The contrast or, better still, the degree of disparity between those eyebrows risen in fomial bewilderment and the keenness of his gaze, to my mind, directly corresponded to the formal aspects of his lines (two lifted eyebrows = two rhymes) and to the blinding precision of their content. What stared at me from the page was the facial equivalent of a couplet, of truth that's better known by heart. The features were regular, even plain. There was nothing specifically poetic about this face, nothing Byronic, demonic, ironic, hawkish, aquiline, romantic, wounded, etc. Rather, it was the face of a physician who is interested in your story though he knows you are ill. A face well prepared for everything, a sum total of a face.
It was a result. Its blank stare was a direct product of that blinding proximity of face to object which produced expressions like "voluntary errands," "necessary murder," "conservative dark," "artificial wilderness," or "triviality of the sand." It felt like when a myopic person takes off his glasses, except that the keensightedness of this pair of eyes had to do with neither myopia nor the smallness of objects but with their deep-seated threats. It was the stare of a man who knew that he wouldn't be able to weed those threats out, yet who was bent on describing for you the symptoms as well as the malaise itself. That wasn't what's called "social criticism"—if only because the malaise wasn't sociaclass="underline" it was existential.
In general, I think this man was terribly mistaken for a social commentator, or a diagnostician, or some such thing. The most frequent charge that's been leveled against him was that he didn't offer a cure. I guess in a way he asked for that by resorting to Freudian, then Marxist, then ecclesiastical terminology. The cure, though, lay precisely in his employing these terminologies, for they are simply different dialects in which one can speak about one and the same thing, which is love. It is the intonation with which one talks to the sick that cures. This poet went among the world's grave, often terminal cases not as a surgeon but as a nurse, and every patient knows that it's nurses and not incisions that eventually put one back on one's feet. It's the voice of a nurse, that is, of love, that one hears in the final speech of Alonso to Ferdinand in "The Sea and the Mirror":
But should you fail to keep your kingdom And, like your father before you, come Where thought accuses and feeling mocks, Believe your pain . . .
Neither physician nor angel, nor—least of all—your beloved or relative will say this at the moment of your final defeat: only a nurse or a poet, out of experience as well as out of love.
And I marveled at that love. I knew nothing about Auden's life: neither about his being homosexual nor about his marriage of convenience (for her) to Erika Mann, etc. —nothing. One thing I sensed quite clearly was that this love would overshoot its object. In my mind—better, in my imagination—it was love expanded or accelerated by language, by the necessity of expressing it; and language— that much I already knew—has its own dynamics and is prone, especially in poetry, to use its self-generating devices : meters and stanzas that take the poet far beyond his original destination. And the other truth about love in poetry that one gleans from reading it is that a writer's sentiments inevitably subordinate themselves to the linear and unrecoiling progression of art. This sort of thing secures, in art, a higher degree of lyricism; in life, an equivalent in isolation. If only because of his stylistic versatility, this man should have known an uncommon degree of despair, as many of his most delightful, most mesmerizing lyrics do demonstrate. For in art lightness of touch more often than not comes from the darkness of its very absence.
And yet it was love all the same, perpetuated by language, oblivious—because the language was English—to gender, and intensified by a deep agony, because agony, too, may, in the end, have to be articulated. Language, after all, is self-conscious by definition, and it wants to get the hang of every new situation. As I looked at Rollie McKenna's picture, I felt pleased that the face there revealed neither neurotic nor any other sort of strain; that it was pale, ordinary, not expressing but instead absorbing whatever it was that was going on in front of his eyes. How marvelous it would be, I thought, to have those features, and I tried to ape the grimace in the mirror. I obviously failed, but I knew that I would fail, because such a face was bound to be one of a kind. There was no need to imitate it: it already existed in the world, and the world seemed somehow more palatable to me because this face was somewhere out there.
Strange things they are, faces of poets. In theory, authors' looks should be of no consequence to their readers: reading is not a narcissistic activity, neither is writing, yet the moment one likes a sufficient amount of a poet's verse one starts to wonder about the appearance of the writer. This, presumably, has to do with one's suspicion that to like a work of art is to recognize the truth, or the degree of it, that art expresses. Insecure by nature, we want to see the artist, whom we identify with his work, so that the next time around we might know what tmth looks like in reality. Only the authors of antiquity escape this scrutiny, which is why, in part, they are regarded as classics, and their generalized marble features that dot niches in libraries are in direct relation to the absolute archetypal significance of their oeuvre. But when you read
... To virit The grave of a friend, to make an ugly scene, To count the loves one has grown out of, Is iwt nice, but to chirp like a tearless bird, As though no one dies in particular
And gossip were never true, unthinkable . . .
you begin to feel that behind these lines there stands not a blond, brunette, pale, swarthy, wrinkled, or smooth-faced concrete author but life itself; and that you would like to meet; that you would like to find yourself in human proximity to. Behind this wish lies not vanity but certain human physics that pull a small particle toward a big magnet, even though you may end up echoing Auden's own: "I have known three great poets, each one a prize son of a bitch." I: "Who?" He: "Yeats, Frost, Bert Brecht." (Now about Brecht he was wrong: Brecht wasn't a great poet.)
4
On June 6, 1972, some forty-eight hours after I had left Russia on very short notice, I stood with my friend Carl
Proffer, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Michigan (who'd flown to Vienna to meet me), in front of Auden's summer house in the small village of Kirch- stetten, explaining to its owner the reasons for our being there. This meeting almost didn't happen.
There are three Kirchstettens in northern Austria, and we had passed through all three and were about to turn back when the car rolled into a quiet, narrow country lane and we saw a wooden arrow saying "Audenstrasse." It was called previously (if I remember accurately) "Hinterholz" because behind the woods the lane led to the local cemetery. Renaming it had presumably as much to do with the villagers' readiness to get rid of this "memento mori" as with their respect for the great poet living in their midst. The poet regarded the situation with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. He had a clearer sentiment, though, toward the local priest, whose n^e was Schicklgruber: Auden couldn't resist the pleasure of addressing him as "Father Schicklgruber."
All that I would learn later. Meanwhile, Carl Proffer was trying to explain the reasons for our being there to a stocky, heavily perspiring man in a red shirt and broad suspenders, jacket over his arm, a pile of books underneath it. The man had just come by train from Vienna and, having climbed the hill, was short of breath and not disposed to conversation. We were about to give up when he suddenly grasped what Carl Proffer was saying, cried "Impossible!" and invited us into the house. It was Wystan Auden, and it was less than two years before he died.