Influenced, perhaps, by Copland’s American style—or possibly by a Western-style musical on which Kurt Weill had been working when the two composers first met—Britten created a happy-go-lucky Western melody to evoke the wide-open spaces of Slim’s home. The song seemed less derivative of the earlier works of American composers, however, than predictive of later Broadway productions. Today, “Slim’s Song” sounds like something straight out of Oklahoma, which did not appear on Broadway until 1943.
As Britten was completing this solo, Pears brought him the happy news that Helen Marshall, the actress cast as Tiny, happened to have joined Pears’s madrigal group that month. In other words, Tiny could sing—a fortunate coincidence in this opera performed primarily by actors, not trained singers. Pears introduced Marshall to Britten, and while they were chatting, Britten casually asked the singer to give him her musical range. By the next night he had completed her solo—Tiny’s homage to her recently deceased mother, a soaring soprano showpiece clearly intended to become the opera’s most memorable tune.
With Britten working productively, Auden should have been able to return to his own work routine. But a development in his relationship with Chester Kallman was causing him distress. Chester had announced that, after his graduation from Brooklyn College in the spring, he planned to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. And he planned to go there alone.
Auden was devastated by this announcement—particularly coming, as it did, so quickly after he had chosen his love for Kallman as his new religious and philosophical path. He knew that it was normal and even necessary for Kallman, at twenty, to strike out on a life of his own. But he was also cognizant of Kallman’s roving eye. He wrote to Isherwood, who coincidentally had separated from his own lover that month, “Chester . . . should I think be there by himself, as he has never been away from home or me. I shall try, I think, to get a job in some college. Being a real Victorian wife, I don’t relish the prospect of being parted at all.”
It was natural for Auden to tell himself that it must be a test. If he had faith in his marriage to Kallman, surely it should be strong enough to withstand a temporary separation. He did his best to meet this challenge to his new philosophy of Christian love. In early March he was scheduled to speak at a Yale University dinner, and he took the opportunity to describe the average undergraduate in what amounted to a loving, forgiving portrait of Kallman, and perhaps also himself:
For the youth who is neither an aesthete nor a scholar, the years between eighteen and twenty-one are, perhaps inevitably, years of melancholy, uneasiness and self-distrust. Conscious for the first time of all the possibilities of the intellectual life, and in some cases of latent powers of his own, he rushes forward without plan or patience to storm the fortress of wisdom and knowledge, only to be repulsed time after time with nothing gained but bruises and the knowledge that he has made a fool of himself. Conscious for the first time of the importance of personal relationships, he must suffer many humiliations before he learns that, unlike his relation to his parents, love and friendship have to be worked for, carefully nourished, and above all, deserved. As I speak to you this evening, therefore, it is of that young man, outwardly arrogant but inwardly timid, gauche, careless, intolerant but eager to learn and be liked that I think of and to whom my remarks are primarily addressed.
At home, Auden adjusted his medications to try to accommodate his mental state, increasing his dose of Benzedrine and Seconal and placing a tumbler of vodka by the bed in case he awoke at night. While absorbing the shock of Kallman’s announcement, he made practical plans for its implementation. Caroline Newton, his friend and patron, volunteered to finance Kallman’s graduate school education and, once again, Auden accepted. Meanwhile, pondering what the boy’s absence would mean to him, he began as always to order his thoughts within the restrictive but satisfying guidelines of poetry. Moving away from the celebration of marriage of “In Sickness and In Health,” away from the instructional tone of “Leap Before You Look,” he experimented tentatively with how a geographical separation from Kallman might feel. In “Atlantis,” he offered advice to a young traveler as he departs on his quest. In “Alone,” he acknowledged that being close to one’s lover could be painful, too:
Each lover has a theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone . . .
Auden still had no idea that Chester had already found a new lover in Brooklyn—and Kallman found himself unable to confess and possibly end what was likely to be the most beneficial relationship of his life. Still, his secret was too powerful to keep to himself. Instead of telling Auden about Jack Barker, then, he chose to tell Jack about Auden.
The young British Merchant Navy officer had returned to New York near the end of February. After two months of separation, he and Chester could hardly wait to reunite. When they did, it was clear that their mutual attraction was as strong as ever. This time, Chester made it clear to Jack that another man was involved and that they needed to be discreet, though he didn’t yet reveal the identity of his other lover.
Jack went along with the clandestine arrangements that Chester obviously relished—making appointments with Chester’s father, then arriving early to meet Chester in the office while Dr. Kallman was out to lunch. On one occasion, the dentist returned to find his office door locked and a patient waiting in the reception room. From inside the office he could hear Jack and Chester, engaged in a loud argument. Dr. Kallman banged on the door and insisted they leave, but they ignored him for nearly an hour before departing.
Dr. Kallman was furious with his son, not only for trespassing but especially for having betrayed Wystan. Jack might be younger and more attractive, he insisted, but Chester would never find another friend like Auden. The dentist may have had in mind the convenience of Auden’s financial support and the prestige of his name, but it was also clear to him that few men were likely to have Chester’s best interests at heart to the extent that Auden did.
