The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  With its tiny circulation, The Masses couldn’t make a dent in the news blackout. When Haywood complained to Dodge’s circle that there must be a better way to make New Yorkers aware, Reed, Dodge, and John Sloan conceived the Paterson Strike Pageant. The theme would be radical but the form wasn’t. Large-scale theatrical pageants were popular and familiar in America at the time. They were organized to celebrate history, mark centennials or other holidays, and teach civic, moral, or religious lessons. Haywood’s Village friends imagined a giant pageant in which the Paterson workers themselves would act out the strike on the stage of some big hall in New York City, which would raise both public sympathy for the strikers and funds to help the strike continue. Haywood thought it was a capital idea. Flynn was less enthusiastic, concerned that it could distract the workers from manning the picket lines.

  Reed, with Dodge’s help, wrote the pageant and rehearsed the cast of more than a thousand workers. Sloan painted giant, realistic backdrops. New York City’s garment workers, with the Triangle fire still seared in their memories, raised the funds to rent Madison Square Garden for one night. At that time the Garden was still at Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, its grand old edifice well worn and dingy, its tower topped with a statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, drawing her bow.

  On the morning of June 7, Reed led eleven hundred workers onto a train from Paterson to Manhattan, where they marched in a grand procession up Fifth Avenue and into the Garden. As dark fell, red lights on the tower—installed without permission—lit up, blazing “IWW” for everyone in Manhattan to see. Down on the street, the line for tickets stretched an incredible twenty-eight blocks. Box seats cost sympathetic toffs thirty dollars, but the great majority of the audience got in for the workers’ price of a quarter, or free if they showed their union cards. A beyond-capacity crowd of fifteen thousand packed the arena, which was draped in red banners, and thrilled as troops of Paterson workers marched down the aisles to the huge stage, where they sang and acted out the heroic story of their strike in simple tableaux.

  Like the Armory Show a few months earlier, the Paterson Pageant was an undeniable triumph of organization, but its outcomes ranged from disappointing to disastrous for its organizers. Reed, who’d thrown himself into it with reckless gusto, was reduced to near complete exhaustion. Mabel Dodge seized the opportunity to whisk him off to Paris and Florence where, she confides rapturously in her memoirs, “at last I learned what a honeymoon should be.” She was one of the few organizers to benefit. As a fund-raiser for the strikers the pageant was a bust. And, as Flynn had predicted, it distracted the strikers from the picket lines, allowing scab workers to filter into the mills. She and Haywood fell out over it; the strike foundered and collapsed by the end of July. It was a mortifying defeat for the IWW and the beginning of its decline.

  On another scale, the pageant may have done its job all too well. Civic and business leaders read those big red IWW signs blazing from the top of Madison Square Garden as a dire warning. Coming on the heels of the outrageous Armory Show, the Paterson Pageant convinced them that dangerous radicals and extremists were attacking from all sides. The Times ran an editorial that began, “Under the direction of a destructive organization opposed in spirit and antagonistic in action to all the forces which have upbuilded this republic . . .” and went on to claim that the purpose of the pageant was “to inspire hatred, to induce violence.”

  It took a few years, but when the establishment struck back it did so in deadly earnest.

  8

  The Provincetown Players

  VILLAGERS HELPED PIONEER ANOTHER NEW ART FORM IN THESE years, the “little theater” movement. American theater in the 1910s was as hidebound as American art. Theater owners and big New York producers like the Shubert family toured the same productions over and over for decades. They called it theatrical manufacturing. Audiences didn’t care about the plays; they went to see stars, such as Sarah Bernhardt and Eugene O’Neill’s father, James, who spent much of his career playing a single role, the Count of Monte Cristo. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was still the most popular show in the country, touring endlessly in all sorts of productions. Young playwrights with fresh ideas need not apply. Susan Glaspell, a founder of the Village’s theater movement, sighed, “We went to the theater and for the most part came away wishing we had gone somewhere else.” Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce thought they found that “somewhere else” in the ethnic theaters on the Lower East Side. They saw Shakespeare in Yiddish and Italian, serious German drama, Chinese plays serialized over weeks. To Boyce it felt nothing like the canned experience of a Broadway play; it was “a stream of life, rich, full, picturesque.”

