February House

by Sherill Tippins

  Chester Kallman hardly needed Jung to illuminate either Auden’s personality or his own. Now in his final year at Brooklyn College and living at his father’s apartment in Manhattan, he visited Auden nearly every afternoon after classes, occasionally staying the night. As his partner of more than a year, Chester was familiar enough with Wystan’s theories to slough them off without comment. Still influenced, perhaps, by his early flirtation with the psychologist Homer Lane, for example, Auden was always insisting that virtually all illness was psychosomatic, the result of the suppression of natural impulses or other unnatural psychic or emotional activity. Rheumatism and arthritis sprang from a stubborn personality. Physical deformity was the product of a struggle between instinct and will. Frustration in love led to boils, and one could get cancer by stifling the creative urge. Auden’s own chain-smoking, he liked to point out, was the result of insufficient weaning, while those with bad breath wanted to be left alone. One took a risk arriving at the table with any mild malady, such as a cold, for Auden was likely to pounce with a diagnosis and not let up until the victim agreed with him.

  As for the much-vaunted Jungian personality types, Chester had known even before he met Auden that the poet’s weakness lay in the realm of feelings or emotions by analyzing his poetry and discussing it with Harold Norse. When confronted, Auden admitted that his poems lacked feeling (though many of his readers would have disagreed) and added that the only way he could evoke emotion in his writing was by first processing it through his intellect, by putting it on the table and analyzing it.

  Like most college poets, Chester placed a high value on the convincing expression of emotion and found this form of dry analysis deplorable. He believed, too, that it led to stunning errors in perception. Chester had once described to Norse a time when he and Auden were riding the subway to Chester’s grandmother’s home and began to argue over which psychological roles they played with each other. As the other passengers looked on in disbelief, Auden shouted over the roar of the train, “I am not your father, I’m your mother!” and Chester yelled back, “You’re not my mother! I’m your mother! . . . You’re my father!” “But you’ve got a father!” Auden countered. “I’m your bloody mother and that’s that, darling! You’ve been looking for a mother since the age of four!”

  He was referring, of course, to the fact that Chester’s mother had died when he was that age. And it was true that Chester liked to tell the story of how he fell in love with his aunt Sadie after his mother’s death. His passion for Sadie became so strong that he begged her to marry him when he grew up, and the young woman playfully assured him that she would. The result was that when she prepared for her real wedding a year later, young Chester felt utterly betrayed. He pitched such a fit that his befuddled family finally told him that he could marry Sadie, too. Thus, Chester stood with Sadie and her groom beneath the wedding canopy and danced with them at the wedding reception until, exhausted, he fell asleep. When he woke, he found the couple gone and himself again unforgivably abandoned. Not long afterward, his father married a woman who would torment him for the rest of his childhood.

  This incident proved, as far as Auden was concerned, that Chester still longed for a mother, and he was more than willing to play the part. But Chester just liked to tell the story of Aunt Sadie because it was a good story. In actuality, he was significantly more preoccupied by a longing for the father who, while physically present, had emotionally abandoned him to a sadistic stepmother. Chester chalked it up to emotional blindness when Auden failed to realize that his sexual preferences leaned decidedly toward the punitively paternal.

  It amused the Americans to observe how Chester played the untamable foil to Auden’s demanding schoolmistress. The teenager’s willingness to goad his partner into flights of pique, or to taunt him from across the table with invented bits of verse, kept the conversation raucous and entertaining. Auden himself, stirring an after-dinner martini with his pinky, laughed along with the others when Chester recited such lines as:

  Wystan is like the fire

  That licks along the wood

  Wystan is the desire

  Of mankind for the good

  Wystan is the poet

  That makes the trees to grow

  The trees don’t know it

  But Wystan thinks so.

