9

Joseph, Mary, pray for those

Misled by moonlight and the rose . . .

 

—W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being,” 1941–42

 

One day in April, seventy-five thousand tea bags drifted down from the sky onto the fields and cities of occupied Holland. Dropped by Britain’s RAF forces, they carried the message “Holland will arise. Keep your courage up.”

In the cool, breezy days of a Brooklyn Heights spring, it seemed possible to hope for an upturn in one’s personal fortunes as well. Neighborhood children, cooped up all winter, exploded out onto the sidewalks and into the blooming gardens and parks. Their shrieks and laughter, carried on the sea air past Benjamin Britten as he hurried from Middagh Street to the subway station, may have spurred memories of his own happy childhood in the seaside fishing village of Lowestoft, in Suffolk.

Britten always felt most homesick for England in the spring, but this year he had little time for nostalgia. The premiere of his Sinfonia da Requiem at Carnegie Hall had gone well, with an appreciative audience and a national radio broadcast, although it received scant critical attention. A brief reference in the New York Herald Tribune called the symphony “promising and frequently eloquent”; the New York Times merely mentioned that the performance had occurred.

Britten, however, continued to believe that the symphony was his best work yet. He had been further encouraged to learn that an April performance of his Violin Concerto by the London Philharmonic—the first British presentation of his new work in nearly a year—had enjoyed even greater success. The praise he received for a concerto composed in America might surely serve as a good omen for Paul Bunyan’s future. Privately, Britten had to acknowledge that the opera needed all the good omens it could get. With opening night just days away, he had only recently completed the music for the Narrator’s between-scene ballads—by inviting the actor over to 7 Middagh Street and knocking out a lead sheet for him on the spot. Even now, each rehearsal brought forth a deluge of suggestions—for new cuts, additions, or improvisations—as cast and crew struggled to complete their work in a short time.

Somehow, despite the chaos, a poster had been designed, a program printed, and Auden had even submitted an essay, “Opera on an American Legend,” describing the challenges of portraying the Paul Bunyan story onstage, to the New York Times for its May 4 Sunday edition.

“Everything in this country is valued by publicity. God, how I hate it all,” Britten had written to a friend the year before. “I always make a resolution never to attend any more first performances—it is terrifying, & I make everyone all round me uncomfortable, by feeling sick, having diarrhoea, & sweating like a pig!” But on the night of the preview, he joined the sizable audience at Brander Matthews Hall along with Auden, Pears, the Mayers, and an assortment of other friends. The audience seemed eager to hear what Britain’s most famous young poet and one of its most promising new composers had to say about their country. The first notes of Britten’s magnificent Prologue made a promising beginning as the curtain rose on the Chorus of Old Trees:

 

Since the birth

Of the earth

Time has gone

On and on:

Rivers saunter,

Rivers run,

Till they enter

The enormous level sea

Where they prefer to be.

 

From this hymnlike beginning, the opera carried its audience on America’s mythical journey, from the appearance of the Blue Moon that signaled Paul Bunyan’s arrival to the importation of ambitious lumberjacks from Europe’s hinterlands, to the tilling of the land and the creation of cities, corporations, and government organizations that typified modern American civilization. To Britten’s and Auden’s relief, the audience seemed to appreciate the opera’s exuberant style, laughing frequently at Auden’s silly jokes and satirical jabs and applauding Britten’s solo compositions. Despite the occasional bungling of the underrehearsed cast and the awkwardness of the university stage, the overall performance managed to convey both the creators’ fascination with America and their concerns for its future. Britten could already see that some cuts needed to be made even before the next day’s premiere, but if the audience’s response was any indication, there seemed reason to hope that Paul Bunyan would survive its initiation. Britten and Auden received congratulations after the show and awaited the critical response.

The critics were not kind. Olin Downes, the much-feared music reviewer for the New York Times, acknowledged in his review on May 6 that the opera was burdened with amateur singers and insufficient time for rehearsals. Nevertheless, he wrote, while Britten was “a very clever young man, who can provide something in any style or taste,” his work in this case was disappointingly shallow and inconsistent. “As for Mr. Auden, we had expected better of him,” Downes continued. While one may not expect an English poet to inject a very American tone into the Paul Bunyan legend, “we had a right to hope for something from him that would have a consistently developed purpose. Whereas his libretto, like the music, seems to wander from one to another idea, without conviction or cohesion . . . It seems a rather poor sort of a bid for success, and possibly the beguilement of Americans.”

The comments of Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles’s friend at the New York Herald Tribune, were even more negative. In a review headlined “Music-Theatrical Flop,” he wrote that “‘Paul Bunyan’ has, as dramatic literature, no shape and very little substance . . . it exists, if at all, by style alone. How much the Auden style is worth on paper is a question this reviewer leaves willingly to the literary world. On the stage it has always been a flop. It is flaccid and spineless and without energy.” Britten’s work was “sort of witty at its best,” Thomson wrote. “Otherwise it is undistinguished.” But, he added acidly, “What any composer thinks he can do with a text like ‘Paul Bunyan’ is beyond me. It offers no characters and no plot. It is presumably, therefore, an allegory or a morality; and as either it is, I assure you, utterly obscure and tenuous . . . I never did figure out the theme.”

Certainly, the opera needed work, but the critics’ negative judgments, Thomson’s in particular, appeared out of proportion to the production. Perhaps the reviewers were unaware of Paul Bunyan’s lengthy, circuitous development from school production to Broadway extravaganza to amateur college production—and so were insulted by its ingenuous, sometimes even adolescent “American” tone. Whatever the reason behind the attacks, they effectively killed Britten’s and Auden’s hopes for a Broadway production. There was some talk of refashioning the opera for a performance at the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood that summer, but these plans, too, came to nothing.

