New York in the '50s (52 page)

Whatever frustration I felt about not yet doing my novel when I lived in New York was erased seven years after I left, when Gay Talese invited me for drinks to celebrate the publication of
Going All the Way
when it was named as a book club selection and hit
Time
's best-seller list (it eventually sold more than a million copies in all editions). Talese poured us both big gin and tonics, turned his x-ray eyes on me with full force, and said, “Congratulations. You've really done it.” And I knew he meant it and was genuinely pleased.

In the meantime, back in the midst of my bourbon-brown mood of that last year in New York, I plunged for salvation into my work, and though the novel I still plugged away at came chokingly slow, if at all, I managed to write magazine pieces of which I was proud.
The most monumentally researched and meaningful to me was an
Esquire
article called “Dos, Which Side Are You On?” which followed John Dos Passos's path from 1920s rebel to 1960s conservative, written in the style of
U.S.A
. In preparation I read every book he had written—it was well over thirty volumes by then—and was moved again by the mass and power of
U.S.A
., and freshly taken with his early mastery, in
Manhattan Transfer
, of a new, kaleidoscopic form that captured the hardest place of all to pin down in its shifting modes and moods.

I also interviewed James T. Farrell, the author of
Studs Lonigan
, for the
Esquire
article while he paced his studio bedroom at the Beaux Arts Hotel in his pajamas. He suddenly stopped and crawled under the bed to search for some old papers and letters. With his bare feet sticking out the side of the bed, I heard him say, “Don't you see, Dos has lived a world so different from these contemporary writers. His interest isn't just himself, it's the world.” I admired Farrell's respect and loyalty but cringed when he showed me a map of the world with marks on various countries indicating support for his own candidacy for the Nobel Prize. (He was running for laureate!) Then he pointed out other countries and said, “Dos has a lot more backing there than I do.”

My God, I thought, will it come to this? Will my friends and I, twenty or thirty years later, be scrambling under hotel beds for evidence of our standing in the world literary market? Show me the way to Walden Pond!

Dos himself—in the carriage house on the slope of a hill in Baltimore where he worked during the week, spending weekends at the country estate that had been his father's in Westmoreland, Virginia—seemed subdued and patient, politely doing his duty with the interview, reflecting, I guessed, the disillusionment and exhaustion expressed in one of his later novels,
Midcentury
. There he plumbed depths lower than I had yet struck; I wondered if this view, too, awaited me with the winding down of the years:

Musing midnight and the

century's decline

man walks with dog …

The hate remains

to choke out good, to strangle the

still small private voice that is

God's spark in man. Man drowns in his own scum
.

These nights are dark
.

He had come a long way from the Jazz Age, the literary Roaring Twenties of his friends Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

I used those quoted words to end my piece, perhaps because they mirrored my own dark mood, one that sank to the pit of an April evening when, for the first time since the early years of the analysis, I drunkenly cut my wrist, and later woke not only with the pain, guilt, and anguish of that self-destructive act but the horrible realization that this was the day I was scheduled to have my interview with the Nieman committee at the Harvard Club of New York.

“It's over,” I wailed, “it's all over.” But I had enough will to live to wail my lament to the right friend, Jane Wylie, who came to the rescue from Perry Street with bandages and aspirin and soup and juice, sticking me in the shower, getting me dressed, cajoling me up to the favorite spot where we used to go and play F. Scott in brighter days, the very Plaza where he jumped into the fountain. Just before the interview Jane fed me two frozen daiquiris and secured the sleeve of my left arm with a safety pin so the cuff wouldn't slip and show the bandage on my wrist. Sailing out on a safety pin and a smile, I appeared before that august body and calmly presented my credentials as a serious journalist, posing as a sane and upstanding citizen, speaking of my work on the racial conflict in the South, my variety of reportage for
The Nation, Esquire
, and other worthy journals, and proudly mentioning my book
Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem
. I exited into the brisk afternoon feeling like a winner, but not taking any bets.

