From Publishers Weekly
For a brief period just before the United States entered WWII, 7 Middagh Street, a shabby Brooklyn brownstone, was the unlikely setting for a unique arrangement in bohemian living and a circle that became the talk of fashionable Manhattan. At its center was the flamboyant literary editor George Davis, who, at loose ends after being sacked by Harper's Bazaar, invited several of his talented New York friends to form an art commune. Sharing a chaotic yet convivial life were poet Auden and his compatriot composer friend Britten, who busied themselves with an opera drawing on their developing experience of American life. Also present was the fragile, sherry-sipping Southerner Carson McCullers, who began her novel The Member of the Wedding at 7 Middagh Street, developed a lesbian crush and split with her failed novelist husband, Reeve; Paul Bowles, then a composer, who crafted a ballet score while his wife, Jane, wrote a novel and worshiped Auden (much to Bowles's consternation); the warm-hearted burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee, whom Davis helped to write a novel; the émigré political activist siblings Erika, Klaus and Golo Mann (children of Thomas Mann); and the distinguished theatrical designer Oliver Smith. Drawing on numerous archival and biographical sources, Tippins, formerly a public television producer, conveys with verve the pace and tenor of life in the house, reconstructing its wild parties, broken romances and supper talk. Her narrative interweaves biographical surveys and lively anecdotes gleaned from interviews with surviving contemporaries into a broader overview of wartime literary and artistic New York. This enjoyable and well-paced read should appeal to anyone interested in 1940s American intelligentsia and Brooklyn history alike. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Genius was not a prerequisite for admission, but several of the house's tenants had it. Not the same kind of genius, however; here was a potpourri of artistic and human resources. Need a critique of your manuscript in progress? Just run it across the hall to poet W.H. Auden. Ready for a musical interlude? Tiptoe downstairs and eavesdrop on composer Benjamin Britten at the piano. Looking for a drinking buddy? You'll find the sun over the yardarm wherever novelist Carson McCullers has come to rest. Interested in sparkling conversation? Don't overlook the founding father, sometime magazine editor George Davis. Simply in need of someone to lean on? You can't go wrong with the resident earth-mother, stripteaser Gypsy Rose Lee.This may sound like a collegiate fantasy, but in 1940 and '41, on Middagh Street in Brooklyn, there actually was such a houseful of artists and performers, with latecomers Paul and Jane Bowles on the bench and the likes of Salvador Dalí, Diana Vreeland, Aaron Copland and Thomas Mann dropping by. The arrangement didn't last long (how could it, with so many sizable egos writhing about?), but for about nine months, you could find a peerless array of talent creating works of art under the same roof. The story of how these prodigies gathered and interacted is the subject of Sherill Tippins's irresistible bonbon of a book, February House -- a name derived from the coincidence that so many of their birthdays fell in that month.A salient feature of the house was how much work actually got done there. Auden and Britten collaborated on an opera, "Paul Bunyan." McCullers began a story that evolved into a novel, The Member of the Wedding. Davis nursed Lee through a partial draft of her first book, a mystery called The G-String Murders. There was plenty of merriment, too, but with Auden as prefect, rules were enforced and art created. He was, it turned out, the right man to crack the whip. Having gone through a louche phase in the homosexual demimonde of Weimar Berlin, Auden, in Tippins's words, "had discarded the romantic idea that unbridled bohemianism was likely to lead to the creation of anything worth reading, looking at, or listening to. . . . Regular meals and quiet work hours were prerequisites for efficiency in every realm, and just because factory owners relied on them should not prevent artists from doing so as well."Although Tippins's "hook" is group life in the house, she doesn't slight the denizens as