Eventually, this eccentric behavior would get George into trouble at Mademoiselle as it had at Harper’s Bazaar. He left the magazine to help his friend Fleur Cowles, the wife of the publisher of Look magazine, launch Flair, a no-expenses-barred, modernist magazine. Yet again, after publishing the works of Tennessee Williams, Jean Cocteau, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Salvador Dalí, George was dismissed from Flair for his refusal, or inability, to conform to office procedures. But the cycle was finally broken when, in 1951, a year after the death of Kurt Weill, George married the composer’s widow, Lotte Lenya. While the marriage may have initially been based on Lenya’s need for company and George’s for room and board, they soon found a new purpose in their shared effort to preserve Weill’s place in the American musical canon, beginning with the wildly successful 1954 revival of The Threepenny Opera and continuing with Lenya’s classic recordings of that opera as well as Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins and Mahagonny. If George Davis had contributed nothing to American culture other than the Weill renaissance, for which he was wholly responsible, he deserved to die as contented as he did in 1957, of heart failure in Berlin, while helping Lenya, his last protégée, realize her artistic dream.
In the years between the attack on Pearl Harbor and George’s death, the 7 Middagh Street alumni regularly reunited in various combinations to create new works. In 1946, Oliver Smith collaborated on a Tanglewood Music Festival production of Britten’s Peter Grimes, now acknowledged as the first true British musical masterpiece of his generation. In 1952, he coproduced the successful revival of Pal Joey, the Broadway musical that had made Gypsy’s sister, June Havoc, an overnight star. Colin McPhee dedicated his memoir, A House in Bali, to George, who had not only provided Colin with a place to live for many years but tirelessly bullied him into sticking with the book through its 1944 publication. Meanwhile, McPhee’s musical transcriptions were performed alongside Britten’s work and included on numerous occasions in the annual Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, founded by Britten in his beloved seaside village.
In 1943, Paul Bowles and Salvador Dalí collaborated on a ballet (a disaster in Bowles’s opinion, a triumph in Dalí’s), and three years later, Smith coproduced Paul’s adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, renamed No Exit. In 1946 and 1947, Janet Flanner and Natalia Murray introduced Carson to literary society in Paris and Rome. And in 1953 Kay Boyle, George Davis’s old friend from 1920s Paris and by then one of Carson’s closest confidantes, dedicated a poem to her two friends from Middagh Street, Carson and Reeves.
In a sense, then, creative life would go on as it had before Pearl Harbor, but in many ways, Carson and George had been right when they sensed the urgent need to focus on their work as long as they could because things would never be the same. With the American entry into the war, nearly all of the residents of Middagh Street were forced to put down their work, at least temporarily, and take a stand of some kind. Isherwood, Britten, and Pears successfully defended their claims as conscientious objectors, serving their countries in productive ways without ever holding a weapon. Auden, desperately working at his Christmas oratorio in hopes of completing it before being drafted, was in the end rejected by the military as psychologically unfit—that is, for being homosexual. Angry over his treatment by the “unpleasant and grotesquely ignorant” psychiatrist in charge, Auden finally managed an official assignment near the end of the war: accompanying James Stern on a mission to interview German citizens on the effect of Allied bombing raids on public morale. (“We got no answers that we didn’t expect,” Auden later remarked.) Meanwhile, Chester Kallman, who was not required to serve due to a slight curvature of the spine, took the only employment of any length he would ever hold—reviewing the correspondence of prisoners of war for the U.S. Censorship Office.
One frequenter of Middagh Street who responded to the crisis in a way no one could have predicted was Klaus Mann, now freed up by the demise of Decision and, by the end of 1942, having completed his autobiography along with a biographical study of his former mentor, André Gide. After several attempts to be accepted into the U.S. Army, he finally succeeded in December 1942. Still depressed nearly to the point of suicide, Klaus said that if his life were of no use to him, it might as well be put to use in the fight against Hitler.
