by Neil Powell
Yet all the work in hand and all the kindness of the Mayers couldn’t disguise an underlying truth: ‘I feel terribly homesick, my dear,’ he told Beth. ‘Yearning for things to get all right & so that we could meet again, & go on living as before.’25 He veered between wanting everyone he loved in Europe to cross the Atlantic to safety – ‘you [Wulff] & Gustel, & if possible Barbara & the family too’26 – and longing to return to them, and to Suffolk, himself. The informal tenancies of both his English homes had turned out disastrously: Jackie Hewitt had left the Hallam Street flat in a filthy state, with rent and bills unpaid, and had even robbed the gas meter; while at Snape, Lennox Berkeley dithered, first declining a proposal that Ralph Hawkes should occupy the Old Mill, then decamping to stay with the critic John Davenport. There were times when Britten’s unhappiness erupted in understandable frustration: ‘Sometimes I feel a bomb on Snape might not be a terrible thing – but I don’t want to sell it.’27 Similarly, his fury with Berkeley – who ‘writes letters about conscience & duty (King & Country etc.) & complains about neglect … He’s just NO GOOD’28 – was essentially a reflection of his own inner turmoil and an acknowledgement that Berkeley’s unresolved dilemmas weren’t so very far from his. When the Mayers provided Ben and Peter with a wonderful Christmas in the German style – the main celebration taking place on Christmas Eve – it could only emphasise how far they were from home.
On New Year’s Day, Ralph Hawkes was to arrive from England: he and Britten planned to travel together to Chicago, where on the 15th the American premiere of his piano concerto would take place, with the Illinois Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Albert Goldberg, and the composer as soloist; but Hawkes was delayed until the middle of the month, so Britten travelled alone. He went first to Champaign, Illinois, where he ‘heard lots of wind-bands & met conductors’ for an article he was writing for the New York Times; next to Chicago to rehearse; then on to Grand Rapids; and finally back to Chicago for the performance. He assured Elizabeth Mayer that ‘when I’m by myself I’m pretty efficient at arranging matters – booking rooms, tickets etc. & getting about. It’s only when Peter’s around that I become so shy & retiring…’29 He had left behind at Amityville two people who loved him. ‘Everything here awaits you patiently,’ wrote Mrs Mayer. ‘Your table at the window, the little piece of red blotting paper, which made me cry silently, the ruler … Here is your home now.’30 For Pears, it was their first substantial time apart while they had been in America, and Britten’s itinerary couldn’t help triggering memories: ‘I shall never forget a certain night in Grand Rapids,’ he wrote. ‘Ich liebe dich, io t’amo, jeg elske dyg (?), je t’aime, in fact, my little white-thighed beauty, I’m terribly in love with you.’31 We should notice not the archness but the passionate expression, committed to the headed notepaper of Boosey Hawkes Belwin Incorporated, of a love that still hardly dared to speak its name.
The Chicago performance of the concerto wasn’t without mishap. During the first movement, the piano keyboard’s fixings came adrift and Britten had to stop the orchestra, apologise and start again. Albert Goldberg recalled that, just as he had his arms raised for the recommencement, ‘Britten stood up looked at the audience and said, “I hope you don’t think it was I who was to blame.” And that won the audience you know.’32 The evening was indeed, as Britten said, ‘a great success’ both in the hall and with the critics: Edward Barry, in the Chicago Tribune, thought that ‘Mr Britten – tall, slim, and 26 – is as English as rain’ and Eugene Stinson, in the Chicago Daily News, predicted that Britten would be ‘vigorously applauded … wherever he plays in America’ while shrewdly observing that the concerto ‘is not as strong as it is bold and not as deep as it is entertaining’.33 The winter was severe in the Midwest: fourteen degrees below freezing one day, according to Britten, who had ‘vile cold and flu’ in Chicago, felt ‘completely dead’ on his return to Amityville, but within a few days was ‘fine now – Mrs Mayer is such an angel & looks after me like a mother’.34 That optimism about his recovery (for the benefit of his sister Beth) was, however, misplaced. It was another month before either of his sisters heard of him again and, when news came, it was in the worrying form of a letter to Beth from Peter, who had a series of medical crises to report. After staying in bed for a few days to shake off the flu, Ben ‘had a long and horrible nose-bleed which left him pretty weakish, and it seems that a streptococcus of some sort seized upon that moment to attack him’. His temperature increased to 104 degrees (‘you can guess it was a bit alarming’) and then, four days later, to 107 degrees; his tonsils were ‘quite rotten apparently and must come out at the first suitable moment’. He was, as Pears wryly pointed out, surrounded by a surfeit of doctors as well as – and more usefully – by Beata, who was a professional nurse, had done ‘night duty for about a week, and now she stays with him for most of the day’. She had been, he added, ‘quite marvellous’.35
