Writing Home (55 page)

My first thought was that this whole enterprise is definitely incongruous. A birthday party for Philip Larkin is like treating Simone Weil to a candlelit dinner for two at a restaurant of her choice. Or sending Proust flowers. No. A volume of this sort is simply a sharp nudge in the direction of the grave; and that is a road, God knows, along which he needs no nudging.

And why now in particular? Apparently he is sixty, but when was he anything else? He has made a habit of being sixty; he has made a profession of it. Like Lady Dumbleton, he has been sixty for the last twenty-five years. On his own admission there was never a boy Larkin; no young lad Philip, let alone Phil, ever. And I’m not going to supply the textual references: there’ll be enough of that going on elsewhere.

Besides, why a
book
? He must be fed up at the sight of books. It’s books, books, books every day of his life, and now here’s another of the blighters. Why not something more along the lines of a biscuit barrel? Because that’s all this collection is, the literary equivalent of an electric toaster (or a Teasmaid perhaps) presented by the divisional manager at an awkward ceremony in the staff canteen, and in the firm’s time too. Still, any form of clock would have been a mistake. Better to have played safe and gone for salad-servers or even a fish-slice. I had an auntie, the manageress of a shoe shop, who every birthday gave me shoe-trees. They were always acceptable.

These are some of the reasons why I feel ill at ease in this doleful jamboree. Added to which there is the question of his name. Without knowing Mr Larkin, what do I call him? I feel like the student at a dance, suddenly partnered by the Chancellor of the university, who happened to be Princess Margaret. Swinging petrified into the cha-cha, he stammered, ‘I am not sure what to call you.’ The strobe was doused in the Windsor glare: ‘Why not try Princess Margaret?’ A bleak smile from Hull could be just as disconcerting.
Philip
he plainly is not, though
Larkin
is overfamiliar too, suggesting a certain fellow-footing. Being a librarian doesn’t help: I’ve always found them close relatives of the walking dead.

Of course this book is presumably not addressed to the librarian. I imagine all librarians get at sixty is piles. If they’re lucky. No, we are addressing the real Larkin, the one who feels shut out when he sees fifteen-year-olds necking at bus-stops. But that’s risky too: authors resent the knowledge of themselves they have volunteered to their readers, and one can never address them in the light of it without turning to some extent into a lady in a hat.

Whether as Larkin, Philip Larkin or plain Philip, his name is bound to turn up on every page of this book. Names strike more than they stroke, and I would like to think of him wincing as he reads, staggering under repeated blows from his own name, Larkin buffeted not celebrated. I should be disappointed in him, too, did he not harbour doubts about the whole enterprise, echoing Balfour’s remark: ‘I am more or less happy when being praised, not very uncomfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained.’

It’s very gingerly, therefore, that I say my thank you. For what? Often simply because his poems happen to coincide with my own life. And, yes, I know that is what one is supposed to feel, and that is Art. But it’s not art that stood me for the Two
Minutes’ Silence on the parade ground at Coulsdon one November morning in 1952 when the Comet came looming low out of the fog, as in ‘Naturally The Foundation Will Bear Your Expenses’. Or put me in a Saturday train from Leeds on a slow and stopping journey southwards, the only empty seats reserved for a honeymoon couple who got on at Doncaster. One of the first of his poems I read was ‘I Remember, I Remember’, and it was this sense of coincidence, even collocation, that made me go on to read more. It isn’t my favourite among his poems, but it’s the one that made me realize that someone who elsewhere admitted his childhood was ‘a forgotten boredom’ might be talking to me.

I had always had a sneaking feeling my childhood didn’t come up to scratch, even at the time; and when I began at the usual age to think there might be some question of becoming ‘a writer’ (I do not say ‘writing’) the want of this apparently essential period seemed crucial. In all the books I had read childhoods were either idyllic or deprived. Mine had been neither. In point of memories I was a non-starter. I had not spent hours in the crook of a great tree devouring Alice or Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read (and even then patchily − I never
devoured
anything)
Hotspur
,
Wizard, Champion
and
Knock-Out
, not quite the ore of art. It’s true that for a long time I too went to bed early, but most children did in those days, with no effect on the percentage turning out to be Proust. I scanned my childhood for eccentrics, and found none. I had an aunt who had played the piano in the silent cinema − her music is still in the piano stool today (snap again) − but there was nothing odd about her, apart from her large, elderly bust; and there was no shortage of those either.

