Footnote (Non-Erudite) to Above
To prefix , the columnists' trade formula " It may not be generally known. . . " to what I am now going to say about Mr. Auden would, I feel, be slightly disingenuous. It is not at all generally known—it is, indeed, even among the avant garde, scarcely suspected—that one of Mr. Auden's idiosyncrasies is his inability to eat snake. To be accurate, he can eat it but he cannot keep it down. I know this because, in the Chinese province of Chekiang where herpetophagy is rife, I once saw Mr. Auden, at a succession of official receptions in villages devastated by the Japanese, attempt to do justice to the local delicacy, It was a failure every time, and this—since snake was generally the third or fourth item in a fifteen-course meal—meant that in practice Mr. Auden got very little to eat. I much admired the resolution with which, obedient to the laws of hospitality, he continued, at banquet after banquet, to grasp with inexpert chopsticks a succulent but to him disastrous segment from the piece de resistance. Those of my readers who have never eaten snake will not, if they stop to think, be surprised to hear that it
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