More or less beauty

What is the role of the artist in times of crisis?

In the fall of 1940, the louche, cat-like bon vivant George Davis began an audacious experiment in communal living at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. Months earlier, he’d been fired from his job as fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar, where he’d developed a reputation for placing the work of literary luminaries between advertisements for women’s underwear. Unfortunately for Davis, he was also known to appear at the office no earlier than 4pm, often hungover and badly bruised on account of heavy drinking with his writers and rough sex with his sailors. Having lost his job, he lost his expense account, and with it, the economic engine of his social and literary life. In this sense, the dilapidated faux-Tudor townhouse overlooking the East River offered him a means of reassembling his community.

A charismatic dreamer and doting den mother, George convinced a gaggle of brilliant artists to join him in Brooklyn—never mind the faulty plumbing and drafty windows. Among this coterie were the novelist Carson McCullers, fresh off the success of her prodigious debut, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter; the poet W.H. Auden, who would live with his much younger partner, Chester Kallman; the composer Benjamin Britten and his lover, Peter Pears; the German emigrés Erika and Klaus Mann, children of the novelist Thomas Mann; and the striptease artist and serial entrepreneur Gypsy Rose Lee. Not a dull moment here, folks! When the group moved in, Davis, at 34, was the eldest, while McCullers, the runt of the litter, was 23.

George Davis and Carson McCullers, Long Island, 1947 (Henri Cartier-Bresson)

In the nine-ish months during which these artists cohabitated, the group worked independently and collaboratively on various creative projects in an environment that was anything but staid; benzedrine, scotch, and sherry-spiked tea flowed freely while lovers, roommates, and revelers entered and exited the premises like actors in a British farce. To be sure, the house at 7 Middagh Street offered a partial respite from the drumbeat of bad news that echoed across the Atlantic. Yet the specter of fascism that haunted the airwaves and corner newsstands nevertheless wormed its way through cracks in the plaster and into the collective psyche of the commune. Each tenant was thus forced to grapple with the question of an artist’s civic responsibility in a time of war and unrest, which led in some instances to explosive disagreements between members of the household. One might argue that these conflicts ultimately led to the experiment’s collapse.

Some may recognize this as a précis of Sherill Tippins’ marvelous book February House, which inspired the musical of the same name. I began writing the show with my friend and colleague Seth Bockley in 2008, five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Like many young artists, we weren’t sure how we were supposed to respond to, and engage with, a war predicated on lies. We were drawn to this story because it resonated across time, and sought, through the lens of the past, to learn something about our (then) present.

More than a dozen years after its New York première at the Public Theater, I’m finishing a week-long residency at Northwestern University, where February House is being produced on campus. Returning to the material all these years later, it’s poignant to recognize how relatively quaint our moral quandaries were back then, and the extent to which today’s destabilized world more closely resembles the conditions faced by Auden, McCullers, Britten, et al., as Hitler’s army marched across Europe. If anything, the musical feels more urgent now than it did in 2012.

W.H. Auden & Benjamin Britten (The Britten-Pears Foundation)

For months, I have wondered how best to harness my creative energy, as a succession of historic catastrophes—each tragic in its own right—has piled up: genocides in Gaza and Sudan, the rollback of women’s and trans rights, the slide into oligarchy in the U.S., and the rapid acceleration of climate crisis. How ought one respond as a citizen? As an artist?

All of this became more urgent last week, when my parents evacuated Altadena, a tiny hamlet northeast of Los Angeles. Within hours, entire neighborhoods were reduced to charred ruins that resembled the aftermath of an aerial bombing campaign. Like many, I’ve struggled to comprehend the scale of this cataclysm, while reckoning with the fact that extreme weather events like these portend more to come as global warming intensifies. Somehow, my parents’ house survived. It sits on a single unscathed block surrounded by rubble and ash. It will be some time before they are able to return to assess smoke damage, but of course they are supremely lucky. Thousands of families in the Palisades, Malibu, Pasadena, and elsewhere, have lost everything.

Meanwhile, the incoming administration is a veritable clown car of climate deniers, set to roll back the small achievements made over the last four years. I open my notebook to write, my pen hovering centimeters above the blank gridded page. What is there to say? What can a song, any piece of art, do at a time like this?

