Yet, from Kallman himself the poet received a barrage of complaints that the many checks he sent arrived late or were insufficient. Making no secret of his continued infatuation with Jack Barker, Kallman also played up his new independence by reporting on his sexual activities in Los Angeles. “Sex has been spotty and silly,” he wrote to Auden, “consisting of quick ones and morceaux de commerces who decide that I’m their dear one,—and have to be dropped discretely before the whole business,—the jealousy, the affection, the conversation,—becomes too violently tiresome—and God it’s such a bore, bore, bore.” The trouble, he explained, was that there were no real men in Hollywood. “Just the other night I picked up a 6 ft. 2½ in. merchant sailor from Brooklyn. Wildly attractive, young, strong, perfectly built, and large. I was all prepared for an absolutely relentless fucking,—but—as it turned out in the end, that is what I had to provide him with.”
Occasionally, however, a sudden, unexpected glimpse of affection appeared in these same letters, dashed off by Kallman as though in afterthought: “I know that, in whatever context it may be, or whatever interpretation it may be subjected to, I love you.”
These rare comments were all that were necessary, it seemed, to keep Auden bound to Kallman. While he would write to Tania Stern a few years later that romance “is not my natural cup of tea at all for, as you know, what I like is humdrum certainty, the same person, the same times,” Auden would also remark more than once on the benefit to the artist of unrequited love, which he can use to test and strengthen himself for his work. That autumn, Kallman wrote to Auden that others were quick to judge him because they could not really understand an ambivalent point of view. “Perhaps it’s good for me that I can’t be grasped at one word,” he suggested; “it means more intensive thinking.”
More intensive thinking, and feeling as well. Auden’s suffering that summer in Brooklyn had proven to be as agonizing as any in his life—particularly as it coincided with his mother’s death—yet at the same time he was aware that the pain he had experienced would stimulate him creatively. Auden had recently comforted his lonely cook with the words: “The person you really need will arrive at the proper moment to save you.” For Auden, Kallman would always be that savior: he always propelled Auden forward in his growth—and thereby rescued him from what he called “frivolity.”
The months of creative inactivity had ended. While the “social half” of Auden’s version of Henry James’s double man carried on with lectures and correspondence, the poet moved into his study and set to work. His new project was a Christmas oratorio that Benjamin Britten had agreed to set to music—the story of the birth of Jesus from Advent through the Flight into Egypt. As always, however, Auden used these events as a framework within which he could analyze the ideas and occurrences of his own life: his life served as a filter through which to better comprehend the parable. The Christmas story, describing a miraculous event—the merging of the spiritual with the material—served also as a perfect vehicle with which to recreate Auden’s experience of his love affair as a means of seeking redemption.
Auden further intensified this double exposure by setting the religious tale in a modern environment, among bars and jukeboxes and newspaper editors and policemen. It was an old technique, routinely used in the past centuries to bring into focus the ultimate union of the profane and sacred, the erotic and religious, the body and soul—two aspects of human consciousness that had been divided only in recent times and whose separation Auden considered the greatest crisis of his time.
In “Advent,” the first of the poem’s nine episodes, Auden established the story’s beginning in a period of faithlessness and confusion, when humankind had lost confidence in the ancient Greek gods and blindly groped for some new source of meaning. Such a state of uncertainty was necessary, Auden believed, to prepare the way for an entirely new vision—and it not coincidentally resembled his own state of uncertainty in the previous two years, when he had abandoned the “gods” of liberal relativism and sought a new way of deciding how one should live. Part II, “Annunciation,” in which Mary exulted in the news of her coming child, echoed Auden’s own relief and joy at the discovery of Chester Kallman. “The Temptation of St. Joseph,” which followed, related in modern terms Joseph’s attempts to ignore the gossip about his wife’s pregnancy and to overcome his anger in the face of her claim that she had been inseminated by God. It mirrored Auden’s own despair the previous summer as well; he wrote, in Joseph’s words:
All I ask is one
Important and elegant proof
That what my Love had done
Was really at your will
And that your will is Love.
And the angel Gabriel answered:
No, you must believe;
Be silent, and sit still.
For nine months, as Auden worked on the oratorio (later called For the Time Being), he drew together all of the elements of the previous year’s spiritual, sexual, intellectual, and emotional crises and poured them into this vivid, exquisitely moving and accessible tale of spiritual salvation. Everything, it seemed, went into the soup: the Jungian Faculties of Intuition, Feeling, Sensation, and Thought with which Auden had categorized himself and all his friends; the conviction that a secular, liberal outlook was largely responsible for the moral vacuum in which fascism had thrived; the use of conjugal love as a path for learning to love mankind; and the present widespread death and mayhem as a chronic backdrop to each day’s events.
