André Breton, the “pope of Surrealism,” was so offended by the pavilion’s much-touted commercial success that he officially banished “Avida Dollars,” as he anagrammatically renamed Dalí, from the group’s roster. But Breton was always banishing other artists, and Dalí hardly noticed in the glare of the publicity that he so thoroughly enjoyed: a cover story in Vogue and extensive coverage in Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker, among other popular magazines. Hoping for even more attention, Dalí concocted a noisy feud with the pavilion’s financial sponsor, a rubber manufacturer from Pittsburgh, claiming that the company insisted for aesthetic reasons on providing rubber mermaid tails when Dalí wanted his mermaids to have rubber fish heads instead. In “protest,” Dalí hired an airplane and flew over Manhattan, dropping copies of a manifesto against rubber manufacturers titled “Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to his own Madness.”
“It is man’s right to love women with ecstatic fish heads,” Dalí wrote. “Man has the right to demand the trappings of a queen for the ‘objects of his desire’: costumes for his furniture! For his teeth! And even for his gardenias!” Having lambasted commercial culture for several pages, the document ended, illogically, with a paean to America: “Christopher Columbus, discovered American [sic],” it read, “and another Catalan, Salvador Dalí, has just rediscovered Christopher Columbus. New York! You who are as mad as the moon . . . I go and I arrive, I love you with all my heart. Dalí.”
Gypsy Rose Lee had been asked to appear in Dalí’s surrealist pavilion (“Come and See Gypsy Rose Lee’s Bottom of the Sea”), but she had wisely declined in favor of Mike Todd’s venture. George Davis was most likely disappointed by her decision, as he could never have passed up such a show. Now, however, he was more interested in the autobiography the artist was writing, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. It was to be published by the owner of the Dial Press, Caresse Crosby, at whose Virginia mansion the Dalís had been staying since the previous summer. Rather than describing the actual events in the artist’s life, The Secret Life contained a hodgepodge of funny stories, dramatic poses, and whatever else Dalí thought of tossing in. “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook,” he began. “At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” He went on to state his opinion on social interactions: “Very rich people have always impressed me; very poor people, like the fishermen of Port Lligat, have likewise impressed me; average people, not at all.” And he concluded with an affirmation of conjugal love that perhaps even Auden would be interested to discuss:
As a child I was wicked, I grew up under the shadow of evil, and I still continue to cause suffering. But since a year ago I know that I have begun to love the being who has been married to me for seven years; and I am beginning to love her as the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church demands, according to its conception of love. Catholic love, said Unamuno, is, “If your wife has a pain in her left leg, you shall feel that same pain in your left leg.”
Gala, you are reality!
And what is heaven? Where is it to be found? “Heaven is to be found, neither above nor below, neither to the right nor to the left, heaven is to be found exactly in the center of the bosom of the man who has faith!”
In fact, however, Dalí’s show of religious fervor was less evidence of a conversion than a cynical attempt to ease his eventual acceptance into Franco’s Spain—as well as an early move to position Gala as the embodiment of the artist’s muse in a publicity ploy for his upcoming exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in late April. With most of the other surrealists trapped in Europe, unable to obtain the necessary visas to come to America, Dalí pronounced the movement dead and himself prepared to take the tradition toward “a new classicism,” thus saving modern art. “A desire for forms and limits possesses us,” he claimed, thinking again, perhaps, of Fascist Spain. But all of this activity was aimed mainly at keeping his name in the news. As he would soon recall in his autobiography-in-progress, “Fame was as intoxicating to me as a spring morning.”
George laughed at Dalí’s posturing—accomplished all in French at Middagh Street, since the artist spoke hardly any English. Bowles, too, was amused by the show. He had been introduced to Dalí two years earlier at the home of the art patrons Kirk and Constance Askew. At that dinner party, Dalí had gazed into the salad bowl and told a grim story of a child’s death while Gala informed Bowles that he must buy a large aviary and shut her into it, then come and scatter food and whistle at her. “Je veux être votre perroquet,” she kept repeating, fixing Bowles in her shrewd gaze.
It was amusing, but Bowles also found himself deeply drawn to Dalí’s and the other surrealists’ focus on the power of the primitive subconscious, as well as their dedication to undermining all forms of authority. The son of an emotionally cold and abusive father, Bowles actively loathed any form of authority, so the surrealists’ brand of creative anarchy appealed to him enormously. He welcomed the Dalís’ presence at Middagh Street—although Jane, who already found it difficult to separate fantasy from reality and preferred to evade rather than confront authority, felt uncomfortable in their presence.
