Now, in 1940, it was easy to point to similar forces at play among the right-thinking American intellectuals who jostled for position even as Europe’s condition turned critical. As stories began to appear about the dramatic rescue operations accomplished by the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), for which the Mann siblings had worked, the left-wing League of American Writers formed its own Exiled Writers Committee (EWC) to perform similar rescues, and a competition developed for press coverage and donations. High-profile émigrés including Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel were persuaded to boycott one organization’s fund-raising event in favor of the other’s, and when complaints were made, each committee accused the other of “alarmist jealousy” and political opportunism. These were precisely the kinds of ridiculous tussles that Auden, Isherwood, and MacNeice were determined to avoid.
At Cornell the previous summer, MacNeice had been confronted by a fellow instructor, a high-strung Frenchman whose anxiety over the events in Europe had prompted him to demand repeatedly, “Poète, why are you doing nothing? You must show us a course, it is your business.” But who was to say that a MacNeice or Auden knew the best course of action to take in this situation? The poet’s job was not, in their view, to take sides as a political activist, as Klaus Mann urged, but, on the contrary, to continue for as long as possible to illuminate the truths of the moment in the hope of making the right course more apparent for each individual reader. It was essential that these truths be presented in all their myriad contradictions and ambiguity—including, for example, the uncomfortable fact of the Allies’ own imperialist past, the fact that this war would wreak horrible destruction on both sides of the front lines, that democracy harbors its own social evils that would not be cured by the Nazis’ defeat, and the human truth that few individuals want to risk their lives for a political cause, no matter how just.
“Nobody interested in culture can afford to be impartial now. Culture must take sides and turn militant, or it is bound to perish,” Klaus Mann had written. Auden believed, on the contrary, that the act of taking sides and turning militant—while quite likely to become necessary soon enough—spelled the death of free culture and the triumph, at least temporarily, of its enemies.
Serious as these disagreements could become, they failed to spoil the atmosphere at 7 Middagh Street, nor did they interfere with the writers’ friendship. Klaus still hoped to persuade Auden and his friends to take a stand (“Just a little statement; once or twice would be enough”), while Auden considered all debate and discussion grist for his creative mill. He saw it as one of the great advantages of 7 Middagh Street, that everyone present understood and shared this process of grinding up the dross of daily life to create art. At Chester Kallman’s urging, Auden had lately reread a number of works by Henry James, including The Aspern Papers, a collection of four short stories that explored the nature of the writing life and the conflicts between the artist’s private and public selves. In one story in particular, James describes a writer who, it is discovered, has a mysterious twin. While the author appears to be blandly socializing downstairs at dinner, telling mildly amusing jokes and flirting with the women, his spectral double is busy creating great works of literature in the darkened study upstairs.
At 7 Middagh Street, there was no need to explain to his housemates that the “real” Auden was always upstairs, working, even when he appeared to be dogmatically lecturing at the dinner table, arguing with Klaus, or demanding that the rent be paid. Beyond the closed door of his study, dark activities were in progress. This was what was required of them all—this relentless effort, which he would later describe in what he would consider his best work, The Sea and the Mirror, as throwing oneself against the “black stone on which the bones are cracked.” Half of Auden’s attention was always in his study, and soon he would feel the need to physically join his specter. Those around the dinner table grew accustomed to the sight of the thirty-four-year-old poet shuffling up the stairs in his slippers—worn out of respect for his painful corns—to disappear for hours in the darkened den. “Unless I am in love with them,” Auden wrote, “I am delighted to see my friends for an hour, and then I want to be alone like Greta Garbo.”
Downstairs, however, one would find the materials necessary for this work. Downstairs were the ideas, the arguments, the images, and the passions that served as “the extraneous and discardable medium for the writing of poems.” Doing the crossword puzzle in the morning, discussing detective novels with Gypsy, debating opera with Chester, and otherwise “rummaging into his living” for “the images that hurt and connect,” Auden unearthed rich creative ore for later analysis. Earlier that year, a book reviewer for Time magazine had written, “Traditionally, poems are composed as soliloquies in some quarter of a poet’s mind: Auden’s most characteristic poems are composed as colloquies between various quarters of his mind. Oxonian Auden’s up-to-the-minute mind has, roughly speaking, as many, and as sketchily correlated, quarters as a university has classrooms or a newspaper has columns.”
The results lay throughout the house—on random bits of paper stuck in books and on tables and especially in the lined notebooks that he bought at Stevenson & Marsters, on Fulton Street. Line after line of verse, hastily sketched but with astonishingly few changes, demonstrated this transformation of the flotsam of daily life into art. “Across East River in the night / Manhattan is ablaze with light,” he had written in Brooklyn. And, in October, having moved into the chaotic Middagh Street house:
Where am I? Metaphysics says
No question can be asked unless
It has an answer, so I can
Assume this maze has got a plan.
