Only your notes are pure contraption . . .
Only your song is an absolute gift.
You alone, alone, imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
And pour out your forgiveness like wine.
These assertions were difficult to justify for someone as rational as Auden, however, and he wrestled throughout the winter with the implications of his own statements and their many exceptions. In “Christmas 1940,” “At the Grave of Henry James,” and “Kairos and Logos,” he praised the religious mystics and tried on for size a variety of Christian attitudes, but he himself deplored the pompous and awkward tone of much of this work and rejected most of it almost immediately.
The difficulty for Auden came down, for the most part, to the act of placing his faith in an impersonal Absolute. As he had written to Isherwood, he was not cut out for the “contemplative life.” His focus lay in the realm of everyday reality—of finding the universal in the personal. Besides, he was not willing to take this journey of faith, to learn to rely on the objective moral tenets of Christianity, on his own. If faith was, as Kierkegaard wrote, a matter of “always being out alone over seventy thousand fathoms,” Auden—the poet who had come to America to become one anonymous “lonely” among thousands—now resisted embarking on a spiritual journey without his lover by his side. That December, he wrote to Chester Kallman in a command that was also, perhaps, a plea:
A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.
Carson had responded with great excitement to the addition of the two British musicians to the household, the opening of the house to visitors, and the arrival of the émigrés from Europe. Her dream of playing host to New York’s cultural elite had not only become real, but the house at 7 Middagh Street was turning into an international forum such as she could never have imagined. The situation brought to mind, for Carson, a convent near her childhood home where the gates had always been shut. One day, when she was about four, she and her nanny were walking past the convent and Carson noticed that the gates were open. Inside, in a courtyard, she could see children joyfully eating ice cream and playing on swings. She begged to join them, but her nanny refused because Carson wasn’t Catholic. The next day, the gate was shut. For years Carson fantasized about the marvelous party that must be going on inside, she wrote, but she could never get in.
Now Carson was in, and her excitement led to a frenetic level of activity at her desk as well as downstairs. Having finally experienced the moment of illumination that she had needed to move forward with The Bride and Her Brother (later renamed The Member of the Wedding), she set to work transforming her insight into words on a page. “It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old,” the novel began. “This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”
Carson went on to describe the summer heat of the town where Frankie lived and the girl’s desultory days spent playing bridge with her six-year-old cousin, Henry, and Berenice, the Negro maid. “The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer,” she wrote. “At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass.”
She well remembered that dead, abandoned feeling of childhood. And she knew that Frankie would look to her departing brother and his bride as her means of escape. But the way to that solution remained unclear. As hard as she tried that winter, she was unable to proceed beyond her first evocation of Frankie’s loneliness—to choose the correct path, from the infinite number of possibilities that presented themselves, to the wedding at the center of the story. Determined to break through her yearlong resistance, she adjusted the elements of her traditional routine, increasing the number of hours spent at her desk, stepping up her consumption of alcohol, and staying up late with George, Gypsy, and their friends in search of further inspiration. She took time off only to work on the remunerative magazine articles George had procured for her and to help Klaus Mann with Decision.
Soon, this intense activity began to take its toll on Carson’s emotional state as well as her health. In late November, the news had arrived that Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach had been hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic after attempting suicide. Carson, stricken, learned that it was not her first attempt; like her morphine addiction, Annemarie’s self-destructive behavior had begun years before. Now, despair over her difficult love affair with the Baronessa von Opel and her guilt over not having returned to Switzerland, where her father had just died, had overwhelmed the young woman. Hospital visits were prohibited, Carson was told, and though she wrote to Annemarie, she had no idea whether her friend received her letters.
The thought of Annemarie—the beautiful “pensive page,” as Klaus Mann had described her—locked up in an institution and suffering the withdrawal symptoms associated with morphine, was too much for Carson to bear. She became weepy and emotional, lashing out at Reeves when he suggested that life at 7 Middagh might be too much for her at this time. Over the past several months, Reeves had grown increasingly disapproving of the group life in Brooklyn—not only of the high level of activity, but also of the open homosexuality accepted by both residents and guests. Carson insisted that the sex of two lovers had nothing to do with their feelings for each other. But Reeves felt threatened by the free life that was fostered on Middagh Street. He, too, began drinking even more than before and succumbed to deep depression. By now he had entered into a number of sexual affairs in Manhattan, but none of them had developed into an emotional relationship that could compensate for the rupture with his wife.
No matter how much Carson and Reeves talked, drank, and wept together, their relationship failed to improve, and Carson saw her marriage as having ended. But she did not know how to convince Reeves to move on. It was not even clear, either to Reeves or herself, that she wanted him to leave permanently. In many ways, despite her talent and fame, Carson remained a child who could not loosen her hold on any person once an attachment had been created.
