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I wrote it three times, with a Thesaurus.
—Gypsy Rose Lee, 1941
“That’s admirable,” Janet Flanner remarked when George described the experiment at 7 Middagh over the telephone. The New Yorker columnist had long considered Brooklyn’s brownstone neighborhoods among the city’s hidden treasures. “And what is [the house] like, George?”
“Well, it’s an old house, quite a handsome old house, a boardinghouse, really,” he replied.
But the connection wasn’t clear, and Flanner thought he said it was a “bawdy” house. “Why, George, how did you find one? That’s just priceless for the pack of you.”
Flanner’s comment made sense, given her familiarity with the young group, but by early November the bawdy life at 7 Middagh had begun to give way to a more structured existence. Thanks to Gypsy’s contribution, the furnace now produced heat and hot water and the cellar was supplied with coal. As the carpenters finished their work in the parlor, George was able to finish decorating. Gypsy persuaded him to replace his spindly parlor settee and straight-backed chairs with sturdier pieces from her farmhouse, but the knickknacks on the mantelpiece, the framed pictures by Bérard, de Chirico, and Vertes, the oil lamps and antique trunks, still gave the parlor a genteel charm that suited the entire household.
George himself moved from the top floor to the high-ceilinged rear room adjoining the parlor, with its romantic view of the rear garden’s untended apple trees and rampant ivy. The parlor had benefited from Gypsy’s steadying influence, but George was able to have his own way with his bedroom. He soon transformed it into a fantasy of framed Valentines, magazine covers, and movie-star chromos, with an enormous bookcase displaying his prized complete set of Balzac, a cherry secretary near the window for writing letters, and a rocking chair for reading near the antique brass bed.
As the most disruptive repairs were completed, Auden’s insistence on regular mealtimes and work periods helped the group settle into a routine. No longer was it necessary for the poet to escape to a restaurant to write, and even George and Carson seemed temporarily chastened by his early-to-bed, early-to-rise approach. The greatest improvement in their quality of life, however, had to do with the arrival of Eva Morcur, Gypsy’s cook.
Eva had started working for Gypsy in 1932 as part of a publicity stunt cooked up when Gypsy was still just a bit performer in Flo Ziegfeld’s Hot-cha! on Broadway. Gypsy had been looking for a way to distinguish herself from the four other dancers with whom she shared a dressing room. Eddy, her society boyfriend, suggested engaging a backstage maid to give herself the aura of a leading lady. Such a luxury was unheard-of for a chorus girl, but Gypsy followed his advice. The sight of the magisterial black woman wrapping Gypsy in a robe after a striptease had precisely the desired impact on the Broadway producers and journalists visiting backstage. A few years later, after Gypsy’s star had risen, she and Eva transferred their partnership to Gypsy’s glamorous Gramercy Park penthouse, where Eva served as chef and majordomo for the elaborate soirées they staged for New York’s cultural, social, and show business elite. “You got your track shoes on? We’re moving fast up here today!” Eva was likely to shout to Gypsy’s sister, June Havoc, when she arrived on a party day. Gypsy’s envious mother may have complained about Eva’s penchant for fancy flambé dishes, but the chef, who had enjoyed an earlier career as a singer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, displayed a dramatic flair that suited Gypsy’s guests.
Auden was delighted by Eva’s culinary talents, particularly her willingness to satisfy his longing for traditional, haute bourgeois meals with several courses. Under his direction, the large table in the ground-floor dining room was loaded nightly with platters of roast beef covered in gravy, boiled potatoes, freshly cooked vegetables, and chocolate desserts. Susie, the daily maid whom Gypsy had engaged for $10 a week, helped serve the meals when not facing the Sisyphean task of tidying up after this active group.
