The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  PART III

  The Greenwich Village Renaissance

  16

  A Refuge in the Age of Anxiety

  AFTER THE WAR GREENWICH VILLAGE SERVED AGAIN AS A TINY speck of American real estate where nonconformists, individualists, bohemians, progressives, avant-gardists, experimenters, gays and lesbians could gather and feel at home. Bringing creative and iconoclastic individuals together in a small area stoked the Village’s culture engine to a new level of productivity. If the 1910s were really Village bohemia’s golden age, then this was the Greenwich Village Renaissance. New York City rose to be the cultural capital of the Western world in this period, and much of that rise was driven by the small community of self-exiled misfits who gathered in and around the Village.

  They came to the Village to escape from an America that was suffering a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder. Following a decade of the Depression, the war had ripped an entire generation of Americans from family farms, small towns, and big-city neighborhoods and hurled them out to the wide world where they witnessed and often participated in the most shocking savagery and depravity humanity can display. Along the way, they experienced cultures and behaviors that were entirely foreign to them. Military personnel saw liberal attitudes toward art, religion, and sex they probably never would have become aware of at home, while on the home front a nation of women and girls experienced the life of the independent wage earner for the first time.

  Now that the war was over, millions of GI Joes and Rosie the Riveters were expected—and often wanted—to settle back into “normal” lives. Their latchkey kids, now “teenagers”—the term and the concept were invented at this time—were supposed to buckle down, shine their shoes, get good grades, and join the football team or the cheerleader squad. The daily threat of nuclear holocaust sent American society into full-scale withdrawal. White Americans retreated en masse to the suburbs; the corporate cubicle; the promise of consumerist prosperity; the lockstep patriotism of the loyalty oath; the sexless, nostalgic fantasies of Doris Day movies and Disneyland. In many ways, white America in the 1950s was stodgier, more conservative, less sophisticated, and less hip than it had been at any previous time in the twentieth century. Willfully so.

  Norman Mailer described it as “the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the conscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” Anatole Broyard, who moved to the Village in 1946, later wrote, “The war had broken the rhythm of American life, and when we tried to pick it up again, we couldn’t find it—it wasn’t there.”

  The poet W. H. Auden, who moved to the Village the same year as Broyard, gave the era an enduring name. Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York from a Europe plunging into war in January 1939. Isherwood moved on to join Aldous Huxley’s circle in California but Auden stayed in New York. Through Random House editions of his books he had already developed a cult following among New York poets, including Delmore Schwartz. Previously a somewhat lazy writer, he acquired a very New York City Benzedrine habit that powered him through his prolific next two decades. Right away he wrote the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan, numerous book reviews and essays, and fine new poems, such as “September 1, 1939,” commemorating the day Britain declared war on Germany.

  In 1946 he took U.S. citizenship and settled in a tiny apartment on the fourth floor of 7 Cornelia Street, a charmless modern elevator building mashed between two tenements. Jug-eared, mule-faced, with large, raw hands and squinty eyes, limbs perpetually akimbo in corkscrewed clothes, not walking so much as gallumphing, he “looked exactly like a half-witted Swedish deckhand,” according to one acquaintance. Auden professed to dislike the Village, but it refused to return the favor. He taught an evening class in Shakespeare at the New School that was so popular a faculty member joked you might have thought Shakespeare was teaching a course on Auden.

  Visitors to his cramped Cornelia Street hovel were disgusted by the squalor. Tennessee Williams called it “fantastically sordid.” Igor Stravinsky, for whom Auden wrote the libretto to The Rake’s Progress, fearfully watched mice snack from dirty dishes piled in the sink. It was in this mess that he completed his longest and in many ways most elusive poem, The Age of Anxiety. He wrote it in the iron-clanging alliterative tetrameter of the Anglo-Saxon poetry he had first come to love at Oxford under a young professor named J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s the narrative of four loners who meet up in a bar on Third Avenue and drunkenly reflect on many things, including an age “tamed by terror,” a grim world “Of convulsion and vast evil, / When the Cold Societies clash / Or the mosses are set in motion / To overrun the earth, / And the great brain which began / With lucid dialectics / Ends in horrid madness.” The book won a Pulitzer; it inspired Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony, to which Jerome Robbins choreographed a ballet; and journalists and other writers began using “the age of anxiety” as an alternative term for “cold war era.”

