The lives of all great poets are a part of their poetry and cannot be separated from it. This would be as true of Homer, of whom we know nothing, as it is of Milton or Goethe, Byron or Mandelstam, about whom we know a great deal, some would say far too much. 'One life, one writing,' wrote Robert Lowell, and recent poets, like he and John Berryman, have sought to present the two together, an independent whole, the life as art and the art as life.
Too conscious the process may have become and yet it seems natural enough. Auden, however, would have strongly disapproved. Old fashioned in this as in other ways he would have felt with Jane Austen and Henry James that the writer's life was in no case the reader's concern. He wished for no biography; attempted to leave instructions against one.
His reasons may have been less straighforward than he would have admitted. His life had no figure in the carpet, no unexpected twists or intriguing skeletons, none of the reserved sacrament, as it were, which makes the profane so inquisitive about Eliot's personality and history. It was just an amiable mess, in which anything went, everything hung out.
Not that Auden had the instincts or morals of a Bohemian - far from it - but his being had nothing mysterious about it, no hidden clue for the biographical sleuth to get after. Perhaps, as many of us would, he feared the nothing that might be revealed rather than the too much.
Humphrey Carpenter and Edward Mendelson have already gone over the ground biographically in a conscientious way and revealed at some length what might in any case have been guessed. Auden in Love is an amiable title, provided we do not expect new revelations, and do not take it as adding anything of significance to our image of the poet.
'He became his admirers,' Auden wrote of the moment the poet died, in his elegy for Yeats; and Valery celebrated in his poem on Poe's tomb the louche figure changed at last by eternity into himself as he really is. Dead poets do not change, but anything further we hear about them has the interest that belongs to a special relationship.
Dorothy Farman's shrewd and good-nature memoir begins from the evening of April 6, 1939, with Auden reading that elegy for Yeats from manuscript at an evening organised by the League of American Writers, a left-wing organisation popular in the thirties. He himself was 32 and had just arrived in New York with Christopher Isherwood. Among the admiring audience were a group of students from Brooklyn College, who afterwards managed to get into conversation. Chester Kallman was one of them. The following day he called at Auden's apartment.
Auden had written in his facetious poem about love the year before. It did; though at the instant of meeting, Auden stepped next door into the room where Isherwood was writing letters and remarked tersely: 'It's the wrong blonde.' By the evening it was clearly very much the right one, however, and a marriage began which ended only with Auden's death in 1973.
In a sense with Kallman's too, less than two years later. Although he caused the poet years of grief and jealousy he could not survive on his own, without his 'criterion,' as he rather strangely referred to Auden. To adapt earlier poetic epitaph admired by Auden:
Auden's agape had sheltered Kallman like the wings of the dove and its removal was the end of him. Though he had the same faults of envy and destructiveness, Kallman was the opposite of that archetypal diabolic boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas. He needed to be loved, and the older man needed to love him.
Kallman refused any permanent sexual relations with Auden and disclaimed any notion of possession of fidelity, although Auden paid for and looked after him and found him his jobs. Auden suffered much, and seemed at one point at the end of the war to be thinking seriously of a permanent sexual relation with Roan Jaffe, an attractive, merry but humourless girl whose one absorbing interest was in psychologising herself and her friends.
On this basis, and also apparently in bed, she had Auden got on very well. They remained great friends, but Auden afterwards said it had not affected him at all, that it was a 'sin' and felt like 'cheating.'
Girls in the offing would be likely to have a difficult time. Chester had met Dorothy and Mary Valentine in Ann Arbor and adopted the pair when they came to New York. 'My Mary and Dorothy period,' as he referred to it, certainly changed their lives. Chester found them jobs and looked after them like a brother. Mary fell in love with him, as girls tended to do, and eventually married his father, a big, clever, ebullient Jewish dentist. Auden was a benevolent presence.
The shy pair from religious homes in the middle west blossomed in New York, and Dorothy's memoir conveys very well the heady atmosphere of those post-war days, the parties, the summer shack on Fire Island, Auden at the opera immaculate in hired tuxedo but still wearing his bedroom slippers.
Dorothy remarks that Auden's tragedy was that 'nobody ever loved him the way he wanted to be loved.' The impression rather is that like many dominant men of powerful organising capability, he was not interested in being loved, other than through the receipt of mere sexual gratification, but extremely obsessed with loving. This was not all agape: he would have liked to own Kallman, who refused to be owned.
But whatever was tragic in the relationship was also suited to it and to both men, and Auden always compared their meeting with the recognition scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of Die Walkure. Before that moment, 'All that I had ever seen was strange, I never found a friend near me.'
Auden's greatest poetry was perhaps already written when they met, but Kallman was probably the muse who kept him a poet till his last day.