Most disappointing for Britten was that this initial, headfirst dive into the American musical theater—a genre he had long admired and to which he had hoped to contribute—had been interpreted as derivative, a shallow mimicry of such composers as Blitzstein, Copland, and Weill. Again, he was being censured for his adaptability at the expense of a strong individual style. It was the very type of comment he had hoped to leave behind in England.

George Davis, who had recently taken a new assignment as theater critic for Decision, may have been seeking revenge for this insult to his housemates when he attacked two new plays for which Paul Bowles had composed the music, even though both plays had already closed. Liberty Jones was a “lisping, whimsical stinker of a play that should have been booed and booted out of a miserable, peaked existence on its opening night,” he wrote, and the Twelfth Night revival was “almost deliberately inept.” Bowles had also provided the music for Lillian Hellman’s new Watch on the Rhine, which received rave reviews, but George wrote, “There were panicky moments for me . . . when I might have found no word for the horror and cruelty of life, when my soul might have paused agonized and silent; but in the nick of time there were words aplenty, oh yes . . . No, I’ll stick to my guns; I’ll see no masterpiece in ‘Watch on the Rhine.’ As theatre, it passes, as they say, the time.”

If these were intended as personal attacks, they missed their mark. Paul and Jane Bowles were long gone, having landed on their feet with a $2,500 Guggenheim grant awarded to Paul for composing a first opera. Virgil Thomson had also offered Paul a job as the assistant music critic on the New York Herald Tribune—a position he would soon accept. But for now, with Pastorela finished and a bank account filled with grant money and theater income, he was preparing to return to Mexico with Jane. Although she would revise her novel considerably before it was finished, her time at 7 Middagh Street had given her the confidence she needed to proceed with the work. Meanwhile, Paul continued to develop his own reawakened ideas regarding fiction. Over the next five years, he published a series of experimental short stories, usually featuring characters in a state of psychological disintegration, before finishing his first novel, The Sheltering Sky.

Regarding Paul Bunyan’s critics, Elizabeth Mayer advised Britten from Long Island, “Let them stew in their own juice, and go on working.” The young composer did his best to comply, discussing with Auden ways to strengthen the opera’s dramatic line in case of a second production. But these discussions soon petered out; Auden seemed distracted—dogmatic in the extreme, as one observer remarked, and “full of ideas about moral character and what-not”—and Britten was utterly exhausted. Paul Bunyan had required more time and energy than he had ever anticipated, and the negative response had sapped his remaining strength. As an artist who was always highly sensitive to criticism, he felt publicly shamed by these bad reviews in a country not his own—nearly as “physically soiled and humiliated by life” in his own way, perhaps, as Auden had felt the month before.

Britten continued to go through the motions—performing a two-piano recital with Colin McPhee and traveling to Long Island to conduct a series of concerts by his amateur orchestra. But it was clear that he had reached his emotional limit the evening he stepped onto the stage of the Suffolk County concert hall to find a nearly empty room—the audience significantly smaller than the orchestra they had come to hear. Britten’s host, David Rothman, later recalled that Britten’s eyes filled with tears at this show of American apathy to Europe’s musical culture. A moment later, however, he turned his back on the room, faced his enthusiastic little orchestra, and raised his baton.

As was often the case during Britten’s stay in America, Peter Pears provided the consolation and hope that he needed to go on. In May, Britten conducted Les Illuminations, his settings of Rimbaud’s poems, for broadcast over CBS Radio. It was a particularly important event for both musicians, serving as the American premiere of the song cycle as a whole and as Pears’s first public performance of the work after a winter of preparation. A surviving recording demonstrates that by now Pears had begun to develop the unique sound and vocal technique that eventually made him one of Britain’s best-known singers. These qualities, springing forth naturally from his personality, particularly suited Britten’s emerging style.

Despite the disappointment of the Long Island concerts, Britten still relished the opportunities to spend time with the Rothmans and, as the weather turned warmer, to join them on weekend outings to the beach.

The windy coastline near Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, reminded Britten of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, an old fishing village not far from his childhood home. Like Montauk, Aldeburgh was dominated by shrieking seagulls and roaring waves, and its traditions were rooted in many generations of fishermen’s culture. Shortly before leaving England, Britten had bought and restored an old mill house in Snape, a quaint old village down the road from Aldeburgh, and set up a studio in its small tower. He had loved the peace and isolation of his country home and enjoyed his long walks through the surrounding marshlands, but his heart lay with the fishing boats and rattling shale beaches of Aldeburgh.

Now, walking along the beach as the Long Island fishing boats returned to shore, Britten reviewed the events of the previous hard winter. In retrospect and with Pears’s sympathetic agreement, he could now admit to himself that the sort of wild ride on which Auden had taken him was not his style. As sincerely as he admired Auden’s intellect, awed as he was by his enormous talent, Britten simply did not want to create operas by racing to catch up with a manic librettist and then jamming bits of music and lyrics together at the last minute to try to build a coherent story. Nor did he want to presume to interpret the history of a country he hardly knew, much less understood. Most certainly, he was no longer prepared to live in the state of ridiculous squalor into which 7 Middagh Street had fallen. Pears, who had worked double shifts through the winter, copying out parts for the opera in addition to his own musical activities, reinforced Britten’s growing sense that it was time to find a new direction.

Change presented itself in the form of an invitation from Rae Robertson and Ethel Bartlett, the pair of British pianists who had performed some of Britten’s work that year, to spend the summer with them in their cottage in Escondido, California. The couple, whom Britten and Pears privately called “the little Owls” for their comically small stature, seemed amiable enough and certainly unlikely to impose their personal foibles on Britten and Pears, as the residents of 7 Middagh Street had done. Pears, knowing that Britten had hoped to compose for Hollywood films when he arrived in America, pressed for the visit, and Britten soon agreed that it seemed a good idea. After all, Isherwood—another pacifist—seemed to have created a stable life for himself on the West Coast, with a studio contract to boot, as had Aldous Huxley. Even Thomas Mann had left Princeton and joined the western expatriate colony that spring, accompanied by his brother Heinrich and other members of his large family. When Britten received a commission from a California patron to compose a string quartet for performance in Los Angeles in September, the visit to California seemed preordained.

