Volume 43, Number 11 · June 20, 1996
His Ewe Lamb
By Robert Craft
Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman
by Thekla Clark, Introduction by James Fenton
Faber and Faber, 130 pp., $19.95
Thekla Clark describes herself as 'a giddy young woman... no intellectual,' and 'aggressively heterosexual,' not the ideal qualifications for the subject, one would have thought, but quite wrongly. Her portraits of both Auden and Kallman are truer, and, in a seemingly offhand manner, as penetrating as any of those by their other memoirist friends. Adding to her non-aptitudes, Mrs. Clark claims to be unmusical, yet she perfectly catches the nuances and intonations of Wystan's and Chester's voices, simply, as their friends would have to attest, by quoting them believably.
Review, 1642 words
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