W. H. Auden and Gypsy Rose Lee at home

曾园

Peter Parker
21 September 2005


FEBRUARY HOUSE
The story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee under one roof in wartime America
Sherill Tippins  

317pp. | Scribner. £14.99 (US $24). | 0 7432 5724 3
  




Full story displayed


In January 1942, W. H. Auden wrote what was in effect a farewell letter to his erstwhile friend and collaborator Benjamin Britten. “Goodness and Beauty are the results of a perfect balance between Order and Chaos, Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention”, he declared. This insight into the creative process can be ascribed in part to an experiment in communal living both men had recently undergone. In the summer of 1940 George Davis, the highly respected fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar, had been searching for somewhere to live (platonically) with one of his protégés, Carson McCullers. Guided by a recurring dream, he found and took a lease on 7 Middagh Street, a house perched on the northernmost bluff of Brooklyn, overlooking the dockyards. Although the rent was low because the house was in such bad repair, it was more than the two of them could afford. The house was also much larger than they needed, so Davis began looking for congenial people who might agree to take rooms and share costs. The first of these was Auden, whose work Davis had helped place in American magazines.

The plan, once rudimentary renovations had been carried out, was to “create a true community – a rational society united by common values and passions that left room for the unexpected”. To this end, Davis, McCullers and Auden were eventually joined by Britten and Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the striptease artiste Gypsy Rose Lee. Numerous visitors, guests and short-term tenants passed through the ramshackle house – from Aaron Copland, Louis MacNeice and George Balanchine to Janet Flanner, Golo Mann and Salvador Dalí – and it soon gained a reputation as “the greatest artistic salon of the decade”. It was here that Auden collaborated with Britten on Paul Bunyan, while McCullers worked on The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding. Paul Bowles (confined to the cellar so that his piano didn’t disturb Britten) composed Pastorela for Lincoln Kirstein’s American Ballet Caravan, while his wife wrote her only novel, Two Serious Ladies. Not to be outdone, under George Davis’s expert tutelage Gypsy Rose Lee bashed out The G-String Murders, the first of her hugely successful thrillers. At any one time you might find Klaus Mann in the dining room editing Decision, his monthly “review of free culture”, or Oliver Smith (later to become one of Broadway’s leading stage designers) working in the attic on Massine’s Saratoga. Denis de Rougemont asserted 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 retrospect this claim seems somewhat exaggerated. Sherill Tippins believes, however, that the tenants of 7 Middagh Street were attempting “to create a new, American culture that, with its psychologically complex, indigenous themes, both built on and defied the old”. This is an interesting theory, but whether or not they succeeded is another question altogether. While Auden and Britten both laboured on substantial works of their own, and developed as artists in their own separate ways, the principal representative of this new culture to emerge from Middagh Street was Paul Bunyan, which at the time was widely considered a failure.

Perhaps less important than the works actually written in the house was the sense that it was a place where ideas were frequently and noisily discussed by the residents and their guests, and these ideas undoubtedly helped shape future careers. February House is at its best when describing the day-to-day life in the Brooklyn brownstone, overseen by the carpet-slippered Auden who characteristically elected himself house mother. He sternly instructed his fellow tenants that “one square of toilet paper should be sufficient for each bathroom visit”, and in his notebooks of the period, drafts of poems sit incongruously beside itemized accounts for rent, coal and laundry. Thus bohemianism and bourgeois convention were held in precarious but productive balance.

Tippins has a nice eye for the telling detail, the entertaining vignette and the lively juxtaposition. For example, it was from Middagh Street that Auden sallied out secretly to church and, grappling with complex works of theology in his top-floor study, began the process of returning to the faith of his childhood. At the same time, Tippins records, on the floor below, Gypsy Rose Lee pursued her own literary endeavours, “describing to George Davis the kind of G-string they should use to kill the burlesque performer Lolita la Verne”. Herself a latter-day resident of Brooklyn, Tippins is also good at evoking the atmosphere of the place in the early 1940s, with its colourful local characters and its rackety dockside bars from which Davis would drag home assorted sailors, so adding to the prevailing atmosphere of va et vient.

Tippins’s grasp of English life and culture is less secure. She describes Cyril Connolly as a poet, refers bafflingly to Stephen Spender’s “studied avoidance of politics during the Chamberlain era”, and characterizes the British literary world in the 1930s as dominated and stultified by the Arts Council, which was in fact not founded until 1946. Equally, her account of Auden’s pre-American life is questionable or occasionally just plain wrong. She thinks that “Musée des Beaux Arts” is an attempt “to express the uneasy sensation of knowing of others’ suffering while one is safe and sound” and claims incorrectly that its author had never been in love before meeting Chester Kallman – even though she has earlier quoted what is perhaps his most famous love poem, “Lullaby”. Auden is described reductively (and twice) as “a product of early-twentieth-century, Anti-
Semitic, middle-class England”, who through Kallman “may have glimpsed a reflection of what he himself might have become if he had been born and raised in this wild country [ie, the USA] rather than his own”. Auden had his own answer to this. “There is more real racism in this country than there was in Germany at the height of Goebbels’s power”, he told an American friend in the late 1940s. “Many Jews go to Eton; nothing is thought of that. We had a Jewish prime minister; that could not happen here.” He spoke from experience, having discovered that Jews were excluded from the school in Massachusetts where he was employed in 1939.

It is also unfortunate that a book about George Davis, an editor who had an “unslakable love of words and their correct usage”, should be marred by careless errors and occasional inelegancies. “Fannie Brice”, “Daryl Zanuck”, and Cocteau’s “Les Infants Terribles” are among the orthographically misrepresented, and the reader is sometimes tripped up by ungrammatical and nonsensical sentences such as: “From before her birth in the small town of Columbus, Georgia, her mother had been convinced that her daughter was a genius”.

Although Tippins usually writes more coherently than this, some of her would-be literary flourishes go badly awry. Of Auden’s meeting Kallman, for example, she writes: “At last, after years of grudgingly applauding Isherwood’s frequent conquests, the chain-smoking, Benzedrine-popping poet had someone new to pine for, a love challenging enough to get his creative juices flowing”. Similarly, she provides an oddly impressionistic (and distinctly novel) analysis of the causes of the Second World War: “Europe was caught in a nightmare of its own making, suffering the consequences of decisions made in thousands of forgotten instances in thousands of individual hearts and minds”.

Even so, Sherill Tippins has a fascinating story to tell and her book stands as a welcome contribution to the cultural history of the twentieth century.