ELIZABETH POLLET, novelist, Rest in Peace

 

(Pollet in the 1940s)

 

Elizabeth Pollet died several months ago, after four decades at Westbeth. At the time of her death, she would have been 89 or 90. Pollet was a novelist who had been married to the brilliant but disturbed poet Delmore Schwartz. Pollet managed to turn the years of her destructive marriage into the sublime "Portrait of Delmore," a collection of his writings and journal entries, which was published in 1986.  

I interviewed Elizabeth in 2005. She was a gracious, profoundly shy woman with a dry wit. Even 50 years after her marriage to Delmore Schwartz ended, she was still haunted by him.

Elizabeth Pollet was the daughter of Joseph Pollet, a prominent Greenwich Village painter. She was a statuesque woman with high cheekbones, and was one of the great beauties of the 1950s intellectual scene. Pollet met the poet Delmore Schwartz not long after she graduated from the University of Chicago in the early 1940s. Their tumultuous relationship lasted 15 years, ending in 1957. Pollet was the author of the best-selling novel “A Family Romance.”

I was roommates with the poet Jean Garrigue on Morton Street. That’s how I met Delmore. He was teaching in Cambridge and was seeing something of Jean. Delmore was coming for dinner with a friend and they needed another girl. I had read Oscar Williams’ poetry anthology. My favorite poets were Delmore Schwartz and Dylan Thomas. There were pictures of all the poets. The idea that I was going to meet Delmore was overwhelming.

Once I was involved with Delmore, I was head-over-heels in love with him. I wanted to marry him. I was absolutely fascinated by him and deeply sorry for him in a lot of ways. After some years of marriage, he said to me once, “You don’t love me as much as you used to.” I said, “I love you more, but I don’t adore you as much.” There’s a big difference between loving someone and adoring them. Delmore was very jealous and possessive. I did my best to give him no occasions for jealousy.

I didn’t have much sense of a career. What I wanted to do was write, which was an essential part of my being. Delmore handed my novel to James Laughlin at New Directions with no name on it. Laughlin liked it a lot. If my name had been on it, maybe he wouldn’t have liked it so much. “A Family Romance” came out from New Directions in 1950, and the British edition and American paperback came out in 1951. It sold 250,000 copies in paperback.

Editing the journals, my feelings went through a big cycle. Why was I so dumb to marry someone so troubled? Why did I think I could help him and why was I so self-destructive? Reading his journals, I was reliving a lot of things, but I was also recalling a lot of positive things. At the time, I wanted to marry Delmore more than I had wanted anything in the world. We both thought of ourselves as Dostoevskian characters. That’s both good and bad. There’s a desperation there, but there’s also an intensity there. You could call it egotistical to dramatize yourself to that extent.

I loved being with Delmore until he really began to disintegrate. Towards the end, he told me to stay near him at parties in case his mind might jump off the rails. I couldn’t get any help for him. If we had a lot of money, maybe something could have been done. I used to say that living with Delmore was like living on the side of a volcano, but that was putting it mildly.

Stanley Moss, Poet and Old Masters Dealer, 87

I interviewed Stanley Moss in the fall of 2005 at his sprawling Riverdale mansion for "The Last Bohemians" exhibit that was held at Westbeth. Stanley went from living a fist-to-mouth existence as a poet in the 1940s to being a very wealthy man from his work as a dealer in Old Masters.


At first, Stanley was charming and quite witty with his bawdy stories. Later, he revealed a level of nastiness and rage that was rather appalling. I think his anger may have been related to his failure to achieve renown as a poet.

Stanley Moss was raised in Queens. After he served in the Navy, Moss came back to New York City to become a poet. Moss also developed a very successful career as an Old Masters art dealer, where many of his discoveries wound up in the finest museums in Europe and America. His poetry books include “A History of Color” and “The Wrong Angel.” He is the publisher of Sheep Meadow Press. Moss lives in Riverdale.

I went to Europe. A girlfriend of mine had painted two paintings of me and I sold them, which paid for the trip. I came back, working my way over on a boat. I thought, what job would I like to have most? I thought, I’d like to work at New Directions. New Directions owner James Laughlin gave me a job as an editor and glorified office boy. It was 1949 and I was 24.

