tiny-auden-musulin.txt

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RUDOLF BLAHA 
BILDREPORTER 
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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. 







MUSULIN   NEULINGGASSE  26/14  1030/WIEN 


=  KOMMEN SAMSTAG =  LOVE  WYSTAN 







WH.Auden 
77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
New York 10003 
U.S.A . 


Air-Mail 


Death  Jean Boras 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Wien  IV . 
Neulin g gasse 26/14 
Austria


1030 




Dec 13th  ' 


7 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
N.Y. 10003 



Dear  Stella : 
Chester  has just telephoned me from  Athens  to say 
that  his  Greek fr i end  Jean Boras ,whom I 
think you have met, while driving my car 
between  Vienna  and  Kirchstetten   coll e ded with 
a Lastwagen and was killed . 
Chester  is going to  Vienna ,but he was too 
upset for  m e to find out where he would 
stay. I presume in  Kirchstetten . 
If you can get in touch him and help him 
in any way (there are purely practical matters to 
be cons i de re d,like the car - papers and insurance policy) 
I should be most grateful , 
love 
Wystan , 



7






Fridau 
A-3200 Obergrafendorf 
bei St.Pölten, Austria . 
15 De d cember 1985.


Dear  Ed ,


The time has come to send out a signal to you from  this 
ancient, scandal-ridden, provincial dump .  Peter Müller  has 
not been sleeping over his plan to edit  a book  on  Auden ´s 
time  here , he has been writing books himself in addition to 
his full time profession.  Now - you may know this - it is 
definite and the book is to come out in February 1987 in 
time for  A ´s 80th.


So he got me back to my desk, to, in his words, combine 
my English and German texts , and bring the whole thing up to 
date.  "Write as fully as you can, double the length."  I 
protested that a) I don´t wish to chatter more feebly than I 
have already, b) I am ancient and frail, also lazy, c) the 
first  MSS  only approximate to each other while containing m kuch 
the same material;  their tone differs.  But above all they 
have, whether bad or indifferent, a certain shape or form and 
you cannot just stuff more material into it which refers to 
things which hap e pened subsequently.  So we agreed that we would 
leave the texts to stand and that I would say, roughly, okay, 
that was how it looked then;  what has happened since, what 
is there still be said by us, who knew  Auden  in  Kirchstetten 
in view of the fact that  Carpenter  did no research on this 
location s ?  For a long time the idea was only to write a 
German text, I mean that the book would be sol t´ ely German 
l n anguage production, and this I thought until quite recently. 
Suddenly,  Peter  bounced me with the comment that he would 
"like an English version as well."  I had thought my two  texts 
were only to be combined and the sequel written in German. 
This presents technical problems.  For example, and now my 
questions to you begin:


We ihave here a copy of  Auden ´s declaration  to the tax 
authorities.  (I have been determined all along that this 
document should be published AND RIGHT  HERE .  Apart from making 
Them look stupid, it must be unique in literary history that a 
great poet should explain to the tax authorities how poetry 
comes to be written.)  Do you have the  English original , or where 
is it;  did it ever exist or was  the German  drafted by  Auden 
and put together by, s y ay,  his lawyer ?  Or could this have been 
done by  whoever it was who wrote the  prose version  of  the 
Weinheber poem ?  I have that  text  which  A.  gave me, but there 
is no record of who wrote it.  In my  first dr s aft of the talk 
given at the  PEN Club  in  London  in 1976 I wrote: "I have the 
statement in  German translation , so that what I am reading is 
my own re-translation  back into English and not the original.


I should be very grateful if you could help me over the 
address which  Auden  held at  Neulengbach .  I have the original 
English text  which to my horror  Auden  asked me to translate: 
although capable of creative writing in German, to deal with 
this tough text was too m k uch and it was corrected by  my husband . 
Müller  possesses the  German text  taken from a tape.  Now this 
English text  is so familia s rrto me that it deafens me to all 
or any sources.  A digest of it is in the  PEN text  but I wonder




- 2 - 
to what extent  Auden ´s speech  contains hitherto unknown material, 
if any.  I said air l ily that he had probably said i a t a s ll before, 
in  Secondary Worlds  and so on, but this is not true.  After a 
preamble the speech begins:


Between the ages of six and twelve, I spent a great many of 
my waking hours in the fabrication of a private secondary 
s  sacred world, the basic elements of which were a) a limestone 
landscape mainly derived from the  Pennine Moors  in the North of 
England  and b) an industry - lead-mining. 
I r t is no doubt psychologically significant that my sacred 
world was autistic - that is to say I had no wish to share 
it with others ...  and so on.


He goes on to define the Primary and Secondary Worlds;  his 
private world, the restrictions on the freedom of the artist; 
water-turbines, his Platonic idea of a concentrating mill and 
of his moral duty to sacrifice his aesthetic  princip  preference 
to reality or truth.


If you like I can have the  whole thing  photo-copied and 
send it along, but you see what it´s about.  I cannot believe 
that  Wystan   chose  Neulengbach  to make a one-time-only 
statement of this length and weight, the idea is absurd and 
the point of my quotation in  my talk in 1976  was to show  Auden 
in one aspect of his contact with the Austrians, not without 
a touch of hilarity.  But this is not in  Secondary Worlds , 
I have leafed through your  Early Auden  page by page and finkd 
no reference, nor can I find it anywhere else.  Can you 
el i ucidate?


M Y y worm´s eye view of the arrangements for the  funeral 
goes iknto   my new piece , and incidentally the contributions 
will be looked over by a lawyer.


Are you about to come out with a Middle Auden or whatever? 
If so it would be nice to know about it so I can refer to it.


The  chaplain  sto the  British Embassy in Vienna  gave me the 
name and addre e ss of the  clergyman  who took the service with the 
RC pasrish priest  and I wrote to him to find o iu ut´whether he 
can remember the form of service etc. but no answer so far. 
This would be of interest here because though common practice 
in  England  such an ecumenical service was a novelty here and 
caused much comment.


How are you and what are you doing apa s rt from teaching? 
I had a lot of illness, hospitals etc. but am now stab l ilised 
and am living now wholly in the  country  but am well looked 
after and see plenty of people.  It´s Parkinson´s disease 
which can be kept pretty well under control these days.  My 
relations organised a splendid surprise party for my 70th 
birthday which went on all day, at breakfast I didn´t yet 
know  t what lay ahead.  My son  plotted this and steered it from 
New York  but was there on the day.  He built up the Austrian 
bank  Creditanstalt-Bankverein  in  NY , and if ever you need to 
send me bulky papers or whatever - not that you will - contact 
him at 212-702-9101.  His  m name is  Marko . 
Good health and suc c ess i j n 1986,







Air _ Mail


Poem  dedicated to  S _ M _ 


Die Baro n in 
Stella Musulin 
Wien  IV  1030 
Neulinggasse 26/14 
Austria 




Oct 19 th .


℅  Spender 
15 Loudoun Rd 
London. N.W.8 


Dear  Stella ; 
Were very disappointed that  we  didn't 
see you again before we left. You seem 
to have stayed in  England  much longer than 
usual. 
This morning a copy of  Austri a  ar r ived 
from  Faber's .  :  The illustrations, which I hadn't 
seen before seem excellent 
Overleaf a  poem  I want to dedicate to 
you. Fir s tly , because of its subject and, 
se c ondly, bec a use it is written in an i m itat in 
of a medieval Welsh metre called a  Cywydd , 
Return to  New York  on N Ov  1st. 
love 
Wystan 



STARK BEW Ö LKT 
( for  Stella Musulin )

I'm no photophil who burns 
his body brown on beaches: 
foolish I find this fashion 
of modern surf-riding man. 
Let plants by all means sun-bathe, 
it helps them to make their meals, 
exposure,though,to ultra- 
- vi et violet vapids the brain, 
bids us be stodge and stupi e d.  
Still,safe in some sheltered shade, 
or watching through a window, 
an ageing male,I demand 
to see a shining summer, 
a sky bright and wholly blue, 
save for a drifting cloudlet 
like a dollop of whipped cream. 
This year all is unthuswise: 
O why so glum,weather-god? 


Day after day we waken 
to be scolded by a scowl, 
venomous and vindictive, 
a flat frowning Friday face, 
horrid as a hang-over 
and mean as well: if you must 
so disarray the heavens, 
at least you might let them rain. 
(Water is always welcome 
for trees to take neat and men 
to make brandy or beer with.) 
But,no,we don't get a drop: 
dry you remain and doleful 
in a perpetual pique. 


Fowls mope,flowers are wretched, 
the raspberry-canes are forced 
into phyllomania: 
to ignore you,not be cross, 
one would have to be either 
drunk,lit on amphetamines, 
or a feverish lover. 
Being dead sober all day, 
I find your bearing boorish, 
by four in the afternoon 
frequently close the curtains 
to shut your shabbiness out. 


Who or what are you mad at? 
What has poor  Austria  done 
to draw such disapproval? 
The  Beamterei ,it's true, 
is as awful as ever, 
the drivers are dangerous, 
standards at the  Staatsoper 
steadily decline each year, 
and  Wien 's become provincial 
compared to the pride she was. 
Still,it's a cosy country, 
unracked by riots or strikes 
and backward at drug-taking: 
I've heard of a dozen lands 
where life sounds far more ugsome, 
fitter goals for your disgust. 
(I needn't name them,for you,whose 
glance circumspects the whole globe, 
ken at first hand what's cooking.) 


Have done! What good does it do, 
dumb god,just to deject us? 
Foul our function may be,but 
foul weather won't reform it. 
If you merely wish our world 
to mend its ways,remember: 
when happy,men on the whole 
behave a wee bit better, 
when unhappy,always worse. 

___






Die Baroni n 
Stella von Mussolin 
Wien III 
Neulingasse 26   , 



W.H.Auden 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Friday


Dear  Stella : 
Many thanks for your letter. Ac r tually, we 
shall be  here  till the end of October. 
So far as I know,any week-day which suits you 
and  Herr Fritsch  would be O.K.for us,so just 
drop us a p.c.when you fix the day. 
longing to see you 


Wystan 







UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN 


TRINITY COLLEGE 
DUBLIN 2


Home address : 
22, Kildare Street, 
DUBLIN, 2 . 
Tel : 762662.


Tel. 772941


31 : V: 1984


Dear  Baroness Musulin ,


I remember you telling me that you liked the novels of 
Molly Keane  when I visited you with  Peter Muller  in October of last year. I 
was delighted to see that  Virago Press  have decided to reprint her early 
novels and I thought of you when I saw them  o in the bookshops.  I am sending 
you herewith  The Rising Tide  - the first in the series of reprints and I very 
much hope you enjoy reading it.


I remember with great affection our chat about  W.H. Auden 
and I am very grateful to you for sharing those memories with me.  Plans for 
the  Auden Exhibition in the  Kunstlerhaus  are now very far advanced.  I have 
put togther a complete collection of  Auden 's first editions, selections from 
his contributions to periodicals, representative anthologies,  his films for 
the  G.P.O Film Unit , many items connected with his work for the  Group Theatre , 
all the opera libretti ,  his Britten 's arrangements of his poems and many other items. 
I have also arranged for various portraits of  Auden  to be sent to  Vienna  ; they 
include  Sir William Coldstream ' s 1937 portrait, a portrait by  Mervyn Peake  painted 
in the same year, two drawings by  Maurice Field  and a portrait by  Don Bachardy . 
I have also managed to get 26 lithographs by  Henry Moore  which he did in 1973 to 
illustrate  a selection of  Auden 's poems .


Stephen Spender  has agreed to come to  Vienna  during the 
period of  the Exhibition  - that is 11th October to 3rd November.  Humphrey 
Carpenter  will lecture on  Auden  at the invitation of the  British Council , so it 
all promises to be a splendid celebration of  Auden 's life and work.


I was terribly disappointed not to have seen you when I was 
in  Vienna  in March but alas I was at the mercy of my friends who have cars and, 
as luck would have it,they were all so busy at various things I was left stranded in 
Vienna  throughout my brief visit.  However I shall be spending September, October 
and November in  Austria  and I very much look forward to seeing you then.


I had a letter from  Edward Mendelson  yesterday and he asked 
me to send you his very best wishes which I do along with my own.  I hope this 
finds you in good spirits and that Summer is  being  better behaved in  Austria   than 
it is here in  Ireland .


With all good wishes, 
Yours very sincerely,


Mich ae l  O'Sullivan 


MICHAEL O'SULLIVAN .










Die Baro n in Stell a  Mus so lin 
Wien III 
Neulingasse 26 .



W . H .  Auden 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 






Die Baronin 
Stella Musuli m 
Wien III 
Neulinggasse 26.


14 



W .H  Auden 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



Dienstag. 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear  Sell  Stella : 
Many thanks for your card. 
Cant get i m  t o   Vienna  before 
Fr iday ,  but do come and see  us 
eith e r on your way to or from 
Fridau ,or let  us  know when we 
could call  ,_ 
Wystan 







Die Baronin 
S t ella Musulin 
Fridau 
Obergrabe m d o r f 
b e i S. Pölten 
N.Ö 
Osterreich 


Wien III 
Neuling g . 2 6 /1 4 



W.H. Auden 
Berlin-Dahlem 
Hubertusbaderstrasse  4 3 
Germany 



JOSEPH WEINHEBER 
( I892-I945) 


Reachi j ng my gate a narrow 
Lane from the village 
Passes on into a wood: 
When I walk that way 
It seems becoming to stop 
And look through the fence 
Of your garden where(under 
The circs they had to) 
They buried you like a loved 
Old family dog. 


Categorised enemies 
Twenty years ago, 
Now next-door neighbors,we might 
Have become good friends, 
Sharing a common ambit 
And love of the word, 
Over a golden Kremser 
Had many a long 
Language on syntax,commas, 
Versification. 


Yes,yes,it has to be said: 
Men of great damage 
And malengine took you up. 
Did they,though,ever 
Take you in,who to  Goebbels ' 
Offer of culture 
Countered  In Ruah lassen! ? 
But the crowd prefers 
A nasty stink and the young 
Condemn you unread. 


What,had you ever heard of 
Franz J ä gerst ä tter , 
The  St.Radegund  peasant 
Who said his lonely 
Nein  to the Aryan State 
And was beheaded, 
Would your heart,as Austrian, 
As poet,have told you? 
Good care,of course,was taken 
You should hear nothing, 


Be unprepared for a day 
That was bound to come, 
A season of dread and tears 
And dishevelment 
When,transfixed by a nightmare, 
You destroyed yourself. 
Retribution was ever 
A bungler at it: 
Dies alles ist furchtbar,hier 
Nur Schweigen gem ä ss .(I)  




(2


Unmarked by me,unmourned for, 
The hour of your death, 
Unhailed by you the moment 
When,providence-led, 
I first beheld  Kirchstetten 
On a pouring wet 
October day in a year 
That changed our Cosmos, 
The annus mirabilis 
When Parity fell. 


Already the realms that lost 
Were properly warm 
And over-eating,their crimes 
The pedestrian 
Private sort,those nuisances, 
Corpses and rubble, 
Lon f g carted away: for their raped 
The shock was fading, 
Their kidnapped physicists felt 
No longer homesick. 


To-day we smile at weddings 
Where bride and bridegroom 
Were both born since the Shadow 
Lifted,or rather 
Moved elsewhere. Never as yet 
Has Earth been without 
Her bad patch,some unplace with 
Jobs for torturers 
(In what bars are they welcome? 
What girls marry them?), 


Or her nutritive surface 
At peace all over. 
No one,so far as we know, 
Has ever been safe, 
And so in secret regions 
Good family men 
Keep eye,devoted as monks, 
On apparatus 
Inside which harmless matter 
Turns homicidal. 


Here,though,I feel as at home 
As you did: the same 
Short-lived creatures re-utter 
The same care-free songs, 
Orchards cling to the regime 
They know,from April's 
Rapid augment of color 
Till boisterous Fall 
When at each stammering gust 
Apples thump the ground. 




(3


Looking across  u our valley 
Where,hidden from view, 
Sichelbach  tottles westward 
To join the  Perschling , 
Humanely modest in scale 
And mild in contour, 
Conscious of grander neighbors 
To bow to,mountains 
Soaring behind me,ahead 
A noble river, 


I would respect you also, 
Neighbor and colleague, 
For even my English ear 
Gets in your German 
The workmanship and the note 
Of one who was graced 
To hear the viols playing 
On the impaled green, 
Committed thereafter  den 
Abgrund zu nennen .(2) 


___ 
N   I) Quotation from  W 8 ' s poem  Auf das Unabwendbare . 
2) Quotation from  W 's poem  Kammermusik . 
__


Dear  Stella : 
Kirchstetten  is intending to have a  cer o emony in memory of the twentieth 
anniversary of  Weinheber ' w s  death .  Herewith my effort to do my 
Gemeindepflicht. 
love 


Wystan . 


P.S. Expect to return  K  April 22nd. Do hope you 
wil l  be  around . 







K ö nnen Sie Mittwoch 
a ns t att Donnerstag zum Abend e ssen kommen 


Auden 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


S onntag.


Dear  Stella : 
Good. Will be at  your place 
on Thu r sday (19th) at 6.p.m . 
Wystan 







WH Auden 
77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
N.Y. 10003 
U.S.A . 


A ir-Mail 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Wien A-1030 
Neulinggasse 26/14 
Austria 




77 St Mark's Place 
N.Y.C. 
N.Y. 1003 


Nov 6 th .


