Other developments in the house added to the strain. The noise of renovations had resumed when Golo Mann departed to begin a lectureship at Olivet College in Michigan and Oliver Smith took over the attic. Smith had set to work at once transforming it into a fully functional studio in which to live and work, so there was no telling when the hammering above Britten’s bedroom would stop. Noise continued to filter up from the floor below as well, as the Bowleses indulged in their extended games. One of their favorites centered on Paul’s portrayal of Bupple Hergesheimer, a man-sized parrot, “monstrous in his behavior,” who responded to Jane’s efforts to put him back into his cage with weird, spontaneous eruptions of “Bupple” or “Rop.”
As spring approached, a host of biological life forms had begun to assert their presence in the squalid house. Recently, Pears had seen a doctor about a foot infection, only to learn that its cause was most likely bedbugs hiding in the bed they had bought in the junkshop on Fulton Street. Fleas and other parasites easily entered the house on the backs of the cats, dogs, chimpanzees, and other animals that passed through.
The surreal quality of life in the house intensified, too, in the weeks leading up to Dalí’s exhibition. If one could slice the building vertically in half and open it like a dollhouse, one might find Pears fighting off the itch of bedbugs on the top floor while practicing Britten’s Illuminations in his sharp, clear tenor (“J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage”); Jane lining up an imaginary class of French schoolgirls on the third-floor stairs (“Adelaide, tenez-vous droit!”); and Gala Dalí in the parlor, fixing an uneasy Britten in her predatory gaze as she described her previous life as the Greek goddess Hera to Salvador’s Zeus. Next door, George Davis could be seen peeling Dalí’s portrait of Harpo Marx off the windowsill, crying to the maid, “It’s rained on the picture, Susie. How could you? It’s ruined! Ruined!” To which Susie replied sympathetically, “Yes, Mr. Davis, you’re right. It sure is too bad, and it was such a beautiful picture of your mother, too.”
Downstairs, in the dining room, Auden was likely to be entertaining Eva with excerpts from his Harper’s Bazaar piece on the greatest last words ever spoken. His favorite was the remark made by the female impersonator Bert Savoy, who, noting an approaching thunderstorm on Long Beach, quipped, “There’s Miss God at it again”—and was instantly struck by lightning. Next door, in the kitchen, Dalí rummaged for coffee until he spotted a stray cat near the stove that had been hit by a car and was nursing a bloody gash in its side. “Je déteste les chats,” he shrieked, recoiling in horror, “et surtout avec des plaies!” (“I detest cats, especially with wounds!”), before fleeing from the room.
Then there was the psychopath who tried to burn down the house by scattering feathers up and down the stairways, the increasing number of complaints that sailors were stealing items from the residents’ rooms, and the suitcase that had been opened and pillaged—not to mention the frequent long nights of drinking in the parlor followed by dreary mornings cluttered with overflowing ashtrays and empty martini glasses.
There was no peace anywhere—not out in the world and not even in this temporary sanctuary that the artists had tried to create. By the end of March, the emotional strain had begun to affect the lodgers’ health. Britten succumbed to “one of the plagues of Egypt,” as he called the relapse of his streptococcal infection from the previous spring—the infection that Auden claimed was caused by homesickness. Paul Bowles contracted a case of measles and retreated to his room to be fed soup and fussed over by Jane. The most serious casualty, however, befell the one founding household member who wasn’t there. The residents—George Davis in particular—had been horrified to learn that in late February, shortly after her return to her mother’s house in Georgia, Carson had succumbed to a series of headaches so violent and excruciating that they had led to partial paralysis and an almost complete loss of vision. By mid-March, her vision had returned to the extent that she was able to read, but she could still barely walk from her bed to the living room sofa, and her doctors were unable to determine the cause of her collapse. It would be years before this mysterious malady would be correctly diagnosed as the first of the severe strokes that would destroy Carson’s health in the decades to come and lead to her death at the age of fifty.
Despite her affliction, Carson was determined to return to New York as soon as possible. But this time her husband, who had traveled south to help care for her, and her mother insisted that the house on Middagh Street was too stimulating for someone in her condition. If she were to go to New York, it must be in Reeves’s care—and she must stay with him in their apartment on West Eleventh Street. In a sense, Carson’s acceptance of these conditions served as a final judgment of the depths to which the experiment at 7 Middagh Street had fallen.
George, having lost Gypsy to Chicago, his friend Victor to the army, and now Carson to her illness and to Reeves, began to ask himself how long this group life could continue. The waiting list for rooms had grown so long that there was no hope of reaching its end; more names were added each week as anxiety about the future increased in New York’s artistic community. The house in Brooklyn had become, it appeared, a lifeboat for a fortunate few, and as new residents replaced the original members, George sensed an unpleasant atmosphere of exclusivity beginning to permeate the drafty old house. Lincoln Kirstein replied, when Auden asked why he insisted on writing such scathing dance reviews for Decision, that the point wasn’t so much the reviews themselves as the friends one made by writing them. And when Jane Bowles’s friend, the former New Yorker employee Robert “Boo” Faulkner, expressed a wish to join the Brooklyn group, Jane coolly retorted, “You’re not important enough.”
