Years_in_Austria.txt

The Years in Austria . 
Half an hour from the outskirts of  Vienna  an invisible 
thread bisect x s 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 
Hinterhol 6 z 6 ;   later, the lane up from the village on the other 
side was renamed  Auden- A Strasse .  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 alwa s ys 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.  I t 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 re f cords 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 cour x se" 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 withou g t 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  z the subject of personal privacy.  Think  of for 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  t sheds any significant light upon their works." 
And on  Oscar Wilde :  "Since know o ledge of an artist's private li r fe 
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 , a j n 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   h He 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  o and write 
about  Auden , which might seem a trifle portentous, not to say 
uncivil.  Or  w else we run the dual risk of trivi li a lity or indiscretio n. 
In the eyes of  those other s  who knew him  best better, there is probably a 
further risk, that of being couple d  with the German mythical 
figure, the hor e seman 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  m no 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  t e here  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  Pri l elau  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  developed grew 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  Els e a Musulin  at her home  Schloss Fridau , 
in  Lower Austria , about half an hour's drive from  Kirchstetten . 
She will rate s  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 di l slike of pursuing the famous 
except inthe way of business where an interview i f s 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 a the memory  of it th at remains  excep is the shock of  Chester 's 
appearance as he stood in the doorway in the strong sunlight: 
pale, misshapen, fish-e s yed, loose-, o mouthed;  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   t The secon e d time I was  asked i nvited 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  called dubbed 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  o consisting 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.  G But the whole 
point of a modern kitchen:  the clear surfaces, ample storage 
space, accessibility, the careful rationalisation, w q as totally 
cancelled out by the permanent clutter which invaded the  kitchen room 
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.  A But 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 the s y 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-heate e d 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 cessant despatch and 
receipt of telegrams, often of some length, play a prominent 
part in human relationships.  They were an  s astonishingly rapid 
and comparatively inexpensive medium of communication and were 
often emplo x yed 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  P post  O office at  Kir f chstetten .  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 rejoi f ced:  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.  Auden He 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, 
roast wild duck or roast pheasant, with a good wine, followed by 
one of the richer Austrian cakes - Wurmbrand-Torte for i h nstance, 
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 coffee e  ceremony was performed.  This was, 
d p own all the years that I have known  Fridau , and still is, the 
ind k ispen d sable 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 
comes rises 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 likel s y to leap to his feet 
without any of those preliminary movements of eyes, hands and feet 
with which people signal their imm e inent 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, w g ho liked 
to follow the customs of  a  the country he lived in, and above all 
he had no special voice for  inferiors employees..  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 seg in 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 it x s duty by him 
and more, from start to finish.  I t still does.  But the  Austrian 
Soci a ety for Literature  is nei gh ther 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, e j njoying 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 shou o t 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 
writer y s have no time.  They are dashing from recording studios 
be s yond  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  q acceptance which, 
at that moment, they happen ed  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 ove e rcome  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  g o - he has a tendency towards hyperbole - "on my knees". 
The  day is  a describe e d  in a  letter of mine  to  a friend  in  Germany 
dated 29th May ... 
"I still can't put  yesterday's expedition  to  Kirchstetten 
ou r t 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 shimm d er 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  we Chester  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 des c truction 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  R Fritz  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 th 4 e  Burgtheater , where ,such is Austrian logic,  he works as a 
chief  dramatu g rgist.  




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  c surrealistic, 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  Austria n '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, a n s 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 liter q ary 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 en g velopes 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  r foreword to a book I 
wrote on  Austria Auden  was to write: 
"The relation between Art and Societ s y 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 it y s 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 ha s d 
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 lea e ding 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 ha x s been better served by its German 
translators than vice versa. §  Shakespeare  apart ,  T t he 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  u in a way, 
Eliot  hardly deserved it:  Not long o  ago  George Steiner  referred 
to English writers' lack of  a sympathy towards the German 
classics and mentioned  Auden  as a striking exception.