To his own surprise, however, military life agreed with him. Inducted at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and transferred to a number of other training camps, the thirty-six-year-old writer was promoted from private first class to staff sergeant within four months of enlisting. His obvious intelligence and fluency in German led to his assignment to the propaganda arm of the Psychological Warfare Branch of Military Intelligence, where he composed leaflets and appeared at the Italian front with a loudspeaker, urging German soldiers to surrender. Klaus endured enemy fire on numerous occasions and risked his life more than once. After the war, he chose to remain in uniform and work as a staff writer for Stars and Stripes, the American military journal.
While others among the 7 Middagh Street crowd—such as Lincoln Kirstein and Reeves McCullers—experienced great satisfaction through their military service, a few—including Paul Bowles and George Davis—were dismissed as homosexuals and forbidden to serve. Gypsy worked tirelessly for the war effort through a string of performances at military bases, the USO, and other organizations, while Carson wrote patriotic articles for American magazines and kept up an encouraging correspondence with Reeves. Even Brooklyn Heights did its part: its shops served more than seventy thousand employees of the Navy Yard at its peak, and many of its brownstones were requisitioned by the military as lodgings and jukebox canteens.
The house itself did not survive the war. In 1945 it was torn down to make room for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, encircling the two boroughs. George Davis, who had just renewed his lease for another five years, was forced to move to Manhattan, where he rented another brownstone until it, too, was demolished. After a brief and miserable time at the seedy midtown Hotel Columbia, he moved into Lotte Lenya’s country house, bought with the proceeds of the 1941 production of Lady in the Dark. Now, nearly six decades later, all that remains of the unusual brownstone is a triangle of grass, a square of concrete sidewalk, and a sign: NO STANDING.
But life in Brooklyn is still slow and dreamy, and the streets are still filled with neatly dressed children and their nannies and rows and rows of maple trees. From where I sit at one of the rickety outdoor tables at the coffee shop on the corner of Middagh Street and Hicks, I can see the spot where the house used to be. Sipping my coffee, I watch a tall, lanky girl in a man’s blazer and a baseball cap cross the street, pause at the window of the rare book shop on the opposite corner, then continue down Middagh to the Brooklyn Promenade. Does she know, I wonder, how closely she resembles the fiercely ambitious young visionary who once made a home here? When she paused at the bookstore, did she notice the word drugs detailed in the mosaic beneath her feet, the only reminder of the shy pharmacist, Mr. Parker? Does she have any idea that the bluff so crudely cut in half once supported an overgrown garden full of a poet’s cats and apple trees whose fruit could go into a burlesque performer’s strudel? Probably not, I decide, as she looks out across the harbor, takes a deep breath of salt air, and continues on. But some signs remain for those who know where to look.
There is, for example, a box of Gypsy’s photographs of herself at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts that contains one beautiful full-figure portrait of the twenty-three-year-old Carson McCullers in Central Park. In George’s papers at the Weill-Lenya Center on East Twentieth Street you will find the notebook in which Auden entered early drafts of “Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day,” a tribute to Britten, and “The Quest,” perhaps written partly in reference to Chester Kallman. Letters from Janet Flanner are in Carson’s papers in Texas, and in Auden’s archives in Manhattan is a handwritten, unfinished tribute to George. Still retained among Britten’s belongings in his old house near Aldeburgh is a handwritten bill for rent and expenses, carefully enu
merated on a scrap of lined notepaper in Auden’s hand:
BENGY AND PETER
Food for two weeks
11.97
Service, laundry, coal etc. for two weeks
32.93
Putting in buzzer
4.50
Rent for Jan.
