New York in the Forties: Fragments and Images
Harrigan, Anthony
The McCarthyism of the Left now gaining momentum steels itself against such testimony. It would rather scorn the call for a responsible relation between political idea and political power,...
...Whatever his peculiar fascination for the press, whatever odd cathartic he supplied for a world-weary America, we were supine under his malevolent leer...
...But several of us had attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina, that curious little experimental college formed by refugees from the Bauhaus School of Design in Germany and other refugees from a tennis college in Florida...
...Its townhouses, parties, parks, and streets were part playground, part stage set, part laboratory for life, part poet's image...
...It would rather scorn the call for a responsible relation between political idea and political power, and instead hold to account those who make it...
...Then our group dispersed...
...wrecked world...
...I wrote poetry for Furioso and Chimera and other equally obscure journals which, at the time, seemed the most important publications in the world...
...Our group was interested in Proust and Pound, not Marx or Rooseveltian politics...
...Ergo, this is not a Woody Allen movie...
...In the afternoons, we went swimming on Long Island...
...The theatre had an important place in our lives...
...For a brief time, New York had a special magic...
...Our New York was both comfortable and consciousness-raising, overwhelming in its exposure to new ideas and safe for our adventures...
...And when I saw this film the audience tittered and chuckled hopefully throughout, grasping desperately at evey Allenism (they abound), squeezing them for what they were not...
...The plot is so transparent as to be silly, an excusable offense if the film had an inquiring nature, which it does not...
...New York, in that interval, fitted our mood and outlook...
...Our Irish temperaments threw up walls across which it was virtually impossible to communicate...
...The political symbols have shifted to such a degree that Alger Hiss can stump the college circuit declaring himself" the first victim of McCarthy...
...The Adlers encouraged Marion Brando's stage career...
...Our group consisted of native New Yorkers (several worlds: Central Park West, the theatre world, and Park Avenue) and others who came from towns and cities in the Middle West and West...
...IVe wrote richly symbolic poems about the skyscrapers and the cars moving through the city's streets at twilight...
...The Front is not a funny movie, nor is its subject funny even in retrospect...
...On the contrary, life was exceptionally rewarding...
...We were intent upon the city's splendor, especially those of us who were writers...
...Anthony Harrigan New York in the Forties: Fragments and Images IVe were intent upon the city's splendor, especially those of us who were writers...
...When Black Mountain underwent one of its periodic fragmentations, a number of the students transferred to Bard College on the Hudson River above Poughkeepsie...
...Political involvement still lay in the future...
...The world seemed to be made up almost exclusively of people who read Rimbaud or analyzed the lyrics of Hart Crane...
...It is silly, and hypocritical, but at least demonstrates a kind of coming to the senses...
...The symbolism of the city also changed with time--from magical opportunity and excitement to decay and disorder...
...Which is why it becomes necessary to repeat that history from which intellectuals have most to learn...
...It is now Diana Trilling who meets opposition from publishing houses merely for trying to respond to Lillian Hellman's attacks on her (based largely on references to the Hiss case which are simply wrong...
...Then, for a time, I went with Ellen Adler, daughter of SteUa Adler, the very able "Method" actress who had been deeply involved with the Group Theatre in the 1930s...
...I recall how it was for our group during one brief interval--1946 and 1947--when New York provided an extraordinary opportunity for discover...
...But in this climate, one Hollywood name on a blacklist overwhelms a slavelabor-camp death on the newly-blessed scales of justice...
...That first summer someone (I believe it was the composer Mark Brunswick) loaned one of our group his splendid old house on Washington Square...
...THE TALKIES by Philip Terzian The Front By their promotion shall ye know them...
...It wasn't a successful performance and the backers, who resembled hoodlums, were very grim when everyone gathered for a drink after the show...
...It never crossed our minds that the city would become a jungle...
...We partied all that summer...
...Certain characters are such awkward symbols that it would have been better to hang signs around their necks and save dialogue...
...Woody Allen is customarily very funny...
...So it is with The Front...
...And therein lies a tale...
...Without resorting to liberal hyperbole it is fair to say that the nation was seized by a kind of madness, a crippling bipartisan fear of the junior senator from Wisconsin, not unlike the mouse contemplating the snake...
...up in the South...
...The personal discovery process in which we had been engaged in '46 and '47 seemed trivial and irrelevant and very far away...
...Each season possesses a special flavor derived from the mix of people and ideas...
...At the time, I could barely afford the train fare to my uncle's home on Long Island...
...It is about all one can do with the bits and pieces of a past that once existed but that ks now only a collection of images...
...At Bard, our group cultivated its sensibilities...
...The McCarthy era, like the 1929 crash, has so conditioned our way of thinking that its details are astonishing in review...
...It may be impossible to expect movie-makers to do otherwise, particularly those personally affected...
...ism," while a Smith College professor with convincing evidence of Hiss' guilt is"disinvited" from campuses once his views are found OUt...
...But we were innocent in imagining that the only battles and crises we faced were battles and crises O f literary imagination...
...Instead, The Front demonstrates the age-old inclination for revenge, the reduction of a complex matter to a simpleminded passion play...
...The story is its essence, and succeeds only in trivializing the subject...
...The age of a city and the ages of its youthful celebrants and observers produces an inter-action in spirit, a composition in lifestyles...
...Movies have not depicted contemporary history for some time--at least not in any thoughtful fashion--and a sober treatment of the early 1950s would be welcome indeed...
...The doors of the house were open to countless friends and friends of friendsqgirls from Bennington who were studying modern dance, would-be novelists and painters, aspiring actors and composers...
...My adviser was Mary McCarthy, the novelist, but we didn't get on very well...
...Woody Allen plays himself, or at any rate the persona he nurtures, this time in the guise of a restaurant cashier, "fronting" for three scriptwriter friends who have been blacklisted by a television network...
...All my friends were writing poems or plays or novels, jim Merrill brought out his first book of poems, The Black Swan in Athens, Greece, and I published the Ten Poets Anthology, with early work by Jim Merrill, Fred Buechner, Richard Wilbur, and others...
...reacted in surprising and varying ways: how eager we were to dance to the McCarthyite waltz, how willing to suspend judgment, discretion, rationality...
...And we weren't, in the sense that our minds were influenced by the symbolic literature we admired so much and that many of us had our skills sharpened by very able refugee teachers from Europe...
...I believe I was the only member of the group who had grown Anthony Harrigan, now executive vice president of the United States industrial Council, was a poet in the 1940s...
...It never crossed our minds that the city would become a jungle...
...We never thought of ourselves as innocents...
...The hammer blows of the extreme Left are now striking with a political vengeance and historical recklessness displayed by that segment of the Right which gravely blurred political distinctions and abused its temporary hold on power 25 years ago...
...The scripts he is supposed to have written are, of course, brilliant, and The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 15...
...The mood, the mind-set, the dreams and experiences of a generational group constitute something as real as the impact of a work of art...
...The emerging issues of the postwar period were not clear...
...And one freezing winter night our group drove from Bard to Schenectady in an oId Chevy with a poor heater to watcti l~iarlrn try out in the play 14 The Alternative: An .American Spectator January 1977 Truddine Cafe...
...I recall Ellen's grandmother, who also was invariably kind to me, said once to Stella: "He is a nice young man, but he doesn't give Ellen any jewels...
...Instead, the characters are wholly onedimensional, even, to use an over.worked word, stereotypical...
...how revealing and saddening...
...The country changed as the world changed...
...The hammer blows will continue to strike, pounding down untold nuance and useful study, as long as any faction enjoys a special dispensation from moral adulthood and political responsibility...
...Bright young people could dream of careers as poets, playwrights, and novelists, not imagining the strife and divisions ahead...
...I don't know what they made of a would-be poet with a Southern upbringing and values...
...Forty-six and forty-seven were quiet years, though years of personal exploration and discovery for a new generation...
...Events proceed without much explanation, minds are changed by painfully obvious incidents...
...It would have been nice if, after the passage of so much time, a certain maturity had held sway in the creation of this story, a sense that the lessons are sufficiently self-evident to allow the film to run its own course, and permit the creator to sculpt what a "work of art" should be, and is best able to do...
...Of course, it is sufficient to say that we have come full circle since then--like postwar France it turns out that we were all actually members of the Resistance, just as in later days politicians were always doubtful about Vietnam...
...Stella and her husband, Harold Clurman, were very kind to me, though we were a million miles apart in outlook...
...They are paraded on and off the screen in soldierly drill: the ambitious man wrestling with the remnants of his conscience, the martyred family man, the courageous woman who sees through the shame of it all, the silkenvoiced shyster lawyer, the idiot antiCommunist merchant (whom I nearly expected to refer to "Communist preverts...
...It was clean, safe, and elegant, unmistakably the world capital in a war...
...One night, I recall, we took the El to the Battery, crossed on the ferry to Staten Island, and then traveled across the island to swim in the surf at two o'clock in the morning...
...Time, place, and people--in any world--have an organic unity...
...I don't recall any political types...
...All that seemed behind us in World War II...
...The advertisements for this ostensibly serious treatment of the era of blacklisting show a quizzical Woody Allen peering out from behind his hornrimmed glasses, inviting us to laugh...
...We had studied Plato and Machiavelli and Erasmus in a tiny institution without structure or rules, except that of working one day a week on the college garbage truck...
...We wrote richly symbolic poems about the skyscrapers and the cars moving through the city's streets at twilight...
...And like all subject peoples Americans Philip Terzian is assistant production manager at The New Republic...
...Each generation envisions and experiences a city in a unique way...
...But human behavior is usually a little more mysterious than The Front suggests, and motivation much more interesting...
...Separating the thin layers of time and holding each up to the light, recreating a real but finite world on the basis of fragments of memory, is a task for the archaeologist of human values and feeling...
...He edited and contributed to the Ten Poets Anthology...
...We sat under the big trees on the lawn that fall and talked about William Butler Yeats, but got nowhere beyond that...
...I had a family interest in this as my uncle, Joshua Logan, was a director and producer of major stage hits...
...There was nothing menacing then about the life of New York City, nothing hostile, nothing threatening, nothing that evidenced decay or breakdown...
Vol. 10 • January 1977 • No. 4
