Volume 31, Number 14 · September 27, 1984
Lives of the Poets
By Robert Craft
Auden in Love
by Dorothy J. Farnan
Simon and Schuster, 253 pp., $17.95
Auden in Love is a biography of Chester Kallman, the 'love' of the title and the poet's closest friend for thirty-four years. The author, Dorothy Farnan, had first known Auden while he was guest professor at the University of Michigan in 1941, and Kallman as a fellow student there a year later. During the following three decades in New York, she was in a better position than anyone else to observe the two of them together, at least after 1948, when she became the consort of Kallman's father. Besides her advantage as a member of the family, she has been able to quote extensively from Auden's letters to Kallman and from Kallman's to her, and to use the testimony of hitherto unknown friends and lovers of both men. The resulting story is of a relationship as strange and disturbing as any in all 'the lives of the poets.'
Review, 3241 words
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