A grand experiment in communal living

At least once a generation, young artists come together by accident or design and help each other realize their dreams. Beginning with the turn of the last century, the Bloomsbury Group brought together writers such as E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf; in the 1950s, the Actors Studio was a haven for Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters and Steve McQueen; in the late '60s, San Francisco produced Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Santana and Sly Stone. My upcoming film "The Hive" deals with a comparable event in 1912 Paris, when, by chance, five unknown young artists from five different countries moved into the same tenement at the same time. A short while later, the world would know these young men as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Diego Rivera, Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani.

In each case, the question remains: Would these artists have been as productive on their own? Would they even have been discovered? Or does budding talent need a petri dish environment in which commingled thoughts, energies and visions can grow?

In her new book "February House," Sherill Tippins deals with a similar confluence of talents in Brooklyn as World War II raged in Europe. The grand experiment in communal living involved novelist Carson McCullers, poet W.H. Auden, composer Benjamin Britten, writer Klaus and actress Erika Mann (children of Thomas Mann) and most surprisingly, burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee. All were under 35. They were brought together to inhabit a ramshackle house at 7 Middagh St. by George Davis, the famous literary editor at Harper's Bazaar, who used the magazine to showcase the best writers of the time.

Adding to the core group at any given moment, day or night, were Carson's estranged husband, Reeves; Britten's partner Peter Pears; and Auden's 18-year-old lover Chester Kallman.

For Auden, the communal experiment, as Tippins describes it, was to balance domesticity with bohemian chaos and thus create a place "with common values and passions that left room for the unpredicted." Unpredictable it was, with a never-ending flow of houseguests that included Orson Welles, dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine, Diana Vreeland, New Yorker writer Janet Flanner, Salvador Dali, William Saroyan, Christopher Isherwood, Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford, artist Paul Cadmus and countless others.