Edward Kallman’s efforts were fruitless; at twenty, Chester wasn’t looking for a friend. He wanted passion of the sort he no longer felt for Auden. Craving drama, he also found himself attracted to the idea of being fought over by the two men who loved him. Once he was won, he wanted to be punished for having made the winner suffer. Love, pain, and punishment were frequently linked in the poetry carefully printed in his lined notebooks: “O my love and punishment, where are you?” and “Speak louder. I can’t hear you. Don’t be afraid / You’ll hurt me; nobody’s home . . .” He had, a friend later wrote, a longing to be mastered.
Kallman waited to make his move until the day Jack’s ship was to depart. The two young men had arranged to meet at a nearby bar before Jack had to go aboard. There Kallman finally confessed the identity of his other lover. Barker reacted with shock and anger. Auden—the famous poet who had generously welcomed him to New York, whose poetry he had admired, whom he hoped to impress and perhaps even befriend—was the last person he wished to harm. In an instant, Kallman was transformed in Jack Barker’s imagination from a passionate, seductive angel to a trickster into whose trap he had fallen. Struggling with the news, Barker declared that Kallman must tell Auden the truth or he would never see him again.
Barker’s ship departed for Glasgow, leaving Kallman behind on the Brooklyn docks. Never before, perhaps, had the young man felt so abandoned and isolated. But it was also likely that he had never before felt so alive.
The house at 7 Middagh Street resembled no other house on the block.
George Davis was “the one editor associated with the stratosphere of literature,” according to Gore Vidal. “If he’d worked for the Reader’s Digest, we would have all aimed for there too.”
“I am at the moment in all the . . . discomforts of housemoving,” Wystan Auden wrote to a friend.
Auden wrote after meeting Chester Kallman, “I am mad with happiness.”
This view of New York Harbor and lower M
anhattan had already inspired literary works by Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Thomas Wolfe.
Klaus Mann hoped to turn 7 Middagh Street into an international center for political activism and “a diffuse but lusty literary life.”
Gypsy Rose Lee dreamed of becoming a writer, but show business was in her blood.
Louis MacNeice described the house full of artists as “ever so Bohemian, raiding the icebox at midnight and eating the catfood by mistake.”
Wystan Auden and Erika Mann met just before their wedding in 1935 and soon became friends.
Auden and Benjamin Britten hoped to express their own idea of America in their opera, Paul Bunyan.
“Living is quite pleasant here when it is not too exciting,” wrote Britten shortly after his arrival at 7 Middagh Street with the tenor Peter Pears.
George Davis wrote, “The house in Brooklyn is a symbol for me . . . it’s a risk, it’s a gamble with myself and others.”
Gypsy’s novel, The G-String Murders, made copious use of such professional burlesque terms as “pickle persuader,” “grouch bag,” and “gazeeka box.”
The house became a destination for many sailors whose ships were docked at the bottom of the hill.
Oliver Smith, the future Broadway set designer and producer, tended the furnace, washed the dishes, and soothed the tempers of both residents and visitors.
“He wrote music and was mysterious and sinister,” Jane Bowles said of her first meeting with her husband. “I said to a friend, ‘He’s my enemy.’”
Paul Bowles shared his room with a larger-than-life cardboard cutout of Gypsy Rose Lee.
Gala Dalí guarded her husband, Salvador, with what he called “the petrifying saliva of her fanatical devotion.”
Richard Wright, an admirer of McCullers’s work, moved to Middagh Street with his wife, Ellen, and their daughter in 1942.
Following the death of her first husband, the composer Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya married George Davis and, with his help, built an illustrious singing career.
For years after the house at 7 Middagh Street was destroyed, the lives of George Davis and Carson McCullers remained intimately entwined.
Part III
The House of Genius
MARCH–DECEMBER, 1941
Once we could have made the docks,
Now it is too late to fly;
Once too often you and I
Did what we should not have done;
Round the rampant rugged rocks
Rude and ragged rascals run.
—W. H. Auden, “Domesday Song”
8
Can we make wounds beautiful?
The tiger at the window smiles.
—Paul Bowles, “Scene VIII,” 1940
“We’ve got a roast and two veg, salad and savory, and there will be no political discussion,” Auden announced to the Middagh Street residents as they took their places at the dining room table. The news had become too awful to contemplate, much less discuss. In the wake of Roosevelt’s signing the Lend-Lease Bill in mid-March, London had endured one of its most punishing night raids since the beginning of the war. Already that year, nearly thirty thousand civilians had been killed. London had become a city of wailing sirens, drifting smoke, dead buried beneath piles of rubble. As the RAF struck back against its enemies, Berlin would come to look much the same. In Poland, the deadline had arrived for Jews to enter Krakow’s walled ghetto. Yugoslavia, surrounded on all sides by Axis powers, would soon be carved up and parceled out among its enemies.
Europe was caught in a nightmare of its own making, suffering the consequences of decisions made in thousands of forgotten instances in thousands of individual hearts and minds. The hellish conditions that resulted were beyond the ability of anyone at 7 Middagh to control. Better, Auden felt, to focus on how best to build a new civilization from the detritus washed up on America’s shores.
