New York in the '50s (19 page)

Going to the Village for the first time in 1952 was like walking into a dream. It not only looked different from the rest of New York—small, cozy brick or frame houses on winding streets rather than skyscrapers looming above long avenues—it sounded different too. There was a quietness about the place, almost a hush, compared to the taxi-blasting traffic, street crowds, and vendors of Broadway, midtown, and Morningside Heights. The special quiet of the Village suggested creation rather than commerce and conveyed a tone of mystery. That aura was added to by the places hidden away like the prizes on a treasure hunt. On Patchin Place, e. e. cummings still lived and wrote his lowercase poetry. Chumley's, the
restaurant-bar that began as a speakeasy in 1928, had never put its name on a sign outside, only a number on obscure Bedford Street. You opened the door to a warm room lit by a fireplace, where Village denizens drank and ate at wooden tables surrounded by a frieze of faded dust jackets on the walls, from books by the writers who frequented the place in the twenties and thirties. It was like walking into a wonderful secret and becoming part of it, taking your place in the play.

There was something of the same quality to Louis', off Sheridan Square, where you walked down a small flight of steps and drank at the bar or sat at a small table and ordered the house special of spaghetti and meatballs with tomato and lettuce salad for sixty-five cents (a bargain that held for a decade). That was the first meal I ate in the Village when Mike Naver, my Columbia classmate and native guide, took me downtown on the IRT. We sat at a window table, looking out through a soft rain in the Sunday dusk and watching the passersby, the real people who lived there, who might have been artists and writers, musicians and dancers, women with long hair and no makeup, men wearing sandals or boots and sometimes a beard. I imagined them writing and painting and making “free love,” which meant you didn't have to be married or engaged or even pinned, like fraternity guys and sorority girls—you only had to want to do it. The thought of all this sex and art and poetry made me dizzy with fear and delight. I hoped Mike didn't notice my hands were shaking as I methodically cut my spaghetti with knife and fork as we did back home in Indiana, a place that felt as remote now as Mars.

Though the Village at first seemed exotically foreign, there was also something familiar about it, the way a remembered dream is familiar, a sense that I had some deeper connection to it than that of a mere tourist. I don't know if I consciously thought then, “I'll live here someday,” but when I moved downtown in 1956, the act seemed not only obvious but inevitable: of course, where else in the world would I live?

The same thought occurred to many of my friends. Meg Greenfield, who became my neighbor on West 10th Street, says, “When I came back from Europe, it never occurred to me to live anyplace but the Village. I mean, where else would you live—in
Yorkville?
”

“I always wanted to live in the Village when I got to New York,” Calvin Trillin says, “not because it was bohemian but because it was more like the United States than the rest of New York. You could see the sky, you knew your next-door neighbors, and it was informal—you didn't have to get dressed up. And that's why the original bohemians came, because it was more like home.”

For some, of course, it seemed more like a nice place to visit. Jules Feiffer, whose hip cartoons of angst and analysis symbolized the Village of the fifties to readers of the
Village Voice
beginning in 1956, chose to live in the lower-key neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. He explained that the Village made him tense, a sentiment that might have been spoken by one of his elongated cartoon figures on an analyst's couch.

For most of my friends, the authentic literary aura of the Village, not only in legend but in the flesh of famous neighbors, was lure enough to make it irresistible. The poet and editor Harvey Shapiro moved to Patchin Place in 1953, the little enclave of gray painted brick houses around a small courtyard with a gate at the entryway. “We had a room and a half right opposite e. e. cummings,” Harvey remembers, “and I used to see him standing out at the gate with his sketchbook. He liked to draw and paint. He was one of the first poets to give readings of his work at colleges, and on spring nights, girls from Smith and Vassar would come into the courtyard and serenade him, or sometimes they'd shout up at his window, reciting lines from his poems: ‘how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death.'”

As if having cummings as a neighbor didn't provide enough atmosphere, Harvey had another literary star of the twenties in the apartment below, the novelist Djuna Barnes. “I was impressed,” Harvey says, “because I'd read
Nightwood
. She wore a cape and carried a cane, and she used to knock the cane on her ceiling, which was our floor, to complain about the noise.”