  Tania Stern was glad to see Chester win the approval of the table—particularly of Auden, who continued to advise the boy not to try to publish his poetry yet and critiqued his work only on technical grounds, showing little of the outright enthusiasm that young writers crave. Auden acted this way with the best of intentions; he himself regretted having to live with his own published juvenilia and hoped for better for Chester. When critiquing he did not consider the topic of a poem his business as much as its execution, but his limited support inevitably irritated and worried Chester. Auden seemed oblivious, too, Tania noted, to the look on Chester’s face when he insisted that it was “not your place” to relate an anecdote about one of his friends or when he abruptly turned his back, shutting Chester out of the conversation. For a boy whom Auden himself had fondly called a “portrait of pure pride,” such insensitive treatment boded ill.

  In general, however, it hardly mattered whether or not one agreed with Auden. Either way, MacNeice would write, one “came away from his presence always encouraged; here at least was someone to whom ideas were friendly—they came and ate out of his hand—who would always have an interest in the world and always have something to say.” Carson, far from being offended by his lack of interest in novels, drank in his remarks about American literature and thought a great deal about them, both at the dinner table and later in her room. By now she had given up on trying to write about the émigré and his friendship with a black man in the South and had returned to The Bride and Her Brother, the novel about the adolescent girl with which she had been struggling for nearly a year. Its twelve-year-old, tomboyish protagonist, whom Carson had named Frankie Addams (a nod, it would seem, to her new friend, Frankie Abbe), could be considered precisely the type of “inarticulate” whom Auden claimed could not be represented in fiction. Half-formed and drifting, Frankie dreamed of faraway places, longing in her southern environment to experience snow. She was, in many ways, the embodiment of the loneliness to which Auden referred when he talked of Emerson and Hawthorne. And it was precisely the nature of this inchoate yearning on which she wanted to focus in this novel even more intensely than she had in her previous one.

  Carson’s own such experience had reached its apogee in the grief she felt as a teenager when Mary Tucker, her piano teacher and first adult friend, moved away. In The Bride and Her Brother, Frankie would suffer a similar sense of abandonment when she learned that her brother planned to marry and leave town. Contrary to Auden’s opinion, Carson felt that, in a sense, inarticulates and failures may be the only people worth writing novels about. But she also knew that their inability to formulate their feelings made it difficult to portray them. She had to find a way to put Frankie’s undefined yearning into a form that could be grasped by the reader and fully understood.

  Despite Auden’s tendency to dominate the conversation, others managed to have their say as well. Carson, a consummate storyteller, delighted her housemates with her descriptions of life in Georgia. She might recount, her slow drawl growing more pronounced the more she drank, the kinds of nicknames that Southerners give their family members—Brother Man, Little Bob, sister, baby-child, honeybunch, and her favorite, “King the Beauty,” still used for her young cousin, now grown. She could list the descending social categories of the South, from “plain” to “common” to “common as pigs’ tracks,” or describe the hot summer nights she used to spend with her five cousins on the wide sleeping porches back home and the homemade ice cream they used to make and eat every Sunday. Her new friends especially liked the southern phrases she recalled from her childhood, such as her father’s remark that “if I hadn’t sold that Coca Cola stock I could just sit and pat my foo
t.”

  Klaus Mann, too, captured the others’ attention with a description of the rescue from France of his younger brother, Golo, and his uncle Heinrich Mann—both now safely recovering at Thomas Mann’s house in Princeton. Lincoln Kirstein added a certain gravity to the group that could even charm when lightened by the presence of one or more of his dancers. And George Davis, as always, was able to recount the most tragic news or bit of theater gossip in a manner so studied and mock-sincere as to leave the others weak with laughter. As November drew near, these intimate dinners at 7 Middagh became an almost nightly festival of “gobble and gossip,” providing precisely the balancing element of intellectual stimulus that Auden had hoped for.

  With the parlor still a shambles, the group frequently went out for their after-dinner drinks—often downhill to the decadent Sands Street district bordering the Brooklyn waterfront. “Hell’s Half Acre” was the nickname Sands Street had been given by the local population. Hell or not, the brawling bars, tattoo parlors, and male and female brothels adjoining the piers were known around the world as the place any right-thinking sailor would want to go when he died. Naval officers in uniform tended to congregate uphill at the St. George Hotel, where elegant dining, dancing, and more discreet assignations were available, but George was convinced that this seedy district’s cruising sailors, cheap liquor, and barroom imbroglios made for better entertainment.

