New York in the '50s (22 page)

When, after the battering of electric shock, the house psychiatrists battered at Krim's belief in his own powers of reason, intelligence, and talent—one of them wanted him to, Krim wrote, “accept my former life, which had produced some good work, as a lie to myself”—and tried to get him to “equate sanity with the current clichés of adjustment,” he was almost, for the second time, “humbled, ashamed, willing to stand up before the class and repeat the middle-class credo of limited expressiveness.” He might have been incarcerated for many more years, or come out so robbed of his beliefs that he wouldn't have written again, but the road to his recovery of confidence came when one of the house psychiatrists finally went too far. The shrink described Greenwich Village as a “psychotic community.”

They might pin some label of nuttiness on
him
, but not the Village! When he heard that, he “saw with sudden clarity that
insanity
and
psychosis
can no longer be respected as meaningful definitions—but are used by limited individuals in positions of social power to describe ways of behaving and thinking that are alien, threatening, and
obscure
to them.”

After that Krim wasn't taking any more. He argued for his “basic right to the insecurity of freedom,” and with the help of a friend
who “did the dirty infighting,” got his release from the sanatorium. A year later he brought a woman psychiatrist friend to the San Remo, one of his favorite Village bars, and she told him with a straight face that it reminded her of “the admissions ward at Bellevue,” where she had been an intern.

Krim felt the “incommunicable helplessness” of the gap between her and a well-known poet whom he'd had a drink with two weeks before at the Remo: “The poet was at home, or at least the heat was off there; while the psychiatrist felt alien and had made a contemptuous psycho-sociological generalization.” Yet both the poet and the psychiatrist were “intelligent and honest human beings, each of whom contributed to my life.”

To the benefit of all concerned—especially the fans of his work and the many writers, like myself, whom Krim gave so much help as a friend, editor, and reviewer—he remained at the Remo, the White Horse, and other such havens of the Village, never again to return to Bellevue.

“The birds did warble from every tree

The song they sang was old Ireland free
”

If at Chumley's nostalgia-filled bar you saw book jackets and photographs of authors from the twenties, at the White Horse you saw in the flesh the writers of books you had read just a week or a year before. One night, through the haze of smoke in the back room, I recognized the face of an author I'd recently seen on a book, not on the back but filling the whole front cover.

What had struck me when I first saw the photo were the eyes. They were large and looked very wise, older than the face in which they were set. There was a sadness about them, but more than that, a power and strength that survived whatever blows—physical or psychic—had caused the deep shadows around them, giving them the bruised look of a fighter who'd been punched. It might, in fact, have been the face of a fighter, a young black man with a thin mustache who had boxed his way out of the ghetto. He had actually done just that, but with words rather than fists. I knew the name that was set in yellow letters across the top of the black-crowned head in the photograph: James Baldwin. His face stared up at me
from the book of essays,
Notes of a Native Son
, on a rack of new paperbacks at the bookstore in Sheridan Square in 1958.

I picked up the book, flipped through the Autobiographical Notes at the beginning, and was as quickly transfixed by the writing as I had been by the eyes on the cover. The words, like the eyes, burned with a special intensity. Though I didn't spend money lightly on books, or on anything else in those days, and this was one of those large, expensive paperbacks priced at $1.25, I bought it and rushed back to my apartment to read it, alive with that heightened excitement of having discovered something so powerful I sensed it could change my own thinking and writing, my very life.

The direct simplicity of the prose, the radiant clarity of it, delivered a message I adopted as a creed. The final sentence of that blazing introduction was not about race relations or what was then called the Negro Question. It seemed to be about how I, as a young journalist aspiring to write novels, might try to conduct myself as a human being in a murderous and corrupting world: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

There was the author at the next table.

