This post and the next are about exiles in
New York City. Some of them chose to
live here, others couldn’t wait until conditions – usually political – changed,
permitting them to return to their homeland.
Some learned English, others did not.
Some loved New York, some tolerated it, and some were never comfortable here and got away as
soon as they could. Admittedly, for most
foreigners, New York requires an adjustment, being fiercely modern, fast-paced,
noisy, and congested. On the other hand,
it has been the preferred destination of many who were separated from the land
of their birth.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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| Saint-Exupéry in Toulouse in 1933. |
A renowned author and pioneer commercial aviator,
Saint-Exupéry came to New York on the last day of 1940, not wishing to live under the
Nazi-allied Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, which had come to power following
the disastrous French military defeat and collapse. He spoke no English, but French-speaking
American friends fed and feted him and found him and his wife Consuelo, who had
followed him here, twin penthouse apartments on Central Park South. (A very posh address. It pays to have friends with
connections.) When one of those friends
saw a figure in his doodles, she suggested that he turn it into the protagonist
of a children’s book. This would be a
radical departure for Saint-Exupéry, the author of serious and sensitive works about aviation and travel, but the idea took hold and he started writing what
would become his best-known work, Le
Petit Prince, an illustrated children’s book to be read as well by adults.
Another American friend, Silvia Hamilton,
saw him regularly for a year and encouraged him in his writing until at last,
in April 1943, the manuscript was
finished. Rushing off to rejoin the Free
French Air Force in North Africa, the author tossed a rumpled paper bag onto
Hamilton’s entry table, containing the 140-page draft manuscript and drawings,
the pages replete with corrections as well as coffee stains and cigarette
burns. The finished work has been called
fabulistic, abstract, ethereal; it is anything but realistic and makes no
direct reference at all to the war in progress.
In it a pilot stranded in a desert meets a yellow-scarfed young prince
fallen to earth from a tiny asteroid. The
prince tells of visiting various asteroids and describes the inhabitants of
each: a king who thinks he rules the entire universe; a businessman counting the
stars he thinks he owns; a drunk who drinks out of shame at his drinking; and
so on. “Grown-ups are so strange,” says
the prince.
Published in New York in French and
English in 1943, Le Petit Prince was
Saint-Exupéry’s last work. Though he was
really too old, the Free French let him fly.
While on a reconnaissance flight on July 31, 1944, his plane disappeared
in the Mediterranean, presumably shot down by a German plane. The plane’s wreckage was found only sixty
years later, though his silver identity bracelet was discovered snagged in a
fishing net off Marseilles in 1998.
Meanwhile Le Petit Prince, not
published in France until 1946, has been translated into 250 languages and
sells over 1.8 million copies a year.
The author’s self-imposed exile in New York was fruitful in the
extreme. I urge anyone who hasn’t read
the work to do so; it is charming, provocative, unique. In fact, I recommend all his works, especially Terre des hommes (in English, Wind, Sand, and Stars, though I prefer the French title by far).
André Breton
Though he had long since broken with the
Communist Party, where he never felt at home, in New York he had yet to
renounce the tenets of dialectical materialism.
Knowing this, the art critic Meyer Schapiro invited two intellectuals of
his acquaintance, one a dedicated Marxist and the other a critic of Marxism, to
a debate for Breton’s benefit. During
the debate Breton listened intently but said not a word, as the critic of Marxism
gained the upper hand. After that,
Schapiro told me long ago, André Breton never again mentioned dialectical
materialism. His distancing from
Communism and its tenets was complete and final.
