Authors: Glenn O'Brien
He allowed these last statements to fall on the silence as a grocer allows dried peas to fall from his brass scoop, one at a time, his head cocked, regarding the indicator needle fixedly, until it reaches the appropriate mark. I didn’t mean to keep him waiting. Finally without saying anything I fetched the unbroken bottle of whiskey and poured him a drink.
“Happy New Year,” I said.
“Happy New Year!”
We clinked glasses and he drank his down with obvious relief. Then he looked at his watch and said he had to be on his way. Claire was waiting for him. Claire. I always thought of Claire as strawberries and cream, cream, red and pink. He looked guilty for her. As well he
might. She would have betrayed him for a dry Martini. She told him she didn’t like me.
I helped him on with his coat and he wrapped the scarf round his neck. At the door we shook hands. As he left he turned back for a moment and said he was counting on me. I waved him down the stairs. Back in the room I finished my drink and smoked a cigarette. I might have laughed. But I always found it difficult to laugh alone.
Cain’s Book
, 1960
Born Frances Deitsch, she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and met Jay Landesman, a former gallery owner who founded the pioneering magazine
Neurotica
(among the first to publish Ginsberg and Kerouac) in 1948. They married and moved to St. Louis, Jays hometown, where he opened a nightclub called the Crystal Palace. Fran to begin to write lyrics, including the classic “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” collaborating on songs with the club’s pianist, Tommy Wolf. Together with Jay, who wrote the book (based on his unpublished novel about New York hipster life), they produced the musical
The Nervous Set,
which played on Broadway One of the show’s songs, “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” became an often-requested gay anthem of the pre-Stonewall era.
All the sad young men
Sitting in the bars
Knowing neon lights
Missing all the stars
All the sad young men
Drifting through the town
Drinking up the night
Trying not to drown
Sing a song of sad young men
Glasses full of rye
All the news is bad again
Kiss your dreams goodbye
All the sad young men
Seek a certain smile
Someone they can hold
For a little while
Tired little girl
Does the best she can
Trying to be gay
For a sad young man
Autumn turns the leaves to gold
Slowly dies the heart
Sad young men are growing old
That’s the cruellest part
While a grimy moon
Watches from above
All the sad young men
Play at making love
Misbegotten moon
Shine for sad young men
Let your gentle light
Guide them home again
All the sad young men
The Nervous Set
, 1959;
The Ballad of the Sad Young Men and Other Verse
, 1982
Holmes’s novel
Go,
published in 1952 when he was twenty-six years old, was a
roman à clef
whose main characters were based on Holmes, Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Huncke. His article “This Is the Beat Generation”
—
a generation to whom he attributed “a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness”—popularized the term, apparently coined by Kerouac and inspired by Huncke, when it was published in
The New York Times Magazine
in 1952. Holmes never hit the road, but led a quiet life teaching and writing fiction (including the jazz novel
The Horn),
essays, and poetry The piece here, from his book
Nothing More to Declare
(1967), is a profile of his friend Jay Landesman.
W
HENEVER
I met Jay Landesman in a bar in the old days, I always seemed to arrive first. I waited around, and far from being piqued, I discovered that I was experiencing a pleasant little ping-ping-ping of anticipation. What I was anticipating was laughter.
Black laughter. Like the idea of a cigarette smoking a man, or
Dr. Strangelove. . . .
Absurd laughter. Oh—like a camel in sneakers, beaded Art Nouveau lamps that play “Valencia,” Andy Warhol. . . . Pertinent laughter. You know, like, “Laugh? I thought I’d
die,”
the cobalt bomb, Lenny Bruce. . . . Laughter accompanied by the sound of hot air escaping from reality’s punctured balloons.
When I think of things like this, I always think of Landesman. Not because he was a wit. There wasn’t a proper epigram in him. Nor one of those living-room Berles, machinegunning everyone with gags. It was that he saw everything on the bias. It was that everything he did had an air of elaborate burlesque about it.
For instance, his six-button jackets with the multiple vents and triple lapels. His stuffed alligator with the lamp in its jaws. His study in St. Louis that was a facsimile of an old Von Sternberg set in all its claustrophobic proliferation of unrelated dreck.
Neurotica
, for instance—so outrageous in its time that you automatically assumed he must have started it for the same reason that other people suddenly decide to throw a wild party. It was like daring the
Partisan Review
niks to go skinny-dipping. Or ASCA (The Advanced School of Cultural Analysis), with all those spoofing lectures on sports cars, drinking, jazz, conformity and other “aspects,” which seemed to be nothing more than a deadpan excuse for Sunday afternoon cocktail parties. Or the Crystal Palace Cabaret Theater in St. Louis, created by Landesman and his brother for the simple reason (one couldn’t help but feel) that it didn’t already exist, and they needed an arena in which to “make things hot.” Or Landesman’s musical,
The Nervous Set,
that got to Broadway, perhaps too soon, and died—funny, irreverent, a parody of the Beat Generation. Or was it? You kept remembering lines from it, you kept humming those songs. And you laughed.
You did. You laughed at all this. You said, “Good old Jay. What the hell kind of wild stunt will he pull off next?” You always looked forward to seeing him, and what he pulled off next was always more outlandish than you had anticipated. . . . A Twist Room that must have been one of the first authentic discothèques in America. Or a TV gab-show that opened with a shot of Landesman’s firehouse shoes, and then panned up to a wry smile that suddenly admitted, “Talk is cheap.” Or a musical version of
Dracula.
A million laughs, all right. A hip, sardonic mind behind it. No doubt of that. Landesmania, his friends called it. A life style that was a wacky amalgam of Hellzapoppin, Theater of the Absurd, and Pop Art. But serious? You must be kidding. . . . I mean, I once saw him wear magenta Bermudas and a pith helmet. He planned a lecture entitled “Abortive Attempts at Middle-Class Rebellion.” He was often heard to say things like, “George Raft in a dinner jacket looks like a stolen Bentley.” And take his parties! There was something fiendish
about them. . . . Chandler Brossard and James Jones in the same room. Hostility games. Come as your favorite perversion. Confess your first homosexual experience. He was a wrecker, he was frivolous, he was—well, just think of going up to Dorothy Kilgallen on Madison Avenue and saying, “This is Sin Street, Madam, get off it!” Or naming your kids Cosmo and Miles Davis. It was all prankishness, eccentricity, maladjusted
chutzpah.
And yet—
And yet there was that damn underlayer to all of it. His projects all seemed to have a disturbing half-life that lingered in the mind like Strontium-90 in the bone. His personal preoccupations had the maddening habit of becoming cultural tendencies ten years later. You never took him seriously at the time, and you were never sure that he did either, and then all of a sudden everywhere you went in New York during the sixties there was a sort of public version of Landesmania. But where was Landesman? He had moved to England, and he wrote back mysteriously, “I see a kind of blurring of the sexual lines. . . . But no matter how you slice it, ducks, it’s all love. . . .” And you started to keep your eyes open, craftily, for that one to reach the surface.
After knowing Landesman for seventeen years, I still find it difficult to explain him to a stranger. A tall, shambling man, who has the warm, inquisitive dark eyes and the self-mocking smile of a secret idealist; who speaks in a glib, exaggerated
patois
of show biz lingo, psychiatric gobbledegook, and Negro and Yiddish slang, all blended into a contagious argot of his own, Landesman has been variously described as “a puppet-master with an aggressive
lack
of talent,” “the Mike Todd of dying cities,” and “a genie with a certain sense of merchandising.” There is a bit of truth in all these estimates, but the whole truth is not there.
For myself, I would say that Landesman possessed, years before it was either chic or marketable, what would now be called the Pop Imagination. In a culture where everything is mass-produced, quick-frozen, readymade, precooked or painted-by-the-numbers, he was the first person I knew who refused such a society’s categorical choice of either remaining an esthete or becoming a vulgarian. For any and
all evidences of a unique and unconventional point ofview interested him, and he looked for these evidences in junk shops, movie houses, and newsstands (wherever his own quirky eye led him), as well as in bookstores, art galleries and theaters. In that Stone Age (ten or fifteen years back), when enlightened people sat in their Eames chairs, under their Calders, talking about T. S. Eliot, Landesman was already living in a thicket of Victorian bric-a-brac, and publishing Allen Ginsberg. I suspect his reasons for doing both were very much the same: he believed in indulging his own curiosity, and only things that were counter, wry, eccentric, special and excessive stimulated him.
Having grown up into (and through) a family antique business, Landesman believed that artifacts were sometimes more evocative of their times than ideas. Things had an uncanny aura to him, and clutter made him feel at ease. The first sight that confronted you on entering his New York apartment was a huge sculpture of Noah’s Ark fashioned from half the gunwale of a cat boat. Over his desk in St. Louis hung a spray-painted jock strap in a gilt frame, and he always worked warmly insulated behind mountains of books, magazines, record albums and any other nameless effluvia that had caught his eye. As a consequence, it was impossible to imagine him living for long in the functional Gobi of a modern house, and he could be painfully hilarious when a guest in one.
Equally, eccentricity of attire was evidence of soul to him, and one ceased being surprised when he turned up in “horrible” candy-striped seersuckers and a string tie that hung down to his crotch, or sporting a denim sack suit in an advanced state of rumple. Such props were as expressive of his personal vision of things as anything he said, for, as he once confided with a dim smile, “Every time I see a man in jodhpurs and an opera hat—and it only happens two or three times a month these days, I always go up and speak to him, because that man isn’t going to hang you up about the weather.” Sometimes this flair for the eccentric was only inches this side of outright perversity (“the three-lapel jacket—yes, that was a very important project”), but most of the time Landesman was that unique phenomenon in a
status-drunk society: a man who knew that the only really hip style is the next one, the one that hasn’t been established yet.
He had an omnivorous interest in popular culture, and long before it was High Camp to collect back issues of
Batman
and idolize the horror movies of Tod Browning, he was publishing articles that anatomized the one, and scouring the most dismal reaches of Brooklyn for screenings of the other. Like many of us in the late forties, he felt that the fine arts were so tyrannized by one or another version of the New Criticism that they had become little more than lifeless appendages of it, but, unlike a lot of people in later years, he shifted his attention to the popular arts without sacrificing his sense of the culture as a whole.
The idea that there is something intrinsically worthwhile about the soup cans, science-fiction movies, mammoth billboards and electronic noise that inundates our civilization (an extremely fashionable idea just recently) would have struck Landesman as being hopelessly frivolous. These things were interesting to him only insofar as they indicated the condition of our imaginations, a condition that could not be perceived if we celebrated the signs of its poverty merely for themselves. “Popular culture never lies,” he used to say. “Not about the people who consume it,” among whom I’m sure he would have included Susan Sontag as well as the stenographer down the hall.
For it was popular culture’s unconscious embodiment of inner fantasies that attracted Landesman. He revelled in it, he let it stimulate his rarer appetites for the bizarre, but he never patronized it in the manner of Camp, and his ear was always cocked for the psychic throb within it—seismographic evidences of which filled the pages of
Neurotica.
As its editor, Landesman’s greatest gift probably lay in getting other people to track down and amplify the whispers he had heard. This wasn’t laziness, nor inability to do the job himself, but simply a canny understanding that what he could best contribute to the magazine was a general intuition about the culture, and a Hawkshaw-knack for ferreting out people who could particularize that intuition into
usable knowledge. Though there were several assistant editors, all of whom did most of the comma-shifting and phrase-haggling, the magazine showed little of their influence—with the single exception of Legman. For Landesman knew precisely what he wanted from the start. He wanted articles like “The World of the Borderline Fetishist,” and “Psychiatrist: God or Demitasse?” and “The Unique Mores of the Bar and Tavern Social Milieu”—all of which existed in the beginning only as titles, to which the articles themselves were more or less jerry-written by other people later.