  Refuges for self-exiled nonconformists were very rare in this era. There was not yet a globally connected counterculture with nodes in every city and on every college campus—that would develop in the 1960s—much less an Internet where far-flung misfits could gather in virtual communities. “Our generation in the fifties needed the Village and all it stood for as much as the artists, writers, and rebels of preceding generations—maybe even more,” Dan Wakefield writes in New York in the Fifties. If everyone else was conforming, “surely it was all the more important to have at least one haven where people were not only allowed but expected to dress, speak, and behave differently from the herd.” The poet Edward Field, who had grown up in Brooklyn and navigated B-17s on bombing raids over Europe during the war, arrived in the Village in 1946 to attend NYU on the GI Bill. In his memoir The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag he writes, “If we were social outcasts, we were proudly, defiantly so. But back then, we were a pitifully small band in exile—homosexuals, blacks, sluts, psychotics, drag queens, radicals of all varieties, artists, ne’er-do-wells.”

  In the Village they felt free not only to be different but to flaunt it. At a time when mainstream American sexuality was being repressed and sublimated until it squeaked out in the depraved titillation of Playboy and Marilyn Monroe movies, the Village once again presented itself as a sexual playground, straight and gay, vanilla and kinky. People still called it free love, and it was still—now maybe more than ever—a rebellious act, a rejection of bourgeois inhibition. Young men flocked to the Village having read about the loose girls there in Bodenheim’s novels, in men’s magazines, in cheap pamphlets with titles like Secrets of Greenwich Village. (“You may think it daring, shocking—but its bold, intimate pages will leave you breathless. POSITIVELY NOT SOLD TO ANYONE UNDER 18!”) Young women came to the Village to throw off their Freudian inhibitions and Reichian body armor. Previously in the century American women had freed themselves of their corsets and starched lace and floor-sweeping skirts. Flappers in the 1920s went braless in loose-fitting tops and their skirts rose above the knee. American women never before (or maybe since) looked as stylish as they did in the late 1930s. In the 1950s their bodies were reimprisoned in bullet bras and girdles, hidden under hoop skirts and petticoats, their feet trapped in murderous heels, their hair in elaborately stiff helmets encasing meticulously made-up faces. Village girls threw that all off. They let their hair down, wore dungarees, and, to the stupefied delight of the males, often wore no bras under their loose peasant blouses. Instead of garter belts and stockings they shopped at Goldin Dance Supply on West Eighth Street for simple black tights. In fair weather, they’d forgo heels in favor of that enduring symbol of the new woman, sandals.

  Also, at a time when Eisenhower America boosted the Protestant work ethic to new heights, Village bohemians refused to enter the gray flannel rat race and proudly loafed like Whitman. David Amram says he earned his “PhD from the University of Hangoutology” in the mid-1950s, when everyone would go to the diners around Sheridan Square and s
it until five in the morning eating hamburgers and shooting the breeze. A Village denizen named Anton Rosenberg became the icon of hangoutology. Although he was a painter and jazz pianist of some talent, he was a god to the Beats simply for his supremely cool loafing. In The Subterraneans, Kerouac based the character Julian Alexander on him. Hanging out, hanging around, doing nothing, in cafés all day, in the bars or lofts or diners all night—as much as anything else, their steadfast refusal to appear to be busy and productive, even though in fact many were getting an awful lot of painting and music and theater and writing done, scandalized the rest of America. Integral to the schtick of Maynard G. Krebs, the resident beatnik on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was his panicked response whenever he heard the word “work”—or, as he pitifully yelped it, “wer-erk!”

