New York in the '50s (31 page)

Helen shows me some of the pages of her journal from the time she knew Jack, and one of the entries mentioned she had bought him a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt. It must have been the shirt he was wearing when I first met him at Johnny Romero's bar. The thought of it gives me an eerie feeling, the way everything seems connected. It doesn't make me jealous, though, as it would have back in 1960 when Helen was my girlfriend, several years after she'd known Jack. Hearing such loving details back then would have no doubt given me a fit.

When we finish our cappuccinos, we decide to walk to Washington Square as part of our nostalgia trip. At the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street, Helen stops and says, “This is where the Howard Johnson's used to be, the one where Jack met Joyce Glassman [Johnson]. Allen arranged it because Jack needed a place to stay again after I'd kicked him out.” Helen laughs. “When Jack needed a place to stay, Allen got busy. He called up all the girls he knew until he found one who agreed to meet Jack. He knew if he could just get the girl to meet Jack, then Jack would have a place to stay.”

As we walk to Washington Square, Helen looks around and says, “You know, when I see the Village now, with the new buildings instead of places we knew and used to go to—like the supermarket where Louis' bar used to be—I have this feeling that what we see now is like a stage set, and the
real
Village is there underneath, just like it used to be.”

We sit for a while in Washington Square Park, where we used to go on Sundays to hear the folksingers and mingle with the crowd, which always included people we knew. It was a community scene, like people in a small town gathering for a concert, but instead of a brass band we had guitar players, and we sang along with them, telling Michael to row the boat ashore or proclaiming this land is your land, this land is my land—with the arch over us, and Washington's words like a blessing: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair …”

Helen and I reminisce for a while in the park and then decide to pay homage to another of our shrines, the White Horse. Helen injured her leg the week before while taking action photographs of a women's rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., and it's painful for her to walk on it very far, so we get a cab. Except for the injured leg, Helen is in excellent shape, for she does yoga and meditation practice every day.

Back in the fifties, I would not have been surprised to hear that Helen would become a photographer, writer, editor-publisher of a newsletter, sometime professional astrologer, and one of the finest American translators of books from the French. Her English version of
The Selected Writings of Antonin Artaud
was nominated for a National Book Award in translation, and of the fifty-some books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction she has translated from the French for U.S. publishers, including works by Flaubert, Claudel, and Teilhard de Chardin, she is most proud of her translation of Philippe Ariès's
The Hour of Our Death
, a massive scholarly study of attitudes toward death in the Christian West.

Such accomplishments would not have surprised me, but I would not, though, have guessed the yoga, vegetarianism, and meditation. Helen and I used to sit at her kitchen table on West 13th Street and create fantasies of the future, but we never could have conjured up the scene that took place in the summer of 1987 when we met at a place called the Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, where both of us had been before on retreats for health and fitness, and arranged to go at the same time to enjoy each other's company at silent vegetarian meals, in meditation and yoga classes. In the days when we stayed up until closing time at the White Horse, we'd have laughed ourselves to the floor at the very idea and then ordered another round of arf 'n' arf.

At the Horse now, we order a round of tea, mine iced, Helen's hot. The waitress is obliging, polite, at this obviously uncommon request. I look around and ask Helen if the place has shrunk—it looks so small, I think they must have cut the back room in half. But no, she assures me, it's just the same—one of the tricks of time.

Helen had come here to drink with Kerouac too, and when she speaks of him again, I say I'm sorry I had seen only his surly side.

“He was just like a child,” Helen says. “He loved to play. If he was
comfortable with people he knew and trusted, he was the life of the party. He had endless imagination—and that gorgeous Massachusetts accent, and his sweetness.”

I say sweetness was exactly the word Gilbert Millstein used to describe Kerouac, and I tell Helen the story of how Millstein happened to review
On the Road
and then became friends with Jack.

