by Amiri Baraka
One night Nellie and I got into a discussion about children. We’d been living together for a few months now. I was beginning to meet some of her friends. A couple of girls from school, a cousin, some old boyfriends. And we’re talking about children, the subject having come up in some strange fashion. “I wouldn’t want children,” Nellie was saying. “I wouldn’t want them to grow up in this kind of world. Children in a mixed marriage would suffer.” (We’d never talked about marriage or anything that square before.)
I disagreed with her. I thought I heard something else in that, that one shouldn’t have children as the result of any mixed situation. I protested and acted, was, hurt. Not that I intended to marry her, but her saying that the issue of an interracial union was negative slightly inflamed me. The more I thought about it, the more inflamed I became. We had yet another split-up and I went to East 3rd Street. I called Betty but she wouldn’t come. I could sniff her disapproval over the phone. “No, I’m not coming over there. For what?”
When we got back together, Nellie told me she was pregnant. That flattened me. Pregnant? Great balls of shit what was going to happen now? But I just smiled at her and touched her arm. “What are we going to do?” she was saying. “It’s already a couple of months.” There was a fitful harassed look on her face.
I asked her what she wanted to do and she told me about some doctor in Pennsylvania who did abortions. In a week she had gone, stayed the weekend, and returned unloaded. But she looked drugged with the whole situation. I offered to leave for good. In a few more months she told me she was pregnant again. “We’ll get married,” I said. It came out of me without my having inspected it. Clear and audible: “married.”
When she repeated the word, I could hear it more clearly. But I have the kind of personality that will take on any kind of commitment if I can feel any real connection with it, and not blanch or shake (at least not outwardly) at whatever consequences. “Yeah,” I assured her. “We can get married.”
What I said had opened a trap door into our deeper feelings. Married? To whom? For what? Forever? I felt a little pushed, more than a little uncertain, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. What? Go get another abortion for crissakes!!? What was terrifying deep down was that I felt nothing really. There was no passion. It was quiet and rational. Our words back and forth. There were smiles. Nellie looked at me smiling, half smiling, uncertain. She didn’t know what to do either. What kind of life would this be? How long would this last? Who was this, anyway?
The fact that this was a white woman that I stood close to in a small New York apartment talking about marrying was not significant at first, but it grew in significance the more I thought about what I’d said. Those same words, that same information, had to be relayed to various out- and inposts, this marrying, especially this marrying across the normal borders of cool. The running bohemians of the black-white hookups I knew didn’t (I didn’t think) get married. (But I didn’t think about that anyway.) Hey, but here I was going off into some normal U.S. social shit, it was out. Some of that slopped around in my head, but at the same time I got the feeling that, after all, marriage was some normal U.S. shit, there was a fixture to it, a stasis I perceived (my youth in rebellion?) that I didn’t know whether I dug or not. Hey, it was a kind of middle-class thing to do. I didn’t come over to the Village for no regular middle-class shit, yet here I was in it. And what was so crushing, yet pulsing on the subtlest of emotional wires, was that I had a responsibility, I was expected to do something. I couldn’t just walk away. And no, there was still no real passion.
We decided that we would get married in a Buddhist temple on the Upper West Side. It meant to me that I could avoid the normal straight up and down middle-class thing. Korret’s prior coaching paid off in this expression. We contacted the Buddhist temple and arranged to be married there. Nellie’s parents nutted out, and while her mother would at least talk about it, the father declared Nellie dead! (A male relative was sent to talk to us, but he was too young and the only thing we succeeded in doing was getting drunk together and I put him on the train wondering was he going to make it.)
My parents took it in stride. There was not even any eye rolling or excessive questioning. (Such is the disposition and tenor of the oppressed, they are so in love with democracy.) They just asked me was I sure about what I was doing. “As long as you’re sure,” my father said, looking at me not quite directly. They came to the wedding, and so did the Hallocks and Will Ribbon. That was it.