At the end of May, as President Roosevelt delivered another Fireside Chat in which he continued to vacillate on the issue of war, and as U-boats continued to sink ships in the Atlantic and bombs continued to fall on England, Britten and Pears said good-bye to the bedbugs of 7 Middagh Street—and a friendly good-bye to a dispirited Auden—and set out for California in an old Ford V8. Perhaps they would find the fulfilling work they had hoped for out west. After all, as became increasingly clear on their cross-country trek through Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and the Mojave Desert, this was America, and anything could happen.

 

“We meant to tell you to take the bottle of Château La Tour which was sitting in the clothes closet at Middagh Street,” Pears wrote to Elizabeth Mayer from the road. “Perhaps Wystan will have found it. If not, drink it together when you are next with him.” Mayer, bereft at having lost her surrogate sons to Hollywood—along with her real son, Michael, to the draft—was eager for any excuse to spend time with Auden. But she was distressed to find, when she stopped by to collect the clothes, papers, and other belongings that “her boys” had carelessly left behind, that the house that had been bursting with activity a few months before now appeared virtually abandoned as summer approached, almost as dilapidated as when George Davis first discovered it. Auden was, as always, glad to see Elizabeth and willing to discuss his latest projects—including, this month, a review of de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World. But while to new acquaintances, such as the New Yorker poetry critic Louise Bogan, Auden could still provide “a grand evening crammed with Insights and Autopsies and Great Simple Thoughts and Deep Intuitions,” Mayer knew the poet well enough to worry over his new air of weariness and distraction. That month, he had delivered a lecture at the University of Michigan, “The Loneliness of the Individual,” standing before the packed auditorium in his wrinkled white linen suit, his accent so thick that the students couldn’t understand a word. And for once he offered no new poems and no amusing asides for his audience to repeat and savor.

George’s mood seemed to echo Auden’s as the weather in Brooklyn turned warm. “I do become terribly depressed, especially in the spring,” he had once written to his parents. “Oh, you understand, when everything seems new, and accomplishment is far below ambition.” By June, he had given up any remaining expectation, or desire, to return to a full-time position at Harper’s Bazaar. Even his freelance commitments brought him into frequent conflict with the day-to-day demands of magazine production, and though George and Carmel Snow continued to respect each other’s talents, George had become convinced, as he wrote to Gypsy, that “she wants me . . . only if I crawl back, and take my drudgery henceforth and like it.” As that was not a situation Davis would accept, Mary Louise Aswell’s name appeared as fiction editor in the magazine’s June issue. George intended to look for a job elsewhere in a few months. Now, however, a new influx of old friends was expected from Europe—including the writer Kay Boyle, the heiress and editor Nancy Cunard, and the artists Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, and Max Ernst—and George was busy with plans to entertain these new refugees on Middagh Street. He was also tending to Carson McCullers, now back in New York but preparing to depart for a summer at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Carson had returned to the city with Reeves in April, her health still precarious and her nerves on edge. At first, she had tried to live again as Reeves’s wife in the apartment on West Eleventh Street. Both partners hoped that, now that Reeves had found a job and Carson’s work was going well, they could reestablish a good relationship. But it did not take long for them to return to the habits of the previous summer. Reeves was still drinking heavily, and Carson had begun treating her cough with cough syrup containing codeine—even as she continued to sip sherry throughout the day and indulge a new taste for bourbon in the evenings. As a result, their arguments began again, punctuated with cruel taunts and occasional outbursts of violence. By May, they had retreated to separate beds, and Carson had announced that she would no longer have sexual relations with her husband on the grounds of ill health. At the same time, she frequently went out alone at night, sometimes failing to return until the next day. Reeves began going out as well, cruising the bars for new partners.

In the midst of this turmoil, Carson was introduced by her friend Muriel Rukeyser to the composer David Diamond. Carson, in awe of all composers, was drawn to Diamond as she had been to Britten—but in this case a personal chemistry manifested itself and the two initiated a friendship that quickly intensified. Carson was pleased when Diamond, sensitive, romantic, and only twenty-five, gave her the ring that he happened to be wearing the first night they met. She was less pleased when he appeared to be attracted to Reeves as well.

This pattern had already established itself with Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach the summer before: Carson sought relief from her marriage in an intense infatuation with another artist—and was once again overcome with jealousy as the object of her love also formed a friendship with Reeves. With a new prize to fight over, Carson and Reeves’s battles grew more vicious, leaving the gentle Diamond to wonder what he had stepped into as he struggled to make peace between them. Janet Flanner, a friend of the composer’s as well as Carson’s, advised Diamond to avoid them during this period of mutual destructiveness. But Diamond seemed irresistibly drawn to the triangular friendship, even as his new friends’ alcoholic life encroached on his own productivity.

As before, Carson fled to George Davis for comfort. Despite the subdued atmosphere at Middagh Street that May, it was refreshing to spend time again with the group whose work was now appearing, almost as a unit, in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Decision. If the “we of me” sense of communion that Carson craved was difficult to maintain with Diamond and Reeves, she could always experience it by sharing a cocktail and a cigarette with George Davis, Auden, and Klaus Mann at the table in the overgrown rear garden at Middagh Street. It was comforting to listen to George affectionately prod Colin McPhee to stop worrying about his block against writing music and instead to write a book about the amazing life he had experienced on the island of Bali. George had already noted McPhee’s stylish and perceptive writing in the many pieces of music criticism that the composer had written for the American journal Modern Music. George believed that his account of having built and lived in a traditional house in an idyllic Balinese village would attract a respectable readership and might even increase interest in McPhee’s real obsession, Balinese music. The composer “huffed and puffed” when George pushed him on the issue, but the encouragement persuaded McPhee to apply for and win a place at Yaddo that summer along with Carson.