The Eaton Fire, January 8, 2025. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Before he left England for the U.S., Auden had traveled in 1937 to witness the Spanish Civil War, where he intended to aid the left-wing Republicans in their fight against the fascist Nationalists. He soon published his famous poem, “Spain,” an extraordinary piece of recruiting rhetoric, which, by the time he arrived in Brooklyn only a few years later, he would disavow. It was in this state of mind—repelled both by left-wing violence in Spain (the Red Terror) as well as by the rise of fascism—that Auden rejected political poetry in favor of a spiritual transformation, one in which he sought to organize his life around the practice of agape, or Christian love. Here, he was undoubtedly influenced by his relationship with his younger lover (and later, platonic life partner), Chester Kallman, who, during their stay at 7 Middagh St., made clear that he would no longer be physically intimate with the older poet.

When I was writing February House fifteen years ago, I found Auden’s turn away from politics unsatisfying, even cowardly. How could he not, international literary celebrity that he was, take a stand against fascism? It seemed to me then that his reluctance stemmed from petty grievances, from a desire to distance himself from leftists whose rhetoric he found sloppy, from an abstract belief that imposing ideology on poetry was at once ineffectual and in poor taste. Indeed, shortly before moving into the house at 7 Middagh Street, he wrote “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” in which he famously states that “poetry makes nothing happen,” a rebuke of his earlier political work.

But now, I see Auden’s evolution as more complex. His devotion to agape anticipated Martin Luther King Jr.’s pursuit of the beloved community, which, too, was rooted in an ethic of Christian love. By contrast, contemporary American politics is driven largely by anger, contempt, and retribution; it is almost entirely loveless. And it is the absence of love in political organizing and discourse that entrenches our society in a sclerotic and unjust status quo, where broadly popular policy goals remain out of reach because we cannot transcend difference in the interest of coalition-building.

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963

But what precisely is this elusive love? To my mind, it is very nearly synonymous with curiosity and humility. It is a love that is hard won: you encounter a person with whom you have little in common, with whom the prospect of identification seems most remote, and yet in spite of that gulf, you exhibit curiosity toward them, curiosity about their way of seeing and being in the world. It is this work that ought to undergird our political efforts.

And what of the artist’s practice? A year ago, in an essay called “Absolute Music Is Not A Luxury,” I suggested that we ask too much and too little of music, that our expectations of the ways in which music can change the world are often unrealistic. Since then, the ambient mood of precarity, powerlessness, and contingency has only deepened. I have two children, six and three, and I am grateful that they are too young to understand how broken our world is. I want so much to make it better on their behalf, and yet I often wake with a sense of despair about what art can or should do in a time like this, when wildfires rage, cities are flooded, civil and human rights are trampled, innocents are bombed, billionaires buy governments, while tens of millions have come to accept that economic uncertainty or misery is the norm.

But resignation is not an option. In his essential book on climate crisis, The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells writes:

The fight is, definitively, not yet lost—in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.

Similarly, when it comes to art-making, there can always be more beauty or less in the world. And beyond beauty, there is the matter of simply bearing witness, as an era of passive decadence and historic inequality gives way to fascism and oligarchy. Since late last year, I’ve been writing songs again: songs about my children; about Luigi Mangione (sort of); about my great-grandfather’s description of his internment at Buchenwald, and how eerily similar it was to a Palestinian poet’s account of his detainment by the IDF; about afternoon winter light in Oregon. At some point, I will try to write about what has happened in my birthplace, Los Angeles, where so many lives have been upended. Bearing witness through art is an act of hope: it suggests that we believe someone will eventually encounter what we have made, whether in ten days or ten years or a hundred.

In the short term, when gathering to share our songs, plays, or poems, we can strive to create environments that encourage us to truly see one another. The seeing, the being, the curiosity, the humility — all of this is exercise for the heart, which we will desperately need as we face the uncertainty of the coming years. Just as there can be more suffering or less, more beauty or less, there can also be, in every human interaction, more kindness or less, more or less love.

I don’t mean to suggest that this work is easy. As the residents of 7 Middagh Street learned all too well, the construction of a chosen family requires a kind of vulnerability. In the musical, the audience witnesses terrified lovers behaving cruelly toward one another. This is instructive for our time, for a chosen family is like a coalition in miniature. It cannot exist without conflict. George Davis was fiercely loyal to his artists, doting on them, caring for them, and yet ultimately found himself bereft as each tenant, for her own reasons, abandoned the house. What will we do, in the coming days, to hold each other more closely, to practice love and compassion, to be less alone?

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February House plays Feb. 21-Mar. 2 at the Ethel M. Barber Theater at the Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts in a production directed by Seth Roseman. Tickets are available here.

Meanwhile, I’m on tour in various capacities for the next several weeks. Dates, tickets & more information here.

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7 Middagh Street