A was a New York snob; how the Dodgers, Don Quixote, and Allen Ginsberg saved me.

• Author: Peters, Charles

I Was A New York Snob

How the Dodgers, Don Quixote, and Allen Ginsberg saved me

I was discharged from the Army in January 1946 and immediately went to New York City to enter Columbia College. For the most part, this was a time during which I was fascinated and delighted by the discoveries of living in New York and attending Columbia. But it was also when I first experienced the snobbery that I have come to detest. The story of how I drifted into it helps explain why The Washington Monthly sees snobbery as the great enemy of the ideals of community and service that we hope to encourage. As for the rest of the story of New York life, and its happier allurements, I hope you find it entertaining. Living through it was just that, and more, for me.

While in the Army, I had read Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun, one of the luminaries of the Columbia faculty. Barzun's description of the college was seductive. It was not gigantic, like the university of which it was a part, but had only 1,750 students and small classes, averaging 20 students or so. More surprising, those small classes were taught, even at the freshman level, by the brightest stars of the faculty--people like Barzun and Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren--rather than by the graduate students my friends who went to other prominent universities often got stuck with.

As Barzun's book implied, teaching was important at Columbia. In the fall of 1946, for example, Trilling taught 11 hours a week. Today's average in the Ivy League is more like five hours. And, as Barzun explained, this teaching served an overall education objective, which was to make sure that every student was introduced to the basics of Western civilization. All students were required to take courses that introduced them to the major works of literature, art, and music as well as to the thought of the great philosophers, economists, and historians. Having leafed through the bulletins of other colleges, which listed a bewildering array of electives with no discernible purpose, I welcomed this deprivation of free choice.

As an intellectual experience, Columbia more than met my expectations. Most of the classes were small; most of the teachers were outstanding. But I had come to Columbia not just to be educated but to live the life of a New Yorker. I had access to that life because it was cheap. Even a student of modest means could enjoy the city. Tuition was $225 per term. A glass of beer cost a dime. The subway was only a nickel as 1946 began.

One snowy night in late January, I took the IRT from the Columbia stop at 116th and Broadway to Greenwich Village, getting off at Sheridan Square and buying a copy of the Daily Worker. I felt deliciously radical with my upturned coat collar and my scarf blowing in the wind. Later, in April and May, the same nickel would buy a ride on an open-topped double-decker bus that would take you down to Washington Square or up to the Cloisters--a perfect answer to those warm spring afternoons when you weren't going to get any studying done anyway. There were lots of inexpensive French and Italian restaurants, like Le Champlain, La Fleur de Lis, and Barbetta's, where dinner with a glass of wine could be had for less than three dollars.

Watching classic films in the theater at the Museum of Modern Art cost 40 cents. Eddie Condon's jazz concerts at Town Hall were little more than a dollar. You could spend an evening at clubs like Jimmy Ryan's or the Three Deuces on 52nd Street for only two dollars or so.

Theater, concert, opera, and ballet tickets could be had for less than two dollars if you didn't mind sitting at the top of the balcony, and I didn't mind at all. Betty Combs, a voice student and my first New York girlfriend, gave me a free introduction to Der Rosenkavalier and her other favorite operas. This did not take place at the Met but by listening to records in her teacher's studio apartment in a brownstone in the West Sixties, which he let us use Friday and Saturday nights. I like the music, but my main interest was Betty. To be alone with a pretty girl in a brownstone apartment in New York, even though our behavior was relatively chaste, was, like buying the Daily Worker in Sheridan Square, very close to the heart of what I had hoped life in the city would be.

And of course there was the theater. In just my first term at Columbia, I saw Gertrude Lawrence in Pygmalion, the then-unknown Marlon Brando playing Marchbanks to Katherine Cornell's Candida, Paul Douglas and Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday (their first starring roles), and Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. The following season I saw the original production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon, and The Importance of Being Earnest, with John Gielgud as Worthing and Margaret Rutherford as Lady Bracknell.

The 1947-48 season brought the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando playing Stanley Kowalski. I saw a Saturday matinee performance, and that evening I tried to play Brando with my date, who proceeded to walk indignantly out of my life.

The next year came South Pacific, Kiss Me Kate, and the original Death of a Salesman, with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. Remember, all these shows opened in just the three and a half years when I was a student at Columbia College. I do not believe that there has been a comparable period of creativity in the history of American theater.

One of the most impressive things about Columbia in the late forties was the brainpower of its students. They were, for the most part, not from the social elite--Jason Epstein was the only person I knew who had gone to prep school. They were drawn largely from two groups. One was World War II veterans. Several of them were my friends: Bob Williams, who had endured the frightening disintegration of the 106th Division during the Battle of the Bulge; John Uhl and Don Kirchoffer, who had served in the Navy; and Ned Gatchell, who had been a bomber pilot and had flown those hair-raising daylight missions over Germany. I was 19 when I entered Columbia, but most of the other veterans were two to six years older and therefore more mature and much less likely to waste time than the average college student. They were tough competition.

Allen and Norman

Only a little less tough, however, was the next largest group of students, the bright high school graduates from New York City, like my friend Steve Marcus. Because there were so many applicants from the city, they were subjected to more demanding admission standards than the rest of us. Columbia had a Jewish quota then, which meant that if you were from New York and Jewish, you had to be even brighter to get in. To those of us who were their less diligent classroom competition, these New Yorkers seemed demonic in their devotion to academic excellence--they'd get off the subway at 8 a.m., go directly to the library in South Hall, and stay there, except for meals and classes, until it closed, studying every minute. Norman Podhoretz, who later became editor of Commentary and a leading neoconservative, was a member of this group.

I knew Podhoretz as someone who attended a class with me, not as a friend or even an acquaintance. The course we took together was in twentieth-century fiction, taught by Harrison Steeves. Since the lures of life in New York often left me less than...