With the addition of these domestic servants, the assemblage at 7 Middagh did, in fact, begin to resemble—if in a distorted fashion—the middle-class families up and down the block. George Davis, as paterfamilias, exuded an aura of contentment as he perused the newspapers at the dining table, waiting for the others to assemble. (“Now, Victor,” he would murmur without looking up as his stevedore friend dropped a grappling hook beside the back door. “Don’t scare Chester. He’s very delicate.”) Facing him across the table, housemother Wystan Auden popped Benzedrine tablets and grumbled about the bills. Carson McCullers, the family ingénue, took her place midway between these two nodes of domestic authority, passing the eggs and paying respectful attention to Auden’s lectures on Kierkegaard, while Gypsy played the sensible older sister, pouring herself a fresh cup of oolong tea and discussing a trip into town to buy provisions. Sophie and Boy, a pair of cats contributed by George, added to the aura of domesticity. Auden, who had hoped but failed to persuade Chester Kallman to live with him in the house, was flattered by Sophie’s choosing to sleep on his bed.
This bourgeois life must have come naturally to Auden, George, and Carson, who had all been brought up in more or less middle-class surroundings. Still, Louis MacNeice, who came to stay at 7 Middagh that autumn, was amused by the sight of his old friend Wystan laying down the law to a “family” consisting of a New York flâneur, a burlesque stripper, and a wide-eyed southern wunderkind who sipped sherry from a china cup. Breakfast would be ready at nine o’clock sharp, Auden announced, and those who were late would not be served. Residents must reserve places at dinner for themselves and their guests; missed meals would be charged to their accounts. Auden clearly welcomed the challenge of dividing food costs with minute accuracy among all the housemates and reminded everyone over breakfast that one square of toilet paper should be sufficient for each bathroom visit—whereas someone had been expending paper by the handful.
If Auden thought he was approaching the rock-steady environment of such artistic sanctuaries as Bread Loaf or Yaddo, he would no doubt soon learn differently. But then, MacNeice mused, why should one try? The thirty-three-year-old Irishman, who was awaiting passage back to Britain to report for military duty, had already begun to feel a kind of advance nostalgia for this artistic life. He still recalled the inferior works that had resulted when the leftist artists of the 1930s tried to imitate the lifestyle of the hypothetical Working-Class Man. Far better to simply relax into one’s natural state, even if it was “ever so Bohemian, raiding the icebox at midnight and eating the catfood by mistake.”
It didn’t take long for Janet Flanner, with her reporter’s nose for a good story, to look in on George Davis’s new home. She, too, was amused to find the residents grouped around the dinner table arguing passionately about the sex lives of the great composers or listening to Gypsy’s spine-tingling tales of how Waxy Gordon, the famous gangster, once forced a dentist to fix her teeth. Flanner and her partner, Solita Solano, were also pleased to find a number of old friends from Paris lounging about the parlor, kitchen, and dining room—Glenway Wescott and Charles Henri Ford, the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, the fashion photographer George Platt Lynes and his lover, Monroe Wheeler, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. And, now that Klaus and Erika Mann had returned to New York, both the artistic and political conversation at 7 Middagh began to heat up.
The atmosphere was especially giddy that November in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection to a third term in office, defeating the isolationists’ favorite, Wendell Willkie. It had been a bitter contest, with America’s role in the European conflict at the center of the debate.
In September, the draft had been instituted; in October, the first American draft number—158—had been called. The first draftees would be shipped south for military training by the end of November. That same month, the president sent fifty World War I destroyers to Britain in exchange for the use of a string of British military bases in the Atlantic—bypassing Congress to do so. Outraged isolationists denounced these acts as a �
��conspiracy against our peace, tranquility and honor as a nation.” On election day Roosevelt garnered less than a third of the number of popular votes he had won in the previous election, but they added up to victory. It was seen as a clear indication that the United States would enter the war in a matter of months if not weeks.
Klaus Mann joined the enormous throngs gathering in midtown Manhattan. When Roosevelt’s victory was announced, “the uproar and clamor in Times Square were overwhelming—half bedlam, half carnival,” he wrote. Among the celebrants he spotted were the writer Vincent Sheean’s wife, Diana, who had dedicated herself to the cause of transporting British children to the United States. “Aren’t we happy?” she shouted to Klaus through the crowd. Now, at last, the British population could hope for American aid.
