It’s on Fifty-Second Street.
*
So now we’re getting somewhere.
Aren’t we?
*
In 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration – part of the great Roosevelt-funded programme that provided employment for over six thousand writers, editors and researchers to produce a series of state guides to America – published their Guide to New York City, ‘A Comprehensive Guide to the Five Boroughs of the Metropolis’. The city of New York, the Guide explained, ‘is the largest in the Western Hemisphere’, with a population, in 1938, of exactly 7,505,068, in an area of just 332.83 square miles. The New York depicted in the pages of the Guide is a city of vivid nightmares and astonishing dreams, a place of cigar stores, rooming houses, hustlers and street hawkers, the ‘Negro metropolis’, ‘the greatest city of the Jews’, ‘the most populous Italian city outside of Italy’, and ‘the world’s third Irish city’, as strange and beautiful a place as anyone could possibly imagine.
In his famous hymn to the city, Here is New York, published in 1949, E. B. White described the place as ‘without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive’.
For Auden, in 1939, New York was a puzzle waiting to be solved.
*
The Arts Project of the W.P.A. was, perhaps, one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state.
(Auden, ‘Red Ribbon on a White Horse’)
*
The WPA Guide works its way steadily from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, from street to street and building to building, offering commentary and insight (the old Custom House is ‘somewhat ponderous in its neoclassic treatment’, the Empire State Building is ‘a great inland lighthouse’, while ‘the gaunt trestle-work of the els [elevated railways] brings twilight to miles of streets’). Fifty-Second Street, it notes, ‘lying in the shadow of the Rockefeller Center between Fifth and Sixth Avenues’, is renowned for its nightclubs and is therefore ‘the source of much of the gossip of columnists and radio commentators’. At No. 72 there is the Little Club, and then at No. 66 the Famous Door, with its state-of-the-art glass-brick vestibule, and Leon and Eddie’s (popular with out-of-towners), and the Twenty-one Club, Tony’s, the Hickory House, and the black-and-white edifice of the Onyx – places known for their hot jazz and sizzlin’ steaks. On any given night of the week you’d have been able to relax, glass of bourbon in hand, rib-eye set before you, and sit back and listen to Pee Wee Russell, Count Basie, Muggsy Spanier and Eddie Condon.
The Guide does not mention, however, the other kind of delights and temptations on offer in the area, including those available at the Dizzy Club, situated at 62 West 52nd Street. This gay bar, according to Harold Norse, in his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, was a ‘sex-addict’s quick fix, packed to the rafters with college boys and working-class youths under twenty-five’.
And it was this particular 52nd Street dive – ‘a writhing mass of tight boys in tighter pants’, according to Norse – that Wystan Auden, the thirty-two-year-old English poet and new arrival in New York, preferred to frequent.
*
In his journal entry for 1 September, Auden writes, ‘10.30 Went to the Dizzy Club. A whiff of the old sad life. I want. I want. Je ne m’occupe plus de cela. Stopped to listen to the news coming out of an expensive limousine.’
It seems likely, then, that he was actually there: the actual Auden was in an actual dive on the actual September 1, 1939.
This is hardly news, and maybe it doesn’t even matter.
*
(Does it matter? Does it matter, for example, if Marco Polo ever went to China? According to scholars, he probably didn’t. Pierre Bayard, the French psychoanalyst and critic, and the author of Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (2007) and Comment parler des lieux où l’on n’a pas été? (2012), argues that what he calls the ‘aberrant space’ created by writers who imagine places is in fact a kind of comfort zone that resembles ‘the universalized space of a collective mythology in which numerous readers can find themselves’. It’s for this reason that we can all still recognise Wessex, say, or Laurie Lee’s Cotswolds, or travel to Oz and Skull Island: these places are all true fictions, projections and idealisations of places, domains and realms of the imagination. Similarly, time in writing, just like space, according to Bayard, possesses an ‘essential chronological mobility, a mobility that allows it to belong simultaneously to several periods, and whose transitory reunion writing illuminates and deepens’. A book’s then is not really a then, then, any more than its here is exactly here. September 1, 1939, in this kind of a reading, is just the title of a poem, and Fifty-Second Street a place that occurs therein. Bayard proposes what he calls ‘an atopic criticism’ that would ‘draw on all the consequences of the permeability of the boundaries between the space of the work and real space’ – a proposal, in other words, to treat literature as literature and not as, say, geography, or history. Writing is not documentary. Poems are not necessarily statements of fact, even when they claim to be statements of fact.)
