The humiliation of addiction, the humiliation of failure, the humiliation of dependence. Once in New York, when he was editing Decision, his most ambitious magazine, he had overheard Auden’s lover Chester dismiss him as “the superfluous Klaus”. And there were those who mocked him for making the journey through life clinging to the Magician’s coat-tails and seeking to bask in reflected glory. The humiliation of lovelessness, the knowledge that he could never find what he sought because those to whom he was most attracted could not respond in kind. The boy from the Zanzi Bar, Miki, the latest – perhaps the last – in a line that stretched out and out and out would lie making real love with his girl tonight, and, if he returned to Klaus and made a show of affection which nevertheless might not au fond be entirely false and not entirely mercenary, there would nevertheless be condescension in his tender embraces. It hadn’t always been like that, but it had been like that for too long and far more often than not.