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| Wearing Alexander Calder earrings. |
Hosting Breton and other exiles in New York was the wealthy art patron
Peggy Guggenheim, a niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, founder of the museum that
bears his name. She had taken an active
interest in Surrealism in the 1930s and in a very short time amassed a
significant collection. Now, on West 57th
Street in wartime New York, she opened a museum/gallery called The Art of This
Century Gallery, of which only the front room was a commercial gallery. She was married at the time to the Surrealist
artist Max Ernst, who found the marriage a convenient way to gain entry to the
U.S., but by her own admission she had a sexual appetite for men that matched
her appetite for art. Photographs reveal
a woman neither plain nor memorably beautiful, but she had money and influence
and chutzpah (she was, after all, Jewish), and many an artist enhanced his
career by obliging her in this regard. A
1942 photograph taken in her New York apartment shows herself posing with no
less than fourteen renowned artists of the time – not all of them necessarily
her lovers – including Breton, Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Fernand Léger, Marcel
Duchamp, and Piet Mondrian. It is a
curious photograph, with some of the subjects facing right, some left, and only
a few looking squarely at the camera. Only
Peggy Guggenheim could have assembled in one spot such a clutch of avant-garde
talent, most of them in wartime exile.
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| Front row: Leonora Carrington, 2nd from left. Middle row: Max Ernst, far left; Breton in middle; Fernand Léger, 2nd from right. Back row: Peggy Guggenheim, 2nd from left; Marcel Duchamp, 2nd from right; Piet Mondrian, far right. |
It was not Peggy Guggenheim who enlisted
Breton’s affections in New York, but Elisa Claro (née Bindorff), whom he met in
a French restaurant on 56th
Street in 1943 and married in (of all places!) Reno, Nevada, in 1945, she
becoming his third and final wife. He
traveled with her to Canada in 1944, and the following year they visited the
Hopi reservation in Arizona, where they observed Hopi rituals and Breton added kachina
dolls to his art collection. Accompanied
by Elisa, in the spring of 1946 Breton returned to Paris to resume his
Surrealist activities and rambunctious ways, as inclined as ever to provocation
and controversy. His former Surrealist
comrades Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, now ardent Communists, dismissed him as
irrelevant, since he had not participated, as they had, in the Resistance. Which didn’t prevent him from advancing as
always the Surrealist cause and exploring what he would term Magical Art.
W. H. Auden
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| Auden in 1939. |
The English poet and man of letters W. H.
Auden, already well known in England as a leftist writer and intellectual, came
to New York in January 1939 with his friend the writer Christopher Isherwood,
the two of them entering the U.S. with temporary visas but intending to
stay. Auden and Isherwood, age 32 and 35
respectively, had known each other since boarding school, and in the 1920s had
left strait-laced, homophobic England for the freedom of Weimar Berlin. There Auden had remained for nine months and
Isherwood for years, the chief attraction being a seemingly inexhaustible
supply of boys available and eager for sex.
In the 1930s Auden worked in England as a schoolteacher, essayist, reviewer,
and lecturer, but in 1937, when he did volunteer work for the Republic in the
Spanish Civil War, he became disillusioned with politics and disgusted with
war. It was this experience, above all,
that prompted him to quit England for America, where he hoped to resolve the
doubts, both political and personal, now plaguing him.
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| Chester Kallman |
When the two newly arrived English writers
gave a reading here, two college students from Brooklyn College sat in the
front row and winked and smiled provocatively.
One of them, Chester Kallman, showed up at their lodgings the next day
to interview them for the college newspaper, causing Auden to remark sourly,
“It’s the wrong blond!” But Kallman, with an ample supply of Brooklyn chutzpah, persisted with the interview, and by the end of it Auden’s interest had kindled. In fact, he was smitten; they soon became lovers.
The New York literary scene was to Auden’s
liking and he remained here, but in April 1939 Isherwood, sensing that the East
Coast would be Auden’s turf, went to California, where he would settle down and
cultivate the West Coast as his own.
When war broke out in September, Auden informed the British Embassy in
Washington that he would return to Britain, if needed, but was told that for
his age group only qualified personnel were wanted. In spite of this, there would develop
considerable resentment in Britain that Auden and Isherwood had absented
themselves when Britain, following the fall of France, stood alone against
Germany and endured the horrors of the Blitz.
Auden, on the other hand, viewed the wartime sloganeering, speechifying,
and committee-joining fervor of British intellectuals as irrelevant to the war effort, and as
potentially damaging as fascism at its worst.