Dear  Stella : 
Many thanks for your letter. Of course, 
selfishly, I'm rather reli v eved. How horrid 
one is ! 
The  U.S.  is grim. 
love 
Wystan . 







JOSEPH WEINHEBER 
(1892-1945) 
Von meiner Garten n tür führt ein schmaler Pfad vom Dorf weiter 
einen Wald.  Auf meinen Gängen dorthin scheint es gehörig, stehen z 
bleiben und durch den Zaun deines Gartens zu schauen, in dem man 
dich (die Umstände verlangten es) wie einen alten geliebten  H F amilien 
hund begrub. 
Vor zwanzig Jahren kategorisierte Feinde, jetzt nah benachbart, 
wären wir vielleicht gute Freunde geworden, die eine gemeinsame 
Umwelt und Liebe für das Wort teilten, und hätten bei einem gold- 
hellen Kremser lange Gespräche über Syntax, Kommas und Verskunst 
geführt. 
Ja, ja, es muss gesagt werden, Machthaber, Männer grossen 
Unheils und Übelwollens, nahmen dich auf;  für wie lang, doch, 
wickelten sie dich ein, dich, der auf  Goebbels  Angebot von Kultur 
"In Ruah lassen!" entgegnetest?  Aber Krethi und Plethi ziehen 
einen Stunk vor, und die Jungen verdammen dich ungelesen. 
Was wohl würde dir, dem Österreicher, dem Dichter, dein Herz 
gesagt haben, hättest du je von  Franz Jägerstätter , dem  Sankt 
Radegund er Bauern, gehört, der sein einsames Nein zu dem Ariersta t at 
sagte und geköpft wurde?  Natürlich sorgte man dafür, daß nichts 
davon zu Ohren kam, 
dass du unvorbereitet auf einen Tag sein solltest, der kommen 
musste, eine Zeit, voller Schrecken, Tränen und Auflösung, in dem 
du, der vom Albdruck erstarrt, dich selbst vernichtet e st? 
Vergeltung ging immer wie ein Stümper vor.  "Dies alles ist 
furchtbar, hier nur Schweigen gemäss." 
Unbemerkt und  b unbetrauert von mir die Stunde deines Todes, 
unbegrüsst von dir war der Augenblick, als ich, von der Vorsehung 
geleitet,  R Kirchstetten  zuerst erblickte, an einem Oktobertag  in  bei 
strömendem Regen, in einem Jahr, das unsern Kosmos veränderte, 
dem  annus mirabilis  als die Parität gestürzt wurde. 
Schon Schon waren die Reiche, die verloren ha b tten, genügend warm und 
sattgegessen, ihre Verbrechen waren auf prosaische und private Art, 
jene Ärgernisse, Tote und Schutt, längst weggeschafft:  für ihre 
Geschändeten verblasste der Schock, ihre gewaltsam entführten 
Physiker hatten kein Heimweh mehr. 
Heute lächeln wir bei Hochzeiten, bei denen Braut und Bräutigam 
schon auf der Welt waren als sich der Schatten gehoben hatte oder 
vielmehr weitergerückt war.  B Noch nie war die Erde ohne ihre faule 
Stelle, einen Unort mit Posten für Folterer, (In welchen Bars sind 
sie willkommen?  Welch e Mädchen heiraten sie?) 
noch nie war überall Friede auf ihrer nährenden Oberfläche: 
so viel wir wissen, ist niemand je sicher gewesen, und deshalb 
überwachen brave Familienväter, mit der Hingebung von Mönchen, in 
geheimen Zonen, Geräte, in denen harmlose Substanz menschenmörderisc 
wird. 
Doch hier fühl ich mich  t zuhause, wie du einst:  dieselben kurz- 
lebigen Geschöpfe stimmen wieder dieselben sorglosen Lieder an; 
Pbstgärten halten fest an dem Regime, das sie kennen, von des April 
rasch zunehmenden Farbtönen bis zum ungestümen Herbst, wenn bei 
jedem stotternden Windstoss Äpfel auf den Boden plumpsen. 
W enn ich über unser Tal - human bescheiden und sanft im Umris 
schaue, in dem der  Sichelbach  westwärts gurgelt, um sich mit der 
Perschling  zu vereinigen, bin ich mir bedeutenderen Nachbarn 
ehrfürchtig bewusst, der Berge, die hinter mir aufragen, vor mi 
des noblen Flusses, 
doch möcht ich auch dir Achtung erweisen, Nachbar und Kolle 
de 


⁒



denn selbst mein englisches Ohr erfasst in deinem Deutsch die 
Meisterschaft und den Tonfall einen dem es vergönnt war, auf dem 
gepfählten Anger die Violas zu hören, die ihn nachher dazu 
verpflichteten, sie "den Abgrund zu nennen".






Eil · Brief 


Die Ba r onin 
Stella Musulin 
1030  Wien  IV 
Neulingasse 26 



KIRCHSTETTEN, BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


A rri val,  Christiane 



KIRCHSTETTEN, BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Sunday.


Dear  Stella : 
I got your telegram yesterday just before 
lu n ch. Tried twice in the afternoon and once 
this morning to reach you , but umsonst. 
Am off to  England  to-morrow, s o  don't see how 
anything can now be arranged . 
If you think these can, please write me 
℅  Faber and Faber ,  24 Russell Square,W.C .  I 
So sorry 
love 
Wystan .








Wien , IV.67


AUFNAHME: 
OTTO BREICHA 
ALSERSTRASSE 48/31 
WIEN 9 






Sunday  J une 1 4t. 


Appendix or Endn o te


RETYPE DO U BLE 
SPACE


( 1 


E ngl i s h  orig inal  of  Auden ' s 
Speech delivered in German  at  Neulengbach  , 2? of May 1970 


Need exact 
d at e of 
Spee ch 


Who 
typed 
this ´ 
e g: 
whose 
p unctu 
i s 
it


Sehr vee rh hrter  Herr Landeshauptman n , meine Damen und Herren: 
I hope you will pardon me if I speak somewhat personally. I do so, 
not out of vanity,but bec ua ause  I do  j not wish to give the impression that I 
am attempting to lay down absolute laws which are valid for all. I give you my 
experience s  as a poet,in the hope that you will be able to compare the , m with 
yours own ,and form your own judgment about them. 
Most of what I  o 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,I spent a great many of my waking hours in 
the fab o rication of a private secondary sacred world,the basic elements of which 
were  at O  a) a limestone landscape mainly derived from the  Pennine Moors in the 
North of England  and b) an industry - 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 no t r 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 and machinery,maps,catalog i ues, 
guide-books and photographs,and,when occasion offered ,to  ta l ke me down real mines, 
tasks 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 'purest' poem,in the  French Symboliste  sense,is 
made of words which are not 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 discovere s d 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 I chose - it 
could not be played without rules. Absolute freedom is meaningless: freedom can 
only be realised in a choice between alternati c ves. 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 Beschr ä nkung zeigt sich erst der Meister , 
Und d s as Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben. 


Check 
Quote 
a n d give e xact 
source if 
possible


As regards my particu al l a r 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-turbine,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  was   could choose between 
t e wo practical possibilit es ies  - a mine can be drained either by an adit or a pump - 
but physic al impossibili es ties and magic means were forbidden.  T 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 Idea of a concentrating-mill,I ran into difficulties. I had to choose 
between two types of a cer at tain machine for separating the sli m es,called a buddle. 
One type I found more sacred or ' beat i uful  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  aeth eti c  aesthetic preference to reality or truth.




(2


W hen,later,I began to write poetry’ I  found th a t,for me, a t least,the same 
obligation was binding. That is to say,I cannot accept the do s ctrine that,in 
poetry,there is a 'suspension of belief e '. A poet must never make a statement 
simply because it sounds poetically exciting: he must also bel ei ieve 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 
n b e  convinced that the poet really believ es what he says,however odd  that  the 
belief may seem to oneself.


Change  co l on  to 
semi-colon ?


Between constructing a private  fantsa yfantasy world  f or oneself alone 
and writing poetry,there is,of course,a profound difference. A  fanatsy 
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  expereinces  experiences,and the goal of 
a poem is  necessaily  necessarily in the future,since it cannot be read until 
it has been 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 pecul iar to human 
beings,namely,Personal Speech. Many animals have impersonal codes of 
communications,visual,olfactory,auditory signals,b y which they convey to 
other members of their species vital information about food,territory,sex, 
the presence of  e nm ies  enemies,etc,and in social animals like the bee,such 
a co d e may be exceedingly comple s x. 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  spak  speak as person to person 
in order to disclose ourselves to others and share our exper ei i ences with 
them,not because we must,but becuase we enjoy doing so. This activity is 
sometimes quite erroneously called 'self-expression'. If I write a poem 
about  ceratin  experiences I have had,I do so ,not bec  bec ua a use I think it 
may should be of interest and value to others ,not : the fact that it has till now 
only been my exper ei ience 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 perpsective, 
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.


Ch a nge colon 
to 
semi . colon ? 


Change colon to 
semi .col on ?


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 of it. 


Check qu ot e 
and 
give 
source if poss ib le


Why  i s this passage 
under li ned ?


Then the second impulse to artistic fabrication is the desire to transcend 
our mort a lity,by making objects which,unlike ourselves,are not subject to 
natural death,but can remain  permantly  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 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, 
quite aside from their artistic merits, Palestrina  must have lived earlier 
than  Mozart : he could not possibly have written as he did after  Mozart . 
By  p Perman a ence,I mean  that the work continues to  h ave relev a nce and 
import a nce lo m g 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 histori a n of science,not 
to what scientists are doing at this moment. Past works of art,on the 
other hand,are of the utmost importance to the contemporary  praticioner . 
pra c tic o t o neroner. Every artist tries to pr od uce something new,but in the hope 
that,in time,it will take its  proper place in the tradition of his art. 
A nd he cannot produce any t hing significantly original unless he knows 
well what has  been  already been done ; w ithout ,th a t is to say , even in  he cannot 
're b el' against the p a st without having a profound reverence for it.


Change colon  ? 




(3


There are periods in history when  art  the arts develop uninterruptedly, 
each generation building on the achievements of the previous generation. 
There are other periods when radical breaks seem to be necessary. However, 
t when they are,one will generally find that the 'radical' artist does not 
diswon  disown the past,but finds in works of a much earlier period or in 
those of  anotehr  culture 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 
Medie av val Poetry.


INSERT 
? another


When I  revei w  review the contemporary artistic scene, I i t strikes me how 
extraorinary  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 manhood before 
I9I4. Until the  Fis   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  histroi  historic imperative. No one asked himself: " 'What is the proper 
kind of music to compose or picture to paint or poem to write in the year 
I9I2.? " '  Secondly,their  audiences  contemporary audiences  were mostly 
cons r ervative,but honestly so.  Those,for instance,who were scandalised by 
Le Sacre du Printemps ,may seem to us now to have been old  fgi  fogies,but 
their reaction was genuine. They did not say to themselves: " 'Times have 
changed and we must change with them in order  to be up to date."   not to 
be left behind. " ' 
Here are a few statements by  Stravinsky  to  whcih  which the young, w h ere where whether 
artists or critics,would do well to listen and  pknde   ponder over.


In my youth the new music grew out of,and in reaction to,traditions , 
whereas it appears to be evolving to-day as much from social needs 
as interior artistic ones...The status of  the  new music as a 
category is another incomparable. It had none at all in my early 
years,being in fact categorically opposed,and often with real 
hostility. But the unsuccess of composers o n f 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 t i o de a th. 
***


Again  : Why are 
all these 
p a s s ages 
un derline d  ? 


Check a n d 
give 
sourc e  if possible


The use of the new hardware naturally appears to the new musician 
a s  " 'historically imperative " '; but music is made out of musical 
imperatives,and the awareness of historical processes is probably 
best left to future and different kinds of wage-earners . 
***


Ch ec k and 
g ive 
so u rce  . 


In times,like our own,of rapid social change and political crisis,there i s 
always a danger of confusing the principles governing political action and 
those governing artistic fabrication.  The most important of such confus u ions 
are thr r ee. 
Firstly,one may come to think of artistic fabrication as  s a  f rom orm of politic a l 
action. Every citizen, artists poets includ i ed,has a duty to be politically  ' engagé ' , 
that is,to  feel  play a responsible part in seeing that the society of which 
he is a member shall function properly and improve. But the poet,qua poet, 
has only one political function. Since lang i uage is his medium,it is his duty, 
by his own example,to defend his  mot eh her mothermother-tongue against corruption by demagogues, 
journalists,the mass-media,etc. As  Karl Kraus s  said: " 'D ie Sprache ist die   Muuet 
Mutter,nicht das Magd,des  d   g Gedankens " ',and when language loses its meaning, 
its  palce  place is taken by violence. Of course,the poet may use political and 
social events as subject-matter for poems - they  a re as much a part of human 
experience as love or nature - but he must never imagine that his poems have 
the power to affect the course of history. The political and social history 
of Europ e  w o uld be what it  ahs  has been if  Dante , Shakepeare , Goethe , Micha le el 
Angelo , Tit ai ian , Mozart , Beethoven ,e y tc, ahd  had never existed.


C heck and 
give 
source




4


Where  politicla  political and social  eveils  evils are concerned,only 
t k wo 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 example,is to take 
arti t stic fabrication as the model for a good society.  The aim of any artist  
Such a model,if put into practice,is bound to produce a  tyrrany. tyranny The aim of 
the artist s  is to produce an object which is complete and will endure without 
change.  A  In the 'city' of a poem,there are always the same inhabitants doing 
exactly the same jobs for ever. A society 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, 
ex y termination  of the physically and mentally unfit,absolute obedience to 
its  D director,a  al large slave cla a ss kept out of sight in  f cellars,and the 
strictest censure e ship of the Arts,forbidding anything to be said which  was  is 
not  out of keeping with the official 'line .' '.


The third confusion,typical of our western  civilisat  'free'  soncietis 
societies at this time,is the opposite of  Plato 's,namely to take political 
act u ion as the model for arti t stic fabrication. Political action is a necessity, 
that is to say,a y t  very every moment something has to be done,and  politicla  it 
is momentary - action at this moment is immediately followed by another action 
at the next.  Artistic fabrication,on the other hand,is  voluntarily  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 arti t stic fabrication o s n political action can therefore,only 
reduce it to momentary  ( h    a d nd arbitrary 'happenings',a conformism with 
the tyrrany of the immediate moment which is far more enslaving and 
destructive of integrity than any conformism with past tradition.


i n sert 
4 ` a


What then,can the Arts do for us? In my opi o nion,they can do two things. 
They can,as  Dr Johns t on  said,'enable us a little better to enjoy life or a 
little better to  enjoy endure it " '. And, bec aas e  because they are objects  permant 
permanently on hand in the world,they are the chief means by which the  lvi 
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  the worlks  their wor l ks 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. 


So u rce ?


And now,I hope those of you who know no English will forgive me i s f 
I conclude d  these remarks with a light poem of my own,entitled 
Doggerel  of  by a Senior Citizen .   (see  CP  638-9).


I have added commas in lists after fin al  item and bef o re etc 
since they are a l ready  the re in  most  o f  the lists - 
I have a ls o  a dded a  f ew o th er comma  ( usuall y  t o co m ple te  a set  o f  pa renthetical comma s) 
I have n o  ch an ged c olon s  though  I wou l d  lik e to  :  Are  th ese  A 's ?




(4a


insert into  next preced i ng page


At this p in oint,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,i n my opinion  they are , in  my opinio n 
the exception,not the rule. The great virtue of formal metrical rules is 
that they forbid automatic  reposnse  resp i onses and,by forcing the  piet  poet 
to have second thoughts,free  f him f or rom 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 exper ei ience ,contrary 
to what one might exp s ect,the  writers o  free-verse poets sound much more 
like each other than those who write in fixed forms. Whatever freedom may do, 
it does not,it would seem,make for originality.


?  delete 
this 
comma ?







Ex press . 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Fridau 
3200 Obergrafendorf 
N.Ö 



W .H.  Auden 


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



Sept 18th.


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear  Stella . 
Del i ght e d to hear you are 
back. 
Could you and  your mother 
come to lunch  on  next Tuesday ? 
love 
Wystan 







W . H : Auden 
77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
New York 10003 
U.S.A 


Air-Mail


Die Baronin 
Stella M usulin 
Vienna III 
26 Neulingasse 
Austria 


Re arrival  interview 
Strobl .



52 6320 
Wa n dl ; 
Elizabeth   . 
Austria   . 



Feb 6th , 


77 St Mark's Place 
N.Y.C 3 .


Dear  Stella . 
I shall be arriving in  Vienna  next 
Monday morning (12th) and staying till 
the 16th in order to  interview a 
prospective couple  to take the  Eiermanns  place . 
Expect to be staying at the  Hotel 
Königin von Hungarn   . 
Will phone you. Do hope you are 
around · 
love 
Wystan 







Die Baronin 
Stella Mussolin 
WIEN III 
Neulinggasse 26 


FRIDAU 
OBERGRAFENDORF 
BEI ST - PÖLTEN 
N.Ö. 



W.H.Auden 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 






29.Mai.