Carson was pleased, too, to learn that Klaus Mann had reviewed her novella Reflections in a Golden Eye in the same May issue of Decision in which Gertrude Stein’s Ida and Auden’s Double Man were discussed. Klaus had in fact created for his review a delightful imaginary dialogue between young Carson, “capering about like a nervous imp,” and the “well-preserved aunt” Gertrude Stein, carried on as they strolled together through the “amazing scenery of their capricious imaginations.” In this fictional exchange, Carson, “wavering and intense, oversensitive, savage, charming and corruptible,” paused during their walk and whispered, “The air is full of sordid mysteries”—at which Stein advised her to stop trying to appear sophisticated and to stick to writing “about savage things. New things. Sad things . . . American things. Not this nineteenth century stuff. With the garden shears! Many things happened to [my] Ida. Dear Ida. But nothing that ridiculous. Naturally not.” Klaus made sure that his fictional Stein concluded with the advice: “You’d better be careful, or you will go astray . . . You are a poet, Carson McCullers. So if you destroy yourself, you destroy a poet. You deprive the twentieth century of a bit of poetry—if you destroy yourself.”

Many of Carson’s friends had begun to worry a great deal, particularly after her stroke, about her continued heavy drinking and irregular habits. But her only hope of escaping such self-destructive behavior lay in writing, and at 7 Middagh Street she could at least find the creative encouragement that was missing in her Manhattan home. That late spring and early summer, Carson drew much closer to Oliver Smith, her Brooklyn “younger brother”—climbing the stairs to the light-filled attic studio he had created when not preparing for an exhibition of his paintings in the city. At one end of the small rectangular room with its steeply pitched ceiling, Smith had installed a large semicircular desk, bequeathed to him by a distant ancestor, Henry James; the area at the other end near the window was dedicated to his watercolors and set designs.

Already, it was possible for the twenty-four-year-old Carson, who had experienced a first burst of fame, a marital separation, a scandalous second publication, and a major stroke all in the past year, to look on the poor but ambitious Oliver Smith with a certain fond nostalgia. While she admired the white china dishes on which the young artist mixed his paints and the watercolor designs he was creating for every play currently on Broadway, he entertained her with stories of his childhood and his early years in New York. Smith had spent his youth obsessively poring over floor plans and creating improved layouts for famous houses, hotels, and theaters. He remembered a time when he was twelve, accompanying his mother as she drove his nineteen-year-old cousin, Paul Bowles, to Yaddo for a stay arranged by Aaron Copland. Oliver had taken one look at the beautiful, turreted, gray stone Victorian mansion and cried, “Oh, Mother! I wish I were Paul.” Outraged, his mother dragged him off immediately. But now, in Brooklyn, no one minded if Oliver designed his own miniature palace at the top of the house—and he did not have to wait to be hired before realizing his vision.

Carson adored his stories and also appreciated Oliver Smith’s knack for giving her the kind of attention she craved. The two talked at length that spring about The Bride and Her Brother, which Carson felt had reached a critical point in its development. His influence proved critical to her ability to progress with the story once she had settled in at Yaddo. Smith had extended the same kindness to Jane Bowles, suggesting that with her gift for dialogue she had great potential as a dramatist. “Someday I’ll give you money to start writing a play,” he had told her—and two years later he kept his promise, coproducing her play In the Summer House.

Smith’s enthusiasm for art, theater, literature, music, and ballet, and his talent for acting as “an island of calm in the sea of temperament,” allowed him to serve as a lively cross-pollinator among the other artists at 7 Middagh Street. That spring, he initiated or maintained friendships with the painters Eugène Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Salvador Dalí at the Brooklyn house, became a favorite of the circle of dancers surrounding Lincoln Kirstein, and with the help of George Davis began doing illustrations for Mademoiselle. “When you’re starting out, you have a wonderful time,” he later remarked about this period. “It’s like a series of great restaurants. You try a little bit and have fun with this period or that architect. Like a child in a cafeteria, you eat everything in sight.”

Since Smith happened to have taken his exam for the set designer’s union in Hollywood with only one other applicant—Salvador Dalí—he may have especially enjoyed attending Dalí’s exhibition that May. Billed as Dalí’s “last scandal,” the beginning of his classical period, the exhibition fooled no one. As reviews in Decision and elsewhere pointed out, Dalí had merely presented his usual quasi-surrealist work in antique frames, although the exhibition did serve as effective advertising for the artist’s upcoming autobiography. The catalogue reproduced a page of the manuscript, along with the Dalíesque teasers: “Can one remember one’s prenatal life? Explained in the book. Why are these horrible cats’ tails grafted upon breasts? Explained in the book . . .”

Certainly, Smith enjoyed—along with everyone else—George’s accounts of Gypsy Rose Lee’s progress with The G-String Murders. Throughout the spring, she had worked to complete the revisions while starring in several shows a day at Todd’s Theatre Café. Gypsy’s editor, Lee Wright, had taken over where George had left off, commenting on the manuscript as Gypsy wrote it. “I loved your notes,” she wrote from her dressing room that May. “I was reading along and saying to myself, ‘I like this chapter fine,’ and at the end I’d come across, ‘What happened to Jake?’ in your hand-writing. Hurt me ego . . . that’s wot.”

