Crasses et Voluptés

After leaving college Richard went to live in Greenwich Village. He made friends easily, he had a gift for endearing himself with others, and he sought out interesting and talented people. Soon he knew many of the writers and artists of the early 1940's including Eugene O'Neill's sons and his ex-wife, Agnes O'Neill. But the scene in Greenwich Village was too rough for him and he moved to Los Angeles. He soon met writers and artists there too in the circle of people around Charlie Chaplin through his connection with Charlie's young wife, Oona O'Neill Chaplin. After a period of living in Los Angeles he moved to Mexico, meeting artists and writers there, collecting paintings and buying books. He had excellent taste in modern and ethnic art, modern music, and modern poetry. He loved the French poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and could recite from memory poems of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine.

But he was nervous and uncomfortable with life. He returned to St. Louis and his family's home to begin psychoanalysis – at that time all the rage. Everyone who was anyone had psychoanalysis. He backed a small bar, Little Bohemia, near the St. Louis riverfront with painter Stanley Radulovich and antique dealer, Jay Landesman. The bar had sawdust on the floor, modern paintings on the walls, and Edith Piaf on the jukebox. It was unique in the entire central part of the United States. Richard, working as a waiter there met his future wife, Anne Browning Williams, who came down with a group of friends from Washington University to experience this exotic, artistic ambience.

A few years later Richard backed, with Jay and Fred Landesman, the Crystal Palace, the first bar in the country where poetry was read to live jazz. At about this same time Richard and Jay Landesman founded the small literary magazine, Neurotica, first published in Spring of 1948. Richard was the editor. Neurotica became a well known magazine and printed many of the "beat" writers for the first time.

Richard and Anne moved to San Francisco, where soon Richard was knocking elbows with the poets of that city, among them, Kenneth Rexroth, Chris McLaine and Philip Lamantia, a period now call The San Francisco Renaissance. Richard and Anne, with Anne doing the publishing, distributing, secretarial work, and typesetting on the old Anarchist press in a house on Potrero Hill, founded and edited two small poetry magazines, Inferno (late 1949) and Gryphon (Spring, 1950).

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