W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden is a recurring literary presence in the narrator’s reflections, remembered less through biography than through his judgments about love and his troubled relation to his own poetry. His remarks sharpen the book’s questions about fidelity, animal companionship, and whether writing can bear the weight placed on it.

A Judgment on Betrayal

Auden is recalled as saying that he disliked men who left a trail of weeping women, and that he would have hated the narrator’s friend. The remark follows an account of the friend’s long succession of affairs, most of which ended in betrayal. In this context, Auden’s words serve as a severe moral measure: the friend’s romantic history is not presented merely as a series of private disappointments but as harm repeatedly left behind.

Tulip and the Measure of Love

Auden also enters a discussion of J. R. Ackerley’s life with his dog, Tulip. The narrator contrasts a friend’s view—that a person whose most significant relationship is with a dog has a sad life—with her own sense that Ackerley experienced a form of mutual, unconditional love that many people never find. Auden’s question about how many people have found their Tulip gives that bond a wider significance without resolving the disagreement. His brief presence helps frame the tension between judging a life by conventional human attachments and recognizing the depth of a human-animal relationship.

Revising and Renouncing a Poem

The book recounts Auden’s changing response to “September 1, 1939.” He came to despise the poem and objected to the line “We must love one another or die,” which he regarded as an obvious falsehood. Before the poem could be reprinted in an anthology, he insisted that the line be changed to “We must love one another and die.” The revision did not settle the matter: later, still troubled, he renounced the poem as irremediably corrupted. The sequence—from celebrated line, to correction, to rejection—shows how a poet’s moral unease can extend beyond a single phrase and turn against the work that contains it.

A Story That Resonates Beyond Its Subject

The narrator explicitly says that she thinks of Auden’s story before recalling how she and her friend once believed writing was the best life they could hope for. She then sets that earlier faith against the friend’s later advice to students: if they could do anything else, they should. Auden’s account does not explain the friend’s change, but its placement makes his poetic self-correction resonate with the book’s broader reconsideration of writing as a vocation. He remains a point of reference through whom conviction, doubt, and revision can be held together.