February House

by Sherill Tippins

  By the time Carson left, not only were the corrections on the galley proofs for “Army Post,” now retitled Reflections in a Golden Eye, nearly complete, but nearly everyone at Bread Loaf knew everything there was to know about Carson’s good friends Erika, Klaus, Reeves, George, Wystan, and Annemarie. If Carson had dreamed just three months before of joining the literary elite, she appeared to have made considerable progress in a very short time.

  Carson McCullers’s hard drinking and chain-smoking at Bread Loaf left her even weaker than when she arrived, and she returned to New York to find the overall situation unchanged. The news from Europe had only grown worse as the Battle of Britain began. More than a thousand civilians had already been killed by Hitler’s bombing raids on British airfields and aircraft factories, and now, at the beginning of September, London itself was under attack. The American government responded to this new disaster with hardly more energy than it had mustered for Holland, Belgium, or France. Erika Mann, outraged by this show of apathy, departed for London to volunteer for the British Ministry of Information, broadcasting antiwar propaganda to the German people. She planned to proceed from there to Lisbon to help organize the exodus of refugees from Europe. Meanwhile, in New York, the war had become virtually the only topic of conversation. Tempers shortened at Harper’s Bazaar as staff members sensed the end of an era. “Everything was weakening,” Vreeland wrote. “I knew that we were heading toward rien.”

  George, who always tended to swing from “larky” to depressed as the hot months of summer took hold, grew especially irritable this year as he watched Paris sink beneath the waves. The friction that surfaced intermittently between himself and Carmel Snow had increased since May. A certain degree of conflict was inevitable between the editor in chief, with her fiscal responsibilities toward her publisher, and George, whose respect for money was minimal and whose cultural ambitions were high. Always before, such conflicts had led to an exchange of threats, ultimatums, and well-phrased insinuations until an unhappy compromise was reached.

  This summer, the bad times had begun with the arrival on George’s desk of “The Leaning Tower” by Katherine Anne Porter, another of his close friends and one of his favorite writers. The story—admittedly, long enough to classify as a novella—was set in Berlin in 1931; it followed the experience of a naive young American tourist who witnesses a series of disturbing examples of postwar German economic misery, wounded pride, and bitterness. The deadpan tale laid out in Porter’s brittle style the human truths underlying the political events that had subsequently taken place there. Certainly, George felt, American readers could do with a simple explanation of how fascism had emerged in Germany and how it could take hold in any country, even this one. But Snow had refused to purchase “The Leaning Tower” unless Porter agreed to cut it by half.

  What was there to cut? George wondered. The story was a masterpiece. In any case, he knew that Porter, who had gotten her start in “slick” magazines, thoroughly despised them for just this type of literary disrespect. As she wrote to their mutual friend, the novelist Glenway Wescott,

  Big Money magazines . . . I lived and worked in that Limbo once . . . and I washed its nasty smells off me carefully a great while ago . . . I made an exception of Harper’s Bazaar on account of George Davis, but I have always been uncomfortable, more than a little apologetic in my mind, about stories of mine appearing there. Yet, if they would publish them as I wrote them, and I wrote them without regard to their tastes, and would pay me well . . . what was lost except perhaps a little shade of my vanity?

  George argued passionately in defense of the story, but his senior editor refused to budge. In the end, George had no choice but to report Snow’s decision to the author, with predictable results. Porter took her story back, presenting it later as part of a short story collection, and claimed she would never again allow Snow to publish her work.

  That was in June. In July, Glenway Wescott’s own long-awaited story had arrived. Wescott had been in a creative slump since the publication of his much-praised The Grandmothers more than a decade earlier. But George had attended the novelist’s readings of his work-in-progress and couldn’t wait to publish his new work. The Pilgrim Hawk was an exquisitely crafted tale of a single afternoon at the French country house of a young American heiress and her guests that recreated, as if preserved in amber, the careless, indolent world of 1920s Europe. George had no doubt that the story was another masterpiece, with special significance for everyone that summer. But once again the pronouncement came down from Carmel Snow—or “Mrs. Cold Caramel,” as Wescott privately called her—that the story was too long. She would offer $300 for it on the condition that Wescott cut the manuscript significantly. That was out of the question, so another story addressing the tragedy overseas would not appear in Harper’s Bazaar.

