New York in the '50s (45 page)

When I lived on West 92nd Street, I got a phone call from a friend telling me Salinger had a story in
The New Yorker
that just came out, and I grabbed my coat and rushed to the nearest newsstand on Broadway to buy the magazine. Calvin Trillin recalls that “in those days the appearance of a Salinger story was an exciting event,” and to Richard Lingeman, “those stories in
The New Yorker
really meant something. People discussed Salinger avidly, asking, What did it mean?”

As Meg Greenfield puts it, “We were all ‘Zooey' people.”

Well, not quite all of us. Seymour Krim thought Salinger a snob, a “way-up-in-the-penthouse Manhattanite.” Joan Didion was even more scathing, putting down
Franny and Zooey
as “self-help copy,” writing in
National Review
that the Glass family saga “emerges finally as
Positive Thinking
for the upper middle classes, as
Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue
for Sarah Lawrence girls.”

Joan complained that Salinger's work gave his readers “instructions for living,” but that's what a lot of us found in novels, and was one of the reasons we read them so avidly. Richard Lingeman remembers reading Vance Bourjaily's
The End of My Life
in his senior year in college, “and I adopted the nihilism and despair of the main character. This was the novel that spoke to us. In the Army I read
From Here to Eternity
. James Jones gave me a way of seeing my own condition, that I really felt at bottom, ‘Don't trust officers,' and ‘It's your duty to go out and get drunk.' I identified with all that in basic training.”

Though Joan Didion was not a “Zooey” person, she anyway was a Peyton fan. The beautiful and doomed Peyton Loftis was the heroine of William Styron's lyric first novel,
Lie Down in Darkness
, which he finished in a writing class at the New School taught by the noted Random House editor Hiram Hayden. Looking back, Joan Didion says, “
Lie Down in Darkness
was a stunning event, especially the last pages, where Peyton is in New York. The stuff in New York was exactly the period we were living.”

Styron, I thought, was the true successor to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I was delighted to meet him at a party at Bill Cole's apartment, where I met more writers than at any other place besides the White Horse Tavern. Bill worked in publicity for Knopf, but he had the same kind of influence and knowledge of books and writers that a good editor had, and in fact he was responsible for getting James Baldwin's first novel published. He lived (and still does) in a comfortably funky apartment spilling over with books in the nonresidential area a little uptown from Times Square. The place was in no way fancy, any more than the food, which was mainly peanuts and potato chips, or the drinks, just bottles of booze set nakedly out on a table with mixers, but Bill's natural amiability drew people to him and his parties.

There were always writers there you knew or wanted to know, and the booze ran freely and the talk was always funny, sharp, knowing, dealing with what we cared about most—books, magazines, and stories, the words and the people who wrote them. Nobody talked of advances or royalties or how much money any book or writer made. That was the sort of thing business people talked about, the organization men, the ones in the gray flannel suits—or the girls who married them and joined what Mary Nichols and her mother's friends in Washington Square called the Lamb Chop Set.

Writers talked about writing and asked one another what they were working on now. When I introduced myself to Styron, he said he had read a recent piece of mine in
Esquire
, and told me he was writing for the magazine himself. We started talking about the editors we knew there, Rust Hills and Harold Hayes, when a pretty girl came over and introduced herself to Styron. He immediately introduced her to me, saying, “Dan and I are colleagues at
Esquire
.”

Colleagues! With the author of
Lie Down in Darkness
! I felt I had just been elevated to the literary heights, and I knew then that Styron was a true gentleman as well as a great writer.

The writers I admired were almost always as good as their books when I met them, and sometimes uncannily
like
their books, as if they were one of their own characters coming off the page. Isaac Bashevis Singer, a rather slight, bald man with eyes that glinted mischievously behind his glasses, was as warm, sly, witty, and entertaining as the people in his stories and novels. I'd become a fan
when I read
The Magician of Lublin
, which was set in the
shtetls
of Poland but conveyed more understanding of the relationship between men and women right then than any other book I knew.