A few weeks before I got married, I met Tim Poston in the street and he was drunk as usual. He beat me on the back, whooping and hollering a mixture of greetings and biting commentary on why he hadn’t seen me. “That’s your girlfriend?” he was screaming. “That’s your girlfriend? How’re you, girlfriend?” he shouted, shoving his thick paw at Nellie. Then he grabs me around the shoulder and pulls me over to the side and in a mock whisper begins to harass me. “Whatta you, eatin’ pussy now, Lee-Roy? Ha-ha-ha! Whatta you, eatin’ pussy?” I pushed him away, telling him something he already knew, that he was drunk.
A couple days later, Tim found out where I was living, on Morton Street. He camps outside under the window screaming up at me. “Whatta you, eatin’ pussy now, Lee-Roy? Huh, whatta you doing?” I had to come downstairs and wave my lead pipe, pulled out from inside the manila envelope, at him. To drive his drunken howling ass away from there.
Korret, Tom, and the rest of my friends had nothing to say about the marriage because I was not seeing them regular now. Jim knew something was going down (or coming up) since I’d gotten almost all my things and told him I would be moving.
I had managed to get on unemployment as a result of having been in the service, though I had to do some writing back and forth and get interviewed because I had a funny discharge. But in the end I got it, $38 a week. It beat a blank. Also I was still working from time to time proctoring. Nellie was taking in manuscripts to proofread and edit and doing typing to supplement the other editorial job. The Morton Street rent was pretty substantial and now the space began really to be too small. Two young people hugged up and in and out don’t think about the space. But now, with more stability to the relationship, and the promise of another boarder, we began to think about moving as soon as we could.
In the meantime, I’d published a poem in a magazine put out by a guy named Judson Crews from Taos, New Mexico. The publication was called The Naked Ear, the poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” addressed to a daughter I did not even have. But the publication was encouraging, even though who the hell read The Naked Ear which was only half the size of a regular paperback but you could see it in some of the bookstores. I became a familiar figure in the Village bookstores, especially the Eighth Street and the Phoenix (run by a guy who was later a very close friend of mine, Larry Wallrich).
I was also going to the different poetry readings at clubs and bars in the Village. In the late ’50s the poetry reading circuit came into its own. I began to meet other poets, Jack Micheline (the great populist) I heard read for the first time down at a club on Sixth Avenue, where Mingus was playing. On Mondays they had open poetry readings, and one night they had a contest and Jack won and I cheered him on. Howard Hart was another of those poets. Both Micheline and Hart wanted to read with jazz, which I thought was a hip idea. Steve Tropp was another reader and his wife Gloria. He was a white jazz drummer, his wife black, both of her arms crippled, but she was made up like in Hollywood science fiction movies about what blacks will look like in the future. (Later they had a child, a boy they called Tree Tree Tropp.) I even caught Langston Hughes reading with Mingus at a new club called the Five Spot. I spoke to him that night, very shyly, when he finished. Later, when I began to publish poems, Langston wrote me a note telling me he liked them. And he began to keep up with my publishing and from time to time wrote me and told me what he thought. Langston was always very sweet and extremely helpful and encouraging to young writers. When his Selected Poems came out he
sent me an autographed copy, “To LeRoi, From Langston, Harlem, U.S.A.,” and later he sent an autographed poem, “Backlash Blues,” which I have on my wall framed today.
About this time I heard talk of Allen Ginsberg and his poem “Howl.” I was moved by this poem so much because it talked about a world I could identify with and relate to. His language and his rhythms and the poem’s contents were real to me. Unlike the cold edges and exclusiveness of the New Yorker poem that had made me cry, Ginsberg talked of a different world, one much closer to my own.
