Carson adored his stories and also appreciated Oliver Smith’s knack for giving her the kind of attention she craved. The two talked at length that spring about The Bride and Her Brother, which Carson felt had reached a critical point in its development. His influence proved critical to her ability to progress with the story once she had settled in at Yaddo. Smith had extended the same kindness to Jane Bowles, suggesting that with her gift for dialogue she had great potential as a dramatist. “Someday I’ll give you money to start writing a play,” he had told her—and two years later he kept his promise, coproducing her play In the Summer House.
Smith’s enthusiasm for art, theater, literature, music, and ballet, and his talent for acting as “an island of calm in the sea of temperament,” allowed him to serve as a lively cross-pollinator among the other artists at 7 Middagh Street. That spring, he initiated or maintained friendships with the painters Eugène Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Salvador Dalí at the Brooklyn house, became a favorite of the circle of dancers surrounding Lincoln Kirstein, and with the help of George Davis began doing illustrations for Mademoiselle. “When you’re starting out, you have a wonderful time,” he later remarked about this period. “It’s like a series of great restaurants. You try a little bit and have fun with this period or that architect. Like a child in a cafeteria, you eat everything in sight.”
Since Smith happened to have taken his exam for the set designer’s union in Hollywood with only one other applicant—Salvador Dalí—he may have especially enjoyed attending Dalí’s exhibition that May. Billed as Dalí’s “last scandal,” the beginning of his classical period, the exhibition fooled no one. As reviews in Decision and elsewhere pointed out, Dalí had merely presented his usual quasi-surrealist work in antique frames, although the exhibition did serve as effective advertising for the artist’s upcoming autobiography. The catalogue reproduced a page of the manuscript, along with the Dalíesque teasers: “Can one remember one’s prenatal life? Explained in the book. Why are these horrible cats’ tails grafted upon breasts? Explained in the book . . .”
Certainly, Smith enjoyed—along with everyone else—George’s accounts of Gypsy Rose Lee’s progress with The G-String Murders. Throughout the spring, she had worked to complete the revisions while starring in several shows a day at Todd’s Theatre Café. Gypsy’s editor, Lee Wright, had taken over where George had left off, commenting on the manuscript as Gypsy wrote it. “I loved your notes,” she wrote from her dressing room that May. “I was reading along and saying to myself, ‘I like this chapter fine,’ and at the end I’d come across, ‘What happened to Jake?’ in your hand-writing. Hurt me ego . . . that’s wot.”
A hitch in Gypsy’s plan had occurred when the Mafia moved in on the Theatre Café in late spring, offering Todd a “partnership.” Rather than get involved with the mobsters, he sold them the club for a dollar and took his and Gypsy’s names off the marquee. Gypsy then lent Todd the money to take their elaborate Gay New Orleans Review on the road—staging three shows a day, six days a week, in Milwaukee, Toledo, San Francisco, Detroit, Atlantic City, and other cities across the country. Even while touring, Gypsy never stopped writing, and by June she had completed the manuscript. Within days, Variety reported that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had bid for the movie rights to the book. A Broadway production was also being discussed, but Gypsy claimed that if it were staged, she would not play the lead role. “Why should I?” she asked reporters. “I’d be a dope to play for $350 a week the part of a Chicago stripteaser when I can be the Chicago stripper for $2000.”
“Does this sound good for a dust jacket: a picture full length of a stripper?” she wrote to her editor. “Semi nude. The G String actually silver flitter. (Very inexpensive, that flitter business.) And a separate piece of paper pasted on as a skirt, like birthday cards, you know? The customers can lift the skirt, and there’s the G-string sparkling gaily. It is strictly gag business but it might cause talk.” Now that The G-String Murders was complete, Gypsy began to think about a sequel. Within the month, she started writing Mother Finds a Body, finding, thanks largely to George’s tutelage, the second novel much easier going than the first. For the rest of her life, in fact, Gypsy relied on writing as a fulfilling outlet for her creativity, second only to her work as a performer.
Glad as Carson was to spend time with her friends, she was due at Yaddo by mid-June. As the summer heat intensified, the Brooklyn house emptied of many other visitors and lodgers as well. Colin McPhee had left for Saratoga Springs at the same time as Carson. Lincoln Kirstein—who had recently surprised everyone by marrying, despite his homosexuality, the sister of the artist Paul Cadmus, Fidelma—left with his new American Ballet Caravan on a South American tour. Paul and Jane Bowles had returned to Taxco, Mexico, to be joined by Oliver Smith, who was eager to turn his back on “that long, hard winter working at awful jobs.” George Davis departed on one of his periodic cross-country jaunts in which he was liable to turn up unexpectedly on a friend’s or relative’s doorstep with a stray cat, dog, or human companion in tow.
