CHESTER KALLMAN is the bad boy of the standard W. H. Auden story. In its extreme version, the tale goes something like this: In 1937, Kallman, a sixteen-year-old freshman at Brooklyn College, slyly maneuvered an introduction to the esteemed thirty-year-old poet, bedded him down that very night—re-awakening Auden’s long-disappointed, long-simmering hope for a lifetime companion, a “true marriage”—and hung on ever after, fitfully available, a slattern of promiscuous lust, an abuser of trust, a financial leech, a glib, destructive, talentless dilettante, the saintly Auden’s “hair shirt.”
But is there any truth to this account? Let us start at the beginning, when Auden and Kallman first met. In several manuscript collections—the Auden-Kallman correspondence in the New York Public Library, the James Merrill-Kallman letters at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Harold Norse Papers at the Lilly Library in Indiana—material is now available that allows for a far more nuanced description of Kallman himself and of his relationship with Auden.
More is involved here than attempting to revise our understanding of one relationship. The rescue mission has broader resonance: the need to “queer” history, to interpret it from the vantage point of our own cultural perspective (keeping in mind that all historical writing is interpretive). For too long the commentary on past LGBT lives has been in the hands of mostly conservative, mostly straight academic historians and critics who tend to define “healthy” or “authentic” relationships as ones that include lifetime, monogamous pair-bonding—the ultimate signpost of something called “maturity.”
Auden (and his many biographers) shared that definition of what constitutes a successful relationship, but Kallman (who’s had no biography) did not. A good-looking young blond of full-lipped sensuality and—as he was pleased to advertise—“well-hung,” Kallman was from an early age cocksure (pardon the pun), confident of his seductive prowess and buoyantly shameless when satisfying his abundant sexual appetite. Even before meeting Auden, Kallman had already told his father (his mother had died young) that he was “queer,” that he saw nothing wrong with it and had no wish to “outgrow it.” Bright, clever, and keen-witted, by age sixteen Kallman was already enrolled as a freshman at Brooklyn College. He had been sexually active since the age of twelve, having his first serious affair with an older Brooklyn College student and fellow poet named Harold Albaum. (He later changed it to Harold Norse, became part of Allen Ginsberg’s circle, won considerable recognition, and lived into his nineties.*)
In the Norse Papers at the Lilly Library, Norse describes Chester Kallman in 1939 as a young man whose “charm and powers have become a legend.” His contemporaries tended to regard him as a singularly “glamorous” creature. Starting at age twelve, he had (in Norse’s words) habitually “molested adults in subway toilets” and fearlessly approached attractive men on the street. In his 1989 autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, Norse emphasizes other aspects of Kallman’s character: his nature was “essentially benign” and kind-hearted, though his campy, merciless wit, “an acid rain of mockery,” sometimes concealed his affectionate nature. Chester also had from an early age a profound passion for music and for opera in particular, identifying, diva-like, with its exaggerated emotions.
After his first sexual experience with Auden in 1939, Kallman delightedly reported to Harold Norse that the poet had exclaimed, “Thank God it’s big!”
When on an out-of-town trip with Auden about a year after they met, Kallman wrote Norse that he was sexually bored: “When I do get back to the city I expect to spend 3/4 of my time flat on my stomach biting into pillows, listening to the music … of the bed-springs.” It didn’t help that Auden was an inept, awkward lover. Although he’d had his share of sexual adventures in Berlin in the 1920s, his dormant Christianity (by 1940 he was about to recommit to his idiosyncratic version of the faith) fed his uneasiness about sensual indulgence. Kallman, born Jewish, was adamantly secular and regarded sex as a source of unequivocal pleasure.
Their views on homosexuality itself were no less at odds. Auden felt that it was a misfortune, a “crooked” disorder. He kept changing his mind about the infirmity’s origins, but his negativity remained a constant. During his Freudian phase he saw it as “an unconscious criticism of the mother as a love-object”; at other times he thought it a form of adolescent rebellion or a flight from intimacy. Consistently and ruefully, he viewed homosexuality as a “backward” or “regressive” form of attachment—not a variation of authentic love but an impediment to it. Before meeting Kallman, Auden had considered his erotic life a failure—a narcissistic derangement, as he saw it, limited and barren.
His attitude reflected, of course, standard psychiatric assumptions of the day. However brilliantly original in his deployment of language and comfortable with his personal eccentricities, Auden was utterly conventional in his views on sexuality and gender roles. Kallman, though a gifted poet, would never find a comparably unique poetic voice, but he rejected conventional views about romantic love and monogamy and freely indulged his guilt-free enjoyment of “immoral” sexual pleasure. His attitude looks ahead to the 21st century, while Auden’s seem anchored in the late 19th.
