Auden had always believed that a commitment of friendship meant full acceptance of that friend’s decisions. If he was willing to tolerate Kallman’s promiscuity and the end of his sexual relations with him, his friends must accept it, too. He acknowledged that the crisis he experienced at Middagh Street that summer was the most devastating of his life. Yet even when he confessed that “there are days when the knowledge that . . . there will never be a person with whom I shall be one flesh, seems more than I can bear,” Auden seems never to have regretted his decision to remain with Kallman. “I never really loved anyone before,” he wrote to Tania Stern that winter, “and even when he got through the wall, he became so much part of my life that I keep forgetting that he is a separate person . . . I have also discovered what I never knew before, the dread of being abandoned and left alone. I am happy about him, though.” He would rephrase this sentiment more succinctly fifteen years later:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
For Auden, as for all of the residents of 7 Middagh Street, the more loving partner was the more creative one. “He makes me suffer and commit follies,” Auden wrote about Kallman that January, a few days after Chester’s twenty-first birthday, “without which I should soon become like the later Tennyson.”
There was no danger of that as Auden proceeded full force with “For the Time Being,” churning through the moral and psychological implications of those dismaying times to produce works of art that would sustain generations of readers. Even as he turned the dross of private catastrophe into poetic treasure, his own words reflected back at him in a way that helped him learn to live with the life fate had given him. On Christmas Day, 1941, while at work on “For the Time Being,” Auden thanked Kallman for giving him the shock he needed in order to continue growing:
Dearest Chester
it is in you, a Jew, that I, a Gentile, inheriting an o-so-genteel anti-semitism, have found my happiness:
As this morning I think of Bethlehem, I think of you.
Because it is you, from Brooklyn, who have taught me, from Oxford, how the most liberal young man can assume that his money and his education ought to be able to buy love;
As this morning, I think of the inn stable, I think of you. Because, suffering on your account the torments of sexual jealousy, I have had a glimpse of the infinite rudeness of masculine conceit;
As this morning, I think of Joseph, I think of you . . .
Because it is through you that God has chosen to show me my beatitude,
As this morning I think of the Godhead, I think of you.
Because in the eyes of our bohemian friends our relationship is absurd;
As this morning I think of the Paradox of the Incarnation, I think of you.
Because, although our love, beginning Hans Andersen, became Grimm, and there are probably even grimmer tests to come, nevertheless I believe that if only we have faith in God and in each other, we shall be permitted to realize all that love is intended to be;
As this morning I think of the Good Friday and the Easter Sunday already implicit in Christmas Day, I think of you.”
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, meanwhile, had been haunting the offices of the Cunard steamship line trying to obtain tickets on any ship bound for England. The sense of urgency increased in February, when Boston’s Serge Koussevitsky offered to commission Britten’s Peter Grimes. “I have reached a definite turning point in my work,” Britten wrote excitedly to his brother-in-law in England, “& what I most want is to be able to think & think & work & work, completely undistracted for a good period of time. If it were in normal times this would be completely possible—but, my problem is only that of probably about 40,000,000 . . . ambitious young men.”
Like Chester Kallman, Britten had received a kind of summing-up letter from Auden that winter—one that he did not at all appreciate. Apparently written without any knowledge of the incident with the Rothmans, it reflected an astounding perceptiveness on Auden’s part about the conflicts that the young Britten would have to face up to and resolve. Having expressed his sadness over Britten and Pears’s departure from America and his love for them both, Auden quickly moved on to express his thoughts about Britten and his work during the past year:
As you know I think you [are] the white hope of music; for this very reason I am more critical of you than of anybody else, and I think I know something about the dangers that beset you as a man and as an artist because they are my own.
Goodness and Beauty are the results of a perfect balance between Order and Chaos, Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention.
Bohemian chaos alone ends in a mad jumble of beautiful scraps; Bourgeois convention alone ends in large unfeeling corpses.
Every artist except the supreme masters has a bias one way or the other . . . For middle-class Englishmen like you and me, the danger is of course the second. Your attraction to thin-as-a-board-juveniles, i.e., to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom of this. And I am certain too that it is your denial and evasion of the . . . demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health, i.e. sickness is your substitute for the Bohemian.
Wherever you go you are and probably always will be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you, and praise everything you do . . . Up to a certain point this is fine for you, but beware. You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself in this way, i.e. to build yourself a warm nest of love (of course when you get it, you find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable talented little boy.
If you are really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have; i.e., you will have to be able to say what you never yet had had the right to say—God, I’m a shit.
This is all expressed very muddle-headedly, but try and not misunderstand it, and believe that it is only my love and admiration for you that makes me say it.
The letter could not have been more poorly timed. Having spent several months working through this very issue on his own, Britten was no longer prepared to take advice from Auden. Answering Auden’s letter with the statement that his relationship with Pears was hardly of the schoolboy variety, he ignored the additional movements of the Christmas oratorio that Auden had sent (now including, in Britten’s opinion, a ludicrously wordy Fugue that would be impossible to set to music), and instead wrote to Isherwood, asking if he would be interested in writing the libretto for Peter Grimes. Isherwood, helping to resettle refugees at the Quaker camp in Pennsylvania, turned down the offer in surprise, and Britten was left to search for another collaborator to take Auden’s place.
