The comments of Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles’s friend at the New York Herald Tribune, were even more negative. In a review headlined “Music-Theatrical Flop,” he wrote that “‘Paul Bunyan’ has, as dramatic literature, no shape and very little substance . . . it exists, if at all, by style alone. How much the Auden style is worth on paper is a question this reviewer leaves willingly to the literary world. On the stage it has always been a flop. It is flaccid and spineless and without energy.” Britten’s work was “sort of witty at its best,” Thomson wrote. “Otherwise it is undistinguished.” But, he added acidly, “What any composer thinks he can do with a text like ‘Paul Bunyan’ is beyond me. It offers no characters and no plot. It is presumably, therefore, an allegory or a morality; and as either it is, I assure you, utterly obscure and tenuous . . . I never did figure out the theme.”
Certainly, the opera needed work, but the critics’ negative judgments, Thomson’s in particular, appeared out of proportion to the production. Perhaps the reviewers were unaware of Paul Bunyan’s lengthy, circuitous development from school production to Broadway extravaganza to amateur college production—and so were insulted by its ingenuous, sometimes even adolescent “American” tone. Whatever the reason behind the attacks, they effectively killed Britten’s and Auden’s hopes for a Broadway production. There was some talk of refashioning the opera for a performance at the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood that summer, but these plans, too, came to nothing.
Most disappointing for Britten was that this initial, headfirst dive into the American musical theater—a genre he had long admired and to which he had hoped to contribute—had been interpreted as derivative, a shallow mimicry of such composers as Blitzstein, Copland, and Weill. Again, he was being censured for his adaptability at the expense of a strong individual style. It was the very type of comment he had hoped to leave behind in England.
George Davis, who had recently taken a new assignment as theater critic for Decision, may have been seeking revenge for this insult to his housemates when he attacked two new plays for which Paul Bowles had composed the music, even though both plays had already closed. Liberty Jones was a “lisping, whimsical stinker of a play that should have been booed and booted out of a miserable, peaked existence on its opening night,” he wrote, and the Twelfth Night revival was “almost deliberately inept.” Bowles had also provided the music for Lillian Hellman’s new Watch on the Rhine, which received rave reviews, but George wrote, “There were panicky moments for me . . . when I might have found no word for the horror and cruelty of life, when my soul might have paused agonized and silent; but in the nick of time there were words aplenty, oh yes . . . No, I’ll stick to my guns; I’ll see no masterpiece in ‘Watch on the Rhine.’ As theatre, it passes, as they say, the time.”
If these were intended as personal attacks, they missed their mark. Paul and Jane Bowles were long gone, having landed on their feet with a $2,500 Guggenheim grant awarded to Paul for composing a first opera. Virgil Thomson had also offered Paul a job as the assistant music critic on the New York Herald Tribune—a position he would soon accept. But for now, with Pastorela finished and a bank account filled with grant money and theater income, he was preparing to return to Mexico with Jane. Although she would revise her novel considerably before it was finished, her time at 7 Middagh Street had given her the confidence she needed to proceed with the work. Meanwhile, Paul continued to develop his own reawakened ideas regarding fiction. Over the next five years, he published a series of experimental short stories, usually featuring characters in a state of psychological disintegration, before finishing his first novel, The Sheltering Sky.
Regarding Paul Bunyan’s critics, Elizabeth Mayer advised Britten from Long Island, “Let them stew in their own juice, and go on working.” The young composer did his best to comply, discussing with Auden ways to strengthen the opera’s dramatic line in case of a second production. But these discussions soon petered out; Auden seemed distracted—dogmatic in the extreme, as one observer remarked, and “full of ideas about moral character and what-not”—and Britten was utterly exhausted. Paul Bunyan had required more time and energy than he had ever anticipated, and the negative response had sapped his remaining strength. As an artist who was always highly sensitive to criticism, he felt publicly shamed by these bad reviews in a country not his own—nearly as “physically soiled and humiliated by life” in his own way, perhaps, as Auden had felt the month before.
