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Sunday, July 21, 2002
Beloved Community
REPUBLIC OF DREAMS: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960, By Ross
Wetzsteon, Simon &
Schuster: 620 pp., $35
By WENDY SMITH
Greenwich Village! Those two words conjure up a rush of images. Narrow, winding
streets defiantly at
odds with the grid pattern imposed on the rest of Manhattan in the early 19th century.
Tiny theaters
presenting plays no commercial producer would touch. Precariously financed magazines
publishing articles so
incendiary in language, so blunt that the contributors frequently found themselves in
court. Smoky coffee
shops crowded with people dressing and behaving in ways that would never have been
tolerated in the
hometowns they had fled.
For more than a century, the Village gave refuge to the nation's misfits,
enfolding them in a community
that embraced individual eccentricity. This community may now seem fragmented,
dispersed to New York
City's outer boroughs as rents skyrocket and the investment bankers move in, but
fragmentation, dispersal
and gentrification are nothing new. "Greenwich Village isn't what it used to be,"
critic and editor Ross
Wetzsteon reminds us, was uttered as early as 1916.
Wetzsteon's sweeping yet intimate history of America's most famous bohemian
neighborhood is,
regrettably, both the first and last book he wrote. (He edited two collections of
plays.) The intelligence, wit
and shrewd analytical abilities that distinguish "Republic of Dreams" will be familiar
qualities to those who read
Wetzsteon's theater reviews and essays in the Village Voice during the three decades
before his death in
1998.
The structural flaws of the narrative's second half may be attributed in part to
the fact that he didn't live
to finish or revise the manuscript; his daughter Rachel's afterword states that he
planned a final chapter
bringing the story up to the present. However, it's unlikely that chapter would have
resolved these technical
problems, which spring from the author's generous spirit and ambitious desire to
encompass the entire Village
experience. Like the rebels he profiles with such sympathy and acuity, Wetzsteon's
successes and failures
are inextricably intertwined.
To begin with the good news, he has written the best account to date of the
explosion of artistic and
political energy between 1912 and 1917 that has been called everything from "the
joyous season" to "the
lyric years." Wetzsteon achieves a delicate equilibrium of abiding affection and
clear-eyed criticism as he
examines such outsized personalities as Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Max Eastman, Emma
Goldman, Margaret
Sanger, Jig Cook and Eugene O'Neill, with long-overdue attention paid to lesser- known
women like Crystal
Eastman and Mary Heaton Vorse.
Through such seminal, though short-lived, institutions as The Masses magazine and
the Provincetown
Players, he argues, this generation gave shape to the amorphous notion of what it
meant to be a bohemian
in America and located its geographic center: "Young men and women dissatisfied with a
small-town or middle-
class life but only vaguely attuned to the insurgent sensibility began to hear tales
of an almost mythical place
called Greenwich Village ... where people pursued love and beauty and justice without
having to respond to
parental invocations of responsibility."
Many writers, particularly academics, have condescended to the prewar Villagers'
exuberant but
intellectually sloppy intermingling of socialism, feminism, Freudianism, modernism and
any other -ism they
could find. Popular histories such as Allen Churchill's "The Improper Bohemians,"
while more sympathetic,
have tended to jovially trivialize the rebellion as a simple expression of youthful
high spirits, which is hardly a
full assessment of the risks of lengthy jail terms knowingly taken by Sanger when she
disseminated birth-
control information or by The Masses editors when they opposed in print the United
States' entry into World
War I.
Wetzsteon avoids both of these traps. He's well aware that his subjects
"alternated between the frivolous
and the fearless," and he's particularly shrewd on the role played by their
well-publicized antics (climbing to
the top of Washington Square Arch to declare the Village "a free and independent
republic" is typical) in
establishing "a common phenomenon of the twentieth century--success measured not by
praise but by
notoriety."
But he values their espousal of personal liberation as a political principle,
spotlighting it as an enduring trait
of American dissidence in all its varieties: "Wasn't heightened consciousness the path
both to individual
happiness and social justice? Change yourself and change the world--the agenda of the
Lyrical Left in the
prewar Village may have been naive but it was hardly modest."