What made Kallman a better candidate for Auden’s affections than previous attachments was their shared class origins, Kallman’s precocious intelligence, and his passion for language. Soon after meeting him, Auden wrote the poem “Heavy Date”:
I believed for years that
Love was the conjunction
Of two oppositions;
That was all untrue;
Every young man fears that
He is not worth loving:
Bless you, darling, I have
Found myself in you.
Auden was now able, with lapses, at least to consider the notion that homosexuality was something other than a curse—if experienced within the context of a committed relationship, that is, when performed (in his words) with “a person with whom I shall be one flesh.” From their first meeting, Auden was obsessed and adoring. Kallman, for his part, seems to have realized early on that he’d found in Auden a soulmate—yet never confused that with having found a sexual partner who could magically and enduringly meet his erotic needs. Not even in the short term.
Kallman wanted sex often and with a variety of partners—and he was open about it. He never pretended to be equally smitten, and never agreed to sexual fidelity. Auden knew the terms of the relationship from the beginning. He sometimes suffered greatly, especially in the early years, from Kallman’s amorous wanderings, yet he refused to relinquish the relationship. He saw in Kallman the life partner he’d given up all hope of finding and was wise enough to realize that love was, after all, far harder to find than sex. His description of himself (to Christopher Isherwood) as “a real Victorian wife,” though perhaps written with tongue in check, wasn’t far off the mark.
For a time, Kallman continued to see Norse almost daily, and he continued to cruise relentlessly—and unrepentantly. Auden may have fallen madly in love, but Kallman had not. He liked and admired Auden, was powerfully drawn to his genius, his awesome phrase-making, his magnetic story-telling and outlandish erudition, his gallant generosity of spirit. But he was not drawn to Auden’s sometimes domineering, cantankerous moods, his stubborn, sometimes gruff, certitude—and most assuredly not to his fleshy, unathletic body and limited, clumsy sexual repertoire.
Not least, Kallman enjoyed having an entrée into Auden’s glamorous world. When the two went cross-country in the summer of 1939 on what Wystan insisted on calling their “honeymoon” (“Such a romantic girl!” Kallman wrote Norse), and bought “wedding rings” to mark the occasion (Kallman refused to wear his), their first stop was a two-day visit to Thomas Mann and his family in Princeton, followed by a layover in Baton Rouge to see Katherine Anne Porter and her husband, a meeting in Taos with D. H. Lawrence’s widow, Frieda (“a marvelous woman,” Kallman wrote Norse), and finally a leisurely stay in California with Christopher Isherwood. (Judging from his published diaries, Isherwood over the years would continue to have mixed feelings about Kallman. He liked him “much more” as he grew older, writing in a 1948 diary entry, after a visit, that Kallman “is very funny, and so anxious to be friendly that it is quite touching. … [He] said to me: ‘I feel at last that you really don’t disapprove of me.’”)
Kallman kept a zealous eye out at bus and train stops for attractive young men, reporting in a letter to Norse that he’d “almost precipitated a domestic crisis by groping a boy sitting next to me between Jacksonville and Tallahassee. Boy, I think, was straight avec un basquet, ma chère, that he kept adjusting. Wystan was quite rightly exasperated, the boy merely removed my hand with a slight smile.” When forced to become aware of Kallman’s “antics,” Auden more typically kept discreetly silent. Thrilled that “the marriage of true minds” he’d long sought was now actually at hand, Auden seems to have hoped that once Kallman’s teen years were behind him and his hormones less rampant he would turn more domestic—and monogamous. But that, as he would unhappily learn, was not to be.
IN THE VERY EARLY DAYS of the relationship, Kallman may have been briefly caught up in Auden’s ecstatic fantasy of enduring “oneness” and may even have shared and encouraged it. Soon after their initial meeting in April 1939, Auden had to leave New York for a few weeks to fulfill a teaching engagement at St. Marks School, and during May and June Kallman sent him several letters underscoring his devotion. In one, dated May 13th and in apparent response to Auden’s parched need for validation, Kallman provocatively replied, “Why this self-abasement? Can you be assured?” He did try: “I love you, I love you, I love you.” In a subsequent letter Kallman even suggested (without saying as much outright) that he’d been giving his cruising a temporary rest: “You worry about the sailors and I wile [sic]away my time imagining you teaching some student French in bed. … We’re both wiling [sic]away time groundlessly I think.”
Ten days later, in another letter, Kallman reiterated his devotion: “Dear, I do love you!” and soon after followed up with “this love business is beginning to tell on me. I miss you disturbingly much—damn you darling.” He even reassured Auden regarding their different preferences in bed: “I am quite convinced, we are not different, darling, not at all—just a bunch of healthy youngsters who come in different positions and look at different people, but we’re quite all right, eh?” As if brought back to reality, Kallman signed the letter “Your little whore.”