This form of corruption, as George saw it, was anathema to his original intention for the house as an open forum to promote important work. In both structure and style, the vessel that was 7 Middagh Street appeared to have gone hopelessly adrift. Auden, too, seemed to have sensed the growing malaise and understood its significance. In a review of Theodore Roethke’s new collection of poetry, Open House, Auden wrote in March that “a work of art, like a life, can fail in two different ways: either, in terror of admitting that there is any chaos, it takes refuge in some arbitrary conscious order it has acquired ready-made from others or thought up itself on the spur of the moment . . . or, lacking the courage and the faith to believe that it is possible and a duty to bring the chaos to order, it contents itself with a purely passive idolization of the flux.” It was necessary to create “both in Life and Art,” he wrote, a “necessary order out of an arbitrary chaos”—not any order, but an order “already latent in the chaos, so that successful creation is a process of discovery . . . and the more consciously one directs this process the more one becomes both conscious of and true to one’s fate.”
An artist, Auden concluded, was someone who conducted this deliberate process of discovery—this conscious form of human development—in a public manner, to be shared by others. Such activity carried with it a responsibility to try not to allow the always-threatening opposing forces of arbitrariness and chaos to interfere. Auden was trying to maintain his own focus despite the arbitrary pressures of patriotism and nationalism created by the war and the forces of chaos working against him in the house on Middagh Street.
In March, Auden’s new book, A Double Man, had appeared with his long poem “New Year Letter” at its center. Its publication coincided well with the current state of thinking in the United States, as much of the population observed with dismay a European culture now “on all fours to greet / A butch and criminal elite” and struggled with the question of “where to serve and when and how?” As a result, the book was well received in America—with a few significant detractors, including the poet Delmore Schwartz—but Auden had already moved beyond his poem’s philosophical vacillation toward a full embrace of the “objective” moral dictates of religious faith.
No longer was Auden concerned, either, with the objections to his current direction
that had been raised by a number of his closest friends. He made this clear in a debate with Klaus Mann, broadcast in mid-March, titled “The Function of the Writer in the Political Crisis.” In the conversation, Mann asserted his view that creative writers are equipped by their professions to see farther and more clearly than the average man, and so they are morally obliged to galvanize the public politically when they see danger ahead. Auden insisted, more confidently and succinctly now than in previous months, that intellectuals do not by definition possess superior political insight—and may, in fact, be as easily tempted as the next man to use politics to their own advantage—but that by focusing on the timeless moral issues they may be able to help move the population toward a better future. In any case, the political present was no longer a matter for poets and writers, Auden claimed, but was in the hands of “professionals,” who would tell the population what it must do. Writers, meanwhile, should stick to what they do best and define the truths on which society could create new and better conventions.
Auden was aware of the exasperation with which Klaus Mann greeted his position—echoing that of Erika, now rumored to be with Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach in Switzerland, helping displaced people escape into that neutral country. But by that spring of 1941, Auden had lost interest in his friends’ objections. Nor did he show any remaining patience with the debate, reportedly still “raging everywhere” in England, over his and other English writers’ presence in America. The month before, when Golo Mann had urged him to defend himself against such criticism in a British newspaper, Auden had replied curtly that there was no point in responding to people whose minds were made up. But the continuing remarks in the British journal Horizon by Cyril Connolly, and particularly by Auden’s friend Stephen Spender, struck him as especially gratuitous, given the circumstances, and he resented their power to distract and upset his fellow expatriates Isherwood and Britten.
Spender, who had written of his “regret” that Auden was not in England, as he was, to write poems about its great ordeal, had long been known in their circle of friends for his tendency to analyze his disagreements with them publicly, in print, instead of directly with those involved. He periodically suffered bouts of envy aimed at Auden—at Oxford, he had once written a novel in which Auden was portrayed as a kind of Lord of Death—and his addiction to publicity was such that he himself once wrote that it disgusted him to read a newspaper in which there was no mention of his name. Now, his and Connolly’s stirring of the ashes of resentment against Auden had prompted Louis MacNeice, now in London writing for the BBC, to respond in the February issue of Horizon that “for the expatriate there is no Categorical Imperative bidding him return—or stay,” and that while it might be right for an artist who was getting nowhere to return to England, “Auden, for example, working eight hours a day in New York, is getting somewhere; it might well be ‘wrong’ for him to return.”
What Spender was pretending not to see in comparing the writers’ situation in Britain to that of Auden was that, by 1941, no one in Britain had a choice about how to act. Their immediate destinies had been dictated when the bombs started to fall. Auden, Isherwood, Britten, and the other expatriates, on the other hand, were still able to decide freely how best to serve. And they were deciding—a much more difficult prospect than automatically responding in the only possible way, by fighting back.
