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

and making forays to Greenwich Village with Malcolm Barbour, whom I got to know in a writing class. My image of Englishmen was of stiff, tea-drinking gentlemen, but Barbour was a rumpled, irreverent, beer-drinking Brit, a regular guy whose humor was simply funneled through an accent. We became good friends, comparing rejection slips, reading each other’s stories, dreaming of beautiful girls.
    Once, while drinking our beers in a booth of the San Remo and speaking of the stories we wanted to write and the sex we wanted to have (our ongoing obsessions), our privacy was suddenly invaded by a wild man who looked like a bum, waving sheets of paper at us with poems he had written. He wanted to sell them, for either a dime or a quarter apiece (the price was negotiable). We got rid ofhim as quickly as possible and laughed as he left. A long-haired woman on her way back from the bar saw us laughing and said reproachfully, “That’s Bodenheim.”
    â€œBodenheim?” Barbour asked me as the woman moved on. “Who the hell’s Bodenheim?” I didn’t know either, and we watched as the poor man went to other tables and booths, trying to sell his wares. Most everyone seemed to know him, and some greeted him kindly, but no one that night bought any poems. In our undergraduate giddiness, Barbour and I thought the name itself was funny: “Was that Bodenheim? ” “Don’t you know Bodenheim? ” I later learned, to my shame, that the man we were mocking had been a well-known poet in the twenties, one whose work Mark Van Doren had published in The Nation .
    When I lived in the Village, I saw Bodenheim again on other nights in the San Remo, a favorite hangout of his and a source of sales. He always made me uncomfortable, not only out of guilt because I had thought him a wino pretending to be a real poet, but also because he was a real poet, one whose work had been recognized and acclaimed, and this was the end to which he had come. I liked to think justice triumphed, especially in literature—that serious artists who didn’t sell out would somehow be rewarded or saved. I knew all the tragic stories of poets’ lifelong struggles and early deaths, but I never had seen a poet whose presence proved that not all literary stories had a good ending, that refusing to sell out could lead in old age to selling one’s work in a bar for spare change.
    I ran into Malcolm Barbour in Los Angeles in 1976, when I was working on the television series I created, “James at 15,” and he was working for a production company. In 1989 I saw his name listed as coproducer of “Cops,” a docudrama series. I still remember a story he wrote in college about a penniless young artist in love with a beautiful dancer in Paris. I can picture the girl, with her long blond hair, walking in her black ballet shoes over the fallen wet leaves of the streets along the Left Bank.
    Abruptly and with no fanfare, my college life ended in February 1955, an anticlimactic finish that came out of season because I lost a semester—and almost my life—after the car crash the summerbefore my senior year began. When I passed my last exam—in, of all things, geology (still using New York as our laboratory, we studied rock layers of the Palisades on the Hudson)—my college career was over. Of course, I could attend the graduation of the class of ’55 in June; otherwise, I’d get my diploma in the mail, which seemed even more unreal, as if I’d simply sent away for it from a catalogue.
    No longer in college and not yet launched on a job, I felt in limbo, like a man without a country. I rationalized that I still had business at Columbia, or at least the excuse of one last semi-official tie: I’d submitted a short story to that year’s fiction contest of The Columbia Review , giving it to Sam Astrachan, who was now one of the editors. I nurtured hopes of a prize, or at least