February House

by Sherill Tippins

  And so George Davis understood precisely the situation in which Carson McCullers found herself that summer. Like Carson, he had seen his name trumpeted in The New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review as a great new voice in American literature. He had read reports of his novel’s phenomenal sales across the country as one printing after another was consumed. He had been photographed by Man Ray, flattered in the gossip columns of the New York Herald Tribune, and eagerly discussed in the women’s book clubs and discussion groups of the very midwestern society he had so effectively satirized in his book. To his astonishment, George had even been named in print as one of the ten people who “might bring back to life the cadaver of civilization”—along with Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Electric’s Owen D. Young, and the composer George Gershwin. George Davis understood, too, how ridiculous such honors were in the light of that one reward that a true writer longs for above all others—to be welcomed by the select group of authors and other creative artists whom one has admired anonymously for years. “They included me in, an in of healing, instructive enchantment,” he later wrote of the fashionable Paris intelligentsia who soon became his friends—André Gide, André Maurois, Paul Eluard, André Breton, Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator Kurt Weill and his cabaret singer wife, the sultry Lotte Lenya, the choreographer George Balanchine, the neo-Romantic Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew and the surrealist Salvador Dalí. Despite “the early hurts and repressions that made me so often feel a dullard, an impostor, in their company,” these sublimely creative, intelligent human beings had accepted George Davis of Clinton, Michigan, and made him one of them.

  It was a remarkable story for Carson McCullers to hear that summer as she experienced her own first success. As an adolescent, she had read My Life, Isadora Duncan’s autobiography, and had begged her father to allow her to go to Paris to become a dancer. More recently, an adult acquaintance in Columbus had inspired her with accounts of a brief sojourn on Paris’s Left Bank, and Carson had decided that someday she and Reeves would live and write in Paris. Now, at the very moment that Paris had fallen to the Fascists, here was someone with a background not unlike her own who had experienced precisely that form of communion.

  Carson responded with such enthusiasm to George’s stories that the two soon became constant companions, finding that they had much more in common than either might have suspected. Not only were they both American romantics, voracious readers steeped in the mysteries of their lonely rural childhoods, but they also shared a gothic sense of humor and a taste for the unconventional, even the bizarre. Like Carson, George had been fascinated by the ramshackle carnivals that had passed through his midwestern hometown—particularly by the sideshows featuring hermaphrodites, midgets, and Siamese twins, whose sad isolation symbolized, for both of them, the essential alienation they had always felt as sensitive observers in rough, unforgiving surroundings. In Europe, George told Carson, he had visited a number of family circuses traveling through the countryside and was fascinated to find giants and bearded ladies setting up housekeeping just like couples in the Midwest. He showed her his treasured collection of photographs of carnival performers and took her to the sideshow on Brooklyn’s Coney Island, where he had befriended a pair of pinheads and a number of other performers. Carson stared in fear and awe at these outsiders, torn between a desire to join them and an urge to run away, but George made every effort to turn them into insiders—to invite them into his world and help them to feel at home.

  Wherever George Davis went, he made friends. Forced to leave Paris at twenty-seven, having squandered the advance on his never-completed second novel, he arrived in mid-Depression New York determined to maintain the Parisian philosophy that “all life is theatre, be it tragedy or comedy,” and that it is a “magnificent kind of courtesy toward other people, to have one’s personal life, one’s thoughts and emotions, so under control that all of it can be transcended, interpreted, acted out.” By then, George had become a master at the art of intimate conversation, engaging perfect strangers in long, intricate accounts of his latest sexual adventures until they felt compelled to confide their own secrets in return. Nothing that happened to George was ever too shocking, depressing, or silly not to be woven into a mesmerizing story, imbued with a mixture of perceptiveness and humor that was peculiarly his and recreated with the dramatic gestures and expressions of a born actor. By the end of his first year in New York, burlesque dancers and bartenders on the Bowery greeted him like royalty, according to one longtime friend. Socialites and fashion mavens adored him for his wit and sensitivity. His folksy, rocking chair manner and basic generosity disarmed the surliest shopkeepers and office assistants. Moving easily from the seedy environs of the Bucket of Blood, a bar in Brooklyn frequented by sailors and transvestites, to the parlors and dining rooms of Park Avenue heiresses, university professors, and Broadway stars, George soon began publishing humorous essays and short stories in Vanity Fair and similar magazines based on the people he befriended.

  Meanwhile, George’s own well-placed bons mots were making the rounds. There was the time at Drossie’s, a cheap downtown cafeteria frequented by the Village’s more outlandish characters, when George witnessed a spat between the Scottish poet Allan Ross MacDougal, then a secretary to the filmmaker Ben Hecht, and another diner who was also a writer. As the two exchanged insults across their separate tables, MacDougal taunted his competitor, “At least I have a job, which is more than you have.” The other writer retorted, “Ass-kissing is not a job, it’s an attitude,” and abruptly yanked the cloth from MacDougal’s table, sending his dinner splattering to the floor. A shocked silence ensued, broken only when George murmured pleasantly, “On the contrary, ass-kissing is a full-time job.”

