4 Patchin Place
(off West 10th Street between 6th Avenue and Greenwich Avenue)
Continue west on Waverley Place until you get to 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas). Turn right on 6th Avenue until you reach West 10th. Turn left on West 10th. E.E. Cummings’s apartment is a little way down on the right in Patchin Place and can be viewed from the street on West 10th.
Dylan’s Friendships
The American poet e.e. cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings) lived here, with his third wife Marion Morehouse, a photographer and fashion model, from 1923 until his death in 1962. Dylan really admired cummings and, on his first tour of New York, he made a special request to Brinnin to arrange a meeting with him. Brinnin, who was present when Dylan and e.e. met, wrote in Dylan Thomas in America, “…it seemed to me that some of their judgements showed the acerb, profound and confident insights of artists who in their work have defined a world within the world…”
Cummings, in fact, had been in the audience at Dylan’s first reading at the Kaufmann Auditorium of the 92nd Street Y on February 23 1950, where Dylan delivered a spellbinding performance to an audience of more than 1000 people. The overwhelmed and appreciative audience refused to let him leave the stage. According to Marion Morehouse, cummings was so moved he walked the streets for hours afterwards. The following week Morehouse invited Dylan over to take his photograph. Dylan had had a few drinks and attempted a playful seduction. She described him as “Groucho Marx on a bad day.”
There is another connection between Patchin Place and Dylan. The writer Djuna Barnes,an obsessive recluse, lived in 5 Patchin Place from the 1940s onwards. According to Constantine Fitzgibbon, Dylan’s first biographer, Barnes, along with James Joyce, influenced Dylan’s early prose writing. He particularly liked her novel Nightwood (1936).
