New York in the '50s (20 page)

It wasn't easy. Reasonable rentals (forget about cheap) were still possible but damnably scarce, and apartment hunters, a fierce and ruthless breed, haunted the newsstands of Sheridan Square and
over on Sixth Avenue and 8th Street for the earliest copies of the weeklies, the
Voice
and the
Villager
, and lined up at night to grab the next day's early edition of the
New York Times
, then dashed to a phone to try to make a deal, or be on the doorsteps of realtors or landlords at dawn.

With diligent effort I was able to grab a single room the shape of a cell (plus kitchenette and bath), with bars on the window, in a dilapidated building on Jones Street across from Rawlings's sublet. The rent was $70, only $15 more than the windowless basement on West 77th Street I lived in during my last semester at Columbia. The location, a few blocks from Sheridan Square, was great, but the jail-like ambience of the “studio” itself was so oppressive that my good friend Ted the Horse took one look around, assessed the apartment and my own black mood, left over from a broken love affair, and said, “Wake, you gotta get out of here.”

We figured we could do better by sharing the rent on a bigger place, and gleefully grabbed a two-room apartment at the corner of 10th and Bleecker for $110 a month, a price neither of us could afford alone but which became a good deal when divided in half. It boasted a separate living room and bedroom, a kitchenette, and a standard-size bathroom. The building even had a self-service elevator, a feature so luxurious I was fearful that my friends who lived in five- and six-floor walk-ups would think I had sold out.

We were on the top floor of our six-story building and could climb to the roof for a view of the Village. The roof had no deck or railing, it was simply black tar paper, yet we took our friends or dates up there with drinks at night to see the lights of the city, feeling we owned it. We held our glasses out toward the city, chanting John Reed's purple poem that we parodied at the same time we felt its spell: “Who that has known thee but shall burn / In exile till he come again / To do thy bitter will, O stern / Moon of the tides of men!” We christened our new apartment “The Towers,” the tag by which it was known for the next four years as new friends came and went, staying for weekends or weeks or a summer, joining the Village party that started half a century before.

If the gangly, offbeat genius John Rawlings might well have been voted my high school's Most Likely to Emigrate to Greenwich Village, my roommate Ted the Horse would surely be the last person
anyone predicted to follow that route. He was not just a successful ladies' man and jock, but a natural leader (president of his high school class by a landslide) with a quick mind. Those who knew him in high school and at Wabash College in Indiana already were touting him as a future governor of the Hoosier state.

How did a guy like that get to Greenwich Village instead? By way of Japan.

The Horse was stationed there after serving in the Army in Korea, and like many young men of our generation who got a glimpse of Japanese culture for the first time, he began to question the assumptions of his own society, exchanging the memorized answers that brought approval at church and school for the
koans
posed by ancient masters that perhaps had no answers at all but whose contemplation might bring not simply knowledge but the ultimate prize,
satori
.

The enemies we defeated in World War II became the sages of youth in my generation, as the translated catchwords of their culture were not only spread by returning GIs like the Horse, but popularized by our principal literary seer, J. D. Salinger. His fictional Glass family of whiz kids added to the conversations at New York parties a question so popular it became a form of intellectual graffiti, which the Horse inscribed on the wall above our bathroom mirror on 10th Street: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

After his time in Japan, the Horse didn't want to settle down back home in Indiana; he didn't want to settle at all for the circumscribed, comfortable life laid out for him there, with the split-level home, the two-car garage, the 2.7 children, and the gold watch at retirement. He wanted to seek the answers to the big riddles, so he left the safe world behind and went to New York on the GI Bill to study at Columbia. He brought a batch of short stories he had started writing in Japan and got a job working on a live TV show (a “Max Liebman Special”), where he began to learn the skills that would enable him later to start his own film company. He explored the Village like a soldier on reconnaissance—questioning, searching, talking—and we ended up, when the bars closed at three in the morning, at Jim Atkins's hash house in Sheridan Square, wolfing down scrambled eggs and french fries. Downing the last of the
steaming coffee, Ted the Horse would end the evening with the ritual question: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Maybe Ivan Gold knew.