Liebling , 
Ich  habe schon sehr lange nicht geschrieben, Du wirst 
Dich, fürchte ich, schon kränken.  Sehr schön war es, Deine 
Stimme zu hören, leider hattest Du nicht viel davon. 
Heute stehe ich immer noch unter dem Eindruck des  gest ir rigen 
Ausflugs  nach  Kirchstetten  wohin ich  Fritz Heer  verabredeter- 
maßen zum Essen mitnahm.  Diese manisch-depressive Genie, und 
dieser innerlich verschreckte Lausbub  Friedrich Heer , und der 
grosse englische Dichter  Auden , von  Kallman  ganz zu schweigen - 
wie würde das gehen?  Es ging großartig.  Fritz  war wie ein aus 
dem Gefängnis entlassener Mensch.  Monatelang kommt er nicht aus 
der Arbeitsroutine heraus, er freute sich so über das satte Grün 
des  Wienerwalds , über die Akazienbäume die immer wieder silbern 
schimmernd aus dem dü h nkleren Hintergrund herausleuchteten, ü v ber 
die gute Luft, die klare Sicht nach dem Sturm vor zwei Tagen. 
Ich  habe ein wenig Angst gehabt, die  beiden Großredner  würden 
gleichzeitig oder aneinander vorbeireden, aber das taten sie 
nur manchmal:  sie wollten von einander etwas erfahren, 
konnten aber natürlich nur immer wieder große Themen streifen, 
Anekdoten erzählen und so.  Jedenfalls war die Stimmung herrlich, 
Fritz  entpuppte sich als begabter "mimic", der nicht nur  Hitler 
zum besten nachmachen konnte, das können viele, sondern auf 
ganz unheimliche Weise  Mussolini  dem er plötzlich unglaublich 
ähnlich sah.  Hatte er also die verdorbenen deutschen und 
italienischen Sprachen illustriert, so ging er später auf die 
französischen Intellektuellen los:  ein zimperlich-geschwollene n s 
Gespräch zwischen  Gide  und  Claudel .  Es wurde über  Wagner s 
Texte gesprochen, über Liturgie-Reform, über  Weinheber ,  Rudolf 
Kassner  und  Freud  - über d i diese drei hatte  Fritz  persönliche 
Erlebnisse zu berichten gehabt.  Wenn ich  Fritz  beobachte, kann 
es sehr oft vorkommen, daß ich sein Gehaben mit den Augen der 
Konvention sehe, ohne diese Vor ein urteile zu empfinden - wenn 
Du das irgendwie verstehen kannst.  So hat  er , als  Auden  ihn 
begrüßte, ihm die Hand geküßt, und das war einerseits "unmöglich" 
und grenzte auch tatsächlich ans Lächerliche, wa f r es aber doch 
nicht, weil  Fritz  einfach aus allen Kategorien, in die man ihn 
hineinpressen möchte, herausplatzt.  Die Erklärung dafür, daß 
er doch nicht ganz lächerlich wirkt, ist die Natürlichkeit, die 
kind ische liche Freude, die er empfindet, im gegeben Fall das plötzliche 
und völlig unaffektierte Bedürfnis, einen großen Mann zu 
huldigen.  Interessant, daß  Heer  mit der  Droste-Hülshoff  und 
auch mit  Bertha Suttner  verwandt ist.


Ohne Zweifel liegt in und um das Wesen  Heer s etwas Tragisches . 
Er ist ebenso unentbehrlich wie unbrauchbar.  Seine große Linie 
stimmt, die Details nicht, das geht für seine geistige Arbeit 
wie für seine Persönlichkeit.  Die akademische Welt, wo immer 
sie von sturer, g e radliniger Mittelmäßigkeit (wie in  Wien ) 
beherrscht wird, empört sich und schiebt ihn von sich: er ist 
frivol, frevelhaft, frech, unorthodox, unberechenbar und - fast 
übertreibe ich da ein bißl - im soziologisch-biologischen Sinne 
artfremd.  Aber nicht nur in  Österreich :  er  sagte  mir , vor 
kurzem sagte ihm ein deutscher Universitätsprofessor ("er konnte 
es sagen, weiler Naturwissenschaftler ist"):  " Sie  müssen es 
mir glauben, daß es sich kein deutsches Professorenkollegium 
leisten kann, Sie zu sich zu nehmen." Ist er einfach zu 
unbequem?  Was aber seine Person enbelangt, so empfindet er es



als weitaus schwieriger, mit sich selbst auszukommen, als 
dies für d en ie Mitmenschen der Fall ist.  "Ich bin noch immer das 
verschreckte, verheulte Kind, das sich irgendwie durchschlagen 
mußte.  Ich bin nie reif geworden.  Ich heiratete zu früh, für 
die Ehe völlig unreif, mußte kämpfen, um meine F q amilie zu 
ernähren und hatte nie Zeit und Ruhe, um nachzudenken... 
ein völliges Versagen...  Mein Leben lang ringe ich mit dem 
Tod, kämpfe ich gegen Selbstmordgedanken...  Ich bin passé: 
man schreibt aus meinen alten Arbeiten kommentarlos ab"usw. usf. 
Diese und  ü ähnliche Dinge erzählte er mir auf der Rückfahrt, 
wo ich eine n  ruhige n  Nebenstrasse nach  Wien  wählte und langsam 
gefahren bin, aber inmitten dieser Depression war er immer wieder 
über die schöne Natur glücklich, über ruhige Dörfer und hübsche 
Häuser. sprach über diesen uralten Kulturboden, "wo die Leute 
noch heute Sachen tun, die vier, fünf Jahrtausende zurück liegen 
reichen, und sie wissen es nicht."


Des Rätsels Lösung, des fast überentwickelten Geistes neben 
der zerrissenen, ungleichmäßig ausgereiften Persönlichkeit, 
kennt er selbst, oder wenigstens zum Teil.  Es liegt i n m 
Entsetzen des 4-jährigen Kindes und in den seelischen 
Entbehrungen, die die Scheidung seiner Eltern verursachte.


Ärgerst Du Dich schon darüber, daß ich so viel über  Fritz 
Heer  schreibe und wahrscheinlich deshalb weniger über andere 
Dinge weil die Zeit fehlen wird?  Ich tue es teils weil  e  ich 
Dir darüber erzählen möchte, teils als eine Art von self- 
expression, weil mich  der Mann  seit 20 Jahren interessiert, seit 
ich seine Stimme zum ersten Mal 1948 in der  "Furche"  hörte. 
Damals habe ich sofort gewusst:  hier ist etwas Gr ßs oßes, das wir 
jetzt brauchen wie ein bißchen Brot.  (Damals keine abgedroschene 
Phrase.)  Und er ist auch für Dich interessant:  ich liefere 
Dir gern Zeugnisse, daß es Menschen gibt - Österreicher! - dem 
die nötigen Eigenschaften, die Zutaten aus dem ein Faschist 
geformt werden kann, gänzlich fehlen.  Plötzlich sagte er mir 
stah  strahlend:  " Kallman  hat mir er äz zählt, seine Vorfahren 
waren Juden aus  Riga ... Juden aus  Riga ."  Aus irgend einen Grund 
freute ihn das enorm, und gleich  k rie  kreisten seine Gedanken 
u in weiß Gott was für Konvolutionen.  Ach ja, jetzt weiß ich 
warum, er hat in  Riga  studiert und kannte wahrscheinlich jüdische 
Menschen dort.


Also Schluß.  Pfingsten:  fast durchwegs herrliches Wetter, 
es war zum T. Besuch draussen, u.a.  Sony ,  ihre Mutter  und die 
Amélie .  Marko  und ich sind Samstag vormittag hinaus- und 
erst Dienstag am späten Nachmittag hereingefahren.  Ich habe 
einen sehr netten Brief vom  foreign editor  der  Financial Times 
bekommen,  um  in dem er sagt, er ist mit meiner Arbeit sehr 
zufrieden und war auch darüber freudig überrascht, daß ich 
imstande bin, in ih e rem Stil zu schreiben - "wenigen gelingt es". 
Jetzt will ich Deine Fragen beantworten und sonst noch schauen 
was in Deinem letzten Brief steht.  Die grande toilette der  Eva 
für  Schönbrunn  war - ich kann Kleider so schlecht schildern - 
ein bis zum Boden reichendes Kleid in sanft grüner Farbe, aus 
einer  mit winzigen Perlen besticker, schwerer Seide.  Der Mantel 
mit ein wenig hochstehendem Kragen war aus dem gleichen aber 
unbesticktem Stoff.  Mein eigenes Kleid für die  Oper  war leider 
auch grün, ganz schlicht, gold-lurex Art, mit Seitenschlitz 
links bis zum Knie.  Für den makellosen Teint der  Königin  ist 
Veranlagung verantwortlich, ich habe selten jemanden mit einem 
so herrlichen Teint gesehen wie seinerzeit  die  ihre  Mutter , 
und diesen hat auch die  Prinzessin Anne  gee h rbt. 
Daß Deine Haut im Augenblick  k in keinem guten Zustand ist, 
ist sehr ärgerlich und ich frage mich, was die Ursache sein 
könnte.


Daß Du Schuppen hast, habe ich nie gemerkt, aber nimm 
doch einen guten Schuppen-Schaumpon.  Freilich kann das alles 
mit dem Alter zu tun  z haben.  Freuen wir uns auf den Teint, den 
Du nachher haben wirst...  Ich will mir  Livia s Stimme, wie sie






W . H . Auden 
℅  Heyworth 
32 Bryanston Square 
London. W.I. 
England 


A ir-M ail 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Wien  IV III 
Neulinggasse 26 
A ustria  .


Re  Czech refugees  .




℅  Heyworth 


32 BRYANSTON SQUARE  LONDON W1 · AMBASSADOR 8906 


Tuesday


Dear  Stella : 
Got back from  Oxford  yesterday and found your 
lett e r 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 , includi ng 
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, w hen  I '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 . 
Shall be here  in  my address until Oc t  31.st After that 
77 St Mark's Place .N.Y.C. N.Y 10003  . 
love 
Wystan 


Here, I suggest 
you cont a ct 
Otto Hoffmann . 
Wien VII 
Karl Schweighofgasse 
4/21 
Tel. 93/88/155.







M i t Fl u g-P os t


Bitte Weiterschicken 


ENGLAND 


Die Baronin 
Stella Mus u l in 
W en IV   Wien III 
Neuling gasse 26/14 .


2 Sea f orth 
St.  J ulian's Street 
TENBY 
Pembrokeshire 



W . H.Auden 


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



July 6th . 


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear  Stella : 
Have just f in ish e d reading  Aust ria" 
by which I was enchanted a s  w e ll as 
i nstructed. My !  how er u dit e  you are ,  Where  did 
you dig up all th os e stories ? 
A trifle alarmed that it may attract more 
to u rist s ,which I' m  sure you don't welco m e 
any m or e than I do. (Thanks , by t he  way, 
for the reference to my garage.) . 
Am very cur iou s to learn mor e  about  " The L i fe 
and A d venture s of  Peter Prosch . "  Is it in print? 
Shoul d n't it be translated? 
As you say, the relati on   b etw e n art and society 
i s  v ery odd. Why should  th e  Vienna  of 1 8 90-1918 
ha ve  pro d uced such a florescence , ? ( Chester  can 
appreciate  Bruckner  better than I) . . Even odder to 
me is the  Biedermayer peri od,  No one can 
possibly approv e  of  Metternich 's police state,yet, 
in a more liberal mil e ieu, could  St i fter , 
Rai m und ,  Nestroy , have  wr itten what they did? 
Hope this reaches yo u.  Loo k ing forw ar d to se e ing yo u 
in Sept 
love and ad m irat ion 
Wystan 







Lunch with  W . H . A.  at the  O pern-Café  on 
13th' Feb.19 6 8 .


T alk of awful impasse in  Vietnam 
War ;  W.   so  afraid of use of nuclear 
weapons that he can hardly  b ear to 
read or listen to the news  ,  Feels US 
will have to get out;perhaps to 
blame for the  " Pueblo "  affair  &  wa r s 
in territorial waters. 
may have to vote Repu b lican ,   thou gh 
he's never done  so   b efore,be c ause the 
Demo c rats really have no one for 
President . 
Says the Hippies are  m oving in on 
his district . I asked what a hippy 
does when he gets old;  W ,  said thats' 
What he asks them; too soon to tell . 
Told him ab ou t  Hundertwasser   & 
his naked protests. 
I  s Said I was glad he had told 
British young people that L.S.D is 
a dead duck for  c reative workers . 
W ,  told me  a t some length about 
his   trials of LSD & m escalin , 
Point is that young people need 
to discover who & what they are  . - 



&L . S . D. doesn't tell them, its' a 
pa ss ive effe c t in which there is  some 
alienat io n from  se lf . You con ce ntrate 
on things (chair, c e iling  ),people 
be c ome unimportant.  s 
effe c t of listening to music - 
intolerabl e  as the sounds lo s e 
their interrelatio n  & form. 
Basi c ally, you achieve a mild 
d egr ee of schizophrenia.  Huxley 
did a  lot  of  h arm by  pu bli s h ing 
his experien c es with mes c alin , 
making people think it is 
an artistic experien c e.  W. 
had  t o add colour effe c ts . 
A wf ul  s tory about young people 
having gone blind was invented - 
q uite untrue .  He did it in 
compa n y with  his doctor  and 
they went round to lo c al pub. 
Suddenly saw a postman waving 
at him & thought "this is it. - 
Later postman said " I waved 
at you , why didn't you  answ er ?" 



2 


Tal k ed with great enthusiasm 
about  "Mayhew" . Said  th is is the 
greatest work of the 19th '  centu r y . 
Has just  reviewed new issue 
in 4  V olumes in the  New Yorker . 
Said h ow  well it pays to do 
a le c ture / reading tour. In 
6 weeks he  c an c lear  15,000  $ . 
But it's  " killing "  - the  s ocial 
life side  which you can't  s kip. And 
if you do meet someone 
interesting y our' e torn apart 
after  2 or  3 minutes , 
W.  had  fl own over for  4  days 
to interview  couple  for  Kir c hstetten  , 
&  had to return to  N _ Y .







W.H.Auden 
77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 3 
New York IOOO3 
U.S.A. 


Air-Mail 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Fridau 
32 o OO Obergrafendorf 
N. Ö . 
Austria 




77 St Mark's Place 
New  York City 3 
New York IOOO3 


Feb 3rd,I96 5 6


Dear  Stella : 
Many thanks for your nice long letter.  Stephen  has a genius for 
subtle misrepresentation. "Serious insistence on unseriousness' 
telescopes two  cnvictuons distinct convictions of mine,falsifying both. 
I) 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  plotical  political history of  Eur i ope ,with  all its the same horrors, 
would be what it has been,if  Dante , Shakespeare , Goethe , Titian , 
Mo x zart ,et al,had never existed. 
2) I believe that the only way in which,to-day at any rate,one can 
speak  seroiu   s eriously   seriously  about serious matters(the alternati c ve 
is silence) is comically. I am surprised to hear from you that 
Jews find this hard to accept. I have enormously admired - and 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, and  the contradictions of human existence,and the relation 
between man and God,occasions for humorous expression. 
e.g,: "If the rich could hire other people to die for them,the poor 
cou o ld make a wonderful living", or "Truth rests with God alone,and 
a little bit with me",or "God will provide - ah,if only He wou o ld till 
He does so." 
So! you encountered the  one-whose-name-we-never-mention . Why  Chest r er  should 
have been so foolish as  to invite him to a p e arty,I cannot imagine. If he 
is to be seen at all,he  jy must be seen alone. Incidentally,next time you see 
Chester ,scold him a) for not writing to me b) for not answering  Harrison 's 
cable. 
All well here.except for a leaking kit v chen roof. No doubt you read about 
our  Black-Out  and  Transit Strike .(My typewriter is on the blink,hence the 
hiatuses.)  A  firen  friend of mine who teaches schyzophrenics ,has a seventeen 
year old girl who is interested in poetry. Asked what poets she liked,she 
mentioned me. " i I happen to know him quite well",said  my friend . To which the 
girl in astonishment:"You mean to say,he's still  alive !". 
Expect to get back to  Kirchstetten  about April 20th. 
much love and  g reetings to  son  and  mum-in-law 
Wystan .







In Retrospect . 
Since then the  Auden  industry has not been idle.  An 
excellent  biography  was published1 and  k in this the Austrian 
period was dealt with but not locally researched.  Edward 
Mendelson  edited  Auden ´s early works and wrote superb commentaries. 
There has been a biography of  Chester Kallman .  Writers of PhD 
theses have been out here and have shaken us up, particularly 
Michael O´Sullivan  of  Trinity College, Dublin  who - not speaking 
a word of German - organised a full-scale  exhibition and an 
international symposium in  Vienna .  The editor of this volume 
Peter Müller  had brought  Michael  out to see  me  at  Fri e dau  in the 
preceding year;  now  he  came again, and after the closure, 
exhausted, he spent a long weekend in the country to recover. 
We dug out ancient files containing original  Auden  manuscripts, 
letters, personal notes and newspaper cuttings, and now we tried 
to winnow the wheat from the chaff.  After some general discussion 
it seemed to us all that there remain certain aspects of  Auden ´s 
life in  Lower Austria  which are not on record, or where they are, 
not from the worm´s eye view.  As an older man  he  was happier 
here than anywhere else:  he felt at home.  He was at  Kirchstette n 
not only during the summer,  i as is often said, but with 
interruptions for five months, depending on his engagements. 
In the course of these years he was still highly  productive 
creative.  So that it might, we thought, be of value to put some 
of those things on record which would otherwise be lost.  Not 
for the first time self . -criticism was expressed, but while doubts 
concerning self-importance s and sell-out of f i riendship were not 
entirely banished, the view prevailed that the local witness 
needs to be put on paper.  Scholarship is at work elsewhere; 
here a few appendices and footnotes are on offer. 
Auden ´s opinions on biographies of creative artists in general 
were, as  Humphrey Carpenter  pointed out, highly contradictory. 
Again and again he said that the private life of poets and other 
people engaged in creative work is none of the public´s business 
but he also said : ´`The biography of an artist, if his life as a w hole 
was sufficiently interesting, is permissible, provided that the 
biographer and his readers realise that such an account throws no 
light whatsoever upon the artist´s work."  And "I do believe, 
however, that, more often than most people realise,  k his works 
may throw light upon his life."