But focus became increasingly difficult to maintain as the fear and anxiety infecting the outside world seeped into the house during those last muddy weeks of winter. Britten in particular found it impossible to ignore the broadcasts of air attacks on London as he prepared for the Carnegie Hall debut of his Sinfonia da Requiem. The symphony, influenced by Mahler, had been his most ambitious and most intimate expression to date of his grief and revulsion over the war. Proud as he was of his artistic accomplishment, the act of reviewing its three movements—a “slow marching lament,” a frenzied “Dance of Death,” and a concluding expression of final peace, as he described them—could only heighten his intense uneasiness over the welfare of his loved ones in England. It was discomfiting, too, to know that most of the American audience would listen in complacent ignorance of the emotional state that had inspired the composition. The performance, scheduled to be broadcast to nine million listeners on Carnegie Hall’s weekly radio program, felt, Britten wrote to a friend, “rather like those awful dreams where one parades about the place naked.”
Nor did the work on Paul Bunyan provide much relief. Rehearsals had begun and were quite exciting for the most part, as Britten and Auden met the cast and watched their ideas take shape onstage. But even now, the opera remained very much a work-in-progress: Auden continued to make changes that required new music, even though Britten was already working night and day to complete the score. It had become clear, too, that not only had some of the leads had no musical training, at least one was completely tone-deaf. While Britten scrambled to cut the nonsinger’s solos and create new numbers for those who could sing, the director, Milton Smith, confronted Auden over the issue of the opera’s tone.
Smith understood that Auden’s interest in the opera was a way of conveying his view of America as civilization’s newest experiment, in which its human population, free to do almost anything it likes, must devise a reliable new rationale to guide its actions. This idea was expressed clearly and entertainingly through the story of Paul Bunyan’s transformation of virgin forest into urban centers with hotels, schools, movie studios, and government bureaucracies. The trouble was, in Smith’s opinion, that these “Ideas” of Auden’s had begun to outweigh the plot. The opera had begun to resemble more a strung-together series of tableaux vivants, each illustrating a separate theme, than a convincing and captivating story. What the work needed was more drama, more action, Smith insisted. Bunyan did, after all, according to legend, have an exciting life.
Auden objected that most of the elements of the Paul Bunyan tale, such as his growing six inches a day as a child, fighting the Indians, and battling and killing something called a whirling whimpus, would be impossible to stage. He had already agreed to solve this problem by writing several Ballad Interludes in which a guitar-strumming narrator would sing of Bunyan’s exploits between scenes. He refused to compromise, however, when it came to the conclusion. There, following the grand, upbeat Christmas Feast number, in which each lead character announced his decision regarding the direction of his life, Auden had added a prolonged Litany—Paul Bunyan’s solemn prayer for America as he prepared to move on with Babe, his blue ox, to other worlds. The festive atmosphere dissipated as Bunyan acknowledged sympathetically that “All but heroes are unnerved / When life and love must be deserved,” but he expressed the hope that his American friends would somehow be saved from the “Pressure Group that says I am the Constitution, / From those who say Patriotism and mean Persecution,” from “entertainments neither true nor beautiful nor witty . . . / From the dirty-mindedness of a Watch Committee,” and from other pitfalls likely to befall any modern democracy.
Finally, following this prayer, Inkslinger, the opera’s intellectual, asked: “Paul, who are you?”
Paul Bunyan replied:
Where the night becomes the day,
Where the dream becomes the fact,
I am the Eternal Guest,
I am Way,
I am Act.
And so the opera ended, in silence. Britten, adaptable as always, had composed a moving accompaniment that conveyed the sincerity of Auden’
s message. But Smith was disappointed by such a somber conclusion. He pleaded with Auden for a more upbeat, patriotic finale. “I don’t want to sound like John Latouche,” Auden snapped, and Bunyan’s final speech remained in place.
Auden’s gruff attitude toward Latouche and his thirteen-minute tribute to Democracy, Ballad for Americans, may have derived from the continued presence of the handsome, urbane lyricist as part of the group that had coalesced around Jane and Paul Bowles. It seemed at times that the group of dynamic theatrical writers and composers, which included Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein, had taken over the parlor, filling the house with American-accented conversation and laughter and making Auden, Britten, and even Pears appear the odd men out.
While Britten’s talent allowed him to socialize with the Americans and even maintain a friendship with the amiable Copland, their collective presence increased the sense of alienation that always threatened to overtake him in the United States. Not only were these other musicians united in their nationality, but most were also former acolytes of the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris—a powerful musical mentor of whose overwhelming influence Britten privately disapproved. Auden, apparently responding to the group’s insularity, had been heard to grumble that forty-three-year-old Virgil Thomson, who played the middle-aged guru to the group, reminded him of “one of those intimidating English butlers.” Britten confided to his sister later that spring his belief that “I am definitely disliked (a) because I am English (no music ever came out of England) (b) because I’m not American (everything is nationalistic) (c) because I get quite a lot of performances (d) because I wasn’t educated in Paris—etc. etc.”
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