  And then there was the time that the opulently feline artist Eugene MacCown, elegant in a leopard jacket and purring with newfound wealth, showed his friends around his renovated apartment, only to hear George remark as they entered the gleaming new bathroom, “Shouldn’t you have had a sandbox put in instead?” And some time later, when an unfriendly associate happened upon George and a dozen male friends dining in an uptown restaurant and remarked, “My word, it’s the Last Supper,” George retorted mildly, “Yes, now that Judas has arrived.”

  Such remarks had won George Davis an enviable reputation in literary circles. By 1936 the poet MacDougal’s employer, Ben Hecht, had begun calling George “the funniest man in America” and fetching him by limousine to perform at his dinner parties. Another friend, the film star Marion Davies, thought at about that time to suggest to her lover William Randolph Hearst that a place be found for George on one of Hearst’s magazines. George’s novel was sent for review to Carmel Snow, the new editor in chief of Hearst’s fashion magazine, Harper’s Bazaar. Snow, a hard-nosed, hard-drinking veteran of Vogue, had already hired as art director Alexey Brodovitch, a former set designer for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in Paris who had transformed the look of the dowdy magazine with bold, arresting cover illustrations by the art deco graphic designer A. M. Cassandre and interior art by Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Grosz, and Salvador Dalí. Next, Snow had discovered the socialite Diana Vreeland dancing at the St. Regis in a white lace Chanel dress and bolero with roses in her hair, and persuaded her to take on the job of fashion editor despite her protestations that she had never even visited an office before. George came next, his novel having met with Snow’s approval. With his three dynamic colleagues, George had proceeded to make journalistic history as, out of sheer enthusiasm, they introduced Middle America to the best of European and American art, literature, fashion, and ideas.

  While Brodovitch found ways to tie together the magazine’s various departments in ways that had not been done before—creating, for example, a “Surrealism Issue” that featured surrealistic art, essays, and fashion photographs and covered the Surrealist Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art—Vreeland introduced her “Why Don’t You?” column, challenging American readers to inject some playful originality
into their lives by wearing “violet velvet mittens with everything” or giving a friend “an enormous white handkerchief-linen tablecloth” with favorite sayings embroidered in “black, acid green, pink, scarlet and pale blue.” While innovative photographers such as Louise Dahl-Wolfe abolished traditional studio portraits in favor of fashion shoots in exotic locales, George tossed out his predecessor’s humdrum stories, addressing “the feelings and problems of America’s young women,” and began publishing truly modern work by Jean Cocteau, Colette, John Cheever, Dawn Powell, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others.

  Soon, Harper’s Bazaar became known as an exciting if somewhat eccentric home for new fiction; it was more willing than The New Yorker to take risks with its content and able to pay top dollar for talent. And George, to his own surprise, had discovered that he liked editing. Not only did his job allow him to indulge his perfectionist tendencies toward language—and to lunch out on the company’s tab—but he now was able to funnel both money and publicity to those of his artist friends most in need of a boost. In 1937, George talked Carmel Snow into sending him to London, where in the space of a few days he managed to sign up the British literary lions Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Edith and Osbert Sitwell, as well as the young and fashionable novelist Christopher Isherwood and the poets Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. None of these writers would have considered selling their work to a fashion magazine in England, but they were so impressed by George’s literary credentials, charmed by his personality and humor, and intrigued by the terms of the magazine’s contracts that they agreed. Publication in the American magazine was “as pleasing as it was unexpected,” Auden later wrote, “because though at first it seemed rather odd to find one’s words wedged between advertisements for bras or deodorants (one of the latter, I remember, ran, ‘It’s always April underneath your arms’), we had never been paid so much in our lives.”

  Thanks to George, Isherwood’s short story “Sally Bowles”—quite a scandalous tale in 1938—shocked readers across America. It was part of Isherwood’s new book, Good-Bye to Berlin, a lightly fictionalized record of his years in Weimar Germany, joined at times by his friends Wystan Auden and Stephen Spender—a book that would eventually become the play I Am a Camera and the film Cabaret. Davis had met Isherwood and Auden in London just weeks before their departure for China to write a kind of travel diary in prose and verse as they observed China’s recently resumed conflict with Japan. After arranging to publish an excerpt from the book, to be called Journey to a War, Davis urged the two writers to stop by New York for a visit on their way back to England. Isherwood and Auden liked the idea, and in late June of 1938, having arrived in Vancouver from China, they took a cross-country train to New York.