The unfolding, sequential nature of this illness will sound familiar; it is exactly the sort of thing that had happened to Britten at Gresham’s. The fact that America affected him in the same way as public school wasn’t lost on Auden, who liked to attribute all maladies to psychosomatic causes, and he may have had a point: in each case, Britten found deracination intolerably stressful, longed to return home and became more seriously and lengthily unwell than might have been expected. Meanwhile, in London, at the Aeolian Hall on 30 January, Sophie Wyss with the Boyd Neel Orchestra had given the first complete performance of Les Illuminations, in a concert at which Britten would have dearly loved to be present. He wasn’t even well enough to write to her about it until 15 March, when he hoarsely dictated a letter to his ‘amiable nurse-secretary’, the indefatigable Beata: ‘I hear you have never sung better and I know what that means.’36 He had only been sent parts of the reviews which dealt with the composition rather than the performance, but he hoped the ‘snarky old critics’ had been kind to her; in fact, both The Times and the Daily Telegraph were remarkably unsnarky, the latter noting that ‘Sophie Wyss’s soprano voice did perfect justice to Benjamin Britten’s delightful song cycle’.37 London musical life was entering its wartime semi-hibernation and England was also enduring a dreadful winter; the Bridges, snowbound in Sussex, were unable to get to the concert. But Lennox Berkeley was there, as generously appreciative as ever of his friend’s music: ‘The “Illuminations” are marvellous – even better than I had expected … I think it’s an absolute knock-out, and the best thing you’ve done (of what I’ve heard).’38
It was still a struggle, even at the end of the month, for Britten to get to the premiere of his Violin Concerto, Op. 15, which was given by Antonio Brosa with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Barbirolli at Carnegie Hall on 28 March. The performance, the first of two on consecutive days, was both a huge success in its own right and the happy conclusion to a chapter of accidents: Barbirolli had originally engaged Brosa to play the Berg concerto, under the impression that they would be giving the piece its American premiere (which had in fact taken place in the same hall three years earlier); it was Brosa who suggested Britten’s new concerto as an alternative and the invaluable Hawkes who arranged for Barbirolli to hear Brosa play it through in London with Henry Boys at the piano. ‘The work will never be better played or more completely understood than it was by you on Thursday & Friday, & I am more than grateful to you for having spent so much time & energy in learning it,’ Britten told Brosa on 31 March.39 He was also able to congratulate him on ‘the rapturous notices you had from all the critics’, modestly omitting to mention that his own share of the reviews – especially Olin Downes’s in the New York Times – hadn’t been so far from rapturous either. The piece subtly acknowledges the fact that, after Berg’s reinvention of the form, the violin concerto would never be quite the same again: it is more conservative, certainly (if not as conservative as Samuel Barber’s, also written in 1939 and also perhaps a kind of reply to Berg), yet the rhythmic motif with which it begins suggests a resp
ectful nod towards the opening of the earlier work, from which Britten has learned a thing or two about orchestral colour and the use of percussion. Its most puzzling and rather English characteristic is that its virtuosic demands, including an enormous central cadenza, never seem at all showy. There is much dancing and dazzling, and for a while a mildly exotic whiff of the Eastern Mediterranean, before the concerto settles into its concluding mood of resolution which, like the ending of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is also one of disenchantment. After all the energetic invention which has preceded it, this episode seems strangely drawn out, as if the expected final cadence keeps clambering onto a slippery rock, falling off and trying again until it eventually succeeds.