1  Hum ö phrey Carpenter :  W.H. Auden, a Biography  ( Houghton Miffli n 
Company, Boston  1981.)




- 2 -


Carpenter ´s  book  calls itself "a first biography", and the 
author expressly restricts his aims:  "It is not a work of literary 
criticism".  It may also be felt to lack an analysis of some 
fundamental questions:  about the depths of the  poet ´s personality, 
his "otherness" (to confine this to his homosexuality would be to 
oversimplify) and the basis of his all-important relationship 
with  Chester Kallman .  As a star it ting point,  "Early Auden" 1 which 
presents an s d comments on the poetry, drama and prose up to 1939 
is most valuable, and  Edward Mendelson  will produce further works 
of scholarship. 
What would  Wystan Auden  say if he could read  "Auden in Love" 
by  Chester ´s old coll a ege friend and last-minute stepmother  Dorothy 
J. Farnon ?2  In July 1985 the  Sunday Times  published a list of 
recommended holiday  books  reading.  The assessment of  "Auden in 
Love"  was a model of compression:  "emetic but compulsive". 
I more than once came up against  Auden ´s idée fixe about the 
irrelevance of the poet´s private self, and asked him one day: 
"So no rotting apples in the desk drawer?"  "No, no rotting apples 
"And if you have an attack of the trots and interrupt your work?" 
"That would make no difference at all."  Chester ´s sole explanatio 
was that it was "a tick like any other", and that in any case he 
was totally inconsistent.  Be that as it may, if the effect on the 
general public was judged as emetic,  Auden ´s nausea can be 
imagined.  All the same, it is a fascinating book, and for people 
who knew the two men only in  r the later years of their lives, does thro 
light on apparently conflicting phenomena and makes their actions, 
and  Chester ´s character in particular, more comprehensible. 
When  Auden  first met  Kallman  he was just 32 and already a poet 
with an established reputation, respected and even revered on 
many a campus.  Kallman  was an 18 year old undergraduate, 
brilliant, beautiful, foca s l l point and leader of a crowd of young 
intellectuals of both sexes.  He was a  Dorian Grey  figure, 
sparkling a and damned, hero and victim, immature and over-ripe, 
sensitive and heartless, a man capable of loving and of being


1 Edward Mendelson :  Early Auden ,  Faber and Faber  1981. Also: 
W.H. Auden: Collected Poems , ed.by  E.Mendelson ,  Faber  1976, and 
The English Auden ,  same Editor ,  Faber  1977.
2 Dorothy J Farnon :  Auden in Love .  Simon & Schuster, NY ,  Faber 
London 1 




- 3 -


loved but who was already - though  Auden  did not know it - 
add di i cted to promiscuity.  In literature and music his knowledge 
was, for his age, above average, but when important examinations 
loomed a kind of petulant mood would come over him and he would 
fail to appear. 
Chester  never wanted to earn his living, and all his life he wa s 
supported financially by other people, particularly by  Auden . 
He usually promptly lost what he was given because he was 
perpetually being robbed by se ö amen picked up on the wharfs of 
New York .  By one of them he was robbed of three months´ income 
in succession.  Or else he gave it away:  no matter what actually 
happened, the money left his pocket. 
The scene shifts to a flat in the  Esslingasse in Vienna´s 
3rd District , where  Kallman  once spent the winter.  He gave a 
party  one evening, and afterwards I took two or three of the men 
part of t i heir way home in my car.  When  Chester  told me later on 
that the m s an who, as it chanced, had been sitting beside me, had 
gone off with 2,000 schillings taken out of the pocket of a 
jacket hanging on the bedroom door, I could not know that this 
was not a mere incident but almost a matter of routine.  When, 
ultimately, he took with him to  Athens  80,000 sch. in cash 
(proceeds of the sale of a building plot) and lost it all on the 
way, this mishap was almost a foregone conclusion. 
That the sexual relationship between  Auden  and  Kallman 
ceased as far back as 19 5 41 is well known:  from that time on - 
there is evidence in the poetry - sex and love became, for  Auden , 
t o wo separate matters.  He felt married to  Chester  (when he was 
not Mother) for the rest of his life, and he wrote that  Chester 
was the only person who, emotionally and intellectually, was 
wholly indispensable to him. 
Like it or not, this statement has to be accepted with all 
the weight it carries.  It was never possible, even in the 
Austrian era, to keep  Chester  in purdah for long, and when ther e 
was a visitor from  Athens  at  Hinterholz 6  there could be tensio n. 
Auden  gave orders to  Yannis Boras  in the abrupt tones of a 
colonial Englishman of yore speaking to the "boy", and when I 
asked one day at lu c nch: "Where is, er....?" he said with a




- 4 -


smirk of satisfaction: "I sent him up on to the roof to mend tiles." 
But fundamentally nothing had changed between them:  this explains 
his Auden ´s intense anxiety over the  death of  Boras  in a car accident in 
Lower Austria , and his fear communicated itself to me as I searched 
for  Chester  in  Vienna .  It was nearly Christmas, what on earth 
would become of him, distraught and alone?  (He had in fact not 
go en ne to  Austria  after all, but had not let  Auden  know.) There 
followed the gloomy summer  l of 1969 when  Chester  was sunk in deep 
depression while  Wyśtan  had a full work programme, and when he 
told me he could hardly think how  Chester  would get through the 
summer1 this was indeed Mother speaking. 
What was it in  Chester Kallman  that made him so entirely 
indispensable to  Auden ?  Perhaps the question is impossible to 
answer;  some may hold it to be inadmissible, or attempts to find 
points of reference impertinent.  Others again may find the whole 
subject unappetising.  But to anyone with an interest in psycholog y 
in the processes of cre w a tivity in general and in those of  Auden 
in particular, there is no way of getting round this essential 
relationship.  It may, after all, come to be seen as one of the 
most curious in the history of English literature. 
In their love of music, of opera above all,  Kallma n n was in 
the lead.  He was a minor poet who wrote because he needed to do s o 
but his output was slight.  Yet in many spheres which were of 
intense interest to  Auden  he had little, sometimes nothing to offe r: 
German literature (though  Chester  picked  i up languages with uncomm o n 
facility;  Wystan ´s  G  spoken German was execrable but his compre- 
hension unerring), the history of cultures, religion and liturgy, 
translation.  When I was with  them   Wystan  did not only most of the 
talking, but of the asking as well; his great charm lay in his 
alert interest in other people´s work, and he would draw one out 
on the odder backwaters of Austrian history.  This side of him com e s 
out in a letter dated 6 July 1970.  When the historian  Friedrich 
Heer  and  Y Auden , both entranced, struck sparks off one another all 
afternoon,  Kallman  was silent.  Kallman  lacked  Auden ´s sensitivity 
to places and people,  ot  to the  genius loci ;  perhaps it was just 
that he was an American, and a New Yorker, while  Auden  never


1 refers to  1976 text .




- 5 -


lost his roots in  Europe . 
On his own ground, operatic libretti,  Chester Kallman  was 
still in good running order, and when the  Rake´s Progress  was put 
on in  Vienna  he wrote a letter to  Die Presse  protesting sharply 
over against the cuts  which had been  made by the  producer .  But of that 
conversational brilliance which old friends have described there 
was little sign.  A scene comes to mind:  Auden  was away, and  Chester 
asked me to meet him for lunch at a restaurant off the  Kärntner- 
strasse .  A young man whose background clearly lay somewhere 
within the crime belt near the  Prater  was with him, and soon the 
youth  s and I were engrossed in conversation, while  Chester  feeling 
out of it, sulked.  Immediately after coffee it seemed best to 
leave them.  Chester ´s intelligence and wit had not deserted him 
but they had too little scope, and, perhaps owing to his carp-like 
appearance, he was liable to be underestimated.  He was good-natured, 
in course of time even affectionate, hospitable and amusing.  He 
looked after  Auden  devotedly and we know that he was able to banish 
Auden ´s loneliness as no one else could.  His misfortune was that 
he lacked those qualities which  Auden  possessed and which decide 
between success and failure. 
It cannot, all the same, have been easy living on a long-term 
basis with  Auden  in  New Yo w rk  while attempting, even though 
fitfully, to develop his own personality and talents.  Putting up with  Auden ´s 
fads, his insistence on punctuality and the rigid routine was one 
thing;  to grow up, to mature in the shadow of this oversized tree 
was another.  There was not enough light.  So he fled, but without 
Mother there was no way he could live at all. 
It is essentia sl l, in the light of what happened later on, to 
remember  Auden ´s generosity.  His  biographer  mentioned the two boys 
whose further education was financed by  Auden :  I can confirm this 
as we lived next door to them for a few years.  They were the sons of 
an artist;  both made rapid careers in industrial management.  But 
there were other examples.  Wyst s a n  had telephoned and asked me to 
meet him and  Chester  at the  Operncafé  - the much-missed café- 
restaurant next to the  Opera , now a car salesroom.  They were waiting 
for  Balanchine  to join them after the performance, but we waited in 
vain and fi kn na lly gave up and went home.  There was a fourth at our 
table, a silent young man who,  Chester  said in an undertone, was 
a student of technology and  Wyst sa an  was helping with his studies.




- 5a -


It turned out that he lived not far from  my flat  so we drove 
off together, and he suddenly broke his silence to ask:  "Who 
is this  Professor Auden  - is he well known?" 
There was a brief flurry after the  1968 uprising in 
Czechoslovakia .  Towards the end of  Auden ´s summer residence at




- 6 -


Kirchstetten  the question cropped  i up whether he would be willing 
to lend the house to a  Czech refugee  and  his wife .  By mid- 
October  Auden  was in  England , and he  wrote  from  London , c/o 
Heyworth ,  32 Bryanston Square :


Dear  Stella , Got  back  from  Oxford  yesterday and found your 
letter waiting.  1) I think I ought to take the  couple  in, 
but I m k ust 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 m k u uch 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 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  Burgom a eister ..." (sic).


In the end nothing came of  ö i t, but the letter is quoted 
here because it is so characteristic;  the  follow-up  is even 
more so.


77 St. Mark´s Place   Nov 6th 
NYC 
NY.1003 


Dear  Stella , 
Many thanks for your letter.  Of course, 
selfishly, I´m rather relieved.  How horrid 
one is! 
The  U.S.  is grim. 
Love, 
Wystan .


Great generosity (these facts, even separately, are known 
to no more than two or three people)  ed  e xi sted combined in  Auden ´s 
character quite readily with his legendary stinginess in the 
small things of everyday life such as stamps or cigarettes. 
"Life" magazine , he told me one day with a beaming smile, had 
just paid him 5,000 dolla sr r s for an article.  "I´m thinking 
of building on a diningroom."  "Very good idea" I said, 
"but for a start I shall smoke your cigarettes for the rest of 
the afternoon."  I very much doubt whether I did.  On the other 
hand he would order things to be sent out from  Vienna   a without 
a second thought.  After  his car accident  he sent me a message 
and I drove out to  Kirchstetten .  He was dishevelled and cross. 
It´s a curious thing, he said, but the first chap  you see  who 
takes any notice of you when you´re carried into hospital is not




- 7 -


the doctor but the man from the accounts offic d e who wants to 
know how you propose to pay for your treatment.  No, he said, 
he didn´t really need anything and  Chester  would arrive shortly, 
but he was running out of gin.  If I´d be an angel and ring 
up  Wild  on the  Neuer Markt  and ask them to send a few bottles out - 
he told me the brand name - that would be splendid. 
When the friendly voice on the end of the line had repeated 
the order I ö asked when they would be making their next delivery 
in the area around  Kirchstetten .  "Oh but we never deliver out 
there" said the voice, "We make a special trip for the  Herr 
Professor ."  Startled, I exclaimed "For goodness´ sake, that must 
cost him a packet - you can buy that brand of gin in  Böheimkirchen !" 
"Certainly you can" said the voice which now sounded amused, 
"but why do we have to worry our heads over the way a Herr 
Profess s o r flings his money around?"  I liked the "we". 
What was so American about the kitchen?  
When fitted kitchens first came in the Austrians calle s d d 
them "American" - the term is now as ex d tinct as "Russian" tea 
but m k ust still have been common parlance in  Kirchstetten . 
There was a tidy line-up consisting of fridge, sink, low 
cupboards providing a good working surface,,a corner  f cupboard 
the interior of which s x wung out, and a gas stove.  Both men  were 
very proud of the kitchen and it became  Chester ´s habitat. 
But the whole point of a modern kitchen:  the labour-saving 
working area, ample storage space, accessibility, was totally 
cancelled out by the permanent clutter.  It was a matter of 
principle with  Chester  to have all cooking ingredients con c veniently 
to hand, which meant that nothing was ever put away, and where 
his loving eye saw method, even the least fussy visitor could 
only see a shambles.  But an interesting shambles owing to the 
exotic nature of the preserved foods and spices which  Chester 
brought with him.  There was  a  for example a dried leaf which, 
detected by me in a casserole, was said to have no flavour but 
to serve as a stimulus or bridge to other flavours. 
It was clear from the beginning that the two of them were 
not so much drinking as eating their way into their graves  i owing


1  Wystan Auden ,  A On Installing an American Kitchen in Lower 
Austria , in  Homage to Clio , ( Faber and Faber  1960).




- 8 -


to the enormous fat content of some of the dishes.  I remember 
my horror as I watched a sauce being prepared in the mixer befor e 
it was re-heated to accompany the roast duck.  It consisted of 
equal parts of rendered down duck  v fat and cream, and would have 
sustained a miner at the  cola  coal face for an indefinite period 
of time.  If they could possibly help i it, of course, neither 
Wystan  nor  Chester  ever walked a yard.


Whether or not - and  Chester  was convinced that this was so - 
the business about  alleged arrears of income tax  shortened  Auden ´s 
life must be left open.  The  "Declaration"  to the tax authorities 
in which a great poet patiently explains how poetry comes to be 
written must be unique and deserves a place in the history of 
literature.


Declaration . 1  
Gentlemen, 
My position is very simple: one pays income tax where one 
earns money, that is to say in my case, as a writer writing in 
English, in the  United States  and in  England .  In  Austria  I 
earn not one groschen, I merely spend sch u illings. 
You maintain that I possess a "material interest" in  Austria , 
by which you presumably mean a "financial" interest.  That might 
conceivably be the case if I had to say to myself:  "I must go 
to  Austria  because I can only work in  Austria !"  But that is not 
the case.  I have lived in many places in many different countries 
and was always able  e to work wherever I might be. 
I naturally have a "p ö e e rsonal" interest in  Austria , otherwise 
I should not come here.  The landscape is pleasing, and I find 
the Austrians whose acquaintance I have made, friendly ansd 
charming. 
You say correctly that I once  received  n an Austrian prize 
for lieterature.   This was a great honour of which I am very 
proud.  You cannot however serioiusly believe, Gentlemen, that I 
calculated:  "If I continue to go to  Austria  maybe I shall be 
given a prize"?  Until it was awarded to me I had never heard 
of  the this prize.  It is equally clear that I cannot receive it a


1 Translation  from the German text which is a manuscript, not a 
letter.  An  English original  is not known to exist and it is 
assumed that  Auden  destroyed his draft.




- 9 -


second time.  You also go on to say that a road in  Kirchstetten 
has been named  Audenstraße  after me.  That was a very kind gesture 
on the part of the local council, but it cannot be maintaine s dd 
that I profit from it  i financially. 
Further, you say with truth that I have written several poems 
in A   with o j n Austrian themes.  To this I would like to make three 
statements.


1.  I have never, in  Austria , received so much as one 
penny for my poems.  One or two of them have been trans- 
lated into German, but in these cases the translators have 
received the money, not I. 
2.  I believe you are not clearly aware how poetry comes 
to be written.  What is generally taken to be the subject 
matter is only a viewpoint, an occasion whereby certain 
thoughts about nature, God, history, mankind etc. may be 
expressed which the poet may have had in mind for a very 
long time.  I wrote, for example, a  poem to commemorate the 
20th anniversary of the death of  Josef Weinheber . 
Fundamentally however the  poem  is concerned with quite 
different things.  First of all it is about the love 
which every poet, whatever his nationality, has for his 
mother tongue, and secondly about what happened after the 
war  in the countries which were defeated, i.e. not only 
in  Austria  but in  Germany  and  Italy .  Again:  in 1964 
I wrote a poem with the title  "Whitsunday in Kirchstetten" 
because it was where I happ p ened to be.  But the place is 
unimportant.  In real t ity the question in this poem is 
what, for a Christian, is the meaning of the Feast of 
Pentecost.  And this is valid for all countries in the 
same way. 
3.  I believe you do not clearly recognize a poet´s (Dichter) 
financial s k ituation.  If he is suc e c essful, a novelist 
can ma , ke a good deal of money.  A poet (Lyriker) cannot, 
even if he is very well known, because he is only read 
by a minority.  By far the greater part of my income 
comes not from the sale of my volumes of poetry but from 
book reviews, translations, lectures etc., activities 
which have nothing to do with  Austria .  A m n d while we are




- 10 -


on the subject of translation : s  you rightly say that 
I have a great int r erest in German and Austrian literatu r 
I may add in music as well - but I do not have to come 
to  Austria  in order to read or to hear them. 
You see f er o r o m all  the above  this that the arguments brought 
forward by you for subjecting me to payment of income tax are not 
valid.  The most pertinent argument against it is that in the 
course of one year I always stay under six months in  Austri sa aa 
and never spend more than three months here consecutively. 
A word in conclusion: if this in my view entirely unjustifiable 
nonsense does not cease, I shall leave  Austria  never to return, 
which would be very sad for me and perhaps too for the shopkeepers 
i of  Kirchstetten .  One thing, Gentlemen, I cannot conceal from you: 
if this should happen it m k ight give rise to a scandal of worldwide 
dimensions. 
W.H. Auden .


