7

Living is quite pleasant here when it is not too exciting.

 

—Benjamin Britten

 

Carson McCullers loved snow, and winter remained her favorite season in New York, although she would never spend a winter in the city without falling seriously ill. “These Northern skies in winter time,” she wrote to Reeves several years later, “somehow they are lovelier than the skies of the South.” The snow after a blizzard dazzled in the sunlight like spun sugar, and there was a “sort of Bruegel heartiness” in the sight of scarlet-cheeked children in their snowsuits racing out into the streets to play. For adults in midcentury New York, winter was “the season,” and by this time the social life at 7 Middagh Street had become legendary.

George Davis, his novel discarded and Gypsy gone, had turned the full force of his considerable talents to giving parties at his Brooklyn house. Frankie Abbe, his former secretary who was now conveniently living next door, stopped by with her toddler son to help with the lists of guests and make phone calls—just as in their earlier days, though they were now creating evening spectaculars rather than magazine text.

Years later, another of George’s assistants described the structure of his parties as a series of Chinese boxes. At the center were the guests of honor—Auden, Britten, Diana Vreeland, Maxwell Anderson, Moss Hart, Marc Blitzstein, Julien Green, and any other established artists who happened to bustle in from the cold. Radiating from this hot center of self-conscious laughter and conversation were the editors, agents, recent émigrés, and young hopefuls, all exchanging telephone numbers and arranging to meet again. In the outer ring, stevedores and shopkeepers whom George had befriended, “working” friends such as Frankie and Victor, who served as bouncer, Brooklyn neighbors, and friends and relatives from the Midwest observed the astonishing scene, remarking, “Well, it takes all kinds.”

A more bizarre fourth ring was added when, with Gypsy’s permission, George sublet her third-floor rooms to a family of circus performers: an organ grinder, his wife and two children, and the chimpanzee and assortment of trained dogs that made up their act. No announcement was made of their arrival, so several guests were surprised when, as they chatted in the kitchen, a chimp raced past into the adjoining bathroom, shut the door, used the facilities, pulled the chain, and raced out again. Such guests may have inspired a rash of gossip in Manhattan the next day, but to George they were simply friends hoping to make a few beneficial connections. Joe the chimp found work at Harper’s Bazaar almost immediately, as it turned out, modeling piqué hats for spring.

That winter, as many as a hundred or more artists gathered on Middagh Street in a single night, many of them dazzlingly famous and all eager to reap as much excitement, fun, and professional advancement as possible from the evening. The Swiss author Denis de Rougemont, in town for the publication of his new book, Love in the Western World, visited 7 Middagh Street at the suggestion of his friend Golo Mann; he later remarked that “all that was new in America in music, painting, or choreography emanated from that house, the only center of thought and art that I found in any large city in the country.” And with the addition of Klaus Mann’s international set, the house was, perhaps more than any private home in America at that critical moment in history, “open to the world.”

Among the composers who visited the house that winter was the thirty-year-old Paul Bowles, then known more for his musical than his literary talents. A handsome, slender, taciturn blond, often appearing in tailored suits with pocket handkerchiefs, Bowles was well connected to many of the residents and guests at Middagh Street. For the past year he had maintained a small, unheated studio not far from Auden’s former apartment in Brooklyn Heights and had dropped in for afternoon cocktails there a number of times. Auden accepted Bowles at once because of his connection to Isherwood; the novelist had met Bowles in Berlin in 1931 and been so charmed that he had named his best-known fictional character, Sally Bowles, after him. Paul had, in fact, gotten to know the real Sally Bowles, aka Jean Ross, when he fell into the habit of meeting her for lunch at the Café des Westens each afternoon with Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Aaron Copland.

Bowles, who was only twenty while in Berlin—slightly younger than the others—chafed at what he considered the Englishmen’s cliquish, condescending behavior toward him. But it seemed to be something that happened only when two or more Englishmen got together, he observed, because Isherwood was perfectly forthright and friendly when they were alone. As for Auden in Brooklyn, “I was considerably in awe of him,” Bowles wrote years later. “His learning and the strange way in which he expressed himself when he spoke combined to make me always unsure of the meaning of his words. But that in itself was a pleasant, if losing, game.”

In February 1940, Bowles found himself in something of a fix. Having gone to Mexico the previous summer to enjoy the cheap and leisurely expatriate life in one of the few places where such a life remained possible, he had been abruptly called back in September to compose the incidental music for a new Theatre Guild production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Composing a score “meant to sound like antique and intricate chamber music,” Bowles earned such excellent reviews—including an entire column by his friend Virgil Thomson in the New York Herald Tribune—that he was immediately given the job of scoring Philip Barry’s Liberty Jones for Broadway. Next followed Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, again for the Theatre Guild, after which he had agreed to compose music for Pastorela, a ballet based on the traditional Christmas posadas of Mexico, for the American Ballet Caravan that Kirstein was creating to tour South America the next summer.

