The Epic Interview with the poet Edward Field, Westbeth, November 3, 2016

 February 3^rd, 2020 was the 75^th anniversary of when the then-20-year-old B-29 navigator Edward Field’s plane was badly shot up by anti-aircraft fire during a bombing run over Berlin. The plane lost altitude, fuel and two engines, but the heroic pilot managed to ditch the plane in the North Sea, saving Edward and most of the crew’s life. The pilot died of a mortal chest injury and a young tailgunner gave his life to save Edward.

The poet Edward Field was born in New York City in 1924, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was from Lithuania and his mother was from Poland. Edward was born in Brooklyn, but to pursue the American Dream, his father moved the family out to Long Island, to Lyndbrook, which was unfortunately the home of the German-American Bund, and young Edward was subjected to anti-Semitic abuse by his schoolmates during his childhood.

His father was a distant patriarch and used physical discipline with his six children.

Edward enrolled in New York University. World War II intervened and become a sudden relief from his miserable family life. Edward shipped out to Oklahoma. As he boarded the train, a Red Cross worker gave him a care package, which included a book of poetry. By the time Edward arrived in Oklahoma, he knew he was going to be a poet. Edward trained as a clerk typist. To avoid a bad love affair, Edward volunteered for the Army Air Corps. Trained as a navigator, he shipped out to Europe in the fall of 1944.

On his fifth bombing run over Berlin, his B-29 was badly shot up. The pilot managed to successfully ditch the plane in the North Sea, saving the crew but received a mortal chest injury.

There was not enough room in the first life raft, so Edward was in the water. The tailgunner gave up his place, saving Edward, swam to the second raft, but died of hypothermia.

After the war, Edward did a short stint in Paris, then settled in New York. Edward worked in a warehouse and tried being a Communist, then supported himself as a temp typist. 

In the mid-1950’s Edward had an affair with the poet Frank O’Hara, who showed Edward what it was life to be a gay man without self loathing. They remained friends and O’Hara promoted his work. Edward has at times been linked with the New York School of Poets.

In 1959, he was working in a typing pool at an ad agency when he was introduced to a handsome writer named Neil Derrick. They moved in together after a few weeks, which started their 58-year relationship, until Neil’s death in January 2018.

In the early 1970’s, Edward moved into Westbeth, subsidized artist housing on Bethune Street in the West Village. Neil joined him in the next year.

In 1963, Edward published his first book of poetry, Stand Up, Friend, with Me. Other poetry books followed, including  After the Fall, A Geography of Poets, A New Geography of Poets, Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems, 1963-1992 and A Frieze in the Temple of Love.

Edward published his memoir of his life in post-war Greenwich Village called The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag in 2005.

The interview took place in Edward and Neil’s Spartan studio on November 3, 2016.

At the time this interview was published in February 2020, Edward was 95. Recently, an animated short movie called "Minor Accident of War" of Edward’s bomber being ditched in the North Sea has been gaining attention around the country at film festivals. Edward did the narration with his poem “World War II,” chronicling the event. 

 

 (Edward Field in the 1950s)

Interview by Dylan Foley

EDWARD FIELD: You heard what happened to my social security?

DYLAN FOLEY: You and Neil got married a few months ago?

EF: Yes, they cut Neil’s social security, because my social security was added in. The other day, we went to [Congressman] Jerrold Nadler’s office and saw a caseworker. She wrote a letter to the VA from him about us. They cut his pension by a third, about $300.

NEIL DERRICK: They cut it by $400, Ed, from $1200 to $800.

DF: But you guys always lived cheaply.

EF: We’re frugal. They wanted us to write down what the income was, and what the expenses were. The expenses were bigger than the income because they cut it. I hope that is significant. The overage on the expenses was exactly what they cut.

DF: You’ve always done most of what you wanted to do by living frugally.

EF: We live in luxury. It’s amazing. We travelled all over. We rent apartments in London and Paris, and we’ve travelled to Amsterdam and North Africa. It’s been a terrific life.

