George Davis, his novel discarded and Gypsy gone, had turned the full force of his considerable talents to giving parties at his Brooklyn house. Frankie Abbe, his former secretary who was now conveniently living next door, stopped by with her toddler son to help with the lists of guests and make phone calls—just as in their earlier days, though they were now creating evening spectaculars rather than magazine text.
Years later, another of George’s assistants described the structure of his parties as a series of Chinese boxes. At the center were the guests of honor—Auden, Britten, Diana Vreeland, Maxwell Anderson, Moss Hart, Marc Blitzstein, Julien Green, and any other established artists who happened to bustle in from the cold. Radiating from this hot center of self-conscious laughter and conversation were the editors, agents, recent émigrés, and young hopefuls, all exchanging telephone numbers and arranging to meet again. In the outer ring, stevedores and shopkeepers whom George had befriended, “working” friends such as Frankie and Victor, who served as bouncer, Brooklyn neighbors, and friends and relatives from the Midwest observed the astonishing scene, remarking, “Well, it takes all kinds.”
A more bizarre fourth ring was added when, with Gypsy’s permission, George sublet her third-floor rooms to a family of circus performers: an organ grinder, his wife and two children, and the chimpanzee and assortment of trained dogs that made up their act. No announcement was made of their arrival, so several guests were surprised when, as they chatted in the kitchen, a chimp raced past into the adjoining bathroom, shut the door, used the facilities, pulled the chain, and raced out again. Such guests may have inspired a rash of gossip in Manhattan the next day, but to George they were simply friends hoping to make a few beneficial connections. Joe the chimp found work at Harper’s Bazaar almost immediately, as it turned out, modeling piqué hats for spring.
That winter, as many as a hundred or more artists gathered on Middagh Street in a single night, many of them dazzlingly famous and all eager to reap as much excitement, fun, and professional advancement as possible from the evening. The Swiss author Denis de Rougemont, in town for the publication of his new book, Love in the Western World, visited 7 Middagh Street at the suggestion of his friend Golo Mann; he later remarked that “all that was new in America in music, painting, or choreography emanated from that house, the only center of thought and art that I found in any large city in the country.” And with the addition of Klaus Mann’s international set, the house was, perhaps more than any private home in America at that critical moment in history, “open to the world.”
Among the composers who visited the house that winter was the thirty-year-old Paul Bowles, then known more for his musical than his literary talents. A handsome, slender, taciturn blond, often appearing in tailored suits with pocket handkerchiefs, Bowles was well connected to many of the residents and guests at Middagh Street. For the past year he had maintained a small, unheated studio not far from Auden’s former apartment in Brooklyn Heights and had dropped in for afternoon cocktails there a number of times. Auden accepted Bowles at once because of his connection to Isherwood; the novelist had met Bowles in Berlin in 1931 and been so charmed that he had named his best-known fictional character, Sally Bowles, after him. Paul had, in fact, gotten to know the real Sally Bowles, aka Jean Ross, when he fell into the habit of meeting her for lunch at the Café des Westens each afternoon with Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Aaron Copland.
Bowles, who was only twenty while in Berlin—slightly younger than the others—chafed at what he considered the Englishmen’s cliquish, condescending behavior toward him. But it seemed to be something that happened only when two or more Englishmen got together, he observed, because Isherwood was perfectly forthright and friendly when they were alone. As for Auden in Brooklyn, “I was considerably in awe of him,” Bowles wrote years later. “His learning and the strange way in which he expressed himself when he spoke combined to make me always unsure of the meaning of his words. But that in itself was a pleasant, if losing, game.”
In February 1940, Bowles found himself in something of a fix. Having gone to Mexico the previous summer to enjoy the cheap and leisurely expatriate life in one of the few places where such a life remained possible, he had been abruptly called back in September to compose the incidental music for a new Theatre Guild production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Composing a score “meant to sound like antique and intricate chamber music,” Bowles earned such excellent reviews—including an entire column by his friend Virgil Thomson in the New York Herald Tribune—that he was immediately given the job of scoring Philip Barry’s Liberty Jones for Broadway. Next followed Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, again for the Theatre Guild, after which he had agreed to compose music for Pastorela, a ballet based on the traditional Christmas posadas of Mexico, for the American Ballet Caravan that Kirstein was creating to tour South America the next summer.
