Racing forward with the work, as was his tendency, Auden had finished most of the libretto by January 1940. Britten had made a good start on the music as well, and when Lincoln Kirstein heard him perform some of the tunes, he was struck both by their vitality and charm and by their uniquely American style. It seemed to him that Auden’s and Britten’s efforts in opera were similar to his own in ballet—to create a uniquely American tradition in what was currently a European art form. He suggested that his and Balanchine’s Ballet Caravan produce Paul Bunyan on Broadway. Excited by the idea of composing for musical theater, Britten began to discuss with Auden the changes that such a production would require. But just then Britten succumbed to a serious streptococcal infection (which Auden diagnosed as a psychosomatic expression of homesickness for England), and both production and operetta were abandoned.
Recently, Auden had received a more modest offer from a representative of the Columbia Theater Associates, a group of actors at Columbia with a mission to broaden the audience for new theater. If Paul Bunyan could be completed immediately, the group would consider staging it at the university’s Brander Matthews Hall in late spring, 1941. It was hardly a glamorous debut, but Auden hoped—and Britten agreed—that it might lead to greater things. The collaboration was one of the reasons that Britten had moved to the house at 7 Middagh Street. Meanwhile Pears, who had toured America years before with a choral group, the New English Singers, hoped to organize a new group to perform English madrigals and some of Britten’s compositions.
But even with the promise of these new ventures, the house at Middagh Street still took getting used to. Their two front rooms on the top floor were charming, with a practically English view of the narrow street and the well-tended garden across the lane. But the absence of carpets meant that Gypsy’s warm laughter drifted up through the floorboards, mixing with the sound of Auden’s and Kallman’s voices down the hall and, on many occasions, with McCullers’s arguments with her husband downstairs. During the day, the doorbell rang every other minute, and someone was always working on a project in the dining room, playing records in the parlor, or holding parties in his or her room. The house remained untidy, too; Susie, the maid, did her best, but with residents like these, her task was impossible.
And the constant talk of the war made it difficult to concentrate. Britten still had two sisters in England—one of them in London and constantly threatened by bombs. With overseas mail agonizingly slow, it was impossible to know from day to day whether she was safe. Britten didn’t like to think about England much these days, anyway, because—like Auden, Isherwood, and the other British artists in America—he was being loudly censured for his absence. In September, an essay he had written for the New York Times before the bombing of London began, “An English Composer Sees America,” had resurfaced in England. His countrymen took strong exception to its praise of the working conditions for composers in the United States as compared to Britain. “Truth is always impalatable, especially when one is in the middle of an air-raid,” Britten wrote to a friend. “I feel sick it was issued there just at this moment.”
Later that month, he received a letter from his British publisher, describing the rising resentment over his decision to remain in America. There was no doubt, the publisher wrote, that it would be difficult to get Britten’s works performed in this hostile climate. He declined to advise Britten on whether he should return—but the composer learned from another source that for months a rumor had been circulating that the entire trio of British artists—Britten, Auden, and Isherwood—might never be allowed back in England.
This news shocked Britten. He told his publisher that he understood the hostility and asked him not to go out of his way to promote his works. “If people want to play them over there, they will, but I don’t want you to embarrass yourself in any way,” he wrote. “I have been desperately worried, not really about what people are saying (I feel that one’s real friends in England will be unselfishly pleased that one is being spared . . . that is in fact what every letter says so far), but about the fact that one is doing nothing to alleviate any of the suffering.”
Like Auden, Britten had reported to British officials in the United States and was told he was not yet wanted back, since he possessed no military skills. The situation was complicated for Britten because both he and Pears were pacifists and could conceivably be imprisoned in Britain if they refused to enlist. Even if they won conscientious objector status, they would be banned from employment by such government-run institutions as the BBC. And, of course, homosexuality was illegal in the British military (as in the United States). Underlying Britten’s anxiety must have been the fear that his sexual life would be laid open to public examination. For the time being, at least, Britten and Pears elected to stay where they were.
Still, it was painful to look into the eyes of the refugee writers, artists, professors, journalists, political dissidents, and other intellectuals who began to appear in increasing numbers at the parties in the house in Brooklyn. By 1940, the flood of wealthy dukes and princesses fleeing Europe had largely abated. The members of this new wave, most of whom had already been drifting across Europe for four years or more, arrived half-starved, with haunted expressions, dressed in ragged clothes and holding tight to the hands of their remaining children. Many of the more than three hundred individuals who had been brought to America by the European Rescue Committee remained in shock from recent events—their escape from concentration camps and French prisons, their crossing over the mountains, their fight for passage across the ocean, and their arrival in New York.
Years later, Isherwood would describe the feelings that filled the newcomer as his ship pulled into the harbor:
God, what a terrifying place this suddenly seemed! You could feel it vibrating with the tension of the nervous New World, aggressively flaunting its rude steel nudity. We’re Americans here—and we keep at it, twenty-four hours a day, being Americans. We scream, we grab, we jostle. We’ve no time for what’s slow, what’s gracious, what’s nice, quiet, modest. Don’t you come snooting us with your European traditions—we know the mess they’ve got you into. Do things our way or take the next boat back—back to your Europe that’s falling apart at the seams. Well, make up your mind. Are you quitting or staying? It’s no skin off our nose. We promise nothing. Here, you’ll be on your own.
