The Yearlong Party

In her study of the community of world-renowned writers, composers and artists who, for a dozen intense and anxious months during 1940 and 1941, the early years of World War II, lived at No. 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn, New York City, biographer Sherill Tippins has filled in many important lacunae in our knowledge of the early career and state of mind of some of the leading figures in American and European culture and thought. February House – the book draws its title from Anais Nin’s characterization of the place, so many were the February birthdays of the house’s occupants – presents a composite portrait of intellectual and creative development as it affected young and iconic pioneers such as the poet W.H. Auden, the novelist Carson McCullers, the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Peter Pears, the composer Colin McPhee, the poet, essayist and political activist Klaus Mann, the novelist Richard Wright, and the painter Salvador Dali, all of whom lived under this one roof. The tenants also included Paul and Jane Bowles, the stripper and thriller writer Gypsy Rose Lee, and the Broadway set designer Oliver Smith. George Davis, the writer and Harper’s Bazaar editor whose project and inspiration the house was, organized the practical side of things together with Auden, who ended up as the unofficial manager of the premises, collecting rent from the tenants and acting as the house policeman, imposing hours of silence and controlling the logistics of multiple occupancy with a firm and sometimes inflexible hand.

While it can’t be denied that the book is above all remarkable for its human interest – the accounts of the affair between Auden and his lover Chester Kallman, the relationship between Davis and McCullers, and the bond that united Pears and Britten in themselves constitute narratives of almost Balzacian intricacy and fascination – it also throws light on some of the burning political and social issues of the day. In particular, it shows how the threat and subsequent outbreak of war in 1939 utterly changed the lives and outlook of people for whom the interpretation of the world and the channelling of it to others was central to their preoccupations. Auden, Britten and Pears, who had left Britain in the late 1930s, came under attack in their home country for supposedly “running away”, and the methods they employed in order to cope with this accusation and prove its falsehood became the underpinning of the evolution of their creative talent, which flowered in ways that could never have been expected in the pre-war situation. Britten found his way towards Peter Grimes, Auden began to write in a new, transatlantic vein of civic populism, while the portrait of Carson McCullers that emerges from the book is a most powerful one: from obscure beginnings as a 22-year-old literary prodigy from the American South, at Middagh Street she came under Auden’s influence and developed a moral and intellectual sensibility that more resembled that of a Central European writer.

It’s perhaps in this pinpointing of the fusion of British, European and American artistic and intellectual life that took place in this strange and impermanent crucible – the house was torn down in 1945 to make room for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway – that Sherrill Tippins’ book makes its most valuable contribution. It was a fusion that depended above all on raw, creative energy, which made itself felt in every aspect of the house’s life: there seems to have been never a moment’s rest or lapse, as the “babble” of voices at the dinner table, the “cheerful and unhygienic mess”, and the obsessive sound of pianos and gamelans and the rattling of typewriters indicated. In conclusion the author writes: “Perhaps in the end what was produced is not as important as the fact that these bold young artists, believing in and committed to the importance of their work, took action to pursue the truth as best they could before the events of history conspired to redirect their efforts. In coming together, they placed their faith in a creative energy that, at the very Ieast was bound to send them off on exciting new trajectories. And it was this journey that was the point of 7 Middagh Street, more even than the results. As Colin McPhee wrote in the sad, silent days after the house at 7 Middagh was torn down, ‘My few friends admire or love me, not for what I've accomplished, but for what they think I might have done. And ultimately, a work of art that does not exist is the most beautiful of ­all - it's a rich blend of nostalgia, stoicism, and futility. Shake well, add fresh ginger, and pour through a fine sieve.’"

February House – the story of Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee living together under one roof in 1940s Brooklyn. Hardcover. 317 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company 2005.