Edward Field

Among the vets returning to NYU in the spring of 1946 was future poet Edward Field who turned 22 that June. His experiences are recounted in his book The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Profiles of the Bohemian Era, a collection of essays about his life as a poet and gay activist in the Village.

The photos of Field in the book show a darkly handsome. slender young man. Like Ozick and Sheraton, Field was from a Jewish family. His father was a commercial artist. Field played cello as a child in a family orchestra that performed on radio. While at NYU, Field commuted from his parent's home in Lynbrook on Long Island. He hated the School of Commerce and had enlisted in the Air Force to escape it

He attributes his interest in poetry to an anthology included in the bag of Red Cross goodies handed to him as he boarded the train taking him from basic training to an unknown destination. It was nurtured further by the poetry enthusiasts and actual poets whom he met in the service. Between bombing missions he encountered members of the Harvard literary crowd at the Officer's Club in London. Most of them had cushy non-combat positions at the Stars and Stripes newspaper or the Office of War Information.

On our week in April 1946, Field was four months out of the Air Force and back at NYU. He writes that under the GI Bill he was required to return to his former studies to collect the education benefit. If true, this seems unfair since other vets could use the benefits to study most anything. In any case, he still hated the School of Commerce and gravitated toward the school's literary crowd before dropping out.

The Village, as he experienced it as a young man, was filled with the refugees and rejects from Puritan America. They advocated sexual freedom. They supported the political left. They rejected religion but were interested in the mystical. Ouija boards, astrology, palm reading, Khalil Gibran, Gurdjieff, Madame Blavatsky and Vegetarianism were the rage. They were into Modernism which they felt demonstrated their superiority over the common herd who preferred simplicity and banality. Everyone was a poet, which essentially meant they had little sense of purpose or ambition. They were not concerned with becoming rich or famous although their Bohemian world had its celebrities.

Field's early sexual experiences pretty much had been limited to furtive encounters in dark places. The more tolerant of the straights and many gays back then thought of homosexuality as a mental disease to be cured through psychoanalysis, the liberal panacea for all problems, or by more radical measures such as lobotomies. He remembers the erotic thrill of body-to-body crowds in the rush hour subways, the groping that went on in the standing room at the Metropolitan Opera, the working class bathhouses in Coney Island with with their crowded steam rooms and men deliberately rubbing up against each other at political rallies in Union Square. He began to frequent the Village gay hangouts like the MacDougal Tavern on Bleecker Street between 3rd and 4th Streets. On his bar rounds Field dressed in a blue merchant marine sweater and suntan pants left over from the war. After the bars he would hang out at a Village cafeteria.

He made social contact with other gay men. He seems to have been attracted to African Americans with whom he felt a kinship. Among his NYU literary crowd was Lloyd George W. Broadfield III, an African American with a grandiose manner who passed himself off as as a writer, carried around books about Oscar Wilde and claimed to come from family of State Department diplomats, Field writes that Broadfield was good-hearted and fun loving and knew everyone in Harlem and the Village. Later in the decade Broadfield was murdered by a hustler. Field visited the loft of Beauford Delaney, an African American painter whom Henry Miller had mentioned in his writing. Delaney led a compartmentalized, conflicted life as a gay man, an African American and an artist. He lived and worked in a factory building close to NYU back then. They smoked a joint together then went off to Variety Photoplays, a jackoff theater on the Bowery, frequented by bums, day laborers, off-duty taxi drivers and immigrants. Field later named a volume of poetry after the theater. He also visited Alain Locke, an early black power theorist, who lived in an elegant apartment with African tribal masks hung on aquamarine walls. Field had a crush on a light-skinned straight student, Wilmer Lucas. who took him up to Harlem to Small's Paradise and to see Billie Holliday at Carnegie Hall. Field observed handsome Anatole Broyard in Washington Square Park fending off the repeated advances of an obese artist. At the time. Broyard, the future Times book critic, was recently discharged from the service, running a bookstore in the Village and in the process of shedding his racial identity as a mixed-raced Louisiana Creole.

Not all of Field's friends were African American. Among them was Alfred Chester, the bald, bewigged, future writer from Flatbush, who had discovered the gay bars before Field did and claimed to have Truman Capote's phone number. Field turned down a proposition from Howard Moss who made his writing debut that year and later would become poetry editor at The New Yorker. Field also paid homage with his fellow Bohemians to Gertrude Stein, not the famous one in Paris but her cousin, who held court in her shabby apartment, basking in reflected glory; Field questioned whether the two Gertrude Stein's were actually related, but apparently they were according to other sources. Then there was 20-year old Ralph Pomeroy from Indiana whose boyish, blond good looks opened the doors of the deeply closeted gay elite, made up of prominent writers, editors, artists, collectors and art patrons. Field writes that Pomeroy had been kicked out of Army during a gay witch hunt. He was a published poet at 18 but later became a hustler and user who stole from his friends, according to Field, when his looks no longer got him by.