I was not at all put off by Arthur’s personality. Quite the contrary. I had always been an amalgam of doer and dreamer. The dreamer’s world was a secret hideaway for me during the lean, gray years. In the competitive school world, the doer stepped forward as needed and gradually took the helm. But the old dreamer was only dormant, biding his time. Now, as this fellow dreamer spoke of alternate colors for grass, I recognized at once that something of great importance was being granted to me. How little I grasped, at the time, just how great it was.
Thus began my shadow university education, one that sustains me still.
For a junk dealer’s boy from Buffalo, Manhattan was a magnificent and magical peach, its sweet riches begging to be sampled—but never to be fully devoured. It was (and is) something of a living museum, some wings devoted to money and deal making, others to the sensibilities and the intellect. For us students, it was definitely mind over money.
With Arthur and sometimes my other favorite classmate, Jerry Speyer, I would explore Greenwich Village, Chinatown, Little Italy, Harlem, and many other neighborhoods. Each had its own distinct character: “ethnic” foods (as we say these days), cafés, clubs, music, street fairs, and a feast of distinctive architecture and streetscapes—sometimes inherited from previous ethnic groups that had moved on to the suburbs.
We were half mad with the excitement—and ultimately the bittersweet frustration—of all the plays that cried out to be seen; the great and small art and history museums and libraries to be explored; the classical, pop, and jazz concerts; the secondhand bookstores (most now long gone); the art galleries on 57th Street and along Madison Avenue.
As my freshman year moved along, I developed nothing less than a hunger for art. The museums were, for me, sanctuaries, holy places. My two, going on three, years in the city with my eyesight still functional provided me with a storehouse of art—images archived in my memory. I learned to use art to live, not just “appreciate” it in passing.
Then there were the riveting and breakthrough new films: Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, among others. We saw these in the movie houses on the Upper West Side, such as the New Yorker (now replaced by a supermarket and high-rise apartments) or the Thalia, or at “art houses” down in the Village.
The musical menu during those days was equally sumptuous: rock and roll or jazz some evenings, classical music other times. Imagine going to Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Everybody was playing there—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Richie Havens. Jazz clubs all over town featured the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Art Blakey, Ron Carter, and Duke Ellington. One of our haunts, not far from campus, was the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem. (Decades later, Jerry would be instrumental in restoring it to its former glory.)
There was no end to the city’s pleasures and gifts. A single individual could not possibly attend every event, every exhibition, given even a hundred hours in a day, every day of the year. It was truly a moveable feast for us, which we dined on as we could, given the constraints of time and cash.
While Arthur and I disagreed on the comparative appeal of musical instruments (guitar for him, trumpet for me), we were in accord on the music itself. For one thing, we agreed on the beauty of the “Kol Nidre,” the poignant Ashkenazic prayer sung on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Perhaps, we once brainstormed, we could take the best of Jewish music, such as the “Kol Nidre,” which Max Bruch had made world famous in his variations for cello, meld it with the best of Christian music—Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor—and produce a transcendent sound.
Certain musical experiences from those Columbia years remain especially clear in memory. In one, a young man moved to the front of a stage, bowed appreciatively, and took his seat at the harpsichord. With a flourish, he began to lead the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. The sound of the brilliant and uplifting music, carrying the precision of Bach’s day, seemed a parallel to our dynamic technological era. The forceful conductor, the young Leonard Bernstein, somehow captured what I thought I was in the process of becoming.
Another time, I was settled in the second-to-last row at the old Metropolitan Opera house, having purchased a ticket for fifty cents. The visual presentation of the performance covered the vast expanse of the opera house’s stage in such splendor I almost felt my senses paralyzed. While the story of Aida was tragic, the music of the “Triumphal March” presaged a great future. My future. Or so I—an eager, somewhat arrogant young man—thought at the time.
I sometimes meditate on that moment at the opera.
So it was my first years at Columbia. One day, as Arthur and I rested on the sundial on College Walk, he hesitantly revealed that he liked to sing. I asked him to sing for me. He demurred. To reassure him, I told him that I played the trumpet. After a short pause, he sang, “Bye bye love. Bye bye happiness. Hello loneliness. I think I’m gonna cry-y.”
“Arthur, that was terrific,” I burst out, pleased with his singing and his selection of an Everly Brothers song. “Have you been singing long?” I asked.
“Well, mainly to myself,” he said. “When I went to temple with my parents, when I was five or so, I learned some of the melodies. They stuck with me, and after school I sang them to myself on the walk home. I like to walk alone and sing. It’s great when no one’s around because I can let go. I love the feel of it.”
“I used to sing the
