The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  Equally, eccentricity of attire was evidence of soul to him, and one ceased being surprised when he turned up in “horrible” candy-striped seersuckers and a string tie that hung down to his crotch, or sporting a denim sack suit in an advanced state of rumple. Such props were as expressive of his personal vision of things as anything he said, for, as he once confided with a dim smile, “Every time I see a man in jodhpurs and an opera hat—and it only happens two or three times a month these days, I always go up and speak to him, because that man isn’t going to hang you up about the weather.” Sometimes this flair for the eccentric was only inches this side of outright perversity (“the three-lapel jacket—yes, that was a very important project”), but most of the time Landesman was that unique phenomenon in a status-drunk society: a man who knew that the only really hip style is the next one, the one that hasn’t been established yet.

  He had an omnivorous interest in popular culture, and long before it was High Camp to collect back issues of Batman and idolize the horror movies of Tod Browning, he was publishing articles that anatomized the one, and scouring the most dismal reaches of Brooklyn for screenings of the other. Like many of us in the late forties, he felt that the fine arts were so tyrannized by one or another version of the New Criticism that they had become little more than lifeless appendages of it, but, unlike a lot of people in later years, he shifted his attention to the popular arts without sacrificing his sense of the culture as a whole.

  The idea that there is something intrinsically worthwhile about the soup cans, science-fiction movies, mammoth billboards and electronic noise that inundates our civilization (an extremely fashionable idea just recently) would have struck Landesman as being hopelessly frivolous. These things were interesting to him only insofar as they indicated the condition of our imaginations, a condition that could not be perceived if we celebrated the signs of its poverty merely for themselves. “Popular culture never lies,” he used to say. “Not about the people who consume it,” among whom I’m sure he would have included Susan Sontag as well as the stenographer down the hall.

  For it was popular culture’s unconscious embodiment of inner fantasies that attracted Landesman. He revelled in it, he let it stimulate his rarer appetites for the bizarre, but he never patronized it in the manner of Camp, and his ear was always cocked for the psychic throb within it—seismographic evidences of which filled the pages of Neurotica.

  As its editor, Landesman’s greatest gift probably lay in getting other people to track down and amplify the whispers he had heard. This wasn’t laziness, nor inability to do the job himself, but simply a canny understanding that what he could best contribute to the magazine was a general intuition about the culture, and a Hawkshaw-knack for ferreting out people who could particularize that intuition into usable knowledge. Though there were several assistant editors, all of whom did most of the comma-shifting and phrase-haggling, the magazine showed little of their influence—with the single exception of Legman. For Landesman knew precisely what he wanted from the start. He wanted articles like “The World of the Borderline Fetishist,” and “Psychiatrist: God or Demitasse?” and “The Unique Mores of the Bar and Tavern Social Milieu”—all of which existed in the beginning only as titles, to which the articles themselves were more or less jerry-written by other people later.

  Also he knew the audience he was trying to reach. “I’m not publishing for the three dozen hard-core scatologists along 42nd Street or the little magazine crowd that tells their Shrinks that, of course, they consider Neurotica too sick to read. I want to get to the five thousand people who really make this society go—the opinion-makers, the guys with the crazy power, the Sell-Outs who are responsible for running the mess in the first place.”

  It is highly debatable whether Neurotica ever succeeded in achieving this aim (despite the fact that, to my knowledge, it is the only little magazine whose entire run of issues was republished in book form a full decade after its demise), but certainly, in Legman, Landesman found someone with the same muckraking appetites, and they worked together like a couple of unemployed dynamiters trying to blow up the Time-Life Building with a firecracker. I tagged along behind them, as did others.