1 You ask why I have made over my half of  our property  in 
Kirchstetten  to  Mr Chester Kallman  who is not related to me. 
Mr Kallman  is my heir.  I have no children and for years past 
he has been my literary collaborator.  s Jointly, we have written 
five new opera libretti,  "The Rake´s Progress ,  "Elegy for Young 
Lovers ",  "The Bassarids_"  and  "Love´s Labours Lost" .  And 
together we have made new translations of  "The MagiccFlute" , 
"Don Giovanni" ,  "Die Sieben Todsünden" ,  "Mahagonny"  and 
"Archifanfaro" .  I am now 65 years old and must reckon with all 
eventualities such as a heart attack.  As you know better than 
I, in the event of sudden death great difficulties arise for the 
heirs to landed property, particularly in a foreign country.


1 The German text was typ e d on a different machine, and the 
separate page joined to the  D d D e claration .  




- 11 -


"Every day f p or the past year" said  Chester  "I have stood 
outside his door in the early morning, afraid to go in." 
This was later.  Now,  Auden  was dead , the voice issuing 
from the car radio had just said so.  A few days ago we had 
talked about his  reading in the  Society for Literature  on 28 
September .  Unfortunately, I said, I was obliged to drive to 
Linz  and to spend the n k ight there, but they were welcome to use 
my  Vienna flat .  It was maddening and I would just as soon 
put it off.  No, said  Auden , mustn´t do that, one should stick 
to one´s commitments.  "And you won´t be missing much" he 
reassured me, "you´ve heard it all before."  We would meet again 
in a few days´time and then he would tell me all about it.  He was 
not sure about the fla a t s but he would let me know in good time. 
On 24 September he wrote a  note  to say that he did not need the 
flat, he would go to the  Hotel Altenburgerhof .  The handwriting 
is ragged. 
Linz  already lay far behind, the car radio went on m k uttering 
to itself unheeded until the familiar voice of  Friedrich Hee e r r r e 
came through, reading one of his book reviews.  It was consoling 
in a world where, suddenly, a signpost was missing.  W j hat are 
you howling about, I asked myself, what gives you the right to 
mourn for  Wystan ?  Think of  Chester .  It was impossible not to 
think of  Chester :  it was not so much a question how much he 
would grieve over the death of  Wystan , as how he would survive 
at all.  Leaving the autobahn at  St.Pölten  I drove straight to 
Kirchstetten ;  it seemed to be just possible that he might have 
arrived in the meantime.  But the green shutters were closed 
and there was no one about apart from the wall-eyed dog, an 
exceptionally hideous mongrel belonging to  Frau Strobl , which 
barked in an irritating falsetto.  He barked from a position close 
beside me while I wrote a note and stuck it in the chink between 
the door´s shutters, and he was still barking as I shut the 
garden gate behind me. 
The answer to my note was a telephone call from  Frau Strobl : 
Herr Kallman  said, would I come over to tea the next day? 
That was the Sunday.




-1 2-


The  sittingroom  seemed to be full of people .  - Chester  was 
sitting on the corner-seat facing the door, where  Auden  always 
used to sit, every  seat chair appeared to be occupied and two young 
men were sitting  in the back  on the floor.  Chester  hurried 
across the room, hugged me and said "The whole thing´s terrible, 
you have to help me." 
I was introduced to the others.  Mrs. Thekla Clark  and  her 
daughter  had come up from  Florence  as soon a as t e hey heard the 
news;  there was  Frau Maria Seitz , headmistress of the high school; 
in  Kirchstetten , the  mayor Herr Enzinge r  Herr Enzinger  the mayor 
of  Kirchstetten ,  a the film scriptwriter  Adolf Opel , and the young men. 
Clearly, the meeting to discuss the funeral arra g ngements was 
not proceeding smoothly.  The  mayor  looked annoyed,  Frau Seitz 
looked worried and  Mrs Clark  bewildered.  There were, of course, 
language difficulties.  Mayor Enzinger  spoke not a word of 
G English and the  Clarks  no German, while the  headmistress  had a 
certain command of English but did not feel up to acting as 
interpreter and adviser in one;  Chester ´a German was perfect k l y 
adequate. 
The root of the problem lay on a deeper level, where two 
separate cultures collided head on.  Chester  was barely coherent, 
but he managed to explain his point of view.  He loathed, from 
the bottom of his hearteverything in the way of  pompes funèbres . 
He wanted to bury  Aud s e n , he said, quietly and privately and, if 
it could possibly be managed, on Tuesday.  He had already informed 
Wyst s an ´s brother  Dr. John Auden ,  Stephen Spender  and  o o s thers 
of the arran t gements and asked them to arrive, if not tomorrow, 
then on Tuesday morning at the latest.  On the other hand  the 
mayor of Kirchstetten , he went on, wanted to lay on a really big 
show with brass bands and all the rest of it, and what was more 
on the Saturday to give as many people as possible the chance to 
come.  The Ministry of Education  and the  provincial council of 
Lower Austria  were to be represented, and as the last straw the 
hearse was to drive  i up to the house.  He would not allow any of 
this, he said:  "I can´t bear it and I won´t have it." 
Mayor Enzinger  drew a deep breath.  The first thing we ha e d 
to realise, he pointed out, was that the body had not yet been




-13-


released by the authorities.  In all cases where the cause of death 
is not wholly clear certain k formalities are obligatory, and even 
intervention at a high level would not work miracles.  Everything 
takes time.  And how could anyone expect it of him, the  Bürgermeister , 
that he should refrain from notifying the  Ministry  and the Cultural 
department of  the Council  of the  e death of  Professor _Auden  ? It 
was as much as his job was worth.  Now  Frau Seitz  spoke.  The 
inhabitants of  Kirchstetten , she believed, would hardly bury a dog 
in the manner proposed by  Herr Kallman , let alone a great poet. 
Chester Kallman ´s position was entirely comprehensible - to 
some of us.  To him, an  E American of Jewish origin and a non-believer, 
the whole pomp and circumstance of a traditional Austrian funeral 
was abhorrent.  Where prominent personages are concerned, there 
would certainly be the local brass band, and where appropr i a te  delegations representing 
the voluntary fire brigade, the federal railways, the veterans´ 
association and others besides, and the gamekeepers would blow 
their horns and wish him good hunting in the Elysian fields. 
To  Chester ´s mind such folksy rituals were as foreign as the burial 
rites of the Incas.  He did not know that not very long ago in 
Lower Austria ,  Auden  as a bachelor would have been accompanied in 
the funeral procession by a "bride" dressed in white.  He was 
unable to understand that his intentions were an intolerable affront 
to the population of  Kirchstetten .  In his despair, it certainly 
never occurred to him that  Auden  himself would very likely have 
been entranced at the idea of a slap-up funeral with all the 
trimmings - one can almost hear his Olympian laughter - followed 
by a hearty meal at the inn where he had so often  ate had his l i unch. 
As it turned out,  Chester  got no marks in local opinion for this 
finale either, as the meal consisted of  Leberkäs  with vegetables: 
T his consisted of fried slices off a loaf of a flabby substance which is neither liver nor cheese related to the 
Frankfurter sausage.  It is a 
homely, juicy meal all too familiar to every Austrian;  a b nd it is 
cheap. n  There would be  mkuc  much talk of this also after all was ove r 
For their part, the local people were forgetting that  Chester  was 
probably in financial straits - not that this would have been taken 
as an excuse. 
For a moment the discussion had come to a standstill. 
XT The young men who took no part in it and conversed in whispers,




- 14 -


fetched more beer,  Frau Strobl  walked in and out and rolled a 
baleful eye on us as she spoke into  Chester ´s ear. 
The points at issue were not only When and How Much;  there 
was also the matter of the church service and the prayers at the 
graveside.  Many people in  Akustria  had assumed  Auden  to be of the 
Roman Catholic  faith;  he had of course remained  a : s member of the 
Anglican  and  Episcopalian churche e s .  The misunderstanding arose 
from his regular attendance at mass in the parish church and his 
friendly relationship with  Father Lustkandl , the parish priest 
referred to in  "Whitsunday in Kirchstetten" .  Auden  asked 
Lustkandl ´s  sucessor  for permission to be buried in the churchyard, 
and his wish was accede o d  to.  Evid n ently ,   T the next logical thing to do, then, 
was to approach the chaplain to the  British Embassy in Vienna ,´ 
the  Revd. Bruce Duncan , and ask him to officiate.  What form of 
service this should be - there could be no question of a funeral 
mass - left everyone present at a loss.  We agreed at last that 
it ought to be some kind of ecumenical ceremony held jointly by 
the  two clergymen , but that first of all, the plan must be put 
before  D D r John Auden . 
At this juncture  Chester Kallman  withdrew his insistence on 
an all too early funeral.   the impossibly early date for the 
funeral.  The room had become much too warm, the oxygen was 
running out and  Chester  would not be able to stand much more 
pressure.  The most urgent  step  objective waslquite simply to 
free him from our burdensome presence.  Once everyone had agreed 
that  Auden ´s relations must be told immediately that the  funeral 
ah had been postponed, the moment had come to dissolve the meeting. 
Mrs Clark  undertook to telephone to  London  and  Frau Strobl  would 
drive her to the Post Office.  Chester  asked me to talk everything 
over with  Frau Seitz  and  Herr Enzinger  and reach definite concl i u- 
sions.  We all stood up,  C hester  came across the room to me and 
spoke in an undertone.  He was completely exhausted, he said, 
he couldn´t stand much more.  "I´ll do anything you want, you 
must just try to hold the others in check." Finally he said 
"It´ll be all right, I´m crammed full of tranquillizers, all I 
need is a bit of a rest."  He embraced me warmly and left the room.




- 17 -


the chief mourners.  It was  "he-whose-name-we-never-mention" ; 
or if it was,  Chester  had said,  Auden  crossed himself. 
At the lowest point in  Kirchstetten  where the roads divide 
thr procession halted while the coffin was transferred from the 
hearse to a hand-drawn bier.  At this point the Church took charge 
and the procession resumed its steady pace;  photographs exist 
which were taken during the brief interval. 
To British ears quite unremarkable, the  ecumenic la al service 
was much ta o Iked about in A ku ustrian circles because nothing of the 
kind had been known  n before.  The  Revd. Bruce Du c ncan , today Rector 
of Crediton in Devon, can remember little  more  about the general 
circumstances but confirms that he used the  Book of Common Prayer 
and the long reading from the first  book Letter of  St.Paul  to the 
Corin g thians , chapter 15, verses 20-58. Beyond that, all he recalls 
is the hysterical behaviour   is his difficulties with  Chester . 
Reaching for my  Authorised Version , for surely no one would 
have dared to use any other, on second thoughts I also took out the 
New Testament  as translated into German by  Martin Luther .  After 
reading the English text through ve d ry slowly, and then a second 
time, I did the same with the  Luther n an Bible  and lost in thought 
compared the two, verse by verse. 
"How nice to see you" said  Auden  who was sitting on one of the 
white garden chairs with the red covers, "it´s a bit  einsam  here. 
And I wanted to write and tell you that the technical word for 
buddle  is  Erzwaschtrog .  I hope there is an equivalent German 
euphemism for `senior citizen´.  Oh and  adit  is  stollen,  and although 
I may be wrong, I guess  concentrating mill  is  Vereinigungsmühle. " 
"What a mercy you´ve told me" I said, relieved.  "I should have 
to have dug up such frightful words in the British Council library. 
But do you think people will understand all that about the primary 
and secondary worlds, or will they get muddled?" 
"It´s perfectly simple" said  Auden .  "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." 
"There is one glory of the sun" I heard myself say, "and 
another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars:  for on




- 18 -


star differeth from another in glory." 
"Ah" he said, "you´ve been reading  Corinthians One , chapter 15. 
`Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.´  Chester  and I took 
that bidding rather too literally." 
"Who would know where that familiar quotation comes from?" 
I wondered. 
"I would" said  Auden .  "I´ve been looking up the German text. 
Have you ever compared the  Autho s rized Version  with  Martin Luther ?" 
"Funny you should ask that" I said.  "It´s one of the things 
I forgot to talk to you about.  `Be not deceived:  evil , comm ku unica- 
tions corrupt good manners.´ He renders that as `Lasset euch nicht 
verführen!  Böse Geschwätze verderben gute Sitten.´" 
"Very neat" said  Auden  happily.  I like `evil chatter´ 
better than `comm k unications´." 
"The publishers" Isaid "have a rather heavy-handed way of 
printing the more quotable bits in bold-face.  But in the next 
verse  Luther  seems to flounder.  `Werdet doch einmal recht nüchtern 
und sündiget nicht!´" Do be a bit sober for once, he pleads.  And 
sin not.  King James ´s translators fancied that  St Paul  cried out 
s S `Awake to righteousness!" 
"Who knows what he really said." 
" Luther ´s language is very fine as he reaches the clim x ax: 
`Siehe, ich sage euch ein Geheimnis... ´" 
But  Auden  was speaking.  "Behold, I shew you a mystery: 
we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, 
in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump:  for the trumpet 
shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we 
shall be changed.´"  And with that he vanished.  Now wide awake, I 
put the  two books  back on their shelf and settled down to re-type 
Auden ´s  speech  at  Neulengbach .


Sehr verehrter  Herr Landeshauptmann , Ladies and gentlemen: 
I hope you will pardon me if I speak somewhat personally.  I do so, 
not out of vanity...







W , H.Auden 
℅  Spender 
15 Loudoun Rd 
St John's Wood 
London. N.W.  8 


Johann-Strauß-Gasse 28  . 
1040 Wien . 







ÖSTERREICHISCHE GESELLSCHAFT FÜR LITERATUR 


Einladung


W. H. AUDEN 
GEDICHTE/POEMS 


Zum Erscheinen  der neuen, zweisprachigen Ausgabe  im  Europa Verlag ,  Wien 
Es lesen der  Autor  und  Achim Benning 


Freitag, 28. September, 20 Uhr,  Palais Palffy , Großer Saal, Wien I., Josefsplatz 6







AUDEN IN KIRCHSTETTEN 


P. 7 Line 8  " Eliot  ha r dly deserved it `:"   Does this mean that you dont 
think  Eliot  w a s worth translating? Or that  Auden  didnt? Or what? 
(see p .  16-17)


R. 2  Line  7   Would  ' Chester '. Would it  be  helpful  a t this 
✓ f irst mention of  him  to add the sur n ame , i.e. 
' Chester Kallman '. ?


IN RETROSPECT . 


P1.   Line  6  from bottom : 
"if his life as a". Sh ou ld this be "if his 
life as one" or "if his life as a whole" ?


p·3   Para 2  Money pinched from  Chester s jacket at party. 
I ncident already referred to in bottom par a  P·13 
of  " Auden in Kirchs t etten " . Since this para is 
in brackets perhaps this is an indicatio n   t hat 
you  in t ended to omit it ? 


Chec k  wi th   Müller   
wh a t is in his mṣ .


p3   Line  4  fr om  bottom 
" at  Hinterholz 6 " ?? Desirabl e  to add 
` Kirchstetten '  for  s ake of clari t y ?


P· 16.   Bottom  
Last sentence   
o v er  to  t o p P.17 ✓ 
I ncident of " he who s e name w e  never mention '  at 
funeral . ? Repe ti tion of mention of this on 
P·14  , to p  para, of  "Auden in Kirchstetten " . 







39 Claremont Ave, apt 32 
New York NY  10027 
USA 


1 December 1980 


Dear  Stella ,


I just got back from a month in  England  to find your letter.  I was 
rather worried as to how you were, and am delighted to hear that 
you're on the ascent after a "decline."  I'm also abashed not to have 
been in touch with you before about the collapse of  our four-memoir 
book , but the whole thing has been farcical and uncertain.  Here are 
the basics.  First, there should be no need to repay any of the 
advance (I haven't spoken with  Random House  about this, except with 
an ill-informed assitant, but there shouldn't be any problem), and 
second, I hope you haven't gone out of your way to work on  the thing 
again.  The structure collapsed in two or three stages.  First  Lincoln 
Kirstein  read the forthcoming  biography  by  Humphrey Carpenter  (not bad, 
not spectacularly good), and decided he didn't know enough  Auden  to 
add new facts, that he wasn't really worthy to be a memoirist, etc. 
None of this has any truth, but  Kirstein  is not a person to argue with. 
He managed to persuade me, in September, that  the book  should at least 
be left to stew for a while.  Then  Spender  finally sent in a first 
draft of his piece, which, between us, was a disaster.  At this time 
Charles Monteith  had a look at it, and agreed.  When I saw  Charles 
in  London  a couple of weeks ago, we formally let  the thing  drop, and 
I think he already wrote you about it.


