New York in the '50s (12 page)

Another person who got his start as a published writer at
National Review
was Joan's husband, John Dunne: “Joan and I had gotten to be good friends and often had dinner together. She was writing for
National Review
, and she was their young literary star. We were riding uptown in a cab one night and she said she'd been asked to do a piece for them on Edwin O'Connor's new book,
The Edge of Sadness
, and she didn't want to do it. I said I'd like to do it, and I wrote about growing up Irish Catholic in Hartford and
NR
published it. You got $25 for a review or a back-of-the-book piece. If you wrote for
NR
you were either a true believer in the conservative cause or a young person who wanted to get your stuff published.

“At the tag end of the fifties,” John adds, “we all for the first time were beginning to get published. We'd made some connection—it didn't matter whether it was
The Nation
or
National Review
or
Time
.”

Joan agrees: “Yes, it was like not being a freshman anymore.”

There were those who didn't get published, of course, people who sometimes seemed as talented, if not more so, than those of us who did get our work in print. Some of them went back home to the Midwest, the South, or wherever else they had started from. Some stayed on in New York and found other means of expression and ways of making a living. The “starving artist” life lost its glamour after a few years, and people wanted, if not a little fame, at least a little fortune.

“I'm hungry,” my friend Ted the Horse said one night at a party in the Village. At first I didn't understand, and suggested we go to Jim Atkins's hash house on Sheridan Square for eggs or pancakes.

“That's not what I mean,” he said.

From the fierce look in his eye, I got it. He wanted to make some money. He was going to get what we called a real job. In preparation, he and I and his other friends read
The Organization Man
, which contained an appendix for the aid of those who wanted to be employed by big companies. It was titled “How to Cheat on Personality Tests.” The first rule to remember in trying to decide the best answer to any psychological-test question was “I loved my mother and my father, but my father a little bit more.” (The presumption was that anyone applying for a serious job in the business world was a man.)

Ted got a kick out of that and began to repeat it, making it a kind of refrain. The rest of us would join in, singing this key to success, jazzing it up, riffing on it as we went along, slapping our knees, clapping, as if this were some great tribal chant or hip new beat from the world of bop: “I-love-my-mother-and-my-father—but-my-father-a-little-bit-more.”

Ted landed a job at McGraw-Hill, in the media department, where he learned to make slide shows and films, and later went on to launch Steeg Productions, his own company, for which he wrote, produced, and directed prizewinning documentaries and films for business, which took him on shooting locations around the world. It was not the voyage of the
Pequod
, but it used his creative talent and earned him a good living.

I may not have had a regular salary, and my fees for
Nation
articles were modest—Calvin Trillin later reported that for his column that magazine paid “in the high two figures”—but I had some great fringe benefits. George Kirstein used to invite me to the penthouse he and his wife, Jane, kept at the One Fifth Avenue Hotel, for drinks and dinner with friends; or I'd go up to their house in Mamaroneck for lunch and a swim (he was the first person I knew who had a private swimming pool); or I'd watch the America's Cup races from his sailboat. His pool had those floating chairs with a hole cut out of the arm to hold a drink, and leaning back in one of those with a Bloody Mary, discussing world events with George, I felt like the Negro boy in Philip Roth's
Goodbye, Columbus
when he looks at a library book of Gauguin paintings and says, “Ain't that the fuckin life.”

My connection with
The Nation
gave me a base to begin a shaky subsistence—but one I would not have traded for anything less free and glamorous—as a writer in New York, living hand-to-mouth on the kind of writing known in the trade as “pieces.” Later, toward the darker end of my New York days, I came to think of them as pieces of myself. Some of them seemed torn out of me unwillingly, by the roots, or what macho fellows in those days referred to as the short hairs, as the pressures of paying the rent and producing article after article mounted to an unrelenting treadmill of production. At the beginning, though, each byline provided a shot of adrenelin, each assignment a challenge and a chance for exploration of the city and its mysteries, unveiling new places and people, sounds and scenes.