The honeymoon was brief. Within a year, a crisis arose when Auden discovered that Kallman had fallen for a handsome, well-built young Englishman known only by the pseudonym “Jack Lansing,” and started seeing him with some regularity. Auden was shocked at the depth of rage this “betrayal” aroused in him. He felt that he knew for the first time “what it is like to feel oneself the prey of demonic powers, in both the Greek and the Christian sense, stripped of self-control and self-respect, behaving like a ham actor in a Strindberg play.” But as Humphrey Carpenter—the Auden biographer who has shown more sympathy toward Kallman than any other—has written: “Chester’s behaviour was only to be expected. He had never loved Auden with the same intensity as he was loved by him … and Auden … had in his eyes the role of patron and protector rather than lover. Even this had its difficulties, for Chester sometimes resented Auden’s patronage.”
At this point, Kallman played his trump card. Following Auden’s stormy reaction over “Jack,” Kallman announced that he and Auden would no longer have sex. And he meant it—though the two would stay together as a couple, and each would find in the other not only his best friend but a mutually reliant “co-conspirator.” As Auden put it in a mid-1940s letter: “I need your interest and your help more than you know (or allow yourself to know).” For his part, Kallman stressed “that, in whatever context it may be, or whatever interpretation it may be subjected to, I love you.”
It was Kallman who opened Auden’s eyes to the wonders of opera. The two came to share a lifelong passion for the form and starting in the late ’40s co-wrote a series of opera librettos, the most successful of which was Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.” The original deal for “The Rake” was made between Auden and Stravinsky—until Auden, with typical generosity, simply told Stravinsky that he’d be taking on “his friend” Chester Kallman as co-librettist. When a surprised Stravinsky reacted negatively to the news and was clearly upset, Auden assured him that “Mr. Kallman is a better librettist than I am”—and in fact Kallman did prove to be an extremely gifted one. After working together for a time, Stravinsky (whom Kallman referred to as “the mighty anal”) wrote him directly to say that he had “found your poetry most expressive and flexible for my music.” Not only was Stravinsky delighted with Kallman’s considerable contribution but (according to his associate, Robert Craft) “was quickly won by [his]… intelligence and sense of humor. … Kallman [according to Craft]was easier to understand than Auden, and could bring out … [Auden’s] dormant affability, as well as subdue his tempers. … Bluntly stated, the Stravinskys were happier with Auden when Chester Kallman was present.”*
Yet Kallman never found, either as a librettist or a poet, anything like Auden’s dedicated vocation; perhaps his talent wasn’t deep enough—his consecration, certainly, was much too sporadic. He never shared Auden’s highly disciplined work ethic, and at least one friend—the distinguished poet James Merrill (“Jimmy”)—came to view Kallman as a prime and sad example of a significant talent destroyed by alcohol—and “gay self-hatred.” As early as 1951, when Merrill attended the premiere of “The Rake’s Progress” in Venice’s glittering La Fenice theater, Merrill noted that at the curtain call—a roaring ovation, with the librettists joining Stravinsky onstage—Kallman looked like “a vision of Sin, puffy and purpled and scarred.”†
When Harold Norse ran into Kallman during roughly the same period, he lamented (or pretended to) that the brilliant, demonic boy he’d once known had disappeared. Perhaps, Norse wrote in his notebook (now in the Lilly Library), “Having been too close to him at an early age, I saw him when all was promise, intimations of grandeur. Now, that’s over. … Also, his social manner [is]… close to the Jewish ham actor. Lots of mugging, always one eye on the effect, never quite true, sure of itself, given.” Norse was being harsh, as we know from other, more appreciative observers, like Isherwood or Merrill.
Still, there was no gainsaying the decline in Kallman’s promise (and his good looks). When he and Auden were apart they exchanged letters (Kallman sometimes belatedly) about everything from literature to publishing to money—which Kallman often needed and which Auden usually sent. Auden would periodically urge Kallman—believing that “no friendship…can endure without cool, clear ‘minds-to-hearts’”—to yield less automatically to his impulses, particularly in regard to sex, and to activate a more rigorous routine when it came to writing. But to no avail, perhaps partly because Auden himself relied heavily on alcohol and Benzedrine. They were no less explicit in their letters about their separate sex lives, with Kallman always having far more to report. “Divine soldier and his friend,” he wrote Auden at one point, “both hotter than the nuts of hell—just want to fuck all night long.” At another point he mockingly chastised Auden for going to the Turkish baths when in Michigan: “Shame on you, Wystan. … By the way—has anything been thrust at you through the Ann Arbor ‘glory holes’?”
For the remainder of their lives, Wystan and Chester continued to live together for part of each year; their affective, though not their sexual lives, remaining closely bound. The “marriage” that Auden had as a younger man desperately longed for, held.
