For there are blossoms rare and curious rush,
The gale’s rich balm, and sun-dew’s crimson blush,
Whose velvet leaf with radiant beauty dress’d,
Forms a gay pillow for the plover’s breast.
Set in the early 1800s, the poem told the story of a fisherman named Peter Grimes whose young apprentice died by drowning. Although the death was officially deemed accidental, the town judged Grimes—a gruff, sometimes violent misfit—to be responsible. Forced to confront an unforgiving society, not wholly innocent yet not fully guilty, Grimes was tormented to his own ultimate demise in the rough waters of the North Sea.
Again, Britten identified fully with the themes running through Crabbe’s story—the suffering of a weak person at odds with his community and the nature of innocence and its corruption. Reading the poem, Britten would recall, “I suddenly realized where I belonged and what I lacked.” What he lacked—what had caused critics to repeatedly call his work derivative—had been the courage to do what Auden had done, to take on such personal and powerful themes in their darker and more gripping forms. And where he belonged was in England, where he could explore these ideas in terms of his own traditions. The fishing villages of England, the folk and religious heritage in all its destructive and inspirational aspects—these were the elements to which Britten wanted to dedicate his talents. The previous winter he had written an article, under Auden’s influence, stating that the static nature of folk music made it useless as a basis for composing new music, since it tended “to obstruct thinking.” The community has been destroyed by the machine age, Britten wrote—or, quite possibly, Auden wrote for him—and only those who turned their backs on the traditions of the past would carry on the human heritage. Now, Britten realized that he disagreed absolutely with these pronouncements. Suddenly illuminated in the light of Crabbe’s poetry, he saw his own path in music as springing directly from these cultural roots. He wanted to share with his own people the stories of their shared past in a way that would shed light on the present.
Peter Grimes’s story could become an opera. Britten could hardly contain his excitement. The technique of choral presentations used to crystallize a dramatic moment or emotion—an approach he had experimented with in Paul Bunyan—could quite effectively tell a story about a village of men and women whose livelihood depended on the sea. And the earthy, evocative language of Crabbe’s poem begged for a vital musical setting. Britten began planning to return East immediately after the September 21 concert of his string quartet to begin work on Peter Grimes. In such a state of inspiration, he was loath to be distracted by the tiny Robertsons, yet they had something to tell him.
It seemed, they confided, that Ethel had fallen in love with Britten. There was nothing to be done about it—her passion must be satisfied. So, having discussed the matter, “the little Owls” had decided that Rae would offer his wife as a gift to the composer. He would be honored if Britten would accept.
Middagh Street might have been squalid and sometimes difficult, but at least in New York one had some connection with reality. Life in the Escondido cottage, far from providing the oasis of sanity Britten and Pears had desired, had become simply ridiculous. “Frankly, I’m a bit sick of California,” Britten wrote to his sister. The day after his String Quartet No. 1 was performed in Los Angeles, he and Pears packed their car and fled “like released prisoners.”
By early October, they had arrived at the Mayers’ home on Long Island, where they had chosen to stay for the brief period they expected to remain in America. Britten was filled with excitement over his idea for the new opera, and the two musicians had agreed during their trip that it was time to return home and face the ordeal of applying for conscientious objector status. Britten could hardly wait, as all of the pent-up anxiety and confusion of the previous year began to resolve itself within the framework of the story of Peter Grimes. The idea of working through these ideas at the mill house in Snape, with a regular timetable, long walks through the countryside after lunch, and only Pears for company, was enough to make him ache with anticipation. The musicians were blocked, however, by the extreme difficulty of obtaining passage to England when ships crossing the Atlantic risked attack and by the long list of commissions that Britten had yet to complete.
Emotionally strained but heady with ideas, Britten did his best to focus on the work at hand. He had now contracted to produce an overture for the Cleveland Orchestra. He worked so frantically to complete the piece, which he had renamed An American Overture with his imminent departure in mind, that years later he forgot he had ever composed it.
