It has taken us long, too long, to come to terms with our inward selves . . . We have had to face a moral crisis for which we were scantily equipped. But at last we have reached our conclusions and are ready to act. We have come through.
—Carson McCullers, 1941
The passage of the Lend-Lease Bill by Congress led to a $7 billion appropriation for armaments manufacture for the Allies, and the effects of this enormous increase in production soon became visible in Brooklyn. In September 1941, the city’s newspapers announced that the Brooklyn Navy Yard, now operating around the clock, would begin hiring female mechanics to replace men who had been drafted or had enlisted. Soon, the bars and luncheonettes of Sands Street filled with female as well as male shipfitters, apprentice welders, and acetylene torch burners who were putting in five-and-a-half-day, fifty-eight-hour weeks.
Such an increase in production demanded a similar increase in the supply of raw materials. Anticipating a shortage of metal, the government warned of lowered numbers of new automobiles, refrigerators, and washing machines in the year ahead, as well as oil and gas shortages. An Aluminum Collection Week was billed as most citizens’ first chance to participate directly in America’s defense. Gypsy Rose Lee helped publicize the event by posing nude, except for her signature high heels and an assortment of strategically placed aluminum pots, pans, and cooking spoons, for Life magazine.
For many, if by no means all Americans, it was gratifying to be asked to do something about the war in Europe after years of standing by and hearing the news. Reports in the newspapers that autumn told of the institution of the death penalty in Poland for Jews found outside the ghettos, of the deaths in Leningrad from freezing or starvation as the city lost electricity and heat, of a two-hour raid on Berlin delivered by RAF bombers on the anniversary of the first mass air attack on London, and of the massive Allied bombing of Naples and other parts of Italy. At the offices of Decision, Klaus Mann was surprised to see the change in the attitude toward engagement of his secretary’s soldier-boyfriend, Johnny. Over the course of one month, he had evolved from an unhappy draftee considering going AWOL (“Let that guy Hitler conquer as much as he wants to”) to a bloodthirsty warrior eager to “beat the hell out of them Japs.”
President Roosevelt announced in his Fireside Chat of September 11 that because of a number of recent skirmishes between American ships and German submarines in the North Atlantic, he had authorized military escorts for the ships transporting supplies across the ocean. “From now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril,” he said. “The sole responsibility rests upon Germany. There will be no shooting unless Germany continues to seek it.” Fifteen days later, the U.S. naval command ordered the sinking, when possible, of every Italian and German ship found in U.S. “defensive” waters. Meanwhile, Americans met in Moscow with representatives of Britain and the Soviet Union to work out a plan of urgent assistance to the Russians. Hitler, undeterred, launched an attack on Moscow on October 2, announcing that Russia “has already been broken and will never rise again.” It would be an autumn of fierce fighting and thousands more deaths.
By this time, George Davis had returned to Middagh Street and set to work rearranging its tenancy. Many changes had taken place over the summer, for George as well as the other residents. The previous winter, he had written to Gypsy that he would be doing some hard thinking in the months ahead. “I figure that after that I’ll be all right for a while,” he had added. By fall, the period of anxiety over his failed attempt to write a second novel, the social experimentation through which he had gained release, and the gloom that followed had ended. George once again began telephoning friends, meeting colleagues for lunch in the city, securing work for himself and his housemates, and finding new artists to nurture and support. This year, in order to free the entire parlor floor of the house for socializing, George moved into Carson’s third-floor suite, claiming the cardboard cutout of Gypsy for himself and installing it near the window. He then furnished Gypsy’s former rooms, complete with grand piano, for Carson when she was in New York.
Carson would use her space for a few days, a week, or even a month or two at a time in the coming years, but her health no longer permitted her to live permanently in the city. Still, during her summer at Yaddo, she had been able to capitalize on the moments of illumination she had experienced in the house in Brooklyn.
Yaddo’s restful environment, with its carefully tended grounds and reliable routine, helped Carson concentrate, and the mix of American artists and European refugees proved stimulating, even if Carson’s recent emotional strain caused her to behave in strange ways at times. In one of these episodes, Carson developed an infatuation for Katherine Anne Porter, the slim, sophisticated writer from Texas who had come to Yaddo for the summer and who counted George Davis, Glenway Wescott, James Stern, David Diamond, and Wystan Auden among her friends. Unaware that Porter had long ago read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and decided that she disliked it, Carson resolved to make herself the newest member of her illustrious social circle. She began following the writer around the grounds, declaring her love and begging to spend time with her, to no avail. Finally one evening, having pounded on Porter’s door for quite a while without gaining entry, Carson lay down across the threshold so that when Porter left to go downstairs for dinner, she would be forced to acknowledge her. When Porter opened the door she looked down at Carson, paused, and simply stepped over her and continued down the hall without a word. Soon afterward, she moved into a separate house on the grounds expressly to avoid Carson—and thus ended their relationship.
There was no doubt that Carson’s continued drinking—beginning with a beer at her writing table immediately after breakfast, continuing with sherry throughout the day, and ending with evening cocktails with the group of writers she had joined—complicated her relations with others at the colony. But she seemed unable to write without it. If her health must be sacrificed in the service of writing, it was a sacrifice she was willing to make.
Reporting to her desk by nine-thirty each morning, Carson made great progress, finishing The Ballad of the Sad Café and moving briskly forward with her problem novel, The Bride and Her Brother. Inspired by a new friendship with the New Yorker short story writer Edward Newhouse, she wrote a story of her own in two days and sold it to the magazine for a satisfying $400. She immediately began another story as well as a poem, “The Twisted Trinity,” for Decision. She also frequently visited Colin McPhee, who was writing about his years in Bali in a picturesque stone tower beside one of Yaddo’s lakes.
