New York in the '50s (2 page)

I don't deny the nostalgia I feel, nor do I deny the darkness peculiar to the time and place I now celebrate. Almost everyone I reminisced with spoke about the heavy boozing without my bringing it up: “We drank too much,” “How did we drink so much?” We abused our bodies with booze and lack of sleep, and inhaled packs of cigarettes as if they were oxygen. We cared nothing for diet or exercise. A few of us smoked pot, and many of us took the popular uppers of the time, on prescription from doctors or psychiatrists—Dexedrine and Dexamyl, those heart-shaped green and orange pills. But for all our excesses, which we often justified as “literary” in imitation of our Roaring Twenties idols, we somehow managed to survive and observe and create in an especially fruitful time.

I went to Columbia as a mid-semester sophomore transfer student in January of 1952 from Indiana University at Bloomington, leaving with excitement and relief the somnolent southern Indiana landscape of rolling hills and limestone quarries for the concrete canyons and skyscraping spires I had dreamed of while listening to Stan Kenton's mushy “Manhattan Towers,” a romantic anthem for many of my peers. I graduated from Columbia in 1955, lived for a while on the Upper West Side near Riverside Drive before moving on to what would be home in Greenwich Village (appropriate antithesis
of what the Midwest means by “home”), until I said goodbye to New York in 1963.

I was lucky to learn from professors at Columbia whose work helped define the times, from the poet Mark Van Doren and the literary critic Lionel Trilling to C. Wright Mills, the rebel sociologist whose controversial books
White Collar
and
The Power Elite
delineated in disturbing strokes the new middle- and upper-class structure of America in the fifties.

Reporting on politics and culture for
The Nation
, I interviewed leaders and covered events that were shaping the period, from protests against civil defense air raid drills which were supposed to save New Yorkers from an A-bomb attack by sending them down to the subway, to Jack Kerouac's drunken reading from
On the Road
at a Village nightclub, which signaled the arrival of the Beat Generation. Writing about the Catholic Worker movement led me to live for a while in Spanish Harlem and write my first book,
Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem
, and I got involved in the grassroots effort to help narcotics addicts and treat them as patients rather than criminals. For
Esquire
, I drew assignments to profile a spectrum of luminaries, dining (with notebook) in Harlem with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and at the New York Yacht Club with William F. Buckley, Jr.

My life and concerns were hardly limited to public figures and events, however. Like so many others of my time and place, I fell in love a hundred times, went into psychoanalysis, tried to write a novel, and listened to jazz musicians like Miles Davis and J. J. Johnson, going from glittery midtown music meccas like Birdland to crowded, smoky Village haunts like the Five Spot. I drank pints of arf 'n' arf and debated politics and books with James Baldwin and Michael Harrington at the White Horse Tavern; saw Jason Robards in
The Iceman Cometh
and Geraldine Page in
Summer and Smoke
at the Circle in the Square; and went with buddies and dates to the Amato Opera, a converted moviehouse with a single piano as orchestra, where music students carried cardboard elephants in the grand march of
Aïda
, all for whatever coins you could afford to put in the hat when it was passed.

This was a New York where you could go on a date to Louis' or the San Remo or the Grand Ticino in Greenwich Village and have
a bottle of wine with your dinner for a little less than five bucks for the two of you. The subway was a dime and the Staten Island ferry a nickel. Four women college graduates who made no more than $50 a week from their magazine or publishing jobs could pitch in and rent a lovely furnished three-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue for $200 a month. Students could afford standing room at the Metropolitan Opera or one of the hit musicals on Broadway, like
Call Me Madam
with Ethel Merman. There was no cover or minimum charge to stand at the bar and hear Mingus at the Five Spot, in the Village. Carson McCullers read for free at Columbia and told how she wrote
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
, a novel that, along with
The Catcher in the Rye
, inspired my newly graduated generation.

I threw all-night parties with new friends who, like myself, had come from the hinterlands to make their fame and fortune and “find themselves” in the pulsing heart of the hip new world's hot center, with the ghosts of the recent past as guides. We quoted aloud Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Millay and e. e. cummings, as we drank the wine and burned at both ends the candle of early youth and bittersweet first disillusionment. We revived our faith with the incantations of Dylan Thomas, our secular poet-priest, whose chants we played at dawn on the Caedmon record that boomed the vow we took to “not go gentle into that good night.”

If my generation was “silent,” it was not in failure to speak out with our work, but in the sense of adopting a style that was not given to splash and spotlights. Max Frankel says, “We set out essentially to be spectators and reflectors on life. A dogged kind of centrism came out of this, and it was later confused with unfeelingness in the sixties, as if we didn't care enough for issues like the environment.”

We had no desire to shout political slogans or march with banners, because we had seen the idealism of the radical thirties degenerate into the disillusionment of Stalinism and the backlash reaction of name-calling anticommunism. The naïve hope of salvation by politics seemed to have burned itself out in the thirties, replaced in the fifties too often by an equally naïve belief in salvation through psychoanalysis. My friends and I agreed with Hemingway's advice at the end of
Death in the Afternoon:
“Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole.” Another of Papa's admonitions from the same book was reaffirmed for us in
the fifties by James Baldwin in
Notes of a Native Son
, and it became a kind of creed: “The great thing, as Hemingway said, is to last and get your work done.”

Ours was not the silence of timidity or apathy, but the kind James Joyce meant, in
Portrait of the Artist
, when he spoke of the young writer's vow as “silence, exile, and cunning.” The “silence” of Joyce was not surrender; it simply meant not to blab or brag about your work. The “cunning” was finding a way to make a living and then doing it. The “exile” was the place far enough from the censure of home and middle-class convention to feel free enough to create. Our own chosen place of exile from middle America was not Europe but New York, where, like Paris in the twenties, you found your contemporary counterparts—allies, mentors, friends. Our fifties were far more exciting than the typical American experience because we were in New York, where people came to flee the average and find a group of like-minded souls. “We had our community, and there was stability and solidarity,” Meg Greenfield says, recalling our group of writer friends, who were centered in the Village but also had connections on the Upper East and West sides.

