Typed Memoir Stella Musulin "The Years in Austria" 1976-09-04--1980-12-01

PID
https://hdl.handle.net/21.11115/0000-000F-7452-2
Author
Musulin, Stella
Editor(s)
Mayer, Sandra
Frühwirth, Timo
Publisher
Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Vienna 2021
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Cite this Source (MLA 9th Edition)
Andorfer Peter, Elsner Daniel, Frühwirth Timo, Grigoriou Dimitra, Mayer Sandra, Mendelson Edward and Neundlinger Helmut. Auden Musulin Papers: A Digital Edition of W. H. Auden's Letters to Stella Musulin. Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2022, amp.acdh.oeaw.ac.at .
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                                   The Years in Austria.

                       Half an hour from the outskirts of Vienna an invisible

                  thread bisectxs the motorway.  It leads from the church which

                  lies to the north, more accurately speaking from the churchyard,

                  disregards entirely the traffic as it thunders to and from the

                  capital, wriggles across a field to the south, passes a small

                  house which was once a garage.  Up a steep path, plum trees

                  on one side and apple trees on the other, through a wicket

                  gate, and now the thread, which has turned neither to right nor

                  left, has reached its objective:  a long, low house, more an

                  extended workman's cottage.  Originally, the address was

                  Hinterhol6z 6;  later, the lane up from the village on the other

                  side was renamed Auden-AStrasse.  This thread or unseen line joins

                  the places where Auden prayed, sang (flat) and was buried, and

                  the place where he lived, and to me it is tangible reality,

                  unfailingly sensed at each frequent crossing.  Partly it is

                  because it was alwasys from that direction that I arrived, being

                  mistrustful of the narrow lane which lies along the top of the

                  garden and leads into a wood where in a small clearing floored

                  at times by sticky mud, the car can be turned.  It seemed

                  preferable, and anyway became a habit, to take the cart track

                   through the field with its ruts, the depth of which left the

                  undercarriage to slide along the plateau of coarse grass.  And

                  to leave the car by the garage and plod up through the orchard,

                  accepting the risk of slithering off the path to the right.

                       On walking through the wicket-gate next to the woodshed,

                  there has been from time to time, and is today, the risk of

                  being savaged by a wall-eyed dog;  in earlier days, of having

                  to account for ones presence to Frau Emma.  Past the vegetable

                  patch, now the ground levels off and the house stands before us.

                  Left, at the foot of the outside staircase and below the window of

                  his workroom, there are the white table and comfortable garden

                  chairs with red cushions.  Facing the caller, the green door with

                  a bell, the sort which jangles when pulled.  I seldom did so,

                  feeling that its clamour spoke of altogether too much aggressive

                  jocularity.  Seeing the light through the sittingroom window, it was

                  better to walk straight in to the small entrance hall - coats hanging
               
                                             2.
               
                  on the wall ahead, kitchen through the right-hand door, a clutter

                  of books and papers on a nearby ledge - and to shout.  That

                  heartwarming bellow from Wystan:  "Ah!" and here is the familiar

                  scene, we are enveloped in the unchanging fug.  The shelves

                  of refcords and the oversized record player on the left, the

                  big, square dining table with its food-stained cloth.  Centre

                  back, the Austrian peasant cupboard containing drinks, sugar,

                  salt, then the corner seat, the table with its cigarette burns

                  and glass rings, and two arm-chairs - a Sitzecke.  To our right

                  a tumble of assorted titles on an invisible surface;  within a

                  matter of days, Auden could make a new book look like a lending

                  library reject:  the content was all, the package irrelevant.

                  Here lie, precariously balanced, collapsing, upended, volumes of

                  poetry, cookery books, Benson's Lucia novels, Akenfield, whodunnits

                  a new translation of the Bible.  Over the years, the content of

                  the heap varied but the overall appearance scarcely at all.

                  And now the stove, country style, a white dome with round green

                  tiles set in it, one of the glories of Austrian Wohnkultur.

                  How fortunate that the stove is irremovable, or it would be in

                  Athens now, along with the cupboard and the original drawings of

                  Stravinsky and Richard Strauss.  Books also lie along the top

                  ledge of the corner seat, and a volume or two of the OED on the

                  upright chairs by the dinner table, adjuncts to the Times

                  crossword.  Was it, I asked, essential to have the complete

                  Oxford English Dictionary, all thirteen volumes of it, at each

                  of ones residences?  "Of courxse" said Auden, surprised at such a

                  question.

                       So much was written during his lifetime about Auden's

                  way of life in Kirchstetten:  articles by capable journalists

                  in the Sunday papers and in their weekly magazines, that any

                  attempt at a personal memoir gives the writer the feeling that

                  he is working all too well-trodden ground.

                       It is not only that the scene is familiar.  What can a friend

                  write withougt lapsing into triviality and gossip, without calling

                  down on his head the wrath of Wystan Auden himself, about whom,
               
                                             3.
               
                  if we know nothing else, we realise the obsession that he had

                  on zthe subject of personal privacy.  Think offor a moment of

                  "Forewords and Afterwords":  again and again he writes on

                  these lines:  Of Wagner:  "On principle, I object to biographies

                  of artists, since I do not believe that knowledge of their

                  private lives tsheds any significant light upon their works."

                  And on Oscar Wilde:  "Since knowoledge of an artist's private lirfe

                  never throws any significant light upon his work, there is no

                  justification for intruding upon his privacy."   Listening to

                  Kurt Weill records one winter's evening in Chester's flat in the

                  Esslarngasse, I asked him whether he could account for it.

                  Disappointingly, Chester only said that it was an obsession with

                  Wystan, ajn individual phobia like any other.   The only time that

                  Auden ever came near to snapping at me was when he spoke once,

                  affectionately, of Tolkien, saying that he was to speak or write

                  about him.  Was he, I asked, going to say anything at all about

                  the man as the creator of the world of Tolkien, of the Lord of the

                  Rings,? and hHe said "Certainly not!  I shouldn't dream of saying

                  anything about Tolkien himself."  So that the predicament is

                  understood :  either we keep silent when asked to speak oand write

                  about Auden, which might seem a trifle portentous, not to say

                  uncivil.  Or welse we run the dual risk of triviliality or indiscretion.

                  In the eyes of thoseothers who knew him bestbetter, there is probably a

                  further risk, that of being coupled with the German mythical

                  figure, the horeseman who rode, as he supposed, over the frozen

                  Lake of Constance, unaware that this was not the case at all, but

                  he was being carried along above dark waters, knowing nothing

                  of the treacherous depths beneath him.  So that my contribution

                  can be mno more than an attempt to show how Auden lived among the

                  Austrians, on what sort of terms he was with them, and perhaps

                  to fill in one or two gaps in what is generally known.

                       I got to know Wystan and Chester through Chris the daughter

                  of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Christiane Zimmer, who was a friend of

                  Auden's in New York.  Gerty von Hofmannsthal, widow of the poet, who died in 1929,

                  owned Sch,loss Prielau at the northern tip of the lake of Zell-

                  am-See in Salzburg province.  She had been forced to sell when the

                  Nazis overran Austria but had regained possession at about the
               
                                         4.
               
                  turn of the fifties, and tehere she spent her summers until she

                  died, filling the house with her friends, often like herself Anglo-Austrian

                  émigrés - the writers, artists and scholars who had lived and

                  worked in Vienna during the twilight of that great explosion of

                  talent which coincided with the decline and end of the Austro-

                  Hungarian Empire.  Raimund and Liz von Hofmannsthal were often

                  there, with their children Arabella and Octavian.  There was

                  a constant coming and going between Prilelau and the rehearsals

                  and then the performances of the Salzburg Festival;  it was a

                  great meeting place for retired birds of paradise such as Lady

                  Diana Cooper, X Ledebur and the dancer and choreographer Grete Wiesenthal.  Gradually, a well-

                  worn track developed between Prielau and our house at the upper

                  end of the Schmittenhöhe valley, and friendships developedgrew between

                  my family1/2/3 and the Hofmannsthals1/2/3/4/5/6/7 and several of their friends

                  which have survived and have been continued by our children.

                  My marriage broke up during 1957-58 and my son Marko and I went

                  to live with my mother-in-law Elsea Musulin at her home Schloss Fridau,

                  in Lower Austria, about half an hour's drive from Kirchstetten.

                  She will rates a mention here because of the entertainment value

                  she was to acquire for Auden.   It was in 1958 that by chance I

                  met Christiane Zimmer at Prielau, and she suggested I should call

                  on Auden:  "After all, he's your neighbour now".  I demurred with

                  some energy, having a great dilslike of pursuing the famous

                  except inthe way of business where an interview ifs called for.

                  The next time I saw her - in 1959 - she asked whether I had seen

                  Auden, I again scoffed at the very idea that he might "love to

                  meet me", and she said "All right.  I'm just off to spend a

                  week there now and I shall fix it up ."

                       So in due course I du came to be standing at the green door,

                  and yet not athe memory of itthat remains excepis the shock of Chester's

                  appearance as he stood in the doorway in the strong sunlight:

                  pale, misshapen, fish-esyed, loose-,omouthed;  it was the

                  unpromising kind of exterior which makes one impatient to discover

                  what lies behind it, the general impression however was one of

                  anxious benevolence, and this proved roughly correct.

                       I think it was only tThe seconed time I was askedinvited over to

                  Kirchstetten was a more convivial occasion:  Wystan had asked

                  me to come over and stand by him because he was giving a little

                  tea-party.  He had invited the parish priest, Father Lustkandl
               
                                        5.
               
                  - crystallized in "Whitsunday in Kirchstetten" - the local school

                  mistress Frau Seitz and her silent husband, and as I came in I ran into

                  Auden who was shuffling out to the kitchen.

                       "Thank goodness you've come" he hissed, "go and look after

                  them, will you, keep the conversation going and hand round the

                  cakes."  Whereupon he shot into the kitchen for more hot water.

                  It was some time before he could abandon the role of the flustered

                  host.  His guests were quite at their ease, and as the years

                  went on they became his friends.  Their composure that day was,

                  I am sure, partly due to their own personal qualities, but

                  partly too to the fact that in Josef Weinheber they had had

                  their local poet laureate before, and now they had one again.

                  This was a cause for great satisfaction, but not for any transports

                  of ecstasy over the celebrity in their midst.

                       What was so "American" about the "kitchen in Lower Austria?"

                  Nothing much, so far as I could see.  When fitted kitchens first

                  came in, Austrians calleddubbed them "American", kitchen.s.  The term is

                  now as extinct as "Russian" tea, but must still have been

                  common parlance in Kirchstetten when Wystan wrote the poem.

                  There was a tidy row oconsisting of a fridge, sink, low cupboards

                  with a good working surface, a corner cupboard the interior of

                  which swung out, and a gas stove.  Both men1/2 were very proud of

                  the kitchen and it became Chester's habitat.  GBut the whole

                  point of a modern kitchen:  the clear surfaces, ample storage

                  space, accessibility, the careful rationalisation, wqas totally

                  cancelled out by the permanent clutter which invaded the kitchenroom

                  at once and never left it.  It was a matter of principle with

                  Chester to have all cooking ingredients conveniently to hand,

                  but this meant that nothing was ever put away, and where his

                  loving eye saw method, even the least fussy visitor could only

                  observe a shambles.  ABut an interesting shambles, however, because

                  of the exotic nature of the preserved foods and spices that

                  Chester brought with him.  From an early date I was convinced

                  that thesy were both eating their way into their graves owing to

                  the enormous fat content of some of the dishes.  I remember the

                  horror with which I watched a sauce being prepared in the mixer

                  before being re-heateed to accompany the roast duck.  First Chester

                  poured in all the rendered down fat from the baking tin, about half

                  a pint of it, then he added an equal quantity of cream, a little

                  seasoning, and switched on the mixer.  The result would have
               
                                             6.
               
                  sustained a miner at the coal face for a full working day, but

                  neither Wystan nor Chester walked a yard if they could help it.
               
                       The small heap of correspondence lying on the filing cabinet

                  beside my desk puts me in mind of the rise and fall of the

                  telegram as a means of social communication.  In English novels

                  during the period up to and even well beyond the first world war -

                  particularly in detective stories - the in[]cessant despatch and

                  receipt of telegrams, often of some length, play a prominent

                  part in human relationships.  They were an sastonishingly rapid

                  and comparatively inexpensive medium of communication and were

                  often emploxyed over short distances.  In Austria, the reign of

                  the telegram persisted into the sixties, lost ground sharply

                  owing to automatisation, but enjoyed one last indian summer in

                  the Ppost Ooffice at Kirfchstetten.  There was no telephone in the

                  house at Holzweg 5 because of the distance from the nearest point

                  of contact;  it would have been too expensive to instal.  Also,

                  Auden liked his peace and quiet and when he wanted to telephone

                  he did so from the post office, combining with his daily shopping

                  expedition.  The lack of a telephone accounts for much of my

                  correspondence with Auden, or rather, because I have only scant

                  records of what I wrote, for his letters to me, and especially

                  for the telegrams.  "We are here, where are you?" or "Wednesday

                  would suit perfectly" and so on, are messages which mark the

                  development of a cosy routine of coming and going between Schloss

                  Fridau, my  mother-in-law's place where I have a flat, and

                  Kirchstetten.  "Mama" was an eccentric of the old-fashioned kind

                  to be met with in many countries.  Auden recognised the type at

                  once and rejoifced:  a rough exterior and an abrupt manner, one

                  who had feared neither Nazis nor Russian occupiers, obstinate,

                  shy, cultured, not troubled by surface blemishes, hospitable,

                  terrifyingly outspoken, fond of good food.  AudenHe liked to be

                  asked out in any case, and Fridau is an easy 25 minutes drive from

                  Kirchstetten, as it were across the fields:  not round by

                  Böheimkirchen and St.Pölten, but across farmland and through

                  villages,  along lanes so winding that only a snake could have

                  planned them.  He too liked his food, all the more so if it
               
                                             7.
               
                  were roast saddle of roebu roe deer with cranberry preserve,

                  roastwild duck or roast pheasant, with a good wine, followed by

                  one of the richer Austrian cakes - Wurmbrand-Torte for ihnstance,

                  which consists mainly of ground burnt almonds and creamed chocolate,-

                  and then to carry ones wine glass back into the sittingroom and

                  wait while the Turkish coffeee ceremony was performed.  This was,

                  dpown all the years that I have known Fridau, and still is, the

                  indkispendsable conclusion to lunches even of the humbler, everyday

                  sort:  turkish coffee with the kaimak hissing faintly as the cup

                  is filled - that pale brown foam which must be removed as the coffee

                  comesrises to the boil and carefully shared out between the empty cups.