“Rummaging through [his] living for the images that hurt and connect,” Auden scattered personal souvenirs throughout the oratorio: the Fifty-second Street dives featured in “September 1, 1939,” now a place for Joseph to brood over Mary’s religious claims; the homosexual slang of the Sands Street bars, echoed by Herod’s soldiers as they prepared to slaughter the innocents; and even, it would seem, Eva Morcur, the beloved cook of Middagh Street, in the guise of “Eva, my coloured nurse,” whom Herod thanked for the “regular habits” that helped make him a rational, liberal ruler. Samplings of the past year’s poetry were tossed in as well: echoes of “Domesday Song” (“Deep among dock and dusty nettle lay”), “In Sickness and in Health” (“Domestic hatred can become / A habit-forming drug” and “Let even the young rejoice”), and the paradisiacal garden of “Kairos and Logos.”
The final act, in which the poet and his readers dismantle the Christmas tree and pack away the decorations, recalled the celebratory Christmas feast created by Auden and Britten for Paul Bunyan. But here the mood was different: the celebrants prepared to resume their jobs and send the children back to school. Returning to the secular world, “the streets / Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten / The office was as depressing as this.” The fleeting moment of spiritual insight was over, with “The night of agony still to come.” Now, “the time is noon,” and one could only move forward, struggling toward faith and praying “that God’s Will will be done, that . . . God will cheat no one, not even the world in its triumph.”
Gone were both the previous year’s groping uncertainty and its smug pronouncements. In their place, with the confidence and depth of a mature artist who had found his direction, Auden had distilled elements of the sacred and the profane into a new, stronger substance with which to address the eternal question of the arts: “How should we live?” Over the next few years, thrust still farther by the volatile explosion at Middagh Street, he would create two more long poems of extraordinary power and originality: The Sea and the Mirror, a poetic retelling of Shakespeare’s Tempest, exploring the nature of creativity and the role of the artist, and The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on and judgment of modern life set in a New York bar.
But even as Auden used his poetry to “talk back to God” in what was for him “a kind of prayer,” he confessed to a friend that autumn that “I feel as if I were scattered into little pieces. And if the Devil were to offer [Kallman] back to me, on condition that I never wrote another line, I should unhesitatingly accept.�
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On November 11, Auden wrote to Britten, “I have sketched out the first movement of the Orations . . . Longing to see you. Much love to all.” Britten and Pears, along with Elizabeth Mayer, had arranged to stop by Auden’s house in Ann Arbor en route from Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Ohio for a series of concerts of Britten’s music. Auden was eager to discuss his new project with Britten and, if necessary, patch up any misunderstandings that lingered from the previous spring.
But it was an uncharacteristically cool and perfunctory Britten, just turned twenty-eight, who arrived at Auden’s front door that afternoon. Like everyone else, he went through the motions of renewing old friendships, and he and Peter gave a rousing recital of their recent work in the living room. But Auden’s housemate, Charles Miller, noted that while Britten smiled politely whenever anyone looked at him, “I don’t remember hearing a note of laughter from that pale, patient face. As he sat in Wystan’s blue upholstered chair, I was impressed with his melancholy, his generally passive attitude, even while Peter and Elizabeth rocked with laughter.”
Certainly, the previous summer in California, to which Britten and Pears had fled with high hopes, had not worked out as planned. The musicians had enjoyed their westward drive, marveling at the scenery and at the number of young hitchhikers who freely wandered along the back roads of this enormous country. And, initially at least, California’s mild weather and relaxed atmosphere had a palliative effect after the creative tension of the house in Brooklyn. “We live a very quiet existence in beautiful but strange country,” Pears wrote to his mother; “40 years ago it was a desert, now it is full of orange & lemon trees. I go down to a house of an Englishwoman in the village and practise every morning from 9:30 until 12:45, and I’m doing a lot of good work.” Pears also easily arranged a number of recitals in private homes, with Britten accompanying on the piano.
Even in sunny Escondido, however, their working conditions did not remain ideal for long. Britten soon realized that the amount of work he had scheduled for the summer would be virtually impossible to complete. Not only must his string quartet be ready for its September performance in Los Angeles, but he had planned to contribute a Mazurka Elegiaca for two pianos to a memorial volume for the composer I. J. Paderewski; a medley of traditional Scottish tunes for two pianos and orchestra, Scottish Ballad, for their hosts in lieu of rent; an arrangement of the Minuet from Mahler’s Symphony No. 3; and Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, a song cycle for Pears that he had wanted to finish for years. In addition, Britten needed to begin thinking about the music for Auden’s “Ode to St. Cecilia”; the poem had already been completed and was due to be published soon in Harper’s Bazaar.
War news was everywhere, just as on the East Coast, considerably raising the level of anxiety for the four British expatriates. As the threat from Japan appeared increasingly real, Britten wrote to William Mayer that “everyone out here . . . is terrified of the Japanese, and there is a terrific prejudice against the poor wretched Japs who have settled down and become perfectly respectable citizens . . . There are terrific goings-on in ‘defense preparations’ round here—but of course San Diego is the biggest naval-base on this coast.” At the same time, more accusations of cowardice reached their ears from England, this time focusing on Britten himself.
