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Living in Manhattan (1969)

Before writing the following notes, on a hot mid Sunday (normally a cultural nadir), I noticed in the New York Times’s incomparably fat entertainment section that the week promises twenty-two plays on Broadway (nineteen of which I won’t ever see), a dozen or so off-Broadway productions; daily Shakespeare both in Central Park (where the Bard is free) and nearby Stratford, Connecticut; scores of movies; a few small dance recitals; a succession of free New York Philharmonic concerts in the public parks (sponsored by the city); a Mozart-Haydn festival at Philharmonic Hall; four inexpensive rock concerts (sponsored by a local beer company) in Central Park; the folk singer Joan Baez at the new Fillmore East auditorium; and much else. In the weekly Village Voice, I see announcements for a dozen-plus productions “off-off-Broadway”, in addition to several enticing lectures and symposia. At times like this I dream of taking a week’s vacation here, moving into a friend’s apartment and then gorging myself on cultural goodies, such as experiencing a different show every night (if not a second one as well, if it has an 11:30 performance), hitting the movies in the afternoon, traveling to certain legendary but normally inaccessible restaurants, scavenging through all the esoteric stores, walking through previously unfamiliar neighborhoods.

For anyone with even a passing interest in culture, New York City is an incredible, impossible place to live, because so much is happening here that not everything good can be seen, while picking even the juiciest fruit is a perennial problem. Although I am as a critic of contemporary arts professionally committed to “keeping up”, I probably miss as many important concerts, plays, movies, performances and recitals as I see. Even a medium as convenient as the radio (which in New York is, at its best, incomparably rich) offers at least thrice as many culturally significant programs than I or anyone else could possibly hear. Of course, no mortal could go to all the available events; indeed, the sponsors of a certain program expect a particular, rather than a general, audience to come. This observation leads me to my first point: that New York is perhaps the most culturally pluralistic city in all the world; for not only are its resident artists socially disparate, but there are a plethora of distinct audiences that have as much relation to one another as cars on the same highway.

New York theater, for instance, is presented in three distinct turfs, known as Broadway, off-Broadway and, inevitably, off-off-Broadway. The first is midtown, just to the west of the more modern of New York’s two main office districts. Here are the larger theaters and more extravagant productions; here are the star actors and actresses, along with the famous directors. The audience is predominantly middle-aged and perhaps a bit fatigued in demeanor; the men favor business suits, the ladies longish dresses; and the performance ends early enough for most of them to take a long trip home, usually to the outlying suburbs. It was probably, one can bet, a favorable notice in the daily New York Times that persuaded them to come. In the Off-Broadway theaters, which are further south or “downtown” in a section of Manhattan called Greenwich Village the theaters are considerably smaller (rarely with seats for more than 200 people), the performers are fewer (usually less than ten in a cast), the productions more modest; the scripts more esoteric, and the ticket prices are one-third to one-half cheaper. Here the audiences are younger and more alert-looking; the men dressed in sport jackets and the ladies in shorter skirts; they perhaps took the advice of critics for the cultural weeklies, such as The Nation, The New Republic or The New York Magazine.

Off-Off -Broadway, which has come into existence only in the past six years, is characterized by makeshift productions, generally presented in rooms patently not intended for theatrical purposes: churches, refurbished basements, lofts, large studios, an abandoned factory; only a few of the performers belong to the professional union (which means that most necessarily take another job during the day), and the plays probably have not been presented before. The people composing the audience tend to be decidedly informal, if not slovenly, in dress; often they sit in shabby chairs (rather than rows of theatrical seats); the price of admission is usually a contribution solicited at the entrance or exit door (averaging about two dollars per person); and most of the audience lives nearby. Indeed, in only one newspaper is this theater regularly advertised, listed and reviewed, the weekly Village Voice; and it was either a good notice there, or, more likely, word of mouth recommendation (the “Village” is, after all, like a village) that enticed the spectators to come. Then there is in New York a fourth, more occasional theater, less organized and less publicized, which I call the Theater of Mixed Means and others call “happenings” or “events”; and in the audience for these performances, Bohemian garb mixes with high fashion extravagance in ways defining a scene less typical of theater than art openings, where, in fact, these same people might also come together. The point is that there exists not one audience for theater in New York City, but several, self-segregating, each of which does, say, ninety percent of its theater going on its own familiar turf.

A similar phenomenon occurs in music, although here the number of people involved is probably smaller. Contemporary composition in America, one remembers, is now split into three distinct artistic languages: serial, originated by Arnold Schoenberg and codified and elaborated by Milton Babbitt, among other composers; chaotic, which extends modern atonality to Henry Cowell and John Cage; and mainstream, which deviates comparatively little from pre-twentieth century conventions: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, et al. In New York City, each musical language cultivates its own distinct following. For music in the serial tradition, this consists of no more than a few hundred dowdy-dressed professional musicians, usually composers or music teachers or highly skilled performers. Thus, a concert by, say, the Group for Contemporary Music uptown at Columbia University resembles a trade convention, where many old friendships are renewed over handshakes; and the crowded party after the concert would seem to gather a large, circuitous family.

One favorite story tells of the time, some years ago, that Leonard Bernstein was asked to conduct at a concert like this; and he opened the program by warning his audience that they would hear difficult music, that these composers were serious and adventurous, as well as deserving of respectful attention, etc. A groundswell of modest and reluctant chuckles burst into laughter before Bernstein finished his preface, and someone arose to explain that, “Maestro, you are probably the only one who’s not been here before.”

For downtown chaotic music, the audiences are usually even smaller, composed of more painters and dancers than musicians. However, should John Cage himself perform, his reputation and celebrity will invariably draw a few hundred more people, some loyal admirers of his work; others, seekers of curiosity. For contemporary music in the mainstream tradition, there is a well-dressed audience analogous to that of the Broadway theater, if not more or less identical with it; and without the support of their wealth, the great concert halls of New York City, as well as the Metropolitan Opera, would have long ago become television studios, department stores, or supermarkets.

The point is that for music, for theater, for nearly everything else in culture here, there is not one New York but many, not a monolith, but a plurality. For example, few other than professional music critics would attend all three kinds of concerts in the course of a season. For this reason alone, any group known as (calling itself) “New York Composers” or “New York Intellectuals” inevitably comprises not all the poets, composers, or intellectuals living here, but a self-selected few who have appropriated the geographical title for themselves. Perhaps because so many writers live in New York, there are also more coteries, which divide and unify themselves in various ways, than I can possibly count.

Within the city’s literary world, nothing appears to define a writer’s allegiances, or to classify both him and his work, more distinctly than where he lives. Writers residing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan are considerably different from those on the Upper East Side, while both in turn have little in common with those on the Lower East. This observation leads me to sketch a geography of literature in New York.

The Upper West Side that runs from 59th Street to 125th Street, between the Hudson River and Central Park (extended to Morningside Park) houses the more “intellectual” writers, established professor critics like Lionel Trilling or Alfred Kazin or decidedly erudite poets like Robert Lowell or Babette Deutsch; such theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett; historians like Richard Hofstadter and Salo Baron; and such chief editors as Carey McWilliams of The Nation or Norman Podhoretz of Commentary. Columbia University, which sits near the northern rim of the Upper West Side, sets a particular tone for the area’s literary lifestyle, for nearly all the writers who would live here are over forty; most have families (and here, indicatively, are the cheapest apartments with five rooms and more); gatherings of writers emphasize talk and drinks; all but a few either teach at a local university or earn a professor’s income through a regular editorial job in publishing. (Indeed, Columbia University’s staff, particularly in the humanities, is an advisory adjunct of New York publishing.)

The Upper East Side, in contrast, runs from the eastern edge of Central Park to the East River, and from 96th Street on the north to 42nd Street on the South. Here the buildings are newer, the side streets cleaner, the restaurants and rents are considerably more expensive than elsewhere, literary parties favor dinner and drink; and the writers who live there are inevitably wealthier than their New York peers. Some inherited their money, the epitome here is George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review and author of a best-selling light memoir about football; others, such as the journalists John Gunther and Martin Mayer, have earned their handsome incomes in the literary marketplace.

As for downtown New York, it has become customary to refer to everything south of 14th Street as “the village”, or “Greenwich Village”; but this area turns out to be as various as the city itself. There are at least four distinct “villages” whose differences can be sensed by anyone walking cross-town from one river to the other--the “West Village”, extending from the Hudson River to Seventh Avenue; the “middle”, which falls between Seventh Avenue on the west and Broadway on the east; and two more sections to the east of Broadway; and each of these villages, inevitably, harbors its own breed of writers. [Nearly four decades later, need I note that the epithets SoHo, Tribeca, & Nolita were not heard in the 1960s.]

The Middle Village, the artistic bohemia recorded as “The Village” in legend and history, has by 1969 become the poshest downtown neighborhood, very much in the shadow of New York University that surrounds Washington Square. Here live the N.Y.U. professors who also write, the unmarried authors with daytime jobs in advertising or publishing, full-time writers with a bit of inheritance or success, the journalist Nat Hentoff, the playwright Edward Albee, the social critic Michael Harrington, the novelist Donald Barthelme, and the poet Stanley Kunitz. By now this neighborhood is nearly as expensive as the Upper East Side, even though its residents dress as though they regarded themselves as livelier, and perhaps, poorer.

Crossing Broadway to the East Village, the walker immediately notices that women’s clothes are no longer so well-tailored, people are younger and not so well scrubbed, married couples have their children with them (instead of hiring baby-sitters); the men are considerably more hirsute. Anyone familiar with New York who emerged from the IRT subway at Astor Place, just east of the Broadway dividing line, would instantly sense the street before him was not the Upper West Side or even the middle village. Still further east, past Avenue A (which lies parallel to the east of First Avenue), to the East River, is what we call “The Far East”, where the streets are even narrower and messier, the tenements dingier and the atmosphere more forbidding. Hardly uniform as either a cultural or a visual entity, “The Village” epitomizes New York City in presenting endlessly various images to the eye.

My own neighborhood is the East Village, to my mind the most authentic Bohemia in the city. Here the rents are low; it is still possible to find a four room apartment for forty dollars a month (though the rooms are minuscule and the tub sits in the kitchen); all kinds of eccentricity, if not anti social behavior, are graciously tolerated by both residents and the police; street life goes on well past midnight and nearly everything that is not price fixed is cheaper here than in the middle village, or need I say, the uptown areas. The East Village is not a predominantly hippie community like San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, but a diverse neighborhood in which hippies, artistic Bohemians (only a few of whom are young enough to blend with the hippies), elderly Jews, slightly less elderly Ukrainians, some Puerto Ricans, and miscellaneous other poor people live and mix in relative amity.

Here would live the non-academic poets Ted Berrigan, Ronald Tavel, Lee Baxandall, Ed Sanders (who is also the lead singer in a notorious rock group called The Fugs); further east and south, on the Lower East Side, live Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and many young writers known only to their friends. In these precincts are published such small circulation magazines as Manhattan Review, Ikon, 0 To 9, Angel Hair, in addition to such “underground” newspapers as East Village Other and Rat. (As a bearded non-academic who also writes experimental poetry, I live, you see, squarely where I belong.) Surprisingly, the eminent English born poet W.H. Auden still lives in this neighborhood much of the winter, in the same apartment that he has occupied for nearly thirty years and refuses to give up; twice last winter I saw him walking alone, undisturbed on the street. Within a few blocks of me also reside some of America’s major visual artists--Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana--even though they could all afford to move uptown.

Of course, the environment does not make the entire person, or the entire writer for that matter; and not all writers subscribe to the styles of literature or behavior typical of their environment. However, the city-wide fact is that most writers work and write as their professional neighbors do, while the process of moving from one to another does indeed affect the writer’s outlook. For instance, in the years since I moved downtown from near Columbia, my attitude toward avant-garde arts has changed from distant intellectual appreciation, evident in my contributions to The New American Arts (1965), to the closer, more participational engagement informing The Theater of Mixed Means (1968); and there are sentences in my recent writing, if not entire essays, if not whole projects, that I can attribute to the fact that I now live here and not there. What all these distinctions suggest, in short, is that New York has not one literary community but several, each of which has its own life styles and gathering places, as well as its characteristic impact upon its literary residents; several milieus, each of which has only occasional contact with the others.

To quote from personal experience again, in over five years “on the literary scene” in this city, I have met, here and there, about two percent of all the New York-based writers whose names might be familiar to me, approximately one hundred out of five thousand; and I doubt if even the most aggressive hostess has exchanged pleasantries with more than ten percent of them. The facts of cultural decentralization and diversity may explain why one group’s enthusiasm is likely to be another group’s poison and a third group’s bore, as well as why a provincial who comes here to “make the scene” inevitably discovers that he has latched onto only one of many constellations in orbit.

To my mind, even though one cannot attend to more than a fraction of the cultural activities in this multifarious city, it is genuinely comforting to know that this incredible abundance is reliably there for one to sample according to his needs and tastes; and that is one of the primary reasons why, even in this torrid summer, I rarely leave New York City.