My English writer friend in the Village, Sarel Eimerl (“a seriously witty man,” according to Bruce Jay Friedman), described our profession with the elegant phrase “living by the pen.” He said it with a certain irony, as we calculated such mundane problems as how to pay the gas bill. The exciting thing was that I was getting published, and a world of stories was out there waiting. Again the words of John Reed came to mind: it was like being “on the edge of a beautiful dream.”

FOUR

Miracle in the Bowery

The only time I'd been to the Bowery was to drink at McSorley's, a saloon known for its cheap beer, sawdust on the floor, and the fact that it didn't allow women. It was a curiosity, the sort of lowlife place that college boys and other tourists could visit to feel they had gotten a taste of the infamous Bowery, whose name was synonymous with bums, men who huddled in doorways with bottles of rotgut wine in paper bags. The Bowery was still the symbol of poverty in a time of prosperity, a kind of sinkhole where people of all nationalities, even homegrown Americans, had fallen down. There was poverty, too, in the teeming streets of the Lower East Side, where the immigrants from Europe and their children were still struggling upward, and poverty in Harlem, where Negroes from the South and Puerto Ricans new to the mainland were trying to adapt and better themselves; but the Bowery was the bottom, and people who had descended to it were not expected to rise.

When my friend Sam Astrachan said he wanted to take me down there to meet a “character” I ought to write about, I assumed at first he meant a colorful Bowery bum. Now that he was about to be a published novelist, Sam was trying to help my budding career as a journalist. It was the summer of 1955, and after publishing my first story in
The Nation
, I was roaming the city in search of other subjects and doing research for C. Wright Mills the rest of the time.

I regarded New York not only as my new home, where I'd surely live the rest of my life (how could anyone of intelligence choose to live anyplace else?), but also as a fabulous source of stories, a bursting cornucopia of people and places to write about.

“So who is this character?” I asked Sam over the roar of the subway we took downtown.

“His name is Ammon Hennacy,” Sam shouted back, “and he's written a book called
Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist
.”

“How can he be both?” I wanted to know.

“Ask him,” said Sam with a spreading smile.

I nodded, clutching the strap of the subway car as we rocketed underground. We emerged downtown, transferred to a bus, and walked through the sweltering streets until we came to a ramshackle building at 223 Chrystie Street, which was the headquarters of the Catholic Worker movement. In addition to putting out a newspaper that cost a penny, the Worker gave food and shelter to the poor, but instead of calling itself a mission, like other such institutions in the Bowery, it was called a hospitality house. Unlike most of the missions, the Catholic Worker house did not demand any declaration of faith or singing of hymns from the three hundred people it fed every day in its bread line; they only had to be hungry.

Ammon Hennacy greeted me and Sam, and pulled out chairs for us to sit with him around an old desk in a big room where a motley group of men and women went in and out. There was a shifting population of some fifty people who lived in the house at any given time—a “staff” of idealists and intellectuals committed to voluntary poverty who shared rooms, food, and clothes with winos and drifters who were admitted on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Hennacy himself was indeed a character. A gray-haired man with only a few teeth left in his mouth, he stood on street corners from Union Square to Broadway selling copies of the
Catholic Worker
, spoke to Quaker meetings (he called them “Quakes”) and student groups at colleges—he told us he was going to talk to the Newman Club at Columbia, and then at Rutgers, before hitchhiking west.

Ammon had plenty of stories, and he loved to tell them: about the time he served in an Atlanta prison for refusing to register for the draft in 1917 on pacifist grounds, including seven months in solitary confinement for organizing a strike to protest the poor
prison food; and about his arrest only a month before I met him, for protesting a civil defense air-raid drill. Along with a group from the Catholic Worker house, and other pacifists and protesters who believed that atomic war was not only wrong but impossible to defend against—that practice drills only lulled us into a false sense of security—Ammon had gone to City Hall Park and passed out antiwar leaflets instead of taking shelter when the sirens sounded.

