Auden and Arendt

Okay, okay, so maybe there was no romance (I was getting excited):

"An Auden-Arendt Marriage

A letter from Miss McCarthy to Miss Arendt, her close friend, shortly after the death of Miss Arendt's husband, tells about a visit from Stephen Spender, who intimated that the poet W. H. Auden, an avowed homosexual, had just proposed marriage to Miss Arendt.

'It is true,' Miss McCarthy said the other day in a telephone interview from her home in Paris. 'I think Auden was slightly put up to it by Stephen Spender. Hannah was absolutely devastated by this. She felt that he was asking her for shelter and that she could not do it. She felt that somehow it was an unfriendly act on her part to refuse'" (from the NYTimes article, "Mary McCarthy, '33, Sends Papers to Vassar).

Either way, Auden evidently read "The Human Condition," loved it, and wrote a gushing review: "'Every now and then,' he declared, 'I come across a book that gives me the impression of having especially been written for me ... it seems to answer precisely those questions which I have been putting to myself."