Book Essay - Winter 2009

Lunching on Olympus

My meals with W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson

By Steven L. Isenberg

The British writers W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson paid respectful attention to each other: Larkin wrote “English Auden was a superb and magnetic wide-angled poet, but the poetry was in the blaming and the warning.” Empson thought Auden a “wonderful poet” and put Larkin among the “very good poets.” Auden wrote a sonnet for Forster, and Empson wrote a poem called “Just a Smack at Auden.” Forster’s novels were touchstones for Auden, who cabled “Morgan” Forster on his 80th birthday these good wishes: “May you long continue what you already are stop old famous loved yet not yet a sacred cow.” Empson thought Forster’s Aspects of the Novel—lectures he had heard as a student at Cambridge—“a model.”

For me the four have another thing in common, the unlikely and unexpected occasions of my having met each of them for lunch. Those visits are always with me, and while I kept no diary and so remember fewer of their words than I wish, the memories I do have are testimony to their humanity and kindness.

W. H. Auden:
“Oh, don’t bother much about that.”

It all began with Auden in New York in 1962. I had recently graduated from Berkeley and started to work at McGraw-Hill as a reader of manuscripts that senior editors wanted cleared out. Unauthorized and unanticipated by my boss, I looked Auden up in the phone book and called him at home. I said I was in McGraw-Hill’s trade editorial department and had recently been a student of and reader for Mark Schorer, the head of the English Department at Berkeley. I wondered if we could meet to discuss whether he might write a biography. I’d come up with this because Auden was not our author, and I had been told that exclusivity clauses in publishing contracts sometimes omit a genre in which the author had never written.

Auden said he didn’t write biographies, but was curious about whom I had in mind as a potential subject. E. M. Forster, I said, or Thomas Mann, or—the third is fuzzy in my memory, but it was either Carl Jung or Hermann Hesse. “Forster is alive,” he said. “Well, perhaps, that one might wait,” I replied, and somehow I got from there to setting a date for lunch. I chose the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel because I had looked in there once and it seemed old-world, serious, and comfortable.

A few days later my boss, Ed Kuhn, the head of the trade editorial department, summoned me to his office. “I have just had a call,” he said, “from Bennett Cerf [I knew who he was from the television panel show What’s My Line?], the head of Random House, asking who the hell you were. I couldn’t imagine why he had heard of you and why he sounded so damn put out. Cerf asked, ‘What does he do for you? He is poaching on one of our authors.’ I asked Cerf who that was. ‘W. H. Auden. He is trying to get him to write a biography.’ I told Cerf you were just a kid out of college, and I had no idea about this, and Cerf said, ‘Well, Auden is having lunch with him.’”

For McGraw-Hill to publish W. H. Auden was virtually unthinkable. We had brought out Schorer’s biography of Sinclair Lewis, but our biggest-selling authors were Eugene Burdick with Fail Safe and Robert Ruark with Uhuru. So it was on a few counts that Kuhn was astonished. I could tell Cerf and Kuhn had enjoyed a laugh at my expense. Nevertheless, the whole matter pricked Kuhn’s pride. Why shouldn’t his house be a place for the likes of Auden?

Kuhn asked what biographies I had suggested. I told him. He was even more stunned after I got out one name. “How much Auden have you read?” he asked. “Not much,” I admitted. He told me to take afternoons off for the next several days to read Auden so the lunch would have less danger of being embarrassing. I asked him if he would like to come with us. “No,” he said, “that wasn’t what Auden had in mind”—and if he went, Cerf would be on the phone again, and this time it wouldn’t be so amusing.

The day before the lunch, though, Kuhn appeared in my office and suggested I include John Starr, a senior editor who had taken a shine to me. Starr was a friend and editor of Richard Condon, the author of The Manchurian Candidate, and that was as much as I knew about his literary taste. He was a seasoned hand at picking up a check on the lunch circuit and had been especially kind to me, so I was happy to ask him. It wouldn’t hurt to bring along someone with the bona fides of adulthood and the publishing business.

We waited for Auden in the leathery den of the Oak Room. Neither of us had ever seen him in person. He came in carrying a pile of newspapers, which seemed to include lots of cut-out crossword-puzzle pages from the Times of London. He wore a tweedy sports coat and pants, his shirt and tie were dominated by academic brown and allied shades. His face was like a plowed field.

We never spoke of biographies at all. Or of his writing anything for us. Auden and Starr began talking about good food and wine. The substance of it was beyond me, but they were at ease and familiar with one another’s distinctions and discriminations. They didn’t show off; they were just appreciative critics. They then spoke of World War II. Starr had served as an Army officer in Europe, while Auden had famously emigrated from England to New York in 1939. In 1940 he wrote “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” set amidst the backdrop of war:

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate

Again, I was separated from the talk by age and experience, having been born in 1940, but they made me feel included. I had a front-row seat; I had made the lunch happen, and they were both happy to be together talking.

Steven L. Isenberg is a visiting professor of humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the publisher of New York Newsday.