In the spring of 1939, at a talk sponsored by the League of American Writers, W. H. Auden fell in love.

Hair tumbling over his eyes, jacket wrinkled, Auden read "Elegy to Yeats" aloud as the much-younger Chester Kallman listened with interest. After the reading, Kallman used Thomas Rogers, Auden's favorite Renaissance poet, as currency to begin a conversation. One conversation later, the two became lovers.

"I am mad with happiness," Auden gushed in a letter to his close friend, Benjamin Britten.

Auden and Kallman set out to travel across the US by train and bus.

Auden expressed his hatred for the "unspeakable jukeboxes... the synonymous cities besotted with electric signs" as he worked on a prose treatise, "The Prolific and the Devourer," addressing the question of artistic duty during wartime.

On a stop in Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood told Auden that, like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, he had become a pacifist, rejecting the impetus to kill the young German men he had once loved or cared for. "The trouble about violence is that most of the punishment falls on the innocent," Auden wrote, channeling Isherwood. In this treatise, Auden concluded that the works of war should be left "to those who believe in them," but he didn't draw a hard line against soldiering, or the artist who felt called to serve in uniform.

Klaus and Erika Mann issued warnings of what they had witnessed. In 1930, the Nazi press denounced Erika as "a flat-footed peace hyena". She was committed to fighting fascism continuously. Klaus had lost his German citizenship in 1934 for publishing Die Sammlung, a journal by artists exiled in Amsterdam. His brother, Thomas Mann, was still (cough) figuring things out.

"Culture must take sides and turn militant, or it is bound to perish," Klaus Mann wrote from the house in New York.Austrian novelist Franz Werfel was married to Alma Mahler, who had brought a suitcase carrying Mahler's scores, Bruckner's Third Symphony, and Warfel's manuscript in progress. The Emergency Rescue Committee helped bring them to safety once they passed through the Pyrenees. While American intellectuals debated liberal responses to tyranny, Hitler demanded absolute unity from Germans.

When Hitler's armies invaded Poland, it was clear the European war had begun.

Auden wrote the poem, "September 1st, 1939" in commemoration of that day which represented, for him, the immensity of history. While he supported the war against Hitley, Auden also saw the Hitler in each of us, meaning that war would not resolve what education failed to alter.

Edward Mendelson expands on the two sides of Auden in “The Secret Auden”:

At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.

Certainly, Auden used poetry and correspondence to untangle his thoughts. (A critic described Auden's poems as "colloquies between various quarters of his mind.)

"I'm delighted to see my friends for an hour," Auden wrote, "and then I want to be alone like Greta Garbo." The persistent problem was truth – or not knowing how to judge one's actions given that hindsight would define the good, the just, the right. In the US – as in his mind, Auden lacked a foundation for ethics - the leap of faith felt too loose, religious, and unmoored.

Pacifism could not bring about world peace by seeking individual incorruptibility; in this, he agreed with Niebuhr. Lack of action in the face of catastrophe could not be ethical, and Isherwood's commitment to yoga and personal development seemed like an easy way out from the dark side of humanity. This tension inherent in magical thinking would bring American writing communities, especially those centered and appropriation of Eastern religious practices, to the point where counterculture went mainstream. Only the sacred had an excuse to bail out – but the secular sainthood competed with the sainthood of the monk for a world one had abandoned.

In a letter to Britten, Auden poked at his comforts and defenses, urging him to risk coming out, or to risk standing for something, which is how Auden was construing this risk at the time. To quote the letter:

After spending time in the Midwest, and writing a libretto about the Midwest, Auden told Charles Miller "the land of the lonely" was the "true America," and he wished someone would write a novel about it.

“The Lonelies could be the title of a grand unwritten American novel,” Auden wrote, adding:

Auden blamed Benjamin Britten's musical impasse on his avoidance of openly-lived homosexuality. He introduced Britten to Arthur Rimbaud, inspiring the cycle of settings Britten would name, Les Illuminations. The cycle repeated the phrase: "I alone have the key to this savage parade."

W.H. Auden; Sir William Menzies Coldstream; Benjamin Britten

Britten's essay, "An English Composer Sees America," was published as he and Auden worked on the operetta, Paul Bunyan. What Britten and Auden seemed to want from this musical was the depiction of American mythos, and the weakness at the heart of this mythos, namely, that freedom created new moral challenges.

In an essay on Paul Bunyan, Auden articulated it: "what happens when men refuse to accept this necessity of choosing, and are terrified or careless about their freedom, we have now only too clear a proof."

The prologue of this American Opera included a trio of wild geese announcing the coming of Paul Bunyan - the religious exceptionalism was there, but the message was not well-received by critics staring at war in Europe. The disconnect continued.

Janet Flanner's essay, "Paris, Germany," first published in the New Yorker in 1940, attempted to convey the complexity of the exile community Just as the US press started to complain of an excess European presence in media — "an intellectual blitzkrieg"—-that dog-whistled to chauvinist xenophobia.

In a letter to his sister, Britten said that he was "definitely disliked" for being British and "because I'm not American (everything is nationalistic)" and because he wasn't "educated in Paris."

On the day France fell to Germany in World War II, Auden gave the commencement address at Smith College. He said death and fear made it difficult to stop and think, to consider what was happening: "Nevertheless, that is our particular duty in this place at this hour. To try and understand what has come upon us and why."

Auden was practical rather than mystical. When he won the National Medal for Literature in 1967, he refused to accept it in Lyndon Johnson’s White House during the Vietnam War or “to make a Cal Lowell gesture by a public refusal,” so he arranged for the ceremony to be held at the Smithsonian, where he gave an acceptance speech about the corruption of language by politics and propaganda.

When Time magazine offered him $10,000 for a short essay on empires, Auden wrote “The Romans”, and maybe this is a good place to end my notebook dump, quoting Auden’s essay:

“I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.”

Auden’s poem, “The Geography of the House,” was dedicated to Isherwood.

"I shouldn't have minded a vestigial tail," Louise Bogan said, after telling Auden about a man who sobbed when confessing his vestigial tail to a fellow cab-rider.

"No," Auden replied, "one can always stand what what other people have."