There was a restaurant in the Village called Charlie’s Gorden: “garden” misspelled on the awning. He had an open-air place in the back where I used to lunch with Alison Lurie, who was a gorgeous thing. She wore green at her wedding and carried one white flower. Then there was a funny little Village restaurant in an old carriage house on a side street where it was always budding writers, or budding painters, or budding sculptors, or budding actors who were waiters. No order ever got right, but the place was fun.
I don’t think anything like that exists now. The Village had such good parties and such amusing people that after a while people said, Gee, Greenwich Village. So a lot of nonentities came. The rents went up. The restaurants were no longer family-type restaurants. And that was it. It just changed. I probably wouldn’t know it now.
There were several crowds that I had the great good luck to fall into. I’m centrifugal. If I spread my wings and fly, I always end up in the middle of something. It’s vibrations. Many lives before this one. Friend of cats and monkeys. Pure instinct. It’s because I never went properly to school. My childish instincts were never battered out of me.
In New York at that moment, there was a wonderful magazine called
Wake,
done by a boy who had just come out of Harvard or something, named Seymour Lawrence. He must have been moneyed. He was very slim and very beautiful with black, black hair. And oh, the ladies just fell over Seymour. He would come into a cocktail party and they’d go, Wow. You could hear them. The Filipino poet José Garcia Villa was the editor. He had just published his first volume of poems by New Directions. It was much made over, because his little gimmick to get attention was to put a comma between every word. To slow down the reader, he said, because people read poetry too fast nowadays. If you forget about the commas, they’re some nice poems. And if I’m not mistaken, Seymour also started at New Directions. That must be how they met. There was that crazy, wonderful creature named James Laughlin who had started New Directions. He was a wealthy guy and just wanted to do it and did it. Right after the war he did that new classics series which was one of the greatest things ever done in America. He published so many of the modern writers for the first time. And reissued things which nobody knew, like Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood.
He published so many translations from French. It was just this fabulous publishing house. Distinguished design, beautiful typography, gorgeous jackets. So there was a New Directions/
Wake
crowd in the Village at that moment.
There was also a magazine called
View,
a surrealist quarterly financed by Helena Rubenstein. I had read
View
magazine all through the war; I had it sent wherever I went. I always write my comments—or did then, having nothing better to do—about any magazine like that which was something special, so I corresponded with Charles Henri Ford from Mississippi, the editor. And John Meyers, who now has the John Meyers Gallery at 57th Street. They were among the first people I saw when I moved to New York because I went to their office. It was there I met Alexander Calder and Joan Miro—all these famous refugee artists were in New York. Pavel Tchelitchew was one of those who had rushed from Paris to New York when it looked like the Germans were to take over Paris. He had rushed, as had Eugene Berman. They were all busy around
View.
And I’ll never forget going to that tiny little cinema in the East 50s somewhere that showed foreign films and special films. Once I went to see the very first Walt Disney natural history film. Not a cartoon, but one of those first films of animals and flowers and plants photographed in their natural habitat. Suddenly this tall, lanky guy somewhere in the front stood up and said, “Oh, Mrs. Nature! Mrs. Nature, she is wonderful.” And that was Tchelitchew.
The
View
crowd did this avant-garde once-a-month thing at the Knickerbocker Music Hall. That was how I got to do Charles Henri’s marionette play, which was designed by the artist Corte Seligmann. I executed the scenery and the marionettes from his designs for the Knickerbocker Music Hall production. John Meyers and I operated the actual marionettes. The music for violin and piano was the first Ned Rorem composition done publicly at the Knickerbocker Music Hall.
José Garcia Villa also knew the
View
crowd. So there was always a link among all the crowds:
View, Wake,
New Directions. All the different communities overlapped and impinged on each other.
I cannot remember how I met José Garcia Villa. I’ve known him forever. I mean, the people I really get along with, I can never remember how I met them. We met in the eighteenth century or in the Renaissance. Or on some Greek island early on. We’re just remeeting years later. Anyway, José Garcia Villa was one of those nosy people who come in your apartment, you know, and if there was a table with a drawer in it, he would open it and see what was in it. One evening I was fixing dinner for him, and he just went through this pile of papers and said, “Well, I like these poems. I want to publish them.” So I had these six poems in
Wake,
and they attracted a certain amount of attention. It wasn’t a splash, but it was a speck.
Hazel McKinley, like her sister Peggy Guggenheim, was quite genuinely interested in young writers, young painters. They were both quite genuine. They weren’t cutesy. They weren’t collecting names in the news or anything. They were genuinely interested in people who were doing things. And so one of the great parties I was invited to after my poems were published in
Wake
was at Hazel McKinley’s when she was coming out of her depression a year after the death of her children. She was still in very bad reputation. They said she’d thrown her two children out of this fiftieth-story window. But the truth is—which I learned from people who knew her—they went to the dentist and the window was open and nobody thought anybody would go on this little iron rail for flowerpots. It was like a little would-be verandah, an architectural detail, high above the street, to break the monotonous façade. It had not been properly attached, and her mad children went climbing out of the window and the whole thing fell fifty floors. They had to get a lot of sponges to clean up what was left of them. Of course, she never recovered. She was out of her mind with grief and became quite dotty. Then people said she threw them out because she was estranged from the husband and had always been sort of cranky with the children. She’s still quite gaga, but worth meeting.
That was a good party. A very fancy apartment. I mean, the ashtrays were by Picasso and the doorknobs were by Alexander Calder. You know. Everybody that was in New York at that moment was there. That man who published the first Truman Capote short story in
Mademoiselle.
Rita Smith, the sister of Carson McCullers. Guy Pène duBois, the old painter, and his daughter Yvonne, who was also a painter. His son, William Pène duBois, was the art editor of the
Paris Review
later.