I got my mind off my worries when
The Saturday Evening Post
sent me to cover a coal mining strike in Hazard, Kentucky, but the piece I produced wasn't as “colorful” as they wanted. I went with what I knew was a meaningful story of American working-class life (including a threatened leader of the striking miners who kept an ax beside him in the seat of his car whenever he left home) to Norman Podhoretz at
Commentary
. He nodded, got the picture precisely, said
to redo it, and helped me clear away the rhetoric and hit the story's bone. I wrote out of my angry weariness, which matched the mood of the striking miners: “I would just as soon forget about Hazard, Kentucky …”

A letter arrived in the mail in late May that said I got the Nieman. I yelped for joy and relief and called everyone I knew. My agent and friend, the courtly and gracious James Oliver Brown, took me to a fabulous dinner at Peter's Backyard—the Village steak house that Meg Greenfield says we always got our parents to take us to when they came to town. When “In Hazard” was published in
Commentary
, I was asked to lunch by Harrison Salisbury and A. M. Rosenthal, who said that was the kind of reporting they wanted to have in the
New York Times
, and offered me a job. I was flattered but not tempted, for I had the Nieman in my pocket, lots of time ahead to write the Novel, and the ease of not having to worry about the rent for a whole year—I had “lived by the pen” in New York for eight years, and I was all scratched out.

I wrote that piece for
Mademoiselle
on the new young conservative movement, and the magazine invited me to a cocktail party for their new crop of guest editors fresh out of college. I was drawn to a lively young editorial aspirant of abundant beauty and charm, whose enthusiasm about being in New York (she had just arrived from Dubuque or Des Moines, or maybe it was De Kalb) reminded me of how I had felt when I got off the train from Indianapolis more than a decade before. Time had evaporated.

Caught up in the magic of her Manhattan excitement, the first flush of it, I got excited again myself, like the contact high jazz musicians sometimes experienced, and when she said, “Being here, it's like being on fire,” I remembered that kind of burning passion for New York I used to have, and a tingle went through me. I was on the verge of asking her to dinner, of pursuing an evening of New York youthful romance—“Dancing on the Ceiling,” “My Funny Valentine”—and then I stopped before the words came out, for I suddenly sensed the enormous gap between her experience of the moment and mine. It was clear that I would only be trying to get some of what she had to rub off on me, and it seemed unfair, like theft. I felt old and grubby. I finished my drink, wished her luck,
went back down to the Village, and called up an old girlfriend of roughly my own vintage and had a quiet, desultory dinner, realizing something was over.

Maybe that's when the fifties ended for me, or maybe it was just the end of my New York, or my youth—or maybe they all were the same. What came to me then was the line from
The Crack-Up
, when Fitzgerald wrote in “Echoes of the Jazz Age” about the twenties: “It all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.”

There were other endings too, other demarcations of the era, for me and for everyone I know, and sometimes we look back on them, identify them, in personal experience and in public events and issues, and sometimes the two converge in a single memory. For Norman Mailer, the shift in the zeitgeist of the decade came in political terms.

“I can tell you when the fifties ended,” he says. “It was 1959 in Chicago, and I was on ‘Kup's Show' [Irv Kupcinet was a Chicago newspaper columnist who hosted his own TV talk show]. He got whatever visiting firemen were in town, this odd mix of people, from an executive of the UJA to the mayor of Dublin, the police chief of Ghana, and Hazel Scott—whoever was in town. There were about twelve people that night, and the show went on for hours, from midnight to three or four in the morning. I got into a debate with some pro-Ike person and it was terribly dull, so finally, to get something going, I said, ‘In my opinion, J. Edgar Hoover has done more to harm this country than Stalin.' Well, that got the ball rolling. Hazel Scott was the only one who joined forces with me, the rest were all out to get me. After saying that, I didn't know how long I had to live—I was as paranoid as the next guy in those days. I thought there would be a horrible response from the FBI. It turned out later, when I saw my FBI file, there were about three hundred pages on me, and about eighty pages were devoted to that one program!

“A friend of mine was out in the control booth and he said calls started coming in, and there were twenty-eight opposed to what I said and twenty in favor. I felt it meant there was something in the air, some dissatisfaction with the Ike era that I didn't know existed.
I'd have thought the response would be something like fifty to five against me.”

