1951 Auden was passing through London on his way from New York to Ischia, where he and his lover, the American poet and librettist Chester Kallman, shared a house. While staying with Natasha and Stephen Spender in St John’s Wood, he was called on the phone by Guy Burgess, ex-Eton, ex-Cambridge, ex-MI6 and (just about to be) ex-Foreign Office. Auden was out.
The next day Burgess called again. Once again, Auden was out. On returning, having ‘evidently dined well’, according to Spender’s biographer (and one of this book’s authors), he was asked if he would return the call. ‘“Do I have to?” Auden drawled: “he’s always drunk”.’1 By this time Burgess was on his way out of the country. Having telegraphed a message to his mother that he was off on a Mediterranean holiday, he and Donald Maclean boarded a cross-channel steamer at Southampton. Both men were defecting to the Soviet Union.
As a younger man, Auden had liked to think of himself as a sort of spy – poetry itself, he thought, was like espionage, transporting ideas across borders – but why would the cleverest and most dangerous real-life spy of the Cold War era try twice to reach him before leaving the country for good?
Richard Davenport-Hines, who tells this story in his biography of Auden, conjectures that because of ‘his dislike of English liberalism’, Auden ‘apparently had the same emblematic importance to Burgess as for thousands of other men of their generation’. Sexual orientation came into the equation too. ‘This affair provoked fears that national security was threatened by “crypto homosexuals”’, writes Davenport-Hines, ‘and the Home Secretary and other officials instituted a campaign of arrests … which amounted to a sexual witch-hunt and ruined many lives in the 1950s.’
Auden and the Spenders didn’t escape so neatly. Both were plagued by the press, once the story of Burgess’s phone calls had got out – Spender claiming (as late as 10 June) that he found it ‘very difficult’ to believe Burgess a Soviet spy, and Auden investigated, even back in Ischia, by the local carabinieri.2
1 John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography, London and New York: Viking, 2004, p. 360.
2 Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden, London: Minerva, 1995, p. 276.