New York in the '50s (6 page)

Ivan took the advice and was drafted after graduation. “Trilling was right, of course, the way those guys [our Columbia professors] always were,” he says, looking back nearly forty years later. “After I
got back from the Army and living in Japan, I did go to graduate school on the GI Bill for a while, but I couldn't hack it.”

Ned O'Gorman, who met Van Doren and Trilling while he was a graduate student at Columbia in the fifties, says, “I sent Mark Van Doren every poem I ever wrote, and he sent me a postcard or letter the next day with his comments. Lionel met my adopted son, Ricky, at the Aspen Institute, and I have a picture of him cutting a watermelon with him. Trilling didn't know how to cut a watermelon, and he's cutting it the wrong way. It's a picture I treasure. Those men were surrogate fathers for many of us.”

When Sam Astrachan was a junior at Columbia and his father died, Trilling got him a scholarship that lasted until graduation. When Sam showed Trilling part of his first novel, the professor got his student into Yaddo, the writers' colony, to finish it, and then sent the book to another former student, Robert Giroux, who published Astrachan's
An End to Dying
at Farrar, Straus.

In a letter Sam Astrachan wrote me last year from his home in Gordes, in the south of France, he said of Trilling, “When he died, I felt I had lost a father.”

Van Doren and Trilling were more to us than lions.

The young lion of Columbia's faculty in the fifties was a brash, dynamic sociologist up from Texas, C. Wright Mills, who had made a name for himself beyond the academy with a provocative new book on the American middle class called
White Collar
, and was working on a similar but even more controversial critique of the upper classes called
The Power Elite
. If Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling epitomized in their personal style and the thrust of their work the best of traditional values, C. Wright Mills was a harbinger of the anti-establishment future.

Impossible to picture in the confinement of a three-piece suit—he even rebelled against wearing a tie—Mills roared down to Columbia on the BMW motorcycle he drove from his house in Rock-land County, outfitted in work boots, helmet, flannel shirt, and heavy-duty corduroys. His broad chest was crisscrossed with canvas straps of duffel bags bearing books, a canteen, and packages of the prepared food he took on camping trips, which he heated up in his
office to save time. He looked like a guerrilla warrior ready to do battle, and in a way he was.

I first became interested in Mills when my classmate Mike Naver pointed out to me an ad for
White Collar
that was part of an enticement for joining the Book Find Club, and I signed up to get Mills's work as a bonus.
White Collar
moved and excited me, as it had so many readers who, I'd heard, wrote letters to the author, responding to the issues he raised and also seeking his advice on problems, for the book seemed to address the deep discontent people felt about their jobs and their circumscribed futures. With its sharp critique of the growing impersonality of white-collar work, it touched my own typical fifties fear, shared by many of my fellow students, that we'd lockstep into some automated, sterile future. But the very articulation of the fear raised hope that we might transcend it.

I was eager to see the author of this powerful work in action in the classroom, but I had to get his permission to take his seminar, which was limited to “qualified” students. I waited for my quarry in the cold, cheerless lobby of Hamilton Hall, ambushed Mills on the way to the elevator, and squeezed in beside him. Riding in an elevator with Mills felt like riding in a Volkswagen with an elephant, not so much because of his size—he was a little over six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds—but because of a sense of restlessness and ready-to-burst energy about him.

Mills fired the requisite questions at me in a rather aggressive, discouraging tone, and I'm sure my answers made obvious my lack of academic qualifications for the course, which I compensated for with enthusiasm. I trotted out my credentials as a journalist and threw in my admiration for
White Collar
. When the elevator ejected the crowd at his floor, Mills glanced back at me and said simply, “O.K.”

Mills at thirty-eight was an exhilarating teacher. He stalked the room or pounded his fist on the table to emphasize a point, surprising us with ideas that seemed utopian, except he was so convinced of their practicality you couldn't dismiss them as mere theory. He shocked us out of our torpor by challenging each of us to build our own house, as he had done himself. He even insisted that, if he applied himself, any man could build his own
car
—a feat not even
Mills performed, though he made an intensive study of German engines and loved to tinker with them.