Dazed by all the people in the street chattering in foreign tongues, by the shops miraculously stuffed full of goods—a dozen varieties, it seemed, of every item—and clutching their well-worn scrapbooks full of performance notices in Vienna and literary prizes won in Prague, these creative intellectuals drifted through the city in search of others like themselves, who could give them information, point them toward cheap housing, and, God willing, get them work. Nearly all of them, it seemed, had heard of Klaus and Erika Mann. The siblings had become such prominent activists that a joke now circulated within the community that one must first pay them a visit in America before being accepted as an official refugee. Frequently, the pair could be found at 7 Middagh Street. To the artists who sought them out there—any one of whom may have been, a decade earlier, a respected European cultural leader accustomed to life’s abundance—the music, conversation, and hospitality that greeted them were like a surreal dream.
To Klaus Mann, now in exile for seven years, it was a familiar pattern. In every city that had welcomed these intellectual refugees—Prague, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels—centers of activity and discussion had sprung up out of nowhere. Wherever they appeared, he wrote, such meeting places became the center of “a diffuse but lusty literary life”—a living embodiment of the literary forum that Mann had created with Die Sammlung and now with Decision. Such meeting places—both actual and on paper—were the most powerful means available, he believed, to “focus the scattered energies of our exiled intelligentsia” and thus amplify the voice defying Hitler.
Golo Mann, who had been feeling alienated by his prominent parents’ cozy, upper-middl
e-class existence in Princeton, had recently accepted an invitation to move into 7 Middagh’s unfinished attic. Now, Klaus enlisted Golo’s help in turning the Brooklyn house into a kind of refugee center for artists. Here, the new arrivals met or were reunited with such European eminences as Franz and Alma Werfel, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Balanchine, the Austrian novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, the Italian journalist Max Ascoli, William and Elizabeth Mayer, and the Manns themselves—all alive, thriving, and willing to help them integrate into American life. At the same time, the Americans could learn from these survivors what life was now like across the ocean in Hitler’s Europe.
Already, Janet Flanner had interviewed Golo Mann and a number of other recent émigrés for her stunning article “Paris, Germany,” which appeared in the December 7, 1940, issue of The New Yorker. Instead of outlining the political moves of the past few months or focusing on Europe’s political leaders, Flanner wisely evoked, in her crisp, sardonic tone, the chilling details of daily life in the occupied country. “Paris is now the capital of limbo,” she began. “It is a beautiful French city on the banks of the Seine which only Berlin, the capital of Germany, knows all about.” Stating flatly that the French would have to become a race of liars and cheats in order to survive, she described housewives faking pregnancy by stuffing pillows under their apron fronts in order to obtain milk. Along the roads leading out of the city, taken by the refugees in June, the bodies of French soldiers had remained exposed through the summer while dead Germans were efficiently buried in gardens and flower beds. And meanwhile, she wrote, “the German soldiers, with money in their pockets for the first time in twenty-two years . . . have steadily advanced through the Paris shops, absorbing, munching, consuming lingerie, perfume, bonbons, leather goods, sweet silly novelties”—methodically ingesting all the wealth of Paris that they so coveted.
The visitors to 7 Middagh Street had other stories to tell—of narrow escapes from Nazi searches, of navigating port cities packed with refugees, and of saying good-bye to their rescuer, Varian Fry, who bestowed on each departing person a supply of cigarettes for bribing soldiers, a handshake, and the magic words “Have a good journey and I’ll see you in New York.”
But recalling the wreckage of Europe was the last thing they wished to do now—even if it were possible to fully communicate the experience of witnessing the arrest, the murder, or the deportation of a friend or loved one. Instead, they wanted to talk about America—to begin their new lives and, most of all, to work. Their years of wandering had taught them how quickly, despite the welcoming speeches at charity dinners and government functions, popular opinion could turn against them. Already, complaints had begun to surface in the press of the “intellectual blitzkrieg of America,” of America’s “becoming saturated with European thought.” A number of American academics demanded to know how, when there were thousands of American Ph.D.’s still out of work because of the Depression, the nation could justify inviting hundreds more. New regulations were already being instituted to make it more difficult or almost impossible for émigré physicians and other professionals to obtain licenses in the United States. “I like them, these Americans, and they behave magnificently toward us,” one émigré remarked, “but fundamentally—they don’t realize it themselves yet—we are not wanted even here.”
