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Chapter 6
- University of Wisconsin Press
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6 Coming home from Europe in 1950 was a major shock, because I was faced with supporting myself for the first time. Until then, I’d been a soldier, taken care of by the U.S. government, and in civilian life was a student on the GI Bill, then lived in Europe on my savings from the war—as a flying officer overseas I got extra pay which I put aside. And here I was in my late twenties, never really having worked and without any way of earning a living. Real-life problems like getting a job and finding an apartment defeated me from the start. I was obsessed with poetry but couldn’t see how to survive as a poet. I made that survival more painful and difficult, since according to my bohemian and leftist principles getting a steady job, especially a white-collar job, would have meant “selling out.” I didn’t feel comfortable with teaching, but of course, I didn’t have a degree, so I couldn’t have taught back then anyway. I kept leaving home whenever I found a cheap apartment in New York, but repeatedly ran into trouble and ended up back in Lynbrook. My old world parents could understand a child moving out only for marriage, so there was 44 45 that guilt to contend with too. Once, when I was living in a coldwater basement flat on the Lower East Side, being very much the starving artist and terribly thin, Freddie Kuh, on a visit from San Francisco , where he had settled after Paris, arrived with a bag of groceries, and standing over me, made me drink down a glass of milk. I found myself in an America that, compared to the pleasures of France and Greece, seemed unutterably grim. There was only a shabby little bohemian band that still hung out at the San Remo bar in the Village, and the whole block that included the gay MacDougal Tavern was being torn down by NYU to build a law school. The fifties was a period of national hysteria, those years of the witch-hunt of leftists and homosexuals, the Rosenberg executions, loyalty oaths, bomb shelters, and cold war hysteria, even the imprisonment and death of loony, nonconformist psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich for claiming that sitting in an orgone box to accumulate “orgone energy,” removing “body armoring,” and having good sex, aiming for the “cosmic orgasm,” could cure cancer. The firing of “subversives” extended to homosexual men and women, for we were considered a security risk as being subject to blackmail. Espionage trials also had homosexual undertones, such as that of Whittaker Chambers vs. Alger Hiss with the rumor of an old affair between them. A number of citizens escaped to more hospitable countries abroad, if they were lucky enough to skip out before their passports were lifted. A few people, even more courageous, refused to cooperate by “naming names” or signing loyalty oaths, and either went to jail or became outcasts and were unemployable for years. But many artists and intellectuals, swept up in the panic that the United States was being taken over by “Stalinists,” or perhaps just protecting their jobs, turned state’s evidence and testified against each other. This divided the left, and all leftist thinking was generally devalued from then on. I don’t think we have ever recovered from that trauma, for when I go to countries that never “outlawed” the far left and preserved the whole spectrum of political and intellectual thought, it feels freer and I breathe easier. In light of the attack on ideas, dissent, and nonconformity, it was not surprising when painters retreated to the neutral ground of abstract expressionism, poets got religion and concentrated on formal subjects like carousels and angels, and psychiatrists tried to make their queer patients straight by talk therapy, and when that failed, by shock treatments, even lobotomies. On the other hand, they couldn’t stop sex, not in a crowded city like New York, with its body-to-body rush hour subways, standing room at the Metropolitan Opera, working class bathhouses on the Coney Island boardwalk with their crowded steam rooms, even the political speeches in Union Square, still attracting hard core remnants of the left, but also men on the loose who clustered around the speaker, rubbing against each other, combining eroticism and politics. It was at the Chinese communist bookstore on lower Fifth Avenue , at that time the shabby end, that...