Even the phone book provided material: a series of business listings copied down on a page of Auden’s notebook (“Airconditioning . . . Beauticians, Beer pumps, Bookkeepers . . . Caterer, Cleaner, Janitors”) was incorporated, a few pages further on, into the lines for a radio play, “What’s freedom anyway? Ask the boys and girls in the city, ask any of them, ask the typists and the teletypists, ask the chiropractors or the air-conditioning contractors, ask the brokers and the bell-hops and the beerpump makers and the baby carriage makers.” And after this came more lines for “St. Cecilia Day Ode,” “Lady Weeping at the Crossroads,” and other brilliant works.
The process of turning words into poems had also become financially easier by mid-November. Earlier that fall, Auden’s equilibrium had been further threatened when Chester Kallman’s father decided to transfer responsibility for his son’s expenses over to the poet. Dr. Edward Kallman had resisted the fact of his son’s homosexuality for years, having learned of it only when the boy’s first great admirer, a wealthy, middle-aged man named Charlie, had offered to pay Chester’s way through Harvard if his father would allow him to adopt him. The shock of that encounter finally wore off, but the dentist—who, though short and rotund, was himself quite a ladies’ man—clung to the hope that his son would eventually outgrow what he considered a homosexual phase. Despite his feelings, he was fond of Auden and considered him a better partner for his son than the toughened sailors or students he might otherwise choose. If Auden wanted to pretend to be married to his son, however, then Dr. Kallman felt he should make a financial commitment as well.
A solution to this new difficulty had arrived in the form of a letter from Caroline Newton, whom Auden had met through Glenway Wescott the previous winter. The middle-aged daughter of a wealthy New York bibliophile, herself a trained psychologist, Newton greatly admired Auden’s work and had become romantically attracted to him despite knowing about Kallman’s role in his life. For months she had courted him with theater tickets and dinners. Now she made an outright offer to partially subsidize his writing. It was the kind of half-embarrassing, half-welcome patronage that Auden and Isherwood had jokingly sought out on their arrival in New York, but that could be something of a burden when it actually occurred. Were it not for Kallman’s expenses, Auden might not have accepted the offer. As it was, though, he gave in, e
xtending an open invitation to Newton to join the table at Middagh Street, where she could talk literature with Klaus and Erika Mann, Wescott, Davis, and others whom she already knew well.
Auden was now free to focus on some of the ideas that had been coalescing in his mind over the past difficult months. And the issue that most concerned him was the very question Klaus Mann had posed: what to do—what “decision” one should make, as a writer but more fundamentally as an individual human being—when confronted with an undeniable evil. When he said, “Write as well and truthfully as you can,” Auden did not, of course, mean that the writer should ignore world events any more than other incidents within his sphere. But one must find a means of judging whether one’s response was a correct and effective one. In an open society like this one, art was potentially a powerful tool for directing unfocused human passion, but such a tool must be used wisely. And, as Auden had learned in the 1930s, no one—certainly no writer—was infallible. The dictator one helped to depose could turn out to have been a better choice than his replacement. New philosophies, no matter how benign, could lead to evil actions unimagined by their creators. Given the limits of our human understanding, all that could be expected, as Auden had written the month before, was that
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
This confusion—this inability to judge whether one’s own actions were ultimately right or wrong—was the dead end to which Auden had been led the previous summer. But he did not want to remain there. There had to be a way, philosophically, to recognize such an extreme evil as that posed by Hitler, judge it wrong objectively, and therefore act against it without doubt and without reserve. The previous spring, Auden had been intrigued by a reference in Kierkegaard’s Journal to “three stages of experience” through which most men typically pass. He recognized the first, aesthetic stage, in which the individual lives for the joys of each passing moment, as comparable to his own life in Weimar Berlin. The second, ethical stage, in which the individual becomes aware of social inequities and involves himself in public issues and politics, corresponded to Auden’s own efforts in 1930s Britain and in Spain. In the third stage, Kierkegaard suggested, the individual understands that the inherent good of mankind is a false concept, that no matter what actions one takes, good may not come as a result.
This was the stage that Auden had reached in the months before moving to Middagh Street. And he had read Kierkegaard’s solution: the individual must either “abandon himself to despair, or must throw himself entirely on the mercy of God.” This, then, he believed, was the “decision” he now faced. As he had no wish to simply despair, could he look to God—or, at least, to the Christian doctrine with which he was most familiar—for the objective vision, the metaphysical absolutes, where rational thought had failed? Could the principles of Christianity serve as the touchstone for correct moral action?
For several weeks now, Auden had been slipping away from 7 Middagh Street to attend early communion at an Episcopal church in the neighborhood. He chose it because it resembled the one he had attended growing up in England, and he found it comforting as he struggled with this new idea. By dropping in early, he missed the dull sermons and curious churchgoers he would have had to endure later in the day. And he did find—to his own surprise, since he had turned his back on religion more than a decade before—that these mornings seemed to help. When he returned home, his housemates and their guests, stumbling downstairs for breakfast, noticed an oddly beatific expression on his face, but no one thought to ask him where he’d been.
