Both versions, Auden pointed out, lacked any concept of the love object as a person, and both were essentially anathema to the Christian doctrine of agape, which dealt with the incarnation in the material world of the spiritual Word. It is in agape, this experience of God’s love on earth, Auden wrote, that “we are delivered from the woe of being alive” and can achieve salvation. One way to arrive at a state of agape is through eros, that is, through the physical and spiritual love of a fellow human. Christian love leads to “an immediate reassertion, not of course of the old life, and not of an ideal life, but of our present life now repossessed by the Spirit.”
The task, then, of human love, is “to actualize the possible,” or to love in a way that opens one to a state of grace. This form of spiritual love can only be achieved “if the right decision is taken,” Auden wrote, and “if any of the wrong decisions are taken, the result will be self-negation.” To avoid this risk, many try to deny either the spiritual or the physical aspects of love, he added. Such crises of faith are inevitable. But there is a way to survive these crises intact—by following the rules of a Christian marriage, “which may not be either as absurdly straitlaced or as coarse as they once appeared.”
It was how Auden worked through any emotional experience, no matter how painful or complex: through the saving mechanism of his intellect. As he pointed out himself so frequently, he was a Thinking and Intuition type, weaker in the areas of Feeling and Sensation, and so he learned from emotional experiences with more difficulty than most. His analysis of de Rougemont’s book served as a necessary means through which he could begin trying to understand the disastrous turn in his relationship with Kallman. Surely, anyone could see that some bad “decisions” had been made in their marriage and that the result had clearly been his own “self-negation,” in one sense, and Kallman’s in another.
Kallman, however, had no intention of following any rules of marriage, Christian or otherwise. Through the spring and summer months, he had continued to spend time at the house on Middagh Street, bringing along “friends,” drinking through the night, and otherwise making clear his refusal to play along anymore with Auden’s fantasy of spiritual and physical communion. It would have been difficult to find a less likely partner for a sacred marriage vow, in fact, as Chester refused to have sexual relations with his former lover, dropped all pretense of remaining emotionally faithful to him, and planned to depart in a few months for an independent life in Ann Arbor.
Still, wasn’t that the basis of the myth that de Rougemont explored in his book, that “only perfection is worthy to be loved”? It was Kallman’s bewitching imperfection that had attracted Auden in the first place—the mix of transcendence and devilry that epitomized the human condition. To love a young man like Kallman was to love humanity, and to accept him in all his inconstancy, ambition, cruelty, and anger was to “love one’s neighbor as oneself.”
Six months earlier, after Kallman’s betrayal with Jack Barker but before Auden learned of it, he had written, “To be saved is to have Faith, and to have Faith means to recognize something as the Necessary. Whether or not the faith of an individual is misplaced does not matter: indeed, in an absolute sense, it always is.” Back then, all of his talk of saints and salvation had been little more than a kind of playing at Christianity. His arbitrary choice of Chester Kallman as his path toward redemption had seemed easy and pleasant. Now, however, Auden had come up against a test of his commitment to moral action, set at the highest price he could imagine. Could he fully love Chester Kallman even as his lover turned away? Could he love him if they never touched, never spoke again? If the answer was yes, would his ability to do so lead to a higher consciousness—not only in this relationship, but in his relations with the world? And if the answer was no, then what other answer could he find?
One of the reasons Auden had moved to Middagh Street was his search for a place in which to work through just these kinds of questions. In rooms economical enough to allow him to focus on his best work, in a house filled with others in pursuit of the same goal, perhaps he could increase his chance of finding a solution to the question of how to choose the correct, moral action in a chaotic, immoral world. Seeking such answers required sacrifice. In the coming years, Auden would describe the artist’s mission in his prose poem The Sea and the Mirror, a commentary on Shakespeare’s Tempest:
And from this nightmare of public solitude, this everlasting Not Yet, what relief have you but in an ever giddier collective gallop, with bison eye and bevel course, toward the grey horizon of the bleaker vision . . . what goal but the Black Stone on which the bones are cracked, for only there in its cry of agony can your existence find at last an unequivocal meaning and your refusal to be yourself become a serious despair, the love nothing, the fear all?
Auden had sought the black stone, and at 7 Middagh Street he had found it—the moment of existential despair that came from too many drinks, too many accusations, too much squalor, and too much heat. Alone in the house in the dead of night that July, the poet and his lover succumbed to an exchange of shouted recriminations that ended only when Kallman reiterated his vow to end his relations with Auden and stumbled upstairs to collapse on the poet’s bed and fall instantly asleep.
Auden remained downstairs alone, struggling with a desire to find Jack Barker and kill him. But Barker was at sea, while Auden sat smoking in the parlor and Kallman slept contentedly upstairs.
Caught in the jealous trap
Of an empty house I hear
As I sit alone in the dark,
Everything, everything,
The drip of the bathroom tap,
The creak of the sofa spring,
The wind in the air-shaft, all
Making the same remark
Stupidly, stupidly,
Over and over again.
