Auden at Bennington in 1946

first published May 1997, The W.H. Auden Society Newsletter No. 16.

Auden spent the spring of 1946, from March until July, teaching at Bennington College in Vermont.

In mid-December 1945, Auden paid his second visit to Bennington College [for details of his 1939 visit, see Stephen Sandy:" `Writing as a Career': An Early W. H. Auden Lecture in the States", The W. H. Auden Newsletter 10-11 (September 1993)]. He talked with Lewis Webster Jones, the College President, agreeing on final arrangements for his appointment for the spring term, 1946.

Theodore Roethke, whom Auden would replace, was being eased out of Bennington on the twin occasions of his 1945 Guggenheim - he had postponed it until January 1946 - and the prospect of a nervous breakdown, evidenced by increasingly manic and erratic behaviour through the fall of 1945. On this brief visit Auden was put up in the Commons building, in the College's only guest suite, the same one that he occupied six years earlier when he first visited the tiny New England college in the spring of 1939. Roethke entertained Auden at Shingle Cottage, where he lived with others such as Kenneth Burke, and where Auden was soon to take up residence. In a letter to Burke dated December 21, 1945, Roethke wrote:

Auden was here for a day and a night. He's coming on for one semester .... He didn't want to stay in the guest room...so we drank and roared down in Shingle until 3:30 or 4:00, at which time I retired virtuously to one of the upstairs rooms.

Auden was put on the College payroll in March; the semester began on March 26, and he was assigned Roethke's apartment in Shingle Cottage. He taught two courses, Forms of Literature, an introductory course all literature faculty taught, which included the - at the time - somewhat advanced choice of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. As well he taught Verse Form, a prosody workshop ordinarily taught by Roethke: "the study of verse as an intellectual discipline" in the words of Roethke's rubric for the course. He may well have taught, whether as a course or in tutorial format is not clear, Modern English Poetry, another Roethke course, billed in its description as "Hardy, Lawrence, Owen, Auden, Thomas."

One senior, Elinor Brisbane Philbin, took Forms of Literature; she remembers that: "there was coffee and everyone smoked like crazy." In 1993 she recalled:

We read Greek writers, some essayists, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. He played operas constantly, Mozart and others. He would perch up on the edge of his chair, lost in thought and smoking. We did read To the Lighthouse, but he didn't go into it very much: He told us about her suicide, though, walking down to the river.

On his relations with his students, she is quite clear:

We adored him, and he was indifferent to us. He told us things like the difference between envy and jealousy. I'd never thought about such large ideas, the difference between envy and jealousy, that sort of thing. I remember his saying: "when you read something, you must give it your original thought; don't listen to others; just your own response." He was a marvellous man, very hard to define; he liked strange literature and was crazy-mad about opera. He had very white skin and small piercing eyes.

Philbin's advisor, the economist Peter Drucker "would come to Auden's class and they argued a great deal. Drucker had just converted to Roman Catholicism ...and he was feeling mystical. Auden argued with him. They argued about God, and he told Peter Drucker that he was ridiculous."

A junior, Eleanor Rockwell Edelstein, was a student in Verse Form:

We had to write a poem a week in the style of the week's lesson ...pastoral, ode, sonnet, sestina, elegy, limerick, ballad and rondel. We wrote lyrics and epics, learned the difference between masculine and feminine rhyme, and tinkered a lot with meter. I suspect most of our poems were lousy: I know mine were ...but Auden was not interested in our youthful muses; he wanted us to understand the skeletons before we ever presumed to deal with inspired flesh and blood.

Clearly, Auden as mentor was a troubling presence:

I did not find Auden a particularly warm individual, although he was not unkind. Instead, the words which come to mind are serious, stern, awkward (physically and socially), wry, uneasy in his role as teacher. These are not qualities which endear a teacher to his students in the classroom, and I clearly remember a kind of dread during each class that something embarrassing would happen - not to me, but to Auden, such as falling out of his chair, which indeed he did one day.

She remembers a story that Kenneth Burke told: "He said that Auden had a habit of shaving while standing in the bathtub, despite the fact that it had no shower, and that he left rusty razor blades in the bottom of the tub." She and her fellow students were amused by Auden's insistence on "proper form," while he "went about in carpet slippers, occasionally on the wrong foot, and lunch displayed on his tie and shirt front."

