After only two weeks’ absence, Carson found the house at 7 Middagh even livelier than when she had left it. Not only was George’s pile of magazines in the parlor full of the writings of the Brooklyn group, but walking through the house, from bottom to top, she could glance past the open doors and see someone writing, composing, debating, or singing in nearly every room. Auden continued to preside over the breakfast table with “malicious dignity,” as one visitor remarked, as the conversation veered from Jung to the ballet to pre-Columbian sculpture. But there seemed to be a new sense of excitement now, a feeling of artistic quickening. Certainly, everyone was working hard.
Much as Carson depended on her childhood surroundings to heal her when necessary, she had grown homesick for Brooklyn. Here, she was able to take up her adult life again—visiting with Janet Flanner, who dropped in occasionally with a new lover, the glamorous Italian radio announcer Natalia Murray—who soon became as maternally fond of Carson as Solita Solano had been. The three of them might debate Auden’s assertion that Kafka was the primary representative of their age, or compare with George their funniest, most outrageous fan mail, or flinch as Lincoln Kirstein, known for his testiness, lashed out at a friend who had interrupted his conversation and then forgot all about the incident moments later.
Carson and Janet Flanner were especially eager for George’s news of Gypsy. Rumor had it that Mike Todd was making money hand over fist with his Theatre Café and that Gypsy stole the show, stripping for more than three thousand people every night. To gain more laughs, she planted a woman in the audience who screamed just as she pulled the last dressmaker’s pin from her dress while a waiter dropped a tray of dishes, and in the midst of the audience’s laughter, Gypsy pretended to black out. Sex was only good for laughs, anyway, she told reporters. “I never try to stir up the animal in ’em.” And she added, “Did you ever hold a piece of candy or a toy in front of a baby—just out of his reach? Notice how he laughs? That’s your strip audience.”
While she was in Chicago, Gypsy continued to type pages of her mystery in her dressing room—making corrections in the bathtub, she claimed, during the hour and a half it took to soak off her body paint after a show. George’s efforts to help her find a publisher had given her a new burst of energy, especially after the editor Lee Wright offered her a contract. It was for shockingly little money, in her opinion—but George advised her to accept it and then work hard to make the book a bestseller. “If you kid [the publishers] along, and become their glamour girl, there isn’t anything that can be thought up that won’t be at your service,” he told her. But if there was one thing that Gypsy knew about, it was public relations, and she hardly needed George’s advice. “I’ll do my specialty in Macy’s window to sell a book,” she wrote to Simon and Schuster’s publicity director that week. “If you would prefer something a little more dignified, make it Wanamaker’s window. There has been so much publicity about it already that I’m a little embarrassed. (The book I mean—not the specialty.)” She read the stack of murder mysteries that Wright recommended, met with Craig Rice, a Chicago beat reporter and best-selling female mystery writer who soon became a close friend, and bought herself a new typewriter (“I thought the blue ribbon was sexy”). Then she got back to work.
Meanwhile, magazine writers and gossip columnists drummed up talk about a growing competition between Gypsy and her sister. June Havoc had become one of the year’s Broadway discoveries, and Gypsy’s writing ambitions had by now become common knowledge. “Gypsy thinks June wastes her time on dull people, doing dull things. June thinks Gypsy wastes her time being a literary butterfly,” reported Life magazine, whose reporters had always enjoyed promoting the burlesque star. While the constant ribbing became wearisome to Gypsy, she believed, along with George, that any publicity was good publicity. So the creation of a “literary Gypsy” spurred her to finish her book more quickly, before the public grew tired of the idea.
George didn’t always cooperate as fully as Gypsy would have liked, however. Frequently, he responded to her batch of pages with a meandering letter filled with detailed descriptions of the goings-on at Middagh Street, vague evocations of his current mood, and such veiled remarks as “I’m delighted to hear that Todd wants you to stay on and make more money.” Informing her that he had agreed to take over the cultural beat for Harper’s Bazaar and was considering returning to work there fulltime, he added such comments as, “I am aware that you will read these lines with a kind of fury, minor but genuine. Instead of brooding and getting nowhere, why haven’t I been tackling the nine pages of your book? Don’t worry I shall, immediately. These are thoughts that you haven’t paid for, and they are using up time that having been bought isn’t mine to waste. Will you try to forgive me? It just can’t be otherwise tonight.” Gypsy could perhaps now sympathize with the position in which Carmel Snow, George’s employer, had found herself for so many years.
Through conversation and work, Carson fell easily back into the routine of life in Brooklyn. Her recovery in Georgia had been more than just physical—she felt emotionally renewed as well. In her short period at home, she had begun making real progress on her novel. Perhaps Auden was right when he insisted that illness was the body’s way of forcing a creative catharsis. As she worked on “Brooklyn Is My Neighbourhood,” a new article for Vogue, she felt stronger and happier than she had in nearly a year.
