The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Somewhere along the way he’d set his sights on becoming a professional writer, a characteristically self-defeating choice. The literary historian Sandra Tomc argues that Poe “selected a career almost guaranteed not to issue in what antebellum society judged to be pecuniary or professional success.” Writing was a marginal pursuit. Pay for all but the most popular writers and successful editors was abysmal, and no copyright laws protected work from piracy. The great mass of writers subsisted in dire poverty, unless they were “gentleman scribblers” of other means. But writing did hold out the possibility of those intangible rewards prestige and fame, which Poe, a rejected, orphaned outsider, might well crave.

  He enjoyed some early successes. “MS. Found in a Bottle” won a small literary prize in Baltimore in 1833, and the Southern Literary Review, after publishing his “Hans Pfaall,” brought him to Richmond as editor in 1835. He thrived there, greatly increasing the magazine’s circulation while building his own repute as a wickedly sharp-tongued critic with the temerity to go after giants of the New England literary establishment the likes of Longfellow. (Boston, not New York, was still the capital of American literature at the time.) But he barely earned a living wage, drank heavily, and suffered black bouts of suicidal depression. In 1836, when he was twenty-seven, he married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. After his drinking got him fired from the Messenger the following year, he brought his child bride and her mother to New York. Not a fan of city life, Poe set them up in a house in what was still, if barely, the suburbs: 137 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. During their short stay he published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, then moved to Philadelphia in 1838 to edit a magazine, and it was here that he published most of the stories on which his reputation rests: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and others. But his salary never lifted him out of poverty, and his alcoholism and disputatious temper again got him fired.

  In 1844 he brought the frail and tubercular Virginia back to New York. They stopped briefly in a boardinghouse on Greenwich Street adjacent to what would become the World Trade Center site. In 1845 they rented a small house at 15 Amity Street, and later number 85. While they were at this address, the New York Evening Mirror published “The Raven,” and for the first time Poe achieved some of the popular success he’d craved. It was an instant hit, widely reprinted, parodied (“The Pole-Cat” amused Abraham Lincoln), and translated into French by Baudelaire and Mallarmé. On the strength of its popularity, the firm of Wiley and Putnam quickly published his Tales, his first book in five years, and The Raven and Other Poems. It was also in 1845 that he briefly co-owned and edited his own publication, the weekly Broadway Journal, which debuted in January of that year and died for lack of funds in January 1846.

  Despite his success, he remained a gloomy, high-strung, contrarian figure. Tomc speculates that although he certainly was all these things, he might have exaggerated his public persona. Many writers and editors of the period cultivated outré reputations as arrogant fops, decadent voluptuaries, immoral lechers, and pugnacious enemies of their contemporaries, hoping to stand out from the rest of the pack. Poe may have played up his glum demeanor as he fulfilled the many requests to read “The Raven” in public. In 1846, with Virginia fading away, the Poes moved out to the Bronx countryside, where in 1847, barely in her mid-twenties, she died. In 1849 Poe left New York for Richmond, where he wooed a widow. As they were making wedding plans, he took a train for New York but somehow ended up in Baltimore instead, where he was found lying on a street in a drunken stupor. He died there, a few months shy of forty-one, on October 7, 1849.

  Poe was quickly labeled America’s “first bohemian,” not only here but in literary France as well. It is a reputation that’s still attached to him today, but it’s doubtful he’d be pleased. Unlike the bohemians, Poe never flaunted his poverty—it was a source of constant shame and misery to him. He didn’t loaf and carouse like a bohemian; he worked himself to the nub trying to support himself, his frail wife, and his mother-in-law, and he drank alone, out of depression. He didn’t reject mainstream values; he sought respect, approval, and success all his truncated life. If he was America’s preeminent poète maudit of the time, it wasn’t by his choice.

