The first time I saw Auden was on a small black and white television screen in England in 1965. The voice had a surprising duck-like softness, but it was the face that captured your attention. Deeply furrowed, it was, Auden himself had said, 'Like a wedding-cake left out in the rain'.
In 1972, aged 65, he famously abandoned New York, his home since 1939, to return to live at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he had been an undergraduate in the 1920s. He was given a cottage in the College grounds, and was expected to give occasional talks and be available to students.
It turned out not to be the success everyone had hoped for. The worse for drink at high table, he could be grumpy and offensive. 'Of course, everyone pees in his bath,' he might say, or rudely turn away from anyone whose conversation he didn't like. He might abandon a talk after a mere few minutes if he'd felt he'd said enough.
Some of the younger Fellows gave him a wide berth. But his fame was such that the College Board was prepared to accommodate such minor irritations, convinced that he was good for their image.
My college, Linacre, was then next to Christ Church, and I would sometimes see him puffing his way along the St Aldates wall. An emphysemic, he struggled for breath in the damp Oxford air. He looked sad, lost, lonely.
A postgraduate mate at Linacre was studying American History. One lunchtime he casually mentioned that his supervisor was running a seminar that afternoon on modern American society, and Auden had agreed to take part. Would I be interested?
Interested was hardly the word. No poet faced the world of his time with more courage and honesty than Auden. One had reservations; there was that troubling line about 'the necessary murders' which so exercised George Orwell, and the conversion to Christianity that for the Left was a sell-out, and his move to America that was a defection. But he was still the finest living poet in English; it would be like sitting at table with Shelley or Arnold.
Eager, we got there early, and were directed upstairs to an ancient gloomy barn. A rickety round table stood in the middle of the floor, and we took chairs from a stack on one side. A few students drifted in, and we sat around the table chatting nervously. Only