Chester Kallman -W. H. Auden
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Ο W. H Auden και ο Chester Kallman gνωρίστηκαν σε μια δημόσια ποιητική ανάγνωση στη Νέα Υόρκη και ο δεκαοκτάχρονος τότε Chester, που φιλοδοξούσε να γίνει και ο ίδιος ποιητής, κατάφερε να σαγηνεύσει τον συγκρατημένο και αρκετά μεγαλύτερης ηλικίας Wystan Hugh. Η σχέση τους κράτησε 35 χρόνια, μέχρι τον θάνατο του Ώντεν στη Βιέννη το 1973, παρά τα προβλήματα που δημιουργούσαν οι συχνές ερωτικές απιστίες του Κάλμαν. Ο Κάλμαν πέθανε στην Αθήνα το 1975.
Ο W. H Auden και ο Chester Kallman gνωρίστηκαν σε μια δημόσια ποιητική ανάγνωση στη Νέα Υόρκη και ο δεκαοκτάχρονος τότε Chester, που φιλοδοξούσε να γίνει και ο ίδιος ποιητής, κατάφερε να σαγηνεύσει τον συγκρατημένο και αρκετά μεγαλύτερης ηλικίας Wystan Hugh. Η σχέση τους κράτησε 35 χρόνια, μέχρι τον θάνατο του Ώντεν στη Βιέννη το 1973, παρά τα προβλήματα που δημιουργούσαν οι συχνές ερωτικές απιστίες του Κάλμαν. Ο Κάλμαν πέθανε στην Αθήνα το 1975.
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Since
On a mid-December day,
frying sausages
for myself, I abruptly
felt under fingers
thirty years younger the rim
of a steering wheel,
on my cheek the parching wind
of an August noon,
as passenger beside me
You as then you were.
Slap across a veg-growing
alluvial plain
we raced in clouds of white dust,
and geese fled screaming
as we missed them by inches,
making a bee-line
for mountains gradually
enlarging eastward,
joyfully certain nightfall
would occasion joy.
It did. In a flagged kitchen
we were served boiled trout
and a rank cheese: for a while
we talked by the fire,
then, carrying candles, climbed
steep stairs. Love was made
then and there: so halcyoned,
soon we fell asleep
to the sound of a river
swabbling through a gorge.
Since then, other enchantments
have blazed and faded,
enemies changed their address,
and War made ugly
an uncountable number
of unknown neighbors,
precious as us to themselves:
but round your image
there is no fog, and the Earth
can still astonish.
Of what, then, should I complain,
pottering about
a neat suburban kitchen?
Solitude? Rubbish!
Its social enough with real
faces and landscapes
for whose friendly countenance
I at least can learn
to live with obesity
and a little fame.
W.H.Auden / 1965
Since
On a mid-December day,
frying sausages
for myself, I abruptly
felt under fingers
thirty years younger the rim
of a steering wheel,
on my cheek the parching wind
of an August noon,
as passenger beside me
You as then you were.
Slap across a veg-growing
alluvial plain
we raced in clouds of white dust,
and geese fled screaming
as we missed them by inches,
making a bee-line
for mountains gradually
enlarging eastward,
joyfully certain nightfall
would occasion joy.
It did. In a flagged kitchen
we were served boiled trout
and a rank cheese: for a while
we talked by the fire,
then, carrying candles, climbed
steep stairs. Love was made
then and there: so halcyoned,
soon we fell asleep
to the sound of a river
swabbling through a gorge.
Since then, other enchantments
have blazed and faded,
enemies changed their address,
and War made ugly
an uncountable number
of unknown neighbors,
precious as us to themselves:
but round your image
there is no fog, and the Earth
can still astonish.
Of what, then, should I complain,
pottering about
a neat suburban kitchen?
Solitude? Rubbish!
Its social enough with real
faces and landscapes
for whose friendly countenance
I at least can learn
to live with obesity
and a little fame.
W.H.Auden / 1965
Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήDescribed by Edward Mendelson as "the most inclusive poet of the twentieth century, its most technically skilled, and its most truthful," Auden is the first major poet to incorporate modern psychological insights and paradigms as a natural element of his work and thought. The foremost religious poet of his age, the most variously learned, and the one most preoccupied with existentialism, Auden is also an important love poet.
Although particularly concerned with the relationship of Eros and Agape and characteristically practicing a "poetry of reticence," Auden celebrates erotic love as a significant element in his geography of the heart.