Klaus Mann returned to his room at the Bedford Hotel in Manhattan, tied to his work for Decision. The past few issues, he felt, had been among the best, and his hopes were rising that the journal would not only help new refugees but would lead to real change in the world as cultural leaders and government officials responded to the challenges in its pages. To his frustration, however, at the same time that he saw such positive results, the funding for the journal had begun to run out. Several major backers did not come through, and the income from subscriptions was not sufficient to cover the operating costs. Klaus had always paid his writers according to need rather than a set standard, but by April he was forced to renegotiate lower payments even to those writers who had no other income. The budget for the May issue did not even allow Klaus to pay himself a living wage, and he found himself, at thirty-four, having to write to his mother at her new home in California: “The other drop of bitterness is that I—it really can’t be helped, it is very distressing to me—must ask for some money: two hundred dollars, I can’t manage with less.”
Asking his parents for money was especially depressing, for Klaus Mann had hoped to finally overcome his reputation as the privileged son, the moody dilettante, the invisible younger sibling of the dynamic Erika Mann. For the past year, he had worked feverishly to facilitate the safe transplantation of European culture to the fertile new soil of America. Yet the people he now approached for financial help seemed to believe that Decision had made its promising start more in spite of Klaus than because of him. More than one potential investor implied that Klaus was unable to manage Decision on his own—Klaus, who had conceived the idea of a journal for émigré artists, who had single-handedly raised the funds, and who had worked night and day for the past eight months to turn it into a tool for merging two disparate democratic cultures. Max Ascoli, the esteemed Italian émigré journalist now teaching at the New School, offered to help raise more money and contribute funds himself if Klaus would create a formal business plan and meet with investors in a conference room rather than at “social gatherings” such as those at Middagh Street. Others insisted that Klaus’s father participate more actively as collaborator and adviser, that Klaus take on an editorial partner, or that Decision be merged with their own political organizations or refugee aid societies.
Klaus might have been less resentful of such slights if he had not now been entering his eighth year of exile, still living and writing in a foreign language and struggling each day against America’s apathy toward his and other refugees’ concerns. Nearly a decade of drifting from country to country, from hotel to hotel, had left him with a sense of living in “a social and spiritual vacuum; striving for a true community but never finding it; disconnected, restless, wandering; haunted by those solemn abstractions in which nobody else believes—civilization, progress, liberty.” Every day constituted another struggle to make himself heard, to connect with others, but it was the constant small cuts that made
life unbearable.
Previously, Klaus had managed to survive emotionally by drawing from Erika’s phenomenal energy, but Erika had been gone for nearly four months. The only person Klaus saw now in New York was Muriel Rukeyser, whom he had recently appointed associate editor of Decision. Without her editorial help and emotional support, he admitted, he could not have gone on. But even she escaped to the country three days each week while Klaus remained, “paralyzed, as it were, by the demon of this fierce and relentless summer. At times I actually fear suffocation in the stifling hole that’s my room.”
It seemed to Klaus that summer as though he and all of the other weary exiles from Hitler’s regime had reached the end of their productive lives, and that, cut off from the culture that had sustained them, nothing more lay ahead but hardship and isolation. It was not surprising, somehow, that two of the three greatest innovators from that earlier age—James Joyce and Virginia Woolf—had perished since the year began. And recently, Sherwood Anderson, one of Decision’s staunchest American supporters, had died in Panama. Numbly going through the motions, Klaus published a remembrance of Woolf by Christopher Isherwood in Decision’s May issue, along with one of her early short stories. Reflecting on her death, he realized that he had lost more friends through suicide than through disease, crime, or accident. There had been several waves—the first one before the establishment of the Third Reich, the second after the invasion of Poland, and now a third wave as America teetered on the edge of war.
Klaus, too, was deeply attracted to the idea of suicide. “I’ve never understood why anyone should be afraid of death,” he wrote in his diary, “when it’s only life that’s so terrible.” In earlier years, he had stifled the wish to end his life through the use of morphine, to which he remained intermittently addicted until his death. “My case is not pathological,” he once told a doctor friend when discussing his dependence. “No doctor can cure me of the different things that weigh on me.” Now he looked to world events for some reason—any reason—to find comfort. In mid-May, news had arrived that Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, had parachuted out of his Messerchmitt 110 and landed in the village of Eaglesham in Scotland. When captured, he demanded to negotiate a peace plan with the British leaders, but Hitler repudiated the “deserter” and announced that Hess was suffering from a mental disorder. Was this desertion of one of the “Devil’s stooges” just another symptom of the world’s insanity, Klaus wondered, or could the flight of Hitler’s “dearest friend [with his] red-painted toenails, the pockets of his uniform full of narcotics and photos,” be a first sign that the Third Reich was crumbling?
Then, at four o’clock on the morning of June 22, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in a blatant grab for the Soviet oil needed to fuel Germany’s expansion. The attack came without warning and in spite of a nonaggression pact signed by both Germany and the USSR. The Russian population succumbed to mass panic even as Molotov shouted over the airwaves, “This incredible attack on our country is an act of treachery unequalled in the history of civilized nations.”
Like the events of the previous summer, disasters followed one upon the other in numbing succession. As Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Hungary, and Albania joined forces against Russia, parts of Byelorussia, Lithuania, and the western Ukraine were lost. Japan, meanwhile, called up more than a million men for military service and ordered all its merchant ships in the Atlantic back home.
