Yaddo’s restful environment, with its carefully tended grounds and reliable routine, helped Carson concentrate, and the mix of American artists and European refugees proved stimulating, even if Carson’s recent emotional strain caused her to behave in strange ways at times. In one of these episodes, Carson developed an infatuation for Katherine Anne Porter, the slim, sophisticated writer from Texas who had come to Yaddo for the summer and who counted George Davis, Glenway Wescott, James Stern, David Diamond, and Wystan Auden among her friends. Unaware that Porter had long ago read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and decided that she disliked it, Carson resolved to make herself the newest member of her illustrious social circle. She began following the writer around the grounds, declaring her love and begging to spend time with her, to no avail. Finally one evening, having pounded on Porter’s door for quite a while without gaining entry, Carson lay down across the threshold so that when Porter left to go downstairs for dinner, she would be forced to acknowledge her. When Porter opened the door she looked down at Carson, paused, and simply stepped over her and continued down the hall without a word. Soon afterward, she moved into a separate house on the grounds expressly to avoid Carson—and thus ended their relationship.
There was no doubt that Carson’s continued drinking—beginning with a beer at her writing table immediately after breakfast, continuing with sherry throughout the day, and ending with evening cocktails with the group of writers she had joined—complicated her relations with others at the colony. But she seemed unable to write without it. If her health must be sacrificed in the service of writing, it was a sacrifice she was willing to make.
Reporting to her desk by nine-thirty each morning, Carson made great progress, finishing The Ballad of the Sad Café and moving briskly forward with her problem novel, The Bride and Her Brother. Inspired by a new friendship with the New Yorker short story writer Edward Newhouse, she wrote a story of her own in two days and sold it to the magazine for a satisfying $400. She immediately began another story as well as a poem, “The Twisted Trinity,” for Decision. She also frequently visited Colin McPhee, who was writing about his years in Bali in a picturesque stone tower beside one of Yaddo’s lakes.
His presence gave Carson an irresistible opportunity to play mentor to a fellow writer, and both she and the composer found that they benefited enormously from this relationship, though McPhee was nearly twice Carson’s age. The younger writer was able to tease her friend out of his morose moods, and her playful techniques to maximize his production—once promising him a party when he finished a chapter—proved surprisingly effective. As the weeks passed, McPhee began to realize that in many ways he enjoyed writing about Bali even more than he liked creating music. “It has gone very well,” he wrote, “18000 words in three weeks, and I am really happy in doing it . . . I write so much better than I compose that I wish a miracle might happen, even at this late date, and that I could express that something that I feel within, that has never found satisfactory utterance.”
It meant a great deal to Carson to be able to give to someone else the attention and creative nurturing that George Davis had given her. The process of mentoring Colin McPhee, combined with the success of her writing projects, gave her a new level of self-confidence. By the middle of July, however, Carson felt herself pulled down again by the familiar ache for her group of Brooklyn friends. Reading the July issue of Decision, in which a poem of Muriel Rukeyser’s appeared, Carson wrote to her that “the poem in Decision made me weep—real wet tears, as I could remember your voice as you had said it and was suddenly homesick.”
Carson also wrote to her husband, Reeves, and was disturbed not to receive a reply. She could not ask David Diamond whether he had any news of him, since the composer had left Yaddo early to deliver some lectures in New York. Carson had not seen as much of Diamond as she had expected to that summer; he had shared Katherine Anne Porter’s two-story cottage, and Carson remained unwelcome there. After he left, she wrote to him of her longing to be with him, and Diamond responded with an offer of marriage, which surprised and disturbed Carson. Marriage to Diamond wasn’t what she had in mind. She already had a husband, and that relationship was disastrous. Carson longed for communion—a platonic love that would nourish her creativity and Diamond’s while leaving room for others as well. She continued to see more promise in triangular relationships, in which she was loved by one person while loving another. In The Ballad of the Sad Café, the hunchbacked Cousin Lyman Willis found himself in this enviable position as he basked in Miss Amelia’s adoration while yearning for her no-good husband. And in The Bride and Her Brother, she would write of Frankie, her brother, and his bride: “The three of them would go into the world and they would always be together. And finally, after the scared spring and the crazy summer, she was no more afraid.”