DF: Your parents were the original immigrants?

EF: They were from Eastern Europe. My father was Lithuanian, but it was Russia at the time. My mother was Polish. They must have been eight, and 10 or 12 when they came over. 

DF: They lived on the Lower East Side?

EF: They went to the Lower East Side. My mother was in the garment industry for a while. She modeled hats. She was very beautiful.

They lived across the street from each other. One of my father’s sisters married my mother’s brother. That was the first connection in the family. I think they lived on East 7^thStreet.

All the old Indian restaurants nearby are going away. [Edward is referring to the restaurants on East 6^th Street.]

My mother was 18. My father was 22 or 24 when they married.

My father went to Cooper Union and the Art Students League for painting. I don’t know what he did until he landed at MGM in their advertising department on Times Square. That was his lifetime job, once he got it. Their advertising department was in the Loew’s State building.

My father moved the family out to Long Island. We were all born in Brooklyn, all the children. It was Bay Park, right near Bensonhurst on the water. There was a little boat basin. My father has a little boat. Then he was going out to the real America, so he moved out to Nassau County, which was the headquarters of the German-American Bund. Jews were not exactly welcome.

We grew up before the war in Lyndbrook. They had a campground in the field behind our house. All that was left was the flagpole. The Bund did meet in the high school. There were swastikas on the telephone poles, graffiti.

DF: What was your father like?

EF: He was an immigrant. He never became an American. He came over at 12. He didn’t have an accent exactly, just a strong New York accent. He was an artist. The family only had classical music we were not allowed to listen to popular music. Every Sunday, we had a recital for him. We all played instruments. He sat back as the patriarch and we would all parade out with our instruments. I played cello. I never had a decent teacher.

There were three boys and three girls. I was the eldest boy, but I had two older sisters. They played the violin and the piano. We had a trio called the Field Family Trio. We were on the radio a little bit. We were on WNYC, on the Horn and Hardart Amateur Hour. We won a cup at Jones Beach in the family music competition. We used to drive out to Freeport to play at WBGG. We had a program called the Field Family Program and their Romantic Melodies.” 7pm. Dinner music. It was a good experience.

DF: Did you go to local schools?

EF: Yes.

DF: What did you do when World War II started?

EF: I went to work on a farm in the summer. They were short of farmworkers immediately. I went to Peekskill, New Paltz, and worked on a farm for the summer. 

DF: What were your parents like?

EF: My father was a European patriarch. He was a brutal man, but he himself had a rough upbringing. His idea of raising children was to train them. You had to be socialized. He battered us a lot. He was, I guess, just from his culture. Parents were like that in the old Europe.

DF: He had a rough childhood?

EF: His father left and his mother took a lover, so he had to hide in the house. He had to hide behind the couch. I don’t know the details. Nobody will tell you.

To get the real idea of what life was like before they came to this country, it’s very hard. Most Jews don’t know what their parents life was like before they came to the U.S. They were glad to escape the pogroms and the poverty. The ocean crossing was amnesia. I’ve done a lot of questioning and I’ve got as much as you can get, what life was all about. 

My father was from a larger town, a little more developed. My mother was from complete peasants. They were business people. There were a few things that my father told me that were unusual. One was that when the men had a political discussion, they gathered in the local forest. Maybe they were discussing socialism, which was criminal. He was sent to the edge of the forest, to warn them if any Russian officers or soldiers came. That was interesting, like a little image. You don’t get much of that.

DF: Why did your father change the family name to Field?

EF: Yeah, to get into advertising. Before the war, a Jew couldn’t work in advertising.

DF: Why is your email “fieldinski”?

EF: That’s what the kids called me. They used to say, “What are you?” They’d say, “Go back to your own country.” My father said, “Say we are atheist Jews.” In Lyndbrook, a Jew was an atheist anyway, because he denied Christ.

DF: Was this abuse in middle school?

EF: This was grammar school. High school was much better. High school was much better. The Army was a liberation. It was wonderful.