For years they spent winters in New York City and summers first on the island of Ischia and later in the cozy Austrian town of Kirchstetten. In their later years, much to Auden’s regret, Kallman began to spend increasing amounts of time in Greece, where casual sex was much more available. By 1963, he had substituted Athens for New York and he and Auden from then on lived together only during the summer. The separation greatly deepened Auden’s gloom and loneliness; nor did it help Kallman rally his resources: more of his energy went into cooking than poetry. He became a master (and hugely messy) chef, once turning out a dinner of Chicken Marengo and chocolate soufflé for twelve on the same evening he moved into a new apartment.
He also fell in love—with a young soldier named Yannis Boras, who was admiringly described by Jimmy Merrill’s partner, David Jackson, as having “the patience and affection to put up with terribly strange lives … [he had]that great talent which understands what is human and what is simply a nervous surface.” Tragically, Yannis, age 26, died in 1968 after being hit by a drunken driver. A bereft Kallman turned more and more to drink. As for Auden, in his later years he’d have an occasional, brief affair, but sex had never been at the center of his life and its absence seems never to have bothered him much; he described himself in his 1966 poem “Fairground” as one of those who’d put “their wander-years behind them,” who “play chess or cribbage,/games that call for patience, foresight, manoeuvre,/ like war, like marriage.”
If he didn’t miss sex, he most certainly missed Kallman; the habit of a shared life had been central to his sense of well-being. In the hope of somehow regaining some form of community, he accepted Oxford’s offer of a permanent residency and returned to England early in 1972. Kallman approved the move—not least because, as he wrote a friend, Wystan had of late been imposing “rather hair-raising tension … on everyone near him in New York, me especially.” For a brief time, Auden seemed happy and relaxed at Oxford. But too much had changed; too many old friends were gone, too many donnish rituals discarded. There were few amenities, and even less conviviality. His friends feared that he would drink himself to death. Miserable and ill, Auden suffered a fatal heart attack in 1973, age 66. It was Kallman, devastatingly, who found his body. Hearing the news, James Merrill wrote to him: “It may not always have been plain to you … how greatly he loved you & relied on you; but it was to the rest of us. I mean, always was.” Shocked and heart-broken, Kallman never recovered. A year and a half later, he too was dead, at age 54.
NEARLY EVERYONE who has written about Chester Kallman has essentially described him—without using the word—as a “borderline” personality: a spoiled and selfish sociopath, a sexual predator, an irresponsible parasite interested in little more than indulging his insatiable sexual appetite. Sometimes explicitly, but usually by indirection, Kallman’s critics profess bewilderment over Auden’s profound and lifelong attachment to him.
Kallman could cause Auden pain and public embarrassment, but that stream ran in both directions. Auden’s uninterruptable monologues and rude, grumpy arrogance inflicted their own share of discomfort on Kallman. Besides, being the spouse of an acclaimed genius, and considerably younger as well, could be an onerous role, automatically encouraging dismissal as a mere appendage, a sponge. Kallman was in fact too gifted simply to bask in reflected glory; he was more its victim.
The point isn’t to parcel out “blame” more evenly but instead to recognize that from their very first meeting, an “electric spark” passed between Auden and Kallman that in the coming decades would often dim but never go out. Though their relationship, like most—like all?—could be contentious and troubled, they saw in each other the likeliest candidate either would ever know of a “true marriage”—and not primarily (as often suggested) because of dovetailing neuroses. Kallman was far more of a genuine partner than is usually credited. “I rely absolutely upon your critical judgment,” Auden once wrote him, and in another letter he stated flat-out that “you are the one comrade my non-sexual life cannot do without.” Kallman often influenced Auden’s taste, held his own with him intellectually (surpassing him in aphoristic wit, though never matching his erudition), and proved genuinely and generously supportive in difficult moments.
Auden could now and then sound a note of homosexual “chauvinism,” but far more often he saw his “condition” as a curse, and possibly even a crime. “It’s wrong to be queer,” he told a friend in 1947, “all homosexual acts are acts of envy.” When The Kinsey Report was published the following year, Auden wrote a review that he himself characterized as “so anti homintern” that he tore it up. In 1950, he titled his review of a new biography of Oscar Wilde “A Playboy of the Western World: St. Oscar the Homintern Martyr.”*
Chester Kallman shared none of those views. He was comfortable with his homosexuality and delighted in sex. That has almost certainly been a contributing factor—and arguably the most important one—to his undeservedly negative press.
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* See Edward Mendelson’s Early Auden, Later Auden (Princeton).
Martin Duberman was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree by Columbia University at its 2017 commencement. He has three new books coming out in 2018, beginning with a memoir titled The Rest of It.