12.50
Total
61.90
Paid
19.00
Remaining
42.90
But perhaps the best place to look is the rare book shop itself. Its display windows and shelves are filled with the results of the 7 Middagh residents’ and visitors’ industry. These artists, all of them under thirty-five, did not accomplish everything that they had hoped before the war, but much of their best work was either created in the house or inspired during their stay. For the Time Being, The Sea and the Mirror, and The Age of Anxiety—in addition to such classic poems as “Leap Before You Look” and “In Sickness and in Health”—are considered by many critics to be Auden’s most significant works. Carson’s Ballad of the Sad Cafe and The Member of the Wedding represented the high-water mark of her career. While Britten may not have achieved the worldly success he had hoped for in America, he made enormous emotional and artistic progress, composing his first symphony and opera and maturing in ways that made it possible for him to create his first dramatic masterpiece, Peter Grimes. Gypsy Rose Lee, of course, had finally added the title of “author” to her name, and Jane Bowles wrote the only novel she would publish in her life. Paul Bowles, despite his conflict with Auden, was sufficiently inspired to drop music in favor of literature. Louis MacNeice, Klaus Mann, Colin McPhee, and Salvador Dalí summarized their experiences in autobiographies or memoirs immediately after leaving the house. And, of course, George Davis would go on, for the rest of his life, nurturing the artists whose lives he happened across—even when, as was increasingly the case as time passed, he was unable to care for himself.
Auden and Britten’s friendship, however, did not survive the Middagh Street experiment in any meaningful way. While Britten spent his remaining years with Peter Pears in England, Auden became an American citizen in 1946 and continued to live in New York in what he called a “cheerful unhygienic mess” almost until his death in 1973. After the war, he purchased a house in Austria and lived there half of each year with Chester Kallman, writing poetry in the morning and, in the afternoon, collaborating with the Brooklyn poet on the libretti for such operas as Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress. The sexual component of the men’s relationship never resumed—the moment Auden returned to New York each winter, Kallman escaped to a sybaritic life in Greece—but, for Auden, half a marriage was better than none. After his death from a heart attack (in his sleep, in a hotel room in Austria), Kallman suffered an emotional collapse and died himself sixteen months later.
All these years, Auden, who so treasured his friendships, remarked more than once that he had lost only one friend in his life—though he was too polite to name Britten. Whenever the subject of Paul Bunyan came up, he called it a failure and blamed his own inexperience and ignorance, as a result of which “some very lovely music of Britten’s went down the drain.” Britten ignored the opera completely, half-pretending it didn’t exist even when Pears dug up the libretto and score decades later and suggested that they try it again.
In 1974, however, after heart surgery that left him too weak to continue composing, the sixty-year-old Britten reluctantly agreed to revive Paul Bunyan for a BBC radio broadcast and, later, a performance at the Aldeburgh Festival. It was, recalled his biographer and close friend, Donald Mitchell, among the very last performances of his music in which he was able to be involved. When he listened to the recording in 1976, when it was first broadcast, Auden was already dead, and Britten himself would die within the year.
Now, listening to the recording, Mitchell later wrote, the aging composer “was deeply moved by the operetta he had created with his old friend all those years ago.” The sheer exuberance of the music and words by these young artists in their prime could not help but bring back those years in America, when all had seemed possible and everything was at stake. Britten “was profoundly touched—sometimes to tears—by such lines as ‘Once in a while the odd thing happens’—‘That was Peter,’ he once confided about that particular chorus . . . and the great Litany at the end of Act Two . . . He turned to me on one occasion . . . and said, ‘You know, Donald, I simply hadn’t remembered that it was such a strong piece.’”
Perhaps, in the end, what was produced is not as important as the fact that these bold young artists, believing in and committed to the importance of their work, took action to pursue the truth as best they could before the events of history conspired to redirect their efforts. In coming together, they placed their faith in a creative energy that, at the very least, was bound to send them off on exciting new trajectories. And it was this journey that was the point of 7 Middagh Street, more even than the results. As Colin McPhee wrote in the sad, silent days after the house at 7 Middagh was torn down, “My few friends admire or love me, not for what I’ve accomplished, but for what they think I might have done. And ultimately, a work of art that does not exist is the most beautiful work of all—it’s a rich blend of nostalgia, stoicism, and futility. Shake well, add fresh ginger, and pour through a fine sieve.”