Born into an upper middle-class professional family in York in 1907 and educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, from which he received his B.A. in 1928, Wystan Hugh Auden was the third son of a physician and a nurse, from whom he imbibed scientific, religious, and musical interests and a love of the Norse sagas. Following his graduation, he spent a year in Berlin, where he enjoyed the city's homosexual demimonde and absorbed German culture. He returned to teach in public schools in Scotland and England from 1930 to 1935.
In 1938, he married Erika Mann, daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann, in order to enable her to obtain a British visa and escape Nazi Germany; the marriage was not consummated. In January 1939, disillusioned with the left-wing politics they had embraced, Auden and his friend and frequent collaborator, Christopher Isherwood, emigrated to the United States.
Settling in New York City, Auden soon fell in love with a precocious eighteen-year-old from Brooklyn, Chester Kallman, with whom he maintained a relationship for the rest of his life, sharing apartments in New York and, later, summer residences in first Ischia and then Austria. Auden died in Vienna on September 29, 1973.
Auden dominated the British literary scene of the 1930s, quickly emerging as the leading voice of his generation. With the publication of The Orators (1932) and the enlarged edition of Poems (1933), Auden became, by his mid-twenties, firmly established as an important literary presence, the leader of the "Auden Gang" that included Isherwood, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice.
Auden's early poetry breathed an air of revolutionary freshness. In language at once exotic and earthy, alternately banal and elegant, colloquial yet faintly archaic, Auden's verse diagnosed psychic disturbances with an extraordinary resonance. Although most of his early poems have their origins in his personal anxieties, especially those related to his homosexuality and his search for psychic healing, they seemed to voice the fears and uncertainties of his entire generation.
Auden may have initially regarded his gayness as a psychic wound, but he came to see it as a liberating force. In the prose poem "Letter to a Wound" (1932), he writes,
Thanks to you, I have come to see a profound significance in relations I never dreamt of considering before, an old lady's affection for a small dog, the Waterhouses and their retriever, the curious bond between Offal and Snig, the partners in the hardware shop on the front. Even the close-ups in the films no longer disgust nor amuse me. On the contrary, they sometimes make me cry; knowing you has made me understand.
Auden's acceptance of his gayness thus leads him to new insight into the universal impulse to love and enlarges his understanding of all kinds of relationships. At the same time, however, Auden is acutely aware of the limitations of eroticism.
His earliest love poems complain of his lack of sexual success, but his poems from the later 1930s such as "May with its light behaving" lament an emotional isolation that accompanies physical intimacy. In the poem beginning "Easily, my dear, you move," erotic love and feverish political activity are both depicted as expressions of vanity and the desire for power. Auden finally reaches the conclusion that Eros and Agape are interdependent.
Auden's recognition of the interdependence of Eros and Agape is at the heart of perhaps the greatest love poem of the century, the grave and tender "Lullaby" (["Lay your sleeping head"] 1937), which moves so nimbly and with such grace among abstractions evoked so subtly that it may well be regarded as the premiere example of the poet's intellectual lyricism. The luminous moment of fulfillment that the poem celebrates is placed in a context of mutability and decay that poignantly underlines the fragility of a love endangered from within by guilt, promiscuity, and betrayal, and from without by the "pedantic boring cry" of homophobic "fashionable madmen."
Auden's marriage to Kallman was not to prove entirely happy (primarily due to Kallman's promiscuity), but it provided the poet with loving companionship and helped seal the permanence of his self-exile. Auden's first flush of passion for Kallman immediately inspired several poems of fulfilled erotic love, including "The Prophets," "Like a Vocation," "The Riddle," "Law Like Love," and "Heavy Date," in which he tells his lover, "I have / Found myself in you."
Kallman introduced Auden to opera, an interest that would shape the curve of his career. The partners collaborated on several original libretti, including one for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951), and on translating others.
Auden movingly celebrates his relationship with Kallman in "The Common Life" (1965), which tellingly declares that "every home should be a fortress." Also among Auden's late poems is "Glad," a light but deeply felt account of his relationship with a male hustler, "for a decade now / My bed-visitor, / An unexpected blessing / In a lucky life."
In "Since," a poem probably inspired by his relationship with Kallman, Auden suddenly remembers an August noon thirty years ago and "You as then you were." He juxtaposes the memory of his youthful love-making with an account of the failures of Eros and Agape in the world since then and finds sustenance in the memory: "round your image / there is no fog, and the Earth / can still astonish."
In a remarkable conclusion that bravely faces the issue of aging with unsentimental wit, he concludes, "I at least can learn / to live with obesity / and a little fame." A stunning achievement, "Since" validates the vision of Eros as a life-sustaining experience that can compensate at least in part even for the inevitable failures of Agape.
