February House Page 6

  George had the answer. While neither he nor Carson had enough money to rent the entire brownstone, each could afford a small piece of it. And if they invited friends to move in as well, together they could raise enough money for the rent and expenses. It would be the group life that Carson had been dreaming of, he explained excitedly, a sanctuary for themselves and others who were also, for financial, political, or any other reason, finding it difficult to focus on their work. He knew, for example, that Auden was looking for a cheaper place to live. If such a respected poet moved in, everyone else would follow. It would be an experiment, he told Carson—a test for himself and a test for each other. But surely it was worth trying.

  Carson listened raptly as George outlined his plan. Like George, Carson’s spirit of adventure was strong. Yet, also like George, she was essentially a family person who liked to keep loved ones close by. Renting a house like this would allow her to make the kind of dramatic gesture she enjoyed while creating the domestic order that best supported her work. Growing up, she had benefited from the social and intellectual ambitions of her mother, Marguerite Smith, who had created a modest salon of her own in which Columbus’s interesting and eccentric had played Bach on the gramophone and discussed favorite works of literature. The idea of replicating this experience with the likes of Wystan Auden and George Davis certainly appealed more strongly to Carson than remaining cooped up with Reeves or finding an apartment on her own.

  Setting out immediately to talk with the rental agent, Carson and George soon learned that the house had previously been occupied by an elderly widow, then converted to a boardinghouse. The house had fallen into such neglect that the widow’s son was willing to offer a long-term lease to anyone willing to keep it from deteriorating further. The rent would be low—$75 a month—with one month’s security deposit due on signing.

  Roughly the same price as a small apartment on the East Side in Manhattan, the four-story house was a bargain—particularly now that the prospect of war had led to more weddings and a housing squeeze in New York. It was also a wreck, as George and Carson realized when given a tour. But the size of the kitchen and dining room made up for the crumbling plaster, and the ornate parlor was perfectly suited to George’s taste. The rear windows offered the same views of New York Harbor and the Brooklyn Bridge that had inspired the poets Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. And the building’s reconfiguration as a boardinghouse made it appropriate for group life already. It was a risk, they agreed, but they would accept it.

  There was still the problem of money. Neither of them had $150, but George knew someone who did. His friend Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy department store heir, was devoting his life to supporting the arts. The hulking thirty-four-year-old whose grim, vulture-like demeanor masked a shyness that his artist friends found charming, had funded his first creative ventures as a student at Harvard, where he had cofounded the iconoclastic literary journal the Hound and Horn and published early works by Katherine Anne Porter and Stephen Spender. He had also cofounded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, which had exhibited—often for the first time in America—the works of Georgia O’Keeffe, Juan Gris, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. This led to his supporting role in the creation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1929. In recent years, however, Kirstein had fallen in love with ballet and with the idea of bringing this European dance tradition to America, where an independent style could be developed. Having imported the choreographer George Balanchine to New York and raised the funds necessary to create the School of American Ballet and the American Ballet Company, he helped stage a series of stunning original productions every year.

  George Davis happened to know—because he had introduced them and followed their friendship for years—that Kirstein idolized Auden and in his earnest devotion would do practically anything to make his life more secure. As far back as 1933, shortly after the publication of Auden’s Orators, Kirstein had been scanDalízed when the composer and music critic Virgil Thomson had lazily insisted that Kirstein summarize the collection for him in “just one word.”

  Kirstein had sought an introduction to Auden and Isherwood when they first came to New York. Then, when Isherwood moved to Hollywood and Auden had to leave their shared apartment, Kirstein invited him to stay at his own home until he found a new place to live.

  The arrangement had not worked particularly well, as Kirstein’s sometimes clumsy efforts to ingratiate himself with Auden tended to go sour. Often abrupt and unintentionally rude—walking off in the middle of the conversation if bored—the young man whom Isherwood had described as a kind of tormented Gulliver surrounded by tiny, beautiful dancers, could be a difficult companion. Once, feeling playful, Kirstein stole up behind Auden and sprayed the back of his neck with perfume, causing him to leap into the air in surprise and slap at his neck, screeching, “Fuck! Stop that! What on earth are you doing? I positively loathe perfume!” Flushing purple, Kirstein left the house until he had recovered.

  Yet, despite the misunderstandings and Auden’s private opinion that ballet was a minor art, not really worthy of so much attention, he was fond of Kirstein in return. He had dedicated his poem “Herman Melville” to this friend who had taken such pains to introduce him to American history and literature, and he had spent much of the past summer at the home of Kirstein’s sister, Mina Curtiss.

