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Down and In: Life in the Underground
Examining the underground movement that emerged from Greenwich Village bohemia, this volume represents a collective biography of the people who created new tastes in art, writing, fashion, entertainment, film, and morality
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
326 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1987
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72 people want to read
About the author
Ronald Sukenick
32 books32 followersRonald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.
Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.
After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”
He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.
He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.
Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.
After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”
He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.
He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.
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February 4, 2020
Collective vs. Individualistic Creation
It might be worth examining a couple of stylistic issues with respect to this study, before delving any deeper into it.
Firstly, the study purports to be a collective work, rather than the work solely of (Post-Modernist writer and critic) Ronald Sukenick. This could be the non-fiction equivalent of having multiple authors/ narrators or one narrator/ protagonist with multiple personalities.
Sukenick explains:
This is quite an overstatement. The quotations rarely add anything substantive to the train of thought established by Sukenick. They add colour and corroboration only. This is Sukenick's story (and he's sticking to it).
Clubland
Secondly, the narrative consists of six chapters, each of which focuses on at least one Manhattan venue (such as a cafe, restaurant, bar or club) that was popular at the time of the narrative:
• The Open Door, Minetta’s, The Remo, the Kettle of Fish
• The Cedar Tavern
• Cafe Bohemia, the Five Spot, the Gaslight, Cafe Figaro, Romero's
• Stanley's
• The Store (Max’s Kansas City)
• One University Place (Chinese Chance), CBGB'S, the Mudd Club.
In furtherance of the author's pretence, many of the interviews are conducted in one or other of the venues to which the interviewee is relevant. Many of the venues, despite their fame, have since closed, even if they lasted beyond the timeframe of the narrative.
Sukenick's approach is therefore to capture the various scenes as they were represented in the dominant venues.
The Underground and the Subterraneans
The narrative commences in 1948 and concludes in about 1984. (The book was first published in 1987.)
Underlying the narrative is a preoccupation with the underground, or at least the subterraneans as they appeared in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Sukenick makes several attempts to define the underground. At its most general level, he regards it as part of a continuum that includes Bohemianism (the tradition of which can be traced back to France in the 1830’s).
In America, it consisted of a community or subculture that adopted an adversary stance with respect to middle class society:
Sukenick recognises that the underground was not just an alternative (lifestyle) to (that of) the middle class. It was an alternative, and adopted an adversary stance, to other subcultures and earlier versions of the underground as well.
The Upper and Lower Bohemians
Early on, Sukenick makes it clear that the underground was “not the same as the older Greenwich Village Bohemians inspired by Freud, Marx, and Modernism.”
This is his shorthand for anybody associated with the cultural magazine, “Partisan Review", who tended to come from an earlier generation of New York Jewish intellectuals and whom he now regarded as “Upper Bohemians":
This is also the basis of conflicting allegiances to Modernism and Post-Modernism, and differences of opinion about politics.
The Post-Modernists vs. the Modernists
In defence of Post-Modernism against Modernism, Sukenick argues that “the political intellectuals usually haven't a clue about what cutting edge contemporaries in the arts are up to, and care less unless it fits their doctrines.”
This implies that the Modernists knew little about art (as opposed to literature).
It's interesting that he questions their insights more in the context of art (the image) than of literature (the verbal). Elsewhere, he acknowledges that Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg (two prominent Modernist art critics within the Partisan Review circle) were supportive polemicists of Abstract Expressionism, which shaped the artistic foundation of American Post-Modernism and fueled its expectation that experimental fiction could be both masterful and deserving of commercial success).
The Apolitical Underground
Sukenick hints at two reasons for the different perspectives on politics:
Firstly, he intimates that he personally was “not especially political”. After all, he had “just joined the middle class” and wasn't really ready to be expelled just yet.
Secondly, he explains that working class political movements had declined in power and influence since the thirties (as a result of their failure), so much so that the underground and Bohemia had become depoliticised.
