The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era

by Edward Field

Long before Stonewall, young Air Force veteran Edward Field, fresh from combat in WWII, threw himself into New York’s literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet. In this vivid account of his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and the bohemian outposts of Paris’s Left Bank and Tangier—where you could write poetry, be radical, and be openly gay—Field opens the closet door to reveal, as never been seen before, some of the most important writers of his time.

Here are young, beautiful Susan Sontag sitting at the feet of her idol Alfred Chester, who shrewdly plotted to marry her; May Swenson and her two loves; Paul and Jane Bowles in their ambiguous marriage; Frank O’Hara in and out of bed; Fritz Peters, the anointed son of Gurdjieff; and James Baldwin, Isabel Miller (Patience and Sarah), Tobias Schneebaum, Robert Friend, and many others. With its intimate portraits, Field’s memoir brings back a forgotten era—postwar bohemia—bawdy, comical, romantic, sad, and heroic.

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

EDWARD FIELD was born in Brooklyn, and grew up in Lynbrook, L.I., where he played cello in the Field Family Trio which had a weekly radio program on WGBB Freeport. He served in WWII in the 8th Air Force as a navigator in heavy bombers, and flew 25 missions over Germany. He began writing poetry during World War II, after a Red Cross worker handed him an anthology of poetry. But it was not until 1963 that his first book, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, won the Lamont Award and was published. In 1992, he received a Lambda Award for Counting Myself Lucky, Selected Poems 1963-1992. Other honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, a Prix de Rome, and an Academy Award for the documentary film “To Be Alive,” for which he wrote the narration. In 1979, he edited the anthology, A Geography of Poets, and in 1992 with Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler, brought out a sequel, A New Geography of Poets. He and his partner Neil Derrick, long-time residents of Greenwich Village, have written a best-selling historical novel about the Village, The Villagers. His most recent book is his literary memoirs, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era. After the Fall, Poems Old and New, will be published by the U. of Pittsburgh Press in October, 2007.

Reviews

[Steve Turtell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have known Edward Field and his poetry for nearly thirty-five years. Unlike many of my youthful enthusiasms, my admiration for Field’s work has endured and grown. His memoir goes a long way towards explaining why. Like his poetry, which always has something to say, it is smart, direct, informal and unpretentious, but serious. The several reviews I’ve read suggest that the main attraction of The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag (The Man Who, for short) is that it resurrects a lost world, New York City’s post WWII literary bohemia, and contains vivid portraits of those Field has known over the course of a half-century of literary life in New York and abroad before some of them achieved great fame: Paul Bowles, May Swenson, and Susan Sontag, in particular. While the memoir does provide this, with Field’s usual concise and colloquial style, the main reason to read it is to watch a first-rate poet discover himself. The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag tells the story behind the man who has written some of the best, most distinctive, American poetry of the last fifty years. He is so echt American that Georges Simenon, the French novelist and author of the Simenon series, wrote that he found everything that he loved about America in Field’s poetry: (“J'y ai retrouvé toute l'Amérique que j'aime.”)

Field’s conversion to poetry was similar to W. H. Auden’s: sudden, unexpected, and complete. In the opening pages of The Man Who, Field tells of a Red Cross worker giving him a Louis Untermeyer anthology to read on a cross-country train ride when he was a soldier just out of basic training. “Three days later when I got off that train I knew what I wanted to be—a poet—in spite of, at the age of eighteen, never having written a line.”

Sixty-four years later, now eighty-two, he has published eight volumes of poems and several novels with his life-partner Neil Derrick, edited two editions of the anthology A New Geography of Poets, as well as editing several volumes of Alfred Chester’s fiction, essays and letters. He is, ironically, an old-school man of letters, working-class style. In a world where pretension has never been more highly rewarded, Field has never felt the need to pretend he is anything or anyone other than who he is. Many times over he has proved the truth of William Carlos Williams’ estimation of his character. In a blurb for Field’s Lamont Award-winning first volume, Stand Up Friend With Me, Williams wrote: “Thanks to God you’re not precious. And, somehow, I have the impression you won’t be corrupted.”

