My mind returned then to the lavatory. I had examined the oakleaf and with my penknife I hewed it down to its proper size. It was no bigger than a pea when I had finished, a minute isosceles triangle with a rough bottom edge to it. I was pleased with the result. Leaning forward then on the handle of my knife, I caused the small blade to sink deeply into the wood at a low centre in the triangle. The knife came away with a small tug. The score, because of the camber of the blade, was most life-like; wedge-shaped, deep. I completed my toilet and returned to the bar. I drank a whiskey. When I left I made straight for the alley.
The flats above formed a tunnel over it where it met the street so that one looked through darkness towards light. Just beyond the darkness, half out of sight round a jutting cornerstone, the man should have stood. I walked along the centre of the lane through the tunnel. The lane, a dead-end, was deserted. The dustbins were already out. I lingered a while. Perhaps I was the stranger you watched apprehensively from your kitchen window. When I left the lane it was already dark and a lamplighter was coming in my direction with his long lighted pole.
THE FLASH of silver . . . the sudden excitement that was almost a nausea . . . the thought of Moira before we left Glasgow . . . the whole complex of the past: I relived it all in that instant I caught sight of the man in the alley on my way back to the scow. The heroin had worn off but I was still pleasantly high from a joint that Tom and I had smoked on the way to Sheridan Square. The street was deserted. The man in the alley, facing the wall, hadn’t noticed me yet. I was standing about ten yards from him. Like a man looking on a new continent. I felt the decision at my nostrils, and perhaps it was to communicate that to him, or perhaps it was simply to steady myself in my purpose—I lit a cigarette, cupping my hands over the match and holding them close to my face, causing the skin of my lower face to glow in the shaft of warmth from the match and leaving the skin about my lips tingling minutely in anticipation. The noise of the match striking and the sudden glow in the dark reached him. He froze momentarily and then looked sideways towards me. I could just make out the round yellowish face and the black moustache. There was a tightening pleasure at my entrails. I was quite sure of myself now. A nameless man. And something nameless had taken possession of me. I had simply to be and feel the workings of the nameless purpose in me, to grant, permissively to meet with, sensation unobstructed, rocked gently out of nightmare at him. He was buttoning up, slowly, it might have been reflectively, and then he turned towards me. There was something oblique and crablike in his movement. He was standing there, still under the electric lamp which shone on his shapeless doublebreasted jacket at the shoulder and on the right side of his round face. I felt myself moving slowly towards him a foot at a time, looking straight at his face. It seemed that he moved forward to meet me. In a few sensational seconds my front was close to his front and our faces were an inch apart. I felt the warmth of his ear against mine and his hand. Belt, thighs, knees, chest, cheek. A few minutes later we were walking very close together back to my scow at Pier 72.
NEW YEAR’S day. Early. Just after 2 a.m. I had just written:
—My wife will enter as she made her exit, like a bad actor in a bad play, and when I move across to her she will make the gesture of resistance, for my act is her cue to resist; and her face will fix itself in its appallingly stupid lines and break where she smiles as she tumbles and says: “Don’t Joe! You’ll ladder my stocking!”
She will not expect me to. So I shall catch her out at herself.
I heard them in the hall.
My wife’s brother crossed the room after glancing at the shattered whiskey bottle. It still lay where she had thrown it. He was wearing a fawn cashmere coat with a thick blue and white scarf wrapped around his neck so that the head, tilted slightly backwards and bringing the fleshy chin into prominence, gave the impression of having been severed from the body and later cushioned there, neatly, pink, and vaguely apoplectic.
When he greeted me it sounded vaguely like a challenge. Robert was vaguely many things; a challenger, a man embarrassed, an inquisitor; his approach, his whole demeanour—at least towards me—was indirect. He was driven on by his sense of duty but was at the same time, so to speak, afraid to stir up the broth. He would gladly not have known what for a long time he had suspected. He had often said to me that he didn’t think I was rotten through and through.