Britten continued to go through the motions—performing a two-piano recital with Colin McPhee and traveling to Long Island to conduct a series of concerts by his amateur orchestra. But it was clear that he had reached his emotional limit the evening he stepped onto the stage of the Suffolk County concert hall to find a nearly empty room—the audience significantly smaller than the orchestra they had come to hear. Britten’s host, David Rothman, later recalled that Britten’s eyes filled with tears at this show of American apathy to Europe’s musical culture. A moment later, however, he turned his back on the room, faced his enthusiastic little orchestra, and raised his baton.
As was often the case during Britten’s stay in America, Peter Pears provided the consolation and hope that he needed to go on. In May, Britten conducted Les Illuminations, his settings of Rimbaud’s poems, for broadcast over CBS Radio. It was a particularly important event for both musicians, serving as the American premiere of the song cycle as a whole and as Pears’s first public performance of the work after a winter of preparation. A surviving recording demonstrates that by now Pears had begun to develop the unique sound and vocal technique that eventually made him one of Britain’s best-known singers. These qualities, springing forth naturally from his personality, particularly suited Britten’s emerging style.
Despite the disappointment of the Long Island concerts, Britten still relished the opportunities to spend time with the Rothmans and, as the weather turned warmer, to join them on weekend outings to the beach.
The windy coastline near Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, reminded Britten of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, an old fishing village not far from his childhood home. Like Montauk, Aldeburgh was dominated by shrieking seagulls and roaring waves, and its traditions were rooted in many generations of fishermen’s culture. Shortly before leaving England, Britten had bought and restored an old mill house in Snape, a quaint old village down the road from Aldeburgh, and set up a studio in its small tower. He had loved the peace and isolation of his country home and enjoyed his long walks through the surrounding marshlands, but his heart lay with the fishing boats and rattling shale beaches of Aldeburgh.
Now, walking along the beach as the Long Island fishing boats returned to shore, Britten reviewed the events of the previous hard winter. In retrospect and with Pears’s sympathetic agreement, he could now admit to himself that the sort of wild ride on which Auden had taken him was not his style. As sincerely as he admired Auden’s intellect, awed as he was by his enormous talent, Britten simply did not want to create operas by racing to catch up with a manic librettist and then jamming bits of music and lyrics together at the last minute to try to build a coherent story. Nor did he want to presume to interpret the history of a country he hardly knew, much less understood. Most certainly, he was no longer prepared to live in the state of ridiculous squalor into which 7 Middagh Street had fallen. Pears, who had worked double shifts through the winter, copying out parts for the opera in addition to his own musical activities, reinforced Britten’s growing sense that it was time to find a new direction.
Change presented itself in the form of an invitation from Rae Robertson and Ethel Bartlett, the pair of British pianists who had performed some of Britten’s work that year, to spend the summer with them in their cottage in Escondido, California. The couple, whom Britten and Pears privately called “the little Owls” for their comically small stature, seemed amiable enough and certainly unlikely to impose their personal foibles on Britten and Pears, as the residents of 7 Middagh Street had done. Pears, knowing that Britte
n had hoped to compose for Hollywood films when he arrived in America, pressed for the visit, and Britten soon agreed that it seemed a good idea. After all, Isherwood—another pacifist—seemed to have created a stable life for himself on the West Coast, with a studio contract to boot, as had Aldous Huxley. Even Thomas Mann had left Princeton and joined the western expatriate colony that spring, accompanied by his brother Heinrich and other members of his large family. When Britten received a commission from a California patron to compose a string quartet for performance in Los Angeles in September, the visit to California seemed preordained.
At the end of May, as President Roosevelt delivered another Fireside Chat in which he continued to vacillate on the issue of war, and as U-boats continued to sink ships in the Atlantic and bombs continued to fall on England, Britten and Pears said good-bye to the bedbugs of 7 Middagh Street—and a friendly good-bye to a dispirited Auden—and set out for California in an old Ford V8. Perhaps they would find the fulfilling work they had hoped for out west. After all, as became increasingly clear on their cross-country trek through Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and the Mojave Desert, this was America, and anything could happen.