His presence gave Carson an irresistible opportunity to play mentor to a fellow writer, and both she and the composer found that they benefited enormously from this relationship, though McPhee was nearly twice Carson’s age. The younger writer was able to tease her friend out of his morose moods, and her playful techniques to maximize his production—once promising him a party when he finished a chapter—proved surprisingly effective. As the weeks passed, McPhee began to realize that in many ways he enjoyed writing about Bali even more than he liked creating music. “It has gone very well,” he wrote, “18000 words in three weeks, and I am really happy in doing it . . . I write so much better than I compose that I wish a miracle might happen, even at this late date, and that I could express that something that I feel within, that has never found satisfactory utterance.”
It meant a great deal to Carson to be able to give to someone else the attention and creative nurturing that George Davis had given her. The process of mentoring Colin McPhee, combined with the success of her writing projects, gave her a new level of self-confidence. By the middle of July, however, Carson felt herself pulled down again by the familiar ache for her group of Brooklyn friends. Reading the July issue of Decision, in which a poem of Muriel Rukeyser’s appeared, Carson wrote to her that “the poem in Decision made me weep—real wet tears, as I could remember your voice as you had said it and was suddenly homesick.”
Carson also wrote to her husband, Reeves, and was disturbed not to receive a reply. She could not ask David Diamond whether he had any news of him, since the composer had left Yaddo early to deliver some lectures in New York. Carson had not seen as much of Diamond as she had expected to that summer; he had shared Katherine Anne Porter’s two-story cottage, and Carson remained unwelcome there. After he left, she wrote to him of her longing to be with him, and Diamond responded with an offer of marriage, which surprised and disturbed Carson. Marriage to Diamond wasn’t what she had in mind. She already had a husband, and that relationship was disastrous. Carson longed for communion—a platonic love that would nourish her creativity and Diamond’s while leaving room for others as well. She continued to see more promise in triangular relationships, in which she was loved by one person while loving another. In The Ballad of the Sad Café, the hunchbacked Cousin Lyman Willis found himself in this enviable position as he basked in Miss Amelia’s adoration while yearning for her no-good husband. And in The Bride and Her Brother, she would write of Frankie, her brother, and his bride: “The three of them would go into the world and they would always be together. And finally, after the scared spring and the crazy summer, she was no more afraid.”
It came as a shock, then, to find later that summer that she had been left out of the equation. Near the end of July, Carson learned that Reeves had moved to Rochester, New York, near David Diamond’s home, with the intention of setting up housekeeping with the composer. Carson was equally stunned to discover that Reeves had financed his move by forging Carson’s signature on her check from The New Yorker and on her royalty checks from Houghton Mifflin. In signing her name to the checks and pursuing the object of Carson’s own infatuation, Reeves had in the most literal possible way reclaimed his name and taken back the life that he felt Carson had snatched from him, shutting her out completely.
If Carson had been experimenting with the idea of exile before—by interviewing Erika Mann and writing of a Jewish refugee traveling through the South—now she experienced for the first time the feeling of being abruptly cut off from family and home. Without ever having left America, she found herself exiled from the warm “we of me” form of communion, just as her fictional alter ego, Frankie Addams, had been forced to separate from her brother and his bride.
Carson McCullers, while physically frail, was unusually strong-willed. Reeves could hurt her deeply, but he would never be able to destroy her. Taking a leave of absence from Yaddo, Carson returned briefly to New York to replenish her overdrawn checking account and to talk with a lawyer about getting a divorce. A short time later, she contacted a psychiatrist, Elizabeth Mayer’s husband, William, to discuss the possibility of entering therapy. Mayer specialized in treating artists—he had been working with McPhee for years—and could be counted on to respect the central importance to artists of their creative lives. Carson’s relationship with him proved enormously helpful over time, and she eventually came to refer to him as her “protective angel.”
Carson returned to Yaddo, crying most of the way back on the train. Once her residency ended in September, she returned to New York for another brief visit, meeting with Robert Linscott, her editor and by now her close friend, to discuss the publication of The Ballad of the Sad Café.
Then she took the train home to Georgia to begin the process of healing.
In New York, she had met with a number of her Middagh Street acquaintances in Manhattan but had resisted traveling out to Brooklyn to spend time there. She was not yet ready to explain her decision to divorce Reeves to such close friends as George and Auden, who would want to discuss it at length. No one on Middagh Street—or anywhere else, she realized—could save her. She would have to learn to take care of herself.
In earlier years, when returning south to recover from a stay in New York, Carson had had to fend off an inner voice suggesting that she left because she “couldn’t take it” and calling her a quitter. Now, however, as the shocks of the previous year began to recede, she found that the voice had been silenced. She had, after all, made a great deal of progress in spite of a calamitous personal life. By the age of twenty-four, Carson had not only demonstrated an exceptional talent for fiction but had also established her skill at creating prescient, evocative essays, emotionally powerful short stories, informed literary criticism, and moving poetry. In the space of fifteen months, many of them under the influence of some of the most accomplished artists in America, Carson had moved from the creative experimentation of a talented novice to the full, creative life of a professional artist.
Bessie Breuer, a writer whom Carson visited briefly that fall, wrote to Klaus Mann that the young author now appeared to be in fine spirits—taking long walks in the woods, thinking about her novel, and talking excitedly about the new piano she had bought for her room at home. Part of this renewed energy derived from the accumulating evidence of the level of professional respect she had earned from other writers during the year in New York—often the very artists she had admired from afar such a short time before. She corresponded regularly with such friends as Muriel Rukeyser, Klaus Mann, and Gypsy Rose Lee. Even Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, now on a photojournalism assignment in the Belgian Congo, wrote fondly to Carson, and the two women soon established an epistolary friendship that they had been unable to achieve in person. Only Carson, Annemarie wrote, thought of the difficult tasks of writing in the same way she did. She expressed the hope that Carson would translate her book-in-progress, despite the southern writer’s inability to speak or read German.
