Hidden sanctity

WH Auden may not have abided by his Church’s teaching on sexuality but evidence is coming out that Christian faith deeply influenced the poet’s life. In the latest New York Review of Books, Auden’s biographer, Edward Mendelson, reveals that when Auden discovered that an old lady in the Episcopal church he attended suffered from night terrors he took a blanket and slept in the hall outside her apartment until she felt better. He gave a friend facing a big medical bill the manuscript of his long poem ‘The Age of Anxiety’ to raise funds. From just after the Second World War until his death in 1973 Auden paid a European relief agency to educated war orphans, two at a time. He insisted NBC pay him immediately for a broadcast of the The Magic Flute for which he had translated the libretto in order that the money could go to Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement to pay for costly repairs the New York Fire Department had ordered she make to a shelter for homeless people. At parties, Auden would soon drift away from the great and the famous to find the least important person in the room. A Canadian prisoner told Mendelson that he had conducted a long correspondence with Auden who had given him an informal course on literature. Auden did good by stealth. Not even his friends knew. The last thing he would want is public recognition but there is definite evidence of sanctity in his life.