                  Failure to do this is the unforgiveable sin.   And Auden would sit,

                  filled with  well nourished, blinking in the sunshine from the

                  window opposite him from where he could see the crown of an immense

                  pear tree.  After his second cup he was likelsy to leap to his feet

                  without any of those preliminary movements of eyes, hands and feet

                  with which people signal their immeinent departure, shake hands

                  all round and hurry away.  But sometimes there  he felt like a turn

                  round the park, or even to stay on for a time, sitting in a deck

                  chair under the trees in the courtyard.   But if he hurried, it was

                  no discourtesy;  Wystan was the most courteous of men, wgho liked

                  to follow the customs of a the country he lived in, and above all

                  he had no special voice for inferiorsemployees..  He got on well with

                  Austrian people who sometimes - without the natural excuse of

                  his food storekeeper in St. Mark's Place - had no idea of the calibre of

                  the man with whom, in his home or theirs, they were having a meal.

                  As I knew him, the only thing he couldn't bear was pretension.

                       So one would have supposed that writers young and older

                  would have lost no time in beating a path out to Kirchstetten.

                  Are writers convivial creatures?  Do they like to congregate

                  together for mutual admiration and to complain about their

                  publishers?  At some times and in some places, yes, at others no;

                  that they have the patience to listen to each other reading their

                  works aloud is true, probably, only under segin circumstances of

                  political persecution.   Be it as it may, I sometimes see Auden's

                  relationship with the literary scene in Austria - such as it is -

                  as a string of wasted opportunities.  He was interviewed, he was
               
                                           8.
               
                  filmed, and the Gesellschaft für Literatur did itxs duty by him

                  and more, from start to finish.  It still does.  But the Austrian

                  Sociaety for Literature is neighther a club nor a coffee house

                  but a society for the promotion of literature with a particular

                  mission to writers in communist eastern Europe.  Somehow, in the

                  sixties, there was otherwise no group of people, no meeting place

                  towards which Auden himself could naturally gravitate.  Think of

                  this in terms of the old pre-war Vienna, the life in the coffee

                  houses where the literary figures of the earlier 20th century

                  congregated, where they spent their days, read their correspondence

                  and the newspapers, read and wrote criticisms, blacked each

                  other's characters:  the Café Central and the Herrenhof.  I can

                  imagine Auden in this atmosphere very well, ejnjoying the

                  opportunity it gave him of rubbing shoulders with writers of all

                  ages, and particularly with the young, as it were by chance,

                  without further commitment on either side and with the minimum

                  of effort.  I can see the cigarette ash on the marble topped

                  tables, the mounds of paper, see Auden slopping to and fro in

                  hsi his eternal bedroom slippers between his table and the

                  telephone kiosk.  But this world ended when Egon Friedell,

                  giving the passers by a shouot of warning as he did so, jumped

                  out of the window to his death on the entry of the Nazis.   It

                  was a world, described again and again by those who knew it,

                  never more effectively than by one of its last active, working

                  survivors, Friedrich Torberg, and it has gone for ever.  Today's

                  writerys have no time.  They are dashing from recording studios

                  besyond Schönbrunn to newspaper offices at the opposite end of

                  Vienna, from the head post office to their homes, where they kiss

                  wife and children, snatch a bag and rush to the airport or to

                  a railway terminal.

                       Alternatively, like Thomas Bernhard, they bury themselves

                  in a farmhouse in a district carefully chosen for its unfashion-

                  ableness and difficulty of access, emerging, like cats, only on

                  their own terms, preferring to turn up unannounced in their

                  friends' houses, perhaps late at night, enquiring for just that

                  ration of warmth, light and unquestioning qacceptance which,

                  at that moment, they happened to need.  Bernhard's fame has now

                  altered the character of the district he lives in and he has

                  withdrawn to still more distant quarters.  Auden always wanted to
               
                                            9.
               
                  meet Bernhard, and asked me to mediate, which I did on several

                  occasions, but to no effect;  I think I did oveercome Bernhard's

                  disinclination but the moment never arrived

                       The cultural historian Friedrich Heer, on the other hand,

                  asked whether he would like to go out to lunch in Kirchstetten,

                  replied that he would go - he has a tendency towards hyperbole - "on my knees".

                  The day is adescribeed in a letter of mine to a friend in Germany

                  dated 29th May ...

                       "I still can't put yesterday's expedition to Kirchstetten

                  ourt of my mind.  Fritz Heer and I drove out to lunch.  This manic-

                  depressive genius Friedrich Heer, dieser verschreckter Lausbub,

                  and the great English poet Auden - to say nothing of Kallman -

                  how would it go off?  It went like a bomb.  Fritz was like a man

                  let out of prison.  For months at a time he never escapes from the

                  treadmill § and he rejoiced so over the soft greens of the Vienna

                  Woods, over the accacia trees whose silver shimmder stood out

                  against the darker background, over the good air, the clear view

                  after the storm of two days ago.  I was a bit worried that the

                  two big talkers1/2 might both speak at once or at cross purposes,

                  but this only happened occasionally:  each really wanted to hear

                  what the other had to say, they exchanged anecdotes and sometimes

                  they moved on to (for Chester and me)on to ground where weChester and I

                  couldn't follow them.  Each picked up the other's illusions

                  instantly, and the stimmung was wonderful.  We were on one of my

                  favourite hobby-horses, the desctruction of the German language

                  by the Nazis.  But Fritz insisted that Mussolini had vulgarised

                  Italian in the same way, and suddenly he drew himself up, threw

                  out his chest, his face became a live mask of Mussolini and he

                  held forth in Italian in a ranting, hectoring, high-pitched tone which - a

                  performance which could have been transferred to any cabaret

                  unaltered.  I never knew he had such a talent for mimicry.  Nor

                  was this all.  The conversation moved to France and the Paris

                  intellectuals, and now RFritz topped up his cabaret with a

                  simpering, lovingly luxuriant interchange between Gide and Claudel.

                  Wystan was convulsed.

                       The talk shifted to Wagner's texts, liturgical reform,

                  Weinheber, Rudolf Kassner and Freud;  of these three Fritz could

                  speak from personal ex knowledge."  (The letter continues with an
               
                  § in th4e Burgtheater, where,such is Austrian logic, he works as a

                  chief dramatugrgist.  
               
                     In the following year there was a reading of the play in

                     the hall used by the Society for Literature in the Palais

                     Palffy.  Auden read a short passage in English and the an

                     actor took over and read in German.  It appears that Auden

                     was not satisfied, as he kept muttering "Nonsense - completely

                     wrong" and making notes in the text.
                  
                                            1O.
               
                  attempt at an analysis of Heer's character and personality which

                  would be out of place here.)

                       Unless Auden had friends to stay, talk of this quality was

                  a rare occurrence.  It was possible to see why Bernhard, to take

                  one example, did not care to go to Kirchstetten:  there was a

                  kind of gène, and a quite unjustified fear that he would have

                  to speak English.  But it is impossible to discern any reason,

                  apart from lack of time, which could have got in the way of

                  personal contact between Auden and his translators.  During his

                  early years in Kirchstetten Auden did feel slighted by some of

                  his translators in Austria and Germany who would publish their

                  work in literary magazines, and if the poet himself ever heard

                  of it, it was by pure chance.  "They don't" he said indignantly,

                  "even send me a copy of their paper".   Nor, in those days, was

                  he satisfied with the quality of the work.  He said to an

                  interviewer in Berlin§, at a time when little of his poetry

                  had been translated into German:  "Translating poetry into a

                  different language is very very problematical - and apart from

                  that, people earn too little by it."  But: "Why can't one send

                  the translation to a living poet before it is published?"  He

                  might not know the exactly suitable word, but he would know what

                  image a word or a phrase was intended to call up in the reader.

                  "For instance, I spoke in a poem about corn - maize - but the

                  translator rendered it as wheat!  I was annoyed, because that

                  sort of thing can be avoided."

                      The fifty minute drive to Kirchstetten presented too great

                  a psychological barrier even to the young, now dead, author and

                  poet Gerhard Fritsch (he committed suicide) who translated Auden's

                  Christmas Oratorio "For the Time Being" into German.  It was

                  published in 1961 under the tiel title "Hier und Jetzt" (here and

                  now).  The translation is no masterpiece, but it was an attempt to

                  demonstrate a style of writing which has always been very English

                  and is characteristic of Auden even within the confines of a

                  stanza:  shifts in tone from the lofty to the colloquial.  In

                  "For the Time Being" Auden's language can be csurrealistic, every-

                  day, ironical, grotesque, mocking, tender, full of grief, rising

                  to moments of lyrical joy.  Rarely even attempted in German

                  literature, in religious writing tone changes of this description

                  are unknown.   Austrian television showed a version of the oratorio

                  on the eve of Epiphany - 5 January 1967 - in which the libretto
               
                  § Article in Die Zeit, Hamburg, 23.4.1965, by Cornelia Jacobsen
               
                                          1Oa.
               
                  was adapted and the music written by the composer Paul Kont.

                  A review by the critic Helmut A. Fiechtner in "Die Furche"

                  gives the impression that it was a performance which, like

                  Victorian children, should be seen but not heard.  Design and

                  costumes were by one of Austrian's leading painters of the

                  postwar era, Anton Lehmden, singers of the calibre of Gloria

                  Davy and Hilde Rössel-Majdan did their best, but the music was

                  unconvincing, it got in the way of the text, and the most

                  impressive passage, not surprisingly, was Helmut Qualtinger's

                  monologue as Herod.   In the following year there was a reading

                  of "Hier und Jetzt" in the Palais Palffy under the auspices of

                  the Society for Literature.  Auden read a short passage in

                  English and an actor took over and read in German.  It appears

                  that Auden was not satisfied, ans he kept muttering "Nonsense -

                  completely wrong!" and making notes in the margin.

                       In later years things changed very much for the better, and

                  although Auden did not actually live to see the volume

                  "Gedichte - Poems" published in English and German in Vienna

                  in 1973, he did check the proofs, and a few of the translators

                  had been to see him.  Today. more of Auden's poetry exists in

                  German than in any other foreign language.

                                      +  +  +

                     Talking of translations:  whatever became of the Ford

                  Foundation translation scheme?  At one time Auden was

                  thinking about a plan in which he had become involved.  This

                  was to bring
               
                  ⁒
               
                                             11
               
                  all the main literary works in the German language under review

                  in so far as they exist in English translation, to judge their

                  quality and to discover the gaps.  The real purpose of the

                  exercise was one with which Auden wholly agreed:  to encourage

                  professional writers of the first category to take part in the

                  re-creation of German literature in English.  To this end the

                  Ford Foundation would make funds available.  Even at that time,

                  for a publisher to have native poetry on his lists showed

                  idealism enough.  A translation fee usually wiped out any

                  conceivable profits on literqary prose texts or poetry.  Nothing,

                  of course, came of the scheme.  Why, it I don't know;  we had

                  a lot of fun making lists on the backs of engvelopes and lamenting

                  the impossibility of sharing playwrights like Raimund, Nestroy

                  and Grillparzer and novelists like Adalbert Stifter with the

                  English-speaking world.  Auden knew quite well, of course, that

                  it is not so much the language barrier, as a fatal lack of

                  universality which has made so many leading Austrian writers - as

                  used to be said of Austrian wine though with less justification -

                  travel so badly.  But it is wortt   In a rforeword to a book I

                  wrote on Austria Auden was to write:

                      "The relation between Art and Societsy is so obscure that only

                  a fool will claim that he understands it.  How, as the author

                  asks in her concluding chapter on Vienna, is one to explain the

                  extraordinary eruption of genius in that city which began during

                  the last decades of the nineteenth century and lasted until the

                  late 1920s, manifesting itself in every field, literature, music,

                  painting, philosophy, medicine?  When it began the empire was

                  already dying on itys feet, and it continued after its total

                  collapse.  Why?  Even more extraordinary in my opinion were the

                  artistic achievements of men like Nestroy and Adalbert Stifter

                  living in Metternich's police state.  More than that, I cannot

                  help wondering if they could have written what they did under a

                  more liberal regime.  Talking of Stifter, (the author) says

                  that he, like the composer Bruckner, 'has not travelled well'.

                  Of Bruckner this may be true, but of Stifter I would say that he

                  has not travelled, period:  until a few years ago nobody hasd

                  attempted to translate him."
               
                                           12
               
                       Perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves of the abortive

                  scheme in these difficult times, because of the underlying

                  principle:  that leaeding writers of the day, who can no doubt

                  earn good money in other ways, should be given some form of

                  enducement to translate from foreign languages at a standard

                  equivalent to the original.  And also, to recall that Auden

                  himself was a major translator of great stature.   On the whole, it is arguable

                  that English literature haxs been better served by its German

                  translators than vice versa. §  Shakespeare apart, Tthe excellence

                  of Rudolf Alexander Schröder's version of Eliot's "Murder in

                  the Cathedral" comes to mind:  a major writer himself, Schröder

                  produced a rendering in which all the cadences, the true Eliot

                  "sound" are there, so that it is almost a matter of indifference

                  whether the play is read in English or German.  And uin a way,

                  Eliot hardly deserved it:  Not longo ago George Steiner referred

                  to English writers' lack of []a sympathy towards the German

                  classics and mentioned Auden as a striking exception.
               
                  § Leaving Shakespeare on one side, as no modern translators have

                  managed to banish the Schlegel-Tieck version from the stage,

                  Eva Hesse made her name as the translator  with Ezra CPound's

                  Cantos, a masterpiece1/2 of the translator's art.    
               
                       Auden immensely enjoyed working on Goethe's "Italian

                  Journey", and was always delighted when he came upon errorxs in

                  the original caused by Goethe's own faulty editing.  Goethe as

                  a man fascinated him - three items in "Forewords and Afterwords"

                  and much else of an earlier date are there to prove it.  So it

                  can't have been later than 1962 when there was a ring at the

                  doorbell of my flat in Vienna.  I openeed the door and there was

                  Auden, panting, as well he might because this was before our

                  lift was put in and he had climbed nintety steps from street

                  level.  His shirt was grubby, his tie askew, his hair was

                  matted, and before he was half through the door and with no

                  further greeting he gasped out:

                      "I have come to the concliusion that Goethe was a very

                  lonely man."
               
                                          13.
               
                       Which I think we may doubt.  But Auden knew loneliness.
               
     Gate-crashing ghost, aggressive
                  
     invisible visitor,
                  
     tactless gooseberry, spoiling
                  
     my téte-à-tête with myself,
                  
     blackmailing brute, behaving
                  
     as if the house were your own...
               
