Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”