New York in the '50s (44 page)

Movies were entertainment rather than art, occasions for popcorn and dates. Movies were somewhat useful, in a crude way, for bringing some good novels to the screen, like James Jones's
From Here to Eternity
and John O'Hara's
Ten North Frederick
and
From the Terrace
. But movies didn't seem to translate the work of the finest writers, the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds and Faulkners. Their artistry was in language and defied successful rendering in big pictures, with laughably mistaken attempts at replacing a powerful fictional image with a deadly wrong face, no matter how attractive, like Ava Gardner as Lady Brett, Alan Ladd as Jay Gatsby.

A few real writers took movies seriously: Mark Van Doren had in his
Nation
reviews, and James Agee in
The Nation
too, and in
Time
. Agee even went to Hollywood in 1950 and wrote the script for
The African Queen
, and again in 1954 to write
Night of the Hunter
. He was the intellectual who made movies respectable in the fifties as a serious topic of conversation. For most of us they were a way to blank out the mind or cool off in summer: theaters hung out blue and silver flags in hot weather, with pictures of a polar bear and promises of “Cool Inside.”

An exception was beginning to grow with the idea of foreign films as art, especially with the advent of the French and Italian directors in the early sixties. Helen Weaver made me go to a double bill at the Greenwich Theatre, Truffaut's
Shoot the Piano Player
and
Jules and Jim
, and I came away breathless, with a feeling of illumination and transcendence—almost the kind of artistic high I got after reading a good novel. As we walked out onto Greenwich Avenue afterward, on our way to get shish-kebab at McGowan's, Helen stopped and recited spontaneously: “Federico Fellini may come, Antonioni may go, But I'm in love with you, François Truffaut.”

But that moment was like a recognition of the future. Except for the work of these foreign directors, whose impact and influence we were just beginning to absorb, movies were mundane. The theater, however—Broadway and now, in the fifties, off-Broadway—was magic. It was based on words rather than pictures, on the language and lines of the play. Directors and actors were supposed to serve
the purposes of the playwrights, who were
literary
people, like Arthur Miller and Carson McCullers.

Kurt Vonnegut recalls of that era, “I went to the theater whenever I could. I was thrilled by Tennessee Williams and William Inge the way a later generation was thrilled by the Beatles. Their plays were my Beatles albums.”

Vonnegut worked in public relations for General Electric in Schenectady from 1948 to 1951. “I made trips down to New York to try to get features about the company sold to
Life
magazine and King Features Syndicate. I'd do what I could to lead the literary life, like going to plays and staying at the Algonquin because it was the writers' hotel. The first time I had lunch there I saw George Jean Nathan talking to this little girl who turned out to be Julie Harris.”

We went to the theater, and we read novels and poems, and discussed them in bars, in night classes, in the apartments of friends. “Even if you didn't write, you read,” Harvey Shapiro says. “My wife and I were members of a reading club. We read Trilling's novel
The Middle of the Journey
, and the English writers Joyce Cary and Henry Green. I remember there was a couple who had a meeting of the reading club at their apartment and afterward announced they were getting a divorce, but they decided to host the meeting before they split up—that was the most important thing.”

In New York the word was most honored, most powerful, most brilliantly imagined, created, and produced, by the writers and editors and literary agents, the newspapers, magazines, and publishers of books, gathered on one single island, which made us love it and believe in it all the more. Here was the place where more writers lived than anywhere else on earth, more even than in Paris. A few exiles remained abroad, like Irwin Shaw, but many young expatriates (Shaw called them “the Tall Young Men”) returned to New York, as George Plimpton, who founded
Paris Review
, did in 1956.

Though some of the giants preferred to live in literary isolation, like Faulkner in Mississippi or Hemingway in Key West or Cuba, even they came here to pay obeisance, to see their editor or agent or a critic—even if only to punch one in the nose, as Hemingway did to Max Eastman. New York was where the word, in most cases, was made and, just as important, made
known
. Vance Bourjaily was
once asked, after he'd left New York to teach in Iowa, “If you want to be a writer, do you have to live in New York?” He thought for a moment and said, “At least for a while.”