Auden's homosexuality is also expressed throughout his canon in the camp wit that discerns defensive fun in serious fear, as in the limerick "The Aesthetic Point of View" (1960). Moreover, the humorous self-revelations of the "Shorts" (1960), the "Marginalia" (1969), or "Profile" (1969), as well as the bawdy verse--such as "A Day for a Lay"--circulated among friends, helped establish for Auden a persona that has been particularly influential on younger gay poets, such as James Merrill, Richard Howard, and Howard Moss. In Merrill's series of adventures with the Ouija board, for example, Auden is a ghostly presence, the embodiment of a homosexual artistic sensibility.
Claude J. Summers
Chester Kallman
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήChester Simon Kallman (7 January 1921 – 18 January 1975) was an American poet, librettist, and translator, best known for his collaborations with W. H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky.
Life
Kallman was born in Brooklyn. He received his B.A. at Brooklyn College and his M.A. at the University of Michigan. He published three collections of poems, Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). He lived most of his adult life in New York, spending his summers in Italy from 1948 through 1957 and in Austria from 1958 through 1974. He moved his winter home from New York to Athens in 1963.
Career
Together with his lifelong friend (and former lover) W. H. Auden, Kallman wrote the libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951). They also collaborated on two librettos for Henze, Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1966), and on the libretto of Love's Labour's Lost (based on Shakespeare's play) for Nicolas Nabokov (1973). They also wrote a libretto "Delia, or, A Masque of Night" (1953), intended for Stravinsky, but never set to music. They were commissioned to write the lyrics for Man of La Mancha, but Kallman did no work on the project, and the producers decided against using Auden's contributions.
Kallman was the sole author of the libretto of The Tuscan Players for Carlos Chávez (1953, first performed in 1957 as Panfilo and Lauretta).
He and Auden collaborated on a number of libretto translations, notably The Magic Flute (1956) and Don Giovanni (1961). Kallman also translated Verdi's Falstaff (1954), Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea (1954) and many other operas.
Bibliography
Poems
An Elegy (1951). New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery. (pamphlet poem)
Storm at Castelfranco (1956). New York: Grove Press.
Absent and Present: poems (1963). Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
The Sense of Occasion: poems (1971). New York: George Braziller.
Libretti
The Rake's Progress (1951, with W. H. Auden, music for Igor Stravinsky) New York: Boosey & Hawkes.
Delia, or A masque of Night (1953, with W. H. Auden; published in Botteghe Oscure XII; never set to music)
Elegy for Young Lovers (1961, with W. H. Auden, for music by Hans Werner Henze). Mainz: B. Schott's Söhne.
Love Propitiated (pbd. 1963, for music by Carlos Chavez; first performed as Panfilo and Lauretta, 1957, then as Love Propitated, 1961). New York: Mills Music.
The Bassarids (1966, with W. H. Auden, for music by Hans Werner Henze). Mainz: B. Schott's Söhne.
Love's Labour's Lost (1973, with W. H. Auden, for music by Nicolas Nabokov). Berlin: Bote & Bock.
Translations (published)
Bluebeard's Castle (1952; translation of the libretto by Béla Balázs for the opera by Béla Bartók). New York: Boosey & Hawkes
Falstaff (1954; translation of the libretto of the opera by Boito). New York: G. Ricordi.
The Magic Flute (1956, with W. H. Auden, for an NBC Opera Theatre production of the opera by Mozart). New York: Random House.
Anne Boleyn (1959; translation of the libretto by Felice Romani for the opera by Donizetti). New York: G. Ricordi.
The Prize Fight (1959; translation of the libretto by Luciano Conosciani for Vieri Tosatti's opera Partita a Pugni). Milan: Ricordi.
Don Giovanni (1961, with W. H. Auden, for an NBC Opera Theatre production of the opera by Mozart). New York: Schirmer.
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, by Bertolt Brecht. (pbd. 1976, with W. H. Auden). Boston: David Godine.
Arcifanfano, King of Fools (pbd. with a recording, 1992, with W. H. Auden, after the opera by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf).
Editions
An Elizabethan Song Book (1955, with W. H. Auden and Noah Greenberg). New York: Anchor Books.
en.wikipedia.org
The Woman in Their Lives
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήBy MIRANDA SEYMOUR
New York Times, September 22, 1996
Wystan and Chester
A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman.
By Thekla Clark.
Illustrated. 130 pp. New York:
Columbia University Press. $19.95.