That all-encompassing ethos reemerged during the 1960s, and Wetzsteon (who
arrived in the Village early
in that decade) clearly shares it. He knows the difference between a visionary and a
crank, but he
understands that the Village has been shaped by both, and he refuses to leave out the
cranks. This decision,
in many ways admirable, has an ultimately unfortunate impact.
The book's first half, perfectly balanced between individual lives and communal
endeavors even in its
chapter titles ("Mabel Dodge's Salon," "Max Eastman and The Masses") closes with a
characteristically astute
portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the shift in mood during the 1920s, when new
residents saw the Village
primarily as a place where they could lead their unconventional lives unmolested by
the bourgeoisie, rather
than a staging ground for social and sexual revolution.
Had Wetzsteon stopped there, he might well have produced the definitive history
of Greenwich Village's
most culturally significant period, with suggestive foreshadowings of how 20th century
bohemianism would be
altered by the mass media.
That's not what he wanted to do. From Millay he moves on to a chapter called
"Eminent Villagers," which
showcases his gift for vivid thumbnail sketches and his mounting difficulties in
controlling the material. This
chapter takes charlatan Guido Bruno ("the Barnum of Bohemia"), genuine nut case
Baroness Elsa von
Freytag-Loringhoven (famous for bizarre costumes that several times got her arrested
for indecent
exposure), wealthy dilettante Robert Clairmont (whose open-door parties went on for
days) and "hobo
poet" Harry Kemp (first of the great Village self-mythologizers) and tosses them
together with more
substantial figures who are hardly Villagers at all.
Margaret Anderson paused there with The Little Review for a few years en route
from Chicago to Paris;
Willa Cather lived there from 1906 to 1932 because it gave her "order, comfort,
security, and especially
privacy--the very things most young people came to the Village to escape"; and
Theodore Dreiser stayed
there not because he found a community but, like the Abstract Expressionists several
decades later, he
found a neighborhood of "low rents, cheap bars, and willing women."
Wetzsteon's point, made with increasing insistence as his chronology becomes
choppier, is that the Village
"was a community in service of individuality." He doesn't flinch from showing that as
individualism came to the
fore, eccentricity often degenerated into neurosis, and the celebration of difference
became the cult of
failure.
When elderly writer Djuna Barnes, asked for her ID in order to cash a check,
loftily declares, "Do I look like
the sort of person who would have a driver's license?" it's a hilarious moment that
subtly demonstrates how
many Legendary Village Characters happily brandished their inability to deal with
modern society instead of
aspiring to change it.
But as the characters grow more self-obsessed, both they and the author's
well-articulated themes are
more tenuously related to Greenwich Village. Hart Crane and e.e. cummings both came to
dislike Village
bohemians; Dylan Thomas was a foreigner who made them an audience for his
self-destructive theatrics.
Thomas Wolfe was as crazy in Brooklyn as in downtown Manhattan; Delmore Schwartz as
alienated on college
campuses as on Greenwich Avenue. Wetzsteon's decision to thread his narrative through
personalities, which
worked well at first, begins to seem like a mistake.
From time to time--in solid chapters on Maxwell Bodenheim and Joe Gould, a tender
one on Dawn Powell--
he persuasively reforges the Village link. But the book closes, running out of steam
rather than wrapping up
with the Abstract Expressionists, who in Wetzsteon's words "never really regarded
themselves as Villagers at
all."
Perhaps it's appropriate that the author ends his account in the days just before
he came to the Village;
as he notes in the introduction, "from its very birth, bohemia seemed to exist in the
past."
There is much to like about this admittedly flawed book. It's a consistent
pleasure to read prose studded
with such marvelous sentences as these, "The Village is the only community in America
where Edgar Allan Poe
could score drugs in the 1840s and Henry James could stroll past grazing cows in the
1890s," and "Village
women ... soon learned that many men all too enthusiastically encouraged them to throw
off their clothes
along with their shackles."
Wetzsteon has sympathetically articulated a crucial tenet of bohemianism--the
insistence that personal
and political change go hand in hand--and gently identified some of its pathologies,
in particular the cult of
failure and self- destruction. Anyone who cares about American culture should read
"Republic of Dreams." Its
contradictions are our contradictions, and its largeness of heart is something that
has been sorely lacking in
our public discourse for several decades.
- - -
Wendy Smith Is the Author of "Real-life Drama: the Group Theatre and America,
1931-1940."
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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