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His habits even left him free to perform a good deed; he married Thomas Mann's daughter Erika in order to get her out of Nazi Germany and safely under the protection of British citizenship. Auden later enlisted E.M. Forster in a campaign to persuade other homosexuals to perform such rescues.
Still, signs of inner strain were there: the chain-smoking, the use of drugs to get going in the morning and to stop at night, the increasingly heavy drinking. His remarkable face became a relief map of a ravaged land; Auden said he looked "like a wedding cake left out in the rain." Osborne does not flinch from presenting such evidence, but neither does he seem to know what to do with it: "On the Atlantic crossing back to England, he was uncharacteristically miserable, and on one occasion burst into tears, confessing to Isherwood that he could never find anyone to love him and that he believed himself to be a sexual failure. Arriving in London on 17 July, they went that evening to the theater."
Auden's shipboard squall may have been uncharacteristic, but it should clearly be given more biographical weight than his social calendar. Yet Auden's reticence about himself may hamper all potential biographers. To his lasting credit, he believed that the dark demons could be hedged in by civility, and he acted on this belief: "A suffering, a weakness, which cannot be expressed as an aphorism should not be mentioned." His love poem "Lullaby" is beautiful and moving precisely because of its reasoned equivocations, its rational tethers on emotion:
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.
"You were silly like us," Auden wrote of Irish Poet William Butler Yeats, but the truth is that Yeats was sillier, more willing to appear foolish and embrace mumbo jumbo in service to his art. Auden's way was very different, circumspect; his poetry achieved greatness but never reached out for Yeatsian grandeur. He wrote:
"The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me."
Osborne captures the second image but not the first; the poses are here, but the model remains mysterious.
—Paul Gray
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