I still think  your piece  is first-rate (the copyright is yours, by the 
way), and I hope you'll publish it, perhaps with a word or two of 
information from  Christa Esders  if that's possible.  (Did you learn 
anything from her??)  If you want me to try to place it in  this country , 
I'll do my best with it.  Do let me know.  I feel very sorry that you 
went to all this trouble for--up to now--nothing, and for many reasons 
I should like to see  the piece  in print.


No, I haven't got to  Vienna  for five years now, and couldn't afford 
a visit this year.  Next summer, if my job is sorted out, I would very 
much like to come over again.  This past summer I tried ringing you a 
few times at 4217175, but got no reply.  Is that your number?  Mine here 
is 212 222-0679 if there's ever a reason to need it.


Please do forgive me for the muddle over  the book .  And please do keep 
in touch.  Incidentally I finished that  critical book --to be published 
in the spring--after doing nothing but work on it for a year.  My "summer" 
trip to  England  got postponed to November while I revised.


Yours ever,


Ed 



Edward Mendelson 
39 Claremont Ave apt 32 
New York NY  10027 


Frl  Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Schlösselgasse 8/17 
A-1080 Wien 
Austria  






W . H.Auden 
77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
N.Y . 10003 
U.S.A 


Not  q uitti n g  Kirchstetten   · 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Fridau 
Obergrabendorf 
N. Ö 
Austria


3200 





Feb 22nd, 1972


77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
N.Y. 10003 


Dear  Stella ; 
Many thanks for your letter ,  Whate ve r 
ma d e you imagine I was quitting  Kirchst e tten ? 
Of course I'm not ,  The  change  is that I 
shall be spending my winters in  Oxford 
not in  New York . 
love 
Wystan 







Express 


" L onging to hear abo u t 
royal visi t  . " 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musuli m 
Wien III 
Neulinggasse 26/14 



W H.  Auden 


KIRCHSTETTEN, BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



KIRCHSTETTEN, BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


May 21 st . . 1969


Dear  Stella , 
Ma n y thank f o  your card ,  Had 
tried several  ti mes t o  reach you 
by phone,but w ithou t succ e ss 
Wed n esday  lunch  May 28th is fine 
for  us ,and we shall much look 
forward to seeing you  both - 
H  Longing to hear about the 
Royal v s it . 
love 
Wystan ' 







NEULINGGASSE 26/14 
1030 WIEN 
TEL. 73 94 015


5. April 1977


A2 


Herrn Dr. Wolfgang Kraus , 
Österreichische Gesellschaft 
für Literatur 
1010 Wien, 
Palais Wilczek, He e rrengasse 5 .


Sehr geehrter, lieber  Herr Doktor  !


Es wird für mich eine Ehre sein, am 5. Mai 
über  Auden  sprechen  zu dürfen.


Wie wäre es mit  " Auden  und die Österreicher" ? 
Aber wenn nicht, ist mir Alles recht!


Mit herzlichen Grüßen,


Stella Musulin   ´ 


Stella Musulin .







Die Baronin 
S e tella Musulin 
1040  Wien  IV 
Neulingasse 26 



KIRCHSTETTEN, BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



AUGUST I ( 968 


The ogre does what ogres can, 
Deeds quite impossible for man, 
but one prize is beyond his reach: 
The ogre cannot master Speech. 
About a subjugated plain, 
Among its desperate and slain, 
The ogre stalks with hands on hips, 
While drivel gushes from his lips. 


___


Dear  Stell a , 
Terribly sorry about  l ast Sunday. 
Since I had no idea whe n  we should be 
a b le to get to you, I tho u g ht  it was unfair 
to t he  kitchen not to cancel. 
Ha ve  a ni c e  win ter and  wi ll see you, I hop e , 
early in Apr il 
love 
Wystan 



ELEGY 
( In Memoriam  Emma Eiermann .  ob 
ob.Nov 4th,I967) 


Liebe  Frau Emma , 
na,was hast Du denn gemacht? 
You who always made 
such conscience of our comfort, 
Oh,how could you go and  die , 
as if you didn't know 
that in a permissive age, 
so rife with envy, 
a housekeeper is harder 
to replace than a lover, 
and  die ,too,when we 
were thousands of miles away, 
leaving no one there 
to prune and transplant before 
the winter cold should set in. 
Good witch that you were, 
S surely you should have foreseen 
the doom that  your death 
would spell for your cats and ours: 
all had to be put away. 
You came with the house, 
you and your brother  Josef , 
Sudeten deutsche,   Sudetendeutsche , 
made homeless paupers when  Czechs 
got their turn to be brutal : 
but catastrophe 
had failed to modernise you, 
Child of the Old World, 
in which to serve a master 
was never thought ignoble. 
Children of the New, 
we had to learn how to live 
in the older way, 
well tendered and observed by 
loyal but critical eyes. 
From the first,I think, 
you liked us but to the last 
assumed most callers 
knocked with some evil intent 
(now and again you were right). 
When guests were coming, 
there was always the worry:- 
would you disallow? 
Greeks,in your censure,were rogues, 
all teen-agers delinquent. 
Nor were you ever 
one  y to behave your temper: 
let Youth pick a fruit 
or flower,out you would storm, 
arms whirling,screaming abuse 


in peasant German 
at startled Americans 
who had meant no harm, 
and,after they'd gone,for days 
you would treat us to the sulks. 
But when in good form, 
how enchanting your shy grin, 
your soft cat-language: 
no,no, Frau E ,dear oddling, 
we shall always be grateful. 
After  Josef  died 
(siblings can live in a bond 
as close as wedlock), 
you were all amort,your one 
wish to rejoin him quickly. 
You have,and we're left 
with ten years to consider, 
astonished at how 
vivid they are to recall: 
Du Gute,schlaf in Ruhe . 


___






Dines wi th   Pfa rr er .


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Wien III 
Neulinggasse 26 .



WH . Auden . 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear  Stella : 
Friday or Satu r day fine,except 
we  dine  wi t h  the  Pfarrer  Saturday eve ni ng. 
Do come to l u nch. 
Wystan .







1. In dem  man ✓  dich — begrub ·


2. Kategorisiert . 
Amb it_ Umwelt is a bit wea k  but pro b ably 
can't  b e helped·


3 . Grosses Unheil stifteten und Böses planten . 
Mem  men of great damage and malengine . 
1  the act io n 
2  the intent. 
Übelwollens? 
Männer ✓  grossen Unheils und Übelwol l ens .  ?


5 . Alpdruck.(vom nicht vor) 
Stümper .


6.   I n str  Bei✓ strömendem Regen 


7.  Hope ever y one won't think  " die Reiche " 
is a missprint for  " die Reichen ". prosais c h e 
&  privat e  Art


8. L äch eln wir bei Hochzei t en ,  auf  denen ? 
Next sentence ungramm a t ica l  .  Verb  lacking missing.. 
And perhaps :   " Noch nie war die Erde ohne 
ihr e  faule n  Stelle n  (singular as in original), 
ein Uno r t mit  Posten  fü r  Folterer


9.  Frieden oder Friede✓ ?


10. An das Regime? Wie  w u einst ✓   ·  W ann  bei jedem 
Wenn  .


11. Bedeu te nd ere r n  Nachbarn  
Warum  des  n oblen   Fl usses  ?   die Perschling 


12. W as  ist der Abgrund? 
statt Bratschen Violas oder Geigen


⁒



Heute lächeln wir bei Hochzeiten , 
bei  d enen Braut u. Bräutigam schon 
auf der Welt waren als sich der Schatten 
gehoben  oder  (vielmehr)✓ weiter ✓ gerückt war . 


1 2· 
Anger wäre ev. besser als Rasen  . 
Try gepfählt


d ie  ihn n achher  dazu ver p f l ichteten, sie 
den Abgrund zu nennen  · 
Look for old-fashioned wo r d for Streicher . 
( Strin g end instruments genera l ly.)






Die Baronin 
Stella Mu s silin 
Wien III 
Neulingasse 26 .



W.H.Auden 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



August 16th


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


De Dear  Stella : 
Del i ghted to hear yo u  are 
back  and would love to see you 
anytime :  Are you living in  Wien  or 
in  Obergrabendorf .? 
I read  your piece in  Die Presse 
last Sunday  wi th great int e re s t , 
yours ever 
Wystan 







Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Fridau 
Obergra endorf 
bei S. Pölten 
N.Ö. 



W . H .  Auden 
Kirchstetten (Westb a h n ) 
Hint e rholz# 6 
N.Ö 
· 



JOSEPH WEINHEBER 
( I892-I945) 


Reaching my gate a narrow 
Lane from the village 
Passes on into a wood: 
When I walk that way, 
It seems befitting to stop 
And look through the fence 
Of your garden where(under 
The circs they had to) 
They buried you like a loved 
Old family dog. 


Categorised enemies 
Twenty years ago, 
Now next-door neighbors,we might 
Have become good friends, 
Sharing a common ambit 
And love of the word, 
Over a golden Kremser 
Had many a long 
Language on syntax,commas, 
Versification. 


Yes,yes,it has to be said: 
Men of great damage 
And malengine took you up. 
Did they for long,though, 
Take you in,who to  Goebbel l s ' 
Offer of culture 
Countered  In Ruah lassen !? 
But Rag,Tag,Bobtail 
Prefer a stink,and the young 
Condemn you unread. 


What,had you ever heard of  etc 


Re v . 


re v. 


Wednesday .  Kirch s t e tten 


Dear  Stella : 
Many thanks for your letter. Will try and call you 
to-day by phone. 
I enclose a  pr o se translation  ma d e by  me  and  a German friend ; 
Sin ce   the copy I sent you  ,   I have made  a  few slig h t 
changes in stanza 3. (see above) 
Could you che c k the translat io n for errors. 
love 
Wystan .




JOSEPH WEINHEBER 
( I892-I945) 


1


Von meiner Gartentur 
Von meiner Gartent ü r f ü rh hrt ein schmaler Pfad vom Dorf weiter in einen Wald. Auf 
meinen G ä ngen dorthin scheint es geh ö rig,stehen zu bleiben und durch den Zaun deines 
Gartens zu schauen,in dem🗴 dich(die Umst ä nde verlangten es) wie einen alten geliebten 
Familienhund begrub.


2


Vor zwanzig Jahren kat erg orisierte🗴 Feinde,jezt nah benachbart,w ä ren wir 
vielleicht gute Freunde geworden,die eine gemeinsame  Umwelt  und Liebe f ü r das Wort 
teilten,und h ä tten bei einem goldhellen Kremser  l ä nge  Gespr ä che uber Syntax,Kommas 
und Verskunst gef ü hrt.


3


Ja,ja,es muss gesagt werden,Machthaber,die grosses Unheil stifteten und  B ö ses 
pl na anten ,nahmen dich auf;f ü r wie lang,doch,wickelten sie dich ein,dich,der auf  Goebbels 
Angebot von Kultur "In Ruah lassen!" entgegnetest?  a Aber  /?   Rag,Tag, Bobta il ?   x ziehen einen Stunk 
vor,und die Jungen verdammen dich ungelesen.


4


Was wohl w ü rde dir,dem Osterreicher,dem Dichter,dein Herz gesagt haben,h ä ttest 
du je von  Franz J ä gerst ä tter ,dem  Sankt Radegund er Bauern,geh ö rt,der sein einsames 
Nein zu dem Arierstaat sagte und gek ö p t ft wurde? Naturlich sorgte man daf ü r,dass nichts 
davon zu Ohren kam,


5 


dass du unvorbereitet auf einen Tag sein solltest,der kommen mu u sste,eine Zeit, 
voller Schrecken,Tr ä nen und Aufl ö sung,in  s dem du,vor Al p bd r ü c k erstarrt,dich selbst 
vernichtetest? Vergeltung ging immer wie ein S t ü mp er vor. "Dies alles ist furchtbar, 
hier nur Schweigen gem ä ss."


6


Unbemerkt und unbetrauert von mir die Stunde deines Todes,unbegr ü sst von dir 
war der Augenblick,als ich,von der Vorsehung geleitet, Kirchstetten  zuerst erblickte, 
an einem Oktobertag in str ö menden Regen,in einem Jahr, s das unsern Kosmos ver ä nderte t  , 
dem  annus mirabilis  als die Parit ä t gest ü rzt wurde. 


7


Schon waren die Reiche,die verloren hatten,gen ü gend warm und sattgegessen,ihre 
Verbrechen waren auf prosaischer und privater Art,jene  Ä rgernisse,Tote und Schutt, 
l ä ngst weggeschafft: f ü r ihre Gesch ä ndeten ver b l al lasste der Schock,ihre gewaltsam 
entf ü hrten Physiker hatten kein Heimw h eh mehr. 


8


Heute lacheln wir bei Hochzeiten,auf denen sowohl Braut als Br ä utigam geboren 
waren,als sich der Schatten gehoben oder vielmehr anderswohin ger ü ckt war. Bis 
jezt  jetzt ist die Erde noch nie ohne ihren faulen Stellen,einen Unort mit 
Stellungen f ü r Folterer,(In welchen Bars sind sie willkommen? Welche M ä dchen 
heiraten sie?)


9 


noch nie war  ü berall Frieden auf ihrer n ä hrenden Oberfl ä che: so viel wir wissen, 
ist niemand je sicher gewesen,und deshalb  ü berwachen brave Familienv ä ter,mit der 
Hingebung von M ö nchen,in geheimen Zonen,Ger ä te,in denen harmlose Substanz 
menschenm ö rderisch wird.


10


Doch hier f ü hl ich mich zuhause,wie  du es ta tst: dieselben kurzlebigen Gesch ö pfe 
stimmen wieder dieselben sorglosen Lieder an; Obstg ä rten halten fest an dem Regime, 
das sie kennen,von des Aprils rasch zunehmenden Farbt ö nen bis zum ungest ü men Herbst, 
wann bei jedem stotternden Windstoss  Ä pfel auf den Boden plumpsen.


11


Wenn ich  ü ber unser Tal - human  un  bescheiden und sanft im Umriss - schaue,in dem 
der  Sichelbach  westwarts gurgelt,um sich mit dem  Perschling  zu vereinigen,bin ich 
mir bedeutendere Nachbarn ehrf ü rchtig bewusst,der Berge,die hinter mir aufragen, 
vor mir des noblen Flusses,


12


doch m ö cht ich auch dir Achtung erweisen,Nachbar und Kollege; denn selbst mein 
englisches Ohr erfasst in deinem Deutsch die Meisterschaft und den Tonfall einen 
dem es verg ö nnt war,auf dem umzaunten Rasen die Brat ch schen zu h ö ren,die er sich 
sp ä ter verpflichtet f ü hlte t ,"den Abgrund zu nennen."


______


sta t t Bra t 


M y  dictionary gives  Krethi und Plethi  . 
I s  that right ? 







from  Peter Heyworth 
32 BRYANSTON SQUARE  LONDON W1  ·  AMBASSADOR 8906 


Oct 24th


Dear  Stella : 
Many thanks for your lette r  and the 
Dr viv ing li c ence  w hich I am mu c h relieved 
to get. 
I can't possibly have the  Langers 
shivering,so I enclose a cheque for 
S.2000 for extra fuel,and will send 
more if and when needed. 
Wh a t is  Mr Langer s first name.? Does 
he underst a nd English? I  m u s t w ri te 
him a note of welcome. 
I leave  to- day week for  Ne w  York . 
A ddress.  77 St Mark's Place. New 
York City. New York 10003. 
much love and thanks 
Wystan 







Eil-Post 


D ie Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Wien III 
Neu l ingg a sse 26  .



W. H. AUDEN 
KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


1·  Buch  Ne u linggasse 
26/14 
27.9. 
beigefügter Brief 
schlamp e rte  Post 
feste Adresse


aus  München  a m 
4 : 5 : 6 :   nic ht 
d a 


n o m ai l saturday


2 6 /



Mittwoch


W. H. AUDEN 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear  Stella : 
Many thanks for your letter. Shall be delighted to 
see  you both  anyday any time. I can't get 
to  Vienna  this week. Will you be there next 
T u esday? I have to go to a reception at 
Amerika Haus  6-8. If you were free,it 
woul d  be fun t o  have dinner to-gether. I 
certainly shan't stay at the do after  7 ·30. 
I ag re e about the cutting. Will keep it till 
you come or bring it with me next week. 
love 
Wystan 


P.S. The  N.D.R  arri ve d.  Translation  quite good, 
but  why  turn  bars  into  Theke ?







W.H.Auden 
77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
New York 10003 
U. S. A 


Ai r-M ail


Death of Emma Eiermann  .