Janet Flanner, now forty-nine and at the top of her field, asked Carson for literary help that autumn, requesting comments on “Goethe in Hollywood,” her profile of Thomas Mann. Flanner had been tormented by the piece the entire previous year, partly because she had soon discovered that she preferred some of the younger Manns to their father, whom she had described as an author who “takes his symbolic eminence for granted.” Nevertheless, Carson assured Flanner that she liked the profile—and then she burned the proofs without showing them to anyone, not even her mother, as the self-conscious Flanner had requested.
George kept up with these events through Carson’s letters and through reports passed along by mutual friends. Events in Brooklyn, however, continued to preoccupy him. McPhee had agreed to move to Middagh Street after his stay at Yaddo ended, in part so that George could oversee the completion of his book, and he was overhauling the top floor for Colin’s use. Oliver Smith was back in Brooklyn, too, returning from Mexico with the news that he had been given his first major job in set design. In Mexico with the Bowleses, Smith had learned that the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was passing through town. Dropping in to visit several acquaintances among the company’s dancers, Smith heard that the scenic designer for Leonid Massine’s upcoming ballet, a light comedy called Saratoga, had fallen ill. Smith pressed his friends to arrange an interview for him with Massine. Smith took to the meeting his portfolio of set designs created in his Middagh Street aerie, and later he recalled that as the choreographer paged through them, “he didn’t say anything. He was very quiet. Then, he finally told me, ‘Picasso you’re not.’” But he liked Oliver’s work enough to commission him to design the set.
When Smith described the project, George suggested that he mimic the style of his collection of hand-tinted, turn-of-the-century postcards that were once sold to tourists. Oliver found the images charming and began translating them into his own romantic-realist style. While the ballet itself proved unsuccessful when it opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in October, Smith was singled out by reviewers for his colorful, naturalistic scenery. It was sufficient recognition to guarantee future work.
The major event in George’s life that fall, however, was the publication of Gypsy’s novel, The G-String Murders: The Story of a Burlesque Girl. Born in the house on Middagh Street of their friendship, by autumn it had become perhaps the most eagerly anticipated mystery debut in the history of American publishing. Gypsy and George, no strangers to the publicity machine, had systematically amassed all the forces of book promotion to ensure its success. George had spent months feeding members of the press with delicious rumors about the book’s creation, about the true burlesque stories behind the fictional façade, and about Gypsy’s background and literary aspirations. Janet Flanner had contributed some snappy flap copy that began: “Here is the living portrait of burlesque, with assorted deaths thrown in,” and Marcel Vertès’s sketch of Gypsy typing in her dressing room adorned the back cover with the caption “The Author at Work.” On its September publication day, The G-String Murders appeared in New York’s bookshop windows alongside Vertès’s own new book of drawings, The Stronger Sex, with text by his Middagh Street friend Janet Flanner.
Gypsy’s efforts to keep the newspaper ink flowing—with appearances at book signings, literary parties, author luncheons, and interviews, referring to herself as “America’s leading literary figure,” and tossing off such remarks as “These late hours are giving me the ‘Yaddo’ pallor”—paid off handsomely. Gypsy and her book were featured in Life magazine, her occasional writing appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker, and respectable young women lined up around the block to buy an autographed copy of the novel. By winter, The G-String Murders had become the biggest-selling mystery since Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man. To George’s delight, Gypsy’s wit was even compared in print to Dorothy Parker’s, and her preferences in modern art were solemnly disseminated for public consumption.
George would have enjoyed sharing this experience with Auden, who also appreciated the comedy of public life. It would have been helpful, too, to have Auden still present and managing the house as new tenants arrived and a new round of painting and redecorating was required. As George himself admitted to a friend, “I loathe the very word ‘managing.’” And Oliver Smith was driving George to the brink of insanity over financial matters, arguing over the charges added to his weekly bill and always rounding his payments down to the nearest dollar, leaving the change unpaid.
Auden, however, was no longer serving as headmaster of 7 Middagh Street. The previous summer, he had received an offer to spend a year as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor—where Chester Kallman planned to be. In need of money and apparently unable to resist the temptation to follow Chester, Auden had accepted. At about the same time, however, Kallman postponed his own arrival at Ann Arbor until the following semester and instead went to Los Angeles to search for a job. Auden, still in a state of emotional shock from the summer’s events, thus found himself moving alone to the Midwest—just as his poem “Calypso,” written during the exuberant early days of his affair with Kallman, appeared in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar:
Driver drive faster and make a good run
Down the Springfield Line under the shining sun.
Fly like an aeroplane, don’t pull up short
Till you brake for Grand Central Station, New York.
For there in the middle of that waiting-hall
Should be standing the one that I love best of all.
Auden moved into a small house in Ann Arbor and, rather than live alone, arranged for a graduate student in poetry, Charles Miller, to serve as live-in cook. Trying to keep a good face on his situation, in early October he wrote to Caroline Newton, “I had my first class last Thursday; some were pleased, others puzzled. The Middle West student is still a mystery to me, but I’m giving a party for them to-night and perhaps alcohol will reveal all.” He remained mystified by this alien culture for a good while, however, as he witnessed Ann Arbor “in fiesta,” with “85000 people here to see the football match of the year,” then joined some students for dinner at a fraternity (“What an anthropological curiosity. I’d rather be dead than live in one”).
Never in his life had Auden been so isolated and without close and accepting friends—not in Berlin, not in China, and certainly not in Brooklyn. For the first time, he was exposed to the general public’s rude and hasty judgments without the insulating layer of like-minded companions. The fact of his homosexuality—which he had baldly announced at his initial interview, to the extreme embarrassment of his hosts—created a barrier between him and those with whom he hoped to connect, which he found quite irritating. He wrote to the Sterns that “every time I ask anyone in pants to the house, they are either hoping or dreading that I shall make a pass at them,” and that recently a favorite student whom Auden had invited home for an evening of conversation “took my playing of a Marlene Dietrich record as a proposal and was promptly sick. I had to give him a long lecture on his lack of intellectual self-confidence and his excess of physical vanity before I could reassure him.”
