Her response?
“I can’t abide Mozart.”
So that was that.
Not long afterward I quit.
10
10. Without him many of us would have never happened.
My old elementary school friend, Johnny, had come to our rent party cum housewarming. Johnny’s father, Louis, had collaborated with W. H. Auden on The Oxford Book of Aphorisms. Along with accounts of Chester Kallman’s imitations of Diana Trilling at Johnny’s parents’ last Christmas fête, Johnny had given us Auden’s address and assured us the poet was a genial and accessible man with a sincere interest in young writers. I’d first gone to 77 St. Marks Place, where the two poets lived, at the tail end of August 1961 (the basement bar on one side of the steps up to the entrance, the printer’s shop on the other), days after our return from Detroit, to introduce myself to Auden and mention that my wife of a week was a poet who’d already won a number of writing awards and scholarships — but I learned from the slim, golden college youths subletting the place, who, when I pressed the bell button, came down to answer the door, that Auden and Kallman would not be back from Austria till September. Sometime later, toward October’s end, Marilyn took some poems over to their house, where she was received by Kallman, who, at the head of the first-floor landing, in a blue kimono, asked her what she wanted and somewhat grumpily took her poems in to Auden. One day in November Marilyn ran up the stairs, excited, with an envelope in which was a white postcard with a handwritten invitation from Auden to come to tea. A day or two later, the phone rang in our apartment. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Hello,” a vaguely English voice returned, the accent somewhat cut away by mechanical transmission. “May I speak with Marilyn Hacker?” I seem to remember Marilyn with an expression that suggested right then she didn’t want to be bothered with anyone.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“This is Wystan Auden.”
As I covered the mouthpiece, there was that swelling excitement and surprise, perhaps a little akin to fear, that comes at such a time. “It’s Auden …!” I told her.
She opened her eyes to look quite as surprised as I felt, then took the phone.
“Yes. … Yes. … Yes. … Certainly. … Thank you. … Yes. Goodbye.” She put down the phone and turned beside the small, polished wooden phone table (that had come, with the easy chair, from her mother’s). “He wants me to come to tea in two weeks …!”
10.1. Here’s Marilyn’s account of her tea (not a full week after her birthday), from an interview twenty-five years and a National Book Award for poetry later:
“I’d been moving furniture that day and looked like a nineteen-year-old girl who’d been moving furniture in paint-stained khaki work-pants and three plaid flannel shirts. [At tea, Auden] said a sestina I’d sent him wasn’t really a sestina because the six repeated words weren’t repeated in the proper order. But he was otherwise encouraging.”
10.2. One of the poems she had given him was “The Song of Liadan,” whose source in Graves’s White Goddess (which, along with Pound’s ABC of Reading, was simply required fare for literary-minded adolescents in those years) Auden recognized at their November meeting. After they’d spoken about some of the other poems, he asked her if she thought Marianne Moore had a tin ear — a few years before, he’d dropped the
“… week/ … physique” quatrain from the famous Yeats elegy, because he found his own rhyme tinny. As they talked, Auden reminisced about his boyhood interest in engineering — which, though she didn’t mention it, Marilyn remembered having read about in some textbook blurb on Auden in one of our old high school poetry anthologies.
10.21. When she came home from her critique session, she wrote a nine-line fragment and a sonnet about the visit. The first recounted waiting for Auden to come out of the back room and join her:
If the “women’s rearrangements” were Marilyn’s own generalization placed, for whatever reason, on the Auden/Kallman domicile, the spider was there — in the upper corner of the room. (The lines I’ve placed in brackets were, a year later, cut.) And it was, yes, cold.
10.22. Auden came into the front room to talk to her. And the result was the following, written right after:
… ringing from the tower of St. Marks Church a few blocks north — or from one of the closer Ukrainian churches.
10.23. If this was her serious response, her lighter one was some bits of doggerel, composed possibly even a few weeks before her visit:
This was her private revenge on Kallman for being so brusque on her first visit to bring Auden the poems in the first place. Completely unconnected with the visit, but within the same day or two, Marilyn also wrote, on the blue flaking wall of the hall outside our apartment in heavy ballpoint:
10.24. I am not a poet. Nor have I ever thought of myself as one. (A love for reading poetry, which I have, is not the same as a talent for writing it, which I lack.) But, like all young writers, from time to time I would try my hand at it — none of it, despite how hard I worked on it, very good. Marilyn’s response to one of my early attempts about this time (and it set me chuckling in our four dark rooms for an hour) was: