Volume 36, Number 6 · April 13, 1989
An Affair of the Heart
By Robert Craft
October 19, 1988. From Wee-enna, as the driver says, to Auden's grave in Kirchstetten. A photograph of W.H.A. is encased in the gateway to the small church and surrounding cemetery, where the stone, head against the wall and shoed-in between two other plots, is both sadly out of place and as unkempt as he was himself. An iron marker doubly identifies the poet as a 'Man of Letters,' a description that would have appalled him. The 'Audenhaus,' at the end of Audengasse, is undergoing much-needed repairs. Difficult to picture him in this melancholy village, with its crossroads crucifixes, to imagine the orgies, the gramophone blaring Wagner. At nearby Melk, the steep staircases leave me pale and panting.
Feature, 2848 words
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