W. H. AUDEN

Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957

1966

THE NEWDIGATE PRIZE for poetry is awarded every year at Oxford. Those who enter for it have to write a poem to a title set by the judges, and in 1957 it was “Earthly Paradise.” I was in my second term reading history at Magdalen College. My rooms were in the handsome New Building, famously misnamed because it dates from the eighteenth century. From my desk I had a view of the deer in the park. Images from childhood worked into the poem that I wrote and submitted.

One morning, there was a knock on the door and W. H. Auden entered and sat down heavily on the sofa. Professor of Poetry at the time, he was one of three judges of the Newdigate. I had never met him. Yours is much the best poem, he said, and I want you to know that I voted for it, but I couldn’t persuade the other judges so I’m afraid you are only the runner-up.

In his lifetime, Auden became perhaps the best-known practicing poet in the English language, and John Anstey, editor of the Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine, commissioned me to write a profile of him. Auden lived in New York but spent summers in Kirchstetten, a village not far from St. Pölten in Lower Austria. “I should like to become, if possible, a minor Atlantic Goethe,” was how he had come to speak of himself. In his speech, the American letter a, short where Oxford would have it long, was a sign of his dual identity. His was a face like nobody else’s, wrinkled and deeply furrowed all over like some animal’s hide, possibly due to age but more likely to inner distress. “A wedding cake left out in the rain” was Dom Moraes’s image for the devastated appearance. There was something awkward about him, nonplussed. Even out of doors, Auden could be seen shuffling about in carpet-slippers.

Receiving me at the house in Kirchstetten, Chester Kallman launched into a critique, evidently well prepared, of the village and its inhabitants. He had lived with Auden since before the war. To judge by his air of condescending superiority, he thought highly of himself. A smile stretched across his face making a disturbing feature of his teeth. Also in the house was a Greek teenager.

Auden was at work in what had been the loft of a farm building tacked on to one side of the house and converted into his study. The sole approach was up an external staircase of rickety wooden posts and planks that creaked when anyone trod on them and which led up to a retreat where he surely would not be disturbed. There on the desk were drafts of poems and sheets of paper with word games, acrostics and aphorisms. On a table lay the twelve massive volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, one or two of them left open where presumably he had been engaged in his favorite sport of chasing rare usages and meanings. I also copied down a line of rhymes: blot, dot, jot, got, what. He gossiped about friends and contemporaries: Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman, John Sparrow the Warden of All Souls, and Hugh Gaitskell. Guy Burgess had been coming to stay with him when the scandal of his defection to Moscow broke. “Arthur Koestler, me no like-ee,” he said, imitating the pidgin English supposedly spoken in the Orient. Why? I asked. “Underdog!” he said in a normal voice, as if that settled it.

At the end of the afternoon, Auden wobbled his way down the staircase and Chester Kallman gave him a martini, and ten minutes later another, and ten minutes after that a third. By the time Kallman and the Greek teenager had got him to bed, it was about half past seven and he was past making sense. They gave him a flask of Chianti, and he lay on his side sucking at it like a baby with a bottle, gurgling, splashing red wine now and again onto the sheets and over himself.

Next day, I gave them a lift to Vienna. Kallman was making up to the Greek teenager, with much laughter between them as they directed me to the gay bar where I was to drop them. Uninvited, left sitting by himself on a red plush sofa in Sacher’s Hotel, Auden was a picture of distress.