In California, Christopher Isherwood wrote in his diary, “Try to avoid negative emotion.” But he had had a nightmare of returning to London. “The houses were smashed, but only the top floors . . . so many ruins you could see a hill in the distance . . . In the newspaper, an advertisement in fake Elizabethan language for seats in a fighter plane to take part in an air raid. Woke with enormous relief that I’m still here.”
Klaus Mann, too, listened to the news with the strange sense that it was all a dream. “Hitler’s attack on Russia is an event of such staggering implications that I don’t dare to gauge them,” he wrote that week. Yet “my spontaneous reaction is one of relief, rather than of dismay or apprehension. The air has become purer. The story of a colossal lie has finally reached its end.” It was now clear to everyone, at last, that Hitler would never keep a promise to any nation, that no country on earth could feel confident of remaining untouched by his greed. As Churchill acknowledged over the airwaves, “It is not too much to say here this summer evening that the lives and happiness of a thousand million additional human beings are now menaced with brutal Nazi violence.”
At the same time, it was conceivable that Hitler’s grasp had, in this case, exceeded his reach. It was a military truism, wasn’t it, never to attack Russia? Churchill warned against the probability that, with the Soviets in hand, Hitler would launch a full-scale invasion of Britain before winter. For this reason, despite his government’s “revulsion” against communism, Britain would come to Russia’s aid. And if the USSR managed to resist long enough, Hitler could find himself pinched between these two great powers until the United States took advantage of the opportunity to step in and administer the fatal blow. Yes, it was a crisis, Klaus believed, but perhaps it was also the beginning of this terrible war’s end.
This thought alone was almost enough to pull Klaus out of his despair. Even on the summer nights when New York had become “a parched and dusty inferno,” with heat “so dazing that one can hardly breathe,” he began to feel again the impulse to transform his experience into art. Wandering alone through the streets of Manhattan, he found that once more he enjoyed being “all alone in the midst of a sweating, easy-going, weary, and sensual crowd.” He wrote, “I relish those sultry evenings when the vast masses of towered stones seem to exhale the accumulated glow of the day like tremendous stoves. I do not long for lush meadows, cool mountain valleys, and the salty breezes from the sea. It gives me a grim sort of pleasure to loiter around Times Square on a torrid August night. I do not seek company.”
The return of his creative impulse was a godsend for Klaus, but he did not feel ready, in that time of flux, to attempt a work of fiction. “Can a novel be completely serious, completely sincere?” he wrote. “Perhaps. But I do not want to write one; not now, not at this hour. I am tired of all literary clichés and tricks. I am tired of all masks, all hypocrisy. Is it art itself that I am tired of? I don’t want to play any more. I want to confess.”
To confess—thereby ending one part of his life and beginning another. Klaus decided to write the story of his life as a young man in exile, to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth . . . To tell my own story, not despite the crisis, but because of it.” His account of the life of a dislocated outsider, he believed, would be “at once unique and representative. Limited in its scope and molded by specific conditions; and yet full of infinite suggestions, transcending the range of its own problems and objectives, pointing to potentialities far beyond its empirical margin.” And he would call his story The Turning Point, because
it is from the turning point that we should examine the path we have covered. In measuring its serpentine curves and paradoxical zigzags, we may learn something as to the next step to take. For one thing is certain at least, in the midst of so many staggering uncertainties: the next step will carry us into new land with landscapes and conditions as they have never been seen before. Nobody can foretell whether things will be worse or better in this transformed world to come. The horizons which, from now on, will surround our lives may be brighter or darker than the skies we knew. But surely the light will alter.
Auden, too, had remained in the city that summer, despite the kind of heat that prompted him to remark of America some time later that “Nature never intended human beings to live here.” He could be grateful, nevertheless, to be at home at all that summer: he had been ordered to report for American military duty on July 1, but at the last moment his appointment was postponed.
In the wake of Chester Kallman’s betrayal and the disaster of the Paul Bunyan premier
e—a failure that he regretted much more for Britten’s sake than his own—Auden had to struggle to maintain his balance that summer. The absence of new poems had become a source of concern, as evidenced by his clipped response to a sympathetic inquiry from his benefactor Caroline Newton:
Caroline dear, You oversimplify. Writing poems is not just a technical craft like making shoes, where the optimum conditions can be stated at once as light, tools, and unlimited leather. If I tried to live by the question ‘what will help me most to write poetry?’, I should never be able to write a line. All one has, are hunches about one’s life as a whole. If the hunches are right, then it doesn’t matter if one writes or not; if they are wrong, the most beautiful poem in the world will be no excuse. Love, Wystan.
The question that had infiltrated Auden’s thinking that summer was whether the conclusions he had drawn from the past six months’ activity were, in fact, wrong. The opportunity to review de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World allowed him to reconsider his thinking about love as one path to spiritual redemption, as de Rougemont analyzed the modern Western myth of passion as the misguided assumption that “only perfection is worthy to be loved.” This erroneous idea sprang from a belief that matter was the creation of the Evil One, therefore all human institutions, including marriage, were corrupt. Only in death could humans escape matter and find perfection in the noncorporeal, according to this belief. And from it a reverse image was born of the Don Juan who believed that the material present was all and the immaterial afterlife a distant nothing.
February House Page 28