Bohemian rhapsody

Bed-hopping was standard, meals were communal and parties were an outrageous concoction of circus acts and transvestites. While today our nation is gripped by the inane ramblings of a chef, a waiter and an IT manager, 7 Middagh Street boasted the poet, WH Auden, the composer, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, the most celebrated stripper of her time, Paul Bowles, the author of The Sheltering Sky, and his wife Jane, plus the writers Carson McCullers and George Davis, the self-destructive former literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who was the commune’s founder and principal ring-master.

Just as 100,000 people applied to take part in the fourth and latest series of Big Brother, bohemian wannabes hammered on the front door anxious for acceptance by the occupants, only to be dismissed by Jane Bowles as, well, not quite famous enough. Sorry.

For two years, 1940 and 1941, when Europe, soon followed by America, was dragged into the bloodiest of all wars, 7 Middagh Street had a gay old time, both in a 1940s and a 1990s sense of the word. Over the course of a couple of years, a small corner of Brooklyn leapt decades into the future in terms of tolerance and behaviour and in the process inspired a clutch of artistic works, novels, poems and even a musical.

The genesis of this creative commune was a dream enjoyed by Davis, a talented drunk who over-estimated his own importance to the top magazine of his day. At Harper’s Bazaar, Davis had an enviable reputation for persuading top names to write on stylish topics. However, coupled with this was a tardiness that bordered on insolence. When in 1940 the magazine’s editor, Carmel Snow, demanded he report for work before lunch-time, Davis stormed out, in the full expectation that Snow would grab his coat-tails. Instead, she held open the door.

Unemployed and in need of new digs, he awoke one morning having dreamt of a large brownstone in Brooklyn, an area he knew well on account of regular visits to Sands Street (the inspiration for Hubert Selby Jun’s grim novel, The Last Exit to Brooklyn) - a clandestine gay pick-up point that was populated by off-duty sailors, transvestites and prostitutes of both sexes. When Davis arrived in Middagh Street, which took its name from Aert Middagh, a Dutch settler, he discovered a "For Rent" sign outside number seven and so snapped it up.

The deposit of $125 was actually paid by Gypsy Rose Lee, a close friend of Davis, who agreed to lend him the money and in the process became a welcome guest and eventual tenant. Davis claimed the first floor for himself and rented out the others to Carson McCullers, a lesbian writer from the Deep South, who took one room; Auden and his lover, Chester Kallman, took another; Paul and Jane Bowles took an upper floor, as did Benjamin Britten and his lover, Peter Pears. In order to add colour and flair to the home, one room was left empty, which Davis made a habit of renting to circus performers, including a midget actor and monkey trainer who arrived with a menagerie of exotic pets. The appeal of Middagh Street was space and cost as the rooms were large, though unfurnished, and Davis charged just $25 a month for bed and board, a small sum even in the early 1940s.

A few weeks after they took up residence the house took on a gaudy appearance. Pavel Tchelitchev, the commune’s resident painter, prepared a huge mural that sprawled along one wall, while Davis stuffed his room with 19th-century furniture and a life-size cut-out of Gypsy Rose Lee, which he had swiped from the lobby of a local theatre.

While the others were content quickly to slump into a lifestyle of louche and mild debauchery, Auden did not. "Sorry, my dear," he said at an early house meeting. "One mustn’t be bohemian." The role Auden carved out for himself was that of Mother Hen. It was he who collected the rent, he who arranged repairs, he who sourced cooks and maids and prepared menus, and he who presided over the communal evening meal. As Golo Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain and winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize for literature, who was a frequent guest, recalled, Auden expressed "instant disapproval if anyone was late for a meal", while he himself "ate enormously at meal times and drank impressive amounts of cheap wine". Among those invited to dinner were Salvador Dal and his wife, Gala.

Each night at around seven o’clock (or whenever the first cocktail was mixed), a party would invariably unfold. A visitor who walked in off the street would find Davis entirely naked, smoking a cigarette, while his hands pounded away at the keys of Britten’s upright piano. McCullers, would swig hot sherry from a tea-cup and stare intently at Gypsy Rose Lee, who, at over 6ft tall with raven hair looked then like Monica Belluci looks now.

Politics as a topic of conversation had been struck off the list by Auden, who was still stinging from criticism that he had abandoned Britain at a time of national crisis and so had no wish to endure such barbs at his new "home". Instead, the conversation swooped high and low, from elevated discussions about the theories of Kierkegaard, the work of Stravinsky and the merits of pre-Columbian art, to school-yard whispers about who fancied who. The parties were the perfect opportunities for housemates to, well, mate.

