Jane Bowles freely adorned Two Serious Ladies with personalities, settings, and miscellaneous details plucked directly from her own life. The rural shack, the hotel in Panama, the grim urban apartments, and Miss Goering’s inherited house—all could be easily recognized as homes Jane had occupied or visited while working on her book. Many of her daily experiences, too, became part of her fiction. Early in the story, for example, Goering asks a new acquaintance, Miss Gamelon, what she does for a living. “Not very much, I’m afraid. I’ve been typing manuscripts for famous authors all my life,” responds the character—in words provided by an author who spent her mornings typing W. H. Auden’s dictation—“but there doesn’t seem to be much demand for authors any more unless maybe they are doing their own typing.”
The name Gamelon intriguingly evoked the musical obsession of the Bowleses’ good friend and Middagh Street habitué, Colin McPhee, and John Latouche served as the physical model, at least, for a character whom Goering would befriend at a party. “Goering” had been plucked from the newspapers. Mrs. Copperfield’s husband, playfully referred to by the initials J.C., resembled Paul Bowles, with his lust for all things exotic and his cool acceptance of his wife’s strange behavior. By placing Paul in her fiction, Jane was able to express without inhibition both her strong attraction and her underlying fear of her husband.
In her novel as in her life, Jane Bowles used a charming quirkiness—a feminine pretense that the ideas she presented were not of any real gravity but only a pretty and amusing game—to conceal a powerful and wholly original moral sensibility that corresponded in many ways to Auden’s overt approach to similar issues. The thirty-four-year-old Protestant poet and the twenty-four-year-old Jewish writer had continued their discussions of Kafka’s novels. Both agreed that his heroes dramatized the difficulty of maintaining religious faith in modern times, even while seeking salvation. Men today could no longer hide from themselves the arbitrariness of the god they chose to worship, Auden claimed, and yet to lose faith in that object was to be damned. This was precisely the idea that Jane had tried to evoke in her story of Mrs. Copperfield and Christina Goering. Klaus Mann, who had written the introduction to the new edition of Amerika that Auden had reviewed, later described Kafka as “hypnotized by the problem of Original Sin,” searching “all hiding places and dingy corners of the Ghetto for the name of the crime that he committed. What is my guilt? Who is my Judge? Where will the Trial take place? . . . My God, why has thou forsaken me?” The heroines of Two Serious Ladies ask the same questions, though not in so many words.
Paul Bowles, listening to Auden and his wife talk at the dinner table, disagreed with their approach to Kafka’s work as a religious quest. “But that’s nonsense,” he objected. “Why can’t they just be marvelous inventions, great novels?” The interruption annoyed Jane, who felt gratified to have found someone—and someone so important—who took her writing seriously rather than laughing as had her other friends. Already, during their typing sessions, she and Auden had discussed a wide variety of related issues and found that they held common views toward marriage as a spiritual and even religious commitment. Auden even seemed to approve of, or at least enjoy, all the little fears, anxieties, and other neuroses that had plagued Jane all her life and that Paul found simply puzzling.
“A neurosis is a guardian angel,” Auden had written in his review of Kafka; “to become ill is to take vows.” To Jane, such a statement must have felt like a benediction. It was little wonder then that, on hearing her husband object to a religious interpretation of the author she so strongly resembled, she snapped impatiently, “Oh, get back in your cage, Bupple,” before turning back to continue her conversation with Auden.
Paul Bowles’s measles finally lifted, only to be followed by the flu. Confined again to bed, Paul had time to observe his wife’s growing enthusiasm for her novel and her sense that after more than two years of fruitless struggle, she was finally making progress. Sitting with Paul while he ate the delicious meals she brought up on a tray, Jane described the details of her characters’ experience and the problems she was having in their development. Listening, Paul gradually found himself caught up in her enthusiasm, and even began to entertain thoughts of perhaps returning to writing fiction himself. Bowles had published poems before—in such well-respected journals as transition in Paris—and had become a part of Gertrude Stein’s circle for a brief period. But the previous summer, he had dropped the idea of continuing as a serious writer because, he claimed, the world was too complex and life too mysterious for him to ever communicate his view of it in a way that a reader might understand.