Benjamin Britten, on the other hand, had to fend off feelings of panic as he worked frantically to complete the music for Paul Bunyan, which was set to open in less than four months. Having completed “Inkslinger’s Song,” he had started on the leads’ solos. The love duet would come next, and then, since Auden had added a singing Narrator to fill in missing parts of the Paul Bunyan story between scenes, it was necessary to create a melody for him to sing. The Prologue had to be completed as well, and for this, the opening number, Britten hoped for something truly spectacular.
It would not have been such a difficult challenge if there hadn’t been other projects that required attention. But he had to prepare for a performance of his Introduction and Rondo alla Burlesca for two pianos by his friends, the married British pianists Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson. He had agreed to arrange Chopin’s Les Sylphides for a February performance by Kirstein’s ballet company. Auden had asked him to provide the incidental music for “The Rocking Horse Winner,” a radio adaptation of a D. H. Lawrence story that the poet was writing with James Stern. Britten’s neglected first symphony, Sinfonia da Requiem, had been scheduled for its Carnegie Hall debut at the end of March, and he was still required to travel to Long Island once a week for a three-hour rehearsal with his amateur orchestra.
Having accepted the necessity of the Long Island job, however, Britten found he enjoyed the chance to closely study the music they were rehearsing and to get to know the musicians. Often, he stayed overnight at the home of David Rothman, the hardware store owner and music enthusiast who had recommended him for the position. The Mayers usually joined them for an evening of musical games—putting on a record and seeing who could identify it first—or of listening to Britten explain why a composer had created a certain motif or built a particular movement. Rothman so admired Britten’s talent that he had introduced him the previous summer to Albert Einstein, who lived nearby and had befriended Rothman when he stopped by his shop for a pair of sandals. They arranged for a musical session together—Elizabeth Mayer and Britten on piano, Einstein on violin, and Pears singing. Afterward, Einstein said of the young musicians, “They are very talented and will go far.”
These brief visits provided a welcome respite for Britten and Pears, but the pressure to produce returned as they entered the house in Brooklyn. Just as record-breaking crowds of revelers had filled Times Square for the holidays, the Broadway theaters themselves appeared determined to outperform one another in the quantity and quality of their offerings that year. Pal Joey and Lady in the Dark had enjoyed particularly successful debuts. George had heard from Lotte Lenya tha
t her husband stood to make enough money from the latter production to buy a house in the country near some of their friends. The show’s surprise hit had been “Tchaikovsky,” a fast-talking, audience-pleasing number consisting solely of the names of Russian composers; it was performed by an unknown young comedian named Danny Kaye, who could reportedly sing the entire song in thirty-nine seconds flat.
Britten and Auden hoped to come up with something similar. In fact, Britten was willing to throw just about everything into his American opera—from Stravinsky to Cole Porter to Kurt Weill to Gilbert and Sullivan to the folk melodies of Appalachia. Such a mix might come close to reflecting musically the American character that Auden was attempting to express in words—the invigorating brew of contrasting influences, ideas, and styles. Colin McPhee, the composer and Balinese music enthusiast whom Britten had met at the Mayers’ and who visited Middagh Street regularly, continued to press Britten to consider how he might use the delicate, ethereal sounds of the Balinese gamelan and was able to educate him about American jazz as well.
Now they had begun work on the Prologue, a kind of advent scene in which a trio of wild geese announce the coming of the mythical Paul Bunyan. The section required a grand, Broadway opening, and Auden worked with Britten and Pears to make it as exciting as possible. The curtain opened on a Chorus of Old Trees singing, in ascending keys, the story of the cycle of life in the ancient forest. In staccato cries, the Young Trees objected to the status quo, voicing their desire “to see things and go places,” to transform themselves into something new. They were goaded by the Wild Geese, who urged them forward in their rebellion, then announced the coming of the great agent of change, Paul Bunyan.
The problems began at this point. Nothing that Auden and Britten came up with seemed to be sufficiently grand. How could they convey the enormity of the change that was about to take place, yet maintain the operetta’s playful style? Day after day—as their production deadline approached—they worked and reworked the piece but failed to find the key to unlock the story. Pears, singing the parts for Britten and Auden as they substituted words and rearranged bits of the melody, had already contributed one of his favorite phrases to the libretto. Auden had picked up on his habitual, whimsical remark that a given event was likely to take place “once in a blue moon,” assigning that phrase to the Wild Geese as they warned of Bunyan’s arrival:
Young Tree.
When are we to see him?
1st Goose.
He will be born at the next Blue Moon.
Chorus of Old Trees.
She’s lying. It isn’t true.
O I’m so frightened.
Don’t worry
There won’t be a Blue Moon in our lifetime.
Don’t say that. It’s unlucky.
[The moon begins to turn Blue.]
Now, Britten began to consider the phrase as the key to the grand ending they desired. They emphasized the blue moon’s arrival by doubling the line:
Young Tree.
Look at the moon! It’s turning blue.
Chorus of Old Trees.