Over time, however, he found cause for amusement as well. He wrote on one occasion of overhearing a professor remark, “I don’t like to say anything malicious about another human being, but I hear Auden is a Platonist,” and on another that “Ann Arbor is going to have a shock next week as Erika is coming to stay the night.”
Essentially, at least for this first semester, Auden’s exile to the Midwest served only to make him even more miserable then he had been before. “Happy I can’t pretend to be,” he wrote to Caroline Newton in early October. “I miss Chester; I miss New York . . . Il faut payer for the happiness of the last 2½ years; alright, but what is harder is that one must not only pay but like paying.” To George he added, “I’m terribly homesick for Brooklyn. I have a lovely car, a lovely house, a student cook who is a perfect Jeeves, but, NO LOVE . . . If you can give me any introductions either here, or in Detroit, or Chicago, I should be most grateful. And if you could come for a visit, it would be lovely. Please give my love to everyone including the cats.”
The letters from his friends often included harsh judgments of Kallman for his past year’s mistreatment of Auden, so the poet frequently felt obliged to defend his absent lover. Tania Stern had advised him earlier not to hobble Kallman’s independence by arranging for full payment of his tuition but to let him grow up by going out and getting a job. Now, Auden dutifully reported on Kallman’s job search, and when Chester decided not to work but instead enroll in a secretarial school, Auden wrote to Tania, “Perhaps you will scold me for agreeing to pay for it, but even if it is wrong to do so, I don’t see how I’ve the right to say so, seeing as I was kept by my parents till I was 22 . . . He has, I think, so many wonderful qualities that it will be an awful shame if nothing comes of them, and I shall have much to answer for.”
Yet, from Kallman himself the poet received a barrage of complaints that the many checks he sent arrived late or were insufficient. Making no secret of his continued infatuation with Jack Barker, Kallman also played up his new independence by reporting on his sexual activities in Los Angeles. “Sex has been spotty and silly,” he wrote to Auden, “consisting of quick ones and morceaux de commerces who decide that I’m their dear one,—and have to be dropped discretely before the whole business,—the jealousy, the affection, the conversation,—becomes too violently tiresome—and God it’s such a bore, bore, bore.” The trouble, he explained, was that there were no real men in Hollywood. “Just the other night I picked up a 6 ft. 2½ in. merchant sailor from Brooklyn. Wildly attractive, young, strong, perfectly built, and large. I was all prepared for an absolutely relentless fucking,—but—as it turned out in the end, that is what I had to provide him with.”
Occasionally, however, a sudden, unexpected glimpse of affection appeared in these same letters, dashed off by Kallman as though in afterthought: “I know that, in whatever context it may be, or whatever interpretation it may be subjected to, I love you.”
These rare comments were all that were necessary, it seemed, to keep Auden bound to Kallman. While he would write to Tania Stern a few years later that romance “is not my natural cup of tea at all for, as you know, what I like is humdrum certainty, the same person, the same times,” Auden would also remark more than once on the benefit to the artist of unrequited love, which he can use to test and strengthen himself for his work. That autumn, Kallman wrote to Auden that others were quick to judge him because they could not really understand an ambivalent point of view. “Perhaps it’s good for me that I can’t be grasped at one word,” he suggested; “it means more intensive thinking.”
More intensive thinking, and feeling as well. Auden’s suffering that summer in Brooklyn had proven to be as agonizing as any in his life—particularly as it coincided with his mother’s death—yet at the same time he was aware that the pain he had experienced would stimulate him creatively. Auden had recently comforted his lonely cook with the words: “The person you really need will arrive at the proper moment to save you.” For Auden, Kallman would always be that savior: he always propelled Auden forward in his growth—and thereby rescued him from what he called “frivolity.”
The months of creative inactivity had ended. While the “social half” of Auden’s version of Henry James’s double man carried on with lectures and correspondence, the poet moved into his study and set to work. His new project was a Christmas oratorio that Benjamin Britten had agreed to set to music—the story of the birth of Jesus from Advent through the Flight into Egypt. As always, however, Auden used these events as a framework within which he could analyze the ideas and occurrences of his own life: his life served as a filter through which to better comprehend the parable. The Christmas story, describing a miraculous event—the merging of the spiritual with the material—served also as a perfect vehicle with which to recreate Auden’s experience of his love affair as a means of seeking redemption.
Auden further intensified this double exposure by setting the religious tale in a modern environment, among bars and jukeboxes and newspaper editors and policemen. It was an old technique, routinely used in the past centuries to bring into focus the ultimate union of the profane and sacred, the erotic and religious, the body and soul—two aspects of human consciousness that had been divided only in recent times and whose separation Auden considered the greatest crisis of his time.
In “Advent,” the first of the poem’s nine episodes, Auden established the story’s beginning in a period of faithlessness and confusion, when humankind had lost confidence in the ancient Greek gods and blindly groped for some new source of meaning. Such a state of uncertainty was necessary, Auden believed, to prepare the way for an entirely new vision—and it not coincidentally resembled his own state of uncertainty in the previous two years, when he had abandoned the “gods” of liberal relativism and sought a new way of deciding how one should live. Part II, “Annunciation,” in which Mary exulted in the news of her coming child, echoed Auden’s own relief and joy at the discovery of Chester Kallman. “The Temptation of St. Joseph,” which followed, related in modern terms Joseph’s attempts to ignore the gossip about his wife’s pregnancy and to overcome his anger in the face of her claim that she had been inseminated by God. It mirrored Auden’s own despair the previous summer as well; he wrote, in Joseph’s words:
All I ask is one
Important and elegant proof
That what my Love had done
Was really at your will
And that your will is Love.
And the angel Gabriel answered:
No, you must believe;
Be silent, and sit still.