For many people the fifties ended with either the hope brought about by the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961 or the despair and disillusionment that came when he was assassinated in 1963. Looking back, however, William F. Buckley, Jr., argues that “it's not accurate to think the election of JFK established the sixties. There was nothing innovative about JFK, though one has to say that now while wearing a safety vest. The civil rights movement was innovative, but he didn't kindle it. The difference he brought to the office was his persona—he was very glamorous. People forget he was not all that popular before he was killed. The issue of
Time
before the assassination said JFK was going to Texas because he thought the Texas vote might decide the presidential election. The fifties weren't really over till Vietnam, in '64 or '65.”

For many people, the Vietnam War became the defining event between eras, and for some it came not just as headlines but in terms of personal and professional decisions. Even those of us too old to face issues of college deferment or the draft were faced with moral dilemmas brought home by Vietnam.

John Gregory Dunne recalls: “In '62 I was writing this stuff for
Time
about Indochina and I didn't even know where the countries were, so I asked
Time
if they'd send me there. I was a bachelor, so I said I'd take my vacation there for three weeks if they'd pay my air fare, and they said O.K. I went to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Saigon, Bangkok. I met David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Peter Arnett, and I got to know Charlie Mohr, who was the
Time
correspondent over there. I respected these guys, and by the early fall of '63 they were all saying things are not like the Pentagon says they are.

“One day I got a long story on the war to work on, a report from Charlie Mohr. I can remember his first sentence as if it's in big block letters in my mind: ‘The war in Vietnam is being lost.' That night I had a date with Joan [Didion] for dinner, and we went to the Chalet Suisse on West 52nd Street and had fondue, and I said, ‘There's no way
Time
is going to print this story from Charlie Mohr and I'm not going to change it. I'm going to call in sick.' Joan said, ‘No, write it the way he sent it.' The procedure at
Time
was you took these report files and worked on them like a carpenter, and that's
what I did. I went back that night and worked till two or three in the morning and got it done as Mohr had reported it. The next morning I got in around eleven. I saw the edited version of the story and Otto Fuerbringer had written ‘Nice' across my copy—but instead of the war being lost, he had edited it into ‘There's light at the end of the tunnel.' I told the editor I wouldn't continue to work on the story and I wouldn't write any more Vietnam stuff. That was the end of my career at
Time
. I stayed on, but I was reassigned to the Benelux countries. I knew my days were numbered, and I didn't get a raise when the time came around. Joan and I were married in January of '64, and that April I went to work one morning and called Joan and said, ‘Do you mind if I quit?' and she said no. I asked for a leave of absence—I knew I wasn't coming back, but I wanted to keep my health benefits as long as I could. I left in May and we went to California.”

Some of us who were adolescents in the age of Ike found the signal of change in the new sexual attitudes. For Bruce Jay Friedman, who first etched some of the male's sexual fears and hang-ups in his black humor novel
Stern
, the fifties ended at a party in the Village: “My wife and I had a son, so we had moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, and we just came into the city at night for musicals in the late fifties and early sixties. One night in 1961 I saw another life. I went to a party given by a woman who lived in a brownstone in the Village. She was a one-woman sexual revolution. It was the beginning of the bossa nova craze. Paul Krassner, who published
The Realist
, and John Wilcock, who wrote ‘The Village Square' column for the
Voice
, were there, and the jazz musician David Amram, and my friend Arthur Frommer, who later did the guidebooks to Europe on five dollars a day. I was there with my wife, and I had on a tweed suit. That night was the first time I ever smelled pot. Instantly, the world tilted. It was the smell of pot in concert with seeing this woman who was giving the party—this tall woman with black hair to the floor and a perfect body, dancing to one of those bossa nova songs. It was a magical vision, smoking dope and seeing this fabulous woman, and in the john there were nude pictures of her from floor to ceiling! This woman almost single-handedly ushered in the sixties. When I was ready to leave the party, I couldn't find my raincoat, and this incredible woman who was the hostess
said, ‘Your raincoat will be here tomorrow.' I didn't even catch on, I was so dumb. I sent my friend Frommer over the next day to get the raincoat! But I knew after that party there was a wonderful craziness out there to be had.”