  Another sort of inspiration came from Europe, where small art theaters had been experimenting with realistic, no-spectacle stagings of psychologically rich dramas by Ibsen, Strindberg, Synge, and others since the late 1880s. As with the new art, only glimpses of this new theater were seen in America, but with profound impact. In 1911–12, Dublin’s Abbey Players toured works such as Synge’s controversial Playboy of the Western World in the United States. O’Neill and John Reed caught the tour in New York, where hecklers, apparently outraged by the immorality of a comedy about loose women attracted to a bragging patricide, threw rotten vegetables and stink bombs at the actors. Soon-to-be Villagers Jig Cook and Floyd Dell saw it in Chicago. Cook and Dell were still there when the Chicago Little Theater opened in 1912. Both men brought to the Village vivid memories of the Shaw and Strindberg plays they first saw on a tiny, no-frills stage near the Chicago Art Institute.

  The artistic, if not financial or political, triumph of the Paterson Pageant also encouraged Villagers to continue do-it-yourself theatrical experiments. Speaking about the birth of Off-Off-Broadway at the Village’s Caffe Cino half a century later, the playwright Robert Patrick has remarked, “This was not a theater. It was almost like a clubhouse where they said, ‘Hey, let’s put on a show.’ ” Much the same could be said of Village theater in the 1910s. The Washington Square Players started out in the back room of the Washington Square Book Shop, performing a (bad) play by Reed and a few other new works, but from the beginning the players dreamed of growing into a bigger and more legitimate theater company. In 1915 they moved to a space well outside the Village, on East Fifty-seventh Street. In 1917 they went to Broadway and hired professional actors. Straying so far so quickly from their amateur Village roots caused dissension in their ranks, and the company disbanded and reorganized as the Theatre Guild in 1918. In the 1920s the guild successfully brought the new theater to Broadway with productions such as Shaw’s Heartbreak House and Saint Joan and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elektra and Strange Interlude.

  Meanwhile, Floyd Dell, inspired by the Chicago Little Theater, began writing and putting on skits at the Liberal Club as soon as he arrived in the Village in 1913. They were lighthearted satires of his new Village friends and their hot-button issues—women’s suffrage, armchair anarchism, free love—produced without sets or lights, acted out by friends. Club members enjoyed laughing at themselves and soon many were pitching in. From this evolved the Provincetown Players. Mary Heaton Vorse, a writer for The Masses and many other venues, had moved to Provincetown, a tiny fishing hamlet on the tip of Cape Cod, in 1906. She was another wealthy radical, raised in an Amherst mansion surrounded by servants, who’d come to New York to study at the Art Students League before turning instead to writing. Along the way she got active in feminism and the labor movement and befriended Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. From 1913 on, “a social register of Greenwich Village Bohemia” vacationed in Provincetown, escaping the heat and stink that characterized summers in Manhattan before air-conditioning (while their Italian and Irish neighbors made do sleeping on the roofs and fire escapes of their tenements). They included Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Cook and Glaspell, Max Eastman and his wife, Ida Rauh, and Hapgood and Boyce.

  In July 1915, on a lark, Hapgood and Boyce staged a pair of Dell-like one-acts in their rented Provinceto
wn beach cottage. Both were slice-of-life commentaries on Village behavior, and like many of the group’s early plays they reveal the doubts many Villagers harbored about one aspect or another of the “splendid plan.” Suppressed Desires, by Cook and Glaspell, spoofed the Freudian fad through a Washington Square couple whose marriage almost founders on the shoals of fashionable psychobabble. It ends happily only when they agree to throw out the Journal of Morbid Psychology. Neith Boyce’s more serious, semiautobiographical sketch Constancy filleted free love and open relationships in quick, deft strokes, suggesting that while these ideas meant freedom for men they were no-win propositions for women. Again there were no lights or stage, no set but the cottage’s furniture. The evening went over in high style, and soon all the vacationing Villagers were writing plays about themselves and needed a larger space in which to perform them. Vorse gave them the use of a ramshackle shack on an old fishing pier she owned. It would become the Wharf Theatre.

