It’s 1940. The United States hasn’t yet entered the Second World War, but artists and writers have been fleeing Europe ahead of Hitler, many to New York, some to a shabby house in Brooklyn leased by a magazine editor who knows everybody. There, at 7 Middagh Street, you might find English poet W.H. Auden keeping meticulous track of the house finances, and issuing handwritten bills.
Bengy and Pete
- Food for two weeks: 11.97
- Service, laundry, coal etc. for two weeks: 32.93
- Putting in buzzer: 4.50
- Rent for Jan.: 12.50
- Total: 61.90
- Paid: 19.00
- Remaining: 42.50
“Bengy” is the 27-year-old English composer Benjamin Britten, who shares a room with his partner, tenor Peter Pears. Auden has arranged for a buzzer to be installed outside Britten’s door following his complaints about housemates barging in without knocking. Britten is feverishly composing the score for an opera as Auden just as hectically writes the libretto. It will be Paul Bunyan, a musical folk history of America, which they hope will make their names in the U.S., but doesn’t.
Since editor George Davis really does know everybody, burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee keeps another room in the shambolic house to work on her first novel, The G-String Murders. Gypsy (real name Rose Louise Hovick) is the biggest earner among them, and has brought her cook and maid to Middagh Street, hoping they might provide at least a degree of comfort amidst furnace breakdowns and infestations of bedbugs, which take a particular shine to Peter Pears.
While pounding out bad prose on her typewriter, Gypsy becomes great friends with another resident, the 24-year-old Southern wunderkind Carson McCullers. McCullers is having enormous trouble finding her way into the novel that will become The Member of the Wedding, chain-smoking, drinking sherry with breakfast (and lunch, and dinner) while popping Benzedrine on Auden’s recommendation.
McCullers is separated from her husband, whom she married when she was only 20. Now she’s crushing on women with an intensity that alarms them, meanwhile telling her housemates—many of them queer—that she has always felt like a boy.
The whole rococo story is recounted by author Sherill Tippins in February House, her wonderfully gossipy book about the extraordinary winter of 1940-41 at the large brownstone on Middagh Street. The house got its name from the fact that an unusual number of its residents were born in February. As she portrays their lives in Brooklyn, Tippins shows a fine eye for detail—and of course a houseful of writers left her a treasure trove of diaries and letters to mine, replete with hilarity, scandal and, not infrequently, malice.
That’s why we know that another pair of residents, writer Jane Bowles and her husband Paul Bowles, then a composer, liked to play loud fantasy games. In one, Paul became a human-sized parrot named Bupple Hergesheimer, whom Jane chased around their room in a vain attempt to put him back in his cage. During the energetic chase, Paul often erupted in cries of “Bupple” and “Rop!”
(The Bowles were the only ones ever evicted from 7 Middagh, although that was also partly because Paul tended to query Auden about his bill, which wasn’t done, and got into a dispute with Britten over whose piano went in the parlour.)
February House was published in 2005, but I only read it recently, after it was highlighted in the Read Like the Wind feature about older books in The New York Times Book Review. Since I’m currently rewriting the manuscript of my new novel—meaning that the research is largely done—I’ve started doing some reading for my next project, which I think will be a novella set in a house shared by a group of university students.
I lived in student rentals during university and know a thing or two about shambolic houses. Yet as soon as I saw the Times review, I jumped on February House. Despite their genius, the Middagh Street irregulars were human, malleable, striving and young. And when you write, I’ve found you need echoes: insights and incidents that are similar but different, and can bounce off each other.
Years ago, when I began crafting the protagonist for my first novel, I had in mind a man I’d met at parties but didn’t know at all well. I was in my mid-20s and he was a couple of decades older, a political operative who was extraordinarily well-connected, powerful, urbane, witty and cutting. He was also very short, and one time when he sat down, I noticed that his feet didn’t reach the floor but dangled a little above it.
He saw me notice, since he didn’t miss a thing. After that, I got the sharp edge of his tongue: the inanity of one of my remarks pointed out, the failure of my new dress.
“Did I honestly just see you sucking on an ice cube?”
I remember not caring what he said, since I knew where it came from, and found it interesting that he would bother to react so strongly. I also felt that his remarks were pre-deserved, since I was trying to write about him.
And failing. I couldn’t get the man onto the page.
Then one day when I got on the subway, I sat down across from another man whose feet didn’t reach the floor. This man had an entirely benign expression on his face. He was reading a book, chuckling, happily absorbed, and in his Mr. Rogers cardigan, he struck me as sweet.
That’s when I got my character. Also when I learned that if you try to put a real, known individual into a novel, you’re attempting to wedge non-fiction into a piece of fiction, and it doesn’t usually work. I’ve looked for other sides to my characters—for consonance, echoes, and especially contradictions—ever since.
One thing Sherrill Tippins does very well in February House is to detail the effect the stronger personalities living at 7 Middagh Street had on the others. Jane Bowles was only 23 when she lived there, eccentric and often ill. She was also struggling with her novel Two Serious Ladies, which would be the only book she’d write. At the dinner table, Jane soon fell under the spell of Wystan Auden, who decided rather imperiously on appropriate subjects for residents to talk about.
Writes Tippins, “Having already excluded politics as an appropriate topic of discussion, (Auden) now forbade personal arguments and bickering as well. His own monologues on literary topics grew louder and more difficult to interrupt, as he developed the habit of muttering a habit of muttering a continuous, “uh…uh…uh” between sentences to keep anyone else from breaking in. Some of his fellow diners were content to ignore him and carry on their own conversations, while others listened to Auden in fascination. Among the latter was Jane Bowles, now utterly under Auden’s spell and avidly incorporating his ideas and opinions into her novel.”
Paul Bowles wasn’t as impressed, and tried to argue with Auden about Franz Kafka.
“’A neurosis is a guardian angel,’ Auden had written in his review of Kafka; “to become ill is to take vows.” To Jane, such a statement must have felt like a benediction. It was little wonder, then that, hearing her husband object to a religious interpretation of the author she so strongly resembled, she snapped impatiently, ‘Oh, get back in your cage, Bupple,’ before turning back to continue her conversation with Auden.”
Then there was the unlikely and productive friendship of Gypsy Rose Lee and Carson McCullers. Tippins writes that it was near dawn after a Thanksgiving feast when the residents of Middagh Street heard sirens scream from a nearby fire station.
“Gypsy loved fires, as did Carson. The two women jumped up impulsively and ran out of the house. ‘We ran for several blocks chasing the fire engines,’ McCullers recalled. ‘It was exhilarating to be out in the chilly air after the close heat of the parlour.’ For the first time in months, she felt free of the anxiety of her work. She could hardly believe that she, Carson, was running through a street in Brooklyn hand in hand with Gypsy Rose Lee. It had been an amazing two months in the house on Middagh Street, despite the crises and setbacks, enriched by friendships such as she had never known before…
“And now—running after the fire engine, laughing, and shivering in the night air—Carson experienced the moment of illumination for which she had been praying. The key to her novel, the image that would allow her to continue, had emerged at last. ‘I caught Gypsy’s arm,’ she would recall, ‘and out of breath said, “Frankie is in love with her brother and his bride and wants to become a member of the wedding!”’
“’Gypsy looked at me as though I had gone insane,’ she added. For Carson, however, months of confusion had ended in an instant. She burst into tears, leaning on the taller Gypsy in the near-freezing air.”
The push and pull of one housemate on another, the unexpected gifts that come from sharing a house—it’s all here, and the book is a delight to read even if you’re not doing research. I kept slipping in pieces of paper to bookmark oddities.
“Gypsy was quite superstitious. Hats on the bed, whistling in a dressing room, and the colour green backstage were all considered unlucky. For good luck, one must eat twelve grapes, one on each of the twelve strokes of midnight, every New Year’s Eve.”
“Louise Bogan recalled telling Auden that month about a man who broke into tears in a taxi, confessing to his travelling companion that he had a vestigial tail. ‘I shouldn’t have minded a vestigial tail,’ Bogan said playfully to her friend. ‘No,’ Auden had replied, ‘one can always stand what other people have.’”
Salvador Dalí and his imperious wife Gala were also frequent visitors to Middagh Street, and Tippins describes “Gala Dalí in the parlour fixing an uneasy Britten with her predatory gaze as she described her previous life as the Greek goddess Hera to Salvador’s Zeus.” Thomas Mann’s son, Golo Mann, lived there for a while, while everyone from dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein through journalist Janet Flanner to singer Lotte Lenya stopped in for the raucous parties, which were also open to sailors from the nearby port.
I’ve barely begun to drop the eminent names littered throughout the book, but maybe it’s time to stop and acknowledge editor George Davis, who not only set up in the house in first place, but helped fund it. He regularly lobbed lucrative commissions from magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker at residents who needed the cash (meaning all of them). He found patrons, proposed residents for jobs and fellowships, and along the way, facilitated the writing of some of Auden’s greatest poetry, enabled Benjamin Britten’s first real flowering as a composer, and nudged Carson McCullers to write The Member of the Wedding.
He would also eventually marry Lotte Lenya after her husband Kurt Weill died, guiding her career at an apparently platonic remove.
Yet in a surprisingly short time, the house grew even more decrepit and the artists began to leave. After only a few months, Gypsy Rose Lee began performing at a marquee burlesque show in Chicago before crowds of 2,000, a spectacle produced by her lover Mike Todd, Elizabeth Taylor’s future husband. Chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, drug-addicted Carson McCullers broke down both physically and mentally and had to return to her mother’s house in Georgia, where she unfortunately suffered her first stroke at the age of 25.
Meanwhile Paul and Jane Bowles were evicted, Britten and Pears went back to England—finally getting passage on a ship that would dodge its way past German submarines—and Auden left to teach English at the University of Michigan, following his lover Chester Kallman, who didn’t particularly want to be followed.
Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. The United States entered the Second World War, and the house on Middagh Street was largely abandoned, later torn down to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A triangle of grass marks the site. It’s all that remains–along with an archive of material Sherrill Tippins has used wonderfully.
February House is 20 years old and still reads beautifully. Grand theories can grow tattered, books that aim to shock can end up sounding tame, and pretension only gets more pretentious. But a book brimming with well-chosen details can illuminate a time, and I’m glad the Times let me find February House, and that I can pass on the recommendation.
Published by Houghton Mifflin, February House is still widely available online, in used bookstores and, in Toronto anyway, at the library.