DF: Did you go to college before the military?

EF: I wasn’t drafted. I had enlisted. I had to get out. My father said that I should go to the College of Commerce at NYU and study advertising. I did that and it was totally unsuitable, so I enlisted. My parents had to sign for me. I must have been 18, but they had to sign. I can’t remember.

DF: Did you pick the Army Air Corps?

EF: I did. Trenches and foxholes didn’t agree with me. First, I trained in Miami Beach, on the golf course. They marched us out. It was quite a nice two months. Then they put us on a train to send us to our next assignment, a clerical  school in Colorado. I already knew how to type, but they gave me real training. I had a clerical job in Tinker Field, Oklahoma City. It was nice. It was all new to me. The Army was great. I grew up in a town where I was so despised. I guess I despised myself, as everybody despised me. Being in the Army, I was with men who respected me.

DF: Why were you despised for being Jewish?

EF: At first. we were foreigners and my parents spoke Yiddish. That was horrible. We were marked for punishment. They beat me up all the time and for no reason. Nobody protected me. Once, a big girl protected me. She kept the guys from beating me up.

DF: When were you sent to Europe?

EF: I had a boyfriend, a master sergeant in the barracks. We started an affair. I had other encounters. I was an active teenager. You find sex everywhere. I did go to the city for sex, but I also found it hitchhiking. Hitchhikers have a good chance of running into sexual opportunities. 

DF: Was there any danger to these encounters?

EF: They were mostly positive.

DF: What happened with your sergeant boyfriend? 

EF: He moved me into his room in the barracks. He was an outdoorsman. . He used to tie flies. Tough. One day, a group of the guys was having a bull session, and he twisted my arm back. That’s what the kids did to me in school. It blew my mind. From that instant on, I didn’t want anything to do with him. I was living with him in his room, so I applied for the Aviation Cadets. An information sheet had come over my desk. They were looking for cadets. I applied and became a cadet. I didn’t get to be a flirt, but they made me a navigator.

DF: In an early poem, you wrote about being a clerk at 30,000 feet.

EF: I had a machine gun at my window and I did fire it once.

DF: What happened to you in Europe?

EF: I went there in the end of 1944. I was flying over Europe. I was stationed in the Midlands.  We flew mostly over Germany. Early 1945. I flew ‘til the end of the war. They were B-17s, Flying Fortresses. They had a crew of about nine. Sometimes we had a visitor, big brass or something.

(Minor Accident of War, 2019...Edward's animated movie)

DF: You were shot down?

EF: It was my fifth mission. It was over Berlin. It was February 3^rd. I just found a report of it online. There were lists of crew and if anything special happened. They had a page for the guy who saved my life. It didn’t say anything about him saving my life. He was never given a medal or anything. The pilot got a silver star. He died. It was probably a chest injury. They have a control panel in front. The landing was in the North Sea, which was like hitting a brick wall. We were between Holland and England

You get into the crash position against one of the bulkheads in the middle of the plane. You sit backwards against it with your knees up, then a guy sits, leaning against your knees. Then somebody sits against his knees. Then you re like an accordion. I was against the bulkhead, so I got the full weight of the crash.

DF: You made it to the raft?

EF: I was in the water and there was no room. The gunner saved my life.  I actually wrote to the webmaster, to apply for a medal for him.

DF: Why did he give up his seat?

EF: He was a very energetic kid, and I think he saw that what we needed to do was to pull the rafts together. One was not completely inflated and taking in water. The pilot was in there. He was out of it. This was in mid-winter. He saw that he should get out, swimming and pulling the rafts together. I had read that you can only live 20 minutes in the water.

DF: Did he die of hypothermia?

EF: Yes. Another guy never got on the raft, as well. He swam for the second raft and never got there. The water was deadly. The gunner took of his clothes to go in the water.

DF: You were assigned a new plane?