Jane Mayhall, the novelist friend I'd met at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, knew of my admiration for Singer and introduced me to him at a dinner of the Poetry Club of New York. Afterward we went out to a Jewish deli in midtown with Singer, his wife, and a few other writers, including Cecil Hemley, who translated some of Singer's work and also was his editor at Farrar, Straus. Cecil was about to have his own first novel published, and he jokingly said to Singer, “Isaac, since I translated your novel from Yiddish to English, why don't you translate mine from English to Yiddish and see if we can get it published in the
Daily Forward
?”

Everyone laughed but Singer, who shrugged, deadpan, raised his hands with palms up, and said, “It's not impossible. We'll take out the sex, put in some socialism …”

I'd recently written an essay on Salinger's work for
New World Writing
, and when an editor of
American Heritage
asked me if I'd do a similar piece on some other contemporary writer, I enthusiastically proposed Singer but was told his work was too limited in appeal. That was a long time before Singer won the Nobel Prize in literature.

I wrote the author a fan letter when
Enemies: A Love Story
came out a decade or so later, saying how unfair I thought it was that he was still being pigeonholed as an ethnic writer and politely dismissed. “I am from darkest Indiana,” I said, “and your characters from nineteenth-century Poland seem to me basically just like the people I grew up with.” I reminded him we'd met once in New York, though I doubted he'd remember. Almost at once I got back an air mail letter of thanks from Singer, postmarked Monaco. He said of course he remembered me, that my kind words made his day, and added, “I'm in Monte Carlo—not gambling!”

My friends and I weren't shy about our literary enthusiasms or our efforts to meet our favorite authors. Brock and Ann Brower loved
The Young Lions
, one of the influential novels of our time, as well as Irwin Shaw's short stories coming out in
The New Yorker
, especially “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” “When Ann and I were in Paris in '56,” Brock says, “we went looking for Shaw, going
to the bars and cafés where he was supposed to hang out, but we never found him. We felt his stories were about
us
and people we knew.”

Gay Talese had better luck: “I'd written fan letters to Shaw, and when I went to Rome to do a piece on the Via Veneto for
The New York Times Magazine
, Bernard Kalb of the
Times
introduced me. Shaw knew me from my letters. He was generous—he knew the Italian bureaucracy and helped me and Nan get married in Rome on June 10, 1959. He thought of us as these kids from New York and thought our marriage was a terrific idea. He even rounded out the evening with a party at the Excelsior, and Merle Oberon was there.”

Our literary idols almost invariably turned out to be generous, both personally and professionally, to us younger aspiring writers. Like most everyone I knew, Leslie Katz was an admirer of James Agee's, and he recalls, “I sent a story to
Partisan Review
—that was the reigning glory we all looked to—and they turned it down, but it led to my meeting Agee. I got a phone call from him, saying he and Dwight Macdonald had liked the story and wanted to publish it, but Philip Rahv was negative. Agee said to come have a drink with him and Macdonald. They were at the Blarney Stone on 14th Street, and I went over and met them. Evidently, the argument about the story was part of a growing disagreement that led to Macdonald leaving
Partisan
.

“Meeting Agee changed a lot for me,” Katz adds. “He befriended me and helped me get free-lance magazine work. The story that
Partisan
turned down was then published by
New Directions
magazine. That was a real thrill. I saw Agee for a considerable period in the early fifties, and we would have lunch frequently. He was at
Time
, and I'd meet him at a little restaurant he liked in Rockefeller Center that was very comfortable. We had an affinity. Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
had been a failure commercially, but it wasn't a failure to any people who knew Agee. He was already legendary.”

Most of these heroes and heroines of ours were novelists, and most of my friends in New York dreamed of writing a novel. Some of us did, with greater or lesser degrees of success, and almost all of us
tried at some point. Meg Greenfield speaks of working on a novel in Rome after college as “the kid thing to do,” before she turned to the factual writing she mastered at
The Reporter
and went on to practice with distinction as editorial page editor and editorial writer at the
Washington Post
and as a columnist for
Newsweek
.