  But for all the barefoot crusades of those Neurotica days, it is the sheer excitement, the high pitch of fun, that I have remembered longest. It is the laughter that rose through the smoke to the ten-foot ceiling of Landesman’s brownstone apartment on West 53rd Street, where we worked together through the late mornings, writing “Alfred Towne’s” exposés of homosexuality in American culture. It is Landesman in his undershirt deciding that we should describe “Towne” as “a midwesterner who has left the country,” and the afternoons we fueled our gleeful outrage (at what “Towne” humorlessly insisted on calling “the effeminization of values”) with lunchtime gin and stag gering corned beef sandwiches from the Stage Delicatessen around the corner. It is remembering how laboriously we fashioned our Mile Wide Hints about such-and-such a conductor; and how lecherously we stripped our scandalous aspersions (concerning so-and-so’s penchant for drag) down to their last veil; and with what giggling thoroughness we mapped that murky territory of innuendo just this side of libel.

  It all seems a little silly today, a little farfetched (though “fearless” articles almost identical to those “Alfred Towne” published in Neurotica and The American Mercury still appear all these fifteen years later), and yet from those hoarse and smoky afternoons I think we both distilled, for ourselves at least, a sense that we were engaging the real Scene that lay buried somewhere under the glum hypocrisies and lofty nonsense that passed for a serious culture then.

  And, anyway, those afternoons led inevitably toward five o’clock, and five o’clock inevitably brought people: Anatole Broyard with that week’s facsimile of the Broyard-girl—blonde, tooled, wordless—changing as little, version to version, as Anatole changed from year to year; Robert Lowry as big and bearish in his corduroys as a grizzly with the face of a panda; Marshall McLuhan (when he was in town) improvising ideas like a combination Spengler, Picasso and Mort Sahl; little, zany William Poster with his clear, darting eye for subtle values; Chandler Brossard as difficult to crack as a horse chestnut and just as tart when you did; Paul Mazursky doing his funny Brando imitations while Stanley Radulovich did his serious ones; Carl Solomon yoinking around so frenziedly on a pogo stick that one night he put the end of it right through the floor into the restaurant below—and all their girls, and their friends’ girls, and their friends’ friends, and even nameless others who may have just heard the hubbub and walked in the door.

  These five oclocks always got to be ten oclocks somehow, and we found ourselves in Birdland, or up at the Park Palace in Spanish Harlem, or in Glennon’s practicing what Landesman called “futility rites,” or down at Louis’ in the Village. Landesman was tablehopping, or mamboing with great flung feet and stabbing hands. Landesman was ankling off to phone, or being loudly paged by the bartender, having told half a dozen people just where he would be, and when to call.

  Mostly, he was always somewhere near the center of a throng of people when I saw him, but one night I found him alone in his apartment, except for a dark-gold girl named Fran, her face luminous with the hip chick’s soulfulness; a girl who bore an astonishing resemblance to Zelda Fitzgerald—only lovelier, softer, more remote; a girl who looked as if she had been tagged early, and become herself in the act of surviving it; the kind of girl with a certain pang behind her intelligence and her chic; the kind of girl you marry if you know your own hangups well enough. A month or so later, Landesman did just that, and almost immediately they became “Jay and Fran” to everyone who knew them, one name all but unpronounceable without the other.

  Soon after this, Landesman grew bored with hunting the culture’s various psychic Snarks, for, unlike Legman, he was not imprisoned by a single perception, and world-changing was not his wine. That singular geiger counter in his head was geared to himself and his personal interests (which he took to be r
epresentative), and when there was no click in his current life, he always began to look elsewhere.

  Also, by 1951, there was Fran, and their marriage; there was a growing need for a setting where the results of an action could be immediately seen, and there was New York that is never hospitable to this need. In one of those abrupt decisions that make us look at our friends through new eyes, Landesman gave Neurotica to Legman, and he and Fran moved back to St. Louis.