For nine months, as Auden worked on the oratorio (later called For the Time Being), he drew together all of the elements of the previous year’s spiritual, sexual, intellectual, and emotional crises and poured them into this vivid, exquisitely moving and accessible tale of spiritual salvation. Everything, it seemed, went into the soup: the Jungian Faculties of Intuition, Feeling, Sensation, and Thought with which Auden had categorized himself and all his friends; the conviction that a secular, liberal outlook was largely responsible for the moral vacuum in which fascism had thrived; the use of conjugal love as a path for learning to love mankind; and the present widespread death and mayhem as a chronic backdrop to each day’s events.
“Rummaging through [his] living for the images that hurt and connect,” Auden scattered personal souvenirs throughout the oratorio: the Fifty-second Street dives featured in “September 1, 1939,” now a place for Joseph to brood over Mary’s religious claims; the homosexual slang of the Sands Street bars, echoed by Herod’s soldiers as they prepared to slaughter the innocents; and even, it would seem, Eva Morcur, the beloved cook of Middagh Street, in the guise of “Eva, my coloured nurse,” whom Herod thanked for the “regular habits” that helped make him a rational, liberal ruler. Samplings of the past year’s poetry were tossed in as well: echoes of “Domesday Song” (“Deep among dock and dusty nettle lay”), “In Sickness and in Health” (“Domestic hatred can become / A habit-forming drug” and “Let even the young rejoice”), and the paradisiacal garden of “Kairos and Logos.”
The final act, in which the poet and his readers dismantle the Christmas tree and pack away the decorations, recalled the celebratory Christmas feast created by Auden and Britten for Paul Bunyan. But here the mood was different: the celebrants prepared to resume their jobs and send the children back to school. Returning to the secular world, “the streets / Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten / The office was as depressing as this.” The fleeting moment of spiritual insight was over, with “The night of agony still to come.” Now, “the time is noon,” and one could only move forward, struggling toward faith and praying “that God’s Will will be done, that . . . God will cheat no one, not even the world in its triumph.”
Gone were both the previous year’s groping uncertainty and its smug pronouncements. In their place, with the confidence and depth of a mature artist who had found his direction, Auden had distilled elements of the sacred and the profane into a new, stronger substance with which to address the eternal question of the arts: “How should we live?” Over the next few years, thrust still farther by the volatile explosion at Middagh Street, he would create two more long poems of extraordinary power and originality: The Sea and the Mirror, a poetic retelling of Shakespeare’s Tempest, exploring the nature of creativity and the role of the artist, and The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on and judgment of modern life set in a New York bar.
But even as Auden used his poetry to “talk back to God” in what was for him “a kind of prayer,” he confessed to a friend that autumn that “I feel as if I were scattered into little pieces. And if the Devil were to offer [Kallman] back to me, on condition that I never wrote another line, I should unhesitatingly accept.”
On November 11, Auden wrote to Britten, “I have sketched out the first movement of the Orations . . . Longing to see you. Much love to all.” Britten and Pears, along with Elizabeth Mayer, had arranged to stop by Auden’s house in Ann Arbor en route from Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Ohio for a series of concerts of Britten’s music. Auden was eager to discuss his new project with Britten and, if necessary, patch up any misunderstandings that lingered from the previous spring.
But it was an uncharacteristically cool and perfunctory Britten, just turned twenty-eight, who arrived at Auden’s front door that afternoon. Like everyone else, he went through the motions of renewing old friendships, and he and Peter gave a rousing recital of their recent work in the living room. But Auden’s housemate, Charles Miller, noted that while Britten smiled politely whenever anyone looked at him, “I don’t remember hearing a note of laughter from that pale, patient face. As he sat in Wystan’s blue upholstered chair, I was impressed with his melancholy, his generally passive attitude, even while Peter and Elizabeth rocked with laughter.”
Certainly, the previous summer in California, to which Britten and Pears had fled with high hopes, had not worked out as planned. The musicians had enjoyed their westward drive, marveling at the scenery and at the number of young hitchhikers who freely wandered along the back roads of this enormous country. And, initially at least, California’s mild weather and relaxed atmosphere had a palliative effect after the creative tension of the house in Brooklyn. “We live a very quiet existence in beautiful but strange country,” Pears wrote to his mother; “40 years ago it was a desert, now it is full of orange & lemon trees. I go down to a house of an Englishwoman in the village and practise every morning from 9:30 until 12:45, and I’m doing a lot of good work.” Pears also easily arranged a number of recitals in private homes, with Britten accompanying on the piano.
Even in sunny Escondido, however, their working conditions did not remain ideal for long. Britten soon realized that the amount of work he had scheduled for the summer would be virtually impossible to complete. Not only must his string quartet be ready for its September performance in Los Angeles, but he had planned to contribute a Mazurka Elegiaca for two pianos to a memorial volume for the composer I. J. Paderewski; a medley of traditional Scottish tunes for two pianos and orchestra, Scottish Ballad, for their hosts in lieu of rent; an arrangement of the Minuet from Mahler’s Symphony No. 3; and Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, a song cycle for Pears that he had wanted to finish for years. In addition, Britten needed to begin thinking about the music for Auden’s “Ode to St. Cecilia”; the poem had already been completed and was due to be published soon in Harper’s Bazaar.
War news was everywhere, just as on the East Coast, considerably raising the level of anxiety for the four British expatriates. As the threat from Japan appeared increasingly real, Britten wrote to William Mayer that “everyone out here . . . is terrified of the Japanese, and there is a terrific prejudice against the poor wretched Japs who have settled down and become perfectly respectable citizens . . . There are terrific goings-on in ‘defense preparations’ round here—but of course San Diego is the biggest naval-base on this coast.” At the same time, more accusations of cowardice reached their ears from England, this time focusing on Britten himself.