Bowles welcomed both the praise and the commissions—but as the work continued and his wife, Jane, came up from Mexico to join him, he needed a place to live. Currently, they were staying at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, but Jane’s constant partying there made it impossible for Paul to work or sleep. When Kirstein heard of their predicament, he suggested that they move to Middagh Street. At a monthly rent of only $25, it sounded like an excellent idea. While Bowles was unfamiliar with George Davis, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and Peter Pears, he did know and like Auden and had been a friend of Klaus and Erika Mann’s since his time in Berlin. It was Erika, in fact, who had introduced Paul to Jane three years earlier.
Ordinarily, the Bowleses wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting a room in the house, for there was now a long waiting list, with many places held by needy refugees, but Kirstein used his influence as house benefactor to lobby on their behalf. Although George preferred writers to musicians as residents, he had little choice but to give the Bowleses Gypsy’s rooms if she decided to give them up. Since Christmas, she had continued to waffle between the worldly temptations of Chicago and the aesthetic life of her Brooklyn studio, but George was under no illusion that she would choose Middagh Street in the end. It was just a matter of waiting for her to decide. At least Gypsy’s subtenants, the circus family, had moved on, and their replacement—a diminutive actor known by everyone in the house as Tallulah’s midget because he had appeared in a Bankhead play—would presumably create less wear and tear.
If Paul and Jane could not yet have a room, at least they could visit, so they soon began attending the almost nightly gatherings, large and small, at the house. Jane, an impish twenty-three-year-old, loved parties and was known for flitting from one man’s lap to another, saying the first thing that popped into her head and then joining in the others’ laughter at how silly it was. And what she said was often laughable, for Jane Bowles had quite a surreal view of life. Having experienced a bout of tuberculosis of the knee as a teenager, she now walked with a limp and had to sit with that leg straight out in front of her. She kept a small strip of adhesive on the knee at all times, as though hoping to convince others that the affliction was temporary. She became quite upset if anyone mentioned her leg, but at the same time she was convinced that it was all anyone thought of when they were with her—and these thoughts preoccupied her a great deal of the time. Still, Jane could be very funny and she was usually the life of any party she joined. Paul preferred lounging against a wall at the back of the room, coolly observing the goings-on, but his good looks and professional reputation drew others to him.
There was much to observe at Middagh Street that winter, aside from the parties. A crisis erupted in early February when the residents learned that Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach had escaped from the institution where she had been confined. After wandering in the freezing Connecticut woods all night, she had managed to find refuge in a friend’s apartment in Manhattan but was said to be very ill.
When word reached Carson in Columbus, she dropped her work and took the train north immediately. Concern for Annemarie’s welfare
mixed with a wild eagerness simply to see her friend again. But Annemarie, in her distress, called out instead for the Baronessa von Opel and even Gypsy Rose Lee. Another suicide attempt soon led to Annemarie’s commitment to a different institution in the suburban town of White Plains.
Carson remained at 7 Middagh Street for several days, unable to see Annemarie but unable, too, to leave without knowing what would happen to her. It was agonizing for the young writer to imagine her friend isolated among uncaring strangers who knew little about the reasons for her despair. Fortunately, Annemarie was adept at seeing to her own interests when necessary, and soon convinced her doctors to allow her to return to Switzerland, accompanied by a nurse. There, she hoped to join Erika Mann, who had already returned to Europe to work with the refugee rescue mission. It was only through actively fighting the Nazi invasion, Annemarie had decided, that she could avoid the debilitating depression that had overtaken her since she arrived in New York. She left by ship for Lisbon. Carson never saw her again.