  That autumn of 1940, the Brooklyn waterfront had become an increasingly exciting destination. While the war had virtually ended the luxury liner traffic between Europe and New York, emptying many of Manhattan’s piers, Brooklyn’s docks served primarily cargo and were now benefiting from a frantic rerouting of world trade. African and South American freighters brought their aromatic spices, coffee, and other goods to Brooklyn instead of Britain or France, picking up American automobiles and manufactured goods for the journey home. By October, sixteen steamship lines serving South America were docking in Brooklyn, while six New York companies provided weekly sailings to Capetown and other African ports. The few British and Dutch ships that arrived slipped into the docks with their guns and camouflage paint like harbingers of doom—the British freighters fetching food for their beleaguered homeland while the struggling Dutch maintained a single route between Brooklyn and the East Indies.

  The new ships brought an exotic flavor to the run-down district, whose only other income came from the thousands of blue-collar workers at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard. The mix of immigrant laborers, their numbers expanding weekly to fill new orders for the coming war’s fleet, with thousands of footloose sailors and the kind of drifters who gravitate to waterfront life, created a rough-and-ready, Wild West atmosphere that the Middagh Street crowd found irresistible.

  The writers soon became regulars at such places as Tony’s Square Bar, known as the toughest sailors’ bar in the world. “All the bars exploded into fisticuffs. It seemed to be a navy tradition,” recalled one enthusiastic patron, but Tony’s had the reputation for maximum excitement at a minimal price. In other taverns down the block, Carson wrote, one could observe the “vivid old dowagers of the block who have such names as The Duchess or Submarine Mary. Every tooth in Submarine Mary’s head is made of solid gold—and her smile is rich-looking and satisfied.” These two older prostitutes had a stable list of sailor clients “and are known from Buenos Aires to Zanzibar. They are conscious of their fame and don’t bother to dance or flirt like the younger girls, but sit comfortably in the center of the room with their knitting, keeping a sharp eye on all that goes on.”

  The area no doubt stimulated Carson’s memories of the riverfront shantytowns she had explored in her childhood and reminded George of Detroit’s Greektown and Auden of the alleys of Shanghai. But George most enjoyed bringing along guests who were either the least likely to come across the district on their own—Columbia professors, editors from Vogue—or who could by their presence step up the intensity of the show. Among the latter was one of his closest friends and America’s best-known burlesque star, Gypsy Rose Lee. The sight of this bejeweled, ermine-cloaked stripper descending on Sands Street after a Broadway show always created a gratifying stir among the sailors.

  Carson, too, thrilled to meet a star like Gypsy, and it was a good time for the burlesque star to be out celebrating. Although only twenty-six (or perhaps twenty-nine—due to her mother’s habit of forging her children’s birth certificates, Gypsy could never be sure of her age), she was enjoying the highest peak yet in an extraordinary career. That summer she had starred in The Streets of Paris, a wildly popular revue at the New York World’s Fair, where the producer Mike Todd had not only paid her $4,000 a week but had posted her image forty feet high—“larger than Stalin’s”—on the front of the Hall of Music. With that success behind her, Gypsy was now appearing on Broadway opposite Bert Lahr in the Cole Porter musical Du Barry Was a Lady when not posing for photographs for Harper’s Bazaar, attending parties on Park Avenue, or otherwise getting her name mentioned in New York’s gossip columns. Over the past decade, such activities had helped expand Gypsy’s fame as a performer from the tawdry, post-vaudeville strip club circuit of the Depression to the classier burlesque “opera houses” of New York, Chicago, and other large cities and finally to the more legitimate stages of Broadway, Hollywood, and the World’s Fair.

  One sign of her success was the extraordinary number of Gypsy imitators who populated New York’s bars and nightclubs in the early 1940s—from the “sepia Gypsy” in a Harlem cabaret, to “Gypsy Voga Lee” in a traveling “Cavalcade of Girls,” to “Our Very Own Gypsy Rose Lee,” who provided entertainment for a program put on by the Young Communist League. The female impersonator Billy Herrero, wearing a brassiere filled with birdseed for that natural look, billed himself as the “Brazilian Gypsy Rose Lee,” while Hubert’s Museum on Forty-second Street featured a “Gypsy Rose Flea.”

