of the twentieth century, and his name for his age, the ‘Age of Anxiety’, has
become a common idiom. Wystan (‘to rhyme with Tristan’) Hugh Auden was
born in England, but lived most of his life abroad and gained American
citizenship in 1946. He experienced the Spanish Civil War and the Second
World War at first hand, and lived in New York, on Ischia (in the Gulf of Naples),
and in Kirchstetten (Austria).
Thekla Clark got to know Auden when she first travelled to Ischia to meet an
American poet friend, Anthony Hecht, in 1951. She was a young woman back
then, and even though half a century passed before she decided to write down
her personal memories of that other poet she met on Ischia and with whom she
remained friends ever since, she writes as though things happened yesterday.
The first thing to note about this ‘memoir’, is its title and thus its focus: ‘Wystan
and Chester’. Chester Kallman was Auden’s lover at first and later on his
companion. It is not completely clear whether Clark has titled her book in this
way because she believes that no biographical writing about Auden should
exclude Chester, or that simply for her personally they were one entity, a
couple. Whatever it may be, it is an interesting and at times insightful book
about their relationship with each other and with Ms Clark herself. She seems
very honest about what she does and does not know, at various points in the
book she states she is guessing at the reasons for which something happened,
and did not want to or dare to inquire further at the time.
The relationship between Chester and Auden, as presented here, is
unconventional to say the least. Auden comes to the fore as a serious man,
someone who woke up early every day to get writing straight away and who
wanted his martini at six thirty and his dinner at seven-thirty. His creativity
seems the fruit of hard labour, a lot of reading and studying and stimulating
conversations with his friends over dinner. Chester was more of a bon-vivant;
he loved to cook and receive friends and stay up until the early hours of
morning with a couple of bottles of wine or spirits. He was a poet too, and next
to his own poetry collaborated with Auden on several opera libretto’s, most
notably the original libretto of ‘The Rake’s Progress’ with music by Strawinsky,
and an English verse translation of Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’. He never seems to
have had the rigour of Wystan, however, and he seemed someone whose life
was a midway between homely dinners with Wystan and being on the prowl with
his latest conquest.
Clark’s book is obviously a ‘personal memoir’ and as such is divided in two:
‘Ischia’ where she met Auden and Kallman and where they spent the 1950s,
and ‘Kirchstetten’, after the Austrian home that Auden bought in the autumn of
1957 after having won the Italian Lincei Prize for lifetime achievement. It was in
this house, now in the ‘Audenstrasse’, that Auden spent the remainder of his
days (alternating with his sojourns at Oxford University where he was the poet-
in-residence). Ischia was compared by both Chester and Wystan to paradise,
though the invasion of tourists in the early 1950s grew every year and turned it
into more of a tourist’s idea of paradise. Austria is where they both felt most at
home, firstly because it was actually Auden’s own property that they lived in,
and secondly both spoke fluent German and were attracted by nearby bustling
Vienna.
Clark shows us something of the dynamics of the one relationship in Auden’s
life that seems to have mattered to him most, and it is fun to read about the
topics of conversation the intellectual ex-pats had in Italy and Austria. Ms Clark
offers us an insight in their lives as if she were talking to the reader as a dear
friend with whom she has not caught up for a long time. It is delightful and
tragic, moving and witty all at the same time. For anyone who wants to discover
the personal side of Auden, this book is a must read.
