So she put him in an eighteenth-century French costume made of antique velvet from before the Civil War, and he traveled with me like that. These are serious matters.
And everybody just likes that monkey. How can you not like him? How can you not like someone whose ears have been bitten off by a poet? He has some interesting things that have been given him over the years. I have several boxes of his possessions. He has a bagpipe that Muriel Spark gave him. An engagement diary for 1962. The famous Danish lady who does invisible stitches made him a cushion by invisible stitches. A bookbinder in Paris made a little sketchbook for him. I love his little wallet; he’s rich in one-lira pieces from before the devaluation of the lira. And being a well-dressed monkey, he has his opera glasses and his dance card. His hats come from Paris, naturally, and he has his gloves. He has some very beautiful jewelry and his little jewelry box. His portrait was done by Domenico Gnoli, the great Italian modern artist who died when he was thirty years old. He did this portrait of Coco which I still have.
He has traveled with me everywhere. I wouldn’t dream of going anywhere on earth without Coco.
*
I went right away to work the second day I was in New York. The Englishman who’d owned the Chaucer Head Book Shop had gone back to England when the war was beginning. It had been bought by the heir of the Rheingold breweries, and he was this impossible spoiled, rich New York Jewish boy with a cast in one eye. “Ah, but of course.” And she, the other partner, was poor white trash, Irish Catholic, from Baltimore. Rheingold fortune, rich Jewish New York, and white trash, Irish Catholic, from Baltimore. They were fighting the whole time, and I loathed them both. And of course, they didn’t understand me at all.
I realized I would hate the job when they had given me instructions like “Now be sure you stand where you can see between the customer and the shelves. You don’t know who will steal what, especially if they are wearing coats.” They said, “Remember that priests and military men are the most famous book thieves.” They said, “Never go in the record booth with a customer. You don’t know what might happen.”
I said, “What might happen?”
And they said, “Oh, don’t go in.”
“What might happen?” Then I said, “Well, who’s going to put the record on the turntable?”
“Well, you put it on first, but keep the door ajar so they can’t get in. Then you go out and open the door for them and say politely, ‘Oh, do come in.’”
I kept thinking: He’s Harvard, she’s self-made. Surely they should enjoy books more. But no. And I don’t think they realized how vicious they were to all of the hired help. There was a black boy who worked in the basement, and he was really having a nervous breakdown. They were so bitchy and mean. “You are seven minutes late.” You know. Then there was a very sort of plumpy, not very masculine boy from Connecticut. They made a nervous wreck out of him. I took refuge in Southern idiocy whenever they got onto me. But they were really destructive without realizing how much. I guess he was proving to his wealthy Rheingold family that he could make it on his own. And she was just climbing to the top from the slums of Baltimore. Now she was on Fifth Avenue.
But I couldn’t take it. The minute I left there at the end of the day, I gulped and took some fresh air and forgot them until the next morning. But I didn’t like it. It wasn’t just the nine-to-five world. It was the “break your balls and all for the dollar” world.
So I lasted there about a year. One day I finished all my rare-book stuff and wrapped and addressed some packages down in the basement. It was twelve o’clock, and I left for lunch. It was a sunny day, and then these white clouds floated over Fifth Avenue. I put out my arms and I flew down Fifth Avenue to the Village and had lunch in an Italian restaurant. And never put foot one in the Chaucer Head Book Shop again. I saw those white clouds racing over that spring air on Fifth Avenue, and I smelled green from Central Park across the street. And I just spread my wings and flew down Fifth Avenue, never to return. Never. They are still looking for me. I am on the police missing list in New York City.
After I freed myself, I lived off unemployment insurance. It was called the thirty-two-fifty club. You got $32.50 a week. I lived off that for a couple of months while I was making my way about New York.