Auden was appointed faculty advisor to the student literary magazine, Silo, his assigned contribution to the extracurricular life of the College. He published one poem in Silo, a small lyric - "How still it is, the horses" - which he then called "Noon." The poem became part of The Age of Anxiety - which he worked on while at Bennington - as one of Malin's speeches at the beginning of Part Three.

Among contemporary colleagues who remembered Auden, few remained in 1993. But Catharine Osgood Foster - "Kit" - and her husband Tom had many recollections. Kit remembered giving him rides in an "aged Chevrolet four-door sedan":

I had an old car and an old dog. The dog had the habit of chewing the back seat of the car, and Auden would get in and say he would sit in the back seat and I'd say: "No. Come on up front." No, he liked it better back there with the dog. He didn't mind it a bit.

As part of the freshman course Forms of Literature, Auden had to teach To the Lighthouse. Kit reported that he had not read this:

But he said: "All right, if this is what the job is, we're doing it." And he read it and he said afterwards with great surprise: "I was so amazed that a woman writer could actually write a novel that was a work of art."

Wallace Fowlie, a close friend of the Fosters but no longer on the Bennington faculty, was living in New York when Auden was at Bennington. Tom Foster said: "One of the things that Wallace told me was that Auden thought that women should not be seen in the evening. He didn't care to associate with women in the evening."

It was while he was at Bennington that Auden became a U.S. citizen: He was delighted and was inseparable from his papers, showing them to everyone. "His passport arrived in the mail," Kit remembered, "and he would carry it around in his back pocket all the time and pull it out and look at it. Someone said: `Oh, you ought to put that in your safe deposit box.' `Not at all,' Auden said, `I might need it some day.' So he'd pull it out and look at it and put it back and keep on showing it."

One evening that spring Auden was invited to visit the Manhattan home of Lydia Winston Malbin, a Bennington trustee, to see her art collection. Auden, according to Tom Foster:

was served a cold supper, which he did not appreciate one bit. He said: "If I had known that, I wouldn't have gone. Who did she think I was to invite me there and give me a cold supper like that?" He went on to say how the British believe in conspicuous consumption and added: "If you'd been invited to a British household they would have given you a fine dinner. But in America they don't believe in conspicuous consumption."

Auden had a reputation for enjoying faculty meetings, the literature department meetings, his counselees, and his classes. Kit Foster remembers him sitting under the apple tree in the barn quadrangle (the chief classroom building) when the weather was fine:

They kept Adirondack chairs out there and he would sit...waiting for his next counselee, beating time on the arm of the chair, keeping his rhythms going, and I saw him doing things like that at the evening meetings, too...he'd be tapping on the chair, listening to some rhythm that interested him at the moment.

Auden was a wonderful teacher, according to all reports. He gave his students startlingly difficult and long assignments and they all broke their necks to get those assignments done .... Then he'd ask them to write in class, besides, which they hastened to do, too. The only complaint was that he would walk round the room like a monitor and mutter light verse to himself, not quite under his breath, so that they were horribly distracted while trying to write.

The Fosters' old friends Connie and Paul St. Onge, at Mt Holyoke College, told Kit that Auden said he never slept on his left side, because that would put weight on his heart and he didn't believe in doing things like that to his heart overnight. Many of the Fosters' memories focus on well-known Auden quirks, such as his obsession with going to bed at ten, and rising early to write every day.

Auden was not tied to Bennington that spring. On June 3, he delivered the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard ("Under Which Lyre"). In mid-June he spent a week in New York, where on June 19 he and Chester Kallman gave a dinner party for T. S. Eliot. Bennington's term went until graduation on July 20, after which his friends Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr collected him (LJrsula Niebuhr remembered the date as in June) to stay in their country place in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

A final Bennington note: in his memoir Alan Ansen quotes Auden, back in New York that fall, as saying: "I've moved from 57th Street. Too Expensive. A student of mine at Bennington with whom the superintendent seems enamored of got me this [7 Cornelia Street] apartment." In the same November talk, Auden said: "Yes, [I taught at Bennington] for one term, while someone else was away on a Guggenheim fellowship. Bennington is positively a brothel, you know. Around eleven o'clock one night I heard a knock on my door. A girl came in and simply refused to leave - insisted on staying the night. Oh, they're nice girls, all right. But they talk: The next morning they rush to the telephone and tell everyone all about their night. It used to be that people were more reluctant to tell than to do. Now it's the other way round."