I had some money from the Veterans Administration because I’d been hurt during the war. I was living in a converted coal bin with the poet Jean Garrigue. The place cost 44 dollars a month. The Navy gave me 25 dollars a months, so I knew my rent was covered.

The Village was amazing back in the late 40s. Djuna Barnes was walking around, Eleanor Roosevelt was walking around. You’d pass the poet John Ashbery and artist Larry Rivers on the street.

We were all freaks then. To get published put you in the real world. We had essentially different values than the rest of society. When I wore a suit to try to sell a painting, I felt like I was in costume. We’d all been through a world war. We were so glad to be alive.

When I started selling art, I had no money or training. I did it by discovering pictures that were in the public eye, but people did no know the value of. I had some social advantages. People liked my jokes. I had personal skills and insights into people. I see certain things that other people don’t see.

I started selling 25-dollar prints. The first print was by Renoir of two girls playing piano. I took it to a public school to sell it. The principal said, “It has a red shawl on the piano. I don’t like red. Do you have one with a blue shawl?” I said yes. I went home and painted the shawl blue. “25 dollars, please.” I’d love to find that painting. That moron of a principal thought Renoir made paintings with different colored shawls.

I have a gift for finding Old Masters. I have discovered pictures that now hang in the Louvre that I bought for nothing. It takes taste and brains.

How do I balance my careers as a poet and a dealer? I have the advantage of not having to sleep much.

The Villager Obituary of Rosetta Reitz, November 2008

The Villager
Volume 78 - Number 24 / NOVEMBER 12 - 18, 2008
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933

Rosetta Reitz, 84, jazz historian, feminist, writer
By Mary Reinholz

Rosetta Reitz, a feminist jazz historian, author and entrepreneur who owned a Greenwich Village bookstore, died at St. Vincent’s Hospital on Nov. 1. The chief cause of death was cardiopulmonary disease, family members said. She was 84. Until her death, she was still writing and involved in Rosetta Records, the recording company she founded in 1980.

Reitz produced 13 albums of women jazz and blues singers, including Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, and “forgotten” female vocalists for her “Women’s Heritage” and “Foremothers” Series. According to a family biography, Reitz pioneered in producing women’s blues and jazz concerts at Avery Fisher Hall in 1980 and ’81 and for the Newport Jazz Festival.

A short woman with strong feminist convictions, Reitz joined New York Radical Women in the early 1970s and was a co-founder of OWL (Older Women’s Liberation). She was a recipient of the Wonder Woman Award in 1982 and a Grandmother Winifred grant recipient in 1994.

“Rosetta was indeed a wonder woman — powerful and creative, who accomplished many things in her life and made many contributions to women,” said Dell Williams, founder of Eve’s Garden, a women’s sexuality boutique on W. 57th St., and a longtime friend of Reitz. “She was the author of a book on menopause and she created the first recording company exclusively dedicated to the incredible jazz and blues singers of the 1920s and ’30s.”

She also taught a course called “Women in Jazz” at The New School.

Vivien Leone, a former editor at Aphra, a feminist literary quarterly, recalled she met Reitz at a W. 10th St. meeting of OWL in 1970. She called Reitz’s 1977 book on menopause “the first” of its kind.

A first-person account called “Menopause: A Positive Approach,” the book warned of the dangers of hormone replacement therapy using estrogen, which was then widely prescribed to menopausal women. Published by Penguin, the book remained in print for 20 years. In 2002, the Veteran Feminists of America named Reitz and her menopause book in its “Roll of Honor” saluting feminist authors at Barnard College.

A former food columnist for The Village Voice, Reitz published several other books, including one in 1965 called “Mushroom Cookery.” Her 1971 essay for The Village Voice “The Liberation of the Yiddishe Mama” appeared in several 1970s feminist anthologies, according to a post by the Feminist Majority Foundation on Facebook.

She grew up Rosetta Goldman in Utica, N.Y., the youngest of six children of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her parents operated Goldman’s Bakery, where young Rosetta worked behind the counter as a child.

“She was such a valued helper that the family had a special box built for her so she reached the cash register to make change,” wrote Rebecca Gribetz, one of Reitz’s three daughters, in an e-mail. “She lived with her family above the bakery. Her love of food stemmed from this childhood.”