My school was dull too. It wasn’t old. It wasn’t new. There was not even a kindly schoolmaster who put books into my hands. I think one may have tried to, but it was not until I was sixteen, and a bit late in the day. Another boy had shown me
Stephen Spender’s
World Within World
, or at any rate the bits dealing with homosexuality, the references to which (while pretty opaque by today’s standards) were thought rather daring in 1951. Spender had been befriended by the music master, Mr Greatorex, who had told young Stephen that, although he was unhappy now, there would come a time when he would begin to be happy and then he would be happier than most. I took great comfort from this, except that I wasn’t particularly unhappy (that was the trouble); but the thought that I was about to get the Greatorex treatment, that a master in my dull day-school had divined beneath my awkwardness the forlorn and troubled essence, produced in me a reaction of such extravagant enthusiasm and wanting to be ‘brought out’ that the master in question (who had merely suggested I might like to read his
New Statesman
from time to time) scuttled straight back into his shell. It was further proof that literature and life (or my life at any rate) were different things. For the time being, anyway. At Oxford I was sure it would be different.

So to Oxford I duly went, changing stations at Sheffield and probably taking for a train-spotter that balding man at the end of the platform eating a pie. That I had still not acquired a past hit me the minute I entered the lodge of my college. It was piled high with trunks: trunks pasted with ancient labels, trunks that had holidayed in Grand Hotels, travelled first-class on liners, trunks painted with four, nay even
five
, initials (that’s another sympathetic thing about Larkin, the bare essentials of his name). They were the trunks of fathers that were now the trunks of sons, trunks of generations. These trunks spoke memory. I had two shameful Antler suitcases that I had gone with my mother to buy at Schofields in Leeds − an agonizing process, since it had involved her explaining to the shop assistant, a class my mother always assumed were persons of some refinement, that the cases were for going to Oxford with
on a scholarship and were these the kind of thing? They weren’t. One foot across the threshold of the college lodge and I saw it, and hurried to hide them beneath my cold bed. By the end of the first term I hadn’t acquired much education but I had got myself a decent second-hand trunk.

It didn’t stop at the trunk either. Class, background, culture, accent − all that was going to have to be acquired second-hand too. Had I read ‘I Remember, I Remember’ in 1955, when
The
Less Deceived
came out, I might have been spared the trouble. Though I doubt it. Poems tell you what you know already, and I still had it to learn. Besides I didn’t read poetry. I thought I read Auden, but to tell the truth − except in the shortest poems − I never got beyond the first dozen or so lines without being completely lost. One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county. I heard Auden give his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956. That put the tin hat on any lingering thoughts of Literature (one of my problems was that I still thought of both Literature and Life as having capital letters). Here were ‘blinding theologies of flowers and fruits’, a monogrammed set of myths and memories carried over from a bulging childhood, and not in Antler suitcases either. Obsessions, landscapes, favourite books, even (one’s heart sank) the Icelandic sagas. If writing meant passing this sort of kit inspection, I’d better forget it.

Dissolve to 1966. Life, love and literature were all long since in the lower case and I had drifted into show business. I was looking for ideas to beef up a comedy series. It was practically a clause in the BBC charter at that time that comedy sketches should be linked only with vocal numbers. I was after something
that bit classier. My producer, Patrick Garland, suggested filming poems, gave me
The Less Deceived
, and I read ‘I Remember, I Remember’. I think I had realized by then that to write one doesn’t need credentials, but I must be the only one of his readers who came to Larkin as an alternative to Alma Cogan.

If presents are in order I would like him to have that sound, part sigh, part affirmation, that I heard once in Zion Chapel, Settle, in Yorkshire, after I’d read ‘MCMXIV’. And another sound: reading Larkin in public, I’ve sometimes followed on with Stevie Smith’s ‘Not Waving But Drowning’, which contains the lines ‘Poor chap, he’s always loved larking/And now he’s dead’. Of course, being the sort of person he was the poor chap would have loved Larkin too, and half thinking it a pun − and not inappropriate at that − one or two people in the audience
mew
to themselves.