  Kirstein knew that Auden was looking for cheaper housing, and he regretted George’s departure from Harper’s Bazaar. He could see how 7 Middagh Street could improve both of his friends’ situations. Further, the idea of a creative group house headed by someone as well connected and beloved by artists as George appealed to him—as did the opportunity such a situation would provide for more material for George’s spellbinding and often salacious stories, to which Kirstein was thoroughly addicted. And he could think of a dozen people or more who might comfortably live at 7 Middagh Street—dancers, choreographers, artists, and musicians, as well as writers. Eager to be involved, Kirstein wrote a check for the initial expenses—an amount laughably minuscule compared to that demanded by his other arts projects. He looked forward to dropping by Middagh Street in a month or so, after George had got it up and running, to see how the experiment was developing.

  With check in hand, George was able to sign the lease and pocket the keys. The official moving date was October 1, but as George explained to Carson, they would have access to the house before then so they could begin repairs. In the meantime, there was much to do. George needed to arrange for his furniture and other belongings to be moved to Brooklyn, while Carson would have to decide how to break the news of her departure to her husband. They would need to find painters, carpenters, and plumbers—something neither of them had ever done in New York. George was excited to have a new project, but much depended on Auden’s involvement. George would not feel fully comfortable until he had brought his British friend on board.

  This task was not likely to prove much of a challenge. Auden and Davis had discussed sharing an apartment with Isherwood once before, when the British writers had first arrived in New York. George’s relationship with Auden had flourished during the previous year and a half, nourished by long lunches paid for by George’s employer and an exchange of amusing notes, letters, and poems when one or the other was out of town. Auden often described George as the wittiest person he had ever known, and George worked hard to maintain that position. The poet also appreciated George’s ongoing efforts to find him publication and lecture opportunities that helped pay his bills.

  It was true, as George Davis and Lincoln Kirstein had heard, that Auden was in a bad financial state that autumn. Lacking a private income, he depended solely on his writing for support, along with a weekly teaching post in Manhattan and occasional lectures elsewhere. The previous year, attracted by the serene atmosphere and human scale of Brooklyn Heights, he had rented an apartment on the top floor of one of the grandest houses overlooking the harbor, at the western end of Montague Street. The apartment was small,
but the view was one of the best in the city, and the insulating distance from Manhattan’s literary scene made the steep rent worth paying. Since then, however, events in Europe had led to a ban on the exportation of British money. Cut off from the profits on the sales of his books in England, Auden had instructed his parents to donate them instead to a fund for transporting children out of bomb-threatened London and had looked to America for other sources of income.

  But they had proved hard to come by—certainly more difficult than George had led him to believe on their first visit in 1938. And while it was true that American publishers generally paid more than those in England for poems and book reviews and that Americans, always eager to improve themselves, compensated him well for lectures and readings, the cost of living in New York was also quite high. The fact was, Auden had overextended himself. If he did not find a solution soon, he did not see how he could continue the daily writing routine on which he utterly depended—and he was just now completing the commentary to a long poem, “New Year Letter,” which would soon be published with a few shorter poems in a book to be called, in its American edition, The Double Man. For a while he had thought that his close friend Benjamin Britten might move in along with his lover, the singer Peter Pears. But there was really no room in the small apartment for Britten to work on his music while Auden wrote, and the composer had bridled at the high cost of even half the apartment’s rent.

  Auden was also losing patience with his intrusive landlady, who had admitted to spending entire nights parked in her car outside the house, keeping an eye on the comings and goings of tenants whose activities had caused complaints. For a man such as Auden, who lived openly as a homosexual despite its illegal status in 1940, such a remark was bound to cause discomfort. As he later wrote to a curious friend, his determination to live openly as he liked was “largely dictated by Worldly Prudence.” He had found that most people responded to his behavior with the thought “‘If there were really anything in this, he couldn’t dare be so obvious,’” whereas, “If one is secretive, and then, discovered, one is lost.” Nevertheless, there was always the danger of confrontation. At the price he was paying to live on Montague Terrace, Auden hardly needed the aggravation of a stranger’s excessive interest in his life.

  George, visiting the poet in his untidy, paper-strewn apartment, suggested in his warm tones that a move to Middagh Street would provide the perfect solution to all of these problems. At $25 per resident, the rent must be a third of what Auden was paying now. Middagh had acres of rooms—they could each take half a floor—and nowhere in New York would Auden find a more congenial pair of housemates. As George painted and renovated each floor, more artists could move in, and the expenses could be divided among more people. And if together they could lower their cost of living and enjoy the stimulation of one another’s presence as well, who knew what they might be able to produce? It was obvious that time was short. Whatever they had in mind to create, they had better do it now.

  Auden hardly needed the reminder. One had only to look out the window at the harbor to know that the opportunity to focus on literary activity was about to end. By September 1940, the number of passenger liners docking at the Manhattan piers had diminished significantly as the European war escalated. News of the bombing raids on London filled the daily newspapers. America clearly could not stand passively by much longer before its engagement in the war became not only a moral issue but a matter of self-defense. A military draft had been introduced in the United States that month. And Auden, more than either of the other future residents of 7 Middagh Street, knew what sort of havoc war and politics would wreak on their individual lives.