That a work receiving its first performance in March 1940 should be so unsure of its own ending is entirely appropriate. A few days later, Britten replied to a cable from Boosey & Hawkes, who had been asked by the Japanese Embassy to confirm details of his commission for them: ‘TITLE SINFONIA DA REQUIEM OR FIRST SYMPHONY SUBTITLE TO MEMORY OF MY PARENTS THREE INTERLINKED MOVEMENTS ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES’.40 He was, as so often, cutting things fine. On 28 April he wrote to Beth: ‘I now find myself faced with the proposition of writing a Symphony in about 3 weeks!’ He had only, he said, just had official confirmation – the earlier exchange of cables being apparently insufficient for him – and was relieved that the fee (7,000 yen or approximately $1,650) would temporarily ease his financial worries; wartime restrictions had made it impossible to transfer money from England. But, he added, ‘I should have written the work anyhow – it is a Sinfonia da Requiem, combining my ideas on war & a memorial for Mum & Pop.’41 This pacifist element makes it sound even less like anything the Japanese government would want and, as with Our Hunting Fathers, Britten seems to have been intent on fulfilling his commission in a manner guaranteed to displease its sponsors: his description of it to Enid Slater as ‘a work with plenty of “peace propaganda” in it – if they will accept it’ suggests that he knew what he was doing. At the same time, he developed ‘a sudden craze for Michael Angelo Sonnetts & have set about half a dozen of them’42 – his Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Op. 22, would be finished by the end of October – and he was thinking about a string quartet. In July, he met Paul Wittgenstein, the philosopher’s pianist brother who had lost his right arm during the First World War and who now commissioned from him the Diversions, Op. 21, for piano (left hand) and orchestra. Having completed the Sinfonia da Requiem, he learned from the British Embassy in Tokyo that he was expected to attend its first performance, but thought that the rapidly deteriorating relations between the USA and Japan made this trip unlikely. ‘Anyhow,’ he told Barbara, ‘I don’t want to go – they have too much rice, earthquakes and hari-kari (or mata-hari, whatever that is).’43
No matter how hard he tried to sound jauntily encouraging in his letters to Barbara, Beth and Kit Welford, Britten had assorted causes for unhappiness. On a simple practical level, his financial affairs were in a mess: overdrawn at his English bank, despite his quarterly retainer from Boosey & Hawkes, he instructed Beth to cash in his life insurance policy, ‘leave a little to keep the account going & pinch the rest – see? Have a good time yourselves – buy some rum & forget for abit – the same for Barbara!’44 He continued to urge the Welfords to live in the Old Mill (when he wasn’t reiterating his wish to get rid of the place) or, conversely, to come to America: he even made enquiries about a job for Kit, who was by this time a locum GP at Swaffham in Norfolk, and sent a formal promise to ‘guarantee your maintenance in this country – & that of any young relations or friends you know of who can get away’.45 Yet, as he wrote more frankly to other friends, ‘America is a great disappointment’; it was ‘so narrow, so self-satisfied, so chauvanistic, so superficial, so reactionary, & above all so ugly’.46 Meanwhile, there had been troubling news – followed by lack of news – about Wulff Scherchen, who had first been interned as an enemy alien and then shipped with other internees to Canada: it seemed that he might have been aboard the Arandora Star, torpedoed and sunk on 2 July with the loss of some six hundred internees and prisoners of war. Finally, after much frantic sending of cables and letters (including Britten’s kind and supportive ones to Gustel Scherchen), Wulff was located at an internment camp near Ottawa: ‘At last we have traced you!… now I can start sending you things – if I can think of anything besides the lists of things I am not allowed to send you!’47 He was, at least, on the safer side of the Atlantic. ‘My dear Gustel,’ Britten wrote on 26 August, ‘I know how you feel. It is tragic for the dear boy, but we must, & he must, just regard it as a period of “marking-time” (as it is for everybody else).’48
Thus he identified the underlying cause of his own private malaise: ‘marking time’ was something Britten always found intolerable and, despite an astonishing level of creativity, he couldn’t avoid the sense of being trapped, in his own words ‘stuck here’, waiting for the end of something. To try and achieve some illusion of freedom, he bought himself a cheap car, a 1931 Ford, in which he and Pears set off for a late summer holiday in New England. They ended up, after a series of breakdowns and garage visits, at Owl’s Head in Maine; the car’s trouble, he told Copland, ‘was probably neurotic – being associated with loupy musicians’ (surely a gentle swipe at Auden’s theory of illness), but they had arrived at ‘the most glorious spot’ and were ‘working like the dickens & happy as kings’.49 Among the other guests at the Owl’s Head Inn was Kurt Weill, who was ‘awfully nice & sympathetic, and it was remarkable how many friends we had in common, both in Europe & here’:50 wartime America, for all its faults, had become the meeting ground for cultural émigrés, a place where Schoenberg and Stravinsky could end up as Californian near neighbours. While at Owl’s Head, Britten finished his Wittgenstein commission before he and Pears set off again to Massachusetts, visiting Auden at Williamsburg and Lincoln Kirstein at Ashfield. ‘I find it very easy to work up here,’ he told Ralph Hawkes, ‘& as we are having grand hospitality the going is very cheap!’51 Money remained a constant worry: he approached an agent, Abe Meyer at MCA, about the possibility of getting some film music work (rather to the displeasure of Hawkes, whose firm was setting up its own agency division) and he contemplated going to Mexico or Canada and re-entering the USA as an immigrant, a step which might have had both financial advantages and less desirable consequences if America entered the war.