As the relationship grew worse and the weather grew colder, Carson’s emotional distress increased. Unable to sleep, she drank with her friends downstairs or on Sands Street until the early hours of the morning. The others began to worry about her hacking cough and strange behavior. One night, at the ballet in Manhattan, Carson convinced herself that she had fallen in love with one of the female dancers onstage. Although she had never met the ballerina face-to-face, she took to lurking for hours night after night outside the stage door, hoping to begin a friendship. These sessions in the freezing weather caused her health to deteriorate so badly that George finally had to tell her in no uncertain terms that there was no future in the infatuation. “You’re not to go down and moon outside her door any longer—do you understand?” he demanded. Chastened, Carson finally agreed.
By then, Carson had developed several serious respiratory ailments and lost so much weight that she was forced to remain in bed. There, she tossed and turned, worrying about her novel, about her relationship with Reeves, and especially about Annemarie. She would later describe this period as one of such intense suffering that she thought she might actually die. Everyone was relieved when her mother, Marguerite Smith, traveled up from Georgia to care for her. Marguerite, a voluble woman with a charming, deep-fried southern drawl, was accustomed to creative people’s eccentricities after many years of running her own artistic salon, so she fit right in at 7 Middagh. She enjoyed chatting with Auden and George in the kitchen while concocting nourishing soups for Carson. Because she and Auden had a hard time understanding each other’s competing accents, Marguerite tended to shout at the poet as though he were hard of hearing. Auden kindly overlooked this habit, however, in the
interest of learning the best way to make such southern dishes as Country Captain—sliced roast chicken with curried tomatoes and almonds, served with “rattling rice”—and Tipsy Squire—a rich dessert topped with whipped cream flavored with bourbon or brandy. Marguerite also described to Auden and George the southern tradition of turning out dozens of Christmas fruitcakes, covering the counters with pans full of sweet, sticky bricks soaking in brandy under clean white cloths. Mixing up a new batch of “sonnie boy” for Carson, she carried it upstairs, singing out, “Here, precious, a little toddy for the body.” Soon, all the others at 7 Middagh had picked up the phrase.
For Carson, it was perhaps a relief to be cared for by her mother again after such a long period away from home. Her frequent childhood illnesses had made her unusually dependent on her mother into adulthood, and the two women fell back quickly into the familiar pattern of nurse and invalid. On nights when it snowed heavily, Marguerite helped Carson downstairs to sit before the fire. Gypsy, a favorite of Marguerite’s, often joined them to cheer Carson up and make her mother laugh. Gypsy, who had a stage mother of her own, didn’t mind listening to Marguerite’s endless accounts of her daughter’s brilliance. Carson, listening to the pair of them from her comfortable chair, may have already been formulating Frankie’s remark in “The Bride and Her Brother”: “The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.”
Another reason Carson enjoyed her sessions in the parlor was that it had become the room where music was made. Since his arrival, Britten had begun working hard to complete the music for Paul Bunyan. Carson, who looked to music’s structure to help build her novels, hoped to talk at length about music with Britten. Her fascination with the philosophical turmoil experienced by the British members of the household, and her sympathy for them as they worried for loved ones back home, informed the essay “Night Watch over Freedom,” which she had written that autumn. In the article, to be published in Vogue’s January 1941 issue, she described Big Ben’s ringing in the New Year in London, even though she had never been there. “On this night, London may be grey with fog, or the clean moonlight may make of the Clock Tower a silhouette against the winter sky,” she wrote. “But when the bells sound it will be the heartbeat of warring Britain—somber, resonant, and deeply sure. Yes, Big Ben will ring again this New Year, and over all the earth there will be listeners.”
Like the refugees from France and Portugal, however, Britten, Pears, and Auden preferred to focus as much as possible on what they could accomplish in America. By now, Britten and Pears had presented a run-through of Paul Bunyan for the producer of the Columbia theater group, Milton Smith. It was a wildly improvised performance; Britten had not completed many of the songs and Pears, as the only singer, was forced to perform all the parts—quartets, choruses, duets, and so on. Nevertheless, Smith was so impressed by Pears’s “magnificent, incredible” performance and Britten’s “tremendous” music that he agreed at once to produce the work.
Auden and Britten, encouraged, stepped up the pace. In his libretto completed the previous winter, Auden had already constructed the operetta’s general story line, in which Paul Bunyan appears in the mythically untouched American forest and, with godlike procreative skills, initiates its development toward industrial modernism.
The story begins with a virginal America awaiting the civilizing hand of man. Auden wrote:
It is a spring morning without benefit of young persons.
It is a sky that has never registered weeping or rebellion.
It is a forest full of innocent beasts. There are none who blush at the memory of an ancient folly, none who hide beneath dyed fabrics a malicious heart.
It is America but not yet.
