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PARTISAN REVIEW
who were also writing. We were all unbearably broke.
If
six of us
together had fifty cents we were lucky. I recall splitting an egg salad
sandwich four ways in the cafeteria.
Barone:
How did you get the money to print
Neon?
Sorrentino:
The first issue was paid for by a guy named Fred Siegel.
Barone:
He did the Pound translations?
Sorrentino:
Right, he was a Pound devotee. The second issue was paid
for by Cubby Selby-Hubert Selby. He was the only one of us
working then. The rest were unemployed or were students on the
G.!. Bill. That's the issue I got Williams into because he liked the
first issue. Paul Goodman also contributed to the second issue.
Barone:
How did Goodman get into it?
Sorrentino:
Cubby met him at a party and told him about the magazine
and Paul said he'd like to contribute. It's hard to realize that at that
time, 1956, Paul Goodman had an audience of maybe a hundred
people. Most of his books were privately printed and distributed.
Paul became known through his writings on' education and socio–
logical change, you know,
Growing Up Absurd.
To this day I think
very few people read his fiction and his fiction is remarkable. You
can tell a Paul Goodman story by one paragraph-it's unique;
nobody writes like that. So, he contributed to that issue and we just
went on from there.
Cubby was in that issue too. His first published story, "Home
for Christmas." I read it over a couple of weeks ago for the first time
in I suppose twenty years. It has all the earmarks of his later work.
I've often told people the logical next step, post-Hemingway, is
Selby's prose.
Barone:
It was Cubby who took you to the Cedar and introduced you
to
all those people?
Sorrentino:
No, I had heard of it through a painter friend of mine. In
the mid-fifties the Cedar was strictly a painters' club. It was origi–
nally a Chinese restaurant, I believe. Then it became a bar. Two guys
took it over, Sam and John, who still own it. At that time many of
the abstract painters in New York lived on 10th Street, near Third
Avenue. In those days you could get a loft for fifteen dollars a month,
a cold water loft. It was possible to live cheaply in New York, which
is why abstract painting was born in New York. Not only was it
possible to live here cheaply, but, as many painters have told me,
there's a quality of light in New York which you don't get in other
cities. The light in New York is very hard. I reread
The Aspern
Papers
a few weeks ago and James mentions the quality of American
