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The Secret Auden



Jerry Cooke/Pix Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
W. H. Auden, Fire Island, 1946



From some letters I found in Auden’s papers, I learned that a few years after World War II he had arranged through a European relief agency to pay the school and college costs for two war orphans chosen by the agency, an arrangement that continued, later with new sets of orphans, until his death at sixty-six in 1973.







He was always professional in his dealings with editors and publishers, uncomplainingly rewriting whole essays when asked—except on at least two occasions when he quietly sacrificed money and fame rather than falsify his beliefs. In 1964, for his translation (with Leif Sjöberg) of Dag Hammarskjöld’s posthumous Markings, he wrote a foreword that mentioned Hammarskjöld’s “narcissistic fascination with himself” and alluded almost invisibly to Hammarskjöld’s homosexuality, which Auden perceived as something entirely inward to Hammarskjöld and never acted upon:

A “thorn in the flesh” which convinces him that he can never hope to experience what, for most people, are the two greatest joys earthly life has to offer, either a passionate devotion returned, or a lifelong happy marriage.

He also alluded to Hammarskjöld’s inner sense of a messianic, sacrificial mission—something he seems to have recognized as a version of the messianic fantasy to which he had himself been tempted by his youthful fame as a revolutionary left-wing poet.

Auden had been Hammarskjöld’s candidate for the Nobel Prize, and was widely expected to win it in 1964. Soon after Hammarskjöld’s executors and friends saw Auden’s typescript, he was visited by a Swedish diplomat who hinted that the Swedish Academy would be unhappy if it were printed in its present form, that perhaps it could be revised. Auden ignored the hint, and seems to have mentioned the incident only once, when he went to dinner with his friend Lincoln Kirstein the same evening and said, “There goes the Nobel Prize.” The prize went to Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused it.

Two years later, Life magazine offered him $10,000 for an essay on the fall of Rome, the last of a series by multiple authors titled “The Romans.” Auden’s typescript ended with his reflections on the fall of two empires:


The editors refused to inflict this on their patriotic mass-market readership in the era of the Pax Americana, and asked Auden to rewrite it. He declined, knowing that the piece would be dropped and that he would be paid nothing. Scholars have known for years that he had written the essay—an editor rescued it from the files when it was about to be discarded—but no one seemed to know why it never appeared. Auden may have told the story only to one friend, Thekla Clark, who retold it in a documentary film, Wystan: The Life, Love and Death of a Poet, by Michael Buergermeister, which had its premiere in Oxford last year.

Auden had many motives for portraying himself as rigid or uncaring when he was making unobtrusive gifts of time, money, and sympathy. In part he was reacting against his own early fame as the literary hero of the English left. In 1937, before he turned thirty, a London paper printed on its front page the news that he had gone to Madrid planning to drive an ambulance for the beleaguered Republic in the Spanish civil war. (He was instead put to work broadcasting propaganda, and, after visiting the front, quietly left, disheartened by some of the actions of his own side.)

In 1939 he left England for America, partly to escape his own public status. Six months later, after making a speech at a political meeting, he wrote to a friend:

I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring…. It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.


In 1939, at thirty-two, he fell in love with Chester Kallman and thought of their relation as a marriage. Two years later, Kallman ended it because he could not endure Auden’s wish for faithfulness. Auden reacted with murderous rage, probably toward Kallman, possibly toward the man with whom Kallman had been unfaithful. A few months later, he wrote in a verse letter to Kallman, “on account of you, I have been, in intention, and almost in act, a murderer.”

By the time he wrote this, he had begun to sense that he had caused the break between them by trying to reshape Kallman into an ideal figure, an imaginary lover whom he valued more than the real one. What Auden had thought of as love for the younger man had been infected by libido dominandi, a lust for the power to transform him into someone else. This was a temptation that everyone experienced, but artists, he thought, were especially susceptible to it. He said in a lecture on Shakespeare’s sonnets a few years later: “Art may spill over from creating a world of language into the dangerous and forbidden task of trying to create a human being.”

Earlier, in his twenties, when he was trying to act as a political poet, he tried to write for a plural audience—that is, for a group or category of readers who shared similar interests. Later, he realized that he had always preferred to write as if addressing an individual reader. He might have thousands of individual readers, but he wrote as if speaking to one. “All the poems I have written were written for love,” he said; “naturally, when I have written one, I try to market it, but the prospect of a market played no role in its writing.”

Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Chester Kallman, W.H. Auden, and the composer Hans Werner Henze discussing the opera Elegy for Young Lovers, for which Kallman and Auden had written the English libretto, London, July 1961

A writer who addresses a plural audience claims to deserve their collective attention. He must present himself as the great modernists—Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Pound—more or less seriously presented themselves, as visionary pioneers and cultural authorities, artist-heroes setting an agenda for their time and their nation. In contrast, a writer who addresses an individual reader presents himself as someone expert in his métier but in every other way equal with his reader, having no moral authority or special insight on anything beyond his art. Virginia Woolf, who thought much as Auden did about these matters, rebuked her readers for accepting an unequal relation with authors:


In an age when writers as different as Hemingway and Eliot encouraged their public to admire them as heroic explorers of the mind and spirit, Auden preferred to err in the opposite direction, by presenting himself as less than he was.