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Wien III 
Neulingasse 26 
Au st ria 




77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
New York 10003 


Nov 8th


Dear  Stella . 
A disaster has ha p pened.  Frau Eiermann 
died of a heart-attack on Nov 4th . 
(Ha v  just hea r d this from  my lawyer .) . 
A minor worry connected with this is what 
is happening to her cats and  ours . I suppose 
they will probably have to be destroyed. 
Next time you are travelling between  Fridau 
and  Wien  , could you be a dear and stop 
in  Kirchstetten  to see what is happening. 
Incedentally, in case you should need it my lawyers 
name and address is  Dr Walter Redlich .  Wien I. 
Wipplingerstrasse ,  24-26 . 
Canterbury  was quite  f un. The  Archbishop  came 
to  my first lecture . 
love 
Wystan 







Air ∼ Mail 


W . H.Auden 
77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
New Yo r k 10003 
U.S , A. 


Boras 


Die Baronin 
Stella M u sulin 
Wien  IV 
Neulinggasse 2 6 /14 
Austria , 


1030 




7 7 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
New Y or k 10003 
U.S.A. 


Jan 4th


Dear  Stella : 
Many thanks for your letter. I gather 
that,in the end,  Chester  deci de d not t o 
go to  Vienna . 
Meanwhile, I am in despair about the 
practical matter of the whereabouts and 
condition of the car .   N o answer from  Ho l fman . 
Can he be dead, too ?  I shoul d  be most 
grateful if you would call him or on h i m. 
to find out what is the matter. Among other 
things he has the cheques for  my Hausmeisterin . 
Address  Otto Hoff m a n n .  Wien VII. Karl S c hweighofegasse 
4/21 . Tel. 93/88/155. 
I hear that my  old lawyer    is supervising 
the case  but have till now heard nothing from 
him. Again coul d  you call hi m  for me. 
Dr Walter Redlich .  Wien  X IX . Paradisgasse 55. 
Tel: 36/43/83. 
Terribly sorry to be such a nuis a nce,  b ut 
I don't k now  what to do. I can't get intouch 
the Insurance till I know more 
love    Wystan -· 



7 






Express , 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Wien III 
Neulingg as se 26/14 



WH .  A uden 


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



Dear  Stella : 
Saturday w i ll be fine. Shall 
look forward to it , 
love 
Wystan 







W.H.Auden 
77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
New York IOOO3 
U.S.A. 


Air-Mail


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Wien  IV III 
Neulinggasse 26/I4 
Austria 


- B ora s 




77 St Mark's Place 
New York City 
New York 10003 


Dec 29th


Dear  Stella : 
I am in despair. I wrote to  my lawyer 
and to our factotum ,  Otto Ho l fmann  to find 
out details about the  accident  and the 
whereabout s  and condition of the car, but have 
not heard a word.  Chester  postpones h 
visit to  Vienna  and I dont know his plans. 
Could you possibly ring  Ho l fmann  to see if 
he knows anything . 
Adress.  W ien VII, Schweighofergasse 4/21 
Tel :  9 3/88/155. . 
Th e Registrati on  Number of my car is W. 618-948. 
love 
Wystan  .







Erklärung 


Meine Herren ! 
Mein Standpunkt ist sehr einfach : Man bezahlt dort 
Einkommensteuer, wo man Geld verdient, das heisst in meinem 
Fall, als Schriftsteller, der englisch schreibt, in den  Ver- 
einigten Staaten  und in  England . In  Österreich  verdiene ich 
keinen Groschen, ich gebe lediglich Schillinge aus. 
Sie behaupten, dass ich ein 'materielles Interesse' an 
Österreich  habe, womit Sie vermutlich ein 'finanziell e s' In- 
teresse meinen. Das könnte nur da nn  möglicherweise richtig sein, 
wenn ich mir sagen müsste :'Ich muss nach  Österreich  gehen, 
weil ich nur in  Österreich  arbeiten kann!. Das ist aber nicht 
der Fall. Ich habe an vielen Orten und in den verschiedensten 
Ländern gelebt, und war imstande, zu arbeiten, wo immer ich 
auch war. 
Ich habe natürlich ein 'persönliches' Interesse an  Öster- 
reich , sonst käme ich nicht hierher. Mir gefällt die Landschaft 
und ich finde die Österreicher, die ich kennen lerne, freundlich 
und charmant. 
Sie sagen wahrheitsgemäss, dass ich einmal  einen öster- 
reichischen Literaturpreis erhalten   habe. Das war e ine grosse 
Ehre, a z uf die ich sehr stolz bin. Aber Sie können doch nicht 
ernstlich glauben, meine Herren, dass ich mir ausgerechnet habe: 
' Q Wenn ich  weiter nach  Österreich  gehe, wird mir vielleicht ein 
Preis verliehen werden'? Bevor er mir zuerkannt wurde, hatte 
ich noch nie von diesem Preis gehört. Es ist auch klar, dass ich 
ihn kein zweites Mal erhalten kann. Dann sagen Sie auch, dass 
man in  Kirchstetten  eine Strasse nach m n ir  Audenstrasse  genannt 
hat. Das war eine sehr liebenswürdige Geste von Seiten der




2


Gemeinde, aber man kann nicht behaupten, dass ich finanziellen 
Nutzen daraus ziehe. 
Sie sagen ferner wahrheitsgemäss, dass ich einige Gedichte 
mit österreichischer Thematik geschrieben habe. Dazu möchte 
ich drei Feststellungen machen : 
1. Ich habe in  Österreich  niemals auch nur einen Penny 
für meine Gedichte erhalten. Ein paar v i on ihnen wurden 
ins Deutsche übersetzt, aber in diesem Fall bekamen die 
Übers t etzer das Geld, nicht ich. 
2.  Ich glaube, Sie sind sich nicht im K k laren darüber, wie 
Gedichte entstehen. Was gewöhnlich für das Thema gehalten 
wird, ist nur ein Blickwinkel, ein Anlass, um gewissen 
Gedanken über die Natur, über Gott, die Geschichte, die 
Menschheit usw. Ausdruck zu verleihen, die der Dichter 
schon sehr lange im Kopf  gehabt haben mag. Ich habe 
zum Beispiel ein  Gedicht zum 20. Todestag von  Josef 
Weinheber  geschrieben. Aber das Gedicht handelt im 
Grunde von anderen Dingen : erstens von der Liebe, die 
jeder gute Dichter, von welcher Nationalität er auch sei, 
zu seiner Muttersprache hegt , und zweitens davon, was 
nach dem  Krieg  in den Ländern geschehen ist, die ihn 
verloren hatten, das heisst, nicht nur  Österreich , sondern 
auch  Deutschland  und  Italien . 
1964 wiederum habe ich ein Gedicht mit dem Titel 
'Pfingstsonntag in Kirchstetten'  geschrieben, weil ich 
mich zuf ü ällig dort aufhielt. Aber der Ort ist unwichtig. 
In Wahrheit geht es in  diesem Gedicht  um die Frage : 
Worin besteht für einen Christen die Bedeutung des Pente- 
cost-Festes'. Und dies gilt für alle Länder auf gle u iche Art.




3


3.  Ich glaube, Sie sind sich nicht i m Klaren über die 
finanzielle Situation eines Dichters. Ein Romanschrift- 
steller kann, wenn er erfolgreich ist, mit seinen Büchern 
eine Menge Geld verdienen. Ein Lyriker kann das nicht, 
selbst wenn er sehr bekannt ist, denn Gedichte werden 
nur von einer Minderzahl gelesen. So stammt der weitaus 
grösste Tei l meines Einkommens nicht aus dem Verkauf 
meiner Gedichtbände, sondern aus Buchrezensionen, 
Übersetzungen, Vorträgen, usw., Tätigk w eiten, die mit 
Österreich  nichts zu  tun haben. Und wenn schon vom 
Übersetzen die Rede ist : Sie sagen wahrheitsgemäss, 
dass ich ein grosses Interesse an deutscher und öster- 
reichischer Literatur habe - ich darf hinzufü f gen, auch 
an der Musik - , aber ich muss nicht nach  Österreich 
kommen, um sie zu lesen oder zu hör o n. 
Sie sehen aus all dem, dass die von Ihnen angeführten Gründe, 
aus denen Sie mich besteuern wollen, nicht stichhaltig sind. Am 
meisten aber spricht dagegen, dass ich im Laufe eines Jahres immer 
weniger als sechs Monate in  Österreich  verbringe und mich niemals 
auch nur drei Monate lang laufend hier aufhalte. 
Ein Wort zum Schluss. Wenn dieser für mein Gefühl völlig un- 
gerechtfertigte Unsinn nicht aufhört, werde ich  Österreich  verlas- 
sen, um nie wiederzukehren, was für mich und vielleicht auch für 
die Ladenbesitzer von  Kirchstetten  sehr traurig wäre. Eines aber 
kann ich Ihnen nicht verhehlen, meine Herren : sollte dies ein- 
treten, dann könnte es einen weltweiten Skandal nach sich ziehen.


W.H.Auden 




Sie fragen, weshalb ich  die me i ne Hälfte  meines uns ere s  Besitzes 
in  Kirchstetten  an  Mr Chester Kallmann  überschrieben habe, 
der ja nicht mit mir verwandt ist.  Mr Kallmann  ist mein 
Erbe. Ich habe keine Kinder und er ist seit Jahren mein 
literarischer Mitarbeiter. Wir haben gemeinsam fünf 
neue Opernlibretti verfasst,  'The Rake's Progress' ,  'Elegy 
for Young Lovers' ,  'The Bassarids'  und  'Love's Labours  L i ost' . 
( 'Weg eines Wüstlings' ,  'Elegie für junge Liebende' ,  'Die 
Bassariden'  und  'Verlorene Liebesm a üh' ) . Und wir haben ge- 
meinsam  'Die Zauberflöte' ,  'Don Giovanni' ,  'Die sieben Tod- 
sünden' , 'Mahagonny'  und  'Archifanfaro'  neu ins Englische 
übersetzt. Ich bin  jetzt fünfundsechzig Jahre alt und muss 
mit jeder Möglichkeit rechnen, etwa mit einem Herzanfall. 
Wie Sie selbst besser wissen als ich, e e rgeben sich im Falle 
eines plötzlichen Ablebens grosse Schwierigkeiten für den 
Erben von Grundbesitz, besonders in ei nem fremden Lande.







Air-Mail 


L eft US driving 
licence  behind   · 


Die Baroninin 
Stella Musulin 
Vi  Wien I V II 
Neulinggasse 26 
Au str ia 



WH _ Auden 
℅  Heyworth 
32 Bryanston Sq u are 
London.  N.,  W.I 
England 



CHRIST CHURCH, 
OXFORD .


Oct 12 th


Dear  Stella . 
Like an idiot ,   I v e  gone and 
left my American Dr iving Licence 
behind . 
It sh ou ld be in an envelope in 
the drawer of my bed-table upstairs. 
Could you be an angel and look for 
it next time you ar e  going to  Fridau 
and air-mail to me 
℅  Mr Peter Heyworth 
32 Bryanston Square 
London . W .I . 
So sorry to be such a nuisance. 
love 
Wystan 







W.H. AUDEN  (1907-1973) 
English poet, as a young man


22 Kildare St. 
Dub l in 2  .


F o r  Stella 
W ith e v ery good 
wi sh 
—  Mic hael .


Photograph by  Carl Van Vechten / Beinecke Library, Yale U . 
©  Crossing Cards 
Trumansburg, N.Y. 14886 
No. 19 







22 Kildare Street, 
Dublin ,  2 


15th August 1984


Dear  Barone s s Musulin ,


I shall 
be arriving in  Vienna  on 1st Sept. 
I have taken  Prof. Hans Raimund 's 
F lat at :  Z LACKIERERGASSE 5 
( Peter Müller  has the telephone 
nu m ber). 4279 394


I have your telephone 
number and I shall call you 
within a few days of my arri v al.







29th November 1985.


The Revd. Br i uce Duncan , 
The Vicarage, 
Crediton 
Devon  EX17 2AS. 


Dear  Mr. Duncan ,


I am a more or less retired journalist and author, 
and am working on  a memoir of W.H. Auden´s years in Austria 
when I got to know him very well.  As he and  Chester Kallman 
were used to involving me in domestic catastrophes of various 
kinds,  C t T hester  asked me to bring order into the chaos which so 
often follows upon a deathöand in  this case  was acute because 
of the total lack of comprehension between the anglo-american 
side and the local Austrian authorities.  Hence my approach 
to you;  on enquiry I was given your name by the present 
incumbent of the Chaplaincy to the  British Embassy in Vienna , 
Canon Phillips .


Would you be so kind as to confirm that you took the 
ecumenical service  - shall I S scall it that? in the  church at 
Kirchstetten  in October 1973, jointly with the  parish priest ?


Do you recall the form of service used, and did  John Auden 
consult you about it?  I simply cannot remember, and al s h though 
there was a long and magnificent passage from the  NT  which I 
could have sworn was from   Corinthians , reading throu t gh  Cor.I  &  II 
nothing seems to ring the right bell.  Then there was the burial 
service.  I am told that the whole occasion aroused a great deal 
of interest here and was m u k u ch discussed:  so normal to the 
British, in  Lower Austria  it was a sensation.  I should be 
extremely grateful if you could find time to tell me anything 
that you remember, and give me permission to quote you.  Not 
everything about  Wystan Auden  was very appetising, his private 
life was a mess.  But he was kind, generous and totally 
unpreten s tious, and personally I was devoted to him.  It is



my dim recollection that some verse or other in the  Bible 
reading might help me to describe that amazing mixture of 
awe-inspiring talent and high scholarship, wretchedness and squalor.


Yours sincerely,


Stella Musulin .






mit Luft Post 


Weinheber-Gedicht 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Fridau 
Obergrafendorf 
bei .  S. Pölten 
NÖ 
Osterreich 


Wien IV 
Neulinggasse 26/14 



W H Auden 
Berlin - Dahlem 
Hubertusbaderstrasse 43 
Deut s c h land · 



Dec 23rd


Berlin . Dahlem 
Hubertusbaderstrasse 43 


Dear  Stella : 
It  was  sweet of you to think of me at 
Christmas ,especially since it's a little einsam here. 
Am beginning to know some local inhabitants. Oddly enough, 
the ones I can talk to most easily ar from  O st-Berlin , 
The most awful thi ng  about the Bifk e s is that 
they are so much nicer under a little  Druck . 
When they feel their oats they are so apt to become 
uppish. 
If I'd known,I'd have warned you about  T he 
National Review . I once  reviewed  a  Charles Williams 
book  for them - never again. Of course  y ou're right 
about the lib-labs ostrich attitude to those who 
wish to destroy them, but one cannot let one's name 
be associated with shits. 
Torture is the iniquity which utterly bewilders me. 
I know something about the evil in my own heart and 
i n the  s o r t of people I  know meet, but I cannot conceive of myself 
or them torturing anybody. Where do the torturers 
come from? What class? Whom do they marry? 
Have you ever met one ?  To what pubs do they go? 
much love and best wishes for 1 9 65 
Wystan 







FREEDOM AND NECESSITY IN THE ARTS 


May 21st.


Dear  S e tella · 
You're an angel. I have to deliver  this 
in  Neulengbach  on Sun day , June 14th . 
In case your dictionary doesn't give it, the 
German for the technical word  buddle  (page I, near 
bottom) is  Erzwaschtrog  . 
I hope there is an equivalent German euphemism 
for  "t e Senior Citizen." , 
If there is a special honary title of adress 
for a  Landeshaupt m an ,please supply. 
love 
Wystan 
P _ S.  Adit =  Stollen . 
Concentrating Mill  is,I  suspec t G uess, though I  ma y 
be wrong ,  Vereinigungmühle   . 




( 1 


Sehr vee rh hrter  Herr Landeshauptman n ,  meine Damen und Herren: 
I hope you will pardon me if I speak somewhat personally. I do so, 
not out of vanity,but bec ua ause  I do  j not wish to give the impression that I 
am attempting to lay down absolute laws which are valid for all. I give you my 
experience s  as a poet,in the hope that you will be able to compare the , m with 
yours own ,and form your own judgment about them. 
Most of what I  o 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,I spent a great many of my waking hours in 
the fab o rication of a private secondary sacred world,the basic elements of which 
were  at O  a) a limestone landscape mainly derived from the  Pennine Moors in the 
North of England  and b) an industry - 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 no t r 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 and machinery,maps,catalog i ues, 
guide-books and photographs,and,when occasion offered ,to  ta l ke me down real mines, 
tasks 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 'purest' poem,in the  French Symboliste  sense,is 
made of words which are not 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 discovere s d 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 I chose - it 
could not be played without rules. Absolute freedom is meaningless: freedom can 
only be realised in a choice between alternati c ves. 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 Beschr ä nkung zeigt sich erst der Meister , 
Und d s as Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben. 


As regards my particu al l a r 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-turbine,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  was   could choose between 
t e wo practical possibilit es ies  - a mine can be drained either by an adit or a pump - 
but physic al impossibili es ties and magic means were forbidden.  T 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 Idea of a concentrating-mill,I ran into difficulties. I had to choose 
between two types of a cer at tain machine for separating the sli m es,called a buddle. 
One type I found more sacred or ' beat i uful  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  aethetic  aesthetic preference to reality or truth.