As the furor continued on both sides of the Atlantic, Auden decided he had had enough. He tried to stanch the flow of commentary by writing privately to Spender, the way he wished his friend had communicated with him:
Dearest Stephen:
People ring me up from time to time to ask me if I am going to answer what they describe as an attack by you in Horizon . . . Your passion for public criticism of your friends has always seemed to me a little odd; it is not that you don’t say acute things—you do—but the assumption of the role of the blue-eyed Candid Incorruptible is questionable. God knows it is hard enough to be objective about strangers; it is quite impossible with those whom one knows well and, I hope, loves . . . As to your review of me, what you say is probably accurate enough, but the tone alarms me. ‘One is worried about Auden’s poetic future’. Really, Stephen dear, whose voice is this but that of Harold Spender M.P. [Stephen’s father] . . .
But what really alarms me is that in a crisis of this time, you should be so bothered about what other contemporary writers are up to. What has to be done to defend Civilisation? In order of immediate importance: (1) To kill Germans and destroy German Property. (2) to prevent as many English lives and as much English property as possible from being killed and destroyed. (3) to create things from houses to poems that are worth preserving. (4) to educate people to understand what civilisation really means and involves . . . Literary criticism is a very small and negative part of the last. With your gifts for creation and education there is more than enough for you to do . . .
I don’t see how my own attitude about the war can be of any interest except to myself, but here it is. If I thought I should be a competent soldier or air-warden I should come back to-morrow . . . As a writer and a pedagogue the problem is different for the intellectual warfare goes on always and everywhere, and no one has a right to say that this place or that time is where all intellectuals ought to be. I believe that for me personally America is the best, but of course the only proof lies in what one produces.
With the arbitrary judgments from England addressed, Auden next turned to the chaos in the house. In order to restore the household to a reasonable balance, it would be necessary to enforce new rules. First, social activities would have to end at a reasonable hour so that the artists in residence could get some sleep. To this end, Auden began adding a handwritten message to each of the party invitations sent out by George: “The carriage will depart sharply at 1:00 A.M.” If guests attempted to stay beyond that time, the poet would descend in slippers and robe to insist that they leave, to their wide-awake host’s disappointment.
Auden grew stricter regarding financial matters as well. Payment of rent had grown lax over recent months; now he announced that the rent would be paid each Tuesday at breakfast, and that anyone who failed to appear at that time could expect to find him knocking at their door by noon. Each resident’s share of the household expenses (“George: 21.06 . . . Benjy Peter: 20”) was scribbled into Auden’s notebooks beside such lines as “A thousand vases— / Life’s certainly spilt / From a thousand—roses.” Britten and Pears, presented with a list of the week’s costs, always paid immediately without objection, but those who tried to question their bills faced his immediate loss of temper.
It was at the dinner table, however, that Auden proved most domineering. Having already excluded politics as an acceptable topic of conversation, he now forbade personal arguments and bickering as well. His own monologues on literary topics grew louder and more difficult to interrupt, as he developed the habit of muttering a continuous “uh . . . uh . . . uh” between sentences to keep anyone else from breaking in. Some of his fellow diners were content to ignore him and carry on their own conversations, while others listened to Auden in fascination. Among the latter was Jane Bowles, now utterly under Auden’s spell and avidly incorporating his ideas and opinions into her novel.
Two Serious Ladies was an autobiographical work—autobiographical as interpreted through Jane’s refracted sensibility. Rather than create a single alter ego whose thoughts and experiences resembled her own, Jane split her ideas and concerns between two contrasting female protagonists, allowing each to play the “serious” game of making or refusing to make certain life choices and then examining the results. The novel begins with one of the two protagonists, Christina Goering, at the age of thirteen, playing a game with a neighbor girl called “I Forgive You for All Your Sins.” In the game, Christina wraps the girl in burlap, covers her with mud, and then submerges her in a stream to wash away her sins. She does not play this game for fun, the character explains, but because it is necessary. And indeed, for the
remainder of the novel, Goering conducts a single-minded if circuitous quest for spiritual redemption—selling her beautiful home to live in a rural shack and sacrificing her body through affairs with strange and possibly dangerous men. Meanwhile, her friend and fellow protagonist, Mrs. Copperfield, chooses a life of pleasure in the belief that God is dead and so cannot forgive her sins. Traveling passively with her husband to Panama, despite her fear and dislike of exotic climes, she then drifts out of his sphere and into a kind of masochistic half-life with a female prostitute named Pacifica.
At the end of the novel, the two serious ladies reunite in a city restaurant to assess the effects of each journey on themselves and on each other. Goering judges herself “nearer to becoming a saint,” but wonders anxiously whether a hidden part of her continues “piling sin upon sin.” Mrs. Copperfield acknowledges that she has “gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as I can be,” she adds, “but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf.”
February House Page 25