Alan Levy > Quotes

“I do have a phone in New York. One night—at one in the morning!—I was awakened by Miss Bette Davis, the actress, calling from California to tell me how much she admired something of mine. She had no idea that it was anything later than ten o’clock at night where I was. “I don’t mind that, but in March, just before I left, the phone rang and a voice said: ‘We are going to castrate you and then kill you.’ All I could say to that was: ‘I think you have the wrong number.’ I’m quite sure he did.…”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“And do you happen to know a four-letter word meaning ‘first name of Swoboda and Hunt’?” His guests supplies Rons. Auden asks: “What are they? Statesmen?” No, ballplayers. Auden moans over American crosswords; he prefers London’s Sunday puzzles and, besides, “the Americans are so inaccurate—for example, a five-letter word for ‘irreligious person’; answer: ‘pagan’! But if the pagans were anything, they were over-religious.”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“Any dialogue with Auden is a two-way street. He listens attentively and, sometimes much later, will take you up on something you said to him before. He anticipates what you were about to say and even mouths your lines, usually quite accurately, but he doesn’t speak them. If your punch line comes out all right—that is, the way he anticipated—his eyes flash an unspoken signal of well done! But when you cross him up, he either crinkles with delighted surprise or puckers with disappointment. Again, though, both reactions go unsaid.”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“Rising from the platform’s lone bench, the tall man in the red sport shirt, worn loose and flowing like a body bandana over baggy khakis, checks the train’s arrival against his wristwatch and nods approvingly. Then his creased face—which has been described as “grooved and rutted like a relief map of the Balkans” and which he himself once said looked as if “it had been left out in the rain” too long—furrows further while his watery eyes squint and canvass the train to ascertain if the visitor who invited himself down is indeed aboard. Only when the sole disembarking passenger in city clothes marches directly toward him does the face re-fold itself into a smile and W. H. Auden rises to extend a brisk handshake of welcome. “We have to hurry because lunch is in fifteen minutes,”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“right now in 1971, this is Wystan Hugh Auden, 64, long-time resident of St. Mark’s Place in the East Village who spends April through October in rural Austria. He calls Kirchstetten “a chapter in my life which is not yet finished,” though he will, before long, forsake Manhattan and indeed end his days in Austria. “I first beheld Kirchstetten on a pouring wet October day in a year that changed our cosmos, the annus mirabilis when Parity fell.” “That was 1957,” Auden explains, “a rather important year in the history of physics—when it was discovered that all physical reactions are not symmetrical.”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“Auden is an Ausländer (foreigner), a Herr Professor (Smith, Swarthmore, Oxford, etc.) and sometimes Herr Dichter (Mr. Poet). This, by definition, means that the only Kirchstetten Inländers with whom he can associate socially are “the schoolmaster and his wife, the doctor and his wife, and the new priest—a young man whose name is Schickelgruber!* I’ve recently introduced Father Schickelgruber to his first martini. It was a huge success.”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“Near Weinheberplatz, Auden swerves down a side road with a smaller marker that says Audenstrasse. Only when the visitor remarks on it does Auden say, with unfeigned embarrassment: “The Gemeinde (township) really shouldn’t have done it. I don’t have the bad manners to tell them how much I detest it, but I don’t have the nerve to thank them for it either. The name Hinterholz is so much better.”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“Auden is relating his lone adventure with LSD: “I would take it only under medical supervision. My physician came around to St. Mark’s Place at 7 A.M. and administered it. All I felt was a slight schizoid dissociation of my body—as though my body didn’t quite belong to me, but to somebody else. “Around 10 o’clock, when the influence was supposed to be at its peak, we went out to a corner luncheonette for ham and eggs. And then it happened! I thought I saw my mailman doing a strange dance with his arms and legs and mail sack. Well, I never see my mailman before noon—so I was very impressed by the results of LSD. “But the next day, at noon, my mailman showed up very angry. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he wanted to know. ‘I saw you in the coffee shop yesterday and I waved at you and jumped up-and-down to catch your eye, but you looked right at me and didn’t even give me a nod!”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“This slave to the clock needs no further introduction on the station platform, for the world recognizes him as the bard who named our times “The Age of Anxiety” and won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for his long poem of the same name set in a New York bar. This is the poet who pleaded—in a poem called “September 1, 1939,” which he later withdrew from circulation—that “we must love one another or die.” This is the heir wearing, somewhat reticently, the mantle of Yeats and Eliot.”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“Auden’s bass voice resonates with Oxonian certainty even though the rumble of the Autobahn a half-mile away means anything can yet happen. For now, however, he is secure in the two-story, shingled, two-tone green farmhouse which, along with three acres of land he bought for $10,000 “soon after the Russians had left, when everything was cheap and very run down and hardly anybody here had cash. I had dollars, so I was able to beat out a theater director who was after the same property.” It is a quiet life that Auden lives here once he puts the anarchy of the city and the publishing world behind him.”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“Auden turns to his guest and asks: “Do you know the frightening thing about the dandelions?” The guest, bracing himself for a riddle, confesses that he doesn’t. Auden says: “The dandelions originally were sexual plants. We don’t know when, but in the course of evolution they gave it up. They go on, though, with the same genes.”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety