New York in the '50s (4 page)

Tea with Mr. Cochrane and his welcoming wife at their graduate student apartment stoked my growing excitement about books as I saw their own love of them. It was a love expressed not only in the abundance of volumes that lined the walls and grew in piles on tables and desks, or the way the Cochranes spoke about books and the stories and ideas in them, but also in how they handled them, with a kind of familiar affection that I'd seen before in the way good basketball players picked up and held a basketball. This was the opposite of the attitude toward books of some of my fraternity brothers—like Brick, the jock who had plucked a novel out of my arm once, held it up like a dirty sock, and said, “You really like that stuff, don't you?”

Mr. Cochrane loaned me his own precious underlined, annotated copy of one of his favorite books, Sherwood Anderson's
A Story Teller's Story
, and I felt I'd been given a trust, the temporary guardianship of a sacred text that was no mere relic but a tangible source of knowledge and power. No wonder the essay I read that semester that struck me so deeply it changed the course of my life, catapulting me on to Columbia, was called “Education by Books.”

When I got back to my seat in one of the coaches after dinner with the Woollens on the train that night, I pulled out the anthology the essay was in so I could read it again, for inspiration as well as affirmation of the road I was now taking. The essay was neither a polemic nor a call to action, but a quietly reasoned, sweetly ironic argument for a college education consisting solely of four years of reading, discussing, and finally understanding the books that were “the acknowledged masterpieces of the past three thousand years:
masterpieces of poetry, of history, of fiction, of theology, of natural science, of political and economic theory”—from Homer, the Bible, and Herodotus, to Freud, Proust, and Einstein.

The author of the essay admitted that students who finished the prescribed reading of great books without the frills might not immediately be able to cope with some of the aspects of the world they entered: “The only thing, indeed, to be said in their favor was that they were educated.… They might not save the world. They might not change it. But they would always be able to see where its center was.”

From what I knew, people who tried to save the world or even change it were likely to become fanatics, religious or political, like the intellectuals who became Communists in the thirties, or the Moral Rearmament zealots of the fifties who tried to make people confess their sexual sins in group meetings. (They did it to my own parents in our living room in Indianapolis!) But people who were able to truly see the world and know where its center was, those must be the people I admired, writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and the poet Robert Frost, who wrote, “I'm waiting for the one-man revolution / The only one that's coming.”

When I finished reading that essay the first time, I felt a quiet excitement of the kind that comes when you discover something—a work of art or literature—that speaks directly to you, that seems to be a response to questions you didn't even know you were asking until the answers appeared with such clarity and power, as if they were waiting for you all the time. The author of the essay was Mark Van Doren, identified as a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who was also a professor of English at Columbia.

Mark Van Doren
. His name seemed to rise up off the page like an Indian smoke signal of the intellect or a Jack Armstrong secret code from the unconscious to guide me to his classroom. I knew without further explanation that somehow I was going to go to Columbia to study with Mark Van Doren.

Besides the lure of Van Doren, Columbia had the virtue of being in the heart of New York City, the place where everything important happened first, before the rest of the country was ready for it. The books, plays, and paintings, the very ideas that would inform, entertain, and inspire the nation and the world, were created in that
single power-packed place. Now that I was no longer tied to mid-western collegiate fraternity standards—the ones that turned me down and out—now that I was free, as Rex Cochrane said, to go anywhere, it seemed not only natural but inevitable to go to the most exciting place of all.

Other generations had and would have other meccas: the literary “hub of the universe” in Boston, for midwesterners like William Dean Howells, had passed; the Hollywood of Stephen Spielberg was yet to come. Generations soon to follow would be lured by Los Angeles as the home of moviemaking and the popular music and record business; or drawn to San Francisco for laid-back, sophisticated culture and Love; or seduced by Seattle's natural beauty and clean air. In the fifties, though, New York had no real rival for youth who wanted to be at the creative—and creating—center of the American dream.