“Otherwise Moira wouldn’t love you as she does, now, would she?” But it wasn’t much after all. Not enough to dispel his consternation.
“Happy New Year, Joe!”
I took his proferred hand, thanked him, and wished him the same.
Moira, who had come in behind him, was staring angrily at the shattered bottle. Robert, turning towards her and following her gaze, murmured quietly: “Better clean it up, Moira. It’ll get trod in.”
She burst into tears.
“Now, now, Moira,” Robert said to her, moving to her and guiding her by the arm towards the bedroom, “you just go to bed and get rested and let me talk this over with Joe.” He followed her into the bedroom. I could hear him expostulating with her, imploring her to be reasonable. I felt sorry for him, for both of them, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to go after them. It wouldn’t have solved anything.
When he came back he sat down in a chair opposite me. He had taken off his coat and scarf. He held them on his knees as he spoke.
“You might have cleaned it up,” he said
“I probably will.”
He nodded quickly and, after a moment’s hesitation, he went on to say that he wasn’t the type of person who interfered with other people’s business, that if the war had taught him anything it was that there were two sides to every question. During the war my brother-in-law was a major in the Royal Corps of Signals. The military air, leavened by what I suppose he took to be his modesty, was to some extent still with him. He added that in his professional experience he had learned that it was not always useful to look at everything through one’s own eyes; even the Law recognized this in its principle of arbitration, the judge in a Court of Law being neutral in spite of the fact that he was appointed by State. My brother-in-law was a solicitor. He often found it helpful to make a gesture to his authorities, military or judiciary, when he was leading up to his point, presenting credentials. He continued. He would be the first to agree if I objected to his arbitration on the ground that he was his sister’s brother, and therefore not, strictly speaking, neutral. However, he hoped I knew him. And, as he had said before, he had no wish to interfere, especially as it was the New Year. He paused. He said he thought one should begin the New Year with a fresh start, not with recriminations. But there it was. Moira, he meant. The poor girl was deeply hurt. To throw bottles about, he meant. He knew I would see that. He had always known I was intelligent. And it wasn’t like her to throw bottles about all over the place. We both knew that. He had said it. He had promised Moira he would have it out with me. And after all she was his sister. Very dear to him. He knew that she was dear to me also. He had never had any doubts about that. He would not say he didn’t find me difficult to understand sometimes. A man who didn’t work, he meant. Oh, he knew I was supposed to be writing or something. But after all I wasn’t a child any more. A man of my age. Well, anyway, it was none of his business and the last thing he wanted to do was to interfere. If Moira didn’t mind working while I sat at home that was her business. But he didn’t like to see her upset. It was the New Year. Bygones should be bygones. If I was agreed no more needed to be said. He was sure I would see things his way. I was a reasonable man. He was willing to shake hands and say no more. What now, agreed?
He allowed these last statements to fall on the silence as a grocer allows dried peas to fall from his brass scoop, one at a time, his head cocked, regarding the indicator needle fixedly, until it reaches the appropriate mark. I didn’t mean to keep him waiting. Finally without saying anything I fetched the unbroken bottle of whiskey and poured him a drink.
�
��Happy New Year,” I said.
“Happy New Year!”
We clinked glasses and he drank his down with obvious relief. Then he looked at his watch and said he had to be on his way. Claire was waiting for him. Claire. I always thought of Claire as strawberries and cream, cream, red and pink. He looked guilty for her. As well he might. She would have betrayed him for a dry Martini. She told him she didn’t like me.
I helped him on with his coat and he wrapped the scarf round his neck. At the door we shook hands. As he left he turned back for a moment and said he was counting on me. I waved him down the stairs. Back in the room I finished my drink and smoked a cigarette. I might have laughed. But I always found it difficult to laugh alone.