  The following summer Eugene O’Neill came up from Manhattan and met the group. Early legends, faithfully repeated for decades after, had it that O’Neill just happened to come to the beach with a friend where he ran into Cook and the others. Later research indicated that he arrived with every intention of showing the Villagers some of his trunkful of unproduced plays. Harry Kemp would later recall, “The young O’Neill was dressed slackly like a sailor who had just jumped ship. Dark and taciturn, he favored the portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. The same handsome moroseness was there.” The youngest son of actor James O’Neill, Eugene was born in 1888 in a hotel favored by theater folk near Longacre Square (renamed Times Square in 1904) and spent his infancy on the road. The unhappy O’Neill household, which he would portray so bleakly in his plays, left him battling with rage and bottomless depression the rest of his life. He took to binge drinking early, went to sea, caught tuberculosis, and attempted suicide, all before turning to writing for at least some relief and release. He’d churned out more than a dozen one-act and full-length plays by the time he met the Provincetown group.

  The old shack on Vorse’s wharf was the perfect setting for one of them, Bound East for Cardiff, more a sketch or scene than a full play, about a young sailor dying in his bunk on a tramp steamer. Cook, Reed, and O’Neill himself performed in it. The group staged other plays that summer, by Reed, Bryant, Glaspell, and Boyce. They enjoyed themselves so heartily that when September came around they agreed to bring Provincetown back to the Village with them. Led by Cook, their most enthusiastic organizer, they rented the town house next door to Polly’s and the Liberal Club on MacDougal Street, built a rough stage and bench seating, and opened a theater there that fall. O’Neill’s Cardiff and another short one, The Long Voyage Home, were early hits, but it remained a communal effort, everyone writing, acting, taking tickets, sweeping the floor.

  For a couple of years it seemed that all the Village—except, characteristically, Willa Cather—was joining in. Hutchins Hapgood brought Cook a manuscript of a play by Dreiser, The Hand of the Potter, about an East Side sex murder, which premiered at the theater. One day in December 1917 a petite, freckled redhead with large, luminously impudent green eyes showed up to audition for a part in Floyd Dell’s one-act farce The Angel Intrudes, in which a fashionably loose Village couple, Jimmy and Annabelle, are trying to decide whether to elope or break up when Jimmy’s guardian angel appears. Annabelle falls for the angel instantly; despite his free-love cant Jimmy is jealous. “What good is he?” he asks Annabelle. “All he can do is sing hymns. In three months he’ll be a tramp.” The angel removes his wings for Annabelle. “Fool!” Jimmy cries. “You don’t know what you are doing . . . Keep your wings, my friend, against the day of your awakening—the day when the glamour of sex has vanished, and you see in her, as you will see, an inferior being.” The angel is outraged and goes off with Annabelle. A moment later he sneaks back onstage, collects his wings, and exits “with them safely clasped to his bosom.”

  The young redhead was Edna St. Vincent Millay. She had been writing and performing since she was five years old, both she and her mother unshakably convinced of her genius from early on. Luckily for them both, enough influential people were too. She was born in Maine in 1892 and grew up poor in a household of women—her mother, who left her father when Edna was almost eight, and her two younger sisters, Norma and Kathleen. Her middle name, presciently, was for St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, where her mother’s brother had been saved from death’s door just as his niece was being born. Family and close friends called her Vincent. When she grew up, some large measure of the charisma she used to win lovers, fans, and devoted press would derive from her Edna–Vincent bisexuality, sometimes a frail and flirty girl in satin and curls, sometimes a boyish gamin in trousers, boldly smoking a cigarette like one of the boys. She’d arrived in the Village just a month before the audition, after graduating from Vassar, where she’d engaged in her first lesbian romances. Her star as a poet was on the rise and her first book of verses had just come out. She’d taken a tiny room on West Ninth Street and talked her sisters into coming to the city.

  Dell not only gave her the Annabelle part but started an affair with her. It was clumsy at first—he was thirty and recently divorced, she was twenty and had only been with Vassar classmates—though eventually he found her passionate and uninhibited. He said she was part chorus girl, part nun, and part Botticelli Venus. He couldn’t keep her undivided attention for long. No one could. For some time she was more interested in attracting lovers than keeping them, and a cloud of suitors surrounded her, jockeying for position. For the press she became the free-loving Greenwich Village new woman personified, spokesperson for the new generation of “footloose girls,” as The New Yorker put it in the mid-1920s, feted for burning her candle at both ends not only in her verse but in her life. Dell got the Millay girls better rooms on Waverly Place, helped with the rent and groceries, and squired them around the Village. Norma, the country mouse, took longer than Edna to acclimate herself to the Village, where she gaped as the women bobbed their hair and threw away their corsets, caroused with men in bars, openly smoking and cursing like stevedores. Decades later she told the biographer Nancy Milford that she and Edna “sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched. Needle in, shit. Needle out, piss. Needle in, fuck. Needle out, cunt. Until we were easy with the words.”