A hitch in Gypsy’s plan had occurred when the Mafia moved in on the Theatre Café in late spring, offering Todd a “partnership.” Rather than get involved with the mobsters, he sold them the club for a dollar and took his and Gypsy’s names off the marquee. Gypsy then lent Todd the money to take their elaborate Gay New Orleans Review on the road—staging three shows a day, six days a week, in Milwaukee, Toledo, San Francisco, Detroit, Atlantic City, and other cities across the country. Even while touring, Gypsy never stopped writing, and by June she had completed the manuscript. Within days, Variety reported that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had bid for the movie rights to the book. A Broadway production was also being discussed, but Gypsy claimed that if it were staged, she would not play the lead role. “Why should I?” she asked reporters. “I’d be a dope to play for $350 a week the part of a Chicago stripteaser when I can be the Chicago stripper for $2000.”

“Does this sound good for a dust jacket: a picture full length of a stripper?” she wrote to her editor. “Semi nude. The G String actually silver flitter. (Very inexpensive, that flitter business.) And a separate piece of paper pasted on as a skirt, like birthday cards, you know? The customers can lift the skirt, and there’s the G-string sparkling gaily. It is strictly gag business but it might cause talk.” Now that The G-String Murders was complete, Gypsy began to think about a sequel. Within the month, she started writing Mother Finds a Body, finding, thanks largely to George’s tutelage, the second novel much easier going than the first. For the rest of her life, in fact, Gypsy relied on writing as a fulfilling outlet for her creativity, second only to her work as a performer.

 

Glad as Carson was to spend time with her friends, she was due at Yaddo by mid-June. As the summer heat intensified, the Brooklyn house emptied of many other visitors and lodgers as well. Colin McPhee had left for Saratoga Springs at the same time as Carson. Lincoln Kirstein—who had recently surprised everyone by marrying, despite his homosexuality, the sister of the artist Paul Cadmus, Fidelma—left with his new American Ballet Caravan on a South American tour. Paul and Jane Bowles had returned to Taxco, Mexico, to be joined by Oliver Smith, who was eager to turn his back on “that long, hard winter working at awful jobs.” George Davis departed on one of his periodic cross-country jaunts in which he was liable to turn up unexpectedly on a friend’s or relative’s doorstep with a stray cat, dog, or human companion in tow.

Klaus Mann returned to his room at the Bedford Hotel in Manhattan, tied to his work for Decision. The past few issues, he felt, had been among the best, and his hopes were rising that the journal would not only help new refugees but would lead to real change in the world as cultural leaders and government officials responded to the challenges in its pages. To his frustration, however, at the same time that he saw such positive results, the funding for the journal had begun to run out. Several major backers did not come through, and the income from subscriptions was not sufficient to cover the operating costs. Klaus had always paid his writers according to need rather than a set standard, but by April he was forced to renegotiate lower payments even to those writers who had no other income. The budget for the May issue did not even allow Klaus to pay himself a living wage, and he found himself, at thirty-four, having to write to his mother at her new home in California: “The other drop of bitterness is that I—it really can’t be helped, it is very distressing to me—must ask for some money: two hundred dollars, I can’t manage with less.”

Asking his parents for money was especially depressing, for Klaus Mann had hoped to finally overcome his reputation as the privileged son, the moody dilettante, the invisible younger sibling of the dynamic Erika Mann. For the past year, he had worked feverishly to facilitate the safe transplantation of European culture to the fertile new soil of America. Yet the people he now approached for financial help seemed to believe that Decision had made its promising start more in spite of Klaus than because of him. More than one potential investor implied that Klaus was unable to manage Decision on his own—Klaus, who had conceived the idea of a journal for émigré artists, who had single-handedly raised the funds, and who had worked night and day for the past eight months to turn it into a tool for merging two disparate democratic cultures. Max Ascoli, the esteemed Italian émigré journalist now teaching at the New School, offered to help raise more money and contribute funds himself if Klaus would create a formal business plan and meet with investors in a conference room rather than at “social gatherings” such as those at Middagh Street. Others insisted that Klaus’s father participate more actively as collaborator and adviser, that Klaus take on an editorial partner, or that Decision be merged with their own political organizations or refugee aid societies.

Klaus might have been less resentful of such slights if he had not now been entering his eighth year of exile, still living and writing in a foreign language and struggling each day against America’s apathy toward his and other refugees’ concerns. Nearly a decade of drifting from country to country, from hotel to hotel, had left him with a sense of living in “a social and spiritual vacuum; striving for a true community but never finding it; disconnected, restless, wandering; haunted by those solemn abstractions in which nobody else believes—civilization, progress, liberty.” Every day constituted another struggle to make himself heard, to connect with others, but it was the constant small cuts that made life unbearable.

Previously, Klaus had managed to survive emotionally by drawing from Erika’s phenomenal energy, but Erika had been gone for nearly four months. The only person Klaus saw now in New York was Muriel Rukeyser, whom he had recently appointed associate editor of Decision. Without her editorial help and emotional support, he admitted, he could not have gone on. But even she escaped to the country three days each week while Klaus remained, “paralyzed, as it were, by the demon of this fierce and relentless summer. At times I actually fear suffocation in the stifling hole that’s my room.”

It seemed to Klaus that summer as though he and all of the other weary exiles from Hitler’s regime had reached the end of their productive lives, and that, cut off from the culture that had sustained them, nothing more lay ahead but hardship and isolation. It was not surprising, somehow, that two of the three greatest innovators from that earlier age—James Joyce and Virginia Woolf—had perished since the year began. And recently, Sherwood Anderson, one of Decision’s staunchest American supporters, had died in Panama. Numbly going through the motions, Klaus published a remembrance of Woolf by Christopher Isherwood in Decision’s May issue, along with one of her early short stories. Reflecting on her death, he realized that he had lost more friends through suicide than through disease, crime, or accident. There had been several waves—the first one before the establishment of the Third Reich, the second after the invasion of Poland, and now a third wave as America teetered on the edge of war.