As a result, the “classless subterranean...[was simultaneously] alienated from both the Downtown proletariat and the Uptown bourgeoisie...”:
This depoliticisation brings Sukenick into conflict with the Old Left:
This conflict involves one of his lecturers at Brandeis University, Irving Howe, a founder of the magazine “Dissent", as well as the Democratic Socialists of America.
The Underground and Academia
Both Howe and Sukenick come from Jewish backgrounds. Howe tells Sukenick that, when he applied for a position at Brandeis, he was interviewed in Yiddish.
Sukenick regards Howe, Marcuse and Philip Rahv (the last of whom was an editor of "Partisan Review") as part of “my intellectual patrimony”, and Brandeis as “a short cut to the underground of intellectual resistance that seems the best alternative to an oppressive middle-class culture.”
The middle class and its culture is the enemy. Ironically, when Sukenick reveals he wants to drop out and live in New York, Howe asks, “Why give up the chance of a successful career in the university system?” He believes that “the option of withdrawing to the underground and living cheap doesn't even exist.”
Still, Sukenick does exactly this a few years later, although nowhere is it explained how he or his peers are able to generate enough income to pay for rent, groceries, alcohol and drugs in Manhattan.
Mind you, he still ends up pursuing an academic career, which allows him enough time and material comfort to write fiction and criticism.
Selling Out
All throughout the book, there's another manifestation of the ideological dispute with respect to the middle class – the fear of becoming a “schmuck", and the dilemma of “selling out":
Norman Mailer and the Underground
In the last chapter (set in the punk and new wave era, when the scene would split into two, “the sleazy chic of Punk, and the posh haunts of the new Hipoisie”), Sukenick quotes art critic and activist, Lucy Lippard, who “makes an emphatic distinction between two ways that art can challenge status quo reality... Critical art, she says, simply offers alternative views of that reality, as Pollock did, while oppositional art is more openly adversarial in a political sense, to the point of activism.”
Lippard herself quotes the media analyst, Herbert Schiller:
After an interview with author Mark Leyner, Sukenick concludes, “There is nothing wrong with wealth and fame, Leyner seems to be saying, but you don't even think of compromising your creative work to get it.”
Sukenick seems to have embraced middle class comforts over time, if only as a result of his academic career. However, it's important that subterraneans don’t turn out to be closet Yuppies. The real problem seems to be the indecent display of excessive material ambition.
Ironically, Sukenick earlier quotes Norman Podhoretz (never a subterranean) opining that the arguably excessive Norman Mailer (who is universally despised and envied by Post-Modernists as [too] commercially successful) “would settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of his time, and earning millions of dollars, and achieving...American celebrityhood.”
Mailer seems to have achieved what the Post-Modernists could only dream of, while simultaneously clinging to their fictional underground myths. Now, Post-Modernists are as careerist as their middle class parents.
Donald Soccerknacker Jr.
It might be worth examining a couple of stylistic issues with respect to this study, before delving any deeper into it.
Firstly, the study purports to be a collective work, rather than the work solely of (Post-Modernist writer and critic) Ronald Sukenick. This could be the non-fiction equivalent of having multiple authors/ narrators or one narrator/ protagonist with multiple personalities.
Sukenick explains:
“Although I have a part in the story, it is mostly a collective narrative about the rise, decline, and future prospects of a phase in [the Bohemian tradition.] [It's] a collective work in the sense that it is based largely on interviews...[that document a] comparative experience.”
This is quite an overstatement. The quotations rarely add anything substantive to the train of thought established by Sukenick. They add colour and corroboration only. This is Sukenick's story (and he's sticking to it).
Clubland
Secondly, the narrative consists of six chapters, each of which focuses on at least one Manhattan venue (such as a cafe, restaurant, bar or club) that was popular at the time of the narrative:
• The Open Door, Minetta’s, The Remo, the Kettle of Fish
• The Cedar Tavern
• Cafe Bohemia, the Five Spot, the Gaslight, Cafe Figaro, Romero's
• Stanley's
• The Store (Max’s Kansas City)
• One University Place (Chinese Chance), CBGB'S, the Mudd Club.
