Auden’s Secrets

When I spot an essay entitled “The Secret Auden,” I get nervous. When it’s in the New York Review of Books, I get nervouser.

Edward Mendelson’s recent piece on Auden does refer to Auden’s homosexuality, but the focus of the piece is elsewhere: Auden’s dirty little secret is that he was a charitable and generous man, despite going “out of his way to seem selfish.”

For instance: “Auden heard that an old woman in [his Episcopal] congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again.”

Another: “Auden had once been told that a friend needed a medical operation that he couldn’t afford. Auden invited the friend to dinner, never mentioned the operation, but as the friend was leaving said, ‘I want you to have this,’ and handed him a large notebook containing the manuscript of The Age of Anxiety. The University of Texas bought the notebook and the friend had the operation.”

Mendelsoon draws the conclusion: “In an age when writers as different as Hemingway and Eliot encouraged their public to admire them as heroic explorers of the mind and spirit, Auden preferred to err in the opposite direction, by presenting himself as less than he was.”