  Disgusted, George put Carson’s Reflections in a Golden Eye through its publication paces—dividing the text between two upcoming issues to avoid challenging his readers’ attention span—and resolved to spend even less time at the office. Frankie, his assistant, had resigned, and her replacement, a young writer named Dorothy Wheelock, was startled by Carmel Snow’s instruction that her first duty each morning was to call George and ask whether he planned to come in that day. Instead of going to work, George spent more time with Carson, but she was able to talk only about her husband’s continued bad behavior.

  In the past weeks, Reeves had increased his drinking even more and had even slapped Carson once—the first time in her life anyone had struck her—when she arrived home late from an evening with Erika and Annemarie. He had also revealed to her, with great satisfaction, that while she was in Vermont, Annemarie had met with him to discuss ways in which he might patch up his differences with his wife. It was Annemarie’s opinion that Carson lived in a bizarre imaginary world and was perhaps seriously ill.

  This betrayal, as Carson saw it, was the last straw. The threads of jealousy and envy that had wrapped themselves around her husband and herself had made their life together intolerable. Even Reeves’s fumbled attempts to make amends with surprise gifts and dinner parties irritated her. She wanted freedom—freedom to write without Reeves always present, freedom to find her way back into that intellectually exciting circle to which George had introduced her. But the wonderful prospect of life in New York seemed to have wilted almost as quickly as it had bloomed. Erika was in Europe now. Annemarie was on Nantucket. Klaus was in California, raising funds for his magazine. Wystan Auden seemed to spend all his time on Long Island, where his friend, the composer Benjamin Britten, was living. And, as the heat refused to break and let in that best of New York seasons, early autumn, George and Carson sank ever deeper into the doldrums.

  To distract herself, Carson had begun reading Louis Untermeyer’s new book of memoirs, From Another World. It recalled the poet’s many adventures through decades of a life in letters with John Reed, Robert Frost, Laura Riding, and many other visionary poets, writers, and political activists. As a member of the editorial staff of the groundbreaking Seven Arts literary journal, Untermeyer wrote, he had helped create the magazine’s manifesto: “It is our faith and the faith of many that we are living in the first days of a renascent period, a time which means for America the coming of that national self-consciousness which is the beginning of greatness. In all such epochs the arts cease to be private matters; they become not only the expression of the national life, but a means to its enhancement.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Carson mused to George, to feel oneself at the beginning, rather than what appeared to be the futile culmination, of a great movement in literary history? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live, all the time, as part of a creative group?

  Such words could only frustrate George further as he continued struggling against Carmel Snow’s editorial strictures. He had never fully reconciled himself to the end of his writing career and the prospect of a permanent life as an editor. His iconoclastic approach, stubbornly maintained despite years of office work, was one
of the reason his writers adored him, but it interfered with his ability to meet deadlines, keep expenses down, placate advertisers, and otherwise do his part to keep a popular magazine going. As a result, he had given Snow plenty of cause for complaint, and her irritation was exacerbated by George’s erratic attendance. If he needed to think, or if it was raining, or if he couldn’t dig up the bus fare, he preferred to stay home. When Snow objected to missed deadlines or engagements, he pointed out that he did his best work at night and that the theater openings and parties that kept him up until dawn were necessary to maintain the relationships necessary to the magazine’s literary prestige.

  But Harper’s Bazaar was, in the end, a business. And finally the conflict between these two stubborn professionals came to a head. Called to task for the usual reasons, he insisted that his job was a creative one and that he intended to continue approaching it in his own creative way. If she was displeased by this attitude, he would be happy to resign. It was a dance that they had performed many times before. But to George’s surprise, this time Snow changed the music by accepting his resignation.