Then I went to work in the foreign exchange section of the New York Public Library, down on 28th Street, where they have a building eight stories high. They had something like six thousand miles of running shelving. I mean, floor after floor of shelves with only enough space between these floor-to-ceiling shelves for somebody to go slightly sideways. If you were fat, you didn’t dare get in there. They had the archives of the WPA music program; they had a braille library for the blind. It was a kind of catch-all archive for the New York Public Library. So many people in New York, when they would die off, their relatives would clean out the apartment and send all the books to the New York Public Library. So they ended up there for us to sort and see if there was anything of great value. Every department would look at what was available, and if they wanted something, they would take it. Otherwise it just stayed at the foreign exchange section.
My job was to make up packages to send to South Africa, East Pakistan, wherever they were on the exchange program for books. There were exchanges where we would send a bundle of American publications and they would send a bundle of local things. They would send us their few and rare publications, say from Guandaruba, and I would send them crates of books, because we had too many. Everybody, especially the Africans, loved my foreign exchange packages. I always put copies of
Sunshine and Health,
the American nudist magazine, in the bottom as though it were padding. If I were packing a package for say, Scandinavia, I always put in things about tropical plants. If I were sending something to Africa, I always had white nudity. I can just see them: “Yeah, gee, we got our Socrates and here’s the New York Architectural Board minutes for 1890, but gee, look here,
Sunshine and Health
.”
If I Spread My Wings and Fly, I Always End Up in the Middle of Something
I lived with the reader’s adviser of the New York Public Library, who’d been in my outfit. I shared an apartment with him for about three or four months. Then I met Randolph Echols, one of about ten people that I had introductions to. He was an actor, playing with the Maurice Evans Shakespeare Company. And I said, “Well, I’ve got to find a place to stay. I have to have my own place. I can’t live with people.” And he said, “Well, you ought to look in Greenwich Village.” And I said, “No, I really want to live in New York City.” Because I didn’t know that Greenwich Village was part of Manhattan. Greenwich Village was a name I’d heard, but I thought it was a little town near New York City. Because we never looked toward New York from Mobile; we looked toward London and Paris.
He just giggled. And he said, “Well, you come with me. I think I know of a place.” He knew a bartender who had had enough of New York and was going back to Arizona or something. He had this three-room apartment just above Sheridan Square. Being a bartender who got off at three or four A.M. and slept late, he had painted the entire apartment black. Floor, ceilings, and walls—black. With white footprints painted from the door to his cot. And the windows—he had squeezed tubes of colored oil paint on them so that no light came through. In the refrigerator, there were yogurts that must have been there a couple of weeks that had long blue whiskers. It was that primitive 1870s housing. Just two big rooms and one little room, and a john which you shared with your next-door neighbor in a little room out in the hallway. Randolph said, “Well, I can get you this at $18 a month.” I said, “I’ll take it.”
So I gave a party for about eight people. And we scraped paint and scraped paint and scraped paint, and then I painted everything pale yellow. It took three coats over some of that black we couldn’t get off. When we scraped the windows, what did I see out of my back window but the little garden of the Evangelical Lutheran Church on Christopher Street. It had a neatly clipped lawn and these wisteria vines under my fire escape. So that’s where I lived. That was 194 West 10th Street.
Just up the street from me, like a few feet, there was this dead-end alley called Patchin Place. e.e. cummings had created this dead-end alley and lived in it. He was the next-door neighbor or across-the-street neighbor of Djuna Barnes. She lived there forty years. He lived there thirty-five years. And there was somebody else there. Whenever anything went vacant, some writer or painter grabbed it. He was very nice and sort of sardonically humorous. She was nervous. I used to see her in the early morning in her dressing gown and curlers at the same bakery I went to. We went to get these coffee rolls they made. They were sticky-finger coffee rolls, and they were so good. She’d become rather a recluse except for running to that corner bakery to get those sticky buns every morning, sometimes even when the bakery first opened at the Sixth Avenue corner.