Bowles welcomed both the praise and the commissions—but as the work continued and his wife, Jane, came up from Mexico to join him, he needed a place to live. Currently, they were staying at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, but Jane’s constant partying there made it impossible for Paul to work or sleep. When Kirstein heard of their predicament, he suggested that they move to Middagh Street. At a monthly rent of only $25, it sounded like an excellent idea. While Bowles was unfamiliar with George Davis, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and Peter Pears, he did know and like Auden and had been a friend of Klaus and Erika Mann’s since his time in Berlin. It was Erika, in fact, who had introduced Paul to Jane three years earlier.

Ordinarily, the Bowleses wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting a room in the house, for there was now a long waiting list, with many places held by needy refugees, but Kirstein used his influence as house benefactor to lobby on their behalf. Although George preferred writers to musicians as residents, he had little choice but to give the Bowleses Gypsy’s rooms if she decided to give them up. Since Christmas, she had continued to waffle between the worldly temptations of Chicago and the aesthetic life of her Brooklyn studio, but George was under no illusion that she would choose Middagh Street in the end. It was just a matter of waiting for her to decide. At least Gypsy’s subtenants, the circus family, had moved on, and their replacement—a diminutive actor known by everyone in the house as Tallulah’s midget because he had appeared in a Bankhead play—would presumably create less wear and tear.

If Paul and Jane could not yet have a room, at least they could visit, so they soon began attending the almost nightly gatherings, large and small, at the house. Jane, an impish twenty-three-year-old, loved parties and was known for flitting from one man’s lap to another, saying the first thing that popped into her head and then joining in the others’ laughter at how silly it was. And what she said was often laughable, for Jane Bowles had quite a surreal view of life. Having experienced a bout of tuberculosis of the knee as a teenager, she now walked with a limp and had to sit with that leg straight out in front of her. She kept a small strip of adhesive on the knee at all times, as though hoping to convince others that the affliction was temporary. She became quite upset if anyone mentioned her leg, but at the same time she was convinced that it was all anyone thought of when they were with her—and these thoughts preoccupied her a great deal of the time. Still, Jane could be very funny and she was usually the life of any party she joined. Paul preferred lounging against a wall at the back of the room, coolly observing the goings-on, but his good looks and professional reputation drew others to him.

There was much to observe at Middagh Street that winter, aside from the parties. A crisis erupted in early February when the residents learned that Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach had escaped from the institution where she had been confined. After wandering in the freezing Connecticut woods all night, she had managed to find refuge in a friend’s apartment in Manhattan but was said to be very ill.

When word reached Carson in Columbus, she dropped her work and took the train north immediately. Concern for Annemarie’s welfare mixed with a wild eagerness simply to see her friend again. But Annemarie, in her distress, called out instead for the Baronessa von Opel and even Gypsy Rose Lee. Another suicide attempt soon led to Annemarie’s commitment to a different institution in the suburban town of White Plains.

Carson remained at 7 Middagh Street for several days, unable to see Annemarie but unable, too, to leave without knowing what would happen to her. It was agonizing for the young writer to imagine her friend isolated among uncaring strangers who knew little about the reasons for her despair. Fortunately, Annemarie was adept at seeing to her own interests when necessary, and soon convinced her doctors to allow her to return to Switzerland, accompanied by a nurse. There, she hoped to join Erika Mann, who had already returned to Europe to work with the refugee rescue mission. It was only through actively fighting the Nazi invasion, Annemarie had decided, that she could avoid the debilitating depression that had overtaken her since she arrived in New York. She left by ship for Lisbon. Carson never saw her again.

These events devastated Carson, but less so than they might have several months before. Now, after nearly a month’s hard work in Georgia on both The Bride and Her Brother and The Ballad of the Sad Café, she knew for the first time since the publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter that she was making real progress and that the work was good. It was an interesting time to be in Brooklyn, if only for a few days. Auden now openly attended church and continued to spend time with Niebuhr. Still working through his feelings about this new relationship with God, he had even begun referring to “Her” familiar ways, as though God were a stern but loving mother whom they must all try to please. Carson, her mind on The Ballad of the Sad Café, must have listened carefully to his talk of achieving salvation through love for another individual. Much later, she wrote of that work, “the love of God . . . the love of Agape—the Greek god of the feast, the God of brotherly love—and of man. This is what I tried to show in The Ballad of the Sad Café in the strange love of Miss Amelia for the little hunchback, Cousin Lyman.”