“We meant to tell you to take the bottle of Château La Tour which was sitting in the clothes closet at Middagh Street,” Pears wrote to Elizabeth Mayer from the road. “Perhaps Wystan will have found it. If not, drink it together when you are next with him.” Mayer, bereft at having lost her surrogate sons to Hollywood—along with her real son, Michael, to the draft—was eager for any excuse to spend time with Auden. But she was distressed to find, when she stopped by to collect the clothes, papers, and other belongings that “her boys” had carelessly left behind, that the house that had been bursting with activity a few months before now appeared virtually abandoned as summer approached, almost as dilapidated as when George Davis first discovered it. Auden was, as always, glad to see Elizabeth and willing to discuss his latest projects—including, this month, a review of de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World. But while to new acquaintances, such as the New Yorker poetry critic Louise Bogan, Auden could still provide “a grand evening crammed with Insights and Autopsies and Great Simple Thoughts and Deep Intuitions,” Mayer knew the poet well enough to worry over his new air of weariness and distraction. That month, he had delivered a lecture at the University of Michigan, “The Loneliness of the Individual,” standing before the packed auditorium in his wrinkled white linen suit, his accent so thick that the students couldn’t understand a word. And for once he offered no new poems and no amusing asides for his audience to repeat and savor.
George’s mood seemed to echo Auden’s as the weather in Brooklyn turned warm. “I do become terribly depressed, especially in the spring,” he had once written to his parents. “Oh, you understand, when everything seems new, and accomplishment is far below ambition.” By June, he had given up any remaining expectation, or desire, to return to a full-time position at Harper’s Bazaar. Even his freelance commitments brought him into frequent conflict with the day-to-day demands of magazine production, and though George and Carmel Snow continued to respect each other’s talents, George had become convinced, as he wrote to Gypsy, that “she wants me . . . only if I crawl back, and take my drudgery henceforth and like it.” As that was not a situation Davis would accept, Mary Louise Aswell’s name appeared as fiction editor in the magazine’s June issue. George intended to look for a job elsewhere in a few months. Now, however, a new influx of old friends was expected from Europe—including the writer Kay Boyle, the heiress and editor Nancy Cunard, and the artists Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, and Max Ernst—and George was busy with plans to entertain these new refugees on Middagh Street. He was also tending to Carson McCullers, now back in New York but preparing to depart for a summer at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Carson had returned to the city with Reeves in April, her health still precarious and her nerves on edge. At first, she had tried to live again as Reeves’s wife in the apartment on West Eleventh Street. Both partners hoped that, now that Reeves had found a job and Carson’s work was going well, they could reestablish a good relationship. But it did not take long for them to return to the habits of the previous summer. Reeves was still drinking heavily, and Carson had begun treating her cough with cough syrup containing codeine—even as she continued to sip sherry throughout the day and indulge a new taste for bourbon in the evenings. As a result, their arguments began again, punctuated with cruel taunts and occasional outbursts of violence. By May, they had retreated to separate beds, and Carson had announced that she would no longer have sexual relations with her husband on the grounds of ill health. At the same time, she frequently went out alone at night, sometimes failing to return until the next day. Reeves began going out as well, cruising the bars for new partners.
In the midst of this turmoil, Carson was introduced by her friend Muriel Rukeyser to the composer David Diamond. Carson, in awe of all composers, was drawn to Diamond as she had been to Britten—but in this case a personal chemistry manifested itself and the two initiated a friendship that quickly intensified. Carson was pleased when Diamond, sensitive, romantic, and only twenty-five, gave her the ring that he happened to be wearing the first night they met. She was less pleased when he appeared to be attracted to Reeves as well.
This pattern had already established itself with Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach the summer before: Carson sought relief from her marriage in an intense infatuation with another artist—and was once again overcome with jealousy as the object of her love also formed a friendship with Reeves. With a new prize to fight over, Carson and Reeves’s battles grew more vicious, leaving the gentle Diamond to wonder what he had stepped into as he struggled to make peace between them. Janet Flanner, a friend of the composer’s as well as Carson’s, advised Diamond to avoid them during this period of mutual destructiveness. But Diamond seemed irresistibly drawn to the triangular friendship, even as his new friends’ alcoholic life encroached on his own productivity.
