This accomplished, George could devote himself to what he considered the most enjoyable part of moving into a new home: hunting down additional necessities at the Curio Shoppe on Manhattan’s Third Avenue, Miss Kate’s junk shop on Brooklyn’s trolley-rattled Fulton Street, and other such mysterious emporiums where he preferred to spend his time. Carson, too, became enchanted by this world, seemingly frozen in time, when she accompanied George on his expeditions. Miss Kate, the Brooklyn junk store proprietor, was a “lean, dark, and haggard” woman, Carson wrote, who slept in her shop most nights “wrapped in a Persian rug and lying on a green velvet Victorian couch.” She had one of the handsomest faces Carson had ever seen, but also one of the dirtiest. A neighboring merchant remarked admiringly that Miss Kate was a good woman, but “she dislikes washing herself. So she only bathes once a year, when it is summer. I expect she’s just about the dirtiest woman in Brooklyn.”
By the time Auden arrived on the first of October, Carson and George felt they had made a great deal of progress toward rendering the place habitable. A number of George’s motley collection of companions, including eighteen-year-old Victor Guarneri, who worked part-time as a stevedore on the Brooklyn waterfront, and Frankie Abbe, George’s former secretary, who had recently separated from her husband and now spent much of her time at the house, had helped move furniture, hire repairmen, stock the kitchen, and otherwise get the house working. Still, Auden was alarmed to see the chaotic state of his new home. While it was true that George had carefully arranged the piano and other furniture in the parlor, for example, the repairmen were still working there, and the room was filled with construction debris and plaster dust. Half-eaten meals were abandoned on the piano or wherever else they had been wolfed down, and dirty dishes piled up not only in the kitchen sink but in the ground-floor bathtub as well. George’s knickknacks seemed to cover every flat surface, chairs and tables were stacked everywhere, and aside from the hasty placement of a table and chairs near the kitchen door, the rear garden had been left overgrown with ivy and weeds. Worse still, since the furnace had not yet been repaired, the house had no heat or hot water, nor did the toilets always work.
Perhaps it was simply how Americans lived. Auden and his fellow expatriates had already learned to adjust to life with people who manipulated their eating utensils in strange ways and dined on remarkably odd combinations of food (“insane salads,” Auden would comment), who said “a quarter of five” instead of “a quarter to five,” and in general behaved in uncivilized ways. Auden himself did not object to a high level of physical disorder in his domestic life. He was well known for living in dimly lit rooms littered with books and papers, overflowing ashtrays, and dirty martini glasses, all lightly dusted with cigarette ash and half-hidden by the cloud of smoke that generally surrounded him.
But now, when he hoped to focus on his work with special intensity, the poet urgently required a quiet space and a predictable routine. In his apartment on Columbia Terrace, he had been able to adhere to his preferred schedule of several daily writing sessions interrupted only by meals, afternoon cocktails, and bedtime at ten o’clock. At 7 Middagh, he found that at ten o’clock George was just beginning to gather energy for his favorite part of the day. Heading into Manhattan to gather friends from the theater and Midtown restaurants, George spent the night touring New York’s nightclubs, bars, and brothels, and then stumbled home with friends in tow for several alcohol-soaked hours of soul-searching before dawn. After his guests left or passed out in their chairs, he would turn to his clacking typewriter, writing the long, confessional, self-dramatizing letters so familiar to his friends. On many occasions, when Auden came downstairs in the morning, he would find George Davis passed out on the sofa, fully dressed. There he would remain through breakfast and much of the morning until nearly noon, when one was likely to glimpse him stepping naked over the plumber, murmuring sleepily, “Vex not his ghost: O let him pass!” from King Lear on his way to the bath.
