+
+
+ 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 family and the Hofmannsthals 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 men 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
+ 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 talkers 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
+ 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 masterpiece 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
+ 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 "
+ 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 Toynbees, 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
+ 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 men 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 writers: 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
+ works, 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,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 parents 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: "ED
+ 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 LY
+ 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
+ 1) I think I ought to take the couple 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 couple 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 us, 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
+ 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 Strobls' 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 Clarks 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 Clarks 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 men 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 men
+ needed each other and perhaps it would have been better if Chester
+
+
+
+
+ 44.
+
+
+ had never left New York for Athens. Apart, both 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 Clarks,
+ 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, bisectintg
+ 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.
+
+
+