  Poe’s memory was insulted at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and another controversial New York University building was the source. In 2000 the university announced a plan to erect a new law school building, Furman Hall, on West Third Street between Sullivan and Thompson Streets, the block where the small brick house once known as 85 Amity Street still stood and was cherished by Villagers as the Poe House. Of course, Poe lived in so many places that there are Poe Houses in several locations; the city of Baltimore, for instance, preserves its own little brick Poe House, as it happens on its own Amity Street, and the Bronx has the Poe Cottage. Nonetheless, NYU’s plan to demolish this particular Poe House raised a furor of opposition among Village residents, preservationists, literary organizations, and celebrities from E. L. Doctorow to Lou Reed, who in 2003 released a two-CD collection of songs inspired by Poe, which he titled The Raven. Pressed on all sides, the university agreed to preserve and somehow incorporate the Poe House into its giant new building. The result is a reproduction brick facade bizarrely embedded in the West Third Street wall of the mammoth building. It looks like a skin graft that didn’t take. The bricks, windows, and door appear to be brand-new. A plaque on the wall informs the passerby that this facade is an “interpretive reconstruction” of the demolished Poe House. The “Poe Room” inside is open to the public for exactly two hours per week, 9 to 11 on Thursday mornings. Furman Hall does salute Poe’s legacy in one other, no doubt unintentional, way: it’s grim as a mausoleum, and the color of dried blood.

  Village lore tenuously connects Poe to one other building in the neighborhood, the appropriately odd Northern Dispensary, the brick triangle where Waverly Place splits and runs into Christopher Street, a few steps from where Poe lived in 1837. It was built in 1831 as the city’s second clinic for the poor, and Poe, who certainly was that, is said to have stopped in with a head cold. As the city grew up around the Village the dispensary staff kept busy, writing more than twenty thousand prescriptions in 1886. Patients dwindled in the twentieth century as more hospitals appeared, and by the 1960s it was solely a dental clinic. In the 1980s it notoriously refused to serve HIV patients and shut down in 1989.

  BY 1850 GREENWICH VILLAGE HAD BEEN SURROUNDED AND ENGULFED by the city, yet it retained a distinctive character. It stood off to one side and at an angle. Its spaghetti of narrow streets west of today’s Sixth Avenue enforced a casual pace, its quaint houses and small shops calming. Until the Seventh and Sixth Avenue extensions, and the subway lines below them, spiked through the Village in the following century, the business and traffic of the city flowed around and past it. Its waterfront bustled, but otherwise it remained a bedroom community, largely free of industrial buildup. It was a backwater, an eddy. Still, it was part of the city now, a neighborhood rather than a village or suburb. Most people didn’t even call it Greenwich Village: west of Sixth Avenue was now the Ninth Ward and around Washington Square and Fifth Avenue was the Fifteenth. Wards were political subdivisions. The Fifteenth Ward was nicknamed the Empire Ward for the high number of wealthy and powerful patricians who lived there. The Ninth came to be known as the American or Yankee Ward, because the wave after wave of new immigrants coming into the city from eastern and southern Europe largely flowed around it. In 1875 about one in three residents of the Ninth Ward was foreign-born, as opposed to areas such as the Lower East Side, its tenements bursting at the seams with new Jewish, Italian, Ukrainian, and other immigrants. The population would change. The immigrants and industry would come, as would apartment towers and tourist honky-tonk. Yet as the rest of Manhattan filled up with skyscrapers and giant apartment buildings, the Village’s “quaint” and charming qualities ensured that
it was never fully transformed and absorbed by the metropolis around it.

  3

  The First Bohemians

  GIVE ME NOW LIBIDINOUS JOYS ONLY!

  GIVE ME THE DRENCH OF MY PASSIONS! GIVE ME LIFE COARSE AND RANK!