Both Klaus and Erika Mann, eager to move forward now that America had taken another step toward engagement, traveled out to Brooklyn to talk over their plans with their friends. Erika had only recently returned from her trip to Britain and Portugal and was eager to report what she had seen. She described to Flanner and others in the Brooklyn parlor the sound of the air raid sirens in London, the experience of sharing a bomb shelter at four A.M. with dozens of half-dressed strangers, and the strong sense of optimism and determination that seemed to have taken over Britain now that it was in the midst of the conflict.
In Europe, the Emergency Rescue Committee was now smuggling hundreds of artists and intellectuals over the Pyrenees to safety. The story of her brother Golo and their uncle Heinrich’s escape from France had already made New York’s newspapers. The pair had made the harrowing mountain crossing by foot accompanied by Heinrich’s wife, Nelly, a former nightclub singer, and the famous Austrian novelist Franz Werfel. Werfel’s imperious wife, Alma Mahler Werfel—the widow of Gustav Mahler, who was known throughout Europe for marrying only geniuses—had joined the group in a billowing white dress, “like a great flag of surrender,” visible for miles. She insisted on bringing a heavy suitcase stuffed with Mahler’s music scores, Bruckner’s Third Symphony, and Werfel’s manuscript-in-progress. Despite these complications, the unlikely group had managed to conquer the Pyrenees’ sheer, windswept cliffs and slippery terrain, and were all now in the United States.
Americans were captivated by such dramatic stories, Erika pointed out, but their interest in these intellectuals and artists, about whom they knew little, was not likely to last. Most of the people here would begin to support engagement only if they began to comprehend what they stood to lose if Hitler won. The Third Reich, with its motto of unity at all costs, stood poised to crush centuries of European intellectual development and free thought beneath its boots. Somehow, people here held on to the illusion that such reactionary forces could never come to power in the United States. It would take the collective voice of the émigrés—those who had witnessed the gradual descent from public apathy to stunned disbelief to morbid fascination to despair as freedoms were curtailed, friends arrested, books burned—to demonstrate to Americans that it could indeed “happen here.”
Erika’s passion was palpable, but of course she had been fighting the Nazis for more than a decade. As early as 1930, when only twenty-four, she had been denounced in the Nazi press as a “flat-footed peace hyena” and described as looking not quite human. Erika had responded then, “If they want a fight—they can have a good one. I may be a peace hyena, but certainly I am no sissy.” Fighting fascism had become her life’s purpose, and now, as she made plans to return to Europe to resume work actively with the rescue mission, she hoped her friends would help to spread the story of Europe’s collapse.
Flanner, who considered Erika “the prince of the Manns,” agreed with alacrity to interview some of the new refugees for a piece in The New Yorker. She was still responsible for European coverage, even though she had been shut out of France, and she depended on the émigrés to provide her with up-to-date anecdotes and information. But Klaus Mann had also moved forward with his own project—the literary and political journal in which refugees would be able to express their views directly and read a full range of informed American responses. For months he had traveled cross-country soliciting funds for his magazine and had dispatched countless letters to well-known writers requesting essays, stories, and poems. Now, in November, he had amassed enough of both to be able to launch his first issue at the beginning of the new year. Some of the contributions were no doubt motivated by respect for his famous father, but Klaus Mann also brought with him the credibility gained from having founded a similar journal, Die Sammlung (The Collection), among the exiled artists in Amsterdam in the mid-1930s—which had cost him his German citizenship in 1934. Whatever the reason for the strong show of support, Klaus was ready to begin. At Wescott’s prompting, he had named the journal Decision: A Review of Free Culture, to highlight its emphasis on the need to take action.
The residents of 7 Middagh Street were impressed by the extraordinary degree to which this melancholic writer had been energized by his new project. In normal times, Klaus emerged so rarely from the shadow of his older sister that his peers in America jokingly referred to him as “the invisible Mann.” (Chester Kallman would eventually top this with, “No, he’s the subordinate Klaus.”) But even Klaus’s father, who disapproved of his openly homosexual lifestyle and his intermittent addiction to morphine, had to admit that Decision had given his son a new sense of purpose in this foreign country. Klaus himself had been impressed by the generosity with which wealthy donors had financed his risky project. “Curiously, I can’t help feeling surprised when any proposition of mine is taken seriously by ‘the grown-ups,’” he wrote in his diary. “But, amazingly, [Decision] materializes: people believe in it. There is something called ‘Decision Inc.,’ with officers, office and a bank account. The secretary looks exactly the way a real secretary should look—in fact, she is very pretty—and apparently fails to notice that I don’t look like a boss.”