Cain’s Book, 1960
Fran Landesman
(1927–2011)
Born Frances Deitsch, she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and met Jay Landesman, a former gallery owner who founded the pioneering magazine Neurotica (among the first to publish Ginsberg and Kerouac) in 1948. They married and moved to St. Louis, Jays hometown, where he opened a nightclub called the Crystal Palace. Fran to begin to write lyrics, including the classic “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” collaborating on songs with the club’s pianist, Tommy Wolf. Together with Jay, who wrote the book (based on his unpublished novel about New York hipster life), they produced the musical The Nervous Set, which played on Broadway One of the show’s songs, “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” became an often-requested gay anthem of the pre-Stonewall era.
The Ballad of the Sad Young Men
All the sad young men
Sitting in the bars
Knowing neon lights
Missing all the stars
All the sad young men
Drifting through the town
Drinking up the night
Trying not to drown
Sing a song of sad young men
Glasses full of rye
All the news is bad again
Kiss your dreams goodbye
All the sad young men
Seek a certain smile
Someone they can hold
For a little while
Tired little girl
Does the best she can
Trying to be gay
For a sad young man
Autumn turns the leaves to gold
Slowly dies the heart
Sad young men are growing old
That’s the cruellest part
While a grimy moon
Watches from above
All the sad young men
Play at making love
Misbegotten moon
Shine for sad young men
Let your gentle light
Guide them home again
All the sad young men
The Nervous Set, 1959;
The Ballad of the Sad Young Men and Other Verse, 1982
John Clellon Holmes
(1926–1988)
Holmes’s novel Go, published in 1952 when he was twenty-six years old, was a roman à clef whose main characters were based on Holmes, Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Huncke. His article “This Is the Beat Generation”—a generation to whom he attributed “a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness”—popularized the term, apparently coined by Kerouac and inspired by Huncke, when it was published in The New York Times Magazine in 1952. Holmes never hit the road, but led a quiet life teaching and writing fiction (including the jazz novel The Horn), essays, and poetry The piece here, from his book Nothing More to Declare (1967), is a profile of his friend Jay Landesman.
The Pop Imagination
WHENEVER I met Jay Landesman in a bar in the old days, I always seemed to arrive first. I waited around, and far from being piqued, I discovered that I was experiencing a pleasant little ping-ping-ping of anticipation. What I was anticipating was laughter.
Black laughter. Like the idea of a cigarette smoking a man, or Dr. Strangelove. . . . Absurd laughter. Oh—like a camel in sneakers, beaded Art Nouveau lamps that play “Valencia,” Andy Warhol. . . . Pertinent laughter. You know, like, “Laugh? I thought I’d die,” the cobalt bomb, Lenny Bruce. . . . Laughter accompanied by the sound of hot air escaping from reality’s punctured balloons.
When I think of things like this, I always think of Landesman. Not because he was a wit. There wasn’t a proper epigram in him. Nor one of those living-room Berles, machinegunning everyone with gags. It was that he saw everything on the bias. It was that everything he did had an air of elaborate burlesque about it.
For instance, his six-button jackets with the multiple vents and triple lapels. His stuffed alligator with the lamp in its jaws. His study in St. Louis that was a facsimile of an old Von Sternberg set in all its claustrophobic proliferation of unrelated dreck. Neurotica, for instance—so outrageous in its time that you automatically assumed he must have started it for the same reason that other people suddenly decide to throw a wild party. It was like daring the Partisan Reviewniks to go skinny-dipping. Or ASCA (The Advanced School of Cultural Analysis), with all those spoofing lectures on sports cars, drinking, jazz, conformity and other “aspects,” which seemed to be nothing more than a deadpan excuse for Sunday afternoon cocktail parties. Or the Crystal Palace Cabaret Theater in St. Louis, created by Landesman and his brother for the simple reason (one couldn’t help but feel) that it didn’t already exist, and they needed an arena in which to “make things hot.” Or Landesman’s musical, The Nervous Set, that got to Broadway, perhaps too soon, and died—funny, irreverent, a parody of the Beat Generation. Or was it? You kept remembering lines from it, you kept humming those songs. And you laughed.