“There was early talk of San Francisco,” Meg Greenfield recalls. “That was the only place that was competition for New York then, but San Francisco didn't have anything like the draw of it—we all thought New York was the only place you could possibly live.”

Joan Didion, the novelist who grew up in Sacramento, says, “I always thought I'd go to New York. I just didn't know how I'd go about it.” Mary Perot Nichols, from suburban Philadelphia, who became a reporter and columnist for the
Village Voice
, recalls, “I had an English teacher who'd been in publishing in New York, and she turned me on to it. I thought I'd be in publishing, or a writer for
The New Yorker
. From high school on, I wanted to live in New York.”

For some, the desire to live in New York came even earlier. Leslie Katz was twelve years old when he came back home to Baltimore after visiting a friend in New York City whom he'd met at summer camp. He told his father, “That's where I want to live. There's just nothing like it.”

Richard Lingeman, executive editor of
The Nation
and biographer of Theodore Dreiser, listened to the Stan Kenton album
Manhattan Towers
when he was going to high school in Crawfordsville, Indiana. After he went to New York on his high school senior trip and stayed at the Hotel Piccadilly in Times Square, “I imagined someday sitting in my own Manhattan tower.”

Calvin Trillin, the author and
New Yorker
staff writer who came
to New York from Kansas City via Yale (“because my father read
Stover at Yale
and wanted me to go there”), says, “The immigrant saga of the fifties was
My Sister Eileen
—which became the Broadway musical
Wonderful Town
—rather than the
Daily Forward
. It was people coming in from the Midwest instead of from Europe.”

The siren songs of movies and musicals about New York sometimes served as the immediate inspiration of someone's pilgrimage. Ann Montgomery, who became a model for the Ford Agency, took a semester off from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and borrowed $50 from a friend to go to New York because “I'd come as a teenager and my uncle always got us theater tickets to musicals, and I believed them all—I thought everyone in New York was living a version of
Wonderful Town
.”

Ann was asked to share an apartment with some other girls who had gone to Miami, and shortly afterward she met a boy one of them dated. “Howie” Hayes, the son of a Baptist minister from North Carolina, reminded her that not all the young people migrated to New York from the Midwest; lots of eager southerners came too. This minister's son became the editor of
Esquire
and a mentor to many of the fifties generation—including Ann's future husband, the writer Brock Brower.

As a teenager, the novelist David Markson used to come down with his high school friends from Albany to go to Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, or the Polo Grounds, and after the games they would eat bowls of spaghetti near Times Square before going home. David returned on the GI Bill to go to graduate school at Columbia in January 1951, and “the minute I got here,” he says, “I knew I wasn't ever going to leave New York. I've always been shocked by the people who came, looked, and didn't stay.”

New York was also a mecca for those who grew up in the city itself, and the young people from other boroughs experienced the same thrill of discovery as we outlanders did on first coming into its heart, Manhattan. Bruce Jay Friedman “grew up in the Bronx next to Yankee Stadium, and went to college at the University of Missouri, but when people in Missouri or in the Air Force asked where I lived, I'd say New York as if to say, Where else on God's earth would a person live?”

If many of my friends first arrived in New York on those trains
with impressive names, some came to Manhattan on the subway from the Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens. Marion Magid lived at home with her parents in the Bronx when she went to Barnard. “Our journey was to go from the Bronx to Manhattan,” she says. “You discovered the city. Going to Manhattan was going to another world.” The editor and critic Norman Podhoretz, who came out of Brooklyn to graduate from Columbia in 1950, explains that “when you came from Brooklyn you didn't consider yourself a New Yorker—that was only people in Manhattan. Manhattan meant New York. My attraction to it started early. I was eleven or twelve when I went to the Loew's Paramount for Frank Sinatra's solo appearance with Benny Goodman's band.”

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who went from Brooklyn to Barnard in 1956, wrote in her novel
Leaving Brooklyn
of the first time her heroine “ventured on the subway from Brooklyn to Park Avenue in mythic Manhattan, a mere river away, though it felt like another planet.… Even the sky seemed a better blue, a more sophisticated blue.”