                  The strengtth, the violence of the pictures in this poem can

                  hardly be paralleled in any other on a related subject.

                  Loneliness is a vicious being, which makes the mind a quagmire

                  of disquiet.  A shadow without shape or sex, excluding

                  consolation, blotting out Nature's beauties, it is a grey

                  mist between the self and God.  What helps?  Routine; typing

                  business letters.  But Auden is safe from its haunting only

                  when fast asleep. Yet:  tomorrow
               
     Chester, my chum, will return.
                  
     Then you'll be through:  in no time
                  
     he'll throw you out neck-and-crop,
                  
     We'll merry-make your cadence
                  
     with music, feasting and fun.
               
                       When Auden walked into Neulinggasse 26 and said what

                  he did about Goethe, it would be almost nine years before he

                  would write this poem, but he was already facing whqat may have

                  seemed the disaster of Chester's decision tnot to return to

                  New York.

                       In October 1964 he went to a PEN conference in Budapest,

                  and came back saying that he had heard an unbelievable amount

                  of hot air.  The French delegat4es had got on his nerves with

                  much talk about "mon â`me."  He may have been unjust;  Auden

                  was not a lover of the French language, sayingand said that to maintain

                  it is quite wrong to call it the most precise and logical of languages;

                  in no other can a person deliver himself of so much intellectual

                  jibberish.  But I had the courage to point out to him that 

                  remind him that Paul Tillich had said he had learned to think

                  by having to express himself in English and to teach orientals

                  in that language.  When he read what he had written years before

                  in German he could barely understand it.
               
                                           14.
               
                       By Octob the end of October 1964 Auden was in Berlin,

                  where he would spend the winter as a guest of the Ford

                  Foundation.  As a visiting professor wohe would give lectures

                  and be at the disposal of students who wanted to consult him.

                  On 21st November he was arrested for drunk driving.  It must have

                  been rather a dreary Christmas, and he remarked in a letter

                  rthart he was lonely, as who wouldn't be in the circumstances.

                  Berlin-Dahlem, 23rd December, 1964:

                  It was sweet of you to think of me at Christmas, especially

                  since it's a little einsam¹ here.  Am beginning to know some

                  local inhabitants.  Oddly enough, the ones I can talk to most

                  easily are from Ost-Berlin.  The most awful thing about the

                  Bifkes² (sic)§ is that they are so much nicer under a little

                  Druck³ []pressure).  When they feel their oats they are so apt

                  to become uppish."
               
                  INSERT 14a.
               
                       Characteristic tohough it is, one might not feel justified

                  in quoting from this letter if it were not for the fact that

                  it goes on to throw light on a passage in his long poem to

                  Josef Weinheber.   It came about like this:  I had been reading

                  a paperback cqalled "The Rise of the South African Reich" by Brian

                  Bunting and mentioned it in my letter with particular reference

                  to torture.  And I had complained that certain attitudes found

                  in so-called liberal circles tended to push one further to the

                  right than one wished to go.  After a sharp comment on the

                  American magazine "The National Review" he continues:  "Of

                  course you're right about the lib-labs' ostrich attitude to

                  those who wish to destroy them, but one cannot let ones name be

                  associated with shits.  Torture is the iniquity which utterly

                  bewilders me.  I know something about the evil in my own heart

                  and in the sort of people I meet, but I cannot conceive of

                  myself or them torturning anybody.  Where do the torturers come

                  from?  What class?  Whom do they marry?"  The words "Have you

                  ever met one?" are deleted.  "To what pubs do they go?"

                  Much love and best wishes for 1965, Wystan."

                      By 20th March 1965 he had completed, typed out and sent

                  off to me the long poem to Weinheber, with the verse:
               
Today we smile at weddings
                                
Where bride and bridegroom
               
                  1. lonely .

                  2_Piefke, the rude Austrian generic term for Germans .

                  3_ Pressure.
               
                                            14a.
               
                  Insert after "to become uppish".
               
                  This was the private Auden.  The publisc Auden in the interview

                  with "Die Zeit" quoted earlier, hotly denied that he had been

                  lonely.   Many of his predecessors, said the interviewer, had

                  repeatedly complain[]ed that little notice had been taken of

                  them and that their stay was far from enjoyable.  Auden's

                  reply was "brusque":  Grumbles of that sort were, he thought,

                  unfair and personally objectionable.  "One always has to do

                  something to establish contacts, no one can do that for one."

                  Not even the wealthy Ford Foundation or the Berlin senate.

                  It was very ungrateful to accept a monthly grant of a couple

                  of tohousand marks and then to start criticising, instead of

                  being thankful to be free to work without financial worries -

                  how often was this possible?  He himself, he went on, ewas

                  extraordinarily glad that in Berlin, if that was what a person

                  wanted, he was left in peace;  he was used to this'live and

                  let live' in New York.
               
                                           15.
               
Were both born since the Shadow
                              
Lifted, or rather
                              
Moved elsewhere.  Never as wyet
                              
Has Earth been without
                              
Her bad patch, some unplace with
                              
Jobs for torturders.
                              
(In what bars are they welcome?
                              
What girls marry them?)
               
                       Later on, I told Chester about this infinitesimal and

                  unwitting contribution of mine to English literature.  Chester

                  snapped:  "Wystan never wastes anything."

                       There exists a prose translation of the poem to Weinheber,

                  made by Auden and "a German friend", which he sent to me for

                  checking together with some amendments to stanza three.  As the

                  occasion for which the poem was written was a celebration of

                  the 20th anniversafry of Weinheber's death, the prose translation

                  was for general information.

                       "Herewith my effort" Auden wrote, "dto do my Gemeindepflicht."

                  (his civic duty.)

                       It hardly needs saying that Auden's interest in Weinheber

                  wnent far beyond a mere civic duty.  It was part of his whole

                  relationship with Lower Austria, his feeling for the landscape,

                  for its history, for the history of the people who lived, or

                  had lived there.   For some reason he felt at home there, and

                  the truth of this is to be found in the best known poems of his

                  last decade - perhaps they are among the best he ever wrote.

                  There is the first patrt of The Cave of Making (In Memoriam Louis

                  MacNeice.)  He often emphasizes how unsensational it all is:
               
     "In a house backed by orderly woods,
                  
      Facing a tractored sugar-beet country,
                  
      Your working hosts engaged to their stint,
                  
      SYou are unlikely to encounter
                  
      Dragons or romance:  were drama a craving,
                  
      You would not have come."
               
                                             (For Friends Only - for John and

                                                         Teckla Clark).
               
                  It strikes me suddenly as odd that he should have said that:

                  in the mythology of Austria this areapart of the countryarea is not, I believe, a

                  dragon country.

                       Or in The Common Life (for Chester Kallman):
               
                                            16.
               
I'm glad the builder gave
                            
our common-room small windows
                          
through which no observedr outside can observe us: ...
               
                  Quite untrue.  If they had the light on, anyone approaching the

                  door could and did see them.   In the poem to Weinheber he

                  tells him:  "Here, though, I feel as at home as you did".

                  But the most moving tdeclaration of love is in "Prologue at

                  Sixty (for Friedrich Heer).

                       It satisfied him to live nedxt door to where the poet

                  Josef Weinheber had lived, a man for whom he felt a remarkable

                  empathy and a strange compassion.  It has occurred to me that

                  an element in this sense of identity might have been this:

                  that he himself had once changed his mind.  He, like Weinheber,

                  had made a political error and had entirely turned away from it.

                  Weinheber had allowed himself to be wooed by the Nazis, but

                  later on he rejected it all and finally he committed suicide.

                  This may be fanciful;  it is put forward simply as a suggestion.

                  Auden knew that he would have got on with the man next door.
               
            Categorised enemies
                  
            Ttwenty  years ago,
                  
            now next-door neighbours, we might
                  
            have become good friends,
                  
            sharing a common ambit
                  
            and love of the wWord,
                  
            over a golden Kremser
                  
            had many a long
                  
            language on syntax, commas,
                  
            versification.
               
                       On May 24th 1965,AudenAuden under the auspices of the Austro-British

                  Council and the Society for Literature, Auden gave a talk on T.S. Eliot in the lecture hall of

                  the Museum of Natural History Museum on the Ring.   It was very

                  well attended, largely by crowds of note-taking students of

                  Eng. Lit, and I have never been quite sure whether, at one moment,

                  he was treating us to a bit of traditional stage business.  He

                  told us that there is a game:  if, like the Trinit,y, we were

                  made up of three persons, what would they be?  Eliot, now,

                  contained, first,ly, the American pre-Jafckson aristocrat of a

                  kind which died out in 1829.  He was a dandy, very carefully
               
                                             17
               
                  dressed in black jacket, striped trousers and bowler hat.  And

                  he worked two floors underground.  Then there was the little

                  boy aged twenlve, adoring practical jokes such as cushions which

                  fart when you sit on them, and who liked to shock people by

                  saying "[]Goethe is awful" and so on.  Finally, there was the

                  Yiddish Momma...

                       At this point a cascade of papers fell off the high reading

                  desk.  Auden disappeared altogether from our sight, scuffed

                  about on the floor for a bit and finally emerged, very slowly,

                  to complete his sentence:  "... who wrote the poems".  By now

                  a very few people werde shaking with silent laughter, but the

                  students, with poised biros, blank-faced and puzzled, were

                  waiting for all this to stop.

                       He was understandably proud of having been asked to preach

                  in Westminster Abnbey.  His triumphant comment to me was:

                  "Eliot never did that".
               
                       SApril 1967 brought a literary congress on avantgarde

                  literature to the Palais Palffy on the Josefsplatz in Vienna.

                  Auden came, together with a rich, at moments over-rich collection

                  of  dons, writers and critics from eastern and western Europe.

                  A number of journalists and a few public figures were present

                  bay invitation, but no intervnention from the floor was allowed

                  and seldom desired by the listeners.  It was enough to hear

                  Francis Bondy and Mary McCarthy, to enjoy the striking contrast

                  between Yefrim Etkind of Leningrad (now at the University of Paris),

                  and the square-headed commissar type from Moscow.  And if some

                  of the read contributions were dry, lifeless and badly delivered,

                  we only had to wait for the knockout blow from Marfcel Reich-Ranicki.

                  On the whole it was this leading West German critic with his

                  maddeningly declamatory style and monitary ind  wagging index finger

                  who dominated the platform, but it was Etkind who with his quiet,

                  reasonable argument and his good manners won the affection of

                  everyone in the room.  SA A face-the-public session in the

                  Redoutensaal on the other side of the Josefsplatz ended the

                  congress.  I asked Auden whether there was Qanything I could do for

                  to help such as lending him my flat, and he promptly replied:

                  "Yes, help me to look after Philip and Mary."  We agreed that

                  we would all meet for supper in the Neulinggasse after the public
               
                                          18.
               
                  session.

                       Since I have no pretensions to being a literary hostess,

                  I found the propspect alarming.  It was not that, as a journalist,

                  famous men worried me in the least, but famous women are somehow

                  a different matter and I was inclined to be overawed by Mary

                  MacCarthy.  But Chester was reassuring.  "Don't you worry about

                  Mary, she won't eat you.  In factthse she'll be charming, she'll

                  merely put you in her next book."

                        A hostess should be at home to welcome her guests, or at

                  the very least, she should arrive with them.  I did neither.

                  Having allowed myself to be pushed down to towards the front

                  of the hall, I was trapped and unable to get out, whereas the

                  members of the congress left the platform and were free.  H I

                  at last fought my way out and the search began for Yefrim YekEtkind

                  whom I had invited as an eastern foil for the westerners!  He

                  was run to ground in a back passage, surrounded by fans.  It was

                  only with the help of the Viennsase Ffire Bbrigade who were clearing

                  the buiolding that I was at last able to extract him from the

                  admiring group and take him out to my car.  Knowing that the

                  rest of the party would be standing outside a locked doork, I

                  drove fast.  Etkind settled himself comfortably, stretched out

                  his legs for a better purchase and said affably:  "YOne day you

                  must come to Leningrad, you'd love to drive there - large, wide,

                  empty streets."  Since then I have dreamed, Toad-like, of tearing

                  down the almost deserted Nevsky Prospect, but in the meantime

                  Etkind, about whom Auden worried greatly as time went on, mainly

                  on account of his friendship with Sacharow, has left Russia

                  and is living and working in France.  And so there thesy all were, a

                  not too friendly row of faces gazing over the banisters into the 

                  on the second floor as we puffed our way upstairs:  Auden,

                  Kallman, Mary MacCarthy, the Toynbees1/2, the author and critic

                  Hilde Spiel and a Danish journalist friend.  But over drink and

                  food the party soon cheered up, and Mary sighed:  "What heaven

                  it is to get away from that man Reich-Ranicki!"  There was a

                  chorus of assent.

                       In August 1966 The Bassarids§ had had its première at the

                  Salzburg Festival.  Now, in the following year, Auden was invited
               
                  The Bassarids, Opera Seria with Intermezzo in One Act bassed on

                  The Bacchae of Euripides by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman.

                  Music by Hans Werner Henze.
               
                                             19.
               
                  to deliver the opening address - a highly festive occasion, and

                  his speedch would be widely reported.  By late April he had already

                  made a draft, and he asked me for my comments.   He had, he said,

                  built in a good deal of criticism, but could he get away with it?

                  Was the package sufficiently decorative?  After a quick read

                  through I looked up and caught Auden's enquiring eye.  What on

                  earth could I say?   No amount of packaging could disguise the

                  fact that this was ana full frontal attack on the policy behind the Salzburg

                  Festival and its administration;  it appeared to be wholly negative

                  and (the estimated length of half an hour was probably too long.

                  Towards the end, where he should be riding high in an appeal for

                  devotion to the optimal standards in music and the arts in general

                  and opera in particular, he was grumbling about the functional

                  erratic workings of the curtain in the Festspielhaus and the lack

                  of canteen facilities for the scenseshifters.  It was a horrible

                  anticlimax.  It was not easy to sayHow could one tell him this in such a way as to

                  get results without offending him?  And there was another thing:

                  he should be advised to rehearse.  Auden understood all the nuances

                  of the German language, but his spoken German was not as good as

                  he seemed to think, being and his delivery was apt to become

                  almost incomprehensible.
               