One of many forms this argument takes is a dispute over the meaning of the great totalitarian evils of the twentieth century: whether they reveal something about all of humanity or only about the uniquely evil leaders, cultures, and nations that committed them. For Auden, those evils made manifest the kinds of evil that were potential in everyone. Looking out from the attic room in peaceful, rural Austria where he composed his poems, he wrote (in “The Cave of Making”):

                      More than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, loveable,
   but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,
   all is possible.

“We,” that is to say, know collectively what is possible “subjectively” in the mind of each individual person.

In “September 1, 1939,” he dismissed the fantasy that anyone’s private life could be innocent of the evils that so obviously drove public life. Individual persons know subjectively—as if looking in a mirror—that they treat others as objects to be used, just as nations do:

Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.





Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

He later quoted Simone Weil’s pensée on the same theme, written around the same time: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”

The view that the citizen and dictator have nothing in common has another corollary: the view that the dictator’s victims are inherently innocent, not merely innocent victims of someone else’s evil, but innocent in everything, so that even after the murderous dictator has been destroyed, their own actions, no matter how oppressive or unjust, may not be judged by the same standard as his actions. As victims of irrational hatred, they cannot imagine themselves acting on comparable hatreds. Against this fantasy of inherent innocence, Auden recognized that victims, no matter how guiltless in their own victimization, are tempted to become victimizers in turn. As he put it briskly in a song, “Many a sore bottom finds/A sorer one to kick.”


In “Under Which Lyre,” his 1946 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, he made a similar distinction under different names. Instead of Arcadians and Utopians, he described the unending war for the human heart between the playful children of Hermes the trickster and the authoritarian children of law-giving Apollo, and he urged his fellow irresponsibles to resist Apollo’s battalions. But he told a friend afterward, “I have a bit of Apollo in me too.” He later told another friend that he had authoritarian impulses in himself that he despised but could never entirely abolish.

In his prose poem “Vespers,” an Arcadian and a Utopian unwillingly perceive that each shares in the guilt of their civilization, that each is responsible for the “cement of blood” without which “no secular wall will safely stand.” When the two encounter each other at a crossroads, neither speaks, but each knows what the other thinks:

Both simultaneously recognize his Anti-type: that I am an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian.
He notes, with contempt, my Aquarian belly: I note, with alarm, his Scorpion’s mouth.

Far from responding to Nazi genocide with wordless awe, Auden understood it as an extreme case of something all too comprehensible, the pandemic fantasy of building New Jerusalem in the real world:


When Auden reviewed Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox in 1954, he offered an alternative to Berlin’s antithesis of hedgehogs who know one thing and foxes who know many. Improvising on Alice in Wonderland, he contrasted strong-minded Alices, confident in their moral rightness, with weak-minded Mabels, content to think as everyone else thinks. His antithesis had more to do with moral self-knowledge than with knowledge of the world.

Berlin was Auden’s lifelong friend, and Auden was demurring gently at the Alice-like qualities he sensed in Berlin’s book. One especially memorable statement by Berlin of the Alice-like views that Auden distrusted occurs in his later essay on Turgenev (printed, among other places, in these pages). Berlin wrote: “The dilemma of morally sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men at a time of acute polarization of opinion has, since [Turgenev’s] time, grown acute and world-wide.” Whatever Berlin intended, a sentence like this encourages readers to count themselves among the sensitive, honest, and responsible, with the inevitable effect of blinding themselves to their own insensitivities, dishonesties, and irresponsibilities, and to the evils committed by a group, party, or nation that they support. Their “dilemma” is softened by the comforting thought of their merits.

Auden wrote a poem about complacency and its pleasures, pleasures that he knew he shared, though he understood their delusions. The poem was “Lakes” (1952):

Only a very wicked or conceited man,
About to sink somewhere in mid-Atlantic,
Could think Poseidon’s frown was meant for him in person,
But it is only human to believe
The little lady of the glacier lake has fallen
In love with the rare bather whom she drowns.

In the final stanza Auden wondered which kind of lake—“Moraine, pot, oxbow, glint, sink, crater, piedmont, dimple”—he would choose if he could own one, and ended on an ironic note of complacent pleasure: “Just reeling off their names is ever so comfy.” He first published the poem with no dedication; when he reprinted it a few months after reviewing The Hedgehog and the Fox he dedicated it “For Isaiah Berlin.”

Auden’s sense of his divided motives was inseparable from his idiosyncratic Christianity. He had no literal belief in miracles or deities and thought that all religious statements about God must be false in a literal sense but might be true in metaphoric ones. He felt himself commanded to an absolute obligation—which he knew he could never fulfill—to love his neighbor as himself, and he alluded to that commandment in a late haiku: “He has never seen God/but, once or twice, he believes/he has heard Him.” He took communion every Sunday and valued ancient liturgy, not for its magic or beauty, but because its timeless language and ritual was a “link between the dead and the unborn,” a stay against the complacent egoism that favors whatever is contemporary with ourselves. The book he wrote while returning in 1940 to the Anglican Communion of his childhood was titled The Double Man. It had an epigraph from Montaigne: “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” He felt obliged to reveal to his neighbor what he condemned in himself.


Why Auden Married April 24, 2014

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