The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  OF THE SIXTY-ONE ARTISTS WHO PARTICIPATED IN THE NINTH Street Show in 1951, only one was still around, and still making art, sixty years later. In a shotgun studio three steps down from the sidewalk in a town house on East Sixth Street, Alfred Leslie sat at a bank of computers editing one of his films. Large panels for one of his comic-bookish illustrated stories were tacked on one long wall. A teakettle burbled on a hot plate next to a sink. Through a door in the back you stepped out to a small roofed courtyard, where one of his giant Ab Ex paintings, much too tall for indoors, leaned. In his mid-eighties he’d lost most of his once lush curly hair, but he was still trim, looking fit, and very active. He attributed his longevity to never being a big boozer as so many of the other New York School artists were.

  Like Rivers, Leslie came to the Village as a zoot suit–wearing young hepcat from the Bronx. Born in 1927, son of an engineer, he was painting, writing, and making his own 16mm films from when he was a boy. He graduated from high school in 1945, studied and posed at the Art Students League, and eventually began hanging out at the New School. “The whole modernist enterprise was dropped into my lap.”

  He enlisted in the Coast Guard after the army and navy turned him down for writing on the sign-up sheet that his religion was “deist.” He was in uniform only a few weeks when the war ended and was discharged “exactly nine months and sixteen days” after signing up. He remembered that because, in addition to a year’s veteran’s pay of twenty dollars a week, under the GI Bill he was eligible for one year, nine months, and sixteen days of educational benefits. He used this to enroll in NYU’s art education department, which he attended for precisely one year, nine months, and sixteen days. He took a small apartment nearby on West Fourth Street at Sixth Avenue. “It had no water. There wasn’t any sink in it. It was just a room at the end of the hall. And it had no toilet. So I would go down and use the bathroom at the Waldorf.” He showered at NYU. For extra cash he posed there, built shelves, and substitute-taught. In downtown studios and at parties he quickly met all the older Abstract Expressionists—some friendly and welcoming to younger artists, he recalled, and some not so much—and all the European-émigré surrealists, “all of the people that constituted the so-called current American avant-garde.”

  In his own work, Leslie would go on to range across the wide landscape of genres and media. Where the first generation of Ab Exers pursued the ultimate in aesthetic purism, he was a postmodernist before postmodernism; a fan of pop culture before Pop art; an enthusiastic explorer of all culture high, low, and in the middle who loved Hollywood movies and newspaper comic strips as much as museum art. He started out making enormous Ab Ex paintings but later became known for ultra-realist portraits and figure studies. He made films, drew his cartoonish illustrations and animations, built sculptures of junk and found objects, wrote poems and plays, and in 1960 edited and published a giant, one-off art “newspaper,” The Hasty Papers, a kind of manifesto of his no-barriers, no-limits ideal, a words-and-pictures collage with contributions from the Beats and New York School poets, from Terry Southern and Billy Klüver (a Swedish PhD engineer at Bell Labs who collaborated with many artists on installations, sculptures, and Happenings), from Aristophanes and Fidel Castro.

  A major catalyst in the budding careers of younger painters like Leslie was an unusual and colorful man named John Myers. A large, flamboyantly out gay man, he had fled Buffalo in his youth, studied art history at the New School, been an editor of the surrealist magazine View, and put on puppet-show versions of European avant-garde plays. In 1950 he convinced his friend Tibor de Nagy, a Hungarian banker, to back an uptown gallery that would show downtown artists. “John was an amazing man,” Leslie recalled. “The most outrageous queen that one can imagine. He had created a self that was beyond imagining. It really took tremendous, tremendous courage to be able to do that” in the pre-gay-liberation 1950s. “He was as smart as anyone that I’ve ever known and a generous, trustworthy human being.” With Greenberg as his guide, Myers gave shows at Tibor de Nagy Gallery to many of the second-generation painters, including Leslie in 1952.