Then Paul Bunyan appears, calling forth lumberjacks from Sweden to cut down the trees and build houses and welcoming farmers to clear fields, raise families, and in time make room for educated people to conceive the dreams necessary to create a full-fledged culture. Under Bunyan’s guidance, America has become a modern, self-sufficient society, no longer dependent on the whims of Nature or limited by the Old World traditions that had produced its citizens.
But Paul Bunyan does not end triumphantly with the creation of this new social order. Auden made it clear in the final scenes that with the creation of modern industrial life, America’s greatest challenge was just beginning. Now that the citizens of America were no longer bound by their former strictures, each was faced with the moral challenge of unlimited free choice. Other countries, including those in Europe, would soon find themselves in the same position. “Now that, in a material sense, we can do anything almost that we like, how are we to know what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to avoid . . . ?” Auden wrote in an essay describing this musical project. “Of what happens when men refuse to accept this necessity of choosing, and are terrified of or careless about their freedom, we have now only too clear a proof.”
It was clear that, even in the simple story of Paul Bunyan, Auden had found a way to work through his ideas about the need for each individual to consciously identify and rely on a set of unconditional values. At the end, the frontier citizens, who have by now freely chosen their life’s paths—as chefs, hotel owners, bureaucrats, and so on—gather for a Christmas feast to celebrate their evolution. It is at that moment that Paul Bunyan, the catalyst, announces that it is time for him to move on.
What’s to become of America now? the bewildered citizens ask. Bunyan replies, as he prepares to depart for other worlds, that America is ever-changing, depending from day to day on the decisions of its people. “America is what you do,” he reminds them (in Auden words). “America is what we choose to make it.”
This opportunity for free choice—the aspect of life in America that most attracted Auden but that he also considered mankind’s greatest challenge for the future—was the central theme of Paul Bunyan that he had wanted to convey to the cast of high school performers he had pictured as his readers. But as an experienced teacher, he knew he must first connect with his adolescent audience if he wanted them to attend to his earnest speeches. He had therefore filled the libretto with jokes likely to appeal to teenagers—giving the lumberjacks the ridiculous names Jen Jenson, Cross Crosshaulson, Pete Peterson, and Andy Anderson, highlighting the monotony of the lumber camp’s meals (heavy on the beans), and lampooning the crass commercialism of the American radio advertisements that begin to appear as, in the libretto, modern America develops.
Britten had already set many of these scenes to equally playful music—giving a Donizetti-type accompaniment to the “Cooks’ Duet” in praise of soup and beans and creating convincingly dopey music for the lumberjacks. When Auden assigned the role of ironic commentators to three pets—a dog, Fido, and two cats, Moppet and Poppet—Britten obligingly produced soprano solos. Most impressively, he created for “The Blues: Quartet of the Defeated” a recitation of the tragedies that accompanied America’s growth (the bust at the end of a gold rush, a gunfight in the West, a drowning in the South, a stock market crash), a brilliant blues number sung in deep, rich Porgy and Bess–style bass. And perhaps because he was still, after all these years, somewhat intellectually intimidated by Auden, Britten even agreed to the poet’s spontaneous decision that, since a giant as tall as Paul Bunyan couldn’t fit on an ordinary stage, the main character would appear only as an enormous pair of boots while his songs were sung by an actor offstage.
Now, however, the collaborators anticipated a more sophisticated audience. They needed to flesh out the story and add new characters with showstopping solos. One of Auden’s more recent additions was Inkslinger, a character who represented the Thinking Man, “the man of speculative and critical intelligence” who so often found himself isolated and undervalued in America. Auden’s years in the United States, and particularly his months on Middagh Street, had given him ample opportunity to observe this American type. Many of h
is Brooklyn friends, including George Davis, Carson McCullers, Chester Kallman, and even Gypsy Rose Lee, could have identified with Inkslinger’s resignation as he talks himself into taking a job as an accountant for Bunyan’s lumber camp:
It was out in the sticks that the fire
Of my existence began
Where no one had heard the Messiah
And no one had seen a Cézanne . . .
And I dreamed of writing a novel
With which Tolstoi couldn’t compete
And of how the critics would grovel
But I guess that a guy gotta eat.
It may even have been their collective vision for 7 Middagh Street that inspired the transcendent new ending that Auden now gave the song:
It isn’t because I don’t love them
That this camp is a prison to me,
Nor do I think I’m above them
In loathing the sight of a tree.
O but where are those beautiful places
Where what you begin you complete
Where the joy shines out of men’s faces,
And all get sufficient to eat?
Auden would continue to shape the libretto and add sections as necessary—but there was an even more urgent need for Britten’s contributions. Not only did he need to compose the music for “Inkslinger’s Song,” but Milton Smith had pointed out that neither of the two romantic leads—Tiny, Paul Bunyan’s daughter, and Slim, the man she would marry—had yet been given solos. Britten also needed to write a duet for the pair and create a grand musical prologue that would bring up the curtain.
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