Hiding in Plain Sight: W. H. Auden in Popular Gay Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹In one instance, Rowse rhetorically wags his finger and crows that a gay sexual double entendre in Auden and Isherwood's The Dog under the Skin “was not lost on me, naughty boys” (Rowse 34).

²Biographer Humphrey Carpenter provides passim the most complete information about Auden's various Greenwich Village residences. Auden moved to the Village in 1945, living initially at 52 Jane Street but moving later that year to West 57th Street. In the fall of 1946, he moved to 7 Cornelia Street, where he remained until he and Chester Kallman combined residences in a fifth-floor apartment in a former warehouse at 235 Seventh Avenue. Dispossessed by the sale of this building in late 1953, Auden moved to 77 St. Mark's Place, where he remained until he departed the United States permanently in 1972.

³In 1972, bibliographers B. C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson summarized the initial print history of the poem and concluded that “all printings are without authority, and Auden denies any association with the poem” (368). But their bibliography appeared while Auden was still living, which possibly preempted their writing as frankly as they wished; in a footnote, they mischievously direct the researcher to an obscure interview in which Auden does indeed acknowledge that he is the author of the poem. Since 1972, however, a letter to Chester Kallman dated December 13, 1948, has come to light in which Auden records the poem's composition (Davenport-Hines 246; Mendelson 298). I first discovered the poem as an undergraduate in the early 1970s in a tabloid that I purchased at a newsstand outside the Forty-Second Street IRT subway station. Not recognizing its bibliographic significance, I clipped the pages containing the poem before jettisoning the remainder of the newspaper and failed to record the ephemeral publication's title or serial information. I subsequently came upon the poem in a 1974 issue of Gay Sunshine Journal, and I quote from that anniversary reprint to which editor Winston Leyland appends an extensive head note summarizing some of the gay lore attached to the poem (Auden, “A Day” 654). During a question-and-answer session following his poetry reading at Purdue University in 1976, I asked Auden's literary executor, Stephen Spender, about the poem's legitimacy. Spender confirmed that the poem was indeed Auden's and was properly titled “The Platonic Blow”; he asserted that nothing similar survives among Auden's papers.

⁴For his 1989 memoir, Norse deleted a passage that appears in the 1984 essay in The Advocate. “Left unappeased at a fever pitch of excitement, Wystan began to masturbate in the dark; then he begged me to take over. I discovered for myself what Chester had told me, that Wystan[’s penis] was really small and it bothered him. Wystan quickly gained relief, but I gained a clue to his sexual insecurity and, perhaps, to his compensatory gruffness and curt manner” (Advocate 27).