EF: Another plane and a new pilot. The crew stayed together. We lost five planes. We didn’t get shot down, but we got shot up. The planes were junk. We landed on an airfield once where the propellers weren’t even spinning. They were junk. I guess they used them for parts. The German air corps was pretty well depleted, though at the end they got jet fighters…if they had just gotten them sooner and had enough gasoline. That was the one time I fired my gun. The jets would try to break up our formation, flying between the planes. We flew wing to wing. The German jets were much faster than regular fighters. When you used your gun, you had to clean it after. I was so tired after 8 to 10 hours in the air, I didn’t [want to clean my gun.]

 (Edward in the US Army Air Corps)

DF: Did you have any romances in England?

EF: I did discover a gay club in London. I had an affair with a gay captain in Paris, just after the war.

DF: Was it dangerous to make or respond to overtures?

EF: I did meet guys. All you had to do was to go to the chaplain’s assistant, who was always gay. He was the contact on the base. Then there was a gay crowd at the PX or at the bar.  I met gays after the war. We were transferred to the South of France, where there was an airfield. We flew American soldiers going to the States over to Casablanca, and then we’d go back and get more. We ferried big brass to Paris and Frankfurt. I went to different cities. In Paris, I went to the most famous gay bar Le Boeuf sur le Toit, started by Cocteau. It was a surrealist café. The bar was totally gay, with servicemen from all over the world. They even said de Gaul had come in a few weeks before.

There I met my captain. He managed to hitchhike to Southern France. He was actually being courtmartialed for being caught in bed with a paratrooper. Mostly, it didn’t feel very dangerous.

DF: During the war, was there a gay bar explosion in New York?

EF: I think that’s true. They were packed for sex. Both men and women were going there. Greenwich Village was known as a place where a man could get laid. Greenwich Village was the home of free love. That’s what it was famous for.

DF: When did you come back to the States?

EF:1945. I went to NYU. I met Alfred Chester there. I had to go back to the School of Commerce. The rules said you had to go back to what you were doing before. I took classes at the Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences. I knew I wanted to be a poet.

DF: Was it the book of classic poetry the Red Cross women gave you?

EF: As we were getting on the train, going from basic training to my school in Colorado, the Red Cross ladies were at the train. It was a long journey, three days to a week. They gave each serviceman a little packet. In it was a toothbrush, a comb and a paperback book. My book was Louis Untermeyer’s Anthology of Great English Poems. That’s what I read going on the train to Colorado. When I got off the train, I knew what I was going to be, a poet, though I had never written poems before.

DF: What was NYU like in 1945?

EF: In the class was Cynthia Ozick, but I didn’t know her.  She was in a totally different world. I was not interested in a course on how to be a poet. The thing about then was that you didn’t go to school to be a poet. You just worked it out. Now everybody goes to these MFA programs.

At my table was George W. Broadfield III, a black intellectual. He had a certain fame at the time. He was the first black executive at Standard Oil. They didn’t hire blacks, they didn’t hire Jews. My friends were thinking what to do, what job? You calculated, could you get into medical school when there was such a small quota for Jews. Like I couldn’t get into Columbia, because they had such a small quota. NYU was open.

DF: Were you working?

EF: I worked after school at Arnold Constable’s, where Mrs. Roosevelt shopped. We sewed tags on dresses, we hung clothes on racks and pushed racks around the store. I actually picked someone up there, a window dresser.

DF: Ah, the arty types!

EF: (Chuckle.) At that time, I was commuting from home. People who were more smart and sophisticated than me got their discharges in Europe and went to the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill.

DF: Was your mother a warm person?

 EF: She was a warm person, but she had so many children that she couldn’t pay attention to each one. I realized later on that I was like my father and there was a standoffishness. She really wasn’t crazy about me.

DF: Did she like your father?

EF: She considered them friends. They must have liked each other. They had all those children. They slept in the same bed. I once asked her why she had all these children. Did she know about contraception? She talked about it all the time. Margaret Sanger was like a goddess in her world. She said, “Oh, what do you know? You’re in bed together and you roll on top of each other. You don’t plan these things.” She was such a peasant.

