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.
“My life’s an open book,” Harriet Sohmers Zwerling declared the other night. She was wearing a maroon bustier and Pharaonic blond bangs, and was leaning on a cane. Zwerling, the writer and grande horizontale, has been a sort of den mother—she would get smashed and have everyone over for lima beans—to five decades of Greenwich Village misfits. Recently, she appeared in a documentary, “Still Doing It,” about sex and older women. “Every time it’s shown, I get e-mail from young guys who want to get it on with me,” she said. “Which is wonderful. I’m seventy-seven fucking years old.”
Zwerling was in the gallery at Westbeth, the artists’ complex on Bethune Street, at a party for the opening of an exhibit of photographs, “The Last Bohemians,” and the publication of her friend Edward Field’s new memoir, “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag.” The book is every bit as gossipy an accounting of lives, his own and others’, as its title suggests. (The Man, by the way, was the critic Alfred Chester.) Few of Field’s cohorts were offended by his dredging up of youthful indiscretions. If profligacy has been their social imperative, its moral corollary is unflinching tolerance. They seemed highly entertained, and even a little proud.
“A wonderful thing about Edward,” Karl Bissinger, a ninety-one-year-old resident of Westbeth, said. “He had a friend that he lived with. The friend left him and, just after, went blind. Edward is still taking care of him after all these years.” Bissinger, a fashion photographer who abandoned his career during the Vietnam War to help draftees escape to Canada, was referring to Field’s partner of forty years, Neil Derrick. “I’m very glad to see you,” Bissinger said, turning to a sweaty, hulking man in a “Poetry at Gunpoint” T-shirt who had flecks of fried egg in his wiry white beard.
Bissinger and the man, Ira Cohen—star-stream poet, shaman, mythographer, ex-publisher of the exorcist journal Gnaoua, bat-eater—shook hands and talked for a while. Cohen began to reminisce. “I’ve known Edward since the sixties,” he said. “I met him and Neil in Tangier many years ago. We liked to smoke and hang around and enjoy the Socco Chico, the little square in Tangier. It was full of policemen, hustlers, smugglers, rich ladies. Those were the slapstick Beckettian dog days. I’ve also lived in Kathmandu and San Francisco. They all have a similar magic center of vibration.”
Field, at the table, continued to greet well-wishers. He regarded one of them, a trim Creole man in a suit and sweater, with amazement. “That was Basil Browne,” he said. “He was in my Greek class at N.Y.U. in 1946.” Field and Derrick live on the third floor of Westbeth; their close friend the anthropologist and rumored cannibal Tobias Schneebaum, to whom the exhibit was dedicated, lived on the fourth. He died in September. His apartment is being kept intact until the Met can catalogue his collection of Asmat artifacts. “I’m watering Tobias’s plants,” Field said. “I met him at Yaddo in 1955. He was a painter before he became an explorer of the jungles of the world.
“This is Ana Maria Vandellos,” he went on, grabbing a dignified woman by the arm. “She’s the only straight woman in the group.” (Vandellos, it turns out, was once married to Stanley Moss.) Field pointed to a photograph on the wall. “That was the two of us in 1951, at a party for a play based on a Christopher Isherwood book.” The picture showed a jaunty Field, leaning in on Vandellos, who was smoking a cigarette and holding a tumbler.
Across the room, Harriet Sohmers Zwerling was finishing a plastic cup of red wine. A woman approached and let Zwerling know that she and her friend were leaving.
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| (Harriet in Paris in the 1950's) |
“We want to have a hamburger at the Corner Bistro,” she said.
“It’s so crowded,” Zwerling said. “We’re going to Philip Marie. It’s not gourmet, but they have very nice drinks. The Bistro is all college kids now. It’s not very interesting,” she said. And that was the end of it.