Cynthia Navaretta, publisher of Midmarch Arts Press, on Riverside Drive, who knew Reitz when she was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, remembered her as “one of the few radicals on campus.” She said Reitz left college after three years — one at the University of Buffalo — because of her desire to come New York City.

“She wanted to come to New York where the bright lights were,” Navaretta said. “She had literary aspirations, and she got a job almost immediately at the Gotham Book Mart” in 1945. In 1947, she opened The Four Seasons bookstore in the Village, at W. 10th and Christopher Sts., which Navaretta described as a “hangout for the literary lions” of the era.

“She had an open house until 11 p.m., and everyone came in, famous authors and poets visiting from out of town,” Navaretta recalled. “She had book parties for people like Saul Bellow and E.E. Cummings, who lived only a half a block away on Patchin Place,” said Naveretta, who was one of the store’s initial investors. “Everyone stopped by daily. She had a talent for design and also opened a greeting-card business.” She said Reitz sold her store in 1956 “because she wanted to live in the country,” and for a time lived in rural New Jersey with her husband, Robert Reitz, then returned to New York City. Her marriage ended in 1963.

Rosetta Reitz lived the rest of her life in a Chelsea apartment on W. 16th St.

“She was a consummate businesswoman,” said Navaretta. She remembers Reitz as a determined and feisty woman, who struggled against difficult circumstances, working variously as a New York stockbroker and manager of classified advertising at The Village Voice to support herself and her children. “She made it on her own,” Navaretta said. “And she created her own identity. Her daughters were devoted to her.”

She is survived by her daughters, Robin, of Tucson, Ariz.; Rainbow and Rebecca, both of Manhattan; Rebecca’s husband, her son-in-law Sidney Gribetz, and a granddaughter, Hannah Rose Gribetz. Her family asks that people who wish to honor her memory should send a donation to Planned Parenthood, a women’s shelter or the organization Women in Need, Inc.

Barton Benes' Last New York Times Profile, November 21, 2011

The great Barton Benes died on May 30, 2012, after a battle with  HIV and AIDS that lasted more than 25 years. I interviewed Barton for the first time 10 years ago. He and his apartment were a reporter's dream. Inside an 800-square-foot studio was crammed 40 years worth of work, including his devastating AIDS pieces, which were usually quite funny at the same time. Barton and his apartment became addictive. I met him when he was deep in the throes of making relics out of celebrity garbage. Like other friends of his, I would send him things I'd come across. 

I had my wisdom teeth pulled and gave them to him, but he sheepishly admitted that many people gave him their teeth, so he'd thrown mine into a bin with all the others. We were just acquaintances, but as long as I visited him after 2 p.m. (he worked all night), he would give me a shot of vanilla-flavored vodka and we'd talk. 

 Barton Benes was a great provocateur. As the article below indicates, his whole apartment is being recreated in a museum in Grand forks, north Dakota. Barton told me that perpetual twinkle in his eye that he was going to be cremated and put in a pillow in front of the television in his apartment's final resting place.

An Enclave of Artists, Reluctant to Leave

(Kirsten Luce for The New York Times)

Reef Hall, 5, and her mother, Samantha Hall, in the Westbeth complex, the first federally subsidized artists' colony in the country.

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

Published: November 21, 2011

“Barton, it’s me; poke your head out the door,” Lucille Rhodes said into her cellphone as she strolled down the antiseptic white corridor linking the artists’ residences known as Westbeth.

Moments later, Barton Lidice Benes peeked out. Wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, he waved two strangers inside as if they were old friends. The smile on his face made it appear as if the oxygen tubes running into his nostrils were some kind of secret and wonderful prank.

The door opened onto a strange alternate universe of taxidermied animals; found objects, which he calls relics; and collages. Money from around the world has been torn up, twisted and pasted into replicas of plants and flowers.

A pendulous hourglass holds the mingled ashes of two lovers. The head of a bull from Pamplona hangs on the wall. The long-necked head of a giraffe, killed by a hunter in Kenya, pokes above the clutter. “Everyone thought I killed it,” Mr. Benes said. “I said, I don’t kill anything, just cockroaches and mice. But if they’re killed already, I like them.”

This is Westbeth, one of New York City’s newest landmarks, on the far west side of the Village, where old-timers like Mr. Benes, who just turned 69, see the ghosts of artists past, like Diane Arbus, photographer of the poignantly twisted. Through his peephole, he saw her body being wheeled out of her apartment down the hall after she committed suicide.

