Arnold T. Schwab, a Harvard Ph.D., has taught English at UCLA, the University of Michigan, and, for twenty years, at California State University, Long Beach. A scholar, biographer, and poet, he has published four scholarly books including a prize-winning biography of the important late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critic James G. Huneker and many articles and reviews on American literature, music, and drama. His book of poems, ‘Elegy for a Gay Giraffe’ appeared in 1988, and his poems have been printed in California Voice, Gay Books Bulletin, and other magazines and newspapers. Now retired, he lives in Westminster, California. aschwab@csulb.edu
How did the son of Jewish-Russian immigrants become a leading gay poet and a member of Greenwich Village bohemia? Edward Field does not exactly say in his lively “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag.” However, one can piece together many aspects of his interesting life in reading his memoirs of the vanished bohemia he inhabited beginning in the middle of the twentieth century. He still inhabits this bohemia, in his eighties, though the Village of that early period has undergone a change he laments.
Field never earned a college degree but his poetry collections have won numerous prestigious awards. In the course of a long lifetime he encountered, with varying degrees of intimacy, some of the outstanding figures of America’s most famous bohemia. This latest book follows the publication of “The Villagers,” a novel written in collaboration with his longtime partner, novelist Neil Derrick. Field supplies word portraits of Alfred Chester (the “man” of the title), Robert Friend, Paul Bowles (not one of his favorite people), James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, Jean Garrigue, Arthur Gregor, Howard Moss, Richard Howard, Fritz Peters, Ralph Pomeroy, Seymour Krim, Herman Rose, Alma Routsong, Tobias Schneebaum, Harriet Sohmers, Susan Sontag, May Swenson, Dunstan Thompson, Gore Vidal, and others. Most of these persons were homosexual members of his circle, and Field does not shy away from outing those not already outed, though most of them are dead. In fact, he emphasizes their sexuality as well as his own. He frankly discusses his relationship with O’Hara, with whom he lived for a time, and his briefer affairs with other bohemians. These portraits paint a revealing and readable picture, and display a talent for writing biography in his selection of details. Field presents a bohemia that served as a background for many of his adventures and those of his writer and artist friends.Though the book does not purport to be an autobiography, Field does discuss his introduction to poetry, largely facilitated by his meeting with and reading of Thompson, who remained his favorite poet for years. Bits of his own life are interspersed, often in the form of italicized passages at the beginning of chapters. The person who stands out among his portraits, as the title indicates, is Alfred Chester (l928-1971), whom he considered a genius as well as his mentor. Chester’s quirky personality, his rise and fall from fame into madness and obscurity, furnish the main drama of the book and, with Robert Friend, Field’s chief interest. Field has written elsewhere about both men, serving as editor of stories and essays by Chester, and as editor of the Alfred Chester Society Newsletter, and of a book of selected poems by Friend.
Susan Sontag is given less space than Chester, but her portrait contains information about her sexuality perhaps not generally known. She and her relationship with Chester are found largely in chapter 17. Of the two, one feels that Field’s interest in Chester and in Chester’s relationship with Songtag is intrinsically greater than in Sontag herself. Field does not slight lesbians, however, as his discussion of Jean Garrigue, May Swenson, and Alma Routsong (“Isabel Miller”) reveals.One noteworthy byway Field takes is his championship of the prolific Long Beach poet and novelist Gerald Locklin. Locklin, along with Charles Stetler, Elliot Fried, and Charles Webb are leading figures of the Long Beach school of poetry, of which Field is considered a “father.” With Locklin and Stetler, he edited “A New Geography of Poets” (1992), and his readings in surrounding states increased his reputation.
Field’s experiences were not confined to America, as he lived in Paris in 1948 and Greece in the following year and later made a half-dozen trips to Morocco. Portraits of these places and others add variety to the book though New York is featured. Returning to America in 1950, he worked at the MacDowell Colony, where he resumed a friendship with James Baldwin. He also worked at Yaddo, where his encounters with gay artists continued. His description of the residents at the latter place constitute one of the highlights of the book. Underlying his experience everywhere was the necessity of earning enough to survive, the problems faced by all poets without an independent income or not connected with a university, publisher, or salary-paying organization. Only relatively late in his career, when he started giving poetry workshops and toured the country with readings, did Field not have to scrounge for a living.
His style is straightforward, unpretentious, and readable. He uses some of the techniques of the novelist when instead of dealing consecutively and chronologically with one writer such as Chester, he drops him to deal with others and then picks him up later to indicate his relationships with them. Touches of humor enliven the portraits. The stain on Frank O’Hara’s bedsheets, he writes, “may have been skidmarks (my emphasis) left by an earlier lover.” Chester “began popping pills to stay awake as he strove to meet deadlines” for critical articles in literary magazines. This demand for deadlines, Fields comments, was “very hard for him to swallow (my emphasis). He puns on the same word when describing the explorations of his friend Tobias Schneebaum, who lived for a time with “New Guinea tribesmen or the naked Amazonians who turned out to be just a bunch of sexy, polymorphous perverse guys, but with just one little quirk difficult to swallow, so to speak—cannibalism.” Hired to translate a book of Inuit poems for a fifth-grade teaching program about the Eskimos, Field modestly notes that “the editors said they chose me because I was the only poet they found whose poetry could be understood by ten-year olds.” He is referring here to the directness and lack of obscurity in his poetry which makes it so accessible.
The book is embellished with photographs of many persons discussed in the text. A picture of the young Field that appears in the front cover is naturally more eye-catching than the one that appears with the other photographs or on the inside back cover. Amusingly, Field, who is usually modest and even self-deprecating, like many gay men conscious of masculine beauty, is ingratiatingly proud, even a trifle boastful, of his youthful good looks now that he is no doubt reluctant (like myself) to look at a mirror.
An alert editor or copy reader should have caught the few errors that crept into the book—-the misspelling of “it’s” for “its,” “Strauss” for publisher Roger Straus, “Thompson” for Virgil Thomson, and ”Samuel” for Morton Fullerton. But these are minor slips that do not detract from the readability of a book that portrays an important era in American literary history and provides memorable, frank portraits of gay figures who enriched it. Scholars of American literature and sexuality, and biographers of Field and other distinguished writers will find it a useful sourcebook for their studies, while lay readers will find themselves in for a treat in spying on the sex life of literary celebrities.
commenting closed for this article