The writers who produced the words that moved us were our heroes and heroines, our stars and guides, their works our texts for study and debate not just of literature but for life, the very meaning and understanding of it, in fact the conduct of it. These gods and goddesses walked among us, living next door and down the street, drank in the same bars, showed up at the same parties, or made appearances to read or speak their wisdom, and we sat at their feet and listened, rapt, as young people through the ages had come to learn the secrets of prophets and seers, for these were ours. And where else would you have the chance of seeing and hearing so many of them if not in New York in the fifties?

Carson McCullers was coming to Columbia.

She had left Georgia for New York City as a teenager, knowing that's where writers went, and now she lived in Rockland County but came into the city sometimes to give readings or talks. Word spread like a drumbeat, because her novel
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
was one of the sacred texts of my generation, a coming-of-age evocation as powerful to many of us as
The Catcher in the Rye
. The heroine, Mick Kelley, was a female version of Holden Caulfield, a sensitive girl attuned especially to music, who thought the symphonies of Beethoven sounded “like God striding in the night.”

Responding to this novel was a sign of sensitivity; Marlon Brando claimed he'd read it nine times! It was first published in 1940, but all of McCullers's works were still read and discussed in the fifties, when her novel
The Member of the Wedding
became a hit play starring Julie Harris, Ethel Waters, and Brandon de Wilde; only the musical
South Pacific
had a longer concurrent run on Broadway.

The author up on the stage of a Columbia lecture hall looked more like her teenage heroine than the distinguished novelist and playwright who was thirty-seven when I saw her that afternoon in 1954. She was small and frail looking, with her brown hair in bangs, and for me she had a tremendous magnetism, perhaps based on my knowing who she was and loving her writing, yet it was more than
that. There was a wistful charm, a kind of sadness and yet a power, not of force but more like magic. I thought she was absolutely beautiful, and I was immediately, madly in love with her, even before she spoke. By the end of that afternoon, I thought she was the most beguiling and brilliant woman in the world.

The beginning of her talk was not auspicious. In fact, it seemed headed for disaster. She started by reading—or trying to read—from a prepared text that lay on the table before her in what looked like a black loose-leaf notebook. Her voice trembled, and so did her hands, as she tried to turn the page, and she was aided in that effort by a man who sat beside her and seemed to be an assistant, or perhaps a relative, an uncle or older brother. He was a handsome, dark-skinned man with a mustache, and he was obviously devoted to her. She called him by a name that sounded like Ten or Tin and at some point introduced him as Tennessee Williams, her friend and fellow southerner.

Despite McCullers's efforts to steady herself and read what sounded like a rather dry academic paper on current literature, she suddenly closed the notebook and put her head in her hands. I think everyone in the audience wanted, as I did, to rush to the stage and comfort her, tell her it didn't matter, she didn't have to say anything further. Writing a book like
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
was quite enough; she need not offer more of herself. But we waited, hushed, and then, with her hands still covering her eyes, she said in a different voice, more calm and steady, though still soft, yet clearly audible, “I think I'll say a poem now.”

With her eyes closed, she recited one of her own poems, “The Ransomed Heart,” from which I have always remembered the words “malignant winter afternoons / and empty clocks,” an image she later used in
Clock Without Hands
. It was like a liturgy, the recitation of a sacred text, and it affected the audience that way, as if a priestess had delivered a deep truth of the spirit, an articulation of our own unexpressed inner emotion, a kind of contemporary psalm, and it must have soothed her as well as us to say it.

McCullers opened her eyes when she finished the poem and, in a lighter tone, relieved and almost playful, she said she thought she'd just talk a little bit about writing
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
. This was mainly a graduate school audience, and there was a scholarly
rustle and rush as notebooks and pens and pencils were whipped out, ready to trap the words, capture the secret.