In 1940-41 Auden lived in a ramshackle
brownstone at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights in an experiment in communal
living launched by his friend George Davis, a brilliant fiction editor recently
fired from his job at Harper’s Bazaar because
of his total lack of self-discipline.
Experiments in communal living were nothing new in America, but
nineteenth-century endeavors had proven impractical, since the free spirits
involved were better at talk and philosophizing than at managing money, doing
the dishes, and taking out the trash.
Nothing daunted, Davis assembled in the brownstone on Middagh Street a
number of his authors and acquaintances, including Auden, Carson McCullers,
Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Gypsy Rose
Lee, and others – such a concentration of creative talent, seasoned by the presence
of an acclaimed stripper recently turned author, that it spices the mind.
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| Carson McCullers |
Auden was not noted for neatness – wherever
he lived, he left papers and cigarette ashes strewn about – but in this crowd
he was by contrast the perfect bourgeois, imposing regular meals and regular
working hours for all. He wrote out cooking
and cleaning schedules, lectured his housemates when they used too much toilet
paper, and announced at dinnertime, “There will be no political
discussion.” He and Carson McCullers,
who had just achieved literary fame with the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, developed
a warm teacher-student friendship beneficial to both – a remarkable
achievement, given Cullers’s neurotic hang-ups and hard drinking. At Davis’s invitation Gypsy Rose Lee joined
the party so he could help her work on a novel, The G-String Murders, which in time became a best-selling
mystery. She alone of the residents had
both money and common sense. Her maid
came with her but was unable to cope with the accumulated dirty clothes and
dishes, empty bottles, and cigarette ashes and stubs.
Visiting this curious artists colony were
Anais Nin, who christened the brownstone the February House because several of
the occupants had birthdays in February, and Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika and
son Klaus. (Auden had married Erika to
give her a British passport, but by mutual consent the marriage was never
consummated and they lived apart.) The
novelist Richard Wright and others also dropped in.
Amazingly, the residents of the February
House all managed to get some significant work done, but their love life was often
less than satisfactory. George Davis happily
cruised the Brooklyn piers, but Carson McCullers pined futilely for the Swiss
journalist and world traveler Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a friend of the Manns,
while Auden yearned stubbornly for Chester Kallman, who after two years, being young and
adventurous, informed Auden that from now on he would range freely in search of
sex. Deeply wounded, Auden, who wanted a
stable relationship, managed to maintain his friendship, albeit sexless, with
Chester. Auden’s friends never could
grasp why Auden clung to a younger partner whom they considered in every way
his inferior, but they apparently failed to grasp that desire is not wise or prudent or practical; it simply is. Auden and Chester Kallman each offered the other something that he needed, something beyond sex; the relationship ended only with Auden’s death. How Auden squared his sex life with the Anglican faith he had returned to in 1940 I do not know. He seems to have been troubled by his sexuality, as Kallman was not.
Inevitably, communal living in the
February House began to fray on the nerves of the participants. Fed up with her housemates’ drinking and
slovenliness, Gypsy bowed out first, soon followed by McCullers, whose boozing
and late hours had impaired her fragile health.
Irked by Paul Bowles’s noisy sex games with his wife and loud partying,
Auden and Britten expelled the offender, but Britten and Pears then also left
the house and America, returning to wartime Britain. Soon afterward Auden too moved out, convinced
of the need for a balance between bohemian chaos and bourgeois convention that
the February House obviously could not provide. George Davis stayed stubbornly on until the
house was demolished in 1945; in time he would marry Kurt Weill’s widow, Lotte
Lenya, and work hard promoting Weill’s work.