But Jane, it seemed, never worried about translating her worldview into a normal vernacular—she simply wrote down whatever ideas and images came into her head. Just as her sensibility tended toward a “natural” form of surrealism, in which the barrier between interior thought and exterior reality frequently ceased to exist, so her work habits seemed to echo the surrealist literary method of writing down words without thinking in order to bypass the strictures of the conscious mind. Paul’s interest had always lain with the primitive mind—the private myths that lurked beneath the conscious thoughts and actions of everyday life but that directed them in profound ways. He could see possibilities in the idea of creating his own Kafkaesque story of a spiritual quest—a quest that would be in no way religious.
It would be years before Paul fully acted on his impulse. Now he confined himself to taking a proprietary interest in Jane’s writing. The more deeply Jane fell under Auden’s intellectual spell, the more resentful Paul became. Cool as he appeared to those who did not know him well, Paul was fiercely possessive of his wife. These feelings had established themselves in the first weeks of their marriage when, after what he considered an idyllic honeymoon in Panama, they had continued on to Paris. There, Jane had friends whom Paul disliked, and so she decided to go out with them alone—often not returning until three in the morning. “It was painful for me to go back to the hotel room at dinnertime and find that she had not yet come in,” Paul wrote, “finally to have dinner alone and rush back to find the room still empty. And Jane was not one to change as a result of my suggestions.” Jealous and angry, Paul finally left her alone in Paris and continued on to St.-Tropez. Once there, he regretted his action and sent for her, but the pattern reasserted itself elsewhere. The previous spring, Paul even struck her during an argument over a party she had held during his absence in their room at the Chelsea Hotel. Instantly horrified by his action, which reminded him of his abusive father, Paul begged Jane’s forgiveness, and she was quick to forgive him. But, although their marriage continued with its former expressions of personal devotion, Jane was afraid to spend much time alone with Paul and refused to continue sexual relations with him.
Now, Jane appeared to be abandoning Paul, not physically or sexually, but in the realm of her creative imagination—sharing her ideas and experiencing her creative development with Auden instead. This felt to Paul even more threatening than a romantic affair. His resentment over Auden’s perceived intellectual seduction of his wife mixed, as he lay brooding in bed, with residual anger over his banishment to the basement with his piano and with his characteristic resentment of the kinds of rules Auden had tried to impose on the household.
As soon as he was able to stagger downstairs for meals, Paul began to fight back against this authority figure who had interfered with his marriage, his work, and his personal life. Reenacting his adolescent rebellion against his father, he began baiting Auden at every opportunity—offering, for example, a Stalinist interpretation of every topic of conversation that was introduced in defiance of the rule against political discussion. Paul also objected loudly and frequently to Jane’s increased drinking as well as to her new habit of taking Benzedrine tablets, like Auden, to increase her productivity. Auden and the others around the table soon learned the truth of Gertrude Stein’s remark, made years earlier in Paris, that Paul Bowles was “delightful and sensible in summ
er but neither delightful nor sensible in winter.” This pattern continued, particularly when he was sick and on a deadline, and feared losing his wife’s allegiance.
All of these pressures—the approaching deadline for Paul Bunyan, the bleak war news and the criticism from England, the disturbing presence of the Dalís and the rest of the mixed group surrounding the Bowleses, and now the annoying, gadfly behavior of Paul—proved nearly too much for Auden that spring. Even the weather seemed designed to break his concentration as temperatures swung wildly between a bitter chill and the kind of sweltering heat that he happened to particularly loathe. Worst of all, it appears likely that Kallman chose this time to tell Auden of his affair with Jack Barker.
