New York in the '50s (21 page)

The literary fame of the bar was enhanced soon after Thomas started drinking there, when one of the young novelists to emerge after World War II, Vance Bourjaily (
The End of My Life
was an influential novel of the period), organized a regular Sunday afternoon gathering of writers at the White Horse. One of them was Norman Mailer.

“The group didn't have a name,” Mailer recalls, “but on any given Sunday we got together—probably twenty times or more. There was Vance, and me, Calder Willingham, John Aldridge, John Clellon Holmes, even Herman Wouk came a few times—he was the most successful author we knew. The only woman who was part of the group was Rosalind Drexler. She was a lady wrestler as well as a writer, and we were agog with the idea we had a woman wrestler in our group. It was like she was a creature from a carnival—we were scared stiff, knowing that if she wanted to she could throw any one of us across the room. She was bright, and she realized we'd come to gawk. In this quiet voice she told us we really didn't care about her writing, and she wasn't going to come anymore. The group finally petered out, I think because there were no themes, no literary discussion, no ongoing arguments. Vance was disappointed—he had more of the collegial spirit than I did.”

The White Horse wasn't the only popular bar in the Village, of course. In those days people made the rounds, going to several bars for an evening's entertainment, but it seemed the Horse was on the route of everyone I knew, and usually served as the final stop, the high point of the evening.

Art d'Lugoff, who started the Village Gate nightclub, says, “I used to make the rounds of the bars—Julius's for those fat hamburgers on toast, then the San Remo, the Kettle of Fish, and the White Horse. Booze was a social thing. The bar scene wasn't just to
get drunk. It was like the public square in a town or a sidewalk café in Paris—comradely meeting and talking.”

The
Village Voice
columnist and reporter Mary Nichols also made the rounds. “When I still lived in East Harlem with the Swarthmore graduates in the el cheapo apartment, before I worked for the
Voice
, I took the El to the Village every night and went to the San Remo, where my friends hung out. We had a regular route, from the Remo to Minetta's to Louis' and then the White Horse.”

David Amram, the musician who managed to cross comfortably between the worlds of writing and painting, frequented the Cedar Tavern. “I met de Kooning, Rivers, Kline, and Alfred Leslie there. The White Horse was all Dylan Thomas fans and people who liked writing. Also, I met the Clancy Brothers there and began playing Irish music, backing them up.”

Ed Fancher, the cofounder and original publisher of the
Village Voice
, says, “There was a smaller bohemian world in the fifties—the writers were at the White Horse or the Remo, the artists were at the Cedar. There's nothing comparable today.”

Most often when I went to the White Horse I was waved to a table by Mike Harrington, the author and activist who served as the informal host of an ongoing seminar on culture and politics, dispensing information and opinion interspersed with great anecdotes about left-wing labor leaders and colorful factional fights of political splinter groups that I could never keep straight, with exotic designations like Schactmanites, Sweezyites, Browderites, Musteites, and Cochranites, not to speak of Trotskyites, Socialist-Laborites, and “Yipsuls” (of the YPSL, or Young People's Socialist League).

The added charm and fascination of hearing all this radical political exotica from Mike Harrington was that in looks, voice, and manner he could have passed for an older version of Huck Finn, or even Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. This was the era in which McCarthyism had brought about the fear that anything left of the mainstream of politics or ideology was—that ugly word—un-American. But here was Mike, a lanky, straightforward guy with freckles, a boyish grin, and broomstraw hair, speaking in a strong Missouri twang, continuing in a time of conformity the great American tradition of questioning the status quo, caring about the underdog, challenging the powers that be. Had it not been for Mike's
taking over the nearly moribund Socialist youth factions, forming the Young Socialist League in 1954 and leading with dignity and intelligence the Socialist movement in America until his death in 1989, it is hard to imagine that tradition surviving the fifties.

Mike lived and worked for a while at the Catholic Worker hospitality house, and the young idealists and intellectuals who were drawn to the place joined Mike's table at the Horse after the Friday night sessions on Chrystie Street. When he became the head of the YSL, the people who heard him speak and lead those meetings also followed him to the Horse.

