Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Coincidence has brought this great (British-born) American poet into my consciousness twice in recent days.  On June 3d I attended one of the Berlin Philharmonic’s most enjoyable concerts in quite a while: with its regular conductor Sir Simon Rattle on the podium, Daniel Barenboim (who ordinarily presides as Generalmusikdirektor of the Deutsche Staatsoper over in eastern Berlin’s magnificent Unter den Linden boulevard) appeared as soloist in Johannes Brahms’ monumental Second Piano Concerto.  (To read my entire review of it you’d have to subscribe to www.musicalamerica.com.)  Before intermission we got a top-notch performance of what I’ve always regarded as Kurt Weill’s true masterpiece - not Die Dreigroschenoper (a.k.a. Three-Penny Opera), not his full-scale opera Mahagonny - both to texts by Bertolt Brecht - but the “ballet chanté” “The Seven Deadly Sins” on which Weill and Brecht collaborated for the last time in 1933,  after both of them had fled Nazi Germany and settled temporarily in Paris.  George Balanchine did the choreography for that world premiere, and many years later, when he wanted to introduce it to New York, he commissioned Auden and his partner Chester Kallman to do a singable English version of Brecht’s inspired text.

As I recall, Auden’s Collected Poems appeared in the USA in the mid-1940s, and I got hooked on one poem in particular, “Heavy Date”, which he wrote while living in the wildly improbable big Brooklyn house where the brilliant magazine editor George Davis (who in time would succeed Kurt Weill after his 1950 death as Lotte Lenya’s second husband) had had the antic idea, prompted by New York’s housing shortage at the time, of renting an entire big house and letting a hand-picked group of artistic friends live there, turning it into probably the most wildly improbable boarding house ever, with Davis as its sort of Den Mother.

You’d scarcely believe the roomers he took in at one time or another, running the place as a co-op.  They included Auden - and I recall reading somewhere that at one co-op meeting Auden complained about what he considered extravagance in the occupants’ use of toilet-paper, even attempting to pass a collective motion rationing it to something like three squares per sitting.  Other Britons included the great composer Benjamin Britten (in due time Lord Britten of Aldeburgh) and his tenor partner Peter Pears (in time Sir Peter).  By far the most unlikely: Gypsy Rose Lee, immortalized in history as a pioneer in the fine art of strip-tease, but literate enough for “The New Yorker” to publish a few pieces she wrote, and touchingly eager to learn from Davis and his more intellectual roomers.  (During his final visit to Berlin, where he died of heart failure, he quoted her to me as having once asked him, ”What’s with this Proust guy?”)

When Auden’s “Collected Poems” appeared in the USA, I found one poem, “Heavy Date”, so enthralling that I read it so repeatedly I eventually discovered I’d inadvertently memorized it.  I don’t want to risk the slammer over copyright issues, so here I’ll risk quoting only this succession of three stanzas:

             Slowly we are learning,
                      We at least know this much,
                      That we have to unlearn
                         Much that we were taught,
                      And are growing chary
                      Of emphatic dogmas;
                      Love like Matter is much
                         Odder than we thought.

             Love requires an Object,
                      But this varies so much,
                      Almost, I imagine,
                         Anything will do:
                      When I was a child, I
                      Loved a pumping-engine,
                      Thought it every bit as
                         Beautiful as you.

             Love has no position,
                      Love’s a way of living,
                      One kind of relation
                         Possible between
                      Any things or persons,
                      Given one condition,
                      The one sine qua non
                         Being mutual need.

An excellent article has recently appeared about Auden in an unlikely place, and I urge anyone interested in him to click here and read it.  I never had the luck to meet Auden, but our paths used to cross during the year he spent in newly walled-in Berlin as guest of a well-heeled Ford Foundation project called “Artists in Residence”.  His totally wrinkled face reminded me of one of those endearingly ugly Chinese Shar-Pei dogs.  When the English produce eccentrics, they don’t just mess around: Auden, no matter where he went, consistently appeared in old fashioned carpet slippers.  Someone on hand gave me a one-word explanation: “Corns.”

A very personal posthumous biography appeared as “Auden in Love.”  If another, considerably racier poem of Auden’s (which he never permitted to appear over his name during his lifetime) intrigues you, you can gain access to it by clicking here.