A FINE recent biography of W. H. Auden by Richard Davenport-Hines describes Thekla Clark as ''an elegant and generous young American woman'' to whom, in the 1950's, Auden became sufficiently attached to suggest they should marry. (Thus, he explained, they could have a son and call him Chester.) The invitation was gracefully declined; the friendship continued.
There has been only one book until now that focused on Auden's tormented but enduring relationship with Chester Kallman, whom he almost dismissed from his New York doorstep in 1939 as ''the wrong blond.'' That book (''Auden in Love'') was written by Kallman's stepmother, Dorothy J. Farnan. Struggling to be impartial, she was prejudiced by the belief that Auden had alienated Kallman from a devoted father, and misled by her own sense of Kallman as the poet's victim. Thekla Clark, with no personal ax to grind and nothing but shrewdness and a generous spirit to guide her, has written a more graceful and remarkable book, one that nobody who cares about Auden can afford to ignore.
This sounds threatening. In fact, reading Mrs. Clark's memoir is likely to be an experience of undiluted pleasure. The stories, of which there are an abundance, are wonderful. Nobody should be deprived of a grand literary tour in Italy that included the gorgeously beringed and theatrical Edith Sitwell, presiding over the family villa near Florence, not to mention Bernard Berenson nearby at I Tatti (a shrine to Art into which Auden pined to introduce as vulgar a seaside souvenir as he could find). Mrs. Clark saw Auden at his best and most relaxed, away from New York, where he was often depressed and taciturn. Here, as she describes him in a European setting, his voice has never been more agreeably identifiable, his character more sympathetically revealed.
''Wystan and Chester'' begins in the early 1950's, when Auden and Kallman were living on Ischia, an Italian island that was still so backward the only taxi was a horse-drawn cart. The memoir ends just after Auden's death in 1973. Rudderless without his companion's harsh certainties to sail by, Kallman died in 1975, alone and penniless, in Athens. Mrs. Clark's one moment of sharpness is reserved for the fact that Kallman's father and stepmother inherited Auden's literary estate, although Mrs. Clark was a witness on the day Kallman left it all to Auden's adored nieces. That will was never found.
In 1951, when she first visited Ischia, Mrs. Clark was a young widow; the next year, she returned with her pretty 2-year-old daughter, Lisa. Always the first to poke fun at herself, she describes herself as ''an overconfident Daisy'' with ''New World exuberance and vulgarity,'' a big blonde (''la biondona'') with a tendency to babble.
The absence of a husband spoke eloquently to Auden; together with Kallman, he drew Thekla and Lisa into a splendidly unconventional family group. Its success was due partly to a shared sense of humor and partly to Kallman and Auden's doting adoration of the little girl. Chester wrote poems for her; Auden read her stories and sometimes performed the trick, greatly admired by Lisa, of taking out his teeth. He and his small friend once had ''a dreadful row'' over who was going to play Mrs. Tiggywinkle in one of their elaborate games, a dispute finally settled by Kallman, who ''declared that Wystan, with his feet, could only be Jemima Puddleduck.''
It is in such delicate comic cameos that Mrs. Clark quietly shows how Auden and Kallman's relationship worked. Sometimes -- too rarely -- we are allowed a glimpse of Auden discussing poetry, reproaching Yeats for sacrificing accuracy to effect, warning a writer against the danger of doing ''anything that will make you feel proud.'' But the anecdotes tell us more about life than literature. ''Happiness isn't a moral force, it's a duty,'' Auden announces and, in a less blithe moment, ''You Americans, to you time implies hope.'' Discreet but sharp-eyed, Mrs. Clark notes that when she talked about children Auden would, quite unconsciously, reach for a pet to cuddle. Like the best documentary film makers, she lets images tell the story.
The union of Auden and Kallman was a marriage of opposites, but the opposition was affectionate, mutually respected and contained by unspoken rules. Sexually, everything was over by the time Mrs. Clark met them; that had all ended in 1941 after Kallman's first discovered lapse from fidelity. On Ischia and later in Austria, the two men both took lovers, simple boys who were treated with respect and, in Kallman's case, exuberant generosity.
Sex, for Auden, had become an occasional functional need and, after dinner, a source of jokes. Kallman was both promiscuous and romantic. Love was the climate in which he thrived and his response to it was reckless. Kallman's lovers came to live with Auden at the house; he even wanted to take one along to Venice for the premiere of ''The Rake's Progress,'' the first of the seven operatic librettos on which Kallman and Auden collaborated.
