"February House": Brick, mortar, genius

"February House"
by Sherill Tippins
Houghton Mifflin, 317 pp., $24

What artsy kid in his or her 20s wouldn't grab at the chance to live in a communal house with some novelists, a poet, a pianist-composer, a gifted tenor and, just for good measure, a striptease dancer?

Part of the pleasure in reading Sherill Tippins' "February House" — a portrait of the Brooklyn Heights brownstone shared by poet W.H. Auden, novelist Carson McCullers, composer Benjamin Britten, tenor Peter Pears, writer-composer Paul Bowles, novelist Jane Bowles and burlesque artiste Gypsy Rose Lee in the early 1940s — is that it lets you enter a sort of Swiss Family Robinson fantasy. Instead of a tree house on a desert island where all the rules of living are reinvented, it's a dilapidated town house in a shabby-genteel New York neighborhood.

The house at 7 Middagh Street no longer exists. It was torn down in 1945 to make room for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But it has kept making cameo appearances in biographies over the years, always stirring curiosity.

Author Tippins, a Brooklyn Heights resident herself, heard about it when she began delivering meals to the housebound elderly in her neighborhood. Now she has written a magnificent — not to mention funny and raunchy — memorial to the place in prose. And she's made the task look far easier than it can have been.

"February House" author Sherill Tippins

Case by case, Tippins orients the reader — lucidly, helpfully — to the situations of the artists she's portraying. She shows us how the key works of Carson McCullers were either published ("The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," "Reflections in a Golden Eye") or took shape ("The Member of the Wedding," "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe") during this brief period, amid the mess of McCullers' life (marital separation, incipient alcoholism).

We see the false steps that Auden and Britten, two Britons, took in attempting an American folk opera about Paul Bunyan — a failure, as they saw it. Nevertheless, it helped lay the groundwork for Britten's first big opera success, "Peter Grimes."

We see Paul Bowles, then a composer, having his interest perked in writing as he hears his wife, Jane, and Auden discuss the art of fiction, especially as it pertained to her cult-classic-in-progress, "Two Serious Ladies."

And on a lighter note, we see the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee try her hand at writing a mystery novel, "The G-String Murders."

Auden, after several chaotic weeks, took on the role of organizing "housemother." But the animating spirit behind February House was bisexual New York editor George Davis, who found and rented the place, and who seemed to know every significant cultural figure working in New York at the time. Along with the steady stream of sailors Davis lured up the hill from local waterfront dives, visitors included choreographer George Balanchine, painters Paul Cadmus and Salvador Dali, and composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.

Swiss historian Denis de Rougemont echoed the opinion of many when he said "all that was new in America in music, painting, or choreography emanated from that house, the only center of thought and art that I found in any large city in the country."

And it wasn't just American culture that flourished there.

Thomas Mann's novelist-son Klaus ("Mephisto") used it as a base for his newly founded periodical, Decision, dedicated to keeping European culture alive while the continent itself was eclipsed by fascist nightmare. The younger Mann also hoped to stir American resistance to Hitler with the magazine.

But the U.S. was caught in an odd historical moment, vividly rendered by Tippins, when American participation in the war was anything but guaranteed. Even the Lend-Lease program, by which the U.S. would keep Britain supplied with arms and other goods, was controversial — much to the frustration of frantic European refugees.

The war complicated the lives of February House residents in other ways. Britten and Pears, both conscientious objectors, and Auden, distrustful of both left and right after his experience of the Spanish Civil War, came under criticism from their countrymen for not returning home once war broke out.

These war shadows make "February House" — for all its denizens' drunken parties and outré behavior — a more sober book than one expects, as it focuses on how young artists worked and lived in a world gone mad. Tippins sometimes forgives her wild bunch their excesses and indulgences a little too readily. But she maintains a near-perfect balance in presenting each of their cases with clarity, humor and insight.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com. He has been the Seattle Times book critic since 1998, and has also published four novels.