DF: When did you move into the city?

EF: A friend found me an apartment on the Lower East Side, a cold-water flat. It was 18 dollars a month on East 4^thStreet.

DF: Were you still at NYU then?

EF: Yeah. My father was horrified. You don’t leave home until you get married. It was a shock.

DF: When was your first European trip?

EF: I dropped out of college in 1948. I went to Europe. I met Robert Friend on the boat going over. It was a converted troop ship. You couldn’t get a passenger liner. Everything was organized in an economical way. The dining room was alphabetical, so Field and Friend were next to each other. Robert has a job in Pennsylvania, but dropped it and stayed in Europe. He taught soldiers until the U.S, government threatened to take his passport away because he was a Communist. The officer in charge of the teaching program told him the FBI was there and asked him to get out. He went to Israel, where he lived the rest of his life.

DF: How long did you stay at East 4^thStreet?

EF: It must have been a year or two. Then I moved in with a friend in Brooklyn Heights.

DF: You dabbled with Communism yourself?

EF: If you are really serious about Communism, you should become a poet of the people. So I became a worker in a machine shop, then a warehouse. I had a union. I loved the union.

DF: Where was the machine shop? 

EF: It was south of Washington Square, to the east. In the Victorian era, it was an area of whorehouses. All the old buildings were factories. All that stuff is gone. You couldn’t be a poet and a worker.

With Frank O’Hara, his idea was that you just write until the phone rings, and that is the end of it. You’re on the phone.

DF: You went into group therapy to become straight?

EF: Partially, it was the fashion. Everybody was trying to go straight, because the new therapies were promising it. The whole Freuduian ideal, if you believe in the Oedipal situation, you wre made gay because you were blocked in certain developments.. Killing your father and marrying your mother. Eventually, you symbolically marry your mother.  Of course, your balls have to want a woman. If you don’t sexually want the other sex, it’s ridiculous.

We did have friends who went straight. There was a particular bullying quality to the group.

DF: Was it the therapist?

EF: The members. They took the place of the therapist at most meetings. You had three meetings a week and one meeting with the therapist.

DF: Was the order “Get a girl, get a job, get married”?

EF: You get the job to get the girl. You can’t get the girl without money. You get the job to get the apartment, then you get the girl. You have to be straight, you have to be conventional.

This was a socialist therapist. He didn’t believe in adapting completely to society, because he believed that socialism was coming and all this would change. He didn’t have this conventional idea.

I quit because the analyst said to me, “Don’t you think you should write prose, so you can make a living?” The idea was to get the apartment, to get the girl. I knew he was not on my side

DF: Who was that older therapist, who showed up to your exhibit in 2006? 

EF: She came later.

DF: What was your experience after you met Frank O’Hara at the Egan Gallery?

EF: I saw you could live in New York as a gay. I also saw a different way of writing, because he was so spontaneous. My training as a poet was New Criticism, where you did manipulate the words until they fell into place. It took a lot of work. Frank didn’t think that way. His mind was so sophisticated. I still don’t write it out. I think he just wrote it out. I take more responsibility for what I do. Second thoughts are not….

DF: What was the San Remo Café like?

EF: The San Remo was one of the gay intellectual bars. I was not a big barfly.

DF: Did you know Jack Dowling early on?

EF: Jack Dowling was a skinny guy. I had a friend who had a thing for skinny guys. He chose Jack as the skinniest guy he could find. He went with the poet Ralph Pomeroy. Jack woke up in a sea of urine. The bed was floating. Ralph was incontinent when he was drunk. He got drunk all the time. [Edward gives me aquavit].

DF: How was Frank O’Hara as a boyfriend? Was he nice to you?

EF: Very nice. He told me he would give money because I was so poor.

DF: Frank O’Hara had a job at MoMA?

EF: Yes. He kept his money in a book and he showed it to me. It was funny when people tried to pay me for sex, because some men automatically try to pay you. He was going to support me. He was younger. He was so competent, so confident. To see him living in New York. I had been in group, which cut off all my friends. You live in group therapy. 

I saw Frank with a group of friends. He had a big, wide range of friends, who all adored him. He had a place to live in New York with Joe LeSueur. He functioned on his own. He wasn’t a neurotic child. He was living with who he was and he was fine. He was close with Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell.

Whenever Larry Rivers was on his own, he and Frank were together. It was an on-and-off again affair.

DF: Was there an incestuous nature to poetry reviewing in 1950’s?

EF: The politics of the poetry world have always been that your friends promote you. The group was small, the poetry world at the time, it was incestuous. Everybody reviewed everybody else.

DF: Did you hang out with Frank?

EF: We were always going somewhere or people were coming over. His social life was intense. He never stayed home. He had to invent his way of writing poetry, for there was no other time. I never saw him write anything. I never saw him scratch a note down in his notebook like I did.

 (Frank O'Hara)

DF: Did MoMA play a role in your life?

EF: Neil worked there. John Button was working there with Scott Burton, a whole bunch of people who became famous.

DF: Frank O’Hara became paranoid? Did this end your relationship as lovers?

EF: It may have been a little paranoia. At the end of the summer—I saw him one summer—he was going out to the Hamptons to stay with Larry Rivers or Fairfield Porter, who was married. Before he went out, he said that he had put a letter in the lockers [at Penn Station], and they had cleaned out the lockers by the time he got back. He thought he’d talked about Larry and drugs in the letter. He didn’t tell me, but I think there was a package of drugs in the locker, too.

DF: Do you think it was pot or heroin?

EF: I don’t think [Frank] did heroin. Everything was so small. It is so different from now. There were little clusters of figures around each figure.

DF: Did you know Floriano Vecchi and his Tiber Press?

EF:  I have a set of the books. They are worth about $15,000.

Jane Freilicher was a figurative painter. In Frank O’Hara’s world. They respected figurative painting.

Herman Rose—they liked him. I met him in Washington Square at an art show. He was at the same psychiatrist I was. He was straight, but he was neurotic. I met him through his wife Elia Baca. Everyone was neurotic then.  It is completely strange. It is completely gone now. In New York, everyone was neurotic. I met his wife at an art exhibition in Washington Square Park. I never saw her at the end. It was too much to take care of. We were very close.

DF: Do you know the Herman Rose and Franz Kline story? “You owe me a screw.” 

EF: It couldn’t have been Herman Rose. He couldn’t pick up a woman in a bar.

DF: Did you see Frank O’Hara after you stopped dating?

EF: I met him at the St. Mark’s Baths. He wanted to get together. 

I did have sex at the baths.

DF: What was happening with your own poetry in the 1950’s?

EF: I was writing wherever I could. I would take a job, save a little money, then take months off to write. Then I’d get another job. I once worked at an art reproduction house, where I’d carry huge glass plates around. Artists would sit at easels, painting the colors for reproductions There’d be one color on each plate, then they’d put them together. 

DF: Did you go to Yaddo in the mid-1950’s?

EF: I went to Yaddo a lot. There were two important times. When I met Tobias, that was the first time. Ralph was there, as well. Tobias had not yet gone to the jungle. Then he went to the Yucatan, then Peru.

DF: You had a great description of Tobias, as walking like her was walking through water. [His friend Tobias Schneebaum was a sexual anthropologist, who lived in Westbeth and died in 2005.]

EF: He walked so softly, it was wonderful. He was having an affair with a little tough bantam rooster of a guy named Dudley Hupler. He would walk behind Dudley, a tough little guy. Tobias, long and flowing, would follow him around. Dudley was a painter. I’d pose for him sometime. I’d hold up my arm and he’d do a painting of my armpit or just one buttocks.

DF: Was Dudley well known? 

EF: I guess not, but he sold a lot of porn. I think people took this as porn. It was very erotic.

DF: When did you meet Neil?