Djuna Barnes wrote a key novel that came out in 1937 from Harcourt, Brace with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. He caused it to be published. I give him credit for that. When everybody was writing WPA novels—sharecroppers and drunks in New York City—she published this nineteenth-century novel.
Nightwood.
It’s about this heroine who can’t decide whether she’s totally female or a daughter of Sappho. She lives in Paris, and she ends up on all fours in a ruined chapel in Virginia. It has one of my favorite twentieth-century lines: “Children know something they can’t explain. They like Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed together.” I met the original of the doctor in the novel. He was still alive when I was in Paris. I went to a party where there was Greta Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta, her friend and lover. There was also this old doctor who’d been a friend of everybody in Paris. Especially if they had delicate wounds. He was made up with chalk white makeup and a lot of mascara. He took care of Americans in Paris. In the novel, after these unhappy love affairs, and she’s Oh, Oh, Oh—so in the middle of the night, in a moment of absolute desperation, she goes to the doctor’s apartment and bangs on the door and bangs on the door and gets in. And he’s sitting up in bed with a long blond Mary Pickford wig and a frilly nightgown and little spots of rouge. Anyway, it’s a great novel. And nobody was prepared for it. This last-gasp Victorian with modern frankness. It failed miserably. Not advertised or reviewed. Height of the Depression. So it was remaindered at Macy’s, and there were millions of copies. My copy is a first edition from Macy’s. Thirty-nine cents. I had read it just before I went off to the war.
But I never had a conversation with her. She was always in her dressing gown and curlers, and I guess I was just observing that old downtown code that all the Mobile ladies went by. You know, when my grandmother’s back was to the street on her front porch, she was invisible. It might mean she hadn’t done her hair yet. You didn’t speak to her. So I never spoke to Djuna Barnes. We had a kind of “Good morning,” “Good morning” relationship.
My apartment which I took to live in during the summer was the old kitchen and servants’ dining room of a big old brownstone mansion on West 9th Street, behind the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I sublet my apartment on 10th Street and stayed on 9th Street in the summer. It was half a level below the street and had a little courtyard paved with flagstones where I could sit in the evenings and hear Jane and Paul Bowles quarreling in their nearby apartment or watch Madeleine L’Engle combing her hair at her window. I always had flowers and a fig tree from Mobile so I could look out and think, Mobile ain’t that far away. The dirt it was growing in was from Mobile—black alluvial soil—so I could go touch it when New York got to be too much. But one day, the poet Howard Moss said, “That thing’s dead,” and picked it up, bucket and all, and threw it into the next courtyard. It was not quite spring, and the leaves were off. He was so New York, he didn’t know that things dropped leaves and came back in the spring. So I never spoke to him again from that day till this. And I walked on the other side of the street to avoid him because I was afraid of him, if he thought that you killed trees because there are no leaves on them. I never shouted at him, didn’t say a word when it happened. I just took him out of my telephone book that night.
*
The year after the war, 1946, was like taking the cap off of an old-fashioned Coca-Cola. There was a big fizz all over America. And they fizzed to New York. Something like 10 percent of the intelligent, somewhat educated, or at least gifted, if uneducated, young people went to New York.
A wave of youth swept New York clean just after World War II. So when you went down the street, you saw these charming people—boys and girls from all over. The theater was full of young people attending. The library was full of young people. There was this brightness of spirit. And the city was clean.
Greenwich Village was still a village. Everybody knew everybody. Those who lived in the Village went to the same restaurants and bars and shops. We just automatically saw each other. When I began working in the theater—when I did
Master Builder
at the Cherry Lane—I’d go into shops to buy paint, go into shops to buy sequins, and somehow you’d get in with all those people. The Village was a great place for artists because the rents were so cheap. The Italians who had the wine store and the darling Viennese Jewish man who had a famous delicatessen across the street at the corner from me where Djuna Barnes went every morning to get the sticky coffee rolls she was queer for—they would let you charge. I could buy things on credit there after they knew where I lived and what I did. I could buy on credit there for a year if I needed it.