It came as a shock, then, to find later that summer that she had been left out of the equation. Near the end of July, Carson learned that Reeves had moved to Rochester, New York, near David Diamond’s home, with the intention of setting up housekeeping with the composer. Carson was equally stunned to discover that Reeves had financed his move by forging Carson’s signature on her check from The New Yorker and on her royalty checks from Houghton Mifflin. In signing her name to the checks and pursuing the object of Carson’s own infatuation, Reeves had in the most literal possible way reclaimed his name and taken back the life that he felt Carson had snatched from him, shutting her out completely.
If Carson had been experimenting with the idea of exile before—by interviewing Erika Mann and writing of a Jewish refugee traveling through the South—now she experienced for the first time the feeling of being abruptly cut off from family and home. Without ever having left America, she found herself exiled from the warm “we of me” form of communion, just as her fictional alter ego, Frankie Addams, had been forced to separate from her brother and his bride.
Carson McCullers, while physically frail, was unusually strong-willed. Reeves could hurt her deeply, but he would never be able to destroy her. Taking a leave of absence from Yaddo, Carson returned briefly to New York to replenish her overdrawn checking account and to talk with a lawyer about getting a divorce. A short time later, she contacted a psychiatrist, Elizabeth Mayer’s husband, William, to discuss the possibility of entering therapy. Mayer specialized in treating artists—he had been working with McPhee for years—and could be counted on to respect the central importance to artists of their creative lives. Carson’s relationship with him proved enormously helpful over time, and she eventually came to refer to him as her “protective angel.”
Carson returned to Yaddo, crying most of the way back on the train. Once her residency ended in September, she returned to New York for another brief visit, meeting with Robert Linscott, her editor and by now her close friend, to discuss the publication of The Ballad of the Sad Café.
Then she took the train home to Georgia to begin the process of healing.
In New York, she had met with a number of her Middagh Street acquaintances in Manhattan but had resisted traveling out to Brooklyn to spend time there. She was not yet ready to explain her decision to divorce Reeves to such close friends as George and Auden, who would want to discuss it at length. No one on Middagh Street—or anywhere else, she realized—could save her. She would have to learn to take care of herself.
In earlier years, when returning south to recover from a stay in New York, Carson had had to fend off an inner voice suggesting that she left because she “couldn’t take it” and calling her a quitter. Now, however, as the shocks of the previous year began to recede, she found that the voice had been silenced. She had, after all, made a great deal of progress in spite of a calamitous personal life. By the age of twenty-four, Carson had not only demonstrated an exceptional talent for fiction but had also established her skill at creating prescient, evocative essays, emotionally powerful short stories, informed literary criticism, and moving poetry. In the space of fifteen months, many of them under the influence
of some of the most accomplished artists in America, Carson had moved from the creative experimentation of a talented novice to the full, creative life of a professional artist.
Bessie Breuer, a writer whom Carson visited briefly that fall, wrote to Klaus Mann that the young author now appeared to be in fine spirits—taking long walks in the woods, thinking about her novel, and talking excitedly about the new piano she had bought for her room at home. Part of this renewed energy derived from the accumulating evidence of the level of professional respect she had earned from other writers during the year in New York—often the very artists she had admired from afar such a short time before. She corresponded regularly with such friends as Muriel Rukeyser, Klaus Mann, and Gypsy Rose Lee. Even Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, now on a photojournalism assignment in the Belgian Congo, wrote fondly to Carson, and the two women soon established an epistolary friendship that they had been unable to achieve in person. Only Carson, Annemarie wrote, thought of the difficult tasks of writing in the same way she did. She expressed the hope that Carson would translate her book-in-progress, despite the southern writer’s inability to speak or read German.