  Thereafter, the trait that had distinguished everything that Landesman had done surfaced in him rapidly, until it became clear that what drove him (and drives the Pop Imagination generally) was an overriding theatrical sense—a sense of how to put a point of view on display, how to isolate a falsehood so that it could be seen, how to reveal a subtle truth through sheer exaggeration. Landesman’s need was to enliven life by “staging” it, to strike creative sparks by rubbing people and ideas together, and, above all, to satisfy a curiosity that was as gluttonous as a Dempster Dumpster. To Landesman, existence was a series of Happenings, or he got glum. Ultimately, his need was for a theater, and St. Louis became that theater for him.

  What followed was the Crystal Palace (“the most gorgeous saloon in America”), and the plays, and ASCA, and the TV show. What followed were the lyrics that Fran began to write one day that were set to music by Tommy Wolf, Alec Wilder, and Roy Kral (those sad, wry, sexy leider—like “Listen Little Girl,” “Fun Life,” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most—” that resembled nothing so much as the fragrant, whimsical, intimate contents of an evening purse, belonging to a girl who is as interesting to talk to as to lie with, spilled out on the dressing table of another, inevitable dawn), and the need for a showcase in which these songs could be displayed. And what followed that was The Nervous Set, with book by Landesman, and all the other shows that made St. Louis, for a few brief years, a town that people visited for more than beer and baseball.

  When I conjure up such a visit, I am sitting in Landesman’s living room, or in the patio behind his house, or in any one of a dozen apartments nearby that he and his brother kept for “their people”; music is providing its throbbing insulation against the discordant world outside (more than likely little-known show tunes, or bossa nova, or good rock); martinis are being stirred in a huge pitcher, making that velvety sound of ice cushioned by gin; there are half a dozen people around, all of whom give off the indescribable air of being members of Landesman’s troupe; children yodel at a TV program upstairs; later (I know) there will be a dinner party somewhere under a chandelier or among enormous imitation trees, during which everyone will be brighter and wittier and sexier than he really is, and later still, Gaslight Square and the Palace, Lenny Bruce or Samuel Beckett, and crowds of people who seem to know me simply because I know Landesman.

  I am sitting there, nicely mulled, astonished by the realization that I am in the midst of a community within a community—a community with its own theaters, bars, restaurants, apartments and galleries, all reflecting the same life style, the same brand of restless and bizarre intelligence. I am amazed, because I have never known its exact like before, but I am also happily expectant (the way I used to be at Billy Wilder movies, the way I still am when I listen to Thelonious), for I know that no matter what happens in the hours ahead, it will be funny, hip, mordant, noisy and meaningful: the stuff of a good memory.

  Landesman’s sense of theater permeated this whole community, and infected anything he spent five minutes on. He always answered the phone with a crisp, “Jay L-a-n-d-esman here!” lingering sonorously on his own name, as one does every time one says a name like Walther von der Vogelweide. He introduced outlandish soubriquets for everyone, some of them so maddeningly adhesive that they simply absorbed the actual person, like a kind of verbal Venus flytrap. I remember, for instance, a five-foot-two chutney salesman who was known to me only as The Lord God, a buxom flip of a girl from the Ozarks called Dearest Little, and a hip-talking layout man invariably referred to as F. Scott Fredsegal.

  The cocktail hour was orchestrated like an opéra-bouffe—music, and booze, and just the right mix of jarring people, all of it calculated to produce an unexpected and sometimes scandalous denouement. Gossip flitted around the room in a balletic counterpoint that intensified the odd feeling of theatricality. There was something overheated and incestuous about these liquid twilights, for Landesman believed that strong personalities, acting on one another in an artificial setting, inevitably would generate the kind of drama out of which recognitions came, and he frankly manipulated “his people” toward this end.