*
Does it matter?
Of course it matters.
*
We are forced to rest content with assumptions – if I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty)
*
Maybe it matters, but what’s more important than whether or not the dive in the poem is indeed the Dizzy Club – motto, ‘A rolling tomato gathers no mayonnaise’, according to the historian Ellen NicKenzie Lawson in Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws: Prohibition and New York City (2013), and which sported a sign behind the bar which read ‘WYBMADIITY’, and if a customer asked what it meant, the barman would reply, ‘Will you buy me a drink if I tell you?’ – is the fact that it is definitely on 52nd Street.
*
Known as Harlem Downtown, and also as Swing Street and Swing Alley, in Sammy Cahn’s famous 1937 song, 52nd Street is described as ‘the place where the swing cats meet’. (The other famous song, about 42nd Street, ten blocks to the south, from the 1933 Busby Berkeley musical 42nd Street, claims that it’s the place ‘Where the underworld / Can meet the elite […] Naughty, bawdy / Gaudy, sporty / 42nd Street.’) According to the Variety editor Abel Green, in the late 1930s 52nd Street was ‘the nocturnal heart of America’. According to Arnold Shaw, in his book 52nd St.: The Street of Jazz (1977): ‘If you flagged a taxi in NYC and asked to be taken to The Street, you would be driven, without giving a number or avenue, to 52nd between Fifth and Sixth avenues.’ 52nd Street was The Street: a midtown Manhattan block of five-storey brownstones, ‘in whose drab and cramped street-level interiors – once known as English basements – there were more clubs, bars, bistros and boîtes than crates in an overstocked warehouse’.
*
52nd Street was at the centre of things – literally. (It was midtown, which was ‘the new center of life in Manhattan’ – according to Ric Burns and James Sanders, in New York: An Illustrated History (1999) – ‘an intricate, ultramodern nexus of office buildings, department stores, apartment houses, and hotels’, which had sprung up around Grand Central Terminal to service the modern new industries of advertising, communications, PR and mass-market entertainment. Midtown was where whatever was it was at.)
For years, between the mid-1930s and the 1950s, the clubs on 52nd Street – the Onyx, the Famous Door, the Three Deuces, Leon and Eddie’s, Hickory House, Kelly’s Stable, Club 18, Downbeat, Tillie’s Chicken Shack, the Troc – were where you went to hear Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Jack Teagarden, Buddy Rich … (‘Fifty-Second Street was a mother,’ according to Dizzy Gillespie. ‘I say mother – and I don’t mean motherfucker, though it was that, too.’ Many of the clubs on the street had once been speakeasies. Several had been owned by Owney Madden, and Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond, and other notorious mobsters.)
It was seedy, it was splendid: it was central.
*
(It’s interesting, isn’t it: Auden had left England, where he was the centre of attention; and here on 52nd Street he quickly found himself at the centre of the action. He seemed to have a knack, a knack I’ve never possessed. I’ve never been anywhere near the centre of things. I’ve always lived on the fringes, at the edge: the end of the Central Line when I was growing up, literally and metaphorically; and now again, the end of an actual line in a small town on an island off an island off the mainland of Europe. I’m undoubtedly attracted to Auden’s centrality because I am so entirely marginal. Auden was gay: I am straight. Auden a poet: I write prose. Central: marginal. Major: minor. Serious: less so. Opposites, etc.)
