February House Sherill Tippins Scribner, 317pp, £14.99 ISBN 0743257243

This marvellous book could be retitled The Big Brother House, 1940. Take a disparate bunch of geniuses, mostly in their twenties; put them in a ramshackle hilltop house in Brooklyn overlooking the naval yards; add ballet dancers, cats, circus animals, sailors and hangers-on; sprinkle with mind-numbing doses of alcohol, tobacco, heroin, Benzedrine and Seconal, plus loads of sex; sit back, and watch the masterpieces flow.

Yet this is no reality show masterminded by a television company; it really happened. In early 1940, Britain was heading for the Blitz, but the US was still at peace. Refugees flooded in, not only those fleeing the Nazis (such as Thomas Mann and his family), but also British expats such as W H Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Christopher Isherwood. While seeking their fortune Stateside, these Brits agonised about whether to return to the war zone, where work would be impossible, or, if not, about how best to use their liberty while it lasted. They knew that it was only a matter of time before America became embroiled, too.

The community at 7 Middagh Street was created by George Davis, the urbane and dissolute literary editor of Harper's Bazaar, who hoped that intense intellectual activity might be generated by such an eclectic group of people living toge-ther. Auden was the first taker; in his early thirties, he was already well known in America by the time he sailed there with Isherwood in 1939. Within weeks, Auden had fallen in love for the first (and only) time in his life with an 18-year-old college poet, Chester Kallman. "I am mad with happiness," he wrote to Britten.

Carson McCullers, the 22-year-old author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, appeared next, accompanied by her husband, Reeves. Davis was to become her mentor for the next year, coaxing her through the early production of further books: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Member of the Wedding and Reflections in a Golden Eye. Isherwood's friends Jane and Paul Bowles settled in and fought each other noisily. To top it all, there arrived the most glorious creature, 26-year-old Louise Hovick, aka Gypsy Rose Lee, who did more than take off her clothes. She, too, wanted to write, and under Davis's tutelage she settled down in a welter of cigarettes and discarded scripts to produce The G-String Murders.

It sounds completely mad, and must have been so much of the time. Auden quickly realised that order was necessary for him, and others, to concentrate: like an elderly bursar, he orchestrated mealtimes and work-times, calculated expenses and collected the rent. Gypsy installed her cook, Eva, and a maid to help with housework. A troupe of circus performers with trained dogs and a chimp took over Gypsy's room when she went on tour (the ape found employment modelling hats for Harper's). A grand piano was donated by Diana Vreeland, and soon Britten (aged 27) and Pears (aged 30) took up residence, glad to have somewhere they could sleep together.

It was dubbed "February House" by AnaIs Nin, because so many of its residents had birthdays that month. For these artists, part of the appeal of living together was the cross-fertilisation of ideas, but there were other advantages, too: more commissions (which helped pay the rent), and opportunities for collaboration. Britten found himself frantically working, with Auden as librettist, on what became his first opera, Paul Bunyan. The house quickly attracted bizarre visitors, including Salvador DalI and his Russian wife, Gala, an imperious woman who could "freeze a dinner partner in her snakelike gaze". Much of the time, the residents were drunk or debauched, yet their out-put was prolific.

Descriptions of the house and its strange artists' colony have appeared in many memoirs, so it is surprising that the whole story has not been told before. The book's genesis was an accident. When Sherill Tippins, a paediatrics writer and co-author of Frommer's Irreverent Guide to Manhattan, volunteered to deliver meals on wheels in Brooklyn Heights, she was fascinated by her clients' insistence that something extraordinary had taken place in the (now-demolished) house at 7 Middagh Street.

The result is a hugely entertaining and fast-moving account of intertwined lives. Without minimising the agonising, the personality clashes, the love affairs and disasters, Tippins does full justice to the remarkable successes that this nursery produced. If there were a single hour of sparkling, intelligent conversation in the Big Brother house, the programme would justify its existence. Wouldn't that be won-derful? Read this book, and dream.

Edwina Currie's Diaries 1997-1992 are published by Time Warner Paperbacks

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