In the hot, muggy summer nights, Rose Lee would wander around topless and it was she who one evening instigated the parlour game, Murder. As Britten recalled in a letter to Antonia Brosa: "Gypsy Rose Lee was a feature and we played murder all over the house and you could not imagine a better setting for it. " As he later explained: "The house in Brooklyn is still in a great deal of a mess."

As were many of the occupants’ personal relationships. Britten’s lover later described the house as "sordid beyond belief", but many of them enjoyed their antics while they lasted. At the time, Auden was so enamoured with Kallman that he was blind to his persistent infidelities with sailors, whom he insisted were only friends but who repeatedly stole from the house during their frequent visits. Despite this behaviour, a glorious 21st-birthday party was thrown for Kallman in the house at which Pears insisted on serenading the young man with Make Believe, from the musical Showboat. However, when Auden discovered his lover had been having an affair with another poet, he tried to strangle him in their bedroom. Meanwhile, McCullers never achieved her ambition, which was to seduce Rose Lee so poured a reservoir of unrequited love into her prose.

For all their drunken antics, the occupants of Middagh Street maintained a productivity to be envied. During his stay, Bowles, then principally a composer, wrote scores for seven plays, among them Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, despite insisting that he was constantly distracted by Britten, playing on a piano upstairs. Britten, in turn, teamed up with Auden and together they wrote and scored an operetta, Paul Bunyan, which was produced in the beginning of 1941. Auden, meanwhile, was often hard at work on two of his most critically acclaimed collections, Another Time and The Double Man, which were both published during his residence in Middagh Street.

Yet, of all those who dwelt in the house, McCullers soaked up the greatest inspiration. The idea for her classic southern novella, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, in which a beautiful tall woman falls in love with a dwarf, sprang almost fully-formed from a sleepy drink in a Brooklyn bar, accompanied by Auden and Davis, where the trio stood, fascinated, by their drinking companions at the other end of the bar. As she recalled in her unfinished memoir, she "was fascinated by a remarkable couple ... a woman who was tall and strong as a giantess, and at her heels she had a little hunchback. I just observed them once and it was not until some weeks later that the illumination of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe struck me." At the time, the 23-year-old was hard at work on a novel, The Member of the Wedding, whose key idea of a sister in love with both her brother and his bride, dropped into her head as she ran beside Rose Lee to watch a fire engine roar past.

Even Rose Lee refused to be left behind, amid her feathered fans and garter belts, and so struck out to compose a novel of her own. In between nightly strip-tease routines at Minsky’s night-club, Rose Lee, whose real name was the rather sedate, Louis Hovick, worked on The G-String Murders, a crime novel in which she herself played the role of the gumshoe. At the time, Rose Lee accepted the credit for her creation. The dust-jacket claimed: "She did not write this book once. ‘I wrote it three times,’ Gypsy says, ‘with a thesaurus.’" Time magazine praised it as a "lurid, witty and highly competent detective story". It should have been, since it was later revealed to be primarily the work of Craig Rice, the creator and writer of a series of novels starring the attorney, John J Malone.

Creativity, or the perception of such, appeared to drip from the banisters of 7 Middagh Street and in January 1941 the occupants founded there own literary journal, entitled: Decision: A Review of Free Culture. Its editorial board consisted of the cream of contemporary novelists, Thomas Mann, Robert Sherwood and Somerset Maugham. Although the publication lasted little more than a year it attracted a string of strong contributions. Auden wrote an attack on the Nazi’s, while Vladimir Nabokov wrote an essay on soviet literature, though the later was never published.

The magic of Middagh Street was never meant to last. Scarcely two years after Davis grasped the keys and flung the front door open to the talent rich but cash poor, respectability came creeping in carrying a large suitcase and a small child. The arrival at the end of 1941 of the novelist, Richard Wright, who wrote Native Son, with his wife and their infant daughter, was a bell tolling; the barman calling time. The couple shunned communal dining and kept themselves rigidly to themselves. A few months later the original tenants, including Auden and Britten and their respective partners, had moved on. Yet, while the essence of Middagh Street, though diluted, lingered on a few more years, those residents harked back to what once was and never would be again.

If 7 Middagh Street had been a house in London, a large blue plaque would be required on which to list the previous occupant’s names. In Brooklyn, the residence had already been existing on borrowed time. That particular stretch of Middagh Street was required for the construction of the new Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and so in 1945 the front door was locked and the building demolished. A reconstruction has since taken place - 7 Middagh Street has been re-built by American author Sherrill Tippins, in her new book, February House, not brick by brick, but story by story.

• February House is expected to be published in 2004.