Auden Wystan Hugh - February House

First Mariner Books edition 2006

Copyright 2005 by Sherill Tippins
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Tippins, Sherill.

February house / Sherill Tippins.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-618-41911-x

1. Authors, AmericanHomes and hauntsNew York (State)New York. 2. McCullers, Carson, 19171967Homes and hauntsNew York (State)New York. 3. Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 19071973Homes and hauntsNew York (State)New York. 4. Britten, Benjamin, 19131976Homes and hauntsNew York (State)New York. 5. Bowles, Jane Auer, 19171973Homes and hauntsNew York (State)New York. 6. Lee, Gypsy Rose, 19141970Homes and hauntsNew York (State)New York. 7. Bowles, Paul, 1910Homes and hauntsNew York (State)New York. 8. American literatureNew York (State)New YorkHistory and criticism. 9. Literary landmarksNew York (State)New York. 10. Communal livingNew York (State)New York. 11. Authors, American
20th centuryBiography. 12. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)Intellectual life. 13. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)Biography. I. Title.

PS255.N5T57 2005 810.9'974723'09044dc22 2004060919

ISBN -13: 978-0-618-71197-0 (pbk.)

ISBN -10: 0-618-71197-x (pbk.)

e ISBN 978-0-544-98736-4
v1.0716

For Bob and Dash

7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn

George Davis

Wystan Auden on moving day

Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman

The view from Brooklyn Heights

Klaus Mann

Gypsy Rose Lee

Louis MacNeice

Wystan Auden and Erika Mann

Wystan Auden and Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears

George Davis at 7 Middagh Street

Gypsy Rose Lee at work

George Davis and a guest

Oliver Smith

Jane Bowles

Paul Bowles

Gala and Salvador Dal

Richard and Ellen Wright

Lotte Lenya

George Davis and Carson McCullers

So many try to say Not Now
So many have forgotten how
To say I Am, and would be
Lost if they could in history.

W. H. Auden, Another Time, 1939

New York is full of old people, struggling to occupy their allotted space despite the pressures of the younger generations pushing in. Elbowed by joggers, hedged in by cyclists, they make their daily odysseys to the supermarket and then retreat to the safety of their homes. As one of tens of thousands of college graduates moving to New York City in the 1970s, I was as oblivious as the next twenty-two-year-old to this segment of the population. A decade later, as a new mother in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood of brownstones facing Wall Street across the East River, I merely noted the number of people with aluminum walkers on the sidewalks as I maneuvered my childs stroller around them. A few years on, however, when I began volunteering to deliver meals to the housebound and got to know many of these people as individuals, I began to regret my past indifference.

Many liked to talk, and I found that I liked to listen. The octogenarian who had covered her walls with her own arresting paintings told me about the silent-film actress who had once lived at the nearby Bossert Hotel and ordered up a milk bath every day. The retired city councilman with the fierce gray eyebrows described the spectacular sunsets, enhanced by post-Depression factory fumes, that he had so enjoyed on his homeward walks over the Brooklyn Bridge. The chain-smoking former navy officer recalled the rich scent of chocolate that used to waft through the streets from a Fulton Street candy factory before World War II. I learned, too, how the Brooklyn Dodgers got their name (Brooklyn residents were once called trolley-dodgers because of the many speeding trolley cars on the boroughs streets); how a working-class girl could enjoy a free daily swim at the St. George Hotels swank saltwater pool (all it took was a doctors note); and what Irish-American children were told when they found an orange in their Christmas stocking (Thank Mr. Tammany, not Santy Claus).

Most intriguing to me, however, were the references to a house that once stood at 7 Middagh Street (pronounced mid-daw), a short, narrow lane at the neighborhoods northwestern tip overlooking the former dockyards and, beyond, New York Harbor. The house had been rented, one neighbor told me, by a group of well-known young poets, novelists, composers, and artists the year before America entered World War II. Aware that enormous devastation lay ahead and determined to continue contributing to the culture as long as possible, they had created an environment for themselves to support and stimulate, inspire and protectjust a few blocks from where I lived.

When I learned that these residents included the poet W. H. Auden, the novelist Carson McCullers, the composer Benjamin Britten, Paul and Jane Bowles, and, of all people, the burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Leeall under thirty-five but already near the apex of their careersmy interest was piqued even further. In a pictorial survey of Brooklyns history, I found a photograph of the housea small, shabby brick and brownstone structure with elaborate Tudor trim. The man who had signed the lease and organized this experiment in communal living turned out to have been George Davis, a fiction editor at Harpers Bazaar who had single-handedly revolutionized the role played by popular magazines in bringing serious literature and avant-garde ideas to the American masses. Davis was known for his attraction to the eccentric in culture, in entertainment, and in his choice of friends. With his encouragement, nights at the Middagh Street house became a fevered year-long party in which New Yorks artistic elite (Aaron Copland, George Balanchine, Louis Untermeyer, Janet Flanner, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, among others) mingled with a flood of migrs fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, including the composer Kurt Weill and the singer Lotte Lenya, the artist Salvador Dal and his wife, Gala, and the entire brilliant family of the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Thomas Mann. Days, however, were dedicated to their workwriting, composing, painting, and otherwise seeking new answers, new approaches to life in a collapsing world.