W. H. Auden by Humphrey Carpenter

Author:Humphrey Carpenter [Humphrey Carpenter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571280889
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Blood, that feeds and drains the soul

And shakes the wedding band,

Served her heart with a dead object

It could not keep in hand.

He idolised her memory for the rest of his life. ‘Mothers’, Auden once wrote to him, ‘have much to do with your queerness and mine.’

His father soon married again, and after the second wife had given birth to a son she grew resentful of Chester and began to ill-treat him. This second marriage eventually broke up and was followed by a third, but again the wife had no affection for Chester. The boy was now spending much of his time with his paternal grandparents, who ran a restaurant in Coney Island. His grandmother, ‘Bobby’ Kallman, was much admired for her cooking, and Chester himself began as he grew up to learn something of her skill with food. He became very deeply attached to his aunt Sadie, who took the place of a mother for him; but she allowed him to depend too much on her, and he was bitterly pained when, in his eighth year, she got married and left his grandparents’ house. ‘She promised to marry me,’ he told his grandmother.

As an adolescent, he was sent to Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, and then to Brooklyn College, where he majored in English literature. He helped to run the college literary magazine, and when Auden and Isherwood arrived in New York he determined, with his friend Harold Norse, to interview them.

He had been born with red hair, but it later became golden, and at eighteen years old, when he first met Auden, he was, in a friend’s words, ‘if not a beauty, then an intriguing good looker’. His eyes were violet-coloured, with dark shadows beneath them that seemed strangely dissipated in someone so young. His mouth was full and sensuous, and his face mobile and good at comic expressions. A friend of Auden observed that there was something about him that was both angelic and demonic.

He was remarkably well read and was not ashamed of expressing his own opinions. He annoyed Harold Norse by attacking Whitman, whom Norse admired; his own chosen models were Henry James, Proust and Flaubert. When he called at Auden and Isherwood’s Yorkville apartment that day, he surprised Auden by recognising esoteric literary allusions in the conversation, and capping them with others. Largely as a result of this he was asked to call again.

He had certainly had affairs with girls, but also with boys, though he was not yet committed to homosexuality. His erotic interests were characterised by a highly romantic temperament; he liked to weave fantasies around lovers, especially if they were absent; a friend remarked: ‘He loved you best if you were far away.’ He was ‘tarty’ in manner, making eyes at likely people. Auden, who cheerfully accepted sex when it came his way, presumably responded readily to these advances. Moreover Chester was sexually ‘well hung’ which always appealed to Auden. Soon, as Chester told Harold Norse, he was indeed in love with the boy.

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