'Or Straight As a Dove'

W.H. Auden, that most charmingly quotable of men in poetry, prose and conversation:

 

“‘Right now America may be the only country in the world for a writer,’ he says without prologue. ‘You help your writers by ignoring them in every conceivable way. I must say I do like that. If one has no professional existence, one is free to come and go as one pleases . . . be what one pleases. Anonymity - to be no one everywhere – it’s a delicious condition, don’t you think?’”

 

It’s Easter morning 1939 in New York City. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had left England three months earlier. The remarks are recounted by John Malcolm Brinnin, the Canadian-born poet who was then twenty-two, in “On First Meeting W.H. Auden,” a brief memoir published in Ploughshares in 1975. Brinnin was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and had learned that Auden, Isherwood and Louis MacNeice were giving a reading in New York. He had two days to get there and booked a flight in a twelve-seat biplane out of Detroit. With a layover in Buffalo, he made it on time. The trio was reading at the Keynote Club on Times Square and Brinnin was first in line.

 

Today we would call him a fanboy or groupie, with at least a hint of mockery. He witnesses the first meeting of Auden and Brooklyn-born Chester Kallman, the poet's longtime partner. The memoir sparked not contempt or condescension in me but rather retroactive envy. After the reading, Brinnin stutteringly introduces himself to Auden, who invites him to the apartment where he is staying for “elevenses”: “Elevenses," Brinnin writes, "I remembered, were something you had if you were a character in a British novel.” On Easter, Auden takes him to a cafeteria for coffee and Danish. The memoir concludes:

 

“As Auden walks away, he calls back: ‘I’ll see you some day in Mitch-igan,” then waves his hand and goes loping around the corner. I stand stockstill for moment, neither quite sure what to make of all the words that have so quickly become flesh nor able to stop them from at once becoming the talismans they were. ‘Yours is the choice, to whom the gods awarded / The language of learning and the language of love, /Crooked to move as a moneybug or a cancer / Or straight as a dove.’”

 

The italicized lines are from Auden’s poem, “A Bride in the 30’s” (On This Island, 1937). For six weeks or so I’ve been living with the two fat volumes of his poems recently published by Princeton University Press as part of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. They are library books but I’m feeling covetous. They total more than 1,900 pages and are priced at $60 each. I’ll hate to return them when some selfish faculty member puts a hold on the volumes. My respect for and pleasure in Auden has only become more solid and makes me, I suppose, a fanboy.

[Hear Auden read the poem here.]