Shortly after Carson’s return to Georgia that month, Reflections in a Golden Eye was published by Houghton Mifflin. Again, many were shocked by the novel’s depiction of sexual deviance and insanity in a military setting. Carson’s father threw the book across the room after reading it. The family even received a telephone threat from the Ku Klux Klan; the voice warned Carson’s father that she had better get out of town or they would come and “get her” before morning: “We know from your first book that you’re a nigger-lover, and we know from this one that you’re queer. We don’t want queers and nigger-lovers in this town.” Carson’s father spent the night on the front porch with a shotgun, ready to fend off the vigilantes, but no one appeared.

Such responses to the book’s “morality” hardly bothered Carson; on the contrary, to some extent she enjoyed the scandal. Yet even many critics panned the book—apparently out of shock, for the most part, that a young woman would admit to knowing about, much less feature in her work, such “marginal” characters as homosexuals, self-abusive wives, and peeping Toms. Rose Feld, who had praised Carson’s first book so highly, admitted that this novel was “a more tightly bound tale, more confidently constructed than the first,” but described her final impression as that of “waking up from a nightmare, of relief in knowing that what has passed was neither real nor probable.”

Carson could console herself that Louis Untermeyer had provided a quotation for the book jacket, calling Reflections in a Golden Eye one of the “most compelling, one of the most uncanny stories ever written in America.” And a Kansas City Star reviewer pointed out that this statement was not an unusual phrase to find on the jacket of a novel. The unusual thing was that “it is perfectly true.” The reviewer for Time magazine stated simply: “In its sphere, the novel is a masterpiece. It is as mature and finished as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.”

The object of their discussion, however, was all a part of Carson’s past. She had completed the novella six months earlier, and now it arrived like a relic from her childhood, bound between hard covers and dedicated to Annemarie. Six months earlier, her Swiss friend had symbolized all the glamour and sophistication of European culture—the world that Carson had longed to join. Now, Carson herself was helping to create a new, American culture that, with its psychologically complex, indigenous themes, both built on and defied the old. Though she grieved for Annemarie, Carson knew now—with two novels published and two more in progress—that no matter what happened, she would continue to produce her work.

 

February was a month of birthdays at 7 Middagh Street—so many that Anaïs Nin would later call it “February house.” George had celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday on the fourth. By Carson’s on February nineteenth, she was back at her mother’s house in Georgia—rising and dressing before eight o’clock, as was her annual custom, to await the arrival of telegrams, flowers, and, most important, presents. On the twenty-first in Brooklyn, Auden turned thirty-four, and Jane Bowles, who had finally inherited the entire third floor with her husband, celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday the following day.

Everyone at Middagh Street enjoyed birthday parties. But in 1941, the reminder of time passing highlighted what an unnerving time in history it was to be young and trying to create art that would survive the present turmoil. On February 7, the day before the House of Representatives was to vote on Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Bill, Churchill willed a positive result by announcing to his people, “We have broken the back of the winter. The daylight grows. A mighty tide of sympathy, of good will and of effective aid has begun to flow across the Atlantic in support of the world cause which is at stake.” He assured the Americans overseas: “We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor next year, nor any year that I can foresee. But we do need most urgently an immense and continuous supply of war materials and technical apparatus of all kinds . . . Our message to the United States: Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”

The Lend-Lease Bill was passed by the lower house the next day, resulting in a national outcry both for and against. At 7 Middagh Street, this next step toward engagement served to increase the rising tide of giddy tension. The evening revelries began to take on an almost surreal quality—literally at times, as on the night Pavel Tchelitchew decided that the parlor needed more color and, grabbing his paints, decorated one long wall with a surrealist mural. (The image was so overwhelmingly grotesque that a number of people begged George to have it painted out. But it was not in his nature to discourage experimentation.)

The presence of Paul and Jane Bowles did little to mitigate this uneasy mood. Their marriage was unconventional: Paul was bisexual, and before their marriage Jane had slept only with women. They had married for the sake of convenience when Jane’s mother refused to marry her own fiancé until after Jane was seen to. Paul had complied partly because marriage was something that one did and partly to shock his parents, since Jane was Jewish. Nevertheless, as husband and wife the two quickly became extremely close as they realized that no one else in the world was likely to so thoroughly comprehend, much less match, their shared proclivities and neuroses.

The couple divided the third floor equally. Paul moved into Gypsy’s rooms, which still contained, to his amusement, the six-foot cutout of her in burlesque garb. Jane took Carson’s rooms, with their green walls and velvet drapes. Their housemates had already noted the decorous and almost Victorian manner in which they carried on their relationship in public—using pet names and treating each other with exquisite politeness and concern. It was therefore a surprise to learn that in private they carried on an intricate, extensive, and occasionally violent fantasy life. Recently, on tour with Liberty Jones, the couple had indulged in one of their favorite games in their hotel room. In this “seduction game,” which involved a good deal of shouting and chasing each other around the room, Jane yelled at one point, “I’ll get you for this. You’ve ruined my uterus.” Then she fell silent, having noticed the open transom above the door. Similar remarks and noises threatened to spill out of their bedrooms and up and down the stairs of 7 Middagh Street.

