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'An Honest Man!'

An aspiring poet himself, Mendelson had shown some of his verse to one of his professors, J. W. Johnson.

Johnson told him that his poems were good, but that he should read Auden's poetry. Auden, the professor said, was writing poems in the style Mendelson was trying to achieve.

The student dutifully found a copy of Auden's poetry. "That pretty much stopped me from being a poet," Mendelson says now, more than 30 years later. But the experience sold him on Auden, and, like all good students, he went to the source.

The great poet was known to hold the equivalent of "office hours" each week at his Manhattan apartment. Listed in the phone book under his own name, Auden gladly met with anyone wishing an audience.

Mendelson set up an appointment, arriving at Auden's apartment late in the afternoon. The two sat awkwardly, with Auden contriving most of the hour's small talk. The poet--who throughout his career was described by friends as a "good and generous man"--then ushered the undergraduate to the door.

Later, when Mendelson enrolled in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, he chose Auden as the subject of his dissertation. He quickly realized that there was no "collected works" of Auden, in part because Auden, a prolific essayist as well as poet, himself didn't know where all his work had appeared.

As part of his research, Mendelson began collecting everything that Auden had ever published. He later was introduced to a bibliographer in the U. K. who was embarked on a similar project.

The British bibliographer introduced --or reintroduced--Mendelson to Auden. The poet did not remember meeting the formerly aspiring poet at "office hours," but this time it took, and a partnership began.

In the spring of 1972, Auden sent Mendelson, who by then was teaching at Columbia, a check for $150 to make photocopies of the Auden work the younger man had collected.

Mendelson made the copies, but found the printing cost came to only $110. So when he sent the copies to Auden, he sent along a check for $40.

Years later, Mendelson was told that the poet, upon opening the letter and finding the check, pranced around the house, shouting, "An honest man! I've found an honest man!"

By the early 1970s, Auden, whose health had been worn by years of drinking, smoking, and abuse of barbiturates, was told he ought to think about getting a literary executor.

"There is a young man in the States who knows more about me than I do," Auden reportedly told his confidant, Tekla Clark. "And that's good for me."

In 1973, a few months before he died, Auden asked Mendelson if he would be his literary executor.

As such, Mendelson has overseen every edition of Auden's poetry and collected essays published since then. Mendelson's 1999 book, Later Auden, completed a two-part critical biography that has received high praise. He also is the editor of Princeton University Press's recent three-part publication The Complete Works of W. H. Auden.

The poet, according to Mendelson, has never quite made it into the canon of 20th-century literature because he was often too ironic in his work and too uninterested in fame as a person. But he's never gone far below the surface.

His poem "Funeral Blues" ("He was my North, my South, my East, and my West / He was my working week and my Sunday rest") was featured at the funeral in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, which created a minor Auden buzz both in the United States and in Great Britain.

As James Fenton wrote in the April 13, 2000, issue of The New York Review of Books (in a three-part analysis of Auden's poetry):

"Auden has been lucky in his scholars, luckier than in his critics. He made a good choice of literary executor in Edward Mendelson, and the results are only now beginning to have their full impact."

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