Auden’s life and character

he was so prone to unforgiving self-rebuke and sometimes subjugated his emotional
needs with such conscientious self-discipline, that he can be termed a spiritual masochist. 

A fellow pupil at his preparatory school was Christopher Isherwood, the future novelist who was subsequently his lover and literary collaborator

During1938, accompanied by Isherwood, Auden visited China, which had been invaded by Japanese forces. This resulted in their joint book, Journey toaWar (1939), containing ‘In Time of War’, a sequence of twenty-seven sonnets, which traces human history from the expulsion from Eden to the mechanised age and its neuroses. The sonnets’ vision of human ferocity, unblinking ethical judgements and refusal to offer false comfort constitute Auden’s supreme achievement of the 1930s.

Although Auden avowedly went to New York seeking anonymous soli-tude, he soon fell in love with 【Chester Kallman ( 1921–75), a handsome, witty, blond college boy from Brooklyn. The two men exchanged vows during a honeymoon in New Mexico during the summer of 1939. As Kallman’s way-ward habits were impossible to ignore, Auden decided that a person’s vices and weakness should be welcomed as potential opportunities and strengths.
Unfortunately for two men who proposed spending their lives together, their
preferred sexual acts were incompatible; Auden had an overwhelming commitment to fellatio and felt sadistic when satisfying Kallman’s urgent anal passivity. Kallman had undeniable aesthetic sensibility, but was selfish and wilful; Auden (while regarding Kallman as a sacred being) was possessive, invasive and overbearing. 

Erika Mann, a lesbian whom Auden had married in 1935, at Isherwood’s instigation, to provide her with a British passport needed to elude Nazi persecution. They never lived together or consummated the marriage.

Later, in1963, Timemagazine prepared a cover storyabout Auden only for it to be abruptly abandoned because its managing editor refused to honour a homosexual. He had never been secretive about his homosexuality, and became more candid in the 1960s, although paradoxically he also became more prudish after1963.