Meanwhile, the couple introduced a new strain of artists to the house. They counted among their friends such luminaries as John Latouche, the creator of the recent, popular Ballad for Americans and the lyricist for the hit Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky; the Theatre Guild members Bill Saroyan and Cheryl Crawford; and the ballet crowd surrounding Kirstein and Balanchine. They were also well acquanted with many of the artists associated with the expanding Museum of Modern Art, including Tchelitchew and his fellow neo-Romantic Eugène Berman, Philip Johnson, and Alfred Barr. Perhaps their most idiosyncratic friend, however, was Salvador Dalí, who visited the house a number of times that winter with his intimidating wife, Gala.

George, too, had known the Dalís for years, having met Salvador in Paris and translated his article “Surrealism in Hollywood” for Harper’s Bazaar. He was typically delighted by the showmanship with which the slender Spaniard shamelessly promoted his work. Most amusing had been “Dalí’s Dream of Venus,” the combination surrealist art exhibition, girlie show, and funhouse that Dalí and his wife had created for the New York World’s Fair. The craggy edifice of pink and white stucco, adorned with an enormous image of Botticelli’s nude Venus, supported a pair of living female sirens in bathing suits who waved seductively at passersby and invited them to enter. The pavilion’s entrance was wedged between two enormous stucco female legs in pink-and-blue-striped stockings. A sharp-toothed stucco fish guarded the crotch. To enter, one dropped a quarter into the eye of the fish and moved into Venus’s inner chambers—past an oversized aquarium containing bathing beauties in topless swimsuits (“Dalí’s Living Liquid Ladies”), a piano with a rubber keyboard in the shape of a woman’s body, telephone receivers drifting like jellyfish at the ends of their cords, and a cow wrapped in bandages that sweetly returned the viewer’s gaze. Moving into the next chamber, visitors discovered an equally large dry tank in which a half-clothed Venus lay dreaming in a bed thirty-six feet long surrounded by mirrors and half-naked attendants. Scattered across the crimson sheets were bottles of champagne and lobsters broiling on beds of hot coals, while dozens of black umbrellas hung from the ceiling like bats. Visitors then moved through a surrealist art gallery containing artifacts based on the works of Magritte, Oscar Domínguez, and other friends of Dalí’s, then a classic Dalí landscape of Catalan desert and melted clocks, and finally past a half-nude female taxi driver chauffeuring Christopher Columbus back to Europe in a New York cab while more “Surrealist babes” preened on the car’s roof.

André Breton, the “pope of Surrealism,” was so offended by the pavilion’s much-touted commercial success that he officially banished “Avida Dollars,” as he anagrammatically renamed Dalí, from the group’s roster. But Breton was always banishing other artists, and Dalí hardly noticed in the glare of the publicity that he so thoroughly enjoyed: a cover story in Vogue and extensive coverage in Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker, among other popular magazines. Hoping for even more attention, Dalí concocted a noisy feud with the pavilion’s financial sponsor, a rubber manufacturer from Pittsburgh, claiming that the company insisted for aesthetic reasons on providing rubber mermaid tails when Dalí wanted his mermaids to have rubber fish heads instead. In “protest,” Dalí hired an airplane and flew over Manhattan, dropping copies of a manifesto against rubber manufacturers titled “Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to his own Madness.”

“It is man’s right to love women with ecstatic fish heads,” Dalí wrote. “Man has the right to demand the trappings of a queen for the ‘objects of his desire’: costumes for his furniture! For his teeth! And even for his gardenias!” Having lambasted commercial culture for several pages, the document ended, illogically, with a paean to America: “Christopher Columbus, discovered American [sic],” it read, “and another Catalan, Salvador Dalí, has just rediscovered Christopher Columbus. New York! You who are as mad as the moon . . . I go and I arrive, I love you with all my heart. Dalí.”