Auden  immensely enjoyed working on  Goethe 's  "Italian 
Journey" , and was always delighted when he came upon error x s 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 opene e d the door and there was 
Auden , panting, as well he might because this was before our 
lift was put in and he had climbed nin t ety 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 concl i usion that  Goethe  was a very 
lonely man."


§ 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  C Pound 's 
Cantos , a  masterpiece  of the translator's art.    




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 strengt t h, 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 wh q at may have 
seemed the disaster of  Chester 's decision  t not 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 delegat 4 es 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,  saying and 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  wo he 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 
r tha r t 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  einsam ¹ 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 
Druck ³  pressure) .  When they feel their oats they are so apt 
to become uppish." 


INSERT 14a.


Characteristic t o hough 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 .  I t came about like this:  I had been reading 
a paperback c q alled  "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 tortur n ing 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  ru de Austrian generic term for Germans . 
3 _  Pressure.




14a.


Insert after "to become uppish".


This was the private  Auden .  The publi s c  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 ed that little notice had been taken of 
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 . 
I t was very ungrateful to accept a monthly grant of a couple 
of t o housand 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,  e was 
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  w yet 
Has Earth been without 
Her bad patch, some unplace with 
Jobs for tortur d ers. 
(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 anniversa f ry of  Weinheber 's death ,  the prose translation 
was for general information. 
"Herewith my effort"  Auden  wrote, " d to do my Gemeindepflicht." 
(his civic duty.) 
It hardly needs saying that  Auden 's interest in  Weinheber 
w n ent 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 pa t rt 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, 
S You are unlike ly  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  area part of the country area 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 observe d r 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  t declaration  of love  is in  " Prologue at 
Sixty (for  Friedrich Heer ) . 
It satisfied him to live ne d xt 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 
T twenty  years ago, 
now next-door neighbours, we might 
have become good friends, 
sharing a common ambit 
and love of the  w Word, 
over a golden Kremser 
had many a long 
language on syntax, commas, 
versification. 


On May 24th 1965, Auden Auden  under the auspices of the  Austro- British 
Council  and  the Society for Literat u re ,  Auden  gave a  talk on  T.S. Eliot  in the lecture hall of 
the  Museum of  Natural History Museum on the Ring .  I t 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-Ja f ckson 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 twe n lve, adoring practical jokes such as cushions which 
fart when you sit on them, and who liked to shock people by 
saying " Goethe  is awful" and so on.  Finally, there was the 
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 wer d e 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 Ab n bey .  His triumphant comment to me was: 
" Eliot  never did that".


S April 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 
b a y invitation, but no interv n ention from the floor was allowed 
and seldom desired by the listeners.  I t 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  Mar f cel 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  Q anything 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 pro p spect 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 fact thse  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  Yek Etkind 
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  Vienn s a se   F fire  B brigade  who were clearing 
the bui o lding 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 door k , I 
drove fast.  Etkind  settled himself comfortably, stretched out 
his legs for a better purchase and said affably:  " Y One 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 the s y 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 bas s ed 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 spee d ch 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  an a 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 scen s eshifters.  It was a horrible 
anticlimax.  It was not easy to say How 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 t he two men   Auden  and  Kallman .  h How, the poet 
asks exclaims,, 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  q around, unfed and shut out 
of her cottage.  Later on he  w seemed 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 
fr 3 equently 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 duc h k for 
creative workers.  This led to a long account of the experiments 
with LSD and  M mescalin that he himself had carried out in the 
company of  his doctor .  He was perfe f ctly 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  Aldou x s 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 disc u over 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  w saw 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 inter c view he gave to the  S i unday Telegraph , 
published on October 29, 1967, under the headl in e  " O n drugs and drivel"  adds to what he said in the  Opern-Café . 
Much of it is vintage  Auden : 
"Mandrake met  W.H. Auden  la x st week to a background of, not 
redbrick, but dazzling, chalkwhite college buildings, with 
miniskirted freshers looking overwhelm ing ed at having  Auden  pacing 
all their fresh-laid corridors in his carpet slipper a s 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 Am d ericanised '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.  Pa f ris 
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.  A Quintin 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 ow in the face every time he went 
there.  He seldom failed to mention the subje f ct when he  had 
c o ame back to  Kirchstetten , and was particularly angry about the 
advertisements on the  London Underground , which he said beat anything 
to be found any t where.