  The way George told the story later—having polished and revised it in his usual manner—thoughts of his past-due rent, utter lack of savings, and the marvelous, unedited stories on his desk caused him to regret his decision instantly. He asked Carmel Snow to reconsider. Surely she would take him back? “Only if you get down on your knees and beg me,” the editor replied. So George got down on his knees and begged. And still “Mrs. Cold Caramel” said no.

  It was September 1940, and George Davis, at thirty-four among the most dynamic, innovative, and beloved editors in New York, was out of a job. At a time in history when events were taking place that would transform the world, his voice had been abruptly silenced. That month alone, George had published “Nuit Blanche” by Colette, “The Loved One” by H. E. Bates, John Cheever’s “I’m Going to Asia,” and a P. G. Wodehouse essay, along with a profile of the presidential candidate Wendell Willkie by Janet Flanner, an analysis of American Indian dance by his friend Lincoln Kirstein, and poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Stephen Spender. The short story writer Nancy Hale had contributed the second installment in a series, “American Failings”—the first being “our weakness for publicity” and the second, “our fear of being alone.” But the cover of the special mid-September issue echoed the country’s increasingly patriotic tone with the phrase “The Call to Color” superimposed on an image of a young woman saluting the American flag.

  Left to his own devices, facing an empty wallet and the impending loss of his apartment, George found it difficult even to get out of bed and read the newspaper or turn on the radio. And who wanted to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting the sound of London’s air raid sirens to America or describing how the searchlight beams swept the sky and invisible pedestrians’ shoes clicked on the sidewalks of the blacked-out city “like ghosts shod with steel shoes”?

  An era was coming to an end. Carson, trying to console George, suggested he try again to write a novel. But he had grown unaccustomed to solitary work. He would miss the camaraderie of his life at Harper’s Bazaar. Perhaps, he suggested playfully, since Carson was so unhappy with Reeves, the two of them might live together. Carson hesitated. “Like brother and sister, of course,” she said. George, laughing, promised it would be a platonic arrangement, and the pair did spend a day searching the area near Lotte Lenya’s summer cottage for a bungalow they could afford. But nothing proved suitable, and George confessed he could never sleep well in the country, since a running brook sounded to him “like a train coming into a subway station.” Besides, he would never be able to bear the isolation of country life. Carson agreed, musing that if only a family could be created like the one at Harper’s Bazaar or like Untermeyer’s group, which had produced the Seven Arts, perhaps it wouldn’t be so lonely. It would be like living at Bread Loaf, except it would be year-round.

  The dream seemed futile, particularly that summer, when the future had become so unpredictable, but George couldn’t put Carson’s vision out of his mind. What a relief it would be to leave Carmel Snow’s anger and Reeves McCullers’s envy behind, to live with others like oneself and serve as mutual catalysts for one another’s creative lives. Even if it meant being terribly poor, at least they would be poor together.

  And what was the alternative? Carson herself had expressed it in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: “All of us here know what it is to suffer for real need. That is a great injustice. But there is one injustice bitterer even than that—to be denied the right to work according to one’s ability. To labor a lifetime uselessly. To be denied the chance to serve. It is far better for the profits of our purse to be taken from us than to be robbed of the riches of our minds and souls.”

  This, to George, was the most frightening prospect: to find himself isolated, cut off from the world, and unable to contribute the fruit of his talents. But how, with no job and no money, could he serve?

  That night, George had a dream.

  2

  Summer was worse than we expected:

  now an Autumn cold comes on the water . . .

  —W. H. Auden, “The Dark Years,” 1940

  George dreamed he was standing on a narrow city street, looking at an odd little four-story house in the middle of a residential block. It was typical of most Victorian townhouses, with dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, parlor above, and two floors of bedrooms at the top. But the details of its decoration—fanciful black stucco filigree, a peaked roof, a steep, narrow stoop with its own sharply inclined roof resting on carved wooden pillars—gave it the look of a Belgian shopkeeper’s residence crossed perhaps with a witch’s cottage from a German fairy tale. It looked nothing like the boxy, red brick houses on either side.