  There was one catch. “Because John Myers had no money, when an artist had a show they were asked to contribute two hundred and fifty dollars to help offset the expenses for the gallery. I had no money.” He thought of the daytime quiz show Strike It Rich, on which hard-luck cases answered trivia questions to win the money they needed. Leslie was in fact the first of the artists to try the game show gambit. He went on the show, looking like an oddball bohemian artist, which perplexed the live audience but delighted the hipster staff, and won the needed money. At the end of their turn contestants were handed a few extra gifts from the show’s sponsors. Among his was a giant box of Tide. When the show’s host asked what he was going to do with his prizes, “I said, ‘When I get home, I’m gonna have Tide for breakfast every morning.’ ” Everybody on the downtown art scene saw or heard about it. “It was a triumph. A triumph. But that was characteristic, because the art world was unknown, and what we think of as the scene today was not going to develop and not really clearly emerge until 1960.”

  In addition to running the gallery, Myers was an indefatigable booster of fizzy collaborations. It was Myers who named the quartet of Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara, and Schuyler the New York School poets, a label they tolerated at best. He published and distributed a newsletter, Semi-Colon, to promote their work, with illustrations by the downtown artists. In 1953 he and his friend Herbert Machiz founded the Artists Theatre to produce plays by O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, and other poets with sets by Rivers, Leslie, Hartigan, Freilicher, and Elaine de Kooning. The poets and painters sometimes performed them as well. Staged at the Theatre de Lys and other spaces in and out of the Village, the productions revived the “Say, let’s put on a play!” spirit of the early Provincetown Playhouse with, according to all involved, varying degrees of success.

  Even when they failed, the collaborations made sense. The New York School poets were, in effect, the Abstract Expressionists of verse, rejecting and poking fun at the formalist rigors of the so-called New Criticism, which dominated the poetry academy at the time. New Criticism taught that a close reading of the words on the page, analyzing a poem purely by its structure, yielded its absolute meaning, regardless of the poet’s possible intent. Ashbery, Koch, and O’Hara all got bored and restless with it. Koch lampooned it in “Fresh Air,” written in 1956, with lines like “Oh they are remembering their days on the campus when they looked up to watch birds excrete, / They are remembering the days they spent making their elegant poems.” Ashbery’s more experimental works went off like anarchist bombs inside the well-made poems of the academy. Inspired by the surrealists and dadaists, he deconstructed poetic forms, fragmented and jumbled lines until a poem made no conventional sense no matter how closely you tried to analyze it. He also satirized the well-made poem in such pieces as “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” which, instead of the pastoral idyll the title suggests, turns out to be an antic tale about Popeye and his friends. He wrote an ode to Daffy Duck as well.

  Schuyler’s poems were the quietest and most conventional. He was a midwesterner, not a Harvard man like the others, and had come to the city before the other three. For a few years he was Auden’s secretary. When Ashbery and O’Hara came to the city in 1951 Schuyler moved into an apartment with them, becoming, as the literary historian David Lehman has put it, the Fourth Musketeer to the Harvard trio. Koch was the lone hetero of the four, but friends joked that he picked up so many mannerisms and attitudes from the others that he could easily pass as gay. Schuyler’s link to Auden proved useful. In the 1950s the older poet assumed a role, apparently not intentionally, as what Lehman calls “the father (or, in camp slang, mother) figure for an entire generation of gay male poets.” In 1955 Auden judged the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. When Schuyler heard that Auden wasn’t happy with any of the work submitted, he passed him manuscripts by his friends Ashbery and O’Hara. Auden wasn’t te
rribly thrilled with their poetry either—it was too jokey and oddball for him—but he had to give the prize to someone, so he went with one of his friend’s friends, Ashbery. Ashbery would return the favor in 1980, when as a judge for the poetry Pulitzer he successfully lobbied for Schuyler to win.