+ + +


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 c q ar began and ended nor  what  by what means it was propelled, 
and she drove her c q ar as though it were a tank, ignoring all 
that la in y 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,  wo one 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




18 22


did precisely this, whereupon  my mother-in-law  f q avoured 
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 verti f cal 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 
br d eak.  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  o i n about Ap r il9  in  1968 .  A message reache e d me in  Vienna : 
he had had an  c accident, 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  Kirchstett n en .  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, a n bove all, "how 
I proposed to pay for the t 5 reatment." 
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  a A After a brief summary of events came a few lines of comment: 
It was not of significance,, I s q aid 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  Kirchst t etten  again  to 
with the idea of entertaining  Wystan  with a few horror stories




2 O 4.


about Austrian politics or anything else that came to mind 
to  h cheer 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  c b ene  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 o my nly got back to the 
Neulinggasse  shor 5 tly before Christmas, to find a  letter  from  Auden 
telling me what had happened.  Chester  had been so prostrated with 
grie d f 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 f rame state 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 
increasi g ngly 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 wa y ste of time;  during the Twelve Days of Christmas 
not even a partridge in a peartree move w s s. 
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 stru f ck 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  p output.  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 w q ays of the house.  In all those amusing and 
s e ssentially true  newspaper  articles in newspapers and glossy 
magazines the tendenc s y is to lea gv ve out this all-important fact: 
Auden  was a very hard-working, systematic, self-disciplined 
writer s , who knew, none better, how nice it is to sit sipping 
a cool drink in the shade of a tree, whiling away the hour w s, 
looking with contentment upon his flowers and his asparagus beds. 
This he  dd ie  did, but having worked steadily through from 9 o'clock 
until lunchtime.  And much of the bosky content n ment, the cool 
drinks and so on, were si j mply 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 Ed e da , 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 
le x ctures, writing articles and book reviews - sometimes they 
were demanding publications such as  Emily Anderson 's 3 volume




26


"Letters of Beethoven"  -  s which 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 tel g egram 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  a the small country  r town 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 y experiences , 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,  P I 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 d d erived from the  Pennine Moors in the North of 
England  and b) an industr s y - 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 
q and machinery, maps, cat e alogues, guide-books and p o hotographs, 
an c d, 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 ' ö purest' poem, in the  French Symboliste 
sense, is made of words which are not  e the 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-turb u ine, 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 b a y 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  i Idea of a concentrating-mill, I 
ran into difficulties.  I had to choose between two types of a 
certain mach u ine 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,  n by which they conve s y 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 e d xperiences 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  e mean 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, quit d e aside from their artistic 
merits,  Palestrina  must have live e d earlier than  Mozart :  he could 
not possibly have written as he did after  Mozart .  By Permanence, 
I mean that h  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 pro u duce 
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 ne f cessary.  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 cul r ture (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 manhoo f d  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 w ir rite 
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 g e rew out of, and in   re q action to, 
tradition s , whereas it appears to be evolving to-day as much 
from social needs as interior artistic ones...  The status 
of new mu s ic 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 diff e re n t 
kinds of  w age-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 i s n seeing that the society of which he is a member shall 
fun a ction properly and improve.  But the poet, qua poet, has only 
one political function.  Since language is his medium, it is his 
duty, by hi w s own example, to defend his mother-tongue against 
corruption by demagogues, journalists, the mass-media etc.  As 
Karl Kraus  said:  " E D Die Sprache ist die Mutter, nicht das Magd , 
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 - bu z t 
he must never imagine that his poems have the power to affect 
the course of history.  The poli c tical and social history of 
Europe would be w z hat it has been if  Dante ,  Shakespeare ,  Goethe , 
Michael Angelo ,  Titian ,  Mozart ,  Beethoven , etc. had never e d xisted. 
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 examp o le, 
is to take artistic fabrication as the model f r or 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 societ s y 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' so f cieties 
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 r d educe it to momenta f ry 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 mor d e like each other than those who 
write in fixed forms.  Whatever freedom may do, it does not, it 
would seem,  a m  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  l permanently 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  he Auden  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,  B British 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 sacram a ental. Holding 
the insights that he di e d 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 mi d sunderstanding apart - the reader should receive 
some thing from a poem;  it is consistent that he should have laughed 
when he told me that some earnes t  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  G English;  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,  I I forg e o t 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  d shown to  Louis MacNeice , and the house 
and garden.


