a volume of Rosemond Tuve’s on English metaphysical poetry (I think she was visiting in Oxford that year). He admired it and, knowing of my interest in the same subject, he expatiated on it—especially the Christian poems of George Herbert. Since I made no notes, I remember nothing more of his lecture, for it did seem a lecture. One maybe relevant memory is that, while he knew I had serious hopes of a writing career, I never asked him if he’d read any one of my manuscript stories; and he never asked to see anything (a fact I can easily comprehend, after five decades of my own teaching; but then verse was his trade, not fiction, though he endlessly consumed mystery novels—as did Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell).
Term soon wound down without a dinner invitation; but by then I took that as no deprivation. Dinner on the Christ Church high table, and with a social reality as daunting as Wystan Auden, would not have been an occasion I sought fearlessly. I do recall that, after the official end of term, I was sitting in my car at the Carfax stoplight when I saw Auden walking up the High with a man whom—from some book-jacket photo maybe—I recognized as Chester Kallman. Kallman was fourteen years younger than his distinguished partner, blondish and fleshy, hardly a man I’d have called handsome, much less beautiful (as Auden implied, in a number of poems). So Auden had kept his self-administered vow; but today as he was no doubt packing to depart, Chester had arrived; and they both were laughing their way down the crowded sidewalk—Auden beaming at his friend.
Were they the first admittedly queer couple I witnessed in public life? Almost surely. If so, they were for me—devoted disciple of physical beauty that I then was—a sad introduction. Yet in their own complicated way, a way that included sexual infidelity on a steady scale for both men, a loyal partnership existed and endured till Auden’s death some seventeen years later. Since the relation seemed—to many of Wystan’s old friends—a source of prolonged unhappiness for him, its continuation was hard for those friends to comprehend. But aren’t a great many enduring marriages, of whatever variety, incomprehensible to close observers? Thus Love me, love my dog is far too much for most married men or women to ask of their friends.
* * *
In any case, in my two remaining years at Oxford—and through the rest of Auden’s life—I never met Chester Kallman; so I have no informed observations of a partnership that, after all, endured for nearly forty years. I did learn, though—as the interested world did—that Auden had left the whole of his hard-won considerable estate to Kallman with the instruction that, should Chester die before Auden, the estate would go to Auden’s two nieces. If Chester should survive Auden, then the estate would be willed by Chester to the nieces. But the feckless Chester died intestate only two years later; and by default the Auden estate went to Chester’s next-of-kin—his own father, Dr. Kallman, who was a dentist in New York, a man in his mid-eighties who soon remarried a younger woman. Not a penny went to Auden’s two nieces. The absurd folly of such a conclusion might have amused the satiric Auden in his last years, prematurely exhausted with life as he was and deep in a miserable nightly drunkenness.
And to complete my own experience in the matter—the last time I saw Wystan Auden was in February 1969 when Nevill Coghill came to New York for the premiere of a musical based on his translation of The Canterbury Tales. He’d co-written the book with Martin Starkie and had himself written the lyrics. Nevill had recently retired from his long career at Oxford; and this was the first public display of a newly ongoing creative life from a man who’d done a great deal for scholarship and theatrical art and had been, above all, an endlessly encouraging teacher. For the opening night on Broadway, he invited three of his old students. The oldest was Cleanth Brooks, the critic who’d virtually invented the hugely influential, and now much lamented, New Criticism (lamented for its departure in the frequently incomprehensible wake of Critical Theory, a widespread disaster that presently blights most fields). The next was Wystan Auden, then me—I’d turned thirty-six only two days before and had flown up from North Carolina for the evening.
I arrived first at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. Wystan, whom I hadn’t seen since Stephen Spe
nder invited us and Robert Lowell to lunch at the Algonquin a few years earlier—an extremely good-natured occasion with a keenly alert Auden still capable of leading the jokes and laughter—arrived next, huffing loudly in a thick black overcoat. He shook my hand, said a perfunctory word or two; then sat beside me, never removing the coat (he’d just turned sixty-two and would live only four more years). As ever, he proceeded next to replace his outdoor shoes with the carpet slippers he’d brought in a brown paper bag. I was shocked by his physical and apparent psychic decline in the short gap of time since our last meeting (later I’d learn that Kallman was now spending a great part of the year away from their traditional lodgings in New York and Austria and that Wystan was suffering from the separation).
Then Cleanth Brooks arrived with his usual Southern-gent courtesy, and the curtain rose on a performance that was not quite brilliant but was at least diverting—the young cast were attractive and scantily dressed when at all possible, generally a big help. Throughout the nimble stage action, Auden continued breathing stertorously. Sad to say, he also gave off the distinct odor of an old Oxonian who seldom used the facilities. We were invited to join Nevill later at a party—he’d only recently turned seventy—but midway through the first act, Wystan whispered to me a gruff “It’s my bedtime” and was off in the darkness. Whether he ever saw Nevill again, I can’t say—his departure from the theatre was inexcusably rude—but in the remaining years of Auden’s life, I never saw the grand poet again, the man who’d written poems as indelible in the history of verse as his “Elegy for William Butler Yeats,” “In Praise of Limestone,” “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love,” “The Shield of Achilles,” and dozens of shorter lyrics and a handful of brilliant long poems like “The Sea and the Mirror” and “For the Time Being.”
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