Kallman was never one to avoid an opportunity for drama when it presented itself. As Barker himself later wrote, “It was Chester’s nature to create jealousy, misery, and rage in his lovers. He would cuckold them to their faces.” Certainly, he made it difficult for Auden to continue to blind himself to his betrayals. And this last betrayal seemed, by all appearances, a final one. Chester Kallman, a Brooklyn student who had always privately considered his affair with the famous poet “utterly fantastic,” had chosen to end the fantasy and begin his real life.
But to Auden the relationship was more than a fantasy—more than a love affair. It was the basis on which he had begun to build a new way of thinking and an entirely new direction in his creative work. This new direction, in turn, was his justification for not having returned to serve in England and his private defense against the barrage of criticism from both enemies and friends. For the past few months, “marriage” to Kallman had become, Auden believed, the only path through which he could ever hope to achieve spiritual salvation—a belief bolstered and informed by his deepening friendship with Reinhold Niebuhr.
Auden simply could not imagine losing Kallman, and his lover’s betrayal threatened to destroy him. As the time leading up to the premiere of Paul Bunyan turned from weeks into days and the rush to compose songs, complete the score, and make other last-minute adjustments grew more frantic, Auden lashed out at the person in the house he considered the most expendable.
Coming across Paul Bowles in an upstairs corridor one evening, Auden paused and announced casually, “I shall be requiring your room over the weekend.” Paul, taken aback, replied that he was still weak from the measles and flu and had intended to stay in bed that weekend. As though he hadn’t heard, Auden insisted, “I have a friend coming from Michigan and he will go into your room.”
As Auden continued down the stairs, Bowles, incensed, remained where he was. Of course, Auden knew he had kept his studio around the corner from Middagh Street, but it was unheated, and the composer was too ill to stay there. This unwarranted eviction, coming from nowhere, Bowles felt, was just like the attacks from his father that he had sworn he would never experience again. Running down the stairs, he confronted Auden and said he had no intention of leaving the house—he was not giving up his room for anyone, for any reason. At this, Auden went very white, hesitated, then turned on his heel and stormed out of the house, slamming the door violently behind him.
As promised, Bowles did not leave the house for a moment that weekend. He remained defiant, challenging Auden’s authority whenever the opportunity arose. The feud between the two men continued for some days, to the extreme discomfort of the rest of the household. George Davis backed Auden’s decision, however, and in the end Paul and Jane Bowles had no choice but to move out. The rupture was as complete as it was unnecessary. Closely as Paul Bowles and W. H. Auden would circle each other in cultural arenas for the rest of their lives, they did not speak again for twenty years.
“Many people have the experience of feeling physically soiled and humiliated by life,” Auden had written in his review of Roethke’s Open House that winter: “some quickly put it out of their mind, others float narcissistically on its unimportant details; but both to remember and to transform the humiliation into something beautiful . . . is rare.”
For more than a decade, Auden had tried to transform his own daily “humiliations” into something worthwhile—to evoke and analyze his sometimes amusing, sometimes difficult, but always human development in poetry and prose. But now, for the first time since he had begun writing poetry at the age of fifteen, he was unsure how to proceed.
In the final days before the opening of Paul Bunyan, Auden added some lines to the end of Act I—a good-night speech for the mythical giant to deliver to his people. “For the saint must descend into Hell,” Bunyan intoned, “that his order may be tested by its disorder.” And he added, as the people of America drifted off to sleep:
Dear Children, trust the night and have faith in tomorrow,
That these hours of ambiguity and indecision may be also
the hours of healing.
Then Auden found he had nothing more to say. For three months—April, May, and June of 1941—the poet who claimed that “unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day, I feel ill,” failed to complete a single poem.
9
Joseph, Mary, pray for those
Misled by moonlight and the rose . . .
—W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being,” 1941–42
One day in April, seventy-five thousand tea bags drifted down from the sky onto the fields and cities of occupied Holland. Dropped by Britain’s RAF forces, they carried the message “Holland will arise. Keep your courage up.”