These events devastated Carson, but less so than they might have several months before. Now, after nearly a month’s hard work in Georgia on both The Bride and Her Brother and The Ballad of the Sad Café, she knew for the first time since the publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter that she was making real progress and that the work was good. It was an interesting time to be in Brooklyn, if only for a few days. Auden now openly attended church and continued to spend time with Niebuhr. Still working through his feelings about this new relationship with God, he had even begun referring to “Her” familiar ways, as though God were a stern but loving mother whom they must all try to please. Carson, her mind on The Ballad of the Sad Café, must have listened carefully to his talk of achieving salvation through love for another individual. Much later, she wrote of that work, “the love of God . . . the love of Agape—the Greek god of the feast, the God of brotherly love—and of man. This is what I tried to show in The Ballad of the Sad Café in the strange love of Miss Amelia for the little hunchback, Cousin Lyman.”
Shortly after Carson’s return to Georgia that month, Reflections in a Golden Eye was published by Houghton Mifflin. Again, many were shocked by the novel’s depiction of sexual deviance and insanity in a military setting. Carson’s father threw the book across the room after reading it. The family even received a telephone threat from the Ku Klux Klan; the voice warned Carson’s father that she had better get out of town or they would come and “get her” before morning: “We know from your first book that you’re a nigger-lover, and we know from this one that you’re queer. We don’t want queers and nigger-lovers in this town.” Carson’s father spent the night on the front porch with a shotgun, ready to fend off the vigilantes, but no one appeared.
Such responses to the book’s “morality” hardly bothered Carson; on the contrary, to some extent she enjoyed the scandal. Yet even many critics panned the book—apparently out of shock, for the most part, that a young woman would admit to knowing about, much less feature in her work, such “marginal” characters as homosexuals, self-abusive wives, and peeping Toms. Rose Feld, who had praised Carson’s first book so highly, admitted that this novel was “a more tightly bound tale, more confidently constructed than the first,” but described her final impression as that of “waking up from a nightmare, of relief in knowing that what has passed was neither real nor probable.”
Carson could console herself that Louis Untermeyer had provided a quotation for the book jacket, calling Reflections in a Golden Eye one of the “most compelling, one of the most uncanny stories ever written in America.” And a Kansas City Star reviewer pointed out that this statement was not an unusual phrase to find on the jacket of a novel. The unusual thing was that “it is perfectly true.” The reviewer for Time magazine stated simply: “In its sphere, the novel is a masterpiece. It is as mature and finished as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.”
The object of their discussion, however, was all a part of Carson’s past. She had completed the novella six months earlier, and now it arrived like a relic from her childhood, bound between hard covers and dedicated to Annemarie. Six months earlier, her Swiss friend had symbolized all the glamour and sophistication of European culture—the world that Carson had longed to join. Now, Carson herself was helping to create a new, American culture that, with its psychologically complex, indigenous themes, both built on and defied the old. Though she grieved for Annemarie, Carson knew now—with two novels published and two more in progress—that no matter what happened, she would continue to produce her work.
February was a month of birthdays at 7 Middagh Street—so many that Anaïs Nin would later call it “February house.” George had celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday on the fourth. By Carson’s on February nineteenth, she was back at her mother’s house in Georgia—rising and dressing before eight o’clock, as was her annual custom, to await the arrival of telegrams, flowers, and, most important, presents. On the twenty-first in Brooklyn, Auden turned thirty-four, and Jane Bowles, who had finally inherited the entire third floor with her husband, celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday the following day.
Everyone at Middagh Street enjoyed birthday parties. But in 1941, the reminder of time passing highlighted what an unnerving time in history it was to be young and trying to create art that would survive the present turmoil. On February 7, the day before the House of Representatives was to vote on Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Bill, Churchill willed a positive result by announcing to his people, “We have broken the back of the winter. The daylight grows. A mighty tide of sympathy, of good will and of effective aid has begun to flow across the Atlantic in support of the world cause which is at stake.” He assured the Americans overseas: “We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor next year, nor any year that I can foresee. But we do need most urgently an immense and continuous supply of war materials and technical apparatus of all kinds . . . Our message to the United States: Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”
The Lend-Lease Bill was passed by the lower house the next day, resulting in a national outcry both for and against. At 7 Middagh Street, this next step toward engagement served to increase the rising tide of giddy tension. The evening revelries began to take on an almost surreal quality—literally at times, as on the night Pavel Tchelitchew decided that the parlor needed more color and, grabbing his paints, decorated one long wall with a surrealist mural. (The image was so overwhelmingly grotesque that a number of people begged George to have it painted out. But it was not in his nature to discourage experimentation.)