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
The history of a year in the lives of a group of well-known artists necessarily depends on the scholarship accomplished by each individual’s biographers. I would like to thank the following authors for their full-length portraits of the residents and guests of 7 Middagh Street or commentaries on their works: Katherine Bucknell, Gena Dagel Caponi, Humphrey Carpenter, Virginia Spencer Carr, Richard Davenport-Hines, Carlos Dews, Millicent Dillon, Irving Drutman, John Fuller, Ian Gibson, June Havoc, Peter Hoffer, Nicholas Jenkins, Edward Mendelson, Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, Carol Oja, Erik Lee Preminger, Jerry Rosco, Josyane Savigneau, Donald Spoto, Jon Stallworthy, Nicholas Fox Weber, and Brenda Wineapple.
I relied as well on the knowledge and expert assistance of the curators and archivists Nicholas Clark at the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh, England; Sue Hodson of the Huntington Library’s Christopher Isherwood collection in San Marino, California; Ursula Hummel of the Münchner Stadtbibliothek, Monacensia Literature Archives, Collection Klaus Mann; Isaac Gewirtz, Philip Milito, and Wayne Furman of the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection; John Vallier of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Library; David Stein of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music; and the staffs of the Goethe Institute in New York City, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Yale University’s Beinecke Library and its Sterling Memorial Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Department, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Public Library, Indiana University’s Lilly Library, the New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Science Library, and the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.
The literary executors Don Bachardy, Barbara Thompson Davis, Peter Davis, the estate of Dorothy Farnan, Floria V. Lasky, Edward Mendelson, and Erik Lee Preminger were more than generous with their time and assistance. Mark McCloud of the Curtis Brown Agency and Robert Lantz of the Lantz Office made every effort to facilitate the permissions process.
Peter Banki kindly translated research materials from German, and Dana Stevens, from French. Robert Nedelkoff, whom I have never met but who has become a true friend online, provided an impressive stack of interview leads and other information. Joel Block contributed valuable research documents. Aamin Cheema acted as consummate photography researcher. Susan Hamovitch provided a crucial collection of articles, including one by her mother, on the psychology of Paul Bowles. John Aielli magically produced just the right book on that same author at just the right time. Jan Van der Donk provided the portrait of Salvador and Gala Dalí. Janie W. Tippins demonstrated what a real libr
arian can do.
Many kind and enthusiastic people allowed themselves to be interviewed for this book. I would especially like to thank Kathryn Abbe, Don Bachardy, Peter Davis, Christine Evans, Gwen Franklin, Victor Guarneri, Erik Lee Preminger, and Dorothy Wheelock Edson for their valuable insights and information. Caroline Seebohm’s and Elizabeth Moulton’s essays about the British artists’ American exile and about George Davis, respectively, proved invaluable. Kenneth Lisenbee of www.paulbowles.org extended both his knowledge and encouragement. The late Edward Jablonski, esteemed biographer of the Gershwins, took the time to describe what it was like to grow up in George Davis’s Michigan and then to discover New York.
I would especially like to thank my agent, Gail Ross, and her staff at Gail Ross Literary Associates, who found the best possible home for my proposal in three breathtaking weeks. Leslie Breed contributed her own considerable talents in foreign rights. Deanne Urmy, my editor, has served as a passionate advocate for February House from the beginning, and her editorial comments were without exception both crucial to the book’s development and wise. Melissa Grella accomplished a yeoman’s task of organization. Luise Erdmann demonstrated her great sensitivity and care as manuscript editor. Walter Vatter, publicist, showed exceptional commitment to this project. And in England, Ben Ball’s enthusiasm and informed understanding carried clearly across the Atlantic.
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