From mid-1940 to late-1941, America’s artistic life centered around a rundown, 19th century brownstone on 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. George Davis, the openly gay, recently fired fiction editor of Harpers Bazaar, saw his future home in a dream and then, having found it, invited two of his friends to share it with him. Davis’s friends - who happened to be the Southern novelist Carson McCullers and the English poet W. H. Auden - accepted his proposal, for they both needed a place to live and write.

Davis, Auden and McCullers were soon joined in their endeavor by other creative spirits who were friends of the trio and/or needed a refuge from foreign war and domestic discord: Among this motley crew were Auden’s boy friend, Chester Kallman; composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, singer Peter Pears; writers Paul and Jane Bowles (husband and wife) and Klaus and Erika Mann (brother and sister); theatrical designer Oliver Smith; and, most famously, burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee. The fact that all of these characters (except, perhaps, Gypsy Rose Lee) were gay or bi only added to their home’s reputation as a “bawdy house” and bohemian hangout. “By the winter of 1940-41, 7 Middagh - called ‘February House’ by the diarist Anais 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.’”

In February House author Sherill Tippins, herself a resident of Brooklyn, recreates the glory days when a nondescript Brooklyn townhouse was home to so much genius. Though the gang partied hardy all through the night - there was plenty of drinking going on, not to mention tricking and cruising - it also worked hard during the day. There Auden and Britten, both refugees from wartime Britain, wrote the opera Paul Bunyan - an expression of their new home. McCullers wrote her masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, between drinks. Lee, eager to be a writer, hired Davis to edit her manuscript and give her writing lessons. She even brought her cook along with her, a vast improvement over McCullers’s eccentric cooking. Out of this came The G-String Murders, Lee’s first bestseller and her second-best known book (after Gypsy, of course).

One thing that the residents of February House lacked was discipline. Auden, a control queen from way back, tried to put things in order, going so far as to assign chores and set hours for working, eating and partying. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out so well, as the genius roommates began to quarrel. (The fact that Kallman was cheating on Auden didn’t help things out, either.) By the time America entered World War II most of the tenants had left February House. The House itself was razed in 1945 to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a sad ending for one of America’s most famous addresses.

February House details 18 months in the lives of a group of creative individuals and the house that they shared. Like many of us, Tippins is more interested in the artists’ personal lives than in their creative output, though a more detailed study of their works might have been in order. At a time when most lesbians and gay men were in the closet, the denizens of February House lived their queer lives to the fullest: Auden went after Kallman, Kallman after everybody, Britten and Pears after each other, McCullers and Jane Bowles after various women (to their husbands’ dismay), and Davis after sailors and other rough trade in nearby dockside bars. February House is full of fascinating anecdotes, and lively bon mots. (Davis is especially good at those.) All in all, February House is recommended to those who enjoy reading about GLBT history, cultural history, and the home front during World War Two.

Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his life partner and many books. You may reach him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.