I sat transfixed as McCullers told how she was writing the novel while living at home with her parents (she was nineteen years old at the time). She said there was a point at which she had written a number of pages, had all the characters, even had constructed some scenes, yet she didn't see the story yet. She wrote in her own room, but when she came to a stopping place, or felt stuck, she would go out to the living room.

“We had a checked rug on the living room floor,” she said in her soft drawl, “and I used to hop from one check to the next, like you do on a checked rug, while I was trying to think. Well, one day I hopped to this check, and I suddenly thought, My main character, his name isn't Minowitz, his name is Singer. And he is deaf, and that's why all these people are talkin' to him.” McCullers smiled and said, “And then I just wrote the book.”

Goose bumps went up my arms. It was like hearing magic explained that can't be explained, but nonetheless the magician has told you as much as she knows, the way she knows it. During the question period, I cringed as a young man in the grad school uniform of horn-rims and corduroy jacket with elbow patches stood up and said something like, “Mrs. McCullers, in your discussion of the creative process in regard to your novel, you referred to the point of illumination at which you perceived the plot or structure of the work while you were in your parents' living room. Would you please expand on that, in regard to the illuminative experience and its role in the creative process?”

There was a slight pause, and then McCullers smiled and said, “Well, like I said, I just hopped to that check!”

A burst of laughter broke over the room, followed by applause. The “lecture” was over. I floated out of the hall.

I never got to see J. D. Salinger—hardly anyone else did either, after
The Catcher in the Rye
made him a cult hero, guru, and seer for the youth of America, which included my friends and me in the fifties. The literary agent Knox Burger, who as fiction editor of
Collier's
bought one of Salinger's short stories, knew him as “Jerry” in those days. “I bought ‘The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls' in about
'51, before
Catcher
was published. It had been turned down elsewhere because it was downbeat—one of the Glass kids got killed. The story was sad but it was terrific, and I was very excited we were getting it. I corresponded with Salinger and he even suggested an illustrator for it—I liked him and commissioned him to do things for us. But our publisher read the story and said we couldn't do it, it was too downbeat, and then I think Jerry turned against the story and said it shouldn't be published. It was a terrific piece, though, and I was very disappointed.

“After that, I met him at a poker game with the agent Don Congdon. Jerry was living in Connecticut then but he came down for this game, and afterward we went out for pizza, which was still a novelty then, and Jerry told us in detail about the kind of cheese in it. He knew all about it because his family was in the cheese business.”

When
Time
did a cover story on Salinger in 1961, they sent Martha Duffy to Cornish, New Hampshire, to try to get him to talk. When she spotted him on the steps of the town post office and simply said, “Excuse me, Mr. Salinger,” he turned, ran, jumped in his jeep, made a U-turn, and fled.

The only person I know who actually met and talked with Salinger after
Catcher
came out is Jane Richmond, who was working at
Partisan Review
when Salinger walked in one day unannounced, wanting to speak to the editor, William Phillips. Phillips was home with a cold, and Jane got to take the famous guest to the editor's apartment in a cab. Salinger was her greatest idol. “I'd been disappointed in so many writers when I met them,” Jane says, “but he was exactly like the person I expected. He was extraordinarily normal—a wonderful man who was anxious to get back to Cornish and be with his new baby. He was not some literary Howard Hughes—his normalcy and gentlemanliness were what struck me. In the cab to William's house we talked about old movies.”

Salinger's popularity and mystique only increased with the publication of “Franny” and “Zooey” and the rest of the Glass family stories that succeeded the novel, and continued even after he became a virtual recluse. Still, his presence was almost tangible in New York when I was there, and all my friends remember his influence. Kitty Sprague, who went to Barnard in the fifties, says, “I knew a woman at college who was in analysis because she said she had a
reading block. She couldn't read any books except
Catcher in the Rye
—she kept reading that over and over.” Less extreme fans read other books but kept going back to Holden Caulfield. “I used to read
Catcher
once a year,” Murray Kempton says. “It was wonderful. I loved Salinger.”