Klaus, too, was deeply attracted to the idea of suicide. “I’ve never understood why anyone should be afraid of death,” he wrote in his diary, “when it’s only life that’s so terrible.” In earlier years, he had stifled the wish to end his life through the use of morphine, to which he remained intermittently addicted until his death. “My case is not pathological,” he once told a doctor friend when discussing his dependence. “No doctor can cure me of the different things that weigh on me.” Now he looked to world events for some reason—any reason—to find comfort. In mid-May, news had arrived that Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, had parachuted out of his Messerchmitt 110 and landed in the village of Eaglesham in Scotland. When captured, he demanded to negotiate a peace plan with the British leaders, but Hitler repudiated the “deserter” and announced that Hess was suffering from a mental disorder. Was this desertion of one of the “Devil’s stooges” just another symptom of the world’s insanity, Klaus wondered, or could the flight of Hitler’s “dearest friend [with his] red-painted toenails, the pockets of his uniform full of narcotics and photos,” be a first sign that the Third Reich was crumbling?

Then, at four o’clock on the morning of June 22, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in a blatant grab for the Soviet oil needed to fuel Germany’s expansion. The attack came without warning and in spite of a nonaggression pact signed by both Germany and the USSR. The Russian population succumbed to mass panic even as Molotov shouted over the airwaves, “This incredible attack on our country is an act of treachery unequalled in the history of civilized nations.”

Like the events of the previous summer, disasters followed one upon the other in numbing succession. As Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Hungary, and Albania joined forces against Russia, parts of Byelorussia, Lithuania, and the western Ukraine were lost. Japan, meanwhile, called up more than a million men for military service and ordered all its merchant ships in the Atlantic back home.

In California, Christopher Isherwood wrote in his diary, “Try to avoid negative emotion.” But he had had a nightmare of returning to London. “The houses were smashed, but only the top floors . . . so many ruins you could see a hill in the distance . . . In the newspaper, an advertisement in fake Elizabethan language for seats in a fighter plane to take part in an air raid. Woke with enormous relief that I’m still here.”

Klaus Mann, too, listened to the news with the strange sense that it was all a dream. “Hitler’s attack on Russia is an event of such staggering implications that I don’t dare to gauge them,” he wrote that week. Yet “my spontaneous reaction is one of relief, rather than of dismay or apprehension. The air has become purer. The story of a colossal lie has finally reached its end.” It was now clear to everyone, at last, that Hitler would never keep a promise to any nation, that no country on earth could feel confident of remaining untouched by his greed. As Churchill acknowledged over the airwaves, “It is not too much to say here this summer evening that the lives and happiness of a thousand million additional human beings are now menaced with brutal Nazi violence.”

At the same time, it was conceivable that Hitler’s grasp had, in this case, exceeded his reach. It was a military truism, wasn’t it, never to attack Russia? Churchill warned against the probability that, with the Soviets in hand, Hitler would launch a full-scale invasion of Britain before winter. For this reason, despite his government’s “revulsion” against communism, Britain would come to Russia’s aid. And if the USSR managed to resist long enough, Hitler could find himself pinched between these two great powers until the United States took advantage of the opportunity to step in and administer the fatal blow. Yes, it was a crisis, Klaus believed, but perhaps it was also the beginning of this terrible war’s end.

This thought alone was almost enough to pull Klaus out of his despair. Even on the summer nights when New York had become “a parched and dusty inferno,” with heat “so dazing that one can hardly breathe,” he began to feel again the impulse to transform his experience into art. Wandering alone through the streets of Manhattan, he found that once more he enjoyed being “all alone in the midst of a sweating, easy-going, weary, and sensual crowd.” He wrote, “I relish those sultry evenings when the vast masses of towered stones seem to exhale the accumulated glow of the day like tremendous stoves. I do not long for lush meadows, cool mountain valleys, and the salty breezes from the sea. It gives me a grim sort of pleasure to loiter around Times Square on a torrid August night. I do not seek company.”

The return of his creative impulse was a godsend for Klaus, but he did not feel ready, in that time of flux, to attempt a work of fiction. “Can a novel be completely serious, completely sincere?” he wrote. “Perhaps. But I do not want to write one; not now, not at this hour. I am tired of all literary clichés and tricks. I am tired of all masks, all hypocrisy. Is it art itself that I am tired of? I don’t want to play any more. I want to confess.”

To confess—thereby ending one part of his life and beginning another. Klaus decided to write the story of his life as a young man in exile, to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth . . . To tell my own story, not despite the crisis, but because of it.” His account of the life of a dislocated outsider, he believed, would be “at once unique and representative. Limited in its scope and molded by specific conditions; and yet full of infinite suggestions, transcending the range of its own problems and objectives, pointing to potentialities far beyond its empirical margin.” And he would call his story The Turning Point, because

 

it is from the turning point that we should examine the path we have covered. In measuring its serpentine curves and paradoxical zigzags, we may learn something as to the next step to take. For one thing is certain at least, in the midst of so many staggering uncertainties: the next step will carry us into new land with landscapes and conditions as they have never been seen before. Nobody can foretell whether things will be worse or better in this transformed world to come. The horizons which, from now on, will surround our lives may be brighter or darker than the skies we knew. But surely the light will alter.

 

Auden, too, had remained in the city that summer, despite the kind of heat that prompted him to remark of America some time later that “Nature never intended human beings to live here.” He could be grateful, nevertheless, to be at home at all that summer: he had been ordered to report for American military duty on July 1, but at the last moment his appointment was postponed.

In the wake of Chester Kallman’s betrayal and the disaster of the Paul Bunyan premiere—a failure that he regretted much more for Britten’s sake than his own—Auden had to struggle to maintain his balance that summer. The absence of new poems had become a source of concern, as evidenced by his clipped response to a sympathetic inquiry from his benefactor Caroline Newton:

 

Caroline dear, You oversimplify. Writing poems is not just a technical craft like making shoes, where the optimum conditions can be stated at once as light, tools, and unlimited leather. If I tried to live by the question ‘what will help me most to write poetry?’, I should never be able to write a line. All one has, are hunches about one’s life as a whole. If the hunches are right, then it doesn’t matter if one writes or not; if they are wrong, the most beautiful poem in the world will be no excuse. Love, Wystan.

