New York in the '50s (25 page)

Among my distinguished fellows at Bread Loaf were two women writers who became good friends when I returned to New York. May Swenson was a poet who lived a few blocks away from me on Perry Street, and the novelist Jane Mayhall lived with her husband, Leslie Katz, in Brooklyn Heights, which I thought of as a suburb of Greenwich Village, a quiet bedroom community where writers lived in reasonably priced apartments near a pleasant boardwalk with a view of the water.

May worked part-time as an editor at New Directions, another avant-garde publisher in the Village. She was from Logan, Utah, and she had a plain, straightforward western manner, speaking in a flat, spare voice almost without accent, sometimes punctuated by a smoker's hack and a raspy laugh. Her face was open, framed by short, straight brown hair with bangs, set with powerful, unflinching eyes. She was the only person I've ever met who made gum chewing seem a serious endeavor, a way of intensifying her concentration, which was focused on whatever you were saying—maybe even what you were thinking. The way that May looked at you, she seemed to be looking
into
you as well, not because she was prying but because she cared what was there. She was interested in truth, the truth of poetry, the kind she expressed in her work, which made her one of the most accomplished and influential poets of her time.

Though May's poetry was timeless, dealing with the age-old themes and questions, she also absorbed and articulated in her poems the special ethos of the place and time she was living in, New York in the fifties. I can think of no other poem that so eloquently put the questions that absorbed me and the people I knew then and there as “The Key to Everything.”

So deeply did it go to the heart of our searches that I used to read it to girls I'd just met, when I brought them up to my apartment for the first time, attempting to establish intimacy with music (Miles Davis or the Modern Jazz Quartet in the background), booze (bourbon with ice and water, or Chianti out of the wicker-bound bottle), and poetry. “The Key to Everything” asked what all men and women seemed to be asking one another then, in the hope born of the Freudian promise of transformation:

Is there anything I can do

or has everything been done

or do

you prefer somebody else to do

it or don't

you trust me to do

it right or is it hopeless and no one can do

a thing or do

you suppose I don't

really want to do

it and am just saying that or don't

you hear me at all or what?

It was the new love poem of the postwar world, the fifties revision of the innocent, romantic verse of Edna St. Vincent Millay. May's poem “Mortal Surge” was like an eloquent primal scream, predating Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” and making that more famous poem seem to me journalistic in comparison. My own “howl” was best expressed by May's poem that opened with a recitation of exact inner feelings that articulated my own. The lines went through my mind as I walked the Village streets to meet a girl or an editor, hoping for love or publication: “We are eager / We pant / We whine like whips cutting the air.”

I also saw reflected in May's verse the “unpoetic,” real details of life in the city, as when in “Snow in New York” she reported, “I went to Rikers to blow my nose / in a napkin and drink coffee for its steam.” Her words showed me better the pictures I saw every day. In “The Garden at St. John's,” a church near where she lived in the Village, she imagines the rector's wife walking with her baby in that garden “of succulent green in the broil of the city,” and sees in the sky “the surgical gleam of an airplane … ripping its way through the denim air.” When I looked up from Village streets and saw an airplane, those lines would run through my mind like the words of a song. May knew I appreciated her poetry, and she not only admired my journalism but encouraged my fiction at a time before any of it was published. She was one of the few people I trusted enough to show the short stories I was writing, in between my articles for
The Nation
, and my first abortive attempt at a novel.

Sometimes I went to May's apartment for dinner, and other times I stopped by for coffee or a drink. She also invited me to parties on Perry Street—she threw the kind of Village parties that featured good talk with other good writers. Usually I saw there her friends Jane Mayhall, the novelist from Louisville (author of the now nearly unknown, brilliant coming-of-age novel
Cousin to Human
) who had gone to Black Mountain College, where she met her husband, Leslie Katz, the writer, art critic, and art collector from Baltimore who founded the Eakins Press. At May's I also met the poet and editor Harvey Shapiro, who later became editor of
The New York Times Book Review;
the art critic Hilton Kramer, now editor of
The New Criterion;
and the art writer and editor Elizabeth Pollet, ex-wife of the poet Delmore Schwartz.