Much as Auden had looked forward to being “alone” with himself in America, relying only on his own judgments and experience, it was a relief during these difficult months to look to an outside source for answers. It was true that accepting God’s judgment brought with it new moral responsibilities. In The Double Man, Auden quoted the theologian Paul Tillich: “at a special time special tasks are demanded, and one aspect of the Kingdom of God appears as a demand and expectation.” But these unquestioned, unquestionable moral demands and expectations were just the kind of responsibility Auden longed for.
All that was necessary, it seemed, was to have faith in God. But he was not quite ready, in November 1940, to take that leap.
While Auden worked in his top-floor study, Gypsy Rose Lee paced the floor of her third-floor sitting room, describing to George Davis the kind of G-string they should use to kill the burlesque performer Lolita La Verne. It should be a fancy one, of course, with fake emeralds on the front and “silver flitter” behind. They could have Siggy, the G-string man, sell it to her before the murderer got hold of it and used it against her.
Siggy, who sold G-strings out of a suitcase to chorus girls backstage, was one of the many burlesque characters Gypsy and George had assembled for her murder mystery. After much discussion, they decided to approach the book like a jigsaw puzzle: first write down all of Gypsy’s anecdotes, character descriptions, and entertaining burlesque details, then arrange them into a rough story line.
George suggested that Gypsy begin by simply dictating some of her favorite stories to him. As she talked, he typed her words on the old typewriter she had installed in the larger of her two rooms above the parlor. This way, Gypsy could preserve the liveliness and timing that, as a comic performer, she had honed to perfection. It also eased her into the writing process, neatly evading the blank-page experience that caused so many beginners to panic. Seeing her words on the page afterward, Gypsy would make the connection between how she spoke and how she wrote. Then, once they had laid out the plot, she could incorporate these anecdotes into each chapter as she wrote.
So far, the system had worked well. George and Gypsy had agreed that her popular police raid story, which had occurred in real life during the premiere of a new act called “Illusion,” could serve as the opening scene of the novel, to establish the burlesque setting and grab the reader’s attention. Gypsy could model the burlesque hall where the murders would take place on the Irving Place Theater, where she had performed so successfully in the mid-1930s. Her former boyfriend, the womanizing burlesque comic Rags Ragland, might provide inspiration for the novel’s love interest, Biff Brannigan, who would play Dr. Watson to Gypsy’s Sherlock Holmes. And the burlesque prima donna Lolita La Verne was only the first in a list of murder victims that would include Dolly Baxter, a baby-faced blonde whose boyfriend Lolita had stolen, Princess Nirvena, based on the snootiest stripper Gypsy had ever known, the gangster owner of a neighborhood bar, and assorted stagehands and hangers-on. If the action threatened to slow down, Gypsy could always sprinkle a few professional terms into the dialogue, such as “pickle persuader,” “grouch bag,” and “gazeeka box.”
Having already spent several months on this project and having cleared much of her busy schedule, Gypsy was eager to proceed. She dedicated herself to her first chapter with the energy of a dancer learning a new routine. Like Auden, Gypsy was an early riser, so her writing schedule came to strongly resemble his. Getting up at six o’clock, she threw on an old cotton housecoat, made herself some hot tea, and began pounding the typewriter keys in her sitting room. If she was finding it difficult to decide where to dump the corpse or how to misdirect suspicion from the actual murderer to a suspect, she might join the “brains” for breakfast at nine so she could ask for advice and swap a few jokes to let off steam. If the work was going well, though, she kept at it straight through the morning until George arrived in the afternoon to review her progress.
While George was marking up her pages, Gypsy deflected her nervousness into useful activities, such as going over her calendar, making phone calls, painting her nails, or doing some embroidery. If she suspected that she had added an inch or two to her waistline, she might summon her masseuse to Brooklyn and “get her ass pounded” while she and George debated her descriptions of dressing room catfights and strip routines. If her extreme
restlessness sometimes annoyed George, he didn’t let it distract him. Now that Gypsy was living in his house, he was determined to teach her to write.
Going over a scene line by line, George assumed the same air of authority, otherwise absent, that Carson had noticed the previous summer. Asking softly but relentlessly, “But would Biff really do that? Would the Princess really care what was going on in the dressing room? What if, underneath your name on the marquis, we add ‘Boxing Tuesday Nights’?” Gypsy absorbed his suggestions like the professional she was and understood that, even if her novel was lighter in tone than Carson’s or Auden’s work, this was an extraordinary learning opportunity.
When Gypsy did not have to attend a business meeting or appear at a Broadway opening or charity event, these afternoon work sessions were likely to drift into cocktails, dinner with guests, and late evenings in the parlor. Gypsy’s suite had become another favorite place to assemble for most of the household. An experienced trouper, she had efficiently made her space as personal as a backstage dressing room, with furniture borrowed from George, homemade curtains in the windows, and scattered baskets of knitting and needlepoint. The typewriter rested on a small table in the corner, next to a tea tray and stacks of books, and George had reached into his supply of old clocks and porcelain figurines to add other details. Aside from a six-foot-tall cardboard cutout of Gypsy herself, brought to Brooklyn from a Broadway theater lobby, the large sitting room exuded a cozy, feminine aura, perfect for long conversations on increasingly chilly nights.
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