  A new kind of hangout came to the Village in the 1950s. Coffeehouses were to the Village of the 1950s what tearooms had been to the 1910s. At first there was only the Caffe Reggio, the granddaddy that had been there since the 1920s, followed by the Rienzi, started by a painter, David Grossblatt, in 1950, after enjoying those in Paris where he’d studied art after the war. They were both on MacDougal Street. By the end of the 1950s the streets around the intersection of MacDougal and Bleecker would be lined with them. They were popular with students, artists, musicians, and bohemians because they were cheap places where they could loiter, talk, and read Sartre. Like the tearooms, they were relatively inexpensive and easy for first-time entrepreneurs to start up.

  And of course there were the bars. Virtually everyone on the scene drank, and bars were the nodes of much Village socializing. Many drank hard, drank daily, drank to excess, ended up damaging their careers or killing themselves with drink.

  “Booze was a big deal,” Roy Metcalf recalled in the 2010s. “It was considered almost an honor to get drunk.” Born in the Bronx in 1927, he went to Rutgers on the GI Bill after the war and got a job as a reporter at the Daily Mirror. He never lived in the Village but did a good deal of drinking and hanging out there.

  Metcalf saw two famous writers drinking themselves to death at the White Horse Tavern. Dylan Thomas “was always drunk, with his head on the table, surrounded by young people who, you know, wanted to hear something poetic.” Thomas drank his last whiskeys at the White Horse early in his fourth visit to the United States in 1953. His volumes of collected poems and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog had earned him a growing following in the States through the 1940s. After his first long reading tour in 1950 he was one of the most popular writers in the English language, and on subsequent visits to America he was feted and celebrated like a rock star. Poetry and literature mattered to young people in the postwar years the way rock would in the 1960s. The shy Welshman, who had already been struggling with alcohol and failing health for years, responded to fame and success the way Bodenheim had, and his visits to America deteriorated into legendary nonstop benders. The White Horse was his watering hole of choice in New York. By that visit in the fall of 1953 he was a wreck. In November, after two nights of drinking at the White Horse, he sank into a coma in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. He died in St. Vincent’s. He had just turned thirty-nine.

  “The diagnosis was massive insult to the brain stem,” Metcalf recalled. “You gotta drink God knows how much booze to do that. It’s a damn shame.”

  In 1945 Delmore Schwartz returned to the Village from Harvard, where he’d taught English during the war. He’d found his students uniformly ignorant and that standing in front of a classroom full of them was torture, but at least it provided occasional comic relief, as when one coed he asked to read aloud from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” misread a line as “Shall I part my bare behind?” He took rooms at 91 Bedford Street, conveniently just a few steps from Chumley’s, and later moved to West Fourth Street, and later again to Charles Street. He met Elizabeth Pollet, a young writer as shy as he was, who had a cold-water flat on Hudson Street. He married her in 1949. He edited poetry for the Partisan Review, which by then had dropped all pretense of political radicalism, and wrote intelligent book reviews and essays for other magazines. He lectured (shyly, haltingly) at the New School. Later he’d get a plum assignment to teach creative writing at Princeton but found it even WASPier and more uncongenial than he had Harvard.

  The pit of depression yawned wider and wider. Despite the very high regard in which others held his writing, despite being one of the most anthologized poets of the era, he was terrified that he had in fact peaked at twenty-five and was on his way downhill. New Directions published a slim volume of his fiction in 1948. It was lavishly praised but sold poorly. A friend congratulating him on it at Minetta Tavern was shocked when Schwartz quietly burst into tears. He self-medicated with drinking at the Minetta, Chumley’s, the White Horse, other bars. Then he added barbiturates. The drink and drugs aged him in his thirties, coarsened his once fine poet’s features, bloated him, and contributed to his increasingly unbalanced mental state. The more he drank the more he lashed out at friends, colleagues, and wife—especially after her 1950 novel A Family Romance sold a quarter of a million copies. She left him in 1955.