Father, what have I done?
Answer me, Father, how
Can I answer the tactless wall
Or the pompous furniture now?
Louise Bogan recalled telling Auden that month about a man who broke into tears in a taxi, confessing to his traveling companion that he had a vestigial tail. “I shouldn’t have minded a vestigial tail,” Bogan said playfully to her friend. “No,” Auden had replied, “one can always stand what other people have.”
Auden had weathered George’s managerial inefficiency, Carson’s drinking and her marital woes, Gypsy’s literary inexperience and remarkable restlessness, the Bowleses’ irritating habits, and the critical lambasting of his friend, Benjamin Britten. But this last insult from Kallman was too much. From childhood, Auden had determined to become a great poet. And only through the love of an individual, he had decided, could that transformation occur. The only person he had ever found whom he could love sufficiently was Chester Kallman. He did not expect Chester to be perfect, but he desperately needed him to remain present and involved, to allow himself to be used as a vehicle for transcendence.
Auden himself did not know what prompted him to leave the parlor after about an hour and climb the stairs to his room at the top of the house. Standing by the bed, looking down at Chester, Auden was overcome by a violent impulse. If he could not murder Jack Barker, he could kill Chester, or perhaps eventually both. While his lover slept, Auden put his thick fingers around Chester’s throat and tried to strangle him to death.
What happened next was lost in the confusion of the moment. Chester awoke, realized what was happening, and either pushed Auden away with all his strength or ran away or laughed, rolled over, and went back to sleep. The attack was hardly frightening to a young man who courted violence in his sexual affairs. But for Auden, this intent to murder, even if it was not carried out, became a life-altering experience.
For the first time, after all his years of looking on the violence of the world and thinking through ways in which it might be defeated, he himself had experienced “what it is like to feel oneself the prey of demonic powers, in both the Greek and Christian sense, stripped of self-control
and self-respect, behaving like a ham actor in a Strindberg play.” No longer could he pretend to be appalled by, or not to understand, the urge toward violence behind the behavior of Gestapo jailers, book burners, or those who took pleasure in the humiliation and defeat of others. Later, still shaken but trying to come to terms with the experience, he remarked to a friend, “It’s frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much—I can see myself doing it. In England one feels all the social restraints held one back. But here anything can happen.” He had come to the land of infinite choice, and this was where it had led him.
During the next few days, Auden continued to move through the traditional stages of grief, from denial to anger and toward negotiation. Histrionic arguments gave way to pleading and bargaining for a place in Chester’s life. But both men knew that he was now speaking from a compromised position. Auden blamed himself, not Chester, for their failed relationship. If he had not tried to impose his own aims and desires on his lover, if he had not bullied him intellectually and neglected him emotionally, if he had treated him less as an object and more as an individual with his own needs and destiny, none of this would have happened. Perhaps it was not too late to save the relationship. He could be Chester’s friend if not his lover. All he asked was that Chester never leave him; that was the one thing he could not bear.
In mid-July, having traveled to Olivet College for a week’s lecturing, Auden felt more depressed and lonely than ever before. “If I stay here any longer,” he wrote to a friend, “I shall either take to the mysticism that Reinhold so disapproves of or buy a library of pornographic books.” Conditions improved only marginally when he joined Chester for a visit to Caroline Newton’s house near Jamestown, Rhode Island. Isherwood, whose contract with M-G-M had recently expired, traveled east to join them. If Auden was relieved to greet his closest friend, appearing as always fresh-faced and elegant after nearly a year in California, Isherwood was less pleased with the scene he found when he arrived.
“Caroline was a silly, snobbish, well-read woman with very little taste,” Isherwood wrote in his journal, “often pathetic and kind-hearted. She was in love with Auden. The atmosphere was in the highest degree embarrassing.” Most uncomfortable was the extreme tension between Auden and Kallman, which broke out periodically in loud arguments and passionate pleas that were impossible not to hear through the thin walls of their bedroom. “I had to keep going on walks, alternately, with the three others, to discuss the latest developments,” he wrote. Kallman remained adamant about ending the relationship and was in fact scribbling desperate, longing notes to Jack Barker in his poetry notebook. Auden, for his part, “was in a difficult, strained, provocative mood, and kept attacking [Christopher’s pacifist friend] Gerald [Heard] and talking theology.”
Then a second disaster befell Auden. A telegram was delivered to the house by telephone—taken by Caroline Newton—that Auden’s seventy-two-year-old mother had died in her sleep. Kallman was deputized to break the news to Auden. Despite the friction between them, he had the grace to deliver it with kindness. Finding Auden in their bedroom, preparing to go out with the others to dinner, Chester told him, “We’re not going to King’s.” “Goody, goody,” Auden said with relief. “The reason is,” Chester continued gently, “your mother has died.”