One night Mike was engaged in a lively colloquy with a Yale professor named Robert Bone, who wrote for
Dissent
and shunned the Whiffenpoofs for the Clancy Brothers at the White Horse whenever he could escape New Haven. He and Mike were discussing the arcane factions of the Spanish civil war—as popular a topic here as the Irish rebellion—when they noticed that two young women none of us knew had appeared at the big table and seemed obviously in the dark.

It was not all that common for girls to show up at the Horse unless they were part of a group like the Catholic Worker or the YSL and knew the regulars, or were brought here on a date by a man; these young women were by themselves and new on the scene. Mike graciously asked what they did, and they said they were telephone operators. There was an uneasy silence as everyone tried to figure out how they happened to wander into this bar, and how we could make them feel at home, since attractive girls showing up in the back room was a happy and welcome event. What could they be told that would make them feel part of a discussion on the intricacies of the Spanish civil war? It was painfully clear the subject was about as familiar to them as nuclear physics.

Bob Bone suddenly brightened and broke the awkward silence: “Telephone operators! Why, telephone operators played a key role in the fighting in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war. Franco's troops were trying to cut off all communications, but the workers at the Barcelona telephone exchange kept the lines open in spite of being under attack.” The men smiled with relief and approval, and the girls perked up, honored by this revelation of the noble behavior of their Catalonian sisters. Pints of arf 'n' arf were ordered for
them, and soon the table broke into some song of Irish rebellion, which cut the tension altogether and allowed everyone to relax. (In the back room, after many pints of ale, the Irish rebellion and the Spanish civil war seemed to blend together in one grand battle of noble underdogs against tyrant oppressors, waged from the dawn of history, and any rousing song of freedom stood just as well for the brave lads of Spain or Ireland, either one—or for any of us who had left home to come to the Village.)

I was asked to write book reviews for
Commonweal
, the liberal Catholic magazine, when I drank with its editors in the back room of the Horse, where they sat at a table with Harrington or at one of their own, in a kind of continuous editorial meeting. I never knew exactly where the office of
Commonweal
was—somewhere downtown, I thought—but I considered the White Horse its true headquarters. It was there I met the editors Jim Finn, John Cogley, Wilfred “Bill” Sheed, and a friendly man described by the
Village Voice
writer Seymour Krim as “a tolerant and sympathetic book editor named Bill Clancy.”

I could echo Krim's experience with Clancy, who, Krim said, “sensed I was not a native or orthodox critic but nevertheless brought out of me some of the best I could do because he had a taste for fullness of expression rather than the narrower, stricter conception of criticism then at its height.” Krim felt that as a Jew, “even writing for a Roman Catholic magazine like
Commonweal
I literally had much more freedom of expression than in
Commentary
.… It took the life out of a young American-Jewish writer to do a piece for them.”

As an unaffiliated
WASP
, I myself enjoyed a sense of freedom when I later began writing for both the Catholic and the Jewish magazines. The publication I would have felt stifled writing for in those days was the
Indianapolis Star
!

I'd been following the jazzy, electric prose of Seymour Krim in the
Voice;
he used his personal experience as material—often like raw wounds—to comment on the literature, culture, and politics of the time. Krim was an unsung father of what was later called the New Journalism, and his pieces from the fifties were collected at the end of the decade in
Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer
, which had a real influence on other writers. He always worked out on the frontier
of trends and lingo; he coined the term “radical chic” before Tom Wolfe made it famous, and his essay “Making It” preceded Podhoretz's book of that title. Krim's souped-up style was similar to Norman Mailer's nonfiction riffs, which were also appearing in the
Voice
in those days. In a foreword to
Cannoneer
Mailer wrote: “Krim in his odd honest garish sober grim surface is a child of our time. I think sometimes, as a matter of style, he is
the
child of our time, he is New York in the middle of the 20th century, a city man, his prose as brilliant upon occasion as the electronic beauty of our lights, his shifts and shatterings of mood as searching and true as the grinding wheels in a subway train. He has the guts of New York, old Krim.”