*
So what is Auden – or whoever the hell it is – doing sitting in this dive on 52nd Street, in the heart of Manhattan?
He is drinking, probably.
But you don’t go to a dive just to drink: you can drink in any old bar.
You might go to listen to the music.
But you can listen to music elsewhere: at home, on the radio, at the concert hall.
You might go to meet other people.
But you can meet other people elsewhere: at work, at church, anywhere.
We should remember, lest we forget, as the poem really gets going, as it soars into the mystic and the ethereal, that a dive – or at least Auden’s dive, the Dizzy Club – is a very particular place of encounter.
It’s a pick-up joint.
A voice was heard from a bottle of hock,
saying:
I am the ghost of W. H. Auden’s cock!
(Gavin Ewart, ‘The Short Blake-Style Gnomic Epigram’)
‘Never write from your head,’ Auden advised John Pudney, ‘write from your cock.’ Auden was a writer who was more than willing and able to – excuse the expression – write from his cock. I am not, however – you will be delighted to hear – going to be writing about Auden’s cock. Or indeed more generally about Auden and sex. It is not my area of expertise. Plenty of people have written about Auden and sex. Writing about writers and sex is boring. Unless it’s not boring, in which case it’s just weird. (All that discussion about Proust’s reputation as the ‘rat man’, for example, with scholars and critics trying to identify exactly how he liked to achieve orgasm. By having caged rats set upon each other, apparently, in case you’re interested, which I’m sure you’re not. It was the kind of thing you could get people to do for you in Parisian brothels if you were in receipt, as Proust was, of the equivalent of about £10,000 private income per month. There was also his fetish for photographs, of course; and his obsession with cleanliness; and so on and so forth. If Proust was odd, which he certainly was, then his critics and biographers are surely even more perverse.)
*
(It’s not just me who thinks sex is boring, by the way. Don’t take my word for it. In an interview in Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982), none other than Foucault himself remarks, ‘I must confess that I am more interested in problems about techniques of the self and things like that rather than sex … sex is boring.’)
Both in conversation and in books, people today are only too ready to take their clothes off in front of total strangers.
(Auden, Secondary Worlds)
(But, just for the record, because it is no doubt fascinating – in his fascinating book A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, the historian David Friedman points out that, in ancient Rome, a boy was often given something called a bulla, ‘a locket containing a replica of an erect penis’, to wear around his neck, which was known as a ‘fascinum’ and was said to signify his status and power, which is why ‘today, fifteen hundred years after the fall of Imperial Rome, anything as powerful or intriguing as an erection is said to be “fascinating”’ – just for the record, Auden’s most famous erotic work is titled ‘The Platonic Blow’, thought to have been written in 1948, and published in 1965 in an issue of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. It is also known as the ‘Gobble Poem’. I’m not going to discuss it here. You can look it up online. In his 1939 journal, Auden criticises ‘the American habit of washing one’s hands after pissing, as if the penis were an object, too filthy for any decent person to touch’. I am not going to fiddle with this any further.)
*
What is perhaps relevant to this poem though, at this point, is to remember that Auden has only recently acquired a young lover, Chester Kallman, who was a student, eighteen years old when they met in April 1939, fourteen years Auden’s junior, and that they had fallen in love, and that Auden believed that his new life had now properly begun. (He wrote to his brother in May 1939: ‘Just a line to tell you that it’s really happened at last after all these years. Mr Right has come into my life. He is a Roumanian-Latvian-American Jew called Chester Kallman.’)
Maybe this is why he’s uncertain and afraid. Maybe he’s nervous. For all his adventurousness, he was English, after all. He’s got a serious boyfriend, the love of his life, he’s just back from honeymoon, and here he is, no longer as young as he used to be, sitting in a gay bar, alone – or maybe not alone.
Maybe it’s making him anxious – the whiff of the old sad life.
Or maybe it’s because of something else.