He would also appreciate something my mother said. My brother had gone to Athens. She was asked where he was but could not remember. ‘It begins with an A,’ she said. ‘Oh, I know. Abroad.’ I am abroad writing this in another place beginning with A, America. He would not thank me for New York, I imagine, but if he does not feel at home here he would not feel out of place among streets like Greene and Grand and Great Jones, the cast-iron district which I see from my window. I would give him, too, any work by Edward Hopper, whose paintings could often pass as illustrations to the poems of Larkin, and in particular ‘People in the Sun’ (1960).

Finally, something I saw scrawled up in the subway. On the wall someone has written ‘Pray for me.’ Another hand has added ‘Sure.’

On a bitter-cold morning in January 1939 Auden and Isherwood sailed into New York harbour on board the SS
Champlain
. After coming through a blizzard off Newfoundland the ship looked like a wedding cake, and the mood of our two heroes was correspondingly festive and expectant. On their first visit to New York the previous year Auden had sometimes been in tears, telling Isherwood no one would ever love him and that he would never have any sexual success. True to form, on this second visit it was Isherwood who already had a date lined up: Vernon, ‘a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent, with very sexy legs’. From that out-of-the-body vantage point he shares with God and Norman Mailer, Isherwood looks down on himself and his friend:

If looking for Mr Right was what it was about, this celebrated voyage that put paid to a decade, it was lucky that Auden’s quest so soon found its object. Otherwise the start of the war might have fetched him home still on the same tack, 1 September 1939 finding him not in a dive on Fifty-Second Street but in some
bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunions vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to five years as a slipshod major, sitting in a dripping Nissen hut in Beaconsfield decoding German intelligence, with occasional trips to the fleshpots to indulge in those hectic intimacies hostilities notoriously encourage. In the short view, it would almost certainly have landed him with the MO. In the long view, it would almost certainly have landed him with the OM. It was not to be. True love had walked in on Auden six months earlier. Henceforth it was to be personal relations for ever and ever.

While Isherwood’s man of destiny had not yet made it to playgroup, Chester Kallman had turned eighteen and was a junior at Brooklyn College. As Dorothy Farnan describes him, ‘he was naturally blond, about five feet 11 in height, slender, weighing about 145 pounds with gray-blue eyes, pale flawless skin, a Norse skull, Latin lips and straight narrow nose’ − a description that smacks both of the mortuary slab and (more appropriately) a ‘Wanted’ poster. In April 1939 Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller was tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon and (a friend who was not a friend) heterosexual. Predictably it was to the unavailable Miller that Auden took a fancy, leaving the more realistic Isherwood to chat up the all-too-available Kallman. Miller had written an article for the college literary magazine, and Auden expressed a desire to read it. (Twenty years later, when he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Auden’s desires were still being expressed in the same guileless way: undergraduate poets asked round to read him their verse, in the hope that one thing might lead to another.)
However, on the day appointed it was not Miller who turned up but Kallman. Isherwood was in the next room when Auden came through and said, ‘It’s the wrong blond.’ The rest is history. Or literature. Or the history of literature. Or maybe just gossip. And on that score anathema to Auden himself, who, wanting no biography, would have been appalled to read this blow-by-blow account of his sex life.

Whether Kallman
was
the wrong blond is the whole question of it. The right blond, Miller, would also have been the wrong blond, so maybe the wrong blond was the right one, wrong blond(e)s after all having some tradition in literature: Lord Alfred Douglas, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe, to name but three who were all wrong, all right. This account of the relationship between Auden and Kallman is written by the blond’s late-in-the-day stepmother, Dorothy J. Farnan, also blonde, who, if not wrong, is not always right, but very readable for all that. (I don’t want to beat this blond business to a bloody pulp, but in his biography of Auden Humphrey Carpenter gives Kallman’s fancied companion as the poet Harold Norse. Norse thinks Auden was expecting him. The right blond, and ready to be just as obliging as Kallman, Norse was a better bet all round. This is one of those moments when three, possibly four, lives go rattling over the points. But Norse or Miller? Auden studies are still in their infancy, and it is perhaps too early to say. The fact that Ms Farnan describes Kallman’s skull as ‘Norse’ is neither here nor there. Or is it?)