  Twelve years earlier, as a recent Oxford graduate who had, as he cheerfully admitted, hardly cracked a newspaper in his life, Auden had traveled to Berlin just as Germany’s Weimar Republic was beginning to crumble and fascism rise in its stead. The city’s heady cultural brew had already produced Dadaism, expressionism, Bauhaus architecture, and particle physics—and still appeared to be in a state of constant revolution. With its favorable exchange rate, Berlin served as the mecca for restless young British artists that Paris represented for Americans. Auden’s arrival coincided with the premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, the publication of King, Queen and Knave by Vladimir Nabokov writing as V. Sirin, Marlene Dietrich’s latest film, and exhibits of the works of Otto Dix and Georg Grosz.

  More significant, in the words of Christopher Isherwood, “Berlin meant Boys.” The cabaret district around the Friedrichstrasse, with its small bars and trysting alleys, was, Isherwood wrote, a “promised libidoland,” where male prostitutes would do anything with anyone for money. Berlin was “a city with no virgins. Not even the puppies and kittens are virgins,” exulted Stephen Spender, who followed his two friends to Berlin. This atmosphere promised relief from the repressed environment of England—particularly, as Isherwood pointed out, for those well-brought-up young Englishmen who could relax sexually only with foreigners of the working class.

  Conveniently, the recent university graduates had at that time fallen under the influence of the American psychologist Homer Lane, who defined God as the pure inner desires of an individual, unwarped by the strictures of society. If this was true, then ignoring one’s own nature in favor of others’ rules was a sin, and the path toward spiritual and emotional health lay in “complete freedom of behavior.” Auden, pushing back the heavy leather door curtain of his favorite boy-bar, the Cosy Corner, did his best to follow Lane’s advice.

  Of course, Auden and his friends were aware that their passionate but brief relations with Berlin’s street prostitutes had everything to do with Germany’s recent bout of rampant inflation and the current high rate of unemployment, and rarely if ever any real sexual attraction. Many if not most of the prostitutes haunting the cabarets were heterosexual, earning an income in the only way they could.

  If this power imbalance occasionally threatened to touch the British writers’ consciences, they were protected for a time by educated England’s traditional conception of the working classes as “characters” placed on earth for their amusement. As the Irish poet Louis MacNeice later wrote, “You may throw darts with the yokels in the village pub but all the time the yokels are on the stage and you are in the stalls.” In fact, Auden and his comrades initially found the prostitutes’ very emotional aloofness exciting in contrast to their physical availability. “The attraction of buggery is partly its difficulty and torments,” Auden would tell a friend. “Heterosexual love seems so tame and easy after it.” Like Carson McCullers more than a decade later, he found that he was stimulated by unsatisfied desire and felt that “there is something in reciprocity that is despair.”

  Opting for male partners, while made easier by Berlin’s political climate, was not a particularly difficult decision for Auden in any case, thanks to the open attitudes of his close circle of friends. At Oxford, he had had opportunities for homosexual play, though never in anything like the liberating context of Berlin. Gradually, along with Isherwood and Spender, he came to know some of the Berlin boys as individuals and to care for them as true lovers or at least friends. And if he liked to brag to his friends back home that he was taking part in the “white slave traffic,” in the end he freely admitted that in Berlin he had been more “a middle-class rabbit” than a successful predator.

  But already, the playground in which these writers had explored their sexuality and practiced their poetry had begun to shut down. The October 1929 American stock market crash had a devastating effect. Sexual and other forms of social tolerance began to evaporate in the face of economic disaster.

  With terrifying speed, violence returned to the streets as Jews and other “troublemakers” were persecuted by political slanderers and thugs taking advantage of the public’s need for scapegoats and for distraction from their acute distress. Every day saw new restrictions on the expression of individual opinion, the movements of certain individuals, the freedom to obtain a job
or a visa or entry into certain organizations and clubs. Free speech gave way to propaganda, free passage through the streets to riots, vanDalísm, and physical attacks. Then the 1929 elections resulted in an enormous victory for the Nazi Party and a defeat for the Social Democrats and Communists. It was eye-opening for the Britons to see the real effects of economic hardship, class division, and political chaos on their working-class German friends. But by that time Auden had turned twenty-two and his parents had stopped his allowance. He had no choice but to return to England.

  Back at home, Auden turned to a series of jobs as a private tutor, a boarding school teacher, and a writer for documentary films. But his life in Berlin persisted in his imagination—he had learned much about human nature as well as the power of politics to shape the destiny of individuals. In his free hours, he began to transform the raw material of his life in Berlin and England into a series of remarkable poems, produced in quick succession. Some conveyed the sense of boding darkness that he had experienced in Germany: “All this time was anxiety at night, / Shooting and barricade in street.” Some alluded to the sexual openness that he and his friends had enjoyed there: “Before this loved one / Was that one and that one.” Others expressed his impatience with Little England—a prim, self-censoring nation where “Whispering neighbours, left and right, / Pluck us from the real delight.” And still others warned of bad times to come: