Eighty years ago today – on January 26th, 1939 – the poet W.H.Auden – accompanied by his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood – stepped off the boat and arrived in New York City.
It wasn’t their first visit. They had spent two happy weeks in the city in 1938, arriving by train from Vancouver on their way back from their trip to China. It was then that they began to think of moving to live in America.
It was bitterly cold that January 1939 morning and the ship was caked in ice after coming through a blizzard in Newfoundland.
Two days later Yeats died. Auden wrote his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” in those first days after his arrival in New York.
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Those last two lines are the words inscribed on Auden’s memorial stone in Westminster Abbey.
Auden and Isherwood’s move to New York caused quite a stir in British literary and political circles where they were minor celebrities known for their writing and politics.
The dyspeptic and conservative satirist Evelyn Waugh cruelly dubbed them Parsnip and Pimpernel and made them a running joke in his novel Put Out More Flags.
Waugh portrayed them as having fled the country at the start of the war to seek personal safety. This of course was an entirely unfair charge. In January 1939 appeasement was still the name of the political game. With Munich just three months gone many thought that war had been averted.
There’s no evidence that Auden moved to America from cowardice or from a desire to run away from the threat of fascism and Nazi Germany.
His motives were personal – he wanted some privacy and anonymity to live his life and do his work. He had, after all, actively sought to experience war first hand in Spain where he had volunteered to drive an ambulance and had taken real risks at the front.
When the war began he wrote to the British Embassy in Washington to offer his services. He was told he was too old to be called back to Britain and anyway they only needed qualified people.
After the US entered the war he was drafted but rejected on the basis of his homosexuality although his feet and his eyesight would have also disqualified him from active service.
Auden’s first home in NYC was the George Washington Hotel on 23rd St and Lexington. He stayed for two months, before – finding himself well-received by the Upper East Side literary set, writing for The New Republic and The Nation, and giving speeches – he moved to a tenement building on East 81st in Yorkville. (John Malcolm Brinnin – who met Auden at the same reading as Chester Kallman remembered it as East 84th Street.) Isherwood did not find NYC so congenial and soon hightailed it to California.
On leaving the hotel Auden gave the manager a five-page handwritten poem extolling its virtues. (Left.) Auden certainly had a gift for verse and for churning it out! (S.A by the way was shorthand for sex appeal. A hoarding is a billboard).
On Good Friday, Auden, Isherwood and Louis MacNeice gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Times Square. Writing in 1975, Brinnin – who was the writer who witnessed and chronicled the deterioration and death of Dylan Thomas – described the Keynote as “a tacky little night spot paneled in primary colors and swathed in tinsel.”
Brinnin lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan and had seen a notice in the Daily Worker on Friday announcing the reading that very evening. He spent his last dollars on a flight to New York to be there.
Right now America may be the only country in the world for a writer. 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?” – Auden to Brinnin over coffee and danish at a cafeteria on E.86th Street, Easter Sunday, 1939. On First meeting W.H.Auden. Ploughshares Vol. 2, No. 4 (1975),
At that time Auden kept a diary.
On September 1st he wrote: “woke with a headache after a night of bad dreams in which C was unfaithful. Paper reports German attack on Poland … 6.0pm.
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears came to lunch.
Peter sang B’s new settings of Les Illuminations and some H Wolf … which made me cry. B played some of Tristan which seems particularly apposite today. Now I sit looking out over the river. Such a beautiful evening and in an hour, they say, England will be at war … 10.30 Went to the Dizzy Club. A whiff of the old sad life. I want. I want. Je ne m’occupe plus de cela. Stopped to listen to the news coming out of an expensive limousine.
“I want, I want” is a reference to a William Blake engraving of a figure holding a ladder to reach the moon while a couple embraces under stars. Je ne m’occupe plus de cela. – I don’t care about that any more
Blake was an idealist who had welcomed the French Revolution only to see the dream turn into violence and chaos. Was Auden too thinking of the idealism and hopes for peace that he knew were now lost?
The Dizzy Club was the gay bar and former prohibition era speakeasy at 64 West 52nd Street referenced in his poem September 1,1939:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade
The Dizzy Club was one of many bars and clubs on 52nd street between 5th and 6th. It had a sign behind the counter WYBMADIITY. If a customer asked what it meant s/he would be asked, “Will you buy me a drink it I tell you?” The club had a motto: “A rolling tomato gathers no mayonnaise”.
Al Hirschfield included Dizzy’s as one of his 36 NYC “Speakeasies of 1932” originally published as “Manhattan Oases.”
Auden lived in a number of places around the city between 1939 and 1953 including 1, Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights and nearby at 7, Middagh Street.
He spent a year at Middagh Street with Chester Kallman in what he called a “menagerie” – a revolving cast of bohemian writers, musicians and artists. Anais Nin called it the February House because several of the residents had birthdays in that month. The motley and talented crew included Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and Richard Wright and his wife and daughter.
At Middagh Street Auden apparently took on the role of grown up – setting end times for partying, times for meals and presiding at the head of the table.
Alcohol was freely imbibed to excess, individual melodrama was on full display, and personal and political squabbles and jealousies were frequent. Plus a lot of high jinks and good times all round.