During the years I knew May, she lived with a woman who was not just a roommate but a mate. I did not question this arrangement, nor did anyone I knew, nor did she speak of it directly, or need to do so. It was perfectly natural because it was May, and there was nothing about her that was not of the greatest dignity and integrity, from her poetry to her work as an editor to her personal life.

This was before “gay” had any other meaning besides “happy,” and homosexual rights were not a political issue, perhaps because such rights weren't acknowledged or accepted in society at large but were part of the unspoken, understood freedom of the Village; that was one of the reasons I loved it. Though “straight” myself, I felt like a misfit in the middle America of the fifties, where even ideas that didn't conform to the mainstream were regarded as “queer.” In the Village, people were free to think what they wanted and be who they were, without condemnation or suspicion by what was called “polite society.” The term seemed especially ironic to me; by literal definition it should have been “rude society,” since it meant the intrusive kind that probed with disapproval into people's private lives and opinions, from sexual to political.

I didn't think of May in terms of her sexual preference but simply as a poet, which was her most basic identity. (By the same token, it occurs to me that I never thought of Richard Wilbur primarily as a “married man,” or of Anne Sexton as a “married woman” or “mother,” but as poets—the rest was incidental, and not even relevant
to their poetry.) Beyond that, I thought of May personally as an older sister, an idea that took specific form when her mate told me once that I reminded May of her younger brother, and said that was one of the reasons she felt especially close to me. I remember her friend's warm smile when she told me this, knowing, I think, that she was giving me the information as a gift. I received it as such and was proud.

There's a family feeling to the recollections of other Villagers of my time, a sense of closeness with neighbors and friends and even business people that comes from the feeling you are part of a common enterprise, a shared vision of the value of art and literature, of music and drama, of individuality and personal freedom.

Art d'Lugoff was one of the first advertisers in the
Village Voice
when he took out an ad for the first concert he put on, a midnight show in November 1955 (he was able to rent the theater at that hour for $25): “Art d'Lugoff presents Pete Seeger at the Circle in the Square.”

“We had to turn people away,” Art says, and he recalls the help he got from Lorraine Hansberry, the gifted black playwright whose drama
A Raisin in the Sun
would become a hit on Broadway starring Sidney Poitier. “Lorraine wrote my first leaflets, typed them up, and took them around to coffeehouses. I got to know her husband, Bob Nemiroff, at NYU. They became close friends of mine, and I worked with her at her in-laws' restaurant—called Potpourri, on Washington Place—now it's a hair salon. Lorraine and I waited and bused tables. Later she wrote
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window
, based on me—at least she told me I was part of a composite of the character. It was quite a thrill.”

Art remembers that “Lorraine used to come to the Gate to hear Nina Simone. Those were interesting days.” I went to the Village Gate myself to hear Nina Simone, and I met Lorraine Hansberry after sending her a fan letter. Some critic had attacked
A Raisin in the Sun
as being “propaganda,” and it made me angry. I wrote to Hansberry saying I had learned in Lionel Trilling's class that “all art is propaganda,” but in the best sense—of propagating values. I said her play was “propaganda for humanity and survival.”

She called me up to thank me, and invited me to meet her and
her husband, Bob Nemeroff, at the Limelight in Sheridan Square. I don't remember the words we spoke over our cappuccinos, but I remember the intensity of them, the sense of commitment and camaraderie, the feeling that we were part of the same grand effort of art and language to communicate, to break down barriers, to make people see one another as individuals, as we did in the Village, our home, where the arch above Washington Square said, “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair …”

May Swenson and Robert Phelps both died a few years back, and Lorraine died even earlier, when she was only in her thirties. Bob Nemiroff lovingly carried on her work by piecing together from her writing the play
To Be Young, Gifted, and Black
, which is performed all over the world. Just recently I read Bob's obit as well.