  TO-DAY, I GO CONSORT WITH NATURE’S DARLINGS—TO-NIGHT TOO,

  I AM FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN LOOSE DELIGHTS—I SHARE THE MIDNIGHT ORGIES OF YOUNG MEN,

  I DANCE WITH THE DANCERS, AND DRINK WITH THE DRINKERS

  —Walt Whitman

  AT 643 BROADWAY BETWEEN BLEECKER AND WEST THIRD Streets an upscale bar-lounge opened in 2011. Through a discreet entrance you descended a narrow stairway to a dimly lit basement. The walls were bare brick but otherwise the space was appointed to evoke sumptuous nineteenth-century indulgence: a long bar of carved oak, stuffed chairs, pleated leather banquettes, carpeted floors, paintings of reclining nudes. It looked like a place where diamond-studded robber barons of the Gilded Age might sit with cigars and brandy between stuffing themselves full of oysters at Delmonico’s and sampling the ladies at the high-class bordello upstairs. Pretty young waitresses in corsets and fishnet stockings abetted the anachronistically risqué atmosphere as they ferried trays of high-priced cocktails to today’s gentlemen and ladies of industry.

  It was called the Vault at Pfaff’s, from a line of Walt Whitman’s, and claimed a lineage to a subterranean Broadway rathskeller where Whitman and his friends quaffed and gabbed a hundred and fifty years earlier. It’s not unusual for bars in New York to adopt some historical theme in their decor and promotion—or to fudge the history as needed. The original Pfaff’s was actually in the basement next door, under the deli and shoe store at 645–647 Broadway. The building at 643 Broadway didn’t exist in Pfaff’s time. And Pfaff’s famous clientele were both more boisterous and less well heeled than the young urban professionals sipping concoctions named the Leaves of Grass and the Smoking Revolver in today’s establishment. They were frayed-collar journalists and poets, struggling artists, and actresses with somewhat salty reputations, and they created New York’s first celebrated bohemian scene.

  THE TERM “BOHEMIAN” HAD FIRST BEEN APPLIED TO POOR ARTISTS and poets on the Left Bank in Paris in the 1830s, but the idea was still new enough in America twenty years later that the New York Times felt obliged to offer a long and rather dismissive definition in 1858. To understand how and why bohemianism came to New York when it did, it helps to know something of its origins. Bourgeois culture and bohemian counterculture were created at the same time, and by the same great force, the industrial revolution. It was then, at the end of the 1700s, that the economies of Europe turned away from peasant agrarianism toward urban industrialism. Cities swelled with the rise of the new middle class and working class. (Both terms come to us from this period, along with “industry,” “factory,” “capitalism,” and “socialism.”) Merchants became captains of industry; peasants flooded in from the countryside to become the new urban proletariat. At the same time, waves of democratic revolt and reform, following the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, were dismantling the long-held powers of monarchs, feudal landlords, and the Church. The freethinking individual of the Enlightenment became the primary and ideal unit of the new social and political order.

  The role of artists, writers, and other creative workers in this period was subject to these drastic changes as well. Until now, the arts had largely been created for and supported by either the Church or noble patrons. The masons who carved the great cathedrals, the painters who adorned them, and the composers who wrote the music for the Mass were all skilled artisans, usually guild members working collectively. They had a fixed place and purpose in the old social order. The idea of the individual artistic genius, free to follow his or her muse wherever she led, “would have been neither tolerated nor understood.” The few insurgent spirits such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Villon are exceptions who “stand out from the army of men with the standards of professional craftsmen and entertainers, the John Sebastian Bachs, Handels, Haydns and Mozarts, the Fragonards and Gainsboroughs.” The poet Kenneth Rexroth, a godfather to the Beats, put it succinctly: “There were no Baudelaires in Babylon.”

  Now creative workers began (theoretically) to enjoy the same individual freedoms that everyone else (theoretically) did. Instead of obediently creating their works for the Church and the nobility, they were free to create whatever they wanted. But this meant competing for sales in a new marketplace, where the burgeoning middle class “required furniture, ceramics, paintings, ornaments, textiles and wallpapers for their homes, and formed a growing educated audience for literature, painting, music and the performance arts.” To lessen the sting of having to sell themselves to the bourgeois philistines (another coinage from the period), artists began to define themselves as superior to their buyers. One of the seminal creations of this period is the idea of the artist as tortured genius, in every way finer, braver, more sensitive, more angelic, and more satanic than those mere shopkeepers and merchants who had the privilege of consuming the products of his greatness.