Auden, who always had difficulty coming to terms with his homosexuality, was more discreet, but kind. One regular was set up with a barber shop -- ''Cost less than dinner at the Ritz.'' Another, Hugie, was forgiven for robbing the Austrian house and provided with an education that helped him obtain a steady job. One of the most beguiling moments in the memoir is Mrs. Clark's account of Auden's visits to Hugie and his obsession with the precise timing of the arrangements. Sex took place at 3:30 and drinks at a nearby bar with Hugie's wife at 5, allowing Auden to be on the 6:12 train home, returning in time for dinner with Chester at 7:30. Hugie and his wife were present at Auden's funeral; both were weeping.
Kallman, once a beauty, excelled in later years at being campily outrageous. But Auden, never at ease as a social rebel, became increasingly conventional in middle age. He could not bear unpunctuality and disliked rudeness. In Austria, he was a regular churchgoer, booming out the responses while Kallman loitered outside, looking like one of ''the socialist husbands of Italian countrywomen.'' The visits of clever, kindly John Auden delighted his brother, stimulating the memory of an orderly, well-regulated past, the peaceful upbringing of an English doctor's sons.
The gap between Auden and Kallman was glaring and, to some of Auden's friends, unnerving. Kallman, the brilliant raconteur and mimic, could seem more like a grubby actor on his uppers than the witty Adonis Auden had first loved. His astonishing meals, shrewdly perceived by Mrs. Clark as a way of holding the reality of life at bay, often consisted of one dish and nothing else: in cooking, as in life, details were sacrificed for the sake of spectacular effect. Auden's meticulousness, his fiercely held moral code and religious beliefs, his fondness for women, were foreign to Kallman's impetuous, volatile and wholeheartedly homosexual nature.
The relationship was, in Mrs. Clark's view, mutually necessary, but the price paid for it was cruelly high. Kallman -- ambitious, intelligent and determined to be seen as Auden's equal -- was made painfully aware that the world did not share that view of him. (Mrs. Clark might, however, have said more about the profound and sensitive musical knowledge Kallman brought as his dowry.) For Auden, the price was even higher. Loving and desiring Kallman, he showed extraordinary restraint in accepting his companion's right to bring intellectually limited young men to live with them for years on end. Praising his poetry far beyond its due must have been troubling for a man so intent on truth -- as was witnessing the slow process of Kallman's transformation from an exquisite boy into a sentimental old roue. Auden was always there to pick up the pieces, to pay the bills and ease the grief, to reassure Kallman that he too was achieving great things.
On all these subjects, Mrs. Clark is deft, convincing and immensely touching. A quiet deadpan humor saves her book from toppling into sentimentality. Here, in one of the clipped exchanges at which she excels, we hear the two men worrying that her 5-year-old son, from her 1961 marriage to John Clark, was becoming too charming for his own good: '' 'Dangerous,' said Wystan. 'Could be fatal,' said Chester.''
Visiting Auden's grave in Austria, she finds a last, affectionate image for its inhabitant: ''It looked lost and different, yet superior.''
SINCE
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήOne of Auden's later poems, written in 1965. By then his relationship
with Chester Kallman had settled into a regular, though not terribly
happy pattern. They were still a couple and Auden at least considered
himself married to Kallman, but they had long stopped sleeping
together.
Perhaps Kallman didn't love Auden equally (according to Auden - its
odd how little one hears Kallman's views in so much writing on
Auden), perhaps he no longer found him sexually attractive, perhaps
he was champing at being always seen as Auden's appendage when he
sought to be a creative artist himself. So they still continued to
spend part of the year together in the house Auden had bought in
Austria, but for the rest Auden went to the US, and Kallman went to
Greece where at some point he had another lover.
Auden accepted the situation and found other lovers for sex. The
situation did make him a little bitter though, bringing out all his
old insecurities about himself and his complicated feelings about his
sexuality. But he never doubted that Kallman was the love of his life
and his partner, and it was moments like the one recorded in his poem
that kept this constancy.
The poem is of a memory that becomes almost a vision, of a time long
back when they were first in love and of a perfect moment at that
perfect time. Since then things have changed much, in the world and
with them, but the memory of that perfect moment, of "You as then you
were" has not. And that sustains the poet through all the changes and
disappointments of time.
Auden knew that love often turns out disappointing, but that
disappointment should not negate the reality of what had once
happened. To have known real love at least once is to know that "the
Earth/ can still astonish" and life has meaning. As to the rest its
just living and can be done easily enough. With practice one can
even "learn/ to live with obesity/ and a little fame."
Vikram/ GAY_BOMBAY