Gypsy Rose Lee had been asked to appear in Dalí’s surrealist pavilion (“Come and See Gypsy Rose Lee’s Bottom of the Sea”), but she had wisely declined in favor of Mike Todd’s venture. George Davis was most likely disappointed by her decision, as he could never have passed up such a show. Now, however, he was more interested in the autobiography the artist was writing, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. It was to be published by the owner of the Dial Press, Caresse Crosby, at whose Virginia mansion the Dalís had been staying since the previous summer. Rather than describing the actual events in the artist’s life, The Secret Life contained a hodgepodge of funny stories, dramatic poses, and whatever else Dalí thought of tossing in. “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook,” he began. “At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” He went on to state his opinion on social interactions: “Very rich people have always impressed me; very poor people, like the fishermen of Port Lligat, have likewise impressed me; average people, not at all.” And he concluded with an affirmation of conjugal love that perhaps even Auden would be interested to discuss:

 

As a child I was wicked, I grew up under the shadow of evil, and I still continue to cause suffering. But since a year ago I know that I have begun to love the being who has been married to me for seven years; and I am beginning to love her as the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church demands, according to its conception of love. Catholic love, said Unamuno, is, “If your wife has a pain in her left leg, you shall feel that same pain in your left leg.”

Gala, you are reality!

And what is heaven? Where is it to be found? “Heaven is to be found, neither above nor below, neither to the right nor to the left, heaven is to be found exactly in the center of the bosom of the man who has faith!”

 

In fact, however, Dalí’s show of religious fervor was less evidence of a conversion than a cynical attempt to ease his eventual acceptance into Franco’s Spain—as well as an early move to position Gala as the embodiment of the artist’s muse in a publicity ploy for his upcoming exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in late April. With most of the other surrealists trapped in Europe, unable to obtain the necessary visas to come to America, Dalí pronounced the movement dead and himself prepared to take the tradition toward “a new classicism,” thus saving modern art. “A desire for forms and limits possesses us,” he claimed, thinking again, perhaps, of Fascist Spain. But all of this activity was aimed mainly at keeping his name in the news. As he would soon recall in his autobiography-in-progress, “Fame was as intoxicating to me as a spring morning.”

George laughed at Dalí’s posturing—accomplished all in French at Middagh Street, since the artist spoke hardly any English. Bowles, too, was amused by the show. He had been introduced to Dalí two years earlier at the home of the art patrons Kirk and Constance Askew. At that dinner party, Dalí had gazed into the salad bowl and told a grim story of a child’s death while Gala informed Bowles that he must buy a large aviary and shut her into it, then come and scatter food and whistle at her. “Je veux être votre perroquet,” she kept repeating, fixing Bowles in her shrewd gaze.

It was amusing, but Bowles also found himself deeply drawn to Dalí’s and the other surrealists’ focus on the power of the primitive subconscious, as well as their dedication to undermining all forms of authority. The son of an emotionally cold and abusive father, Bowles actively loathed any form of authority, so the surrealists’ brand of creative anarchy appealed to him enormously. He welcomed the Dalís’ presence at Middagh Street—although Jane, who already found it difficult to separate fantasy from reality and preferred to evade rather than confront authority, felt uncomfortable in their presence.

Certainly, Gala Dalí could make anyone feel uncomfortable. At forty-six a decade or more older than her hosts, the Russian surrealist rarely smiled, and when she did it was to express derision. The Middagh Street residents soon learned to fear her for her ability to freeze a dinner partner in her snakelike gaze and eviscerate him or her with one icy word. This she willingly did, guarding her husband with what he called “the petrifying saliva of her fanatical devotion” while he prattled on about his exhibition. Gala complained constantly and was unpleasant to everyone, Anaïs Nin had written after staying with them at Caresse Crosby’s the previous summer. But she was utterly devoted to Salvador’s advancement.

 

The Dalís’ presence created some lively evenings in Brooklyn. But Britten and Pears were beginning to lose patience with the intensely bohemian flavor of their new home. The brownstone was becoming absolutely filthy with so many people tramping through at all hours, to say nothing of the cats. The furnace, now in operation, worked too well, turning the top floor into a sauna. Parties took place constantly, with George staying up until dawn with his sailor friends. The recent addition of the Bowleses directly beneath their room, their voices drifting up from the third floor to the fourth, hadn’t helped. Britten found himself resorting occasionally to Seconal to get to sleep at night. And now Paul Bowles intended to move an upright piano into his room to work on the music for Pastorela.

Britten suspected that the resulting noise during his own parlor work sessions would drive him mad.

Britten didn’t know how long he could withstand such a live-and-let-live atmosphere, even though he understood that much of his unhappiness sprang from circumstances over which no one in the house had any control. More bad news had arrived from England: the London apartment of his sister, Barbara, had been destroyed by a bomb, though she had survived. And Britten’s musical mentor and former teacher, Frank Bridge, had died at his home in Sussex. It was not only a personal blow to Britten, who had already lost both parents, but also seemed a bad omen: Bridge’s successful tour of America in the 1920s had been a major factor in Britten’s decision to give this country a try. Meanwhile, life in Brooklyn was “just one hectic rush,” with four complete numbers still to be written for Paul Bunyan before a final playthrough in less than a week. It was all just too much. Britten wrote to Elizabeth Mayer’s daughter, Beata, that he was “just staggering out of an acute depression—probably into another one.”

