In that spring of 1939, everything changed for Wystan Auden. For the first time, he fell in love. The encounter took place at a talk sponsored by the left-wing League of American Writers, featuring Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, who had come to America for a brief visit, and Auden’s critic and admirer, the aspiring poet Frederic Prokosch. The event was well attended by hordes of earnest college students, despite a two-hour delay while the writers were fetched from another location to which they had been misdirected. Sitting in the front row was eighteen-year-old Chester Kallman, a fledgling poet at Brooklyn College, with his occasional lover and fellow poet Harold Norse.
By most accounts, Auden stole the show. His typically disheveled appearance (“Miss Mess,” whispered Kallman, eyeing the poet’s drooping socks and untied shoelaces) contrasted dramatically with the astounding power of his new poem, “Elegy to Yeats,” evidence of another great creative leap forward since his arrival in the United States. But Isherwood was still the more attractive of the pair, and it was he whom Kallman and Norse tried to corner for an “interview” backstage. The novelist was more interested in another fan who had joined them, and he gave that boy a card with the address and phone number of the East Side apartment he now shared with Auden. Kallman appropriated the card from the better-looking student as soon as they left the building and a few days later appeared at Isherwood’s front door.
“It’s the wrong blond!” Auden complained when he opened the door to see Chester standing there. When Isherwood saw who it was, he returned immediately to his writing. Chester entered nevertheless and, in a brief, awkward conversation, finally captured Auden’s interest by mentioning Thomas Rogers, one of his favorite Renaissance poets. With that, they were off. The two spent the rest of the afternoon discussing literature (Auden’s specialty) and music (Chester’s passion). By their next meeting, they were lovers.
Tall and slim, Chester Kallman had the androgynous face of an angel but blurred, as though God had tried to smudge it out with His thumb. The son of a Brooklyn dentist and a former actress in the Yiddish theater who had died when Chester was very young, the boy had developed a protective gloss of arrogance over the years, along with a caustic Brooklyn wit. Yet Auden was entranced by the fierce love of language and music that frequently surfaced in his conversation—a passion that Chester had nurtured largely on his own throughout his childhood. On the surface, the insouciant, sexually confident Jewish teenager appeared to have little in common with the thirty-two-year-old product of early-twentieth-century, anti-Semitic, middle-class England. Yet Auden may have glimpsed a reflection of what he himself might have become if he had been born and raised in this wild country rather than his own. As he wrote in his poem “Heavy Date” that year:
I believed for years that
Love was the conjunction
Of two oppositions;
That was all untrue;
Every young man fears that
He is not worth loving:
Bless you, darling, I have
Found myself in you.
“I am mad with happiness,” Auden wrote to Benjamin Britten, who had himself recently arrived in the United States. At last, after years of grudgingly applauding Isherwood’s frequent conquests, the chain-smoking, Benzedrine-popping poet had someone new to pine for, a love challenging enough to get his creative juices flowing. Chester Kallman, young, handsome, vain, intelligent, and unpredictable enough to hold his attention, seemed to have been sent by God.
Auden’s infatuation was so all-encompassing that at first he hardly noticed the successive waves of resentment beginning to reach America from Britain as a result of his and Isherwood’s lengthy absence. Much of the initial outrage over their departure stemmed from utter disbelief that two of Britain’s greatest young literary figures would prefer uncultured America to England. By the spring of 1939, however, as Hitler began to move toward Poland and British military conscription was announced, the cry for the writers’ return grew shrill. Ignoring the fact that war had seemed much less likely when they left England, pundits and politicians began to accuse Auden and Isherwood of having deliberately abandoned their country in a perilous time. Responding to the announcement of the military draft, Auden presented himself to the British consul in New York to offer his services, but he was told that only Britons with appropriate technical expertise were wanted at this time. Still, Auden knew that the time to commit himself—to something, anything—was now. He needed to arrive at some sort of position on the moral and intellectual questions raised by the advent of war—not because of the hue and cry in Britain but because it was his duty as a poet living in these times.
At the same time, Isherwood decided to leave New York for Hollywood. He “wanted to get away from New York and into the ‘real’ America,” he later wrote. He hoped to find work in the movie industry, “but I . . . was not sure of anything, even staying in America.”
