5
Wandering Rocks
IN A BRILLIANT STYLISTIC MOVE, John O’Hara modeled the opening sections of BUtterfield 8 after the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, which it follows in mapping the synchronous, mutually indifferent, and ironically interacting lives of its several characters. If the energies of Jazz Age Manhattan had been powerfully convergent, in the Depression-bound city, divergences and distances were increasing. Putting down, in 1938, his impressions of New York, the fashionable English photographer Cecil Beaton was struck by the divisions even within the “pleasure class” that entertained him.
“People divide themselves into various groups: those who like or dislike the President, those who worship Miss Dorothy Thompson, listen to the pianist Serkin, read the novels of John O’Hara or the poetry of Wallace Stevens,” he observed. Café society had its haunts—the Stork Club, El Morocco, and “21.” The Herbert Bayard Swopes, the Howard Dietzes, the George S. Kaufmans, and the Harpo Marxes composed what Cecil Beaton called the “West Point set.” In another sphere, the former Russian nobility, “scattered as hotel managers, clerks, mannequins, water-colorists and sales-ladies,” exhibited some of their old éclat on holidays, cooking elaborate banquets in kitchenettes and enjoying the hospitality of the still-prosperous Prince Serge Obolensky on New Year’s. The publishing heir Cass Canfield and his wife were among the “social intellectuals”; couples like the Carter Burdens shared “the country pursuits and family interests of country people.” The Stettheimer sisters had a salon on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street at the Alwyn Court frequented by artists, writers, and the literary critic A. R. Orage, a follower of the mystic Gurdjieff. Carrie had spent her life working on a dollhouse with art by their friend Marcel Duchamp, Ettie wrote novels for their friend Alfred Knopf, and Florine edged briefly into the spotlight when she designed the sets for Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, and then tiptoed away.
This division into sets and sects was particularly apparent among artists and intellectuals. In New York Intellect, Thomas Bender contrasts the New York intellectuals, as they were later known, headquartered at Columbia University, City College, and Partisan Review, whose salons were clamorous cafeterias, with the more affluent “civic intellectuals,” who had the resources to pursue more of the performing arts less available to the former, who were people of the book and generally from modest circumstances at best. The civic intellectuals—the “uptown bohemians”—included the budding cultural impresario Lincoln Kirstein; the composer Virgil Thomson; the architectural historian (he was not yet an architect) Philip Johnson and his friend and collaborator Henry-Russell Hitchcock; and Alfred Barr, who would be the longtime director of the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art was uptown Bohemia’s public venue. At MoMA their patron Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s son Nelson headed an influential advisory committee that included Kirstein, Johnson, and the difficult banking heir “Eddie” Warburg. Independently wealthy but not, as subsequent decades would show, lacking energy, Johnson endowed and headed the architecture department.
There is a vivid group portrait of “the avant-garde art distributors,” as he calls them (alternatively “the eye-and-ear people”) in the memoirs of Virgil Thomson, who arrived back from Paris in 1932. Their meeting places included various galleries on the East Side, including Pierre Matisse’s, but the liveliest was the lofty East Sixty-second Street brownstone of the art dealer Kirk Askew—born in Kansas City, like Thomson—and his wife, Constance.
“The drink, till Prohibition went, was homemade gin,” Thomson remembered in 1967. “Evenings it was diluted with ginger ale or soda. For cocktails it was shaken with a nonalcoholic vermouth that produced a flocculation in the glass not unlike that which snows around Eiffel’s Tower or New York’s Liberty when rotated in their filled-with-liquid globes. The furniture was splendidly Victorian, with carpets, seats, and curtains richly colored. In the early thirties all pictures there were modern, but by decade’s end some Italian Old Masters had been inherited.”
Many of the civil intellectuals had gone to Harvard College: Johnson, Kirstein, Barr, Thomson himself, and their great friend and ally A. Everett (Chick) Austin. Austin, who seemed to the composer to be “the most spectacular of all,” was a professor at Trinity College and director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. But Thomson’s group was much wider than just the modern-art-distributing group. The Askews’ afternoon teas, nightly cocktails, and Sunday-night at-homes brought together theater people (including the yet unknown John Houseman and the very young Joseph Losey); poets (E. E. Cummings to Kirstein); the black performer Taylor Gordon, a singer and vaudevillian; the actress Edna Thomas; various curators; and painters such as Florine Stettheimer, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Eugene Berman. Sometimes Elizabeth Bowen would come over from London and stay for a month.