I had met Peggy Guggenheim at her gallery Art of This Century. I was there the third day after a new show opened. I had no idea who she was. All I know is that I was looking at a great big painting which I liked, and she was there roaming about with a pencil and a tablet and seemed to be some kind of attendant. I’ll never forget these lapis lazuli grape leaves she was wearing. But I didn’t know who she was. I thought she might be the gallery assistant or something; she was the only person there. So I asked her some questions about the painter, and she sort of laughed and answered them. I said, “I love that big painting of the snow on the barbed-wire fence.” She laughed and laughed. It was one of the first Jackson Pollock throw-the-paint abstracts.
And then years later, we met again in Rome, and she invited me to stay for a week with her in Venice in her eighteenth-century palazzo right on the Grand Canal. A showplace. Her bedroom was a cerulean blue room with this oval bed. She had commissioned Alexander Calder to make her an old-fashioned brass bed. But at the time she commissioned it, World War II was starting and brass was absolutely forbidden to civilians. So she had him make it in sterling silver. The walls she had covered with her earring collection; the whole wall was gorgeous earrings, hung up on nails. What I most loved—she has a Marino Marini, a man on a horse sculpture. It’s a naked man on a horse, throwing his arms back as though he were exulting and looking up at the sky. And also he had a big erection. Gorgeous. After the penis had been knocked off and stolen three times, she had one made by the sculptor that screws in. So the last thing she did in the evening was go and unscrew that penis and take it to a shoebox, where she kept it inside. Every morning, first thing she did in her négligée, she would go out and screw the penis in place to greet the morning sun.
*
In the Village, there was something called the Birdland bars. There were three bars. There was the Blue Jay, the Red Bird, and something else. If you wanted to indicate that you thought somebody was gay, you’d say “Birdland.” It was all the gay boys who were mostly in theater and the beginning of certain kinds of radio and advertisement. They were all from the provinces, and they were all more New Yorker than the New Yorker. They wore these Brooks Brothers suits, these white shirts, and these silk ties. They talked very properly. Every once in a while they’d forget, and you’d get Iowa or Missouri. Most of them had been in the army or the navy or the air force and were escaping small-town boredom. And the nonacceptance of anything that wasn’t in a Bradley sweater or corduroy pants. But I found that closed gay world of New York impossible. They didn’t have anything to talk about. They didn’t read any books. They were just brainless wonders who thought they were getting New York gloss. And who probably had only two friends in Viola, Iowa, and suddenly they could see hundreds from all over the United States. Mobile didn’t have anything like the so-called gay set in New York. That was like a club in New York, a very private club, which was the saddest private club I’ve ever attended. Some of those people didn’t see the so-called normal world for months on end.
There was this actress who had a huge loft apartment where she had parties for only gay males. I don’t remember her name; I’ve had Alzheimer’s all my life. She called and said, “I’m having everybody in to my loft apartment on Saturday night. Can you come?” I said, “Well, yeah,” because I wanted to see a loft apartment. And I thought, Well, I’m going to give them something to think about. Because they would all be in those Brooks Brothers suits. So I wore my Prospero costume. It was a Mardi Gras costume with sequins and jewels, one of the old Mardi Gras costumes that really was silk and satin, not nylon. The sequins were real metal, and the rhinestones were real glass. It was a kind of Neapolitan nobleman’s costume of 1500, mostly shades of blue, green, and yellow. Knee britches and tight stockings and a great jerkin sort of thing and a cape to the ground and sleeves to the ground.
I took a taxi, of course, and the driver said, “Oo-wee, you must be going to a party.” I said, “I am the party. I’m going to a loft full of bores.”
So I got there, and there were about thirty to forty elegant young men from the backwoods of Iowa, Minnesota, Arizona, Missouri; they were all in their gray Brooks Brothers being New Yorker. They fell in a faint when I walked in. Everybody was drinking martinis; that was the new drink at that moment of history. Everybody stood clenching a martini and watched me enter. And I pretended that I didn’t notice that I was the only one properly dressed. And I went up to the hostess and shook hands and said, “What are you all drinking?” She said,
“Well…I…we…”
I said, “Well, I usually drink bourbon.” She said, “Oh, yes,” sort of like “I knew you wouldn’t drink a martini. Not dressed like that.”
So I went and sat on a sofa that was in the middle of this huge room and drank my bourbon. Everybody kept this respectful distance, kind of like “What is it?” Finally there was some boy from someplace in the South who had been saying something like “Have you seen the latest Paulette Goddard?” you know, but he dropped his loftiness and came over to me and said, “Where are you from?” I said, “Mobile, the mother of Carnival.” He said, “I should have known.”
When it came time to go, I realized I didn’t have enough money and I was going to have to walk home. I’d come in this taxi and I’d tipped the driver generously because he was so amusing. So I just held my shoulders up, pretended I was dressed in native costume, and walked down Sixth Avenue.
Those cars would slow down, I’m telling you. Finally a police car slowed down. And they said kind of like “Hey there. Where are you going?” I said, “I’m going home.” “Where you been?” I said, “I went to a party.” I didn’t tell them I was broke and why didn’t they give me a lift. I didn’t want any part of those New York police. One thing that makes a natural poet a natural poet is a dislike of military people and absolute fear and distrust of policemen. That’s part of the born element of the poet. I always wish I had a water pistol full of Tabasco and could just shoot them in the eyes and blind them for twenty-four hours but do no permanent harm.
But anyway, I saw a loft. I went to a Birdland party in a loft. In the spirit of sociological research. I hope they are still talking about it somewhere. And I’m perfectly certain that more than half of them got sick of New York after three or four years and went back home and now are busy changing their grandchildren’s diapers and mowing the lawn with that retired look on their faces. Others, you know, are probably dead of AIDS in Indochina or something.