Mills urged us, as part of a new generation coming of age, to abandon the cities, which he felt were already hopelessly dehumanizing, and set up small, self-governing units around the country. His vision of communities where people could develop crafts and skills and work with their hands was in some way acted out in the communes of the sixties, though the drug culture would have been completely foreign to Mills. The yearning for such an independent and self-sufficient way of life that Mills expressed in the fifties was part of the message that so excited his audience.

Inspired by his challenge to think for ourselves, I tried an experiment in his course. Instead of cranking out the usual dry précis of one of the heavyweight books we read each week, I let my imagination go to town, comparing Ortega y Gasset's
Revolt of the Masses
with a Hemingway story.

When Mills handed back the papers, he scanned the classroom and asked with sly curiosity, “Which one is Wakefield?”

I took a deep breath and held up my hand.

“See me after class,” he said.

In his office, I waited in suspense while Mills sat behind the desk, stoked up his pipe, and looked me over. Finally he asked what had made me write a paper comparing Ortega and Hemingway. I confessed I was bored by simply recounting the contents of the book in précis form.

“My God, I'm bored too, reading the damn things,” he said, and we both laughed.

He told me to “do some more,” continue to experiment. I started going to his office after class to talk about the latest paper, and these discussions broadened into friendly inquiries about my plans and goals, and even—to my flattered surprise—a sharing of his own work and concerns. I think he felt a bond with me because of our similar backgrounds as middle-class boys from the hinterlands who made it to the intellectual center, New York. I told him how my admiration for
White Collar
had inspired me to take his course, and he said what the book meant to him personally.

“I met a woman at a cocktail party who really understands me,” he said. “She told me, ‘I know you, Mills. I've read
White Collar
and
I know what it's all about.' I asked her to tell me, and she said, ‘That's the story of a Texas boy who came to New York.'” Mills paused, frowning, and then broke into a giant grin and said, “My God, she was right.” As he later wrote,
White Collar
was “a task primarily motivated by the desire to articulate my own experience in New York City since 1945.”

I was glad to learn that Mills was more interested in the personal vision than in polls and statistics. He thought of himself as a writer rather than a sociologist, and attributed an almost magical power to the process of writing. Hadn't it brought him, with academic whistle-stops along the way, out of Texas to New York City and national prominence? He proudly explained how he managed to escape a teaching post in the farmlands of Maryland, proclaiming in his booming tone, “I wrote my way out of there!”

When I confessed I wanted to write novels someday, Mills said he had a friend named Harvey Swados who'd just finished his first novel, to be published in the coming year.

“Oh yes,” I said, “it's called
Out Went the Candle
.”

“How did you know that?” Mills asked.

In a recent issue of
New World Writing
, I'd read a short story by Swados called “The Dancer,” an allegory of a favorite fifties theme: a pure artist selling out to crass commercialism and dying as a result. The short author's bio mentioned his forthcoming novel. I said I was eager to read it.

“Would you like to meet Harvey?” Mills asked.

That was like asking me, ten years before, if I'd like to meet Blanchard or Davis, the stars of the Army football team.

The following week, I took the bus for the short trip up the Hudson to Rockland County, and Mills picked me up at the Nyack station in a well-worn but sporty red MG convertible. He drove me to his comfortable old frame house, which had floor-to-floor ceiling bookcases he had built in. He introduced me to his wife, Ruth, a tall blond, welcoming woman who immediately put me at ease. She had a zest and humor that matched Mills's, as well as a formidable, if unassuming, intellect.

Harvey Swados and his wife, Bette, arrived with a bottle of wine and a bubbling cheerfulness. Harvey and Mills were colleagues as well as neighbors, reading each other's manuscripts and offering
criticism, advice, and support. Harvey was a “promising young writer” of short stories that dramatized concerns such as Mills addressed in
White Collar
, like the threat to individual freedom from new technology and corporate conformity.