In furtherance of the author's pretence, many of the interviews are conducted in one or other of the venues to which the interviewee is relevant. Many of the venues, despite their fame, have since closed, even if they lasted beyond the timeframe of the narrative.
Sukenick's approach is therefore to capture the various scenes as they were represented in the dominant venues.
The Underground and the Subterraneans
The narrative commences in 1948 and concludes in about 1984. (The book was first published in 1987.)
Underlying the narrative is a preoccupation with the underground, or at least the subterraneans as they appeared in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Sukenick makes several attempts to define the underground. At its most general level, he regards it as part of a continuum that includes Bohemianism (the tradition of which can be traced back to France in the 1830’s).
In America, it consisted of a community or subculture that adopted an adversary stance with respect to middle class society:
“My first take on the underground is that it's a class of outsiders experimenting with an idea of the good life beyond stable middle-class constraints.”
“In Greenwich Village at the time there was a strong sense of alternative identity. In the underground of Greenwich Village you not only knew who They were, you also knew who We were. America was one thing and Greenwich Village another.”
Sukenick recognises that the underground was not just an alternative (lifestyle) to (that of) the middle class. It was an alternative, and adopted an adversary stance, to other subcultures and earlier versions of the underground as well.
The Upper and Lower Bohemians
Early on, Sukenick makes it clear that the underground was “not the same as the older Greenwich Village Bohemians inspired by Freud, Marx, and Modernism.”
This is his shorthand for anybody associated with the cultural magazine, “Partisan Review", who tended to come from an earlier generation of New York Jewish intellectuals and whom he now regarded as “Upper Bohemians":
“Upper Bohemians happen to have radical, or at least heterodox, ideas, but they live [a] middle class [lifestyle.] Or even upper middle class. Or even rich. The distinction between Upper and Lower Bohemia should not be confused with the distinction between hardcore and softcore underground.”
This is also the basis of conflicting allegiances to Modernism and Post-Modernism, and differences of opinion about politics.
The Post-Modernists vs. the Modernists
In defence of Post-Modernism against Modernism, Sukenick argues that “the political intellectuals usually haven't a clue about what cutting edge contemporaries in the arts are up to, and care less unless it fits their doctrines.”
This implies that the Modernists knew little about art (as opposed to literature).
It's interesting that he questions their insights more in the context of art (the image) than of literature (the verbal). Elsewhere, he acknowledges that Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg (two prominent Modernist art critics within the Partisan Review circle) were supportive polemicists of Abstract Expressionism, which shaped the artistic foundation of American Post-Modernism and fueled its expectation that experimental fiction could be both masterful and deserving of commercial success).
The Apolitical Underground
Sukenick hints at two reasons for the different perspectives on politics:
Firstly, he intimates that he personally was “not especially political”. After all, he had “just joined the middle class” and wasn't really ready to be expelled just yet.
Secondly, he explains that working class political movements had declined in power and influence since the thirties (as a result of their failure), so much so that the underground and Bohemia had become depoliticised.
As a result, the “classless subterranean...[was simultaneously] alienated from both the Downtown proletariat and the Uptown bourgeoisie...”:
"[This was] the situation of the cultural underground in the forties and fifties, with its hostility toward the middle class and its ideological divorce from the working class in consequence of the failed socialist movements of the thirties...
“It was a situation that vitiated the politics of the older Bohemia and largely depoliticised the new underground until the social protest movements of ten years later...A deemphasis of politics and, especially, ideology marked the transition from Bohemians to ‘subterraneans' who, it might be said, initially moved further underground.”
This depoliticisation brings Sukenick into conflict with the Old Left:
“I think what I sensed was the end of the old-guard fantasy of holding out for the revolution.”
This conflict involves one of his lecturers at Brandeis University, Irving Howe, a founder of the magazine “Dissent", as well as the Democratic Socialists of America.
The Underground and Academia
Both Howe and Sukenick come from Jewish backgrounds. Howe tells Sukenick that, when he applied for a position at Brandeis, he was interviewed in Yiddish.
Sukenick regards Howe, Marcuse and Philip Rahv (the last of whom was an editor of "Partisan Review") as part of “my intellectual patrimony”, and Brandeis as “a short cut to the underground of intellectual resistance that seems the best alternative to an oppressive middle-class culture.”
The middle class and its culture is the enemy. Ironically, when Sukenick reveals he wants to drop out and live in New York, Howe asks, “Why give up the chance of a successful career in the university system?” He believes that “the option of withdrawing to the underground and living cheap doesn't even exist.”
Still, Sukenick does exactly this a few years later, although nowhere is it explained how he or his peers are able to generate enough income to pay for rent, groceries, alcohol and drugs in Manhattan.
Mind you, he still ends up pursuing an academic career, which allows him enough time and material comfort to write fiction and criticism.
Selling Out
All throughout the book, there's another manifestation of the ideological dispute with respect to the middle class – the fear of becoming a “schmuck", and the dilemma of “selling out":
“[A schmuck] is not just a jerk or a wimp, it has to do with a particular time and place. A schmuck is somebody with a certain way of thinking, a combination of caution, conformity, and mercenary values. An idolator of Things, a consumer at the feet of the Golden Calf.”
“...selling out became the hot topic among those of us in Midwood who weren’t schmucks, what was selling out and what wasn't, who was selling out and who wasn't. Selling out applied to those who assumed the moral superiority of leftist views while maintaining schmuck-materialist values about money, success, and sexuality. It never occurred to any of us that schmuck materialism and dialectical materialism had any relation. The dialectical lefties were stuffy, but the schmucks were not even ‘subtle’.
"We thought of ourselves as in the spirit of the true left, unaware that we might be something else, something for which there was perhaps no political category, or at least not yet. Not till the sixties, if then. So selling out came to mean not only working for advertising companies and corporations, but almost any of the normal schmuck-materialist ambitions when pursued by leftist classmates.
"Selling out, finally, meant becoming even a doctor or a lawyer, because such choices denied the promise of a more ‘valid’ kind of life beyond the middle class from which we all came. For some, selling out was simply the synonym for making it – at anything.”
Norman Mailer and the Underground
In the last chapter (set in the punk and new wave era, when the scene would split into two, “the sleazy chic of Punk, and the posh haunts of the new Hipoisie”), Sukenick quotes art critic and activist, Lucy Lippard, who “makes an emphatic distinction between two ways that art can challenge status quo reality... Critical art, she says, simply offers alternative views of that reality, as Pollock did, while oppositional art is more openly adversarial in a political sense, to the point of activism.”
Lippard herself quotes the media analyst, Herbert Schiller:
“Aroused consciousness is the greatest tool for institutional change that we'll ever get our hands on.”
After an interview with author Mark Leyner, Sukenick concludes, “There is nothing wrong with wealth and fame, Leyner seems to be saying, but you don't even think of compromising your creative work to get it.”
Sukenick seems to have embraced middle class comforts over time, if only as a result of his academic career. However, it's important that subterraneans don’t turn out to be closet Yuppies. The real problem seems to be the indecent display of excessive material ambition.
Ironically, Sukenick earlier quotes Norman Podhoretz (never a subterranean) opining that the arguably excessive Norman Mailer (who is universally despised and envied by Post-Modernists as [too] commercially successful) “would settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of his time, and earning millions of dollars, and achieving...American celebrityhood.”
Mailer seems to have achieved what the Post-Modernists could only dream of, while simultaneously clinging to their fictional underground myths. Now, Post-Modernists are as careerist as their middle class parents.
Donald Soccerknacker Jr.
Read
February 27, 2016I very much enjoy scenes. The envy of the isolated, one might suppose. The French one around Sartre and de Beauvoir is famous. The Hegel=Schelling=Hölderlin seminary scene is one of my favorites of all time.
This book here is about a scene I’ve never been especially fond of. But there it is. And it is/was that kind of underground scene. Which I think’s important. So if you too find that the true and the authentic and the honest and the innovative scenes are usually underground, you’ll want this little biography of the (second wave) Greenwich Village scene. Ron’s pretty slick ; there’s lots of names ;; there’s lots of interview quotes.
Ron does not fail to (finally) getting around to dropping the names of his pals Raymond Federman and Steve Katz.
The cover (no charge!) ;; but here I have a complaint. While Ginsberg floats around frequently throughout (naturally), there is butone two single Springsteen mention (both in parallel with Willie Nelson and Billy Joel and Alice Cooper (all of equivalent talent levels)) ;; there’s plenty of Warhol of course, but his whole thing was so ephemeral, why even speak more of it ; Dylan gets 10 index entries, but that’s an overestimate of his role here. And there is zero nada nichts on Zappa. Which is, well, even for Sukenick pretty much unforgivable. Frank’s even got a song about that one hotspot :: Mudd Club (the disgusting ThingFish mix).
This book here is about a scene I’ve never been especially fond of. But there it is. And it is/was that kind of underground scene. Which I think’s important. So if you too find that the true and the authentic and the honest and the innovative scenes are usually underground, you’ll want this little biography of the (second wave) Greenwich Village scene. Ron’s pretty slick ; there’s lots of names ;; there’s lots of interview quotes.
Ron does not fail to (finally) getting around to dropping the names of his pals Raymond Federman and Steve Katz.
The cover (no charge!) ;; but here I have a complaint. While Ginsberg floats around frequently throughout (naturally), there is but
August 5, 2011
I could swear the title of the book was Down and In/In Greenwich village. Maybe the title was changed.
I was a child in the Greenwich Village of the early 50s and a young adult in the Greenwich Village of the 60s, so I speak with some authority. For example, this tidbit: The older artist woman I lived with in the West Village hated the author's sister Gloria because she was good looking and got the guys. So believe me when I say that the book gives the reader a pretty accurate as well as amusing glimpse into the lives and the times of the Bohemians, Beats, HIpsters, and Hippies who inhabited lower Manhattan, pretty much between Houston and 14th Street and from the East River to the Hudson during the 50s and 60s. As both a child and a young adult I loved it. I was taken to all night parties and slept a lot in school. Peasant dresses and Orgone Energy. Jazz and heroin. Artists. The Cedar Bar -- old and new. The Annex East and Stanley's Bar on Avenue B. The coffee houses like Figaro's and San Raeo. Poetry readings. The Five Spot on St. Marks where you could just pop in and hear Thelonius Munk. Then the explosion of my generation hitting Tompkins Park just as I moved to the West Side. And Max's Kansas City and Andy Warhol holding court. We owe Sukenick a debt of gratitude for recording some of this. For it is gone. In the 80s the Yuppies started moving into the West Village and into SoHo (South of Houston). So we went from Bohemian to Bourgeois in a little over quarter century. Glad I was there at the time. Despite a lot of posturing and bullshit, these two decades were yet very powerful for the arts. Poety was vibrant. You could go into almost any hole-in-the-wall bookstore and find GOOD, really GOOD poetry, not by Oprah authors or poets laureate, but by a plethora of known and unknowns poets, either published by small presses or self published. THE ARTS WERE VIBRANT in this period. And I do not believe we will see such again for a very, very long time. I will share something of my experience with you. I am told that this poem, too, gives a feeling for this very special lost time and place.
THIRTEENTH STREET
(For Dee H.)
The spics sleep on Thirteenth Street
Their jungle bongos beat … in perfervid dreams
Of rut and rot, of purple mountain tops
And breaking glass. Toward Avenue A and up
Up the blank-eyed tenement walls I look
And I own it all, the city and the night, the light
Enhaloing the streetlamps, the still warm asphalt
The fretwork of fire escapes, I own it all
Behind me a few doors, San Sebastian
Twists in agony in his gilt capella
His hermaphroditic plaster form pierced
By a dozen well-fletched Roman arrows, his gaze
Through store-front chapel’s plate glass window
Imploring, piteous, ecstatic. And next door
My own apartment the year before the plaster
-- Like my youthful pride -- would buckle and fail
Dee, I loved your lisp and how you said
The first line of this poem The sthpics sthleep...
I loved your body and how you looked in jeans
How the springs of the folding bed would complain
As loudly as that AA Wendy bitch
Across the dingy sounding board of a hall
And Bach on the bare old Zenith by the bed
And the warm orange glow of its vacuum tubes
Spare as a monk’s cell I imagined it
My apartment, no stockings, no woman’s evidence
As I was callow and ascetically inclined
I was lucky to have missed the eye of celebrity
That that pot-bellied poet-pederast of Tenth Street
Never wrote a poem for me entitled
“Gimme Yr. Ass Boy” not among his best
If there were any best after his youthful Howl
And dear Kim, who quit Balanchine
Before she was fifteen, and Roger, the seminarian
He was as close I got to faggotry
And proud I was, not that I was stiff
And he limp, but that Mother would not approve
…The spics sleep on Thirteenth Street …
Indeed, I envy them their sleep, their dreams
For what I loved and lost on Thirteenth Street
New York, 1964; Puerto Vallarta 2009
I was a child in the Greenwich Village of the early 50s and a young adult in the Greenwich Village of the 60s, so I speak with some authority. For example, this tidbit: The older artist woman I lived with in the West Village hated the author's sister Gloria because she was good looking and got the guys. So believe me when I say that the book gives the reader a pretty accurate as well as amusing glimpse into the lives and the times of the Bohemians, Beats, HIpsters, and Hippies who inhabited lower Manhattan, pretty much between Houston and 14th Street and from the East River to the Hudson during the 50s and 60s. As both a child and a young adult I loved it. I was taken to all night parties and slept a lot in school. Peasant dresses and Orgone Energy. Jazz and heroin. Artists. The Cedar Bar -- old and new. The Annex East and Stanley's Bar on Avenue B. The coffee houses like Figaro's and San Raeo. Poetry readings. The Five Spot on St. Marks where you could just pop in and hear Thelonius Munk. Then the explosion of my generation hitting Tompkins Park just as I moved to the West Side. And Max's Kansas City and Andy Warhol holding court. We owe Sukenick a debt of gratitude for recording some of this. For it is gone. In the 80s the Yuppies started moving into the West Village and into SoHo (South of Houston). So we went from Bohemian to Bourgeois in a little over quarter century. Glad I was there at the time. Despite a lot of posturing and bullshit, these two decades were yet very powerful for the arts. Poety was vibrant. You could go into almost any hole-in-the-wall bookstore and find GOOD, really GOOD poetry, not by Oprah authors or poets laureate, but by a plethora of known and unknowns poets, either published by small presses or self published. THE ARTS WERE VIBRANT in this period. And I do not believe we will see such again for a very, very long time. I will share something of my experience with you. I am told that this poem, too, gives a feeling for this very special lost time and place.
THIRTEENTH STREET
(For Dee H.)
The spics sleep on Thirteenth Street
Their jungle bongos beat … in perfervid dreams
Of rut and rot, of purple mountain tops
And breaking glass. Toward Avenue A and up
Up the blank-eyed tenement walls I look
And I own it all, the city and the night, the light
Enhaloing the streetlamps, the still warm asphalt
The fretwork of fire escapes, I own it all
Behind me a few doors, San Sebastian
Twists in agony in his gilt capella
His hermaphroditic plaster form pierced
By a dozen well-fletched Roman arrows, his gaze
Through store-front chapel’s plate glass window
Imploring, piteous, ecstatic. And next door
My own apartment the year before the plaster
-- Like my youthful pride -- would buckle and fail
Dee, I loved your lisp and how you said
The first line of this poem The sthpics sthleep...
I loved your body and how you looked in jeans
How the springs of the folding bed would complain
As loudly as that AA Wendy bitch
Across the dingy sounding board of a hall
And Bach on the bare old Zenith by the bed
And the warm orange glow of its vacuum tubes
Spare as a monk’s cell I imagined it
My apartment, no stockings, no woman’s evidence
As I was callow and ascetically inclined
I was lucky to have missed the eye of celebrity
That that pot-bellied poet-pederast of Tenth Street
Never wrote a poem for me entitled
“Gimme Yr. Ass Boy” not among his best
If there were any best after his youthful Howl
And dear Kim, who quit Balanchine
Before she was fifteen, and Roger, the seminarian
He was as close I got to faggotry
And proud I was, not that I was stiff
And he limp, but that Mother would not approve
…The spics sleep on Thirteenth Street …
Indeed, I envy them their sleep, their dreams
For what I loved and lost on Thirteenth Street
New York, 1964; Puerto Vallarta 2009
August 14, 2015
Ronald Sukenick's Down and In: Life in the Underground is part memoir, part history,of American art and the counter-culture from 1948-1984, a crucial period that saw the rise and fall of the 'American Century'(as Life magazine would have it). The American Avant-Garde emerged from the war with the financial triumph of Abstract Expressionism, the giddy days of the New York School and Beat poetry, the radical performances of the Living Theatre, and so on. Sukenick was born in 1932, in Brooklyn. As a teenager he escaped to Manhattan, exploring the bars of the Village, heir to the old, pre-war Bohemia. The Village was already a tourist destination in the 30s, but in the late forties rents were still cheap, the mob still owned everything, and the culture was thoroughly entrenched in the underground. Sukenick was escaping his middle class family and its liberal values. He doesn't romanticize all of this at all. His book explores the ways in which 'counter-culture' 'underground' and 'avant-garde' intertwine and the relationship between these entities, or social movements and the dominant, post-war mass culture of America. He is particularly astute at articulating the contradictions: the desire of artists to make it, to make money, to hustle, and also stay true to their beliefs, aesthetic and political, and their instincts. As the fifties becomes the sixties the counter-culture becomes big business. The West Village and the Lower East Side change with the influx of hippies. The book transpires in bars, cafes, events, and he interviews and quotes a dozen or so writers, artists, and performers. Warhol, Mailer and Ginsberg are key figures of hustling and success, raising questions of selling out and appropriation. Sukenick was a novelist who enjoyed some commercial success in the late sixties with his book UP (1967) and through the early 70s was publishing with mainstream presses, though his work was experimental. In 1975 he was one of the founders of the Fiction Collective and eventually he became a professor in Boulder, CO, where Ginsberg's Naropa institute is. This is the institutionalization of the counter-culture, a move he sees as both necessary and disturbing. The book is lively, funny, and analytical. It also raises serious questions that are relevant today, as cities like New York are too expensive to support a genuine underground. The underground always exists of course, but there are periods when its influence on the culture at large is greater. Today the underground is all but invisible, even to young people. This subsiding back into obscurity, even as many of the social values have become mainstream, began in the 70s and was complete by the 80s. Conformity now has as high a price as non-comformity and in abny event, many artists simply cannot sell out because there is no market for their work in contemporary America. Sukenick has problems with celebrating poverty and a marginalized existence, but he also sees them as inevitable and vital to freedom and independence, which are the only guarantors of a living, exploratory, art. He doesn't resolve these contradictions so much as articulate them. The book ends in the 80s with the death of Mickey Ruskin, proprietor of Max's Kansas City and other legendary NY bars, of a drug overdose. This book is a great companion to Legs McNeils' Please Kill Me and Patti Smith's Just Kids. Earlier books like The Banquet Years (Roger Shattuck) and The Bride and the Bachelors (Calvin Tomkins)are excellent sources for early phases of Bohemia.
November 18, 2016
Nigdy nie zrozumiem fenomentu beatników i chyba każda następna książka będzie mi to udowadniać na nowo.
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