This enclave was threatened, Harvey recalls, when a new school was going to be built in the neighborhood. “They were either going to tear down Patchin Place or another site, called Rhinelander Gardens. All of us who lived in Patchin Place met in the cummings apartment, and e. e.'s wife, Marion, was one of the leaders of the campaign to save our street. We had petitions and signs we took all
over the neighborhood, and I guess we worked harder than the people in Rhinelander Gardens, because that was torn down and Patchin Place was saved.”

Later cummings himself was threatened with eviction by some bureaucratic zoning zealot who said there were not enough bathrooms in the apartment. A friend told Mary Perot Nichols, who wrote a story about it in the
Village Voice
, rallying support for the poet, and then Mary used her political clout: “I got to the housing commissioner, and I said if cummings was evicted I'd embarrass the Wagner administration—I'd really make it an issue. A deal was worked out whereby cummings got to stay in his apartment, but in return he had to go to City Hall and pose with Mayor Wagner, who of course got as much mileage out of it as he could, as the savior of the great poet.” (Saving cummings's apartment was great, but even more impressive was that Mary Nichols's investigative reporting saved Washington Square from being destroyed by the highway Robert Moses tried to carve through the middle of it.)

I never met cummings, though I sometimes saw him walking around the neighborhood, and I learned that one of my friends had set some of cummings's works to music. This enhanced the already amazing reputation of John Rawlings, the first person I knew who actually lived in Greenwich Village.

Rawlings seemed the perfect prototype of the kind of youth who came to the Village from the provinces. He had gone to my high school in Indianapolis and moved down to Jones Street after graduating from Yale a few years before I got out of Columbia.

A bit of an oddball by virtue of his physical stature as well as his precocious talent as a writer, musician, and artist, John had the courage and wit to flaunt his fragile-looking frame of six feet seven or so bony inches by bounding in front of the crowds at Shortridge High School football and basketball games. As our most conspicuous cheerleader, he clowned it up as he reached higher and with greater gusto than anyone else in the whole city, to pull down laughs as well as yells for the Blue Devils.

He wrote and composed the music for an act in the Shortridge Vaudeville spoofing ancient Egypt, called “My Mummy Done Ptolemy,” which earned him a trip to Hollywood during summer vacation to work on the screenplay for
Duel in the Sun
, a fifties hit
movie with Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck. At Yale he wrote music and poetry and graduated from the architecture school, then moved to Greenwich Village. Of course.

I had never been inside anyone's apartment in the Village until the time I visited Rawlings's place when I was still at Columbia. Before that, I had only seen what any tourist could see who had the price of that spaghetti and meatball special at Louis' bar, or a beer at Julius's, the popular hangout with cobwebs on the ceiling, or a ticket to the Circle in the Square Theatre to watch Jason Robards or Geraldine Page. Walking into Rawlings's apartment, you left the bourgeois world of home, with its overstuffed furniture and flocked walls, left the dull, predictable decor of dorm room bullfight posters and heavy, battered desks with wobbly stacks of books in corners. There was no clutter, and I automatically felt less encumbered myself as I entered a realm that was not especially large yet seemed to offer an abundance of space and light.

There was a Japanese tone in the spareness of white walls and the simple pallet on the floor. A circular shade made of tan paper enclosed the light bulb that hung from the ceiling. Instead of a desk, a plain pine door was set on two construction horses. The only decorative object was something else that hung from the ceiling, a contraption of many armatures that dangled from one another like a child's toy and moved slightly in the soft breeze from the window. John said it was a mobile, and was made by the friend from whom he sublet this apartment, a sculptor named Alexander Calder (I later met Sandy Calder at one of Rawlings's parties).

John was free to fling his long arms and legs wherever he pleased; there were no vases or table lamps to knock over, no gewgaws to scatter. The space was filled with talk of books, plays, movies, and poetry, talk of what Rawlings was doing now, which included not only his architectural drawings but also the work he'd begun at Yale of setting e. e. cummings's poems to music—with the sanction of the poet, who was now a friend and neighbor. John was also performing at a midtown nightclub, where he sang his own songs and accompanied himself on the piano, flailing his arms and fingers over the keyboard, accentuating his dramatic physique. He billed himself as the Playing Mantis.