  Gypsy maintained a game attitude toward most of this activity. “Money in the bank” was her attitude. Not only was imitation the highest form of flattery, she would remark while tossing back a gin and tonic (not so easy to get these days) and lighting one of the 150 Turkish cigarettes she smoked each day, but it meant free publicity for her. Anyway, she could thank God she wasn’t one of the carbon copies.

  Certainly, Gypsy was an original. Long-legged, radiantly healthy, and remarkably self-possessed, she lacked the blond-bombshell looks that were popular in Hollywood but had a powerful, statuesque beauty all her own. Small-breasted and large-hipped, she designed and often sewed her own costumes to emphasize the long neck, elegant profile, and creamy, glowing skin that her public had grown to love. Her auburn hair, too flyaway to be worn loose, was usually arranged in an elaborate coiffure, and her signature six-inch heels added glamour to her five-foot-nine-inch frame. But her greatest charm lay, George felt, in the athletic, almost tomboyish stride that belied these ladylike accoutrements—a holdover, perhaps, from a childhood spent playing the male parts opposite her prettier younger sister in vaudeville. In every way—from her sophisticated manner of handling the ogling crowds to her half-joking, almost British-sounding contralto with carefully pronounced French phrases (punctuated occasionally with an American curse word or two)—Gypsy gave the impression of a smart, ambitious, self-made young woman with a well-developed sense of humor. This persona had been born more than a decade earlier, at about the time Gypsy and George had met.

  Crammed around a Sands Street table, the residents of 7 Middagh listened, entranced and amused, as Gypsy told the story of the day she first set eyes on George Davis. It was just after Gigolo, her pet monkey, strangled to death in Omaha in a coat she’d sewn for him from the scraps of some old hotel blankets, she told them. Gypsy, known then as Louise Hovick, was thirteen years old at the time—an awkward, overweight adolescent resentfully touring with her sister, June, in the care of her mother, Rose, and Rose’s manager-boyfriend, Gordon. Louise had left Gigolo in his coat overnight to keep him warm, but he had twisted the cloth around his neck u
ntil he couldn’t get free. It was the first real tragedy of her life, but they had to move on. They disposed of the monkey and traveled to Detroit, where the miserable teenager’s nights were spent onstage and her days cooped up in the Dixieland Hotel, listening to the grownups argue.

  But Louise had a secret. Next door to the hotel she had discovered a magical place—her own special retreat—the Seven Arts bookstore. Even June didn’t know about it or the hours that Louise spent there. Gypsy described it as “a strange, wonderful place with batik scarves on the walls and small tables and chairs placed in the dimly lighted corners of the room. Candles, stuck in bottles, threw flickering lights on the bookshelves.”

  Louise had always loved books, but she was even more attracted to the people sitting at the bookstore tables, so unlike anyone in her daily life. During the late afternoons they would crowd into the shop, looking “almost alike with their shaggy haircuts and low flat shoes,” talking eagerly about F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. Eavesdropping on their conversations, Louise browsed through the bookshelves, pondering what to buy with the allowance she had saved. She had to be careful about the books she chose. Not only were her funds limited, but she was allowed just one trunk for all her books and her sister’s toys. Whenever she bought a new book, she had to let an old one go. Already she had replaced A Child’s Garden of Verse with Boccaccio’s Decameron and The Wizard of Oz with The Rubdijydt of Omar Khayyam. “In the candle-lighted bookshop I hesitated between a copy of Firbank’s Flower Beneath the Foot, which had a lovely picture on the faded gray cover, and Marius the Epicurean,” Gypsy wrote years later. “I knew if I bought either one I would have to make room for it in the trunk. I was wondering more about which of my old books would have to go, when the manager of the store spoke to me. ‘Have you read Shakespeare’s sonnets?’ he asked, offering me a slender cloth-covered book.”