In the early thirties, the Askews’ guests, but rarely Kirk or Constance, would often set out for Harlem after midnight, as if pursuing the last enchantments of the twenties. Thomson had completed his opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. One night in Harlem, listening to the jazz singer Jimmy Daniels (then Johnson’s lover) in some small club, he had the idea of having Four Saints performed by black singers: “Next morning I was sure, remembering how proudly the Negroes enunciate and how the whites just hate to move their lips.” In due course Four Saints was staged in Hartford, at the Atheneum, with Houseman directing an all-black cast and designs by Stettheimer that featured dangerously flammable cellophane curtains. Subsequently, Houseman collaborated with Orson Welles in producing the famous “voodoo” Macbeth, set in Haiti, with another all-black cast, for the Federal Theatre Project.
While the Partisan Review group tended to be strenuously heterosexual, many of the leading civic intellectuals (male) were homosexual or bisexual. There was an element of camp about such projects as the celebrated Paper Ball in February 1936, which was organized by Chick Austin at the Hartford Atheneum in the depths of the Depression and attended by such New York notables as Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Fernand Léger, George Gershwin, and Buckminster Fuller, who arrived in a curvy “Dymaxion” car with Clare Boothe Luce in tow. Pavel Tchelitchew designed the decor and costumes, which made heavy use of newspaper cuttings, black-and-white text, and vivid comic-strip colors. Tchelitchew’s partner was Charles Henri Ford, the editor of the exotic magazine View. Ford and the film critic Parker Tyler coauthored the 1933 novel The Young and Evil and were among the six men who shocked old Hartford with their appearance—“almost as nature made them, and nature made them well”—supporting a carriage bearing Ford’s sister, the actress Ruth Ford, posing as the Muse of Poetry, enveloped in cellophane. Of course, as in the person of Nelson Rockefeller, who escorted his mother to the ball, the civic intellectuals boasted some vigorous heterosexuals as fellow travelers.
By the late thirties, the last flashes of “Mongrel Manhattan” had come and gone. The light faded even from the Askews’ salon, though instead of bathtub gin, they drank good Scotch whiskey. “I only know we never laughed again there,” Thomson writes sadly. Fashionable Manhattan stopped going uptown to Harlem, noted Beaton. “The large colored night-clubs, to which the negroes were never welcomed, have moved downtown to Broadway, the financial depression ruined the smaller boites. Paris has claimed the torch singers, the Blackbirds have scattered and the waiters spin trays no more.”
The photographer had an eye as multifaceted as a fly’s, and it took in many curious glimpses of what he called the pleasure class. In a typical scene from Cecil Beaton’s New York (1938), Tchelitchew is in his apartment on East Seventy-third Street, still at work after two years “on his vast picture, his interpretation of the universe in terms of freaks.” He gossips on the telephone with George Balanchine about Lincoln Kirstein and the crowd of “grotesques” that comprised the audience for a recent performance of Norma, while in the kitchen Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler are cooking duck with olives and raisins and arguing about Wystan Auden and Stephen Spender. Have they perverted Marxism or has Marxism perverted them? Tyler is writing for Partisan Review one of those baroque essays on film that will appear in Magic and Myth of the Movies (and be rediscovered a generation later via Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge).
A precocious nineteen-year-old who spoke with the heavy accent of Brownsville, Alfred Kazin presented himself one summer day in 1934 at the office of the New Republic in Chelsea—altogether elsewhere so far as the pleasure world was concerned. He carried an introduction (“Here’s an intelligent radical”) from John Chamberlain, the daily book reviewer at the New York Times, then an influential man of the left. After an interview Malcolm Cowley, who had succeeded Edmund Wilson as literary editor, invited him to join the other starvelings on the “hunger bench” reserved for would-be reviewers. “Handsome and as coolly macho as Clark Gable in his vivid seersucker suit,” Cowley would dole out assignments and, for desperate cases, unwanted review copies that might be worth a few pennies. Quick and fluent, full of passionate judgments, Kazin was soon writing reviews not only in the New Republic but also for the Times, the Herald Tribune, and venerable magazines like Scribner’s. He was born for the writer’s trade, and Cowley marveled that from the start his copy never needed fixing.