The story of 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn Heights, brief but stellar, has
justifiably been called a true mingling of the sublime and the ridiculous; it
is well told in Sherill Tippins’s February
House (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
When Auden was called up for the draft in
1942, the U.S. Army rejected him because of his avowed homosexuality. For several years he taught at Swarthmore
College and in 1945, unknown to Auden at the time, he was considered for the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on the basis of his volume For the Time Being, but lost out to Karl Schapiro because of his
alleged Communism (he had never joined he Party) and his aloofness from the
war. Then, in March 1945, he applied to
join U.S. Army as part of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in
Germany, and became a major as a “bombing research analyst in the Morale Division,” interviewing civilians in the devastated cities of Germany.
Significantly, neither his wartime disgust with war nor his
homosexuality seems to have been a problem, and the prospect of a steady and
substantial salary was surely an enticement.
The thought of Auden in uniform is, to put it mildly, arresting. (The Strategic Bombing Survey, by the way,
studied the effects of bombing on both Germany and Japan and concluded that 10%
of the bombs hit their target. One
wonders, then, where the other 90% ended up.)
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| The later Auden. |
Auden became a U.S. citizen in 1946 and
continued to live in New York, making a living as a writer, teacher, lecturer,
and librettist. Reading his poetry, he
practiced a low-keyed delivery, despising the sonorous and inflated tones that
often plague poets when they read. In
1948 his long poem The Age of Anxiety won
the Pulitzer Prize. From 1953 on he
shared houses and apartments with Kallman, though later he would summer in
Europe. Time took its toll on both of
them. Auden’s aging face grew fissured
from his steady smoking, and svelte, young Chester became a middle-aged
man who drank far more than was good for him.
When Stravinsky asked Auden to do the libretto for The Rake’s Progress, Auden, hoping to reclaim Chester through the
steadiness of work, enlisted his support and sold him to the composer as a
collaborator. Occasionally Kallman would
show some poetry of his own to a friend, who was invariably struck by its
intensity. One suspects that Kallman
secretly resented being in the shadow of an acclaimed man of letters, but he
published three volumes of his own poetry and in collaboration with Auden
became known as a librettist.
Auden’s literary reputation has had its
ups and downs. While a poet friend of
mine praised him to the skies, I found him a bit too ironic, detached,
intellectual, preferring the Celtic word jungle of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, impenetrable
as that jungle can be. By the time
of his death in 1973, Auden was recognized as a literary elder statesman. He died in Vienna of heart failure and is buried in
Kirchstettin, a town in Austria where he had owned a farmhouse.
Just as Auden once went to Berlin for boys,
so Kallman went to Athens for the same, moving his winter home there in
1963. He is said to have been generous
to his young male lovers. He died suddenly in
Athens in 1975, age 54, and is buried there in the Jewish Cemetery, far apart
from Auden. Some sources say that, mourning Auden, he died of a broken heart, but I find this fanciful. On a deep level his life was not a happy one, but perhaps I'm being judgmental.
A note on WBAI: The loyal staff, whose devotion is
commendable, profess optimism about saving the station, but the desperate
appeals for donations go on and on and on.
I never thought the award-winning news program would vanish, but it
did. The substitute news program likewise
vanished, replaced by fund-raising specials, then came back, and now has
vanished again. Inconsistency in
programming is sure to drive listeners away -- listeners like me, a longtime supporter of the station. I hear Gary Null’s one-hour program at noon
on weekdays, though he warns that he may be eliminated, because of his
criticism of the current management. I
hear Richard Wolff’s weekly economics program at noon on Saturday, though I’ve
got his message fully by now (capitalism is bad, socialism is the answer). And I hear Thom Hartmann’s 5 p.m. program
weekdays, though his self-promotion annoys me, as does his constant replaying
of segments, often up to three or four times within two days. But that’s it. I find it very easy to turn from WBAI to
WNYC, and that is the crux of the problem.
(Apologies to those unfamiliar with WBAI and its travails, but I feel a
need to chronicle its endless downward spiral; unique, it is in danger of
disappearing forever.)
This is New York
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| Bob Jagendorf |
Coming soon: Exiles in New York, part 2. The Scarlet Sisters, a Dragon Lady, an anarchist with a compact, diverse others.
©
2014 Clifford Browder
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