I thought “Howl” was something special. It was a breakthrough for me. I now knew poetry could be about some things that I was familiar with, that it did not have to be about suburban birdbaths and Greek mythology. I kept watch for more of Ginsberg’s poems. And somehow I found out that he was living then in Paris, on a street called Git Le Couer. Wanting to be as weird to him as I thought he was to me, I wrote him a letter on toilet paper asking him was he for real. He sent me back a letter, also written on toilet paper, but the coarser European grade that makes better writing paper. He told me he was sincere but that he was tired of being Allen Ginsberg. (The notoriety was just starting.) He signed the letter and had a drawing under his signature of a lineup, a parade, of different beasts and animals, all with halos over their heads in some weird but jolly procession.
It was around this time I decided to publish a magazine. Poets. Writers. I knew that not only me but young dudes like Ernie and Ed and even Steve Korret and Tim Poston didn’t publish for one reason or another. With Ernie, Ed, and me, I knew it was turndowns.
A guy named Brayton (Brady) Harris had a printing shop on Cornelia Street, just around the corner from where we lived. When I’d go into the Phoenix Book Store to poke around, I’d pass the shop. Eventually I went in there and asked about starting a magazine. We could be co-publishers, I improvised on the spot. I know all the young poets and writers. Do the printing at cost, you distribute some, I’ll distribute the rest. Micheline was getting ready to publish his first book, River of Red Wine, and Maurice Kenny was publishing a book there, so one day when Micheline went over to see about his book, I raised the question about the magazine and Brady went for it. In fact he said he’d start a series of books and magazines. Jack’s would be the first and our magazine could come out about the same time.
Nellie went for the idea. She was working in publishing. She had majored in literature. She thought it was a good thing to do. She’d type the manuscripts on our electric typewriter we rented when she took in typing. The name of the magazine would be Zazen. It was a Zen word, a special quality of being, a texture of perception reflected by the term “mystery.” It had to do with attaining a high state of grace and relationship to divinity in whatever you did, especially in the arts. I had read the Japanese philosopher Seami, On Attaining the Stage of Zazen, and to me this was the quality the magazine must have, must attempt to put out. The attaining of a mysterious grace linked to spiritual revelation! And so the magazine would be called Zazen.
I wrote to Allen G. for manuscripts. I talked to Ernie and Ed and even Steve Korret and Tim Poston. I talked to some of the poets I’d met at the readings, they gave me other names. Work came in. Ginsberg sent four small poems for that first issue and told me about people like Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and others. Whalen sent some poetry immediately and Allen passed the word around. He was the poetry advertiser of that age, the role that Ezra Pound played during the ’20s, hipping people to each other, trying to get various people published. He was one communications element, a very important one, in the mobilization of all those young poetic forces so that they could find some concrete expression.
I also had met some painters. A guy named Peter Schwarzberg was actually the son of one of Nellie’s relative’s friends. Peter was really out, out, out. He was in graduate school at the New School, in philosophy. He said he was a “phenomenologist” and his endless discourse about “the self and the other,” existentialism and phenomenology, made me begin to study these philosophies myself. I began to read Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Husserl. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus became an emotional reference for me. And Peter’s paintings, heavily influenced by the German Expressionists, made me check their works out and study them. I came to dig Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottloff, Beckmann, Nolde, and the others, relating to that wild sense of color and exaggeration. But also to their deep sense of distress and social calamity.
Peter did our first cover and a few others, plus many illustrations in the magazine. There was also Tomi Ungerer, whom I met through the bookstore. Tomi was a painter, illustrator, writer, and mordant self-proclaimed existentialist wit. He did covers and some illustrations for us as well. Tomi went on to become very wealthy and famous for his children’s books and other kinds of works plus his shows of paintings. The first issue of Zazen said: “A New Consciousness in Arts & Letters.” We thought that. We used collages, illustrations, and drawings because we wanted to. We had no heavy weight of bullshit literary tradition staring us down.
