Volume 23, Number 1 · February 5, 1976
Love in the Catskills
By Richard Ellmann
During the last year of W. H. Auden's life, I sometimes had the luck to meet him in Oxford. On these occasions he would gradually place me as someone associated with literary biography, and would then inform me kindly but firmly that literary biography was no use. For its only purpose must be to display a relation of life and art, and either this relation—he would say—was obscure and impossible to detect, or else (and here his tone became triumphant) it was obvious and not worth mentioning. The verdict was chastening. But I found a little comfort in the fact that Auden defied his own rules. No one was more curious than he about the underpinnings of artistic careers. He wrote biographical poems about Housman's furtive sexuality and Melville's combat with Nobodaddy, and some of his essays, such as a long article on Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas, happily flouted by example his antibiographical precept.
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