The cause was Ernest Newman’s enthusiastic review in the Sunday Times of Britten’s Violin Concerto, performed by the London Philharmonic in April. Newman’s reference to Britten as a “thoroughbred” of a composer sparked a flood of outraged letters, soon dubbed “the Battle of Britten,” in which some writers remarked that “most of our musical ‘thoroughbreds’ are stabled in or near London and are directing all their endeavours towards winning the City and Suburban and the Victory Stakes,” or claiming that as an expatriate, Britten could no longer claim the title of “British composer” and should be demoted to the status of “import.” Others protested that by serving his art, Britten was serving his country, since “ultimately it is by its cultural achievements that a nation will be judged.”
The controversy raged in England through the summer and into the fall, torturing the young composer, who loathed controversy and who preferred his native country to the one in which he now lived. By the end of the summer Britten’s stay in California had taken any bloom that remained off his enthusiasm for America. This was “a crazy country,” he wrote to his sister:
& I don’t think I altogether like it. I know old England is a stuffy place, the BBC is horrible, & the plumbing is bad; but there are lots of things about this ’ere place that arn’t [sic] so good, either. Their driving—their incessant radio—their fat and pampered children—their yearning for culture (to be absorbed in afternoon lectures, now that they can’t “do” Europe)—and above all their blasted stomachs, with their vitamens [sic], their bowel movements (no one ever “goes” naturally here—only with a good deal of stimulus!), & their bogus medicines. Still they aren’t blowing each other to bits so far, & perhaps that’s something.
As for Los Angeles, Britten called it “the ugliest and most sprawling city on earth,” now “swarming with refugees,” with “every composer whose name is familiar” present and competing for a limited number of film jobs.
Britten could see that his Hollywood dream would go unfulfilled—though his disgust with Los Angeles kept him from becoming too despondent. Still, he needed to compose if he was to survive professionally, and the domestic situation at the Robertsons abruptly worsened when their two pianos arrived and the couple began practicing. Britten could not possibly concentrate under these conditions (“If anything is more disturbing than one piano it’s two!” he wrote to his sister), and reacted to the intrusion of sound with no more grace than Paul Bowles had done in Brooklyn. Like Bowles, Britten found that he had no choice but to retreat—in his case, moving to the toolshed in the backyard, where he composed with an electric fan on to block the sound of the Robertsons’ rehearsals.
As the weeks passed, he grew increasingly anxious and had a series of spats with his hosts. Some of the conflict centered on his working conditions, but much sprang from the couple’s condescending attitude toward his relationship with Peter Pears. The Robertsons liked to insist that the “boys” would soon outgrow their homosexual phase and that Britten would then marry a nice young woman. This type of presumptive teasing enraged Britten, and Pears frequently had to act as peacekeeper.
It was in this mood—sick of California, only slightly more enthusiastic about New York, and tired of trying to cope with the “perpetual jigsaw puzzles” of personal relationships—that Britten picked up a copy of the Listener, a music journal that someone—perhaps Auden—had forwarded to him. It contained an article by E. M. Forster on George Crabbe, a turn-of-the-century poet from Aldeburgh. “To think of Crabbe is to think of England,” Forster wrote; the poet, named after the national saint, had been a hard-working child of poverty on the British seaside, became a clergyman of the English Church, and spent his entire life in the villages of England.
Having grown up among the British poor, Crabbe was truly their poet, Forster wrote. Still, he had held no sentimental illusions about poverty’s virtues. On the contrary, his understanding of life in England’s grim fishing villages, and thus of England itself, had rested on an understanding of the weakness of the human race. “To all of them, and to their weaknesses, Crabbe extends a little pity, a little contempt, a little cynicism, and a much larger portion of reproof. The bitterness of his early experiences has eaten into his soul, and he does not love the human race, though he does not denounce it, and dares not despair of its ultimate redemption . . . Disapproval is all too common in the pulpit, but it is rare in poetry, and its presence gives his work a curious flavour, subtle yet tart, which will always attract connoisseurs.”
Britten was taken by this description of the cantankerous poet’s character but even more entranced by Forster’s evocation of the landscape around Aldeburgh. Having himself grown up in a house directly facing the North Sea, with its fierce storms and salty air, Britten well knew the sound of “the wallop the sea makes as it pounds at the shingle.” On his walks to Aldeburgh from his mill house in Snape, he, too, had grown to love the area’s flat, melancholy scenery and the cries of the marsh birds. These images, brought forth by Forster, called to Britten with all the power of home. Forster wrote that no matter how far Crabbe wandered, he was never able to expunge the spirit of Aldeburgh and its people from his writing; Crabbe was a provincial, and the term was meant as high praise. Reading these words on the West Coast of America, Britten realized that they described him, too.
Soon afterward, on one of their trips into the city, Pears stopped in at a rare book shop and serendipitously came across a copy of The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe, published in 1851. He gave the book to Britten, who quickly became captivated by the evocative language in Crabbe’s long poem “The Borough”:
Our busy streets and sylvan-walks between,
Fen, marshes, bog and heath all intervene;
Here pits of crag, with spongy, plashy base,
To some enrich th’uncultivated space:
For there are blossoms rare and curious rush,
The gale’s rich balm, and sun-dew’s crimson blush,
Whose velvet leaf with radiant beauty dress’d,
Forms a gay pillow for the plover’s breast.
Set in the early 1800s, the poem told the story of a fisherman named Peter Grimes whose young apprentice died by drowning. Although the death was officially deemed accidental, the town judged Grimes—a gruff, sometimes violent misfit—to be responsible. Forced to confront an unforgiving society, not wholly innocent yet not fully guilty, Grimes was tormented to his own ultimate demise in the rough waters of the North Sea.