individuals. Many readers will already know a good deal about Auden and Britten (transplanted Englishmen who were criticized for having abandoned their homeland during its finest hour), McCullers and the Bowleses, but not so much about Davis and Lee. The author of a much-praised novel at age 24, Davis was a savvy editor (he spotted the talent in McCullers, among others) and an indefatigable catalyst (he finagled the first month's rent out of Lincoln Kirstein, then a young patron of the arts). But maintaining an air of professionalism was beyond him, and magazines kept letting him go. As a performer, the book-loving Lee made the most of her assets, which ran more toward brains than beauty. "Small-breasted and large-hipped," she was lacking, Tippins notes, in "the blond-bombshell good looks that were popular in Hollywood." But she'd figured out that "men didn't really want to see another naked woman -- they'd rather imagine what was under her clothes." She stripped some, but mostly she teased. Among her traits were joie de vivre and an attraction to bald-headed men. (She eventually married the baldest man in Hollywood, director Otto Preminger.) The gregarious Davis had befriended her in a Detroit bookshop when they were both young and he advised her to buy a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets. She was so beloved by her fellow residents that her departure, to star in a show mounted in Chicago by producer Mike Todd, seems to have marked the beginning of the house's end.Amid all the buoyancy, February House sounds notes of gravity and even despair. The gap between Auden's romantic ideals and the real-life object of his love, a selfish young poet named Chester Kallman, is redolent of heartbreak in the making. After the golden months were over, novelist Richard Wright moved in but stayed only a year. "He found it too painful, he said, to witness Carson's self-destruction though drinking and George's dangerous adventures" in gay bars and brothels. But overall, this is a bracing story. A number of gifted artists came together, stimulated one another and got started on important works. The house itself has long since been demolished, but Sherill Tippins has rebuilt it with intelligence and charm.Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
The disparate personalities of February House, so called because many of the residents had birthdays in that month, makes for fascinating reading. By weaving together thorough biographies of 7 Middagh Street’s artists-in-residence with interviews from surviving contemporaries, Tippins vividly reconstructs a crazy, chaotic, feverish year. At times her attempts to underpin the historical happenings of the day to her subjects’ frames of mind seems forced; at other points, critics questioned whether 7 Middagh Street truly inspired its residents’ creativity. Yet her able portraits of the house’s inhabitants and their guests, written with an ear for both gossip and scholarship, should satisfy devoted fans as well as casual readers.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Imagine W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee all living under one roof. On the eve of U.S. involvement in World War II, "February House" (so named because many of its inhabitants had birthdays in that month) became a live-in salon for some of the great creative minds of the twentieth century. While the ramshackle four-story residence set on a leafy Brooklyn street was known for its heady soirees (regular guests included George Balanchine, Lotte Lenya, Diana Vreeland, and Aaron Copland), many renowned literary works were also rendered within its four walls. McCullers wrote Member of the Wedding and the Ballad of the Sad Café, and Auden composed some of his most memorable verse. (The poet, who, along with fellow Brit Britten, was sharply criticized for fleeing his homeland in a time of crisis, also served as "house auntie," collecting rent, enforcing curfew, and serving up romantic advice.) Tippins masterfully blends fact, drama, and dish in this tale of young artists who pursued the truth "before the events of history blew out the illuminating candle." Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"This is a book that made me wish I was 20 again or living in pre-war Brooklyn circa 1940." --Rocky Mountain News