 

The question that had infiltrated Auden’s thinking that summer was whether the conclusions he had drawn from the past six months’ activity were, in fact, wrong. The opportunity to review de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World allowed him to reconsider his thinking about love as one path to spiritual redemption, as de Rougemont analyzed the modern Western myth of passion as the misguided assumption that “only perfection is worthy to be loved.” This erroneous idea sprang from a belief that matter was the creation of the Evil One, therefore all human institutions, including marriage, were corrupt. Only in death could humans escape matter and find perfection in the noncorporeal, according to this belief. And from it a reverse image was born of the Don Juan who believed that the material present was all and the immaterial afterlife a distant nothing.

Both versions, Auden pointed out, lacked any concept of the love object as a person, and both were essentially anathema to the Christian doctrine of agape, which dealt with the incarnation in the material world of the spiritual Word. It is in agape, this experience of God’s love on earth, Auden wrote, that “we are delivered from the woe of being alive” and can achieve salvation. One way to arrive at a state of agape is through eros, that is, through the physical and spiritual love of a fellow human. Christian love leads to “an immediate reassertion, not of course of the old life, and not of an ideal life, but of our present life now repossessed by the Spirit.”

The task, then, of human love, is “to actualize the possible,” or to love in a way that opens one to a state of grace. This form of spiritual love can only be achieved “if the right decision is taken,” Auden wrote, and “if any of the wrong decisions are taken, the result will be self-negation.” To avoid this risk, many try to deny either the spiritual or the physical aspects of love, he added. Such crises of faith are inevitable. But there is a way to survive these crises intact—by following the rules of a Christian marriage, “which may not be either as absurdly straitlaced or as coarse as they once appeared.”

It was how Auden worked through any emotional experience, no matter how painful or complex: through the saving mechanism of his intellect. As he pointed out himself so frequently, he was a Thinking and Intuition type, weaker in the areas of Feeling and Sensation, and so he learned from emotional experiences with more difficulty than most. His analysis of de Rougemont’s book served as a necessary means through which he could begin trying to understand the disastrous turn in his relationship with Kallman. Surely, anyone could see that some bad “decisions” had been made in their marriage and that the result had clearly been his own “self-negation,” in one sense, and Kallman’s in another.

Kallman, however, had no intention of following any rules of marriage, Christian or otherwise. Through the spring and summer months, he had continued to spend time at the house on Middagh Street, bringing along “friends,” drinking through the night, and otherwise making clear his refusal to play along anymore with Auden’s fantasy of spiritual and physical communion. It would have been difficult to find a less likely partner for a sacred marriage vow, in fact, as Chester refused to have sexual relations with his former lover, dropped all pretense of remaining emotionally faithful to him, and planned to depart in a few months for an independent life in Ann Arbor.

Still, wasn’t that the basis of the myth that de Rougemont explored in his book, that “only perfection is worthy to be loved”? It was Kallman’s bewitching imperfection that had attracted Auden in the first place—the mix of transcendence and devilry that epitomized the human condition. To love a young man like Kallman was to love humanity, and to accept him in all his inconstancy, ambition, cruelty, and anger was to “love one’s neighbor as oneself.”

Six months earlier, after Kallman’s betrayal with Jack Barker but before Auden learned of it, he had written, “To be saved is to have Faith, and to have Faith means to recognize something as the Necessary. Whether or not the faith of an individual is misplaced does not matter: indeed, in an absolute sense, it always is.” Back then, all of his talk of saints and salvation had been little more than a kind of playing at Christianity. His arbitrary choice of Chester Kallman as his path toward redemption had seemed easy and pleasant. Now, however, Auden had come up against a test of his commitment to moral action, set at the highest price he could imagine. Could he fully love Chester Kallman even as his lover turned away? Could he love him if they never touched, never spoke again? If the answer was yes, would his ability to do so lead to a higher consciousness—not only in this relationship, but in his relations with the world? And if the answer was no, then what other answer could he find?

One of the reasons Auden had moved to Middagh Street was his search for a place in which to work through just these kinds of questions. In rooms economical enough to allow him to focus on his best work, in a house filled with others in pursuit of the same goal, perhaps he could increase his chance of finding a solution to the question of how to choose the correct, moral action in a chaotic, immoral world. Seeking such answers required sacrifice. In the coming years, Auden would describe the artist’s mission in his prose poem The Sea and the Mirror, a commentary on Shakespeare’s Tempest:

 

And from this nightmare of public solitude, this everlasting Not Yet, what relief have you but in an ever giddier collective gallop, with bison eye and bevel course, toward the grey horizon of the bleaker vision . . . what goal but the Black Stone on which the bones are cracked, for only there in its cry of agony can your existence find at last an unequivocal meaning and your refusal to be yourself become a serious despair, the love nothing, the fear all?

 

Auden had sought the black stone, and at 7 Middagh Street he had found it—the moment of existential despair that came from too many drinks, too many accusations, too much squalor, and too much heat. Alone in the house in the dead of night that July, the poet and his lover succumbed to an exchange of shouted recriminations that ended only when Kallman reiterated his vow to end his relations with Auden and stumbled upstairs to collapse on the poet’s bed and fall instantly asleep.

Auden remained downstairs alone, struggling with a desire to find Jack Barker and kill him. But Barker was at sea, while Auden sat smoking in the parlor and Kallman slept contentedly upstairs.

 

Caught in the jealous trap

Of an empty house I hear

As I sit alone in the dark,

Everything, everything,

The drip of the bathroom tap,

The creak of the sofa spring,

The wind in the air-shaft, all

Making the same remark

Stupidly, stupidly,

Over and over again.

