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

conventional verse. He was more like an abstract painter who was good at figurative stuff.”
    Ginsberg was starting to read Whitman then, and felt at odds with the prevailing academic attitude toward poetry. “When I was at Columbia,” he says, “Shelley was considered a jerk, Whitman ‘an awkward prole,’ and William Carlos Williams wasn’t in the running.” Ginsberg felt alienated from the faculty in other ways was well: “I told Trilling I smoked grass and he was horrified. He thought it was a nineteenth-century disease.”
    My friends and I at Columbia in the fifties would have been as shocked. “I was surprised by the beats coming out of Columbia,” Max Frankel says. “That was a side of the college I never knew, and it was just a few years before me. We were such innocents. There wasn’t any dope around, and a beer party was a big thing.”
    Because we were serious students who hit the books not out of a sense of duty but from a driving curiosity to find answers, to understand, didn’t mean we spent all our time holed up in the library. “New York is our laboratory” was a jocular toast, as we winked knowingly and clinked glasses of draft beer at the San Remo in the Village, swilling it to give us the courage to pick up the wistful girls at another table whose long hair and sandals we hoped were signs of bohemian belief in free love (it more likely indicated a sophisticated disdain for college boys).
    New York was not just our laboratory but our theater, our art museum, our opera house. It was one thing to take a music appreciation course—students at any college did that—but quite another to have the music of great professionals performed live. Mike Naver got us standing-room tickets for Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera (the old one, on 39th and Broadway), and we looked over the massive, gilt-embellished tiers of boxes under jeweled chandeliers. This was the real thing.
    New tastes burst inside me like music when I went to my first French restaurant, a modest place with red-checked tablecloths in the West 50s called the Café Brittany, where students and young office workers could afford to take a date for dinner. Continental cuisine had not made its way to the cities of the plains back then; I had known of no French food in Indianapolis. The Mandarin Inn,with chop suey, and the Italian Village, with the first post–World War II pizza, had been our exotic foreign restaurants.
    What knocked me out in the Brittany was not so much the sauces and the tender flesh of coq au vin (so different from the chicken I knew, fried to a crisp) but the revelation—to a boy who had grown up eating vegetables condemned to death by midwestern ritual boiling rites—that green beans could actually have a taste.
    That sense of bursting open, of blooming, accompanied all these excursions into the city. Here was the source, the living experience of books now lifting off the page, as after art appreciation classes I went for the first time with Columbia friends to the Museum of Modern Art. I was overwhelmed, shaken up, and turned around by Picasso’s stark, howling Guernica , with arms that seemed to stretch from the canvas into my heart and mind.
    I loved New York and Columbia, and was stricken when I had to stay out the fall semester of my junior year, but grateful I was alive to return after a car wreck in August 1953 put me in the South Chicago Community Hospital with a broken and dislocated fifth cervical vertebra. I was in traction for three months, and read the Greek tragedies and Dos Passos’s U.S.A . with the aid of a pair of refracting glasses, as well as letters and copies of Spectator from my friends back at Columbia. I went home in a body cast and eagerly returned to Morningside Heights in a neck brace for the spring semester of 1954.
    I took to smoking little cigars called Between the Acts, which came in a red and white tin,