The cause was Ernest Newman’s enthusiastic review in the Sunday Times of Britten’s Violin Concerto, performed by the London Philharmonic in April. Newman’s reference to Britten as a “thoroughbred” of a composer sparked a flood of outraged letters, soon dubbed “the Battle of Britten,” in which some writers remarked that “most of our musical ‘thoroughbreds’ are stabled in or near London and are directing all their endeavours towards winning the City and Suburban and the Victory Stakes,” or claiming that as an expatriate, Britten could no longer claim the title of “British composer” and should be demoted to the status of “import.” Others protested that by serving his art, Britten was serving his country, since “ultimately it is by its cultural achievements that a nation will be judged.”
The controversy raged in England through the summer and into the fall, torturing the young composer, who loathed controversy and who preferred his native country to the one in which he now lived. By the end of the summer Britten’s stay in California had taken any bloom that remained off his enthusiasm for America. This was “a crazy country,” he wrote to his sister:
& I don’t think I altogether like it. I know old England is a stuffy place, the BBC is horrible, & the plumbing is bad; but there are lots of things about this ’ere place that arn’t [sic] so good, either. Their driving—their incessant radio—their fat and pampered children—their yearning for culture (to be absorbed in afternoon lectures, now that they can’t “do” Europe)—and above all their blasted stomachs, with their vitamens [sic], their bowel movements (no one ever “goes” naturally here—only with a good deal of stimulus!), & their bogus medicines. Still they aren’t blowing each other to bits so far, & perhaps that’s something.
As for Los Angeles, Britten called it “the ugliest and most sprawling city on earth,” now “swarming with refugees,” with “every composer whose name is familiar” present and competing for a limited number of film jobs.
Britten could see that his Hollywood dream would go unfulfilled—though his disgust with Los Angeles kept him from becoming too despondent. Still, he needed to compose if he was to survive professionally, and the domestic situation at the Robertsons abruptly worsened when their two pianos arrived and the couple began practicing. Britten could not possibly concentrate under these conditions (“If anything is more disturbing than one piano it’s two!” he wrote to his sister), and reacted to the intrusion of sound with no more grace than Paul Bowles had done in Brooklyn. Like Bowles, Britten found that he had no choice but to retreat—in his case, moving to the toolshed in the backyard, where he composed with an electric fan on to block the sound of the Robertsons’ rehearsals.
As the weeks passed, he grew increasingly anxious and had a series of spats with his hosts. Some of the conflict centered on his working conditions, but much sprang from the couple’s condescending attitude toward his relationship with Peter Pears. The Robertsons liked to insist that the “boys” would soon outgrow their homosexual phase and that Britten would then marry a nice young woman. This type of presumptive teasing enraged Britten, and Pears frequently had to act as peacekeeper.
It was in this mood—sick of California, only slightly more enthusiastic about New York, and tired of trying to cope with the “perpetual jigsaw puzzles” of personal relationships—that Britten picked up a copy of the Listener, a music journal that someone—perhaps Auden—had forwarded to him. It contained an article by E. M. Forster on George Crabbe, a turn-of-the-century poet from Aldeburgh. “To think of Crabbe is to think of England,” Forster wrote; the poet, named after the national saint, had been a hard-working child of poverty on the British seaside, became a clergyman of the English Church, and spent his entire life in the villages of England.
Having grown up among the British poor, Crabbe was truly their poet, Forster wrote. Still, he had held no sentimental illusions about poverty’s virtues. On the contrary, his understanding of life in England’s grim fishing villages, and thus of England itself, had rested on an understanding of the weakness of the human race. “To all of them, and to their weaknesses, Crabbe extends a little pity, a little contempt, a little cynicism, and a much larger portion of reproof. The bitterness of his early experiences has eaten into his soul, and he does not love the human race, though he does not denounce it, and dares not despair of its ultimate redemption . . . Disapproval is all too common in the pulpit, but it is rare in poetry, and its presence gives his work a curious flavour, subtle yet tart, which will always attract connoisseurs.”
Britten was taken by this description of the cantankerous poet’s character but even more entranced by Forster’s evocation of the landscape around Aldeburgh. Having himself grown up in a house directly facing the
North Sea, with its fierce storms and salty air, Britten well knew the sound of “the wallop the sea makes as it pounds at the shingle.” On his walks to Aldeburgh from his mill house in Snape, he, too, had grown to love the area’s flat, melancholy scenery and the cries of the marsh birds. These images, brought forth by Forster, called to Britten with all the power of home. Forster wrote that no matter how far Crabbe wandered, he was never able to expunge the spirit of Aldeburgh and its people from his writing; Crabbe was a provincial, and the term was meant as high praise. Reading these words on the West Coast of America, Britten realized that they described him, too.
Soon afterward, on one of their trips into the city, Pears stopped in at a rare book shop and serendipitously came across a copy of The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe, published in 1851. He gave the book to Britten, who quickly became captivated by the evocative language in Crabbe’s long poem “The Borough”:
Our busy streets and sylvan-walks between,
Fen, marshes, bog and heath all intervene;
Here pits of crag, with spongy, plashy base,
To some enrich th’uncultivated space:
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