Auden sensed Britten’s unhappiness and, still feeling intensely responsible for Britten’s presence in the United States, tried to step in and correct matters. When Britten complained about the residents’ habit of entering people’s rooms unannounced, Auden ordered a buzzer installed by his friend’s bedroom door. He placed strict limits on the use of the radio, since its constant war news upset Britten even more.

Britten didn’t mention his irritation over another matter—the continued presence of Chester Kallman, who seemed to consider himself an expert on the opera, reenacting every scene of Der Rosenkavalier. It was, frankly, mystifying to him to observe Auden’s unthinking acceptance of Kallman’s musical taste and expertise. The year before, Auden and Kallman had taken to attending the opera together—Auden wearing a stained tuxedo left over from his Oxford days, along with sneakers or house slippers to accommodate his corns. Afterward, if they had the money, they would dine at an expensive restaurant while Kallman “instructed” Auden on Bellini, Rossini, and Monteverdi. “I am so anxious for you to meet Chester, though a little frightened as he is extremely musical, and you do play so fast,” Auden had written to Britten then. Now, living at 7 Middagh, the composer was still waiting for evidence that Auden could learn much at all of value about music from this boy. It was a little sickening to see how Auden drank in his partner’s words—and then wandered about the house talking opera as though he were an expert, too.

Unwilling to hurt Auden’s feelings, however, Britten turned instead to the matter of Paul Bowles. It was impossible for two composers to work in such proximity. No doubt Bowles found the situation just as untenable. Was there any way to separate them sufficiently so that they would not hear each other at work?

Auden, too, was glad to focus on Bowles rather than on any of the founding members of what he now called “our menagerie.” And there was something about Bowles that irritated Auden as well. Whereas, for example, the other residents tended to dress quite casually, Bowles was an impeccable dresser, brandishing his silver cigarette holder in a way that Auden particularly disliked. At the dinner table, Paul picked neurotically at his food, and Jane fretted over him like a worried mother, murmuring such comments as, “Oh, Bubbles, if you’d just stick to cornflakes and fresh fruit!” An entertaining storyteller with a dry sense of humor and popular with the crowd that frequented 7 Middagh, Bowles nevertheless held others at a certain cool distance. Worst of all, he seemed to have little if any respect for the rules of the house. When Auden distributed the weekly bill for rent and expenses, Bowles routinely questioned his share. And it seemed that no matter what philosophical or literary proposition the poet put forth for discussion, the composer was prepared to shoot it down with a sardonic remark.

Nor was Auden fond of Bowles’s surrealist friends. Part of it had to do with his “anti-frog” and “pro-kraut” bias, as he himself had described it—Auden disliked having to conduct dinners in French. And Auden had admitted years before in England that “I have never met a surrealist, so my ideas of the movement may be completely misconceived.” But even if he had had any interest in or understanding of the visual arts, surrealism’s society-bashing, logic-smashing dogma could hold little appeal for a poet so fully invested in a life of routine and in rational thought. The surrealists hated modern society, while Auden had embraced it as his subject. And Dalí, who had blurted out when first introduced to Auden, “Do you speak English?” stood poised to cause particular offense.

Still, no one could argue that the Bowleses were inappropriate additions to the household. Not only was Paul quite a successful composer, but Jane had been working sporadically for more than a year on a novel. She had begun reading excerpts to her friends, but her quaint delivery had provoked such hilarity that it was difficult for her listeners to judge the writing. Lately, she and Auden had begun talking about literature and had found that they shared an interest in the novels of Kafka. In fact, the two had become so friendly during these discussions that Auden had asked Jane to do his secretarial work for him. To Paul’s astonishment, the two now met in the dining room at six o’clock each morning so that Jane could type Auden’s dictation for several hours before breakfast. They were delightful sessions for Auden; Jane, warm and attentive, willingly played pupil to his schoolteacher and also mothered him with treats from the kitchen and other forms of attention. And Auden’s interest in debating ideas seemed to have sparked a period of increased productivity in Jane—a development that irritated her husband no end.

Recently, another member of the Bowles family had moved into the house—Paul’s cousin Oliver Smith, who had turned twenty-two that February. Smith, too, was an artist, producing pleasant, realistic watercolor scenes. He had been living for months in a run-down hotel on Water Street, tucked beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, painting scenes of the Sands Street district, but his room’s lack of heat had become unbearable, and the Middagh Street residents had invited him in from the cold. Smith was as handsome and elegantly dressed as Bowles himself—though on a more modest scale—but somehow, with his affable personality, this affectation came off well for him. Having turned down his acceptance to the Yale School of Drama in favor of life in New York, the young man shared Auden’s love for the city’s teeming streets, skyscrapers, and dramatic vistas.