Auden now wore a wedding ring, bought one for Chester, and moved in on Chester’s life. There was a honeymoon at Taos in New Mexico, weekly visits to the opera in rented tuxedos, and dinners in Auden’s Brooklyn household, where, among others regularly passing the (obligatory) potatoes, were Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Lincoln Kirstein and Gipsy Rose Lee.

When love comes to the confirmed bachelor, old friends find it difficult to take. Chums winced to see T. S. Eliot spooning with wife number two, smirked when they brazenly held hands, and there was a bit of that with Auden. Look at it from the friends’ point of view. They have to budge up to make room for the new companion, knowing as they do so that they will be seeing less of the great man. Pretty college boy introduced to glamorous world by famous writer in return for services rendered: is he, they telephone each other, on the make? A male lover is judged more harshly than a wife (wives are women, after all), the likelihood of children somehow a safeguard. If the lover comes on too strong in company he is thought to be pushy; if he keeps mum he is put down as just a pretty face. Oh well, the friends shrug, it won’t last. Boredom will drive him back to us. But it did, and it didn’t. Chester wasn’t just a pretty face: he was an amusing companion and better company than Auden because less full of himself. (‘Less of himself to be full of,’ said the friends.) Still, Chester stayed the course, and thirty-odd years later walks behind the coffin in Kirchstetten as Siegfried’s Funeral March gives way to the more comfortable strains of the village band, the medley of the two just about summing it up.

Back in 1939, Auden is typically bold − not to say boastful − about his affair. Even nowadays, with parents the stunned and submissive onlookers at their children’s lives, a middle-aged man would think twice about meeting the family of the seventeen-year-old son he’s knocking off. Auden had no such scruples, but then he liked families, particularly those belonging to other people. Casting no spell, they always exercised a powerful attraction. Auden was a practised (if not always accomplished)
ami de maison
, homing in on comfortable domestic set-ups and establishing himself as a frequent and not undemanding guest. Several families of academic sparrows were flattered, if slightly startled, to find themselves playing
host to this celebrated cuckoo, who scattered his ash as liberally as he did his aperçus. If one wanted to entertain Auden, the first requirement was a good Ewbank.

In this matter of family Chester was well-supplied. He was the son of a Brooklyn dentist, Edward Kallman. His mother, Bertha, was a cultivated woman, who had acted in Yiddish theatre. She died when Chester was small, his father remarried, and the boy was largely brought up by his grandmother. His grandmother’s name was Bobby. His stepmother’s name was Syd. (In their choice of names the Americans have always been more eclectic than we are: a girl in
Dynasty
, for instance, is called Kirby, a name hitherto confined to a grip). These Kallman names can’t have helped. With a grandmother called Bobby and a stepmother called Syd, it’s not surprising Chester turned out to be a nancy.

Edward Kallman sounds an engaging character, even allowing for the fact that this book is written by his wife: Ms Far nan succeeded the terrible Syd as the third Mrs Kallman, though more or less a contemporary of her stepson. Syd had been the bane of Chester’s life, and tales of her appalling behaviour never failed to fascinate him and (reportedly) Auden too. The tales of Kallman
père
, on the other hand, suggest a cross between Phil Silvers and S. Z. (‘Cuddles’) Szakall.

Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and, after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic small talk (‘How’s the bite?’) before King levelled with his guest. ‘I want to adopt Chester,’ said King. ‘I can do a great deal for him. Send him to Harvard. Take him to Europe. I just want to be near him. Travel with him. Sleep next to him.’ Apart from some poisoned remarks from hissing Syd (‘That boy is a
hothouse flower’), this urbane proposition was the first hint the dentist had that Chester was not all set to be a model of heterosexuality. Cut to the surgery, where the patient is now a psychiatrist. Dr Kallman puts the problem to him. (’So my son is a faggot. Where did I go wrong? Rinse please.’) The psychiatrist recommends another psychiatrist, whom Chester dutifully sees but, finding he has never heard of T. S. Eliot, leaves in disgust. It is at this opportune moment that Auden, who
has
heard of T. S. Eliot, appears on the scene. No more is heard of Mr King.

