Dorothy Farnan, 84, Chronicled W.H. Auden's Love
Hyfler/Rosner
paid obit in Thursday's NY Times. Worth going to The Sun to see the photo,
too. Great job.
FARNAN--Dorothy J., Educator, writer, painter died peacefully at home on
October 23, 2003. Beloved wife of the late Dr. Edward Kallman, cherished
godmother of Rev. Carla Valentine Pryne of Seattle, WA. Loving stepmother of
Bill Kallman of Greenfield, Indiana, and the late Chester and Malcolm
Kallman. Dear friend of Lisa Lesavoy. Friends may call at The Greenwich
Village Funeral Home, 199 Bleecker Street, NYC on Friday, October 31, 2-5
and 7-9pm. Funeral Mass Saturday, November 1, 9:30am at St. George's
Ukrainian Church, 33 East 7th Street, NYC. Committal, Trinity Church
Mausoleum, 770 Riverside Drive, NYC. In lieu of flowers memorial donations
to any animal charity of your choice.
Dorothy Farnan, 84, Chronicled W.H. Auden's Love From a Nearby Perch
By STEPHEN MILLER Staff Reporter of the Sun
Dorothy Farnan, whose literary memoir "Auden in Love" caused a sensation
with its sensitive, insider's portrayal of the poet's longtime homosexual
love affair, died October 23 at her home in the East Village. She was 84.
Although at least two biographies of W.H. Auden had appeared by the time
"Auden in Love" was published, in 1984, his romantic life had never been
portrayed as anything more than a possibly embarrassing sidelight to his
poetry. Most of his readers had no idea his love poems were written to a
reckless man 14 years his junior. Farnan's achievement was to place Chester
Kallman, Auden's onetime lover and permanent love, at the center of his
emotional and artistic life.
She was able to present the material from a remarkably intimate
perspective because she was herself a friend of Kallman's since college. Her
best friend, a woman, had fallen in love with Kallman - not an unusual
occurrence for someone of either sex. And Farnan herself married Kallman's
father, Edward, a dentist who shared her interest in painting. In later
years, Kallman would joke that his erstwhile college chum had become his
mother.
As the tale emerges from the wonderfully gossipy "Auden in Love," Kallman
was an intelligent, witty, and lovely young man of omnivorous proclivities
who was heedless enough to accept a great poet's love without, most of the
time, returning it.
Kallman fancied himself a poet, too, but Auden seemed one of the few to
encourage him. It was thanks to Auden that Kallman got a share in the credit
for the libretto of Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress." Indeed, Auden
continued to support Kallman emotionally and financially long after the two
had ceased being lovers. Even then, Auden could write to Kallman, "As this
morning I think of the Good Friday and Easter Sunday already implicit in
Christmas Day, I think of you." As Farnan tells the tale, Auden fell in love
but once, and for life.
The two continued somehow to be "married" into their rumpled bachelor
middle ages. They lived together for many years on St. Mark's Place, sharing
meals and friendships, and often traveled together. Auden never stopped
bailing Kallman out financially.
It was Kallman who discovered Auden's body after he had died alone in his
sleep at 66 in a hotel room in Vienna September 28, 1973. A year later,
Kallman was dead, in Athens, where he had gone to be with the Greek sailors
he had come to favor as lovers.
Farnan grew up in Minnesota, the only child of an attorney and a
housewife. She attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she
met Auden, then a visiting professor, for the first time over coffee at the
campus drugstore, in 1941. When he heard she had won a poetry contest, he
informed her that she should read C.S. Lewis so she would understand that
romantic love did not exist in classical antiquity. Neither Farnan nor the
poet seems to have been overly impressed with one another. Shortly
afterward, she met Kallman, Auden's lover, who had come from Brooklyn to be
with him and take classes at Ann Arbor.The two became friends.
In 1943, a master's degree in literature in hand, she moved to New York
with a friend, and the two became caught up in the social whirl of what she
called the "Auden-Kallman circle of the forties" - artists and writers and
hangers-on in a constant hail of boozy sexual intrigue. She was never
terribly close to Auden, whom she portrays as perpetually peeved with
her.Yet she remained on his periphery throughout his life, close enough to
describe vividly both his and Kallman's descent into alcohol and despair.
In 1948, Farnan married Kallman's father - "somewhat illegally," since
his Mexican divorce (paid for by Auden) was being contested. The two were
not to be officially married until 1975, after his first wife had died.
In the mid-1950s, she began teaching English at De Witt Clinton High
School in the Bronx. In 1965, she became the first female chairman of the
English department at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where she stayed
until her retirement, in 1975.
The book seems to have been as much her husband's idea as her own. Dr.
Edward Kallman "believed that the love story - for it was a love story -
could best be told by one of Chester's contemporaries," she wrote in the
book's introduction.
Childless, she was an excellent amateur painter and lived for many years
in the East Village with her husband and a large family of cats, still
nurturing a circle of friends.
Dorothy Jeanne Farnan
Born June 29, 1919, in Winona, Minn.; died October 23 at home in
Manhattan; survived by her stepson, William Kallman of Indiana.