Since its founding in 1914 the New Republic had been published from the same address on West Twenty-first Street, settling like the neighborhood into shabby gentility but remaining, as Arthur Schlesinger writes, “the voice of Eastern, metropolitan progressivism.” The editors lunched together three or four times a week, attended by a cook and a butler, a married couple who lived in the basement. Through the New Republic, Kazin was introduced to ancient eminences like the philosopher John Dewey, who once made a great impression at a cocktail party with a sweeping gesture that knocked fifty brimming glasses of gin off a table, as well as to prodigies of his own generation like John Cheever, whose first published short story appeared in the New Republic when he was eighteen—a handsome, graceful youth recently expelled from his prep school.
Kazin graduated from City College in 1935, but like many of his generation of New York intellectuals, he educated himself at the New York Public Library, where he did the reading for his path-breaking On Native Grounds (1942). Whole sets of the old Masses, crumbling catalogues, shelves of forgotten novels, along with the writings of Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, James G. Huneker, Irving Babbitt, Edmund Wilson, and Allen Tate, were retrieved by the librarians to be digested by the young critic. Often he was joined at one of the polished tables in the reading room by his friend Richard Hofstadter, whose The American Political Tradition (1948) was also destined to be famous. A great walker, Kazin would think as he passed these landmarks of “Mark Twain in his old house on Tenth Street, Dreiser and Millay in Washington Square, Willa Cather on Bank Street.” He wrote On Native Grounds on his parents’ kitchen table in Brownsville.
Kazin was befriended by Otis Ferguson, who, eight years older, was the New Republic’s movie and radio reviewer. Ferguson was an intense young man given to delivering pungent opinions from the corner of his mouth. While working his way through Clark University, he won a top prize in a New Republic college writing contest; soon after, or so the story went, he turned up at the magazine’s doorstep and refused to budge until he was hired. Ferguson worshipped jazz and jazzmen. A decade before Jack Kerouac began his efforts in this vein (“bebop prosody”), he was attempting jazz rhythms in the “Nertz to Hertz” essay that he wrote sitting up all night in the rat trap he rented above a movie theater on Union Square; reeking of the Four Roses whiskey he drank for inspiration, he would deliver his copy at the last possible minute directly to the printer. Otis Ferguson feared and hated the gods of high culture like T. S. Eliot, whom Kazin admired; he despised the “cozy, Algonquin-lunching people” who wrote for the newspapers and the New Yorker. “Otis hated them with all the righteous fury of the sans-culotte who feels that his hour has come. Otis allied himself to the toughness of the times, to the militant new wind, to the anger which was always in the air.” Yet, such was Kazin’s sense of himself as the embattled son of Brownsville that he thought of his friend Ferguson as a “have,” and thus ignorant of the real intensities of the struggle going on all around them. It was a shock to him when his friend, whom he invited to Brownsville for dinner (“I surreptitiously thought of him as a visitor from the great literary world”), seemed to find his family commonplace. Though embarrassed by his father’s table manners and eagerness to please, Kazin thought of his parents’ poverty and crudity, as it might strike an outsider, as being “sacramental.” Out of such poor, unworldly Jews had come Christianity; out of such would come the great socialist revolution.
Otis Ferguson died in 1943 when his ship was bombed in the Bay of Salerno. Kazin would never imitate his excesses. He was disciplined and purposeful and though he was awkward and stammering at parties, envying John Cheever’s precocious ease, he was avid and ambitious. The world of “New York intellect” was sufficiently village-like that only one or two degrees separated him, in his obscure literary beginnings, from the avant-garde art distributors or from middlebrow penthouse dwellers like the popular critic Alexander Woollcott. They would have glanced at his book reviews, or shared nodding acquaintances, people like Malcolm Cowley or the biographer Matthew Josephson, who seemed to know everybody. But his world was not yet the great world.
Later in the thirties, married to a young scientist, Natasha Dohn, and living in a two-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights, Kazin thought of their austere work-filled days, their modest pleasures of walking and listening to recordings of Schubert and Bach and César Franck, the occasional concert, as the very pattern of a postrevolutionary world, when “life would be purified and beautiful and everyone would live as Natasha and I lived in the radiance of cultural truth.” Needless to say, Cecil Beaton’s pleasure world would have regarded this prospect with horror and dismay. Really, what had an Alfred Kazin to do with the likes of the revelers at the Paper Ball, or the revelers with him?
Poet W. H. Auden in his beach shack in the Pines on Fire Island, 1945