Mike Harrington thought the Village we knew—the last of the old bohemia—ended “the night a gawky kid named Bob Dylan showed up at the Horse in a floppy hat.” Mike heard Dylan give an impromptu concert at McGowan's restaurant, at the urging of his journalistic champion, Robert Shelton of the
New York Times
. Mike said, “I heard the future and I didn't like it” (though he later gave a nod to Dylan's genius when he heard “Blowin' in the Wind”).

In a way, Bob Dylan marked the dividing line between our generation and the one to come, though as Mike Harrington pointed out, Allen Ginsberg sounded the change earlier with “Howl,” and Mike quoted Irving Howe's definition of the new sensibility as one that is impatient with coherence and wants literature to be “as unarguable as orgasm and as delicious as a lollipop.”

Dylan represented the new “stutter style,” as Harrington dubbed it, and Art d'Lugoff turned him down for a gig at the Village Gate: “Dylan auditioned for me, tried to interest me in his music. He was so influenced by Woody Guthrie—he didn't have much beyond that then. When he started writing his own songs he got interesting, but when he started out, my interest wasn't piqued.”

Nat Hentoff says, “My wife and I used to see Dylan around the Village. She was captivated by him—not his music, but the way he looked, with that cap and all. I didn't take him seriously until Robert Shelton wrote about him in the
Times
. Then I did a profile of him in
The New Yorker
, and he told me he had run away from home
when he was thirteen or fourteen to join a band, but after the piece came out I learned it never happened. He lied to me.”

Maybe the Village of my generation went from the time Dylan Thomas came to the White Horse to the time Bob Dylan showed up that night in 1961 wearing his floppy hat. Maybe from the time of Floyd Dell and Edna Millay up through Malcolm Cowley to Mike Harrington and my own generation, everyone thinks “the real Village” is the one they knew, and declares it “dead” when a new wave of youth comes on the scene. It doesn't much matter, though, since the Village and what it means—the freedom and art and experimentation and promise of discovery and love—keep going on, drawing new hearts and faces to its winding, willful streets. Brock and Ann Brower tell me they just helped one of their daughters who is fresh out of college move into an apartment on Jones Street. It's next door to the building where I lived when I first came to the Village in 1956.

SEVEN

What Rough Beats?

In January 1957, a couple of years after we graduated from Columbia, my novelist friend Sam Astrachan took me to a hip new bar in the Village called Johnny Romero's. Romero's had a smoldering kind of illicit sexual excitement about it, for the place was supposedly a rendezvous for white girls to meet black men. I went, and returned many times later, motivated by curiosity and voyeurism, as well as a sense of being on the inside of what was happening, at a nerve center of the latest hip behavior patterns. Romero's wasn't known as a literary bar, yet that first time I went there Sam spotted a writer he knew at a table in the back and took me over to meet him. He briefed me that the writer had gone to Columbia in the forties, where he played on the football team until he dropped out of college. He'd written a very good, Thomas Wolfe–like novel that was published in 1950 called
The Town and the City
. His name was Jack Kerouac.

Wearing a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt, with mussy hair and a day's growth of beard, Kerouac seemed more lumberjack than literary man as he gruffly offered to buy us a drink. He was celebrating an advance he had gotten for another novel. We sat down at a table with Kerouac and several of his friends, and Jack talked in the rather grumpy, desultory way he had, evidently his customary manner with people he'd just met. I took him to be a
heavily serious sort of person, one who seemed more weighed down than elated about the sale of his novel to Viking Press, a prestigious publisher of fiction.

I was in awe of anyone who wrote novels. My classmate Sam had published his first novel,
An End to Dying
, the year after graduation, and I regarded the journalistic pieces I was writing for
The Nation
as training, in the Hemingway tradition, for someday writing my own novel, a dream I'd finally realize thirteen years later with the publication of
Going All the Way
. I had no idea then that Kerouac had written four other novels, as yet unpublished, and that it had taken Viking six years to decide to accept the manuscript of the one we were celebrating,
On the Road
.