Dear readers,
I have a sprightly white-haired neighbor who has lived in the garden apartment next door since Lyndon B. Johnson was president, more or less, and most days you will find her out there on her little patch of tulips and concrete, holding court in two languages. (The better gossip, I deeply suspect, is in Polish.)
I love her consistency, and I also love how specific her territory is. Whatever’s going on beyond this block: not her business. Her purview is strictly whatever falls between the co-op, the cosmetic dentist and the mosque. That chic spot on the corner serving “contemporary Americana with a flair for sustainability”? She knew it when it was a French bistro and before that, a deli selling glorious pre-Ozempic piles of kielbasa and goulash.
Which brings me to the picks in this week’s newsletter, both of which zoom in on chunks of urban real estate so finely parsed you could probably cover them with a large tarp. These books, like the lady next door, are living histories: loyal keepers of their own neighborhood flames, and other goulash ghosts of old New York.
—Leah
“February House,” by Sherill Tippins
Nonfiction, 2005
The subtitle of this book — “The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee Under One Roof in Brooklyn” — makes it sound like some kind of mid 20th-century celebrity Mad Libs, or the Paris Review version of fantasy football. But there really was a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights where, for a few short years in the 1940s, some of the most brilliant and eccentric artists of the era converged to share a dish rack.
The mastermind was a youngish man called George Davis, who had been the vaunted fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar (he published the likes of John Cheever, Colette and Gertrude Stein) and was, more important, an excellent social connector. When he learned that one of his favorite writers, a gawky girl named Carson who’d just made a splash with her debut novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” was wilting in her fifth-floor West Village walk-up — and that two starry British exports, the poet W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten, were also desperate for cheaper digs — he took it upon himself to rent a former boardinghouse across the East River for $75 a month.
The four-story brownstone had a marble fireplace and charming gingerbread trim; it was also a wreck. Davis fixed what he could and filled the rooms, and the result was mostly pandemonium, particularly when the burlesque superstar Gypsy Rose Lee moved in. But canonical stuff was also made on site; one awed visitor said (in Tippins’s paraphrase) that it was ”like opening a door to find an entire generation of Western culture hidden away in this rickety old Brooklyn parlor.”
In resurrecting this arrangement, Tippins intersperses deep dives into the residents’ various creative endeavors and the lurking menace of World War II with tales of sexual swashbuckling, wild parties and delightfully petty feuds. The cameos are casually bananas: Salvador Dalí, Albert Einstein, George Balanchine. (Anaïs Nin is the one who bestowed the house’s nickname, after the birthday month many residents happened to share.)
It’s all smartly and sympathetically told, if inevitably not quite as sparkly as its subjects. But then Tippins will drop some gem, like this cheerful update on one Middagh alumnus, a monkey belonging to a short-stay circus family: “Joe the chimp found work at Harper’s Bazaar almost immediately, as it turned out, modeling piqué hats for spring.”
Read if you like: “The Sullivanians,” by Alexander Stille, faulty plumbing, sherry in your breakfast coffee.
Available from: A Mariner Books paperback, or the share shelf at assorted Brooklyn communes.
“The Princess of 72nd Street,” by Elaine Kraf
Fiction, 1979
“Attacks of radiance” are what the narrator of Kraf’s groovy, glimmering novel calls the manic episodes that sometimes overtake her. Her fingers turn to flower petals and her head is full of bells; more often than not, she is compelled to take her clothes off. (The radiance cannot be smothered by convention, or pants.)
Officially, her name is Ellen, and she is trained as a portrait painter. In her mind, though, she is Princess Esmeralda surveying her tiny kingdom on the Upper West Side — benevolent ruler of all the late-night jazzbos, tweedy psychoanalysts and shifty watermelon salesmen who populate her stretch of Bagel Noshes, gay bars and bookstores.
When the radiance comes, it is not always welcomed by her friends and lovers, many of whom seem a lot less sane than she is; most episodes end forcibly at Bellevue Hospital or St. Vincent’s with “an injection of something to make me stop bothering everyone with my happiness.” But in between and even in the midst of an attack, she is a fount of lucid, high-flying thoughts on morality, marriage — she tried it once, with a moody egomaniac from art school — and the rules of modern (that is, circa 1979) dating.
Kraf died in 2013 and never found much mainstream success in her lifetime, though “Princess” has just gotten a snazzy hardback reissue with an introduction by the novelist Melissa Broder and a new, Gatsby-esque cover. It really deserves to be read — not just for the nitty-gritty New York of it all but for her wry, confiding voice, which is funny, disarming and frequently ruthless; woe to the couple who tries to drag Esmerelda to a suburban barbecue. Most books about madness are either instructive or enervating, long harrowing marches into hearts of darkness. This one feels more like a dance.
Read if you like: Body paint, synesthesia, men who wear scarab pinky rings.
Available from: The Modern Library reissue, or the waiting room at Bellevue.
Why don’t you …
Dive into a different kind of New York underground via Sarah Schulman’s bleakly beautiful 1995 novel “Rat Bohemia”?
Say goodbye to the corn-dogs-and-diesel glory of a city summer with Bruce Gilden’s great photo book “Coney Island”?
Try to parse the dense dis-and-dat Brooklynese of Thomas Wolfe’s classic 1935 short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn”? Or, you know, fuggedaboutit.
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