Reviews for Auden in love

The average rating for Auden in love based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-09-11 00:00:00 Amber Brookins This is a double biography - of Auden, and of Chester Kallman, the man with whom he was in love from the time they met in 1939 until Auden's death in 1973. Dorothy J. Farnan, a contemporary of Kallman's, later became his stepmother, and she does not try to hide the fact that her knowledge of him is greater than what she can offer on the subject of Auden (whom she also knew reasonably well for the same length of time). A high school teacher of some seniority, Farnan is refreshingly aware of scholarly method, and her book, although a memoir, is also drawn from a variety of sources and properly documented. The tale she tells is not perhaps so very strange - a long-term relationship which survives despite the early snapping of sexual ties. Although she carefully avoids pejorative adjectives, Kallman appears to have been a rather unpleasasnt youth, and not to have improved with age - his arrogance, his promiscuity, and his financial dependence on Auden seem, to outside eyes, to make him an undesirable lifelong companion. But Kallman appears, too, to have been gifted with intelligence and vivacity. The book makes a fairly credible stab at explaining the nature of the relationship between the two - too complex to be summed up here. Farnan apparently does not feel herself competent to comment on the effect of the relationship upon Auden's poetry, for she attempts very little in this vein. This is in no way a literary study, although the aptness of the occasional quotation shows that Farnan is certainly well-acquainted with Auden's poetry. [These notes were made in 1989:].

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-08 00:00:00 Philippe Gagnon If this book were fiction, I'd've abandoned it about 4 chapters in, when I realized that the title was meant to be ironic. Auden and Kallman fall in love in '39 but have mostly fallen out of love by '41; although they're technically together until Auden's death in '73, they're more apart than together. And they're just so horrible to each other for most of the '40s and '50s: sullen, jealous, disappointed Auden and immature, shit-stirring Kallman, both of them catty as could be, made quite a pair, but not one I might otherwise have wanted to read about. By the end, I had a "the car is on fire" approach, page after page as Farnan's chronicle (beset by the casual racism, sexism, homophobia, and bi erasure practically unavoidable by a person in the early '80s writing about the '40s and '50s) moved through time, I thought Surely they'll end it any day now. Surely they'll call off this farce, stop torturing themselves and each other. But, no, a combination of stubbornness and relationship inertia held them together for decades, and, I don't know, I guess I was supposed to see it as... noble? Mostly I just thought it was a little sad for everyone involved.