Look at the moon! It’s turning blue.
As the piece continued with a frantic resistance from the Old Trees, then a reluctant giving in, Britten saw an opportunity for a spectacular full chorus, its crescendo laced with just a hint of Colin McPhee’s glasslike, Bali-inspired tones:
But once in a while the odd thing happens,
Once in a while the dream comes true,
And the whole pattern of life is altered,
Once in a while the Moon turns Blue.
It was the kind of melody you could hum or whistle, and it must have been impossible not to as Carson walked down the hill to Sands Street for a night of drinking and talking with George Davis and Auden. As they entered one of the ramshackle bars and sat down at a rickety table, Carson noticed that the establishment was run by a tall, hulking Amazon of a woman who worked beside a hunchbacked midget. The midget strutted proudly about the place as though he owned it, Carson noted, and wherever he went he was “petted by everyone, given free drinks, and treated as a sort of mascot by the proprietor.”
While not particularly unusual in that environment, the angular woman and her companion piqued Carson’s interest. There was something about the connection between them—the choreographed movements of lifelong partners—that put into sharper relief their differences in physique and manner. Throughout the evening, as she talked and drank with Auden and George, her eyes lingered on the proprietor’s capable hands as she mixed the drinks and on the alert way in which the midget moved from table to table, always provoking roars of laughter.
This time, Carson’s moment of “illumination” did not happen instantly. Instead, the night on Sands Street lingered like a colorful backdrop in the back of her mind for days as she said good-bye to her friends. She would stay at home for a month or so this time, she thought, long enough to make serious progress with The Bride and Her Brother so that she would be less easily distracted when she came back. But on the long trip south, the rhythm of the train and the sips from her flask lulling her into a pleasant reverie, Carson’s impressions of the Sands Street bar must have mixed with thoughts of Gypsy and George Davis, Auden and Kallman, Reeves, and especially Annemarie, more irrevocably separated from Carson now than she had been before. Carson was greatly bothered by her inability to obtain news of her friend. Yet her stay at Middagh Street had been productive in other ways, as she would soon realize. Shortly after settling into her mother’s house, Carson was struck with a vision so overpowering that she set aside The Bride and Her Brother so that she could record the essential elements of this new story. It would be set in one of the cotton mill towns that dotted the South, Carson decided, the kind with a main street just a few hundred yards long. The largest building, in the center of town, leaned so far to one side, Carson imagined, that it seemed about to collapse.
It was in this isolated, dreary house that Carson placed the Amazon from Brooklyn, whom she named Miss Amelia, and her small, hunchbacked companion. Miss Amelia was “a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard quality.” At the table, “Miss Amelia ate slowly and with the relish of a farm hand. She sat with both elbows on the table, bent over the plate, her knees spread wide apart and her feet braced on the rungs of the chair.” Her greatest talents were for building things and caring for people. And the liquor she brewed in a still out back had a special quality of its own. “It is clean and sharp on the tongue,” Carson wrote,
but once down a man it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of man—then the worth of Miss Amelia’s liquor can be understood. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended.
Miss Amelia lived for one thing only: the little hunchback Cousin Lyman Willis had appeared on her doorstep one day and now strutted about her store in tight knee-length breeches, black stockings, and queerly shaped shoes laced up over the ankles. She spoiled him shamelessly, taking him for walks into the swamplands and letting him ride on her back, and rubbing him with pot liquor morning and night to give him strength. She even turned her store into a café so that he could enjoy the company of others.
Her love went unrequited. Cousin Lyman would soon fall in love with Amelia’s former husband, “a terrible character who . . . caused ruin, and then went on his way again,” and who would treat the midget as badly as Cousin Lyman treated Amelia. But in the end, who was hurt and who did the hurting were beside the point.
“There are the lover and the beloved,” Carson wr
ote, “but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this . . . It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved.” She concluded, “Almost everyone wants to be the lover.”
With The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson found a way to express the longing she experienced—more or less continually, no matter what the object—for true communion with a lover. Within the confines of this strange story of a triangular affair, a story that oddly echoed Auden’s developing relationship with Kallman as well, she began to come to terms with the understanding that it was the act of loving, not the object of that love, that gave her energy and direction. The Ballad of the Sad Café, born in a bar on Sands Street, eventually became, in the opinion of many readers, Carson McCullers’s greatest work.
7
Living is quite pleasant here when it is not too exciting.
—Benjamin Britten
Carson McCullers loved snow, and winter remained her favorite season in New York, although she would never spend a winter in the city without falling seriously ill. “These Northern skies in winter time,” she wrote to Reeves several years later, “somehow they are lovelier than the skies of the South.” The snow after a blizzard dazzled in the sunlight like spun sugar, and there was a “sort of Bruegel heartiness” in the sight of scarlet-cheeked children in their snowsuits racing out into the streets to play. For adults in midcentury New York, winter was “the season,” and by this time the social life at 7 Middagh Street had become legendary.
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