EF: 1959. He wasn’t working at MoMA yet. He got that job later. We were both working as temporary typists, so we were sent out. At one job at an advertising agency, they had a typing pool. They sat us together. We were talking too much. So they separated us. Too late.

DF: Neil was living in the Forties, in Manhattan?

EF: West 47^thStreet. Hell’s Kitchen. We lived across from the police station.

Q. What was the cop story?

EF: We were arrested. We were questioned separately.

DF: You were harassed by an out-of-town cop?

EF: I don’t know. I don’t know. He reported we were talking about the murder. Of course, it was crazy. The police took him seriously. [out-of-town cop, comes into New York to solve the murder of a family friend].

DF: Did you live together in Hell’s Kitchen?

EF: Until we moved down to the Village. We had a neighbor who was very annoying. She was really quite offensive.

DF: Because you were gay?

EF:I don’t think that meant anything to her because she was a New Yorker. She made a lot of noise. She had a huge family. Irish. She had huge parties. She had a lot of friends and had huge parties with loud music. I couldn’t stand it. We moved to the Village. You could get places to live back then.

(Neil Derrick in the 1960's)

DF: Where did you live in the Village? 

EF: First on Charles Street, in a furnished room, places that don’t exist anymore. There were boarding houses. We lived there for a while, then Alfred Chester was going away, so we moved to his loft. It was above the Sullivan Street Playhouse, near Washington Square. I think it was “The Fantasticks.”  

DF: When did your first book come out?

EF: Stand Up, Friend, with Me. That was 1963. It was Grove Press, sort of an accident. New Directions submitted my book for the Lamont Award, one year in 1962 or ’61.

 (Stand Up, Friend, with Me)

 The next day, I asked Grove if they would submit my book. I guess they never expected me to win it. When I won it, it was a little embarrassing for them, but they published me, as required for the prize.

Neil and I went to Europe, then I won a Guggenheim while we were there, so there was plenty of money.

 (Edward and Neil in the last decade)

DF: The Guggenheim came after the book and you had applied for it?

EF: Yes. I guess so. It was $4,000, a princely sum. It really gave us freedom, because we had gone on very little money.

DF: Where did you go in Europe?

EF: We were in Paris mostly, but we also went to London.

DF: Then you went back to New York?

EF: Yeah, then Neil got the job at MoMA. He was at the front desk.

DF: What was Neil writing at the time?

EF: He was writing at the time, too, publishing his soft-core pornography. Recently, I saw one of his books for $50 online. 

DF: Did you do any teaching?

EF: I finally decided to say yes [to teaching]. A poet published an article in the Tampa Bay Whatever Times or whatever, where he wrote about calling me up to be a poet-in-residence at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He wrote that I said, “I’ve just decided to say yes to everything.” That was the idea to the article, to “Say yes to everything.” I had. I finally decided, after I was a poet and didn’t do anything else. I got the job translating the Eskimo poems. I got an offer to be the poet-in-residence, and I accepted it. So I went to Florida for a term. I did other things for a while. I had started to give readings and went on tour. My analyst said, “Aren’t you going to sell your books?” “Sell my books?” I said. “I’m a poet. I don’t sell stuff.” “Take your book and sell it,” she said. I realized it was the most fun part of the experience. I’d put a box of books on a chair with a price. They’d take a book, leave money. I’d come back from the reading. There’d be money, but no books.

DF: Tell me about your analyst.

EF: I went to her for seven years. She was pro-gay. She’d been in show biz herself. She was 10 years older. She died soon after my 2006 book launch. When I met Neil, I took him to her. She gave us her approval.

DF: When did you move to Westbeth?

EF: I was in the second group.  It was 1972. Neil and I had broken up. I told the manager, I’m going to have to leave New York if I can’t find an apartment here. He said, “That’s what were are here for, to keep artists in the Village.” He gave me an apartment. It was three before this one. This is the third. It is the most Gimuctisch. [The most livable. It’s German for livable.] We’ve been here for 10 years. 