Auden knew he would deeply miss his friend, who had served as a spiritual brother since their days at St. Edmund’s preparatory school in Surrey. He had come to depend on the constant presence of this companion with his “squat spruce body and enormous head,” as he had described Isherwood in Look, Stranger! in 1936. Still, he had Chester. Auden had been spending a great deal of time with Kallman’s family in Brooklyn, scribbling poems on the subway as he traveled there and back each day, fixed on the idea of settling down permanently with his young lover. Once the idea occurred to him, he couldn’t let it go. He began to analyze—in his poetry and conversation—the personal responsibilities and commitment that he was convinced should accompany true love. Auden had always used his life as the ever-evolving medium from which to forge his philosophical ideas, however much those ideas might change from day to day. Now, having largely given up on political activism and having been turned down for military service, he looked to his love affair for the raw material from which to create his poems.
Auden began to consider himself married to Chester and wore a wedding ring for a brief period—though the ring soon vanished. Once the college semester ended, he convinced Chester to accompany him on a cross-country “honeymoon”—traveling south by bus to New Orleans, west to New Mexico, on to California to visit Isherwood in Hollywood, and then back to New York by train. Like most honeymoons, the vacation had its sublime moments—a hilarious afternoon with the widowed Mrs. D. H. Lawrence in Taos, during which Auden accidentally walked off with the key to the chapel containing Lawrence’s ashes—and its disappointing ones, as when Chester flirted with the various youths he met along the route. Auden was appalled by parts of the country he’d never seen before (later deploring the “unspeakable juke-boxes . . . the anonymous countryside littered with heterogeneous dreck and the synonymous cities besotted with electric signs”) and objected to Chester’s constant quoting of Hart Crane, whose work Auden disliked. He was also disappointed in the cultural environment around Taos, “dotted with the houses of second rate writers and painters. It’s curious how beautiful scenery seems to attract the second rate. For me, I like it for a holiday, but I’d rather die than live permanently in a beauty spot, at least till I’m much older.” But when he and Chester holed up in a borrowed mountain cabin by themselves, they had an unforgettable, pleasantly debauched time.
All that summer, Chester practiced writing poems in a notebook much like Auden’s, which he had bought at a stationer’s on Montague Street in Brooklyn; Auden was hard at work on a prose work called “The Prolific and the Devourer,” influenced by Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the Pensées of Pascal. The discourse, written in the form of an interview or dialogue, was Auden’s attempt to work out, in logical steps, the artist’s duty in times of war. Was it to fight as a soldier like any other man, to put his particular gifts to use in the creation of propaganda or other material to support the war effort, or to remain outside the conflict and dedicate himself to the interpretation of human nature? By choosing this last option, perhaps artists could help lead men out of their trap of violence or
at least give them something to live for afterward.
Isherwood, with whom the pair reunited when they arrived in Los Angeles, startled Auden with the announcement that he had chosen, along with his British colleagues Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, a pacifist stance toward the European conflict. He simply could not accept the possibility of killing any of the German boys he had known and cared for, he said—nor, for that matter, any German boy cared for by anyone else.
Since his arrival in Hollywood, he had taken steps to inform his pacifism by studying Vedanta philosophy and practicing yoga. These actions forced Auden to consider his own willingness to become a soldier. He had already stated, in “The Prolific and the Devourer,” his belief that artists did not belong in the realm of politics—both because they were likely to prove ineffectual and because they had other, separate but equally important work to do. If this work concerned, as he had suggested, making us “more aware of ourselves and the world around us” so that we might become more difficult for politicians to deceive, then it was the artist’s responsibility to seek out and communicate those truths that could help raise human consciousness toward greater understanding and better actions.
But did this belief lead directly to nonparticipation in any war? Auden now added a question-and-answer section to the end of his prose piece in which he served as his own interrogator to explore this issue, among others. Asking himself whether he had become a pacifist, he appeared to try on Isherwood’s views when responding, “The trouble about violence is that most of the punishment falls on the innocent. That is why, even if you imagine you are fighting for the noblest of ends, the knowledge that it is more your children than yourself who will have to pay for your violence . . . should make you hesitate.” But he also restated his belief that as a person who, like everyone else, had been quite willing to help create the current situation in Europe through thousands of small, thoughtless actions, he could hardly justify avoiding the consequences by refusing to don a uniform. Still, it was best to leave the conduct of wars “to those who believe in them” for as long as possible, he wrote. His abilities were put to better use in the classroom and on the page. The artist and the politician must accept their differences and instead focus in their separate realms on doing their jobs well.
Unsatisfied, Auden wrote in the role of interrogator, “You keep evading the real political issue.” To some extent this was true. Despite pressure from England and the implicit pressure from Isherwood, Auden remained undecided about his place in the rapidly changing world situation. On the one hand, he glumly remarked that if he chose the path of pacifism, he would probably have to start studying yoga when he returned to New York. On the other, he wished he could simply forget about current events.