                       The New York postmark usually meant an announcement of

                  domestic disaster and a request for help, and the winter of 1967

                  brought serious disruption to the peaceful running of the house

                  at Kirchstetten.  Auden's poem to Emma Eiermann begins in German:

Liebe Frau Emma, / 
na, was hast du denn gemacht?

                  and it contains just about all there is to say about her, and her

                  relationship with the two men Auden and Kallman.  hHow, the poet

                  asksexclaims,, could she go and die when they were both away - and what

                  about the cats - they had to be destroyed.  But when his letter

                  to me arrived he didn't yet know that:  it contains an urgent

                  plea to hurry over to Kirchstetten and find out what on earth

                  was happening to the animals.  He couldn't bear to think - it was

                  late November - that they were prowling qaround, unfed and shut out

                  of her cottage.  Later on he wseemed to be rather upset that no one

                  came forward to adopt one or two of the cats;  the others were
               
                                                2O.
               
                  strays.

                       In February 1968 he flew over to Vienna to interview a co

                  Frau Strobl after the death of Emma Eiermann.  We were lunching

                  together at the Opern-Café and this was one of the very few

                  occasions when I kept a note of what had been said.   Auden had

                  fr3equently taken a stand against drug-taking, and had made his

                  attitude clear in a number of lectures and interviews.  In

                  October 1967, for instance, he brought up the subject in a lecture

                  at Eliot College, and now I told him I was glad he had been

                  saying to young people in England that LSD is a dead duchk for

                  creative workers.  This led to a long account of the experiments

                  with LSD and Mmescalin that he himself had carried out in the

                  company of his doctor.  He was perfefctly certain that no original

                  line of poetry and no work of art had ever been created under the

                  influence of drugs, and he was convinced that Aldouxs Huxley did

                  a lot of harm by publishing his experiences with mescalin, and

                  making people believe it to be an artistic experience.  The point

                  is, he said, that young people need to discuover who and what they

                  are.  And LSD doesn't tell them, it is a purely passive effect in

                  which there is alienation from self.  You concentrate on things -

                  a chair, the ceiling etc., - and people become unimportant.  There

                  is a curious effect in listening to music:  it is intolerable as

                  the sounds lose their interrelation and form.  Basically, what you

                  achieve is a mild degree of schizophrenia.  After the experiment

                  was over, he and the doctor went round to the local pub.  Suddenly,

                  through a window he wsaw a postman waving at him, and though,t my

                  God, this is it.  Later on, the postman said "I waved at you,

                  why didn't you answer?"  An intercview he gave to the Siunday Telegraph,

                  published on October 29, 1967, under the headline "On drugs and drivel" adds to what he said in the Opern-Café.

                  Much of it is vintage Auden:

                      "Mandrake met W.H. Auden laxst week to a background of, not

                  redbrick, but dazzling, chalkwhite college buildings, with

                  miniskirted freshers looking overwhelminged at having Auden pacing

                  all their fresh-laid corridors in his carpet slipperas and Sloppy Joe

                  T-shirt marked with the Hobbit motif of the Tolkien fan club.

                  'Now, I live a lot of the time in New York.  You can live really

                  quietly there, you know' says Auden, and anyway Britain he finds on

                  every trip getting increasingly Amdericanised 'and vulgar and still

                  more vulgar.  It must be the first time in history that culture has

                  spread from the bottom up .  The Establishment latches on last of all
               
                                              21
               
                  to what the mass does first.  And London is so provincial.  Pafris

                  is provincial.  Berlin is provincial.  But New York - it's dirty

                  and a damned dangerous place to live in sometimes, but at least it

                  isn't provincial.'...   About drug-taking activities in some

                  British universities, Auden says firmly he is an anti.-drug man,

                  'although I have taken them myself by way of experiment.  By

                  saying that, I don't want Mr. AQuintin Hogg down on my neck for

                  corrupting the young or anything ... so what I want to make

                  absolutely clear are the three points which should help put young

                  people right off the idea of taking drugs at all.

                      'First, LSD  is a dangerous thing - it should be taken only

                  under medical supervision, with somebody there, because you may

                  get the willies and end up in a loony bin.  Second, if people

                  think they're going to get any dru fulfilment in Art through

                  taking drugs then they're in for a hell of a disappointment.

                  Because on tape recordings of people under LSD it's been shown

                  they speak absolute drivel.

                       'Thirdly, and lastly, taking drugs as a short cut to God

                  is absolute drivel as well.' "

                       It is true, incidentally, that the progressive "vulgarisation"

                  of London struck him like a bl[]ow in the face every time he went

                  there.  He seldom failed to mention the subjefct when he had

                  coame back to Kirchstetten, and was particularly angry about the

                  advertisements on the London Underground, which he said beat anything

                  to be found anytwhere.
               
                  + + +
               
                       Auden liked to be amused.  As I mentioned earlier, he was

                  interested, as a human phenomenon, in my mother-in-law who

                  until she was forced to abandon it was certainly one of the

                  worst and most dangerous drivers who ever drove the roads of

                  Austria.  She never went very fast but she had no idea where

                  the cqar began and ended nor what by what means it was propelled,

                  and she drove her cqar as though it were a tank, ignoring all

                  that lainy in her path.  I have seen her move off, the engine

                  howling, in a series of leaps;  she had clearly forgotten to

                  release the hand-brake.  Her accidents were frequent, and

                  often bizarre, and for all this her basic attitude to traffic

                  was usually to blame.  This attitude she made clear once and

                  for all when sitting beside the driver - my brother-in-law - on

                  the road to St. Pölten, which was her, and for that matter

                  Auden's, shopping town.  They came to a T crossing.  It is a

                  blind corner, woone is about to turn on to a main arterial road

                  down which the traffic thunders.  The law and common sense

                  require one to stop dead, look both ways, and only then to

                  swing across into a gap in the stream of traffic.  The driver
               
                                         1822
               
                  did precisely this, whereupon my mother-in-law fqavoured

                  him with a withering glance and said, unforgivably:  'COWARD!'

                  This was Auden's favourite story.  She caught him once when

                  he had nipped round to the garage in Fridau to a look at the

                  state of her Volkswagen after one of the usual smashes.  It

                  may have been the time she left the road and charged through

                  one of those telegraph poles with two legs in the shape of

                  an inverted Y, or another time when she failed to take a

                  bend in the road and ended up with one wheel suspended

                  over a vertifcal drop into the River Pielach far below.  At

                  all events there was a long and painful silence - Mama was

                  famous for her silences - which Auden found it difficult to

                  brdeak.  Whenever I saw him again for the first time after

                  his arrival in the spring, sooner or later a look of gleeful

                  expectancy would usher in the question:  "Now:  tell me about

                  ma-in-law's latest car smash."
               
                       The reason why Auden himself failed one day to take a

                  corner in Kirchstetten village and crashed I never had the

                  courage to ask.    It happened on the first day of his

                  arrival oin about April9 in 1968 .  A message reacheed me in Vienna:

                  he had had an caccident, was in St. Pölten hospital and could I

                  come at my convenience?  As my informant thought that Auden

                  was about to be sent home it seemed advisable to telephone

                  the hospital and find out where he would be by the afternoon.

                  The following conversation ensued:

                      "May I ask whether Professor Auden is still in hospital ,

                  presumably in the accident casualty department, or whether he

                  has been sent home?"

                        "Professor who?"

                        "Auden.  A - U - D - E - N, Anna Union Dora Emil Nordpol."

                        "The name is not familiar.  I will check the records."

                  Pause.  "No, we have no one of that name here."

                        "But I am informed that Professor Auden was admitted.

                  By the way he is an American citizen."

                        "Ah" (confidently) "then I can say quite definitely

                  that he has not been admitted here."

                       So I drove out to Kirchstettnen.  And there was Auden,

                  a bundle of misery, sitting at the big table all by himself,
               
                                            19.23
               
                  his right arm and shoulder in plaster.   He was a little

                  offhand about the accident, but his memories of the hospital

                  which he had just left by taxi were unimpaired.  They hadn't

                  exact"ly put out the red carpet.  For a long time, the first and

                  only attention he had received was from a man who wanted to 

                  name and address and all relevant details and, anbove all, "how

                  I proposed to pay for the t5reatment."

                       Soon I was asking what I could do for him and in what order.

                  What was the most urgent thing?

                       "I'm almost out of gin".  Perhaps I would be kind enough

                  to ring up Wild, the grocers on the Neuer Markt in Vienna, and

                  ask them to send some down.   But why, I asked, couldn't I

                  drive to Böheimkirchen right away and fetch some?  They'd have

                  the usual brands.  No, call up Wild.

                       Back in the Neulinggasse I rang up that high quality

                  emporium and gave the order.  "Are you" it seemed sensible to

                  ask, "delivering in that district during the next few days?"

                       "We prac virtually never deliver to the country, Madam,

                  but we always make a special trip for the Herr Professor."

                       "That must make the gin, which is quite  After a shocked

                  silence I said:  "It's no business of mine, but that's a pretty

                  pricey way of buying the same make of gin as he could get at

                  the local grocer's."

                       "Quite right, Madam, "said the cheerful voice.  "But that

                  has been the Herr Professor 'susual practice for some years."

                  Who am I to criticise?"

                       A carefully worded letter to the hospital was indicated.

                  After aAAfter a brief summary of events came a few lines of comment:

                  It was not of significance,, I sqaid heavily, that Professor Auden was a poet

                  and author of international reputation who had been honoured by

                  the Austrian state.  To a hospital, a casualty was a casualty. 

                  A hospital was not a respecter of persons, and a casualty was a

                  casualty.  But to disclaim all knowledge of a patient who was

                  occupying a bed in the hospital would certainly create confusion

                  and distress in any family which might be the victim of such a

                  mishap.   A day or two later I went out to Kirchsttetten again to

                  with the idea of entertaining Wystan with a few horror stories
               
                                      2O4.
               
                  about Austrian politics or anything else that came to mind

                  to hcheer him over the interval until Chester arrived.from

                  Athens.  He had been back to the hospital for a check-up on

                  the sit of the plaster, and he r as I walked in he grinned

                  from ear to ear:  "What did you say to them?  I was treated

                  like royalty."   For the record, the hospital did in fact

                  write a handsome apology in reply to my letter.
               
                       Auden would often lend his car to someone or other during

                  the winter, and one day when he and Chester turned up to lunch

                  at Fridau I was shown, with some amusement, a bullet hole in

                  the car - just cbene below the windscreen, in line with the

                  driver's seat.  Having had a little experience of some of

                  Chester's friends in Vienna I wasn't altogether surprised,  In

                     the end, that car became a total wreck, and the circumstances

                     are the subject of various letters before and after C

                  but it later transpired that I was wrong.  Naturally, no one had

                  told me of the existence of Auden's callboy Hugie, and it was

                  he who, having been lent the car, was involved in events which

                  led to his arrest and imprisonment.  In the end, the car became a

                  total wreck, and the circumstances are the subject of various

                  increasingly frantic letters from Auden before and after

                  Christmas 1968.  In December, Chester's Greek friend Jean Boras

                  who often stayed with the two men1/2 in Kirchstetten, was in Vienna

                  and using the car.  One day, on the road between Vienna and

                  Kirchstetten he collided with a lorry head on and was killed

                  instantly.   As I was away at the time and omynly got back to the

                  Neulinggasse shor5tly before Christmas, to find a letter from Auden

                  telling me what had happened.  Chester had been so prostrated with

                  griedf that he, Auden, had hardly been able to understand him on

                  the telephone line line from Athens, but he believed that he must be in

                  Vienna.  Would I look for him and see what I could do?   The

                  thought of Chester's framestate of mind, alone in Vienna at Chr over

                  Christmas, was blood-chilling, and my imagination ran away with me.

                  A protracted search produced no signs that he had been in Austria

                  at all, and it finally turned out that he had never left Athens.

                  Letters flew to and fro on the subjects of:  release of corpse,

                  release of wrecked car and/or papers, with Auden becoming

                  increasigngly impatient ("I am in despair") over the inaction both

                  of officialdom and of his lawyers.  He was learning the hard way
               
                                             25.
               
                  that to attempt to carry out any form of business in Vienna

                  during the twelve days of Christmas   between the last days

                  before Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th

                  is a sheer wayste of time;  during the Twelve Days of Christmas

                  not even a partridge in a peartree movewss.

                      When Auden and Kallman got back to Austria in the April

                  Chester was still profoundly shaken up and I remember Auden's

                  anxiety, saying to me "I don't know how he's going to get

                  through the summer."  And it strufck me:  what a contrast between

                  these two writers1/2:  the lesser poet but much younger man,

                  cooking too much rich food for the entirely sedentary life

                  that they both led, but otherwise with little purpose left.in

                  And the far greater and much older poet, with his regular

                  hours of work and his considerable poutput.  The days of their

                  very fruitful collaboration on opera libretti were already

                  over;  what remained was the Times crossword.

                       It was so easy, I think, to make fun of the slightly

                  old-maidish wqays of the house.  In all those amusing and

                  sessentially true newspaper articles in newspapers and glossy

                  magazines the tendencsy is to leagvve out this all-important fact:

                  Auden was a very hard-working, systematic, self-disciplined

                  writers, who knew, none better, how nice it is to sit sipping

                  a cool drink in the shade of a tree, whiling away the hourws,

                  looking with contentment upon his flowers and his asparagus beds.

                  This he ddie did, but having worked steadily through from 9 o'clock

                  until lunchtime.  And much of the bosky contentnment, the cool

                  drinks and so on, were sijmply owing to the presence of guests,

                  including the journalist with his sharp eye.  So that these

                  sometimes rather rib-nudging descriptions of this unconventional

                  household leave it altogether to us to remember that in the

                  last dozen years of his life, Auden was writing several volumes

                  of poetry, opera libretti, translating the Elder Ededa, the

                  "Italian Journey ", Dag Hammarskjöld's "Markings" and other

                  works1/2/3/4/5/6, editing "The Dyer's Hand", the "Faber Book of Aphorisms",

                  his Commonplace Book, "Forewords and Afterwords", and that

                  heavenly compilation the "Nineteenth Century Book of Minor Poets".

                  He was reading over an enormous field, writing and delivering

                  lexctures, writing articles and book reviews - sometimes they

                  were demanding publications such as Emily Anderson's 3 volume
               
                                            26
               
                  "Letters of Beethoven" - swhich he gave me, the blank pages are

                  filled with his notes - and even a new 12 volume annotated

                  translation of the Bible.  In any case, the sacred beast in his

                  lair was probably much wittier than most strangers who came

                  to view the set-up.
               
                       On 19th May 1970 I was mildly horrified (I write in German

                  but do not translate into it) to get a telgegram asking "If I

                  sent half hour speech in a few days could you translate soon

                  into German - Love Wystan."  On the principle:  say yes now,

                  worry afterwards, I agreed.  He was to deliver the speech a couple

                  of weeks later in athe small country rtown of Neulengbach in the

                  presence of the governor of Lower Austria.  After making a draft,

                  I sent both texts to my husband so that he could polish up my

                  version.  This It had not been easy.
               