He was older than the face in the picture. The rather scraggly mustache was gone, and he looked more mature and self-assured. He was thirty-three at the time, and I was twenty-five, a gap that made him seem like a wise elder. His big, staring eyes were like a trademark, an appropriate symbol for the way his unrelenting gaze as a writer penetrated the walls and disguises of a whole social structure. The eyes seemed almost to protrude from his face in a look of unsparing inquiry. (Later, I was shocked to learn that as a child Baldwin had been told he was ugly, and believed it; I thought he was beautiful.) When he turned those eyes on me, I felt that he could see through me, into my mind, read my thoughts, and that I would never be able to avoid or even shade the truth in his presence.

One of the regulars introduced me. Jimmy, he was called, which surprised me. The diminutive didn't seem to suit his natural dignity, the way he held himself so straight, alert, giving his rather small frame a sense of the greater stature he had as a writer and as a man. There was an authority about him, not aggressiveness or pomposity but the earned authority of the Whitman line he quoted
as the epigraph of
Giovanni's Room:
“I was the man, I suffered, I was there.” You felt that authority in his prose, in the sureness of it, and in his own speech, so that his use of slang or idiom, which would have sounded pretentious or cute from anyone else, seemed right coming from Baldwin. He was the only man I've ever known who could call me “baby” without making me wince.

At the time I met him I was writing
Island in the City
. Baldwin had read some of my pieces in
The Nation
about the emerging civil rights struggle in the South, and he expressed an appreciative interest in my Spanish Harlem book, rather than the condescension or challenge that a black writer born in Harlem might well have presented to a white outsider presuming to report on that scene. He treated me not as an interloper but as a like-minded colleague, a fellow writer. In the same spirit, he also invited me to come by his apartment in the Village and have a drink some afternoon.

Baldwin lived on Horatio Street, in a high-ceilinged studio that was clean and sparsely furnished—all I remember is a couch and a hi-fi set, bare hardwood floors and tall windows. He always offered bourbon, my favorite drink at the time, and we would sip it with ice and talk about Harlem, the South, the racial madness, and politics, but mainly we talked about writing. After reading
Notes of a Native Son
, I had quickly devoured Baldwin's two published novels,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
, a powerhouse family drama of growing up black, and
Giovanni's Room
, about a middle-class American boy in Paris who discovers his homosexuality.

I showed Baldwin the pieces I was writing, and he read them and gave me encouragement, not always in an immediate way, with a “That's good” or “I like it,” but sometimes in a later conversation on another subject, when his praise would surprise me. I went to him once full of enthusiasm for a book by John Reed I hadn't read before, praising Reed's prose and his compassion for the people he wrote about, and Baldwin turned those great eyes on me and said, “But that's
you
.”

Baldwin and I agreed in our literary preferences, and I loved hearing him extol the virtues of Henry James and deflate what he felt was the overblown literary reputation of the beat writers. He was especially disturbed by Kerouac's romantic portrayal of Negro life, and said once of such a passage in a Kerouac novel, raising his
eyebrows with disdain, “He had better not read that from the stage of the Apollo Theater.” Referring sardonically to their infatuation with Zen Buddhism and the teachings of D. T. Suzuki, Baldwin liked to refer to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and their followers as “the Suzuki Rhythm Boys.”

Sometimes he passed on advice he had gotten from someone else and had adopted for himself. Once, he came back from giving a talk at Howard University extremely stirred by a conversation with a venerable Negro professor he admired on the faculty. The professor had told him always to keep in mind that the work of a writer was first of all to write—rather than to speak or picket or campaign for causes—and that his primary goal in life should be to end up with his own “shelf of books.” Baldwin was constantly asked to lend his name and presence to civil rights and other causes he deeply believed in, and he was often torn by the question of how much time to devote to those endeavors. The counsel of the old Howard professor had seemed like a validation of his own wish to put writing first. In giving me the advice, he was reinforcing it for himself as he nodded, pointed a finger at my chest, and said, “Remember, baby. A shelf of books—a whole
shelf
.”

