If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?" asked the painter David Hockney after first meeting W.H. Auden. For my money, it's the best, and cruelest, comment made about Auden's face in the last two decades of his life. Other contenders include Auden's own remark "My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain" and Hannah Arendt's rather grandiose claim that "life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape" on Auden "to make manifest the heart's invisible furies." James Merrill's description of the face as "runneled and seamed" and Christopher Isherwood's claim that such a face "really belonged in the British Museum" are weak entries in the field, especially coming from such talented writers. Perhaps their admiration for the poet held their tongues in check.