What impressed me most of all was that Hennacy, as a teenage Ohio farm boy, had joined the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World—he was a real live Wobbly, like those I'd read about in Dos Passos's
U.S.A
. and heard praised by C. Wright Mills as the only truly homegrown American radicals. As a Wobbly, Hennacy was an anarchist and considered himself a “non-church Christian,” but he'd liked the
Catholic Worker
when a priest in Milwaukee gave him a copy in 1936, and Hennacy wrote for it for sixteen years before finally becoming a Catholic. He kept his anarchist-pacifist views, and annually picketed the White House at tax time, selling copies of the
Worker
as he walked back and forth on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The most surprising part of all this was that Hennacy conveyed it with a sense of delight and humor. There was nothing heavy or dour about him, but rather a feeling of joy and discovery. Murray Kempton later told me he'd invited Ammon to his home in Princeton, where he made a hit with the children by showing them how to catch and hold a garter snake in the backyard.

I asked Hennacy how he could be a Catholic and an anarchist at the same time, and he smiled and said I had to read his book to find out. It so happened he had some copies for sale, which he pulled out of a drawer, and I bought one.

Sam told Ammon he had a book of his own coming out, a novel.

“What do you call it?” Hennacy asked.

“An End to Dying,
” Sam said with a certain dramatic tone.

“Well,” said Ammon, squinting and rubbing his chin, “that might be all right.”

We all burst out laughing.

Hennacy gave us copies of the latest
Catholic Worker
and introduced us to some of the people. There didn't seem to be much distinction between the ones who worked in the office or the kitchen and those who stood in the twice-daily bread lines. I learned that
not all the people who lived in the rooms or ate the food of the Catholic Worker were Catholics, or workers. Some, who agreed with the aims of the movement, were pacifists or anarchists. Some were former monks. Some were alcoholics. Some were just hungry.

Ammon introduced us to a quietly imposing woman without makeup who wore her gray hair in a braid around her head, like a peasant or one of those strong midwestern farm women painted by Grant Wood. She was Dorothy Day, cofounder of the
Catholic Worker
and the guiding spirit of the movement. Dorothy greeted us politely, if reservedly and rather sternly, and let us see a copy of the first issue of the
Worker
, published on May Day of 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression. When I read the first editorial, one that she wrote, I had to sit down at once and copy it into my notebook. It said the paper would not be restricted to the people of any one religion or political belief, any one color of skin or cut of clothes, but that it was

For those who are sitting on benches in the warm spring sunlight.

For those who are huddling in shelters trying to escape the rain.

For those who are walking the streets in the all but futile search for work.

For those who think there is no hope for the future, no recognition of their plight.

I felt a tinge from the power of the words, and of the woman who wrote them. When I looked up, she was gone.

I was both surprised and impressed to learn that Dorothy Day, this stern, dedicated woman who some people already thought was a candidate for sainthood—a real movement for her canonization would start several decades later—had been a true bohemian free spirit in the 1920s, part of the glamorous life of Greenwich Village, where she hung out with Eugene O'Neill at a bar called the Hell Hole. Malcolm Cowley wrote in one of my favorite books of the
time, a bible of twenties lore called
Exile's Return
, that all the gamblers in one of the Village bars that Dorothy frequented admired her because she could drink any one of them under the table.

As the twenties waned, Dorothy's concerns shifted from literature to politics, and she joined the IWW (a woman Wobbly!), served as an editor of
The Masses
, became a Catholic instead of a Communist, and reported on the hunger march in Washington in 1932, wondering what she could do to help the poor and homeless. She prayed, came home, and found Peter Maurin, a French peasant and migrant laborer who had a vision of helping the needy through hospitality houses (like the one on the Bowery), collective farms (like one that bore his name on Staten Island and supplied bread for the Chrystie Street house), round-table discussions, and a paper for the people in the street. Peter and Dorothy started the
Catholic Worker
in the kitchen of her apartment and sold the first issues themselves in Union Square.