60.4a

“Movement.” Article-interview by anonymous author. New Yorker, 16 November, 16-17. Account of a party for Seymour Krim’s anthology, The Beats (60.4) hosted by the publisher, Fawcett Publications, in the lobby of the Living Theatre on 14th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. Krim was there to greet the guests and there was an open bar. The crowd waits expectantly for Mailer, who is named as “the only good writer in the whole room.” Krim tells the bartender that the Beat Movement is not really a movement. “Actually, it’s an attitude in anybody who’s young or young at heart. It’s a posture of rebellion…a wave…that brings ideas useful to all of us interchangeably. We turn each other on.” Kerouac and Ginsberg, both of whom have something in the anthology, are not coming; the former “plays hard to get,” and the latter is in Chile. Mailer arrives in a business suit, and a young man informs him that he has been telling people to buy Deaths for the Ladies (62.3). “‘Say, thanks,’ Mailer said, looking bashful.” Praised for the scene in the collection from his unfinished play, The Deer Park, in which the atom bomb goes off, Mailer says, “That part’s all right. Then I’ve got two more scenes after that, they’re even better.” Nobody asks Mailer for an autograph, which another young man says is “a mark of his skill.” The Fawcett host tells the New Yorker reporter that the young woman on the cover of the book is “an associate editor on our books. She’s not Beat at all. We put her on because she looked so typical.” See 57.2, 59.11, 59.13, 60.4, 67.13.