Read Online New York in the '50s by Dan Wakefield - Free Book Online

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    â€œI was a literary girl, a writing major,” Jane says, looking back. She won the Elizabeth Janeway Writing Prize when she graduated, started writing for the satirical television show of the sixties, “That Was the Week That Was,” wrote scripts for “Kate and Allie,” and continued her lifelong love of writing short stories, which have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.
    Though Barnard girls were segregated from Columbia’s undergraduate classes and publications, they were welcomed at the West End, whose notorious allure was unintentionally enhanced by Diana Trilling, Lionel’s wife and herself a literary critic. Mrs. Trilling immortalized the place in a Partisan Review piece as “that dim waystation of undergraduate debauchery on Morningside Heights.” She compared it unfavorably to the “well-lighted” Stewart Cafeteria, a popular literary hangout in her day.
    With a horseshoe-shaped bar, a steam table offering stews and other student bargains, plus wooden booths and a jukebox, the West End was the all-purpose off-campus hangout for Columbia and Barnard. It provided a respite from academia as a place to go for drinks, dates, and fun, and also served as a haven where students could moan about their troubles over a beer. When the threat of being drafted to fight in Korea struck Columbia men at the start of the decade, they knew where to go for comfort. The editors of Spec reported: “Rumors that the college ranks would be depleted by the end of the year [1951] caused many to lose faith and many more to find solace in the West End.”
    The West End owed its literary rep to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other beats who frequented the place in the forties, and some of them reappeared in our own time. Jane Richmond saw Kerouac there just after On the Road came out and she was a senior at Barnard. “He loved women with dark hair,” she says. “He’d look at me and say, ‘You Greek girl? Why you all look like that?’” She had also met Ginsberg, “one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known. He told someone I always looked like I was wearing a big picture hat.”
    Ginsberg got the right image for Jane—a sense of largesse, bigness of spirit, a celebratory air. Her smile, her ability to make you laugh, her very presence, lit up the time and place.
    I didn’t meet Ginsberg at the West End back then, but I knew about him. He was a personage on the Columbia scene, a mixture of mystery and legend even before the publication of Howl had made him famous. A rumor buzzed among literature students that he’d been the inspiration for the brilliant, troubled student in Lionel Trilling’s short story “Of This Time, of That Place,” though Trilling later denied the character was based on any real people.
    No one denied that Ginsberg had been suspended from the college and spent time at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute: “The people here see more visions in one day than I do in a year,” he wrote his student friend Jack Keroauc. Both Trilling and Mark Van Doren testified for Ginsberg when he was brought to trial for possession of stolen goods. He had gotten mixed up with friends who pulled a robbery and stored the loot at his apartment; Van Doren told him he had to choose between criminals and society (“Some of us here have been thinking that it might be a good thing for you to hear the clank of iron”). Ginsberg was later cleared of the charge.
    Besides such notorious escapades, Ginsberg was known for his talent as a poet, and was even recognized as such by Norman Podhoretz, a fellow student who became his literary arch-rival. “What I remember about him was his virtuosity with metrical forms,” Podhoretz recalls. “I remember him writing something in heroic couplets,and he wrote in other traditional forms, so when he busted loose it was not as if he couldn’t write