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Benjy and Peter Pears (for whom he wrote the leading tenor role of Grimes) arrived in the U.S. in 1939, moved in with Auden, in an arty household at 7 Mid-dagh Street in Brooklyn. It was a ramshackle, remodeled four-story brownstone whose architecture had fascinated Auden and his friends: from the street it looked something like a Swiss chalet. It was there that Negro Author Richard Wright later wrote Black Boy, and Novelist Carson Me Cullers wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye. Composer Paul Bowles worked at his Mexican ballet on the parlor piano (until Benjy quietly asked that Bowles move his piano to the basement).
Gypsy Rose Lee came in blue jeans, to paint Benjy's fourth-floor rooms. Author Christopher Isherwood, Poet Louis Mac-Neice, Composers Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson drifted in & out. At meals, Auden presided at one end of the table. He also did the bookkeeping, and was irritated if any of the tenants questioned their bills. Benjy always paid up (about $25 a week) without a murmur.
Britten lived about six months in Brooklyn, and another three years in Amityville, Long Island. For a time Britten conducted an amateur orchestra in another Long Island town, just for the fun of it. The amateurs got so they could play a Mozart symphony creditably, then began thinking about a professional concert. Britten thought that amateurs should be content to stay amateurs.
Rosy Prospects. Britten regarded his visit to the U.S. as a vacation trip "rather from the general European atmosphere than from overwork." Though his knowledge of the U.S. is pretty well limited to New York City and suburbs, he found the U.S. "a very rosy prospect" for composers : "The American composer has little to grumble at; compared with English composers, nothing." In fact, he saw a danger of "excessive nationalism" in the way conductors indiscriminately played U.S. music, and in American composers' search for a style of their own. Says Britten: "No accident of nationality has ever excused a composer for writing bad music." Besides, in the U.S. there was too much seeking out, too much pushing of composers "before they are ready."
He had another reason for wanting to leave the U.S. England was at war, and although he is a pacifist (his personal faith is something akin to the Quakers', though he is not much of a churchgoer), he thought he belonged there. But first he went to see Conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who had played some of Britten's music. Koussevitzky gave him $200 a month for five months to write an opera.* Says Koussevitzky: "If he had asked more we would have paid it."
Back in England, a Conscientious Objectors Tribunal exempted Britten from war service, but he gave concerts in bomb shattered towns.