For a short while the house had its own literary journal: Decision: A Review of Free Culture first published in January 1941. Thomas Mann and Somerset Maugham were on the editorial board and contributors included Jean Cocteau. Stefan Zweig, Aldous Huxley, Janet Flanner, May Sarton and Upton Sinclair.
It was during this year that Auden began attending church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at fifteen.
Between 1941 and 1945 he taught at the University of Michigan and Swarthmore College. In mid 1945 he was recruited to serve in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey to study the effects of Allied bombing on German morale. When he returned, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer, a lecturer at The New School for Social Research, and a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946 he became a US citizen.
Beginning in 1948 Auden began spending summers with Kallman in Ischia, an island in the Gulf of Naples. Ten years later he began spending summers in lower Austria where he bought a farmhouse in Kirchstetten, the only house he ever owned.
In 1953 he settled into a railroad apartment with Kallman at 77 St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side. He lived there until 1972 when he took up residence at Christ’s College, Oxford. This was the same house where decades earlier a small group of Bolsheviks published the Russian-language Novy Mir (“New World”) in the basement. It was here where Leon Trotsky met with fellow anti-war exiles and for a time he claimed it served as the headquarters for “internationalist revolutionary propaganda”.
Auden was the grandchild of two Anglican vicars. In Brooklyn he had renewed his association with the Church and he now became a regular worshipper at St. Mark’s in the Bowery at Second Avenue and 10th Street.
Hannah Arendt described the Auden she met in the late 1960’s.
If you listened to him, nothing could seem more deceptive than this appearance. Time and again, when, to all appearances, he could not cope anymore, when his slum apartment was so cold that the plumbing no longer functioned and he had to use the toilet in the liquor store at the corner, when his suit (no one could convince him that a man needed at least two suits, so that one could go to the cleaner, or two pairs of shoes, so that one pair could be repaired: a subject of an endless ongoing debate between us throughout the years) was covered with spots or worn so thin that his trousers would suddenly split from top to bottom—in brief, whenever disaster hit before your very eyes, he would begin to more or less intone an utterly idiosyncratic version of “Count your blessings.” Remembering W.H. Auden, Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker January 20th 1975.
The Holiday Cocktail Lounge opened next door to Auden’s apartment in 1965 and he was a regular. The owner was Ukranian Stefan Lutak who tended bar until he was 89. Auden often sat by the window writing with a stubby pencil, erasing and re-writing.
He was known to drink a bottle of cognac as he sat there, writing and chain-smoking. According to legend, Lutak said, “When he sober, he can’t write. When he too drunk he can’t write. You could never say when he was drunk, because he drinking all the time.”
Earlier – in 1947 – Auden had written a poem set in another long-lost New York location:
In Schrafft’s
Having finished the Blue-plate Special
And reached the coffee stage,
Stirring her cup she sat,
A somewhat shapeless figure
of indeterminate age
In an undistinguished hat.
When she lifted her eyes it was plain
That our globular furore,
Our international rout
Of sin and apparatus
And dying men galore
Was not being bothered about.
Which of the seven heavens
Was responsible her smile
Wouldn’t be sure but attested
That, whoever it was, a god
Worth kneeling-to for a while
Had tabernacled and rested.
July 1947
In March 1972 Auden wrote a farewell tribute to New York that was published in the NY Times. Here’s an excerpt:
New York is a city of neighborhoods, and I consider myself extremely fortunate in the one where I have lived for the past 20 years. (To me, it will always be the “the Lower East Side,” never “the East Village.”)
Whoever invented the myth that America is a melting pot? It is nothing of the kind and, as a lover of diversity, I say, “Thank God.” The Poles, the Ukrainians, the Italians, the Jews, the Puerto Ricans who are my neighbors may not be the same as they would be in another country, but they keep their own characteristics. Mine is a neighborhood of small shops where they know one personally, and how nice they have all been to this WASP! Let me take this opportunity to thank in particular Abe and his co-workers in the liquor store; On Lok, my laundryman; Joseph, Bernard and Maurice in the grocery store at Ninth Street and Second Avenue; John, my mailman; Francy from whom I buy my newspaper, and Charles from whom I buy seeds for my Austrian garden. God bless you all!
When the NY Times reported that Auden was returning to England to take residence at his old university, Christ Church College, Oxford, they quoted him as saying:
“You mustn’t think I dislike America. It’s just that I’m getting rather old to live alone in the winter, and I’d rather live in community. At my age it’s not good to be alone. Supposing I had a coronary. It might be days before I was found.”
On April 15th, 1972 Auden left New York to take up what he thought would be permanent residence in Oxford. He intended never to return. And he never did.
Sources include:
Wikipedia
W.H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry, Peter Edgerly Firchow
The New Yorker
The Guardian
New York Times
The Speakeasies of 1932, Al Hirschfeld
The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, edited by Kevin R. McNamara
W. H. Auden: A Biography, Humphrey Carpenter
The Financial Times
Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography,Edward Mendelson
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature,edited by Jay Parini
Westminster Abbey
On First Meeting W. H. Auden, John Malcolm Brinnin