In a long and rambling letter written from the Owl’s Head Inn to Beth – its stream-of-consciousness style perhaps connected with a brief recurrence of his throat infection and a temperature peaking at 103 degrees – Britten hinted that he and Pears might be moving on from Amityville, where they had been the Mayers’ guests for exactly a year, sometimes sleeping at the house of Dr Titley, the director of Long Island Home, but eating and working at Stanton Cottage. The Home, he said, was ‘really a small village where everyone knows everyone & everyone’s business, & the intrigues and scandals are unbelievable’. There had been ‘a certain amount of friction’ about when and where people were asked to meals: it was ‘impossible for people to be shut up together without squabbling’.52 In fact, there seems to have been less tension than one might expect in a small professional community: a recent patch of coolness, according to Elizabeth Mayer, had actually been caused by Britten borrowing Dr Titley’s tennis racket and forgetting to return it. A fortnight later, although it was ‘grand to be back with the family’ who were ‘such dears & a comfort in these bloody times’, he told Beth that ‘We feel we have to be nearer the big city where things go on & jobs are born’. So, although he admitted that he loathed the idea, ‘Peter & I are going to take a flat with Wystan Auden for the winter in Brooklyn – one of the districts of New York City’.53
3
What Britten tactfully called a ‘flat’ and Pears, writing to his mother, described as ‘rooms’ in a house ‘just bought’ by ‘a friend of ours’54 was in fact one room on the top floor of a four-storey brownstone house owned by George Davis, the writer
and literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar, at 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn Heights. It seems unlikely that either Beth Britten or Jessie Pears would have recognised the place from the information they had been given nor, probably, would they have approved of it. ‘Auden was proxy landlord,’ as the Britten scholars Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed put it, ‘to a household that surely must have been among the most remarkable ever to have been gathered together under one roof.’55 This is scarcely an exaggeration. Among its residents for longer or shorter spells – apart from Auden, Britten and Pears, and sometimes Davis himself – were the writers Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers, Louis MacNeice, and Golo and Klaus Mann; the stripper and actress Gypsy Rose Lee; and the theatrical designer Oliver Smith. As Klaus Mann noted in his diary, ‘What an epic one could write about this!’56 There are, it hardly needs to be said, two sharply distinct ways of reacting to such a ménage. In the opinion of Denis de Rougemont, the author of Passion and Society, ‘all that was new in America in music, painting, or choreography emanated from that house, the only center of thought and art that I found in any large city of the country’; whereas for Caroline Seebohm, it was ‘a huge, rambling society of creative eccentrics, living in varieties of squalor’ in which ‘Auden ruled the roost after a fashion; he collected rents, paid bills, organized food, calling meal times’.57 The fashion in which Auden ruled was recalled by Paul Bowles: ‘Our communal living worked well largely because Auden ran it. He would preface a meal by announcing: “We’ve got roast and two veg, salad and savory, and there will be no political discussion.”’58 But Auden’s orderly mealtimes were calm interludes in the general chaos: MacNeice, who stayed briefly when a visiting lecturer at Cornell, remembered ‘Auden writing in one room, a girl novelist [McCullers] writing with a cup of sherry in another, a composer [Britten] composing, a singer [Pears] hitting a high note and holding it, and Gypsy Rose Lee coming round for meals like a whirlwind of laughter and sex. It was the way the populace once liked to think of artists – ever so bohemian, raiding the icebox at midnight and eating the cat food by mistake.’59