Some of us hitchhiked from our hometowns, and some took advantage of a popular mode of free transportation, the driveaway service: you got to where you were going at no charge by delivering someone's car to a prearranged destination. My friend Ted Steeg (known as “the Horse” for his speed, strength, and reliability, the guy you could count on) went to my high school in Indianapolis, graduated from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and wanted to come to New York when he got home from the Army in January 1955. He looked in the classified ads of the
Indianapolis Star
for a car to deliver to New York City, where he was going to study at Columbia on the GI Bill. He still remembers the journey. “I'd never been east of the Ohio, and when I came up the Jersey Turnpike I saw the skyline in the distance. It was night and the sky was lit up. I saw the Statue of Liberty—at first I didn't know what she was, she was turned the other way, but then I recognized her, and I got a lump in my throat. That and the skyline were thrilling.”

Joan Didion, from Sacramento, opened the window of the bus she took from Idlewild (later Kennedy) Airport to Manhattan to get a glimpse of the skyline, but all she could see was the “wastes of Queens” and signs that said
MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS WAY.
There
was a sudden summer shower, which seemed exotic and remarkable to her because she was from the West, where there was no summer rain. She was a junior at Berkeley when she flew to New York that June of 1955 to be a college guest editor at
Mademoiselle
. She remembers it as her first trip on a plane. She recounted, in
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
, that the temporary terminal at Idlewild smelled of mildew, and some instinct, “programmed” by all the songs, movies, and stories she knew of New York, told her things would never be the same again.

On the train I took, after the great steak dinner in the dining car, I read until the overhead lights went out and then put down the anthology with Van Doren's essay in it on the seat beside me. I pressed my face against the darkened window, watching the scattered lights of isolated farmhouses shining like beacons across the fields as we moved through the land I could love perhaps for the first time now that I was leaving it.

The next morning I woke to the bright winter sunlight reflecting on steel and glass skyscrapers packed in a proud, upreaching outline, the one my friend Ted was thrilled to see from the Jersey Turnpike at night, the one my future professor and mentor, C. Wright Mills, pointed at one morning when we crossed the George Washington Bridge and said with a challenge in his voice, “Take
that
one, boy!”

TWO

Lions and Cubs on Morningside Heights

LIONS

When New Yorkers said “train” it meant the subway. As in Duke Ellington's “Take the A Train,” you took the train to go downtown to Greenwich Village or uptown to Columbia, on Morningside Heights. I took the IRT line to the local stop at 116th and Broadway and got off there to go to college. Crash and toot of congested traffic, underground earthquaking rush of the subway, faces black, yellow, and swarthy, voices speaking in foreign tongues, made the place seem as alien as Rangoon, yet I felt at home, sensing it was where I should be.

Columbia bore no resemblance to the idyllic, pastoral campuses of the movies, or the ones I knew in the Midwest, where ivy-clad buildings were set on rolling hills with ancient elms, and chapel bells tolled the slow passage of time. The quad of dormitories and classroom buildings that made up Columbia College was set in the gritty heart of the city, and the catalogue boasted, “New York is our laboratory.” I loved it. What could be more removed from the rah-rah frat-house collegiate life I had fled?

Because I was a transfer student, I had to make up required courses I had missed, but my faculty advisor allowed me, as a reward, to take the elective Introduction to Poetry course of Mark
Van Doren my first semester. The morning that began a new term—and for me a whole new life—I went for breakfast at the drugstore my roommates recommended on Amsterdam Avenue (the eastern boundary of the campus, opposite Broadway), squeezing into a packed counter of students crying orders to the friendly pharmacist, Mr. Zipper, who reminded me of a plump Groucho Marx. I picked out something soft and sweet called a French cruller, a doughnut fancier than any I'd dunked in Hoosierdom, and washed it down with sugar-and-cream-laden coffee, hoping to dispel the butterflies I felt before going to meet for the first time the teacher whose words drew me halfway across the country.