One of the writing stars of Columbia had just come back from Japan himself. He had stayed on after serving in Korea, to learn the Japanese language, tutor English, and continue the literary career he'd begun in college. He'd returned to his parents' apartment on the Lower East Side but soon moved to the Village. Even though it was just across town from the neighborhood where he grew up, the significance of leaving home and coming to the Village was as great for Ivan as it was for me and the Horse. I introduced Ivan to my roommate and they became friends.

My Columbia friends who were native New Yorkers were just as much exiles as my high school buddies from Indianapolis when they came to live in the Village. It was the same for Sam Astrachan from the Bronx, Sarel Eimerl from England, Meg Greenfield from Seattle, or anyone in the other shifting groups of friends who lived in that liberated zone below 14th Street. (That was the border; you didn't have to put on a tie or get dressed up unless you went north of it.) We made up only one of countless circles of young people with common interests and outlook, sharing the camaraderie of pioneers living where we did not by the accident of birth or marriage or corporate or military transfer, but by our own choice and declaration, as committed to it as Brigham Young when he said, “This is the place!”

I knew it for sure the day I looked up at the arch in Washington Square and for the first time read the words there. It was a quote from George Washington to his troops, but it seemed a slogan for those of us who had come to live in that neighborhood: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hands of God.”

We all had a group identity (at least one, maybe more, some of them overlapping) within the larger identity of being Villagers. “I was part of a group of poets who lived in the Village and Brooklyn Heights,” Harvey Shapiro recalls. “Jean Garrigue was
the
poet. I loved her poetry—we all did, and we all sort of gathered around
her. There was May Swenson, Leslie Katz, Jane Mayhall, Ruth Hirshberger, and Arthur Gregor.”

Calvin Trillin lived on Jane Street, and his own circle of friends had more of a journalistic bent: “I was part of a group of writers who played basketball at a court on Gansevoort Street. There was Victor Navasky, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Dick ‘Swish' Lingeman—because he was from Indiana he was a good shot—and for a while LeRoi Jones played. We called the court the Field of Honor, and we had a banquet every year where we gave awards, like the Roy Cohn Award for the Most Improved Jewish Player.”

Young mothers also had their own groups, with their own interests and outlook. “There were lots of mothers with children in the Village in the fifties,” Mary Nichols says. “The group of mothers I was friends with used to sit in Washington Square Park and read Dostoevsky and sneer at what we called the Lamb Chop Set—they were also the Nylon Blouse Set—who lived on lower Fifth Avenue and were always talking about what they were going to have for dinner.”

My friends and I wouldn't consider the Lamb Chop Set “real” Villagers, for they didn't share our bohemian outlook but simply liked the real estate. They were like our parents and friends back home, who didn't care about the same things we did.

The parents, friends, and neighbors we had left behind, whether on the Lower East Side or Indianapolis, in Mike Harrington's St. Louis or James Baldwin's Harlem, May Swenson's Utah or Robert Phelps's Ohio, were not really interested in trying to find out the answer to questions like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” If asked, they'd probably tell you it was nothing at all. To us, it was everything.

Rejecting the answers we were given in childhood, turning our backs on our roots and religion, we searched in books and poems, on analysts' couches and lovers' beds, and most of all, inside those shrines of contemplation and conversation, our second homes any night we wished until three the next morning: the bars of the Village. Everyone had his or her favorite, but for writers, the one place where you could always find a friend, join a conversation, relax and feel you were part of a community was the White Horse.