In the cool, breezy days of a Brooklyn Heights spring, it seemed possible to hope for an upturn in one’s personal fortunes as well. Neighborhood children, cooped up all winter, exploded out onto the sidewalks and into the blooming gardens and parks. Their shrieks and laughter, carried on the sea air past Benjamin Britten as he hurried from Middagh Street to the subway station, may have spurred memories of his own happy childhood in the seaside fishing village of Lowestoft, in Suffolk.
Britten always felt most homesick for England in the spring, but this year he had little time for nostalgia. The premiere of his Sinfonia da Requiem at Carnegie Hall had gone well, with an appreciative audience and a national radio broadcast, although it received scant critical attention. A brief reference in the New York Herald Tribune called the symphony “promising and frequently eloquent”; the New York Times merely mentioned that the performance had occurred.
Britten, however, continued to believe that the symphony was his best work yet. He had been further encouraged to learn that an April performance of his Violin Concerto by the London Philharmonic—the first British presentation of his new work in nearly a year—had enjoyed even greater success. The praise he received for a concerto composed in America might surely serve as a good omen for Paul Bunyan’s future. Privately, Britten had to acknowledge that the opera needed all the good omens it could get. With opening night just days away, he had only recently completed the music for the Narrator’s between-scene ballads—by inviting the actor over to 7 Middagh Street and knocking out a lead sheet for him on the spot. Even now, each rehearsal brought forth a deluge of suggestions—for new cuts, additions, or improvisations—as cast and crew struggled to complete their work in a short time.
Somehow, despite the chaos, a poster had been designed, a program printed, and Auden had even submitted an essay, “Opera on an American Legend,” describing the challenges of portraying the Paul Bunyan story onstage, to the New York Times for its May 4 Sunday edition.
“Everything in this country is valued by publicity. God, how I hate it all,” Britten had written to a friend the year before. “I always make a resolution never to attend any more first performances—it is terrifying, & I make everyone all round me uncomfortable, by feeling sick, having diarrhoea, & sweating like a pig!” But on the night of the preview, he joined the sizable audience at Brander Matthews Hall along with Auden, Pears, the Mayers, and an assortment of other friends. The audience seemed eager to hear what Britain’s most famous young poet and one of its most promising new composers had to say ab
out their country. The first notes of Britten’s magnificent Prologue made a promising beginning as the curtain rose on the Chorus of Old Trees:
Since the birth
Of the earth
Time has gone
On and on:
Rivers saunter,
Rivers run,
Till they enter
The enormous level sea
Where they prefer to be.
From this hymnlike beginning, the opera carried its audience on America’s mythical journey, from the appearance of the Blue Moon that signaled Paul Bunyan’s arrival to the importation of ambitious lumberjacks from Europe’s hinterlands, to the tilling of the land and the creation of cities, corporations, and government organizations that typified modern American civilization. To Britten’s and Auden’s relief, the audience seemed to appreciate the opera’s exuberant style, laughing frequently at Auden’s silly jokes and satirical jabs and applauding Britten’s solo compositions. Despite the occasional bungling of the underrehearsed cast and the awkwardness of the university stage, the overall performance managed to convey both the creators’ fascination with America and their concerns for its future. Britten could already see that some cuts needed to be made even before the next day’s premiere, but if the audience’s response was any indication, there seemed reason to hope that Paul Bunyan would survive its initiation. Britten and Auden received congratulations after the show and awaited the critical response.
The critics were not kind. Olin Downes, the much-feared music reviewer for the New York Times, acknowledged in his review on May 6 that the opera was burdened with amateur singers and insufficient time for rehearsals. Nevertheless, he wrote, while Britten was “a very clever young man, who can provide something in any style or taste,” his work in this case was disappointingly shallow and inconsistent. “As for Mr. Auden, we had expected better of him,” Downes continued. While one may not expect an English poet to inject a very American tone into the Paul Bunyan legend, “we had a right to hope for something from him that would have a consistently developed purpose. Whereas his libretto, like the music, seems to wander from one to another idea, without conviction or cohesion . . . It seems a rather poor sort of a bid for success, and possibly the beguilement of Americans.”
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