“My recollection of that time was of complete incapacity to work,” he admitted. “I was in quite a psychological state then.”
Increasingly, part of Britten’s strain could be attributed to a growing awareness that it would not be easy to say good-bye to many of the people he had come to know in America. He was particularly bereft over the idea of leaving the Rothmans, the family who had welcomed him when he had traveled out to Long Island to conduct his orchestra. Immediately on his return from California, he had visited the family. As always, the entire group greeted him effusively—David Rothman, his wife, and their son, Bobby. Over the past year, Britten and Bobby Rothman had grown quite fond of each other, roughhousing, exploring the beaches around Montauk, and otherwise expending their youthful energy. Britten had written to David that his son was “a grand kid,” that the Rothmans were “such a delightful family.” That autumn, however, Britten understood that his simple affection for Bobby had changed: he had fallen in love with the boy, and he felt that he simply could not leave him and return to England permanently with his beloved but older partner, Peter.
For years, Britten had wrestled with his attraction to adolescent boys, courting a number of schoolboys but evidently resisting the urge to seduce in spite of Isherwood’s and Auden’s goading. Extremely sensitive to any form of public censure, and even more aware than most of the sanctity of childhood innocence, Britten believed he had found permanent relief from his tendencies in his relationship with Peter Pears. Bobby Rothman, however, was the first adolescent male with whom Britten had had close contact since his relationship with Peter had begun, and it now appeared that he had miserably failed his first test. For the next two weeks, while working nonstop, Britten silently struggled with his desire to throw away his future for the sake of a dark-eyed, trusting fourteen-year-old. Britten’s hours at that time were brutal. “Unforgettable evening,” Elizabeth Mayer wrote in her journal on October 16. “We three working in music room till 2:30 A.M. Peter reading aloud from Forster: A Room with a View—myself preparing score with ruler on piano.”
On the twenty-second, Britten rushed to Boston for the first rehearsal of his Sinfonia da Requiem by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Serge Koussevitsky. On his return, he began work on the score of Scottish Ballad. Once that was completed, he had to travel to Washington, D.C., with Peter and Elizabeth, to be presented with a medal for composition by his California patron, Elizabeth Coolidge, while the Kroll Quartet played his work. On November 4, he wrote to his sister that perhaps he would stay in the United States after all. The pressure of trying to come to terms with his growing obsession while maintaining his career had led him to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
Back in Amityville, Elizabeth Mayer noted in her diary that Britten was playing a great deal of Mahler. Preoccupied and gloomy, he spent a few quiet days with his hosts, playing the piano and listening to the others read aloud. On November 6, he left to spend two nights at the Rothmans’ house. For fun, David Rothman allowed Britten to help tend his hardware store during the day, but he later confessed that he was completely unprepared for the abrupt declaration that the composer made on the second day. “He wanted to stop writing music,” Rothman recalled, “and wanted to work in my store . . . He had the feeling that he would like to work in a store . . . which seemed to me most ridiculous. I don’t know whether he was serious or not, but I
had the idea he might have been.” Stunned, Rothman said, “Look, you’re only about twenty-six years old; you’ve already done well . . . they did [your] violin concerto with the New York Philharmonic. What do you want? Blood?”
Britten did not, of course, divulge the reason behind his desire to abandon Peter and his music and settle down with the Rothmans and their hardware store. He took the rejection stoically and didn’t mention the idea again. When it was time to leave, he said good-bye as usual and returned to Elizabeth’s house, where he found Auden’s letter announcing the completion of the first movement of his oratorio. In mid-November, just before departing with Peter and Elizabeth for Chicago, Britten wrote to David Rothman, “You, especially, David, I feel a real source of inspiration & encouragement, such as I have rarely met. I am very touched by your urgings on a certain important decision—please don’t be injured if I seem to treat them lightly, that is only to cover how seriously I consider them. In spite of my jocularity, I am a great believer in ‘Fate’ or ‘God’ or what-you-will, and I am for the moment going on with the work in hand (which is plenty, I can assure you!) and letting the future take care of itself . . . from a grateful Benjamin B.”