The daytime work hours were not much better, with the kitchen often full of chattering photographers, actors, artists, and other curious visitors. Throughout the afternoon, George could be heard talking on the telephone with his many friends in Manhattan, opening each conversation with “What’s going on?” in his warm, teasing tone. Then he would go on to report the day’s gossip, honing with every call his descriptions of the “ruin” he had rented and the adventures he had been having as a result. Carson, too, seemed to find it hard to concentrate; she clattered down to the kitchen several times a day to refill her thermos with a mixture of hot tea and sherry she had affectionately nicknamed “sonnie boy.” Most alarming to Auden, meals turned out to be equally casual. Carson enjoyed playing chef, but her menus were limited to such dishes as meat patties, canned green pea soup with wienies, and a concoction she called “Spuds Carson”—mashed potatoes mixed with onions, cheese, or whatever she found in the larder. Even these were often burnt to the consistency of charcoal, since Carson tended to wander off and forget that she was cooking. George, while capable of throwing together a delicious dinner, preferred to dine out at one of the sailors’ hangouts in the neighborhood, such as Lottie and Jack’s on Pineapple Street, when not with friends in Manhattan.
It was ironic that Auden should find himself in such a situation, since he had been considering at length, in both his recent essays and in the long poem “New Year Letter,” the ideal conditions necessary for creating good works of art. If it was the artist’s job to perceive and tell the truth, and if this duty appeared to have become especially important in light of recent events, how could it be best facilitated? Long before arriving at Middagh Street, he had discarded the romantic idea that unbridled bohemianism was likely to lead to the creation of anything worth reading, looking at, or listening to. The fundamental premise on which bohemianism was based—the idea that “‘good’ equals what the bourgeoisie do not do”—was self-evidently false. Regular meals and quiet work hours were required for efficiency in every realm, and just because factory owners relied on them should not prevent artists from doing so as well.
On the other hand, naturally, it was also possible to go too far in the direction of the aesthetically sublime. Auden had conveyed the appeal of the orderly environment in a brief but memorable portrait in “New Year Letter.” Written in the form of a thank-you letter to a friend after a visit to her home, he had recalled their experience of listening to music together during the week that the war in Europe began—enjoying the benefits of a civilized life even as it was threatened. He had then added:
To set in order—that’s the task
Both Eros and Apollo ask;
For Art and Life agree in this
That each intends a synthesis,
That order which must be the end
That all self-loving things intend
Who struggle for their liberty,
Who use, that is, their will to be.
The hostess to whom the poem was addressed was Elizabeth Mayer, the wife of an émigré Jewish psychiatrist and mother of two adult and two adolescent children, at whose home Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears had been living intermittently for more than a year. The Mayers had come to America from Munich, where Elizabeth, who had been trained as a pianist, had held one of the city’s most successful salons, attended by many of Europe’s most talented writers, artists, and musicians. Now living in a small cottage on the grounds of a sanatorium in Amityville, Long Island, where her husband served as medical director, Elizabeth continued to invite dozens of artist friends to spontaneous large dinner parties and for overnight stays, despite her small quarters.
Britten had described Elizabeth in a letter as “one of those grand people who have been essential through the ages for the production of art; really sympathetic & enthusiastic, with instinctive good taste.” Indeed, the formidable Elizabeth seemed to devote more attention to her guests than to her children, whom she would send to an empty patient’s cottage if necessary (to their wry amusement) to make
room for another musician. When Auden came to visit, Elizabeth set up a writing table for him at the end of the living room, opposite Britten’s place at her Bechstein piano. She would then move between the two all afternoon, supplying Britten with food—she considered him too thin—and Auden, in his cloud of cigarette smoke, with cups of tea. After dinner, they would listen to recordings on the gramophone or, even better, Britten would play the piano for them and Pears would sing.
Britten and Pears, whom the Mayers playfully referred to as “the geniuses,” considered the house in Amityville a kind of paradise. Auden, too, as his poem demonstrated, found great pleasure in the reliability and comfort of the life there. But in his poem he had explored the idea that such highly nurturing environments could also harm the artist because they were essentially closed. By limiting the possibility of change and access to the unknown, they prevented the artist from encountering the ambiguous or difficult elements that would spur him toward true creativity and expression. Without the random interloper that interferes with his perfect vision, Auden suggested, an artist becomes stagnant and only repeats himself in a cosseted, self-reflecting cycle. One could even say that at times the Devil himself served God’s purpose, then, by luring the artist toward inauthentic paths and thus revealing to him, by contrast, what his true path had always been.