Both generations were incorrigible lechers, the father as active on one side of the street as the son was on the other. Chester was not without girlfriends, though whether Anything Happened is not clear. At one point he had an apartment above his father’s and his female callers sometimes knocked on the wrong door, whereupon Edward Kallman would waltz out on to the landing, clad only in a bath towel, saying ‘Won’t I do?’ Ms Farnan calls him a pragmatist: ‘He knew one must make the best of what cannot be changed.’

One comes to like Chester’s father, whose adult education must have come from coping with the vagaries and enthusiasms of his wayward son and the increasingly unsympathetic behaviour of his ex-officio son-in-law. He and Auden seem to have quarrelled finally over a kitten which Auden was trying to entice into his house at Kirchstetten. Old Kallman, now deaf, banged a door during the wooing process and the not-so-cosy poet blew his top. The old man left the house the next day. ‘Forever after he was quick to tell all who would listen that W.H. Auden had lost his temper because of a cat. What kind of cat? “One hundred per cent alley.”’ Presumably he is still telling whoever will listen, for, twenty years later and in his nineties, he seems to be still around.

It was two happy years after he had met Chester (and, back in
the world of telegrams and anger, a month after the Germans invaded Russia) that Auden discovered he was not the only one laying his head human on Chester’s faithless arm. The first (or at any rate the first known to biography) was Jack Lansing (‘not his real name’), who, ‘despite his Latin eyes’, was ‘as English as cricket. He could trace his ancestors back to the Saxons in the Domesday Book while his father claimed a distant kinship to William the Conqueror.’ Ancestry soon got confused with dentistry, as Chester would meet Lansing on the quiet at his father’s surgery (‘Wider please’), and on one occasion their antics kept Edward waiting over an hour outside the locked door. When Auden found out about the affair his rage and jealousy were murderous. These were emotions he seems not to have experienced before, and the effect on him was profound. It’s not just the confusion of heartache and toothache that makes Auden’s grief less than tragic. It’s hard to understand how Auden could have lived with Kallman for two years without cottoning on to the younger man’s character, or how he had reached the age of thirty-four without finding himself in this situation before. Here was one of the most acknowledged of unacknowledged legislators who had laid down the law about love with seemingly no experience whatever of its pains and penalties. There is a powerful impulse to say, ‘Well, serve you right.’

That the friendship survived is taken by Ms Farnan to be somewhat unusual, and a tribute to Auden’s strength of character: a lesser man, she implies, would have packed his bags. But a period of exclusive physical attachment followed by a close friendship in which each party goes his own (sometimes promiscuous) way is not uncommon. Or wasn’t − these days homosexuals are having to do what the people the other side of the fence call ‘working at the marriage’. Auden had the sense to realize that sharing a joke is rarer than sharing a bed, which,
according to Chester, they ceased to do. Whatever it was they did together (and Ms Farnan is not unspecific on the point), they didn’t any more. This does seem unusual. Ms Farnan puts it down, if not to principle on Chester’s part, at least to his romantic temperament. There seems to be a streak of wanton cruelty in it − or the cruelty of a wanton. Chester found nothing so easy as attracting company to his bed − a quality, once he had come to terms with it, in which Auden took pride. With the world’s fighting men lining up eagerly for Chester’s favours, did Auden
never
get a look in, even if not on quite the one-to-one basis with Chester that he wanted? Well, maybe. Ms Farnan chooses to see Auden’s love-life from here on as tragic, the short-lived affair a lifelong heartache. It doesn’t seem to have been too bad, particularly when one remembers that for some people sexual intercourse only began in 1963. He certainly didn’t want for consolation. Unhappy but not unhappy about it just about sums it up.

The cast of the sex lives of Auden and Kallman is large. It is also coy. Since this is the love that dares not speak its name, the sex, when it is not anonymous, is pseudonymous, with over a score of the participants footnoted ‘not his real name’. Nor are the names under which they do appear of a noble simplicity. Here is no Chuck, no Rick, no Lance. Ms Farnan has lavished much art on these fellatious appellations: they include Royce Wagoner, Dutch Martell, Peter Komadina, Mr Schuyler Bash and (a real ball of fire) Lieutenant Horace Stepole. Francis Peabody Magoun, on the other hand,
is
a real name, as is Giorgione, who is footnoted as ‘famous Venetian painter’ − presumably to distinguish him from all those other Italian boys who went down on posterity but not to it.