Around five o'clock on those afternoons of our talks, the buzzer would sound and other friends would arrive. By eight a Village party of talk and music and drinking would be in full swing, and ended only when the host announced it was time for dinner. He would lead us across the street to El Faro, a Spanish restaurant, where he would commandeer a big table. Baldwin usually paid the bill with a personal check, and those who could afford it tossed in some money.

The talk was always good with Baldwin—he'd been a preacher as a teenager in Harlem, and he spoke in the cadence of biblical prose and with the clarity of a musical instrument, which matched the clarity of his writing. There was no more brilliant conversationalist, but the talk was not always intense and literary; it was often just fun. Baldwin had a delightful sense of humor and a joy that seemed to explode when his face cracked open in an enormous smile and hearty laughter. He could express mountainous irony with a slight upward shift of his eyes, as he did the night we were at a party and he excused himself to phone an editor who was trying
to sign up his next book. “It seems I'm in a Madison Avenue price war,” he explained, making that tilt of his eyes that spoke his disdain for the whole commercial literary machine.

When he told me the name of the editor he was calling, I winced and said I hoped he wouldn't sign with that man. He had done gratuitous harm to a friend of mine, and he didn't like me either. Baldwin beckoned me to the phone as he made the call and said to the editor, “Hello, this is Jimmy. I'm calling from a party in the Village. I'm here with my friend Dan Wakefield.” He grinned, and I smiled back and raised my glass. It was a cold winter night and Baldwin was wearing one of those Russian-style fur hats—he had kept it on after we'd come inside—and he looked mischievous and happy, like a kid.

Unhappily, even in the Village Baldwin could not escape the reality of racial paranoia and hatred. One night he went to a bar down the street from the White Horse called the Paddock, where working people hung out, and sat drinking in a booth with Dick Bagley, the cameraman who shot
On the Bowery
and was one of the White Horse regulars, and two girls of their acquaintance. Some of the patrons were enraged at the sight of a white girl sitting next to a Negro, and they attacked Baldwin and Bagley, beating them brutally.

Baldwin later reminisced about that nightmare episode when he met up with Mike Harrington in Paris in 1963. Jimmy remembered squeezing himself into a ball under the bar as one of the men tried to kick him in the genitals. It was at that moment, Baldwin said, that he knew he would never be safe in white America.

Nor was it only blacks who experienced the violence of “neighbors” in the Village who regarded all bohemians as suspicious interlopers. The hostility toward all nonconformists was heightened during the McCarthy fervor of the fifties, when mostly Irish kids from the surrounding area made raids on the Horse, swinging fists and chairs, calling the regulars “Commies and faggots.”

The White Horse was patronized by Irish longshoremen as well as bohemian writers and politicos, and one night Old Ernie, the owner, asked Mike Harrington if he couldn't have his friends sing their radical songs in French or German instead of English so the other customers wouldn't be able to understand the words and get upset.

Another night the Horse closed early, so Mike and his pals moved on to a bar around the corner. They were singing their labor songs when the trade union regulars who drank at the place took the sentiments the wrong way—and the White Horse guys were merely expressing their solidarity with the workers! When the union men threatened Mike and his friends, who they thought were Commies, the owner had to call the police, and the guys from the Horse escaped through the back door.

There was also a long history of hostility to the bohemians from the Italian residents, who made up the largest ethnic group of the Village. When Seymour Krim first moved to Cornelia Street with his girlfriend, he confessed that he was “scared of the Italian street-threat that used to psychically de-ball all us violin-souled Jewish boys who had fled downtown.”

My Italian superintendent on Jones Street banged on my door one morning to yell at me for throwing a party for “beatniks” the previous night. I angrily shouted back that one of the guests was my minister friend from East Harlem, the
Reverend
Norman Eddy, and this quieted him down. What the super really hated me for was the doe-eyed girl he saw emerging from my place in the mornings. He had been her pal and protector when she had first moved in down the street, in another of his buildings, but he stopped speaking to her when he saw her coming from my place after spending the night.