Again, Britten identified fully with the themes running through Crabbe’s story—the suffering of a weak person at odds with his community and the nature of innocence and its corruption. Reading the poem, Britten would recall, “I suddenly realized where I belonged and what I lacked.” What he lacked—what had caused critics to repeatedly call his work derivative—had been the courage to do what Auden had done, to take on such personal and powerful themes in their darker and more gripping forms. And where he belonged was in England, where he could explore these ideas in terms of his own traditions. The fishing villages of England, the folk and religious heritage in all its destructive and inspirational aspects—these were the elements to which Britten wanted to dedicate his talents. The previous winter he had written an article, under Auden’s influence, stating that the static nature of folk music made it useless as a basis for composing new music, since it tended “to obstruct thinking.” The community has been destroyed by the machine age, Britten wrote—or, quite possibly, Auden wrote for him—and only those who turned their backs on the traditions of the past would carry on the human heritage. Now, Britten realized that he disagreed absolutely with these pronouncements. Suddenly illuminated in the light of Crabbe’s poetry, he saw his own path in music as springing directly from these cultural roots. He wanted to share with his own people the stories of their shared past in a way that would shed light on the present.
Peter Grimes’s story could become an opera. Britten could hardly contain his excitement. The technique of choral presentations used to crystallize a dramatic moment or emotion—an approach he had experimented with in Paul Bunyan—could quite effectively tell a story about a village of men and women whose livelihood depended on the sea. And the earthy, evocative language of Crabbe’s poem begged for a vital musical setting. Britten began planning to return East immediately after the September 21 concert of his string quartet to begin work on Peter Grimes. In such a state of inspiration, he was loath to be distracted by the tiny Robertsons, yet they had something to tell him.
It seemed, they confided, that Ethel had fallen in love with Britten. There was nothing to be done about it—her passion must be satisfied. So, having discussed the matter, “the little Owls” had decided that Rae would offer his wife as a gift to the composer. He would be honored if Britten would accept.
Middagh Street might have been squalid and sometimes difficult, but at least in New York one had some connection with reality. Life in the Escondido cottage, far from providing the oasis of sanity Britten and Pears had desired, had become simply ridiculous. “Frankly, I’m a bit sick of California,” Britten wrote to his sister. The day after his String Quartet No. 1 was performed in Los Angeles, he and Pears packed their car and fled “like released prisoners.”
By early October, they had arrived at the Mayers’ home on Long Island, where they had chosen to stay for the brief period they expected to remain in America. Britten was filled with excitement over his idea for the new opera, and the two musicians had agreed during their trip that it was time to return home and face the ordeal of applying for conscientious objector status. Britten could hardly wait, as all of the pent-up anxiety and confusion of the previous year began to resolve itself within the framework of the story of Peter Grimes. The idea of working through these ideas at the mill house in Snape, with a regular timetable, long walks through the countryside after lunch, and only Pears for company, was enough to make him ache with anticipation. The musicians were blocked, however, by the extreme difficulty of obtaining passage to England when ships crossing the Atlantic risked attack and by the long list of commissions that Britten had yet to complete.
Emotionally strained but heady with ideas, Britten did his best to focus on the work at hand. He had now contracted to produce an overture for the Cleveland Orchestra. He worked so frantically to complete the piece, which he had renamed An American Overture with his imminent departure in mind, that years later he forgot he had ever composed it.
“My recollection of that time was of complete incapacity to work,” he admitted. “I was in quite a psychological state then.”
Increasingly, part of Britten’s strain could be attributed to a growing awareness that it would not be easy to say good-bye to many of the people he had come to know in America. He was particularly bereft over the idea of leaving the Rothmans, the family who had welcomed him when he had traveled out to Long Island to conduct his orchestra. Immediately on his return from California, he had visited the family. As always, the entire group greeted him effusively—David Rothman, his wife, and their son, Bobby. Over the past year, Britten and Bobby Rothman had grown quite fond of each other, roughhousing, exploring the beaches around Montauk, and otherwise expending their youthful energy. Britten had written to David that his son was “a grand kid,” that the Rothmans were “such a delightful family.” That autumn, however, Britten understood that his simple affection for Bobby had changed: he had fallen in love with the boy, and he felt that he simply could not leave him and return to England permanently with his beloved but older partner, Peter.
For years, Britten had wrestled with his attraction to adolescent boys, courting a number of schoolboys but evidently resisting the urge to seduce in spite of Isherwood’s and Auden’s goading. Extremely sensitive to any form of public censure, and even more aware than most of the sanctity of childhood innocence, Britten believed he had found permanent relief from his tendencies in his relationship with Peter Pears. Bobby Rothman, however, was the first adolescent male with whom Britten had had close contact since his relationship with Peter had begun, and it now appeared that he had miserably failed his first test. For the next two weeks, while working nonstop, Britten silently struggled with his desire to throw away his future for the sake of a dark-eyed, trusting fourteen-year-old. Britten’s hours at that time were brutal. “Unforgettable evening,” Elizabeth Mayer wrote in her journal on October 16. “We three working in music room till 2:30 A.M. Peter reading aloud from Forster: A Room with a View—myself preparing score with ruler on piano.”
On the twenty-second, Britten rushed to Boston for the first rehearsal of his Sinfonia da Requiem by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Serge Koussevitsky. On his return, he began work on the score of Scottish Ballad. Once that was completed, he had to travel to Washington, D.C., with Peter and Elizabeth, to be presented with a medal for composition by his California patron, Elizabeth Coolidge, while the Kroll Quartet played his work. On November 4, he wrote to his sister that perhaps he would stay in the United States after all. The pressure of trying to come to terms with his growing obsession while maintaining his career had led him to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
Back in Amityville, Elizabeth Mayer noted in her diary that Britten was playing a great deal of Mahler. Preoccupied and gloomy, he spent a few quiet days with his hosts, playing the piano and listening to the others read aloud. On November 6, he left to spend two nights at the Rothmans’ house. For fun, David Rothman allowed Britten to help tend his hardware store during the day, but he later confessed that he was completely unprepared for the abrupt declaration that the composer made on the second day. “He wanted to stop writing music,” Rothman recalled, “and wanted to work in my store . . . He had the feeling that he would like to work in a store . . . which seemed to me most ridiculous. I don’t know whether he was serious or not, but I had the idea he might have been.” Stunned, Rothman said, “Look, you’re only about twenty-six years old; you’ve already done well . . . they did [your] violin concerto with the New York Philharmonic. What do you want? Blood?”