Janet Flanner, now forty-nine and at the top of her field, asked Carson for literary help that autumn, requesting comments on “Goethe in Hollywood,” her profile of Thomas Mann. Flanner had been tormented by the piece the entire previous year, partly because she had soon discovered that she preferred some of the younger Manns to their father, whom she had described as an author who “takes his symbolic eminence for granted.” Nevertheless, Carson assured Flanner that she liked the profile—and then she burned the proofs without showing them to anyone, not even her mother, as the self-conscious Flanner had requested.
George kept up with these events through Carson’s letters and through reports passed along by mutual friends. Events in Brooklyn, however, continued to preoccupy him. McPhee had agreed to move to Middagh Street after his stay at Yaddo ended, in part so that George could oversee the completion of his book, and he was overhauling the top floor for Colin’s use. Oliver Smith was back in Brooklyn, too, returning from Mexico with the news that he had been given his first major job in set design. In Mexico with the Bowleses, Smith had learned that the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was passing through town. Dropping in to visit several acquaintances among the company’s dancers, Smith heard that the scenic designer for Leonid Massine’s upcoming ballet, a light comedy called Saratoga, had fallen ill. Smith pressed his friends to arrange an interview for him with Massine. Smith took to the meeting his portfolio of set designs created in his Middagh Street aerie, and later he recalled that as the choreographer paged through them, “he didn’t say anything. He was very quiet. Then, he finally told me, ‘Picasso you’re not.’” But he liked Oliver’s work enough to commission him to design the set.
When Smith described the project, George suggested that he mimic the style of his collection of hand-tinted, turn-of-the-century postcards that were once sold to tourists. Oliver found the images charming and began translating them into his own romantic-realist style. While the ballet itself proved unsuccessful when it opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in October, Smith was singled out by reviewers for his colorful, naturalistic scenery. It was sufficient recognition to guarantee future work.
The major event in George’s life that fall, however, was the publication of Gypsy’s novel, The G-String Murders: The Story of a Burlesque Girl. Born in the house on Middagh Street of their friendship, by autumn it had become perhaps the most eagerly anticipated mystery debut in the history of American publishing. Gypsy and George, no strangers to the publicity machine, had systematically amassed all the forces of book promotion to ensure its success. George had spent months feeding members of the press with delicious rumors about the book’s creation, about the true burlesque stories behind the fictional façade, and about Gypsy’s background and literary aspirations. Janet Flanner had contributed some snappy flap copy that began: “Here is the living portrait of burlesque, with assorted deaths thrown in,” and Marcel Vertès’s sketch of Gypsy typing in her dressing room adorned the back cover with the caption “The Author at Work.” On its September publication day, The G-String Murders appeared in New York’s bookshop windows alongside Vertès’s own new book of drawings, The Stronger Sex, with text by his Middagh Street friend Janet Flanner.
Gypsy’s efforts to keep the newspaper ink flowing—with appearances at book signings, literary parties, author luncheons, and interviews, referring to herself as “America’s leading literary figure,” and tossing off such remarks as “These late hours are giving me the ‘Yaddo’ pallor”—paid off handsomely. Gypsy and her book were featured in Life magazine, her occasional writing appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker, and respectable young women lined up around the block to buy an autographed copy of the novel. By winter, The G-String Murders had become the biggest-selling mystery since Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man. To George’s delight, Gypsy’s wit was even compared in print to Dorothy Parker’s, and her preferences in modern art were solemnly disseminated for public consumption.
George would have enjoyed sharing this experience with Auden, who also appreciated the comedy of public life. It would have been helpful, too, to have Auden still present and managing the house as new tenants arrived and a new round of painting and redecorating was required. As George himself admitted to a friend, “I loathe the very word ‘managing.’” And Oliver Smith was driving George to the brink of insanity over financial matters, arguing over the charges added to his weekly bill and always rounding his payments down to the nearest dollar, leaving the change unpaid.
