Alea's Children: The Avant-Garde on the Lower East Side, 1960-1970

Abstract

A century ago area known as New York's Lower Aside was among most depressed neighborhoods in city. As Milton Meltzer has noted, it distinction of being the most crowded slum district in city, and probably in world, with an 1890 population density of 37 persons per dwelling (73-75)-half a million people in a tight comer of Manhattan. Strangely enough, Lower Side is also a central location of a great deal of American popular culture. A steady flow of creative works have emanated from tenements at edge of Big Apple. The avant-garde movement of Lower Side in early 1960s--when it turned, for some people at least, into East Village--was a remarkable period. Grim though walk-ups might have been, atmosphere of creative and artistic energy was exhilarating. There was a ludic buoyancy--perhaps from hunger, or too much herbal tea. Maybe it was because there was so much jazz in air, maybe because poets knew musicians who knew painters who knew dancers. Historians like to fix and x-ray avant-garde movements and analyze them in terms of process or product. Those who find themselves attracted to such vortices, however, know that avant-garde is less about change in arts than it is about genuine experimentation in social relations. America in fifties, writes Ron Sukenick in Down and In: Life in Underground, had large numbers of people in what today would be cared internal exile, a condition creating a kind of subversive sensibility maybe best described by title Herb Gold refused to relinquish, The Man Who Was Not With It. In this mode, even screwing up became a form of resistance (96). The artistic circles attracted people who were well-educated, curious about other cultures, and widely read. The work of African American writers and artists on Lower Side scene was directly influenced by low-rent cosmopolitanism of their environs. As Michel Oren notes in his excellent study of Umbra grou, general freedom of neighborhood made itself felt in Umbra poets' life styles and in their poems. From 1960 to 1965 LES was also locus of a ferment in American letters that revolved around a series of coffee-house poetry readings, just as in '50s and early '60s single 10th Street block between Third and Fourth Avenues been home to seven co-op art galleries ... and hangout of Abstract Expressionists. (185) The relative freedom that Oren speaks of in this passage is more specifically characterized in his quotation from Brenda Walcott to effect that neighborhood atmosphere was one of |a shaky truce' between its diverse ethnic and socio-economic factions. Bohemian artists are, by definition, people determined not to do what is expected of them. They are usually bright enough to aspire to leadership yet educated enough to feel dissatisfied and skeptical. Often, if they are from minority groups that feel oppressed, they are also carefully prepared but unwitting vicars of their elders' desire. Some of younger artists came to Lower Side from South or Midwest. Others, like poet David Henderson, were uptown boys downtown. In my own case, I was a kid from Long Island who thought he only one river to cross. To all comers, Lower Side offered what La Boheme has always offered--a range of possibilities from creatively electrifying to irremediably lethal. What once been heartland of Yiddish culture soon was distinguished, according to Judd L. Teller, by the imprint of three distinctive and separate segments--the Puerto Ricans, Ukrainians who entered United States from Germany after World War II, and New Bohemians (251-52). It is clear, though, that something of intellectual vivacity that marked Cafe Royal in 1920s and '30s was still alive in coffeehouses such as Deux Megots and Metro, where a new generation of poets held forth, debated same isms, and quarreled about matters having nothing to do with Parnassus. …