When the first issue came out with its brownish-yellow cover with a face receding into a background of apparently shifting forms, I walked them all over the Village getting them in bookstores. I think we did five hundred and in a short time they were gone. There was no money in it, of course, but we wanted to get the work out. I was open to most directions of work (though my main thrust was unacademic, later anti-academic). I was looking for a “new consciousness.” I didn’t have any analytical treatise prepared on why my own consciousness was new, but that’s the way I felt. And there were the vibes I picked up from the young people around me who were trying to live in a contemporary world. The people who had not been mugged so severely by various “English Departments” that they were still battily swamped in iambic pentameter, not to mention starchy-ass ways of living.
We saw “the man in the grey flannel suit” as an enemy, an agent of Dwight Eisenhower whose baby-food mentality we made fun of. We could feel, perhaps, the changes that were in motion throughout the whole society. We reflected some of that change. Though in those days I was not political in any conscious way, or formally political at any rate. But my first published poem in Zazen is about an angel who thinks that the segregated bathrooms of South Carolina marked “others” must be for him. “I wonder, could they have known?” So there is a political consciousness lurking, albeit somewhat submerged, under the focus and banner of my attention then to “Art.” (A year or so later I could even be heard arguing with Kenneth Tynan that I was not political, as he struggled with me at some Beat poetry reading, ridiculing the nonsense I was spouting.)
It was 1958 and the first issue included Philip Whalen, Ed James, Judson Crews, Tom Postell, Allen Polite, Stephen Tropp, Bobb Hamilton, LeRoi Jones, Diane DiPrima, Ernest Kean, Jack Micheline, and Allen Ginsberg. Works by Tim Poston and Steve Korret were also included. The second issue, also 1958, had Gregory Corso, Tuli Kupferberg, Thomas Postell, LeRoi Jones, Barbara Ellen Moraff, Ron Loewinsohn, Diane DiPrima, Oliver Pitcher, James Boyer May, Harold Briggs, Bobb Hamilton, Gary Snyder, Ben (A. B.) Spellman, George Stade, and a poem of Poston’s.
The magazine opened up a whole world of back-and-forth correspondence among other young writers. It also created some beginning recognition of my own name and work. I began to get word of other publications and sometimes exchanged issues. There was also news of new publications and various readings near and far. With Zazen, I had plugged into a developing literary world and I was beginning to see its outline. But new or not, there was still definite connection with the old world. For instance, one of the young editors of a magazine dedicated to the new writing had written me a letter saying that while he liked some of the work, some of it reminded him of “the old nigger writing of the ’30s.” I held the note, staring at it awhile. First of all I didn’t know what he meant, except that there was some “nigger writing” he didn’t like. (Do you think he was talking about the writers of the Harlem Renais
sance?) This young editor was hooked up a little with Pound’s work and ideas, but strangely enough, later, this same editor became a friend of mine and I never asked him about the remark.
So I could see the “newness” and the openness of ideas and forms that now began to come in to me as an editor. I was given a broader overview about what was going on that young people wanted to call literature that could be sent to a youthful Buddhist-tinged, “new” asserting publication that any close observer could see was hooked up in some way with somebody black. The first issue was evenly divided between black and white writers. By the third issue there was not one black writer at all (though I was still an editor)! At the same time the normal trepidation I felt when confronted with anything in the U.S. which I knew historically must be in some way linked to white supremacy made me wary as I entered into these new relationships. I did think that white people would be opposed to a black dude even being a writer, even saying it. I thought maybe it was like coming into some place where they wouldn’t want you. That maybe there were passwords or dress codes or certain signals you had to learn. By this time I had met enough outright boobs and dumbasses to know better than my initial misunderstanding that the Village was the home of all World Class intellectuals, but I thought maybe there would be, for instance, purposeful confusion between the Silvas’ and Clyde Hamlet’s hanging out or just looking for white women and my own seriousness. I could assert anything, of course, but also I knew that there was a legitimacy and depth to my concerns. I did not as yet have a whole lot of confidence. But that came later on as well.