  It was not the first time George had had this vision. It was a recurring dream that came to him in times of stress and that left him in a lighter, more optimistic mood in the morning. This time, however, the dream continued long enough for George to recognize the neighborhood. The shade trees, the air of quiet domesticity, and especially the view at one end of the street of the Manhattan skyline across the water—it had to be Brooklyn Heights, where Wystan Auden now lived. George looked back at the house, still in his dream, and was filled with a sense of its vast, empty interior. The house was large enough to accommodate George and all of his closest friends. Somehow, he knew it was for rent.

  George woke the next morning determined to find the house in Brooklyn. It was a spectacular day for an outing. Autumn had arrived in New York, with its crisp breezes and sharp, brittle light. Taking the subway from Manhattan’s East Side to Brooklyn’s Borough Hall station, he emerged to find the neighborhood’s Victorian mansions and grand hotels gleaming at the top of the bluffs, superimposed against the sparkling water of New York Harbor and monitored by seagulls overhead. Tightly wedged between the water and the commercial and civic hub of Brooklyn, the small residential district provided a quiet retreat for shoppers and office workers as well as the children who raced along Pierrepont Street trailed by uniformed nannies.

  Even slowing down to peer first at one brownstone, then another, it took less than thirty minutes for George to search the main streets, but without success. Gradually, he moved downhill toward the neighborhood’s northern edge, where the streets named for Manhattan’s great mercantile families gave way to simpler “fruit” streets—Pineapple, Orange, Cranberry—and respectable Brooklyn Heights threatened to give way to the unsavory dockyards below. Some of the single-family homes had already succumbed, divided up to make boardinghouses or abandoned. This evidence of decline only made the area more interesting to George. And the area’s somewhat down-at-heel look—old men shambling home from the bars, sailors wandering about in restless packs, young mothers gossiping on the front stoops—corresponded precisely to what he had imagined. Yet he could not find the house in his dream.

  Finally he reached tiny Middagh Street, a four-block lane clinging to the edge of the north
ernmost bluff overlooking the Fulton Ferry and the dockyards below. At this extreme end of the Heights, the houses looked even older and smaller than those nearby, some covered only by clapboards and hunched over ground-floor shops. Even the shadows were deeper as the sun’s rays struggled to reach the narrow gap between the buildings. But George hardly noticed these deficiencies. Halfway down the last, dead-end block, nestled in a row of ordinary brick homes, stood the object of his search, resembling in every detail his nighttime vision. George let his gaze drop to the sign in the parlor window. It read, as he knew it would, HOUSE TO LET.

  George telephoned Carson and insisted that she come to Brooklyn right away. She hesitated at first, uneasy at the thought of traveling to an outer borough and getting lost for hours in a tangle of subway lines. But contrary to her expectation, she found the neighborhood surprisingly easy to reach—a single stop past Manhattan’s Wall Street, a five-cent ride from her Village home. She, too, was charmed, as George met her at the station and walked her to Middagh Street, by the serenity of the old neighborhood. It was easy to understand why Auden had chosen to live here. The low buildings and waterfront location offered more light and fresh air than Manhattan, and the harbor served as an insulating barrier between the famous poet and the world of society hostesses he preferred to avoid.

  After a summer in Carson’s cramped rooms on West Eleventh Street, the house at 7 Middagh seemed enormous. Standing in the street, facing the house, the view to the left of the busy harbor stretching to the shore of downtown Manhattan was stunning, and the short, dead-end block itself afforded a sense of privacy and seclusion almost unheard-of in the city. The front steps led to a charming wooden porch with gingerbread trim. A person could have a rich life in a house like this—standing before the large wooden door, welcoming guests like the grand hostesses of Charleston and Atlanta. Peering through the windows at the high-ceilinged parlor with its marble fireplace, it was possible—for an imaginative twenty-three-year-old, at least—to picture sophisticated parties and brilliant conversation taking place inside. Still, an entire house—how could they possibly afford it?