                      "Sehr verehrter Herr Landeshauptmann,meine Damen und Herren:

                       I hope you will pardon me if I speak somewhat personally.

                  I do so, not out of vanity, but because I do not wish to give the

                  impression that I am attempting to lay down absolute laws which

                  are valid for all.  I give you m[]y experiences,as a poet, in the hope

                  that you will be able to compare them with yours, and form your

                  own judgment about them.

                       Most of what I know about the writing of poetry, or at least

                  about the kind I am interested in writing, I discovered long

                  before I took any interest in poetry itself.

                       Between the ages of six and twelve, PI spent a great many

                  of my waking hours in the fabrication of a private secondary

                  sacred world, the basic elements of which were ( a) a limestone

                  landscape mainly dderived from the Pennine Moors in the North of

                  England and b) an industrsy - lead-mining.

                       It is no doubt psychologically significant that my sacred

                  world was autistic - that is to say, I had no wish to share it

                  with others nor could I have done so.  However, though constructed

                  for and inhabited by myself alone, I needed the help of others,

                  my parents1/2 in particular, in collecting its basic materials;

                  others had to procure for me the necessary text-books on geology

                  qand machinery, maps, catealogues, guide-books and pohotographs,

                  ancd, when occasion offered, to take me down real mines, tasks
               
                                             27
               
                  which they performed with unfailing patience and generosity.

                       From this activity, I learned certain principles which I was

                  later to find applied to all artistic fabrication.  First, whatever

                  other elements it may include, the initial impulse to create a

                  secondary world is a feeling of awe aroused by encounters, in the

                  Primary World, with sacred beings or events.  This feeling of awe

                  is an imperative, that is to say, one is not free to choose the

                  object or the event that arouses it.  Though every work of art

                  is a secondary world, it cannot be constructed ex nihilo, but is

                  a selection from and a recombination of the contents of the

                  Primary World.  Even the 'öpurest' poem, in the French Symboliste

                  sense, is made of words which are not ethe poet's private property,

                  but the communal creation of the linguistic group to whom he

                  belongs, so that their meaning can be looked up in a dictionary.

                       Secondly, in constructing my private world, I discovered

                  that, though this was a game, or rather precisely because it was a

                  game - that is to say, not a necessity like eating or sleeping,

                  but something I was free to do or not as a chose - it could not

                  be played without rules.  Absolute freedom is meaningless:

                  freedom can only be realised in a choice between alternatives.

                  A secondary world, be it a poem, or a game of football or bridge,

                  must be as much a world of law as the Primary, the only difference

                  being that in the world of games one is free to decide what its

                  laws shall be.  But to all games as to real life, Goethe's lines

                  apply.
               
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
                           
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
               
                       As regards my particular lead-mining world, I decided, or

                  rather, without conscious decision I instinctively felt, that I

                  must impose two restrictions upon my freedom of fantasy.  In

                  choosing what objects were to be included, I was free to select

                  this and reject that, on condition that both were real objects

                  in the Primary World, to choose, for example, between two kinds of

                  water-turbuine, which could be found in a text-book on mining

                  machinery or a manufacturer's catalogue:  but I was not free to

                  invent one.  In deciding how my world was to function, I could

                  choose between two practical possibilities  - a mine can be drained
               
                                            28.
               
                  w either bay an adit or a pump - but physical impossibilities and

                  magic means were forbidden.  When I say forbidden, I mean that I

                  felt, in some obscure way, that they were morally forbidden.

                  Then there came a day when the moral issue became quite conscious.

                  As I was planning my Platonic iIdea of a concentrating-mill, I

                  ran into difficulties.  I had to choose between two types of a

                  certain machuine for separating the slimes, called a buddle.

                  One type I found more sacred or 'beautiful', but the other type

                  was, I knew from my reading, the more efficient.  At this point

                  I realised that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my aesthetic

                  preference to reality or truth.

                       When, later, I began to write poetry, I found that, for me

                  at least, the same obligation was binding.  That is to say, I

                  cannot accept the doctrine that, in poetry, there is a 'suspension

                  of belief'.  A poet must never make a statement simply because

                  it sounds poetically exciting:  he must also believe it to be true.

                  This does not mean, of course, that one can only appreciate a

                  poet whose beliefs happen to co-incide with one's own.  It does

                  mean, however, that one must be convinced that the poet really

                  believes what he says, however odd the belief may seem to oneself.

                      Between constructing a private fantasy world for oneself alone

                  and writing poetry, there is, of course, a profound difference.

                  A fantasy world exists only in the head of its creator:  a poem

                  is a public verbal object intended to be read and enjoyed by others.

                  To become conscious of others is to become conscious of historical

                  time.in various ways.  The contents of a poem are necessarily

                  past experiences, and the goal of a poem is necessarily in the

                  future, since it cannot be read until it has been wirt written.

                  Again, to write a poem is to engage in an activity which human

                  beings have practised for centuries.  If one asks why human beings

                  make poems or paint pictures or compose music, I can see two

                  possible answers.  Firstly all the artistic media are forms of

                  an activity peculiar to human beings, namely, Personal Speech.

                  Many animals have impersonal codes of communications, visual,

                  olfactory, auditory signals, nby which they convesy to other members
               
                                           29.
               
                  of their species vital information about food, territory, sex,

                  the presence of enemies etc., and in social animals like the bee,

                  such a code may be exceedingly complex.  We, too, of course, often

                  use words in the same way, as when I ask a stranger the way to the

                  railroad station.  But when we truly speak, we do something quite

                  different.  We speak as person to person in order to disclose

                  ourselves to others and share our experiences with them, not

                  because we must, but because we enjoy doing so.   This activity

                  is sometimes quite erroneously called 'self-expression'.  If I

                  write a poem about edxperiences I have had, I do so because I think

                  it should be of interest and value to others:  the fact that it has

                  till now only been my experience is accidental.  What the poet or

                  any artist has to convey is a perception of a reality common to

                  all, but seen from a unique perspective, which it is his duty as

                  well as his pleasure to share with others.  To small truths as

                  well as great, St.  Augustine's words apply.
               
                           The truth is neither mine nor his nor another!s; but belongs

                              to us all whom Thou callest to partake of it: warning us

                              terribly, not to account it private to ourselves, lest

                              we be deprived or it.
               
                      Then the second impulse to artistic fabrication is the desire to

                  transcend our mortality, by making objects which, unlike ourselves,

                  are not subject to natural death, but can remain permanently

                  'on hand' in the world, long after we and our society have perished.

                       Every genuine work of art, I believe, exhibits two qualities,

                  Nowness and Permanence.  By Nowness I emean the quality which enables

                  an art-historian to date a work, at least, approximately.  If,

                  for example, one listens to a composition by Palestrina and one by

                  Mozart, one knows immediately that, quitde aside from their artistic

                  merits, Palestrina must have liveed earlier than Mozart:  he could

                  not possibly have written as he did after Mozart.  By Permanence,

                  I mean thath the work continues to have relevance, and importance

                  long after its creator is dead.  In the history of Art, unlike the

                  history of Science, no genuine work of art is made obsolete by a

                  later work.  Past science is of interest only to the historian of

                  science, not to what scientists are doing at this moment.  Past
               
                                          3O.-
               
                  works of art, on the other hand, are of the utmost importance

                  to the contemporary practitioner.  Every artist tries to produce

                  something now, but in the hope that, in time, it will take its

                  proper place in the tradition of his art.  And he cannot prouduce

                  anything significantly original unless he knows well what has be

                  already been done;  that is to say, he cannot 'rebel' against the

                  past without having a profound reverence for it.

                      There are periods in history when the arts develop uninterr-

                  uptedly, each generation building on the achievements of the

                  previous generation.  There are other periods when radical breaks

                  seem to be nefcessary.  However, when they are, one will generally

                  find that the 'radical' artist does not disown the past, but finds

                  in works of a much earlier period or in those of a culrture (other)

                  than his own, the clue as to what he should do now.  In my own

                  case, for example, I know how much I owe to Anglo-Saxon and

                  Medieval Poetry.

                       When I review the contemporary artistic scene, it strikes me

                  how extraordinarily fortunate men like Stravinsky, Picasso, Eliot,

                  etc., that is, those persons we think of as the founders of

                  'modern' art, were in being born when they were, so that they came

                  to manhoofd before 1914.  Until the First World War, western

                  society was still pretty much what it had been in the nineteenth

                  century.  This meant that for these artists, the felt need to

                  create something new arose from an artistic imperative, not a

                  historic imperative.  No one asked himself:  "What is the proper

                  kind of music to compose or picture to paint or poem to wirrite

                  in the year 1912?"   Secondly, their contemporary audiences

                  were mostly conservative, but honestly so.  Those, for instance,

                  who were scandalised by Le Sacre du Printemps, may seem to us now

                  to have been old fogies, but their reaction was genuine.  They did

                  not say to themselves:  "Times have changed and we must change

                  with them in order not to be left behind."

                      Here are a few statements by Stravinsky to which the young,

                  whether artists or critics would do well to listen and ponder over.
               
                      In my youth the new music gerew out of, and in reqaction to,

                         traditions, whereas it appears to be evolving to-day as much

                            from social needs as interior artistic ones...  The status

                            of new music as a category is another incomparable.  It had
               
                                           31
               
                       none at all in my early years, being in fact categorically

                          opposed, and often with real hostility,  But the unsuccess

                          of composers of my generation at least kept them from trading

                          on success, and our unsuccess may have been less insidious 

                          than the automatic superlatives which nowadays kill the new

                          by absorbing it to death.

                                             ++++++++

                       The use of the new hardware naturally appears to the new

                          musician as "historicallv imberative ";  but music is made 

                          out of musical imperatives, and the awareness of historical

                          processes is probably best left to future and different

                             kinds of wage-earners.

                                             +++++++++
               
                       In times, like our own, of rapid social change and political

                  crisis, there is always a danger of confusing the principles

                  governing political action and those governing artistic fabrication.

                  The most important of such confusions are three.

                      Firstly, one may come to think of artistic fabrication as a

                  form of political action.  Every citizen, poets included, has a

                  duty to be politically 'engagé', that is, to play a responsible

                  part isn seeing that the society of which he is a member shall

                  funaction properly and improve.  But the poet, qua poet, has only

                  one political function.  Since language is his medium, it is his

                  duty, by hiws own example, to defend his mother-tongue against

                  corruption by demagogues, journalists, the mass-media etc.  As

                  Karl Kraus said:  "[]EDDie Sprache ist die Mutter, nicht das Magd,

                  des Gedankens.", and when language loses its meaning, social 

                  its place is taken by violence.  Of course, the poet may use

                  political and social events as subject-matter for poems - they

                  are as much a part of human experience as love or nature - buzt

                  he must never imagine that his poems have the power to affect

                  the course of history.  The polictical and social history of

                  Europe would be wzhat it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe,

                  Michael Angelo, Titian, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. had never edxisted.

                       Where political and social evils are concerned, only two

                  things are effective:  political action and straightforward,

                  truthful, detailed journalistic rapportage of the facts.  The Arts

                  are powerless.

                      The second confusion, of which Plato is the most famous exampole,

                  is to take artistic fabrication as the model fror a good society.
               
                                            32
               
                  Such a model, if put into practice, is bound to produce a tyranny.

                  The aim of the artist is to produce an object which is complete

                  and will endure without change.  In the 'city' of a poem, there

                  are always the same inhabitants doing exactly the same jobs for

                  ever.  A societsy which was really like a good poem, embodying the

                  aesthetic virtues of order, economy and subordination of the

                  detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror for, given the

                  historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come

                  into being through selective breeding, extermination of the

                  physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director,

                  a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars and the strictest

                  censureship (sic) of the Arts, forbidding anything to be said

                  which is out of keeping with the official 'line'.

                      The third confusion, typical of our western 'free' sofcieties

                  at this time, is the opposite of Plato's, namely to take political

                  action as the model for artistic fabrication.  Political action

                  is a necessity, that is to say, at (e)very moment something has

                  to be done, and it is momentary - action at this moment is

                  immediately followed by another action at the next.  Artistic

                  fabrication, on the other hand, is voluntary - the alternative

                  to one work of art can be no work of art - and the artistic

                  object is permanent, that is to say, immune to historical change.

                  The attempt to model artistic fabrication on political action can

                  therefore, only rdeduce it to momentafry and arbitrary 'happenings',

                  a conformism with the tyranny of the immediate moment which is

                  far more enslaving and destructive of integrity than any conformism

                  with past tradition.

                      At this point, a little digression on the subject of 'free'

                  verse, which seems now to be almost universal among young poets.

                  Though excellent examples, the poems of D.H-. Lawrence, for example,

                  exist, they are, in my opinion, the exception, not the rule.

                  The great virtue of formal metrical rules is that they forbid

                  automatic responses and, by forcing the poet to have second

                  thoughts, free him from the fetters of self.  All too often, the

                  result of not having a fixed form to be true to, is a self-

                  indulgence which in the detached reader can only cause boredom.

                  Further, in my experience, contrary to what one might expect, the

                  free-verse poets sound much morde like each other than those who

                  write in fixed forms.  Whatever freedom may do, it does not, it

                  would seem, am make for originality.
               
                                            31. a
               
                       What, then, can the Arts do for us?  In my opinion, they can

                  do two things.  They can, as Dr. Johnson said, 'enable us a little

                  better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it."'  And,

                  because they are objects lpermanently on hand in the world, they

                  are the chief means by which the living are able to break bread

                  with the dead, and, without a communication with the dead, I do

                  not believe that a fully human civilised life is possible.

                       Perhaps, too, in our age, the mere making of a work of art

                  is itself a political act.  So long as artists exist, making

                  what they please or think they ought to make, even if their works

                  are not terribly good, they remind the Management of something

                  managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are

                  people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Laborans

                  is also Homo Ludens.

                       And now, I hope those of you who know no English will

                  forgive me if I conclude these remarks with a light poem of my

                  own, entitled Doggerel by a Senior Citizen."
               