He hasn’t. Enjoy the stories of young Susan Sontag, an increasingly troubled Alfred Chester, the Parisian portraits of James Baldwin and the “faux Truman Capote” and the chilling vignettes of Paul Bowles in Morocco. But don’t lose sight of what makes this book an extraordinary accomplishment. It provides a road map for any poet who wants to stay true to himself. It is the record of a man who has, through the choices he has made, achieved wisdom, balance, and wholeness.

[Marko · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose this book because I was interested to learn about other artists and their lives. Not being into poetry, I have never heard of almost any of the names, with the exception of the ones that take the main stage as the book (and history) progresses.
I learned something and could get a certain sense of something but it's all too small and scattered and I will have to make better sense of it all myself later, somehow. I made so many highlights of interesting "pieces of life" or historical facts, but I've rarely read a book that feels as uninteresting and as water-y as this one - the portraits of "wild" gay Bohemia! The only exception were the parts about Chester, Tangiers and the despicable Paul Bowles.

I do appreciate author's honesty and unpretentiousness; the descriptions and accounts feel realistic and undistorted and it must have taken some courage as obviously some stars herein were not able to make even one ant-sized step in the similar direction. I also think I respect the author for what he's doing/done and admitted here, and very much so. (I wonder how much vitriol he kept to himself.)
But not as an author of prose, or at least of this memoir. He says he likes to keep his language invisible and, besides some rough sexual moments, he definitely manages to achieve his goal. But in my opinion this badly hurts the result and makes it all feel pretty uninspired. How can life in all those environments, surrounded by all these people, end up expressed like this? There was one paragraph with Pearl Schwartz going out to grab a more satisfying peice of new life for herself; it was amazing and I don't understand where that came from. That's how the whole book should have looked like. Or like the excerpts from Chester.

PS: I find it pretty hard to understand how the title is supposed to be understood. What kind of a joke? The very very internal one? Very clumsy and unfortunate choice. The cover collage too, as well as the italic typeface used for some segments of the text.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the reading front I have been devouring Edward Field's The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag. J picked up the book for me from ROBA (as I am not able to take out books) and I have been engrossed in Field's fascinating and amazing memoir of his life as a Bohemian poet. The book traces his life and that of Chester across North America, through France, Holland and England and all of the luminaries of American poetry and literature that Field has encountered in his life. While an engrossing read I find the narrative lost in the stories of the various lives that Field encounters. The memoir moves freely across time and space in an attempt to capture the fluid nature of the life of a poet. What I find most intriguing is that the more I read about Chester the more I am curious about him as an individual. There is something familiar about his life and his quest to find his own sense of self. Everyone I have read so far, Ozick, Athill and Field talk about Chester's inability to find his own sense of identity. This quest mirrors a search in my own life for the meaning of identity. Indeed my entire academic career has been a quest for the elusive qualities of identity and how it came to occupy the minds of academia in the post World War II world. What is odd is that all the energy spent trying to fix something that is inherently elusive, ethereal and relative has seemingly come to an end. There are fewer and fewer academic works concerned with the nature of identity. Maybe in the postmodern world the "problem" of identity has been exhausted?

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

In some ways, this is a graceless book. It covers some of the same terrain as Edmund White's novels/memoirs, but with less of a narrative arc. And Field's prose is hardly fluid--here's hoping that his poetry is better, more artful. Although, in some ways, that's his argument: that his poetry was "natural" and free of artifice. Yes, yes. A bohemian, living for his art, taking care of his lover. The book does touch on some lesser-known personalities around the New York School years, which was interesting. I learned a lot about Paul Bowles and his wife--hopefully it won't prevent me from finishing Bowles's book of short stories.

[Hamad · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you take away the consistent name-dropping and sporadic shifts in time and place (but I suppose that could have been done deliberately), you can perhaps enjoy the details of the lives of young, up-and-coming writers, poets and artists in an era when such intellectuals rejected the whole-sale consumption of their art. It is though an invaluable work as it tries to bring some very intelligent people (and their ideas) back to life.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must memoir to read about the life of a fine poet and his friendships with writers such as Alfred Chester and Susan Sontag. There have been quite a few memoirs about Sontag recently as well as the publication of her journals, but Field, for my money, is much more credible in sizing up how someone becomes "Susan Sontag."

[Peadaar Morrissy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its were but I think that this must be some short stories put together into the pretty awesome book. And I love the fact that merges information from loads of other histroical books I have read.

Its a great read !!!