  Edna wrote and directed one-acts for the Provincetown group. Her Aria da Capo was a sold-out hit for two weeks in December 1919. The Times’s Alexander Woollcott raved that it was “the most beautiful and most interesting play in the English language now to be seen in New York.” It was a harlequinade, a popular form of comedic nostalgia at the time, but she twisted it into lyrical high camp that began with Pierrot and Columbine as a lampoonish Village couple (“Don’t stand so near me! I am become a socialist. I love Humanity; but I hate people.”) and then darkened into a bitterly poetic antiwar commentary. Norma played Columbine.

  Another young woman, a sharp-tongued journalist and poet named Djuna Barnes, also contributed plays. She’d arrived in the Village in 1915 but she didn’t come to be a bohemian. She came from a family of bohemians and it had left her permanently damaged. Her paternal grandmother, Zadel, was a Victorian freethinker, free lover, abolitionist, suffragist, spirit medium, writer of stories and verse for Harper’s, and, during several years she lived in London, a friend of both Lady Wilde, mother of Oscar, and Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl. Djuna’s father, Wald, seems to have embodied the worst attributes of the bohemian. He was a shiftless ne’er-do-well who sponged off Zadel until she died (when he was fifty), and used his presumption of superiority to bourgeois morality as a rationale for immoral behavior, possibly including incest and certainly including child abuse. Djuna was born in 1892, the same year as Millay, and raised in a log cabin in Cornwall-on-Hudson and on a farm in Huntington, Long Island, in a household crowded with her grandmother, her mother, Elizabeth, her four siblings, her father’s live-in l
over Fanny, and their several children. Zadel paid the bills. As nonconformists among conservative country folk, the Barneses held themselves apart and mostly held the kids out of school, surrounding them with literature, art, and music but neglecting to teach them basics like spelling and arithmetic. Zadel doted on Djuna and encouraged her to write and draw. Both Zadel and Wald goaded the children to throw off bourgeois sexual restraints. For fifteen years Djuna and Zadel slept in the same bed, and their bizarrely bawdy letters, which Djuna saved, suggest they engaged in sexual fondling and play. Some feminist scholars would later attempt to interpret this activity, if in fact it happened, as the women’s revolt against Wald’s patriarchal hegemony rather than incest and child molestation. Wald certainly gave his daughter good reason to be revolted. Djuna later told and wrote conflicting stories about her first heterosexual encounter at the age of sixteen: her father initiated her entry to full womanhood by either raping her himself or bringing in a neighbor to do it. Whichever man it was, the experience left her with rage and humiliation that marked the rest of her life. When Djuna was eighteen, Zadel compounded the girl’s sexual confusion by pushing her into the arms of Fanny’s fifty-two-year-old brother.

  When Wald’s two families could no longer stand living under one roof, he kept Fanny and her children and banished Elizabeth and hers. They moved to the Bronx in 1912, and from there Djuna escaped to the Village in 1915, taking a room in one of the boardinghouses on Washington Square South. “In those days Greenwich Village was to the Bronxite just another name for hell and the devil,” she later wrote, a place that would “get a girl by her back hair and sling her into damnation.” She cut a striking figure, sometimes dressing all in black, with a black veil. She was extremely bright and talented, with a knack for the killingly clever bon mot reminiscent of one of her role models, Oscar Wilde, and a luxuriously decadent style of drawing heavily influenced by another, Aubrey Beardsley. But her abusive and isolated upbringing had left its scars and skewed her dealings with the world. She flung herself at New York and Greenwich Village with reckless bravado yet at the same time held herself aloof. Her haughty attitude and sharp tongue fascinated and amused some Villagers, annoyed others; she had a gift for raising eyebrows and ires.