Britten did not, of course, divulge the reason behind his desire to abandon Peter and his music and settle down with the Rothmans and their hardware store. He took the rejection stoically and didn’t mention the idea again. When it was time to leave, he said good-bye as usual and returned to Elizabeth’s house, where he found Auden’s letter announcing the completion of the first movement of his oratorio. In mid-November, just before departing with Peter and Elizabeth for Chicago, Britten wrote to David Rothman, “You, especially, David, I feel a real source of inspiration & encouragement, such as I have rarely met. I am very touched by your urgings on a certain important decision—please don’t be injured if I seem to treat them lightly, that is only to cover how seriously I consider them. In spite of my jocularity, I am a great believer in ‘Fate’ or ‘God’ or what-you-will, and I am for the moment going on with the work in hand (which is plenty, I can assure you!) and letting the future take care of itself . . . from a grateful Benjamin B.”
Britten was at that time also preparing settings for a series of English folk songs, dedicating each song to an American friend as a farewell gift. One of them, intended for a young girl recently betrothed, he dedicated to Bobby Rothman. Its private meaning was quite clear:
O father, dearest father, you’ve done to me great wrong,
You’ve tied me to a boy when you know he is too young . . .
All because he was a young boy and growing,
All because he was a young boy and growing.
Now, in Ann Arbor, Britten realized with a certainty he had never before experienced in his relationship with Auden that the poet’s grand examination of the nativity, barely concealing his own personal tragedy, was not the story he wanted to set to music. Having watched Auden transform his life into art for years and with his experience with Bobby Rothman still fresh in his mind, Britten found the story of Peter Grimes taking on an emotional urgency.
After years of following others’ instructions—first his mother’s, then Auden’s, and then, to some degree, Pears’s—Britten knew the direction he needed to take for his own artistic growth. In his music, if not in his life, he could explore the conflicting desire and fear that had made his own adult life too complex. The story of Peter Grimes, who tries to overcome his weakness and, in doing so, is classified as a criminal and destroyed, unearthed years of Britten’s own struggle to conform to the sexual strictures of his culture. Perhaps he could channel those feelings into his work and create something not derivative (as critics too often called his work) but powerful, original, and great.
The November visit with Auden was short, with a concert scheduled for Cincinnati the following day. Britten and Auden said good-bye, aware that they were unlikely to see each other for some time. Professionally, their parting was friendly but inconclusive. Britten still planned to set “St. Cecilia” to music, and he had not refused outright to consider the oratorio. But Auden must have sensed that he had been to some degree dismissed by his former protégé. In essence, this poet, for whom friends were more important than anything except his work, the talented friends most of all, was losing the prize of his collection. Charles Miller noted that before Britten and Pears left, Auden nodded in their direction and remarked to him, “Now there’s a happily married couple.”
If his sense of isolation had been painful before, it worsened after Britten’s departure. Only now, having written extensively about America and created an entire libretto describing its development, did Auden feel that he finally understood the full tragic loneliness of the American Middle West.
“Charlie, it’s amazing that no one has really written about the true America, the land of the lonely!” he said to his housemate. “The land of eccentrics and outcast lonelies. ‘The Lonelies’ could be the title of a grand unwritten American novel. I’ve been told of a likely hero, the homosexual ‘queen’ of Niles, Michigan, you know? Each evening when the New York–Chicago train pauses there to put off a passenger or so, this lonely queen meets the train, hoping to encounter one of his own kind. By profession, he’s an accountant, but actually he’s a loner who solicits traveling salesmen. His stand-by source of sex is high school football players who are coached not to ‘do anything with women.’”
Taking a sip of his coffee, Auden added, “Imagine it, Charlie. Imagine such a scene being repeated daily in hundreds of dismal little American towns!” He sighed heavily. “America is one of the loneliest places on this planet. And my friend George Davis ought to write a novel about it . . .’”
“Hasn’t Sherwood Anderson written it already?” Miller asked.
“Perhaps, in his own way. But the novel needs to be written by one of us.”
George Davis, who had long before fled small-town America, was now too busy to consider writing novels. Fed up with having too little money and not enough influence, he had decided to give up the freelance life and accept an editorial position at Mademoiselle. After all, Auden had left, and Britten and Pears, and Golo Mann and Gypsy—and these days Carson didn’t use her room at all. Klaus Mann, who was nearly certain that the January issue of Decision would be the last due to lack of funds, hardly ever came by anymore. Other artists were moving in, but it wasn’t the same. The year was up, and the “gamble with myself and others” was over, even if the results were not yet all in. When Anaïs Nin visited the famous house some time later, she would find it charmingly furnished with bright carpets, heavy antiques, framed watercolors and sketches, and Victorian bric-a-brac covering every flat surface. “A museum of Americana,” she called it, having arrived too late to witness the living, breathing creative workshop that it had once been.
On December 7, 1941, the death knell that the residents of 7 Middagh Street had been expecting finally arrived, though no one could have foreseen its form. At 7:55 A.M., with no declaration of war, the Empire of Japan mounted a surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor air and naval base in Hawaii. Nearly three thousand people were killed and more than six hundred wounded. The backbone of the American Pacific fleet was eliminated before the United States had even begun to fight. Americans were stunned by this evidence of such advanced military logistics and organization. But in Britain, those who heard the news got out the last of their champagne for a celebratory toast, and in Europe the prisoners being carted off to concentration camps embraced one another in the midst of their despair. They were convinced that now Hitler had no hope of victory. America was ready. And everything would change.