At 7 Middagh Street, Auden saw an opportunity to create a viable balance between the closed domestic perfection of a home like Elizabeth Mayer’s and the romantic, bohemian chaos that he had discovered on moving in. Rather than living apart as separate individuals in “a crowd of lost beings,” they could create a true community—a rational society united by their common values and passions that left room for the unexpected.
Granted, even by mid-October they were far from having achieved that goal. Auden’s friend, the writer James Stern, and his wife, Tania, were surprised to find, when they dropped in one afternoon, “George naked at the piano with a cigarette in his mouth, Carson on the floor with half a gallon of sherry, and Wystan bursting in like a headmaster, announcing: ‘Now then, dinner!’” Even Britten and Pears had been unable to hide their shock and disappointment when they had visited their future home at around the same time, only to discover the workmen still at their task and the house itself squalid almost beyond belief. “They’re incredibly slow! Don’t you believe that this country is so marvelously efficient!” Britten wrote of the workmen after he and Pears had hastened back to Elizabeth Mayer’s house with the promise to return for another inspection in about a month’s time. But despite this evidence, Auden believed that a healthy group life was possible. All they needed were some rules.
It was clear now, and should have been clear from the beginning, that George Davis was not the one to provide them. As brilliantly as the editor acquitted himself at both the high and low extremes of New York life, he was also, of all the people Auden knew in the city, perhaps the least able to manage the conventions and requirements of everyday living. Everyone knew, for example, that the editor’s odd apparel, borrowed from friends or rescued from thrift shops, resulted from a horror of the ordinary so pronounced that he would do almost anything rather than enter a department store. Banks so discomfited him that he preferred to beg the assistants at Harper’s Bazaar to cash his paychecks for him. And, as Auden now discovered, the furnace remained broken because George had run out of funds but could not force himself to bring up the subject of money with his housemates. He believed that as writers, Carson and Wystan should not have to think of such things.
Finally comprehending the situation, Auden approached it with characteristic good humor. A group house like this one required a firm guiding hand, he told George, and for this job he nominated himself. He was thoroughly familiar with the requirements of communal living; he had attended boarding schools for years and served as an English public school teacher with sufficient skill and enthusiasm to have been nicknamed by his students “Uncle Wiz.” Now, taking his place at the head of the table, he announced with relish that several goals must be attained before 7 Middagh Street could become the catalyst for creative productivity that they all desired. First, they must agree on a schedule of regular hours for work and for socializing, and during work, silence must be maintained. Second, a list of chores must be created and divided among the residents as best suited their talents and needs, and these tasks must be completed. Third, they must find a way to raise money to pay for necessary repairs and then invite others to move in as quickly as possible to facilitate the payment of rent. Auden himself would be responsible for collecting the rent, paying bills, and scheduling repairs. It would be excellent if they could afford a cook as well, eventually. He and Isherwood had had a cook named Elizabeth at their apartment in Manhattan, and he still recalled with great pleasure her pleasant company and “civilized meals.”
Carson and George responded enthusiastically to Auden’s efforts to take charge. Carson volunteered to wash dishes and provide wine for dinner when she could afford it, and George got on the telephone to solicit magazine work for all three of them. In the meantime, Auden improvised for himself a schedule of early-morning work sessions in his room (before any workmen arrived) and a second session, beginning at 10:30 A.M., at a corner table at a nearby cafeteria. Sending one of his poems to Harry Brown, a fellow poet and admirer who worked at The New Yorker, he added a note: “Dear Harry, PLEASE sell this to the New Yorker as I am VERY VERY VERY poor . . . I STILL HAVE NO HOT WATER I STILL HAVE NO HOT WATER. I shall go crazy.”