Oliver’s dream was to become a Broadway set designer, but he was virtually unknown in the field. Still, the other residents were charmed by his leading-man looks, excellent literary taste, and air of languid sophistication, and he quickly won a place as the much-loved baby of the family. Joining the Bowleses on the third floor, he willingly assumed the chores of washing dishes and tending the furnace. Although he later described that period of his life as “slightly Dickensian,” it did not take long for him to settle in among the clutter and junk as though he had always lived there.

So it was not Paul Bowles’s relations who posed a problem for Auden but Bowles himself. Hunting Paul down while he was at work one day, Auden presented him with the problem: two pianos so close together were bound to create interference for both composers. As Britten had already claimed the grand piano in the parlor, Bowles would have to find another place to put his upright.

Bowles had to admit that the basement seemed the only possible place under those conditions. But he was outraged by this sign of favoritism toward Britten. Bowles was a close friend of two of Britten’s American cohorts, Aaron Copland and Colin McPhee; he had, in fact, first met Britten at Copland’s studio some months before. “At that time he was not talkative,” Bowles later wrote; “he struck me as obsessed by his work.” Even now, although the two composers ate at the same table each day, they had little to say to each other.

This coolness reminded Bowles of the benign exclusion he had experienced with Isherwood and his other British friends in Berlin in the 1930s. He had resented it then, and he resented it now. “One might say that the household was segregated rather than integrated,” he later wrote; “there were British and there were Americans, and the members of each group appeared to find its own nationals more sympathetic, thus easier to converse with, than the others.”

No matter that Bowles himself was known for having been “less than friendly” toward a different group of expatriate artists as a member of the raucous Young Composers’ Group, which he had joined with Virgil Thomson some years before. “There was not a lot of brotherly and sisterly love,” one observer dryly remarked of the winner-take-all atmosphere of that group of eager debaters. Regardless, no matter who was right, as junior resident at Middagh Street, Paul had to move.

The upright piano was installed in the house’s dank subbasement, next to the boiler room and as far as Bowles could get from Britten’s piano. “It might have been satisfactory had there been any heat,” he wrote, “but New York is cold in the winter and there was nothing but a kerosene heater which smoked excessively.” Still, working night and day with his customary earplugs, he made good progress on Pastorela. He would not allow the British contingent to interfere with his work.

 

Britten had not yet completed the score for Paul Bunyan, but more important now were the two solos for the romantic leads, Slim and Tiny. The operetta (or opera, as Britten also referred to it) had been scheduled to debut on May 5, with a preview the day before for the League of Composers, a few critics, and friends. The production had been fully cast, but the lead actors were still waiting for their most important numbers.

Setting aside his other commitments, Britten set to work on “Slim’s Song”—the solo that would establish Paul Bunyan’s romantic hero as an American wanderer seeking a more settled life:

 

O ride till woods or houses

Provide the narrow place

Where you can force your fate to turn

And meet you face to face.

 

Influenced, perhaps, by Copland’s American style—or possibly by a Western-style musical on which Kurt Weill had been working when the two composers first met—Britten created a happy-go-lucky Western melody to evoke the wide-open spaces of Slim’s home. The song seemed less derivative of the earlier works of American composers, however, than predictive of later Broadway productions. Today, “Slim’s Song” sounds like something straight out of Oklahoma, which did not appear on Broadway until 1943.

As Britten was completing this solo, Pears brought him the happy news that Helen Marshall, the actress cast as Tiny, happened to have joined Pears’s madrigal group that month. In other words, Tiny could sing—a fortunate coincidence in this opera performed primarily by actors, not trained singers. Pears introduced Marshall to Britten, and while they were chatting, Britten casually asked the singer to give him her musical range. By the next night he had completed her solo—Tiny’s homage to her recently deceased mother, a soaring soprano showpiece clearly intended to become the opera’s most memorable tune.

 

With Britten working productively, Auden should have been able to return to his own work routine. But a development in his relationship with Chester Kallman was causing him distress. Chester had announced that, after his graduation from Brooklyn College in the spring, he planned to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. And he planned to go there alone.

Auden was devastated by this announcement—particularly coming, as it did, so quickly after he had chosen his love for Kallman as his new religious and philosophical path. He knew that it was normal and even necessary for Kallman, at twenty, to strike out on a life of his own. But he was also cognizant of Kallman’s roving eye. He wrote to Isherwood, who coincidentally had separated from his own lover that month, “Chester . . . should I think be there by himself, as he has never been away from home or me. I shall try, I think, to get a job in some college. Being a real Victorian wife, I don’t relish the prospect of being parted at all.”