TO THE TABLES AT THE WHITE HORSE

“The birds did warble from every tree

The song they sang was old Ireland free
”

It was in the back room of the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street that I learned and sang songs of Irish rebellion as if they were the anthems of my own and my friends' personal struggles. In a way they were, for I'd never been to Ireland and knew next to nothing of its history or politics except that it seemed to be in a continuous state of rebellion against oppression, and my friends and I identified with the Irish as underdogs battling the mighty British Empire. We regulars in the back room thought of ourselves as underdogs and rebels in Eisenhower's America, and so we lustily joined in the songs, sometimes led by the Clancy Brothers (they were real Irishmen and understood the whole thing), who made the White Horse their headquarters.

The Horse was like a social club or informal fraternity, and veterans took pride in telling something of the history of the place to novices. On one of my first visits a habitué volunteering as host showed me the table where Dylan Thomas, one of the legendary patrons, had his last drink (the shot that killed him?). My host then pointed out the window to St. Vincent's Hospital, up the street, and explained with hushed reverence that there the great Welsh poet was taken to die at age thirty-nine. The proximity of the tavern to the hospital seemed a real convenience, giving assurance to a newcomer that if he, too, were to drink himself to oblivion at one of these historic tables, an emergency room was not far away.

I was twenty-three at the time, and the whole thing seemed not only tragic but glamorous and wise, for life after forty sounded so far off as to seem superfluous, and most great poets died young anyway, didn't they? Whenever I could, I tried to get a seat at Dylan Thomas's “last table” and told the story to impress people new to the place, especially girls. Sometimes I took a date there and then back to my apartment to play her my Caedmon record of Thomas reciting his passionate poetry. As seductive as any record of Sinatra
singing “In the Wee Small Hours” or even the sexy June Christy throatily crooning “Something Cool” was the poet himself telling us not to go gentle into that good night.

I always wondered how Thomas had discovered the White Horse in the first place, which before he came was mainly known as a longshoremen's hangout and had no literary aura at all. An old-time Village friend told me the novelist David Markson, who wrote
Springer's Progress, The Ballad of Dingus Magee
, and
Wittgenstein's Mistress
, was the one who first brought the Welshman to the bar on Hudson Street, but Markson says it was the other way around—it was Thomas who took
him
to the White Horse.

“I was a graduate student at Columbia when Dylan Thomas gave a reading there in 1952,” Markson remembers. “I went backstage because I wanted to see a real writer, up close and in the flesh. I don't know where I got the chutzpah, but I asked him if he wanted to have some drinks with a couple of would-be writers at the West End bar. He said he had to go to a party first, given by the critic William York Tyndall, who taught at Columbia, but he said, ‘If you wait, I'll be out of there soon.' We didn't think he'd really come to drink with us, but he did.

“The next time I saw him I was supposed to meet him at a bar next door to the Chelsea Hotel, where he was staying, and he said, ‘Let's go down to the White Horse.' I went there a number of times with him, and people would be sitting around staring at him—and then at me, wondering who the hell I was because I was with Dylan. People would be eight deep at the bar, all because Dylan Thomas was there.”

John Malcolm Brinnin, the poet and teacher who escorted Thomas on his American reading tour and wrote about it in
Dylan Thomas in America
, says it was really the Scottish poet Ruthven Todd who introduced Thomas to the White Horse. Brinnin explains that “the British who came to New York liked the White Horse because it reminded them of a pub. Before Todd took Dylan to the Horse, I'd been trying to keep him in check, take him to places like the Blarney Stone, which wasn't all that interesting, didn't have a lot of people for him to talk to, but when he got to the White Horse it was all over.”

Thomas's patronage of the White Horse is immortalized now on
the bar's menu, which boasts, “Over 100 years old, the White Horse Tavern first found favor as the favorite watering hole of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. (In fact, his final collapse came a few staggering steps from the front door.) The White Horse remains a fascinating collection of history, color, charm, and character …” There's a plaque on the wall now indicating the table where the poet had his last drink, but in the old days it was one of an insider's privileges to
know
, and reveal the sacred spot to newcomers.