Work and love were both progressing well for him that summer. “For the first time I am leading a life which remotely approximates to the way I think I ought to live,” he wrote to a friend back home, adding, “I never wish to see England again. All I want is, when this is over, for all of you to come over here.”
But political events continued apace. Traveling back to New York on the train with Chester, listening to the radio, Auden wrote to a friend that “every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on.” Pain or not, the news kept coming, and every hour it was worse. Edward R. Murrow, the bane of British emigrants with his grim reports from London, broadcast the day’s evacuation announcements: “If you live in one of the areas mentioned and have a child of school age, and wish to have him evacuated, send him to school tomorrow, Friday, with hand luggage containing the child’s gas mask, a change of underclothing, night clothes, house shoes, spare stockings or socks, a toothbrush, a comb, a towel, soap, facecloth and if possible a warm coat or mackintosh, a packet of food for the day. Schoolchildren will be taken by their teachers to homes in safer districts . . .” Frequent news bulletins spoke of German troops massing on the Polish border. Finally, on September 1, 1939, as the two men arrived back in New York, they heard the words Auden had been dreading. Hitler’s armies had invaded Poland. The war in Europe had begun.
If ever there was a time when the right words were needed, this was surely it. This war, as virtually everyone in Europe now understood, was not simply a question of national sovereignty but a battle over human freedom, over the human soul. If the evil set loose in the world were to be conquered, those who were its enemies would need all possible insight, understanding, and wisdom to achieve their goal. Having settled back into his room at the George Washington Hotel, Auden began writing “September 1, 1939,” perhaps the first poem written in World War II and a work that not only defined the awful inevitability of this war for so many but felt uniquely prescient in America even decades later:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid . . .
The “dive” was Dizzy’s Club, a bar on the Midtown jazz strip frequented by Chester and Harold Norse. Dizzy’s was “the sex addict’s quick fix, packed to the rafters with college boys and working-class youths,” Norse wrote. “Amid the laughter and screaming and ear-splitting jukebox music, it was like an orgy room for the fully clad.” Chester Kallman had introduced Auden to the place on their return to New York. Returning alone one evening, Auden took a table in a corner of the room and began writing. Similar clubs that he had known in Berlin no longer existed—their denizens, owners, performers, and financiers now imprisoned, exiled, or dead. The same fate was likely to have befallen any poets writing at a corner table, any readers who enjoyed their poems when published, and whoever might have helped lead the poetry to fruition. Those who had escaped were now in Paris, or Amsterdam, or even London. But they had better move on soon. New York itself—and open environments like Dizzy’s, places where individuals were free to love, to experiment, to live without punishment—might not be immune.
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return . . .
“I’m sure we are all in for a bad time during the next six months, perhaps for being killed,” the novelist E. M. Forster wrote to Isherwood from London. “That’s one of my reasons for not wanting you and Auden back here. Another is that you both must and can carry on civilization.”
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky . . .
With the horrors of Berlin, Spain, and China still vivid in his mind, along with his recent efforts to define his own responsibilities in time of war, Auden concluded:
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
The little points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their Messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Even before the poem appeared in the pages of the New Republic that October, Auden regretted what he considered the false emotion, the self-aggrandizement, of “September 1, 1939.” Prior to its publication, he had tinkered with various lines. But no matter what he omitted or altered, the poem continued to strike him as “infected with an incurable dishonesty.” As an ordinary man more interested in his love affair than in Europe, how could he claim any special ability to “show an affirming flame” or in any way affect matters in the future? Loved as the poem has been for generations, it was rejected by its author almost from the start.
Auden’s faith in his ability to create positive change was again profoundly shaken when he attended a German cinema in Yorkville, a neighborhood of German immigrants near the apartment he and Isherwood had shared. To his surprise, it screened a Na
zi propaganda film showing the recent invasion of Poland. Watching Hitler’s soldiers marching through the streets lined with defeated men, women, and children, members of the audience began to yell, “Kill them!” and “Kill the Poles!” Appalled, Auden was filled with the sense, as he later described it, that “every value I had been brought up on, and assumed everybody held, was flatly denied.” Instead, he witnessed “the brutal honesty of the assumption that might is right.” Here in New York were the viciousness and hatred he thought he had left behind ten years earlier in Berlin. But now its perpetrators were panting at the prospect of victory. The moment was so ugly that Auden despaired of ever finding any remedy for such evil.
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