The Cafeteria Crowd

The cafeteria at NYU was where the commuter students socialized between classes, particularly when it was too cold or wet to hang out in the Park or explore the Village. Not as legendary as the City College cafeteria of the late 1930s with its highly politicized factions , the NYU cafeteria in 1946 also had identifiable cliques, according to Cynthia Ozick and classmate, the poet Edward Field, who wrote about his experiences in his 2005 memoir The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag. Field had returned to his studies in the School of Commerce at NYU after his wartime service as an officer in the Air Force.

Ozick, Field, Alfred Chester and Sol Yurick gathered at a table of aspiring literary Bohemians in 1946. Henry Miller, much of whose work had been banned in the US,, and psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich , whose theories on sexuality had aroused much controversy, were their idols. Chester appears to have been a tentpole for the group. Field wrote that the literary set was generally not politically active although they held leftist opinions. The Trotskyists among them, Field wrote, oddly made pilgrimages to Washington to visit modernist icon Ezra Pound, incarcerated in a mental hospital after collaborating with the Italian Fascists. He also wrote that there was a hanger-on at the table who was rumored to be a spy for HUAC, supposedly having testified against his own parents to the committee.

Communists, Trotskyists, Schachtmanites, African-Americans and frat boys and their girlfriends occupied other tables. Ozick noted the presence of the many veterans eating their sandwiches as they plowed their way through their accounting texts, their conversations limited to used cars, housing and other practical matters. Mimi Sheraton did not appear to pay much attention to the cafeteria cliques, being a married, working woman in 1946.