"February House casts an important light onhow one group of artists handled the challenges of the era." -- Bay Area Reporter

"A tremendous amount of research lies behind February House...it truly is an engrossing tale." --The New York Observer

"The building is gone now, but Sherill Tippins makes marvelous work of the brief experiment in communal living." -- New York Daily News


Review
"A lively literary history with some surprising depth . . . A brief, madcap moment in literary chronicles."


The New Yorker
"A cozy, gossipy read, punctuated by solid. . .literary criticism."


Los Angeles Times
"Tippins’ research is prodigious and fun to go through, the personalities she depicts indelibly drawn."


Providence Journal
"Tippins' poignant stories...make the residents of the February House come alive for literature lovers and intellectual voyeurs alike."


Book Description
February House is the uncovered story of an extraordinary experiment in communal living, one involving young but already iconic writers -- and the country's best-known burlesque performer -- in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn during 1940 and 1941. It was a fevered yearlong party fueled by the appetites of youth and by the shared sense of urgency to take action as artists in the months before America entered the war.In spite of the sheer intensity of life at 7 Middagh, the house was for its residents a creative crucible. Carson McCullers's two masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, were born, bibulously, in Brooklyn. Gypsy Rose Lee, workmanlike by day, party girl by night, wrote her book The G-String Murders in her Middagh Street bedroom. Auden -- who along with Britten was being excoriated at home in England for absenting himself from the war -- presided over the house like a peevish auntie, collecting rent money and dispensing romantic advice. And yet all the while he was composing some of the most important work of his career.Sherill Tippins's February House, enlivened by primary sources and an unforgettable story, masterfully recreates daily life at the most fertile and improbable live-in salon of the twentieth century.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PrefaceNew 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 northeastern 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 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 serious 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.Copyright © 2005 by Sherill Tippins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"February House is the story of an extraordinary experiment in communal living, one involving young but already iconic writers - and the country's best-known burlesque performer - in a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn during 1940 and 1941. It was a fevered yearlong party fueled by the appetites of youth and by the shared sense of urgency to take action as artists in the months before America entered the war." "In spite of the sheer intensity of life at 7 Middagh, the house was for its residents a creative crucible. Carson McCullers's two masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, were born, bibulously, in Brooklyn. Gypsy Rose Lee, workmanlike by day, party girl by night, wrote her book The G-String Murders in her Middagh Street bedroom. W. H. Auden - who along with Benjamin Britten was being excoriated at home in England for absenting himself from the war - presided over the house like a peevish auntie, collecting rent money and dispensing romantic advice. And yet all the while he was composing some of the most important work of his career." Sherill Tippins's February House, enlivened by primary sources and an unforgettable story, recreates daily life at the most fertile and improbable live-in salon of the twentieth century.

FROM THE CRITICS

Dennis Drabelle - The Washington Post

… overall, this is a bracing story. A number of gifted artists came together, stimulated one another and got started on important works. The house itself has long since been demolished, but Sherill Tippins has rebuilt it with intelligence and charm.

Amanda Vaill - The New York Times

Where February House succeeds is as a story of young artists trying to become themselves -- a story Auden might have been trying to tell in the libretto for his and Britten's failed Paul Bunyan opera. ''It is a forest full of innocent beasts,'' he wrote -- was he thinking, at all, of his Brooklyn house, full of British poets and composers, Manhattan magazine editors, neurasthenic Southern novelists, refugee German journalists, all of them with their most important work before them? ''It is America,'' he said then, ''but not yet.''

The New Yorker

In 1940, George Davis, an editor recently fired from Harper’s Bazaar, rented a dilapidated house in Brooklyn Heights in which he installed brilliant, volatile artists, who spent the next year working, fighting, and drinking. Carson McCullers sipped sherry while, down the hall, the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee typed her mystery novel with three-inch fingernails, and, downstairs, Benjamin Britten and Paul Bowles fought over practice space. W. H. Auden was housemother, collecting rent, assigning chores, and declaring no politics at dinner. Tippins’s book is a cozy, gossipy read, punctuated by solid, if perfunctory, literary criticism. Like all bohemian utopias, February House (so named because of the residents’ February birthdays) was unable to withstand the centrifugal force of its constituent egos. The artists dispersed—to return home, serve in the military, or follow wayward lovers—and the house was demolished to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Library Journal

W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Jane and Paul Bowles are well known for their poetry, novels, music, and more. What might come as a surprise is that they all once lived under the same roof in Brooklyn, NY. The dwelling was called February House because many of its inhabitants were born in that month. In this captivating book, Tippins (The Irreverent Guide to New York) examines how all these gifted artists came to live in this house from 1940 to 1941 and recounts the events that occurred there during that year. We learn that in February House McCullers began writing her novels The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Lee wrote The G-String Murders, and Auden wrote some of his most important poetry (while enforcing curfew and collecting rent). The result is a fascinating literary history about a group of artists living together at a turbulent time; the only disappointment is learning that the house is no longer standing. Recommended for literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/04.]-Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ. Lib., Manhattan Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews