The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (44 page)

The dead bourgeois artifact I'd cringed before in
The New Yorker
was a material and spiritual product of a whole way of life and perception of reality that was hostile to me. I dug that even as young boy weeping in San Juan. Coming out of Howard and getting trapped in the air force had pulled me away from the “good job” path which is also called the Yellow Brick Road. The Yalla heaven of the undead!

I'd come into the Village
looking
, trying to “check,” being open to all flags. Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” was the first thing to open my nose, as opposed to, say, instructions I was given, directions, guidance. I dug “Howl” myself, in fact many of the people I'd known at the time warned me off it
and thought the whole Beat phenomenon a passing fad of little relevance. I'd investigated further because I was looking for something. I was precisely open to its force as the statement of a new generation. As a line of demarcation from “the silent generation” and the man with the (yellow) grey flannel skin, half brother of the one with the grey flannel suit. I took up with the Beats because that's what I saw taking off and flying that somewhat resembled myself. The open and implied rebellion — of form and content. Aesthetic as well as social and political. But I saw most of it as Art, and the social statement as merely our lives as dropouts from the mainstream. I could see the young white boys and girls in their pronouncement of disillusion with and “removal” from society as being related to the black experience. That made us colleagues of the spirit. Yet I was no stomp-down bohemian. I had enough of the mainstream in me, of lower-middleclass craving after order and “respectability,” not to get pulled all the way over to Wahooism. Yet as wild as some of my colleagues were and as cool as I usually was, the connection could be made because I was black and that made me, as Wright's novel asserted,
an outsider
. (To some extent, even inside those “outsider” circles.)

The understanding that there were several different “schools” of new writers excited me. As an editor I thought that all the different relevant new schools should get published. Yet in this admirable “catholicism” a bug was sewn up in my rug that had to eat its way clear before too long was over.
Zazen
4 saw the picking up on the Black Mountain people, also my new social relationships. The issue had a black cover with white abstraction by Fee Dawson. It was striking and the whole issue much more professionally done — Varityped instead of the old IBM, not as many of the weird little paste-ins and collages. The lineup was Olson, Orlovsky, O'Hara, Finstein, Dawson, A.B., Bremser, Marshall, Oppenheimer, Crews, Snyder, Kerouac, Wieners, Creeley, Corso, Jones, Sorrentino, Mason Jordan Mason. Mason was supposedly black but actually it turned out he was really Judson Crews. Crews had several noms de plume and several personalities. Mason Jordan Mason was his “black” personality. But interestingly enough the M.J.M. poems were better than the Judson Crews ones, because in “being” black Crews assumed a simplicity and directness that made the work more forceful. The Crews poems were too full of literary allusion and stuffy syntax.

The black cover on one hand does represent to me the coming into full force, or full consciousness, of one circle, at a relatively high literary level. But there is only one black writer, LeRoi Jones. (At the time I might have
thought it was two!) Ernie, Ed, Steve, Tim, Bobb Hamilton, Allen Polite, Tom Postell are not there. But I was not with them socially either. (Though around that time I had had to get Tim out of Bellevue, where one of his drinking bouts had taken him right into the nut ward. I had to testify to his sanity and become his guardian.) I was “open” to all schools within the circle of white poets of all faiths and flags. But what had happened to the blacks? What had happened to me? How is it that there's only the one colored guy?

But I answered that the same way the National Book Award committee answered inquiries to it in the '80s about why there were no minorities or women among their nominees. “We were looking for quality literature and that is what we got.” Amen.

So obviously my social focus had gotten much whiter. White wife, coeditor. The weekend hollering and drinking trysts were hooked to the same social focus; they were it, actually. Our first child, a daughter, Kellie, was born. I had come back from reading poetry somewhere, with a couple other poets, and we came back to the hospital and squatted outside, until I got to go in. That was the high point of my life, another mystery uncovered. I was a father at twenty-four and a half years old.

Nellie and I never hassled each other, in the main. Though she had a bright pixie quality, like a child insisting it be allowed to celebrate. She had had to come to terms with the marriage in her own way. I can only guess what whites who think they belong in the mainstream of U.S. — American Dream — society think when they find out for some reason (in this case an exploding black penis) that they will not be allowed in that stream. She had that quality that marks survivors, a dogged will that haunted her twinkling eyes. A strength to her laughter that made it richer. Yet for these reasons a kind of lonely atmosphere accompanied her no matter how she tried to mount it or quiet it.

She liked the weekend bashes we had because it cast her in another light. We were, in some repects, at the center of a particular grouping of folks. The magazine both created that circle and connected people to us that we didn't even know. Nellie had not been such a popular kid, she'd told me many times. She was unpretty, she'd said, in a pretty world. Unglamorous in a world ruled by glamour. So she loved the attention that even such a modest circle as our drunken, adulterous poets provided. The fortuitous link with
Sectarian
gave her a look at two worlds.

The world we were in was off to the side of the one she'd prepared for. Nellie was always laughing, scolding our house guests, or rollicking with
the bashes, and she must have been drawn, as was I, into its values and mores.

When we heard first about why Fy had to leave Brooklyn (and then he was with us), he and Paul were rubbing shoulders. Then we learned (she first from Rene) that Rene Meisler and Mark Fine were a number. Mark lived with them in the Bronx and when John went off to his printing gig, they had at it. When Paul went off to his gig, Fy and Ceeny did it. CD stood at the side of people swirling in a larger party and wept (months later) in confession to Paul that he'd been jamming his lady. Why he picked a party to put on such a drama I will not speculate upon. During this period I myself had an affair of sorts with one of the campfollowers Gil brought over from Brooklyn. That was the first in a long series of affairs and liaisons, mostly with white women.

The various “schools” of poetry we related to were themselves all linked together by the ingenuous. They were a point of departure from the academic, from the Eliotic model of rhetoric, formalism, and dull iambics. Bullshit school poetry.

Under the broad banner of our objective and subjective “united front” of poetry, I characterized the various schools: the Jewish Apocalyptic, biblical, long crashing rhythms of spiritual song. “Howl” and “Kaddish” are the best examples. Kerouac's “Spontaneous Bop Prosody” is an attempt to buy into the “heaven in the head” of religious apocalypse, which Ginsberg inherited from his rabbinical sources (and his historic models, Christopher Smart, Blake, Whitman). It is a hyped-up version of Joyce with a nod in blacks' direction because of the heroic improvised character of African American music, especially the improvising soloist.

The wildest of the literary-social schools was the full-out bohemians of “turn on, drop out” fame. People in “pads” smoking pot, listening to “wild sounds.” But these were the most politically open of all the schools, the most radical and furthest removed from the university. These were the forerunners of the hippies and flower children. The “punks” of today.

The Black Mountain people linked me to a kind of Anglo-Germanic school, more accessible than the academics, but still favoring hard-edged, structured forms. Olson and Creeley were its twin prophets, but Olson had the broader sword, the most “prophetic” stance. His concerns went further and touched me deeper. Creeley was closer to the William Carlos Williams style — sparse and near-conversational, though much more stylized than Williams and influenced by someone like Mallarm, in the
tendency toward using the language so precisely and literally it became at times “abstract.”

Olson shared Williams' word usage but also was a Poundian (though opposing it seemed to me, Pound's social pathology and worship of the European Renaissance as the beginning and end of all culture). Olson's
Maximus Poems
, his major work, is a direct descendant of both the
Cantos
and
Paterson
.

If in one space of New York City you'd have neo-Ginsbergian poems all over the place, wander into the West 20th Street circle you'd have beaucoups Creeley poems and neo-Creeley poems every which where.

I met Frank O'Hara through Allen Ginsberg, like so many writers I met. Frank was assistant curator for the Museum of Modern Art. He was a close friend of the whole community of New York painters, abstract expressionist as well as the loony pre-pop figures like Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, and Bob Rauschenberg. Frank was one of the most incisive and knowledgeable critics of painting in New York at the time. The New York school was chiefly, to me, O'Hara. And if you were anywhere around Frank, as he launched into this subject or that, always on top, laughing, gesturing, exclaiming, being as broad as any topic, and the easy sense of sophistication which gave him an obvious “leadership,” you'd understand. (He'd turn red at such a suggestion. “Listen, my dear, you can take that leadership business and shove it!”)

Kenneth Koch, whose poetry I dug because it was almost always hilarious, especially the great “Fresh Air,” which single-handedly demolished the academic poets (even if they couldn't dig it), and the later Pulitzer-National Book Award winner John Ashbery were the other chief practitioners of the New York school, so called because its writers not only lived there but — at least with Frank — expressed a sense of the high sophistication and motley ambience of the city. This was (in O'Hara's hands) a French(-Russian) surreal-tinged poetry. A poetry of expansiveness and high emotion. Sometimes a poetry of dazzling abstraction and shifting colorful surfaces. It was out of the Apollinaire of
Zone
but also close to Whitman and Mayakovsky.

Williams was a common denominator because he wanted American speech, a mixed foot, a variable measure. He knew American life had outdistanced the English rhythms and their formal meters. The language of this multinational land, of mixed ancestry, where war dance and salsa combine with country and western, all framed by African rhythm-and-blues confessional.

Whitman and Williams and Pound and Apollinaire and the Surrealists were our prophets. Whitman, who broke away from England with his free verse. Williams, who carried that fight into our own century, seeing the universal in the agonizingly local. Pound, the scientist of poetry, the translator, the mover and shaker (and fascist)! Apollinaire, a whole tradition of French antixbourgeois openness and aesthetic grace. And the Surrealists, because they at least figured the shit had to be turned upside down! (This plus the improvised zeitgeist of black music!)

All these I responded to and saw as part of a whole anti-academic voice. So that the magazine and Nellie and I were at the vortex of this swirling explosion of new poetry. And I moved from one circle to the other, effortlessly, because I sincerely had no ax to grind but the whole of new poetry.

The Cedar Tavern would be bursting with the Black Mountaineers on one hand, maybe just come down the hill from West 20th Street. And the New York school people, Frank, Kenneth, would be holding court along with any number of painters (Larry Rivers, Mike Goldberg, and Norman Bluhm were special friends of Frank's). A.G. and company were not too heavy on that scene. The Beats were more “pad” people or “On the Road” and more into bush smoking than boozing. Also they lived mostly on the Lower East Side and tended to hang there more regularly. The cold-water flats of East 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, etc. The tenements of Eldridge Street, Clinton Street, Allen Street, East Broadway. The Lower East Side was still sparsely populated by arty or bohemian types in those days. It was poor — on the real side.

I started meeting Frank for lunch some afternoons at joints near our workplaces — Frank's, the MOMA at 53rd Street, mine at 49th Street, Technoscopic Productions. We'd meet at some of those bar-restaurants on the Upper East Side and drink and bullshit, exchange rumors and gossip, and make plans and hear the latest about the greatest. Frank and I were friends. I admired his genuine sophistication, his complete knowledge of the New York creative scene. A mutual friend, editor Donald Allen, brought us together. Don was an early admirer and champion of Frank's poetry. Don was an editor for the Grove Press at the time and the man who made
Evergreen Review
the standard of excellence it was at that time. He looked like the quintessential Roman aesthete, a haughtier John Gielgud, with the same impeccable diction. Don had been putting together an anthology of new poetry and new poets. He worked meticulously, and he went to great pains to investigate the poetic scene, inquiring after new poets, buying all the magazines, going to all the poetry readings and events manqué.
(He had found me through
Zazen
.)
Evergreen Review
charts the late '50s-early '60s U.S. poetry explosion. The results of his work, the standard-setting
The New American Poetry
: 1945–60, is clearly one of the greatest anthologies of poetry in the American language.

Frank O'Hara was also part of the high-powered New York City homosexual scene in the arts and, as far as art was related to money, certain aspects of flashy jet-set society. It was Frank whom I first heard pronounce the word “camp.” “Oh, that campy bastard!” or “My dear, the production was entirely too campy.” Or he might just run someone down while tossing down a drink: “It was a trifle tacky, don't you think?”