As before, Carson fled to George Davis for comfort. Despite the subdued atmosphere at Middagh Street that May, it was refreshing to spend time again with the group whose work was now appearing, almost as a unit, in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Decision. If the “we of me” sense of communion that Carson craved was difficult to maintain with Diamond and Reeves, she could always experience it by sharing a cocktail and a cigarette with George Davis, Auden, and Klaus Mann at the table in the overgrown rear garden at Middagh Street. It was comforting to listen to George affectionately prod Colin McPhee to stop worrying about his block against writing music and instead to write a book about the amazing life he had experienced on the island of Bali. George had already noted McPhee’s stylish and perceptive writing in the many pieces of music criticism that the composer had written for the American journal Modern Music. George believed that his account of having built and lived in a traditional house in an idyllic Balinese village would attract a respectable readership and might even increase interest in McPhee’s real obsession, Balinese music. The composer “huffed and puffed” when George pushed him on the issue, but the encouragement persuaded McPhee to apply for and win a place at Yaddo that summer along with Carson.
Carson was pleased, too, to learn that Klaus Mann had reviewed her novella Reflections in a Golden Eye in the same May issue of Decision in which Gertrude Stein’s Ida and Auden’s Double Man were discussed. Klaus had in fact created for his review a delightful imaginary dialogue between young Carson, “capering about like a nervous imp,” and the “well-preserved aunt” Gertrude Stein, carried on as they strolled together through the “amazing scenery of their capricious imaginations.” In this fictional exchange, Carson, “wavering and intense, oversensitive, savage, charming and corruptible,” paused during their walk and whispered, “The air is full of sordid mysteries”—at which Stein advised her to stop trying to appear sophisticated and to stick to writing “about savage things. New things. Sad things . . . A
merican things. Not this nineteenth century stuff. With the garden shears! Many things happened to [my] Ida. Dear Ida. But nothing that ridiculous. Naturally not.” Klaus made sure that his fictional Stein concluded with the advice: “You’d better be careful, or you will go astray . . . You are a poet, Carson McCullers. So if you destroy yourself, you destroy a poet. You deprive the twentieth century of a bit of poetry—if you destroy yourself.”
Many of Carson’s friends had begun to worry a great deal, particularly after her stroke, about her continued heavy drinking and irregular habits. But her only hope of escaping such self-destructive behavior lay in writing, and at 7 Middagh Street she could at least find the creative encouragement that was missing in her Manhattan home. That late spring and early summer, Carson drew much closer to Oliver Smith, her Brooklyn “younger brother”—climbing the stairs to the light-filled attic studio he had created when not preparing for an exhibition of his paintings in the city. At one end of the small rectangular room with its steeply pitched ceiling, Smith had installed a large semicircular desk, bequeathed to him by a distant ancestor, Henry James; the area at the other end near the window was dedicated to his watercolors and set designs.
Already, it was possible for the twenty-four-year-old Carson, who had experienced a first burst of fame, a marital separation, a scandalous second publication, and a major stroke all in the past year, to look on the poor but ambitious Oliver Smith with a certain fond nostalgia. While she admired the white china dishes on which the young artist mixed his paints and the watercolor designs he was creating for every play currently on Broadway, he entertained her with stories of his childhood and his early years in New York. Smith had spent his youth obsessively poring over floor plans and creating improved layouts for famous houses, hotels, and theaters. He remembered a time when he was twelve, accompanying his mother as she drove his nineteen-year-old cousin, Paul Bowles, to Yaddo for a stay arranged by Aaron Copland. Oliver had taken one look at the beautiful, turreted, gray stone Victorian mansion and cried, “Oh, Mother! I wish I were Paul.” Outraged, his mother dragged him off immediately. But now, in Brooklyn, no one minded if Oliver designed his own miniature palace at the top of the house—and he did not have to wait to be hired before realizing his vision.
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