“In a way, that review that made him famous ruined his life,” Helen says. “He got creamed by the media, especially TV. He needed to be protected and sheltered, and instead he was baited, attacked—he aroused incredible hostility. Even now, they still want to tear him apart and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt he couldn't write—and the guy's been dead for twenty-one years! I went to Lowell last year and read his correspondence with John Clellon Holmes. Dan, it was beautiful. People try to portray Jack as this illiterate barbarian, but if you read those letters you see a different person. You hear the voices of two highly literate writers discussing their craft. Someone should publish those letters.

“Alcohol was his defense. He was phobic in crowds, shy and supersensitive. He was always open, taking in everything that happened. He felt his divine mission was to be like a recording angel and tell all that happened to him. I had no idea how good a writer he was until I read
Dr. Sax
, only this year. I think it's his best work, an American classic. Reading it made me feel ashamed that I was one of those people who put him down. We all owe him, at the very least, an apology. I want to write my own book about him, in part as a kind of atonement.”

Helen and I leave the White Horse, and at the corner of Hudson she points across 11th Street to the building where she used to live—the one where Jack and Allen and their friends turned up that November Sunday morning in the courtyard on their way back from California and Mexico, on their way to fame. That's the morning it was snowing.

I can see the snow falling in the courtyard as the travelers with their backpacks and sleeping bags look up hopefully at the window—so tired, hungry, and—well, is there any other word than the one they were about to make famous, along with themselves, on their way to creating the myth of a generation?

They were beat.

EIGHT

Roses, Dreams, and Diaphragms

A ROMANTIC EDUCATION

The throaty lilt of sexy June Christy swinging out with “I'll Take Romance” seemed to me a companion song to Mel Torme's crooning “We'll Have Manhattan.” A bright young man like Gay Talese came to live in New York because it was “the capital of newspapers,” while for others it was the capital of commerce, the arts, entertainment, intellectual life—and for all of us it seemed the capital of love and romance, at least for America and perhaps the world. Though Paris held the title in the twenties, romantic as well as literary and artistic supremacy seemed to have shifted from the Seine to the Hudson in the fifties.

New York's romantic spirit was epitomized for me by a stately Negro lady named Mabel Mercer, who sat on a high stool beneath a single spotlight in a pitch-dark nightclub on the West Side called the By-Line Room and huskily sang-spoke sophisticated love songs like “Dancing on the Ceiling” and “My Funny Valentine.” Couples crunched hands and mashed knees together beneath tiny tables as the chanteuse raised one hand from her lap in a single gesture of finale, declaring each day Valentine's Day or proclaiming Manhattan an isle of joy, just made for a girl and boy (as we males and females under thirty were known in those days).

Romance was everywhere in New York, even if you couldn't afford a nightclub cover charge. For a nickel you could ride the Staten Island ferry, reciting the famous lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay: “We were very tired / We were very merry / We went back and forth / All night on the ferry.” Some grand Saturday nights we took our dates to the Amato Opera House, a converted movie theater where unemployed singers performed to the accompaniment of a piano, and we dropped coins into a hat that was passed between the acts. We went for beers to Chumley's, the former Village speakeasy with no sign on the door, which Richard Lingeman remembers as “a great place for sophisticates—you had to know where it was” on Bedford, one of the winding little streets of the Village.

This aura of romance and sophistication emanating from the island of Manhattan made many of our parents in the hinterlands fear for our bodies and souls when we announced our intentions to live in a city they regarded as nothing less than Sodom, with skyscrapers. When Mary Perot Nichols told her Philadelphia Main Line mother she wanted to live in New York after graduating from college, her mother, like any God-fearing parent, went to the minister for help. “My mother told our minister to talk me out of it,” Mary says. “She warned me that if I moved there I'd be ‘kept' by somebody. Later, when I was living and working in New York I used to wonder why I didn't get kept like my mother said I would be.”