Father, what have I done?

Answer me, Father, how

Can I answer the tactless wall

Or the pompous furniture now?

 

Louise Bogan recalled telling Auden that month about a man who broke into tears in a taxi, confessing to his traveling companion that he had a vestigial tail. “I shouldn’t have minded a vestigial tail,” Bogan said playfully to her friend. “No,” Auden had replied, “one can always stand what other people have.”

Auden had weathered George’s managerial inefficiency, Carson’s drinking and her marital woes, Gypsy’s literary inexperience and remarkable restlessness, the Bowleses’ irritating habits, and the critical lambasting of his friend, Benjamin Britten. But this last insult from Kallman was too much. From childhood, Auden had determined to become a great poet. And only through the love of an individual, he had decided, could that transformation occur. The only person he had ever found whom he could love sufficiently was Chester Kallman. He did not expect Chester to be perfect, but he desperately needed him to remain present and involved, to allow himself to be used as a vehicle for transcendence.

Auden himself did not know what prompted him to leave the parlor after about an hour and climb the stairs to his room at the top of the house. Standing by the bed, looking down at Chester, Auden was overcome by a violent impulse. If he could not murder Jack Barker, he could kill Chester, or perhaps eventually both. While his lover slept, Auden put his thick fingers around Chester’s throat and tried to strangle him to death.

What happened next was lost in the confusion of the moment. Chester awoke, realized what was happening, and either pushed Auden away with all his strength or ran away or laughed, rolled over, and went back to sleep. The attack was hardly frightening to a young man who courted violence in his sexual affairs. But for Auden, this intent to murder, even if it was not carried out, became a life-altering experience.

For the first time, after all his years of looking on the violence of the world and thinking through ways in which it might be defeated, he himself had experienced “what it is like to feel oneself the prey of demonic powers, in both the Greek and Christian sense, stripped of self-control and self-respect, behaving like a ham actor in a Strindberg play.” No longer could he pretend to be appalled by, or not to understand, the urge toward violence behind the behavior of Gestapo jailers, book burners, or those who took pleasure in the humiliation and defeat of others. Later, still shaken but trying to come to terms with the experience, he remarked to a friend, “It’s frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much—I can see myself doing it. In England one feels all the social restraints held one back. But here anything can happen.” He had come to the land of infinite choice, and this was where it had led him.

 

During the next few days, Auden continued to move through the traditional stages of grief, from denial to anger and toward negotiation. Histrionic arguments gave way to pleading and bargaining for a place in Chester’s life. But both men knew that he was now speaking from a compromised position. Auden blamed himself, not Chester, for their failed relationship. If he had not tried to impose his own aims and desires on his lover, if he had not bullied him intellectually and neglected him emotionally, if he had treated him less as an object and more as an individual with his own needs and destiny, none of this would have happened. Perhaps it was not too late to save the relationship. He could be Chester’s friend if not his lover. All he asked was that Chester never leave him; that was the one thing he could not bear.

In mid-July, having traveled to Olivet College for a week’s lecturing, Auden felt more depressed and lonely than ever before. “If I stay here any longer,” he wrote to a friend, “I shall either take to the mysticism that Reinhold so disapproves of or buy a library of pornographic books.” Conditions improved only marginally when he joined Chester for a visit to Caroline Newton’s house near Jamestown, Rhode Island. Isherwood, whose contract with M-G-M had recently expired, traveled east to join them. If Auden was relieved to greet his closest friend, appearing as always fresh-faced and elegant after nearly a year in California, Isherwood was less pleased with the scene he found when he arrived.

“Caroline was a silly, snobbish, well-read woman with very little taste,” Isherwood wrote in his journal, “often pathetic and kind-hearted. She was in love with Auden. The atmosphere was in the highest degree embarrassing.” Most uncomfortable was the extreme tension between Auden and Kallman, which broke out periodically in loud arguments and passionate pleas that were impossible not to hear through the thin walls of their bedroom. “I had to keep going on walks, alternately, with the three others, to discuss the latest developments,” he wrote. Kallman remained adamant about ending the relationship and was in fact scribbling desperate, longing notes to Jack Barker in his poetry notebook. Auden, for his part, “was in a difficult, strained, provocative mood, and kept attacking [Christopher’s pacifist friend] Gerald [Heard] and talking theology.”

Then a second disaster befell Auden. A telegram was delivered to the house by telephone—taken by Caroline Newton—that Auden’s seventy-two-year-old mother had died in her sleep. Kallman was deputized to break the news to Auden. Despite the friction between them, he had the grace to deliver it with kindness. Finding Auden in their bedroom, preparing to go out with the others to dinner, Chester told him, “We’re not going to King’s.” “Goody, goody,” Auden said with relief. “The reason is,” Chester continued gently, “your mother has died.”

Auden had known his mother was ill. For some days, he had “raised heaven and earth” to speak with her by telephone, but it had proved impossible in wartime and he was never put through. Now all he could say to Chester was, “How like her that her last act on earth should be to get me out of a social engagement I didn’t want,” before he burst into tears.

 

Before Isherwood returned to California, he accompanied Auden to Middagh Street to take a look at the now-famous house that his friend had once shared with Gypsy Rose Lee. He found the house “an attractive, insanely untidy place where, owing to some freak of plumbing, the water in the toilet was nearly boiling. The weather was overpoweringly hot and sticky.” It seemed a lonely place in midsummer in which to leave Auden and Kallman, especially when they were so at odds with each other. Isherwood wrote in his diary that “poor Wystan cried when I left for Los Angeles.” Isherwood himself, having resolved to live and work as a pacifist at a Quaker settlement, was experiencing the euphoria of having finally reached a solution to his own dilemma of how to respond to the war. It was distressing to see his closest friend so low. But Auden had been determined to throw himself against the black stone of experience. And, that summer, it seemed there was nothing left.