Certainly, Gala Dalí could make anyone feel uncomfortable. At forty-six a decade or more older than her hosts, the Russian surrealist rarely smiled, and when she did it was to express derision. The Middagh Street residents soon learned to fear her for her ability to freeze a dinner partner in her snakelike gaze and eviscerate him or her with one icy word. This she willingly did, guarding her husband with what he called “the petrifying saliva of her fanatical devotion” while he prattled on about his exhibition. Gala complained constantly and was unpleasant to everyone, Anaïs Nin had written after staying with them at Caresse Crosby’s the previous summer. But she was utterly devoted to Salvador’s advancement.
The Dalís’ presence created some lively evenings in Brooklyn. But Britten and Pears were beginning to lose patience with the intensely bohemian flavor of their new home. The brownstone was becoming absolutely filthy with so many people tramping through at all hours, to say nothing of the cats. The furnace, now in operation, worked too well, turning the top floor into a sauna. Parties took place constantly, with George staying up until dawn with his sailor friends. The recent addition of the Bowleses directly beneath their room, their voices drifting up from the third floor to the fourth, hadn’t helped. Britten found himself resorting occasionally to Seconal to get to sleep at night. And now Paul Bowles intended to move an upright piano into his room to work on the music for Pastorela.
Britten suspected that the resulting noise during his own parlor work sessions would drive him mad.
Britten didn’t know how long he could withstand such a live-and-let-live atmosphere, even though he understood that much of his unhappiness sprang from circumstances over which no one in the house had any control. More bad news had arrived from England: the London apartment of his sister, Barbara, had been destroyed by a bomb, though she had survived. And Britten’s musical mentor and former teacher, Frank Bridge, had died at his home in Sussex. It was not only a personal blow to Britten, who had already lost both parents, but also seemed a bad omen: Bridge’s successful tour of America in the 1920s had been a major factor in Britten’s decision to give this country a try. Meanwhile, life in Brooklyn was “just one hectic rush,” with four complete numbers still to be written for Paul Bunyan before a final playthrough in less than a week. It was all just too much. Britten wrote to Elizabeth Mayer’s daughter, Beata, that he was “just staggering out of an acute depression—probably into another one.”
Auden sensed Britten’s unhappiness and, still feeling intensely responsible for Britten’s presence in the United States, tried to step in and correct matters. When Britten complained about the residents’ habit of entering people’s rooms unannounced, Auden ordered a buzzer installed by his friend’s bedroom door. He placed strict limits on the use of the radio, since its constant war news upset Britten even mor
e.
Britten didn’t mention his irritation over another matter—the continued presence of Chester Kallman, who seemed to consider himself an expert on the opera, reenacting every scene of Der Rosenkavalier. It was, frankly, mystifying to him to observe Auden’s unthinking acceptance of Kallman’s musical taste and expertise. The year before, Auden and Kallman had taken to attending the opera together—Auden wearing a stained tuxedo left over from his Oxford days, along with sneakers or house slippers to accommodate his corns. Afterward, if they had the money, they would dine at an expensive restaurant while Kallman “instructed” Auden on Bellini, Rossini, and Monteverdi. “I am so anxious for you to meet Chester, though a little frightened as he is extremely musical, and you do play so fast,” Auden had written to Britten then. Now, living at 7 Middagh, the composer was still waiting for evidence that Auden could learn much at all of value about music from this boy. It was a little sickening to see how Auden drank in his partner’s words—and then wandered about the house talking opera as though he were an expert, too.
Unwilling to hurt Auden’s feelings, however, Britten turned instead to the matter of Paul Bowles. It was impossible for two composers to work in such proximity. No doubt Bowles found the situation just as untenable. Was there any way to separate them sufficiently so that they would not hear each other at work?
Auden, too, was glad to focus on Bowles rather than on any of the founding members of what he now called “our menagerie.” And there was something about Bowles that irritated Auden as well. Whereas, for example, the other residents tended to dress quite casually, Bowles was an impeccable dresser, brandishing his silver cigarette holder in a way that Auden particularly disliked. At the dinner table, Paul picked neurotically at his food, and Jane fretted over him like a worried mother, murmuring such comments as, “Oh, Bubbles, if you’d just stick to cornflakes and fresh fruit!” An entertaining storyteller with a dry sense of humor and popular with the crowd that frequented 7 Middagh, Bowles nevertheless held others at a certain cool distance. Worst of all, he seemed to have little if any respect for the rules of the house. When Auden distributed the weekly bill for rent and expenses, Bowles routinely questioned his share. And it seemed that no matter what philosophical or literary proposition the poet put forth for discussion, the composer was prepared to shoot it down with a sardonic remark.
Nor was Auden fond of Bowles’s surrealist friends. Part of it had to do with his “anti-frog” and “pro-kraut” bias, as he himself had described it—Auden disliked having to conduct dinners in French. And Auden had admitted years before in England that “I have never met a surrealist, so my ideas of the movement may be completely misconceived.” But even if he had had any interest in or understanding of the visual arts, surrealism’s society-bashing, logic-smashing dogma could hold little appeal for a poet so fully invested in a life of routine and in rational thought. The surrealists hated modern society, while Auden had embraced it as his subject. And Dalí, who had blurted out when first introduced to Auden, “Do you speak English?” stood poised to cause particular offense.