It was natural for Auden to tell himself that it must be a test. If he had faith in his marriage to Kallman, surely it should be strong enough to withstand a temporary separation. He did his best to meet this challenge to his new philosophy of Christian love. In early March he was scheduled to speak at a Yale University dinner, and he took the opportunity to describe the average undergraduate in what amounted to a loving, forgiving portrait of Kallman, and perhaps also himself:

 

For the youth who is neither an aesthete nor a scholar, the years between eighteen and twenty-one are, perhaps inevitably, years of melancholy, uneasiness and self-distrust. Conscious for the first time of all the possibilities of the intellectual life, and in some cases of latent powers of his own, he rushes forward without plan or patience to storm the fortress of wisdom and knowledge, only to be repulsed time after time with nothing gained but bruises and the knowledge that he has made a fool of himself. Conscious for the first time of the importance of personal relationships, he must suffer many humiliations before he learns that, unlike his relation to his parents, love and friendship have to be worked for, carefully nourished, and above all, deserved. As I speak to you this evening, therefore, it is of that young man, outwardly arrogant but inwardly timid, gauche, careless, intolerant but eager to learn and be liked that I think of and to whom my remarks are primarily addressed.

 

At home, Auden adjusted his medications to try to accommodate his mental state, increasing his dose of Benzedrine and Seconal and placing a tumbler of vodka by the bed in case he awoke at night. While absorbing the shock of Kallman’s announcement, he made practical plans for its implementation. Caroline Newton, his friend and patron, volunteered to finance Kallman’s graduate school education and, once again, Auden accepted. Meanwhile, pondering what the boy’s absence would mean to him, he began as always to order his thoughts within the restrictive but satisfying guidelines of poetry. Moving away from the celebration of marriage of “In Sickness and In Health,” away from the instructional tone of “Leap Before You Look,” he experimented tentatively with how a geographical separation from Kallman might feel. In “Atlantis,” he offered advice to a young traveler as he departs on his quest. In “Alone,” he acknowledged that being close to one’s lover could be painful, too:

 

Each lover has a theory of his own

About the difference between the ache

Of being with his love, and being alone . . .

 

Auden still had no idea that Chester had already found a new lover in Brooklyn—and Kallman found himself unable to confess and possibly end what was likely to be the most beneficial relationship of his life. Still, his secret was too powerful to keep to himself. Instead of telling Auden about Jack Barker, then, he chose to tell Jack about Auden.

The young British Merchant Navy officer had returned to New York near the end of February. After two months of separation, he and Chester could hardly wait to reunite. When they did, it was clear that their mutual attraction was as strong as ever. This time, Chester made it clear to Jack that another man was involved and that they needed to be discreet, though he didn’t yet reveal the identity of his other lover.

Jack went along with the clandestine arrangements that Chester obviously relished—making appointments with Chester’s father, then arriving early to meet Chester in the office while Dr. Kallman was out to lunch. On one occasion, the dentist returned to find his office door locked and a patient waiting in the reception room. From inside the office he could hear Jack and Chester, engaged in a loud argument. Dr. Kallman banged on the door and insisted they leave, but they ignored him for nearly an hour before departing.

Dr. Kallman was furious with his son, not only for trespassing but especially for having betrayed Wystan. Jack might be younger and more attractive, he insisted, but Chester would never find another friend like Auden. The dentist may have had in mind the convenience of Auden’s financial support and the prestige of his name, but it was also clear to him that few men were likely to have Chester’s best interests at heart to the extent that Auden did.

Edward Kallman’s efforts were fruitless; at twenty, Chester wasn’t looking for a friend. He wanted passion of the sort he no longer felt for Auden. Craving drama, he also found himself attracted to the idea of being fought over by the two men who loved him. Once he was won, he wanted to be punished for having made the winner suffer. Love, pain, and punishment were frequently linked in the poetry carefully printed in his lined notebooks: “O my love and punishment, where are you?” and “Speak louder. I can’t hear you. Don’t be afraid / You’ll hurt me; nobody’s home . . .” He had, a friend later wrote, a longing to be mastered.

Kallman waited to make his move until the day Jack’s ship was to depart. The two young men had arranged to meet at a nearby bar before Jack had to go aboard. There Kallman finally confessed the identity of his other lover. Barker reacted with shock and anger. Auden—the famous poet who had generously welcomed him to New York, whose poetry he had admired, whom he hoped to impress and perhaps even befriend—was the last person he wished to harm. In an instant, Kallman was transformed in Jack Barker’s imagination from a passionate, seductive angel to a trickster into whose trap he had fallen. Struggling with the news, Barker declared that Kallman must tell Auden the truth or he would never see him again.

Barker’s ship departed for Glasgow, leaving Kallman behind on the Brooklyn docks. Never before, perhaps, had the young man felt so abandoned and isolated. But it was also likely that he had never before felt so alive.