Soon, many of the refugees, having realized that jobs with the New York Philharmonic or at Columbia University were scarce, would begin fanning out across the country to take positions with the new amateur symphonies, theaters, and art institutions that were springing up in midsized cities everywhere, each in need of the experience and education that the Europeans had to offer. Until then, Klaus Mann could provide a few with immediate publication in Decision—a morale boost that might help them restart their writing careers in the United States. Others could at least receive directions to the nearest German-language newspaper kiosk, public library, or museum while they mulled over the significance of their presence in this new world and considered what mistakes they might, as society’s thinkers, try to help this country avoid.
The first issue of Decision was sent out for review on December 18, and the response was hugely positive. Klaus was invited to read from the journal on the radio, along with the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Vincent Benet, and requests for copies began pouring in. “The list of our sponsors and contributors becomes almost unduly glamorous,” he wrote in his diary. Encouraged, he threw himself ever more feverishly into his activities. Like his friends from overseas, he found it a great relief to turn away from the devastation in Europe with the second issue of Decision and focus instead on the question of what kind of society should be created next, here in America. “When this war began the democracies found themselves shockingly unprepared for it,” Klaus wrote in his editorial column; “what they lacked as much as planes and guns, were ideas and aims.” Even today, the democratic countries had no constructive program with which to refute the Nazis’ propaganda, nor any clear postwar policy. “It is, therefore, the task and natural function of the intellectuals, of independent writers, scholars and thinkers, to visualize and outline the structure of a new society. We must not forget that almost all the great revolutionary changes in history were anticipated and prepared by the intellectual vanguard.”
In this issue, Klaus added, he would provide a survey of various groups in the United States and Britain now working to create some form of “new order,” so that readers could consider the implications of each one for themselves. He singled out for particular praise the manifesto The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, published that winter by Viking Press and signed by seventeen distinguished thinkers—including the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, the chairman of the American Friends of German Freedom, and an active fund-raiser for refugee aid. Klaus explained that Niebuhr and his fellow authors strove to define the moral, legal, and economic foundations of a new form of democracy that could begin to correct the kinds of problems that, they believed, had led to the current crisis. These tenets, designed literally to change the world, rested on the belief in certain absolute, objective moral values that must be considered before any economic, social, or other policy could be put into place. The authors advocated, too, a personal activism that must naturally emerge as the result of these objective values—and that they claimed was required by their religious beliefs.
As it happened, Auden had also been reading Niebuhr’s views in his book Christianity and Power Politics, which he reviewed for the Nation. He summarized Niebuhr’s argument that Western democracies, having developed from the Renaissance tradition, saw human history as a realm of infinite positive potential—and ignored to their peril the truth that the potential for evil exists permanently within this realm as well. The progressive democratic conviction that an individual could extricate himself from a state of sin—that is, eradicate his potential for evil through either mysticism or rational action—was false. The practice of pacifism, for example, would never achieve its goal of world peace in the face of political devastation because it was based on the idea that perfection could be achieved simply through progressive thinking. Evil, whether active or latent, would always remain, and it was blasphemous, as well as tragic, to ignore this truth when choosing one’s actions.
Niebuhr’s argument succinctly expressed many of the ideas that Auden had been mulling over since his visit with Isherwood the previous summer. He, too, had come to believe, particularly since the awful experience in the German cinema in Yorkville, that turning to pacifism and yoga would be a tragic misdirection of his energies. Still, Niebuhr’s choice to rely solely on orthodox religion for guidance in choosing how to act left him a little uneasy, considering religious history. Furthermore, he thought it was actually possible for certain individuals to lead such a saintly existence that they changed the world for the better. He wondered, in his review, whether Niebuhr had simply “seen the bogus so often” that he had lost his ability to b
elieve.
Auden’s discomfort may have been partly the result of his own recent rediscovery of religious worship—and its associated saints and mystics. It also sprang from the fact that two of his closest friends—Isherwood and Britten—claimed to be pacifists. And even if his views increasingly conflicted with theirs, Auden’s loyalty forced him to seek a way to excuse them from the rules he was striving to create for himself and everyone else.
Isherwood, who with Aldous Huxley had in fact submitted two pleas for pacifism to Decision, had written to Auden, asking whether he felt abandoned by Isherwood’s having opted for the practice of yoga and official status as a conscientious objector. Auden did his best to provide Isherwood with an out, responding:
I shan’t feel you have walked out on me, whatever happens. The only really difficult question to decide—all the other difficulties are difficulties of execution—is; what is one’s vocation? As you know, I regard the contemplative life as the highest and most difficult of all vocations, and therefore the one to which very few people are called—fewer even than are called to be creative artists, among whom rightly or wrongly, I believe my place to be: for the other I am not good enough. If you are certain you are called, then of course you must obey, but you must be certain, otherwise it is just presumption. The ethical problem depends on where on the spiral one is. At my level, I must fight if asked to, and believe that America should enter the war. At the level you are aiming for, such questions have no meaning.
Isherwood, Auden decided, was excused from action against Hitler because he felt called to a kind of sainthood. And Auden considered the creation of music itself a sacred act, so Britten was excused from fighting on similar grounds. As long ago as 1938 he had evoked his sense of music as the most sacred of arts in his poem “The Composer”:
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