                       To what extent parts of this lecture had been said or written

                  before is immaterial, it is still surprising that heAuden chose to

                  repeat it in Neulengbach.  If here and there, he
               
Adopted what I would disown
                             
The preacher's loose immodest tone
               
                  in the main, such a closely argued statement must surely have

                  floated past the ear of most of his listeners.  This would not,

                  I think, have been because of an innate lack of intelligence

                  on their part but because the Austrian and the German academic

                  mind tends towards compartmentalised thought more than is the

                  case among well educated Americans, BBritish and French people who

                  may have acquired the ability to survey one discipline in terms

                  of another.  This exceedingly demanding speech tells one something

                  else about Auden:  he never talked down to people.  They would

                  absorb as much as they were able to, as much as they were ready

                  for;  and someone would have understood a great deal.  Auden's

                  attitude towards language as a means towards "artistic fabrication"

                  is I think in the exact sense of the word sacramaental. Holding

                  the insights that he died into the nature of the poet's struggle

                  with the primary world, it is hardly surprising that he should

                  have held strong views on modern translations of the Bible - a

                  subject he often came back to in conversation - and revised
               
                                               32.a
               
                  liturgies.  The new banality offended his acute sense of the

                  power contained in words and phrases which have brought mankind

                  into mystical contact with the primary world:  Darkness, Silence,

                  Nothing, Death, and all those things which are held sacred by any

                  particular cultural group.  It is consistent that Auden was

                  suspicious of Eng.Lit. textual analysis;  that he felt the importance

                  that - gross midsunderstanding apart - the reader should receive

                  something from a poem;  it is consistent that he should have laughed

                  when he told me that some earnest person wanted to know just what he

                  had meant by a word written thirty years ago.  "Ridiculous!  How

                  should I know?"

                       It always seemed that as the years passed Auden became more

                  and more GEnglish;  this natural process of reverting to type annoyed

                  Chester who would expostulate at signs of it.  He liked to listen

                  to the cool, rounded tones of the British county gentry, he intensely

                  admired "Akenfield", he loved the Lucia novels by E.F. Benson, he

                  happily read and reviewed "The History of the British Nannie" and

                  he was addicted to English detective novels - his collection is now

                  at Fridau.  I dropped in one early afternoon on my way to Vienna,

                  just to leave something for him, II forgeot what.  Auden came pounding

                  down the rickety outside staircase, greeted me with his usual warmth,

                  urged me to come in, to stay ... No no, I said, we're both busy,

                  I must get on.  "Oh!" he exclaimed, and it was as though he were

                  begging me not to infringe the most basic rule of British hospitality:

                  "But you can't go without having a cup of tea!"

                       That study of his is so bare now:  it is t"The Cave of Making"

                  which he wished he could have dshown to Louis MacNeice, and the house

                  and garden.
               
                                      ... Devoid of
                  
       flowers and family photographs, all is subordinate
                  
          here to a function, degsigned to
                  
       discourage daydreams - hence windows averted from plausible
                  
          videnda but admitting a light one
                  
       could mend a watch by - and to sharpen hearing:  reached
                  
                                                       by an
               
          outside staircase, domestic
                  
       noises and odours, the vast background of natural
                  
          life are shut off.  Here silence
                  
       is turned into objects.
               
                       To write to Auden unnecessarily would have been to encroach on

                  his time.  But Chester spent the whole of one winter in Vienna and

                  I could hardly resist describing a party in Chester's flat.
               
                                            33.
               
                  Afterwards, I had given a lift home to a carload of people

                  including one whose pockets, had II but known it, were stuffed

                  with Chester's money - lifted from a jacket huanging on the

                  bedroom door.  The party itself had been all but wrecked by a

                  loudly argumentative individual who succeeded in clearing the

                  sittingroom altogether as the gueests gradually slunk off to the

                  kitchen, refugees from his abrasive but tedious presenfce.

                  Auden's reply was:

                      "So!  You encountered the one-whose-name-we-never-mention.

                  Why Chester should have been so foolish as to invite him to a

                  party I cannot imagine.  If he is to be seen at all he is to

                  be seen alone."

                       My next sighting of this cloven-hooved adjunct to the

                  Viennese literary scene was at Auden's funeral, where I watched

                  him work his way up the procession to the church until he found

                  the place he sought:  immediately behind the coffin among the

                  chief mourners.  Wondering at this, and remembering Wystan's

                  sinister euphemism, II subsequently asked Chester whether Auden

                  had ever liked the man.  "LIKED him?" shrieked Chester.  "Why,

                  he crossed himself whenever his name was mentioned."

                       In that same letter to Neew Work I mentioned that a friend

                  of his had quoted him as using the term - as a definition of

                  humour - "Serious insistence on unseriousness."  His response

                  was as follows:  "X has a genius for subtle misrepresentation.

                  'Serious insistence on unseriousness' telescopes two distinct

                  dconvictions of mine, falsifying both.

                  One.  I believe it to be a serious moral error when an artist

                  overestimates the importance of art and, by implication, of

                  himself.  One must admit that the political history of Europe,

                  with the same horrors, would be what it has been, if Dante,

                  Shakespeare, Goethe, Titian, Mozart, et al, had never existed."

                  Two.  I believe that the only way in which, to-day at any rate,

                  one can speak seriously about serious matters (the alternative

                  is silence) is comically....  I have enormously admired - and by

                  been influenced by - the tradition of Jewish humor.  More than

                  any other people, surely, they have seen in serious matters,

                  that is to say, human suffering, the contradictions of human

                  existence, and the relation between man and God, occasions for

                  humorous expression.  e.g. 'IIf the rich could hire other people

                  to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living', or,
               
                                             34.
               
                  'Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me', or 'God

                  will provide - ah, if only he would till He does so.'"  After a

                  brief domestic chronicle he adds that a friend of his who teaches

                  schyzophrenics had a seventeen year old girl who was interested

                  in poetry.  Asked what poets she liked, she mentioned Auden.

                  ''I happen to know him quite well'said the friend.  To wh8ich the

                  girl in astonishment:  'You mean to say, he's still alive?'

                  (Auden was about 58 at the time).

                       That deeply scored face which struck awe into so many people

                  who saw him, that battlefield so mercilessly displayed above dozens

                  upon dozens of newspaper articles:  when I look at my own photographs

                  of him I am appalled at the speed of the development.  It was a

                  head straight out of the icelandic sagas, or a prehistoric head

                  from the bogs of Jutland.  Auden should have been carcved, much

                  larger than life, by Henry Moore and placed in effigy on a high hill.

                       Abruptly, the way most statements emerged from Auden, he said

                  one day at lunch:  "Kokoschka wants to paint me."  It appears that

                  Oskar Kokoschka had written and asked him to come to Switzerland.

                  But Auden felt it was too much of an effort, and evidently the much

                  older man felt the same way, so that nothing came of it.  It is a

                  great pity, because for one thing they would have enjoyed each

                  other's company, and the sight of these physically so oddly similar

                  men sitting together must have fired some onlooker if only to the

                  extent of taking a historic snapshot.  Nor does Auden's closing

                  remark on the subject provide much compensation for the lack of the

                  portrait, though the thought satisfied him.  "After all", he said,

                  as he reached for his wine glass and narrowed his eyes to slits

                  against the subnlight seeping in from the garden, "After all, I AM

                  a Kokoschka painting."

                      But the causes:  the question needs to be answered.  Why was

                  Auden, in his sixties and indeed much earlier, a prematurely aged

                  man?  "Ein alter Mann", one or two German obituarists were to write,

                  but without surprise, or:  "the aged poet" - when he was 68!

                      Surely not.  There is one edxplanation which I place on record

                  only after much hesitation.  Some time after Auden's death Chester

                  Kallman gave me his edxplanation for the evidence that Wystan had

                  become older than his years warranted:  he put the phenomenon down

                  to Benzedrine.  "For how long?"  Oh, said Chester, he began right

                  back in his early years in the States.  And he had carried on right

                  through, only dropping the habit when he came to spend his summers
               
                                              35.
               
                  in Austria.  Most people now have forgotten about Benzedrene;

                  other things  have taken its place.  Chester reminded me that it

                  was the stimulant with the help of which airmen in wartime,

                  examinees, doctors and so on, could keep themselves going in a

                  state of complete wakefulness, to carry them through a period

                  of temporary stress.  Taken for a restricted purpose, perhaps by

                  a surgeon faced with operations round the clock after a major

                  disaster, it was a blessing.  Physical reserves would be replaced

                  later when the emergency was over.  But to take Benzedreine over a

                  long period meant - I am quoting Kallman and subject to correction -

                  using up ones body at an accelerated rate with the obvious

                  consequence that it would become prematurely aged.

                      It would be difficult to think of any reason why Chester should

                  say rthis if it were not substantially true.   As to why Auden

                  should have felt he needed such a powerful stimulant, over and

                  above those which modern man indulges in as a matter of course -

                  coffee, tea, alcohol and cigaretetes - his friends of those days

                  years can answer.   Perhaps an extract from Edmund Wilson's

                  "W.H. Auden in America" is helpful:  it is one of a collection of

                  critical essays edited by Monroe Spears and published in 1964:

                  the operative phrase lies buried in the quotation.
               
                       "Since becoming an American citizen, the poet has not

                      ceased to explore, to roam - he has covered more ground in

                      this country than most Americans do, and he now spends every

                      summer in Italy. This spring he returns to England to be

                      lecturer on poetry at Oxford.  It is a part of his role to go

                      everywhere, to be accessible to all sorts of people, serve

                      intrerestedly and conscientiously in innumerable varied

                      capacities:  on the staff of a Middle Western college;  at a

                      cultural congress in India;  on a grand jury in New York City,

                      deciding the fate of gangsters;  on a committee of the

                      American Academy, making handouts to needy writers.  He has

                      above all withstood the ordeal of LYAmerica through a habitation

                      of seventeen years;  he has even 'succeeded' here." And he

                      has made all these exploits contribute to the work of a great

                      English poet who is also - in the not mondain sense - one

                      of the great English men of the world."
               
                                           36.
               
                  + + +
               
                       During the uprising in Czechoslovakia in the early autumn

                  of 1968 Vienna was filled with people who had come across the

                  border bent on emigration, or simply to snuff the air outside

                  their own country and explore the possibilities.  Many people

                  had strangers in their houses and Auden wanted to do his bit.

                  As he was just leaving Kirchstetten he left it to me to choose

                  a suitable family, and having done so I wrote to him c/o Heyworth,

                  32 Bryanston Square, London W.1.  A reply is dated 15 October 1968:
               
                       "Got back from []Oxford yesterday and found your letter waiting.

                       1) I think I ought to take the couple1/2 in, but I must leave

                       it to you to decide whether they are O.K. If they are, all

                       rooms, including my study (which can't be heated) are open

                       to them.

                       2) How much money will they need to keep going?  And how

                       shall I make the arrangements for payment.

                       3) Will they be able to find work or emigrate before I

                       return in April, when I'Mm afraid there will not be room

                       for them?

                       4) I'm worried about how they will get gas cylinders for

                       cooking from Neulengbach, since, presumably, they have no car.

                       I expect someone in the village will help.

                       5) If and when they come, I must know in advance so that

                       I can write a note to the Burgomeister..."
               
                       The couple1/2 found somewhere else to live in a less remote

                  place, the emergency was soon over and Auden didn't not disguise

                  his relief:
               
                                                     "77 St. Mark's Place, N.Y.C.

                                                                Nov.6th.

                       Many thanks for your letter.  Of course, selfishly, I'm

                       rather relieved.  How horrid one is!

                       The U.S. is grim."
               
                       Auden was an extraordinarily generous person.  An evening

                  at the Opern-Café comes to mind.  Wystan and Chester had been to

                  a performance over the road and had asked me to join them avfterwards

                  It was hoped that Balanchine would join us1/2/3, but to my disappointment

                  he never turned up.  Conversation was lively, and the more so, the
               
                                             37.
               
                  greater the contrast with the enforfced silence of a young

                  Austrian whose identity was never fully revealed, though

                  Chester muttered to me:  "WYystan is helping with his studies

                  at the College of Technology."  When the party broke up it

                  turned out that the young man lived in my direction, so I took

                  him home, and in my car he opened his mouth and spoike, and

                  what he said became engraved on my mind.  "Who is Professor

                  Auden?" he asked.  "Tell me about him.  Is he an important man?"

                       This is the cue for a story which, though with names

                  omitted, should be placed on record.  It must have been in

                  about 1949 or 1950 that an American woman was travelling by

                  train th in Austria.  In the carriage were two Austrian boys

                  in their early teens.  The three got into conversation, the woman

                  asked a number of questions and heard the boys' story.  Their

                  father was an artist, they lived in a village on a lakeside and

                  went to the local high school.  Yes, they would be leaving school

                  at fifteen, one of them would go as an apprentice to the local

                  printer's.  No, there was no money for further education, there

                  was no grammar school nearby, the family couldn't acfford boarding

                  school fees, nor lodgings.  Not long after this chance encounter

                  the family heard that Auden would like to pay for the boys'

                  education.  They went through grammar school in Innsbruck and

                  never looked back;  both made swift careers in industry.  I have

                  the impression that Auden did meet the family in later years;

                  nothing was ever further from my mind than to bring up the story

                  with Auden.  It was disinterested generosity of a rare order.

                  In the light of this kindness to Austrian citizens, it is all

                  the more sad, and ironical too, that his final years in Austria

                  should have brought him into conflict with the tax authorities.

                  He had felt at peace in Kirchstetten:
               
           Here, though, I feel as at home
                  
           as you did:  the same
                  
           short-öolived creatures re-utter
                  
           the same care-free songs,
                  
           orchards cling to the regime
                  
           they know, from April's
                  
           rapid augment of colour
                  
           till boisterous Fall,
                  
           when at each stammering gust
                  
           apples thump the ground.
               
                                         38.
               
                  A nd in his Prologue at Sixty:
               
          Though the absence of hedge-rows is odd to me
                  
          (no Whitg landlord, the landscape vaunts,
                  
          ever uempired on Austrian ground),
                  
          this unenglish tract after ten years
                  
          into my love has looked itself...
               
                       But then worry invaded it.  While all the time believing

                  himself not to be liable for income tax, debts to the fiscus were

                  in fact running up to such an extent that a mortgage was placed

                  on the property in Kirchstetten.  The final amount was A.S.

                  930,000.  What this meant to Auden was that instead of being able

                  to take things a bit more easily, he had to pay out pretty well

                  all that he had put on one side, and return to the lecture circuit

                  in the States, a prospect which he viewed with dread.