There were actually many such communities in New York then, many of them interconnected. David Amram, the jazz musician and composer I used to hear play at the Five Spot, says, “There was a cross-pollination of music, painting, writing—an incredible world of painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, and actors, enough so we could be each other's fans. When I had concerts, painters would come, and I'd go play jazz at their art gallery openings, and I played piano while beats read their poetry. Kerouac asked Larry Rivers and me to be in the movie
Pull My Daisy
, with him and Allen Ginsberg.”

Another community, which served as an intellectual and spiritual base for many young people who came to New York then, was the Catholic Worker movement in the Bowery, founded by Dorothy Day, an ex-bohemian who had turned, in the 1930s, from the lure of communism to a deeply felt Catholicism.

It was there that I met Mary Ann McCoy, who with two other young women had started a day care center for children in Spanish Harlem, and showed me the neighborhood that inspired my first book. Mary Ann now lives in a racially mixed neighborhood in
Brooklyn, where she's a community activist. “I associate the feeling of the Catholic Worker farm on Staten Island with our time, the fifties,” she says. “There was a big oak tree and a cow mooing and the chapel was part of the barn. Mass was held every morning, and you celebrated the hours of the day. The people there had a commitment, and we gave up part of our personal life to care for the poor, like Dorothy Day. There was a balance there that the sixties didn't have. The sixties lacked a connection with the other things of life. What's ever come out of the sixties? What did it get us? I saw it as being one big party time.”

The Catholic Worker also served as a community for a young poet named Ned O'Gorman, whom I used to see at Dorothy Day's Bowery mission and at the White Horse Tavern. Ned is now headmaster of the Storefront School for Children, which he founded in 1966 in Harlem.

“New York was safe then,” he says, looking back on the time we were friends. “It was bouncing, almost like the whole of it was a little village where everybody knew everybody else. Literary life in New York had not yet become a commercial venture then. When Bill Clancy was editor of
Commonweal
, he used to have parties with serious young writers and priests, and you went because you were excited about a real intellectual life, not because you wanted to get in Suzy's column or get a book contract. I went to a literary party the other night and there was a mass of writers craning their necks to get photographed—it seems vulgar. I preferred the White Horse and the Catholic Worker to what passes for literary life in New York now.”

There are, of course, new and different communities in New York now, with their own constituencies and their own contributions, but the city itself is not the same one we inhabited then and took for granted. I miss the people most of all, and some of them are gone forever. In January 1990 I went to a memorial service for one of my Village writer friends, Seymour Krim, and saw many familiar faces from the past. We'll be seeing each other again at similar gatherings, which will come with increasing frequency.

This book began as only a personal memoir, and it didn't feel right. I needed to hear other people's stories and impressions as well as my own, and when I went to New York on a short visit in the
fall of 1990, I looked up some old friends. I had lunch with Dan Wolfe, the cofounder and original editor of the
Village Voice
, at a Korean restaurant in midtown, met with Nat Hentoff at Bradley's bar in the Village, and called Gilbert Millstein to talk about his friendship with Jack Kerouac, which began when he reviewed
On the Road
in the
New York Times
. These conversations were so rich and gave such life to my own memory of the time that I started coming down more often and seeing more people. By the end of the year, I realized I wanted to spend more time in New York. My novelist friend Lynne Sharon Schwartz was looking for someone to sublet her studio apartment on West 96th Street for a few months, and I said I'd take it.

This book has become, I hope, a kind of community memoir as well as my own, and the effort to make it that, I think, is true to the spirit of the time and place, for we had a deep sense of community and comradeship then that was unique. I see now how important this was to all of us. Certainly I know how essential it was to me, and how precious it still is.

When I started this exploration, I had no idea how much there was to see and hear and remember. There could easily be ten or twelve books on aspects of New York in the fifties. There are huge, important subjects I haven't touched on at all, or only spoken of in passing. This book is in no way meant to be definitive, but only evocative, slanted to what were my own concerns and passions and those of my friends, who mostly had literary aspirations and were starting out. We were the newcomers, the people Carl Sandburg meant by the phrase “always the young strangers.”

Even while it was all happening, I knew that the time and the place were special. I remember walking down Broadway in mid-town and seeing people I identified as tourists and feeling sorry for them because they didn't live in New York! I felt privileged to be there, and now I feel proud as well, of the friends I had and the work we did and will continue to do for as long as we have the time and chance. Whatever we've done was shaped by the fortunate fact that we started out in the most exciting city of its era, a mecca that, like Paris in the twenties, exists now only in memory. Its naming now seems legendary: New York in the fifties.

ONE

To Grand Central Station

The only way to go to New York from the rest of the country in 1952 was by train—I mean the only romantic, “literary” way. It was possible to fly, of course, but that was considered expensive and elite, even a little dangerous. My parents and I were the first on our block to travel by plane when we went to the New York World's Fair in 1939, and the neighbors all came to the airport to see us off, one of them warning my mother not to wear her good hat on the flight for fear “it might blow off up there.” You could drive or hitchhike or take a bus, but all that seemed grubby and déclassé compared to going on the train, which popular songs, like “Blues in the Night,” and poets and novelists from Walt Whitman to Thomas Wolfe had immortalized, invoking the whistle of the locomotive sounding in the dark as a signal of love, loss, and longing (“hear that lonesome whistle, whooee”), the pitch of our deepest hopes and dreams. The trains we took to New York are part of the dreams of my generation, a shared symbol of collective memory.