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Welcome back to A Closer Read, Harper’s Bazaar’s seasonal books newsletter. This spring, we’ll be covering the most exciting new books, interviewing some of our favorite writers and exploring titles you may have overlooked.
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Welcome back to A Closer Read, Harper’s Bazaar’s seasonal books newsletter. This spring, we’ll be covering the most exciting new books, interviewing some of our favorite writers and exploring titles you may have overlooked.
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As I wrote in last week’s newsletter, our president and our secretary of defense were threatening to bomb an entire civilization (and an expanse of land beneath which much of the earth’s fresh water emanates from) “back into the stone age.” It seemed entirely fruitless to be fretting about how to write a good sentence when everyone I knew was DMing each other dark jokes and terrible memes about world annihilation.
But we are in another week, and with some distance I am reminded of a book I read in 2024, in a similar moment of worlds ending. February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in Brooklyn, by Sheril Tippin, is a group biography of the writers mentioned in the title. All six of them decided, beginning in the winter of 1940, to share a house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. The experiment lasted only two years.
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I feel like February House is the model from which countless Brooklyn and spiritually Brooklyn house shares sprang. All of these artists were singular, of course, but they are also archetypal Bad Art Friends. Carson McCullors was eager to live in the house because she was escaping a husband jealous of her writing career, as well as struggling with her own queer identity. It was at February House that she would begin her two great masterpieces, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. W.H. Auden was living there because, although he was an acclaimed poet, he was broke; he would write his collection The Double Man. Jane Bowles, also broke, would start her famous Two Serious Ladies there. Every bohemian house share needs a few people who actually have jobs. In this case, there was Gypsy Rose Lee, at that time a successful burlesque dancer, who would write her bestseller The G String Murders at the house. Her life would go on to be the basis of the musical Gypsy. Also, queer. And the only person there with an office job was the novelist George Davis, whose idea it was to rent the place and who was fiction editor of this very magazine at the time. He introduced Gertrude Stein and others to Harper’s Bazaar readers.
The residents of February House made art as the world slipped deeper into the throes of fascism and outright war broke out. Auden, originally respected in England as a brilliant young poet, was quickly derided, along with other British expat writers, because of the perception that they were not willing to return to join the fight. Much of his time in February House was spent wrestling with this question of abstaining. Auden, in his youth, was a leftist, and he understood the threat of fascism. A few years earlier, he had married Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann, because she was about to be stripped of her German citizenship for loudly criticizing Nazism. Auden, of course, and Mann were both queer; it was a marriage of convenience. But Auden was also deeply wary of war, having participated in and disillusioned by the Spanish Civil War and various antifascist fights of the 1930s. During Auden’s time in February House, Mann entreated him and the writers there to publicly join the cultural fight against fascism, urging them to write essays against the Nazis. Auden resisted. Was this cowardice or a different way of being in the world? While at February House, he wrote this poem that seems to capture the turbulence of trying to create in a time of destruction:
Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish
loves:
The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every
day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command
—Rejoice.
Tippin’s witty, fast-paced history of February House is a reminder that the things that seem uniquely grotesque and unbearable in this moment have been a part of the human experience for a long time. Writers have always been asking these questions. Our job as a culture is to make sure we stay alive enough to beauty and humanity that writers will keep asking these questions in the future too.
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The same spring that Auden and McCullors and Lee were drinking and writing and arguing and crushing on one another in a drafty house in Brooklyn Heights, Carmel Snow, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar and inadvertent benefactor of February House (she hired George Davis, and it was his salary that paid for the place), sailed to Italy. From there, they boarded unheated and unlit freight trains with army soldiers, until they reached Paris for the spring fashion shows. This was in the middle of a war zone, at the start of the Second World War. “That’s how much Paris was loved by the Americans,” writes Tamara Sturtz-Filby in her latest book, Power, Grit and Glamour: The Women Who Made Halston. Sturtz-Filby includes this detail to juxtapose how revolutionary the shift was to the American designers of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s: Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and of course Halston, the subject of this book.
“He wanted to dress everyone from the celebrity and socialite to the shopgirl behind the makeup counter in Bloomingdale’s,” Sturtz-Filby writes. “Dark-skinned girls, Black girls, blondes, brunettes, and redheads; these were the girls of America. He was fully aware that his customers came in all ages, shapes, and sizes. “I have no ideal woman,” Sturtz-Filby quotes Halston as saying in her book. “We have suggestions for every figure type. After all, Americans come from every ethnic group, have every kind of figure. Most American women are under five feet four. I’d say that 90 percent of them wear bras.”