                       "Do you know" he said to me, "they're accusing me of having

                  been inspired by the Austrian landscape!  The Weinheber poem and

                  all that."  I said:  "You wrote the poem in Berlin" and he

                  shrugged.  At that time I had no idea how serious the whole thing

                  was.  As rthe result of an appeal in high quarters the sum awas

                  reduced by about half, and was fully paid up.  At some point, the

                  document is undated, Auden composed a statement, consisting of

                  three pages of typescript, giving his point of view in this

                  extraordinary affqair.  One day, if the whole official correspondence

                  is published, tihis document with the rest will be numbered among

                  the curiosities of literary history.§

                       Having disposed of the "accusations" that he had a "material

                  interest" in Austria, that he had been awarded athe state prize for

                  literature and that a road in Kirchstetten had been named after

                  him (he requested the local authorities, by the way, not to do so

                  until after his death, but they disregarded his wish) he continued:

                       "You go on to say, correctly, that I have written a few

                  poems on Austrian themes.  To this I should like to make tzhree

                  observations:

                  1.   I have never received so much as a penny for my poetry in

                  Austria.  A few of them were translated into German, but in this

                  case the translators received the money, not I.
               
                  § The statement is in German translation, what follows is my own

                    re-translation back into English and not the original.
               
                                           39.
               
                  2.  I believe you are not aware how it is that poems are

                  written.  What is generally taken to be the subject is only

                  a point of view, an occasion, in order to give expression to

                  certain thoughts about nature, about God, history, mankind etc.

                  qhixh rhw powr m  which the poet may have had in his head for

                  a very long time.  I wrote a poem, for instance, for the 20th

                  anniversary of the death of Josef Weinheber.  But basically,

                  the poem has to do with other things:  firstly with the love

                  which every good poet, of whatever nationality he may be, has

                  for his mother tongue, and secondly with what has happened

                  since the war in the countries that lost it, that is to say,

                  not only Austria, but also Germany and Italy.

                       Then again:  in 1964 I wrote a poem with the tietle

                  "'Whitsunday in Kirchstetten"' because I happened to be there

                  at the time.  But the place is unimportant.  What this poem is

                  actually about is the question:  "'What is the significance

                  for a Christian of the Feast of Penetecost??'  And this applies

                  to all countries alike.

                  3.  I believe that you fail tuo understand the financial situation

                  of a poet.  A novelist can, if he is successful, earn a good

                  deal of money with his books.  A peoet cannot do that, even if he

                  is very well known, because poems are only read by a minority.

                  Far and awasy the greater part of my income derives, therefore,

                  not from the sale of my volumes of verse, but from book reviews,

                  translations, lectures etc., activities which have nothing to do

                  with Austria.  And while on the subject of translations:  you

                  say correctly, that I have a great interest in German and Austriqan

                  literature - I might add, also in its music, but I have no need

                  to come to Austria to read or to hear them."

                       Auden goes on to the length of time spent annually in

                  Austria, and concludes:

                       "One last word.  If this in my view utterly unjustified

                  nonsense does not cease, I shall leave Austria never to return,

                  which both for me and perhaps too for the shopkeepers of

                  Kirchstetten would be very sad.  But one thing I cannot conceal

                  from you, gentlemen:  if this should come about, the consequence

                  might be a scandal of world-wide dimensions."
               
                  + + +
               
                                          40.
               
                       The news reached me over the car radio on the motorway near

                  Linz, and I headed straight for Kirchstetten on the off-chance

                  that Chester might already have come home.  Wystan had died in

                  the night of 28/29 September, and the fact blotted out all else.

                  Why had I gone to Linz and missed his last reading at the

                  Society for Literature?  I had talked it over with him a few

                  days earlier, saying tähat I was exasperated at finding myself

                  committed to a meeting in Linz which I yearned to cut;

                  particularly as I should like him to make use of my flat and

                  perhaps spend the night there.  I was glum, and he cheered me

                  up, saying that I'd heard it all before, and I must come over

                  afterwards and he'd tell me how it had gone off.

                       There was all too much time on the motorway to react, and I

                  fought against what seemed to be unr[]easonable waves of emotion.

                  Don't exaggerate, I told myself, don't flatter yourself that

                  you have the right to mourn.  Think of Chester.  I am thinking

                  of Chester;  I hardly dare think of him.  How will he live?

                  Will he live?  The car radion was still muttering quietly.  As

                  a distrcaction, I turned it up and the familar voice of Friedrich

                  Heer reviewing a book was something consoling to hold on to.

                       The green shutters on the door at Kirchstetten were closed,

                  and there was no one there.  I wrote a note and stuck it in the

                  centre gap, watched by the Strobls1/2' eternally suspicious mongrel,

                  and drove to Fridau.  An answer to the note came by telephone:

                  Chester would like me to come over in the afternoon - by now it

                  was Sunday.

                       The room was full of people.  On the seat behind the fcoffee

                  table sat the pathetic figure whom one instinctively acknowledged

                  as the widow.  Mrs. Clark and her daughter had come up from

                  Florence, the mayor of Kirchstetten was there, the headmistress

                  of the high school, Frau Seitz, a writer friend of Chester's

                  calleed Adolf Opel, and an assortment of unidentified young people.

                  The expressions on the faces of the chief protagonists in what was

                  clearly a heated discussion were not quite what one would expect

                  at a gathering of mourners and local worthies who had come to

                  offer their condolences.  The mayor was looking stubborn, the

                  Frau Seitz looked worried, the Clarks1/2 puzzled.  Chester was hardly

                  coherent,;  the rest conversed in whispers.
               
                                            41
               
                       Chester tried to explain, and gradually his wishes became

                  clear.  He hated everything in the shape of pompes funèbres.

                  He wanted Wystoan buried quietly and at once, if possible on

                  Tuesday, telegrams had been sent to John Auden, to Stephen

                  Spender and others telling them to come on Tuesday morning or

                  earlier.   The mayor, Chester said, wanted a big funeral at the

                  following weekend, with the town band out, a hearse coming to

                  the door, representatives of the Ministry of Education, the Land

                  and all the rest of it.  He, Chester, couldn't bear it and

                  wouldn't have it.  Knowing Austrian burial customs it was evident

                  tthat we were faced with a cultural clash of no mean proportions.

                  A hurried private funeral of the kind envisaged by Chester might

                  seem normal to in western intellectual circles.  In Austria it

                  was an affront to the decencies and carried a whiff of pauperism,

                  suicide or both.  Now the mayor had his say.  "First of all" he

                  said, "the body has not yet been released.  As in all cases of

                  sudden death in a hotel, where the circumstances are not wholly

                  clear, there has had to be an inquest, and even with intervention,

                  these things take time."  And then:  "Imagine not even informing

                  the ministry, the department of culture of the Land government -

                  it would be more than my job is worth."  Frau Seitz now gave it as

                  her view that Kirchstetten would hardly bury a dog in the wqay

                  intended by Herr HKallman, let alone a major poet, a man moreover

                  whom they had all known and loved.

                       The discussion continued, the young people drifted like

                  autumn leaves hither and thither, whispering and bearing bottles.

                  Frau Strobl made frequent dramatic entrances for reasons which

                  were never quite clear.   It was not, it occurred to us, only a

                  question of when and how much, but:  what kind of a funeral service

                  should it be?  Auden was a practising member of the Church of

                  England§- or of the Episcopalian Church in the States - but he

                  had regularly attended Mass in the Catholic Church of Kirchstetten

                  and had wished to be buried there.  Should not the Anglican

                  chaplain in Vienna be asked to participate?   []No one seemed to

                  have any ideas, but it was finally agreed that an ecumenical

                  service would be appropriate, the texts to be spoken being left to

                  John Auden to decide in conjunction with the clergy.
               
                  § Few people would question this, but in view of two or three

                  statements in the press that he became R.C., th4e rfact perhaps

                  needs emphasising.
               
                                            42.
               
                       The room was stifling.  It seemed that Chester needed to

                  have fewer people around him and that the party needed to be

                  broken up.  The chance came when Chester agreed to have the

                  funeral postponed.  If my memory of events is correct, agreement

                  was first reached only over the vital point that Tuesday was

                  impossible and that people in  In England should be notified at once,

                  leaving the final date over for the moment.  This decision

                  conveniently created a natural pause, and now the Clarks1/2 undertook

                  to send the telegrams and were driven to the Ppost Ooffice by Frau

                  Strobl.  We all stood up, Chester came over and asked me to

                  carry on discussions for the funeral arrangements with the mayror

                  and Frau Seitz.  It was all, he said, more than he could bear,

                  I must just try to hold the others in check but he would agree

                  to anything I said.  He was all right really, he said he was

                  full to the brim with tranquillisers and only needed a bit of peace.

                  We hugged each other warmly and, together with the mayor, I left

                  in Frau Seitz's car and we drove to her house at the other end of

                  the village.

                       This was not the sort of talk in which one can whip through

                  the avgenda, and we took our time.  If only Chester had realised

                  it, compared with the style in which an Austrian ivillage carries

                  its senior citizens to the grave, what he was being asked to

                  consent to was not a tall order.  There would be no voluntary

                  fire brigade, no gamekeepers with their ancient ritual and their

                  wishes for good hunting in the fields of Elysium bellowed into the

                  open grave, no linesmen from the local railway, no representatives

                  of the local football club, marksmen's association et al.

                  And since none of them would be there, they would not have to be

                  fed afterwards.  All the mayor wanted was the brass band;  I felt

                  that Wystan would have been amused, and might, if he were watching,

                  even enjoy it, and I agreed.  Thursday was chosen to keep down

                  the number of idle onlookers, a great concession for which I was

                  grateful.  Chester had told me that he had a phobia about hearses

                  being brought to the door.  What he wanted was for the coffin to

                  be carried to the bottom of the hill, if not further, and only then

                  placed in the hearse.  But the thought of the weighty coffin

                  being carried down a narrow lane, pitted with ruts and potholes

                  and strewn with loose stones, made my hair stand on end.  The

                  mayor and Frau Seitz felt the same wasy, and here too, Chester

                  later agreed to our compromise.  Subsequently, I was to blame

                  myself very mzuch for not raising the qu4estion of who was to play
               
                                                43.
               
                  pay for the band.  As Chester was being compelled to comply with

                  local customs, and the district council in the person of its mayor

                  wished to honour a citizen who had brought it great fame, it never

                  occurred to me that it was not free of charge.  Nor did it occur

                  to Chester, whose anger at being sent in a bill precipitated a chain

                  of events which badly hampered the efforts of the Society for

                  Literature to preserve the house as a place of memorial for W.H. Auden.

                  At the time, however, we thought we had troubles enough, and the

                  misunderstanding was born.

                       Meanwhile the mayor was worrying about something else altogetheer:

                  the safety of Auden's manuscripts and papers in the attic room.

                  Altogether, he took a distrustful view of the fate of the house and

                  everything in it once Chester went back to Athens.  He was afraid

                  that in his state of despair and nervous exhaustion Chester might

                  agree to almost anything that was suggested to him with sufficient

                  force or calculation.  But to pursue this subject further is too would be to

                  reach out too far beyond the death of Auden.

                       When I got back to the house it was to find Chester in a calmer

                  frame of mind and body and able to talk in that gentle and

                  affectionate way, with occasional burst of sardonic humour, which

                  his friends will remember, overlooking all else.

                       In attempting a memoir of Auden in his latter years it would be

                  unreasonable to leave Chester Kallman to play a purely walking on

                  part, the more so as in articles by visitors to Kirchstetten

                  Chester was invariably the fall-fguy.  It would be very difficult for

                  fullsy to understand the relationship between Auden and Kallman, and

                  it never seemed to me that it was any business of mine to try to do so.

                  But I saw something of Chester without Wystan´:  during the winter

                  that he spent alone in Vienna in a flat in the Esslarhngasse not far

                  from my own, and when he was in hospital in St.Pölten for treatment.

                  He was a person full of contrasts where vulgarity and second-rate

                  humour and tastes lived side by sidee with a remarkable personal

                  sensitivity and with talent and discrimination in the espheres of

                  literature and music.  It seems clear from their writings alone,

                  that when both men1/2 went their own wasys in sexual matters, Auden's

                  heart was not involved, whereas Kallman's hrelationship with Jean

                  Boras was both passionate and emotionally degrading.  Both men1/2

                  needed each other and perhaps it would have been better if Chester
               
                                        44.
               
                  had never left New York for Athens.  Apart, both1/2 lapsed into

                  squalor;  together, they kept the pot boiling and the stove

                  crackling.  The daily routine was maintained, drink disciplined

                  and loneliness banished.  When Boras died, Auden wondered how

                  Kallman would get through the Austrian summer.  When Auden died,

                  Kallman pined away.

                       The gathering in the livingroom on the eve of the funeral

                  prompted that banal, well-known reflection about how much the

                  deceased would have enjoyed it.  There was the comforting presence

                  of John Auden, Stephen Spender was there, David Luke, the Clarks1/2,

                  Sonia Orwell.  There were no more conflicts of interest, no more

                  cultural confrontations, merely a group of people bent on

                  mutual consolation.

                       Then Auden came home to Kirchstetten, that un-English tract.