  There were animosities a-plenty; there was a more or less continual game of musical beds going on; new “stars” were taken up, old ones dropped; games of charades somehow always ended in group therapy sessions; parties quickly became psychodramas; and there are people from those days who probably have no desire to ever hear the name Landesman again. In my opinion, however, Landesman’s habit of playing the social Diaghilev was ultimately more creative than destructive (how thin the line!). For its spur was not merely boredom, but rather a desire to break through all the masks, and heighten his sense of life as being openended, dangerous with possibilities, free; a sense that later drew him naturally toward Zen, LSD and consciousness-expansion in general. In any case, people seemed to “perform” a little beyond their usual talents when they were around Landesman. At least, most of them still refer to those days with the unmistakable accents we reserve for the description of an enlarging experience, and Landesman spoke to a vein of ironical decadence which, in those pious, prosperous years, ran deep in all of us. For in the struggle of progress versus decay, Landesman frankly opted for the latter, and this, I believe, was the closest he came to having a guiding principle. It was also the dark secret of his appeal.

  Out of the loftiest of intentions, the lust for progress has created the shallowest of worlds, and even the most optimistic of social engineers must sometimes wake up after midnight, disturbed by a vague but persistent nostalgia for something that is not covered in the manuals. As a result, people of my generation instinctively gravitated to the margins, the corners, the backstreets of contemporary experience, hoping to gain a little human time before the automated bulldozers of the future arrived. A lot of us felt twinges of guilt about this, but there was no arguing with the fact that, though we were for progress, it profoundly depressed us; and as the steel and glass “environments” went up, we tended to withdraw to whatever “neighborhoods” were left.

  Landesman was usually there before us, getting out the gin, and busily poking at the pomposities of a culture so traduced that it equated the Good only with the Useful. This was why he had gone back to St. Louis in the first place, for St. Louis in the fifties was a dying city (hopelessly stratified by outmoded social distinctions, its growth paralyzed by civic ordinances that were as hoary as its architecture), and its prevailing mood can best be compared to the mood of pre-Castro Havana: lethargy, somnolence and a faint whiff of corruption hung in the air that wafted off the big river. It was precisely the sort of scene in which a canny and energetic provocateur could make his move, and almost before they knew it, the burghers and the debutantes found a minor, but authentic, cultural renaissance flourishing under their very noses—Krapp’s Last Tape instead of the usual South Pacific, and “Squareville U.S.A.: A New Look At Main Street” in place of the standard lecture on rubbernecking in Angkor Wat.

  For a while a few luxuriant poinsettias bloomed among the crumbling buildings and the blistered streets. But cultural renaissances cannot hold out for long against America’s twin fixations of the moment—urban renewal and civic betterment—and St. Louis eventually voted for progress as represented by the wrecker’s ball and the touring company. You knew a Broadway musical was good (hadn’t you read about it in The New Yorker?), and every city, with any pride in itself, was erecting those distinctive air-conditioned saltine boxes. But how did you know what to feel about the murky and controversial plays the Landesmans put on? And those
old waterfront buildings, some of them going back a hundred and fifty years or more—they were only eyesores that never ceased to remind you that you lived in a backward little city in Hicksville. So as the Saarinen Arch (The Gateway to the West) relentlessly went up, Landesman’s flamboyant banner, on which might have been emblazoned the frank admonition, “Onward and Downward!” fluttered to the pavement. And in another of those abrupt uprootings, which were the surest sign that it was never comfort that he prized, but creative room, he went east. All the way east. All the way to London.

  Landesman chose decay, I firmly believe, because of what he knew. He knew himself, and he knew what interested him, and he knew in what exotic mulch those interests had a chance of coming to full flower. Also, he knew precisely how he had to live to prevent the contradictions in his nature (an artist’s nature, even though he sometimes lacked an art—that is to say, a reckless, inquisitive, ultimately unsatisfiable nature) from becoming stalemated in a struggle that he knew he could only lose. For underlying his imagination, his theatricality, and his “decadence,” was something considerably more rare: a man cursed with a keenly contemporary sensibility and all its exaggerated appetites, living out, in himself, most of the psychic displacements and realignings, which, in this time, often suggest that a new and wider human consciousness is on the road to its Bethlehem to be born.