Third Wheel
Dorothy J. Farnan, b. 1919  Dorothy Farnan and her lifelong best friend, Mary Valentine, recent arrivals in New York, were drowning their troubles over coffee at the Waldorf Cafeteria on a dismal rainy November night in 1943 when whom should they see at a neighboring table but that charismatic pal from their student days at the University of Michigan, the sharp-tongued, prodigal Chester Kallman, effulgent as a golden-haired fallen angel. It was, Dorothy later wrote, the 'one event that changed the course of our lives.' When they approached Kallman, he responded warmly and invited them to come by the next evening for drinks. Before they realized what was happening, they had been admitted to his inner circle, made up mostly of gay men and revolving around Chester's radiant wit and the eccentric spin of his companion, W.H. Auden.
In 'Auden in Love,' the account (part memoir, part biography) of Chester and Wystan's relationship that she wrote after both men died, Farnan reveals that she never liked the celebrated poet. She found him 'rude and cold,' 'exasperating' and 'moody' and 'forbidding.' She resented his 'jealousy' and the way in which he 'usurped' Chester and bossed him around like 'a crotchety schoolmaster.' Nor, she felt, did Auden conceal his 'basic antagonism' to both Mary and herself. Indeed, Dorothy heard that Auden had once tried to conjure a curse on her. But the two women were not that easily deflected. Mary was smitten with Chester. And Dorothy, hopping up a generation, found herself so drawn to Chester's father, Edward -- a dentist with his son's wit, charm and penchant for (in his case, heterosexually oriented) philandery -- that she moved into his home and eventually married him. Inevitably, Mary was less successful. Indeed, when she revealed the nature of her affection to Chester, his friendship with both women cooled.
Even though she wrote a 253-page book about it, Farnan could never quite get to the bottom of the relationship between Kallman and his older, distinguished companion. She wasn't the only one baffled. An alcoholic with a self-destructive drive, Chester inflicted a great deal of pain on Auden -- although far more on himself. After the first couple of years, the sexual component of the partnership ended. Some of Auden's friends wondered why the famous poet remained devoted to Chester. Edward Mendelson, who is Auden's literary executor, says that Kallman's cleverness constituted part of his appeal. Largely unharnessed and unproductive, the torrent of Kallman's intelligence was nonetheless entrancing. 'I saw his wit,' Mendelson says. 'It was unbelievably quick. One mild example is, somebody referred to Klaus Mann' -- Thomas's son -- 'as the invisible Mann. Chester said, 'No, he's the subordinate Klaus.'' Hopeless with money and pathologically disorganized, Kallman never held a job and relied on Auden for financial support. Auden was fiscally prudent but practical only by comparison to Kallman.
A decade after Farnan's book appeared, Thekla Clark, a far closer friend of the couple, wrote her own memoir, 'Wystan and Chester.' 'It shows you the point of Chester,' Mendelson says. In it, Kallman's charm (at least until his sad final years) is evident. Written as a sort of rebuttal to Farnan's version, Clark's book is a delightful recollection that contains, buried inconspicuously, a bombshell. Clark recounts that, toward the end, she and her husband accompanied the middle-aged pair to a Vienna attorney's office, where Kallman and Auden drew up wills, each leaving his property to the other, with the financial rights to the literary estate passing upon the death of the survivor to Auden's two beloved nieces. Those wills have disappeared. 'Auden's intention was on record,' Mendelson says. 'It was just sloppiness.'
Auden died in September 1973, and Kallman survived him by only 15 months. Although aware of the missing wills, Auden's family was far too genteel to contemplate a lawsuit. The estate was inherited by Chester's elderly father, and after his death it went to his widow, Dorothy. Which is how this tall, formidable, chilly woman -- whose other distinction was having been the first female head of the English department of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn -- came to be the sole beneficiary of the Auden estate. 'No one who is not a movie star would have to work for a living with the income from the estate,' Mendelson says. The annual fees these days are in the low six figures.
When Farnan died in October at the age of 84, much of her property went to the daughter of her late friend Mary Valentine. Ultimately, however, Farnan earmarked the income from the Auden corpus -- including such classic poems as 'Lullaby,' 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats,' 'Spain 1937,' 'Stop All the Clocks' and 'The Age of Anxiety' -- for four animal charities. She was inordinately fond of cats. 'Auden was a great cat lover, too,' says Chester's half-brother, William Kallman, 'so I guess he won't roll over too many times in his grave.'
THE LIVES THEY LIVED Arthur Lubow is a contributing writer for the magazine.