Still, no one could argue that the Bowleses were inappropriate additions to the household. Not only was Paul quite a successful composer, but Jane had been working sporadically for more than a year on a novel. She had begun reading excerpts to her friends, but her quaint delivery had provoked such hilarity that it was difficult for her listeners to judge the writing. Lately, she and Auden had begun talking about literature and had found that they shared an interest in the novels of Kafka. In fact, the two had become so friendly during these discussions that Auden had asked Jane to do his secretarial work for him. To Paul’s astonishment, the two now met in the dining room at six o’clock each morning so that Jane could type Auden’s dictation for several hours before breakfast. They were delightful sessions for Auden; Jane, warm and attentive, willingly played pupil to his schoolteacher and also mothered him with treats from the kitchen and other forms of attention. And Auden’s interest in debating ideas seemed to have sparked a period of increased productivity in Jane—a development that irritated her husband no end.
Recently, another member of the Bowles family had moved into the house—Paul’s cousin Oliver Smith, who had turned twenty-two that February. Smith, too, was an artist, producing pleasant, realistic watercolor scenes. He had been living for months in a run-down hotel on Water Street, tucked beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, painting scenes of the Sands Street district, but his room’s lack of heat had become unbearable, and the Middagh Street residents had invited him in from the cold. Smith was as handsome and elegantly dressed as Bowles himself—though on a more modest scale—but somehow, with his affable personality, this affectation came off well for him. Having turned down his acceptance to the Yale School of Drama in favor of life in New York, the young man shared Auden’s love for the city’s teeming streets, skyscrapers, and dramatic vistas.
Oliver’s dream was to become a Broadway set designer, but he was virtually unknown in the field. Still, the other residents were charmed by his leading-man looks, excellent literary taste, and air of languid sophistication, and he quickly won a place as the much-loved baby of the family. Joining the Bowleses on the third floor, he willingly assumed the chores of washing dishes and tending the furnace. Although he later described that period of his life as “slightly Dickensian,” it did not take long for him to settle in among the clutter and junk as though he had always lived there.
So it was not Paul Bowles’s relations who posed a problem for Auden but Bowles himself. Hunting Paul down while he was at work one day, Auden presented him with the problem: two pianos so close together were bound to create interference for both composers. As Britten had already claimed the grand piano in the parlor, Bowles would have to find another place to put his upright.
Bowles had to admit that the basement seemed the only possible place under those conditions. But he was outraged by this sign of favoritism toward Britten. Bowles was a close friend of two of Britten’s American cohorts, Aaron Copland and Colin McPhee; he had, in fact, first met Britten at Copland’s studio some months before. “At that time he was not talkative,” Bowles later wrote; “he struck me as obsessed by his work.” Even now, although the two composers ate at the same table each day, they had little to say to each other.
This coolness reminded Bowles of the benign exclusion he had experienced with Isherwood and his other British friends in Berlin in the 1930s. He had resented it then, and he resented it now. “One might say that the household was segregated rather than integrated,” he later wrote; “there were British and there were Americans, and the members of each group appeared to find its own nationals more sympathetic, thus easier to converse with, than the others.”
No matter that Bowles himself was known for having been “less than friendly” toward a different group of expatriate artists as a member of the raucous Young Composers’ Group, which he had joined with Virgil Thomson some years before. “There was not a lot of brotherly and sisterly love,” one observer dryly remarked of the winner-take-all atmosphere of that group of eager debaters. Regardless, no matter who was right, as junior resident at Middagh Street, Paul had to move.
The upright piano was installed in the house’s dank subbasement, next to the boiler room and as far as Bowles could get from Britten’s piano. “It might have been satisfactory had there been any heat,” he wrote, “but New York is cold in the winter and there was nothing but a kerosene heater which smoked excessively.” Still, working night and day with his customary earplugs, he made good progress on Pastorela. He would not allow the British contingent to interfere with his work.
Britten had not yet completed the score for Paul Bunyan, but more important now were the two solos for the romantic leads, Slim and Tiny. The operetta (or opera, as Britten also referred to it) had been scheduled to debut on May 5, with a preview the day before for the League of Composers, a few critics, and friends. The production had been fully cast, but the lead actors were still waiting for th
eir most important numbers.
Setting aside his other commitments, Britten set to work on “Slim’s Song”—the solo that would establish Paul Bunyan’s romantic hero as an American wanderer seeking a more settled life:
O ride till woods or houses
Provide the narrow place
Where you can force your fate to turn
And meet you face to face.
February House Page 23