Auden, however, was no longer serving as headmaster of 7 Middagh Street. The previous summer, he had received an offer to spend a year as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor—where Chester Kallman planned to be. In need of money and apparently unable to resist the temptation to follow Chester, Auden had accepted. At about the same time, however, Kallman postponed his own arrival at Ann Arbor until the following semester and instead went to Los Angeles to search for a job. Auden, still in a state of emotional shock from the summer’s events, thus found himself moving alone to the Midwest—just as his poem “Calypso,” written during the exuberant early days of his affair with Kallman, appeared in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar:
Driver drive faster and make a good run
Down the Springfield Line under the shining sun.
Fly like an aeroplane, don’t pull up short
Till you brake for Grand Central Station, New York.
For there in the middle of that waiting-hall
Should be standing the one that I love best of all.
Auden moved into a small house in Ann Arbor and, rather than live alone, arranged for a graduate student in poetry, Charles Miller, to serve as live-in cook. Trying to keep a good face on his situation, in early October he wrote to Caroline Newton, “I had my first class last Thursday; some were pleased, others puzzled. The Middle West student is still a mystery to me, but I’m giving a party for them to-night and perhaps alcohol will reveal all.” He remained mystified by this alien culture for a good while, however, as he witnessed Ann Arbor “in fiesta,” with “85000 people here to see the football match of the year,” then joined some students for dinner at a fraternity (“What an anthropological curiosity. I’d rather be dead than live in one”).
Never in his life had Auden been so isolated and without close and accepting friends—not in Berlin, not in China, and certainly not in Brooklyn. For the first time, he was exposed to the general public’s rude and hasty judgments without the insulating layer of like-minded companions. The fact of his homosexuality—which he had baldly announced at his initial interview, to the extreme embarrassment of his hosts—created a barrier between him and those with whom he hoped to connect, which he found quite irritating. He wrote to the Sterns that “every time I ask anyone in pants to the house, they are either hoping or dreading that I shall make a pass at them,” a
nd that recently a favorite student whom Auden had invited home for an evening of conversation “took my playing of a Marlene Dietrich record as a proposal and was promptly sick. I had to give him a long lecture on his lack of intellectual self-confidence and his excess of physical vanity before I could reassure him.”
Over time, however, he found cause for amusement as well. He wrote on one occasion of overhearing a professor remark, “I don’t like to say anything malicious about another human being, but I hear Auden is a Platonist,” and on another that “Ann Arbor is going to have a shock next week as Erika is coming to stay the night.”
Essentially, at least for this first semester, Auden’s exile to the Midwest served only to make him even more miserable then he had been before. “Happy I can’t pretend to be,” he wrote to Caroline Newton in early October. “I miss Chester; I miss New York . . . Il faut payer for the happiness of the last 2½ years; alright, but what is harder is that one must not only pay but like paying.” To George he added, “I’m terribly homesick for Brooklyn. I have a lovely car, a lovely house, a student cook who is a perfect Jeeves, but, NO LOVE . . . If you can give me any introductions either here, or in Detroit, or Chicago, I should be most grateful. And if you could come for a visit, it would be lovely. Please give my love to everyone including the cats.”
The letters from his friends often included harsh judgments of Kallman for his past year’s mistreatment of Auden, so the poet frequently felt obliged to defend his absent lover. Tania Stern had advised him earlier not to hobble Kallman’s independence by arranging for full payment of his tuition but to let him grow up by going out and getting a job. Now, Auden dutifully reported on Kallman’s job search, and when Chester decided not to work but instead enroll in a secretarial school, Auden wrote to Tania, “Perhaps you will scold me for agreeing to pay for it, but even if it is wrong to do so, I don’t see how I’ve the right to say so, seeing as I was kept by my parents till I was 22 . . . He has, I think, so many wonderful qualities that it will be an awful shame if nothing comes of them, and I shall have much to answer for.”
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