  O’Hara’s poems were the most casual and conversational. Edward Field describes them as “swishy, surrealist, almost zany.” His “lunch poems,” banged out on break time at MoMA, are slangy, jazzy, seemingly offhand, loaded with specific midtown Manhattan images; he jokingly yet aptly called them “I did this I did that” poetry. He could write high seriousness and deep sadness—they all could—but when O’Hara did it felt more like the aftermath of a broken affair or a crushing hangover than glum existential angst. He was also the most New York of the four. Ashbery left New York for Paris in the mid-1950s and stayed ten years. Koch went to Paris as well and Schuyler went out to the Hamptons. O’Hara stayed; propelled at breakneck speed through his own life, he was born for Manhattan and its constant busyness. From his arrival in New York in 1951 to his bizarre and untimely death in 1966, he was a ubiquitous downtown scene maker—with his broken nose and instamatic smile he seems to turn up in every photograph taken in the Cedar, the Five Spot, and every gallery and museum opening of the era. He also developed impeccable uptown connections. Born in Baltimore and raised in Massachusetts, after serving in the Pacific as a navy sonar operator, he went to Harvard on the GI Bill, where he became friends with Ashbery. His roommate was Edward Gorey. When he arrived in New York he got a job selling postcards and Christmas cards at MoMA, eventually charming his way up to the curator position he used to advance the careers of his downtown painter friends. He was a cultural omnivore, moving fluidly from art to literature to music to movies to dance, and making friends in all those circles. Like so many at the time, he was also an alcoholic, spritely and effervescent at cocktails but vicious and insulting by the wee hours. In one of the quintessential portraits of him by his friend, collaborator, and sometime sex partner Rivers, he’s nude except for a pair of unlaced army boots, his arms raised to show off his wiry torso, one knee turned out to show off his penis. Over the years, pretty much all the artists would do portraits of him, and he’d write about them all.

  O’Hara once said that the thing he feared most was to live past forty. In his late thirties, his alcoholism completely out of hand, he seemed to be willfully drinking himself into an early grave. In July 1966, a few months after his fortieth birthday, he was out on Fire Island, the narrow scrawl of sand off Long Island’s southern coast that had been a summer getaway for Village bohemians since the 1920s. By the ’60s the hamlets of Cherry Grove and the Pines were gay resorts, with the wooded area separating them known among gay men as the Meat Rack for all the outdoor sex they had there. (The National Park Service rangers responsible for policing the island would generally turn a blind eye into the 2000s, when they’d begin handing out summonses for the most egregiously lewd behavior.) At 3 a.m. O’Hara and some drunken friends were in one of the little buses that drove along the beach, heading from the Pines to another hamlet where they were staying for the weekend, when it got a flat tire. As they all waited for a new tire, O’Hara teetered off a little way into the darkness. A drunk barreling past in a jeep ran him down. When Rivers and de Kooning visited him in the hospital, they “went white,” Rivers writes, seeing the extent of his injuries. They weren’t sure if O’Hara, in a heavily medicated fog, recognized them but instantly he began chatting away, dreamily dishing about some party. He died soon after. The New York art world, crowded with O’Hara’s friends, lovers, enemies, and colleagues, went into deep mourning. Hundreds attended his burial in Springs’s Green River Cemetery, where he was given a small plaque near the large boulder marking Pollock’s grave.

  18

  Duchamp, Cage, and the Theory of Pharblongence

  RESIDING IN GREENWICH VILLAGE FROM WORLD WAR II UNTIL 1968, Marcel Duchamp was a sort of living bridge between the New York avant-garde of the 1910s and the new avant-garde of the postwar years—but in a very particular and Duchampian way. He’d already given up on painting by the time of the Armory Show in 1913, and for decades he’d been more interested in and known for chess than he was for his art. When he originally lived in New York he could be found every night at the Marshall Chess Club, a private, members-only establishment then above the Pepper Pot on West Fourth Street. (The club moved around the Village before settling on West Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in 1931, where it remains today. Over the years, members have included Bobby Fischer, Stanley Kubrick, and Howard Stern.) Duchamp’s friend Man Ray joined the club as well. “There were pretty girls who brought one coffee; the place was a mixture of sociability and serious players,” he recorded.