                  He had celebrated Kirchstetten village, the church where he sang

                  so flat and now lies buried, and the house he lived.  He had

                  celebrated Josef Weinheber, Franz Jägerstätter, Emma Eiermann

                  and the cats.  He had celebrated the whole quiet, unexciting

                  landscape and its war-torn past and even the autuobahn which lies

                  between the church and his home, bisectintgg the invisible line

                  joining one to the other.  Though as we known from his statement

                  for the taxation people, he would not want us to take him too

                  literally.  "What is taken to be the subject of a poem is only a

                  point of view, an occasion, in order to give expression to certain

                  thoughts about nature, about God..."  In other words:
               
          To speak is human because human to listen,
                  
          beyond hope, for an Eighth Day,
                  
          when the creature'as Image shall become the Likeness:
                  
          TGiver-of-Life, translate for me
                  
          till I accomplish my corpse at last.
GND	118549847
Wikidata	Q51672
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1923-02-17
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1934-11-11
GND	118608460
Wikidata	Q103529
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1919-09-07
Death	2010-10-25
GND	119265311
Wikidata	Q87277
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1878-01-21
Death	1938-03-16
GND	118535560
Wikidata	Q112255
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	0354-11-13
Death	0430-08-28
GND	118505114
Wikidata	Q8018
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1942-03-03
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1790-06-01
Death	1836-09-05
GND	118597914
Wikidata	Q45025
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1907-05-20
Death	1943-08-09
GND	118556509
Wikidata	Q45243
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1920-06-02
Death	2013-09-18
GND	118599194
Wikidata	Q33637
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1892-03-09
Death	1945-04-08
GND	118766287
Wikidata	Q78776
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1946-02-13
Wikidata	Q75311857
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1916-04-10
Death	1983-09-18
GND	118547666
Wikidata	Q87771
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1900-06-03
Death	1986-12-25
GND	1061459772
Wikidata	Q86638
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1928-10-08
Death	1986-09-29
GND	118828983
Wikidata	Q45233
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1996-12-21
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1892-01-03
Death	1973-09-02
GND	118623222
Wikidata	Q892
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1856-05-06
Death	1939-09-23
GND	118535315
Wikidata	Q9215
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1920-08-19
Death	2000-12-26
GND	120720124
Wikidata	Q15451051
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1921-11-10
Death	2008-07-02
GND	113123302
Wikidata	Q108811081
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1916-10-28
Death	1980-03-28
Wikidata	Q75311853
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1864-06-11
Death	1949-09-08
GND	11861911X
Wikidata	Q13894
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1916-06-25
Death	1981-06-15
GND	117421413
Wikidata	Q7184481
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
GND	129219827
Wikidata	Q18526943
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1868-08-06
Death	1955-02-23
GND	118521039
Wikidata	Q295830
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1886-03-01
Death	1980-02-22
GND	118564722
Wikidata	Q154260
Read more	Detail Page
GND	118531395
Wikidata	Q48305
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1931-03-29
Death	2012-11-28
GND	134651162
Wikidata	Q1532072
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1594-02-02
GND	118818686
Wikidata	Q179277
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1881-10-25
Death	1973-04-08
GND	118594206
Wikidata	Q5593
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1895-05-08
Death	1972-06-12
GND	118633481
Wikidata	Q704931
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1854-10-16
Death	1900-11-30
GND	118632779
Wikidata	Q30875
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1921-05-21
Death	1989-12-14
GND	118642111
Wikidata	Q997
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1756-01-27
Death	1791-12-05
GND	118584596
Wikidata	Q254
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1824-09-04
Death	1896-10-11
GND	118515799
Wikidata	Q81752
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1918-08-25
Death	1980-12-11
GND	124223478
Wikidata	Q7561744
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1885-09-11
Death	1930-03-02
GND	118570358
Wikidata	Q34970
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1900-03-02
Death	1950-04-03
GND	118630202
Wikidata	Q55004
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1905-07-29
Death	1961-09-18
GND	118545388
Wikidata	Q1267
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1907-10-09
Death	2001-10-12
GND	118970585
Wikidata	Q175366
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1773-05-15
Death	1859-06-11
GND	118581465
Wikidata	Q45662
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1882-06-17
Death	1971-04-06
GND	118642545
Wikidata	Q7314
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1970-03-14
GND	117542784
Wikidata	Q5363177
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1874-04-28
Death	1936-06-12
GND	118566288
Wikidata	Q44328
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1888-09-26
Death	1965-01-04
GND	118529854
Wikidata	Q37767
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1845-05-12
GND	118607960
Wikidata	Q57281
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1925-03-02
Death	2020-03-30
GND	122585119
Wikidata	Q1379218
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1929-02-04
Death	2004-03-04
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1919-09-05
Death	1986-11-08
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1878-01-26
Death	1962-08-22
GND	118610880
Wikidata	Q76332
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1708-09-18
Death	1784-12-13
GND	118558161
Wikidata	Q183266
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1749-08-28
Death	1832-03-22
GND	118540238
Wikidata	Q5879
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1935-06-12
Death	2018-07-15
GND	115600817
Wikidata	Q363515
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1869-02-13
Wikidata	Q76104681
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1872-08-27
Death	1957-05-03
Wikidata	Q5536493
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1908-09-16
Death	1979-11-10
GND	118623362
Wikidata	Q112880
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1873-09-11
Death	1959-04-01
GND	118560492
Wikidata	Q84835
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1912-06-21
Death	1989-10-25
GND	118575686
Wikidata	Q268147
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1931-02-09
Death	1989-02-12
GND	118509861
Wikidata	Q44336
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1869-11-22
Death	1951-02-19
GND	118539124
Wikidata	Q47484
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1867-07-24
Death	1940-02-29
GND	11885349X
Wikidata	Q771698
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1916-05-09
Death	1970-06-16
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1950-01-31
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1922-10-26
Death	2019-05-30
Wikidata	Q62566483
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1904-01-22
Death	1983-04-30
GND	118652044
Wikidata	Q310184
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1918-02-26
Death	1999-11-22
GND	118531271
Wikidata	Q518172
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1920-04-09
Death	2008-06-18
GND	1017201366
Wikidata	Q31739891
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1801-12-07
Death	1862-05-25
GND	118587080
Wikidata	Q44862
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1813-05-22
Death	1883-02-13
GND	118594117
Wikidata	Q1511
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1880-03-16
Death	1959-11-09
GND	116952199
Wikidata	Q76361745
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1898-07-30
Death	1986-08-31
GND	118583875
Wikidata	Q151097
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1902-05-14
Death	1987-01-05
GND	118975803
Wikidata	Q24260023
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1805-10-23
Death	1868-01-28
GND	118618156
Wikidata	Q168542
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1770-12-17
Death	1827-03-26
GND	118508288
Wikidata	Q255
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1892-08-29
Death	1986-06-16
GND	105184292
Wikidata	Q128576
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1915-01-01
Death	2003-05-27
GND	118840940
Wikidata	Q121694
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1321-09-14
GND	118523708
Wikidata	Q1067
Read more	Detail Page
GND	118594893
Wikidata	Q859
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1906-05-26
Death	1974-03-20
GND	1144902630
Wikidata	Q75313732
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1773-05-31
Death	1853-04-28
GND	12989432X
Wikidata	Q57239
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1911-09-18
Death	1984-06-27
GND	116499230
Wikidata	Q59601596
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1874-02-01
Death	1929-07-15
GND	118552759
Wikidata	Q51513
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1907-09-12
Death	1963-09-03
GND	118575988
Wikidata	Q1353378
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1967-11-04
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1885-10-30
Death	1972-11-01
GND	118596039
Wikidata	Q163366
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1909-02-28
Death	1995-07-16
GND	118751840
Wikidata	Q448764
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1911-10-19
Death	1990-11-30
GND	118751980
Wikidata	Q93872
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1915-07-16
Death	1996-01-21
GND	127246711
Wikidata	Q120538514
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1942-01-14
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1886-08-20
Death	1965-10-22
GND	118622692
Wikidata	Q60104
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1903-12-14
Death	1991-01-21
GND	1089340591
Wikidata	Q14946819
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1891-03-17
Death	1962-10-26
GND	1065958706
Wikidata	Q5372032
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1998-05-23
GND	131850520
Wikidata	Q55590162
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1475-03-06
Death	1564-02-18
GND	118582143
Wikidata	Q5592
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1926-07-01
Death	2012-10-27
GND	118549383
Wikidata	Q76915
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1921-06-03
Death	1991-10-02
GND	172137276
Wikidata	Q7174657
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1894-07-26
Death	1963-11-22
GND	118555081
Wikidata	Q81447
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1883-07-29
Death	1945-04-28
GND	118585967
Wikidata	Q23559
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1576-08-27
GND	118622994
Wikidata	Q47551
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1948-01-11
GND	137925816
Wikidata	Q94782596
Read more	Detail Page
Death	1616-05-03
GND	118613723
Wikidata	Q692
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1938-01-28
Wikidata	Q39073705
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1921-01-07
Death	1975-01-18
GND	119544911
Wikidata	Q5093626
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1907-02-21
Death	1973-09-29
GND	118650963
Wikidata	Q178698
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1929-01-02
Death	2018-08-07
GND	118727192
Wikidata	Q583021
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1791-01-15
Death	1872-01-21
GND	118542192
Wikidata	Q154438
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1929-04-23
Death	2020-02-03
GND	119200244
Wikidata	Q453288
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1916-08-12
Death	1978-03-06
GND	115753761
Wikidata	Q55845153
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1924-03-28
Death	1969-03-22
GND	118536133
Wikidata	Q87532
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1921-01-30
Death	2010-12-15
GND	13041185X
Wikidata	Q89249
Read more	Detail Page
Birth	1885-12-09
Death	1970-06-22
GND	118771663
Wikidata	Q79178
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Read more	Detail Page
Country	DE, Germany
GND	4005728-8
Wikidata	Q64
Geonames	2950159
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4075391-8
Wikidata	Q42497
Geonames	2770542
Read more	Detail Page
Country	FR, France
GND	4044660-8
Wikidata	Q90
Geonames	2988507
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Wikidata	Q21865352
Geonames	2766429
Read more	Detail Page
Country	US, United States
GND	4075730-4
Wikidata	Q170541
Read more	Detail Page
Country	GB, United Kingdom
Wikidata	Q7986192
Geonames	12504039
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	7533154-8
Wikidata	Q694757
Geonames	12503870
Read more	Detail Page
Country	CH, Switzerland
GND	4007403-1
Wikidata	Q4127
Geonames	2659347
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4046036-8
Wikidata	Q782708
Geonames	2768843
Read more	Detail Page
Country	FR, France
GND	4018145-5
Wikidata	Q142
Geonames	3017382
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Geonames	12504035
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4075613-0
Wikidata	Q28513
Read more	Detail Page
Country	GB, United Kingdom
GND	4044234-2
Wikidata	Q34217
Geonames	2640729
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4066009-6
Wikidata	Q1741
Geonames	2761369
Read more	Detail Page
Country	DE, Germany
GND	4087308-0
Wikidata	Q700541
Geonames	2939440
Read more	Detail Page
Country	DE, Germany
GND	4011882-4
Wikidata	Q183
Geonames	2921044
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4117646-7
Wikidata	Q131330
Geonames	6354998
Read more	Detail Page
Country	US, United States
Geonames	12503865
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4389973-0
Wikidata	Q187763
Geonames	2760620
Read more	Detail Page
Country	GB, United Kingdom
GND	4206437-5
Wikidata	Q5933
Geonames	6618996
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Wikidata	Q674814
Geonames	2774361
Read more	Detail Page
Country	HU, Hungary
GND	4008684-7
Wikidata	Q1781
Geonames	3054643
Read more	Detail Page
Country	GR, Greece
GND	4003366-1
Wikidata	Q1524
Geonames	264371
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Read more	Detail Page
Country	GB, United Kingdom
GND	4014770-8
Wikidata	Q21
Geonames	2649994
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Geonames	12504047
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4027096-8
Wikidata	Q1735
Geonames	7871498
Read more	Detail Page
Country	DE, Germany
GND	4023118-5
Wikidata	Q1055
Geonames	2911298
Read more	Detail Page
Country	GB, United Kingdom
GND	4022153-2
Wikidata	Q145
Geonames	2635167
Read more	Detail Page
Country	DK, Denmark
GND	4028858-4
Wikidata	Q25389
Geonames	2619218
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4244475-5
Wikidata	Q46242
Geonames	6354988
Read more	Detail Page
Country	RU, Russia
GND	4077548-3
Wikidata	Q15180
Geonames	8354411
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4043271-3
Wikidata	Q40
Geonames	2782113
Read more	Detail Page
Country	US, United States
GND	7735547-7
Wikidata	Q773527
Geonames	5053156
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Wikidata	Q110768231
Geonames	11704028
Read more	Detail Page
Country	US, United States
GND	4042011-5
Wikidata	Q60
Geonames	5128581
Read more	Detail Page
Country	US, United States
GND	4078704-7
Wikidata	Q30
Geonames	6252001
Read more	Detail Page
Country	RU, Russia
GND	4074987-3
Wikidata	Q649
Geonames	524901
Read more	Detail Page
Country	US, United States
Wikidata	Q2142493
Geonames	11819921
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4577998-3
Wikidata	Q21879612
Geonames	2781612
Read more	Detail Page
Country	IT, Italy
GND	4017581-9
Wikidata	Q2044
Geonames	3176959
Read more	Detail Page
Country	IT, Italy
GND	4027833-5
Wikidata	Q38
Geonames	3175395
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Wikidata	Q106193570
Geonames	12503978
Read more	Detail Page
GND	4078435-6
Wikidata	Q33946
Geonames	8505031
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Geonames	12503995
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	1051283507
Wikidata	Q873895
Geonames	12504036
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4076982-3
Wikidata	Q34713
Geonames	2766824
Read more	Detail Page
Country	GB, United Kingdom
Geonames	12503862
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4074255-6
Wikidata	Q41329
Geonames	2772400
Read more	Detail Page
Country	GB, United Kingdom
GND	4074335-4
Wikidata	Q84
Geonames	2643743
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	1068798920
Wikidata	Q3573245
Geonames	12504002
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4808806-7
Wikidata	Q1493443
Geonames	10244820
Read more	Detail Page
Country	RU, Russia
GND	4267026-3
Wikidata	Q656
Geonames	498817
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	7598731-4
Wikidata	Q251246
Geonames	2601183
Read more	Detail Page
Country	IN, India
GND	4026722-2
Wikidata	Q668
Geonames	1269750
Read more	Detail Page
Wikidata	Q262857
Geonames	12514727
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	1052612687
Wikidata	Q1651450
Geonames	2779247
Read more	Detail Page
Country	RU, Russia
GND	4214692-6
Wikidata	Q382500
Geonames	12514767
Read more	Detail Page
Country	DE, Germany
GND	4087295-6
Wikidata	Q56037
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
GND	4041812-1
Wikidata	Q32136998
Geonames	2770730
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Wikidata	Q2242987
Geonames	2768323
Read more	Detail Page
Country	CH, Switzerland
GND	4053881-3
Wikidata	Q39
Geonames	2658434
Read more	Detail Page
GND	4015701-5
Wikidata	Q46
Geonames	6255148
Read more	Detail Page
Country	AT, Austria
Geonames	12504033
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Tolkien, J. R. R.
Date	1954
Wikidata	Q15228
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Auden, W. H.
Date	1972
Wikidata	Q5383618
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Wilson, Edmund
Date	1956
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Hammarskjöld, Dag
Date	1963
Wikidata	Q7944306
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Spiel, Hilde
Date	1972
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Schröder, Rudolf Alexander
Date	1939
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Blythe, Ronald
Date	1969
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Auden, W. H. Kronenberger, Louis
Date	1962
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Auden, W. H.
Date	1960
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Auden, W. H.
Date	1965
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Auden, W. H.
Date	1972
Read more	Detail Page
Author(s)	Fritsch, Gerhard
Date	1961
Read more	Detail Page
Wikidata	Q44996
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Author(s)	Auden, W. H. Moore, Henry
Date	1974
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Author(s)	Auden, W. H.
Date	1962
Wikidata	Q7731278
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Author(s)	Tieck, Ludwig Schlegel, August Wilhelm von
Date	1825
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Author(s)	Auden, W. H. Schmalz-Jacobsen, Cornelia
Date	1965
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Author(s)	Auden, W. H.
Date	1972
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Wikidata	Q205874
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