  “We ought to be wearing togas,” Auden said, eyeing the marble columns and vast spaces of New York’s Pennsylvania Station. But there was no time for further comment because George Davis was approaching them on the platform. Greeting them with great enthusiasm and stuffing their pockets with what appeared to be enormous wads of cash as advance payment for their book excerpt, George proceeded to take the writers on a frantic, fantastic sightseeing tour of the city. “We shot up and down skyscrapers, in and out of parties and brothels, saw a fight in a Bowery dive, heard [the jazz singer] Maxine Sullivan sing in Harlem, went to Coney Island on July the Fourth,” Isherwood wrote in his diary. George introduced them to the playwright Maxwell Anderson, to Lotte Lenya, who had by then come to America, to the dance impresario and arts patron Lincoln Kirstein, the literary hostess Muriel Draper, and the young filmmaker Orson Welles. George seemed determined to make the two writers feel that New York was a performance staged especially for them, Isherwood later wrote, and that everyone in the city had been yearning for their arrival. Determined to prove that New York was not only the most exciting city in the world but the most romantic, George offered to provide each writer with whatever partner he desired. “All right,” Isherwood responded, half-joking, “I want to meet a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent, with very sexy legs.” Instantly, such a boy was produced, and Isherwood was sufficiently entranced to maintain contact with him after he returned to England.

  As such a high level of activity would have proved impossible to sustain for the length of their nine-day visit under normal circumstances, Davis supplied Auden and Isherwood with Benzedrine tablets to get them going in the morning, Seconal at night to help them sleep, and alcohol to enhance their experience all day long. All three substances were legal at the time, and Auden was impressed by how efficiently they got him out of bed in the morning and to sleep at night. He listened with interest, as well, to George’s enthusiastic accounts of how easy it was for a writer to live off the proceeds of his work in New York, as opposed to London, and his promise that if they moved to America he would help place their stories and poems in his own and other magazines. With his seemingly infinite capacity for entertainment and fun, George “was a marvelous companion and guide,” Isherwood wrote. “It was very largely due to him that we both fell madly in love with America, and decided to return the first moment we could.”

  That was in 1938. Two years later, when George Davis met Carson McCullers, he was able to give his new friend an equally thrilling tour. Though he still spent much of his free time on the Bowery, befriending such performers as Tugboat Ethel and Bilious Margaret, former Society Deb, he had also gathered around him the very members of New York’s higher literary echelon whom Carson longed to join. By 1940, both Isherwood and Auden had achieved their goal of moving to America; while Isherwood had since gone on to Hollywood to work for the film studios, Auden lingered in New York. That summer, Carson was introduced to the English poet who, at thirty, had been awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry by King George VI. Now thirty-four, Auden was widely considered the best living poet writing in the English language, and he commanded an imitative cult following among the younger literary generation that was the despair of college professors everywhere. Meeting him, Carson felt buoyed by the same sense of unreality that had sustained her through the ecstatic response to her novel, so she was able to feel instantly at home in the presence of the tall, tow-haired, chainsmoking poet. Despite their mutually incomprehensible accents (Carson would forever mispronounce Auden’s first name “Winston”), contrasting backgrounds, and opposing opinions on many literary works, the two quickly settled into a teacher-student relationship that both enjoyed.

  Erika Mann had been kind enough to respond to Carson’s request to talk with her about the émigré experience—material Carson claimed she needed for a new novel-in-progress—and had arranged to meet her. By this time, Carson had had a similar encounter with Greta Garbo, only to find that she and the actress had little to say to each other. But Carson discovered that Auden and George Davis knew Erika and her younger brother, Klaus, quite well. Klaus and George had met in Paris in the late 1920s, and Auden had met Erika through Isherwood, who had come to know her in the cabarets of 1930s Berlin. Since then the two siblings, now thirty-three and thirty-four, had been exiled from Germany and had drifted from Vienna to Paris to Prague to Amsterdam to New York along with thousands of other wandering émigrés, “wearing out our passports quicker than our shoes,” in Brecht’s memorable words. In 1935, when Erika was threatened with the loss of her German citizenship for having created The Pepper Mill, a popular cabaret revue satirizing the Nazi regime, she appealed to Isherwood to marry her so that she could obtain a British passport. Isherwood too strongly loathed bourgeois society to join it through even a sham marriage, but he referred Erika to Auden, who agreed to become her husband sight unseen. The couple met shortly before their wedding, and while they never lived together as man and wife, each preferring partners of their own sex, they became friends during their time in New York.

  When Carson sold her first story at the age of nineteen, she had spent part of the $25 payment on a copy of Thomas Mann’s new Stories of Three Decades. Now, in 1940, it was a thrill to
meet the Mann siblings and their friends, many of whom had recently fled the horrors of Europe and had urgent stories to tell. In Fayetteville, she and Reeves had listened to the news from Europe with growing alarm but had felt virtually alone in their anxiety, surrounded by ignorance and apathy. Here, however, Erika Mann, a strikingly handsome, charismatic actor and writer known for her political passion and intellectual confidence, was already making plans to rescue the hundreds of artists, political dissidents, and other enemies of the Reich who had fled Nazi-occupied northern France and were trapped in the unoccupied southern part of the country around Marseilles. The Nazis, Mann explained to Carson, had a list of enemies whom they intended to eliminate one by one. The Emergency Rescue Committee that she was helping to create must therefore compile its own list of all the European artists and intellectuals who required rescuing. The group would then send representatives to Europe to find the fugitives, secure passports and American visas for them, and smuggle them over the border into Spain.