 W. H. Auden is also known to have been an early friend.Although he apparently never sought to become a citizen of the United States, a country where he spent upwards of a third of his life, Heller nevertheless had a deep respect for American democracy, which he felt embodied values directly opposed to those that informed the political realities of the Central Europe he fled in 1939.This pietistic stance however never prevented him from espousing views considered by the mainstream opinion in America to be outdated or otherwise 'politically incorrect' whenever he thought them valid on objective grounds; nor did he shrink from considering America an intellectual desert.