When the Village Was the Vanguard

For four centuries, America's poets, artists, addicts and misfits all headed to one Manhattan neighborhood.       

By HENRY ALLEN

 

    

Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village  

    

The glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the Greenwich Village that was Greenwich Village: all gone.

The difference being that in my long, casual acquaintance, I have learned that the Village was always gone. Whenever you got there you were always too late, and there was always some bring-down artist to tell you so.

The Village

By John Strausbaugh
Ecco, 624 pages, $29.99

 

Half a century ago I'd be drinking with journalists at the Lion's Head or admiring the cool of chess hustlers in a coffeehouse or checking out the leotards and kohl-rimmed eyes of bookstore chicks mulling copies of "The Myth of Sisyphus," this being long ago when it was hip to be intellectual. Bliss until Mr. Bring-Down appeared, as he always did, shrugging and nodding, hipper than hip.
The Village is over, man, nothing left but tourists and folk singers from New Jersey . . . ad men digging Thelonious at the Five Spot with their bored girlfriends . . . acidheads running into traffic on Sixth Avenue . . . gay orgies in the backs of meatpacking trucks . . .
Now all that's gone too. The Village may be seriously over this time, says John Strausbaugh in his encyclopedic, 624-page "The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues."
Four centuries! Other refuges for the marginal and the alienated come and go, but the Village goes back to the "free negro lots" established by the Dutch as a buffer against the Lenape Indians. Revolutionary War firebrand Thomas Paine lived there, then Edgar Allan Poe, who was called "America's first bohemian."
By the mid-19th century tourists were coming to Pfaff's restaurant to "get a look at the lions of bohemia," the New York Times reported. Recalling the old days at Pfaff's, Walt Whitman wrote: "Ah, the friends and names and frequenters, those times, that place. Most are dead . . . "
Mr. Strausbaugh places the Golden Age of the Village in the 1910s, but you suspect that even then Theodore Dreiser, Edward Hopper, Emma Goldman and Eugene O'Neill were probably saying the Village had gone to hell since Winslow Homer and Mark Twain left.
He notes that "every generation who misspent their youth there declared it over by the time they'd grown out of it." However: "Today, it does seem dead . . . a magnet for millionaires, not misfits."
Woody Guthrie, W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, Burl Ives, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, James Agee, Paul Robeson . . .
A neutron bomb of money seems to have vaporized the old Village people and left their buildings for the rich to occupy. The crooked streets and cobblestones abide, but the most celebrated artists are chefs. Nannies push strollers down sidewalks where Irish longshoremen's wives once hung out windows and screamed at their kids Kevinyastoopididiotdattruckcouldakilledya . . .
These were the members of the working class who lived in the cold-water walk-ups that poets could also afford. Tradesmen drank in bars next to artists, who felt enlivened by their authenticity. The Village was where Ivy League Marxists got to meet real proletarians.
"It's not the same," says Suze Rotolo, a crown princess of the '60s Village. "It still looks wonderful but it lost its funk." Rotolo, who died of lung cancer in 2011, was the girlfriend who appeared on the 1963 cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," an album that changed America.
The cover was everything you wanted to believe about the Village—Dylan and Suze cuddle for warmth as they shamble down a slushy winter street with its fire-escape buildings, half-frozen but all possibility. They "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars," as Jack Kerouac once wrote. It was such a powerful image that Wal-Mart WMT +0.99% sells it as a jigsaw puzzle.
Everything was possible and nothing quite real. Everyone could be a living legend, or imagine themselves one. In Edna St. Vincent Millay's anthemic 1920 metaphor, they were free to burn their candles at both ends.
Mr. Strausbaugh says: "The history of Greenwich Village is littered with the corpses of those who drank themselves to creative ruin or death, overdosed on various drugs, committed alcohol- or drug-fueled murder or suicide or partied themselves into oblivion. Their excesses could be heroic, despicable, or just ridiculous. In Village lore self-destruction was often revered as martyrdom." Like Keats and the Romantic movement, the Village was "half in love with easeful death."
Among the destroyed: bebop heroin genius Charlie Parker at 34, poet Dylan Thomas drinking his way into that good night at 39, ultimately hip comedian Lenny Bruce overdosing at 40, abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock dead of drunk driving at 44 . . .
And, toward the end, the uncountable victims of AIDS.
From its start in the 1600s, the Village "was a zone of rogues and outcasts," Mr. Strausbaugh writes. What is now Washington Square held a potter's field, a dueling ground and a gallows. It was converted to a parade ground, but gun-carriage wheels sometimes broke through to reveal the corpses of fever victims in yellow shrouds. Chronic instability meant infinite promise and an absence of rules.