(2


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 do s ctrine that,in 
poetry,there is a 'suspension of belief e '. A poet must never make a statement 
simply because it sounds poetically exciting: he must also bel ei ieve 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 
n be convinced that the poet really believ es what he says,however odd  that  the 
belief may seem to oneself. 
Between constructing a private  fantsa yfantasy world for oneself alone 
and writing poetry,there is,of course,a profound difference. A  fanatsy 
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  expereinces  experiences,and the goal of 
a poem is  necessaily  necessarily in the future,since it cannot be read until 
it has been 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 pecul iar to human 
beings,namely,Personal Speech. Many animals have impersonal codes of 
communications,visual,olfactory,auditory signals,b y which they convey to 
other members of their species vital information about food,territory,sex, 
the presence of  e nm ies  enemies etc,and in social animals like the bee,such 
a code may be exceedingly comple s x. 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  spak  speak as person to person 
in order to disclose ourselves to others and share our exper ei i ences with 
them,not because we must,but becuase we enjoy doing so. This activity is 
sometimes quite erroneously called 'self-expression'. If I write a poem 
about  ceratin  experiences I have had,I do so ,not bec  bec ua a use I think it 
may should be of interest and value to others ,not : the fact that it has till now 
only been my exper ei ience 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 perpsective, 
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 of 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  permantly  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 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, 
quite aside from their artistic merits, Palestrina  must have lived earlier 
than  Mozart : he could not possibly have written as he did after  Mozart . 
By  p Perman a ence,I mean  that the work continues to have relevance and 
importance lo m g 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 works of art,on the 
other hand,are of the utmost importance to the contemporary  praticioner . 
practic o t o neroner. Every artist tries to produce something new,but in the hope 
that,in time,it will take its  proper place in the tradition of his art. 
And he cannot produce anything significantly original unless he knows 
well what has  been  already been done ; w ithout ,that is to say , even in  he cannot 
'rebel' against the past without having a profound reverence for it.




(3


There are periods in history when  art  the arts develop uninterruptedly, 
each generation building on the achievements of the previous generation. 
There are other periods when radical breaks seem to be necessary. However, 
t when they are,one will generally find that the 'radical' artist does not 
diswon  disown the past,but finds in works of a much earlier period or in 
those of  anotehr  culture 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 
Medie av val Poetry. 
When I  revei w  review the contemporary artistic scene, I i t strikes me how 
extraorinary  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 manhood before 
I9I4. Until the  Fis    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  histroi  historic imperative. No one asked himself:"What is the proper 
kind of music to compose or picture to paint or poem to write in the year 
I9I2.?"  Secondly,their  audiences  contemporary audiences  were mostly 
cons r ervative,but honestly so.  Those,for instance,who were scandalised by 
Le Sacre du Printemps ,may seem to us now to have been old  fgi  fogies,but 
their reaction was genuine. They did not say to themselves:"Times have 
changed and we must change with them in order  to be up to date."   not to 
be left behind." 
Here are a few statements by  Stravinsky  to  whcih  which the young, w h ere where whether 
artists or critics would do well to listen and  pknde   ponder over.


In my youth the new music grew out of,and in reaction to,traditions , 
whereas it appears to be evolving to-day as much from social needs 
as interior artistic ones...The status of  the  new music as a 
category is another incomparable. It had none at all in my early 
years,being in fact categorically opposed,and often with real 
hostility. But the unsuccess of composers o n f 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 t i o de a th. 
***


The use of the new hardware naturally appears to the new musician 
a s "historically imperative"; but music is made out of musical 
imperatives,and the awareness of historical processes is probably 
best left to future and different kinds of wage-earners . 
***


In times,like our own,of rapid social change and political crisis,there i s 
always a danger of confusing the principles governing political action and 
those governing artistic fabrication.  The most important of such confus u ions 
are thr r ee. 
Firstly,one may come to think of artistic fabrication as  s a  f rom orm of politic a l 
action. Every citizen, artists poets includ i ed,has a duty to be politically 'engagé', 
that is,to  feel  play a responsible part in seeing that the society of which 
he is a member shall function properly and improve. But the poet,qua poet, 
has only one political function. Since lang i uage is his medium,it is his duty, 
by his own example,to defend his  mot eh her mothermother-tongue against corruption by demagogues, 
journalists,the mass-media etc. As  Karl Kraus s  said:"D ie Sprache ist die   Muuet 
Mutter,nicht das Magd,des  d   g Gedankens" ,and when language loses its meaning, 
its  palce  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 - but he must never imagine that his poems have 
the power to affect the course of history. The political and social history 
of  Europe  w o uld be what it  ahs  has been if  Dante , Shakepeare , Goethe , Micha le el 
Angelo , Tit ai ian , Mozart , Beethoven ,e y tc, ahd  had never existed.




4


Where  politicla  political and social  eveils  evils are concerned,only 
t k wo 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 example,is to take 
arti t stic fabrication as the model for a good society.  The aim of any artist  
Such a model,if put into practice,is bound to produce a tyrrany. The aim of 
the artist s  is to produce an object which is complete and will endure without 
change.  A  In the 'city' of a poem,there are always the same inhabitants doing 
exactly the same jobs for ever. A society 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, 
ex y termination  of the physically and mentally unfit,absolute obedience to 
its  D director,a alrge slave cla a ss kept out of sight in  f cellars and the 
strictest censure e ship of the Arts,forbidding anything to be said which  was  is 
not  out of keeping with the official 'line.' 
The third confusion,typical of our western  civilisat  'free'  soncietis 
societies at this time,is the opposite of  Plato 's,namely to take political 
act u ion as the model for arti t stic fabrication. Political action is a necessity, 
that is to say,a y t very moment something has to be done,and  politicla  it 
is momentary - action at this moment is immeiately followed by another action 
at the next.  Artistic fabrication,on the other hand,is  voluntarily  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 arti t stic fabrication o s n political action can therefore,only 
reduce it to momentary  ( h    a d nd arbitrary 'happenings',a conformism with 
the tyrrany of the immediate moment which is far more enslaving and 
destructive of integrity than any conformism with past tradition.


i n sert 
4 ` a


What then,can the Arts do for us? In my opi o nion,they can do two things. 
They can,as  Dr Johns t on  said,'enable us a little better to enjoy life or a 
little better to  enjoy endure it". And, bec aas e  because they are objects  permant 
permanently on hand in the world,they are the chief means by which the  lvi 
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  the worlks  their wor l ks 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 i s f 
I conclude d  these remarks with a light poem of my own,entitled 
Doggerel  of  by a Senior Citizen .




(4a


insert into next page


At this p in oint,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,i n my opinion  they are, in  my opinio n 
the exception,not the rule. The great virtue of formal metrical rules is 
that they forbid automatic  reposnse  resp i onses and,by forcing the  piet  poet 
to have second thoughts,free  f him f or rom 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 exper ei ience ,contrary 
to what one might exp s ect,the  writers o  free-verse poets sound much more 
like each other than those who write in fixed forms. Whatever freedom may do, 
it does not,it would seem,make for originality.












A2 


Frau 
Stella von Musulin 
Friedau 
3200 Obergrafendorf 


Wien , 22.März 1977


Sehr verehrte, liebe  gnädige Frau ,


wie mit  Frau Bronold  mündlich vereinbart, möchte ich nun 
auch schriftlich festhalten, daß wir Sie sehr herzlich 
einladen, Ihren  Vortrag über  W.H.Auden  am Donnerstag, den 
5.Mai, bei uns zu halten. Wir haben dafür den Figaro-Saal 
im  Palais Palffy  reserviert, Zeit 20 Uhr. Als Honorar 
können wir 1.500 Schilling anbieten.


Ich wäre Ihnen nur sehr dankbar, wenn Sie uns umgehend 
den genauen Titel bekanntgeben könnten.


Mit herzlichen Empfehlungen und Wünschen


Ihr


( Dr.Wolfgang Kraus )







39 Claremont Ave, apt 31 
New York NY  10027 


21 Novembe er r  1981


Dear  Stella ,


Delighted you got that  EARLY AUDEN , and even more delighted you find 
it worth looking into.  As I suppose you've experienced yourself, Is it a universal experience among authors to 
be surprised that someone actually reads one's book?  I'm so familiar 
with  the thing  by now, and so aware of its deficiencies, that I wish 
I could recall the edition and rewrite  the whole  thing from book  from the start. 
Luckily, t h eaching, reviewing and miscellaneous annoyances keep the 
mind elsewhere.  One of those miscellaneous annoy ances was a move 
from  my o d ld flat  to  an t other one  on the same floor in the same building. 
The  new address  is up above, and the only change is in the apartment 
number.  Phone number still 212 222-0679.


Yes, I saw the  you g ng man  who was doing advance work f ro or  Robert Robinson , 
but haven't heard from him since July.  I gather  wor that work  progresses, 
though.  There was  an hour on  Wystan  on  BBC   Radio  the other week--a 
"dramatization" with an actor reading the poems and lots of ominous 
noises off.  I'm told it was fairly dreadful, but perh aps  the TV film 
will be better.  I saw quite a  good one  from the  BBC  on  Benjamin Britten . 
Its only fault--and I'm not sure  this was a fault, given the usual tone 
of TV journalism--was an awed tone of worship.


A Easy answers to important questions.  Those  two volumes  f by and about 
Auden  sound very attractive.  (Which publisher is interested?)  The 
place to write for permissions is to the agents, specifically, to 
Maureen Walters 
Curtis Brown Ltd 
575 Madison Avenue 
New York NY  10022 
USA 
Mention  my name , and things will be easier.  But they should be easy 
anyway.


Now let me beg you for an easy answer.  I've heard from at t  least two 
different people that they had seen (or knew someone else who had seen) 
a  German text of your Wystan memoir  in print.  Are they right, or are 
they confusing this with an occasion when you read it aloud (and it was 
reported)?  I had an  Austrian student  here this summer working on  Wystan , 
and I wanted to tell her about  the piece , but didn't know where to find 
it.  Please,  please  tell me if you printed  it , and if so, where.  No need 
for a long letter: just a "No, calm down, I never printed  it " or a "Yes, 
it appeared in such-in-such a journal" would be more than enough.  This is 
the one min or mystery of writings-about- Wystan  I haven't been able to solve, 
so please do help.


Have I told you  ny any of my news?  I'm now at  Columbia University  permanently, 
if I want to be.  I have a  flat  with a small guest room and bath--so please 
take note if you're in  th e is country  for any reason.  I have a lady friend, 
the first whom I expect to be with for a very long time, and we are quite 
happy about things in general.  Next June we'll be in  Europe , certainly in 
Paris , possibly father  south,  t although we may put off the southern trip 
for another year or so.  I haven't been across the Atlantic this year; too 



Mendelson 
39 Claremont Ave, apt 31 
New York NY  10027 


Red aktion  11-12. 
Kr on e nz ei tung . ½ 2- 5 
M or gen  197 7.  · 
1.Nu mer.   Heft . 


Frau Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
Sch l t össelgasse 8/17 
A-1080 Vienna 
Austria 


preoccupied, too broke, too much to do in  New York  to feel much of an 
i p mpulse to get away.  My years in  New Haven  always left me panting to 
get overseas, but now I feel at home again.


Did you see  Humphrey Carpenter 's  book on  Wystan ?  Not bad, as biographies 
g o, but not very deep either.  It seems to have most of the facts right, 
which is something.  Now  a life of  Chester  is being written, by the  woman 
who recently married  Chester 's father , and who knew  Chester  since 1942. 
Full of surprises and purple passages;  Chester  would be pleased, I think, 
although I don't like to imagine how  Wystan  would have taken  it .


A ff ection a tely,


Ed 






Die Baronin 
Stella Mus s ulin 
Fridau 
O bergrabendorf, 
N. O  ,  bei S. Pölten 



W.H.Auden 


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



July 23rd.


KIRCHSTETTEN (WESTBAHN) 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear  Stella : 
How are you and where are 
you? 
If in  Fridau , we  would love to 
see you. Am  expecting  Christiane 
Zimmer   here  about   August 5th. 
Wystan 







L ast letter  .


Die B a ronin 
Stella  M usulin 
A-1030 Wien 
Neulingasse 26/14 



W.H. Auden 


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear   O Sept 24th


Dear  Stella : 
I dont yet  k now a t  w h at time 
the  re a ding  is to be. If not until 8 ·o .p. 
I shall eat first,beca u se I like to go 
to bed early _ 
Many tha n ks for the invitation to stay 
the nig h t  with  y ou , but I have already 
booked a roo m   a t t h e  H otel  Altburg hof 
Altburgenhof , 
love 
Wystan , 







Baroque Pietà , Loreto . 


Wystan Auden 


W . H . A.   Mama ,  Chester Kalmann .



Allerheiligen 1960 .






W. H .  Auden 
Kirchstetten (West Bah n ) 
Hinterholz # 6. 
N.O. 


Die Baronin 
Stella M us ulin 
Fridau 
Obergrafendorf 
bei St. Pölten 
N. O 




Kirstetten .


Thursday


CHRIST CHURCH, 
OXFORD. 


Dear  Baroness Musulin : 
Delighted to get your ca rd .  We 
shall look forw a rd to seeing you 
on Saturday aftern o on. 
We have a gramophone now  and  a 
tape-rec o rder. 
yours sinc e rely 
Wystan Auden 







Einschub 1 , 
Als  ich  zwischen sechs und zwölf Jahre alt war verbrachte ich 
viele meiner wachen Stunden damit mir eine heilsame zweite Welt zu 
schaffen . Ihre  Grundelemente  Bausteine waren erstens eine 
Karlksteinlandschaft , die hauptsächlich . ..... von der  Pennine Heide 
herrührte und zweitens ein Werk - die Bleigruben .


Einschub 2 
Zweitens , während ich meine höchst-eigene Welt aufbaute , 
musste ich feststellen , dass hier nicht ohne Regeln  gespielt vorgegangen werden konnte 
werden konnte  - obwohl, oder gerade weil es hier um ein Spiel 
ging , nicht eine Notwendigkeit wie essen oder schlafen , um etwas, das 
mir frei stand , das ich tun oder lassen konnte, wie es mir 
passte


Eimschub 3 
Während ich meine  Pläne Vorstellungen für einen  zentral-Meiler Anreicherungs-Meiler entwarf, stiess 
ich auf Schwierigkeiten: Ich musste zwischen zwei Arten von 
Maschienen wählen , die d ie er Absonderung des Schlamms d urchführen 
dienen , sie werden ' buddle ' genannt , Der eine Typ kam mir 
' heilsamer ' , schöner vor aber der andere, das wusste ich bereits aus 
meiner  L ekture funktionierte besser  .................... 
Als ich später  Gedichte zu schreiben begann stellte ich fest , 
dass für mich genau die gleiche Verpflichtung gültig war . Das 
heisst, ich ich kann die Do j ktrin nicht akzeptieren derzufolge man 
in der Poesie  vom Zwang der Glaubwürdigkeit  vorübergehend vom Zwang 
zur Glaubwürdigkeit entbunden werden kann  .


Einschub 4 
Eine eigene Phantasiewelt für sich  selbst aufbauen  allein




- 2 -


aufbauen und Gedichte schreiben , das ist gewiss auf profunde Weise etwas 
anderes. "


Einschub 5 
" Die Wissenschaften früherer Tage sind nur für die Studenten der 
Wissenschaftsgeschichte von Interesse , sie haben keinen Bezug auf das , 
was Wissenschaftler in diesem Augenblick tun "


Einschub 6 
Gründer der " modernen Kunst " ansehen , Glück, weil sie just in 
diesem Augenblick auf die Welt kamen , mithin vor 1914 erwachsene 
Männer waren .


Einschub 7 
In meinen jungen Jahren hatte sie gar keinen , sie befand sich im 
Zustand kategorischen Gegensatzes , häufig in wirk o licher 
Feindschaft


Einschub 8 
In Zeiten wie der unseren , in Zeiten rascher sozialer Veränderungen 
und politischer Krise , besteht immer die Gefahr die auf 
politische Aktion anwendbaren Prinzipien mit jenen zu verwechseln , 
die das künstlerische Schaffen bestimmen.


Einschub 9 
heisst auf verantwortliche Weise am richtigen Funktionieren 
der Gesellschaft, der er angehört, wie an ihrer Verbesserung , 
mitzuwirken . "




- 3 -


Einschub 1o 
Politisches  h Handel t n kommt aus Notwendigkeit , das 
heisst : In jedem Augenblick muss etwas getan werden , für den 
Augenblick - der Aktion des Augenblickes folgt die des nächsten 
Augenblicks .


E u inschub 11 
Noch eine weitere Erfahrung, dieich gemacht habe : Im Gegensatz 
zu dem, was man erwarten würde,klingen die freien Verse viel 
ähnlicher als  jene  die Verse von Dichtern , die in vorgegebenen 
Formen schreiben "







Translation  rec d. 
Wedding  n ear Kre m s 


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
1030 Wien 
Neulinggasse 26/14 



WH Auden 


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



July  June 10 th 


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear  Stella 
Translation  just received. Thanks 
e  million. 
On Saturday  Chester  and I have 
to attend a  wedding in near 
Kr e ms   at 3 · 0.p.m,which means 
we shall have to lunch at 12 · 0 , 
Could you possibly make that ? 
If not,per haps  you could come 
on Monday, if ·retur:  or whichever day 
you  w ill be retur n ing to  Vienna 
from  Fridau . 
love and again thanks ever 
so much 
Wystan 







"A Certain World " .


Die Baronin 
Stella Musulin 
1030 Wien III 
Neulinggasse 26/14 



WH Auden 


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 



June 4th.


3062 KIRCHSTETTEN 
BEZ. ST. PÖLTEN 
HINTERHOLZ 6 
N.-Ö., AUSTRIA 


Dear  Stella : 
I have  a  copy of  A Cert a in World 
for you ,t o  pi c k up any time at 
your convenience. 
love 
Wystan