“Greenwich Village isn’t what it used to be,” Ross Wetzsteon announced in his delightful history of Greenwich Village, “Republic of Dreams.” He went on, with a hint of self-mockery, to say that the phrase was first used in 1916. Nothing is really quite what it used to be.We are reminded of Heraclitus’s observation that you never step into the same river twice.

In his new memoir, “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag: And Other Intimate Portraits of the Bohemian Era” (University of Wisconsin Press, 284 pages, $29.95), the poet Edward Field laments the passing of the bohemian era of Greenwich Village as he has known it. The book is a bit of a disappointment, shedding little light on any of the subjects that fall under Mr. Field’s scrutiny – with one exception, Alfred Chester. It is Chester, a flamboyant gay man, who decided at a point when he was near a breakdown that he wanted to marry Sontag.

Mr. Field is a modest presence in his own memoir. For almost two decades he has earned his small living by giving readings of his poetry. Mr. Field’s first collection, “Stand Up, Friend, With Me,”won the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Award, and his “Selected Poems, 1963-1992” won a Lambda Literary Award. He is author of another collection, “A Frieze for a Temple of Love,” and co-author, with his partner, Neil Derrick, of the best-selling novel “The Villagers.”

Mr. Field’s introduction to poetry came when he was serving in the Army Air Forces. (He was a heavy bomber navigator in World War II and flew 25 missions over Europe.) Upon returning to the United States he enrolled at New York University, mostly avoiding class es and hanging out in the cafeteria where he met a few like-minded literary types, among them Alfred Chester.

Not finding academia to his liking, Mr. Field dropped out of college, took his saved flying pay, and went off to France. For two years he lived the life of the expatriate, meeting American poets Robert Friend, Ralph Pomeroy, and Dunstan Thompson, most of whom are now forgotten.Like many others,he returned when the money ran out.

Chester was clearly one of the great influences on Mr. Field’s life, and he has spent much of the last several years trying to resurrect Chester’s reputation. A strange figure, Chester was virtually unknown by the time he died in 1971. Radiation treatment of a childhood disease left him completely hairless, a fact he never acknowledged. He wore a slightly bedraggled orange wig that comically accentuated his hairlessness rather than hid it.

Chester published his fiction in major magazines – the New Yorker, Botteghe Oscure, and Esquire – and established a reputation as a scathing and authoritative critic in the New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and Commentary. He won a Guggenheim fellowship, and his novels and short stories garnered praise from the likes of V. S. Pritchett and Gore Vidal. But his increasing paranoia and his early death brought short his career.

Chester was briefly smitten with Susan Sontag, who reportedly called him the most fascinating man in New York. The attraction led him to doubt his identity as a homosexual. But Mr. Field’s comments on Sontag tell us little about this intellectual powerhouse, the “dark lady” of New York intellectual life; though she looms large in the title, she barely figures in the narrative.

May Swenson appears sketchily in his account, as do Paul and Jane Bowles. Mr. Field also had a brief relationship with Frank O’Hara, but his portrait of O’Hara adds nothing to the literature beyond something curious about O’Hara’s penis – to which artists, he says, never did justice, and which we, surely, didn’t need to know.

Mr. Field is much given to namedropping. But often they are the wrong names. At one literary party he meets Rose “MacCauley” (sic) as well as T.S. Eliot and his friend “Max [sic] Hayward.” The journalist Walter Clemons becomes Walter Clemmons. The novelist Marianne Wiggins is transformed into Marianne Williamson, and Nikos Kazantzakis is breezily referred to as Kazantzaki. In the index Whittaker Chambers is made singular as Whittaker Chamber. And this is from a university press.

This book is like a long chat with the reader over a glass or two. It is conversational and meandering. The prose is pedestrian and colorless; one might have thought a poet could occasionally come up with an arresting phrase.

Mr. Field is a gay man and consequently much of his history concerns figures who were also gay.The book is part of a series of gay and lesbian autobiographies called “Living Out.” But surely there must have been a few heterosexual bohemians living in his Greenwich Village. Still, if this book arouses greater interest in Alfred Chester, it will have served some purpose.

Mr. Volkmer, deputy treasurer of the village of Southampton, writes regularly about books and music for the Southampton Press.