Dreadful Times

Bombs dropping. Carnage in the streets. People fleeing. Dictators violating international law. A country is divided. A sense of dread across the world. Then as now.

This could be the present or the future but I am describing the past. It is late summer, 1940. Hitler has unleashed the blitzkrieg over England. Poland has fallen in the east and Belgium and France are occupied by the Nazis.

The U.S. is receiving refugees and the first peacetime draft is underway. Roosevelt has started to aid England with the Lend Lease program but the tenor of our country is half isolationist.

In a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights by the East River there lived W.C. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. This Bohemian-like enclave was the brain-child of George Davis, the flamboyant raconteur editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In a single issue of that magazine Davis published Collette, Elizabeth Bishop, Katharine Anne Porter and Stephen Spender.

Over the next 18 months this address was, arguably, the hub of American literati living a communal style fueled by the urgency of war. This moment in history is so well-captured by Sherill Tippins in her 2005 book The February House.

All-night parties included Aaron Copland, George Balanchine, William Saroyan, Kurt Weil and Lotte Lenya, the three children of Thomas Mann, Salvadore Dali and Richard Wright who later moved in.

Carson McCullers was the toast of the town having just published The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter at age 23. Britten was working on his operetta, Paul Bunyan and Gypsy Rose Lee started her first novel, G-String Murders. It was a hive of creative minds.

Rent was $75/month shared equally by the residents. The Depression was still being felt for some while Gypsy Rose Lee earned $4,000/week from Mike Todd’s extravaganza at the World’s Fair.

At the same time, the British emigres, Auden, Britten and Isherwood were being denounced as cowards by their homeland. Britten made his way back to England in 1942 but Auden remained and became an American citizen. He was struggling with his loss of faith, which I take to mean faith in the human race. The book includes conversations between Auden and the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr.

I was alive through all this but my experience as a child was the sense of a struggle between the forces of good and evil and we were the good guys. By age ten (1943) I never doubted our victory over fascism. After all, I was buying war bonds, collecting tin foil and even knitting squares for blankets. Two of my closest friends were German refugees. With those clandestine meetings on the other side of my bedroom wall, I went to sleep driving Nazis from Stalingrad.

Auden and others were also conflicted with the role of an artist / writer in dreaded times as is the case today. In his original poem “1939” the last line rings true for me. We must love one another or die. He later changed it to read, love one another and die. In the final version he omitted the line altogether. It still has resonance 87 years later. Without love we die inside.