Britten was at that time also preparing settings for a series of English folk songs, dedicating each song to an American friend as a farewell gift. One of them, intended for a young girl recently betrothed, he dedicated to Bobby Rothman. Its private meaning was quite clear:
O father, dearest father, you’ve done to me great wrong,
You’ve tied me to a boy when you know he is too young . . .
All because he was a young boy and growing,
All because he was a young boy and growing.
Now, in Ann Arbor, Britten realized with a certainty he had never before experienced in his relationship with Auden that the poet’s grand examination of the nativity, barely concealing his own personal tragedy, was not the story he wanted to set to music. Having watched Auden transform his life into art for years and with his experience with Bobby Rothman still fresh in his mind, Britten found the story of Peter Grimes taking on an emotional urgency.
After years of following others’ instructions—first his mother’s, then Auden’s, and then, to some degree, Pears’s—Britten knew the direction he needed to take for his own artistic growth. In his music, if not in his life, he could explore the conflicting desire and fear that had made his own adult life too complex. The story of Peter Grimes, who tries to overcome his weakness and, in doing so, is classified as a criminal and destroyed, unearthed years of Britten’s own struggle to conform to the sexual strictures of his culture. Perhaps he could channel those feelings into his work and create something not derivative (as critics too often called his work) but powerful, original, and great.
The November visit with Auden was short, with a concert scheduled for Cincinnati the following day. Britten and Auden said good-bye, aware that they were unlikely to see each other for some time. Professionally, their parting was friendly but inconclusive. Britten still planned to set “St. Cecilia” to music, and he had not refused outright to consider the oratorio. But Auden must have sensed that he had been to some degree dismissed by his former protégé. In essence, this poet, for whom friends were more important than anything except his work, the talented friends most of all, was losing the prize of his collection. Charles Miller noted that before Britten and Pears left, Auden nodded in their direction and remarked to him, “Now there’s a happily married couple.”
If his sense of isolation had been painful before, it worsened after Britten’s departure. Only now, having written extensively about America and created an entire libretto describing its development, did Auden feel that he finally understood the full tragic loneliness of the American Middle West.
“Charlie, it’s amazing that no one has really written about the true America, the land of the lonely!” he said to his housemate. “The land of eccentrics and outcast lonelies. ‘The Lonelies’ could be the title of a grand unwritten American novel. I’ve been told of a likely hero, the homosexual ‘queen’ of Niles, Michigan, you know? Each evening when the New York–Chicago train pauses there to put off a passenger or so, this lonely queen meets the train, hoping to encounter one of his own kind. By profession, he’s an accountant, but actually he’s a loner who solicits traveling salesmen. His stand-by source of sex is high school football players who are coached not to ‘do anything with women.’”
Taking a sip of his coffee, Auden added, “Imagine it, Charlie. Imagine such a scene being repeated daily in hundreds of dismal little American towns!” He sighed heavily. “America is one of the loneliest places on this planet. And my friend George Davis ought to write a novel about it . . .’”
“Hasn’t Sherwood Anderson written it already?” Miller asked.
“Perhaps, in his own way. But the novel needs to be written by one of us.”
George Davis, who had long before fled small-town America, was now too busy to consider writing novels. Fed up with having too little money and not enough influence, he had decided to give up the freelance life and accept an editorial position at Mademoiselle. After all, Auden had left, and Britten and Pears, and Golo Mann and Gypsy—and these days Carson didn’t use her room at all. Klaus Mann, who was nearly certain that the January issue of Decision would be the last due to lack of funds, hardly ever came by anymore. Other artists were moving in, but it wasn’t the same. The year was up, and the “gamble with myself and others” was over, even if the results were not yet all in. When Anaïs Nin visited the famous house some time later, she would find it charmingly furnished with bright carpets, heavy antiques, framed watercolors and sketches, and Victorian bric-a-brac covering every flat surface. “A museum of Americana,” she called it, having arrived too late to witness the living, breathing creative workshop that it had once been.
On December 7, 1941, the death knell that the residents of 7 Middagh Street had been expecting finally arrived, though no one could have foreseen its form. At 7:55 A.M., with no declaration of war, the Empire of Japan mounted a surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor air and naval base in Hawaii. Nearly three thousand people were killed and more than six hundred wounded. The backbone of the American Pacific fleet was eliminated before the United States had even begun to fight. Americans were stunned by this evidence of such advanced military logistics and organization. But in Britain, those who heard the news got out the last of their champagne for a celebratory toast, and in Europe the prisoners being carted off to concentration camps embraced one another in the midst of their despair. They were convinced that now Hitler had no hope of victory. America was ready. And everything would change.
Epilogue
Each moment then is a turning point—not only the fruit of an infinite past but also the bud, the chance, indeed, the promise of an infinite future.
—Klaus Mann, 1941
Janet Flanner’s former companion, Solita Solano, later described 1941 as the year that everything changed “nearly down to the roots of life.” It was certainly true for her. Having lost Flanner to the younger Natalia Murray, she would stop writing that year and move west with her own new lover. But of course the sea change after Pearl Harbor was more a global political and cultural phenomenon than the result of any single personal event. December 7 came to symbolize not only, in Churchill’s words, the end of the beginning of the Second World War and the beginning of the end, but the end of one era in America and the beginning of another.
Private dramas continued to play themselves out, even if viewed somewhat differently in light of world events. It must have astounded even Wystan Auden, for example, to read Chester Kallman’s letter, written on the day of the attack, complaining of its effect on his Hollywood sex life: “It really isn’t fair—I feel bitter, vindictive, half-immersed in ‘circular madness’ . . . Is it asking so much to want to be fucked or even to indulge in the simplest of childhood experiences with a more dangerous engine? . . . it’s all very depressing—and now War.” Despit
e this further evidence of “imperfection,” Auden, having made his commitment to Kallman, remained. Traveling to California that month, he took Kallman on rounds of visits to friends in a position to help him find a job, continued to support him financially when opportunities fell through, and arranged for the payment of Kallman’s tuition when he arrived in Ann Arbor for the spring semester.
Understanding that Kallman remained enraptured by Jack Barker, Auden even agreed to drive him to New York so that the two could meet—though only after Barker agreed to an interview with Auden to ensure that his intentions were “honorable.” (Trying to explain his actions to Caroline Newton, Auden wrote, “Promiscuity . . . fills one with jealousy and anxiety for his spiritual welfare, while a genuine love fills one with jealousy and respect.”) Although Barker managed to reassure Auden that his interest in Kallman was at least somewhat spiritual as well as carnal, the lovers’ reunion did not go well. While staying with Kallman as George Davis’s guest at 7 Middagh Street, Barker was diagnosed with syphilis, and an outraged household ordered the two boys out at once. Kallman wrote bitterly to Auden that “they all found the unity they appallingly lacked in a hysterical fear of ‘catching disease,’” and that George “had an opportunity for his own special theatre,” telling everyone that “he couldn’t, out of respect for you, have me in the house with Jack!”
George was not the only friend of Auden’s to react negatively to The Crisis, as the culmination of “l’affaire C” would become known. When the couple visited the Mann family in California, the entire group expressed such hostility to Kallman that Auden ended his relations that year with all but the patriarch, Thomas. He broke off his friendship with Lincoln Kirstein’s sister, Mina Kirstein Curtiss, as well, after she referred to Kallman as “just a Brooklyn kike” (though she herself was Jewish). Only those who managed to hold their tongues, no matter what their private opinions—Isherwood, the Mayers, James and Tania Stern—remained part of Auden’s circle after 1941.
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