February House
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Illustrations
Preface
The House on the Hill
JUNE–NOVEMBER 1940
1
2
3
4
The Bawdy House
DECEMBER 1940–FEBRUARY 1941
5
6
7
Photos
The House of Genius
MARCH–DECEMBER, 1941
8
9
10
Epilogue
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Credits
Index
About the Author
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 trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
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, American—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 2. McCullers, Carson, 1917–1967—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 3. Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907–1973—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 4. Britten, Benjamin, 1913–1976—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 5. Bowles, Jane Auer, 1917–1973—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 6. Lee, Gypsy Rose, 1914–1970—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 7. Bowles, Paul, 1910—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 8. American literature—New York (State)—New York—History and criticism. 9. Literary landmarks—New York (State)—New York. 10. Communal living—New York (State)—New York. 11. Authors, American
—20th century—Biography. 12. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Intellectual life. 13. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title.
PS255.N5T57 2005 810.9'974723'09044—dc22 2004060919
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-71197-0 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-618-71197-x (pbk.)
eISBN 978-0-544-98736-4
v1.0716
For Bob and Dash
Illustrations
PAGE 178
7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn
Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives
George Davis
With the permission of Peter A. Davis
Wystan Auden on moving day
With the permission of Peter A. Davis and courtesy of the Weill-Lenya Research Center, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, New York
Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
The view from Brooklyn Heights
Courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society
Klaus Mann
Courtesy Munchner Stadtbibliothek, Monacensia Literature Archives, Collection Klaus Mann
Gypsy Rose Lee
Courtesy of Erik Lee Preminger
Louis MacNeice
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Stallworthy Dep. 30N, polyfoto
Wystan Auden and Erika Mann
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Wystan Auden and Benjamin Britten
W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, New York, c. 1941; photo: Courtesy of the Britten-Pears Library, Aldeburgh
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears
Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, New York, c. 1941; photo: The Elizabeth Mayer Collection, courtesy of the Britten-Pears Library, Aldeburgh
George Davis at 7 Middagh Street
With the permission of Peter A. Davis
Gypsy Rose Lee at work
Eliot Elisofon/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
George Davis and a guest
With the permission of Peter A. Davis
Oliver Smith
Photograph by Marcus Blechman, courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York, The Theater Collection
Jane Bowles
© Karl Bissinger
Paul Bowles
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, by permission of the Van Vechten Trust, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Gala and Salvador Dalí
Photograph by Eric Schaal, © 2006 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Richard and Ellen Wright
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Lotte Lenya
Courtesy of the Weill-Lenya Research Center, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, New York
George Davis and Carson McCullers
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
Preface
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 child’s 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 borough’s streets); how a working-class girl could enjoy a free daily swim at the St. George Hotel’s swank saltwater pool (all it took was a doctor’s 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 neighborhood’s 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 envir
onment for themselves to support and stimulate, inspire and protect—just 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 Lee—all under thirty-five but already near the apex of their careers—my interest was piqued even further. In a pictorial survey of Brooklyn’s history, I found a photograph of the house—a 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 Harper’s 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 York’s artistic elite (Aaron Copland, George Balanchine, Louis Untermeyer, Janet Flanner, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, among others) mingled with a flood of émigrés fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, including the composer Kurt Weill and the singer Lotte Lenya, the artist Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala, and the entire brilliant family of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann. Days, however, were dedicated to their work—writing, composing, painting, and otherwise seeking new answers, new approaches to life in a collapsing world.
By the winter of 1940–41, 7 Middagh—called “February House” by the diarist Anaïs Nin because so many of its residents had been born in that month—had developed a reputation as the greatest artistic salon of the decade. Denis de Rougemont, the author of Love in the Western World, claimed that “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.” Throughout the months of that suspenseful season, as Hitler’s armies tightened their hold on Europe and killed or wounded thousands of British citizens in bombing raids, Thomas Mann’s son Klaus labored in the Middagh Street dining room, assembling essays, poems, short stories, and reviews for Decision, a monthly “review of free culture,” while upstairs in the parlor, the British émigrés Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden worked together on an “American” opera that would express their hopes for and misgivings about their adopted country. On the third floor, McCullers agonized over the opening paragraphs of The Member of the Wedding, while in the room next door George Davis coached Gypsy on her own project, a comic burlesque mystery novel called The G-String Murders. Bowles, then a composer, wrote a ballet score in the cellar while his wife, Jane, did Auden’s typing and wrote her own novel, Two Serious Ladies. Oliver Smith, destined to become one of Broadway’s most prolific set designers and producers but then a destitute twenty-two-year-old, washed the dishes, tended the furnace, and, like many “youngest children,” took on the role of family peacemaker. Auden, one of the greatest poets of his generation, served as housemaster to this lively household—which at one point included several circus performers and a chimpanzee—collecting the rent, dispensing romantic advice, playing word games with his housemates, and strictly enforcing nighttime curfews—all while laying the groundwork for some of the most courageous and original work of his career.