Klaus Mann looked to Brooklyn for moral support and new ideas for his venture. And there he found them as Carson McCullers offered her services as editorial assistant, George Davis provided editorial, layout, and marketing advice, and Wystan Auden joined Decision’s board of editorial advisers, which already included Sherwood Anderson, Somerset Maugham, Vincent Sheean, Robert E. Sherwood, Ernest Boyd, Horace Gregory, and Thomas Mann. For the first issue, to be published in January, Janet Flanner had agreed to contribute “Paradise Lost,” a meditation on the death of the republic of France; Jean Cocteau, a surrealist tale called “The Ruins of Paris”; and Aldous Huxley, “Dust,” an essay in which he argued that small philosophically oriented communities were the only solution to, on the one hand, the mental dissipation of modern life in America, and on the other, the fascism of Europe. Franz Werfel submitted an essay of thanks to America for offering him sanctuary. Isherwood, whom Klaus had visited in Los Angeles in August, wrote an admiring review of For Whom the Bell Tolls, while Klaus critiqued Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Wave of the Future for its disturbing message that “after all, the [Fascist] dictators can’t be so bad since they are so successful.”
In his editorial for the premier issue, Klaus wrote of the need for the world’s artists and intellectuals to join the fight to rescue their culture. A group of writers may begin to accomplish this mission by “stimulating each other to find the right attitude, the right approach and the right ideas.” It was his hope that Decision would provide this kind of forum in America, “last bulwark of liberty, focus of our hopes.” “We want to make an independent magazine but not an impartial one,” he added. “Nobody interested in culture can afford to be impartial now. Culture must take sides and turn militant, or it is bound to perish.”
To emphasize this point, he planned to include in this first issue a symposium in which several well-known writers would respond to the questions: “Do you think intellectuals can or should have an influence in political affairs?” “What should be the role of a cultural review in this connection?” The responses varied widel
y. But one of the contributors, Auden, objected to any identification of artists as “intellectuals” separate from the rest of humanity. If the word “intellectual” meant a capacity for abstract thinking, as contrasted with manual skill or the organizing skills of the politician, he argued, then airplane designers, code decipherers, and campaign strategists were as much intellectuals as were poets. And if this was the case, then one could not really speak generally of the intellectual’s role in wartime but only the roles of particular intellectuals. And “as far as writers are concerned,” he added, “their problem is not What should I do as a writer?—the answer to that is the same under all circumstances. Write as well and truthfully as you can—but only Have I any other capacities, e.g. physical strength, which are of direct military value and which I ought therefore to offer to the state?”
He added, “The value of a magazine like Decision seems to me to be independent of peace or war in their political sense. The struggle of culture with ignorance and barbarism is continuous and never-ending. War, as such, is only a sharp reminder that civilized life is always in greater danger than we realize, and that we have never done as much to maintain it as we could.”
This rather equivocal response lacked the fighting spirit that Klaus and Erika were hoping for from the creator of “September 1, 1939.” As Klaus had complained to Isherwood in California, Auden was being “very cagey” about his position on the responsibility of writers regarding the war. Like Isherwood, Auden had avoided making the kinds of definite public statements that the Manns hoped could serve as propaganda against Hitler.
The Manns’ passion was rooted in their own experience of what happened when intellectuals failed to act. But Auden, Isherwood, and MacNeice lived with vivid memories as well—recollections of the damage done in England in the 1930s when left-wing writers, artists, and thinkers heedlessly subverted their talents to a political cause. What they had learned from that experience was that the truth of any social structure or political event was more complex than petitions could express; that neither side of such issues was wholly right or wrong; and that by “turning militant,” the artist risked extending the kinds of lies that had caused the problem in the first place and thus betrayed his duty to the truth.
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