Intimate Companions by David Leddick

Author:David Leddick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250104786
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

The War Years

With the coming of the war, the struggle to survive the Depression ended suddenly, not so much with affluence as with the country’s need for everyone to take part in the war effort. For many Americans the war came as something of a surprise. Although there had been every indication for almost a decade that Nazism in Germany would lead to a worldwide war, most of the people in the United States had been able to ignore it.

Caught up in building their careers in the world of the arts, George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, and the group who surrounded them had not paid much attention to events in Europe. Even annual trips abroad did not suggest the catastrophe that was to come. When friends had to flee France in 1939, cutting short their holidays as the Nazis threatened to invade, Americans still paid little attention, and even the subsequent bombing of London did not distract them in any real way from their pursuits.

George Platt Lynes continued his photographing of fashion and the famous, distracting himself with an ever-increasing interest in male nudes. Paul Cadmus remained immersed in his painting, but it began to undergo a sea change. From acid critiques of those people the journalist H. L. Mencken called “the booboisie,” his work took a turn toward the magical and sensuous. It was certainly very much affected by his long summers on nearly deserted Fire Island in the company of Jared French and his wife. Lincoln Kirstein was deeply involved in building a national ballet company. The School of American Ballet he had founded with George Balanchine was producing more and more well-trained dancers for his company.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Americans stopped ignoring the war overnight. The men in the Lynes-Cadmus-Kirstein group, many of them homosexual, now had to face their futures in a nation at war and decide what their role in it would be.

George Platt Lynes continued on in his professional life almost as though the war did not exist, though he was to be greatly affected by it. Paul Cadmus moved his art even further into a world set magically apart from the war. Lincoln Kirstein, however, entered the military. He wasn’t offered a commission and spent the war as an enlisted man in Europe.

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