... Devoid of 
flowers and family photographs, all is subordinate 
here to a function, de g signed 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  I I  but known it, were stuffed 
with  Chester 's money - lifted from a jacket h u anging 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 gue e sts gradually slunk off to the 
kitchen, refugees from his abrasive but tedious presen f ce. 
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,  I I 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  Ne e w 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 
d convictions 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. ' I If 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 wh 8 ich 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 car c ved, 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."  I t 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.  I t 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 su b nlight 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 e d xplanation which I place on record 
only after much hesitation.  Some time after  Auden 's death   Chester 
Kallman  gave me his e d xplanation 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 Benzedr e ine 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  r this 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 cigaret e tes - 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 
int r erestedly 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  L Y America  through a habitation 
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  Oxford  yesterday and found your letter waiting. 
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' M m 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  did n'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 a v fterwards 
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 enfor f ced silence of a young 
Austrian whose identity was never fully revealed, though 
Chester  muttered to me:  " W Y ystan  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 spo i ke, 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 a c fford 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- öo lived 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 Whi t g landlord, the landscape vaunts, 
ever  u empired 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  r the result of an appeal in high quarters the sum  a was 
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 aff q air.  One day, if the whole official correspondence 
is published, t i his 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  a the 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 t z hree 
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 ti e tle 
" '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 Pen e tecost ? ?'  And this applies 
to all countries alike. 
3.  I believe that you fail t u o understand the financial situation 
of a poet.  A novelist can, if he is successful, earn a good 
deal of money with his books.  A p e oet cannot do that, even if he 
is very well known, because poems are only read by a minority. 
Far and awa s y 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 Austri q an 
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 t ä hat 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 easonable waves of emotion. 
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 radio n  was still muttering quietly.  As 
a distr c action, 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  f coffee 
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 
calle e d  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  Wyst o an  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 
t t hat 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 w q ay 
intended by  Herr  H Kallman , 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., th 4 e  r fact 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  P post  O office by  Frau 
Strobl .  We all stood up,  Chester  came over and asked me to 
carry on discussions for the funeral arrangements with the  may r or 
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 a v genda, and we took our time.  If only  Chester  had realised 
it, compared with the style in which an Austrian  i village 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 wa s y, and here too,  Chester 
later agreed to our compromise.  Subsequently, I was to blame 
myself very m z uch for not raising the qu 4 estion 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 altogethe e r: 
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 to o   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- f guy.  It would be very difficult  for 
full s y 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  Esslar h ngasse  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 side e  with a remarkable personal 
sensitivity and with talent and discrimination in the  e spheres of 
literature and music.  It seems clear from their writings alone, 
that when  both men  went their own wa s ys in sexual matters,  Auden 's 
heart was not involved, whereas  Kallman 's  h relationship 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 aut u obahn which lies 
between the church and his  home , bisec t in t g g  the invisible line 
joining one to the other.  Though as we know n  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' a s Image shall become the Likeness: 
T Giver-of-Life, translate for me 
till I accomplish my corpse at last.