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Bianca Jagger, Halston, Martha Graham and Lauren Hutton attend “Private Lives” Performance Party at Halston’s Olympic Towers apartment in New York City (1983) |
Bianca Jagger, Halston, Martha Graham and Lauren Hutton attend “Private Lives” Performance Party at Halston’s Olympic Towers apartment in New York City (1983) |
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A relentlessly democratic commitment to beauty and style is refreshing, especially when it is considered against the historical backdrop of the times, as Sturtz-Filby makes clear: a world emerging from the darkness of fascism, as well as the old beliefs about French and Italian style superiority being shattered. But it is also inevitable that such a populist attitude attracts critics. Kennedy Fraser, The New Yorker’s fashion critic, dismissed Halston as an “anti-designer” who had “more in common with blue jeans and mass production than couture and hard-workmanship.” But, Sturtz-Filby argues, “this could not have been further from the truth. The design and construction of every piece, while deceptively simple, was a feat of highly complicated and technically innovative engineering.”
Halston was a rare cultural figure in American life, in that he seemed to genuinely enjoy the company of women and to take them seriously. Sturtz-Filby’s book seeks to trace the influences of the various women in his life: the models and muses he worked with, known as the Halstonettes; the Hollywood stars, like Anjelica Huston, Elizabeth Taylor, and of course Liza Minnelli; and the women behind the scenes who championed his career, like the legendary publicist and social connector Eleanor Lambert. “He treated his friend, the gregarious, 200-pound Andy Warhol muse Pat Ast, like a celebrity, showering her with all the glitz and glamour he felt she deserved,” Sturtz-Filby writes. “Everyone in Halston’s circle was treated to his generosity and loyalty.” Andy Warhol, a Halston friend who grew to loathe him and his circle, referred to them as “Halston’s home for Wayward Women”—a dig Halston would learn of after Warhol’s death, when his diaries were published. Deeply hurt by his unflattering depiction in the diaries, Halston’s only recourse, since Warhol was already dead, was to sell all the work he owned by the great artist.
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Martha Graham, Elizabeth Taylor, Halston, and Liza Minnelli attend a benefit for the Martha Graham Dance Company at Halston’s Fifth Avenue Salon (1983) |
Martha Graham, Elizabeth Taylor, Halston, and Liza Minnelli attend a benefit for the Martha Graham Dance Company at Halston’s Fifth Avenue Salon (1983) |
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There’s darkness in Halston’s story too, of course. This book does an excellent job of defining the artistry of its subject while not shying away from his flaws. It’s similar to Laurene Leamer’s dishy and entertaining Warhol’s Muses, Capote’s Women, and Hitchcock’s Blondes. In those books, and in this one, the temperament and influences of an artist are revealed through his friendships. It’s notable that these are looking at relationships in which the men are not necessarily sexually involved with the women they are fascinated by but have some other bond—something forged in creativity, the desire to make things, and ambition. This makes the relationships more intense, the betrayals and acts of loyalty more stunning, and the stories these muses told about the Great Men who were inspired by them that much more compelling.
This book opens with a scene of a typical lunch in Halston’s studio. Sturtz-Filby writes, “The air is filled with the heady scent of expensive perfume, white orchids, True cigarettes and Rigaud Cypres candles. The sunlight is pouring in, casting warm shadows across the luxurious, red-carpeted floor. Smooth jazz croons softly in the background. The office door is closed, the phone left unanswered. Gossip and laughter fill the room.” I’m a sucker for books like this. I adore histories that feel as if someone is telling you about a really good party you missed, by chance, the night before.
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Tamara Sturtz-Filby has been a journalist for more than 30 years, specializing in fashion, beauty, and women’s lifestyle. She is the author of Behind the Gloss (2023), The Story of the Diamond (2023), and The Little Book of Tiffany & Co. (2025). She lives in the United Kingdom. |
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In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Addie Kitchens. Her debut novel, Dominion, has been long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and is a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
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Addie Kitchens: “I can edit anywhere, but I can rarely actually write anywhere but the place I call home. I am too nosy; if there are humans around, I will want to engage in some way. Also, I live in New Orleans, which is a great city for creation and creators. Every time I leave the house is an inspiration; every time I sit on my balcony and a party bus rolls by playing bounce music or somebody pedals by in a bike-boat contraption with a menagerie of pets in tow, I am moved. I take walks, I go dance, I talk to people, and I come back to my apartment and use what I’ve seen.”
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