  By 1956 Schwartz was a shambling wreck, holed up in the Hotel Marlton, a dour eight-story fleabag at 5 West Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Opened in 1900, its cheap rates had always made it a favorite residence of actors, artists, and writers, who at various times included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lillian Gish, John Barrymore, and later Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Mickey Rourke, and Warhol’s would-be assassin Valerie Solanas. (In the late 1980s the New School took it over and cleaned it up as a dormitory.) By the end of the decade he was drifting from one fleabag to another; the one place he could usually be found was the White Horse, expostulating drunkenly, reading aloud from a tattered copy of Finnegans Wake. Metcalf used to see him there. “He was out of his mind by then, the poor guy. He lost hold of himself, I guess.” While he deteriorated, he still managed to write fitfully, and his reputation continued to grow. A collection of old and new poems, Summer Knowledge, was widely hailed and won him the coveted Bollingen Prize. “The gift is loved but not the gifted one,” he wrote in one poem. Because he was wandering around so much he failed to be among the poets—including Auden and Robert Frost—at JFK’s inaugural ceremonies in 1961. The invitation didn’t find its way to him until four months after the event.

  He went to teach at Syracuse, where the faculty warily avoided him, but some students, including Lou Reed, adored him. In 1966 he was incapable of much of anything, living at the Hotel Dixie and then the nearby Columbia, seeing almost no one, drinking alone in midtown and Chelsea bars. One night in July he lay for an hour in a hallway of the Columbia, dying of a heart attack at fifty-two. He had so distanced himself from everyone that he lay in the morgue for two days before anyone identified him. His canonization as yet another martyr to his art, murdered by an American culture that couldn’t care less about its poets, proceeded apace and reached its apotheosis when Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, based on his friendship with Schwartz, won raves and prizes in 1975.

  WELL INTO THE 1950S, THE ARTS SCENE IN AND AROUND THE VILLAGE remained small and isolated. Everyone knew everyone else. Painters, poets, playwrights, musicians, filmmakers, composers, and dancers worked together, played together, drank together, lived together, slept together, and inspired one another. This promoted a milieu that was, as the poet Kenneth Koch put it, “fizzy with collaboration.” Poets wrote plays, their painter friends designed and built the sets, their musician friends played the music, and they all acted in them, with their photographer and filmmaker friends documenting. Art galleries were often cooperatives funded and run by the artists themselves. Their poet friends wrote the exhibition catalogues and often the publicity copy and the reviews as well. In turn, the galleries published small literary magazines of their friends’ writing, illustrated by the artists. The wild improvisation of bebop in the clubs inspired the free expression in Abstract Expressionist painting and Beat writing.
Happenings drew together creative talents from across the disciplines.

  The Off-Broadway playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, who moved to the Village toward the end of the 1950s, recalls that “there weren’t as many artists as there are now. It was a smaller world and so the compartments came closer together in those days.” David Amram put it this way: “Contrary to a lot that’s been written, the folk musicians and the jazz musicians and the writers and the painters and the poets and the bartenders and the waitresses and the chess players all hung out together. There wasn’t that subdivision of culture.”

  In their memoirs of the period, Anatole Broyard and the writer-composer John Gruen both describe a Village that was fizzy with collaboration indeed. Gruen and his wife, Jane Wilson, moved to the Village from Iowa in 1949. He was twenty and she was twenty-two. They took a one-room apartment at 319 West Twelfth Street, a brownstone near Hudson Street. They had no kitchen, and shared the bathroom with upstairs neighbors, for forty-eight dollars a month. The other tenants were an aspiring actress, a dancer with Martha Graham, an Italian man who drove a bakery truck, a gay couple who had loud sadomasochistic sex, and a fashion model “who was deep in Reichian analysis and could be found in her orgone box at all hours of the day and night.” (Wilhelm Reich’s idiosyncratic psychological theories, blending Marxism and antifascism while promoting the cosmic power of the orgasm, scandalized the rest of the world but found a natural home in the Village, where he joined the faculty of the New School in 1939. He believed his orgone boxes collected cosmic rays that could increase sexual potency, heal mental illness, shrink tumors, and cure cancers. This was not an avenue of research destined to go down well in repressed postwar America; from the late 1940s on Reich was hounded by the federal government and eventually died in a penitentiary in 1957.)