Eating - Jason Epstein [40]
NINE
PUBLISHING BOOKS WITH KNIFE AND FORK
In the 1950s, when I lived on the top floor of an old town house in Greenwich Village, I could still encounter on walks through my neighborhood relics of the old bohemia: the wood-frame house on Bedford Street where Edna Millay once lived; Patchen Place, the rickety mews where e. e. cummings rented a house and where Djuna Barnes still lived; the run-down tenement across town, on St. Mark’s Place, where Lev Bronstein, who changed his name to Leon Trotsky, once kept a printing press, and where Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman now lived, amid piles of books and manuscripts, and where you had to check before you sat down that Chester, a good if messy cook, hadn’t parked a pot of oxtail stew on your chair. On Hudson Street, Dylan Thomas was drinking himself to death at the White Horse, two blocks north of the modest house where Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Once or twice in the Fourth Street subway station, when I still worked at Doubleday and Co., I saw William Faulkner—slight, with grayish hair, dressed in chinos—clutching a manuscript folder on his way uptown to see his editor, Albert Erskine, at Random House. It did not occur to me—as I walked along these century-old streets under leafy sycamores with Barbara and her Harvard friends John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch, who would become the so-called New York School of Poets—that we were at the end of an expiring bohemia, which was even then becoming gentrified. That trickle would soon become a flood of restored town houses, smart restaurants, and expensive shops, all but obliterating the picturesque remnants of the 1920s culture.
From my flat on Tenth Street, I liked to walk a mile or so downtown to the old Washington Market, which was razed by 1973 to make way for the World Trade Center. There are still a few old-style public markets in New York’s ethnic neighborhoods, where merchants hire stalls to display their meat, poultry, produce, and grocery items, and from May to October the green markets throughout the city are a blessing, but the Washington Market, beneath a vast skylit roof bounded by Fulton, Vesey, and Washington Streets, barely a mile north of the tip of Manhattan, was special, for it had been established before the Revolution on land donated by Trinity Church and still conveyed a sense of those times. Here you could feel immersed in New York’s living past as you wandered from booth to booth, tended by merchants with plump red faces in long white coats and straw boaters beside shambles offering racks of feathered game, fine poultry, sides of beef, whole lambs and piglets, while other stalls featured crates of eggs, tubs of yellow butter, neatly piled eggplants and cabbages and oysters on ice, one of which poisoned me so that I could not look at another for a decade.
I remember, as in a dream, a long-lost restaurant on Cedar Street, a few blocks north of the market, which must have supplied the game birds featured on its menu, including the cold Scotch grouse that I ordered at a solitary lunch some fifty years ago. The bird was boned and stuffed with foie gras and accompanied by a sprightly juniper-infused game sauce, with a side of pommes soufflées on a linen napkin in a battered silver dish. But a few years later, when I happened to be downtown, the restaurant had vanished, leaving not a trace. Even now when I find myself on lower Broadway I think of it and wonder if that unforgettable restaurant, with its sawdust floors and worn wooden tabletops, may have been only a dream.
For underpaid young editors in those days, there were a dozen or so inexpensive French restaurants in Manhattan with blurred menus in light-blue ink run off on a ditto machine, offering céléri rémoulade, moules marinière, pêté maison, maquerau au vin blanc, escargots, blanquette de veau, coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, entrecôte aux pommes souffl