  After going back to Paris for les années folles, Duchamp returned to the Village permanently during the second world war, taking an apartment and studio on West Fourteenth Street, and cofounded the Greenwich Village Chess Club. “Chess is much purer than art,” he declared more than once. He loved it because it had “no social purpose” and “you can’t make money out of it.” According to Man Ray, Duchamp’s first wife (of less than one year) was so frustrated by his constant chess playing that one night while he slept she glued all his pieces to the board. He refused to have anything to do with the New York School painters and Abstract Expressionism, which he shrugged it off as mere “retinal” art. The downtown artists he did like were the composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage and Duchamp first met in 1942, and though Cage was already experimenting with making music using everyday utensils and sounds that was very like Duchamp’s readymade sculptures in spirit, they didn’t become friends for more than twenty years, and when they did it was through chess.

  Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. His father, no one was later surprised to hear, was an eccentric inventor who produced a not quite successful submarine during World War I, the safety of which he liked to demonstrate by sailing it on Friday the Thirteenth with a crew of thirteen. He also developed a theory for space travel based on his “electrostatic field theory” of the universe, which he demonstrated in miniature to unconvinced scientists at Cal Tech. During World War II Cage was exempted from military service because he was helping his father research ways for airplanes to see through fog. He studied piano as a boy and played one on his own radio show on a local station in high school. By college he was also writing, painting, and composing. He made a living for a while during the Depression lecturing housewives about music, then worked for the WPA in San Francisco, teaching Italian, black, and Chinese kids about percussion. He studied composition with Henry Cowell at the New School and with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles; Schoenberg later commented, “Of course he’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor—of genius.” In 1942 Cage came to New York, penniless but with the rich and influential friends Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. Through them he met everybody on the New York arts scene. He later recalled that “in one fell swoop or series of evenings at Peggy Guggenheim’s you met an entire world of both American and European artists. She was already involved with Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Cornell was a frequent visitor. Marcel Duchamp was there all the time, and I even met Gypsy Rose Lee. It was absolutely astonishing to be in that situation.” He also met the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who’d come to New York several years earlier to dance in Martha Graham’s troupe. Cage left his wife for Cunningham and the two men started a lifelong relationship. They gave their first concert together in 1944.

  Within a few years Cage was immersed in Zen and the I Ching, which had lasting influences on his experiments with sounds and silence, and with introducing the element of chance in his compositions as a way to bypass the ego. Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and the poet Jackson Mac Low made similar experiments with literature. Cage also gave lectures that were like the repetitive drone of Buddhist mantras. At the Artists Club in 1950 he rhythmically intoned his “Lecture on Nothing�
�� for the first time. It was a seemingly rambling, remorselessly monotone meditation on being and nothingness, stillness and action. He began, “I am here, and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” It went on that way for a long time. In his book Silence he recalls that the artist Jeanne Reynal, best known for the painstaking and repetitious art of the mosaic, “stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, ‘John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.’ She then walked out.” When the “lecture” finally ended Cage invited questions; however, to illustrate his feelings about the pointlessness of discussion, he responded only with prewritten answers such as “That is a very good question. I should not want to spoil it with an answer.”

  While some artists found Cage’s lectures maddening others were inspired. Alfred Leslie remembered a lecture he gave at Studio 35. “It was the summer, with the window open on the street. He stood behind the lectern there, and he paused, and he took out a watch, and he put his watch down on the table, and just folded his arms and looked out and didn’t say a word. And then he looked down and said, ‘One minute has passed. Any questions?’ Of course he was pointing out that you had an opportunity here, the window being open, you heard all the sounds, the music, the composition that he had just created.” The courses Cage taught at the New School had a big impact on the avant-garde arts of the 1950s and ’60s, including the Fluxus group, of which Yoko Ono was a member, and Happenings, which he helped to invent, and the improvisational stylings of Charles Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous.