When Frank O’Hara sought out upperclassman Edward Gorey, was he engineering the future of fey letters? Probably not consciously, but they were certainly encouraged and educated by one another. The romance attached to communities of budding artists has something to do with the notion that two heads are better than one. But it also has to do with the Utopian hope that the thickly meaningful world of art can be recreated in life.

In 1940, Carson McCullers, aged 23, established a household that soon included a 33-year-old W.H. Auden. Benjamin Britten and Paul and Jane Bowles were not far behind. Salvador Dali, Louis MacNeice, and the offspring of Thomas Mann all became close friends of the family. The house – at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, since demolished to make way for the BQE – is the subject of “February House” (Houghton Mifflin, 317 pages, $24) by Sherill Tippins.

When “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” was published in 1940, Mc-Cullers moved to New York City, hoping to join, in person, the kind of artistic community she had always found in books. But despite the instant fame attached to the book’s success, nothing happened. Her eventual entree came through George Davis, fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar.

Davis has been in Paris in the 1930s, where he had been accepted by that city’s intelligentsia. “They included me in, an in of healing, instructive enchantment,” he later wrote. Davis was so impressed with the way he was nurtured that, without really planning to, he spent the rest of his life, back in New York, nurturing other artists. One of his finest pupils was McCullers.

Tellingly, both took great satisfaction in self-mythologizing, a habit that does require a sympathetic audience. When, for financial and personal reasons, they decided to get like-minded people together to rent a house in Brooklyn, they were making a brazen effort to extend their mythologies into the future – to make their lives more interesting. Indeed, Lincoln Kirstein agreed to pay the security deposit on the house because “such a situation would provide for more material for George’s spellbinding and often salacious stories, to which Kirstein was thoroughly addicted.”

It was Auden, not George Davis, who dominated the household. Auden signed on to 7 Middagh because, cut off from his English monies on account of the war, he needed “rooms economical enough to allow him to focus on his best work.” For a few weeks, Auden suffered Davis and McCullers’s disorganization, but soon enough he made himself rent collector and assigned daily chores.

Auden thought regular meals and sleep produced the best work, but he also knew that he needed a certain amount of chaos to inform his poetry. As Ms. Tippins reports, he went “‘rummaging into his living’ for ‘the images that hurt and connect.'” Auden was too ambitious to submit to the superstition that a lifestyle didn’t count if it was contrived.

Indeed, Auden loaded his personal life with metaphysical import. He wrote, “From this nightmare of public solitude, this everlasting Not Yet, what relief have you but in an ever giddier collective gallop … what goal but the Black Stone on which the bones are cracked.” From the paradoxes of social life, Auden sought crisis – sought material. The lifestyle at 7 Middagh afforded bountiful chaos.

Ms. Tippins’s set-pieces are marvelous. Going for after-dinner drinks on the Brooklyn waterfront, the group was often accompanied by Davis’s friend, the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee. “The sight of this bejeweled, ermine cloaked stripper descending on Sands Street after a Broadway show always created a gratifying stir among the sailors.” Lee decided to write a mystery, moved in, and to Auden’s delight brought her cook and maid.

The house became a clubhouse for war refugees and New York arts celebrities, all looking for an inspiring good time. After one all-night party, McCullers and Lee heard a fire engine and ran, hand in hand, to chase it down the snowy morning street. It was a breakthrough moment for McCullers – she suddenly realized the plot of “A Member of the Wedding” – and it was the pure product of her contrived residential situation.

After the social experiment of 7 Middagh, McCullers and Auden arrived at a surprisingly similar philosophy of interpersonal relationships. McCullers, as evident in some of her best novels, decided that love triangles, in which unequal love can still form a closed circuit, were ideal. Auden, resolving the tortuous early years of his affair with Chester Kallman, came to understand, as he would later versify, that “If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me.”

Both decided that the rewards of socializing could not be shared with others. Perhaps that is why they did such fine work while living together.