I met Seymour Krim at the White Horse, in the most embarrassing “literary encounter” of my life, one that almost turned into a brawl. Surprisingly, for a bar of steadily drinking patrons, continually engaged in passionate discussions, there weren't many bad scenes, and only a few times I know of when fights were even threatened.

Murray Kempton had quoted something from Dostoevsky in his column in the
Post
that day, and I was holding forth on how great it was. Just as I was reaching a crescendo of praise, I heard a high, squeaky female voice screech from a few tables away: “I just can't
stand
Murray Kempton!”

When I heard the slur, a kind of calm, trancelike state came over me. I got up from my chair, took my nearly full pint, walked with deliberate steps to the table where the woman sat with several other people, raised my glass above her, and poured the contents over her head. As she screamed, I calmly walked back to my own table and took up the conversation as if nothing had happened. In my trance, I did not expect any further response. I somehow thought I had simply taken the only appropriate action called for under the circumstances.

I was surprised when two pairs of hands yanked me roughly from my seat. Two men who'd been sitting with the screecher had come to defend her honor. We started shouting at each other: “Why you goddam—who the hell do you think you are!” Then one of the men, a tall, intellectual-looking guy wearing horn-rims, grabbed me by the collar and said, “I know who you are, Wakefield. I've seen you around. I never thought you'd—” Now I grabbed his collar
and demanded, “Who the hell are you?” When he told me he was Seymour Krim, I said, “No kidding? I read your stuff in the
Voice
,” and he said, “Yeah? I read your stuff in
The Nation
.” We were still gripping each other by the collar and snarling through our teeth. “Great piece you did on Bellevue,” I said, and he said, “I dug the one you did on Kerouac,” but everyone was watching and we couldn't release ourselves from our roles as ferocious antagonists. We both admitted later how relieved we were when a big waiter came over and broke us apart, which allowed us to sit down without losing face.

Krim became a friend in the Village whose work I read and enjoyed discussing over beers at the Horse, and over veal scaloppine at John's, a marvelous restaurant he introduced me to on East 10th Street. It was handy to Krim's dinky, book-erupting studio apartment on the same street where, to the everlasting amusement of his friends, he once entertained Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward by turning a couple of garbage cans upside down for them to sit on—the only seats in the place.

What Mailer described as Krim's “odd honest garish sober grim surface” was created in part by those thick black-rimmed glasses beneath a head of matted-down wavy black hair. He always seemed to be wearing the same black corduroy sport jacket with a thin tie, as if he were a hip diplomat of the literary fringe come to negotiate his ideas with you. Behind that formal surface was a healthy sense of humor that broke out in his prose as well as his conversation, in quirky, jazzy phrasings like the description of his friend Milton Klonsky, a legendary Village poet-genius of the forties, who Krim claimed had “an IQ that would stutter your butter.”

I felt a bond with Krim because we had both known the urge and passion to write early on. He started publishing in high school—DeWitt Clinton in the Bronx—where he wrote for the school magazine,
The Magpie
, and coedited a more avant-garde mimeographed sheet called
expression
(“Man, were we swingingly lowercase back in 1939,” he later said). We also shared a devotion to the Village, where Krim, a decade older than I, had moved in 1943 at age twenty-one, thrilled to find a “one-room bohemian fantasy on Cornelia Street.” One of his literary heroes, James Agee, had lived on
that street, and Krim as a high school student made a pilgrimage there to meet and interview him.

In an odd and unexpected way, Krim's love of the Village and his feeling for it as home saved him from a downward personal spiral that started in the summer of 1955, when he experienced what we called then a “crack-up” or “nervous breakdown.” He describes in his unforgettable essay “The Insanity Bit” how he was handcuffed and taken to Bellevue, and sent from there to “a private laughing academy in Westchester,” where he was given insulin shock treatments. A few months after his release he confessed to a psychologist a suicide attempt he'd planned but didn't carry out, and was dispatched “this time to another hedge-trimmed bin in Long Island,” where “electric shock clubbed my good brain into needless unconsciousness” (as it did to some of the great Negro jazz musicians of the time, damaging or altogether destroying their ability, as in the case of Bud Powell).