It was thrilling to George and Carson to watch this intelligent, inquisitive, critical poet—whose focused energy was so different from their own—bring their domestic lives into order. Clearly, Auden enjoyed organizing other people’s lives and could be depended on in every way, in MacNeice’s words, to be “getting on with the job.” By the end of the month, they began to see results. George’s networking efforts garnered commissions for both Carson and Auden for work to be published in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as well as an offer from his friend Louise Dahl-Wolfe to photograph Carson in Central Park, where she had taken pictures of Auden and Isherwood two years before. Auden would supplement his own income through a number of essays and book reviews for Common Sense, the Nation, and other journals in the coming weeks, while George, who had not yet gotten around to beginning his novel, considered writing some New Yorker profiles instead. Until the checks started to arrive, they would have to make do with the money they had. But at least Auden and Carson were enjoying regular work hours again, and George had enlisted Victor’s help in throwing together occasional evening meals.
Often, a dinner prepared for four or five would have to be stretched to serve six, seven, or more, when friends stopped by to spend the evening: Reeves McCullers, Chester Kallman, Frankie Abbe, James and Tania Stern, Lincoln Kirstein, Klaus Mann, back from California, Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach occasionally, and even Carson’s friend from Bread Loaf, the Brooklyn native Louis Untermeyer, on one or two occasions. These feasts, while still held in primitive circumstances with an understocked kitchen and amateur cooks, proved lively as Auden’s housemates discovered that the poet was not as conventional as he liked to pretend. Wolfing down his food, taking big swallows of cheap Chianti (“I have the digestion of a horse as you know,” he later admitted), he tossed out opinions almost faster than his listeners could take them in. He did not particularly like teaching college students, he might remark, because he felt that by their age they should be teaching themselves. Or he might begin the dinner conversation with, “There are two things I don’t like—to see women drinking hard liquor and to see them standing at bars without escorts.” If he could come up with a more provocative or outrageous opener, he would make it. And if George or Reeves or Louis Untermeyer ventured an insufficiently interesting response, Auden was likely to fix him with a look that the poet Joseph Brodsky later described as that of “a physician who is interested in your story though he knows you are ill.” He would then veer into a lively discourse on Ril
ke, a word game such as Purgatory, in which one chose two people who would least like to be stuck with each other in that realm for eternity, such as Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde, or the loud recitation of his own or another’s poetry.
Carson listened in fascination to Wystan’s pronouncement that detective stories were virtually the only type of novel that he cared to read. Most other kinds, particularly American novels, lacked interest in his opinion. He disliked Steinbeck’s work, for example, since he did not believe that novels could successfully deal “with inarticulates or with failures.” Moreover, he was struck by the utter loneliness of American literature. Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, James—American literature was “one extraordinary literature of lonely people.” That was not necessarily a criticism. It was the destiny of all Western nations, as the machine age developed, to lose their traditions, their connections, their allegiances. America was just ahead of the rest of the world in highlighting man’s aloneness, his real condition.
Auden spoke so rapidly that his tumbling river of words became incomprehensible at times, particularly as the wine thickened his tongue. The Americans were interested to note that he seemed especially attracted to theories that involved organizing concepts into categories, especially if they applied to human behavior. Jung’s typology approach to personality, for example, delighted him, with its neat classifications of individuals into Introvert or Extrovert and those who operated primarily through Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, or Intuition. Auden, for instance, was a Thinking and Intuition type, weaker in the areas of Feeling and Sensation. This meant that he apprehended his life experiences through his intellect rather than his emotions, and only after a considerable delay did his feelings come into play. As a result, contrary to what others often assumed, he learned from such experiences with more difficulty than most, and grew more slowly as a result. Nineteen-year-old Chester, on the other hand, was a Thinking-Sensation type, which enhanced his understanding of music and certain other arts but implied a tendency toward narcissism. What was needed, Auden advised with all the prescriptive self-confidence of a physician’s son, was to learn one’s missing skills from others who had them. Chester could develop his emotional side through his college friend Elsie, for example, who had once been in love with him, and intuition from Auden himself.
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