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ix Foreword Da n Wa k e f i e l d S eymour Krim described his nonfiction articles or essays or “pieces” (whichever term you prefer) as “grapplings with life, desperate bids for beauty and truth and the slaking of personal need, hot mortal telegrams from writer to reader however disguised by subjectmatter .” No better description of his offbeat, on-the-mark work could be made, and that work not only lit up the consciousness of writers, artists, musicians, hipsters, and freelance intellectuals who came of age in New York in the 1950s, it still shines understanding on the world today. My friendship with Krim began in the most inauspicious of ways, but in the most appropriate literary setting of the era—the back room of The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, hallowed by the poet Dylan Thomas, who imbibed his last drink at one of its tables before being taken across the street to St. Vincent’s Hospital to die of complications brought on by acute alcoholism. Soused myself in that very back room one night, I doused my pint of ‘arf and ‘arf on the head of a young woman at another table who had screamed, “I just can’t stand Murray Kempton,” thus taking in vain the name of one of my journalistic/literary heroes of the time. AfterIhadpouredout(literally)myresponsetosuchsacrilege,Icalmly sat down at my own table of friends as if there would be no consequence to my oafish action, but of course there was. Two chivalrous knights from the table of the besoaked blonde stood up to avenge her honor, one of them grabbing me by the scruff of my tattered sport coat and lifting me up to upbraid and challenge me. When face to face, we began shouting x . Foreword at each other, “Why you goddamn—who the hell do you think you are!” Then one of my antagonists, a tall, intellectual-looking guy wearing blackrimmed glasses and a black corduroy sport coat grabbed me by the collar and said, “I know who you are, Wakefield—I’ve seen you around, I never thought you’d. . . .” Now I grabbed his collar and demanded, “Who the hell are you?” When he said he was Seymour Krim, I said “Yeah? I read your stuff in The Village Voice,” and he said, “Yeah? I read your stuff in The Nation. We were still gripping each other by the collar and snarling through our teeth, in the classic pose of a Western barroom showdown. “Great piece you did on Bellevue,” I said, and he said, “I dug the one you did on Kerouac,” but everyone was watching and we couldn’t release ourselves from our roles as ferocious antagonists. We both admitted later how relieved we were when a big waiter came over and broke us apart, which allowed us to disengage without losing face. I was already an admirer of Krim’s writing, and after our encounter he became a friend. He had a great sense of humor as well as a personal and literary style I enjoyed. He always seemed to be out in front of whatever new wave was coming along, coining the term “radical chic” before Tom Wolfe picked it up and made it famous, and writing a terrific essay on “Making It” before the critic and editor Norman Podhoretz wrote a whole memoir with the title. It was fitting that Norman Mailer praised Krim’s work in a foreword to Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, Krim’s first book of his published pieces, since Mailer’s own nonfiction style owes a great deal to what Krim was doing in The Village Voice that both of them were writing for in the Fifties. “I think sometimes,” wrote Mailer in his foreword, that Krim, in the matter of style, “is the child of our time, he is New York in the middle of the 20th century, a city man, his prose as brilliant upon occasion as the electronic beauty of our lights, his shifts and shatterings of mood as searching and true as the grinding of wheels in a subway train.” The kind of nonfiction pieces that Mailer made famous and that reached a wider audience in the Esquire of the Sixties—like “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” his impressionistic riff on JFK—owe their jazz, souped-up, incisive style to the kind of prose that Krim was turning out for The Village Voice, The Evergreen Review, Commentary, and Commonweal in the Fifties...

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