Auden had known his mother was ill. For some days, he had “raised heaven and earth” to speak with her by telephone, but it had proved impossible in wartime and he was never put through. Now all he could say to Chester was, “How like her that her last act on earth should be to get me out of a social engagement I didn’t want,” before he burst into tears.
Before Isherwood returned to California, he accompanied Auden to Middagh Street to take a look at the now-famous house that his friend had once shared with Gypsy Rose Lee. He found the house “an attractive, insanely untidy place where, owing to some freak of plumbing, the water in the toilet was nearly boiling. The weather was overpoweringly hot and sticky.” It seemed a lonely place in midsummer in which to leave Auden and Kallman, especially when they were so at odds with each other. Isherwood wrote in his diary that “poor Wystan cried when I left for Los Angeles.” Isherwood himself, having resolved to live and work as a pacifist at a Quaker settlement, was experiencing the euphoria of having finally reached a solution to his own dilemma of how to respond to the war. It was distressing to see his closest friend so low. But Auden had been determined to throw himself against the black stone of experience. And, that summer, it seemed there was nothing left.
10
It has taken us long, too long, to come to terms with our inward selves . . . We have had to face a moral crisis for which we were scantily equipped. But at last we have reached our conclusions and are ready to act. We have come through.
—Carson McCullers, 1941
The passage of the Lend-Lease Bill by Congress led to a $7 billion appropriation for armaments manufacture for the Allies, and the effects of this enormous increase in production soon became visible in Brooklyn. In September 1941, the city’s newspapers announced that the Brooklyn Navy Yard, now operating around the clock, would begin hiring female mechanics to replace men who had been drafted or had enlisted. Soon, the bars and luncheonettes of Sands Street filled with female as well as male shipfitters, apprentice welders, and acetylene torch burners who were putting in five-and-a-half-day, fifty-eight-hour weeks.
Such an increase in production demanded a similar increase in the supply of raw materials. Anticipating a shortage of metal, the government warned of lowered numbers of new automobiles, refrigerators, and washing machines in the year ahead, as well as oil and gas shortages. An Aluminum Collection Week was billed as most citizens’ first chance to participate directly in America’s defense. Gypsy Rose Lee helped publicize the event by posing nude, except for her signature high heels and an assortment of strategically placed aluminum pots, pans, and cooking spoons, for Life magazine.
For many, if by no means all Americans, it was gratifying to be asked to do something about the war in Europe after years of standing by and hearing the news. Reports in the newspapers that autumn told of the institution of the death penalty in Poland for Jews found outside the ghettos, of the deaths in Leningrad from freezing or starvation as the city lost electricity and heat, of a two-hour raid on Berlin delivered by RAF bombers on the anniversary of the first mass air attack on London, and of the massive Allied bombing of Naples and other parts of Italy. At the offices of Decision, Klaus Mann was surprised to see the change in the attitude toward engagement of his secretary’s soldier-boyfriend, Johnny. Over the course of one month, he had evolved from an unhappy draftee considering going AWOL (“Let that guy Hitler conquer as much as he wants to”) to a bloodthirsty warrior eager to “beat the hell out of them Japs.”
President Roosevelt announced in his Fireside Chat of September 11 that because of a number of recent skirmishes between American ships and German submarines in the North Atlantic, he had authorized military escorts for the ships transporting supplies across the ocean. “From now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril,” he said. “The sole responsibility rests upon Germany. There will be no shooting unless Germany continues to seek it.” Fifteen days later, the U.S. naval command ordered the sinking, when possible, of every Italian and German ship found in U.S. “defensive” waters. Meanwhile, Americans met in Moscow with representatives of Britain and the Soviet Union to work out a plan of urgent assistance to the Russians. Hitler, undeterred, launched an attack on Moscow on October 2, announcing that Russia “has already been broken and will never rise again.” It would be an autumn of fierce fighting and thousands more deaths.
By this time, George Davis had returned to Middagh Street and set to work rearranging its tenancy. Many changes had taken place over the summer, for George as well as the other residents. The previous winter, he had written to Gypsy that he would be doin
g some hard thinking in the months ahead. “I figure that after that I’ll be all right for a while,” he had added. By fall, the period of anxiety over his failed attempt to write a second novel, the social experimentation through which he had gained release, and the gloom that followed had ended. George once again began telephoning friends, meeting colleagues for lunch in the city, securing work for himself and his housemates, and finding new artists to nurture and support. This year, in order to free the entire parlor floor of the house for socializing, George moved into Carson’s third-floor suite, claiming the cardboard cutout of Gypsy for himself and installing it near the window. He then furnished Gypsy’s former rooms, complete with grand piano, for Carson when she was in New York.
Carson would use her space for a few days, a week, or even a month or two at a time in the coming years, but her health no longer permitted her to live permanently in the city. Still, during her summer at Yaddo, she had been able to capitalize on the moments of illumination she had experienced in the house in Brooklyn.
February House Page 29