The two couples took me in, making me feel a part of their good-humored camaraderie rather than like a mere student who was ignorant of their worldly wisdom. I needn't have worried about keeping up with their intellectual allusions; the evening turned on Mills's display of his latest motorcycle equipment, which he'd ordered from a magazine. Harvey ribbed him about that, saying it reminded him of a kid mailing in boxtops. Enjoying the kidding, Mills with jocular pride got out his new crash helmet, and to show how effective it was, he put it on and banged his head against the living room wall, sending us into hilarious laughter.

Mills became a friend whose help and guidance would see me through the early years in New York. Columbia had not only provided me with an education but a new family as well, in the city I'd adopted as home.

CUBS

If the real lions of Columbia were its star professors, I sensed very soon that some of my fellow students were future lions. They had come to the university to excel, to learn at the feet of great men in order to aim for greatness themselves, or at least to ascend to the highest ranks in their field. The college was a training ground for ambitious and talented cubs, especially those who would find careers in the media, whose national headquarters were based in New York—which, after all, was our laboratory. In 1952, the year I arrived at Columbia, the editor of the student newspaper was Max Frankel, who eventually became executive editor of the
New York Times;
the editor of the literary magazine was Robert Gottlieb, the future editor of
The New Yorker;
and the editor of the college yearbook was Roone Arledge, who years later became president of ABC News.

Some undergraduates already had a leonine aura about them, an air not of arrogance but of mission, as if they were ready to stride
from the classroom to the IRT downtown local and take their places in New York, which was the world. I was awed most of all by Frankel, who was not just editor of the
Spectator
but also served as campus correspondent for the
New York Times
. I was further impressed because he was the first student I knew who always seemed to be wearing a suit. It was usually dark, worn with a white shirt and dark tie, and I took it as a symbol of the dignity of his office, a kind of uniform for those who bore the honor of representing the stately
Times
.

As a cub reporter when he was a senior, I didn't get to know Frankel well, but found him to be a serious, soft-spoken man whose intensity about his job did not prevent him from being gracious to a newcomer from the wilds of the Midwest. I immediately assumed—and reported this back to my high school journalism teacher—this man would someday be editor of the
Times
.

In his office, now forty years later, Frankel tells me how he got his start as campus correspondent for the
Times
. His friend Dave Wise, from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, worked on
Spec
and landed the job of Columbia correspondent for the
New York Herald Tribune
. The year after Frankel came and started working on
Spec
, the prized job of
Times
correspondent, then held by Nancy Edwards, opened up.

Wise saw Max at the
Spectator
office and said, “Now I have to decide whether to shift to the
Times
or stay at the
Tribune
.” The two young men walked across Broadway to Prexy's (home of “the Hamburger with the College Education”), where they sat at the counter and talked it through over coffee.

“We doped it all out very dispassionately,” Max recalls. “We decided a young man could move faster on the
Trib
at that time. We both wanted to go the political-journalism route, covering City Hall, then Albany, then Washington and national politics. Dave decided to stay at the
Trib
, so later he whispered in Nancy Edwards's ear about me being the best person to replace her. She'd been at the Graduate School of Journalism and was going to work on the
Times
's society page—the opening women got in those days. She told the
Times
she had this great candidate for campus correspondent, but their jaws fell open when she said I was only a sophomore. Why shouldn't they hire someone from the journalism school? She
said, ‘This guy spends all day at
Spectator
, he knows all the stories coming in—you're getting fifty reporters instead of one.' They hired me.”

Going out for
Spec
was my own entrée into the life of Columbia, and soon I was covering stories I'd never seen in Indiana, from crew races at Cornell to Broadway and TV actresses, who would appear in the Lions' Den, the dorm restaurant, to be crowned queen of some prom or other. “‘That ain't Dagmar,' said a confused Columbia man” was the lead of my first story, quoting a student who stumbled into the wrong coronation while looking for the famously buxom blonde who was one of the first celebrities created by television.