For the moment, the composer was satisfied. “I feel much, much older &, well perhaps wiser,” he had written to a friend some months before. And now, consciously or unconsciously echoing Auden’s own words, he added to his brother-in-law, discussing the need for discipline and obedience in life, “in art, as you know, the bias is . . . that of anarchy and romantic ‘freedom’. A carefully chosen discipline is the only possible course.” The experience of being in America, able to look back on his homeland and on his past with increased objectivity, had allowed Britten to decide for himself what he needed. And what he needed was not the sloppy, scandalous, bohemian life of Auden and his friends at Middagh Street but the ordered, civilized environment represented by Peter Pears and all of England. He was ready for the next stage of his creative development, and it would not take place in America.
In March 1942, two places on a small Swedish cargo ship became available, and Britten and Pears were at last able to depart. On the journey home, Britten worked hard, despite the cramped quarters and the constant fear of attack, to wrap up the work of an “American” period that was already receding into his past. By their arrival, he had finished the music for Auden’s “Ode to St. Cecilia.” It was the last work on which the pair would collaborate. No
r would the two artists’ friendship fully survive the year they spent together in America.
Shortly after his arrival, Britten invited the poet and journalist Montagu Slater to write the libretto for Peter Grimes. The collaboration proved exceptionally fruitful, and in time the opera was hailed by critics as among the most original and groundbreaking works of the twentieth century. Expressing the dark undertow of Britten’s personality to a degree that Auden could hardly have imagined, Peter Grimes opened the way for more than three decades of brilliant, strong, and original music. As his abilities blossomed, so did Pears’s. Once in England, Pears put his vastly improved singing technique to work in winning the title role in the opera Tales of Hoffman. The acclaim with which his performance was greeted assured him a career as long and successful as Britten’s.
It was strange at first, being back in England after their transformative years abroad. While Britten was quick to exclaim that “Snape is just heaven, I couldn’t have believed that a place could be so lovely,” he also wrote, “The first impression of the country is a sort of drab shabiness [sic]. All the excitement of the ‘blitz’ (except for isolated spots) has died down, & people seem very, very tired. Musical life doesn’t really exist . . . So far people have all been nice to me, and there has been no suggestion of vindictiveness. In one or two places, over-kindness, which makes one suspicious.” To his great relief, he got through the review by tribunal of his claim to conscientious objector status and was granted an unconditional exemption from military duty. Despite the relative ease of this transition, however, he found that he missed the country he had just left. He wrote to Elizabeth Mayer that, even as he enjoyed the help and friendship of his fellow artists, including Stephen Spender and especially Louis MacNeice, and however much he loved England, “I feel that, come what may, half my life is now tied up with America.” Despite his break with Auden, he begged Elizabeth for reports about him as well as Isherwood, McPhee, and Copland. “I am so keen to hear their news,” he wrote, “& I hate to feel that they’re forgetting me!”
Mayer was happy to comply, dropping in at 7 Middagh Street for occasional visits and passing on to Britten and Pears any news she picked up. By the spring of 1942, she was able to report that Carson McCullers, Wystan Auden, and Colin McPhee had each won a Guggenheim fellowship to complete The Member of the Wedding, For the Time Being, and A House in Bali, respectively. (“Our average income was $25 per week,” Oliver Smith later joked, “most of it from the Guggenheim Foundation.”) Carson maintained a room at 7 Middagh for years, using it occasionally as she moved from Georgia to Yaddo and back again. The novelist Richard Wright, who was entranced by Carson when he finally met her, moved to 7 Middagh Street with his family in 1942. While their neighbors had appeared remarkably tolerant of the wild goings-on at the house in previous years, occupancy by a black man, his white wife, and their baby daughter was another matter. Stones were thrown at the windows, and the coal deliverer, himself African American, resigned rather than serve someone of his own race. Nevertheless, it was Wright who chose to leave the house after a year. He found it too painful, he said, to witness Carson’s self-destruction through drinking and George’s dangerous adventures among the bars and brothels of Sands Street.
Carson, however, continued to find her life in Brooklyn Heights uniquely nurturing. Throughout the war years, she treasured her visits with George, who was always ready to enjoy a drink with her in the parlor or to trudge through the snowdrifts for a meal at their favorite Chinese restaurant, a few blocks away. In 1943, when Reeves wrote to Carson after more than a year without contact, George served as go-between as the couple considered reuniting. In his letters to Carson, Reeves claimed to understand now what a consuming process it was to write a novel and to have shed his jealousy of her success. Carson was impressed by Reeves’s courage as a member of the elite Rangers assault outfit during the Normandy invasion and on the front lines in Germany. They remarried in 1945, and though their marriage again proved destructive—ending with Reeves’s suicide in Paris in 1953—everyone agreed that their bond had in the end been impossible to sever and that they had simply been destined to experience life together. Carson survived her husband by only fourteen years, dying from a series of strokes and severe illnesses in her home in Nyack, New York.