Later John worked as a costume designer for Paul Taylor's dance
company, and Taylor praised him in his autobiography,
Private Domain
, as “one of the few people I've ever really collaborated with. He has an uncanny grasp of what the emerging dance is trying to be.” Once when Taylor showed Rawlings a new dance and asked what the performers should wear, John shielded his eyes in thought for a moment and murmured, “Bananas. I see bunches of large bananas.” The dance turned out to be
From Sea to Shining Sea
, a title that came from Rawlings as well. Taylor was so pleased with his collaborator, whom he called “the seven footer” (Rawlings was so thin he
seemed
that tall), that he gave him “a smooch” on the nearest thing he could reach—his necktie.

I came away from my first visit with Rawlings as impressed with him as Paul Taylor would be. I loved the free and open feeling of his Village apartment, which seemed to inspire creative thought and activity, and I was in awe of Rawlings's invention of himself as a unique creative and performing artist defying all the pressures of conformity that the current era was famous for exerting.

Our generation in the fifties needed the Village and all it stood for as much as the artists, writers, and rebels of preceding generations—maybe even more. If the mood of the country was to force everyone to conform, to look and dress like the man in the gray flannel suit, surely it was all the more important to have at least one haven where people were not only allowed but expected to dress, speak, and behave differently from the herd. This was a time when a beard might be regarded as a sign of subversion, or at least raised suspicion about the character of the person who wore it. When the writer Sara Davidson went as a teenager to Disneyland in the fifties, she and her otherwise well-dressed date were turned away because he had a beard; a Disney official explained that this was a place for families.

All the more essential that somewhere in the land was a place where a beard was a badge of honor. Beyond the symbolic freedom it represented was the deeper freedom to create that writers and artists found in the atmosphere of the Village. I had no desire to grow a beard, but I wanted to write books. My friends and I who went to the Village in the fifties felt the creative tradition of the place as an inspiration. We wanted to tap the power of it, absorb the literary heritage reflected by those dust jackets around the walls of
Chumley's, from books written by people who had talked and drunk at the very tables where we now sat. Supposedly Fitzgerald and Hemingway had drunk—or had been drunk—there, and James Joyce was said to have spent several months at a corner table, writing part of
Ulysses
.

Some of the 1920s crowd had already declared the Village dead, but generations of poets and painters had been saying that since it first became a bohemian center in the early 1900s. Floyd Dell, a writer friend of fellow Villager John Reed, thought the neighborhood had been ruined by becoming fashionable and commercialized during World War
One
. Yet even though earlier writers like Sinclair Lewis bemoaned the passing of the “real” Village before the First World War, it enjoyed its greatest heyday in the twenties, when Edna St. Vincent Millay was “burning the candle at both ends” and Eugene O'Neill was drinking Dorothy Day under the table at the Hell Hole while he recited Francis Thompson's poem “The Hound of Heaven.” The Lost Generation's literary chronicler, Malcolm Cowley, declared that the “real” Village wasn't ruined by commercialism until after World War
Two
.

My own Village friend Michael Harrington arrived from St. Louis in 1949 to find the place still flourishing with other “voluntary exiles from the middle class.” Discovering the “bohemia of talent” he had hoped for, Mike would later write in his autobiography,
Fragments of the Century
, “The Village didn't die till I got there.” Happily, he found the bohemian party we had all dreamed about back in the Midwest was still in progress.

The party was going strong—with Harrington one of its welcoming hosts in the back room of the White Horse Tavern—when I moved to the Village in 1956. Though the editor of
Partisan Review
, William Phillips, had expressed the old, familiar lament for “the death of bohemia” in his magazine's symposium on “Our Country, Our Culture” in 1952, citing the demise of the cold-water flat and the rise of modern apartment buildings, where rents became too steep for artists and writers, I was able to find my own affordable foothold in the Village.