Since the idea of bohemia arose, the Village has balanced on the teetering rock of a contradiction. Before the 19th century, artists had been supported by the church or the nobility. With the rise of the bourgeois, they were forced into the marketplace. They didn't like it. Artists became prophets who railed at the "philistines," the very bourgeois who bought their work.
Not everyone wanted to live in the Village, but almost anyone could. In 1640, the south end of Manhattan contained "the motliest assortment of souls in Christendom," according to a history of New York. Three centuries later, heiress Mabel Dodge, doyenne of the Golden Age, held salons with guests she described as "Socialists, Trade Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, 'Old Friends,' Psychoanalysts . . . Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern Artists." When she left to settle in Taos, N.M., the Village must have seemed over yet again.
In 1927 the Christian Science Monitor ran an obituary headlined: "Greenwich Village Too Costly Now for Artists To Live There," but merrily, warily, scarily it rolled along. In the 1930s, Stalinists vied with Trotskyists. Popular Frontists argued about the Hitler-Stalin pact. The great proletarian novel became a new grail that was never found.
After World War II, with the Communist Party irrelevant and the organization man ascendant, the Village seemed gone once more. Rebirth came in the form of bebop, beatniks, bongo drums, benzedrine, Brando . . . happenings, hootenannies, heroin, Hans Hofmann . . .
There were underground movies such as "Pull My Daisy," with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso failing to turn Beat narcissism into art. The Village Voice became the newspaper of record for hipsters nationwide. Jules Feiffer taught college boys about hipness by satirizing it in his weekly cartoon.
With the increasing abstraction of jazz came also the rise of folk music, a child of the left: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Then Village rock with the Velvet Underground and Jimi Hendrix.
With the anti-Vietnam movement came furies. The upscale revolutionaries of the Weather Underground planned to bomb Fort Dix but blew up only their own comfortable townhouse on West 11th Street. Everyone sensed they'd had it coming.
With the '70s came the joyless self-righteousness of radical politics. Even sex was politics, as in the feminist periodical Off Our Backs. The remaining Marxists cringed as the construction-worker proletariat beat up peace demonstrators.
As time went along, jazz ceased to give us culture heroes like Miles Davis. There's still theater in Greenwich Village, but what countercultural production has the impact of Jack Gelber's "The Connection" or "Dutchman" by LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka?
The last hurrah of the old Village may have been shouted by the gay activists of the "Stonewall Uprising." One miraculous night in 1969, after eons of cringing, they fought back against cops who were busting one of their bars, the Stonewall.
Gay pride was born, a sort of triumphalism that would liberate homosexuals and, in the Village, give sex the status of a performance art, with drag queens, leather bars and sado-masochism on rotting Hudson River piers, where one Villager is cited here as recalling "seeing the bodies of cats" who'd been attacked by rats "who ate part of them."
When the rats are eating the cats, something has gone wrong.
Was this what Whitman foresaw? He wrote: "I am for those who believe in loose delights— / I share the midnight orgies of young men."
AIDS arrived. One theory has it that as the gays disappeared the rich arrived too. The Village got gentrified. Now it has the quaintness of a stage set in storage. The same thing has happened to similar scenes—Provincetown, Taos, the Hamptons, where Pollock could once afford to live—the difference being that the Village had lasted so very long.
You might wish that Mr. Strausbaugh had provided more analysis of all the zeitgeists and ideologies—avant-garde aesthetics, dialectical materialism, the free-love movement, the sort of experimental art whose experiments usually failed—but there are no anecdotes or biographies here that you'd want to sacrifice to make room for theory. Instead, in his easy lope of a style, the author brings back the ghosts you still feel in the old streets—ectoplasmic wisps of Ginsberg's "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."
Thelonious Monk, Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, John Dos Passos, Billy Holiday, Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Sanger, Clifford Odets, Sinclair Lewis . . .
Are there any fashionably outrageous places left where only outsiders can be insiders? Where hip is actually hip, with a claim on truth, and not just stingy-brim hats at music festivals? Will an electronic Village evolve from the ooze of the Internet? Do we want it to? Is it possible that Bob Dylan's hard rain has fallen?
—Mr. Allen, a former writer and editor for the Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000.