The presence of Paul and Jane Bowles did little to mitigate this uneasy mood. Their marriage was unconventional: Paul was bisexual, and before their marriage Jane had slept only with women. They had married for the sake of convenience when Jane’s mother refused to marry her own fiancé until after Jane was seen to. Paul had complied partly because marriage was something that one did and partly to shock his parents, since Jane was Jewish. Nevertheless, as husband and wife the two quickly became extremely close as they realized that no one else in the world was likely to so thoroughly comprehend, much less match, their shared proclivities and neuroses.
The couple divided the third floor equally. Paul moved into Gypsy’s rooms, which still contained, to his amusement, the six-foot cutout of her in burlesque garb. Jane took Carson’s rooms, with their green walls and velvet drapes. Their housemates had already noted the decorous and almost Victorian manner in which they carried on their relationship in public—using pet names and treating each other with exquisite politeness and concern. It was therefore a surprise to learn that in private they carried on an intricate, extensive, and occasionally violent fantasy life. Recently, on tour with Liberty Jones, the couple had indulged in one of their favorite games in their hotel room. In this “seduction game,” which involved a good deal of shouting and chasing each other around the room, Jane yelled at one point, “I’ll get you for this. You’ve ruin
ed my uterus.” Then she fell silent, having noticed the open transom above the door. Similar remarks and noises threatened to spill out of their bedrooms and up and down the stairs of 7 Middagh Street.
Meanwhile, the couple introduced a new strain of artists to the house. They counted among their friends such luminaries as John Latouche, the creator of the recent, popular Ballad for Americans and the lyricist for the hit Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky; the Theatre Guild members Bill Saroyan and Cheryl Crawford; and the ballet crowd surrounding Kirstein and Balanchine. They were also well acquanted with many of the artists associated with the expanding Museum of Modern Art, including Tchelitchew and his fellow neo-Romantic Eugène Berman, Philip Johnson, and Alfred Barr. Perhaps their most idiosyncratic friend, however, was Salvador Dalí, who visited the house a number of times that winter with his intimidating wife, Gala.
George, too, had known the Dalís for years, having met Salvador in Paris and translated his article “Surrealism in Hollywood” for Harper’s Bazaar. He was typically delighted by the showmanship with which the slender Spaniard shamelessly promoted his work. Most amusing had been “Dalí’s Dream of Venus,” the combination surrealist art exhibition, girlie show, and funhouse that Dalí and his wife had created for the New York World’s Fair. The craggy edifice of pink and white stucco, adorned with an enormous image of Botticelli’s nude Venus, supported a pair of living female sirens in bathing suits who waved seductively at passersby and invited them to enter. The pavilion’s entrance was wedged between two enormous stucco female legs in pink-and-blue-striped stockings. A sharp-toothed stucco fish guarded the crotch. To enter, one dropped a quarter into the eye of the fish and moved into Venus’s inner chambers—past an oversized aquarium containing bathing beauties in topless swimsuits (“Dalí’s Living Liquid Ladies”), a piano with a rubber keyboard in the shape of a woman’s body, telephone receivers drifting like jellyfish at the ends of their cords, and a cow wrapped in bandages that sweetly returned the viewer’s gaze. Moving into the next chamber, visitors discovered an equally large dry tank in which a half-clothed Venus lay dreaming in a bed thirty-six feet long surrounded by mirrors and half-naked attendants. Scattered across the crimson sheets were bottles of champagne and lobsters broiling on beds of hot coals, while dozens of black umbrellas hung from the ceiling like bats. Visitors then moved through a surrealist art gallery containing artifacts based on the works of Magritte, Oscar Domínguez, and other friends of Dalí’s, then a classic Dalí landscape of Catalan desert and melted clocks, and finally past a half-nude female taxi driver chauffeuring Christopher Columbus back to Europe in a New York cab while more “Surrealist babes” preened on the car’s roof.
February House Page 22