You did. You laughed at all this. You said, “Good old Jay. What the hell kind of wild stunt will he pull off next?” You always looked forward to seeing him, and what he pulled off next was always more outlandish than you had anticipated. . . . A Twist Room that must have been one of the first authentic discothèques in America. Or a TV gab-show that opened with a shot of Landesman’s firehouse shoes, and then panned up to a wry smile that suddenly admitted, “Talk is cheap.” Or a musical version of Dracula.
A million laughs, all right. A hip, sardonic mind behind it. No doubt of that. Landesmania, his friends called it. A life style that was a wacky amalgam of Hellzapoppin, Theater of the Absurd, and Pop Art. But serious? You must be kidding. . . . I mean, I once saw him wear magenta Bermudas and a pith helmet. He planned a lecture entitled “Abortive Attempts at Middle-Class Rebellion.” He was often heard to say things like, “George Raft in a dinner jacket looks like a stolen Bentley.” And take his parties! There was something fiendish about them. . . . Chandler Brossard and James Jones in the same room. Hostility games. Come as your favorite perversion. Confess your first homosexual experience. He was a wrecker, he was frivolous, he was—well, just think of going up to Dorothy Kilgallen on Madison Avenue and saying, “This is Sin Street, Madam, get off it!” Or naming your kids Cosmo and Miles Davis. It was all prankishness, eccentricity, maladjusted chutzpah. And yet—
And yet there was that damn underlayer to all of it. His projects all seemed to have a disturbing half-life that lingered in the mind like Strontium-90 in the bone. His personal preoccupations had the maddening habit of becoming cultural tendencies ten years later. You never took him seriously at the time, and you were never sure that he did either, and then all of a sudden everywhere you went in New York during the sixties there was a sort of public version of Landesmania. But where was Landesman? He had moved to England, and he wrote back mysteriously, “I see a kind of blurring of the sexual lines. . . . But no matter how you slice it, ducks, it’s all love. . . .” And you started to keep your eyes open, craftily, for that one to reach the surface.
After knowing Landesman for seventeen years, I still find it difficult to explain him to a stranger. A tall, shambling man, who has the warm, inquisitive dark eyes and the self-mocking smile of a secret idealist; who speaks in a glib, exaggerated patois of show b
iz lingo, psychiatric gobbledegook, and Negro and Yiddish slang, all blended into a contagious argot of his own, Landesman has been variously described as “a puppet-master with an aggressive lack of talent,” “the Mike Todd of dying cities,” and “a genie with a certain sense of merchandising.” There is a bit of truth in all these estimates, but the whole truth is not there.
For myself, I would say that Landesman possessed, years before it was either chic or marketable, what would now be called the Pop Imagination. In a culture where everything is mass-produced, quick-frozen, readymade, precooked or painted-by-the-numbers, he was the first person I knew who refused such a society’s categorical choice of either remaining an esthete or becoming a vulgarian. For any and all evidences of a unique and unconventional point ofview interested him, and he looked for these evidences in junk shops, movie houses, and newsstands (wherever his own quirky eye led him), as well as in bookstores, art galleries and theaters. In that Stone Age (ten or fifteen years back), when enlightened people sat in their Eames chairs, under their Calders, talking about T. S. Eliot, Landesman was already living in a thicket of Victorian bric-a-brac, and publishing Allen Ginsberg. I suspect his reasons for doing both were very much the same: he believed in indulging his own curiosity, and only things that were counter, wry, eccentric, special and excessive stimulated him.
Having grown up into (and through) a family antique business, Landesman believed that artifacts were sometimes more evocative of their times than ideas. Things had an uncanny aura to him, and clutter made him feel at ease. The first sight that confronted you on entering his New York apartment was a huge sculpture of Noah’s Ark fashioned from half the gunwale of a cat boat. Over his desk in St. Louis hung a spray-painted jock strap in a gilt frame, and he always worked warmly insulated behind mountains of books, magazines, record albums and any other nameless effluvia that had caught his eye. As a consequence, it was impossible to imagine him living for long in the functional Gobi of a modern house, and he could be painfully hilarious when a guest in one.
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