“I work all night, so I was awake,” Mr. Benes, one of the original Westbeth residents from 1970, said. “It’d be something she would take a picture of, the way they dragged her body out of here.”

His generation of artists were so grateful for cheap rent and a place to live and work that they thwarted Westbeth’s original vision of being an incubator for artists for five years or so, until they were ready to fly the nest. In New York, with its perpetually overheated real estate market, Westbeth was Never Never Land, and like Peter Pan, they never left. Only unlike Peter Pan, they grew old, and many are now in their 70s and 80s.

Westbeth, a jumble of five industrial buildings and once the home of Bell Laboratories, opened 41 years ago as the first and largest federally subsidized artists’ colony in the United States. A young architect named Richard Meier remodeled the complex on Bethune Street, not far from where he would build three controversial glass towers. The city’s landmarks commission gave landmark status to the complex on Oct. 25. Westbeth was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. The landmark status means the buildings cannot be torn down or altered without the commission’s approval, and will make it more difficult for a developer to make a play for any of the buildings.
The residents of the 383 apartment-studios have seen the neighborhood go from a neglected and crime-ridden industrial backwater to what Mr. Benes calls Hollywood on the Hudson, an affluent enclave populated by stars like Hilary Swank.

The lobby is filled with tottering elderly people whose wild hair, mismatched clothes and keen gazes bespeak not madness or age but rather a lifetime of challenging convention. A grant pays for a social worker to come in four days a week. “People in this neighborhood think this is an old age home,” Mr. Benes said, chuckling.

George Cominskie, the head of the tenants’ organization, estimates that 40 percent to 50 percent of the original tenants still live at Westbeth. Some artists have handed their apartments down to children and grandchildren. The actor Vin Diesel still comes to visit his parents.

The waiting list has been closed for five years, and vacancies are rare. Tenants have to be recommended by people in their creative field — the arts, acting, writing — although subletting to nonartists has been known to occur.

Despite the aging population, the halls still ring with the sounds of children playing.

Stephen Hall, a painter who moved in 15 years ago and counts as young at 57, and his wife, Samantha, 45, are raising their daughter, Reef, 5, in an alcove off the studio where he paints. His large canvases in vividly saturated acrylic show cultural conflict and homogenization: a Japanese woman who, on closer examination, wears a pattern of Eames chairs in her kimono and is clutching McDonald’s fries; a Native American against a patterned ground that turns out to consist of silhouettes of Windex bottles.
“I wouldn’t be at this stage now if it wasn’t for Westbeth,” said Mr. Hall, whose application to Westbeth was recommended by the Pop artist Jim Dine.

“The only way essentially an apartment vacates is because someone died,” Mr. Hall said. “It is terrible to say, but I have smelled decomposing bodies before anybody knew they were dead.”
Now there are five families with children under 9 in his wing of the third floor where the Hall family lives. The children wander the halls in pajamas and drop in on their friends for Saturday morning pancakes.

They grow up surrounded by cultural events like last week’s PEN-sponsored literary reading, in which the public traipsed through various apartments, listening to authors read their work. Asked if he had apartment envy, one visiting writer, Lev Grossman, said, “I’m trying to keep it under control.” His neighborhood in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is filled with artists, but, he said, “we hide in our houses, so it’s not like this.”

When Mr. Benes threw open his door for his birthday party last week, Ms. Rhodes, a documentary filmmaker whose application to Westbeth was recommended by Norman Mailer (she edited Mailer’s film "Maidstone"), brought the vodka.

The North Dakota Museum of Art endeared itself to Mr. Benes by displaying his Molotov cocktail of his H.I.V.-contaminated blood. So he has willed it the contents of his Westbeth apartment, which will be reconstituted amid the sunflowers and cornfields of Grand Forks, as a permanent exhibit.
Much has changed in the streets outside Westbeth. D’Agostino’s, Mr. Benes says, is “like Tiffany’s,” and all the divey Chinese restaurants are gone. But Westbeth goes on.

When he moved in, his rent was $99 a month. Now it is a still delightfully affordable $640. “I came here when I was young and needed cheap living,” Mr. Benes said, "and now I’m old and still need cheap living."