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THR Web Features / June 10, 2026

Companions on Parnassus

W.H. Auden and James Schuyler in life and literature

Alan Jacobs

( THR illustration; photograph of James Schuyler and W.H. Auden from the journal Literatura na Świecie, 2007, Warsaw, Poland.)

Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs is a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University and a senior fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. A prolific essayist, reviewer, and blogger, he is the author of Paradise Lost: A Biography, Breaking Bread With the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, “The Book of Common Prayer”: A Biography, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, among others.

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Until I read Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler I did not realize how large a role Schuyler played in Auden’s life in the late 1940s. I knew that they were friends, and that Schuyler served occasionally as a typist and secretary for Auden. But he was for a few years a central part of Auden’s life. Schuyler, then in his early twenties, who had only recently immersed himself in the gay scene of Manhattan, was introduced to Auden by Chester Kallman—Auden’s former lover and life companion—and he (Schuyler) and his boyfriend Bill Aalto became regular visitors to Auden’s apartment on Cornelia Street. When, in October of 1947, Schuyler and Aalto boarded a ship for Europe, Auden and Kallman saw them off at the dock and promised to reconnect the following spring.

They did, first in Florence, where they all spent part of the spring of 1948 and Auden wrote a series of significant poems, including “In Praise of Limestone”; and then in the town of Forio on Ischia, the island in the Bay of Naples where Auden had just decided to live for part of each year, mainly in the summer. (He despised the heat and humidity of Manhattan in the summertime, and would spend the warmer months on Ischia for the next decade.) When Auden returned to New York, he enlisted Schuyler and Aalto to serve as housesitters—but they remained in situ (except when traveling) after Auden and Kallman returned to Forio. The four of them, plus frequent visitors, were a big, odd, gay family, drinking too much, giggling, quoting opera ceaselessly at each other—Auden called Schuyler and Kallman “Dorabella” and “Fiordiligi” after the sisters in Così fan tutte—until Aalto, whose rages were frequent, tried to kill Schuyler, at which point Auden banished him. (“BILL MUST GO,” he wrote in a letter.) Aalto tried to make it up with Schuyler, but Schuyler, for obvious reasons, was having none of it; and when he found a new boyfriend, well, Charles Heilemann moved right in.

Kallman never stayed in one place very long, and when he was traveling Auden would write him gossipy letters about Schuyler and Heilemann, dubbing them—for reasons easily imaginable—the Mattress Girls (after a recent Italian movie called Le sorelle Materassi, The Mattress Sisters). Auden, under Chester’s influence in this respect, was at the height of his gay-camp phase, in which it seemed funny to refer to “Madame Kallman” and “Baroness Aalto” and even—he kept this habit for the rest of his life—“Miss God.”

So from 1948 to 1958, Auden split his time between Greenwich Village and Ischia. When he was in the US, he made his money giving lectures, writing book reviews, writing introductions to books, editing books, and so forth. Though he wrote some poems in New York, his primary focus in those months of the year was the prose that paid the bills. The person who typed most of his manuscripts in New York was Alan Ansen. Now, Auden could type and often did, but he was a somewhat eccentric typist, and did not spell or punctuate reliably. So he liked having smart people type his manuscripts for him. In the late Forties and in Greenwich Village, that was Alan Ansen. On Ischia, it was James Schuyler—which meant that Schuyler was the one typing most of the poems.

Ansen was a poet himself, and very knowledgeable about poetry. Though he may have typed the prose, Auden also used him as a sounding board and as a critic of his metrical and formal experiments in The Age of Anxiety. Schuyler, by contrast, was just a typist. At that point, he had no real thought of writing poetry; he was hoping to write fiction, though hadn’t really written any yet. And typing up virtually the entire manuscript of Auden’s collection Nones (which I am currently editing) left him awed, fascinated, and discouraged. When he did finally begin his career as a poet, his model was not Auden—though there are small echoes of Auden in his...