  With all these new freedoms came another: the freedom to starve. Without the support of the Church, noblemen, and the old guilds the creative worker was now “left to cast his soul upon a blind market, to be bought or not.” Then as now, for every successful, celebrated creative worker there were many, many others who shivered and scrounged in obscurity. This is when the first identified “bohemians” emerge. In Paris by the 1820s young, hungry artists and intellectuals gathered together in the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank around the Sorbonne—the old student district, where Latin had been the common tongue of the international university crowd, and where, more to the point, the rents were very cheap. In many respects the lives they pursued there were indistinguishable from long-standing traditions in any university district in any city. Unencumbered by bourgeois concerns of getting and spending, they slept late and caroused early, clustered in cheap cafés to drink bad wine and shout lofty philosophies, experimented with drugs and with the occult, espoused free love, befriended the lower orders, developed an unhealthy fascination with romantic death and tragic suicide, and created art, literature, and ideas guaranteed to shock and confound their elders. The term “bohemian” was apparently first applied to them by a journalist named Felix Pyat in 1834. The French had long called Gypsies bohemians, because they were thought to come from the kingdom of Bohemia. (They were “gypsies” because they were thought to have come to Bohemia from Egypt.)

  The inherent conflicts, confusions, and stresses that continue to dog the relationship of bohemian countercultures to their bourgeois markets were in place early. In rejecting the restrictions of capitalism and exploring the outer edges of individualism, bohemians were “essentially an oppositional fraction of the bourgeois class,” “acting out the conflicts inherent in the bourgeois character . . . Many non-Bohemians experienced the same ambivalence” about their roles in the new social order “but they did not devote their lives to living it out.” Writing about his Greenwich Village years in Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley points out that there had always been poor writers and artists, and they’d often clustered together in metropolitan ghettos, from ancient Rome and Alexandria to Grub Street, the shabby zone of hack writers and cheapjack publishers in eighteenth-century London. What was new about the bohemians, he argues, was their confrontational attitude and behavior: “Bohemia is Grub Street romanticized, doctrinalized and rendered self-conscious; it is Grub Street on parade.”

  Fifteen years after Pyat coined the term, another French writer, Henry Murger, went a long way toward romanticizing bohemia and thus launched it into international popular culture. Murger himself was a bohemian more by association and necessity than personal desire. Born into the lower end of the middle class, son of a tailor/janitor and a concierge, he decided not to follow his father’s trade and pursued writing instead. He wrote as “Henry” rather than his given “Henri” because he thought the exotic Eng
lish spelling would get him noticed. He was scrounging, doing hack work for various publications, when he began to write a series of feuilletons—brief sketches of everyday affairs, like the “Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker—in a small newspaper in 1845, portraying the lives, loves, and carefree poverty of his bohemian friends. At first the public barely noticed, but when the sketches were reworked into a play, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, first produced in Paris in 1849, it was an enormous hit. Suddenly all Paris—then all France, then all of the Western world—was fascinated with bohemians. Riding the wave, Murger put out Scènes as a book in 1851 and it became an international best seller.

  Bohemians fired imaginations everywhere—London, Berlin, Munich, St. Petersburg—and the wave hit American shores in the 1850s. One of the first American-born bohemians was James McNeill Whistler. He has come down to us as the painter of a dour, dark portrait of his mother, but Whistler himself cut an aggressively bright figure in the world. Born in New England in 1834, raised partly in Russia and London, the twenty-two-year-old moved to Paris in 1855, apparently under the spell of Murger’s novel. He took a studio in the Latin Quarter and soon fell into the bohemian life, which almost killed him within a few years. He affected flouncy, eccentric outfits and outrageous public behavior, while counting Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Marcel Proust, and Édouard Manet among his acquaintances. On returning to London, he continued to play the oddly dressed, larger-than-life, two-fisted bohemian for the rest of his days, attracting a lot of press, alienating a lot of fellow artists and wealthy patrons, and inspiring a new generation of young aesthetes. Whistler was the first notable American-born artist actually to settle in bohemian Paris, as opposed to those who would make brief tourist pilgrimages beginning in the mid-1850s.