Perhaps inevitably, the intensity of life at 7 Middagh and the pressures created by the war in Europe led to physical and emotional breakdowns, domestic disputes, and creative crises. Even as the residents succumbed to the pressure of the times, so too did the United States. The attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, provoked America’s entry into the fiercest and most destructive war in history—a six-year conflagration that killed fifty-five million people before it ended. As the artists of 7 Middagh Street had expected, they were scattered in all directions by these events. Some enlisted as soldiers. Others used their skills to create propaganda, conduct surveys, or entertain the troops. And, in the sweeping changes that took place over the next half-decade, 7 Middagh Street itself disappeared, torn down to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Today, nothing remains but an unmarked stretch of sidewalk, a wire fence, and a precipitous drop to the lanes of traffic speeding from one borough to the next.
What does remain is the work these artists created. The final parts of Auden’s book The Double Man, his poems “The Dark Years,” “If I Could Tell You,” “In Sickness and in Health,” and the brilliant and innovative oratorio For the Time Being, were all completed during or inspired by the year at 7 Middagh. The twenty-seven-year-old Benjamin Britten gained both the artistic experience and the emotional growth necessary to create his first great opera, Peter Grimes. Carson McCullers’s two final masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, were born in Brooklyn. Auden’s support helped Jane Bowles take the first necessary steps toward completing her only novel, while Paul Bowles’s jealousy over their relationship spurred him toward the writing of fiction for which he is now largely known. Even Gypsy’s G-String Murders, written with the help of her admiring housemates, became a 1941 bestseller, establishing her reputation, not just as a stripper who could write, but as a writer who also knew how to keep an audience entranced.
Frequently, I go out of my way to pass the dead-end street where the house once stood, just to remind myself that these extraordinary artists actually occupied the space I do now—living together, arguing, laughing, creating, and using their imaginations to increase others’ awareness of the issues and choices laid bare in that horrible, horrifying time. If we don’t act now, when will we? they asked themselves in choosing this shared creative life. If we don’t use our talents to find a new way to live, who will?
How this houseful of geniuses answered those questions is the story my elderly neighbors wanted me to hear. But the questions themselves are what keep me coming back, dreaming of the house at 7 Middagh.
Part I
The House on the Hill
JUNE–NOVEMBER 1940
All genuine poetry is in a sense the formation of private spheres out of a public chaos.
—W. H. Auden
1
In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. Early every morning they would come out from the house where they lived and walk arm in arm down the street to work . . .
—Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1940
Summer in New York City is never pleasant, as tempers rise with the temperature and the noises, smells, and colors of Manhattan intensify in the humid air. In June 1940, conditions were made worse by the alarming state of world events. Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland the previous autumn, signaling the beginning of another European war. In April, following a tense seven months of promises and threats, the Nazis had invaded Denmark and Norway, taking both countries in an astonishing forty-eight hours. Holland fell in May, less than a week after its initial invasion. Belgium and Luxembourg followed. As German troops moved into parts of France, British forces scrambled to resist, but their efforts proved too meager and far too late. By mid-June, after a disastrous rout of ill-prepared British military forces at Dunkirk, the inconceivable occurred. France fell, having resisted Hitler’s onslaught for less than a month. Paris, world symbol of democratic enlightenment, was now under Fascist control. As the swastika was raised over the Arc de Triomphe, Churchill stepped up the digging of bomb shelters in London.
The speed and efficiency with which the Nazis had extended their domain across Western Europe left the rest of the world stupefied. Every day in New York that summer, new horrors appeared in the headlines: Parisians were fleeing the city by the thousands, gunned down on the roads by German planes. In some French villages, citizens disgusted by their own corrupt government greeted Hitler’s soldiers with flowers and applause. Newsreels provided images of German troops patrolling the muddy ghettos of Krakow. Radios screamed the news of the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Es
tonia, and Latvia. And in the city, sailors and soldiers in uniform maneuvered for sidewalk space with hordes of Austrian, Czech, Polish, Danish, French, German, and Italian refugees.
Until that summer, it had been possible for Americans to tell themselves that the conflagration was just one more struggle in an endless succession among nations that would never get along, a struggle that had nothing to do with them. That conviction was less easy to maintain now that German U-boats were sinking ships in the Atlantic and Hitler had announced that Britain—the last country standing between Germany and the United States—was next in line for attack. Memories of the First World War, with its terrible cost in terms of human life and prosperity, were still fresh in most people’s minds. Since then, the country had been preoccupied by the worst economic depression in its history. But a general desire to avoid further problems had begun to give way to a growing understanding that the evil force overtaking Europe could not be stopped through passive resistance, negotiation, economic sanctions, or any other nonviolent means.
As Europe appeared to be going up in flames that summer, heat flared from a different source in America. Sparked by innovations brought home from Paris in the 1920s, fueled by a decade of political foment and shattering economic hardship, American literature had achieved an astonishing new level of authority and power. In 1929, a year in which National Socialist Party members were assaulting Communists in the streets of Berlin, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel was published in the United States. In 1930, as the Reichstag elections increased the number of Nazi seats in the German government from twelve to one hundred seven, William Faulkner published As I Lay Dying. Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre appeared the same year in which Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and the books of European authors were burned. When Poland fell to the German invaders, Americans were reading John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and The Grapes of Wrath. And in that terrible spring of 1940, as the great nations of Western Europe collapsed one after another, Richard Wright, the self-educated son of a black Mississippi sharecropper, published the saga of the black murderer Bigger Thomas in his first novel, Native Son.