Walter Goodman recalls the fifties as “quite an exciting time for novels—Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud were big, and made a big impression on me.” It was an earlier novelist, though, whom Walter tried to emulate as a young man: “When I worked for the BBC in Europe in '51 I was trying to write a novel, under the influence of Thomas Wolfe—he was an awful influence on young writers—but I didn't have the knack.” Walter discovered he did have a knack for editing and writing first-class journalism and nonfiction, for magazines ranging from
The New Republic
to
Redbook
and
Playboy
in the fifties and later for the
New York Times
, where he now serves as a cultural commentator and TV columnist.

After my first book, the nonfiction
Island in the City
, was published, I decided it was time to try writing my own novel. I was still supporting myself by free-lance writing for magazines and had to steal time from these assignments to pound away at my fictional creation. I was granted a month at Yaddo, and I sat there through August 1959, staring out the window at the lovely manicured lawns, waiting for my lunch to come in the workman's black lunch pail that was left outside the door of each artist. I was also waiting for inspiration, and nipping from a pint of bourbon in a desperate effort to help it along. I ate the enormous dinners and breakfasts with my fellows every day and left the place eight or ten pounds heavier but with only a handful of pages, not a single one of them worth preserving.

Like a sculptor hacking at the rock of Gibraltar, I banged away at the stubborn subject of youthful love and angst in Indiana when I got back to the Village. I carried on the battle in between magazine assignments, late at night, managing finally to accumulate some fifty pages, which
seemed
like a promising beginning.

My publishers disagreed. They were as kind and gentle about it as possible, bringing me up to lunch at the swanky Locke-Ober Café, Boston's finest restaurant, but leaving me, after the lobster Savannah, with the clear message that they considered me a fine
young journalist but not a novelist. I was shattered, defeated, disillusioned—and of course that night I got drunk, my reaction to any news, good or bad (and sometimes just for the hell of it, with no news at all). I tossed the fifty pages but determined to try again. I wasn't giving up.

Disappointed as I was about the novel, I enjoyed the kind of journalism I was doing to make a living. I sensed a growing interest among writers, editors, and even literary critics in the way nonfiction was opening up, becoming more artful. As early as 1950, Lionel Trilling had said in
The Liberal Imagination
that some of the new sociology, like David Riesman's
The Lonely Crowd
, was telling us more about our world in a more interesting way than current novels.

The excitement about experimenting with new forms of nonfiction—the sort of excitement stirred among writers by Agee's work—and the possibility of trying these approaches were expressed by C. Wright Mills in a letter he wrote me from Europe in November 1956, after I had written to tell him my idea for a book about Spanish Harlem. “We've got to work out a new form of writing—using some fictional techniques and some reportage tricks and some sociological stuff,” Mills wrote. “Of course all that's nothing without some really big view into which all the little stuff fits and makes sense.… No matter what you're writing about, you're also writing about the whole goddamned world. Huizinga does that [in
The Waning of the Middle Ages
, one of Mills's favorite books]—it's easier to do it for the past, less risky. Agee touched it on those sharecroppers. Dos Passos did in
U.S.A
. The trouble is when you try it, you can fall so very, very hard. It's easier not to try. Go detailed scholarly. Go clean journalist. Disguise it … in fiction. No fiction nowadays is ‘about the world' in this sense.”

Besides the kind of books Mills was talking about, and writing—
The Power Elite
had just come out—I was getting a dose of an experimental, brilliant kind of writing when I read Murray Kempton in the
New York Post
.

What distinguished his column from every other one I had ever seen was not only the literary excellence and complexity of the prose, but the fact that Murray was not content to sit in his office and reflect on the news; he went out to cover events as a reporter
(he regarded the term “journalist” as pretentious, and it made him wince).