At least some parents would have been reassured to know that much of our early New York life was heavy with romance and light on sex, as Ned O'Gorman remembers: “In those days there was still a radical innocence, not endless sex, not endless lovemaking. There was an enthusiasm that bubbled up through all that life. I remember going to mass on Saturday nights with some of the Catholic Worker girls, and then to the San Remo. We'd be running around at four in the morning. Nobody had a TV, everybody read books, there was a kind of serious gaiety—we all knew we had to grow up and do the work the Lord decided us to do.”

Even many of us who were recent converts to collegiate atheism still believed, if not the Lord, then Frank Sinatra when he told us in his 1955 hit song that love and marriage go together like a horse
and carriage. We, of course, would have amended it to say that love and at least the
intention
of marriage went together if both boy and girl consented (or were mutually swept away) to the ultimate act, what we had called in high school the Big Deed, the Dirty Deed, or going all the way.

This early postcollegiate atmosphere of romantic innocence prevailed the first year or so out of college, when we were still sharing the big communal apartments of boys and girls that functioned like makeshift, miniature sororities and fraternities—this being the era of impromptu but proper pajama parties with “the boys upstairs” of the kind where Ann Montgomery met Howie Hayes.

It was in 1955 that I met my first great love in New York. Like the new, “mature” Sinatra (as he was christened in a
Time
cover story), I was no longer a callow youth but a college graduate and published writer with a bylined article in
The Nation
. Though I was yet shy and nervous around women, I believed—and was told—that my professional achievements should impress those sophisticated Manhattan beauties whom Irwin Shaw described in his
New Yorker
short story that my friends and I so admired, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses”—a story so ingrained in my generation's consciousness that a mention of it forty years later to Brock Brower prompts him spontaneously to recite the last line: “What a pretty girl, what nice legs.”

I met Emily Lamson when I went to see an editor of a women's magazine in hopes of getting an assignment; their rates of payment for articles were roughly ten times that of
The Nation
and other “little magazines” I was writing for. I didn't get the assignment, but better still got a date with Emily, the bright, attractive Wellesley graduate who worked as the editor's assistant.

When I fell in love with Emily I thought she was Jewish, an assumption I based on the fact that she had dark hair and was highly intelligent. Being Jewish made her seem more sexy to me. Like most men, I believed that women of ethnic backgrounds different from my own were more exotic than those of my cultural tribe, and perhaps this was another manifestation of rebellion against family and home. Some of my Jewish friends had similar lustful reactions to preppy
WASP
women, a Brazilian novelist I knew went only for
Nordic blondes, while an Irish friend was equally mad for Italian girls, and I'm sure the Italians thought nothing more enticing than a freckle-faced colleen.

I was pleased at the thought that Emily was Jewish not only because of the added sex appeal it gave her in my eyes, but also because I would, paradoxically, have no religious conflict in marrying her. As a newly minted intellectual atheist, I was adamant in my rejection of the religion I grew up with, and had stopped dating a lovely southern girl I met in New York because she admitted to being a churchgoing Christian. When I rudely told her I could not “get serious” with someone who harbored such beliefs—the same ones that had served as the basis of my life until a few years before—she said with a sadness that haunts my memory of her gentle voice, “I'm sorry we didn't have more a meeting of the minds.” Beyond all this, I was proud of being recently made an “honorary Jew” by Sam Astrachan, and it seemed only fitting I should now have a Jewish girlfriend.

Emily turned out to be of Anglo-Irish descent, from Dayton, Ohio. By the time I learned this disillusioning news, however, I was already crazy about her. She reminded me of Leslie Caron in
Daddy Longlegs
, and along with her winsome, wistful quality, Emily had a sharp, resilient mind that caught me up if I tried to pass off secondhand ideas. She challenged me when I lapsed into sloppy thinking, keeping me alert and alive. Her eyes and nose suddenly crinkled when she laughed, and she would surprise me, walking along MacDougal Street or hanging by the strap on a downtown local, with spontaneous bursts of Millay: “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / I have forgotten.”