Volume 30, Number 20 · December 22, 1983
Compositions
By Robert Craft
Auden: An American Friendship
by Charles H. Miller
Scribner's, 180 pp., $14.95
This Man and Music
by Anthony Burgess
McGraw-Hill, 192 pp., $14.95
Glenn Gould: Variations
by Himself and His Friends, edited with an introduction by John McGreevy
Doubleday, 319 pp., $24.95
Balthus: Drawings and Watercolors
by Giovanni Carandente
A New York Graphic Society Book/Little, Brown, 120 pp., $29.95
The Letters of William Somerset Maugham to Lady Juliet Duff
edited and with an introduction by Loren R. Rothchild
Rasselas Press, 81 pp., no price given
This book tells us more about its author than about W.H. Auden. To even the most trivial remarks of the poet, Mr. Miller gives his own reactions in full: ''Aren't the fireplaces handsome?' Wystan enthused, and yes, I thought of the previous century when those fireplaces heated the generous rooms.' Noting that after a certain incident he never again heard Auden mispronounce the word 'ate,' Mr. Miller feels it necessary to add: 'Though he may have said it outside my hearing.' What did Wystan 'get' from him? Mr. Miller asks at one point. And he answers himself: 'My offbeat, 'amiable anarchist' wisdom, my ability (finally!) to laugh at life.' Lucky Wystan.
Review, 3599 words
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