Ironically, the fate of Jane Bowles, Carson’s temporary replacement at Middagh Street, proved remarkably similar to her predecessor’s. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, Jane showed her finished novel to her husband. When he objected strenuously to its many grammatical and spelling errors—shouting, “You can’t let anyone see such an abject manuscript!”—she replied calmly, “They don’t publish a book because it has perfect spelling, Gloompot.” While not a commercial success, Two Serious Ladies survives as an utterly original, uniquely feminine literary work. Jane went on to publish a short story collection and to see her play, In the Summer House, produced by her cousin-in-law Oliver Smith; but as Paul’s writing career took off with the publication of The Sheltering Sky, Jane’s fell victim to alcoholism and neurosis. Jane died at fifty-six in Spain, blinded by strokes and institutionalized, while Paul survived into old age as a successful, if alienated, author, living an exile’s life in Morocco.
Oliver Smith’s future was a happier one. After his work on Saratoga, Pavel Tchelitchew recommended him as set designer for the Ballet Russe production of Rodeo. Choreographed by Agnes de Mille to Aaron Copland’s score, the Western ballet became a smash hit and is still performed around the world. Next, Oliver worked with the brilliant young choreographer Jerome Robbins and the composer Leonard Bernstein on Fancy Free, a “ballet story” about a pair of naïve young sailors on shore leave in New York. Fancy Free, whose setting at a waterfront bar resembled the raucous Sands Street haunts in Brooklyn, proved enormously successful and was soon transformed into the musical play On the Town; it was subsequently made into a hit Hollywood film. In 1945, Carson wrote to Reeves in amusement: “Oliver Smith has produced a show called On The Town, which is the most successful comedy in many years. The critics agree that it is the best thing of its kind in ages, and now suddenly he is wallowing in wealth. Two weeks ago he couldn’t pay George the rent.”
Smith earned enough money from that play and film to buy a twenty-eight-room, yellow brick Brooklyn Heights mansion on Willow Street, which he had long admired. There, he recreated his Middagh Street attic studio, invited as houseguests such artists as Truman Capote, one of George Davis’s discoveries who would write Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood in Oliver’s basement, and rested between such culturally defining design and production projects as Brigadoon, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Flower Drum Song, Camelot, Hello, Dolly!, Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, and The Sound of Music. Years later, he remarked that West Side Story had been inspired by the walks he and Jerome Robbins used to take under the Brooklyn Bridge and down by the docks around Sands Street. Consequently, he confided to a reporter, the set for that show was really “more Brooklyn than Manhattan—but don’t tell anyone.”
Like Smith, Gypsy Rose Lee succumbed to a severe case of house-lust in the wake of her stay at Middagh Street. In 1942, after Mayor La Guardia’s successful efforts to ban burlesque entertainment in New York City, she invested in Mike Todd’s idea to cash in on the free publicity by producing a Broadway show about burlesque, to be called Star and Garter and starring Gypsy herself. Todd wagered that the general public would pay Broadway rates to see a sanitized version of forbidden entertainment, and his bet paid off enormously. Gypsy’s thirty-nine and five-twelfths interest in the production—along with the royalties from The G-String Murders and its well-reviewed but financially less successful sequel, Mother Finds a Body—brought in enough cash to buy a fixer-upper mansion, also with twenty-eight rooms, on East Sixty-third Street in Manhattan.
Even better, Gypsy was able to wrap her great love, Mike Todd, tight in the apron strings of her bank account. Their correspondence during this period consisted of a dizz
ying series of IOUs, promises to pay, promises to invest more, and promises to pay more back. Still, despite their close financial relationship, Gypsy was unable to get the married producer divorced and back to the altar. By the time they produced Gypsy’s first play, The Naked Genius, on Broadway, Todd had become a widower. But he cast Joan Blondell instead of Gypsy in the starring role—and when the playwright was panned but the actress praised by Broadway critics, Todd married Blondell. Gypsy, knocked down again but certainly not out, consoled herself with a new movie career, an affair with Otto Preminger (with whom she had a son), and the successful publication of Gypsy, the autobiography that led to the successful Broadway play. Years later her son, Erik Lee Preminger, wrote that, though his mother would always be “an entertainer first and a writer second,” she was never happier than when at her typewriter. Given her lack of formal education, he added, Gypsy never could have found this lifelong source of satisfaction without the help of George Davis.
At Mademoiselle, where George continued to nurture new talent, its editorial assistants watched in awe as Gypsy Rose Lee, Christopher Isherwood, Wystan Auden, Carson McCullers, and an occasional French sailor dropped in to take George out to lunch or for drinks at the Russian Tea Room. George continued to fascinate the fashion magazine set, with his dark, gloomy office crammed to overflowing with musty antique furniture, his sly, knowing stories, and his illustrious roster of friends. At Mademoiselle, George soon found an assistant willing to cash his paychecks for him, to cover for his frequent absences, and to manage the waiting room outside his office, where his appointments “multiplied like planes stacked up over La Guardia”—and even to make editorial house calls to his home, now shared with “a parrot with the usual bad disposition, a small, unraveled dog upstaged by half a dozen feline thugs,” and a giant Austrian houseman whom George allowed to steal from him because he brought him orange juice in bed.
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