We were on the 5^thfloor for a long time. It was like a cave. The first apartment turned out to be noisy. It was driving me crazy. When they offered me the cave, which was on a little courtyard, it was quiet. I healed from the noise. When you suffer from noise, it is, it is a really terrible disease. In the cave, I healed. I can’t remember if Neil moved in there.

DF: I’ve known you since 1998, when I did the piece on Tobias Schneebaum. You were here already.

EF: I have no sense of time anymore.

DF: Tobias was such a good soul.

EF: What a terrific guy, terrific person.

DF: When did Neil lose most of his sight? 

EF: About ’71 or ’72 We got back together, of course. There was no question. 

DF: Had you started writing together at this point?

EF: He couldn’t write. I helped him and we started writing together. Finally, we had to stop. We did publish two novels, The Villagers and The Office. It was difficult. You have your own ideas and you are too strong-minded. Even living together is a victory. 

DF: You have a poem where you recount the story of your mother telling you not to marry a non-Jew.

EF: She said that they would call me a “dirty Jew,” which was what the kids called me in my childhood.

DF: That’s so awful.

EF: I survived it. The thing is, my childhood was horrible, simply ghastly, because my family was difficult, too. My life after that, when I think back, what a terrific life I have had. I really have no complaints at all.

DF: You’ve done everything you’ve wanted to do?

EF: And I am the nurse type.. If I have to take care of someone, that’s great.

DF: Do you find you have some understanding for the kids who bullied you in school?

EF: These kids were acting according to their parents. Their parents put that in them because it was a Republican town. It was really a fascist town. Their parents never would have hurt me, but the kids got it from their parents.

There were very few Jewish families. The town was English, Scotch-Irish and German, heavy German. They were innocent. It was from their parents.

We were the blacks. They looked on us as the blacks. America was full of racial issues. Eventually, the Jews became white. I am a Semite. I never think of myself as white.

DF: What was the turning point for Jews and other ethnics when they came into political power and prosperity?

EF: I stopped getting flack for being Jewish when Israel was founded in 1947. No matter what I think about Israel now, I think it saved my life.

When I was a kid, they said, “Go back to where you came from” I had nowhere to go.

Everything was different before Israel. After the war, Israel was founded It was a very heroic little country. Even though we don’t think about what they’ve been doing with the Palestinians. Nevertheless, it saved my life. I look at what Israel has been doing and its horrible. The reactionary religious Jews have taken over. It’s not socialist kibbutzism anymore.

I am also glad we’ve been back to Muslim countries. I went to Afghanistan by myself.

DF: After the first book, did you find more success as a poet?

EF: There is the Geography of American Poets. I did the anthology. 

DF: How many books have you written? 

EF: I’ve only had nine books of poetry and prose. I do hope to get my collected poems done eventually.

(Counting Myself Lucky)

DF: What year did you start writing?

EF: It goes back to 1949, when I started writing what I thought were good poems. I look over my collected poems. I have a file. I thought, “Gee, these are terrific.”

DF: What was Westbeth like in 1972?

EF: It was an industrial neighborhood, and shipping, the docks. There was a big sex scene in the trucks of the waterfront, and on Washington Street, right in front of Westbeth. There was a lot of cruising and drag queens. There were cars cruising by to pick guys There was a rabbi driving by with Jersey plates. It was very funny. Before you go home…

I read that there were these guys at the Holland Tunnel, picking up men who drove to New Jersey. It was a financial transaction. Penn Station was a good place for pick ups. You could pick up guys before they went home to their families. There were little hotels nearby. In New York City, there is sex everywhere. If you want sex, you can find it everywhere.

DF: Was the area around Westbeth dangerous?

EF: Never. We did have friends who were mugged. A woman in my building, who’d been in one of my group therapy sessions, two drag queens came up on either side of her and said, “Take us to your bank machine and we want you to withdraw money for us.” She died soon after. That was a big shock. She was a fervent communist, so blacks were sacred.